COMING TO HIMSELF.
When he left the cemetery Jean Merle went home to his wretched chalet,
flung himself down on his rough bed, and slept for some hours the
profound and dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. The last three nights
he had passed under the stars, and stretched upon the low
juniper-bushes. He awoke suddenly, from the bright, clear moonlight of a
cloudless sky and dry atmosphere streaming in through his door, which he
had left open. There was light enough for him to withdraw some money
from a safe hiding-place he had constructed in his crazy old hut, and to
make up a packet of most of the clothing he possessed. There were
between twenty and thirty pounds in gold pieces of twenty francs
each--the only money he was master of now his Lucerne bankers had failed
him. A vague purpose, dimly shaping itself, was in his brain, but he was
in no hurry to see it take definite form. With his small bundle of
clothes and his leathern purse he started off in the earliest rays of
the dawn to escape being visited by the young English girl, whom he had
seen at the grave, and who would probably seek him out in the morning
with her father. Who they were he could find out if he himself returned
to Engelberg.
_If_ he returned; for, as he ascended the steep path leading up to the
Trübsee Alp, he turned back to look at the high mountain-valley where he
had dwelt so long, as though he was looking upon it for the last time.
It seemed to him as if he was awaking out of a long lethargy and
paralysis. Three days ago the dull round of incessant toil and
parsimonious hoarding had been abruptly broken up by the loss of all he
had toiled for and hoarded up, and the shock had driven him out like a
maniac, to wander about the desolate heights of Engelberg in a mood
bordering on despair, which had made him utterly reckless of his life.
Since then news had come to him from home--stray gleams from the
Paradise he had forfeited. Strongest of them all was the thought that
these fourteen years had transformed his little son Felix into a man,
loving as he himself had loved, and already called to take his part in
the battle of life. He had never realized this before, and it stirred
his heart to the very depths. His children had been but soft, vague
memories to him; it was Felicita who had engrossed all his thought. All
at once he comprehended that he was a father, the father of a son and
daughter, who had their own separate life and career. A deep and
poignant interest in these beings took possession of him. He had called
them into existence; they belonged to him by a tie which nothing on
earth, in heaven, or in hell itself could destroy. As long as they lived
there must be an indestructible interest for him in this world. Felicita
was no longer the first in his thoughts.
The dim veil which time had drawn around them was rent asunder, and they
stood before him bathed in light, but placed on the other side of a gulf
as fathomless, as impassable, and as death-like as the ice-crevasses
yawning at his feet. He gazed down into the cold, gleaming abyss, and
across it to the sharp and slippery margin where there could be no
foot-hold, and he pictured to himself the springing across that horrible
gulf to reach them on the other side, and the falling, with outstretched
hands and clutching fingers, into the unseen icy depths below him. For
the first time in his life he shrank back shivering and terror-stricken
from the edge of the crevasse, with palsied limbs and treacherous
nerves. He felt that he must get back into safer standing-ground than
this solitary and perilous glacier.
He reached at last a point of safety, where he could lie down and let
his trembling limbs rest awhile. The whole slope of the valley lay below
him, with its rich meadows of emerald green, and its silvery streams
wandering through them. Little farms and chalets were dotted about, some
of them clinging to the sides of the rocks opposite to him, or resting
on the very edge of precipices thousands of feet deep, and looking as if
they were about to slip over them. He felt his head grow giddy as he
looked at them, and thought of the children at play in such dangerous
playgrounds. There were a few gray clouds hanging about the Titlis, and
caught upon the sharp horns of the rugged peaks around the valley. Every
peak and precipice he knew; they had been his refuge in the hours of his
greatest anguish. But these palsied limbs and this giddy head could not
be trusted to carry him there again. He had lost his last hope of making
any atonement. Hope was gone; was he to lose his indomitable courage
also? It was the last faculty which made his present life endurable.
He lay motionless for hours, neither listening nor looking. Yet he
heard, for the memory of it often came back to him in after years, the
tinkling of innumerable bells from the pastures below him, and around
him; and the voices of many waterfalls rushing down through the
pine-forests into the valley; and the tossing to and fro of the
interwoven branches of the trees. And he saw the sunlight stealing from
one point to another, chased by the shadows of the clouds, that gathered
and dispersed, dimming the blue sky for a little time, and then leaving
it brighter and deeper than before. He was unconscious of it all; he was
even unaware that his brain was at work at all, until suddenly, like a
flash, there rose upon him the clear, resolute, unchangeable
determination, "I will go to England."
He started up at once, and seized his bundle and his alpenstock. The
afternoon was far advanced, but there was time enough to reach the
Engstlenalp, where he could stay the night, and go on in the morning to
Meiringen. He could be in England in three days.
