She's All the World to Me Part 22

Christian leaped up and took his father by both hands, but his eyes were not raised to the troubled face.

"This is worse than all," he said, "but G.o.d knows everything. He will make me answer for it."

"What is the debt?" asked Balladhoo, with an effort to be calm.

"Money squandered in England."

The old man shook his head with an impatient gesture.

"I mean how much?"

"A thousand pounds." There was a pause.

"We can meet it," said Balladhoo; "and now, my son, cheer up; set your face the right way, and His servant shall not be ashamed."

Christian strode up and down the room. His agitation was greater than before. "I feel less than a man," he said. "Oh, but a hidden sin is a mean thing, father--a dwarfing, petrifying, corroding, unmanly thing.

And to think that I could descend so low as to try to conceal it--a part of it--by consorting with a gang of lawless fellows--by a vulgar outrage that might have ended in death itself but that the hand of Heaven interposed!"

"You are not the first," answered Balladhoo, "who has descended from deceit to the margin of crime; but it isn't for me to judge you. Read your misfortunes, my lad, as Heaven writes them. Are they not warnings against the want of manliness? No, it's not for me to say it; but if there's one thing truer than another, it is that the world wants _men_.

Clever fellows, good fellows, it has ever had in abundance, but in all ages the world's great want has been _men_."

Balladhoo glanced down at Mona. Throughout this interview she had sat with eyes bent on her lap. The old man touched the arm of his son and continued:

"As for the hand of Heaven, it has worked through the hand of this dear, brave girl. You owe her your life, Christian, and so do I."

Then the young man, with eyes aflame, walked to Mona and lifted her into his arms. The girl looked very beautiful in her confusion, and while she sobbed on Christian's breast, and Balladhoo looked on with wondering eyes, Christian confessed everything; how, in effect, Mona had been his wife for six years past, and little Ruby was their child.

It was a staggering blow. But when the surprise of it was past, all was forgiven.

"You love my boy?" said Balladhoo, turning to Mona.

The girl could not answer in words. She threw her arms around the old man's neck, and he kissed her. Then through the tears that had gathered in his blurred old eyes there shot a merry gleam as he said above the girl's hidden face, "Oh, so I've got to be happy yet, I find."

There came the noise of people entering the house. In another moment Kerruish Kinvig had burst in with one of the Castle Rushen men behind him.

"Manxman-like, he's a dog after the fair, and away from Peel to-night,"

bawled Kinvig, indicating the subject of his inconsequent remarks by a contemptuous lurch of his hand over his shoulder.

"We stayed too long in hiding," said the man, with a glance of self-justification.

"Of course," shouted Kinyig, oblivious of the insinuation against his own leaders.h.i.+p; "and who hasn't heard that the crab that lies always in its hole is never fat?"

"The fis.h.i.+ng-boat is still at sea, sir. It's scarce likely that the men will come back to Peel," said the man, addressing Balladhoo.

"Who dreamed that they would?" cried Kinvig. "What black ever stamped on his own foot?"

"We're trusting you think we've done our best, sir," continued the man, ignoring the interruptions.

"Eaten bread is quick forgotten," shouted Kinvig. "What you've done you've done, and there's an end of it, and it's not much either; and if I were magistrate, I'd have the law on the lot of you for a pack of incompetent loblolly boys. Wouldn't you, Christian?"

"You have done your best," said Balladhoo, and the man left them. "As for you, Kerruish," he added, "if you'd had the ill-luck to succeed, think what a sad dog you must have been by this time; you would have had nothing to growl about."

Christian had walked to the window. "Hark," he said, turning to Mona, "the wind is rising. What of those poor fellows outside?" The melancholy sough of the wind could be heard above the low moan of the distant sea.

Mona thought of Danny, and the tears came again into her eyes.

It was time for the girl to return home. Christian put on his hat to accompany her, and when they left the house together he laughed, dejected though he was, at the bewildered look on the face of Kerruish Kinvig as he glanced in stupid silence from Balladhoo to them, and from them back to Balladhoo.

CHAPTER XX

THE FAIRY THAT CAME FOR RUBY

The night was dark, and the wind was chill outside, but light and warmth were in two happy hearts. With arms entwined and clasped hands they walked down the familiar road, transfigured now into strange beauty at every step. When two souls first pour out their flood of love, whatever the present happiness, it is the unconscious sense of a glad future that thrills them. It was the half-conscious sense of a sad past shared together that touched these two to-night.

"I feel like another man," said Christian; "to have the weight of these six years of disguise lifted away is a new birth." He seemed to breathe more freely.

"How glad I am it is gone, this haunting secret," said Mona, with a sigh of relief; but suddenly a fresh torment suggested itself. "What will people say?" she asked.

"Don't think of that. Let people say what they will. In these relations of life the world has always covered its nakedness in the musty rags of its old conventions, and dubbed its clothes morality. We'll not heed what people say, Mona."

"But the child?" said the girl, with some tremor of voice.

Christian answered the half-uttered question.

"Ruby is as much my daughter as Rachel was the daughter of Laban, and you are even now as much my wife as she was the wife of Jacob."

Mona glanced up into his face. "Can this be Christian?" she thought.

"Where one man sets himself apart for one woman," he continued, "there is true marriage, whether the mystic symbol of the Church be used or not. No; I've feared the world too long. I mean to face it now."

"I'm afraid I don't understand, Christian," answered Mona. "But surely to defy the world is foolishness, and marriage is a holy thing."

He stopped, and, with a smile, kissed the girl tenderly. "Never fear, darling--_that_ shall be made as the world wants it. I was thinking of the past, not the future. And if ours was a sin, it was one of pa.s.sion only, and we whispered each other--did we not?--that He who gave the love would forgive its transgression." Then they walked on. In the distance the hill above glowed red through the darkness. Danny's Contrary fire, which had smoldered all day, showed brightly again.

"Oh, how glad I am that all is over," repeated the girl, creeping closer beneath Christian's arm. "You said to-night to your father that a secret sin is a corroding thing. How truly I've felt it so when I've thought of my own poor father. You never knew him. He died before you came to us.

He was a good, simple man, and loved us, though perhaps he left us poorer than we might have been, and more troubled than we were in the old days at Glen Rushen."

"No, I never knew him; but the thought of him has stung me to the quick when I've seen his daughter working for daily bread. It has been then that I've felt myself the meanest of men."

"Christian," continued Mona, regardless of the interruption, "have you ever thought that the dead are links that connect us with the living?"

"How?"

"Well, in this way. From our kin in heaven we can have no secrets; and when the living kin guess our hidden thought, our secret act, perhaps it has been our dead kin who have whispered of it."