"Your father's name was Roland Sefton?" said the drunkard.
"Yes," answered Felix.
"And he was banker of the Old Bank at Riversborough?" he asked.
"Yes," said Felix.
"Then what I've got to say is this," went on the rough, thick voice of the half-drunken man; "and the tale's true, mates. Roland Sefton, o' Riversborough, cheated me out o' all my hard earnings—one hundred and nineteen pounds—as I'd trusted him with, and drove me to drink. I were a steady man till then, as steady as the best of ye; and he were a fine, handsome, fair-spoken gentleman as ever walked; and we poor folks trusted him as if he'd been God Almighty. There was a old deaf and dumb man, called Marlowe, lost six hundred pound by him, and it broke his heart; he never held his head up after, and he died. Me, it drove to drink. That's the father o' the parson who stands here telling you about Jesus Christ, and maybe trusted with your money, as I trusted mine with him as cheated me. It's a true tale, mates, if God Almighty struck me dead for it this moment."
There was such a tone of truth in the hoarse and passionate tones, which grew steadier as the speaker gained assurance by the silence of the audience, that there was not one there who did not believe the story. Even Felix, listening with white face and flaming eyes, dared not cry out that the accusation was a lie. Horrible as it was, he could not say to himself that it was all untrue. There came flashing across his mind confused reminiscences of the time when his father had disappeared from out of his life. He remembered asking his mother how long he would be away, and did he never write to her? and she had answered him that he was too young to understand the truth about his father. Was it possible that this was the truth?
In after years he never forgot that sultry evening, with the close, noisome atmosphere of the hot mission-hall, and the confused buzzing of many voices, which after a short silence began to hum in his ears. The drunkard was still standing in the doorway, the very wreck and ruin of a man; and every detail of his loathsome, degraded appearance was burnt in on Felix's brain. He felt stupefied and bewildered—as if he had received almost a death-blow. But in his inmost soul a cry went up to heaven, "Lord, Thou also hast been a man!"
Then he saw that the cross lay before him in his path. "Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." It had seemed to Felix at times as if he had never been called upon to bear any cross. But now it lay there close before him. He could not take another step forward unless he lifted it up and laid it on his shoulders, whatever its weight might be. The cross of shame—the bearing of another's sin—his father's sin. His whole soul recoiled from it. Any other cross but this he could have borne after Christ with willing feet and rejoicing heart. But to know that his father was a criminal; and to bear the shame of it openly!
Yet he could not stand there longer, fighting his battle, in the presence of these curious eyes so keenly fastened upon him. The clock over the door showed upon its dial only a minute or two gone; but to Felix the time consumed in his brief foretaste of the cross seemed years. He gathered together so much of his self-possession as could be summoned at a moment's notice, and looked straight into the faces of his audience.
"Friends," he said, "if this is true, it is as new to me as it is to you. My father died when I was a boy of ten; and no one had a heart hard enough to tell me then my father was a rogue. But if I find it is true, I'll not rest day nor night till this man has his money again. What is his name?"
"Nixey," called out three or four voices; "John Nixey."
Again Felix's heart sank, for he knew Simon Nixey, whose farm lay nearest to Phebe's little homestead; and there was a familiar ring in the name.
"Ay, ay!" stammered Nixey; "but old Clifford o' the Bank paid me the money back all right; only I'd sworn a dreadful oath I'd never lay by another farthin', and it soon came to an end. It were me as were lost as well as the money."
"Then what do you come bothering here for," asked one of the men, "if you've had your money back all right? Get out with you."
For a minute or two there was a scuffle, and then the drunkard was hustled outside and the door shut behind him. For another half hour Felix mechanically conducted the business of the club, as if he had been in a dream; and then, bidding the members of the little committee good night, he paced swiftly away from his district in the direction of his home.
"But why go home?" Felix stopped as he asked himself this question. He could not face his mother with any inquiry about the mystery that surrounded his father's memory, that mystery which was slowly dissipating like the mists which vanish imperceptibly from a landscape. He was beginning to read his mother's life in a more intelligible light, and all along the clearer line new meanings were springing into sight. The solitude and sadness, the bitterness of spirit, which had separated her from the genial influences of a society that had courted her, was plain to him now at their fountain-head. She had known—if this terrible thing was true—that shame, not glory, was hers; confusion of face, not the bearing of the palm. His heart ached for her more than for himself.
In his heart of hearts, Felix had triumphed greatly in his mother's fame. From his very babyhood the first thought impressed upon his mind had been that his mother was different from other women; far above them. It had been his father who had given him that first impression, but it had grown with strong and vigorous growth from its deep root, through all the years which had passed since his father died. Even his love for Alice had not touched his passionate loyalty and devotion to his mother. He had rejoiced in thinking that she was known, not in England alone, but in other countries into whose language her books had been translated. Her celebrity shone in his eyes with a very strong and brilliant splendor. How could he tell her that he had been thrust into the secret of his father's infamy!
There was only Phebe to whom he could just yet lay open the doubt and terror of his soul. If it was true that her father, old Marlowe, had died broken-hearted from the loss of his money, she would be sure to know of it. His preparations for his journey to-morrow morning were complete; and if he chose there was time enough for him to catch the night train, and start at once for Riversborough. There would be no sleep for him until some of these tormenting questions were answered.
It was a little after sunrise when he reached Riversborough, where with some difficulty he roused up a hostler and obtained a horse at one of the inns. Before six he was riding up the long, steep lanes, fresh and cool with dew, and overhung with tall hedgerows, which led up to the moor. He had not met a living soul since he left the sleeping town behind him, and it seemed to him as if he was in quite a different world from the close, crowded, and noisome streets he had traversed only a few hours ago. In the natural exhilaration of the sweet mountain air, and the silence broken only by the singing of the birds, his fears fell from him. There must be some mistake which Phebe would clear up. It was nothing but the accusation of a besotted brain which had frightened him.
He shouted boyishly when the quaint little cottage came in sight, with a thin column of blue smoke floating upward from its ivy-clad chimney. Phebe herself came to the door, and Hilda, with ruffled hair and a sleepy face, looked out of the little window in the thatched roof. There was nothing in his appearance a few hours earlier than he was expected to alarm them, and their surprise and pleasure were complete. Even to himself it seemed singular that he should sit down at the little breakfast-table with them, the almost level rays of the morning sun shining through the lattice window, instead of in the dingy parlor of his London lodgings.
"Come with me on to the moors, Phebe," he said as soon as breakfast was over.
