CHAPTER XXXVII.POETIC RETRIBUTION.—GROG-SELLERS INTERVIEWED BY WOMEN.
On a perfect morning in early May, the very day of the departure of the count and Madam Susie for France, a man prematurely old by dissipation, and destitute through wasting his substance by gambling, approached the town of Oakdale, which once had been his home. His last cent had been spent to bring him to a railroad station some miles distant, and from sunrise until ten o’clock he had walked, weary and almost fainting at every step.
He arrived by the least frequented road, and when a few rods from the house once owned by Mrs. Buzzell, he sat down under a tree by the roadside. The birds were singing and chirping in the branches, the sun was warm, and the air balmy and delicious. As he sat there, a little child approached and stood silently regarding him with evident curiosity. It was a lovely child, whose soft, golden hair descended to her waist from under a quaint little mushroom-shaped hat of white straw. She was dressed very coquettishly, her stockings nicely gartered above the knee, short white dress with embroidered flounces, and pretty bronzed gaiter-boots. Her dress was protected by a jaunty white apron, with bib and pockets trimmed with crimson braid. Her blue eyes showedtraces of tears, and the man looking at the charming little picture before him, soon discovered the cause—a dead canary-bird whose tiny claws and yellow tail peeped out of one of her apron pockets.
“Well, I never before saw a little girl with a canary-bird in her apron pocket,” he said, trying to smile.
“You never had a birdie die.Younever did; did you?” she asked, almost ready to sob.
“No, I never had a birdie. I am sorry yours died.”
The child took the dead bird from her pocket, and sitting down on a stone beside the man, caressed it and moaned pitifully, “Oh, birdie! birdie! I am so sorry Minnie gave you chocolate drops! Oh, birdie! birdie! How can I leave you in the cold ground! I shall never, never see you again!”
The child’s distress touched the rough gambler’s heart, and he tried to console her. “What a beautiful thing this child is! Some rich man’s spoiled darling,” were his thoughts, and he sighed heavily.
“Poor old man!” said the little one, forgetting her own trouble for a moment. “What is the matter?”
“Do you think me so old? How old are you?”
“I am six years old.”
“Six years old!” repeated the man, and then he asked her name.
“My name is Minnie von Frauenstein. I am Paul’s little girl, you know, and he gave me my birdie. Oh, it sungsosweetly! and I gave it chocolate drops. Poor birdie! Minnie was so silly;” and the child sobbed again.
Dan, for of course the reader has guessed that it was he, though he was broken in spirit and weak and exhausted by fever and chills, from which he had long sufferedin the West, had yet in his degradation something more of human softness than he had ever had in his strength. When this beautiful little girl told him she was six years old, the thought flashed upon him that his and Susie’s child would be, if living, about this age; and something in her face appealed to him like a half-forgotten picture. Mrs. Forest had never once alluded to Susie in her letters, and in the short notes he returned, at long intervals, in answer to his mother’s tiresome, pious communications, he asked no questions, though he had often determined to do so, or write to his sister, or even to Susie; but he had never done so. Susie might be gone away or dead, for all he knew, and the child too. This one was no such child as would spring from him and Susie, he thought. This was some proud, petted beauty, whose birth had been heralded as a blessing, and when she told him her name, his speculation ceased, but every word and motion charmed him. She seemed like a creature of some purer, higher sphere than that to which he belonged, and when he spoke to her he softened his voice and manner as by instinct.
“I must bury my birdie and go back,” she said, “for I am going away with mamma and Linnie and Paul. The ship is waiting for us, papa says, in Boston, and it sails on the great ocean to-morrow morning. We are going to France, you know, to the Social Palace.”
“Who’s Linnie? Not Linnie Forest?”
“Yes; Linnie Forest, my doctor’s girl. Don’t you know Linnie? She is my nurse now.”
Dan saw at once that this Frauenstein must be some great nabob, or his mother would never let Linnie go in such a capacity—a relative, he thought, of that millionairecount, of whom he had heard in his youth. As the child ran on, talking of many things, she mentioned her mother as “Madam Susie.”
