“You do not believe me?”
Then as Sylvester did not reply otherwise than by a shrug, he drew a mass of papers from his breast-pocket and selected therefrom a photograph, old and discoloured, of a man and woman posed in the angular attitudes of the photographer's art in the late fifties, and clad in the uncouth attire of those days. The woman had a baby upon her lap.
“Your mother and brother and I,” said Mr. Usher. “I was a handsome young man. I had fine black whiskers.”
Sylvester received the picture, looked at it, and a spasm of horrible disgust shook his frame. The young woman was his mother—unmistakably.
“She was my dear wife,” said Usher.
“And you played the brute beast, I suppose, until she divorced you. And then she married my father. I see,” said Sylvester, grimly.
But Usher raised his hand in deprecation. “On the contrary,” said he, “we were never divorced. When I said your father had no illegitimate children, I was wrong. You are an illegitimate child.”
Sylvester flung the photograph with a furious gesture into the fire. The old man darted forward to rescue it, but Sylvester roughly pushed him back into his chair, and stood over him trembling with anger. Behind him the photograph curled and flamed.
“What devilish story are you telling me? Let me have it at once, all of it,” cried Sylvester.
There was a slight pause. Usher passed the tip of his tongue over his lips, and again he hugged himself in his armchair.