I TOOK a chair at a respectful distance from the sofa on which Mrs. Macallan seated herself. The old lady smiled, and beckoned to me to take my place by her side. Judging by appearances, she had certainly not come to see me in the character of an enemy. It remained to be discovered I whether she were really disposed to be my friend.
“I have received a letter from your uncle the vicar,” she began. “He asks me to visit you, and I am happy—for reasons which you shall presently hear—to comply with his request. Under other circumstances I doubt very much, my dear child—strange as the confession may appear—whether I should have ventured into your presence. My son has behaved to you so weakly, and (in my opinion) so inexcusably, that I am really, speaking as his mother, almost ashamed to face you.”
Was she in earnest? I listened to her and looked at her in amazement.
“Your uncle’s letter,” pursued Mrs. Macallan, “tells me how you have behaved under your hard trial, and what you propose to do now Eustace has left you. Doctor Starkweather, poor man, seems to be inexpressibly shocked by what you said to him when he was in London. He begs me to use my influence to induce you to abandon your present ideas, and to make you return to your old home at the Vicarage. I don’t in the least agree with your uncle, my dear. Wild as I believe your plans to be—you have not the slightest chance of succeeding in carrying them out—I admire your courage, your fidelity, your unshaken faith in my unhappy son, after his unpardonable behavior to you. You are a fine creature, Valeria, and I have come here to tell you so in plain words. Give me a kiss, child. You deserve to be the wife of a hero, and you have married one of the weakest of living mortals. God forgive me for speaking so of my own son; but it’s in my mind, and it must come out!”
This way of speaking of Eustace was more than I could suffer, even from his mother. I recovered the use of my tongue in my husband’s defense.
“I am sincerely proud of your good opinion, dear Mrs. Macallan,” I said. “But you distress me—forgive me if I own it plainly—when I hear you speak so disparagingly of Eustace. I cannot agree with you that my husband is the weakest of living mortals.”
“Of course not!” retorted the old lady. “You are like all good women—you make a hero of the man you love,—whether he deserve it or not. Your husband has hosts of good qualities, child—and perhaps I know them better than you do. But his whole conduct, from the moment when he first entered your uncle’s house to the present time, has been, I say again, the conduct of an essentially weak man. What do you think he has done now by way of climax? He has joined a charitable brotherhood; and he is off to the war in Spain with a red cross on his arm, when he ought to be here on his knees, asking his wife to forgive him. I say that is the conduct of a weak man. Some people might call it by a harder name.”
This news startled and distressed me. I might be resigned to his leaving me for a time; but all my instincts as a woman revolted at his placing himself in a position of danger during his separation from his wife. He had now deliberately added to my anxieties. I thought it cruel of him—but I would not confess what I thought to his mother. I affected to be as cool as she was; and I disputed her conclusions with all the firmness that I could summon to help me. The terrible old woman only went on abusing him more vehemently than ever.
“What I complain of in my son,” proceeded Mrs. Macallan, “is that he has entirely failed to understand you. If he had married a fool, his conduct would be intelligible enough. He would have done wisely to conceal from a fool that he had been married already, and that he had suffered the horrid public exposure of a Trial for the murder of his wife. Then, again, he would have been quite right, when this same fool had discovered the truth, to take himself out of her way before she could suspect him of poisoning her—for the sake of the peace and quiet of both parties. But you are not a fool. I can see that, after only a short experience of you. Why can’t he see it too? Why didn’t he trust you with his secret from the first, instead of stealing his way into your affections under an assumed name? Why did he plan (as he confessed to me) to take you away to the Mediterranean, and to keep you abroad, for fear of some officious friends at home betraying him to you as the prisoner of the famous Trial? What is the plain answer to all these questions? What is the one possible explanation of this otherwise unaccountable conduct? There is only one answer, and one explanation. My poor, wretched son—he takes after his father; he isn’t the least like me!—is weak: weak in his way of judging, weak in his way of acting, and, like all weak people, headstrong and unreasonable to the last degree. There is the truth! Don’t get red and angry. I am as fond of him as you are. I can see his merits too. And one of them is that he has married a woman of spirit and resolution—so faithful and so fond of him that she won’t even let his own mother tell her of his faults. Good child! I like you for hating me!”
“Dear madam, don’t say that I hate you!” I exclaimed (feeling very much as if I did hate her, though, for all that). “I only presume to think that you are confusing a delicate-minded man with a weak-minded man. Our dear unhappy Eustace—”
“Is a delicate-minded man,” said the impenetrable Mrs. Macallan, finishing my sentence for me. “We will leave it there, my dear, and get on to another subject. I wonder whether we shall disagree about that too?”
“What is the subject, madam?”
“I won’t tell you if you call me madam. Call me mother. Say, ‘What is the subject, mother?’”
“What is the subject, mother?”
“Your notion of turning yourself into a Court of Appeal for a new Trial of Eustace, a............