“Oh, Miss Chatty! They know it all, every word,” Lizzie cried.
XLIX
Two little girls are as unlike as anything can be to one little boy. This gave Warrender a sort of angry satisfaction in the ridiculous incident which had happened in his life. For it is a ridiculous incident. When a man is hardened to it, when he has had several children and is habituated to the paternal honours, it may be amusing and interesting and all the rest. But scarcely a year after his marriage, when he was not quite four-and-twenty, to be the father of twins! He felt sometimes as if it was the result of a conspiracy to make him ridiculous. The neighbouring potentates, when he met them, laughed as they congratulated him. “If you are going to continue like this, you will be a patriarch before you know where you are,” one of them said. It was a joke to the entire country round about. Twins! He felt scarcely any of the stirrings of tenderness in his heart which are supposed to move a young father, when he looked at the two little yawning, gaping morsels of humanity. If there had been but one, perhaps!—but two! He was the laughingstock of the neighbourhood, he felt. The sight of his wife, pale and smiling, touched his heart indeed. But even this sight was not without its pangs. For alas! she knew all about this position which was so novel to him. She understood the babies and their wants, as it was natural a mother who was already experienced in motherhood should. And finally she was so far carried away by the privileges and the expansion of the moment as to ask him—him! the last authority to be consulted on such a subject—whether Geoff was delighted to hear of his little sisters. Geoff’s little sisters! The thought of that boy having anything to do with them, any relationship to claim with his children clouded Warrender’s face. He turned it away, and Lady Markland, in the sweet enthusiasm of the moment, fortunately did not perceive that change. She thought in her tender folly that this would make everything right; that Geoff, as the brother of his little girls, would be something nearer to Theo, claiming a more favourable consideration. She preserved this hope for some time, notwithstanding a great many signs to the contrary. Even Theo’s dark face, when he found Geoff one day in his mother’s room, looking with great interest at the children, did not alarm the mother, who was determined not to part with her illusion. “Do you think it right to have a boy of Geoff’s age here in your room?” he said. “Oh, Theo, my own boy!—what harm can it do?” she had said, so foolishly, forgetting that Geoff’s crime in the eyes of his young stepfather was exactly this, that he was her own boy.
Thus the circumstance which everyone concerned hoped was to make the most favourable change in the position did only intensify its difficulties. Geoff naturally was more thrown into the society of his stepfather during his mother’s seclusion, and Geoff was very full of the new event and new relationships, and was no wiser than his mother so far as this was concerned. When they lunched together the boy was so far forgetful of former experiences as to ply Theo with questions, as he had not done since the days when the young man was his tutor, and everything was on so different a footing. Geoff’s excitement made him forget all the prudence he had acquired. His “I say, Warrender,” over and over repeated drove Theo to heights of exasperation indescribable. Everything about Geoff was offensive to his stepfather: his ugly little face, the nervous grimaces which he still made, the familiarity of his address, but above all the questions which it was impossible to silence. Lady Markland averted them more or less when she was present, and Geoff had learnt prudence to some extent, but in his excitement he remembered these precautions no more.
“I say, Warrender! shall you take mamma away? Nurse says she must go for a change. I think Markland is always the nicest place going, don’t you?”
“No, I prefer the Warren, as you know.”
“Oh!” Geoff could scarcely keep out of his voice the wondering contempt with which he received this suggestion: but here his natural insight prevailed, and a sort of sympathetic genius which the little fellow possessed. “To be sure, I like the Warren very much indeed,” he said. “I suppose what makes me like Markland best is being born here.”
“And I was born there,” Theo said.
“Yes, I know. I wonder which the babies will like best. They are born here, like me; I hope they will like Markland. It will be fun seeing them run about, both the same size, and so like. They say twins are always so like. Shall we have to tie a red ribbon round one and a blue ribbon round the other, as people do?”
To this question the father of the babies vouchsafed no reply.
“Nurse says they are not a bit like me,” Geoff continued, in a tone of regret.
“Like you! Why should they be like you?” said Warrender, with a flush of indignation.
“But why not, Warrender? Brothers and sisters are alike often. You and Chatty are a little alike. When I am at Oxford, if they come to see me, I shall like fellows to say, ‘Oh, I saw your sisters, Markland.’ ”
“Your sisters!” Theo could scarcely contain his disgust, all the more that he saw the old butler keeping an eye upon him with a
