“Could he not be permitted to share the imprisonment of his father, Sir Geoffrey Peveril?” He forgot not, on this occasion, to add the surname of his house.
The warder, an old man of respectable appearance, stared, as if at the extravagance of the demand, and said bluntly, “It is impossible.”
“At least,” said Peveril, “show me where my father is confined, that I may look upon the walls which separate us.”
“Young gentleman,” said the senior warder, shaking his grey head, “I am sorry for you; but asking questions will do you no service. In this place we know nothing of fathers and sons.”
Yet chance seemed, in a few minutes afterwards, to offer Peveril that satisfaction which the rigour of his keepers was disposed to deny to him. As he was conveyed up the steep passage which leads under what is called the Wakefield Tower, a female voice, in a tone wherein grief and joy were indescribably mixed, exclaimed, “My son!—My dear son!”
Even those who guarded Julian seemed softened by a tone of such acute feeling. They slackened their pace. They almost paused to permit him to look up towards the casement from which the sounds of maternal agony proceeded; but the aperture was so narrow, and so closely grated, that nothing was visible save a white female hand, which grasped one of those rusty barricadoes, as if for supporting the person within, while another streamed a white handkerchief, and then let it fall. The casement was instantly deserted.
“Give it me,” said Julian to the officer who lifted the handkerchief; “it is perhaps a mother’s last gift.”
The old warder lifted the napkin, and looked at it with the jealous minuteness of one who is accustomed to detect secret correspondence in the most trifling acts of intercourse.
“There may be writing on it with invisible ink,” said one of his comrades.
“It is wetted, but I think it is only with tears,” answered the senior. “I cannot keep it from the poor young gentleman.”