 | Pictures of country life |  |
THE OUTCAST.
Saturday night has come, and the last sunstreaks have drawn
themselves down the snowy hills of Clovernook, and where they
lately shone, the darkness is fallen and unfolding very fast.
The chickens are gone to roost among the cold, comfortless
boughs of the trees nearest the barn; the cows are milked, and
in most places the work-horses, feeding in the stable, have had
an extra currying, preparatory to Sunday morning, when they
are expected to walk soberly and straightly to the village church,
drawing after them, in the newly-washed and tar-smelling wagon,
father and mother, and all the children, from the eldest son—
as proud of his darkening beard, and “boughten” coat and
hat, as he will be in years to come of more stylish appareling or
senatorial honors; and the little girl on her mother's knee, more
pleased with the brass buttons on her father's coat, and her
own red shoes, than she will be, perhaps, with her point lace
and shining brocade, when a few years hence she shall dance
at the president's ball.
Another week has gone; great, in its little events, to the
unambitious people who are now done with its hopes and fears,
its working and planning—with their tending of sick beds, and
making of wedding gowns—as great to them as the largest
experience to the largest mind; and who knows but that in the
down to the account of those who have thought always of the
pride and place of this world, as the child does of the marvels
of the fairy story; for what, after all, can be got out of this
life but usefulness? With all our racking of the soul, we
cannot solve the problem of fore-ordination and free will, of
good and evil, of life and death. I am not sure that they are
not wisest, as well as best, who are, “contented if they may
enjoy the things which others understand,” and let alone the
mysteries which all effort to unfold but folds anew.
It was about the middle of February, and along the northern
slopes of the hills, at the roots of big trees, and close in the
shadow of the fences, lay the skeleton of the great winter snow.
For all their searching, the sheep had not found a single patch
of green grass as yet, and the mother cow had brought home
to the stable her young calf, without waiting to be invited, so
sharply went the winds along woods and meadows.
The smoke issued briskly from chimney-tops, and the heaps of
dry wood near the doors, and the lights shining pleasantly out
along the frozen ground, told of quiet and comfort within.
Here and there an axe was busy at the woodpile, or a lantern
shone over the dry sunflower stocks by the garden fence, as
some less orderly farmer than the rest went from house to barn,
to attend some little chore forgotton or neglected.
Mostly, however, it was quiet, and cold, and dark, except at
one or two windows of each house, and the snow and frozen earth,
ground together, powdered the lonesome road before the late
travellers. Of these there was, on the night I write of, not
more than one to be seen; at any rate, it is with one only my
story has to do. If you had seen him you would not have
yet he seemed very tired, and bent under the bundle hung
across his shoulder, as if he had trudged a long way; for this
bundle was not large, and it could not have been the weight of
it that so crooked his shoulders. You would have thought him
old, doubtless, for his face was browned and careworn, and a
slouched hat and tangly hair and beard gave him the air of
years. You would probably have said, if you had chanced to
look out of your own room, and observed him shuffling his tired
way through the grey chilly moonlight, “there goes a man with
a sack on his back; I wonder if he knows where he is going and
what after?” for so we see our fellows, brothers and friends,
going burdened and bent, past our warm hearths every day, and
to us they are only as men with sacks on their backs.
Once or twice he stopped where the lights shone brightest,
as if he would go in; but having cut the air with his disengaged
hand, as if he were done with some vagary, went on, his
feet leaving a trail in the snow and dust, crooked as if he were
purposeless. And so, alas, he was; and wondered, as much as
any one, as he pulled his hat lower and turned thought introspective,
where he was going, and what for. Ah, that was the
worst of it! footsore and burdened as he was, he had no object,
not even a shapeless outline for his future. He might be going
into the lap of the best fortune in the world: such things have
been done, so he has heard, and he smiles at the bright suggestion;
but reduce it to a where, and when, and how, and the
possibility loses all probability; it is not at all likely any good
luck will happen to him; everybody says he deserves no better
fate than he has, and he supposes he does not. He had an
object once, which was to get away from everybody that knew
about him! from his father, who said he was going down hill as
fast as he could, and the sooner he got to the bottom the better
for his family and himself too; and from the black eyes that
looked scornfully upon him the last time he dared look up into
their searching brightness.
