"Because she had been deceived!"
"For just that reason. At least it must be terrible for a woman to spend her life with a man whose word she cannot trust. I should think it would be just ground for separation if anything is."
His mother recalled not only the energy of his tones, but the suddenness with which his wife introduced another topic.
Then there flashed upon her the memory of the clergyman's next remark, addressed to her:—
"Mrs. Burnham, is your daughter always as pale as she is to-day, or has our near approach to a quarrel, just now, frightened her?" Whereupon the color had flamed into Irene's face until her very forehead was flushed; and Erskine, looking at her, had said gayly:—
"My wife always blushes when she is the subject of conversation." What terrible significance attached to all these trifles now!
But, worse than all else, the woman had deserted and disowned her own child! So impossibly preposterous did this seem to Erskine Burnham's mother, that although she had detained her guest until a late hour, and questioned and cross-questioned, and insisted upon yet more proof, and been shown that there was not a possibility of error, she still shrank from it as something that could not be.
"Can a mother forget her child?" It was the question of inspiration, designed to show the almost impossibility of such a thing; yet inspiration had answered, "Yes, she may!" and here, under their own roof, was a living proof of its truth.
"How could she! How could she!" The mother-nature continually went back to that awful question. Suppose she had not? Suppose she had taken the child away with her, and mothered it all these years, and, at last, Erskine had married her? Then he would have stood in the place of father to that girl, and she would have been taught to call him so! His poor mother shivered as though in an ague chill as the strange, and to her appalling, details of this life-tragedy pressed upon her. A tragedy all the more terrible and bewildering because they had been—some of them—living it unawares.
The possibility that Erskine might have knowledge of this appalling story did not, even for a moment, occur to his mother. She knew him too well for that. Erskine had been deceived, fearfully deceived! not only in great and terrible ways, as one under awful provocation, but in petty details,—as to her age, for instance; and that this was merely an instance, Ruth knew only too well.