“Where have you been, Arthur?” Helen said in a trembling voice.
“How can you look that—that dear lady, and a Christian clergyman in the face, sir?” bounced out the Doctor, in spite of Helen’s pale, appealing looks. “Where has he been? Where his mother’s son should have been ashamed to go. For your mother’s an angel, sir, an angel. How dare you bring pollution into her house, and make that spotless creature wretched with the thoughts of your crime?”
“Sir!” said Pen.
“Don’t deny it, sir,” roared the Doctor. “Don’t add lies, sir, to your other infamy. I saw you myself, sir. I saw you from the Dean’s garden. I saw you kissing the hand of that infernal painted—-”
“Stop,” Pen said, clapping his fist on the table, till the lamp flickered up and shook, “I am a very young man, but you will please to remember that I am a gentleman—I will hear no abuse of that lady.”
“Lady, sir,” cried the Doctor, “that a lady—you—you—you stand in your mother’s presence and call that—that woman a lady!—-”
“In anybody’s presence,” shouted out Pen. “She is worthy of any place. She is as pure as any woman. She is as good as she is beautiful. If any man but you insulted her, I would tell him what I thought; but as you are my oldest friend, I suppose you have the privilege to doubt of my honour.”
“No, no, Pen, dearest Pen,” cried out Helen in an excess of joy. “I told, I told you, Doctor, he was not—not what you thought:” and the tender creature coming trembling forward flung herself on Pen’s shoulder.
Pen felt himself a man, and a match for all the Doctors in Doctordom. He was glad this explanation had come. “You saw how beautiful she was,” he said to his mother, with a soothing, protecting air, like Hamlet with Gertrude in the play. “I tell you, dear mother, she is as good. When you know her you will say so. She is of all, except you, the simplest, the kindest, the most affectionate of women. Why should she not be on the stage?—She maintains her father by her labour.”
“Drunken old reprobate,” growled the Doctor, but Pen did not hear or heed.