Robert left her weeping,
and closed the door quietly as if his dead father had been lying in
the room.
He took his way up to his own garret, closed that door too, and sat
down upon the floor, with his back against the empty bedstead.
There were no more castles to build now. It was all very well to
say that he would not believe the news and would pray for his
father, but he did believe them--enough at least to spoil the
praying. His favourite employment, seated there, had hitherto been
to imagine how he would grow a great man, and set out to seek his
father, and find him, and stand by him, and be his son and servant.
Oh! to have the man stroke his head and pat his cheek, and love
him! One moment he imagined himself his indignant defender, the
next he would be climbing on his knee, as if he were still a little
child, and laying his head on his shoulder. For he had had no
fondling his life long, and his heart yearned for it. But all this
was gone now. A dreary time lay before him, with nobody to please,
nobody to serve; with nobody to praise him. Grannie never praised
him. She must have thought praise something wicked. And his father
was in misery, for ever and ever! Only somehow that thought was not
quite thinkable. It was more the vanishing of hope from his own
life than a sense of his father's fate that oppressed him.
He cast his eyes, as in a hungry despair, around the empty room--or,
rather, I should have said, in that faintness which makes food at
once essential and loathsome; for despair has no proper hunger in
it.
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