What Can She Do? Part 13

The man ate for a while in dogged silence, but at last in a tone that was meant to be somewhat conciliatory said:

"What the devil did you mean by putting the boy up to such foolishness?"

"Hush!" said his wife imperiously, "I'm in no mood to talk with you now."

"Oh, ah, indeed, a man can't even speak in his own house, eh? I guess I'll take myself off to where I can have a little more liberty," and he went out, harnessed his old white horse, and started for his favorite groggery in the village.

His father had no sooner gone than Arden came out and said pa.s.sionately:

"It's no use, mother, I can't stand it; I must leave home to-day. I guess I can make a living; at any rate I'd rather starve than pa.s.s through such scenes."

The poor, overwrought woman threw herself down in a low chair and sobbed, rocking herself back and forth.

"Wait till I die, Arden, wait till I die. I feel it won't be long.

What have I to live for but you and Rosy? And if you, my pride and joy, go away after what has happened, it will be worse than death,"

and a tempest of grief shook her gaunt frame.

Arden was deeply moved. Boylike he had been thinking only of himself, but now as never before he realized her hard lot, and in his warm, impulsive heart there came a yearning tenderness for her such as he had never felt before. He took her in his arms and kissed and comforted her, till even her sore heart felt the healing balm of love and ceased its bitter aching. At last she dried her eyes and said with a faint smile: "With such a boy to pet me, the world isn't all flint and thorns yet."

And Rosy came and kissed her too, for she was an affectionate child, though a little inclined to be giddy and vain.

"Don't worry, mother," said Arden. "I will stay and take such good care of you that you will have many years yet, and happier ones, too, I hope," and he resolved to keep this promise, cost what it might.

"I hardly think I ought to ask it of you, though even the thought of your going away breaks my heart." "I will stay," said the boy, almost as pa.s.sionately as he had said, "I will go." "I now see how much you need a protector."

That night the father came home so stupidly drunk that they had to half carry him to bed where he slept heavily till morning, and rose considerably shaken and depressed from his debauch. The breakfast was as silent as it had been stormy on the previous day. After it was over, Arden followed his father to the door and said:

"I was a boy yesterday morning, but you made me a man, and a rather ugly one too. I learned then for the first time that you occasionally strike my mother. Don't you ever do it again, or it will be worse for you, drunk or sober. I am not going to college, but will stay at home and take care of her. Do we understand each other?"

The man was in such a low, shattered condition that his son's bearing cowed him, and he walked off muttering:

"Young c.o.c.ks crow mighty loud," but from that time forward he never offered violence to his wife or children.

Still his father's conduct and character had a most disastrous effect upon the young man. He was soured, because disappointed in his most cherished purpose at an age when most youths scarcely have definite plans. Many have a strong natural bent, and if turned aside from this, they are more or less unhappy, and their duties, instead of being wings to help life forward, become a galling yoke.

This was the case with Arden. Farm work, as he had learned it from his father, was coa.r.s.e, heavy drudgery, with small and uncertain returns, and these were largely spent at the village rum shops in purchasing slow perdition for the husband, and misery and shame for his wife and children. In respectable Pushton, a drunkard's family, especially if poor, had a very low social status. Mrs. Lacey and her children would not accept of bad a.s.sociations, so they had scarcely any. This ostracism, within certain limits, is perhaps right. The preventive penalties of vice can scarcely be too great, and men and women must be made to feel that wrong-doing is certain to be followed by terrible consequences. The fire is merciful in that it always burns, and sin and suffering are inseparably linked. But the consequences of one person's sin often blight the innocent. The necessity of this from our various ties should be a motive, a hostage against sinning, and doubtless restrains many a one who would go headlong under evil impulses. But mult.i.tudes do slip off the paths of virtue, and helpless wives, and often helpless husbands and children, writhe from wounds made by those under sacred obligations to shield them. Upon the families of criminals, society visits a mildew of coldness and scorn that blights nearly all chance of good fruit. But society is very unjust in its discriminations, and some of the most heinous sins in G.o.d's sight are treated as mere eccentricities, or condemned in the poor, but winked at in the rich. Gentlemen will admit to their parlors men about whom they know facts which if true of a woman would close every respectable door against her, and G.o.d frowns on the Christian (?) society that makes such arbitrary and unjust distinctions. Cast both out, till they bring forth fruits meet for repentance.

