Even in that hour of distress Martin thanked God from his heart that his child had not shared the fate of her parent.
Mrs. Batten hurried off in the cab for a doctor, whose arrival was anxiously awaited by Martin. When the medical man had come and examined the patient, he pronounced Mrs. Laver to be in a critical state. She was in great pain of body and anguish of mind, and passed the rest of that night in fearful misery. At an early hour of the morning, Martin, at Ann's own desire, sent an urgent message to Mr. Vale, the clergyman of the parish, to ask him to come and see his sick wife.
"Laver!" repeated Mr. Vale, when the message was delivered by Mrs. Batten. "Surely that is the name on the tobacconist's shop in John Street."
"The very same," said the fishmonger's wife. "I used always to see with regret that shop open when I passed it on Sundays," observed the clergyman, who had once entered it when on his way to church, in order to expostulate with Mrs. Laver both on her Sabbath-breaking, and on the character of some of the ballads exposed in her window. "Last Sunday, however, I noticed that, for the first time, the shutters were up. I suppose that both Laver and his wife had gone on this unfortunate party of pleasure."
"No, sir, not he," replied Mrs. Batten, frankly. "I wish that none of us had had more to do with the matter than Martin Laver. He had words with his wife, she told me herself, poor soul, about that same closing of the shop; he was determined to give up all selling and buying upon Sundays, and mighty angry was she at what she called his folly; but maybe he was the wiser of the two after all."
Poor Mrs. Laver, moaning on her sick-bed, had good cause to come to the same conclusion. What had she procured with those Sunday earnings which she had reserved for the Sunday treat? A few hours of boisterous pleasure, to be followed by many weeks of pain! And sickness drew poverty after it; for Martin's time was necessarily so much taken up with nursing his wife, and attending to their child, that business was much neglected, while illness brought many expenses. Ann Laver had to pay a very dear price indeed for her frolic down the river, undertaken against the will of her husband.
But this, it may be said, was quite accidental; Ann might have broken the Fourth Commandment every Sunday in her life, and yet have been never the worse.
No, never believe that, my reader, all money unlawfully earned may be called Satan's loan, and at one time or other, a fearful amount of interest has to be paid for every farthing thus borrowed. "Lightly won—lightly gone," says the proverb, but this expresses but half of the truth. Ill-gotten money not only seems to slip through the fingers, but it leaves a brand on the soul, and a fearful debt on the conscience. An account is kept, and all must be paid for in this world, in the next, or in BOTH! *
* Christ has paid all debts of His saints.
Let not only the godless rich, but the godless poor—the thief, the Sabbath-breaker, the wretched earner of the wages of sin—pause and reflect on this awful sentence, written in God's holy Book—"Your gold and silver is cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days!" †