CHAPTER XXI
Darcy Sherwoodhad dropped out of Meadow Brook life as completely, apparently, as if he had died.
His old friends and associates did not realize it at first, thought he was gone on one of his short trips, or had taken on a new operation of some sort. Nobody ever seemed to know just what Darcy’s business was, only that nobody ever spoke of him as one who had no business. He was one who kept his mouth shut about his own affairs, and much as his friends would have liked to ask him questions, they seldom did. If they did they were surprised to find that, although he answered them pleasantly, they had gained very little real knowledge of what they had started out to investigate.
People talked about him, as people always will talk about those they do not understand, and they said a great many things about him that were not true, while things that they did not say or think about him, things that were, some of them, worse than those they did think, were very often true.
Darcy had a strange code of honor and of life.
He was the product of a naturally loving disposition left to come up without much training, left to experiment with life for himself, and to search out his own view of the universe and his own doctrines of right and wrong. There were certain things he would not do though heaven and hell were against him, because he had decided in his heart that they were not right—not “square,” he calledit. One was that he never would harm a woman or a child in any way, directly or indirectly, if he knew it; and another was that he must always help the downtrodden, sometimes without regard to whether their cause was right or wrong, according to law and public opinion.
With all this he had the unusual combination of being both extremely clever as a business man, and entirely unselfish in his personal life. Strong beyond most, he could walk among pitch when he liked without being soiled, yet he often chose to play with that pitch and minded not if others saw it on his hands, or misunderstood his actions. Beautiful as the devil must have been before he fell, with dark eyes, bronze-gold hair, inclined to curl, and a smile of more than ordinary beauty, yet sad, too, with the sadness of the lost sometimes. Nobody quite knew what it was about Darcy Sherwood that made them like him so, or just what they so utterly disapproved of. And he went his way without seeming to care which they did. Only little children and old women saw the real Darcy, and won his rare confidence.
Darcy had a brother-in-law after his own heart, who knew how to keep his mouth shut—not as clever as Darcy, not always so good, but much richer in respectability, and most kind to Darcy’s sister, a good dull girl who loved Darcy devotedly, but who never understood him. Sharp little Lib was a product of this home and her uncle’s training. Where she got her sharpness was always a problem to Darcy. Certainly not from her simple-minded mother, nor yet from her somewhat commonplace father. Yet Darcy was fond of them both, and respected their ability to keep their mouths shut. It was something that Darcyhad always taught everybody, sooner or later, with whom he came in contact.
And now Darcy was gone.
“I’ll be away for awhile, I don’t know how long. Business trip. All you know about it, Mase, see?”
Mason Knox nodded.
“I getcha!” he said, and went on cleaning the carburetor of his car.
After awhile his brother-in-law raised his head and gave Darcy a keen glance.
“Anything gone wrong, Darcy?”
“No, Mase, nothing wrong. New line, that’s all. Been working on the wrong dope, I guess. Going to try a new line. But first I’ve got something to do. May take a long time. May be only a few days. Don’t let Ellen worry. I’ll write if there’s any need.”
He went the next day. Mason Knox and Dan Peterson were the only two in Meadow Brook who knew anything about his going, and that was all they knew. When people began to make inquiries Mason Knox answered with: “I couldn’t say. He might and he might not be back soon. That depends.”
When Dan Peterson heard that Darcy had disappeared from his usual haunts, heard first through his own son, who was a devotee of the baseball field on afternoons, he looked thoughtful, and wise, and went and told his father.
And Darcy had a strange method of going. He did not take the train, nor buy a ticket. He waited until night—no one quite remembered when they saw Darcy Sherwood last, when it came right down to the question some months afterward. Even the sharp-eyed Tyke, who wasvigilant night and day as soon as his eyes were open to the necessity, had somehow missed his movements.
Darcy went at night, alone, without baggage or any impedimenta whatever; first to the graveyard, where he took from a tangle of grass and weeds under the hedge on the outer edge of the next field a pick and shovel that came strangely to hand, and went silently and deftly to a spot that he seemed to know well.
