Masterman and Son Part 14

"Nay, Life will conquer thee," replied the legions of the dead. "Let be. Submit. Why strive when all strife is vain?"

And then, out of the deep well of his misery, a bubble of light swam up, and something in his soul cried, "I will not submit! I will gird on the two swords of Faith and Courage. I will conquer Life!"

He had sat so long in absorbed silence that he was unconscious that the door of the room had opened and shut. The noise of the closing door, gentle as it was, roused him like a clap of thunder. He turned at the sound, and saw his mother.

She was robed in white, a white silk shawl was drawn over her head, and in the dim light she looked like a gentle apparition.

"Mother!" he cried.

She came toward him with outstretched arms.

And then, as by a magic touch, he became a little child again. She sat besides him, drew his head down upon her warm bosom, put her arm round his neck, and whispered, "I know." And beneath her gentle caress, thawed as it were by the mere warmth of contact with her, something hard and cold in his own heart dissolved and drained itself away in delicious tears. He wept unrestrainedly, as a child weeps who is in no haste to cease from weeping, lest the consolation for his tears should cease with the tears themselves. And the chief sweetness of it all lay in the silence of their communion. Neither spoke because there was no need of speech. He knew that he was comprehended, and this is the final ecstasy of all communion. From this faithful bosom he had drawn his life; these hands had been the first to touch him; and as they had long ago bound up his childish bruises, so now their very touch drew the hurt out of his pained heart. He drank life from her again; he was conscious of a warm inflowing flood of strength, of restful power, of quiet blessedness.

When at last he lifted his eyes he saw her transfigured. The frost of silence had melted from her face; he caught in the dim light the sparkle of her eyes, divined rather than discerned the flush of her cheek and the new youth and vehemence of her aspect.

"Mother!" he said again.

She quietly pushed him from her, and gazed deep into his eyes.

"And now let us talk," she whispered.

"You know what has happened?" he said.

"Yes, I know."

"O mother, what am I to do?"

"You must do right, my son."

She was silent for a moment, and he felt her hand tighten as it held his own. Then she said abruptly, "I have my confession to make before I can counsel you."

"Your confession, mother?"

"Can't you see that one is needed? Have you never asked yourself the reason for my silence, my aloofness, and my lack of interest in life?

Did you never feel yourself that these things were unnatural, that there must be a reason for them, and that the reason must be tragic? I am going to tell you that reason. I have waited for this hour for years--O my G.o.d, what dreary, fearful years! I have watched your growth with terror, Arthur--yes, with terror, because I feared what you might become. Do you know what I feared? G.o.d forgive me! I feared you might be like your father. I watched every little seed of thought as it opened in you, fearful of what flower it might bear. I studied every glance, every sign of disposition, every drift of temperament; weighed your words, a.n.a.lysed them endlessly through sleepless nights, gazed into your mind and heart with dread and yearning. No one knows what I suffered when you went to Oxford. There was not a night when I did not lie awake for hours thinking of you. I said, 'Here he will meet the world in all its grossness, and he will succ.u.mb to it, as a thousand others have done. He will lose his fineness; he will become like the rest.' Each time when you came home I met you with a kind of terror. I dared scarcely look into your face for fear of the record I might find written there. A mother reads the signs that no one else can read. She knows, as no one else can know, the secret potencies within the nature of her child. And knowing what I did of life, I was terrified; and it was because I feared to look I stood aloof, that I shunned even speech with you, that I have shut myself for years within a wall of ice. Arthur, can you forgive me?"

"O my poor mother! it is I who should ask forgiveness, because I did not understand you better."

She stooped to kiss his forehead, and went on relentlessly: "No; I see now that I was wrong. I denied myself to you. I should have given myself to you all the more because I feared for you. But surely I have been punished--punished by the loss of how many moments like this! And I might have had them! What can ever give me back the kisses I have never kissed?"

"Mother, I will not have you talk like that. I have never doubted that you loved me. And I love you all the more for what you have endured for me. Yes, I knew you suffered--I always understood that."

"I suffered--but I have not yet told you the deepest cause. I must tell you that too."

"I don't want to know, mother. I have no right to know."

"Yes; it is your right to know."

