Cobwebs and Cables Part 28

"Here is your bag, sir," said the man.

"Ah! I'd forgotten it," exclaimed Felix. "Good night, and thank you."

He had just time to drop a s.h.i.+lling into his hand before the omnibus was off. But the man stood there in front of the Mansion House, motionless, with all the busy sea of life roaring around him, hearing nothing and seeing nothing. This coin that lay in his hand had been given to him by his son; his son's voice was still sounding in his ears. He had walked behind him taking note of his firm strong step, his upright carriage and manly bearing. It had been too swift a march for him, full of exquisite pain and pleasure, which chance might never offer to him again.

"Move on, will you?" said a policeman authoritatively; and Jean Merle, rousing himself from his reverie, went back to his lonely garret.

CHAPTER XV.

HAUNTING MEMORIES.

Felicita was slowly recovering her strength at the sea-side. She had never before felt so seriously shaken in health, as since she had known of the attachment of Felix to Alice Pascal; an attachment which would have been quite to her mind, if there was no loss of honor in allowing it whilst she held a secret which, in all probability, would seem an insuperable barrier in the eyes of Canon Pascal.

This secret she had kept resolutely in the background of her own memory, conscious of its existence, but never turning her eyes towards it. The fact that it was absolutely a secret, suspected by no one, made this more possible; for there was no gleam of cognizance in any eye meeting hers which could awaken even a momentary recollection of it. It seemed so certain that her husband was dead to every one but herself, that she came at last almost to believe that it was true.

And was it not most likely to be true? Through all these long years there had come no hint to her in any way that he was living. She had never seen or heard of any man lingering about her home where she and her children lived, all whom Roland loved, and loved so pa.s.sionately.

Certainly she had made no effort to discover whether he was yet alive; but though it would be well for her if he was dead--a cause of rest almost amounting to satisfaction--it was not likely that he would remain content with unbroken and complete ignorance of how she and her children were faring. If he had been living, surely he would have given her some sign.

There was a terrible duty now lying in her path. Before she could give her consent to Felix marrying Alice, she must ascertain positively if her husband was dead. Should it be so, her secret was safe, and would die with her. n.o.body need ever know of this fraud, so successfully carried out. But if not? Then she knew in herself that her lips could never confess the sin in which she had shared; and nothing would remain for her to do but to oppose with all the energy and persistence possible the marriage either of her son or daughter. And she fully believed that neither of them would marry against her will.

Her health had not permitted her hitherto to make the exertion necessary for ascertaining this fact, on which her whole future depended--hers and her children's. The physician whom she had consulted in London had urged upon her the imperative necessity of avoiding all excitement and fatigue, and had ordered her down to this dull little village of Freshwater, where not even a bra.s.s band on the unfinished pier or the arrival of an excursion steamer could disturb or agitate her. She had nothing to do but to sit on the quiet downs, where no sound could startle her, and no spectacle flutter her, until the sea-breezes had brought back her usual tone of health.

How long this promised restoration was in coming! Phebe, who watched for it anxiously, saw but little sign of it. Felicita was more silent than ever, more withdrawn into herself, gazing for hours upon the changeful surface of the sea with absent eyes, through which the brain was not looking out. Neither sound nor sight reached the absorbed soul, that was wandering through some intricate mazes to which Phebe had no clue. But no color came to Felicita's pale face, and no light into her dim eyes.

There was a painful and weird feeling often in Phebe's heart that Felicita herself was not there; only the fair, frail form, which was as insensible as a corpse, until this spirit came back to it. At such times Phebe was impelled to touch her, and speak to her, and call her back again, though it might be to irritability and displeasure.

"Phebe," said Felicita, one day when they sat on the cliff, so near the edge that nothing but the sea lay within the range of their sight, "how should you feel if, instead of helping a fellow-creature to save himself from drowning, you had thrust him back into the water, and left him, sure that he would perish?"

"But I cannot tell you how I should feel," answered Phebe, "because I could never do it. It makes me shudder to think of such a thing. No human being could do it."

"But if you had thrust the one fellow-creature nearest to you, the one who loved you the most," pursued Felicita, "into sin, down into a deeper gulf than he could have fallen into but for you--"

"My dear, my dear!" cried Phebe, interrupting her in a tone of the tenderest pity. "Oh! I know now what is preying upon you. Because Felix loves Alice it has brought back all the sorrowful past to you, and you are letting it kill you. Listen! Let me speak this once, and then I will never speak again, if you wish it. Canon Pascal knows it all; I told him. And Felix knows it, and he loves you more than ever; you are dearer to him a hundred times than you were before. And he forgives his father--fully. G.o.d has cast his sin as a stone into the depths of the sea, to be remembered against him no more forever!"

