“Well, I’ve seen them all, you know, Mother,” said Joyce firmly. “Why don’t you go and look at them with Mr. Watkins?”
Then as if to make the matter more decided Joyce went to the piano and sat down, letting her fingers ripple lightly over the keys, just to help her detach herself from this tête-a-tête that was being forced upon her.
They got through the evening at last, somehow, Joyce foiling every attempt on the part of her stepmother to leave the two alone, and finally the young man took himself away, and reproaches began to rain down upon the poor child’s head.
“I never was so ashamed in my life! A perfectly respectable young man, and a great admirer of yours! You in your present position should be glad and grateful to have attentions from one who is such a successful person. There is a man to be proud of! Nobody suspects him of doing anything crooked. They never link his name with those of gangsters and murderers. Why? Because he has never been indiscreet enough to mix with the offscouring of the earth! And you, the sister of a boy under suspicion of almost anything, dare to treat him with disdain! Here in your own house, and invited guest!”
“He was not my guest, Mother, and you didn’t even tell me he was coming. Besides, I didn’t treat him discourteously.”
“And why didn’t I tell you he was coming? Because on every occasion possible you have been running off to hide whenever he comes anywhere near here. He wishes to come here socially, to have you for a friend, and you baffle his attempts at every turn.”
“I don’t want him for a friend,” said Joyce quietly. “I suppose I have a right to choose my friends, don’t I? I’ll be polite to him, but that’s all. I won’t go out anywhere with him.”
“Yes, you think you have a right to choose your own friends. Well, I don’t know about that. I suppose you’d like to go around with that Rowan Parsons. You’re so thick with his plain old mother! But he’s another criminal! My word! I certainly married into a lovely crowd! You turn down a charming successful young man whom everybody, simply everybody respects, and yet if that fellow at the next farm were to come back tonight and ask you, you’d be willing to ride around in his old shabby car in the moonlight till all hours! A criminal!”
But Joyce had borne all she could stand. She turned and flashed up the stairs and locked herself in her room, weeping her heart out, until she fell asleep and dreamed that Rowan was kneeling beside her with his arms around her, and his lips upon hers and saying that she was precious.
The days went by breathlessly for a time, everyone expecting hourly something decisive to happen. The town grew almost impatient over the delay, and the two families most concerned looked haggard and worn as day after day went by and still no news came of the two young men who had so suddenly disappeared from the hometown.
Then word came from the place where the inquest and inquisition had gone on over the two Rowleys, living and dead. But nothing had developed. The living Rowley had nothing to say, would not open his lips to answer the questions put to him. Not even the most severe grilling had been able to make him say anything except that he was not guilty.
It presently developed that both his and his brother’s pictures were in the Rogues’ Gallery, and that they had both been wanted for some time in cases even more serious than the one back in the village where they had been in hiding from the law, under assumed names, for the past three or four years. All that time they had been working with a gang in far bigger enterprises than just the looting of a country bank and the shooting of a simple kindly night watchman. All these things were brought to light but they didn’t help the two households most concerned, nor ease the pain of Mother Hannah and the two girls, who nightly wept and prayed and tried to endure days as if nothing was the matter.
And the suspicions were not allayed.
As the days went by rumors grew into stories that were related as truth beside firesides in country farm houses, and carried to nearby villages, and written to faraway friends, and each time they were related they grew more virulent, until the first teller would scarcely have recognized even the smallest fragment of his original story. And the stories came back to the homes; they were told about in great wave lengths of sorrow and heartbreak.
And then one day, Nathan Whitney who had been growing more and more irascible, both at home and abroad, had a fight in the public square of the village with a drunken truck driver who stumbled out of a tavern next to the hotel and called out his name and taunted him in the vilest of language with being the father of a thieving, murdering gangster!
Nathan knocked the drunken brawler cold and then stalked away to his home, leaving his neighbors to look after the man, no one who had watched the fray lifting a hand to stop him.
And when he reached the house he opened the door into the parlor where his wife and daughter sat, entertaining a couple of ladies of the neighborhood who had called to see what news they could squeeze out for the quota of the day.
He stood a second looking from one to the other, and then he opened his mouth to speak, but his lips refused to function and twisted themselves fearfully about his face. His strong frame tottered and collapsed like a towering building under a heavy blow, shattered, bowed, broken!
He fell and his fall jarred the house. Aunt Libby rushed in and stood staring at him and began to weep wildly and to jabber, “Oh! He’s had a stroke at last! I ben expectin’ it, the way he’s carried on. Oh, poor soul! Poor soul!”
Mrs. Whitney stood still long enough for the startled look to pass into indignant action and then she went to the telephone and sent for the doctor. On second thought she went back and sent for the other doctor, too. The first one had been her doctor, but if this was a stroke as Aunt Libby said, and Aunt Libby ought to know having lived so long in the poorhouse where they had them often, why he should have his due. So she sent for Dr. Fulton.
Joyce went at once to her father and knelt beside him with his head in her lap and her arms around him, her lips to his poor twisted face.
