THE SUMMER'S STORY.
AFTER this Louis Ansted steadily failed. It had seemed as though he
summoned all the strength left in his worn-out body for that one
interview wherein he had resolved that his mother should know the truth
from his lips.
After that the lamp of life burned lower and lower. He rallied again,
two days afterward, and was locked in with his lawyer, and gave
critical attention to business.
"I imagine that he made important changes in his will," Mr. Chessney
said to Claire. "I do not know of what character, though I was called
in as a witness. I hope he made special provision for his sister Alice.
I think that she is likely to disappoint her parents in their schemes,
and it might be greatly to her comfort to be independent, so far as
property is concerned. But Louis kept his own counsel. His lawyer told
me that he might be failing in body, but he had never seen him clearer
in brain. So there will be no trouble about carrying out whatever he
has planned."
"I did not know," Claire said, "that he had property to leave,
independent of his parents."
"Oh, yes; a large estate, willed to him from his grandfather,
absolutely in his own right. It is what has helped to ruin him."
"How good it would be if he could make his money undo, so far as money
could, some of the mischief he has done."
"How could money undo it, my friend?"
"Oh, it couldn't. Still, it might relieve the misery which comes from
want. I was thinking just then of poor little Mrs. Simpson and her
fatherless baby. I have heard that her husband drank his first glass
while in Louis Ansted's employ, and that Louis offered it to him, and
he did not like to refuse for fear of giving offense. He died with the
delirium tremens, and his wife sold her bedclothes and her shoes to buy
food for him at the last. Perhaps she would rather starve than take
money from poor Louis. Haven't I heard that he was connected with one
of the distilleries?"
"Some of his property is invested in that way," Mr. Chessney answered,
startled with the remembrance. "I had not thought of it. Poor Alice!
I am afraid there is great trouble for her in whatever direction one
looks. If Louis leaves his property to her, her father and mother will
violently oppose what her intense temperance principles would advocate.
I wish Louis had felt like talking these things over with me a little."
Well, the day came when they followed the ruined body to the grave. It
rested in a costly coffin, and the funeral appointments were such as
became large wealth and the habit of lavish expenditure.
Later, when the will was read, it appeared that the poor heart had
taken counsel of One who makes no mistakes. He had done what he could
to undo wrong. The income from valuable investments was large, and
was left in trust to his sister Alice, to be used at her discretion
in relieving the woes of those who had been brought low through the
influence of intoxicants. As for the distillery from which half of his
income was derived, its business was immediately to cease, its stock
was to be destroyed, and its buildings to be made into tenement-houses
for the poor.
"The poor boy was not in his right mind when he made such a will,"
the father said. "Why, it is a sinful waste; it is simply throwing
thousands of dollars into the river."
"It is all the influence of that Benedict girl," the mother said, in
bitterness of spirit.
But the will stood, and its directions were obeyed with all the
promptness that the sister to whose trust the work was left, could
force her lawyers. She seemed in feverish haste to have the work of
destruction go on. And when her mother accused her of being hopelessly
under the influence of "that Benedict girl," and having no mind of her
own, her answer was:
"Mamma, you are mistaken. At last I am under the influence of One who
has a right to own me, body and soul. Poor Louis found Him at last, and
yielded to his power, and followed his direction, and it was through
Claire Benedict's influence that he did; and, mamma, if he had known
Claire Benedict a few years earlier, we should have him with us to-day.
Mamma, the time has come for me to speak plainly. Religion has been
nothing but a name to me until lately. I have not believed in its
power. It is Claire Benedict who has shown me my mistake, and helped
me to see Christ as a sufficient Saviour. I belong to him now for time
and eternity, and, mamma, I will never marry a man who does not with
his whole heart own Christ as his Master, and who is not as intense and
fanatical on the temperance question as my brother became."
She had always been strong-willed. The mother had been wont to say,
somewhat boastfully, that her oldest daughter resembled her in strength
of purpose.
Human nature is a curious study. What Mrs. Ansted would do, had been a
matter of extreme solicitude to several people. Mr. Chessney believed
that she would make Alice's life miserable; that she would become
Claire Benedict's enemy, and injure her if she could, and that she
would withdraw her younger daughters from not only Claire's, but their
eldest sister's influence, and from the church to which they had become
attached.
"I do not mean that she will do this in revenge," he said to Claire,
"or that she will really intend to injure anybody. She is one of those
persons who can make herself believe that she is doing God's service
by just such management as this. I am sorry for Alice and for the
young girls. It gives me a sense of relief and joy to remember that
Louis is forever safe from pitfalls, and yet sometimes I can not help
wishing that he could have lived for a few months longer. He had great
influence over his mother. She tried to manage him, and his indolent
will allowed himself to be influenced in a wonderful manner, but when
he did really rouse, he had great power over his mother."
Mrs. Ansted did none of the things which were feared. Instead, she
turned suddenly, and with apparent loathing, from the life which she
had heretofore lived. She sent for Claire one morning, greeted her
with a burst of tears as her dear child, and declared that had she
understood the feeling between Louis and herself nothing would have
given her greater joy than to have welcomed her into the family.
Claire opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again. If
this were the form of cross that she was to bear, it was peculiar,
certainly; but why not bear it as well as any other? Of what use to
explain again, what the son's own lips had told, that she had utterly
refused the honor offered her--that she had never for a moment desired
to be received into this family? If the bereaved mother had really
succeeded in making herself believe such folly as this, why not let
it pass--the grave had closed over the possibility of its ever being
realized?
It was a strange part to play--to accept without outward protest the
position of one who would have been a daughter of the house, to hear
herself mentioned as Louis Ansted's intended wife; to ride, and walk,
and talk with the mother, and help her make believe that she would not
for the world have thwarted her son's desires; but Claire, after a few
attempts at explanation, dropped the effort. The mother did not wish
to believe the truth about this, or many other things, and therefore
closed her eyes to them.
She wished also to impress herself and others with the belief that
Louis had been in every respect an exemplary, and, indeed, a remarkable
young man. She withdrew her connection with the church in town and
united by letter with the one at South Plains; avowedly, because "dear
Louis was interested in it more than in any other church in the world."
She imagined plans that he might have had for the church, and called
them his, and eagerly worked them out. She adopted the minister, and
his wife and his children, because she had often heard Louis say that
he would rather hear that man preach than to hear Doctor Archer; and
once he told her that the minister's little girl had a very sweet face,
and was a cunning little witch whom he liked to tease. She turned with
something like disgust from the very name of VanMarter, protesting that
"poor Louis had had a great deal to bear from their advances," and that
she had no desire to cultivate their acquaintance further.
On all these strange changes in her mother Alice looked with
bewilderment.
"She frightens me," she said to Claire one evening, "I don't know
what to think. She contradicts every theory of life I ever heard her
express. She attributes to Louis graces that he did not possess. She
accuses people of injuring him, who really tried to help him, and she
adopts as plans of his, things of which I know he had not even thought.
I do not know my mother at all; and as I said, it frightens me. Is she
losing her mind?"
Claire had no ready reply to these questionings, for she, too, was
puzzled. But Mr. Chessney, as they walked slowly down from the house on
the hill, discussing once more the strange change in the woman of the
world, advanced a theory which Claire adopted, but which was hardly the
one to explain to Alice.
"I think," said Mr. Chessney, "that she is hushing her conscience. It
would like to speak loudly to her, and tell her that she is responsible
for a ruined life, and she does not mean to listen to it. She is
imagining a life she believes Louis might have lived, after the change
that came to him on his sick-bed, and is making herself believe that
he did live it, and that she was, and is, in hearty accord with it.
It is a strange freak of the bewildering human mind, but unless I am
mistaken, the woman will not find the peace in it that she is seeking.
