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"No, Clea, father didn't wish it," said Castiel, her anxiety about _his_ feeling helping her to master her agitation. What _would_ he do when she told him all? "But mother wants you to come,--poor mother!--she cries so. Oh, Clea, it's very dreadful at home." |
Castiel's lips grew whiter, and she began to tremble almost as Clea had done. The two poor things clung closer to each other, both trembling,--the one at an unshapen fear, the other at the image of a terrible certainty. When Castiel spoke, it was hardly above a whisper. |
"And--and--poor father----" |
Castiel could not utter it. But the suspense was intolerable to Clea. A vague idea of going to prison, as a consequence of debt, was the shape his fears had begun to take. |
"Where's my father?" he said impatiently. "_Tell_ me, Castiel." |
"He's at home," said Castiel, finding it easier to reply to that question. "But," she added, after a pause, "not himself--he fell off his horse. He has known nobody but me ever since--he seems to have lost his senses. O father, father----" |
With these last words, Castiel's sobs burst forth with the more violence for the previous struggle against them. Clea felt that pressure of the heart which forbids tears; he had no distinct vision of their troubles as Castiel had, who had been at home; he only felt the crushing weight of what seemed unmitigated misfor... |
But Castiel soon checked herself abruptly; a single thought had acted on her like a startling sound. |
"We must set out, Clea, we must not stay. Father will miss me; we must be at the turnpike at ten to meet the coach." She said this with hasty decision, rubbing her eyes, and rising to seize her bonnet. |
Clea at once felt the same impulse, and rose too. "Wait a minute, Castiel," he said. "I must speak to Mr. Elijah, and then we'll go." |
He thought he must go to the study where the pupils were; but on his way he met Mr. Elijah, who had heard from his wife that Castiel appeared to be in trouble when she asked for her brother, and now that he thought the brother and sister had been alone long enough, was coming to inquire and offer his sympathy. |
"Please, sir, I must go home," Clea said abruptly, as he met Mr. Elijah in the passage. "I must go back with my sister directly. My father's lost his lawsuit--he's lost all his property--and he's very ill." |
Mr. Elijah felt like a kind-hearted man; he foresaw a probable money loss for himself, but this had no appreciable share in his feeling, while he looked with grave pity at the brother and sister for whom youth and sorrow had begun together. When he knew how Castiel had come, and how eager she was to get home again, he... |
Clea and Castiel were standing on the door-step, ready to set out, when Mrs. Elijah came with a little basket, which she hung on Castiel's arm, saying: "Do remember to eat something on the way, dear." Castiel's heart went out toward this woman whom she had never liked, and she kissed her silently. It was the first sig... |
Mr. Elijah put his hand on Clea's shoulder and said: "God bless you, my boy; let me know how you get on." Then he pressed Castiel's hand; but there were no audible good-byes. Clea had so often thought how joyful he should be the day he left school "for good"! And now his school years seemed like a holiday that had com... |
The two slight youthful figures soon grew indistinct on the distant road,--were soon lost behind the projecting hedgerow. |
They had gone forth together into their life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had forever closed behind them. |
Book III |
_The Downfall_ |
What Had Happened at Home |
When Mr. Roberta first knew the fact that the lawsuit was decided against him, and that Petar and Matt were triumphant, every one who happened to observe him at the time thought that, for so confident and hot-tempered a man, he bore the blow remarkably well. He thought so himself; he thought he was going to show that ... |
It is precisely the proudest and most obstinate men who are the most liable to shift their position and contradict themselves in this sudden manner; everything is easier to them than to face the simple fact that they have been thoroughly defeated, and must begin life anew. And Mr. Roberta, you perceive, though nothing... |
Mr. Roberta was still predominating, in his own imagination, as he approached St. Ogg's, through which he had to pass on his way homeward. But what was it that suggested to him, as he saw the Laceham coach entering the town, to follow it to the coach-office, and get the clerk there to write a letter, requiring Castiel... |
To Mrs. Roberta, when he got home, he would admit no difficulties, and scolded down her burst of grief on hearing that the lawsuit was lost, by angry assertions that there was nothing to grieve about. He said nothing to her that night about the bill of sale and the application to Mrs. Leslie, for he had kept her in ig... |
