He shrank back in his cell. His heart beat violently as he heard the rustle of her dress. The sheriff unlocked the grated iron door which led to the long, narrow corridor into which the cells opened, and to which prisoners had access during the day.
"He's in that cell, ladies," said the officer's voice, and then, with commendable delicacy, withdrew, having first ordered the prisoners in his charge to their cells.
"Lean upon my arm," urged a gentle voice, which Haldane recognized as that of Mrs. Arnot.
"O, this is awful!" moaned the stricken woman; "this is more than I can endure."
The pronoun she used threw a chill on the heart of her son, but when she tottered to the door of his cell he sprang forward with the low, appealing cry:
"Mother!"
But the poor gentlewoman was so overcome that she sank down on a bench by the door, and, with her face buried in her hands, as if to shut out a vision that would blast her, she rocked back and forth in anguish, as she groaned:
"O Egbert, Egbert! you have disgraced me, you have disgraced your sisters, you have disgraced yourself beyond remedy. O God! what have I done to merit this awful, this overwhelming disaster?"
With deep pain and solicitude Mrs. Arnot watched the young man's face as the light from the grated window fell upon it. The appeal that trembled in his voice had been more plainly manifest in his face, which had worn an eager and hopeful expression, and even suggested the spirit of the little child when in some painful emergency it turns to its first and natural protector.
But most marked was the change caused by the mother's lamentable want of tact and self-control, for that same face became stony and sullen. Instead of showing a spirit which deep distress and crushing disaster had made almost childlike in its readiness to receive a mother's comfort once more, he suddenly became, in appearance, a hardened criminal.