The second child, modified by these four grave, earnest months, was made up of sincerity, earnest thought, and unfailing benevolence. Her early disregard for appearances, as compared to realities, made a wide gulf that could never be bridged between the two sisters. There was absolutely no relationship between them. Marian’s plain, honest, eager, affectionate face was grand beside the empty, pretty one of her elder sister. The younger was slow in developing her whole nature, which was transcendent in its interior moral characteristics. The blow came too late to seriously injure the physical. There was just the unavoidably less degree of robustness between herself and sister, which, with the absence of hope and common gayety, favored gravity in the former.
[THE BLACK SHEEP.]
The black sheep of a family is to be pitied rather than hated. He is the wronged, as well as the wrong-doer. Many years ago such an one came frequently under my observation. The family consisted of five boys and three girls, all but the one in question remarkably good-looking, gentle-hearted, fairly intelligent, thoroughly temperate, and honest. The third, in order, of the boys, was a coarse, brutal, unprincipled fellow, the dread and despair of his timid mother, whose money, and even clothing, he would steal (the latter to pawn), and whose life he would constantly threaten when a mere lad. He was at home only in a groggery, and that not so much on account of a love of liquor, as from his need of companions on his own plane. He was more than once in prison; oftener escaped through the prayers and management of his mother. Who, now, was responsible for this dangerous member of society?
The father was an amiable, inefficient, illiterate, temperate man; a waster of other people’s time; an interminable talker of nothings. The mother, an amiable, industrious, capable woman, who patched and knitted and made a few dollars by nursing, at the call of the village doctor—a most tender and devoted mother, a too generous neighbor. Passing the unfinished habitation one day, I stopped to admire the double hollyhocks and breathe the perfume from the beds of herbs. At the same moment I heard a loud cry for help, and the old lady came hurriedly round the corner of the house, followed by her son, with a hoe in his hand upraised to strike her. Seeing me, he flung the hoe aside and walked sullenly out of the gate. Sitting on the doorstep wiping her tears away with the corner of her apron, the unhappy woman apologized for her evil son in this wise:
“We were always poor, living from hand to mouth. My husband never had any faculty for making a living. I strove and strove to keep my children from want, and keep them looking decent. There were now six of them, and I was nearly distracted when I found I was going to have another. At this point, late in the fall, my husband went off and stayed four months with a well-to-do uncle of his, leaving me and the six children without food or fire-wood. I had endured all patiently till then, but this made me full of bitterness and anger. I was just raving—quite beside myself all the time. A neighbor helped me, and trusted me a little, so that we kept from starving; but this did not prevent me from feeling indignation, almost hatred, toward a father who could be so unfatherly. Thomas showed the same disposition from a child.”
[“MY CONSOLATION.”]
Here is a counterpart to the preceding narrative.
We had gone to visit an invalid friend who himself had climbed these mountain heights to escape the fogs below on the sea-shore. Here, cosily sheltered by the summit, surrounded by peach and cherry-trees, and looking down on wooded heights and gorges, we found a most excellent hotel. The host, a mild, intelligent man, was himself quite delicate; his wife, on the contrary, was one of those rarely met with, magnetic, generous-natured women, whose coming affects one like the ocean breezes. She had, so she told us, nine children living and one dead. Only such a brave, bounteous creature could have been equal to this, and never in one instance bring reproach on her motherhood. It is of the tenth I would speak, now a lad of sixteen, observing whom the invalid remarked: “I shall get well just looking at that boy. What a manly, affectionate fellow!”
“I call him my consolation,” said his mother. “He can do anything, and he does it so easily, so quietly.” And, indeed, the way in which this refined lad handed you your plate, your glass of milk, or cup of coffee, gave a dignity to the meal, while conferring honor on all parties concerned. The phrase “menial labor” had no significance when he was basting the meat or ironing the “belated” table-cloths for his mother.
Usually, when a woman in very straitened circumstances has an extremely large family, she presently becomes oppressed and discouraged. Her ambition is foiled. She can neither clothe, educate, nor train the children properly, and the latest comers are apt to have a poorer make-up—a fag-end sort of air. Here, on the contrary, was the flower of the flock, a youth full of faculty, at home on the piano-forte stool as at the knife-board, determined to sustain his mother at all hazards.