FullReads

“Do you mean–to tell me–that it was true ?”

She got the words out with an effort. Her chin worked convulsively. She looked an old, old woman.

“True?”

The man lifted a dazed, questioning face to hers. He groped his way back through twenty years. This woman had believed in him all the time! He saw her take two or three steps backward and fall into a chair. They sat there until the room grew dark. The wind began to blow through the house, and Alex got up and put out the cat and shut the door. Then he went to his wife’s side.

“Don’t you think you’d better go to bed, Matildy?”

She shook her head.

“I suppose there’s such a thing as repentance,” he went on, with a rasp in his voice, “and a blotting out of sins, isn’t there, Matildy?”

She put out her hand and pushed him away. He went into the bedroom and shut the door. She could hear him pulling off his boots on the bootjack. Then he walked about a little in his stocking feet, and presently the bed-cord squeaked, and she knew he was in bed. Later, she could hear his heavy breathing. She sat there in the dark until she heard Wattie whistling; then she got up and lit a candle and opened the door softly. The boy came loping up the path.

“Mary France’s got a beau!” he broke out, with a little snort of ridicule.

His mother laid her hand on his arm.

“Wattie,” she said, “I want you to go out to the barn and harness up old Doll and the colt. I want you to go with me and Mary Frances over to grandfather Hazlitt’s.”

The boy’s mouth and eyes grew round.

“To-night?”

“Yes, right away. I don’t want you to ask any questions, Wattie. Mother never yet told you to do anything wrong. Just go out and get the team, and be as quiet as you can.”

The boy “hunched” his shoulders, and started with long, soft strides toward the barn. His mother heard him begin to whistle again and then stop abruptly. She stood on the step until she heard voices at the gate, and Mary Frances came up the walk between the marigolds and zinnias and stood in the square of light from the door. She met her mother with a pink, bashful face.

“I want you to go upstairs, Mary Frances, and get your other cloak and my blanket shawl. Wattie’s gone to fetch the horses. You and him and me’s goin’ over to grandfather Hazlitt’s.”

“To grandfather Hazlitt’s this time o’ night! Is anybody sick?”

“No, there’s nobody sick. I don’t want you should ask any questions, Mary Frances. Just get on your things, and do as mother says; and don’t make any more noise than you can help.”

The young girl went into the house, and came out presently with her mother’s shawl and bonnet. They could hear the wagon driving around to the gate.

Matilda went into the kitchen and blew out the candle. Then she closed the door quietly, and went down the walk with her daughter.

Matilda Randall was not at communion on the next Sabbath. She was “down sick at her father’s,” the women said, and they thought it hard that she should be absent when Alex joined the church.

“I don’t doubt it’s been quite a cross to her, the way he’s held out,” one of them remarked; “and it seems a pity she couldn’t have been there to partake with him the first time.”

But the weary woman, lying so still in her old room in her father’s house, had a heavier cross.

Her mother tiptoed into the room, the morning after her arrival, and stood beside her until she opened her eyes.

“Elick is outside, Matildy. Shall I tell him to come in?”

She shook her head, and closed her eyes again wearily.

The old woman went out, and confronted her gray-haired husband helplessly.

“It beats me, Josiah, what he could ‘a’ said or done that she’s took to heart so, after what she’s put up with all these years.”

* * * * *

Mr. Anderson preached the funeral sermon very touchingly, when it was all over. The tears came into his young eyes, and there were treacherous breaks in his rhetoric as he talked.

“This sister in Israel, whose lovely and self-sacrificing life has just ended so peacefully, lived to see the dearest wish of her heart gratified,–the conversion of the husband of her youth to the faith of her fathers. We are told that some have died of grief, but if this frail heart ceased to beat from any excess of emotion, it must have been, my friends, from the fullness of joy,–the joy ‘that cometh in the morning.'”

But Alex Randall knew better.