The banker sat beside him, awed, embarrassed, incapable; the small motives—the little endeavours of his own worldly existence, shrank away ashamed and convicted of meanness in this presence. He could not act as comforter—he felt a moral inability to speak at all—to presume to intrude his own indifferent feelings, before this stern avenging wrath of Love.
And Hope sat looking up with her fearless, reverent, youthful eyes into the old man’s harshly-agitated face. She laid her soft girlish hand upon those swollen veins of his.
“Saunders, I think he is not dead.”
The young face was quite clear, brave, undoubting—the girl’s heart, in which the first breath of the rising woman and the sympathies of childhood still met and blended, could tread in awe, but without fear, where the worldly man dared not enter. Peter Delvie’s mother threw her apron over her head and wept aloud; and after a convulsive struggle to restrain them, one or two heavy tears ran down the cheek of Saunders.
“Na, na, ye dinna ken—ye’re but a bairn—he’s mine, and I canna hope.”
Oh, secret, hoarded, precious hope, to which the wrung heart clung with such passionate tenacity! He could not bear that a stranger’s eye should glance upon it. He whispered it never in any ear but God’s. His wife, the mother of the lost, knew it not except as she heard it in his daily prayer; and he denied it. Jealous of this spark of light which still was in his heart, he denied it rather than make its presence known; and yet—the light leaped up in its socket—the precious germ quickened and moved within him. He could not resist the quivering thrill, almost of expectation, with which he heard those words—the softening tears that followed them.
“Saunders, God let the prodigal come back that his father might forgive him. I think He will let Peter come back to hear that you will be friends with him now. There was a gentleman—Miss Maxwell knows him at Mossgray—and they sent home word that he was dead; but he was not dead—he is coming home—and I think, Saunders, that Peter did not die.”
“Is’t true—bairn, bairn, are ye sure it’s true?” cried Peter Delvie’s mother, “is he coming hame—is he living that was ca’ed dead? Wha telled ye it was true? If it happened wi’ ane it micht happen wi’ twa—and my laddie! my ain bairn!”
“It is quite true, for Helen Buchanan told me,” said Hope.
The old man trembled strangely. He held his head supported in his hands, and was silent. It was the mother who spoke now; the secret treasure of hope in the old man’s vehement breast would not bear the light.