Part 1

Chapter 14,416 wordsPublic domain

MORE BED-TIME STORIES.

AGAINST WIND AND TIDE.

Jack Ramsdale was a bad boy. He had been a bad boy so long that secretly he was rather tired of it; but he really did not know how to help himself. It was his reputation, and it is a curious thing how naturally we all live up to our reputations; that is to say, we do the things which are expected of us. There is a deal of homely sense in the old proverb, "Give a dog a bad name and hang him." Give a boy a bad name, and he is reasonably sure to deserve one. Not but that Jack Ramsdale had fairly earned his bad name. His mother had died before he was old enough to remember her, so he had never known what a home was. Once, when his father was unusually good-natured, he had asked him some questions about his mother.

"She was one of God's saints, if ever there was one," the man answered, half reluctantly. "Everybody wondered that she took up with me, but maybe it was because she saw I needed her more than anybody else did. She might have made a different man of me if she'd lived; at least, I've always thought so. I never drank so much when she was alive but what I kept a comfortable home over her head. But when she was gone, it didn't appear to me there was any thing left to live for. I lacked comfort sorely, and I don't say but what I've sought for it in by-paths,--by and forbidden paths, as she used to say."

"I wish I could ha' seen her," said Jack.

"She was a dreadful motherly creetur, and was always hangin' over you. Cold nights I've known her get up half-a-dozen times, often, to see if the clothes was all up over your shoulders; and sometimes I've seen her stand there looking down at you in the biting cold till I thought she'd freeze; but I didn't dare to say any thing, for her lips were movin', and I knew she was prayin' for you. She was a prayin' woman, your mother was. I used to think her prayers would save both of us."

"I can't make out how she looked," Jack persisted. He was so anxious to hear something about this dead mother who had loved him so. Ever since she died, he had been knocked round from pillar to post, as they say, with his father. Sam Ramsdale was good help, as all the farmers knew, when he was sober; but he was not reliable, and then he had the disadvantage of always being incumbered with the boy, whom he took with him everywhere,--an unkempt, undisciplined little fellow whom no one liked. Now, as his father talked, it seemed to him so strange a thing to think that some one used to stand beside his bed in cold winter nights and pray for him, that he could hardly believe it; and he said again, out of his desolate longing,--

"I wish I could ha' seen how she looked."

"I don't suppose folks would ha' said she was much to look at." His father spoke, in a musing sort of way. "She was a little pale slip of a woman, with soft yellow hair droopin' about her white face, and eyes as blue as them blue flowers you picked up along the road. But there, I can't talk about her, and I ain't a goin' to, what's more; and don't you ever ask me again!"

From that time Jack never dared to ask any more questions about his mother, but all through his troublesome, turbulent boyhood he remembered the meagre outlines of the story which had been told him. No matter how bad he had been through the day, the nights were few when he failed to think how once a pale slip of a woman, with soft yellow hair around her white face, and eyes blue as the blue gentians, had bent above his slumbers and said prayers for him.

When he was ten years old his father died in the poor-house. Drink had enfeebled his constitution; a sudden cold did the rest. There were a few weeks of terrible suffering, and then the end came. Jack was with him to the last. There was nowhere else for him to be, and the father liked to have him in his sight. One day, just before the end, when they were all alone, the man called the boy to his bedside.

"I can't tell you to follow my example, Jack; that's the shame of it. I've got to hold myself up as a warnin', and not as an example. Just you steer as clear o' my ways as you can; but remember that your mother was a prayin' woman. I s'pose nobody'd believe it, Jack; but since I've been lyin' here I've kinder felt nearer to her than I ever did before since she died. Seems as if I could a'most hear her prayin' for me; and I think, by times, that the God she lived so close to won't say no. It's the 'leventh hour, Jack, the 'leventh hour, I know that as well as anybody; but she used to sing a hymn about while the lamp holds out to burn. When I get there I shall get rid of this awful thirst for drink. It's been an _awful_ thirst; no hunger that I know of can match it; but I shall get rid of that when this old body goes to pieces. And what does a Saviour mean, if it ain't that He'll save us from our sins if we ask Him?"

As he said these last words he seemed sinking into a sort of stupor, but he started out of it to say once more,--

"Never follow my example, Jack, boy. Remember your mother was a prayin' woman."

Those were the last connected words any one ever heard him speak. After that the night came on,--the double night of darkness and of death. Once or twice the woman who acted as nurse, bending over him, heard him mutter, "The 'leventh hour, Jack!" and afterwards she wondered whether it was a presentiment, for it was just at eleven o'clock that he died.

Jack had been sent to bed a little before, and when he got up in the morning, he knew that he was all alone in the world.

