When Professor Harrington asked her to go somewhere with him, he frequently found that she had another engagement in the city. As he became curious, she finally took him to one of her classes, with the result that he entered into a lengthy argument with her all the way home, trying to persuade her to give it up. He informed her that it was ridiculous for her to waste her fine mind being led by men who ignored the simplest principles of science and pinned their faith to a book that was so old, and no one could be sure who wrote it or where it came from. He told her that a person was a fool to swallow whole the teachings of men who denied geology, zoology, science in every branch; who taught that the legends of scripture were actual truths; and who dared to enter into the occult and profess to have spiritual relations with the Maker of the universe; who even descended to the ridiculous and marked out the future from the mystical writings of the men they chose to call prophets.
When he reached this point, Joyce sat up straight in the train, her cheeks glowing, her eyes bright, so that those sitting near must have noticed her, and said, “Stop! I cannot listen to any more of your talk. You and I simply have nothing in common!”
He saw that he had offended her and sought to make his peace. He apologized and said they would speak of something else, and for the remainder of the half hour that the late train took in dragging from station to station till it reached Silverton, he made himself most fascinating, telling in his best style of a trip he took to Switzerland the summer before.
Ordinarily Joyce would have enjoyed this with all her eager young mind, visualizing the beautiful descriptions and putting herself there almost as if she had experienced it herself. But now she only sat quietly, looking straight ahead, a withdrawal in her manner, a look in her eyes as if she saw something that others could not see, an air that showed she was thinking deeply about something and her thoughts were not following his words.
He was piqued and mortified. He could not believe that she would not yield to the things that she had often enjoyed before in his conversation. In fact, it had been a source of much pleasure to him to tell her of rare experiences he had had in travel and watch the flush of her cheek and the glow in her eye as she enjoyed it with him. It cut him that he could not reach her, that she had withdrawn her friendliness. It mortified his pride and his sense of superiority. And most of all, it hurt him in his self-love. Perhaps he would have named it love for her, for he had come during the winter to recognize that that was what he felt for this girl; and seeing that was the case, he was the more determined to mold and make her as she should be to fit his walk and station in life. Albeit his love for anyone was merely another name for self-love. He wanted her and her love merely to make himself more complete for himself, and so he was really in love with himself all the time.
For the rest of the ride, Joyce was absolutely silent, and when they alighted at the station and started toward her home, she said nothing, and she walked a trifle apart from him and ignored the arm he offered.
In a sudden yearning for his heart’s desire, he took her hand and drew it within his arm, holding her hand in a firm warm grasp and speaking with new tenderness.
“Joyce, don’t you know why I have spoken to you as I have? Don’t you know that it is because I love you, because I cannot bear to see your brilliant mind filled with such twaddle, such nonsense, such rot!”
“Stop!” she cried, wrenching her hand away from his clasp. “Don’t you ever dare to speak such words to me again! Don’t dare to talk about the wonderful words of inspiration in that way. It is blasphemy!”
“Now, my dear child,” he began, trying to get possession of her hand once more, “you have wholly misunderstood me. The words of scripture are just as beautiful to me and just as sacred in their way as they are to you. It is a mere difference in the way of looking at them. Now I—”
“Mr. Harrington, I am not interested in how you look at the Bible. I would rather not hear you tell about it. You have filled me with horror.”
“Are you not interested that I am telling you that I love you?” he asked in deep, impassioned tones. “I am asking you now to be my wife. Cannot we put these trivial things away and be one in spirit now?” He leaned toward her gently and tried to capture the little gloved hand once more.
But Joyce quickly put her Bible in it and drew away from him.
“No!” she said. “No. We could never be one in spirit or in anything else while you deny the inspiration of the scriptures and call those wonderful expositions that we heard tonight rot and twaddle and nonsense. You are one of those people that it warns against in the Bible: ‘Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.’ It also says, ‘Avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science, falsely so called.’”
“Now, Joyce, please don’t quote scripture at me. Let us drop that. If we love each other, those things will settle themselves by and by. Let us talk a little while about ourselves. Tell me you love me, Joyce, don’t you? I’m sure I’ve seen it in your eyes.”
“No,” said Joyce frankly. “I don’t think I do. I don’t think it would be possible for me to love anyone who thought of the things that are the most precious to me in the way you do.”
“But, those things aside, you really in your heart love me? Tell me you do, Joyce. I long to hear you say the words. Just speak your own true heart. Once that question is settled, the other things will all fall in line.”
“I can’t put those things aside, Professor Harrington. They are a part of my soul. Nothing counts without them.”
There was a long silence. They had almost reached Joyce’s little home. He suddenly turned her around.
“Let us walk back down this next street. It is not late, and if you will not let me come into your house, at least we can walk a little longer. I must have this question settled tonight. I cannot let this separation go on between us any longer.”
“The question so far as I am concerned is settled now,” she said firmly.
“But, Joyce, if it were not for the difference? Suppose I thought as you do—would you say yes?”
Joyce hesitated. Theirs had been a pleasant companionship in a way.
