I have known all for years. The clergyman who married
you to Mercy Claridge was a distant relative of my mother's, and
before he died he told me. When you married her, he knew you only
as James Fetherdon, but, years afterwards, he saw and recognised
you. He held his peace then, but at last he came to me. And I did
not speak. I was not strong enough, nor good enough, to face the
trouble of it all. I could not endure the scandal, to see my own
son take the second place--he is so brilliant and able and
unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, so sure of winning a great
place in the world, surer than yourself ever was, he is so
calculating and determined and ambitious! And though he loves me
little, as he loves you little, too, yet he is my son, and for what
he is we are both responsible, one way or another; and I had not the
courage to give him the second place, and the Quaker, David
Claridge, the first place. Why Luke Claridge, his grandfather,
chose the course he did, does not concern me, no more than why you
chose secrecy, and kept your own firstborn legitimate son, of whom
you might well be proud, a stranger to you and his rights all these
years.
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