“Susie!” echoed Dan. “Is that your mother’s name? What is her other name? I mean, what was it before she was married?” But he could get no satisfactory reply. “Is this Mr. Frauenstein, then, your father?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Minnie. “He wasn’t once, you know, but he made me his little girl. He isn’t Mr. He’s Count.”
“Who is your real father?”
“Oh, we don’t ever speak of him. He was a naughty, bad man. He didn’t love me nor mamma. He went off and forgot his little girl; but Paul loved me, and is so good to me. He is my Slave of the Lamp, you know.” Dan covered his face with his hands, and hot tears of shame and remorse poured down his face. Minnie patted his head with her soft little hands, and told him not to cry. “Come home to my house,” she said, “and we will give you something to eat.”
“Thank you; I am not a beggar.”
“Well, you are poor, ain’t you?”
“Yes, poor enough, God knows.”
“Well, then, you can work for Auntie Clara while we are gone; and she is such a darling auntie, and she is very kind to all poor people. So is mamma too, and Paul, and Minnie is too.” While she was talking the count approached, being anxious to know why she stayed so long. Dan rose totteringly from his seat when the elegant gentleman appeared. “My child,” the count said to Minnie, who ran towards him, “your mamma is anxious about you. Go quickly and get ready. Thetrain leaves in a few minutes.” And taking her up in his arms, he kissed her tenderly. She had not buried her bird. Her heart had failed at the last moment. She would leave him with auntie, she said. As she ran back toward the house, the count turned to the man and said,
“You look ill, my friend. You had better go to Dr. Forest, just across the Common.”
“I know where he lives,” said Dan. “That is where I am going.” And the count took the poor, broken-down man’s arm, though Dan tried to refuse, and walked with him back to the Common, telling him on the way that Dr. Forest would be able to set him all right, and then would give him work, if he desired it. “Tell him Frauenstein sent you to him, and you will be well taken care of. Or, better, come to the house with me. The doctor may be there by this time.”
Dan declined as politely as he could. His emotions were varied, to use a mild term, at being recommended to the charity of his own father by a great nabob, who had adopted his child, and was just at that moment starting on a European tour with that child’s mother. Dan supposed, as a matter of course, that Susie had married this man. His head was in a dazed condition, as, from behind a great tree on the edge of the Common, he saw the party emerge from the house. Susie, and the child, and Linnie received the parting embraces from Clara and the doctor, who then handed them into an open carriage. The count lingered a moment at the porch, holding Clara’s hand. Susie looked more mature, and much more beautiful to Dan than ever before, and through her tears shone a radiant happiness. The countcame forward, embraced the doctor, jumped into the carriage, which immediately drove off, Min throwing kisses to the doctor and Clara till it was out of sight.
Shame, regret, self-reproach, and jealousy, gnawed at Dan’s very vitals, as he stood there, a poor, forlorn wretch, witnessing a bliss that might have been his, but for his own folly. He felt strangely attracted to the beautiful child. He could feel still her little hand patting his head, and pitying his sorrow. Surely if ever there was an exemplification of poetic retribution, Dan Forest experienced it that day.
He stood supporting himself against the old tree for some time after his father and sister entered the house, and then he went to his mother. She wept over him, and accepted without question his representation of the causes of his sad condition. According to this representation, he was the innocent victim of an untoward fate. He said not a word about gambling or drinking; and as he was certainly cadaverous in appearance from his intermittent fever, as well as from hard drinking, she attributed the effect wholly to the causes he assigned. She gave him a biscuit and a glass of wine, and then made him take a warm bath, and don the clean linen she prepared for him. While they were at lunch, the doctor came in. He looked searchingly into Dan’s face as he held his trembling hand, and the quick eye of the physician read the secret of the terrible life his son had led; but he uttered no word of reproach. He sat down to the table and listened, with Mrs. Forest and Leila, to all that Dan had to say of the beauties of California, and the scenes through which he had passed, carefully omitting those in which he had played a disgraceful part, orpresentinghisrôle as that of a third party. Mrs. Forest thought the state of society must be dreadful in California, and wondered that her son could live in such a moral atmosphere!
