Wayward Winds (15 page)

 26 
Memories of a Happy Day

I'm ready to go home, Mrs. Rutherford. How about you?”

Jocelyn glanced up and smiled. “Do you think the new king and queen and all their admirers can do without us?”

“I think they just might be able to at that,” laughed Charles.

“I'm glad you had a nice visit with your old friends. It was good to hear you laugh.”

“Yes, I enjoyed it. But I don't miss that world, though I do miss a few of the people who are in it.”

“Did you want to visit Timothy Diggorsfeld again before we left the city?”

“I thought it might be nice,” Charles replied. “But this took longer today than I anticipated. I'm glad we were able to have dinner and a good long visit last evening. I'll post him a letter or call him as soon as we get home.”

He took her hand and they made their way back to the field where Charles' Peugeot was parked along with the other automobiles present. They would drive to Southampton this afternoon, where they would spend the night at an inn, before continuing on to Devon tomorrow.

An hour later they had passed the western reaches of the metropolis and were motoring leisurely through the countryside. The coronation and reception had reminded them distinctly of their trip to London fourteen years earlier for Queen Victoria's sixty-year Jubilee where
Charles was knighted. Now as they drove, both husband and wife fell into a melancholy and reminiscent mood.

“I still laugh,” said Charles, “whenever I think of Amanda looking up to Victoria and telling her she was going to be prime minister one day.”

Jocelyn smiled at the memory.

“I was so timid and afraid back then,” she said.

“I almost had to drag you to come with me!”

“I'm glad you did. I'll never forget the queen's lovely eyes. The look she gave me was so tender.”

Jocelyn sighed and grew pensive. “So much has changed since then,” she said.

“That's when it began to change,” rejoined Charles, “—the ride to the Jubilee, the ruckus I got into, then the walk the next day . . . and meeting Timothy Diggorsfeld, learning about the Lord for the first time. How could I ever forget that day? How could I have imagined back then that a young pastor whom I encountered passing out anti-evolution leaflets would become my best friend!” Charles added with a chuckle. “You're right, Jocie—everything's changed, and that's when it began.”

“Do you ever wonder, Charles . . . you know, if we
did
do something wrong with Amanda—if what she is now going through is our fault?”

“Of course, Jocie—I wonder that all the time. Sure, I think I did so
many
things wrong with her. I was not nearly sensitive enough to what she was feeling at the time.”

“But you didn't know.”

“Neither of us knew how negatively she was reacting to our attempts toward spirituality. But as I look back, I see many areas where perhaps I should have given her more rope, more trust, and not tried to force her.”

“You never tried to force the children to see everything exactly as you did. I sometimes thought you gave them too much liberty.”

Charles laughed, though without a great deal of humor in his tone. “It does get confusing,” he said. “Did I really change that much when I became a Christian? I tried so hard to teach them independence of thought. Yet Amanda now thinks I forced her into my own personal framework of belief. It is
so
hard for me to understand what happened, because I never wanted to do that at all.
The very thing I wanted so badly to accomplish with my children, it would seem I failed at.”

“Timothy would say we weren't forcing them. We were doing our best to
train
them according to biblical principles. All three were young at the time. Wasn't it still our duty to teach and train and instruct them?”

Charles nodded. “Timothy is a staunch believer in personal responsibility for one's choices and actions. If he were listening, he would say that Amanda is accountable for her own decisions, and that we are not to blame for what she has done. He would say the same of George and Catharine. They are following our beliefs, at present Amanda is not. But I feel tremendous guilt sometimes, thinking of all the ways I perhaps did not—I don't know—be all as a father to her that I might have . . . that perhaps I should have been.”

“So do I,” rejoined Jocelyn. “But don't forget, we were new Christians at the time.”

She paused thoughtfully for a moment. “That's the trouble with parenthood,” she went on, “—you don't get second chances. You fumble through, do the best you can. Before you know it your children are grown up, and you can't go back. And, Charles, we
did
do our best, at least the best we knew at the time.”

“And you know what Timothy would say to that?”

Jocelyn nodded. “That no parent can do more than their best.”

“And that parental
im
perfection is something God built into the human relational equation.”

Charles sighed. “I say the words,” he added. “I know in my brain that God doesn't expect perfection from me. He doesn't now, and he didn't then. Yet my mind is constantly searching out the past . . . wondering, doubting, reliving incidents, trying to think what I
might
have done differently so as not to have alienated Amanda. But I always come to the same place in the end—I don't know . . . I just don't know. And not knowing makes the grief all the harder to bear. Over and over I say to myself that I have to put it behind me, that I must stop thinking about it, stop talking about it all the time. Yet I can't help it. Something inside me is compelled to try to understand.”

It fell silent for a few minutes as they both gazed out over the passing countryside. Slowly Jocelyn began to cry.

“Oh, Charles,” she said at length, “I miss her!”

“I know, Jocie . . . so do I.”

“I haven't seen our daughter in three years. Sometimes I think my heart is just going to break for aching to see her and hold her again.”

“We've got to be realistic, Jocie,” said Charles. “That day may not come for a while.”

“I want to write her, pour out my heart, tell her I love her, even ask if I can come visit her.”

“There's nothing I want more than to wrap my arms around her and hold her to me like I did when she was a little girl. But it's nothing we can make happen ahead of its time. She is a grown woman. Now more than ever, whatever the future holds between us has to be Amanda's choice.”

