“He said he had an idea—” said Joyce. “I haven’t been able to think where it would be. Something Jason had once said, I gathered. But I haven’t dared to think it through with so many rumors going around. I just wouldn’t let such thoughts even pass through my mind. I am sure they didn’t go to Rowley’s. Everybody seems to think—! But what’s the use? Rowan told me not to worry, that he would bring him back, and I’m not going to worry. Only, now and then I can’t help thinking—what if those Rowleys have somehow got it in for the boys and will do them some harm?”
“There, now, child, just you put them into the Father’s care as I have. ‘Casting all your care upon Him for He careth for you.’ That’s what He’s told us to do. You and I are both His children, His saved ones, and we have a right to rest on His promises and not be afraid.”
“But—does that count when we’re trusting for the boys? I don’t know about Rowan, he never talks much about such things, but I’m quite sure Jason isn’t saved yet.”
“I’m afraid Rowan isn’t walking as close to the Lord as he should be,” said his mother sadly. “When he was a little boy I used to be sure he was saved, but since he’s grown up and been away to college he seems quite different, and I can’t seem to get beneath his reserve. He joined the church, you know, when he was about fifteen, but I am not sure how much it meant to him. But I feel sure you and I have a right to pray, and to leave this whole matter in the Lord’s hands. We cannot love our boys more than He loves them, and wherever, however, it all turns out, He is leading. We’ll just pray, little girl, and God will work it out in His own way.”
Joyce was silent while she ate the tempting supper that Hannah had spread before her. At last she said hesitantly, “It isn’t that I can’t trust God. It’s just that I feel I was the cause of your suffering, too. If I hadn’t spoken to Rowan he never would have known about Jason, and he would have been safe at home with you now and never have gone under that awful suspicion. Oh—people are so cruel!”
She shuddered and closed her eyes from the thought of all the unspoken suspicions that had been flung at her that day.
“I know, dear! But that’s something again that you didn’t intend to do. You didn’t know it would work out this way when you asked Rowan if he had seen your brother. But likely God meant to send Rowan all the time and He just used you as the instrument to give the message. I’m so glad you told me that you had talked with Rowan. Do you mind if I tell Charles? I think it will ease his burden to know there was a real reason and it was not just a bit of his own impetuosity that took him away so suddenly.”
“Of course, tell him,” said Joyce. “I know he’ll keep it to himself. I wouldn’t like the town to know it. They would say—oh, they would say horrible things if they thought I went to a young man for help.”
“I know, dear, and Charles knows. We’ll guard you as our own. And I’m sure my boy will keep his promise to you and bring back Jason if it is in his power. Now, you’re not to worry anymore. You must get some sleep and be ready to meet tomorrow calmly. I suppose you wouldn’t want to stay here tonight? I’d love to keep you, and it is getting late.”
“Oh, no, I must go!” said Joyce, rising with sudden startled remembrance and glancing at the clock. “There would be an awful fuss if I didn’t get back. They think I am walking in the meadow. I’ll go quickly. Thank you for your dear comfort and the supper and—the—assurance. It’s so good to know you understand. So good to know someone else is praying.”
“I know, dear! And now go quickly. Suppose I go a ways with you. It’s pretty dark in the meadow.”
“I’m not afraid of the meadow,” laughed Joyce sadly.
“And I daren’t offer you the flashlight. Widow Lamb watches every light within sight. She would have you a burglar by morning surely if she saw a flashlight moving across lots. But I’ll tell you what, you turn on the light in your room as soon as you get home and then I’ll know you are all right!”
She stooped and kissed the girl and Joyce disappeared into the darkness, speeding across the meadow in the pale moonlight like a thing of the mist, and presently a light flashed on in the window of the room where Hannah knew Joyce slept. Then Hannah went in and shut her door, and stepping into the dark dining room, slipped down on her knees beside a chair and breathed a prayer:
“I think Thee, O my Father, that Thou hast sent me this added assurance. I trusted Thee, and I trusted Rowan, but it is nice to see the proofs, and I think Thee, my Lord and my God.”
Then she rose to get ready another nice little supper for her Charles in place of the one she had given to Joyce.
Two hours later she was rewarded at last by hearing the sound of the staid old family car coming up the hill, and she drew a breath of relief. Charles had come at last.
Chapter 5
Charles Parsons looked very weary when he came into the house. Hannah was startled by the thought that he looked years older, and his usual cheery smile was only a shadow of its former self.
“It’s good to get home, Hannah,” he said as he stooped and kissed her sweet anxious face.
“It’s good to have you!” she said, laying her face on the rough sleeve of his coat for an instant. “It’s been a hard day, I know. But now you’re to sit down and eat some supper before you talk at all. You didn’t stop for supper, did you? I knew you wouldn’t.”
“It tastes so much better at home,” he pleaded wearily.
She was bustling back and forth from the kitchen stove.
“I know,” she said as she put a steaming bowl of the soup he liked best before him, beef broth with barley and plenty of carrots and onions.
“Ah!” he said, sniffing the steam that rose. “That smells heartening!”
