“You are my son!”
He flung the woman’s hand savagely from him, and sprang to his feet with an oath. “Your son!” he said. “Ha! ha! ha! Your son, indeed! Since when have your senses quite left you, Mother Mim? A dark cell in Bedlam and a strait waistcoat would be your best physic.”
“I am rightly punished,” moaned the woman—“rightly punished. I ought to have told you years ago—ay—before you ever grew to be a man. But I loved you so, and had such pride in you, that I couldn’t bear the thought of telling you, and it’s only now when I’m on my deathbed that the secret forces itself from me. But it will go no farther, never you fear that. No living soul but you will ever hear it from my lips; and you have only got to keep your own lips tightly shut, and you will live and die as Kester St. George.”
She sank back with the exhaustion of speaking. Mechanically, and almost without knowing what he was doing, Kester again gave her a little brandy. Then he sat down; and Mother Mim, finding his hand close by, took possession of it again. He shuddered slightly, but did not withdraw it.
Although Mother Mim had advanced no proofs in support of the strange story she had just told him, there was something in her tone which carried conviction to his inmost heart.
“I must know more of this,” he said, after a little while, speaking almost in a whisper.
“How well I remember everything about it! It seems only like yesterday that it all happened,” sighed the woman. “You—my own child, and he—the other one that was sent to me to nurse, were born within a few hours of one another. His father broke a blood-vessel about six weeks after the child was brought to me. The mother went with her husband to Italy to take care of him, and the child was left with me. A week or two afterwards he was taken suddenly ill, and died. Then the devil tempted me to put my own boy into the place of the lost heir. When Mrs. St. George came back from Italy she came to see her child, and you were shown to her as that child. She accepted you without a moment’s suspicion. They let you stay with me till you were eight years old, and then they took you away and sent you to school. My husband and my sister were the only two beside myself who knew what had been done, and they both died years ago without saying a word. I shall join them in a few days, and then you alone will be the keeper of the secret. With you it will die, and on your tombstone they will write: ‘Here lies the body of Kester St. George.’”
She had told her story with great difficulty, and with frequent interruptions to gather strength and breath to finish it. She now lay back, utterly exhausted. Her eyes closed, her hand relaxed its hold on Kester’s, her jaw dropped slightly, the thin white face grew thinner and whiter: it seemed as if Death, passing that way, had looked in unexpectedly, and had beckoned her to go with him. Kester rose quickly, and struck a match and lighted a fragment of candle that he found on the chimney-piece. His next impulse was to try and revive her with a little brandy, but he paused with the glass in his hand. Why try to revive her? Would it not be better for him, for her, for every one, if she were really dead? If such were the case, it would do away with all fear of her strange secret being ever divulged to any one else. Yes—in every way her death would be a welcome release.
It was not without a tremor, it was not without a faster beating of the heart, that Kester took the bit of cracked looking-glass from the wall and held it to the woman’s lips. His very life seemed to stand still for a moment or two while he waited for the result. It came. The glass clouded faintly. The woman was not dead. With a muttered curse Kester dashed the glass across the floor and put back the candle on the chimney-piece. Then he took up his hat. Where was the use of staying longer? She could tell him nothing more when she should have come to her senses than she had told him already: nothing, that is, of any consequence; and as for details, he did not want them—at least, not now. What he had been told already held food enough for thought for some time to come. He paused for a moment before going out. Was it really possible—was it really credible, that that haggard, sharp-featured woman was his mother?—that his father had been a coarse, common labouring man, a mere hedger and ditcher, who had lived and died in that mean hut, and that he himself, instead of being the Kester St. George he had always believed himself to be, was no other than the son of those two—the boy whose supposed death he remembered to have heard about when little more than a mere child?
Fiercely and savagely he told himself again and again that such a thing could not be—that what Mother Mim had told him was nothing more than a pack of devil’s lies—the invention of a brain weakened and distorted by illness and the clouds of coming death. It was high time to go. He put five sovereigns on the chimney-piece, went softly out, and shut the door behind him. The girl was sitting on the low mud-wall near the door, with the skirt of her dress drawn over her head as some protection from the bitter wind. Her black, glittering eyes took him in from head to foot as he walked up to her. “Go inside at once. She has fainted,” said Kester. The girl nodded and went. Then Kester mounted his horse and rode slowly homeward through the chilly twilight. Bitterest thoughts held him as with a vice. When he came within sight of the chimneys of Park Newton, he gave a sigh of relief, and put spurs to his horse. “That is mine, and no power on earth shall take it from me,” he muttered. “That and the money that comes with it. I am Kester St. George. Let those disprove who can!”