This last humiliation, more perhaps than anything else, made
him rise in the middle of the night, some weeks ago, bundle
together a few necessary effects, and steal like a thief away
from the house where he was born—unblest of his mother, and
with no “God-speed you,” from his honest old father. But back
of the scorn of the black eyes, the complaining of the mother,
and the sentence of the father, there are intemperance, and
idleness, and profligacy, that brought all about; why these
should have been he doesn't know, he did not mean to be a bad
son nor an untrue lover; he doesn't say he was; he doesn't really
think he was; but he knows other folks say so, and so, trying to
be indifferent to what men and women think of him, to all the
past and all the future, he changes the load on his shoulder,
and trudges on.
About half a mile down a narrow lane, that turns out from
the main road, he sees a house, small and apparently rude, but
with light shining so brightly and cheerfully through all the
windows, he is almost persuaded to turn that way; he doesn't
know why nor what for, only it seems for a moment that he
has got home. The watch dog sees him from his post at the
gate, and sends him forward with a suspicious and unfriendly
growl. He fancies he hears a song in the cottage, it may be
the wind in the treetops; he won't stop to see, for what are
songs or lights to him! He is half disposed to lie down on the
has always known the comfort of a warm bed—he cannot quite
do that yet. He passes a good many snug farmhouses, but
the front doors are close shut, and he feels just as if they had
been closed to keep him out. But by and by he is very tired,
and his diffidence grows less and less under the necessity of rest;
he doesn't much care where it is, nor who accords it, but he must
have rest, somewhere; that is the strongest feeling he has. The
wind blows against him harder and colder all the time, and he
concludes that has become his enemy too, as long ago he settled
into a conviction that mankind were leagued against him. 'Tis
a pity that he himself is his own worst enemy; but he cannot
see it, and that is a pity too. Presently he sees a commodious
house, brightly painted, and with lights streaming from the
front windows, right before him; the curtain is drawn aside, and
he discovers a man in black and goodly apparel, reading in a
large book, it is the Bible, he thinks; he is very tired and
hungry and must have food and rest. Without more ado he
approaches the door and thumps with his stick confidently and
boldly. No hearty voice answers, “Come in!” and as he
crouches, in dim expectancy, he hearts the crackling of the wood
in the fireplace, and the prattling of children. The door opens
soon, carefully and narrowly, and the man in the black coat
looks out distrustfully and asks, “What do you want?”
“I want to stay all night,” answers the traveller.
The door is pushed round a little and the man in the black
coat says, “We have no accommodation for travellers.”
“But I am tired and hungry,” urges the stranger.
“We are sorry,” says the man in the black coat, speaking
for himself and all the house; and so closes the door.
The tired man thinks he hears the key turn, but he is not quite
sure. His senses are bewildered, and he hardly knows whether
or not he saw a dish of apples, and another of cakes, on the
table before the fire, but he thinks he did, and that he also saw
a prim-looking woman, in a silk gown, shaking her head at the
man in the black coat, while he held the door so cautiously
open.
The house was not like a farmhouse, and he is almost sure it
is the parsonage; but he is not quite sure about anything, poor
fellow. He is sure enough, however, to anathematize all piety
as hypocrisy, and he says with an oath he doesn't care for all the
preachers in the world; he will get to heaven as soon as any
of them; and he wishes the white neckcloth of the man in the
black coat might choak him that very instant. And then he
imagines how he would take possession of the parsonage, and
sit by the warm fire and eat apples and cakes, and never pay
one cent for preaching as long as he lived. One thing he would
do, he knows, he would entertain poor travellers.
He has climbed a long hill, and gone over a hollow, where
there is a one-arched wooden bridge, and where he hears no
tinkling of water; even that has shut itself away from him,
under ice; he almost expected a murderer to come out from
beneath the dark arch, but there did not; and now he ascends
another hill, abrupt and high; and as he nears the summit he
sees a good many lights shining, and presently becomes aware
that he is entering a village. A number of covered wagons
almost block up the road before him; each is loaded with boxes,
and barrels, and farming implements, full as it can be, and from
among them, or from under each wagon, looks out a huge dog—
the faithful guardian while the teamster sleeps. Immediately
door open at last. He is so glad to throw down his budget,
and seat himself at the fire, that he heeds little the fumes of
whisky and tobacco with which the room is reeking. The
idlers there make him welcome, and offer him cigars and punch,
and in return for their kindness, he grows merry and talks
freely and indiscreetly; sometimes profanely; and so the night
wears into midnight, and the merry-making has become a carousal.
