“Give to God’s service what has been a failure in man’s!” said Cyrus, with a keenness of self-contempt that I felt to be exaggerated—after Cy’s old fashion.
“You have been serving God, don’t you know you have?” I insisted. “And you have grown, too! You are broader and better and more sympathetic than you ever were before! You will be a better minister because you have been a shipbuilder and failed. And you need not think any longer of us.” And I poured out my tale of practical success, and Estelle’s gleam of promise, although I had wished her to tell that herself. I said nothing about “Evelyn Marchmont,” that seemed a doubtful prospect; moreover, I knew that Octavia would never forgive me.
Cyrus seemed very much surprised. I remarked, triumphantly, that he couldn’t possibly call the production of hogs’-head-cheese a lady-like accomplishment, and he assented gravely. And he looked with respect at the check which I produced from my pocket-book. There is nothing queerer than the way in which a man of the old-fashioned, protecting sort looks at the earnings of his women-kind. But he seemed more astonished that Estelle had a commission to make illustrations. He said that he had no idea that she could do anything that was worth paying for.
“But, after all, Bathsheba, the real bitterness is in the thought of what grandfather would have felt to have his business go out of the family! In the thought that I could not hold on to what ought to be, what will be some time, in the right hands, so valuable.”
I said all I could to comfort him and he rewarded me by a great compliment—drawn forth, I knew, not so much by the comforting words as by the hogs’-head-cheese:
“If only you had been a boy, Bathsheba!”
“There is Dave,” I ventured. “Is there nothing that he can do about it?”
“At his age, with his past record, what could he possibly do?” said Cyrus.
And I left him and climbed our lovely orchard slope, with the greening grass under my feet and a bluebird singing on the pear-tree, and felt that life was a burden almost too heavy to bear.
I found, when I reached the house, that Dave was in his room, asleep.