He was then removed amidst a murmur of grief, as deep and sincere as was ever expressed for a human being under circumstances of a similar character. After having! entered the prison, he was about to turn along a passage which led to the apartment hitherto allotted to him.
“This way,” said the turnkey, “this way; God knows I would be glad to let you stop in the room you had, but I haven't the power. We must put you into one of the condemned cells; but by —-, it'll go hard if I don't stretch a little to make you as comfortable I as possible.
“Take no trouble,” said Connor, “take no trouble. I care now but little about my own comfort; but if you wish to oblige me, bring me my father. Oh, my mother, my mother!—you, I doubt, are struck down already!”
“She was too ill to attend the trial to-day,” replied the turnkey.
“I know it,” said Connor; “but as she's not here, bring me my father. Send out a messenger for him, and be quick, for I wont rest till I see him—he wants comfort—the old man's heart will break.”
“I heard them say,” replied the turnkey, after they had entered the cell allotted to him, “that he was in a faint at Mat Corrigan's public house, but that he had recovered. I'll go myself and bring him in to you.”
“Do,” said Connor, “an' leave us the moment you bring him.”
It was more than an hour before the man I returned, holding Fardorougha by the arm, and, after having left him in the cell, he instantly locked it outside, and withdrew as he had been desired. Connor ran to support his tottering steps; and wofully indeed did unfortunate parent stand in need of his assistance. In the picture presented by Fardorougha the unhappy young man forgot in a moment his own miserable and gloomy fate. There blazed in his father's eyes an excitement at once dead and wild—a vague fire without character, yet stirred by an incomprehensible energy wholly beyond the usual manifestations of thought or suffering. The son on beholding him shuddered, and not for the first time, for he had on one or two occasions before become apprehensive that his father's mind might, if strongly pressed, be worn down, by the singular conflict of which it was that scene, to that most frightful of all maladies—insanity. As the old man, however, folded him in his feeble arms, and attempted to express what he felt, the unhappy boy groaned aloud, and felt even in the depth of his cell, a blush of momentary shame suffuse his cheek and brow. His father, notwithstanding the sentence that had been so shortly before passed upon his son—that father, he perceived to be absolutely intoxicated, or, to use a more appropriate expression, decidedly drunk. There was less blame, however, to be attached to Fardorougha on this occasion, than Connor imagined. When the old man swooned in the court-house, he was taken by his neighbors to a public-house, where he lay for some minutes in a state of insensibility. On his recovery he was plied with burnt whiskey, as well to restore his strength and prevent a relapse, as upon the principle that it would enable him to sustain with more firmness the dreadful and shocking destiny which awaited his son. Actuated by motives of mistaken kindness, they poured between two and three glasses of this fiery cordial down his throat, which, as he had not taken so much during the lapse of thirty years before, soon reduced the feeble old man to the condition in which we have described him when entering the gloomy cell of the prisoner.
“Father,” said Connor, “in the name of Heaven above, who or what has put you into this dreadful state, especially when we consider the hard, hard fate that is over us, and upon us?”
“Connor,” returned Fardorougha, not perceiving the drift of his question, “Connor, my son, I'll hang—hang him, that's one comfort.”