LAUGHING DICK CRANSTONE.Itwas not that soft, white, feathery stuff that flutters to the ground pleasantly and lighter than the fall of a rose-leaf; that, dancing and darting around and about everywhere with gleaming whiteness and varied and graceful motion, makes the empty air seem a living thing smiling at its own frolic. No; the snow was not of that character at all. It was a sharp, fierce storm that made at you in a determined manner, as though it had a sort of spite against you and the whole human race generally for bringing it down out of its bed somewhere up there among the clouds; that, as it was compelled to make the journey, made up its mind to let you and everybody else have the full benefit of it. So down it came fiercely in bitter lines so regular that a William Tell might shoot an arrow through them without touching a single flake. It rushed at you, it beat you in the face, it snarled around your legs, it powdered your hair, and made for the small of your back; it peeped up your sleeves, and made acquaintance with the inside as well as outside of your boots, as though it thought of getting a pair itself, and wished to examine your shoemaker’s handiwork. It laughed at umbrellas, and made such a savage assault on your overcoat and waterproof that it was plainly as enraged as it could be at being foiled, and in revenge settled down on them, till it made you look from top to toe as though you had been just rolled in feathers,minusthe tar.Ah! it was a dreary day—a day that made one shiver and think of the poor, and shiver again. It spoiled the play of the children, and little Bessy would sit “anyhow,” as her nurse termed it, in her chair, with one hand mechanically endeavoring to pull the cane at the back of it to pieces, while her big round blue eyes would look out in silent wonder at the ugly day; and little Benny would flatten his already flat nose in desperation against the window-pane, creating quite a little atmosphere of fog around him; while Harry, the big brother, ten years old last birthday, would make a false attempt to keep up his spirits by riding that imaginary horse round and round the room, making him curvet and caper, and shy at that corner, and evince a particular dislike to the nurse, and kick so furiously at the door-key, till acrack of the whip suddenly brought the restive animal to his senses, and Harry would be still a moment, and gaze silently with the rest of the world out at the cheerless snow.Was it the snow that Cranstone of Cranstone Hall was gazing at so fixedly out of the library window? Was it the snow that made those cheeks so deadly white, save for the two little purple spots on each of them? Was it the snow that made him clench his hands till the nails almost tore the flesh? What was he looking at so fixedly out there in the Park? What did he see out in the blinding snow, driving down on his own meadow-lands, and draping the strong forms of his ancestral oaks in mystic drapery, while from the bottom where the river ran, stole up a snaky mist in curling ashy-gray folds? He saw no snow, no mist, no oaks: he looked through them, beyond them, straight out at a tall form striding along, its back to Cranstone Hall, and its face to the wide, wide, bitter, cold world—striding on, and on, and on, and never looking back to the home where he fell one day like one of these little snowflakes out of heaven, and grew up straight, and tall, and honest, and true, and manly, with a head, and a handsome head too, on his shoulders, and such a heart in his bosom!—the pride of all the country-side, and the heir of Cranstone Hall. It was Dick Cranstone whose figure his father was gazing at so fixedly, though that figure had been gone three hours, and was far out of sight—Dick Cranstone, his father’s only son, the only relic of his dead mother, the boy on whom all the father’s strong heart was now set, who was striding along through the snow and the mist out into the bleak world on that winter morning, cast out from his father’s hearth and heart, driven away with a bitter curse.What had Dick Cranstone done to bring down this curse and chastisement on his handsome young head? Dick and his father had been companions as well as father and son, for Ralph Cranstone was still a youngish man, and bore such years as he had well. His heart and his hopes were centred in this boy, whose mother had been snatched away so early; and when he saw the bright-eyed, laughing lad ripen into a great, handsome, clever young fellow, who rode with him, and played cricket with him, and scoured over the country neck and neck with him—for there was a dare-devil drop in the Cranstones—it would be hard to find a happier man in this world than Ralph, or a more loving son than Dick; in fact, “Oh! they’re as fond of each other as the Cranstones” had grown into a proverb in all the country-side. What, then, was Dick’s great crime that left him in a day fatherless, and his father childless, and rent asunder with a fierce wrench two hearts which all their lives had run together?The Cranstones were an old family, older than Elizabeth, though it was at her time that Cranstone Hall first came into their possession. That was a good reign for people blessed with an elastic conscience. The Elizabethan Cranstone was a Catholic. He had the choice of running his neck in a noose and dying a martyr for his faith, or renouncing the religion he believed in, and taking instead the goodly Abbey of Cranstone, with its river, meads, and all its appurtenances. He did not hesitate long. Like most of his countrymen, he threw up his religion, and took to the abbey, turned out the monks, became a bitter persecutor of the church, changed the name of the place to Cranstone Hall,lived to a good old age, and the rich man died and was buried—in Cranstone churchyard. The old country folk round about tell you that this particular old Cranstone, whom they look upon as the first of the race, “died a-yellin’ for holy water like hell-foire”; but then, such people are always foolish. However, to come back to the story, the Cranstones remained from that day out a flourishing, wealthy family, strongly devoted to church and state, fierce persecutors of the Catholics whilst persecution was the fashion; when not so, what Catholics call bigoted Protestants.Ralph was no exception to the rule. He honored the queen, and hated the pope and Papistry as genuinely as the old Elizabethan Cranstone had professed to do. He thought the country was going to ruin when he found Papists throwing up their heads, and walking about on English ground, just as though they had as much right there as anybody else. And when his old friend and neighbor Harry Clifford, who had been at Eton and Oxford with him, and whom Ralph had pronounced over and over again “the best fellow going,” turned Catholic one fine day, as soon as Ralph heard of it, and met Harry by chance at a friend’s, he turned on his heel, and walked out of the house, leaving the latter standing there with the old friendly hand outstretched towards him. From that day out, all intercourse ceased between the Cliffords and Cranstones, and the old friends were as dead to each other as though they had never met.In good time, Dick went off to Oxford, with an Eton fame as a good bat and all-round cricketer, a handy man at the oar, the best runner and jumper in the school, added to the lesser reputation of being able to knock off the best Latin poem in the college, and running Old Barnacles hard for the head of the class—Old Barnacles, who did nothing but grub at his books night and day, and who sucked at Greek roots as little chaps would at lollipops. He made one of “the eleven” that year against Cambridge at Lord’s, and saved the game from becoming a disastrous defeat to his university by his plucky and cool play against that terrible left-hand bowler. How proud his father was of him that day! He could almost have gone up and shaken hands with Harry Clifford, whom he saw there with his wife and a beautiful young lady in the carriage, so divided in looks between Harry and his sweet wife that she could have belonged to no one else but to them. “A Clifford to the tip of her nose!” he kept repeating to himself, as he stole a sly glance at them now and then, and yearned for a grasp of his old friend’s hand; but the stubborn Cranstone blood was too strong within him, and he turned away slowly to watch the game.It was going badly for Oxford in the second innings; the Cambridge men had a hard hitter in, who hit so hard and so furiously, and had so completely “mastered the bowling,” that the score mounted rapidly, and every new hit elicited shouts of applause for Cambridge. All over the field flew the ball, sometimes in among the rows of carriages which lined the ground. “They’ll never get him out,” said the spectators one to another, as the Cantab struck away right and left as freely as though he were playing with the bowlers. “There she goes! Bravo! Well hit!” they shouted, as the ball flew from the bat right across the field, straight and furious, full at the carriage where were seated the Cliffords. “Look out there! Look out—lookout!” they shout, as the carriage party, conversing together, are utterly unconscious of the danger approaching them. It takes a long time to tell this here, though it was all over in half a minute. The cricket-ball was flying at lightning speed straight at the head of the young lady, who at the moment was looking in another direction, inattentive to the warning cries that rose from all parts of the field. The shouts were hushed into that deadly silence that will settle so awfully over a vast assembly when every eye is bent in one direction, and every heart beats as one great one with the expectation of immediate disaster. All saw the danger of the young girl, but no one could prevent it, when suddenly there is a rush of something white, a leap in the air, a bare arm flashes in the sun, and the ball is clasped in the hand of one who never missed a catch yet, as he falls back over the side of the carriage, right in among the party, holding the ball all the while, and the great Cantab is out.