“I am afraid it was!”
“But you—when you knew—when at last she told you what I had been taught—didn’t you see yourself how cruel it was?”
Sir Geoffrey was silent. He did not wish to own to Dorothy, what he was forced to acknowledge to himself, that his mother had deceived him as egregiously as she had his wife; that, in pursuing her own revengeful and selfish ends, she had gone near to wrecking both their lives. But something, some part of her work was bound to become known; and he had reluctantly to see that the intercourse between his wife and his mother could never be anything but strained.
“I had been led to believe,” admitted he, “that your hatred of me was so great, your fear of me too, that even the idea that I had died would not affect you long.”
She shuddered, and abruptly withdrew her hand from his. “Dorothy, forgive me. I never meant that you should bear the burden so long. When you rebelled, and insisted on going away from the place where my mother had put you, I had been sent abroad for my health. When I came back, you were gone, and my mother told me you were travelling abroad. But I was already hungering for a sight of you, anxious to see you, to find out whether there was really no prospect of reconciliation for us. And as I found my mother unwilling to help me, I went away, but not abroad as she thought. I had found out where you were, and I determined to settle down near you, and to keep watch for an opportunity of approaching you, and finding out that one thing which was more important than anything else in life to me—whether my young wife was ready to forgive her old husband, and to welcome him back to life.”
At these words he paused. Dorothy, her face glowing with deep feeling, went down on her knees and lifted her swimming eyes to his.
“If you could have known—If you could have looked into my heart!” she whispered.
“Ah! my darling, how could I know? I used to watch you from the lane, waiting for hours for what glimpse I could catch of your face through the trees. Then one night, when I was prowling about the place, thinking of you, it came into my head that if I could look on your face while you slept, and call to you, I might speak to you while you were half awake, and tell you what was in my heart and prepare you for finding out that I was alive. So I climbed up to your window, and looked in.”
“Ah! That was what I thought was a dream! I saw you!”
“Yes. You were not asleep. You looked at me with such a stare of horror and alarm, that I was afraid of the effect of my own act, and I dropped down to the ground. But some one looked out from an upper window—it was your housemaid, Annie; the next day I met her, and, seeing that she recognized me as the person she had seen the night before, I told her who I was. Fortunately, she had seen my portrait hanging in a room of the house, a locked room, she told me; so that she was ready to believe me.”