‘And brought the child back to prove it?’ interpolated the doctor, casting an eye over the fashionable crowd beginning to fill the room.
‘Exactly,’ said the Baron, ordering wine. ‘I made an exclamation, and she said quickly: “You can’t blame me, you can’t accuse me of using a child for my own ends!” Well, what else does it come to?’
‘That woman’, the doctor said, settling himself more comfortably in his chair, ‘would use the third-rising of a corpse for her ends. Though’, he added, ‘I must admit she is very generous with money.’
The Baron winced. ‘So I gathered from her over-large bid for the portrait. Well, she went on to say that, when they met, the Baronin had so obviously forgotten all about her, that the child was “ashamed.” She said “shame went all over her". She was already at the door when she spoke the last sentence. In fact, she conducted the whole scene as though my room were a stage that had been marked out, and at this point she must read her final lines.
‘"Robin,” she said, “Baronin Robin Volkbein, I wonder if she could be a relative."
‘For a whole minute I couldn’t move. When I turned around I saw that Guido was ill. I took him in my arms and spoke to him in German. He had often put questions to me about his mother and I had managed always to direct his mind to expect her.’
The doctor turned to the Baron with one of his sudden illuminations. ‘Exactly right. With Guido, you are in the presence of the “maladjusted". Wait! I am not using that word in the derogatory sense at all, in fact my great virtue is that I never use the derogatory in the usual sense. Pity is an intrusion when in the presence of a person who is a new position in an old account—which is your son. You can only pity those limited to their generation. Pity is timely, and dies with the person; a pitiable man is his own last tie. You have treated Guido well.’
The Baron paused, his knife bent down. He looked up. ‘Do you know, doctor, I find the thought of my son’s possible death at an early age a sort of dire happiness, because his death is the most awful, the most fearful thing that could befall me. The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy. I have become entangled in the shadow of a vast apprehension which is my son; he is the central point toward which life and death are spinning, the meeting of which my final design will be composed.’
‘And Robin?’ the doctor asked.
‘She is with me in Guido, they are inseparable and this time’, the Baron said, catching his monocle, ‘with her full consent.’ He leaned down and picked up his napkin. ‘The Baronin’, he continued, ‘always seemed to be looking for someone to tell her that she was innocent. Guido is very like her, except that he has his innocence. The Baronin was always searching in the wrong direction, until she met Nora Flood, who seemed, from what little I knew of her, to be a very honest woman, at least by intention.’