Cobwebs and Cables Part 18

For as years pa.s.sed on Felicita had attained some portion of her ambition. In Riversborough it seemed as if she was the first writer of the age; and though in London she had not won one of those extraordinary successes which place an author suddenly at the top of the ladder, she was steadily climbing upward, and was well known for her good and conscientious work. The books she wrote were clever, though cynical and captious; yet here and there they contained pa.s.sages of pathos and beauty which insured a fair amount of favor. Her work was always welcome and well paid, so well that she could live comfortably on the income she made for herself, without falling back on her marriage settlement.

Without an undue strain upon her mental powers she could earn a thousand a year, which was amply sufficient for her small household.

Though Roland Sefton had lavished upon his high-born wife all the pomp and luxury he considered fitting to the position she had left for him, Felicita's own tastes and habits were simple. Her father, Lord Riversford, had been but a poor baron with an enc.u.mbered estate, and his only child had been brought up in no extravagant ways. Now that she had to earn most of the income of the household, for herself she had very few personal expenses to curtail. Thanks to Madame and Phebe, the house was kept in exquisite order, saving Felicita the shock of seeing the rooms she dwelt in dingy and shabby. Excepting the use of a carriage, there was no luxury that she greatly missed.

As she became more widely known, Felicita was almost compelled to enter into society, though she did it reluctantly. Old friends of her father's, himself a literary man, sought her out; and her cousins from Riversford insisted upon visiting her and being visited as her relations. She could not altogether resist their overtures, partly on account of her children, who, as they grew up, ought not to find themselves without friends. But she went from home with unwillingness, and returned to the refuge of her quiet study with alacrity.

There was only one house where she visited voluntarily. A distant cousin of hers had married a country clergyman, whose parish was about thirty miles from London, in the flat, green meadows of Ess.e.x. The Pascals had children the same age as Felix and Hilda; and when they engaged a tutor for their own boys and girls they proposed to Felicita that her children should join them. In Mr. Pascal's quiet country parsonage were to be met some of the clearest and deepest thinkers of the day, who escaped from the conventionalities of London society to the simple and pleasant freedom they found there. Mr. Pascal himself was a leading spirit among them, with an intellect and a heart large and broad enough to find companionship in every human being who crossed his path. There was no pleasure in life to Felicita equal to going down for a few days' rest to this country parsonage.

That she was still mourning bitterly for the husband, whose name could never be mentioned to her, all the world believed. It made those who loved her most feel very tenderly toward her. Though she never put on a widow's garb she always wore black dresses. The jewels Roland had bought for her in profusion lay in their cases, and never saw the light. She could not bring herself to look at them; for she understood better now the temptation that had a.s.sailed and conquered him. She knew that it was for her chiefly, to gratify an ambition cherished on her account, that he had fallen into crime.

"I worship my mother still," said Felix one day to Phebe, "but I feel more and more awe of her every day. What is it that separates her from us? It would be different if my father had not died."

"Yes, it would have been different," answered Phebe, thinking of how terrible a change it must have made in their young lives if Roland Sefton had not died. She, too, understood better what his crime had been, and how the world regarded it; and she thanked G.o.d in her secret soul that Roland was dead, and his wife and children saved from sharing his punishment. It had all been for the best, sad as it was at the time.

Madame also was comforted, though she had not forgotten her son. It was the will of G.o.d: it was G.o.d who had called him, as He would call her some day. There was no bitterness in her grief, and she did not perplex her soul with brooding over the impenetrable mystery of death.

CHAPTER XXV.

DEAD TO THE WORLD.

In an hospital at Lucerne a peasant had been lying ill for many weeks of a brain fever, which left him so absolutely helpless that it was impossible to turn him out into the streets on his recovery from the fever, as he had no home or friends to go to. When his mind seemed clear enough to give some account of himself, he was incoherent and bewildered in the few statements he made. He did not answer to his own name, Jean Merle; and he appeared incapable of understanding even a simple question. That his brain had been, perhaps, permanently affected by the fever was highly probable.

When at length the authorities of the hospital were obliged to discharge him, a purse was made up for him, containing enough money to keep him in his own station for the next three months.

By this time Jean Merle was no longer confused and unintelligible when he opened his lips, but he very rarely uttered a word beyond what was absolutely necessary. He appeared to the physicians attending him to be bent on recollecting something that had occurred in the past before his brain gave way. His face was always preoccupied and moody, and scarcely any sound would catch his ear and make him lift up his head. There must be mania somewhere, but it could not be discovered.

"Have you any plans for the future, Merle?" he was asked the day he was discharged as cured.

"Yes, Monsieur," he replied; "I am a wood-carver by trade."

