“Tell me,” he said. “Confide in this old, broken, selfish man, who has that love in his heart to seek comfort for you where he can find none himself.”
Then, standing up in the red dusk of the room, I gave him my history. “Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.” And he sat with face darkened from me, and quivered only when he heard of Jason’s villainy.
And at the end he lifted up his voice and cried:
“Oh, Absolom, my son—my son, Absolom!”
CHAPTER XXXII.
OLD PEGGY.
The months that immediately followed my home-coming were passed by me in an aimless, desultory temporizing with the vexed problems that, unanswered, were consuming my heart.
I roamed the country as of old and renewed my acquaintance with bird, fish and insect. Starting to gather a collection of butterflies and moths—many of which were local and rare—with the mere object of filling in the lapses of a restless ennui and in some dull gratitude to a pursuit that had helped me to a little degree of late success, I rapidly rose to an interest in its formation that became, I may say, the then chief happiness of my life. To my father, also, it brought, in the arrangement and classification of specimens, a certain innocent pleasure that helped to restore him to some healthier show of manliness moral and physical.
Poor, broken old man! I would not now have stultified his pathetic confidence in me for the biggest bribe the world could hold out.
Yet it must not be supposed I ever really for a moment lost sight of the main issues of a mystery that was bitten into my heart with an acid that no time could take the strength from. Sometime, sooner or later, I knew it would be revealed to me who it was that killed Modred.
As to that lesser secret of the coins—it troubled me but little. Free of that dread of possible ruin that appeared to cling hauntingly to my father, I was not disinclined to the belief that the complete dissipation of his bugbear estate might prove after all his moral salvation. Remove its source of irritation, and would not the sore heal?