第28章

Yes,and properly so.Now,Elfride,you see the reason of his teaching me by letter.I knew him years before he went to Oxford,but I had not got far enough in my reading for him to entertain the idea of helping me in classics till he left home.Then I was sent away from the village,and we very seldom met;but he kept up this system of tuition by correspondence with the greatest regularity.I will tell you all the story,but not now.There is nothing more to say now,beyond giving places,persons,and dates.His voice became timidly slow at this point.

No;dont take trouble to say more.You are a dear honest fellow to say so much as you have;and it is not so dreadful either.It has become a normal thing that millionaires commence by going up to London with their tools at their back,and half-a-crown in their pockets.That sort of origin is getting so respected,she continued cheerfully,that it is acquiring some of the odour of Norman ancestry.

Ah,if I had MADE my fortune,I shouldnt mind.But I am only a possible maker of it as yet.

It is quite enough.And so THIS is what your trouble was?

I thought I was doing wrong in letting you love me without telling you my story;and yet I feared to do so,Elfie.I dreaded to lose you,and I was cowardly on that account.

How plain everything about you seems after this explanation!Your peculiarities in chess-playing,the pronunciation papa noticed in your Latin,your odd mixture of book-knowledge with ignorance of ordinary social accomplishments,are accounted for in a moment.

And has this anything to do with what I saw at Lord Luxellians?

What did you see?

I saw the shadow of yourself putting a cloak round a lady.I was at the side door;you two were in a room with the window towards me.You came to me a moment later.

She was my mother.

Your mother THERE!She withdrew herself to look at him silently in her interest.

Elfride,said Stephen,I was going to tell you the remainder to-morrow--I have been keeping it back--I must tell it now,after all.The remainder of my revelation refers to where my parents are.Where do you think they live?You know them--by sight at any rate.

I know them!she said in suspended amazement.

Yes.My father is John Smith,Lord Luxellians master-mason,who lives under the park wall by the river.

O Stephen!can it be?

He built--or assisted at the building of the house you live in,years ago.He put up those stone gate piers at the lodge entrance to Lord Luxellians park.My grandfather planted the trees that belt in your lawn;my grandmother--who worked in the fields with him--held each tree upright whilst he filled in the earth:they told me so when I was a child.He was the sexton,too,and dug many of the graves around us.

And was your unaccountable vanishing on the first morning of your arrival,and again this afternoon,a run to see your father and mother?.I understand now;no wonder you seemed to know your way about the village!

No wonder.But remember,I have not lived here since I was nine years old.I then went to live with my uncle,a blacksmith,near Exonbury,in order to be able to attend a national school as a day scholar;there was none on this remote coast then.