He was sorry afterward, bitterly sorry, when he came to reflect on his rashness, and that all her life-long his child must be motherless; but the deed was done—he had driven his wife away in disgrace, and he would not relent enough to recall her.
He took his baby and her nurse, and sailed immediately for the United States. His sister was about changing her home to a distant city, and to her care he committed his little Editha, to be brought up as her own, deeming it wiser to renounce all claim to her than that she should grow up to know of her mother’s folly and sin.
That was what those strange words meant that he uttered upon the night before he died, when his eyes fondly followed Editha from the room, and he had said: “God grant that that sin may never shadow her life.”
After the death of his parents he had left his native town and repaired to the city where his sister, Mrs. Dalton, resided, that he might be near and watch over his child, whom he loved almost to idolatry.
He never sought to obtain a divorce from Estelle, nor cared to marry again; his trust in woman was destroyed, and he lived only to make Editha happy, and amass a fortune to leave her at his death.
How well he succeeded in this we all know; her life up to his death was like a cloudless summer’s day: she had never known a care or a sorrow that he had not lightened; she had never shed a tear in his presence that he had not wiped with the utmost tenderness away.
Aside from what might be considered his unreasonableness and harshness toward his young and erring wife, he was a noble, tender-hearted, upright man, beloved and respected to an unusual degree by all who knew him.
His was a singularly sad and isolated life, brightened only by the occasional presence of the child he dare not own, lest he bring a blight on her otherwise sunny life.
While he lived, Sumner Dalton had not dared to treat her in any but the most gentle and tender manner. She might oppose him in any way that her imperious little will dictated, but he could only hide his anger and irritability by laughing at her wilfulness. But once Richard Forrester’s surveillance removed, his natural tyranny and cruelty came to the surface, causing her much of sadness and suffering, while he even dared to risk her life and happiness to gratify his ignoble passion for revenge upon another.