After the funeral Deacon Small took him home. He wouldn't be of much use for two or three years to come, the deacon said. Maybe he could drive up the cows, and ride the horse to plough, and scare the crows away from the corn, but he couldn't earn his salt for a number o' years to come. However, somebody must take him, and he guessed _he_ would. It would be a good spell before the "creetur" would come of age, and the last part of the time he might be smart enough to pay off old scores.

But surely Jack Ramsdale must have eaten more salt than ever boy of ten ate before if he did not work enough for it, for it was Jack here, and Jack there, all day long. Jack did everybody's errands; Jack drew Mrs. Small's baby-grandchild in its little covered wagon; Jack scoured the knives; Jack brought the wood; Jack picked berries; Jack weeded flower-beds. From being an idle little chap, in everybody's way, as he had been in his father's time, he was pressed right into hard service, for more hours in the day than any man worked about the place. Now work is good for boys, but all work and no play--worse yet, all work and no love--is not good for any one. Jack grew bitter; and where he dared to be cruel, he was cruel; where he dared to be insolent, he was insolent. Not toward Deacon Small, however, were these qualities displayed. The deacon was a hard master, and the boy feared, and hated, and obeyed him. But as the years went on, five of them, he grew to be generally considered a bad boy. At fifteen he was strong of his age, a man, almost, in size.

His schooling had been confined to the short winter terms, and he had always been the terror of every successive schoolmaster.

When he was fifteen, a new teacher came,--a handsome, graceful young man, just out of college. He was slight rather than stout, well-dressed, well-mannered, fit, you would have said, for a lady's drawing-room, rather than the country schoolhouse in winter, with its big boys, tough customers, many of them, and Jack Ramsdale the toughest customer of all. After Mr. Garrison had passed his examination, one of the committee, impressed by what he thought a certain-fine-gentleman air in the young man, warned him of the rough times in store for him, and especially of the rough strength and insubordination of Jack Ramsdale. Ralph Garrison smiled a calm smile, but uttered no boasts.

He had been a week in the school before he had any especial trouble. Jack was taking his measure. The truth was, the boy had a certain amount of taste, and Garrison's gentlemanliness impressed him more than he would have cared to own. It is possible that he might have gone on, quietly and obediently, but that now his bad name began to weigh him down. The boys who had looked up to him as a leader in evil grew impatient of his quiet submission to rules. "Got your match, Jack?" said one. "Goin' to own beat without giving it a try?" said another. And Jack began to think that the evil laurels he had won, as the bravo and bully of the school, would fall withered from his brow if he didn't make some effort to fasten them.

So one morning, midway between recess and the close of school, he took out an apple and began paring it with a jack-knife and eating it. For a moment Mr. Garrison looked at him; then he remarked, with ominous quietness, in a tone lower and more gentle than usual,--

"Jack, this is not the place or time for eating."

"My place and time to eat are when I am hungry," Jack answered, with cool insolence, cutting off a mouthful, and carrying it deliberately to his mouth.

"You will put up that apple instantly, if you please."

Still the teacher spoke very gently, and turned a little pale. The persuasive words and the slight paleness misled Jack. He thought his victory was to be so easily won, there would not even be any glory in it. He smiled and ate, quite at his ease.

"You will come here whether you please or not," was the next sentence from the teacher's desk. Jack cut off another mouthful and sat still.

Then, he never knew how it was, but suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, he felt himself pulled from his seat out into the middle of the floor while knife and apple flew from his hand. He kicked, he struggled, he tried to strike; but an iron grasp held his wrists. The strong muscles of the stroke-oar at Harvard did good service. The handsome face was pale, but the lips were set like steel, and the cool eyes never wavered as they fixed and held those of the young bully. Then suddenly he whipped from his pocket a ball of strong fish-line and bound the struggling wrists tightly, and, pushing a chair toward his captive, said, coolly,--

"I want nothing more of you till after school. You can sit or stand, as you please. Now I will hear the first class in arithmetic."

There was a strange hush in the school, and every scholar knew who was master.

When all the rest had gone, the teacher turned to Jack Ramsdale.

"I took you a little by surprise," he said. "Perhaps you are not yet satisfied that I am stronger than you."

"Yes, I'm satisfied," Jack answered. "I ain't so mean but what I'm willing to own beat when it's done fair and square."

Mr. Garrison, meanwhile, was untying his wrists. As he unwound the last coil, he said,--

"The forces of law and order are what rule the world. I think if you fight against them, you'll always be likely to find yourself on the losing side."

