‘No; I hated him.’
‘Hated!’
‘He was an evil man. She feared him, sitting beside her. He looked at me, too, as if he hated me.’
‘God!’ An amazed, half startled look came into his eyes. ‘Speak soft. What it is to have so quick a wit! Thy father, that—was it? Do you know, then, what you are?’
‘I know what he called me.’
‘What?’
‘I will not speak if of myself.’
The eyes were piercing him; and then, all in a moment, a film seemed to come before them, and they were wonderfully dim and soft. An arm was put about his neck; the voice dropped to a moving tenderness, full of grief and pity.
‘I will not speak it of thee neither. A curse on him that made thee so! Ah, that day! She would importune me—child, she would importune me for a sight of thee—a little speech—one kiss, to ease her load of shameful yearning. And I, though I feared the issue, consented; I sent Clerivault to prepare the way. And he—that evil man—he looked on thee with hate, did he? And well he might, to see such evidences of his own villainy. She was ever sweet and trustful—nay, you shall hear it all—my Jane, my little sister—and he a smooth-tongued liar. It was at Mary’s Court they met, she a lady-in-waiting, and he, already a wedded man, just out from the Tower—would to God he had shared his father’s fate there—made Master of the Queen’s ordnance. A curse upon his house! But she ever believed in him—she died believing in him. Ah died, my girl! And we had been children here together—bred in the old faith—in her heart she never abandoned it—she clung to where she loved. It was that guided my choice of thy preceptor, thine adoptive father—a good old man, but weakly recusant, known to me by name and repute. A Protestant, forsooth? Neither that nor the other, but a Catholic with views moderated by the Reform movement. So were we all: so was the Queen herself, till Cecil drove her to intolerance: so was—no, he was never but a plausible time-server—a perjurer and false-swearer. Yet he gave thee life, Brion—he gave thee life.’
His voice broke: he had spoken spasmodically, and with great emotion, and the effort seemed to have exhausted him. But to Brion’s young soul the confession had brought a tragic resignation which was almost like peace after storm. Long half-suspecting the truth, he knew now what he was, and what he could never be. His brain was busy as he knelt. To make a name or inherit one—which was the nobler? He could be anything in the wide world but that one thing, and that one thing was the one thing in the wide world no child of earth could ever achieve for himself. There was no question of personal credit connected with it, and he would be a poor moralist who should hold him to blame for another man’s fault. So reasoned the sane young philosopher. He could be all that he chose, except the one thing in which he had no choice, and he was not debarred by that single exception from the best thing of all, which was certainly self-respect. For his own sweet erring mother he felt the tenderest love and pity; towards the instrument of her undoing nothing but animosity. No ethical qualms moved him there; bad was bad, by whatever name you called it.