by Grant Allen
He said it caressingly. He said it eagerly. He said it as one asks some supreme favor.
Mrs. Egremont bowed her head, and dared not look him in the face as her lips answered low, “How shall I tell you the truth? You are his son, Hubert!”
“And his name?” Hubert cried, pressing forward breathlessly.
“I can’t say it aloud,” the mother replied, still trembling with anxiety; “but — stoop down here — closer — at your ear — I will whisper it.”
She whispered one word in his ear. Hubert started, amazed. It was indeed a great name. “What, the poet?” he cried, gasping.
His mother hung her head with a gesture deprecation. “Yes, the poet,” she answered.
In a revulsion of pride and joy, Hubert clasped her in his arms, and kissed her many times ecstatically. “Thank you, mother,” he said simply. “Thank you! Thank you!”
“Oh, hush, Hubert,” the mother interposed. “Suppose any one were to hear! Don’t thank me for that! It was a sin they say, a very great sin — and bitterly am I expiating it.”
“It was a splendid sin,” Hubert cried clinging fondly to her hand, “and from my heart I thank you for it. Such sins are purer far than half this world’s purity. It is love — and natural fitness — not the word of a priest or a law, that sanctifies. And the result shows it. To be that great soul’s son — not the loathsome drunkard’s!”
“My darling,” Mrs. Egremont cried, now weeping bitterly with the reaction from that moment of effort, “you frighten me when you say so. You don’t know what pangs and remorses it has given me.”
“It need have given you none,” Hubert exclaimed. “It gave you them only because you but half understood him. Your heart told you true. Your poet was right. He knew what was best. You have given me a noble and a glorious father!”
The mother clung to him still. “Oh, Hubert,” she cried, “if you say so, my boy, I am justified. He wanted to raise up a son like himself, he said. He wanted to raise him up by the woman meant for him. He told me we two were meant by nature for one another. But I doubted it still. You can’t think what a relief it is to me now to have told you.”
“I trust the truth,” Hubert answered slowly. “It is all so new and strange; but” — and he paused—” this, this is the father I had always dreamed of.”
“And I told you the truth,” Mrs. Egremont added wistfully. “I told you the truth, as far as I could tell it. Far more than you thought. I told you he was dead. I told you he was indeed a father to be proud of. I told you he had many great and splendid qualities. I told you half: but I could never tell you how great and pure he was — my love, my poet!”
“Does my uncle know?” Hubert ventured, after a moment’s pause.
“Not a soul on earth but myself! I have hidden it in my heart — deep, deep, unspoken — ever since that white soul died ten years ago in Florence. But — I loved him — I loved him — oh, Hubert, how I loved him!”
She raised her head and looked her son in the face now. The knowledge of his approval had taken all sense of false shame away from her. It was his father’s face. More than ever, she saw it so.
And that man — your husband?” Hubert asked. “The man to whom you were nobly unfaithful. Did he know what had happened?”
“He never even suspected it,” Mrs. Egremont answered. “He was far too drunk to know or to trouble himself about anything that happened. I left him at once as soon as — as soon as I was sure what was going to happen to me; as soon as I felt a new life within me. And you are the son of that moment of profoundest passion!”
She said it confidently now; she said it almost proudly. She saw, she felt the father in the son. She no longer shrank from him. “Then all is easy now,” Hubert cried. “I can marry Fede.”
His mother flung her arms round him in a transport of joy. “I thank heaven I have had the courage to tell you,” she whispered. “You can marry Fede. I would never have dared to tell it, though, my darling, if I had not overheard what you said the other night in this very room to your uncle. I have thought so often since of those glorious words you quoted from Meredith— ‘The real sin would have been if she and I had met, and—’ They comforted me deeply. So too did your own comment: ‘There are positive duties in life as well as negative. If it is a duty to abstain from peopling the world with the unfit, is it not equally a duty to do what we can towards peopling it with the fittest?’” And she looked at him proudly.
There was another long pause. Each gazed on each with profound earnestness. “And you forgive me?” the mother asked at last, with a momentary shrinking.
