A Son of Hagar: A Romance of Our Time

"What do you think? Why, I went to Doctors' Commons and bought the license – dirt cheap, too, at the price – and now it can be done any day – any day – think of that! So ho! so ho! covering your face, eh? – up, now, up with it – gently. Do you know, they asked me your complexion, the color of your eyes, or something – that old Shylock or somebody – and I couldn't tell for the life of me – there, a peep, just one wee peep! Why, what's this – what the d – What villain – what in the name of mischief is the ma – Why, Greta, you're cry – yes, you are – you are crying!"

Paul had forced up Greta's face with gentle violence, and now he held her at arm's length, surveying her with bewildered looks.

Parson Christian twisted about in his chair. He had not been so much immersed in wars and rumors of wars as to be quite ignorant of what was going on around him. "Greta is but in badly case," he said, pretending to laugh. "She has fettled things in the house over and over again, and she has if't and haffled over everything. She's been longing, surely." The deep voice had a touch of tremor in it this time, and the twinkling old eyes looked hazy.

"Ah, of course!" shouted Paul, in stentorian tones, and he laughed about as heartily as the parson.

Greta's tears were gone in an instant.

"You must go home at once, Paul," she said; "your mother must not wait a moment longer."

He laughed and bantered and talked of his dismissal. She stopped him with a grave face and a solemn word. At last his jubilant spirit was conquered; he realized that something was amiss. Then she told him what happened at the Ghyll on Monday night. He turned white, and at first stood tongue-tied. Next he tried to laugh it off, but the laughter fell short.

"Must have been my brother," he said; "it's true, we're not much alike, but then it was night, dark night, and you had no light but the dim lamp – and at least there's a family resemblance."

"Your brother Hugh was sitting in his room."

Paul's heart sickened with an indescribable sensation.

"You found the door of my mother's room standing open?"

"Wide open."

"And Hugh was in his own room?" said Paul, his eyes flashing and his teeth set.

"I saw him there a moment later."

"My features, my complexion, my height, and my build, you say?"

"The same in everything."

Paul lifted his face, and in that luminous twilight it were an expression of peculiar horror: "In fact, myself – in a glass?"

Greta shuddered and answered, "Just that, Paul; neither more nor less."

"Very strange," he muttered. He was shaken to the depths. Greta crept closer to his breast.

"And when my mother recovered she said nothing?"

"Nothing."

"You did not question her?"

"How could I? But I was hungering for a word."

Paul patted her head with his tenderest touch.

"Have you seen her since?"

"Not since. I have been ill – I mean, rather unwell."

Parson Christian twisted again in his chair. "What do you think, my lad? Greta in a dream last night rose out of bed, went to the stair-head, and there fell to the ground."

"My poor darling," said Paul, the absent look flying from his eyes.

"But, blessed be God, she has no harm," said the parson, and turned once more to his guest.

"Paul, you must hurry away now. Good-bye for the present, dearest. Kiss me good-bye."

But Paul stood there still.

"Greta, do you ever feel that what is happening now has happened before – somehow – somewhere – and where? – when? – the questions keep ringing in your brain and racking your heart – but there is no answer – you are shouting into a voiceless cavern."

His face was as pale as ashes, his eyes were fixed, and his gaze was far away. Greta grew afraid of the horror she had awakened.

"Don't think too seriously about it," she said. "Besides, I may have been mistaken. In fact, Hugh said – "

"Well, what did he say?"

"He made me ashamed. He said I had imagined I saw you and screamed, and so frightened your mother."

"There are men in the world who would see the Lord of Hosts come from the heavens in glory and say it was only a water-spout."

"But, as you said yourself, it was in the night, and very dark. I had nothing but the feeble oil-lamp to see by. Don't look like that, Paul."

The girl lifted a nervous hand and covered his eyes, and laughed a little, hollow laugh.

Paul shook himself free of his stupor.

"Good-night, Greta," he said, tenderly, and walked to the door. Then the vacant look returned.

"The answer is somewhere – somewhere," he said, faintly. He shook himself again, and shouted, in his lusty tones:

"Good-night, all – good-night, good-night!"

The next instant he was gone.

