“That is well. But, mother, please do not call it shame. You were guiltless of any wrong. The shame, if there be any, is his,” he urged, with troubled brow.
Marion sighed and let the matter drop. If the shame was not to be imputed to her, she had suffered as though it were.
From that day her son was changed.
A new dignity of purpose seemed to crown him. His boyishness dropped from him all at once, and he suddenly developed, mentally, into the full stature of a man. He became grave and thoughtful, but a new and deeper tenderness pervaded all his care of his mother thereafter, making him gentle as a woman in his sympathy and attention to her wants.
She died blessing him, and telling him what a comfort he had been to her all his life, and bidding him not forget the lessons she had taught him of truth and right.
With an almost breaking heart, he buried her under a noble, sweeping elm, in a quiet spot of the village cemetery, and felt as if he had not a friend upon the face of the earth.
He sent a notice of her death to the Marquis of Wycliffe, declining all further aid from him upon his own behalf, and then went forth into the world to battle for himself.
One thing he resolved to do before settling down to the real business of life, and that was to visit the place where his mother had been made the victim of such baseness and treachery.
He went down to South Sussex County, visited Rye, and all the places she had described to him, and thought of her there, as a fair and innocent girl, filled to the brim with joy and gayety.
He saw the house, the Surrey mansion, where she had spent those eight short, happy weeks and longed to enter, that he might see the rooms where her gay laughter had rang out and her light and nimble feet had danced to tuneful measure.