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Cobwebs and Cables

by Hesba Stretton · English · Gutenberg #19802 · 642,847 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Cobwebs and Cables

Author: Hesba Stretton


        
Release date: November 13, 2006 [eBook #19802]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19802

Credits: Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Mary Meehan and
        the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
        http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COBWEBS AND CABLES ***




Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Mary Meehan and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net









COBWEBS

AND

CABLES.

BY

HESBA STRETTON,

AUTHOR OF "THROUGH A NEEDLE'S EYE," "IN PRISON AND OUT," "BEDE'S
CHARITY," ETC.

NEW YORK: DODD, MEAD & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS.




_AUTHOR'S CARD._

_It is my wish that Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Company alone should publish
this story in the United States, and I appeal to the generosity and
courtesy of other Publishers, to allow me to gain some benefit from my
work on the American as well as English side of the Atlantic._

_HESBA STRETTON._




CONTENTS.


PART I.

CHAPTER

I. ABSCONDED

II. PHEBE MARLOWE

III. FELICITA

IV. UPFOLD FARM

V. A CONFESSION

VI. THE OLD BANK

VII. AN INTERRUPTED DAY-DREAM

VIII. THE SENIOR PARTNER

IX. FAST BOUND

X. LEAVING RIVERSBOROUGH

XI. OLD MARLOWE

XII. RECKLESS OF LIFE

XIII. SUSPENSE

XIV. ON THE ALTAR STEPS

XV. A SECOND FRAUD

XVI. PARTING WORDS

XVII. WAITING FOR THE NEWS

XVIII. THE DEAD ARE FORGIVEN

XIX. AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER

XX. A DUMB MAN'S GRIEF

XXI. PLATO AND PAUL

XXII. A REJECTED SUITOR

XXIII. ANOTHER OFFER

XXIV. AT HOME IN LONDON

XXV. DEAD TO THE WORLD


PART II.

CHAPTER

I. AFTER MANY YEARS

II. CANON PASCAL

III. FELICITA'S REFUSAL

IV. TAKING ORDERS

V. A LONDON CURACY

VI. OTHER PEOPLE'S SINS

VII. AN OLD MAN'S PARDON

VIII. THE GRAVE AT ENGELBERG

IX. THE LOWEST DEEPS

X. ALICE PASCAL

XI. COMING TO HIMSELF

XII. A GLIMPSE INTO PARADISE

XIII. A LONDON GARRET

XIV. HIS FATHER'S SIN

XV. HAUNTING MEMORIES

XVI. THE VOICE OF THE DEAD

XVII. NO PLACE FOR REPENTANCE

XVIII. WITHIN AND WITHOUT

XIX. IN HIS FATHER'S HOUSE

XX. AS A HIRED SERVANT

XXI. PHEBE'S SECRET

XXII. NEAR THE END

XXIII. THE MOST MISERABLE

XXIV. FOR ONE MOMENT

XXV. THE FINAL RESOLVE

XXVI. IN LUCERNE

XXVII. HIS OWN CHILDREN

XXVIII. AN EMIGRATION SCHEME

XXIX. FAREWELL

XXX. QUITE ALONE

XXXI. LAST WORDS




COBWEBS AND CABLES




PART I.




CHAPTER I.

ABSCONDED.


Late as it was, though the handsome office-clock on the chimney-piece
had already struck eleven, Roland Sefton did not move. He had not
stirred hand or foot for a long while now; no more than if he had been
bound fast by many strong cords, which no effort could break or untie.
His confidential clerk had left him two hours ago, and the undisturbed
stillness of night had surrounded him ever since he had listened to his
retreating footsteps. "Poor Acton!" he had said half aloud, and with a
heavy sigh.

As he sat there, his clasped hands resting on his desk and his face
hidden on them, all his life seemed to unfold itself before him; not in
painful memories of the past only, but in terrified prevision of the
black future.

How dear his native town was to him! He had always loved it from his
very babyhood. The wide old streets, with ancient houses still standing
here and there, rising or falling in gentle slopes, and called by quaint
old names such as he never heard elsewhere; the fine old churches
crowning the hills, and lifting up delicate tall spires, visible a score
of miles away; the grammar school where he had spent the happiest days
of his boyhood; the rapid river, brown and swirling, which swept past
the town, and came back again as if it could not leave it; the ancient
bridges spanning it, and the sharp-cornered recesses on them where he
had spent many an idle hour, watching the boats row in and out under the
arches; he saw every familiar nook and corner of his native town vividly
and suddenly, as if he caught glimpses of them by the capricious play of
lightning.

And this pleasant home of his; these walls which inclosed his
birth-place, and the birth-place of his children! He could not imagine
himself finding true rest and a peaceful shelter elsewhere. The spacious
old rooms, with brown wainscoted walls and carved ceilings; the tall and
narrow windows, with deep window-sills, where as a child he had so often
knelt, gazing out on the wide green landscape and the far distant,
almost level line of the horizon. His boy, Felix, had knelt in one of
them a few hours ago, looking out with grave childish eyes on the
sunset. The broad, shallow steps of the oaken staircase, trodden so many
years by the feet of all who were dearest to him; the quiet chambers
above where his mother, his wife, and his children were at this moment
sleeping peacefully. How unutterably and painfully sweet all his home
was to him!

Very prosperous his life had been; hardly overshadowed by a single
cloud. His father, who had been the third partner in the oldest bank in
Riversborough, had lived until he was old enough to step into his place.
The bank had been established in the last century, and was looked upon
as being as safe as the Bank of England. The second partner was dead;
and the eldest, Mr. Clifford, had left everything in his hands for the
last five years.

No man in Riversborough had led a more prosperous life than he had. His
wife was from one of the county families; without fortune, indeed, but
with all the advantages of high connections, which lifted him above the
rank of mere business men, and admitted him into society hitherto closed
even to the head partner in the old bank; in spite even of the fact that
he still occupied the fine old house adjoining the bank premises. There
was scarcely a townsman who was held to be his equal; not one who was
considered his superior. Though he was little over thirty yet, he was at
the head of all municipal affairs. He had already held the office of
mayor for one year, and might have been re-elected, if his wife had not
somewhat scorned the homely bourgeois dignity. There was no more popular
man in the whole town than he was.

But he had been building on the sands, and the storm was rising. He
could hear the moan of the winds growing louder, and the rush of the
on-coming floods drawing nearer. He must make good his escape now, or
never. If he put off flight till to-morrow, he would be crushed with the
falling of his house.

He lifted himself up heavily, and looked round the room. It was his
private office, at the back of the bank, handsomely furnished as a bank
parlor should be. Over the fire-place hung the portrait of old Clifford,
the senior partner, faithfully painted by a local artist, who had not
attempted to soften the hard, stern face, and the fixed stare of the
cold blue eyes, which seemed fastened pitilessly upon him. He had never
seen the likeness before as he saw it now. Would such a man overlook a
fault, or have any mercy for an offender? Never! He turned away from it,
feeling cold and sick at heart; and with a heavy, and very bitter sigh
he locked the door upon the room where he had spent so large a portion
of his life. The place which had known him would know him no more.

As noiselessly and warily as if he was a thief breaking into the quiet
house, he stole up the dimly-lighted staircase, and paused for a minute
or two before a door, listening intently. Then he crept in. A low shaded
lamp was burning, giving light enough to guide him to the cot where
Felix was sleeping. It would be his birthday to-morrow, and the child
must not lose his birthday gift, though the relentless floods were
rushing on toward him also. Close by was the cot where his baby
daughter, Hilda, was at rest. He stood between them, and could lay a
hand on each. How soundly the children slept while his heart was
breaking! Dear as they had been to him, he had never realized till now
how priceless beyond all words such little tender creatures could be. He
had called them into existence; and now the greatest good that could
befall them was his death. It was unutterable agony to him.

His gift was a Bible, the boy's own choice; and he laid it on the pillow
where Felix would find it as soon as his eyes opened. He bent over him,
and kissed him with trembling lips. Hilda stirred a little when his lips
touched her soft, rosy face, and she half opened her eyes, whispering
"Father," and then fell asleep again smiling. He dared not linger
another moment, but passing stealthily away, he paused listening at
another door, his face white with anguish. "I dare not see Felicita," he
murmured to himself, "but I must look on my mother's face once again."

The door made no sound as he opened it, and his feet fell noiselessly on
the thick carpet; but as he drew near his mother's bed, her eyes opened
with a clear steady gaze as if she had been awaiting his coming. There
was a light burning here as well as in the night-nursery adjoining, for
it was his mother who had charge of the children, and who would be the
first the nurse would call if anything was the matter. She awoke as one
who expects to be called upon at any hour; but the light was too dim to
betray the misery on her son's face.

"Roland!" she said, in a slightly foreign accent.

"Were you calling, mother?" he asked. "I was passing by, and I came in
here to see if you wanted anything."

"I did not call, my son," she answered, "but what have you the matter?
Is Felicita ill? or the babies? Your voice is sad, Roland."

"No, no," he said, forcing himself to speak in a cheerful voice,
"Felicita is asleep, I hope, and the babies are all right. But I have
been late at bank-work; and I turned in just to have a look at you,
mother, before I go to bed."

"That's my good son," she said, smiling, and taking his hand between her
own in a fond clasp.

"Am I a good son?" he asked.

His mother's face was a fair, sweet face still, the soft brown hair
scarcely touched with white, and with clear, dark gray eyes gazing up
frankly into his own. They were eyes like these, with their truthful
light shining through them, inherited from her, which in himself had won
the unquestioning trust and confidence of those who were brought into
contact with him. There was no warning signal of disloyalty in his face
to set others on their guard. His mother looked up at him tenderly.

"Always a good son, the best of sons, Roland," she replied, "and a good
husband, and a good father. Only one little fault in my good son: too
spendthrift, too lavish. You are not a fine, rich lord, with large
lands, and much, very much money, my boy. I do my best in the house; but
women can only save pennies, while men fling about pounds."

"But you love me with all my faults, mother?" he said.

"As my own soul," she answered.

There was a profound solemnity in her voice and look, which penetrated
to his very heart. She was not speaking lightly. It was in the same
spirit with which. Paul wrote, after saying, "For I am persuaded that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord;" "I could wish that myself were separate from
Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." His mother
had reached that sublime height of love for him.

He stood silent, looking down on her with dull, aching eyes, as he said
to himself it was perhaps for the last time. It was the last time she
would ever see him as her good son. With her, in her heart and memory,
all his life dwelt; she knew the whole of it, with no break or
interruption. Only this one hidden thread, which had been woven into the
web in secret, and which was about to stand out with such clear and open
disclosure; of this she had no faint suspicion. For a minute or two he
felt as if he must tell her of it; that he must roll off this horrible
weight from himself, and crush her faithful heart with it. But what
could his mother do? Her love could not stay the storm; she had no power
to bid the winds and waves be still. It would be best for all of them if
he could make his escape secretly, and be altogether lost in
impenetrable darkness.

At that moment a clock in the hall below struck one.

"Well," he said wearily, "if I'm to get any sleep to-night I must be off
to bed. Good-by, mother."

"Good-by?" she repeated with a smile.

"Good-night, of course," he replied, bending over her and kissing her
tenderly.

"God bless you, my son," she said, putting both her hands upon his head,
and pressing his face close to her own. He could not break away from her
fond embrace; but in a few moments she let him go, bidding him get some
rest before the night was passed.

Once more he stood in the dimly-lighted passage, listening at his wife's
door, with his fingers involuntarily clasping the handle. But he dared
not go in. If he looked upon Felicita again he could not leave her, even
to escape from ruin and disgrace. An agony of love and of terror took
possession of him. Never to see her again was horrible; but to see her
shrink from him as a base and dishonest man, his name an infamy to her,
would be worse than death. Did she love him enough to forgive a sin
committed chiefly for her sake? In the depths of his own soul the answer
was no.

He stole down stairs again, and passed out by a side door into the
streets. It was raining heavily, and the wind was moaning through the
deserted thoroughfares, where no sound of footsteps could be heard.
Behind him lay his pleasant home, never so precious as at this moment.
He looked up at the windows, the two faintly lit up, and that other
darkened window of the chamber he had not dared to enter. In a few hours
those women, so unutterably dear to him, would be overwhelmed by the
great sorrow he had prepared for them; those children would become the
inheritors of his sin. He looked back longingly and despairingly, as if
there only was life for him; and then hurrying on swiftly he lost sight
of the old home, and felt as a drowning wretch at sea feels when the
heaving billows hide from him the glimmering light of the beacon, which,
however, can offer no harbor of refuge to him.




CHAPTER II.

PHEBE MARLOWE.


Though the night had been stormy, the sun rose brightly on the
rain-washed streets, and the roofs and walls stood out with a peculiar
clearness, and with a more vivid color than usual, against the deep blue
of the sky. It was May-day, and most hearts were stirred with a pleasant
feeling as of a holiday; not altogether a common day, though the shops
were all open, and business was going on as usual. The old be-thought
themselves of the days when they had gone a-Maying; and the young felt
less disposed to work, and were inclined to wander out in search of
May-flowers in the green meadows, or along the sunny banks of the river,
which surrounded the town. Early, very early considering the ten miles
she had ridden on her rough hill-pony, came a young country girl across
one of the ancient bridges, with a large market-basket on her arm,
brimful of golden May-flowers, set off well by their own glossy leaves,
and by the dark blue of her dress. She checked her pony and lingered for
a few minutes, looking over the parapet at the swift rushing of the
current through the narrow arches. A thin line of alders grew along the
margin of the river, with their pale green leaves half unfolded; and in
the midst of the swirling waters, parting them into two streams, lay a
narrow islet on which tall willow wands were springing, with soft, white
buds on every rod, and glistening in the sunshine. Not far away a lofty
avenue of lime-trees stretched along the banks, casting wavering shadows
on the brown river; while beyond it, on the summit of one of the hills
on which the town was built, there rose the spires of two churches built
close together, with the gilded crosses on their tapering points
glittering more brightly than anything else in the joyous light. For a
little while the girl gazed dreamily at the landscape, her color coming
and going quickly, and then with a deep-drawn sigh of delight she
roused herself and her pony, and passed on into the town.

The church clocks struck nine as she turned into Whitefriars Road, the
street where the old bank of Riversborough stood. The houses on each
side of the broad and quiet street were handsome, old-fashioned
dwelling-places, not one of which had as yet been turned into a shop.
The most eminent lawyers and doctors lived in it; and there was more
than one frontage which displayed a hatchment, left to grow faded and
discolored long after the year of mourning was ended. Here too was the
judge's residence, set apart for his occupation during the assizes. But
the old bank was the most handsome and most ancient of all those urban
mansions. It had originally stood alone on the brow of the hill
overlooking the river and the Whitefriars Abbey. Toward the street, when
Ronald Sefton's forefathers had realized a fortune by banking, now a
hundred years ago, there had been a new frontage built to it, with the
massive red brick workmanship and tall narrow windows of the eighteenth
century. But on the river side it was still an old Elizabethan mansion,
with gabled roofs standing boldly up against the sky; and low broad
casements, latticed and filled with lozenge-shaped panes; and
half-timber walls, with black beams fashioned into many forms: and with
one story jutting out beyond that below, until the attic window under
the gable seemed to hang in mid-air, without visible support, over the
garden sloping down a steep bank to the river-side.

Phebe Marlowe, in her coarse dark blue merino dress, and with her
market-basket of golden blossoms on her arm, walked with a quick step
along the quiet street, having left her pony at a stable near the
entrance to the town. There were few persons about; but those whom she
met she looked at with a pleasant, shy, slight smile on her face, as if
she almost claimed acquaintance with them, and was ready, even wishful,
to bid them good-morning on a day so fine and bright. Two or three
responded to this inarticulate greeting, and then her lips parted
gladly, and her voice, clear though low, answered them with a sweet
good-humor that had something at once peculiar and pathetic in it. She
passed under a broad archway at one side of the bank offices, leading to
the house entrance, and to the sloping garden beyond. A private door
into the bank was ajar, and a dark, sombre face was peering out of it
into the semi-darkness. Phebe's feet paused for an instant.

"Good-morning, Mr. Acton," she said, with a little rustic courtesy. But
he drew back quickly, and she heard him draw the bolt inside the door,
as if he had neither seen nor heard her. Yet the face, with its eager
and scared expression, had been too quickly seen by her, and too vividly
impressed upon her keen perception; and she went on, chilled a little,
as if some cloud had come over the clear brightness of the morning.

Phebe was so much at home in the house, that when she found the
housemaid on her knees cleaning the hall floor, she passed on
unceremoniously to the dining-room, where she felt sure of finding some
of the family. It was a spacious room, with a low ceiling where black
beams crossed and recrossed each other; with wainscoted walls, and a
carved chimney-piece of almost black oak. A sombre place in gloomy
weather, yet so decorated with old china vases, and great brass salvers,
and silver cups and tankards catching every ray of light, that the whole
room glistened in this bright May-day. In the broad cushioned seat
formed by the sill of the oriel window, which was almost as large as a
room itself, there sat the elder Mrs. Sefton, Roland Sefton's foreign
mother, with his two children standing before her. They had their hands
clasped behind them, and their faces were turned toward her with the
grave earnestness children's faces often wear. She was giving them their
daily Bible lesson, and she held up her small brown hand as a signal to
Phebe to keep silence, and to wait a moment until the lesson was ended.

"And so," she said, "those who know the will of God, and do not keep it,
will be beaten with many stripes. Remember that, my little Felix."

"I shall always try to do it," answered the boy solemnly. "I'm nine
years old to-day; and when I'm a man I'm going to be a pastor, like
your father, grandmamma; my great-grandfather, you know, in the Jura.
Tell us how he used to go about the snow mountains seeing his poor
people, and how he met with wolves sometimes, and was never frightened."

"Ah! my little children," she answered, "you have had a good father, and
a good grandfather, and a good great-grandfather. How very good you
ought to be."

"We will," cried both the children, clinging round her as she rose from
her chair, until they caught sight of Phebe standing in the doorway.
Then with cries of delight they flew to her, and threw themselves upon
her with almost rough caresses, as if they knew she could well bear it.
She received them with merry laughter, and knelt down that their arms
might be thrown more easily round her neck.

"See," she said, "I was up so early, while you were all in bed, finding
May-roses for you, with the May-dew on them. And if your father and
mother will let us go, I'll take you up the river to the osier island;
or you shall ride my Ruby, and we'll go off a long, long way into the
country, us three, and have dinner in a new place, where you have never
been. Because it's Felix's birthday."

She was still kneeling on the floor, with the children about her, when
the door opened, and the same troubled and haggard face, which had
peered out upon her under the archway, looked into the room with
restless and bloodshot eyes. Phebe felt a sudden chill again, and rising
to her feet put the children behind her, as if she feared some danger
for them.

"Where is Mr. Sefton?" he asked in a deep, hoarse voice; "is he at home,
Madame?"

Ever since the elder Mr. Sefton had brought his young foreign wife home,
now more than thirty years ago, the people of Riversborough had called
her Madame, giving to her no other title or surname. It had always
seemed to set her apart, and at a distance, as a foreigner, and so quiet
had she been, so homely and domesticated, that she had remained a
stranger, keeping her old habits of life and thought, and often yearning
for the old pastor's home among the Jura Mountains.

"But yes," she answered, "my son is late this morning; but all the world
is early, I think. It is not much beyond nine o'clock, Mr. Acton. The
bank is not open yet."

"No, no," he answered hurriedly, while his eyes wandered restlessly
about the room; "he is not ill, Madame?"

"I hope so not," she replied, with some vague uneasiness stirring in her
heart.

"Nor dead?" he muttered.

"Dead!" exclaimed both Madame and Phebe in one breath; "dead!"

"All men die," he went on, "and it is a pleasant thing to lie down
quietly in one's own grave, where the wicked cease from troubling, and
the weary are at rest. He could rest soundly in the grave."

"I will go and see," cried Madame, catching Phebe by the arm.

"Pray God you may find him dead," he answered, with a low, miserable
laugh, ending in a sob. He was mad; neither Madame nor Phebe had a doubt
of it. They put the children before them, and bade them run away to the
nursery, while they followed up the broad old staircase. Madame went
into her son's bedroom; but in a few seconds she returned to Phebe with
an anxious face.

"He is not there," she said, "nor Felicita. She is in her own
sitting-room, where she likes not to be followed. It is her sacred
place, and I go there never, Phebe."

