A pang of jealousy shot through the man's heart.
"Ah," he said to himself bitterly, "he is up in arms for her."
"And, oh, father," cried the boy passionately, "I hate myself for believing what she said against you—I don't know how I could have thought anything bad of you; but I have, nearly the whole time since she spoke to me about—about mother's death; and, oh, I've been so unhappy."
He had been sitting on the edge of his father's bed; and now, as if he had suddenly come to an end of his powers of telling, he flung himself lengthwise on the bed and turned his face to the wall.
For one moment Clifford hesitated. He would have given anything on earth to have eased his mind then and there by telling the boy all the circumstances of poor Marianne's tragic death. The old conviction that he was responsible for Marianne's death assailed him once more. The old battle between common-sense and morbid sensitiveness raged within him. Was he responsible for Marianne's death? Was he not responsible for Marianne's death? Was it his duty to tell the boy? Was it his duty to spare the boy? Would it not be cruel to the boy to burden him with a knowledge which he could not understand, and cruel to himself to risk being hated and shunned by his own son? And for what—for what?—for a fiction woven from the fine, frail threads of morbid conscientiousness. But in spite of everything—oh, the luxury of opening his locked-up heart—now—this moment!
Then a vision of the boy wandering alone on the hill-side in the silence of the night rose before him.
He went and sat on the bed where the boy lay, with his face turned to the wall. He put his hand on Alan's arm.
"Alan," he said, "be comforted. There was nothing unnatural in your mother's death; nothing which I humanly speaking, could have prevented. Her heart was weak—weaker than she herself knew; but I knew—that was why——"
He paused; for the dead are despots, and must not be spoken against.
"That was why I had always tried to keep her tranquil," he said.