"Sir!" interrupted the young man, by a strong effort suppressing the resentment these taunting words fired in his breast from breaking through the limits of filial respect. "Far be it from me, to expect such things at your hands. No, truly, the very husks of the fields _would_ be far sweeter to my taste than the begrudged bread eaten in my father's house. And, refused as I am the just and reasonable demand I have made to-night--determined as you are to show the cruelly childish dependence to which you have reduced me, willingly would I embrace the other alternative, and by the sweat of my brow, unaided by you, gain my daily subsistence, were it not for the one consideration which draws me back, and renders me powerless to resist--my mother."
"Come, come, Sir; no more of this," interrupted Mr. Trevor impatiently, wincing consciously--as he generally did from any allusion of the kind--at this observation of the zealous son, as if he feared the reflection on his own conduct which it implied. "No doubt, as you have now found that I am not to be threatened out of another thousand pounds to-night, you have plenty of considerations in reserve to reconcile your dainty stomach to the loaves and fishes so cruelly forced upon you, in preference to the husks to which it so nobly aspired. There--you had better go and learn to practise, first, the duty, and obedience, and all that you will have to preach to us bye and bye. Let me hear," in a tone of taunting irony, "what shall be your first text."
"Fathers, provoke not your children to anger!" was the reply which thrilled in low, deep accents from the young man's voice through the dusky apartment. But the servant for whom Mr. Trevor had some minutes before rang impatiently, entering the next moment with lights, the impression, whatever might have been its nature, which it made upon the hearer, was dissipated, and a conclusion put to one of those dark, painful interviews such as it is our unpleasing task to record, which within that long, low library were enacted. Alas! more dark and dreadful still are those which have to follow.
Poor Mary Seaham! how would your gentle spirit have quailed with shuddering dread, if a vision of what had there been witnessed had dimly passed before your sight--those calm, sweet eyes there fixed with such trustful and admiring confidence, upon that venerable old man--have shrunk with horror and aversion, could "the light of other days" but have revealed in all its naked hideousness, the spirit--which now chained and incapacitated in its decrepitude and weakness--had once worked with such hateful power within that aged form; but what even this, to the knowledge of other things which it might also have revealed--the close and active part which he--who then sat by her side, as an angel of light to her infatuated eyes--had taken in some of these deeds of darkness.