What should he do with the boy? Her child?--the child of the woman who had brought infamy on his name, who had taken the heart out of his life; leaving nothing but a harsh and battered husk behind?
The child was like her, too. He had known the first moment he looked on the little face that this was the baby she had stolen away from his home when he thought she was gradually growing to love him, when he thought she had forgotten for ever the villain who had induced her perfidy!
Like her! Good heavens! was this child to live with him always? Was this child, day after day, hour after hour, to remind him by the look in his eyes of all his youthful dreams of love and happiness, and the wildering blow that for a time drove his reason from him and wrecked his life before the voyage was well begun?
That would be intolerable. No man could bear that. Heaven could not expect him to endure such a hell on earth.
He rose with a groan, and began pacing the room up and down.
He was a man slightly below the middle height, somewhat uncouth and awkward in his motions. His shoulders were broad, his figure thin almost to emaciation. He had large and powerful hands, not handsome and soft, but muscular and knotty, like those of a man who had done much physical labour, although he had never performed a day's manual work in all his life. His nose was long and blunt at the end. His cheeks were sunken. There were odd grey streaks in his long, straight hair. He stooped slightly, and was slovenly in his carriage and dress. The colour of his face was dark, almost dusky. His forehead was high and pale.
The mere shell of the man was poor, almost mean. He did not look as though he could fight or work. Beyond the breadth of his shoulders there was no suggestion of bodily strength about him. When he walked his tread lacked firmness. He looked as though the push of a child would knock him down.
But when you had formed a poor opinion of the man, and set him down as a weed, and were prepared to make short work of him morally, or mentally, or physically, and came close to him face to face, and he looked up at you and spoke, you felt confused, abashed. His eyes were dark hazel, large, deep-set, luminous. They seldom moved quickly, they seldom flashed, they seldom laughed. They rarely seemed concerned with the people or things immediately in front of him. They had the awful sadness and far-away look of the Sphinx. They saw not you, nor through you, but beyond you. You became not the object of their gaze, but an interruption in their range. They made you feel that you were in the way. You seemed to be an impertinence interposing between a great spirit in its commune with supernatural and august mysteries.
His voice was slow, deliberate, low in ordinary speech. It was not musical. It had a breathlessness about it which fixed the attention at once of those who heard. It suggested that the words spoken were read from the margin of some mighty page, and that the speaker, if he chose, could decipher the subject of the scroll.
If he raised his voice above this pitch it became uncertain, harsh, grating, discordant. It suggested the unwilling awakening of the man. It seemed to say that he lived at peace, and would that he were left at peace, and that you came unnecessarily, undesired, to rouse and harass him.