Strange as it may seem, it was four months before Mr. Green "found time" to see about another school, and to get John entered therein; during which long period the boy had full liberty to go pretty much where he pleased, and to associate with whom he liked. It is hardly to be supposed that he grew any better for this.
By the time John was seventeen years of age, Mr. Green's business had become greatly enlarged, and his mind more absorbed therein. With him gain was the primary thing; and, as a consequence, his family held a secondary place in his thoughts. If money were needed, he was ever ready to supply the demand; that done, he felt that his duty to them was, mainly, discharged. To the mother of his children he left the work of their wise direction in the paths of life--their government and education; but she was inadequate to the task imposed.
From the second school at which John was entered he was dismissed within three months, for bad conduct. He was then sent to school in a distant city, where, removed from all parental restraint and admonition, he made viler associates than any he had hitherto known, and took thus a lower step in vice. He was just seventeen, when a letter from the principal of this school conveyed to Mr. Green such unhappy intelligence of his son that he immediately resolved, as a last resort, to send him to sea, before the mast--and this was done, spite of all the mother's tearful remonstrances, and the boy's threats that he would [{95}] escape from the vessel on the very first opportunity.
And yet, for all this sad result of parental neglect, Mr. Green devoted no more time nor care to his children. Business absorbed the whole man. He was a merchant, both body and soul. His responsibilities were not felt as extending beyond his counting-house, further than to provide for the worldly well-being of his family. Is it any cause of wonder that, with his views and practice, it should not turn out well with his children; or, at least, with some of them?
At the end of a year John came home from sea, a rough, cigar-smoking, dram-drinking, overgrown boy of eighteen, with all his sensual desires and animal passions more active than when he went away, while his intellectual faculties and moral feelings were in a worse condition than at his separation from home. Grief at the change oppressed the hearts of his parents; but their grief was unavailing. Various efforts were made to get him into some business, but he remained only a short time in any of the places where his father had him introduced. Finally, he was sent to sea again. But he never returned to his friends. In a drunken street-brawl, that occurred while on shore at Valparaiso, he was stabbed by a Spaniard, and died shortly afterward.
On the very day this tragic event took place, Mr. Green was rejoicing over a successful speculation, from which he had come out the gainer by two thousand pounds. In the pleasure this circumstance occasioned, all thoughts of the absent one, ruined by his neglect, were swallowed up.
Several months elapsed. Mr. Green had returned home, well satisfied with his day's business. In his pocket was the afternoon paper, which, after the younger children were in bed, and the older ones out of his way, he sat down to read. His eyes turned to the foreign intelligence, and almost the first sentence he read was the intelligence of his son's death. The paper dropped from his hands, while he uttered an expression of surprise and grief that caused the cheeks of his wife, who was in the room, to turn deadly pale. She had not power to ask the cause of her husband's sudden exclamation; but her heart, that ever yearned toward her absent boy, instinctively divined the truth.
"John is dead!" said Mr. Green, at length, speaking in a tremulous tone of voice.
There was from the mother no wild burst of anguish. The boy had been dying to her daily for years, and she had suffered for him worse than the pangs of death. Burying her face in her hands, she wept silently, yet hopelessly.
"If we were only blameless of the poor child's death!" said Mrs. Green, lifting her tearful eyes, after the lapse of nearly ten minutes, and speaking in a sad, self-rebuking tone of voice.