Out in the road, he began to run; but it was not from exertion alone that his breath came and went in gusts. Before he reached the village his nameless sentiment of dread of the unknown had given way to anxiety for his mother. What was this strange illness that had come upon her in his absence? Her angel-face had been his beacon in darkness. She had lifted his soul from the dust. Tortured by the world and the world's law, yet Heaven's peace had settled on her. Let the world say what it would, into her heart the world had not entered.

He hurried on. What a crazy fool he had been to let Natt go off with the trap! Why had not that coxcomb told him what had occurred? He would break every bone in the blockhead's skin.

How long the road was, to be sure! A hundred fears suggested themselves on the way. Would his mother be worse? Would she be still conscious? Why, in God's name, had he ever gone away?

He came by the Flying Horse, and there, tied to the blue post, stood the horse and trap. Natt was inside. There he was, the villain, in front of the fire, laughing boisterously, a glass of hot liquor in his hand.

Paul jumped into the trap and drove away.

It was hardly in human nature that Natt should resist the temptation to show his cronies by ocular demonstration what a knowing young dog he could be if he liked. Natt never tried to resist it.

"Is it all die-spensy?" he asked, with a wink, when, with masterly circumlocution, he had broached his topic.

"It's a fate, I tell tha'," said Tom o' Dint, taking a churchwarden from between his lips; and another thin voice, from a back bench – it was little Jacob Berry's – corroborated that view of the mystery.

A fine scorn sat on the features of Natt as he exploded beneath their feet this mine of supernaturalism.

"Shaf on your bogies and bodderment, say I," he cried; "there are folks as won't believe their own senses. If you'll no' but show me how yon horse of mine can be in two places at once, I'll maybe believe as Master Paul Ritson can be here and in London at the same time. Nowt short o' that'll do for me, I can tell you."

And at this conclusive reasoning Natt laughed, and crowed, and stirred his steaming liquor. It was at that moment that Paul whipped up into the trap and drove away.

"Show me as my horse as I've tied to the post out there is in his stable all the time, and I's not be for saying as maybe I won't give in."

Gubblum Oglethorpe came straggling into the room at that instant, and caught the words of Natt's clinching argument.

"What see a post?" he asked.

"Why, the post afore the house, for sure!"

"Well, I wudna be for saying but I's getten a bit short-sighted, but if theer's a horse tied to a post afore this house, I's not be for saying as I won't be domd!"

Natt ran to the door, followed by a dozen pairs of quizzing eyes. The horse was gone. Natt sat down on the post and looked around in blank astonishment.

"Well, I will be domd!" he said.

At last the bogies had him in their grip.

CHAPTER XIII

By the time that Paul had got to the Ghyll his anxiety had reached the point of anguish. Perhaps it had been no more than a fancy, but he thought as he approached the house that a mist hung about it. When he walked into the hall his footsteps sounded hollow to his ear, and the whole place seemed empty as a vault. The spirit-deadening influence of the surroundings was upon him, when old Dinah Wilson came from the kitchen and looked at him with surprise. Clearly he had not been expected. He wanted to ask twenty questions, but his tongue cleaved to his mouth. The strong man trembled and his courage oozed away.

Why did not the woman speak? How scared she looked, too! He was brushing past her, and up the stairs, when she told him, in faltering tones, that her mistress was gone.

The word coursed through his veins like poison. "Gone! how gone?" he said. Could it be possible that his mother was dead?

"Gone away," said Dinah.

"Away! Where?"

"Gone by train, sir, this afternoon."

"Gone by train," Paul repeated, mechanically, with absent manner.

"There's a letter left, sir; it's on the table in her room."

Recovering his self-possession, Paul darted upstairs at three steps a stride. His mother's room was empty; no fire in the grate; the pictures down from the walls; the table coverless; the few books gone from the shelf; all chill, voiceless, and blind.

