“Mother didn’t seem to know we were there after father came,” Jane told me. And I wondered if the child had not been hurt, that all her months of patient love and watching had been forgotten in a tempest of love for a vagabond husband that had wrought nothing but disaster and death.
After the funeral, through which he went in a dazed sort of stupor, Bob got drunk, I don’t know why or how. He seemed tenderer since then than before. I noticed that he reformed oftener and got over it quicker. A piece of crape that Jane had fixed about his hat seemed to possess sacred properties to him. When he touched it and swore abstinence, he generally held out two or three days. One night, as he lay in the gutter, a cow, full of respect for his person, and yet unable to utterly control her hunger, chewed his hat. Since then he seemed to have lost his moorings, and drifted about on a currentless drunk.
He was always kind to Jane and the little biddie. In his maudlin way he would caress them, and cry over them, and reform with them, and promise to work for them. Even when he ate their last crust of bread, he accompanied the action with a sort of fumbling pomposity that robbed it of its horror. He never did it without promising to go out at once and bring back a sack of flour. Once he went so high as to promise four sacks. So that the child, in love like her mother with the old rascal, and like her mother fresh always in faith, was rather rejoiced than otherwise when he ate the bread. Did he bring the flour?
“Why, how could he? They had to bring him home. So of course I did not blame him. Poor father!”
I must do Bob the justice to say that he never earned a cent in all these days that he did not intend giving to Jane. Of course he never did it, but I desire him to have the credit of his intention. If the Lord held the best of us strictly to performance and ruled out intention, we wouldn’t be much better in his sight than Bob is in ours.
One day I was sitting behind a window looking at Jane, who stood in the kitchen door. Her oldish-looking, chipper little face was turned straight to me. It was a pretty face. The brown eyes were softened with suffering, and fear and anxiety had driven all color from her thin cheeks. I noticed that her mouth was never still. Though she was alone and silent, her lips quivered and trembled all the time. At times they would break into a dumb sob. Then she would draw them firmly together. Again they would twitch convulsively in the terrible semblance of a smile. Then in that pretty, feminine way she would pucker them together.
Long suffering had racked the child until she was all awry, and her nerves were plunging through her tender frame like devils.
“Jane, were you ever hungry?”
“Sir!” and she started painfully, while her starved heart managed to send a thin coating of scarlet into her cheeks. She was a proud little body, and never talked of her sorrows.
May the Lord forgive me for repeating the question!