“It cannot be the end, sir,” she said, in a low voice. “For she is—still my mother. And she is alone and ill—and she needs me.”
He had begun to pace the room anew, this time with an impatient, angry step. But at that he stood and faced her, and she needed all her courage to support the gloom of his look. “How do you know?” he said. For Miss Sibson, discharging an ungrateful task, had not entered into details. “Have you seen her?”
She felt that she must judge for herself; and though her mother had said something to the contrary, and hitherto she had obeyed her, she thought it best to tell all. “Yes, sir,” she said.
“A fortnight ago?” She trembled under the growing darkness of his look.
“And you never told me!” he cried. “You never told me!” he repeated, with a strange glance, a glance which strove with terror to discern the mother’s features in the daughter’s face. “You, too—you, too, have begun to deceive me!”
“Oh, no! no!” Mary cried, infinitely distressed.
“But you have!” he rejoined. “You have kept this from me.”
“Only, believe me, sir,” she cried, eagerly, “until I could find a fitting time.”
“And now you want to go to her!” he answered, unheeding. “She has suborned you! She, who has done the greatest wrong to you, has now done the last wrong to me!”
He began again to pace up and down the room.
“It is so!” he answered, darting an angry glance at her. “It is so! But I shall not let you go! Do you hear, girl? I shall not let you go! I have suffered enough,” he continued, with a gesture which called those walls to witness to the humiliations, the sorrows, the loneliness, from which he had sought refuge within them. “I will not—suffer again! You shall not go!”
She was full of love for him, and of pity. She understood even that gesture, and the past wretchedness to which it bore witness. And she yearned to comfort him, and to convince him that nothing that had gone before, nothing that could happen in the future, would set her against him. Had he been seated, she would have knelt and kissed his hand, or cast herself on his breast and his love, and won him to her. But as he walked she could not approach him, she did not know how to soften him. Yet her duty was clear. It lay beside her dying mother. Nevertheless, if he forbade her to go, if he withstood her, how was she to perform it?