Mrs. Oliphant

“ But a convict cannot be hid. A man may live the purest life, he may win everything that energy and even genius can secure, but at the end of all the meanest may rise up and say, ‘Behold the convict’s son,’ and cover even a hero with shame. Imagination could not go so far as that in picturing the evils that are possible. Poor Jack! Poor boy! with his father a convict—a convict! The horror of it was so great and terrible that nothing was possible, save to say over and over these words of shame.
And Elly felt it still more deeply in her way. ”

“ I always made up my mind to call the boy after him. What do you know about John May? that’s not my name, not my name at all. I’m rather in a weak state of health and I can’t bear very much. You wouldn’t speak of such things if you knew that they threw me into a tremble all over, which is very bad for me. Who do you mean by John May?’
The three men looked at each other in a tremulous quiver of excitement, like the flashing of intense heat in the air. They gazed at each other saying nothing. Montressor, though he had hitherto been calm, was growing agitated too, he could not tell why. ”

“ She hurried away from the table where the curate sat, regarding her with that compassionate look, and threw herself into her grandfather’s chair which stood dutifully by the side of the blank fireplace where Elly and John had placed it. Her simple open countenance, which had hid that secret beneath all the natural candour and truth of a character which was serene as the day, was flushed with trouble and misery. Life seemed to have revealed its sweeter mysteries to Susie only to show her how far apart she must keep herself from honest people, as she said. ”

“ Poor wretch, for whom love and honour do not exist, but only fear and pity! the good man, the prosperous and happy, who has deserved his prosperity, as well as the other deserved his misery, is still the Son of His Father, and still bound for ever in this world at least, wretchedness to well-being, honour to shame.{310}
There is, however, one way in which this piece of personal history may be safely made to end like a fairy-tale. Susie and her curate went home to their new parish like a pair of doves to their nest. ”

“ Egerton,’ said Susie, with a directness which brought a little colour to the old curate’s cheek, ‘must have been very pretty then.’
‘To me she is beautiful now,’ he said, fervently, ‘and always will be. I am not of the opinion that age has anything to do with beauty. It becomes a different kind. It is not a girl’s or a young woman’s beauty any longer, but it is just as beautiful. You will forgive me, Miss Sandford——’
‘I have nothing to forgive,’ said Susie, but she said it with a little heat. ‘I like people to be faithful,’ she added, perhaps indiscreetly. ”

“ He flung himself down on the sofa, and lay like a man dead or disabled; like a man, he said to himself, who had been drunk overnight, who had come out of dissipation and vice with eyes that sickened at the light of day. And this was John Sandford, who never in his life before, having unbroken health and an energetic disposition and boundless determination to get on, had spent a morning in this way. ”

“ Would it be the best way, the only way, to shake the dust from off his feet and rush away to the end of the world where a man could work, if it were the roughest navvy work, and be free from false accusation and the horror of seeing himself falsely condemned. But, then, Elly! John plunged again deeper than ever into that blackness of darkness. He had boasted in his self-confidence of the success which was awaiting him, of the certainty of his prospects. He remembered now how Mrs. Egerton had shaken her head. ”

“ Before he can come home again, before he can find you out, this very night, if you are safe so long, leave this place. Find somewhere else to live in. Oh! you shall have no trouble. I will find you a place; but leave this, leave it now at once. Leave him no clue. What? he has left you none, you say? Why should you hesitate? Come away with me, John. For the love of God! and if you have learned to feel any respect or any pity for your mother—for the poor woman whom once you called Emily—— John, think what it was to me that you should call me Emily, that you should refuse me the name of mother. ”

“ Well, Sandford, most likely we were wrong altogether. I find a great deal that is admirable in your scheme. We see business in it,’ said Mr. William, rubbing his hands. ‘We see money in it. We see our way to making a great thing of it; that’s the fact, Sandford. We never meant you to take our remonstrance as bitterly as you did, you know: never. Things looked bad. It looked like an ugly piece of business—it looked like——’
‘Put it in plain words,’ said John, roused to all his old indignation, and using involuntarily the words his navvies might have used. ”

“ Elly could not call a convict father. She must never even know of the man who was John’s destroyer, though he was at the same time John’s father. He shuddered at the words, notwithstanding that a great melting and softening was in his heart towards the strange, loosely-knitted intelligence which seemed to drift through everything—life, and morality, and natural affection—without feeling any one influence stronger than the other, or any moral necessity, either logical or practical. ”

“ My father is a gentleman! He may not be much as a parson—it’s not for me to say: but he’s as fine a gentleman as Chaucer’s knight. Say all the bad things you please, you two, I know what’s in papa! He will no more forbid me to marry John than he would turn against the poor boy himself for what’s no fault of his. But I won’t do it now,’ Elly added, magnanimously, breaking into a laugh, which much resembled crying. ”

