Short Fiction · The Widow’s Mite (1/4)

The Widow’s Mite

“But I’m not a widow, and I haven’t got two mites.”

“My dear, you are a widow, and you have got two mites.”

“I’ll tell both of you something that will astonish you. I’ve made a calculation, and I find that if everybody in England would give up their Christmas dinner⁠—that is, in Scotland, and Ireland too⁠—”

“They never have any in Ireland, Bob.”

“Hold your tongue till I’ve done, Charley. They do have Christmas dinners in Ireland. It’s pretty nearly the only day that they do, and I don’t count much upon them either. But if everybody gave up his special Christmas dinner, and dined as he does on other days the saving would amount to two millions and a half.”

Charley whistled.

“Two millions and a half is a large sum of money,” said Mrs. Granger, the elder lady of the party.

“Those calculations never do any good,” said the younger lady, who had declared herself not to be a widow.

“Those calculations do a great deal of good,” continued Bob, carrying on his argument with continued warmth. “They show us what a great national effort would do.”

“A little national effort, I should call that,” said Mrs. Granger, “but I should doubt the two millions and a half.”

“Half-a-crown a head on thirty million people would do it. You are to include all the beer, wine, and whisky. But suppose you take off one-fifth for the babies and young girls, who don’t drink.”

“Thank you, Bob,” said the younger lady⁠—Nora Field by name.

“And two more fifths for the poor, who haven’t got the half-crown a head,” said the elder lady.

“And you’d ruin the grocer and butcher,” said Charley.

“And never get your half-crown, after all,” said Nora.

It need hardly be said that the subject under discussion was the best mode of abstracting from the pockets of the non-suffering British public a sufficiency of money to sustain the suffering portion during the period of the cotton famine.

Mr. Granger was the rector of Plumstock, a parish in Cheshire, sufficiently near to the manufacturing districts to give to every incident of life at that time a colouring taken from the distress of the neighbourhood; which had not, however, itself ever depended on cotton⁠—for Plumstock boasted that it was purely agricultural. Mr. Granger was the chairman of a branch relief committee, which had its centre in Liverpool; and the subject of the destitution, with the different modes by which it might be, should be, or should not be relieved, were constantly under discussion in the rectory. Mr. Granger himself was a practical man, somewhat hard in his manners, but by no means hard in his heart, who had in these times taken upon himself the business of alms-begging on a large scale. He declined to look at the matter in a political, statistical, or economical point of view, and answered all questions as to rates, rates in aid, loans, and the Consolidated Fund, with a touch of sarcasm, which showed the bent of his own mind.

“I’ve no doubt you’ll have settled all that in the wisest possible way by the time that the war is over, and the river full of cotton again.”

“Father,” Bob replied, pointing across the Cheshire flats to the Mersey, “that river will never again be full of American cotton.”

“It will be all the same for the present purpose, if it comes from India,” said the rector, declining all present argument on the great American question.

To collect alms was his immediate work, and he would do nothing else. Five-pound notes, sovereigns, half-crowns, shillings, and pence! In search of these he was urgent, we may almost say day and night, begging with a pertinacity which was disagreeable, but irresistible. The man who gave him five sovereigns instantly became the mark for another petition.

“When you have got your dinner, you have not done with the butcher forever,” he would say in answer to reproaches. “Of course, we must go on as long as this thing lasts.”

Then his friends and neighbours buttoned up their pockets; but Mr. Granger would extract coin from them even when buttoned.

The two young men who had taken part in the above argument were his sons. The elder, Charles, was at Oxford, but now in these Christmas days⁠—for Christmas was close at hand⁠—had come home. Bob, the second son, was in a merchant’s house in Liverpool, intending to become, in the fullness of time, a British merchant prince. It had been hinted to him, however, more than once, that if he would talk a little less and work a little harder, the path to his princedom would be quicker found than if his present habits were maintained. Nora Field was Mrs. Granger’s niece. She was Miss Field, and certainly not a widow in the literal sense of the word; but she was about to become a bride a few weeks after Christmas.

“It is spoil from the Amalekites,” Mr. Granger had said, when she had paid in some contribution from her slender private stores to his treasury:⁠—“spoil from the Amalekites, and therefore the more precious.” He had called Nora Field’s two sovereigns spoil from the Amalekites, because she was about to marry an American.

