The breakfast was prepared and eaten,
such as it was. Sophy made all things neat,
and kept the baby while her mother dressed herself,
and then she prepared for her walk to the village.
But she was not to struggle through the snow that
day. Just as she was bidding her good-bye, they
were startled by the sound of voices quite near, and
the boys rushed out in time to see a yoke of oxen
plunging through the drift that rose like a wall before
the door. The voice of Stephen Grattan fell
like music on their ears. The things were come
at last, and plenty of them. There were bags
and bundles manifold, and a great round basket of
Dolly Grattan’s, well known to the little Morelys
as capable of holding a great many good things, for
it had been in their house before.
“I don’t know as you would
speak to me, if you knew all, mother,” said
Stephen at last, approaching Mrs Morely, who was sitting
by the fire with her baby in her arms. “You
are all alive, I see, at least the boys
are. How is baby, and my little Sophy?
Why, what ails the child?”
He might well ask; for Sophy was lying
limp and white across the baby’s cot.
Poor little Sophy! The reaction from those terrible
fears the doubt that her father had forgotten
them, and the fear of what might become of them all was
too much for her, weakened as she was by anxiety and
want of food. She had borne her burden well,
but her strength failed her when it was lifted off.
It was only for a moment. As Stephen lifted
her on the bed, she opened her eyes, and smiled.
“Mother, dear, it is nothing, only
I’m so glad.” Her eyes closed again
wearily.
“That ain’t just the way
my folks show how glad they be,” said Stephen,
as she turned her face on her pillow to hide her happy
tears.
“She’s hungry,”
said Ned, gravely. “There wasn’t
much; and she didn’t eat any dinner yesterday nor
much supper.”
“Now I know you’ll have
nothing to say to me,” said Stephen. “These
things the most of them, at least might
have been here, as well as not, the night your husband
went away, if I had done my duty, as I promised.”
“Thank God!” she murmured
as she grasped Stephen’s hand. “He
did not forget us. The rest is as nothing.”
“And,” continued Stephen
with a face which ought to have been radiant, but
which was very far from that, “the very last
word he said to me that night, when I bade him good-bye,
was, `I’ll hold on to the end.’”
And, having said this, Stephen seemed
to have nothing more to say. He betook himself
to the preparation of dinner with a zeal and skill
that put all Sophy’s attempts to help him quite
out of the question. How the dinner was enjoyed
need not be told. Breakfast the boys called it,
in scornful remembrance of the gruel. There
were very bright faces round the table. The
only face that had a shadow on it was Stephen’s;
and that only came when he thought no one was looking
at him. He was in a great hurry to get away,
too, it seemed.
“For the roads are awful; and
you may be thankful, little Sophy, that you hadn’t
to go to Littleton to-night. I started to bring
the things on a hand-sled, but would never have got
through the drifts if it hadn’t a’ been
for Farmer Jackson and his oxen. Don’t
you try it yet a while. I’ll be along again
with Dolly one of these days.”
Stephen Grattan’s face might
have been brighter, as he turned to nod to the group
of happy children watching his departure at the door
of the log cottage. The “good-byes”
and the “come agains” sent after him did
make him smile a little, but only for a moment.
The shadow fell darker and darker on his face, as
he made his way through the scarcely-open road in
the direction of the village. For Stephen’s
heart was very heavy, and with good cause. Sad
as had been his first sight of the sorrowful mother
and her children, he had seen a sadder sight that day.
In the dim grey of the bitter morning he had caught
a glimpse of a crouching, squalid figure hurrying
with uncertain yet eager steps whither?
His heart stood still as he asked himself the question,
“To the foot-bridge over Deering Brook?
To the gaping hole beyond?”
Stephen Grattan had not what is called
“a rapid mind.” He was not bold
to dare, nor strong to do. But in the single
minute that passed before he found himself on Deering
Bridge he realised all the miserable circumstances
of Morely’s fall, balanced the chances of life
and death for the poor wretch, and took his own life
in his hand for his sake. He knew that one more
wicked deed had been added to the tavern-keeper’s
catalogue of sins, that the children’s
bread had been stolen, and the father brutalised and
then cast forth in the bitter cold, to live or die,
it mattered little which.
“To live, it must be,”
said Stephen; “at least for repentance perhaps
for a better life. He must be saved. But
how?”
Stephen could have touched him with
his hand as he asked the question. Could he win
him by persuasion and gentle words, or must he master
him by force, and save him from the death on which
he was rushing? Must he wrestle with the madman’s
temporary strength? perhaps yield to it,
and share his fate?
