"I"ll divide the flowers, David."
"Oh, keep them all."
"No, indeed. Mother Bab would be disappointed if you brought her none."
She opened the box, separated half of the arbutus from their mates and laid them in the uplifted corner of her coat. "There," she said, "the rest are yours and Mother Bab"s. It was perfect in the woods to-day.
Thank you----"
But he interrupted her. "It is I who must say that, Phbe! This has been a great day. I"ll never forget the glorious hour when we were on our knees and pushed away the leaves and found the arbutus. That is something to take with one, to remember when the days are not perfect as this one."
He laid his fingers a moment on her hand as she held the corner of her coat to keep the flowers from falling, then he turned and jumped into the carriage.
"Give my love to Mother Bab," she said.
He turned, smiled and nodded, then started off. Phbe stood at the gate and watched the carriage as it went slowly up the steep road by the hill. Her thoughts were with the man who was going home to his mother, going with trailing arbutus in his hands and some great unhappiness in his heart.
"Is it always so?" she thought. "We carry fragrance in our hands, but what in our hearts?" For the time she was once more the old sympathetic, natural Phbe, eager to help her friend in need, feeling the divine longing to comfort one who was miserable. "Oh, Davie, Davie," she thought as she went into the house, "I wish I could help you."
CHAPTER XXVIII
MOTHER BAB AND HER SON
WHEN David drove over the brow of the hill and down the green lane to the little house he called home he caught sight of his mother in her garden. He whistled. At the sound Mother Bab rose from the soft earth in which she was working and straightened, smiling. She raised a hand to shade her eyes and waited for the coming of her boy, dreaming of a possible separation from him, dreaming long mother-dreams while he took the horse and carriage to the barn.
When he returned he had mustered all his courage and was smiling--he would be a stoic as long as he could, but he knew that his mother would soon discover that all was not well with him.
"Here, mother." He gave her the box of arbutus.
"Then you got some, Davie!" She buried her face in the cool, sweet blossoms. "Oh, how sweet they are! Did you and Phbe have a good time?
Did she enjoy it as much as she always used to enjoy a day in the woods?"
She looked up suddenly from the flowers and caught him unawares. "What is wrong?" she asked with real concern. "Did you and Phbe fall out?"
"No," he shook his head. He knew that attempts at subterfuge and evasion would be vain. "No, mommie, no use trying to deceive you any longer--I fell out with myself--I wish I could keep it from you," he added slowly; "I know it"s going to hurt you."
"You tell me, Davie. I"ve lived sixty years and never yet met a trouble I couldn"t live through. Tell me about it."
She placed the box of arbutus in the garden path and laid her hand on his arm.
"Oh, mommie," he blurted out, almost sobbing, "I"m ashamed of myself!
You"ll be ashamed of your boy."
"It"s no girl----" the mother hesitated.
He answered with a vehement, "No!"
"Then tell me," she said softly. "I can look in your eyes and hear you tell me most anything so long as you need not tell me that you have broken the heart or spoiled the soul of a girl."
She spoke gently, but the man cried out, "Thank G.o.d, I have nothing like that to confess! You know there is only one girl for me. I could never look into her eyes if I had betrayed the trust of any girl. I have dreamed of growing into a man she could love and marry, but I failed. I wanted to offer her more than slavery on a farm, I wanted to have something more than the few hundreds I sc.r.a.ped together. I took the five hundred dollars we skimped for and bought stock of Caleb Warner--you heard that he died?"
"Phares told me."
"I guess the five hundred dollars is gone with him! I heard of other men getting rich by buying gold and oil stock so I took a chance and staked all the spare money I had."
"It was your money, Davie."
"You called it mine, but you helped to earn and save it. Caleb promised me he would sell half of the stock for me at a great profit in a week or two, and I could keep the other half for the big dividends it would pay me soon--now he"s dead, and the stock is probably worthless."
He looked miserably at her troubled face. She flung her arm about him and led him to a seat under the budded cherry tree. "We must sit down and talk it over," she said. "Perhaps it isn"t so bad as you think. Are you sure the stock is worth nothing? Perhaps you can get something out of it."
"Perhaps I can." He brightened at the suggestion.
"Well," she went on, "I can"t say that I think you did right to buy the stock and try to get rich quick. You know that money gotten that way is tainted money, more or less. To earn what you have and have a little is better and safer than to have much and get it in such a way. But it"s too late to preach about that now--I guess I didn"t tell you that often enough and hard enough before this, or else you wouldn"t have wanted to buy the stock. It is partly my fault, for I thought some time ago you talked as though you were getting the money craze, but I thought it would soon wear off. You did a foolish thing, but there"s no use crying about it. You see you did wrong and are sorry, so that is all there is to it. I"m not sorry you lost on the stock, for if you made on it the craze would go deeper. I can live without the few extra things that money would buy."
"Don"t be so forgiving, mother! Scold me! I"d feel less like a criminal.
But here comes Phares; he"ll give me the scolding you"re saving me."
The preacher crossed the lawn and advanced to the seat under the cherry tree.
"Aunt Barbara," he began, then noted the troubled look on the face of David and asked, "What is wrong?"
"Nothing," said David, "except that I have some of Caleb Warner"s stock."
"You do? Whatever made you buy that?"
David spoke as calmly as possible. "I wanted to be rich, that"s all. But I guess I was never intended to be that."
"I"m afraid you are going to be sorry," said the preacher very soberly.
"I just came from town and they say things look bad for the investors.
They said first that Warner was asphyxiated accidentally, but he was so deep in a hole with investing and re-investing other people"s money and his own and he had lost so much that people think this was the easiest way out of it all for him. I suppose it will be hushed up and no one will ever know just how he died. There are at least twenty people in town and farms near here who are worried about their money since he died. Did you have much stock?"
"Five hundred dollars" worth."
"If people were as eager to lay up treasures in heaven----" the preacher said thoughtfully.
"If they were," said David, struggling to keep the wrath from his words and voice. "I know, Phares, you can"t understand why everybody should not be as good as you. I wish I were--mother should have had a son like you. I"m the black sheep of the Eby family, I suppose."
"No, no!" cried Mother Bab. "We all make mistakes! You are good and n.o.ble, David. I am proud of you, even if you do err sometimes."
"We must make the best of it," said the preacher. "Perhaps the stock is not quite worthless. If I were you I"d go to the lawyer in Lancaster.
He"ll see you at his house if you "phone in."
"Mighty good to think of that for me," said David, gripping the hand of his cousin. "I"ll go in to-night."