Of course, I bear in mind that you are of
age, and can therefore please yourself, but if you choose to claim the
strict letter of the law, and act without consideration for your
father's feelings, you must not be surprised if you one day find that
I have claimed a like liberty for myself.--Believe me, your
affectionate father, G. PONTIFEX."
I found this letter along with those already given and a few more which I
need not give, but throughout which the same tone prevails, and in all of
which there is the more or less obvious shake of the will near the end of
the letter. Remembering Theobald's general dumbness concerning his
father for the many years I knew him after his father's death, there was
an eloquence in the preservation of the letters and in their endorsement
"Letters from my father," which seemed to have with it some faint odour
of health and nature.
Theobald did not show his father's letter to Christina, nor, indeed, I
believe to anyone. He was by nature secretive, and had been repressed
too much and too early to be capable of railing or blowing off steam
where his father was concerned. His sense of wrong was still
inarticulate, felt as a dull dead weight ever present day by day, and if
he woke at night-time still continually present, but he hardly knew what
it was.
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