Trevelyan held the door open for her as she went, and kept it open during her absence. There was hardly a word said between him and Lady Rowley, but he paced from the passage into the room and from the room into the passage with his hands behind his back. “It is cruel,” he said once. “It is very cruel.”
“It is you that are cruel,” said Lady Rowley.
“Of course;—of course. That is natural from you. I expect that from you.” To this she made no answer, and he did not open his lips again.
After a while Mrs. Trevelyan called to her mother, and Lady Rowley was allowed to go upstairs. The quarter of an hour was of course greatly stretched, and all the time Trevelyan continued to pace in and out of the room. He was patient, for he did not summon them; but went on pacing backwards and forwards, looking now and again to see that the cab was at its place—that no deceit was being attempted, no second act of kidnapping being perpetrated. At last the two ladies came down the stairs, and the boy was with them—and the woman of the house.
“Louis,” said the wife, going quickly up to her husband, “I will do anything, if you will give me my child.”
“What will you do?”
“Anything;—say what you want. He is all the world to me, and I cannot live if he be taken from me.”
“Acknowledge that you have been wrong.”
“But how;—in what words;—how am I to speak it?”
“Say that you have sinned;—and that you will sin no more.”
“Sinned, Louis;—as the woman did—in the Scripture? Would you have me say that?”
“He cannot think that it is so,” said Lady Rowley.
But Trevelyan had not understood her. “Lady Rowley, I should have fancied that my thoughts at any rate were my own. But this is useless now. The child cannot go with you today, nor can you remain here. Go home and think of what I have said. If then you will do as I would have you, you shall return.”
With many embraces, with promises of motherly love, and with prayers for love in return, the poor woman did at last leave the house, and return to the cab. As she went there was a doubt on her own mind whether she should ask to kiss her husband; but he made no sign, and she at last passed out without any mark of tenderness. He stood by the cab as they entered it, and closed the door upon them, and then went slowly back to his room. “My poor bairn,” he said to the boy; “my poor bairn.”
“Why for mamma go?” sobbed the child.
“Mamma goes—; oh, heaven and earth, why should she go? She goes because her spirit is obstinate, and she will not bend. She is stiff-necked, and will not submit herself. But Louey must love mamma always;—and mamma some day will come back to him, and be good to him.”
“Mamma is good—always,” said the child. Trevelyan had intended on this very afternoon to have gone up to town—to transact business with Bozzle; for he still believed, though the aspect of the man was bitter to him as wormwood, that Bozzle was necessary to him in all his business. And he still made appointments with the man, sometimes at Stony Walk, in the Borough, and sometimes at the tavern in Poulter’s Court, even though Bozzle not unfrequently neglected to attend the summons of his employer. And he would go to his banker’s and draw out money, and then walk about the crowded lanes of the City, and afterwards return to his desolate lodgings at Willesden, thinking that he had been transacting business—and that this business was exacted from him by the unfortunate position of his affairs. But now he gave up his journey. His retreat had been discovered; and there came upon him at once a fear that if he left the house his child would be taken. His landlady told him on this very day that the boy ought to be sent to his mother, and had made him understand that it would not suit her to find a home any longer for one who was so singular in his proceedings. He believed that his child would be given up at once, if he were not there to guard it. He stayed at home, therefore, turning in his mind many schemes. He had told his wife that he should go either to Italy or to America at once; but in doing so he had had no formed plan in his head. He had simply imagined at the moment that such a threat would bring her to submission. But now it became a question whether he would do better than go to America. He suggested to himself that he should go to Canada, and fix himself with his boy on some remote farm—far away from any city; and would then invite his wife to join him if she would. She was too obstinate, as he told himself, ever to yield, unless she should be absolutely softened and brought down to the ground by the loss of her child. What would do this so effectually as the interposition of the broad ocean between him and her? He sat thinking of this for the rest of the day, and Louey was left to the charge of the mistress of River’s Cottage.
“Do you think he believes it, mamma?” Mrs. Trevelyan said to her mother when they had already made nearly half their journey home in the cab. There had been nothing spoken hitherto between them, except some half-formed words of affection intended for consolation to the young mother in her great affliction.
“He does not know what he believes, dearest.”
“You heard what he said. I was to own that I had—sinned.”
“Sinned;—yes; because you will not obey him
