Tristram of Blent | Page 9

and no excess of sentiment on his. Friendliness based on a thorough sympathy of mind was his attitude if his demeanor revealed it truly; while Lady Tristram was to her son as she was to all the world at this time, a creature of feelings now half cold and of moods that reflected palely the intense impulses of her youth. But a few years over forty, she grew faded and faint in mind, it seemed, as well as in body, and was no longer a merry comrade to the boy who never left her. Yet he did not wish to leave her. To her, indeed, he was not a boy, and nobody about the place regarded him as other than a man. He had been actually and effectively master of the house for years, just as he was master of his own doings, of his friendships, recreations, and pursuits. And he had managed all well, except that he was not thought to be very happy or to get much enjoyment from his life. That was just an idea he gave of himself, and gave involuntarily--in spite of taking his fair share in the amusements of the neighborhood, and holding his own well in its sports and athletics. But he was considered cold and very reserved. Had Mina Zabriska remembered this use of "reserve," perhaps she would have employed the word instead of "wariness." Or perhaps, if his acquaintances had looked more keenly, they would have come over to Mina's side and found her term the more accurate. She spoke from a fresher and sharper impression of him.
His childhood at least had been happy, while Lady Tristram was still the bewilderingly delightful companion who had got into so much hot water and made so many people eager to get in after her. Joy lasted with her as long as health did, and her health began to fail only when her son approached fifteen. Another thing happened about then, which formed the prelude to the most vivid scene in the boy's life. Lady Tristram was not habitually a religious woman; that temper of mind was too abstract for her; she moved among emotions and images, and had small dealings with meditation or spiritual conceptions. But happening to be in a mood that laid her open to the influence, she heard in London one day a sermon preached by a young man famous at the time, a great searcher of fashionable hearts. She drove straight from the church (it was a Friday morning) to Paddington and took the first train home. Harry was there--back from school for his holiday--and she found him in the smoking-room, weighing a fish which he had caught in the pool that the Blent forms above the weir. There and then she fell on her knees on the floor and poured forth to him the story of that Odyssey of hers which had shocked London society and is touched upon in Mr Cholderton's Journal. He listened amazed, embarrassed, puzzled up to a point; a boy's normal awkwardness was raised to its highest pitch; he did not want to hear his mother call herself a wicked woman; and anyhow it was a long while ago, and he did not understand it all very well. The woman lifted her eyes and looked at him; she was caught by the luxury of confession, of humiliation, of offering her back to the whip. She told him he was not her heir--that he would not be Tristram of Blent. For a moment she laid her head on the floor at his feet. She heard no sound from him, and presently looked up at him again. His embarrassment had gone; he was standing rigidly still, his eyes gazing out toward the river, his forehead wrinkled in a frown. He was thinking. She went on kneeling there, saying no more, staring at her son. It was characteristic of her that she did not risk diminishing the effectiveness of the scene, or the tragedy of her avowal, by explaining the perverse accident owing to which her fault had entailed such an aggravation of evil. Harry learnt that later.
Later--and in a most different sort of interview. From the first Harry had no thought of surrender; his mother had none either as soon as she had forgotten her preacher. The discussion was resumed after a week (Lady Tristram had spent the interval in bed) on a business footing. She found in him the same carelessness of the world and its obligations that there was in herself, but found it carried to the point of scorn and allied to a tenacity of purpose and a keenness of vision which she had never owned. Not a reproach escaped him--less, she thought, from generosity than because he chose to concentrate his mind