“Then why are you crying, mummy? Have you been naughty?”
She laughed, caught him to her breast again.
“We are all miserable sinners, Hughie, save you. And you are the dearest mother’s angel that ever lived.”
She remained with him for the rest of the day, seeking material distraction in his childish interests and needs, and finding the crushed woman’s solace in his near and happy presence. Yet the beloved sight of him brought pain. He was nameless, a child of Hagar. Already his future years had been weighted with his mother’s public dishonour. Now, if this thing were noised abroad, the burden of illegitimacy was added. The maternal instinct rose, revolted, and raised up resentment against Hugh.
In the evening she put the boy to bed and sat by him as he slept. What would be the outcome of it all? She rested her head upon the edge of the pillow, and tried to think. In the first blank agony of that afternoon, there had come into her head a wild idea of leaving Hugh, and living her broken life in solitude. Perhaps the suggestion had been too fantastic to be called an idea. She had been visited by obscured gleams of visions, in which she had seen herself now flying on foot from the house, now sitting at a window in a sea-coast cottage, with the boy at her side.
Afterwards she recognised that these were but pictures of a brain momentarily disordered. Even if her own heart did not bid her pity Hugh, the boy was a sacred bond between them, not to be broken by any change in their outer lives. Whatever happened, they would continue to live as man and wife before the world, carrying on the lie. To her transparent nature deceit was abhorrent. She had the blemish of her qualities.
And her love for Hugh? She strained her spiritual vision, saw things distortedly, out of perspective. The woman of flesh and blood also suffered. A certain grandeur of cold and cruel loveliness had invested her conception of her of the ophidian eyes, and had stirred in her bosom, not jealousy, but a feminine thrill of triumph. Far different were her feelings with reference to Minna. How could the high-souled gentleman have fallen a victim to the tawdry wiles of one so commonplace and vulgar? The intrigue debased him in her eyes. It quenched in her image of him that suffused radiance of idealism and spirituality which had always existed. What she had said was true. The divinity in which she had trusted had faded into nothingness. Her soul put forth its hands for support, and found none; it was groping in darkness.
The boy stirred in his sleep. She slid one hand beneath the bed-clothes and soothed him. The other touched the little crumpled hand, that gradually closed round her finger. The action seemed symbolical. A passionate tumult of maternal emotion swelled her heart. The tears started again to her eyes. For a long time she sat, quite still, absorbed as it were in the soul of the sleeping child.
Something strange had taken place. She felt the relief of returning strength. She rose, kissed the breath of the parted, innocent lips, and retired to her own room. When Hugh, an hour afterwards, came home, he entered noiselessly and advanced a pace or two on tip-toe. Her placid, regular breathing told him that she slept. He withdrew as gently as he had entered, and went to bed.
The next day was Sunday. They met at breakfast. She approached him, and offered her cheek to his kiss.