The Cloister and the Hearth | Page 5

afternoon at supper there was one mouth less. Catherine looked at
Richart's chair and wept bitterly. On this Elias shouted roughly and
angrily to the children, "Sit wider, can't ye: sit wider!" and turned his
head away over the back of his seat awhile, and was silent.

Richart was launched, and never cost them another penny; but to fit
him out and place him in the house of Vander Stegen, the merchant,
took all the little hoard but one gold crown. They began again. Two
years passed, Richart found a niche in commerce for his brother Jacob,
and Jacob left Tergou directly after dinner, which was at eleven in the
forenoon. At supper that day Elias remembered what had happened the
last time; so it was in a low whisper he said, "Sit wider, dears!" Now
until that moment, Catherine would not see the gap at table, for her
daughter Catherine had besought her not to grieve to-night, and she had
said, "No, sweetheart, I promise I will not, since it vexes my children."
But when Elias whispered "Sit wider!" says she, "Ay! the table will
soon be too big for the children, and you thought it would be too
small;" and having delivered this with forced calmness. she put up her
apron the next moment, and wept sore.
"'Tis the best that leave us," sobbed she; "that is the cruel part."
"Nay! nay!" said Elias, "our children are good children, and all are dear
to us alike. Heed her not! What God takes from us still seems better
that what He spares to us; that is to say, men are by nature unthankful -
and women silly."
"And I say Richart and Jacob were the flower of the flock," sobbed
Catherine.
The little coffer was empty again, and to fill it they gathered like ants.
In those days speculation was pretty much confined to the
card-and-dice business. Elias knew no way to wealth but the slow and
sure one. "A penny saved is a penny gained," was his humble creed. All
that was not required for the business and the necessaries of life went
into the little coffer with steel bands and florid key. They denied
themselves in turn the humblest luxuries, and then, catching one
another's looks, smiled; perhaps with a greater joy than self-indulgence
has to bestow. And so in three years more they had gleaned enough to
set up their fourth son as a master-tailor, and their eldest daughter as a
robemaker, in Tergou. Here were two more provided for: their own
trade would enable them to throw work into the hands of this pair. But
the coffer was drained to the dregs, and this time the shop too bled a

little in goods if not in coin.
Alas! there remained on hand two that were unable to get their bread,
and two that were unwilling. The unable ones were, 1, Giles, a dwarf,
of the wrong sort, half stupidity, half malice, all head and claws and
voice, run from by dogs and unprejudiced females, and sided with
through thick and thin by his mother; 2, Little Catherine, a poor little
girl that could only move on crutches. She lived in pain, but smiled
through it, with her marble face and violet eyes and long silky lashes;
and fretful or repining word never came from her lips. The unwilling
ones were Sybrandt, the youngest, a ne'er-do-weel, too much in love
with play to work; and Cornelis, the eldest, who had made calculations,
and stuck to the hearth, waiting for dead men's shoes. Almost worn out
by their repeated efforts, and above all dispirited by the moral and
physical infirmities of those that now remained on hand, the anxious
couple would often say, "What will become of all these when we shall
be no longer here to take care of them?" But when they had said this a
good many times, suddenly the domestic horizon cleared, and then they
used still to say it, because a habit is a habit, but they uttered it half
mechanically now, and added brightly and cheerfully, "But thanks to St.
Bavon and all the saints, there's Gerard."
Young Gerard was for many years of his life a son apart and he was
going into the Church, and the Church could always maintain her
children by hook or by crook in those days: no great hopes, because his
family had no interest with the great to get him a benefice, and the
young man's own habits were frivolous, and, indeed, such as our cloth
merchant would not have put up with in any one but a clerk that was to
be. His trivialities were reading and penmanship, and he was so
wrapped up in them that often he could hardly be got away to