“Bravo, Cranstone! Bravo, Cranstone!” What a shout from the Oxonians! What a shout and a rush from all sides of the field to applaud the young fellow whose Eton fame had not belied him for speed, and whose swiftness and agility, and that high leap in the air and splendid catch, had perhaps saved a young girl’s life, while it rid his side of a terrible foe, and revived the hopes of Cambridge! But Cranstone never heeded the shouts; he lay back there in the carriage, lifeless, his head on Harry Clifford’s knee, his eyes closed, and his face white, while the frightened ladies, who scarcely yet knew from what a danger they had escaped, bent over him in terror. He had fallen heavily on the side of the carriage, and the shock caused him to faint.The crowd is parted by a strong man, who rushes wildly to the spot. “Dick, my boy, Dick, are you hurt? Good God! Harry, it’s my son. Water, some of you—water. Clear away there, and let him have air!” The water is brought, and in a few moments he revives, to open his eyes on a pair of the tenderest blue eyes looking pityingly and frightened into his. A shake or two, like a strong mastiff, and he is all right again; the game goes on, and, though Oxford was beaten, that catch lives in men’s memories; while Ralph Cranstone and Harry Clifford were old friends again, and Mr. Dick Cranstone was reintroduced to his old playmate, Miss Ada Clifford.Dick went back to Oxford that year with another feeling creeping into his heart side by side with the great love for his father which had hitherto possessed it. He was not over head and ears in love with Ada Clifford, nor, since it must be confessed, she with him; but his father and himself rode over often that vacation, and Dick found the family one of the most agreeable in every way that he had ever met, while Ralph atoned for his former rudeness in a thousand ways that come with such an indescribable charm from a strong nature. Dick took back this memory with him to the university, and perhaps it saved him from getting among the “fast men”—a society only too fascinating for young fellows blessed with health, strength, good nature, good looks, and money.Without actually giving up his practices of muscular Christianity, association with more intellectual minds brought him soon to perceive that there was a higher ambition in this life for a young man than being the captain of a cricket eleven, the “stroke” of a university eight, thebest pigeon shot, or the proprietor of the most startling “turn-out” on the road. Association with intellectual men brought with it intellectual thoughts, inquiries, pursuits; while under all happily ran the boy’s innate love of honor, of what was fair and truthful, supporting him somewhat, and keeping him, on the whole, straight in the midst of the dangerous speculations and vexed problems which were being agitated around him, and discussed with all the boldness natural to undisciplined minds.His Oxford course was drawing to a close, and he began to think of adopting some career, though the wealth and property to which he was heir necessitated no pursuit at all other than that of a quiet country gentleman living on his estates. During his last year particularly he had read and studied much, and the result of his studies and inquiries always came home to him in the form of the old question of Pilate, What is truth? He was, like his father, a loyal Englishman, a supporter of the state, rather because he found it there established, and could see no better, than for any divine right which, in his father’s mind, and in the minds of so many Englishmen, the glorious British Constitution possesses. But the church was another affair. That question puzzled him sorely. That it might be a very fine institution, that it had given birth to many splendid minds, that it still possessed many very amiable and worthy followers, he did not deny; but that an institution which was at best a very mixed affair, which was not believed in by the majority of his countrymen, which had been patched, and stretched, and mended, and cobbled to meet the exigencies of every changing hour, which was not believed in even by so many of its professed members and teachers, was in any sense a divine institution, he could not concede. To his truthful mind, it dated from Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, not from Jesus Christ; it was simply in its present form an amiable machine of state, not a divine organization which should command the approving consent of all were it what men who believed in salvation ought to follow. As for the rest of the wrangling sects, he looked upon them as so many ecclesiastical tinkerings, better calculated to bore holes in the edifice of faith than to build up a system strong, enduring, and right.Filled with thoughts of this description, he came home restless, dissatisfied, questioning; too true and too earnest to throw quite overboard all belief as a sham, and take the world as he found it—a mixture of good and bad, inexplicable save as a result of chance and conventionality. He visited the Cliffords, and they found laughing Dick Cranstone an altered man, somewhat graver, and evidently unsettled. One day, when his father was not present, he unbosomed himself to Mr. Clifford, who was a very intellectual man. The latter listened kindly to the boy, though he knew the story well; he had gone through it all himself. He did not try to explain matters there and then; he merely told him that what he was then experiencing was the exact counterpart of what he himself had experienced. “If you like to come over in a few days, I expect to have F. Leslie here, a Jesuit, and a convert like myself. He will explain matters to you much better than I can, if you are not afraid of meeting a Jesuit, Richard.”Dick winced a little at this proposal; he had never in his life met with a Jesuit, and his opinion of the society was formed on what he had read of them as the most deceitful, crafty,and cunning set of men ever organized to blind men’s eyes and lead them astray from freedom and light; though, when he came to think the matter over, he could not bring to mind a single case of any of his friends who had come across them and been converted to Catholicity, as some of them had, turning out fiends or blind enthusiasts. So he resolved to meet F. Leslie.It was the old story. After due inquiry and preparation, he was converted, and immediately after went straight to his father, and told him all.To describe Ralph Cranstone’s wrath at the news would be impossible. He only saw one terrible fact—his family disgraced for ever in the person of their last descendant his son, from whom he had hoped so much. The line of the Cranstones was poisoned, defiled in the person of one who could thus turn traitor to his queen and country. A Cranstone a Papist! And that Cranstone his son Dick! He did not ask him to retract—he rose up and cursed the boy, and turned him out of the house.Protestant friends, this part of the story, though inwoven with fiction, is a very hard fact. It is not of unfrequent occurrence; the writer to-day has friends who in their own persons can corroborate it.Ralph Cranstone could have borne anything rather than this—that his son should turn Papist. He might become an infidel, and believe in no God at all; he might join any one he chose of the sects, however low; he might even turn Mussulman or Jew—but a Cranstone a Papist! Good God! it were better that he had never been born.And so Ralph sat there looking out into the storm, where the form of his brave, handsome boy had vanished. He was conscious only of the storm raging in his own breast, of the terrible curse he had uttered out of his heart on the head of the one he had loved more, infinitely more, than himself. That curse was ringing around the room still, and seemed to mock him like a fiend. He rose at last, and staggered to his room, not noticing the tearful old housekeeper, who knew that something dreadful had happened, and who came timidly asking him to take something to eat, for the day had gone. His day had gone out with his boy, and the light of his life went out with Dick into the winter storm, to be swallowed up and buried away in it for ever.