The Son of His Father; vol. 2/3

THE SON OF HIS FATHER. VOL. II.
BY MRS. OLIPHANT AUTHOR OF “IT WAS A LOVER AND HIS LASS,” “AGNES,” “THE LAIRD OF NORLAW,” ETC., ETC. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED, 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1887. All rights reserved.

THE SON OF HIS FATHER.
Out in the world.
It was not so long a journey as that he had taken to Liverpool with the curate, but how different it was! Then he had his home to return to; he had set forth curious indeed and interested, with a hope of discovering something about himself, but always with the idea of going back to the quiet of his own life and working it out. He had his natural anchorage, his harbour to sail back to, and no need to think of facing by himself the storms of life. He had not been happy then; but even his sadness, his trouble, even the mystery thrown into his life, his dis quietude, all these were so different. That was only a sort of amateur trouble, a playing at distress. Now it enveloped him on every side. He sat down opposite to his mother in the railway carriage, and saw everything that he had known gliding away from him, disappearing into the distance. He did not know where he was going, or to what. She said nothing to him, not a word of his home, or of his new life; and his old had come to an end, as if he had died.
As if he had died! In some ways it would have been more satisfactory to have died. Then his name and memory, the name which he knew best, without any mystery attached to it, would always have remained in the same place, and the whole village would have been sorry, and talked of him with bated breath, shaking their heads in sympathy. Poor boy, to have died so young! and Elly and the boys would have looked after his grave. Elly at least would have done it. She would never have forgotten. Tears came into John’s eyes when he thought of Elly going with her flowers to his grave, crying a little, never forgetting him. He made a little picture to himself, in which he saw her leaning over the turf, arranging her posy to his memory: and his eyes moistened with sadness which had in it an exquisite sort of melancholy pleasure. For after all it is not so dreadful for the very young to contemplate dying: the violets on their grave breathe to them a great consolation and the thought of the universal sympathy; they have not got so engrafted into life, so determined in all its habits as their elders. But when John turned to the other side, and found himself facing that blank world of the unknown—not knowing what he was to do, having, so to speak, no say in it, depending entirely upon what She should decide—there was no consolation at all in it, nothing that corresponded to the violets on the grave.