p. 28 | In the Wheel House by Eleanor Kirk

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 14, 1886

In the Wheel House.

By Eleanor Kirk

"You might as well come inside here, Johnny," said the pilot of one of our large steamboats to a boy who stood shivering on the hurricane deck. The lad turned a pale, anxious face, and with a pitiful attempt at a smile, said, "Thank you, sir, but I thought there was no admittance here."

"Oh, once in a while we let a friend in," said the pilot, kindly, and with a sweeping glance that took his companion in from top to toe, and seemed to penetrate to his inmost soul.

"Where're you bound?" he continued, with a hearty brusqueness from which no offense could be taken.

"I don't know exactly," the lad answered. "I'm going to Boston first, that is—"

"Yes, that's about what I thought," the pilot interrupted, "if you can manage to get there. Let me tell you something, my boy. A man in my position has every opportunity in the world to study character; and as quick as my eyes lit upon your face, I knew that you were running away from home."

The only response to this was a hasty turning away of the head, and a quick, gasping sigh which sounded forlorn from one so young.

"And I wouldn't be afraid to wager this steamboat that you have got a mother living, and more than that, as kind and loving a mother as ever drew breath. You wonder how I know all this," the man continued, his eyes fixed on the waste of water before him, and his steady hands guiding the great craft with perfect ease and precision; "but you carry your mother about in your face, my lad, and your eyes are a bad give-away," he added with a smile. "Now I am going to tell you a story. You are about sixteen, I take it? Yes, I thought so. Well I was a year older when I concluded I knew more than my mother and all the rest of my relations, and skipped, just as you have. You feel that you have been the victim of injustice, and all the right in the universe is on your side. That was my case, but I was a fool, and so are you. There is no necessity of entering into particulars; but I was jealous of my older brothers, and made myself believe that they were in collusion to keep me out of money that honestly belonged to me. I wanted some of the property that was eventually coming to me, to travel with. I was wild to see the world, and the ridicule of my brothers, and my mother's apparent sympathy with them, made me desperate. Well, one rumpus followed another, my mother all the time trying to show me how unjust and ridiculous my demands were, until one day I threw all affection and decency to the winds, and ran away."

"Now the point that I particularly want to make in this yarn, my lad, and which I would give a great many dollars to impress upon others, is, that any fellow with a grain of honest love in his heart for his mother, is pretty sure to have something to regret as long as he lives if he hurts that mother by doing what you and I have done. In a moment of anger we say to ourselves that no one cares for us, and we care for nobody; and then some trouble comes along, and we find too late that we have only deceived ourselves. Now I tramped up and down the earth for six months without sending a line home, or hearing a word from home; but at last there came a day when sickness from exposure and labor beyond my years and my strength drove me back. Not to stay or to make myself known to any one, but to take—or, I would rather say, steal—some money, or some valuables which I could convert into money, to bridge over the present emergency. You had no idea that you were talking with a man that had been tempted like that, eh? Well, I said to myself that I was simply taking a small share of what was mine by right. There was $10,000 held in trust for me, and it was a great pity if I could not have enough of it to purchase food and medicine. I will do myself the credit to say that there did not appear to be any flaws in that argument then, and that in every other respect I was an honest lad."

"It required no skill to let myself into my mother's house. To slip the catch from one of the back-parlor windows was the work of a moment. My mother always kept her money in a desk in the sitting-room adjoining her bedroom. I had written a note to leave there, telling her my reasons for appropriating the money. It makes my blood run cold as my thought goes back to the horrors of that night. As I softly raised the window and crept into the room, I was struck, it seemed to me, with the chill of death. I had no fear of being caught—I knew the ways of the house too well for that—and I was never in my life very much afraid of anything or anybody. It was a chill that seemed to strike clear through me, causing my teeth to chatter and my heart to feel like a lump of ice in my bosom. These were novel sensations, and I tried to analyze them; but it was of no use. I found that I literally did not dare to move hand or foot in this awful blackness. I knew where the matches were formerly kept, and could have reached them by a couple of steps, but how to take those steps was the question. At last, by a supreme effort of the will, I groped my way to the mantelpiece. There were two matches in the box. I struck one, and my hand shook so that I was afraid it would go out before I could look about me. But it lasted long enough, my lad, to show me a sight which nearly killed me on the spot. Just in front of me, by the folding doors, was a coffin, and I knew then that it was the presence of death in the room that had sent such a chill through every fiber of my being. At this crisis, my boy, I realized the criminality of my conduct to the fullest extent. In some form or other it always comes home to everybody but the most hardened and depraved; and it is my opinion that somewhere, sometime, even these are brought to an understanding of the torture they have inflicted upon others."

"I must look and see what face it was shut away from sight in this narrow bed; but how could I? They tell us that in great crises people sometimes have a quick and awful glimpse of all they have done in their lives. I seemed to remember everything my mother had ever said to me, all her kisses, her tears, the prayers I had said at her knee, all my own heartlessness, every mean and cruel word I had ever spoken, every single act of disobedience. I had come to-night to rob her, and had found her in her coffin. But perhaps it might not be. It was not impossible that some one else in the house could have died, I told myself. But no! Some agonizing intuition seemed to tell me that it was my mother, and I had killed her. God forbid that I should not be able to do some good with this terrible experience! I have faced some dangers since, been in some tight places; but there is nothing seen or unseen that would ever be to me what it was to strike that one remaining match and open that coffin lid. With a desperation which no pen or tongue can describe, I forced myself toward the folding doors, and then, after a pause in which the beating of the heart sounded in my ears like the roar of artillery, I ignited the match and raised the lid; but the little blaze only flashed out for a second, leaving me in total darkness again. Then the lid fell from my hand with a sharp click, and a moment afterwards my eldest brother and a friend rushed in and discovered me."

"Mother?" I gasped, pointing in my unutterable agony to the coffin.

"Alive and well," was the joyful answer; and that was the last I knew for several days.

"The poor lifeless body that had shown me where I stood in reference to my mother, as well as in the category of crime, was that of a distant relative who had fallen ill and died at our house."

"I made a clean breast to my mother, and she forgave me, and loved me and petted me as only mothers know how to do. And now, my boy, I want to ask you to go home with me to-morrow and see my mother, the loveliest old lady on the continent; and let me telegraph to your mother in the morning, and then you can go back with me on the next trip. What do you say?"

"I'll do it, sir, and may God bless you for your kindness!" the boy answered, wiping away the tears that had rolled down his face like rain during the telling of this true and tragic story.—Eleanor Kirk, in Boston Budget.