Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

ages ago. What is your name, my gentle angel?”

Hailing his softened tone and manner, his daughter fell upon

her knees before him, with her appealing hands upon his breast.

“O, sir, at another time you shall know my name, and who my

mother was, and who my father, and how I never knew their hard,

hard history. But I cannot tell you at this time, and I cannot tell

you here. All that I may tell you, here and now, is, that I pray to

you to touch me and to bless me. Kiss me, kiss me! O my dear, my

dear!”

His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair, which

warmed and lighted it as though it were the light of Freedom

shining on him.

“If you hear in my voiceI don’t know that it is so, but I hope it

isif you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once

was sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch,

in touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay

on your breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep

for it! If, when I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where I

will be true to you with all my duty and with all my faithful service,

I bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your

poor heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!”

She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her

breast like a child.

“If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over, and

that I have come here to take you from it, and that we go to

England to be at peace and at rest, I cause you to think of your

useful life laid waste, and of our native France so wicked to you,

weep for it, weep for it! And if, when I shall tell you of my name,

and of my father who is living, and of my mother who is dead, you

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

learn that I have to kneel to my honoured father, and implore his

pardon for having never for his sake striven all day and lain awake

and wept all night, because the love of my poor mother hid his

torture from me, weep for it, weep for it! Weep for her, then, and

for me! Good gentlemen, thank God! I feel his sacred tears upon

my face, and his sobs strike against my heart. O, see! Thank God

for us, thank God!”

He had sunk in her arms, and his face dropped on her breast: a

sight so touching, yet so terrible in the tremendous wrong and

suffering which had gone before it, that the two beholders covered

their faces.

When the quiet of the garret had been long undisturbed, and

his heaving breast and shaken form had long yielded to the calm

that must follow all stormsemblem to humanity, of the rest and

silence into which the storm called Life must hush at lastthey

came forward to raise the father and daughter from the ground.

He had gradually dropped to the floor, and lay there in a lethargy,

worn out. She had nestled down with him, that his head might lie

upon her arm; and her hair drooping over him curtained him from