The woman looked at him, still with the same expression of tender yearning in her eyes.

"It's a hard question to ask," she said, "but can you feel towards me as a laddie should feel to his mother?"

"Yes," he replied, "I do."

"Then call me 'Mother,' and kiss me!" she cried pa.s.sionately.

"Mother!" he said, and held her close to him.

A few minutes later she began to tell him the things which for years he had been longing to know, and concerning which gossip had been rife.

"I want to know, mother," he said, "who my father is, where I was born, and why the truth has been so long kept from me."

"Born," she said, and her face became hard; "you were born in a workhouse, and your father would call himself a gentleman, and we were married in Scotland!"

A bright light came into the youth's eyes at the last part of the sentence. "But is my father alive?" he asked eagerly.

"I do not know," she replied; "I think he must be. I feel sure he is, but I cannot tell. Listen. I was reared in Scotland, not far beyond the English border. My name was Jean Lindsay. My father had been a fisherman as a young man, but came to Cornwall for his wife, and soon after he brought her to Scotland and I was born, she died. He had a farm in Scotland, and there I lived with my stepmother and stepbrothers and sisters, who made life a misery for me until I was eighteen, and then one day I met a gentleman. Oh, my lad, it was no wonder I loved him; he was different from all the lads I had met in those parts, young, handsome, laughter-loving, just the man to captivate a la.s.sie's heart. He married me, Scottish fashion, and on the day we were wed he told me he had received a letter which urged him to go back to his home at once. We were married secretly, my boy, because I was afraid for my father and stepmother to know. They wanted me to wed a young farmer, and would have forced me to do so but for him, and I could not--how could I when I loved him and he loved me? And I believed in him too; he was all the world to me. No one knew but he and me. But when we were married and he came to the inn, he told the landlady I was his wife."

The boy nodded. "And the letter, mother?" he said, "the letter, what of that?"

"It urged him to go to his home," she replied. "You must remember, my boy, that I was young and ignorant. I knew nothing of the ways of the world, nothing of men, but I loved him devotedly. He was my king, my life! When he had read the letter, he said he must leave the following morning, and urged me to go back to my home and wait until he could come and fetch me. I was to tell them, he said, that we were married, and that thus I was free from the attentions of Willie Fearn, the farmer they wanted me to wed."

The youth did not seem to understand her, but looked at her with wild wonder in his eyes, trying to comprehend the story she was telling. It seemed utterly unreal to him. He wondered whether she fully realised what she was saying.

"Yes, mother," he said at length, "go on."

"What could I do but obey him?" she said. "I had promised before G.o.d that I would, and I did. I went back to my father--he had wondered where I had gone--and told him I had wedded a young Englishman named Douglas Graham. I think my father thought that all was right, for, while he spoke harsh words to me, he seemed presently to settle down to the conviction that my husband would soon come to me, and that I should be a lady. But my stepmother said awful things. I will not tell you what! Even now her words cut me like a knife."

"Well," said the youth, "and what then?"

"Day after day I waited for a letter from him," she replied. "At first I hadn't a doubt; he had promised me and I believed him. But when one month had gone, and then two, I grew desperate."

"And he never wrote to you at all?" asked the youth.

"At the end of three months," she replied, "I got a letter."

"Yes"--and his voice was eager--"what did he say?"

"Here it is," she replied, and she pa.s.sed him a crumpled piece of paper. The envelope was stamped with a London post-mark, but the paper within had no address of any sort. It simply contained the words:

"DEAR JEAN,--It cannot be helped now, and of course we were never really married. It was only a joke.--DOUGLAS."

"And that was all?" said the youth.

"That was all, G.o.d helping me, that was all."

"And you have heard nothing from him since?"

"Never a word since the morning he bid me good-bye at the station, and told me to go back to my father, saying he would write to me at once, and come to me soon. No, I have never seen nor heard of him since."

The eyes of the youth became red with anger. His hands clenched and unclenched themselves pa.s.sionately, but he did not speak. It seemed as if he could not. Then an oath escaped him, and his voice was hoa.r.s.e.

"But, mother," he cried presently, "tell me more. There must be more than this. What about this marriage? Were there no witnesses? Have you no marriage lines?"

"Things are different in Scotland, my boy," was her answer. "There many people just take each other as man and wife, and that is all, and the marriage is legal. Do you know"--and her voice trembled with pa.s.sion--"that on the afternoon when he took me as his wife we knelt down by the roadside, and he prayed with me that G.o.d would help us to be true man and wife to each other?"

"But, but----" he cried, and he was trembling with emotion, "and he treated you like that?"

The woman did not reply, but looked away across the moors with a hard, stony stare.

"My mother, my poor, poor mother!" He seemed incapable of saying more, and for two or three minutes there was a silence between them.

"And then, mother?" he went on presently.

"Months later," she went on, "I was driven from home. I had no friends, no relatives, no one to whom I could go, and I thought I should go mad!"

"And what did you do?" he asked.

"There seemed to me only one thing I could do," she said. "I could not stay near my old home, I was ashamed--besides, my father and stepmother drove me away with a curse. They said I had disgraced the name of Lindsay. I always hated Scotland, and as my heart turned to my mother's home, I determined I would go to Cornwall. I had just three pounds, and with that I commenced my journey."

"You came by train?" he asked.

"No, I walked. I wanted to h.o.a.rd my money. You see it was very little."

"You walked all the way to Cornwall from Scotland?"

"Every step," she said. "It was winter time, too, and it often rained, but somehow I felt as though Cornwall would give me a home, a welcome.

It took me weeks to do it, but I got there at last. Often I slept in a farmer's barn; more than once I walked all through the night." And into her eyes came a far-away look, while her lips quivered as if with pain.

"And did you find a home and welcome?" he asked.

She shook her head. "How could I? I went straight to St. Ives, but everyone had forgotten my mother, and her people were dead. You see, I looked like a vagrant, my clothes were weather-stained, my boots were worn out, I had no money, and no one wanted me. More than once I thought I should have died of starvation."

"And what did you do?" he asked.

"I did not know what to do. I went from place to place. Here and there I got a day's work, but I never begged. I would rather have died than have done that."

A kind of grim satisfaction settled in the youth's face as he heard this, but it was easy to see that the pain which lay in his mother's heart also pa.s.sed into his. He was not pleasant to look at at that moment, and if murder can ever be seen in a man's eyes, it could be seen in his at that moment.

"Well, mother?" he said at length, "and what afterwards?"

"I began to tramp northward again," she said. "I hoped that surely, surely, someone would help me. And then one day I fell down by the roadside. It was spring time now but terribly cold, and I thought, 'Now I shall die, and all will be over.' I think I went to sleep, because I knew nothing of what happened. A great darkness fell upon everything, and then, when I woke again, I found myself in a workhouse.

I knew it was a workhouse by the clothes the people wore and by the way they talked; but I did not care much--I had got beyond that." She hesitated, like one who did not know how to continue her story. Her teeth became set, her lips quivered, her eyes were hard. "Oh, my boy, my boy!" she said, "I could not help it, I thought I did what was right!"

The youth took hold of her hand almost awkwardly. He wanted to try and comfort her, but knew not how. Perhaps the affectionate action, even although accompanied by no words, was the best thing he could have done to ease her aching heart. She laid her head upon his chest as though she were tired. And then she sobbed convulsively. "There you were born, my boy."