Dick entered trembling, uncertain whether it was a spirit or his father himself whom he saw before him.
“I want my boy, my Dick, my brave, handsome son. Bring him back to me. You stole him away. Where is he?”
“Father, he is here. Look at me, father. Here I am, Dick—your own son Dick, come back to you. Do you not know me?”
“You? You’re not my son. I’ve got no son. He went away from me. He hates his father—his poor father. I—I—cursed him, when I could have blessed him, and he believed me; and Dick’s gone—gone—gone.” And the poor creature moaned, and covered his crazed head with his hands, while the sharpest pang that ever rent his boy’s heart rent it at that moment with the thought that, perhaps, it was all his fault, and that, had he only forced himself upon him, his father might have forgiven him, all might have gone well, and he would not now have been summoned to the side of the lost wreck before him.
They bore him back to the bed whence he had stolen while those who should have watched him had dozed a little. The next day the Cliffords came over, and took up their abode in the old Hall, where Ada and her mother watched and tended the sufferer as only women can do. Dick was around them and about them, and in and out, and happy and miserable, and all contraries in a breath. Ada alone could set him right, and prevent him from going as mad as his father.
Ralph lay long between the two worlds. His strong reason; once forced out, seemed sullen to return. But it did come at last, and his weak eyes opened on his son, while the heart of the father, with all the pent-up feelings of these years, gushed out over his boy. He had gone away and wandered everywhere. He drank till his brain gave way, and only enough reason was left to lead him home to die.
But death seems a long way off from Ralph Cranstone yet. The saying is oftener than ever on people’s lips, “They’re as fond of each other as the two Cranstones.” Old Cranstone’s face—the Elizabethan—has taken a new scowl, for underneath his picture rises up an ivory crucifix which Ralph himself set there. The snow falls merrily and cheerily; the old oaks smile in their winter garb; no mist rises up from where the river runs. Yes; that’s young Ralph there dashing out of the hall door to meet his uncle and papa; there he goes climbing up uncle’s legs, and shaking him as though he were a telegraph post set up there for him to shake; and, if ever there was a happy couple, that couple is Ada and laughing Dick; and the old Cranstone frowns down on it all out of his dim canvas, for the Cranstone line has gone back to its old faith.
[SONNET]
TO A BOOK OF IMAGINATION; OR, THE LITERATURE OF THE FUTURE.