His agents, so the banker said, had probably unearthed every detail in the story that was now to be known.
On August 5, 1895, Thomas Coburn had been married in The Bronx, to Lucy Speight. Coburn was a carpenter who had fallen from a roof in the following October, and had died a few days later of his injuries. Their child, Grace Coburn, had been born in The Bronx on March 5, 1896, and had died on April 21, 1897. After that all trace of the mother had been lost, though a woman who killed herself by poisoning in the Female House of Detention in the suburb of New Rotterdam, after having been arrested for shop-lifting, on December 24, 1904, might be considered as the same person. This woman had been known to such neighbors as could remember her as Mrs. Lucy Coburn, though at the time of her arrest she had claimed to be the widow of Theodore Whitelaw, after having married Thomas Coburn as her first husband. The wardress who had talked to her on taking her to a cell recalled that she had been incoherent and contradictory in all her statements about herself, her husband, and her child.
As a matter of fact, the early history of Lucy Speight had been traced. She was the daughter of a laboring man at Chatham, in the neighborhood of Albany. Her mental inheritance had been poor. Her father had been the victim of drink, her mother had died insane. One of her sisters had died insane, and a brother had been put at an early age in a home for the feeble-minded. A brother and two sisters still lived either at Chatham or at Pittsfield. He had in his hand photographs of all the living members of the family, and copies of photographs of those deceased, including two of Lucy Speight as she was as a young girl.
He turned toward Tom. "Would you like to look at them?"
The power of emotion came back to him with a rush. He remembered his mother, vividly in two or three attitudes or incidents, but otherwise faintly. A flush that stained his cheek with the same dark red which dissipation stamped on Tad's made the brothers look more than ever alike as he crossed the room to take the pictures from his father's hand.
There were a dozen or fourteen of them, all of poor rustic boys and girls, or men and women, feebleness in the cast of their faces, the hang of their lips, the vacancy of their eyes. Standing to sort them out, he put aside quickly the two of Lucy Speight. One of them must have dated from 1894, or thereabouts, because of the big sleeves; the other, with skin-tight shoulders, was that of a girl perhaps in 1889. In their faded simper there was almost nothing of the wild dark prettiness with which he saw her in memory, and yet he could recreate it.
He stood and gazed long, all eyes fixed on him. Moving to the table where Mrs. Whitelaw sat behind the tray, he held the two pictures before her.
"That's my mother."
Though he said this without thought of its significance, and only from the habit of thinking of Lucy Speight as really his mother, he saw her shrink. With a glance at the photographs, she glanced up at him, piteously, begging to be spared. Even such contact as this, remote, pictorial only, with people of a world she had never so much as touched, hurt her fastidiousness. That the son of this poor half-witted creature, this Lucy Speight, should also be her son ... but the only protest she could make was in her eyes.
Tom did not sit down again as Whitelaw continued with his facts; he stood at the end of the mantelpiece, with its candelabra in biscuit de Sèvres. Leaning with his elbow on the white marble edge, he had all the others facing him, as all the others had him. The attitude seemed best to accord with the position in which he felt himself, that of a prisoner at the bar.