“I cannot tell,” she said thoughtfully. “It would have made so much difference, I cannot tell how I would have felt.”
“There!” he said triumphantly. “You see, I was right. You do love me, only you are so filled with this fanaticism that you won’t let yourself see it.”
“You are mistaken,” said Joyce gravely. “I have never even considered it, because from the first of my acquaintance I have known that you were this way.”
“This way? What way?” he asked sharply. It hurt him to have her criticize him now, when he had declared his love for her.
Joyce thought a moment. “You do not believe. You do not understand the things of the Spirit. You base whatever faith you have on the wisdom of men, not in the power of God. Haven’t you ever heard that the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God?”
“We are talking around in a circle,” said Harrington crossly. “I was speaking of loving one another. From the moment I laid eyes upon you, I knew that you were mine. Does it mean nothing to you that I came after you when I did not even know who you were? Does it mean nothing that the vision of your face stayed in my heart?”
“From the moment I laid eyes on you, I knew that you were not mine,” said Joyce suddenly. “It is getting very late. Hear! The clocks are striking twelve. I must go home this minute!” Her heart had suddenly gone into a panic. She wanted to get away by herself and think. Life was a strange thing. Was this man going to insist on being in her life?
Harrington, deeply offended, led her to her home in silence. She bade him good night and received a stiff good night in answer. He stalked away in the moonlight, a handsome picture of a man with a rising future and much that was good and beautiful for a maiden to think upon. Yet she turned into her little
warm room as to a haven and knelt down by her bed.
“Oh, my dear heavenly Father! Keep me. Don’t let me get bewildered by things. I don’t want to love anyone now, please. And I know he isn’t a right one to love.”
From that night forth, she unconsciously ceased to pray for him. It seemed somehow as if her duty were done there and it was not for her to further seek his salvation. It seemed almost to her as if he desired her soul’s destruction, so determined had he been to drag her away into his world. It almost frightened her when she thought about it. For several days thereafter she kept to herself as much as possible when at school.
For several days Harrington maintained a grave aloofness toward her, did not come to her room nor appear in the hall when she would be likely to be about. When he needed to give a message to her, he sent it through one of the seniors or wrote a stiff note, signing himself J. S. Harrington.
Joyce felt that she was being punished and managed not to have to go to the office at all that week. She never had been a frequenter of his office at any time, however, so that was scarcely noticeable.
But one morning he happened to pass her room quite early, before scarcely anybody had entered the building, and he heard her singing softly to herself as she put the arithmetic problems on the blackboard for the day.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
The words were the words of a hymn, he knew, one of those he had once criticized as being “emotional twaddle,” yet there was something exquisitely lovely and dear in the way she sang it, the perfect confidence of her soul in that One in whom she trusted expressed in those simple words. He glanced at her wistfully as he passed the door and took in all the slender grace of her pose, as the white fingers, holding the chalk, made rapid lines of figures on the board. The sun made a bright background of beaten gold, outlining the lovely head, and he glanced back wistfully. Here was a rare girl indeed. Why, in this age of progress, should it be that such a choice flower of womanhood should be tainted with a primitive fanaticism? It was as if she were a flower left over from the Victorian age, out of place in a world that had grown beyond her—exquisite yet impractical. How could she possibly hope to get on in the world with such notions?
In the calm reflections of the night—of several nights—in which he had lain awake and gone over their last conversation, he had chided himself severely for going so far. He simply must not let himself go again, not until he was sure that he could make her over. Never would it do for him to hamper his future with one who was so utterly unadaptable to life as he found her up to date. It simply would ruin his career.
Yet that afternoon he made a special trip to town to find a certain book, one written in the vague modern style, sweet and mystical, with the emphasis on loving one another and being able to see the good in everybody, and the next morning, with a perfect rose just coming out of bud, she found it lying on her desk. No name, just the rose and the book. Of course she knew who put them there, but if she had not, his smile and greeting as he passed her in the hall would have told her. And that day she prayed, “Now, Father, help me. Keep me.”
When Tyke came back from Canada, there was vengeance in his eye. It had not taken him long to find out that there was no such street and number as Lib had given him, but he did not turn around and flee home without first examining every inch of the city where there might be a possible clue to Darcy. He went to the general delivery and asked for letters for Darcy Sherwood. He even stood for hours behind a pillar in the post office and watched the comers and goers, hoping to find Darcy among them. He walked over the city in daytime and at night, examined its haunts and amusements, looked over the hotel registries, and searched in a number of places where it seemed likely to him he might find his former partner, but no trace did he find of Darcy.
