Joel slowly swung his head up and down. "I believe that you both love each other still. I was wrong to over-persuade you when you held out so long against me. John Trott acted for your good in leaving, and I should not have saddled on you myself, the greatest failure among men that ever lived. I feel to-night as if the blight of an avenging God is on me for my presumption. I have put two little children on your hands and feel as incapable of protecting you and them as a crawling infant."
"I won't listen to you!" Tilly stood up. "You shall not abuse yourself in this way. You acted exactly as you should. No one could blame you.
You are one of the noblest men living. Without you I'd have been lost after my mother and father died. For you to say that--that John and I still--I won't say the word. You have no right to utter it when all is considered--you and me and the children. What right have you to--to think that you could know John's heart, when you have not seen him for eleven years? You may think you know mine. You may do so if you insist on making yourself unhappy, but you have no right to--to pass an opinion on--on the present feelings of my first husband. What are you going by, I'd like to know? You don't suppose that John would tell Mr. Cavanaugh such things, even if they were true? And how could Mr. Cavanaugh come to you, my husband, and--and even _mention_ such a thing?"
Joel was on his feet also. The childlike and unconscious eagerness of his wife to make sure of the thing she was secretly craving stabbed him to the core of his being, and yet he told himself that it was his duty to withhold nothing concerning his rival from her.
"Reading him as I'd read myself," Joel answered. "I thought he'd remain constant, but to-day I wormed it out of Mr. Cavanaugh."
"Wormed what out--_what out_?" Tilly sank back into her chair, open-mouthed, her eyes gleaming portals to breathless expectancy. "You can't mean that Mr. Cavanaugh thinks--actually thinks that John still--?"
Joel bowed his head in the relentless starlight, sat down as from sheer frailty, and was silent. The undulating landscape, the fields, the meadows, the woodland, the hills and streams seemed to hold their vast breath with his. Suddenly Tilly rose. It was as if she were about to stand behind his chair, as was her wont at times, put her hands upon his shoulders, and kiss his thorn-crowned brow, but she did not. She went slowly into the cabin. He heard her feet--feet he knew to be winged with sudden, far-reaching joy--treading the boards as she went to the bed of the children. What was she doing? he wondered. Her step ceased. He pictured her as seated by the side of the children's bed. Was she pitying him or rejoicing? Why ask? He knew. And his love was so divine a thing that, but for his throes of death-agony, he could have rejoiced with her.
CHAPTER IX
Cavanaugh had a duty to perform. He had decided to take on himself the act of informing Mrs. Trott of her son's survival. So, the next morning after his colloquy with Eperson he walked out to the cabin the widow occupied near the home of Eperson. As he passed Joel's place he saw from the distance that Joel was at work in his corn-field, and, watching a few minutes, he saw Tilly come out and feed her chickens, so he judged that Mrs. Trott had not yet been told the important news.
Walking on, he soon reached the isolated cabin in the woods that he was seeking. It had but a single room, one window in front, and a crude chimney made from unhewn stones and clay. The door facing the little road was open, and as he drew near, Mrs. Trott, hearing his step, came to the door and looked out.
She was now quite gray, and wore a plain dress of homespun unadorned in any way save for a neat white collar and an old cameo pin which had been a gift of her husband's. A touch of her old beauty still lingered in the contour of her face and good basic features. Her eyes had a placid expression, and her voice had become that of a child who loves to be led and petted. She smiled on recognizing the unexpected visitor, and gave him a seat in the cabin.
"I didn't expect to see you out this way," she said. "Joel told me a couple of weeks ago that you'd gone off somewhere."
He nodded. It was difficult to introduce the topic on his mind, and he chatted with her about the land in the neighborhood, Joel's prospective crop, and the fear some of the farmers had of a harmful drought if rain did not fall within a week or so. He had not been able to come to the matter in hand when a sound outside was heard.
"Grandmother Trott," a small voice piped up, "sister won't come on. She keeps stopping and picking flowers and leaves."
