VI
Hastings did not look behind him, as with lowered head he ran along the railroad track to the station, jumped into a cab and urged the driver to speed to the house where his mother must be waiting.
Some one within heard his footstep, knew it for what she craved most to hear, and was in the doorway of her room, when he saw her. Picking her up like a child, he covered her white hair, her tired face, her hands with kisses, and as she clung weeping on his breast, he carried her to a big armchair in the bay window. He was on his knees with his rumpled head in her lap when she found broken voice to say:
"Oh, Jack, are you well? Are you all right? My own precious boy! I have come to comfort and love you. Nothing else matters. Nothing else matters to me, now that I have found you safe and sound."
She twisted her slim fingers in his thick brown hair, and as she felt the warm pressure of his head in her lap, the years had stepped aside, and he was the little boy who used to flee to that dear sanctuary in every time of trial. And to her this was only another trouble, which only Mother could understand and clear from his path. When at length he looked up, she was shocked to see the shadow circles under his eyes, and the nervous twitching of the mouth that was so very like his mother's. He was sobbing, and not ashamed of it, as he murmured:
"I have been disgraced and disappointed, but I don't care any more now that I have found you. Are you all right, Little Mother? Did you think I had deserted you?"
She told him of the race as she had seen it, and was with difficulty dissuaded from planning to search out the Head Coach, crying with the angry sparkle he loved of old:
"It is not ladylike, Jack, but I would like to scratch his horrid eyes out. Of course, he should have kept you on the crew, but we are not going to cry over spilt milk, are we? I want you to tell me all about it—everything—so that we can look and find some consolation. Every cloud has a silver lining."
While he carried the tale down to the parting with Cynthia she smiled and frowned in turn, and wiped her eyes before he had finished. A mother's intuition read between the lines and when the rueful confession halted, her arm stole around his neck, and she kissed him again.
"It is a sad story," she said; "but never let me hear that word disgrace as long as you live. Of course, I was nearly killed about it to-day, and I should have been crying for four nights at sea if I could have heard the news before I started. But it would have been only because you were unhappy and disappointed. What else are mothers for than to understand when the world seems upside down? When you were seven years old, you were kept home from a Sunday-school picnic by the chicken-pox, and you told me in floods of tears that you didn't 'b'lieve you could never, never be happy again.' I knew how small your world was, and that the chicken-pox was big enough to fill it to overflowing.
"Now you have tried your best, you rowed as well as you knew how, and the crew was everything to you, just as it ought to be. But some day you may have larger troubles, and they, too, shall pass away, and more and more you will come back to the simple gospel of living I have tried to teach you, that there is only one standard by which to judge success or failure. Is the thing worth while, and have you done your best in the best way to gain it? I don't mean to preach, my boy mine. You don't want that. You want your mother. I know, I know."
She stroked his cheek as he went deep into his heart, and brought up more than he had ever told her before of his dreams of love, first love, and of what he had been building. His mother knew that she must be careful, and she hesitated, as if pondering how best to speak her view-point.
"She did not understand, poor girl. It is not all her fault, and it is not yours, laddie boy. When the race began and I saw that you were not in the crew, it seemed as if I were in the depths of a bad dream. I was with you all the way, and I thought of nothing else. And I know that while you would have been with me if you could, yet if the girl were here you would wish in your heart to find her first. No, don't try to deny it. But she did not know at all what it meant to you, she could not know. But if she had loved you, she would have understood as I did. We will talk about her all night if it will make your heartache any better. What are we going to do now?"
The boy straightened himself and threw back his wide shoulders, because his mother saw no cause for reproach in his downfall. But he did not want to see the crew again, and he wished to avoid the riotous celebration soon to burst. Obviously the best plan was to go to New Haven at once, where they could find refuge in his rooms, and pack his trunk for the vacation departure.
To him this little journey from New London was a panic flight, to her it was made radiant by the one fact that her boy had come back to her. After dinner, in a quiet corner of the college town, they went to his rooms on the campus. The sight of the two twelve-foot oars on the walls, his own trophies of two victories, their handles stained dark with the sweat of his hands, made her turn to him as they entered:
"Nothing can ever take those away from you, with all their splendid story of success."
The boy looked at them for an instant, then brushed a hand across his tired young eyes.
"Better make kindling of them," he said. "Look at that one over there. I won it as a raw, overgrown Freshman, and three years later I can't do as well as I did then. Matthews, 'the sub,' will hang my third oar on his wall next year. I am going to curl up on the window-seat and rest a while, Mother. I feel all played out."
She, too, was very tired, but felt that her son had need of her, and she tried to soothe him to sleep, and smiled as she found herself half unconsciously humming a slumber-song she had crooned to him twenty years before. Her photograph was on his desk, and framed near it the winsome face of Cynthia Wells, and she crossed the room to look closely and comprehendingly at the girl who had acted in her own world as naturally as had the youth in his. When she returned to the window, her son was asleep, and she softly kissed him.
Looking across the green, she saw a blaze of red fire that colored the evening sky. Rockets and Roman candles began to spangle the illumination, and presently the far-away blare of a brass band crept nearer. She knew that these were signs of the home-coming of the crew, of the celebration whose glories Jack had eloquently portrayed. It was not disloyalty to him that she should want to see what it was like, although she knew he would not want to be there. Yet feeling traitorish qualms, she scribbled a little note, saying she had gone out for a "breath of fresh air," and stole down the staircase.
When she came to the corner the procession was rioting up Chapel Street toward the campus. The band preceded a tally-ho, on top of which were the heroes in their white boating uniforms, nervously dodging innumerable fiery darts aimed straight at them by wild-eyed admirers on the pavement. Behind, surging from curb to curb, skipped thousands of students and townspeople, arm in arm, in common rapture. The wavering line of fireworks told that the tail of the parade was blocks and blocks away.
The coach was stopped at the corner of the campus, as a hundred agile figures swarmed up the wheels, and dragged the crew to earth, from which they were instantly caught up, and borne on tossing shoulders to the stone steps of the nearest recitation hall. There they were held aloft, still struggling, while cheers greeted each by name.