Chapter 37

CHAPTER XXXVII - LOOKING SOUTH

'A spade! a rake! a hoe!

A pickaxe or a bill!

A hook to reap, or a scythe to mow,

A flail, or what ye will--

And here's a ready hand

To ply the needful tool,

And skill'd enough, by lessons rough,

In Labour's rugged school.'

HOOD.

Higgins's door was locked the next day, when they went to pay
their call on the widow Boucher: but they learnt this time from
an officious neighbour, that he was really from home. He had,
however, been in to see Mrs. Boucher, before starting on his
day's business, whatever that was. It was but an unsatisfactory
visit to Mrs. Boucher; she considered herself as an ill-used
woman by her poor husband's suicide; and there was quite germ of
truth enough in this idea to make it a very difficult one to
refute. Still, it was unsatisfactory to see how completely her
thoughts were turned upon herself and her own position, and this
selfishness extended even to her relations with her children,
whom she considered as incumbrances, even in the very midst of
her somewhat animal affection for them. Margaret tried to make
acquaintances with one or two of them, while her father strove to
raise the widow's thoughts into some higher channel than that of
mere helpless querulousness. She found that the children were
truer and simpler mourners than the widow. Daddy had been a kind
daddy to them; each could tell, in their eager stammering way, of
some tenderness shown some indulgence granted by the lost father.

'Is yon thing upstairs really him? it doesna look like him. I'm
feared on it, and I never was feared o' daddy.'

Margaret's heart bled to hear that the mother, in her selfish
requirement of sympathy, had taken her children upstairs to see
their disfigured father. It was intermingling the coarseness of
horror with the profoundness of natural grief She tried to turn
their thoughts in some other direction; on what they could do for
mother; on what--for this was a more efficacious way of putting
it--what father would have wished them to do. Margaret was more
successful than Mr. Hale in her efforts. The children seeing
their little duties lie in action close around them, began to try
each one to do something that she suggested towards redding up
the slatternly room. But her father set too high a standard, and
too abstract a view, before the indolent invalid. She could not
rouse her torpid mind into any vivid imagination of what her
husband's misery might have been before he had resorted to the
last terrible step; she could only look upon it as it affected
herself; she could not enter into the enduring mercy of the God
who had not specially interposed to prevent the water from