CHAPTER XXXIX. TOWARDS THE END
Repton was standing at his parlor window, anxiously awaiting his friend's arrival, when the chaise with four posters came to the door. “What have we here?” said the old lawyer to himself, as Barry assisted a lady dressed in deep mourning to alight, and hurried out to receive them.
“I have not come alone, Repton,” said the other. “I have brought my daughter with me.” Before Repton could master his amazement at these words, she had thrown back her veil, revealing the well-known features of Kate Henderson.
“Is this possible?—is this really the case?” cried Repton, as he grasped her hand between both his own. “Do I, indeed, see one I have so long regarded and admired, as the child of my old friend?”
“Fate, that dealt me so many heavy blows of late, had a kindness in reserve for me, after all,” said Barry. “I am not to be quite alone in this world!”
“If you be grateful, what ought not to be my thankfulness?” said Kate, tremulously.
“Leave us for a moment together, Kate,” said Barry; and taking Repton's arm, he led him into an inner room.
“I have met with many a sore cut from fortune, Repton,” said he, in the fierce tone that was most natural to him; “the nearest and dearest to me not the last to treat me harshly. I need not tell you how I have been requited in life; not, indeed, that I seek to acquit myself of my own share of ill. My whole career has been a fault; it could not bring other fruit than misery.” He paused, and for a while seemed laboring in strong emotion. At last he went on:—
“When that girl was born—it was two years before I married—I intrusted the charge of her to Henderson, who placed her with a sister of his in Bruges. I made arrangements for her maintenance and education,—liberally for one as poor as I was. I made but one condition about her. It was that under no circumstances save actual want should she ever be reduced to earn her own bread; but if the sad hour did come, never—as had been her poor mothers fate—never as a governess! It was in that fearful struggle of condition I first knew her. I continued, year after year, to hear of her; remitting regularly the sums I promised,—doubling, tripling them, when fortune favored me with a chance prosperity. The letters spoke of her as well and happy, in humble but sufficient circumstances, equally remote from privation as from the seductions of a more exalted state. I insisted eagerly on my original condition, and hoped some day to hear of her being married to some honest but humble man. It was not often that I had time for self-reproach; but when such seasons would beset me, I thought of this girl, and her poor mother long dead and gone—But let me finish. While I struggled—and it was often a hard struggle—to maintain my side of the compact, selling at ruinous loss acquisitions it had cost me years of labor to obtain, this fellow, this Henderson, was basely betraying the trust I placed in him! The girl, for whose protection, whose safety I was toiling, was thrown by him into the very world for which I had distinctly excepted her; her talents, her accomplishments, her very graces, farmed out and hired for his own profit! Launched into the very sea where her own mother met shipwreck, she was a mere child, sent to thread her way through the perils of the most dissipated society. Hear her own account of it, Repton. Let her tell you what is the tone of that high life to which foreign nobility imparts its fascinations. Not that I want to make invidious comparisons; our own country sends its high tributaries to every vice of Europe! I know not what accident saved her amidst this pollution. Some fancied theory of popular wrongs, she thinks, gave her a kind of factitious heroism; elevating her, at least to her own mind, above the frivolous corruptions around her. She was a democrat, to rescue her from being worse.