THE FATHER.

A STORY FROM REAL LIFE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "REAL MOUNTAIN DECAMERON."

THE interest of the following narrative (if interest it possess) is founded on the parental affection. To many the degree of it therein portrayed may appear morbid; but to those I would submit a few remarks on children considered as a great class of society, not as embryo elements of it-mere things of promise and present pastime. In pleasantry we may designate them as a happy little people, who have no need of laws, pains, and punishments, among them: but when we seriously reflect on the corrupting and hardening effect on our hearts of worldly pursuits and collision with our fellow-men, and then turn to these innocent beings, happy by unerring instinct only, not through false views, or vicious aims, or the sufferings of others-when we grasp the little hand put artlessly into ours, when we look into the fair countenance, and say, " Here is the hand that never did offence, the eye that never looked it, the mind that never thought less innocently than the spirits of heaven !"-I say, when wearied with our worldly conflict, we turn into our domestic circle, and thus muse over these, its purest ornaments, are we not justified in regarding children as a most important body? as a sort of link between our polluted degenerate selves, and that primeval innocence, of which we have on earth no representative or image left, but "little children?" Surely it is something to enjoy daily so beautiful, so pure a spectacle, as a multitude of creatures of our own nature, without a speck of that defilement incident to all adult nature; creatures which realize all the ideas we can form of life in heaven,-of the society of angels.

I cannot but think that this constant presence of human nature, pure and happy, of simple and innocent enjoyment, exerts a great, though little noticed influence on this whole great fighting family of man; and that each member of it foregoes somewhat of his selfishness, abates something of his fury, after every such contemplation of something happier than himself, which never yet regarded self, never was infuriated by passions. No wonder that the greatest of men have mostly evinced a passionate fondness for children; neither is it surprising that in some persons, not otherwise of weak character, such fondness should even rise to excess. In our mourning over a lost child the very sources of our comfort bear in them an embittering venom for our grief. The same purity of soul which assures us of its acceptance into the bosom of God, also renders the memory of its vanished prettiness and graces more intolerable by the exemption of every, even the least drawback on our love, from failings or offence. To the busy world what, indeed, is the death of a child? It forwarded-it retarded no human aim; it stood an insignificant little alien by the side of the mighty and dusty arena of life. Not so to the parent :—to him its smile and play were the invigorating spirit that nerved him in the conflict; and the very apathy of the whole world beside, its utter want of sympathy with him in his (to their feeling) trifling loss, becomes itself an added source of poignant, lonely, heart.consuming misery.

I was requested by a middle-aged farmer to visit his only son, and set out with him on a ride of nine miles to his mountain home. As a specimen of a numerous class of the aborigines of Wales, and the most estimable class-the secluded breeders of sheep and cattleI must briefly sketch my fellow-traveller. His manner was so reserved as to border on sullenness, until intercourse had dispelled its coldness. He wore a grey coat (of home-dressed wool) of a coarse texture, and a shapeless straw hat; there was an air of negligence about his personal appearance, which betokened habits of solitary life; the moss from the bark of trees had greened his dress in many places; but, being a man of tall and fine person, and his behaviour indicating education above that of a labouring rustic, his whole appearance was not without a homely dignity, primitive though rather grotesque. There is a pensiveness of look and tone in the more secluded Welsh farmers, almost touching, produced, no doubt, by the solitude in which much of their lives is spent, as well as by the character of their native land. Many of the sequestered Welsh homes have something of the solemnity of a church in their grey antiquity, bowered by huge trees, in the depths of dingles, shut up by mountains so nearly meeting as to almost bulge over the roof of deep thatch. Owls hooting by night from one wild barrier ridge to the other, across these ravines roaring with waterfalls at a little distance, among huge misshapen rocks; and the plover (the bird of ill omen to the Welsh) shrieking from the fern in the still noon, and the kite from the hills' stony tops; the mournful morass, with its black bogs and ever-whistling wind, which beyond those tops cuts off communication with the world to all but resolute hill climbers :-all these cannot fail, while thus surrounding the native almost from birth to burial, to exert a plastic influence on the mind and character of man.

It was to such a home that my master-shepherd, as I shall call him, at last introduced me, after a long descent down a watercourse, called by courtesy a road. The short dialogue which passed between us prior to our arrival, may serve to bring the reader acquainted with David Beynon, the hereditary owner of Llandefelach.

"You are a widower, I believe, David?" I remarked. (In rural Wales we exclude the "sir," and the surname, and the "mister," so frequent in Saxon usage.)

