Читать книгу The Man. A Story of To-day - Hubbard Elbert - Страница 4

With my woman’s intuition I knew all just from the hint John gave. My father a week before had gone to Montreal, saying he would be back Wednesday. It was now Friday and he had not returned. I remember the two men who had come to “take an inventory for the ‘Tax Office,’” one said, and he winked at the other. How they walked through the house with their hats on and joked each other as they tried the piano! I saw it all! My father had lost money and had given a chattel mortgage on the furniture, having first raised all the money he could on the real estate.

I asked my mother if she remembered giving the mortgage, and she looked at me, grieved and surprised, saying:

“Why, of course not, dear. I always signed the papers he brought me. Do you think it a woman’s place to ask questions about business?”

Well, if I were writing my own history, I would tell you how the two men from the “Tax Office” came back with Robert McCann the auctioneer; how they hung a big red flag over the sidewalk and took up the carpets so that when they walked across the bare floor of the big parlors the echo of the footsteps rang through the whole house; how greasy men with hook noses came and examined the furniture; of how one such insisted on seeing my mother on very private business, when he asked, “If dot bainting was a real Millais or only a schnide; and if it was a schnide, to gif a zerdificate dat it vas a Millais and I will bid it off at a hundred, so hellup me gracious!”; of how kind neighbors came and bought in all the dishes and silverware and gave them back to us; of how a certain widowed gentleman offered to bid in the piano if I would accept a position as governess for his daughter and live at his house.

Well, the furniture went and so did we. The Fitch ambulance came and took mother down to our new quarters, which I had rented on South Division street, near Cedar, and right pretty did the little house look too. Mrs. Grimes, the laundress, came with us – in fact, came in spite of us.

“I have no money to pay you, and you cannot come. That is all there is about it,” I protested.

“Well, I don’t want no money,” said this gray-haired old woman. “I have ’leven hundred dollars in the Erie County, and it is all yours if you want it. Haven’t I worked for the Hobbses three weeks lacking two days before you was left on the steps? I was the only girl they had then, and I am the only girl you got now. I have sent my hair trunk down to South Division street, and I’m going myself on the next load with Bill Smith, who drives the van for Charlie Miller. I knowed Bill before I did you, and Bill says he will stand by Aspasia Hobbs too, he does.”

What could I do but kiss the grizzled kindly face of this old “girl” on both cheeks and let her come?

It was a full month before we got track of my father. I went to Montreal and brought back an old man, with tottering mind, crushed in spirit. He had fixed his heart on things of earth – he became a part of them, they of him – and when they went down there was only one result. He lingered along for three months, constantly reproaching himself; seeing also reproach in the face of every passer-by, imagining upbraidings in each look of those who sought to comfort and care for him, and the light of his life went out in darkness.

“Judge not that ye be not judged.”