There was another listener at the lecture who was unexpectedly present. Part of poor Sallie's trial had been to tell her brother, who had been radiant for a week over the prospect of taking her, that she had with her own hand put away the blessing. How would Mark take it? Dirk's forlorn-looking sister was no favorite of his. I think it would have been very difficult to have convinced him that there was a trace of Mrs. Roberts in her face.
But such curious creatures are we that it actually hurt Sallie to see how quietly he took the great sad news of her sacrifice. After the first start of surprise, he seemed preoccupied, and she could almost have thought that he did not hear her explanation. She had much ado to keep back the tears, but she had made a special little feast for him that evening, with a white cloth on the table, and a cup of actual tea, and the cup set in a saucer. She was not going to spoil the scene with tears; so after a little she said, cheerily:—
“Now you have a chance to do something nice for somebody. Who will you take on your ticket?”
“I was thinking,” he answered, slowly. “You know it is a temperance lecture, and it is by a wonderful man. The fellows in the shop have been talking about him all day, and they say you just can't help thinking when he gets agoing; and I was just thinking, What if we could get him to go, and he would listen, and get to thinking.”
There are no italics that will give you an idea of the peculiar emphasis which the boy put on the pronouns. Sallie understood; that “he” could mean but one person in the world. But her brother must have answered the look on her face, for she spoke no word.
“Sometimes they do, Sallie. There was old Pete, you know.”
Oh, yes, Sallie knew old Pete; every body in that alley knew him; a notorious drunkard once, of the sort which people, even good Christian people, are apt to pronounce hopeless; yet now he wore a neat suit of clothes every day, and brought home twenty pounds of flour at one time in a sack, and bought his coal by the barrel. Wonderful things occasionally happened in that alley.
“Yes,” said Sally, “that is true; and old Pete wasn't much like him.”
The tone spoke volumes. It would have almost angered her, even now, to have had it hinted that old Pete was superior to that father, though hardly a person acquainted with the two but would have said that there was more hope for old Pete, even in his miserable past, than for this one.
How they managed it, those two: the difficult task of getting him persuaded to go, find then the more difficult task of keeping him sufficiently sober to get there, would make a story in itself. I fancy there are many such stories in real life which will never get told. The probabilities are, if they were, some wise critic would pronounce them unnatural and sensational.