"You see I am laying bare my innermost soul to you. It hurts me to say that through all these years he loved and honoured and revered his wife,—and the memory of her. He was never unkind to me,—he never spoke of her. But I knew, and he knew that I knew. He loved you, his little boy. I, too, loved you once, Kenneth. When you were a little shaver I adored you. But I came to hate you as the years went by. It is needless to tell you the reason why. When it came time for him to die he left you half of his fortune. The other half,—and a little over,—he gave to me." Her voice faltered a little as she added: "For good and faithful service, I suppose."
During this long speech Kenneth had succeeded in collecting his thoughts. He had been shocked by her confession, and now he was mentally examining the possibilities that might arise from the aspect it bared.
First of all, Viola was not even his step-sister. He experienced a thrill of joy over that,—notwithstanding the ugly truth that gave her the new standing; to his simple, straightforward mind, Viola's mother was nothing more than a prostitute. (In his thoughts he employed another word, for he lived in a day when prostitutes were called by another name.) Still, Viola was not to blame for that. That could never be held against her.
"Why have you told me all this?" he asked bluntly. "I had no means of learning that you were never married to my father. There was never a question about it in my mind, nor in anybody else's, so far as I know. You have put a very dangerous weapon in my hand in case I should choose to use it against you."
She was silent for a long time, struggling with herself. He could almost feel the battle that was going on within her. Somehow it appalled him.
The wind outside was rising. It moaned softly, plaintively through the trees. A shutter creaked somewhere at the back of the house and at intervals banged against the casement. The frogs down in the hollow had ceased their clamour and no doubt took to themselves credit for the storm that was on the way in answer to their exhortations. The even, steady thump of the rocking-chair in the room overhead stopped suddenly, and Viola's quick tread was heard crossing the floor. She closed a window. Then, after a moment, the sound of the rocking-chair again.
Rachel left her chair and walked over to the window to peer out into the night.
"It is coming from the west," she said, as if to test the steadiness of her voice.
A far-off flicker of lightning cast a faint, phosphorescent glow into the dimly lighted room, quivering for a second or two on the face of the woman at the window, then dying away with what seemed to be a weird suggestion of reluctance.
She stood before him, looking down. "I have at last obeyed a command imposed by Robert Gwynne when he was on his death-bed. Almost his last words to me were in the nature of a threat. He told me that if I failed to carry out his request,—he did not call it a command,—he would haunt me to my dying day. You may laugh at me if you will, but he HAS been haunting me, Kenneth Gwynne. If I ever cherished the notion that I could ignore his command and go on living in the security of my own secret, I must have known from the beginning that it would be impossible. Day and night, ever since you came, some force that was not my own has been driving at my resistance. You will call it compunction, or conscience or an honest sense of duty. I do not call it by any of those names. Your father commanded me to tell you with my own lips,—not in writing or through the mouth of an agent,—he commanded me to say to you that your mother was the only wife he ever had. I have done this to-night. I have humbled myself,—but it was after a long, cruel fight."