She brought him white bread of her own baking and butter of her own making that smelled of the clover from which it was brewed. She brought a comb of honey from their own hives and a dish of her yellow tomato preserve, a foaming glass of milk from their own cow, a piece of custard pie and some cottage cheese which their own hens and cow had contributed, and contentedly he drew up his chair and ate, slowly, deliberately. Hannah sat down to watch him, not asking a question lest she worry him, though her whole soul was yearning to know the news.
At last he looked up and gave a sad little smile.
“Well,” he said, “it’s pretty bad. Worse ever than I feared. Yes, it’s been a pretty hard day!” And he sighed sadly.
“You mean money, Charles? Our money? Loss of money isn’t the worst thing in the world. Don’t let that worry you. We’ll make out.”
“No, not so much that. Though it may come to a loss if things can’t be cleared up. But we’ve discovered things. Tamperings with the books. Why, if this robbery hadn’t happened we might not have found it out for months! And it looks bad. Really bad—!”
“You mean for Jason?”
Charles nodded.
“Yes,” with a deep-drawn sigh, “and—well you might as well know the truth, Hannah, for you’ll inevitably hear it from somebody if I don’t tell you. For our boy, too. You see, he’s allowed himself to be associated with Jason.”
Hannah was still for a moment thinking things out.
“Why do they pick on Jason?” she said. “Was that why they dismissed him, because they had found something wrong with the books?”
“No, not that. They hadn’t discovered it then. They dismissed him for fighting one of their very best men.”
“Fighting?” said Hannah, astonished.
“Yes, it seems he came in yesterday morning and went about his work as usual, and then suddenly there was a fight right there on the floor of the bank. Jason roared out, ‘You’re a liar!’ and knocked the other man down. It was some time before they could bring him to.”
“Who was the other man?” asked Hannah thoughtfully.
“Corey Watkins. One of the most exemplary young men in the whole town!”
Hannah still looked thoughtful.
“Do you know, I never liked
that fellow,” she said half under her breath. “I never felt that he was really sincere. He always seems so slick.”
“I know, Hannah, you take prejudices, and it doesn’t help any that our Rowan blacked Corey’s eye the first day they went to school together, and Corey went boohooing to the teacher and got Rowan a demerit for it. But you know they were only babies then, and you can’t hold that against him. I know you and Rowan have always had it in for him, but you’ll have to put your prejudices aside, for Goodright says he is absolutely dependable in every way and as honest as the day is long.”
“I wonder—!” said Hannah Parsons with a worried look in her eyes.
“Well, anyhow, they think they’ve traced the trouble to Jason. It seems they found his notebook in front of the safe this morning, and they’ve found the same fingerprints on the pages of the ledger that were on the books. Of course they can’t prove yet that the notebook was Jason’s although it looks that way. It had his name written in it. But they’re going over to Whitney’s and try for a set of Jason’s fingerprints on something in his room. Poor Joyce! I suppose she’ll suffer through this! I did my best to get them to omit that, to just wait a little and see whether we can catch the thieves—it isn’t conceivable that Jason did it alone, and of course that means an investigation of our boy when he gets back, but they were bent on it. In fact, Corey Watkins’s father practically insisted upon it. He is pretty well worked up against Jason of course on account of what he did to Corey. And then he always did have it in for Nathan Whitney. So things haven’t been any too sweet.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Hannah, perplexed. “Do they think that Jason broke into the bank himself? He didn’t have a key or anything, did he?”
“Oh, no! They didn’t enter with a key, Hannah. Burglars don’t wait on keys. They know how to manipulate locks and bars. But you see, Jason was seen to go down the road toward Rowley’s as soon as he was dismissed from the bank, and they think he went right down and got help to get his revenge. And perhaps, too, to cover up what he had been doing to the books. You see, Hannah, there has been constant pilfering going on in the bank, and the books were being continually altered to cover it up, almost ever since Jason got his job there.”
“It isn’t possible that Jason did a thing like that, Charles!” said Hannah indignantly, rising in her excitement and walking across to the window to stare out in the darkness toward the Whitney house across the meadows, that now showed a dim outline in the raggedy moonlight. “Charles, that’s not possible! I know Jason Whitney. I’ve known him ever since he was a baby! Didn’t I take care of him all the time his sweet little mother was slipping away to heaven? Don’t I know his honest blue eyes? Don’t I remember how he would always own up if he had been eating green apples, and how he once brought me a dime he had found under the step, when I knew he had very little money of his own and wanted to buy some candy? You can’t tell me that a baby who started out being honest like that would get down to systematic pilfering from a bank before he was twenty-one! He had a nasty sullen temper like his irascible father, and he had a daredevil way of tossing his head back like a balky horse and saying he didn’t care what people thought of him, but he wasn’t dishonest, I’m sure and certain of that!”
Charles watched her with a sad kind of admiration.
“Well, Hannah, I’m sure I hope you’re right, but I’m afraid it can’t be proved,” he said, “and I’m afraid it’s going to go hard with Jason, whether he did or didn’t have part in this robbery. I know you’re pretty generally right in your insight into character, but I guess your heart has run away with your judgment this time. At any rate that very trait of Jason’s that he won’t try to set himself right in others’ eyes is going to be his undoing. There won’t be anybody else to take up for him, if he can’t or won’t defend himself.”
