“More like he wishes to avoid introducing his bride into society, which he knows has no wish to receive her,” muttered Ada.
Tom paid no attention to this spiteful speech, but continued, “He has drawn his money from the —— Bank, and with it he intends purchasing a farm in the western part of New York.”
“An admirable plan,” again interrupted Ada. “That Lee girl is just calculated for a farmer’s wife.”
Taken alone there was nothing particularly disagreeable in the three words “that Lee girl;” but spoken by Ada Montrose they sounded insultingly, and every time she uttered them, I felt my blood boil, for I, too, was a Lee girl, and I was sure she included me in the same contemptuous category. As Herbert had said, I did not think the disappointment would break her heart. She was too angry for that, and I believe now, as I did then, that most of her feeling arose from the mortification of knowing that a “poor country girl,” as she called Anna, was preferred to herself. For half an hour or more Tom Wilson and my aunt conversed together, she asking him at least a dozen times “if he did not think Herbert could be induced to return.” At last, with quivering lips and flushed cheeks, as if it cost her pride a great effort, she said, “Of course I mean Anna, too, when I speak of Herbert’s return. She is his wife, you say, and though I might, perhaps, wish it otherwise, it cannot now be helped, and if he only would come back to me, I should love her for his sake.”
In my heart I blessed her for these words, and mentally resolved to leave no argument untried, which might bring the fugitives back. But it could not be. Herbert was decided, he said. He meant to be a farmer and live in the country, adding what he knew would silence his mother sooner than aught else he could say, “that temptations for him to drink were far greater in the city than in the country, and it was for this reason partly that he preferred living in the latter place.”
And so my aunt yielded the point; but from the day of her son’s desertion, there was in her a perceptible change. Far oftener was she found in the house of prayer, and less frequently was she seen in places of amusement, while more than once I heard her in secret asking that her wayward boy might be shielded from the great temptation. Alas! for thee, poor Herbert Langley, sleeping in thine early grave! There were prayers enough, methinks, to save thee; for at the old Meadow Brook home, thou wert remembered in the early morn, and not forgotten when at eve, my father knelt him down to pray. Why, then, didst thou fall ere thy sun had reached the meridian of manhood? Was it because in thine early training there was an error which no after exertions could repair? We answer, Yes. The fault was there, and little know they what they do, who set before their sons the poisonous cup, and bid them, by their own example, drink and die. How many young men, from the higher walks of life, now sleeping in the dishonored grave of a drunkard, might at this moment be filling some honorable position, had it not been for the wine or beer drinking habit acquired in childhood by their own firesides, and at their father’s table? Look to it, then, you around whose hearthstones promising sons are gathered, and if in the coming years you would escape the sleepless nights, the bitter tears, and the broken hearts of those whose children walk in the path, which, sooner than all others, leadeth down to death, teach them, both by precept and by practice, to “touch not, taste not, handle not,” for therein alone lieth safety.
CHAPTER XIV.
TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.
Early in March, as I was one Saturday morning seated with my aunt in her pleasant, cozy sewing-room, a little boy brought me a note from Dell Clayton, in which she requested me, if possible, to spend the afternoon with her. She was sick, she wrote, unable to sit up, and what was worse than all, she was homesick and unhappy! Her aunt, she said, was out of the city, and as she had no acquaintance, she thought the sight of a familiar face would do her good.
Aunt Charlotte, to whom I handed the note, consented to my going, and immediately after dinner, which that day was served at an earlier hour than usual, I started. Long and daily walks have always been to me a luxury, and so, though I had been but a few months in Boston, I was tolerably well acquainted with most of its localities, and had no trouble in finding the once stylish, but now rather dilapidated and gloomy looking block, in one part of which Dr. Clayton was keeping house. Since the night when I met him at the theatre, I had never seen him, and all that I knew of him was that he had left the Tremont. Subsequently, however, I heard the whole history of their proceedings—partly from the doctor, partly from Dell, and partly from other sources, and as a recital of it may not be wholly uninteresting to my readers, I will give it before proceeding with a description of my call.
It seems that boarding at the Tremont was rather too expensive for a physician, whose patients were not so numerous as to be troublesome, and several times had the doctor proposed returning to his old place in Sturbridge, where everything was cheaper; but to this Dell objected, for she well knew it would be an admission that they could not succeed in Boston, and against this her pride revolted. “People at home,” she reasoned, “would never know how matters really were, and as long as she could keep up an appearance of gentility and upper-ten-dom with her former friends, she should do so,” preferring, like many others, almost absolute want in the city, to plenty in the country. From this, the reader is not to infer that the doctor was extremely poor; for when he first went to Boston he was worth about fifteen hundred dollars, which, in a country village, with a prudent wife, would have surrounded him with all the comforts of life, besides leaving him with something for that “rainy day,” about which everybody blessed with a careful grandmother has heard more or less.