A slight flush crept over Felicita's pale face. It was a relief to her to learn that Canon Pascal and Felix knew so much of the truth. The darker secret must be hidden still in the depths of her heart until she found out whether she was altogether free from the chance of discovery.

"It was right they should know," she said in a low and dreamy tone; "and Canon Pascal makes no difficulty of it?"

"Canon Pascal said to me," answered Phebe, "that your n.o.ble life and the fame you had won atoned for the error of which Felix and Hilda's father had been guilty. He said they were your children, brought up under your training and example, not their father's. Why do you dwell so bitterly upon the past? It is all forgotten now."

"Not by me," murmured Felicita, "nor by you, Phebe."

"No; I have never forgotten him," cried Phebe, with a pa.s.sionate sorrow in her voice. "How good he was to me, and to all about him! Yes, he was guilty of a sin before G.o.d and against man; I know it. But oh! if he had only suffered the penalty, and come back to us again, for us to comfort him, and to help him to live down the shame! Possibly we could not have done it in Riversborough; I do not know; but I would have gone with you, as your servant, to the ends of the earth, and you would have lived happy days again--happier than the former days. And he would have proved himself a good man, in spite of his sin; a Christian man, whom Christ would not have been ashamed to own."

"No, no," said Felicita; "that is impossible. I never loved Roland; can you believe that, Phebe?"

"Yes," she answered in a whisper, and with downcast eyes.

"Not as I think of love," continued Felicita in a dreary voice. "I have tried to love you all; but you seem so far away from me, as if I could never touch you. Even Felix and Hilda, they are like phantom children, who do not warm my heart, or gladden it, as other mothers are made happy by their children. Sometimes I have dreamed of what life would have been if I had given myself to some man for whom I would have forfeited the world, and counted the loss as nothing. But that is past now, and I feel old. There is nothing more before me; all is gray and flat and cold, a desolate monotony of years, till death comes."

"You make me unhappy," said Phebe. "Ought we not to love G.o.d first, and man for G.o.d's sake? There is no pa.s.sion in that; but there is inexhaustible faithfulness and tenderness."

"How far away from me you are!" answered Felicita with a faint smile.

She turned her sad face again towards the sea, and sat silent, watching the flitting sails pa.s.s by, but holding Phebe's hand fast in her own, as if she craved her companions.h.i.+p. Phebe, too, was silent, the tears dimming her blue eyes and blotting out the scene before her. Her heart was very heavy and troubled for Felicita.

"Will you go to Engelberg with me by-and-by?" asked Felicita suddenly, but in a calm and tranquil tone.

"To Engelberg!" echoed Phebe.

"I must go there before Felix thinks of marrying," she answered in short and broken sentences; "but it cannot be till spring. Yet I cannot write again until I have been there; the thought of it haunts me intolerably.

Sometimes, nay, often, the word Engelberg has slipped from my pen unawares when I have tried to write; so I shall do no more work till I have fulfilled this duty; but I will rest another few months. When I have been to Engelberg again, for the last time, I shall be not happy, but less miserable."

"I will go with you wherever you wish," said Phebe.

It was so great a relief to have said this much to Phebe, to have broken through so much of the icy reserve which froze her heart, that Felicita's spirits at once grew more cheerful. The dreaded words had been uttered, and the plan was settled; though its fulfilment was postponed till spring; a reprieve to Felicita. She regained health and strength rapidly, and returned to London so far recovered that her physician gave her permission to return to work.

But she did not wish to take up her work again. It had long ago lost the charm of novelty to her, and though circ.u.mstances had compelled her to write, or to live upon her marriage settlement, which in her eyes was to live upon the proceeds of a sin successfully carried out, her writing itself had become tedious to her. "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!"

and there is much vexation of spirit, as well as weariness of the flesh, in the making of many books. She had made enemies who were spiteful, and friends who were exacting; she, who felt equally the irksomeness of petty enmities and of small friends.h.i.+ps, which, like gnats buzzing monotonously about her, were now and then ready to sting. The sting itself might be trivial, but it was irritating.

Felicita had soon found out how limited is the circle of fame for even a successful writer. For one person who would read a book, there were fifty who would go to hear a famous singer or actor, and a hundred who would crowd to see a clever acrobat. As she read more she discovered that what she had fondly imagined were ideas originated by her own intellect, was, in reality, the echo only of thought long since given to mankind by other minds, in other words, often better than her own. Her own silent claim to genius was greatly modified; she was humbler than she had been. But she knew painfully that her name was now a hundred-fold better known than it had been while she was yet only the wife of a Riversborough banker. All her work for the last fourteen years had placed it more and more prominently before the public. Any scandal attaching to it now would be blazoned farther and wider, in deeper and more enduring characters, than if her life as an author had been a failure.

