David ate his three cutlets and, both as regards appetite and in other
ways, was a great success at the little luncheon party. Afterwards,
they finished the bottle of Marsala under a cedar tree, and whilst the
Colonel indulged in reminiscences, Sylvia's eyes rested more than once
upon the automobile drawn up before the door. It was quite an
adventure in her rather humdrum life, and, after all, there was no
reason why a fairy prince shouldn't be an American millionaire and come
in a Rolls-Royce.
"I am sure I hope you'll like Broomleys, Mr. Thain," the Colonel said,
as David rose to make his adieux. "I am delighted to leave the place
in the hands of such a good tenant. It makes one almost sorry to go
away when one realises what one is missing in the shape of neighbours,
eh, Sylvia?"
Sylvia was unaccountably shy, but she raised her eyes to David's for a
moment.
"It is most disappointing," she agreed. "Mr. Thain is such a
sympathetic shopper."
David drove off a little gloomily.
"Why the devil couldn't I fall in love with a nice girl like that," he
muttered to himself, "instead of--"
He pulled up short, set his heel upon that other vision, and braced
himself for the immediate task before him. He drove around the park,
drew up outside the cottage, and, descending from the car, approached
the low hedge. At the further end of the garden he could hear his
uncle's sonorous voice. He was seated in a high-backed chair, the
Bible upon his knee, reading to himself slowly and with great
distinctness the Ten Commandments. On the ground by his side were the
remnants of another chair. As David came up the little path, his uncle
concluded his reading and laid down the Bible.
"Bring out a chair and sit with me, David," he invited.
David pointed to the ground.
"Your furniture seems--"
"Don't jest," his uncle interrupted. "That chair I have broken to
pieces with my own hands because of the woman who sat upon it not many
hours since."
David frowned.
"You mean Marcia?"
"I mean Marcia--the woman who was my daughter," was the stern reply,
"the woman of whose visit you warned me."
"Come into the house with me," David begged, turning his back upon
Mandeleys. "You sit and look at that great drear building and brood
overmuch. I want to talk with you."
Richard Vont rose obediently to his feet and followed his visitor into
the little parlour. David looked around him curiously.
"This place seems to have the flavour of many years ago," he said.
"Sometimes I can scarcely realise that I have ever eaten my meals off
that oak table. Sometimes it seems like yesterday."
"Time passes, but time don't count for much," the old man sighed.
"Mary Wells will be up from the village soon, and she'll make us a cup
of tea. Sit opposite me, lad. Is there any more news?"
"None!"
"Them shares, for instance?"
"There will be no change in them," David replied. "In two months' time
he will know it."
"And he'll have forty thousand pounds to find, eh?--forty thousand
pounds which he will never be able to raise!" Richard Vont muttered,
his eyes curiously bright. "There isn't an acre of land here that
isn't mortgaged over and over again."
"You'll make him a bankrupt, I suppose," David said thoughtfully.
"Ay, a bankrupt!" his uncle repeated, lingering over the word with a
fierce joy. "But there's something more as'll fall to your lot,
David," he went on,--"something more--and the time's none so far off."
David moved in his chair uneasily.
"Something more?"
"Ay, ay!" the old man assented. "You'll find it hard, my boy, but
you'll keep your word. You've got that much of the Vonts in your
blood. Your word's a bond with you."
"Tell me," David begged, "about that something more?"
"The time's not yet," his uncle replied. "You shall know, lad, in good
season."
David was silent for a moment, filled with nameless and displeasing
apprehensions. He was brave enough, prepared to meet any ordinary
emergency, but somehow or other the vagueness of the task which lay
before him seemed appalling. Outside was Mandeleys, a grim and silent
remembrance. Inside the cottage everything seemed to speak of
changeless times. The pendulum of the tall clock swung drowsily, as it
had swung thirty years ago. The pictures on the wall were the same,
the china, the furniture, even its arrangement. And the man who sat in
his easy-chair was the same, only that his whiskers and hair were white
where once they had been black.
