“Dear mother, are you so resolved?”
“I am resolved. I have long outbidden folly with folly, pride with pride, scorn with scorn, insolence with insolence, and have outlived many vanities with many more. I will outlive this danger, and outdie it, if I can. It has closed around me almost as awfully as if these woods of Chesney Wold had closed around the house, but my course through it is the same. I have but one; I can have but one.”
“ Mr. Jarndyce—” I was beginning when my mother hurriedly inquired, “Does he suspect?”
“No,” said I. “No, indeed! Be assured that he does not!” And I told her what he had related to me as his knowledge of my story. “But he is so good and sensible,” said I, “that perhaps if he knew—”
My mother, who until this time had made no change in her position, raised her hand up to my lips and stopped me.
“Confide fully in him,” she said after a little while. “You have my free consent—a small gift from such a mother to her injured child!—but do not tell me of it. Some pride is left in me even yet.”
I explained, as nearly as I could then, or can recall now—for my agitation and distress throughout were so great that I scarcely understood myself, though every word that was uttered in the mother’s voice, so unfamiliar and so melancholy to me, which in my childhood I had never learned to love and recognize, had never been sung to sleep with, had never heard a blessing from, had never had a hope inspired by, made an enduring impression on my memory—I say I explained, or tried to do it, how I had only hoped that Mr. Jarndyce, who had been the best of fathers to me, might be able to afford some counsel and support to her. But my mother answered no, it was impossible; no one could help her. Through the desert that lay before her, she must go alone.