Their mother never pardoned him, or at least by any actual words admitted his restoration to favour.

For many years, as far as they knew, poor Tom was an unrepentant prodigal, wallowing in bad company, and cut off from all respectable sympathy.

Their father had never had the courage to acquaint them with his more true, and kind, and charitable version of Tom's story.

So he passed at home for no better than a black sheep; his marriage with a penniless young lady did not tend to raise him in the esteem of his relatives at Clapham; it was not until he was a widower, until he had been mentioned several times in the Gazette for distinguished military service, until they began to speak very well of him in Leadenhall Street, where the representatives of Hobson Brothers were of course East India proprietors, and until he remitted considerable sums of money to England, that the bankers his brethren began to be reconciled to him.
I say, do not let us be hard upon them.

No people are so ready to give a man a bad name as his own kinsfolk; and having made him that present, they are ever most unwilling to take it back again.