Here he worked for half an hour or more, lifting sod and soil from the place and setting them aside, as if he had done it before, pausing now and again to listen to a stir in the hedge or to mark the scuttling of a wild rabbit. Then, after a longer pause than usual, there came the sound of soft clinking, crashing; the gurgle of liquid coming through a small aperture, yet muffled, as if it were flowing underground. For a long time this went on, while Darcy stood watching the darkness, listening to the distance, identifying each falling leaf and stir in the shadows among the weird shafts of marble, and sighing cedars of the cemetery.
After a time he put back the soil and the sods into place, laid the pick and the shovel in the bed of a little creek just over in the next field, where the water tinkled over it harmlessly and obliterated all finger-marks from its handle; and then stole away down the road, leaving behind, in the place of the dead, a strange, penetrating, unmistakable odor, which by morning would be purged away and escape into the elements.
Down in the road he paused, where he had encountered Joyce, and for a moment let his soul feel all that he had felt then—the delicacy of her hallowed touch, the thrillof her presence so near him, followed by the scorching shame that she should find him here, and by her question, with its piercing meaning, its wise conclusion, its sorrowing rebuke. The deep, wonderful look in her eyes as the flashlight revealed his identity to her, of recognition and of hurt surprise—he felt it all again! The tone of that voice that from his childhood he had treasured like the beautiful song of a bird in the holiest place in his heart. It was almost as if he suddenly felt that for a moment God was looking at him through her eyes, and he too saw himself as God saw him, and did not like it.
There was more to it. There was a kind of recoiling in horror from himself as he suddenly saw that in what he had been doing he had been untrue to himself and to his code. He had respected himself for the way he had kept to his self-made laws, and now his self-respect was broken. He could not go on and any more take satisfaction in what he had been doing.
He stood there in the darkness with bowed head and went over it all again, as he had gone over it a thousand times since that night when he had seen her go from him into the dark, and the thought of her had driven him forth on this quest. Then, still, with bowed head he went on down the road.
A strange thing happened to him. He seemed to think as she must have been thinking, to know at each turn of the road what she would have done, which way she would have turned.
He knew that she had slept in the hammock, for he had sent his colleagues away, and taking another way about to overtake her, had seen her enter the gate, andwatched her through the night until she stole away in the gray of the morning. So far he knew her way and could follow the trail.
But when he reached the streets of the little town beyond and must choose between houses and turning corners it was not so plain. Yet he had resolved to leave no clue unfollowed, no spot where she might have turned unsearched.
He had a plan to make his search complete. He would make a map of each day’s wanderings, note each house and corner and way of egress, choose the most likely and search it to the end, then come back and choose the next. It seemed, perhaps, the work of a lifetime, yet he did not feel that he would be long in finding her. There was something in his soul that told him he would find her. He had to find her and tell her what he had been doing, and that he never would do it again. He had to absolve his soul from that before her eyes. He could not lift up his head and respect himself again unless he did. She had stood like a young saint within the shrine of his heart, and now he felt cast away from the presence of all that he held really holy in the world.
So he went step by step over the way that Joyce had gone, his clever judgment quickly deciding which corner she would have chosen, where she would have paused, and how gone on again. And Joyce would have been surprised to know how far he traced her very steps.
It was not until he reached the city that his way became bewildering. He had dropped into a number of homes on his way where people lived who often visited in Meadow Brook, and casually, as if he had had an accidenton the road and needed to borrow water or a tool for his car, which he had left out of sight down the road, he would put one or two keen questions that would make him sure she had not passed that way while these people were about. And so his little note book became filled with tiny tracings of maps, with streets and corners noted, and each turning that he had not followed marked for returning some day in case his quest was not successful.
