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.

And now! Philip could not face the horror of the thought that was waiting to take possession of his mind. He roused himself angrily, and stood up, crushing the letter and the portraits into his pocket. A path went beyond the hamlet, leading upward toward the crest of a pass lying between two ranges of mountains. He strode hastily along it, as if he were pursued by an enemy, passing through pine woods, and over torrents of stones, which many a storm had swept down from the precipices above him. Some massive thunderclouds had gathered in the north, and the snowy peaks gleamed out pale and ghost-like against the leaden sky. But his eyes were blinded, and his ears deafened. Yet he was not thinking; he dared not think. A miserable dread was dogging his footsteps along an unknown path; and presently he must summon courage to turn round and confront this dread.

He reached at last the top of the pass, where three crosses stood out strongly and clearly against the sky. Three crosses! Not only that on which the Lord died, but those on which every man must hang, weary and ashamed, at some moment of his life. He sat down beneath the central one, and leaned against the foot of it. It was his Lord's cross; but on each side stood the cross of a fellow-man--the man of sorrows, and the man of sins. He, too, was come to the hour when he must be lifted up upon his cross. He must be crucified upon it, perhaps in the sight of men, certainly in the sight of God. He had come to it straight from the conviction of the presence of God; and looking up to the three empty crosses, he cried out, "Lord, remember me."

Then, with hands that shook, and with dazed eyes, he read the long letter, which Sophy had written years before he was born. And as he read he found the burden less intolerable than he had dreaded it would be. His father had not been as base as his first miserable suspicion had vaguely pictured him. Sophy Goldsmith had been his wife; and Philip, counting how many years were passed, saw his father a young man like himself, loving her as he loved Phyllis, but with far less hope of ever gaining the consent of his friends to such a marriage. He, too, would have married Phyllis, in spite of all opposition; only not in secret.

His brain grew clearer with this gleam of comfort. Then the thought came that the miserable, half savage peasant whom he had seen that morning, being Sophy's child, must be his father's first-born son, and his own brother. It was his father's eyes he had seen, and partly recognized, when he first looked into Martin's face. His brother Martin! He thought of his brother Hugh, between whom and himself there existed the strongest and most loyal brotherhood. Hugh had stood by him through all his difficulties about Phyllis, and approved of his choice of her with the warmest approbation. But this barbarous, degraded, forlorn wretch, an outcast among the lowest people--how could he feel a brother's love for him?

If the eldest son--then the heir! The estates in Yorkshire were strictly entailed upon Sir John Martin's male heirs, as his mother's lands were settled upon Hugh. This man, scarcely higher than a brute, must take from him the inheritance which had seemed to be his all his life. Why! he, Philip Martin, would be a poor man, a man who must work for his living. This was a new aspect of the case, and one which aroused him from the deeper depths of his dismay. This discovery suddenly and completely changed his whole life.

It was not he who would some day be Philip Martin of Brackenburn--nothing would be his. Now he could marry Phyllis without opposition, for he would be as poor as she was. He was not afraid of poverty; he had no practical acquaintance with it, and Margaret had trained her sons into a fine contempt of mere wealth. There would be a worthy object in setting to work now, for he would have a wife and family to maintain. That was far better than simply making more money to invest or to speculate with.

But what ought he to do? This was a secret of momentous importance concealed by his father for nearly thirty years. It had come suddenly to his knowledge; and what must he do with it? And now, his heart having shaken off the worst of its burden, his mind was clear enough to recognize the hideous and insane selfishness of his father's conduct. Before he knew who it was that had deserted this young girl and her unborn child, he had felt a strong indignation at his baseness and cowardice. What could have made his father, who seemed the soul of honor, act in such a manner? He had been guilty of a great crime, and the man sent to discover it was his own son.

Lifting up his eyes from the ground, on which they had been gloomily bent, Philip saw the uncouth figure of his elder brother crouching and half hidden under one of the thieves' crosses. His bare feet had brought him noiselessly along the road; and he shrank a little from his observation, as if he was afraid of some sharp rebuff. The deep-set eyes glowered at him much as a dog's will do when he is not sure of what reception he will get. There was something wild and desolate about this solitary figure which touched Philip's inmost heart; and yet he could give him no welcome to a place there.

Must he tell his mother? It would be like piercing her to the soul with a sword. He knew well what keen and tender sympathy she had felt for the Goldsmiths, both when Sophy first disappeared and during all the succeeding years of alternating hope and despair. It was this sympathy that had won Rachel Goldsmith's profound devotion to her beloved mistress. How his mother must suffer when she learned that the husband she loved and honored so perfectly had been living a base and cruel lie at her side, witnessing all the sorrow of the family he had wronged, and pretending to share in it. He could imagine her bearing his father's death, but he could not imagine her bearing his dishonor. His mother must suffer more than he did.

Philip roused himself at last to go down into the valley; the afternoon was passing by, and his mother would be getting anxious at his absence. He said "_Addio_" to his silent companion; but he was conscious, without looking back, that Martino was following him. He felt glad when he reached Cortina, on glancing round, to see that he was at last alone. Dorothy was standing on the balcony outside his mother's bedroom, and she leaned over, with a laughing face, to reproach him for being away so long.

"The very first day, too!" she said. "And oh! if you only knew how vexed I am! There is a telegram from your father, very pleasant for you, but most disagreeable to me."

He ran upstairs at hearing this news, no longer afraid of meeting his mother, and she gave to him the telegram.

"Going to Munich on business," it ran; "proceed immediately--meet there. Taking Phyllis."

"But there is a great _festa_ in the village to-morrow," said Dorothy, "and as it is too late to proceed immediately, we are going to stay for the morning and go on to Toblach in the afternoon. We shall reach Munich before your father and Phyllis can be there. And oh, Philip! the bells are ringing carillons as if they were chimes in heaven."