“Yes,” I said. “I have read about that; but I never knew till now it was a principle of Evangelicism.”
He looked at me balefully.
“And, in any case, what was the worthy purpose here?” I asked.
“You cannot be expected to appreciate it,” he said. “Your mother was a vessel potential for holiness. As you have the indelicacy to question of her past sorrows, you shall be given the truth in full. Better that than the half measure, which would only instigate your base spirit, I fear, to distortion and exaggeration. She had been ensnared by a villain whom she had lent herself to reclaim. It was the usual case of a promise given and forsworn. I never asked or learned his name. In the eyes of Heaven she was a wife; and any confession of the truth would, with such a man as Lord Skene, have been held merely to justify him in his attempts to claim her to ungodliness. As a fact, he was greatly infatuated—accepted the assumption that you were born in wedlock—engaged tacitly to ask no questions, but to accept on its merits the blessing which had been vouchsafed him.”
“Then, at least, in the eyes of Heaven, which you represent, Lady Skene is a bigamist.”
He seemed, to my surprise, to accept this casuistry with a certain relief.
“Put it that way if you like,” he said. “She was distinctly, from the moral point of view, a wife already, though legally unbound.”
“Then why, from the moral point of view, am I a child of sin?”
He began to stammer hopelessly.
“I will tell you,” I said. “It is because of the wrong she has done me, and would visit, like a woman, upon the innocent head of her disgrace. And you hate me because she does, and because you have made her interests your own. I think you have played your cards very well, Mr Pugsley.”