"And where are you going to now?" was the next question.

"I must go to Engelberg," answered Merle, with a shudder.

"Ah! to Monsieur Nicodemus; then," said the doctor, "you must be a good hand at your work to please him, my good fellow."

"I am a good hand," replied Merle.

The valley of Engelberg lies high, and is little more than a cleft in the huge ma.s.s of mountains; a narrow gap where storms gather, and bring themselves into a focus. In the summer thunder-clouds draw together, and fill up the whole valley, while rain falls in torrents, and the streams war and rage along their stony channels. But when Jean Merle returned to it in March, after four months' absence, the valley was covered with snow stretching up to the summits of the mountains around it, save only where the rocks were too precipitous for it to lodge.

He had come back to Engelberg because there was the grave of the friendless man who bore his former name. It had a fascination for him, this grave, where he was supposed to be at rest. The handsome granite cross, bearing only the name of Roland Sefton and the date of his death, attracted him, and held him by an irresistible spell. At first, in the strange weakness of his mind, he could hardly believe but that he was dead, and this inexplicable second life as Jean Merle was an illusion.

It would not have amazed him if he had been invisible and inaudible to those about him. That which filled him with astonishment and terror was the fact that the people took him to be what he said he was, a Swiss peasant, and a wood-carver.

He had no difficulty in getting work as soon as he had done a piece as a specimen of his skill. Monsieur Nicodemus recognized a delicate and cultivated hand, and a faithful delineator of nature. As he acquired more skill with steady practice he surpa.s.sed the master's most dexterous helper, and bid fair to rival Monsieur Nicodemus himself. But Jean Merle had no ambition; there was no desire to make himself known, or put his productions forward. He was content with receiving liberal wages, such as the master, with the generosity of a true artist, paid to him. But for the unflagging care he expended upon his work, his fellow-craftsmen would have thought him indifferent to it.

For nine months in the year Jean Merle remained in Engelberg, giving himself no holiday, no leisure, no breathing time. He lived on the poorest fare, and in the meanest lodging. His clothing was often little better than rags. His wages brought him no relaxation from toil, or delivered him from self-chosen wretchedness. Silent and morose, he lived apart from all his fellows, who regarded him as a half-witted miser.

When the summer season brought flights of foreign tourists, Merle disappeared, and was seen no more till autumn. n.o.body knew whither he went, but it was believed he acted as a guide to some of the highest and most perilous of the Alps. When he came back to his work at the end of the season, his blackened and swarthy face, from which the skin had peeled, and his hands wounded and torn as if from scaling jagged cliffs, bore testimony to these conjectures.

He never entered the church when ma.s.s was performed, or any congregation a.s.sembled; but at rare intervals he might be seen kneeling on the steps before the high altar, his s.h.a.ggy head bent down, and his frame shaken with repressed sobs which no one could hear. The cure had tried to win his confidence, but had failed. Jean Merle was a heretic.

When he was spoken to he would speak, but he never addressed himself to any one. He was not a native-born Swiss, and he did not seek naturalization, or claim any right in the canton. He did not seek permission to marry or to build a house, but as he was skilful and industrious and thrifty, a man in the prime of life, the commune left him alone.

He seemed to have taken it as a self-imposed task that he should have the charge of the granite cross, erected over the man whose death he had witnessed. He was recognized in Engelberg as the man who had spent the last hours with the buried Englishman, but no suspicion attached to him.

So careful was he of the monument that it was generally rumored he received a sum of money yearly for keeping it in order. No doubt the friends of the rich Englishman, who had erected so handsome a stone to his memory, made it worth the man's while to attend to it. Besides this grave, which he could not keep himself from haunting, Engelberg attracted him by its double a.s.sociation with Felicita. Here he had seen her for the first and for the last time. There was no other spot in the world, except the home he had lost forever, so full of memories of her.

He could live over again every instant of each interview with her, with all the happy interval that lay between them. The rest of his life was steeped in shadow; the earlier years before he knew Felicita were pale and dim; the time since he lost her was unreal and empty, like a confused dream.

After a while a dull despondency succeeded to the acute misery of his first winter and summer. His second fraud had been terribly successful; in a certain measure he was duped by it himself. All the world believed him to be dead, and he lived as a shadow among shadows. The wild and solitary ice-peaks he sometimes scaled seemed to him the unsubstantial phantasmagoria of a troubled sleep. He wondered with a dull amazement if the creva.s.ses which yawned before him would swallow him up, or the shuddering violence of an avalanche bury him beneath it. His life had been as a tale that is told, even to its last word, death.

PART II.

CHAPTER I.

AFTER MANY YEARS.