"Why, no; but much the same thing. My wife is alive; but her brother and I were on bad terms before our marriage, and worse after; this led to quarrels, which always made things worse, so we parted. Then we had a great dispute about which should have my little Peter. We could not both have him, and I could not part with him, and would not. I have no relations left, she has many; so I thought she could better spare him than I could. So I have been both father and mother to him; always in my lap, in my arms, and in my bed; abroad with me up the hill with the sheep, and in the snow he would toddle after me."

"Is your wife still desirous to have him with her?" I inquired.

"Furious about him still, I hear. I should be sorry for her, but I do hear that she finds a comforter in a fellow who courted her before we were married. I've had thoughts of our coming together again, for little Peter's sake, in case I should die, that he might not have in a mother a stranger to go to; but, since I heard that, I've done with her."

On reaching the antique home I found a very sweet little boy, sensible, pale, patient, stretched on what appeared-from the dangerous state of typhus-fever under which he was suffering-too likely to prove his death-bed.

Of terrible and overwhelming evils the mind does not readily admit the probability; but, when this happy incredulity is once overcome by evidence, the transition to absolute despair is rapid, and equally unreasonable with the previous obstinacy of hope. Hence it was that, no sooner had I signified to David that his child was in great danger, than his eyes rolled and dilated as if under some astonishing news, and a wild dismay marked his whole countenance. He stood a minute statue-like; asked again if I meant that his child was actually likely to die, and, without waiting reply, burst forth, "O my God! my God! what shall I do?"-then ran to his child as if he had but a minute more to see him alive, hung over him in dumb agony, and at last vented his agony in a womanlike flood of tears.

Afraid to flatter him with hope, I said something commonplace of his having surely known that his child was mortal.

"Mortal!" he exclaimed; "why, ay; and so am I too, thanks to God! for how could I bear to live without him now? A patient sensible boy! a good boy and a fond! So fond of me, a rough man, -just as if I had been his own soft mother! Oh! sir, what avails it now? Now I wish to God he had been less good, less fond.-I wish I could remember one fault he had; for now every pretty look of his up into my face, and all his pretty ways, do every one come back like a knife at my heart, now that I think I shall never see 'em more. Oh! doctor, bear with me; I am a lone man, and there's no one in my house that is a father but I! No one to feel with me, or for me!"

On my second visit, delirium had supervened in my little patient. The first indication of wandering intellect in a beloved object is, to even the best-regulated mind, dreadful; but to our extravagant recluse it was a gorgon that almost produced a kindred reeling of the mind to that visible in the object he so doated on.

The boy fancied himself on the hill side with the sheep, and the affrighted father tried almost angrily to convince him of the delusion, as if he would steady and hold back by force that reason which he saw departing-that mind of precocious power of which he had been so proud, now wandering and groping in the shadows of a night too likely to prove eternal. A pretty, but vacant smile only answered to the agonised and eager words of the parent thus striving against nature; but once his hollow horror of voice and accent seemed to rouse the sufferer; for he feebly tried to raise his arm as if to wipe away the tears he saw streaming from his father's eyes, and by that pathetic and pretty action brought many more.

Day after day did this impassioned parent sit sleepless, wan, and without food, holding that small hand, and counting the beats of that frightful pulse, watching every turn of those half-extinguished eyes, whose light had been the very light of life to him.

Had David been less beloved by his farm-servants every duty would have been neglected by them, as was every avocation by himself, but that of a nurse; for, taking no longer interest in anything beyond that little bed, he was grown impatient of their attention to even the most needful calls of daily duty. He seemed to fancy that

the aid of every hand and every mind was demanded, in that fearful crisis, on which depended his own future doom of deadly sorrow or restoration to happiness; he was enraged by the presence of mind in others which could any longer recollect milking-time and folding-time, could still hear the cows lowing to be milked at the door, the sheep needing penning down in the valley of the brook; it almost seemed a slight and a cruelty to his darling, to attend to these things, to regard the future or the present, or anything but the moaning and the tossing of that dear sufferer-for any eye, or heart, or hand, to watch, and tend, and tremble, and ache, with a less fearful anxiety than his

own.

