Oh, the bitter, bitter bread of dependence! No welcome by the
hearth-stone: no welcome at the board: the mocking tone, the cutting
taunt, the grudged morsel. Weary days, and sleepless, memory-torturing
nights.
“Well, Josiah’s dead and gone,” said my uncle, taking down his
spectacles from the mantel, to survey me, as I sank on the settle, in
the chimney corner. “Take off your bonnet, Hetty. I suppose we must give
you house-room. Josiah never had the knack of saving anything—more’s the
pity for _you_. That farm of his was awfully mismanaged. I could have
had twice the produce he did off that land. Sheer nonsense, that shallow
ploughing of his, tiring the land all out; he should have used the
sub-soil plough. Then he had no idea of the proper rotation of crops, or
how to house his cattle in winter, or to keep his tools where they
wouldn’t rust and rot. That new barn, too, was a useless extravagance.
He might have roofed the old one. It’s astonishing what a difference
there is in brothers, about getting beforehand in the world. Now, I’ve a
cool thousand in the bank, all for taking care of little things. (There,
Jonathan! Jonathan! you’ve taken the meal out of the wrong barrel: it
was the damaged meal I told you to carry to Widow Folger.)
“Well, as I was saying, Hetty, in the first place, your father didn’t
know how to manage; then he didn’t know how to say No. He’d lend money
to anybody who wanted it, and pay his workmen just what they took it
into their heads it was right to ask. Now, there’s Jonathan, yonder; a
day or two since, he struck for higher wages. Well, I _let_ him strike,
and got an Irishman in his place. This morning he came whining back,
saying that his wife was sick, and his youngest child lay dead in the
house, and that he was willing to work on at the old wages. That’s the
way to do, Hetty. If Jonathan chose to saddle himself with a wife and
babies before he was able to feed them, I don’t see the justice of my
paying for it! But it’s time for family prayers; that will be something
new to you, I suppose. I don’t want to judge _any_ body; I hope your
father has gone to Heaven, but I’m afraid he didn’t let his light shine.
Don’t whimper, child; as the tree falls, so it must lie. You must see
that you do _your_ duty: make yourself useful here in my house, and try
to pay your way. Young people of your age consume a great deal in the
way of food and clothes.”
Oh, the monotony of those weary days! how memory lingered over the sunny
past: how thought shrank back affrighted from the gloomy future: how
untiringly and thanklessly I strove to cancel the debt for daily bread,
and how despairingly I prayed for relief from such bitter thraldom.