Chapter Ten.
“O! love will venture in where it daurna weel be seen;
O! love will venture in where wisdom ance has been.”
Saunners Crombie had not been mistaken when he told his friend that “a measure of prosperity” had, of late, come to John Beaton. A debt long due to his father had been paid to him, and the story which the debtor had to tell was worth many times the money to John and his mother.
It was not the first good deed done in secret by the father which had since his death come to the knowledge of the son. Other stories had been told by friends and neighbours, and even by comparative strangers, of kind words spoken by him, and generous help given, which had healed sick hearts, and opened the way out of depths of despair to some who were sinners, and to some who were only sufferers. And now this man came to tell how he also had been helped—saved, he called it, and he told it with tears in his eyes, though more than a generation had passed since then.
David Cunningham was the son of the minister of the parish where the first of the three Johns had lived, and where the second John and his brothers and sisters had been born. He had fallen into foolish ways first, and then into evil ways, and through some act of inexcusable folly, or worse, had, it seemed, shut upon himself the last door of hope for a life of well-doing. An offer of a clerkship in an East Indian house had been given him by a friend of his family, and a sum sufficient for his outfit had been advanced. This sum he had lost, or rather it had been claimed for the payment of a debt which he could not have confessed to his father without breaking the old man’s heart. It would have been utter ruin to the lad if John Beaton had not come to the rescue.
This was before John was a rich man, or even had a prospect of riches, but he gave the money willingly, even gladly, to save the son of his father’s friend.
“When you come home a rich man you can pay me, if I be living; and if I be dead, you can pay it to them who may come after me,” said he. And now David Cunningham had come home to pay his debt.
“Every month from the very first,” he told John, “I put something away toward it, and a good many months passed before the full sum was saved. Then, when I wrote to your father that it was ready for him, he told me to invest it for him, and let it grow till I should come home again. That was five-and-thirty years ago, and it has grown well since then. It is yours now, and much pleasure and profit may you get out of it.”
“There is no fear of that,” said John.
“And I have a better wish than that for you,” said Mr Cunningham gravely. “May you have the chance and the heart to help to save some poor fellow as your father saved me.”