“Nothing, madam—except that the sweetly affectionate care and the pious home-training of my younger days is bearing its natural fruit,” was his caustic reply, for he felt a very hell of fierce wrath blazing within. “And now, let me congratulate you upon having things at last exactly as you have long wished them to be.”
He passed her. The hall door shut behind him with an angry slam, and thus Roland Dorrien went out from the presence of his father—never to look upon him again in this world.
Mrs Dorrien found her husband sitting in the study in a state of terrible exhaustion. He was a strong man for his age, but the frightful passion to which he had given way had seriously shaken him.
“Has—that—villain—gone?” he asked at length.
“Roland?—Yes. But wait—don’t be in a hurry to talk. Keep quiet for a little while,” she answered sadly.
“The deep-dyed scoundrel! Eleanor, if you had heard what he said to me as he stood there! Now listen to me. He is dead to us henceforth, stone dead. And tell the others—Hubert and Nellie—that if ever they mention his name in my hearing, or hold any communication with him whatever, that day they go after him.”
Mrs Dorrien assented sadly. She had got what she knew to be the secret wish of her heart. Her Hubert—her darling boy—would be Dorrien of Cranston; for she knew her husband too well to suppose he would ever relent. But it may be, furthermore, that her hard, cold nature felt a twinge of regret as she thought of this unloved son and realised that she would never see him again, and if her conscience cried loudly of maternal neglect and duties unfulfilled, we may be very sure she stifled it.
Yet this sin of omission was destined to bring upon her an awful retribution.