A Knight of the Nineteenth Century

by Edward Payson Roe

Last week I gave you a chance; this week I am induced to give you a good word. While I warn you that I will tolerate no weak dallying with your old temptations, I also tell you that I would like to see you make a man of yourself, or, more correctly, perhaps, as Dr. Barstow would express it, be made a man of. If one wants to do right, I believe there is help for him (go and ask the Rev. Dr. Barstow about this); and if you will go right straight ahead till I see you can be depended upon, I will continue to speak good words to you and for you, and perhaps do more. GEORGE IVISON.

This note greatly encouraged Haldane, and made his precarious foothold among the world's industries seem more firm and certain. The danger of being swept back into the deep water where those struggle who have no foothold, no work, no place in society would not come from the caprice or forgetfulness of his employer, but from his own peculiar temptations and weaknesses. If he could patiently do his duty in his present humble position, he justly believed that it would be the stepping-stone to something better. But, having learned to know himself, he was afraid of himself; and he had seen with an infinite dread what cold, dark depths yawn about one whom society shakes off as a vile and venomous thing, and who must eventually take evil and its consequences as his only portion. The hot, reeking apartment wherein he toiled was the first solid ground that he had felt beneath his feet for many days. If he could hold that footing, the water might shoal so that he could reach the land. It is true he could always look to his mother for food and clothing if he would comply with her conditions. But, greatly perverted as his nature had been, food and clothing, the maintenance of a merely animal life, could no longer satisfy him. He had thought too deeply, and had seen too much truth, to feed contentedly among the swine.

But the temptations which eventually lead to the swine—could he persistently resist these? Could he maintain a hard, monotonous routine of toil, with no excitements, no pleasures, with nothing that even approached happiness? He dared not give way; he doubted his strength to go forward alone with such a prospect. If conversion be a blessed miracle by which a debased nature is suddenly lifted up, and a harsh, lead-colored, prosaic world transfigured into the vestibule of heaven, he longed to witness it in his own experience.

It was while he was in this mood that his thoughts recurred to Dr. Marks, the good old clergyman who had been the subject of his rude, practical joke months before. He recalled the sincere, frank letter which led to their evening interview, and remembered with a thrill of hope the strong and mysterious emotion that had seized upon him as the venerable man took his hand in his warm grasp, and said in tones of pathos that shook his soul, "I wish I could lead you by loving force into the paths of pleasantness and peace." Wild and reckless fool as he then was, it had been only by a decided effort and abrupt departure that he had escaped the heavenly influences which seemed to brood in the quiet study where the good man prayed and spun the meshes of the nets which he daily cast for souls. If he could visit that study again with a receptive heart, might not the emotion that he had formerly resisted rise like a flood, and sweep away his old miserable self, and he become in truth a "new creature"?

The thought, having been once entertained, speedily grew into a hope, and then became almost a certainty. He felt that he would much rather see Dr. Marks than Dr. Barstow, and that if he could feel that kind, warm grasp again, an impulse might be given him which even Mrs. Arnot's wise and gentle words could not inspire.

Before the week was over he felt that something must be done either to soften his hard lot or to give him strength to endure it.

The men, boys, and girls who worked at his side in the mill were in their natures like their garb, coarse and soiled. They resented the presence of Haldane for a twofold reason; they regarded the intrusion of a "jail-bird" among them in the light of an insult; they were still more annoyed, and perplexed also, that this disreputable character made them feel that he was their superior. Hence a system of petty persecution grew up. Epithets were flung at him, and practical jokes played upon him till his heart boiled with anger or his nerves were irritated to the last degree of endurance. More than once his fist was clenched to strike; but he remembered in time that the heavier the blow he struck, the more disastrously it would react against himself.

After the exasperating experiences and noise of the day, Mr. Growther's cottage was not the quiet refuge he needed. Mr. Growther's growl was chronic, and it rasped on Haldane's overstrained nerves like the filing of a saw. Dr. Barstow's sermons of the previous Sabbath had emphatically "riled" the old gentleman, and their only result, apparently, was to make him more out-of-sorts and vindictive toward his poor, miserable little self than ever. He was so irascible that even the comfortable cat and dog became aware that something unusual was amiss, and, instead of dozing securely, they learned to keep a wary and deprecatory eye on their master and the toes of his thick-soled slippers.

"I've been goin' on like a darned old porkerpine," he said to Haldane one evening, "and if you don't git convarted soon you'd better git out of my way. If you was as meek as Moses and twice as good you couldn't stand me much longer;" and the poor fellow felt that there was considerable truth in the remark.

The mill closed at an earlier hour on Saturday afternoon, and he determined to visit Dr. Marks if he could obtain permission from his employer to be absent a few hours on Monday morning. He wrote a note to Mr. Ivison, cordially thanking him for his encouraging words, but adding, frankly, that he could make no promises in regard to himself. "All that I can say, is," he wrote, "that I am trying to do right now, and that I am grateful to you for the chance you have given me. I wish to get the 'help' you suggest in your note to me, but, in memory of certain relations to my old pastor, Dr. Marks, I would rather see him than Dr. Barstow, and if you will permit me to be absent a part of next Monday forenoon I will esteem it a great favor, and will trespass on your kindness no further. I can go after mill-hours on Saturday, and will return by the first train on Monday."