Effie Maurice | Page 9

give some
account of himself, and the circumstances that brought him to his
present situation, and what think you was the prime moving cause of all
this wretchedness?'

'I suspect he was very poor,' said Effie.
'Something worse than that I should think,' added her brother, 'perhaps
he was a gamester.'
'Or a drunkard,' suggested Effie.
'Or both,' responded the mother, or perhaps he commenced by being
merely a time-waster, and money-waster, and finally was reduced to
what persons of that stamp are very apt to consider the necessity of
committing crime, by way of support.
Mr Maurice shook his head. 'It was neither poverty, nor play, nor
drunkenness, nor indolence, nor extravagance, that made that old man
wretched, and yet he was the most wretched being I ever saw.'
'He was poor, though, wasn't he, father?'
'Poverty is but a small thing, Effie, and in our land of equal laws and
charitable institutions, very few suffer from absolute want, but that old
man was richer (in gold and silver I mean) than I am.'
'What! and lived in that dreadful place, father?'
'Oh! I see it,' exclaimed Harry; 'he is a miser.'
'Yes, Harry,' returned Mr Maurice, 'you are right, the love of money is
the cause of all his misery. He came to this city a great many years ago,
(he could not himself tell how many, for his memory evidently
wavered,) and commenced business as a linen draper. He had one only
daughter then, and he lavished all his earnings on her at first, but finally
she married, and from that time he became wholly engrossed with self.
He was never very fond of show, and so did not become a spendthrift,
but he adopted the equally dangerous course of hoarding up all his
savings, until it became a passion with him. After a while he retired
from business, but the passion clung to him with all the tenacity of a
long established habit, and he became a usurer. He was known to all the
young profligates, the bad young men who throng our city, and became

as necessary to them as the poor avaricious Jew was in former days to
the spendthrifts and gamesters in London. He told me frightful stories,
my children, of tyranny and fraud, of ruined young men led on by him
till they committed self-murder, of old men shorn of their fortunes
through his ingenious villainy--'
'O father!' exclaimed little Effie, covering her eyes with her hands.
'All this,' said Mr Maurice, solemnly, 'was the result of the indulgence
of a single bad passion.'
'But the little boy?' inquired Mrs Maurice.
'The husband of the daughter proved to be a miserable, worthless
fellow, and for some time the old man sent them remittances of money,
but after a while his new passion triumphed over paternal love, and the
prayers of the poor woman were unheeded. Two or three years ago she
came to the city on foot--a weary distance, the old man said, but he
could not tell how far, bringing with her the little boy that first attracted
my attention to-night. Her husband was dead, and her elder children
had one by one followed him to the grave, till there was only this, the
youngest left. She had come to the city, hoping that her presence would
be more successful than her letters had been in softening the old man's
heart, but she only came to die. Her journey had worn her out, and she
was to be no tax upon the old man's treasures. She died, and the
miserable grandfather could not cast off her only son. The little fellow's
face looks wan and melancholy; as if from suffering and want, and he
seems to have passed at once from a child into an old man, without
knowing anything of the intermediate stage.'
'Poor boy!' said Mrs Maurice 'you didn't leave him alone with his
grandfather, I hope?'
'No, I engaged a neighbour to spend the night with them, and called at
my office on my way home to write a letter to a brother, of whom the
old man told me, who is now residing in the country. The little
grandson will probably be wealthy now, but I do not believe the
enjoyment of it will make up for his past suffering.'

'I hope he won't be a miser,' said Effie.
'I shouldn't think it very strange if he should be,' replied her brother,
'the example of his grandfather is enough to spoil him.'
'But you forget, Harry,' said Mrs Maurice, 'what a terrible example it
was. I think the little fellow will be likely to avoid it.'
'Very probably,' added Mr Maurice, 'there is more danger of his going
into the opposite extreme.'
'I am sure, father,' said Harry, 'that it