“If it must be so, dearest—yet indeed, indeed, it is a mistaken duty; do not look on me so beseechingly, I will urge no more. For myself I know I did not merit the joy I had dared to picture; yet still, still to resign it thus, to know you love me spite of all—Sarah, how may I struggle on, with every hope and promise blighted?”
“Do not say so, Reuben. Our Father will not leave you lonely. Seek Him, love Him, and He will fill up all the void which my absence may create; and do not think we part for ever. Oh, Reuben, the love borne in my heart so long can know no cloud or change, and though years may pass on—my first duty be accomplished—yet when it is, and my poor father’s weary course is ended, if you be still free, may I not return to you, all, all your own?”
She lifted up her pale face to his with such a look of confidence and love, that Reuben’s only answer was to fold her to his heart and bid God bless her for such words.
Days passed on, and though all who heard her resolution were against it, though she had to encounter even Miss Leon’s arguments and entreaties that she would forego a purpose as uncalled for as misguided, Sarah never for one moment wavered. Vainly Miss Leon sketched the miseries that would await her in a foreign land; the little chance there was of her even being permitted to be near her father; the little she could do for him, even if they were together. She reasoned well and strongly and even feelingly, but there are times and duties when the heart hears only its own impulses, its own feelings, and must follow them. Had she wavered before she again met her father after his condemnation, which, however, she did not, her first interview would have strengthened her yet more. There was a wild and haggard look about him, a hollow tone and wandering words, that made her at the first moment tremble for his reason.
“Sarah, my daughter! they have banished me from my God! they have sentenced me to return to sin. Better, better had they said I was to die, for then I should have gone direct from you to judgment, and your prayers, your angel words, had turned me from my sin; but they will send me from you, and I shall sin again. I shall fall away from all the good you taught me. With you, with you only I am safe—my daughter, oh, my daughter!”
“And I will not leave you, father—I go with you, not in the same ship, but I will meet you in a strange land. We shall be together there as here. I will not leave you while you need me. Do not look so, father, I have sworn it to my God.”
She threw herself upon his neck, and the sinful but repentant man wept as an infant on her shoulder; and from that hour her dread that his reason was departing never tormented her again.
The evening before Levison’s removal with his fellow-convicts to Portsmouth—the ship awaiting them there—the influence of a larger bribe than usual from Reuben to the turnkey had secured to Sarah a few uninterrupted hours with her father in a separate cell. There was something strange in Levison’s countenance which rather alarmed him when he joined them; it was flushed and excited, and as he walked across the cell his limbs seemed to totter beneath him.
They had not much longer to be together, when an unusual number of footsteps crowded along the passage; and, soon after, the turnkey, a sheriff, and a gentleman whom neither Sarah nor Reuben knew, though he was evidently of their own nation, entered the cell. There was still quite daylight sufficient to distinguish persons and features, and the very instant Levison’s eye caught the stranger, he started with a shrill cry to his feet, endeavoured to spring forward, but failed, and would have fallen had not Reuben caught him in his arms, where he remained in a fit of trembling, which almost seemed convulsion. “Now be quiet, my good fellow, you will do well enough,” whispered the turnkey, as he stepped forward to assist in supporting Levison upon his feet. “Here is this here gemman come to swear to your person, as having seen you in the burial-ground, just as how you said, that there night; proving an alibi, d’ye see. They’ll let you go even now—who’d ha’ thought it?”
“You, said, sir, that you saw and spoke to a man named Isaac Levison, of the Jewish nation, in the burial-ground of your people, on the morning of Wednesday, the 14th of May, exactly as the clock of Mile End Church chimed three,” deliberately began the pompous sheriff, on whose blunted sensibilities the various attitudes of agonized suspense, hope and terror delineated in the group before him excited no emotion whatever. “I have troubled you to come here to see this man, who calls himself by that name, and tells the same tale, seeing, that if you can swear to his person, he must be detained from accompanying the rest of the gang, and undergo a second trial, that your assertion in the court may publicly prove it.”