“Whose was it, then?” Hollyer had asked. “My mother’s?”
“No. Your dear mother, Hollyer, had no faults. But she made mistakes, as we all do.”
“You mean, if I’d been allowed to live like other people I’d have been all right?”
“Well—you weren’t a very robust infant; and later on there was a slight risk. Personally, I’d have taken it. You must take some risks. But your mother was afraid. You were all she had. And I daresay she wasn’t sorry to keep you with her.”
“I see.”
He saw it clearly. He had been sacrificed to his mother’s selfishness. Nothing but that had doomed him to his humiliating dependence, his poverty, his intolerable celibacy. He found himself brooding over it, going back and back to it, with a certain gratification, as if it justified him. His mind was appeased by this righteous resentment. When the remembrance of his mother’s beauty and sweetness rushed at him and accused him he turned from it to his brooding.
He had begun to talk, to say things about his mother. Put into spoken words his grievance seemed more real; it acquired validity.
He had felt so safe. His mother couldn’t hear him. She would never know what he thought about her; he would have died rather than let her know. And he had only talked to Effie. Talking to his wife was no worse than thinking to himself. After all he had gone through, he felt he was entitled to that relief.
It was June, a hot, close evening before lamplight; they were sitting together in the drawing-room, Effie in his mother’s chair and he at his piano in the recess on the other side of the fireplace. And there was something that Effie said when he had stopped playing and had turned to her, smiling.
“Wilfrid—are you happy?”