By slow degrees the conviction had been forced upon this truth-loving woman that she had for a daughter one to whom the truth was as a trifle to be trampled upon a dozen times a day if the fancy seized her.
Numberless instances of this had been thrust upon a close observer. "Yes," she would say unhesitatingly and unblushingly to Erskine, when his mother knew that "No" would have been the truth. Even the servants had learned to smile over this peculiarity in their young mistress, and to make efforts to have witnesses for any of her orders that were important. With the outside world she was so unpardonably careless of her word that Mrs. Burnham was almost growing used to apologizing for and blushing over her daughter's society inaccuracies.
Given a woman like Ruth Erskine Burnham, belonging to a family in whom, generations back, there had been martyrs for the truth's sake, trained from her very babyhood to despise every false way, self-trained, through the years, to hold with almost painful insistence to whatever she had seemed to promise, perhaps no other fault would have been harder to condone in others. She was still struggling to try to love her daughter-in-law, but she knew that she had ceased to respect her.
It was this condition of things which had made it possible for her to credit Miss Parker's story. Since Irene's moral twist with regard to truth was most apparent, why should she be expected to spurn the thought of other immoralities?
It was while Ruth Burnham was at this stage of her mental confusion that the temptation of her life came to her, clad in the white robes of truth and honor. It came, of course, by way of Erskine. He must know the whole blighting story and must know it at once. He must be told that the woman whom he had blessed with his love and whom he was tenderly sheltering from a rude world was a woman who could trample upon marriage vows, desert her first-born child, and lie about it all in a colossal manner; not only once, at first, but through the years! The whole fearful structure of Erskine's later life, built as it was upon falsehood, must be made to tumble about him in ruins. What a cruel thing! Erskine, the soul of honor, with as keen a love for truth as it was possible for human being to have, must, in spite of himself, be involved in the meshes of this false and cruel life! And yet, underneath the groan which she had for his ruined home and his ruined hopes, was a faint little thrill of exultation.
When Erskine must cease to respect his wife, he could not continue to love her with the kind of love that he was giving to her now. At the best it could be only a pitying, protecting love, and there was a sense in which she, his mother, would have him back again, at least to a degree. No one knew better than herself that there was a sense in which she had lost him.
What would he be likely to do? Irene was his wife, and he would do his duty at whatever cost, but just what was his duty? She tried to settle it for him. There was the child, the young woman rather, Irene's daughter. Would he not insist that the mother should do her tardy duty toward the child? But what was the duty of such a mother toward such a child? And how could anything be arranged for now, under such strange, such startling circumstances? She did not know. She could not plan, could not think; Erskine would have to do the thinking; but in the meantime, where would a boy, trained as he had been, turn naturally for sympathy but to his mother? She would have him again! She exulted in the thought; even then, in her first recoil from sin and its consequences, she exulted.
And then—just in that moment of exultation—she began to realize what she was doing, and a kind of terror of herself came upon her. Was it possible that she was really that despicable thing, a creature so full of self, and selfish loves, as to be able to thrill with joy, in the very midst of a ruin that involved her best and dearest, merely because out of it she was to gain something?
It was a terrible night. Mrs. Burnham kept her door close locked, though Erskine came once, and again, to seek admittance and went away puzzled and pained: locked out from his mother's room for the first time. She called out to him, trying to speak reassuringly, that she was not ill, only unusually tired; she was in bed, and did not feel equal to getting up to let him in.
"But, mommie," he said, "I did not know that you ever locked your door at night—not when we are together. What if you should be ill in the night?"