“The way!” she said, choking. “Do you know who lives down there?”
He laughed.
“I make it my business to know everything. Perhaps you don’t know that he’s away for the moment—gone to take a trip on his own account. Boys will grow up. Rest satisfied, I made sure of his not being there as I came by the lodge.”
Then she stepped back, and I heard him going lightly down the path into the Caddle. And presently she turned, and, pulling her shawl about her face, moved towards the house, but suddenly stumbled and stood swaying.
My heart beat as if it would break. “Mother, mother!” I whispered in an agony, “why don’t you ask for me—trust me—love me!”
But in a moment she recovered herself, cold, self-willed spirit as she was, and went off quietly through the trees.
CHAPTER XII.
AN ODD RECOGNITION
I was so stunned, so amazed by this sudden and utterly unexpected turn of events, that, for a time, only a monstrous sense of indignation could make room for its consideration in my brain. That another should be found to have a title equal with mine, and a knowledge obviously greater, to claim those preserves of retribution which I had considered my exclusive property, was sufficiently disturbing; that I should be brought to realise how, to all the intents and purposes of this inquisition, I was suddenly confessed the confederate, the mean subordinate even, of a common blackmailer, was infinitely, sickeningly worse. For the first time I was awake to a healthy scorn of myself for ever having condescended to a habit of espionage. That it should have reduced me to something the level of this fellow!—no outright, hard-fisted burglar, as, to his better credit, I had assumed him to be, but just an obscene Jerry Sneak! It had been awful to me to see that cold exclusive beauty writhing in the grip of such a scoundrel. I felt fouled, humiliated, ashamed. There and then I swore an oath that I would let Lady Skene understand, on the first reasonable opportunity, the nature of my claim on her—not to bleed her pocket but her heart.
And, in the meanwhile, how to engineer my discovery? Should I use it to my more crushing indictment of a guilty woman—a bludgeon in my already loaded hand? A gentle son! a human merciful spirit! To admit myself one in purpose with this vulgar conspirator? Never, never! To convince her, rather, of her insensibility to the means for reprisal, for defence, at least, which lay ready to her hand. What was her sin to me, if only she would once expiate it in a word, a look of remorse?
I asked for no more. Yet, lacking it, she must lack a faithful Paladin. I had thought I hated her; and it had needed only this menace from another quarter to reawaken all my maddest cravings. She was my mother, and in direful peril. The pity and the sorrow of it quite blinded me for the moment to all subordinate issues.