“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.