"But she knows where Mr. Sefton is," answered Phebe, "and we must ask
her. We cannot leave poor Mr. Acton alone. If nobody else dare disturb
her, I will."

"She will not be vexed with you," said Madame Sefton. "Knock at this
door, Phebe; knock till she answers. I am miserable about my son."

Several times Phebe knocked, more loudly each time, until at last a low
voice, sounding far away, bade them go in. Very quietly, as if indeed
they were stepping into some holy place barefooted, they crossed the
threshold.




CHAPTER III.

FELICITA.


The room was a small one, with a dim, many-colored light pervading it;
for the upper part of the mullioned casement was filled with painted
glass, and even the panes of the lower part were of faintly tinted
green. Like all the rest of the old house, the walls were wainscoted,
but here there was no piece of china or silver to sparkle; the only
glitter was that of the gilding on the handsomely bound books arranged
in two bookcases. In this green gloom sat Felicita Sefton, leaning back
in her chair, with her head resting languidly on the cushions, and her
dark eyes turned dimly and dreamily toward the quietly opening door.

"Phebe Marlowe!" she said, her eyes brightening a little, as the fresh,
sweet face of the young country girl met her gaze. Phebe stepped softly
forward into the dim room, and laid the finest of the golden flowers she
had gathered that morning upon Felicita's lap. It brought a gleam of
spring sunshine into the gloom which caught Felicita's eye, and she
uttered a low cry of delight as she took it up in her small, delicate
hand. Phebe stooped down shyly and kissed the small hand, her face all
aglow with smiles and blushes.

"Felicita," said Madame, her voice altering a little, "where is my son
this morning?"

"Roland!" she repeated absently; "Roland? Didn't he say last night he
was going to London?"

"To London!" exclaimed his mother.

"Yes," she answered, "he bade me good-by last night; I remember now. He
said he would not disturb me again; he was going by the mail-train. He
was sorry to be away on poor little Felix's birthday. I recollect quite
distinctly now."

"He said not one word to me," said Madame. "It is strange."

"Very strange," asserted Felicita languidly, as if she were wandering
away again into the reverie they had broken in upon.

"Did he say when he would be back?" asked his mother.

"In a few days, of course," she answered.

"But he has not told Acton," resumed Madame.

"Who did you say?" inquired Felicita.

"The head clerk, the manager when Roland is away," she said. "He has not
said anything to him."

"Very strange," said Felicita again. It was plainly irksome to her to be
disturbed by questions like these, and she was withdrawing herself into
the remote and unapproachable distance where no one could follow her.
Her finely-chiselled features and colorless skin gave her a singular
resemblance to marble; and they might almost as well have addressed
themselves to a marble image.

"Come," said Madame, "we must see Acton again."

They found him in the bank parlor, where Roland was usually to be met
with at this hour. There was an unspoken hope in their hearts that he
would be there, and so deliver them from the undefined trouble and
terror they were suffering. But only Acton was there, seated at Roland's
desk, and turning over the papers in it with a rapid and reckless hand.
His face was hidden behind the great flap of the desk, and though he
glanced over it for an instant as the door opened he concealed himself
again, as if feigning unconsciousness of any one's presence.

"My son is gone to London," said Madame, keeping at a safe distance from
him, with the door open behind her and Phebe to secure a speedy retreat.
The flap of the desk fell with a loud crash, and Acton flung his arms
above his head with a gesture of despair.

"I knew it," he exclaimed. "Oh, my dear young master! God grant he may
get away safe. All is lost!"

"What do you mean?" cried Madame, forgetting one terror in another, and
catching him by the arm; "what is lost?"

"He is gone!" he answered, "and it was more my fault than his--mine and
Mrs. Sefton's. Whatever wrong he has done it was for her. Remember
that, Madame, and you, Phebe Marlowe. If anything happens, remember it's
my fault more than his, and Mrs. Sefton's fault more than mine."

"Tell me what you mean," urged Madame breathlessly.

"You'll know when Mr. Sefton returns, Madame," he answered, with a
sudden return to his usually calm tone and manner, which was as
startling as his former vehemence had been; "he'll explain all when he
comes home. We must open the bank now; it is striking ten."

He locked the desk and passed out of the comfortably-furnished parlor
into the office beyond, leaving them nothing to do but to return into
the house with their curiosity unsatisfied, and the mother's vague
trouble unsoothed.

"Phebe, Phebe!" cried Felix, as they slowly re-entered the pleasant
home, "my mother says we may go up the river to the osier island; and,
oh, Phebe, she will go with us her own self!"

He had run down the broad staircase to meet them, almost breathless with
delight, and with eyes shining with almost serious rapture. He clasped
Phebe's arm, and, leaning toward her, whispered into her ear,

"She took me in her arms, and said, 'I love you, Felix,' and then she
kissed me as if she meant it, Phebe. It was better than all my birthday
presents put together. My father said to me one day he adored her; and I
adore her. She is my mother, you know--the mother of me, Felix; and I
lie down on the floor and kiss her feet every day, only she does not
know it. When she looks at me her eyes seem to go through me; but, oh,
she does not look at me often."

"She is so different; not like most people," answered Phebe, with her
arms round the boy.

Madame had gone on sadly enough up-stairs to see if she could find out
anything about her son; and Phebe and Felix had turned into the terraced
garden where the boat-house was built close under the bank of the river.

"I should be sorry for my mother to be like other people," said Felix
proudly. "She is like the evening star, my father says, and I always
look out at night to see if it is shining. You know, Phebe, when we row
her up the river, my father and me, we keep quite quiet, only nodding at
one another which way to pull, and she sits silent with eyes that shine
like stars. We would not speak for anything, not one little word, lest
we should disturb her. My father says she is a great genius; not at all
like other people, and worth thousands and thousands of common women.
But I don't think you are a common woman, Phebe," he added, lifting up
his eager face to hers, as if afraid of hurting her feelings, "and my
father does not think so, I know."

"Your father has known me all my life, and has always been my best
friend," said Phebe, with a pleasant smile. "But I am a working-woman,
Felix, and your mother is a lady and a great genius. It is God who has
ordered it so."

She would have laughed if she had been less simple-hearted than she was,
at the anxious care with which the boy arranged the boat for his mother.
No cushions were soft enough and no shawls warm enough for the precious
guest. When at length all was ready, and he fetched her himself from
the house, it was not until she was comfortably seated in the low seat,
with a well-padded sloping back, against which she could recline at
ease, and with a soft, warm shawl wrapped round her--not till then did
the slight cloud of care pass away from his face, and the little pucker
of anxiety which knitted his brows grow smooth. The little girl of five,
Hilda, nestled down by her mother, and Felix took his post at the helm.
In unbroken silence they pushed off into the middle of the stream, the
boat rowed easily by Phebe's strong young arms. So silent were they all
that they could hear the rustling of the young leaves on the trees,
under whose shadows they passed, and the joyous singing of the larks in
the meadows on each side of the sunny reaches of water, down which they
floated. It was not until they landed the children on the osier island,
and bade them run about to play, and not then until they were some
distance away, that their merry young voices were heard.

"Phebe," said Felicita, in her low-toned, softly-modulated voice, always
languid and deliberate, "talk to me. Tell me how you spend your life."

Phebe was sitting face to face with her, balancing the boat with the
oars against the swift flowing of the river, with smiles coming and
going on her face as rapidly as the shadows and the sunshine chasing
each other over the fields this May morning.

"You know," she answered simply, "we live a mile away from the nearest
house, and that is only a cottage where an old farm laborer lives with
his wife. It's very lonesome up there on the hills. Days and days go by,
and I never hear a voice speaking, and I feel as if I could not bear the
sound of my own voice when I call the cattle home, or the fowls to come
for their corn. If it wasn't for the living things around me, that know
me as well as they know one another, and love me more, I should feel
sometimes as if I was dead. And I long so to hear somebody speak--to be
near more of my fellow-creatures. Why, when I touch the hand of any one
I love--yours, or Mr. Sefton's, or Madame's--it's almost a pain to me;
it seems to bring me so close to you. I always feel as if I became a
part of father when I touch him. Oh, you do not know what it is to be
alone!"

"No," said Felicita, sighing; "never have I been alone, and I would give
worlds to be as free as you are. You cannot imagine what it is," she
went on, speaking rapidly and with intense eagerness, "never to belong
to yourself, or to be alone; for it is not being alone to have only four
thin walls separating you from a husband and children and a large busy
household. 'What are you thinking, my darling?' Roland is always asking
me; and the children break in upon me. Body, soul, and spirit, I am held
down a captive; I have been in bondage all my life. I have never even
thought as I should think if I could be free."

"But I cannot understand that," cried Phebe. "I could never be too near
those I love. I should like to live in a large house, with many people
all smiling and talking around me. And everybody worships you."

She uttered the last words shyly, partly afraid of bringing a frown on
the lovely face opposite to her, which was quickly losing its vivid
expression and sinking back into statuesque coldness.

"It is simply weariness to me and vexation of spirit," she answered. "If
I could be quite alone, as you are, with only a father like yours, I
think I could get free; but I have never been left alone from my
babyhood; just as Felix and Hilda are never left alone. Oh, Phebe, you
do not know how happy you are."

"No," she said cheerfully, "sometimes when I stand at our garden-gate,
and look round me for miles and miles away, and the sweet air blows past
me, and the bees are humming, and the birds calling to one another, and
everything is so peaceful, with father happy over his work not far off,
I think I don't know how happy I am. I try to catch hold of the feeling
and keep it, but it slips away somehow. Only I thank God I am happy."

"I was never happy enough to thank God," Felicita murmured, lying back
in her seat and shutting her eyes. Presently the children returned, and,
after another silent row, slower and more toilsome, as it was up the
river, they drew near home again, and saw Madame's anxious face watching
for them over the low garden wall. Her heart had been too heavy for her
to join them in their pleasure-taking, and it was no lighter now.




CHAPTER IV.

UPFOLD FARM.


Phebe rode slowly homeward in the dusk of the evening, her brain too
busy with the varied events of the day for her to be in any haste to
reach the end. For the last four miles her road lay in long by-lanes,
shady with high hedgerows and trees which grew less frequent and more
stunted as she rose gradually higher up the long spurs of the hills,
whose rounded outlines showed dark against the clear orange tint of the
western sky. She could hear the brown cattle chewing the cud, and the
bleating of some solitary sheep on the open moor, calling to the flock
from which it had strayed during the daytime, with the angry yelping of
a dog in answer to its cry from some distant farm-yard. The air was
fresh and chilly with dew, and the low wind, which only lifted the
branches of the trees a little in the lower land she had left, was
growing keener, and would blow sharply enough across the unsheltered
table-land she was reaching. But still she loitered, letting her rough
pony snatch tufts of fresh grass from the banks, and shamble leisurely
along as he strayed from one side of the road to another.

Phebe was not so much thinking as pondering in a confused and
unconnected manner over all the circumstances of the day, when suddenly
the tall figure of a man rose from under the black hedgerow, and laid
his arm across the pony's neck, with his face turned up to her. Her
heart throbbed quickly, but not altogether with terror.

"Mr. Roland!" she cried.

"You know me in the dark then," he answered. "I have been watching for
you all day, Phebe. You come from home?"

She knew he meant his home, not hers.

"Yes, it was Felix's birthday, and we have been down the river," she
said.

"Is anything known yet?" he asked.

Though it was so solitary a spot that Phebe had passed no one for the
last three miles, and he had been haunting the hills all day without
seeing a soul, yet he spoke in a whisper, as if fearful of betraying
himself.

"Only that you are away," she replied; "and they think you are in
London."

"Is not Mr. Clifford come?" he asked.

"No, sir, he comes to-morrow," she answered.

"Thank God!" he exclaimed, in a louder tone. When he spoke again he did
so without looking into her face, which indeed was scarcely visible in
the deepening dusk.

"Phebe," he said, "we have known each other for many years."

"All my life, sir," she responded eagerly; "father and me, we are proud
of knowing you."

Before speaking again he led her pony up the steep lane to a gate which
opened on the moorland. It was not so dark here, from under the
hedgerows and trees, and a little pool beside the gate caught the last
lingering light in the west, and reflected it like a dim and dusty
mirror. They could see one another's faces; his was working with strong
excitement, and hers, earnest and friendly, looked frankly down upon
him. He clasped her hand with the strong, desperate grip of a sinking
man, and her fingers responded with a warm clasp.

"Can I trust you, Phebe?" he cried. "I have no other chance."

"I will help you, even to dying for you and yours," she answered. The
girlish fervor of her manner struck him mournfully. Why should he burden
her with his crime? What right had he to demand any sacrifice from her?
Yet he felt she spoke the truth. Phebe Marlowe would rejoice in helping,
even unto death, not only him, but any other fellow-creature who was
sinking under sorrow or sin.

"Come on home," she said, "it is bitterly cold here; and you can tell me
what to do."

He placed himself at the pony's head again, and trudged on speechlessly
along the rough road, which was now nothing more than the tracks made by
cart-wheels across the moor, with deep ruts over which he stumbled like
a man who is worn out with fatigue. In a quarter of an hour the low
cottage was reached, surrounded by a little belt of fields and a few
storm-beaten fir-trees. There was a dull glow of red to be seen through
the lattice window, telling Phebe of a smouldering fire, made up for her
by her father before going back to his workshop at the end of the field
behind the house. She stirred up the wood-ashes and threw upon them some
dry, light fagots of gorse, and in a few seconds a dazzling light filled
the little room from end to end. It was a familiar place to Roland
Sefton, and he took no notice of it. But it was a curious interior.
Every niche of the walls was covered with carved oak; no wainscoted hall
in the country could be more richly or more fancifully decorated. The
chimney-piece over the open hearth-stone, a wide chimney-piece, was
deeply carved with curious devices. The doors and window-frames, the
cupboards and the shelves for the crockery, were all of dark oak,
fashioned into leaves and ferns, with birds on their nests, and timid
rabbits, and still more timid wood-mice peeping out of their coverts,
cocks crowing with uplifted crest, and chickens nestling under the
hen-mother's wings, sheaves of corn, and tall, club-headed
bulrushes--all the objects familiar to a country life. The dancing light
played upon them, and shone also upon Roland Sefton's sad and weary
face. Phebe drew her father's carved arm-chair close to the fire.

"Sit down," she said, "and let me get you something to eat."

"Yes," he answered, sinking down wearily in the chair, "I am nearly
dying of hunger. Good Heavens! is it possible I can be hungry?"

He spoke with an indescribable expression of mingled astonishment and
dread. Suddenly there broke upon him the possibility of suffering want
in many forms in the future, and yet he felt ashamed of foreseeing them
in this, the first day of his great calamity. Until this moment he had
been too absorbed in dwelling upon the moral and social consequences of
his crime, to realize how utterly worn out he was; but all his physical
strength appeared to collapse in an instant.

And now for the first time Phebe beheld the change in him, and stood
gazing at him in mute surprise and sorrow. He had always been careful
of his personal appearance, with a refinement and daintiness which had
grown especially fastidious since his marriage. But now his coat, wet
through during the night, and dried only by the keen air of the hills,
was creased and soiled, and his boots were thickly covered with mud and
clay. His face and hands were unwashed, and his hair hung unbrushed over
his forehead. Phebe's whole heart was stirred at this pitiful change,
and she laid her hand on his shoulder with a timid but affectionate
touch.

"Mr. Roland," she said, "go up-stairs and put yourself to rights a
little; and give me your clothes and your boots to brush. You'll feel
better when you are more like yourself."

He smiled faintly as he looked up at her quivering lips and eyes full of
unshed tears. But her homely advice was good, and he was glad to follow
it. Her little room above was lined with richly carved oak panels like
the kitchen below, and a bookcase contained her books, many of which he
had himself given to her. There was an easel standing under the highest
part of the shelving roof, where a sky-light was let into the thatch,
and a half-finished painting rested on it. But he did not give a glance
toward it. There was very little interest to him just now in Phebe's
pursuits, though she owed most of them to him.

By the time he was ready to go down, supper was waiting for him on the
warm and bright hearth, and he fell upon it almost ravenously. It was
twenty-four hours since he had last eaten. Phebe sat almost out of sight
in the shadow of a large settle, with her knitting in her hand, and her
eyes only seeking his face when any movement seemed to indicate that she
could serve him in some way. But in these brief glances she noticed the
color coming back to his face, and new vigor and resolution changing his
whole aspect.

"And now," he said, when his hunger was satisfied, "I can talk to you,
Phebe."




CHAPTER V.

A CONFESSION.


But Roland Sefton sat silent, with his shapely hands resting on his
knees, and his handsome face turned toward the hearth, where the logs
had burned down and emitted only a low and fitful flame. The little room
was scarcely lighted by it, and looked all the darker for the blackness
of the small uncurtained window, through which the ebony face of night
was peering in. This bare, uncovered casement troubled him, and from
time to time he turned his eyes uneasily toward it. But what need could
there be of a curtain, when they were a mile away from any habitation,
and where no road crossed the moor, except the rugged green pathway,
worn into deep ruts by old Marlowe's own wagon? Yet as if touched by
some vague sympathy with him, Phebe rose, and pinned one of her large
rough working-aprons across it.

"Phebe," he said, as she stepped softly back to her seat, "you and I
have been friends a long time; and your father and I have been friends
all my life. Do you recollect me staying here a whole week when I was a
school-boy?"

"Yes," she answered, her eyes glistening in the dusky light; "but for
you I should have known nothing, only what work had to be done for
father. You taught me my alphabet that week, and the hymns I have said
every night since then before I go to sleep. You helped me to teach
myself painting; and if I ever paint a picture worth looking at it will
be your doing."

"No, no; you are a born artist, Phebe Marlowe," he said, "though perhaps
the world may never know it. But being such friends as you say, I will
trust you. Do you think me worthy of trust, true and honest as a man
should be, Phebe?"

"As true and honest as the day," she cried, with eager emphasis.

"And a Christian?" he added, in a lower voice.

"Yes," she answered, "I do not know a Christian if you are not one."

"That is the sting of it," he groaned; "true, and honest, and a
Christian! And yet, Phebe, if I were taken by the police to-night, or if
I be taken by them to-morrow, I shall be lodged in Riversborough jail,
and tried before a jury of my towns-people at the assizes next month."

"No, it is impossible!" she cried, stretching out her brown,
hard-working hand, and laying it on his white and shapely one, which had
never known toil.

"You would not send me to jail," he said, "I know that well enough. But
I deserve it, my poor girl. They would find me guilty and sentence me to
a convict prison. I saw Dartmoor prison on my wedding journey with
Felicita, Heaven help me! She liked the wild, solitary moor, with its
great tors and its desolate stillness, and one day we went near to the
prison. Those grim walls seemed to take possession of me; I felt
oppressed and crushed by them. I could not forget them for days after,
even with Felicita by my side."

His voice trembled as he spoke, and a quiver ran through his whole
frame, which seemed to thrill through Phebe's; but she only pressed her
pitiful hand more closely on his.

"I might have escaped last night," he went on, "but I stumbled over a
poor girl in the street, dying. A young girl, no older than you, without
a penny or a friend; a sinner too like myself; and I could not leave her
there alone. Only in finding help for her I lost my chance. The train to
London was gone, and there was no other till ten this morning. I
expected Mr. Clifford to be at the bank to-day; if I had only known he
would not be there I could have got away then. But I came here, why I
hardly know. You could not hide me for long if you would; but there was
no one else to help me."

"But what have you done, sir?" she asked, with a tremulous, long-drawn
sigh.

"Done?" he repeated; "ay! there's the question. I wonder if I can be
honest and true now with only Phebe Marlowe listening. I could have told
my mother, perhaps, if it had been of any use; but I would die rather
than tell Felicita. Done, Phebe! I've appropriated securities trusted to
my keeping, pledging some and selling others for my own use. I've stolen
£10,000."

"And you could be sent to prison for it?" she said, in a low voice,
glancing uneasily round as if she fancied she would be overheard.

"For I don't know how many years," he answered.

"It would kill Mrs. Sefton," she said. "Oh! how could you do it?"

"It was for Felicita I did it," he replied absently; "for my Felicita
only."

For a few minutes Phebe's brain was busy, but not yet with the most
sorrowful thoughts. There could be no shadow of doubt in her mind that
this dearest friend of hers, sitting beside her in the twilight, was
guilty of the crime he had confessed. But she could not as yet dwell
upon the crime. He was in imminent peril; and his peril threatened the
welfare of nearly all whom she loved. Ruin and infamy for him meant
ruin and infamy for them all. She must save him if possible.

