“Why, Miss Elinor, I never heard you. …”
Little Phil rounded the last turn of the staircase. At the sight of his parents he gave a shout, he quickened his pace; he almost slid from step to step.
“Not so fast, not so fast!” his mother called anxiously, and ran toward him.
“Not so fast!” echoed Miss Fulkes, hurrying down the stairs behind. And suddenly, from the morning room, which had a door leading out into the garden, Mrs. Bidlake appeared, white and silent and with floating veils, like an imposing phantom. In a little basket she carried a bunch of cut tulips; her gardening scissors dangled at the end of a yellow ribbon. T’ang the Third followed her, barking. There was a confusion of embracing and handshaking. Mrs. Bidlake’s greetings had the majesty of ritual, the solemn grace of an ancient and sacred dance. Miss Fulkes writhed with shyness and excitement, stood first on one leg and then on the other, went into the attitudes of fashion plates and mannequins, and from time to time piercingly laughed. When she shook hands with Philip, she writhed so violently that she almost lost her balance.
“Poor creature!” Elinor had time to think between the answering and asking of questions, “How urgently she needs marrying! Much worse than when we left.”
“But how he’s grown!” she said aloud. “And how he’s changed!” She held the child at arm’s length with the gesture of a connoisseur who stands back to examine a picture. “He used to be the image of Phil. But now …” She shook her head. Now the broad face had lengthened, the short straight nose (the comical “cat’s nose” which in Philip’s face she had always laughed at and so much loved) had grown finer and faintly aquiline, the hair had darkened. “Now he’s exactly like Walter. Don’t you think so?” Mrs. Bidlake remotely nodded. “Except when he laughs,” she added. “His laugh’s pure Phil.”
“What have you brought me?” asked little Phil almost anxiously. When people went away and came back again, they always brought him something. “Where’s my present?”
“What a question!” Miss Fulkes protested, blushing with vicarious shame and writhing.
But Elinor and Philip only laughed.
“He’s Walter when he’s serious,” said Elinor.
“Or you.” Philip looked from one to the other.
“The first minute your father and mother arrive!” Miss Fulkes continued her reproaches.
“Naughty!” the child retorted, and threw back his head with a little movement of anger and pride.
Elinor, who had been looking at him, almost laughed aloud. That sudden lifting of the chin—why it was the parody of old Mr. Quarles’s gesture of superiority. For a moment the child was her father-in-law, her absurd, deplorable father-in-law, caricatured and in miniature. It was comic, but at the same time it was somehow no joke. She wanted to laugh, but she was oppressed by a sudden realization of the mysteries and complexities of life, the terrible inscrutabilities of the future. Here was her child—but he was also Philip, he was also herself, he was also Walter, her father, her mother, and now, with that upward tilting of the chin, he had suddenly revealed himself as the deplorable Mr. Quarles. And he might be hundreds of other people too. Might be? He certainly was. He was aunts and cousins she hardly ever saw; grandfathers and great-uncles she had only known as a child and utterly forgotten; ancestors who had died long ago, back to the beginning of things. A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts and would go on dictating and controlling. Phil, little Phil—the name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like “France” or “England,” to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong. She looked at the child with a kind of terror. What a responsibility!
“I call that cupboard love,” Miss Fulkes was still going on. “And you musn’t say ‘naughty’ to me like that.”
Elinor gave a little sigh, shook herself out of her reverie, and, picking up the child in her arms, pressed him against her. “Never mind,” she said, half to the reproving Miss Fulkes, half to her own apprehensive self. “Never mind.” She kissed him.
Philip was looking at his watch. “Perhaps we ought to go and wash and brush up a bit before lunch,” he said. He had the sentiment of punctuality.
“But first,” said Elinor, to whom it seemed that meals were made for man, not man for meals, “first we simply must run into the kitchen and say how do you do to Mrs. Inman. It would be unforgivable if we didn’t. Come.” Still carrying the child, she led the way through the dining room. The smell of roast duck grew stronger and stronger as they advanced.
Fretted a little by his consciousness of unpunctuality, and a little uneasy at having to risk himself, even with Elinor for dragoman, in the kitchen among the servants, Philip reluctantly followed her.
At luncheon, little Phil celebrated the occasion by behaving atrociously.
“The excitement has been too much for him,” poor Miss Fulkes kept repeating, trying to excuse the child and indirectly to justify herself. She would have liked to cry. “You’ll see when he’s got used to your being here, Mrs. Quarles,” she said, turning to Elinor. “You’ll see; he can be such an angel. It’s the excitement.”
She had come to love the child so much that his triumphs and humiliations, his virtues and his crimes made her exult or mourn, feel self-satisfaction or shame, as if they had been her own. Besides, there was her professional pride. She had been alone responsible for him all these months, teaching him the social virtues and why the triangle of India is painted crimson on the map; she