He thought much as he took his way on foot through the world, and began to feel himself a pilgrim on a holy quest, not a knight, for his self-confidence had been too badly shaken for that. He had not so much the feeling that she needed him and he could help her to her inheritance if he found her, as he had the need of her in his soul. It seemed sometimes that he could not live until he had unburdened his soul by confession to her and had told her he would sin that way no more. He wanted her restored confidence, her clear-eyed smile, the feeling that she was his friend, though ever so far away, that there was something sweet and true between them. He had never thought of her as his in any way except as a guiding star, but now that he had lost that star, his life seemed all awry, as if he could not go on without her, as if all was darkness and horror, that she should think of him as one so unworthy.
As he thought out his pilgrimage before him it occurred to him that the churches should be his goal. He knew that she always went to service, to prayer meetings, and Sunday School, and morning and evening church gatherings. There was his key to the situation. If she were still in the land of the living, if nothing evil had befallen her, she would be at some place of worship at the time appointed.And so, when a bell from some steeple rang a call to worship, he would pause, and wait, and watch the worshippers till all were in, or if he passed an open church door he would enter, sit down and gaze about until he had searched every face, and was sure she was not there. Then he would quietly get up and leave. Seldom did he hear the service that went on about him, seldom pretended to listen. He was there but for one purpose, and he had no time to waste. Words indeed passed through his consciousness as they were spoken, in story or song, but they left no impression there. He was not a scoffer at religious things. They had simply never touched him. He stood on the outside of them. Except for that one afternoon in his life when he had sat in the dim aisles of the grove and listened to Mary Massey reading the story of the blind man, he had never really taken heed to the Bible. Oh, he had heard it read in school, of course, and now and then in a service that some strange fancy carried him to as a boy, never in Sunday School, for he had not been sent there, and it was not a place he would have chosen to go because it meant confinement in the house when one might be out-of-doors. He had always been a law unto himself and he was rather proud of the fact. Now a great depression was upon him because he felt he had not kept his own law. It was Joyce’s clear eyes, her keen question, that made him see that in breaking the law of his land, he had broken also the law of that inner, finer self. It was in his thoughts of her that he came to see that there was always something behind a law, it was never just a law.
What was that in Mary Massey’s prayer so long ago?
“Help us for Christ’s sake to have our eyes open to sin, so that we shall always know when we are not pleasing Thee.”
It had been long years since he had heard that first and only real prayer of his lifetime, for other prayers that he had happened to hear had meant nothing to him, but the words of this were as clear to him as if it had been heard only yesterday. He pondered on the words as he walked down the highways on his search. “To have one’s eyes open to sin, so that one should always know—” That had been his trouble. Strange! He had prided himself on never making mistakes, on keeping his code in mind, and yet what he had been doing had not seemed to be hurting any one, and it was not until that clear-eyed girl had been a witness of his deeds in the darkness that he had felt the conviction. There had been something like that in the story her aunt had read. He wished he had a Bible that he might find it and read it again.
The desire grew upon him as the days went by, till the next time he reached a city he searched out a book-store.
It was a little dusty book-shop in a back street, with a kindly old gentleman in spectacles in charge, and when Darcy asked for a Bible he looked at him over his spectacles with a smile and asked what type of Bible he would like. Darcy didn’t know. Did they have different types? He had supposed a Bible was a Bible.
“Aren’t they all alike?” he said with a troubled frown. “I want one that has a story of a man that was born blind and was healed. Would that be in them all?”
“Oh, yes, oh, yes,” said the man happily, trotting away and returning with an armful of Bibles. “I’ll find itfor you. There’s a concordance in the back of this one. This is a very good Bible—Scofield Bible, you know. Has notes and explanations. Good binding too, though it is a little expensive. Let’s see, let’s see, blind man, blind man—bornblind—yes, here it is, one of the Gospels. I thought so. John nine, sir—” and he handed over the open page to Darcy.
Standing in the little dusty book-shop, with the daylight fading and the street lights beginning to blink out here and there, the young man read the old story over again until he came to the last words of the chapter: “If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.”
