And the young man, groaning bitterly--bitterly, in the anguish of his spirit, fell back in his chair--covering his face with his hands.
Yes--a light had indeed broken in upon him, elucidating a terrible mystery in a terrible manner! Lady Georgiana Hatfield had procured the royal pardon:--Lady Georgiana Hatfield must therefore have had strong reasons thus to exert herself in behalf of a convicted felon, who had passed through the hands of the hangman, but had been recalled to life and restored to the world in some wondrous manner. But of what nature were those potent reasons? Naturally did it strike Charles Hatfield that _love_ must have been the cause;--and when he recollected the resemblance which existed between his own father and that Thomas Rainford who had once been his friend and protector, it flashed to his mind that he in whom Lady Hatfield had shown such tender interest--even to the compromising of her fair fame in the eyes of the world,--he for whom she had so far stepped aside from the precise course of female delicacy as to implore the royal pardon,--he it must be who was her husband!
Yes--yes: it was now as clear as the sun at noon-day:--Mr. Hatfield and Thomas Rainford were one and the same individual,--and he--Charles Hatfield--was the son of a highwayman who had been tried--convicted--and ushered through all the ignominious ordeal of the scaffold!
For several minutes the young man sat motionless--crushed, stupefied, astounded by the appalling truth which he had elicited from his fatal investigations into the past:--for several minutes it must have been a mere balancing of chances whether he should awake from that dreadful reverie to the light of reason once more, or suddenly start up a howling, hopeless maniac!
But this latter condition was not to be his frightful doom. By degrees--by very slow degrees, he recovered so much of his self-possession and composure as to be enabled to look his misfortune in the face, and even fall into additional reflections on the subject.
“Yes--Thomas Rainford and Mr. Hatfield are the same individual--and _he_ is my father! It was but little more than nineteen years ago when the trial and the ordeal of the gallows took place--and I am twenty-five! Was my mother--was Lady Hatfield my father’s _wife_ at that time? In other words--am I legitimate? ‘_As God is my judge_,’ said my father yesterday, ‘_she has never been guilty of weakness or frailty_.’ Then what am I to believe? That my father and my mother were married privately in an honourable manner--and that I was the offspring of that lawful union;--then, that my father deserted my mother, and became enamoured of Tamar, whom he took as his mistress;--and, lastly, that after Tamar’s death, my parents were reunited! This--this must be the truth--and therefore my father deceived me not when he so emphatically proclaimed my mother’s virtue and my legitimacy. But--Oh! my God!--well might he have said that _the weightiest reasons had alone induced him and my mother to practise a deception towards myself and the world in respect to the degree of relationship in which I really stood with regard to them_! Yes--for the world perhaps dates the marriage of my parents only from the time when they were reunited a few years after Tamar’s death:--and hence the necessity of calling me their _nephew_! I understand it all now--Oh! yes, I understand it all too well! I am legitimate--but I am the son of a highwayman: my God! how bitterly--bitterly is my curiosity punished this night!”