The judge bowed gravely. There was no denying that he looked relieved.
“This will have to go through the regular routine, of course,” he said, “but it can be run through quickly. Mr. Robinson, you get the items, numbers of cases sold, and so on; prepare the indictment, and we’ll try to get it through tomorrow.”
The judge straightened up and looked around him, his eyes resting on the four witnesses, holding their hats ready for a speedy departure, and at that moment the district attorney jumped up briskly.
“Your Honor,” he said. “I ask that these four witnesses be held for perjury.”
A murmur of satisfaction went rippling over the courtroom as people rose to go out.
People were rushing around Joyce as she came out, still escorted by little Lib, proud as a small peacock. Nan was the first to envelop her in a smothering embrace, weeping copiously upon her neck with a loud show of affection. Many old friends lingered, waiting just to watch her dear face alight with the relief and triumph of the moment. The minister and his wife were close behind Joyce and eagerly asked her to come home with them.
“No,” put in Nan decidedly, “she’s coming to her own home, of course. Everything in your room is just as you left it, darling—”
Joyce couldn’t help smiling at the affectionate appellative.
“For pity’s sake, get rid of that awful child and come on,” whispered Nan loudly. “Don’t let her hang on you like that. Let’s get out of this terrible crowd! How curious people are! Come on home!”
Poor little Lib dropped Joyce’s arm as if she had been shot, but Joyce quickly caught the little cold hand and drew it back close with her arm, her own warm fingers keeping the little hand clasped tight.
“I want her here, Nan. She is my dear little friend,” said Joyce pleasantly.
“For mercy’s sake! You always had such strange friends, Joyce,” she laughed disagreeably. “Well, never mind, bring her along, only come on!”
But Dan Peterson’s hand was on Joyce’s shoulder.
“No, Mrs. Massey, Joyce is coming with us. Father wants to see her right away at home,” and off he carried Joyce and Lib in his own big shiny car, while Nan tried to hide her chagrin.
Joyce went home with the Petersons and was presently sitting in Judge Peterson’s library, learning about her inheritance and being prepared for the reading of the will, which was to come after supper as soon as the Masseys could be summoned to the hearing.
But all the time her mind was listening, she was hoping that Darcy would come. Surely, surely he would come and speak to her, just thank her or something. He had been busy with the attorney when she left the courtroom and had flashed her just one gorgeous smile as she looked back at him. Had she been mistaken? Surely there was a promise in that glance, that he would see her again. She wondered why everything seemed to have suddenly gone so flat. She ought to go back, of course, on the night train and be ready to teach the next day, but her heart was not willing to go—not yet—and Judge Peterson presently settled the matter by saying that she would be needed the next day for the technicalities of the settlement of the estate.
So she sent a telegram to Harrington:
WILL BE BACK TO TEACH MONDAY MORNING.
CANNOT POSSIBLY COME SOONER. J. RADWAY
Chapter 31
The will was read at last.
Gene and Nan, glowering in the corner of Judge Peterson’s comfortable library, learned with dismay that their part was only a small patrimony that Mary Massey had in her own right. The rest, house and meadowlands and money enough to keep her comfortably, was all Joyce’s left her by her mother from her own father’s estate.
It had been her mother’s wish that Joyce should not know that she had anything but herself to depend upon until she grew up. She felt that as a result she would the better come up unspoiled and independent. So she had placed the property in her sister’s hands in such a way that unless Mary Massey died, Joyce would not know that she had anything until she came of age. Judge Peterson was the other trustee of the property and was to use his own discretion about telling Joyce in case of her aunt’s death before her majority. But during the interval of Joyce’s absence from Meadow Brook, Joyce had come to her majority, so there was no longer any hindrance to her entering into her inheritance at once.
Mary Massey had not told her son the whole thing for reasons of her own, but she had left a letter explaining the matter to him and reminding him of what she had always told him, that she had very little to leave him, but commending Joyce to his tender care and saying she had little fear but that Joyce would always be generous with him.