Frederic Frew, or Frederic F. Frew, as he delighted to hear himself called, for he had been christened Franklin as well as Frederic⁠—and to an American it is always a point of honour that, at any rate, the initial of his second Christian name should be remembered by all men⁠—was a Pennsylvanian from Philadelphia; a strong Democrat, according to the politics of his own country, hating the Republicans, as the Tories used to hate the Whigs among us before political feeling had become extinct; speaking against Lincoln the president, and Seward his minister, and the Fremonts, and Sumners, and Philipses, and Beechers of the Republican party, fine hard racy words of powerful condemnation, such as used to be spoken against Earl Grey and his followers, but nevertheless as steady for the war as Lincoln, or Seward, or any Republican of them all;⁠—as steady for the war, and as keen in his bitterness against England.

His father had been a partner in a house of business, of which the chief station had been in Liverpool. That house had now closed its transactions, and young Frew was living and intended to live an easy idle life on the moderate fortune which had been left to him; but the circumstances of his family affairs had made it necessary for him to pass many months in Liverpool, and during that sojourn he had become engaged to Nora Field. He had travelled much, going everywhere with his eyes open, as Americans do. He knew many things, had read many books, and was decided in his opinion on most subjects. He was good-looking too, and well-mannered; was kindly-hearted, and capable of much generosity. But he was hard, keen in his intelligence, but not broad in genius, thin and meagre in his aspirations⁠—not looking to or even desirous of anything great, but indulging a profound contempt for all that is very small. He was a well-instructed, but by no means learned man, who greatly despised those who were ignorant. I fear that he hated England in his heart; but he did not hate Nora Field, and was about to make her his wife in three or four weeks from the present time.

When Nora declared to her aunt that she was not a widow, and that she possessed no two mites, and when her aunt flatly contradicted her, stating that she was a widow, and did possess two mites, they had not intended to be understood by each other literally. It was an old dispute between them.

“What the widow gave,” said Nora, “she gave off her own poor back, and therefore was very cold. She gave it out of her own poor mouth, and was very hungry afterwards in consequence. I have given my two pounds, but I shall not be cold or hungry. I wish I was a widow with two mites! only, the question is whether I should not keep them for my own back after all, and thus gain nothing by the move.”

“As to that,” replied her aunt, “I cannot speak. But the widowhood and the two mites are there for us all, if we choose to make use of them.”

“In these days,” said Bob, “the widows with two mites should not be troubled at all. We can do it all without them, if we go to work properly.”

“If you had read your Bible properly, Sir,” said Mrs. Granger, “you would understand that the widows would not thank you for the exemption.”

“I don’t want the widows to thank me. I only want to live, and allow others to live according to the existing circumstances of the world.” It was manifest from Bob’s tone that he regarded his mother as little better than an old fogey.

In January, Nora was to become Mrs. Frederic F. Frew, and be at once taken away to new worlds, new politics, and new loves and hatreds. Like a true, honest-hearted girl as she was, she had already become half an American in spirit. She was an old Union American, and as such was strong against the South; and in return for her fervour in that matter, her future husband consented to abstain from any present loud abuse of things English, and generously allowed her to defend her own country when it was abused. This was much as coming from an American. Let us hope that the same privilege may be accorded to her in her future home in Philadelphia. But in the meantime, during these last weeks of her girlhood, these cold, cruel weeks of desperate want, she strove vigorously to do what little might be in her power for the poor of the country she was leaving. All this want had been occasioned by the wretched rebels of the South.

This was her theory. And she was right in much of this. Whether the Americans of the South are wretched or are rebels we will not say here; but of this there can be no doubt, that they created all the misery which we then endured.

“But I have no way of making myself a widow,” she said again. “Uncle Robert would not let me give away the cloak he gave me the other day.”

“He would have to give you another,” said Mrs. Granger.

“Exactly. It is not so easy, after all, to be a widow with two mites!”

Nora Field had no fortune of her own, nor was her uncle in a position to give her any. He was not a poor man; but like many men who are not poor, he had hardly a pound of his own in the shape of ready money.

To Nora and to her cousins, and to certain other first cousins of the same family, had been left, some eighteen months since, by a grandaunt, a hundred pounds apiece, and with this hundred pounds Nora was providing for herself her wedding trousseau.

A hundred pounds do not go far in such provision, as some young married women who may read this will perhaps acknowledge; but Mr. Frederic F. Frew had been told all about it, and he was contented. Miss Field was fond of nice clothes, and had been tempted more than once to wish that her great-aunt had left them all two hundred pounds apiece instead of one.

“If I were to cast in my wedding veil?” said Nora.

“That will be your husband’s property,” said her aunt.

