“Mark, tell me if you have ever had any experimental knowledge of want?” The young man looked up with a questioning glance. “Because if you do not know, I can tell you, Mark. I know how young people think of poverty, and talk of poverty, when any strong motive like love, or any other passion, urges them to embrace it; and people who are older, and should know better, talk pretty much in the same way. They will tell you that poverty deprives you of none of the real essential blessings of life; that the riches of nature and of nature’s God are free alike to the rich and the poor; that the blessings of health, of well-doing, of sunshine, and the face of nature, are open alike to both. It is so with the rich, doubtless, and it may be so with the poor who were born in this poverty; but to the well-born and well-educated, to the refined and intellectual, poverty is a dreadful, dreadful thing. It is not only to suffer the privation of proper and sufficient food, and comfortable clothing, and dwelling—it is to be shut out of all enjoyment of the blessings of nature and of society, and at the same time be exposed to all the evils that nature and society can inflict upon you. You have no leisure, or if you have, you have no respectable clothing, in which to go out and take the air, and enjoy the genial sunshine of pleasant days, on the one hand; and on the other, no adequate protection against the freezing cold of winter, and no escape from the burning heat of summer. And for society, pride will not permit you to seek the company of your sometime peers, and delicacy restrains you from the coarse association around you. To us, Mark, poverty would be the privation of every enjoyment. To be poor, were to be maimed, blind, ill, and imprisoned, at once!”
“Dear mother, you are a lady—I, a man! And loss of fortune has now no terrors for me; and birth and education, so far from rendering me more helpless, shall make me stronger to conquer my difficulties. I have no fear of wanting any of the comforts of life from the very onset. And as for being shut out, or rather shut in, from nature—mother, do you think I shall be? Do you think I shall keep away from nature because I cannot call on her in a coach, with a groom on horseback to take in my card? No, indeed. On the contrary, I purpose to live with nature. She’s an old intimate friend of mine, and no summer friend either—nor shall I be a summer friend of hers, and shrink from her boisterous winds and rattling sleet. And as for society, mother—oh, let me quote to you the words of Dr. Channing, whose lips, indeed, seemed touched with fire: ‘No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the Sacred Writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of paradise, and Shakspeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship.’ So, dearest mother, with industry that will procure me all the necessaries of life, health that will enable me to enjoy or endure nature in all her moods, and a mind dependent on itself for its enjoyment, what have I to dread from loss of fortune?”
“It may be very well for you, at least tolerable; but for India! You would not bring Miss Sutherland down to such a state?”
Mark paused, and then answered—
“Yes, mother, yes; if the only other alternative is to be a separation of many years, I would bring India down to this state.”
“Oh, Mark! that is very, very selfish!”
“I do not think so, madam.”
“Mark! Just now, when I told you of the nameless miseries of the well-born poor, you did not deny them, but said, ‘Mother, you are a lady—I, a man.’ Mark! out of your own mouth I will condemn you. India—Miss Sutherland—‘is a lady,’ Mark! Are you not selfish?”
“No, mother! not if India feels as I do—as I know she does; not if our separation would be to her, as it would be to me, a greater evil than all the early struggles our union may bring upon us.”
“My dear son, your sanguine confidence gives me deep pain. Dear Mark, be not too sure! Not for worlds would I speak a word against your India. Nor do I know that, under her circumstances, I speak much evil of her when I say that she is haughty, self-willed, indolent, and fastidious! But are those the elements of self-sacrifice?”