Rogues and Vagabonds

by George R. Sims

All of them mentioned George. They had been written mostly when George was a little lad, one year that the squire had gone abroad for six weeks by himself. As the old man read the words of tender love and devotion, he thanked God that this fond heart, at least, had ceased to beat ere its idol could grow up to break it.

Then he wondered if things would have been different had she lived. Perhaps he had been too severe and expected too much.

He read the lines traced by the hand long cold in the grave, and a strange sense of uneasiness came over him.

It seemed as though the spirit of the dead woman was pleading with him for her boy.

The hereafter was a mystery. If the eyes of the saints look down upon earth, what would the mother in heaven think of the father who robbed his son of his inheritance and left him a beggar?

The old man was low and desponding, and his mind was none too vigorous now. Strange fancies came to him at times. He wrestled with the devil in spirit, and endeavoured to ascribe every trifling incident to the direct interposition of Providence.

He had been proud of his son, he said to himself, and made an earthly idol of him The worship had certainly been as cold and formal as some other worships which look down with considerable contempt on enthusiasm in religion, but he persuaded himself it had been there. So he was punished for his idolatry by the shattering of his idol. In olden times he would have worn a shirt of hair and washed the feet of beggars for his sins; now he strove to put himself right by mortifying not the flesh but the spirit—by trampling out his natural affections, and misinterpreting the will of heaven.

He read the letters of his dead wife, which spoke of George again and again. Once he cast them aside with a shudder. It was another wile of the Evil One to lure him into leniency for the transgressor. But gradually his heart softened as memory carried him back to the happiest days of his life, when his sweet Ruth tossed the laughing child upon her knee and held him up for his father’s kiss.

It was not long ago—it was to-day. He could see them. The gloomy room faded away, and it was the pleasant summer time. There with fresh-plucked roses in her hand, sat his wife, and George—little George—was clapping his baby hands with delight as ‘pretty mamma’ twined the beautiful buds in her hair.

He started up, and held his hands towards the vision, but it faded in an instant, and he was once more alone—a miserable, weak old man, wifeless and childless.