Heriot's Choice: A Tale

by Rosa Nouchette Carey

'Ah, to be sure,' passing his hand wearily through his whitening hair. 'I get confused; you are so like your mother. Ask this gentleman to wheel me in, Ethel; I am getting tired.'

'Is he often like this?' asked Richard, when at last she was free to join him in the porch. The curfew bell was ringing as they walked through the dewy crofts among the tall, sleeping daisies; the cool breeze fanned Ethel's hot temples.

'Yes, very often,' she returned, in a dejected tone. 'It is this that tries me so. If he would only talk to me a little as he used to do before things went wrong; but he only seems to live in the past—his wife and his boys—but it is chiefly Rupert now.'

'And yet he seems restless without you.'

'That is the strangest part; he seems to know me through it all. There are times when he is a little clearer; when he seems to think there is something between us; and then nothing satisfies him, unless I sit beside him and hold his hand. It is so hard to hear him begging my forgiveness over and over again for some imaginary wrong he fancies he has done me.'

'Poor Ethel! Yet he was never dearer to you than he is now?'

'Never,' she returned, drying her eyes. 'Night and day he engrosses my thoughts. I seem to have no room for anything else. Do you know, Richard, I can understand now the passionate pity mothers feel for a sick child, for whom they sacrifice rest and comfort. There is nothing I would not do for papa.'

'Aunt Milly says your devotion to him is beautiful.'

Ethel's face grew paler. 'You must not tell me that, Richard; you do not consider that I have to retrieve the coldness of a lifetime. After all, poor papa is right. I have not been a good daughter to him; I have been carping and disagreeable; I have presumed to sit in judgment on my own father; I have separated myself and my pursuits from his, and alienation was the result.'

'For which you were not wholly to blame,' he replied, gently, unable to hear those self-accusations unmoved. Why was she, the dearest and the truest, to go heavily all her days for sins that were not her own?