‘The only way in which you can help me, my child, is by finding a happy future for yourself. I am anxious about that—selfishly anxious, for it seems that my life can gain its real goal only by making you happy, since I missed the chance of making your mother so. I know that she was not happy; and my career, which has been one of strange good fortune, as men reckon fortune by the money you make, has been one of misery. Do you not think that droll?’
‘You are not like other men, I think; others would have forgotten the past, and forgiven.’
She was thinking of Philip’s wish that his father should be reconciled to Austin Shield.
‘I can forgive,’ he said softly; ‘I cannot forget.—Now, let us look at the position quietly as it is. The only thing which has given me an interest in life is the hope that I may be useful to you. When my sorrow came upon me, it seemed as if the whole world had gone wrong.’ (That was spoken with a kind of bitter sense of the humorous side of his sorrow.) ‘Doctors would have called it indigestion. You see, however, it does not matter much to the patient whether it is merely indigestion or organic disease, so long as he suffers from the pangs of whatever it may be. Well, I did not die, and the doctor is entitled to his credit. I live, eat my dinner, and am in fair health. But there is a difference: life lost its flavour when the blunder was made. When your mother believed the false report which reached her, the man who loved her was murdered.’
‘She could not act otherwise than she did,’ said Madge bravely in defence.
‘She should have trusted to me,’ he retorted, shaking his head sadly. ‘But that is unkind, and I do not mean to say one word of her that could be called unkind. She would forgive it.’
‘How she must have suffered!’ murmured Madge, her hand passing absently over the aching brow.
‘Ay, she must have suffered as I did—poor lass, poor lass!’
He turned abruptly to the hearth, as if he had become suddenly conscious of the ordinary duties of life, and aware that the fire required attention.
‘I want you to try to understand me,’ he said as he stirred the embers, and the oak-log on the top of the coal started a bright flame.