Benefits Forgot Part 2

"O father, not that," cried Jason. "I'll apologize! I'll wear the pants!

Why, it would be Christmas before I'd see them again!"

"I can't accept your apology now. Neither your spirit nor mine is right.

And I cannot retract. Your punishment must stand."

Jason was all child now. "Mother," he cried, "don't let him! Don't let him!"

Mrs. Wilkins' lips quivered. For a moment she could not speak. Then with an inscrutable look into her husband's eyes she said:

"You must obey your father, Jason. You have been very wicked."

Jason put down his candle and sobbed. "I know it. But I'll be good. Let me have my magazines. They're mine. I paid for them."

"No!" roared the minister. "Go to bed, sir, and see to it that you pray for a better heart."

Jason's sobs sounded through the little house long after his father and mother had gone to bed. The minister sighed and turned restlessly.

"Why was I given such a rebellious son, do you suppose?" he asked finally.

"Perhaps G.o.d hopes it'll make you have a better understanding of children," replied Mrs. Wilkins. "Christ said that unless you became like one of them you could not enter the kingdom."

There was another silence with Jason's sobs growing fainter, then, "But he was wicked, Mary, and he deserved punishment."

"But not such a punishment. Of course, I had to support you, no matter what I thought. But O Ethan, Ethan, it's so easy to kill the fineness in a proud and sensitive heart like Jason's."

"Nevertheless," returned the minister, "when he spurns the giving hand of G.o.d, forgiveness is G.o.d's, not mine. We'll discuss it no more."

Nor was the matter discussed again. Jason appeared at breakfast, with dark rings about his eyes, after having done his ch.o.r.es, as usual. Once, it seemed to his mother that he looked at her with a gaze half wondering, half hurt, as if she had failed him when his trust and need had been greatest. But he said nothing and she hoped that her mind had suggested what was in her aching heart and that Jason's was only a child's hurt that would soon heal.

He never again asked for the magazines. On Christmas morning his father placed them, tattered and marred, from their many lendings, beside his plate. Jason did not take them when he left the table and later on his mother carried them up to his room. Whether he read them or not, she did not know. But she was glad to see him begin again to watch for the packet and read the current numbers as they arrived.

She dyed Billy Ames' striped pants in walnut juice and they really looked very well. Jason wore them without comment as he did the shirts she fashioned for him from many shirt tails.

And in the spring they left High Hill for a valley town.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

II

THE CIRCUIT RIDER

[Ill.u.s.tration]

II

THE CIRCUIT RIDER

The years sped on with unbelievable swiftness as they are very p.r.o.ne to do after the corner into the teens is turned.

Jason worked every summer, but he did not offer to buy his mother a dress nor did he buy himself either clothing or books. He put all he earned by toward his course in medicine. When he was a little fellow, his mother had given him a lacquered sewing box that had belonged to her French mother. It had proved an admirable treasure box for childish h.o.a.rdings. Jason, the summer he was thirteen, cleared it out and put into it his summer earnings, ten dollars.

With his newly acquired reticence, he did not speak of the box, nor did he mention the extra bills, quarters and dollars that appeared there from time to time. The little h.o.a.rd grew slowly, very slowly, in spite of these anonymous additions--it grew as slowly as the years sped rapidly, it seemed to Jason's mother.

Jason must have been sixteen, the summer he went with his father on one of the Sunday circuit trips. He never had been on one before. But it had been decided that he was to begin his medical studies in the fall. He was to be apprenticed to a doctor in Baltimore and his mother was anxious for father and son to draw together if possible before the son went into the world. Not that Jason and the minister quarreled. But there never had been the understanding between the two that except for the unfortunate magazine episode, always had existed between Jason and his mother.

The trip lay in the hills of West Virginia. Brother Wilkins rode his old horse, Charley, a handsome gray. Jason rode an old brown mare, borrowed from a parishioner for the trip.

Mrs. Wilkins, standing in the door, watched the two ride off together with a thrill of pride. Jason was almost as tall in the saddle as his father. He had shot up amazingly of late. The minister was getting very gray. He had been late in his thirties when he married. But he sat a horse as though bred to the saddle and Old Charley was a beauty.

Brother Wilkins was very fond of horses and was a good judge of horse flesh. Sometimes Mrs. Wilkins had thought, that if Ethan had not chosen to be a Methodist minister he would have made a first-cla.s.s country squire.

She watched the two out of sight down the valley road, then with a little sigh turned back to the empty home.

Jason, though always a little self-conscious when alone with his father, was delighted with the idea of the trip. They crossed the Ohio on the ferry and rode rapidly into the West Virginia hills. The minister made a great effort to be entertaining and Jason was astonished at his father's intimate knowledge of the countryside.

"I don't see how you remember all the places, father," he said at noon, when the minister had turned to a side road to find a farmer whom he wished to greet.

"I had this circuit years ago before you were born, my boy. I know the people intimately."

"Don't you get tired of it?" asked Jason, suddenly.

"Tired of saving souls?" returned his father. "Do you think you'll ever get tired of saving bodies?"

"O that's different," answered the boy. "You've got something to take hold of, with a body."

"And the body ceases to exist when the soul departs. Never forget that, my boy."

"But you work so hard," insisted Jason, "and you get so little for it. I don't mean money alone," flushing as if at some memory, "but it doesn't seem as if the people care. They'll take all they can get out of each minister as he comes along, and then forget him."

Brother Wilkins looked at Jason, thoughtfully. "Sixteen is very young, Jason. I'm afraid you were born carnal minded. I pray every night of my life that as you grow older, you'll grow toward Christ and not away from Him."

Again Jason flushed uncomfortably and a silence fell that lasted until they reached the remote hill settlement where service was to be held that night. The settlement consisted of a log church, surrounded by a scattered handful of log houses, each already with its tiny glow of light, for night comes early in the hills. The two had eaten a cold lunch in the saddles, for church service would begin as soon as they arrived.

There were twenty-five or thirty people in the rough little church. They crowded round Brother Wilkins enthusiastically when he entered and he called them all by name as he shook hands with them. Jason slid into a back seat. His father mounted to the pulpit.

"Let us open by singing

'How tedious and tasteless the hours When Jesus no longer I see--'"

The old familiar tune! Jason wondered how many meetings his father had opened with it. The audience sang it with a will. In fact with too much will. A group of young men on the rear seat opposite Jason sang with unnecessary fervor, quite drowning out the female voices in the congregation. Jason saw his father, his face heavily shadowed in the candle-light, glance askance at the rear seat.

"Let us pray," said Brother Wilkins. There was a rustle as the congregation knelt. "O G.o.d, I have come to You again in this mountain place after many years and many wanderings. I thank You for giving me this privilege. I have greeted old friends who have not forgotten me and who all these years have remembered You and Christ, Your only begotten Son. Tonight, O Heavenly Father, I have brought with me to this sacred fold my own one lamb that he might see how sacred and how great is Your power. Look on him tonight, O Supreme Master, and mark him for Your own. And remember, that if the young men in the rear seat plan any disturbance tonight, O Heavenly Father, that the arm of Thy priest is strong and the soul of Thy servant is resolute. For Jesus Christ's sake, Amen."