The Hand of the Mighty, and Other Stories

by Vaughan Kester

However, when he had proved that music possessed a money value that he turned readily to account, they ceased to object—for money, like religion, is sacred, and not to be made light of.

But his determination to rise above the dependent and precarious position of an instructor they persistently combated. Enough to live on comfortably to them represented enough for soul and body alike. That his art meant to him expression and development, they never guessed and he never sought to explain. He was very patient with them and forgiving.

So, silently and without complaint, he drudged away as teacher and organist, his burden made heavy by innumerable younger brothers and sisters whom he was pushing with him into humble respectability.

Going back into the past he could recall the hard bitter season that came in his childhood and youth: there were things done then, want endured and privation, that even in the comparative luxury of his success made his heart sick with a deadly sense of shame and humiliation.

He could remember the death of a little baby sister that happened shortly after the family's arrival in the town. The memory of that event stood forth distinct and minute down to the least particular. It was one of those hopelessly miserable experiences he would have liked to forget, but could not.

There were many little ones then and they were very poor, indeed. His stepfather had not been able to pay for the assistance which is customary at such times, but had shaped a coffin with his own hands for the little body, and when all was ready, borrowing a horse and wagon from a neighbor, had driven to the graveyard, holding the pine box across his knees. As his mother was ill, and could not go, Franz had ridden alone with the shoemaker, who, even then, to all appearances was an old man bent and gray from much confinement to his bench. The small boy rode crouching in the bottom of the wagon, for there was not room for him upon the seat. He was long haunted by the vision, ineffaceable and clear, of his father, as he drove along, bending sadly over the burden in his lap, gray and somber, with the poor dignity of grief.

Their way took them past his uncle's store, for in a squalid fashion the brother was well-to-do. As they passed his place the child who huddled drearily in the bed of the cart, oppressed by an indefinite sense of sorrow, saw his uncle standing beside his open door in his shirt-sleeves—the center of a lounging group of idlers—and when the man became conscious of the nearness of the two, the wide-eyed child and the father, driving the horse, the coffin in his lap, he laughed aloud.

It was years afterward, when his uncle had quitted the town for a larger field somewhere in the West that the brooding solitary boy comprehended the full meaning of that day's ride, and it gave him an insight into the quality of human sympathy that one can safely rely upon receiving in the hour of need, far beyond his age. It served to augment a peculiar harshness of belief—a wish to keep to himself and from contact with others.

The family's poverty, which was beyond denial or subterfuge, only intensified this characteristic. His pride was like a raw sore;—the kindest touch was positive pain for him. Anything that savored of patronage or of condescension met with an instant and rude rebuff.

The Beckers—for the family was known by this name—a tacit recognition of Franz's importance and the family's unimportance that offended no one more than it did Franz—were extremely imposing as to numbers, with a majority in favor of the sterner sex, and the old shoemaker's patriotism had been evinced in the naming of his numerous offspring.