Chapter LVII: Expiation

Important business had taken Sidney to Liverpool, and it had been arranged that instead of returning to Apley, he should go across to Brackenburn and meet the rest of the Christmas party there. Traveling was a good deal impeded by a severe snowstorm, and he was disappointed, though not surprised, to find that the London train was very much behind time, when he reached the country station nearest to Brackenburn. Leaving the carriage and brake to bring the large party coming up from the south, Sidney hired a light spring cart, which would make its way more quickly and easily along the encumbered roads. The early night had already fallen; and a few breaks in the drifting clouds, through which the stars shone by twos and threes, seemed to foretell a cessation in the storm.

The full moon was shining through one of these rifts when he reached the forecourt of the old house, and its silvery light fell on all the gables, and touched every tossing spray of ivy glistering with the freshly fallen snow. But instead of the cheerful lights shining in every window, all the front of the house was in darkness. Within the wide porch a deep drift almost barred the approach to the door. There was something ominous in the deathlike silence and darkness of this place, to which he had been traveling with the expectation of entering it surrounded by all whom he loved most. There stole over him a sense of loneliness, such as all of us feel at times, when the utter solitude of the life within us, the isolation of each one's spirit, presses consciously and with deep awe upon us. No words could say how precious Margaret was to him; but even she could never enter into the secret and mysterious house of his soul.

A glimmer in a distant window at last answered to the driver's noisy and repeated ringing of the great bell; and the door was opened, Mary Goldsmith appearing with a face of terror.

"Oh, Mr. Martin!" she cried in a tremulous voice, "they're lost in the snow. They've never come back. Andrew and Martin are lost in the snow!"

For a moment it seemed as if her words forbade his entrance; and he stood motionless on the threshold looking from her to the whiteness of the scene behind him.

"Come in, come in," she said impatiently, "and tells us what we must do. All the men are gone to the station, and only the old gardener's left. They went out hours ago, Andrew and Martin, and never came back. They'd have been home before nightfall if they hadn't lost themselves."

Sidney entered the hall, leaving the heavy door ajar, and in a minute or two a long drift of snow stretched across the polished floor, blown in by the rising wind.

"Has nobody gone in search of them?" asked Sidney.

"Nay!" said Mary, crying, "there's only me, and Selina, and the maids; and it's such a dizzy storm. We lost our way only going along the garden walks. We couldn't see a yard before us. But we've lighted up all the windows at the back, looking over the moor. Only I'm afraid they can't be seen far off through the driving snow."

The wind had risen again almost to a gale, and roared round the solitary house, shaking every door and casement, and beating the long ivy tendrils against the windowpanes. Sidney could see nothing even of the storm for the sheet of ice and snow covering the outside of the windows. Andrew old, and Martin ailing in health, out on the moors, in this tempest! He looked into Mary's terror-stricken face with an expression of intense anxiety.

"They will be dead before morning!" cried Mary.

She put his own half formed thought into blunt words. Dead! Sophy's father and Sophy's son! The old, long gone by days when he was a boy and madly in love with Sophy came back to him vividly, as if the effacing touch of many years had not blotted out the recollection of them. The girl's pretty, saucy face, her high spirits and merry moods, her unrestrained love for him and his brief frenzied passion for her, all the long forgotten memories, sprang into bitter and stinging life. His conscience told him he had been glad when he knew she was dead, leaving his way to happiness and prosperity clear before him. But there was a great horror to him in a thought which was lurking somewhere in an obscure corner of his brain, a murderous thought, that he would rejoice in the death of Sophy's son. What would he do if Philip, his beloved son, were lost on the moors? That must he do for Martin.

He forgot Margaret for the time, as if to him she had no existence. He thought only of his sons--Philip, whom he would give his life to save, and Martin, to whom he owed a deeper debt than to any other human being; and flinging open the hall door he precipitated himself into the storm. There was a sudden lull as he did so; the gusts of wind ceased, and the dizzy snowflakes no longer hid the way. Bidding Mary send all the aid she could, as soon as the men arrived from the station, Sidney started across the moors.

He was fairly well acquainted with their general aspect, and felt no misgiving as to keeping within the range of the points most familiar to him. The light was clear enough to enable him to avoid the greater drifts, and the hollows, lying like great basins of snow. Besides, at any moment he might come upon the weary men, exhausted, perhaps, with exposure and fatigue, but stumbling homeward. From time to time he shouted, and waited, listening painfully for some answer. But no answer came, and still he went on, busy with the multiplicity of thoughts that crowded through his brain, and taking little heed of time or distance.

It seemed almost as if Martin and Philip were walking beside him. The fatherhood that was in him--the most godlike of all human emotions--was stirred to its very depths. He knew what it was; he had felt it in all its fullness toward Philip. But Martin also was his son! What an infinite love and pathos there were in the words "my son"! It seemed incredible, impossible, that he could have so sinned against that divine fatherhood in himself as to forsake the mother of his firstborn child. He had given life to Martin, but alas! what a life! Could he never set that wrong right through even the countless ages of eternity? Had not Martin lost forever the birthright that ought to have been his in this world?

No love either of father or mother; no symbol by which he could learn the love of God himself. Martin had never known what it was to be a son. All the innocent blisses, the passing gladness, the deep, unutterable joys of a happy childhood had been stolen from him. That which Philip had possessed in the richest measure Martin had had no least taste of. His childhood had been desolate and oppressed as childhood ought never to to be; his manhood had been given over to destitution and slavery. The father had sown in a small seed-plot, the son had reaped in a wide harvest-field.

The chief bitterness of it all, the very sting of death, was that no atonement was possible. As Sidney struggled onward through the clogging snowdrifts, he felt that he could give up even Margaret if he could recall the past. What was wealth, or influence, or the love of wife and child, or the choicest of all earth's many gifts, compared with the joy of having been true to that which was most akin to God in his own nature? That joy could never be his; but he would be a true father to Martin now, though he could not hope to find in him the sonship which is the crown of fatherhood.

The lull in the storm was over. The snowflakes began to whirl around him giddily, driven and tossed hither and thither by the bitter wind, and falling so thickly that they formed a dense veil of fluttering atoms, as impervious to the sight as a stone wall. The familiar landmarks were utterly lost were they ever so near to him. He fought his way through the wind and the snow as best he could, calling from time to time. The thick air was soundless; he could hear only his own heavy sighs and labored breath. The biting cold was making him feel dull and torpid; a lethargy crept over his busy brain.

Suddenly, as if a white curtain had been drawn aside for a moment, he saw on the other side of a slight ravine the cave which had been Martin's chosen retreat, and in the safe shelter of it sat Andrew and Martin, with a fire burning brightly in the entrance of the cave. Yonder there were warmth and safety; and in Sidney's clouded brain there sprang a great gladness at having found his son. He cried "Martin!" and it seemed to him as if he turned his ear toward him and listened to his call.

But the vision was hidden again from his sight before he could take a step forward; and still groping his way, though feebly and with exhausted limbs, he struggled on through the bewildering snowflakes to reach the haven of his son's shelter.