Sunrise by Grace Livingston Hill

Author:Grace Livingston Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barbour Publishing Inc
Published: 2015-09-13T23:56:48+00:00

Chapter 10

The whole town was stirred by Nathan Whitney’s sudden stroke. For as much as two or three days they refrained again from hard words and hushed their voices when they spoke of him. They said it was sad, and ceased not day nor night to call up on the telephone and hear how he was.

Day after day the word came back that he was still alive but that was all. The doctor gave no hope of his recovery, and yet he did not know whether he would die soon or linger. The other doctor agreed. People lifted hands of horror and were aghast.

By the fourth day the wise ones among the gossips had begun to whisper about Jason. Where was he? Did he know of his father’s condition? Would he try to come home? Well, if he came he would be arrested, so likely he wouldn’t come home. Did the family know where he was, and were they keeping it from the authorities? What had made Nathan Whitney so unusually nervous and troubled those last few days before his stroke? Did he have some terrible news?

And then that awful word murderer began to creep around on its hands and knees again, stealing into the most respectable houses and presenting thoughts to unwary victims.

If Nathan Whitney died, then surely his son would be as much a murderer as if he had actually shot him to death. As if old Sam Paisley had died from the shot that was fired that fatal night when the bank was robbed.

Murder! Murder! Murder!

Murder come home to strike at the father of the murderer!

The little flames of words stole here, stole there, and caught on tinder minds, and flared and flamed so quietly that no one noticed at first, until it swept the whole countryside, and Joyce, listening to certain bitter phrases as they drifted into the house by way of grocery boys, nurses, and Aunt Libby’s tearful babbling, was glad that her father was out of it all.

For they were saying now, some of them, that Jason had come by his murdering tendency naturally. That Nathan Whitney was a murderer at heart or he would not have fought that poor drunken truck driver.

Not that the truck driver was killed. No, far from it. He had slept it off with a bruise or two and a black eye, and rallied to prate about suing the Whitneys.

But Nathan Whitney was lying quietly out of it all, and safe as if he had died and were lying in his grave. They could not touch a man with his body frozen in a deathly grasp like that, a man with a twisted face and silent lips lying in the grip of a living death! Neither law nor bluster, not the scorpion lips of his fellows could hurt him now.

And whether he was feeling anything, or thinking anything, they could not tell, nor whether the terrible vise that held him would relax at all before he died and let

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