Weighed and Wanting | Page 6

line of
ancestors, and a few thousand pounds--less than twenty--from his
father, who was a country attorney, a gentle, quarrelsome man, who yet
never, except upon absolute necessity, carried a case into court, he had
found, as his family increased, that his income was not sufficient for
their maintenance in accustomed ease. With not one expensive personal
taste between them, they had neither of them the faculty for saving
money--often but another phrase for doing mean things. Neither
husband nor wife was capable of screwing. Had the latter been,
certainly the free-handedness of the former would have driven her to it;
but while Mrs. Raymount would go without a new bonnet till an outcry
arose in the family that its respectability was in danger, she could not
offer two shillings a day to a sempstress who thought herself worth
half-a-crown; she could not allow a dish to be set on her table which
was not as likely to encourage hunger as allay it; neither because some
richer neighbors gave so little, would she take to herself the spiritual

fare provided in church without making a liberal acknowledgment in
carnal things. The result of this way of life was the deplorable one that
Mr. Raymount was compelled to rouse himself, and, from the chair of a
somewhat self-indulgent reader of many books, betake himself to his
study-table, to prove whether it were not possible for him to become
the writer of such as might add to an income showing scantier every
quarter. Here we may see the natural punishment of liberal habits; for
this man indulging in them, and, instead of checking them in his wife,
loving her the more that she indulged in them also, was for this reason
condemned to labor--the worst evil of life in the judgment of both the
man about Mayfair and the tramp of the casual ward. But there are
others who dare not count that labor an evil which helps to bring out
the best elements of human nature, not even when the necessity for it
outlasts any impulse towards it, and who remember the words of the
Lord: "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work."
For Gerald Raymount, it made a man of him--which he is not who is of
no service to his generation. Doubtless he was driven thereto by
necessity; but the question is not whether a man works upon more or
less compulsion, but whether the work he is thus taught to do he makes
good honest work for which the world is so much the better. In this
matter of work there are many first that shall be last. The work of a
baker for instance must stand higher in the judgment of the universe
than that of a brewer, let his ale be ever so good. Because the one trade
brings more money than the other the judgment of this world counts it
more honorable, but there is the other judgment at hand.
In the exercise of his calling Raymount was compelled to think more
carefully than before, and thus not only his mind took a fresh start, but
his moral and spiritual nature as well. He slid more and more into
writing out the necessities and experiences of his own heart and history,
and so by degrees gained power of the only true kind--that, namely, of
rousing the will, not merely the passions, or even the aspirations of men.
The poetry in which he had disported himself at college now came to
the service of his prose, and the deeper poetic nature, which is the
prophetic in every man, awoke in him. Till after they had lived together
a good many years the wife did not know the worth of the man she had
married, nor indeed was he half the worth when she married him that
he had now grown to be. The longer they lived the prouder she grew of

him and of his work; nor was she the less the practical wisdom of the
house that she looked upon her husband as a great man. He was not a
great man--only a growing man; yet was she nothing the worse for
thinking so highly of him; the object of it was not such that her
admiration caused her to deteriorate.
The daughter of a London barrister, of what is called a good family, she
had opportunity of knowing something of what is called life before she
married, and from mere dissatisfaction had early begun to withdraw
from the show and self-assertion of social life, and seek within herself
the door of that quiet chamber whose existence is unknown to most.
For a time she found thus a measure of quiet--not worthy of the name
of rest; she had not heeded a certain low knocking as of