Another followed; and then another morning after that.
Night and day were much the same to John in this dreadful pause of existence. Sometimes he dozed in the day, in utter weariness and sickness of heart, after coming in from an unsuccessful search for some trace of any one of those three men who had so changed the course of his life; often lay awake through the slow and terrible night, in which all manner of miserable thoughts came crowding about him like vultures, so that he did not know which was most insupportable, the night or the day. The wondering looks of the people in the house, the shaking of the head of his landlady, Mrs. Short, who saw all her fears realised, and made no doubt whatever that John had been tempted, and had fallen, and had been dismissed by his employers with obliquy, did not affect him, for he was unconscious of them. He sought no comfort from his mother, who was the only confidant he could have had—indeed, he sought comfort nowhere. He did not recognise the possibility of any succour existing for him at all.
Again he had slept late on the morning of the third day. By that means he seemed to cheat time of one little bit of its tedious, soul-consuming power. The day was a little less long when he thus managed to steal an hour from it, and this habit, which the troubled and sorrowful share with the idle and dissipated, easily steals upon those who are unemployed and unhappy. He felt that he hated the light, as so many have done before him. To turn his face to the wall, to close his eyes upon it, to push as far from him as possible the new day, in which there could be nothing but evil, was a little gain in the dearth of all comfort. John was roused with a start by some one knocking at his door, to bid him make haste and come downstairs, where two ladies were waiting for him.
‘Missis wants to know if she’s to send up breakfast for them?’ the serving maiden inquired.
John, in his consternation, did not answer the question. Two ladies! After a while, he said to himself, while he completed his dressing hastily, that no doubt his mother had sent for Susie, and that together they had come to plead with him to abandon the unfortunate, to keep everything secret. John smiled at himself in his glass at the thought. Abandon him! The poor culprit, the convict, the deserted father had been more magnanimous than they were, and had fled from him not to shame him. So much the less could his son abandon him. He prepared himself to tell them his resolution as he finished his dressing. Susie would cry, perhaps, but neither of them would care much: why should they care? He had never entered actively into their lives. It would be nothing to them to lose him. They might, indeed, have been proud of him, had he come to be, as he believed he should so short a time ago, a successful and famous engineer. But pride and love were two different things. They might plead as they pleased, but he would not give in to them. What, preserve this hideous secret, cheat the world into supposing them an honourable family? That might have been, perhaps, had John been entering upon a successful career, accompanied by the plaudits of the office, and with many things depending upon him. But now when nothing depended upon him, when he was considered to have justified all prejudices against him (of which now he knew the cause) and to be himself a traitor—now that he should shrink from doing his duty! No, no! His father after all was everything that belonged to him, as he was the only thing that belonged to his father.
He went through all this with himself as he prepared to go downstairs. And he threw himself into their thoughts. He fancied how, as they heard his step coming down, they would say over to each other the arguments it would be best to use, and the mother might perhaps suggest to Susie to be more loving than usual to win him. It was very likely that she would do that. And when John opened the parlour door and found himself in a moment caught in some one’s arms, the first flush of consciousness in his mind was that to the letter the programme was being carried out.
But that flush of consciousness was very brief. The next was different, it was rapture and anguish mingled together. For the arms that were flung about him, the face that was put close to his was not his sister’s but Elly’s—Elly’s! Good heavens!
‘Don’t!’ he cried, putting her away from him, putting away her hands from his shoulders. ‘Don’t! for the love of God.’
‘Jack!’ she cried, ‘Jack!’ and kissed him determinedly, openly, without a blush, flinging off those deterring hands.
‘Oh, Jack, my boy, what does all this mean?’ said another voice behind. Had he gone mad, or was he still in a dream? For this mocking spirit seemed to speak with Mrs. Egerton’s voice. The whole world seemed to swim in his eyes for a moment, and then things settled back into their place, and he found himself standing in his parlour with two ladies indeed, but the ladies were Elly and her aunt. Mrs. Egerton was seated in the only easy-chair in the room, the one which May the convict had preferred, and Elly stood all eagerness and life, like a creature made out of light, in the full shining of the morning sun which came in at the end window, and which had caught and translated itself bodily to her hair.