“Yes, Charles! But—I hope—our Rowan—can come home—before—it—happens!”
“Well, yes, that would be nice,” said Charles thoughtfully. “But after all, that won’t matter so much. You know I’ve been convinced for some time that Rowan is off doing his duty, and that in some way God is going to use this to make our Rowan a real child of His. He had to be led. He was rebellious sometimes and thought he knew a lot. But I’m glad God is leading him through something legitimate, and not through the discipline that comes from deadly wrong doing. I’m glad there was some good motive at the bottom. And now, Hannah, cheer up. We’re living out last days down here just as happily as we ever did any others.”
“Of course!” said Hannah, wiping the tears and choking over the smile she flung out.
“And then there’s always the thought, Hannah, that the Lord may come before anything more happens but a few pains more or less, and maybe we won’t either of us go through the gate of death. But if one of us should go first and the other remain till Jesus comes, why whichever goes first will be coming in the clouds when the trumpet blows.”
“Yes, I often think of that when I lie awake at night and think how the end might come for one of us and not the other. Oh, I know it will be grand and glorious any way it turns out, only I can’t somehow keep the tears back at thought of being away. Even overnight. You know I always dreaded it.”
“Yes, I know, but you’ll have to remember that this will be the last time, and you’ll come pretty soon if I go first, and then we’ll be at Home forever!”
“Yes, but oh, Charles, if it should happen—before Rowan comes back, he’s going to feel it so! He’s going to think that he has been the cause of it all!”
“Well, you mustn’t let him feel that! You see, I had this pain long before any of this happened. Of course this last strain has been hard on me, but it hasn’t been Rowan’s doings. I haven’t for a minute thought it was, and you make him understand that. Perhaps I’ll write him a letter, too, so that if I should go before he comes back, why, he won’t have any heartaches over that. And now, Hannah, let’s have supper! I’m hungry. I didn’t eat any lunch down in the village today. I guess I sort of dreaded telling you this. But now it’s told and we understand each other we can go on just the same as if there was a possibility I might have to go to Washington for a few days the way I used to do when we were first married.”
She looked up and tried to smile and broke down in a sob, and Charles took her in his comforting arms and held her close. Two old lovers, fearful at the probability of a brief parting, but knowing all would be well when they were both at Home.
That night when they knelt to pray together, Hannah said, “You’ll pray our boy will come—before—?”
“I’ll pray that God may have His way, whatever it is; but Hannah, girl, don’t worry if he doesn’t. I somehow feel this is a long trek for Rowan, but in the end he’s coming out gloriously. I haven’t the shadow of a doubt.”
“And there’s Joyce,” said Hannah. “Our Rowan loves her, I’m convinced.”
“Does Joyce love Rowan?”
“Yes, I think she does,” said Hannah thoughtfully. “Poor little girl! She’s having a hard life. And she is very fond of you, Charles. I’m wishing so that you can stay till she has a taste of you for a father. Her own father has been so hard.”
“Yes, I’d like that myself. I’ve always loved the child. But, Hannah, her own father is coming into his fatherhood, I’m thinking. Even frozen fast in a dead body he’s telling her at last with his eyes that he loves her, and she’s finding her comfort in ministering to him.”
“That’s wonderful! But isn’t it strange Mrs. Whitney stays away as she does?”
“The Lord be thanked that she does!” said Charles fervently. “It is to everybody’s comfort, her own included, that she stays away. She would have the sick man back in unconsciousness in half an hour if she came, if she even stepped her foot in the room, and brought her clattery tongue into the house. Oh, Hannah, I thank the Lord daily that He gave me a wife like you, with your wise, gentle ways and your quiet tongue.”
She laid her face against his arm where she had so many times gathered strength, and stilled the sharp pang to thing she might not have that refuge long on earth. Then she lifted anxious eyes. “Charles, you said with care the doctor thought you might live as long as anybody?”
“Yes,” said Charles, with a smile.
