Mr. Hardy was a man of great will power, but this scene with his drunken son crushed him for a moment and seemed to take the very soul out of him. Mrs. Hardy at first uttered a wild cry and then ran forward and seizing her eldest boy, almost dragged him into the house, while Mr. Hardy, recovering from his first shock, looked sternly at the companions of the boy and then shut the door. That night was a night of sorrow in that family. The sorrow of death is not to be compared with it.

But morning came, as it comes alike to the condemned criminal and to the pure-hearted child on a holiday, and after a brief and troubled rest Mr. Hardy awoke to his second day, the memory of the night coming to him at first as an ugly dream, but afterwards as a terrible reality. His boy drunk! He could not make it seem possible. Yet there in the next room he lay, in a drunken stupor, sleeping off the effects of his debauch of the night before. Mr. Hardy fell on his knees and prayed for mercy, again repeating the words, “Almighty God, help me to use the remaining days in the wisest and best manner.” Then calming himself by a tremendous effort he rose up, and faced the day’s work as bravely as any man under such circumstances could.

After a family council in which all of them were drawn nearer together than they ever had been before, on account of their troubles, Mr. Hardy outlined the day’s work something as follows:

First he would go and see James Caxton and talk over the affair between him and Clara. Then he would go down to the office and arrange some necessary details of his business. If possible he would come home to lunch. In the afternoon he would go to poor Scoville’s funeral, which had been arranged for two o’clock. Mrs. Hardy announced her intention to go also. Then Mr. Hardy thought he would have a visit with George and spend the evening at home, arranging matters with reference to his own death. With this program in mind he finally went away, after an affectionate leave-taking with his wife and children.

George slept heavily until the middle of the forenoon, and then awoke with a raging headache. Bess had several times during the morning stolen into the room to see if her brother was awake. When he did finally turn over and open his eyes he saw the young girl standing by the bedside. He groaned as he recalled the night and his mother’s look, and Bess said timidly, as she laid her hand on his forehead:

“George, I’m so sorry for you. Don’t you feel well?”

“I feel as if my head would split open. It aches as if some one was chopping wood inside of it!”

“What makes you feel so?” asked Bess innocently. “Did you eat too much supper at the Bramleys?” Bess had never seen any one drunk before, and when George was helped to bed the night before by his father and mother she did not understand his condition. She had always adored her big brother. It was not strange she had no idea of his habits.

George looked at his small sister curiously, and then under an impulse he could not explain, he drew her nearer to him and said:

“Bess, I’m a bad fellow. I was drunk last night. Drunk-- do you understand? And I’ve nearly killed mother.”

Bess was aghast at the confession. She put out her hand again.

“Oh, no, George!” Then with a swift revulsion of feeling she drew back and said: “How could you, with father feeling as he does?”

And little Bess, who was a creature of very impulsive emotions, sat down, crying, on what she supposed was a cushion, but which was George’s tall hat accidentally covered with one end of a comforter which had slipped off the bed. Bess was a very plump little creature, and as she picked herself up and held up the hat, George angrily exclaimed:

“You’re always smashing my things!”

But the next minute he was sorry for the words. Bess retreated toward the door, quivering under the injustice of the charge. At the door she halted. She had something of Clara’s passionate temper, and once in a while she let even her adored brother George feel it, small as she was.

“George Hardy, if you think more of your old stovepipe hat than you do of your sister, all right! You’ll never get any more of my month’s allowance. And if I do smash your things, I don’t come home drunk at night and break mother’s heart. That’s what she’s crying about this morning--that, and father’s queer ways. Oh, dear! I don’t want to live. Life is so full of trouble!”

And little twelve-year-old Bess sobbed in genuine sorrow. George forgot his headache a minute.

“Come, Bess, come, and kiss and make up. Honest now, I didn’t mean it. I was bad to say what I did. I’ll buy a dozen hats and let you sit on them for fun. Don’t go away angry. I’m so miserable!”

He lay down and groaned and Bess went to him immediately, all her anger vanished.

“Oh! Let me get you something to drive away your headache. And I’ll bring you up something nice to eat. Mother had Norah save something for you--didn’t you, mother?”

Bessie asked the question just as her mother came in.

Mrs. Hardy said yes, and going up to George sat down by him and laid her hand on his head as his sister had done. The boy moved uneasily. He saw the marks of great suffering in his mother’s face, but he said nothing to express sorrow for his disgrace.

“Bess, will you go and get George his breakfast?” asked Mrs. Hardy, and the minute she was gone the mother turned to her son and said:

“George, do you love me?”

