"I am sorry you feel so badly, Burton. Your father was old, and quite ready to die; surely that should comfort you a little."
"Yes, yes, I know; but please don't talk to me now," he replied, with a gesture of the hand as if to silence her.
He was not sorry for his father's death, but he was willing, nay glad, that she should think so, for he could not tell her of the load of shame from which he should never be free.
"What would she say if she knew?" he asked himself, as he remembered all her pride of blood, and birth, and family. And Grey, his only boy, of whom he was so proud, and who, he fully expected, would some day fill one of the highest posts in the land;—what would he say if he knew his father was the son of a murderer? Burton would not soften the crime even in thought, though he knew that had his father been arrested at the time, he could only have been convicted of manslaughter, and possibly not of that. But he called it by the hard name murder, and shuddered as he thought of Grey.
"But he never will know," he said to himself, "Hannah will keep her promise, and I do not fear Mr. Sanford, though I'd give half my fortune—yes, all—if he had not been told. Grey will never know. But I know, and must meet his innocent eyes, and hear him talk of his grandfather as of saint."
It was at this point in his soliloquy that Grey came slowly in, his face whiter than his father's, with dark rings around his eyes, which were heavy and swollen with the tears he had shed. Grey had not slept at all, for the dreadful words, "I killed a man, and buried him under my bed," were continually ringing in his ears, while the ghost of the murdered man seemed present with him, urging him to vengeance for the wrong, until at last, when he could bear it no longer, he stretched his hands out into the darkness, and cried:
"What is it you want with me? I am not to blame, but if there is any thing I can do to make it right, I'll do it, when I am man. Now, go away and do not torment me so."
Grey knew there was nothing there, knew that the spirits of the departed do not come back again, but he was not in a frame of mind to reason clearly upon anything. He only knew how wretched he was, and that after his promise to redress the dead man's wrongs he grew calmer and more quiet, though there was still the terrible pain and disappointment in his heart, especially when he thought of his Aunt Hannah, whom he had held so high, and whom he now felt he had loved and revered more than any other person.
Remembering all the past, which at times had puzzled him, and which he now understood, he was certain that she had known from the first, and so was an accomplice. Possibly the law would not touch her, he reasoned, as he tried to fancy what might have been had this thing been known to the public; but he remembered having heard of a case which happened in an adjoining town many years before, where, at the instigation of his wife, a man was killed and thrown into his own well. The wife was hung in Worcester with her three accomplices, but a woman who was in the house at the time went free, though she was ever after known as "Old 'Scape Gallows," and shunned accordingly. Was his Aunt Hannah like her? Would people thus call her, if they knew?
"No, no; oh, no," he cried in agony. "She is not like that! Please God, grant that my Aunt Hannah is a good woman still. I cannot lose faith in her, and I love her so much."