XVI
Walks and Talks
“They tell me you are to be congratulated, Hester,” said old Captain Morgan.
She had met him taking his evening walk, and in that and in his aspect altogether there was something altogether despondent—a depression and air of weakness which was not common with the old man. She had not gone with him for some days, and perhaps he had felt the desertion. The first thing Hester did was to draw his hand within her arm.
“You are tired,” she said.
“Not very. I am a silly old fellow and always go too far. I have been thinking of you, my dear; and if you are to be congratulated—”
“No; I don’t think so, Captain Morgan. What about?”
“About—If anything so important had happened you would have come and told me, Hester.”
“I am glad you see that at last. But yes, there is something to congratulate me upon. Nothing did happen. Is not that a great deal to say? For I was tempted, sadly tempted.”
“My dear, I don’t understand that.”
Hester laughed.
“You see, Captain Morgan, you are wise and know a great deal; but you were never a girl—and a poor girl. It would have been so delightful to put my mother back in her nice house, and show Catherine—” Here she paused somewhat embarrassed.
“What of Catherine?” he said.
“Oh, not much—they were, perhaps, when they were young—on different sides. My mother has come down, and Cousin Catherine has gone up. I should like to have put the balance straight.”
“To bring Catherine down, and put your mother—”
“No, Captain Morgan. Catherine is always good when she is with you. I think I almost like her then. I would not harm her,” said Hester, holding up her head, “if I had the power to do it. But she scorns every one of us; perhaps because we all consent to eat her bread. I would not, you know, if I could help it.”
“I know you are ungenerous, Hester, in that respect.”
“Ungenerous! Well, never mind, there are more kinds of ungenerosity than one. I am going in with you to tell Mrs. Morgan.”
“I am not sure,” said the old captain, “though it is a wretched piece of self-denial, that I want you to come with me tonight.”
Hester opened her great eyes wide.
“Why!” she said. It was the one house in the world to which she felt she had a right.
“That is nonsense, however,” said the old man; “for of course you must meet. We have got our grandson, Hester.”
“I heard somebody had come, but I thought it was a gentleman. I did not know you had any—children—except little Mary.”
“We have none—in this world; but do you think my wife would have been what she is with never a child? We all have our disabilities, my love. I have never been a young girl, and you have never been an old—pair.”
They both laughed. Hester with the easily-recovered cheerfulness of youth, he in tremulous tones, which had as much pathos as mirth in them.
“This is the son of my daughter,” he said. “She has been long dead, poor girl—happily for her. Unless when there is some business connected with them to be settled we don’t talk much of them. My wife and I long ago went back to the honeymoon stage. We have had to live for each other: and very glad to have each other to live for. Children are very strange, my dear.”
“Are they?” said Hester, with an awe which she could scarcely understand.
“Very strange. So dependent upon you for long, so independent after; so unlike you, that you cannot understand what you have to do with them. Perhaps it is a penalty of living so long as we have done. I have a theory,” said the old captain, cheering up, “that after seventy, when you have lived out your life, you begin another. And it is quite different. It is a pity we can’t renew the old bodies—eyes and ears and legs and all the rest of it. It would be a very interesting experiment.”
“Like the people who found the elixir of life, or the Wandering Jew?”
The girl spoke to humour him, herself wondering over every word with that curiosity, mingled with pity and tenderness and half disapproval, with which youth listens to the vagaries of age.
“Not at all like the Wandering Jew; his life was continuous and one-ideaed,” said Captain Morgan, delighted to get upon his hobby. “And I miss a great deal in the stories of those who get the elixir. They may renew their lives but not themselves. There is one I recollect at this moment, St. Leon. Of course you have never read St. Leon. He becomes a beautiful young man, and the rival of his son, who, of course, does not know him. But the old fellow knows him. He is an old fellow notwithstanding his elixir; the soul of him is just the same. That is not my point of view.”
The old man had become quite erect and walked smartly, animated by his fancy, leading Hester with him rather than leaning on her.
“No,” he repeated, “that is not at all my point of view. The bodies keep old, the minds get—different. I have shaken off my old burdens. I don’t take any more responsibility for those who—used to belong to me. They don’t belong to me any longer. They are labouring along in the former life. I have started in the new.”
“But Mrs. Morgan?” said Hester, with a quaver in her voice.
“Ah! there’s the blot,” said the old man. “Of course, she and I belong to each other forever and ever. Oh, I don’t want to begin again without my old wife; and she won’t give up the
