A few years of intellectual elevation and
development had made a prodigious change in the poor fugitive stripling
from the convent. Still that no one should know me in my rightful home
was overpowering. I felt like the prodigal son returned. I was a
stranger in the house of my father. I burst into tears, and wept aloud.
When I made myself known, however, all was changed. I who had once been
almost repulsed from its walls, and forced to fly as an exile, was
welcomed back with acclamation, with servility. One of the servants
hastened to prepare my father for my reception; my eagerness to receive
the paternal embrace was so great that I could not await his return;
but hurried after him.
What a spectacle met my eyes as I entered the chamber! My father, whom
I had left in the pride of vigorous age, whose noble and majestic
bearing had so awed my young imagination, was bowed down and withered
into decrepitude. A paralysis had ravaged his stately form, and left it
a shaking ruin. He sat propped up in his chair, with pale, relaxed
visage and glassy, wandering eye. His intellects had evidently shared
in the ravage of his frame. The servant was endeavoring to make him
comprehend the visitor that was at hand. I tottered up to him and sunk
at his feet. All his past coldness and neglect were forgotten in his
present sufferings. I remembered only that he was my parent, and that I
had deserted him. I clasped his knees; my voice was almost stifled with
convulsive sobs. "Pardon - pardon - oh my father!" was all that I could
utter. His apprehension seemed slowly to return to him. He gazed at me
for some moments with a vague, inquiring look; a convulsive tremor
quivered about his lips; he feebly extended a shaking hand, laid it
upon my head, and burst into an infantine flow of tears.
From that moment he would scarcely spare me from his sight. I appeared
the only object that his heart responded to in the world; all else was
as a blank to him. He had almost lost the powers of speech, and the
reasoning faculty seemed at an end. He was mute and passive; excepting
that fits of child-like weeping would sometimes come over him without
any immediate cause. If I left the room at any time, his eye was
incessantly fixed on the door till my return, and on my entrance there
was another gush of tears.
To talk with him of my concerns, in this ruined state of mind, would
have been worse than useless; to have left him, for ever so short a
time, would have been cruel, unnatural. Here then was a new trial for
my affections. I wrote to Bianca an account of my return and of my
actual situation; painting in colors vivid, for they were true, the
torments I suffered at our being thus separated; for to the youthful
lover every day of absence is an age of love lost.