But we hope for little of a reformative tendency from the selfish society of the world. Changing human fashion rules it, rather than the eternal truth of the G.o.d of love. The saddest feature of all is that the shifting code of fashion is coming more and more to govern the church. Doctrine may remain the same, profession and intellectual belief the same, while practical action drifts far astray. There are mult.i.tudes of wealthy churches, that will no more admit a.s.sociations with that cla.s.s among which our Lord lived and worked, than will select society. They seem designed to help only respectable, well-connected sinners, toward heaven.

This tendency has two phases. In the cities the poor are practically excluded from worshipping with the rich, and missions are established for them as if they were heathen. There can be no objection to costly, magnificent churches. Nothing is too good to be the expression of our honor and love of G.o.d. But they should be like the cathedrals of Europe, where prince and peasant may bow together on the same level they have in the Divine presence. Christ made no distinction between the rich and poor regarding their spiritual value and need, nor should the Christianity named after Him. To the degree that it does, it is not Christianity. The meek and lowly Nazarene is not its inspiration.

Perhaps the personage He told to get behind Him when promising the "kingdoms of the world and the glory of them" has more to do with it.

The second phase of this tendency as seen in the country, is kindred but unlike. Poverty may not be so great a bar, but moral delinquencies are more severely visited, and the family under a cloud, through the wrong-doing of one or more of its members, is treated very much as if it had a perpetual pestilence. The highly respectable keep aloof. Too often the quiet country church is not a sanctuary and place of refuge for the victims either of their own or another's sin, a place where the grasp of sympathy and words of encouragement are given; but rather a place where they meet the cold critical gaze of those who are hedged about with virtues and good connections. I hope I am wrong, but how is it where you live, my reader? If a well-to-do thriving man of integrity takes a fine place in your community, we all know how church people will treat him. And what they do is all right. But society--the world--will do the same. Is Christianity--are the followers of the "Friend of publicans and sinners"--to do no more?

If in contrast a drunken wretch like Lacey with his wife and children come in town on top of a wagon-load of shattered furniture, and all are dumped down in a back alley to scramble into the shelter of a tenement house as best they can, do you call upon them? Do you invite them to your pew? Do you ever urge and encourage them to enter your church? and do you make even one of its corners homelike and inviting?

I hope so; but, alas! that was not the general custom in Pushton, and poor Mrs. Lacey had acquired the habit of staying at home, her neighbors had become accustomed to call her husband a "dreadful man,"

and the family "very irreligious," and as the years pa.s.sed they seemed to be more and more left to themselves. Mr. Lacey had brought his wife from a distant town where he had met and married her. She was a timid, retiring woman, and time and kindness were needed to draw her out. But no one had seemingly thought it worth while, and at the time our story takes an interest in their affairs, there was a growing isolation.

All this had a very bad effect upon Arden. As he grew out of the democracy of boyhood he met a certain social coldness and distance which he learned to understand only too early, and soon returned this treatment with increased coldness and aversion. Had it not been for the influence of his mother and the books he read, he would have inevitably fallen into low company. But he had promised his mother to shun it. He saw its result in his father's conduct, and as he read, and his mind matured, the narrow coa.r.s.eness of such company became repugnant. From time to time he was sorely tempted to leave the home which his father made hateful in many respects, and try his fortunes among strangers who would not a.s.sociate him with a sot; but his love for his mother kept him at her side, for he saw that her life was bound up in him, and that he alone could protect her and his sister and keep some sort of a shelter for them. In his unselfish devotion to them his character was n.o.ble. In his harsh cynicism toward the world and especially the church people, for whom he had no charity whatever --in his utter hatred and detestation of his father--it was faulty, though allowance must be made for him. He was also peculiar in other respects, for his unguided reading was of a nature that fed his imagination at the expense of his reasoning faculties. Though he drudged in a narrow round, and his life was as hard and real as poverty and his father's intemperance could make it, he mentally lived and found his solace in a world as large and unreal as an uncurbed fancy could create. Therefore his work was hurried through mechanically in the old slovenly methods to which he had been educated, he caring little for the results, as his father squandered these; and when the necessary toil was over, he would lose all sense of the sordid present in the pages of some book obtained from the village library. As he drove his milk cart to and from town he would sit in the chill drizzling rain, utterly oblivious of discomfort, with a half smile upon his lips, as he pictured to himself some scene of sunny aspect or gloomy castellated grandeur of which his own imagination was the architect. The famous in history, the heroes and heroines of fiction, and especially the characters of Shakespeare were more familiar to him than the people among whom he lived. From the latter he stood more and more aloof, while with the former he held constant intercourse. He had little in common even with his sister, who was of a very different temperament. But his tenderness toward his mother never failed, and she loved him with the pa.s.sionate intensity of a nature to which love was all, but which had found little to satisfy it on earth, and was ignorant of the love of G.o.d.

