“Mother! Like iron!” Justin was angry and pitiful at once. “You ought to have insisted,” he said shortly, and his tone added, “I thought I could have trusted you.”
She was miserable at his displeasure, although she did not resent it. She guessed that it must ease him to vent in any way his regret for his own absence; but she knew, too, that whatever he thought, she had not failed Mrs. Cloud.
“I think——You know, I’ve thought, Justin,” she tried to explain, “that she—she was afraid of what she might find. She didn’t want any one to see—to be able to think badly of him. I believe I’d have felt that way too.”
“All the same, you ought to have gone.” But he spoke more gently. Laura often thought of things that had not occurred to him. Then he went off at a tangent: “Think badly! What else can one think? Do you realize that he left Mother, without a line, twenty years—and living all the time within a railway journey of her? He’s my brother, and he’s dead—but I can’t forgive him. Never shall. The callousness! It’s—it’s inconceivable!”
“Why did he go—originally?”
“Some row with my father. A cheque. A beastly business. He bolted to America. But you’d think—later on—when he came back—when things had blown over—when he’d found his feet——”
“Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps he was ashamed.”
“Then Coral should have made him. Any decent woman—but what can you expect?” And he looked with deep disfavour at the girl in showy mourning sitting with Mrs. Cloud at the other end of the lawn.
For Mrs. Cloud had not returned alone. In the dingy room to which they had carried John Cloud when his unsteady feet had been knocked from under him by a passing car, she had found a young woman with an old face, and a little big-eyed boy at sight of whom she caught her breath, not knowing for the moment whether it were John or Justin come back to her across the years. But his name, the mother told her, between sobs and business-like explanations of how she had found the address and what she had done about the funeral, was Timothy. She herself—she poured it all out with an utter frankness that touched Mrs. Cloud—was Coral, Johnnie’s wife. Married five years ago—Timothy was three—called after Johnnie’s father, Johnnie said—and things had just begun to look up—they had got a joint engagement—oh, yes, on the stage for years. She had got him his first job—and now—and now——No, he had never stirred after they brought him in.
So Mrs. Cloud, when she had seen her son and had buried him, gathered together all that he had left her and went back to her home. It was a nine-days-wonder for Brackenhurst, all eyes and ears and enquiries.