“It is for your mother,” he would impress upon me. “When she is gone, Paul, put it aside, Keep it for doing good; that may make it clean. Start your own life without any help from it.”
He need not have troubled. It went the road that all luck derived however indirectly from old Hasluck ever went. Yet it served good purpose on its way.
But the most marvellous feat, to my thinking, ever accomplished by Barbara was the bearing off of my father and mother to witness “A Voice from the Grave, or the Power of Love, New and Original Drama in five acts and thirteen tableaux.”
They had been bred in a narrow creed, both my father and my mother. That Puritan blood flowed in their veins that throughout our land has drowned much harmless joyousness; yet those who know of it only from hearsay do foolishly to speak but ill of it. If ever earnest times should come again, not how to enjoy but how to live being the question, Fate demanding of us to show not what we have but what we are, we may regret that they are fewer among us than formerly, those who trained themselves to despise all pleasure, because in pleasure they saw the subtlest foe to principle and duty. No graceful growth, this Puritanism, for its roots are in the hard, stern facts of life; but it is strong, and from it has sprung all that is worth preserving in the Anglo-Saxon character. Its men feared and its women loved God, and if their words were harsh their hearts were tender. If they shut out the sunshine from their lives it was that their eyes might see better the glory lying beyond; and if their view be correct, that earth's threescore years and ten are but as preparation for eternity, then who shall call them even foolish for turning away their thoughts from its allurements.
“Still, I think I should like to have a look at one, just to see what it is like,” argued my father; “one cannot judge of a thing that one knows nothing about.”
I imagine it was his first argument rather than his second that convinced my mother.
“That is true,” she answered. “I remember how shocked my poor father was when he found me one night at the bedroom window reading Sir Walter Scott by the light of the moon.”
“What about the boy?” said my father, for I had been included in the invitation.
“We will all be wicked together,” said my mother.
So an evening or two later the four of us stood at the corner of Pigott Street waiting for the 'bus.