“My poor mother is the only woman I have ever lived in the house with,” he remarked; “and, of course, she was not able to be dainty.”
He said this rather sadly, but without
a taint of humility. Mrs. Yorke was impressed by the dignity of that character which would not be ashamed of anything but its own wrong-doing.
One confidence led to another, and Dick was afterward surprised on recollecting that he had related the story of his whole life to Edith’s aunt, and spoken more freely to her of his early struggles and sufferings than even to Edith herself. Not only this; but, seeing tears in her eyes when he told of his father’s despairing efforts to reform himself, and hearing the pitying word she spoke for him whom others had mocked, he told her the end of it all, and where that father’s desolate grave had been made.
“You poor, dear boy!” she exclaimed, holding out her kind hand to him, “I don’t wonder that Edith loves you!”
“I do not pretend to understand the designs of God,” Dick said unsteadily. “When I think of my father, all is a mystery. But for myself, I think I can see that suffering was good. My nature is to go straight to any end which I propose to myself, without much regard for the wishes of others, and no regard for ordinary obstacles. I might have been cruel, I should have been selfish; but suffering has taught me to be more tender of other people.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Yorke said; and, recollecting her own early trials, thought that they had helped her to be more pitiful of his.
Then, led on by her sympathy for him, she told her own past, there on the spot where it had occurred.
These confidences drew the two together, and formed a bond which was never broken.
A man’s manliness can scarcely bear a severer test than when he becomes the pet of woman. One is sometimes astonished to see how characters, apparently fine, deteriorate under that insidious influence. But Dick Rowan was too grateful and modest, and too little selfish or vain, to be injured.