Then the two ladies who had been calling, drifted silently out to get their news to their respective districts as swiftly as tongues could carry them.
Chapter 10
The whole town was stirred by Nathan Whitney’s sudden stroke. For as much as two or three days they refrained again from hard words and hushed their voices when they spoke of him. They said it was sad, and ceased not day nor night to call up on the telephone and hear how he was.
Day after day the word came back that he was still alive but that was all. The doctor gave no hope of his recovery, and yet he did not know whether he would die soon or linger. The other doctor agreed. People lifted hands of horror and were aghast.
By the fourth day the wise ones among the gossips had begun to whisper about Jason. Where was he? Did he know of his father’s condition? Would he try to come home? Well, if he came he would be arrested, so likely he wouldn’t come home. Did the family know where he was, and were they keeping it from the authorities? What had made Nathan Whitney so unusually nervous and troubled those last few days before his stroke? Did he have some terrible news?
And then that awful word murderer began to creep around on its hands and knees again, stealing into the most respectable houses and presenting thoughts to unwary victims.
If Nathan Whitney died, then surely his son would be as much a murderer as if he had actually shot him to death. As if old Sam Paisley had died from the shot that was fired that fatal night when the bank was robbed.
Murder! Murder! Murder!
Murder come home to strike at the father of the murderer!
The little flames of words stole here, stole there, and caught on tinder minds, and flared and flamed so quietly that no one noticed at first, until it swept the whole countryside, and Joyce, listening to certain bitter phrases as they drifted into the house by way of grocery boys, nurses, and Aunt Libby’s tearful babbling, was glad that her father was out of it all.
For they were saying now, some of them, that Jason had come by his m
urdering tendency naturally. That Nathan Whitney was a murderer at heart or he would not have fought that poor drunken truck driver.
Not that the truck driver was killed. No, far from it. He had slept it off with a bruise or two and a black eye, and rallied to prate about suing the Whitneys.
But Nathan Whitney was lying quietly out of it all, and safe as if he had died and were lying in his grave. They could not touch a man with his body frozen in a deathly grasp like that, a man with a twisted face and silent lips lying in the grip of a living death! Neither law nor bluster, not the scorpion lips of his fellows could hurt him now.
And whether he was feeling anything, or thinking anything, they could not tell, nor whether the terrible vise that held him would relax at all before he died and let him speak to them all once more; nor whether he would just slip away silently without a change; they could not tell.
So Joyce ministered to him daily and watched his tortured eyes that followed her everywhere she went. They were the only things about him that could move, those terrible eyes so full of anguish.
And sometimes he would seem to look beyond her toward the door with a kind of fright in his eyes, but then his gaze would be upon her again, and she would smile and talk lovingly to him.
In those days of her quiet ministration she came nearer to her father than she had ever come before. She told him how she loved him! She tried to soothe him. And one day when his eyes wore that look of fright, turned toward the door, she suddenly said without premeditation, “She isn’t here, Father. She’s gone away to her sister’s to rest awhile.” He looked at her steadily as she said it over again, and then she thought there came a relief in his eyes. Perhaps it was only imagination, but he fell asleep and slept longer than since he had his seizure.
Hannah Parsons came over and brought little things that she thought he might be able to swallow. She touched Joyce’s forehead lightly with her lips and whispered, “We are praying for you, Charles and I.” and then she turned her eyes toward the bed and added: “And for him! Charles says he’s sure he used to know the Lord, long ago!”
And after that, when the night nurse was gone and the day nurse was asleep, Joyce, kneeling by the bed, would pray aloud, though very softly, for her father.
She thought he was asleep always when she knelt. But once when she was praying so she opened her eyes and saw him gaze upon her, though the light was dim. Suddenly she leaned over and kissed his forehead softly and whispered, “Father dear! God hears. God is here! You talk to Him, too, in your heart!”
Oh, she knew the doctor and the nurses would tell her her father did not understand her. That his mind was paralyzed, too. That probably his hearing was gone.
But anyway it comforted her to talk to him and to pray with him when nobody was around.
And once she told him that she was sure Jason was coming back pretty soon.
That night she imagined a hungry look in his eyes, and she prayed aloud for Jason when they were alone again. Prayed: “Dear Lord, take care of our dear Jason and bring him back to us soon, and let everybody know that he didn’t do wrong.”
Several times she said it, and when she looked at her father again she saw that hungry look, almost like a little boy who had been naughty and now was sorry. She couldn’t explain it to herself, why she had that thought. But suddenly she stooped down and whispered in his ear, “Father, Rowan Parsons has gone after Jason to find him and bring him back to us!”
And when she looked she saw such a light in her father’s eyes as had not been there before. A real gleam, as if he was glad. As if he understood and was glad!
The next morning the drawn look in his face was decidedly relaxed. The lips were not twisted nearly so far to the side as they had been. The nurse noticed it as soon as she came on duty in the morning and called Joyce to look. The doctor spoke of it as soon as he came in the room, and Joyce felt somehow that she had conversed with her father. Felt that he knew what she had told him, and was glad.
