He could not bear to utter the word till she insisted.
Her face twitched painfully; she put him back, rose, and went pacing to and fro. Helplessly he stood and watched her strange distress, till she turned to him again.
'My boy—no—you can be a boy no more; this day I must see you are a man. Listen, Christian: I knew this day must come—though it seems oversoon to me—and I was resolved that so soon as you should refuse any confession to me, I—I—must make confession to you.'
She silenced his pained protest, and went on.
'When my child was born, eighteen years ago come Christmas Eve, our priest was no worthy man as now; little good was known of him, and there was bad guessed at. But there was this that none here guessed—I only. And you must know—it is part of my confession.'
She spoke painfully, sentence by sentence. After eighteen years her voice yet vibrated with hot, live passion.
'My sister—my young sister—came to make her home with us; she would, and then she would not, for no cause—and went away. She died—she died on the night my child was born—and hers. Then I vowed that neither I nor my child should receive sacrament of God from that man's hands. He dared no word when I passed by with my unbaptized child in my arms; he met my eyes once—never after. We were two living rebukes, that he but no other could read plain enough. 'Twas in those days that my man Giles went seafaring, so the blame was the more all mine. He indeed, knowing all from me, would have had the child away to be baptized of other hands. But in those days the nearest were far, and I put him off with this plea and that; and come a day, and gone in a day, and months away, was the way with him then. For this thwart course, begun out of fierce resentment, so long as that did not abate, I found I had no will to leave. Yet all along I never meant to hold it over a week more, or a week more, or at most a month more. So two years went, and a third drew on, and that wolf of the fold was dead.
'On the day he was laid underground God took my child from me.
'I knew—the first word of missing—I knew what I had done. Conscience struck away all hope. From the print of children's feet we traced how the smallest went straying, how little hands shell filled went grasping for more. I gleaned and keep. They said it was hours before, at the ebb. Then the tide stopped us, and that was all.
'In my bitter grief I said at the first that God was just but not merciful; since He took the dear body from me and hid it in the sea that I, who had not wrapped it for christening, should never wrap it meetly for the grave. Most just, most merciful! afterwards He sent you to me by the very sea. I knew and claimed you as you lay on the shore, a living child, among twoscore dead men, and none withstood me.