A REFORMER DISAPPOINTED.
During the day or two which followed his interview with Tappelmine,
Father Baguss was consumed with conflicting emotions. He could not deny
that his offer to help Tappelmine had taken an unpleasant load off of
his own heart; but it was equally certain that the contemplation of the
possible results of the arrangement gave him a sense of oppression,
which differed from the first in quality, but of which the quantity
was far too great to be endured with comfort. To find a way of getting
out of the whole matter was a suggestion which came frequently to the
heart of the old man, and was not as rigidly excluded as it would have
been from that of the reader; but fortunately for the honesty of Father
Baguss, his ingenuity was of the lowest order conceivable; so he did
as thousands of his betters have done when unable, by any abandonment
of self-respect, to avoid the inevitable: he submitted, and groaned
frequently to the Lord. Sometimes these efforts before the Unseen
increased the old man’s lugubriousness; at other times, a song came to
his rescue, followed by a troop of its own kind; but so uncertain were
his moods that Mrs. Baguss, who never before had occasion to suppose
that there was a single nerve in her husband’s body, began to complain
that she didn’t “believe in this thing of lookin’ out for other folks,
if it makes you cranky with your own.”
The old man’s trouble increased on the third day, for Tappelmine
dropped in and hinted vaguely that it was not yet too late to plant
winter wheat. The old man went into Tappelmine’s field with his own
team, and plowed; he worked his horses longer hours than he ever did on
his own ground; he lent an extra horse to work with Tappelmine’s own
before a harrow; he himself sowed the wheat, casting now plentifully,
as he thought of what Tappelmine might owe him by harvest-time, and
now scantily, as he thought of what might be his own fate if the crop
should be troubled with rust, or blight, or rain, or drought. And all
the while, as he followed his horses, the old man kept uttering short
petitions for Tappelmine and himself; and all the while his soul was
full of unspoken prayers for heavy rains or sudden cold, so that
the work might be stopped by the hand of Providence himself. But no
such fortune befell the good old man: such an open fall had not been
known since the settlement of Barton; even the Indian summer lasted
so long that the poet of the Barton _Register_ found opportunity to
publish, in three successive weekly numbers, “odes,” which could be
read in the weather which suggested them. When a heavy rain at last
put an end to field work, there were twenty-seven acres in wheat on
the Tappelmine estate. Father Baguss ached in soul and body, but the
wheat-field work was but the beginning of sorrow. The Tappelmine
larder was bareness itself; there was not a porker in the Tappelmine
pen; there was not even corn enough in the Tappelmine crib to feed
the family horse, let alone to send to mill, and be ground into the
meal which the Tappelmines fortunately preferred to fine flour.
Father Baguss sold the necessities of life in small quantities to his
neighbor, with the understanding that they were to be repaid by the
labor of Tappelmine, who was to get out material for barrel-staves
and wheelwright’s spokes on the old man’s woodland; but, by the time
the wheat was planted, Tappelmine, who, under the eye of Baguss, did
more work in a month than he had done in the whole of the year which
preceded, and who during the month had been pretty effectually kept
from his accustomed stimulant, fell sick. Then the cup of misery which
Father Baguss had put to his own lips was full; as the old man, in his
homely way, explained to his own pastor, it didn’t run over, and that
was just the trouble; he had to drink it all. He sought for sympathy
among his neighbors and acquaintances, but without much success; the
Barton postmaster expressed the sentiment of the township, when he said
that “no one but a thick-headed blunderer like Baguss would attempt
to reform a dead-and-gone soaker like Tappelmine.” Besides, most of
the inhabitants wanted to see how the case was going to turn out,
and all of them instinctively understood that the best point of view
is always at a respectable distance from the object to be looked at.
The sorrowing philanthropist went to Crupp, Tomple, and Deacon Jones;
but these three reformers, knowing that Baguss could afford the loss,
quietly agreed with each other that it would be indeed consolatory
to have a companion in experience; so they made excuses, and quoted
figures in evidence, and Father Baguss went home with the settled
conviction that he would have to look to Providence for his only
assistance.
