The parable of the Prodigal Son has long been justly regarded as a model of terse and compact narrative; but modern commentators of the analytical sort have a quarrel with the abruptness of its ending. They would have liked to learn what the good stay-at-home son said and did after his father had for a second time explained the situation to him. Did he, at least outwardly, agree that “it was meet that we should make merry and be glad”? And if he consented to go into the house, and even to eat some of the fatted calf, did he do it with a fine, large, hearty pretence of being glad? Did he deceive the returned Prodigal, for example, into believing in the fraternal welcome? Or did he lie in wait, and, when occasion offered, quietly, and with a polite smile, rub gall and vinegar into the wayfarer’s wounds? Alas, this we can only guess.
Poor Ben Lawton had been left in no doubt as to the attitude of his family toward the prodigal daughter. A sharp note of dissent had been raised at the outset, on the receipt of her letter—a note so shrill and strenuous that for the moment it almost scared him into begging her not to come. Then his better nature asserted itself, and he contrived to mollify somewhat the wrath of his wife and daughters by inventing a tortuous system of lies about Jessica’s intentions and affairs. He first established the fiction that she meant only to pay them a flying visit. Upon this he built a rambling edifice of falsehood as to her financial prosperity, and her desire to do a good deal toward helping the family. Lastly, as a crowning superstructure of deception, he fabricated a theory that she was to bring with her a lot of trunks filled with costly and beautiful dresses, with citified bonnets and parasols and high-heeled shoes, beyond belief—all to be distributed among her sisters. Once well started, he lied so luxuriantly and with such a flowing fancy about these things, that his daughters came to partially believe him—him whom they had not believed before since they could remember—and prepared themselves to be civil to their half-sister.
There were five of these girls—the offspring of a second marriage Lawton contracted a year or so after the death of baby Jessica’s mother. The eldest, Melissa, was now about twenty, and worked out at the Fairchild farm-house some four miles from Thessaly—a dull, discontented young woman, with a heavy yet furtive face and a latent snarl in her voice. Lucinda was two years younger, and toiled in the Scotch-cap factory in the village. She also was a commonplace girl, less obviously bad-tempered than Melissa, but scarcely more engaging in manner. Next in point of age was Samantha, who deserves some notice by herself, and after her came the twins, Georgiana and Arabella, two overgrown, coarse, giggling hoydens of fifteen, who obtained intermittent employment in the button factory.
Miss Samantha, although but seventeen, had for some time been tacitly recognized as the natural leader of the family. She did no work either in factory or on farm, and the local imagination did not easily conceive a condition of things in which she could find herself reduced to the strait of manual labor. Her method, baldly stated, was to levy more or less reluctant contributions upon whatever the rest of the family brought in. There was a fiction abroad that Samantha stayed at home to help her mother. The facts were that she was only visible at the Law-ton domicile at meal-times and during inclement weather, and that her mother was rather pleased than otherwise at this being the case.
Samantha was of small and slight figure, with a shrewd, prematurely-sapient face that was interesting rather than pretty, and with an eye which, when it was not all demure innocence, twinkled coldly like that of a rodent of prey. She had several qualities of mind and deportment which marked her as distinct from the mass of village girls; that which was most noticeable, perhaps, was her ability to invent and say sharp, comical, and cuttingly sarcastic things without herself laughing at them. This was felt to be a rare attainment indeed in Thessaly, and its possession gave her much prestige among the young people of both sexes, who were conscious of an insufficient command alike over their tongues and their boisterous tendencies. Samantha could have counted her friends, in the true, human sense of the word, upon her thumbs; but of admirers and toadies she swayed a regiment. Her own elder sisters, Melissa and Lucinda, alternated between sulky fear of her and clumsy efforts at propitiation; the junior twins had never as yet emerged from a plastic state of subordination akin to reverence. Samantha’s attitude toward them all was one of lofty yet observant criticism, relieved by lapses into half-satirical, half-jocose amiability as their pay-days approached. On infrequent occasions she developed a certain softness of demeanor toward her father, but to her mother she had been uniformly and contemptuously uncivil for years.
Of this mother, the second Mrs. Lawton, there is little enough to say. She was a pallid, ignorant, helpless slattern, gaunt of frame, narrow of forehead, and bowed and wrinkled before her time. Like her husband, she came of an ancestry of lake and canal boatmen; and though twenty odd years had passed since increasing railroad competition forced her parents to abandon their over-mortgaged scow and seek a living in the farm country, and she married the young widower Ben Lawton in preference to following them, her notions of housekeeping and of existence generally had never expanded beyond the limits of a canal-boat cabin. She rose at a certain hour, maundered along wearily through such tasks of the day as forced themselves upon her, and got to bed again as early as might be, inertly thankful that the day was done. She rarely went out upon the street, and still more rarely had any clothes fit to go out in. She had a vague pride in her daughter Samantha, who seemed to her to resemble the heroines of the continued stories which she assiduously followed in the Fireside Weekly, and sometimes she harbored a formless kind of theory that if her baby boy Alonzo had lived, things would have been different; but her interest in the rest of the family was of the dimmest and most spasmodic sort. In England she would have taken to drink, and been beaten for it, and thus at least extracted from life’s pilgrimage some definite sensations. As it was, she lazily contributed vile cooking, a foully-kept house, and a grotesque waste of the pittances which came into her hands, to the general squalor which hung like an atmosphere over the Lawtons.
The house to which Jessica had come with her father the previous afternoon was to her a strange abode. At the time of her flight, five years before, the family had lived on a cross-road some miles away; at present they were encamped, so to speak, in an old and battered structure which had been a country house in its time, but was now in the centre of a new part of Thessaly built up since war. The building, with its dingy appearance and poverty-stricken character, was an eyesore to the neighborhood, and everybody looked hopefully forward to the day when the hollow in which it stood should be filled up, and the house and its inhabitants cleared away out of sight.
Jessica upon her arrival had been greeted with constrained coolness by her stepmother, who did not even offer to kiss her, but shook hands limply instead, and had been ushered up to her room by her father. It was a low and sprawling chamber, with three sides plastered, and the fourth presenting a time-worn surface of naked lathing. In it were a bed, an old chest of drawers, a wooden chair, and a square piece of rag carpet just large enough to emphasize the bareness of the surrounding floor. This was the company bedroom; and after Ben had brought up all her belongings and set them at the foot of the bed, and tiptoed his way down-stairs again, Jessica threw herself into the chair in the centre of its cold desolation, and wept vehemently.
There came after a time, while she still sat sobbing in solitude, a soft rap at her door. When it was repeated, a moment later, she hastily attempted to dry her eyes, and answered, “Come in.” Then the door opened, and the figure of Samantha appeared. She was smartly dressed, and she had a half-smile on her face. She advanced readily toward the chair.
“Don’t you know me?” she said, as Jessica rose and looked at her doubtfully in the fading light. “I’m Samantha. Of course, I’ve grown a good deal; but Lord! I’d have known you anywhere. I’m glad to see you.”