Besides, he must be told that his father had recovered, for every one must know it soon, and people would speak of it before him, and think it very strange if he were ignorant of it. She hid from herself the underthought that Archie must surely refuse to live with his father, after all that had passed, and the wild hope of escape from what she had undertaken to do, which the suggestion raised.
She sat silent and thoughtful, her tears drying on her cheeks, while her son still knelt beside her. But without looking at him, she laid her hand on his arm, and her grasp tightened while she was thinking.
"What is it, mother? What is it?" he asked again and again.
At last she let her eyes go to his, and she answered him.
"Your father is well again. By this time he must have left the asylum. Shall we go back to him?"
"I suppose we must, if he’s all right," answered Archie, promptly.
Helen’s face fell suddenly, for she had expected a strong refusal.
"Can you forgive him for all he did to you?" she asked slowly.
"I don’t see that there’s much to forgive. He hit me, and I hit him just as often; so we’re square. He won’t hit me now, because he’s afraid of me. I hate him, of course, and he hates me. It’s quite fair. He thinks I’m stupid, and I think he’s mean; but I don’t see that there’s anything to forgive him. I suppose he’s made so. If he’s all right again, I don’t see but what we shall have to go and live with him again. I don’t see what you’re going to do about it, mother."
Helen buried her face in her hands, not sobbing again, but thinking. She did not see ’what she was going to do about it,’ as Archie expressed the situation. If she had not already sent the telegram, it would have been different. The young man’s rough phrases showed that he had not the slightest fear of his father, and he was ignorant of what she herself had suffered. Much she had hidden from him altogether, and his dulness had seen nothing of the rest. He supposed, if he thought anything about it, that his mother had been unhappy because Harmon drank hard, and stayed away from home unaccountably, and often spoke roughly and rudely when he had been drinking. To his unsensitive nature and half-developed mind these things had seemed regrettable, but not so very terrible, after all. Helen had been too loyal to hold up Harmon as an example of evil to his son, and the boy had grown up accustomed to what disgusted and revolted her, as well as ignorant of what hurt her; while his own unfinished character was satisfied with a half-barbarous conception of what was fair so far as he himself was concerned. He had given blow for blow and bruise for bruise, and on a similar understanding he was prepared to return to similar conditions. Helen saw it all in a flash, but she could not forgive Harmon.