One rainy day when the conclave in Brotherton’s cigar store was weary of discussing the quarrel of Mr. Conklin and Mr. Blaine and the eccentricities of the old German Kaiser, the subject of love came before the house for discussion. Dr. Nesbit, who dropped in incidentally to buy a cigar, but primarily to see George Brotherton about some matters of state in the Third ward, found young Tom Van Dorn stroking his new silky mustache, squinting his eyes and considering himself generally in the attitude of little Jack Horner after the plum episode.
“Speaking broadly,” squeaked the Doctor, breaking irritably into the talk, “touching the ladies, God bless ’em–from young Tom’s angle, there’s nothing to ’em. Broad is the petticoat that leadeth to destruction.” The Doctor turned from young Van Dorn, and looked critically at some obvious subject of Van Dorn’s remarks as she picked her way across the muddy street, showing something more than a wink of striped stockings, “Tom, there’s nothing in it–not a thing in the world.”
“Oh,–I don’t know,” returned the youth, wagging an impudent, though good-natured head at the Doctor; “what else is there in the world if not in that? The world’s full of it–flowers, trees, birds, beasts, men and women–the whole damn universe is afire with it. It’s God; there is no other God–just nature building and propagating and perpetuating herself.”
“I suppose,” squeaked the Doctor with a sigh, as he reached for his morning paper, “that if I had nothing else to do for a living except practice law with Joe Calvin on the side and just be twenty-five years old three hundred days in the year, and no other chores except to help old man Sands rib up his waterworks deal, I would hold some such general views myself. But when I was twenty-five, young man, Bedelia and I were running a race with the meal ticket, and our notions as to the moral government of the universe came hard and were deepset, and we can’t change them now.”
George Brotherton, Henry Fenn, Captain Morton and Amos Adams came in with a kind of Greek chorus of general agreement with the Doctor. Van Dorn cocked his hat over his eyes and laughed, and then the Doctor went on in his high falsetto:
“It’s all right, Tom; go it while you’re young. But that kind of love’s young dream generally ends in a nightmare.” He hesitated a minute, and then said: “Well, so long as we’re all here in the family, I’ll tell you about a case I had last night. There’s an old fellow–old Dutchman to be exact, down in Spring township; he came here with us when we founded the town; husky old boy, that is, he used to be fifteen years ago. And he had Tom’s notion about the ladies, God bless ’em, when he was Tom’s age. When I first knew him his notion was causing him trouble, and had settled in one leg, and last night he died of the ladies, God bless ’em.”
The Doctor’s face flinched with pain, and his treble voice winced as he spoke: “Lord, but he suffered, and to add to his physical torment, he knew that he had to leave his daughter all alone in the world–and without a mother and without a dollar; but that isn’t the worst, and he knew it–at the last. This being twenty-five for a living is the hardest job on earth–when you’re sixty, and the old man knew that. The girl has missed his blood taint; she’s not scarred nor disfigured. It would be better if she were; but he gave her something worse–she’s his child!” For a moment the Doctor was silent, then he sighed deeply and shut his eyes as he said: “Boys, for a year and more he’s been seeing all that he was, bud like a glorious poison in his daughter.”
Van Dorn smiled, and asked casually, “Well, what’s her name?” The rest of the group in the store looked down their noses and the Doctor, with his paper under his arm, obviously ignored the question and only stopped in the door to pipe out: “This wasn’t the morning to talk to me of the ladies–God bless ’em.”
The men in the store watched him as he started across the street, and then saw Laura skip gayly toward him, and the two, holding hands, crossed the muddy street together. She was laughing, and the joy of her soul–a child’s soul, shone like a white flame in the dull street and George Brotherton, who saw the pair in the street, roared out: “Well, say–now isn’t that something worth looking at? That beats Niagara Falls and Pike’s Peak–for me.”
Captain Morton looked at the gay pair attentively for a moment and spoke: “And I have three to his one; I tell you, gentlemen–three to his one; and I guess I haven’t told you gentlemen about it, but I got the exclusive agency for seven counties for Golden’s Patent Self-Opening Fruit Can, an absolute necessity for every household, and in another year my three will be wearing their silks and diamonds!” He smiled proudly around the group and added: “My! that doesn’t make any difference. Silk or gingham, I know I’ve got the best girls on earth–why, if their mother could just see ’em–see how they’re unfolding–why, Emma can make every bit as good hash as her mother,” a hint of tears stood in his blue eyes. “Why–men, I tell you sometimes I want to die and go right off to Heaven to tell mother all the fine news about ’em–eh?” Deaf John Kollander, with his hand to his less affected ear, nodded approval and said, “That’s what I always said, James G. Blaine never was a true friend of the soldier!”
