Then he sighed as he said: “It’s a bad business, but I feared from the start this would be the end of it. And now I’m going to tell thee something. I’ve served thee and thy partner as well as I could, and I’ve saved some money doing it. It’s a gradely life up yonder, in spite of the snow and cold—ay, I would ask no better than to end my days there, but it’s over easy and peaceful in a world that’s brimming with misery, and I’ve been feeling like Jonah when he fled with his message.”
Aline smiled at me over her shoulder, and I stared at him in amaze, saying, “I never found it either particularly easy or peaceful. I don’t quite understand you.”
“No,” said Lee, changing in a moment to his old pedantic style I had almost forgotten. “Thou hast not 319 the message; it’s thy work to till the soil, and I had thought to bide in this good land helping thee until my time came. But a voice kept on saying, ‘Go back to them hopeless poor and drunkards thou left in Lancashire.’ I would not listen. The devil whispered I was worn out and done, but when I talked with Harry, he, not having understanding, said: ‘You’re looking younger every day. If I heard those kind of things I should say it was liver.’”
Aline no longer smiled, but sat watching him and listening gravely, and I began to catch a glimmer of his meaning.
“The folks at chapel had not forgotten me,” continued Lee, “and they were in trouble. There was another man took up the work I left, but he went off with t’ brass they’d gathered for a new gallery, and they wrote they’d see I got back the old shop if I come home again. And because I was weak and fearful o’ the grinding struggle over there, I did not go. They wrote another letter, but still I bided, until I read this paper.”
He spread out a soiled English journal, and, running a crooked finger across it, read out the headings, with extracts, at some of which, remembering Aline’s presence, I frowned. It was only a plain record of what happens in the crowded cities of the older land—a murder, two suicides, and the inevitable destitution and drunkenness, but he looked up with kindling eyes.
“I could not shut my ears. The call was, ’come an’ help us,’ an’ I’m going. Going back out of the sunshine into the slums o’ Lancashire.”
This, I reflected, was the man who had once attempted my life—ignorant, intolerant, and filled with prejudice, but at least faithful to the light within him; and I knew that even if he failed signally, the aim he set before himself was a great one. No suitable answer, however, suggested 320 itself, and I was thankful when Aline said, “It is a very fine thing to do. But what about your daughter?”
“Her place was by her husband,” said Lee; “but her husband left her. Minnie is going back with me. Your brother will take me to see her to-morrow.”
I did so, at the risk of overtaxing the horses by a trying journey through softening snow; but I sent a telegram to Minnie, and when we left the cars she was there to meet us, looking weak and ill, with shadows in the hollows round her eyes.