during the day or two which followed his interview with tappelmine, father baguss was consumed with conflicting emotions. he could not deny that his offer to help tappelmine had taken an unpleasant load off of his own heart; but it was equally certain that the contemplation of the possible results of the arrangement gave him a sense of oppression, which differed from the first in quality, but of which the quantity was far too great to be endured with comfort. to find a way of getting out of the whole matter was a suggestion which came frequently to the heart of the old man, and was not as rigidly excluded as it would have been from that of the reader; but fortunately for the honesty of father baguss, his ingenuity was of the lowest order conceivable; so he did as thousands of his betters have done when unable, by any abandonment of self-respect, to avoid the inevitable: he submitted, and groaned frequently to the lord. sometimes[175] these efforts before the unseen increased the old man’s lugubriousness; at other times, a song came to his rescue, followed by a troop of its own kind; but so uncertain were his moods that mrs. baguss, who never before had occasion to suppose that there was a single nerve in her husband’s body, began to complain that she didn’t “believe in this thing of lookin’ out for other folks, if it makes you cranky with your own.”
the old man’s trouble increased on the third day, for tappelmine dropped in and hinted vaguely that it was not yet too late to plant winter wheat. the old man went into tappelmine’s field with his own team, and plowed; he worked his horses longer hours than he ever did on his own ground; he lent an extra horse to work with tappelmine’s own before a harrow; he himself sowed the wheat, casting now plentifully, as he thought of what tappelmine might owe him by harvest-time, and now scantily, as he thought of what might be his own fate if the crop should be troubled with rust, or blight, or rain, or drought. and all the while, as he followed his horses, the old man kept uttering short petitions for tappelmine and himself; and all the while his soul was full of unspoken prayers for heavy rains or[176] sudden cold, so that the work might be stopped by the hand of providence himself. but no such fortune befell the good old man: such an open fall had not been known since the settlement of barton; even the indian summer lasted so long that the poet of the barton register found opportunity to publish, in three successive weekly numbers, “odes,” which could be read in the weather which suggested them. when a heavy rain at last put an end to field work, there were twenty-seven acres in wheat on the tappelmine estate. father baguss ached in soul and body, but the wheat-field work was but the beginning of sorrow. the tappelmine larder was bareness itself; there was not a porker in the tappelmine pen; there was not even corn enough in the tappelmine crib to feed the family horse, let alone to send to mill, and be ground into the meal which the tappelmines fortunately preferred to fine flour. father baguss sold the necessities of life in small quantities to his neighbor, with the understanding that they were to be repaid by the labor of tappelmine, who was to get out material for barrel-staves and wheelwright’s spokes on the old man’s woodland; but, by the time the wheat was planted, tappelmine, who, under the eye of[177] baguss, did more work in a month than he had done in the whole of the year which preceded, and who during the month had been pretty effectually kept from his accustomed stimulant, fell sick. then the cup of misery which father baguss had put to his own lips was full; as the old man, in his homely way, explained to his own pastor, it didn’t run over, and that was just the trouble; he had to drink it all. he sought for sympathy among his neighbors and acquaintances, but without much success; the barton postmaster expressed the sentiment of the township, when he said that “no one but a thick-headed blunderer like baguss would attempt to reform a dead-and-gone soaker like tappelmine.” besides, most of the inhabitants wanted to see how the case was going to turn out, and all of them instinctively understood that the best point of view is always at a respectable distance from the object to be looked at. the sorrowing philanthropist went to crupp, tomple, and deacon jones; but these three reformers, knowing that baguss could afford the loss, quietly agreed with each other that it would be indeed consolatory to have a companion in experience; so they made excuses, and quoted figures in evidence, and father baguss went home with the[178] settled conviction that he would have to look to providence for his only assistance.
but while providence was thus reforming father baguss, tappelmine was growing steadily weaker, and baguss found his causes of discomfort increased by a debate, which lasted long in his mind, whether it might not be better, for the sake of the drunkard’s family, to let tappelmine die, and then lease the farm himself at a price which would support the widow. while one phase of the case was present in his mind, he would suggest to the doctor that medicine didn’t seem to do any good—which was certainly true—and that he didn’t believe it would pay to come so often; when, on the contrary, conscience would argue for its own side, the old man would have all three of the physicians visit tappelmine in rapid succession. the doctors disagreed, as any one but father baguss would have known. perry suggested electrical treatment, which would necessitate the purchase of a battery, no such piece of mechanism having ever been seen in the town except in a locked cabinet of the barton high school. dr. white outlined a course of treatment which seemed reasonable to father baguss, but which, put into practice, did neither good nor harm;[179] while pykem arranged for certain inexpensive applications of water, with results which were in the main encouraging. but tappelmine was unable to leave his bed for three months, and when he was at all fit to work, he could labor for but two or three hours a day.
and so father baguss found himself brought down to the position of a man who was spending money without knowing what he was to get for it. such a position he had never occupied before, and no one could wonder that he felt uncomfortable in it; but the duration of the period was such that the victim succumbed to the steady pressure of truths which, in their abstract form, would have been as ineffective against him as against an acute logician whose intellect had been trained by his pocket.
