Far into the night the old man talked to the sailor, telling him purposely how week after week during the thirty years of his absence the old mother had come, hoping against hope for word of her son, and he said, “It hurt me to have to send her back every time with a heavy heart. She was a good mother though, my boy. Never in all those thirty years did she speak an unkind word of you. Her thought was always that Sandy was a good boy and will be a good man, that he would write if he could.” Then the old man went on, even more pathetically: “The last time your mother walked to the office, Sandy, I knew she would never return. She knew this also. The way she lingered, the way she longed for a letter, all told plainly that it would be her last call, and after she had gone up the road a little piece she turned and came back again to ask me if a letter came that it might be sent on to the old home. Your mother lived for you from week to week, Sandy,” he said, “and her life clung to the hope of a letter. At last her strength was not great enough to be told again, ‘There is no letter from Sandy.’”
“NO LETTER FROM SANDY.”
The old man went on further, though he saw that the tears were now running unrestrainedly down Sandy’s cheeks. “The love your mother had for you has made a better man of you,” he said. “I do not believe she could have walked home that last day if I hadn’t told her that possibly for some reason we didn’t know you were up in heaven waiting for her. She looked at me so earnestly then and her tears flowed freely, as they did often, and finally she said:
“‘I hadn’t thought of that. Sandy must be in heaven or he would write me.’
“After that she left the office with a lighter step and with even a smile upon the face that before had been cast down.” After a little, when Sandy managed to get hold of himself again, he was told how his mother had been laid away in the old village churchyard five years before. Also that his father had followed her in the next year, and then the old man said:
“There is no one, Sandy, to put up a stone even, to mark where they are laid. You know how poor we all are here. Some of us would have done it if we could, but we had our own loved ones to look after.”
While it added a good deal to his pain, Sandy felt that it was only his duty to visit the little churchyard the next day, and there he was shown the graves of the parents who had loved him so long and faithfully. Glad he was then that he had brought with him the pay he had received from his last voyage. A stone such as he knew his old mother would have been proud of was ordered, flowers were placed on the graves, and every mark of respect arranged for. Even so, Sandy felt in his heart that this did not begin to atone for his neglect for the long years gone by, and for many months he stayed in the village, talking with those who had known his father and mother, keeping the flowers fresh on the graves in the churchyard, and trying to feel himself back in the old home. After a time Sandy went back to his seafaring life. When his old shipmates saw him they exclaimed at the wrinkles in his face and wondered what had happened during his absence to make him look so much older. At first he said nothing, but in the midst of the voyage, when the long roll of the sea or the roar of the wind brought back memories of his experiences with the heroic lad Robert, he told to some of his mates the story of the pain which had come to him during those months in the old home in Scotland.
Sandy lived like a real man for the rest of his life. He was strong and true and clean. He read his Bible and as best he knew he tried to follow the path laid out for him, so that some day he would be sure of meeting his father and mother, when the great call came, in the place where he knew they had gone already.