“She left her home early this morning—suddenly—no one knows why or wherefore. I am intensely anxious to find her.”
“But why? She has been able to take care of herself very well for the last twenty years. You have not been particularly interested in her all that time. Why should you be anxious to-day?”
“Because I have reason to think that all is not well with her—that her mind is not quite right—and I am full of fear lest she should do something rash.”
“God help her,” sighed Mercy, the pale face growing just a shade whiter. “If you had seen much of her in the years that are gone your fears would not have come so late in the day.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that her mind has been unsettled ever since I was old enough to observe and to understand her. I was little more than a child when I found out that she had brooded upon one great sorrow until all her thoughts were warped—all charity and kindly feeling were dead in her—dead or frozen into a dreadful numbness, a torpor of the soul. She never really loved me—me, her only child, who tried very hard to win her love. God knows how I loved her, having no one else to love. There was always a barrier between us—the barrier of some bitter memory. I could never get near her heart.”
He did not answer for some minutes, but stood up looking out of the window at the dreary prospect of slated roof and smoke-blackened chimney-pot, prospect in which a few red tiles or an old gable-end were as a glimpse of beauty, amidst the all-pervading greyness and cruel monotony of form and hue. He felt a constraint upon him such as he had never felt in all his life before—felt tongue-tied, helpless, paralyzed by a deep sense of shame and self-humiliation before this unacknowledged daughter, who under happier circumstances might have looked up to him and honoured him as the first among men. In this bitter hour the name that he had won for himself in the world, the fortune which his talent had earned for him were as dust and ashes—the bitter ashes beneath the dazzling brightness of the dead sea fruit.
“Why do you stop in this back room, Mercy?” he asked abruptly. “Why do you condemn yourself to look out upon chimney-pots and blackened roofs, when you have all the world to choose from if you like? Why in pity’s name did you refuse my offer of an income?”
“Because I will take nothing from you—nothing—nothing—nothing!”
Her lips closed in a rigid line after that reiterated word. Her eyes looked straight before her, cold, calm, resolute.