“That day when we all came into London together—that was our
old
life, before we knew what it meant to walk with God. And yet that was also the last time we had a good relationship with Amanda. I don't understand it, Charles. Sometimes it weighs me down so. How could giving our lives to the Lord create such pain and division in our own family?”

“I don't know, Jocie,” sighed Charles, shaking his head. “It puzzles me too. All we can do is pray for the Lord to accomplish his purposes . . . in our hearts as well as Amanda's.”

Jocelyn quietly wept at the words she knew were true, yet were nonetheless painful.

Charles slowed and pulled off the dusty dirt road at the next opportunity. He stopped the car, then pulled Jocelyn close and stretched his arm around her. She continued to cry softly. They sat for five or ten minutes in silence. Gradually Charles began to pray.

“Lord,”
he said,
“wherever our dear Amanda is at this moment, whatever she
is doing, whoever she is with, whatever she is thinking, we ask that you would be there beside her, inside her—speaking, wooing, luring her to your heart. Again we
pray, as we have so many times, that you would send brief arrows of light into her heart, pleasant reminders and fond memories. And, Father, in your time and in
your way, we ask you to please restore the friendship that once existed between Amanda and us. Remind her of
the happy times, the long talks, the laughter. In the
meantime as you carry out that silent, invisible work, give us patience, give us hope. Give us fortitude and courage
to trust
you
to be Amanda's Father in our place. O God, be a tender, caring, loving Father to
our daughter.
Watch over her, protect her, and accomplish your
perfect will and perfect desire in her life.”

“And in
ours,”
added Jocelyn softly.
“As painful as this separation
is, dear Lord, we ask you to perfect your will in us through it.”

 27 
Heathersleigh Hall

The estate toward which Sir Charles and Lady Jocelyn Rutherford were returning, in the middle of the county of Devon in southwest England, had been called Heathersleigh longer than anyone alive could remember.

That some former lord of the manor had been fond of the wiry plant from which was derived the name of the property was clear from the extensive patch of it planted east of the mansion. Charles and Jocelyn had reclaimed the overgrown area from the encroaching woods because of their own newfound love of growing things several years earlier. They had since expanded it into a heather garden of considerable size, which included pathways, streams, hedges, and a few small conifers. It had become one of their favorite places on the estate, where they often retreated, either alone or together, for prayer.

Their twenty-three-year-old son George, home after his graduation from Oxford, found himself wandering out of the library on the afternoon prior to his parents' return from London. He had been reading in one of several titles given them by London minister and family friend Timothy Diggorsfeld. The books were by the Scotsman, dead now six years, who had long been Diggorsfeld's favorite author and whom he had met and spoken with during one of the author's visits to London late in his life.

As George left the library, his steps took him unintentionally in the direction of a wide portrait gallery off the landing of the main
central staircase. For one with such a thirst to understand mechanical things, who had explored every inch of the ancient Hall, and who had even discovered more than one hidden passage his father never knew existed, George had been curiously uncurious about the people who had dwelt in this wonderful old place which was his home, and who had come before him in the Rutherford line.

How many times had he passed through this gallery, unconsciously observing the portraits hanging on each side of him, yet walking by unseeing and unquestioning? But the book he had been reading contained just such a portrait gallery, and its mystery made him all the more aware of a possible mystery here.

Who were these people? What kind of men and women were they? What had they thought, what had they felt? What secrets of Heathersleigh Hall might they have possessed? If they could speak, what would they tell him that would satisfy George's quest for mystery?

Such questions George Rutherford had never before considered.

But suddenly on this day, the young man stopped. His attention was arrested by the look coming off the canvas from one of his old silent ancestors. Why were those two eyes—which he had walked past a thousand times since his boyhood—all at once staring at him . . . following him even as he moved? They seemed suddenly alive with mute expression. George was not immediately aware of it, but he had himself inherited a good many of the old fellow's physical characteristics, from dark brown hair and tall forehead, to wide-set eyes and lanky but ruggedly built frame. Right now George was gazing into the man's eyes, hazel like his own, almost as if he were looking into a mirror.

George paused, and returned the stare. What was the old fellow trying to say?

As he gazed upward at the face, the strange sensation came over him that this was the man who had constructed the hidden passage George had discovered leading from the library to the garret, and who had walled up a portion of the upper region of the house.

It had long been a riddle that George had not been able to solve:
Why
had it been done?

The conviction grew upon him as he studied the peculiar expression of the portrait that
this
man knew the secret.

George turned and gazed around one by one at the other faces all staring down at him from the gallery's walls.

All
of these people possessed secrets. If only they could speak.

Again George returned to the portrait that had first arrested his attention. The old fellow was still staring at him with eyes that seemed alive. George walked closer, then bent forward to read the brass plate on the frame beneath the man's portrait.

Henry Rutherford, 1783–1865.

The expression of the old lord of the manor revealed a life of bitterness. George had heard stories that in his old age his great-grandfather had lost his senses. Yet . . . something other than senility stared out of that face. There was almost a look . . . of pleading mingled with hardness and anger—pleading with someone to heed his silent cry from the grave, to make right what he had done but did not have the courage in this life to repent of, yet in the next life no longer had the power to change.

Slowly George moved away, unnerved by the old man's expression. He continued along the gallery and gazed again at face after face from the past.

The sound of an automobile engine approaching on the gravel entryway outside interrupted his reverie. Already he heard his younger sister running out the front door below to welcome their parents home.

George turned and made for the stairway.