"Uncle," he begged, "let me know the worst now?"
"You'll know in good time and not before," was the almost fierce reply.
"Don't weary me to-night, lad," Vent continued, his voice breaking a
little. "The day has been full of trials for me. 'Twas no light
matter to have a strange woman here--the strange woman, David, that was
once my daughter."
David frowned a little.
"Uncle," he said, "I don't wish to pain you, but I am sorry about
Marcia."
"You don't need to be, lad. She isn't sorry for herself. She is
puffed up with the vanity of her brain. She came here in fine clothes
and with gentle manners, and a new sort of voice. She has made
herself--a lady! Poor lass, her day of suffering is to come! Maybe I
was hard on her, but I couldn't bear the sight of her, and that's the
truth. She talked to me like one filled with wisdom. It was me whom
she thought the ignorant one. Put Marcia out of your mind, David. We
will talk of other things."
David leaned forward in his chair. His eyes were bright, his tone
eager.
"Let us have this out, uncle," he begged. "I've been thinking of
it--perhaps as much as you lately. They may have been wrong, those
two; they may be sinners, but, after all, the world isn't a place for
holy people only. The Bible tells you that. For nearly twenty years
he has stood by her and cared for her. There has been no meanness, no
backing out on his part. He is as much to her to-day as ever he was."
"Ay," his listener interposed scornfully, "she talked that way. Do you
reckon that a man and woman who sinned a score of years ago are any the
better because they are going on sinning to-day? Faithfulness to good
is part of the Word of God. Faithfulness in sin is of the Devil's
handing out."
David shook his head.
"I am sorry, uncle," he said earnestly, "I have come to look on these
things a little differently. Many years ago, in America, I used to
wonder what it was that kept you apart from every one else, kept the
smile from your lips, made you accept good fortune or ill without any
sign of feeling. I was too young to understand then, but I realise
everything now. I know how you denied yourself to send me to school
and college. I know how you left yourself almost a beggar when you
gave me the chance of my life and trusted me with all your savings.
These things I shall never forget."
"One word, lad," Vont interrupted. "It's the truth you say. I trusted
you with well-nigh all I had that stood between me and starvation, but
I trusted you with it on one condition. Do you mind that condition?
We sat outside the little shanty I'd built with my own hands, up in the
Adirondacks there, and before us were the mountains and the woods and
the silence. We were close to God up there, David. You remember?"
"I remember."
"You'd come hot-foot from the city, and you told me your story. I sat
and listened, and then I told you mine. I told you of the shame that
had driven me from England, and I told you of the thoughts that were
simmering in my mind. As we sat there your wrath was as mine, and the
oath which I had sworn, you swore, too. I lent you the money over that
oath, boy. Look back, if you will. You remember the night? There was
a hot wind--cool before it reached us, though--rushing up from the
earth, rushing through the pine trees till they shook and bowed around
us; and a moon, with the black clouds being driven across it, looking
down; and the smell of the pines. You remember?"
"I remember," David repeated.
"We stood there hand in hand, and there was no one to hear us except
those voices that come from God only knows where, and you swore on your
soul that you would help me as soon as the time came to punish the man
who had blasted my life. In my way you promised--not yours. There
should be no will but mine. For this one thing I was master and you
were slave, and you swore."
"I swore. I am not denying it," David acknowledged. "Haven't I made a
start? Haven't I deceived the man at whose table I sat and laid a plot
to ruin him? And I have ruined him! Do you want more than this?"
"Yes!" was the unshaken reply.
"Then what, in heaven's name, is it?" David demanded. "Out with it,
for God's sake! I carry this whole thing about with me, like a weight
upon my soul. Granted that you are master and I am slave. Well, I've
done much. What is there left?"
"That you will be told in due season."
"And meantime," David continued passionately, "I am to live in a sort
of prison!"
