“I think I’ll be going now.” Pryor Gaines rose with the words.
“Don’t go,” Jim insisted. “I want you here.”
So Gaines sat down. Shirley, who was quick in intuitive power, knew instinctively what awaited him. He opened the letter and read it while the two friends busied themselves with a consideration of Jim’s bookcase, reading-table, and toolchest combined, all made out of one goods box with sundry trimmings.
Jim said nothing when he had finished, grateful that no painful silence on the part of the other two men forced him to words until he was ready to speak.
“Listen to me,” he said at length. “I need your help now. When I came West life didn’t seem worth living at first, but I had it on my hands and couldn’t throw it away. I tried to take an interest in Asher Aydelot’s home. But it is a second-rate kind of pleasure to sit by your own lonely fireside and enjoy the thought of the comfort another man has in his home with the wife of his choice.”
A shadow fell on Dr. Carey’s face as he sat looking through the open window at the stretch of green clover down the valley.
“I was about ready to call time on myself one winter here when Carey brought me a letter. It was from Alice Leigh, my brother Tank’s wife. Tank and I were 151 related—by marriage. We had the same father, but not the same mother. My mother died the day I was born. Nobody else is so helpless as a man with a one-day-old baby. My father was fairly forced into a second marriage by my step-mother, Betsy Tank. She was the housekeeper at the tavern after my mother’s death. Her god was property and Tank is just like her. She married the old Shirley House. It looked big to her. Oh, well! I needn’t repeat a common family history. I never had a mother, nor a wife, nor a sister, nor a brother. Even my father was early prejudiced in Tank’s interest against mine, always. The one happy memory of my boyhood years was the loving interest of Asher Aydelot’s mother, who made the old Aydelot farmhouse on the National road a welcome spot to me. For the Lord made me with a foolish longing for a home and all of these things—father, mother, sister, and brother.”
“So you have been father and mother, brother and sister to this whole settlement,” Pryor Gaines said.
“Which may be vastly satisfying to these relatives, but does not always fill the lack in one’s own life,” Horace Carey added, as a man who might know whereof he spoke.
“I won’t bore you with details,” Jim began again. “The letter I had from Alice Leigh, Tank’s wife, a dozen or more years ago, asked me if I would take the guardianship of her children if they should need a guardian. I knew they would need one, if she were—taken from earth, as she had reason to fear then that she might be soon. I began to live with a new motive—a sense that I was needed, a purpose to be ready to help her children—the one service I could give to her. There’s a long, cruel story back of her marriage to Tank—a story of deception, 152 coercion, love of money, and all the elements of common cussedness—too common to make a good story. And, as generally happens, when Tank married the girl who didn’t want him he treated her as he’s always treated everybody else.”