‘All right,’ answered Paul; and so finished his meal, and took his cap from its hook behind the door.
‘Where are you going?’ cried his mother.
‘That’s my business,’ said Paul, breaking into sudden passionate defiance. ‘What am I flogged like a dog for? You don’t know. There isn’t one of you, from father down to George, who knows what I’ve been doing. I can’t remember an hour’s fair play from the day that I was born. Look here, father: you may take another turn at me to-morrow and next day, you can come on every morning till I’m as old as you are, but you’ll never get a word out of me. I’ve done no harm, and anybody with an ounce of justice in him would prove something before he served his own flesh and blood as you’ve served me.’
He was in a rage of tears again, and every word he spoke was tuned to the vulgar accent of his childhood. ‘Father’ was ‘feyther’ and ‘born’ was ‘boorn.’ He did not speak like a poet, or look like one to whose full soul all things yielded pleasure. These thoughts hit Paul, and he laughed loud and bitterly, and went his way into the street.
The upshot of it was that Paul was flogged no more. Armstrong sickened of the enterprise, and gave it up.
The lonely man was thinking of it all, seeing it all. Suddenly a voice seemed to speak to him, and the impression was so astonishingly vivid that before he knew he had answered it aloud. He started awake at the sound of his own voice, and his skin crisped from head to heel.
‘There’s no rancour, Paul, lad?’ the voice had said, or seemed to say.
‘Rancour?’ he had answered, with a queer tender laugh. ‘You dear old dad!’
For the first time the sense of an actual visitation rested with him, and continued real. He felt, he knew, or seemed to know, that his father’s soul was near.