Van Dorn had been looking intently at nothing through the store window. When no one answered Captain Morton, Van Dorn addressed the house rather impersonally:
“Man is the blindest of the mammals. You’d think as smart a man as Dr. Nesbit would see his own vices. Here he is mayor of Harvey, boss of the town. He buys men with Morty’s father’s money and sells ’em in politics like sheep–not for his own gain; not for his family’s gain; but just for the joy of the sport; just as I follow the ladies, God bless ’em; and yet he stands up and reads me a lecture on the wickedness of a little more or less innocent flirting.” The young man lighted his cigar at the alcohol flame on the counter. “Morty,” he continued, squinting his eyes and stroking his mustache, and looking at the boy with vast vanity, “Morty, do you know what your old dad and yon virtuous Nesbit pasha are doing? Well, I’ll tell you something you didn’t learn at military school. They’re putting up a deal by which we’ve voted one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of city bonds as bonus in aid of a system of city water works and have given them to your dad outright, for putting in a plant that he will own and control; and that he will build for seventy-five thousand dollars.” Van Dorn smiled a placid, malevolent smile at the group and went on: “And the sheik of the village there helped Daniel Sands put it through; helped him buy me as city attorney, with your father’s bank’s legal business; helped buy Dick Bowman, poor devil with a houseful of children for a hundred dollars for his vote in the council, helped work George here for his vote in the council by lending money to him for his business; and so on down the line. The Doc calls that politics, and regards it as one of his smaller vices; but me?” scoffed the young man, “when I go gamboling down the primrose path of dalliance with a lady on each arm–or maybe more, I am haled before the calif and sentenced to his large and virtuous displeasure. Man,”–here young Mr. Van Dorn drummed his fingers on the showcase and considered the universe calmly through the store window–“man is the blindest of mammals.” After which smiling deliverance, Thomas Van Dorn picked up his morning paper, and his gloves, and stalked with some dignity into the street.
“Well, say,”–Brotherton was the first to speak–“rather cool–”
“Shame, shame!” cried John Kollander, as he buttoned up his blue coat with its brass buttons. “Where was Blaine when the bullets were thickest? Answer me that.” No one answered, but Captain Morton began:
“Now, George, why, that’s all right. Didn’t the people vote the bonds after you fellows submitted ’em? Of course they did. The town wanted waterworks; Daniel Sands knew how to build ’em–eh? The people couldn’t build ’em themselves, could they?” asked the Captain triumphantly. Brotherton laughed; Morty Sands grinned,–and, shame be to Amos Adams, the rugged Puritan, who had opposed the bonds in his paper so boldly, he only shook a sorrowful head and lifted no voice in protest. Such is the weakness of our thunderers without their lightning! Brotherton, who still seemed uneasy, went on: “Say, men, didn’t that franchise call for a system of electric lights and gas in five years and a telephone system in ten years more–all for that $100,000; I’m right here to tell you we got a lot for our money.”
Again Amos Adams swallowed his Adam’s apple and cut in as boldly as a man may who thinks with his lead pencil: “And don’t forget the street car franchises you gave away at the same time. Water, light, gas, telephone and street car franchises for fifty years and one hundred thousand to boot! It seemed to me you were giving away a good deal!”
But John Kollander’s approving nod and George Brotherton’s great laugh overcame the editor, and the talk turned to other things.
