"What is the use of reading what one cannot understand?" cried he, in a gloomy tone. "Your mother was a Catholic. She did not read the Bible, and if there is a heaven above, it was made for such as she."
"My mother did read her Bible," answered Richard, with solemnity. "She taught me to read it, making a table of her knees, while her hands toiled for our subsistence. It was a lamp to her path, a balm to her sorrows. She lived according to its precepts. She died, believing in its promises."
The glistening eyes of Richard seemed to magnetize his father, so earnest, so steadfast was his gaze.
"Have you her Bible?" he asked, in a husky voice.
"I have; it was her dying gift."
"Bring it, and read to me the chapters she loved best. Perhaps—who knows? Great God! I was once a praying child at my mother's knee."
Richard grasped his father's hand with a strong emotion,
"I will bring it, father. We will read it together, and her spirit will breathe into our hearts. The pages are marked by her pencil, blistered by her tears."
"Yes, bring it!" he repeated. "Who knows? Just heaven!—who knows?"
Who, indeed, did know what influence that book, embalmed in such sacred memories, might have on the sinner's blasted heart? The fierceness and sullenness that had repelled and terrified me on our first entrance had passed away, and sensibility roused from an awful paralysis, started at the ruins it beheld. There was hope, since he could feel. Richard's filial mission might not be in vain. But mine was. I realized this before I left the cell, and resolved to yield to him the task which I had hoped to share. I could not help feeling grieved and disappointed, not so much on my own account, as for the indifference manifested to my mother's memory,—that mother who had loved him, even to her dying hour.