“Could they bring you to forgive me for all the pain and suffering I have caused you?”
She drew a little sharp breath. “We need never speak of that again. It is behind us.”
“But it is beginning to be very present with me,” he answered gravely. “Lately my eyes have been opened to many things. Some day I may find it in my power to tell you how. I have wronged you cruelly and unjustly. I would give much to make atonement—but one can never atone. One can only crave forgiveness—and pity for a blind man. I feel I can ask it of you now. Since you have been here you too have shown me things I never knew of. For nearly two years I have given you every reason to hate me. You have put all aside, treated me with a sister's gentleness, given me all your sympathy and tenderness. I am not accustomed to perceive large and generous natures.... I will make a confession. In my morbid arrogance and folly, I put myself upon a pedestal and regarded you, God forgive me, as something beneath me. You are as far above me as he whom we buried today. I had to tell you.”
For a few moments she could not find words to reply. She had never known him to humble himself like this. It was hard to reconcile him with the grim, pitiless man who had sat opposite her on that nightmare journey from London.
“I did hate you—bitterly,” she said at last. “I don't think I do so now. It is easy to say 'I forgive you,' but I don't quite know what it implies. As for one of us being higher than the other, you are a great physician, and I am just an ignorant girl with a miserable set of unregulated emotions—”
“You should thank God for them,” he interrupted.
“They haven't brought me much happiness,” she said, with a little shrug of her shoulders.
“See, I am frank! No, I won't say I forgive, but I'll think kindly of you, Syl, I promise.”
“It is all I dare hope for,” he said. And so the enmity came to an end.
For the next two or three days, Sylvester was busy with his father's affairs. The will provided for a large sum to be paid to Usher, another to Roderick, while Sylvester was the residuary legatee, charged with a yearly allowance to Miss Lanyon and certain minor bequests. But after deducting the legacies to the Ushers, there was nothing left in the estate but Woodlands itself, and that was heavily mortgaged, and the mortgage had been bought up by Usher. Sylvester reviewed his own financial position.