VICTOR’S GRAVE.

When Arthur Penrose came to himself, with a painful sense of effort to struggle back to life, he opened his eyes upon a group of strangers surrounding a bed on which he was lying. One of them appeared to be a doctor, for he was counting the beatings of his pulse, though he, as well as all the others, had the look of rough and weather-beaten men.

“Where have you taken me to?” he asked, fancying for a moment that he had been picked up in his little pleasure-boat, and carried to shore in England.

“You are in my house, sir,” said one of the group; “in the island of Alderney, among friends. Our life boat rescued you, and brought you here. We will do our best for you, be sure.”

In Alderney! He turned his face towards the light, and through the uncurtained window he could see the rough and tossing sea, and that only stretching up to the distant horizon. He felt sick and giddy at the sight of it; and as if he read the story on the stormy scene, all the memories of the terrible time he had passed through flashed, with intense vividness, through his mind.

“Are there any others saved?” he inquired, in a faint undertone.

“One seaman, who gives his name as Fleck,” answered the doctor. “Come, come; you must forget all that for a little while. Here, drink this.”

He had scarcely swallowed the draught before he found himself falling asleep, with a strange and pleasant feeling of rest and forgetfulness stealing over him. When he awoke, some hours later, he felt stronger and better, though none the less miserable. He lay still for some time without stirring, brooding over the calamity, with all its agonizing details, through which the “Dolphin” had been lost. Presently he could bear his solitude no longer, and he sprang up in haste. He was feverishly impatient to see Fleck, for Fleck was the only one who had been saved. He crept down stairs tremulously, feeling all his nerves unstrung. The house was a large one, and evidently an hotel. As his footsteps made themselves heard, the watchful landlord appeared, and opened the door of a private room.

“I’ve ordered a fire in here for you, sir,” he said; “it’s more cheery, though it is not a chilly day. This is a very awkward place to be in in stormy weather. Our communication is cut off sometimes for days together, and there’s not much chance of running over to Guernsey at present. Our steamer brought us in the mails yesterday, just before the storm. You’ll be anxious to communicate with your friends, I fear, sir?”

“There is no hurry,” answered Penrose, mournfully.

“Well, well!” said the landlord. “Fleck, the sailor that was saved with you, sir, says you’d be wanting to charter our ‘Queen of the Isles,’ cost what it would, and I have been sending out to see if I could find a crew. But not a man in the island will risk his life at present. You’ll be forced to stay for awhile.”

“I have no wish to leave,” said Penrose.

“That’s well,” he continued; “we’re going to bury the poor little cabin-boy to-morrow, and perhaps, if you feel well enough, you’d choose to follow him to the grave. But just as you please.”

“Where is he?” asked Penrose, waking up to more interest in his landlord’s conversation.

“He’s lying up stairs,” he replied; “the crew of the lifeboat picked him up in the water, but he was quite dead, poor little fellow. It was all over with him when they found him.”

“Let me see him,” said Penrose.

Victor’s body was lying in a westerly room, and the light of the setting sun shone full upon his face as Penrose stood looking down upon it. He asked the landlord to leave him alone with it. The pale placid face, with the eyelids closed over the eyes that had been so bright yesterday morning, wore a smile, partly of surprise, partly of joy. It looked very young and untroubled; there were no hard lines or wrinkles in it. The boy might have been sleeping, and dreaming happy dreams. It was almost as joyous as it had been when he was steering the boat that had gone to the rescue of Penrose.

He sat down beside the corpse, with his eyes fastened upon it, thinking. There seemed to come around the bed the images of those men who had formed the crew of the “Dolphin.” Strange that he should know all their faces as well as though they had been familiar to him all his life! But they were his father’s victims, and he could not forget them. How many more had been hurried away into the same great and silent mystery of death, sinking unseen and unheard into the gloomy and secret depths of the sea? Their number he would never know. All he knew was that a fearful debt of crime against his fellow-men, and against God, lay to his father’s charge, and descended to him by a fell inheritance. He had been daintily fostered and unstintingly indulged upon the proceeds of these men’s agonies. He had not eaten a meal or clothed himself with a garment that had not been bought with blood. His whole past life, that merry boyhood and sunny pleasant youth, which had only ended yesterday, became a loathing to him. He longed to rid himself of it; to change lots with the poorest and meanest of men; to shake off his father’s name, and his father’s claims upon him. In his utter wretchedness of soul he felt that he could never bear to look into his father’s face again.

Why had he not died a few years ago whilst he was like this pale, quiet, smiling boy beside him? If he had but gone away while he loved and trusted his father, and knew no wrong in him! There was no one else in the world whom he had loved so much--no one who loved him so much. Yet he shrank painfully from going back to him, or of entering into any communication with him. No! he would never return to England. It was a good thing that he had been cast upon the coast of Alderney, whence he could pass either to Guernsey or France, and fade away from his father’s ken, leaving no clue behind him by which he could be traced. He would never taste another morsel of his father’s bread, nor set his foot across his father’s blood-stained threshold.

The sun went down while he was still brooding over his despair. All night long the same thoughts and memories haunted him. When he was following Victor’s rough coffin to the grave, he walked behind it as in a painful dream. He listened absently to the funeral service read over it, hearing little except the words, “In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succor, but of Thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased.” Yes! God was full of anger against sin, and what fearful sins had not his father committed against God! sins that must be visited upon himself, which were already being visited upon him!

He lingered behind, after everyone else was gone away. The stormy sky was dark with clouds drifting rapidly before the westerly wind. The low and ceaseless roll of the waves breaking all along the rocky coast sounded mournfully in his ears. Scuds of rain followed one another at short intervals, and if the sun gleamed out for an instant, it shone through a mist upon the coffin which would hide for ever the face of Victor from those who loved him, and who were still watching for him to come home to them, unconscious of their loss. Penrose lifted up his hand, and, as if addressing a crowd of witnesses, he said aloud, though in a low and awe-stricken voice:

“I swear to God that I will never look upon my father’s face again, nor touch a penny of his money, until he repents, and makes what restitution he can for these crimes!”

After that he left the open grave with the autumn raindrops falling into it. He felt a miserable sense of satisfaction in his own fixed resolve. It seemed to him that he was doomed to be the avenger of blood against his own father, and that he was entering upon his doom, to suffer and to inflict a wretchedness that would in some measure meet the demands of justice. Human laws, at least in his own country, took no cognizance of such crimes, but Divine laws did. His father had filled many a home with misery; now his own home should be desolate. He had robbed mothers of their sons, and he would never hear again his son’s voice call him “Father.” Many a heart-sickened woman was looking still for the return of those who could never come back; it was only just that his father’s heart should sicken, and long in vain to know the fate of his only son!