Read CHAPTER XXIX - FATHER AND DAUGHTER of Mabel's Mistake , free online book, by Ann S. Stephens, on ReadCentral.com.

General Harrington had no power to comfort the poor creature at his feet. More deeply moved than he had been for years, the strangeness of his own feelings paralyzed his action. But the hand to which Lina clung grew cold in her grasp, and over his face stole an expression of sadness, the more touching because so foreign to its usual apathy.

“Father oh, my heart breaks with the word are you indeed my father?” cried Lina, lifting her pale face upward and sweeping her hair back with a desperate motion of the hand.

“Poor child poor child!” muttered the old man compassionately.

“What can I do? what shall I do? It will kill me! It will kill us both. Oh, Ralph, Ralph, if I had but died yesterday!” cried the poor girl, attempting to rise, but falling back again with a fresh burst of grief.

The old man stood gazing to harden his heart striving to compose the unusual tremor of his nerves, but all in vain. Sorrow, regret, and something almost like remorse smote him to the soul, for he had once been a man of strong passions, and the ice of his selfishness again broken up, the turbid waters rose and swelled in his bosom, with a power that all the force of habit could not resist. He bent down and lifted the girl from his feet, trembling slightly, and with a touch of pity in his voice.

“It is useless and foolish to take any misfortune in this manner, child.”

“Child!” Lina shuddered at the word. She shrunk away from his hand, arose without his help, and staggered backward with a feeling of unutterable repulsion.

He saw the quiver of pain in her features, and his soul hardened once more. She had not met the feeling of tenderness, so new, and, for the moment, so exquisite to himself, and it withered away like a hot-house blossom.

“This is a new and strange relation to us both,” he said, seating himself, and regarding her gravely. “Of course it involves many important and painful questions. Up to this day you have been to Mrs. Harrington and myself a daughter in everything but the name!”

Lina wrung her hands, wildly moaning: “That name! Oh, heavens! how can I bear that name unless he should have given it to me. Now, now just as it sounded so sweet, it separates us for ever. This unholy name of child!”

General Harrington moved in his chair with a gesture of annoyance, but Lina, growing still more impassioned, came toward him, wringing her small hands impetuously.

“You are my father God forgive you! But there is yet another to curse or bless me with her claims where and whom is my mother? Is Mrs. Harrington indeed the parent she has always seemed to me?”

The General waved his hand with a dissenting gesture.

“Do not question me upon a subject that must be painful to us both. This is no time to answer you.”

“No time, when you uproot every hope of my life and present a future black with improbable things? Up to this day, that dear lady was enough. I had no desire to ask about father or mother. They told me I was an orphan’s destiny, and overlooked by all the world, if the dear ones under this roof only loved me. I had no other place on earth, and now, what am I? an impostor, cast upon the charity of the dear lady my birth has wronged.”

General Harrington arose, and advancing toward Lina, took her hands in his. The poor little hands quivered like wounded birds in his clasp, and she lifted her eyes with a piteous and pleading look that no human heart could have withstood.

“Ah! you are trying me? It isn’t true?” she said, with a gleam of hope and hysterical sobs.

“No! it is all real, far too real, Lina! Do not deceive yourself. I would not wound you thus for an aimless experiment. You are indeed my child!”

“Your child, really really your own child? Oh, I cannot understand it! Ralph my brother, Ralph!”

Lina started as if some new pang had struck her, and then drew away her hands with a gesture of passionate grief.

“Ralph, my own brother, and older than I am, for he is older oh, this is terrible.”

“You will see,” said General Harrington, speaking in a composed voice, that seemed like a mockery of her passionate accents “you will see by this how necessary it is that what I have told you should be kept secret from my wife and child. Your peculiar relations with my son rendered it imperative. I have intrusted you with a secret of terrible importance. You can imagine what the consequences would be, were your relationship to myself made known.”

“I will not tell. Oh! thank God, I need not tell!” cried Lina wildly; “but then, Ralph? what will he think how will he act? Ralph, Ralph my brother! Oh, if I had but died on the threshold of this room!”

“Be comforted,” said the General, in his usual bland voice, for the scene had begun to weary him. “You will soon get used to the new position of things.”

“But who will explain to Ralph? What can I say? how can I act? He will not know.”

“Ralph is a very young man. He will go into the world, and see more of society. This is his first fancy I will take care that he is more occupied. The world is full of beautiful women.”

Lina turned deadly pale. The cruel speech struck her to the soul.

The old man saw it, but worldly philosophy made him ruthless. “I will crush the boy out of her heart,” he said, inly, “to be rude here is to be merciful.”

“You must forget Ralph,” he said, and his voice partook of the hardness of his thoughts.

“I cannot forget,” answered the girl, with a faint moan, “but I will strive to remember that that he is my brother!”

The last words came to her lips almost in a cry. She shuddered all over, and the name of brother broke from her with a pang, as if her heart-strings snapped with the utterance.

“Can I go away?” she said, at last, creeping like a wounded fawn slowly to the door.

“Not yet,” answered the old man. “You must first comprehend the great necessity there is for composure and silence. Not a word of this must be breathed under my roof now or ever. My own tranquillity and that of Mrs. Harrington are at stake, to say nothing of your own. I have told you a momentous secret. Let it be sacred.”

“Oh! the terrible burden of this secret! Must I carry it for ever? Even now I go out from your presence like a guilty thing, and yet I am not guilty.”

