George called her attention by a wink to any picturesque or queer figure that passed. He liked to watch her quiet brown eyes gleam with fun. Nobody had such a keen sense of the ridiculous as his mother. Sometimes, at the mere remembrance of some absurd idea, she would go off into soft silent paroxysms of laughter until the tears would stream down her cheeks.
George was fond and proud of his childish little mother.
He had never known any body, he thought, so young or so transparent. It was easily understood. She had married at sixteen, and had been left a widow little more than a year afterward. "And I," he used to think, "was born with an old head on my shoulders; so we have grown up together. I suppose the dear soul never had a thought in her life which she has not told me."As they sat together a steward brought Mrs. Waldeaux a note, which she read, blushing and smiling.
"The captain invites us to sit at his table," she said, when the man was gone.
"Very proper in the captain," said George complacently.
"You see, Madam Waldeaux, even the men who go down in ships have heard of you and your family!""I don't believe the captain ever heard of me," she said, after a grave consideration," nor of the Waldeaux. It is much more likely that he has read your article in the Quarterly, George.""Nonsense!" But he stiffened himself up consciously.
He had sent a paper on some abstruse point of sociology to the Quarterly last spring, and it had aroused quite a little buzz of criticism. His mother had regarded it very much as the Duchess of Kent did the crown when it was set upon her little girl's head. She always had known that her child was born to reign, but it was satisfactory to see this visible sign of it.
She whispered now, eagerly leaning over to him. "There was something about that paper which I never told you.
I think I'll tell you now that the great day has come.""Well?"
"Why, you know--I never think of you as my son, or a man, or anything outside of me--not at all. You are just ME, doing the things I should have done if I had not been a woman. Well,"--she drew her breath quickly,--"when I was a girl it seemed as if there was something in me that I must say, so I tried to write poems. No, I never told you before. It had counted for so much to me I could not talk of it. I always sent them to the paper anonymously, signed `Sidney.' Oh, it was long--long ago! I've been dumb, as you might say, for years. But when I read your article, George--do you know if I had written it I should have used just the phrases you did? And you signed it `Sidney'!" She watched him breathlessly. "That was more than a coincidence, don't you think? I AM dumb, but you speak for me now. It is because we are just one. Don't you think so, George?"She held his arm tightly.
Young Waldeaux burst into a loud laugh. Then he took her hand in his, stroking it. "You dear little woman! What do you know of sociology?" he said, and then walked away to hide his amusement, muttering "Poems? Great Heavens!"Frances looked after him steadily. "Oh, well!" she said to herself presently.
She forced her mind back to the Quarterly article. It was a beginning of just the kind of triumph that she always had expected for him. He would soon be recognized by scientific men all over the world as their confrere, especially after his year's study at Oxford.
When George was in his cradle she had planned that he should be a clergyman, just as she had planned that he should be a well-bred man, and she had fitted him for both roles in life, and urged him into them by the same unceasing soft pats and pushes. She would be delighted when she saw him in white robes serving at the altar.
Not that Frances had ever taken her religion quite seriously. It was like her gowns, or her education, a matter of course; a trustworthy, agreeable part of her.
She had never once in her life shuddered at a glimpse of any vice in herself, or cried to God in agony, even to grant her a wish.
But she knew that Robert Waldeaux's son would be safer in the pulpit. He could take rank with scholars there, too.
She inspected him now anxiously, trying to see him with the eyes of these Oxford magnates. Nobody would guess that he was only twenty-two. The bald spot on his crown and the spectacles gave him a scholastic air, and the finely cut features and a cold aloofness in his manner spoke plainly, she thought, of his good descent and high pursuits.
Frances herself had a drop of vagabond blood which found comrades for her among every class and color. But there was not an atom of the tramp in her son's well-built and fashionably clothed body. He never had had a single intimate friend even when he was a boy. He will probably find his companions among the great English scholars,"she thought complacently. Of course she would always be his only comrade, his chum. She continually met and parted with thousands of people--they came and went.
"But George and I will be together for all time," she told herself.
He came up presently and sat down beside her, with an anxious, apologetic air. It hurt him to think that he had laughed at her. "That dark haze is the Jersey shore," he said. "How dim it grows! Well, we are really out now in the big world! It is so good to be alone there with you," he added, touching her arm affectionately. "Those cynical old-men-boys at Harvard bored me.""I don't bore you, then, George?"
"You!" He was very anxious to make her forget his roughness. "Apart from my affection for you, mother," he said judicially, "I LIKE you. I approve of you as Inever probably shall approve of another woman. Your peculiarities--the way your brown hair ripples back into that knot "--surveying her critically. "And the way you always look as if you had just come out of a bath, even on a grimy train; and your gowns, so simple--and rich.
