II
One cannot look on a widow who has long survived her husband without a curiosity not easily put into terms. The curiosity is intensified, and the difficulty enhanced if there are children to testify of a relation which, in the absence of the dead, has no other witness. The man has passed out of the woman’s life as absolutely as if he had never been there; it is conceivable that she herself does not always think of her children as also his. Yet they are his children, and there must be times when he holds her in mortmain through them, when he is still her husband, still her lord and master. But how much, otherwise, does she keep of that intimate history of emotions, experiences, so manifold, so recondite? Is he as utterly gone, to her sense, as to all others? Or is he in some sort there still, in her ear, in her eye, in her touch? Was it for the nothing which it now seems that they were associated in the most tremendous of the human dramas, the drama that allies human nature with the creative, the divine and the immortal, on one side, the bestial and the perishable on the other? Does oblivion pass equally over the tremendous and the trivial and blur them alike?
Anther looked at Mrs. Langbrith in a whirl of question: question of himself as well as of her. By virtue of his privity to her past, he was in a sort of authority over her; but it may have been because of his knowledge that he almost humbly forbore to use his authority.
“Amelia,” he entreated her, “have you brought him up in a superstition of his father?”
“Oh no!” She had the effect of hurrying to answer him. “Oh, never!”
“ I am glad of that, anyway. But if you have let him grow up in ignorance—
“How could I help that?”
“You couldn’t! He made himself solid, there. But the boy’s reverence for his father’s memory is sacrilege—”
“I know,” she tremulously consented; and in her admission there was no feint of sparing the dead, of defending the name she bore, or the man whose son she had borne. She must have gone all over that ground long ago, and abandoned it. “ It ought to have come out,” she even added.
“Yes, but it never can come out now, while any of his victims live,” Anther helplessly raged. “ I’m willing to help keep it covered up in his grave myself, because you’re one of them. If poor Hawberk had only taken to drink instead of opium!”
“Yes,” she again consented, with no more apparent feeling for the memory imperiled by the conjecture than if she had been nowise concerned in it.
“But you must, Amelia—I hate to blame you; I know how true you are—you must have let the boy think—”
“As a child, he used to ask me, but not much; and what would you have had I should answer him?”
“ Of course, of course! You couldn’t.”
“ I used to wonder if I could. Once, when he was little, he put his finger on this”—she put her own finger on a scar over her left eye—“and asked me what made it. I almost told him.”
Anther groaned and twisted in his chair. “The child always spoke of him,” she went on passionlessly, “ as being in heaven. I found out, one night, when I was saying his prayers with him, that—you know how children get things mixed up in their thoughts—he supposed Mr. Langbrith was the father in heaven he was praying to.”
“Gracious powers!” Anther broke out.
“I suppose,” she concluded, with a faint sigh, “though it’s no comfort, that there are dark corners in other houses.”
“Plenty,” Anther grimly answered, from the physician’s knowledge. “ But not many as dark as in yours, Amelia.”
“No,” she passively consented once more. “As he grew up,” she resumed the thread of their talk, without prompting, “he seemed less and less curious about it; and I let it go. I suppose I wanted to escape from it, to forget it.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“But, doctor,” she pleaded with him for the extenuation which she could not, perhaps, find in herself, “ I never did teach him by any word or act— unless not saying anything was doing it—that his father was the sort of man he thinks he was. I should have been afraid that Mr. Langbrith himself would not have liked that. It would have been a fraud upon the child.”
‘‘I don’t think Langbrith would have objected to it on that ground,” Anther bitterly suggested.
‘‘No, perhaps not. But between Mr. Langbrith and me there were no concealments, and I felt that he would not have wished me to impose upon the child expressly.”
“ Oh, he preferred the tacit deceit, if it would serve his purpose. I’ll allow that. And in this case, it seems to have done it.”
“Do you mean,” she meekly asked, “that I have deceived James?”
“No,” said Anther, with a blurt of joyless laughter. “But if such a thing were possible, if it were not too sickeningly near some wretched superstition that doesn’t believe in itself, I should say that his father deceived him through you, that he diabolically acted through your love, and did the evil which we have got to face now. Amelia!” he startled her with the resolution expressed in his utterance of her name, “you say the boy will object to my marrying you. Do you object to my telling him?”
“Telling him?”
“Just what his father was!”
“Oh, you mustn’t! It would make him hate you.”
“What difference?”
“I couldn’t let him hate you. I couldn’t bear that. ” The involuntary tears, kept back in the abstracter passages of their talk, filled her eyes again, and trembled above her cheeks.
" If necessary, he has got to know," Anther went on, obdurately.
" I won't give you up on a mere apprehension of his opposition."
" Oh, do give me up !" she implored. " It would be the best way."
" It would be the worst. I have a right to you, and if you care for me, as you say — "
"I do!"
" Then, heaven help us, you have right to me. You have a right to freedom, to peace, to rest, to security ; and you are going to have it. Now, will you let it come to the question without his having the grounds of a fair judgment, or shall we tell him what he ought to know, and then do what we ought to do : marry, and let me look after you as long as I live?"
She hesitated, and then said, with a sort of furtive evasion of the point: "There is something that I ought to tell you. You said that you would despise yourself if you had cared for me in Mr. Langbrith's lifetime." She always spoke of her husband, dead, as she had always addressed him, living, in the tradition of her great juniority, and in a convention of what was once polite form from wives to husbands, not to be dropped in the most solemn, the most intimate, moments.
Anther
