"My dear, my dear—why don't you go to him?"
She stopped a moment and looked at her father, and even in the starlight she could see his hard mouth and his ruthless jaw. Then she cried out, "Oh, father, I can't—I can't—" After a moment she turned and looked at him, and asked, "Would you? Would you?" and walked into the house without waiting for an answer.
The father sat crumpled up in his chair, listening to the flames crackling in his heart. The old negation was fighting for its own, and he was weary and broken and sick as with a palsy of the soul. For everything in him trembled. There was no solid ground under him. He had visited his material kingdom in the City, and had seen its strong fortresses and had tried all of its locks and doors, and found them firm and fast. But they did not satisfy his soul; something within him kept mocking them; refusing to be awed by their power, and the eternal "yes" rushed through his reason like a great wind.
As he sat there, suddenly, as from some power outside, John Barclay felt a creaking of his resisting timbers, and he quit the struggle. His heart was lead in his breast, and he walked through the house to his pipe organ, that had stood silent in the hall for nearly a year. He stood hesitatingly before it for a second, and then wearily lay him down to rest, on a couch beside it, where, when he had played the last time, Jane lay and listened. He was tired past all telling, but his soul was relaxed. He lay there for hours—until the tall clock above his head chimed two. He could not sleep, but his consciousness was inert and his mind seemed limp and empty, as one who has worked past his limit. The hymn that the clock chimed through the quarter hours repeated itself over and over again without meaning in his brain. Something aroused him; he started up suddenly, and lying half on his elbow and half on his side he stared about him, and was conscious of a great light in the room: it was as though there was a fire near by and he was alarmed, but he could not move. As he looked into space, terrified by the paralysis that held him, he saw across the face of the organ, "Righteousness exalteth a Nation, but sin is a reproach to any people."
Quick as a flash his mind went back to the time that same motto stared meaninglessly at him from above the pulpit in the chapel at West Point, to which he had been appointed official visitor at Commencement many years before. But that night as he gazed at the text its meaning came rushing through his brain. It came so quickly that he could not will it back nor reason it in. Righteousness, he knew, was not piety—not wearing your Sunday clothes to church and praying and singing psalms; it was living honestly and kindly and charitably and dealing decently with every one in every transaction; and sin—that, he knew—was the cheating, the deceiving, and the malicious greed that had built up his company and scores of others like it all over the land. That, he knew—that bribery and corruption and vicarious stealing which he had learned to know as business—that was a reproach to any people, and as it came to him that he was a miserable offender and that the other life, the decent life, was the right life, he was filled with a joy that he could not express, and he let the light fail about him unheeded, and lay for a time in a transport of happiness. He had found the secret.
The truth had come to him—to him first of all men, and it was his to tell. The joy of it—that he should find out what righteousness was—that it was not crying "Lord, Lord" and playing the hypocrite—thrilled him. And then the sense of his sinning came over him, but only with joy too, because he felt he could show others how foolish they were. The clock stopped ticking; the chimes were silent, and he lay unconscious of his body, with his spirit bathed in some new essence that he did not understand and did not try to understand. Finally he rose and went to his organ and turned on the motor, and put his hands to the keys. As he played the hymn to the "Evening Star," John Barclay looked up and saw his mother standing upon the stair with her fine old face bathed in tears. And then at last—
Tears? Tears for Mr. Barclay? All these months there have been no tears for him—none, except miserable little corroding tears of rage and shame. But now there are tears for Mr. Barclay, large, man's size, soul-healing tears—tears of repentance; not for the rich Mr. Barclay, the proud Mr. Barclay, the powerful, man-hating, God-defying Mr. Barclay of Sycamore Ridge, but for John Barclay, a contrite man, the humblest in all the kingdom.
And as John Barclay let his soul rise with the swelling music, he felt the solace of a great peace in his heart; he turned his wet face upward and cried, "Oh, mother, mother, I feel like a child!" Then Mary Barclay knew that her son had let Him in, knew in her own heart all the joy there is in heaven over one sinner that repenteth.