By the Way of the Silverthorns

by Grace Livingston Hill

  And now at last the train was moving and the last good-bye was said, and they must turn back to their old life again with Sydney gone from them into a new life of her own.

  Chapter 5

  Lincoln Silverthorn driving down the broad avenue the next morning on the way to a business appointment, suddenly saw on the sidewalk just ahead of him, the slim figure of a girl who looked strangely familiar, and not very welcome to his eyes which grew more and more troubled as he came nearer and made sure his first sight had been right.

  She was bending under the weight of a heavy suitcase, which he also recognized, having carried it two short nights before. She had also a small overnight bag, and her slender arms did not seem well adapted or accustomed to carrying such burdens.

  Unconsciously he slowed down, and gave a glance ahead. Yes, there was a side street where he could turn off at once and not have to go by her at all. He certainly did not want to get into her toils again. And yet, his innate courtesy, and his Christian training could not quite let him do that. She was a woman, and she was obviously having a hard time getting that suitcase transported. There! Now she was stopping, putting it down on the sidewalk and straightening up as if her back ached, and her arm was tired. He saw her give a glance at her watch, and then turn and shift the luggage to the other arm. Why in the world didn’t she call a taxi? She couldn’t be hard up, could she? He had never heard that the Lazarelles were especially wealthy, but surely if she had money enough to come here from a distance where she now lived, she must have enough to pay for a taxi. But obviously she hadn’t done it, and here she was out in the street, at least two more blocks from any bus line if she had meant to take a bus, seven blocks from the railroad if she was taking a train. Well, if was not his responsibility. Why should he get tangled up in it, and perhaps have that girl on his hands for the day? She wasn’t his cousin, not even distantly, and if the Hollises didn’t see fit to look after her why should he worry?

  But of course the Hollises would do something about it if they knew she was trudging off by herself that way with heavy luggage. And they had put her in his charge, and he saw her now. Did not common courtesy make it necessary for him to do something about it? What would his mother and father say if it were put up to them? What would the Hollises say if he should tell them he had seen her so and passed her by? What did Christian courtesy demand?

  Of course he needn’t tell his family, nor the Hollises, and no one would ever know but himself. But—Christian courtesy! Of course his Lord would know, and now his own heart was convicting him. Even if he didn’t like the girl, he could at least be polite. And after all she was one for whom the Lord had died. Did that demand that he too, who was supposed to have died with Christ, do an unpleasant duty?

  Well, he didn’t have to be particularly affable, anyway. He could take her to her bus, or train. That wouldn’t last long.

  Just then the girl put down her luggage, the little bag on top of the big one and drew a deep breath as if she were tired. Of course, from all he knew of her in the past this might be an act that she was putting on for his benefit, to attract his attention. Yet he didn’t think she could have seen him. And besides, he had been fairly severe with her the last time he saw her.

  Then he drew up sharply at the curb, a little ahead of where she was standing, and leaning out gave her a cold courteous bow. He felt certain there was nothing in the quality of that bow to encourage her further pursuit of him, nothing to make her think he was interested in her.

  She looked up and a startled quiver went over her face. She seemed almost frightened.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, and tried to make his voice as colorless as possible, not as if he were glad to see her at all, as if it were merely duty that made him ask.

  A dreary, dispirited look came into her eyes.

  “Oh, no,” she said listlessly, “I’m all right. I’ll make it. But—” and then she stopped and a sudden wistfulness came over her face, almost an eagerness. “I did want to ask you a question. I’ve been wishing all day yesterday that I could see you just one minute. I won’t take long—” She drew a little nearer to his car. “Would you mind stopping just one minute? It’s something you said the other night, and I wanted to know if you really meant it, or were you just mad because you had to bother taking me away?”

  He gave her an astonished glance. Was this another act that she was going to try on him? But there was such earnestness in her face, such eagerness in her voice, as if it meant so much to her that he could not bring himself to refuse, or turn her away.

  He tried to make his voice sound kindly, though he was all at once intensely annoyed. He had wanted to get his errands done in a hurry and get back home to some work he had planned, and now was she going to upset everything? This was the way Luther Waite said she did, always barging in and insisting on being important.

  “What did I say?” he asked. “I’m afraid I was rather rude to you. I was annoyed of course to have my friends so upset.”

  “Oh, I don’t meant that. Of course you didn’t like it that you had to bother with me at a time like that. And I guess what you said to me was all true. I’ve been thinking it over and I’ve seen myself as I never did before. I guess I ought to be glad you told me. Because I’ve been trying all my life to have people like me and they never do. I guess I must have been going about it in the wrong way, and you made me see it. But what you said that I want to ask about is this: you said I could be different. Did you really mean that? Do you honestly think I could?”

  Link gave her a quick searching look and then said gravely, commandingly,

  “Get it!”

  “No, I don’t want to bother you that way. If you’ll just tell me if you meant it or not.”

  “Why, sure I meant it.”

  Her face took on a hungry look.