Three days: so short a time separated him from the country and the home
from which he had been exiled so many years. Any day during those
fourteen years he might have started homeward as he was doing now; but
there had not been the irresistible hunger in his heart that at this
moment drove him thither. He had been vainly seeking to satisfy himself
with husks; but even these, dry and empty, and bitter as they were, had
failed him. He had lost all; and having lost all, he was coming to
himself.
There was not the slightest fear of detection in his mind. A gray-haired
man with bowed shoulders, and seamed and marred face, who had lost every
trace of the fastidiousness, which had verged upon foppery in the
handsome and prosperous Roland Sefton, ran no risk of recognition, more
especially as Roland Sefton had been reckoned among the dead and buried
for many a long year. The lineaments of the dead die with them, however
cunningly the artist may have used his skill to preserve them. The face
is gone, and the memory of it. Some hearts may long to keep it engraven
sharp and clear in their remembrance; but oh, when the "inward eye"
comes to look for it how dull and blurred it lies there, like a
forgotten photograph which has grown faded and stained in some
seldom-visited cabinet!
Jean Merle travelled, as a man of his class would travel, in a
third-class wagon and a slow train; but he kept on, stopping nowhere for
rest, and advancing as rapidly as he could, until on the third day, in
the gray of the evening, he saw the chalk-line of the English coast
rising against the faint yellow light of the sunset; and as night fell
his feet once more trod upon his native soil.
So far he had been simply yielding to his blind and irresistible longing
to get back to England, and nearer to his unknown children. He had heard
so little of them from Alice Pascal, that he could no longer rest
without knowing more. How to carry out his intention he did not know,
and he had hardly given it a thought. But now, as he strolled slowly
along the flat and sandy shore for an hour or two, with the darkness
hiding both sea and land from him, except the spot on which he stood, he
began to consider what steps he must take to learn what he wanted to
know, and to see their happiness afar off without in any way endangering
it. He had purchased it at too heavy a price to be willing to place it
in any peril now.
That Felicita had left Riversborough he had heard from her own lips, but
there was no other place where he was sure of discovering her present
abode, for London was too wide a city, even if she had carried out her
intention of living there, for him to ascertain where she dwelt. Phebe
Marlowe would certainly know where he could find them, for the English
girl at Roland Sefton's grave had spoken of Phebe as familiarly as of
Felix and Hilda--spoken of her, in fact, as if she was quite one of the
family. There would be no danger in seeking out Phebe Marlowe. If his
own mother could not have recognized her son in the rugged peasant he
had become, there was no chance of a young girl such as Phebe had been
ever thinking of Roland Sefton in connection with him; and he could
learn all he wished to know from her.
He was careful to take the precaution of exchanging his foreign garb of
a Swiss peasant for the dress of an English mechanic. The change did not
make him look any more like his old self, for there was no longer any
incongruity in his appearance. No soul on earth knew that he had not
died many years ago, except Felicita. He might saunter down the streets
of his native town in broad daylight on a market-day, and not a
suspicion would cross any brain that here was their old townsman, Roland
Sefton, the fraudulent banker.
Yet he timed his journey so as not to reach Riversborough before the
evening of the next day; and it was growing dusk when he paced once more
the familiar streets, slowly, and at every step gathering up some sharp
reminiscence of the past. How little were they changed! The old
grammar-school, with its gray walls and mullioned windows, looked
exactly as it had done when he was yet a boy wearing his college-cap and
carrying his satchel of school-books. His name, he knew, was painted in
gold on a black tablet on the walls inside as a scholar who had gained
a scholarship. Most of the shops on each side of the streets bore the
same names and looked but little altered. In the churchyard the same
grave-stones were standing as they stood when he, as a child, spelt out
their inscriptions through the open railings which separated them from
the causeway. There was a zigzag crack in one of the flag-stones, which
was one of his earliest recollections; he stood and put his clumsy boot
upon it as he had often placed his little foot in those childish years,
and leaning his head against the railings of the churchyard, where all
his English forefathers for many a generation were buried, he waited as
if for some voice to speak to him.
Suddenly the bells in the dark tower above him rang out a peal, clanging
and clashing noisily together as if to give him a welcome. They had rung
so the day he brought Felicita home after their long wedding journey. It
was Friday night, the night when the ringers had always been used to
practise, in the days when he was churchwarden. The pain of hearing them
was intolerable; he could bear no more that night. Not daring to go on
and look at the house where he was born, and where his children had been
born, but which he could never more enter, he sought out a quiet inn,
and shut himself up in a garret there to think, and at last to sleep.