“She went right to the lawyer the minute she knew it and had the papers made out, never even waited to tell her folks at home, never said a word to me till it was all done and registered and everything, and the lawyer came to me and gave me the papers.
“I went right over there, of course, as soon as I knew and told her I wouldn’t have it. I told her Grandma loved her, and so do I—and that I was sure from things she had said that she was terribly disappointed that something seemed to have come between her and you, Dana.”
Dana winced and drew down his brows at that, but went on reading—“and I said I couldn’t think of taking the money when Grandma wanted her to have it. But Lynette just put her foot down and said she wouldn’t touch a cent of it, that it belonged in the family and must stay there. And she was so sweet and nice about it that she made me feel it was all right. So I’ve taken it. I think you ought to write her a letter and thank her. You didn’t treat her right, Dana, you know.
“I’m sending you five hundred dollars, because I feel you should have something just now when you are having a hard time. Of course, I know Grandma put the money out of my hands because she felt you needed to go through some discipline. She used to talk to me about it. I never dreamed she was going to divert the property, but now I can see she was trying to make me understand. She said if you ever got prosperous and had a lot of money, it would ruin you. She was afraid you would lose your soul. Then, too, she hated Jessie Belle, and I know she didn’t want her to get any of the money. And I wouldn’t feel right about giving you much, on account of what Grandma said. It was hers and she had a right to leave it as she did. Of course I shall leave it to you when I die, but perhaps you’ll be a stronger man by that time. And anyhow I think Grandma knew that Lynette would do the right thing. Now, Dana, do try to get along plainly and simply, and get Jessie Belle to settle down. Things will come out better for you someday if you work hard in your present parish and try to do right. God takes care of His own children, and you were dedicated to God, you know.”
Dana cast his mother’s letter aside with a contemptuous exclamation, the last few lines still unread, and snatching up the check, went out to put it in the bank and pay some of those awful bills.
So his mother was going to try to cut him out of the money, too! His own mother! Well, she couldn’t get away with that. He would pay the bills and sell the things and pack up Jessie Belle’s clothes and send them to her, and then he was going home to settle Mother. That was only a little reaction from her long years of servitude under a tyrant. But he would soon make her see that he must have his rights.
So Dana paid his bills, sold his furniture, packed his things, resigned his charge, sent Jessie Belle’s trunk to her the last thing, and started home again. He thought he was the prodigal going home for the fatted calf, but he still had not the talismanic words upon his lips. He had no idea in his soul of saying, “I have sinned against heaven in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.” He almost felt that he was conferring a favor upon the Almighty by this coming back and being willing to straighten everything else out and begin over again. He even cherished hopes yet of that New York church, after they were done following around hearing dumb Englishmen and realized that Dana Whipple was the only brilliant pulpit star still available in the universe. Let Jessie Belle go to her Hollywood if she wanted to. Nobody outside the family knew that he was married, only those people up in Canada. The world was too big to keep track of one man’s deeds, and anyhow New York wasn’t narrow. He could pose as a young, unmarried preacher without telling any lies whatever, and if Jessie Belle made any trouble later, everybody would pity the sad, handsome preacher whose wife had left him, who was so faithful to his work—so eloquent—and who had walked so circumspectly in their midst. Then, sometime, surely, something would happen, things would straighten out—
God wouldn’t let his future be utterly ruined by one mistake—and he could marry Lynette after all.
Of course, Lynette would be only too glad to forgive and receive him back!
So Dana went home almost at peace with himself again, having reconstructed his whole life with five hundred dollars and a little brilliant soul hedging.
Chapter 24
Lynette was telling all about her wonderful trip. The first trying days filled with the funeral and that awful will and its adjusting were over, and everything settled. Now they could talk in peace. They all felt as if a terrible scourge had passed over them and held them in its grip for a few days with a kind of threatening blight. But now that it was gone, they all were safe, and everything was moving right.
True, there was over their dear Lynette a grave, sweet maturity that almost troubled them. They could not help but feel that she still was suffering from Dana’s attitude.
But she said nothing about it, never seemed to brood or be gloomy, and they drew long breaths of relief when the matter of the property was all settled up and out of Lynette’s way. Grandmother Rutherford said to her daughter in the privacy of her own room with locked doors that it wasn’t at all delicate of Grandmother Whipple to have done such a thing and brought Lynnie into the public eye in that way. It wasn’t delicate! That was as near as Grandmother Rutherford would come to criticizing her rugged old dead neighbor.
So they sat themselves down one happy morning to hear all about the trip.
Of course they had heard bits before, but now they were to hear the special things, and Lynette was going to begin at the beginning and make a regular serial story out of it for the benefit of the family. Elim had given up a baseball game with Spud and the rest to stay home and hear it. Elim was seated by the dining room table whittling away at the model of a ship he was making. It was almost completed. He had been working at it all winter for Lynette’s birthday present, and there were just a few little finishing touches to be put on it. It really was a masterpiece, a copy of some rare old picture that had fallen into his hands. Lynette was delighted with it.