There came a day in Harvey when men, looking back at events from the perspective of another day, believed that in those old days of Harvey, Daniel Sands was master and Dr. Nesbit was servant. And there was much evidence to indicate that Daniel’s was the master spirit of those early times. But the evidence was merely based on facts, and facts often are far from the truth. The truth is that Daniel Sands was the beneficiary of much of the activity of Doctor Nesbit in those days, but the truth is also that Doctor Nesbit did what he did–won the county seat for Harvey, secured the railroad, promoted the bond election, which gave Daniel Sands the franchises for the distribution of water, gas and electricity–not because the Doctor had any particular regard for Daniel Sands but because, first of all, the good of the town, as the Doctor saw it, seemed to require him to act as he acted; and second, because his triumph at any of these elections meant power, and he was greedy for power. But he always used his power to make others happy. No man ever came to the Doctor looking for work that he could not find work for that man. Men in ditches, men on light poles, men in the court house, men at Daniel Sands’s furnaces, men grading new streets, men working on city or county contracts knew but one source of authority in Harvey, and that was Doctor James Nesbit. Daniel Sands was a mere money grubbing incident of that power. Daniel could have won no one to vote with him; the county seat would have gone to a rival town, the railroad would not have veered five miles out of its way to reach Harvey, and a dozen promoters would have wrangled for a dozen franchises but for Dr. Nesbit.
And if Dr. Nesbit made it his business to see that Dick Bowman had work, it was somewhat because he knew how badly the little Bowmans needed food. And if he saw to it that Dick’s vote in the council occasionally yielded him a substantial return from those whom that vote benefited so munificently, it was partly because the Doctor felt how sorely Lida Bowman, silently bending over her washtub, needed the little comforts which the extra fifty-dollar bill would bring that Dick sometimes found in his monthly pay envelope. And if the Doctor saw to it that Ira Dooley was made foreman of the water works gang, or that Tom Williams had the contract for the stone work on the new court house, it was largely in payment for services rendered by Ira and Tom in bringing in the Second Ward for John Kollander for county clerk. The rewards of Ira and Tom in working for the Doctor were virtue’s own; and if re-marking a hundred ballots was part of that blessed service, well and good. And also it must be recorded that the foremanship and the stone contract were somewhat the Doctor’s way of showing Mrs. Dooley and Mrs. Williams that he wished them well.
Doctor Nesbit’s scheme of politics included no punishments for his enemies, and he desired every one for his friend. The round, pink face, the high-roached, yellow hair, the friendly, blue eyes, had no place for hate in them, and in the high-pitched, soft voice was no note of terror to evil doers. His countenance did not betray his power; that was in his tireless little legs, his effective hands, and his shrewd brain motived by a heart too kind for the finer moral distinctions that men must make who go far in this world. Yet because he had a heart, a keen mind, even without much conscience, and a vision larger than those about him, Dr. Nesbit was their leader. He did not move in a large sphere, but in his small sphere he was the central force, the dominating spirit. And off in a dark corner, Daniel Sands, who was hunger incarnate and nothing more, spun his web, gathered the dust and the flies and the weaker insects and waxed fat. To say that his mind ruled Dr. Nesbit’s, to say that Daniel Sands was master and Dr. Nesbit servant in those first decades of Harvey–whatever the facts may seem in those later days–is one of those ornately ridiculous travesties upon the truth that facts sometimes are arranged to make. But how little did they know what they were building! For they and their kind all over America working in the darkness of their own selfish desires, were laying footing stones–quite substantial yet necessary–for the structure of a growing civilization which in its time, stripped of its scaffolding and extraneous débris, was to stand among the nations of the earth as a tower of righteousness in a stricken world.
CHAPTER IV
THE ADAMS FAMILY BIBLE LIES LIKE A GENTLEMAN
How light a line divides comedy from tragedy! When the ass speaks, or the man brays, there is comedy. Yet fate may stop the mouth of either man or ass, and in the dumb struggle for voice, if fate turns the screws of destiny upon duty, there is tragedy. Only the consequences of a day or a deed can decide whether it shall have the warm blessing of our smiles or the bitter benediction of our tears.