She went out with him bareheaded, as she had been used to do when a girl at home, and led him to a little knoll covered with short heath and ferns, from which a broad landscape of many miles stretched under their eyes to a far-off horizon. The hollow of the earth curved upwards in perfect lines to meet the perfect curve of the blue dome of the sky bending over it. They were resting as some small bird might rest in the rounded shelter of two hands which held it safely. For a few minutes they sat silent, gazing over the wide sweep of sky and land, till Felix caught sight of a faint haze, through which two or three spires were dimly visible. It was where Riversborough was lying.
"Phebe," he said, "I want you to tell me the naked truth. Did my father defraud yours of some money?"
"Felix!" she cried, in startled tones.
"Say only yes or no to me first," he continued; "explain it afterward. Only say yes or no."
Through Phebe's brain came trooping the vivid memories of the past. She saw Roland again hurrying over the moors from his day's shooting to mount his horse, which she had saddled for him, and to ride off down the steep lanes, with a cheery shout of "Good-night" to her when he reached the last point where she could catch sight of him; and she saw him as his dark form walked beside her pony that night when he was already crushed down beneath his weight of sin and shame, pouring out his burdened heart into her ears. If Felix had asked her this question in London it might have hurt her less poignantly; but here, where Roland and her father filled all the place with the memory of their presence, it wounded her like the thrust of a sword. She burst into a passion of tears.
"Yes or no?" urged Felix, setting his face like a flint, and striking out blindly and pitilessly.
"Yes!" she sobbed; "but, oh, your father was the dearest friend I ever had!"
The sharp, cruel sound of the yes smote him with a deadly force. He could not tell himself what he had expected to hear; but now for a certainty, his father, whom he had been taught to regard as a hero and a saint, proved no other than a rogue.
It was a long time before he spoke again, or lifted up his head; so long that Phebe ceased weeping, and laid her hand tenderly on his to comfort him by her mute sympathy. But he took no notice of her silent fellowship in his suffering; it was too bitter for him to feel as yet that any one could share it.
"I must give up Alice!" he groaned at last.
"No, no!" said Phebe. "I told Canon Pascal all, and he does not say so. It is your mother who cannot give her consent, and she will do it some day."
"Does he know all?" cried Felix. "Is it possible he knows all, and will let me love Alice still? I think I could bear anything if that is true. But, oh! how could I offer to her a name stained like mine?"
"Nay, the name was saved by his death," answered Phebe sadly. "There are only three who knew he was guilty—Mr. Clifford, and your mother, and I. If he had lived he might have been brought to trial and sent to a convict prison; I suppose he would; but his death saved him and you. Down in Riversborough yonder some few uncharitable people might tell you there was some suspicion about him, but most of them speak of him still as the kindest and the best man they ever knew. It Was covered up skilfully, Felix, and nobody knew the truth but we three."
"Alice is visiting my father's grave this very day," he said falteringly.
"Ah! how like that is to Canon Pascal!" answered Phebe; "he will not tell Alice; no, she will never know, nor Hilda. Why should they be told? But he will stand there by the grave, sorrowing over the sin which drove your father into exile, and brought him to his sorrowful death. And his heart will feel more tenderly than ever for you and your mother. He will be devising some means for overcoming your mother's scruples and making you and Alice happy."
"I never ran be happy again," he exclaimed. "I never thought of such a sorrow as this."
"It was the sorrow that fell to Christ's lot," she answered; "the burden of other people's sins."
"Phebe," he said, "if I felt the misery of my fellow-man before, and I did feel it, how can I bear now to remember the horrible degradation of the man who told me of my father's sin? It was a drunkard——"
"John Nixey," she interrupted; "ay, but he caught at your father's sin as an excuse for his own. He was always a drinking man. No man is forced into sin. Nothing can harm them who are the followers of God. Don't lay on your father's shoulders more than his own wrong-doing. Sin spreads misery around it only when there is ground ready for the bad seed. Your father's sin opened my soul to deeper influences from God; I did not love him less because he had fallen, but I learned to trust God more, and walk more closely with Him. You, too, will be drawn nearer to God by this sorrow."
"Phebe," he said, "can I speak to Mr. Clifford about it? It would be impossible to speak to my mother."
"Quite impossible," she answered emphatically. "Yes, go down to Riversborough, and hear what Mr. Clifford can tell you. Your father repented of his sin bitterly, and paid a heavy price for it; but he was forgiven. If my poor old father could not withhold his forgiveness, would our heavenly Father fall short of it? You, too, must forgive him, my Felix."
To forgive his father—that was a strange inversion of the attitude of Felix's mind in regard to his father's memory. He had been taught to think of him with reverence, and admiration, and deep filial love. As Felicita looked back on the long line of her distinguished ancestry with an exaltation of feeling which, if it was pride, was a legitimate pride, so had Felix looked back upon the line of good men from whom his own being had sprung. He had felt himself pledged to a Christian life by the eminently Christian lives of his forefathers.
Now, suddenly, with no warning, he was called upon to forgive his father for a crime which had made him amenable to the penal laws of his country; a mean, treacherous, cowardly crime. Like Judas, he had borne the bag, and his fellow-pilgrims had trusted him with their money; and, like Judas, he had been a thief. Felix could not understand how a Christian man could be tempted by money. To attempt to serve Mammon as well as God seemed utterly comtemptible and incredible to him.
His heart was very heavy as he rode slowly down the lanes and along the highway to Riversborough, which his father had so often traversed before him. When he had come this way in the freshness and stillness of the early morning there had been more hope in his soul than he had been aware of, that Phebe would be able to remove this load from him; but now he knew for a certainty that his father had left to him a heritage of dishonor. She had told him all the circumstances known to her, and he was going to learn more from Mr. Clifford.
He entered his old home with more bitterness of spirit than he had ever felt before in his young life. Here, of all places in the world, clustered memories of his father; memories which he had fondly cherished and graved as deeply as he could upon his mind. He could almost hear the joyous tones of his father's voice, and see the summer gladness of his face, as he remembered them. How was it possible that with such a hidden load of shame he could have been so happy.
Mr. Clifford, though a very old man, was still in full and clear possession of his faculties, and had not yet given up an occasional attention to the business of the bank. He was nearly eighty years of age, and his hair was white, and the cold, stern blue eyes were watery and sunken in their sockets. Some years ago, when Samuel Nixey had given up his last hope of winning Phebe, and had married a farmer's daughter, his mother, Mrs. Nixey, had come to the Old Bank as housekeeper to Mr. Clifford, and looked well after his welfare. Felix found him sitting in the wainscoted parlor, a withered, bent, old man, seldom leaving the warm hearth, but keen in sight and memory, living over again in his solitude the many years that had passed over him from his childhood until now. He welcomed Felix with delight, holding his hands, and looking earnestly into his face, with the half-childlike affection of old age.
