Yet as a law of ethics is the impossibility of standing still in face of the necessity of motion, either progressive or retrograde, so Miss Moggaridge went on verifying the worst prognostications of her neighbors; and it was surmised that the way in which she had raised the money to pay for having the cataract removed from old Master Sullivan's eyes eyes worn out in the service of two generations of the town's children which she was one day found to have done, was by scrimping her store of wood and coal (Bridget's departure having long left her free to do so), to that mere apology for a fire the winter long to which she owed a rheumatism that now began to afflict her hands and feet in such a manner as to make her nearly useless in any physical effort. It was no wonder the townsfolk were incensed against her, for her conduct implied a reproof of theirs that was vexatious; why in the world couldn't she have let Master Sullivan's eyes alone? He had looked out upon the world and had seen it to his satisfaction or dissatisfaction for three-score years and over; one would have imagined he had seen enough of a place whose sins he was always bewailing!
But a worse enormity than almost any preceding ones remained yet to be perpetrated by Miss Moggaridge. It was an encroachment upon her capital, her small remaining capital, for the education of one of the Luke Moggaridges, a bright boy whom his aunt thought to be possessed of too much ability to rust away in a hand-to-hand struggle with life. Longing, perhaps, to hear him preach some searching sermon in his grandfather's pulpit, and to surrender into safe and appreciative keeping those barrels full of sacred manuscripts which she still treasured, she had resolved to have him fitted and sent to college. Very likely the town in which the boy lived thought it a worthy action of the aunt's, but the town in which he didn't live regarded it as a piece of Quixotism on a par with all her previous proceedings, since the boy would have been as well off at a trade, Miss Moggaridge much better off, and the town plus certain tax money now lost to it forever. It was, however, reserved for Miss Keturah to learn the whole extent of her offence before the town had done so to learn that she had not been spending merely all her income, dismissing Bridget, freezing herself, starving herself, but she had been drawing on her little principal till there was barely enough to buy her a yearly gown and shoes, and in order to live at all she must spend the whole remainder now, instead of waiting for any interest.
"Exactly, exactly, exactly what I prophesied!" cried Miss Keturah.
"And who but you could contrive, let alone could have done, such a piece of work? You show ingenuity enough in bringing yourself to beggary to have made your fortune at a patent. You have a talent for ruin!"
"I am not afraid of beggary, Kitty," said Miss Moggaridge. "How often shall I quote the Psalmist to you? "I have been young and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread."
"I know that, Ann. I say it over often. It's the only thing that leaves me any hope for you." And Miss Keturah kept a silent meditation for a few moments. "As if it wasn't just as well," she broke forth at length, "for that Luke Moggaridge boy to dig potatoes or make shoes, as to preach bad sermons, or kill off patients, or make confusion worse confounded in a lawsuit!"
Whether Miss Moggaridge thought it a dreadful world where every one spoke the truth to his neighbor, or not, she answered, pleasantly, "Kitty, dear, I should have consulted you as to that"
"As to what ? Shoes or sermons? He might have made good shoes."
"Only," continued Miss Moggaridge, meekly but determinedly "only you make such a breeze if you think differently, that I felt it best to get him through college first"
"Why couldn't he get himself through?"
"Well, he's sickly."
"O dear Lord, as if there weren't enough of that kind! Serve Heaven because he can't serve the flesh! Taking dyspepsia and blue devils for faith and works!"
"You mustn't now, Kitty, you mustn't. I meant for us all to advise together concerning the choice of a profession after his graduation. For he has real talent, he'll do us credit."
"Well," said Miss Keturah, a little mollified, "it might have been wise. It might have saved you a pretty penny, might have lent the young man the money he needed, and it would have done him no harm to feel that he was to refund it when he was able."
"That is exactly what I have done, Kitty. And I never thought of letting any one else, even you though I'd rather it should be you than any one while I was able. And I'm sure I can pinch along any way till he can pay me. and if he never can pay me, he can take care of me, for he is a noble boy a noble boy."
"And what if he shouldn't live to do anything of the sort?"
"O, I can't think of such a thing."
''He mightn't, though. There's many a hole in the skimmer."
"I don t know, I don't know what I should do. But there, no matter. I shall be taken care of some way, come what will. I always have been. The Lord will provide."
"Well now, Ann, I'm going to demand one thing by my right as your next friend, and one caring a great deal more about you than all the Lukes in the world. You won t lend that boy, noble or otherwise, another penny, but you'll let him keep school and work his way through his profession himself."
"No indeed. Kitty' That would make jt six or seven years before he got his profession. There are only a few hundreds left, so they may as well go with the others."
"Light come, light go,"' sniffed Miss Keturah. "If you'd had to work for that money What. I repeat, what in the mean time is to become of you ?"
