“Father! who is he, what is he? He lives, then! But he has deserted me,—he must have betrayed her! I need him not. The law gives me no father.”
The last words were said with a return of bitter anguish: then, in a calmer tone, he resumed, “But I should know who he is—as another one whose path I may not cross.”
Dr. Morgan looked embarrassed, and paused in deliberation. “Nay,” said he, at length, “as you know so much, it is surely best that you should know all.”
The doctor then proceeded to detail, with some circumlocution, what we will here repeat from his account more succinctly.
Nora Avenel, while yet very young, left her native village, or rather the house of Lady Lansinere, by whom she had been educated and brought up, in order to accept the place of companion to a lady in London. One evening she suddenly presented herself at her father’s house, and at the first sight of her mother’s face she fell down insensible. She was carried to bed. Dr. Morgan (then the chief medical practitioner of the town) was sent for. That night Leonard came into the world, and his mother died. She never recovered her senses, never spoke intelligibly from the time she entered the house. “And never, therefore, named your father,” said Dr. Morgan. “We knew not who he was.”
“And how,” cried Leonard, fiercely,—“how have they dared to slander this dead mother? How knew they that I—was—was—was not the child of wedlock?”
“There was no wedding-ring on Nora’s finger, never any rumour of her marriage; her strange and sudden appearance at her father’s house; her emotions on entrance, so unlike those natural to a wife returning to a parent’s home,—these are all the evidence against her. But Mrs. Avenel deemed them strong, and so did I. You have a right to think we judged too harshly,—perhaps we did.”
“And no inquiries were ever made?” said Leonard, mournfully, and after a long silence,—“no inquiries to learn who was the father of the motherless child?”
“Inquiries! Mrs. Avenel would have died first. Your grandmother’s nature is very rigid. Had she come from princes, from Cadwallader himself,” said the Welshman, “she could not more have shrunk from the thought of dishonour. Even over her dead child, the child she had loved the best, she thought but how to save that child’s name and memory from suspicion. There was luckily no servant in the house, only Mark Fairfield and his wife (Nora’s sister): they had arrived the same day on a visit.
“Mrs. Fairfield was nursing her own infant two or three months old; she took charge of you; Nora was buried and the secret kept. None out of the family knew of it but myself and the curate of the town,—Mr. Dale. The day after your birth, Mrs. Fairfield, to prevent discovery, moved to a village at some distance. There her child died; and when she returned to Hazeldean, where her husband was settled, you passed as the son she had lost. Mark, I know, was as a father to you, for he had loved Nora: they had been children together.”