Felix Holt | Page 9

bench still, I see,' he went on, as he followed her across the hall; 'is he at home - will he be here this evening?'
'He says you must go to the rectory when you want to see him. You must remember you have come back to a family who have old-fashioned notions. Your uncle thought I ought to have you to myself in the first hour or two. He remembered that I had not seen my son for fifteen years.'
'Ah, by Jove ! fifteen years - so it is I ' said Harold, taking his mother's hand and drawing it under his arm; for he had perceived that her words were charged with an intention. 'And you are as straight as an arrow still; you will carry the shawls I have brought you as well as ever.'
They walked up the broad stone steps together in silence. Under the shock of discovering her son's Radicalism, Mrs Transome had no impulse to say one thing rather than another; as in a man who had just been branded on the forehead all wonted motives would be uprooted. Harold, on his side, had no wish opposed to filial kindness, but his busy thoughts were imperiously determined by habits which had no reference to any woman's feeling; and even if he could have conceived what his mother's feeling was, his mind, after that momentary arrest, would have darted forward on its usual course.
'I have given you the south rooms, Harold,' said Mrs Transome, as they passed along a corridor lit from above, and lined with old family pictures 'I thought they would suit you best, as they all open into each other, and this middle one will make a pleasant sitting-room for you.'
'Gad ! the furniture is in a bad state,' said Harold, glancing round at the middle room which they had just entered; 'the moths seem to have got into the carpets and hangings.'
'I had no choice except moths or tenants who would pay rent,' said Mrs Transome. 'We have been too poor to keep servants for uninhabited rooms.'
'What ! you've been rather pinched, eh?'
'You find us living as we have been living these twelve years.'
'Ah, you've had Durfey's debts as well as the lawsuits - confound them ! It will make a hole in sixty thousand pounds to pay off the mortgages. However, he's gone now, poor fellow; and I suppose I should have spent more in buying an English estate some time or other. I always meant to be an Englishman, and thrash a lord or two who thrashed me at Eton.'
'I hardly thought you could have meant that, Harold, when I found you had married a foreign wife.'
'Would you have had me wait for a consumptive lackadaisical Englishwoman, who would have hung all her relations round my neck? I hate English wives; they want to give their opinion about everything. They interfere with a man's life. I shall not marry again.'
Mrs Transome bit her lip, and turned away to draw up a blind. She would not reply to words which showed how completely any conception of herself and her feelings was excluded from her son's inward world.
As she turned round again she said, 'I suppose you have been used to great luxury; these rooms look miserable to you, but you can soon make any alteration you like.'
'O, I must have a private sitting-room fitted up for myself down-stairs. And the rest are bedrooms, I suppose,' he went on, opening a side-door. 'Ah, I can sleep here a night or two. But there's a bedroom down-stairs, with an anteroom, I remember, that would do for my man Dominic and the little boy. I should like to have that.'
'Your father has slept there for years. He will be like a distracted insect, and never know where to go, if you alter the track he has to walk in.' 'That's a pity. I hate going up-stairs.'
'There is the steward's room: it is not used, and might be turned into a bedroom. I can't offer you my room, for I sleep up-stairs.' (Mrs Transome's tongue could be a whip upon occasion, but the lash had not fallen on a sensitive spot.)
'No; I'm determined not to sleep up-stairs. We'll see about the steward's room to-morrow, and I daresay I shall find a closet of some sort for Dominic. It's a nuisance he had to stay behind, for I shall have nobody to cook for me. Ah, there's the old river I used to fish in. I often thought, when I was at Smyrna, that I would buy a park with a river through it as much like the Lapp as possible. Gad, what fine oaks those are opposite ! Some of them must come down, though.'
'I've held every tree sacred on the demesne, as I told