"Why, _Neale_!" said Marise, astonished and touched.

"Yes, quite a flight of fancy for me, wasn't it?" commented Neale casually, leaning forward to change the carburetor adjustment.

Marise felt Paul lean over her shoulder from the back of the car. "Say, Mother," he said in her ear, "would you just as soon get in back with me for a while?"

Neale stopped the care. Marise stepped out and in, and seated herself beside Paul. He had apparently nothing to say, after all, looking fixedly down at his bare brown feet.

But presently he moved nearer to his mother and leaned his head against her breast. This time she put her arm around him and held him close to her, the tears in her eyes.

CHAPTER XXIX

VIGNETTES FROM HOME LIFE

I

August 20.

Paul had been sent for blue-berries through the Eagle Rock woods to the high upland pasture where the Powers cows fed during the day. On the upper edge of that, skirting a tract of slash left from an old cutting, was a berry-patch, familiar to all the children of Crittenden's valley.

When at four o'clock there was no sign of him, and then at five still none, Marise began to feel uneasy, although she told herself that nothing in the world could happen to Paul on that well-known mountain-side. He had taken Medor with him, who would certainly have come for help if Paul had fallen and hurt himself. She excused herself to the tall, awkward lad from North Ashley come to try over his part in a quartet, asked Toucle to help Elly set the supper things on the table if she should be late, and set off at a rapid pace by the short-cut over the ledges.

As she hurried over the rough trail, frankly hastening, now frankly alarmed, she thought that probably for all the life-time of the people in the valley the death of Frank Warner would set a sinister element of lurking danger in those familiar wooded slopes. Nothing _could_ have happened to Paul, but still she hurried faster and faster, and as she came near the upper edge of the pasture she began to shout loudly, "Paul! Paul!" and to send out the high yodel-cry that was the family a.s.sembly call. That act of shouting brought her a step nearer to panic.

But almost at once she heard the little boy's answer, not far from her saw his dog bounding through the bushes, and as she emerged from the woods into the open pasture she saw Paul running towards her, pail in hand, evidently astonished to know her there. But there was about him something more than astonishment, something which Marise's mother-eye catalogued as furt.i.tve, that consciousness of something to hide which always looks to grown-ups like guilt. She gave no sign of seeing this, however, stopping short to catch her breath, smiling at him, and wondering with great intensity what in the world it could be. He looked a little frightened.

He came up to her, answering her smile uneasily, and she saw that he had only a few berries in his pail. At this she was relieved, thinking that possibly all that had happened was that he had lingered to play. But when she glanced back at his face, she had the impression that there was something more, very much more. He had received some indelible impression and it was his instinct to hide it from his mother. Her heart sank forebodingly.

"What is the best thing to do?" she asked herself. "To speak about it first, or to wait till he does?"

She sat down on a stone, fanning herself with her hat, watching him, trying to make out the meaning of every shift of expression, turn of eye, position of his hands, carriage of his head, bringing to this all her acc.u.mulated knowledge of Paul, afire with the sudden pa.s.sion to protect him which had flamed up with her intuition that something had happened to him.

(Come and gone with the dry rapidity of fingers snapped, she had thought, "The point is, that other people may be more clever than mothers, but n.o.body else _cares_ enough, always, always to try to understand!")

"I thought I'd come up and walk back with you," she offered.

"I haven't got very many," said Paul, abashed, looking down at the few, blue, bloom-covered b.a.l.l.s in the bottom of his shining tin pail. "I was trying to hurry up and get enough for supper, anyhow."

Marise in spite of herself, moved by pity for his confusion, offered him a way out. It always seemed to her too dreadful for anyone not to have a way out, even if it implied a fib. "Weren't there very many on the bushes?" she asked.

But he refused it with a characteristic integrity. "Oh yes, there were lots there," he said.

A silence fell. The little dog, sensitively aware of something wrong, whined uneasily, and pawed at Paul's hand. But Paul did not look down at him. He stood, his bare feet wide apart, the empty pail in his hand, looking down the beautiful green slope of the pasture, golden now in the long rays from the sun poised low on the line of the mountains opposite.