But while Providence was thus reforming Father Baguss, Tappelmine was
growing steadily weaker, and Baguss found his causes of discomfort
increased by a debate, which lasted long in his mind, whether it might
not be better, for the sake of the drunkard’s family, to let Tappelmine
die, and then lease the farm himself at a price which would support the
widow. While one phase of the case was present in his mind, he would
suggest to the doctor that medicine didn’t seem to do any good--which
was certainly true--and that he didn’t believe it would pay to come so
often; when, on the contrary, conscience would argue for its own side,
the old man would have all three of the physicians visit Tappelmine in
rapid succession. The doctors disagreed, as any one but Father Baguss
would have known. Perry suggested electrical treatment, which would
necessitate the purchase of a battery, no such piece of mechanism
having ever been seen in the town except in a locked cabinet of the
Barton High School. Dr. White outlined a course of treatment which
seemed reasonable to Father Baguss, but which, put into practice, did
neither good nor harm; while Pykem arranged for certain inexpensive
applications of water, with results which were in the main encouraging.
But Tappelmine was unable to leave his bed for three months, and when
he was at all fit to work, he could labor for but two or three hours a
day.
And so Father Baguss found himself brought down to the position of a
man who was spending money without knowing what he was to get for it.
Such a position he had never occupied before, and no one could wonder
that he felt uncomfortable in it; but the duration of the period was
such that the victim succumbed to the steady pressure of truths which,
in their abstract form, would have been as ineffective against him
as against an acute logician whose intellect had been trained by his
pocket.
But Father Baguss was not the only instrument of the salvation of
Tappelmine. In existence, but scarcely known of or recognized, there
was a Mrs. Tappelmine. With face, hair, eyes, and garments of the
same color, the color itself being neutral; small, thin, faded,
inconspicuous, poorly clad, bent with labors which had yielded no
return, as dead to the world as saints strive to be, yet remaining in
the world for the sake of those whom she had often wished out of it,
Mrs. Tappelmine devoted herself to the wreck of what was once a hope
over which her eyes had been of a luster which high-born maidens had
envied, and a hope in which her heart had throbbed with a joy which had
seemed too great for life to hold. About the bedside of her husband
she hovered day and night. When she slept no one but herself knew, and
she herself did not care. When Tappelmine made his verbal agreement
with Father Baguss, she had listened with a joy whose earnestness was
as nothing compared with her resolution. She had hurried away from the
broken window to a corner where her dirty children were at quarrelsome
play, and she had bestowed upon each of them a passionate caress
which startled even the little wretches themselves into wondering
silence. From that moment she watched her husband’s every movement, and
Tappelmine, like a true Pike--for the Pike, like the Transcendentalist,
existed ages before he found his way into literature--Tappelmine
subjected himself into his wife’s dominion. He made numberless excuses
to go to some place where liquor could be found; she, with the wisdom
of the serpent, yet the gentleness of the dove, prevented him. As,
through the course of her husband’s labors, under the eye of Baguss, he
had grown more silent than ever, she had increased her exertions for
his comfort; when, finally, the task was completed, and Tappelmine,
with thinner face and hollower eyes than ever, fell heavily upon his
rude bed and uttered--almost screamed--the single word “Whiskey!” she
was on her knees beside him in an instant.
“Jerry,” she exclaimed, “you’ve got the better of whiskey these late
days.”
“Just a drop more--to keep me from dying,” gasped Tappelmine.
“Don’t, Jerry,” she pleaded. “Let me hold you tight, so you _can’t_
die.”
“Just a drop, for God’s sake, Mariar!” said Tappelmine imploringly.
“O Jerry!” replied the wife, “don’t--for the children’s sake; _they’re_
more to you than God is. I hope he’ll forgive me for sayin’ it.”
“Only a single mouthful, Mariar,” said Tappelmine, “to keep me from
sinkin’.”
