Sons of fire, Vol. I.

by M. E. Braddon

Again her sobs choked her speech. She threw herself into a chair and abandoned herself to that passionate grief.

"Dear Mrs. Wornock, forgive me for having revived these sorrowful memories. I was wrong—I ought not to have spoken——"

"No, no, there is nothing to forgive. It does me good to talk of the past—with you, Allan, with you, not with any one else. And now you know why my heart went out to you from the first. Why you are to me almost as a son—almost as dear as my own son—and your future wife as my daughter. It does me good to talk to you of that time—so long and long ago. It does me good to talk of my dead self. I have never forgotten. The past has always been dearer to me than anything in this life that came afterwards."

"I do not think my father has forgotten that past, any more than you have, Mrs. Wornock. I know that there has always been a cloud over his life—the shadow of one sad memory. I have felt and understood this, without knowing whence the shadow came."

"He was too true-hearted to forget easily," Mrs. Wornock said, gently, "and we were both so young. I was his first love, as he was mine. And when a first love is pure and strong as ours was, it must be first and last, must it not, Allan?"

"Yes," he answered, half doubtfully, remembering certain sketchy loves of his own, and hoping that they could hardly be ranked as love, so that he might believe that his passion for Suzette was essentially the first; essentially, if not actually.

"No, I have never forgotten," Mrs. Wornock repeated musingly, seating herself at the piano, and softly touching the notes now and then, playing a few bars of pensive melody sotto voce as she talked—now a phrase from an Adagio of Beethoven's, now a resolution from a prelude by Bach, dropping gravely down into the bass with softly repetitive phrases, from piano to pianissimo, melting into silence like a sigh. "No, I have never forgotten—and I have suffered from the pains as well as the pleasures of memory. Before my son was born, and after, there was a long interval of darkness when I lived only in the past, when the shadows of the past were more real to me than the living things of the present, when my husband's face was dim and distant, and that dear face from the past was always near me, with the kind smile that comforted me in my desolate youth. Yes, I loved him, Allan, loved him, and gave him up for his own sake. And now you tell me my sacrifice was useless; that, even with the wife his mother chose for him, the good amiable wife, he has not been altogether happy."

"His life has been placid, studious, kindly, and useful. It may be that he was best fitted for that calm, secluded life—it may be that if you had taken the more natural and the more selfish course—and in so doing parted him for ever from his mother, who was a proud woman, capable of lifelong resentment—it may be that remorse might have blighted his life, and that even your love would not have consoled him under the conviction that he had broken his mother's heart. I know that, after her strong-minded masterful fashion, she adored him. He was all she had in this world to love or care for; and it is quite possible that a lasting quarrel with him might have killed her. Dear Mrs. Wornock, pray do not think that your sacrifice was altogether in vain. No such self-surrender as that can be without some good fruit. I do not pretend to be a holy person, but I do believe in the power of goodness. And, consider, dear friend, your life has not been all unhappy. You had a kind and good husband."

"Good! He was more than good, and for over a year of our married life I was a burden to him. He was an exile from the home he loved, for my sake—for me, who ought to have brightened his home for him."

"But that was only a dark interval," said Allan, remembering what Mrs. Mornington had told him, of the long residence at Grindelwald, and the birth of the heir in that remote spot. "There were happier days afterwards."