St. Arnaud led her tenderly to a chair, saying:
“Remember, you are among friends who honour you and love Gavin.”
The woman, who had borne with stoical composure for twenty years the miseries of a repudiated wife, broke down under these words of kindness. She laid her head upon her arms and sobbed convulsively. Freda, with wide and frightened childish eyes, watched her, while St. Arnaud let her weep unchecked; he saw that it was doing her good. Freda, who was an affectionate child, stole her little hand in Lady Hamilton’s, and asked earnestly:
“Won’t you let me get you some coffee to make you stop crying—and a little piece of bread with it and some cheese?”
Lady Hamilton drew the child to her, and smiling through her tears, called her a dear child. Freda thought the ways of grown people very remarkable.
In a few minutes Lady Hamilton recovered her self-possession—the pains of joy are short-lived—and sat up, her wan face glowing with happiness. And then, just as she and St. Arnaud were talking as if they had known each other forty years, an eager step was heard on the stairs, and Gavin, his face flushed with exercise, and looking every inch a man and a soldier in his hussar uniform, bounded into the room. St. Arnaud slipped into his own bedroom—the meeting between the mother and son was too sacred for other eyes.
Gavin caught his mother in his arms and strained her to his heart. Both wept—they had shed no tears at parting—and a dozen times Gavin cried: “Mother! my mother!” and Lady Hamilton answered: “My son! my excellent, brave son,” as if the mere repetition of the title each loved gave them joy.
The first rapturous kisses over, mother and son looked at each other with new eyes. When they had parted nearly two years before, Gavin was a boy. He had looked up to his mother for help in every relation of life, and she had been forgetful, as mothers are, of the development of the boy into the man, and had yearned over him in his youth and inexperience much as she had watched over him in his cradle. Now, in the twinkling of an eye, after a separation of two years, their situations were reversed. The mother saw at one glance that here she had a stay and prop—the days of her comfort were beginning. And the son saw that, in the natural evolution of events, he could now begin to return to his mother that all-providing care with which she had sheltered his hard and poverty-stricken youth. Lady Hamilton surveyed his tall and well-formed figure with delight. She had never before in her life seen him tolerably well dressed. To keep him decent had taxed all her slender resources; and to see him in all the splendour of his white hussar uniform was a revelation to her.
“I did not know you were so nearly handsome,” she said fondly, kissing his forehead. “But I never before saw you in the guise of a gentleman.”
“Oh, my mother,” cried Gavin, “after I had left you and knew something of the world, I wondered how you, alone and forsaken in a strange country, ever continued to live at all! And to feed and clothe me—what a burden I must have been to you!”