"Stay, dear mother," John had cried, with a feeling of self-reproach; "you look so tired, I can't bear to see it. Wait, and we'll find some one else to send."
But the widow's only reply had been a faint smile, as she had left the cottage on her errand for her son.
"My mother has been half-killing herself for me, ungrateful dog that I am," muttered John, his self-reproach growing stronger and stronger. "Why, what can she have been living on all these six weeks, while I've been lying like a log in my bed? I can see well enough in her face what she's been a-suffering for me, without grudging, without complaining, bearing with all my ill temper, nursing me night after night! And what kind of a return do I make for it all? Did I not say to mother this very morning that I wanted to speak to Dick Brace about our little piece of business? She only sighed—I could see she was vexed; but I let her be vexed rather, than give up what I'd set my heart on.
"I've sometimes thought," continued John Carey, still muttering to himself, "I've sometimes thought that if I ever get well again—and now it's like as I may—I'd turn to God, serve Him as my parents have served Him, and begin what mother calls a pilgrim's life in good earnest. But if I did so—ah! The first steps are those as be so hard to take! If I did so—I must honour and obey my mother, as the Bible tells me I should; I must give up this pleasant plan of starting in business with Brace, I must give up the 'Jolly Ploughboys.' 'Twould be a hard pull—it would!"
John rubbed his chin; thinking wearied him, but he could not throw the subject off his mind.
"I might give up Dick Brace and the business, but that would not be the worst of it. Dinah Dealtry!" thought John. "She would not look at a mere day-labourer—she would not live in a cottage like this with my mother!"
He glanced with something like discontent around him at the humble home in which he had been born.
"Dinah has as good as told me that she'd ha' nothing to say to a man who could not offer her a house of her own. If she wouldn't choose to live with mother, mother wouldn't care to live with her; them two could never get on together, they've such different notions and ways."
John heaved a sigh of perplexity and vexation.
"It seems as if I must choose between the two, for I can't have both—that's clear; and I must choose between the two paths also; I know well enough which is the right one, but—but—how thinking does make one's head ache—and one's heart too for the matter of that!"