Gene and Nan arose silently when the business of the will was concluded. They had a look of withdrawing. A hurt, stricken look.
Joyce sprang up and went over to them, saying eagerly, “Of course, Gene, you’ll stay in the house.”
“It’s your house,” said Gene. “Of course we’ll get right out.”
“Please don’t,” said Joyce earnestly. “At least not unless you don’t want to stay, of course. The house was your mother’s home. All these technicalities of law don’t change the matter a mite to me. I know Aunt Mary expected us all to live there, and she knew I would say so. Even though it is mine, it’s just the same as yours. Besides, I’ve another little house of my own in Silverton, and I presume I shall go back there and go on teaching. I should not be happy doing nothing. The house may have been bought by my father’s money, but it was made into a home by your mother’s loving care, and it’s yours as much as it is mine. As long as you live, I want you to feel you can live in it if you want to.”
“You could sell it,” said Gene, still independently, “or rent it. I will pay you rent,” stiffly.
Joyce laughed. “No, indeed. You won’t pay me rent. If you try to, I’ll pay you for your mother’s love and care. How would that be? And I don’t want to sell the house. I love it. I like to think it’s there for me to come home to now and them. And, Nan, you don’t need to feel hampered there. You can arrange things just as you like, just as if it were your own. Just treat me like a sister, that’s all, and share with me in what there is.”
“I’m sure that’s very generous of you, Joyce,” said Gene, feeling a sense of shame over the way he had always treated her. “We’ll think about it. Aren’t you coming home with us now?”
“Why, I’ll be down tomorrow, I guess,” she said pleasantly. “I want to get all these papers signed and everything fixed. I must be back on my job Monday, you know.”
“I shouldn’t think you’d have to teach now,” said Nan, an envious note in her voice. “Why don’t you just telegraph them you aren’t coming back and quit?”
“Why, that wouldn’t be honorable,” laughed Joyce. “And besides, I like it. I wouldn’t leave the kiddies for anything till the term is up.”
“You’re a strange girl,” said Nan speculatively. “I don’t see why you don’t just want to have a good time.”
“Why, I am having a beautiful time,” said Joyce, wide-eyed. “I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do.”
They went home, and the evening passed, and still Darcy did not come. Joyce began to wonder if he were not coming at all, if, perhaps, she might be going to have to write him a note or call him up or something, for she did not mean to go back to Silverton without telling him in so many words how glad she was that he had found her Lord.
Joyce spent Friday in going over her things in the old home and packing up what she wanted to take back with her to Silverton, but she went back at night to Judge Peterson’s. The minister and his wife came to call that evening, and they had a beautiful talk, but all the time Joyce was listening for a step that did not come, and wondering. Was Darcy still shy? Surely he would come just once after all that had happened, after she had come home to make things straight and set him free.
She thought she heard the minister speak his name as they were about to leave, talking to Dan Peterson over by the door, and Dan said, “Yes, tom
orrow,” that was all. She wanted to ask, but something held her back, and no one mentioned Darcy. Was it his second trial that was coming off tomorrow? she wondered.
She did not sleep well that night. She kept waking and thinking of Darcy. Was he going to have to go to prison after all for bootlegging? It seemed so hard now that he had begun his new life. She wished she dared ask about the law.
The next morning at the breakfast table, she followed a sudden impulse and told the judge and his wife all about Darcy’s speech in the meeting on the night of the rain. Dan had gone into the hall to answer the telephone, and when he came back, he tiptoed in and stood by the door quietly, as if someone were praying. His eyes were down and his face looked strangely tender as if he were hearing a miracle. Neither the judge nor Dan was much on religion, but Mrs. Peterson was a saint if there was one, and her face glowed with joy over the story. The old judge cleared his throat three times before he growled out the words. “Yes, Darcy’s all right. Darcy’s all right.” His glasses seemed to be blurred, and he had to take them off and polish them before he could see right again. “He needn’t have confessed that at all. It was all over and forgot. But still, I like him better for it. Great stuff in him!”
