“Say,” replied the sick man, with an earnestness which was almost terrible in its intensity; “say that whisky was the best business friend I ever found, and that when it began to abuse me, no one thought enough of me to step in between us. And tell them that this story is as true as it is ugly.”
As Doughty spoke, he had raised himself upon one elbow; as he uttered his last word, he dropped upon his pillow, and passed into a land to which no one but his wife manifested any willingness to follow him.
CHAPTER VIII.
AN ESTIMABLE ORGANIZATION CRITICISED.
The funeral services of George Doughty were as largely attended as the great temperance meeting had been, and the attendants admitted—although the admission was not, logically, of particular force—that they received the worth of their money. The pall-bearers, twelve in number, were all young men who had been in the habit of drinking, but who had signed the pledge, some of them having appended signatures to special pledges privately prepared on the evening before the service. The funeral anthem was as doleful as the most sincere mourner could have wished, the music having been composed especially for the occasion by the chorister of Mr. Wedgewell’s church. As for the sermon, it was universally voted the most powerful effort that Parson Wedgewell had ever made. Day and night had the good man striven with Doughty’s parting injunction, determined to transmit the exact spirit of it, but horrified at its verbal form. At last he honestly made George’s own words the basis of his whole sermon; his method being, first, to show what would have been naturally the last words of a young man of good birth and Christian breeding, and then presenting George’s moral legacy by way of contrast. To point the moral without offending Squire Tomple’s pride, and without inflicting useless pain upon the Squire’s sufficiently wounded heart, was no easy task; but the parson was not lacking in tact and tenderness, so he succeeded in making of his sermon an appeal so powerful and all-applicable that none of the hearers found themselves at liberty to search out those to whom the sermon might seem personally addressed.
Among the hearers was Mr. Crupp, and no one seemed more deeply interested and affected. He followed the funeral cortege to the cemetery; but, arrived there, he halted at the gate, instead of following the example of the multitude by crowding as closely as possible to the grave. The final services were no sooner concluded, however, than the object of Mr. Crupp’s unusual conduct became apparent to one person after another, the disclosure being made to people in the order of their earthly possessions. The parson was shocked at learning that Mr. Crupp was importuning every man of means to take stock in a woolen mill, to be established at Barton; but a whispered word or two from Crupp caused the parson to abate his displeasure, and finally to stand near Crupp’s side and express his own hearty approbation of the enterprise proposed. Then Mr. Crupp whispered a few words to Squire Tomple, and the Squire subscribed a hundred shares at ten dollars each, information of which act was disseminated among business men and well-to-do farmers by Parson Wedgewell with an alacrity which, had modern business ideas prevailed at Barton, would have laid the parson open to a suspicion of having accepted a few shares, to be paid for by his own influence. Then Deacon Jones subscribed twenty shares, and Judge Macdonald, Fred’s father, promised to take fifty; Crupp’s name already stood at the head of the list for a hundred. No stock-company had ever been organized at Barton before, and the citizens had always manifested a laudable reluctance to allow other people to handle their money; but this case seemed an exception to all others; confidence in the enterprise was so powerfully expressed, alike by the mercantile community, the bar, the church, and the unregenerate (the last-named class being represented by the ex-vender of liquors), that people who had any money made haste to participate in what seemed to them a race for wealth with the odds in everybody’s favor. Crupp neglected no one; he scorned no subscription on account of its smallness; before he left the cemetery gate nearly half the requisite capital had been pledged, and before he slept that night he found it necessary to accept rather more than the twenty thousand dollars which, it had been decided two days before, would be needed. Several days later a board of directors was elected; two or three of the directors informally offered the superintendency of the mill to Fred Macdonald, on condition that he would pledge himself to abstain from the use of intoxicating beverage while he held the position, and then Fred was elected superintendent in regular form and by unanimous vote of the board of directors.
Great was the excitement in Barton and the tributary country when it was announced that the mill needed no more money, and that, consequently, no more stock would be issued. In that mysterious way in which such things always happen, the secret escaped, and encountered every one, that his new position would prevent Fred Macdonald from drinking; non-stockholders had then the additional grievance that they had been deprived of taking any part in an enterprise for the good of a fellow-man, and all because the rich men of the village saw money in it. None of these injured ones dared to express their minds on this subject to Squire Tomple, to whom so many of them owed money, or to Judge Macdonald, who, in his family pride, would have laid himself liable to action by the grand jury, had any one suggested that his oldest son had ever been in any danger of becoming a drunkard. But to Mr. Crupp they did not hesitate to speak freely; Crupp owned no mortgages, no total abstainers owed him money; besides, he not only was not a church member, but he had been in that most infernal of all callings, rum-selling. So it came to pass that when one day Crupp went into Deacon Jones’s store for a dollar’s worth of sugar, and was awaiting his turn among a large crowd of customers, Father Baguss constituted himself spokesman for the aggrieved faction, and said,
“It ’pears to me, Mr. Crupp, as if reformin’ was a payin’ business.”