EXPIATION.
Important business had taken Sidney to Liverpool, and it had been
arranged that instead of returning to Apley, he should go across to
Brackenburn and meet the rest of the Christmas party there. Traveling
was a good deal impeded by a severe snowstorm, and he was disappointed,
though not surprised, to find that the London train was very much
behind time, when he reached the country station nearest to
Brackenburn. Leaving the carriage and brake to bring the large party
coming up from the south, Sidney hired a light spring cart, which would
make its way more quickly and easily along the encumbered roads. The
early night had already fallen; and a few breaks in the drifting
clouds, through which the stars shone by twos and threes, seemed to
foretell a cessation in the storm.
The full moon was shining through one of these rifts when he reached
the forecourt of the old house, and its silvery light fell on all the
gables, and touched every tossing spray of ivy glistering with the
freshly fallen snow. But instead of the cheerful lights shining in
every window, all the front of the house was in darkness. Within the
wide porch a deep drift almost barred the approach to the door. There
was something ominous in the deathlike silence and darkness of this
place, to which he had been traveling with the expectation of entering
it surrounded by all whom he loved most. There stole over him a sense
of loneliness, such as all of us feel at times, when the utter solitude
of the life within us, the isolation of each one's spirit, presses
consciously and with deep awe upon us. No words could say how precious
Margaret was to him; but even she could never enter into the secret and
mysterious house of his soul.
A glimmer in a distant window at last answered to the driver's noisy
and repeated ringing of the great bell; and the door was opened, Mary
Goldsmith appearing with a face of terror.
"Oh, Mr. Martin!" she cried in a tremulous voice, "they're lost in the
snow. They've never come back. Andrew and Martin are lost in the
snow!"
For a moment it seemed as if her words forbade his entrance; and he
stood motionless on the threshold looking from her to the whiteness of
the scene behind him.
"Come in, come in," she said impatiently, "and tells us what we must
do. All the men are gone to the station, and only the old gardener's
left. They went out hours ago, Andrew and Martin, and never came back.
They'd have been home before nightfall if they hadn't lost themselves."
Sidney entered the hall, leaving the heavy door ajar, and in a minute
or two a long drift of snow stretched across the polished floor, blown
in by the rising wind.
"Has nobody gone in search of them?" asked Sidney.
"Nay!" said Mary, crying, "there's only me, and Selina, and the maids;
and it's such a dizzy storm. We lost our way only going along the
garden walks. We couldn't see a yard before us. But we've lighted up
all the windows at the back, looking over the moor. Only I'm afraid
they can't be seen far off through the driving snow."
The wind had risen again almost to a gale, and roared round the
solitary house, shaking every door and casement, and beating the long
ivy tendrils against the windowpanes. Sidney could see nothing even of
the storm for the sheet of ice and snow covering the outside of the
windows. Andrew old, and Martin ailing in health, out on the moors, in
this tempest! He looked into Mary's terror-stricken face with an
expression of intense anxiety.
"They will be dead before morning!" cried Mary.
She put his own half formed thought into blunt words. Dead! Sophy's
father and Sophy's son! The old, long gone by days when he was a boy
and madly in love with Sophy came back to him vividly, as if the
effacing touch of many years had not blotted out the recollection of
them. The girl's pretty, saucy face, her high spirits and merry moods,
her unrestrained love for him and his brief frenzied passion for her,
all the long forgotten memories, sprang into bitter and stinging life.
His conscience told him he had been glad when he knew she was dead,
leaving his way to happiness and prosperity clear before him. But
there was a great horror to him in a thought which was lurking
somewhere in an obscure corner of his brain, a murderous thought, that
he would rejoice in the death of Sophy's son. What would he do if
Philip, his beloved son, were lost on the moors? That must he do for
Martin.
He forgot Margaret for the time, as if to him she had no existence. He
thought only of his sons--Philip, whom he would give his life to save,
and Martin, to whom he owed a deeper debt than to any other human
being; and flinging open the hall door he precipitated himself into the
storm. There was a sudden lull as he did so; the gusts of wind ceased,
and the dizzy snowflakes no longer hid the way. Bidding Mary send all
the aid she could, as soon as the men arrived from the station, Sidney
started across the moors.
He was fairly well acquainted with their general aspect, and felt no
misgiving as to keeping within the range of the points most familiar to
him. The light was clear enough to enable him to avoid the greater
drifts, and the hollows, lying like great basins of snow. Besides, at
any moment he might come upon the weary men, exhausted, perhaps, with
exposure and fatigue, but stumbling homeward. From time to time he
shouted, and waited, listening painfully for some answer. But no
answer came, and still he went on, busy with the multiplicity of
thoughts that crowded through his brain, and taking little heed of time
or distance.
It seemed almost as if Martin and Philip were walking beside him. The
fatherhood that was in him--the most godlike of all human emotions--was
stirred to its very depths. He knew what it was; he had felt it in all
its fullness toward Philip. But Martin also was his son! What an
infinite love and pathos there were in the words "my son"! It seemed
incredible, impossible, that he could have so sinned against that
divine fatherhood in himself as to forsake the mother of his firstborn
child. He had given life to Martin, but alas! what a life! Could he
never set that wrong right through even the countless ages of eternity?
Had not Martin lost forever the birthright that ought to have been his
in this world?
No love either of father or mother; no symbol by which he could learn
the love of God himself. Martin had never known what it was to be a
son. All the innocent blisses, the passing gladness, the deep,
unutterable joys of a happy childhood had been stolen from him. That
which Philip had possessed in the richest measure Martin had had no
least taste of. His childhood had been desolate and oppressed as
childhood ought never to to be; his manhood had been given over to
destitution and slavery. The father had sown in a small seed-plot, the
son had reaped in a wide harvest-field.
The chief bitterness of it all, the very sting of death, was that no
atonement was possible. As Sidney struggled onward through the
clogging snowdrifts, he felt that he could give up even Margaret if he
could recall the past. What was wealth, or influence, or the love of
wife and child, or the choicest of all earth's many gifts, compared
with the joy of having been true to that which was most akin to God in
his own nature? That joy could never be his; but he would be a true
father to Martin now, though he could not hope to find in him the
sonship which is the crown of fatherhood.
The lull in the storm was over. The snowflakes began to whirl around
him giddily, driven and tossed hither and thither by the bitter wind,
and falling so thickly that they formed a dense veil of fluttering
atoms, as impervious to the sight as a stone wall. The familiar
landmarks were utterly lost were they ever so near to him. He fought
his way through the wind and the snow as best he could, calling from
time to time. The thick air was soundless; he could hear only his own
heavy sighs and labored breath. The biting cold was making him feel
dull and torpid; a lethargy crept over his busy brain.
Suddenly, as if a white curtain had been drawn aside for a moment, he
saw on the other side of a slight ravine the cave which had been
Martin's chosen retreat, and in the safe shelter of it sat Andrew and
Martin, with a fire burning brightly in the entrance of the cave.
Yonder there were warmth and safety; and in Sidney's clouded brain
there sprang a great gladness at having found his son. He cried
"Martin!" and it seemed to him as if he turned his ear toward him and
listened to his call.
But the vision was hidden again from his sight before he could take a
step forward; and still groping his way, though feebly and with
exhausted limbs, he struggled on through the bewildering snowflakes to
reach the haven of his son's shelter.