There was anguish in her voice now. The yellow rays of the sinking moon, falling on her face, revealed a white, strained contour, as though flame and marble mingled.

"Listen, Arthur. I must go back through the years to the time when I married your father. I was young, gay, inexperienced, and as lighthearted as a girl could be. Your father had a greatness of his own--never think that I doubt that--and when I first met him I thought him the most wonderful man in all the world. No man was ever better calculated to impress the senses of a young girl. I gave him what was almost adoration, unthinking adoration. Of course I knew that I shared only one part of his life, but what did I care? Women are usually content if men love them; they do not care to ask what kind of life the men they trust live when they are away from them. Of the nature of your father's business life I could hardly form a guess. It was not my concern, and I was happy in my ignorance until--until a day came when I had to know.

"I will spare you details, Arthur. I have said enough when I say that the discovery I made was that your father's business was based on merciless chicanery and fraud. I begged him on my knees to alter it.

I told him that I was willing to live anywhere, to do anything, to suffer any privation, rather than eat dishonest bread. At first he argued with me, as one might with a foolish child. He told me he was no worse than other people--all businesses were like that; he was as good as circ.u.mstances permitted; and he laughed at what he called my pretty Puritanism. Then, when he saw that I was in earnest, he grew angry.

"'Haven't I given you everything you possess?' he cried.

"'You shall give me no more,' I answered. 'You have taken from me much more than you gave.'

"'What have I taken?'

"'My belief in you, my belief in life,' I answered. And then, in my hot anger, I told him all that I had learned, and how I abhorred to live softly at the price of cruel suffering in others, and refused to profit by the wages of robbery. He turned pale at that, for he saw that I knew something which went beyond legalised dishonesty.

"From that hour our lives were separate. I never again wore my girlish finery; I ate as little as I could; I lived in solitude. I knew that nothing I could say would influence him. I was condemned to futility.

It was in that year of our final quarrel you were born. O my boy, can you understand now with what terror I looked at your little innocent face as it lay upon my bosom? For many, many months I wished you dead for fear of what you might become. I have watched the growth of your father's wealth with far deeper alarm than men have ever watched the coming of poverty. I could discern in it nothing but a threat to you.

I have wasted myself in tears and prayers for you, all the time telling myself that prayers were in vain. And now--praise be to the G.o.d I have insulted!--I find my prayers miraculously answered. Arthur, my son, you have stood the test. Your soul has overcome the forces of your blood. I live to-night, I live for the first time in twenty years, and G.o.d restores to me the years that the locust has eaten."

Her impa.s.sioned speech thrilled him like the note of rapture in the voice of a saint. And as she spoke, with that pale moonlight lighting her face like a flame, it was as though the saint's halo rested on her brow; she was the creature of a vision, ineffably pure and tender, clothed in the eternal sacredness of motherhood. He had rested his head upon her bosom while he wept; he knelt now, and laid it on her knees.

"O my son, my son," she cried, "I planned for this long before you were born, but I never thought it would come true. It was for this I chastened myself with tears and fasting, hoping that the life I nourished might be freed from the stain I feared. But I had no faith.

I could only bring G.o.d my timidity; I could only plead my agony; I had no strength to bring to Him. Yet He heard me, and after all the doubting years He has given me the desire of my heart."

"And I never understood," he whispered.

"But you understand now, and I am repaid in full," she answered. "When I saw you go out with your father to-night into the office, I knew the great battle of your life had come, and something told me you would not fail."

"Yet I did fail, mother. He made me feel that I had wronged him."

"I know. He told me."

"He said I had behaved like a bad-hearted little boy. He humbled me to the dust."

"I know that too. That is why I came to you, my dear. I knew that you would need me."

"I do need you, mother. Everything is dark and perplexed to me. It seems that though I have done right, I have done it in the wrong way."

"The great thing is to have done right. That atones for everything with G.o.d, I think."

"But I don't see the next step, mother."

"We never do, till we take it. But I can see it. Shall I tell you what it is?"

"Yes, mother."

"It is the step I did not take--that is why I see it so clearly. You must go away. You must take your life into your own hands. You must begin it all over again. Women cannot do that; men can. Only now and then does a woman claim her own personality, and for her the risk is terrible. But a man can do it; he is meant to do it. That is where he finds his greatness."