Chapter XXI. Colonel Kelmscott's Punishment - Page 2

own mouth has suggested it. What use my trying to keep it from you any longer? These lads--are Kelmscotts."

"And--my mother?" Granville Kelmscott burst out, in a very tremulous voice. The question was almost more than a man dare ask. But he asked it in the first bitterness of a terrible awakening.

"Your mother," Colonel Kelmscott answered, lifting his head once more, with a terrible effort, and looking his son point-blank in the face--"your mother is just what I have always called her--my lawful wife--Lady Emily Kelmscott. The mother of these lads, to whom I was also once duly married, died before my marriage with my present wife--thank God I can say so. I may have acted foolishly, cruelly, criminally; but at least I never acted quite so basely and so ill as you impute to me, Granville."

"Thank Heaven for that," his son answered fervently, with one hand on his breast, drawing a deep sigh as he spoke. "You're my father, sir, and it isn't for me to reproach you; but if you had only done that--oh, my mother! my mother! I don't know, sir, I'm sure, how I could ever have forgiven you; I don't know how I could ever have kept my hands off you."

Colonel Kelmscott straightened himself up, and looked hard at his son. A terrible pathos gleamed in his proud brown eyes. His white moustache had more dignity than ever.

"Granville," he said slowly, like a broken man, "I don't ask you to forgive me; you can never forgive me; I don't ask you to sympathise with me; a father knows better than to accept sympathy from a son; but I do ask you to bear with me while I try to explain myself."

He braced himself up, and with many long pauses, and many inarticulate attempts to set forth the facts in the least unfavourable aspect, told his story all through, in minute detail, to that hardest of all critics, his own dispossessed and disinherited boy.

"If you're hard upon me, Granville," he cried at last as he finished, looking wistfully for pity into his son's face, "you should remember, at least, it was for your sake I did it, my boy; it was for your sake I did it--yours, yours, and your mother's."

Granville let him relate his whole story in full to the bitter end, though it was with difficulty at times that that proud and grey-haired man nerved himself up to tell it. Then, as soon as all was told, he looked in his father's face once more, and said slowly, with the pitilessness of sons in general towards the faults and failings of their erring parents--

"It's not my place to blame you, I know. You did it, I suppose, as you say so, for me and my mother. But it is my place to tell you plainly, father, that I, for one, will have nothing at all to do with the fruits of your deception. I was no party to the fraud; I will be no party either to its results or its clearing up. I, too,