He didn’t tell me all he went through for two or three years after that, but it must have been awful for him to do what he did. She ruined him, brought him down till his home was sold up. It’s a common enough story—the drinking wife or the drinking husband that ruins the home, and you can read about it in the police cases almost every day. Sometimes it comes to murder, for a man who is a decent, hard-working fellow goes mad when he gets together home after home, only to see each go to pieces, wrecked by the dreadful drink, and his children, that he is proud of and loves, running the streets ragged and neglected.
But it was doubly sad in our odd man’s case, poor fellow, because the thing that brought it about was the mother’s love for her little one. He had lost his child, and through that he lost his wife and his home.
He found at last that all his trying was no good. If he didn’t give his wife money to get the drink she pawned his things, and what she couldn’t pawn she sold. She ran him into debt and got him into difficulties everywhere, and he was driven mad when he saw his life and her life being wrecked in such a dreadful way.
It was too much for him at last, and then he grew desperate. One night, when he came home and found the place stripped and his wife in a drunken sleep, he went out himself, and, meeting a friend, they went to the public-house together, and Tom had a glass of brandy to steady his nerves, and then he had another, and then—well, and then he took to drink too—drank hard himself to drown his trouble, and then the end came quickly. He was dismissed from his place for drunkenness, a place he had had for twenty years, and that week he was homeless—homeless, with a drunken wife and a delicate child, and, as he said, it might have been so different.
Oh, that “might have been!” What a lot it means in our lives!
When Tom got to this part of his story, he broke down at last. “You mustn’t mind me, ma’am,” he said; “but I can’t think of that awful time even now without a shudder. The first night that I slept in the casual ward, and lay awake and thought the past over, I thought I should have gone mad. I made up my mind that the next day I’d go to one of the bridges and drown myself.
“And then I thought, What would become of my poor little girl and that poor misguided woman if I was dead?
“I was the only hope they had in the world. Then I said to myself, ‘Perhaps, now things are at the worst, they will mend. There may be a chance of my poor lass coming to her senses now she sees what she’s brought us all to. At any rate, she can’t get any drink now, and the break may be the means of curing her.’”
“And was it, Tom?” I said, for I was getting interested in his story, and I knew something must have happened to change his luck, as they call it, or he wouldn’t be our odd man now, so cheerful, and so contented and respectable.
“Well, ma’am, it didn’t all come right at once. We’d a good deal to go through before things began to mend. My wife——”