"Why don't you?"
"For one thing, I don't want to."
"Oh!"
It was the woman again. The sound was rather queer. You could not have
told whether it meant relief or indignation.
The man's sad penetrating eyes were bent on him sympathetically. "When
you say that you don't want to, exactly what do you mean?"
"I'm not sure that I can say. She was my mother. She was good to
me. I was fond of her. I never knew any other mother. I don't think
I could--" he looked over at the woman in the shadow, letting
his words fall with a certain significant spacing--"know--any
other--mother--now--and so--"
Rising, she took a step toward him. He too rose so that as she stood
looking up at him he stood looking down at her. There and then her face
was imprinted on his memory, a face of suffering, but of suffering that
had not made her strong. The quivering victim of self-pity, she begged
to be allowed to forget. She had suffered to her limit. She couldn't
suffer any more. Everything in her that was raked with the harrow
protested against this bringing up again of an outlived agony.
Her beautiful eyes, brimming with unspilled tears, gazed at him
reproachfully. As plainly as eyes could tell him anything, they told
him that now, when life and time had dug between them such a gulf, she
didn't want him as her son. She might have to accept him, since so many
things pointed that way, but it would be hard for her. Taking back a
little boy would have been one thing; taking back a grown man, none of
whose habits or traditions were the same as theirs, would be another.
She would do it if it were forced on her, but it couldn't recompense
her now for past unhappiness. It would be only a new torture, a torture
which, if he hadn't drifted in among them, she might have escaped.
When swiftly and silently she had left the room the man put his hand on
Tom's arm.
"Sit down again. You mustn't think that my wife doesn't feel all this.
She does. It's because she does that she's so overwrought."