University of Virginia Library

19. CHAPTER XIX.

Ten years! A segment of the great circle of eternity!
How much of the long past abides in so brief a period!
Rivulets of influence which started, perhaps, with the subsidence
of the flood, and have been joined by other rivulets
flowing from rifts in the stratified centuries, or have been
turned aside into sluggish circuits through long ages, have,
in ten years, deposited their store of blessings or curses,
and, at the same moment, sunk in the sands. Ten years!
They are the high road of destiny, crowded with shouting
multitudes—multitudes in chariots—multitudes in armor—
multitudes chasing golden phantoms—eager-eyed and sleepless
multitudes—multitudes in rags and wretchedness—
multitudes trodden upon and forgotten in death. Ten
years! Ten hours of joy—ten ages of sorrow! Seed-time
of a harvest which shall not be fully reaped and garnered
till the stars, now throbbing and flashing in the
strength and beauty of their youth, shall flicker and fall.
Ten sweeps of the wing of that great angel who, earthward
bound, bears the proclamation that time shall be no more!
Ten years! They transform helpless infants into bounding
children, confer manhood on boyhood, make matrons of
maidens, stamp wrinkles upon the brow of beauty, bring
declining years to senile idiocy, draw millions into life, bear
millions to their death, stud a heaven of hope with stars and
blot them all out, and, yet, only ten years!

Ten busy years swept over the settlement of Agawam,
and wrought their changes and left their traces—wiping
away old memories with new experiences; raising up one,

and bowing down another; bearing cups of joy to some,
and clothing others in the weeds of mourning; involving
old identities in new associations and circumstances, and
preparing the field for a fresh and more interesting survey.
In ten years, the Bay Path had been changed from a simple
bridle path to a worn and frequented highway. Packed
horses went and came upon it through all the summer and
autumn; land hunters, in merry parties, cantered along its
shady aisles; emigrants coming from and returning to the
Bay, with strange freights of children and household stuffs,
and droves of cows and goats, crept along the solitudes
which it divided, and lighted nightly their lonely fires; Mr.
Pynchon, with a pleasant retinue of companions, which not
unfrequently numbered some of the women of the plantation,
went twice a year to attend the General Court, and
the artery connecting the distant settlement with the body
of the colony throbbed more freely with the life and influence
of the growing heart.

In ten years, Mr. Pynchon had greatly changed. Those
years had brought him seriousness with increasing care, and
determination with strengthening convictions of duty. The
increase in the population of the settlement by immigration,
brought in new materials, the strongest portion of which
were those with which he found himself inharmonious. His
heart rebelled against influences which he felt were beginning
to control the minds around him. The old creed, which
he hoped to see liberalized and simplified, was growing still
more strait. The community which he had been endeavoring
to mould into the semblance of his beautiful Ideal had
become warped, so that he hardly recognised it. Driven in
upon himself, forced in his declining years to see others
outstripping him in enterprise, and conscious of the advance
of errors which he had from motives of policy sought to
neutralize in their effect, rather than oppose in themselves,
he busied himself with his Bible, his thoughts, and his pen.

He began to write—uncertainly at first, reading and carefully
revising as he wrote, from day to day; and then, as
he became more interested in his work, he devoted himself
with entire ardor to the fulfilment of the mission he had
assigned himself. For weeks and months the work progressed.
During the day he wrote, and during the night
he studied the Scriptures and prayed; and when at last the
huge mass of manuscript lay before him, he found that he
had written a book on theology. Little did he dream, as
he turned over its leaves, interlining a sentence here, and
correcting a word there, that his own fate and that of the
plantation were involved in its pages!

The changes that began in Mr. Moxon, when he first became
unsettled in his religious belief, went on during ten
years with great rapidity. Even his occasional fits of
strength and independence became, at first, widely intermittent,
and then ceased altogether, until at last he had
degenerated into a weak-minded, melancholy, fearful, and
humble man. He moved about the streets quietly, looking
hurriedly around at the slightest noise, as if he anticipated
the appearance of some danger. His little ones had become
ten years older, but they were puny and stunted children,
and still the sources of severe trials. They still had their
strange fits; and their pitiable case had been commended
to God, at the public request of their father, by all the
members of the church. They were talked about, and at
every new attack from which they suffered, the probabilities
touching the authorship of their torments were thoroughly
canvassed, until half the people in the plantation
had been mentioned as objects of suspicion.

