A Blot on the Scutcheon. Mabel Winifred Knowles
who dares call my father foul names, whilst I have no knowledge to enable me to slit their tongues for such lies."
Silence in the wainscotted room.
How the bird-song without jarred.
"So you would know?" said Sir Henry dully. "Then I will tell you."
The proud, aristocratic old face was very hard and set.
"Your father," he said monotonously, "was my only son. He was handsome—you shall see his portrait presently. And I was proud of him. So was his mother. But she should not have hidden his faults from me. It is so with women: they weaken with their pampering where discipline should strengthen. I knew nothing of his gambling at Oxford, or his reputation later on at Arthur's and White's, where Stephen Berrington became, I believe, a notable figure—as a pigeon ready for plucking.
"I remained here and knew nothing, only picturing my son according to my fancy. Then the inevitable happened. He got mixed up in one of those bubble Jacobite plots which were for ever being blown by the friends of poor Prince Charlie. He and his bosom companion, Ralph Conyers, were burning, it seemed, with zeal for the royal exile. I do not say that I altogether disapproved, though warning them of the penalties of rashness.
"They did not listen—I hardly expected them to, though I warned them again before they set out on that fatal day to Ireland, where, in due course, their hero was to land.
"I need not tell you the story in detail. They failed. The cracking of an egg-shell was no harder than the quashing of such a plot, though there were brave gentlemen concerned in it. Too much heart and too little brain is a bad mixture for success in such enterprises. Stephen was imprisoned at Dublin Castle with Ralph Conyers and others."
A long pause. Sir Henry's face was ashen, his old lips twitching nervously.
Michael's dark head was bent eagerly forward, but there was fear in his grey eyes.
"Yes," he muttered. "He was imprisoned?"
"For treason. When I heard the news I wept for my son, yet I honoured him, thinking he was giving his life for a gallant cause."
"He escaped?"
The old man's lips were twisted into that bitterly sarcastic smile of his.
"Ay," he replied. "Stephen Berrington escaped scot free by betraying his comrades."
Tick, tick, tick.
The solemn, monotonous chant of the great clock in the corner was the only sound in the room.
Michael sat, white and rigid as the stern old man opposite.
"Betrayed!"
"Betrayed. I learnt that the son I mourned as dead was alive—free; but the price was dishonour. I cursed him then, as I curse him now."
It was very terrible, the concentrated and undying fury in those quiet, even tones.
Michael shuddered, covering his face with his hands.
"The son of a traitor," he moaned—"a traitor! And he was right."
"Who?"
"Morice Conyers. Yet I would have killed him for calling me a traitor's son."
"He spoke truth. His father was one of those who suffered even more, perhaps, than those whom my son's words helped to send to the scaffold. Ralph Conyers was imprisoned for ten years and came back a cripple, whose limbs were twisted and bent with rheumatism and ague. Do you wonder if he too curses the name of Berrington?"
"My father! And such an act!"
"You do well to tremble. It is an ill heritage for you, lad—a stained and blotted scutcheon, with coward and traitor written across an unsullied sheet."
"And he—is still alive?"
"I do not know. Yet I pray Heaven he is not. I have never seen him since. And he knew better than to come whining to me. I would have had him whipped from the doors. His mother saw him by stealth once, and he told her a tale. I did not listen to it. She died soon after; I think of a broken heart. It did not help me to love my son better. He wrote once to tell me of his marriage to an Irishwoman and of your birth. I did not answer. He has not written again."
"My mother wept," said Michael slowly, "whenever I asked concerning him. Yet I do not think he is dead."
"And why not?"
"A letter came once, not long since. The messenger who brought it was from abroad. My mother did not welcome him very warmly, and afterwards she cried. The messenger went away laughing, and that maddened me. I ran after him, demanding that he should fight, but he caught me by the wrist, looking down for a long time into my face.
"'Your father's son? Impossible!' he mocked. 'Impossible save for that big nose of yours and the set of your shoulders. Ha, ha! So you would not run away in face of an enemy? Morbleu! A game cockerel, I protest.'
"So, making me a very mocking bow, he went away. And my mother wept again very sorely and very often, till the day she died."
"Saying nought of him?"
"As I knelt beside her, at the last, she put her arms around me closely.
"'Pray God you may not meet him!' she moaned, 'or, if you do, pray God you may save him from——' But she died before she finished her words."
Sir Henry's chin was sunk on his breast. The reopening of an unhealable wound is sore enough work.
Let it be closed henceforth.
Yet, being open, he would tell the lad all now, before forbidding mention of such subject again. "Come," he said, rising, clutching at his ebony stick with the sudden weakness of age. "You shall see his likeness, and then—well, it is good that the dead past buries its dead."
Sir Henry Berrington did not believe in ghosts. Yet they haunted the picture-gallery up there. Ah yes! Curse he might and did, yet the ghosts laughed and sang with merry, boyish voices, shouting in glee as they romped with Chieftain and Bride, the great deerhounds, crying aloud to tell father or mother of some youthful sport, carolling out some brave, rollicking ditty of gallant deeds.
Ah, yes! It was not the old mother alone who had wept on the neck of these ghosts, holding out wide, empty arms to embrace shadows, and turning away—alone.
But the old man's step was firmer now as he trod the gallery floor, head erect and shoulders set as he passed between rows of smiling or frowning ancestors, followed by a lean, dark-browed boy, whose head was a trifle bent and his eyes deprecating as they met the fixed stare of painted ones around.
Was it his fault that the scutcheon they left so fair was stained and blotted by a foul and treacherous deed?
The setting sun sent a flare of light through the great window, with its blazonment of arms and rich colouring, at the end of the gallery. It shone strangely on the dusty curtain which hung there over the last picture on the wall.
Force himself though he would, Sir Henry's hand trembled as he drew back the velvet folds.
And Michael, looking, saw the picture of a young man, dressed in the extravagant fashion of a period twenty years earlier. Rich setting to rich beauty.
Stephen Berrington, aged twenty-two, was a son any mother might have been proud of.
Surely it was no traitor's face, but rather that of a very pretty gentleman. Weak? Yes; chin and mouth proved that—a youth to be led rather than born to rule. And Satan had led him to his own destruction. So Sir Henry said, even whilst Stephen's mother wept for her son on her knees. A woman puts love before honour where a brave man makes the latter his deity.
Thus Michael looked on his father's face and found scorn overcoming the pity.
A traitor—and his father!
No wonder Morice Conyers had mocked him. Yet he would prove that a man can be a traitor's son, and yet