I ran down the stair with the vile paper in my hand.
“The wicked woman!” I cried. “If she _be_ John's mother, I don't care: she's a devil and a liar!”
“Hush, hush, little one!” said my uncle, with a smile in which the sadness seemed to intensify the sweetness; “you do not _know_ anything against her! You do not _know_ she is a liar!”
“There are things, uncle, one knows without knowing!”
“I should say she was a liar although she told no lie. My uncle is not what she threatens to say he is!”
“But men have repented, and grown so different you would not know them: how can you tell it has not been so with me? I may have been a bad man once, and grown better!”
“I know you are trying to prepare me for what you think will be a shock, uncle!” I answered; “but I want no preparing. Out with your worst! I defy you!”
Ah me, confident! But I had not to repent of my confidence!
My uncle gave a great sigh. He looked as if there was nothing for him now but tell all. Evidently he shrank from the task.
He put his hand over his eyes, and said slowly,--
“You belong to a world, little one, of which you know next to nothing. More than Satan have fallen as lightning from heaven!”
He lay silent so long that I was constrained to speak again.
“Well, uncle dear,” I said, “are you not going to tell me?”
There was absolute silence for, I should think, about twenty minutes. I could not and would not urge him to speak. What right had I to rouse a killing effort! He was not bound to tell _me_ anything! But I mourned the impossibility of doing my best for him, poor as that best might be.
“Do not think, my darling,” he said at last, and laid his hand on my head as I knelt beside him, “that I have the least difficulty in trusting you; it is only in telling you. I would trust you with my eternal soul. You can see well enough there is something terrible to tell, for would I not otherwise laugh to scorn the threat of that bad woman? No one on the earth has so little right to say what she knows of me. Yet I do share a secret with her which feels as if it would burst my heart. I wish it would. That would open the one way out of all my trouble. Believe me, little one, if any ever needed God, I need him. I need the pardon that goes hand in hand with righteous judgment, the pardon of him who alone can make lawful excuse.”