“Oh, Sam,” he cried. “How I wish it could have been otherwise! But I had to tell you. I couldn’t let a thing like that lie between us.”
“No,” said Sam wearily. “It’s got to be cleared up. Living a lie! I remember a sermon—Annie Laurie and I heard it—living a lie! No, I couldn’t. Good-bye, Dick. It—it wasn’t for me, was it?” He looked about the charming room, and through the window at the great campus. “Good-bye. And—thank you. You did right. It was the only thing to do, since we were such old—”
“Friends!” cried Dick with a half-sob. “Such old friends, Sam. Yes, go home and clear it up. And come back, old man—whatever you do, come back!”
CHAPTER XI
MARCHING ORDERS
Sam saw nothing now of the inviting homes and their lovely gardens as he rode back to the station. The world seemed black shot through with little darts of scarlet. They kept teasing him—these darting flecks of red, sharp-pointed and angry. At the station he found that it was an hour and a half before train time, so he sat down stolidly to wait. He had missed his luncheon, and it was now near dinner time, but it did not occur to him to get anything to eat.
The time, too, raced by, keeping pace with those swift-speeding thoughts of his, on which he could not have drawn the reins had he tried. And presently he was on the train again, going homeward. He soon would see his father, who would not, Sam had to confess with biting shame, look him in the eye nor answer any question frankly. Moreover, it would be his fate to add to his mother’s misery; he would see Hannah turning away from him even more than she had. And all the town would be looking at him with the eyes of suspicion. He would read: “Son of a thief! Son of a thief!” in their averted glances.
Of course his father might not be guilty. And yet, somehow, shamefully, heart-breakingly, it was borne in upon him that he was. And why should he, Sam, who had done no harm to anyone, go back to face it? Why should Annie Laurie and her friends see his shame? He could disappear now—slip off the train at the next station—and walk and walk till he reached some place where nobody knew him, and then he could go to work and care for himself, and win an honorable name. That was what America was for, he had heard Mr. Carson say, to give a chance to the individual. A man had a right to prove himself, and to be judged by himself, apart from and regardless of his family.
Yet, to run away from a thing like that, to let the old neighbors think him a poor wretch, to lose the regard of—of all those he cared about, was out of the question. And moreover, he couldn’t let his father go on keeping back the fortune that belonged to others. He’d have to go back and make him right himself.
His thoughts came clashing together as a returning wave meets and breaks against an advancing one upon the seashore. And the tumult and raging was too much for him. He found himself incapable of going on just then. The train stopped for a moment at some woodland siding—the track was but a single one and such stops were occasionally necessary—and almost without thinking, Sam leaped from the platform and slipped away into the twilight.
He walked along, hardly knowing where he was going. His suit case was not much of a handicap, for there was little enough in it. He could not have told, if any one had asked him, why he kept on pounding along the road, nor why, when he came to a heavily wooded hill, he should have gone in through an opening in the trees and begun to climb its gentle slope. He only knew that he was grateful to have the trees closing around him like that, hiding him from the sight of men.