"But you didn't at the beginning. You couldn't have done."
"Your father and I were friends. Yes, always—always—right through everything—to the very end. When your mother came into our lives, I loved her almost more. That will seem very strange to you one of these days, but it was true. When she was dying she asked me to take care of you both." She drew herself up, and pushed the untidy wisps of hair out of her face, and with that gesture she seemed suddenly to grow vigorous and young. "Why, Robert, it's better than if you were my own son; it's as though in you I had a little of those two always with me."
"Christine, you won't ever leave me, will you?"
For now his fear had him by the throat. She didn't—she never had belonged to him. It was his father and his mother, who were dead.
"Of course not—not so long as you need me. You mustn't worry. It's because we're both tired and hungry. We'll get supper."
Her voice was its old self. But whilst she laid the cloth he stood pressed against the window and looked out with blind eyes into the darkness, so that she should not see his slow, hot tears. He was aware of great and bitter loss. But he loved Christine more than he had ever done. His love had ceased to be instinctive. It had become conscious of itself and of her separateness. And it would never be quite free again from pain.
III
1
Long before he could read words of three syllables, Robert had learnt the Origin of Man, and had made a vivid, somewhat fanciful picture of that personage's pathetic beginnings as a miasm floating on the earth's surface, and of his accidental, no less pathetic progression as a Survival of the Fittest. He gathered that even more than old Jaegers, Mr. Ricardo hated God Almighty and Jesus Christ, the latter of whom was intimately connected with something called a Sun Myth—chiefly, Robert supposed, because He was the Son of God. Mr. Ricardo could not leave these two alone. He hunted them down, he badgered and worried them, he covered them with gibes and insults. It seemed to Robert sometimes that even the multiplication table was really a disguised missile hurled in their unsuspecting and non-existent faces.
Mr. Ricardo appeared to have no friends. As far as Robert could make out, when he was not at school he sat at his desk in the untidy, stuffy attic in the still more untidy, stuffy boarding-house where he lived, and wrote feverishly. What he wrote Robert did not know. There was an air of mystery about the whole business, as though he were concocting a deadly explosive which might go off at any moment. Sometimes he seemed dated, sometimes cast down by the results, but always doggedly resolved.