On a subsequent and private examination, the doctor found Dan’s system even more shattered than he had expected, and told him he must leave off drinking, or there was no hope for him. Dan promised faithfully to follow the regimen the doctor prescribed, seemed very reasonable and grateful for his father’s kindness, and that very day, late at night, a policeman brought him home in a beastly state of intoxication.
Poor Mrs. Forest had been touched to the heart that her only son should have returned on foot, like a beggar, to the home of his youth, and she had supplied him generously with money, a fact she now regretted. Dan, in his weakness, illustrated well the truth of the old saying,in vino veritas. He was maudlin to the last degree. He raved about his “dear child,” his “beautiful Minnie”—how she looked with the dead canary in her apron pocket, and how cruelly she had been torn from his protection by that “swell, Frauenstein,” whose head he seemed very anxious to “punch,” as he declared. Mrs. Forest was disgusted beyond measure by the low words Dan used; but the doctor studied him, as the naturalist would some strange species of animal. After Dan had wept copiously over the wrong he had suffered in being robbed by the count of Susie’s love, he ordered champagne and then “cocktails” of his mother, whom he took for the mistress of an unmentionable resort; and then the doctor managed to get him upstairs and on the bed, when he removed his boots and left him.
“How awful! How awful! What shall we do with him?” exclaimed the mother, as the doctor re-entered and threw himself on the lounge.
“I don’t know, Fannie. He’s only one step fromdelirium tremens. He ought to go at once to an inebriate asylum.” Mrs. Forest was shocked at the idea. “It couldn’t be so bad as that. She would have a long talk with him. Doubtless he had met old friends and they had induced him to drink.”
“My dear, he is already over the bay. His nerves are shattered. He has no power to save himself. Talk to him! I should as soon expect to stop the thunder by beating a tam-tam.”
“I know. Those are your fatalist views. You don’t believe in free-will, so of course you will say he can’t save himself.”
“What is free-will? One of our greatest scientists characterizes it as the ‘lawlessness of volition.’ The will is not a faculty. It is simply the state of mind immediately preceding action, and that state is determined by motives; by circumstances and attractions which we do not create.”
“Yes, we do. We create them in others. We constantly affect their motives and their actions; and so we may act on ourselves, and change our motives. We can make weak ones strong.”
“What do you mean byweacting onourselves? But I will not quibble, Fannie. What is the result, when you put two pounds in one scale of a balance and one pound in the other? Dan’s desire for the excitement produced by alcohol is the two-pound weight; his resisting force is the other.”
“I am sure there can be no pleasure in the excitement he is now under, for example.”
“Oh, yes; a subverted pleasure. He felt himself a hero as he talked about his wrongs, and he had strong hopes of conquering Frauenstein, whom he thinks his enemy. You see it is insanity; but many insane people are happy. This is often the case when insane enough to be ignorant of their condition. Some madmen enjoy years of a triumphant career as Julius Cæsar, Napoleon, and so on.”
“Well, then, you think Dan happy, and that we had better do nothing to save him,” said Mrs. Forest, with a sad irony. “For my part, I shall do all I can to avoid the repetition of this.”
“Do all you can, dear. You should know, without my telling you, how I feel about our son; but I see no possible way to save him, except the one I suggested. How do you propose to keep him from getting in the same condition to-morrow?”
Mrs. Forest was silent a moment, and then she went quickly out of the room. Pretty soon she returned. “Just look!” she said, holding some crumpled money in her hands and counting it. “Two dollars and eighty-four cents, out of twenty dollars that I gave him to-day. Well, he can’t get any liquor to-morrow; that’s one satisfaction. Such a shame! Such a disgrace to us!”
“Rather worse than Clara’s leaving Delano, eh?”
