She's All the World to Me/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX.
THE WORLD'S WANT IS MEN.
In the old house at Balladhoo, three hearts nearly made glad had still one painful passage to experience. It was dusk. By the fire stood Mylrea Balladhoo, with Mona Cregeen seated beside him. Christian had stepped to the door, and now returning to the room with the stranger previously seen in his company, he said, with averted face, "This is the man, father."
Balladhoo neither lifted his eyes to the new-comer nor shifted their gaze from the fire. His frame trembled perceptibly as he said, "I know your business, sir, and it shall have my attention." The stranger glanced from father to son. They stood apart, each unable to meet the other's face. Perhaps there is no more touching sight in nature, rightly regarded, than an old man, and to the pathos incident to age Balladhoo added the sorrow of a wretched and shattered hope.
"May I ask if this deed was drawn by your authority?" said the stranger. He stepped up to the old man, and put the document into his listless hand. Balladhoo glanced down at it, but his poor blurred eyes saw nothing.
"Yes," he answered, promptly enough, but in a husky voice. Christian's face quivered, and his head dropped on his breast. The stranger looked incredulous. "It is quite right if you say so," he answered, with a cold smile.
Balladhoo lifted his face. It was seamed with lines of pain, and told of a terrible struggle. "I do say so," he replied.
His fingers crumpled the deed as he spoke; but his head was erect, and truth seemed to sit on his lips. Christian sat down and buried his eyes in his hand.
The stranger smiled again the some cold smile. "The mortgageor wishes to withdraw the mortgage," he said.
"He may do so—in fifteen days," answered Balladhoo.
"That will suffice. It would be cruel to prolong a painful interview."
Then, with a glance toward Christian, as he sat convulsed with distress that he was unable to conceal, the stranger added, in a hard tone:
"Only, the mortgageor came to have reasons to think that perhaps the deed had been drawn without your knowledge."
Balladhoo handed back the document with a nerveless hand. He looked again through dim eyes at the stranger, and said quietly, but with an awful inward effort, "You have my answer—I knew of it."
The recording angel set down the words in the Book of Life to the old man's credit in heaven. They were not true.
The stranger bowed low and retired.
Christian leaped up and took his father by both hands, but his eyes were not raised to the troubled face.
"This is worse than all," he said, "but God knows everything. He will make me answer for it."
"What is the debt?" asked Balladhoo, with an effort to be calm.
"Money squandered in England."
The old man shook his head with an impatient gesture.
"I mean how much?"
"A thousand pounds." There was a pause.
"We can meet it," said Balladhoo; "and now, my son, cheer up; set your face the right way, and His servant shall not be ashamed."
Christian strode up and down the room. His agitation was greater than before. "I feel less than a man," he said. "Oh, but a hidden sin is a mean thing, father—a dwarfing, petrifying, corroding, unmanly thing. And to think that I could descend so low as to try to conceal it—a part of it—by consorting with a gang of lawless fellows—by a vulgar outrage that might have ended in death itself but that the hand of Heaven interposed!"
"You are not the first," answered Balladhoo, "who has descended from deceit to the margin of crime; but it isn't for me to judge you. Read your misfortunes, my lad, as Heaven writes them. Are they not warnings against the want of manliness? No, it's not for me to say it; but if there's one thing truer than another, it is that the world wants men. Clever fellows, good fellows, it has ever had in abundance, but in all ages the world's great want has been men."
Balladhoo glanced down at Mona. Throughout this interview she had sat with eyes bent on her lap. The old man touched the arm of his son and continued,
"As for the hand of Heaven, it has worked through the hand of this dear, brave girl. You owe her your life, Christian, and so do I."
Then the young man, with eyes aflame, walked to Mona and lifted her into his arms. The girl looked very beautiful in her confusion, and while she sobbed on Christian's breast, and Balladhoo looked on with wondering eyes, Christian confessed everything; how, in effect, Mona had been his wife for six years past, and little Ruby was their child.
It was a staggering blow. But when the surprise of it was past, all was forgiven.
"You love my boy?" said Balladhoo, turning to Mona.
The girl could not answer in words. She threw her arms around the old man's neck, and he kissed her. Then through the tears that had gathered in his blurred old eyes there shot a merry gleam as he said above the girl's hidden face, "Oh, so I've got to be happy yet, I find."
There came the noise of people entering the house. In another moment Kerruish Kinvig had burst in with one of the Castle Rushen men behind him.
"Manxman-like, he's a dog after the fair, and away from Peel to-night," bawled Kinvig, indicating the subject of his inconsequent remarks by a contemptuous lurch of his hand over his shoulder.
"We stayed too long in hiding," said the man, with a glance of self-justification.
"Of course," shouted Kinyig, oblivious of the insinuation against his own leadership; "and who hasn't heard that the crab that lies always in its hole is never fat?"
"The fishing-boat is still at sea, sir. It's scarce likely that the men will come back to Peel," said the man, addressing Balladhoo.
"Who dreamed that they would?" cried Kinvig. "What black ever stamped on his own foot?"
"We're trusting you think we've done our best, sir," continued the man, ignoring the interruptions.
"Eaten bread is quick forgotten," shouted Kinvig. "What you've done you've done, and there's an end of it, and it's not much either; and if I were magistrate, I'd have the law on the lot of you for a pack of incompetent loblolly boys. Wouldn't you, Christian?"
"You have done your best," said Balladhoo, and the man left them. "As for you, Kerruish," he added, "if you'd had the ill-luck to succeed, think what a sad dog you must have been by this time; you would have had nothing to growl about."
Christian had walked to the window. "Hark," he said, turning to Mona, "the wind is rising. What of those poor fellows outside?" The melancholy sough of the wind could be heard above the low moan of the distant sea. Mona thought of Danny, and the tears came again into her eyes.
It was time for the girl to return home. Christian put on his hat to accompany her, and when they left the house together he laughed, dejected though he was, at the bewildered look on the face of Kerruish Kinvig as he glanced in stupid silence from Balladhoo to them, and from them back to Balladhoo.