Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/504

472 construed by him, were hardly less easy to bear than the old man's constant recollection of events, and reference to them in the daily business of life.

"Be easy," he would say, not questioning his right to command the patience he had himself learned in so hard a school—"Be easy, Joseph; you will work things around right yet."

Then he had worked them wrong? Oh, yes! infernally wrong!

And again—"I don't doubt, Joseph, that if you went into business to-morrow, with your skill, you could drive all before you. But I would not advise it; better keep quiet awhile."

Was the past, all the results of his departed years, too fresh in people's minds?

And then—"Things are sure to turn round at last; so you can take 'em by the right handle. All you have to do is look out."

"To get out," was Hazard's fierce comment when he heard this.

A hundred plans for the future presented themselves to him, one after the other, only to be dismissed. In not one of these did he take thought of his daughter. He left her out of all his calculations. "What right have I to think of her? The judge will take care of her." These were his conclusions so far as she was concerned.

But meanwhile Margaret also was thinking unutterable thoughts.

Now and then she caught a word as it fell from his lips, which she turned over and over in her mind, giving it a meaning which showed that she had ventured far along the dreary track on which he supposed he must walk in solitude and shame until he came to the friendly gulf of oblivion.

Now and then she caught a look which haunted her, and always she was hearing a voice from the grave, saying, "Stay with your father, Maggie. Stand by him—stand closer."

It would be a good thing to say of Margaret, that natural affection left her no other choice than this. But it is truer to write that a natural repugnance stood in the way of such choice, and made it difficult to achieve. For her father was not a man who could walk about the Dunham streets as if he had just returned from an embassy. He was humbled before God, man, and himself. He appeared really to have become a companion for the bat and the owl. He sat in the house by day, apparently occupied, absorbed with papers and books; he listened while the judge delivered his opinions as though conscious of no right to form one of his own. His daughter, observing all these tokens, and comparing him with her five-year-old recollection, and, thinking of her mother, felt her heart die away within her. The thing that loathes itself is not likely to command reverence and love. But pity? Yes—only—a parent brought to that!

One day Miss Ross said to Margaret,

"I thought I should see you walking out with your father sometimes, now he has come home. You used to be so fond of walking—and so did he. He and your mother were great at that."

Margaret felt as if she had been stung. That was not a bad result. It was not a long while before these two were to be seen everywhere together. So small a fact as this, that he had the companionship, the countenance of his daughter, gave Joseph Hazard a new sense of manhood; and it secured for him, moreover, a different kind of observation from any that had been extended to him before.