“Ah, but before I’m married.”

“Then why have it at all?”

“It is ordered, you know.”

“Couldn’t you bedizen yourself with one made of false lace” said her uncle. “Frew would never find it out, and that would be a most satisfactory spoiling of the Amalekite.”

“He isn’t an Amalekite, uncle Robert. Or if he is, I’m another.”

“Just so; and therefore false lace will be quite good enough for you. Molly,”⁠—Mrs. Granger’s name was Molly⁠—“I’ve promised to let them have the use of the great boiler in the back kitchen once a week, and you are to furnish them with fuel.”

“Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Granger, upon whose active charity this loan of her own kitchen boiler made a strain that was almost too severe. But she recovered herself in half a minute. “Very well, my dear; but you won’t expect any dinner on that day.”

“No; I shall expect no dinner; only some food in the rough. You may boil that in the copper too if you like it.”

“You know, my dear, you don’t like anything boiled.”

“As for that, Molly, I don’t suppose any of them like it. They’d all prefer roast mutton.”

“The copper will be your two mites,” whispered the niece.

“Only I have not thrown them in of my own accord,” said Mrs. Granger.

Mr. Frew, who was living in Liverpool, always came over to Plumstock on Friday evening, and spent Saturday and Sunday with the rector and his family. For him those Saturdays were happy days, for Frederick F. Frew was a good lover. He liked to be with Nora, to walk with her, and to talk with her; he liked to show her that he loved her, and to make himself gracious and pleasant. I am not so sure that his coming was equally agreeable to Mr. Granger. Mr. Frew would talk about American politics, praising the feeling and spirit of his countrymen in the North; whereas Mr. Granger, when driven into the subject, was constrained to make a battle for the South. All his prejudices, and what he would have called his judgment, went with the South, and he was not ashamed of his opinion; but he disliked arguing with Frederic F. Frew. I fear it must be confessed that Frederic F. Frew was too strong for him in such arguments. Why it should be so I cannot say; but an American argues more closely on politics than does an Englishman. His convictions are not the truer on that account; very often the less true, as are the conclusions of a logician, because he trusts to syllogisms which are often false, instead of to the experience of his life and daily workings of his mind. But though not more true in his political convictions than an Englishman, he is more unanswerable, and therefore Mr. Granger did not care to discuss the subject of the American war with Frederic F. Frew.

“It riles me,” Frew said, as he sat after dinner in the Plumstock drawing-room on the Friday evening before Christmas Day, “to hear your folks talking of our elections. They think the war will come to an end, and the rebels of the South have their own way, because the Democrats have carried their ticket.”

“It will have that tendency,” said the parson.

“Not an inch; any more than your carrying the Reform Bill or repealing the Corn Laws had a tendency to put down the throne. It’s the same sort of argument. Your two parties were at daggers drawn about the Reform Bill; but that did not cause you to split on all other matters.”

“But the throne wasn’t in question,” said the parson.

“Nor is the war in question; not in that way. The most popular Democrat in the States at this moment is McClellan.”

“And they say no one is so anxious to see the war ended.”

“Whoever says so slanders him. If you don’t trust his deeds, look at his words.”

“I believe in neither,” said the parson.

“Then put him aside as a nobody. But you can’t do that, for he is the man whom the largest party in the Northern States trusts most implicitly. The fact is, Sir,” and Frederic F. Frew gave the proper twang to the last letter of the last word, “you, none of you here, understand our politics. You can’t realise the blessing of a⁠—”

“Molly, give me some tea,” said the rector in a loud voice. When matters went as far as this he did not care by what means he stopped the voice of his future relative.

“All I say is this,” continued Frew, “you will find out your mistake if you trust to the Democratic elections to put an end to the war, and bring cotton back to Liverpool.”

“And what is to put an end to the war?” asked Nora.

“Victory and union,” said Frederic F. Frew.

“Exhaustion,” said Charley, from Oxford.

“Compromise,” said Bobby, from Liverpool.

“The Lord Almighty, when He shall have done His work,” said the parson. “And, in the meantime, Molly, do you keep plenty of fire under the kitchen boiler.”

That was clearly the business of the present hour, for all in Mr. Granger’s part of the country;⁠—we may say, indeed, for all on Mr. Granger’s side of the water. It mattered little, then, in Lancashire, whether New York might have a Democratic or a Republican governor. The old cotton had been burned; the present crop could not be garnered; the future crop⁠—the crop which never would be future, could not get itself sown.