We will not linger over it, it is too sad to see manhood
so debasing itself; intellect burning itself out in evil passion,
and the likeness of the angel becoming more grovelling than
the brute.
Sunday morning comes; the heavens are full of clouds, and
of winds; very rough and cold they are blowing everywhere;
but roughest and coldest through the leafless locust trees that
grow along the fence of the Clovernook graveyard; so thinks
the poor fellow who lies beneath one of them, his stick by his
side, and his bundle for a pillow—all the wild merriment that
filled the tavern last night, dwarfed to a drunken dreaming.
The people ride by to church, one wagon load after another,
and now and then some one says, “There is a drunken man;”
but many pass without seeing him at all, and no one stops to
see whether he is alive or dead. He is lying nearly opposite
the narrow lane, where he paused last evening, seeing the light
in the rude house, half a mile away. If he were roused up he
would not know how nor why he came to be where he is, nor
do I myself know, unless it were that Providence directed his
staggering, when he was found to be inebriate and penniless,
and driven away from the tavern where he had paid his last
sixpence for his present imbecility.
Heavy and mournful through the dull air sounds the church
bell, like a summons to penance rather than a cheerful call to
thanksgiving; the troubled sleeper hears it and thinks doomsday
has come, and groans and turns on his comfortless pillow.
A stout grey horse, with an eye that looks kinder and nobler
than has been given to some reasonable creatures, climbs
steadily the steep hill in the lane, and trots briskly forward,
the neat little wagon behind him rattling in a loud and lively
key; out into the main road he comes, and turns toward the
call of the bell; but as he passes the graveyard he looks round
as if seeing the man lying there and pitying him.
“Dear me!” exclaims the woman who is driving the grey
horse; and she draws up the reins and is on the ground in a
moment; so is the young woman who sat beside her, and she
indeed is the first to climb the clay bank and reach the dead
man, as she thinks he is; and truly he is dead—to all that a
man should be alive for.
“Oh, mother, mother,” she cries, clapping her hands joyously,
“he is only asleep, after all! I am so glad! What makes
him lie here, mother?”
“I don't know, my poor child,” answers the good woman,
wiping her eyes; “I am afraid he has been drinking at the
tavern;” and stooping over him, she shakes him by the shoulder.
“Yes, mother, I will get up in a minute,” he answers, without
opening his eyes.
“How funny,” says the young girl, laughing aloud; “he
thinks you are his mother.”
“Mercy,” says the deacon, peeping from the front of his
dearborn, “if there is not Mrs. Goforth and her daughter Elsy,
look at her.” And he touches his horse smartly on the flank,
and does not apparently hear Mrs. Goforth call to him.
She is at a loss what to do, and well she may be; for though
she has tugged and lifted the man to a sitting posture, he cannot
retain it for a moment, unsupported by her; how then is
he to stand or walk? The air is bitter cold, and he may
freeze to death if she leaves him. She asks him who he is, and
how he came there? but he says he does not know; and pulls at
her shawl, and looks in her face like a bewildered child; and
repeats that he will go as soon as he can walk, that he is sure
he is not harming anybody.
“But you are harming yourself, my son,” says the good
woman; “that is the trouble.”
“Why, it is not any trouble to you,” replies the young man,
“because what I do ain't nothing to nobody;” and he relapses
again into his horrible unconsciousness.
The bells were already done ringing; but Mrs. Goforth was
not a woman to go to church and leave a man freezing to death
by the roadside; she could not, to use her own words, have
any comfort of the meeting whatever; and though she did not
like to stay away from her place, she thought it was right to
do so under the circumstances; so, having turned about her
grey horse, she brought the little wagon as close to the clay
bank as she could, and she and Elsy, half dragging and half
lifting the poor outcast, got him into it, in some way.
