Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/191

Rh me proud, I feels grateful, and when I has a chance I shows him my gratitude. Mr. Richard Marwood, I'm your friend to the last spoonful of my claret; and let the man as murdered your uncle keep clear of my left mawley, if he wants to preserve his beauty."

after the meeting of the Cherokees Richard Marwood received his mother, in a small furnished house he had taken in Spring Gardens. Mrs. Marwood, possessed of the entire fortune of her murdered brother, was a very rich woman. Of her large income she had, during the eight years of her son's imprisonment, spent scarcely anything; as, encouraged by Mr. Joseph Peters's mysterious hints and vague promises, she had looked forward to the deliverance of her beloved and only child. The hour had come. She held him in her arms again, free.

"No, mother, no," he says, "not free. Free from the prison walls, but not free from the stain of the false accusation. Not till the hour when all England declares my innocence shall I be indeed a free man. Why, look you, mother, I cannot go out of this room into yonder street without such a disguise as a murderer himself might wear, for fear some Slopperton official should recognise the features of the lunatic criminal, and send me back to my cell at the asylum."

"My darling boy," she lays her hands upon his shoulders, and looks proudly into his handsome face, "my darling boy, these people at Slopperton think you dead. See," she touched her black dress as she spoke, "it is for you I wear this. A painful deception, Richard, even for such an object. I cannot bear to think of that river, and of what might have been."

"Dear mother, I have been saved, perhaps, that I may make some atonement for that reckless, wicked past."

"Only reckless, Richard; never wicked. You had always the same noble heart, always the same generous soul; you were always my dear and only son."

"You remember what the young man says in the play, mother, when he gets into a scrape through neglecting his garden and making love to his master's daughter—'You shall be proud of your son yet.

"I shall be proud of you, Richard. I am proud of you. We are rich; and wealth is power. Justice shall be done you yet, my darling boy. You have friends"

"Yes, mother, good and true ones. Peters—you brought him with you?"