“And for this purpose a little tract has been composed, entitled 'A Word to the Worldling.' This, with your permission, I will place in your hands. You will there find at more length than I could bestow—But I fear I impose upon this lady's patience?”
“It has left me long since, madam,” said Miss Dinah, as she actually gasped for breath.
In the grim half-smile of the old nun might be seen the triumphant consciousness that placed her above the “mundane;” but she did not resent the speech, simply saying that, as it was the hour of recreation, perhaps she would like to see her young ward in the garden with her companions.
“By all means. We thank you heartily for the offer,” cried Barrington, rising hastily.
With another smile, still more meaningly a reproof, Sister Lydia reminded him that the profane foot of a man had never transgressed the sacred precincts of the convent garden, and that he must remain where he was.
“For Heaven's sake! Dinah, don't keep me a prisoner here a moment longer than you can help it,” cried he, “or I'll not answer for my good behavior.”
As Barrington paced up and down the room with impatient steps, he could not escape the self-accusation that all his present anxiety was scarcely compatible with the long, long years of neglect and oblivion he had suffered to glide over.
The years in which he had never heard of Josephine—never asked for her—was a charge there was no rebutting. Of course he could fall back upon all that special pleading ingenuity and self-love will supply about his own misfortunes, the crushing embarrassments that befell him, and such like. But it was no use, it was desertion, call it how he would; and poor as he was he had never been without a roof to shelter her, and if it had not been for false pride he would have offered her that refuge long ago. He was actually startled as he thought over all this. Your generous people, who forgive injuries with little effort, who bear no malice nor cherish any resentment, would be angels—downright angels—if we did not find that they are just as indulgent, just as merciful to themselves as to the world at large. They become perfect adepts in apologies, and with one cast of the net draw in a whole shoal of attenuating circumstances. To be sure, there will now and then break in upon them a startling suspicion that all is not right, and that conscience has been “cooking” the account; and when such a moment does come, it is a very painful one.
“Egad!” muttered he to himself, “we have been very heartless all this time, there's no denying it; and if poor George's girl be a disciple of that grim old woman with the rosary and the wrinkles, it is nobody's fault but our own.” He looked at his watch; Dinah had been gone more than half an hour. What a time to keep him in suspense! Of course there were formalities,—the Sister Lydia described innumerable ones,—jail delivery was nothing to it, but surely five-and-thirty minutes would suffice to sign a score of documents. The place was becoming hateful to him. The grand old park, with its aged oaks, seemed sad as a graveyard, and the great silent house, where not a footfall sounded, appeared a tomb. “Poor child! what a dreary spot you have spent your brightest years in,—what a shadow to throw over the whole of a lifetime!”
He had just arrived at that point wherein his granddaughter arose before his mind a pale, careworn, sorrow-struck girl, crushed beneath the dreary monotony of a joyless life, and seeming only to move in a sort of dreamy melancholy, when the door opened, and Miss Barrington entered with her arm around a young girl tall as herself, and from whose commanding figure even the ungainly dress she wore could not take away the dignity.