It had come to the ears of the parson, before the hour for
service, that a man was lying drunken by the road-side; and
the fact afforded a text for the severest denunciation of sinners,
especially of this sort. He did not once reflect, let us hope,
fellow-sinner too, to the condition and exhibition of infamy
which he so unmercifully condemned.
The meaning of the vacant seat of Mrs. Goforth was hardly.
construed, for in the preacher's mind, when taken in connection
with other absences of late, it argued conclusively a growing
indifference to the Lord's sanctuary. This was wrong, and
uncharitable, as the reader sees; but none of the congregation
saw it then, or felt it then. Good Mrs. Goforth was casting
her bread upon the waters, with no thought of future reward;
but after many days, as we shall see, reward came.
Monday morning it was still cloudy, and not only so, but
snowing—a little fine icy snow, that struck sharply like sand
against Mrs. Goforth's small windows; for she lived in a small
house, and the windows were not much larger than a lady's
pocket handkerchief. It was but a cabin, indeed, built of logs,
very rudely; and humble as it was, and small as it was, Mrs.
Goforth would have thought herself rich to own it. Yet she
did not own the house, nor the meadow, nor the wood adjacent,
nor much in all the world, except a heart that was large,
and truthful, and loving. She did not complain, however, that
she did not own a great house and a hundred or more acres of
land, like most of her neighbors; she was cheerful, under the
necessity of hiring a small lof, and milking her own cow, and
feeding her own chickens, and working in the garden. Now
and then she procured a few days' work, but for the most part
she and Elsy managed to get along alone. And very comfortably
they did get along; no young woman in the neighborhood
looked tidier than the widow's daughter, and surely none
was prettier; in summer, no dress in all the church was whiter
lacked the flowers and the rich ribbons of some there. She
was a dreadfully giddy young girl, to be sure, and her
mother had often to recall her eyes to her hymn-book from
a new dress or shawl which for the first time had made its
appearance in a neighboring pew; perhaps sometimes from casting
upon some young man an admiring glance; so the older
and more staid young ladies said, at least, though Elsy stoutly
denied it. She did not care whether the young men saw her
or not, she often said, but that she could not help seeing them
when they were in the same house with her. And anybody
who saw her blue laughing eyes, would have readily believed
she could not help it.
Jacob Holcom, for that was the name of our purposeless
traveller, awoke to self-consciousness early on Monday morning
—perhaps with the tinkling of the snow on the window-panes,
perhaps with the remorseful stirrings of his own mind,
and the dreamy memory of a face that looked kindly upon
him.
First, he saw the whitewashed joists above him, and felt that
he was not at home in his own chamber, which was large and
substantial; and as he sunk back on his pillow, his eye caught
the neat stitching in the pillow-case, he wondered whose hand
did it, and involuntarily linked it with one he had dreamed of
as loosening something that choked him, when he lay on a very
cold hard bed somewhere: he could not tell when or where.
He could not tell much better where he was now; that he was in
the flesh he was sure, for his hands had the mark of the axe and
the hoe-handle; but the room was new to him, and how he
came there passed all his recollection. Raising himself on one
new baby-house.
The second thought was of his unfitness for the place—all
was so neat—there was such an atmosphere of purity about
him—and the bed itself was so sweet and so white—what
business had he in it? There was mud on his face and in his
hair, that had come from some sorry resting-place, of which he
had but a faint recollection now.
He could not do much in the way of personal renovation;
but all he could do, he did, brushing his soiled garments and
hair, and drawing upon his small bundle for such clean articles
as it contained. This done, he felt quite at a loss, and looking
out into the snow-storm, half wished he were in it, rather than
in a place of which he was so unworthy.
Mrs. Goforth and Elsy had been an hour astir; the cow was
milked, the fire burning on the hearth, the table spread near
it, and the coffee sending up its pleasant steam with the smoke,
when the footsteps of the unknown traveller arrested their
attention; and a soft rap on the door and the announcement
that breakfast was waiting, fell strangely enough on
the ears of the bewildered Jacob; it was just as if his own
mother had called him, except that she had not spoken his
name.
