But Joyce had gone down the aisle with swift steps, out into the street where it was still raining briskly, and the water pouring along the gutter in deep, angry tides. She paid no heed. She fled along on winged feet across the water, down another block; wet and breathless, she arrived at last at the station.
She did not glance at the clock to see if she had missed her train; she hurried out to the gates and scanned every entrance to a train, but the man was just closing the gate and slipping down the sign for the New York express, which was moving away in the distance, and there was no other train sign up except her own, the last one out to Silverton that night. She glanced at the clock. There were three minutes before it left. She cast a despairing glance around. He was probably gone on that train to New York and she had missed her chance of telling him how glad she was. She must go home, of course. She would be in a terrible predicament if she missed that train and had to stay in the station all night, for she had no money for lodging and would not have known where to go if she had. And there were her examination papers.
The guard had his hand on the gate and his eye on the clock. She hurried through the gates and onto the train, sinking into a seat just as the train began to move and feeling a rush of bitter disappointment so deep she could hardly restrain the tears.
Yet beneath it all, as she put her head down on her hand and tried to control her feelings, there was a deep gladness. Her prayers had been answered. Darcy had found the way home. The horror of that night in the cemetery was all cleared away. She had her friend once more, whether he ever knew it or not.
Afterward, while the wheels were turning in a drowsy tune and the sleepy passengers with closed eyes were trying to snatch a bit of rest on the way, her heart woke up and began to tell over to her every word that he had spoken, every precious look that showed his heart was changed, every intonation of the voice she had known so long. And to think the Lord had used her to make him listen to God’s voice! Oh, it was too dear, too wonderful!
The look of glory stayed on her face the next morning as she came blithely through the hall at school and met the young professor.
“You look as though you had fallen heir to a fortune,” he said sourly, as though he begrudged her her happy heart.
“Why, I have,” she said brightly and smiled.
“Can’t you share it?” he said wistfully.
“I’m afraid not,” she said gently. “It wouldn’t share. You wouldn’t understand.”
“How do you know I wouldn’t?” he said crossly.
“Oh,” she tried to explain. “It’s just—that I’ve heard from home.” Her eyes were all alight.
“Oh!” he said rudely and turned away.
“There’s another man in Meadow Brook,” he told himself gloomily. “I must do something about this right away. I’m a fool, but I can’t help it.”
At recess time he entered Joyce’s classroom with a smile and handed her a newspaper still in its wrapper.
“Here’s a paper from Meadow Brook that just came in the mail. I thought perhaps it might interest you. There’s a boy in high school there who persists in thinking that I’m interested in their baseball team, and every time they win a game, I get a sheaf of papers. Of course they don’t interest me. I hardly remember the names of people there anymore. I was there so short a time.”
Joyce thanked him and put the paper in her desk for a leisure moment, going on with the blackboard exercise she was writing. Harrington was disappointed. He had hoped she would open the paper in his presence, and he might perhaps get some clue to her interest in Meadow Brook, but she was as cool and disinterested as a lily. Well, he must find a way to keep her in his company; there was no other way. It was against all his principles to be too attentive until he felt she was worthy of his position, but there seemed to be no other way to win out, for it was getting toward spring and he must have this matter settled before he went away on his vacation. He had an eye to another larger school with better pay. It would be an advantage to him to have it known that he was engaged to a personable young woman. It was a wealthy community where he was hoping to be called, and Joyce would shine in such society with a little tutoring from him, always providing of course that he could rid her of her ridiculous fanaticism.
Chapter 28
That morning Darcy received Lib Knox’s letter.
He was passing through a city where he had been in the habit of receiving mail, and he stopped to see if anything was in the box for him and to pay his box rent and give it up. There he found the letter.
His face grew tender and stern as he read. Dear little brave Lib. Well, he knew who the bad man with red hair must be, but how did Tyke ever find out Lib? Some deviltry somewhere. But one thing was certain: he must abandon his plans and go home to protect her. He would take Tyke out in the open somewhere and give him a lesson if necessary.
He glanced at the date on the letter and frowned. Already he had been in ignorance too long. There was time enough for any number of things to have happened to Lib, and well he knew that Tyke was a bad man. To the warning concerning his own welfare he paid no heed whatever, passing over Lib’s solicitude for him with a tender smile.
More alarmed than he cared to own even to himself, he studied up timetables and took the first train that would make connections for Meadow Brook. He must tell Mason to look after Lib better. They were too careless with that child. As soon as his quest was over, he must try to do something about Lib. She wasn’t being brought up in the right way. She wasn’t being taught right and wrong. She was too much on her own, just as he had been. That must all be changed.
So he boarded the train for home, and on the way he closed his eyes and tried to exercise his new power of prayer. What he was praying for was that he might find Joyce Radway, and as the train rumbled along, he began to think to himself that perhaps, after all, he had been a fool. He had got interested in his quest as a quest and had not remembered that it might by this time be unnecessary. For all he knew, she might have reached home.
Still, there was Dan Peterson. Dan always knew about where to find him within a few days, and there had been no word from Dan all along the line.
