Mr. Clifford, though a very old man, was still in full and clear possession of his faculties, and had not yet given up an occasional attention to the business of the bank. He was nearly eighty years of age, and his hair was white, and the cold, stern blue eyes were watery and sunken in their sockets. Some years ago, when Samuel Nixey had given up his last hope of winning Phebe, and had married a farmer's daughter, his mother, Mrs. Nixey, had come to the Old Bank as housekeeper to Mr. Clifford, and looked well after his welfare. Felix found him sitting in the wainscoted parlor, a withered, bent, old man, seldom leaving the warm hearth, but keen in sight and memory, living over again in his solitude the many years that had passed over him from his childhood until now. He welcomed Felix with delight, holding his hands, and looking earnestly into his face, with the half-childlike affection of old age.
"I've not seen you since you became a parson," he said, with a sigh; "ah, my lad, you ought to have come to me. You don't get half as much as my cashier, and not a tenth part of what I give my manager. But there! that's your mother's fault, who would never let you touch business. She would never hear of you taking your father's place."
"How could she?" said Felix, indignantly. "Do you think my mother would let me come into the house my father had disgraced and almost ruined?"
"So you've plucked that bitter apple at last!" he answered, in a tone of regret. "I thought it was possible you might never have to taste it. Felix, my boy, your mother paid every farthing of the money your father had, with interest and compound interest; even to me, who begged and entreated to bear the loss. Your mother is a noble woman."
A blessed ray of comfort shot across the gloom in Felix's heart, and lit up his dejected face with a momentary smile; and Mr. Clifford stretched out his thin old hand again, and clasped his feebly.
"Ah, my boy!" he said, "and your father was not a bad man. I know how you are sitting in judgment upon him, as young people do, who do not know what it is to be sorely tempted. I judged him, and my son before him, as harshly as man could do. Remember we judge hardest where we love the most; there's selfishness in it. Our children, our fathers, must be better than other folk's children and fathers. Don't begin to reckon up your father's sins before you are thirty, and don't pass sentence till you're fifty. Judges ought to be old men."
Felix sat down near to the old man, whose chair was in the oriel window, on which the sun was shining warmly. There below him lay the garden where he had played as a child, with the river flowing swiftly past it, and the boat-house in the corner, from which his father and he had so often started for a pleasant hour or two on the rapid current. But he could never think of his father again without sorrow and shame.
"Sin hurts us most as it comes nearest to us," said old Mr. Clifford; "the crime of a Frenchman does not make our blood boil as the crime of an Englishman; our neighbor's sin is not half as black as our kinsman's sin. But when we have to look it in the face in a son, in a father, then we see the exceeding sinfulness of it. Why, Felix, you knew that men defrauded one another; that even men professing godliness were sometimes dishonest."
"I knew it," he answered, "but I never felt it before."
"And I never felt it till I saw it in my son," continued the old man, sadly; "but there are other sins besides dishonesty, of a deeper dye, perhaps, in the sight of our Creator. If Roland Sefton had met with a more merciful man than I am he might have been saved."