“You’re not sinkin’, old man--Jerry, dear; you’re gittin’ _up_. _Keep_
up, Jerry.”
“I’ll be all right in a day or two, Mariar, if I only get a taste.
You don’t want a sick man a-layin’ around, not fit to do for his young
ones?”
“You don’t need to, Jerry. _I’ll_ do for ’em, if you’ll only--only make
’em proud of you.”
“It’ll make me good for more to _you_, old woman--one single mouthful
will,” said Tappelmine.
“You’ve been better to me these three weeks than you ever was before,
Jerry; keep on bein’ so, won’t you? It puts me in mind of old
times--times when you used to laugh, an’ kiss me.”
“I’d be that way again,” said Tappelmine, “if I could only pick up
stren’th.”
“You’re that way now, Jerry, if you only stay as you are.”
“_You’ll_ die, Mariar,” said the man, “if I don’t get out of this bed
some way--you an’ the young uns.”
“I’d be glad enough,” said the woman, “if you’d only stay, Jerry.”
“An’ the boys an’ girls?” queried Tappelmine.
“Would be better off alongside of me in the ground, rather than have
their dad go backwards again,” said Mrs. Tappelmine. “People turn up
their noses at ’em now, Jerry.”
“What are you drivin’ at, Mariar?”
“Why, Jerry, when the children go ’long the road--God knows I don’t let
’em do it oftener than I can help--folks see ’em dirty, an’ wearin’
poor clothes, an’ not lookin’ over an’ above fed up, an’ they can’t
help kind o’ twitchin’ up their faces at ’em once there was a time when
I couldn’t have helped doin’ it to young ones lookin’ that way.”
“_Curse_ people!” exclaimed Tappelmine.
“They do it to me, too,” continued the woman.
Tappelmine sprang up, and exclaimed fiercely,
“What for?”
“’Cause--’cause you’ve made ’em, I reckon, Jerry,” answered Mrs.
Tappelmine with some difficulty, occasioned by some choking sobs which
nearly took exclusive possession of her. “You know, Jerry, I don’t
say it to complain--complainin’ never seems to bring one any good to
a woman like me; but--if you only knowed how folks look at me in--in
stores, an’ everywhere else, you--wouldn’t blame me for not likin’ it.
_I_ didn’t ever do anything to bring it about, unless ’twas in marryin’
_you_, and I _ain’t_ sorry I did _that_; but I wish I didn’t ever have
to see anybody again, if you’re goin’ to keep on drinkin’.”
The sick man fell back and was silent; his wife threw herself beside
him, crying,
“Don’t get mad at me, Jerry; God knows it’s the deadest truth.”
After a moment or two Tappelmine laid a hand on his wife’s cheek, where
it had not been before for twenty years; once its touch had brought
blushes; now, tears hurried down to meet it, and yet Mrs. Tappelmine
was happier than when she had been a pretty Kentucky girl, twenty years
before.
“Mariar,” said Tappelmine at last, “I’ve dragged you all down.”
“No, you haven’t, Jerry,” asserted Mrs. Tappelmine, with a lie which
she could not avoid.
“If dyin’ll help you up again, I’m willin’,” continued Tappelmine.
The apartments in the Tappelmine mansion were so few that it was
impossible for anything unusual to transpire without attracting the
attention of all the inmates; so it followed that the children,
beholding the actions of their parents, had gradually approached the
bed with countenances whose blankness was painfully eloquent to the
sick man. Tappelmine looked at them, and grew more miserable of visage;
he hid his face beside his wife, groaned “No more whiskey if I die
for it!” and jumped up and kissed each of his children, while Mrs.
Tappelmine sobbed aloud, and Father Baguss, who, coming over a few
moments before to talk business, had heard the simple word “whiskey,”
and had since been jealously listening under the window, sneaked away
muttering to himself,
“After all I’ve done for him, I can’t even say to myself that _I_ saved
him.”