Perfect love, as we know,
casteth out fear: your father loves you perfectly, my darling, but he
does not feel as though you loved him perfectly in return. If you fear
him it is because you do not love him as he deserves, and I know it
sometimes cuts him to the very heart to think that he has earned from you
a deeper and more willing sympathy than you display towards him. Oh,
Ernest, Ernest, do not grieve one who is so good and noble-hearted by
conduct which I can call by no other name than ingratitude."
Ernest could never stand being spoken to in this way by his mother: for
he still believed that she loved him, and that he was fond of her and had
a friend in her--up to a certain point. But his mother was beginning to
come to the end of her tether; she had played the domestic confidence
trick upon him times without number already. Over and over again had she
wheedled from him all she wanted to know, and afterwards got him into the
most horrible scrape by telling the whole to Theobald. Ernest had
remonstrated more than once upon these occasions, and had pointed out to
his mother how disastrous to him his confidences had been, but Christina
had always joined issue with him and showed him in the clearest possible
manner that in each case she had been right, and that he could not
reasonably complain.
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