If these two men knew just what happened,
when, by a sudden movement of Stephen, they were brought
face to face, they never spoke of it, even to each
other. Dolly’s brief “Thank God!”
as she opened the door to let them in, was like heavenly
music to Stephen’s ear, he told her afterwards;
but never, even to Dolly, would he go beyond the opening
of the door in speaking of that day.
After three terrible hours, Stephen
left Morely in a troubled sleep, and set out for the
log-house on the hill with the help so much needed.
All the way there he had been going over the question
in his mind whether or not he should tell Mrs Morely
of her husband’s situation. His first
thought had been that she must not know it; but, seeing
Morely as he had seen him for the last few hours,
he feared to take upon himself the responsibility
of concealment. Should his troubled sleep grow
calm and continue, a few days’ rest and care
would suffice to place him where he was when he left
home; but, otherwise, none could tell what the end
might be. Weakened by illness, by want of food,
and by his late excess, Stephen well knew the chances
were against his recovery; and ought not his wife
to be made aware of his situation? The first
glance at Mrs Morely’s pale face decided him.
She must not know of this new misery that had befallen
her husband, at least not now.
So it was no wonder that Stephen turned
towards home with a sad face and a heavy heart, knowing
all this. He had not been so downcast for a long
time. It broke his heart to think of poor Morely.
Even the misery and destitution that seemed to lie
before the poor wife and children were nothing to
this; and, as he dragged himself through the heavy
snow, panting and breathless, he was praying, as even
good men cannot always pray, with an urgency that
would take no denial, that this poor soul might have
space for repentance, that he might not
be suffered to go down into endless death. He
did not use many words. “Save him, Lord,
for Thy Name’s sake for Thine own
Name’s sake, Lord!” These were nearly
all. But his hand was on the hem of the Lord’s
garment. Hundreds of times the cry arose.
Sometimes he spoke aloud in his agony, never knowing
it, never seeing the wondering looks that followed
him over the bridge and up the street to his own door.
“Well, Dolly!” he said, faintly, going
in.
Dolly was never a woman of many words;
she nodded her head towards the closed door and said,
“A leetle quieter, if anything.”
“Thank God!” said Stephen,
and the tears ran down his brown old face with a rush
that he could not restrain. Dolly did not try
to comfort him. She did better than that; she
took from the stove a vessel containing soup, and
having poured some into a basin and broken some bread
into it, she set it before him, saying, “It’s
no wonder you feel miserable. Eat this.”
“Can I, do you suppose?” said Stephen.
“You’ve got to!”
said Dolly, taking such an attitude as a hen-sparrow
might be supposed to assume should she see fit to threaten
a barn-yard fowl. And he did eat it, every drop.
“I feel better,” he said, with a grateful
sigh.
“I expect so,” said Dolly,
briefly, as she removed the basin. It was Mrs
Grattan’s acknowledged “object in life,”
her recognised “mission,” to provide her
husband with “something good to eat.”
In the old days, when Stephen’s reformation
was new, she had many a time satisfied herself with
a crust, that he might have food to strengthen him
to resist the old fierce craving for stimulants, and
thus doing, she helped, more than she knew, God’s
work of grace in him.
“Did you tell the poor creetur?” she asked.
Stephen shook his head, and told her
of poor Mrs Morely’s illness, and of all that
had been happening at the little log-house during the
days of the storm. “It seemed as though
it was more than she could bear to hear: so I
told her what he said to me the other night, and nothing
at all of to-day.”
They were both silent for a while,
thinking. It was a great responsibility for
them to take thus to conceal Morely’s situation
from his wife, for it might be that he was in real
danger. But it was not of this they were thinking.
Even if he were not in danger if, after
a few days’ nursing, they were able to send
him to Montreal as though nothing had happened their
troubles would not be at an end.
For they were very poor people.
By the utmost economy they had been able, during
the last five years, to buy and pay for the little
house in which they lived; but they had nothing laid
up for the future; and now that Littleton was growing
to be a place of some importance, as the new railway
was nearly completed to it, there were new shops of
all kinds to be opened in it, and Stephen’s
business would be interfered with; for he could not
make good boots and shoes as cheaply as other people
could buy and sell poor ones, and his custom was dropping
off. It would all come right in the end, he
told Dolly; but in the meantime a hard winter might
lie before them.