Then Joyce summoned courage.
“Will he have trouble again, with this other trial? What will be the penalty? Will he have to go to prison?”
“Oh, no! Nothing like that,” said the judge hastily. “Oh, no, he’ll just have to pay a penalty. Probably about five hundred dollars or something like that, according to the amount of stuff handled. Know how much it was, Dan?”
“About,” said Dan gruffly.
“Great boy, Darcy!” said the judge emphatically. “He’ll be all right this morning. Case comes off before noon, doesn’t it, Dan? Where’s my notebook?”
“Yes, before noon,” said Dan, and then they both went out, and Joyce, with relieved heart, went to singing and playing on the old, yellow-keyed, square piano, singing with all her heart the song they sang that night in the meeting:
Free from the law, O sinner, receive it,
Free from the law, O brother, believe it!
And Mrs. Peterson, up in her room making her bed and plumping up the pillows, said to herself happily, “Bless her dear little heart. I wish we could keep her here.”
Darcy came home with Judge Peterson at noon to lunch. He seemed a new Darcy. His face was alight, and his smile was joyous.
He did not talk much during the meal, but what he said rippled with humor and kept them all in gales of laughter. The new gravity that was upon him when he was silent sat well there and gave him an air of one who had found a solid foundation.
As they arose from the table, he looked at Joyce and said in a tone that everyone could hear, “Miss Joyce, it’s a gorgeous afternoon, and I thought perhaps you’d like to take a walk through some of the old paths. I have something I’d like to tell you, and if you don’t mind being seen in the company of a lawbreaker like me, we might stroll down to the old woods.”
Joyce looked up with her face flooded with glory. “Oh, but you’re not under the law now, you know,” she said brightly.
“No, not in any sense, thank the Lord,” said Darcy reverently.
They walked down the long, smooth road together past the bridge and around the turn, and there on the hill before them lay the woods in all the beauty of the springtime verdure. They had been talking of the trial, Darcy telling her all that had gone on before she arrived, and also of the second trial where he had paid the fine and been set free. But now, at the turn of the road, they stopped and looked. The scene was so lovely, one could but exclaim at the beauty of the hillside. The fields were green and dotted with violets where they walked, and all around were spicy odors of the spring, with exquisite perfumes in the making. Before them rose the woods, pale greens stippled with red buds on their tips and a background of darker pines. And now they spoke of Aunt Mary and the day they had spent together.
As they entered the woods, frail anemones scattered their pathways, and hepaticas, blue and white, met them in groups where maidenhair hid, and little curled fern fronds stuck up through the black mold. As they walked down that pine-strewn path, flower-broidered and dim, each was conscious of the last time they had passed that way. They had gone out from that arched silence a boy and girl; they were reentering man and woman.
For a few moments, neither spoke. Then Darcy, as if he were treading holy ground, said, “It was here you sat when I first saw you.”
Joyce flashed him a golden look.
“And you there?” She pointed. “I have always wanted to go there and sit myself,” she said, “with my feet hanging over that rock.”
“Let’s go!” he said, and caught her hand.
He helped her down to a comfortable spot, where the mossy rock shelved over the water, and the little brook babbled over bright stones in a quiet, musical way.
Sitting there he told her of the deep experience of his heart. Of how that day and the story of the blind man had lingered with him all those years, until he came to understand that he was blind and he was a sinner and needed a Savior. He told her how her eyes had pierced his soul, like the thought of God searching him, and how he had finally surrendered. He spoke of the peace and joy that were his now, and of his Bible.
And then Joyce told him how she had come in out of the rain and heard him talking and tried to reach him and failed.
