CHAPTER III.
"No, no! it is for your good,--Austin says so. Go,--it is but the first
shock."
Then to my mother I opened the sluices of that deep I had concealed from
scholar and soldier. To her I poured all the wild, restless thoughts
which wandered through the ruins of love destroyed; to her I confessed
what to myself I had scarcely before avowed. And when the picture of
that, the darker, side of my mind was shown, it was with a prouder face
and less broken voice that I spoke of the manlier hopes and nobler aims
that gleamed across the wrecks and the desert and showed me my escape.
"Did you not once say, mother, that you had felt it like a remorse that
my father's genius passed so noiselessly away,--half accusing the
happiness you gave him for the death of his ambition in the content of
his mind? Did you not feel a new object in life when the ambition
revived at last, and you thought you heard the applause of the world
murmuring round your scholar's cell? Did you not share in the day
dreams your brother conjured up, and exclaim, 'If my brother could be
the means of raising him in the world!' And when you thought we had
found the way to fame and fortune, did you not sob out from your full
heart, 'And it is my brother who will pay back to his son all--all he
gave up for me'?"
"I cannot bear this, Sisty! Cease, cease!"
"No; for do you not yet understand me? Will it not be better still if
your son--yours--restore to your Austin all that he lost, no matter how?
If through your son, mother, you do indeed make the world hear of your
husband's genius, restore the spring to his mind, the glory to his
pursuits; if you rebuild even that vaunted ancestral name which is glory
to our poor sonless Roland; if your son can restore the decay of
generations, and reconstruct from the dust the whole house into which
you have entered, its meek, presiding angel,--all, mother! if this can
be done, it will be your work; for unless you can share my ambition,
unless you can dry those eyes, and smile in my face, and bid me go, with
a cheerful voice, all my courage melts from my heart, and again I say, I
cannot leave you!"
Then my mother folded her arms round me, and we both wept, and could not
speak; but we were both happy.
