"He is all but broken-hearted," he replied, "and so is my mother. They look already years older, Dorothy. It is we younger ones who must go to their help now. We must make them feel that the future will not be a failure, even after this blow. Why cannot we in part reclaim my brother? He can never be an educated man, not a civilized man according to our notions. But after all, civilization is as much a fashion as reality. He need not remain a brute or a savage. The grandson of Andrew Goldsmith and my father's son must have something in him which will make him not altogether irreclaimable. You will help us, Dorothy?"
"Do you remember how wild and uneducated I was when your father found me?" she asked. "I know I can never have such dainty ways as Phyllis; and this poor fellow can never be like you. But he will improve as I have done."
Philip could not help laughing as he looked at her, and thought of the rough, uncouth man his brother was. The tears filled her eyes again.
"I have seen him," she continued, catching her breath, as if she could not quite control her sobs, "every night since we came back. Oh, how dreadful it is I cannot say; and I never thought he was Mr. Martin's son. He is just like a wild creature prowling about the houses. The first night I heard him I was awake, and I stole quite quietly on to the balcony, wondering if I should catch sight of a wolf down in the street, and there, in the moonlight, was a miserable man searching in the gutters for food. Ever since I have taken some bread from dinner and let it down to the ground just under my balcony, and he has come for it every night."
"Thank God!" cried Philip in an accent of unutterable pity and amazement; "then he is not dying of famine. And that is my brother!"
"I just spoke a word to him last night," she went on. "I spoke very softly. 'Poor man,' I said in Italian, and he lifted up his head and threw his hands above it. Then he ran away very swiftly, without making a sound."
"Oh, if my father had only known!" he said.
"I did not tell him, he seemed so absent," replied Dorothy; "but the poor fellow will come again to-night most likely. We will sit in the dark watching till he comes, and you can see him from my balcony. The moon rises later every night, but there will be light enough."
The vision he had seen the previous night had haunted Martin's dull brain all the day. He had stolen under the windows of the hotel, where he had never failed to find food from the first night he had sought it in the streets. Suddenly a white, quiet form, standing in the moonlight on the balcony above him, like some image of the Blessed Virgin, such as he had often seen in shrines and churches, spoke to him in a low, soft, sweet voice, such a voice as the Blessed Virgin might have. The vision hardly frightened him, and yet he fled from it, and hurried back to his place of refuge. He pondered over it in a confused way all through the day. Legends of the apparition of angels, but more often of demons, had been told to him and the other children in his earliest days. It was not strange that such a blessed vision should be seen, but it was strange that it appeared to him, whose mother was accursed in hell. Was it possible that this white angel had come to tell him better news of his mother? Why had he fled so swiftly, when he felt so little fear of it? Would he see it again if he went down into the valley?