“Please do not speak so; I don’t believe that any son really entertains such thoughts.”
“Ah, that shows how little you know. You have not been in society all these years. Eddy is philosophical, and thinks that I have very little good of my life, which is true enough, and that he would have a great deal, which is quite as true.”
“Even if it were so, he would not be his own master—at nineteen,” Evelyn said.
“Twenty—he is the eldest. Of course he would be better off in that case. He would have more freedom, and a better allowance; and he would be of more importance, not the second but the first.”
“Oh,” she cried with horror, “do not impute such dreadful motives to your own child.”
He shook his head, looking at her with an air of cynical wisdom—a look which made the countenance, so changed and faded with disease, almost diabolical to contemplate. Evelyn turned her eyes away with a movement of horrified impatience. And this was not at all the feeling with which Saumarez meant to inspire the woman who had once loved him. He was unwilling even now to believe that she had entirely escaped out of his power.
“Evelyn,” he said, putting forth again that large nerveless hand, from the touch of which she shrank—“let me call you so, as in the old days. It can do no one any harm now.”
“Surely not,” she said; “it could do no one any harm.”
He had not expected this reply; if she had shrank from the familiarity and refused her permission, he would have been better pleased. Helpless, paralytic, dreadful to behold, he would fain have considered himself a danger to her peace of mind still.
“I have to accept that,” he said, “like all the rest. That it doesn’t matter what I say, no man could be jealous of me. Evelyn!—I like to say the name—there’s everything that’s sweet and womanly in it. I wish I had called my little girl by that name. I thought of it, to tell the truth.”