'Where is the hurry, cousin? For hard on twenty years I have sought you,
shall we then part so soon? Let us talk a while. Before we part to meet
no more, perhaps of your courtesy you will answer me a question, for I
am curious. Why have you wrought these evils on me and mine? Surely
you must have some reason for what seems to be an empty and foolish
wickedness.'
I spoke to him thus calmly and coldly, feeling no passion, feeling
nothing. For in that strange hour I was no longer Thomas Wingfield, I
was no longer human, I was a force, an instrument; I could think of my
dead son without sorrow, he did not seem dead to me, for I partook of
the nature that he had put on in this change of death. I could even
think of de Garcia without hate, as though he also were nothing but a
tool in some other hand. Moreover, I KNEW that he was mine, body and
mind, and that he must answer and truly, so surely as he must die when
I chose to kill him. He tried to shut his lips, but they opened of
themselves and word by word the truth was dragged from his black heart
as though he stood already before the judgment seat.
'I loved your mother, my cousin,' he said, speaking slowly and
painfully; 'from a child I loved her only in the world, as I love her to
this hour, but she hated me because I was wicked and feared me because I
was cruel. Then she saw your father and loved him, and brought about his
escape from the Holy Office, whither I had delivered him to be tortured
and burnt, and fled with him to England.
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