“No one was talking of guilt, I imagine,” answered the General, with a slight flush of the forehead. “The whole thing is certainly an annoyance, and in one sense, a misfortune, perhaps. But guilt is an unfeminine word, and I regret that you could have used it.”

Lina wrung her hands in desperation.

“I could not help it. This misery has found me so unprepared.”

“Misery! Indeed, young lady, it seems to me that few women would consider it so great an evil to have the blood of a Harrington in her veins,” said the General, stung in the inner depths of his vanity by her words, and losing all pity in his wounded self-love.

“But I am a Harrington without a name a daughter without parent a beggar upon the charity of one to whom my existence is an insult! Would you have me grateful for this?” cried Lina, with all the grief and fire of her young nature in arms against the cold-blooded composure of the man who so quietly called her child.

“I would have you prudent, silent, and at all events, more lady-like in your expressions; with well-bred people, a scene is always revolting, and it pains me that a daughter of mine can be led into the intemperance of action and speech that has marked this interview.”

The General glanced with a look of cool criticism at the excited girl as he spoke. Her pale, tearful face, the dishevelled masses of hair falling upon her shoulders, and the almost crouching attitude that a sudden sense of shame had left her in, outraged his fastidious taste, and the old habits of a life swept over his new-born tenderness. Feeling, if not elegantly expressed, always shocked the old gentleman, and for the moment, shame and tears had swept Lina’s beauty all away. She might have been picturesque to an artist, but General Harrington was not an artist only a fastidious, selfish old man, whose eyes always led what little of heart he possessed.

“Can I go, sir? I am faint the room is growing dark. I wish, sir, I I”

The poor girl attempted to move toward the door, as she uttered this broken protestation; but the sight utterly left her eyes and, instead of the entrance, she tottered toward the General, with her hands extended as if to catch at some support, and fell forward, resting her poor white face upon the folds of his Oriental dressing gown that fell around his feet.

“This is very embarrassing,” muttered the General, jerking the gorgeous folds of his gown from beneath the head of his child, and scattering her hair, in a thousand glossy tresses, over the floor. “What is to be done now? I suppose the religious people would call this sowing dragon’s teeth with a vengeance. I wish the girl had more coolness; there is no managing events against weak nerves and hysterics but she must be soothed; at this rate, we shall have the whole house in commotion. Lina, my child, make an effort to be calm. Look up, I am not angry with you!”

The old man was so encased and wrapped in self-love, that he really believed his own severe words had alone dashed the strength from those young limbs, and that a little gentle encouragement would make all right again. So, stooping downward, he laid his soft, white hand, upon Lina’s head, as the last words were uttered; and, when this failed, made an effort to lift her from the floor. But the leaden weight of utter insensibility rendered more effort necessary, and, at last really frightened, he arose and lifted the insensible girl in his arms.

That moment, as her pale face lay upon his bosom, and her loosened hair fell in floods over his arm, the door softly opened, and Agnes Barker looked in.

“Did you ring, General? I heard a bell ring somewhere.”

“No, I did not ring, young lady,” answered General Harrington, sharply, “but this young lady has been over-fatigued someway, or was taken suddenly ill as I was speaking of her studies.”

A faint smile crept over Agnes’ lips, but she checked it in an instant, and moved forward with an air of gentle interest.

“She has studied very hard of late, no wonder her strength gave way,” suggested Agnes, softly smoothing the hair back from Lina’s forehead.

There seemed to be fascination in the movement of those treacherous fingers, for they had scarcely touched her brow, when Lina started to life with a shudder, as if the rattlesnake of the hill had sprung upon her unawares.

Casting one wild look upon the female, and another upon the General, she drew from his arm, with a sensation of loathing that made her faint again.

“Let me go to my room I must be alone!” she said, with a hand pressed upon either temple. “The air of this place drives me frantic: so close so dreary so so”

She moved away wavering in her walk, but making feeble motions with her hand, as if to repel all assistance. Thus faint, pale, and almost broken-hearted, the poor girl stole away, to weep over her new-born shame.

“She seems very ill,” said Agnes, softly, “very ill!”

“You have allowed her studies to prey upon her health,” said General Harrington, seating himself and fixing his cold, clear eyes on the face of his questioner. “I must hereafter more directly superintend her education in person. You will have the goodness to inform Mrs. Harrington of this sudden indisposition.”

Agnes changed color. The self-poise of this old man of the world, baffled even her eager curiosity. She had expected that he would desire her to keep the whole scene secret; and when he quietly told her to reveal it to his wife, and took a resenting tone, as if she had herself been the person in fault, her astonishment was extreme. The General saw his advantage, and improved upon it. After softly folding the skirts of his dressing-gown over his knees, and smoothing the silk with his palm, he took up a volume from the table, and adjusted the gold glasses to his eyes with more than usual deliberation. Agnes looked at him steadily, baffled, but not deceived, till his thoughts seemed completely buried in the volume. As she gazed, the evil of her half-smothered passion broke out in her glance; and, as the General languidly raised his eyes from the book, they met hers.

“Is there anything you wait for?” he inquired, meeting that fierce gaze with his cold eyes. “Ah, I had forgotten, my people may drive the carriage round please say as much.”

Agnes left the room, biting her lips till they glowed again, and with her hand clenched in impatient fury. As she closed the door, General Harrington laid down his book with an impatient gesture.