“Oh, don’t mock me, doctor. It is a hundred thousand times worse.” This concession was quite new on Mrs. Forest’s part, and the doctor did his best to comfort and reassure his wife. Dan, however, did come home the next night in much the same state, after seeming so penitent,and promising his mother that she would never see him intoxicated again. In sore distress Mrs. Forest then went to Clara. It was the first time she had crossed the threshold in seven years. Clara received her in the sweetest, most filial way; took her all over the conservatories and nurseries, and presented young Page to her. Mrs. Forest was greatly pleased with this happy, modest young fellow. She looked at his fair complexion, his light, boyish moustache just appearing, and thought of her own boy, before the wicked world had degraded and ruined him. He wore a straw hat, shading his girlish complexion, and a brown linen blouse, buttoned to the throat. Mrs. Forest stayed and took lunch with her daughter, when there appeared at the table three of Clara’s flower-girls and this young Page, now divested of his blouse, which left exposed a fine linen shirt, printed all over with dogs of every species. It was a new experience for Mrs. Forest to sit down with working-people; but then she was getting old, and had had strange havoc made lately with all her “settled” notions of things. She watched these young people narrowly; noticed how clean they were, even to their finger-nails, and that their manners at table were unexceptionable. Clara called them her children; and it was pleasant to Mrs. Forest to see the affection and harmony existing between Clara and them.
During the lunch the conversation turned on the woman’s-rights convention, which was to sit at Oakdale the following week. Mrs. Kendrick had actually signed the call, and Mrs. Forest had been almost tempted to do so, but that was before the count’s name had been added, or she would not have resisted. These adolescents seemedto have very decided views on the subject of equal political rights, especially young Page. Mrs. Forest asked him where he obtained his first convictions on this mooted question. “From my mother, ma’am,” he answered, promptly. She had had at one time a very successful millinery industry in a large village near Boston, and her husband ruined it through drinking. Mrs. Forest did not see how the ballot in his mother’s hands could have prevented her husband from drinking.
“I think, madam,” he replied, “that the ballot in the hands of women would shut up the rum-shops. Would you not yourself vote to have them all cleaned out of Oakdale?”
This was touching Mrs. Forest in a tender place, but the young man knew nothing of her special interest in the question.
The doctor came in afterward, bringing Dan with him, and they held a family council on the subject of his weakness. He defended himself for awhile, declaring that he did not drink more than other fellows, but finally he broke down like a child—confessed he could not resist drinking, and said he meant to put a bullet through his head. Clara was very gentle to him. She soon hit upon the strongest motive that could be brought to bear upon him—his regard for Susie, and the hope that she had not wholly ceased to care for him. He told his mother if she hadn’t treated Susie like a dog, making her eat with Dinah instead of with the family, he should not have been ashamed of his love for her, and would have married her before ever Clara came home from school; by which all understood he meant before the appearance of Miss Marston. Dan seemed greatly relieved when helearned that Susie had gone abroad solely on business, and that there was no idea of marriage between her and the count, though he had adopted Minnie. Dan said if Susie would forgive him and care for him, he could stop drinking; and Mrs. Forest, seizing this hope, inspired Dan with it, though Clara said she did not believe he could ever win her—certainly not as a dissipated man. Dan was pretty sure of himself, and made a strong vow to abstain from drinking and follow the doctor’s directions until he looked “a little less like a corpse,” as he said. He seemed to be well pleased that Susie had not seen him in his present condition. Of course the poor fellow was sincere in his resolution; but in three days he came home reeling. Again Mrs. Forest sought Clara for advice.
“I have thought of a plan,” said Clara, “that might do some good. If you will go with me, we will visit every drinking-saloon in town; see the keepers and appeal to them. Perhaps we can get them to promise to stop selling Dan liquor.” But Mrs. Forest was not equal to the task. She said she should sink with shame to enter such places. Clara urged her most earnestly. “I am sure it will do some good at least. Mrs. Burnham, perhaps, will go with us. You see how intemperance is ruining not only Dan, but many young men. Burnham’s only son, not yet twenty, is a drunkard. Now, Mr. Burnham goes for shutting up the drinking-places. They are discussing this in the town-council, and the dealers are having their fears aroused, and could easily be persuaded to make some compromise. Do go, mamma! You would not see me go alone?”
“No, I would not; but——”
“How can you say ‘but’? I should think you would gladly make any effort to save Dan.”
“Well, go and see Mrs. Burnham. Let us see what she says.”
“Why, mother dear, it is for you to go. You and Mrs. Burnham both have sons ruined by drink. You can appeal to her as I cannot; and besides, I am so driven by my business.”
