"I will," her mother answered, "I will come back immediately."
Choking the sob that rose in her throat, Mrs. Wentworth left the room and proceeded towards Mr. Swartz's office. Her visit was a hopeless one, but she determined to make the trial. She could not believe that the heart of every man was turned against the poor and helpless.
What a world is this we live in! We view with calm indifference the downfall of our fellow-mortals. We see them struggling in the billows of adversity, and as our proud bark of wealth glides swiftly by, we extend no helping hand to the worn swimmer. And yet we can look upon our past life with complacency, can delight to recall the hours of happiness we have past, and if some scene of penury and grief is recalled to our memory, we drive away the thought of what we then beheld and sought not to better.
What is that that makes man's heart cold as the mountain tops of Kamtschatka? It is that cursed greed for gain—that all absorbing ambition for fortune—that warps the heart and turns to adamant all those attributes of gentleness with which God has made us. The haggard beggar and the affluent man of the world, must eventually share the same fate. No matter that on the grave of the first—"no storied urn records who rests below," while on the grave of the other, we find in sculptured marble long eulogies of those who rest beneath, telling us "not what he was, but what he should have been." Their end is the same, for beneath the same sod they "sleep the last sleep that knows no waking," and their spirits wing their flight to the same eternal realms, there to be judged by their own merits, and not by the station they occupied below.
If there are men in this world who cannot be changed by wealth, Swartz was not of the number. What cared he for the sighs of the desolate, the appeals of the hungry, or the tears of the helpless? His duty was but to fill his coffers with money, and not to expend it in aimless deeds of charity. He looked upon the poor just as we would look upon a reptile—something to be shunned.
It was indeed a wild hallucination that induced Mrs. Wentworth to bend her steps towards his office. Could he have seen her as she was coming, he would have left his room, for the sight of the mendicant filled him with greater horror than a decree of God declaring that the end of the world had come.
CHAPTER NINETEENTH.
AN ACT OF DESPAIR.
Mrs. Wentworth reached the store of Mr. Swartz and entered. The clerk looked at her in astonishment. She was unrecognizable. Her dress was ragged and dirty; the hands and face that once rivalled the Parian marble in whiteness, were tanned by toil, and lay shrivelled and dried. Her hair was dishevelled and gathered up in an uncomely heap on the back of her head. She looked like the beggar, she had become.