Mrs. Trott laughed, and her face beamed. "It is Joel's children," she explained. "The little darlings come with milk for me every bright day.
Tilly sends it."
Rising, she stood in the doorway. "Come on; but, no, Joie, don't pull her hand so hard! You might jerk her little arm out of joint. Come on by yourself. She will come when she feels like it."
The boy soon appeared with the pail of milk and set it in the door.
"Mother said tell you she'd have some fresh butter for you in the morning and some eggs. The hens have started again. Tilly and I found six eggs in the hay last night. Grandmother, where are the kittens?"
"Right around behind the cabin, dearie," Mrs. Trott answered, taking the pail. "The mother-cat is nursing them in the sun. Show them to your little sister. You may have them when they are larger."
Cavanaugh heard the children as they went behind the house and bent over the cat and kittens. He heard them uttering endearing words to the animals. "Don't, don't, you little stupid!" Joel cried. "She may scratch you! Don't you see her claws?"
Mrs. Trott laughed softly as she emptied the pail and washed it out.
"They are the sweetest children in the world," she said to Cavanaugh, as she put the pail on the door-step and sat down again. "They stayed with me a week last month when Joel and Tilly went to camp-meeting over the mountain. They were not one bit of trouble, and, oh, I did love to have them about! I never let on to Tilly and Joel, but when they took the darlings away I was awfully blue. Short as the time was, you see, I got accustomed to them."
The children had gone home and still Cavanaugh had not reached the object of his visit. It was the shadow of vague wonderment in the widow's eyes, and her lagging talk, that compelled him to introduce it.
He first spoke, and rather adroitly, of Todd Williams's encounter in New York with the man who resembled her son, and, pausing, he heard her sigh.
"Poor boy! poor boy!" she muttered, sadly. "And they said he and Dora were on the way to New York when that awful thing happened. Mr.
Cavanaugh, you are a good man. You've always been considered a good man by everybody that knows you. I understand that you never had any children, but you may know the human heart well enough to know that no regret ever heard of can be deeper than that which is brought on by the sort of thing that happened to me. I don't talk this way to Tilly and Joel, because I owe them too much to let them dream that I am not thoroughly happy. But if I could live a thousand years I'd never be able to rid my mind of the positive knowledge that by--by--I _will_ say it--I'll say it to you as I'd say it to a priest, if I was a Catholic.
I've often wished I was one, so that I could let what I feel out of me.
Maybe saying it like this to you will do a little good. I don't know, but I will say that nothing on earth can rid my mind of the fact that by my thoughtless way of acting when I was young I-- I--"
"Stop! I know what you mean, my poor friend," Cavanaugh broke in, "and you are getting all wrought up. Listen to me. Why not look on the hopeful side, the bright side? How do you know but that John and Dora are still alive, and none the worse; in fact--"
He suddenly checked himself, for a sickly, greenish pallor had overspread the listener's face, and she leaned forward as if about to swoon. In a moment, however, she had recovered herself, and, sitting erect, her white, shapely hands pressed to her breast, she smiled feebly.
"Oh, I know what you mean, Mr. Cavanaugh. I did try that. I summed up every hope, everything that held out the slightest promise. I used to lie awake at night and declare over and over that it couldn't be--that the laws of life wouldn't let such an unjust thing happen to them, innocent as they were, and with their right to live, but it didn't do any good. I didn't let anybody know about it, but one after another I got three different papers with John's name in them. I went to Atlanta and visited the editors of all the papers and asked their advice. They were sorry, but they said the list had never been disputed and ought to have been even bigger than it was. Then I gave up."
A shrewd, half-fearful gleam was in the contractor's shifting eyes.
"I know, I know, Mrs. Trott," he gently persisted, "but many and many an account like that has turned out afterward to be incorrect. You don't know it, but maybe all three of those papers got their information from one report. You see, a reporter representing a lot of papers in a sort of combine goes to a spot like that was and his account is telegraphed all about over the country. So you see, even if you had seen it in a hundred papers you wouldn't have to take it as law and gospel."
