The man sat down on the lower step a few moments, quite quiet, crushing his hat up in a slow, steady way, looking up at the mouldy cobwebs on the wall. He got up at last, and went in to Lois. Had she heard? The old scarred face of the girl looked years older, he thought,—but it might be fancy. She did not say anything for a while, moving slowly, with a new gentleness, about him; her very voice was changed, older. He tried to be cheerful, eating his supper: she need not know until to-morrow. He would get out of the town to-night, or—— There were different ways to escape. When he had done, he told her to go; but she would not.
"Let me stay til' night," she said. "I be n't afraid o' th' mill."
"Why, Lo," he said, laughing, "yoh used to say yer death was hid here, somewheres."
"I know. But ther' 's worse nor death. But it'll come right," she said, persistently, muttering to herself, as she leaned her face on her knees, watching,—"it'll come right."
The glimmering shadows changed and faded for an hour. The man sat quiet. There was not much in the years gone to soften his thought, as it grew desperate and cruel: there was oppression and vice heaped on him, and flung back out of his bitter heart. Nor much in the future: a blank stretch of punishment to the end. He was an old man: was it easy to bear? What if he were black? what if he were born a thief? what if all the sullen revenge of his nature had made him an outcast from the poorest poor? Was there no latent good in this soul for which Christ died, that a kind hand might not have brought to life?
None? Something, I think, struggled up in the touch of his hand, catching the skirt of his child's dress, when it came near him, with the timid tenderness of a mother touching her dead baby's hair,—as something holy, far off, yet very near: something in his old crime-marked face,—a look like this dog's, putting his head on my knee,—a dumb, unhelpful love in his eyes, and the slow memory of a wrong done to his soul in a day long past. A wrong to both, you say, perhaps; but if so, irreparable, and never to be recompensed. Never?
"Yoh must go, my little girl," he said at last.
Whatever he did must be done quickly. She came up, combing the thin gray hairs through her fingers.
"Father, I dunnot understan' what it is, rightly. But stay with me,—stay, father!"
"Yoh've a many frien's, Lo," he said, with a keen flash of jealousy. "Ther' 's none like yoh,—none."