“You’re right. She may thank God for it, poor thing. She couldn’t have saved her child from the Aviolet taint, as you’re going to save yours, Rose. It’s what he’s got from you that’s all along held Cecil back from being what Ford is.”
A sound escaped her.
“Don’t you understand?” he asked again, very gently. “Ford understood. In a way, Cecil was Ford. It was the same for both of them. Fundamentally, each of them was aware of that paralysis, that ghastly moral decay, in himself. You and I, my dear, can hardly guess at the meaning of that—the utter, deadly lack, not only of self-confidence, but of self-respect, that it must have engendered. Do you remember that line that you quoted to me once, a long time ago?
‘And some push stumbling on, without a star.’
Don’t cry, Rose, my beautiful, don’t cry any more.”
He knelt beside her, and she wiped away the tears that blinded her and, with the old familiar gesture, pushed the strands of yellow hair away from her brow.
“Is that why Ford hated Cecil?” she asked.
“I think so. Ford saw himself in Cecil all the time. Cecil used to say what wasn’t true so as to make himself believe in himself, so as to see himself as a fine fellow. It wasn’t any one else he wanted to deceive, really. But he had nothing to fall back upon, no inner security, and so he tried to find the courage we all of us need to meet life with, by an imaginary picture of himself as he longed to be. Oh, my God, Rose, which of us hasn’t done it? Only that poor boy got lost, between the two worlds of reality and pretence.”
The doctor paused, and then resumed very gently:
“Ford Aviolet knew exactly the same panic that poor Cecil knows, I’m certain of it. He lacked the inner security, too. But he didn’t take refuge in illusion—couldn’t perhaps. He had other methods of reassuring himself. When he could sneer at, or bully, or hurt something weaker than himself, it gave him a sense of power. He could see himself as a fine fellow, then—the little self that grovelled within him from very weakness. And in both of them, both Ford and Cecil, it was the same taint of corruption, the decadence that came from the Aviolets. Not from you, my dear. You must never think that any more. You’re alive, as the Aviolet stock can never be alive again, and it’s what you’ve given to your boy that’s going to pull him through.”