212520_The_Adve ... _Way_Through_The_World.pdf - OUDL Home

284 THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP
keep them at Dr. Pybus's, where they were doing so well ; and they
were ever so much better and more gentlemanlike than Colonel
Chandler's boys ; and to lose the army will break Moira's heart,
it will. And the little ones, my little blue-eyed Carrick, and my
darling Jany, and my Mary, that I nursed almost miraculously out
of her scarlet fever. God help them ! God help us all !" thinks
the poor mother. No wonder that her nights are wakeful, and her
heart in a tumult of alarm at the idea of the impending danger.
And the father of the family ?—the stout old General whose
battles and campaigns are over, who has come home to rest his
war-worn limbs, and make his peace with Heaven ere it calls him
away—what must be his feelings when he thinks that he has been
entrapped by a villain into committing an imprudence which makes
his children penniless and himself dishonoured and a beggar ? When
he found what Dr. Firmin had done, and how he had been cheated,
he went away, aghast, to his lawyer, who could give him no help.
Philip's mother's trustee was answerable to Philip for his property.
It had been stolen through Baynes's own carelessness, and the law
bound him to replace it. General Baynes's man of business could
not help him out of his perplexity at all ; and I hope my worthy
reader is not going to be too angry with the General for what I
own he did. You never would, my dear sir, I know. No power
on earth would induce you to depart one inch from the path of
rectitude ; or, having done an act of imprudence, to shrink from
bearing the consequence. The long and short of the matter is, that
poor Baynes and his wife, after holding agitated stealthy councils
together—after believing that every strange face they saw was a
bailiff's coming to arrest them on Philip's account—after horrible
days of remorse, misery, guilt—I say the long and the short of the
matter was that these poor people determined to run away. They
would go and hide themselves anywhere—in an impenetrable pine
forest in Norway—up an inaccessible mountain in Switzerland.
They would change their names ; dye their mustachios and honest
old white hair ; fly with their little ones away, away, away, out of
the reach of law and Philip ; and the first flight lands them on
Boulogne Pier, and there is Mr. Philip holding out his hand and
actually eyeing them as they get out of the steamer ! Eyeing them?
It is the eye of Heaven that is on those criminals. Holding out
his hand to them ? It is the hand of fate that is on their wretched
shoulders. No wonder they shuddered and turned pale. That
which I took for sea-sickness, I am sorry to say was a guilty
conscience: and where is the steward, my dear friends, who can
relieve us of that ?
As this party came staggering out of the Custom-house, poor