Part 1 (2/2)

Her son was arguing with the deck steward about chairs.

”Now, mother,” he said at last, ”it's all right. They are under cover so that the glare will not strain your eyes, and we can keep dry while we watch the storms.”

”How did you know about it all? One would think you had crossed a dozen times, George.”

”Oh, I've studied the whole thing up thoroughly,” George said, with a satisfied little nod. ”I've had time enough! Why, when I was in petticoats you used to tell me you would buy a s.h.i.+p and we would sail away together. You used to spoil all my school maps with red lines, drawing our routes.”

”Yes. And now we're going!” said Frances to herself.

He sat down beside her and they watched the unending procession of pa.s.sengers marching around the deck. George called her attention by a wink to any picturesque or queer figure that pa.s.sed. He liked to watch her quiet brown eyes gleam with fun. n.o.body had such a keen sense of the ridiculous as his mother. Sometimes, at the mere remembrance of some absurd idea, she would go off into soft silent paroxysms of laughter until the tears would stream down her cheeks.

George was fond and proud of his childish little mother. He had never known any body, he thought, so young or so transparent. It was easily understood. She had married at sixteen, and had been left a widow little more than a year afterward. ”And I,” he used to think, ”was born with an old head on my shoulders; so we have grown up together. I suppose the dear soul never had a thought in her life which she has not told me.”

As they sat together a steward brought Mrs. Waldeaux a note, which she read, blus.h.i.+ng and smiling.

”The captain invites us to sit at his table,” she said, when the man was gone.

”Very proper in the captain,” said George complacently. ”You see, Madam Waldeaux, even the men who go down in s.h.i.+ps have heard of you and your family!”

”I don't believe the captain ever heard of me,” she said, after a grave consideration, ”nor of the Waldeaux. It is much more likely that he has read your article in the Quarterly, George.”

”Nonsense!” But he stiffened himself up consciously.

He had sent a paper on some abstruse point of sociology to the Quarterly last spring, and it had aroused quite a little buzz of criticism. His mother had regarded it very much as the d.u.c.h.ess of Kent did the crown when it was set upon her little girl's head. She always had known that her child was born to reign, but it was satisfactory to see this visible sign of it.

She whispered now, eagerly leaning over to him. ”There was something about that paper which I never told you. I think I'll tell you now that the great day has come.”

”Well?”

”Why, you know--I never think of you as my son, or a man, or anything outside of me--not at all. You are just ME, doing the things I should have done if I had not been a woman. Well,”--she drew her breath quickly,--”when I was a girl it seemed as if there was something in me that I must say, so I tried to write poems. No, I never told you before. It had counted for so much to me I could not talk of it. I always sent them to the paper anonymously, signed 'Sidney.' Oh, it was long--long ago! I've been dumb, as you might say, for years. But when I read your article, George--do you know if I had written it I should have used just the phrases you did? And you signed it 'Sidney'!” She watched him breathlessly. ”That was more than a coincidence, don't you think? I AM dumb, but you speak for me now. It is because we are just one. Don't you think so, George?” She held his arm tightly.

Young Waldeaux burst into a loud laugh. Then he took her hand in his, stroking it. ”You dear little woman! What do you know of sociology?”

he said, and then walked away to hide his amus.e.m.e.nt, muttering ”Poems?

Great Heavens!”

Frances looked after him steadily. ”Oh, well!” she said to herself presently.

She forced her mind back to the Quarterly article. It was a beginning of just the kind of triumph that she always had expected for him. He would soon be recognized by scientific men all over the world as their confrere, especially after his year's study at Oxford.

When George was in his cradle she had planned that he should be a clergyman, just as she had planned that he should be a well-bred man, and she had fitted him for both roles in life, and urged him into them by the same unceasing soft pats and pushes. She would be delighted when she saw him in white robes serving at the altar.

Not that Frances had ever taken her religion quite seriously. It was like her gowns, or her education, a matter of course; a trustworthy, agreeable part of her. She had never once in her life shuddered at a glimpse of any vice in herself, or cried to G.o.d in agony, even to grant her a wish.

But she knew that Robert Waldeaux's son would be safer in the pulpit.

He could take rank with scholars there, too.

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