“Not unless I had another mamma,” said Geoff. “Theo is about as old as you.”
“Oh no; much younger than I am. Do you remember you once said you would like him for your tutor, Geoff?”
“I don’t think I should now,” said the little boy. “That was because he was so clever. I begin to think now, perhaps it would be better not to have such a clever one. When you are very small you don’t understand.”
“You are not very big still, my dear boy.”
“No, but things come different.” Geoff had a way of twisting his little face, as he made an observation wiser than usual, which amused the world in general, but not his mother. He was not a pretty boy; there was nothing in his appearance to satisfy a pretty young woman in her ambition and vanity for her child; but his little face was turned into a grotesque by those queer contortions. She put her hand upon his arm hastily.
“Don’t make such faces, Geoff. Why should you twist your features out of all shape, with every word you say?”
This was perhaps too strong, and Geoff felt it so. “I don’t want to make faces,” he said, “but what else have you got to do it with when you are thinking? I’ll tell you how I have found out that Theo Warrender would be too clever. That day when he showed me how to do my Latin”—The boy here paused, with a curious elfish gravity. “It was a long time ago.”
“I remember, dear.”
“Well, you were all talking, saying little speeches, as people do, you know, that come to pay visits; and he was out of it, so he talked to me. But now, when he comes, he makes the speeches, and you answer him, and you two run on till I think you never will be done; and it is I who am out of it,” said Geoff, with great gravity, though without offence. His mother pressed his clinging arms to her side, with a sudden exclamation.
“My own boy, you feel out of it when I am talking!—you, my only child, my only comfort!” Lady Markland held him close to her, and quick tears sprang to her eyes.
“It is nothing to make any fuss about, mamma. Sometimes I like it. I listen, and you are very funny when you talk. That is, not you, but Theo Warrender. He talks as if nothing was right but only as you thought. I suppose he thinks you are very clever.” Geoff paused for a moment, and gave her an investigating look; and then added in a less assured tone, “And I suppose you are clever, ain’t you, mamma?”
She was moved to a laugh, in the midst of other feelings. “Not that I know of, Geoff. I was never thought to be clever, so far as I am aware.”
“You are, though,” he said, “when you don’t make speeches as all the people do. I think you are cleverer with Theo than with anybody. What was he talking of today, for instance, when I was away?”
The question was put so suddenly that she was almost embarrassed by it. “He was saying that he wished to be your tutor, Geoff. It was very kind. To save me from parting with you—which I think would be more than I could bear—and to save me the trouble of having a—strange gentleman in the house.”
“But he would be a strange gentleman, just the same.”
“He is a friend, the kindest friend; and then he would not be in the house. He wants to come over every day, just for your lessons. But it is too much—it is too much to accept from anyone,” she said suddenly, struck for the first time with this view.
“That would be very jolly!” cried Geoff. “I should like that: if he came only for my lessons, and then went away: and afterwards there would be only you and me—nobody but you and me, just as we used to be all the time, before—”
“Oh, don’t say that! We were not always alone—before; there was—”
“I know,” said the little boy; but after a moment’s pause he resumed: “You know that generally we were alone, mamma. I like that—you and me, and no one else. Yes, let Theo come and teach me; and then when lessons are over go away.”
Lady Markland laughed. “You must think it a great privilege to teach you, Geoff. He is to be allowed that favour—to do all he can for us—and as soon as he has done it to be turned from the door. That would be kind on his part, but rather churlish on ours, don’t you think?”
“Oh,” said the boy, “then he does it for something? You said tutors worked for money, and that Theo was well off, and did not want money. I see; then he wants something else. Is no one kind just for kindness? Must everybody be paid?”
“In kindness, surely, Geoff.”
The boy looked at her with his little twinkling eyes and a twist in the corner of his mouth. Perhaps he did not understand the instinctive suspicion in his mind—indeed, there is no possibility that he could understand it; but it moved him with a keen premonition of danger. “I should think it was easiest to pay in money,” he said, with precocious wisdom. “How could you and me be kind?”
They strolled homeward during this conversation along the bare avenue, through the lines of faint, weak-kneed young trees which had been planted with a far-off hope of some time, twenty years hence, filling up the gaps. Little Geoff, with all the chaos of ideas in his mind, a child unlike other children, just saved from the grave of his race, the last little feeble representative of a house which had been strong and famous in its day, was not unlike one of the feeble saplings which rustled and swayed in the wailing autumn wind. The sunshine slanted upon the two figures, throwing long shadows across the wet
