‘If reparation can be made to any one, if restitution can be made to any one, let us know it and make it. Nay, mother, if within my means, let me make it. I have seen so little happiness come of money; it has brought within my knowledge so little peace to this house, or to any one belonging to it, that it is worth less to me than to another. It can buy me nothing that will not be a reproach and misery to me, if I am haunted by a suspicion that it darkened my father’s last hours with remorse, and that it is not honestly and justly mine.’
There was a bell-rope hanging on the panelled wall, some two or three yards from the cabinet. By a swift and sudden action of her foot, she drove her wheeled chair rapidly back to it and pulled it violently—still holding her arm up in its shield-like posture, as if he were striking at her, and she warding off the blow.
A girl came hurrying in, frightened.
‘Send Flintwinch here!’
In a moment the girl had withdrawn, and the old man stood within the door. ‘What! You’re hammer and tongs, already, you two?’ he said, coolly stroking his face. ‘I thought you would be. I was pretty sure of it.’
‘Flintwinch!’ said the mother, ‘look at my son. Look at him!’
‘Well, I am looking at him,’ said Flintwinch.
She stretched out the arm with which she had shielded herself, and as she went on, pointed at the object of her anger.
‘In the very hour of his return almost—before the shoe upon his foot is dry—he asperses his father’s memory to his mother! Asks his mother to become, with him, a spy upon his father’s transactions through a lifetime! Has misgivings that the goods of this world which we have painfully got together early and late, with wear and tear and toil and self-denial, are so much plunder; and asks to whom they shall be given up, as reparation and restitution!’
Although she said this raging, she said it in a voice so far from being beyond her control that it was even lower than her usual tone. She also spoke with great distinctness.