‘What is the matter, John? I can’t go out like this, you know. I have to make arrangements. What is it?—for heaven’s sake tell me what it is.’
‘I may never in my life ask such a thing from you again. Most likely I shall never want it. If you have any feeling for me, for God’s sake come with me. To me it is life or death.’
She put her hand upon his arm, and drew him towards her, looking in his face, feeling with a professional touch his hands and the throbbing of his pulse.
‘Something has gone amiss,’ she said. ‘Your hands are cold, and yet your pulse is high. You have had some shock.’ She got up as she spoke, and made him sit down in her chair, and put her hands upon his head. ‘Tell me what is the matter,’ she said, in that tone of mild determination with which she overawed her patients. ‘You are not fit to be flying about.’
There was something in the touch, in the maternal authority—though that was scarcely more individual to him than to any other—which touched the poor young fellow in the feverish crisis of feeling in which he was. It was a relief to sink down into the chair, to feel even its wooden arms giving him a sensation of support. And to have some one to fall back upon at such a moment was the best thing in heaven or earth. He had never wanted such a prop before. It was against all the principles of his life to look for it, and yet there was the profoundest consolation in it. He closed his eyes for a moment, and the heat and the horror of his thoughts relaxed a little. He had meant to seize upon her, to carry her away in a whirlwind of passionate haste and anxiety, to confront her with him, the stranger who had possession of John’s rooms, and seemed to claim possession of his life. That had seemed at first the only thing to do: to carry her off without warning, to bring her face to face with that unthought of, unsuspected apparition, and demand of her, ‘Who is this?’ Perhaps there had been in it a gleam of personal vengeance too, the desire to recompense with a keen, swift stroke of punishment the deception put upon him, and all the mysteries now suddenly let loose upon his head. But the touch of his mother’s hand, the anxiety in her voice, the kindness—though perhaps no more than any patient at the hospital would have called forth—over-turned all these intentions in a moment. He was wound up to such a passion of feeling that everything told upon him, and the revulsion was great. He leaned back, touching her shoulder, laying his head upon it.
‘Mother,’ he said, like a child, with a pathetic voice of reproach, ‘why did you tell me he was dead?’
‘John!’ she started so violently that the pillow of rest on which he had leaned seemed to reject as well as fail him. ‘John!’
He turned round upon her suddenly, and caught her hands in his.
‘Mother,’ he said again, ‘is it true? Mother, is it true? I have never understood. God help me, was this what it meant all the time?’
Mrs. Sandford, who was so self-controlled and so strong, trembled and quivered in his hold. She said, in a hoarse whisper,