'Do not let there be any scene; I could not bear it;' and the weariness in his voice made her heart ache still more. 'Mother, I think that we had better never speak of these things again. As far as I am concerned, I will willingly blot out the past from my memory. To-day we must begin afresh—you and I.'
His tone made her shiver, and as she looked up in his dark impassive face, and saw the deep-seated melancholy in his eyes, a sort of despair seized her.
'Oh!' she cried passionately, 'can it be my son who speaks? Blot out the past?—that happy past, when we were all in all to each other—when even poverty was delicious, because I had my boy to work for me!'
'I shall work for you still.'
'Yes, but will it be the same? What do I care for the gifts you may bring me when your heart has gone from me? How am I to bear my life when you treat me with such coldness? Cyril, you do not know what a mother's love is. If you had sinned, if you had come to me and said, "Will you take my hand, red as it is with the blood of a fellow-creature?" with all my horror I would still have taken it, for it is the hand of my son.'
She spoke with a wild fervour that would have touched any other man; but he only returned coldly:
'And yet you had no mercy for my father?'
Then a look of repugnance crossed her face.
'That was because I did not love him. Where there is no love there is no self-sacrifice; but, Cyril, with all my faults, I have been a good mother to you.'
'I know it,' he replied, 'and I hope I shall always do my duty by you; but, mother, you must be patient and give me time. Do you not see,' and here his voice became more agitated, 'that you have yourself destroyed my faith in my mother: the mother in whom I believed, who was truth itself to me, is only my own illusion. I know now that she never existed; that is why I say that you must give me time, that I may become used to my new mother.'