“Yes,” I replied, “nearly so, for I have little more to say. Had you treated me any way decently, I might have concealed some of these things from you, but you defied me, dared me, so I have done my best, as you know to your sorrow. And to close, I must tell you that I have not the least respect for you as a man, nor the least regard for you as a father. I leave you to your own bitter thoughts, which will be hell enough for you, and may God have mercy on your soul, if He can.”
I left at once, glad enough to have finished the hateful business. Did I do right in what might be called running this man to earth? What less could I have done than what I did? It seems most natural that there should be some filial regard of a child for a parent, but I could never, from the time I first saw him, so hardened and devilish, looking down on my weeping mother, feel the least respect, much less love for him as a father, and could only think of him as a wicked, contemptible, living thing.
Other thoughts I have had. The chaplains must have known the character of this man, and yet they appointed or allowed him to conduct the religious services in church; his associates must have known of his amours, intrigues and seductions, for such things cannot be concealed, but they probably were as deep in the mire as he was in the mud, so very likely no one ever checked him in his career of lust and crime. Society must have known all about him, yet he was the swell cad of them all, the admired and intimate friend of the ladies. What delicate tastes some ladies have! He was called a Christian too, and he would no doubt have taken it as an insult if any one had hinted otherwise. A Christian!
I have read the story of a wicked man, who, being angry with his wife, took their child to a wood and murdered it. Then taking some of its flesh he returned home, and sending his wife on an errand put the flesh into a curry that she was preparing. Unheeding the child’s absence, the woman presently ate of the curry, when the inhuman father told her what he had done. Crazed with horror the wretched mother fled to the jungle and destroyed herself. This wicked man belonged to a wild jungle tribe of heathen, but there is not a heathen so low and degraded but would hold up his hands in horror at such an unnatural crime.
But here is a Christian, an intelligent man, of good standing in the upper class of English society, who murdered his wife, my mother, as much as if he had put a noose around her neck and strangled her. He discarded his own children; left them to poverty and starvation. He seduces his own daughter, my sister, and becomes grandfather to his own child! Tell me, O God! and all thinking beings on the earth, who was the worse, that heathen wicked man, or this so-called Christian gentleman?
CHAPTER XXI.
For some days after returning home, I could not get rid of the horrid gloom that brooded over me like a cloud of sulphurous vapor. During the day I kept myself very busy, looking after various things, making calls on those who needed a little assistance, looking after my garden and property, visiting Mr. Jasper, so my mind was diverted. But at night! I had to read the driest metaphysical books I possessed, not for pleasure or profit, but to fatigue my mind, so that it could get any rest at all. Woe to me, if it caught even the slightest thread of the black story of my life, for then away it would run like a fast flying reel, until all from the beginning was unwound. How I tossed and turned, trying to sleep! I repeated poem after poem, put wet cold towels around my head, arose and ran as fast as I could through the garden, and to concentrate my thoughts, repeated poems and paragraphs backward word by word.
I thought of the fate of the damned, who through the long eternal night are trying to forget the foul offenses and crimes of their lives on earth! No, no hell to be compared to such a torment! To be their own accusers, to be their own judge, to keep forever their own infamous record! To be haunted by a ghost that will never be laid. Utter annihilation would be a paradise of bliss compared to such an eternal state of misery.
I still had a duty to perform before I could drop the subject so far as it was possible to do so. M. Le Maistre had made me promise to let him know the result of my investigation, and of my visit to the Commissioner. It was no use to delay, as sooner or later I would have to tell him, and the black wounds would have to be re-opened again. I could not write to him, for I have made it a habit of my life never to write anything that I was not willing the whole world should know. I have gone a hundred miles to tell what I might have written in a few lines. There are so many chances for a paper to be lost and be found by the wrong person, to be mislaid or kept for years, to be read and gossiped about by the world after the writer is dead. These letters and writing of the Commissioner, some of them unsigned, had been his death warrant.
So I had to go again to Lucknow. My old friend received me kindly, as usual. I went over the whole affair again, except that about my sister. That I never told except to the one himself most concerned. He heard it, and will remember it. My sister never even suspected what that man was to her. She had enough sorrow and shame as it was, without knowing of that black, foul crime. It was too much for me to know, and what would I have given to have erased the hideous remembrance of it from my memory?