FOR ONE MOMENT
She had not uttered a word to him; but her smile and the tender gesture
of her dying hands had spoken more than words. He stood motionless,
gazing down upon her, and upon Phebe, who had thrown herself beside her,
encircling her with her arms, as if she would snatch her away from the
relentless grasp of death. A single cry of anguish had escaped him; but
he was dumb now, and no sound was heard in the silent hut, except those
that entered it from without. Phebe did not know what had happened, but
he knew. Quite clearly, without any hope or self-deception, he knew that
Felicita was dead.
The dread of it had haunted him from the moment that he had heard of her
hurried departure in quest of him. When he read Phebe's words, imploring
him to follow them, the recollection had flashed across him of how the
thread of Lord Riversdale's life had snapped under the strain of unusual
anxiety and fatigue. Felicita's own delicate health had been failing for
some months past. As swiftly as he could follow he had pursued them; but
her impatient and feverish haste had prevented him from overtaking them
in time. What might have been the result if he had reached her sooner
he could not tell. That there could ever have been any knitting together
again of the tie that had ever united them seemed impossible. Death
alone, either hers or his, could have touched her heart to the
tenderness of her farewell smile and gesture.
In after life Jean Merle never spoke of that hour of agony. But there
was nothing in the past which dwelt so deeply or lived again so often in
his memory. He had suffered before; but it seemed as nothing to the
intensity of the anguish that had befallen him now. The image of
Felicita's white and dying face lying against the darkened walls of the
hovel where she had gone to seek him, was indelibly printed on his
brain. He would see it till the hour of his own death.
He lifted her up, holding her once more in his arms, and clasping her to
his heart, as he carried her through the village street to the hotel.
Phebe walked beside him, as yet only thinking that Felicita had fainted.
His old neighbors crowded out of their houses, scarcely recognizing Jean
Merle in this Monsieur in his good English dress, but with redoubled
curiosity when they saw who it was thus bearing the strange English lady
in his arms. When he had carried her to the hotel, and up-stairs to the
room where he had watched beside the stranger who had borne his name, he
broke through the gathering crowd of onlookers, and fled to his familiar
solitudes among the mountains.
He had always told himself that Felicita was dead to him. There had not
been in his heart the faintest hope that she could ever again be
anything more to him than a memory and a dream. When he was in England,
though he had not been content until he had seen his children and his
old home, he had never sought to get a glimpse of her, so far beyond him
and above him. But now that she was indeed dead, those beloved eyes
closed forever more from the light of the sun, and the familiar earth
never again to be trodden by her feet, the awful chasm set between them
made him feel as if he was for the first time separated from her. Only
an hour ago and his voice could have reached her in words of entreaty
and of passionate repentance and humble self-renunciation. They could
have spoken face to face, and he might have had a brief interval for
pouring out his heart to her. But there had been no word uttered between
them. There had been only that one moment in which her soul looked back
upon him with a glance of tenderness, before she was gone from him
beyond recall. He came to himself, out of the confused agony of his
grief, as the sun was setting. He found himself in a wild and barren
wilderness of savage rocks, with a small black tarn lying at his feet,
which just caught the glimmer of the setting sun on its lurid surface.
The silence about him was intense. Gray clouds stretched across the
mountains, out of which a few sad peaks of rock rose against the gray
sky. The snowy dome of the Titlis towering above the rest looked down on
him out of the shadow of the clouded heavens with a ghostly paleness.
All the world about him was cold and wan, and solemn as the face of the
dead. There was death up here and in the valley yonder; but down in the
valley it bore too dear and too sorrowful a form.
As the twilight deepened, the recollection of Phebe's loneliness and her
distress at his absence at last roused him. He could no longer leave
her, bewildered by this new trouble, and with slow and reluctant steps
he retraced his path through the deep gloom of the forests to the
village. There was much to be turned over in his mind and to be decided
upon before he reached the bustling hotel and the gaping throng of
spectators, marvelling at Jean Merle's reappearance under circumstances
so unaccountable. He had met with Phebe as she returned from starting
Felicita in the first boat, and they had waited for the next. At
Grafenort they had dismissed their carriage, thinking they could enter
the valleys with less observation on foot; and perhaps meet with
Felicita in such a manner as to avoid making his return known in
Engelberg. He had turned aside to take shelter in his old hut, whilst
Phebe went on to find Felicita, when his bitter cry of pain had called
her back to him. The villagers would probably take him for a courier in
attendance upon these ladies, if he acted as one when he reached the
hotel. But how was he to act?