Grandma was seated by the window mending a bit of fine linen with tiny stitches, her sweet old face wearing a light of utter joy and satisfaction. Mary Brooke was beating softly away at the whites of eggs for the birthday cake, the yellow bowl in the lap of her big blue linen kitchen apron, beating carefully so as not to miss a word of the story. Lynette was mending a dress she wanted to put on, the same little blue dress she had worn last year. Her grandmother had asked for it again because Lynette looked so pretty in it.
They had heard the preliminaries of the first day out, and Lynette had come to the stranger who stood beside her in the starlight and told her such wonderful things of the heavens. “Gee!” said Elim pausing in his work of adjusting a cord on a mast, and looked up. “I never heard of that before. The names of the stars, and they are all in the order of the things that happened? You say you brought home that book? Gee, I’d like to read that!”
Lynette went on to tell how the stranger had preached on shipboard, giving bits of the wonderful sermon and telling what people had said to him afterward, imitating their voices in her own inimitable way, telling how Dorothy had been crazy over him and called him “Plush Eyes,” but how his name was really Alec Douglas.
“Why, yes, I’ve heard of him,” said Mary Brooke. “There’s often a quotation from one of his sermons in the religious papers. You remember, Mother, I read it to you last Sunday. Why, Lynnie, he’s over in this country now, isn’t he? I think that was the name. They said he was to preach in one of the New York churches soon, the whole month of June, or July, I forgot which. Let me see, which church was it?”
“Yes, he’s over here,” she answered. “He came back on the same ship with us again. Wasn’t that strange? And we saw him quite a little; his steamer chair wasn’t far away from ours. He is a wonderful man. It was a privilege to talk with him. I shall never forget the things he said.”
Mary Brooke gave her child a keen, furtive glance and went on beating her frosting.
“You know I heard him preach again, in Lond
on. Yes, Dorothy and I happened to see in the paper that he was going to preach. We hadn’t known just which his church was before that, and anyway we had just arrived there. So we went to church. It was the first time that I had ever been able to get Dorothy to go to church willingly. She hated it. So we went. And Mother, it was even greater than the sermon on shipboard. He told such wonderful things about our privilege of victory through Christ. It was all a kind of continuation of the other sermon we had heard, all based on the condition of having died with Christ that we might also live with Him. The text was:
“That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto His death, if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.”
“It was a new thought to me that we might be having fellowship with Christ through suffering.”
Mary Brooke looked up with a light in her eyes and nodded understandingly.
A look of quiet peace settled over Grandma Rutherford’s sweet lips and gentle brow. Lynnie was safe. Lynnie had passed through the fire and understood the way of peace!
Then suddenly Elim shoved back his chair harshly and jumped, his face expressing utter disgust.
“Good night! There comes that dirty sucker!” he said in a low, ugly tone. “Lynnie, don’t you ferget what I told you. Say, you don’t needta see him, do ya? Gee, I’d go out an wallop him fer a cent! I’ll go to the door! Want me to, Lynnie?”
Lynette had dropped her sewing and looked out of the window. There was Dana coming up the walk, with almost his old cheerful swing. There was nothing dejected about Dana.
Mary Brooke set the yellow bowl down on the table and stood looking at Dana, her eyes wide, a piteous, yearning expression on her face. And just when they were all so happy, too! Why couldn’t Dana stay where he belonged? It surely wasn’t here.
Grandmother looked out of the window and paused in her fine linen stitches, looked, and then remembered. No, Lynnie would be kept. They needn’t worry. Lynnie had found higher ground than even Dana could presume to reach.
It was Lynette herself who rose to the occasion.
“Thank you, Elim, but I’ll have to see him myself.”
There was that about her tone that gave the excited boy confidence in her.
“Well,” he hesitated, “if you think you gotta, but—Lynnie, I’ll be right here at the back door. You just whistle if you need me!”
Lynette gave him a quick smile of gratitude and reassurance and passed out of the room, slipping quickly up the stairs. It was Mary Brooke who opened the door for Dana and ushered him formally into the parlor, a thing that he couldn’t remember ever to have happened to him before in that house. He had always entered freely wherever the family was sitting, even if it was the kitchen.
She left him there and went to call her daughter. There was a grave dignity about her that put a silence to the happy greeting Dana had summoned to his lips. But Dana was quick to adjust himself to the circumstances. He entered with a grace of dignity all his own, as one who has passed honorably through heavy chastening. Dana had a way of placing his own blame on other shoulders, just by his graceful manner.
Lynette entered presently, with a grave constraint upon her, and shook hands with Dana as if he had been a playmate of childhood very, very long ago.
“Lynette, I’ve come back!” he announced with his disarming manner. He grasped her hand and held it in a warm clasp.
Lynette disengaged her hand gently and stepped back a trifle, her chin slightly lifted, her eyes upon him, questioningly.
“Yes?” she said gently. “I know it’s been very hard for you. You were very fond of your grandmother.” There was genuine sympathy in her voice.
He waved his hand impatiently.
“Of course,” he said almost brusquely. “But that’s not the point. Lynn, I’ve come back!”
