I looked up in surprise. What had I done now? Was it because I was a few minutes behind time in the morning? There was no room for conjecture. Taking the arm-chair, Mr. Wyman began:
“Have you any plans for the fall and winter, Marston?”
“I was hoping that you would need me for the fall, Mr. Wyman; and in the winter I should like to go to school,” I answered with a choking voice.
“Mr. Farnham was here Saturday night, after you went to Claverton. He spoke of you, and said that you was trying to study, and hoped to go through college. Do you really think of any thing like this?”
“If I can, Mr. Wyman, although I am sometimes afraid it will take a long time. I can only hope to go to school winters, at least for several years.”
“That is just what Mr. Farnham said, and as we no longer have a boy to educate, he made me more than half believe that I ought to help you. He said that you could nearly pay your board with errands, and odd jobs for Mr. Harlan; and I told him I would pay you wages through this month and the next. So if you want to go to school, you had better begin Wednesday. The more one knows, the better they may get along. Learn all you can, and try and make a man. Boys sometimes think their employers have no hearts. There has not been a day since you came here, in which I have not remembered my Willie, and felt for you. I could have made your work easier, but that would not be the way to make you a prompt, useful, industrious man.”
My head bowed low while he spoke. I wished that I could live over the past months. I had tried; but there had been many days when I had dragged on, working because obliged to, yet not cheerful and happy. So many resolves I had made and broken; so many times felt like running away, and hiding myself out of sight and sound, longing to be free from responsibility and from effort, and then in a moment ashamed to think I should so forget, should be so weak and vacillating. Could I only live the vacation over again, I would be more watchful, more patient in trial.
It is thus we ever feel, when we look back. Yet do we always gain wisdom from the retrospect? The future instead of the past calls for our resolves, and the wail of memory blending with the whispers of conscience, should be our incentive to a more useful life.
But when Mrs. Wyman came in with some nice new shirts that were once Willie’s, and a handsome blue cloth jacket, that “looked so like the dear boy,” she said, I broke down entirely.
“I do not deserve all this,” I said, choking down the tears. She put her hand on mine.