This, one must remember in reading the chapter of this story that shall follow. It is the close of the story to which Mary Adams, with her memory book and notes and clippings, has contributed much. For of the pile of envelopes all numbered in their order; the one marked “Margaret Müller” was the last envelope that she left. Now the package that concerns Margaret Müller may not be transcribed separately but must be woven into the woof of the tale. The package contains a clipping, a dozen closely written pages, and a photograph–a small photograph of a girl. The photograph is printed on the picture of a scroll, and the likeness of the girl does not throb with life as it did thirty years ago when it was taken. Then the plump, voluptuous arm and shoulders in the front of the picture seemed to exude life and to bristle with the temptation that lurked under the brown lashes shading her big, innocent, brown eyes. And her hair, her wonderful brown hair that fell in a great rope to her knees, in this photograph is hidden, and only her frizzes, covering a fine forehead, are emphasized by the picture maker. One may smile at the picture now, but then when it was taken it told of the red of her lips and the pink of her flesh, and the dimples that forever went flickering across her face. In those days, the old-fashioned picture portrayed with great clearness the joy and charm and impudence of that beautiful face. But now the picture is only grotesque. It proves rather than discloses that once, when she was but a young girl, Margaret Müller had wonderfully molded arms and shoulders, regular features and enchanting eyes. But that is all the picture shows. In the photograph is no hint of her mellow voice, of her eager expression and of the smoldering fires of passion, ambition and purpose that smoked through those gay, bewitching eyes. The old-fashioned frizzled hair on her forehead, the obvious pose of her hand with its cheap rings, the curious cut of her dress, made after that travesty of the prevailing mode which country papers printed in their fashion columns, the black court-plaster beauty spot on her cheek and the lace fichu draped over her head and bare shoulders, all stand out like grinning gargoyles that keep much of the charm she had in those days imprisoned from our eyes to-day. So the picture alone is of no great service. Nor will the clipping tell much. It only records:
“Miss Margaret Müller, daughter of the late Herman Müller of Spring Township, this county, will teach school in District 18, the Adams District in Prospect Township, this fall and winter. She will board with the family of ye editor.”
Now the reader must know that Margaret Müller’s eyes had been turned to Harvey as to a magnet for three years. She had chosen the Adams district school in Prospect Township, because the Adams district school was nearer than any other school district to Harvey; she had gone to the Adamses to board because the little bleak house near the Wahoo was the nearest house in the district to Harvey and to a social circle which she desired to enter–the best that Harvey offered.
She saw Grant, a rough, ruddy, hardy lad, of her own time of life, moving in the very center of the society she cherished in her dreams, and Margaret had no gay inadvertence in her scheme of creation. So when the lank, strapping, red-headed boy of a man’s height, with a man’s shoulders and a child’s heart, started to Harvey for high school every morning, as she started to teach her country school, he carried with him, beside his lunch, a definite impression that Margaret was a fine girl. Often, indeed, he thought her an extraordinarily fine girl. Tales of prowess he brought back from the Harvey High School, and she listened with admiring face. For they related to youths whose names she knew as children of the socially elect.
A part of her admiration for Grant was due to the fact that Grant had leaped the social gulf–deep even then in Harvey–between those who lived on the hill, and the dwellers in the bottoms near the river.
This instinctively Margaret Müller knew, also–though perhaps unconsciously–that even if they lived in the bottoms, the Adamses were of the aristoi; because they were friends of the Nesbits, and Mrs. Nesbit of Maryland was the fountain head of all the social glory of Harvey. Thus Margaret Müller of Spring Township came to camp before Harvey for a lifetime siege, and took her ground where she could aim straight at the Nesbits and Kollanders and Sandses and Mortons and Calvins. With all her banners flying, banners gaudy and beautiful, banners that flapped for men and sometimes snapped at women, she set her forces down before Harvey, and saw the beleaguered city through the portals of Grant’s fine, wide, blue eyes, within an easy day’s walk of her own place in the world. So she hovered over Grant, played her brown eyes upon him, flattered him, unconsciously as is the way of the female, when it would win favor, and because she was wise, wiser than even her own head knew, she cast upon the youth a strange spell.
Those were the days when Margaret Müller came first to early bloom. They were the days when her personality was too big for her body, so it flowed into everything she wore; on the tips of every ribbon at her neck, she glowed with a kind of electric radiance. A flower in her hair seemed as much a part of her as the turn of her cleft chin. A bow at her bosom was vibrant with her. And to Grant even the things she touched, after she was gone, thrilled him as though they were of her.
Now the pages that are to follow in this chapter are not written for him who has reached that grand estate where he may feel disdain for the feverish follies of youth. A lad may be an ass; doubtless he is. A maid may be as fitful as the west wind, and in the story of the fitfulness and folly of the man and the maid, there is vast pathos and pain, from which pathos and pain we may learn wisdom. Now the strange part of this story is not what befell the youth and the maid; for any tragedy that befalls a youth and a maid, is natural enough and in the order of things, as Heaven knows well. The strange part of this story is that Mary and Amos Adams were, for all their high hopes of the sunrise, like the rest of us in this world–only human; stricken with that inexplicable parental blindness that covers our eyes when those we love are most needing our care.
