Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/84

 eyes burning with the slow fire that had lain nineteen years asleep at the bottom of them, told his son the story of his life—of Rachel and of her father and her father's curse, of what she had given up and suffered for him, and of how he had repaid her with neglect, with his mother's contempt, and with his own blow. Then of her threat and his flight and his coming to that island; of his meeting with 'Liza, of his base marriage with the woman and the evil days they spent together; of their child's birth, and his own awful resolve in his wretchedness and despair; and then of the woman's death, wherein the Almighty God had surely turned to mercy what was meant for vengeance. All this he told, and more than this, sparing himself not at all. And Michael listened with a bewildered sense of fear and shame, and love and sorrow, that may not be described, growing hot and cold by turns, rising from his seat and sinking back again, looking round the walls with a chill terror, as the scenes they had witnessed seemed to come back to them before his eyes, feeling at one moment a great horror of the man before him, and at the next a great pity, and then clutching his father's huge hands in his own nervous fingers.

"Now you know all," said Stephen Orry, "and why it is not for me to go back to her. There is another woman between us, God forgive me, and dead though she is, that woman will be there for ever. But she who is yonder, in my own country, if she is living, is my wife. And Heaven pity her, she is where I left her—down, down, down among the dregs of life. She has no one to protect and none to help her. She is deserted for her father's sake, and despised for mine. Michael, will you go to her?"

The sudden question recalled the lad from a painful reverie. He had been thinking of his own position, and that even his father's name, which an hour ago he had been ashamed to bear, was not his own to claim. But Stephen Orry had never once thought of this, or that the dead woman who stood between him and Rachel also stood between Rachel and her son.

"Promise me, promise me," he cried, seeing one thing only—that Michael was his son, that his son was as himself, and that the woman who was dead had been as a curse to both of them.

But Michael Sunlocks made him no answer.

"I've gone from bad to worse—I know that, Michael. I have done in cold blood what I'd have trembled at when she was by me. Maybe I was thinking sometimes of my boy even