••••••••••••Dick had a hard time of it. He refused all offers of assistance tendered him by Mr. Clifford. He would not even go down to visit them; he would not appear in the neighborhood; for he could not meet his father again. He wrote to him many times, but his letters were always returned unopened. He soon received news from Mr. Clifford that his father had broken up his home, left the neighborhood, and gone no one knew whither. He could only pray for him to the God to whom, for the first time in his life, he found he could pray with a strong faith and earnest belief. He still would not go to the Cliffords’, though he corresponded with them from London, and saw them now and then when they came up. He had friends on the press, and with their assistance managed to eke out enough to live upon by means of his pen. He worked away, sustained, in his loss of father, fortune, and place, by the religion of Jesus Christ, discovering each day new wonders in an exhaustless region. His father he never heard from, nor gained any intelligence of his whereabouts, nor whether he was living or dead. The trial was a sore one, buthe felt that perhaps he was in some small degree atoning for all the evils which had followed that first defection of his family from the religion to which they belonged. And so he worked away, and rose; for he had talent, and soon attained a position which relieved him from all fears of absolute want, though still poor enough.The Cliffords were a great comfort to him, and the thought of Ada often inspired the weary pen to fresh exertion when it flagged from sheer fatigue. The more he found the love of her growing upon him, the more he avoided the presence of the family; for his poverty set a boundless sea, in his imagination, between himself and her. He excused himself for not calling on them by a thousand reasons—press of business, and the usual excuses; till at last their intercourse almost ceased, and poor Dick, laughing Dick, became wretchedly miserable, and began to look upon the world as a poor sort of place after all, while Cranstone Hall would force itself upon his mind, dreary and deserted, the garden weedy, and the oaks lonely, with that terrible, heartless curse hanging over all.One night, while seated in his room thinking such thoughts as these, a hasty knock came to the door, and, opening it, the old housekeeper fell forward almost fainting in his arms, with the exclamation:“O Master Richard! Master Richard, dear! he’s come back at last.”Dick staggered as though the old woman’s trembling voice had been a giant’s arm which smote him.“Yes, yes,” he murmured.“For God’s sake and your dear mother’s, Master Richard, fly! He’s ill—he’s dying—he’s raving of you!... At the Hall.... Yes. Go, go, or you’ll be too late.”He rushed into the street, she following him. The snow was falling again as bitterly as on the day when he last saw his father. The train, though it flew along, seemed to him to travel at a snail’s pace. The snow blocked the roads leading to the Hall: the chaise could not advance. He leaped out, unyoked one of the horses, bade the driver follow as best he could with the housekeeper, mounted the animal, and, by what means he never knew, found himself at the Hall. He was about to dash up to his father’s rooms, when a light in the library window attracted his attention. Mother of God! can that be his father?The brown curls bleached to snow, the face white, and thin, and bloodless, the eyes staring wildly straight out of the window, the form shrunk, the mouth mumbling some incoherent words. The light of a candle shone full on his father’s face, altered to that of a ghost.Dick entered trembling, uncertain whether it was a spirit or his father himself whom he saw before him.“I want my boy, my Dick, my brave, handsome son. Bring him back to me. You stole him away. Where is he?”“Father, he is here. Look at me, father. Here I am, Dick—your own son Dick, come back to you. Do you not know me?”“You? You’re not my son. I’ve got no son. He went away from me. He hates his father—his poor father. I—I—cursed him, when I could have blessed him, and he believed me; and Dick’s gone—gone—gone.” And the poor creature moaned, and covered his crazed head with his hands, while the sharpest pang that ever rent his boy’s heart rent it at that moment with the thought that, perhaps, it was all his fault, and that, had he only forced himself upon him, his fathermight have forgiven him, all might have gone well, and he would not now have been summoned to the side of the lost wreck before him.They bore him back to the bed whence he had stolen while those who should have watched him had dozed a little. The next day the Cliffords came over, and took up their abode in the old Hall, where Ada and her mother watched and tended the sufferer as only women can do. Dick was around them and about them, and in and out, and happy and miserable, and all contraries in a breath. Ada alone could set him right, and prevent him from going as mad as his father.Ralph lay long between the two worlds. His strong reason; once forced out, seemed sullen to return. But it did come at last, and his weak eyes opened on his son, while the heart of the father, with all the pent-up feelings of these years, gushed out over his boy. He had gone away and wandered everywhere. He drank till his brain gave way, and only enough reason was left to lead him home to die.But death seems a long way off from Ralph Cranstone yet. The saying is oftener than ever on people’s lips, “They’re as fond of each other as the two Cranstones.” Old Cranstone’s face—the Elizabethan—has taken a new scowl, for underneath his picture rises up an ivory crucifix which Ralph himself set there. The snow falls merrily and cheerily; the old oaks smile in their winter garb; no mist rises up from where the river runs. Yes; that’s young Ralph there dashing out of the hall door to meet his uncle and papa; there he goes climbing up uncle’s legs, and shaking him as though he were a telegraph post set up there for him to shake; and, if ever there was a happy couple, that couple is Ada and laughing Dick; and the old Cranstone frowns down on it all out of his dim canvas, for the Cranstone line has gone back to its old faith.
LAUGHING DICK CRANSTONE.Itwas not that soft, white, feathery stuff that flutters to the ground pleasantly and lighter than the fall of a rose-leaf; that, dancing and darting around and about everywhere with gleaming whiteness and varied and graceful motion, makes the empty air seem a living thing smiling at its own frolic. No; the snow was not of that character at all. It was a sharp, fierce storm that made at you in a determined manner, as though it had a sort of spite against you and the whole human race generally for bringing it down out of its bed somewhere up there among the clouds; that, as it was compelled to make the journey, made up its mind to let you and everybody else have the full benefit of it. So down it came fiercely in bitter lines so regular that a William Tell might shoot an arrow through them without touching a single flake. It rushed at you, it beat you in the face, it snarled around your legs, it powdered your hair, and made for the small of your back; it peeped up your sleeves, and made acquaintance with the inside as well as outside of your boots, as though it thought of getting a pair itself, and wished to examine your shoemaker’s handiwork. It laughed at umbrellas, and made such a savage assault on your overcoat and waterproof that it was plainly as enraged as it could be at being foiled, and in revenge settled down on them, till it made you look from top to toe as though you had been just rolled in feathers,minusthe tar.Ah! it was a dreary day—a day that made one shiver and think of the poor, and shiver again. It spoiled the play of the children, and little Bessy would sit “anyhow,” as her nurse termed it, in her chair, with one hand mechanically endeavoring to pull the cane at the back of it to pieces, while her big round blue eyes would look out in silent wonder at the ugly day; and little Benny would flatten his already flat nose in desperation against the window-pane, creating quite a little atmosphere of fog around him; while Harry, the big brother, ten years old last birthday, would make a false attempt to keep up his spirits by riding that imaginary horse round and round the room, making him curvet and caper, and shy at that corner, and evince a particular dislike to the nurse, and kick so furiously at the door-key, till acrack of the whip suddenly brought the restive animal to his senses, and Harry would be still a moment, and gaze silently with the rest of the world out at the cheerless snow.Was it the snow that Cranstone of Cranstone Hall was gazing at so fixedly out of the library window? Was it the snow that made those cheeks so deadly white, save for the two little purple spots on each of them? Was it the snow that made him clench his hands till the nails almost tore the flesh? What was he looking at so fixedly out there in the Park? What did he see out in the blinding snow, driving down on his own meadow-lands, and draping the strong forms of his ancestral oaks in mystic drapery, while from the bottom where the river ran, stole up a snaky mist in curling ashy-gray folds? He saw no snow, no mist, no oaks: he looked through them, beyond them, straight out at a tall form striding along, its back to Cranstone Hall, and its face to the wide, wide, bitter, cold world—striding on, and on, and on, and never looking back to the home where he fell one day like one of these little snowflakes out of heaven, and grew up straight, and tall, and honest, and true, and manly, with a head, and a handsome head too, on his shoulders, and such a heart in his bosom!