“My prophetic soul!” he cried. Horror appeared to scarify the wasted features of the boy’s father.
The proud gladness of the well-remembered voice had seemed to break the boy’s father; for those ears it was charged with mockery.
The old school-master, still smiling in the expression of his simple faith, received his former pupil in his arms and took him to his bosom with the ineffable tenderness by which a matron consoles a young girl.
The boy could not understand this painful scene which had been enacted before him. He could form no conception of the manner in which two natures had been wrung by their first meeting after thirty years. He could only discern, and that very dimly, that this aged man bore a similar relation to his father that his father bore to himself. The voice, the look, the bearing of this old man, were precisely those with which he himself was succoured when he awoke shuddering and bathed in terror, and implored his father to strike a match to dispel the phantasies which peopled the darkness of the night.
III
Sunk in bewilderment that one so wise and powerful as his father should be so distressed, the boy seemed to lose the sense of what was taking place around him. But he was recalled to it with a start of dismay; his father was about to leave the room. Involuntarily he turned to the door also, and placed his hand on his father’s arm.
“Do you forget that you are now at school, Achilles?” said his father in a low voice.
The boy could not repress a little quiver of fear.
“You—you are not going to forsake me, my father!” he said.
“What of the resolve you took last night?” said his father. “By whose act is it, beloved one, that you have come to school?”