It was on an evening when they were alone in their plain suburban residence,where life was not blue but brown,that she ultimately broke silence,qualifying her announcement of a probable second marriage by assuring him that it would not take place for a long time to come,when he would be living quite independently of her.
The boy thought the idea a very reasonable one,and asked if she had chosen anybody?She hesitated;and he seemed to have a misgiving.
He hoped his stepfather would be a gentleman?he said.
'Not what you call a gentleman,'she answered timidly.'He'll be much as I was before I knew your father;'and by degrees she acquainted him with the whole.The youth's face remained fixed for a moment;then he flushed,leant on the table,and burst into passionate tears.
His mother went up to him,kissed all of his face that she could get at,and patted his back as if he were still the baby he once had been,crying herself the while.When he had somewhat recovered from his paroxysm he went hastily to his own room and fastened the door.
Parleyings were attempted through the keyhole,outside which she waited and listened.It was long before he would reply,and when he did it was to say sternly at her from within:'I am ashamed of you!
It will ruin me!A miserable boor!a churl!a clown!It will degrade me in the eyes of all the gentlemen of England!'
'Say no more--perhaps I am wrong!I will struggle against it!'she cried miserably.
Before Randolph left her that summer a letter arrived from Sam to inform her that he had been unexpectedly fortunate in obtaining the shop.He was in possession;it was the largest in the town,combining fruit with vegetables,and he thought it would form a home worthy even of her some day.Might he not run up to town to see her?
She met him by stealth,and said he must still wait for her final answer.The autumn dragged on,and when Randolph was home at Christmas for the holidays she broached the matter again.But the young gentleman was inexorable.
It was dropped for months;renewed again;abandoned under his repugnance;again attempted;and thus the gentle creature reasoned and pleaded till four or five long years had passed.Then the faithful Sam revived his suit with some peremptoriness.Sophy's son,now an undergraduate,was down from Oxford one Easter,when she again opened the subject.As soon as he was ordained,she argued,he would have a home of his own,wherein she,with her bad grammar and her ignorance,would be an encumbrance to him.Better obliterate her as much as possible.
He showed a more manly anger now,but would not agree.She on her side was more persistent,and he had doubts whether she could be trusted in his absence.But by indignation and contempt for her taste he completely maintained his ascendency;and finally taking her before a little cross and altar that he had erected in his bedroom for his private devotions,there bade her kneel,and swear that she would not wed Samuel Hobson without his consent.'I owe this to my father!'he said The poor woman swore,thinking he would soften as soon as he was ordained and in full swing of clerical work.But he did not.His education had by this time sufficiently ousted his humanity to keep him quite firm;though his mother might have led an idyllic life with her faithful fruiterer and greengrocer,and nobody have been anything the worse in the world.
Her lameness became more confirmed as time went on,and she seldom or never left the house in the long southern thoroughfare,where she seemed to be pining her heart away.'Why mayn't I say to Sam that I'll marry him?Why mayn't I?'she would murmur plaintively to herself when nobody was near.
Some four years after this date a middle-aged man was standing at the door of the largest fruiterer's shop in Aldbrickham.He was the proprietor,but to-day,instead of his usual business attire,he wore a neat suit of black;and his window was partly shuttered.From the railway-station a funeral procession was seen approaching:it passed his door and went out of the town towards the village of Gaymead.
The man,whose eyes were wet,held his hat in his hand as the vehicles moved by;while from the mourning coach a young smooth-shaven priest in a high waistcoat looked black as a cloud at the shop keeper standing there.
December 1891.