What did it mean? Paul stood an instant on the threshold, seeing all in one swift glance, yet seeing nothing. Then, with the first return of present consciousness, his eye fell on the letter that lay on the table. He took it up with trembling fingers. It was addressed in his mother's hand to him. He broke the seal. This is what he read:

"I go to-day to the shelter of the Catholic Church. I had long thought to return to this refuge, though I had hoped to wait until the day your happiness with Greta was complete. That, in Heaven's purposes, was not to be, and I must leave you without a last farewell. Good-bye, dear son, and God bless and guide you. If you love me, do not grieve for me. It is from love of you I leave you. Think of me as one who is at peace, and I will bless you even in heaven. If ever the world should mock you with your mother's name, remember that she is your mother still, and that she loved you to the last. Good-bye, dear Paul; you may never know the day when this erring and sorrowing heart will be allowed, in His infinite pity, to join the choirs above. Then, dearest, from the hour when you read this letter, think of me as dead, for I shall be dead to the world."

Paul held the letter before him, and looked at it long with vacant eyes. Feeling itself seemed gone. Not a tear came from him, not a sigh, not one moan of an overwrought heart escaped him. All was blind, pulseless torpor. He stood there crushed and overwhelmed, a shaken, shattered man. A thousand horrors congealed within him to one deep, dead stupor.

He turned away in silence, and walked out of the house. The empty chambers seemed, as he went, to echo his heavy footsteps. He took the road back toward the vicarage, turning neither to the right nor the left, looking straight before him, and never once shifting his gaze. The road might be long, but now it fretted him no more. The night might be cold, but colder far was the heart within him. The moon might fly behind the cloud floes, and her light burst forth afresh; but for him all was blank night.

In the vicarage the slumberous fire was smoldering down. The straggle-brained guest had been lighted to his bed, and the good parson himself was carrying to his own tranquil closet a head full of the great world's dust and noise. Greta was still sitting before the dying fire, her heart heavy with an indefinable sensation of dread.

When Paul opened the door his face was very pale and his eyes had a strange look; but he was calm, and spoke quietly. He told what had occurred, and read aloud his mother's letter. The voice was strong in which he read it, and never a tremor told of the agony his soul was suffering. Then he sat some time without speaking, and time itself had no reckoning.

Greta scarcely spoke, and the old parson said little. What power had words to express a sorrow like this? Death had its solace; but there was no comfort for death in life.

At last Paul told Parson Christian that he wished the marriage to take place at once – to-morrow, or, at latest, the day after that. He told of their intention to leave England, of his father's friend, and, in answer to questions, of the power of attorney drawn up in the name of his brother.

The old man was deeply moved, but his was the most unselfish of souls. He understood very little of all that was meant by what had been done, and was still to do. But he said, "God bless you and go with you!" though his own wounded heart was bleeding. Greta knelt at his chair, and kissed the tawny old face lined and wrinkled and damp now with a furtive tear. It was agreed that the marriage should take place on Friday. This was Wednesday night.

Paul rose and stepped to the door, and Greta followed him to the porch.

"It is good of you to leave all to your brother," she said.

"We'll not speak of it," he answered.

"Is there not something between you?" she asked.

"Another time, darling."

Greta recalled Hugh Ritson's strange threat. Should she mention it to Paul? She had almost done so, when she lifted her eyes to his face. The weary, worn expression checked her. Not now; it would be a cruelty.

"I knew the answer to that omen was somewhere," he said, "and it has come."

He stepped over the threshold and stood one pace outside. The snow still lay under foot, crusted with frost. The wind blew strongly, and soughed in the stiff and leafless boughs. Overhead the flying moon at that moment broke through a rack of cloud. At the same instant the red glow of the fire-light found its way through the open door, and was reflected on Paul's pallid face.

Greta gasped; a thrill passed through her. There, before her, eye to eye with her once again, was the face she saw at the Ghyll!

CHAPTER XIV

Paul went back home, carrying with him a crushed and broken spirit He threw himself into a chair in a torpor of dejection. When the servants spoke to him, he lifted to their faces two clouded eyes, heavy with suffering, and answered their questions in few words. The maid laid the supper, and told him it was ready. When she returned to clear the cloth, the supper was untouched. Paul stepped up to his mother's room, and sat down before the cold grate. The candle he carried with him burned out.

