“I want to tell you how sorry I am for talking like that,” she rushed on, unheeding. “And to tell you that no man who looks and talks the way you do was ever a sot or a scoundrel. Weak, maybe. Yes, we all are. But never bad.”
“Would—would you let me tell you?” he faltered, gripped by a sudden, overwhelming impulse to make this wonderful little woman his mother confessor—to tell her what he had never clearly told himself.
She nodded eager, kindly assent.
In a voice at first incoherent, almost broken, but that soon steadied into narrative force, Dad told the whole pitiful tale.
He did not strive for effect. He spared no needful detail. He spoke as though of a third person; calmly, impartially.
When the story of his Mexican disgrace was done, he went on to tell her of his homecoming, his futile life for the past fourteen years, his continued degradation, the sordid surroundings, the unworthy hopelessness of it all.
Only when he spoke of Jimmie did an unconscious softness and a thrill of pride come into the deep voice.
He told of his son’s departure for the front, the bedside talk with Jimmie in the moonlight, the escape from Ideala, the kneeling vigil on the hill-top where he had forever shaken off his dead self. Of his later army achievements he said little.
It was twilight now, all over the battle world. The long twilight of early summer. And in the attic darkness left the faces of the man and woman visible only as dim white rifts in the gloom.
Presently Dad’s deep voice ceased. There was a hush; through which the far-off throb of a complaining whippoorwill, from down in the bottom-lands, by the river, came to their ears.