"I told her a week ago to-day. My wife is now forty-seven. We have no children. We can have none. A week ago to-day we were discussing that; that I had no one, no one directly to whom I could leave Wenlock Hall. She knows what that place means to me. I think you know too. It was my father's and his father's. Well, it has been in the family for seven generations now. Each one of us has done something to it to improve it. In the Stuart period one of my ancestors built a chapel. Before then a wonderful tithe barn was built. It's one of the finest in England. The date is on one of the beams--1618. The eldest son has always inherited. We've never broken the line. We were talking about it the other night. I was an only son. The property is not entailed. The next of kin is a cousin. He's the only male Liddiard. I'm not particularly fond of him, but he's the only Liddiard. I should leave it to him. My wife was saying what a pity it was. She wondered whose fault it could be. 'I believe it must be mine,' she said, 'and if it is, what can I do?'"
He paused again and looked long at Mary whose needle still with the finest of precision was passing in and out of the material in her hands.
"I told her what she could do," he added and met Mary's eyes as they looked up.
"What was that?" she asked quietly.
"I told her she could give our child a home and a name," said he, "if you would consent to let him go."
II
It was in Mary's sensations as though, all unprepared, she had turned a sudden corner and found herself looking into an abyss, the darkness and depth of which was unfathomable. All sense of balance and equilibrium seemed to leave her. She reeled and was giddy in her mind. She could have laughed aloud. Her mental stance upon the plane of thought became a negation. Her grip was gone. She was floating, nebulously, foolishly, without power of volition to gravitate herself to a solid conception of anything.
He proposed to take John away from her. He was suggesting to her by every word he said that it was her duty to John to let him go. Not only could she laugh at the thought of it--she did. After all these twelve years when the whole of her life and John's too were planned out like a design upon a loom, needing only the spinning, she was to tear the whole fabric into shreds and fling it away! It was preposterous, unbelievable that he could have thought it worth while to come to her with such a suggestion. Yet she laughed, not because it was so ludicrous as to be unbelievable, but because Fate had so ordered it that, in a depth of her consciousness, she knew he could have done nothing else.
From the world's point of view it was the natural and inevitable sequence in an extraordinary chain of events. Many a woman would be glad of such an advancement for her son. Most conceivable it was that a man should desire his own flesh and blood to inherit and carry on in his name that of which the generations had made him proud. All this she realized. All this was the darkness and depth of the abyss into which she looked.
But then the sound of her laughter in her ears gave her hold again. More real than all worldly considerations became the cruelty it was to her. More real even than that was the destruction of the ideal she had cherished in her heart and nurtured and fed in John's.