They had not been able to support themselves, to rear and educate him,
on their income alone, and gradually their small capital had been
consumed. They were about to negotiate the sale of their home, the
proceeds of which would keep them from want--if they did not live too
long. They tried to make light of it, but Thompson grasped the tragedy.
They had been born in that brick cottage with the silver birch before
the door.
"Well," he said at length, "I don't want to preëmpt the Lord's
prerogative of providing. But I can't permit this state of affairs. I
wish you had taken me into your confidence, aunties, when I was a
youngster. However, that doesn't matter now. Can you live comfortably on
eleven hundred dollars a year?"
Aunt Harriet held up her hands.
"My dear boy," she said, "such a sum would give us luxuries, us two old
women. But that is out of the question. If we get five thousand for the
place we shall have to live on a great deal less than that."
"Forget that nonsense about selling this place," Thompson said roughly.
That grated on him. He felt a sense of guilt, of responsibility too long
neglected. "Where I'm going I shall be supplied by the government with
all I need. I've made some money. I own war-bonds sufficient to give you
eleven hundred a year in interest. I'll turn them over to you. If I come
back with a whole skin when the war's over, I'll be able to use the
capital in a way to provide for all of us. If I don't come back, you'll
be secure against want as long as you live."
He made good his word before his leave was up. He had very nearly lost
faith in the value of money, of any material thing. He had struggled for
money and power for a purpose, to demonstrate that he was a man equal to
any man's struggle. He had signally failed in his purpose, for reasons
that were still a little obscure to him. Failure had made him a little
bitter, bred a pessimism it took the plight of his aunts to cure. Even
if he had failed to achieve his heart's desire he had acquired power to
make two lives content. Save that it ministered to his self-respect to
know that he could win in that fierce struggle of the marketplace, money
had lost its high value for him. Money was only a means, not an end. But
to have it, to be able to bestow it where it was sadly needed, was worth
while, after all. If he "crashed" over there, it was something to have
banished the grim spectre of want from these two who were old and
helpless.
He was thinking of this along with a jumble of other thoughts as he
leaned on the rail of a transport slipping with lights doused out of the
port of Halifax. There was a lump in his throat because of those two old
women who had cried over him and clung to him when he left them. There
was another woman on the other side of the continent to whom his going
meant nothing, he supposed, save a duty laggardly performed. And he
would have sold his soul to feel her arms around his neck and her lips
on his before he went.