“Nay, dear father,” returned Alice, in a merry tone, “a different treatment from us awaits him, when he arrives.”
Her father heard her not, for he had relapsed once more into a fit of passion, and he walked across the room, stamping violently.
“And I must totter on my cane, at my kind son’s inclination, and he must dance so merrily, to give me pain. Oh! how fondly he is now speaking to his fair partner, and doubtless requesting her not to allow herself to be too much fatigued. He takes her to a recess, lest she be weary with the dance; but his poor old father must watch for him all the night. It matters not how weary I be. No, no, I do my son wrong, great wrong. He wishes me to be at rest,—in my grave. How kind! Nay, daughter, speak not in his favour. Hark to the sounds of revelry around him. Sweet they are to his ears, almost as sweet as my dying words.”
He looked around the room as minutely as if he had anticipated conspirators and ruffians to start forth, at his son’s commission, and take his life. He examined the desk, as if he expected to discover poison purchased for him. He trembled as he took out a brace of pistols, and scarcely dared to ascertain whether they were charged or not. He dusted the books in the library, and glanced over many of the title-pages, as if he were certain to lay hold of a treatise on the duty and necessity of parricide. He would not allow the ladies to speak, but he harshly interrupted them. They seemed to be like thoughts in his own mind, which were unwelcome, and which, therefore, he had the power and the right of forbidding and preventing.
“If he should not return,” he muttered as he paced more calmly across the room, “my executors will not be troubled with his name in the will, and this may ease the dog of a good bone; yes, very prudent of the young man to stay from home, very.”
“Father!” exclaimed Alice.
“Father me not,” he returned furiously, “or mock me with the name but a little longer. Oh—” and tears flowed down his cheeks as he went to the door, “no dreams of gold to night, no money bags; a halter around my son’s neck, and that son a rebel!”
“Father, weep not. All shall yet be well with James. I cannot endure these tears, you once told me that you had not one; that although your hopes were gone for ever, you had not a tear to give them; that you had not mourning apparel to attend them to their grave!”