In the kitchen the servants of the farm and house gossipped long and bickered vigorously. "Whatever ails Master Paul?" "Crossed in love, maybe." "Shaf on sec woman's wit!" "Wherever has mistress gone?" "To buy a new gown, mayhap." "Sista now how a lass's first thowt runs on finery!" "Didsta hear nowt when you drove mistress to the rail, Reuben?" "Nay, nowt." "Dusta say it war thee as drove to the station this afternoon." "I wouldn't be for saying as it warn't." "Wilta be meeting Master Hugh in the forenoon, Natt?" "Nay, ax Natt na questions. He's fair tongue-tied to-neet, Natt is. He's clattering all of it to hisself – swearing a bit, and sec as that."

When the servants had gone to bed, and the house was quiet, Paul still sat in his mother's abandoned room. No one but he knew what he suffered that night. He tried to comprehend the disaster that had befallen him. Why had his mother shut herself in a convent? How should her love for him require that she should leave him? To demand answers to these questions was like knocking at the door of a tomb; the voice was silent that could reply; there came no answer save the dull, heavy, hollow echo of his own uncertain knock. All was blind, dumb, insensate torpor. No outlook; no word; no stimulating pang.

His stupor was broken by a vision that for long hours of that dead night burned in his brain like molten lead. The face which Greta had seen, and which his mother must also have seen, seemed to rise up before him as he sat in that deserted chamber. He saw his own face as he might have seen it in a glass. Not even the blackness of night could conceal it. Clear as a face seen in the day it shone and burned in that dark room. He closed his eyes to shut it out, but it was still before him. It was within him. It was imprinted in features of fire on his brain. He trembled with fear, never until that hour knowing what fear was. It acted upon him like his own ghost.

He knew it was but a phantasy, but no phantasy was ever more horrible. He got up to banish it, and it stood before him face to face. He sunk down again, and it sat beside him eye to eye.

Then it changed. For a moment it faded away into a palpitating mist, and the tension of his gaze relaxed. How blessed was that moment's respite! His thought returned to his mother. "If ever the world should mock you with your mother's name, remember that she is your mother still, and that she loved you to the last." Dear, sacred soul. Little fear that he should forget it! Little fear that the wise world should tarnish the fair shrine of that holy love! Tears of tenderness rose to his eyes, and in the midst of them he thought his mother sat before him. Her head was bent; an all-eating shame was crimsoning her pale cheek. Then he knew that other eyes were upon her, looking into her heart, prying deep down into her dead past, keeping open the heavy eyelids that could never sleep. He looked up; his own shadow was silently gazing down upon both of them.

Paul leaped to his feet and ran out of the room. Surely the spirit of his mother still inhabited the deserted chamber. Surely this was the shadow that had driven her away. Big drops of sweat rolled in beads from his forehead. He went out of the house. Heavy black clouds were adrift in a stormy sky; behind them, the bright moon was scudding.

He walked among the naked trees of the gaunt wood at the foot of Coledale, and listened to the short breathings of the wind among the frost-covered boughs. At every second step he gave a quick glance backward. But at last he saw the thing he looked for – it was walking with him side by side, pace for pace.

He passed slowly out of the wood, not daring now to run. The white fell rose sheer up to the grim, gray crags that hung in shaggy, snowy masses over the black seams of the ravines; and the moon's light rested on them for an instant. Without thought or aim he began to climb. The ascent was perilous at any hour to any foot save that of a mountaineer. The exertion and the watchfulness banished the vision, and his liberated mind turned to Greta. What was life itself now without Greta's love? Nothing but a succession of days. She was the savior of his outcast state; she was his life's spring, whence the waters of content might flow. And a flood of emotion came over him, and in his heart he blessed her. It was then that on that gaunt headland he seemed to see her at his side. But between them, and dividing them, stalked the spectre of himself.

All to the east was dense gloom, save where the pulsating red of the smelting house burned in the distance. With no rest for his foot, Paul walked in the direction of the light, and the shadow of his face walked with him. As the wind went by him it whistled in his ear, and it sounded in that solitude like the low cry of the thing at his side.

Old Laird Fisher was at his work of wheeling the refuse of the ore from the mouth of the furnace, and shooting it down the bank. The glow of the hot stone in the iron barrow that he trundled was reflected in sharp white lights on his wrinkled face.

