The way in which people interested themselves in Miss Moggaridge's affairs would have been a curiosity in itself anywhere but in the seacoast town where Miss Moggaridge lived. But there it had become so much a matter of course for one neighbor to discuss the various bearings of all the incidents in another neighbor's life, and if unexplained facts still remained to supply the gap from fancy in addition to the customary duty of keeping the other neighbor's conscience, that it never struck a soul among all the worthy tribes there that they were doing anything at all out of the way in gossiping, wondering, conjecturing, and declaring this, that, and the other about Miss Moggaridge's business after a fashion that would have made any one but herself perfectly wild.
But Miss Moggaridge was a placid soul, and as the fact of her neighbor's gossip implied a censure which perhaps she felt to be not altogether undeserved, while, on the other hand, their wonder was not entirely uncomplimentary, she found herself able to disregard them altogether, and in answer to query, complaint, or expostulation concerning her wicked waste, which was to make woeful want, always met her interlocutor with the sweet and gentle words, "The Lord will provide."
Poor Miss Moggaridge's father had been that extraordinary phenomenon, a clergyman possessed not only of treasure in Heaven, but of the rustier and more corruptible treasure of this world's goods an inherited treasure, by the way, which he did not have time to scatter to the four winds in person, as it was left to him by an admirer (to whom his great sermon on the Seventh Seal had brought spiritual peace), but a few years before his death, which happened suddenly ; and the property was consequently divided according to his last will and testament between two of his three children, giving them each a modest competency, but leaving the third to shift for himself, as he always had done. The first thing which Miss Moggaridge did with her freedom and her money was to imitate the example of the "fearless son of Ginger Blue," and try a little travel, to the great scandal of souls in her native borough, who found no reason why Miss Moggaridge should want to see any more of the
world than that borough presented to her, and never shared her weak and wicked desire to see what sort of region it was that lay on the other side of the bay and the breakers.
"The idea, Ann!" said Miss Keturah Meteyard, a well-to-do spinster whose farm and stock, and consequently whose opinion, were the pride of the place "the idea of your beginning at your time of life to kite round like a young girl. The eyes of the fool are in the ends of the earth," quoted Miss Keturah, with a long sigh. "For my part, the village is good enough for me!"
"And for me too, Kitty," said Miss Moggaridge. "I am not going any great distance; I - I am going to see Jack."
Now Jack was the scapegrace Moggaridge, who had run away to sea and therewith to the bad; and the stern clergyman, his father, having satisfied his mind on the point that there was no earthly reclamation possible for Jack, had with true, old-style rigor commenced and carried on the difficult work of tearing the boy out of his heart, that since Heaven had elected Jack to damnation there might be no carnal opposition on his own part through the weak bonds of the flesh; and Jack's name had not been spoken in that house from which he fled for many a year before the old man was gathered to his fathers. For all that, every now and then a letter came to Miss Ann and another went from her in reply, and her father, with an inconsistency very mortifying but highly human, saw them come and saw them go, convinced that he should hear from Ann whatever news need might be for him to hear; and so it came to pass that Miss Ann knew of Jack's whereabouts, and that Miss Keturah, hearing her intent of seeking them Miss Keturah with one eye on the community and one on her old pastor held up her hands a brief instant in holy horror before memory twitched them down again.
"Ann!" said she, solemnly "Ann, do you know what you are doing?"
"Doing?" said Miss Moggaridge. "In going to see Jack, do you mean? Certainly I do. A Christian duty."
"And what," said Miss Keturah "what constitutes you a better judge of Christian duty than your sainted father, a Christian minister for fifty years breaking the bread of life in this parish?"
"Very well," said Miss Moggaridge, unable to answer such an argument as that for Miss Keturah fought like those armies that put their prisoners in the front, so that a shot from Miss Moggaridge must necessarily have demolished her father the clergyman "very well," said his faithful daughter,
"perhaps not a Christian duty, we will say not; but, at any rate, a natural duty."
"And you dare to set a natural duty, a duty of our unregenerate condition, above the duties of such as are set apart from the world?"
"My dear Kitty," said Miss Moggaridge, "I am not sure that we ever are or ever should be set apart from the world; that we are not placed here to work in it and with it till our faith and our example leaven it."
"Ann Moggaridge!" said the other, springing to her feet, with a lively scarlet in her yellow face, a color less Christian perhaps than that of her remarks, "this is rank heresy, and I won't stay to hear it!"
"O pooh, Kitty," said Miss Moggaridge, listening to the denunciation of her opinions with great good-humor, "we've gone all through that a hundred times. Sit down again we'll leave argument to the elders I want to talk about something else.
"Something else?" with a change as easy as Harlequin's.
"Yes, I want to talk to you about that corner meadow. It just takes a jog out of your land, and I've an idea you'd like to buy it. Now say so, freely, if you would."
"Humph! what has put that into your head, I'd like to know? You've refused a good price for it, you and your father, every spring for ten years, to my knowledge. You want," said Miss Keturah, facing about with uplifted forefinger like an accusing angel in curl-papers and brown gingham "you
want the ready money to go and see Jack with!"
