"He used my mother badly, and
yet he was himself; he was the soul that he was born, a genius in his own
way, a neglecter of all that makes life beautiful--and yet himself,
always himself. He never pottered. He was real--a pirate, a plunderer,
but he was real. And he cared for me, and would have had me in the
business if he could. Perhaps John Grier knows the truth now! . . .
I hope he does. For, if he does, he'll see that I was not to blame for
what I did, that it was Fate behind me. He was a big man, and if I'd
worked with him, we'd have done big things, bigger than he did, and that
was big enough."
"Do nothing till you see me," his mother had written in a postscript to
her letter, and, with a moroseness at his heart and scorn of Barouche at
his lips, he went slowly up to his mother's room. At her door he paused.
But the woman was his mother, and it must be faced. After all, she had
kept faith ever since he was born. He believed that. She had been an
honest wife ever since that fatal summer twenty-seven years before.
"She has suffered," he said, and knocked at her door. An instant later
he was inside the room. There was only a dim light, but his mother was
sitting up in her bed, a gaunt and yet beautiful, sad-eyed figure of a
woman. For a moment Carnac paused. As he stood motionless, the face of
the woman became more drawn and haggard, the eyes more deeply mournful.
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