 | CHAPTER XXI.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH THE BOY? Oldtown folks |  |
21. CHAPTER XXI.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH THE BOY?
“WELL,” said my Aunt Lois, as she gave the last sweep to
the hearth, after she had finished washing up the supper-dishes;
“I 've been up to Ebal Scran's store this afternoon, to see
about soling Horace's Sunday shoes. Ebal will do 'em as reasonable
as any one; and he spoke to me to know whether I
knew of any boy that a good family would like to bind out to
him for an apprentice, and I told him I 'd speak to you about
Horace. It 'll be time pretty soon to think of putting him at
something.”
Among the many unexplained and inexplicable woes of childhood,
are its bitter antagonisms, so perfectly powerless, yet often
so very decided, against certain of the grown people who control it.
Perhaps some of us may remember respectable, well-meaning
people, with whom in our mature years we live in perfect amity,
but who in our childhood appeared to us bitter enemies. Children
are remarkably helpless in this respect, because they cannot
choose their company and surroundings as grown people can;
and are sometimes entirely in the power of those with whom
their natures are so unsympathetic that they may be almost said
to have a constitutional aversion to them. Aunt Lois was such
a one to me, principally because of her forecasting, untiring,
pertinacious, care-taking propensities. She had already looked
over my lot in life, and set down in her own mind what was to
be done with me, and went at it with a resolute energy that
would not wait for the slow development of circumstances.
That I should want to study, as my father did, — that I should
for this cause hang as an unpractical, unproductive, dead weight
on the family, — was the evil which she saw in prospective,
against which my grandfather's placid, easy temper, and my
grandmother's impulsive bountifulness, gave her no security. A
to which a poor widow in dependent circumstances had no right
to look forward, and therefore she opened the subject betimes,
with prompt energy, by the proposition above stated.
My mother, who sat on the other side of the fireplace, looked
at me with a fluttering look of apprehension. I flushed up in a
sort of rage that somehow Aunt Lois always succeeded in putting
me into. “I don't want to be a shoemaker, and I won't
neither,” I said.
“Tut, tut,” said my grandfather, placidly, from his corner;
“we don't let little boys say `won't' here.”
I now burst out crying, and ran to my grandmother, sobbing
as if my heart would break.
“Lois, can't you let this boy alone?” said my grandmother,
vengefully; “I do wonder at you. Poor little fellow! his father
ain't quite cold in his grave yet, and you want to pitch him out
into the world,” — and my grandmother seized me in her strong
arms, and lulled me against her ample bosom. “There, poor boy,
don't you cry; you sha' n't, no, you sha' n't; you shall stay and
help grandma, so you shall.”
“Great help he is,” said Aunt Lois, contemptuously; “gets
a book in his hand and goes round with his head in a bag;
never gives a message right, and is always stumbling over things
that are right in his way. There 's Harry, now, is as handy as a
girl, and if he says he 'll do a thing, I know 't 'll be done,” — and
Aunt Lois illustrated her doctrine by calling up Harry, and
making him stretch forth his arms for a skein of blue-mixed
yarn which she was going to wind. The fire-light shone full on
his golden curls and clear blue eyes, as he stood obediently and
carefully yielding to Aunt Lois's quick, positive movements. As
she wound, and twitched, and pulled, with certainly twice the
energy that the work in hand required, his eyes followed her
motions with a sort of quiet drollery; there was a still, inward
laugh in them, as if she amused him greatly.
Such open comparisons between two boys might have gone
far to destroy incipient friendship; but Harry seemed to be in a
wonderful degree gifted with the faculties that made him a universal
he was quiet and obedient, always doing with cheerful promptness
exactly what he was bidden, unless, as sometimes happened in our
family circle, he was bidden to do two or three different things at
one and the same time, when he would stand looking innocently
puzzled, till my grandmother and Aunt Lois and Aunt Keziah
had settled it among them whose was to be the ruling will. He
was deft and neat-handed as a girl about any little offices of a
domestic nature; he was thoughtful and exact in doing errands;
he was delicately clean and neat in his personal habits; he
never tracked Aunt Lois's newly scoured floor with the traces
of unwiped shoes; he never left shavings and litter on a cleanly
swept hearth, or tumbled and deranged anything, so that he
might safely be trusted on errands even to the most sacred precincts
of a housekeeper's dominions. What boy with all these
virtues is not held a saint by all women-folk? Yet, though he
was frequently commended in all those respects, to my marked
discredit, Harry was to me a sort of necessary of life. There
was something in his nature that was wanting to mine, and I
attached myself to him with a pertinacity which had never
before marked my intercourse with any boy.
