“Why, who can have been here?” exclaimed Mrs. Bolder, glancing towards the door.
“Sit down, wife, and I’ll tell you all,” said Tychicus Bolder. “When you had gone out, and I was left alone with my pain—”
“I’m sure I’d gladly have stayed with you,” interrupted Miriam; “I went because you told me to go.”
“I know it—I know it—I sent you. Well, as I sat here alone with my pain, I began turning over in my mind what you’d told me of the last lecture, of the Midianites in possession. Ay, thinks I, I have them all here, every one of the four. There’s Disappointment; for wasn’t I a thriving man, and looking to get up higher and higher in the world—leave this place and take a larger business in Axe—till this sickness came, and pulled me back, and made it hard enough to struggle on here!”
Mrs. Bolder mournfully shook her head.
“And isn’t there Discontent; for it has often seemed as if the pain, and the weakness, and the helplessness were a’most more than man could bear!”
“I’m sure that no man could bear them more—” Miriam stopped in the midst of her sentence, less from a doubt as to its perfect truth than because she saw that her husband did not wish to be interrupted; so she relapsed into her usual position—that of a listener.
“There’s Dissension, for I feel ready to quarrel with all the world; and Distrust, for I can’t bring myself to think that I’ve not been hardly dealt with. Now if, as the parson said, all these enemies are most like to come, like the Midianites, to a soul where there’s been an idol set up, where was the idol in mine? You see, wife, pain and loneliness set an old man thinking.”
“You never had an idol,” said the wife; “in the midst of such a drunken, disorderly, quarrelsome set as we have here in Wildwaste, you took the pledge, and kept it too—never a drop of the poison wetted your lips; there’s not many a man would have kept steady, standing all alone as you did. And then you didn’t worship Mammon; no man can say of you that your money was not honestly earned—every penny that you took in.”
“Bating a few overcharges,” muttered Bolder; “on the whole, I did keep my hands pretty clean.”