“Then you will be careful? You will do just what he tells you to do?”
“Of course,” said Charles. “Now I know what it means I’ll do all I can.”
“Charles, shall we tell Myra?”
“Not yet, Hannah. It would only distress her, and maybe bring that Mark person around to look after my business affairs. I am sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t trust that Mark son-in-law of mine. He looks slippery to me. His eyes are too little and too near together to see anything but his own interests very clearly.”
“My poor little girl!” mourned Hannah. “If she could only have had a man like you, Charles! She’s never known what real love is.”
“Well, the Lord will make it up to her someday, so don’t grieve too much over that. We can’t help it now, and the time is coming when all the wrongs are going to be made right.”
It was a few days later that he came home and told her that he had fixed things so that she would be taken care of after he was gone.
“You know I don’t trust Mark, Hannah, and I’ve fixed things so he can’t meddle, and so he can’t control what I’m leaving to Myra. It will be in your hands, her part, till you go, and then it will be strictly hers, with a guardian, Jamie Goodright, and his son if he goes. His son is a grand man and true as steel. So you don’t need to worry about property at all. That won’t come into it if I go. You’ll have the place, of course, to live in. I’ve fixed it so it’s not to be sold. It’s yours always and Rowan’s after you. But if I were you I wouldn’t say anything about money to Myra and Mark. If Myra knew, Mark would get it out of her and then he’d do something to make things hot for her, and maybe for you. Of course if Rowan were here he would prevent that. I talked to him once about looking after you and his sister if I were gone, and he thoroughly understood. He’ll carry on all right when he gets back, but until he does, Hannah, don’t talk to the others about money.”
“Charles, I think Myra thinks you’ve lost everything in the burglary. Myra’s last letter said that Mark was very bitter about Rowan having made you lose all you had, and she also said, you know, that mark thought it was utterly unnecessary for you to have to give up all you had even if you were a trustee. You ought to have salted a good pile down so they couldn’t touch it, if such a contingency arose. He said you never ought to have been a trustee. I haven’t answered that letter yet, Charles, I somehow couldn’t bring myself to do it right away. If felt so angry at Mark, and at Myra for letting him talk that way, and for daring to repeat it to us.”
“Well, you mustn’t blame our girl too much. You know she has to live with him, and she’s only trying to get it off her mind. She’d like to have you deny it, I suppose. But don’t worry. It’s all going to come right someday. And now, Hannah, we’ve talked about this once and we needn’t go back to it. I’ll write out full direction and put them in the safety deposit box, and then if the time ever comes that you need them, you just follow them, but don’t think a thing more about it unless it does. I may live to be a hundred. Who knows?”
And so the two laid their burdens down before their Lord and went forth into the coming days, strong in His strength to meet whatever He sent.
Chapter 11
When Jason came out of the telephone booth at Rowley’s after talking with Rose Allison, somehow the world looked less sordid and horrible, and the future less impossible to him.
Before he went in there, if someone had come along and suggested suicide to him he might have been in a very receptive mood. He felt that the last hope was gone and he might just as well g
o to the dogs as not, yet somehow he didn’t seem to want even to go to the dogs. He was the prodigal without the husks left. He had in his mind only the one wild idea that had chased itself back and forth in his consciousness ever since he had been a boy and found that people charged him with things that he had not done. He had planned then that when he grew up, if they kept on blaming him for everything, that he would go away where none of them could ever find him again.
Oh, he hadn’t been perfect. He never claimed that nor wanted them to think that, but he had grown bitter as he saw through the years an increasing tendency to blame him with things that other boys did. The others hid behind him just because they knew he was too honorable to tell on them. He began presently to feel the virtue of his position. This one bit of code he kept religiously, even though he sinned in many other ways.
Sometimes he felt that perhaps it would be just as well to be what they thought him and be done with it all. Yet his conscience recognized the error of that reasoning, just as it also tried to point out to him the childishness of his cherished plan of going away sometime when things should get too thick for him. Yet he still clung to that longing to start fresh and make a new reputation in a place where he wouldn’t have past failures tagging him constantly.
