While my unhappy father was thus speaking, my mother entered the summer-house, and leading me forth, she placed her finger on her lips to enjoin me to silence. We stood aside, and watched him, unobserved.
‘As I gaze there,’ he continued, ‘methinks I see her in her days of innocence, when first her little steps began: laughing, she ran, with arms extended towards me; then I trembled lest her young feet should fail, and she should fall. But she passed through those fearful times unharmed. She escaped those thousand dangers. Now she falls—falls to the earth, never to rise! She’s gone—she’s lost! My Clara! Oh, my child!’
My heart was ready to burst, and I was almost choked with endeavouring to repress the heavy sobs that heaved my bosom. My father threw himself into a chair, and my mother advanced towards him, and touched him on the shoulder.
‘A tear,’ she observed, in gentle accents. ‘Did I not hear our Clara’s name too? Did not your lips utter the name of our child?’
‘No, no,’ he replied, hastily rising; ‘let us, if possible, not think or speak of her again.’
‘Well, well, dearest husband,’ returned my mother, ‘I will not urge it now; but here is a poor creature, the daughter of—’
‘Away—away!’ hastily and vehemently interrupted my unhappy parent. ‘I have no daughter now.’
‘No,’ replied my mother; ‘but this repentant child, the daughter of a neighbor, is on her way to ask forgiveness of her offended father. She faints with shame and grief, and dares not meet him. Do speak a word or two of comfort to her, and teach her in what words she should address him to gain his blessing, and to sooth his anguish.’
‘None,’ replied my father, hastily, and his eyes beaming wild, ‘none. Let her not dare to look upon him. Let not her presence insult the home her infamy has disgraced. Perhaps, too, she had a mother, rich in every virtue. Let her shun that mother, for contamination is in her touch. Virtue can hold no intercourse with vice, though vice, with double baseness, kneels affecting reverence for virtue.’
I found it impossible to help groaning aloud, as I listened to my father’s observations, and I threw myself into my mother’s arms. He turned his eyes steadily upon me for a minute or so, and then resumed—