Of course, any one who waits for others to move, can never be counted on for any heroic work. Clara had to go to Mrs. Burnham herself. Mrs. Burnham believed in the move, and said she would consult her husband. She did so, and he told her to not “make a fool of herself,” which was the best thing he could have done, for it roused a spirit of defiance, and no sooner was he out of the house than she ordered her carriage, drove over to Clara’s, and announced herself ready. On the way they called for Mrs. Kendrick, who joined them, and Mrs. Forest also at the last.
In some of the places they visited, they saw sickening scenes; but Clara’s noble presence, her commanding eyes, her frank, womanly speech, gave the rest courage. She asked in every instance for a private interview with the heads of such establishments, and this interview was often had, for want of a better place, in back rooms piled with casks of liquor, demijohns, and bottles. Clara leading, the three elegant ladies followed, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but rather to the floor covered with sawdust, to absorb the tobacco-juice, ends of cigars, and dirt. The air was sickening in the extreme. Clara laid the case before the proprietors, appealed to their humanity, even when she had little faith in the existenceof the sentiment, and pictured to them the suffering of mothers and wives and sisters, at the sight of their loved ones ruined for all good in this world. Some of the men affected contempt for any one who didn’t know “when he had got enough.” Mrs. Burnham occasionally put in a word of indignant protest that the town should allow poisonous liquors to be sold to young men, and boys in their teens. At one place a burly-necked, brutal man told Clara she had better go somewhere else to preach temperance, and suggested, with a leer, that a good place for her talents was among the “shriekers” at the approaching convention. When they left this place, their cheeks burning, Clara said, “Which of you ladies will tell me you have all the rights you want? These men, my friends, are your masters. These make the laws that control your property and your happiness. These men would teachusour sphere, and make us forever dependent upon them, and the laws they make without our consent.”
“Oh, don’t!” exclaimed Mrs. Burnham. “I am so angry already that I could burn up every rum-cask in town, and, I had almost said, these brutes with it.”
“But don’t forget this, Mrs. Burnham: we are on a mission of strategy. We are not the political equals of these men, and every sign of anger you show, betrays your impotence to help yourself, and weakens our chance of success. Here we are at the next saloon. Now do be calm, Mrs. Burnham.”
It was a long and arduous task, but at last, without flagging, they finished the rounds. A great number of the liquor dealers promised to cease selling intoxicating drinks to those known as drunkards, or to make an exceptionin the case of Dan and young Burnham. Clara often asked them to promise “upon their honor,” which always flattered a certain class of these men.
It was a good lesson in woman’s rights to these women who went with Clara, and it greatly increased their admiration for her personally. The effort did much more good than they expected; for though Dan, young Burnham, and others, occasionally went home intoxicated, the occurrence was rare, and gave Dan a chance to follow up his father’s treatment and recover his health. The doctor, in the count’s absence, had the full control of the works over the river, and after a month or so, Dan went daily with his father, and becoming interested, did good service, in the preparation of the parks and gardens.
Mrs. Forest was very grateful that Clara had persuaded her to go on that “terrible excursion,” as she called it. “You are a noble girl, Clara,” she said, with expansion, “and I feel that I have not always been just to you. If I had my life to live over again, I should do many things differently.”
“Oh, mother dear,” Clara replied, embracing her, “you have done the best you could. Clara has no fault to find with her mamma;” and seizing her mother in a weak moment, asked her, as a great favor, to attend the coming convention!
“Well,” said Mrs. Forest, resignedly, “I will go. There can be no harm in it. Many of our most respectable people have signed the call. But,” she added, with a sudden sign of terror, “you don’t suppose I should be called on to sit on the platform, or offer a resolution or anything, do you?” Clara laughed. “Oh no, mamma. There will be no backwardness on the part of women, todo all that is required. I myself am going to read an address.”
“You, Clara! Well. I begin to believe it is ‘written,’ as the count says, that you are to do everything you set out to do. I might as well yield at discretion. The prospect of some time seeing you on a woman’s-rights platform used to be my nightmare. That also is ‘written,’ you see.”