THE MISER.
'In passing through a narrow back lane,' said Mr Maurice, after relating
several tales of minor importance, 'I paused to look upon a low
building, so old that one corner of it was sunken so much as to give it
a tottering appearance, and if possible it was more dark and dismal than
the others. It seemed to be occupied by several families, for a little
gray smoke went straggling up from two or three crumbling chimneys, but
the rooms were all on the ground floor. As I stood gazing at it, I was
startled by a boy (about your age, Harry, or a little older perhaps) who
came bounding from the door, and grasping my coat untreated me to go in
and see his grandfather.'
'Did you go, father?' inquired Effie, 'wasn't you afraid?'
'Afraid! what had he to be afraid of?' exclaimed her brother, 'I should
just as lief go as not.' Yet, notwithstanding the little boy's vaunt
there was a slight tremor on his lip, and his large blue eyes grew
larger still and darker where they were dark, while the whites became
unusually prominent.
'Of course I went,' resumed Mr Maurice, in a sad tone, 'and a fearful
spectacle did I behold. I had expected to see some poor widow, worn out
by toil and suffering, perchance by anguish and anxiety, dying alone, or
a family of helpless ones, such as I had often visited, or a drunken
husband. I had often glanced at guilt and crime, but never would my
imagination have pictured the scene before me. The room was dark and
loathsome, containing but few articles of furniture, and those battered
and defaced by age, and with a rickety bed in one corner, on which lay
stretched in mortal agony the figure of a wrinkled, gray-haired old man,
apparently approaching the final struggle. O my children, poverty,
loneliness, want, are the portion of many on this fair, beautiful earth,
but such utter wretchedness as appeared in that man's face, can only be
the result of crime.' Mr Maurice was evidently deeply affected, and his
wife and children were for a moment silent.
'Was he dying, father?' at length Harry ventured to inquire, in a
subdued tone.
'He seemed very weak, except now and then when he was seized with
convulsions, and then he would writhe and throw himself about, and it
was more than I could do to keep him on his bed--I do not think it
possible for him to survive till morning.'
'Didn't he say anything, father?'
'It was a long time before he said anything, but after I had succeeded
in warming some liquid, which I found in an old broken cup, over the
decayed fire, I gave him a little of it, and in time he became much
calmer. Between his paroxysms of pain, I induced him to give some
account of himself, and the circumstances that brought him to his
present situation, and what think you was the prime moving cause of all
this wretchedness?'
'I suspect he was very poor,' said Effie.
'Something worse than that I should think,' added her brother, 'perhaps
he was a gamester.'
'Or a drunkard,' suggested Effie.
'Or both,' responded the mother, or perhaps he commenced by being merely
a time-waster, and money-waster, and finally was reduced to what persons
of that stamp are very apt to consider the necessity of committing
crime, by way of support.
Mr Maurice shook his head. 'It was neither poverty, nor play, nor
drunkenness, nor indolence, nor extravagance, that made that old man
wretched, and yet he was the most wretched being I ever saw.'
'He was poor, though, wasn't he, father?'
'Poverty is but a small thing, Effie, and in our land of equal laws and
charitable institutions, very few suffer from absolute want, but that
old man was richer (in gold and silver I mean) than I am.'
'What! and lived in that dreadful place, father?'
'Oh! I see it,' exclaimed Harry; 'he is a miser.'
'Yes, Harry,' returned Mr Maurice, 'you are right, the love of money is
the cause of all his misery. He came to this city a great many years
ago, (he could not himself tell how many, for his memory evidently
wavered,) and commenced business as a linen draper. He had one only
daughter then, and he lavished all his earnings on her at first, but
finally she married, and from that time he became wholly engrossed with
self. He was never very fond of show, and so did not become a
spendthrift, but he adopted the equally dangerous course of hoarding up
all his savings, until it became a passion with him. After a while he
retired from business, but the passion clung to him with all the
tenacity of a long established habit, and he became a usurer. He was
known to all the young profligates, the bad young men who throng our
city, and became as necessary to them as the poor avaricious Jew was in
former days to the spendthrifts and gamesters in London. He told me
frightful stories, my children, of tyranny and fraud, of ruined young
men led on by him till they committed self-murder, of old men shorn of
their fortunes through his ingenious villainy--'
'O father!' exclaimed little Effie, covering her eyes with her hands.
'All this,' said Mr Maurice, solemnly, 'was the result of the indulgence
of a single bad passion.'
'But the little boy?' inquired Mrs Maurice.
'The husband of the daughter proved to be a miserable, worthless
fellow, and for some time the old man sent them remittances of money,
but after a while his new passion triumphed over paternal love, and the
prayers of the poor woman were unheeded. Two or three years ago she came
to the city on foot--a weary distance, the old man said, but he could
not tell how far, bringing with her the little boy that first attracted
my attention to-night. Her husband was dead, and her elder children had
one by one followed him to the grave, till there was only this, the
youngest left. She had come to the city, hoping that her presence would
be more successful than her letters had been in softening the old man's
heart, but she only came to die. Her journey had worn her out, and she
was to be no tax upon the old man's treasures. She died, and the
miserable grandfather could not cast off her only son. The little
fellow's face looks wan and melancholy; as if from suffering and want,
and he seems to have passed at once from a child into an old man,
without knowing anything of the intermediate stage.'
'Poor boy!' said Mrs Maurice 'you didn't leave him alone with his
grandfather, I hope?'
'No, I engaged a neighbour to spend the night with them, and called at
my office on my way home to write a letter to a brother, of whom the old
man told me, who is now residing in the country. The little grandson
will probably be wealthy now, but I do not believe the enjoyment of it
will make up for his past suffering.'
'I hope he won't be a miser,' said Effie.
'I shouldn't think it very strange if he should be,' replied her
brother, 'the example of his grandfather is enough to spoil him.'
'But you forget, Harry,' said Mrs Maurice, 'what a terrible example it
was. I think the little fellow will be likely to avoid it.'
'Very probably,' added Mr Maurice, 'there is more danger of his going
into the opposite extreme.'
'I am sure, father,' said Harry, 'that it can't be so bad to spend money
foolishly, as to hoard it up the way that old man did.'
'No,' said Effie, 'for he made a _god_ of it, and it is better to care
too little about it, than too much.'
'But the man that spends his money in frivolous pursuits, or what would
be called slightly criminal adventures, who lavishes the money which God
has given him to do good with, upon himself, seeking only his own
gratification--'
'O father!' interrupted Harry, 'he made a _god_ of himself.'
'Such a man,' continued Mr Maurice, 'may be led on from one step to
another until he becomes as guilty as the old man of whom I have told
you to-night.'
'If I were a man,' said little Effie, shuddering, 'I should be afraid to
do anything lest I should do wrong.'
'And why so?' asked Mrs Maurice; 'you forget, my dear, that you, too,
are exposed to temptations, that none of us are exempt from trials, and
our only hope is in the promise that the child of God shall not be
tempted above what he is able to bear.'
'Remember,' added Mr Maurice, taking the family Bible from its shelf
preparatory to their evening devotions, 'to love not the world, neither
the things that are in the world. And remember, when you are searching
your hearts to discover their hidden idols, that the same Divine Being
has said, "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in
him."'