George had been expecting something different. He looked at his mother as the tears fell over her face, and all that was still good in him rose up in rebellion against the animal part. He seized his mother’s hand and carried it to his lips, kissed it reverently and said in a low tone:

“Mother, I am unworthy. If you knew--”

He checked himself as if on the verge of confession. His mother waited anxiously and then asked, “Won’t you tell me all?”

“No, I can’t!”

George shuddered, and at that moment Bess came in bearing a tray with toast and eggs and coffee. Mrs. Hardy left Bess to look after her brother and went out of the room almost abruptly. George looked ashamed, and after eating a little, told Bess to take the things away. She looked grieved, and he said:

“Can’t help it, I’m not hungry. Besides, I don’t deserve all this attention. Say, Bess, is father still acting under his impression, or dream, or whatever it was?”

“Yes, he is,” replied Bessie with much seriousness; “and he is ever so good now, and kisses mother and all of us good-bye in the morning. And he is kind and ever so good. I don’t believe he is in his right mind. Will said yesterday he thought father was non campus meantus And then he wouldn’t tell me what it meant. But I guess he doesn’t think father is just right intellectually.”

Now and then Bess got hold of a big word and used it for all it would repeat. She said intellectually over twice, and George laughed a little, but it was a bitter laugh, not such as a boy of his age had any business to possess. He lay down and appeared to be thinking, and after awhile said aloud:

“I wonder if he wouldn’t let me have some money while he’s feeling that way?”

“Who?” queried Bess. “Father?”

“What! You here still, Curiosity? Better take these things downstairs!”

George spoke with his “Headache tone,” as Clara called it, and Bess without reply gathered up the tray things and went out, while George continued to figure out in his hardly yet sober brain the possibility of his father letting him have more money with which to gamble. And yet in the very next room Mrs. Hardy kneeled in an agony of petition for that first-born son, crying out of her heart, “O God, it is more than I can bear! To see him growing away from me so! Dear Lord, be thou merciful to me. Bring him back again to the life he used to live! How proud I was of him! What a joy he was to me! And now, and now! O gracious Father, if Thou art truly compassionate, hear me! Has not this foul demon of drink done harm enough, that it should still come into my home! Ah, but I have been indifferent to the cries of other women, but now it strikes me! Spare me, great and powerful Almighty! My boy! My heart’s hunger is for him! I would rather see him dead than see him as I saw him last night! Spare me, spare me., O God!” Thus the mother prayed, dry-eyed, and almost despairing, while he for whom she prayed that heart-broken prayer calculated, with growing coldness of mind, the chances of getting more money from his father to use in drink and at the gaming table.

O appetite, and thou spirit of gambling, ye are twin demons with whom many a fair-browed young soul today is marching arm-in-arm, down the dread pavement of hell’s vestibule, lined with grinning skeletons of past victims! And yet men gravely discus the probability of evil, and think there is no special danger in a little speculation now and then. Parents say, “Oh, my boy wouldn’t do such a thing!” But how many know really and truly what their boy is really doing, and how many of the young men would dare reveal to their mothers or fathers the places where they have been and the amusements they have tasted, and the things for which they have spent their money?

Mr. Hardy went at once to his neighbors, the Caxtons, who lived only a block away. He had not been on speaking terms with the family for some time, and he dreaded the interview with the sensitive dread of a very proud and stern-willed man. But two days had made a great change in him. He was a new man in Christ Jesus. And as he rang the bell he prayed for wisdom and humility.

James himself came to the door with his overcoat on and hat in hand, evidently just ready to go down town. He started back at seeing Mr. Hardy.

“Are you going down town? I will not come in then, but walk along with you,” said Mr. Hardy quietly.

So James come out, and the two walked along together. There was an awkward pause for a minute, then Mr. Hardy said:

“James, is it true that Clara and you are engaged?”

“No, sir; that is-not exactly what you might call engaged. We would like to be.” Mr. Hardy smiled in spite of himself. And James added in a quickened tone, “We would like to be with your consent, sir?”

Mr. Hardy walked on thoughtfully and then glanced at the young man at his side. He was six feet tall, not very handsome as Bess had frankly said, but he had a good face, a steady, clear blue eye. And a resolute air as of one who was willing to work hard to get what he wanted. Mr. Hardy could not help contrasting him with his own prematurely broken-down son George, and he groaned inwardly as he thought of the foolish pride that would bar the doors of his family to a young man like James Caxton simply because he was poor and his father had won in a contested election in which the two older men were candidates for the same office.

