Then he took up the papers again, and began to read.
It was a few days later that Ralph received the news of his mother’s illness.
She had written to him occasionally, telling him of his father’s tiresome ways, his brother’s arrogance, his sister’s feeble piety, and finally she had told him of Beatrice’s arrival.
“I consented very gladly,” she had written, “for I thought to teach my lady a lesson or two; but I find her very pert and obstinate. I do not understand, my dear son, how you could have wished to make her your wife; and yet I will grant that she has a taking way with her; she seems to fear nothing but her own superstitions and folly, but I am very happy to think that all is over between you. She never loved you, my Ralph; for she cares nothing when I speak your name, as I have done two or three times; nor yet Master More either. I think she has no heart.”
Ralph had wondered a little as he read this, at his mother’s curious interest in the girl; and he wondered too at the report of Beatrice’s callousness. It was her damned pride, he assured himself.
Then, one evening as he arrived home from Hackney where he had slept the previous night, he found a messenger waiting for him. The letter had not been sent on to him, as he had not left word where he was going.
It contained a single line from his father.
“Your mother is ill. Come at once. She wishes for you.”
It was in the stormy blackness of a February midnight that he rode up through the lighted gatehouse to his home. Above the terrace as he came up the road the tall hall-window glimmered faintly like a gigantic luminous door hung in space; and the lower window of his father’s room shone and faded as the fire leapt within.