"Father," said Henri, "you and I are different; and I can understand that you, an old man, in your great goodness and transcendental sense of duty, cannot understand how I feel and think and act. Still, I do not believe that I have corrupted Addie and I am convinced that it was a good impulse that suggested to Constance and me to tell our child about our past at once and not to wait until he was a year or two older. Tell me if you think that he looks like a child whose imagination has been defiled. Tell me if you do not think, on the contrary, that he is a strong-minded boy who suffered from those slanders, when they reached him, simply because he did not know the truth, and who now, knowing the truth, loves both his parents with his clear, candid soul and is no longer in doubt, but knows."
The old man slowly shook his head with the tall, ivory forehead, while his gnarled hands trembled:
"Henri, you can thank God if your child, whose purity you have put to so severe a test, emerges from that test unstained."
Van der Welcke was silent, out of respect. He felt himself, notwithstanding his love, so far removed from his father that his heart was wrung and he thought:
"Will Addie ever, ever be so far removed from me?..."
CHAPTER XXXIV
The old man often reverted to that conversation:
"Henri, can you imagine me, your father, speaking to you, when you were thirteen, about a sin, a crime I had committed?"
No, Van der Welcke could never have imagined it! He was sorry now that he had told his father so much, seeing how shocked the old man was. And, though he tried to find soothing words, in order to calm his father after that shock, still everything that he said sounded too cynical, too modern, too flippant almost; and he no longer answered, but preferred to avoid the subject, when the old man returned to it daily, shaking his head and making his comments. And Van der Welcke was obliged to smile when his father often closed those comments with the remark: