hesitation. “Because – ” said Osy – but then he made a pause – his mother’s eye was upon him, and, perhaps, though he had not the least idea what she feared and probably in childish defiance would have done that precisely had he known, yet this glance did give him pause; and he remembered that he had been told not to repeat what the servants said. The processes in a child’s mind are no less swift than those of a more calculating age. “Because,” said the boy, lingering, beginning to enjoy the suspense on all these faces, “because – it would make his back straight. Mamma says my back’s straight because the sergeant drilled me when I was a lickle, lickle boy.”
“And the dear child is as straight as a rush, my lady,” said Parsons, who was, as so often, arranging Lady Piercey’s work. She, too, was grateful beyond measure to little Osy for not repeating the talk of the servants’ hall.
“And what are you now, Osy,” cried Sir Giles, with a great laugh, “if you’re no longer a lickle, lickle boy?”
“I’m the king of the castle,” said Osy, tilting at Dunning with the old gentleman’s stick. “Bedone, you dirty rascal; let’s play at you being the castle, Uncle Giles, and I’ll drive off the enemy. Bedone, you dirty rascal; – det away from my castle. I’ll be the sentry on the walls,” said the child, marching round and round with the stick over his shoulder for a gun, “and I’ll call out ‘Who does there?’ and ‘What’s the word’ – and I’ll drive off all the enemy. But there must be a flag flying.” He called it a flap, but that did not matter. “Mamma, fix a flap upon my big tower. Here,” he cried, producing from his little pocket a crumpled rag of uncertain colour, “this hankechif will do.”
“But that’s a flag of truce, Osy; are you going to give me up then?” said the old gentleman.
“We’ll not have no flaps of truce,” said Osy, seizing Sir Giles’ red bandana, “for I means fightin’ – and they sha’n’t come near you, but over my body. Here! Tome on, you enemy!” Osy’s thrusts at Dunning, who retreated outside a wider and a wider circle as the little soldier made his rounds, amused the old gentleman beyond measure. He laughed till, which was not very difficult, the water came to his eyes.
“I do believe that mite would stand up for his old uncle if there was any occasion,” said Sir Giles, nodding his old head across at his wife, and trying in vain to recover the bandana to dry his old eyes.
These were the sort of games that went on in the afternoon, especially in winter, when the hours were long between lunch and tea. When the weather was fine, Osy marched by Sir Giles’ garden chair, and made him the confidant of all his wonderings. “What do the leaves fall off for, and where do they tome from when they tome again? Does gardener go to the market to buy the new ones like mamma goes to buy clothes for me? How do the snowdrops know when it’s time to come up out of the told, told ground?” Fortunately, he had so many things to ask that he seldom paused for an answer. Sir Giles laid up these questions in his heart, and reported them to my lady. “He asked me to-day if it hurt the field when the farmers ploughed it up? I declare I never thought how strange things were before, and the posers that little ’un asks me!” cried the old man. Lady Piercey smiled with a superior certainty, based upon Mangnall’s Questions and other instructive works, that she was not so easily posed by Osy. She had instructed him as to where tea and coffee came from, and taught him to say, “Thank you, pretty cow,” thus accounting for his breakfast to the inquisitive intelligence. But there was one thing that brought a spasm to Lady Piercey’s face, especially when, as now and then happened, she hid the little truant from his mother, and saved Osy from a scolding, as he nestled down amid her voluminous skirts and lifted up a smiling, rosy little face, in great enjoyment of the joke and the hiding place. Sometimes as she laid her hand upon his curly head with that sensation of half-malicious delight in coming between the little sinner and his natural governor, which is common to the grand-parent, there would come a sudden contraction to her face, and a bitter salt tear would spring to her eye. If Gervase had a child like that to be his father’s heir! Why was not that delightful child the child of Gervase, instead of being born to those who had nothing to give him? It was upon Margaret, who had not a penny, that this immeasurable gift was bestowed. And no woman that could be the mother of such a boy would ever marry Gervase! Oh! no, no – a barmaid, to give him a vulgar brat, who, perhaps – . But the thoughts of angry love and longing are not to be put into words.
Margaret went to the end of the gallery to her own room, where her child’s soft breath was just audible as he slept. She went and looked at him in his little crib, a little head like an angel’s, upon the little white pillow. But it was not only in a mother’s tender adoration that she stood and looked at her child. To hurt any one was not in Margaret Osborne’s heart, but there had come into it for some time back a dart of ambition, a gleam of hope: little Osy, too, was of the Piercey blood. She herself was a Piercey, much more a Piercey than Gervase, poor fellow. If an heir was wanted, who so fit as her boy? Far more fit than old General Piercey, whom nobody knew. Oh! not for worlds, not for anything that life could give, would she harm poor Gervase, or any man. But the barmaid and her possible progeny were as odious to Margaret as to Lady Piercey: and where, where could any one find an heir like Osy, the little prince, who had conquered and taken possession of the great house?
CHAPTER V
It has been stated by various persons afflicted with that kind of trouble, that to be enlightened above one’s fellows is a great trial and misery. I don’t know how that may be, but it is certainly a great trouble to be a Softy, to have a fluid brain in which everything gets disintegrated, and floats about in confusion, and never to be able to lay hold upon a subject distinctly either by head or tail, however much it may concern you. This was the case of poor Gervase the morning after he had received that evening address from his mother in her nightcap, which was so well adapted to confuse any little wits the poor fellow had. That his marriage might be forbidden, and his very name taken from him, and himself reduced to draw beer at the Seven Thorns for his living, instead of making a lady of Patty, and lifting her out of all such necessities, overwhelmed his mind altogether. If it was true, he had better, in fact, have nothing more to say to Patty at all. A forlorn sense that it might be well for her in such a case to turn to Roger, who at least would deliver her from drawing beer, lurked in the poor fellow’s breast. Nothing would humiliate Gervase so much as the triumph of Roger, who had always been the one person in the world who pointed the moral of his own deficiencies to the unfortunate young squire; and there swelled in his breast a sort of dull anguish and sense of contrast, in which Roger’s triumphant swing of the bat and kick of the football mingled with his carrying off of the woman whom poor Gervase admired and adored, adding a double piquancy to the act of renunciation which he was slowly spelling out in his own dumb soul. Nobody would try to take away that fellow’s name. He had a cottage of his own that he could take her to, dang him! Gervase was beguiled for a moment into his old indignant thought that such a man playing cricket all over the county would probably come to the workhouse in the end, and that this was where Patty might find herself, if she preferred the athlete to himself; but he threw off the idea in his new evanescent impulse. She was too clever for that! She’d find a way to keep a man straight, whether it was a poor fellow who was not clever, or one that was too good at every kind of diversion. I am no great believer in heredity, and the house of Piercey was by no means distinguished for its chivalrous instincts or tendencies; yet I am glad to think that some vague influence from his ancient race had put this idea of giving up Patty, if he could bring only trouble and no bettering to her, into his dull and aching head. If he had been wiser, he would probably have kept away from her in this new impulse of generosity, but he was not wise at all, his first idea was to go to Patty, and tell her, and receive her orders – which no doubt she would give peremptorily – to go away from her. He never expected anything else. He was capable of giving her up, for her good, if he found himself unable to make a lady of her, in a dull sort of way, as a necessity; but he was not capable of the thought that she might stand by him to her own hurt. It seemed quite natural to him – not a thing to be either blamed or doubted – that as soon as it was proved that he could not make a lady of her, she
