“Amen,” said Gilbert. “I’ll wear patches and play ‘bones.’”
Lizzette and Antoine said nothing; but a look of intelligence passed between them, which told of a purpose they did not care to mention just then. And so the little Home Circle Club was arranged. Three evenings in the week the programme came to be successfully carried out. Margaret kept a record of all the proceedings, carefully noting down the doubts and difficulties that beset them, and as carefully adding all truths that came to help them. The music of the violin and organ was not a startling success at first, for the empty purse prevented all thought of tuition except that furnished by self-teaching manuals; but as exceptional genius lay beneath Antoine’s curly locks, and Elsie was an uncommonly bright scholar, it was not long before the two young heads had solved the puzzling rudiments of music, and were on their way toward a tolerable amount of proficiency. Antoine was a new being. His mother affirmed that the music would cure him. A faint color tinged the hitherto pale cheeks, and an unusual sparkle lit up the dark eyes. It would have been hard to find a happier group of people than the five at Idlewild. They were like one family in their interests and efforts. Lizzette flitted in and out of both domiciles, intent now on Elsie’s cooking, now on Antoine’s music, which came to her ears at all hours of the day and night—for the violin had grown to be like a living companion to the crippled lad—now helping Gilbert and Margaret in the garden or gravely puzzling over some of the English books on Margaret’s table. They were all busy, cheerful, and conscious that they were making progress, intellectually and materially. Lizzette’s experience had been the safeguard over Margaret’s efforts in the garden. It was prospering finely, and already Lizzette had sold at her stall in the market at C—— enough to make Margaret feel that her hard days of work with hoe and spade were sometimes sure to be well rewarded. As the season progressed the work in the garden required additional help. In an old negro woman, known to everybody in the neighborhood as “Aunt Liza,” together with her son Eph, Margaret found the needed assistance. Often she worked beside them, finding as acquaintance progressed a perpetual source of annoyance in the aimless and half-hearted way in which they worked. Irresponsibility seemed to be with them the predominating characteristic, and strive as she would against it, she frequently found her efforts not much more successful than so much writing in water. They would both listen to her instructions with serious but blank faces, and relapse at once into that indolent method which was a continual thorn in Margaret’s New England thrift. It was her first serious stumbling-block on the way to that high plane of achievement whereon she had made no allowance for the thriftless, the ignorant, and the irresponsible. To her well-regulated mind, all people ought to be industrious, patient, and ambitious, and it was a keen thrust against her composure to be brought into contact with the unpromising side of human nature. It was not so much that the two did not earn the wages she paid them, as that she saw failure, suffering, misfortune before the two unthinking mortals. She felt a moral responsibility in endeavoring to set their feet aright, and so tried in numberless little ways to impress upon them a faint idea of the requirements of life. She found in the little hut where they lived a deplorable poverty, and undertook to question Liza, who in the summer, together with Eph, earned fairly good wages, how it happened that they were so poor.
“Dunno, Miss Margaret,” answered Liza with a grin. “Spec somehow me an’ Eph ain’t got no way of sabin’. In the summertime we has ’nough ter eat, and we firgits about de cold, and so when de winter comes, folks ’bout here is mighty good, and don’t let us go hungry, and that’s jes’ de way we gits thru.”
“But wouldn’t you rather save a part of your wages in the summer and fix up the cabin good and warm, and be able to feed yourself and have people respect you?”
“Spec ’twould seem better to have de old cabin fixed up; but as for folks ’spectin’ ole Aunt Liza and nigger Eph—yah! yah! I reckon, Miss Margaret, yer ain’t lived long o’ niggers much.”
Liza’s fat sides shook with unctuous laughter as she looked up into Margaret’s face.
“No,” said Margaret, “but I think every one is entitled to respect who earns it, whether he is black or white.”
“P’raps that’s so,” assented Liza, “but niggers ain’t white folks, nohow. They’s a pore down-trodden race fo’ suah,” she added, catching the whine of some claptrap orator. “Dey jes’ don’t know how to be any better.”
“They can learn.”
“Mighty hard work teach a nigger; dey’s got dreffel thick skulls. Niggers is the comicalest folks too; jes’ gib ’em a chicken bone and a watermillion and dey don’t care fo’ nuffin’ else,” and Aunt Liza stopped work long enough to chuckle over her own wit.