So her life had settled into a pleasant little groove with interesting prospects ahead, and still the “barrel of meal,” as she called her worn little pocketbook, always contained enough to live on and get the real necessities and sometimes a fragment or two of luxury. Winter was coming sometime, of course, with need for heat and light, and she must prepare for it, too, but it wasn’t here yet. Still, she did not feel that she had arrived at the point where she cared to let the Meadow Brook people know where she was. Some of them might take it into their heads to hunt her up on a motor trip, and she wasn’t just prepared yet to show off her little house. Besides, she wanted to be anchored firmly with a regular school job before she told anyone where she was. Well, she knew there were people in Meadow Brook who would gladly have offered her a home just for Aunt Mary’s sake, and she was a proud little girl and didn’t want to have anybody feel they must offer her help. Besides, it wasn’t exactly loyal to the family to explain her position at present, and she was one who would be loyal to her family even if her family was not loyal to her.
So she went her various helpful ways and eked out her small necessities with always something in the little brown pocketbook. Day by day the little house grew more homelike and cozier.
The homemade bed was a wonderful success. Mounted on four solid little square boxes six inches high and nailed firmly to them, with a valance and cover of gray denim, and cotton pillows covered with the same, it seemed a luxurious bed. At night when the cover was removed, it made a wonderful bed. When Joyce finally attained a fluffy pink coverlet made of cotton batting and a remnant of pink cheesecloth tied with pink yarn, she felt that she slept in luxury. Sheets and pillowcases were not expensive when one bought remnants of coarse cloth and hemmed them; and washing was not hard to do with the outside faucet and drain so near. It might not be so easy in winter, but it was all right in summer. And presently Mrs. Bryant made it still easier for her by suggesting that she use the tubs and hot water in the laundry in return for helping her out by getting super once in a while when she had company.
Gradually the little house in the side yard took on an atmosphere of home. The two barrels, sawed in the middle half around, fitted with four springs in the seats, and upholstered in gray denim with padded backs became two easy chairs, really comfortable to sit in. Joyce was proud of them. She invited Mrs. Bryant to take a seat in one when it was finished, and that good lady was almost disposed to doubt the girl’s word when she told her it was made out of a barrel.
“My grandmother made one,” explained Joyce, “and we always kept it carefully. I often wanted to make one when I saw a nice clean barrel, and now I’ve done it.”
“Well, I think you’re a wonder,” said Mrs. Bryant after she had lifted the valance and felt the sturdy barrel staves for herself. “Just a wonder! You get so much more out of life than those flapper girls do! I wonder why they like to be such fools. I can’t see what the boys see in them. My Jimmie don’t like ’em. He says, ‘Mother, you don’t know what the girls are like nowadays,’ and I believe him. I’m sure I hope he stays sensible and finds a girl someday that will be the right kind. I was ‘most afraid there weren’t any left, but now that I’ve seen you, I’m real encouraged.”
The said Jimmie appeared at home one weekend from technical school, where he was learning to be an electrical engineer, and kindly offered to wire her little house for her, probably at his mother’s suggestion. So, at last, she had light and a place to cook, and she saved enough from getting her own dinners to buy a tiny electric grill, which gave her great comfort.
One corner that she called her dining room blossomed out with shelves, on which little blue and white cups and plates bought at the ten-cent store made quite a display.
She found a table and two wooden kitchen chairs at a secondhand store one day and bought the lot for two dollars, painted them gray, and she had a dining room set. The box dressing table had long ago been decked out in pink-flowered cretonne and made commodious harbor for her meager wardrobe. By and by she would find a chest of drawers and paint that gray also, and then she would be fixed.
The only thing that really troubled her when she stopped to think was how she was going to keep the place warm when winter came. And presently that problem, too, was solved, for Jimmie, hearing of the difficulty on one of his weekends at home, suggested that he would build her a chimney out of the big pile of stones on the back of his father’s lot, with a fireplace of stone in the room. If that didn’t give her heat enough in the middle of winter, she could get a little coal stove and set it up in one corner with a pipe into the chimney. In return, Joyce helped him with his mathematics for the next week, so that she did not feel he was making the chimney for nothing.
By the time the vacation Bible school opened, Joyce felt quite at home in the church of her choice and was growing shyly intimate with Mrs. Lyman, the minister’s wife. They had given her the primary department, and when she arrived at the church on the opening morning of the Bible school, she found that there were forty-nine little ones, not one of them over five years old, all ready and eager to study the Bible. Joyce, with reverent heart, set about her glorious task, praying that she might be allowed to lay the foundation of belief in Christ and the Holy Scriptures even while they were so young. She entered into her work with eagerness and was inclined to spend even more time than she was required in preparing for each day’s work, it was all such a joy to her.
