Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/130

118 money, though she had in no way suspected the thief at the time. It was, then, her earnings that he spent on the slouchers at tavern bars, on the riff-raff of both sexes that haunt street corners? There was no thrusting the miserable fact aside.

A convulsive shudder ran through her, the four walls of the little room which held her seemed to rock with a misery too great to put into words. All was dumb and confused as she sank on her knees on the floor, pressing her forehead against the hard rim of the wooden table. It was the only thing she was conscious of feeling physically for a time which might have been minutes or hours. The face of her son—flaccid, loose of lip, and shifty of eye, as she had caught sight of it in the street some fortnight ago—held her like some hideous phantasm. The very oath with which he had repelled her seemed to reiterate in her ears.

Why had she been sent this scourge? She had toiled for twenty years for this son, but now, for the first time in her life, an extraordinary gulf appeared to open between them. What was it, and how had it been compassed? A numbness was creeping up from her very feet. A curious lassitude followed the tumult of half an hour before. It was over. That sensation at least was definite. It was all over. There was the feeling as if she had been frozen. Her pulse hardly beat at all.

An hour—two hours passed. Then the sudden flare and stench of the guttering candle recalled her to her surroundings and made her crawl to the window, where the yellow light from a street lamp gave a faint gleam from the pavement below. She did not trouble to find another candle, but sat crouched on the ground, listlessly hearing the other lodgers climb the steep stairs and one after another go to bed. Where was her son? Or did she any longer actually care? Soon after all was silent in the house, and, as the draught from the window made her shiver, she Rh