The pronoun she used threw a chill on the heart of her son, but when she tottered to the door of his cell he sprang forward with the low, appealing cry: "Mother!"
But the poor gentlewoman was so overcome that she sank down on a bench by the door, and, with her face buried in her hands, as if to shut out a vision that would blast her, she rocked back and forth in anguish, as she groaned: "O Egbert, Egbert! you have disgraced me, you have disgraced your sisters, you have disgraced yourself beyond remedy. O God! what have I done to merit this awful, this overwhelming disaster?"
With deep pain and solicitude Mrs. Arnot watched the young man's face as the light from the grated window fell upon it. The appeal that trembled in his voice had been more plainly manifest in his face, which had worn an eager and hopeful expression, and even suggested the spirit of the little child when in some painful emergency it turns to its first and natural protector.
But most marked was the change caused by the mother's lamentable want of tact and self-control, for that same face became stony and sullen. Instead of showing a spirit which deep distress and crushing disaster had made almost childlike in its readiness to receive a mother's comfort once more, he suddenly became, in appearance, a hardened criminal.
Mrs. Arnot longed to undo by her kindness the evil which her friend was unwittingly causing, but could not come between mother and son. She stooped down, however, and whispered: "Mrs. Haldane, speak kindly to your boy. He looked to you for sympathy. Do not let him feel that you, like the world, are against him."
"O no," said Mrs. Haldane, her sobs ceasing somewhat, "I mean to do my duty by him. He shall always have a good home, but oh! what a blight and a shadow he has brought to that home! That I should have ever lived to see this day! O Egbert, Egbert! your sisters will have to live like nuns, for they can never even go out upon the street again; and to think that the finger of scorn should be pointed after you in the city where your father made our name so honorable!"
"It never shall be," said Haldane coldly. "You have only to leave me in prison to be rid of me a long time."
"Leave you, in prison!" exclaimed his mother; "I would as soon stay here myself. No; through Mrs. Arnot's kindness, arrangements are made for your release. I shall then take you to our miserable home as soon as possible."