In such a painful and painstaking mood he was carried over the Alleghenies and out on the Western plains. He changed trains at Chicago without having slept, and all he could remember of the journey was a protracted sorrow, a stabbing consciousness of Roseanne, dulled by his last picture of her, and a hopeless guessing of what she thought about him now.
Hugo's mother met him at the station. She was unaltered, everything was unaltered. The last few instants in the vestibule of the train had been a series of quick remembrances; the whole countryside was like a long-deserted house to which he had returned. The mountains took on a familiar aspect, then the houses, then the dingy red station. Lastly his mother, upright and uncompromisingly grim, dressed in her perpetual mourning of black silk. Her recognition of Hugo produced only the slightest flurry and immediately she became mundane.
"Whatever made you come in those clothes?"
"I was working outdoors, mother. I got right on a train. How is father?"
"It's God's will." She gazed at him. "You've changed a little, son."
"I'm older." He felt diffident. A vast gulf had risen between this vigorous, religious woman and himself.
She opened a new topic. "Whatever in the world made you send us all that money?"
Hugo smiled. "Why--I didn't need it, mother. And I thought it would make you and father happy."
"Perhaps. Perhaps. It has done some good. I've sent four missionaries out in the field and I am thinking of sending two more. I had a new addition put on the church, for the drunkards and the fallen. And we put a bathroom in the house. Your father wanted two, but I wouldn't hear of it."
"Car? I couldn't use one of those inventions of Satan. Your father made me hire this one to meet you. There's Anna Blake's house. She married that fellow she was flirting with when you went away. And there's our house. It was painted last month."
Now all the years had dropped away and Hugo was a child again, an adolescent again. The car stopped.
"You can go right up. He's in the front room. I'll get lunch."
Hugo's father was lying on the bed watching the door. A little wizened old man with a big head and thin yellow hands. Illness had made his eyes rheumy, but they lighted up when his son entered, and he half raised himself.