Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/48

36 same time I desire you to understand, that, as long as you are under my care, I must insist that your acquaintance with any of the late Mrs. Leicester's, your mother's, relations be nothing beyond what ordinary courtesy to them shall require. Any intimacy with them was strongly deprecated by the late Major Leicester, your father, during his lifetime, and both as his friend and as your guardian I feel myself bound to follow out his wishes on the subject, even if my own did not coincide with them, as, I may add, they do most completely.

'I enclose my accustomary allowance of £5 to you for the year's pocket-money. You can apply to the Rev. Dr. Craven for the necessary funds for your travelling expenses, an account of which I shall expect you to forward to me.—I remain, truly yours,

''

As I stripped myself, ran down to the wash-room, took my place behind the last fellow on the stairs, and as I was washing in the wash-room before I went under the tap, I thought in a half-dreamy way about this uncle of mine, and then about my mother and Colonel James, and then about my father. But going under the tap and standing there with the cool water gushing all over my chest and down my body, my thoughts, arrested, took another turn, and it was not till I was in bed that night that they reverted to the matter. Who was my mother? My father was a major in the army, a 'friend' of Colonel James: something like Colonel James seems to me, perhaps: a stiff-bodied, stiff-kneed, steel-grey-headed old gentleman modelled upon Thackeray's Major Pendennis Was my mother the woman up in one of the berths of that second darker vision, the woman up in one of the berths, soothing and giving suck to the child fractious with sleep and misery? The baby-boy, then, was my brother or sister? Had I a brother or sister? I felt somehow that I had not. Had I a mother? I felt that, on the other side of some broad, shelved and dim atmosphere, I had. Sometimes she stood still, turned towards me; but neither of us made any great effort to see the other. 'My father lies dead in the close dark coffin in the ground with a frown on his face And my thoughts of them,' I said to myself, 'are this