A day or two after the arrival of the children, the minister and
Lady Lothrop had called on my grandmother in all the dignity
of their station, and taken an approving view of the boy. Lady
Lothrop had engaged to take him under her care, and provide a
yearly sum for his clothing and education. She had never had a
child of her own, and felt that diffidence about taking the entire
charge of a boy which would be natural to a person of fastidious
and quiet habits, and she therefore signified that it would be more
agreeable to her if my grandmother would allow him to make
one of her own family circle, — a proposal to which she cheerfully
assented, saying, that “one more chick makes little difference
to an old hen.”
I immediately petitioned that I might have Harry for a bedfellow,
and he and I were allowed a small bedroom to ourselves
at the head of the back stairs. It was a rude little crib, roughly
fenced off from the passage-way by unplaned boards of different
rude case of drawers, were all its furniture. Harry's love of
order was strikingly manifest in the care which he took of this
little apartment. His few articles of clothing and personal belongings
all had their exact place, and always were bestowed
there with scrupulous regularity. He would adjust the furniture,
straighten the bed-clothing, and quietly place and replace
the things that I in my fitful, nervous eagerness was always
disarranging; and when, as often happened in one of my spasms
of enthusiasm, I turned everything in the room topsy-turvy,
searching for something I had lost, or projecting some new arrangement,
he would wait peaceably till I had finished, and
then noiselessly get everything back again into its former order.
He never quarrelled with me, or thwarted me in my turbulent or
impatient moods, but seemed to wait for me to get through whatever
I was doing, when he would come in and silently rearrange.
He was, on the whole, a singularly silent child, but with the kind
of silence which gives a sense of companionship. It was evident
that he was always intensely observant and interested in
whatever was going on before him, and ready at any moment to
take a friendly part when he was wanted; but for the most part
his place in the world seemed that of an amused listener and
observer. Life seemed to present itself to him as a curious spectacle,
and he was never tired of looking and listening, watching
the ways and words of all our family circle, and often smiling to
himself as if they afforded him great diversion. Aunt Lois,
with her quick, sharp movements, her determined, outspoken
ways, seemed to amuse him as much as she irritated me, and I
would sometimes see him turn away with a droll smile when he
had been watching one of her emphatic courses round the room.
He had a certain tact in avoiding all the sharp corners and
angles of her character, which, in connection with his handiness
and his orderly ways, caused him at last to become a prime
favorite with her. With his quiet serviceableness and manual
dexterity, he seemed to be always the one that was exactly wanting
to do an odd turn, so that at last he came to be depended on
for many little inferior offices, which he rendered with a good-will
none the less cheerful because of his silence.
“There 's time enough to think about what Horace is to do
another year,” said my grandfather, having reflected some moments
after the passage of arms between my grandmother and
Aunt Lois. “He 's got to have some schooling. The boys had
both better go to school for this winter, and then we 'll see
what next.”
“Well, I just mentioned about Ebal Scran, because he 's a
good man to take a boy, and he wants one now. If we don't
take that chance it may not come again.”
“Wal, Miss Lois,” said Sam Lawson, who had sat silent in a
dark corner of the chimney, “ef I was to say about Horace,
I 'd say he 'd do better for somethin' else 'n shoemakin'. He 's
the most amazin' little fellow to read I ever see. As much as a
year ago Jake Marshall and me and the other fellers round to
the store used to like to get him to read the Columbian Sentinel
to us; he did it off slicker than any on us could, he did, — there
wa' n't no kind o' word could stop him. I should say such a
boy as that ought to have a liberal education.”
“And who 's going to pay for it?” said Aunt Lois, turning
round on him sharply. “I suppose you know it costs something
to get a man through college. We never can afford to send him
to college. It 's all we can do to bring his Uncle Bill through.”
“Well, well,” said my grandmother, “there 's no use worrying
the child, one way or the other.”
“They can both go to district school this winter,” said my
grandfather.
