Butler Ellis Parker
Dominie Dean: A Novel

XXVI. “OUR DAVID”

I GET back to Riverbank but seldom. I have just returned from one of my infrequent visits there, the first in many years. First I had my business to attend to; later, at the office of the lawyer and on the street, I met many of those I had known when I lived in Riverbank. The faces of most puzzled me, being not quite remembered. My memory had to struggle to recognize them, as if it saw the faces through a ground glass on which it had to breathe before they became clear. Many seemed glad to see me again and that was a great pleasure to me. It was almost like a game of “hidden faces” but with faces of living men and women to be guessed. This all happened in the first hour or so after I had finished my business, and rapidly, and then I turned from one of these resurrected faces to find a young girl standing waiting to speak to me.

“You don’t remember me,” she said with a smile, because she saw my puzzled face. “I was a baby when you went away. Dora Graham. You wouldn’t remember me. Mack Graham is my father. I dared to speak to you because father has spoken of you so often – of you and Mr. Dean.”

“Oh, I do remember Mack!” I exclaimed. “I must see him if I can before I go.”

“Please,” she said. “It would mean so much to him.”

She was not too well-dressed. She reminded me of Alice Dean in the days when Lanny was courting her, making the bravest show she could with her cheap, neat hat and neat, inexpensive garments. I guessed that Mack Graham was not one of the town’s new rich men.

“I’ll see him if I have to stay over a day,” I told her. “And our dominie, Dominie Dean, you can tell me how to get to his house!”

“I’m just from there,” she said. “Are you going to see him? He will be so pleased; he spoke about you. You know he is very poor? It’s pitiful; it makes my heart ache every time I go there.”

“But I thought – ” I said.

“About his being made pastor emeritus? Yes, they did that for him. Father made them do that, when they were going to drop him out of the church as they always used to drop the old men. Father fought for that. We were so proud of father, mother and I. He was like a rock, like a mountain of rock, about it. They were afraid of him. But the money was nothing, almost nothing.”

“How much?” I asked, but she did not know that. She only knew that it must be very little; the new dominie would not come for what had been paid David; there had not been much to spare for a discarded and worn-out old man.

I walked up the hill and over the hill and down the other side, to where the cheap little cottages stand in a row facing the deserted brickyard which will, some day, be town lots. I found David on the little porch, sitting in the sun, and he arose as I entered the gate, and stood waiting to grasp my hand, although he could not yet see me distinctly enough to recognize me; his eyes were failing, he told me.

He was very feeble, but as gently cheerful as ever, still striving to keep an even mind under all circumstances. Alice came out when she heard us talking; she looked older, in worry, than her father. It was evident they were very poor.

I went up to see ‘Thusia. I did not mind the narrow stairs nor the low-ceiled room in which I found her, for a home and happiness may be anywhere, but I felt a hot, personal shame that anything quite so mean should be the reward of our David.

It was harder to speak cheerfully with ‘Thusia than with David. I would not have known her, so little of her was there left, the blue veins standing out under the skin of her shrunken hands, and her face not at all that of the ‘Thusia I had known when I was a child. I talked of myself and of my family and of my little successes, and all the while I felt that she must see through me, and that she must know I was chattering to hide the pain I felt at seeing these dear friends so changed, and so deep in poverty. In this I was mistaken. Her only thought was gratitude that I had found time to come to them, and pleasure to know all was well with me.

“You’ll come when you come to Riverbank again,” she said when I had to leave her, “It has done me so much good to see you. Now go down and give David the rest of your visit.”

She raised her hand for me to take in farewell.

“God has been very good to us,” she said.

When I went down Alice had brought her sewing to the porch, and had carried out a chair for me – such a shabby chair – and Rose Hinch was there. She hurriedly hid a paper parcel behind her skirt when she arose to greet me, but it toppled over and a raw potato rolled out. I pretended to be unaware of it. I knew then that our David still had one friend, and guessed who reminded the older church members that David and ‘Thusia might some days go hungry, unless they received such alms as were given to the very poor.

I sat for an hour, talking with David and Rose and Alice, and for an hour tried to forget that this poverty was David’s reward for a life spent in serving God and his people, and then Rose and I left, and I walked over the hill with her. We talked of David, and when I told her I was going to see Mack Graham she said she would go with me.

The small real estate office, on a second floor, was not as shabby as I had expected, nor was Mack Graham as shabby.

“Big family, that’s all the matter with me,” he told me cheerfully. “I want you to come up to dinner if you can and meet my brood. So you’ve been up to see our David! How is he to-day!”

“Mack,” I said, “can’t something be done! Can’t someone here start something! I know how a place gets in a rut – how we forget the things we have with us day by day. If you could go away, as I went, and come back to see our David as he is now, poor, discarded, neglected – ”

“Rose, what do you mean, neglecting our David!” Mack asked, almost gayly.

Rose smiled sadly.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Mack said, reaching for an envelope on his desk. “Our church is changed. Most of the old people are gone now. I felt the way you did about it – it was a pity our David wasn’t a horse instead of a man; then we could have shot him when we had worn him out and were through with him. Folks forget things, don’t they! Well – ”

He drew a letter from the envelope and passed it to me.

When I had read the letter I was not quite as ashamed of my kind as I had been a moment before. The letter did not promise much. It seemed there was not a great deal of money available and the calls were many, but, after all, there was a Fund and it could spare something for David, as much, perhaps, as a child could earn picking berries in a season each year. But it would mean all the difference between penury and dread of the poorhouse on the one hand and safety on the other to David. I thought how glad David would be and how grateful. I handed the letter to Rose Hinch.

She read it in silence and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes.

“I am so glad – for ‘Thusia,” she said. “She has worried so for fear David might have to go to the poorhouse – alone! She has been afraid to die; David would have been so lonely in the poor-house.”

“Well, it is great anyway!” said Mack more noisily than necessary. “So come up to the house to dinner. You, too, Rose. We’ll give our dominie the letter. We’ll have him come to dinner, too, and Alice, and we’ll celebrate – ”

Rose smiled, as she used to smile in the days when I first knew her.

“No, Mack,” she said. “We will give him the letter when he has put on his hat and coat, and is going home. He will want ‘Thusia to be the first to be glad with him.”

So that was how it was done.