Janet's Love and Service

by Margaret M. Robertson

He was changed, and yet the wonder was, that the influences of these ten years had not changed him more. The lonely life he had pictured to his friends, that last night on the “Steadfast,” fell far short of the reality that awaited him. Removed from the kindly associations of home, and the tranquil pursuits and pleasures of a country village, to the turmoil of a Western city, and the annoyance of a subordinate in a merchant’s office, he shrunk, at first, in disgust from the life that seemed opening before him. His native place, humble as it was, had lived in song and story for many centuries; and in this city which had sprung up in a day, nothing seemed stable or secure. A few months ago the turf of the prairie had been undisturbed, where to-day its broad streets are trodden by the feet of thousands. Between gigantic blocks of buildings rising everywhere, strips of the prairie turf lay undisturbed still. The air of newness, of incompleteness, of insecurity that seemed to surround all things impressed him painfully; the sadden prosperity seemed unreal and unnatural, as well it might, to one brought up in a country where the first thought awakened by change or innovation is one of mistrust and doubt.

All his preconceived ideas of business and a business-life, availed him nothing in the new circumstances in which he found himself. If business men were guided in their mutual relations by any principle of faith or honour, he failed in the first bitterness of his disgust to see it. Business-life seemed but a scramble, in which the most alert seized the greatest portion. The feverish activity and energy which were fast changing the prairie into a populous place seemed directed to one end—the getting of wealth. Wealth must be gotten by fair means or foul, and it must be gotten suddenly. There was no respite, no repose. One must go onward or be pushed aside, or be trodden under foot. Fortune was daily tempted, and the daily result was success, or utter failure, till a new chance could be grasped at.

“Honest labour! Patient toil!” Allan wondered within himself if the words had ever reached the inward sense of these eager, anxious men, jostling each other in their never-ceasing struggle.

Allan watched, and wondered, and mused, trying to understand, and to make himself charitable over the evil, by calling it a national one, and telling himself that these men of the new world were not to be judged by old laws, or measured by old standards. But there were among the swiftest runners of the race for gold men from all lands, men whose boyish feet had wandered over English meadows, or trod the heather on Scottish hills. Men whose fathers had spent their lives content in mountain sheilings, with no wish beyond their flocks and their native glens; humble artisans, smiths, and masons, who had passed in their own country for honest, patient, God-fearing men, grew as eager, as unscrupulous, as swift as the fleetest in the race. The very diggers of ditches, and breakers of stone on the highway, the hewers of wood and drawers of water; took with discontent that it was no more their daily wages, doubled or tripled to them, since they set foot on the soil of the new world.

That there might be another sort of life in the midst of this turmoil, he did not consider. He never could associate the idea of home or comfort with those dingy brick structures, springing up in a day at every corner. He could not fancy those hard voices growing soft in the utterance of loving words, or those thin, compressed lips gladly meeting the smiling mouth of a little child. Home! Why, all the world seemed at home in those vast hotels; the men and women greeting each other coldly, in these great parlours, seemed to have no wants that a black man, coming at the sound of a bell, might not easily supply. Even the children seemed at ease and self-possessed in the midst of the crowd. They troubled no one with noisy play or merry prattle, but sat on chairs with their elders, listening to, or joining in the conversation, with a coolness and appropriateness painfully suggestive of what their future might be. Looking at these embryo merchants and fine ladies, from whose pale little lips “dollar” and “change” fall more naturally than sweeter words, Ruthven ceased to wonder at the struggle around him. He fancied he could understand how these little people, strangers, as it seemed to him, to a home or even to a childhood, should become in time the eager, absorbed, unscrupulous runners and wrestlers, jostling each other in the daily strife.

Ruthven was very bitter and unjust in many of his judgments during the first part of his residence in C. He changed his opinions of many things afterwards, partly because he became wiser, partly because he became a little blind, and, especially, because he himself became changed at last. By and by his life was too busy to permit him to watch those about him, or to pronounce judgment on their aims or character. Uncongenial as he had at first found the employment which his uncle had provided for him, he pursued it with a patient steadiness, which made it first endurable, then pleasant to him. At first his duties were merely mechanical; so much writing, so much computing each day, and then his time was his own. But this did not continue long. Trusted always by the firm, he was soon placed in a position where he was able to do good service to his employers. His skill and will guided their affairs through more than one painful crisis. His integrity kept their good name unsullied at a time when too many yielding to what seemed necessity, were betaking themselves to doubtful means to preserve their credit. He thoroughly identified himself with the interests of the firm, even when his uncle was a comparative stranger to him. He did his duty in his service as he would have done it in the service of another, constantly and conscientiously, because it was right to do so. So passed the first years of his commercial life.

In default of other interests, he gave himself wholly up to business pursuits, till no onlooker on the busy scene in which he was taking part would have thought of singling him out as in any respect different from those who were about him. Those who came into close contact with him called him honourable and upright, indeed, over scrupulous in many points; and he, standing apart from them, and in a certain sense above them, was willing so to be called. But as one cannot touch pitch without being defiled, so a man must yield in time to the influences in the midst of which he has voluntarily placed himself. So it came to pass that, as the years went on, Allan Ruthven was greatly changed.

It need not have been so. It doubtless was far otherwise with some who, in his pride and ignorance, he had called earth-worms and worshippers of gold; for though, in the first bitterness of his isolation, he was slow to discover it, there were in the midst of the turmoil and strife of that new city warm hearts and happy homes, and the blessed influence of the Christian faith and the Christian life. There were those over whom the gains-getting demon of the place had no power, because of a talisman they held, the “constraining love of Christ,” in them. Those walked through the fire unscathed, and, in the midst of much that is defiling, kept their garments clean. But Ruthven was not one of them. He had the name of the talisman on his lips, but he had not its living power in his heart. He was a Christian only in name; and so, when the influence of early associations began to grow weak, and he began to forget, as men will for a time, his mother’s teachings “in the house, and by the way,” at the “lying down and the rising up,” no wonder that the questionable maxims heard daily from the lips of the worldly-wise should come to have weight with him at last.

Not that in those days he was, in any sense, a lover of gold for its own sake. He never sank so low as that. But in the eagerness with which he devoted himself to business, he left himself no time for the performance of other and higher duties, or for the cultivation of those principles and affections which can alone prevent the earnest business-man from degenerating into a character so despicable. If he was not swept away by the strong current of temptation, it was because of no wisdom or strength or foresight of his. Another ten years of such a life would have made him, as it has made many another, a man outwardly worthy of esteem, but inwardly selfish, sordid, worldly—all that in his youth he had most despised.

This may seem a hard judgment, but it is the judgement he passed on himself, when there came a pause in his busy life, and he looked back over those years and felt that he did not hold the world loosely—that he could not open his hand and let it go. He had been pleasing himself all along with the thought that he was not like the men about him—content with the winning of wealth and position in the world; but there came a time when it was brought sharply home to him that without these he could not be content. It was a great shock and surprise to him to be forced to realise how far he had drifted on with the current, and how impossible it had become to get back to the old starting-place again, and in the knowledge he did not spare himself, but used harder and sterner words of self-contempt than any that are written here.