“Will papa ever come to hear me pray?”
That sad and unconscious question went to the heart of Morton. The child could not comprehend death. He had sought to explain it, but she had been accustomed to consider her protector dead when he was absent from her, and she still insisted that he must come again to life. And that man of turbulence and crime, who had passed unrepentant, unabsolved, from sin to judgment: it was an awful question, “If he should hear her pray?”
“Yes!” said he, after a pause,—“yes, Fanny, there is a Father who will hear you pray; and pray to Him to be merciful to those who have been kind to you. Fanny, you and I may never meet again!”
“Are you going to die too? Mechant, every one dies to Fanny!” and, clinging to him endearingly, she put up her lips to kiss him. He took her in his arms: and, as a tear fell upon her rosy cheek, she said, “Don’t cry, brother, for I love you.”
“Do you, dear Fanny? Then, for my sake, when you come to this place, if any one will give you a few flowers, scatter them on that stone. And now we will go to one whom you must love also, and to whom, as I have told you, he sends you; he who—Come!”
As he thus spoke, and placed Fanny again on the ground, he was startled to see: precisely on the spot where he had seen before the like apparition—on the same spot where the father had cursed the son, the motionless form of an old man. Morton recognised, as if by an instinct rather than by an effort of the memory, the person to whom he was bound.
He walked slowly towards him; but Fanny abruptly left his side, lured by a moth that flitted duskily over the graves.
“Your name, sir, I think, is Simon Gawtrey?” said Morton. “I have came to England in quest of you.”
“Of me?” said the old man, half rising, and his eyes, now completely blind, rolled vacantly over Morton’s person—“Of me?—for what?—Who are you?—I don’t know your voice!”
“I come to you from your son!”