The subtle hope, very real, vague as it was, that her husband was in truth dead, gathered strength. The silence that had engulfed him had been so profound that it seemed impossible he should still be treading the same earth as herself, and wearing through its slow and commonplace days, sleeping and waking, eating and drinking like other men. Felicita was not superst.i.tious, but there was in her that deep-rooted, instinctive sense of mystery in this double life of ours, dividing our time into sleeping and waking hours, which is often apt to make our dreams themselves omens of importance. She had never dreamed of Roland as she did of those belonging to her who had already pa.s.sed into the invisible world about us. His spirit was not free, perhaps, from its earthly fetters so as to be able to visit her, and haunt her sleeping fancies. But now she began to dream of him frequently, and often in the daytime flashes of memory darted vividly across her brain, lighting up the dark forgotten past, and recalling to her some word of his, or a glance merely. It was an inward persecution from which she could not escape, but it seemed to her to indicate that her persecutor was no more a denizen of this world.

To get rid of these haunting memories as much as possible, she made such a change in her mode of life as astonished all about her. She no longer shut herself up in her library; as she had told Phebe, she resolved to write no more, nor attempt to write, until she had been to Engelberg.

She seemed wishful to attract friends to her, and she renewed old acquaintances.h.i.+ps with members of her own family which she had allowed to drop during these many years. No sooner was it evident that Felicita Sefton was willing to come out of the extremely quiet and solitary life she had led hitherto, and take her place in society both as Lord Riversdale's daughter and as the author of many popular books, than the current of fas.h.i.+on set towards her. She was still a remarkably lovely woman, possessing irresistible attractions in her refined face and soft yet distant manners, as of one walking in a trance, and seeing and hearing things invisible and inaudible to less favored mortals. Quite unconsciously to herself she became the lion of the season, when the next season opened. She had been so difficult to know, that as soon as she was willing to be known invitations poured in upon her, and her house was invaded by a throng of visitors, many of them more or less distantly related to her.

To Hilda this new life was one of unexpected and exquisite delight.

Phebe, also, with her genuine interest in her fellow-creatures, and her warm sympathy in all human joys and sorrows, enjoyed the change, though it perplexed her, and caused her to watch Felicita with anxiety. Felix saw less of it than any one, for he was down in Ess.e.x, leading the tranquil and not very laborious life of a country curate, chafing a little now and then at his inactivity, yet blissful beyond words in the close daily intercourse with Alice. There was no talk of their marriage, but they were young and together. Their happiness was untroubled.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE VOICE OF THE DEAD.

In his lonely garret in the East End, Jean Merle was living in an isolation more complete even than that of Engelberg. There he had known at least the names of those about him, and their faces had grown familiar to him. More than once he had been asked to help when help was sorely needed, and he had felt, though not quite consciously, that there was still a link or two binding him to his fellow-men. But here, an unit among millions, who hustled him at every step, breathed the same air, and shared the common light with him, he was utterly alone. "Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to man," and no man could be more completely isolated than he.

Strangely enough, his Swiss proclivities seemed to have fallen from him like a worn-out garment. The narrow, humble existence of his peasant forefathers, to which he had so readily adapted himself, was no longer tolerable in his eyes. He felt all the force and energy of the life of the great city which surrounded him. His birthright as an Englishman presented itself to his imagination with a splendor and importance that it had never possessed before, even in those palmy days when it was no unthought-of honor that he might some day take his place in the House of Commons. He called himself Jean Merle, for no other name belonged to him; but he felt himself to be an Englishman again, to whom the life of a Swiss peasant would be a purgatory.

Other natural instincts were a.s.serting themselves. He had been a man of genial, social habits, glad to gather round him smiling faces and friendly voices; and this bias of his was stirring into life and shaking off its long stupor. He longed, with intense longing, for some mortal ear into which he could pour the story of his sins and sufferings, and for some human tongue to utter friendly words of counsel to him. It was not enough to pour out his confessions before G.o.d in agonizing prayer; that he had done, and was doing daily. But it was not all. The natural yearning for man's forgiveness, spoken in living human speech, grew stronger within him. There was no longer a chance for him to make even a partial reparation of the wrong he had committed; he felt himself without courage to begin the long conflict again. What his soul hungered for now was to see his life through another man's eyes.

But his money, economize it as he might, was slowly melting away. Unless he could get work--and all his efforts to find it failed--it would not do to remain in England. At Engelberg had secured a position as a wood carver, and his livelihood was a.s.sured. There, too, he possessed a scanty knowledge of the neighbors, and they of him. It would be his wisest course to return there, to forget what he had been, and to draw nearer to him the simple and ignorant people, who might yet be won over to regard him with good-will. This must be done before he found himself penniless as well as friendless. He set aside a certain sum, when that was spent he must once more be an exile.