‘You are John?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he answered, with a gasp.
‘Have you a cab? This is all I have brought. Let us lose no time.’
She had put her hand in his as she had come up to him. She gave him no other salutation, no kiss; but followed, as the boy, once more with the sensation of falling down, down, from he knew not what height, led the way to where the cab was standing. She put in her bag, stepped in hastily, motioned him to her side, and in another moment they were driving away together, seated there, this mother and son who had not met for years. John felt timid, altogether stupid, unable to say a word, his heart one moment giving a great throb, the next like a lump of lead in his breast.
‘How is my mother?’ she asked, ‘is she still alive?’
It was like a stab to John to have this question put to him in so many words, though he knew that it was a question of how long she might survive.
‘I was told,’ he said, ‘to tell you that your mother was a little better and might rally.’
‘Might rally?’ she said, thoughtfully, ‘I should scarcely think it likely.’ She was quite calm. John seated so that he felt her breath upon him, could scarcely help shivering with a nervous chill which seemed to come from her. She remarked this at once.
‘You are cold,’ she said. ‘Put up the window at your side; no doubt it is your nerves: you have been kept on the strain all day, or perhaps for some days. It is not a good thing for you at your age: put up the window, I will keep mine open; I like the air. Have they let you be with her?’
‘A little last night—not before.’
‘I am glad they had so much sense as that. She would talk to you, no doubt, and you would be very much affected. Poor boy!’
There seemed a momentary wavering in her, as if she might have turned to him with something like tenderness. Her arm seemed to him to move. He thought she was going to put it round him, and his heart filled with a sudden rush of warmth and softness. His mother! But either she had never meant it, or she changed her mind. She altered her position only enough to change from one hand to another the little bag she carried. And yet he could not help feeling that she meant more than that.
‘Did she say anything to you?—I mean anything beyond what she would naturally say?’
‘She spoke to me about you, mother.’
Once more the dark figure at his side moved. A sort of thrill seemed to run through her. She took a little time apparently to compose and command herself.
‘What did she say to you of me?’
‘I did not understand it,’ said John.
She turned, and seemed to look at him as if asking herself whether this simplicity was assumed or not. Then, with a touch of divination, put her hand upon his arm for a moment, and repeated,
‘Poor boy! I can see you are half-dazed with trouble and fatigue,’ she said.
‘Mother!’ said John, ‘mother——’
Again there was that faint thrill and moving in the profile that showed against the dim night of the further window. There was a soft suffusion of whiteness in the air from an unseen moon, and he could see the outline of her face and figure against it. But, if she had been moved by any impulse of love, she restrained it once more.
‘I would rather,’ she said, quickly, ‘that you used that name as little as possible while I am here. I am your mother, certainly; but we’ve been separated for a long time, and I have my reasons, chiefly for your own sake, for preferring not to be talked about among your village people, or discussed who I am. I mean no unkindness,’ she added, after a little pause.
‘Must I not call you mother?’ asked the boy. He was so tired, so dazed, as she said, so broken down with weariness and wonder and grieving that the sharp tone in his voice was more the petulance of a child than the indignation which began faintly to rise among the other emotions that were too much for him.
‘Not except when we are alone,’ she said. ‘Is this the village? are we near?’
The carriage stopped with a sudden creaking and jar. John had not observed where they were. He stumbled out now to his feet and held the door for her to get out. The door of the house was open, and his grandfather stood in the opening. The old man came down through the little garden slowly, shuffling with his heavy feet. There seemed to John’s feverish eyes some change, he scarcely knew what, in the house, as if the expectation, the waiting, had come to an end.
‘Emily,’ said old Mr. Sandford, ‘you are too late. Your mother is dead.’
‘Dead?’ she said, standing still at the gate.
‘Half-an-hour ago.’
The two, father and daughter, stood facing each other, with John behind not able to convince himself that there was anything real in it, that it was not all a dream.
‘Do you mean me to go back again, straight,’ she said, ‘from your door?’
CHAPTER XII.
EMILY.
She came into the parlour first, where she sat down close to the fire. She shivered as she looked round, Mr. Sandford and John both standing behind looking at her. There was indeed already upon the house that air of revolution, the cold strangeness of a place which is no longer the centre of domestic life, but fit only for an ante-chamber and waiting-room for those who cannot be at the point of deepest interest. There was an unusual chill in this place which had always been so warm.
John could see now for the first time what his mother was like. She did not resemble either of her parents. Her features were marked and high; her complexion of an ivory paleness; her hair quite black in original colour, with a thread or two of grey—altogether a tragic woman whom nobody could pass without a certain interest. She showed no emotion, nothing beyond the seriousness of aspect which was evidently habitual to her. For a little time even she said nothing, but held with a shiver her hands to the fire. Her father stood beside her leaning upon the mantel-piece, looking down upon the hearth, and for some time there was not a word spoken.
‘Half-an-hour ago,’ she repeated at length, in a low voice. ‘Did she know I was on the way?’
‘For twenty hours she has scarcely taken any notice. The last was——’
‘The last must have been what she said to the boy,’—his mother spoke of him as if he were a thing and not a person—‘and that was, he says, about me, something he did not understand. I hope there was no talk about—— affairs.’
‘Emily, you are not softened, even by death.’
‘It is not in me, I suppose,’ she said, with a sigh. Then she turned round to John. ‘Why did you not tell me that she was ill? You wrote from yourself. You said nothing about her—or nothing to speak of. If you had told me she was ill, I might have been in time.’
They both turned and looked at him, his grand-father with heavy eyes and a blank aspect of exhaustion and helplessness, but, with so much expression as was left in him, reproachful too.
And all power of self-defence, of anything but submission and acquiescence, seemed taken from John.
‘I did not think of it,’ he said, giving himself up, as he was dimly conscious, to total misconstruction, but what did it matter? Nothing seemed to be of any consequence