As he re-entered the room, he met Mollie, who cast an appealing glance at him. She could not have been over twenty years of age, but she looked worn and haggard. Her hair was disheveled, large, dark rings encircled her heavy, lusterless eyes, now swollen with weeping, and there was a look of helpless and hopeless despair in her glance that aroused Houston’s pity. It was a new experience for him to be brought into contact with these wrecked and ruined lives, and sorrow for the one life which had gone out so suddenly and needlessly, made him pitiful toward all.
A look of pity, a word of pure, disinterested kindness, was something new in the life of the poor creature before him, and she began sobbing afresh:
“He’s gone,” she moaned, “and I don’t want to live no longer.”
“Did you care so much for him?” asked Houston, wonderingly.
“Yes,” she sobbed, “I never cared for nobody but him. I thought once he cared for me, but after a while I found he didn’t, and then I went to the bad as fast as I could, but still I cared for him. I never was very good, for I never had no chance to be, but I’d ’a been different from what I am, if he’d only ’a cared for me.”
Houston went back into the wretched room, and looked long and sadly at the one who, in his last moments of despair, had called him his friend. He recalled the story told him that night among the rocks; he thought of the life ruined by a mother’s neglect and sin, and now of another life shut out in hopeless misery because of his indifference and neglect, and Houston realized at that moment, as never before, the influences, for good or for evil, extending from one human life to another, spreading onward and onward,
“As wave follows wave across the sea,”
till the widening circles at last touch the shores of eternity.
An hour or two later, when Houston stepped over to the depot to meet the incoming special freight, he was somewhat surprised to see Mr. Blaisdell step from the train, and in his white face, his firmly set mouth with its hard lines, and his pale blue eyes, it could readily be seen that he knew nothing of pity or mercy for the man who had served him so faithfully.
“I did not expect you so early, Mr. Blaisdell,” said Houston, as they exchanged greetings, “I thought after receiving my dispatch you would feel no anxiety, and would probably not come out till the evening train.”