"I've not seen you since you became a parson," he said, with a sigh; "ah, my lad, you ought to have come to me. You don't get half as much as my cashier, and not a tenth part of what I give my manager. But there! that's your mother's fault, who would never let you touch business. She would never hear of you taking your father's place."
"How could she?" said Felix, indignantly. "Do you think my mother would let me come into the house my father had disgraced and almost ruined?"
"So you've plucked that bitter apple at last!" he answered, in a tone of regret. "I thought it was possible you might never have to taste it. Felix, my boy, your mother paid every farthing of the money your father had, with interest and compound interest; even to me, who begged and entreated to bear the loss. Your mother is a noble woman."
A blessed ray of comfort shot across the gloom in Felix's heart, and lit up his dejected face with a momentary smile; and Mr. Clifford stretched out his thin old hand again, and clasped his feebly.
"Ah, my boy!" he said, "and your father was not a bad man. I know how you are sitting in judgment upon him, as young people do, who do not know what it is to be sorely tempted. I judged him, and my son before him, as harshly as man could do. Remember we judge hardest where we love the most; there's selfishness in it. Our children, our fathers, must be better than other folk's children and fathers. Don't begin to reckon up your father's sins before you are thirty, and don't pass sentence till you're fifty. Judges ought to be old men."
Felix sat down near to the old man, whose chair was in the oriel window, on which the sun was shining warmly. There below him lay the garden where he had played as a child, with the river flowing swiftly past it, and the boat-house in the corner, from which his father and he had so often started for a pleasant hour or two on the rapid current. But he could never think of his father again without sorrow and shame.
"Sin hurts us most as it comes nearest to us," said old Mr. Clifford; "the crime of a Frenchman does not make our blood boil as the crime of an Englishman; our neighbor's sin is not half as black as our kinsman's sin. But when we have to look it in the face in a son, in a father, then we see the exceeding sinfulness of it. Why, Felix, you knew that men defrauded one another; that even men professing godliness were sometimes dishonest."
"I knew it," he answered, "but I never felt it before."
"And I never felt it till I saw it in my son," continued the old man, sadly; "but there are other sins besides dishonesty, of a deeper dye, perhaps, in the sight of our Creator. If Roland Sefton had met with a more merciful man than I am he might have been saved."
For a minute or two his white head was bowed down, and his wrinkled eyelids were closed, whilst Felix sat beside him as sorrowful as himself.
"I could not be merciful," he burst out with a sudden fierceness in his face and tone, "I could not spare him, because I had not spared my own son. I had let one life go down into darkness, refusing to stretch out so much as a little finger in help, though he was as dear to me as my own life; and God required me yet again to see a life perish because of my hardness of heart. I think sometimes if Roland had come and cast himself on my mercy, I should have pardoned him; but again I think my heart was too hard then to know what mercy was. But those two, Felix, my son Robert, who died of starvation in the streets of Paris, and your father, who perished on a winter's night in Switzerland, they are my daily companions. They sit down beside me here, and by the fireside, and at my solitary meals; and they watch beside me in the night. They will never leave me till I see them again, and confess my sin to them."
"It was not you alone whom my father wronged," said Felix, "there were others besides you who might have prosecuted him."
"Yes, but they were ignorant, simple men," replied Mr. Clifford, "they need never have known of his crime. All their money could have been replaced without their knowledge; it was of me Roland was afraid. If the time could come over again—and I go over and over it in my own mind all in vain—I would act altogether differently. I would make him feel to the utmost the sin and peril of his course; but I would keep his secret. Even Felicita should know nothing. It was partly my fault too. If I had fulfilled my duty, and looked after my affairs instead of dreaming my time away in Italy, your father, as the junior partner, could not have fallen into this snare. When a crime is committed the criminal is not the only one to be blamed. Consciously or unconsciously those about him have been helping by their own carelessness and indolence, by cowardice, by indifference to right and wrong. By a thousand subtle influences we help our brother to disobey God; and when he is found out we stand aloof and raise an outcry against him. God has made every one of us his brother's keeper."
"Then you too have forgiven him," said Felix, with a glowing sense of comfort in his heart.
"Forgiven him? ay!" he answered, "as he sits by me at the fireside, invisible to all but me, I say to him again and again in words inaudible to all but him:
'Even as I hope for pardon in that day,When the great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits,So be thou pardoned.'"
'Even as I hope for pardon in that day,When the great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits,So be thou pardoned.'"
The tremulous, weak old voice paused, and the withered hands lay feebly on his knees as he looked out on the summer sky, seeing nothing of its brightness, for the thoughts and memories that were flocking to his brain. Felix's younger eyes caught every familiar object on which the sun was shining, and knitted them up for ever with the memory of that hour.
"God help me!" he cried, "I forgive my father too; but I have lost him. I never knew the real man."
On the same August morning when Felix was riding up the long lovely lanes to Phebe Marlowe's little farmstead, Canon Pascal and Alice were starting by the earliest boat which left Lucerne for Stansstad, in the dewy coolness of the dawn. The short transit was quickly over, and an omnibus carried them into Stans, where they left their knapsacks to be sent on after them during the day. The long pleasant walk of fourteen miles to Engelberg lay before them, to be taken leisurely, with many a rest in the deep cool shades of the woods, or under the shadow of some great rock. The only impediment with which Alice burdened herself was a little green slip of ivy, which Felix had gathered from the walls of her country home, and which she had carried in a little flower-pot filled with English soil, to plant on his father's grave. It had been a sacred, though somewhat troublesome charge to her, as they had travelled from place to place, and she had not permitted any one to take the care of it off her hands. This evening, with her own hands, she was going to plant it upon the foreign grave of Roland Sefton; which had been so long neglected, and unvisited by those whom he had left behind him. That Felicita should never have made a pilgrimage to this sacred spot was a wonder to her; but that she should so steadily resist the wish of Felix to visit his father's resting-place, filled Alice's heart with grave misgivings for her own future happiness.
But she was not troubling herself with any misgivings to-day, as they journeyed onward and upward through the rich meadows and thick forests leading to the Alpine valley which lay under the snowy dome of the Titlis. Her father's enjoyment of the sweet solitude and changeful beauty of their pathway was too perfect for her to mar it by any mournful forebodings. He walked beside her under the arched aisles of the pine-woods bareheaded, singing snatches of song as joyously as a school-boy, or waded off through marshy and miry places in quest of some rare plant which ought to be growing there, splashing back to her farther on in the winding road, scarcely less happy if he had not found it than if he had. How could she be troubled whilst her father was treading on enchanted ground?
