oubted the tale; he felt it was
true; knew it as well, now, as if he had been privy to it all along. His
own child! And dead too. Dying beside Nicholas, loving him, and looking
upon him as something like an angel. That was the worst!

They had all turned from him and deserted him in his very first need.
Even money could not buy them now; everything must come out, and
everybody must know all. Here was the young lord dead, his companion
abroad and beyond his reach, ten thousand pounds gone at one blow, his
plot with Gride overset at the very moment of triumph, his after-schemes
discovered, himself in danger, the object of his persecution and
Nicholas's love, his own wretched boy; everything crumbled and fallen
upon him, and he beaten down beneath the ruins and grovelling in the
dust.

If he had known his child to be alive; if no deceit had been ever
practised, and he had grown up beneath his eye; he might have been a
careless, indifferent, rough, harsh father--like enough--he felt that;
but the thought would come that he might have been otherwise, and that
his son might have been a comfort to him, and they two happy together.
He began to think now, that his supposed death and his wife's flight had
had some share in making him the morose, hard man he was. He seemed to
remember a time when he was not quite so rough and obdurate; and almost
thought that he had first hated Nicholas because he was young and
gallant, and perhaps like the stripling who had brought dishonour and
loss of fortune on his head.

But one tender thought, or one of natural regret, in his whirlwind of
passion and remorse, was as a drop of calm water in a stormy maddened
sea. His hatred of Nicholas had been fed upon his own defeat, nourished
on his interference with his schemes, fattened upon his old defiance
and success. There were reasons for its increase; it had grown and
strengthened gradually. Now it attained a height which was sheer wild
lunacy. That his, of all others, should have been the hands to rescue
his miserable child; that he should have been his protector and faithful
friend; that he should have shown him that love and tenderness which,
from the wretched moment of his birth, he had never known; that he
should have taught him to hate his own parent and execrate his very
name; that he should now know and feel all this, and triumph in the
recollection; was gall and madness to the usurer's heart. The dead
boy's love for Nicholas, and the at