  “Oh, if I only knew how!” she said, and her face didn’t look at all like Minnie Lazarelle. “I’ve been trying all my life to be like other people, and I never get anywhere!” There was almost a wail in her voice, a desperate look in her eyes, as she stepped back with a kind of finality in her air, like one who had found out her illness, and now must search till she found a way to attain the cure. She stooped and began to gather up her bags.

  “Get in!” said Link firmly, and swinging open the door slid by the wheel and out on the sidewalk beside her. “Now, get in!” he said again. “You and I have got to thrash this out till you understand. If you really want it. Yes, there’s a way!”

  He swung her bags into the compartment behind the seats, and went around to the wheel. She looked at him with sudden wonder, almost dread. She wasn’t used to grave and gentle service. Young men sometimes gave her what she forced them to give in the way of attentions, but never this grave definite help because they saw she needed it. She crept into the seat hesitantly, not with her old arrogant swing. She had nothing to cover. This young man knew the truth about her. He had told it to her.

  “Now, where were you going?” he asked as his hand grasped the wheel. “We might as well save you time.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said apathetically, “I was just going to the station, but I don’t care. If you’ll just tell me so I can understand how I could possibly be different.”

  There was something in her groping voice, in the bitterness of her accent, that gave Link a sudden compassion for her. Was she genuine? If she was, there was something in that cry of hers that called for all the gallantry, all the ability to help that the years had taught Link.

  “I think you need the Lord Jesus Christ!” said Link, startlingly, as the car threaded its way through traffic.

  The girl was utterly still with downcast eyes for some seconds, a hopeless look growing around her mouth. At last she spoke vaguely:

  “Oh, you mean religion!” and her tone grew still more hopeless than it had been. “You mean I should go to church a lot and all that?”

  “No!” said Link. “I don’t mean religion. Religion is a system of g
ood works serving any kind of god. I mean you need to know the Lord Jesus Christ, personally and intimately.”

  “Yeah?” said the girl with a half contemptuous laugh. “A big chance I’d ever stand doing that! You might as well tell me to go and get to be pals with the president, or the king of England!”

  “Oh, no!” said Link. “It wouldn’t be like that because He loves you.”

  “Oh yeah? Well you don’t know me, that’s all. I’ve never had anything at all to do with Him. I don’t know as I’ve even believed in Him. I’ve never been interested in going to church, or anything religious. He couldn’t love me.”

  “Yes, but He does,” said Link reverently, almost tenderly. “He says so Himself in the Bible.”

  “The Bible!” said the girl half contemptuously. “I’ve never read that. I never was interested.”

  “Yes, but that’s where you find His messages to you. His love messages!”

  “Well, I never read them, but I can’t see how that would make me different, anyway.”

  “You would if you got to reading what He says about it.”

  “What He says about it? You mean what He says about me being different? But why would He say anything about me? What does He say?”

  “He tells you that you must be born again!”

  “Born again!” said the girl. “But that’s silly! How could I be born again? No, that wouldn’t help any. I’m born this way, and I’ll have to go on to the end I suppose.” She drew a pitiful sigh. “There! I oughtn’t to have bothered you. I suppose I’ve known all along things I oughtn’t to do, just like I know now that I ought not to bother you. Only I didn’t do them. I thought it was smart to do the unexpected, to make people furious at me, and get away with all sorts of deviltry. And nobody ever told me I couldn’t be different. Nobody ever really called me down as you did and told me people wouldn’t like me that way, and that there was a way to be different. But even you, when I ask you, only tell me impossible things to do. Be born again! How could I?”

  Link drove into the parking space behind the station and stopped his car.

  “What time does your train go?” he asked in a crisp businesslike tone.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said in a desperate tone. “Somewhere around eleven o’clock, I think. I was going in to ask.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Oh, back home, I suppose. There doesn’t seem to be anything for me back here any more. I thought I’d come and have a good time, and perhaps stay and get me a good job, or some friends or something, but now I guess there’s nothing for it but to go back. I hate it of course. Somehow I’ve lost my punch. I don’t click any more anywhere. I don’t know that I ever did. Only since you talked to me the other night you showed me that I never would, and I’ve about given up. I think I’ve reached the end. Perhaps I can die and that will be the end of me. Only I’d make less trouble if I went back to my folks than if I stayed among strangers and put them to all that annoyance. Born again! Why was I ever born at all, I’d like to know? I never asked to be born, and why should I want to be born again?”

  Link drew a deep breath, looked at her keenly for a minute, and then swung out of the car.

  “Wait here!” he said. “I’ll find out about your train and then I’ll come back and talk.”

  He was gone and the girl sat there dispiritedly and thought about it all. This was the first time in a long time that a young man had of his own accord gone out of his way to help her. They just didn’t do such things for her unless she shamelessly required it of them in the presence of others so that they were ashamed not to help her. She used to think that if she got young men to go with her places, and do things for her the way they waited upon other girls, that they would enjoy being with her. She wasn’t bad looking, she was sure of that. Back in the family history, somewhere she had had a grandmother who was supposed to have been a beauty, and her father used to say she looked like that grandmother. She had always tried to look like other girls, as far as her allowance made it possible. She had tried to look smart and act smart, and often went to extremes of daring in dress and manners, thinking she would thus win popularity.

