'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.




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