Mr. Moxon's mind, shut up within a rigid creed, which,
in many points, chafed and benumbed his reason, shrank
from the walls of the inclosure, and became dry and dead.
He had fed on no liberal ideas. He had had no enlargement,
and there, hemmed in on every side, and afraid to

burst out, he had clutched at effete superstitions, and eaten
them in silence and fear. His ministrations upon the Sabbath
had become uninstructive and uninteresting, and had come
to be regarded with lamentable indifference by his people.

Ten years came down on Holyoke's rough house, and the
walls became blackened by the sun and rain; but the
ground looked so pleasantly around, and so many delightful
associations were connected with it, that it had a cheerful
look to all. On Holyoke, ten years had wrought a great
work. Satisfied in his affections, blest in his home, happy
in his Christian experience, and in fellowship with a mind
that fostered every good motive, nourished every good
resolve, and rewarded with the sweetest and only praise he
sought every difficult achievement and noble deed, he could
not choose but outgrow even his own expectations of
growth, and become, in his own modest consciousness,
more noble and manly than he had once supposed a man in
active contact with the world could be. Everyone looked
upon him as one of the coming men—one who, in the
future, would fill an important place in the plantation, if
not in the colony. Time had fed him; experience had
given him strength. The love that burned warmly at his
heart, and the angel that fed the flame, kept all the chords
of his being in harmony; and while, from this fact, he was
able to give his whole soul and undivided energies to whatever
work he undertook, his mental and spiritual growth
was, from the same fact, symmetrical, and strong as a natural
consequence of its symmetry.

Mary Holyoke hardly looked older by a day than when
she was married, yet she had known many cares and anxieties,
for three beautiful children played around the hearth-stone.
Yet Mary Holyoke had changed even more than
her husband. With advancing years, she had grown more
and more silent and diffident. She saw the growth of her
husband, and in the gratification which it gave her, and the

sweet cares imposed upon her by her children, she became
greatly self-forgetful. The more intimately she communed
with the masculine mind with which she was associated,
the more she saw its depth, its power, and its beauty; and
the greater became her admiration of it. She did not measure
herself by it, but she was content to add herself to it
and blend herself with it. She experienced no sense of
humiliation at his side, but, on the contrary, emotions of
noble and ennobling pride. His love was the sweetest
blessing the earth had for her; his admiration the sweetest
praise. When she dressed, it was for him; when she labored,
it was for him; when he was absent, all time that
was not devoted to him and those he loved, was a burden;
when she left him, it was to fly back, at the first opportunity,
to him and the home in which he had made her so
happy and himself so essential to her happiness. She asserted
no prominent place in the neighborhood where she
might have had commanding influence, because she was
content to feed the springs of love and power of one who
could fill that office as she could not. In this beautiful
devotion, her heart had known no cankering envy, no bitter
self-revilings, no vain regrets. Passion had left no trace
upon her cheeks, jealousy and pride and selfish discontent
had ploughed no furrows across her brow; and even the
fresh blush of maidenhood had only given place to a maturer
grace—a deeper, broader, and softer glory—which
happy maternity may alone bestow. She had been content
to be a woman, and to follow the promptings of her own
loving heart; and in devoting herself to her husband and
children, had found the highest happiness she had ever
known.

The difference in the character of the changes that respectively
passed over Mary Holyoke and her sister, Ann
Smith, was as great as that of the respective motives by
which they were actuated. Ann was married to a man

with whom a sense of duty was the highest motive of action.
He had a strong will, and she readily took the coloring he
gave her. She performed the duties of a wife. She kept
the house, and clothed the children, and cooked the food,
and mended her husband's garments, because as the wife
of Henry Smith it came within the line of her duty, and
because she knew that Henry Smith would regard the service
in that light, and not as any direct manifestation of
love to him. Thus labor became a burden, and sacrifice a
sorrow. Thus toil lost its dignity and its dignifying influence.
Thus discontent became a tenant of her heart by a
perpetual lease, signed and sealed by her husband. Thus
upon her face the bloom of girlhood was never replaced
by any grace that atoned for its loss. Thus her features
assumed permanently the hard lines which were the appropriate
expression of her prevalent thoughts and emotions.
Thus the corrugation of care which slept behind the fair
disguise of health, or became exhausted before they
reached the soft plump outlines of the surface, displayed
themselves in permanent wrinkles so soon as youth and
health began to wane. Thus she became old before her
time.