Lynette stepped back to a chair and motioned him to another.
“Sit down, Dana,” she said gravely. “Just what do you mean? Come back to stay? Do you mean—? You’ve not given up your church have you? Your mother said you were preaching somewhere up in Canada.”
“Oh, I’m not talking of such things. Don’t you understand, Lynn, I’ve come back to you. I’ve come to throw myself on your mercy!”
“Dana!” she exclaimed in a troubled voice. “How? What do you mean?”
She thought he must be somehow thinking of the money, yet she could not see the connection.
“I mean,” said Dana desperately, “that you are mine. Why, you’ve always been mine! I love you and I can’t do without you. I thought when I came home that I was going to be able to wait until things got straightened out to tell you this, but now that I see you, looking so beautiful and so like yourself, only sweeter, much sweeter, I can’t wait. I’ve had your image in my heart ever since I saw you at the funeral sitting beside my grandmother, looking like an angel. Lynn, you’re wonderful!”
Lynette was very still, and white. She sat looking at him in amazement. For a moment she could not summon words to her lips.
“But Dana,” she said, wondering why his declaration of love had not given her the joy it would have done months ago. “No, sit still, please. There are some things that must be explained, and—there are—”
“Yes, I know, Lynn. I’m coming to it all. I know you were sore about my forgetting your birthday, but I was annoyed at being deviled over at the house about those people coming that I forgot everything. And then, that girl—Lynn, she was the limit! She made a perfect fool out of me. Of course, I shouldn’t have let her, but I was so upset about your going off that way without a word, just that nasty little crack about poise. You didn’t seem to know that all I said was meant for your good.”
Lynette felt a cold clutch settling around her throat and tightening so that it was hard to speak, but she wanted to control herself. Somehow she was seeing Dana in a light she had never seen him before, and he seemed weak—weak and childish.
“Do you mean, Dana, that you—flirted with that girl that you brought over here that evening?”
Dana looked down at his shoes uncomfortably. “Yes—it amounts to that!” he answered, still looking down. “But,” he added eagerly, “I think I can get out of it. I’m sure I can, without any trouble. I think she is sick of it, too.”
The cold clutch went on down and gripped Lynette’s heart. What was this she was hearing?
“Do you mean that you are in some way bound to her?” she asked in a steady little voice that sounded very far away from herself. She began to wonder if she was hearing right. Was Dana really saying all this, or was she dreaming?
There was a long silence. Somehow Lynette did not seem able to break it. She continued looking at Dana, the broad shoulders, the sleek, well-set head. The same Dana her heart had cherished, the beau she had brooded over and prayed for all these months. Dana, saying things like that! It seemed in the nature of a confession, and yet he did not seem particularly sorry, only annoyed that he had been led into a breach of etiquette as it were. She saw everything with startling clearness now as she sat and waited for him to speak. Why had she never felt that way about him before? Was she still bitter at him?
At last he spoke, looking up with a kind of charming defiance.
“Yes, I married her!” he said, almost a smile upon his lips. “Of course, I shouldn’t have, but she made such a devilish fuss, and I didn’t see any way out then. It really seemed as if I had to.”
“You married her!” said Lynette, looking at him steadily and rising to her feet, a new strength suddenly coming to her. “Is that what you are asking me to forgive you for?”
Her tones were hard, keen, like a knife going through him. He had not known that she could be so cold.
“Why, yes, Lynn. I shouldn’t have done it, I know, it was all a great mistake. She is not the kind of girl I could ever love. I have never loved anybody but you. Listen, Lynn, now don’t get up in the air and go out of the room before I
finish. You don’t understand. You always did go off half-cocked. Sit down now, and let me explain.”
“There can be no explanation, Dana. You have no right to talk to me of love. You are a married man. It is too late to tell me that you love me. You belong to someone else.”
“But that’s just it, Lynn. I never did belong to her in the sense of loving her. She cast a glamour over me for a while, and when she got me right where she wanted me, she threatened to tell everybody how intimate we had been, she threatened to—well, she would have played havoc with my prospects in New York. She had wormed out of me where I was going to preach, and she threatened to send them word of all sorts of impossible things about me. It was really blackmail of the worst kind. She demanded that I marry her at once. And—well—I was desperate, and I thought I had to. It was terrible to me to think of my family and my professors and everybody hearing all those terrible lies about me.”
“Dana, if they were lies they would not have mattered. The truth would have come out in the end!”
She looked straight through him as if she was reading the truth from his heart, and the slow color stole into his lean cheeks and showed up the dark circles under his eyes. Dana had been suffering. That was plainly to be seen.
“Well,” he hedged uneasily, “I was crazed. I couldn’t use my usual judgment, and I married her!”
He flung the statement at her with his old defiance, and she did not answer, only looked at him steadily, sadly, as if she had suddenly grown years wiser than himself.
“But I do not understand,” she said at last. “What is it that you, a married man, are asking of me? If it is forgiveness for having been disloyal to the love you say you had for me, you have it, my full, free forgiveness.”
Dana rose and stood beside her eagerly.