"My son! my son!" he gasped, "spare me!"
"'Son' and 'father,' are words easily spoken," continued Nameless. "Have you been a father to me? It would be very striking, and altogether like the fifth act of a melodrama, no doubt, for me to overlook your twenty-one years of silence, and with love and tears consent to be your heir. But you have not been my father. My father,—the father of my soul,—Cornelius Berman, lies a corpse to-night. I forgive you, father, but I cannot forget, for I am not the Savior; I am simply a man—"
"Have you no mercy?" faltered the Legate, who stood in the presence of his son like a criminal before his judge. "Do you not know your words are killing me?"
But Carl Raphael, as though all that was dark in his own life, all that was dark in his mother's death-hour, held possession of his soul, would not give his father one chance of justification.
"A man, father, who has known so much suffering, that he now only desires to forget the real world, in the ideal world created by his own pencil; who only desires to turn his back upon wealth and all its hatreds, and win his bread humbly, and away from the world, by the toil of his hand. Mary!—thou who wast true to me, when I slept in the coffin,—thou who wast true to me when I was the tenant of a madman's cell,—Mary! come, let us go."
While the spectators stood like statues,—all, save Randolph, who, with his face from the light, took no notice of the scene,—he took Mary by the hand, and moved toward the door.
With one voice, his father, his sister, Martin Fulmer, called him back.
"Carl! Carl! you must not go!"
"My son! my son!"
"Brother!"