That child had no doubts, asked herself no question, for she was but too
content to see him with a lustre round his head. Poor dear, good dear,
truest, kindest, dearest, were the only words she had for him, as she
hushed him to rest. She never left him all that night. As if she had done him a wrong which
her tenderness could hardly repair, she sat by him in his sleep, at
times softly kissing him with suspended breath, and calling him in a
whisper by some endearing name. At times she stood aside so as not to
intercept the low fire-light, and, watching him when it fell upon his
sleeping face, wondered did he look now at all as he had looked when he
was prosperous and happy; as he had so touched her by imagining that he
might look once more in that awful time. At the thought of that time,
she kneeled beside his bed again, and prayed, 'O spare his life! O
save him to me! O look down upon my dear, long-suffering, unfortunate,
much-changed, dear dear father!'
Not until the morning came to protect him and encourage him, did she
give him a last kiss and leave the small room. When she had stolen
down-stairs, and along the empty yard, and had crept up to her own
high garret, the smokeless housetops and the distant country hills were
discernible over the wall in the clear morning. As she gently opened the
window, and looked eastward down the prison yard, the spikes upon the
wall were tipped with red, then made a sullen purple pattern on the sun
as it came flaming up into the heavens. The spikes had never looked so
sharp and cruel, nor the bars so heavy, nor the prison space so gloomy
and contracted. She thought of the sunrise on rolling rivers, of the
sunrise on wide seas, of the sunrise on rich landscapes, of the
sunrise on great forests where the birds were waking and the trees were
rustling; and she looked down into the living grave on which the sun
had risen, with her father in it three-and-twenty years, and said, in
a burst of sorrow and compassion, 'No, no, I have never seen him in my
life!'