"Klondyke gave me my first start," he said finally. "He knows nearly as much as you—except about that woman—but he's stood to me all through. I don't ask your pity. I admit I deceived you, Mary, an' I done wrong, but it warn't because I didn't want to do right. I got to pay for it, I can see that. I dare say it's right, but I'll only say ... and this is final ... Enry Arper, whatever 'is father done, don't deserve not a half, not a quarter of what's been done to him."
She had to hold on by the table. Something was stifling her. There were things in this elemental soul which the Pridmores and the Colthursts might once have known, but for long generations had forgotten.
She dare not look at him. An abyss had opened. She simply couldn't face it.
Somehow he knew that. It needed no words to tell him. Everything was lost. The mariner could never hope to come into port. Again that horrible sense of rage came on him, which a few hours ago had overthrown him in his interview with Edward Ambrose. It maddened him to think that he had been allowed to get so far along the road and that a subtle trick had defeated him when the goal was actually in sight.
Yet even at the last there was just one thing, and only one, that stood to him: if it was still possible he must be a man, a gentleman. He knew this woman was suffering cruelly, and he owed it to her and to his friends not to profane the God she worshiped. There was no God in heaven after all, it seemed, for Henry Harper, but for her, who had not the stain of a father's crime upon her, it was a different matter.
As he stood not three paces from her, clenched and incoherent, fighting not to strike her with the sudden awful blasphemies that were surging to his lips, he knew nothing of what was passing in her mind. Had he known she would have had his pity. All that her progenitors had stood for in the past had suddenly recoiled upon her. All those entries in Burke it had been her pleasure to deride, all the politicians and the landed proprietors, all the Lady Sophias and the Lady Carolines, all that flunkyfied reverence for concrete things of those generations of the Pridmores and the Colthursts, which had so long affronted her high good sense, were now having their word to say in the matter.
She had pledged her help to this man if ever he asked it, but now she found that help was not hers to give. Said the tart voice of her famous Aunt Caroline, it is not to be expected, my dear, of a sane Christian gentlewoman. Think of your father, my dear! By some strange irony, Mary Pridmore suddenly thought of him, that admired and bewhiskered servant of a generation which allowed his friend Bismarck to steal Schleswig and to murder France, but paid itself the tribute of building the Albert Memorial; the distinguished servant of a generation that had denied reading, writing, and arithmetic to its Henry Harpers and had turned them barefoot into its Blackhampton gutters.
Many things were coming home to the heart of Mary Pridmore in the awful silence of that room. She was no more to blame for the long line of her fathers whose governing abilities were commemorated in the England of the sixties than was their victim, Henry Harper, in whose bruised body and tormented soul had been commemorated his mother's murder. She was numb and dazed now she had heard his story, but she had nothing to give him.
The truth had come to him already. "Now, Enery, you must be a man and bear it," said the voice of Auntie, wheezing in the upper air. Well ... if his flesh and blood would only let him he must be a gentleman as long as he had the honor to converse with a real Hyde Park lady who believed in God ... that was all he knew at the moment. If there was a spark of manhood in him he must hold on to that.
"Miss Pridmore." ... He was able to pull himself together in a way that astonished even himself.... "I see it's all over with me and you. I'll never be able to get through without your help. I'm fair done in. But I don't blame you. An' I just want you to say you don't blame me, an' then I'll quit."