"It is astonishing how much may be done by cultivating the finer emotions. Your brother has always seemed to me not sufficiently susceptible. Supposing I were to lend you a book of my favourite poetry, and you were to read to him, and endeavour to excite an interest in him for higher and better things—who knows?"
Miriam had no special professional acquaintance with the theory of salvation, but she instinctively felt that a love of drink was not to be put down by the "Keepsake" in red silk.
She was still silent. At last she said—"I am much obliged to you, aunt; I will take anything you may like to lend. You have a good deal of influence, doubtless, over uncle. If you can persuade him to say what he can in case application is made to him for a character, I shall think it very kind of you."
"My dear Miriam, I have no influence over your uncle. His is not a nature upon which I can exert myself. I think some pieces in this would be suitable;" and Mrs. Dabb offered Miriam a volume of Mrs. Hemans' works.
Miriam took it, and bade her aunt good-bye.
She was now face to face with a great trouble, and she had to encounter it alone, and with no weapons and with no armour save those which Nature provides. She was not specially an exile from civilisation; churches and philosophers had striven and demonstrated for thousands of years, and yet she was no better protected than if Socrates, Epictetus, and all ecclesiastical establishments from the time of Moses had never existed.
She did not lecture her brother, for she had no materials for a sermon. She called him a fool when she came home; and having said this, she had nothing more to say, except to ask him bitterly what he meant to do. What could he do?—a poor, helpless, weak creature, half a stranger in London; and without expostulating with her for her roughness with him, he sat still and cried. It was useless to think of obtaining a situation like the one he had lost. He could prove no experience, he dared not refer to his uncle, and consequently there was nothing before him but a return to clockmaking, or rather clock repairing. Here again, however, he was foiled, for his apprenticeship was barely concluded, and he had never taken to the business with sufficient seriousness to become proficient. After one or two inquiries, therefore, he found that in this department also he was useless.
The affection of Miriam for her brother, never very strong, was not increased by his ill-luck. She began, in fact, to dislike him because he was unfortunate. She imagined that her dislike was due to his faults, and every now and then she abused him for them; but his faults would have been forgotten if he had been prosperous. She hated misery, and not only misery in the abstract, but miserable weak creatures. She was ready enough, as we have seen, to right a wrong, especially if the wrong was championed by those whom she despised; but for simple infirmity, at least in human beings, she had no more mercy than the wild animals which destroy any one of their tribe whom they find disabled. There was more than a chance, too, that Andrew would interfere with her own happiness. If he could not get anything to do, they must leave London, for living on the allowance from Cowfold was impossible. Reproof, when it is mixed with personal hostility, although the person reproving and the person reproved may be unconscious of it, is never persuasive; and as a tendency to whisky and water requires a very powerful antidote, it is not surprising that Andrew grew rather worse than better.
One evening Montgomery called. He had come to ask them both to the hall. He was in a very quiet, rational humour, for he had not as yet had his threepennyworth. Andrew had been out all day, had come home none the better for his excursion, and had gone to bed.
"Your brother not at home?"