Our father had not
yet descended. When he did, it was with loud cries and piteous
ejaculations. Word had gone upstairs and surprised him in the room
with my mother. I recollect wondering in all childish simplicity
why he wrung his hands so over the death of a man he so hated and
feared. Nor was it till years had passed and our mother had been
laid in the grave and the house had settled into a gloom too heavy
and somber for Reuben to endure, that I recognized in my father the
signs of a settled remorse. These I endeavored to account for by
the fact that he had been saved from what he looked upon as political
death by the sudden but opportune decease of his best friend. This
caused a shock to his feelings which had unnerved him for life.
Don't you think this the true explanation of his invariably moody
brow and the great distaste he always showed for this same library?
Though he would live in no other house, he would not enter that
room nor look at the gloomy settle from which the general had fallen
to his death. The place was virtually tabooed, and though, as the
necessity arose, it was opened from time to time for great
festivities, the shadow it had acquired never left it and my father
hated its very door until he died. Is it not natural that his
daughter should share this feeling?'
"It was, and I said so; but I would say no more, though she cast me
little appealing looks which acquired an eery significance from the
pressure of her small fingers on my arm and the wailing sound of
the wind which at that moment blew down in one gust, scattering the
embers and filling the house with banshee calls.
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