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The old fellow stood by to serve me as I ate, with a pathetic touch of the old slavery days in his deferential, half-fatherly manner, dropping a quaint remark every now and again; as, when drawing my attention to the sun bursting through the clouds, he said, "The poor man's blanket is coming out, sah" phrases in which there seemed a whole world of pathos to me.
This is indeed an event. A year ago he wrote me a long letter of advice, touching my studies, and giving a world of counsel regarding my deportment. That cold, half-dictatorial, half-fatherly letter, seemed forced from his heart by a sense of duty. This is brief, elegant and kind.
His gay, half-fatherly ways with these rising talents were well known. They made part of his fame with his contemporaries; a picturesque element in his dinner-parties which the world appreciated. Fenwick found his way rather sulkily to the dining-room. It annoyed him that Cuningham had a lady and he had none.
He exasperated his kind aunt, he made all his friends indignant, and what was more, he exposed the young heiress hourly to many attempts on the part of the inferior class, from which as a matter of fact she herself sprang; and it was not until she was driven nearly desperate by those attempts that Sir Tom suddenly appeared upon the scene, and moved, it was thought, more by a half-fatherly kindness and sympathy for her, than either by love or desire of wealth, took her to himself, and made her his wife, to the great and grateful satisfaction of the girl herself, whose strange upbringing and brief introduction into a higher sphere had spoiled her for that homely country-town existence in which every woman flattered and every man made love to her.
Miss Bibby shook hands with Kate, then with Hugh, on whom she bent a curious glance: she had half expected to see him turn aside and dive through the doorway at the sight of herself, yet there he stood as calm and unashamed as possible. He took her hand and held it in a pleasant grasp. He looked down at her in the half-fatherly, bantering fashion he adopted to the "ducky little girls."
He dearly liked the better way of living, the more liberal strain of housekeeping and expenditure; he liked the social meetings in the evening, the talk after dinner with the three young men, the half-fatherly flirtation with Phoebe, which she too enjoyed much, avowedly preferring him, with pretty coquetry, to the others.
And he assured me that he felt at least quite half-fatherly when he put his arm around her waist and kissed her. The girl, however, had not forgotten the difference of her station. All her life, by her mother, by other girls, by schoolteachers, by the whole tradition of her class she had been warned against gentlemen. She was being kissed by a gentleman.
Was this all? as he kissed her, and smiled, leaning over her in the old kind way, with a tenderness that was half-fatherly and indulgent to her weakness, she did not seem at all sure what it was that had moved like a ghost between him and her; was it in reality only this this and no more? She almost thought so as she looked up into his kind face. Only this!
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