We stood together, with our eyes fixed on the portrait.
Without anything said or done on my part to irritate him, he suddenly turned to me in a state of furious rage. “Not a sign of sorrow!” he burst out. “Not a blush of shame! Wretch, you stand condemned by the atrocious composure that I see in your face!”
A first discovery of the odious suspicion of which I was the object, dawned on my mind at that moment. My capacity for restraining myself completely failed me. I spoke to him as if he had been an accountable being. “Once for all,” I said, “tell me what I have a right to know. You suspect me of something. What is it?”
Instead of directly replying, he seized my arm and led me to the table. “Take up that paper,” he said. “There is writing on it. Read--and let Her judge between us. Your life depends on how you answer me.”
Was there a weapon concealed in the room? or had he got it in the pocket of his dressing-gown? I listened for the sound of the doctor’s returning footsteps in the passage outside, and heard nothing. My life had once depended, years since, on my success in heading the arrest of an escaped prisoner. I was not conscious, then, of feeling my energies weakened by fear. But _that_ man was not mad; and I was younger, in those days, by a good twenty years or more. At my later time of life, I could show my old friend that I was not afraid of him--but I was conscious of an effort in doing it.
I opened the paper. “Am I to read this to myself?” I asked. “Or am I to read it aloud?”
In these terms, his daughter addressed him:
“I have been so unfortunate, dearest father, as to displease you, and I dare not hope that you will consent to receive me. What it is my painful duty to tell you, must be told in writing.
“Grieved as I am to distress you, in your present state of health, I must not hesitate to reveal what it has been my misfortune--I may even say my misery, when I think of my mother--to discover.
“But let me make sure, in such a serious matter as this is, that I am not mistaken.
“In those happy past days, when I was still dear to my father, you said you thought of writing to invite a dearly-valued friend to pay a visit to this house. You had first known him, as I understood, when my mother was still living. Many interesting things you told me about this old friend, but you never mentioned that he knew, or that he had even seen, my mother. I was left to suppose that those two had remained strangers to each other to the day of her death.