At the word he half-started from his chair and sunk back into it again. His eyes blazed as I had not seen them do since my return.
“For twenty years and more,” he shrieked, “that name has never been on your lips—on the lips of any one of you. I would have struck him down without pity that spoke it!”
I stood looking at him amazed. For a moment he seemed transformed—translated out of his fallen self—for a moment and no more. His passion left him quakingly.
“Ah!” he cried, with a gasp, and looked up at me beseeching—“you’re not offended—you are not offended, Renalt?”
“No, no,” I said, impatiently. “You must tell me why, dad. You will, won’t you?”
He answered with a sobbing moan.
“You, her son, must not know. Haven’t I been faithful to her? Have I ever by word or sign dishonored her memory in her children’s ears—my boy, have I?”
“I have never heard you mention her till now. I have never dreamed of her but as a nameless shadow, father.”
“Let her be so always. She wrecked my life—in a day she made me the dark brute you remember well. I was not so always, Renalt. This long, degraded life of despair and the bestial drowning of it were her doing—hers, I tell you. Remorse! It has struggled to master me, and I have laughed it away—all these years I have laughed it away. Yet it was pitiful when she died. A heart of stone would have wept to see her. But mine was lead—lead—lead.”
He dropped his head on his breast. I stood darkly pondering in the quiet room. There seemed a stir and rustling all round within the house, as if ghostly footfalls were restlessly pacing out their haunting penance.