but father baguss was not the only instrument of the salvation of tappelmine. in existence, but scarcely known of or recognized, there was a mrs. tappelmine. with face, hair, eyes, and garments of the same color, the color itself being neutral; small, thin, faded, inconspicuous, poorly clad, bent with labors which had yielded no return, as dead to the world as saints strive to be, yet remaining in[180] the world for the sake of those whom she had often wished out of it, mrs. tappelmine devoted herself to the wreck of what was once a hope over which her eyes had been of a luster which high-born maidens had envied, and a hope in which her heart had throbbed with a joy which had seemed too great for life to hold. about the bedside of her husband she hovered day and night. when she slept no one but herself knew, and she herself did not care. when tappelmine made his verbal agreement with father baguss, she had listened with a joy whose earnestness was as nothing compared with her resolution. she had hurried away from the broken window to a corner where her dirty children were at quarrelsome play, and she had bestowed upon each of them a passionate caress which startled even the little wretches themselves into wondering silence. from that moment she watched her husband’s every movement, and tappelmine, like a true pike—for the pike, like the transcendentalist, existed ages before he found his way into literature—tappelmine subjected himself into his wife’s dominion. he made numberless excuses to go to some place where liquor could be found; she, with the wisdom of the serpent, yet the[181] gentleness of the dove, prevented him. as, through the course of her husband’s labors, under the eye of baguss, he had grown more silent than ever, she had increased her exertions for his comfort; when, finally, the task was completed, and tappelmine, with thinner face and hollower eyes than ever, fell heavily upon his rude bed and uttered—almost screamed—the single word “whiskey!” she was on her knees beside him in an instant.
“jerry,” she exclaimed, “you’ve got the better of whiskey these late days.”
“just a drop more—to keep me from dying,” gasped tappelmine.
“don’t, jerry,” she pleaded. “let me hold you tight, so you can’t die.”
“just a drop, for god’s sake, mariar!” said tappelmine imploringly.
“o jerry!” replied the wife, “don’t—for the children’s sake; they’re more to you than god is. i hope he’ll forgive me for sayin’ it.”
“only a single mouthful, mariar,” said tappelmine, “to keep me from sinkin’.”
“you’re not sinkin’, old man—jerry, dear; you’re gittin’ up. keep up, jerry.”
“i’ll be all right in a day or two, mariar, if i only[182] get a taste. you don’t want a sick man a-layin’ around, not fit to do for his young ones?”
“you don’t need to, jerry. i’ll do for ’em, if you’ll only—only make ’em proud of you.”
“it’ll make me good for more to you, old woman—one single mouthful will,” said tappelmine.
“you’ve been better to me these three weeks than you ever was before, jerry; keep on bein’ so, won’t you? it puts me in mind of old times—times when you used to laugh, an’ kiss me.”
“i’d be that way again,” said tappelmine, “if i could only pick up stren’th.”
“you’re that way now, jerry, if you only stay as you are.”
“you’ll die, mariar,” said the man, “if i don’t get out of this bed some way—you an’ the young uns.”
“i’d be glad enough,” said the woman, “if you’d only stay, jerry.”
“an’ the boys an’ girls?” queried tappelmine.
“would be better off alongside of me in the ground, rather than have their dad go backwards again,” said mrs. tappelmine. “people turn up their noses at ’em now, jerry.”
[183]
“what are you drivin’ at, mariar?”
“why, jerry, when the children go ’long the road—god knows i don’t let ’em do it oftener than i can help—folks see ’em dirty, an’ wearin’ poor clothes, an’ not lookin’ over an’ above fed up, an’ they can’t help kind o’ twitchin’ up their faces at ’em once there was a time when i couldn’t have helped doin’ it to young ones lookin’ that way.”
“curse people!” exclaimed tappelmine.
“they do it to me, too,” continued the woman.
tappelmine sprang up, and exclaimed fiercely,
“what for?”
“’cause—’cause you’ve made ’em, i reckon, jerry,” answered mrs. tappelmine with some difficulty, occasioned by some choking sobs which nearly took exclusive possession of her. “you know, jerry, i don’t say it to complain—complainin’ never seems to bring one any good to a woman like me; but—if you only knowed how folks look at me in—in stores, an’ everywhere else, you—wouldn’t blame me for not likin’ it. i didn’t ever do anything to bring it about, unless ’twas in marryin’ you, and i ain’t sorry i did that; but i wish i didn’t ever have to see anybody again, if you’re goin’ to keep on drinkin’.”
[184]
the sick man fell back and was silent; his wife threw herself beside him, crying,
“don’t get mad at me, jerry; god knows it’s the deadest truth.”
after a moment or two tappelmine laid a hand on his wife’s cheek, where it had not been before for twenty years; once its touch had brought blushes; now, tears hurried down to meet it, and yet mrs. tappelmine was happier than when she had been a pretty kentucky girl, twenty years before.
“mariar,” said tappelmine at last, “i’ve dragged you all down.”
“no, you haven’t, jerry,” asserted mrs. tappelmine, with a lie which she could not avoid.
“if dyin’ll help you up again, i’m willin’,” continued tappelmine.
the apartments in the tappelmine mansion were so few that it was impossible for anything unusual to transpire without attracting the attention of all the inmates; so it followed that the children, beholding the actions of their parents, had gradually approached the bed with countenances whose blankness was painfully eloquent to the sick man. tappelmine looked at them, and grew more miserable of visage; he hid his face beside his wife,[185] groaned “no more whiskey if i die for it!” and jumped up and kissed each of his children, while mrs. tappelmine sobbed aloud, and father baguss, who, coming over a few moments before to talk business, had heard the simple word “whiskey,” and had since been jealously listening under the window, sneaked away muttering to himself,
“after all i’ve done for him, i can’t even say to myself that i saved him.”
