Do you want more string? Do you want more bottles? By God, I’ll go around collecting them if you say so.” His voice had risen almost to a scream. “But tell me what you want. Don’t you own enough? Do you want the town? What is it?”
“Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about, boy,” said Eliza angrily. “If I hadn’t tried to accumulate a little property none of you would have had a roof to call your own, for your papa, I can assure you, would have squandered everything.”
“A roof to call our own!” he yelled, with a crazy laugh. “Good God, we haven’t a bed to call our own. We haven’t a room to call our own. We have not a quilt to call our own that might not be taken from us to warm the mob that rocks upon this porch and grumbles.”
“Now, you may sneer at the boarders all you like—” Eliza began sternly.
“No,” he said. “I can’t. There’s not breath or strength enough in me to sneer at them all I like.”
Eliza began to weep.
“I’ve done the best I could!” she said. “I’d have given you a home if I could. I’d have put up with anything after Grover’s death, but he never gave me a moment’s peace. Nobody knows what I’ve been through. Nobody knows, child. Nobody knows.”
He saw her face in the moonlight, contorted by an ugly grimace of sorrow. What she had said, he knew, was fair and honest. He was touched deeply.
“It’s all right, mama,” he said painfully. “Forget about it! I know.”
She seized his hand almost gratefully and laid her white face, still twisted with her grief, against his shoulder. It was the gesture of a child; a gesture that asked for love, pity, and tenderness. It tore up great roots in him, bloodily.
“Don’t!” he said. “Don’t, mama! Please!”
“Nobody knows,” said Eliza. “Nobody knows. I need some one too. I’ve had a hard life, son, full of pain and trouble.” Slowly, like a child again, she wiped her wet weak eyes with the back of her hand.
