He saw the movement, and into his eyes flashed a look so mournful, so filled with longing that I was thrilled to the heart. The next moment he threw himself upon his knees by the side of my bed, and cried out tensely:
"Oh, my darling child, don't shrink from me. You will kill me. Don't you see? Can't you guess? I am your father!"
I looked at the elderly man kneeling beside my bed, and my brain whirled with the unreality of it all. The "man of mystery," the "Quester" of Broadway, the elderly soldier of fortune, about whose reputed wealth and constant searching of faces wherever he was the idle gossip of the city's Bohemia had whirled--to think that this man was the father I had never known, the father, alas! whom I had hoped never to know.
Everything was clear to me now--the reason for his staring at me when he first caught sight of me in the Sydenham Hotel, his trailing of my movements until he had found out my name and home, the introduction he obtained to Dicky, and through him to me, his emotion at hearing my mother's name, his embarrassing attentions to me ever since--the explanation for all of which had puzzled me had come in the choking words of the man whose head was bowed against my bed, and whose whole frame was shaking with suppressed sobs.
I felt myself trembling in the grip of a mighty surge of longing to gather that bowed gray head into my arms and lavish the love he longed for upon my father. My heart sang a little hymn of joy. I, who had been kinless, with no one of my own blood, had found a father!
And then, with my hand outstretched, almost touching my father's head, the revulsion came.
True, this man was my father, but he was also the man who had made my mother's life one long tragedy. All my life I had schooled myself to hate the man who had deserted my mother and me when I was four years old, who had added to the desertion the insult of taking with him the woman who had been my mother's most intimate friend. My love for my mother had been the absorbing emotion of my life, until she had left me, and because of that love I had loathed the very thought of the man who had caused her to suffer so terribly.
My father lifted his head and looked at me, and there was that in his eyes which made me shudder. It was the look of a prisoner in the dock, waiting to receive a sentence.