John could not make any reply. How his heart veered from side to side!—sometimes all with her in her pride and passion, sometimes touched with a sudden softening recollection of the man with his sophistries, his self-reconciliating philosophy, his good humour, and his almost childish, ingratiating smile.
‘I don’t see how he can have found out anything. I have never lost sight of him—that was easy enough. He has had whatever indulgences, or alleviations of his lot were permitted. I left money in the chaplain’s hand for him when the time came for his coming out. I did not trust the chaplain even with any clue.’
The balance came round again as she spoke, and John remembered how, in this very room, the same story had been told to him from the other side, and he had himself cried out, indignantly, ‘Could you not find them? Was there no clue?’
He said now, breathlessly, ‘Did you think that right?’
‘Right!’ She paused with a little gasp, as if she had been stopped suddenly in her progress by an unexpected touch. ‘Could there be any question on the subject?’
‘Did Susie think it right?’
‘Susie!’ She paused again with impatience. ‘Susie is one of those women who are all-forgiving, and who have no judgment of right and wrong.’
‘And you never hesitated, mother!’
‘Never,’ she said, a faint colour like the reflection of a flame passing over her pale face. ‘Why should I hesitate? Could there be a question? Alas! Fate has done it instead of me: but could I—I, your mother, bring such a wrong upon you of my own free will? Don’t you think I would rather have died—to use that foolish phrase again—I use it to mean the extremity of wish and effort,—rather than have exposed you to know, much less to encounter—? Don’t let us speak of it,’ she said, giving her head a slight nervous shake, as if to shake the thought far from her. ‘Upon that subject I never had a doubt.’
‘And yet he was a man, like other men: and his children at least were not his judges. Most men who have children have something, somebody to meet them after years of separation.’