A Red Wallflower

'You do not think he would come all the way on purpose? Papa, he would be very much changed if he did not.'

'Impossible to say, my dear. He is very likely to have changed.' And the colonel went back to his reading.

'Papa does not care about it,' thought Esther. 'Oh, can Pitt be so much changed as that?'

CHAPTER XXII

A QUESTION

The identically same doubt busied some minds in another quarter, where Mr. and Mrs. Dallas sat expecting their son home. They were not so much concerned with it through the winter; the Gainsboroughs had been happily got rid of, and were no longer in dangerous proximity; that was enough for the time. But as the spring came on and the summer drew nigh, the thought would recur to Pitt's father and mother, whether after all they were safe.

'He mentions them in every letter he writes,' Mrs. Dallas said. She and her husband were sitting as usual in their respective easy chairs on either side of the fire. Not for that they were infirm, for there was nothing of that; they were only comfortable. Mrs. Dallas was knitting some bright wools, just now mechanically, and with a knitted brow; her husband's brow showed no disturbance. It never did.

'That's habit,' he answered to his wife's remark.

'But habit with Pitt is a tenacious thing. What will he do when he comes home and finds they are gone?'

'Make himself happy without them, I expect.'

'It wouldn't be like Pitt.'

'You knew Pitt two and a half years ago. He was a boy then; he will be a man now.'

'Do you expect the man will be different from the boy?'

'Generally are. And Pitt has been going through a process.'

'I can see something of that in his letters,' said the mother thoughtfully. 'Not much.'

'You will see more of it when he comes. What do you say in answer to his inquiries?'

'About the Gainsboroughs? Nothing. I never allude to them.'

Silence. Mr. Dallas read his paper comfortably. Mrs. Dallas's brow was still careful.

'It would be like him as he used to be, if he were to make the journey to New York to find them. And if we should seem to oppose him, it might set his fancy seriously in that direction. There's danger, husband. Pitt is very persistent.'

'Don't see much to tempt him in that direction.'

'Beauty! And Pitt knows he will have money enough; he would not care for that.'

'I do,' said Mr. Dallas, without ceasing to read his paper.

'I would not mind the girl being poor,' Mrs. Dallas went on, 'for Pittwill have money enough – enough for both; but, Hildebrand, they are incorrigible dissenters, and I do not want Pitt's wife to be of that persuasion.'

'I won't have it, either.'

'Then we shall do well to think how we can prevent it. If we could have somebody here to take up his attention at least' —

'Preoccupy the ground,' said Mr. Dallas. 'The colonel would say that is good strategy.'

'I do not mean strategy,' said Mrs. Dallas. 'I want Pitt to fancy a woman proper for him, in every respect.'

'Exactly. Have you one in your eye? Here in America it is difficult.'

'I was thinking of Betty Frere.'

'Humph! If she could catch him, – she might do.'

'She has no money; but she has family, and beauty.'

'You understand these things better than I do,' said Mr. Dallas, half amused, half sharing his wife's anxiety. 'Would she make a comfortable daughter-in-law for you?'

'That is secondary,' said Mrs. Dallas, still with a raised brow, knitting her scarlet and blue with out knowing what colour went through her fingers. Perhaps her husband's tone had implied doubt.

'If she can catch him,' Mr. Dallas repeated. 'There is no calculating on these things. Cupid's arrows fly wild – for the most part.'

'I will ask her to come and spend the summer here,' Mrs. Dallas went on. 'There is nothing like propinquity.'

In those days the crossing of the Atlantic was a long business, done solely by the help or with the hindrance of the winds. And there was no telegraphing, to give the quick notice of a loved one's arrival as soon as he touched the shore. So Mr. and Mrs. Dallas had an anxious time of watching and uncertainty, for they could not tell when Pitt might be with them. It lasted, this time of anxiety, till Seaforth had been in its full summer dress for some weeks; and it was near the end of a fair warm day in July that he at last came. The table was set for tea, and the master and mistress of the house were seated in their places on either side the fireplace, where now instead of a fire there was a huge jar full of hemlock branches. The slant sunbeams were stretching across the village street, making that peaceful alternation of broad light and still shadows which is so reposeful to the eye that looks upon it. Then Mrs. Dallas's eye, which was not equally reposeful, saw a buggy drive up and stop before the gate, and her worsteds fell from her hands and her lap as she rose.

'Husband, he is come' she said, with the quietness of intensity; and the next moment Pitt was there.

Yes, he had grown to be a man; he was changed; there was the conscious gravity of a man in his look and bearing; the cool collectedness that belongs to maturer years; the traces of thought and the lines of purpose. It had been all more or less to be seen in her boy before, but now the mother confessed to herself the growth and increase of every manly and promising trait in the face and figure she loved. That is, as soon as the first rush of delight had had its due expression, and the first broken and scattering words were spoken, and the three sat down to look at each other. The mother watched the broad brow, which was whiter than it used to be; the fine shoulders, which were even straighter and broader than of old; and the father noticed that his son overtopped him. And Mrs. Dallas's eyes shone with an incipient moisture which betrayed a soft mood she had to combat with; for she was not a woman who liked sentimental scenes; while in her husband's grey orbs there flashed out every now and then a fire of satisfied pride, which was touching in one whose face rarely betrayed feeling of any kind. Pitt was just the fellow he had hoped to see him; and Oxford had been just the right place to send him to. He said little; it was the other two who did most of the talking. The talking itself for some time was of that disjointed, insignificant character which is all that can get out when minds are so full, and enough when hearts are so happy. Indeed, for all that evening they could not advance much further. Eyes supplemented tongues sufficiently. It was not till a night's sleep and the light of a new day had brought them in a manner to themselves that anything less fragmentary could be entered upon. At breakfast all parties seemed to have settled down into a sober consciousness of satisfied desire. Then Mr. Dallas asked his son how he liked Oxford?

Pitt exhausted himself in giving both the how and the why. Yet no longer like a boy.

'Think you'll end by settling in England, eh?' said his father, with seeming carelessness.

'I have not thought of it, sir.'

'What's made old Strahan take such a fancy to you? Seems to be a regular love affair.'

'He is a good friend to me,' Pitt answered seriously. 'He has shown it in many ways.'

'He'll put you in his will, I expect.'

'I think he will do nothing of the kind. He knows I will have enough.'

'Nobody knows it,' said the older Dallas drily. 'I might lose all mymoney, for anything you can tell.'

The younger man's eyes flashed with a noble sparkle in them. 'What I say is still true, sir. What is the use of Oxford?'

'Humph!' said his father. 'The use of Oxford is to teach young men of fortune to spend their money elegantly.'

'Or to enable young men who have no fortune to do elegantly without it.'

'There is no doing elegantly without money, and plenty of it,' said the elder man, looking from under lowered eyelids, in a peculiar way he had, at his son. 'Plenty of it, I tell you. You cannot have too much.'