Mrs. Trott slowly shook her head and moaned softly.
"I wonder if I dare tell her," Cavanaugh debated with himself. "She almost fainted just now. She may have a weak heart. I must be careful.
I've heard of sudden joy killing." He was silent for a moment; then he began again: "Mrs. Trott, you are welcome to your opinion, and I reckon you'll let me have mine. But, to tell you the truth, I never have been _fully convinced_ that John and Dora was lost in that wreck. I have my reasons, and they are pretty good ones."
He saw her arched brows meet in a little frown of polite wonderment, and she was about to speak when little Joel suddenly reappeared at the door.
"Oh, grandmother," he half lisped, in breathless haste, for he had been running, "I forgot to tell you what mother told me to say. She said for me to be sure not to forget. She said tell you that she is coming over after dinner to tell you the best news you ever heard."
"Ah, tell her I'm glad, darling!" Mrs. Trott said, with a smile. And she went and stooped down before the child and added: "Won't you give old grandmother a sweet little hug? There! there! that's a darling little man!" And Cavanaugh saw her pressing the boy to her breast and kissing his cheeks.
When the child had left she came back to her chair, her face filled with a rare maternal glow. "If you were a younger man, Mr. Cavanaugh, and childless, as you now are, I'd advise you to adopt children. I don't know why or how it is, but I know that persons can love other children than their own and love them deeply, too. I love Tilly's two-- I really do. That child there, that little boy with all his cute ways and moods, takes me back to the childhood of my own son. But I neglected him. How I could have done it only God knows, but I did, and you know it better than any one else besides myself. You gave him a fine start, and if he had lived he would have made a great success. But I must stop-- I must stop! I think I know what Tilly's good news is. Joel has been trying to rent the Marsden farm. He put in a bid for it. It is a big place, and Mr. Marsden furnishes supplies. Maybe Joel has got it. I hope so, for he is at the end of his rope."
"The good news is not for poor Joel, Mrs. Trott. The truth is that Tilly wants to tell you the same thing I've come to tell you. You know I said that I never was fully convinced about John. Now what if I was to tell you that I went to New York to make sure?"
"Make sure? Make sure that--that John--" she began and stopped.
He nodded, holding her bewildered stare by his fixed eyes. "I found out enough up there to be sure, Mrs. Trott."
"You mean that John-- Why, you _can't_ mean that--?"
Again he nodded. "I've been afraid to shock you with the good news, but he is alive and prospering. I was with him a week."
She was convinced. She sat white and limp. She put her thin hands to her face as if to hide her joy from him. He saw her breast heaving. He heard her sob in an effort to control her emotion, and then she became quiet.
That night at home Cavanaugh wrote a long letter to John. "Something must be done," he wrote, in one place. "If you had seen that transformed human soul as I saw her there in her lonely log hut and heard her talk of you and your babyhood and the thousands of regrets she has for what she has done and left undone, your kind heart would have melted with pity as mine did. My old mother's passed on, John, but if I could call her back I'd give my last breath to furnish her with a minute's joy. You could give yours years of comfort and happiness. Do you know what I'd do if I was you? I'd come here and get her and take her back to New York with me, and let her have some of the things she used to hunger for and which may have caused her to do as she did. She is poor; she needs you; the two good friends who have been helping her so long really haven't the means to keep it up. You must come--you really must. If you don't it will darken the end of your life. I love you too much to let you neglect this sublime duty. Men of the greatest brains have married repentant women and never regretted it; surely a man as noble as you are, and as able as you are, can afford to pardon the woman who gave him his very life."
Mrs. Cavanaugh read the letter when it was finished. She made no comment on it, but her opinion of her husband had never been so high. Deep pools of his inner being for the first time in his life were exposed to the light of her understanding.
"May I?" she asked, taking the pen into her hand, and laying his letter open on the table.
"Yes," he nodded. "Add anything you like."