"Hannah?" I said softly.
"What then?"
"Does mother know--about the boat?"
"Now don't ye be wheedlin'."
I managed to discover, however, that my mother did not know, and surmised
that the best reason why she had not been told had to do with Hannah's
criminal acquiescence concerning the operations in the shed. I ran into
the front hall and up the stairs, and my mother heard me coming and met
me on the landing.
"Hugh, where have you been?"
As I emerged from the semi-darkness of the stairway she caught sight of
my dwindled garments, of the trousers well above my ankles. Suddenly she
had me in her arms and was kissing me passionately. As she stood before
me in her grey, belted skirt, the familiar red-and-white cameo at her
throat, her heavy hair parted in the middle, in her eyes was an odd,
appealing look which I know now was a sign of mother love struggling with
a Presbyterian conscience. Though she inherited that conscience, I have
often thought she might have succeeded in casting it off--or at least
some of it--had it not been for the fact that in spite of herself she
worshipped its incarnation in the shape of my father. Her voice trembled
a little as she drew me to the sofa beside the window.
"Tell me about what happened, my son," she said.
It was a terrible moment for me. For my affections were still quiveringly
alive in those days, and I loved her. I had for an instant an instinctive
impulse to tell her the whole story,--South Sea Islands and all! And I
could have done it had I not beheld looming behind her another figure
which represented a stern and unsympathetic Authority, and somehow made
her, suddenly, of small account. Not that she would have understood the
romance, but she would have comprehended me. I knew that she was
powerless to save me from the wrath to come. I wept. It was because I
hated to lie to her,--yet I did so. Fear gripped me, and--like some
respectable criminals I have since known--I understood that any
confession I made would inexorably be used against me.... I wonder
whether she knew I was lying? At any rate, the case appeared to be a
grave one, and I was presently remanded to my room to be held over for
trial....
Vividly, as I write, I recall the misery of the hours I have spent, while
awaiting sentence, in the little chamber with the honeysuckle wall-paper
and steel engravings of happy but dumpy children romping in the fields
and groves. On this particular March afternoon the weather had become
morne, as the French say; and I looked down sadly into the grey back yard
which the wind of the morning had strewn with chips from the Petrel. At
last, when shadows were gathering in the corners of the room, I heard
footsteps. Ella appeared, prim and virtuous, yet a little commiserating.
My father wished to see me, downstairs. It was not the first time she had
brought that summons, and always her manner was the same!
The scene of my trials was always the sitting room, lined with grim books
in their walnut cases. And my father sat, like a judge, behind the big
desk where he did his work when at home. Oh, the distance between us at
such an hour! I entered as delicately as Agag, and the expression in his
eye seemed to convict me before I could open my mouth.
"Hugh," he said, "your mother tells me that you have confessed to going,
without permission, to Logan's Pond, where you embarked on a raft and
fell into the water."
The slight emphasis he contrived to put on the word raft sent a colder
shiver down my spine than the iced water had done. What did he know? or
was this mere suspicion? Too late, now, at any rate, to plead guilty.
"It was a sort of a raft, sir," I stammered.
"A sort of a raft," repeated my father. "Where, may I ask, did you find
it?"
"I--I didn't exactly find it, sir."
"Ah!" said my father. (It was the moment to glance meaningly at the
jury.) The prisoner gulped. "You didn't exactly find it, then. Will you
kindly explain how you came by it?"
"Well, sir, we--I--put it together."
"Have you any objection to stating, Hugh, in plain English, that you made
it?"
"No, sir, I suppose you might say that I made it."
"Or that it was intended for a row-boat?"
Here was the time to appeal, to force a decision as to what constituted a
row-boat.
"Perhaps it might be called a row-boat, sir," I said abjectly.
"Or that, in direct opposition to my wishes and commands in forbidding
you to have a boat, to spend your money foolishly and wickedly on a whim,
you constructed one secretly in the woodshed, took out a part of the back
partition, thus destroying property that did, not belong to you, and had
the boat carted this morning to Logan's Pond?" I was silent, utterly
undone. Evidently he had specific information.... There are certain
expressions that are, at times, more than mere figures of speech, and now
my father's wrath seemed literally towering. It added visibly to his
stature.
"Hugh," he said, in a voice that penetrated to the very corners of my
soul, "I utterly fail to understand you. I cannot imagine how a son of
mine, a son of your mother who is the very soul of truthfulness and
honour--can be a liar." (Oh, the terrible emphasis he put on that word!)
"Nor is it as if this were a new tendency--I have punished you for it
before. Your mother and I have tried to do our duty by you, to instil
into you Christian teaching. But it seems wholly useless. I confess that
I am at a less how to proceed. You seem to have no conscience whatever,
no conception of what you owe to your parents and your God. You not only
persistently disregard my wishes and commands, but you have, for many
months, been leading a double life, facing me every day, while you were
secretly and continually disobeying me. I shudder to think where this
determination of yours to have what you desire at any price will lead you
in the future. It is just such a desire that distinguishes wicked men
from good."
I will not linger upon a scene the very remembrance of which is painful
to this day.... I went from my father's presence in disgrace, in an agony
of spirit that was overwhelming, to lock the door of my room and drop
face downward on the bed, to sob until my muscles twitched. For he had,
indeed, put into me an awful fear. The greatest horror of my boyish
imagination was a wicked man. Was I, as he had declared, utterly depraved
and doomed in spite of myself to be one?
There came a knock at my door--Ella with my supper. I refused to open,
and sent her away, to fall on my knees in the darkness and pray wildly to
a God whose attributes and character were sufficiently confused in my
mind. On the one hand was the stern, despotic Monarch of the Westminster
Catechism, whom I addressed out of habit, the Father who condemned a
portion of his children from the cradle. Was I one of those who he had
decreed before I was born must suffer the tortures of the flames of hell?
Putting two and two together, what I had learned in Sunday school and
gathered from parts of Dr. Pound's sermons, and the intimation of my
father that wickedness was within me, like an incurable disease,--was not
mine the logical conclusion? What, then, was the use of praying?... My
supplications ceased abruptly. And my ever ready imagination, stirred to
its depths, beheld that awful scene of the last day: the darkness, such
as sometimes creeps over the city in winter, when the jaundiced smoke
falls down and we read at noonday by gas-light. I beheld the tortured
faces of the wicked gathered on the one side, and my mother on the other
amongst the blessed, gazing across the gulf at me with yearning and
compassion. Strange that it did not strike me that the sight of the
condemned whom they had loved in life would have marred if not destroyed
the happiness of the chosen, about to receive their crowns and harps!
What a theology--that made the Creator and Preserver of all mankind thus
illogical!