Rose Clark Part 41

"Yes; and I so deplored it after my husband's death; I used to watch so eagerly for one flitting expression of his father's."

John replaced the pictures in the box with a sigh, and sat a few moments thinking.

"Gertrude, do you know that your nature would never have fully developed itself in prosperity? The rain was as needful as the sunshine to ripen and perfect it."

"Yes, I feel that," said his sister. "And when I look around and see divided households; husbands and wives wedded to misery; parents, whose clutching love for gold swallows up every parental feeling; children, whose memories of home are hate, and discord, and all uncharitableness, I hug my brief day of unalloyed happiness to my bosom, and cheerfully accept my lot at His hand who hath disposed it."

CHAPTER LXIII.

"Dear Tom--

"Received your last letter by the Baltic. It was a gem, as usual.

If your book is half as good, you will make your reputation and a fortune out of it. I knew you would like Paris; it is the only place in the world to live in. I hope yet to end my days there.

"And speaking of ending days, I have the most extraordinary thing to tell you:

"Jack--our glorious dare-devil Jack--has turned parson! Actual parson--black coat, white neck-tie, and long-tailed surtout--it is incredible! The little opera-dancer, Felissitimi, laughed till she was black in the face when I told her. It is no laughing matter to me, though, for he was always my shadow. I miss him at the club, the billiard-table, at King street, and every where else. It is confoundedly provoking. I feel like half a pair of scissors, and wander round in a most unriveted state.

"Such crowds as Jack draws to hear him! There is no church in town that will hold all his admiring listeners. _I_ have not been, from principle, because I think all that sort of thing is a deuced humbug, and I won't countenance it. But the other night, Menia did not perform, as was announced on the play-bills, and I looked about quite at a loss where to spend my evening. The first thing I knew, I found myself borne along with the current toward John's church.

Then I said to myself 'Now if that crowd choose to relieve me of the responsibility of countenancing John's nonsense, by _pushing_ me into that church, well and good;' so I just resigned myself to the elbowing tide. And, by Jove! the first thing I knew, there I was, in a broad aisle-pew, sitting down as demure as if I were Aminidab Sleek.

"Well, pretty soon John came in. How well he had got himself up in that black suit! It was miraculous. I looked round on the women--_he_ had them! With that musical voice of his, even that old hymn he read, sounded as well as any thing of Byron's. His prayer was miraculous!--I can't think how he did it; one would have supposed he felt every syllable; but you and I know Jack.

"Well, then came the sermon. 'Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days.' He said it was in the Bible, and I suppose it was; I never heard of it before, but that may be for want of reading. By that time I was all eyes and ears. I knew he had impudence enough, so I was not afraid of his breaking down; and if he did, so much the better; there'd be something to laugh at him about.

"Now, Tom, you can't credit what I am going to tell you; that fellow began to relate his own experience; beginning with the prayers and hymns his mother taught him, and which he gradually lost the recollection of after she died, and as he grew older; then he described--and, by Jove, he did it well--his past downward steps, as he called them (I think that expression is open to discussion, Tom), the temptations of his youth, the gradual searing of conscience, and Satan's final triumph, when he cast off all restraint, and acknowledged no law but the domination of his own mad pa.s.sions. Then he described his life at that point, _our_ life--(I wonder if he saw _me_ there?) he spoke of the occasional twinges of conscience, growing fainter, fainter, and at last dying out altogether.

"Then came his waking up from that long trance of sin, our meeting with that old lady in the street--(you remember, Tom), and the tearful look which she bent on him, when in reply to some remark of mine, he exclaimed,

"'Jesus Christ!'

"Then, how that look had haunted him, tortured him, by day and night; how it had wakened to new life all the buried memories of childhood--his mother's prayers and tears, and dying words; and how, after wrestling with it, through deeper depths of sin than any into which he had yet plunged, he had yielded to the holy spell, and that 'Jesus Christ' had now become to him, with penitential utterance, 'My Lord and my G.o.d.'

"Tom--there was not a dry eye in that church when Jack got through, no--not even mine, for I caught the infection (I might as well own it); I felt as wicked as old King Herod; and all day to-day--it is a rainy day, though, and I suppose, when the sun shines out, I shall feel better, I have not been able to get that sermon out of my mind. I don't believe in it, of course not; hang me if I know what _does_ ail me; I am inclined to think it is a bad fit of indigestion. I must have a game at billiards. Write me.

"Yours, "FINELS."

CHAPTER LXIV.

