CHAPTER IX. MAURICE SINCLAIR ESCAPES WITH HIS VICTIM.
In the darkness of the night,
When the sun has lost command,
Wrong walks side by side with right—
Sin and truth go hand in hand.
Mrs. Sinclair rose late the next morning. A sleepless night had been followed by hours of heavy slumber which extended far into the forenoon. She awoke as she had retired, burdened with a trouble for which she could find no tangible form.
Here was her only son, resembling his father in face and manner,—a young man exemplary to all appearances, the knowledge of whose safe return, after long years of sorrowful separation, had overflowed her heart with gratitude and mother love, but whose actual presence thrilled her, not with unspeakable affection, but with an indefinable sensation of perplexity and apprehension. She blamed herself for the restraint which so evidently existed between Maurice and herself, and in this self accusing mood she rose and prepared earnestly to explore the seemingly inaccessible paths to her son's estranged affections.
Breakfast, was the first suggestion of her sensible mind. She smiled, even in her perplexity, at this prompting of the flesh, but obeying the practical impulse, she rang for the butler and assured herself that everything in this particular department was in its customary, excellent condition.
She was indeed perplexed and the limit of her logical nature was reached when she undertook the Herculean task of lifting the cloud which hung so heavily over her son's individuality. She saw no inherited trait, neither could she account for the developing of those peculiarities which so early in life branded her only son with the marks of evil associations and morbid desires. True, his faults at fifteen years were but the outcome of boyish adventures and experiments, but a nature like his, impulsive and so prone to investigation, had caused her, even in his childhood days, to look forward to serious, inevitable results unless added years brought more than the average amount of judgment to balance the opposing inclinations.
Living, as he evidently had, in ignorant and brutal Mongolian habitations, the seeds of vice, she reasoned, could easily have been fostered, yet why she should so persistently associate vice with every thought of this almost faultless young man, was a mystery she could not solve with all her reasoning.