More ashamed than he had ever been in his life, he obeyed
the call, and with downcast eyes and a blushing cheek, presented
himself, expecting, notwithstanding the mild call, to
receive summary dismissal, with severe reproof. But a cordial
good-morning, and an invitation to partake of the breakfast
that awaited, almost caused him to think he was still dreaming,
and in his hesitation, he behaved so awkwardly that Elsy would
not only pity for the stranger, but in some sort responsible for
him. He did not look like an evil-disposed person to her; she
did not believe he was one; and she did not care what anybody
said, she would not believe it. Now no one had said anything
about the young man that Elsy knew of, and it was
strange-her thoughts should run before and suppose an accusation,
and take up a defence; but such was the fact, and such
are often the curious facts with which love begins his impregnable
masonry.
As Jacob partook of the breakfast (without much appetite
we may suppose) he kept inventing stories, one after another,
with which to make himself appear better than he was, in the
event of being questioned by his hostess in reference to his past
life, which questioning he momently expected.
At first he thought he would say he was turned out of his
father's house for a supposed fault, of which he was guiltless,
and that he had travelled till quite exhausted by cold and hunger,
when, in a fit of temporary delirium, he had lain down by
the road-side, and that that was the last he knew; he would
offer to pay for his entertainment after breakfast, and affect
surprise at finding his money gone; and say that it had been
stolen from him during his insane sleep. But Mrs. Goforth
talked of the late storm, and of her fears that the apples and
peaches would have been killed—of her plans for gardening
and farming—in short, of her own affairs altogether; so the
lies Jacob had invented died in his heart. If she had breathed
one word of blame of him, they would have come out, black as
they were.
His next plan was to modify the story somewhat; he would
would say he laid down, because he was too tired to go on,
and growing numb with the cold, had fallen asleep; that he
discovered that morning his money was all gone, though how
he had lost it, he did not know. This gave him a little more
satisfaction, and he was just on the point of commencing an
exculpation, unasked, when Elsy brought to the table some
warm cakes she had been baking, and offered him; he felt
obliged to refuse: and when with her own hand she laid one
on his plate, he felt the second story all going to pieces.
He now wished heartily the meal was concluded, and
resolved to steal away the first moment he could do so, without
saying a word. He had no money with which to pay for
his entertainment, and what were apologies and thanks?
Nothing; he would steal away unobserved, and somewhere,
and some time, try to amend.
He did not know when nor where, nor once ask himself, why
then and there would not be as good a time and place as there
would ever be.
When the breakfast was done, Mrs. Goforth gave him the
best chair and the warmest corner; and having told Elsy to
run over to farmer Hill's, and see if he could not spare his son
John to chop for them that afternoon, she went herself to the
“milk-house,” a little cellar that lay under a mound of snow,
a few steps from the door.
The opportunity Jacob had longed for was come; he stole
back for the bundle he had left, took it up, and there was
nothing in the way of escape, nothing but a natural nobility of
soul that was not all gone yet. There was the white bed,
Elsy's own bed, he knew, which she had given to him; and
face; and there was the Bible on the snowy cover of the table;
all mute, to be sure, but they seemed to rebuke the purposes
he had formed, nevertheless. No, he would not, and could not,
steal away like a thief, which he was not. Was not the house,
and all that was in it, trusted in his hands? If there had
been any suspicion manifested toward him, it would be easy to
go; but he could not return basely the frankness and confidence
he had met. He would see Mrs. Goforth—tell her truly his
destitute condition, nothing else—give her his thanks, which was
all he could give, and somewhere seek for honest employment.
So resolving, and wishing the resolutions were executed, he
sat, when his hostess returned, followed almost immediately by
Elsy, her cheeks blushing red with the rough kisses of the wind,
and her eyes sparkling, notwithstanding the disappointment she
had met. John Hill had gone to town an hour before, and
who was to chop their wood she could not tell; but she
looked at Jacob when she said so in a way that implied a suspicion
of his ability to solve the problem.
Jacob ventured to say he would like to work long enough to
pay for his entertainment, if he dare ask such a favor; it would
not be asking, but doing a favor, Mrs. Goforth said; and,
throwing down his bundle, the young man took up the axe.
