Night and Morning Part 46

Whatever there had hitherto been in the circ.u.mstances connected with Morton, that had roused the interest and excited the romance of Eugenie de Merville, her fancy was yet more attracted by the tone of the letter she now read. For though Morton, more accustomed to speak than to write French, expressed himself with less precision, and a less euphuistic selection of phrase, than the authors and elegans who formed her usual correspondents; there was an innate and rough n.o.bleness--a strong and profound feeling in every line of his letter, which increased her surprise and admiration.

"All that surrounds him--all that belongs to him, is strangeness and mystery!" murmured she; and she sat down to reply.

When Madame Dufour departed with that letter, Eugenie remained silent and thoughtful for more than an hour, Morton's letter before her; and sweet, in their indistinctness, were the recollections and the images that crowded on her mind.

Morton, satisfied by the earnest and solemn a.s.surances of Eugenie that she was not the unknown donor of the sum she reinclosed, after puzzling himself in vain to form any new conjectures as to the quarter whence it came, felt that under his present circ.u.mstances it would be an absurd Quixotism to refuse to apply what the very Providence to whom he had anew consigned himself seemed to have sent to his aid. And it placed him, too, beyond the offer of all pecuniary a.s.sistance from one from whom he could least have brooked to receive it. He consented, therefore, to all that the loquacious tailor proposed to him. And it would have been difficult to have recognised the wild and frenzied fugitive in the stately form, with its young beauty and air of well-born pride, which the next day sat by the side of Eugenie. And that day he told his sad and troubled story, and Eugenie wept: and from that day he came daily; and two weeks--happy, dreamlike, intoxicating to both--pa.s.sed by; and as their last sun set, he was kneeling at her feet, and breathing to one to whom the homage of wit, and genius, and complacent wealth had hitherto been vainly proffered, the impetuous, agitated, delicious secrets of the First Love. He spoke, and rose to depart for ever--when the look and sigh detained him.

The next day, after a sleepless night, Eugenie de Merville sent for the Vicomte de Vaudemont.

CHAPTER XIV.

"A silver river small In sweet accents Its music vents; The warbling virginal To which the merry birds do sing, Timed with stops of gold the silver string."

Sir Richard Fanshawe.

One evening, several weeks after the events just commemorated, a stranger, leading in his hand, a young child, entered the churchyard of H----. The sun had not long set, and the short twilight of deepening summer reigned in the tranquil skies; you might still hear from the trees above the graves the chirp of some joyous bird;--what cared he, the denizen of the skies, for the dead that slept below?--what did he value save the greenness and repose of the spot,--to him alike the garden or the grave! As the man and the child pa.s.sed, the robin, scarcely scared by their tread from the long gra.s.s beside one of the mounds, looked at them with its bright, blithe eye. It was a famous plot for the robin--the old churchyard! That domestic bird--"the friend of man," as it has been called by the poets--found a jolly supper among the worms!

The stranger, on reaching the middle of the sacred ground, paused and looked round him wistfully. He then approached, slowly and hesitatingly, an oblong tablet, on which were graven, in letters yet fresh and new, these words:--

TO THE MEMORY OF ONE CALUMNIATED AND WRONGED THIS BURIAL-STONE IS DEDICATED BY HER SON.

Such, with the addition of the dates of birth and death, was the tablet which Philip Morton had directed to be placed over his mother's bones; and around it was set a simple palisade, which defended it from the tread of the children, who sometimes, in defiance of the beadle, played over the dust of the former race.

"Thy son!" muttered the stranger, while the child stood quietly by his side, pleased by the trees, the gra.s.s, the song of the birds, and reeking not of grief or death,--"thy son!--but not thy favoured son--thy darling--thy youngest born; on what spot of earth do thine eyes look down on him? Surely in heaven thy love has preserved the one whom on earth thou didst most cherish, from the sufferings and the trials that have visited the less-favoured outcast. Oh, mother--mother!--it was not his crime--not Philip's--that he did not fulfil to the last the trust bequeathed to him! Happier, perhaps, as it is! And, oh, if thy memory be graven as deeply in my brother's heart as my own, how often will it warn and save him! That memory!--it has been to me the angel of my life!

To thee--to thee, even in death, I owe it, if, though erring, I am not criminal,--if I have lived with the lepers, and am still undefiled!" His lips then were silent--not his heart!

After a few minutes thus consumed he turned to the child, and said, gently and in a tremulous voice, "f.a.n.n.y, you have been taught to pray--you will live near this spot,--will you come sometimes here and pray that you may grow up good and innocent, and become a blessing to those who love you?"

"Will papa ever come to hear me pray?"

That sad and unconscious question went to the heart of Morton. The child could not comprehend death. He had sought to explain it, but she had been accustomed to consider her protector dead when he was absent from her, and she still insisted that he must come again to life. And that man of turbulence and crime, who had pa.s.sed unrepentant, unabsolved, from sin to judgment: it was an awful question, "If he should hear her pray?"

"Yes!" said he, after a pause,--"yes, f.a.n.n.y, there is a Father who will hear you pray; and pray to Him to be merciful to those who have been kind to you. f.a.n.n.y, you and I may never meet again!"

"Are you going to die too? Mechant, every one dies to f.a.n.n.y!" and, clinging to him endearingly, she put up her lips to kiss him. He took her in his arms: and, as a tear fell upon her rosy cheek, she said, "Don't cry, brother, for I love you."