Yet how could they know that Grant needed their care? Was he not in their eyes the fairest of ten thousand? They enshrined him in a kind of holy vision. It seems odd that a strapping, pimple-faced, freckled, red-headed boy, loudmouthed and husky-voiced, more or less turbulent and generally in trouble for his insistent defense of his weaker playmates–it seems odd that such a boy could be the center of such grand dreams as they dreamed for their boy. Yet there was the boy and there were the dreams. If he wrote a composition for school that pleased his parents, they were sure it foretold the future author, and among her bundle of notes for the Book, his mother has cherished the manuscript for his complete works. If at school Friday afternoon, he spoke a piece, “trippingly on the tongue,” they harkened back over his ancestry to find the elder Adams of Massachusetts who was a great orator. When he drove a nail and made a creditable bobsled, they saw in him a future architect and stored the incident for the Romance that was to be biography. When he organized a baseball club, they saw in him the budding leadership that should make him a ruler of men. Even Grant’s odd mania to take up the cause of the weak–often foolish causes that revealed a kind of fanatic chivalry in him–Mary noted too; and saw the youth a mailed knight in the Great Battle that should precede and usher in the sunrise.
Jasper was a little boy and his parents loved him dearly; but Grant, the child of their honeymooning days, held their hearts. And so their vanity for him became a kind of mellow madness that separated them from a commonsense world. And here is a curious thing also–the very facts that were making Grant a leader of his fellows should have warned Mary and Amos that their son was setting out on his journey from the heart of his childish paradise. He was growing tall, strong, big-voiced, with hands, broad and muscular, that made him a baseball catcher of a reputation wider than the school-grounds, yet he had a child’s quick wit and merry heart. Such a boy dominated the school as a matter of course, yet so completely had his parents daubed their eyes with pride that they could not see that his leadership in school came from the fact that a man was rising in him–the far-casting shadow of a virility deep and significant as destiny itself. They could not see the man’s body; they saw only the child’s heart. It was natural that they should ask themselves what honor could possibly come to the house of Adams or to any house, for that matter, further than that which illumined it when Grant came home to announce that he had been elected President of the senior class in the Harvey High School and would deliver the valedictory address at commencement. When Mary and Amos learned that news, they had indeed found the hero for their book. After that, even his cousin, Morty Sands, home from college for a time, little, wiry, agile, and with a face half ferret and half angel, even Morty, who had an indefinite attachment for glowing exuberant Laura Nesbit, felt that so long as Grant held her attention–great, hulking, noisy, dominant Grant–even Morty arrayed in his college clothes, like Solomon, would have to wait until the fancy for Grant had passed. So Morty backed Grant with all his pocket money as a ball player while he fluttered rather gayly about Ave Calvin–and always with an effect of inadvertence.
Now if a lad is an ass–and he is–how should a poor jack be supposed to know of the wisdom of the serpent? For we must remember that early youth has been newly driven from the heart of that paradise wherein there is no good and evil. He gropes in darkness as he comes nearer the gates of his paradise, through an unchartered wilderness. But to Mary and Amos, Grant seemed to be wandering in the very midst of his Eden. They did not realize how he was groping and stumbling, nor could they know what a load he carried–this ass of a lad coming toward the gate of the Garden. In those times when he sat in his room, trying to show his soul bashfully to Laura Nesbit as he wrote to her in Maryland at school, Grant felt always, over and about him, the consciousness of the spell of Margaret Müller, yet he did not know what the spell was. He wrestled with it when finally he came rather dimly to sense it, and tried with all the strength of his ungainly soul to be loyal to the choice of his heart. His will was loyal, yet the smiles, the eyes, the soft tempting face of Margaret always were near him. Furious storms of feeling swayed him. For youth is the time of tempest. In our teens come those floods of soul stuff through the gates of heredity, swinging open for the last time in life, floods that bring into the world the stores of the qualities of mind and heart from outside ourselves; floods stored in Heaven’s reservoir, gushing from the almost limitlessly deep springs of our ancestry; floods which draw us in resistless currents to our destinies. And so the ass, laden with this relay of life from the source of life, that every young, blind ass brings into the world, floundered in the flood.
