‘Sixteen—you must take me to Edie. Sixteen’s too young to ask many questions: and when it dances besides! But you’ve got a wife?’
‘She’s an angel too, May.’
‘It’s you that are lucky, Montressor. I wonder if I’ve still got a wife? She was a sort of an arch-angel, don’t you know, too high-minded, too grand for the like of me. I wonder if she’s alive. Yes, she must be alive. Nobody but she would have sent me that money without a word. Perhaps, Montressor, it’s her he’s gone to consult.’
‘Never mind, me friend. Let’s think no more of them. Let’s go away.’
‘It will be so,’ said May, as if speaking to himself; ‘his mother—that master of his said. Confound all jealous masters, he will cause me a deal of trouble getting those things back. Ay, the mother! she’ll tell him everything, she’ll not spare the old riotous good-for-nothing—his father!’ Here the voice changed. ‘A father like me,’ he added, ‘isn’t for a young man, Montressor; you’re right in what you say. I’d do for a boy, a little fellow like my own little chap. He and I could go away together where nobody ever heard of us. Get a little farm in the country, perhaps, and a spade, and—that sort of thing: and the poor little beggar would never know. But for a man that is respectability itself, and all that—— No, no, you’re right, Montressor. Take me to your angel that dances, and the other one—what does she do?—perhaps she sings.’ He burst forth into a tremulous, broken laugh. ‘Two angels—instead of my own little chap. You’re right, Montressor. Don’t let us wait for the poor boy that’s coming back broken-hearted. Who knows, if I weren’t such a good-for-nothing, if I weren’t such a reckless fool, I might be broken-hearted too.’
‘Me poor friend!’ the actor cried, ‘as long as I have a roof over me head, come; it’s but a poor place, but ye’ll be welcome. Montressor’s door is never shut against trouble and sorrow. And when ye see me Edie dance—and she’ll dance to ye as if ye were a crowned head—ye’ll forget everything.’
‘Ah, I’ll forget everything,’ said the other; he added, musing, ‘I’ll do that easy, whether or no.’
CHAPTER IX.
THE FIRST SHOCK.
John left the hospital, he scarcely knew when, and could not tell how. He had forgotten, though he never could for a moment forget, that he had left waiting for him the two men, the man who—— Remember him!—it seemed to John an impossibility that ever again, even if he lived a hundred years, he could forget what had been revealed to him that day, or the look of the man’s face, who suddenly in a moment had lifted the veil of his own childish life, and made the playful, sweet recollection which had never died out of his mind an instrument of torture.
He was conscious when he came out from under the shadow of the great building in which his mother’s life was spent, and found himself on the bridge with the clear vacancy of the river on each side of him, that the afternoon had waned, that the sun was going down, and that a sentiment of the coming evening, with its rest and quietness, was already in the air. But that a long time had elapsed since in hot haste and excitement he had crossed that bridge, going to demand from his mother an explanation of this horror, he could not tell. It was a moment, an age, he could not tell which. Despair had been in his soul, mingled with a passionate determination that this thing should not be, when he went: but he was still and silent as he returned. He had not received either explanation or proof. His mother’s panic was proof enough on one side, as were the few words that he had said on the other. These words alone were unanswerable, unforgettable. If the convict had vanished from his eyes unnamed, John felt that his fond recollection of that child in his night-gown was enough to have proved all the terrible story. For who could know it but himself and one other, himself and his father?