FATHER AND DAUGHTER.
There was no longer a shadow of doubt that Mr. Grey and Magdalen bore to
each other the relation of father and child. He had been satisfied with
far less testimony than Magdalen required, and even she was satisfied at
last, though she suggested the propriety of ascertaining from Roger if
his remembrances of the woman who had left her with him tallied with
Mrs. Storms’ description of Mrs. Grey as she was when she left
Cynthiana. To this Mr. Grey assented, and proposed that as personal
interviews were always more satisfactory than letters, Guy should go to
Schodick, leaving himself and Magdalen to rest a day or so in
Cincinnati, and then return to Beechwood, where Guy would join them with
his report. Magdalen had half hoped he might go himself, though she knew
how he must shrink from a meeting with Roger Irving, and mingled with
her happiness in having found both parents and sister was a keen sense
of pain as she thought how the gulf between herself and Roger was
widened by the discovery of her lineage.
“Roger will hate me now, perhaps,” she said to herself, when alone in
her room at the hotel she sat down to rest and tried to realize her
position.
Guy was going early the next morning before she was up, and if she would
send any message to Roger it must be written that night. Once she
thought to write him a long letter, begging him for her sake and
Alice’s, whom he was sure to love, to forgive her father all the wrong
he had done, and to come to them at Beechwood, where he would receive a
cordial welcome. But after a moment’s reflection she felt that she was
hardly warranted in writing thus. His cordial welcome from all parties
was not so certain. Mr. Grey had not intimated a wish to see him or
hinted at anything like gratitude for all Roger had done for her. It
would be pleasanter both for Roger and her father never to meet. She
could not invite him to Beechwood and so with a gush of tears she took
her pen and wrote to him hastily:
“MR. IRVING: Can you forgive me when you hear who I am, and will you
try to think of me as you did in the days which now seem so very far
in the past. I have been your ruin, Roger. I have brought to you
almost every trouble you ever knew, and now to all the rest I must add
this, that I am the child of your worst enemy, Arthur Grey. Don’t hate
me for it, will you? Alice, who is much better than I, would say it
was God’s way of letting you return good for evil. I wish you would
think so, too, and I wish I could tell you all I feel, and how
grateful I am to you for what you have done for me. If I could I would
repay it, but I am only a girl, and the debt is too great ever to be
cancelled by me. May Heaven reward you as you deserve.
“Your grateful MAGDALEN.
“P. S.—Mr. Seymour will tell you the particulars of my strange story.
You will like him. There is not a drop of Grey blood in his veins.”
This was Magdalen’s letter, which she handed to Guy in her father’s
presence when she went to say good-night to the two gentlemen in the
parlor.
“Will you write to Mr. Irving, too?” she asked Mr. Grey, who shook his
head, while a look of embarrassment and pain flitted across his face.
“Not now,—some time perhaps I may. I am truly grateful to him, and Guy
must tell him so. Guy will know just what to say. I leave it in his
hands.”
Mr. Grey was not quite like himself that night, and when next morning
Magdalen met him at breakfast, he still seemed abstracted and
absent-minded, and but little inclined to talk. When breakfast was over,
however, he went with her to her room, and sitting down beside her
grasped her hands in his, and said:
“Magdalen, my child, I never expected to see this day,—never thought
there was so much happiness in store for me,—a happiness I have not
deserved, and which still is not unmixed with pain and humiliation.
Magdalen, my daughter,” he continued, “there is something between us
which should not be between a father and his child. I feel it in your
manners, and see it in your face, and hear it in your voice. What is it,
Magdalen?”
He was talking very kindly, and sadly too, and the tears glittered in
Magdalen’s eyes, but she did not reply. She could not tell him all the
hard things she had written against him in her heart, before she knew
him to be her father, but he guessed them in part, and continued:
“Penelope told you something of your mother’s story. I wonder if she
told you all?”
“Yes, all that I ever care to hear,” Magdalen replied. “I know of her
clandestine marriage, her wretched life at Beechwood, of their taking
Alice from her, and of—of your cruel neglect of her.”
She said the last hesitatingly, for there was something in the blue eyes
fastened upon her which prevented her saying as hard things as she felt.
