“’E ’as to stay there for ’is ’ealth, miss,” he said. “Every summer. ’Is ’ealth is very pre-precocious, miss....”
He fed his fire with a few judiciously administered twigs.
“What was your own father, Dick?”
With that she opened a secret door in Bealby’s imagination. All stepchildren have those dreams. With him they were so frequent and vivid that they had long since become a kind of second truth. He coloured a little and answered with scarcely an interval for reflection. “’E passed as Mal-travers,” he said.
“Wasn’t that his name?”
“I don’t rightly know, miss. There was always something kep’ from me. My mother used to say, ‘Artie,’ she used to say: ‘there’s things that some day you must know, things that concern you. Things about your farver. But poor as we are now and struggling.... Not yet.... Some day you shall know truly—who you are.’ That was ’ow she said it, miss.”
“And she died before she told you?”
He had almost forgotten that he had killed his mother that very morning. “Yes, miss,” he said.
She smiled at him and something in her smile made him blush hotly. For a moment he could have believed she understood. And indeed, she did understand, and it amused her to find this boy doing—what she herself had done at times—what indeed she felt it was still in her to do. She felt that most delicate of sympathies, the sympathy of one rather over-imaginative person for another. But her next question dispelled his doubt of her though it left him red and hot. She asked it with a convincing simplicity.
“Have you any idea, Dick, have you any guess or suspicion, I mean, who it is you really are?”