Mrs. Custis, growing paler, exclaimed:
"Daniel Custis, have you lost everything in that furnace?"
"Everything!"
"And my money, too?"
"Yes."
"Merciful God!"
Before the weak lady could fall Vesta's arm was around her, and her finger on the table-bell. Servants entered and Mrs. Custis was carried out, her daughter following.
When Vesta returned her father was walking up and down the floor with his long silk handkerchief in both hands, weeping bitterly, and speaking broken syllables. She looked at him a moment with all the might of a daughter, first called on to act alone in a great crisis. The feeling she was wont to hold towards him, of perfect pride, had received a blow in her mother's expression: "Your father's habits have mastered him beyond reclamation."
Could this be true; that he, the grand, the kind, the gentleman, was beneath the diver's reach, the plummet's sounding, where light could not pierce, nor Hope overtake? Her father, the first gentleman in Somerset, a drunkard, going ever downward towards the gutter, and no ray of heaven to beam upon his grave!
She saw his danger now: it was written on his face, where the image of God shone dim that had once been crowned there. Hair thinner, and very gray; the rich, dark eyes intimidated, as if manly confidence was gone; the skin no more the pure scroll of regular life written in the healthy fluid of the heart, but faded, yet spotted with alcohol; on the nose and lips signs of coarser sensuality; the large skeleton bent and the nervous temperament shattered. This father had been until this moment Vesta's angel. Now, there might not be an angel in the universe to fly to his rescue. Deep, dreadful humility descended into the daughter's spirit.