The Son of His Father. Mrs. Oliphant
All this must have been in his mind, though he had never thought of it before. He wrote down all that his grandmother had told him, and then he paused in his new development of feeling. It seemed to him that he would like to take this paper and tear it into a dozen pieces in the exasperation of his soul.
‘Grandmamma,’ he said, with a little quiver in his voice, ‘don’t you think it would be better for me to write from myself, and tell her this in my own way? I will say just what you want to have said, but it shall be from myself. It would be more natural. After all she is my—mother, I suppose.’
‘John!’ said the old lady. ‘You suppose! What should she be but your mother? Who should be your mother but she? Oh, my dear, I hope you will not take things into your head that are not true. We have enough of trouble, enough of trouble, in our family. Don’t you begin and imagine things that are not true.’
‘I don’t imagine anything,’ said the boy, ‘but if you will consider, grandmamma, this is my mother. And I know nothing about her. For a long time it seemed all simple. I never minded. But, now I’m getting older and see how other people are, it is all so strange. Let me have my own way this time—let me just write to her as it would be natural if I were really her son.’
‘Oh, my John, that you are, indeed, indeed; her son and nothing else. Whose son should you be but hers? Don’t take any wrong notions into your head. My poor Emily! Oh, if you knew how many things she has had to bear! And what would she do at the end of all if her own boy’s heart was cold to her? You are her son and no one’s else—hers, my dear, and hers alone.’
John looked with his clear young eyes, severe yet gentle, in her face.
‘Isn’t that too much to say, grandmamma? Am I not the son of my father, too?’
The old lady looked at him with a strange, low cry. She caught hold of both his hands for a moment, with a grasp in which there seemed something like terror. And then she dropped back upon her pillow and covered her face with her hands.
‘I always said it. I always said it,’ she cried.
Just then, in the pause that followed, a heavy, familiar step, slow and steady, came along the road, audible for some time in the quiet of the afternoon and the house. Mrs. Sandford dried her eyes hastily and raised herself up again.
‘There is your grandfather,’ she said. ‘Oh, my dear, take that away, and write as you please: but don’t say anything about it, for I have not spoken to him. And it is not as if I were sending for her, John. I am only saying that I should like to see her. Of course I should like to see her, every mother wishes that, to see her child. Write out of your own head; but don’t say anything about it, and quick, quick, take all that away!’
CHAPTER IX.
JOHN’S LETTER.
John was allowed to sit in the parlour now that he was almost a man, after the old people had gone to bed. His own room was small, and it had been agreed upon as a reasonable thing that he should have a place in which he could sit and read, or write—till eleven o’clock, at least. Mr. Sandford retired to his room at ten exactly, every night, and, since she had been so ill—no, not ill, tired—his wife had preceded him, going upstairs very early, in that unaccountable but quite gentle fatigue which had come over her. All the afternoon and evening John had been very silent, thinking—chiefly what he was to say in his letter to his mother—but also about all the circumstances, the strangeness of the household life altogether, the extraordinary separation which, now that conveyance was so easy, now that everybody travelled, when even little Joe Hodge, who was apprenticed in London, came home every Christmas to see his mother, a poor widow in the alms-houses—was more wonderful than ever. In old times it might have been understood, when there were no railways, in the days which the old people remembered—but now! It perplexed him beyond description, when his thoughts were fully directed to the subject. And it became clear to him all at once, as when a landscape suddenly becomes apparent to us on turning a corner or coming to the top of a hill, that some other reason must exist for this than the simple fact that his mother lived in London and his grandparents at Edgeley. That was no reason; his enlightened mind rejected it. All the afternoon he kept turning over and over in his mind what he was to say. He had never in his life written an important letter, scarcely ever written one at all which was not suggested, partly dictated even, by the old people, who would say to him, ‘You must write to Susie,’ or, ‘Don’t you think, John, that you ought to write to your mother?’ This was how his correspondence had generally been conducted. He had written a few schoolboy epistles to Dick and Percy, but they did not count. He thought a great deal of the importance of the letter. Phrases for it, sentences which he polished and reconstructed, and which he felt, with a little satisfaction, would come very well, kept passing through his mind in a sort of procession. Sometimes he felt that he had put a thing very strongly indeed, that his mother must feel herself entirely in the wrong, and change her procedure altogether. He was not aware that people do not like to find themselves in the wrong, and are far from candid in acknowledging that fact, even when it is most apparent in the accuser’s eyes.
He got out the little writing-case, of which he was proud, as soon as his grandfather had gone upstairs. He got out some paper, carefully inspecting it to see that there was no infinitesimal soil on its glossy purity; and then he began to write, taking a new pen, and every precaution against blotting. All these were signs and symbols of the importance of the act he was about to accomplish. He lingered over the preparations with a hope that they would inspire him. But when all was done he did not find it so easy to put down what he wanted to say. He did not go to bed at eleven that night. He sat up for two hours later, trying to shape an epistle which should be like that of a son to his mother, yet at the same time that of a young man coming into full possession of his reason to a woman who was not obeying the dictates of that fundamental principle. He did not want to be instructive or dictatorial, but yet he wanted to show her that he was aware she was failing in her duty; and withal it was his intention to be perfectly respectful and filial. To combine these things was to an unaccustomed letter-writer very difficult. His beautiful sheet of paper which he had chosen so carefully was all scored and interlined, and had become a mere scrawl long before he was done. And he himself grew hot and excited in the process: far more than if Mr. Cattley had cut to pieces his Latin poem, and he had been trying to do a new composition. As a matter of fact, he had made two or three compositions of this letter before he settled on one that would do.
This was what he decided on sending at the last:
‘Dear Mother’—(He had always heretofore said Mamma, keeping the baby name, which was the only one under which he had any real knowledge of her. That, and Emily, he understood: but Mother seemed a new person, some one with whom he had no real acquaintance, whom he must learn to know). ‘Dear Mother,’—He did not add any more for half an hour, and then he began to write quickly for ten minutes, and put down the most of what is copied here, though with corrections and interlining past counting. This was nothing but the mere draft.
‘I think I am old enough to write to you from myself, being no longer a child: for it seems so very hard not to know you, or to understand why it is that I have not seen you for such a long, long time. People change very much in such a time; it is said that even your body changes, and, still more, your mind, which is always undergoing developments, and learning more and having more experiences. Dear mother, I am not now a little boy. I have finished my education. Mr. Cattley thinks I have gone as far as I need try to do, as I am not to proceed seriously with my studies, and now it has been settled that I am to begin to learn the profession of an engineer. I had my choice between that and going into an office, and I chose that. I hope you will be interested in hearing all this. Mothers are generally so, and it is hard upon me—Please do think so!—not to know whether you care, or if you will be pleased. Mother, I am writing now to ask you something—something that is very much in my mind. I do want you to come here. Consider that I don’t know you at all. It is not natural. I feel almost as if it were wrong not to know my mother. But it