Charles Parsons came in to see him one day and sat and put his kindly hand upon his neighbor’s twisted hand. And Joyce, watching, saw a kindling in the eyes of her father.
There had not been much neighborliness between these two for several years. Nathan had been hard to get along with, always picking a fight, and Charles had been sternly stubborn on his side. Charles had not approved of Jason, and Nathan had tried to put the blame upon Rowan who was older, and so it went.
But now, suddenly, something seemed to grow between the spirits of these two, a softening, a renewing of old friendship of years long gone, of eyes looking into eyes that saw a common change coming in the future, a common sorrow ripening into common interests.
It was like a silent drama that went on without words, just looks, and a tender touch now and then, just whispered words that they were not sure were heard, yet spoken the more tenderly for that!
The facing of a coming separation perhaps. Who knew? How soon?
Charles himself was looking white and tired these days. Joyce noticed it one afternoon when the late rays of the sun shone across his strong face and gave a delicacy to the flesh, an ethereal look. It startled her. Why, these two men were growing old! She had thought of them always as staying the same age forever, while only young things grew old!
But the sun’s rays passed and she looked again and saw the same kind old friend, Rowan’s father, just as he had been since she could remember, and she thought she must have been mistaken.
Charles came often to Nathan, and one day he brought James Goodright with heartening smiles, and before they left Charles said, “Now, tell him, Jamie, what we were talking about. I think he understands.”
And the banker brushed away a tear and laid his hand upon the poor paralyzed one and said gently, “I’m sorry, Nate, about all this business, and when your boy comes home we’re going to clear it all up and take him back into the bank, if he’ll come!”
“And he’s coming back! Don’t you worry, Nate,” said Charles.
Then Joyce, watching, thought she saw that gleam again, as the quiet eyes of the sick man looked from one to the other of his old friends.
But when they left, the nurse said to Joyce, “That man they call Charles looks very frail to me. I don’t like his looks these last few days. Has he ever had heart trouble?”
But Joyce did not know, and she watched her beloved Hannah’s Charles with growing fear. Rowan’s father! Oh, God, nothing must happen to Rowan’s father while Rowan was away! Oh, not that, please, dear God!
But Hannah saw it, too.
“Charles, you’re very tired. I wish you would stay at home in the morning and rest a little while. I wish you’d go to Dr. Fulton and ask him to go over you and see what you need, give you a tonic or something.”
“Oh, I’m all right, Hannah, just a little tired. But I’ll get rested again. I always have. But I’ve got to go to the office in the morning. There are several important matters. And I’ve promised James Goodright I’ll drop into the bank for a few minutes. There are some things to clear up.”
So it went on from day to day, and Charles did not get the promised rest.
But one day he felt a strange sharp pain that he had sometimes felt before. He sat and thought about it awhile, and then he called his friend the doctor to see him.
That night when he came home there was something very sweet and gentle about him, and he came and sat down by Hannah’s side. It was late afternoon, earlier than he usually came. Supper was started on the stove, but not ready yet.
He sat there a minute and then he took her hand.
“Hannah,” he said, “I’ve got something to tell you that will be hard to bear! Can you take it, my girl?”
Hannah looked up with her eyes full of fear. This was the moment she had been dreading ever since Rowan went away. Some day they would come and tell her that Rowan was dead! That he had been shot, or thrown over a precipice or drowned. She had thought it all out and promised her Lord that if He willed it so she wou
ld take it bravely. She would take it with a smile and bow to His will. They had talked it over, the two of them, and she had been prepared for almost anything like that. She was a strong-hearted woman.
But when she tried to summon that smile, great fear came instead and stood in her eyes and Charles saw it.
“No, dear, it’s not that! It’s nothing about Rowan. It’s something else entirely,” he said, and then when he saw a new frantic fear growing in her gaze he went on. “It’s me, this time, Hannah. Be brave now!”
“I’m being brave!” said Hannah with quivering chin and a smile among the tears like a rainbow through the rain.
“Yes, I know you are. Well, I won’t keep you waiting. And it isn’t perhaps as bad as it might be. But you see, Hannah, I’ve been having a pain in my heart a good deal lately, and I thought it was just indigestion, but lately it came back so much, and so sharply, that this morning I went to the doctor and had him look me over from stem to stern, and it seems I’ve got a bad heart. He says I’m all right every other way and I may live for years and years yet, but then again I may go any time. I’ve just got to be careful and live right, and forget it, and go on. Really, Hannah, it isn’t any worse than life at any stage, you know. There is always the possibility that any one of us may go at any minute.”
He was holding her hand now, looking deep into her dark eyes. “Hannah, we want God to have His way with us, don’t we?”
“Oh yes, Charles—!” she managed. “Yes, of course.” And the smile quivered out again, and so did the tears.
“I’m all right, Charles,” she said. “I’m brave!”
“Yes, my girl! You’re always brave! You’ve always been brave ever since we started out together to the end. But the blessed thing is there won’t be any end. There may be a very brief separation somewhere, like when you went down once to visit Myra, but it won’t last, and then we’ll be at Home with Him!”