“Of course, if you can; but whatever you say will only harm her. Your silence is the best thing you can give her.”
“I can marry her.”
If Billy had shot at his mother he could have astonished her hardly more.
“Billy! You’re only a little boy!” she gasped with her first recovered breath.
“Oh, not to-day, but after a while. And meantime, while I’m growing old enough and earning something, I can lick any fool that speaks against her.”
In a long life of many trials Mrs. Bennett had learned self-control; also that many worries are best left alone for a time before attacking them. She rose and stood behind Billy’s chair, stroking his soft, abundant hair. “Boy, put such thoughts out of your mind. They are unsuited to you. Whatever is just and right, whatever is manly and needed by this girl from you, that of course you must do. But time will show what that may be. In the meantime you must go on as usual, doing the duty of each day. Just now that means a bath, supper, your lessons, and bed.”
Again she kissed him, drew her hand caressingly across his forehead, and left the room. And to Billy’s keen ear it seemed as if her step in a moment had become the slow, shuffling tread of an old woman.
As the evening passed, his depression grew. He found it difficult to study. The pages were meaningless. Or if he roused himself to some attention suddenly the print blurred, and he heard again the quick tempest of the night before surging through the trees, or Erminie’s pitiful, “I’m so afraid, Billy!”
And his mother’s step, as she left the room, haunted him. What had made her walk like that? He began to suspect the case was worse than he had thought if it could hurt her so. “Betsey, Betsey! Why didn’t you get a move on?” he whispered whimsically. It was years since he had thought of his boyish name for his conscience. Yet reviewing the night’s experience he could find little blame for himself.
His large attic room, usually so cheery and so much to his wish, was full of sounds that to his overwrought mind seemed to come from unseen beings. He listened for a time, then switched on the light; and seeing only the familiar scene, turned it off again, impatient with himself, ashamed. He need not have been so. He was neither a coward nor a hyper-sensitive; it was his own high-strung imagination that peopled the darkness with jeering shapes.