And so the years dragged on to Arden, and hiss twenty-first birthday made him free from his father's control as he practically long had been, but it also found him bound more strongly than ever by his mother's love and need to his old home life.

CHAPTER IX

A DESERT ISLAND

The good cry that Edith indulged in on her way to the boat was a relief to her heart, which had long been overburdened. But the necessity of controlling her feelings, and the natural buoyancy of youth, enabled her by the time they reached the wharf to see that the furniture and baggage were properly taken care of. No one could detect the traces of grief through her thick veil, or guess from her firm, quiet tones, that she felt somewhat as Columbus might when going in search of a new world. And yet Edith had a hope from her country life which the others did not share at all.

When she was quite a child her feeble health had induced her father to let her spend an entire summer in a farmhouse of the better cla.s.s, whose owner had some taste for flowers and fruit. These she had enjoyed and luxuriated in as much as any b.u.t.terfly of the season, and as she romped with the farmer's children, roamed the fields and woods in search of berries, and tumbled in the fragrant hay, health came tingling back with a fullness and vigor that had never been lost. With all her subsequent enjoyment, that summer still dwelt in her memory as the halcyon period of her life, and it was with the country she a.s.sociated it. Every year she had longed for July, for then her father would break away from business for a couple of months and take them to a place of resort. But the fashionable watering-places were not at all to her taste as compared with that old farmhouse, and whenever it was possible she would wander off and make "disreputable acquaintances,"

as Mrs. Allen termed them, among the farmers' and laborers' families in the vicinity of the hotel. But by this means she often obtained a basket of fruit or bunch of flowers that the others were glad to share in.

In accordance with her practical nature she asked questions as to the habits, growth, and culture of trees and fruits, so that few city girls situated as she had been knew as much about the products of the garden. She had also haunted conservatories and green-houses as much as her sisters had frequented the costly Broadway temples of fashion, where counters are the altars to which the women of the city bring their daily offerings; and as we have seen, a fruit store was a place of delight to her.

The thought that she could now raise without limit fruit, flowers, and vegetables on her own place was some compensation even for the trouble they had pa.s.sed through and the change in their fortunes.

Moreover she knew that because of their poverty she would have to secure from her ground substantial returns, and that her gardening must be no amateur trifling, but earnest work. Therefore, having found a seat in the saloon of the boat, she drew out of her leather bag one of her garden-books and some agricultural papers, and commenced studying over for the twentieth time the labors proper for April.

After reading a while, she leaned back and closed her eyes and tried to form such crude plans as were possible in her inexperience and her ignorance of a place that she had not even seen.

Opening her eyes suddenly she saw old Hannibal sitting near and regarding her wistfully.

"You are a foolish old fellow to stay with us," she said to him. "You could have obtained plenty of nice places in the city. What made you do it?"

"I'se couldn't gib any good reason to de world, Miss Edie, but de one I hab kinder satisfies my ole black heart."

"Your heart isn't black, Hannibal."

"How you know dat?" he asked quickly.

"Because I've seen it often and often. Sometimes I think it is whiter than mine. I now and then feel so desperate and wicked, that I am afraid of myself."

"Dere now, you'se worried and worn-out and you tinks dat's bein'

wicked."

"No. I'm satisfied it is something worse than that. I wonder if G.o.d does care about people who are in trouble, I mean practically, so as to help them any?"

"Well, I specs he does," said Hannibal vaguely. "But den dere's so many in trouble dat I'm afeard some hab to kinder look after demselves." Then as if a bright thought struck him, he added, "I specs he sorter lumps 'em jes as Ma.s.sa Allen did when he said he was sorry for de people burned up in Chicago. He sent 'em a big lot ob money and den seemed to forget all about 'em."

Hannibal had never given much attention to religion, and perhaps was not the best authority that Edith could have consulted. But his conclusion seemed to secure her consent, for she leaned back wearily and again closed her eyes, saying:

"Yes, we are mere human atoms, lost sight of in the mult.i.tude."

Soon her deep regular breathing showed that she was asleep, and Hannibal muttered softly: