Rue and Roses

by Angela Langer

I had laid myself down on one of the torn mattresses, and had closed my eyes at once in order to make them believe that I had gone to sleep. As soon, however, as all were silent I sat up and looked round in wild despair. My mother, tired of her daily work, slept soundly, and I listened to her breathing for a while. Then I glanced over to where my brother lay. He looked now even leaner and taller than before, and his face, all unguarded, showed such a strange expression of disappointment, woe, and pain, that for the moment I forgot his vanity, his brutality, his arrogance. A great pity sprang up within me for his early-spoiled youth, his strange, passionate nature lashing him, as it were, never granting him a second's rest nor reconciliation to his fate. He hated my father because he thought that bad management of the business had been the reason for all our misfortune. But he was wrong. I knew for a certainty that my father had given large credit to people who afterwards did not pay, and the natural consequence of it was that he himself became unable to pay for the goods he had received. Besides all that, there were the large number of children and other matters, which would have melted a bigger capital than my father had ever possessed. It is true that one might say there was no need for him to give credit to people who could or would not pay, but he was too generous and too good-hearted to refuse. Being himself a child of the poor, he understood the bitterness of want, and if he had given way too much to such feelings, he had, God knows, not escaped punishment.

I could not for a long time take my eyes from my father and my brother, who now slept so peacefully side by side as if an ill word had never passed between them.

My mother had to leave home very early next morning, and after the poor breakfast was over, my brother seated himself at the table and called my two little brothers to him.

"Come on, you lazy-bones; go and get your books!" he shouted, after which they produced a few dirty books from a corner. My brother then commenced the lesson with them; he was, however, very rude, and boxed their ears for trifling things. Once he gave the youngest a brutal kick, at which I sprang to my feet and, placing myself with clenched fists before him, said:

"Don't you touch him again!"

My brother fell into a terrible rage.

"That's the thanks I get from you, I guess," he roared, "for spoiling my whole career in giving up my time to educate the boys, a thing which it is true you all consider superfluous. Do you believe that I can quietly see them grow up and become such rogues as I have become, only because I have had no education? Where are you, you dogs?" he shouted, turning to the table again.

But while he had been disputing with me the boys had run away.

"There you are," he said to me, "they are no more afraid of the devil than they are of books. Like sire, like son! The boys are not a bit better than their honourable begetter. However, I trust I shall be able to steady them yet, and will see who is the master here."

After he had for a while scolded and reproached me for my incomprehensible shortsightedness in taking the part of these miserable boys, he reached down a shabby felt hat and disappeared.