They were face to face, mother and son, all the artificialities and conventionalities of their lives scorched and burnt away. But between them lay that unbridgeable gulf of ignorance and wrong, and her outstretched hands appealed to him in vain. He looked at her coldly, uncertainly, as though she were a stranger to him.
Then, with one strange, gasping cry, she seemed to thrust all consciousness of herself fiercely on one side in her realisation of his great need. In the very crisis of her agony, in the very crisis as it seemed of her defeat, there came upon her a great dignity.
“My son,” she said, “there is something in your life of which you have never known—something which accident might have revealed to you at any time, but which I kept from you, hoping that fortune might favour me—as it has done—and preserve your ignorance; believing that in happiness and self-respect lay one of your safeguards, and dreading that knowledge might bring to you some sort of morbid temptation. Julian, it is the toil and struggle of twenty years that you are trampling on in throwing down your life like this. Twenty years ago your father died by his own hand—a swindler, liar, and thief. A few chance words brought home to me the possibility that some such dreadful taint might rest on you. To keep you from its awful consequence; to give you such a life as should obviate the possibility of temptation; to hedge you in with every security that money and position could create for you; to give you such a standing in the world as should leave you nothing to wish for; has been the one thought, the one motive of my life from that time until now.”
The speech—so terrible a declaration of a struggle foredoomed by its own essence to failure, a struggle in which the foe was real, the combatant in desperate earnest, and the weapons straws—trembled into an abrupt, palpitating silence, as though her feelings were too intense for speech. There was a moment’s stillness like the stillness of death; a stillness broken only by Julian’s long, laboured breaths as he stood facing her, his face blanched and frozen into an image of horror. Then he spoke.
“Is it true?” He had turned mechanically to Dennis Falconer, and the words came from him in a hoarse whisper.
Dennis Falconer was white to the lips. Far down in his nature, at the root of the rigid and conventional morality by which he lived, was a pulse which palpitated in harmony with the divine realities of life. And, as like answers to like, that pulse in him had recognised its counterpart at last, through all the cramped distortion that had concealed it for so long, beating full and strong, instinct with the throbbing life of the same great realities, in a dwarfed and darkened woman’s soul. Perfect mother love, absolute self-abnegation, let them clothe themselves in what mistaken form they may, are an earnest of ideal love and beauty, and in their presence condemnation must give place to reverence. Conscious, for the first time in his life, that he stood in the midst of that which was beyond his power to analyse or to estimate, he made no attempt at speech. He bowed his head in silence.
Julian looked at him for a moment longer, and then he turned his face once more upon his mother. As though what she saw there struck into her very heart, a cry of pity and tenderness broke from her. She moved swiftly to him, putting her arms about him, trying to draw him into her embrace as though he had been once more her little child.
“Julian!” she cried, “my boy! my boy! Try to understand—try to understand why I have told you this now! I don’t ask you to think of me—to think what such a repetition of the past as threatens me in you would be to me—a blow infinitely heavier, an agony infinitely crueller than what came upon me twenty years ago, because of the long struggle to which it would bring defeat, because of the long hope and resolution which it would take out of my heart, because of my love for you, my darling—my darling!” She was kissing his hands now passionately, with that oblivion of any other presence in the room which she had evinced throughout; and Falconer, watching her, fascinated, almost awestruck, saw her, as she went on, lift one of the young man’s hands and press it to her cheek, stroking it with a wild, nervous movement of her own thin fingers.
“But there’s a motive power for you in it, Julian! A lever for your own pride, your own strength of will. You are panic-stricken, unnerved, worn out. Danger is new to you, my darling! Look at your father’s fate—wholesale ruin, disgrace, and obloquy—and let it nerve you to turn away from it. Look down the precipice on the brink of which you are standing, and lay firm hold upon the only rope that can save you. Take your courage in both hands, and we will face the danger and conquer together. Oh, my boy, if it is a hot fire to pass through it won’t last long! It leads to safety, to firmer standing-ground, to a new lease of life!”
She was clinging to him convulsively, touching his hands, his hair, his face, as though speech alone afforded an all-insufficient outlet for her agonised beseeching. And as she spoke the last words he seized her hands in his and thrust her from him, not with any personal roughness, but rather unconsciously and involuntarily as in the very isolation of despair.