Henry Northcote

For some time Northcote stood holding her hand and looking down into her eyes. A sense of deep wonder was percolating slowly to every part of his being. What a haven was here to embrace when the frail bark of his nature had been flung, like the cockle-shell that it was, upon the crest of tempestuous and multitudinous seas. How blind and undeveloped he had been not to have understood this before! From what ignominy could this anchorage have saved him! It would not have been necessary to founder upon the shoals had he been aware of this harbor that would have been so willing to embrace him. He was already broken into pieces; and those tears which appeared to suffuse his eyes with such facility and to suffuse hers with such a painful reluctance were falling from him.

“You must ignore that unmannerly attack in the Age,” she said in a stern voice which yet was full of redress. “The enemies of the friendless have no kingdom into which they can enter. A few years hence, when you are a rich and honored man, you will forgive them for having once stabbed you.”

The silence which followed her words was broken by the hard and intense breathing of the figure that clasped her.

“There is one thing I shall ask of you,” said Northcote at last. “I shall ask you to give me the pledge from your own lips that you will always believe in me as completely as you do at this moment, whatever doubts, charges, or suspicion the future hurls against me.”

“It is not necessary for me to give this assurance, but, since you demand it, I give it.”

“It is part of my weakness to demand it,” said her son, “although none is so well aware as am I that there is no need to give expression to your faith.”

“As you say, there is no need. But I remember your father saying to me shortly before that illness which was fatal to him, the greater the gifts the greater the lenity to be meted out to their unhappy possessors. On that account I have always treated you with more indulgence than otherwise I should have done.”

“Had you been more Spartan you might have strangled the genie at its birth.”

“I might.”

“And yet made of its possessor a more upright and God-fearing citizen.”

“That is impossible.”

“You never could conceive of his being other than you see him now?”

“I could not.”

“Even if the indelible evidence were laid before you?”

“Evidence is never indelible to us. So-called facts have no worth in our eyes. We believe or we do not believe. Nothing changes our emotions; they are what we understand by religion.”

“You speak for wise and great women.”

“I speak for the humblest of wives and mothers who cannot accept credit for blind obedience to an instinct which alone gives her life.”

“I begin to understand why even the most imperious natures, which are as ruthless as volcanoes in action, cannot live without your aid. It is not that you enslave and fetter them; your function is to cleanse, renew, rehabilitate.”

As Northcote spoke a feeling of profound joy overspread the humiliation whose penalties had been far more grievous to him than those of despair. Hardly had he tasted it, however, than the nightmare at the back of his thoughts assumed a visible shape. Of a sudden there came a sharp screech from the curtain. Margaret, who throughout the conversation with his mother had been engaged in fixing pieces of holly over the photographs on the wall, was still employed in this decoration. It was not she who was responsible for the sudden shrieking of the brass rings along the curtain pole.

With a single comprehensive movement the curtain had been flung back and the bed revealed. Seated upon it, half-dressed, with her hair hanging loose, and her bare arms exposed by her chemise, was his visitor of the previous night. Half a dozen hairpins were stuck in a row in her mouth. In the cold grayness of the December morning, which seemed to envelop her malignity in a bald realism, her features appeared blunt, pale, and hideous. The almost incredibly bitter and mocking glance was not directed upon the man, but upon the elderly, unprepossessing, and countrified figure in the shabby clothes and antique hat whom he was holding by the hand.

Northcote let the hand fall, and recoiled from his mother with a gasp of fear mixed with passion.

The young girl, whom life had done nothing to enlighten, stood in dumb amazement upon the chair on which she was poised.

There was a moment in which the older woman quivered with terror. The brutal eyes of the prostitute, fixed upon her face with a blunt contempt, seemed to change her into stone. Observing her to be petrified like a bird in the presence of a serpent, the woman seated upon the bed picked the row of hairpins from between her teeth with the circumspection of an actress who, upon the stage, is notorious for her power, and who, having a stupendous scene to enact, prepares her audience for it by a display of quietude. She proceeded to coil up her hair with a deliberation that had value as drama.

“Vice-president of the Great Trades’ Union,” she said, removing the last hairpin from her mouth.

The elder woman stood looking helplessly away. Those indomitable eyes were cowed for the first time in their history. For the first time they had come upon something upon which they had no opinion to deliver. She had barely the strength to carry her gaze to her son, who stood ten paces from her as pale and rigid as a statue.

“Better go—better take Peggy,” he whispered in a voice that she did not know to be his.

Margaret, still holding the holly, had come down from the chair, and like a child had come to stand at the side of her natural protectress. She was visibly afraid; and she had clutched the holly so tightly that blood was trickling from the wounds in her soft fingers.

The spectacle of her childishness restored to the elder woman that capacity for action which she was never without.

“Get your coat and gloves, child,” she said in her harsh tones. “Where’s the basket?”

She herself took up the basket, and, without venturing to look at her son or her who sat upon the bed, neither of whom had changed their postures nor spoken again, she led the way out with resolute steps to the top of the stairs. The young girl followed in her wake with a timid obedience, pulling on her cotton gloves over her bleeding fingers as she went.

At the head of the stairs this new resolution of the elder woman’s appeared to fail her.

“Go down, child; take the basket. I will follow you in a minute,” she said, handing the basket to the girl.

She turned suddenly and went back into the room. Her son was still standing in the attitude in which she had left him. There was a curious glare in his eyes. Advancing to him she placed her hands on his shoulders, pressed her lips against his forehead, and then, in a kind of headlong flight, darted away like a rabbit out of the room and down the stairs.