“Yes, it’s all true, and more,” Mr. Grey replied. “Penelope could not
tell you as bad as it was, for she never knew all. I did neglect your
mother when she needed me the most. I liked my ease. I could not endure
scenes. I was afraid of mother. I acted a coward’s part, and Laura
suffered for it. She was beautiful once,—oh, so beautiful when I first
met her in her sweet young girlhood! She was much like you, and I loved
her as well as I was capable of loving then. I had been thwarted and
crossed, and had done things for which I have always been sorry, but
never as sorry as since I have known you were my child, for there is
something in your face which seems continually to reproach me for the
past, and until I have made you my confession, I feel that there cannot
be perfect confidence between us. I think I had seen you before you came
to Beechwood.”
“Yes, in Belvidere, at Mrs. Irving’s grave, though I did not know who
you were. I had not heard of you _then_.”
She knew about Jessie,—Mr. Grey was sure of that, and with something
between a sigh and a groan, he said:
“You have heard of that sad affair too, I see; but perhaps you don’t
know all, and how I was deceived.”
“Yes, I know all. I have seen Mrs. Irving’s letter—the one she wrote on
board the ‘Sea Gull,’ and to which you added a postscript. Mr. Grey, why
did you write so coldly? Why did you express no sorrow for what you had
done? Why did you leave a doubt of Jessie to sting and torment poor
Roger, the truest, the best man that ever lived?”
Magdalen was confronting her father with poor Jessie’s wrongs, and he
felt that, if possible, she resented them more than those done to her
mother.
“I was a fiend, a demon in those days,” he said. “I hated the old man
who had won the prize I coveted so much. I did not care how deeply I
wounded him. I wanted him to feel as badly as I felt when I first knew I
had lost her. I was angry with fate, which had thwarted me a second time
and taken her from me just as I thought possession secure. I did not
despair of coaxing her to go with me at last,—that is, I hoped I might,
for I knew her pliant nature; but death came between us, and even in
that terrible hour, when the water around me was full of drowning,
shrieking wretches, I cursed aloud when I saw her golden hair float on
the waves far beyond my reach, and then go down for ever.”
He shuddered as if with cold, was silent a moment, and then went on:
“I loved Jessie Morton as I have never loved a woman since, not even
your mother. I went to Belvidere just because she had once lived there.
I met you in the graveyard, and was struck with your eyes, which
reminded me of Laura. I never dreamed you were my child, but I was
interested in you, and made you a part of the little pencil sketch I
drew of the yard. That picture has often excited Alice’s curiosity, for
it was hung in my room at home. When you came and I heard you were from
Millbank I hid the sketch away, lest you should see it and recognize the
place and wonder how I came by it. You see I am telling you everything,
and I may as well confess that when Penelope told me you were from
Millbank I wished you had never come to us. We usually hate what we have
injured, and anything connected with the Irvings has been very
distasteful to me, and I could not endure to hear the name.”
“But you would like Roger; he is the best, the noblest of men!” Magdalen
exclaimed, so vehemently that her father must have been dull indeed if
he had failed to see how strong a hold Roger Irving had on Magdalen’s
affections.
He did see it, but could not sympathize with her then, or at once lay
aside all his olden prejudice against the Irvings, and it would be long
before Magdalen would feel that in her love for Roger she had her
father’s cordial sympathy.
“I have no doubt you speak truly,” he said, “and some time, perhaps, I
may see him and tell him myself that his mother was pure, and good, and
innocent as an angel; but now I wish to talk of something else, to tell
you of my former life, so you may know just the kind of father you have
found.”
Magdalen would rather not have listened to the story which followed, and
which had in it so much of wrong, but there was no alternative. Mr. Grey
was resolved upon a full confession, and he made it, and when the
recital was finished, he said:
“I have kept nothing from you. I would rather you should know me as I
am. I have told you what I could never tell to Alice. She could not bear
it; but you are different. Alice leans on me, while something assures me
that I can lean on you. I am growing old. I have a heavy burden to bear.
I want you to help me; want you to trust me; to love me, if you can. I
have sinned greatly against your mother; have helped to make her what
she is. But I have tried to be kind to her these many years; and I ask
you, her child and mine, to for give all that is past and try to love
me, if only ever so little. Will you, Magdalen?”
He held his hands toward her, and Magdalen took them in hers, and by the
kisses and tears dropped upon them, Arthur Grey knew that there was a
better understanding between himself and Magdalen than had existed an
hour ago; that she knew the worst there was to know of him, and would,
in time, see and appreciate the better side of his character, and with
this he was content, and seemed much like himself, the courtly, polished
gentleman, whose attentions were almost lover-like, and who showed in
every look and action how thoroughly he believed in and how fast his
love and interest was increasing for the beautiful girl who had been so
conclusively proved to be his daughter.