The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

Dick’s guardian had set out to give the boy a thorough training in those things he thought made for happiness and usefulness. He had read with him from babyhood until Dick could no more go without books than without food. He had started him early in languages. He had given him horses, and, an unusual accomplishment, as Dick afterwards learned, had trained him to walking. A tramping trip by the two of them had been one of Dick’s joys from the time he could remember. He did not know then that his guardian had more than pleasure in view by these trips. It was only later that he discovered that the regular outside life into which he had been trained was the older man’s wise way of counteracting a possible development of the disease of which both his parents had died, and which it was believed he had inherited.

When the time came, Dick had gone East to college, and from there he was sent for two years or more of Europe, as his taste might dictate. At the end of his first year his guardian had died. It left the boy quite alone and wholly bewildered. He had never thought of life without this firm, kind, wise, counseling power. He had done what had been suggested, and always found joy in it. He had never really wanted anything in life, as he could remember. His guardian had foreseen everything. And now what was he? A boy of 23, with comfortable means, a passion for reading, for travel and for people, and that was all. He must have a profession. It was his need of a backing, as well as a combination of æsthetic and the æsthete in him, with possibly something of environment—for he happened to be at Oxford when news of his guardian’s death came—that decided him to go into the Church.

Dick worked hard in term time, but all his long and short holidays he spent tramping Central Europe. This had been his guardian’s request.

“You will come back some day to your own land to work, Richard. My own judgment of you is that you will find your greatest interest in shaping whatever profession you choose to meet the new forms of social progress which each generation works out. I think this because you so love people. You’ll never be content, as I have been, with books and solitude. I don’t think you realize how full your life has been of human relations, or how you have depended on them, so I urge you to go among people in your holidays, common people, to be one of them; and do not hurry your return. You are young. Take time to find your place.”

Dick had faithfully followed this advice. He had spent six years in Europe without returning to the United States. He was thirty when he came back to take a church in a prosperous and highly energetic community. One year had been enough. They kept him busy from morning until night with their useful activities. To this he did not object; but while so active he had been chilled to the bone by his failure to get spiritual reactions from his parishioners. Moreover, he had been unable to establish anything like companionship, as he had known it, with any one in his church. He resigned, giving as his reason: “I am not earning your money. I don’t know how.” It was a sad blow to more than one member of St. Luke’s, for while they were a little afraid of him (which, if Dick had known, would have made a difference), they were also enormously proud of him.

His failure turned him to Great Rock, which he had never had the heart to visit since his guardian’s death. There was a girl there he had always carried in a shadowy way in his heart, the only girl he ever saw in the dreams which sometimes disturbed him—a fair, frank, lovely thing, he remembered her to have been, Annie Dunne. For the first time in his life he wanted his mate. He couldn’t face life again without one. He would go and find her. Why, why, he asked himself, had he not done this before? It was so clear that it was she that he needed. He did not ask himself if he loved her. He knew he did. As for Annie’s loving him? Had he waited too long? Every mile of his journey westward was filled with recollections of their youth, the summer evenings on the veranda, the winter evenings by the fireside. And her letters, never many, but how dear and friendly and intimate they had been! He felt so sure of her, almost as if she were telling him, “I knew you would come.”

It was night when he reached Great Rock. He was always thankful that it was in the dark that he heard the words at her door, “Miss Annie? Miss Annie is dead. She was buried a week ago.”

There was a blank space after that which Dick never tried to fill. All he knew was that he pulled his courage together and took to the road, Swiss bag on his back. He seemed to have no friend now but the road, and more than once he caught himself announcing to the long winding highways he followed eastward, “You’re all I have.”

He was in the hills that roll up from the Ohio in long, smooth billows, forming lovely, varied valleys for the great streams that feed the mighty river, and mounting always higher as you go toward the rising sun, until finally they are mountains. A fine, old post road from the East, one that had been fought over by French and Indians and British and trod by Washington, was Dick’s main route. He knew it well, for as a boy he had more than once walked it with his guardian. Moreover, it was by that road that half of Great Rock, his own family included, had made their pioneer trip into what was then the West.

He often spent his night in an old inn, a relic of those days, with thick walls, splendid woodwork and great rooms, but low and narrow doors, built at a time when it was not wise to have too generous entrances or too many windows.