"No," replied the mother, rising, "I wish to see him at once. I do appreciate your kindness, but I cannot go to the place which shelters your husband. I can never forgive him. Nor can I go to a hotel. I would rather stay in this prison until I can hide myself and my miserable son in our own home. Oh, how dark and dreadful are God's ways! To think that the boy that I had brought up in the Church, as it were, should show such unnatural depravity!" Then, stepping to the door, she said to the under-sheriff in waiting, "Please take me to my son at once, if possible."
"Would you like me to go with you?" asked Mrs. Arnot, gently.
"Yes, yes! for I may faint on the way. Oh, how differently this day is turning out from what I expected! I was in hopes that Egbert could meet me in a little trip to New York, and I find him in prison!"
CHAPTER XV
HALDANE'S RESOLVE
It was not in accordance with nature nor with Haldane's peculiar temperament that he should remain long under a stony paralysis of shame and despair. Though tall and manlike in appearance, he was not a man. Boyish traits and impulses still lingered; indeed, they had been fostered and maintained longer than usual by a fond and indulgent mother. It was not an evidence of weakness, but rather a wholesome instinct of nature, that his thoughts should gradually find courage to go to that mother as his only source of comfort and help. She, at least, would not scorn him, and with her he might find a less dismal refuge than his narrow cell, should it be possible to escape imprisonment. If it were not, he was too young and unacquainted with misfortune not to long for a few kind words of comfort.
He did not even imagine that Mrs. Arnot, the wife of his employer, would come near him in his deep disgrace. Even the thought of her kindness and his requital of it now stung him to the quick, and he fairly writhed as he pictured to himself the scorn that must have been on Laura's face as she saw him on his way to prison like a common thief.
As he remembered how full of rich promise life was but a few days since, and how all had changed even more swiftly and unexpectedly than the grotesque events of a horrid dream, he bowed his head in his hands and sobbed like a grief-stricken child.
"O mother, mother," he groaned, "if I could only hear your voice and feel your touch, a little of this crushing weight might be lifted off my heart!"
Growing calmer after a time, he was able to consider his situation more connectedly, and he was about to summon the sheriff in charge of the prison, that he might telegraph his mother, when he heard her voice as, in the company of that official, she was seeking her way to him.