Two courses were open to him. There was no longer any reason to dread a
public trial and conviction for the crime he had committed so many years
ago. It was quite practicable to return to England, account plausibly
for his disappearance and the mistake as to identity which had caused a
stranger to be buried in his name, and take up his life again as Roland
Sefton. It was improbable that any searching investigation should be
made into his statements. Who would be interested in doing it? But the
old memories and suspicions would be awakened and strengthened a
hundred-fold by the mystery surrounding his return. No one could compel
him to reveal his secret, he had simply to keep his lips closed in
impenetrable silence. True he would be a suspected man, with a
disgraceful secrecy hanging like a cloud about him. He could not live so
at Riversborough, among his old towns-people, of whom he had once been a
leader. He must find some new sphere and dwell in it, always dreading
the tongue of rumor.
And his son and daughter? How would they regard him if he maintained an
obstinate and ambiguous silence towards them? They were no longer little
children, scarcely separate from their father, seeing through his eyes,
and touching life only through him. They were separate individuals,
living souls, with a personality of their own, the more free from his
influence because of his long absence and supposed death. It was a young
man he must meet in Felix, a critic and a judge like other men; but with
a known interest in the criticism and the judgment he had to pass upon
his father, and less apt to pass it lightly. His son would ponder deeply
over any account he might give of himself. Hilda, too, was at a
sensitive and delicate point of girlhood, when she would inevitably
shrink from any contact with the suspicion and doubt that would surround
this strange return after so many years of disappearance.
Yet how could he let them know the terrible fraud he had committed for
their mother's sake and with her connivance? Felix knew of his other
defalcations; but Hilda was still ignorant of them. If he returned to
them with the truth in his lips, they would lose the happy memory of
their mother and their pride in her fame. He understood only too well
how dominant must have been her influence over them, not merely by the
tender common ties of motherhood, but by the fascinating charm of her
whole nature, reserved and stately as it had been. He must betray her
and lessen her memory in their sorrowful esteem. To them, if not to the
world, he must disclose all, or resolve to remain a stranger to them
forever. During the last six months it had seemed to him that a humble
path lay before him, following which he might again live a life of lowly
discipleship. He had repented with a bitter repentance, and out of the
depths into which he had fallen he had cried unto God and been
delivered. He believed that he had received God's forgiveness, as he
knew that he had received men's forgiveness. Out of the wreck of his
former life he had constructed a little raft and trusted to it bearing
him safely through what remained of the storm of life. If Felicita had
lived he would have remained in the service of his father's old friend,
proving himself of use in numberless ways; not merely as an attendant,
but in assisting him with the affairs of the bank, with which he was
more conversant, from his early acquaintanceship with the families
transacting business with it, than the stranger who was acting manager
could be. He had not been long enough in Riversborough to gain any
influence in the town as a poor foreigner, but there had been a hope
dawning within that he might again do some good in his native place, the
dearer to him because of his long and dreary banishment. In time he
might perform some work worthy of his forefathers, though under another
name. If he could so live as to leave behind him the memory of a sincere
and simple Christian, who had denied himself daily to live a righteous,
sober, and godly life, and had cheerfully taken up his cross to follow
Christ, he would in some measure atone for the disgrace Roland Sefton's
defalcations had brought upon the name of Christ.
This humble, ambitious career was still before him if he could forego
the joy of making himself known to his children--a doubtful joy. For
had he not cut himself from them by his reckless and despairing
abandonment of them in their childhood? He could bring them nothing now
but sorrow and shame. The sacrifice would be on their side, not his. It
needs all the links of all the years to bind parents and children in an
indestructible chain; and if he attempted to unite the broken links it
could only be by a knowledge of their mother's error as well as his. Let
him sacrifice himself for the last and final time to Felicita and the
fair name she had made for herself.
He was stumbling along in the dense darkness of the forest with no gleam
of light to guide him on his way, and his feet were constantly snared in
the knotted roots of the trees intersecting the path. So must he stumble
along a dark and rugged track through the rest of his years. There was
no cheering gleam beckoning him to a happy future. But though it was
thorny and obscure it was not an ignoble path, and it might end at last
even for him in the welcome words, "Well done, good and faithful
servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."
His mind was made up before he reached the valley. He could not unravel
the warp and woof of his life. The gossamer threads of the webs he had
begun to weave about himself so lightly in the heyday of his youth and
prosperity and happiness had thickened into cables and petrified; it was
impossible to break through the coil of them or find a way out of it.
Roland Sefton had died many years ago. Let him remain dead.