The sun dropped lower in the west, and the long shadows came within their sweet retreat. Finally, they sat in silence, just listening to the birds and the tinkle of the water, feeling how good it was to be here after the years.
Suddenly Darcy began to speak again. “Joyce, I’m going to tell you something. You may think perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, that I have no right to speak of such things—that I am unworthy. But somehow I think you ought to know. After I’ve told you, I’m not going to presume upon it. I know as well as you do that I’m unworthy. But I’ve loved you all my life, and it’s kept me from a great deal that I might have done if I hadn’t. I never dreamed of you as mine, not in any material sense of the word. I always knew I wasn’t big enough and good enough for you, but I’ve kept you like a shrine in a temple, a place to worship at. You can’t know what it’s meant to me. I’m telling you this because it’s the only way I can thank you for what you did for me. You saved my life, and I want you to know that all that a man has to give a woman, that I have given to you. There will never be any other girl for me.”
Joyce’s head was turned away. She was trying to keep the blinding joy of her heart from leaping to her eyes.
“And you refuse to let me give anything back to you?” she asked in a little faltering voice.
“What do you mean, Joyce?” He lifted his eyes and looked at her anxiously.
“I mean, does it mean nothing to you that I have loved you, too, ever since the day we were here last?”
He caught her hand.
“Joyce! Do you mean that? You loved me all that time? But of course, you did not know me, did not know that I was—”
“I loved you,” said Joyce firmly. “And I love you now. I didn’t know it was that when I came home to save you, but I guess it was there all the time, only I hadn’t told myself about it—yet—”
“Oh, Joyce, my darling!”
He gathered her close to his heart and closed his eyes in an ecstasy of joy.
“It makes me feel so humble!” he said at last, looking into her eyes. “To think that I, a sinner, a lawbreaker—”
She laid her fingers on his lips.
“‘For ye are not under the law,’” she quoted softly, “‘but under grace.’ Have you forgotten that He puts His righteousness upon us?”
They came back from their walk in the twilight with the stars looking down upon them and a new moon shining in a clear sky, but they did not see it. They were walking hand in hand and talking of many precious things.
The Petersons had been waiting dinner for them almost
an hour, but they were serenely unconscious of the fact.
They went to church the next day and sat in the old Peterson pew, side by side, with the judge and Mrs. Peterson and Dan, for the delight of all eyes, but they didn’t know that either. They were happy as any two people could be in this world.
Monday morning, with the first ray of light, Darcy was up and at his car, and before the people of Meadow Brook had begun to think about waking up, he and Joyce were on their way to Silverton. Joyce had around her shoulders her gray fox neckpiece. Nan had ostentatiously thrown it out the window in the gray of the morning when they stopped there for Joyce’s trunk, saying, “Here, Joyce, you’ll need this. It’s chilly. I had it put carefully away for you in camphor all winter.”
They had the road to themselves for the first two hours, and Darcy’s racing engine flew out along the road as smoothly as perfect steel and well-oiled bearings could make it. They drove into Silverton at ten minutes to eight and went straight to Joyce’s little house to leave her trunk, much to the wonder and delight of Mrs. Bryant, who hadn’t known what to make of Joyce’s absence.
Joyce was wearing on her finger a splendid diamond. Darcy had routed a jeweler friend out of bed last Saturday night to get it, and paid for it with a check that almost cleaned his bank account out entirely, but he wore a look on his face of utter happiness.
They drove up to the schoolhouse five minutes before the bell rang, and Professor Harrington stood on the steps talking to a teacher. Joyce was still in her new spring suit and little hat, with the pretty fox around her neck, and Harrington felt his resolve slowly melting away from him. How could one be cold to a girl who looked like that? She certainly was stunning in those clothes. He had thought all along that clothes would make a big difference. But who the deuce was the big, good-looking giant who brought her And then the giant stooped and kissed Joyce, and he frowned.
“Was that your brother?” he asked as Joyce came flying up the walk, afraid that she was going to be late.