“No, I don’t,” said Lew, calmly. “You haven’t the spirit. Your mammy would do it like a shot, if it wasn’t for--other things.”
“What other things?” cried Rob, fiercely.
“Well, because she’s got a heart--rather bigger than her spirit, and that’s saying a great deal: and because she believes like an Arab--and that’s saying a great deal too--in her bread and salt.”
“Look here!” cried Rob, looking about him for a reason, “I don’t mean to stand any longer the way you speak of my mother. Whatever she is, she is my mother, and I’ll not listen to any gibes on that subject--least of all from you.”
“What gibes? I say her heart is greater even than her spirit. I might say that”--and here Lew made something like the sign of the Cross, for he had queer fragments of religion in him, and sometimes thought he was a Roman Catholic--“of the Queen of heaven.”
“You call her mother,” cried Bob, angrily.
“I should like to know,” said his companion, whose temper was invulnerable, “where I could find a better name.”
“And old girl,” cried Rob, working himself into a sort of fury, “and--other names.”
“I beg your pardon, old fellow; there I was wrong. It don’t mean anything, you know. It means dear old lady; but I know it’s an ugly style, and comes from bad breeding, and I’ll never do it again.”
A sort of grunt, half satisfied, half sullen, came from Rob, and his companion knew the worst was over. “Let’s think a little,” he said--“you’re grand at describing--tell me a bit what that woman is like.”
Rob hesitated for some minutes, and then his pride gave way.
“She’s what you might call all in the air,” he said.
“But looks at you to see if you think her so.”
“She has a lot of fair hair--dull-looking, it might be false, but I don’t think somehow it is--and no colour to speak of, but might put on some, I should say. She looks like that.”
Lew put his arm within Rob’s as if accidentally, and gave forth a low whistle. “If that’s _her_,” he said, “and she’s going to marry a minister--I should just think she would like to get me out of the way.”
“But why, then, should she ask you to come and see her?--for she had seen you on the sly, and that was enough.”
“There’s where the mystery comes in: but you never know that kind of woman. There’s always a screw loose in them somewhere. She repents it, perhaps, by now. Let’s make a round by her house, wherever it is, and perhaps we’ll see her through a window, as she saw me.”