Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/207

 You were then still a child--as a child, my soothing angel. A year or so more my daughter, to whom all my pride of House--all my hope of race, had been consigned--she whose happiness I valued so much more than my ambition, that I had refused her hand to your young Lord of Montfort--puppet that, stripped of the millinery of titles, was not worthy to replace a doll!--my daughter, I folded her one night in my arms,--I implored her to confide in me if ever she nursed a hope that I could further--knew a grief that I could banish; and she promised--and she bent her forehead to my blessing--and before daybreak she had fled with a man whose very touch was dishonour and pollution, and was lost to me for ever. . . . Then, when I came hither to vent at my father's grave the indignant grief I suffered not the world to see, you and your mother (she who professed for me such loyal friendship, such ineffaceable gratitude), you two came kindly to share my solitude--and then, then you were a child no more!--and a sun that had never gilt my life brightened out of the face of the Caroline of old!" He paused a moment, heeding not her bitter weeping; he was rapt from the present hour itself by the excess of that anguish which is to woe what ecstasy is to joy--swept along by the flood of thoughts that had been pent within his breast through the solitary days and haunted nights, which had made the long transition state from his manhood's noon to its gathering eve. And in that pause there came from afar off a melodious, melancholy strain--softly, softly borne over the cold blue waters--softly, softly through the sere autumnal leaves--the music of the magic flute!

"Hark!" he said, "do you not remember? Look to that beech-tree yonder! Summer clothed it then! Do you not remember! as under that tree we stood--that same, same note came, musical as now, undulating with rise and fall--came, as if to interpret, by a voice from fairyland, the beating of my own mysterious heart. You had been pleading for pardon to one less ungrateful--less perfidious--than my comforter proved herself. I had listened to you, wondering why anger and wrong seemed banished from the world; and I murmured, in answer, without conscious thought of myself: 'Happy the man whose faults your bright charity will admonish--whose griefs your tenderness will chase away! But when, years hence, children