AN OLD MAN'S PARDON.
To forgive his father--that was a strange inversion of the attitude of
Felix's mind in regard to his father's memory. He had been taught to
think of him with reverence, and admiration, and deep filial love. As
Felicita looked back on the long line of her distinguished ancestry with
an exaltation of feeling which, if it was pride, was a legitimate pride,
so had Felix looked back upon the line of good men from whom his own
being had sprung. He had felt himself pledged to a Christian life by the
eminently Christian lives of his forefathers.
Now, suddenly, with no warning, he was called upon to forgive his father
for a crime which had made him amenable to the penal laws of his
country; a mean, treacherous, cowardly crime. Like Judas, he had borne
the bag, and his fellow-pilgrims had trusted him with their money; and,
like Judas, he had been a thief. Felix could not understand how a
Christian man could be tempted by money. To attempt to serve Mammon as
well as God seemed utterly comtemptible and incredible to him.
His heart was very heavy as he rode slowly down the lanes and along the
highway to Riversborough, which his father had so often traversed before
him. When he had come this way in the freshness and stillness of the
early morning there had been more hope in his soul than he had been
aware of, that Phebe would be able to remove this load from him; but now
he knew for a certainty that his father had left to him a heritage of
dishonor. She had told him all the circumstances known to her, and he
was going to learn more from Mr. Clifford.
He entered his old home with more bitterness of spirit than he had ever
felt before in his young life. Here, of all places in the world,
clustered memories of his father; memories which he had fondly cherished
and graved as deeply as he could upon his mind. He could almost hear the
joyous tones of his father's voice, and see the summer gladness of his
face, as he remembered them. How was it possible that with such a hidden
load of shame he could have been so happy.
Mr. Clifford, though a very old man, was still in full and clear
possession of his faculties, and had not yet given up an occasional
attention to the business of the bank. He was nearly eighty years of
age, and his hair was white, and the cold, stern blue eyes were watery
and sunken in their sockets. Some years ago, when Samuel Nixey had given
up his last hope of winning Phebe, and had married a farmer's daughter,
his mother, Mrs. Nixey, had come to the Old Bank as housekeeper to Mr.
Clifford, and looked well after his welfare. Felix found him sitting in
the wainscoted parlor, a withered, bent, old man, seldom leaving the
warm hearth, but keen in sight and memory, living over again in his
solitude the many years that had passed over him from his childhood
until now. He welcomed Felix with delight, holding his hands, and
looking earnestly into his face, with the half-childlike affection of
old age.
"I've not seen you since you became a parson," he said, with a sigh;
"ah, my lad, you ought to have come to me. You don't get half as much as
my cashier, and not a tenth part of what I give my manager. But there!
that's your mother's fault, who would never let you touch business. She
would never hear of you taking your father's place."
"How could she?" said Felix, indignantly. "Do you think my mother would
let me come into the house my father had disgraced and almost ruined?"
"So you've plucked that bitter apple at last!" he answered, in a tone of
regret. "I thought it was possible you might never have to taste it.
Felix, my boy, your mother paid every farthing of the money your father
had, with interest and compound interest; even to me, who begged and
entreated to bear the loss. Your mother is a noble woman."
A blessed ray of comfort shot across the gloom in Felix's heart, and lit
up his dejected face with a momentary smile; and Mr. Clifford stretched
out his thin old hand again, and clasped his feebly.
"Ah, my boy!" he said, "and your father was not a bad man. I know how
you are sitting in judgment upon him, as young people do, who do not
know what it is to be sorely tempted. I judged him, and my son before
him, as harshly as man could do. Remember we judge hardest where we love
the most; there's selfishness in it. Our children, our fathers, must be
better than other folk's children and fathers. Don't begin to reckon up
your father's sins before you are thirty, and don't pass sentence till
you're fifty. Judges ought to be old men."
Felix sat down near to the old man, whose chair was in the oriel window,
on which the sun was shining warmly. There below him lay the garden
where he had played as a child, with the river flowing swiftly past it,
and the boat-house in the corner, from which his father and he had so
often started for a pleasant hour or two on the rapid current. But he
could never think of his father again without sorrow and shame.
"Sin hurts us most as it comes nearest to us," said old Mr. Clifford;
"the crime of a Frenchman does not make our blood boil as the crime of
an Englishman; our neighbor's sin is not half as black as our kinsman's
sin. But when we have to look it in the face in a son, in a father, then
we see the exceeding sinfulness of it. Why, Felix, you knew that men
defrauded one another; that even men professing godliness were
sometimes dishonest."
"I knew it," he answered, "but I never felt it before."
"And I never felt it till I saw it in my son," continued the old man,
sadly; "but there are other sins besides dishonesty, of a deeper dye,
perhaps, in the sight of our Creator. If Roland Sefton had met with a
more merciful man than I am he might have been saved."
For a minute or two his white head was bowed down, and his wrinkled
eyelids were closed, whilst Felix sat beside him as sorrowful as
himself.
"I could not be merciful," he burst out with a sudden fierceness in his
face and tone, "I could not spare him, because I had not spared my own
son. I had let one life go down into darkness, refusing to stretch out
so much as a little finger in help, though he was as dear to me as my
own life; and God required me yet again to see a life perish because of
my hardness of heart. I think sometimes if Roland had come and cast
himself on my mercy, I should have pardoned him; but again I think my
heart was too hard then to know what mercy was. But those two, Felix, my
son Robert, who died of starvation in the streets of Paris, and your
father, who perished on a winter's night in Switzerland, they are my
daily companions. They sit down beside me here, and by the fireside, and
at my solitary meals; and they watch beside me in the night. They will
never leave me till I see them again, and confess my sin to them."
"It was not you alone whom my father wronged," said Felix, "there were
others besides you who might have prosecuted him."
"Yes, but they were ignorant, simple men," replied Mr. Clifford, "they
need never have known of his crime. All their money could have been
replaced without their knowledge; it was of me Roland was afraid. If the
time could come over again--and I go over and over it in my own mind all
in vain--I would act altogether differently. I would make him feel to
the utmost the sin and peril of his course; but I would keep his secret.
Even Felicita should know nothing. It was partly my fault too. If I had
fulfilled my duty, and looked after my affairs instead of dreaming my
time away in Italy, your father, as the junior partner, could not have
fallen into this snare. When a crime is committed the criminal is not
the only one to be blamed. Consciously or unconsciously those about him
have been helping by their own carelessness and indolence, by cowardice,
by indifference to right and wrong. By a thousand subtle influences we
help our brother to disobey God; and when he is found out we stand aloof
and raise an outcry against him. God has made every one of us his
brother's keeper."
"Then you too have forgiven him," said Felix, with a glowing sense of
comfort in his heart.
"Forgiven him? ay!" he answered, "as he sits by me at the fireside,
invisible to all but me, I say to him again and again in words inaudible
to all but him:
'Even as I hope for pardon in that day,
When the great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits,
So be thou pardoned.'"
The tremulous, weak old voice paused, and the withered hands lay feebly
on his knees as he looked out on the summer sky, seeing nothing of its
brightness, for the thoughts and memories that were flocking to his
brain. Felix's younger eyes caught every familiar object on which the
sun was shining, and knitted them up for ever with the memory of that
hour.
"God help me!" he cried, "I forgive my father too; but I have lost him.
I never knew the real man."