Marise looked at him, seeing nothing in all the world but that tanned, freckled, anxious little face. With what an utter unexpectedness did these moments of crisis spring on you; something vital there, and no warning, no chance to think.

"Anything the matter, Paul?" she said gently.

He nodded, silent.

"Anything you can tell Mother?" she asked, still more gently.

Paul said gruffly, "I don't know: it's about Ralph Powers. He was up here this afternoon." He looked down at his brown, bramble-scratched legs.

Marise's imagination gave an unbridled leap of fear. She had always felt something strange and abnormal about Ralph. But she thought, "I mustn't tyrannize over Paul, even by a too-waiting expectant silence," and stooped over with the pretext of tying her shoe. A lump came to her throat. How terribly, helplessly, you _cared_ about what came to your children!

When she lifted her head, Paul had come nearer her and was looking down at her, with troubled eyes. "Say, Mother, he didn't _say_ not to tell you. Do you suppose it would be fair?"

She made a great effort at loyalty and said, "I can't tell, Paul. You saw him. You know better than I, if you think he meant you not to tell.

Try to remember if he said anything about it."

Paul thought hard. "You wouldn't tell anybody?" he asked.

"Not if you don't want me to," she answered.

Paul sat down by her and drew a long breath. "I don't believe he would care, your knowing it, if you never told anybody else, nor said anything to him. Mother, I was going along, up there by the big rock where the white birches grow, and I saw Ralph... . He was in front of a sort of table he'd fixed up with a long piece of slate-stone, and he had some queer-shaped stones on it ... oh, _Mother_ ... he was crying so, and talking to himself! And when he saw me he got as mad! And he told me about it, just as mad all the time, as though he was mad at me. Mother, it's an altar!

"An altar!" said Marise, stupidly, utterly disconcerted by the word, so totally other than what her fears had been foreboding.

"Yes, an altar, and he says the stones on it are idols, and he bows down and worships them, the way the Bible says it's wicked to."

Marise was too much astonished to open her lips.

Paul said, "Mother, Ralph says he hates G.o.d, and isn't going to say his prayers to him any more. He says G.o.d let his father and mother both get killed, and he don't know what the devil could do any worse than that.

He said he started in having an altar to idols because he thought from what the Bible said that if you did you'd be so wicked lightning would strike you dead. But it didn't, and now he doesn't believe _any_thing.

So he's going on, having idols because the Bible says not to."

Marise's first rounded and exclusive emotion was of immense relief.

Nothing had happened to her own son, and beside this relief, nothing for the moment seemed of any consequence. She drew Paul to her with a long breath of what was, she recognized it the moment afterward, her old, clear, undiluted, ferocious, hateful mother-egotism. For that instant she had not cared an atom what happened to another woman's child, so long as hers was safe.

But the next instant, the awareness of her hard heart cut across her like the lash of a whip. She shrank under it, horrified. She hung her head guilty and ashamed, divining the extremity of the other child's misery.

As she sat there, with her living arms around her own little son, the boy whose mother was dead came and stood before her in imagination, showing those festering, uncared-for wounds of sorrow and bitterness and loneliness, and furious, unavailing revolt from suffering too great to be borne.

She felt the guilt driven out from her narrow heart as it swelled larger to take him in. Any child who needed a mother so much, was _her own child_. He had no longer any mother who would care enough to try to understand, but _she_ would care enough.

"He bowed down and worshiped," said Paul, in a shocked, frightened voice. "He knocked his head on the stones and cried like anything. He said he hated G.o.d."

"Oh!" cried Marise, intolerably stung by sympathy and pity. She started up to her feet, her heart burning, the tears on her cheeks. Her arms ached with emptiness till she should have drawn that suffering into them.

Paul said shyly, "Say, Mother, it's _awful_ hard on those Powers kids, isn't it, not having anybody but their grandmother. Say, Mother, don't you think maybe we could ... we could ..." He turned his freckled, tanned, serious little face up to hers.

His mother stooped to kiss him, furiously, burningly, pa.s.sionately, as she did not often kiss Paul, and he clung to her with all the strength of his strong little arms. "Yes, yes, you darling, you darling," she told him brokenly. "Yes, yes, yes."