The old dog that had kept a suspicious eye on him all the
morning, arose now, and with some hesitation followed him to
the woodpile, whence the sturdy strokes, issuing presently, made
agreeable music in the widow's house. That day, and the next,
and the next, he kept at work, and that week, and the next,
faithfully he performed all the duties intrusted to him; but he
spoke no word concerning his past life.
Many of the neighbors expressed surprise that Mrs. Goforth
should pick up a man in the high road, and hire him to do her
work; they could not account for it, except by saying she was
a strange woman; they hoped she might not be paid for her
foolishness by finding her horse gone some morning, and her
hired man with it. But when she was seen going to church,
and this hired man riding in the wagon with her own daughter,
there was such commotion in the congregation as had not
been known there for many a year. Some of the women, indeed,
passed by the pew where the widow and daughter sat,
pretending not to see them, and such sayings as that “birds
of a feather flock together,” and “a woman is known by the
company she keeps,” and the like, were whispered from one to
another, all having reference to Mrs. Goforth and the drunken
man, as everybody called Jacob. But the good woman had
little regard for what her neighbors thought, so long as her
own heart did not accuse her, for “what have I done,” she
said, “except practice what they preach?”
All the truth about the young man, after his arrival in the
neighborhood, was speedily bruited about and lost nothing as
it went. Elsy believed not one word of it, for a nicer or a
smarter person than Jacob Holcom she had never seen
in her life. If she could believe it was true she would
not talk with Jacob so freely; but she knew better; and even
if it were true, she thinks those who talk of it might find some
faults nearer home to attend to.
It was about the middle of the sugar-making season—night
and raining. Jacob had been busy in the sugar camp two or
three days, so busy that he had scarcely been at the house except
for the doing of necessary chores. The day we write of
and very hungry, and very lonesome, Elsy thinks; and she
goes to the window often, to see whether he is coming, but
she does not see anything of the torchlight gleaming over the
hill—and Jacob is used to make a torch of hickory bark to
light him on his way home at night—so she keeps standing
and looking out into the dark, and the rain, hoping her mother
will say, “You had better run across the meadow, Elsy, and see
whether some accident has not happened to Jacob;” but her mother
keeps at her knitting, by the fireside, and doesn't say anything
of the sort; her heart has not fluttered her steady common
sense into unnatural fears. At last she can bear the darkness
and rain no longer; who knows she thinks, but that Jacob may
have had another of those dreadful fits, and so fallen into the
fire, or the boiling water. “Mother,” she says, “it is not
raining much now: I think I will take Carlo, and run over the
hill and see if I can tell whether Jacob is in the sugar camp;
if I see him from the hill top I will come straight back.”
“Very well, my child,” replies Mrs. Goforth; “but I don't
think anything has happened to him.”
Elsy was not long in tossing a shawl over her head, nor long
in reaching the hill-top; she did not once think of darkness
and rain; one moment she paused and stood on tiptoe, looking
earnestly into the great red light that shone against the trees,
and flickered along the ground of the sugar-camp. She did
not see Jacob, and therefore sped on faster than the wind.
Before the stone furnace, where the sugar water was boiling,
a rude hut had been constructed, which afforded protection
from the storm; and here, seated on a low bench, watching
the jets of flame as they broke from the main body of fire
Elsy, her hair dripping with rain, and her face pale with fright,
presented herself before him.
“What can have happened?” he asked in surprise, taking
her hand and drawing her to a seat before the fire.
Elsy's cheek grew red when she found that she was come of
a foolish errand, and she stammered the truth—her fears for
him—as the best excuse she could make. It was Jacob's turn
to be confused now, and taking up a handful of the straw that
carpeted his rude hut, he pulled it to pieces, his eyes bent on
the ground, stepping aside till he was quite out of the shelter.
“Oh, don't stay in the rain,” said Elsy, “sit here by me,
there is room enough.”
Jacob sat down, but kept his face averted from the gentle,
confidant eyes of his companion. “I am sure you have not
told me true,” said Elsy, “and that you are not well. Oh, if
you should have another of those dreadful fits!”
