He turned away, ungrateful and
moody. Long afterwards he remembered the calm and brightness which his
hand had not been raised to make, and understood the meaning of its
promise.
He went to work now in earnest: he had to work for his bread-and-butter,
you understand? Restless, impatient at first; but we will forgive him
that: you yourself were not altogether submissive, perhaps, when the
slow-built hope of life was destroyed by some chance, as you called it,
no more controllable than this paltry burning of a mill. Yet, now that
the great hope was gone on which his brain had worked with rigid, fierce
intentness, now that his hands were powerless to redeem a perishing
class, he had time to fall into careless, kindly habit: he thought it
wasted time, remorsefully, of course. He was seized with a curiosity to
know what plan in living these people had who crossed his way on the
streets; if they were disappointed, like him. He went sometimes to read
the papers to old Tim Poole, who was bed-ridden, and did not pish or
pshaw once at his maundering about secession or the misery in his back.
Went to church sometimes: the sermons were bigotry, always, to his
notion, sitting on a back seat, squirting tobacco-juice about him; but
the simple, old-fashioned hymns brought the tears to his eyes:--"They
sounded to him like his mother's voice, singing in paradise: he hoped
she could not see how things had gone on here,--how all that was honest
and strong in his life had fallen in that infernal mill.
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