He had had this somewhat in mind when he went to college. He had battled to get away to the college of his choice. His father wanted him to go where he had gone, but Jason had wanted to go far away from home where he wouldn’t be known and see if he couldn’t make a reputation to be proud of.
In the end his father had won and he had gone to the family Alma Mater. In due time his reputation at home had seeped back to college, and then the sparks flew.
He had to admit even to himself that he had done several mischievous things in college. But the things he perpetrated himself were never found out; it was the misbehavior of others that was blamed on him, all because of a mean little story that had come somehow from home—he hadn’t yet been able to trace that to its source but he would someday.
Well, perhaps it was his fault because he never would defend himself. He had grown up with a lofty idea of letting people think what they wanted to. He never had faced this theory honestly and rooted out the source of it. He had not yet discovered that it grew not from humility but from pride, hurt pride at the thought that others did not take for granted he was blameless! And so he had let first one case and then another pile up, until the last bitter charge in college. He would have come forward and denied that if it hadn’t been for the fool girl who was mixed up in it; he simply couldn’t get out from under and let her take the blame, even though her boyfriend did do just that!
How that had angered his father! His Alma Mater! Disgrace before his own college. He couldn’t blame the old man. It was tough luck, and it was just because he had foreseen something like this that Jason hadn’t wanted to go there to college.
He had come home and endured the whole gamut of blame from his stepmother and his father, even down to Aunt Libby in the kitchen who went around with red eyes, snuffing, her long thin nose red and dripping with frequent tears, blaming him even while she made tarts in secret for his enjoyment. And then Joyce. Joyce who never blamed him but who looked so sad, and who said, “Oh, Jason! Oh—Jason!” when he came home and told her first of all. She never blamed him, but her sorry exclamation cut deepest of all.
That had been a terrible time, those months after he came home from college and lay around, and worried, and was insolent to his stepmother who kept up a continual nagging that stirred his father to habitual scathing words whenever he came around. Those were the days when he began to go to Rowley’s to play pool, trying to get a little money. His father wouldn’t give him a cent. Not a cent! And how could he ever amount to anything stuck down in this little dump of a village, and living on a farm? How could he get a job? His father wouldn’t let him go to any other college. He said he had to get out and get to work. He would never amount to anything anyway and he was done trying to do for him.
So he had played at Rowley’s and sometimes won a little money, enough to play around with the girls who came his way at Rowley’s, enough to go on joy rides off to little towns away from home in other fellows’ cars.
And day by day the venom of hate had worked in his soul until he was almost ready to do something really dreadful, like committing suicide, only there wasn’t really any effectual way of doing it around his home. He hadn’t any gun. His father wouldn’t allow one. He hadn’t any car so he couldn’t turn it on and go to sleep. Aunt Libby was always around in the kitchen so he couldn’t use the gas stove, and anyway, suicide had never appealed to him very strongly. It didn’t seem quite respectable and would be so hard for Joyce to bear. He had dismissed it with a mere thought and let his mind travel on to wider schemes that included far lands. He would go away so far they could not find him, and then someday he would come back rich and successful and they would see that they had been mistaken about him. That he wasn’t the scoundrel they thought him even if he did play pool for money at Rowley’s sometimes and show a girl a good time now and then with the money he got.
Then Rowan had come home from college, and he had always admired Rowan tremendously. Rowan was just enough older to be a hero in his eyes. And Rowan had been friendly.
They had gone around together a lot in Rowan’s car, and he had helped Rowan plow a field and plant corn and pull weeds and do a lot of farm work that his father couldn’t have got him to do for love nor money. But Rowan hadn’t asked him. Rowan just worked, and so he worked along.