“Rowan will!” said Hannah firmly, as if it were a settled thing.
Charles gave her a startled look. “Has Rowan been home?”
Hannah shook her head. “No, but Joyce has been here. She says it was her fault that Rowan is mixed up in this. She came over here last night just after dark and waited out by the fence till Rowan got back from Bainbridge to ask him if he knew where Jason was, and when she told him Jason had lost his job in the bank and hadn’t been home to tell them, Rowan told her he would go and find him. He said he had an idea from something he said several months ago where he might have gone, and she wasn’t to worry, he would find him and bring him back!”
Charles was watching her with alert eyes now, very thoughtfully.
“She said I might tell you, Charles, but she didn’t want anybody else to know she had been over here. Her stepmother would say shameful things to her if she found it out. I told her you would keep it to yourself.”
Charles was silent for another thoughtful moment, then he said, “Of course! Joyce mustn’t be mixed up in this. And anyway, it wouldn’t help anybody to tell it. They would only think we had cooked it up between us. We’ll keep it to ourselves—till Rowan comes back. That’s the only thing that can clear this thing up, to have Rowan come back—and Jason, too. And they will come back, of course, Hannah! I’m glad you told me this. It has cleared up any doubts that might have been tempted to hover around if things get bad. Don’t you worry, little mother. Rowan will come back!”
“Yes,” said Hannah bravely, but with a quiver of her lip, “of course he will—if—if—those awful Rowleys haven’t shot him or—something!”
“Now, Hannah! Don’t go thinking up things like that!” said Charles sharply. “Nothing like that could happen without it being found out by this time. If anybody had been shot the police would have known it by now. They’ve been combing the country ever since the robbery.”
“They might have carried him off and hidden him! If he was trying to get Jason away from them, they might! Criminals, you know, do anything when they get desperate, Charles!”
Hannah’s voice was quivering now and the tears were coming softly down her cheeks.
“They are not such great criminals, those Rowleys!” said Charles contemptuously. “They were only amateurs, I think. They dropped one of the most important bundles of all the papers they stole. One that would have done them the most good, too. Did I tell you that? That little Paisley boy, Sam’s eldest—Tommy, isn’t he?—found it down in the ditch by the road where it had been flung or dropped. He found it about nine o’clock this morning. They must have come right up the road past here, Hannah!”
“Yes,” said Hannah as if she had known it all the time. “That was they that drove by so furiously in the night without any taillights. I looked out of the window when they went by.”
“Yes,” said Charles. “I did too, but I thought you were asleep.”
Hannah smiled until the tears trickled off into the nice pleasant wrinkles of her face and glistened there.
Charles smiled, too. “Now, Hannah, it’s time we got to our knees. Where’s the Bible? Our Father knows just how we feel, and He’s putting every one of those tears into His bottle, and writing them down in His book, and the time will come when He’ll have them in remembrance and make it all right! After all, our boy seems to have gone on a legitimate errand, with no nonsense about it, and we ought to be thankful for it. We must thank our Lord that He let us have that satisfaction. But I’m glad that we trusted Him before we knew everything. Glad we trusted our boy, too.”
Charles got his Bible from the table where it usually lay and opened to their trouble psalm as they called it, the ninety-first.
“‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in Him will I trust. Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust.’”
The tender words rang out in the quiet room where the two had sat so many nights together through the year
s, and often read them before when heavy sorrows were burdening them. Hannah remembered those other nights now, and Charles’s voice, reading the words of trust just as he was reading them now. The night their first little baby lay dying and the doctor had told them there was no hope. The night Rowan had been so sick and they thought he, too, was to be taken away. The night after Myra’s wedding, when it had seemed to the two that this sorrow was almost worse than death. Ah, there had been other times, too, and always their Lord had sustained them!
As the wonderful promises followed one another climaxing with the triumphal ultimate hope, the two old saints remembered that they were not living for this life alone. They were pilgrims journeying to a better country, where all their troubles were to be righted and all their tears wiped away.
And then they knelt side by side and hand in hand while Charles prayed, God standing close beside them, so that they could almost feel His hand upon their heads with a touch of assurance. They had trusted before. They would go on trusting to the end, for their heavenly Father had never yet failed them. The night might be dark now, but day was promised, and their Guide could see in the dark as well as in the day, and “He knoweth the end from the beginning.”
Next morning about eleven o’clock Myra arrived.
Myra had read a much distorted account of the bank robbery in her city paper, with suspicions so mixed with fact that one would have hardly recognized the story. Her brother’s name was prominently woven into the tale, as being the son of her father, “a prominent citizen, one of the bank directors, and a respected elder of the church,” etc.
It had been in the evening paper occupying a prominent place on the front page. Mark had brought it home and thrust it at Myra with a contemptuous: “There! There’s your lovely family! There’s your high and mighty brother with his fine education and all his airs. Just a common robber and murderer! I never trusted him, but I certainly didn’t expect such disgrace when I married you! Your father being such a religious man and all!”
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