It did not take long to think all this. Then he said, looking again at the young man with a business-like look:

“Supposing you had my permission, what are your prospects for supporting my daughter? She has always had everything she wanted. What could you give her?”

The question might have seemed cold and business-like. The tone was thoughtful and serious.

A light flashed into James’s eyes, but he said simply, “I am in a position to make a thousand dollars a year next spring. I earn something extra with my pen at home.”

Mr. Hardy did not reply to this. He said, “Do you know what a willful, quick-tempered girl Clara is?”

“I have known her from a little child, Mr. Hardy. I feel as if I know her about as well as you do.”

“Perhaps you know her better than I do; I do not know my child as I should.”

The tone was not bitter but intensely sad. The young man had of course been greatly wondering at this talk from Mr. Hardy, and had observed the change in his manner and his speech. He looked at him now and noted the pale, almost haggard face, and his extremely thoughtful appearance.

“Mr. Hardy,” said James frankly, “you are in trouble. I wish I could--”

“Thank you, no, you can’t help me any in this- except,” continued Mr. Hardy with a faint smile, “except you solve this trouble between you and my daughter.”

“There is no trouble between us, sir,” replied James simply. “You know I love her and have loved her for a long time, and I believe I am able to support her and make her happy. Won’t you give your consent, sir? We are not children. We know our minds.”

James was beginning to speak very earnestly. He was beginning to hope that the stern, proud man who had so curtly dismissed him a little while before would in some unaccountable manner relent and give him his heart’s desire. Mr. Hardy walked along in silence a little way. Then he said almost abruptly:

“James, do you drink?”

“No, sir!”

“Or gamble?”

“You forget my mother, Mr. Hardy.”

The reply was almost stern. Mrs. Caxton’s younger brother had been ruined by gambling. He had come to the house one night and, in a fit of anger because his sister would not give him money to carry on his speculation, he had threatened her life. James had interposed, and at the risk of his own life had probably saved his mother’s. Mrs. Caxton had been so unnerved by the scene that her health had suffered from it seriously. All that had happened when James was growing out of boyhood. But not a day had passed that the young man did not see a sad result of that great gambling passion in his own mother’s face and bearing. He loathed the thought of a vice so debasing that it ignored all the tender ties of kindred and was ready to stop at nothing in order to get means for its exercise. Mr. Hardy knew the story and he exclaimed:

“Forgive me, James, I did not think!’ Then after a pause- “Are you a Christian? I mean do you have a faith in the revelation of God to men through Jesus Christ, and do you try to live according to His teachings, with a supreme love for God controlling your life? Do you live every day as if it might be the last you would have to live?”

James started. Was Mr. Hardy out of his mind? He had never heard him talk like this before. The idea of Mr. Hardy caring about his religious character in the event of his becoming a son-in-law, was an idea too remote for occurrence. He could see, however, that some very powerful change had taken place in Mr. Hardy’s usual demeanor. His words also produced a strong effect with the young man. He was like thousands of young men- temperate, honest, industrious, free from vices, strictly moral, but without any decided religious faith. “Am I a Christian?” he asked himself, echoing Mr. Hardy’s question. No, he could not say that he was. He had never said so to any one. He had, in fact, never been confronted with the question before. So he replied to Mr. Hardy:

“No, sir, I don’t think I am what would be called a Christian. And as for living as if every day was to be my last- do you think that is possible, sir?”

Mr. Hardy did not answer. He walked along thoughtfully. In the course of the conversation they had reached the corner where the young man turned down to his office, and the two paused.

“I want to have another talk with you,” Mr. Hardy said. “To-day is Tuesday. Say tomorrow evening. I want to see your father also, and-” Mr. Hardy was on the point of saying that he wanted to ask the elder Caxton’s forgiveness, but for some reason he stopped without doing so. James exclaimed eagerly as Mr. Hardy turned to go:

“Then you don’t forbid my entertaining some hope of your good will in the matter of my love for Clara?” He lowered his voice and spoke very strongly. “You don’t forget your own youth, and the way in which you yourself began your home?”

Mr. Hardy answered never a word to this appeal, but looked into the young man’s face with a gaze he did not forget all day, then wrung his hand and turned on his heel abruptly and walked rapidly down the street. James looked after him as he disappeared among the crowds of people going to their business, and then turned to his own tasks. But something in him gave him hope. Another something appealed all day to his inner nature, and he could not shake off the impression of Mr. Hardy’s question,- “Are you a Christian?” And even when he went home at night that question pursued him more strenuously than any other, and would not give him peace.

~ end of chapter 5 ~