Mrs. Morland stumbled for a second, as her eyes rested on the rough clothing and labour-hardened hands of her husband’s eldest son. But if there was an opening for reproach, Jim did not avail himself of it.
“I do not envy them their better fortune, Madam. Indeed, I do not.”
“You have no occasion to. If you have missed what you might have had, it has been no fault of theirs or mine. I have settled here, in my own house, and my children are learning to love their home. You, perhaps, are attached to yours. I have no wish to suggest that you should go elsewhere, and I should prefer not to do so myself. At the same time, my resolve that you and they shall hold no intercourse is unalterable; and I will rather break up my home than have its peace destroyed. If you will give me your promise to keep silence on this purely private matter—which never ought to have been brought forward—and to refrain from forcing yourself on my children, there is no reason why you and they should not rest undisturbed.”
Mrs. Morland waited in an anxiety to which her manner gave no clue.
“I never thought of telling anyone,” said Jim simply. “I never meant to come here against your will. I’ll promise, as you wish.”
He picked up the papers Mrs. Morland had laid aside, and thrust them back into his pocket. The young blacksmith would have been puzzled to know what was meant by theories of life and analyses of conduct; but he did not lack intelligence, and he perceived that he was being treated unworthily by his father’s widow. For the two children he had lately left he had no condemnation, though from them had come the only stabs which had reached his heart.
“I’ll go now, Madam,” he said. “I’ve done as my grandfather bade me, and I hope you’ve seen as he spoke true.”
“Yes,” reflected Mrs. Morland, while Jim was closing the door softly behind him, “the wretched old man did ‘speak true’! That boy has his father’s eyes and expression—he is like Frances. None of those marvellous resemblances one reads of in story-books, of course; but there are sometimes traces which recall personalities more closely than a stronger likeness would. I hope, I hope against hope, that he’ll keep his word! If he’s his father’s son, he will.”
Down by the garden-gate Frances and Austin Morland awaited Jim’s return. Frances had striven hard to draw her brother away; but as he would neither leave his post nor talk to her, she remained by his side, acutely miserable. With tongues inactive, the girl and boy thought the more. Frances felt a self-accusing shame which she could not escape and did not know how to justify. She was not old enough to probe her nature with searching finger, and find there that very sensitiveness to the opinions of others which she always had thought so poor a thing. She wondered only why the sudden appearance of a blacksmith-brother should seem so great a misfortune to her—to her whom her friends had nicknamed “Frances the Altruist”, who had appeared to have a mission for the better instruction of less liberal-minded persons! She was a sinner against her own code, a traitor to her own cause.