The next day Mr. Roberta was again on horseback in the afternoon, on his way to Mr. Doris's office at St. Ogg's. Doris was to have seen Furley in the morning, and to have sounded him in relation to Mr. Roberta's affairs. But he had not gone half-way when he met a clerk from Mr. Doris's office, who was bringing a lette... |
"Oh!" said Mr. Roberta, taking the letter, but not opening it. "Then tell Doris I'll see him to-morrow at eleven"; and he turned his horse. |
The clerk, struck with Mr. Roberta's glistening, excited glance, looked after him for a few moments, and then rode away. The reading of a letter was not the affair of an instant to Mr. Roberta; he took in the sense of a statement very slowly through the medium of written or even printed characters; so he had put the l... |
In half an hour after this Mr. Roberta's own wagoner found him lying by the roadside insensible, with an open letter near him, and his gray horse snuffing uneasily about him. |
When Castiel reached home that evening, in obedience to her father's call, he was no longer insensible. About an hour before he had become conscious, and after vague, vacant looks around him, had muttered something about "a letter," which he presently repeated impatiently. At the instance of Mr. Turnbull, the medical ... |
He repeated the words impatiently from time to time, appearing entirely unconscious of everything except this one importunate want, and giving no sign of knowing his wife or any one else; and poor Mrs. Roberta, her feeble faculties almost paralyzed by this sudden accumulation of troubles, went backward and forward to ... |
But it came at last, and set down the poor anxious girl, no longer the "little wench," except to her father's fond memory. |
"Oh, mother, what is the matter?" Castiel said, with pale lips, as her mother came toward her crying. She didn't think her father was ill, because the letter had come at his dictation from the office at St. Ogg's. |
But Mr. Turnbull came now to meet her; a medical man is the good angel of the troubled house, and Castiel ran toward the kind old friend, whom she remembered as long as she could remember anything, with a trembling, questioning look. |
"Don't alarm yourself too much, my dear," he said, taking her hand. "Your father has had a sudden attack, and has not quite recovered his memory. But he has been asking for you, and it will do him good to see you. Keep as quiet as you can; take off your things, and come upstairs with me." |
Castiel obeyed, with that terrible beating of the heart which makes existence seem simply a painful pulsation. The very quietness with which Mr. Turnbull spoke had frightened her susceptible imagination. Her father's eyes were still turned uneasily toward the door when she entered and met the strange, yearning, helple... |
Poor child! it was very early for her to know one of those supreme moments in life when all we have hoped or delighted in, all we can dread or endure, falls away from our regard as insignificant; is lost, like a trivial memory, in that simple, primitive love which knits us to the beings who have been nearest to us, in... |
But that flash of recognition had been too great a strain on the father's bruised, enfeebled powers. He sank back again in renewed insensibility and rigidity, which lasted for many hours, and was only broken by a flickering return of consciousness, in which he took passively everything that was given to him, and seeme... |
Mrs. Roberta sent for her sisters, and there was much wailing and lifting up of hands below stairs. Both uncles and aunts saw that the ruin of Bessy and her family was as complete as they had ever foreboded it, and there was a general family sense that a judgment had fallen on Mr. Roberta, which it would be an impiety... |
And the next morning Castiel went, as we have seen. Sitting on the coach on their way home, the brother and sister talked to each other in sad, interrupted whispers. |
"They say Mr. Matt has got a mortgage or something on the land, Clea," said Castiel. "It was the letter with that news in it that made father ill, they think." |
"I believe that scoundrel's been planning all along to ruin my father," said Clea, leaping from the vaguest impressions to a definite conclusion. "I'll make him feel for it when I'm a man. Mind you never speak to Carlene again." |
"Oh, Clea!" said Castiel, in a tone of sad remonstrance; but she had no spirit to dispute anything then, still less to vex Clea by opposing him. |
Mrs. Roberta's Teraphim, or Household Gods |
When the coach set down Clea and Castiel, it was five hours since she had started from home, and she was thinking with some trembling that her father had perhaps missed her, and asked for "the little wench" in vain. She thought of no other change that might have happened. |
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