And now the door opened and the seven candle-flames bowed to their young master. The man who stood in the doorway, and paused for a moment before entering further, was dressed so soberly, and looked so shy, that you might at first glance have taken him for a servant or a poor relation but that there was something in his eyes betokening authority as well as the habitual kindness that is the visible part of wisdom. He was a smallish man with a round face, a broad nose, and a mouth slightly out of true; bald of crown, but with graying brown hair still copious about the temples; and plump of figure, as befits a man who enjoys a quiet mind and good living. As he stepped forward into the room he shifted his keen gaze from Marden, and, with head a little aslant, seemed to look down the side of his nose at the carpet, as if he saw there the answer to his questing thought. He moved to his chair and laid a hand on the back of it. It was a hand full of character, expressing something, of austerity and spiritual power, that the jolly contours of the face tended to disguise.
‘Well?’ asked Marden, breaking the silence between them.
The priest bowed his head. ‘Our friend is with God.’
‘No!’ The young man had expected this event, but now he must needs deny it. He rose, shading his eyes from the sight of his companion, and moved slowly towards the hearth, where there was warmth, fire, a beacon still unquenched. But in an instant he turned angrily. ‘Why didn’t you call me, sir? It is a day since I saw him.’
‘It was not his wish,’ said the priest. He smiled: not amusedly, but as one smiles in the presence of troubling beauty. ‘Nor did we know he was so near his end. He received the sacrament and died at peace. He said he was sorry to have caused such a parcel of commotion; he thanked us for our pains; and he wished, he said, that it might not prove a trouble to Master Jack.’
Jack Marden looked; then looked away. ‘Not for ten years has he called me that.’
Staring again into the red caverns and hills of the fire, he was away with the memories that now came crowding to him. He was nine years old, the only child of a fond mother. Fond, but tempering her fondness with a certain rough-and-tumble discipline. She corrected his manners when they were at fault; she expected obedience to her few commands, and got it without having recourse to his father, an expedient that would have been a betrayal of their comradeship, a breach of the deep and happy and unsentimental understanding between them; she demanded of him—in a ceremonious age—less ceremony in his commerce with herself than would have been considered the due of an elder sister; she was dogmatic, quick-tempered, generous, shrewd, loving; pretending to no more patience and forbearance than she possessed, and capable of playing with a small boy as with an equal. In all this she was but herself, spontaneous and unreflecting; for though she had many moments of thoughtfulness and self-questioning, and in secret pondered much upon her son’s unknown destiny, the last thing she would have dreamt of giving conscious attention to was her personal relation with him: that she took for granted, happily and easily, never doubting of success, as young lovers, being sure of each other, take their first kiss. The result was all that a mother could wish. By an instinct of genius that knew no art, nor needed any, she made herself the seal upon his multifarious happiness, his inexhaustible zest in the newness and colour and infinite humorous surprises of mortal life; so that however far he wandered in the rage of his infant curiosity, whatever fun he encountered or games invented or new playmates found, it was always to his mother that he brought back the tale of his day’s work, and the prospect of so sharing his experiences provided a delicate undertone in all he did and suffered. She was sometimes hasty in rebuke, but her anger came and went in swift flashes, fire from the flint of kindness: her very violence was friendly, presupposing intimacy and love; for with an offending stranger, even with a child if she could not love it, she would have been cool, dignified, careful to hide herself. From Jack she hid nothing, except her opinion (which we shall never know) of his father: a man much her senior who spent the greater part of his time in London, consorting with fashionable rakes and loud-laughing women, and industriously wasting his inheritance at cards and cockfights and other diversions of the town. With it all he was curiously reserved—‘the proudest gull that ever invited fleecing,’ they said who had best reason to know. A big morose man, with a vast face pitted with the small pox, and eyes in which one might perhaps have read that he was never at peace with himself, for nine days out of ten he would take no notice of his son, and on the tenth, unbending and becoming aggressively playful, would wax coarsely sarcastic, or sulkily self-pitying, at receiving a timid response. ‘Damnation, you’re my son, aint you? Twas I that gat him, did I not, madam?’ To which his wife would answer, with cold patience: ‘You are pleased to amuse yourself, Mr Marden.’ To the little boy, who made nothing of this that he could have put into words, his father was an impressive though unlovable personage when dressed in the grand clothes that were so seldom paid for; but seen in bed, wigless and unshaven, as Jack once or twice saw him, he was a grotesque and almost terrifying spectacle, from which a child not yet ten was glad to run away to the shelter of his mother’s warm, gay, mocking tenderness. Those were lonely years, though Jacky could not have told you that he was lonely. He could not be always with his mother, and except when his twin cousins from Stenham came visiting, Charles and Petronella, with the stately Aunt Chevenix and the uncle who was so much like Mamma, Jacky had no one of his own age to play with, and had perforce to spend much of his time alone. And he was kept ceaselessly busy in filling the emptiness he was unaware of. When the attractiveness of the actual was for a moment exhausted, he was quick to recreate it in terms of his childish imagination. He spun endless fantasy, peopling the house, the garden, the park, with imaginary boys and girls, with strange animals, with God and the angels of God, the Persons of the Trinity and the Holy Mother, and even with ghosts and goblins, sometimes terrifying himself in the process. But in the end he found the ideal companion in Nolly, the gradual creation of whom drained all vitality from these other phantoms and brought him much solace. Nolly was a boy of his own age. He and Nolly had been born on the same day, and therefore, argued Jacky, they were twins. Nolly was responsive to his every mood: he was always there when wanted yet never obtrusive. He could play and talk with Jacky; even quarrel with him (but they always made it up before parting); and he vanished instantly at the approach of a third person. Though he was Jacky’s brother he made no claim on Mamma, to whom he was nothing, indeed, but a shyly spoken name and the hero of a few fictions confided to her, and to no other in the world, by Jacky. At some points he differed from Jacky, being fair-haired and plump, whereas Jacky was a dark slim child; and very brave in the dark, brave and strong, whereas Jacky knew himself timid. With Nolly at hand a boy could not only have fun, but in pursuit of fun could face dangers that might otherwise have daunted him. And apart from Father Gandy his tutor, he had no other male companionship, except sometimes, for a few minutes, that of Paul Dewdney the stableboy, whose mother, then a brisk woman of forty, was housekeeper to the Marden establishment. Paul was friendly, but at first shy of so small and strange a boy, whose eyes seemed so often to be exploring the invisible or to be turned in upon his own thoughts; and he was shy, too, of appearing to be—in the estimation of his elders and betters—too familiar with his young master. So it fell out that in the earliest years their intercourse was confined to a brief exchange of question and answer. By means of this occasional catechism he learned much about horses that amused and delighted him, but he did not gain a friend comparable with Nolly, the friend of his dreams.