“But they are not,”—burst from his lips, as the thought on which he so gloomily brooded sprang to the surface and took him by surprise. He checked his words by a powerful effort, and the blood forsook his face. Mary Potter placed her hand on her heart, and seemed to gasp for breath.
Gilbert could not bear to look upon her face. He turned away, placed his elbow on the table, and leaned his head upon his hand. It never occurred to him that the unfinished sentence might be otherwise completed. He knew that his thought was betrayed, and his heart was suddenly filled with a tumult of shame, pity, and fear.
For a minute there was silence. Only the long pendulum, swinging openly along the farther wall, ticked at each end of its vibration. Then Mary Potter drew a deep, weary breath, and spoke. Her voice was hollow and strange, and each word came as by a separate muscular effort.
“What are they not? What word was on your tongue, Gilbert?”
He could not answer. He could only shake his head, and bring forth a cowardly, evasive word,—“Nothing.”
“But there is something! Oh, I knew it must come some time!” she cried, rather to herself than to him. “Listen to me, Gilbert! Has any one dared to say to your face that you are basely born?”
He felt, now, that no further evasion was possible; she had put into words the terrible question which he could not steel his own heart to ask. Perhaps it was better so,—better a sharp, intense pain than a dull perpetual ache. So he answered honestly now, but still kept his head turned away, as if there might be a kindness in avoiding her gaze.
“Not in so many words, mother,” he said; “but there are ways, and ways of saying a thing; and the cruellest way is that which everybody understands, and I dare not. But I have long known what it meant. It is ten years, mother, since I have mentioned the word 'father' in your hearing.”
Mary Potter leaned forward, hid her face in her hands, and rocked to and fro, as if tortured with insupportable pain. She stifled her sobs, but the tears gushed forth between her fingers.
“O my boy,—my boy!” she moaned. “Ten years?—and you believed it, all that time!”