"I had no idea of--of meeting her," John said, in a tone which sank beneath his breath. "I must spare her that."
"It is a pity--a pity, but it will be best!" Mrs. Trott sighed. "I wish I could see some other way, but I can't. How long are you going to stay?"
"Not longer than a week," he answered. "Are you sure that you won't go with me?"
She slowly shook her head. "No, I must stay here, John. I couldn't leave them-- I really couldn't. They have wound themselves about my tired old heart and I want to stay near them. I wish I could help them out of their terrible poverty. The children ought to be educated. They are wonderfully bright."
They sat without speaking for several minutes; then John said, suddenly: "Do you think we could, between us, devise any way by which I might help them substantially? I assure you I have plenty of money for which I have no need."
"Oh, that would never do, John!" Mrs. Trott exclaimed. "Neither Joel nor Tilly would accept it. That is out of the question."
John's face fell. "I was afraid you'd say that," he sighed. Then, with a start and an eager searching of her face, he said: "Will you answer me a direct question? If you, yourself, were to come into some money, at your death would you want them to have it?"
"Why, of course!" she answered. "That is all I'd want money for now."
"Then the way is clear," John beamed, and his voice throbbed with excitement. "You are my mother. You can't keep me from making you comfortable out of my useless means. I have some absolutely safe securities that bring in good dividends. Before I return to New York they will be in your name at one of the banks in town, with a cash deposit to your credit. The income on the stocks amounts to about three thousand a year. Remember, I am in no way suggesting to you what you should do with the principal or the interest, but legally to be on the safe side, you ought at once to make a will."
"Why, John-- John, you astound me!" his mother cried. "Mr. Cavanaugh intimated that you were not particularly well off, and here you say--you say that I am to have three thousand dollars a year from you.
Why--why--"
"It is nothing," he said, smiling. "I want to do it, and you must help me. If you should decide to do so, you can convert some of the stocks into money and buy Joel a farm on which he could make a good living.
After I am gone they won't refuse it from you, for you owe it to them, considering all they have done for you."
Without knowing it, Mrs. Trott was weeping. Great crystal tears were on her cheeks. Her still beautiful lips were quivering; her slender hands were clasped in her lap.
"Oh, John, John, can it be possible to do this for them?" she half whimpered. "I want to do it. I want to help them, but poor Joel is so sensitive and proud that--that--"
"You owe it to him, and I, as your son, who left you unprotected, owe it to him also. When I am gone he will see that it had to be. Let him know about the will in his children's favor, but give him to understand that the money is from _you_, not from _me_, and tell him, too, if you can do so adroitly, that I shall never come this way again. This is his home, not mine. As for Til--as for his wife, I shall not meet her while I am here. You are going to help them substantially--that is the main thing.
_You_, no one else."
"Oh, it would be glorious--glorious!" Mrs. Trott dried her eyes on her apron. "As for Tilly, Tilly--it may seem to you a strange idea of mine, John, but somehow I believe, actually believe that she would accept the money from you as readily as she'd give her last cent to you under the same circumstances. She is a strange, strange little woman, more of the next life, it seems to me, than this. She has been an angel of light to me and I couldn't leave her; even if you were an emperor offering me a throne I'd stay here. In taking your money, John, I am taking it on her account. She will see through your plan, but it will only make her the happier, for she thinks your soul and hers are united for all time, and it may be so, John--it may be so. Love like yours and hers ought not to die. How could it?"
He sat silent. All the morbid hauntings of his past seemed to be withdrawing like shadows before some vast supernal light. His body felt imponderable. A delicious pain clutched his throat and pierced his breast. He was ashamed of his weakness and tried to shake it off, but it continued to thrill and sob in every nook and cranny of his hitherto unexplored being. The woman before him seemed more than mere flesh, blood, and bone. A veritable nimbus hovered over her transfigured head and shone against the unbarked logs behind her.
CHAPTER XIII
By choice, he started home through the wood. He wanted the feel of the grass, heather, and moss beneath his feet; the scent of wild flowers in his nostrils; the bending boughs of great trees over him; the minute sounds of insects in his ears; the flight of winged things in his sight.
Deeper and deeper into the wood he plunged. There seemed something to be drunken like an impalpable spiritual elixir. He held out the arms of his being to it; he opened the pores of his body and soul to it. The far-off hum of the town's commerce and traffic seemed an insistent denial of the intangible thing for which he hungered, and he closed his ears to it.
Presently he heard the sound of breaking twigs and the stirring of dry leaves behind the vines and boulders close by on his right, and he paused to listen. Then there fell upon his ears the soft voices of children, and, carefully parting the pliant branches of some willows, he saw in a little grassy glade Tilly's daughter and son. They were gathering flowers and ferns. Little Tilly had her chubby arms full, and Joel was plucking more.
It was a beautiful sight, and yet it drenched him with infinite pain. He was tempted to attract their attention, to take them into his arms again, but he checked the impulse.
"What is the use?" he muttered. "They are hers, not mine--_his_ and hers, not _mine_ and hers."
Softly he moved away. Presently he came to a fallen tree and sat down on it. He could no longer hear the children's voices. However, another sound broke the stillness about him. It was the rapid tread of some one hurrying through the wood in his direction. The branches of the bushes in front of him parted and Tilly stood facing him, her cheeks and brow flushed and damp from rapid walking. That she could be so beautiful as now he had never dreamed possible. The years had added indescribable charm and grace to her every movement, feature, and expression.
"Oh, John!" she cried, holding out her hands as appealingly and navely as of old, "the children are lost! They started for your mother's cabin, but haven't been there. There are dangerous places in this wood, and--"
He smiled reassuringly as he took her hands. "They are all right," he said. "They are just over there. I saw them only a moment ago."
Their hands clung together, but neither of them was cognizant of the fact. It was as if not a day had elapsed since they had parted.
Forgetting every law of propriety, he drew her into his arms. Her uncovered head went as of old to his shoulder, and he was about to kiss her throbbing lips when, with her hand to his mouth, she suddenly checked him.
"No, no, John!" she said, and she disengaged herself from his embrace with a firm, resolute movement. "I understand how you feel, but you mustn't-- I mustn't. I want to--yes, yes, I want to kiss you, but it would be wrong."
"Yes, it would be wrong," he groaned, and turned white. He sat down on the trunk of the tree. She stood before him. Neither spoke for a while, and the prattling voices of the children sounded on the warm, still air.
"I'm afraid I have pained you," Tilly said, after a moment, and she put her hand on his shoulder as if to make him look at her. "I wish I knew some other way, but I know of none."
"There is no other way," he declared, his hungry eyes now on her face, the marvel of which still held him enthralled. In all his dreams of her she had never appeared so transcendently wonderful.
"How could she ever have been mine--actually mine?" he asked himself from the abyss into which he was sinking.
"You see," she went on, now taking his hand into hers, "I'd have to tell Joel. I'm his wife, the mother of his children, and there can be nothing in my life that is not open to him. He is the soul of honor, John."
"I know it," John answered, simply.
"This thing is killing him, John," she went on, rapidly, as if taking no heed of what she was saying. "The world was against him, anyway, and the news of your being here so prosperous and successful by contrast to himself has bowed his head to the earth. I don't know what to do or what to say. He knows how I feel. You see, I couldn't hide from him the joy I felt when I heard you were living. I can bear anything now--anything!
You see, Joel thinks that you--he has no reason for thinking so, of course, for you have lived up there and he here--but he thinks--it is stupid of him--but he thinks that you feel--exactly the same toward me as you did when we were married. Exactly! Exactly!"
"It wouldn't take a wise man to know that," John said, bitterly, his lips awry, his stare dull with agony.
"You mean to say that you _do_?" Tilly urged, her little hand pressing his spasmodically, her eyes glistening with moisture.
He nodded slowly. "How could I help it? You have done nothing to alter my feeling toward you except to deepen it. How can I overlook the fact that you befriended my mother (after I deserted her) and made her what she now is?"
"That was nothing but my duty, and my love for her," Tilly answered. She paused for a moment, and went on:
"Then you don't blame me for _marrying again_?" This was tremulously uttered, and the speaker's eyes were now downcast.
"No, I expected it. In a way, you owed it to Joel. In fact, I owe him more now than I can ever repay."
Tilly released his hand and sat down on the log beside him. Her little feet were thrust out from her, and he saw her poor tattered shoes and noted the coarse dress she wore.
"I've always wanted to know one thing," she faltered. "A thousand times after the report of your death I wondered if you died understanding how it was that I left you. Did you know why I left our little home so suddenly, John?"
"Why, to escape the awful scandal that was in the air; but what is the good of bringing that up now?"
"Ah, I see, you didn't quite know the truth," Tilly cried. "John, my father was practically out of his mind that day. He died not long afterward of softening of the brain. He had a revolver, and would have shot you if he had met you. I was expecting you home every minute, and when I saw that I could pacify him by going right back with him I did it."
"Oh, I see!" A great light broke on John. "Then it was really to save my life."
"As I saw it, yes," Tilly replied. "I wrote to you once, after I got to Cranston, but I learned afterward that father stopped the letter. I was kept like a prisoner at home, John, until the court, under my father's influence, and a narrow-minded jury had annulled our marriage. In spite of that, I was ready to go to you and only waiting for a chance, when the news of your death came. I didn't blame you for leaving. I knew that you did it in despair of any other solution, and also to help poor little Dora. That was a glorious thing to do, and God blessed your effort. How is she, John?"