—the pride of all the country-side, and the heir of Cranstone Hall. It was Dick Cranstone whose figure his father was gazing at so fixedly, though that figure had been gone three hours, and was far out of sight—Dick Cranstone, his father’s only son, the only relic of his dead mother, the boy on whom all the father’s strong heart was now set, who was striding along through the snow and the mist out into the bleak world on that winter morning, cast out from his father’s hearth and heart, driven away with a bitter curse.What had Dick Cranstone done to bring down this curse and chastisement on his handsome young head? Dick and his father had been companions as well as father and son, for Ralph Cranstone was still a youngish man, and bore such years as he had well. His heart and his hopes were centred in this boy, whose mother had been snatched away so early; and when he saw the bright-eyed, laughing lad ripen into a great, handsome, clever young fellow, who rode with him, and played cricket with him, and scoured over the country neck and neck with him—for there was a dare-devil drop in the Cranstones—it would be hard to find a happier man in this world than Ralph, or a more loving son than Dick; in fact, “Oh! they’re as fond of each other as the Cranstones” had grown into a proverb in all the country-side. What, then, was Dick’s great crime that left him in a day fatherless, and his father childless, and rent asunder with a fierce wrench two hearts which all their lives had run together?The Cranstones were an old family, older than Elizabeth, though it was at her time that Cranstone Hall first came into their possession. That was a good reign for people blessed with an elastic conscience. The Elizabethan Cranstone was a Catholic. He had the choice of running his neck in a noose and dying a martyr for his faith, or renouncing the religion he believed in, and taking instead the goodly Abbey of Cranstone, with its river, meads, and all its appurtenances. He did not hesitate long. Like most of his countrymen, he threw up his religion, and took to the abbey, turned out the monks, became a bitter persecutor of the church, changed the name of the place to Cranstone Hall,lived to a good old age, and the rich man died and was buried—in Cranstone churchyard. The old country folk round about tell you that this particular old Cranstone, whom they look upon as the first of the race, “died a-yellin’ for holy water like hell-foire”; but then, such people are always foolish. However, to come back to the story, the Cranstones remained from that day out a flourishing, wealthy family, strongly devoted to church and state, fierce persecutors of the Catholics whilst persecution was the fashion; when not so, what Catholics call bigoted Protestants.Ralph was no exception to the rule. He honored the queen, and hated the pope and Papistry as genuinely as the old Elizabethan Cranstone had professed to do. He thought the country was going to ruin when he found Papists throwing up their heads, and walking about on English ground, just as though they had as much right there as anybody else. And when his old friend and neighbor Harry Clifford, who had been at Eton and Oxford with him, and whom Ralph had pronounced over and over again “the best fellow going,” turned Catholic one fine day, as soon as Ralph heard of it, and met Harry by chance at a friend’s, he turned on his heel, and walked out of the house, leaving the latter standing there with the old friendly hand outstretched towards him. From that day out, all intercourse ceased between the Cliffords and Cranstones, and the old friends were as dead to each other as though they had never met.In good time, Dick went off to Oxford, with an Eton fame as a good bat and all-round cricketer, a handy man at the oar, the best runner and jumper in the school, added to the lesser reputation of being able to knock off the best Latin poem in the college, and running Old Barnacles hard for the head of the class—Old Barnacles, who did nothing but grub at his books night and day, and who sucked at Greek roots as little chaps would at lollipops. He made one of “the eleven” that year against Cambridge at Lord’s, and saved the game from becoming a disastrous defeat to his university by his plucky and cool play against that terrible left-hand bowler. How proud his father was of him that day! He could almost have gone up and shaken hands with Harry Clifford, whom he saw there with his wife and a beautiful young lady in the carriage, so divided in looks between Harry and his sweet wife that she could have belonged to no one else but to them. “A Clifford to the tip of her nose!” he kept repeating to himself, as he stole a sly glance at them now and then, and yearned for a grasp of his old friend’s hand; but the stubborn Cranstone blood was too strong within him, and he turned away slowly to watch the game.It was going badly for Oxford in the second innings; the Cambridge men had a hard hitter in, who hit so hard and so furiously, and had so completely “mastered the bowling,” that the score mounted rapidly, and every new hit elicited shouts of applause for Cambridge. All over the field flew the ball, sometimes in among the rows of carriages which lined the ground. “They’ll never get him out,” said the spectators one to another, as the Cantab struck away right and left as freely as though he were playing with the bowlers. “There she goes! Bravo! Well hit!” they shouted, as the ball flew from the bat right across the field, straight and furious, full at the carriage where were seated the Cliffords. “Look out there! Look out—lookout!” they shout, as the carriage party, conversing together, are utterly unconscious of the danger approaching them. It takes a long time to tell this here, though it was all over in half a minute. The cricket-ball was flying at lightning speed straight at the head of the young lady, who at the moment was looking in another direction, inattentive to the warning cries that rose from all parts of the field. The shouts were hushed into that deadly silence that will settle so awfully over a vast assembly when every eye is bent in one direction, and every heart beats as one great one with the expectation of immediate disaster. All saw the danger of the young girl, but no one could prevent it, when suddenly there is a rush of something white, a leap in the air, a bare arm flashes in the sun, and the ball is clasped in the hand of one who never missed a catch yet, as he falls back over the side of the carriage, right in among the party, holding the ball all the while, and the great Cantab is out.“Bravo, Cranstone! Bravo, Cranstone!” What a shout from the Oxonians! What a shout and a rush from all sides of the field to applaud the young fellow whose Eton fame had not belied him for speed, and whose swiftness and agility, and that high leap in the air and splendid catch, had perhaps saved a young girl’s life, while it rid his side of a terrible foe, and revived the hopes of Cambridge! But Cranstone never heeded the shouts; he lay back there in the carriage, lifeless, his head on Harry Clifford’s knee, his eyes closed, and his face white, while the frightened ladies, who scarcely yet knew from what a danger they had escaped, bent over him in terror. He had fallen heavily on the side of the carriage, and the shock caused him to faint.The crowd is parted by a strong man, who rushes wildly to the spot. “Dick, my boy, Dick, are you hurt? Good God! Harry, it’s my son. Water, some of you—water. Clear away there, and let him have air!” The water is brought, and in a few moments he revives, to open his eyes on a pair of the tenderest blue eyes looking pityingly and frightened into his. A shake or two, like a strong mastiff, and he is all right again; the game goes on, and, though Oxford was beaten, that catch lives in men’s memories; while Ralph Cranstone and Harry Clifford were old friends again, and Mr. Dick Cranstone was reintroduced to his old playmate, Miss Ada Clifford.Dick went back to Oxford that year with another feeling creeping into his heart side by side with the great love for his father which had hitherto possessed it. He was not over head and ears in love with Ada Clifford, nor, since it must be confessed, she with him; but his father and himself rode over often that vacation, and Dick found the family one of the most agreeable in every way that he had ever met, while Ralph atoned for his former rudeness in a thousand ways that come with such an indescribable charm from a strong nature. Dick took back this memory with him to the university, and perhaps it saved him from getting among the “fast men”—a society only too fascinating for young fellows blessed with health, strength, good nature, good looks, and money.Without actually giving up his practices of muscular Christianity, association with more