Half Brothers

by Hesba Stretton

From this first break in the perfect union of their home Margaret suffered less than she would have done but for the companionship of Dorothy. The girl's nature was one of strong, simple, and pure impulses; and her mind, though uncultivated in the ordinary acceptation of the word, was clear and intelligent. Margaret could speak to her, more fully than to anyone else, of the exceptional spiritual life she was living. There were thoughts and feelings in her soul, inmost impressions, to which she found it was impossible to give utterance. It was a life hid with Christ in God. But Dorothy seemed able to comprehend something of these workings of her mind, if only she caught a syllable here and there, which told of Margaret's profound realization of the love in which all men lived and moved. Probably Dorothy's long years of solitary childhood spent on the open moors, in contact with simple and grand aspects of nature, had kept her spirit open to such impressions as Margaret's mysticism, if it could be called mysticism, produced upon her. These two, like exiles in a strange land, clung to one another with an intense sympathy and love.

But this attachment to Margaret did not diminish Dorothy's devotion to Sidney. There was a touch of romance in this devotion. He seemed to her to be the deliverer who had opened her prison doors and brought her out into a happy freedom. In these first hours of his disappointment in Philip, her presence in his home tended to soften the bitterness of his vexation. Laura thought that she kept Phyllis out of her proper place; but it was, in fact, due to Dorothy that Phyllis continued to visit at the Hall. She would not let Philip's future wife be banished from his parents' house. The girlish acquaintance which had hitherto existed between them ripened into a girlish intimacy; and Phyllis was almost as often at the Hall as formerly. It was a comfort to Margaret that it should be so; and even Sidney felt it was wiser to maintain a certain degree of intercourse with his future daughter-in-law. He could not blame her as he blamed Laura.

In all this Laura felt that her schemes so far had not miscarried. She had never expected Sidney to welcome an engagement between his son and her daughter; it was too poor a match, and here Laura sympathized with him. But his opposition to it was less violent than she might have anticipated. All was going well with Phyllis; and now if Dick would only woo and win the young heiress she would be perfectly content. Dick was quite willing to fall into her plans. She spent many really happy hours in forecasting and arranging for them. Though Margaret was younger than herself, and in perfect health, and Sidney no older than her husband, and more likely than not to outlive all his contemporaries, she frequently thought of them both as dead, and Philip possessing the estates, and Phyllis reigning in Margaret's place. She expected to behold these things with her own eyes, and share in the glory of them. That she herself might grow old and die, while Philip and her daughter were still in comparative poverty and dependent upon Sidney, very seldom occurred to her. It was a contingency she could not bear to think of.

It was a much quieter winter at Apley than usual. There was no political excitement to occupy Sidney, and Hugh was visiting some of his Oxford friends during the short Christmas vacation. A few guests, staying two or three days each, came to Apley Hall. But there was no special festivity at which Laura could have made an open display of her daughter as betrothed to the son and heir. The few friends who came were fully aware of the circumstance, and sympathized very cordially with the disapprobation felt by Sidney and Margaret. Philip was wandering about Italy, and wrote frequently to Phyllis. The opposition to his love, of which he had never dreamed, naturally deepened it. He felt aggrieved and amazed that his father and mother should see any defect in her; and this made him exaggerate her charms and good qualities, until she seemed perfect in his eyes. Yet her letters were poor and meager, betraying an empty head, and an almost equally empty heart.

In spite of the novelty of the impressions crowding upon him, especially in Rome, this winter was, on the whole, a dreary—a very dreary—time to him. For the first time he was separated from everybody whom he loved; even Dick could not spare a year of his life to travel about with him. He saw no one but strangers, until he longed to see some one familiar face. He began to feel himself banished; and at times he suffered from genuine homesickness. His mother wrote long letters to him; letters as precious in his eyes as Phyllis's; to any other eyes as gold to tinsel. But his father did not write; it was the only sign of his displeasure. The checks sent out to him were liberal beyond his requirements; but no message came with them. There was a silent strife between his father and himself, a warfare of their wills, both of them strong and unyielding. It was as great a grief to Philip as to Sidney.

The spring came in early, and with unusual heat, in Italy. Much rain had fallen in February and March, and with the sudden outburst of heat there was an unwholesome season and a good deal of fever. Down in Sicily, and even in Naples, there were some fatal cases of cholera. A few of the English visitors, thronging to Rome for Easter, died of malaria; probably not a larger number than usual, but they happened to be persons of some note, whose deaths were reported in the daily papers, with a few lines of comment. Sidney read the notes from the Italian correspondents before looking at any other column of the Times. Laura and Phyllis grew anxious, and professed their anxiety loudly. But Philip wrote regularly, though in his now wonted strain of low spirits; and Sidney could see no reason for shortening his term of banishment. He had not been away four months yet; and there was no sign of any decrease of his infatuation.

Philip sent word he was going north to Venice, where the weather was reported as cool and fine. But about the end of April there came a letter from him complaining of low fever; and after that there was silence for a few days, a silence which filled them with apprehension. Then arrived a note from an American doctor, living in Venice, saying that he was attending Mr. Philip Martin, and that he was suffering from a combined attack of nostalgia and malaria, which might, not improbably, take a serious turn, and which could be best counteracted by the presence of his father or mother, or one equally dear to him.

"I must go to him, at once," cried Margaret. "I was expecting this. I knew it would come sooner or later; and, O Sidney, it is I who must go. He fancies he loves Phyllis best, but his love for me will be strongest now, for a time at least. And Phyllis cannot nurse him as I can; his own mother! I can be ready in an hour."

"You shall go," answered Sidney, "and I will take you. I would give my life for his. Is not he my first-born child as well as yours?"

As he made the hurried arrangements—looking out the trains, giving orders at home, and sending telegrams up to the City—his brain was full of remembrances of his son. It seemed but yesterday that he was a boy at school, idolizing his father; not longer than the day before yesterday that he was a little child, venturing on its first perilous journey across the floor from its mother's arms to its father's. He felt that the fibers of his heart were all interwoven with his son's life; and there was a new and terrible pain there. What if Philip should cut the knot of their estrangement by dying?