“You looked and could not remember him,” said John Treverton.
“No. Yet there was something in the face that seemed familiar to me. When he spoke I knew that I had heard the voice before. It seemed kind and friendly, like the voice of someone I had known long ago. He told me to try and realise what change ten years of evil fortune would make in a man’s looks. It was not time only which had altered him, he told me, but the world’s ill-usage, bad health, hard work, corroding sorrow. ‘Make allowance for all this,’ he said, ‘and look at me with indulgent eyes, and then try to send your thoughts back to that old life at Chiswick, and say what part I had in it.’ I did look at him very earnestly, and the more I looked the more familiar the face grew. ‘I think you must be a friend of my father’s,’ I said at last. ‘Poverty has no friends,’ he answered, ‘at the time you remember your father was friendless. Oh, child, child, can ten years blot out a father’s image? I am your father.’ ”
Laura paused, with quickened breathing, recalling the agitation of that moment.
“I cannot tell you how I felt when he said this,” she continued, presently. “I thought I was going to fall fainting at his feet. My brain clouded over; I could understand nothing; and then, when my senses came slowly back, I asked him how this could be true? Did not my father die a few hours after I was taken away by Jasper Treverton? My benefactor had told me that it was so. Then he—my father—said that he had allowed Jasper Treverton to suppose him dead, for my sake; in order that I might be the adopted child of a rich man, and well placed in life, while he—my real father—was waif and stray, and a pauper. Mr. Treverton had received a letter announcing his old friend’s death—a letter written in a feigned hand by my father himself, and had never taken the trouble to inquire into the particulars of the death and burial. He felt that he had done enough in leaving money for the sick man’s use, and in relieving him of all care about his daughter. This is what my father told me. How could I reproach him, Jack, or despise him for this deception, for a falsehood which so degraded him. It was for my sake he had sinned.”
“And you had no doubt as to his identity? You were fully assured that he was that very father whom you had supposed dead and buried ten years before?”
“How could I doubt? He showed me papers—letters—that could have belonged to no one but my father. He gave me my mother’s portrait; and then, through the mist of years, his face came back to me as a face that had been very familiar; his voice had the sound of long ago.”
“Did you give him money on this first meeting?”
“He told me that he was poor, a broken-down gentleman, without a profession, with bad health, and no means of earning his living. Could I, his daughter, living in luxury, refrain from offering him all the help in my power. I begged him to reveal himself to Mr. Treverton—papa, as you know I always called him—but he shrank, not unnaturally, from acknowledging a deception that placed him in such a false position. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I told a lie for your sake, I must stick to it for my own.’ I could not urge him to alter his resolution upon this point, for I felt how hard it would be for him to stand face to face with his old friend under such degrading circumstances. I promised to keep his secret, and I told him that I would send him all the money I could possibly spare out of my income, if he would give me an address to which I might send it.”
“How often did you see him after this?” asked John Treverton.
“Before tonight, only three times. One of those occasions was the night on which you saw me admit him at the garden-door.”
“True,” said Treverton, blushing as he remembered the cruel suspicions that had been awakened in his mind by that secret interview. “And you never told my cousin anything about your father?”
“Never. He made me promise to keep his existence a secret from all the world; and even if I had not been so bound, I should have shrunk from telling Mr. Treverton the cheat that had been practised upon him; for I felt that it was a cheat, however disinterested and generous the motive.”
“A purposeless cheat, I should imagine,” said John, musingly, “for once having promised to take care of you, I should hardly think that my cousin Jasper would have flung you back upon poverty and gloomy days. No, love, once knowing your sweetness, your truthful, loving nature, it would not have been human to give you up.”
“My poor father thought otherwise, unhappily.”
“Dearest love, do not let this error of your father’s cast a shadow upon your life. I, who have known the shifts and straits to which poverty may bring a man, can pity and in
