“No, no. Don’t, pray don’t, speak like that, father. Think of what I must feel. I’d lay down my life to save you both, but it seems so horrible that my brother should die for that of which he is innocent.”
The old man wrested himself from her grasp, and paced the cell like some caged wild creature, seeking to be free.
“I cannot bear it,” he exclaimed. “Heaven help me for a wretched weak man. Why has this complication come to tempt me? Claire, I would have died—without a murmur, without a word, but this dangling before me the means of escape is too much. Yesterday, I did not fear death. To-day, I am a coward. I see before me the hideous beam, the noosed rope, the executioner, and the hooting crowd, hungry to see me strangled to death, and I fear it, I tell you, for the hope of life has begun to burn strongly again now that Fred has spoken as he has.”
“Father!”
“Yes; you shrink from me, but you do not know. Claire, I speak to you as I could speak to none else, for you have known so much from the beginning. You know how I have suffered.”
“Yes, yes,” she said mournfully.
“You know how I have shrunk and writhed in spirit to see you loathe me as you have, and look upon me as something unutterably base and vile. Have I not suffered a very martyrdom?”
“Yes, father, yes,” sighed Claire.
“And heaven knows I would not have spoken. I would have gone boldly to the scaffold, and died, a sacrifice for another’s crime. But now that he has confessed—now that he denounces himself, and I see life before me once again, the desire to live comes so strongly to this poor weak creature that my lips seem to be unsealed, and I must—I must have your love, Claire, as of old.”
“Father!” cried Claire with a horrified look, as if she doubted his reason.