He opened his eyes again with an instinct of escape. There were the bands of blue, and, still passing in their multitudes, leaving him forever, the proud, exultant sea-gulls. The man still knelt beside him. He heard his own voice come:—
“What do you mean?”
“I never meant to tell you! I never meant to tell you!” a moan answered him. “But—seeing you lying there!—dying!—my son!—who has given his life for England!—And how I have longed for you all these years!—My romance, Marmaduke—How could I be silent? Forgive me! Forgive me, my boy. Yes, mine. My known children are dear to me, but how far dearer the unknown son, seen only by stealth, in snatched glimpses! It is true, Marmaduke, true. We were lovers. She loved me. Do not ask. Do not question. We were young. She was very beautiful. It was springtime; daffodils were in the woods. She said that she had never known any one like me. She said that her life was hollow, meaningless. I opened doors to her, I read to her. Browning—I read Browning,” he muttered on, “in the woods; among the daffodils. It was a new life to her—and to me. And we were swept away. Don’t blame us, Marmaduke. If there was wrong, there was great beauty—then. Only then; for after, she was cruel—very cruel. She turned from me; she crushed and tore my heart. Oh!—I have suffered! But no one knew. No one ever dreamed of it. Only she and I. My God!—I see her in your hair and eyes!”
It was true. It was absolutely true. Through his whole being he felt its inevitability. Everything was clear, with a strange, black, infernal clearness. His life lay open before him, open from beginning to end: that beginning of tawdry sentiment and shame—with daffodils; and this end, with daffodils again, and again with tawdry sentiment and shame.
He was not a Follett. He had no part in the Folletts. He had no part in Channerley. He was an interloper, a thief. He was the son of this wretched man, in whose very grief he could detect the satisfaction—oh, who more fitted to detect such satisfaction!—of his claim upon a status above his own. He was all that he had always most despised, a second-rate, a third-rate little creature; the anxious, civil, shrinking Marmalade of Cauldwell’s office. Why (as the hideous moments led him on, point by point, his old lucidity, sharpened to a needle fineness, seemed to etch the truth in lines of fire upon the blackness), hadn’t he always been a pitiful little snob? Wasn’t it of the essence of a snob to over-value the things one hadn’t and to fear the things one was? It hadn’t been other people, it had been himself, what he really was, of whom he had always been afraid. He saw himself reduced to the heretofore unrecognized, yet always operative, element in his own nature—a timid, watchful humility.
Oh, Channerley! Channerley! The wail rose in his heart and it filled the world. Oh, his woods, his daffodils, his father’s smile—gone—lost forever! Worse than that—smirched, withered, desecrated!
A hideous gibbering of laughter seemed to rise around him, and pointing fingers. Amy’s eyes passed with another malice in their mockery; and Robert would never turn to him now, and Griselda would never look at him. He saw it all, as they would never see it. He was not one of them, and they had always felt it; and oh,—above all,—he had always felt it. And now, quite close it seemed, softly rustling, falsely smiling, moved his loathsome mother: not only as he remembered her in youth, but in her elegant middle years, as he had last seen her, with hard eyes and alien lips and air of brittle, untouched exquisiteness.
Suddenly fury so mounted in him that he saw himself rising in bed, rending his dressings, to seize the kneeling man by the throat and throttle him. He could see his fingers sinking in on either side among the clustered hair, and hear himself say, “How dare you! How dare you! You hound! You snivelling, sneaking hound! You look for pity from me, do you!—and tenderness! Well, take this, this! Everything, everything I am and have that’s worth being and having, I owe to them. I’ve hated you and all you mean, always—yes, your fear and your caution and your admiration and your great high forehead. Oh, I see it! I see it!—it’s my own! And though I am only that in myself, then take it from me that I hate myself along with you and curse myself with you!”
It came to him that he was slowly panting, and that after the fever-fury an icy chill crept over him. And a slow, cold smile came with it, and he saw Jephson, the wit of the office, wagging his head and saying, “Little Marmalade take a man by the throat! Ask me another!”
No; little Marmalade might win the V.C.; but only when he thought he was a Follett. Was that what it all came to, really? Something broke and stopped in his mind.