Well might she have thought, poor simple-hearted child,
from the strange behavior of the young man, that a fit was
about to seize him, for as she looked up in his face, he covered
it with his hands, and she presently saw the tears coming out
between his fingers.
All at once she divined the truth, she thought she had
wounded him by speaking of the fit, for people said it was a
drunken fit, and Jacob might fancy she believed it.
How to begin she did not know, but to sit in silence and see
Jacob weeping like a child, was not to be thought of, so she
stammered in some way that she did not know as anybody had
said anything against him, and if they had she did not believe
it, she did not care what it was. And the more she said
she believed he was all that was good and true, the more
discomforted the young man seemed. If she had joined her
denunciations to the rest, he could have denied their justice
perhaps; but to be thought so much better than he was, made
him more sadly humble, more truly good, than he had ever
been in his life.
He assured Elsy, in a broken voice, that he was quite well,
but that he was not worthy of the interest she had taken in
him, though he thanked her for it.
“Poor Jacob,” thought she, “I am sure his mind is wandering;
he not worthy, indeed! then I don't know who is.” And
she went herself out into the rain to mend the fire, and afterward
arranged her shawl against the crevices of the wall by
which Jacob sat, so that the wind and rain should not blow
against him.
“Sit here yourself,” said the sugar-maker, rising from the
seat, and drawing Elsy toward it; “do, I pray, for I cannot;
I would rather stand out in the rain.”
“O Jacob, what do you mean?” she asked in affright;
“sit down beside me; the bench is long enough, and tell me
what it is troubles you.” And there, the rain beating around
them, and the fire brightening, and fading, and brightening again,
Jacob told all the story of his life, sparing himself no whit.
But if he has done wrong sometimes, thought Elsy, what of
that? I suppose every one has some faults, and if everybody
has turned against him I am sure there is the more need I
should not. In fact, she believed he made his vices greatly
larger than they were; but even if he did not, it was so magnanimous
to confess them, and to come back to virtue. Verily,
he came to tell of the black eyes that had made all the woods
about his home brighter than the May sunshine, and how their
loving beams changed into sharp arrows, and pierced him
through and through, Elsy's little foot tapped smartly on the
ground, and her own eyes looked as indignant as it was in their
power to do, for in her heart she felt that the woman who
could scorn Jacob, no matter what the provocation, did not
deserve to have a lover. It is to be supposed that Jacob saw
all this, for such thoughts shine right in one's face as plainly as
written words; nevertheless, to make assurance doubly sure, no
doubt, he said, “and you, Elsy, would have spurned me just
as she did, if I had been a lover of yours!”
“How can you say so, Jacob?” she replied, “I should have
felt that you needed me most when that you were not strong
enough in yourself to resist temptation.”
“Dear Elsy!” he said, and the bench, which a little
while before was not big enough for two, might have accommodated
three very well as he spoke. But there is no need to
repeat what more they said; suffice it, they forgot to make a
torch to light them home, each confidently believing the full
moon was shining in all her splendor, they saw the way so
well.
When Jacob rapped next at the parsonage, it was not to
entreat a night's lodging, and the door opened so wide, and
the parson smiled so blandly, he could hardly believe it was
the same house or the same man he had seen before; and
when he sat next in the pew, at church, with Mrs. Goforth and
Elsy, not Elsy Goforth any more, there was nobody in all the
house that did not see them, and smile, and shake hands.
Jacob never had another fit, and the manly dignity and
propriety of his conduct soon won for him, not only the esteem
and admiration of all the neighborhood, but led the people
to believe they had wronged him in their first accusation; and
they bestowed upon Mrs. Goforth the reputation of having a
gift for curing fits, and many were the applications for advice
she received in consequence. When she assured them that she
practised no art, and that simply doing as she would be done
by, was all her wisdom, there was invariably disappointment
and sorrow, so hard is it to understand the hardest of human
possibilities, and the most wonder-working. Five years after
the mysterious cure, Jacob Holcom owned one of the prettiest
little farms about Clovernook, and in all that time Elsy and he
had never had any disagreement, except when he affirmed that
she was an angel, which she always stoutly denied; but she
was a good and true wife, and that is but a little lower than
an angel.
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