“And you,” said Fred softly, as he held out his hands; “you, I can remember it well, used to hold these hands together, father, and teach me to say, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.’ Father, have I sinned so deeply as all this?”
“Sinned!” cried the old man starting forward, and catching his son by the throat. “Sinned? Blasphemer! coward! hypocrite! You dare to say this to me! Go, before I try to strangle you, for I cannot contain myself when you are here.”
“Father!” cried Fred, kneeling unresisting as the old man clasped him tightly by the throat, “are you mad?”
“Would to God I were before I had lived to see this day,” cried Denville, still in the same hoarse whisper. “But go—I have done ill enough in my wretched life without adding murder to the wrong. Go, and coward that you are, escape to some far-off land where your crime is not known, and there try and repent, if you can. No, there can be no repentance for the coward who destroys one wretched, helpless life, and then to save his own worthless body—he can have no soul—sends his poor, worn-out, broken father to the scaffold.”
Fred did not move, but gazed pityingly in his father’s face.
“You cannot be a man,” continued Denville, “a man as other men. You do not speak—you do not speak. Fool! Murderer! Do you think that your crime was not known?”
Fred still remained silent, gazing in the convulsed face, with the veins in the temples throbbing, the eyes glaring wildly, and the grey hairs seeming to rise and move.
“Speak, since you have forced it upon me, though I would have gone to the scaffold without a word, praying that my sacrifice might expiate my own child’s crime. Speak, I say: do you still think it was not known?”
Fred Denville remained upon his knees, but neither spoke nor resisted.
“I tell you that when I awoke to the horrors of that night, I said to myself, ‘He is my own son—my own flesh and blood—I cannot speak. I will not speak. I will bear it.’ And I have borne it—in silence. Wretch that you are—listen. I have, to screen you, borne all with my lips sealed, and let that sweet, pure-hearted girl shrink from me, believing—God help me!—that mine was the hand that crushed out yon poor old creature’s life.”