Rowan let him drive his car. It wasn’t much of a car, but Rowan let him drive it. Rowan had bought it himself, and he wouldn’t let his dad give him a better one. He was working to earn the money for a better one himself. Jason had decided that he would do the same. Somehow he would get a job and earn money and be a man, like Rowan. They would loaf around together and be buddies. Rowan didn’t seem to mind that he was younger. Sometimes Rowan would even drive out and look for him at Rowley’s where he was playing pool again to get money to pay the first installment on a car.
It rather amused him when he heard somebody say that it was a pity that nice Rowan Parsons was beginning to run to that road house a lot just the way Jason Whitney did. That was just the way people jumped to conclusions about him, branded him as a drunkard and a gambler when he wasn’t either really. It sort of put Rowan in his class according to his crude young ideas and made them buddies more than ever.
And then, right out of the blue, without any warning, just like a miracle, had come that job in the bank. Where it came from he didn’t know. Nor whose influence had got it for him. His father disclaimed any knowledge of it and doubted if he could make good. He got no encouragement at home except from Joyce, whose eyes were shining at his success. Just Mr. Goodright’s wonderful note in the post office for him one discouraged morning, saying he had heard he was looking for a job and offering him a chance in the bank.
The only drawback had been that his old enemy of bumblebee days was there also, but he figured he wouldn’t have to have anything to do with him, and of course the other fellow was a man now and probably had a little sense. So everything had been wonderful for several months. And then suddenly those strange things happened: each employee was called into Mr. Goodright’s office and told quietly, like a warning, that money was missing. Little mistakes were discovered here and there; he knew they suspected him. It was all so subtle, it seemed as if someone had planned it. It was then he began to watch Corey Watkins. Somehow the very fact that he had always been able to get away with the mischief that he really planned himself made Jason doubly alert in watching others, and day by day he saw little things that made him wonder.
And at last, that awful morning when a marked bill was found by Corey Watkins in his locker at the bank!—planted there, of course, because he had no knowledge of it. He still felt glad he had hit Corey Watkins. He wished he could hit him again. Of course that was not the way clerks were ex
pected to behave in banks. But he raged inwardly afresh as he recalled the look in Corey’s neat face as he accused him.
Jason had told Mr. Goodright the bill wasn’t his and he knew nothing about it; Mr. Goodright had said all right, if that was the case they would try him again. But Jason had risen up in his old-time wrath and declined to have anything more to do with the bank. It was the same old story. Other people’s crimes were blamed on him. He knew now well enough where that bill came from, who had planted it in his drawer. But he wouldn’t tell. He couldn’t prove it, of course, though he might have created suspicion if he had gone to work in the right way. But he scorned to do that. So he held his head high and left the bank and let it be told around that he had been fired. Well, what was the difference?
Of course all this dreams of being a buddy of Rowan’s were gone now. Rowan wouldn’t want to be friends with a guy that had been fired after getting such a break as he had when he got in. no, he would just cut loose from everything and carry out his scheme of long ago.
He would leave at once. He would never go back to the old town. Not until he was rich and successful. He’d show them!
Bitterly he thought these things as he walked out the familiar way toward Rowley’s. Not to play this time for money to carry out his schemes. Mr. Goodright had given him a whole month’s pay, although he had earned only a week of it. But it was habitual to walk this road, so he took it.
When he got to the turn of the road he looked back, just to get a glimpse of the old place before he left it forever. His eyes blurred a little with unaccustomed tears as he saw the trees and houses and all the familiar scene. There was the high school where he had gone so recently, and there the tall white steeple of the church.
Then suddenly he thought of Rose and his promise to her. Why, this was the night of the meeting, and he had meant to keep that promise. Something in her eyes when she asked him had made him feel he must do it for her, and now he must make it there. For a whole second he hesitated. Of course he could still go back tonight to that meeting. He wouldn’t need to go home, nor to let anybody he knew see him all day, and he could sit at the back of the church. Nobody would be expecting him there, and he could leave before the service was quite over. He would be keeping his promise to Rose, and he could write back sometime and let her know he had been there.