“Well,” said Aunt Lois, “the other day I found him down in
a corner humping his back out over a Latin grammar that I 'd
put away with all the rest of his father's books on the back side
of the upper shelf in our closet, and I took it away from him.
If he was going to college, why, it 's well enough to study for it;
but if he is n't we don't want him idlin' round with scraps of
Latin in his head like old Jock Twitchel, — got just Latin enough
to make a fool of his English, and he 's neither one thing nor
another.”
“I do wonder, Lois, what there is under the sun that you don't
feel called to see to,” said my grandmother. “What do you want
if he wants it, and any of the rest of his father's books, poor
child. I s'pose he likes 'em because they were his poor father's.”
I leaped for joy in my grandmother's lap, for my father's precious
books had been in a state of blockade ever since we had
been in the house, and it was only by putting a chair on a table
one day, when Aunt Lois and my mother were out, that I had
managed to help myself to the Latin grammar, out of which my
father had begun to teach me before he died.
“Well, well,” said Aunt Lois, “at any rate it 's eight o'clock,
and time these boys went to bed.”
Upon this hint Harry and I went to our little bedroom without
the ceremony of a candle. It was a frosty autumn night, but a
good, clear square of moonlight lay on the floor.
Now Harry, in common with many other very quiet-natured
people, was remarkable for a peculiar persistency in all his ways
and manners. Ever since I had roomed with him, I had noticed
with a kind of silent wonder the regularity of his nightly devotional
exercises, to which he always addressed himself before he
went to bed, with an appearance of simple and absorbed fervor,
kneeling down by the bed, and speaking in a low, earnest tone of
voice, never seeming to hurry or to abbreviate, as I was always
inclined to do whenever I attempted similar performances. In
fact, as usually I said no prayers at all, there was often an awkward
pause and stillness on my part, while I watched and waited
for Harry to be through with his devotions, so that I might resume
the thread of worldly conversation.
Now to me the perseverance with which he performed these
nightly exercises was unaccountable. The doctrines which in
that day had been gaining ground in New England, with regard
to the utter inutility and unacceptableness of any prayers or religious
doings of the unregenerate, had borne their legitimate fruits
in causing parents to become less and less particular in cultivating
early habits of devotion in children; and so, when I had a
room to myself, my mother had ceased to take any oversight of
my religious exercises; and as I had overheard my Aunt Lois
maintaining very stringently that there was no use in it so long
So, when night after night I noticed Harry going on with his devotions,
it seemed to me, from my more worldly point of view,
that he gave himself a great deal of unnecessary trouble, particularly
if, after all, his prayers did no good. I thought I would
speak with him about it, and accordingly this night I said to him,
“Harry, do you think it does any good to say your prayers?”
“To be sure I do,” he said.
“But if your heart has n't been changed, your prayer is an
abomination to the Lord. Aunt Lois says so,” I said, repeating
a Scriptural form I had often heard quoted.
Harry turned over, and in the fading daylight I saw his eyes,
large, clear, and tranquil. There was not the shadow of a cloud
in them. “I don't know anything about that,” he said quietly.
“You see I don't believe that sort of talk. God is our Father; he
loves us. If we want things, and ask him for them, he will
give them to us if it is best; mother always told me so, and I
find it is so. I promised her always to say these prayers, and to
believe that God loves us. I always shall.”
“Do you really think so, Harry?” I said.
“Why, yes; to be sure I do.”
“I mean, do you ever ask God for things you want? I don't
mean saying prayers, but asking for anything.”
“Of course I do. I always have, and he gives them to me.
He always has taken care of me, and he always will.”
“Now, Harry,” said I, “I want to go to college, and Aunt
Lois says there is n't any money to send me there. She wants
mother to bind me out to a shoemaker; and I 'd rather die than
do that. I love to study, and I mean to learn. Now do you
suppose if I ask God he will help me?”
“Certainly he will,” said Harry, with an incredible firmness
and quietness of manner. “Just you try it.”
“Don't you want to study and go to college?” said I.
“Certainly I do. I ask God every night that I may if it is
best,” he said with simplicity.
“It will be a great deal harder for you than for me,” I said,
“because you have n't any relations.”
“Yes, but God can do anything he pleases,” said Harry, with
a sort of energetic simplicity.
