“Yes,” said Jennie.
“You’ll promise to do that now, will you?”
“Yes,” she replied.
For a time neither of them spoke.
“Jennie,” he said at last, the spring-like quality of the night moving him to a burst of feeling, “I’ve about decided that I can’t do without you. Do you think you could make up your mind to live with me from now on?”
Jennie looked away, not clearly understanding his words as he meant them. It was a strong statement for him. The man had got to the place where that wondrous something about her made it constantly more difficult for him to keep his hands off of her. She was so much of a grace and a naiad, he longed to fold her in his arms. Oh, that youth could only come back to him, so that he might be worthy of this girl.
“I don’t know,” she said, vaguely feeling that it all meant something finer and better.
“Well now, you think about it,” he said pleasantly. “I’m serious. Would you be willing to marry me and let me put you away in a seminary for a few years?”
“Go away to school?”
“Yes, after you marry me.”
“I guess so,” she replied. Her mother came into her mind. Maybe she could help the family.
He looked around at her, and tried to make out her face clearly in the shadow. It was not dark. The moon was now above the trees in the east, and already the vast host of stars were paling before it.
“Don’t you care for me at all, Jennie?” he asked.
“Yes!”
“You never come for my laundry any more though,” he returned pathetically. It touched her to hear him say this.
“I didn’t do that,” she answered. “I couldn’t help it. Mother thought it was best.”
“So it was,” he said, feeling her sorrow over the matter. “I was only joking with you. You’d be glad to come if you could, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I would,” she answered frankly.
He took her hand and pressed it so feelingly that all his kindly words seemed doubly re-enforced to her. Reaching impulsively up, she put her arms about him. “You’re so good to me,” she said with the loving tone of a daughter.
“There, there,” he exclaimed, the weakest and loveliest portion of his disposition manifesting itself. “It isn’t that. You’re my girl, Jennie. I’d do anything in the world for you.”
CHAPTER VI
The father of this unfortunate family, William Gerhardt, was a man of considerable interest on his personal side. Born in the Kingdom of Saxony, he had had character enough to oppose the army-conscription iniquity, and flee, in his eighteenth year, to Paris. From there he had set forth for America, the land of promise.
Arrived in this country, he had made his way by slow stages from New York to Philadelphia and thence westward, working for a time in the various glass factories of Pennsylvania, and found, in one romantic village of this new world, his heart’s ideal. With her, a simple American girl, of immediate German extraction, he had removed to Youngstown, and thence to Columbus, each time following a glass manufacturer by the name of Hammond, whose business prospered and waned by turns.
It is to some purpose that the natural romance of such a progress is indicated, for this man had now become extremely religious; and this feeling was directly due to the pensive, speculative chord re-echoing in a nature incapable of a broad mental perspective, but producing such actions and wanderings as his life, up to this time, had been full of. Gerhardt felt, rather than reasoned. He had always done so. A slap on the back, accompanied by enthusiastic protestations of affection or regard, was always worth more to him than mere cold propositions concerning his own individual advancement. He loved companionship, and was easily persuaded by it, but never beyond the limit of honesty.
“William,” his employer used to say to him, “I want you because I can trust you,” and this, to him, was more than silver and gold.
He might sometimes get so overwrought by praise of this sort that he would talk about it, but ordinarily it was a deep-seated happiness which he found in realizing that he was honest.
This honesty, like his religious propensity, was wholly due to inheritance. He had never reasoned about it. Father and grandfather before him were sturdy German artisans who had never cheated anybody out of a dollar, and this honesty of intention came into his veins undiminished.
His Lutheran proclivities had been strengthened by years of church-going and home religious service. In his father’s cottage, the influence of the Lutheran minister had been all-powerful, and from that situation he inherited the feeling that the Lutheran Church was a perfect institution, and its teachings of all-importance when it came to the matter of future life. Having neglected it during the ruddiest period of his youth, he took it up again when it came to the matter of selecting a wife, and was insistent enough to have his sweetheart change her faith at his behest. She would naturally have aligned herself with the Mennonite or perhaps the Dunkard religion, had theology been of equal weight with love. As it was, she came heartily over to the Lutheran denomination, was resoundingly instructed by a preacher of that faith in Beaver Falls, and thereafter came modestly to believe in it—the positive thunderings of the local pulpit seeming scarcely explicable to her on any other grounds than that of absolute truth. Why should these men rage and roar if what they said was not dangerously true? Why wear black, and forever struggle in so solemn a cause? Regularly she attended the small local church with her husband; and the several ministers, who had come and gone in their time, had been regular visitors, and, in a sense, inspectors of this household.
Pastor Wundt, the latest minister, saw to it personally that they gave a good account of themselves. He was a sincere and ardent churchman, but his bigotry and domineering orthodoxy were all outside the pale of rational religious conception. He considered that the members of his flock were jeopardizing their eternal salvation if they danced, played cards or went to theatres, and he did not hesitate to declare vociferously that hell was yawning for those who disobeyed his injunctions. Drinking, even temperately, was a sin. Smoking—well, he smoked himself. Right conduct in marriage, however, and innocence in the matter of youthful virtue until marriage was reached, were the last essence of Christian necessity. Let no one talk of salvation, he had said, for a daughter who had failed to keep her chastity unstained, or for the parents who, by negligence, had permitted her to fall. Hell was yawning for all such. You must walk the straight and narrow way if you would escape eternal punishment through his theology, and there was scarcely a Sunday in which he did not refer to the iniquitous license which was observable among American young men and women.
“Such shamelessness!” he used to say. “Such indifference to all youthful reserve and innocence!—Here they go, these young boys, loafing about the street comers, when they should be at home helping their fathers and mothers, or studying and improving their minds.” And the girls—what bitter scenes had he of late not been compelled to contemplate. There was laxness somewhere. These fathers and mothers, whose daughters walked the streets after seven at night, and were seen strolling in the shadowy path of the trees and hanging over gates and fences talking to young men, would rue it some day. There was no possible good to come out of anything like that. The boys could only evolve into loafers and scoundrels, the daughters into something too shameless to name. Let there be heed taken of this.
Gerhardt and his wife and Jennie heard this, and, so indeed, did all the others except Sebastian, but the little ones were, of course, not able to understand very well. Sebastian could not be made to go to church. He was vigorous and self-willed, and his father, from whipping him, unavailingly, and occasionally threatening to turn him out of doors, had come, out of