I think she will have to cry, 'God be merciful to me a sinner,' before
her heart will find rest."
And then he added one sentence which set Claire's heart into a strange
flutter:
"Claire, when I see the energy with which she carries out one of her
imaginings, connected with you, I am very grateful that Louis insisted
on my being present at that first interview between you and him, and
that I heard the truth from his own lips, for the mother is succeeding
in deceiving every one else."
"And I do not know how to help it," Claire said, with troubled voice.
"It seems a strange thing to be living a falsehood; but when I try to
explain to her, she puts me gently aside, and acts as though I had not
spoken; and others have no right to question me about the truth of her
theories."
"Except myself. Have I the right? Was it as emphatic a refusal as poor
Louis understood it? Believe me, I am not asking merely to gratify idle
curiosity."
"There never was anything in it, Mr. Chessney, and there never could
have been."
The passage of all these and many other events not chronicled here,
consumed the greater portion of the summer vacation. For Claire
Benedict was letting the summer slip from her without going home. Sore
had been the trial at first; but a few weeks before the term closed,
opportunity had been offered her to teach a summer class of city
pupils, at prices that were almost equal to her year's salary. What
right had she, who wanted to bestow so many luxuries on her mother,
to close her eyes to such an opportunity as this, merely because she
was homesick for a sight of that mother's face? It had been hard to
reconcile the sister, especially, to this new state of things. The
gentle mother had long ago learned the lesson that what looked like
manifest duty must not be tampered with, no matter how hard to bear;
but the hot-hearted young sister refused to see anything in it except
an added trial too great to be borne. Many letters had to be written
before there was a final reluctant admission that two hundred dollars
more to depend on, paltry sum though it was, would make a great
difference with the mother's winter comforts. The letter in which poor
Dora admitted this was blistered with tears; but the sacrifice was
made, and the extra term had been well entered upon.
There was much outside of the class and the life being lived on the
hill to occupy Claire's thoughts. I hope you do not suppose that the
work on the part of "the girls" had been accomplished during a sort
of "spasm," and that now they were ready to drop back into inaction.
Nothing was farther from their thoughts. If you have imagined so, you
have not understood how thoroughly some of them had sacrificed in order
to do. We never forget that for which we sacrifice.
Besides, the habit of thinking first of the church, and the various
causes which are the tributaries of the church, was formed. That the
work was to go on, was demonstrated in many ways; not the least by the
random remarks which came so naturally from the lips of the workers.
"Girls," had Ruth Jennings said, when they lingered one evening after
prayer-meeting, "when we cushion these seats, we shall have to send
somebody after the material who can carry the carpet and wall paper in
his mind's eye. It will never do to have a false note put in here to
jar this harmony."
"When we cushion the seats!" Claire heard it, and laughed softly. Who
had said that the seats were ever to be cushioned? But she knew they
would be, and that before very long.
On another evening, Mary Burton had said:
"Look here! don't you think our very next thing, or, at least, one of
the next, ought to be a furnace? I _don't_ like those stove pipes, if
they are Russia. A furnace would heat more evenly, and with less dust,
and Bud could manage a furnace as well as he can these stoves."
How naturally they talked about their future sacrifices! What would
have utterly appalled them a few months before, were spoken of
carelessly now as "next things."
Ruth Jennings readily assented to the necessity for a furnace, but
added:
"I don't believe we shall have Bud for engineer. He wants to go to
school, did you know it? And what is more, Mrs. Ansted intends to send
him. Fanny told me about it last night. She says her mother thinks
Louis intended that Bud should have an education, and she wants to
carry out all his plans. I did not know that Louis Ansted ever had any
such plans, did you?"
Then Nettie Burdick, after a thoughtful pause:
"Oh, well, girls, if we can't have Bud for engineer, perhaps we can
have him to preach for us some day. He told me last night that if he
lived he meant to preach; and I believe he will, and preach well, too.
Just think of it: Bud a minister!"