But the last time they allowed themselves to sit down to rest before entering the village, Canon Pascal's face grew grave, and his manner toward his daughter became more tender and caressing than usual. The secret which Phebe had told him of Roland Sefton had been pondered over these many weeks in his heart. If it had concerned Felix only he would have felt himself grieved at this story of his father's sin, but he knew too well it concerned Alice as closely. This little ivy-slip, so carefully though silently guarded through all the journey, had been a daily reminder to him of his girl's love for her old playfellow and companion. Though she had not told him of its destiny he had guessed it, and now as she screened it from the too direct rays of the hot sun it spoke to her of Felix, and to him of his father's crime.
He had no resolve to make his daughter miserable by raising obstacles to her marriage with Felix, who was truly as dear to him as his own sons. But yet, if he had only known this dishonest strain in the blood, would he, years ago, have taken Felix into his home, and exposed Alice to the danger of loving him? Felix was out of the way of temptation; there was no stream of money passing through his hands, and it would be hard and vile indeed for him to fall into any dishonest trickery. But it might be that his children, Alice's children, might tread in the steps of their forefather, Roland Sefton, and pursue the same devious course. Thieves breed thieves, it was said, in the lowest dregs of social life. Would there be some fatal weakness, some insidious improbity, in the nature of those descending from Roland Sefton?
It was a wrong against God, a faithless distrust of Him, he said to himself, to let these dark thoughts distress his mind, at the close of a day such as that which had been granted to him, almost as a direct and perfect gift from heaven itself. He looked into the sweet, tranquil face of his girl, and the trustful loving eyes which met his anxious gaze with so open and frank an expression; yet he could not altogether shake off the feeling of solicitude and foreboding which had fallen upon his spirit.
"Let us go on, and have a quiet dinner by ourselves," said Alice, at last, "and then we shall have all the cool of the evening to wander about as we please."
They left their resting-place, and walked on in silence, as if they were overawed by the snow-clad mountains and towering peaks hanging over the valley. A little way off the road they saw a poor and miserable hut, built on piles of stones, with deep, sheltering eaves, but with a broken roof, and no light except such as entered it by the door. In the dimness of the interior they just caught sight of a gray-headed man, sitting on the floor, with his face hidden on his knees. It was an attitude telling of deep wretchedness, and heaviness of heart; and though neither of them spoke of the glimpse they had had, they drew nearer to one another, and walked closely together until they reached the hotel.
It was still broad daylight, though the sun had sunk behind the lofty mountains when they strolled out again into the picturesque, irregular street of the village. The clear blue sky above them was of the color of the wild hyacinth, the simplest, purest blue, against which the pure and simple white of the snowy domes and pinnacles of the mountain ranges inclosing the valley stood out in sharp, bold outlines; whilst the dark green of the solemn pine-forests climbing up the steep slopes looked almost black against the pale grey peaks jutting up from among them, with silver lines of snow marking out every line and crevice in their furrowed and fretted architecture. Canon Pascal bared his head, as if he had been entering his beloved Abbey in Westminster.
"God is very glorious!" he said, in a low and reverent tone. "God is very good!"
In silence they sauntered on, with loitering steps, to the little cemetery, where lay the grave they had come to seek. They found it in a forlorn and deserted corner, but there was no trace of neglect about the grey unpolished granite of the cross that marked it. No weeds were growing around it, and no moss was gathering upon it; the lettering, telling the name, and age, and date of death, of the man who lay beneath it, was as clear as if it had just come from the chisel of the graver. The tears sprang to Alice's eyes as she stood before it with reverently bowed head, looking down on Roland Sefton's grave.
"Did you ever see him, father?" she asked, almost in a whisper.
"I saw him once," he answered, "at Riversdale Towers, when Felix was still only a baby. He was a finer and handsomer man than Felix will ever be; and there was more foreign blood in his veins, which gave him greater gaiety and simpler vivacity than Englishmen usually have. I remember how he watched over Felicita, and waited on her in an almost womanly fashion; and fetched his baby himself for us to see, carrying him in his own arms with the deft skill of a nurse. Felix is as tender-hearted, but he would not make a show of it so openly."
"Cousin Felicita must have loved him with her whole heart," sighed Alice, "yet if I were in her place, I should come here often; it would be the one place I loved to come to. She is a hard woman, father; hard, and bitter, and obstinate. Do you think Felix's father would have set himself against me as she has done?"
She turned to him, her sad and pensive face, almost the dearest face in the world to him; and he gazed into it with penetrating and loving eyes. Would it not be best to tell the child the secret this grave covered, here, by the grave itself? Better for her to know the truth concerning the dead, than cherish hard and unjust thoughts of the living. Even if Felicita consented, he could not let her marry Felix ignorant of the facts which Phebe had disclosed to him. Felix himself must know them some day; and was not this the hour and the place for revealing them to Alice?
"My darling," he said, "I know why Felicita never comes here, nor lets her children come; and also why she is at present opposed to the thought of Felix marrying. Roland Sefton, her husband, the unhappy man whose body lies here, was guilty of a crime; and died miserably while a fugitive from our country. His death consigned the crime to oblivion; no one remembered it against her and her children. But if he had lived he would have been a convict; and she, and Felix, and Hilda would have shared his ignominy. She feels that she must not suffer Felix to enter our family until she has told me this; and it is the mere thought and dread of such a disclosure that has made her ill. We must wait till her mind recovers its strength."
"What was it he had done?" asked Alice, with quivering lips.
"He had misappropriated a number of securities left in his charge," answered Canon Pascal, "Phebe says to the amount of over £10,000; most of it belonging to Mr. Clifford."
"Is that all?" cried Alice, the color rushing back again to her face, and the light to her eyes, "was it only money? Oh! I thought it was more dreadful than that. Why! we should never blame cousin Felicita because her husband misappropriated some securities belonging to old Mr. Clifford. And Felix is not to blame at all; how could he be? Poor Felix!"
"But, Alice," he said, with a half smile, "if, instead of being buried here, Roland Sefton had lived, and been arrested, and sent to a convict prison for a term of imprisonment, Felicita's life, and the life of her children, would have been altogether overshadowed by the disgrace and infamy of it. There could have been no love between you and Felix."
"It was a good thing that he died," she answered, looking down on the grave again almost gladly. "Does Felix know this? But I am sure he does not," she added quickly, and looking up with a heightened color into her father's face, "he is all honor, and truth, and unselfishness. He could not be guilty of a crime against any one."
"I believe in Felix; I love him dearly," her father said, "but if I had known of this I do not think I could have brought him up in my own home, with my own boys and girls. God knows it would have been a difficult point to settle; but it was not given to my poor wisdom to decide."
