Eli's Children Part 25

Reports these that lost nothing doubtless in the telling, and which never failed to reach the Rector in a way that seemed to suggest that he was answerable for his son's misdoings.

Then followed other troubles, culminating in an affray with the keepers, an affair which, from the family friendship with old Lord Artingale, could easily have been hushed up; but the Rector jumped at the opportunity he found in his son's dread and evident anxiety to get away from the neighbourhood, so quite in a hurry Frank was shipped off to New Zealand.

And there was peace at the Rectory? Nothing of the kind. There was the misery of hearing endless little stories of Frank's "carryings on," as they were termed; some bill was constantly being brought to the house, with a request that the Rector would pay it, and, to hide his son's disgrace, this he sometimes did. But the annoyance was none the less, and the Rector used to declare plaintively to his wife that if it were not for Julia and Cynthia he would run right away.

"And for me, Eli," said the suffering woman, with a smile.

"And for you, dear," he said, tenderly, and there was peace until some new peccadillo of the eldest son was discovered.

Then to the Rector's dismay he found that Cyril--his mother's darling-- seemed to have taken a leaf out of his brother's book. If the younger brother's career had been to run upon a tram-line laid down by his elder brother, he could not have followed in the course more truly, and just as the Rector was beginning to feel calmed down and happy in the society of his two pretty daughters, troubles concerning Cyril kept cropping up.

"Nice chaps for a parson's sons," said Jabez Fullerton, the princ.i.p.al draper at Lawford, who could afford to speak out, as Mrs Mallow and her daughters sent to Swan and Edgar's for everything. And he did speak out; for, as deacon at his chapel and occasional preacher, he never lost an opportunity of saying a few words by way of practice.

"Nice chaps for a parson's sons! This is the sort of stuff they send to college, and then send back to teach us, in their surplices which we have to pay for the washing of, though we never go to church. Nice fellows they'll be to preach sermons--out of books too--read 'em. We at chapel never read our sermons, eh?"

There was a murmur of acquiescence here, and Mr Jabez Fullerton felt happy.

Not that the Rev Eli Mallow had thought of making his sons clergymen after testing them for a short time. Cyril had, like his brother, been to college, and with a view to his succeeding to the living of Lawford, but, as in the case of Frank, the Rector soon gave him up in despair.

Matters grew worse; then worse still. Expostulation, prayer, anger, all were tried in vain, and, having to bear the trouble to a great extent in silence, so as to hide it from the sick mother, who idolised Cyril, the Rector was at times almost beside himself.

At last there came a crash, and the Rector determined to get this son away before something worse should result.

Emigration was being much talked of just then, and plenty of young men were going out to the various colonies to commence life as squatters both in the far east and west. A couple of the young farmers of the neighbourhood of Lawford were about to start, and, after a stormy scene with his father, Cyril came one day to propose that he should be furnished with a little capital and an outfit, so that he could go and try his luck in Australia.

For a few moments the Rev Eli Mallow was aghast at the idea. He wished Cyril to leave the town, but not to go abroad.

"I don't care where I go," said Cyril; "I'll either try Australia, or go and hunt out Frank and chum with him."

"But we don't know where he is," said the Rector.

"New Zealand."

"Yes, but New Zealand is large."

"Not so large but what a fellow might find out Frank. Everyone would know him."

The Rector sighed, and wished his sons were not so popular with a certain cla.s.s, and then he thought over the position, and shrank from giving his consent. Knowing the mother's intense love for her son, he felt that the parting would nearly break her heart, and after a few moments' pause he said so.

"Oh, you need not fidget about that," said the young man. "I've talked to her about it for days past."

"And what does she say?"

"Well, it upset her a bit at first, but she soon came round, and she thinks it would be the best thing I could do."

It was then with a sense of relief that made him feel ashamed, that the father, after a liberal endowment of money, saw his son sent from Liverpool, after the heartiest promises on the part of the young man to do battle with life and make himself a name and a position in the colony.

"If not for my sake, Cyril, for your mother's," the father had said, as he held his son's hand upon the deck of the Great Central liner.

"Depend upon me this time, father," was the earnest reply, and Cyril went his way across the sea, fully believing in himself that his wild oats were sown, and that now he was about to make a position of substantial basis for himself.

It was a strange thing, and as if a curious kind of clairvoyance made him prophetic, for the Rev Eli Mallow went home, and that evening busied himself over his next Sunday's sermon, involuntarily choosing the parable of the Prodigal Son, and not waking up to the fact of what he had done till he sat there in his study reading the ma.n.u.script over by the light of his shaded lamp.

"Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me," he muttered in a low voice, as, with the ma.n.u.script in his hand, he sat gazing straight before him into the darker part of the room, and then became silent.

"And took his journey into a far country," he muttered again, in the same dreamy abstracted manner, and then there was a longer pause, followed by a deep sigh.

The Rev Eli Mallow rose slowly from his seat, and, with an agonised look in his face, walked up and down the room for some time before sinking back into his chair.

"And there wasted his substance with riotous living."

It did not seem to be his voice that spoke in the silence of that room; but he knew it was his that exclaimed piteously as the king of old--"Ah, Cyril, my son, my son!" Again there was absolute silence in that room, till, quoting once more from the parable which he had made the subject of his discourse, the Rector said softly--

"Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son."

"Yes, and I should forgive him," he continued, after a pause. "I do try to practise as I preach. Poor Cyril! poor wilful boy. I pray heaven that my thoughts have been doing thee wrong."

There was a gentle smile upon his lips then as he took the ma.n.u.script of his sermon and tore it up into very small pieces before consigning it to the waste-paper basket.

"No," he said, "I must not preach a sermon such as that: it is too prophetic of my own position with my sons;" and as we know this prodigal did return penniless, having worked his way back in a merchant brig, to present himself one day at the rectory in tarry canvas trousers, with blackened h.o.r.n.y hands and a reckless defiant look in his eyes that startled the quiet people of the place.

He made no reference as to his having wasted his substance; he talked not of sin, and he alluded in nowise to forgiveness, to being made as one of his father's hired servants, but took his place coolly enough once more in the house, and if no fatted calf was killed, and no rejoicings held, he was heartily welcomed and forgiven once again.

He was his mother's favourite, and truly, in spite of all, there was forgiveness ready in the father's heart. As there was also for Frank, who after some years' silence had suddenly walked in at the rectory gates, rough-looking and boisterous, but not in such a condition as his brother, who had quite scandalised the men-servants, neatly clad in the liveries, of which a new supply had come from London, greatly to the disgust of Smithson in the market-place, who literally scowled at every seam.

PART ONE, CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

AT THE KING'S HEAD.

"What I say is this," exclaimed Jabez Fullerton. "Justice is justice, and right is right."

"Hear, hear!" murmured several voices, as Mr Fullerton glanced round the room, and drew himself up with the pride of a man who believed that he had said something original.

"I hope I'm too good a Christian to oppose the parson," he continued, "and I wouldn't if it had been Mr Paulby, but it's time we stopped somewhere, gentlemen."

"Hear, hear!" again; and several of the gentlemen addressed took their long pipes from their mouths to say it, and then, replacing them, continued to smoke.

"Ever since parson has been back he has been meddling and interfering.

First he kills poor old Sammy Warmoth. Broke his heart, he did. Then he makes Joe Biggins saxon, a man most unfitted for the post, gentlemen.

I say a man most unfitted for the post."

"Hear, hear!"

"Chap as is always looking at you as if he wanted to measure you for a coffin," said Smithson, the tailor.

"Natural enough," said the Churchwarden, chuckling; "you always look at our clothes, Smithson, eh?"