"Well--I wouldn't say it to Emma, but Fulleymore _does_ drink. Like a fish he does."

(It was his sacrifice to honesty.)

"But Randall was wild. He didn't quite know what he was saying. Poor chap! It's. .h.i.t him harder than he thinks."

Ranny, alone with his mother, put his arm round her neck and kissed her.

(She had gone into her room and returned dressed, ready to go back with him to Southfields.)

"I'm sorry, Mother, if I hurt you."

"Never mind, Ranny, I know how hurt you must have been before you could do it. It was what you said about your Father, dear. But there--you've always been good to him no matter what he's been."

"Is he _very_ bad, Mother?"

"He is. I don't know, I'm sure, how I'm going to leave him; unless he can manage with Mabel and Mr. Ponting. She's a good girl, Mabel. And he's got a kind heart, Ranny, that young man."

"D'you think I haven't?"

"I wasn't meaning you, my dear. Come, I'm ready now."

They went downstairs. Mrs. Ransome paused at the kitchen door to give some final directions to Mabel, the maid, and a message for Mr. Ponting, the a.s.sistant; and they went out.

As they were going down the High Street, her thoughts reverted to Ranny's awful outburst.

"Ranny, I wish you hadn't spoken to your uncle like you did."

"I _know_, Mother--but he set my back up. He was talkin' through his Sunday hat all the time, pretendin' to stick up for Virelet, knowin'

perfectly well what she is, and cussin' and swearin' at her for it in his heart, and naggin' at me because there wasn't anybody else to go for."

"He was trying to help you, Ranny."

"If G.o.d can't help me, strikes me it's pretty fair cheek of Uncle to presume--" He meditated.

"But he wasn't tryin' to help me. He was thinkin' how he could help his own d.a.m.ned respectability all the blessed time. He knows what a bloomin'

h.e.l.l it's been for Virelet and me this last year--and he'd have forced us back into it--into all that misery--just to save his own silly skin."

"No, dear, it isn't that. He doesn't think Vi'let should be let go on living like she is if you can stop her. He thinks it isn't proper."

"Well, that's what I say. It's his old blinkin', bletherin' morality he's takin' care of, not me. Everybody's got to live like he thinks they ought to, no matter how they hate it. If two Kilkenny cats he knew was to get married and one of them was to bolt he'd fetch her back and tie 'em both up, heads together, so as she shouldn't do it again. And if they clawed each other's guts out he wouldn't care. He'd say they were livin' a nice, virtuous, respectable and moral life.

"What rot it all is!

"Stop her? As if any one could stop her! G.o.d knows she can't stop herself, poor girl. She's made like that. I'm not blamin' her."

For, with whatever wildness Ranny started, he always came back to that--He didn't blame her. He knew whereof she was made. It was proof of his sudden, forced maturity, that unfaltering acceptance of the fact.

"Talk of helpin'! Strikes me poor Vi's helpin' more than anybody, by clearin' out like she's done."

That was how, with a final incomparable serenity, he made it out.

But his mother took it all as so much wildness, the delirium, the madness, born of his calamity.

"He'd have been all right if I'd been a.s.s enough to play into his hands and gone blowin' me nose and grizzlin', and whinin' about my misfortune, and let _him_ go ga.s.sin' about the sadness of it and all that. But because I kept my end up he went for me.

"Sadness! He doesn't know what sadness is _or_ misfortune.

"My G.o.d! If every poor beggar had the luck I've had--to be let off without having to pay for it!"

Up till then his mother had kept silence. She had let him rave. "Poor boy," she had said to herself, "he doesn't mean it. It'll do him good."

But when he talked about not having to pay for it, that reminded her that paying for it was just what he would have to do.

"How'll you manage," she said now, "about the children? I can take them for a week or two or more while you get settled."

"Would you?"

It _was_ a way out for the present.

"I'd take them altogether--I'd love to, Ranny--if it wasn't for your Father bein' ill."

In spite of the cataclysm, she still by sheer force of habit kept it up.

"I don't want you to take them altogether," he said.

"I could do it--if you was to come with them--"

That, indeed, was what she wanted, the heavenly possibility she had sighted from the first. But she had hardly dared to suggest it. Even now, putting out her tremorous feeler, she shrank back from his refusal.

"If you could let Granville--and come and live with us."

His silence and his embarra.s.sment pierced her to the heart.

"Won't you?" she ventured.

"Well--I've got to think of them. For them, in some ways, the poor old Humming-bird might, you see, be almost as bad as Virelet."

She knew. She had known it all the time. She had even got so far in knowledge as to see that Ranny's father was in a measure responsible for Ranny's marriage. If Ranny had had more life, more freedom, and more happiness around him in his home, he would not have been driven, as he was, to Violet.

"Well, dear, you just think it over. If you don't come you must get somebody."

Yes. He must get somebody. He had thought of that.

"It can't be Winny Dymond, dear."

"No," he a.s.sented. "It can't be Winny Dymond."

"And you'll have to come to me until I can find you some one."