Tedham nodded, and I took the little paper in turn. The letter was
written in a child's stiff, awkward hand. It was hardly more than a
piteous cry of despairing love. The address was Mrs. Hasketh's, in
Somerville, and the date was about three months after Tedham's
punishment began. "Is that the last you have heard from her?" I asked.
Tedham nodded as he took the letter from me.
"But surely you have heard something more about her in all this time?"
my wife pursued.
"Once from Mrs. Hasketh, to make me promise that I would leave the child
to her altogether, and not write to her, or ask to see her. When I went
to the cemetery to-day, I did not know but I should find her grave,
too."
"Well, it is cruel!" cried my wife. "I will go and see Mrs. Hasketh,
but--you ought to feel yourself that it's hopeless."
"Yes," he admitted. "There isn't much chance unless she should happen to
think the same way you do: that I had suffered enough, and that it was
time to stop punishing me."
My wife looked compassionately at him, and she began with a sympathy
that I have not always known her to show more deserving people, "If it
were a question of that alone it would be very easy. But suppose your
daughter were so situated that it would be--disadvantageous to her to
have it known that you were her father?"
"You mean that I have no right to mend my broken-up life--what there is
left of it--by spoiling hers? I have said that to myself. But then, on
the other hand, I have had to ask myself whether I had any right to keep
her from choosing for herself about it. I sha'n't force myself on her. I
expect to leave her free. But if the child cares for me, as she used to,
hasn't that love--not mine for her, but hers for me--got some rights
too?"
His voice sank almost to a hush, and the last word was scarcely more
than a breathing. "All I want is to know where she is, and to let her
know that I am in the world, and where she can find me. I think she
ought to have a chance to decide."
"I am afraid Mrs. Hasketh may think it would be better, for her sake,
_not_ to have the chance," my wife sighed, and she turned her look from
Tedham upon me, as if she wished me rather than him to answer.
"The only way to find out is to ask her," I answered, non-committally,
and rather more lightly than I felt about it. In fact, the turn the
affair had taken interested me greatly. It involved that awful mystery
of the ties by which, unless we are born of our fathers and mothers for
nothing more than the animals are, we are bound to them in all the
things of life, in duty and in love transcending every question of
interest and happiness. The parents' duty to the children is obvious and
plain, but the child's duty to its parents is something subtler and more
spiritual. It is to be more delicately, more religiously, regarded. No
one, without impiety, can meddle with it from the outside, or interfere
in its fulfilment. This and much more I said to my wife when we came to
talk the matter over after Tedham left us. Above all, I urged something
that came to me so forcibly at the moment that I said I had always
thought it, and perhaps I really believed that I had. "Why should we try
to shield people from fate? Isn't that always wrong? One is fated to be
born the child of a certain father, and one can no more escape the
consequences of his father's misdeeds than the doer himself can. Perhaps
the pain and the shame come from the wish and the attempt to do so, more
than from the fact itself. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon
the children. But the children are innocent of evil, and this visitation
must be for their good, and will be, if they bear it willingly."
"Well, don't try to be that sort of blessing to _your_ children, Basil,"
said my wife, personalizing the case, as a woman must.
After that we tried to account to each other for having consented to do
what Tedham asked us. Perhaps we accused each other somewhat for doing
it.
"I didn't know, my dear, but you were going to ask him to come and stay
with us," I said.
"I did want to," she replied. "It seemed so forlorn, letting him go out
into the night, and find a place for himself, when we could just as well
have let him stay as not. Why shouldn't we have offered him a bed for
the night, as we would any other acquaintance?"
"Well, you must allow that the circumstances were peculiar!"
"But if he was sentenced to pay a certain penalty, and has paid it, why,
as he said, shouldn't we stop punishing him?"
"I suppose we can't. There seems to be an instinctive demand for eternal
perdition, for hell, in the human heart," I suggested.
"Well, then, I believe that your instinct, Basil--"
"Oh, _I_ don't claim it, exclusively!"
"Is a survival of savagery, and the sooner we get rid of it the better.
How queer he seems. It is the old Tedham, but all faded in--or out."
"Yes, he affected me like an etching of himself from a wornout plate.
Still, I'm afraid there's likeness enough left to make trouble, yet. I
hope you realize what you have gone in for, Isabel?"
She answered from the effort that I could see she was making, to brace
herself already for the work before us:
"Well, we must do this because we can't help doing it, and because,
whatever happens, we had no right to refuse. You must come with me,
Basil!"
"I? To Mrs. Hasketh's?"
"Certainly. I will do the talking, but I shall depend upon your moral
support. We will go over to Somerville to-morrow afternoon. We had
better not lose any time."
"To-morrow is Sunday."
"So much the better. They will be sure to be at home, if they're there
at all, yet."
She said they, but I knew that she did not expect poor old Hasketh
really to count in the matter, any more than she expected me to do so.