Eudora, drawn completely out of herself, forgot for the moment her own sorrows in ministering to those of the poor, bereaved destitute Annella. Much acquaintance with grief had taught Eudora the rarest of all arts—that of wisely comforting the afflicted. She knew that sorrow is less hurtful when it is permitted to express itself in complaints. She tempted Annella to complain, and the child said:
“Oh, Miss Miller, it is so—so hard! I hadn’t a friend in the world but him—and he hadn’t one on earth but me! We were all in all to each other! and so we always have been, ever since I can remember! When the court-martial took his commission away from him, he gathered me to his heart, and said—‘Thank God they can never take you from me, my Nella!’ And now he is taken from me!”
Here a burst of tears interrupted her speech. When it was over she resumed her complaint:
“They speak ill of him because he drank, Miss Miller; but he could not help it. How hard he tried to break himself of that fatal habit no one knows so well as myself—except his Maker! but he never could! Drinking was as much a disease with him as coughing is with the consumptive, or shaking is with the paralytic. Oh, Miss Miller, you look so good! you don’t think hard of my poor dead father do you?”
“No, dear; I have always believed inebriation—habitual inebriation—to be a mere disease,” said Eudora, sympathetically.
“Oh, it is! it is just as much a disease as dyspepsia or consumption is! This disease that he could not conquer—the dishonor that he felt to the inmost core of his heart—the despair that he should ever recover all that he had lost—these broke his heart! I know it; and I will defend his memory if no one else does!”
Here another burst of weeping arrested her farther discourse. When this second gust of sorrow was past, she continued her touching apology for the dead:
“If man could see as God sees—what it was that first drove him to drink—I mean what it was that first brought on this disease, they would pity instead of condemning him! It was my mother’s early death! He loved her so much, Miss Miller. Since she died he has never looked upon another woman with affection. And he loved me so much for her sake! And now he is gone, and I shall never see him more—never! never! never!”
Here, for the third time, a wild gush of tears and sobs choked her voice; but as it gradually subsided to quiet weeping, she grew still, and dropped into slumber.
She was but a child in her first sorrow, and like a child she had cried herself to sleep.