“I know I have, and if I take credit for it, that only makes all this worse. I’ve never asked you questions which I thought you wouldn’t care to answer. I’ve never been inquisitive about all this affair with Katharine. I don’t even know at the present moment whether you’re engaged to her still, or not. I don’t want to know—but I hope you’ll marry her some day, for I’m very fond of her. No—I’ve never interfered with your liberty, and I’ve never been willing to listen to what people wished to tell me about you. I shouldn’t think it honest. And in that way we’ve lived very harmoniously, haven’t we?”
“Mother, you know we have,” answered John, earnestly.
“All that makes this very much worse. One drop of blood will turn a whole bowl of clean water red. It wouldn’t show at all if the water were muddy. If you and I lived together all our lives, we should never forget last night.”
“We could try to,” said John. “I’m willing.”
Mrs. Ralston paused and looked at him a full minute in silence. Then she put out her hand and touched his arm.
“Thank you, Jack,” she said gravely.
John tried to press her hand, but she withdrew it.
“But I’m not willing,” she resumed, after another short pause. “I’ve told you—I don’t want a woman’s privilege to act like a brute and be treated like a spoiled child afterwards. Besides, there are many other things. If what I thought had been true, I should never have allowed myself to act as I did. I ought to have been kind to you, even if you had been perfectly helpless. I know you’re wild, and drink too much sometimes. You have the strength to stop it if you choose, and you’ve been trying to since Monday. You’ve said nothing, and I’ve not watched you, but I’ve been conscious of it. But it’s not your fault if you have the tendency to it. Your father drank very hard sometimes, but he had a different constitution. It shortened his life, but it never seemed to affect him outwardly. I’m conscious—to my shame—that I didn’t discourage him, and that when I was young and foolish I was proud of him because he could take more than all the other officers and never show it. Men drank more in those days. It was not so long after the war. But you’re a nervous man, and your father wasn’t, and you have his taste for it without that sort of quiet, phlegmatic, strong, sailor’s nature that he had. So it’s not your fault. Perhaps I should have frightened you about it when you were a boy. I don’t know. I’ve made mistakes in my life.”
“Not many, mother dear.”
“Well—I’ve made a great one now, at all events. I’m not going back over anything I’ve said already. It’s the future I’m thinking of. I can’t do much, but I can manage a ‘modus vivendi’ for us—”