“Who knows?” said the boy, as if to himself. “Poor Hayes. He may be quite a wonderful man, considering all things, his heredity and his environment. What would I have been, dad, but for you?”
His father grunted, pulled hard at his pipe, coughed a bit, then looked his son straight in the face, saying, “God knows what any of us owe to our past.” He fell into silence. His mind was far away, following his heart to the palisaded plot of ground among the Foothills and the little grave there in which he had covered from his sight her that had been the inspiration to his best and finest things, and his defence against the things low and base that had once hounded his soul, howling hard upon his trail.
The son, knowing his mood, sat in silence with him, then rising suddenly he sat himself on the arm of his father's chair, threw his arm around his shoulder and said, “Dear old dad! Good old boy you are, too. Good stuff! What would I have been but for you? A puny, puling, wretched little crock, afraid of anything that could spit at me. Do you remember the old gander? I was near my eternal damnation that day.”
“But you won out, my boy,” said his father in a croaking voice, putting his arm round his son.
“Yes, because you made me stick it, just as you have often made me stick it since. May God forget me if I ever forget what you have done for me. Shall we read now?”
He took the big Bible from its place upon the table, and turning the leaves read aloud from the teachings of the world's greatest Master. It was the parable of the talents.
“Rather hard on the failure,” he said as he closed the book.
“No, not the failure,” said his father, “the slacker, the quitter. It is nature's law. There is no place in God's universe for a quitter.”
“You are right, dad,” said Barry. “Good-night.”
He kissed his father, as he had ever done since his earliest infancy. Their prayers were said in private, the son, clergyman though he was, could never bring himself to offer to lead the devotions of him at whose knee he had kneeled every night of his life, as a boy, for his evening prayer.