'Have you finished, Arthur, or have you anything more to say to me?
I think there can be nothing else. You have been short, but full of
matter!' 'Mother, I have yet something more to say. It has been upon my mind,
night and day, this long time. It is far more difficult to say than what
I have said. That concerned myself; this concerns us all.'
'Us all! Who are us all?' 'Yourself, myself, my dead father.'
She took her hands from the desk; folded them in her lap; and sat
looking towards the fire, with the impenetrability of an old Egyptian
sculpture. 'You knew my father infinitely better than I ever knew him; and his
reserve with me yielded to you. You were much the stronger, mother, and
directed him. As a child, I knew it as well as I know it now. I knew
that your ascendancy over him was the cause of his going to China to
take care of the business there, while you took care of it here (though
I do not even now know whether these were really terms of separation
that you agreed upon); and that it was your will that I should remain
with you until I was twenty, and then go to him as I did. You will not
be offended by my recalling this, after twenty years?''
I am waiting to hear why you recall it.'
He lowered his voice, and said, with manifest reluctance, and against
his will: 'I want to ask you, mother, whether it ever occurred to you to
suspect--' At the word Suspect, she turned her eyes momentarily upon her son, with
a dark frown.
She then suffered them to seek the fire, as before; but
with the frown fixed above them, as if the sculptor of old Egypt had
indented it in the hard granite face, to frown for ages. '
--that he had any secret remembrance which caused him trouble of
mind--remorse? Whether you ever observed anything in his conduct
suggesting that; or ever spoke to him upon it, or ever heard him hint at
such a thing?' 'I do not understand what kind of secret remembrance you mean to infer
that your father was a prey to,' she returned, after a silence. 'You
speak so mysteriously.'
'Is it possible, mother,' her son leaned forward to be the nearer to her
while he whispered it, and laid his hand nervously upon her desk, 'is
it possible, mother, that he had unhappily wronged any one, and made no
reparation?' Looking at him wrathfully, she bent herself back in her chair to keep
him further off, but gave him no reply.