“ There are sins which are a thousand times more deeply guilty than theft or even forgery, but they are in a different category. Trial, conviction, the contamination of a prison, the felon’s obliteration from personality and right, make up a horror and shame of the actual, undeniable, matter-of-fact kind, which the dullest feel, and which affect the innocent with a sensation like a nightmare.
In the silence of their long drive Mrs. Egerton repeated now and then to herself, ‘A convict!’ with a shudder. ”

“ Egerton, after the girl had gone, ‘Oh, Jack, I wish I could believe as she does, that my brother—— But I will not deceive you, Jack. He will never, never consent. He is a proud man, though she does not know it—there are no such proud people as these simple people. I wish, I wish I could think as she does: but I can’t, I can’t, Jack!’
‘Do you really wish it, Mrs. Egerton,’ said John, taking her hand and kissing it. ”

“ THE CULPRIT. John’s amanuensis, whom he had so rashly trusted, had carried away his copy of John’s scheme with, in reality, little or no idea of cheating, and none at all of injuring John. His faculties were confused by long courses of meditative sophistry, such as had been his amusement in the years when he had no other, and by the criminal atmosphere in which he had lived, in which the deception or spoiling of your neighbour was the most natural matter, the best sign of talent and originality, at once the excitement and the amusement of the perverted mind. ”

“ But with all his success, and with the happiness which is about to come, one great cloud remains on John Sandford’s life, a fear which sometimes takes his breath away and makes his heart sick, the fear that some day when he suspects nothing, some sweet day—it might be his marriage morning, it might be any happy anniversary—there will suddenly appear round a corner a stumbling, shambling figure, never without a certain attractiveness even in its degradation, a sort of charm of careless innocence in the midst of guilt. ”

“ There was another silence, for Montressor was daunted, and felt once more that even the resources of his profession failed him; and May went on, after the telling interval of that pause.
‘A young fellow that is the pink of respectability, that never took a drop too much, nor went an inch out of the way in all his life! Lord, Montressor, think what it would be to be set down for life, to be overlooked by a fellow like that! to see in his eyes what he thought of you! I’m a poor wretch that can’t live without a laugh. ”

“ John smiled at himself in his glass at the thought. Abandon him! The poor culprit, the convict, the deserted father had been more magnanimous than they were, and had fled from him not to shame him. So much the less could his son abandon him. He prepared himself to tell them his resolution as he finished his dressing. Susie would cry, perhaps, but neither of them would care much: why should they care? He had never entered actively into their lives. It would be nothing to them to lose him. ”

“ This was always the position in which these two appeared—Percy bringing forward all kinds of opinions, decisive of many matters, social and otherwise; but Mr. Cattley always adding a criticism or comment, something that changed the issue. Mrs. Sandford, for the fiftieth time, leaned back in her chair, and put down her pen, and asked herself, with a faint, lingering smile, which softened her stern face, what Susie meant. Susie was her own child, to whom her heart was soft, her companion, the sharer of all her thoughts. The sternness which she had shown to John had never touched his sister. ”

“ Montressor’s was no indifferent backing of his friend. He threw himself with his whole soul into the wrongs of the unfortunate young man. Indeed, so entirely did he enter into John’s case that John felt himself restored to hopeful life, half by the sympathy, and perhaps a little more than half by the genial absurdity that seemed to glide into everything from Montressor’s devoted zeal. ”

“ A woman who can give that unquestioning admiration, that boundless trust, is always sweet. It is not every woman that can do it, however godlike may be the man: and the curate did not believe that he was godlike. But yet it was very delightful that she should think so. It was a surprise to him to receive this tender homage; but it was very sweet.
They had reached the quiet street in which John’s rooms were, when Susie was suddenly roused out of this heavenly state by the sight of some one coming hastily out of her brother’s door. ”

“ Laughing or crying what did it matter, the one was as horrible as the other.
‘Missis said as she thought perhaps you would be wishing your dinner at ’ome to-day,’ said the maid, startled by his laugh.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ said John; but, when the food came with its savoury smell, he found out, poor fellow, that he was hungry, very hungry, having eaten nothing for—he did not recollect how long, weeks it seemed to him, since that peaceful breakfast before anything had gone wrong. At twenty-one a young man’s appetite cannot be quenched by anything that may happen. ”

“ No man could be in the depths of a catastrophe who had his breakfast-table neatly set out and the Standard folded by his plate. ‘He has given us a fright for nothing,’ Elly had said. The appearance of John indeed gave them a moment’s pause, for he was very pale, and his eyes had a worn and troubled look which it was impossible not to remark. ”

“ John had been in a fever of excitement and suspense when he went away. He was now calm enough, quite quiet and resolute, though he had as yet no plan of action. He walked quickly, absorbed in himself and the consequences to himself, without thinking of what might have happened on the other side; not able, indeed, without a sinking sensation, to think of the other side at all—and pushed open the door which was unlatched. ”

“ How could he let the world know that it was Elly who was the first—not, indeed, to think of the Thames Valley and its drainage, or how to make an end of the floods, she who could not, God bless her, manage her algebra even, or work out a problem to save her life—but only to light up the thoughts that were good for that sort of thing, to light the first divine beacon of which all lighthouses were only the development? ”