But sometimes when she lay on the soft bed alone in her little toy house at night, and the streets were still except for the night watchman’s whistle now and again in the distance, and the electric light flickered softly over her white wall and played tricks of design on her curtains and draperies, she thought of the days at home with Aunt Mary and how different it all would be if her precious aunt could have been with her here. How she longed to tell her everything that had happened and talk over each day’s doings just as she used to do. The loneliness was inexpressible, and the tears would come. Then her heart would go back to the dear home where she had spent so many years, and familiar faces would come back, and little happenings, till she felt as if she could not bear it, being away like this. And then she would remember Nan and Gene and how hard the days had been before she left and knew that she had done the wisest thing in going and that God had set His seal upon her choice by prospering her in her way.
But always when she had one of these times of retrospect, she did not fail to remember the boy who had spent that happy day with her and Aunt Mary in the woods so long ago, and to feel again the pain of that night when she found him and knew that somehow he had been doing something unworthy. Then she would pray with all her heart, as indeed she prayed every night, for him, that he might be converted and get to know Jesus Christ. Indeed, this was the great prayer of her life, the one big desire that her heart had set above all other desires. And as the day went by and she prayed for it, she grew gradually to feel that somehow it would be accomplished. She might never see, might never even know on this earth that it had been done, but she had faith to believe it would be done because Jesus said, “If ye ask anything in my name, I will do it,” and because He also said, “The Lord is not willing that any should perish; but that all should come to repentance.”
And so she came to feel that someday her friend would find the way, and that perhaps, sometime in a more heavenly sphere, she would see him again with the smile of a reconciled God reflected in his face. And her heart was comforted.
Chapter 21
Darcy Sherwood had dropped out of Meadow Brook life as completely, apparently, as if he had died.
His old friends and associates did not realize it at first—thought he was gone on one of his short trips or had taken on a new operation of some sort. Nobody ever seemed to know just what Darcy’s business was, only that nobody ever spoke of him as one who had no business. He was one who kept his mouth shut about his own affairs, and as much as his friends would have liked to ask him questions, they seldom did. If they
did, they were surprised to find that although he answered them pleasantly, they had gained very little real knowledge of what they had started out to investigate.
People talked about him, as people always will talk about those they do not understand, and they said a great many things about him that were not true, while things that they did not say or think about him, things that were, some of them, worse than those they did think, were very often true.
Darcy had a strange code of honor and of life.
He was the product of a naturally loving disposition left to come up without much training, left to experiment with life for himself and to search out his own view of the universe and his own doctrines of right and wrong. There were certain things he would not do though heaven and hell were against him, because he had decided in his heart that they were not right—not “square,” he called it. One was that he never would harm a woman or a child in any way, directly or indirectly, if he knew it; and another was that he must always help the downtrodden, sometimes without regard to whether their cause was right or wrong, according to law and public opinion.
With all this he had the unusual combination of being both extremely clever as a businessman and entirely unselfish in his personal life. Strong beyond most, he could walk among pitch when he liked without being soiled, yet he often chose to play with that pitch and minded not if others saw it on his hands or misunderstood his actions. He was as beautiful as the devil must have been before he fell, with dark eyes, bronze-gold hair inclined to curl, and a smile of more than ordinary beauty, yet sad, too, with the sadness of the lost sometimes. Nobody quite knew what it was about Darcy Sherwood that made them like him so, or just what they so utterly disapproved of. And he went his way without seeming to care which they did. Only little children and old women saw the real Darcy and won his rare confidence.
Darcy had a brother-in-law after his own heart who knew how to keep his mouth shut—not as clever as Darcy, not always so good, but much richer in respectability and most kind to Darcy’s sister, a good, dull girl who loved Darcy devotedly but who never understood him. Sharp little Lib was a product of this home and her uncle’s training. Where she got her sharpness was always a problem to Darcy.
Certainly not from her simpleminded mother, nor yet from her somewhat commonplace father. Yet Darcy was fond of them both and respected their ability to keep their mouths shut. It was something that Darcy had always taught everybody, sooner or later, with whom he came in contact.
And now Darcy was gone.
“I’ll be away for a while; I don’t know how long. Business trip. All you know about it, Mase, see?”
Mason Knox nodded. “I getcha!” he said, and went on cleaning the carburetor of his car.
After a while his brother-in-law raised his head and gave Darcy a sharp glance. “Anything gone wrong, Darcy?”
“No, Mase, nothing wrong. New line, that’s all. Been working on the wrong stuff, I guess. Going to try a new line. But first I’ve got something to do. May take a long time. May be only a few days. Don’t let Ellen worry. I’ll write if there’s any need.”
He went the next day. Mason Knox and Dan Peterson were the only two in Meadow Brook who knew anything about his going, and that was all they knew. When people began to make inquiries, Mason Knox answered with, “I couldn’t say. He might and he might not be back soon. That depends.”
When Dan Peterson heard that Darcy had disappeared from his usual haunts, heard first through his own son, who was a devotee of the baseball field on afternoons, he looked thoughtful and wise and went and told his father.
