A TRAITOR'S SON
"So you fought Morice Conyers?"
Michael nodded.
He had found that the shorter his answers the better pleased his
grandfather was.
The old man's hand, resting idly on his knee, clenched and unclenched.
Outside the birds were singing carols of love to the roses after the
joy of a summer shower. The scent of wet, brown earth was alluring to
Michael, yet he sat still, knowing that something momentous stirred in
the evening air.
The lines round Sir Henry's mouth were hardening.
"Who won?"
"I, sir."
"Ah!"
It was an enigmatical sound.
Michael plucked up courage and met the stare of cold blue eyes steadily.
"He had used his little sister roughly."
"What was that to you?"
"She is a playmate of mine, sir."
"_Playmate of yours!_"
"Yes, sir."
"A Conyers playmate to your father's son? What do you mean, boy?"
Michael drew himself up stiffly and told the tale in brief. He had
played with little Gabrielle Conyers--and fought for her. He did not
say how he was for ever and ever her true knight.
Yet when he had finished, the old man opposite was sneering.
"It was well for you her father knew nought of such play," said he
sourly, "or I might have had to look farther for an heir."
Michael's eyes blazed.
"May I speak, sir?" he asked huskily, and never waited even for the
curt nod of acquiescence.
"I would know about my father," he said slowly and very steadily. "My
mother wept when I spoke of him, but she would say no word save that I
should know well enough one day. Neither would she tell me whether he
were alive or dead. But I am a child no longer, and will be at the
mercy of no man who dares call my father foul names, whilst I have no
knowledge to enable me to slit their tongues for such lies."
Silence in the wainscotted room.
How the bird-song without jarred.
"So you would know?" said Sir Henry dully. "Then I will tell you."
The proud, aristocratic old face was very hard and set.
"Your father," he said monotonously, "was my only son. He was
handsome--you shall see his portrait presently. And I was proud of
him. So was his mother. But she should not have hidden his faults
from me. It is so with women: they weaken with their pampering where
discipline should strengthen. I knew nothing of his gambling at
Oxford, or his reputation later on at Arthur's and White's, where
Stephen Berrington became, I believe, a notable figure--as a pigeon
ready for plucking.
"I remained here and knew nothing, only picturing my son according to
my fancy. Then the inevitable happened. He got mixed up in one of
those bubble Jacobite plots which were for ever being blown by the
friends of poor Prince Charlie. He and his bosom companion, Ralph
Conyers, were burning, it seemed, with zeal for the royal exile. I do
not say that I altogether disapproved, though warning them of the
penalties of rashness.
"They did not listen--I hardly expected them to, though I warned them
again before they set out on that fatal day to Ireland, where, in due
course, their hero was to land.
"I need not tell you the story in detail. They failed. The cracking
of an egg-shell was no harder than the quashing of such a plot, though
there were brave gentlemen concerned in it. Too much heart and too
little brain is a bad mixture for success in such enterprises. Stephen
was imprisoned at Dublin Castle with Ralph Conyers and others."
A long pause. Sir Henry's face was ashen, his old lips twitching
nervously.
Michael's dark head was bent eagerly forward, but there was fear in his
grey eyes.
"Yes," he muttered. "He was imprisoned?"
"For treason. When I heard the news I wept for my son, yet I honoured
him, thinking he was giving his life for a gallant cause."
"He escaped?"
The old man's lips were twisted into that bitterly sarcastic smile of
his.
"Ay," he replied. "Stephen Berrington escaped scot free by betraying
his comrades."
Tick, tick, tick.
The solemn, monotonous chant of the great clock in the corner was the
only sound in the room.
Michael sat, white and rigid as the stern old man opposite.
"Betrayed!"
"Betrayed. I learnt that the son I mourned as dead was alive--free;
but the price was dishonour. I cursed him then, as I curse him now."
It was very terrible, the concentrated and undying fury in those quiet,
even tones.
Michael shuddered, covering his face with his hands.
"The son of a traitor," he moaned--"a traitor! And he was right."
"Who?"
"Morice Conyers. Yet I would have killed him for calling me a
traitor's son."
"He spoke truth. His father was one of those who suffered even more,
perhaps, than those whom my son's words helped to send to the scaffold.
Ralph Conyers was imprisoned for ten years and came back a cripple,
whose limbs were twisted and bent with rheumatism and ague. Do you
wonder if he too curses the name of Berrington?"