A great bitter wave of defiance swelled up in Jack's heart; not against Mr. Garrison as an individual, but against such as he,--handsome, graceful, cultured; against his own hard lot; against a prosperous world; against, it almost seemed, God, Himself.

"What do _you_ know about it?" he said sullenly. "You never had to fight. It was all on your side. God did it. He made you handsome and strong, and had you go to school and college, and grow up a gentleman. And he made me"--how the face darkened here--"what you see. He took my mother, who did love me and pray for me, away from me when I wasn't more than three years old. He gave me to a father who drank hard and taught me nothing good. And then he took even him from me, and handed me over to Deacon Small; and I tell you, teacher, you don't know what a tough time is till you've summered and wintered with Deacon Small. I've got a bad name, and who wonders? and I feel like living up to it. I hadn't any thing against you, specially; but if I'd given in peaceably to all your rules, the boys would have said I had grown chicken-hearted, and a little name for pluck is all the name I have got."

Mr. Garrison looked at him a few moments, steadily. Then he said,--

"It does seem as if fate had been hard on you. But do you know what I think God has been doing for you, in giving you all these hard knocks; for things don't _happen_; God never lets go the reins."

The boy looked the question he did not speak, and Mr. Garrison went on.

"I think He has been making you strong, just as rowing against wind and tide made my wrists strong, until now you could fight all your enemies if you would.

"The thing we are put here for," he continued, "is to do our best; and if we are doing that, in God's sight, there is nothing that can prevail against us; not fate, or foes, or poverty, or any other creature. There is nothing in all the universe that is strong enough to stand against a soul that is bound to go up and not down. You may go home, now."

It was one of Mr. Garrison's merits that he knew when to stop. Jack Ramsdale went home with that last sentence ringing in his ears,--

"There is nothing in all the universe that is strong enough to stand against a soul that is bound to go up and not down."

The words went with him all the rest of the day. They lay down with him at night, and he looked out of his window and fixed his eyes on a bright, far-off star, and thought of them.

What if he should turn all the strength that was in him to going up and not down? If he did right, who could make him afraid? If he served willingly, he need fear no master. It was very late, and the star, obedient to the law which rules the worlds, had marched far on, out of his sight, before he went to sleep. He had made a resolve. In the strength of that resolve he awoke to the new day.

"I will not go down," he said to himself; "I will go up and on!"

He was not all at once transformed from sinner to saint. Such sudden changes do not belong to this slow world. But the purpose and aim of his life was changed. Never again did he lose sight of the shining heights he meant to climb. If the mother in the heavenly home could look down on the world below, she knew that not in vain had she been "a praying woman." To Mr. Garrison the boy's devotion was something wonderful,--humble, loyal, faithful, and never ceasing. From being the teacher's terror, Jack had become the teacher's friend.

BLUE SKY AND WHITE CLOUDS.

"Say yes, and you'll be such a dear papa."

Papa bent down and kissed his girl, before he asked, half reproachfully,--

"And how if I say 'no'? Shan't I be dear, then?"

Kathie blushed, and then laughed.

"Why, of course you'll be dear, any way; but may be it's partly because you are so good, and hate so to say no to your own little daughter, that I love you so much."

"To my little daughter as tall as her mother? Do you know, small person, that I've often thought it might be better for that same little daughter if I said no to her oftener? I couldn't love you more, but I'm afraid I might love you more wisely. A hundred and twenty-five dollars for a new party dress! Bring your own mature judgment to bear on it, and tell me if it appears quite sage, even to you."

Kathie thought so hard for a moment that she fairly scowled with earnestness; then she answered,--

"Yes, on the whole, I think it will be eminently judicious. You see, I shall be going out a good deal now, and I can do so many different things with a handsome silk, and if I got a tarleton, or any of those cheap, thin goods, it would be used up at once."

Papa smiled.

"Well, if you are quite sure you're right, I'll bring the check home this noon, and you and mamma can begin your search for this wonderful yellow gown."

"Yellow!" Kathie clapped her hands to her ears. "What did I ever do to make you think I would wear a horrid yellow gown?"

"Oh, was it red you said you wanted?"

"Worse and worse. You talk like a Hottentot. My gown is to be blue, soft, and lustrous, like a summer sky, and I am to look in it,--well, you shall see on Christmas Eve."

Then, with half a dozen good-by kisses, the father of this only child--happy, easy-going, and too indulgent--took himself off down town, and Kathie danced away to the sewing-room to find her mother and inform her of her success.

