Lesley listened, appalled. A homely detail of this kind impressed her more than any appeal to her higher imagination. The woes of the poor had suddenly become real.
"I hope you never had to go through all that, Kingston," she said, very gently.
"Yes, ma'am, twice," said Kingston. "Once with my mother, and once with my little boy. They were both dead in the morning, but I didn't see 'em die."
"But where was your husband? Was he dead?" said Lesley, quickly.
"Oh, no, ma'am. But he was amusing himself. He was a gentleman, you see--more shame to me, perhaps you'll say. I couldn't expect him to think of things like candles."
"No ma'am, he isn't dead," said Kingston. And from the shortness of her tone and the steadiness with which she averted her face Lesley came to the conclusion that she did not want to be questioned any more.
Lesley went down to dinner feeling that she had made some new and extraordinary discoveries. She noticed that her father and her aunt made several allusions which would have seemed mysterious and repellant to her the day before, but which now possessed an almost tragic interest. When before had she heard her aunt speak casually of a Mothers' Meeting and a Lending Library? These were common-place matters to the ordinary English girl; but to Lesley they possessed the elements of a romance. For was it not by means of hackneyed, common-place machinery of this kind that cultured men and women put themselves into relation with the great, suffering, coarse, uncultured, human-hearted poor?
Added to Lesley's new views of life, there was also a new feeling for her father. In the first rush of enthusiastic admiration for his book, she forgot all that she had heard against him, and believed--for the moment--that he was all Maurice Kenyon represented him to be. But naturally this state of mind could not last. The long years of her mother's influence told against any claim to love or respect on the father's part. Lesley remembered how bitterly Lady Alice spoke of him. She could not think that her mother had been wrong.
It is a terrible position for a son or daughter--to have to judge between father and mother. It is a wrong position, and one in which Lesley felt instinctively that she ought never to have been placed. Of course it was impossible for her to help it. Father and mother had virtually made her their judge. They said to her, "Live for a year with each of us, and choose which you prefer. You cannot have us both." And as the only true and natural position for a child is that in which he or she can have both, Lesley Brooke was in a very trying situation. She had begun life in her father's house as her mother's ardent partisan; and she was her mother's partisan still. Only she was not quite sure whether she was not going to find that she could love her father too. And in that case, Lesley was tremulously certain that Lady Alice would accuse her of unfaithfulness to _her_.