It was the third or fourth morning after her father's inspiring temperance lecture in Bert's tent that Esther laughed outright at her thoughts, which had been running along lines like those just mentioned.
"What are you laughing at?" her mother demanded peevishly. Mrs. Trailey was rinsing a couple of towels in the wash-hand-basin just outside the entrance to their tent. "I don't see anything to laugh at," she went on; "especially now your father has taken to drink."
"Drink! Father!" cried Esther in astonishment. "What on earth do you mean, mamma?"
"What I say—silly," snapped Martha Trailey. "He's gone and broken my poor heart," and she twisted and wrenched at a helpless towel in the extremity of her grief.
"I can't believe it, mamma. Why, father used to lecture at the Band of Hope meetings at chapel!"
"Don't I know it! And now he's brought us down to this! Mind you don't marry a man who lectures at Band of Hope meetings—they're all alike, you may depend. The Rev. Jeremiah Sittingbourne's words are coming true—every one of 'em. The very day you were christened, when he came for tea, and I hadn't any cake made, and I had to give him bread and butter and jam, and he asked a blessing just the same as if it had been one of my best plum cakes, 'Yes, my dear Mrs. Trailey,' he said, after he'd drunk four cups of tea, and then wiped his whiskers on his pocket-handkerchief—you remember his white whiskers all stained yellow round his mouth, don't you, Esther? 'Yes,' he said——"
"Of course, I don't remember, mamma. I was only a baby. But where did dad get the drink?"
"How do I know where he got it? He's saturated with it yet. He smells like that low public-house at the top of the High Street, where that cat, Mrs. What's-her-name, the one the chapel-folks said did away with her first husband; you know the one I mean—'The Woman in Black'—or is it Pink?—the public-house is called. Oh, dear me! what will become of us now? What with a drunken husband; and a daughter that should have been a son—-and would have been if my prayers had been answered—but it's like the Rev. Mr. Sittingbourne——"
"Sh-h, 'sh-h, mamma! here's dad coming now. One of the horses is bringing him on the end of its rope. Don't for goodness' sake let him hear you carrying on so. Perhaps he was worrying about our long journey, and——"
"Worrying! Your father worrying! Would to God—Oh! that ever I should say such a thing!—and me with two brothers missionaries—or would have been if they hadn't both been taken to heaven in their infancy when your grandmother Bickering was having children too fast. Mind you never have children too——"