He felt this to the bottom of his heart; but she did not feel it all. She took the questions quite naturally, and answered them with calm simplicity. “The doctor comes twice a-day. He’ll be here soon. I cannot keep the name of it in my mind. Sitting up of nights makes me stupid like; but when he comes, you’ll hear.”
Then there was a pause. She stood before him, with her hands clasped, waiting for what he was going to say. She had no thought of resisting or standing on her rights, for had she not given up the boy long ago?—and waited with keen but secret anguish for the sentence which she believed he must be about to pronounce. The door was open behind her. While she stood waiting for Richard’s words, her ear was intent upon Val, ready to hear if he made the slightest movement. Between these two things which absorbed her, she was completely occupied. She had no leisure to think of herself.
But he who was alive to all the strange troubles of the position, at what a disadvantage he was! His embarrassment and overwhelming self-consciousness were painful beyond description, while she was free from self altogether, and suffered nothing in comparison. While she stood so steadily, a tremulous quiver ran through his every limb. He was as superior to her as it is possible to conceive, and yet he was helpless and speechless before her. At last he made out, faltering, the confused words, “Do you know who he is?”
“Yes, I know,” she said, with a panting breath. A gleam of light came over her face. “I have known him ever since he was a boy. He’s been Dick’s friend. No lad had ever a better friend. They took a fancy to each other the first day. I heard his name—it’s seven years since—and knew.”
“And you told—Val——”
She gave a slight start, and looked at him reproachfully, appealingly, but made no other reply. This look disturbed Richard more and more. There was in it a higher meaning than any he seemed capable of. He felt that from some simple eminence of virtue, impossible to him to conceive, she looked down upon him, quietly indignant of, yet half pitying, his suspicions of her. And, in fact, though she was not capable of any sentiments so articulate, these, in a rudimentary confusion, were the feelings in her mind.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, humbly. “Then he knows nothing? And the other, the younger—he who is with you——”
How he faltered! man of the world, and highbred gentleman as he was; he did not know how to put the inquiry into words.
“Oh,” she said, roused from her stillness of expectation, “don’t meddle with Dick! Oh! sir, leave my boy alone! You don’t know—no one knows but me—how good he is. He’s put up with all my wild ways. He’s been willing to give up all he likes best for me; but God’s given me strength, and I’ve mastered myself. I’ve stayed quiet, though it went near to kill me,” she said, clasping her hands tightly; “I wouldn’t shame him, and take his home from him. Oh, don’t meddle with Dick! He’s happy now.”
Her entreating look, her appeal to his generosity, her absolute detachment from all emotion except in connection with her children, worked upon Richard in the strangest way. They moved him as he had never thought to be moved. His heart swelled, and filled with a novel emotion. “Is this all you think of?” he said, with, in his turn, a strange tone of reproach in his voice—“only of the children! when we meet like this after so many—so many years!”