“Nothing yet,” she whispered again. “But do you think that we have all been praying to Him all this time for nothing?”
“And my father?”
“The most inveterate Papist of us all!”
There was a tone of triumph in her voice that was almost amusing.
“How did it all come about?”
“She did it,” broke in Kenneth, pointing to his mother. “Did I not tell you that she was the sweetest woman to have her own way? If I were a heretic, I would sooner face the Grand Inquisitor himself than this most amiable of women. Set a thief to catch a thief, Roger. But come; heretics don’t abstain as do wicked creatures like these ladies. I forget, they do, though; and my heretic, fair ladies, has had nothing to eat all day; so I insist upon not another word until the fatted calf is disposed of by our returned prodigal.”
That was a merry Christmas eve. We all nestled together, and bit by bit the whole story came out. On the receipt of my first letter, after a fruitless inquiry for me, Kenneth and his mother posted down to Leighstone. Their arrival was most opportune; for my father, on hearing of my departure, suffered a relapse that laid him quite prostrate. Poor Nellie was in despair, brave heart though she was. By unremitting care he was partially restored, and then followed the long dreary months and the weary waiting, day after day, for some scrap of news from me. In such cases, the worst is generally dreaded save when the worst actually takes place, and my father drooped gradually. He was prevailed upon to pay a visit to the Goodals, and there it was that his heart, pierced with affliction, and bowed down with sorrow, opened to the holier and higher consolation that religion only affords. Father Fenton, who was invalided from a severe course of missionary labors, was staying with them, and the intercourse thus begun developed into what we have seen. On his return to Leighstone, the silent house opened up the bitter poignancy of his grief. Every familiar object on which his eye rested only served to remind him of one who had passed away; whom he accused himself of having driven away by an order that he could only now regard with abhorrence. A cold, something slight, seized him, and soon appeared alarming symptoms. In view of the recent changes, Nellie knew not to whom of our relatives to apply in this emergency, and could only write to Mrs. Goodal, who flew to her assistance. The arrival of my letter brought down Kenneth, “like a madman,” his mother said. The letter arrived just at the crisis of the fever in which my father lay; the good news was imparted to him in one of his lucid intervals, and the crisis took a favorable turn. The Christmas holy-days brought Elfie from her convent; and finally all came together, awaiting my expected return. How that letter had been kissed, petted, wept over, laughed over, spelt out inch by inch! I wonder that a fragment of it remained; but even had it been worn to dust by reverent fingers, it would not have mattered: the women knew every word of it by heart. It formed the staple topic of conversation whenever they met. There never yet was such a letter written, and the idea that the writer of it should only receive ten dollars—how much money was ten dollars?—a week was proof positive that the American people did not appreciate true genius when it found its way among them. Mr. Culpepper, indeed! Who cared what he would think? The idea of a person of the name of Culpepper having to do with men of genius! They wondered how I could consent to write for such a person at all. And Mrs. Jinks! Good gracious! that dreadful Mrs. Jinks and her “littery gents”; Mrs. Jinks and the beefsteak; Mrs. Jinks and the pork chops; Mrs. Jinks and her “mock turtle” soup; Mrs. Jinks and “her Jane,” etc. etc. Poor old Roger! Poor, dear boy! How miserable it made them all, and yet how absurdly ridiculous it all was. It made them laugh and cry in the same breath.
What a hero I had become! What was all my fancied triumph to this? What is all the success one can win in this world to the genuine love and the foolish adoration of the two or three hearts that made up our little world before we knew that great wide open beyond the boundary of our own quiet garden? And all this fuss and affection was poured out over me, who had run away from it, and thought of it so little while I was away. It was, speaking reverently, like the precious ointment in the alabaster vase, broken and poured out over me, in the fond waste of love. Why, indeed, was this waste for me? This ointment was precious, and might have been sold for many pence and given to the poor—the poor of this great world, who were hungering and thirsting after just such love as this, that we who have it accept so placidly, and let it run and diffuse itself over us, and take no care, for is not the source from which it comes inexhaustible, as the widow’s cruse of oil? But so it is, and so it will continue to be while human nature remains truly human nature. The good shepherd, leaving the ninety-nine sheep, will go after the one which was lost, and finding him, bear him on his own travel-weary and travel-worn shoulders in triumph home. The father will kill the fatted calf for the prodigal who has lived riotously and wasted his inheritance, but the faint cry of whose repentant anguish is heard from afar off. The mother’s heart will go out after the scapegrace son who is tramping the world alone, turned out of doors for misbehavior; and all the joy she feels in the good ones near her is as nothing compared with the thought that he at last has come back, sad and sorrowful and forlorn, to the home he left long ago, in the brightness of the morning, with so gay a step and so light a heart. It is unjust, frightfully unjust, that it should be so. Did not the good son so feel it, and was his protest not right? Did not the laborers in the vineyard so find it when those who came at the eleventh hour, and had borne naught of the heat and the burden of the day, received the same reward as they? And who shall say that the laborers were not right and the lord of the vineyard unjust? What trades-union could ever take into consideration such reasoning as this, forbidden by the very book of arithmetic? Wait awhile, friends. Some day when we, who now feel so keenly the injustice of it all, are fathers and mothers, let us put the question then to ourselves: “Why this waste of precious ointment on one who values it not? I will seal up the alabaster jar, let the ointment harden into stone, and no sweetness shall flow out of it.” Do so—if you can, and the world will be a very barren place. It would dry and shrivel up under arid justice. Did not the Master tell us so? Did he not say that he came to call not the just but sinners to repentance? And is it not this very injustice that makes earth likest heaven, where we are told there shall be more joy over one sinner doing penance than over the ninety-nine just who need not penance?
And here am I preaching, instead of spending my Christmas merrily like a man. But the thought of all this affection wasted on so callous a wretch as I had proved myself to be, was too tempting to let pass. Suddenly the chimes rang out from the old steeples, and we were silent, listening with softened hearts and moistening eyes.
“There is another surprise for you yet,” said Mrs. Goodal, mysteriously. “Come, I want to show you your room.”