Sweet Cicely | Page 7

blow to both on us.
Wall, she lived, Cicely did, which was more than we any one of us
thought she could do. I went right there, and stayed six weeks with her,
hangin' right over her bed, night and day; and so did his mother,--she a
brokenhearted woman too. Her heart broke, too, by the United States;
and so I told Josiah, that little villain that got killed was only one of his
agents. Yes, her heart was broke; but she bore up for Cicely's sake and
the boy's. For it seemed as if she felt remorsful, and as if it was for
them that belonged to him who had ruined her life, to help her all they
could.
Wall, after about three weeks Cicely begun to live. And so I wrote to
Josiah that I guessed she would keep on a livin' now, for the sake of the
boy.
And so she did. And she got up from that bed a shadow,--a faint, pale
shadow of the girl that used to brighten up our home for us. She was
our sweet Cicely still. But she looked like that posy after the frost has
withered it, and with the cold moonlight layin' on it.
Good and patient she wuz, and easy to get along with; for she seemed
to hold earthly things with a dretful loose grip, easy to leggo of 'em.
And it didn't seem as if she had any interest at all in life, or care for any
thing that was a goin' on in the world, till the boy wus about four years
old; and then she begun to get all rousted up about him and his future.
"She must live," she said: "she had got to live, to do something to help
him in the future.
[Illustration: CICELY AND THE BOY.]
"She couldn't die," she told me, "and leave him in a world that was so
hard for boys, where temptations and danger stood all round her boy's
pathway. Not only hidden perils, concealed from sight, so he might
possibly escape them, but open temptations, open dangers, made as
alluring as private avarice could make them, and made as respectable as
dignified legal enactments could make them,--all to draw her boy down
the pathway his poor father descended." For one of the curius things

about Cicely wuz, she didn't seem to blame Paul hardly a mite, nor not
so very much the one that enticed him to drink. She went back further
than them: she laid the blame onto our laws; she laid the responsibility
onto the ones that made 'em, directly and indirectly, the legislators and
the voters.
Curius that Cicely should feel so, when most everybody said that he
could have stopped drinking if he had wanted to. But then, I don't know
as I could blame her for feelin' so when I thought of Paul's chin and lips.
Why, anybody that had them on 'em, and was made up inside and
outside accordin', as folks be that have them looks; why, unless they
was specially guarded by good influences, and fenced off from bad
ones,--why, they could not exert any self-denial and control and
firmness.
Why, I jest followed that chin and that mouth right back through seven
generations of the Slide family. Paul's father wus a good man, had a
good face; took it from his mother: but his father, Paul's grandfather,
died a drunkard. They have got a oil-portrait of him at Paul's old home:
I stopped there on my way home from Cicely's one time. And for all
the world he looked most exactly like Paul,--the same sort of a
irresolute, handsome, weak, fascinating look to him. And all through
them portraits I could trace that chin and them lips. They would
disappear in some of 'em, but crop out agin further back. And I asked
the housekeeper, who had always lived in the family, and wus proud of
it, but honest; and she knew the story of the hull Slide race.
And she said that every one of 'em that had that face had traits accordin';
and most every one of 'em got into trouble of some kind.
One or two of 'em, specially guarded, I s'pose, by good influences, got
along with no further trouble than the loss of the chin, and the feelin'
they must have had inside of 'em, that they wuz liable to crumple right
down any minute.
And as they wus made with jest them looks, and jest them traits, born
so, entirely unbeknown to them, I don't know as I can blame Cicely for
feelin' as she did. If temptation hadn't stood right in the road in front of

him, why, he'd have got along, and lived happy. That's Cicely's idee.
And I don't