“‘Mother! mother!’ I cried out, and opened my arms to her in a passion of tears. But she laid her finger smilingly on my lips, and made me be silent. In a month hence, when I was well, we should talk it all over, but not now.
“Before the month was out, she was dead!”…
Marmaduke started to his feet with a cry of horror, and Botfield, unable to control the anguish that his own narrative evoked, dropped his head into his hands, and shook the room with his sobs.
“O dear God! that I should have lived to tell it!—to talk over the mother that I murdered! Brave, tender, generous mother! I killed you, I broke your heart, and then—then I brought shame upon your memory! O God! O God! why have I outlived it?” He rocked to and fro, almost shouting in his paroxysm of despair. Marmaduke had never beheld such grief; he had never in his life been so deeply moved with pity. He did not know what to say, what to do. His heart prompted him to do the right thing: he fell on his knees, and, putting his arms around the wretched, woe-worn man, he burst into tears and sobbed with him.
Botfield suffered his embrace for a moment, and then, pressing his horny palm on the young man’s blond head, he muttered: “God bless you! God bless you for your pity!”
As soon as they were both calmed, Marmaduke asked him if he would not prefer finishing the story to-morrow. But he signed to him to sit down; that he would go on with it to the end.
“What is there more to tell?” he said, sadly shaking his head.
“I was lying a cripple on my bed when she was carried to her grave. I was seized with a violent brain fever, which turned to typhus, and they took me to the hospital. The servants were dismissed; they had received notice from my mother. She had foreseen everything, taken every necessary step as calmly as if the catastrophe I had brought upon her had been a mere change of residence for her own convenience. All we had was gone. That brave answer of hers to my question about our resources was a subterfuge of her love. If ever a sin was sinless, assuredly that half-uttered falsehood was. She had directed the lawyer to raise the money immediately, at every sacrifice. She meant to work for her bread, and trusted to me to make the task light and short to her. I would have done it had she been spared to me. So help me God, I would! But now that she was gone, I had nothing to work for. I left the hospital a cripple and a beggar. I did not even yet know to what an extent. I went straight to our old house, expecting to find it as I had left it—that is, before all consciousness had left me. I found it dismantled, empty; painters busy on scaffolding outside. I went to Mr. Kerwin, and there learned the whole truth. Nothing remained to me but suicide. Nothing kept me from it, I believe, but the prayers of my mother.”
“You were a Christian, then?” interrupted Marmaduke in a tone of unfeigned surprise.
“I ought to have been. My father was, and my mother was; I was brought up as one, until I went to the university and lost what little belief I had. For a moment it seemed to come back to me when I found myself alone in the world. I remember walking deliberately down to the river’s side when I left the lawyer’s office, fully determined to drown myself. But before I reached the water, I heard my mother’s voice calling so distinctly to me to stop that I felt myself arrested as by some visible presence. I heard the voice saying, ‘Do you wish never to see me again even in the next world?’ Of course it was the work of imagination, of my over-wrought feelings; but the effect was the same. I stopped, and retraced my steps to Mr. Kerwin’s.”