The confidence expressed in his manner produced a kind of
effect upon me. I had urgent needs, too, — longings which I
was utterly helpless ever to fulfil, — particularly that visionary
desire to go to college and get an education. “Harry,” I said,
“you ask God that I may go to college.”
“Yes, I will,” he answered, — “I 'll ask every night. But
then,” he added, turning over and looking at me, “why don't you
ask yourself, Horace?”
It was difficult for me to answer that question. I think that
the differences among human beings in the natural power of
faith are as great as any other constitutional diversity, and that
they begin in childhood. Some are born believers, and some are
born sceptics. I was one of the latter. There was an eternal
query, — an habitual interrogation-point to almost every proposition
in my mind, even from childhood, — a habit of looking at
everything from so many sides, that it was difficult to get a settled
assent to anything.
Perhaps the curious kind of double life that I led confirmed
this sceptical tendency. I was certain that I constantly saw and
felt things, the assertion of whose existence as I saw them drew
down on me stinging reproofs and radical doubts of my veracity.
This led me to distrust my own perceptions on all subjects, for I
was no less certain of what I saw and felt in the spiritual world
than of what I saw and felt in the material; and, if I could be
utterly mistaken in the one, I could also be in the other.
The repression and silence about this which became the habit
of my life formed a covering for a constant wondering inquiry.
The habit of reserve on these subjects had become so intense,
that even to Harry I never spoke of it. I think I loved Harry
more than I loved anything; in fact, before he came to us, I do
not think I knew anything of love as a sentiment. My devotion
to my father resembled the blind, instinctive worship of a dog for
his master. My feeling toward my mother and grandmother
was that impulse of want that induces a chicken to run to a hen
in any of its little straits. It was an animal instinct, — a commerce
of helplessness with help.
For Harry I felt a sort of rudimentary, poetical tenderness,
like the love of man for woman. I admired his clear blue eyes,
his curling golden hair, his fair, pure complexion, his refined and
quiet habits, and a sort of unconsciousness of self that there was
about him. His simplicity of nature was incorruptible; he
seemed always to speak, without disguise, exactly what he
thought, without the least apparent consideration of anything but
its truth; and this gave him a strange air of innocency. A sort
of quaint humor always bubbling up in little quiet looks and
ways, and in harmless practical jokes, gave me a constant sense
of amusement in his society.
As the reader may have observed, we were a sharp-cut and
peculiar set in our house, and sometimes, when the varied
scenes of family life below stairs had amused Harry more than
common, he would, after we had got into our chamber by ourselves,
break into a sudden flow of mimicry, — imitating now
Aunt Lois's sharp, incisive movements and decided tones, or flying
about like my venerated grandmother in her most confused and
hurried moments, or presenting a perfect image of Uncle Fliakim's
frisky gyrations, till he would set me into roars of laughter;
when he would turn gravely round and ask what I was
laughing at. He never mentioned a name, or made remarks
about the persons indicated, — the sole reflection on them was
the absurd truthfulness of his imitation; and when I would call
out the name he would look at me with eyes brimful of mischief,
but in utter silence.
Generally speaking, his language was characterized by a peculiar
nicety in the selection of words, and an avoidance of clownish
or vulgar phraseology, and was such as marks a child whose early
years have all been passed in the intercourse of refined society; but
sometimes he would absurdly introduce into his conversation scraps
from Sam Lawson's vocabulary, with flashes of mimicry of his
shambling gait, and the lanky droop of his hands; yet these
shifting flashes of imitation were the only comment he ever made
upon him.
After Harry began to share my apartment, my nightly visions
became less frequent, because, perhaps, instead of lying wide-awake
indeed, I saw standing by him, after he had fallen asleep, that
same woman whose blue eyes and golden hair I had remarked
when we were lost in the forest. She looked down on him with
an inexpressible tenderness, and seemed to bless him; and I used
to notice that he spoke oftener of his mother the next day, and
quoted her words to me with the simple, unquestioning veneration
which he always showed for them.