"I shall not love Felix one jot less," she said, "or reverence him less. If all his forefathers had been bad men I should be sure still that he was good. I never knew him do or say anything that was mean or selfish. My poor Felix! Oh, father! I shall love him more than ever now I know there is something in his life that needs pity. When he knows it he will come to me for comfort; and I will comfort him. His father shall hear me promise it by this grave here. I will never, never visit Roland Sefton's sin on his son; I will never in my heart think of it as a thing against him. And if all the world came to know it, I would never once feel a moment's shame of him."
Her voice faltered a little, and she knelt down on the parched grass at the foot of the cross, hiding her face in her hands. Canon Pascal laid his hand fondly on her bowed head; and then he left her that she might be alone with the grave, and God.
The miserable, delapidated hut at the entrance of Engelberg, with no light save that which entered by the doorway, had been Jean Merle's home since he had fixed his abode in the valley, drawn thither irresistibly by the grave which bore Roland Sefton's name. There was less provision for comfort in this dark hovel than in a monk's cell. A log of rough, unbarked timber from the forest was the only seat, and a rude framework of wood filled with straw or dry ferns was his bed. The floor was bare, except near the door, the upper half of which usually stood open, and here it was covered with fine chips of box and oak-wood, and the dust which fell from his busy graver, the tool which was never out of his fingers while the light served him. There was no more decoration then there was comfort; except that on the smoke-stained walls the mildew had pencilled out some strange and grotesque lines, as if some mural painting had mouldered into ruin there. Two or three English books alone, of the cheap continental editions, lay at one end of a clumsy shelf; with the few cooking utensils which were absolutely necessary, piled together on the other. There was a small stove in one corner of the hovel, where a handful of embers could be seen at times, like the eye of some wild creature lurking in the deep gloom.
Jean Merle, though still two or three years under fifty, was looked upon by his neighbors as being a man of great, though unknown age. Yet, though he stooped in the shoulders a little, and walked with his head bent down, he was not infirm, nor had he the appearance of infirmity. His long mountain expeditions kept his muscles in full force and activity. But his grey face was marked with many lines, so fine as to be seen only at close quarters; yet on the whole forming a wrinkled and aged mask as of one far advanced in life. In addition to this singularity of aspect there was the extraordinary seclusion and sordid miserliness of his mode of existence, more in harmony with the passiveness of extreme old age, than with the energy of a man still in the prime of his days. The village mothers frightened their children with tales about Jean Merle's gigantic strength, which made him an object of terror to them. He sought acquaintanceship with none of his neighbors; and they avoided him as a heretic and a stranger.
The rugged, simple, narrow life of his Swiss forefathers gathered around him, and hedged him in. They had been peasant-farmers, with the exception of the mountain-pastor his grandfather, and he still well-remembered Felix Merle, after whom his boy had been called. All of them had been men toiling with their own hands, with a never-ceasing bodily activity, which had left them but little time or faculty for any mental pursuit. This half of his nature fitted him well for the life that now lay before him. As his Swiss ancestors had been for many generations toil-worn and weather-beaten men, whose faces were sunburnt and sun-blistered, whose backs were bent with labor, and whose weary feet dragged heavily along the rough paths, so he became. The social refinement of the prosperous Englishman, skin deep as it is, vanished in the coarse and narrow life to which he had partly doomed himself, had partly been doomed, by the dull, despondent apathy which had possessed his soul, when he first left the hospital in Lucerne.
His mode of living was as monotonous as it was solitary. His work only gave him some passing interest, for in the bitterness of his spirit he kept himself quite apart from all relation with his fellow-men. As far as in him lay he shut out the memory of the irrevocable past, and forbade his heart to wander back to the years that were gone. He strove to concentrate himself upon his daily toil, and the few daily wants of his body; and after a while a small degree of calm and composure had been won by him. Roland Sefton was dead; let him lie motionless, as a corpse should do, in the silence of his grave. But Jean Merle was living, and might continue to live another twenty years or more, thus solitarily and monotonously.
But there was one project which he formed early in his new state of existence, which linked him by a living link to the old. As soon as he found he could earn handsome wages for his skilled and delicate work, wages which he could in no way spend, and yet continue the penance which he pronounced upon himself, the thought came to him of restoring the money which had been intrusted to him by old Marlowe, and the other poor men who had placed their savings in his care. To repay the larger amount to which he was indebted to Mr. Clifford would be impossible; but to earn the other sums, though it might be the work of years, was still practicable, especially if from time to time he could make safe and prudent speculations, such as his knowledge of the money-market might enable him to do, so as to insure more rapid returns. At the village inn he could see the newspapers, with their lists of the various continental funds, and the share and stock markets; and without entering at all into the world he could direct the buying in and selling out of his stock through some bankers in Lucerne.
Even this restitution must be made in secret, and be so wrapped up in darkness and stealth that no one could suspect the hand from which it came. For he knew that the net he had woven about himself was too strong and intricate to be broken through without deadly injury to others, and above all to Felicita. The grave yonder, and the stone cross above it, barred the way to any return by the path he had come. But would it be utterly impossible for him to venture back, changed as he was by these many years, to England? It would be only Jean Merle who would travel thither, there could be no resurrection for Roland Sefton. But could not Jean Merle see from afar off the old home; or Phebe Marlowe's cottage on the hill-side; or possibly his mother, or his children; nay, Felicita herself? Only afar off; as some banished, repentant soul, drawing a little nearer to the walls of the eternal city, might be favored with a glimpse of the golden streets, and the white-robed citizens therein, the memory of which would dwell within him for evermore.
As he drew nearer the end he grew more eager to reach it. The dull apathy of the past thirteen years was transformed into a feverish anticipation of his secret journey to England with the accumulated proceeds of his work and his speculations; which in some way or other must find their way into the hands of the men who had trusted him in time past. But at this juncture the bankers at Lucerne failed him, as he had failed others. It was not simply that his speculations turned out badly; but the men to whom he had intrusted the conduct of them, from his solitary mountain-home, had defrauded him; and the bank broke. The measure he had meted out to others had been measured to him again. Whatsoever he had done unto men they had done unto him.
For three days Jean Merle wandered about the eternal frosts of the ice-bound peaks and snow-fields of the mountains around him, living he did not himself know how. It was not money he had lost. Like old Marlowe he realized how poor a symbol money was of the long years of ceaseless toil, the days of self-denial, the hours of anxious thoughts it represented. And besides this darker side, it stood also for the hopes he had cherished, vaguely, almost unconsciously, but still with strong earnestness. He had fled from the penalty the just laws of his country demanded from him, taking refuge in a second and more terrible fraud, and now God suffered him not to make this small reparation for his sin, or to taste the single drop of satisfaction that he hoped for in realizing the object he had set before him. There was no place of repentance for him; not a foot-hold in all the wide wilderness of his banishment on which he could stand, and repair one jot a little of the injury he had inflicted upon his fellow-men.
