I wasn’t hypocrite enough to take the hand extended. I wanted to shake the life out of his smiling old body.
“Has he been good to the old lady?” I asked. He only stared at me. “Do you know you told me you swam your horse through swollen streams once to get to a little log church because you knew your congregation would be waiting for you there? You wanted to preach that sermon that day that some soul might be saved that you might never reach again. You said you didn’t want the devil to get anybody. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” he quavered, “I remember.”
“Well,” I stormed, “it’s my honest belief that he will get you. I wonder what the God you have preached all these years means to do with men like you who are mean to their wives and cloak their meanness to poor feeble old women under smooth-sounding texts.”
He stood up, his faded blue eyes flashed, his pallid lips under the straggly white moustache worked. When he dropped back in his chair, having uttered no word, I thought maybe I had killed him. But I did not care. He would have gone to his Maker with a little preparation he would otherwise not have had. I stood over him silent, inexorable.
“She got mad because——”
“Never mind what she got mad about,” I said. “For fifty-nine years and six months she didn’t get mad. And she’s not mad now. I saw her slipping out of the back of your house just a minute ago. She’s been doing up your night work. You ought to go over there and get down on your knees—the knees you have worn out praying the Lord to make you the sort of a man you have not desired to be—and ask her to forgive you, and bring her home.”
Some good honest blood left in the old veins crept up and tinged the pallid, sunken cheeks. And, suddenly, all my fierceness was gone. I was pleading for the love that had betrayed them at the end of a lifetime. I had his old, old hands in mine that looked so young and strong by contrast, and I was leading him back to their courtship days, to the time when their one little child was born and she almost lost her life. Some of the story I knew from him, and some of it I knew from her. Before I finished the tears were dropping down his cheeks. “The old man has some lonely hours,” he said. Gayly I told him they were over; gayly I pressed my gift into his hand, and I fairly pushed him into her gate.
As I hurried on I suddenly realized that the rain was over, that the eastern hills were sparkling under a giant rainbow, and that Ellinor Baxter was rushing toward me with outstretched hands. Ellinor threw as many of her pupils as she could on her assistant, and, with the help of one of the older girls, took my pupils in my absence.
“How radiant you look!” I said as I kissed her. “I was afraid you would be all dragged out with the children.”