intellectual minds brought him soon to perceive that there was a higher ambition in this life for a young man than being the captain of a cricket eleven, the “stroke” of a university eight, thebest pigeon shot, or the proprietor of the most startling “turn-out” on the road. Association with intellectual men brought with it intellectual thoughts, inquiries, pursuits; while under all happily ran the boy’s innate love of honor, of what was fair and truthful, supporting him somewhat, and keeping him, on the whole, straight in the midst of the dangerous speculations and vexed problems which were being agitated around him, and discussed with all the boldness natural to undisciplined minds.His Oxford course was drawing to a close, and he began to think of adopting some career, though the wealth and property to which he was heir necessitated no pursuit at all other than that of a quiet country gentleman living on his estates. During his last year particularly he had read and studied much, and the result of his studies and inquiries always came home to him in the form of the old question of Pilate, What is truth? He was, like his father, a loyal Englishman, a supporter of the state, rather because he found it there established, and could see no better, than for any divine right which, in his father’s mind, and in the minds of so many Englishmen, the glorious British Constitution possesses. But the church was another affair. That question puzzled him sorely. That it might be a very fine institution, that it had given birth to many splendid minds, that it still possessed many very amiable and worthy followers, he did not deny; but that an institution which was at best a very mixed affair, which was not believed in by the majority of his countrymen, which had been patched, and stretched, and mended, and cobbled to meet the exigencies of every changing hour, which was not believed in even by so many of its professed members and teachers, was in any sense a divine institution, he could not concede. To his truthful mind, it dated from Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, not from Jesus Christ; it was simply in its present form an amiable machine of state, not a divine organization which should command the approving consent of all were it what men who believed in salvation ought to follow. As for the rest of the wrangling sects, he looked upon them as so many ecclesiastical tinkerings, better calculated to bore holes in the edifice of faith than to build up a system strong, enduring, and right.Filled with thoughts of this description, he came home restless, dissatisfied, questioning; too true and too earnest to throw quite overboard all belief as a sham, and take the world as he found it—a mixture of good and bad, inexplicable save as a result of chance and conventionality. He visited the Cliffords, and they found laughing Dick Cranstone an altered man, somewhat graver, and evidently unsettled. One day, when his father was not present, he unbosomed himself to Mr. Clifford, who was a very intellectual man. The latter listened kindly to the boy, though he knew the story well; he had gone through it all himself. He did not try to explain matters there and then; he merely told him that what he was then experiencing was the exact counterpart of what he himself had experienced. “If you like to come over in a few days, I expect to have F. Leslie here, a Jesuit, and a convert like myself. He will explain matters to you much better than I can, if you are not afraid of meeting a Jesuit, Richard.”Dick winced a little at this proposal; he had never in his life met with a Jesuit, and his opinion of the society was formed on what he had read of them as the most deceitful, crafty,and cunning set of men ever organized to blind men’s eyes and lead them astray from freedom and light; though, when he came to think the matter over, he could not bring to mind a single case of any of his friends who had come across them and been converted to Catholicity, as some of them had, turning out fiends or blind enthusiasts. So he resolved to meet F. Leslie.It was the old story. After due inquiry and preparation, he was converted, and immediately after went straight to his father, and told him all.To describe Ralph Cranstone’s wrath at the news would be impossible. He only saw one terrible fact—his family disgraced for ever in the person of their last descendant his son, from whom he had hoped so much. The line of the Cranstones was poisoned, defiled in the person of one who could thus turn traitor to his queen and country. A Cranstone a Papist! And that Cranstone his son Dick! He did not ask him to retract—he rose up and cursed the boy, and turned him out of the house.Protestant friends, this part of the story, though inwoven with fiction, is a very hard fact. It is not of unfrequent occurrence; the writer to-day has friends who in their own persons can corroborate it.Ralph Cranstone could have borne anything rather than this—that his son should turn Papist. He might become an infidel, and believe in no God at all; he might join any one he chose of the sects, however low; he might even turn Mussulman or Jew—but a Cranstone a Papist! Good God! it were better that he had never been born.And so Ralph sat there looking out into the storm, where the form of his brave, handsome boy had vanished. He was conscious only of the storm raging in his own breast, of the terrible curse he had uttered out of his heart on the head of the one he had loved more, infinitely more, than himself. That curse was ringing around the room still, and seemed to mock him like a fiend. He rose at last, and staggered to his room, not noticing the tearful old housekeeper, who knew that something dreadful had happened, and who came timidly asking him to take something to eat, for the day had gone. His day had gone out with his boy, and the light of his life went out with Dick into the winter storm, to be swallowed up and buried away in it for ever.••••••••••••Dick had a hard time of it. He refused all offers of assistance tendered him by Mr. Clifford. He would not even go down to visit them; he would not appear in the neighborhood; for he could not meet his father again. He wrote to him many times, but his letters were always returned unopened. He soon received news from Mr. Clifford that his father had broken up his home, left the neighborhood, and gone no one knew whither. He could only pray for him to the God to whom, for the first time in his life, he found he could pray with a strong faith and earnest belief. He still would not go to the Cliffords’, though he corresponded with them from London, and saw them now and then when they came up. He had friends on the press, and with their assistance managed to eke out enough to live upon by means of his pen. He worked away, sustained, in his loss of father, fortune, and place, by the religion of Jesus Christ, discovering each day new wonders in an exhaustless region. His father he never heard from, nor gained any intelligence of his whereabouts, nor whether he was living or dead. The trial was a sore one, buthe felt that perhaps he was in some small degree atoning for all the evils which had followed that first defection of his family from the religion to which they belonged. And so he worked away, and rose; for he had talent, and soon attained a position which relieved him from all fears of absolute want, though still poor enough.The Cliffords were a great comfort to him, and the thought of Ada often inspired the weary pen to fresh exertion when it flagged from sheer fatigue. The more he found the love of her growing upon him, the more he avoided the presence of the family; for his poverty set a boundless sea, in his imagination, between himself and her. He excused himself for not calling on them by a thousand reasons—press of business, and the usual excuses; till at last their intercourse almost ceased, and poor Dick, laughing Dick, became wretchedly miserable, and began to look upon the world as a poor sort of place after all, while Cranstone Hall would force itself upon his mind, dreary and deserted, the garden weedy, and the oaks lonely, with that terrible, heartless curse hanging over all.One night, while seated in his room thinking such thoughts as these, a hasty knock came to the door, and, opening it, the old housekeeper fell forward almost fainting in his arms, with the exclamation:“O Master Richard! Master Richard, dear! he’s come back at last.”Dick staggered as though the old woman’s trembling voice had been a giant’s arm which smote him.“Yes, yes,” he murmured.“For God’s sake and your dear mother’s, Master Richard, fly! He’s ill—he’s dying—he’s raving of you!... At the Hall.... Yes. Go, go, or you’ll be too late.”He rushed into the street, she following him. The snow was falling again as bitterly as on the day when he last saw his father. The train, though it flew along, seemed to him to travel at a snail’s pace. The snow blocked the roads leading to the Hall: the chaise could not advance. He leaped out, unyoked one of the horses, bade the driver follow as best he could with the housekeeper, mounted the animal, and, by what means he never knew, found himself at the Hall. He was about to dash up to his father’s rooms, when a light in the library window attracted his attention. Mother of God! can that be his father?The brown curls bleached to snow, the face white, and thin, and bloodless, the eyes staring wildly straight out of the window, the form shrunk, the mouth mumbling some incoherent words. The light of a candle shone full on his father’s face, altered to that of a ghost.Dick entered trembling, uncertain whether it was a spirit or his father himself whom he saw before him.