"Phebe," he said, breaking the dreary silence, "I ought to tell you one
thing more. The money your father left with me--the savings of his
life--six hundred pounds--it is all gone. He intrusted it to me, and
made his will, appointing me your guardian; such confidence he had in
me. I have made both him and you penniless."

"I think nothing of that," she answered. "What should I ever have been
but for you? A dull, ignorant country girl, living a life little higher
than my sheep and cattle. We are rich enough, my father and me. This
cottage, and the fields about it, are our own. But I must go and tell
father."

"Must he be told?" asked Roland Sefton anxiously.

"We've no secrets," she replied; "and there's no fear of him, you know.
He would see if I was in trouble; and I shall be in trouble," she added,
in a sorrowful voice.

She opened the cottage door, and going out left him alone. It was a
familiar place to him; but hitherto it had been only the haunt of happy
holidays, from the time when he had been a school-boy until his last
autumn's shooting of grouse and woodcock on the wide moors. Old Marlowe
had been one of his earliest friends, and Phebe had been something like
a humble younger sister to him. If any one in the world could be
depended upon to help him, outside his own family, it must be old
Marlowe and his daughter.

And yet, when she left him, his first impulse was to rise and flee while
yet there was time--before old Marlowe knew his secret. Phebe was a
girl, living as girls do, in a region of sentiment and feeling, hardly
understanding a crime against property. A girl like her had no idea of
what his responsibility and his guilt were, money ranking so low in her
estimate of life. But old Marlowe would look at it quite differently.
His own careful earnings, scraped together by untiring industry and
ceaseless self-denial, were lost--stolen by the man he had trusted
implicitly. For Roland Sefton did not spare himself any reproaches; he
did not attempt to hide or palliate his sin. There were other
securities for small sums, like old Marlowe's, gone like his, and ruin
would overtake half a dozen poor families, though the bulk of the loss
would fall upon his senior partner, who was a hard man, of unbending
sternness and integrity. If old Marlowe proved a man of the same
inflexible stamp, he was lost.

But he sat still, waiting and listening. Round that lonely cottage, as
he well knew, the wind swept from whatever quarter it was blowing;
sighing softly, or wailing, moaning, or roaring past it, as ceaselessly
as the sound of waves against a fisherman's hut on the sea-coast. It was
crying and sobbing now, rising at intervals into a shriek, as if to warn
him of coming peril. He went to the window and met the black face of the
night, hiding everything from his eye. Neither moon nor star gleamed in
the sky. But even if old Marlowe was merciful he could not stay there,
but must go out, as he had done last night from his own home, lashed
like a dog from every familiar hearth by an unseen hand and a heavy
scourge.

Phebe had not lingered, though she seemed long away. As she drew near
the little workshop she saw the wagon half-laden with some church
furniture her father had been carving, and with which he and she were to
start at daybreak for a village about twenty miles off. She heard the
light tap of his carving tools as she opened the door, and found him
finishing the wings of a spread-eagle. He had pushed back the paper cap
he wore from his forehead, which was deeply furrowed, and shaded by a
few straggling tufts of gray hair. He took no notice of her entrance
until she touched his arm with her hand; and then he looked at her with
eyes, blue like her own, but growing dim with age, and full of the
pitiful, uncomplaining gaze of one who is deaf and dumb. But his face
brightened and his smile was cheerful, as he began to talk eagerly with
his fingers, throwing in many gestures to aid his slow speech. Phebe,
too, smiled and gesticulated in silent answer, before she told him her
errand.

"The carving is finished, father," she said. "Could we not start at
once, and be at Upchurch before five to-morrow morning?"

"Twenty miles; eight hours; easily," he answered; "but why?"

"To help Mr. Sefton," she said. "He wants to get down to Southampton,
and Upchurch is in the way. Father, it must be done; you would never see
a smile upon my face again if we did not do it."

The keen, wistful eyes of her father were fastened alternately upon her
troubled face and her moving hands, as slowly and silently she spelt out
on her fingers the sad story she had just listened to. His own face
changed rapidly from astonishment to dismay, and from dismay to a
passionate rage. If Roland Sefton could have seen it he would have made
good his escape. But still Phebe's fingers went on pleading for him; and
the smile, which she said her father would never see again--a pale, wan
smile--met his eyes as he watched her.

"He has been so good to you and me," she went on, with a sob in her
throat; and unconsciously she spoke out the words aloud and slowly as
she told them off on her fingers; "he learned to talk with you as I do,
and he is the only person almost in the world who can talk to you
without your slate and pencil, father. It was good of him to take that
trouble. And his father was your best friend, wasn't he? How good Madame
used to be when I was a little girl, and you were carving all that
woodwork at the old bank, and she let me stay there with you! All our
happiest days have come through them. And now we can deliver them from
great misery."

"But my money?" he interposed.

"Money is nothing between friends," she said eagerly. "Will you make my
life miserable, father? I shall be thinking of them always, night and
day; and they will never see me again if he is sent to jail through our
fault. There never was a kinder man than he is; and I always thought him
a good man till now."

"A thief; worse than a common thief," said her father. "What will become
of my little daughter when I am dead?"

Phebe made no answer except by tears. For a few minutes old Marlowe
watched her bowed head and face hidden in her hands, till a gray hue
came upon his withered face, and the angry gleam died away from his
eyes. Hitherto her slightest wish had been a law to him, and to see her
weeping was anguish to him. To have a child who could hear and speak had
been a joy that had redeemed his life from wretchedness, and crowned it
with an inexhaustible delight. If he never saw her smile again, what
would become of him? She was hiding her face from him even now, and
there was no medium of communication between them save by touch. He must
call her attention to what he had to say by making her look at him.
Almost timidly he stretched out his withered and cramped hand to lay it
upon her head.

"I must do whatever you please," he said, when she lifted up her face
and looked at him with tearful eyes; "if it killed me I must do it. But
it is a hard thing you bid me do, Phebe."

He turned away to brush the last speck of dust from the eagle's wings,
and lifting it up carefully carried it away to pack in his wagon, Phebe
holding the lantern for him till all was done. Then hand in hand they
walked down the foot-worn path across the field to the house, as they
had done ever since she had been a tottering little child, hardly able
to clasp his one finger with her baby hand.

Roland Sefton was crouching over the dying embers on the hearth, more in
the utter misery of soul than in bodily chilliness, though he felt cold
and shivering, as if stripped of all that made life desirable to him.
There is no icy chill like that. He did not look round when the door
opened, though Phebe spoke to him; for he could not face old Marlowe, or
force himself to read the silent yet eloquent fingers, which only could
utter words of reproach. The dumb old man stood on the threshold, gazing
at his averted face and downcast head, and an inarticulate cry of
mingled rage and grief broke from his silent lips, such as Phebe herself
had never heard before, and which, years afterward, sounded at times in
Roland Sefton's ears.

It was nearly ten o'clock before they were on the road, old Marlowe
marching at the head of his horse, and Phebe mounted on her wiry little
pony, while Roland Sefton rode in front of the wagon at times. Their
progress was slow, for the oak furniture was heavy and the roads were
rough, leading across the moor and down steep hills into valleys, with
equally steep hills on the other side. The sky was covered with a thin
mist drifting slowly before the wind, and when the moon shone through
it, about two o'clock in the morning, it was the waning-moon looking sad
and forlorn amid the floating vapor. The houses they passed were few and
far between, showing no light or sign of life. All the land lay around
them dark and desolate under the midnight sky; and the slow creaking of
the wheels and sluggish hoof-beats of the horse dragging the wagon were
the only sounds that broke the stillness.

In this gloom old Marlowe could hold no conversation either with Phebe
or Roland Sefton, but from time to time they could hear him sob aloud as
he trudged on in his speechless isolation. It was a sad sound, which
pierced them to the heart. From time to time Roland Sefton walked up the
long hills beside Phebe's pony, pouring out his whole heart to her. They
could hardly see each other's faces in the dimness, and words came the
more readily to him. All the burden of his confession was that he had
fallen through seeking Felicita's happiness. For her sake he had longed
for more wealth, and speculated in the hope of gaining it, and tampered
with the securities intrusted to him in the hope of retrieving losses.
It was for her, and her only, he maintained; and now he had brought
infamy and wretchedness and poverty upon her and his innocent children.

"Would to God I could die to-night!" he exclaimed; "my death would save
them from some portion of their trouble."

Phebe listened to him almost as heart-broken as himself. In her
singularly solitary life, so far apart from ordinary human society, she
had never been brought into contact with sin, and its profound,
fathomless misery; and now it was the one friend, whom she had loved the
longest and the best, who was walking beside her a guilty man, fleeing
through the night from all he himself cared for, to seek a refuge from
the consequences of his crime in an uncertain exile. In years afterward
it seemed to her as if that night had been rather a terrible dream than
a reality.

At length the pale dawn broke, and the utter separation caused by the
darkness between them and old Marlowe passed away with it. He stopped
his horse and came to them, turning a gray, despairing face upon Roland
Sefton.

"It is time to leave you," he said; "over these fields lies the nearest
station, where you can escape from a just punishment. You have made us
beggars to keep up your own grandeur. God will see that you do not go
unpunished."

"Hush, hush!" cried Phebe aloud, stretching out her hand to Roland
Sefton; "he will forgive you by and by. Tell me: have you no message to
send by me, sir? When shall we hear from you?"

"If I get away safe," he answered, in a broken voice, "and if nothing is
heard of me before, tell Felicita I will be in the place where I saw her
first, this day six months. Do not tell her till the time is near. It
will be best for her to know nothing of me at present."

They were standing at the stile over which his road lay. The sun was not
yet risen, but the gray clouds overhead were taking rosy and golden
tints. Here and there in the quiet farmsteads around them the cocks
were beginning to crow lazily; and there were low, drowsy twitterings in
the hedges, where the nests were still new little homes. It was a more
peaceful hour than sunset can ever be with its memories of the day's
toils and troubles. All the world seemed bathed in rest and quietness
except themselves. Their dark journey through the silent night had been
almost a crime.

"Your father turns his back upon me, as all honest men will do," said
Roland Sefton.

Old Marlowe had gone back to his horse, and stood there without looking
round. The tears ran down Phebe's face; but she did not touch her
father, and ask him to bid his old friend's son good-by.

"Some day no man will turn his back upon you, sir," she answered; "I
would die now rather than do it. You will regain your good name some
day."

"Never!" he exclaimed; "it is past recall. There is no place of
repentance for me, Phebe. I have staked all, and lost all."




CHAPTER VI.

THE OLD BANK.


About the same hour that Roland Sefton set off under shelter of old
Marlowe's wagon to attempt his escape, Mr. Clifford, the senior partner
in the firm, reached Riversborough by the last train from London. It was
too late for him to intrude on the household of his young partner, and
he spent the night at a hotel.

The old bank at Riversborough had been flourishing for the last hundred
years. It had the power of issuing its own notes; and until lately these
notes, bearing the familiar names of Clifford and Sefton, had been
preferred by the country people round to those of the Bank of England
itself. For nobody knew who were the managers of the Bank of England;
while one of the Seftons, either father or son, could be seen at any
time for the last fifty years. On ordinary days there were but few
customers to be seen in its handsome office, and a single clerk might
easily have transacted all the business. But on market-days and
fair-days the place was crowded by loud-voiced, red-faced country
gentlemen, and by awkward and burly farmers, from the moment its doors
were opened until they were closed at the last stroke of four sounding
from the church clock near at hand. The strong room of the Old Bank was
filled full with chests containing valuable securities and heirlooms,
belonging to most of the county families in the neighborhood.

For the last twenty years Mr. Clifford had left the management of the
bank entirely to the elder Sefton, and upon his death to his son, who
was already a partner. He had lived abroad, and had not visited England
for more than ten years. There was a report, somewhat more
circumstantial than a rumor, but the truth of which none but the elder
Sefton had ever known, that Mr. Clifford, offended by his only son, had
let him die of absolute starvation in Paris. Added to this rumor was a
vague story of some crime committed by the younger Clifford, which his
father would not overlook or forgive. That he was a hard man, austere to
utter pitilessness, everybody averred. No transgressor need look to him
for pardon.

When Roland Sefton had laid his hands upon the private personal
securities belonging to his senior partner, it was with no idea that he
would escape the most rigorous prosecution, should his proceedings ever
come to the light. But it was with the fixed conviction that Mr.
Clifford would never return to England, or certainly not to
Riversborough, where this hard report had been circulated and partly
accepted concerning him. The very bonds he had dealt with, first
borrowing money upon them, and at last selling them, had been bequeathed
to him in Mr. Clifford's will, of which he was himself the executor. He
had, as he persuaded himself, only forestalled the possession of them.
But a letter he had received from Mr. Clifford, informing him that he
was on his way home, with the purpose of thoroughly investigating the
affairs of the bank, had fallen like a thunderbolt upon him, and upon
Acton, through whose agency he had managed to dispose of the securities
without arousing any suspicion.

Early the next morning Mr. Clifford arrived at the bank, and heard to
his great surprise that his partner had started for London, and had been
away the day before; possibly, Madame Sefton suggested with some
anxiety, in the hope of meeting him there. No doubt he would be back
early, for it was the day of the May fair, when there was always an
unusual stir of business. Mr. Clifford took his place in the vacant bank
parlor, and waited somewhat grimly for the arrival of the head clerk,
Acton.

There was a not unpleasant excitement among the clerks, as they
whispered to each other on arrival that old Clifford was come and Roland
Sefton was still absent. But this excitement deepened into agitation and
misgiving as the hour for opening the bank drew near and Acton did not
arrive. Such a circumstance had never occurred before, for Acton had
made himself unpopular with those beneath him by expecting devotion
equal to his own to the interests of the firm. When ten o'clock was
close at hand a clerk ran round to Acton's lodgings; but before he could
return a breathless messenger rushed into the bank as the doors were
thrown open, with the tidings that the head clerk had been found by his
landlady lying dead in his bed.

More quickly than if the town-crier had been sent round the streets with
his bell to announce the news, it was known that Roland Sefton was
missing and the managing clerk had committed suicide. The populace from
all the country round was flocking into the town for the fair, three
fourths of whom did business with the Old Bank. No wonder that a panic
took possession of them. In an hour's time the tranquil street was
thronged with a dense mass of town's-people and country-people, numbers
of whom were fighting their way to the bank as if for dear life. There
was not room within for the crowds who struggled to get to the counters
and present their checks and bank-notes, and demand instant settlement
of their accounts. In vain Mr. Clifford assured them there was no fear
of the firm being unable to meet its liabilities. In cases like these
the panic cannot be allayed by words.

As long as the funds held out the checks and notes were paid over the
counter; but this could not go on. Mr. Clifford himself was in the dark
as to the state of affairs, and did not know how his credit stood. Soon
after midday the funds were exhausted, and with the utmost difficulty
the bank was cleared and the doors closed. But the crowd did not
disperse; rather it grew denser as the news spread like wildfire that
the Old Bank had stopped!

It was at the moment that the bank doors were closed that Phebe turned
into Whitefriars Road. She had taken a train from Upchurch, leaving her
father to return home alone with the empty wagon. It was a strange sight
which met her. The usually quiet street was thronged from end to end,
and the babble of many voices made all sounds indistinct. Even on the
outskirts of the crowd there were men, some pale and some red with
anxiety, struggling with elbows and shoulders to make their way through
to the bank, in the vain hope that it would not be too late. A
strongly-built, robust farmer fainted quietly away beside her, like a
delicate woman, when he heard that the doors were shut; and his wife and
son, who were following him, bore him out of the crush as well as they
could. Phebe, pressing gently forward, and gliding in wherever a chance
movement gave her an opportunity, at last reached the archway at the
side of the house, and rapped urgently for admittance. A scared-looking
man-servant, who opened the door with the chain upon it, let her in as
soon as he recognized who she was.

"It's a fearsome day," he said; "master's away, gone nobody knows where;
and old Acton's poisoned himself. Nobody dare tell Mrs. Sefton; but
Madame knows. She is in the dining-room, Miss Marlowe."

Phebe found her, as she had done the day before, sitting in the oriel
window; but the usually placid-looking little woman was in a state of
nervous agitation. As soon as she caught sight of Phebe's pitiful face
she ran to her, and clasping her in her arms, burst into a passion of
tears and sobs.

"My son!" she cried; "what can have become of him, Phebe? Where can he
be gone? If he would only come home, all these people would be
satisfied, and go away. They don't know Mr. Clifford, but they know
Roland; he is so popular. The servants say the bank is broken; what does
that mean, Phebe? And poor Acton! They say he is dead--he did kill
himself by poison. Is it not true, Phebe? Tell me it is not true!"

But Phebe could say nothing to comfort her; she knew better than any one
else the whole truth of the calamity. But she held the weeping little
woman in her strong young arms, and there was something consoling in her
loving clasp.

"And where are the children?" she asked, after a while.

"I sent them to play in the garden," answered Madame; "their own little
plots are far away, out of sight of the dreadful street. What good is it
that they should know all this trouble?"

"No good at all," replied Phebe. "And where is Mrs. Sefton?"

"Alas, my Phebe!" she exclaimed, "who dare tell her? Not me; no, no!
She is shut up in her little chamber, and she forgets all the world--her
children even, and Roland himself. It is as if she went away into
another life, far away from ours; and when she comes home again she is
like one in a dream. Will you dare to tell her?"

"Yes, I will go," she said.

Yet with very slow and reluctant steps Phebe climbed the staircase,
pausing long at the window midway, which overlooked the wide and sunny
landscape in the distance, and the garden just below. She watched the
children busy at their little plots of ground, utterly unconscious of
the utter ruin that had befallen them. How lovely and how happy they
looked! She could have cried out aloud, a bitter and lamentable cry. But
as yet she must not yield to the flood of her own grief; she must keep
it back until she was at home again, in her solitary home, where nobody
could hear her sobs and cries. Just now she must think for, and comfort,
if comfort were possible, these others, who stood even nearer than she
did to the sin and the sinner. Gathering up all her courage, she
quickened her footsteps and ran hurriedly up the remaining steps.

But at the drawing-room door, which was partly open, her feet were
arrested. Within, standing behind the rose-colored curtains, stood the
tall, slender figure of Felicita, with her clear and colorless face
catching a delicate flush from the tint of the hangings that concealed
her from the street. She was looking down on the crowd below, with the
perplexity of a foreigner gazing on some unfamiliar scene in a strange
land. There was a half-smile playing about her lips; but her whole
attention was so absorbed by the spectacle beneath her that she did not
see or hear Phebe until she was standing beside her, looking down also
on the excited crowd.

"Phebe!" she exclaimed, "you here again? Then you can tell me, are the
good people of Riversborough gone mad? or is it possible there is an
election going on, of which I have heard nothing? Nothing less than an
election could rouse them to such a pitch of excitement."

"Have you heard nothing of what they say?" asked Phebe.

"There is such a Babel," she answered; "of course I hear my husband's
name. It would be just like him if he got himself elected member for
Riversborough without telling me anything about it till it was over. He
loves surprises; and I--why I hate to be surprised."

"But he is gone!" said Phebe.

"Yes, he told me he was going to London," she went on; "but if it is no
election scene, what is it, Phebe? Why are all the people gathered here
in such excitement?"

"Shall I tell you plainly?" asked Phebe, looking steadily into
Felicita's dark, inscrutable eyes.

"Tell me the simple truth," she replied, somewhat haughtily; "if any
human being can tell it."

"Then the bank has stopped payment," answered Phebe. "Poor Mr. Acton has
been found dead in bed this morning; and Mr. Sefton is gone away, nobody
knows where. It is the May fair to-day, and all the people are coming in
from the country. There's been a run on the bank till they are forced to
stop payment. That is what brings the crowd here."

Felicita dropped the curtain which she had been holding back with her
hand, and stepped back a pace or two from the window. But her face
scarcely changed; she listened calmly and collectedly, as if Phebe was
speaking of some persons she hardly knew.

"My husband will come back immediately," she said. "Is not Mr. Clifford
there?"

"Yes," said Phebe.

"Are you telling me all?" asked Felicita.

"No," she answered; "Mr. Clifford says he has been robbed. Securities
worth nearly ten thousand pounds are missing. He must have found it out
already."

"Who does he suspect?" she asked again imperiously; "he does not dare
suspect my husband?"