The first meeting with his three friends after his return was not very satisfactory. They chided him for his absence, derided him for going to Canada at all at the instigation of a sharp child, and charged him with trying to serve his own ends by the delay. They even went so far as to suggest that perhaps he was in with Darcy himself and this was all a big bluff. Tyke drew off and fairly bellowed at them in his wrath and finally settled down to a plan that he said would bring things to a climax within a week. The four heads were bent together long over a paper on which Cottar was jotting down suggestions for Tyke to act upon. It was Tyke, after all, who was made to play the part out in the open. And once, while they were talking in a little shanty far away from the town, with a bit of a candle in an old lantern for light, and their paper spread out on a rough box, there came a face at the window, a long, white, thin old face with only two teeth, one above and one below; a long, heavy wisp of snow-white hair straggling over a high yellow forehead, and watery, faded eyes, yet sharp, watching them. It ducked down when Tyke lifted his head once and looked nervously that way as a twig rubbed up and down on the roof in the wind from the old apple tree outside, but the eyes peered up again and watched long and silently, listening, and crouched when the men put out the lantern and stole away into the night. It was only old Noah Casey, harmless and wandering around again, escaped from the poor farm and traveling some of the old roads of his youth. Nobody minded old Noah, though he gave them a start now and then.
Noah was following a voice now, the voice he had heard loudest inside the shanty, the voice of the one with the red hair. Crouching low, he stole from tuft to tuft of the marshy grass, a thing of the night, old, flighty, his worn garment colorless like weathered wood, his wisps of hair blowing like gray clouds around his mild, anxious face from under the tattered felt hat. A bent old gnome in the dark with something on his mind.
Chapter 26
Along in the early spring one night just as Eugene and Nan were about to retire, the telephone rang and a man’s voice asked if Mr. Massey was at home and if he could see someone on important business connected with his cousin Miss Radway.
Eugene was immediately excited and fairly shouted into the telephone, demanding to know who was speaking.
“That’s all right, pard. I ain’t tellin’ all I know over the wire. Alone now? I’ll drop around. This is absolutely secret, you know.”
Nan stood trembling in the doorway, white-faced, frightened.
“You go to bed!” ordered Eugene, trying to still the excitement of his own voice and getting up to pace the room nervously. “Go to bed, I say!” he roared as Nan still stood in the doorway watching him.
There was a wild look in his eye that made her afraid of him sometimes. He had been hard toward her ever since she falteringly told him of her visit to the minister, and he had looked at her as if she had been a viper and answered her only, “You FOOL! If you could only learn to keep your mouth shut! Yes, weep. WEEP! That’s your line! Oh, why did I marry a fool?”
Since that day, Nan had kept much to herself and not ventured to take any part in the frantic search for Joyce that was still going on in a stealthy way. Now, at the look in her husband’s eye, she vanished, sobbing softly to herself. She went hurriedly up the stairs and flung herself noisily on the bed. A moment later, she rose stealthily, removed her shoes, and prepared to listen to whatever went on downstairs. Her heart was beating so wildly that she had put her hand on it; it almost hurt.
Eugene forestalled any attempt on her part to listen by closing the doors of the sitting room, and her only possibility of finding out anything lay in the back staircase or in watching out the window.
The night was dark, and a ghoulish wind was roaring around the house, a real March night with dark clouds driven across a starless sky. She could not even see the stealthy figure like a flat shadow that slid across the open space before the door and flattened against the side of the house some minutes before the knock that echoed so slightly she almost thought she was mistaken. She heard the door open and blow shut with a gust of wind,
and there were voices, low murmurs, that was all. She strained her ears to hear, for she felt sure Gene would not tell her anything. He said she was a fool and he could not trust her.
Downstairs in the sitting room, Tyke stood flat against the wall by the door and ordered Gene to pull down the shades. This done, he selected a seat in the darkest corner of the room and motioned Gene to a seat in front of him.
“You plumb sure thar ain’t no one lis’nen in on us?” he asked, eyeing the various doors.
“Positive,” said Gene, eyeing his caller suspiciously. This man of course wanted money, and he wasn’t a very pleasant-looking customer. Perhaps he ought to have sent for a policeman and had him in hiding. Yet there might be something he would not have wanted a policeman to know. No, rather take the chances himself. He glanced nervously toward the telephone to make sure he could reach it from where he sat in case he needed it. Nan, of course, would be worse than useless in an emergency. Still, perhaps he had made a mistake in sending her to bed. However, he felt pretty sure she would manage to find a cranny to listen, and when he heard a soft creaking on the back stairs and saw Tyke start nervously, he made no move.
“It’s only a mouse in the wall,” he said. “Go on.”
“Well, I came here purely out o’ kin’ness,” began Tyke ingratiatingly, his eyes roving from door to window and back again. “I’m ‘ware I’m doin’ a dangerous thing; an’ I’m riskin’ m’ life. The man we gotta deal with is a desp’rate feller, an’ he wouldn’t stop at nothin’. We gotta work still as death ur we won’t get nowheres. Now, to begin, ’bout how long uv you ben sure your young woman relative was kidnapped?”
“Kidnapped!” said Gene with a start. “Kidnapped. Yes. Why—” Then it was money the man wanted. “Why—I’ve been coming slowly to that conclusion for some time. Haven’t been able to prove it yet, of course…. That is—” Here, he was telling too much himself. He oughtn’t to tell this man anything. He ought to let the man do all the talking.