Kathie Mason, at sixteen, was a girl bright, and sweet, and bonny enough to tempt any parent to a little over-indulgence. She had soft, sunny, yellow hair; and lovely, dark brown eyes; with a look in them that kept saying, "Oh, be good to me!"; a delicate, flower-like face; and a mouth red as Fair Rosamond's, which has long been dust now, but which poets and painters raved about centuries ago. She had a graceful little figure, and a clear, fresh young voice; and she had a heart, too, which was in the right place, though she herself was almost a stranger to it. She loved beauty dearly, whether in books, or nature, or human faces, or blue silk gowns, and it was just as natural to her to be a picture, whatever way she looked or moved, as it was to be Kathie.

As she danced along she was humming a verse of a gay little French _chanson_, where some lover said his love was like a rose; and you thought it might have been written about herself, only Kathie had no thorns. As she drew near the sewing-room she stopped, for her mother and the dress-maker were talking busily. Miss Atkinson was a pathetic little woman, with eyes which looked as if the color had been washed out of them by many tears, a thin, frail body, and a voice not complaining, but simply plaintive. Somehow Kathie hated to break in upon the slow pathos of those tones with her blue silk ecstasy, so she stood leaning against the door for a few moments and waited.

"You see," the little woman was saying, "it was a great pull-back, my being sick two months in the summer, and then my brother being so much worse. But it will all come right, somehow. If I can manage to get Alice clothed up so she can go to school, I shall be thankful; for she's a bright child, and it's too bad to have her wasting her time. But then, food and fire must come first, and if people are sick they are sick, and two hands can't do any more than they can."

There was nothing to oppose to this mild fatalism; so Kathie's mother only said, very sympathizingly, that it was hard, and that it seemed as if, with her sister and her sister's child to support, Miss Atkinson had all she could do before, without undertaking any new responsibilities for the ailing brother and his family.

"Oh! but there's no one else to do it if I don't, you see," quoth the little dress-maker, almost cheerfully--as cheerfully, that is, as her voice could be made to speak; but Kathie noticed that a moment after she pressed her hand on her side and drew a sharp, hard breath.

"Does your side pain you, Miss Atkinson?" she asked, kindly.

"Not much more than usual. It's rather bad, most days. I went to work too soon after I was sick, the doctor said. But he didn't tell me how the rest were going to live if I laid by any longer; and, dear me, I'm thankful enough to be able to work at all."

Kathie thought she should be ashamed to have this poor little woman, who had two people besides herself to provide for, entirely, and no knowing how many more, in part, work on her blue silk superfluity. Clearly _that_ must be made by some other dress-maker; and she could not even speak to her mother about it now; so she just asked for some work, and sat down with it, thinking more seriously than, perhaps, she had ever thought in her gay, butterfly life before.

"How old is your little niece, Alice?" she asked, after a while.

"Ten, and she is as far along in her studies now as a good many girls of twelve. I did mean to have sent her straight through, normal school and all, and let her prepare to be a teacher; but it doesn't look much like it, now William's taken so poorly. I expect I shall have to pretty much clothe his three children besides Alice."

"Can't your sister, little Alice's mother, help you at all?"

"Well, yes, she does help. She does all she's able to, and more; for, you see, she's feeble, too. She keeps house for us, and cooks, and washes and makes our things after I fit them, and keeps us mended; but there's nothing she can do to bring in any thing. But there, I beg your pardon ten times over, apiece. It's against my principles to go out sewing, and harrow up folks' minds with my troubles; only, you see, I'm a little nervous and unsettled to-day on account of Alice's crying pretty hard this morning because she hadn't any thing to wear to school."

Papa Mason took Kathie aside when he came home to dinner, and with a little fun, and teasing, and pretence of mystery, produced the check. There it was, one hundred and twenty-five dollars, all right, and three weeks between now and Christmas Eve to get her blue silk gown made.

While she ate her roast beef she began to think again. One question kept asking itself over in her mind,--Why should some people have blue silk gowns, and others have no gowns at all? I rather think we have all asked ourselves this same thing, in one form of words or another. Since the great Father made and loves us all, why should one be Queen Victoria and another little Alice staying at home from school for want of a few yards of woollen and a pair of boots? Political economists have ciphered it all out, beautifully; but Kathie did not know that, and so the vexing question puzzled her. What if it was done just to give us a chance to help each other? she asked herself, at last, and the text of a sermon she heard once came into her mind,--"Bear ye one another's burdens." If all fared just alike there would be no chance for helpfulness, or charity, or self-denial; so may be clothes would be put on people's backs at the expense of better things in their hearts. It must be that God knew best. Oh! if one couldn't think that, the world might as well fall to pieces at once.

"Will you have pudding, dear? I have asked you three times," said Mrs. Mason's voice, with a little extra energy in it; and Kathie looked up out of her dream with a certain vagueness in her eyes, and answered,--