Phebe replied only by a mute gesture. She had never had any secret to
conceal before, and she did not see that she had betrayed herself by the
words she had uttered. The deep gloom on her bright young face struck
Felicita for the first time.

"Do you think it was Roland?" she asked.

Again the same dumb, hopeless gesture answered the question. Phebe could
not bring her lips to shape a word of accusation against him. It was
agony to her to feel her idol disgraced and cast down from his high
pedestal; yet she had not learned any way of concealing or
misrepresenting the truth.

"You know he did it?" said Felicita.

"Yes, I know it," she whispered.

For a minute or two Felicita stood, with her white hands resting on
Phebe's shoulders, gazing into her mournful face with keen, questioning
eyes. Then, with a rapid flush of crimson, betraying a strong and
painful heart-throb, which suffused her face for an instant and left it
paler than before, she pressed her lips on the girl's sunburnt forehead.

"Tell nobody else," she murmured; "keep the secret for his sake and
mine."

Before Phebe could reply she turned away, and, with a steady,
unfaltering step, went back to her study and locked herself in.




CHAPTER VII.

AN INTERRUPTED DAY-DREAM.


Felicita's study was so quiet a room, quite remote from the street, that
it was almost a wonder the noise of the crowd had reached her. But this
morning there had been a pleasant tumult of excitement in her own brain,
which had prevented her from falling into an absorbed reverie, such as
she usually indulged in, and rendered her peculiarly susceptible to
outward influences. All her senses had been awake to-day.

On her desk lay the two volumes of a new book, handsomely got up, with
pages yet uncut as it had come from the publishers. A dozen times she
had looked at the title-page, as if unable to convince herself of the
reality, and read her own name--Felicita Riversdale Sefton. It was the
first time her name as an author had been published, though for the last
three years she had from time to time written anonymously for magazines.
This was her own book; thought out, written, revised, and completed in
her chosen solitude and secrecy. No one knew of it; possibly Roland
suspected something, but he had not ventured to make any inquiries, and
she had no reason to believe that he even suspected its existence. It
was simply altogether her own; no other mind had any part or share in
it.

There was something like rapture in her delight. The book was a good
book, she was sure of it. She had not succeeded in making it as perfect
as her ideal, but she had not signally failed. It did in a fair degree
represent her inmost thoughts and fancies. Yet she could not feel quite
sure that the two volumes were real, and the letter from the publisher,
a friendly and pleasant letter enough, seemed necessary to vouch for
them. She read and re-read it. The little room seemed too small and
close for her. She opened the window to let in the white daylight,
undisguised by the faint green tint of the glass, and she leaned out to
breathe the fresh sweet air of the spring morning. Life was very
pleasurable to her to-day.

There were golden gleams too upon the future. She would no longer be the
unknown wife of a country banker, moving in a narrow sphere, which was
altogether painful to her in its provincial philistinism. It was a
sphere to which she had descended in girlish ignorance. Her uncle, Lord
Riversdale, had been willing to let his portionless niece marry this
prosperous young banker, who was madly in love with her, and a little
gentle pressure had been brought to bear on the girl of eighteen, who
had been placed by her father's death in a position of dependence. Since
then a smouldering fire of ambition and of dissatisfaction with her lot
had been lurking unsuspected under her cold and self-absorbed manner.

But her thoughts turned with more tenderness than usual toward her
husband. She had aroused in him also a restless spirit of ambition,
though in him it was for her sake, not his own. He wished to restore her
if possible to the position she had sacrificed for him; and Felicita
knew it. Her heart beating faster with her success was softened toward
him; and tears suffused her dark eyes for an instant as she thought of
his astonishment and exultation.

The children were at play in the garden below her, and their merry
voices greeted her ear pleasantly. The one human being who really dwelt
in her inmost heart was her boy Felix, her first-born child. Hilda was
an unnecessary supplement to the page of her maternal love. But for
Felix she dreamed day-dreams of extravagant aspiration; no lot on earth
seemed too high or too good for him. He was a handsome boy, the very
image of her father, the late Lord Riversdale, and now as she gazed down
on him, her eyes slightly dewed with tears, he looked up to her window.
She kissed her hand to him, and the boy waved his little cap toward her
with almost passionate gesticulations of delight. Felix would be a great
man some day; this book of hers was a stone in the foundation of his
fame as well as of her own.

It was upon this mood of exultation, a rare mood for Felicita, that the
cry and roar from the street had broken. With a half-smile at herself,
the thought flashed across her mind that it was like a shout of applause
and admiration, such as might greet Felix some day when he had proved
himself a leader of men. But it aroused her dormant curiosity, and she
had condescended to be drawn by it to the window of the drawing-room
overlooking Whitefriars Road, in order to ascertain its cause. The crowd
filling the street was deeply in earnest, and the aim of those who were
fighting their way through it was plainly the bank offices in the floor
below her. The sole idea that occurred to her, for she was utterly
ignorant of her husband's business, was that some unexpected crisis in
the borough had arisen, and its people were coming to Roland Sefton as
their leading townsman. When Phebe found her she was quietly studying
the crowd and its various features, that she might describe a throng
from memory, whenever a need should arise for it.

Felicita regained her luxurious little study, and sat down before her
desk, on which the new volumes lay, with more outward calm than her
face and movements had manifested before she left it. The transient glow
of triumph had died away from her face, and the happy tears from her
eyes. She closed the casement to shut out the bright, clear sunlight,
and the merry voices of her children, before she sat down to think.

For a little while she had been burning incense to herself; but the
treacherous fire was gone out, and the sweet, bewildering, intoxicating
vapors were scattered to the winds. The recollection of her short-lived
folly made her shiver as if a cold breath had passed over her.

Not for a moment did she doubt Roland's guilt. There was such a
certainty of it lying behind Phebe's sorrowful eyes as she whispered "I
know it," that Felicita had not cared to ask how she knew it. She did
not trouble herself with details. The one fact was there: her husband
had absconded. A dreamy panorama of their past life flitted across her
brain--his passionate love for her, which had never cooled, though it
had failed to meet with a response from her; his insatiable desire to
make her life more full of pomp and luxury and display than that of her
cousins at Riversdale; his constant thraldom to her, which had
ministered only to her pride and coldness. His queen he had called her.
It was all over now. His extraordinary absence was against any hope that
he could clear himself. Her husband had brought fatal and indelible
disgrace upon his name, the name he had given to her and their children.

Her name! This morning, and for many days to come, it would be
advertised as the author of the new book, which was to have been one of
her stepping-stones to fame. She had grasped at fame, and her hand had
closed upon infamy. There was no fear now that she would remain among
the crowd of the unknown. As the wife of a fraudulent banker she would
be only too well and too widely talked of.

Why had she let her own full name be published? She had yielded, though
with some reluctance, to the business-like policy of her publisher, who
had sought to catch the public eye by it; for her father, Lord
Riversdale, was hardly yet forgotten as an author. A vague sentiment of
loyalty to her husband had caused her to add her married name. She hated
to see the two blazoned together on the title-page.

Sick at heart, she sat for hours brooding over what would happen if
Roland was arrested. The assizes held twice a year at Riversborough had
been to her, as to many people of her position, an occasion of
pleasurable excitement. The judges' lodgings were in the next house to
the Old Bank, and for the few days the judges were Roland Sefton's
neighbors there had been a friendly interchange of civilities. An assize
ball was still held, though it was falling into some neglect and
disrepute. Whenever any cause of special local interest took place she
had commanded the best seat in the court, and had obsequious attention
paid to her. She had learned well the aspect of the place, and the mode
of procedure. But hitherto her recollections of a court of justice were
all agreeable, and her impressions those of a superior being looking
down from above on the miseries and crimes of another race.

How different was the vision that branded itself on her brain this
morning! She saw her husband standing at the dock, instead of some
coarse, ignorant, brutish criminal; the stern gravity of the judge; the
flippant curiosity of the barristers not connected with the case, and
the cruel eagerness of his fellow-townsmen to get good places to hear
and see him. It would make a holiday for all who could get within the
walls.

She could have written almost word for word the report of the trial as
it would appear in the two papers published in Riversborough. She could
foretell how lavish would be the use of the words "felon" and "convict;"
and she would be that felon and convict's wife.

Oh, this intolerable burden of disgrace! To be borne through the long,
long years of life; and not by herself alone, but by her children. They
had come into a miserable heritage. What became of the families of
notorious criminals? She could believe that the poor did not suffer from
so cruel a notoriety, being quickly lost in the oblivious waters of
poverty and distress, amid refuges and workhouses. But what would
become of her? She must go away into endless exile, with her two little
children, and live where there was no chance of being recognized. This
was what her husband's sin had done for her.

"God help me! God deliver me!" she moaned with white lips. But she did
not pray for him. In the first moments of anguish the spirit flies to
that which lies at the very core. While Roland's mother and Phebe were
weeping together and praying for him, Felicita was crying for help and
deliverance for herself.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE SENIOR PARTNER.


Long as the daylight lasts in May it was after nightfall when Felicita
left her study and went down to the drawing-room, more elegantly and
expensively furnished for her than the drawing-room at Riversdale had
been. Its extravagant display seemed to strike upon her suddenly as she
entered it. Phebe was gone home, and Madame had retired to her own room,
having given up the expectation of seeing Felicita that day. Mr.
Clifford, the servant told her, was still in the bank, with his lawyer,
for whom he had telegraphed to London. Felicita sent him a message that
if he was not too busy she wished to see him for a few minutes.

Mr. Clifford almost immediately appeared, and Felicita saw him for the
first time. She had always heard him called old; but he was a strong,
erect, stern-looking man of sixty, with keen, cold eyes that could not
be avoided. Felicita did not seek to avoid them. She looked as steadily
at him as he did at her. There were traces of tears on her face, but
there was no tremor or weakness about her. They exchanged a few civil
words as calmly as if they were ordinary acquaintances.

"Tell me briefly what has happened," she said to him, when he had taken
a seat near to her.

"Briefly," he repeated. "Well! I find myself robbed of securities worth
nearly £8000; private securities, bond and scrip, left in custody only,
not belonging to the firm. No one but Acton or Roland could have access
to them. Acton has eluded me; but if Roland is found he must take the
consequences."

"And what are those?" asked Felicita.

"I shall prosecute him as I would prosecute a common thief or burglar,"
answered Mr. Clifford. "His crime is more dishonorable and cowardly."

"Is it not cruel to say this to me?" she asked, yet in a tranquil tone
which startled him.

"Cruel!" he repeated again; "I have not been in the habit of choosing
words. You asked me a question, and I gave you the answer that was in my
mind. I never forgive. Those who pass over crimes make themselves
partakers in those crimes. Roland has robbed not only me, but half a
dozen poor persons, to whom such a loss is ruin. Would it be right to
let such a man escape justice?"

"You think he has gone away on purpose?" she said.

"He has absconded," answered Mr. Clifford, "and the matter is already in
the hands of the police. A description of him has been telegraphed to
every police station in the kingdom. If he is not out of it he can
barely escape now."

Felicita's pale face could not grow paler, but she shivered perceptibly.

"I am telling you bluntly," he said, "because I believe it is best to
know the worst at once. It is terrible to have it falling drop by drop.
You have courage and strength; I see it. Take an old man's word for it,
it is better to know all in its naked ugliness, than have it brought to
light bit by bit. There is not the shadow of a doubt of Roland's crime.
You do not believe him innocent yourself?"

"No," she replied in a low, yet steady voice; "no. I must tell the
truth. I cannot comfort myself with the belief that he is innocent."

Mr. Clifford's keen eyes were fastened upon Felicita with admiration.
Here was a woman, young and pallid with grief and dread, who neither
tried to move him by prayers and floods of tears, nor shrank from
acknowledging a truth, however painful. He had never seen her before,
though the costly set of jewels she was wearing had been his own gift to
her on her wedding. He recognized them with pleasure, and looked more
attentively at her beautiful but gloomy face. When he spoke again it was
in a manner less harsh and abrupt than it had been before.

"I am not going to ask you any questions about Roland," he said; "you
have a right, the best right in the world, to screen him, and aid him in
escaping from the just consequences of his folly and crime."

"You might ask me," she interrupted, "and I should tell you the simple
truth. I do so now, when I say I know nothing about him. He told me he
was going to London. But is it not possible that poor Acton alone was
guilty?"

Mr. Clifford shook his head in reply. For a few minutes he paced up and
down the floor, and then placed himself at the back of Felicita, with
his hand upon her chair, as if to support him. In a glass opposite she
could see the reflection of his face, gray and agitated, with closed
eyes and quivering lips--a face that looked ten years older than that
which she had seen when he entered the room. She felt the chair shaken
by his trembling hand.

"I will tell you," he said in a voice which he strove to render steady.
"I did not spare my own son when he had defrauded Roland's father.
Though Sefton would not prosecute him, I left him to reap the harvest of
his deed to the full; and it was worse than the penalty the law would
have exacted. He perished, disgraced and forsaken, of starvation in
Paris, the city of pleasures and of crimes. They told me that my son was
little more than a living skeleton when he was found, so slowly had the
end come. If I did not spare him, can I relent toward Roland? The
justice I demand is, in comparison, mercy for him."

As he finished speaking he opened his eyes, and saw those of Felicita
fastened on the reflection of his face in the mirror. He turned away,
and in a minute or two resumed his seat, and spoke again in his ordinary
abrupt tone.

"What will you do?" he asked.

"I cannot tell yet," she answered; "I must wait till suspense is over.
If Roland comes back, or is brought back," she faltered, "then I must
decide what to do. I shall keep to myself till then. Is there anything I
can do?"

"Could you go to your uncle, Lord Riversdale?" suggested Mr. Clifford.

"No, no," she cried; "I will not ask any help from him. He arranged my
marriage for me, and he will feel this disgrace keenly. I will keep out
of their way; they shall not be compelled to forbid me their society."

"But to-morrow you had better go away for the day," he answered; "there
will be people coming and going, who will disturb you. There will be a
rigorous search made. There is a detective now with my lawyer, who is
looking through the papers in the bank. The police have taken possession
of Acton's lodgings."

"I have nowhere to go," she replied, "and I cannot show my face out of
doors. Madame and the children shall go to Phebe Marlowe, but I must
bear it as well as I can."

"Well," he said after a brief pause, "I will make it as easy as I can
for you. You are thinking me a hard man? Yes, I have grown hard. I was
soft enough once. But if I forgave any sinner now I should do my boy,
who is dead, an awful injustice. I would not pass over his sin, and I
dare not pass over any other. I know I shall pursue Roland until his
death or mine; my son's fate cries out for it. But I'm not a hard man
toward innocent sufferers, like you and his poor mother. Try to think of
me as your friend; nay, even Roland's friend, for what would a few
years' penal servitude be compared with my boy's death? Shake hands
with me before I go."

The small, delicate hand she offered him was icy cold, though her face
was still calm and her eyes clear and dry. He was himself more moved and
agitated than she appeared to be. The mention of his son always shook
him to the very centre of his soul; yet he had not been able to resist
uttering the words that had passed his lips during this painful
interview with Roland's young wife. Unshed tears were burning under his
eyelids. But if it had not been for that death-like hand he might have
imagined her almost unmoved.

Felicita was down-stairs before Madame the next morning, and had ordered
the carriage to be ready to take her and the children to Upfold Farm
directly after breakfast. It was so rare an incident for their mother to
be present at the breakfast-table that Felix and Hilda felt as if it
were a holiday. Madame was pale and sad, and for the first time Felicita
thought of her as being a sufferer by Roland's crime. Her husband's
mother had been little more to her than a superior housekeeper, who had
been faithfully attached to her and her children. The homely, gentle,
domestic foreigner, from a humble Swiss home, had looked up to her young
aristocratic daughter-in-law as a being from a higher sphere. But now
the downcast, sorrowful face of the elder woman touched Felicita's
sympathy.

"Mother!" she said, as soon as the children had run away to get ready
for their drive. She had never before called Madame "mother," and a
startled look, almost of delight, crossed Madame's sad face.

"My daughter!" she cried, running to Felicita's side, and throwing her
arms timidly about her, "he is sure to come back soon--to-day, I think.
Oh, yes, he will be here when we return! You do well to stay to meet
him; and I should be glad to be here, but for the children. Yes, the
little ones must be out of the way. They must not see their father's
house searched; they must never know how he is suspect. Acton did say it
was all his fault; his fault and--"

But here Madame paused for an instant, for had not Acton said it was
Felicita's fault more than any one's?

"Phebe heard him," she went on hastily; "and if it is not his fault, why
did he kill himself? Oh, it is an ill-fortune that my son went to London
that day! It would all be right if he were here; but he is sure to come
to-day and explain it all; and the bank will be opened again. So be of
good comfort, my daughter; for God is present with us, and with my son
also."

It was a sorrowful day at the Upfold Farm in spite of the children's
unconscious mirthfulness. Old Marlowe locked himself into his workshop,
and would see none of them, taking his meals there in sullen anger.
Phebe's heart was almost broken with listening to Madame's earnest
asseverations of her son's perfect innocence, and her eager hopes to
find him when she reached home. It was nearly impossible to her to keep
the oppressive secret, which seemed crushing her into deception and
misery, and her own muteness appeared to herself more condemnatory than
any words could be. But Madame did not notice her silence, and her grief
was only natural. Phebe's tears fell like balm on Madame's aching
heart. Felicita had not wept; but this young girl, and her abandonment
to passionate bursts of tears, who needed consoling herself, was a
consolation to the poor mother. They knelt together in Phebe's little
bedroom, while the children were playing on the wide uplands around
them, and they prayed silently, if heavy sobs and sighs could be called
silence; but they prayed together, and for her son; and Madame returned
home comforted and hopeful.

It had been a day of fierce trial to Felicita. She had not formed any
idea of how searching would be the investigation of the places where any
of her husband's papers might be found. Her own study was not exempt
from the prying eyes of the detectives. This room, sacred to her, which
Roland himself never entered without permission was ransacked, and
forever desecrated in her eyes. This official meddling with her books
and her papers could never be forgotten. The pleasant place was made an
abomination to her.

The bank was reopened the next morning at the accustomed hour, for a
very short investigation by Mr. Clifford and the experienced advisers
summoned from London to assist him proved that the revenues of the firm
were almost as good as ever. The panic had been caused by the vague
rumor afloat of some mysterious complicity in crime between the absent
partner and the clerk who had committed suicide. It was, therefore,
considered necessary for the prosperous re-establishment of the bank to
put forth a cautiously worded circular, in which Mr. Clifford's return
was made the reason for the absence on a long journey of Roland Sefton,
whose disappearance had to be accounted for. By the time he was arrested
and brought to trial the confidence of the bank's customers in its
stability would in some measure be regained.

There was thus a good deal of conjecture and of contradictory opinion
abroad in Riversborough concerning Roland Sefton, which continued to be
the town's-talk for some weeks. Even Madame began to believe in a
half-bewildered manner that her son had gone on a journey of business
connected with the bank, though she could not account for his total
silence. Sometimes she wondered if he and Felicita could have had some
fatal quarrel, which had driven him away from home in a paroxysm of
passionate disappointment and bitterness. Felicita's coldness and
indifference might have done it. With this thought, and the hope of his
return some day, she turned for relief to the discharge of her household
duties, and to the companionship of the children, who knew nothing
except that their father was gone away on a journey, and might come back
any day.

Neither Madame nor the children knew that whenever they left the house
they were followed by a detective, and every movement was closely
watched. But Felicita was conscious of it by some delicate sensitiveness
of her imaginative temperament. She refused to quit the house except in
the evening, when she rambled about the garden, and felt the fresh air
from the river breathing against her often aching temples. Even then she
fancied an eye upon her--an unsleeping, unblinking eye; the unwearying
vigilance of justice on the watch for a criminal. Night and day she felt
herself living under its stony gaze.

It was a positive pain to her when reviews of her book appeared in
various papers, and were forwarded to her with congratulatory letters
from her publishers. She was living far enough from London to be easily
persuaded, without much vanity, that her name was upon everybody's lips
there. She read the reviews, but with a sick heart, and the words were
forgotten as soon as she put them away; but the Riversborough papers,
which had been very guarded in their statements about the death of Acton
and the events at the Old Bank, took up the book with what appeared to
her fulsome and offensive enthusiasm. It had never occurred to her that
local criticism was certain to follow the appearance of a local writer;
and she shrank from it with morbid and exaggerated disgust. Even if all
had been well, if Roland had been beside her, their notices would have
been well-nigh intolerable to her. She could not have endured being
stared at and pointed out in the streets of her own little town. But now
Fame had come to her with broken wings and a cracked trumpet, and she
shuddered at the sound of her own name harshly proclaimed through it.

