He now contemplated the sleeping figure with a curious blend or mixture of emotions. There was pity in the blend, there was contempt in it, there was something of the respect or reverence due to an ancestor. One does not often get the chance of paying respect to so remote an ancestor as a great-grandfather. The ancestor lay back in his chair, his head turned a little on one side; his face, perfectly calm, had something of the transparent waxen look that belongs to the newly dead.
The young man went on thinking of what he had heard of this old man, who was at once the pride and the shame of the family. No one can help being proud of having a recluse, an anchorite, in the family--it is uncommon, like an early Shakespeare; moreover, the recluse was the head of the family, and lived in the place where the family had always lived from time beyond the memory of man.
He remembered his mother, a sad-faced widow, and his grandmother, another sad-faced widow. A certain day came back to him--it was a few weeks after his father’s early death, when he was a child of seven--when the two women sat together in sorrow, and wept together, and conversed, in his presence--but the child could not understand--and said things which he recalled at this moment for the first time.
“My dear,” said the elder lady, “we are a family of misfortune.”
“But why--why--why?” asked the other. “What have we done?”
The elder lady shook her head. “Things are done,” she said, “that are never suspected. Nobody knows, nobody finds out, but the arm of the Lord is stretched out and vengeance falls, if not upon the guilty, then upon his children and his grandchildren unto the third and fourth generation. It has fallen heavily upon that old man--for the sins of his father, perhaps--and upon us--and upon the children----”
“The helpless, innocent children? Oh! It is cruel.”
These words--this conversation--came back suddenly and unexpectedly to the young man. He had never remembered them before.
“Who did what?” he asked. “The guilty person cannot be this venerable patriarch, because this affliction has fallen upon him and still abides with him after seventy years. But they spoke of something else. Why do these old words come back to me? Ancestor, sleep on.”