‘You lie!’ I exclaimed passionately. This tipsy, dissipated, coarse-looking creature, the woman who bore me, and whom I had believed to be lying in her grave for sixteen years and more. Was it wonderful that at the first blush my mind utterly refused to credit it? The angry accusation I have recorded had barely left my lips, when I looked up and saw my mother—the woman who had come as an angel of light into my father’s darkened home, and watched over me with the tenderest affection since—standing on the threshold, pale and peaceful in her mourning garb, as the Spirit of Death itself.
‘Mother! say it is not true,’ I cried as I turned towards her.
‘Oh, Charlie, my darling boy! my brave, good son! Be quiet! bear it like a man; but it is true!’
‘This—this woman was my father’s wife!’
‘She was!’
‘And you, mother!’ I exclaimed in agony.
‘I was only the woman that he loved, Charlie,’ she answered, with downcast eyes. ‘You must think no higher of me than that!’
‘I think the very highest of you that I can. You were my father’s loving companion and friend for years: you saved his life and his reason! You were his true, true wife, and my mother. I shall never think of you in any lower light.’
My emotion had found vent in tears by that time. It was all so new and so horrible to believe, and my mother’s hand rested fondly on my bowed head.