"You've no need to find it such," the old man declared doggedly.
David sprang to his feet. The time had come for his appeal. The words
seemed to rush to his lips. He was full of confidence and hope.
"Uncle," he began, "you must never let a single word that I may say
seem to you ungrateful, but I beseech you to listen to me. Life is
like a great city in which there are many thoroughfares. It is an
immense, insoluble problem which no one can understand. You never open
another book except your Bible. You have never willingly exchanged
speech with any human being since you left here. In America you
shunned all company, you lived in the gloomiest of solitudes. This
little corner of the earth is all you know of. Perhaps there is more
in life even than that Book can teach you."
"Marcia talked like this," Richard Vont said quietly. "She spoke of
another world, a world for cleverer folk than I. Are you going to try
and break my purpose, too?"
"I would if I could," David declared fervently. "This man is what his
ancestors and his education have made him. He has led a simple,
ignorant, and yet in some respects a decent life. He is too narrow to
understand any one's point of view except his own. When he took Marcia
away, she was the village girl and he the great nobleman. To-day
Marcia holds his future in her hands. She is the strong woman, and he
is the weak man. She has achieved fame and made friends. She has
lived a happy life, she is at the present moment perfectly content.
Every promise he made her he has kept. Well, why not let it go at
that?"
"So you are another poor child who knows all about this wonderful world
of which I am so ignorant," Richard Vont said bitterly. "Yet, my lad,
I tell you that there's one great truth that none of you can get over,
and that is that sin lives, and there is nothing in this world, save
atonement, can wash it out."
"There's a newer doctrine than that, uncle," David insisted. "You talk
with the voice of the black-frocked minister who dangles Hell in front
of his congregation. There is something else can clear away sin, and
the Book over which you pore, day by day, will teach it you, if you
know where to look for it. There's love."
"Was it love, then, that brought him down through the darkness to
dishonour my daughter?" Vont demanded, with blazing eyes.
"It didn't seem like it, but love must have been there," David
answered. "Nothing but love could have kept these two people together
all this time, each filling a great place in the other's life. I
haven't thought of these things much, uncle, but I tell you frankly,
I've read the Bible as well as you, and I don't believe in this black
ogre of unforgivable sin. If these two started in wrong fashion,
they've purified themselves. I hold that it's your duty now to leave
them alone. I say that this vengeance you still hanker after is the
eye for an eye and limb for a limb of the Old Testament. There has
been a greater light in the world since then."
"Have you done?" Vont asked, without the slightest change in his tone
or expression.
"I suppose so," David replied wearily. "I wish you'd think over it
all, uncle. I know I'm right. I know there is justice in my point of
view."
"I'll not argue with you, lad," his uncle declared. "I'll ask you
no'but this one question, and before you answer it just go back in your
mind to the night we stood outside my shack, when the wind was blowing
up from the valleys. Are you going to stand by your pledged word or
are you going to play me false?"
The great clock ticked drearily on. From outside came the clatter of
teacups. David walked to the latticed window and came back again.
Richard Vont was seated in his high-backed chair, his hands grasping
its sides. His mouth was as hard and tightly drawn as one of his own
vermin traps, but his eyes, steadfastly fixed upon his nephew, were
filled with an inscrutable pathos. David remembered that passionate
outburst of feeling on a far-distant night, when the tears had rolled
down this man's cheeks and his voice was choked with sobs. And he
remembered--
"I shall keep my word in every way," he promised solemnly.
Vont rose slowly to his feet. His knees were trembling. He seemed to
be looking into a mist. His hands shook as he laid them on David's
shoulders.
"Thank God!" he muttered. "David, boy, remember. This light talk is
like an April shower on the warm earth. Goodness and sin are the same
now as a thousand years ago, and they will be the same in a thousand
years to come. We may pipe a new tune, but it's only the Devil's
children that dance to it--sin must be punished. There's no getting
over that! Forgiveness later maybe--but first comes punishment."