There was news in the next mail that could not be so lightly dismissed. The family physician wrote that Boyd's mother, already in feeble and precarious health, had been shocked by the tidings of her son's calamity into a condition that threatened the worst. This calamity was one which even Boyd Westover's stoicism could not face without flinching. From childhood his affection for his mother had been a dominant passion, and since his father's death it had become fatherly as well as filial. He had jealously guarded that "little mother," as he called her, against every shock, every care, every breath of an adverse wind as it were. He had made a veritable pet of her, and while never for a moment laying aside his chivalric respect and reverence, he had added to them a certain big brotherly manner in which she had found joy untellable. If she wearied while walking with him in the house grounds, he would pick her up, as he might have done with any child, and in spite of her laughing protests, carry her into the porch and deposit her in a hammock. If a light shone disagreeably in her eyes he discovered it and shut it off before she became conscious of its glare. If she went to her room to rest he quietly stationed a maid at the foot of the stairs with orders to permit no noise and no passing up or down.
Now that news came of this dearly loved little mother's serious illness, the young man was made to suffer agonies by the consciousness that her affliction was on his account, so that it required all of Jack Towns's eloquence to convince him that he was himself in nowise to blame for it. By way of emphasizing that, the young lawyer had to put the matter into brutally plain phrase.
"If you were guilty of the crime of which you have been convicted, and for which you will have to serve a term in state's prison, you would do well to scourge your soul with a whip of scorpions for your sin against the mother who bore you. As you are innocent of that and of all other crimes you have no right to hold yourself responsible for the consequences of other people's mistakes."
"Am I free to go to my mother while she yet lives?" Boyd asked in an agony of apprehension.
Then Jack Towns lied—like the generous gentleman he was.
"No," he said. "Legally you are free to go anywhere you please—to Mozambique or the dominions of Mumbo Jumbo if you choose. But you are free only because of the generous confidence of the Judge and the Commonwealth's Attorney in your honor as a gentleman. You are bound by that honor not to leave Richmond during the days granted you."
As a matter of fact Jack Towns had in his possession a letter addressed to him by the Westover family physician in which were written these words:
"Whatever else happens, for heaven's sake don't let Boyd come home now. The shock of seeing him would kill his mother out of hand."
But Jack Towns was a lawyer and he found a better way of putting the matter by way of accomplishing his purpose.
Still another thing darkened the young man's way. It was not because of news, but because of no news at all.