Shining Ferry Part 4

"You'll get it because I can't help myself. There's your half-sister's children at home; but of what use to me is a girl or a blind boy?

You are narrow--narrow as the grave: but I find that, like the grave, you are inevitable; and, like the grave, you keep what you get. For the kind of finance that was the true game of manhood to your grandfather and me, you have no capacity whatever. No, I cannot explain. Finance? Why, you haven't even a _sense_ of it. Yet in a way you are capable. You will make the money yield interest, and will keep the race going. That is what I look to--you will keep the race going. Now I want to speak about that boy of yours. Do me the only favour I have ever asked you--send him to a public school, and afterwards to college, and let him have his fling."

Sam thought his father must have gone mad. "What, sir! After all you have said of such places! 'Dens of idleness,' 'sinks of iniquity'--I have heard you scores of times!"

"I spoke as a fool. 'Twas my punishment, perhaps, to believe it; but, Lord!"--he eyed his son up and down--"to think my punishment should take this form!" He caught Sam's arm suddenly and wheeled him about in face of a gla.s.s shop-front. "Man, look at yourself! Make the boy something different from _that!_ Do what I'd have done for you if ever you had given me a chance. Turn him loose among gentlemen; don't be afraid if he idles and wastes money; let him riot out his youth if he will--he'll be learning all the time, learning something you don't know how to teach, and maybe when his purse is emptied he'll come back to you a gentleman.

I tell you there's no difference in the world like that between a gentleman and a man who's not a gentleman. Money can't buy it; and, after the start, money can't change or hide it. The thing is there, or it isn't."

"Whatever the thing is," said Sam sullenly, "you are asking me to peril my son's soul for it."

They had reached the Hoe by this time. John Rosewarne dropped upon a bench and sat resting both hands on his staff and gazing over the twinkling waters of the Sound.

"Anne married a gentleman," pursued Sam.

"Ay, and a rake. A-ah!" muttered the old man after a moment, drawing a long breath, "if only that boy of hers weren't blind! But he doesn't carry the name, while _you_."--He broke off with a savage laugh.

"What's that you said a moment ago?--something about immortal souls."

"I said there's a world beyond this, and,"--

"Is there? That's what I'm concerned to know just now. And_ you?_ What are you proposing to do when you get there?" He withdrew his eyes from the bright seascape and let them travel slowly over his son. "_You!_ sitting there like a blot on G.o.d's suns.h.i.+ne! By what right should you expect another world, who have cut such a figure in this one? I have known love and l.u.s.t, and drink and hard work and hard fighting; I have been down in the depths, and again I have known moments to make a man smack his hands together for joy to be alive and doing. But you?

What kind of man are you, you son of mine? What do you live for? Why did you marry? And what did you and your poor woman find to talk about?"

Whatever bullying Sam suffered, he had his revenge in this--that he and no other man could exasperate his father to weakness. He rubbed his thin side whiskers now and muttered something about 'an acceptable sacrifice.'

The old man jabbed viciously at the gravel with his staff. "And your religion?" he broke forth again. "What is it? In some secret way it satisfies you--but how? I look into the Bible, and I find that the whole of religion rests on a man's giving himself away to help others.

I don't believe in it myself; I believe in the exact contrary.

Still there the thing is, set out in black and white. It upsets law and soldiering and nine-tenths of men's doings in trade: to me it's folly; but so it stands, honest as daylight. When did _you_ help a man down on his luck? or forgive your debtor? You'll get my money because you never did aught of the kind. Yet somehow you're a Christian, and prate of your mean life as an acceptable sacrifice. In my belief you're a Christian precisely because Christianity--how you work it out I don't know--will give you a sanction for any dirty trick that comes in your way. When good feeling, or even common honour, denies you, there's always a text somewhere to oil your conscience."

"I've one, sir, on which I can rely--'Be just, and fear not.'"

"I'll test it. You'll have my money; on which you hardly dared to count, eh? Be honest."