It soon became evident that Roland Sefton had succeeded in getting away
out of the country. The police were at fault; and as no one in his own
home knew how to communicate with him, no clew had been discovered by
close surveillance of their movements. Such vigilance could be kept up
only for a few months at longest, and as the summer drew toward the end
it ceased.




CHAPTER IX.

FAST BOUND.


Roland Sefton had met with but few difficulties in getting clear away
out of England, and there was little chance of his being identified,
from description merely, by any of the foreign police, or by any English
detective on the Continent who was not as familiar with his personal
appearance as the Riversborough force were. In his boyhood he had spent
many months, years even, in his mother's native village with her father,
M. Roland Merle, the pastor of a parish among the Jura Mountains. It was
as easy for him to assume the character of a Swiss mountaineer as to
sustain that of a prosperous English banker. The dress, the patois, the
habits of the peasant were all familiar to him, and his disguise in them
was as complete as disguise ever can be. The keen eye either of love or
hate can pierce through all disguises.

Switzerland was all fatherland to him, as much so as his native country,
and the county in which Riversborough was situated. There was no
ignorance in him of any little town, or the least known of the Alps,
which might betray the stranger. He would never need to attract notice
by asking a question. He had become a member of an Alpine club as soon
as his boyish thews and sinews were strong enough for stiff and perilous
climbing. He had crossed the most difficult passes and scaled some of
the worst peaks. And there had been within him that passionate love of
the country common to the Swiss which an English Alpine climber can
never feel. His mother's land had filled him with an ardent flame,
smouldering at times amid the absorbing interests of his somewhat
prominent place in English life, but every now and then breaking out
into an irrepressible longing for the sight of its white mountains and
swift, strong streams. It was at once the safest and the most dangerous
of refuges. He would be certainly sought for there; but there he could
most effectually conceal himself. He flew thither with his burden of
sin and shame.

Roland adopted at once the dress of a decent artisan of the Jura--such a
man as he had known in his boyhood as a watchmaker of Locle or the
Doubs. For a few days he stayed in Geneva, lodging in such a street as a
Locle artisan would have chosen; but he could not feel secure there, in
spite of his own certainty that his transformation was complete. A
restless dread haunted him. He knew well that there are in every one
little personal traits, tricks of gesture, and certain tones of voice
always ready to betray us. It was yet too early in the year for many
travellers to be journeying to Switzerland; but already a few straggling
pioneers of the summer flight were appearing in the larger towns, and
what would be his fate if any one of them recognized him? He quitted
Geneva, and wandered away into the mountain villages.

It was May-time, and the snow-line was still lingering low down on the
steep slopes, though the flowers were springing into life up to its
very margin, seeming to drive it higher and higher every day. The High
Alps were still fast locked in midwinter, and with untrodden wastes and
plains of snow lying all around them. The deserted mountain farms and
great solitary hotels, so thronged last summer, were empty. But in the
valleys and the little villages lying on the warm southern slopes, or
sheltered by precipitous rocks from the biting winds, there was
everywhere a joyous stir of awakening from the deep sleep of winter. The
frozen streams were thawed and ran bubbling and gurgling along their
channels, turning water-wheels and filling all the quiet places with
their merry noise. The air itself was full of sweet exhilaration. In the
forests there was the scent of stirring sap and of the up-springing
wild-flowers, and the rosy blossoms of the tender young larch-trees
shone like jewels in the bright sunshine. The mountain-peaks overhead,
gleaming through the mists and clouds, were of dazzling whiteness, for
none of the frozen snow had yet fallen from their sharp, lance-like
summits.

Journeying on foot from one village to another, Roland roamed about
aimlessly, yet as one hunted, seeking for a safe asylum. He bore his
troubled conscience and aching heart from one busy spot to another,
homesick and self-exiled. Oh, what a fool he had been! Life had been
full to the brim for him with gladness and prosperity, and in trying to
make its cup run over he had dashed it away from his lips forever.

His money was not yet spent, for a very little went a long way among
these simple mountain villages, and in his manner of travelling. He had
not yet been forced to try to earn a living, and he felt no anxiety for
the future. In his boyhood he had learned wood-carving, both in
Switzerland and from old Marlowe, and he had acquired considerable skill
in the art. Some of the panels in his home at Riversborough were the
workmanship of his own hands. It was a craft to turn to in extremity;
but he did not think of it yet.

Labor of any kind would have made the interminable hours pass more
quickly. The carving of a piece of wood might have kept him from
torturing his own heart perpetually; but he did not turn to this slight
solace. There were times when he sat for hours, for a whole age, as it
seemed to him, in some lonely spot, hidden behind a great rock or half
lost in a forest, thinking. And yet it was not thought, but a vague,
mournful longing and remembrance, the past and the absent blended in
dim, shadowy reverie, of which nothing was clear but the sharp anguish
of having forfeited them. There was a Garden of Eden still upon earth,
and he had been dwelling in it. But he had banished himself from it by
his own folly and sin, and when he turned his eyes toward it he could
see only the "flaming brand, and the gate with dreadful faces thronged
and fiery arms." But even Adam had his Eve with him, "to drop some
natural tears, and wipe them soon." He was utterly alone.

If his thoughts, so dazed and bewildered usually, became clear for a
little while, it was always Felicita whose image stood out most
distinctly before him. He had loved her passionately; surely never had
any man loved a woman with the same intensity--so he said to himself.
Even now the very crime he had committed seemed as nothing to him,
because he had been guilty of it for her. His love for her covered its
heinousness from his eyes. His conscience had become the blind and dumb
slave of his passion. So blind and dumb had it been that it had scarcely
stirred or murmured until his sin was found out, and it was scarcely
aroused to life even yet.

In a certain sense he had been religious, having been most sedulously
trained in religion from his earliest consciousness. He had accepted the
ordinary teachings of our nineteenth-century Christianity. His place in
church, beside his mother or his wife, had seldom been empty, and
several times in the year he had knelt with them at the Lord's table,
and taken the Lord's Supper, feeling himself distinctly a more religious
man than usual on such occasions. No man had ever heard him utter a
profane word, nor had he transgressed any of the outward rules of a
religious life. It is true he had never made a vehement and
extraordinary profession of piety, such as some men do; but there was
not a person in Riversborough who would not have spoken of him as a
good churchman and a Christian. While he had been gradually
appropriating Mr. Clifford's money and the hard-earned savings of poorer
men confided to him, he had felt no qualm of conscience in giving
liberally to many a religious and philanthropic object, contributing
such sums as figure well in a subscription list; though it was generally
his wife's name that figured there. He had never taken up a subscription
list without glancing first for that beloved name, Mrs. Roland Sefton.

In those days he had never doubted that he was a Christian. So far as he
knew, so far as words could teach him, he was living a Christian life.
Did he not believe in God, the Father Almighty? Yes, as fully as those
who lived about him. Had he not followed Christ? As closely as the mass
of people who call themselves Christians. Nay, more than most of them.
Not as much as his mother perhaps, in her simple, devout faith. But then
religion is always a different thing with women than with men, a fairer
and more delicate thing, wearing a finer bloom and gloss, which does not
wear well in a work-a-day world such as he did battle in. But if he had
not lived a Christian life, what man in Riversborough had done so,
except a few fanatics?

But his religion had been powerless to keep him from falling into subtle
temptations, and into a crime so heinous in the sight of his fellow-men
that it was only to be expiated by the loss of character, the loss of
liberty, and the loss of every honorable man's esteem. The web had been
closely and cunningly woven, and now he was fast bound in it, with no
way of escape.




CHAPTER X.

LEAVING RIVERSBOROUGH.


The weeks passed by in Riversborough, and brought no satisfactory
conclusion to the guarded investigations of the police. A close search
made among Acton's private papers produced no discovery. His will was
among them, leaving all he had to leave, which was not much, to Felix,
the son of his friend and employer, Roland Sefton. There was no
memorandum or letter which could throw any light upon the transactions,
or give any clew to what had been done with Mr. Clifford's securities.

Nor was the watch kept over the movements of the family more successful.
The police were certain that no letter was posted by any member of the
household, which could be intended for the missing culprit. Even Phebe
Marlowe's correspondence was subject to their vigilance. But not a trace
could be discovered. He was gone; whether he had fled to America, or
concealed himself nearer home on the Continent, no one could make a
guess.

Mr. Clifford remained in Riversborough, and resumed his position as head
of the firm. He had returned with the intention of doing so, having
heard abroad of the extravagant manner in which his junior partner was
living. The bank, though seriously crippled in its credit and resources,
was in no danger of insolvency, and there seemed no reason why it should
not regain its former prosperity, if only confidence could be restored.
He had reserved to himself the power of taking in another partner, if he
should deem it advisable; and an eligible one presenting himself, in the
person of a Manchester man of known wealth, the deeds of partnership
were drawn up, and the Old Bank was once more set up on a firm basis.

During the time that elapsed while these arrangements were being made,
Felicita was visibly suffering, and failing in health. So sensitive had
she grown to the dread of seeing any one not in the immediate circle of
her household, that it became impossible to her to leave her home. The
clear colorlessness of her face had taken on a transparency and delicacy
which did not lessen its beauty, but added to it an unearthly grace. She
no longer spent hours alone in her desecrated room; it had grown
intolerable to her; but she sat speechless, and almost motionless, in
the oriel window overlooking the garden and the river; and Felix, a
child of dreamy and sensitive temperament, would sit hour after hour at
her feet, pressing his cheek against her knee, or with his uplifted eyes
gazing into her face.

"Mother," he said one day, when Roland had been gone more than a month,
"how long will my father be away on his journey? Doesn't he ever write
to you, and send messages to me? Grandmamma says she does not know how
soon he will be back. Do you know, mother?"

Felicita looked down on him with her beautiful dark eyes, which seemed
larger and sadder than of old, sending a strange thrill through the
boy's heart, and for a minute or two she seemed uncertain what to say.

"I cannot tell you, Felix," she answered; "there are many things in life
which children cannot understand. If I told you what was true about your
father, your little brain would turn it into an untruth. You could not
understand it if I told you."

"But I shall understand it some day," he said, lifting his head up
proudly; "will you tell me when I am old enough, mother?"

How could she promise him to do that? This proud young head, tossed back
with the expectant triumph of some day knowing all that his father and
mother knew, must be bowed down with grief and shame then, as hers was
now. It was a sad knowledge he must inherit. How would she ever be able
to tell him that the father who had given him life, and whose name he
bore, was a criminal; a convict if he was arrested and brought to
judgment; an outlaw and an exile if he made good his escape? Roland had
never been as dear to her as Felix was. She was one of those women who
love more deeply and tenderly as mothers than as wives. To see that
bright, fond face of his clouded with disgrace would be a ceaseless
torment to her. There would be no suffering to compare with it.

"But you will tell me all about it some day, mother," urged the boy.

"If I ever tell you," she answered, "it will be when you are a man, and
can understand the whole truth. You will never hear me tell a falsehood,
Felix."

"I know that, mother," he replied, "but oh! I miss my father! He used to
come to my bedside at nights, and kiss me, and say 'God bless you.' I
tried always to keep awake till he came; but I was asleep the last time
of all, and missed him. Sometimes I feel frightened, as if he would
never come again. But grandmamma says he is gone on a long journey, and
will come home some day, only she doesn't know when. Phebe cries when I
ask her. Would it be too much trouble for you to come in at night
sometimes, like my father did?" he asked timidly.

"But I am not like your father," she answered. "I could not say 'God
bless you' in the same way. You must ask God yourself for His
blessing."

For Felicita's soul had been thrust down into the depths of darkness.
Her early training had been simply and solely for this world: how to
make life here graceful and enjoyable. She could look back upon none but
the vaguest aspirations after something higher in her girlhood. It had
been almost like a new revelation to her to see her mother-in-law's
simple and devout piety, and to witness her husband's cheerful and manly
profession of religion. This was the point in his character which had
attracted her most, and had been most likely to bind her to him. Not his
passionate love to herself, but his unselfishness toward others, his
apparently happy religion, his energetic interest in all good and
charitable schemes--these had reconciled her more than anything else to
the step she had taken, the downward step, in marrying him.

This unconscious influence of Roland's life and character had been
working secretly and slowly upon her nature for several years. They
were very young when they were married, and her first feeling of
resentment toward her own family for pressing on the marriage had at the
outset somewhat embittered her against her young husband. But this had
gradually worn away, and Felicita had never been so near loving him
heartily and deeply as during the last year or two, when it was evident
that his attachment to her was as loyal and as tender as ever. He had
almost won her, when he staked all and lost all.

For now, she asked herself, what was the worth of all this religion,
which presented so fair a face to her? She had a delicate sense of honor
and truthfulness, which never permitted her to swerve into any byways of
expediency or convenience. What use was Roland's religion without
truthfulness and honor? She said to herself that there was no excuse for
him even feeling tempted to deal with another man's property. It ought
to have been as impossible to him as it was impossible to her to steal
goods from a tradesman's counter. Was it possible to serve God--and
Roland professed to serve Him--yet cheat his fellow-men? The service of
God itself must then be a vanity--a mere bubble, like all the other
bubbles of life.

It had never been her habit to speak out her thoughts, even to her
husband. Speech seemed an inefficient and blundering medium of
communication, and she found it easier to write than to talk. There was
a natural taciturnity about her which sealed her lips, even when her
children were prattling to her. Only in writing could she give
expression to the multitude of her thoughts within her; and her letters
were charming, and of exceeding interest. But in this great crisis in
her life she could not write. She would sit for hours vainly striving to
arouse her languid brain. It seemed to her that she had lost this gift
also in the utter ruin that had overtaken her.

Felicita's white, silent, benumbed grief, accepting the conviction of
her husband's guilt with no feminine contradicting or loud lamenting,
touched Mr. Clifford with more pity than he felt for Madame, who bore
her son's mysterious absence with a more simple and natural sorrow.
There was something irritating to him in the fact that Roland's mother
ignored the accusation he made against him. But when Roland had been
away three months, and the police authorities had given up all
expectation of discovering anything by watching his home and family, Mr.
Clifford felt that it was time something should be arranged which would
deliver Felicita from her voluntary imprisonment.

"Why do you not go away?" he asked her; "you cannot continue to live
mewed up here all your days. If Roland should be found, it would be
better for you not to be in Riversborough. And I for one have given up
the expectation that he will be found; the only chance is that he may
return and give himself up. Go to some place where you are not known.
There is Scarborough; take Madame and the children there for a few
months, and then settle in London for the winter. Nobody will know you
in London."

"But how can we leave this house?" she said, with a gleam of light in
her sad eyes.

"Let me come in just as it is," he answered. "I will pay you a good rent
for it, and you can take a part of the furniture to London, to make
your new dwelling there more like home. It would be a great convenience
to me, and it would be the best thing for you, depend upon it. If Roland
returns he never will live here again."

"No, he could never do that," she said, sighing deeply. "Mr. Clifford,
sometimes I think he must be dead."

"I have thought so too," he replied gravely; "and if it were so, it
would be the salvation of you and your children. There would be no
public trial and conviction, and though suspicion might always rest upon
his memory, he would not be remembered for long. Justice would be
defrauded, yet on the whole I should rejoice for your sake to hear that
he was dead."

Felicita's lips almost echoed the words. Her heart did so, though it
smote her as she recollected his passionate love for her. But Mr.
Clifford's speech sank deeply into her mind, and she brooded over it
incessantly. Roland's death meant honor and fair fame for herself and
her children; his life was perpetual shame and contempt to them.

It was soon settled that they must quit Riversborough; but though
Felicita welcomed the change, and was convinced it would be the best
thing to do, Madame grieved sorely over leaving the only home which had
been hers, except the little manse in the Jura, where her girlhood had
passed swiftly and happily away. She had brought with her the homely,
thrifty ways in which she had been trained, and every spot in her
husband's dwelling had been taken under her own care and supervision.
Her affections had rooted themselves to the place, and she had never
dreamed of dying anywhere else than among the familiar scenes which had
surrounded her for more than thirty years. The change too could not be
made without her consent, for her marriage settlement was secured upon
the house, and her husband had left to her the right of accepting or
refusing a tenant. To leave the familiar, picturesque old mansion, and
to carry away with her only a few of the household treasures, went far
to break her heart.

"It is where my husband intended for me to live and die," she moaned to
Phebe Marlowe; "and, oh, if I go away I can never fancy I see him
sitting in his own chair as he used to do, at the head of the table, or
by the fire. I have not altogether lost him, though he's gone, as long
as I can think of how he used to come in and go out of this room, always
with a smile for me. But if I go where he never was, how can I think I
see him there? And my son will be angry if we go; he will come back, and
clear up all this mystery, and he will think we went away because we
thought he had done evil. Ought we not to come home again after we have
been to Scarborough?"

"I think Mrs. Sefton will die if she stays here," said Phebe. "It is
necessary for her to make this change; and you'd rather go with her and
the children than live here alone without them."

"Oh, yes, yes!" answered Madame; "I cannot leave my little Felix and
Hilda, or Felicita: she is my son's dear wife. But he will come home
some day, and we can return then; you hope so, don't you, Phebe?"

"If God pleases!" said Phebe, sighing.

"In truth, if God pleases!" repeated Madame.

When the last hour came in which Phebe could see Roland's wife, she
sought for her in her study, where she was choosing the books to be sent
after her. In the very words in which Roland had sent his message he
delivered it to Felicita. The cold, sad, marble-like face did not
change, though her heart gave a throb of disappointment and anguish as
the dread hope that he was no longer alive died out of it.

"I will meet him there," she said. But she asked Phebe no questions, and
did not tell her where she was to meet her husband.




CHAPTER XI.

OLD MARLOWE.


Life had put on for Phebe a very changed aspect. The lonely farmstead on
the uplands had been till now a very happy and tranquil home. She had
had no sorrow since her mother died when she was eight years of age, too
young to grieve very sorely. On the other hand, she was not so young as
to require a woman's care, and old Marlowe had made her absolute
mistress of the little home. His wife, a prudent, timid woman, had
always repressed his artistic tendencies, preferring the certainty of
daily bread to the vague chances of gaining renown and fortune. Old
Marlowe, so marred and imperfect in his physical powers, had submitted
to her shrewd, ignorant authority, and earned his living and hers by
working on his little farm and going out occasionally as a carpenter.
But when she was gone, and his little girl's eyes only were watching him
at his work, and the child's soul delighted in all the beautiful forms
his busy hands could fashion, he gave up his out-door toil, and, with
all the pent-up ardor of the lost years, he threw himself absorbingly
into the pleasant occupation of the present. Though he mourned
faithfully for his wife, the woman who had given to him Phebe, he felt
happier and freer without her.

Phebe's girlhood also had been both free and happy. All the seasons had
been sweet to her: dear to her was "the summer, clothing the general
earth with greenness," and the winter, when "the redbreast sits and
sings be-twixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch of the mossy
apple-tree." She had listened to "the eave-drops falling in the trances
of the blast," and seen them "hang in silent icicles, quietly shining to
the quiet moon." There had been no change in nature unnoticed or
unbeloved by her. The unbroken silence reigning around her, heightened
by the mute speech between herself and her father, which needed eyes
only, not lips, had grown so familiar as to be almost dear to her, in
spite of her strong delight in fellowship with others. The artistic
temperament she had inherited from her father, which very early took
vivid pleasure in expressing itself in color as well as in form, had
furnished her with an occupation of which she could never tire. As long
as there was light in the sky, long after the sun had gone down, in the
lingering twilight, loath to forsake the uplands, she was at her canvas
catching the soft gray tones, and dim-colored tints, and clearer masses
of foliage, which only the evening could show.

To supply her need of general companionship there had been so full and
satisfying a sense of friendship between herself and the household at
the Old Bank at Riversborough that one day spent with them gave her
thought for a month. Every word uttered by Roland and Felicita was
treasured up in her memory and turned over in her mind for days after.
Madame's simple and cheerful nature made her almost like a mother to the
simple and cheerful country girl; and Felix and Hilda had been objects
of the deepest interest to her from the days of their birth. But it was
Roland, who had known her best and longest, to whom she owed the
direction and cultivation of her tastes and intellect, who had been
almost like a god to her in her childhood; it was he who dominated over
her simple heart the most. He was to Phebe so perfect that she had never
imagined that there could be a fault in him.

There is one token to us that we are meant for a higher and happier life
than this, in the fact that sorrow and sin always come upon us as a
surprise. Happy days do not astonish us, and the goodness of our beloved
ones awakens no amazement. But if a sorrow comes we cry aloud to let our
neighbors know something untoward has befallen us; and if one we love
has sinned, we feel as if the heavens themselves were darkened.

It was so with Phebe Marlowe. All her earthly luminaries, the greater
lights and the lesser lights, were under an eclipse, and a strange
darkness had fallen upon her. For the first time in her life she found
herself brooding over the sin of one who had been her guide, her
dearest friend, her hero. From the time when as a child she had learned
to look up to him as the paragon of all perfection, until now, as a girl
on the verge of womanhood, she had offered up to him a very pure and
maidenly worship. There was no one else whom she could love as much; for
her dumb and deaf father she loved in quite a different manner--with
more of pity and compassion than of admiration. Roland too had sometimes
talked with her, especially while she was a child, about God and Christ;
and she had regarded him as a spiritual director. Now her guide was lost
in the dense darkness. There was no sure example for her to follow.

She had told her father he would never see her smile again if Roland
Sefton was taken to jail. There had been, of course, an implied promise
in this, but the promise was broken. Old Marlowe looked in vain for the
sweet and merry smiles that had been used to play upon her face. She was
too young and too unversed in human nature to know how jealously her
father would watch her, with inward curses on him who had wrought the
change. When he saw her stand for an hour or more, listlessly gazing
with troubled, absent eyes across the wide-spreading moor, with its
broad sweep of deep-purpled bloom, and golden gorse, and rich green
fern, yet taking no notice, nor hastening to fix the gorgeous hues upon
her canvas while the summer lasted; and when he watched her in the long
dusk of the autumn evenings sit motionless in the chimney corner
opposite to him, her fingers lying idly on her lap instead of busily
prattling some merry nonsense to him, and with a sad preoccupation in
her girlish face; then he felt that he had received his own death-blow,
and had no more to live for.

The loss of his hard-earned money had taken a deeper hold upon him than
a girl so young as Phebe could imagine. For what is money to a young
nature but the merest dross, compared with the love and faith it has
lavished upon some fellow-mortal? While she was mourning over the
shipwreck of all her best affections, old Marlowe was brooding over his
six hundred pounds. They represented so much to him, so many years of
toil and austere self-denial. He had risen early, and late taken rest,
and eaten the bread of carefulness. His grief was not all ignoble, for
it was for his girl he grieved most; his wonderful child, so much more
gifted than the children of other men, whom nature had treated more
kindly than himself, men who could hear and speak, but whose daughters
were only commonplace creatures. The money was hers, not his; and it was
too late now for him to make up the heavy loss. The blow which had
deprived him of the fruits of his labor seemed to have incapacitated him
for further work.

Moreover, Phebe was away oftener than usual: gone to the house of the
spoiler. Nor did she come home, as she had been wont to do, with radiant
eyes, and a soft, sweet smile coming and going, and many a pleasant
piece of news to tell off on her nimble fingers. She returned with
tear-stained eyelids and a downcast air, and was often altogether silent
as to the result of the day's absence.

He strove, notwithstanding a haunting dread of failure, to resume his
old occupation. Doggedly every morning he put on his brown paper cap,
and went off to his crowded little workshop, but with unequal footsteps,
quite unlike his former firm tread. But it would not do. He stood for
hours before his half-shaped blocks of oak, with birds and leaves and
heads partly traced upon them; but he found himself powerless to
complete his own designs. Between him and them stood the image of Phebe,
a poverty-stricken, work-worn woman, toiling with her hands, in all
weathers, upon their three or four barren fields, which were now the
only property left to him. It had been pleasant to him to see her milk
the cows, and help him to fetch in the sheep from the moors; but until
now he had been able to pay for the rougher work on the farmstead. His
neighbor, Samuel Nixey, had let his laborers do it for him, since he had
kept his own hands and time for his artistic pursuit. But he could
afford this no longer, and the thought of the next winter's work which
lay before him and Phebe harassed him terribly.

"Father," she said to him one evening, after she had been at
Riversborough, "they are all going away--Mrs. Sefton, and Madame, and
the children. They are going Scarborough, and after that to London,
never to come back. I shall not see them again."

"Thank God!" thought the dumb old man, and his eyes gleamed brightly
from under their thick gray eyebrows. But he did not utter the words, so
much less easy was it for his fingers to betray his thoughts than it
would have been for his lips. And Phebe did not guess them.

"Is there any news of him?" he asked.

"Not a word," she answered. "Mr. Clifford has almost given it up. He is
an unforgiving man, an awful man."

"No, no; he is a just man," said old Marlowe; "he wants nothing but his
own again, like me, and that a scoundrel should not get off scot free. I
want my money back; it's not money merely, but my years, and my brain,
and my love for thee, and my power to work: that's what he has robbed me
of. Let me have my money back, and I'll forgive him."

"Poor father!" said Phebe aloud, with a little sob. How easy it seemed
to her to forgive a wrong that could be definitely stated at six hundred
pounds! All her inward grief was that Roland had fallen--he himself. If
by a whole sacrifice of herself she could have reinstated him in the
place he had forfeited, she would not have hesitated for an instant. But
no sacrifice she could make would restore him.

"Does Mrs. Sefton know what he has done?" inquired her father.

She nodded only in reply.

"Does she believe him innocent?" he asked.

"No," answered Phebe.

"And Madame, his mother?" he pursued.

"No, no, no! she cannot believe him guilty," she replied; "she thinks he
could free himself, if he would only come home. She is far happier than
Mrs. Sefton or me. I would lay down my life to have him true and honest
and good again, as he used to be. I feel as if I was in a miserable
dream."

They were sitting together outside their cottage-door, with the level
rays of the setting sun shining across the uplands upon them, and the
fresh air of the evening breathing upon their faces. It was an hour they
both loved, but neither of them felt its beauty and tranquillity now.

"You love him next to me?" asked old Marlowe.

"Next to you, father," she repeated.

But the subtle jealousy in the father's heart whispered that his
daughter loved these grand friends of hers more than himself. What could
he be to her, deaf mute that he was? What could he do for her? All he
had done had been swept away by the wrong-doing of this fine gentleman,
for whom she was willing to lay down her life. He looked at her with
wistful eyes, longing to hold closer, swifter communication with her
than could be held by their slow finger-speech. How could he ever make
her know all the love and pride pent up in his voiceless heart? Phebe,
in her girlish, blind preoccupation, saw nothing of his eager, wistful
gaze, did not even notice the nervous trembling of his stammering
fingers; and the old man felt thrown back upon himself, in more utter
loneliness of spirit than his life had ever experienced before. Yet he
was not so old a man, for he was little over sixty, but his hard life
of incessant toil and his isolation from his fellow-creatures had aged
him. This bitter calamity added many years to his actual age, and he
began to realize that his right hand was forgetting its cunning, his eye
for beauty was growing dim, and his craft failing him. The long, light
summer days kept him for a while from utter hopelessness. But as the
autumn winds began to moan and mutter round the house he told himself
that his work was done, and that soon Phebe would be a friendless and
penniless orphan.

"I ought not to have let Roland Sefton go," he thought to himself; "if
I'd done my duty he would have been paying for his sin now, and maybe
there would have been some redress for us that lost by him. None of his
people will come to poverty like my Phebe. I could have held up my head
if I had not helped him to escape from punishment."




CHAPTER XII.

RECKLESS OF LIFE.


If old Marlowe, or Mr. Clifford himself, could have followed Roland
Sefton during his homeless wanderings, their rigorous sense of justice
would have been satisfied that he was not escaping punishment, though he
might elude the arbitrary penalty of the law.

As the summer advanced, and the throng of yearly tourists poured into
the playground of Europe from every country, but especially from
England, he was driven away from all the towns and villages where he
might by chance be recognized by some fellow-countryman. Up into the
mountain pastures he retreated, where he rambled from one chalet to
another, sleeping on beds of fodder, with its keen night air piercing
through the apertures of the roof and walls, yet bringing with it those
intolerable stenches which exhale from the manure and mire lying
ankle-deep round each picturesque little hut. The yelping of the
watch-dogs; the snoring of the tired herdsmen lying within arm's length
of him; the shrill tinkling of cow-bells, musical enough by day and in
the distance, but driving sleep away too harshly; the sickness and
depression produced by unwholesome food, and the utter compulsory
abandonment of all his fastidious and dainty personal habits, made his
mere bodily life intolerable to him. He had borne something like these
discomforts and privations for a day or two at a time, when engaged in
Alpine climbing, but that he should be forced to live a life compared
with which that of an Irish bog-trotter was decent and civilized, was a
daily torment to him.

It is true that during the long hours of daylight he wandered among the
most sublime scenery. Sometimes he scaled solitary peaks and looked down
upon far-stretching landscapes below him, with broad dead rivers of
glaciers winding between the high and terrible masses of snow-clad
rocks, and creeping down into peaceful valleys, where little living
streams of silvery gray wandered among chalets looking no larger than
the rocks strewn around them, with a tiny church in their midst lifting
up its spire of glittering metal with a kind of childish confidence and
exultation. Here and there in deep sunken hollows lay small tarns, black
as night, and guilty looking, with precipices overhanging them fringed
with pointed pine-trees, which sought in vain to mirror themselves in
those pitch-dark waters. And above them all, gazing down in silent
greatness, rose the snow-mountains, very cold, whiter than any other
whiteness on earth, pure and stainless, and apparently as unapproachable
in their far-off loveliness as the deep blue of the pure sky behind
them.

But there was something unutterably awful to Roland Sefton in this
sublimity. A bad man, whose ear has never heard the voice of Nature, and
whose eye is blind to her ineffable beauty, may dwell in such places and
not be crushed by them. The dull herdsmen, thinking only of their cattle
and of the milking to be done twice a day, might live their own stupid,
commonplace lives there. The chance visitor who spent a few hours in
scaling difficult cliffs would perhaps catch a brief and fleeting sense
of their awfulness, only too quickly dissipated by the unwonted toil and
peril of his situation. But Roland Sefton felt himself exiled to their
ice-bound solitudes, cut off from all companionship, and attended only
by an accusing conscience.

Morning after morning, when his short and feverish night was ended, he
went out in the early dawn while all the valleys below were still
slumbering in darkness, self-driven into the wilderness of rock and snow
rising above the wretched chalets. With coarse food sufficient for the
wants of the day he strayed wherever his aimless footsteps led him. It
was seldom that he stayed more than a night or two in the same
herdsman's hut. When he was well out of the track of tourists he
ventured down into the lower villages now and then, seeking a few days
of comparative comfort. But some rumor, or the arrival of some chance
traveller more enterprising and investigating than the mass, always
drove him away again. There was no peace for him, either in the high
Alps or the most secluded valleys.

How could there be peace while memory and conscience were gnawing at his
heart? In a dreary round his thoughts went back to the first beginnings
of the road that had led him hither; with that vague feeling which all
of us have when retracing the irrevocable past, as if by some mighty
effort of our will we could place ourselves at the starting-point again
and run our race--oh, how differently!

Roland could almost fix the date when he had first wished that Mr.
Clifford's bonds, bequeathed to him, were already his own. He
recollected the very day when old Marlowe had asked him to invest his
money for him in some safe manner for Phebe's benefit, and how he had
persuaded himself that nothing could be safer than to use it for his own
purposes, and to pay a higher interest than the old man could get
elsewhere. What he had done for him had been still easier to do for
other clients--ignorant men and women who knew nothing of business, and
left it all to him, gratefully pleased with the good interest he paid
them. The web had been woven with almost invisible threads at the first,
but the finest thread among them was a heavy cable now.

But the one thought that haunted him, never leaving him for an instant
in these terrible solitudes, was the thought of Felicita. His mother he
could forget sometimes, or remember her with a dewy tenderness at his
heart, as if he could feel her pitiful love clinging to him still; and
his children he dreamed of at times in a day-dream, as playing merrily
without him, in the blissful ignorance of childhood. But Felicita, who
did not love him as his mother did, and could not remain in ignorance of
his crime! Was she not something like these pure, distant snowy
pinnacles, inapproachable and repellent, with icy-cold breath which
petrified all lips that drew too near to them? And he had set a stain
upon that purity as white as the driven snow. The name he had given to
her was tarnished, and would be publicly dishonored if he failed in
evading the penalty he merited. His death alone could save her from
notorious and intolerable disgrace.

But though he was reckless of his life, he could not bring himself to be
guilty of suicide. Death was wooing him in many forms, day by day, to
seek refuge with him. When his feet slipped among the yawning crevasses
of the glaciers, the smallest wilful negligence would have buried him in
their blue depths. The common impulse to cast himself down the
precipices along whose margin he crept had only to be yielded to, and
all his earthly woe would be over. Even to give way to the weary
drowsiness that overtook him at times as the sun went down, and the
night fell upon him far away from shelter, might have soothed him into
the slumber from which there is no awaking. But he dared not. He was
willing enough to die, if dying had been all. But he believed in the
punishment of sin here, or hereafter; in the dealing out of a righteous
judgment to every man, whether he be good or evil.

As the autumn passed by, and the mountain chalets were shut up, the
cattle and the herdsmen descending to the lower pastures, Roland Sefton
was compelled to descend too. There was little chance of encountering
any one who knew him at this late season; yet there were still
stragglers lingering among the Alps. But when he saw himself again in a
looking-glass, his face burned and blistered with the sun, and now
almost past recognition, and his ragged hair and beard serving him
better than any disguise, he was no longer afraid of being detected. He
began to wonder in mingled hope and dread whether Felicita would come
out to seek him. The message he had sent to her by Phebe could be
interpreted by her alone. Would she avail herself of it to find him out?
Or would she shrink from the toil and pain and danger of quitting
England? A few weeks more would answer the question.

Sometimes he was overwhelmed with terror lest she should be watched, and
her movements tracked, and that behind her would come the pursuers he
had so successfully evaded. At other times an unutterable heart-sickness
possessed him to see her once more, to hear her voice, to press his
lips, if he dared, to her pale cheeks; to discover whether she would
suffer him to hold her in his arms for one moment only. He longed to
hear from her lips what had happened at home since he fled from it six
months ago; what she had done, and was going to do, supposing that he
were not arrested and brought to justice. Would she forgive him? would
she listen to his pleas and explanations? He feared that she would hate
him for the shame he had brought upon her. Yet there was a possibility
that she might pity him, with a pity so much akin to love as that with
which the angels look down upon sinful human beings.

Every day brought the solution of his doubts nearer. The rains of autumn
had begun, and fell in torrents, driving him to any shelter he could
find, to brood there hour after hour upon these hopes and fears. The fog
and thick clouds hid the mountains, and all the valleys lay forlorn and
cold under clinging veils of mist, through which the few brown leaves
left upon the trees hung limp and dying on the bare branches. The
villagers were settling down to their winter life; and though along the
frequented routes a few travellers were still passing to and fro, the
less known were deserted. It was safe now to go down to Engelberg,
where, if ever again except as a prisoner in the hands of justice, he
would see Felicita.

Impatient to anticipate the day on which he might again see her, he
reached Engelberg a week before the appointed time. The green meadows
and the forests of the little valley were hidden in mist and rain, and
the towering dome of the Titlis was folded from sight in dense clouds,
with only a cold gleam now and then as its snowy summit glanced through
them for a minute. The innumerable waterfalls were swollen, and fell
with a restless roar through the black depths of the forests. The
daylight was short, for the sun rose late behind the encircling
mountains, and hastened to sink again below them. But the place where he
had first met Felicita was dear to him, though dark and gloomy with the
cloudy days. He hastened to the church where his eyes had fallen upon
the young, silent, absorbed girl so many years ago; and here, where the
sun was shining fitfully for a brief half hour, he paced up and down the
aisles, wondering what the coming interview would bring. Day after day
he lingered there, with the loud chanting of the monks ringing in his
ears, until the evening came when he said to himself, "To-morrow I shall
see her once more."




CHAPTER XIII.

SUSPENSE.


Roland Sefton did not sleep that night. As the time drew near for
Felicita to act upon his message to her, he grew more desponding of her
response to it; yet he could not give up the feeble hope still
flickering in his heart. If she did not come he would be a hopeless
outcast indeed; yet if she came, what succor could she bring to him? He
had not once cherished the idea that Mr. Clifford would forbear to
prosecute him; yet he knew well that if he could be propitiated, the
other men and women who had claims upon him would be easily satisfied
and appeased. But how many things might have happened during the long
six months, which had seemed almost an eternity to him. It was not
impossible that Mr. Clifford might be dead. If so, and if a path was
thus open to him to re-enter life, how different should his career be in
the future! How warily would he walk; with what earnest penitence and
thorough uprightness would he order all his ways! He would be what he
had only seemed to be hitherto: a man following Christ, as his
forefathers had done.

He was staying at a quiet inn in the village, and as soon as daybreak
came he started down the road along which Felicita must come, and waited
at the entrance of the valley, four miles from the little village. The
road was bad, for the heavy rains had washed much of it away, and it had
been roughly repaired by fir-trees laid along the broken edges; but it
was not impassable, and a one-horse carriage could run along it safely.
The rain had passed away, and the sun was shining. The high mountains
and the great rocks were clear from base to summit. If she came to-day
there was a splendid scene prepared for her eyes. Hour after hour passed
by, the short autumnal day faded into the dusk, and the dusk slowly
deepened into the blackness of night. Still he waited, late on into the
night, till the monastery bells chimed for the last time; but there was
no sign of her coming.

The next day passed as that had done. Felicita, then, had deserted him!
He felt so sure of Phebe that he never doubted that she had not received
his message. He had left only one thread of communication between
himself and home--a slender thread--and Felicita had broken it. There
was now no hope for him, no chance of learning what had befallen all his
dear ones, unless he ran the risk of discovery, and ventured back to
England.

But for Felicita and his children, he said to himself, it would be
better to go back, and pay the utmost penalty he owed to the broken laws
of his country. No hardships could be greater than those he had already
endured; no separation from companionship could be more complete. The
hard labor he would be doomed to perform would be a relief. His
conscience might smite him less sharply and less ceaselessly if he was
suffering the due punishment for his sin, in the society of his
fellow-criminals. Dartmoor Prison would be better for him than his
miserable and degrading freedom.

Still, as long as he could elude publicity and preserve his name from
notoriety, the burden would not fall upon Felicita and his children. His
mother would not shrink from bearing her share of any burden of his. But
he must keep out of the dock, lest their father and husband should be
branded as a convict.

A dreary round his thoughts ran. But ever in the centre of the circling
thoughts lay the conviction that he had lost his wife and children
forever. Whether he dragged out a wretched life in concealment, or was
discovered, or gave himself up to justice, Felicita was lost to him.
There were some women--Phebe Marlowe was one--who could have lived
through the shame of his conviction and the dreary term of his
imprisonment, praying to God for her husband, and pitying him with a
kind of heavenly grace, and at the end of the time met him at the prison
door, and gone out with him, tenderly and faithfully, to begin a new
life in another country. But Felicita was not one of these women. He
could never think of her as pardoning a transgression like his, though
committed for her sake. Even now she would not stoop so low as to seek a
meeting with one who deserved a penal punishment.

Night had set in, and he was trudging along the road, still heavy with
recent rains, though the sky above was hung with glittering stars, and
the crystal snow on Titlis shone against the deep blue depths, casting a
wan light over the valley. Suddenly upon the stillness there came the
sound of several voices, and a shrill yodel, pitched in a key that rang
through the village, to call attention to the approaching party. It was
in advance of him, nearer to Engelberg; yet though he had been watching
the route from Stans all day, and was satisfied that Felicita could not
have entered the valley unseen by himself, the hope flashed through him
that she was before him, belated by the state of the roads. He hurried
on, seeing before him a small group of men carrying lanterns. But in
their midst they bore a rude litter, made of a gate taken hastily off
the hinges. They passed out of sight behind a house as he caught sight
of the litter, and for a minute or two he could not follow them, from
the mere shock of dread lest the litter held her. Then he hurried on,
and reached the hotel door as the procession marched into the hall and
laid their burden cautiously down.

"An accident?" said the landlord.

"Yes," answered one of the peasants; "we found him under Pfaffenwand. He
must have been coming from Engstlensee Alp; how much farther the good
God alone knows. The paths are slippery this wet weather, and he had no
guide, or there was no guide to be seen."

