I still hung my head.
"She brings me money for poor Hugh."
He started back, whether from anger or relief I couldn't tell, and his face twitched for the fourth time. In the end, I suppose, he decided that anger was the card he could play most skilfully.
"So that that's what enables him to keep up his rebellion against me!"
"No, sir," I said, humbly, "because he never takes it." I went on with that portrait of Mrs. Brokenshire which I vowed she would have to justify. "That doesn't make any difference, however, to her wonderful tenderness of heart in wanting him to have it. You see, sir, when any one's so much like an angel as she is they don't stop to consider how justly other people are suffering or how they've brought their troubles on themselves. Where there's trouble they only ask to help; where there's suffering their first instinct is to heal. Mrs. Brokenshire doesn't want to sustain your son against you; that never enters her head: she only wants him not—not"—my own voice shook a little—"not to have to go without his proper meals. He's doing that now, I think—sometimes, at least. Oh, sir," I ventured to plead, "you can't blame her, not when she's so—so heavenly." Stealing a glance at him, I was amazed and shocked, and not a little comforted, to see two tears steal down his withered cheeks. Knowing then that he would not for some minutes be able to control himself sufficiently to speak, I hurried on. "Hugh doesn't take the money, because he knows that this is something he must go through with on his own strength. If he can't do that he must give in. I think I've made that clear to him. I'm not the adventuress you consider me—indeed I'm not. I've told him that if he's ever independent I will marry him; but I shall not marry him so long as he isn't free to give himself away. He's putting up a big fight, and he's doing it so bravely, that if you only knew what he's going through you'd be proud of him as your son."
Resting my case there, I waited for some response, but I waited in vain. He reflected, and sat silent, and crossed and uncrossed his knees. At last he picked up his hat from the floor and rose. I, too, rose, waiting beside my chair, while he flicked the dust from the crown of his hat and seemed to study its glossy surface as he still reflected.
I was now altogether without a clue to what was passing in his mind, though I could guess at the age-long tragedy of December's love for May. Having seen Ibsen's "Master Builder," at Munich, and read one or two books on the theme with which it deals, I could, in a measure, supplement my own experience. It was, however, the first time I had seen with my own eyes this desperate yearning of age for youth, or this something that is almost a death-blow which youth can inflict on age. My father used to say that fundamentally there is no such period as age, that only the outer husk grows old, while the inner self, the vital ego, is young eternally. Here, it seemed to me, was an instance of the fact. This man was essentially as young as he had been at twenty-five; he had the same instincts and passions; he demanded the same things. If anything, he demanded them more imperiously because of the long, long habit of desire. Denial which thirty years ago he could have taken philosophically was now a source of anguish. As I looked at him I could see anguish on his lips, in his eyes, in the contraction of his forehead—the anguish of a love ridiculous to all, and to the object of it frightful and unnatural, for the reason that at sixty-two the skin had grown baggy and the heart was supposed to be dead.
From the smoothing of the crown of his hat he glanced up suddenly. The whip-lash inflection was again in the timbre of the voice.
"How much do you get here?"
I was taken aback, but I named the amount of my salary.