Part 17 (2/2)

”This is the only thing I dread. Otherwise your coming to us would be the happiest thing that has befallen me for the last year.

”Yours faithfully,

”Felicita.”

If Felicita was glad to have her, Phebe knew that Madame and the children would be enraptured. Nor had she judged wrongly. Madame received her as if she had been a favorite child, whose presence was the very comfort and help she stood most in need of. Though she devoted herself to Felicita, there was a distance between them, an impenetrable reserve, that chilled her spirits and threw her love back upon herself.

But to Phebe she could pour out her heart unrestrainedly, dwelling upon the memory of her lost son, and mourning openly for him. And Phebe never spoke a word that could lead Roland's mother to think she believed him to be guilty. With a loving tact she avoided all discussion on that point; and, though again and again the pang of her own loss made itself poignantly felt, she knew how to pour consolation into the heart of Roland's mother.

But to Felix and Hilda Phebe's companions.h.i.+p was an endless delight. She came from her lonely homestead on the hills into the full stream of London life, and it had a ceaseless interest for her. She could not grow weary of the streets with their crowd of pa.s.sers-by; and the shop windows filled with wealth and curiosities fascinated her. All the stir and tumult were joyous to her, and the faces she met as she walked along the pavement possessed an unceasing influence over her. The love of humanity, scarcely called into existence before, developed rapidly in her. Felix and Hilda shared in her childish pleasure without understanding the deep springs from which it came.

It was an education in itself for the children. A drive in an omnibus, with its frequent stoppages and its constant change of pa.s.sengers, was delightful to Phebe, and never lost its charm for her. She and the children explored London, seeing all its sights, which Phebe, in her rustic curiosity, wished to see. From west to east, from north to south, they became acquainted with the great capital as few children, rich or poor, have a chance of doing. They sought out all its public buildings, every museum and picture gallery, the birthplaces of its famous men, the places where they died, and their tombs if they were within London.

Westminster Abbey was as familiar to them as their own home. It seemed as if Phebe was compensating herself for her lonely girlhood on the barren and solitary uplands. Yet it was not simply sight-seeing, but the outcome of an intelligent and genuine curiosity, which was only satisfied by understanding all she could about the things and places she saw.

To the children, as well as to Madame, she often talked of Roland Sefton. Felix loved nothing more than to listen to her recollections of his lost father, who had so strangely disappeared out of his life. On a Sunday evening when, of course, their wanderings were over, she would sit with them in summer by the attic window, which, overlooked the river, and in winter by the fireside, recounting again and again all she knew of him, especially of how good he always was to her. There were a vividness and vivacity in all she said of him which charmed their imagination and kept the memory of him alive in their hearts. Phebe gave dramatic effect to her stories of him. Hilda could scarcely remember him, though she believed she did; but to Felix he remained the tall, handsome, kindly father, who was his ideal of all a man should be; while Phebe, perhaps unconsciously, portrayed him as all that was great and good.

For neither Madame nor Phebe could find it in their hearts to tell the boy, so proud and fond of his father's memory, that any suspicion had ever been attached to his name. Madame, who had mourned so bitterly over his premature death in her native land, but so far from his own, had never believed in his guilt; and Phebe, who knew him to be guilty, had forgiven him with that forgiveness which possesses an almost sacred forgetfulness. If she had been urged to look back and down into that dark abyss in which he had been lost to her, she must have owned reluctantly that he had once done wrong. But it was hard to remember anything against the dead.

CHAPTER XXIV.

AT HOME IN LONDON.

Every summer Phebe went down to her own home on the uplands, according to her promise to the Nixeys. Felix and Hilda always accompanied her, for a change was necessary for the children, and Felicita seldom cared to go far from London, and then only to some sea-side resort near at hand, when Madame always went with her. Every summer Simon Nixey repeated his offer the first evening of Phebe's residence under her own roof; for, as Mrs. Nixey said, as long as she was wed to n.o.body else there was a chance for him. Though they could see with sharp and envious eyes the change that was coming over her, transforming her from the simple, untaught country girl into an educated and self-possessed woman, marking out her own path in life, yet the sweetness and the frankness of Phebe's nature remained unchanged.

”She's growing a notch or two higher every time she comes down,” said Mrs. Nixey regretfully; ”she'll be far above thee, lad, next summer.”

”She's only old Dummy's daughter after all,” answered Simon; ”I'll never give her up.”

To Phebe they were always old friends, whom she must care for as long as she lived, however far she might travel from them or rise above them.

The free, homely life on the hills was as dear to her and the children as their life in London. The little house, with its beautiful and curious decorations; the small fields and twisted trees surrounding it; the wide, purple moors, and all the a.s.sociations Phebe conjured up for them connected with their father, made the dumb old wood-carver's place a second home to them.

The happiest season of the year to Mr. Clifford was that when Phebe and Roland Sefton's children were in his neighborhood. Felicita remained firm to her resolution that Felix should have nothing to do with his father's business, and the boy himself had decided in his very childhood that he would follow in the footsteps of his ancestor, Felix Merle, the brave pastor of the Jura. There was no hope of having him to train up for the Old Bank. But every summer they spent a few days with him, in the very house where their father had lived, and where Felix could still a.s.sociate him with the wainscoted rooms and the terraced garden. When Felix talked of his father and asked questions about him, Mr. Clifford always spoke of him in a regretful and affectionate tone. No hint reached the boy that his father's memory was not revered in his native town.

”There is no stone to my father in the church,” he said, one Sunday, after he had been looking again and again at a tablet to his grandfather on the church walls.

”No; but I had a granite cross put over his grave in Engelberg,”

answered Mr. Clifford; ”when you can go to Switzerland you'll have no trouble in finding it. Perhaps you and I may go there together some day.

I have some thoughts of it.”

”But my mother will not hear a word of any of us ever going to Switzerland,” said Felix. ”I've asked her how soon she would think us old enough to go, and she said never! Of course we don't expect she would ever bear to go to the place where he was killed; but Phebe would love to go, and so would I. We've saved enough money, Phebe and I; and my mother will not let me say one word about it. She says I am never, never to think of such a thing.”

”She is afraid of losing you as well as him,” replied Mr. Clifford; ”but when you are more of a man she will let you go. You are all she has.”

”Except Hilda,” said the boy fondly, ”and I know she loves me most of all. I do not wonder she cannot bear to hear about my father. My mother is not like other women.”

”Your mother is a famous woman,” rejoined Mr. Clifford; ”you ought to be proud of her.”

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