“Forgive you? Dear mother, I have nothing to forgive! I have everything to thank you for. You took care to ensure me a splendid birthright. One thing alone I regret.” He gazed at her wistfully. “I shall have to bear that wretched creature’s name through life,” he said—” instead of the one I am rightfully entitled to.”
“You will,” his mother said—” for my sake.... And for yours, I regret it.”
“So do I,” Hubert answered. “But I will bear it still, for your sake alone — not for fear of the base lies that enslave and unman us.”
They leaned back and were silent. A whiff of tobacco smoke broke suddenly upon their reverie. Mother and son looked up with one accord. Again that unspeakably hateful apparition! Colonel Egremont was standing on the balcony by the open window, with arms akimbo, regarding them cynically.
CHAPTER XIV.
COLONEL EGREMONT SEES HIS WAY.
HE had a cigar in his mouth, but he withdrew it jauntily.
“Forgive this persistence,” he said, smiling. “Family feeling! Family feeling! Restitution of conjugal rights is all I ask for. And — I’ve ventured to take it. When you locked me out of the door, my dear Julia, with such unnatural cruelty — you forgot it was easy for me to come in by the window.”
Mrs. Egremont seized her son’s arm. “Oh, Hubert,” she cried, low, “did he hear, do you think? Did he hear us?”
“I don’t fancy he did,” Hubert answered, whispering. “And if he did, I don’t care. He is a drunken lunatic, or next door to it. Nobody would pay the slightest heed to his chatter.” He turned to the wretched creature. “Leave the room, sir,” he said, pointing to the window by which the man had entered, “or take your choice of being thrown out. I will permit no insolence.”
Colonel Egremont advanced a step. “Take care, young man,” he cried. “You touch me at your peril!”
Hubert, was just about to seize him, when Mrs. Egremont intervened with an imploring look. “For my sake, Hubert, let him stop! We can answer him now. We understand one another, my boy — you and I — and we have nothing more to fear from him.”
The Colonel stepped forward, looking about him gingerly. “That Italian brigand’s gone?” he said, peering round the chairs as if in doubt. “Yes? Then here we are, en famille! We can proceed to business!”
Hubert shuddered at his breath. “He’s drunk, mother,” he said, low. “He reeks of brandy.”
“Well, yes,” the Colonel replied, drawing himself up with dignity, and squinting through his eyeglass, “I do my duty in the matter of brandy. I flatter myself, I am the chief support of that vast industry.”
Then for the first time it began to dawn upon Hubert that the man’s bravado was an initial stage in the form of madness known as megalomania, where the lunatic, at first humorously, but afterwards seriously, exaggerates to a gross and ludicrous extent the importance of all his own pettiest actions.
Mrs. Egremont laid her hand on her son’s arm gently. “Don’t bandy words with him, Hubert,” she whispered. “Hear him out, and have done with him.”
“Exactly my own idea,” the Colonel answered blandly. “Most excellent advice. Short and sweet just suits me. I come to the point. I’m here without funds; not a sou, not a rap, not a doit, not a stiver. I’m uncertain, I admit, as to the precise nature and value of the common stiver; but I’m sure I haven’t got one. So what I want to know
is simply this, Julia. Are you or are you not going to find that two hundred pounds for me, and to increase the miserable pittance you allow me to a thousand a year?” He assumed once more his mock-pathetic air. “Must I ask you twice about it?”
The touch of humor about the man, the comicality of his appeals, the very cleverness of his talk, increased his loathsomeness. He would have been a trifle less repulsive were it not for his good-humor. His horrid unconsciousness of his own utter degradation made Hubert recoil from him. “Don’t answer him, mother,” the young man said, appealing to her. “On what ground does he ask for it? Why should he not earn his own bread like other people?”
“God bless my soul,” Colonel Egremont cried, “what else did I marry her for? Is she to gain the privilege of having me as her husband, and bearing the honored name of Egremont — one of the best in Lancashire — all for nothing? No, no, young fellow, I shall have my rights, I tell you. She had a tidy little fortune of her own when I married her.”
