“I stumbled and fell against the corner of the mantelpiece and scratched it,” I began wildly, but she stopped me.
“O father, have pity, for I cannot bear to hear you speak what is not true, and—I saw it all.”
Then followed a silence made more dreadful by the darkness which the one ghostly point of light seemed to accentuate.
Presently my daughter spoke again.
“Have you no word of comfort to me before I go? How is it that you who have prevented thousands from doing this very thing yet do it yourself secretly and at the dead of night? If you think it safer to vaccinate yourself, why was I, your child, left unvaccinated, and taught that it is a wicked superstition? Father, father, for God’s sake, answer me, or I shall go mad.”
Then I spoke, as men will speak at the Judgment Day—if there is one—and for the same reason, because I must. “Sit down, Jane, and listen, and, if you do not mind, let it remain dark; I can tell you best in the dark.”
Then, briefly, but with clearness and keeping nothing back, I told her all, I—her father—laying every pitiable weakness of my nature open to my child’s sight; yes, even to the terror of infection that drove me to the act. All this while Jane answered no word, but when at length I finished she said:—
“My poor father, O my poor father! Why did you not tell me all this years ago, when you could have confessed your mistake? Well, it is done, and you were not to blame in the beginning, for they forced you to it. And now I have come to tell you that I am very ill—that is why I am here—my back aches dreadfully, and I fear that I must have caught this horrible smallpox. Oh! had I known the truth a fortnight ago, I should have let Ernest vaccinate me. It broke my heart to refuse him the first thing he ever asked of me. But I thought of what you would feel and what a disgrace it would be to you. And now—you see.
“Turn up the light, for I must go back. I daresay that we shall never meet again, for remember you are not to come into my room. I will not allow you to come into my room, if I have to kill myself to prevent it. No, you must not kiss me either; I daresay that I have begun to be infectious. Good-bye, father, till we meet again somewhere else, for I am sure that we do not altogether die. Oh! now that I know everything, I should have been glad enough to leave this life—if only I had never—met Ernest,” and turning, Jane, my daughter, crept away, gliding up the broad oak stairs back to the room which she was never to quit alive.
As for me, daylight found me still seated in the study, my brain tormented with an agony of remorse and shame which few have lived to feel, and my heart frozen with fear of what the morrow should bring forth.