He repeated Swanhild’s story, and then, hoping to catch his father in the vestry before the service began, he hurried off, leaving Cecil to the only companionship she could have borne in her great happiness—that of little Lance.
But Roy found himself too late to catch his father, there was nothing for it but to wait, and, anxious to speak to him at the earliest opportunity, he made his way into the chapel that he might get hold of him when the service was over, for otherwise there was no saying how long he might not linger talking with the other deacons, who invariably wanted to ask his advice about a hundred and one things.
He was at this moment giving out the hymn, and Roy liked to hear him do this once more; it carried him back to his boyhood—to the times when there had been no difference of opinion between them. He sighed just a little, for there is a sadness in all division because it reminds us that we are still in the days of school-time, that life is as yet imperfect, and that by different ways, not as we should wish all in the same way, we are being trained and fitted for a perfect unity elsewhere.
Mr. Boniface was one of those men who are everywhere the same; he carried his own atmosphere about with him, and sitting now in the deacon’s seat beneath the pulpit he looked precisely as he did in his home or in his shop. It was the same quiet dignity, that was noticeable in him, the same kindly spirit, the same delightful freedom from all self-importance. One could hardly look at him without remembering the fine old saying, “A Christian is God Almighty’s gentleman.”
When, by and by, he listened to Roy’s story, told graphically enough as they walked home together, his regret for having misjudged Frithiof was unbounded. He was almost as impatient to get hold of Darnell as his son was.
“Still,” he observed, “you will not gain much by going to-night, why not start to-morrow by the first train?”
“If I go now,” said Roy, “I shall be home quite early to-morrow evening, and Tuesday is Christmas eve—a wretched day for traveling. Besides, I can’t wait.”
Both father and mother knew well enough that it was the thought of Sigrid that had lent him wings, and Mr. Boniface said no more, only stipulating that he should be just and generous to the offender.
“Don’t visit your own annoyance on him, and don’t speak too hotly,” he said. “Promise him that he shall not be prosecuted or robbed of his character if only he will make full confession, and see what it was that led him to do such a thing, I can’t at all understand it. He always seemed to me a most steady, respectable man.”
Roy being young and having suffered severely himself through Darnell’s wrong-doing, felt anything but judicial as he traveled westward on that cold December night; he vowed that horsewhipping would be too good for such a scoundrel, and rehearsed interviews in which his attack was brilliant and Darnell’s defense most feeble. Then he dozed a little, dreamed of Sigrid, woke cold and depressed to find that he must change carriages at Bristol, and finally after many vicissitudes was landed at Plymouth at half-past nine on a damp and cheerless winter morning.