“I want my boy, my Dick, my brave, handsome son. Bring him back to me. You stole him away. Where is he?”“Father, he is here. Look at me, father. Here I am, Dick—your own son Dick, come back to you. Do you not know me?”“You? You’re not my son. I’ve got no son. He went away from me. He hates his father—his poor father. I—I—cursed him, when I could have blessed him, and he believed me; and Dick’s gone—gone—gone.” And the poor creature moaned, and covered his crazed head with his hands, while the sharpest pang that ever rent his boy’s heart rent it at that moment with the thought that, perhaps, it was all his fault, and that, had he only forced himself upon him, his fathermight have forgiven him, all might have gone well, and he would not now have been summoned to the side of the lost wreck before him.They bore him back to the bed whence he had stolen while those who should have watched him had dozed a little. The next day the Cliffords came over, and took up their abode in the old Hall, where Ada and her mother watched and tended the sufferer as only women can do. Dick was around them and about them, and in and out, and happy and miserable, and all contraries in a breath. Ada alone could set him right, and prevent him from going as mad as his father.Ralph lay long between the two worlds. His strong reason; once forced out, seemed sullen to return. But it did come at last, and his weak eyes opened on his son, while the heart of the father, with all the pent-up feelings of these years, gushed out over his boy. He had gone away and wandered everywhere. He drank till his brain gave way, and only enough reason was left to lead him home to die.But death seems a long way off from Ralph Cranstone yet. The saying is oftener than ever on people’s lips, “They’re as fond of each other as the two Cranstones.” Old Cranstone’s face—the Elizabethan—has taken a new scowl, for underneath his picture rises up an ivory crucifix which Ralph himself set there. The snow falls merrily and cheerily; the old oaks smile in their winter garb; no mist rises up from where the river runs. Yes; that’s young Ralph there dashing out of the hall door to meet his uncle and papa; there he goes climbing up uncle’s legs, and shaking him as though he were a telegraph post set up there for him to shake; and, if ever there was a happy couple, that couple is Ada and laughing Dick; and the old Cranstone frowns down on it all out of his dim canvas, for the Cranstone line has gone back to its old faith.
Itwas not that soft, white, feathery stuff that flutters to the ground pleasantly and lighter than the fall of a rose-leaf; that, dancing and darting around and about everywhere with gleaming whiteness and varied and graceful motion, makes the empty air seem a living thing smiling at its own frolic. No; the snow was not of that character at all. It was a sharp, fierce storm that made at you in a determined manner, as though it had a sort of spite against you and the whole human race generally for bringing it down out of its bed somewhere up there among the clouds; that, as it was compelled to make the journey, made up its mind to let you and everybody else have the full benefit of it. So down it came fiercely in bitter lines so regular that a William Tell might shoot an arrow through them without touching a single flake. It rushed at you, it beat you in the face, it snarled around your legs, it powdered your hair, and made for the small of your back; it peeped up your sleeves, and made acquaintance with the inside as well as outside of your boots, as though it thought of getting a pair itself, and wished to examine your shoemaker’s handiwork. It laughed at umbrellas, and made such a savage assault on your overcoat and waterproof that it was plainly as enraged as it could be at being foiled, and in revenge settled down on them, till it made you look from top to toe as though you had been just rolled in feathers,minusthe tar.
Ah! it was a dreary day—a day that made one shiver and think of the poor, and shiver again. It spoiled the play of the children, and little Bessy would sit “anyhow,” as her nurse termed it, in her chair, with one hand mechanically endeavoring to pull the cane at the back of it to pieces, while her big round blue eyes would look out in silent wonder at the ugly day; and little Benny would flatten his already flat nose in desperation against the window-pane, creating quite a little atmosphere of fog around him; while Harry, the big brother, ten years old last birthday, would make a false attempt to keep up his spirits by riding that imaginary horse round and round the room, making him curvet and caper, and shy at that corner, and evince a particular dislike to the nurse, and kick so furiously at the door-key, till acrack of the whip suddenly brought the restive animal to his senses, and Harry would be still a moment, and gaze silently with the rest of the world out at the cheerless snow.
Was it the snow that Cranstone of Cranstone Hall was gazing at so fixedly out of the library window? Was it the snow that made those cheeks so deadly white, save for the two little purple spots on each of them? Was it the snow that made him clench his hands till the nails almost tore the flesh? What was he looking at so fixedly out there in the Park? What did he see out in the blinding snow, driving down on his own meadow-lands, and draping the strong forms of his ancestral oaks in mystic drapery, while from the bottom where the river ran, stole up a snaky mist in curling ashy-gray folds? He saw no snow, no mist, no oaks: he looked through them, beyond them, straight out at a tall form striding along, its back to Cranstone Hall, and its face to the wide, wide, bitter, cold world—striding on, and on, and on, and never looking back to the home where he fell one day like one of these little snowflakes out of heaven, and grew up straight, and tall, and honest, and true, and manly, with a head, and a handsome head too, on his shoulders, and such a heart in his bosom!—the pride of all the country-side, and the heir of Cranstone Hall. It was Dick Cranstone whose figure his father was gazing at so fixedly, though that figure had been gone three hours, and was far out of sight—Dick Cranstone, his father’s only son, the only relic of his dead mother, the boy on whom all the father’s strong heart was now set, who was striding along through the snow and the mist out into the bleak world on that winter morning, cast out from his father’s hearth and heart, driven away with a bitter curse.
What had Dick Cranstone done to bring down this curse and chastisement on his handsome young head? Dick and his father had been companions as well as father and son, for Ralph Cranstone was still a youngish man, and bore such years as he had well. His heart and his hopes were centred in this boy, whose mother had been snatched away so early; and when he saw the bright-eyed, laughing lad ripen into a great, handsome, clever young fellow, who rode with him, and played cricket with him, and scoured over the country neck and neck with him—for there was a dare-devil drop in the Cranstones—it would be hard to find a happier man in this world than Ralph, or a more loving son than Dick; in fact, “Oh! they’re as fond of each other as the Cranstones” had grown into a proverb in all the country-side. What, then, was Dick’s great crime that left him in a day fatherless, and his father childless, and rent asunder with a fierce wrench two hearts which all their lives had run together?
The Cranstones were an old family, older than Elizabeth, though it was at her time that Cranstone Hall first came into their possession. That was a good reign for people blessed with an elastic conscience. The Elizabethan Cranstone was a Catholic. He had the choice of running his neck in a noose and dying a martyr for his faith, or renouncing the religion he believed in, and taking instead the goodly Abbey of Cranstone, with its river, meads, and all its appurtenances. He did not hesitate long. Like most of his countrymen, he threw up his religion, and took to the abbey, turned out the monks, became a bitter persecutor of the church, changed the name of the place to Cranstone Hall,lived to a good old age, and the rich man died and was buried—in Cranstone churchyard. The old country folk round about tell you that this particular old Cranstone, whom they look upon as the first of the race, “died a-yellin’ for holy water like hell-foire”; but then, such people are always foolish. However, to come back to the story, the Cranstones remained from that day out a flourishing, wealthy family, strongly devoted to church and state, fierce persecutors of the Catholics whilst persecution was the fashion; when not so, what Catholics call bigoted Protestants.