Like a spear it thrust conviction to his soul. Yes, he had not been blind. He had been proud of his ability to see, to be a law unto himself—and he had sinned against all that was best in himself.
He bought the book and went out into the dusk, pondering. He went to a hotel and read the story over again and turned the pages aimlessly to find more about it, but in his soul there grew that knowledge of himself that brought a sense of sin. So far it was only sin in the eyes of the girl who stood to him for all that was pure and holy in the world, but it was sin, and the weight of the knowledge of it lay like a burden upon him. His smile grew grave whenever it appeared, and his eyes took on their sad wistfulness. People looked after him sometimes and thought how strangely sad he looked for a young man as fine and strong as he seemed to be.
The next time he entered a church in his search thepreacher was reading the Bible, and the words he read caught Darcy’s attention.
They seemed to be stranger and sweeter than any words he had ever heard. It reminded him of the place where Jesus heard that the blind man had been cast out and He came to find him. The words were these:
“Behold, what manner of love the father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore, the world knoweth us not because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”
So far he had been listening with deep interest. It seemed like what would have been written for Mary Massey and her niece. They were pure. They lived their lives according to what would please God. That was the dominating principle of their existence. He listened wistfully. They were so far removed from his world. He had never counted himself in with them, never expected to be nearer to them, except that one bright day in his childhood; but they had always lingered like luminaries in his sky, and always he had felt that if he had been born into a different walk in life, among Christian people like them, he would have belonged to them, have chosen them for his life-long companions if they had been willing. He had known even as a child that he did not belong with them—known that he could not fit, and kept away. Yet he had never been able to feel satisfied with other people; always there had been a silent aloofness in his manner,except with little children, among whom there was no such thing as class.
He had named this thing that separated them “class” in his thoughts. Now he began to see that it was something else. It was sin. It was right and wrong that had separated them all these years. They were not people who stopped at class. There were no social classes in their eyes, else they would not have companioned with him that glorious day so intimately. He had come to know, years back, that education had something to do with separations, and he had taken pains to study and read, and make himself acquainted with the best literature, and now he no longer felt that he would be separated from them in that way. But this thing that was back of it all was sin—had been sin all along. Perhaps if he had gone there, as that woman with the dear eyes had asked, he would have learned to know sin and not have been wise in his own conceit. Perhaps he might even have come to be in the same world with them.
But the words were going on and they struck him sharply:
“Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law; for sin is the transgression of the law.”
Yes, he was a transgressor of the law. He had broken the law of the land. That had never seemed a sin before. It had been only a matter of getting away with it. The sin would have been in being discovered, to his mind. Everybody else was doing it, some doing it bunglingly, and not getting away with it. He despised them. He had gone into it more for the game than the money. He had known he could do it without discovery.
But he had not gotten away with it. He had been discovered. And by that girl! Not only that, but by the girl he most honored in all the earth!
If he had been asked at the start whether he would like to have her know what he was doing he might not have thought much about it, but when her eyes looked into his with their question it was to him as if the great God had asked him: “What are you doing?” It was like the question that the Lord God called in the garden in the cool of the evening: “Adam, where art thou?” only Darcy did not even know that story, knew Adam only as a hazy being of history or mythology, he could not have told which.
But he knew God’s voice when he heard it, even though it spoke through the voice of a woman—the woman he loved.
Suddenly, he knew that too. He loved her. He had loved her all along. That was why he was going after her. She was lost and he was finding her. And somehow it was beginning to dawn upon his soul that he would not find her until he had found the God she loved, and set this thing right which was wrong with himself, if there was any such thing as setting it right in this crooked world.
And then, if Darcy Sherwood had not been bound to find Joyce Radway and bring her safely home, he might have felt that life was not any longer worth living; for all the laws by which he had lived, and all the principles by which he had stood, were crumbling beneath him like the sands of the sea, and he felt himself stumbling in the darkness.