the explanation i had desired for the morrow i determined to bring about there and then. i went and stood above the old man and looked down upon him.
“dad,” i said, softly, “once before, if you remember, i came to you heart-full of the question that i am now going to put to you again. i was a boy then, and likely you did right in refusing me your confidence. now i am a man, and, dad, a man whose soul has been badly wounded in its sore struggle with life.”
he had drooped forward as i began, but at this he raised his head and looked me earnestly in the eyes.
“i know, renalt. it was i broke the bottle then, as you have now. you have taken the lead into your own hands. what is it you’d ask?”
“don’t you know, dad?”
“yes, i know. give me a little time and perhaps some day i’ll tell you.”
“why not now, dad?”
he seemed to muse a little space, with his brows gone into furrows of calculation.
“why not?” he muttered. “why not?”
suddenly he leaned forward and said softly:
“has it ever concerned you to think what might be the source of your father’s income?”
“i have thought of it, dad, many and many a time. it wasn’t for me to ask. i have tried to force myself to believe that it came from our grandfather.”
“he was a just man, renalt, and a hard. i married against his will and he never spoke to me afterward.”
“but the mill——”
“the mill he left to me, as it had been left to him. he would not, in his justice, deprive me of the means of living. ‘what my hands have wrought of this, his may do,’ he wrote. but all his little personal estate he willed elsewhere.”
“and you never worked the mill?”
“for a time i worked it, to some profit. we began not all empty-handed. she brought a little with her.”
“my mother?”
at the word he half-started from his chair and sunk back into it again. his eyes blazed as i had not seen them do since my return.
“for twenty years and more,” he shrieked, “that name has never been on your lips—on the lips of any one of you. i would have struck him down without pity that spoke it!”
i stood looking at him amazed. for a moment he seemed transformed—translated out of his fallen self—for a moment and no more. his passion left him quakingly.
“ah!” he cried, with a gasp, and looked up at me beseeching—“you’re not offended—you are not offended, renalt?”
“no, no,” i said, impatiently. “you must tell me why, dad. you will, won’t you?”
he answered with a sobbing moan.
“you, her son, must not know. haven’t i been faithful to her? have i ever by word or sign dishonored her memory in her children’s ears—my boy, have i?”
“i have never heard you mention her till now. i have never dreamed of her but as a nameless shadow, father.”
“let her be so always. she wrecked my life—in a day she made me the dark brute you remember well. i was not so always, renalt. this long, degraded life of despair and the bestial drowning of it were her doing—hers, i tell you. remorse! it has struggled to master me, and i have laughed it away—all these years i have laughed it away. yet it was pitiful when she died. a heart of stone would have wept to see her. but mine was lead—lead—lead.”
he dropped his head on his breast. i stood darkly pondering in the quiet room. there seemed a stir and rustling all round within the house, as if ghostly footfalls were restlessly pacing out their haunting penance.
“renalt,” said my father, presently; “never speak of her; never mention her by that name. she passed and left me what i am. i closed the mill and shut its door and that of my heart to every genial influence that might help it to forget. i had no wish to forget. in silence and solitariness i fed upon myself till i became like to a madman. then i roused and went abroad more, for i had a mission of search to attend to.”
“you never found him?”
the words came to my lips instinctively. how could i fail to interpret that part, at least, of the miserable secret?
“to this day—never.”
he answered preoccupied—suddenly heedless of my assurance in so speaking. a new light had come to his face—an unfamiliar one. i could have called it almost the reflection of cunning—vanity—a self-complacent smugness of retrospect.
“but i found something else,” he cried, with a twitching smirk.
“what was that?”
he leaned forward in a listening attitude.
“hush!” he murmured. “was that a noise in the house?”
“i heard nothing, dad.”
he beckoned me to stand closer—to stoop to him.
“a jar of old greek and roman coins.”
he fell back in his chair and stared up at me with frightened eyes. the mystery was out, and an awful dismay seized him that at length in one moment of sentiment he had parted with the secret that had been life to him.
“what have i said?” he whispered, stilly. “renalt, you won’t give any heed to the maundering of an old man?”
i looked down on him pityingly.
“don’t fear me, father,” i said, almost with a groan. “i will never breathe a word of it to anybody.”
“good, dear boy,” he answered, smiling. “i can trust you, i know. you were always my favorite, renalt, and——”
he broke off with a sudden, sharp cry.
“my favorite,” and he stared up at me. “my favorite? so kings treat their favorites!”
he passed a nervous hand across his forehead, his wild eyes never leaving my face. i could make nothing of his changing moods.
“what about the jar of coins?” i said.
“ah!” he muttered, the odd expression degrading his features once more. “they were such a treasure it was never one man’s lot to acquire before or since—heaven’s compensation for the cruelty of the world.”