"That must be searched into," said the landlord; "is he dead?"

"No, no," replied two or three together.

"He has spoken twice," continued the peasant who had answered before,
"and groaned much. But none of us knew what he said. He is dying, poor
fellow!"

"English?" asked the landlord, looking down on the scarred face and
eager eyes of the stranger, who lay silent on the litter, glancing round
uneasily at the faces about him.

"Some of us would have known French, or German, or Italian," was the
reply, "but not one of us knows English."

"Nor I," said the landlord; "and our English speaker went away last
week, over the St. Gothard to Italy for the winter. Send round, Marie,"
he went on, speaking to his wife, "and find out any one in Engelberg who
knows English. See! The poor fellow is trying to say something now."

"I can speak English," said Roland, pushing his way in amid the crowd
and kneeling down beside the litter, on which a rough bed of fir
pine-branches had been made. The unknown face beneath his eyes was drawn
with pain, and the gaze that met his was one of earnest entreaty.

"I am dying," he murmured; "don't let them torture me. Only let me be
laid on a bed to die in peace."

"I will take care of you," said Roland in his pleasant and soothing
voice, speaking as tenderly as if he had been saying "God bless you!" to
Felix in his little cot; "trust yourself to me. They shall do for you
only what I think best."

The stranger closed his eyes with an expression of relief, and Roland,
taking up one corner of the litter, helped to carry it gently into the
nearest bedroom. He was gifted with something of a woman's softness of
touch, and with a woman's delicate sympathy with pain; and presently,
though not without some moans and cries, the injured man was resting
peacefully on a bed: not unconscious, but looking keenly from face to
face on the people surrounding him.

"Are you English?" he asked, looking at Roland's blistered face and his
worn peasant's dress.

"Yes," he answered.

"Is there any surgeon here?" he inquired.

"No English surgeon," replied Roland. "I do not know if there is one
even at Lucerne, and none could come to you for many hours. But there
must be some one at the monastery close by, if not in the village--"

"No, no!" he interrupted, "I shall not live many hours; but promise
me--I am quite helpless as you see--promise me that you will not let any
village doctor pull me about."

"They are sometimes very skilful," urged Roland, "and you do not know
that you must really die."

"I knew it as I was slipping," he answered; "at the first moment I knew
it, though I clutched at the very stones to keep me from falling. Why! I
was dead when they found me; only the pain of being pulled about brought
me back to life. I'm not afraid to die if they will let me die in
peace."

"I will promise not to leave you," replied Roland; "and if you must die,
it shall be in peace."

That he must die, and was actually dying, was affirmed by all about him.
One of the brothers from the monastery, skilled in surgery, came in
unrecognized as a doctor by the stranger, and shook his head hopelessly
when he saw him, telling Roland to let him do whatever he pleased so
long as he lived, and to learn all he could from him during the hours of
the coming night. There was no hope, he said; and if he had not been
found by the peasants he would have been dead now. Roland must ask if
he was a good Catholic or a heretic. When the monk heard that he was a
heretic and needed none of the consolations of the Church, he bade him
farewell kindly, and went his way.

Roland Sefton sat beside the dying man all the night, while he lingered
from hour to hour: free from pain at times, at others restless and
racked with agony. He wandered a little in delirium, and when his brain
was clear he had not much to say.

"Have you no message to send to your friends?" inquired Roland, in one
of these lucid intervals.

"I have no friends," he answered, "and no money. It makes death easier."

"There must be some one who would care to hear of you," said Roland.

"They'll see it in the papers," he replied. "No, I come from India, and
was going to England. I have no near relations, and there is no one to
care much. 'Poor Austin,' they'll say; 'he wasn't a bad fellow.' That's
all. You've been kinder to me than anybody I know. There's about fifty
pounds in my pocket-book. Bury me decently and take the rest."

He dozed a little, or was unconscious for a few minutes. His sunburnt
face, lying on the white pillow, still looked full of health and the
promise of life, except when it was contracted with pain. There was no
weakness in his voice or dimness in his eye. It seemed impossible to
believe that this strong young man was dying.

"I lost my valise when I fell," he said, opening his eyes again and
speaking in a tranquil tone; "but there was nothing of value in it. My
money and my papers are in my pocket-book. Let me see you take
possession of it."

He watched Roland search for the book in the torn coat on the chair
beside him, and his eyes followed its transfer to his breast-pocket
under his blue blouse.

"You are an English gentleman, though you look a Swiss peasant," he
said; "you are poor, perhaps, and my money will be of use to you. It is
the only return I can make to you. I should like you to write down that
I give it to you, and let me sign the paper."

"Presently," said Roland; "you must not exert yourself. I shall find
your name and address here?"

"I have no address; of course I have a name," he answered; "but never
mind that now. Tell me, what do you think of Christ? Does He indeed save
sinners?"

"Yes," said Roland reluctantly; "He says, 'I came to seek and to save
that which was lost.' Those are His own words."

"Kneel down quickly," murmured the dying man. "Say 'Our Father!' so that
I can hear every word. My mother used to teach it to me."

"And she is dead?" said Roland.

"Years ago," he gasped.

Roland knelt down. How familiar, with what a touch of bygone days, the
attitude came to him; how homely the words sounded! He had uttered them
innumerable times; never quite without a feeling of their sacredness and
sweetness. But he had not dared to take them into his lips of late. His
voice faltered, though he strove to keep it steady and distinct, to
reach the dying ears that listened to him. The prayer brought to him the
picture of his children kneeling, morning and evening, with the
self-same petitions. They had said them only a few hours ago, and would
say them again a few hours hence. Even the dying man felt there was
something more than mere emotion for him expressed in the tremulous
tones of Roland Sefton's voice. He held out his hand to him when he had
finished, and grasped his warmly.

"God bless you!" he said. But he was weary, and his strength was failing
him. He slumbered again fitfully, and his mind wandered. Now and then
during the rest of the night he looked up with a faint smile, and his
lips moved inarticulately. He thought he had spoken, but no sound
disturbed the unbroken silence.




CHAPTER XIV.

ON THE ALTAR STEPS.


It was as the bells of the Abbey rang for matins that the stranger died.
For a few minutes Roland remained beside him, and then he called in the
women to attend to the dead, and went out into the fresh morning air. It
was the third day that the mountains had been clear from fog and cloud,
and they stood out against the sky in perfect whiteness. The snow-line
had come lower down upon the slopes, and the beautiful crystals of frost
hung on the tapering boughs of the pine-trees in the forests about
Engelberg. Here and there a few villagers were going toward the church,
and almost unconsciously Roland followed slowly in their track.

The short service was over and the congregation was dispersing when he
crossed the well-worn door-sill. But a few women, especially the late
comers, were still scattered about praying mechanically, with their eyes
wandering around them. The High Altar was deserted, but candles burning
on it made a light in the dim place, and he listlessly sauntered up the
centre aisle. A woman was kneeling on the steps leading up to it, and as
the echo of his footsteps resounded in the quiet church she rose and
looked round. It was Felicita! At that moment he was not thinking of
her; yet there was no doubt or surprise in the first moment of
recognition. The uncontrollable rapture of seeing her again arrested his
steps, and he stood looking at her, with a few paces between them. It
was plain that she did not know him.

How could she know him, he thought bitterly, in the rough blue blouse
and coarse clothing and heavy hobnail boots of a Swiss peasant? His hair
was shaggy and uncut, and the skin of his face was so peeled and
blistered and scorched that his disguise was sufficient to conceal him
even from his wife. Yet as he stood there with downcast head, as a
devout peasant might have done before the altar, he saw Felicita make a
slight but imperious sign to him to advance. She did not take a step
toward him, but leaning against the altar rails she waited till he was
near to her, within hearing. There Roland paused.

"Felicita," he said, not daring to draw closer to her.

"I am here," she answered, not looking toward him; her large, dark,
mournful eyes lifted up to the cross above the altar, before which a
lamp was burning, whose light was reflected in her unshed tears.

Neither of them spoke again for a while. It seemed as if there could be
nothing said, so great was the anguish of them both. The man who had
just died had passed away tranquilly, but they were drinking of a cup
more bitter than death. Yet the few persons lingering over their morning
devotions before the shrines in the side aisles saw nothing but a
stranger looking at the painting over the altar, and a peasant kneeling
on the lowest step deep in prayer.

"I come from watching a fellow-man die," he said at last; "would to God
it had been myself!"

"Yes!" sighed Felicita, "that would have been best for us all."

"You wish me dead!" he exclaimed, in a tone of anguish.

"For the children's sake," she murmured, still looking away from him;
"yes! and for the sake of our name, your father's name, and mine. I
thought to bring honor to it, and you have brought flagrant dishonor to
it."

"That can never be wiped away," he added.

"Never!" she repeated.

As if exhausted by these passionate words, they fell again into silence.
The murmur of whispered prayers was about them, and the faint scent of
incense floated under the arched roof. A gleam of morning light, growing
stronger, though the sun was still far below the eastern mountains,
glittered through a painted window, and threw a glow of color upon them.
Roland saw her standing in its many-tinted brightness, but her wan and
sorrowful face was not turned to look at him. He had not caught a
glance from her yet. How vividly he remembered the first moment his eyes
had ever beheld her, standing as she did now on these very altar steps,
with uplifted eyes and a sweet seriousness on her young face! It was
only a poor village church, but it was the most sacred spot in the whole
world to him; for there he had met Felicita and received her image into
his inmost heart. His ambition as well as his love had centred in her,
the penniless daughter of the late Lord Riversford, an orphan, and
dependent upon her father's brother and successor. But to Roland his
wife Felicita was immeasurably dearer than the girl Felicita Riversford
had been. All the happy days since he had won her, all the satisfied
desires, all his successes were centred in her and represented by her.
All his crime too.

"I have loved you," he cried, "better than the whole world."

There was no answer by word or look to his passionate words.

"I have loved you," he said, more sadly, "better than God."

"But you have brought me to shame!" she answered; "if I am tracked
here--and who can tell that I am not?--and if you are taken and tried
and convicted, I shall be the wife of the fraudulent banker and
condemned felon, Roland Sefton. And Felix and Hilda will be his
children."

"It is true," he groaned; "I could not escape conviction."

He buried his face in his hands, and rested them on the altar-rails. Now
his bowed-down head was immediately beneath her eyes, and she looked
down upon it with a mournful gaze; it could not have been more mournful
if she had been contemplating his dead face lying at rest in his coffin.
How was all this shame and misery for him and her to end?

"Felicita," he said, lifting up his head, and meeting the sorrowful
farewell expression in her face, "if I could die it would be best for
the children and you."

"Yes," she answered, in the sweet, too dearly loved voice he had
listened to in happy days.

"I dare not open that door of escape for myself," he went on, "and God
does not send death to me. But I see a way, a possible way. I only see
it this moment; but whether it be for good or evil I cannot tell."

"Will it save us?" she asked eagerly.

"All of us," he replied. "This stranger, whose corpse I have just
left--nobody knows him, and he has no friends to trouble about
him--shall I give to him my name, and bury him as myself? Then I shall
be dead to all the world, Felicita; dead even to you; but you will be
saved. I too shall be safe in the grave, for death covers all sins. Even
old Clifford will be satisfied by my death."

"Could it be done?" she asked breathlessly.

"Yes," he said; "if you consent it shall be done. For my own sake I
would rather go back to England and deliver myself up to the law I have
broken. But you shall decide, my darling. If I return you will be known
as the wife of the convict Sefton. Say: shall I be henceforth dead
forever to you and my mother and the children? Shall it be a living
death for me, and deliverance and safety and honor for you all? You must
choose between my infamy or my death."

"It must be," she answered, slowly yet without hesitation, looking away
from him to the cross above the altar, "your death."

A shudder ran through her slight frame as she spoke, and thrilled
through him as he listened. It seemed to them both as if they stood
beside an open grave, on either side one, and parted thus. He stretched
out his hand to her, and laid it on her dress, as if appealing for
mercy; but she did not turn to him, or look upon him, or open her white
lips to utter another word. Then there came more stir and noise in the
church, footsteps sounded upon the pavement, and an inquisitive face
peeped out of the vestry near the altar where they stood. It was no
longer prudent to remain as they were, subject to curiosity and
scrutiny. Roland rose from his knees, and without glancing again toward
her, he spoke in a low voice of unutterable grief and supplication.

"Let me see you and speak to you once more," he said.

"Once more," she repeated.

"This evening," he continued, "at your hotel."

"Yes," she answered. "I am travelling under Phebe Marlowe's name. Ask
for Mrs. Marlowe."

She turned away and walked slowly and feebly down the aisle; and he
watched her, as he had watched the light tread of the young girl eleven
years ago, passing through alternate sunshine and shadow. There was no
sunshine now. Was it possible that so long a time had passed since then?
Could it be true that for ten years she had been his wife, and that the
tie between them was forever dissolved? From this day he was to be dead
to her and to all the world. He was about to pass voluntarily into a
condition of death amid life, as utterly bereft of all that had once
been his as if the grave had closed over him. Roland Sefton was to exist
no more.




CHAPTER XV.

A SECOND FRAUD.


Roland Sefton went back to the room in which the corpse of the stranger
was now lying. The women were gone, and he turned down the sheet to look
at the face of the man who was about to bear his name and the disgrace
of his crime into the safe asylum of the grave. It was perfectly calm,
with no trace of the night's suffering upon it; there was even a faint
vestige of a smile about the mouth, as of one who sleeps well, and has
pleasant dreams. He was apparently about Roland's own age, and a
description given by strangers would not be such as would lead to any
suspicion that there could have been a mistake as to identity. Roland
looked long upon it before covering it up again, and then he sat down
beside the bed and opened the pocket-book.

There were notes in it worth fifty pounds, but not many papers. There
was a memorandum made here and there of the places he had visited, and
the last entry was dated the day before at Engstlenalp. Roland knew
every step of the road, and for a while he seemed to himself to be this
traveller, starting from the little inn, not yet vacated by its peasant
landlord, but soon to be left to icy solitude, and taking the narrow
path along the Engstlensee, toiling up the Joch pass under the mighty
Wendenstöcke and the snowy Titlis, clear of clouds from base to summit
yesterday. The traveller must have had a guide with him, some peasant or
herdsman probably, as far as the Trübsee Alp; for even in summer the
route was difficult to find. The guide had put him on to the path for
Engelberg, and left him to make his way along the precipitous slopes of
the Pfaffenwand. All this would be discovered when an official inquiry
was made into the accident. In the mean time it was necessary to invest
this stranger with his own identity.

There were two or three well-worn letters in the pocket-book, but they
contained nothing of importance. It seemed true, what the dying man had
said, that there was no link of kinship or friendship binding him
specially to his fellow-men. Roland opened his own pocket-book, and
looked over a letter or two which he had carried about with him, one of
them a childish note from Felix, preferring some simple request. His
passport was there also, and his mother's portrait and those of the
children, over which his eyes brooded with a hungry sorrow in his heart.
He looked at them for the last time. But Felicita's portrait he could
not bring himself to give up. She would be dead to him, and he to her.
In England she would live among her friends as his widow, pitied, and
comforted, and beloved. But what would the coming years bring to him?
All that would remain to him of the past would be a fading photograph
only.

So long he lingered over this mournful conflict that he was at last
aroused from it by the entrance of the landlord, and the mayor and other
officials, who had come to look at the body of the dead. Roland's
pocket-book lay open on the bed, and he was still gazing at the
portraits of his children. He raised his sunburnt face as they came in,
and rose to meet them.

"This traveller," he said, "gave to me his pocket-book as I watched
beside him last night. It is here, containing his passport, a few
letters, and fifty pounds in notes, which he told me to keep, but which
I wish to give to the commune."

"They must be taken charge of," said the mayor; "but we will look over
them first. Did he tell you who he was?"

"The passport discloses that," answered Roland; "he desired only a
decent funeral."

"Ah!" said the mayor, taking out the passport, "an English traveller;
name Roland Sefton; and these letters, and these portraits--they will be
enough for identification."

"He said he had no friends or family in England," pursued Roland, "and
there is no address among his letters. He told me he came from India."

"Then there need be no delay about the interment," remarked the mayor,
"if he had no family in England, and was just come from India. Bah! we
could not keep him till any friends came from India. It is enough. We
must make an inquiry; but the corpse cannot be kept above ground. The
interment may take place as soon as you please, Monsieur."

"I suppose you will wish for some trifle as payment?" said the landlord,
addressing Roland.

"No," he answered, "I only watched by him through the night; and I am
but a passing traveller like himself."

"You will assist at the funeral?" he asked.

"If it can be to-morrow," replied Roland; "if not I must go on to
Lucerne. But I shall come back to Engelberg. If it be necessary for me
to stay, and the commune will pay my expenses, I will stay."

"Not necessary at all," said the mayor; "the accident is too simple, and
he has no friends. Why should the commune lose by him?"

"There are the fifty pounds," suggested Roland.

"And there are the expenses!" said the mayor. "No, no. It is not
necessary for you to stay; not at all. If you are coming back again to
Engelberg it will be all right. You say you are coming back?"

"I am sure to come back to Engelberg," he answered, with gloomy
emphasis.

For already Roland began to feel that he, himself, was dead, and a new
life, utterly different from the old, was beginning for him. And this
new life, beginning here, would often draw him back to its birth-place.
There would be an attraction for him here, even in the humble grave
where men thought they had buried Roland Sefton. It would be the only
link with his former life, and it would draw him to it irresistibly.

"And what is your name and employment, my good fellow?" asked the mayor.

"Jean Merle," he answered promptly. "I am a wood-carver."

The deed he had only thought of an hour ago was accomplished, and there
could be no undoing it. This passport and these papers would be
forwarded to the embassy at Berne, where doubtless his name was already
known as a fugitive criminal. He could not reclaim them, for with them
he took up again the burden of his sin. He had condemned himself to a
penalty and sacrifice the most complete that man could think of, or put
into execution. Roland Sefton was dead, and his wife and children were
set free from the degradation he had brought upon them.

He spent the remaining hours of the day in wandering about the forests
in the Alpine valley. The autumn fogs and the dense rain-clouds were
gathering again. But it was nothing to him that the snowy crests of the
surrounding mountains were once more shrouded from view, or that the
torrents and waterfalls which he could not see were thundering and
roaring along their rocky channels with a vast effluence of waters. He
saw and heard no more than the dead man who bore his name. He was
insensible to hunger or fatigue. Except for Felicita's presence in the
village behind him he would have felt himself in another world; in a
beamless and lifeless abyss, where there was no creature like unto
himself; only eternal gloom and solitude.

It was quite dark before he passed again through the village on his way
to Felicita's hotel. The common light of lamps, and the every-day life
of ordinary men and women busy over their evening meal, astonished him,
as if he had come from another state of existence. He lingered awhile,
looking on as at some extraordinary spectacle. Then he went on to the
hotel standing a little out of and above the village.

The place, so crowded in the summer, was quiet enough now. A bright
light, however, streamed through the window of the salon, which was
uncurtained. He stopped and looked in at Felicita, who was sitting alone
by the log fire, with her white forehead resting on her small hand,
which partly hid her face. How often had he seen her sitting thus by the
fireside at home! But though he stood without in the dark and cold for
many minutes, she did not stir; neither hand nor foot moved. At last he
grew terrified at this utter immobility, and stepping through the hall
he told the landlady that the English lady had business with him. He
opened the door, and then Felicita looked up.




CHAPTER XVI.

PARTING WORDS.


Roland advanced a few paces into the gaudy salon, with its mirrors
reflecting his and Felicita's figures over and over again, and stood
still, at a little distance from her, with his rough cap in his hand. He
looked like one of the herdsmen with whom he had been living during the
summer. There was no one else in the large room, but the night was
peering in through half a dozen great uncurtained windows, which might
hold many spectators watching them, as he had watched her a minute ago.
She scarcely moved, but the deadly pallor of her face and the dark
shining of her tearless eyes fixed upon him made him tremble as if he
had been a woman weaker than herself.

"It is done," he said.

"Yes," she answered, "I have been to see him."

There was an accent in her voice, of terror and repugnance, as of one
who had witnessed some horrifying sight and was compelled to bear a
reluctant testimony to it. Roland himself felt a shock of antipathy at
the thought of his wife seeing this unknown corpse bearing his name. He
seemed to see her standing beside the dead, and looking down with those
beloved eyes upon the strange face, which would dwell for evermore in
her memory as well as his. Why had she subjected herself to this
needless pang?

