He remembered now, he had remembered at the second “Phoebe”—and at the second “Reuben.” He was even granting her, grimly, her right to call him by that name when the “Bradshaw” struck upon his ear.
“Bradshaw?” he repeated. “Bradshaw?” And this second time, there was an angry question in it.
“I came about John,” she said. “John is our son, Reuben. Of course he did not know, but—” Reuben had covered the space between them at a bound. He was holding her hands tightly, he was looking at her with eyes that seared. In moments like these, thought outspaces time. John, his wife’s murderer, was his son, and the son of Phoebe Bradshaw whom he had—well, he supposed he had betrayed her. She had told the son, of course. He had nursed a grievance, he had shot Dorothy in revenge. Whether he had aimed at Reuben and hit Dorothy, or whether he lied when he had made that statement to the constable and had, in fact, aimed at Dorothy, they had the true motive now. Reuben might have put it that his sin had found him out, but his thought did not run on those lines. Then, what was she saying? “Of course, he did not know.” Oh, that was absurd, that took them back for motive to what John had been telling the constable—that he shot at Hepplestall to—to—(what was the boy’s wind-bagging phrase which the constable reported?)—“to set the people free from a tyrant.”
“Say that again,” he said.
She met his eye fearlessly. “Of course he did not know. You could not think that I would tell of my shame. Father and I, we invented a second cousin Bradshaw whom I married, who died before John was born.”
Yes, she was speaking the truth, and, after all, he didn’t know that it mattered very much. Dorothy was dead, either way, but, yes, it did matter. It mattered enormously, because of Dorothy’s sons. If John had known, there must have been disclosures at the trial, things said against Reuben, ordinary enough but not the things he cared to have Dorothy’s sons know about their father.
It wasn’t criminal to have seduced a woman twenty years ago, and the exceptional thing about Reuben was that he had seduced no more women, that he had not abused his position as employer. Needham was known, with grim humor, as “the father of his people.” Whereas Reuben had been Dorothy’s husband.
He saw the trial and that disclosure insulting to Dorothy’s memory. He heard the jeers of Needham and his kind. Hepplestall, Gentleman Hepplestall, reduced by public ordeal to a common brutishness with the coarse libertines he had despised! He saw Dorothy’s sons contemptuous of their father. This, they would take occasion to think, was where factory-owning led a man.
“You’re sure of this?” he asked. “You’re absolutely sure he did not know he is my son?”
“Absolutely,” she said.