And Darcy had a strange method of going. He did not take the train or buy a ticket. He waited until night—no one quite remembered when they saw Darcy Sherwood last, when it came right down to the question some months afterward. Even the sharp-eyed Tyke, who was vigilant night and day as soon as his eyes were open to the necessity, had somehow missed his movements.
Darcy went at night, alone, without baggage or any equipment whatever—first to the graveyard, where he took from a tangle of grass and weeds under the hedge on the outer edge of the next field a pick and shovel that came strangely to hand, and went silently and deftly to a spot that he seemed to know well.
Here he worked for half an hour or more, lifting sod and soil from the place and setting them aside, as if he had done it before, pausing now and again to listen to a stir in the hedge or to mark the scuttling of a wild rabbit. Then, after a longer pause than usual, there came the sound of soft clinking and crashing, the gurgle of liquid coming through a small aperture, yet muffled, as if it were flowing underground. For a long time this went on, while Darcy stood watching the darkness, listening to the distance, identifying each falling leaf and stir in the shadows among the weird shafts of marble and sighing cedars of the cemetery.
After a time, he put back the soil and set the sod into place, laid the pick and the shovel in the bed of a little creek just over in the next field, where the water tinkled over it harmlessly and obliterated all finger marks from its handle, and then stole away down the road, leaving behind in the place of the dead a strange, penetrating, unmistakable odor, which by morning would be purged away and escape into the elements.
Down in the road, he paused where he had encountered Joyce and for a moment let his soul feel all that he had felt then—the delicacy of her hallowed touch, the thrill of her presence so near him here, and by her question, with its piercing meaning, its wise conclusion, its sorrowing rebuke. The deep, wonderful look in her eyes as the flashlight revealed his identity to her, of recognition and of hurt surprise—he felt it all again! The tone of that voice that from his childhood he had treasured like the beautiful song of a bird in the holiest place in his heart. It was almost as if he suddenly felt that for a moment God was looking at him through her eyes, and he, too, saw himself as God saw him—and did not like it.
There was more to it. There was a kind of recoiling in horror from himself as he suddenly saw that in what he had been doing he had been untrue to himself and to his code. He had respected himself for the way he had kept to his self-made laws, and now his self-respect was broken. He could not go on and anymore take satisfaction in what he had been doing.
He stood there in the darkness with bowed head and went over it all again as he had gone over it a thousand times since that night when he had seen her go from him into the dark, and the thought of her had driven him forth on this quest. Then, still with bowed head, he went on down the road.
A strange thing happened to him. He seemed to think as she must have been thinking, to know at each turn of the road what she would have done, which way she would have turned.
He knew that she had slept in the hammock, for he had sent his colleagues away and, taking another way about to overtake her, had seen her enter the gate and watched her through the night until she stole away in the gray of the morning. So far he knew her way and could follow the trail.
But when he reached the streets of the little town beyond and must choose between houses and turning corners, it was not so plain. Yet he had resolved to leave no clue unfollowed, no spot where she might have turned unsearched.
He had a plan to make his search complete. He would make a map of each day’s wanderings, note each house and corner and way of egress, choose the most likely and search it to the end, then come back and choose the next. It seemed, perhaps, the work of a lifetime, yet he did not feel that he would be long in finding her. He had to find her and tell her what he had been doing and that he never would do it again. He had to absolve his soul from that before her eyes. He could not lift up his head and respect himself again unless he did. She had stood like a young saint within the shrine of his heart, and now he felt cast away from the presence of all that he held really holy in the world.
So he went step by step over the way that Joyce had gone, his clever judgment quickly deciding which corner she would have chosen, where she would have paused, and how she went on again. And Joyce would have been surpri
sed to know how far he traced her very steps.
It was not until he reached the city that his way became bewildering. He had dropped into a number of homes on his way where people lived who often visited in Meadow Brook, and casually, as if he had an accident on the road and needed to borrow water or a tool for his car, which he had left out of sight down the road, he would ask one or two sharp questions that would make him sure she had not passed that way while these people were about. And so his little notebook became filled with tiny tracings of maps, with streets and corners noted, and each turning that he had not followed marked for returning someday in case his quest was not successful.
He thought much as he took his way on foot through the world and began to feel himself a pilgrim on a holy quest, not a knight, for his self-confidence had been too badly shaken for that. He had not so much the feeling that she needed him and he could help her to her inheritance if he found her, as he had the need of her in his soul. It seemed sometimes that he could not live until he had unburdened his soul by confession to her and had told her he would sin that way no more. He wanted her restored confidence, her clear-eyed smile, the feeling that she was his friend, though ever so far away, that there was something sweet and true between them. He had never thought of her as his in any way except as a guiding star, but now that he had lost that star, his life seemed all awry, as if he could not go on without her, as if all was darkness and horror, that she should think of him as so unworthy.