University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
THE LEAST OF TWO EVILS.

It was a few days previous to the timely benefaction
of the baker's son that Lee broke his leg.
After he was disabled, his family subsisted on the
avails of work which his wife obtained from a slop-shop.
Her time was nearly consumed in attendance
on her exacting husband. She had no friends
in the city—not an acquaintance even, excepting
her husband's employer, and he was not of a character
to overcome her natural reluctance to make
known the extreme degradation of her condition.
Want—starvation—stared her in the face; still she
would not incur a debt, even for a loaf of bread,
that she saw no possibility of paying. “Lucy,”
she had said to her child, “we can beg if we must,
but we will not take bread that we cannot pay for.”
The poorest, even, have some means of education
when they can give such a practical lesson in integrity.

It had now become necessary to take some measures
to obtain subsistence. Mrs. Lee was not the
woman to sit with her hands folded, and repeat
“that bitter and perplexed `what shall I do!”'
She applied at a Venetian blind-factory, and obtained
for her two youngest girls, the one eleven, the other
nine, the sewing of the worsted stays to the blinds,
by which they earned $1 50 per week; and this

in the intervals of their daily school. She had a
plan for Lucy, but this she would not put into execution
without her father's concurrence, which she
foresaw it would be no easy matter to obtain.
Lucy had always been his darling. She was his
first-born. She was pretty; and having in his more
fortunate days given her some advantages of education,
he looked forward to a time when she might,
by that prize which is always in a pretty woman's
lottery, a fortunate marriage, regain the place in
society forfeited by his misconduct.

The children were asleep. Lee, wretched and
restless, was tossing on his bed, calling at every
moment his patient wife from the garment which
she was making by a dim light to earn one shilling.
The air of the room was scarcely tempered by the
single stick of wood in the stove, and all this misery
was the consequence of a base indulgence in a low
appetite. But the poor man paid the severest
penalty in his own person. Who that looked upon
his grisled hair, his bloated face, his bloodshot
eyes, and his stiffened and trembling limbs, could
have recognised him who, fifteen years before, was
one of the most promising young lawyers of Massachusetts?

After expressing a wish for this and that, and
complaining of the cold, “What in Heaven's name
are we to do?” he said. “Has Barton never sent
to inquire after me?”

“No—he probably does not know where we
live.”

“It would be easy finding out—but people don't
take pains to look up poor acquaintances. Barton
is no worse than the rest of the world. Lord help

us! we may as well come to it first as last. We
shall starve or freeze to death here. Won't you
stop that sewing? Every stitch of your needle goes
through my nerves. You can't earn enough to
save us from starvation. Send me to the almshouse—it
makes little difference where one dies;
and when I am gone you can manage to scramble
on with the rest.”

“No, Richard—no—we have gone through many
a dark day together, and we will not separate till
it pleases God to part us.” Lee drew the sheet
over his face. “We have a hard winter before
us, and we must take measures accordingly. The
first step should be to reduce the family. I am
thinking of getting a place for Lucy.”

“A place! what sort of a place?”

“A service-place.”

“Good Heavens! you are not in earnest?”

“I am; and, if you will hear me patiently, you
may think me right.”

“Never, never—all the talking in the world
won't persuade me to degrade Lucy to a servant.”

Mrs. Lee thought of the degradation to which
her husband's vice had reduced them, and she resolutely
proceeded.

“We must have relief, and that immediately. I
will not subject my children to being depraved by
dependance on charity while they have the means
of exertion—honest labour is never degrading.”

“Certainly not to those who are used to it.”

“Nor to those that need it, dear husband, as we
do. It does not startle or frighten me in the least.
I have been through all gradations from perfect
competency to our present suffering state, and each

degree—even ours—has its peculiar advantages
and temptations, and its happiness too.”

“Happiness!” echoed Lee.

His wife proceeded: “I can't but hope Lucy will
find hers in a faithful performance of her duties.
I can truly say I have often envied servants when
I have heard the merry peals of laughter in the
kitchen, and known what anxious hearts there were
in the parlour.”

“But what is all this to the purpose! Lucy
shall never live in anybody's kitchen.”

“It is much to the purpose,” replied Mrs. Lee,
judiciously answering to the first clause of his
sentence, “to settle it in our minds that Lucy may
be good and happy in any position.”

“But, wife, consider—recollect how you and I
were brought up.”

“That is what I try to forget!”

“But you ought not voluntarily to put Lucy out
to service!”

“Richard, you know I do not mean to reproach
you; but I must say, that in our situation we have
lost the power of voluntary action—we are under the
stern coercion of necessity.” Mrs. Lee now laid
aside her work, and spoke, though with a tremulous
voice, in a tone of decision she seldom assumed.
“For the last week Lucy and I have lived on rye-mush.
The bread you and the other children have
eaten was given to us by the baker. I will not
continue to subsist on his bounty while we have
unemployed means of feeding ourselves. Lucy is
nearly fourteen, old enough to get a place and earn
wages. There will be one less to eat, and some
help through this hard winter from her earnings.”

“But how can you bear to think of making a
mere servant-girl of Lucy?”

“The condition of servant-girls is no longer what
it once was. They are not servants in the old sense
of the word. Their relation to their employers
is one of mutual advantage and mutual dependance.
In a well-ordered family, a girl is fitting
herself for the duties that belong to her sex. She
is learning to fill honourably the station of a wife,
mistress, and mother of a family.”

“Oh, I grant you, in a well-ordered family! but
where will you find such? and pray, how are you
to know anything of the family you put her in—
you have not an acquaintance in the city.”

“No, not one—and this it is that perplexes and
distresses me. It seems to me we never know the
wants of a condition till we are placed in it ourselves.
I remember joining in a laugh at the presumption
of a servant, who, when asked for her references,
asked them in return of the employer.
Yet surely the knowledge should be mutual in such
a contract.”

“You are always refining, wife—what should
be and what is in this world are wide apart, and
you must submit to what is. I see,” he added,
after a pause and a groan, “what we are coming
to—I never realized it before!”

Shame—shame to thee, Lee! This from a man
conscious of having lived for fifteen years in the
violation of the laws of temperance, to which are
affixed such rewards and such dreadful penalties;
who had broken his marriage vows, involving in
mortification, hardship, and bitter sorrow her whom
he had sworn to cherish and protect; who had not

only neglected the duties of a Christian father, but
foregone the instincts of a brute parent, and, depriving
his children of their birthright in a prosperous
land, had reduced them to the privations
and slavery of extreme poverty. Yet this weak
man revolted from putting his child to domestic
service as the severest trial of his condition!

This was doubtless an extreme case of Lee.
But was not his feeling a part of a very general
false estimate of life, its positions, its trials, and
its duties?