"Don't fear for me. the Lord will provide."
"The poorhouse will, you mean! Why in the name of wonder can't he work his way up. as well as his betters?"
"Well, the truth is. Kitty, he's - he's engaged. And of course he wants to be married And"--
But Miss Keturah had risen from her chair and stalked out, and slammed the door behind her. without another syllable.
Poor Miss Moggaridge. It was but little more than a twelvemonth after this conversation that her noble boy was drowned while bathing; and half broken-hearted for she had grown very fond of him through his constant letters and occasional visits she never called to mind how her money, principal and interest and education, had gone down with him and left her absolutely penniless, save for the rent of the residue of the house where she kept her two or three rooms. But Miss Keturah did.
Miss Moggaridge was now, moreover, quite unable to do a thing to help herself. Far too lame in her feet to walk and in her hands to knit, she was obliged to sit all day in her chair doing nothing, and have her meals brought to her by the family, and her rooms kept in order, in payment of the rent, while her time was enlivened only by the children who dropped in to see the parrot an entertainment ever new; by a weekly afternoon of Mrs. Morris', who came and did up all the little odd jobs of mending on which she could lay her willing hands; by the calls of Master Sullivan, glowering at the world out of a pair of immense spectacles, through which he read daily chapters of the Psalms to her; and by the half-loving, half-quarreling visits of Miss Keturah. She used to congratulate herself in those days over the possession of the parrot. "I should forget my tongue if I hadn't him and the hound to talk with" she used to say, in answer to Miss Keturah's complaints of the screeching with which the bird always greeted her. "He is a capital companion. When I see him so gay and good-natured, imprisoned in his cage with none of his kind near, I wonder at myself for repining over my confinement in so large and airy a room as this, where I can look out on the sea all day long." And she bent her head down for the bird to caress, and loved him none the less on the next day when Miss Keturah would have been glad to wring his neck for the crowning disaster of her life, which he brought about that very evening.
For the mischievous fellow, working open the door of his cage, as he had done a thousand times before, while Miss Moggaridge sat nodding in her chair, had clambered with bill and claw here and there about the room, calling in the aid of his splendid wings when need was, till, reaching a match-safe and securing a card of matches in his bill with which he made off, pausing only on the top of a pile of religious newspapers, on a table beneath the chintz window-curtains, to pull them into a multitude of splinters; and the consequence was that presently his frightened screams woke the helpless Miss Moggaridge to a dim, hall -suffocated sense that the world was full of smoke, and to find the place in flames, and the neighbors rushing in and carrying her, and the parrot clinging to her, to a place of safety, upon which Miss Keturah swooped down directly and had her removed to her own house and installed in the bedroom adjoining the best-room, without asking her so much as whether she would or no.
"Well, Ann," said Miss Keturah, rising from her knees after their evening prayers, "it's the most wonderful deliverance I ever heard anything about"
"It is indeed," sobbed the poor lady, still quivering with her excitement. "And, under Heaven, I may thank Poll for it," she said, looking kindly at the crestfallen bird on the chair's arm, whose screams had alarmed the neighbors.
"Indeed you may!" the old Adam coming uppermost again strange they never called it the old Eve "indeed you may thank him for any mischief picking out a baby's eyes or setting a house afire, it's all one to him. But there's no great loss without some small gain; and there's one thing in it I'm truly grateful for, you can't waste any more money, Ann Moggaridge, for you haven't got any more to waste!"
"Why, Kitty, there's the land the house stood on, that will bring something" profoundly of the conviction that her possession was the widow's curse, and with no idea of ever taking offense at anything that Miss Keturah said.
"Yes, something. But you'll never have it," said Miss Keturah, grimly. "For I'm going to buy that land myself, and never pay you a cent for it; so you can't give that away! And now you're here, I'm going to keep you, Ann; for you're no more fit to be trusted with yourself than a baby. And I shall see that you have respectable gowns and thick flannels and warm stockings and the doctor. You'll have this room, and I the one on the other side that I've always had; and we'll have your chair wheeled out in the daytimes; and I think we shall get along very well together for the rest of our lives, if you're not as obstinate and unreasonable"
"O Kitty," said Miss Moggaridge, looking up with streaming eyes that showed how great, although unspoken, her anxiety had become, and how great the relief from that dread of public alms which we all share alike "O Kitty! I had just as lief have everything from you as not. I had rather owe"
"There's no owing in the case!" said Miss Keturah, tossing her head, to the infinite danger of the kerosene from the whirlwind made by her ribbons.
"O, there is! there is!" sobbed Miss Moggaridge. "Debts, too, I never can pay! You've always stood my next best friend to Heaven, dear; and didn't I say," she cried, with a smile breaking like sunshine through her tears "didn't I say the Lord would provide?"
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