AN OLD LETTER.
Philip left the stifling atmosphere of the hovel, and, with a
deep-drawn breath of relief, stepped into the open air. The wonderful
landscape stretched before him in clear sunlight, dazzling to his eyes.
He was nearly two thousand feet above the valley, and the mountains,
which were foreshortened to the sight there, now seemed to tower into
the cloudless sky with indescribable grandeur and beauty. It was a
perfect day, and the light was intense. The colors of these rocks were
exceedingly soft, with a bloom upon them like the bloom upon a peach.
Tender shades of purple and red, with blue and orange, pale yellow and
green, blended together, and formed such delicate tints as would drive
an artist to despair. Tall pinnacles of these cliffs rose behind the
dun-colored mountains of porphyry, and seemed to look down upon him, as
if their turrets and parapets were filled with spectators of the
trivial affairs of man. Thin clouds were floating about them, hanging
in mist upon their peaks or slowly gliding across from one snow-veined
crest to another. Immediately above him, just beyond the hamlet, lay a
vast hollow, in which the snowdrift was melting in the heat of the sun,
which had at last risen behind its rough screen of crags; and a stream
of icy-cold water was falling noisily down a steep and stony channel,
which it had worn out for itself through many centuries of spring
thaws. The heat was very great; and Philip made his way to some little
distance from the huts, and sat down on the ledge of a rock, which
commanded a splendid view of the groups of mountains, and the valleys
lying between them. He was not, as yet, so interested in the packet in
his hand as to be indifferent to the romantic scenery surrounding him.
These letters had been written thirty years ago; they could well wait a
few minutes longer.
Yet he was indignant; and he was full of compassion toward his
unfortunate fellow-countryman. But at that moment he was enjoying the
sensation of an almost perfectly full life. He felt himself in
faultless health; his mind was on the stretch, with a sense of vigor
and power which was delightful to him after the low spirits of the last
few months; and beneath this strong sensation of mental and physical
life lay a clearer, keener, diviner conviction of the presence of God
than he had ever known before. It seemed to him as if he could all but
hear a voice calling to him, "This is holy ground!" In spite of the
miserable homes of men and women close by, and in spite of the degraded
man whose life had been one long wretchedness in this place, Philip
felt that it was a temple of God himself.
With this strength, and in the consciousness of unusual energy, he
turned away at last from the sublime landscape, to read the faded paper
in his hands. It bore no name or address; and it was not sealed, only
tied together with a ribbon. A very, very long letter of several
pages, written in almost undecipherable lines, for the ink was faded,
and the paper stained. But there was another packet, and opening it he
found a daguerreotype glass. There were two portraits on it, one of a
girl with a very pretty face, and the other--but whose could this
portrait be?
Philip's healthy pulse ceased to beat for a moment. Who could it be?
How perfectly he seemed to know it! There had been an old
daguerreotype lying about in the nursery at Apley, which he had seen
and played with as soon as he was old enough to recognize it in its
morocco case. Was it possible that this portrait was the same as that?
He shut the case softly, feeling as if dead hands were closing it. A
terrible foreboding of some dire calamity came all at once into the
sunshine, and the sweet air, and the sound of hurrying waters. He
unfolded the time-stained letter, and began to read; and as he read,
the dreadful truth, the whole truth, as he thought, broke upon him, and
overwhelmed him with dismay and horror.
One of his earliest remembrances was the story of the lost girl, Rachel
Goldsmith's niece, who had gone away secretly from home and had never
again been heard of. As a boy he had often thought of how he would go
forth to find her, and bring her home again to his oldest friend,
Andrew Goldsmith. It had been his boyish vision of knight-errantry.
As a young man he had learned what such a loss meant; not the simple
loss he had fancied it as a boy. It had become in later years a
subject he could no longer mention to her father, or his own mother.
Philip's ideal of a man's duty toward a woman was of the purest and
most chivalrous devotion.
And now! Philip could not face the horror of the thought that was
waiting to take possession of his mind. He roused himself angrily, and
stood up, crushing the letter and the portraits into his pocket. A
path went beyond the hamlet, leading upward toward the crest of a pass
lying between two ranges of mountains. He strode hastily along it, as
if he were pursued by an enemy, passing through pine woods, and over
torrents of stones, which many a storm had swept down from the
precipices above him. Some massive thunderclouds had gathered in the
north, and the snowy peaks gleamed out pale and ghost-like against the
leaden sky. But his eyes were blinded, and his ears deafened. Yet he
was not thinking; he dared not think. A miserable dread was dogging
his footsteps along an unknown path; and presently he must summon
courage to turn round and confront this dread.
He reached at last the top of the pass, where three crosses stood out
strongly and clearly against the sky. Three crosses! Not only that on
which the Lord died, but those on which every man must hang, weary and
ashamed, at some moment of his life. He sat down beneath the central
one, and leaned against the foot of it. It was his Lord's cross; but
on each side stood the cross of a fellow-man--the man of sorrows, and
the man of sins. He, too, was come to the hour when he must be lifted
up upon his cross. He must be crucified upon it, perhaps in the sight
of men, certainly in the sight of God. He had come to it straight from
the conviction of the presence of God; and looking up to the three
empty crosses, he cried out, "Lord, remember me."
