The Bondage of Ballinger | Page 9

Hannah. I wish I could think they are, for I have been selfish and mindful only of my own wishes. But I am going to begin again, and in earnest. Hereafter for every book you shall have a forfeit. Better than this, I shall buy no more books. From this moment I am emancipated from the slavery that has made you suffer so much."
Still with that same patient, gentle smile she replied: "I would not ask thee, dear, to do this for my happiness or thy wretchedness. We must take our lives as they come to us. We may not wholly destroy the impulse that is strong, or chafe under the desires we cannot kill. But we may take our life more gently, dear. We may find a home where our wandering may end and where we may enjoy in peace and rest the things that are precious to us."
"May we not find such a home across the water, Hannah? How often have we talked of the distant land where life is one long and pleasant summer, where there are no cares, no troubles, and where everything that we have left in the sunny country you loved so much is intensified a hundred-fold,"
She shook her head. "Would such a land hold thee, Thomas? It seems fair and pleasant now, as was the country we deserted, but would it last? Should we not be wandering again, always wandering, in search of the happiness that lies just beyond. Should we not find that we are deceived in this as we have been deceived all these years. Is there any happiness beyond the contentment of our own minds, dear?"
He said quietly, though his eyes still gazed far over the placid ocean: "Shall we go back, Hannah, back through the desert and over the mountains, away from all this summer and warmth and luxuriance of nature?"
She looked at him, and the flush came to her face and the light to her eyes. "Let us go back,"' she said.
"But," he urged, "the journey is long and difficult, nothing is ahead of us to stimulate our hopes and excite our ambitions, and we are very poor."
"Was the journey short and were we rich when we came, dear?"
"Our parents are dead, and our friends are scattered, Hannah. The years have brought changes to our village as well as to us. We shall be known to few, and all will be so different. Is it not a risk that we should avoid?"
"Is it not our home, Thomas? Let us go back."
"And the temptations, Hannah?" He thought of what she had said and he was wavering. "You know my weakness, dear, and it is a land of books."
She laid her head on his shoulder and turned her face that he might not see her smile. And she answered simply:
"Let us go back."

IF the sunlight had danced less merrily on the waves of the great lake as they rolled in to the western shore, if the changing tints of gray, blue, and green, far to the north, south, and east, had been less fascinating to Thomas Ballinger and less restful to Hannah, perhaps they might not have lingered in the smoky, grimy city with its rushing tide of money-seekers and fortune-builders. They had come slowly across the desert and mountains and prairie, and had stopped again to take breath and acquire the means of journeying. And if Thomas could have looked into the mysterious book which holds the future, and turned to the page which bears his name, he would have seen that fate decreed that Ms wanderings were over and that he had come at last to his inheritance, poor, small, and uncertain though it might be.
But the one thing that never entered into Thomas's calculations was the future, and he was accustomed to argue that the man who is ever bothering his poor brain with problems of what may happen by and by is wholly insensible to the delights of the present. It might have been retorted by Hannah, or other members of the family entitled to speak, that he who is absorbed in the joys of the present is laying up more than his share of trouble for the future, but such replies he would have dismissed not only as discourteous, but as entirely foreign to the question. Yet in spite of his disinclination to consider the various periods of time, Thomas acknowledged that work must be accepted as a factor in the argument, viewed from any standpoint, and work he found immediately, and friends, and good wages, and far uptown in a quiet street near the water 's edge he established Hannah in a little house, where the vines grew up and around the windows, and where through the looping wistaria and honeysuckle she could look