"Well, yes. I don't need the meadow and I do need the money; for when you have everything tied up in stocks, you can't always get at it, you know."
"That's very shiftless of you, Ann Moggaridge," said Miss Keturah. "When the money's gone, it's gone, but there the meadow'll always be."
"Bless your heart, for the matter of that, I've made up my mind to get
rid of all the farm."'
"Get rid of the farm!'
"Yes. I'm not well enough nor strong enough to carry it on by myself, now father's gone, and his means are divided. Your place would make me blush like a fever beside it. No, I couldn't keep it to advantage; so I think I shall let you take the corner meadow, if you want it, and Squire Purcell will
take the rest."
"And what will you do with yourself when you come back from from Jack, if you really mean to go?"
"O, board with the Squire or anywhere; the Lord will provide a place; perhaps with you," added Miss Moggaridge, archly.
"No, indeed," said Miss Keturah, "not with me! We never should have any peace of our lives. There isn't a point in all the Westminster Catechism that we don't differ about, and we should quarrel as to means of grace at every meal we sat down to. Besides which, you would fret me to death with
your obstinacy when you are notoriously wrong as in this visit to Jack, for instance."
"Jack needs me, Kitty. I must go to him."
"It is your spiritual pride that must go and play the good Samaritan!"
"Jack and I used to be the dearest things in the world to each other when we were children, you know," said Miss Ann, gently. "We had both our pleasures and our punishments together. The severity of our home drove him off I don't know what it drove him to. I waited, because father claimed my first duty; now, I must do what can be done to help Jack into the narrow path again."
"The severity of your home!" said Miss Keturah, who had heard nothing since that; "of such a home as yours, such a Christian home, with with"-
"The benefit of clergy," laughed Miss Moggaridge.
"Ann, you're impious!" exclaimed Miss Keturah, bringing down her umbrella hard enough to blunt its ferule. "Much such a spirit as that will do to bring Jack back! It isn't your place to bring him back, either. You've had no call to be a missionary, and it's presumption in you to interfere with the plain will of Providence. You will go your own gait, of course, but you sha'n't go without knowing that I and every friend you have disapprove of the proceeding. And it's another step to total beggary, for the upshot of it all will be that Jack coaxes and wheedles your money."
"My money?" said Miss Ann. "There will be no need of any coaxing and wheedling; it's as much his as mine."
"His!"
"I know father expected me to do justice, and so he didn't trouble himself. I should feel I was wronging him in his grave if I refused."
"And what is Luke going to do, may I ask?" inquired Miss Keturah, with grim stolidity.
"Because Luke won't give up any of his, is no reason why I shouldn't."
"Luke won't? That's like him. Sensible. Sensible. He won't give the Lord's substance to the ungodly."
"So he says. But I m afraid not to the godly, either. I'm afraid he wouldn't even to me if I stood in want, though perhaps I oughtn't to say so."
"Not it you'd wasted all you have on Jack, certainly."
"I shall divide my property with Jack as a measure of simple Justice, Kitty," said Miss Moggaridge, firmly " It is as much his as mine, as I said. "
"And when it s all gone," continued Miss Keturah, "what is to become of you then?"
"When it's all gone? O, there's no danger of that."
"There's danger of anything between your butter-fingers, Ann. So if it should happen, what then?"
"The Lord will provide," said Miss Ann, sweetly.
*"The Lord "helps them that help themselves," said Miss Keturah. "Well, I'm gone. I'd wrestle longer with you if it was any use you're as set as Lot's wife. I suppose," she said, turning round after she had reached the door, you'll come and see me before you go. I've I've something you might take Jack; you know I've been knitting socks all the year and we've no men-folks," and then she was gone.
Poor Miss Keturah a good soul after her own fashion, which was not Miss Moggaridge s fashion once she had expected the wicked Jack to come home from sea and marry her; and the expectation and the disappointment together had knit a bond between her and his sister that endured a great deal of stretching and striving. The neighbors said that she had pious spells; but if that were so, certainly these spells were sometimes so protracted as almost to become chronic, and in fact frequently to assume the complexion of a complaint; but they never hindered her from driving a bargain home to the head, from putting royal exactions on the produce of her dairy, from sending her small eggs to market, and from disputing every bill, from the tax- man's to the tithes, that ever was presented at her door. But somewhere down under that crust of hers there was a drop of honey to reward the adventurous seeker, and Miss Ann always declared that she knew where to find it.
So Miss Moggaridge went away from the seacoast tor some seasons, and the tides ebbed and flowed, and the moons waxed and waned, and the years slipped off after each other, and the villagers found other matter for their gossip; and the most of them had rather forgotten her, when some half dozen years later she returned, quite old and worn and sad, having buried the wretched Jack, and a goodly portion of her modest fortune with him. and bringing back nothing but his dog as a souvenir of his existence a poor little shivering hound that in no wise met the public approbation.
*"The Lord "helps them that help themselves," a misnomer, a wrong or inaccurate use of a term people often attach to holy scriptures. Nowhere in the Bible does this construct, sentence or sentiment exist. In fact the opposite is more frequently presented as truth. The Lord helps those who rely on Him alone or who love Him.
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