“Where is the money to come from, if you please? It has been all mother
could do just to live and she has struggled on, in the expectation of
my being able soon to help her. She has no money for experiments. There
is nothing for it but for me to rest a dead weight upon her hands,
or--die.”
He said the last word with a sort of gasp. Susie Hale shivered. She
drew closer to him. She looked into his poor, tortured face, with her
dark and tender eyes, and said very quietly,--
“You believe in God, George Graham, and you will not defy Him. If He
means you to bear this you will bear it like a man, and not try to get
rid of the burden. But I do not believe He does mean you to bear it;
and I will not believe it till every means has been tried for your
cure. Just now, it seems to me, you ought to go home. Would you like
your mother to hear this first from some one else?”
He rose slowly.
“You are right,” he said, “and you are a good girl. Good-by, Susie.”
She did not try to go with him; she followed him only with her eyes.
She was contented if she could but send him home in safety to his
mother.
His mother met him at the gate. When she took his hand in hers the poor
fellow felt that she knew all. She was very quiet and self-controlled.
“Your teacher has been here,” she said, “and he has told me. My
darling, why have you sat in the darkness, and shut your mother out
from any share in your trouble?”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you, mother!” he sobbed, with his head upon her
breast, at last,--“I couldn’t, I thought it would break your heart.”
“Ah! that was because you did not know. If you should die and leave me
alone in the world, _that_, indeed, would break my heart; but while
I have you beside me, nothing can make me altogether miserable, and
nothing must make you so. There is help somewhere, and we will find it,
please God; or, if not, we will bear what others have borne, and find a
way to lighten the darkness.”
Meantime, Susie Hale had gone home full of an absorbing purpose.
Somehow money must and should be raised to try what a skilful oculist
could do for George Graham.
Susie was the orphan niece of Deacon Solomon Grant, in whose store
a place was awaiting George. She knew that she had a modest little
fortune of her own, but it was all in her uncle’s hands, and without
his consent she could not dispose even of her slender income. But
would he not be persuaded to let her have enough of her own money
to accomplish her desire? She asked him, using her utmost power of
persuasion to touch his heart, but he refused with peremptory decision.
He wouldn’t mind contributing moderately to a fund for young Graham’s
help--he would not even mind letting her have five or ten dollars of
her own for that purpose--but beyond that the duty of one neighbor did
not go. And Deacon Solomon shut his lips together as tightly as he
buttoned up his pocket.
Susie had in the world one treasure,--a diamond ring which had been her
mother’s, with a stone white and clear as a dew-drop. This must, she
knew, be worth three or four hundred dollars. It was her very own. She
had meant to keep it all her life for her mother’s sake, but surely
this great need of George Graham’s justified her in parting with it.
She had one friend in Boston,--an old teacher,--in whose good faith and
judicious management she felt implicit confidence, and to him she sent
her mother’s ring, with a request that he would sell it as speedily
and on as good terms as possible, and remit her the price of it in
bank-notes, not in a check, and keep for ever the secret that she had
disposed of it.
It was a week after George Graham had given up hope, when a most
unexpected hope came to him. A neighbor, going by from the post-office,
handed in at the door a letter addressed to him. Mrs. Graham opened
it, for George’s vision had failed with every day, and his eyes were
utterly useless now.
“George,” she cried, after a moment, in an eager, trembling voice,
“here are three one-hundred dollar bills, and this is the letter that
comes with them:--
“‘This money is from a true friend of George Graham’s, and is to be
applied to taking him to an oculist, in the hope that his sight may
be restored. The giver withholds his name, both because he desires
no thanks, and because he wishes to make the return of the money
impossible.’
“It is from Heaven, itself!” the mother cried. “George, we will start
for Boston to-morrow. I feel in my soul that you are to be cured.”
The next day a mother and her blind son sought rooms at a quiet
boarding-house, of which they had found the number in the advertisement
column of a city paper, and the day after that they were among the
earliest patients of Doctor Annesley. The first examination of George’s
eyes was unpromising enough. They would be worse before they were
better; an operation might or might not restore sight to them, but the
time for it had not yet come. Meanwhile the doctor wanted to see him
daily.
Those were weary days and weeks that followed, both before the
operation and afterward, when the poor eyes were carefully bandaged
from the light, and mother and son sat day after day in the dark
together, wondering, wondering, wondering what the result would be.
It was curious that the mother was always hopeful, and the son always
despairing. At last it almost irritated him to hear her speak of hope
to him; and one day he turned on her with the first burst of passionate
impatience she had ever experienced from him.
“Mother,” he said, “for the love of Heaven do not talk to me as if it
was a sure thing that I am going to see again. I _want_ to think it
doubtful, almost impossible. If you should make me expect a sure cure,
and then it shouldn’t come, don’t you see that I should go mad? I think
I should dash my head against the wall. I can only _live_ by expecting
nothing.”
After that the mother held her peace; but whenever she went out of
that darkened room those who saw her marvelled at the light of joy in
her eyes, the bloom of hope upon her cheeks. At last the time came--the
bandage was removed. There was just one wild cry, “Mother, I see you!”
and then George Graham lay at the doctor’s feet, swooning and helpless
in his great joy.
It was weeks yet before he went home again, but the good news preceded
him. The mother wrote it to Deacon Grant, who had agreed still to
keep the place in his store open, while awaiting the result of this
experiment.
The deacon read the letter in full family conclave, with the slow
deliberation of a man unused to correspondence. He little knew how his
niece longed to snatch the paper from his hand and read it for herself;
nor did he heed the tears that swam in her dark eyes.
Deliberately he smoothed out the letter, and folded it. Deliberately he
took off his spectacles, and wiped them, and put them on again. Then
he said, with the half pompous, half solemn manner which became his
position,--
“Well, well, I’m ready always to rejoice with those that rejoice; and
I’m sure I’m thankful that the Widow Graham hasn’t got to struggle with
so much trouble as it looked as if Providence was laying on her; but
wherever she got that money the Lord knows.”
Another letter came, afterward, to tell when the widow and her son were
to return, and to ask Deacon Grant, in whose keeping the key of their
house had been left, to put it in their door on that day as he was
passing by to the store.
It was Susie who walked over with the key, early in the afternoon,
carrying with her a basket of dainties for the travellers’ supper, from
Mrs. Grant, a woman who knew how to be a good neighbor, and to make
life pleasant with cheap kindnesses. Susie’s black eyes danced, and her
heart sang within her as she set the table in the little parlor and
lighted a fire in the kitchen stove, ready to make a fresh cup of tea
whenever the widow and her son should arrive. Then she dusted every
thing; and then she gathered some of the flowers of September,--for
already the summer was over,--and put them in the vases on the mantel,
and on the widow’s little round sewing-table.
And at last the travellers came, as at last every thing does come, if
we wait long enough for it. They had expected to find an empty house;
they found instead, warmth and brightness and good cheer and Susie
Hale.