He closed his eyes and tried to pray. He was just learning to pray, and since he had read the promises to those who prayed and believed, he had spent much time on this one petition: “Oh, God, help me to find Joyce, and keep her safe.”
It was dark when Darcy reached Meadow Brook. He had come by a way of his own and had not seen anyone he knew. He took the shortcut across by the railroad and in at the back gate and so entered the house from the kitchen door.
His sister was sitting by the dining room table with her head on her arms, crying in the dark. Lib was standing with her face flattened against the windowpane, the slow tears coursing down her cheeks. Darcy reached up and turned the light on, blinking at them wonderingly. His first startled thought was that Mase must be dead. He put out a hand gently and laid it on Ellen’s bowed head. Good, simple Ellen!
Ellen lifted her head and saw him and screamed, dropping her face down again on her folded arms and breaking into renewed sobs. But Lib ran to him and threw her arms around his neck, burying her wet little face on his shoulder.
It was so he learned what had come to him, sitting in a dining room chair beside his sister with his hand on her bowed head and little Lib in his lap, her face against his breast, sobbing as her mother told the story brokenly. Mase, she said, was out trying to see a lawyer and find out what to do. But there wasn’t anything to do. Everybody said there wasn’t anything to do. The case was all against him.
Darcy took the blow straight with white, stern face and steady eyes. The hand that held little Lib’s did not tremble, and his voice did not shake. The thing he was thinking was, Now I shall have to stop hunting for Joyce. Oh, God, take care of Joyce!
But he opened his lips and said, “Well, Ellen, don’t take it so hard! It’s all in the day’s work, and it’ll all come out in the wash. Anyhow, Ellen, I?
??ve found a new line. God isn’t forgetting any of us, and you just put that away and think about it.”
Ellen sat up and wiped her eyes and stared at him. This was strange talk from Darcy, and yet it was like him. She broke out afresh with indignant tears that they should fasten a crime so heinous on this beloved brother. She was engulfed, overwhelmed by the shame and disgrace that had befallen them. She was old enough to have remembered their gentle mother who always tried to keep them “respectable.”
“Never mind, Ellen. Don’t cry anymore. Give me a bite to eat, and I’ll go out and see what can be done.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t go out!” cried Ellen, and little Lib gripped him fiercely. “You mustn’t! They’ll get you. They’re looking everywhere for you.”
“That’s all right,” said Darcy cheerfully. “I’ll help them. I’ll go and give myself up.”
And go he would in spite of all their efforts. He went away whistling down the street, just as he always did when he was at home. Whistling!
So first he went to the police headquarters and walked in as he had done many a time before, and they stared at him. “I understand you’re looking for me,” he said gravely, with a new dignity about him they scarcely understood.
“Yes,” said the chief embarrassedly, almost deferentially, for Darcy had been almost like one of themselves. “Yes.”
“Well, here I am.”
They scarcely knew what to say to him. They treated him like a gentleman, a stranger. It cut him the way they went about it. They were not his friends anymore. It seemed that they were afraid of him, as if they did not know how to take him. They had been prepared for rebellion, subterfuge. He gave none. He was his old grave self, with the old winning smile as he met them, his eyes upon them with the old question in them, the wistfulness. It disarmed them. They would have rather had to fight with him.
And by and by he asked to see Dan Peterson. He would find out if he had any friends left.
Joyce did not remember the Meadow Brook newspaper again after she had put it into her desk for almost two weeks. It lay under a pile of copybooks that were awaiting marks, and she had been too busy to get at them. But one morning during study period, she found time and drew them out, and there was the newspaper. She took it out and was about to throw it in the wastebasket, realizing how much out-of-date it must be. Then a longing overcame her to see some of the old, familiar names again, and she slipped off the wrapper and decided to take just a moment to look it over before throwing it away.
It was well that the top of her desk was raised and that the eyes of her young pupils were occupied with their work, for the letters that met her gaze flaring across the top of the paper in the blackest of type make her gasp and turn white. They almost shouted at her as she read:
BASEBALL IDOL IN TROUBLE!
Darcy Sherwood wanted on charge of abduction and murder of Joyce Radway who left her home in Meadow Brook one year ago and has not been heard from since.
The article went on to state that there were eyewitnesses to the murder and burial of the girl who were willing to testify in the case. It was also rumored that Eugene Massey, the cousin of the murdered girl, had located the grave and exhumed the body, which had been identified by portions of clothing worn when Miss Radway left her home. Meantime, Darcy Sherwood had also mysteriously disappeared, some said to Canada, and a reward was offered for any knowledge of him, although it was also stated that the detectives had been right on his track for months and could easily locate and produce him when he was needed.
For a moment, Joyce thought she was going to faint. It went through her mind to wonder if Harrington had known what was in the paper when he gave it to her and took this way to let her know it. But she rejected the idea instantly. His manner had been too pleasant and altogether intimate for that. He was one who could never tolerate a thing like this publicity in an intimate friend. His life was too well ordered and conventional to make it possible to treat a girl just the same as ever if he knew anything like this had been connected with her name. Her next impulse was to hide the paper where no eye could ever see it. She folded it quickly into a thick square and stuffed it into her handbag. As she did so, its date caught her eye, and her heart froze within her. It was more than two weeks back. What might have happened in that time? Darcy in such awful trouble and she, the only one who could help him, chained to these children.
