be furnished with a little capital and an outfit, so that he could go and try his luck in Australia.
For a few moments the Rev. Eli Mallow was aghast at the idea. He wished Cyril to leave the town, but not to go abroad.
“I don’t care where I go,” said Cyril; “I’ll either try Australia, or go and hunt out Frank and chum with him.”
“But we don’t know where he is,” said the Rector.
“New Zealand.”
“Yes, but New Zealand is large.”
“Not so large but what a fellow might find out Frank. Everyone would know him.”
The Rector sighed, and wished his sons were not so popular with a certain class, and then he thought over the position, and shrank from giving his consent. Knowing the mother’s intense love for her son, he felt that the parting would nearly break her heart, and after a few moments’ pause he said so.
“Oh, you need not fidget about that,” said the young man. “I’ve talked to her about it for days past.”
“And what does she say?”
“Well, it upset her a bit at first, but she soon came round, and she thinks it would be the best thing I could do.”
It was then with a sense of relief that made him feel ashamed, that the father, after a liberal endowment of money, saw his son sent from Liverpool, after the heartiest promises on the part of the young man to do battle with life and make himself a name and a position in the colony.
“If not for my sake, Cyril, for your mother’s,” the father had said, as he held his son’s hand upon the deck of the Great Central liner.
“Depend upon me this time, father,” was the earnest reply, and Cyril went his way across the sea, fully believing in himself that his wild oats were sown, and that now he was about to make a position of substantial basis for himself.
It was a strange thing, and as if a curious kind of clairvoyance made him prophetic, for the Rev. Eli Mallow went home, and that evening busied himself over his next Sunday’s sermon, involuntarily choosing the parable of the Prodigal Son, and not waking up to the fact of what he had done till he sat there in his study reading the manuscript over by the light of his shaded lamp.
“Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me,” he muttered in a low voice, as, with the manuscript in his hand, he sat gazing straight before him into the darker part of the room, and then became silent.
“And took his journey into a far country,” he muttered again, in the same dreamy abstracted manner, and then there was a longer pause, followed by a deep sigh.
The Rev. Eli Mallow rose slowly from his seat, and, with an agonised look in his face, walked up and down the room for some time before sinking back into his chair.
“And there wasted his substance with riotous living.”
It did not seem to be his voice that spoke in the silence of that room; but he knew it was his that exclaimed piteously as the king of old—“Ah, Cyril, my son, my son!” Again there was absolute silence in that room, till, quoting once more from the parable which he had made the subject of his discourse, the Rector said softly—
“Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”
“Yes, and I should forgive him,” he continued, after a pause. “I do try to practise as I preach. Poor Cyril! poor wilful boy. I pray heaven that my thoughts have been doing thee wrong.”
There was a gentle smile upon his lips then as he took the manuscript of his sermon and tore it up into very small pieces before consigning it to the waste-paper basket.
“No,” he said, “I must not preach a sermon such as that: it is too prophetic of my own position with my sons;” and as we know this prodigal did return penniless, having worked his way back in a merchant brig, to present himself one day at the rectory in tarry canvas trousers, with blackened horny hands and a reckless defiant look in his eyes that startled the quiet people of the place.
He made no reference as to his having wasted his substance; he talked not of sin, and he alluded in nowise to forgiveness, to being made as one of his father’s hired servants, but took his place coolly enough once more in the house, and if no fatted calf was killed, and no rejoicings held, he was heartily welcomed and forgiven once again.
He was his mother’s favourite, and truly, in spite of all, there was forgiveness ready in the father’s heart. As there was also for Frank, who after some years’ silence had suddenly walked in at the rectory gates, rough-looking and boisterous, but not in such a condition as his brother, who had quite scandalised the men-servants, neatly clad in the liveries, of which a new supply had come from London, greatly to the disgust of Smithson in the market-place, who literally scowled at every seam.
Part 1, Chapter XVI.
At the King’s Head.
“What I say is this,” exclaimed Jabez Fullerton. “Justice is justice, and right is right.”
“Hear, hear!” murmured several voices, as Mr. Fullerton glanced round the room, and drew himself up with the pride of a man who believed that he had said something original.
“I hope I’m too good a Christian to oppose the parson,” he continued, “and I wouldn’t if it had been Mr. Paulby, but it’s time we stopped somewhere, gentlemen.”
“Hear, hear!” again; and several of the gentlemen addressed took their long pipes from their mouths to say it, and then, replacing them, continued to smoke.
“Ever since parson has been back he has been meddling and interfering. First he kills poor old Sammy Warmoth. Broke his heart, he did. Then he makes Joe Biggins saxon, a man most unfitted for the post, gentlemen. I say a man most unfitted for the post.”
“Hear, hear!”
“Chap as is always looking at you as if he wanted to measure you for a coffin,” said Smithson, the tailor.
“Natural enough,” said the Churchwarden, chuckling; “you always look at our clothes, Smithson, eh?”
“Ay, I do, Master Portlock, sir; but I don’t want you to die for it. I want you to live and grow stout, and want new suits, not a last one.”
“Stiff, hard suit o’ mourning, eh, Smithson, made o’ wood?”
“Yes, sir, well seasoned; ellum, eh?”
There was a general laugh at this lugubrious joking, and Fullerton tapped impatiently with his pipe-bowl upon the table.
“I say, gentlemen, a most unsuitable man,” he continued.
“Who would you have had then?” said Churchwarden Portlock.
“Why