“Most of which you’ve long ago squandered,” Mrs. Egremont said, interposing.
The Colonel poised himself blandly. “Well, I’ve done my best, I acknowledge,” he said, “to prevent you from wasting it on your own selfish pleasures. I’ve used it royally. Did you ever know me pander for a moment to the better elements of my nature, Julia? Still, we shared and shared alike in both our fortunes; so that’s all even. With all my worldly goods I thee endowed — fourteen pence in the pound to compound with my creditors — and you made up the deficit.”
“Promise him anything, Hubert,” Mrs. Egremont cried, with a sudden rush of disgust; “only, get rid of him instantly.”
“I will promise him nothing, mother,” Hubert answered sternly; “and I earnestly hope you will not either. — Leave the room, sir, this moment, or I shall ring for the servants of the hotel to remove you.”
The Colonel struck a mock-tragic attitude. “Then your sentence is for open war?” he said rhetorically.
“My sentence is for open war,” Hubert answered, with a contemptuous dash of the hand. “I have nothing to do with you. You may try your worst. Anything rather than continue to disgrace my mother’s rooms with your disgusting presence.”
“That’s pretty hot,” the Colonel ejaculated, wiping his brow with the back of his hand, and gazing round the room for some imaginary spectator. “Well, war let it be, then; I’m an old campaigner. But I won’t begin operations without all due formalities. If we must be belligerents, I give you due notice, I mean henceforth to act upon the offensive. No more skulking about upon the Continent for me! I shall carry the war into the enemy’s country. When next we meet, we meet at Milworth!”
“I accept your challenge,” Hubert answered. “I am not afraid of you.”
The Colonel advanced yet a step. “And mind you, Julia,” he said, “when I come to Milworth, I come to stay. I shall institute an action for Restitution of Conjugal Rights. By George, I mean it. You shall receive me again as your lawful husband.”
“You dare not show your face in England,” Mrs. Egremont cried, flushing. “You know you dare not! That bill of exchange — and those cheques of General Walker’s!”
The Colonel smiled calmly. “Blown over!” he said, with a wave of one hand. “Blown over, long ago! I’m game to try, anyhow. There was only one man left alive in England whose evidence against me would have been worth twopence — that’s Walker; and it may interest you to know that I saw his death in the Times at Lugano.”
He played that trump card with an insolent smile. He had come there, in fact, in large part to play it. Mrs. Egremont shrank from him. “But — the other things?” she said, hesitating.
The Colonel laughed. “Oh, no,” he answered quietly. “The public prosecutor isn’t going to rake up old scandals like that at this time of day just to gratify you, my dear. He’s had more than enough of them. The authorities prefer to keep those things quiet. Anyhow, I’ll risk it. You shall see me back at Milworth before long, dear Julia.” And he kissed his hand to her.
Hubert could stand it no longer. He advanced and laid his hand on the old scoundrel’s shoulder. “You have said enough,” he murmured, in a very low voice. “Now, go! We know your intentions. In my mother’s name I tell you plainly, you shall not have one penny now, nor one penny ever if you come to Milworth.” And he pushed him backwards forcibly towards the balcony.
“Hullo! What’s this?” the Colonel cried, fairly surprised that Hubert should actually lay hands on him. “You’re my son, young man, remember. Will you assault your father?”
“Your son!” Hubert cried, hardly able to contain himself. “Your son!” And he gave an imploring look towards his mother.
Mrs. Egremont’s face was still flushed with the joy and pride and shame of her confession to her boy. She could not look at that wretched sot who had once been her husband without the profoundest loathing. Should he call Hubert his son? Her whole soul revolted from it. She rose up and faced him with a sudden tremulous resolution. “He is not your son,” she cried, flinging the words defiantly in the old man’s face. “He is the son of ten thousand times a nobler and better man than you are.”
Hubert let his hand fall. “Now you know the whole truth,” he said calmly, gazing full at Colonel Egremont.
The mother sank back on the sofa in a sudden revulsion of alarm and terror. What had she done? What had she done? What was this she had said in the impulse of a moment? He might publish it to the world; he might shame her; he might ruin her!