Chapter 29
Joyce cast a helpless look around at the busy little figures behind their desks. She glanced at the clock. It was only half past nine. There was a train to the city in three-quarters of an hour. She must make it. She would have to go home for money, too, and to change some of her things. She must get someone to take her place, and she must manage it so that no one would ask her any questions. Her brain seemed fairly burning up with the rapidity of her thoughts.
Miss Beatty was a retired teacher who lived not far away and who sometimes substituted when a teacher was ill. Would she be at home now, and free? And how could she get out to telephone her?
With fingers that trembled so that she could hardly move her pencil, she wrote a little note to the teacher of the senior high school class and sent it by one of the children. It read:
Dear Miss Clayton: Can you let me have Mary Grover to keep order for a little while? I am obliged to be out of the room.
Mary Grover appeared in three or four minutes. Meantime Joyce had summoned her senses and picked up everything she did not want to leave in her desk and slipped out to the telephone booth in the hall. She dared not take the time to run across the street to the drugstore for more privacy. While she waited for her number, she prayed that the Lord would arrange the way before her. Her head was throbbing so that she could scarcely see, and her heart beating wildly. She did not dare to think except just about getting to the train. It seemed if she did that she would have to cry out and shout the horror of her soul at what had happened.
Strange that at such a time our breathless minds will pick out trivialities and dwell upon them. During that tense moment while she waited for her answer, it came to Joyce how Professor Harrington would smile in his cynical way if he knew what she was doing, and ask her, didn’t she think Miss Beatty would be home just the same if she didn’t pray? Then Miss Beatty’s precise voice echoed reassuringly over the wire. “Yes? Ellen Beatty at the phone!” and Joyce, with a thrill of triumph, spoke in her trembling voice. “Oh, Miss Beatty, I’m so glad you are there! I hope you aren’t busy. This is Miss Radway at the school. I’ve had bad news from home, and I must catch the next train. Could you take my place?”
“Why, yes, I think so,” answered the kindly voice. “I’m very sorry—”
But Joyce cut her off quickly. “Oh, thank you, then. Will you come over at once? I’m leaving directions on the desk, and Mary Grover is with the class till you get here. I haven’t a minute. Good-bye.”
She wrote a hurried note to Harrington there in the telephone booth:
I have had bad news from home and must go at once. Miss Beatty is taking my place. Did not want to disturb your class and had not a minute to wait. Will telegraph if I cannot get back tomorrow.
Sincerely,
Joyce Radway
She slipped back to her own room and dispatched this note by another delighted child, got her hat from the dressing room, and got away before Harrington had had time to even open her note. She ran all the way home, hastily changed her dress, put a few things into her little briefcase that she had bought at a bargain counter to carry her papers in back and forth to school, and arrived at the station with three or four minutes to spare and a tumult in her heart that demanded an opportunity to cry.
Those three or four minutes seemed longer than the whole preceding three-quarters of an hour, and she walked to the far end of the platform and kept her eye out toward the street. She somehow had a feeling that Harrington would not like it that she had not consulted him before going, and she was almost sure if he could make it that he would come down to th
e train. But it had happened that Harrington was busy with three guests from another school, committeemen sent out to size him up, and Joyce’s note lay harmlessly on his desk for half an hour before he even had an opportunity to read it. Even then his mind was so filled with wondering if he had made the right impression that he scarcely took it in except to be annoyed, for he had planned on taking the guests in to Joyce’s room to show it off, intending later, if matters developed sufficiently, to whisper a suggestion that she might be the future Mrs. Harrington. It was very annoying of Joyce not to consult him. He would punish her for that by coldness for a few days. She was altogether too prone to take matters into her own hands. That’s what came of having an independent religion that taught one to think in unconventional lines. He had no thought of her trouble. He didn’t take that in, but Joyce was riding away into the morning and facing the awful facts that had called her from her work. Facing the possibilities that might be ahead of her.
Suppose they had found Darcy and had the trial! There had been time enough for that, she supposed. Supposing they had convicted him! But how could they when it was all false? Still, if such things could be published in the paper when they were not true, what might happen? Law was a strange thing. Would they have hung him? Or electrocuted him? Did they do those things so soon after the trial? The paper had spoken of eyewitnesses. False witnesses, of course. How could they be true since the thing never happened? And what was Gene doing in it all? The paper had spoken of Gene. She hardly dared to get it out again and read it over lest someone should read it over her shoulder. It seemed so terrible to see Darcy’s name in such connection. Darcy who had just given himself to Christ, who had made over his life. And this to meet him at the outset. It was enough to make some lose their faith. Not Darcy. Oh, not Darcy! She cradled the thought of him like a child in her prayers as the miles crept by and the morning went on.