And there she was, dear, fat, bright old lady; her nightcap awry on her curly grey hair, her white dressing-gown buttoned up long, odd slippers on her feet. There she stood, holding the candle high in her trembling hand, while glistening tear after tear rolled down her cheeks.
"Leo, my dear boy--my dear, dear boy!"
The caressing, confused murmur was half shy, as if she hardly dared all at once to take the son, as son, to her bosom. Then she gave herself a little shake and clung round his neck, while the candle she still held trickled grease down his back. The silence of this embrace was broken by the heartrending howling and whining of the dogs, who yearned for their master with all their lungs. His mother noticed the noise.
"Do they know already?" she asked, as she straightened herself, and, reaching up, took his head between her hands.
He nodded, and kissed the fingers that glided over his cheeks with an anxious touch.
Then a new wave of joy overpowered her. She put the candle on the stairs, and, cowering beside it, she covered her face with her hands wept bitterly. He was seized with a sense of shame; all this love and longing had been waiting for him, and he, with a brutal thirst for seeing life, had simply turned his back on it and gone his way. He bent over her and half consciously and half absently stroked the crochet edging of her nightcap, from which the grey hair escaped in scanty little curls.
Another light cast its radiance from the back of the hall, and an infirm old figure came forward trembling and hesitating. His mother dropped her hands, and, laughing through her tears, called out--
"Come, Christian, come. Don't be frightened, you stupid fellow. It really is he. Look at him, and see for yourself that it is."
The old butler, arrayed in Leo's old dressing-gown and Leo's old slippers, in his joy and astonishment let candle and matches fall with a crash on the floor. Tender and servile, half slave and half father, he bent over the master's hand, wiping away nervously his fast-falling tears.
A fresh feeling of shame took possession of Leo. "What a wonderful thing was the faithful soul of such old servants!" he thought. "No matter how you might have bullied and abused them all your life, they still clung to you and worshipped you as a god." And then aloud he said, "That's enough now. Christian; we shall have other opportunities of rejoicing together. Go and let the dogs loose, or the brutes will go mad."