Ralph was no exception to the rule. He honored the queen, and hated the pope and Papistry as genuinely as the old Elizabethan Cranstone had professed to do. He thought the country was going to ruin when he found Papists throwing up their heads, and walking about on English ground, just as though they had as much right there as anybody else. And when his old friend and neighbor Harry Clifford, who had been at Eton and Oxford with him, and whom Ralph had pronounced over and over again “the best fellow going,” turned Catholic one fine day, as soon as Ralph heard of it, and met Harry by chance at a friend’s, he turned on his heel, and walked out of the house, leaving the latter standing there with the old friendly hand outstretched towards him. From that day out, all intercourse ceased between the Cliffords and Cranstones, and the old friends were as dead to each other as though they had never met.
In good time, Dick went off to Oxford, with an Eton fame as a good bat and all-round cricketer, a handy man at the oar, the best runner and jumper in the school, added to the lesser reputation of being able to knock off the best Latin poem in the college, and running Old Barnacles hard for the head of the class—Old Barnacles, who did nothing but grub at his books night and day, and who sucked at Greek roots as little chaps would at lollipops. He made one of “the eleven” that year against Cambridge at Lord’s, and saved the game from becoming a disastrous defeat to his university by his plucky and cool play against that terrible left-hand bowler. How proud his father was of him that day! He could almost have gone up and shaken hands with Harry Clifford, whom he saw there with his wife and a beautiful young lady in the carriage, so divided in looks between Harry and his sweet wife that she could have belonged to no one else but to them. “A Clifford to the tip of her nose!” he kept repeating to himself, as he stole a sly glance at them now and then, and yearned for a grasp of his old friend’s hand; but the stubborn Cranstone blood was too strong within him, and he turned away slowly to watch the game.
It was going badly for Oxford in the second innings; the Cambridge men had a hard hitter in, who hit so hard and so furiously, and had so completely “mastered the bowling,” that the score mounted rapidly, and every new hit elicited shouts of applause for Cambridge. All over the field flew the ball, sometimes in among the rows of carriages which lined the ground. “They’ll never get him out,” said the spectators one to another, as the Cantab struck away right and left as freely as though he were playing with the bowlers. “There she goes! Bravo! Well hit!” they shouted, as the ball flew from the bat right across the field, straight and furious, full at the carriage where were seated the Cliffords. “Look out there! Look out—lookout!” they shout, as the carriage party, conversing together, are utterly unconscious of the danger approaching them. It takes a long time to tell this here, though it was all over in half a minute. The cricket-ball was flying at lightning speed straight at the head of the young lady, who at the moment was looking in another direction, inattentive to the warning cries that rose from all parts of the field. The shouts were hushed into that deadly silence that will settle so awfully over a vast assembly when every eye is bent in one direction, and every heart beats as one great one with the expectation of immediate disaster. All saw the danger of the young girl, but no one could prevent it, when suddenly there is a rush of something white, a leap in the air, a bare arm flashes in the sun, and the ball is clasped in the hand of one who never missed a catch yet, as he falls back over the side of the carriage, right in among the party, holding the ball all the while, and the great Cantab is out.
“Bravo, Cranstone! Bravo, Cranstone!” What a shout from the Oxonians! What a shout and a rush from all sides of the field to applaud the young fellow whose Eton fame had not belied him for speed, and whose swiftness and agility, and that high leap in the air and splendid catch, had perhaps saved a young girl’s life, while it rid his side of a terrible foe, and revived the hopes of Cambridge! But Cranstone never heeded the shouts; he lay back there in the carriage, lifeless, his head on Harry Clifford’s knee, his eyes closed, and his face white, while the frightened ladies, who scarcely yet knew from what a danger they had escaped, bent over him in terror. He had fallen heavily on the side of the carriage, and the shock caused him to faint.
The crowd is parted by a strong man, who rushes wildly to the spot. “Dick, my boy, Dick, are you hurt? Good God! Harry, it’s my son. Water, some of you—water. Clear away there, and let him have air!” The water is brought, and in a few moments he revives, to open his eyes on a pair of the tenderest blue eyes looking pityingly and frightened into his. A shake or two, like a strong mastiff, and he is all right again; the game goes on, and, though Oxford was beaten, that catch lives in men’s memories; while Ralph Cranstone and Harry Clifford were old friends again, and Mr. Dick Cranstone was reintroduced to his old playmate, Miss Ada Clifford.
Dick went back to Oxford that year with another feeling creeping into his heart side by side with the great love for his father which had hitherto possessed it. He was not over head and ears in love with Ada Clifford, nor, since it must be confessed, she with him; but his father and himself rode over often that vacation, and Dick found the family one of the most agreeable in every way that he had ever met, while Ralph atoned for his former rudeness in a thousand ways that come with such an indescribable charm from a strong nature. Dick took back this memory with him to the university, and perhaps it saved him from getting among the “fast men”—a society only too fascinating for young fellows blessed with health, strength, good nature, good looks, and money.
Without actually giving up his practices of muscular Christianity, association with more intellectual minds brought him soon to perceive that there was a higher ambition in this life for a young man than being the captain of a cricket eleven, the “stroke” of a university eight, thebest pigeon shot, or the proprietor of the most startling “turn-out” on the road. Association with intellectual men brought with it intellectual thoughts, inquiries, pursuits; while under all happily ran the boy’s innate love of honor, of what was fair and truthful, supporting him somewhat, and keeping him, on the whole, straight in the midst of the dangerous speculations and vexed problems which were being agitated around him, and discussed with all the boldness natural to undisciplined minds.
His Oxford course was drawing to a close, and he began to think of adopting some career, though the wealth and property to which he was heir necessitated no pursuit at all other than that of a quiet country gentleman living on his estates. During his last year particularly he had read and studied much, and the result of his studies and inquiries always came home to him in the form of the old question of Pilate, What is truth? He was, like his father, a loyal Englishman, a supporter of the state, rather because he found it there established, and could see no better, than for any divine right which, in his father’s mind, and in the minds of so many Englishmen, the glorious British Constitution possesses. But the church was another affair. That question puzzled him sorely. That it might be a very fine institution, that it had given birth to many splendid minds, that it still possessed many very amiable and worthy followers, he did not deny; but that an institution which was at best a very mixed affair, which was not believed in by the majority of his countrymen, which had been patched, and stretched, and mended, and cobbled to meet the exigencies of every changing hour, which was not believed in even by so many of its professed members and teachers, was in any sense a divine institution, he could not concede. To his truthful mind, it dated from Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, not from Jesus Christ; it was simply in its present form an amiable machine of state, not a divine organization which should command the approving consent of all were it what men who believed in salvation ought to follow. As for the rest of the wrangling sects, he looked upon them as so many ecclesiastical tinkerings, better calculated to bore holes in the edifice of faith than to build up a system strong, enduring, and right.
Filled with thoughts of this description, he came home restless, dissatisfied, questioning; too true and too earnest to throw quite overboard all belief as a sham, and take the world as he found it—a mixture of good and bad, inexplicable save as a result of chance and conventionality. He visited the Cliffords, and they found laughing Dick Cranstone an altered man, somewhat graver, and evidently unsettled. One day, when his father was not present, he unbosomed himself to Mr. Clifford, who was a very intellectual man. The latter listened kindly to the boy, though he knew the story well; he had gone through it all himself. He did not try to explain matters there and then; he merely told him that what he was then experiencing was the exact counterpart of what he himself had experienced. “If you like to come over in a few days, I expect to have F. Leslie here, a Jesuit, and a convert like myself. He will explain matters to you much better than I can, if you are not afraid of meeting a Jesuit, Richard.”