What passed through his soul those three days, amidst the ice-solitudes where no life was, and where the only sounds that spoke to him were the wild awful tones of nature in her dreariest haunts, he could never tell; he could hardly recall it to his own memory. He felt as utterly alone as if no other human being existed on the face of the earth; yet as if he alone had to bear the burden of all the falsehood, and dishonesty and dishonor of the countless generations of false and dishonorable men which this earth has seen.
All hope was dead now. There was nothing more to work for, or to look forward to. Nothing lay before him but his solitary blank life in the miserable hut below. There was no interest in the world for him but Roland Sefton's grave.
He descended the mountain-side at last. For the first time since he had left the valley he noticed that the sun was shining, and that the whole landscape below him was bathed in light. The village was all astir, and travellers were coming and going. It was not in the sight of all the world that he could drag his weary feet to the cemetery, where Roland Sefton's grave was; and he turned aside into his own hut to wait till the evening was come.
At last the sun went down upon his misery, and the cool shades of the long twilight crept on. He made a circuit round the village to reach the spot he longed to visit. His downcast eyes saw nothing but the rough ground he trod, and the narrow path his footsteps had made to the solitary grave, until he was close to it; and then, looking up to read the name upon the cross, he discerned the figure of a girl kneeling before it, and carefully planting a little slip of ivy into the soil beneath it.
Alice Pascal looked up into Jean Merle's face with the frank and easy self-possession of a well-bred English woman; coloring a little with girlish shyness, yet at the same time smiling with a pleasant light in her dark eyes. The oval of her face, and the color of her hair and eyes, resembled, though slightly, the more beautiful face of Felicita in her girlhood; it was simply the curious likeness which runs through some families to the remotest branches. But her smile, the shape of her eyes, the kneeling attitude, riveted him to the spot where he stood, and struck him dumb. A fancy flashed across his brain, which shone like a light from heaven. Could this girl be Hilda, his little daughter, whom he had seen last sleeping in her cot? Was she then come, after many years, to visit her father's grave?
There had always been a corroding grief to him in the thought that it was Felicita herself who had erected that cross over the tomb of the stranger, with whom his name was buried. He did not know that it was Mr. Clifford alone who had thus set a mark upon the place where he believed that the son of his old friend was lying. It had pained Jean Merle to think that Felicita had commemorated their mutual sin by the erection of an imperishable monument; and it had never surprised him that no one had visited the grave. His astonishment came now. Was it possible that Felicita had revisited Switzerland? Could she be near at hand, in the village down yonder? His mother, also, and his boy, Felix, could they be treading the same soil, and breathing the same air as himself? An agony of mingled terror and rapture shot through his inmost soul. His lips were dry, and his throat parched: he could not articulate a syllable.
He did not know what a gaunt and haggard madman he appeared. His grey hair was ragged and tangled, and his sunken eyes gleamed with a strange brightness. The villagers, who were wont at times to call him an imbecile, would have been sure they were right at this moment, as he stood motionless and dumb, staring at Alice; but to her he looked more like one whose reason was just trembling in the balance. She was alone, her father was no longer in sight; but she was not easily frightened. Rather a sense of sacred pity for the forlorn wretch before her filled her heart.
"See!" she said, in clear and penetrating accents, full, however, of gentle kindness, and she spoke unconsciously in English, "see! I have carried this little slip of ivy all the way from England to plant it here. This is the grave of a man I should have loved very dearly."
A rapid flush of color passed over her face as she spoke, leaving it paler than before, while a slight sadness clouded the smile in her eyes.
"Was he your father?" he articulated, with an immense effort.
"No," she answered; "not my father, but the father of my dearest friends. They cannot come here; but it was his son who gathered this slip of ivy from our porch at home, and asked me to plant it here for him. Will it grow, do you think?"
"It shall grow," he muttered.
It was not his daughter, then; none of his own blood was at hand. But this English girl fascinated him; he could not turn away his eyes, but watched every slight movement as she carefully gathered the soil about the root of the little plant, which he vowed within himself should grow. She was rather long about her task, for she wished this madman to go away, and leave her alone beside Roland Sefton's grave. What her father had told her about him was still strange to her, and she wanted to familiarize it to herself. But still the haggard-looking peasant lingered at her side, gazing at her with his glowering and sunken eyes; yet neither moving nor speaking.
"You know English?" she said, as all at once it occurred to her that she had spoken to him as she would have spoken to one of the villagers in their own country churchyard at home, and that he had answered her. He replied only by a gesture.
"Can you find me some one who will take charge of this little plant?" she asked.
Jean Merle raised his head and lifted up his dim eyes to the eastern mountain-peaks, which were still shining in the rays of the sinking sun, though the twilight was darkening everywhere in the valley. Only last night he had slept among some juniper-bushes just below the boundary of that everlasting snow, feeling himself cast out forever from any glimpse of his old Paradise. But now, if he could only find words and utterance, there was come to him, even to him, a messenger, an angel direct from the very heart of his home, who could tell him all that last night he believed that he should never know. The tears sprang to his eyes, blessed tears; and a rush of uncontrollable longing overwhelmed him. He must hear all he could of those whom he loved; and then, whether he lived long or died soon, he would thank God as long as his miserable life continued.
"It is I who take care of this grave," he said; "I was with him when he died. He spoke to me of Felix and Hilda and his mother; and I saw their portraits. You hear? I know them all."
"Was it you who watched beside him?" asked Alice eagerly. "Oh! sit down here and tell me all about it; all you can remember. I will tell it all again to Felix, and Hilda, and Phebe Marlowe; and oh! how glad, and how sorry they will be to listen!"
There was no mention of Felicita's name, and Jean Merle felt a terrible dread come over him at this omission. He sank down on the ground beside the grave, and looked up into Alice's bright young face, with eyes that to her were no longer lit up with the fire of insanity, however intense and eager they might seem. It was an undreamed-of chance which had brought to her side the man who had watched by the death-bed of Felix's father.
"Tell me all you remember," she urged.
"I remember nothing," he answered, pressing his dark hard hand against his forehead, "it is more than thirteen years ago. But he showed to me their portraits. Is his wife still living?"
