The simple evening meal stood untasted upon the table. The strong winds of deep emotion were sweeping over his face. The bitterest time of all his stout, laborious life was standing forth before him in its deadly coloring of cruel wrong and terrible bereavement. Not now the sanctity of tenderness wherewith her gentle memory made all things holy round it; but the bitter, blind agony of yonder dark hour of her death, was swelling in the heart of Edith Dacre’s forlorn and faithful husband.
The look of her wan face as she tottered up the bare paths of yonder hills, seeking a place to die in; the last faint whisper of her voice that forgave her hard and haughty kinswoman, and bade God bless him and the child; vivid, in bitter pain and anguish, they came into his heart, as he laid his face down into his clasped hands and wept—those few terrible tears of stern manhood which express to us the uttermost agony of grief.
After a time he grew calmer, though Edith started to see the pale face, still moved with its extremity of emotion, which her father raised to her before he spoke.
“Edith,” he said, hoarsely, “I have never dared to tell you—never dared for terror of myself: yet I say the Lord forgive her—the Lord pardon the proud woman, as she did who is in His heaven long years ago. My Edith! my blessed one!”
“Father,” said Edith, “tell me not if it moves you thus: indeed I did not know any thing; but, father, spare yourself.”
“Edith,” said Master Field, proceeding with fixed composure, like one reading words which he had conned so often that he knew them at last ‘by heart,’ “they were near kinswomen, daughters of two brethren: yonder haughty lady was the heir; Edith had naught but the riches of her own noble heart. The proud cousin ruled with the strong hand of a tyrant; the gentle one was an orphan, alone in this chill earth: and in the house of her fathers Edith Dacre was a slave!
“Ah! Edith, thou knowest grief—thou knowest not the hard sorrows of thy sweet mother’s youth!
“And so she gave her gentle hand to me, and we were at peace and joyous for one blessed while. Thou wert born then, in our glad poverty, Edith: I dare not look back upon its wondrous sunshine—I dare not!
“But it was an evil time! Yonder hapless king and the archbishop were failing in their unrighteous power; and suddenly, when we thought no evil, we were driven, by some of the king’s followers, from our quiet home—for the war was raging then. It was a bitter winter—stern and cold, like the power that persecuted us; and underneath a chill sky, Edith, they drove us forth homeless: thy mother with the faint rose only budding in her cheek, and thou new-born!
“What could we do? I?—I would have toiled—I would have suffered; I would have taken upon me the uttermost yoke that mortal neck ever bore for ye both; but every door was closed upon us—no man dared shelter the forlorn Puritan; no kind heart offered refuge to the fainting fragile mother—the hunted Puritan’s wife.