Then, with hands that shook, and with dazed eyes, he read the long
letter, which Sophy had written years before he was born. And as he
read he found the burden less intolerable than he had dreaded it would
be. His father had not been as base as his first miserable suspicion
had vaguely pictured him. Sophy Goldsmith had been his wife; and
Philip, counting how many years were passed, saw his father a young man
like himself, loving her as he loved Phyllis, but with far less hope of
ever gaining the consent of his friends to such a marriage. He, too,
would have married Phyllis, in spite of all opposition; only not in
secret.
His brain grew clearer with this gleam of comfort. Then the thought
came that the miserable, half savage peasant whom he had seen that
morning, being Sophy's child, must be his father's first-born son, and
his own brother. It was his father's eyes he had seen, and partly
recognized, when he first looked into Martin's face. His brother
Martin! He thought of his brother Hugh, between whom and himself there
existed the strongest and most loyal brotherhood. Hugh had stood by
him through all his difficulties about Phyllis, and approved of his
choice of her with the warmest approbation. But this barbarous,
degraded, forlorn wretch, an outcast among the lowest people--how could
he feel a brother's love for him?
If the eldest son--then the heir! The estates in Yorkshire were
strictly entailed upon Sir John Martin's male heirs, as his mother's
lands were settled upon Hugh. This man, scarcely higher than a brute,
must take from him the inheritance which had seemed to be his all his
life. Why! he, Philip Martin, would be a poor man, a man who must work
for his living. This was a new aspect of the case, and one which
aroused him from the deeper depths of his dismay. This discovery
suddenly and completely changed his whole life.
It was not he who would some day be Philip Martin of
Brackenburn--nothing would be his. Now he could marry Phyllis without
opposition, for he would be as poor as she was. He was not afraid of
poverty; he had no practical acquaintance with it, and Margaret had
trained her sons into a fine contempt of mere wealth. There would be a
worthy object in setting to work now, for he would have a wife and
family to maintain. That was far better than simply making more money
to invest or to speculate with.
But what ought he to do? This was a secret of momentous importance
concealed by his father for nearly thirty years. It had come suddenly
to his knowledge; and what must he do with it? And now, his heart
having shaken off the worst of its burden, his mind was clear enough to
recognize the hideous and insane selfishness of his father's conduct.
Before he knew who it was that had deserted this young girl and her
unborn child, he had felt a strong indignation at his baseness and
cowardice. What could have made his father, who seemed the soul of
honor, act in such a manner? He had been guilty of a great crime, and
the man sent to discover it was his own son.
Lifting up his eyes from the ground, on which they had been gloomily
bent, Philip saw the uncouth figure of his elder brother crouching and
half hidden under one of the thieves' crosses. His bare feet had
brought him noiselessly along the road; and he shrank a little from his
observation, as if he was afraid of some sharp rebuff. The deep-set
eyes glowered at him much as a dog's will do when he is not sure of
what reception he will get. There was something wild and desolate
about this solitary figure which touched Philip's inmost heart; and yet
he could give him no welcome to a place there.
Must he tell his mother? It would be like piercing her to the soul
with a sword. He knew well what keen and tender sympathy she had felt
for the Goldsmiths, both when Sophy first disappeared and during all
the succeeding years of alternating hope and despair. It was this
sympathy that had won Rachel Goldsmith's profound devotion to her
beloved mistress. How his mother must suffer when she learned that the
husband she loved and honored so perfectly had been living a base and
cruel lie at her side, witnessing all the sorrow of the family he had
wronged, and pretending to share in it. He could imagine her bearing
his father's death, but he could not imagine her bearing his dishonor.
His mother must suffer more than he did.
Philip roused himself at last to go down into the valley; the afternoon
was passing by, and his mother would be getting anxious at his absence.
He said "_Addio_" to his silent companion; but he was conscious,
without looking back, that Martino was following him. He felt glad
when he reached Cortina, on glancing round, to see that he was at last
alone. Dorothy was standing on the balcony outside his mother's
bedroom, and she leaned over, with a laughing face, to reproach him for
being away so long.
"The very first day, too!" she said. "And oh! if you only knew how
vexed I am! There is a telegram from your father, very pleasant for
you, but most disagreeable to me."
He ran upstairs at hearing this news, no longer afraid of meeting his
mother, and she gave to him the telegram.
"Going to Munich on business," it ran; "proceed immediately--meet
there. Taking Phyllis."
"But there is a great _festa_ in the village to-morrow," said Dorothy,
"and as it is too late to proceed immediately, we are going to stay for
the morning and go on to Toblach in the afternoon. We shall reach
Munich before your father and Phyllis can be there. And oh, Philip!
the bells are ringing carillons as if they were chimes in heaven."