He had heard his mother crying from behind her closed door....
He had been coming, on a wet autumnal afternoon, down the dark stairs from
his attic and suddenly at the other end of the long passage there had been
this sound, so sudden and so pitiful coming upon that dreary stillness that
he had stopped with his hands clenched and his face white and his heart
beating like a knock on a door. Instantly all those many little moments
that he had had in that white room with that heavy-scented air crowded
upon him and he remembered the smile that she had always given him and the
way that her hair lay so tragically about the pillow. He had always been
frightened and eager to escape; he felt suddenly so deeply ashamed that
the crimson flooded his face there in the dark passage. She had wanted him
all these years and he had allowed those other people to prevent him from
going to her. What had been happening to her in that room? The sound of her
crying came to him as though beseeching him to come and help her. He put
his hands to his ears and went desperately into the dark wet garden. He
knew now when he thought of it, that his behaviour to his mother had been,
during these months since he had left Dawson's, an unconscious cowardice.
Whilst he had been yet at school those little five minutes' visits to his
mother's room might have been excused, but during these last months there
had been, with regard to her, in his conscience, if he had cared to examine
it, sharp accusation.
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