“I want you to save Grant.”
She still stood over him, looking at him with her glazed eyes shot with the evidence of a strong emotion.
591“Kenyon, Kenyon–my boy–my son!” she whispered, then said greedily: “Let me say it again–my son!” She whispered the word “son” for a moment, stooping over him, touching his forehead gently with her fingers. Then she cried under her breath: “What about that man–your–Grant? What have I to do with him?”
He reached for her hands beseechingly and said: “We are asking your husband, the Judge, to let him out of jail to-night, for if the Judge doesn’t release Grant–they are going to mob him and maybe kill him! Oh, won’t you save him? You can. I know you can. The Judge will let him out if you demand it.”
“My son, my son!” the woman answered as she looked vacantly at him. “You are my son, my very own, aren’t you?”
She stooped to look into his eyes and cried: “Oh, you’re mine”–her trembling fingers ran over his face. “My eyes, my hair. You have my voice–O God–why haven’t they found it out?” Then she began whispering over again the words, “My son.”
A clock chimed the half-hour. It checked her. “He’ll be back in half an hour,” she said, rising; then–“So they’re going to mob Grant, are they? And he sent you here asking me for mercy!”
Kenyon shook his head in protest and cried: “No, no, no. He doesn’t even know–”
She looked at the young man and became convinced that he was telling the truth; but she was sure that Laura Van Dorn had sent him. It was her habit of mind to see the ulterior motive. So the passion of motherhood flaring up after years of suppression quickly died down. It could not dominate her in her late forties, even for the time, nor even with the power which held her during the night of the riot in South Harvey, when she was in her thirties. The passion of motherhood with Margaret Van Dorn was largely a memory, but hate was a lively and material emotion.
She fondled her son in the simulation of a passion that she did not feel–and when in his eagerness he tried vainly to tie her to a promise to help his father, she would only reply: