MRS. SANDFORD looked round upon the tidy little sitting-room, but with eyes of alarm that sought in the curtains and shadows for some apparition she feared, and not as a woman looks at the dwelling-place of her child. She had never been here before. Susie had visited him from time to time with a woman’s interest in his surroundings, but his mother never. It was all strange to her as if he had been a stranger. She gave that keen look round which noted nothing except what was its object, that there was nobody to be seen.
‘Is he here?’ she said, in a low voice of alarm, without any greeting or preface. Caresses did not pass between these two either at meeting or at parting, and there was no time to think even of the conventional salutation now.
‘No, he is not here.’
She sat down with a sigh of relief, and put back altogether the heavy gauze veil which had enveloped her head.
‘Is he coming back? Are you—— Tell them to admit no one, no one! while I am here.’
‘I do not think you need fear; he is not coming back.’
She leaned back in her chair with relief. It was the same chair in which the other had been sitting when John had left the room in the afternoon. This recollection gave him a curious sensation, as if two images, which were so antagonistic had met and blended in spite of themselves.
‘I don’t know what I said to you this afternoon; I was so taken by surprise: and yet I was not surprised. I—expected it: only not that it should have happened to you. It is better,’ she continued, after a pause, ‘that it should have happened to you.’
‘Perhaps,’ said John; ‘I may be better able to bear it—but why did I have no warning that such a thing could be.’
‘Oh, why?’ said she, with a quick breath of impatience—rather as demanding why he should ask than as allowing the possibility of giving an explanation. She loosened her long black cloak and put it back from her shoulders, and thus the shadows seemed to open a little, and the light to concentrate in her pale, clear face. It is but rarely, perhaps, that children observe the beauty of their mothers, and never, save when it is indicated to them by the general voice, or by special admiration. John had never thought of Mrs. Sandford in this light; but now it suddenly struck him for the first time that she had been, that she was, a woman remarkable in appearance, as in character, with features which she had not transmitted to her children, no common-place, comely type, but features which seemed meant for lofty emotions, for the tragic and impassioned. She had not been in circumstances, so far as he had seen her, to develop these, and her lofty looks had fallen into rigidity, and the austereness of rule and routine. Sometimes they had melted when she looked at Susie, but no higher aspect than that of a momentary softening had ever animated her countenance in his ken. Now it was different. Her fine nostrils moved, dilating and trembling, with a sensitiveness which was a revelation to her son; her eyes shone; her mouth, which was so much more delicate than he had been aware, closed with an impassioned force, in which, however, there was the same suspicion of a quiver. Her face was full of sensation, of feeling, of passion. She was not the same woman as that austere and authoritative one whom he had all this time known. When he returned from giving the order which she asked, that nobody should be admitted, he found her leaning back in her chair with her eyes closed, which seemed to make the rest of her face, which was all quivering with emotion, even more expressive than before.
‘I thought that I had not told you enough—that you deserved explanations, which, painful, most painful as they are, ought to be given to you now. I suppose I told you very little to-day?’
‘Nothing, or next to nothing,’ he replied.
‘I suppose—I wanted to spare myself,’ she said, with a faint quiver of a smile.
‘Mother,’ cried John, ‘I will take it for granted. Why should you make yourself wretched on my account? And, after all, when the fact is once allowed, what does it matter? I know all that I need to know—now.’
‘Perhaps you are right, John. You know what I would have died to keep from your knowledge, if it were not folly and nonsense to use such words. Much, much would be spared in this world if one could purchase the extinction of it by dying. I know that very well: it is a mere phrase.’
He made no reply, but watched with increasing interest the changes in her face.
‘It was thought better you should not know. What good could it have done you? A father dead is safe; he seems something sacred, whatever he may have been in reality. I thought, I don’t shrink from the responsibility, that it was better for you; and my father agreed with me, John.’
‘Grandmother did not,’ he said, quickly; ‘now I know what she meant.’
‘Then,’ she said, ‘now that you know, you can judge between us.’
She made no appeal to his affection. She was not of that kind. And John was sufficiently like her to pause, not to utter the words that came to his lips. He seemed once more to see himself in his boyhood, so full of ambition and pride and confidence. After awhile he said,
‘It is much for me to say, but I think I approve. If it is hard upon me as a man, what would it have been when I was a boy?’
‘I am glad,’ she said, ‘that you see it in that light;’ and then she paused, as if concluding that part of the subject. She resumed again, after a moment: ‘I took every precaution. We disappeared from the place, and changed our name. My father and mother changed their home, broke the thread—I left no clue that I could think of.’ She stopped again and cleared her throat, and said, with difficulty, ‘Does he think he has any clue?’
John could not make any reply. How his heart veered from side to side!—sometimes all with her in her pride and passion, sometimes touched with a sudden softening recollection of the man with his sophistries, his self-reconciliating philosophy, his good humour, and his almost childish, ingratiating smile.
‘I don’t see how he can have found out anything. I have never lost sight of him—that was easy enough. He has had whatever indulgences, or alleviations of his lot were permitted. I left money in the chaplain’s hand for him when the time came for his coming out. I did not trust the chaplain even with any clue.’
The balance came round again as she spoke, and John remembered how, in this very room, the same story had been told to him from the other side, and he had himself cried out, indignantly, ‘Could you not find them? Was there no clue?’
He said now, breathlessly, ‘Did you think that right?’
‘Right!’ She paused with a little gasp, as if she had been stopped suddenly in her progress by an unexpected touch. ‘Could there be any question on the subject?’
‘Did Susie think it right?’
‘Susie!’ She paused again with impatience. ‘Susie is one of those women who are all-forgiving, and who have no judgment of right and wrong.’
‘And you never hesitated, mother!’
‘Never,’ she said, a faint colour like the reflection of a flame passing over her pale face. ‘Why should I hesitate? Could there be a question? Alas! Fate has done it instead of me: but could I—I, your mother, bring such a wrong upon you of my own free will? Don’t you think I would rather have died—to use that foolish phrase again—I use it to mean the extremity of wish and effort,—rather than have exposed you to know, much less to encounter—? Don’t let us speak of it,’ she said, giving her head a slight nervous shake, as if to shake the thought far from her. ‘Upon that subject I never had a doubt.’
‘And yet he was a man, like other men: and his children at least were not his judges. Most men who have children have something, somebody to meet them after years of separation.’
‘Did he say that?’
‘He did not blame anybody. Knowing nothing about it but that he was a wretched poor criminal, and that this was his story, I, who was one of the offenders without knowing, was very indignant.’
‘You were very indignant!’
‘Yes, mother; I thought it cruel. My heart ached for the man; fourteen years of privation and loneliness, and not a soul to say “Welcome” when he came back into the cold world.’
‘He had money, which buys friends—the kind of friends he liked.’
She had changed her attitude, and sat straight up, her eyes shining, the lines of her face all moving, rising up enraged and splendid in her own defence.
‘It seemed to have gone to his heart—the abandonment—and it went to mine, merely to hear the story told.’
‘I bow,’ she said, ‘to the tenderness of both your hearts! I always felt there was a certain likeness. I act on other laws:—to bring a convict back into my family, to shame my young, high-minded, honourable son, whose path in life promised no difficulty; to shame my gentle child who has all a woman’s devotion to whoever suffers or seems to suffer; I don’t speak of myself. For myself, I would die a hundred times (that phrase again!) rather than be exposed—— No, no, no—nothing, nothing would have induced me to act otherwise. You don’t know what it is—you don’t know what he is. Fate, I will not say God, has baffled my plans: but do not let him come near me, for I cannot bear it. I will rather leave everything and go away—to the end of the world.’
John had in his heart suffered all that a proud and pure-minded young man can suffer from the thought of what and who his father was: and he had felt his heart sicken with disgust, turning from him and loathing him. But when his mother spoke thus a sudden revulsion of feeling arose in him. He could not hear him so assailed. A sudden partisanship, that family solidarity which is so curious in its operations, filled his mind. He felt angry with her that she attacked him, though she said no more than it had been in his own heart to say.
He replied, with some indignation in the calmness of his words:
‘I think you may save yourself trouble on that account. I have not seen him again. When I came back he was gone. They had not waited for me. They left no message. I don’t know where to find him.’
‘Gone?’ she said. ‘Gone——?’
‘Yes, mother. He delivered me from the difficulty, the misery in which I was coming back, with the intention of saying—what it is so hard to say to a man who—may be one’s—father.’ John grew pale, and then grew red. The word was almost impossible to utter, but he brought it forth at last. ‘But he did not wait for my hesitation or difficulties. He relieved me. They were gone without leaving a sign.’
‘Who do you mean by they?’
‘He had a friend,’ John answered, faltering, ‘a friend who is my friend too. An actor, Montressor.’
‘Montressor!’ said Mrs. Sandford, with something like a scream. Then she covered her eyes suddenly with her hand. ‘Oh, what scenes, what scenes that name brings back to me! they were friends, as such men call friendship. They encouraged each other in all kinds of evil. Montressor! and how came he to be a friend of yours?’
‘It is an old story, mother: I daresay you have forgotten. It was entirely by chance. Susie knows. I will make a confession to you,’ he said, with a sudden impulse. ‘I was very unhappy, and full of resentment towards everybody——’
‘Towards me,’ she said, quietly, ‘I remember very well. That was the time when you said I was Emily, and would not have me for your mother.’
She smiled at the boyish petulance, as a mother thus outraged has a right to smile: and perhaps it was natural she should remember it so. But it was not the moment to remind him. He smiled too, but his smile was not of an easy kind.
