"The poor Jeanne was too easy with her. She indulged her far too much," said Marie Lebrun. "She took all the hardest and most unpleasant work on herself, to spare Lucille, and leave her time for her needlework and her fine spinning. If she had had to work as hard as my girls, she would not have had so much time to indulge her foolish fancies."
"Ah, Marie, it is easy to condemn," remarked her sister Marthe, who had never married, and was held in great respect among us for her piety and good works. "If Jeanne had taken the opposite course, people would have said it was because the child was so oppressed that she left her father's house. It is easy to say what might have been. A parent may do her best, and yet the child may go wrong."
"I am not so sure of that," said Marie, with some complacency. "'Train up a child in the way he should go,' you know."
"'My beloved had a vineyard in a very fruitful hill,'" quoted Marthe; "'and he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst thereof, and also made a wine-press therein; and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes.' If the great Lord of the vineyard met with such a disappointment, shall we blame the under-gardeners when the vintage does not answer our expectations?"
"Ah, my Marie, after all, that others can do for us; we must each build our lives for ourselves. We cannot cast off the responsibility on any one else."
I have many a time thought of these words of the good Marthe, when I have heard parents blamed for the faults of their grown-up children. Poor Marthe! She was one of the victims of the times, and died in prison.
As we walked homeward, Andrew and I fell into conversation about our future prospects. He told me of his house at Tre Madoc, which was, however, his mother's as long as she lived; of the increased wealth which had come to them from the working of a mine on his estate; and described to me the old house and its surroundings till I could almost see it.
Then he asked me frankly, in his sailor fashion, whether I liked him, and whether I thought I could be happy with him; to which I answered, with equal frankness:
"I do not see why I should not, cousin—that is, if your mother will be kind to me."
"You need not fear that," answered Andrew. "She is kindness itself, and my sisters are good merry girls. But about myself."