"When we buried Isabel Munn, you came back in the night to weep at her
grave."
He thrust out a warding hand toward me.
"Why did you weep over Isabel Munn's grave, Bartholomew?"
"Speak no evil of the dead," he cried wildly.
"It is not in my mind. She was a good and pure woman. What would she
have been if she had listened to you?"
"What do you know? Who betrayed me?"
"You, yourself. When you came down with pneumonia after the burial, I
sat with you through a night of delirium."
Bartholomew Storrs bowed his head.
"My sin hath found me out," he groaned. "God knows I loved her, and--and
I hadn't the strength not to tell her. I'd have given up everything for
her, my hope of heaven, my--my--I 'd have given up my office and gone
away from God's Acre! And that was twenty years ago. I--I don't sleep o'
nights yet, for thinking."
"Well, you ain't the only one," said the dull voice of Mr. Hines.
"You're tempting me!" Bartholomew Storrs snarled at him. "You're trying
to make me false to my trust."
"Just to let her lie by her mother, like her mother would ask you if she
could."
"Don't say it to me!" He beat his head with his clenched hand.
Recovering command of himself, he straightened up, taking a deep breath:
"I must be guided by my conscience and my God," he said professionally,
and I noted a more reverent intonation given to the former than to the
latter. A bad sign.
"Isabel Munn's daughter, Bartholomew," I reminded him.
Instead of replying he staggered out of the door. Through the window we
saw him, a moment later, posting down the street, bareheaded and
stony-eyed, like one spurred by tormenting thoughts.
"Will he do it, do you think?" queried the anxious-visaged Mr. Hines.
I shook my head in doubt. With a man like Bartholomew Storrs, one can
never tell.
Old memories are restless companions for the old. So I found them that
night. But there is balm for sleeplessness in the leafy quiet of Our
Square. I went out to my bench, seeking it, and found an occupant
already there.
"We ain't the only ones that need a jab of dope, Dominie," said Mr.
Hines, hard and pink and hoarsely confidential as when I first saw him.
"No? Who else?" Though I suspected, of course.
"Old Gloom. He's over in the Acre."
"Did you meet him there? What did he say?"
"I ducked him. He never saw me. He was--well, I guess he was praying,"
said Mr. Hines shamefacedly.
"Praying? At the Munn grave?"
"That's it. Groaning and saying, 'A sign, O Lord! Vouchsafe thy servant
a sign!' Kept saying it over and over."
"For guidance to-morrow," I murmured. "Mr. Hines, I'm not sure that I
know Bartholomew Storrs's God. Nor can I tell what manner of sign he
might give, or with what meaning. But if I know my God, whom I believe
to be the true God, your Minnie is safe with him."
"Yeh? You're a good guy, Dominie," said Mr. Hines in his emotionless
voice.