After all this storm of distress in the house of Llandefelach, and the quiet cum of the Glasnaut, I had the great pleasure of seeing the restored child and father lying on the sunny sod slanting down to the foamy little brook, fringed with cowslips and harebells; the former nearly well and quite happy, surrounded with almost a toyshop: the various toys procured from a distant town, the promised rewards of good conduct in taking the requisite remedies.,

Again I visited that valley and spot. I saw the father with folded arms walking thoughtfully, rather sullenly on by himself, and little Peter calling after him to stop for him, he being still too feeble to hasten much. The father stopped at last; but rather, I thought, as if ashamed that I should see his inattention to the boy, than moved by his eager and half-reproachful call. Never shall I forget the then inexplicable fall and change of that man's countenance as it met mine, as he paused, perplexed between reluctance to indulge his child with the usual "jump" as he begged to be "carried," and his shame under my observation of his altered manner toward him-how altered!—and the child more beautiful than ever! for the paleness left by illness harmonised with a certain amiability and gentleness, the fruits, perhaps of a half-developed superior mind, which my small patient exhibited.

"What has my little friend here done, David ?" I inquired. "Nothing very bad, I am sure,"—and the blue and speaking eyes of Peter, suffused each with a tear, seconded my question, earnestly gazing up at the rather stern and deeply sorrowful face of the father.

"Done? God bless thee, boy, nothing-nothing! He has done nothing, sir-as good a child as ever- "The child, delighted, mounted a little bank of wild thyme, ready for a spring into his arms, of which the unaccountable man, after half-extending his arms to his pretty supplicant, disappointed him, letting them slowly fall to his sides, and muttering, "Poor little fellow!-poor little-wretch!" Then he seated himself on the ground in strange absence of mind, as if forgetting me, his child, everything.

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"I should have thought, David, your heart would have bled to draw tears from those beautiful eyes," and I tried to console him by my kiss and a present, for the want of his father's.

Suddenly the latter sprang up out of his disconsolate revery, and he broke forth in a hollow voice of frightful energy.

"Does not my heart bleed then? Have I shed no tears? Sir, for every tear that my cruelty draws from his, mine shed hundreds -in the night, sir,-in the dead of night,-lonely-long and lonely nights! He is no longer my little bedfellow now; oh! no more now

--never more! If ever agony did force blood from a wretch's eyes, I have wept blood!"

While he raved thus, his large melancholy eyes were fixed on the brook; he seemed to be rather in a passionate soliloquy than addressing me, although answering me; and after a pause, he wept and trembled like an infant, adding in a quieter tone:" Would to God we had again one bed, even this earth? one grave, one death-hour, to lie shroud by shroud, as hand in hand we used to sleep sweetly! O my boy!-my boy! I had been happy to see you die a few short weeks ago, to suck in death from thy poor black lips, and lay me down for ever by thy side--oh! yes, then, while I could have said, 'Farewell, my boy!' But now-oh! now- -"He broke off there, and fixed a stern, yet, I thought, a sort of shamefaced look on me, and recalled by my presence, as it seemed, to more self-recollection, he started, and exclaimed-"How I have been talking to you, a stranger!"

But lest this change in our master-shepherd should be as bewildering to the reader as it then was to me, let me briefly supply the explanation.

During the boy's convalescence, David, in his fulness of joy, had invited the mother to visit their child. After a sort of reconciliation, the old source of contention (the question with which parent he should live) produced a fresh quarrel. It had happened that Peter was a seven months' child, without very manifest signs of such prematurity. The malignity of Mrs. Beynon's brother, a brutal sort of grazier and drover, had led him to goad his enemy, David, by taunts, at the expense of his sister's character in short, he had insinuated that the real father of the child was the man who (as David Beynon told me) had wooed her prior to her marriage. At this fatal interview, that unhappy mother, either wishing to estrange her husband from Peter, and so effect her object, or urged by mere fury of revenge, forgot decency and herself, and her son's welfare, so far as to avow the truth of this scandal raised by her brother. To prove to the selfish father, who had engrossed to himself their common object of love, that it was in fact hers, and hers only, so that he had been hugging to his heart his bane and his dishonour in what he deemed his pride and blessing. This was a tempting species of revenge, too sweet and keen in point for her mood of the moment to resist. David, breaking up the interview with terrible curses on her head, from that moment never looked into those sweet and innocent eyes, without seeing there the image of that man's countenance, who he believed had wronged him. Those pretty orbs, into which he had rarely looked without an impulse to implant kisses on both, were now become inha bited by a smiling devil--a face that seemed to leer upon him, as the fool and dotard who had fostered another's offspring for his own. That man's eyes, too, were blue; Peter's were of a lovely blue. The mother's eyes were, indeed, of that colour; but David could and would no longer see that mother's eyes in those; for," Trifles light as air," &c. The dreadful condition of feelings here depicted has never, that I am aware, filled a page in the biography of human hearts, prolific as is our age of all sorts of histories, real and fanciful, and far-fetched as are the sources of excitement in many of them. To those, then, who may regard in the light of incidents any new and strange harrowing