The character of Henry Smith had grown without being
enlarged—that is, the qualities of mind and heart that were
his when the reader first made his acquaintance, were by
the experience of ten years simply intensified or strengthened.
There was no change in the outlines of his character.
The identities of his being had all been preserved. He
had adopted a system of opinions on almost every subject
that interested him in youth, and as manhood came on he
shut off the influx of light and knowledge, having got
enough for his purposes. All his opinions and sentiments
were clearly arranged in his own mind, and as he could and
would talk of nothing beyond his range, he had the reputation
of being clear-headed and strong-minded. He had

tracked over every channel of his soul till he knew it as he
did the paths around the plantation. He knew just what
arguments and illustrations he had on hand, as well as he
knew what trees grew hickory nuts and chestnuts upon his
farm. In his own consciousness mind was cut up in patches
like his home-lot, each patch being productive of some useful
fruit, and while the whole might be made more fruitful
even as the home-lot might, its area, like that, could never
be increased by any intrinsic principle of growth. He was
a kind of cast-iron man—a perfectly reliable man—a man
whom one always knew where to find, and with humble
ostentation he gloried in the character.

What did ten years do for Peter Trimble? The first of
the ten found him a small lad. He had not growth enough
for his years; and while he remained small, his roguery
seemed to be so concentrated that a successful attempt to
check the appropriate expression might have been fatal.
But, at the close of the year, his master, whose attention was
called to the subject, found the bottoms of the legs of Peter's
trowsers in the immediate vicinity of his knees. He saw
that the boy had begun to grow in earnest, and then recognised
the fact that as the length of his limbs had increased
his roguishness had diminished.

Year after year this process went on until he arrived at
manhood with a stoop in his shoulders, bashfulness in his
manners, a tuft of white beard upon his chin which was invisible
at a short distance, and a populous settlement of the
most inflammable and intractable pimples upon his face.
Peter's legs seemed to have a great influence in his conversion
to good behavior. The utter disparity between his
legs and his favorite pursuits first became apparent to him
on the occasion of his tripping up a small boy as the boy did
not happen to be so long as his legs; and after that, he half
unconsciously adopted his legs as a moral standard, and
they certainly answered an excellent purpose. While his

legs thus became the means of his reformation, his pimples
did good service in confirming him in principles of sobriety.
They made him modest and retiring, for he was as conscious
of each particular pimple as if it were a burning mountain.
Each florid protuberance seemed to possess an independent
power of blushing, and would redden as it felt itself the subject
of observation until his face appeared like a chart, representing
all the stages of active inflammation.

If he had an errand at any house in the settlement, the
last thing he did before knocking at the door was to draw
his hands down over his face, and, as the surface was smooth
or rough, he was bold or embarrassed in his interview with
the individuals with whom his business lay. Sometimes,
when his face felt extremely rough and uneven, he was
obliged to look down upon his legs for reassurance of his
manhood, and thus those organs became more than a simple
moral standard—became, in fact, a motive force, by
which the spurs were put to resolution. In short, Peter
was so thoroughly changed that one who had not seen him
in ten years, would not have recognised him at all. He was
a new creation. He was as if he had been literally what he
had been often denominated figuratively—“a hard little
nut”—which had fallen to the ground, burst open, and given
birth to a tall chestnut sapling, either absorbing the nut or
entirely covering it from sight.

Mary Woodcock had become a woman, and her sharp
black eye had grown large, and, softened by new sympathies,
very beautiful. It was a most legible index to an uneasily
balanced, passionate nature. It seemed sympathetic
and inviting, and yet repulsive, with a kind of reckless disdain.
To many susceptible temperaments, it was charged
with the most intense fascination. Her eye was apparently
all that any one saw who came into her presence. A stranger
would have remembered nothing but her eye. Her size,
form, face—all would have been forgotten in the recollection

of that wonderful revelation of character, that subtle
detecter of sympathy, that inquisitor of motive, that inspheration
of soul. One watched it involuntarily, and without
being conscious that that was the only object observed, as
one watches a whole face for the perusal of the emotions
which express themselves in its changes. It had its sunshine,
its clouds, its depths of thoughtful coolness, its flashes
of passion, its dances of delight, its phases of humid softness,
its half-repulsive glarings of wild merriment, and all those
appreciable but indescribable intermediate shadings and interminglings
of emotion, passion, sentiment, and thought,
which found birth and being within her soul.