"Only on so much of it as is entailed, sir."

For a while John Rosewarne sat silent, with his eyes on the horizon.

"That," said he at length, "is just what you could not count on."

He turned and looked Sam squarely in the face. "You were born out of wedlock, my son."

Sam's hand gripped the iron arm of the bench. The muscles of his face scarcely moved, but its sallow tint changed, under his father's eyes, to a sickly drab.

"Ay," pursued the old man, "I am sorry for you at this moment; but you mustn't look for apologies and repentance and that sort of thing.

The fact is, I never could feel about it in that way. I was young and fairly wild, and it happened. One doesn't think of possible injury to someone who doesn't yet exist. But that, I grant you, doesn't make it any the less an injury. Now what have you to say?"

"The sins of the fathers."--

"--Are visited on the children: quite so. Afterwards we did our best, and married. No one knows; no one has ever guessed; and the proof would be hard to trace. In case of accident, I give you Port Royal for a clue."

Sam rose and stood for a moment staring gloomily down on the gravel.

"Why did you tell me, then?" he broke out. "What need was there to tell?"

His father winced, for the first time. "I see your point. Why didn't I, you ask, having played the game so far, play it out? Why couldn't I take my secret with me into the last darkness, and be judged for it--my own sole sin and complete? Well, but there's the blind child. By law the house and home estate would he his. I might have kept silence, to be sure, and let him be robbed; but somehow I couldn't. I've a conscience somewhere, I suppose."

"Have you?" Sam flamed out, with sudden spirit. "A nice sort of conscience it must be! I call it cowardice, this dragging me in to help you compensate the child. Conscience? If you had one, you wouldn't be s.h.i.+fting the responsibility on to mine."

"You are mistaken," said his father calmly. "And by the way, I advise you not to take that tone with me. It may all be very proper under the circ.u.mstances; but there's the simple fact that I won't stand it.

You're mistaken," he repeated. "I mean to settle the compensation alone, without consulting you; though, by George! if 'tweren't for pitying the poor child, I'd like to leave it to you as a religious man, and watch you developing your reasons for giving him nothing."

"And it was you," muttered Sam, with a kind of stony wonder, "who advised me just now to let my son run wild!"

"I did, and I do." John Rosewarne stood up and gripped his staff.

"By the way, too," he said, "your mother was a good woman."

"I don't want to hear anything about it."

"I know; but I wanted to tell you. Good-bye."

He turned abruptly and went his way down the hill. As he went, his lips moved. He was talking not to himself, but to an unseen companion--

"Mary! Mary!--that this should be the fruit of our sowing!"

CHAPTER IV.

ROSEWARNE'S PENANCE.

Beside the winding Avon above Warwick bridge there stretches a flat meadow, along the brink of which on a summer evening you may often count a score of anglers seated and watching their floats; decent citizens of Warwick, with a sprinkling of redcoats from the garrison. They say that two-thirds of the Trappist brotherhood are ex-soldiers; and perhaps if we knew the reason we might also know why angling has a peculiar fascination for the military.

Angling was but a pretext, however, with a young corporal of the 6th Regiment, who sat a few yards away on John Rosewarne's right, and smoked his pipe, and cast frequent furtive glances, now along the river path, now back and across the meadow where another path led from the town.

Each of these glances ended in a resentful stare at his too-near neighbour, who fished on unregarding.

"Is this a favourite corner of yours?" the corporal asked after a while, with meaning.

"I have fished on this exact spot for thirty-five years," answered John Rosewarne, not lifting his eyes from the float.

The corporal whistled. "Thirty-five years! It's queer, now, that I never set eyes on you before--and I come here pretty often."

Rosewarne let a full minute go by before he answered again.

"There's nothing queer about it, Unless you've been stationed long in Warwick."

"Best part of a year."

"Quite so: I fish in Avon once a year only."

"Belong to the town?"

"No; nor within two hundred miles of it."