“There’s own folks that ain’t own folks, and strangers that is,” said Loveday, sententiously. “The Lord knows best, and it’s for us to do our duty.”
CHAPTER II
CYRUS SACRIFICES HIMSELF FOR THE SAKE OF THE “ALIENS”
“I’ve thought it all over and there’s no other way. I must give up going to college,” Cyrus announced in his slow, positive way.
It was six years after grandpa had given him the charge to care for little Dave, for I must resist the great temptation to linger on the days when childhood filled the earth for us with “the light that never was on sea or land.”
Those days seemed to come to an end all at once for Cyrus and Octavia, and even for me, when grandpa died. For financial trouble came and we feared losing even the dear old roof over our heads.
Grandpa had been a shipbuilder. The firm of David Partridge & Son was known all over the State and, in fact, much farther than the State. Although the business of shipbuilding had declined in our State, even before grandpa entered it, yet he prospered for a time. The weaknesses of disease and old age caused his failure—the same causes that had made him yield to mother’s dimple—at least so Uncle Horace solemnly declared. He had never yielded to Uncle Horace, but had always been determined to keep him in leading-strings and consequently, Uncle Horace had felt but little interest in the business, devoting himself to raising stock on his fine farm.
But when grandpa died, and his affairs were found badly involved, Uncle Horace immediately undertook to manage the business and retrieve the losses. And it was Cyrus, eighteen-year-old Cyrus, whom he consulted; they went over the books together. It was the family opinion that Uncle Horace and Cyrus were alike. They both had strong individualities and were extremely reserved and self-contained; otherwise I could never see any resemblance. Certainly Uncle Horace had never given them any reason to hope that their desire of making a minister of him would be accomplished, while almost from childhood Cyrus’ bent had been in that direction, and we all understood that it was beginning to be his heart’s desire.
I knew that grandma prayed every day that she might live to hear Cyrus preach the gospel; that Octavia self-denyingly saved her school-money—she had secured the Mile End school to teach by the time she was sixteen—and that Loveday made her clover-stamped, “gilt-edged” butter and the Groundnut Hill cheese, by which we were getting famous, all with the one idea of paying Cyrus’ college expenses.
I even picked berries to make preserves to sell, with Estelle helping me until her chubby hands and arms were torn and bleeding from the blackberry thorns. She was as stout-hearted as an Indian and never complained. And we put the money into her red-apple bank to send Cyrus to college; and proud enough we both were.
After all that, after the sending of Cyrus to college had been the family impetus for years and Cyrus had been prepared at the Corinth Academy—I drove him over with old Abigail, the white mare, every day—with old Parson Grover to add the finishing touches to his Latin and Greek, one may imagine how I felt to have Cyrus tell me, quietly, that he had decided not to go to college after all!