I couldn’t mistake the face. It was burnt into my brain now. This was he, though much older and sadder, and more scarred and lined by age and weather. It was my very first papa. My own papa. I cried silently still. I couldn’t bear to look at it. Then the real truth broke upon me once more. This, and this alone, was in very deed my one real father!
I seized the faded photograph and pressed it to my lips.
“Oh, I know him!” I cried wildly. “It’s my father! My father!”
Some minutes passed before Jack could go on with his story. This rush of emotions was too much for me for a while. I could hardly hear him or attend to him, so deeply did it stir me.
At last I calmed down, still holding that pathetic photograph on the table before me.
“Tell me all about him,” I murmured, sobbing. “For, Jack, I remember now, he was so good and kind, and I loved him—I loved him.”
Jack went on with his story, trying to soothe me and reassure me. The old man introduced himself by very cautious degrees as a person in want, not so much of money, though of that to be sure he had none, as of kindness and sympathy in a very great sorrow. He was a shipwrecked mariner, in a sense: shipwrecked on the sea of Life and on the open Pacific as well. But once he had been a clergyman, and a man of education, position, reputation, fortune.
Gradually as he went on Jack began to grasp at the truth of this curious tale. The worn and battered stranger had but lately landed in London from a sailing vessel which had brought him over from a remote Pacific islet: not a tropical islet of the kind with whose palms and parrots we are all so familiar, but a cold and snowy rock, away off far south, among the frosts and icebergs, near the Antarctic continent. There for twenty long years that unhappy man had lived by himself a solitary life.
I started at the sound.
“For twenty years!” I exclaimed. “Oh, Jack, you must be wrong; for how could that be? I was only eighteen when all this happened. How could my real father have been twenty years away from me, when I was only eighteen, and I remember him so perfectly?”