Grant thought his experience was unique. Yet it is the common lot of man. To feel his soul exposed at a thousand new areas of sense; to see a new heaven and a new earth–strange, mysterious, beautiful, unfolding to his eyes; to smell new scents; to hear new sounds in the woods and fields; to look open-eyed and wondering at new relations of things that unfold in the humdrum world about him, as he flees out of the blind paradise of childhood; to dream new dreams; to aspire to new heights, to feel impulses coming out of the dark that tremble like the blare of trumpets in the soul,–this is the way of youth.
With all his loyalty for Laura Nesbit–loyalty that enshrined her as a comrade and friend, such is the contradiction of youth that he was madly jealous of every big boy at the country school who cast eyes at Margaret Müller. And because she was ages older than he, she knew it; and it pleased her. She knew that she could make all his combs and crests and bands and wattles and spurs glisten, and he knew in some deep instinct that when she sang the emotion in her voice was a call to him that he could not put into words. Thus through the autumn, Margaret and Grant were thrown together daily in the drab little house by the river. Now a boy and a girl thrown together commonly make the speaking donkeys of comedy. Yet one never may be sure that they may not be the dumb struggling creatures of the tragic muse. Heaven knows Margaret Müller was funny enough in her capers. For she related her antics–her grand pouts, her elaborate condescensions, her crass coquetry and her hidings and seekings–into what she called a “case.” In the only wisdom she knew, to open a flirtation was to have a “case.” So Margaret ogled and laughed and touched and ran and giggled and cried and played with her prey with a practiced lore of the heart that was far beyond the boy’s knowledge. Grant did not know what spell was upon him. He did not know that his great lithe body, his gripping hands, his firm legs and his long arms that had in their sinews the power that challenged her to wrestle when she was with him–he did not know what he meant to the girl who was forever teasing and bantering him when they were alone. For it was only when Margaret and Grant were alone or when no one but little Jasper was with them, that Margaret indulged in the joys of the chase. Yet often when other boys came to see her–the country boys from the Prospect school district perhaps, or lorn swains trailing up from Spring Township–Margaret did not conceal her fluttering delight in them from Mary Adams. So the elder woman and the girl had long talks in which Margaret agreed so entirely with Mary Adams that Mary doubted the evidence of her eyes. And Amos in those days was much interested in certain transcendental communications coming from his Planchette board and purporting to be from Emerson who had recently passed over. So Amos had no eyes for Margaret and Mary was fooled by the girl’s fine speech. Yet sometimes late at night when Margaret was coming in from a walk or a ride with one of her young men, Mary heard a laugh–a high, hysterical laugh–that disquieted Mary Adams in spite of all Margaret’s fair speaking. But never once did Mary connect in her mind Margaret’s wiles with Grant. Such is the blindness of mothers; such is the deep wisdom of women!
All the while Grant floundered more hopelessly into the quicksand of Margaret’s enchantment, and when he tried to write to Laura Nesbit, half-formed shames fluttered and flushed across his mind. So often he sat alone for long night hours in his attic bedroom in vague agonies and self accusations, pen in hand, trying to find honest words that would fill out his tedious letter. Being a boy and being not entirely outside the gate of his childish paradise, he did not understand the shadow that was clouding his heart.
But there came one day when the gate closed and looking back, he saw the angel–the angel with the flaming sword. Then he knew. Then he saw the face that made the shadow and that day a great trembling came into his soul, a blackness of unspeakable woe came over him, and he was ashamed of the light. After that he never wrote to Laura Nesbit.
In May Margaret’s school closed, and the Adamses asked her to remain with them for the summer, and she consented rather listlessly. The busy days of the June harvest combined with the duties of printing a newspaper made their Sunday visits with the Nesbits irregular. It was in July that Mrs. Nesbit asked for Margaret, and Mary Adams remembered that Margaret, whose listlessness had grown into sullenness, had found some excuse for being absent whenever the Nesbits came to spend the afternoon with the Adamses. Then in August, when Amos came home one night, he saw Margaret hurry from the front porch. He went into the house and heard Mary and Grant sobbing inside and heard Mary’s voice lifted in prayer, with agony in her voice. It was no prayer for forgiveness nor for mercy, but for guidance and strength, and he stepped to the bedroom and saw the two kneeling there with Margaret’s shawl over the chair where Mary knelt. There he heard Mary tell the story of her boy’s shame to her God.