“And it’s hard to hear it,” she murmured.
“No one knows anything of this but me,” he continued, “and I promise you that no other ever shall. It’ll be just between us as between”—he paused and then added with a voice that was husky—“as between brother and sister.”
She shook her head again, feeling for the moment too upset to speak, and tried to draw away from him. But he put his other hand on her shoulder and held her.
“I’ll go halves with you. I can have it all arranged so that no one will ever find out. I can’t make the regular partition of the property until the end of the year. But, until then, I’ll send you what would be your interest, monthly, and you can live where, or how, you like. I—I—can’t go on, knowing things, and thinking of you living in this sort of way and teaching music.”
“I can’t do it,” she said, in a strangled undertone, and pulling her hand out of his grasp. “I can’t. It’s not possible. I can’t take money that was your father’s.”
“But it’s not his—it’s mine now. Don’t let what’s dead and buried come up and interfere.”
She backed away from him, still shaking her head. She made an effort toward a cold composure, but her pain seemed to show more clearly through it. He looked at her, vexed, irresolute, wrung with pity, that he knew she would not permit him to express.
It was impossible for them to understand each other. She, with her secret knowledge of her mother’s lawful claim and her own legitimacy—he regarding her as the wronged child of his father’s sin. In her dazed distress she only half-grasped what he thought. The strongest feeling she had was once again to escape the toils that these terrible people, who had so wronged her mother, were spreading for her. They wanted to pay her to redeem the stain on their past.
“Money can’t set right what was wrong,” she said. “Money can’t square things between your family and mine.”
“Money can’t square anything—I don’t want it to. I’m not trying to square things; I’ve not thought about it that way at all. I just wanted you to have it because it seemed all wrong for you not to. You had a right, just as I had, and Maud had. I don’t think I’ve thought much about it, anyway. It just came to me that you ought to have what was yours. I wouldn’t make you feel bad for the world.”