The man addressed was sensible of a sort of flash of memory, and a picture came up before his eyes.
A neat, quiet home; an invalid wife sitting in a chair by the fire, tenderly holding a little frail boy; a crippled girl standing with her hand in the child's; a low hoarse voice pleading, "You'll take care of 'em, Tom! You'll let that dreadful drink alone, and feed them as are so helpless instead!"
That was the picture, and as Tom heard the woman say what she proposed "was better than starving," he knew in his heart how cruelly he had broken the promise he had made to his dying wife.
"I'll take 'im right away up to the attic if ye like," the woman went on, "and then," indicating Cherry by a movement of her hand, "she won't hear nor see nothink."
The man shook his head.
"One thing, she do keep 'im quiet when we don't want 'im. And if she makes a fuss I'll find a way to shut 'er mouth; that I will, don't yer fear."
Cherry lay and quaked. Well she knew all that was implied in this low-toned conversation, both towards her little brother and herself. But she too had seen, as by a flash, another scene. A woman on a dying bed, whispering with an earnestness which impressed every word on her child's memory, "Cherry, if you're in any trouble, tell Jesus—ask Him to help you. Oh, Cherry, if I did not know you love Him, my heart would break. Jesus, will help you. Tell Dickie that I always said that."
Cherry thought of it now, at first with a hopeless feeling that things had been so bad for so long that she feared Jesus did not hear; and then with a rebound she determined never to give up what her beloved and dying mother had bequeathed to her. "She always spoke true," she thought, with a sudden lightening of her terrible burden, and her head nestled against Dickie's with a certain dim belief that rescue of some sort would come some day.
The crowded inhabitants of the room had one by one sunk into slumber; even her father had ceased tossing about and swearing at all around him. Still Cherry lay broad awake, thinking over all the events of the last year, and remembering now with a sort of awe how she had called upon her Lord Jesus last May, when things had been so dreadfully bad with little Dickie, and how He had heard her, and had sent Dickie a long and dangerous illness, which had made him quite unable to be taken out on hire with old Sairy as heretofore.
She remembered now with thankfulness, though she had not looked upon it as the answer at the time, that somehow the kind carpenter who had been repairing their wretched room had taken notice of Dickie, and had given him a blanket and some grapes, and how his wife had brought him many a nice meal from their table.