"YEA, AND HIS OWN LIFE ALSO"
When Helen entered her own room she had leisure to analyse the tumult of emotion filling her heart. Amazement, shame, anger, dismay, grief, were surging across her soul.
"How can he think of leaving his mother? It is a shame!" she cried indignantly to herself. But why this hot sense of shame? "Nonsense!" she protested vehemently to herself, "it is that poor, dear old lady I am thinking of." She remembered that sudden stab at her heart at the old lady's broken words, "He will be going away, lassie," and her cheek flamed hot again. "It is all nonsense," she repeated angrily, and there being no one to contradict her, she said it again with even greater emphasis. But suddenly she sat down, and before long she found herself smiling at the memory of the old lady's proud cry, "Could not? Ay, he could." And now she knew why her heart was so full of happy pride. It was for Shock. He was a man strong enough to see his duty and brave enough to face what to him was the bitterness of death, for well she knew what his mother was to him.
"He will go," she whispered to her looking-glass, "and I'd go with him to-morrow. But"—and her race flamed hot—"he must never know."
But he did come to know, to his own great amazement and overwhelming, humbling gladness.
Shock's determination to offer himself to the far West awakened in his friends various emotions.
"It is just another instance of how religious fanaticism will lead men to the most fantastic and selfish acts," was Mrs. Fairbanks' verdict, which effected in Brown a swift conversion. Hitherto he had striven with might and main to turn Shock from his purpose, using any and every argument, fair or unfair, to persuade him that his work lay where it had been begun, in the city wards. He was the more urged to this course that he had shrewdly guessed Helen's secret, so sacredly guarded. But on hearing Mrs. Fairbanks' exclamation, he at once plunged into a warm defence of his friend's course.
"The finest thing I ever heard of," he declared. "No one knows what these two are to each other, and yet there they are, both of them, arriving at the opinion that Shock's work lies in the West."
"But to leave his mother alone!" exclaimed Mrs. Fairbanks indignantly.
"She is not to be alone," said Brown, making there and then a sudden resolve. "By the greatest of luck for me I am turned out of my quarters, and she is to take me in, and while I can't fill Shock's place, still I am somebody," added Brown, fervently hoping the old lady would not refuse him shelter.