Cobwebs and Cables

by Hesba Stretton

"Oh! she's quite the fine lady," answered Simon. "Mrs. Roland Sefton, Lord Riversdale's daughter that was, took quite a fancy to her, and had her to live with her in London; not as a servant, you know, but as a friend; and she paints pictures wonderful. My mother, who lives housekeeper with Mr. Clifford, hears say she can get sixty pounds or more for one likeness. Think of that now! If she'd been my wife what a fortune she'd have been to me!"

"Has she sold this place?" asked Jean Merle.

"There it is," he replied; "she gave her father a faithful promise never to part with it, or I'd have bought it myself. She comes here once a year with Miss Hilda and Mr. Felix, and they stay a week or two; and it's shut up all the rest of the time. I've got the key here if you'd like to look inside at old Dummy's carving."

How familiar, yet how different, the interior of the cottage seemed! He knew all these carvings, curious and beautiful, which lined the walls and decorated every article of the old oak furniture. But the hearth was cold, and there was no pleasant disorder about the small house telling its story of daily work. In the deep recess of the window-frame, where the western sun was already shining, stood old Marlowe's copy of a carved crucifix, which he had himself once brought from the Tyrol, and lent to him before finding a place for it in his own home. The sacred head was bowed down so low as to be almost hidden under the shadow of the crown of thorns. At the foot of the cross, in delicately small old English letters, the old man had carved the words, "Come unto me all ye that be weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He remembered pointing out the mistake that he had made to old Marlowe.

"I like it best," said the dumb man; "I have often been weary, but not with labor; weary of myself, weary of the world, weary of life, weary of everything but my Phebe. That is what Christ says to me."

Jean Merle could see the old man's speaking face again, and the fingers moving less swiftly when spelling out the words to him, than when he was talking to Phebe. Weary! weary! was it not so with him? Could any man on earth be more weary than he was?

He loitered back to Riversborough through the cool of the evening, with the pale stars shining dimly in the twilight of the summer sky; pondering, brooding over what he had seen and heard that day. He had already done much of what he had come to England to do; but what next? What was the path he ought to take now? He was in a labyrinth, where there were many false openings leading no-whither; and he had no clue to guide him. All these years he had lain as one dead in the coil he had wound about himself, but now he was living again. There was agony in the life that he had entered into, but it was better than the apathy of his death in life.

He returned to London, and hired a garret for a small weekly rent, where he would lodge until he could resolve what to do. But week after week passed without bringing to his mind the solution of the problem. Remorse had given place to repentance; but despair had not been succeeded by hope. There was nothing to hope for. The irrevocable past stood between him and any reparation for his sin which his soul earnestly desired to make. An easy thing, and light, it would have been to put himself into the power of his enemy, Mr. Clifford, and bear the penalty of the law. He had suffered a hundred fold more than justice would have exacted. The broken law demanded satisfaction, and it would have been a blessed relief to him to give it. But that could never be. He could never bear the penalty of his crime without dragging Felicita into depths of shame and suffering deeper than they would have been if he had borne it at first. The fame she had won for herself would lift up his infamy and hers to the intolerable gaze of a keen and bitter publicity. He must blacken her fair reputation if he sought to appease his own conscience.

He made no effort to find out where she and his children were living. But one after another, in the solitude of his garret, he read every book Felicita had written. They gave him no pleasure, and awoke in him no admiration, for he read them through different eyes from her other readers. There was great bitterness of soul for him in many of the sentences she had penned; now and then he came upon some to which he alone held the true key. He felt that he, her husband, was dwelling in her mind as a type of subtle selfishness and weak ambition. When she depicted a good or noble character it was almost invariably a woman, not a man; it was never a man past his early manhood. However varied their circumstances and temperaments, they were in the main worldly and mean; sometimes they were successful hypocrites, deceiving those nearest and dearest to them.

It was a wholesome penance to him, perhaps, but it shook and troubled his soul to its very depths. His sin had ruined the poor weakminded drunkard, John Nixey, and hastened the end of dumb old Marlowe; these consequences of it must, at any time, have clouded his own after-life. But it had also wrought a baneful change in the spirit of the woman whom he loved. It was he who had slain within her the hope, and the love, and the faith in her fellow-men which had been needed for the full perfecting of her genius.