“where did you find them?”
“in an ancient barrow of the dead,” he whispered, looking fearfully around him—“there, on the downs. it had rained heavily, and there had been a subsidence. i was idly brooding, and idly flung a stone through a rent in the soil. it tinkled upon something. i put in my hand and touched and brought away a disk of metal. it was a golden coin. i covered all up and returned at night, unearthed the jar and brought it secretly home. it was no great size, but full to the throat of gold. then i knew that life had found me a new lease of pleasure. i hid the jar where no one could discover it and set about to enjoy the gift. it came in good time. the mill had ceased to yield. my store of money was near spent. i selected three or four of the likeliest coins and carried them to a man in london that bought such things—a numismatist he called himself. if he had any scruples he smothered them then and afterward, in face of such treasures as it made his eyes shoot green to look upon. he asked me at first where i had got them. hunting about the downs, i said. that was the formula. he never asked for more. he gave me a good price for them, one by one, and made his heavier profit, no doubt, on each. they yielded richly and went slowly. they made an idle, debauched man of me, who forgot even his revenge in the glut of possession.”
he seemed even then to accuse himself, through an affectation rather than a conviction of avarice.
“they went slowly,” he repeated; “till—till—renalt, i would have loved you as boy was never loved, if you had killed that doctor, as you killed——” he stopped and gave a thin cry of anguish.
“i didn’t kill modred, father. i know it now.”
“no, no—you didn’t,” he half-whined in a cowering voice. “don’t say i said it. i caught myself up.”
“we’ll talk about that presently. the doctor——”
“that night, you remember,” he cried, passionately, “when i dropped a coin and he saw it—that was the beginning. oh, he has a hateful greed for such things. a wicked, suspicious nature. he soon began cajoling, threatening, worming my secret out of me. i had to silence him now and again or he would have exposed me to the world and wrenched my one devouring happiness from me.”
“you gave him some of the coins?”
“he has had enough to melt into a grill as big as st. lawrence’s, and he shall fry on it some day. more than that—more than that!”
he clenched his hands in impotent fury.
“there was one thing in the jar worth a soul’s ransom—a cameo, renalt, that i swear was priceless—i, who speak from intuition—not knowledge. the beauty of the old world was crystallized in it. an emperor would have pawned his crown to buy it.”
his words brought before me with a shock the night of modred’s death, when i had stood listening on the stairs.
“one evening—a terrible evening, renalt—when i went to fetch a new bribe for him from the hiding-place (he demanded it before he would move a finger to help that poor boy upstairs), i found this cameo gone. he swore he hadn’t set eyes on it, and to this day i believe he lied. how can i tell—how can i tell? twenty times a week, perhaps, my vice brought the secret almost within touch of discovery. sometimes for days together i would carry this gem in my pocket, and take it out when alone and gaze on it with exquisite rapture. then for months it would lie safely hidden again. if i had dropped and lost it in one of my fits—as he suggested—should i have never heard of it again? renalt”—he held out two trembling hands to me—“it was the darling of my heart! find it for me and i will bless you forever.”
he ended almost with a sob. i could have wept myself over the pitiful degeneration of a noble intellect.
“father, you said he cajoled—threatened. didn’t you ever reveal to him——”
“where the jar was hid? no; a million times, no! he would have sucked me dry of the last coin. he knew that i had made a rich find—no more.”
“and on the strength of that vague surmise you have allowed him to blackmail you all these years?”
he hung his head, as if cruelly abashed.
“you don’t know the man as i do,” he cried, in a low voice. “he is a devil—not a man.”
i was utterly shocked and astounded.
“well,” i said at length. “i won’t ask you for your secret. to share it with any one would kill the zest, no doubt.”
he lifted his head with a thin wail.
i put my hand gently on his shoulder.
“dad,” i said, “i must never leave you again.”
he seized my hand and kissed it.
“harkee, renalt,” he whispered. “many are gone, but there are some left. could i find out where the cameo is, we would take it, and what remains, and leave this hateful place—you and i—and bury ourselves in some beautiful city under the world, where none could find us, and live in peace and comfort to the end.”
“peace can never be mine again, father. would you like to know why? would you like to know what has made a sorrowful, haunted man of me, while you were living on at the old mill here these five years past?”
“tell me,” he said. “confide in this old, broken, selfish man, who has that love in his heart to seek comfort for you where he can find none himself.”
then, standing up in the red dusk of the room, i gave him my history. “nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.” and he sat with face darkened from me, and quivered only when he heard of jason’s villainy.
and at the end he lifted up his voice and cried:
“oh, absolom, my son—my son, absolom!”