One thing about Harry which was striking to me, and which
he possessed in common with many still, retiring people, was
great vigor in maintaining his individuality. It has been the
experience of my life that it is your quiet people who, above
all other children of men, are set in their ways and intense
in their opinions. Their very reserve and silence are a fortification
behind which all their peculiarities grow and thrive at their
leisure, without encountering those blows and shocks which materially
modify more outspoken natures. It is owing to the
peculiar power of quietness that one sometimes sees characters
fashioning themselves in a manner the least to be expected from
the circumstances and associates which surround them. As a
fair white lily grows up out of the bed of meadow muck, and,
without note or comment, rejects all in the soil that is alien from
her being, and goes on fashioning her own silver cup side by side
with weeds that are drawing coarser nutriment from the soil, so
we often see a refined and gentle nature by some singular internal
force unfolding itself by its own laws, and confirming itself
in its own beliefs, as wholly different from all that surround it as
is the lily from the rag-weed. There are persons, in fact, who
seem to grow almost wholly from within, and on whom the
teachings, the doctrines, and the opinions of those around them
produce little or no impression.
Harry was modest in his bearing; he never put forth an
opinion opposed to those around him, unless a special question
was asked him; but, even from early childhood, the opinion of no
human being seemed to have much power to modify or alter certain
convictions on which his life was based.
I remember, one Sunday, our good Parson Lothrop took it into
which certain scholarly and rational Christians in easy worldly
circumstances seem to take delight, — a sort of preaching which
removes the providence of God as far off from human sympathy
as it is possible to be. The amount of the matter as he stated it
seemed to be, that the Creator had devised a very complicated
and thorough-working machine, which he had wound up and set
going ages ago, which brought out results with the undeviating
accuracy of clock-work. Of course there was the declaration
that “not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Father,”
and that “the very hairs of our head are numbered,” standing
square across his way. But we all know that a text of Scripture
is no embarrassment at all in the way of a thorough-paced
theologian, when he has a favorite idea to establish.
These declarations were explained as an Oriental, metaphorical
way of stating that the All-wise had started a grand world-machine
on general laws which included the greatest good to the
least of his creation.
I noticed that Harry sat gazing at him with clear, wide-open
eyes and that fixed attention which he always gave to anything
of a religious nature. The inference that I drew from it
was, that Harry must be mistaken in his confidence in prayer,
and that the kind of Fatherly intervention he looked for and
asked for in his affairs was out of the question. As we walked
home I expected him to say something about it, but he did not.
When we were in our room at night, and he had finished his
prayers, I said, “Harry, did you notice Dr. Lothrop's sermon?”
“Yes, I noticed it,” he said.
“Well, if that is true, what good does it do to pray?”
“It is n't true,” he said, simply.
“How do you know it is n't?”
“O, I know better,” he said.
“But, Harry, — Dr. Lothrop, you know, — why, he 's the minister,”
— and what could a boy of that day say more?
“He 's mistaken there, though,” said Harry, quietly, as he
would speak of a man who denied the existence of the sun or
moon. He was too positive and too settled to be in any frame to
to me so damaging to his opinions, melted over him like so much
moonshine. He fell asleep saying to himself, “The Lord is my
shepherd, I shall not want,” and I lay awake, wondering in my
own mind whether this was the way to live, and, if it were, why
my grandmother and Aunt Lois, and my father and mother, and
all the good people I had ever known, had so many troubles and
worries.
Ages ago, in the green, flowery hollows of the hills of Bethlehem,
a young shepherd boy took this view of life, and began his
days singing, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” and
ended them by saying, “Thou hast taught me from my youth up,
and hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works”; and his ten
der communings with an unseen Father have come down to our
days as witnesses of green pastures and still waters to be found
in this weary work-a-day world, open ever to those who are
simple-hearted enough to seek them. It would seem to be the
most natural thing in the world that the child of an ever-present
Father should live in this way, — that weakness and ignorance,
standing within call and reach of infinite grace and strength,
should lay hold of that divine helpfulness, and grow to it and
by it, as the vine climbs upon the rock; but yet such lives are
the exception rather than the rule, even among the good. But
the absolute faith of Harry's mind produced about him an atmosphere
of composure and restfulness which was, perhaps, the
strongest attraction that drew me to him. I was naturally nervous,
sensitive, excitable, and needed the repose which he gave
me. His quiet belief that all would be right had a sort of effect
on me, and, although I did not fall into his way of praying, I came
to have great confidence in it for him, and to indulge some vague
hopes that something good might come of it for me.
| CHAPTER XXI.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH THE BOY? Oldtown folks | |