‘I was altogether wrong,’ he said, ‘I confess it. When I met this man, I called myself—by the name which seemed to come uppermost in that whirl of trouble. I said I was John May.’
She was silent for a time, not making any reply, her anger not increased, as he thought it would be: for, indeed, her mind was too full to be affected by things which at ordinary times would have moved her much.
‘And so,’ she said, after a time, ‘that was how he found you out. I will not call it fate—it seems like God. And yet, for such a childish, small offence, it was a dreadful penalty. Poor boy! you thought to revenge yourself a little more on me—and instead you have brought upon your own head—this——’
In the silence that followed—for what could John reply?—there came a slight intrusion of sound from the house. Some one went out or came in downstairs, a simple sound, such as in the natural state of affairs would not even have roused any attention. It awakened all the smouldering panic in Mrs. Sandford’s face. She started, and caught John by the arm.
‘What’s that? What’s that? It is some one coming—he is coming back.’
‘No, mother. It is the people below.’
‘Where is he?’ she cried, huskily, recovering herself, yet not loosing John’s arm. ‘Where is he? Where does he live?—not here, don’t say he is here.’
‘I don’t know where he lives. He has never told me, and he left no message, no address.’
‘No address,’ she said. ‘You don’t know where he lives, to stop him, but he knows where you live, to hold you in his power. I will meet him in the face when I go out from your door.’
The horror in her looks was so great that John tried to soothe her.
‘There is no reason to fear that. He went away, though I had asked them to wait. Perhaps he will come no more.’
‘Do me one favour, John,’ she cried, grasping his arm closer; ‘do this one thing for me. Before he can come home again, before he can find you out, this very night, if you are safe so long, leave this place. Find somewhere else to live in. Oh! you shall have no trouble. I will find you a place; but leave this, leave it now at once. Leave him no clue. What? he has left you none, you say? Why should you hesitate? Come away with me, John. For the love of God! and if you have learned to feel any respect or any pity for your mother—for the poor woman whom once you called Emily—— John, think what it was to me that you should call me Emily, that you should refuse me the name of mother. And yet you were my boy, for whom I had denied myself that you might take no harm. Oh, if you have anything to make up to me for that, do it now. Come away with me to-night, leave this place, let him find no clue, no clue!’
Something of this was said almost in dumb show, her voice giving way in her passion of entreaty. She had clasped his arm in both her hands as her excitement grew. Her breath was hot on John’s cheek. There was something in the clasp of her hands, in the force of her passionate determination, that made him feel like a child in her hold.
‘Mother,’ he said, ‘what would be the use? Do you think I could disappear? If ever that was possible, it isn’t now. Whoever wants to find me, if not here, will find me at the office, or wherever I may be working. I can’t sink down through a trap-door into the unknown; that might be on the stage but not in real life. How could one like me, with work to do for my living, and employers and people that know me, disappear?’
A remnant, perhaps, of John’s own self-esteem, which had been so bitterly pulled down by the incidents of this day, awoke again. It was only the insignificant who could obliterate themselves and leave no clue. For him to do it was impossible. It was but a melancholy pride, but it was pride still.
‘He will not go to the office after you. He knows none of your friends. If you leave this, and give no address, he will perhaps not seek for you, for that would be a great deal of trouble. He never liked trouble. We should gain time at least to think what should be done. John, do what I ask you! Come away with me to-night. I will manage everything. You shall have no trouble. John!’
‘Mother,’ he cried, taking her hands into his, ‘at the end, when all is said that can be said, he is our father, Susie’s and mine. We can’t leave him alone to perish. We can’t forsake him. Mother, now that I know the truth, I know it, and there is an end. I can’t put it out of my mind again. I thought my father was dead, but he is not dead, he is alive. It can never be put out of sight again. It may be bitter enough, terrible enough, but we can’t put it out of our minds. There it is—he is alive. He is my business more than anything else. There can be no choice for Susie and me.’
She had been trying to free her hands while he spoke. She wrung them out of his hold now, thrusting him from her.
‘I might have known,’ she said, trembling with anger and misery, ‘I might have known! Susie, too. What does it matter that I have protected you, saved you, guarded you? I am not your business, I or my comfort—but he—he—— What will you do with him? where will you take him? If he comes here, the woman of this house will not bear it long, I warn you. What will you do, John? Will you take him to your village among the people you care for? Where will you take him? What will you do with him, John?’
‘My village?’ John said. And there came over him a chill as of death. His face grew ashy pale, his limbs refused to support him longer; he sank into the vacant chair, and leaned his head, which swam, on his two hands, and looked at his mother opposite to him with eyes wild with sudden dismay and horror: all the day long amid his troubles he had not thought of that. His village! And must he tell this dreadful story there? and unfold all the new revelations of failure, betrayal, disgrace—and of how he had no name, and only shame for an inheritance? Must he tell it all there?