‘Did he say that?’
‘He did not blame anybody. Knowing nothing about it but that he was a wretched poor criminal, and that this was his story, I, who was one of the offenders without knowing, was very indignant.’
‘You were very indignant!’
‘Yes, mother; I thought it cruel. My heart ached for the man; fourteen years of privation and loneliness, and not a soul to say “Welcome” when he came back into the cold world.’
‘He had money, which buys friends—the kind of friends he liked.’
She had changed her attitude, and sat straight up, her eyes shining, the lines of her face all moving, rising up enraged and splendid in her own defence.
‘It seemed to have gone to his heart—the abandonment—and it went to mine, merely to hear the story told.’
‘I bow,’ she said, ‘to the tenderness of both your hearts! I always felt there was a certain likeness. I act on other laws:—to bring a convict back into my family, to shame my young, high-minded, honourable son, whose path in life promised no difficulty; to shame my gentle child who has all a woman’s devotion to whoever suffers or seems to suffer; I don’t speak of myself. For myself, I would die a hundred times (that phrase again!) rather than be exposed—— No, no, no—nothing, nothing would have induced me to act otherwise. You don’t know what it is—you don’t know what he is. Fate, I will not say God, has baffled my plans: but do not let him come near me, for I cannot bear it. I will rather leave everything and go away—to the end of the world.’
John had in his heart suffered all that a proud and pure-minded young man can suffer from the thought of what and who his father was: and he had felt his heart sicken with disgust, turning from him and loathing him. But when his mother spoke thus a sudden revulsion of feeling arose in him. He could not hear him so assailed. A sudden partisanship, that family solidarity which is so curious in its operations, filled his mind. He felt angry with her that she attacked him, though she said no more than it had been in his own heart to say.
He replied, with some indignation in the calmness of his words: