II
The sun, a huge brazen ball, was low in the west when he set off along the river with confident, springy step. He stopped at a farmhouse and asked for supper. The evening meal was over, the farmer’s wife explained; but when he assured her that his needs were few and that he expected to pay for his entertainment, she produced a pitcher of milk and a plate of corn bread. She brought a bowl of yellow glaze crockery and he made himself comfortable on a bench by the kitchen door. He crumbled the bread into the creamy milk and ate with satisfaction.
Her husband appeared, and instantly prejudiced by Bruce’s knickerbockers, doggedly quizzed him as to the nature and direction of his journey. Bruce was a new species, not to be confused with the ordinary tramp who demands food at farmhouses, and suddenly contrite that the repast she was providing was so meager, the woman rose and disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a huge piece of spice cake and a dish of sliced peaches. She was taken aback when he rose deferentially to accept the offering, but her tired face relaxed in a smile at his cordial expressions of gratitude. She joined her husband on the stoop, finding the handsome pilgrim’s visit a welcome break in the monotonous day. As he ate he answered their questions unhurriedly.
“I guess the war left a lot o’ you boys restless,” she suggested.
“Oh, it wasn’t the war that made a rover of me!” he replied with a smile. “It was this way with me. When I got home I found I had something to think out—something I had to get used to”—he frowned and became silent for a moment—“so I decided I could do it better by tramping. But I’ve settled things in my own mind pretty well now,” he ended, half to himself, and smiled, hardly aware of their presence.
“Yes?” The woman’s tone was almost eager. She was curious as to the real reason for his wanderings and what it was that he had settled. In the luminous afterglow her dull imagination quickened to a sense of something romantic in this stranger, and she was disappointed when he told of an experience as a laborer in a great steel mill, just to see what it was like, he said—of loitering along the Susquehanna, and of a more recent tramp through the Valley of Virginia.
“I reckon you don’t have to work?” the farmer asked, baffled in his attempts to account for a young man who strolled over the country so aimlessly, wearing what struck him as an outlandish garb.
“Oh, but I do! I’ve done considerable work as I’ve sauntered around. I’m an architect—or hope to be! I’ve earned my keep as I’ve traveled by getting jobs as a draughtsman.”
“Going to stop in the city?” the woman inquired. “I guess there’s lots of architects over there.”
“Yes,” Bruce replied, following the direction of her glance.
“You know folks there?” she persisted. “I guess it’s hard getting started if you ain’t got friends.”
“There’s a chap living there I knew in college; that’s all. But when you strike a strange town where you don’t know anyone the only thing to do is to buckle in and make them want to know you!”
“I guess you can do that,” she remarked with shy admiration.
The farmer shuffled his feet on the brick walk. For all he knew the young stranger might be a burglar. He resented his wife’s tone of friendliness and resolved to deny the request if the young man asked the privilege of sleeping in the barn; but the stranger not only failed to ask for lodging, but produced a dollar bill and insisted that the woman accept it. This transaction served instantly to dispel the farmer’s suspicions. He answered with unnecessary detail Bruce’s questions as to the shortest way to town, and walked with him to a lane that ran along the edge of a cornfield and afforded a short cut to the highway.
Bruce had expected to reach the city before nightfall, but already the twilight was deepening and the first stars glimmered in the pale sky. Now that he was near the end of his self-imposed wanderings, he experienced a sense of elation. The unhappy thoughts with which he had left his Ohio home a little more than a year earlier had gradually become dim in his memory. The letters he had burned at the riverside really marked in his consciousness a dispersion of doubts and questions that left his spirit free. His mother’s revelation had greatly shaken him; but she need never have told him; and it spoke for her courage and her faith in him that she had confessed the truth. They had been companions in an unusual sense. From his earliest youth she had interested him in the things that had been her delight—books, music, pictures. She was herself an accomplished musician, and strains of old melodies she had taught him recurred to him now, and as he swung along the country road he whistled them, happy for the first time in the awakening of old memories.
With the cool breeze blowing upon him from fields of tall ripening corn, there was no bitterness in his soul. He had beaten down the bitter thoughts that had assailed him in the early days of his journeying—the sense that a stigma attached to him, not the less hateful because he alone had knowledge of it; and the feeling that there was something fantastic in the idea that he should put himself where, in any need, he could serve the father he had never known.
This had now all the sanctity of a commission from the dead. Again he speculated as to what manner of man this could be who had awakened so deep a love in the heart of the good woman he knew his mother to have been—a love which she had carried in her heart to her last hours. In his long ponderings he had, he felt, come to understand her better than he ever had in her lifetime—her imaginative and romantic side, her swiftly changing moods, her innumerable small talents that had now a charm and a pathos in the retrospect. Age had never, to his eyes, laid hands upon her. Even through the last long illness she had retained the look and the spirit of youth.
Rounding a bend in the river, the flare of an amusement park apprised him that he was close upon the city—a city he had heretofore never visited and knew of only from his newspaper reading as a prosperous industrial center. Here, for the strangest reason in the world, he was to make his home, perhaps spend the remainder of his days! He crossed a stone bridge with a sense that the act marked an important transition in his life, and quickly passing through the park, boarded a trolley car and rode into town.
He had formed a very clear idea of what he meant to do, and arriving at the business center he went directly to the Hotel Fordham, to which he had expressed his trunk from Cincinnati.