“I feel painfully that I have taken a liberty with you,” he said, “after the long estrangement between us--for which my want of Christian forbearance is to blame. Forgive it, sir, and forget it. I hope to show that necessity justifies my presumption, in subjecting you to a wearisome journey for my sake.”
Beginning to recover myself, I begged that he would make no more excuses. My interruption seemed to confuse him.
“I wished to say,” he went on, “that you are the one man who can understand me. There is my only reason for asking to see you, and looking forward as I do to your advice. You remember the night--or was it the day?--before that miserable woman was hanged? You were the only person present when I agreed to adopt the poor little creature, stained already (one may say) by its mother’s infamy. I think your wisdom foresaw what a terrible responsibility I was undertaking; you tried to prevent it. Well! well! you have been in my confidence--you only. Mind! nobody in this house knows that one of the two girls is not really my daughter. Pray stop me, if you find me wandering from the point. My wish is to show that you are the only man I can open my heart to. She--” He paused, as if in search of a lost idea, and left the sentence uncompleted. “Yes,” he went on, “I was thinking of my adopted child. Did I ever tell you that I baptized her myself? and by a good Scripture name too--Eunice. Ah, sir, that little helpless baby is a grown-up girl now; of an age to inspire love, and to feel love. I blush to acknowledge it; I have behaved with a want of self-control, with a cowardly weakness.--No! I am, indeed, wandering this time. I ought to have told you first that I have been brought face to face with the possibility of Eunice’s marriage. And, to make it worse still, I can’t help liking the young man. He comes of a good family--excellent manners, highly educated, plenty of money, a gentleman in every sense of the word. And poor little Eunice is so fond of him! Isn’t it dreadful to be obliged to check her dearly-loved Philip? The young gentleman’s name is Philip. Do you like the name? I say I am obliged to cheek her sweetheart in the rudest manner, when all he wants to do is to ask me modestly for my sweet Eunice’s hand. Oh, what have I not suffered, without a word of sympathy to comfort me, before I had courage enough to write to you! Shall I make a dreadful confession? If my religious convictions had not stood in my way, I believe I should have committed suicide. Put yourself in my place. Try to see yourself shrinking from a necessary explanation, when the happiness of a harmless girl--so dutiful, so affectionate--depended on a word of kindness from your lips. And that word you are afraid to speak! Don’t take offense, sir; I mean myself, not you. Why don’t you say something?” he burst out fiercely, incapable of perceiving that he had allowed me no opportunity of speaking to him. “Good God! don’t you understand me, after all?”