Vi read the paragraph wondering. It did not affect her except with surprise. “His mother?” she said; “I never knew——” and then she bethought herself suddenly of all that had passed, and of that fatal attack upon Valentine which had (no doubt) brought on his fever, and which threatened to separate him from her for ever. “Oh, papa!” she cried suddenly, with a flash from her eyes which seemed to scorch the culprit like a gleam of angry yet harmless lightning; then she added, looking at him fixedly, with indignant firmness: “But you are glad of this? glad he is better? glad his mother is found, and that everything will go well?”
Mr Pringle paused a moment looking at her. He was afraid to contradict her. He answered hurriedly, half servilely: “Yes, yes—I’m glad;” then, with a groan—“Vi, I am made a fool of. I am proved a poor, mean, paltry liar; that was never what I meant to be. Perhaps I said more than was right; but it was for justice, Vi—yes, it was for justice, though you may not believe what I say.”
If you consider all that Violet had suffered, you will perceive how hard it was for her all at once to look upon this question impartially, to believe what her father said. She turned away her head from him in natural resentment. Then her tender heart was touched by the tones of wretchedness in his voice.
“Yes,” he said, getting up from his chair, “you may think it was all ill feeling—and so many think; but it was for justice too. And now, apparently, things are turning out as I never expected. I did not believe in this woman, and God knows whether it may not be a cheat still. But if this is true that they are bold enough to put in the newspaper, then,” said Mr Pringle, with a groan, “I’m in the wrong, my dear—I am in the wrong, and I don’t know what to do.”
He sank down again, leaning his head on the table, and hiding his face in his hands. Vi’s heart melted altogether. She put her soft arm round his neck, and bent down her head upon his. She did not feel the bitterness of being in the wrong. It seemed to her innocent soul that there was so easy a way to shake off that burden. She clasped her father round the neck and whispered consolation. “Papa, dear! you have nothing to do but to say this to them. Oh, what makes you think you don’t know what to do? Say you were wrong, and that you are sorry! One is so certain that this must be the right thing.”
He shook her away not unkindly but with a little impatience. “You don’t know—you are too young to know,” he said.
“Papa, can there be any doubt?” said Violet, in the majesty of her innocence. “When one has done wrong, one undoes it, one confesses that it was wicked. What else? Is it not the first lesson one learns in life?” said the girl, serene in perfect certainty, and sadly superior to her age, in what she considered her experience of that existence of which she already knew the sorrows. She stood over him as grave and sweet as an angel, and spoke with entire and childlike confidence in her abstract code. “We all may be wrong,” said Violet, “the best of us; but when we find it out we must say so, and ask pardon of God and of those whom we have wronged, papa. Is there any other way?”
CHAPTER XXXIX.
Of all the persons involved at this crisis, I think the most to be sympathised with was honest Dick, who wrote the letter over which Mrs Pringle pondered out of such a maze and confusion of feeling as seldom arises without personal guilt in any mind. From his very first glimpse of the new personage introduced into his little world—the stranger who had suddenly appeared to him when he went to open his own door to Lady Eskside, standing between him and her, anticipating and forestalling him—a glimmering instinctive knowledge who this stranger was had flashed into Dick’s mind. Already the reader is aware he had thought it probable that Valentine’s father was also his own father, and had endeavoured to account to himself for his mother’s strange behaviour on this score. I cannot quite describe the feelings with which Dick, with his tramp-traditions, regarded such a supposed father. What could “the gentleman,” who had been his mother’s lover, be to him? Nothing, or less than nothing—not “the author of his being,” as our pious grandfathers used to say; but something much more like an enemy, a being half malignant, half insulting, with whom he had nothing to do, and towards whom his feelings, if not those of mere indifference, would be feelings of repulsion and instinctive dislike. He felt no shame on his mother’s account or his own; but for the other who had left that mother and himself to take their chance in the woods or on the streets, he was ashamed of his connection with him, and felt mortified and humbled by the mere suggestion of his existence. So long as he kept out of the way, Dick could refrain from thinking of this unknown parent; but the moment he appeared, he woke a hundred lively emotions in the bosom of his son. Dislike, annoyance, a sense of pride injured, and secret humiliation, came to him at the first glance of Richard Ross. This was his feeling before any hint of the real state of affairs had reached him. The old lord had not made the disclosure that first day, but waited until the crisis of Valentine’s fever was over. Then he called to Dick to go out with him, and there, on the bank of that river which had witnessed all the changes in his fortune, this last and most extraordinary change was revealed to the bewildered young man. Dick’s mind was already excited by the painful interval of suspense which had occurred; and when this revelation was made to him, the confusion in his thoughts was indescribable. That he was Valentine’s brother—not secretly and guiltily, but in the eye of day—that the great house which he had looked upon with so much awe and admiration was his home—that all the accessories and all the realities of wealth and rank were his, actually his—relatives, connections, leisure, money, luxury,—was more than he could understand. He did not believe it at first. He thought the old lord had gone mad, that he had been seized with some sudden frenzy, that he had altogether misconceived the relationship between his son, the gentleman whom Dick disliked and suspected of being his father, and the poor lad who never had known what a father was. “I think I know what you mean. I had got to suppose he was my father for some time,” said Dick, bluntly, “but not in that way. You are mistaken, sir; surely you are mistaken.”
“How could I be mistaken? are there more ways of being your father than one?” said the old lord, half amused by the lad’s incredulity. Dick shook his head; he was better informed than Lord Eskside, who was so much his senior. He knew things which it was impossible the other could know—but how was he to say them? It did not occur to him even now that there was any relationship between the father of Richard Ross and himself, even though he was prepared to believe that he himself was Richard Ross’s son.