The very next day, Louis, by what his father and Dr. Richards would have agreed to call “blind chance,” found a silver quarter lying in the gutter before his own door. Yet it was certainly not blind chance, but sheer hard work, that had worn a hole in Frau Anna’s thimble.
Louis had been wishing very much that he could buy her another, for she had said that it was almost impossible to use the old one. Once the needle had slipped in through the hole, and run up under her nail, which had hurt her very much indeed; and the necessity of keeping it away from the worn place hindered her work. Louis and George had talked the matter over very seriously, with many wishes that they were as big as Franz and Bruno, the pastor’s sons, and could earn money by chopping wood and shovelling snow. And now here was a whole silver quarter, which would surely buy many things beside a thimble.
He started at once in search of George, whom he found sitting on a box outside the grocery, consuming an apple which had been given him by the grocer’s wife. Now, if the apple had been Louis’, a part of it would as surely have found its way to George as the early worm finds out the nest where the mother bird’s brood wait to welcome it; but this view of the case did not occur to any one but the good-natured grocery woman, who showed her appreciation of the situation by bestowing another apple on Louis.
But before the child would bite even once into its red and tempting cheeks, he related to George all the circumstances concerning the finding of the quarter, and the marvellous purchasing power thereto appertaining.
“Where does the thimble-man live?” asked George, when they had planned to buy everything in town,—from a live pony to a penny trumpet.
“I don’t know,” said Louis gravely; but the grocery woman, who had been standing in the doorway listening to the conversation, with her hands on her hips, probably to keep her fat sides steady, they shook so with laughter, interrupted them.
“Do you know where Martin, the jeweller, lives?”
“Yes,” said Louis brightly. “’Tisn’t far; he mended our clock.”
“Well,” said the grocery woman, “you go to him, and tell him you want a thimble. Mind you say who it’s for. Himmel! There was a day when he’d have given a thousand thimbles to call your mother Anna Martin.”
“That ain’t her name,” said George slowly, “her name is Anna Rolf.”
The fat sides shook again. “You do as I tell you,” she said; “and see here, Louis Metzerott, you eat that apple up, do you hear, and don’t give none of it to nobody. Apples is good for boys, they fall in their legs, and make ‘em grow. Verstanden?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Louis, obediently taking such a very large bite that he had some difficulty in disposing of it.
“And if I was you,” continued the grocery woman, “I’d buy the thimble first, and see how much you have left towards a pony. Fact is, ponies are expensive to feed, anyhow; and I wouldn’t advise you to invest in ‘em just yet. Won’t it do just as well if I buy you each a gingerbread horse, next time I go to market?”
“No, ma’am, not quite as well, because a pony is alive, and we could ride on it,” said Louis gravely. “But a gingerbread horse is very good to eat,” he added politely.
“Herr Martin,” said Louis, as the two children trotted, hand in hand, into the shop, “we want to buy a thimble.”
“Presently, my boy,” said the jeweller, setting upon the counter a tray full of small, dainty-looking pins. “Now, ma’am,” he said; but his customer’s attention had been drawn from his wares to the purer gold that curled under Louis’ woollen cap.
“What a dear little boy,” she said, “and so straight and strong!” Her red lip was caught for one moment between her teeth, a mist came over the brown eyes, she turned away, and busied herself in selecting a pin.
Her husband, who had been leaning idly against the window frame, looking into the street,—for jewelry did not particularly interest Dr. Richards,—now came and stood at her elbow. He said nothing, but his mere presence and the consciousness of his sympathy strengthened her nobler self, so that in a little while she turned to Louis again, with a smile that was sad but very sweet.
“Attend to the children, Mr. Martin,” she said; “they don’t like to wait. Are you buying a thimble for your mother, my little man?”
“My mother’s dead,” said Louis, “because we are poor, and the millionnaires wont ’vide. This thimble is for George’s mother.”
“You don’t remember the boy, Alice,” said Dr. Richards; “indeed I don’t know that you ever saw him; he is Dora Metzerott’s child.”
“He is very like her,” said Alice slowly. Her mind went back to the days when she and Dora had been “evened” to one another as equally headstrong in marrying for love and disregarding orthodoxy. She would be proud and happy to be “evened” to Dora now, in another respect.
Meanwhile Herr Martin had produced a case of thimbles, by whose silvery brightness the boys were so impressed that they began to doubt whether their quarter would buy so very many of them after all.
“But how much money have you got?” asked the jeweller.
“A real quarter,” answered Louis proudly. “I found it this morning.”
“Oh! found it, did you? Then how do you know but it belongs to me?”
“You’re in fun,” said the child gravely; “my papa said it might belong to me.”
“Oh! well, if your papa said so! But doesn’t any of it belong to George?”
“Yes,” said Louis, “me and George always ’vides everyfing.”
“That’s just about where it is,” said the jeweller, with a glance at his older customers, who were listening attentively, “me and George ’vides; George and me don’t always. But, I say, young uns, you don’t suppose I can sell you a thimble for twenty-five cents, do you?”
Louis’ lip quivered. “Can’t you?” he said. “It is for George’s mother; and Frau Tundt said there was a day when you’d give a thousand thimbles to call her Anna Martin.”
“Did Frau Tundt say that?” cried the jeweller, crossing his arms on the counter and laughing heartily. “Well, she’s right; so I would, so I would! Ah! she was a fine girl, and no mistake.”
Still laughing, he selected a very pretty thimble, rapidly enclosed it in a pink-cottoned box, wrapped that again in white paper, and gave it to Louis.
“There,” he said, “give that to Frau Anna with a Christmas greeting from her old sweetheart. No, I don’t want your quarter. Keep it to buy seed-cakes.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Louis. “‘A Christmas greeting from her old sweetheart!’ I won’t forget. But what is Christmas?” he added.
