“You will not curse me,” wailed the tremulous voice from the bed; “I have your promise.”
“I can not understand how Heaven could let your lips remain silenced all these long, agonizing years, if your story be true. Why, yourself told me my wife and child had both died on that never-to-be-forgotten night, and were buried in one grave. How could you dare steep your lips with a lie so foul and black? Heaven could have struck you dead while the false words were yet warm on your lips!”
“I dared not tell you, master,” moaned the feeble voice, “lest the shock would kill you; then, after you recovered, I grew afraid of the secret I had dared to keep, and dared not tell you.”
“And yet you knew that somewhere in this cruel world my little child was living––my tender, little fair-haired child––while I, her father, was wearing my life out with the grief of that terrible double loss. Oh, woman, woman, may God forgive you, for I never can, if your words be true.”
“I feared such anger as this; that is why I dared not tell you,” she whispered, faintly. “I appeal to your respect for me in the past to hear me, to your promise of forgiveness to shield me, to your love for the little child to listen calmly while I have strength to speak.”
He saw she was right. His head seemed on fire, and his heart seemed bursting with the acute intensity of his great excitement.
He must listen while she had strength to tell him of his child.
“Go on––go on!” he cried, hoarsely, burying his face in the bed-clothes; “tell me of my child!”
“You remember the terrible storm, master, how the tree moaned, and without against the western wing––where your beautiful young wife lay dead, with the pretty, smiling, blue-eyed babe upon her breast?”
“Yes, yes––go on––you are driving me mad!” he groaned.