The Moccasin Maker | Page 6

goods,
his fortune and his future to America, which, in the days of 1829, was
indeed a venturesome step, for America was regarded as remote as the
North Pole, and good-byes were, alas! very real good-byes, when
travellers set sail for the New World in those times before steam and
telegraph brought the two continents hand almost touching hand.
So little Lydia Bestman stood drearily watching with sorrow-filled eyes
the England of her babyhood fade slowly into the distance--eyes that
were fated never to see again the royal old land of her birth. Already
the deepest grief that life could hold had touched her young heart. She
had lost her own gentle, London-bred mother when she was but two
years old. Her father had married again, and on her sixth birthday little
Lydia, the youngest of a large family, had been sent away to
boarding-school with an elder sister, and her home knew her no more.
She was taken from school to the sailing ship; little stepbrothers and
sisters had arrived and she was no longer the baby. Years afterwards
she told her own little children that her one vivid recollection of

England was the exquisite music of the church chimes as the ship
weighed anchor in Bristol harbor--chimes that were ringing for
evensong from the towers of the quaint old English churches. Thirteen
weeks later that sailing vessel entered New York harbor, and life in the
New World began.
Like most transplanted Englishmen, Mr. Bestman cut himself
completely off from the land of his fathers; his interests and his friends
henceforth were all in the country of his adoption, and he chose Ohio as
a site for his new home. He was a man of vast peculiarities, prejudices
and extreme ideas--a man of contradictions so glaring that even his own
children never understood him. He was a very narrow religionist, of the
type that say many prayers and quote much Scripture, but he beat his
children--both girls and boys--so severely that outsiders were at times
compelled to interfere. For years these unfortunate children carried the
scars left on their backs by the thongs of cat-o'-nine-tails when he
punished them for some slight misdemeanor. They were all terrified at
him, all obeyed him like soldiers, but none escaped his severity. The
two elder ones, a boy and a girl, had married before they left England.
The next girl married in Ohio, and the boys drifted away, glad to escape
from a parental tyranny that made home anything but a desirable
abiding-place. Finally but two remained of the first family--Lydia and
her sister Elizabeth, a most lovable girl of seventeen, whose beauty of
character and self-sacrificing heart made the one bright memory that
remained with these scattered fledglings throughout their entire lives.
The lady who occupied the undesirable position of stepmother to these
unfortunate children was of the very cold and chilling type of
Englishwoman, more frequently met with two generations ago than in
this age. She simply let her husband's first family alone. She took no
interest in them, neglected them absolutely, but in her neglect was far
kinder and more humane than their own father. Yet she saw that all the
money, all the pretty clothes, all the dainties, went to her own children.
Perhaps the reader will think these unpleasant characteristics of a harsh
father and a self-centred stepmother might better be omitted from this
narrative, particularly as death claimed these two many years ago; but

in the light of after events, it is necessary to reveal what the home
environment of these children had been, how little of companionship or
kindness or spoken love had entered their baby lives. The absence of
mother kisses, of father comradeship, of endeavor to understand them
individually, to probe their separate and various dispositions--things so
essential to the development of all that is best in a child--went far
towards governing their later actions in life. It drove the unselfish,
sweet-hearted Elizabeth to a loveless marriage; it flung poor, little
love-hungry Lydia into alien but, fortunately, loyal and noble arms.
Outsiders said, "What strange marriages!" But Lydia, at least, married
where the first real kindness she had ever known called to her, and not
one day of regret for that marriage ever entered into her life.
It came about so strangely, so inevitably, from such a tiny source, that
it is almost incredible.
One day the stepmother, contrary to her usual custom, went into the
kitchen and baked a number of little cakelets, probably what we would
call cookies. For what sinister reason no one could divine, but she
counted these cakes as she took them from the baking-pans and placed
them in the pantry. There were forty-nine, all told. That evening she
counted them again; there were forty-eight. Then she complained to her