“Then you ought. I am a poor, lost——”
“Not lost, Margaret. We have all near lost ourselves in such times as we have had of late; except indeed Mary, who will never lose herself, it is my opinion. It has come across me, Margaret, that I may have hurt you sometimes, without thinking, with light talk when you had not spirits for it, (not that I had real spirits, for that matter,) and with saying silly things to Mrs. Skipper, and the like. Ah! I see you felt it so; and it is no wonder you should. But you may take my word for it, I think nothing of Mrs. Skipper, nor ever did. Only, one is driven on, one does not know how, to behave foolishly when one is near desperate at heart.”
“And that’s my fault.”
“Not altogether. No! not by any means. There were many things besides—besides one—to make me unwilling to look back to the time when we used to walk in Fergusson’s oak copse, and say——Nay, Margaret, if you cannot hold up your head in thinking of that time, where should you rest it but upon your husband’s shoulder, as you did then? How can you turn away so, as if I was your enemy? Well, I turned away too from the thought of those days, knowing, all the while, that it was a bad sign to turn away.”
“And to think of all that has happened since! Of all these children, and of my being such a bad mother——”
“It was the children I most wanted to speak about, especially John. But come, now, Margaret, open your mind to me, and don’t be afraid. It was want and downright weakness that first led you into it. Was not it?”
“O, it began long and long ago. When I was weakly as a girl, they used to give me things, and that was the beginning of it all. Then when I grew weakly again, it seemed to come most natural, especially because it was cheaper than bread, and the children wanted all we could get of that.”
“So, often when you have pretended to have no appetite, it was for the children’s sake and mine. Well, I half thought so all the time.”
“No, not often; only at the beginning. Afterwards it was true that I could not eat,—no, not if the king’s dinner had been before me. I did try for long to get the better of the habit, and three times I thought I had; but a sinking came, and I could not bear it. That was twice; and the third time, it was your joking sharply about——But that was no reason. I don’t mean to say it was. You don’t know what the support is for the time, John, whatever comes after it. It raises one; and yet I remember times—many times—when I knew I could not speak sensibly if you spoke to me, and yet I prayed and prayed that I might die before the morning light.”
“Does that mean that you were less afraid of God than of me?”