Dick winced a little at this proposal; he had never in his life met with a Jesuit, and his opinion of the society was formed on what he had read of them as the most deceitful, crafty,and cunning set of men ever organized to blind men’s eyes and lead them astray from freedom and light; though, when he came to think the matter over, he could not bring to mind a single case of any of his friends who had come across them and been converted to Catholicity, as some of them had, turning out fiends or blind enthusiasts. So he resolved to meet F. Leslie.
It was the old story. After due inquiry and preparation, he was converted, and immediately after went straight to his father, and told him all.
To describe Ralph Cranstone’s wrath at the news would be impossible. He only saw one terrible fact—his family disgraced for ever in the person of their last descendant his son, from whom he had hoped so much. The line of the Cranstones was poisoned, defiled in the person of one who could thus turn traitor to his queen and country. A Cranstone a Papist! And that Cranstone his son Dick! He did not ask him to retract—he rose up and cursed the boy, and turned him out of the house.
Protestant friends, this part of the story, though inwoven with fiction, is a very hard fact. It is not of unfrequent occurrence; the writer to-day has friends who in their own persons can corroborate it.
Ralph Cranstone could have borne anything rather than this—that his son should turn Papist. He might become an infidel, and believe in no God at all; he might join any one he chose of the sects, however low; he might even turn Mussulman or Jew—but a Cranstone a Papist! Good God! it were better that he had never been born.
And so Ralph sat there looking out into the storm, where the form of his brave, handsome boy had vanished. He was conscious only of the storm raging in his own breast, of the terrible curse he had uttered out of his heart on the head of the one he had loved more, infinitely more, than himself. That curse was ringing around the room still, and seemed to mock him like a fiend. He rose at last, and staggered to his room, not noticing the tearful old housekeeper, who knew that something dreadful had happened, and who came timidly asking him to take something to eat, for the day had gone. His day had gone out with his boy, and the light of his life went out with Dick into the winter storm, to be swallowed up and buried away in it for ever.
Dick had a hard time of it. He refused all offers of assistance tendered him by Mr. Clifford. He would not even go down to visit them; he would not appear in the neighborhood; for he could not meet his father again. He wrote to him many times, but his letters were always returned unopened. He soon received news from Mr. Clifford that his father had broken up his home, left the neighborhood, and gone no one knew whither. He could only pray for him to the God to whom, for the first time in his life, he found he could pray with a strong faith and earnest belief. He still would not go to the Cliffords’, though he corresponded with them from London, and saw them now and then when they came up. He had friends on the press, and with their assistance managed to eke out enough to live upon by means of his pen. He worked away, sustained, in his loss of father, fortune, and place, by the religion of Jesus Christ, discovering each day new wonders in an exhaustless region. His father he never heard from, nor gained any intelligence of his whereabouts, nor whether he was living or dead. The trial was a sore one, buthe felt that perhaps he was in some small degree atoning for all the evils which had followed that first defection of his family from the religion to which they belonged. And so he worked away, and rose; for he had talent, and soon attained a position which relieved him from all fears of absolute want, though still poor enough.
The Cliffords were a great comfort to him, and the thought of Ada often inspired the weary pen to fresh exertion when it flagged from sheer fatigue. The more he found the love of her growing upon him, the more he avoided the presence of the family; for his poverty set a boundless sea, in his imagination, between himself and her. He excused himself for not calling on them by a thousand reasons—press of business, and the usual excuses; till at last their intercourse almost ceased, and poor Dick, laughing Dick, became wretchedly miserable, and began to look upon the world as a poor sort of place after all, while Cranstone Hall would force itself upon his mind, dreary and deserted, the garden weedy, and the oaks lonely, with that terrible, heartless curse hanging over all.
One night, while seated in his room thinking such thoughts as these, a hasty knock came to the door, and, opening it, the old housekeeper fell forward almost fainting in his arms, with the exclamation:
“O Master Richard! Master Richard, dear! he’s come back at last.”
Dick staggered as though the old woman’s trembling voice had been a giant’s arm which smote him.
“Yes, yes,” he murmured.
“For God’s sake and your dear mother’s, Master Richard, fly! He’s ill—he’s dying—he’s raving of you!... At the Hall.... Yes. Go, go, or you’ll be too late.”
He rushed into the street, she following him. The snow was falling again as bitterly as on the day when he last saw his father. The train, though it flew along, seemed to him to travel at a snail’s pace. The snow blocked the roads leading to the Hall: the chaise could not advance. He leaped out, unyoked one of the horses, bade the driver follow as best he could with the housekeeper, mounted the animal, and, by what means he never knew, found himself at the Hall. He was about to dash up to his father’s rooms, when a light in the library window attracted his attention. Mother of God! can that be his father?
The brown curls bleached to snow, the face white, and thin, and bloodless, the eyes staring wildly straight out of the window, the form shrunk, the mouth mumbling some incoherent words. The light of a candle shone full on his father’s face, altered to that of a ghost.
Dick entered trembling, uncertain whether it was a spirit or his father himself whom he saw before him.
“I want my boy, my Dick, my brave, handsome son. Bring him back to me. You stole him away. Where is he?”
“Father, he is here. Look at me, father. Here I am, Dick—your own son Dick, come back to you. Do you not know me?”
“You? You’re not my son. I’ve got no son. He went away from me. He hates his father—his poor father. I—I—cursed him, when I could have blessed him, and he believed me; and Dick’s gone—gone—gone.” And the poor creature moaned, and covered his crazed head with his hands, while the sharpest pang that ever rent his boy’s heart rent it at that moment with the thought that, perhaps, it was all his fault, and that, had he only forced himself upon him, his fathermight have forgiven him, all might have gone well, and he would not now have been summoned to the side of the lost wreck before him.
They bore him back to the bed whence he had stolen while those who should have watched him had dozed a little. The next day the Cliffords came over, and took up their abode in the old Hall, where Ada and her mother watched and tended the sufferer as only women can do. Dick was around them and about them, and in and out, and happy and miserable, and all contraries in a breath. Ada alone could set him right, and prevent him from going as mad as his father.
Ralph lay long between the two worlds. His strong reason; once forced out, seemed sullen to return. But it did come at last, and his weak eyes opened on his son, while the heart of the father, with all the pent-up feelings of these years, gushed out over his boy. He had gone away and wandered everywhere. He drank till his brain gave way, and only enough reason was left to lead him home to die.
But death seems a long way off from Ralph Cranstone yet. The saying is oftener than ever on people’s lips, “They’re as fond of each other as the two Cranstones.” Old Cranstone’s face—the Elizabethan—has taken a new scowl, for underneath his picture rises up an ivory crucifix which Ralph himself set there. The snow falls merrily and cheerily; the old oaks smile in their winter garb; no mist rises up from where the river runs. Yes; that’s young Ralph there dashing out of the hall door to meet his uncle and papa; there he goes climbing up uncle’s legs, and shaking him as though he were a telegraph post set up there for him to shake; and, if ever there was a happy couple, that couple is Ada and laughing Dick; and the old Cranstone frowns down on it all out of his dim canvas, for the Cranstone line has gone back to its old faith.