Poor old Jemmie, he must have been pining for his son. He must have had
a vague presentiment of his last illness. And how extraordinary that
he should have said nothing about the birth of Geoffrey's little girl.
To have lain there all these months silent about that great event! It
was strange too that he should not have left any money to Geoffrey.
Perhaps he had known when he left in his will everything to her that
she would find out from his papers about Geoffrey and the little girl,
and had trusted to her to make some provision for them. It might be
that all those years he had been anxious for a reconciliation and that
he had waited for a word from herself to give him an excuse to make the
first move. He would have been too proud of his own accord to propose
the reconciliation; but if he could have salved his pride by pretending
that he was receiving Geoffrey back into the family on her account,
there was no doubt that he would have done so. Oh, it was clearly her
duty to go to-morrow and find out if Geoffrey was still in Wood Green.
It was her duty to the dead man and to her own self. Few might be the
gray hairs of her head, but heavy had been the frost upon her heart
all these years of middle-age. The more she thought about it, the more
remarkable appeared Jemmie's secretiveness. What could have been at the
back of his mind? To be sure, when first Geoffrey married, it was she
who had been of all the bitterest against him. But there had been some
justification then. She had not stayed implacable. Yet she had never
suggested a reconciliation, which it was her place to do. Jemmie might
be pardoned for supposing that she did not want one. But what a pity!
He would have died more happily if he had been friends at the last with
the only son left to him. How much she hoped that he could be looking
down from that mysterious hinterland of death, and that he might behold
her setting out to-morrow on her mission of good-will.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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