"Give it back to him, then," I exclaimed with a laugh, "if you can persuade him to take it. Of which, however, as I said before, I doubt me much."
"Alas!" she replied, "I cannot give it back to him, but interest must be made with the Marquis to take up your cause and help you, as he seems well disposed to do now. For myself, until the villain, Robert, is defeated, I have but the hundred guineas a year left me by my uncle--a bare pittance only sufficing to pay for these rooms, the physician's account and my food."
"Shall I not see the Marquis?" I asked; "surely I should go to him and tell him all."
"Thou shalt see him soon enough," she said. "I have acquainted him with the fact of all I knew--no human creature could have guessed or thought how much more there is to tell, nor how wicked can be the heart of man, ay! even though that man be one's own flesh and blood--and also that you might soon be expected to reach London. And he has sent two or three times a week to know if you had yet arrived: doubtless he will send again to-morrow. He lives but a stone's throw from here, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, on the north side."
At ten o'clock my mother told me she must go to her bed for she was tired and never sat up later, and she rang for Molly, the maid, to ask if the small room in which she kept her dresses and other apparel had been prepared for me as she desired. Hearing that it was in readiness, she told me that a good night's rest would do me good also, and prepared to retire. And now for the first time, as she rose to depart, I saw what inroads her disease had made upon her and that she who, when I first remember her, stood up a straight, erect young woman, was much bent and walked by the aid of a crutch-stick, and that one of her hands shook and quivered always.
"Yet strange it is," she said, observing my glance, "that there come moments when I am free from all suffering and affliction, when I can stand as straight as I stood at the altar on my wedding day, and when this hand is as steady as your own. Nay, I can almost will it to be so. See!" and she held it out before me and it did not quiver, while next, seizing a huge brass candelabra that stood upon the table, she lifted that and held it at arm's-length, and neither did that quiver nor was any of the hot wax from the lighted candles spilt.
"Ah! courage, mother," I said, "courage! You have but to will it and you are strong. There is enough strength in that arm, which can lift a candlestick as heavy as this, to do anything it needs. You could hold a runaway horse with it, or keep off a dog flying at your throat, or---or--" I went on with a laugh at my silly thoughts, "thrust a sword through a man's body if you desired to do so."
She was bending to kiss me for the last time that night while I spoke, but as I uttered the final words of my boyish speech she stopped and drew herself up so that she was now erect, and then, in a voice that seemed altered somewhat, she said:
"'Thrust a sword through a man's body if I desired to do so! Thrust a sword through a man's body!' My sweet, such deeds ill befit a woman. Yet there are two men in this world through whose bodies I would willingly thrust a sword if they stood before me and I had one to my hand. I mean thy uncle Robert, the false-faced, black-avised villain, and that other and most despicable liar, his friend and creature, Wolfe Considine."
Yet, even as she spoke, her hand fell powerless by her side and commenced to shake and quiver once more, when, putting her other upon my arm, she bade me Good Night and blessed and kissed me and went to her room.