"I'm not hard-hearted, God knows," he answered, "but no man likes to give his child to the son of a felon, convicted or unconvicted."
"Then I have done harm by telling you."
"No, no; you have done rightly," he replied, "it was good for me to know the truth. We will let things be for awhile. And yet," he added, his grave, stern face softening a little, "if it would be good for Felicita, tell her that I know all, and that after a battle or two with myself, I am sure to yield. I could not see Alice unhappy; and that lad holds her heart in his hands. After all, she too must bear her part in the sins of the world."
But though Phebe watched for an opportunity for telling Felicita what she had done, no chance came. If Felicita had been reserved before, she inclosed herself in almost unbroken silence now. During her illness she had been on the verge of delirium; and then she had shut her lips with a stern determination, which even her weak and fevered brain could not break. She had once begged Phebe, if she grew really delirious, to dismiss all other attendants, so that no ear but hers might hear her wanderings; but this emergency had not arisen. And since then she had sunk more and more into a stern silence.
Felix had left home, and entered into his lodgings, taking his father's portrait with him. He was not so far from home but that he either visited it, or received visitors from it almost every day. His mother's illness troubled him; or otherwise the change in his life, his first step in independent manhood, would have been one of great happiness to him. He did not feel any deep misgivings as to Alice, and the blessedness of the future with her; and in the mean-time, while he was waiting, there was his work to do.
He had taken orders, not from ambition or any hope of worldly gain, those lay quite apart from the path he had chosen, but from the simple desire of fighting as best he might against the growing vices and miseries of civilization. Step for step with the ever-increasing luxury of the rich he saw marching beside it the gaunt degradation of the poor. The life of refined self-indulgence in the one class was caricatured by loathsome self-indulgence in the other. On the one hand he saw, young as he was, something of the languor and weariness of life of those who have nothing to do, and from satiety have little to hope or to fear; and on the other the ignorance and want which deprived both mind and body of all healthful activity, and in the pressure of utter need left but little scope for hope or fear. He fancied that such civilization sank its victims into deeper depths of misery than those of barbarism.
Before him seemed to lie a huge, weltering mass of slime, a very quagmire of foulness and miasma, in the depths and darkness of which he could dimly discern the innumerable coils of a deadly dragon, breathing forth poison and death into the air, which those beloved of God and himself must breathe, and crushing in its pestilential folds the bodies and souls of immortal men. He was one of the young St. Michaels called by God to give combat to that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which was deceiving the old world.