“I have said nothing to you—indeed, indeed, I have wished to say nothing—about—— Richard, my dear boy, listen to me with patience, I will not keep you long—— about—Val’s mother—your wife.”
“What about her?” said Richard, with harsh brevity. He made a movement almost as if to throw off his mother’s arm.
“My dear, you must not think this subject is less disagreeable to me than to you. Nothing has been said about her for a long time——”
“And why should anything be said about her?” said Richard. “In such a hopeless business, what is the advantage of discussion? She has chosen her path in life, which is not the same as mine.”
His soft and gentle face set into a harsh rigidity: it grew stern, almost severe. “Come indoors, mother—the evening gets cold,” he added, after a pause.
“Just a word, Richard—just one word! Do you not see a trace of something different rising in her? She has brought back your boy: I suppose she thinks, poor thing, that it is just she should have one of them——”
“Mother,” said Richard, “I am astonished at your charity. You say, poor thing. Do you remember that she has ruined your son’s life?”
Lady Eskside made no answer. She looked at him wistfully, with an evident repression of something that rose to her lips.
“She has been my curse,” said Richard, vehemently. “For God’s sake, if she will leave us alone, let us leave her alone. She has made my life a desert. Is it choice, do you think, that makes me an outcast from my own country? that shuts me out from everything your son and my father’s son ought to have been? Why cannot I take my proper place in society—my natural place? You know well enough what the answer is—she is the cause. She has been my ruin: she is the curse of my life.”
He spoke almost with passion, growing not red but white in the intensity of his feelings. Lady Eskside looked at him, kept looking at him, with a face in which sympathy shone—along with some other expression not so easy to be defined.