"You wished it?" he said. "You consented to my plan?"

"Yes," she answered in the same monotonous tone of reluctant testimony.

"And it was best so, Felicita," he said tenderly; "we have done the dead
man no wrong. Remember he was alone, and had no friends to grieve over
his strange absence. If it had been otherwise there would have been a
terrible sin in our act. But it has set you free; it saves you and my
mother and the children. As long as I lived you would have been in
peril; but now there is a clear, safe course laid open for you. You will
go home to England, where in a few months it will be forgotten that your
husband was suspected of crime. Only old Clifford, and Marlowe, and two
or three others will remember it. When you have the means, repay those
poor people the money I owe them. And take comfort, Felicita. It would
have done them no good if I had been taken and convicted; that would not
have restored their money. My name then will be clear of all but
suspicion, and you will make it a name for our children to inherit."

"And you?" she breathed with lips that scarcely moved.

"I?" he said. "Why, I shall be dead! A man's life is not simply the
breath he draws: it is his country, his honor, his home. You are my
life, Felicita: you and my mother and Felix and Hilda; the old home
where my forefathers dwelt; my townsmen's esteem and good-will; the work
I could do, and hoped to do. Losing those I lost my life. I began to
die when I first went wrong. The way seemed right in my own eyes, but
the end of it was death. I told old Marlowe his money was as safe as in
the Bank of England, when I was keeping it in my own hands; but I
believed it then. That was the first step; this is the last. Henceforth
I am dead."

"But how will you live?" she asked.

"Never fear; Jean Merle will earn his living," he answered. "Let us
think of your future, my darling. Nay, let me call you darling once
more. My death provides for you, for your marriage-settlement will come
into force. You will have to live differently, my Felicita; all the
splendor and the luxury I would have surrounded you with must be lost.
But there will be enough, and my mother will manage your household well
for you. Be kind to my poor mother, and comfort her. And do not let my
children grow up with hard thoughts of their father. It will be a
painful task to you."

"Yes," she said. "Oh, Roland, we ought not to have done this thing!"

"Yet you chose," he replied.

"Yes; and I should choose it again, though I hate the falsehood," she
exclaimed vehemently. "I cannot endure shame. But all our future life
will be founded on a lie."

"Let the blame be mine, not yours," he said; "it was my plan, and there
is no going back from it now. But tell me about home. How are my
children and my mother? They are still at home?"

"No," she answered; "the police watched it day and night, till it grew
hateful to me. I shall never enter it again. We went away to the
sea-side three months ago, and there our mother and the children are
still. But when I get back we shall remove to London."

"To London!" he repeated. "Will you never go home to Riversborough?"

"Never again!" she replied. "I could not live there now; it is a hateful
spot to me. Your mother grieves bitterly over leaving it; but even she
sees that we can never live there again."

"I shall not even know how to think of you all!" he cried. "You will be
living in some strange house, which I can never picture to myself. And
the old home will be empty."

"Mr. Clifford is living in it," she said.

He threw up his hands with a gesture of grief and vexation. Whenever his
thoughts flew to the old home, the only home he had ever known, it would
be only to remember that the man he most dreaded, he who was his most
implacable enemy, was dwelling in it. And when would he cease to think
of his own birth-place and the birth-place of his children, the home
where Felicita had lived? It would be impossible to blot the vivid
memory of it from his brain.

"I shall never see it again," he said; "but I should have felt less
banished from you if I could have thought of you as still at home. We
are about to part forever, Felicita--as fully as if I lay dead down
yonder, as men will think I do."

"Yes," she answered, with a mournful stillness.

"Even if we wished to hold any intercourse with each other," he
continued, gazing wistfully at her, "it would be dangerous to us both.
It is best for us both to be dead to one another."

"It is best," she assented; "only if you were ever in great straits, if
you could not earn your living, you might contrive to let me know."

"There is no fear of that," he answered bitterly. "Felicita, you never
loved me as I love you."

"No," she said, with the same inexpressible sadness, yet calmness, in
her voice and face; "how could I? I was a child when you married me; we
were both children. There is such a difference between us. I suppose I
should never love any one very much--not as you mean. It is not in my
nature. I can live alone, Roland. All of you, even the children, seem
very far away from me. But I grieve for you in my inmost soul. If I
could undo what you have done I would gladly lay down my life. If I
could only undo what we did this morning! The shadow of it is growing
darker and darker upon me. And yet it seemed so wise; it seems so still.
We shall be safe again, all of us, and we have done that dead man no
wrong."

"None," he said.

"But when I think of you," she went on, "how you, still living, will
long to know what is befalling us, how the children are growing up, and
how your mother is, and how I live, yet never be able to satisfy this
longing; how you will have to give us up, and never dare to make a sign;
how you will drag on your life from year to year, a poor man among poor,
ignorant, stupid men; how I may die, and you not know it, or you may
die, and I not know it; I wonder how we could have done what we did this
morning."

"Oh, hush, hush, Felicita!" he exclaimed; "I have said all this to
myself all this day, until I feel that my punishment is harder than I
can bear. Tell me, shall we undo it? Shall I go to the mayor and deliver
myself up as the man whose name I have given to the dead? It can be done
still; it is not too late. You shall decide again."

"No; I cannot accept disgrace," she answered passionately; "it is an
evil thing to do, but it must be done. We must take the consequences.
You and I are dead to one another for evermore; but your death is more
terrible than mine. I shall grieve over you more than if you were really
dead. Why does not God send death to those that desire it? Good-by now
forever, Roland. I return to England to act this lie, and you must
never, never seek me out as your wife. Promise me that. I would
repudiate you if I lay on my death-bed."

"I will never seek you out and bring you to shame," he said; "I promise
it faithfully, by my love for you. As I hope ever to obtain pardon, I
promise it."

"Then leave me," she cried; "I can bear this no longer. Good-by,
Roland."

They were still some paces apart, he with his shaggy mountain cap in his
hand standing respectfully at a distance, and she, sitting by the low,
open hearth with her white, quiet face turned toward him. All the
village might have witnessed their interview through the uncurtained
windows. Slowly, almost mechanically, Felicita left her seat and
advanced toward him with an outstretched hand. It was cold as ice as he
seized it eagerly in his own; the hand of the dead man could not have
been colder or more lifeless. He held it fast in a hard, unconscious
grip.

"Good-by, my wife," he said; "God bless and keep you!"

"Is there any God?" she sobbed.

But there was a sound at the door, the handle was being turned, and they
fell apart guiltily. A maid entered to tell Madame her chamber was
prepared, and without another word Felicita walked quickly from the
salon, leaving him alone.

He caught a glimpse of her again the next morning as she came
down-stairs and entered the little carriage which was to take her down
to Stansstad in time to catch the boat to Lucerne. She was starting
early, before it was fairly dawn, and he saw her only by the dim light
of lamps, which burned but feebly in the chilly damp of the autumn
atmosphere. For a little distance he followed the sound of the carriage
wheels, but he arrested his own footsteps. For what good was it to
pursue one whom he must never find again? She was gone from him forever.
He was a young man yet, and she still younger. But for his folly and
crime a long and prosperous life might have stretched before them, each
year knitting their hearts and souls more closely together; and he had
forfeited all. He turned back up the valley broken-hearted.

Later in the day he stood beside the grave of the man who was bearing
away his name from disgrace. The funeral had been hurried on, and the
stranger was buried in a neglected part of the churchyard, being
friendless and a heretic. It was quickly done, and when the few persons
who had taken part in it were dispersed, Roland Sefton lingered alone
beside the desolate grave.




CHAPTER XVII.

WAITING FOR THE NEWS.


Felicita hurried homeward night and day without stopping, as if she had
been pursued by a deadly enemy. Madame and the children were not at
Scarborough, but at a quiet little fishing village on the eastern coast;
for Felicita had found Scarborough too gay in the month of August, and
her cousins, the Riversfords, having appeared there, she retreated to
the quietest spot that could be found. To this village she returned,
after being absent little more than a week.

Madame knew nothing of her journey; but the mere fact that Felicita was
going away alone had aroused in her the hope that it was connected in
some way with Roland. In some vague manner this idea had been
communicated to Felix, and both were expecting to see the long-lost
father and son come back with her. Roland's prolonged and mysterious
absence had been a sore trial to his mother, though her placid and
trustful nature had borne it patiently. Surely, she thought, the trial
was coming to an end.

Felicita reached their lodgings utterly exhausted and worn out. She was
a delicate woman, in no way inured to fatigue, and though she had been
insensible to the overstrain of the unbroken journey as she was whirled
along railways and passed from station to station, a sense of complete
prostration seized upon her as soon as she found herself at home. Day
after day she lay in bed, in a darkened room, unwilling to lift her
voice above a whisper, waiting in a kind of torpid dread for the
intelligence that she knew must soon come.

She had been at home several days, and still there was no news. Was it
possible, she asked herself, that this unknown traveller, and his
calamitous fate, should pass on into perfect oblivion and leave matters
as they were before? For a cloud would hang over her and her children
as long as Roland was the object of pursuit. While he was a fugitive
criminal, of interest to the police officers of all countries, there was
no security for their future. The lie to which she had given a guilty
consent was horrible to her, but her morbid dread of shame was more
horrible. She had done evil that good might come; but if the good
failed, the evil would still remain as a dark stain upon her soul,
visible to herself, if to none else.

"I will get up to-day," she said at last, to Madame's great delight. She
never ventured to exert any authority over her beautiful and clever
daughter-in-law--not even the authority of a mildly expressed wish. She
was willing to be to Felicita anything that Felicita pleased--her
servant and drudge, her fond mother, or her quiet, attentive companion.
Since her return from her mysterious journey she had been very tender to
her, as tenderly and gently demonstrative as Felicita would ever permit
her to be.

"Have you seen any newspapers lately?" asked Felicita.

"I never read the papers, my love," answered Madame.

"I should like to see to-day's _Times_," said Felicita.

But it was impossible to get it in this village without ordering it
beforehand, and Felicita gave up her wish with the listless indifference
of an invalid. When the late sun of the November day had risen from
behind a heavy bank of clouds she ventured down to the quiet shore.
There were no visitors left beside themselves, so there were no curious
eyes to scan her white, sad face. For a short time Felix and Hilda
played about her; but by and by Madame, thinking she was weary and
worried, allured them away to a point where they were still in sight,
though out of hearing. The low, cold sun shed its languid and watery
rays upon the rocks and creeping tide, and, unnoticed, almost unseen,
Felicita could sit there in stillness, gazing out over the chilly and
mournful sea. There was something so unutterably sad about Felicita's
condition that it awed the simple, cheerful nature of Madame. It was
more than illness and exhaustion. The white, unsmiling face, the
drooping head, the languor of the thin, long hands, the fathomless
sorrow lurking behind her dark eyes--all spoke of a heart-sickness such
as Madame had never seen or dreamed of. The children did not cheer their
mother. When she saw that, Madame felt that there was nothing to be done
but to leave her in the cold solitude she loved.

But as Felicita sat alone on the shore, looking listlessly at the
fleeting sails which were passing to and fro upon the sea, she saw afar
off the figure of a girl coming swiftly toward her from the village, and
before many moments had passed she recognized Phebe Marlowe's face. A
great throb of mingled relief and dread made her heart beat violently.
Nothing could have brought Phebe away, so far from home, except the news
of Roland's death.

The rosy color on Phebe's face was gone, and the brightness of her blue
eyes was faded; but there was the same out-looking of a strong, simple,
unselfish soul shining through them. As she drew near to Felicita she
stretched out her arms with the instinctive gesture of one who was come
to comfort and support, and Felicita, with a strange, impulsive feeling
that she brought consolation and help, threw herself into them.

"I know it all," said Phebe in a low voice. "Oh, what you must have
suffered! He was going to Engelberg to meet you, and you never saw him
alive! Oh, why did not God let you meet each other once again? But God
loved him. I can never think that God had not forgiven him, for he was
grieved because of his sin when I saw him the night he got away. And in
all things else he was so good! Oh, how good he was!"

Phebe's tears were falling fast, and her words were choked with sobs.
But Felicita's face was hidden against her neck, and she could not see
if she was weeping.

"Everybody is talking of him in Riversborough," she went on, "and now
they all say how good he always was, and how unlikely it is that he was
guilty. They will forget it soon. Those who remember him will think
kindly of him, and be grieved for him. But oh, I would give worlds for
him to have lived and made amends! If he could only have proved that he
had repented! If he could only have outlived it all, and made everybody
know that he was really a good man, one whom God had delivered out of
sin!"

"It was impossible!" murmured Felicita.

"No, not impossible!" she cried earnestly; "it was not an unpardonable
sin. Even if he had gone to prison, as he would, he might have faced the
world when he came out again; and if he'd done all the good he could in
it, it might have been hard to convince them he was good, but it would
never be impossible. If God forgives us, sooner or later our
fellow-creatures will forgive us, if we live a true life. I would have
stood by him in the face of the world, and you would, and Madame and the
children. He would not have been left alone, and it would have ended in
every one else coming round to us. Oh, why should he die when you were
just going to see each other again!"

Felicita had sunk down again into the chair which had been carried for
her to the shore, and Phebe sat down on the sands at her feet. She
looked up tearfully into Felicita's wan and shrunken face.

"Did any one ever win back their good name?" asked Felicita with
quivering lips.

"Among us they do sometimes," she answered. "I knew a working-man who
had been in jail five years, and he became a Christian while he was
there, and he came back home to his own village. He was one of the best
men I ever knew, and when he died there was such a funeral as had never
been seen in the parish church. Why should it not be so? If God is
faithful and just to forgive us our sins, why shouldn't we forgive? If
we are faithful and just, we shall."

"It could never be," said Felicita; "it cannot be the same as if Roland
had not been guilty. No one can blot out the past; it is eternal."

"Yes," she replied, covering Felicita's hand with kisses and tears; "but
oh, we love him more now than ever. He is gone into the land of thick
darkness, and I cannot follow him in my thoughts. It is like a gulf
between us and him. Even if he had been farthest away from us in the
world--anywhere--we could imagine what he was doing; but we cannot see
him or call across the gulf to him. It is all unknown. Only God knows!"

"God!" echoed Felicita; "if there is a God, let Him help me, for I am
the most wretched woman on His earth to-day."

"God cannot keep from helping us all," answered Phebe. "He cannot rest
while we are wretched. I understand it better than I used to do. I
cannot rest myself while the poorest creature about me is in pain that I
can help. It is impossible that He should not care. That would be an
awful thing to think; that would make His love and pity less than ours.
This I know, that God loves every creature He has made. And oh, He must
have loved him, though he was suffered to fall over that dreadful
precipice, and die before you saw him. It happened before you reached
Engelberg?"

"Yes," said Felicita, shivering.

"The papers were sent on to Mr. Clifford," continued Phebe, "and he sent
for me to come with him, and see you before the news got into the
papers. It will be in to-morrow. But I knew more than he did, and I came
on here to speak to you. Shall you tell him you went there to meet
him?"

"Oh, no, no!" cried Felicita; "it must never be known, dear Phebe."

"And his mother and the children--they, know nothing?" she said.

"Not a word, and it is you who must tell them, Phebe," she answered.
"How could I bear to tell them that he is dead? Never let them speak
about it to me; never let his name be mentioned."

"How can I comfort you?" cried Phebe.

"I can never be comforted," she replied despairingly; "but it is like
death to hear his name."

The voices of the children coming nearer reached their ears. They had
seen from their distant playground another figure sitting close beside
Felicita, and their curiosity had led them to approach. Now they
recognized Phebe, and a glad shout rang through the air. She bent down
hurriedly to kiss Felicita's cold hand once again, and then she rose to
meet them, and prevent them from seeing their mother's deep grief.

"I will go and tell them, poor little things!" she said, "and Madame.
Oh, what can I do to help you all? Mr. Clifford is at your lodgings,
waiting to see you as soon as you can meet him."

She did not stay for an answer, but ran to meet Felix and Hilda; while
slowly, and with much guilty shrinking from the coming interview,
Felicita went back to the village, where Mr. Clifford was awaiting her.




CHAPTER XVIII.

THE DEAD ARE FORGIVEN.


Roland Sefton's pocket-book, containing his passport and the papers and
photographs, had reached Mr. Clifford the day before, with an official
intimation of his death from the consulate at Berne. The identification
was complete, and the inquiry into the fatal accident had resulted in
blame to no one, as the traveller had declined the services of a
trustworthy guide from Meirengen to Engelberg. This was precisely what
Roland would have done, the whole country being as familiar to him as to
any native. No doubt crossed Mr. Clifford's mind that his old friend's
son had met his untimely end while a fugitive from his country, from
dread chiefly of his own implacable sense of justice.

Roland was dead, but justice was not satisfied. Mr. Clifford knew
perfectly well that the news of his tragic fate would create an
immediate and complete reaction in his favor among his fellow-townsmen.
Hitherto he had been only vaguely accused of crime, which his absence
chiefly had tended to fasten upon him; but as there had been no
opportunity of bringing him to public trial, it would soon be believed
that there was no evidence against him. Many persons thought already
that the junior partner was away either on pleasure or business, because
the senior had taken his place. Only a few, himself and the three or
four obscure people who actually suffered from his defalcations, would
recollect them. By and by Roland Sefton would be remembered as the kind,
benevolent, even Christian man, whose life, so soon cut short, had been
full of promise for his native town.

Mr. Clifford himself felt a pang of regret and sorrow when he heard the
news. Years ago he had loved the frank, warm-hearted boy, his friend's
only child, with a very true affection. He had an only boy, too, older
than Roland by a few years, and these two were to succeed their fathers
in the long-established firm. Then came the bitter disappointment in his
own son. But since he had suffered his son to die in his sins, reaping
the full harvest of his transgressions, he had felt that any forgiveness
shown to other offenders would be a cruel injustice to him. Yet as
Roland's passport and the children's photographs lay before him on his
office desk--the same desk at which Roland was sitting but a few months
ago, a man in the full vigor of life, with an apparently prosperous and
happy future lying before him--Mr. Clifford for a moment or two yielded
to the vain wish that Roland had thrown himself on his mercy. Yet his
conscience told him that he would have refused to show him mercy, and
his regret was mingled with a tinge of remorse.

His first care was to prevent the intelligence reaching Felicita by
means of the newspapers, and he sent immediately for Phebe Marlowe to
accompany him to the sea-side, in order to break the news to her.
Phebe's excessive grief astonished him, though she had so much natural
control over herself, in her sympathy for others, as to relieve him of
all anxiety on her account, and to keep Felicita's secret journey from
being suspected. But to Phebe, Roland's death was fraught with more
tragic circumstances than any one else could conceive. He was hastening
to meet his wife, possibly with some scheme for their future, which
might have hope and deliverance in it, when this calamity hurried him
away into the awful, unknown world, on whose threshold we are ever
standing. But for her ardent sympathy for Felicita, Phebe would have
been herself overwhelmed. It was the thought of her, with this terrible
and secret addition to her sorrow, which bore her through the long
journey and helped her to meet Felicita with something like calmness.

From the bay-window of the lodging-house Mr. Clifford watched Felicita
coming slowly and feebly toward the house. So fragile she looked, so
unutterably sorrow-stricken, that a rush of compassion and pity opened
the floodgates of his heart, and suffused his stern eyes with tears.
Doubtless Phebe had told her all. Yet she was coming alone to meet him,
her husband's enemy and persecutor, as if he was a friend. He would be a
friend such as she had never known before. There would be no vain
weeping, no womanish wailing in her; her grief was too deep for that.
And he would respect it; he would spare her all the pain he could. At
this moment, if Roland could have risen from the dead, he would have
clasped him in his arms, and wept upon his neck, as the father welcomed
his prodigal son.

Felicita did not speak when she entered the room, but looked at him with
a steadfastness in her dark sad eyes which again dimmed his with tears.
Almost fondly he pressed her hands in his, and led her to a chair, and
placed another near enough for him to speak to her in a low and quiet
voice, altogether unlike the awful tones he used in the bank, which made
the clerks quail before him. His hand trembled as he took the little
photographs out of their envelope, so worn and stained, and laid them
before her. She looked at them with tearless eyes, and let them fall
upon her lap as things of little interest.

"Phebe has told you?" he said pitifully.

"Yes," she whispered.

"You did not know before?" he said.

She shook her head mutely. A long, intricate path of falsehood stretched
before her, from which she could not turn aside, a maze in which she was
already entangled and lo

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