“Stop!” he said, in a low voice—“stay! I can not bear it.”
He rose from his seat and came close to her. He leaned upon his stick heavily, and looked at her with eyes full of that same strange, inexplicable tenderness and compassion. Her eyes seemed fascinated by his, and in her mind there arose a strange bewilderment, an expectation of something she knew not what.
“Edith,” said he, in a sweet and gentle voice, full of tender melancholy—“Edith, it would be sin in me to let you any longer heap up matter for future remorse; and even though I go against the bright hope of my life in saying this now, yet I must. Edith—”
He paused, looking at her, while she regarded him with awful eyes.
“Edith!” he said again—“my—my—child!”
There were tears in his eyes now, and there was on his face a look of unutterable love and unspeakable pity and forgiveness. He reached out his hand and placed it tenderly upon her head.
“Edith,” he said again, “my child, you will never say these things again. I—I do not deserve them. I—am your—your father, Edith!”
At these words a convulsive shudder passed through Edith. He felt her frail form tremble, he saw her head fall, and heard a low sob that seemed torn from her.
She needed no more words than these. In an instant she saw it all; and though bewildered, she did not for a moment doubt his words. But her whole being was overwhelmed by a sudden and a sharp agony of remorse; for she had accustomed herself to hate this man, and the irrepressible tokens of a father's love she had regarded as hypocrisy. She had never failed to heap upon that reverend head the deepest scorn, contumely, and insult. But a moment before she had hurled at him a terrible accusation. At him! At whom? At the man whose mournful destiny it had been all along to suffer for the sins of others; and she it was who had flung upon him an additional burden of grief.
But with all her remorse there were other feelings—a shrinking sense of terror, a recoil from this sudden discovery as from something abhorrent. This her father! That father's face and form had been stamped in her memory. For years, as she had lived in the hope of seeing him, she had quickened her love for him and fed her hopes from his portrait. But how different was this one! What a frightful change from the father that lived in her memory! The one was a young man in the flush and pride of life and strength—the other a woe-worn, grief-stricken sufferer, with reverend head, bowed form, and trembling limbs. Besides, she had long regarded him as dead; and to see this man was like looking on one who had risen from the dead.