“I tried it. But you can’t get a nearness to him when he ain’t a mind to let you; you couldn’t when he wa’n’t more’n five years old. ‘Why, what are you a-drivin’ at, Loveday?’ says he, and his handsome face that’s jest like his mother’s, got as red as fire. ‘Does it make any difference,’ says he, ‘what horse a fellow bet on so long as he didn’t win?’ says he. And he said it so kind of reckless that it made my blood run cold. For one of our boys to speak like that! And all the time he looked so manly and noble you couldn’t have no realizin’ sense that he was the mean and foolish kind that bets. When I come off and left him—it was down in the shipyard and he was hammerin’ away, all the time, and wouldn’t pay hardly a mite of attention to me—I turned back and out of the fulness of my heart my mouth spoke, ‘Mr. David, I don’t believe no such a thing!’ says I. ‘You’re the child of your sainted ma,’ says I, ‘and the grandchild of your sainted grandpa, and it ain’t noways likely that you ever done any such a thing!’ That ’peared to be reflectin’ kind of unfavorable on his pa, so I said, right off quick, ‘Your pa, too, he was a gentleman, if he was an artist, and he wouldn’t never a-done no such mean thing!’
“He laughed, but he looked queer, too; he looked real queer.
“‘Do you s’pose, Loveday,’ says he, ‘that I should ’a’ let myself be expelled and brought to this for somethin’ that I never done?’ says he.
“I was kind of beat, for a minute, then I said, ‘It don’t ’pear as if you would. There ain’t nothin’ in this livin’ world that would make it right for you to do it.’
“‘Isn’t there, Loveday? Isn’t there?’ he says, and he stopped hammering for the first time and turned and looked at me.
“‘There’s such a thing as sacrificin’ yourself for others in a way that’s ag’in sanctified common sense,’ says I.”
“You think he sacrificed himself for others, Loveday?” I interrupted. “Then it must have been for Rob. But I don’t see how that could possibly have been.”
“I don’t know as I do,” said Loveday, leaning back wearily in her rocker. “And yet I can’t bring myself to believe no evil of that boy. He was mischievous, some, when he was a child, and he would keep a-drawin’ things and pesterin’ his teachers, but the best of folks has their failures and that was born in him. But he was the honestest youngster and would look you square in the face and tell you jest what he’d been up to. His close-mouthed fits wa’n’t never about any of his own pranks. You never could get him to tell of anybody else.”
“But it couldn’t have been Rob,” I repeated, answering what I knew was Loveday’s thought.
“It doesn’t ’pear to be possible,” said Loveday. “But, then! when they go away from home you can’t tell how they’ll turn out. I shouldn’t wonder if some of them colleges was hot-beds of iniquity.