“Oh God!” he moaned. “This boy’s future and happiness are in my hands! What can I do? What can the impotent wreck that I am, do?”
What, indeed, could Doctor Joe do? He was so indifferent a trapper that his earnings barely served to supply him with the ordinary comforts and necessities of life. The journey to New York would be an expensive one, and there appeared to him no other way by which Jamie’s sight could be saved.
Through the mist of departed years Doctor Joe turned back in fancy to his own boyhood home. He saw his father’s house, where he had grown to young manhood, and had planned the great things he was to do in the world. That was when life and the world with all their possibilities lay before him. Now they were behind him. There were no hopes or prospects for the future beyond a hand-to-mouth living from day to day, with a gray shadow upon the past.
He saw the path leading up from the village street to the door of his father’s cottage, and the green, well-kept lawn on either side, and his mother’s flower beds which she loved so well and nurtured with her own dear hands. He was there again in fancy. An odor of roses and sweet peas and honeysuckles came to his nostrils. He could see the fat, saucy robins hopping about upon the grass. And there was his mother at the door! How gentle and loving she always was. How she used to tuck him into bed and kiss him good night, when he was little. What plans she built for him, and how she always told him that he must be a generous and noble man when he grew up.
And then he passed on to the years when he helped his father, after school hours, in the little store around the corner, and the terrible day when his father died quickly, to be soon followed by his mother. How desolate the world seemed then! What a lonely struggle lay before him!
And when his father’s estate was settled, and the store and the home were sold, and he left the village, he had barely enough money in his pocket to meet his first year’s expenses at college. But he had vowed to make his way, as his mother had wished, and also to be her ideal of a man.
The years that followed were years of struggle, for it was not easy with bare hands to finish his education. But in those days he had brains and hope and courage, and the basic tenacity that will not surrender. And he was inspired in those early years by a profound belief that his mother was near him. He could not see her, but her spirit walked with him and watched over him. It gave him courage to feel her near him, and kept him straight when he was tempted to do wrong, for he would permit himself then to do nothing of which his mother would disapprove.
But somehow, later on in life, he had drifted away from her. He did not think of her so often, and with passing years her memory dimmed, and sometimes he forgot to be true to himself and to her ideals.
Doctor Joe’s thoughts dwelt for a time on the thing which had caused his downfall. What a friend it had seemed at first, but how, when it gained possession of him it tortured and finally ruined him. And here he was now—just a bit of human driftwood, cast up by the tide of events upon a far shore.
“Well,” said Doctor Joe, finally, lifting his head and looking about him, “there’s one consolation. Driftwood in this land may be used as firewood, to help warm freezing fingers. It’s a better fate than falling into a city sewer, or being cast upon a city’s garbage heap.”