Then all three looked at him with different degrees of remonstrance, protest, or appeal. Mrs. Warrender was much too sensible of her incapacity to prevail against him to risk any controversy. And even Minnie was so confounded by the certainty of his tone that, except another resounding “Theo!” the tone of which was enough to have made any man pause in an evil career, she too, for the moment, found nothing to say.
“My dear, don’t you think that’s a great pity?” his mother remarked very mildly, but with a countenance which said much more.
“I don’t wish to discuss the question,” he said. “I thought I had told you before. I don’t mean to be disagreeable, mother; but don’t you think that in my own case I should know best?”
“Theo!” cried Minnie for the third time, “you are more than disagreeable; you are ridiculous. How should you know best—a boy like you? You think you can do what you like because poor papa is dead, and we are nothing but women. Oh, it is very ungenerous and undutiful to my mother, but it is ridiculous too.”
“My mother can speak for herself,” said the young man. “I don’t owe any explanations to you.”
“You will have to give explanations to everyone, whether you owe them or not!” cried Minnie. “I know what people think and what they say. There is always supposed to be some reason for it when a young man doesn’t go back to his college. They think he has got into disgrace; they think it is some bad scrape. We shall have to make up excuses and explanations.”
“They may think what they please, so far as I am concerned,” he replied.
“But, my dear, she is right, though that does not matter very much,” said Mrs. Warrender. “There will be a great many inquiries; and explanations will have to be given. That is not the most important, Theo. Didn’t you tell me that if you lost this term you could not go in, as you call it, for honours? I thought you had told me so.”
“Honours!” he said contemptuously. “What do honours mean? I found out the folly of that years ago. They are a sort of trademark, very good for business purposes. Brunson has sense on his side when he goes in for honours. They are good for the college to keep up its reputation as a teaching machine; and they are good for a schoolmaster in the same way. But what advantage would all the honours of the University be to me?” he added, with a laugh of scorn. “There’s an agricultural college somewhere. There would be some meaning in it if I took honours there.”
“You have a strange idea of your own position, Theo,” said Mrs. Warrender, roused to indignation. “You are not a farmer, but a country gentleman.”
“Of the very smallest,” he said—“a little squire. If I were a good farmer and knew my trade, I should be more good.”
“A country gentleman,” cried Minnie, who had kept silence with difficulty, and seized the first opportunity to break in, “is just the very finest thing a man can be. Why, what are half the nobility compared to us? There are all sorts of people in the nobility—people who have been in trade, brewers and bankers and all sorts; even authors and those kind of people. But I have always heard that an English country gentleman who has been in the same position for hundreds of years—Why, Theo, there is not such a position in the world! We are the bulwark of the country. We are the support of the constitution. Where would the Queen be, or the church, or anything, without the gentry? Why, Theo, an English country gentleman—”
She paused from mere want of breath. On such a subject Miss Warrender felt that words could never have failed; and she devoutly believed everything she said.
“If he’s so grand as that,” said Theo, with a laugh, “what do you suppose is the consequence of a little more Latin and Greek?”
Minnie would have said with all sincerity, Nothing at all; but she paused, remembering that there were prejudices on this subject. “You might as well say, What’s the use of shoes and stockings,” she said, “or of nice, well-made clothes, such as a gentleman ought to wear? By the by, Mr. Cavendish, though I did not care so much for him this time as the last, had his clothes very well made. Education is just like well-made things,” she added, with a sense that she had made, if not an epigram, something very like it—a phrase to be remembered and quoted as summing up the discussion.
“If that’s all,” said Warrender, “I’ve got enough for that.” The reference to Cavendish and the epigram had cleared the atmosphere and given a lighter tone to the family controversy, and the young man felt that he had got over the crisis better than he hoped. He waved his hand to Minnie amicably as he rose from the table. “I thank thee, Jew,” he said with a lighter tone and laugh than were at all usual with him, as he went away. The ladies sat silent, listening to his steps as he went through the hall, pausing to get his hat; and no one spoke till he suddenly appeared again, crossing the lawn towards the gate that led into the village. Then there was a simultaneous long breath of fulfilled expectation, not to be called a sigh.
“Ah!” said Minnie, “I thought so. He always goes that way.”
“It is the way that leads to all the places Theo would be likely to go to.”
“You mean it leads to Markland, mamma. Oh, I know very well what Theo means. He thinks he is very deep, but I see through him; and
