"I'm not sure that I can say. She was my mother. She was good to me. I was fond of her. I never knew any other mother. I don't think I could—" he looked over at the woman in the shadow, letting his words fall with a certain significant spacing—"know—any other—mother—now—and so—"
Rising, she took a step toward him. He too rose so that as she stood looking up at him he stood looking down at her. There and then her face was imprinted on his memory, a face of suffering, but of suffering that had not made her strong. The quivering victim of self-pity, she begged to be allowed to forget. She had suffered to her limit. She couldn't suffer any more. Everything in her that was raked with the harrow protested against this bringing up again of an outlived agony.
Her beautiful eyes, brimming with unspilled tears, gazed at him reproachfully. As plainly as eyes could tell him anything, they told him that now, when life and time had dug between them such a gulf, she didn't want him as her son. She might have to accept him, since so many things pointed that way, but it would be hard for her. Taking back a little boy would have been one thing; taking back a grown man, none of whose habits or traditions were the same as theirs, would be another. She would do it if it were forced on her, but it couldn't recompense her now for past unhappiness. It would be only a new torture, a torture which, if he hadn't drifted in among them, she might have escaped.
When swiftly and silently she had left the room the man put his hand on Tom's arm.
"Sit down again. You mustn't think that my wife doesn't feel all this. She does. It's because she does that she's so overwrought."
Tom sat down. "Yes, sir, of course!"
"She's been through it so often. For a good ten years after our child was lost boys used to be brought to us to look at every few months. And every time it meant a draining of her vitality."
"I understand that, sir; and I hope Mrs. Whitelaw doesn't think I've come of my own accord."
"No, she knows you haven't. We've asked you to come because—but I must go back. When my wife had been through so much—so many times—and all to no purpose—she made me promise—the doctors made me promise—that she shouldn't be called on to face it again. Whenever she had to interview one of these claimants—"