“Am I not to come back here next summer?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not, Gavan; we haven’t first claim, you see. Perhaps Sir James will lend you to us now and then; but from what I know of him I imagine that he will want to do a lot with you, to put you through a great deal. There won’t be much time for this sort of thing. You will probably travel with him.”
They were in the library and, speaking from the depths of her fear, Eppie asked: “Do you like Sir James, Uncle Nigel?” She suspected a pitying quality in the cogitating look that the general bent upon Gavan.
“I hardly know him, my dear. He is quite an eminent man. A little severe, perhaps,--something of a martinet,--but just, conscientious. It is a great thing for Gavan,” the general continued, making the best of a rather bleak prospect, “to have such an uncle to give him a start in life. It means the best sort of start.”
Directly the two children were alone, both sitting in the deep window-seat, Gavan said, “Don’t worry, Eppie. Of course I’ll come back--soon.” His face took on the hardness that its delicacy could so oddly express. He was confronting his ambiguous fate in an attitude of cold resolution. For his sake, Eppie controlled useless outcries. “You have seen your uncle, Gavan?”
“Yes, once; in India. He came up to Darjeeling one summer.”
“Is he nice--nicer than Uncle Nigel made out, I mean?”
“He isn’t like my father,” said Gavan, after a moment.
“You mean that he isn’t wicked?” Eppie asked baldly.
“Oh, a good deal more than that. He is just and conscientious, as the general said. That’s what my mother felt; that’s why she could bear it, my going to him. And the general is right, you know, Eppie, about its being a great thing for me. He is a very important person, in his way, and he is going to put me through. He is determined that my father sha’n’t spoil my life. And, as you know, Eppie, my mother’s life, any chance for her, depends on me. To make her life, to atone to her in any way for all she has had to bear, I must make my own. My uncle will help me.”
The steeliness of his resolves made his face almost alien. Eppie felt this unknown future, where he must fight alone, for objects in which she had no share, shutting her out, and a child’s sick misery of desolation filled her, bringing back the distant memory of her mother’s death, that suffocating sense of being left behind and forgotten; but, keeping her eyes on his prospect, she managed in a firm voice to question him about the arid uncle, learned that he was married, childless, had a house in the country and one in London, and sat in Parliament. He was vastly busy, traveled a great deal, and wrote books of travel; not books about foreign people and the things they ate and wore, as Eppie with her courageous interest hopefully surmised, but books of dry, colorless fact, with lots of statistics in them, Gavan said.