Yet she had few sympathies with her own sex. Her
development never lost the bias towards masculineness
given to it in its initiative stages. Not that she was coarse,
or offensively and improperly bold; but her individuality
had the faculty and characteristic of standing alone. She
leaned on no one, and had no wish to lean. She had no
confidant but her benefactress—no intimate associate of her
own age—and she had no desire for one. If she had any
desire touching man or woman, it was that she might
receive his or her confidence and trust, and to stand in the
relation of a protector or supporter. In such a relation,
she could dare or do anything.

Everybody felt that Mary Woodcock was attractive, and
yet everybody naturally and specially subject to her
attractions, was afraid of her. There was a scar upon the
minister's hand which every one in the plantation had seen.
All knew or believed, that there was incorporated in her
nature a terrible temper.

Mr. Moxon's children were still subject to their strange
fits, and there was, necessarily, in the minds of the credulous—and
nearly all were such—some medium or agency
by which the Satanic influence was communicated. After
everybody in the plantation against whom a suspicion

could by possibility be indulged, had been taken up by the
reckless fingers of gossip, turned over, and dropped, the
ill-starred orphan was fixed upon as the one who most
probably was in the blame. The scar upon Mr. Moxon's
hand was evidence of her spite against him, and the banishment
and disgrace of her father, in consequence, indirectly
at least, of his reputed agency in tormenting the children,
were deemed motives sufficient to induce her to perpetuate
the work he had commenced.

These things were not talked about openly, yet everybody
knew of them, and had not the girl been under the
protection of Holyoke and his wife, she would have been
subjected to great annoyances, if not to unrestrained persecution.
As it was, she became aware of the suspicions
held, and influences operative against her, and the consciousness—as
her mood might be—wearied, sickened, soured, or
maddened her.

There were also shadowy reports in regard to certain
interviews that Mary had been known to have with men,
or forms, who came and went in the night; and a very
singular looking communication had been found addressed
to her. This had been passed from hand to hand, and
finally came into the possession of Mr. Moxon, who put it
under lock and key, with the impression that it might possibly
be of use to him. These facts formed the basis of all
kinds of stories, which did not require ten years for such
growth and modification as to place them beyond the
recognition of their first acquaintances.

At the house of Mr. Pynchon, a new spirit had taken
possession. Mary had long been absent. The old lady
grew more and more quiet, from year to year, and, busying
herself in the small economies of the establishment, left
the labor to the devoted servants of the household; while
John, the boy pupil of Mary, came early into man's estate,
and assumed naturally and boldly its responsibilities.

During all these years, what changes had come over John
Woodcock? None in the plantation could tell. He had
not once been heard of in the settlements eastward or at
the south; but, though none had seen him, there were very
few who did not believe that he was alive. There was one
who knew him to be alive, or, rather, who had no doubt
of the fact. This was his daughter. She had received, at
the hand of Commuk, the Indian, a score of communications,
rudely traced upon strips of birch bark, consisting of
warnings, bits of information in regard to her position in
the neighborhood, scraps of advice, &c. These were nearly
always accompanied by presents, larger or smaller, in silver
money or wampum; and though the communications had
no signature, and the gifts no nominal donor, she had no
doubts touching their common origin. The Indian messenger
answered no questions, and made no explanations.

Within the first year after Woodcock's withdrawal from
the plantation, the discharge of a gun was occasionally
heard in the forest, when all belonging to the plantation
were at home. An Indian was seen, on one occasion, with
a musket in his hand, but he suddenly fled from sight, and
as, in one way and another, the Indians generally became
possessed of fire-arms, the matter was forgotten.

The reader has been made acquainted with the changes
which ten years had wrought upon his acquaintances in the
plantation of Agawam. As he recognises, one after another,
through their faded lineaments or modified characteristics,
those in whom he has acquired an interest, he is ready to
join their hands in sympathy, and pass forward with them
to the resolution of the problem of their lives, and, perhaps,
make a few new acquaintances with them on the way.