"I cannot read them here," replied Philip, taking the yellow, time-stained packet from his hand; "but if you will come to my hotel this evening I will tell you the contents."
"Very good," said the priest.
CHAPTER XXXII.
AN OLD LETTER.
Philip left the stifling atmosphere of the hovel, and, with a deep-drawn breath of relief, stepped into the open air. The wonderful landscape stretched before him in clear sunlight, dazzling to his eyes. He was nearly two thousand feet above the valley, and the mountains, which were foreshortened to the sight there, now seemed to tower into the cloudless sky with indescribable grandeur and beauty. It was a perfect day, and the light was intense. The colors of these rocks were exceedingly soft, with a bloom upon them like the bloom upon a peach. Tender shades of purple and red, with blue and orange, pale yellow and green, blended together, and formed such delicate tints as would drive an artist to despair. Tall pinnacles of these cliffs rose behind the dun-colored mountains of porphyry, and seemed to look down upon him, as if their turrets and parapets were filled with spectators of the trivial affairs of man. Thin clouds were floating about them, hanging in mist upon their peaks or slowly gliding across from one snow-veined crest to another. Immediately above him, just beyond the hamlet, lay a vast hollow, in which the snowdrift was melting in the heat of the sun, which had at last risen behind its rough screen of crags; and a stream of icy-cold water was falling noisily down a steep and stony channel, which it had worn out for itself through many centuries of spring thaws. The heat was very great; and Philip made his way to some little distance from the huts, and sat down on the ledge of a rock, which commanded a splendid view of the groups of mountains, and the valleys lying between them. He was not, as yet, so interested in the packet in his hand as to be indifferent to the romantic scenery surrounding him. These letters had been written thirty years ago; they could well wait a few minutes longer.
Yet he was indignant; and he was full of compassion toward his unfortunate fellow-countryman. But at that moment he was enjoying the sensation of an almost perfectly full life. He felt himself in faultless health; his mind was on the stretch, with a sense of vigor and power which was delightful to him after the low spirits of the last few months; and beneath this strong sensation of mental and physical life lay a clearer, keener, diviner conviction of the presence of God than he had ever known before. It seemed to him as if he could all but hear a voice calling to him, "This is holy ground!" In spite of the miserable homes of men and women close by, and in spite of the degraded man whose life had been one long wretchedness in this place, Philip felt that it was a temple of God himself.
With this strength, and in the consciousness of unusual energy, he turned away at last from the sublime landscape, to read the faded paper in his hands. It bore no name or address; and it was not sealed, only tied together with a ribbon. A very, very long letter of several pages, written in almost undecipherable lines, for the ink was faded, and the paper stained. But there was another packet, and opening it he found a daguerreotype glass. There were two portraits on it, one of a girl with a very pretty face, and the other—but whose could this portrait be?
Philip's healthy pulse ceased to beat for a moment. Who could it be? How perfectly he seemed to know it! There had been an old daguerreotype lying about in the nursery at Apley, which he had seen and played with as soon as he was old enough to recognize it in its morocco case. Was it possible that this portrait was the same as that?
He shut the case softly, feeling as if dead hands were closing it. A terrible foreboding of some dire calamity came all at once into the sunshine, and the sweet air, and the sound of hurrying waters. He unfolded the time-stained letter, and began to read; and as he read, the dreadful truth, the whole truth, as he thought, broke upon him, and overwhelmed him with dismay and horror.
One of his earliest remembrances was the story of the lost girl, Rachel Goldsmith's niece, who had gone away secretly from home and had never again been heard of. As a boy he had often thought of how he would go forth to find her, and bring her home again to his oldest friend, Andrew Goldsmith. It had been his boyish vision of knight-errantry. As a young man he had learned what such a loss meant; not the simple loss he had fancied it as a boy. It had become in later years a subject he could no longer mention to her father, or his own mother. Philip's ideal of a man's duty toward a woman was of the purest and most chivalrous devotion.