"How you grow, Charley," said John, tossing him up on his shoulder, and walking up to the looking-gla.s.s. "It seems but yesterday that you lay wrapped up in your blanket a-board Captain Lucas' ship with your thumb in your mouth (that unfailing sign of a good-natured baby), thinking of nothing at all; and now here you are six years' old to-day--think of that man? and I dare say you expect a birth-day present."

"Yes, if you please," said Charley.

"There, now; that is to the point. I like an honest boy. What will you have, Charley?"

"Something pretty for my mamma," said the loving little heart.

"Better still," said John; "but mamma won't take presents. I have tried her a great many times. There is one I want very much to make her, but she always says 'No.'" And John glanced at Gertrude.

"Mind what you say," whispered his sister. "He might chance to repeat it to his mother."

"So much the better, Gertrude. Then she will be sure to think of me at least one minute.

"But, Charley, tell me what _you_ want. I would like to get you something for _yourself_."

"I want my papa," said Charley, resolutely. "Tommy Fritz keeps saying that I 'haven't got any papa.' _Haven't_ I got a papa, cousin John?"

"You have a Father in heaven," said John, kissing Charley as he evaded the earnest question.

"When did he die? I want you to tell me all about him, cousin John, because Tommy Fritz sits next me at school and teases me so about not having any papa."

"Fritz?" repeated John, turning to Gertrude; "Fritz?--the name sounds familiar. Where could I have heard it? Fritz?" and John paced up and down the room, trying to remember.

"Yes, Tommy Fritz," repeated Charley; "and Tommy's big brother comes to school with him some days, and he saw me, and told Tommy that I hadn't any papa."

"Did you say any thing to your mamma about it?" asked John.

"No," said Charley, with a very resolute shake of the head, "because it always makes mamma look so sad when I talk to her about papa; but I don't want Tommy to plague me any more. Is it bad not to have a papa, cousin John?"

"There are a great many little boys whose papas are dead," said John.

"Yes, it is bad for them, because they feel lonesome without them, just as you do."

Charley looked very earnestly in John's face, as if he were not satisfied with his answer, and yet as if he did not know how better to make himself understood. Looking thoughtfully on the ground a few moments, he said--

"Was my papa good, cousin John?"

John drew Charley closer to his breast. "I did not know your papa, my dear, but your mamma loves him very much, and she is so good herself that I think she would not love him so were he not a good man."

"I'm _so_ glad!" exclaimed Charley, with sparkling eyes. "May I tell Tommy Fritz that?" he asked, with the caution acquired by too early an acquaintance with sorrow.

"Certainly," said John, secretly resolving to inquire into this Fritz matter himself.

"Your mother is calling you, Charley," said Gertrude. "Poor little fellow," she added, as he ran nimbly out of the room. "Just think of a child with such a frank outspoken nature, burying such a corroding mystery in his own loving little heart, rather than pain his mother by asking for a solution. Poor Rose--the haunting specter which her prophet-eye discerned in her child's future, has a.s.sumed shape sooner than even she dreamed. Who can this 'big Fritz' be, John? and where could he have known Rose?"

"I have it," exclaimed John, stopping suddenly before his sister, with a deep red flush upon his face. "This Fritz was a fellow-pa.s.senger of Rose's and mine on board Captain Lucas's vessel. The conceited puppy imagined that Rose would save him the trouble of gathering her by dropping at his feet--he found thorns instead of a rose, and his wounded vanity has taken this mean revenge. But he shall learn Rose has a protector," said John, folding his arms, and closing his lips firmly together.

"I shall do nothing rashly," said he, shaking off the clasp of Gertrude's hand. "Puppy"--he exclaimed--"contemptible coward, with all his pretensions to the t.i.tle of a gentleman, to slander a woman!"

"Defining the word gentleman in that way," answered Gertrude, "the ranks would be pretty well thinned out. Some do it with a shrug--some with an uplifted eyebrow--some with a curl of the lip--some with a protracted whistle; and many a 'gentleman,' to make himself the paltry hero of the hour, has uttered boasting words of vanity, false as his own black heart; and many a virtuous woman has had occasion to repel insults growing out of this dastardly mention of her name before strangers, that else would never have been offered her. The crime is so common as to excite little or no reprehension, as to be little or no barrier in the intercourse between gentlemen. If every man who honors woman, and who finds himself in such unscrupulous society--testified his abhorrence by turning his back upon such a circle, the rebuke would soon tell. There _are_ those whose standard of manly honor requires this in an a.s.sociate.

"What! going, John?"