"Do you, dear f.a.n.n.y? Then, for my sake, when you come to this place, if any one will give you a few flowers, scatter them on that stone. And now we will go to one whom you must love also, and to whom, as I have told you, he sends you; he who--Come!"

As he thus spoke, and placed f.a.n.n.y again on the ground, he was startled to see: precisely on the spot where he had seen before the like apparition--on the same spot where the father had cursed the son, the motionless form of an old man. Morton recognised, as if by an instinct rather than by an effort of the memory, the person to whom he was bound.

He walked slowly towards him; but f.a.n.n.y abruptly left his side, lured by a moth that flitted duskily over the graves.

"Your name, sir, I think, is Simon Gawtrey?" said Morton. "I have came to England in quest of you."

"Of me?" said the old man, half rising, and his eyes, now completely blind, rolled vacantly over Morton's person--"Of me?--for what?--Who are you?--I don't know your voice!"

"I come to you from your son!"

"My son!" exclaimed the old man, with great vehemence,--"the reprobate!--the dishonoured!--the infamous!--the accursed--"

"Hus.h.!.+ you revile the dead!"

"Dead!" muttered the wretched father, tottering back to the seat he had quitted,--"dead!" and the sound of his voice was so full of anguish, that the dog at his feet, which Morton had not hitherto perceived, echoed it with a dismal cry, that recalled to Philip the awful day in which he had seen the son quit the father for the last time on earth.

The sound brought f.a.n.n.y to the spot; and, with a laugh of delight, which made to it a strange contrast, she threw herself on the gra.s.s beside the dog and sought to entice it to play. So there, in that place of death, were knit together the four links in the Great Chain;--l.u.s.ty and blooming life--desolate and doting age--infancy, yet scarce conscious of a soul--and the dumb brute, that has no warrant of a Hereafter!

"Dead!--dead!" repeated the old man, covering his sightless b.a.l.l.s with his withered hands. "Poor William!"

"He remembered you to the last. He bade me seek you out--he bade me replace the guilty son with a thing pure and innocent, as he had been had he died in his cradle--a child to comfort your old age! Kneel, f.a.n.n.y, I have found you a father who will cherish you--(oh! you will, sir, will you not?)--as he whom you may see no more!"

There was something in Morton's voice so solemn, that it awed and touched both the old man and the infant; and f.a.n.n.y, creeping to the protector thus a.s.signed to her, and putting her little hands confidingly on his knees, said--

"f.a.n.n.y will love you if papa wished it. Kiss f.a.n.n.y."

"Is it his child--his?" said the blind man, sobbing. "Come to my heart; here--here! O G.o.d, forgive me!" Morton did not think it right at that moment to undeceive him with regard to the poor child's true connexion with the deceased: and he waited in silence till Simon, after a burst of pa.s.sionate grief and tenderness, rose, and still clasping the child to his breast, said--

"Sir, forgive me!--I am a very weak old man--I have many thanks to give--I have much, too, to learn. My poor son! he did not die in want,--did he?"

The particulars of Gawtrey's fate, with his real name and the various aliases he had a.s.sumed, had appeared in the French journals, had been partially copied into the English; and Morton had expected to have been saved the painful narrative of that fearful death; but the utter seclusion of the old man, his infirmity, and his estranged habits, had shut him out from the intelligence that it now devolved on Philip to communicate. Morton hesitated a little before he answered:

"It is late now; you are not yet prepared to receive this poor infant at your home, nor to hear the details I have to state. I arrived in England but to-day. I shall lodge in the neighbourhood, for it is dear to me.

If I may feel sure, then, that you will receive and treasure this sacred and last deposit bequeathed to you by your unhappy son, I will bring my charge to you to-morrow, and we will then, more calmly than we can now, talk over the past."

"You do not answer my question," said Simon, pa.s.sionately; "answer that, and I will wait for the rest. They call me a miser! Did I send out my only child to starve? Answer that!"

"Be comforted. He did not die in want; and he has even left some little fortune for f.a.n.n.y, which I was to place in your hands."

"And he thought to bribe the old miser to be human! Well--well--well--I will go home."

"Lean on me!"

The dog leapt playfully on his master as the latter rose, and f.a.n.n.y slid from Simon's arms to caress and talk to the animal in her own way. As they slowly pa.s.sed through the churchyard Simon muttered incoherently to himself for several paces, and Morton would not disturb, since he could not comfort, him.

At last he said abruptly, "Did my son repent?"

"I hoped," answered Morton, evasively, "that, had his life been spared, he would have amended!"

"Tush, sir!--I am past seventy; we repent!--we never amend!" And Simon again sunk into his own dim and disconnected reveries.

At length they arrived at the blind man's house. The door was opened to them by an old woman of disagreeable and sinister aspect, dressed out much too gaily for the station of a servant, though such was her reputed capacity; but the miser's affliction saved her from the chance of his comment on her extravagance. As she stood in the doorway with a candle in her hand, she scanned curiously, and with no welcoming eye, her master's companions.

"Mrs. Boxer, my son is dead!" said Simon, in a hollow voice.

"And a good thing it is, then, sir!"

"For shame, woman!" said Morton, indignantly. "Hey-dey! sir! whom have we got here?"