Cobwebs and Cables Part 25

A rapid flush of color pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 G.o.d 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. n.o.body 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 s.h.i.+ver; 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."

"G.o.d bless you!" cried Jean Merle, in a tremulous voice. "G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed. 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 Trubsee Alps, from which he might be either ascending the t.i.tlis or taking the route to the Joch-Pa.s.s. 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 n.o.body. 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-Pa.s.s, with some faint hopes of meeting with Jean Merle on their route, hopes that were not fulfilled.

CHAPTER XI.

COMING TO HIMSELF.

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 pa.s.sed 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.

_If_ he returned; for, as he ascended the steep path leading up to the Trubsee 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 h.o.a.rding had been abruptly broken up by the loss of all he had toiled for and h.o.a.rded 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 h.e.l.l 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 impa.s.sable, and as death-like as the ice-creva.s.ses 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 s.h.i.+vering and terror-stricken from the edge of the creva.s.se, 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 t.i.tlis, 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 cla.s.s would travel, in a third-cla.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e 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 scholars.h.i.+p. 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.