Darcy Sherwood had 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 called it. 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 Darcy had 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 was vigilant 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 thrill of 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, and watched 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
accident on 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 it for 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--_born_
blind--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 the preacher 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.