The thought of it filled him with a tempest of self-accusation, of regret, of new-born devotion.
“Eweretta, I will make a clean breast of it. I will give up all. I will tell Philip Barrimore. He will come back to you!” he exclaimed.
The girl’s face took on a look of pain.
“No, uncle, no,” she said very gently. “I would not again be Eweretta. I would not spoil the happiness of those two. Philip believes me dead. Let him go on believing it. Let him live his life. Don’t you see that if Philip knew that I was myself, and not Aimée, he would feel obliged to——Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! He has taught himself to forget. We could never be what we were to each other. And how could I make that other girl suffer what I have suffered? As to the money, I give it you freely. I live here. I have all I want except my freedom. I want to go out—to be as others.”
“And by heaven you shall!” exclaimed Alvin.
It was no passing emotion, this complete change of front in Alvin.
To the pariah, the outcast, who receives sympathy, comes a devotion unimaginable to those who have always had friends. From that moment Alvin became possessed of a dog-like devotion to Eweretta.
Mrs. Le Breton could not in the least understand it. She was not a woman of great intelligence. To her mind Thomas Alvin had been born not merely unlucky, but a “bad lot.” But to her mind his brother had been a worse man than he. John Alvin had not been born an unlucky number. He had succeeded in life. But what had he been? Had he not left her and her child to starve? Had not his abandonment of herself in her extremity caused poor Aimée to be what she had been?
The chance words of a midwife had cursed Thomas Alvin. When he had been born, this woman had said, “The thirteenth child is always unlucky,” and the silly mother had harped upon it, in the boy’s hearing, harped on it constantly, till the boy had come to believe in it. From a very early age he had decided that nothing he did greatly mattered, as he was predestined to ill-luck. Neither he nor anyone else seemed to realize that it was his attitude, his acceptance of a superstition that accounted for the ill-luck that had ever pursued him.
Thomas Alvin had been bitterly envious of his brother John. All that John touched had prospered. John had grown rich. Yet he had not been immaculate. He had betrayed a trusting woman. He had forsaken her and the child of their guilt. The woman had had to mend shoes to keep life in herself and her half-witted daughter.