The busy, monotonous years ran through their course tranquilly, marked only by a change of residence from the narrow little house suited to Felicita's slender means to a larger, more commodious, and more fashionable dwelling-place in a West End square. Both Felicita and Phebe had won their share of public favor and a fair measure of fame; and the new home was chosen partly on account of an artist's studio with a separate entrance, through which Phebe could go in and out, and admit her visitors and sitters, in independence of the rest of the household.

Never once had Felix wavered in his desire to take orders and become a clergyman, from the time his boyish imagination had been fired by the stories of his great-grandfather's perils and labors in the Jura.

Felicita had looked coldly on his resolution, having a quiet contempt for English clergymen, in spite of her friendship for Mr. Pascal, if friendship it could be called. For each year as it pa.s.sed over Felicita left her in a separation from her fellow-creatures, always growing more chilly and dreary. It seemed to herself as if her lips were even losing the use of language, and that only with her pen could she find vent in expression. And these written thoughts of hers, printed and published for any eye to read, how unutterably empty of all but bitterness she found them. She almost marvelled at the popularity of her own books. How could it be that the cynical, scornful pictures she drew of human nature and human fellowship could be read so eagerly? She felt ashamed of her children seeing them, lest they should learn to distrust all men's truth and honor, and she would not suffer a word to be said about them in her own family.

But Madame Sefton, in her failing old age, was always ready to sympathize with Felix, and to help to keep him steady to her own simple faith; and Phebe was on the same side. These two women, with their quiet, unquestioning trust in G.o.d, and sweet charity toward their fellow-men, did more for Felix than all the opposing influences of college life could undo; and when his grandmother's peaceful and happy death set the last seal on her truthful life, Felix devoted himself with renewed earnestness to the career he had chosen. To enter the lists in the battle against darkness, and ignorance, and sin, wherever these foes were to be met in close quarters, was his ambition; and the enthusiasm with which he followed it made Felicita smile, yet sigh with unutterable bitterness as she looked into the midnight gloom of her own soul.

It became quite plain to Felicita as the years pa.s.sed by that her son was no genius. At present there was a freshness and singleness of purpose about him, which, with the charm of his handsome young face and the genial simplicity of his manners, made him everywhere a favorite, and carried him into circles where a graver man and a deeper thinker could not find entrance; but let twenty years pa.s.s by, and Felix, she said to herself, would be nothing but a commonplace country clergyman, looking after his glebe lands and riding lazily about his parish, talking with old women and consulting farmers about his crops and cattle. She felt disappointed in him; and this disappointment removed him far away from her. The enchanted circle of her own isolation was complete.

The subtle influence of Felicita's dissatisfaction was vaguely felt by Felix. He had done well at Oxford, and had satisfied his friend and tutor, Mr. Pascal; but he knew that his mother wished him to make a great name there, and he had failed to do it. Every day, when he spent a few minutes in Felicita's library, lined with books which were her only companions, their conversation grew more and more vapid, unless his mother gave utterance to some of her sarcastic sayings, which he only half understood and altogether disliked.

But in Phebe's studio all was different; he was at home there. Though it was separate from the house, it had from the first been the favorite haunt of all the other members of the family. Madame had been wont to bring her knitting and sit beside Phebe's easel, talking of old times, and of the dear son she had lost so sorrowfully. Felix had read his school-boy stories aloud to her whilst she was painting; and Hilda flitted in and out restlessly, carrying every bit of news she picked up from her girl friends to Phebe. Even Felicita was used to steal in silently in the dusk, when no one else was there, and talk in her low sad voice as she talked to no one else.

As soon as Felix was old enough, within a few months of Madame's death, he took orders, and accepted a curacy in a poor and densely populated London district. It was not much more than two miles from home, but it was considered advisable that he should take lodgings near his vicar's church, and dwell in the midst of the people with whom he had to do. The separation was not so complete as if he had gone into a country parish, but it brought another blank into the home, which had not yet ceased to miss the tranquil and quiet presence of the old grandmother.

"I shall not have to fight with wolves like Felix Merle, my great-grandfather," said Felix, the evening before he left home, as he and Phebe were sitting over her studio fire. "I think sometimes I ought to go out as a missionary to some wild country. Yet there are dangers to meet here in London, and risks to run; ay! and battles to fight. I shall have a good fist for drunken men beating helpless women in my parish. I couldn't stand by and see a woman ill-used without striking a blow, could I, Phebe?"

"I hope you'll strike as few blows as you can," she answered, smiling.

"How could I help standing up for a woman when I think of my mother, and you, and little Hilda, and her who is gone?" asked Felix.

"Is there n.o.body else?" inquired Phebe, with a mischievous tone in her pleasant voice.