"Oh, yes!" she answered, "but she will not let either of them come to Switzerland; neither Felix nor Hilda. Nobody speaks of this country in her hearing; and his name is never uttered. But his mother used to talk to us about him; and Phebe Marlowe does so still. She has painted a portrait of him for Felix."
"Is Roland Sefton's mother yet alive?" he asked, with a dull, aching foreboding of her reply.
"No," she said. "Oh! how we all loved dear old Madame Sefton! She was always more like Felix and Hilda's mother than Cousin Felicita was. We loved her more a hundred times than Cousin Felicita, for we are afraid of her. It was her husband's death that spoiled her whole life and set her quite apart from everybody else. But Madame—she was not made so utterly miserable by it; she knew she would meet her son again in heaven. When she was dying she said to Cousin Felicita, 'He did not return to me, but I go to him; I go gladly to see again my dear son.' The very last words they heard her say were, 'I come, Roland!'"
Alice's voice trembled, and she laid her hand caressingly on the name of Roland Sefton graved on the cross above her. Jean Merle listened, as if he heard the words whispered a long way off, or as by some one speaking in a dream. The meaning had not reached his brain, but was travelling slowly to it, and would surely pierce his heart with a new sorrow and a fresh pang of remorse. The loud chanting of the monks in the abbey close by broke in upon their solemn silence, and awoke Alice from the reverie into which she had fallen.
"Can you tell me nothing about him?" she asked. "Talk to me as if I was his child."
"I have nothing to tell you," answered Jean Merle. "I remember nothing he said."
She looked down on the poor ragged peasant at her feet, with his gaunt and scarred features, and his slowly articulated speech. There seemed nothing strange in such a man not being able to recall Roland Sefton's dying words. It was probable that he barely understood them; and most likely he could not gather up the meaning of what she herself was saying. The few words he uttered were English, but they were very few and forced.
"I am sorry," she said gently, "but I will tell them you promised to take care of the ivy I have planted here."
She wished the dull, gray-headed villager would go home, and leave her alone for awhile in this solemn and sacred place; but he crouched still on the ground, stirring neither hand nor foot. When at last she moved as if to go away, he stretched out a toil-worn hand, and laid it on her dress.
"Stay," he said, "tell me more about Roland Sefton's children; I will think of it when I am tending this grave."
"What am I to tell you?" she asked gently, "Hilda is three years younger than me, and people say we are like sisters. She and Felix were brought up with me and my brothers in my father's house; we were like brothers and sisters. And Felix is like another son to my father, who says he will be both good and great some day. Good he is now; as good as man can be."
"And you love him!" said Jean Merle, in a low and humble voice, with his head turned away from her, and resting on the lowest step of the cross.
Alice started and trembled as she looked down on the grave and the prostrate man. It seemed to her as if the words had almost come out of this sad, and solitary, and forsaken grave, where Roland Sefton had lain unvisited so many years. The last gleam of daylight had vanished from the snowy peaks, leaving them wan and pallid as the dead. A sudden chill came into the evening air which made her shiver; but she was not terrified, though she felt a certain bewilderment and agitation creeping through her. She could not resist the impulse to answer the strange question.
"Yes, I love Felix," she said simply. "We love each other dearly."
"God bless you!" cried Jean Merle, in a tremulous voice. "God in heaven bless you both, and preserve you to each other."
He had lifted himself up, and was kneeling before her, eagerly scanning her face, as if to impress it on his memory. He bent down his gray head and kissed her hand humbly and reverently, touching it only with his lips. Then starting to his feet he hastened away from the cemetery, and was soon lost to her sight in the gathering gloom of the dusk.
For a little while longer Alice lingered at the grave, thinking over what had passed. It was not much as she recalled it, but it left her agitated and disturbed. Yet after all she had only uttered aloud what her heart would have said at the grave of Felix's father. But this strange peasant, so miserable and poverty-stricken, so haggard and hopeless-looking, haunted her thoughts both waking and sleeping. Early the next morning she and Canon Pascal went to the hovel inhabited by Jean Merle, but found it deserted and locked up. Some laborers had seen him start off at daybreak up the Trübsee Alps, from which he might be either ascending the Titlis or taking the route to the Joch-Pass. There was no chance of his return that day, and Jean Merle's absence might last for several days, as he was eccentric, and bestowed his confidence on nobody. There was little more to be learned of him, except that he was a heretic, a stranger, and a miser. Canon Pascal and Alice visited once more Roland Sefton's grave, and then they went on their way over the Joch-Pass, with some faint hopes of meeting with Jean Merle on their route, hopes that were not fulfilled.
When he left the cemetery Jean Merle went home to his wretched chalet, flung himself down on his rough bed, and slept for some hours the profound and dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. The last three nights he had passed under the stars, and stretched upon the low juniper-bushes. He awoke suddenly, from the bright, clear moonlight of a cloudless sky and dry atmosphere streaming in through his door, which he had left open. There was light enough for him to withdraw some money from a safe hiding-place he had constructed in his crazy old hut, and to make up a packet of most of the clothing he possessed. There were between twenty and thirty pounds in gold pieces of twenty francs each—the only money he was master of now his Lucerne bankers had failed him. A vague purpose, dimly shaping itself, was in his brain, but he was in no hurry to see it take definite form. With his small bundle of clothes and his leathern purse he started off in the earliest rays of the dawn to escape being visited by the young English girl, whom he had seen at the grave, and who would probably seek him out in the morning with her father. Who they were he could find out if he himself returned to Engelberg.
Ifhe returned; for, as he ascended the steep path leading up to the Trübsee Alp, he turned back to look at the high mountain-valley where he had dwelt so long, as though he was looking upon it for the last time. It seemed to him as if he was awaking out of a long lethargy and paralysis. Three days ago the dull round of incessant toil and parsimonious hoarding had been abruptly broken up by the loss of all he had toiled for and hoarded up, and the shock had driven him out like a maniac, to wander about the desolate heights of Engelberg in a mood bordering on despair, which had made him utterly reckless of his life. Since then news had come to him from home—stray gleams from the Paradise he had forfeited. Strongest of them all was the thought that these fourteen years had transformed his little son Felix into a man, loving as he himself had loved, and already called to take his part in the battle of life. He had never realized this before, and it stirred his heart to the very depths. His children had been but soft, vague memories to him; it was Felicita who had engrossed all his thought. All at once he comprehended that he was a father, the father of a son and daughter, who had their own separate life and career. A deep and poignant interest in these beings took possession of him. He had called them into existence; they belonged to him by a tie which nothing on earth, in heaven, or in hell itself could destroy. As long as they lived there must be an indestructible interest for him in this world. Felicita was no longer the first in his thoughts.