But Colonel Egremont drew back, trying to take it all in with that drunken head of his. “Not my son!” he muttered slowly. “Ten thousand times a nobler and better man than I am!” Then he burst of a sudden into a loud, harsh laugh. “So that’s how things lie, is it?” he cried, steadying himself by the lintel of the window. “I see it all now. So you choose to play my game! Well tant mieux pour moi!
I had an inkling of this before. I half suspected as much that last winter at Venice!”
Mrs. Egremont cowered in her place, now overcome with remorse. The mad impulse of a moment had thrown away everything.
The Colonel let his eyeglass drop, gazed hard at her, and spoke very slowly. “I think I could put a name to it,” he said at last. And he glanced aside at the photograph.
Mrs. Egremont clasped her hands and followed his eyes silently.
“You were always hanging about with him in a gondola,” the husband went on. “I wonder it didn’t occur to me. Ha, ha, ha; what a stroke of luck!” He turned to Hubert. “I don’t know whether you’re aware of it or not, young man,” he said; “but — this exceedingly frank confession disinherits you. If you’re not my son, you have no claim to Milworth. By your grandfather’s will, and the marriage settlements, it’s your mother’s for life; but, after her, it goes to the children of the marriage.”
“And I am proud to say,” Hubert answered, “that I am not a child of the marriage.”
“Oh, that’s all very fine now,” the Colonel continued, swelling visibly with pride; “but you’ve got to remember, the property’s entailed on the children of the marriage — with remainder to me, if there are no children, to dispose of as I like, without any restriction. Aha, young fellow, there I have you on the hip! So you’d better just compromise. I’m prepared to negotiate.” He struck a judicial attitude. “If you can’t confine your skeleton to its native cupboard,” he said, with emphasis, “the next best thing is to dress it up smart, and walk out in the Park with it, arm in arm together, as if you loved it. My proposal is — I come back to Milworth.”
“What he says is true, Hubert,” Mrs. Egremont murmured low. “He can will the estate away from you.”
“It seems strange,” Hubert answered, amazed, “that a man can’t inherit his own mother’s property.”
“But in law,” the Colonel cried, catching a murmur of the words, “an illegitimate son is not related to his own mother; and we know from Blackstone that the law is the perfection of wisdom!”
Hube
rt advanced towards him once more. “This time you must go,” he said firmly. “I will have no shilly-shallying. We are not afraid of you. You may do your worst. But recollect this — if you come to England, you shall never receive one penny further.”
He made a threatening move forward. The Colonel, having gained all he wanted for the moment, retreated strategically before him. “Well, good morning, Julia,” he said, with a deep mock bow. “We shall meet at Philippi — I mean to say, Milworth.”
And he retired by the balcony with pretended ceremoniousness.
She had given herself away. She had given him Milworth.
CHAPTER XV.
AND FEDE?
MRS. EGREMONT sank back on the sofa once more, terrified. “Oh, what have I done?” she cried, clasping her hands. “What have I done? My poor boy, I have ruined you!” Hubert smoothed her hair once more with his hand. “Dear mother,” he answered, “you have done nothing at all. What is Milworth to me, compared to the relief of knowing after all I am a great man’s son — not that besotted creature’s? Even if Milworth were lost, I am young, and strong, and a Fellow of my college; I am far better off than nine men out of ten who were with me at Oxford. I could earn enough for myself, and for you and Fede. But Milworth will not go. He cannot take it. My grandfather meant it should be yours and your children’s; the silly phrase about “issue of her body, lawfully begotten,” is a mere verbal trick and catchword of the lawyers. Suppose even he tries to prove his point — what evidence has he for the matter but your word? What corroboration, what witnesses? If he goes about talking after so long a lapse of time, nobody will believe him. He may talk till he dies, and the whole world will laugh at him. But he will not talk. His very insanity will urge him to secretiveness.”
Mrs. Egremont wrung her hands. “Oh, why did I tell him?” she cried, in her reaction. “Why did I tell him?”