Cobwebs and Cables Part 22

He reached his mission-room at last, through the close, unwholesome atmosphere, and found it fairly filled, chiefly with working men, some of whom had turned into it as being a trifle less hot and noisy than the baking pavements without, crowded with quarrelsome children. It was, moreover, the pay-night for a Providence club which Felix had established for any, either men or women, who chose to contribute to it.

There was a short and simple lecture given first; and afterwards the club-books were brought out, and a committee of working men received the weekly subscriptions, and attended to the affairs of the little club.

The lecture was near its close, when a drunken man, in the quarrelsome stage of intoxication, stumbled in through the open door. Felix knew him by sight well; a confirmed drunkard, a mere miserable sot, who hung about the spirit-vaults, and lived only for the drink he could pour down his throat. There had been a vague instinctive dread and disgust for the man, mingled with a deep interest he could not understand, in Felix's mind. He paused for an instant, looking at the dirty rags, and bleared eyes, and degraded face of the drunkard standing just in the doorway, with the summer's light behind him.

"What's the parson's name?" he called in a thick, unsteady voice. "Is it Sefton?"

"Hus.h.!.+ hus.h.!.+" cried two or three voices in answer.

"I'll not hus.h.!.+ If it's Sefton, it were his father as made me what I am.

It were his father as stole every blessed penny of my earnings. It were his father as drove me to drink, and ruined me, soul and body. Sefton!

I've a right to know the name of Sefton if any man on earth does. Curse it!"

Felix had ceased speaking, and stood facing his little congregation, listening as in a dream. The men caught the drunken accuser by the arms, and were violently expelling him, but his rough voice rose above the noise of the scuffle.

"Ay!" he shouted, "the parson won't hear the truth told. But take care of your money, mates, or it'll go where mine went."

"Don't turn him out," called Felix; "it's a mistake, my men. Let him alone. He never knew my father."

The drunkard turned round and confronted him, and the little a.s.sembly was quiet again, with an intense quietness, waiting to hear what would follow.

"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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d Almighty struck me dead for it this moment."

There was such a tone of truth in the hoa.r.s.e and pa.s.sionate tones, which grew steadier as the speaker gained a.s.surance 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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.

CHAPTER VI.

OTHER PEOPLE'S SINS.

"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 pa.s.sed since his father died. Even his love for Alice had not touched his pa.s.sionate 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sion 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 fellows.h.i.+p 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.