"Ista theer, Mister Paul?" he said, catching his breath and coughing amid the smoke, and shouting between the gusts of wind.

The slow beat of the engine and the clank of the chain of the cage in the shaft deadened the wind's shrill whistle. The smoke from the bank shot up and swirled away like a long flight of swallows.

Standing there, the vision troubled him no longer. It had been merely a waking phantasy, bred of what Greta said she saw in the snow, and heightened by the shock to his nerves caused by his mother's departure. The sight of Matthew helped to beat it off. His submissive face was the sign of his broken spirit. A tempest had torn up his only hold on the earth. He was but a poor naked trunk flung on the ground, without power of growth or grip of the soil. He was old and he had no hope. Yet he lived on and worked submissively. Paul's own case was different. Destiny had dashed him in unknown seas against unseen rocks. But he was young, he had the power of life, and the stimulus of love. Yet here he was, the prey to an idle fancy, tortured by an agony of fear.

"Good-night to you, Matthew!" he shouted cheerily above the wind, and went away into the night.

He would go home and sleep the fever out of his blood; he took the road; and as he went, the monotonous engine-throb died off behind him. He passed through the village; the street was empty, and it echoed loud to the sound of his footfall. Large shadows fell about him when for an instant the moon shot clear of a cloud. A light burned in a cottage window. Poor Mrs. Truesdale's sick life was within that sleepless chamber lingering out its last days. The wind fell to silence at one moment, and then a child's little cry came out to him in the night.

He walked on, and plunged again into the darkness of the road beyond. The dogs were howling at the distant Ghyll. A sable cloud floated in the sky, and at its back the moon sailed. It was like black hair silvered with gray. But on one spot on the road before him the moon shone clear and white. The place fascinated him like a star. He quickened his pace until he came into the moon's open light. Then it turned to an ashy tint; it lay over the church-yard. His father's grave was only a few paces from the road.

What unseen power had drawn him there? Was it meant that he should understand that all the stings that fate had in store for him were to be in some unsearchable way the refuse of his father's deed? His mind went back to the night of his father's death. He thought of his mother's confession – a confession more terrible to make more fearful to listen to, than a mother ever made before or a son ever heard. And now again, was the disaster of this very night a link in the chain of destiny?

Let no man compare the withering effects of a father's curse with the blasting influence of a father's sin. If the wrath of Providence should fail in its stern and awful retribution, the world in its mercy would not forget that the sins of the fathers must be visited upon the children.

Paul entered the lych-gate and entered the church-yard. The night dew on his cheeks was not colder than his tears as he knelt by his father's grave. At one instant he cursed the world and the world's cruel law. Then there stole into his heart a poison that corroded its dearest memory: he thought of his father with bitterness.

At that moment a strange awe crept over him. He knew, though still only by the eyes of his mind, that the vision had returned. He knew it was standing against the night-sky as a ghastly headstone to the grave. But when he raised his eyes what he saw was more terrible. The face was before him, but it was a dead face now. He saw his own corpse stretched out on his father's grave.

His head fell on the cold sod. He lay like the dead on the grave of the dead. Then he knew that it was ordered above that the cloud of his father's sin should darken his days; that through all the range and change of life he was to be the lonely slave of a sin not his own. His fate was sin-inherited, and the wages of sin is death.

Was it strange that at that moment, when all the earth seemed gloomed by the shadow of a curse that lay blackest over him – when reverence for a father's memory and love learned at a mother's knee were deadened by a sense of irremediable wrong – was it strange that there and then peace fell on him like a dove from heaven?

Orphaned in one hour – now, and not till now – foredoomed to writhe like a worm amid the dust of the world – the man in him arose and shook off its fear.

It was because he came to know – rude man as he was, unlettered, but strong of soul – that there is a Power superior to fate, that the stormiest sea has its Master, that the waif that is cast by the roughest wave on the loneliest shore is yet seen and known.

And the voice of an angel seemed to whisper in his heart the story of Hagar and her son; how the boy was the first-born of his father; how the second-born became the heir; how the woman and son were turned away; how they were nigh to death in the desert; and how, at last, the cry came from heaven, "God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is."