CHAPTER XXXVI

AGAIN A MESSAGE FROM MOTHER

Out in the woods the minister walked alone. As usual he wanted to find the crystal-clear spring that he knew was near by. As he approached the spring silently in the soft moss, he thought he heard the sound of sobbing.

Deeply sympathetic, he hurried toward the sound. He advanced a couple of steps, but stopped in wonder and perplexity.

The boy whom he had just seen and whose courageous appearance as a preacher out in the woods had awakened his wondering surprise, lay on the ground close beside the spring, shaking with sobs.

‘What good is it that I stand and make a show for people we don’t belong to?’ sobbed the boy. ‘What good is it that I dragged the little girls and all of us away from the mountains and the little gray house there? If we had stayed, even if it had been in the poor-house, we would never have known that there was anything better for us, and thought it should be so. But now I don’t think so any more, ’cause now I want something better. I must know something about everything on earth, and be like the fine children here. And now it is only heavy and sad inside of me. I don’t want to walk the roads and be ashamed when I go into a house, and haven’t anything to trade for food. I _don’t want_ to be a beggar that no one likes and cares anything about, no matter what he says. I don’t want to stand on a stone in the woods and preach. I want to stand in a church and tell people what mother taught us. But I just have to walk and walk; it burns worse and worse inside me, as if I never do what is right, even though I want to. Dear God, please, care for me so that I will like to do what you want and so that I don’t do like little Magnus and just want to forget it.’

Andy looked up in terror. He thought he heard a rustle, saw the shadow of a person.

It was the minister who now approached him.

Ashamed and so crushed that he scarcely dared look up, Andy came to his feet. He seized the tin pitcher Anna-Dea had thrown to him when she saw him set off into the woods toward the spring.

Andy plunged the pitcher into the spring and saw with repulsion his swollen face twistedly reflect itself in it.

‘Will you give me a drink before you fill the pitcher?’ said the minister’s calm, gentle voice.

Andy looked up in surprise into the trustworthy, deep dark eyes that so kindly, so understandingly were turned upon him.

He did not know how it happened, but he found himself quite fearlessly wandering down the winding path toward the marsh with the man who just now, when he saw him from ‘the pulpit,’ had given him such a painfully humiliating feeling of shyness.

The two sat a long time on the mossy stone down by the marsh, the older man with the kind heart, sensitive to all trouble and need, and the boy with the exhausted, shrinking, meditative spirit, now suddenly so open-hearted and cheerful.

Andy could now, as if he were talking to God, talk about everything that had weighed upon him. He could describe simply and clearly the uneasiness he had continually felt about the little brothers and sisters before he found such homes for them as he knew mother would have liked. He talked about her love and suffering and death, and about how he had promised her to look after the children and the goat.

Yes, at last Andy could talk, without shyness or fear, even about what had grown up innermost in him. He thought it had been in him since the first time, when he was only a few years old, that he went to an early Christmas morning service at the little chapel at Barren Moor. Andy now found words to express his absolutely impossible desire to be, _some time, a minister_.

The already won friend sat now silent and thoughtful. He sat a long time without, as before, encouraging the boy to open his heart with serious simple questions or little sympathetic exclamations.

At last he stood up. A holy resolution seemed to shine in his eyes.

‘It is not the work of people or an accident that put you in my way, boy. It is God’s work and will. I believe that we ought to follow the road that your mother’s prayers have opened for you.’

Andy looked up astonished, as if blinded by lightning.

‘You will have your bringing-up with us, and study at the college in the city. I am sure of God’s blessing in the undertaking both for you and for us. We, my wife and I, will be mother and father to you, always wishing you well. You will be a good son to us, and _that is settled_. God bless you, my boy!’

Andy felt a hand steadily, solemnly, placed on his head.

Foster-father and foster-son stood together out in the woods by the sleeping marsh in the summer night that was as light as day.

Andy felt himself in a dream. It seemed to him that God’s angels would appear out of the sheer hazy veil that hung over the marsh. He would not have been surprised if he had seen mother’s face in the soft mist, smiling as brightly as when she had left them with words of blessing.