“Ach! that father of yours, with his free-thinking! Can you believe it, Mrs. Richards! a man who won’t let his boy have a Christmas,” cried Herr Martin indignantly.
Alice stooped and kissed the sweet face. “I knew your mother, my dear, and I will come to see you soon, and tell you about Christmas. It is a beautiful story.”
Dr. and Mrs. Richards drove home very silently. It was not often that they had the pleasure of an hour’s shopping together, and yet this expedition in preparation for Christmas had had its own bitterness. It had been seven years since Frederick Richards asked Alice Randolph to share a future which his pessimism forbade him to gild with hope; seven years since she had announced her choice of misery with rather than happiness without him. Which had she found? There had been love in her lot, plenty of it; and, though not wealth, yet no touch of “poortith cauld.” Yet the silence between them was a sad silence; and once Alice laid her hand on his arm, and said, half below her breath,—
“Fred, tell me, how do you bear your life, not believing, or trying to believe, that God knows best, and orders all for our good?”
“Do you believe that, Alice?” he asked.
“I try,” she said; “oh! indeed I try hard.”
“That’s right,” he said gently; “it is the best comfort you can find.”
“But it does seem unjust,” she said. “Look at that little Louis, so strong and active, and then think of”—
“Well, well,” he answered, “Freddy has his own pleasures. I don’t know a happier boy.”
“That is true,” she said, with a smile through her tears; “he is very happy!” and then she sank again into her own thoughts, and forgot to notice that her question remained unanswered.
In a few moments they stopped at their own door; and Alice, flying upstairs to what was still called the nursery, was greeted by a rapturous shout, and clasped by two little arms that seemed as if they would never unclose to let her go again. And Alice, sitting on the floor while she removed her bonnet, had no mist of tears to dim her brown eyes, which were so much like Freddy’s own; she was the bright, merry playfellow, full of life and fun, and brimming over with wonderful and delightful songs and stories of all descriptions. Dr. Richards, too, brought only sunshine into Freddy’s nursery; he took off his pessimism with his overcoat, or left it bottled in alcohol on a shelf in his office; so there was really little wonder that Freddy was happy.
Who can tell just how it happened? Was it mere blind chance, or the outcome of a taint in the blood, due to some unknown ancestral sin? Whatever the cause, Alice Richards had been, as the phrase goes, “unlucky with her children.” The eldest had died in babyhood: and the boy, with his great, pathetic brown eyes and laughing, rosy mouth, would never walk; his little spine was all bent and distorted, and his lower limbs quite useless. He had suffered much already in his short four years of life, would suffer far more as he grew older. Dr. Richards knew this,—knew it so keenly that that other knowledge, that by scarce a possibility could Freddy live to be a man, was almost a relief by contrast. And the child was his father’s idol. Well might Alice ask how he could bear his life.
Yet there was plenty of merriment at that little dinner-table. Freddy was carried down between his father and John, the doctor’s “man.” There were rings on the sides of Freddy’s chair through which poles could be passed, and there were screws to tighten them, so that the transit need cause no jar to the little frame. John went first, not backward, for fear of a misstep, but with the poles over his shoulders; and the doctor came behind, keeping his end of the poles level with John’s. Freddy wore a little scarlet wrapper, embroidered with gay flowers, and concealing the poor shrunken limbs, from which any eye but his mother’s would have instinctively turned away. He had a small pale face, with a broad forehead set in rings of brown hair, large brown eyes, and vividly red lips. Sometimes, too, there was a bright spot of color on either cheek, and then one would almost have called him a beautiful child; but that sort of beauty was not a welcome sight to Dr. Richards.
The child enjoyed going down to dinner as he enjoyed everything; and beat upon the arms of the chair with his little thin hands, as he called gleefully, “Look out, mamma, here comes the ‘Ark of the Covenant!’” which was a name he had taken from his picture Bible.
Freddy’s greatest pleasure was to hear his mother’s stories, and she had the gift of finding true ones as interesting as any fairy tale. One of his favorites soon became the story of the little boy who had no mamma, and had never heard of Christmas, such deprivations, in Freddy’s eyes, that the little boy’s health and activity could not be accepted as in the remotest degree a compensation.
“We must tell him about Christmas right away, mamma,” said Freddy, who was old and wise beyond his years. “If he only had a picture of the Christ-child, now.”
“That’s a good suggestion, Freddy. I’ll make a copy of yours. I think I can do it before Christmas.”
“And he can come to my tree, mamma?”
“Just as you like, my darling.”
Freddy’s picture of the Christ-child was one which had evidently been adapted from Ary Scheffer’s “Christus Liberator;” but the central figure was that of a smiling child, whose little arms were outstretched to those haggard and chained, appealing for deliverance. Around it was written the angels’ song, “Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, good will towards men.” Dr. Richards had noted with inward bitter amusement the picture and the motto. “Good will towards men!” and all those hungry, burdened arms! and only a child to work their liberation! It was Christianity’s pictured confession of her own futility, he thought. Meanwhile, it satisfied his wife and child, who surely needed all the comfort they could get; and what had he, that was better, to give them? So he held his peace, or rather that simulation of peace which is found in silence. Real peace he had none, either to hold or let go. For, seeing no trace in all the universe of a sheltering, guiding, and protecting Father’s hand,—holding the world to be governed by blind, unconscious, irresistible force,—there were two questions ever present to his mind: one, “How would my boy endure one day of absolute poverty?” the other, “If my health should fail, as it may, who will protect him from this, or any evil?”
Blind chance? Even the old Romans knew better. Was not Fors Fortuna the goddess of the all-seeing, radiant dawn?