He mailed the letter that night and then studied hard till three o'clock in the morning.
The next morning's mail brought him a dainty little note from Gila's mother, inviting him to a quiet family dinner with them on Friday evening. He frowned when he read it. He didn't care for the large, painted person, but perhaps there was more good in her than he knew. He would have to go and find out. It might even be that she would be a help in case Stephen Marshall's mother did not pan out.
CHAPTER X
Mother Marshall stood by the kitchen window, with her cheek against a boy's old soft felt hat, and she looked out into the gathering dusk for Father. The hat was so old and worn that its original shape and color were scarcely distinguishable, and there was one spot where Mother Marshall's tears had washed some of the grime away into deeper stains about it. It was only on days when Father was off to town on errands that she allowed herself the momentary weakness of tears.
So she had stood in former years looking out into the dusk for her son to come whistling home from school. So she had stood the day the awful news of his fiery death had come, while Father sat in his rush-bottomed chair and groaned. She had laid her cheek against that old felt hat and comforted herself with the thought of her boy, her splendid boy, who had lived his short life so intensely and wonderfully. When she felt that old scratchy felt against her cheek it somehow brought back the memory of his strong young shoulder, where she used to lay her head sometimes when she felt tired and he would fold her in his arms and brush her forehead with his lips and pat her shoulder. The neighbors sometimes wondered why she kept that old felt hat hanging there, just as when Stephen was alive among them, but Mother Marshall never said anything about it; she just kept it there, and it comforted her to feel it; one of those little homely, tangible things that our poor souls have to tether to sometimes when we lose the vision and get faint-hearted. Mother Marshall wasn't morbid one bit. She always looked on the bright side of everything; and she had had much joy in her son as he was growing up. She had seen him strong of body, strong of soul, keen of mind. He had won the scholarship of the whole Northwest to the big Eastern university. It had been hard to pack him up and have him go away so far, where she couldn't hope to see him soon, where she couldn't listen for his whistle coming home at night, where he couldn't even come back for Sunday and sit in the old pew in church with them. But those things had to come. It was the only way he could grow and fulfil his part of God's plan. And so she put away her tears till he was gone, and kept them for the old felt hat when Father was out about the farm. And then when the news came that Stephen had graduated so soon, gone up higher to God's eternal university to live and work among the great, even then her soul had been big enough to see the glory of it behind the sorrow, and say with trembling, conquering lips: "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!"
That was the kind of nerve that blessed little Mother Marshall was built with, and it was only in such times as these, when Father had gone to town and stayed a little later than usual, that the tears in her heart got the better of her and she laid her face against the old felt hat.
Down the road in the gloom moved a dark speck. It couldn't be Father, for he had gone in the machine—the nice, comfortable little car that Stephen had made them get before he went away to college, because he said that Father needed to have things easier now. Father would be in the machine, and by this time the lights would be lit. Father was very careful always about lighting up when it grew dusk. He had a great horror of accidents to other people. Not that he was afraid for himself, no indeed. Father was a man! The kind of a man to be the father of a Stephen!
The speck grew larger. It made a chugging noise. It was one of those horrible motor-cycles. Mother Marshall hated them, though she had never revealed the fact. Stephen had wanted one, had said he intended to get one with the first money he earned after he came out of college, but she had hoped in her heart they would go out of fashion by that time and there would be something less fiendish-looking to take their place. They always looked to her as if they were headed straight for destruction, and the person on them seemed as if he were going to the devil and didn't care. She secretly hated the idea of Stephen ever sitting upon one of them, flying through space. But now he was gone beyond all such fears. He had wings, and there were no dangers where he was. All danger and fear was over for him. She had never wanted either of her men to know the inward quakings of her soul over each new risk as Stephen began to grow up. She wanted to be worthy to be the mother and wife of noblemen, and fears were not for such; so she hid them and struggled against them in secret.
The motor-cycle came on like a comet now, and turned thundering in at the big gate. A sudden alarm filled Mother Marshall's soul. Had something happened to Father? That was the only terrible thing left in life to happen now. An accident! And this boy had come to prepare her for the worst? She had the kitchen door wide open even before the boy had stopped his machine and set it on its mysterious feet.