"I will write and tell them all," I answered; "it will be too painful to you."
"We will both write," he said; and we did.
"You blame yourself too much," cried he, when he perused my letter.
"You speak too kindly, too leniently of me," said I, after reading his; "yet I am glad and grateful. Your mother will judge me from the facts, and nothing that you or I can say will warp or influence her judgment. She understands so clearly the motives of action,—she reads so closely your character and mine, I feel that her decision will be as righteous as the decree of eternal justice. Oh that I were with her now, for my soul looks to her as an ark of safety. Like the poor weary dove, it longs to repose its drooping wings and fold them in trembling joy on her sheltering breast."
I will not speak of the trial, the condemnation, or the agony I felt, when I learned that my father was doomed to expiate his crime by solitary confinement for ten long years. Could Ernest have averted this fate from him, for my sake he would have done it; but the majesty of the law was supreme, and no individual effort could change its just decree. My affections were not wounded, for I never could recall his image without personal repugnance, but my mother's remembrance was associated with him;—I remembered her dying injunctions,—her prophetic dream. I thought of the heaven which he had forfeited, the God whose commandments he had broken, the Saviour whose mercy he had scorned. I wanted to go to him,—to minister to him in his lonely cell,—to try to rouse him to a sense of his transgressions,—to lead him to the God he had forsaken, the Redeemer he had rejected, the heaven from which my mother seemed stretching her spirit arms to woo him to her embrace.
"My mother dreamed that I drew him from a black abyss," said I to Ernest; "she dreamed that I was the guardian angel of his soul. Let me go to him,—let me fulfil my mission. I shudder when I look around me in these palace walls, and think that a parent groans in yonder dismal tombs."
"I will go," replied Ernest; "I will tell him your filial wish, and if I find you can do him good, I will accompany you there."
"I can do him good,—I can pity and forgive him,—I can talk to him of my mother, and that will lead him to think of heaven. 'I was sick and in prison and ye came unto me.' Oh, thus our Saviour said, identifying himself with the sons of ignominy and sorrow. Go, and if you find his heart softened by repentance, pour balm and oil into the wounds that sin has made. Go, and let me follow."