"It cost me no small effort to come, I can tell you, Hubert; it is so wretched to find you here in this miserable room, with every thing so mean and neglected round you. You seem ever to do what you can to render your own appearance uninviting, crouching down there with your matted hair and melancholy face."
There was little of the accents of love in these words, and a slight shiver seemed to agitate the frame of Hubert as he felt at that moment that he was repulsive even to the mother who bore him; but he lifted his dark gray eyes to her face with the sweet, patient smile which filled his countenance at times with a spiritual beauty, and said gently:
"I did not expect you at this hour, or I should have tried to make both my little den and myself look more cheerful in your honor."
There was something in his expression which touched with an intense power a never-slumbering memory. She flung her arms round his neck and bent over him.
"Oh, my Henry—my Henry—it was his eyes that looked at me just now, as they have often looked in their tenderness, for ever perished—his eyes that I kissed in death with my poor heart broken—broken—as it is to this day—his eyes sealed up now with the horrible clog of his deep grave—oh, my Henry—my Henry—come back to me!"
She pressed the head of her son close to her beating heart and wept. He waited till she was more composed; then, gently disengaging himself, he made her sit down beside him, and held her hand in both his own.
"Dear mother," he said very gently, "it is my father whom you love in me and not myself; when I do not wear this passing likeness of him, which at times only draws your heart to me, there remains nothing in myself to win your affections, and you do not love me."
"It is true," she answered calmly; "living I loved him only—dead, it is his memory alone which I adore."
"Then I think you cannot refuse the prayer I have to make to you this day," said Hubert, not the least flush of indignation tinging his pale cheek at this unfeeling announcement; "I think it cannot in truth be any pleasure to you to see in me the marred and hateful resemblance of that which was so beautiful, and so dear; better surely to feed on his image pure and unchanged in the depths of your heart, and never have it brought so painfully before you in my miserable person." He paused a moment whilst she looked wondering at him, and then, suddenly, he exclaimed, with a passionate burst of feeling, "Mother, let me go—let me go—from this house, where my presence is abhorred by some and sought by none; nothing has kept me here but my fatal promise to you: I would I had died ere I made it; but it will cost you nothing to part from me, and you know not what it may cost me to stay here; it is cruel to keep me—let me go."
"Let you go! Hubert think what you are saying, you would go to starve!"