The dim veil which time had drawn around them was rent asunder, and they stood before him bathed in light, but placed on the other side of a gulf as fathomless, as impassable, and as death-like as the ice-crevasses yawning at his feet. He gazed down into the cold, gleaming abyss, and across it to the sharp and slippery margin where there could be no foot-hold, and he pictured to himself the springing across that horrible gulf to reach them on the other side, and the falling, with outstretched hands and clutching fingers, into the unseen icy depths below him. For the first time in his life he shrank back shivering and terror-stricken from the edge of the crevasse, with palsied limbs and treacherous nerves. He felt that he must get back into safer standing-ground than this solitary and perilous glacier.
He reached at last a point of safety, where he could lie down and let his trembling limbs rest awhile. The whole slope of the valley lay below him, with its rich meadows of emerald green, and its silvery streams wandering through them. Little farms and chalets were dotted about, some of them clinging to the sides of the rocks opposite to him, or resting on the very edge of precipices thousands of feet deep, and looking as if they were about to slip over them. He felt his head grow giddy as he looked at them, and thought of the children at play in such dangerous playgrounds. There were a few gray clouds hanging about the Titlis, and caught upon the sharp horns of the rugged peaks around the valley. Every peak and precipice he knew; they had been his refuge in the hours of his greatest anguish. But these palsied limbs and this giddy head could not be trusted to carry him there again. He had lost his last hope of making any atonement. Hope was gone; was he to lose his indomitable courage also? It was the last faculty which made his present life endurable.
He lay motionless for hours, neither listening nor looking. Yet he heard, for the memory of it often came back to him in after years, the tinkling of innumerable bells from the pastures below him, and around him; and the voices of many waterfalls rushing down through the pine-forests into the valley; and the tossing to and fro of the interwoven branches of the trees. And he saw the sunlight stealing from one point to another, chased by the shadows of the clouds, that gathered and dispersed, dimming the blue sky for a little time, and then leaving it brighter and deeper than before. He was unconscious of it all; he was even unaware that his brain was at work at all, until suddenly, like a flash, there rose upon him the clear, resolute, unchangeable determination, "I will go to England."
He started up at once, and seized his bundle and his alpenstock. The afternoon was far advanced, but there was time enough to reach the Engstlenalp, where he could stay the night, and go on in the morning to Meiringen. He could be in England in three days.
Three days: so short a time separated him from the country and the home from which he had been exiled so many years. Any day during those fourteen years he might have started homeward as he was doing now; but there had not been the irresistible hunger in his heart that at this moment drove him thither. He had been vainly seeking to satisfy himself with husks; but even these, dry and empty, and bitter as they were, had failed him. He had lost all; and having lost all, he was coming to himself.
There was not the slightest fear of detection in his mind. A gray-haired man with bowed shoulders, and seamed and marred face, who had lost every trace of the fastidiousness, which had verged upon foppery in the handsome and prosperous Roland Sefton, ran no risk of recognition, more especially as Roland Sefton had been reckoned among the dead and buried for many a long year. The lineaments of the dead die with them, however cunningly the artist may have used his skill to preserve them. The face is gone, and the memory of it. Some hearts may long to keep it engraven sharp and clear in their remembrance; but oh, when the "inward eye" comes to look for it how dull and blurred it lies there, like a forgotten photograph which has grown faded and stained in some seldom-visited cabinet!
Jean Merle travelled, as a man of his class would travel, in a third-class wagon and a slow train; but he kept on, stopping nowhere for rest, and advancing as rapidly as he could, until on the third day, in the gray of the evening, he saw the chalk-line of the English coast rising against the faint yellow light of the sunset; and as night fell his feet once more trod upon his native soil.
So far he had been simply yielding to his blind and irresistible longing to get back to England, and nearer to his unknown children. He had heard so little of them from Alice Pascal, that he could no longer rest without knowing more. How to carry out his intention he did not know, and he had hardly given it a thought. But now, as he strolled slowly along the flat and sandy shore for an hour or two, with the darkness hiding both sea and land from him, except the spot on which he stood, he began to consider what steps he must take to learn what he wanted to know, and to see their happiness afar off without in any way endangering it. He had purchased it at too heavy a price to be willing to place it in any peril now.
That Felicita had left Riversborough he had heard from her own lips, but there was no other place where he was sure of discovering her present abode, for London was too wide a city, even if she had carried out her intention of living there, for him to ascertain where she dwelt. Phebe Marlowe would certainly know where he could find them, for the English girl at Roland Sefton's grave had spoken of Phebe as familiarly as of Felix and Hilda—spoken of her, in fact, as if she was quite one of the family. There would be no danger in seeking out Phebe Marlowe. If his own mother could not have recognized her son in the rugged peasant he had become, there was no chance of a young girl such as Phebe had been ever thinking of Roland Sefton in connection with him; and he could learn all he wished to know from her.
He was careful to take the precaution of exchanging his foreign garb of a Swiss peasant for the dress of an English mechanic. The change did not make him look any more like his old self, for there was no longer any incongruity in his appearance. No soul on earth knew that he had not died many years ago, except Felicita. He might saunter down the streets of his native town in broad daylight on a market-day, and not a suspicion would cross any brain that here was their old townsman, Roland Sefton, the fraudulent banker.
Yet he timed his journey so as not to reach Riversborough before the evening of the next day; and it was growing dusk when he paced once more the familiar streets, slowly, and at every step gathering up some sharp reminiscence of the past. How little were they changed! The old grammar-school, with its gray walls and mullioned windows, looked exactly as it had done when he was yet a boy wearing his college-cap and carrying his satchel of school-books. His name, he knew, was painted in gold on a black tablet on the walls inside as a scholar who had gained a scholarship. Most of the shops on each side of the streets bore the same names and looked but little altered. In the churchyard the same grave-stones were standing as they stood when he, as a child, spelt out their inscriptions through the open railings which separated them from the causeway. There was a zigzag crack in one of the flag-stones, which was one of his earliest recollections; he stood and put his clumsy boot upon it as he had often placed his little foot in those childish years, and leaning his head against the railings of the churchyard, where all his English forefathers for many a generation were buried, he waited as if for some voice to speak to him.
Suddenly the bells in the dark tower above him rang out a peal, clanging and clashing noisily together as if to give him a welcome. They had rung so the day he brought Felicita home after their long wedding journey. It was Friday night, the night when the ringers had always been used to practise, in the days when he was churchwarden. The pain of hearing them was intolerable; he could bear no more that night. Not daring to go on and look at the house where he was born, and where his children had been born, but which he could never more enter, he sought out a quiet inn, and shut himself up in a garret there to think, and at last to sleep.