  But suddenly two nights ago Lincoln Silverthorn had made her see that such things were not popular with me, not with the kind of young men that were in her cousin Sydney’s crowd anyway, and she felt as if she had reached the limit and there was no use going on any farther.

  She ought not to have let Link go in to that station and find out about her train for her. She ought to have insisted on getting out and going in herself. She might have made him fell she had a little shred of self-respect anyway. When he came back she would just get out at once and leave him. She was holding him up in his day’s business probably, and it wouldn’t do any good anyway. Born again! That sounded like nonsense, and anyway she wasn’t religious and couldn’t acquire a character like that. She couldn’t acquire any kind of a character, except one that all people hated, so what was the use? The thing she ought to do was to get out at once while he was gone, get her suitcase out of the back, and have them on the pavement where she could thank him and swing out of his way as fast as possible. Maybe then he could forget how silly she had been night before last. Not that it really mattered whether he forgot or not. She had made an indelible impression upon him, of a disagreeable girl, and he would never want to think about her again of course. The best thing she could do would be to get out of his way.

  Suddenly she grasped the door handle and flung the door open. She was just putting her foot out on the running board, when there he was beside her. She was too late.

  “Don’t get out,” he said. “You’ve plenty of time. Your train doesn’t go for nearly an hour yet. I’ll drive over to the other side there out of the way of traffic.”

  “But I’m taking a lot of your time,” she said sadly, “and that’s not necessary. I don’t want to be any more of a nuisance than I have been to you already. It isn’t at all important for you to stick around till I leave.” There was a sort of a colorless dignity to her voice that made him look at her, and then suddenly as she looked hopelessly up to him his face broke into a smile.

  “Snap out of it!” he said pleasantly. “It may not be important for me to put you on the train but it is important that you should know how to be born again. Get back in and we’ll drive over under that tree and talk a few minutes.”

  “I don’t see why it’s important for me to know about being born again. I didn’t do anything about being born the first time, and I don’t think I’d understand the other any better. I guess I’ll have to stay the way I am always.”

  “Get in,” he said gently, and he pushed her back into the seat and closed the door.

  He parked the car over under the big tree across the cinder parking lot, and turned around toward her.

  “You ought not to bother with me!” she said gloomily. “I know you have lots of important things to do.”

  “Don’t you know that to a believer, a person who is born-again, nothing is so important in life as to show some other soul how to be saved?”

  “Be saved?” she repeated with a look of bewilderment. “Be saved from what?”

  Link looked at her in surprise.

  “Why, be saved from sin. Saved from self!”

  “Try and do it!” she said with a bitter little contemptuous laugh. “I was born with this kind of a self, and nobody can change me. Not even you could do it.”

  “Oh, no!” said Link. “I couldn’t do it. It would take the Lord Jesus Christ to do that. No human being could do it.”

  “Well, I don’t understand at all what you mean,” she said crossly. “I’m not so much of a sinner. I don’t think I ever did anything that was real wrong in my life. I’ve just tried to get in with other girls and men and have a good time, and I never succeeded in doing that once. What is sin anyway? Why should I have to be saved from sin? I’ve never robbed anybody, nor told lies, not murdered.”

  “The great
est sin, all sin, is not believing in Christ who took all your sins on Himself, and paid the price of them with His blood that you might be free before God from your sin.”

  “Why should He do that? I never felt I had any sin. God didn’t care anything about me.”

  “Oh, yes, He did. He created you that He might love you and enjoy you. But you were under condemnation of death for sin, ever since Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden. You with everybody else inherited sin, and He cared enough for you to make a way for you to be saved, to be washed from your sin, so that you might be fit to live forever with Him in heaven and companion with Him.”

  “Well, I didn’t have anything to do with Adam’s sin. I wasn’t born then. I don’t think that was fair.”

  “Fair or unfair, it is the truth. The sins of the fathers are inherited by their children, whether they like it or not, and the penalty of sin is death. There’s only one way to get away from that penalty and that is God’s way. The way of believing on His Son who took the death penalty in our place. If you will accept what Jesus did for you when He died in your place, if you will believe that He did that for you, and will take Him as your personal Savior, that moment you are born again, and His Holy Spirit will come into your heart to stay, and will teach you all the things you need to know. If you will let Him He will make of you a new creature. That is why I told you you did not need to be this way.”

  The girl sat and stared at him.

  “I never heard anybody talk that way before,” she said wonderingly. “Do other people believe that?”

  “A great many do. You’d be surprised how many!”

  “But how do you get to believe a thing like that?”

  “It’s all in the Bible,” said Link gently.

  “Well, I never read the Bible. I suppose I’ve heard some of it read the few times I’ve ever been to church, which wasn’t many. I didn’t care for church. It seemed dull to me, and our folks didn’t go. I didn’t have to go. Sometimes when I was a kid I went to Sunday school for a little while, but I thought it was a bore so I didn’t go any more. I guess I wouldn’t know enough to be saved as you call it.”