Now that his cousin was no longer to be feared as a rival, he felt that it would be both safe and politic, to treat him with a degree of consideration. This course would be likely to mislead suspicion, if any should be excited, when it was found, as it soon would be, that his cousin shared no portion of his father’s princely estate.
“My uncle sleeps?” he said, inquiringly, as he entered the chamber.
“Yes,” said Robert, solemnly, lifting up a wan face from the bed-clothes in which it was buried; “the sleep that knows no waking.”
Apparently much shocked at this intelligence, Lewis started back with an ejaculation of sorrow.
“I ought not to feel surprised,” he said, in a low voice; “it is an event which I have been expecting and fearing for many weeks. Yet its actual coming finds me unprepared.”
With his mournful gaze intently fixed upon the old man’s face, Robert paid little heed to his cousin’s words. Thoughts of the long weary years that had intervened since he parted from his father, then in the strength and pride of that manhood, upon which he himself was just entering, and the changes that had since come over each, till the present sad moment brought them together, crowded upon him with a force which he could not resist, and he sat there, looking straight before him, vainly endeavoring to reconcile the past with the present, till he was tempted to think the past eighteen years but a dream, from which he would ere long awake.
It did not take him long to recover from that delusion.
As he lifted his eyes he met his own reflection in the mirror opposite. That was no young man’s face that met his gaze. The freshness of youth, had given place to the grave careworn look of later years. The once dark hair was threaded here and there with silver. The smooth brow was sown with premature wrinkles. The cheek had lost its bloom, and was now thin and sallow. In all this there was no deception. But even if this had not been sufficient, he had but to look towards the bed, to realize how time had passed. That thin, shrunken old man who lay there—was that his father? No, there was no mistaking all this; these years of estrangement were no vain imaginings; they were all too sad realities.
And there, but a few steps from him, sat, with a look of hypocritical sorrow, the man who had lent his best efforts to widen the breach, of which he had been the cause, and throw up a permanent wall of separation between the father and the son. He had changed least of the three. There was the same plausible smile, the same crafty look about the eyes that seldom met your gaze. There were no wrinkles to be seen on his brow. Neither had his heart changed. It was as full of subtlety and evil thoughts and plans as ever.
Lewis Rand had changed least of the three, yet, of them all, he was farthest removed from the freshness and simplicity of childhood, that had never been his. He was one of those who seem never to have been young.