"My father! And such an act!"
"You do well to tremble. It is an ill heritage for you, lad,--a
stained and blotted scutcheon, with coward and traitor written across
an unsullied sheet."
"And he--is still alive?"
"I do not know. Yet I pray Heaven he is not. I have never seen him
since. And he knew better than to come whining to me. I would have
had him whipped from the doors. His mother saw him by stealth once,
and he told her a tale. I did not listen to it. She died soon after;
I think of a broken heart. It did not help me to love my son better.
He wrote once to tell me of his marriage to an Irishwoman and of your
birth. I did not answer. He has not written again."
"My mother wept," said Michael slowly, "whenever I asked concerning
him. Yet I do not think he is dead."
"And why not?"
"A letter came once, not long since. The messenger who brought it was
from abroad. My mother did not welcome him very warmly, and afterwards
she cried. The messenger went away laughing, and that maddened me. I
ran after him, demanding that he should fight, but he caught me by the
wrist, looking down for a long time into my face.
"'Your father's son? Impossible!' he mocked. 'Impossible save for
that big nose of yours and the set of your shoulders. Ha, ha! So you
would not run away in face of an enemy? Morbleu! A game cockerel, I
protest.'
"So, making me a very mocking bow, he went away. And my mother wept
again very sorely and very often, till the day she died."
"Saying nought of him?"
"As I knelt beside her, at the last, she put her arms around me closely.
"'Pray God you may not meet him!' she moaned, 'or, if you do, pray God
you may save him from----' But she died before she finished her words."
Sir Henry's chin was sunk on his breast. The reopening of an
unhealable wound is sore enough work.
Let it be closed henceforth.
Yet, being open, he would tell the lad all now, before forbidding
mention of such subject again. "Come," he said, rising, clutching at
his ebony stick with the sudden weakness of age. "You shall see his
likeness, and then--well, it is good that the dead past buries its
dead."
Sir Henry Berrington did not believe in ghosts. Yet they haunted the
picture-gallery up there. Ah yes! Curse he might and did, yet the
ghosts laughed and sang with merry, boyish voices, shouting in glee as
they romped with Chieftain and Bride, the great deerhounds, crying
aloud to tell father or mother of some youthful sport, carolling out
some brave, rollicking ditty of gallant deeds.
Ah, yes! It was not the old mother alone who had wept on the neck of
these ghosts, holding out wide, empty arms to embrace shadows, and
turning away--alone.
But the old man's step was firmer now as he trod the gallery floor,
head erect and shoulders set as he passed between rows of smiling or
frowning ancestors, followed by a lean, dark-browed boy, whose head was
a trifle bent and his eyes deprecating as they met the fixed stare of
painted ones around.
Was it _his_ fault that the scutcheon they left so fair was stained and
blotted by a foul and treacherous deed?
The setting sun sent a flare of light through the great window, with
its blazonment of arms and rich colouring, at the end of the gallery.
It shone strangely on the dusty curtain which hung there over the last
picture on the wall.
Force himself though he would, Sir Henry's hand trembled as he drew
back the velvet folds.
And Michael, looking, saw the picture of a young man, dressed in the
extravagant fashion of a period twenty years earlier. Rich setting to
rich beauty.
Stephen Berrington, aged twenty-two, was a son any mother might have
been proud of.
Surely it was no traitor's face, but rather that of a very pretty
gentleman. Weak? Yes; chin and mouth proved that--a youth to be led
rather than born to rule. And Satan had led him to his own
destruction. So Sir Henry said, even whilst Stephen's mother wept for
her son on her knees. A woman puts love before honour where a brave
man makes the latter his deity.
Thus Michael looked on his father's face and found scorn overcoming the
pity.
A traitor--and his father!
No wonder Morice Conyers had mocked him. Yet he would prove that a man
can be a traitor's son, and yet no traitor himself. The blood drummed
in his head and through his pulses at the thought.
Yes, he would prove that, and, by his own deeds, wipe out the stain
which seemed ready to tear his shrinking soul.
The curtain fell back into its place. Sir Henry turned to his grandson.
They did not speak, but stood there in the dying sunlight, whilst grey
eyes alone spoke their promise to sunken blue ones.
Then the old, withered hand fell on the lad's shoulder.
"You understand?" he said simply.
Michael understood.