University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
THE PLACE AND PEOPLE.

Joseph Asten's nature was shy and sensitive, but not
merely from a habit of introversion. He saw no deeper into
himself, in fact, than his moods and sensations, and thus
quite failed to recognize what it was that kept him apart
from the society in which he should have freely moved. He
felt the difference of others, and constantly probed the pain
and embarrassment it gave him, but the sources wherefrom
it grew were the last which he would have guessed.

A boy's life may be weakened for growth, in all its fibres,
by the watchfulness of a too anxious love, and the guidance
of a too exquisitely nurtured conscience. He may be so
trained in the habits of goodness, and purity, and duty, that
every contact with the world is like an abrasion upon the
delicate surface of his soul. Every wind visits him too
roughly, and he shrinks from the encounters which brace
true manliness, and strengthen it for the exercise of good.

The rigid piety of Joseph's mother was warmed and
softened by her tenderness towards him, and he never felt it
as a yoke. His nature instinctively took the imprint of
hers, and she was happy in seeing so clear a reflection of
herself in his innocent young heart. She prolonged his
childhood, perhaps without intending it, into the years when
the unrest of approaching manhood should have led him to
severer studies and lustier sports. Her death transferred
his guardianship to other hands, but did not change its

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 715EAF. Tipped-in Material. Gift tag with "Merry Christmas from junior to Aunt Helen" written on it.]

character. Her sister Rachel was equally good and conscientious,
possibly with an equal capacity for tenderness,
but her barren life had restrained the habit of its expression.
Joseph could not but confess that she was guided by the
strictest sense of duty, but she seemed to him cold, severe,
unsympathetic. There were times when the alternative
presented itself to his mind, of either allowing her absolute
control of all his actions, or wounding her to the heart by asserting
a moderate amount of independence.

He was called fortunate, but it was impossible for him
consciously to feel his fortune. The two hundred acres of
the farm, stretching back over the softly swelling hills which
enclosed the valley on the east, were as excellent soil as the
neighborhood knew; the stock was plentiful; the house,
barn, and all the appointments of the place were in the best
order, and he was the sole owner of all. The work of his
own hands was not needed, but it was a mechanical exhaustion
of time,—an enforced occupation of body and mind,
which he followed in the vague hope that some richer development
of life might come afterwards. But there were
times when the fields looked very dreary,—when the trees,
rooted in their places, and growing under conditions which
they were powerless to choose or change, were but tiresome
types of himself,—when even the beckoning heights far down
the valley failed to touch his fancy with the hint of a
broader world. Duty said to him, “You must be perfectly
contented in your place!” but there was the miserable, ungrateful,
inexplicable fact of discontent.

Furthermore, he had by this time discovered that certain
tastes which he possessed were so many weaknesses—if not,
indeed, matters of reproach—in the eyes of his neighbors.
The delight and the torture of finer nerves—an inability to

use coarse and strong phrases, and a shrinking from all display
of rude manners—were peculiarities which he could not
overcome, and must endeavor to conceal. There were men
of sturdy intelligence in the community; but none of refined
culture, through whom he might have measured and understood
himself; and the very qualities, therefore, which
should have been his pride, gave him only a sense of shame.

Two memories haunted him, after the evening at Warriner's;
and, though so different, they were not to be disconnected.
No two girls could be more unlike than Lucy
Henderson and Miss Julia Blessing; he had known one for
years, and the other was the partial acquaintance of an evening;
yet the image of either one was swiftly followed by
that of the other. When he thought of Lucy's eyes, Miss
Julia's hand stole over his shoulder; when he recalled the
glossy ringlets of the latter, he saw, beside them, the faintly
flushed cheek and the pure, sweet mouth which had awakened
in him his first daring desire.

Phantoms as they were, they seemed to have taken equal
possession of the house, the garden, and the fields. While
Lucy sat quietly by the window, Miss Julia skipped lightly
along the adjoining hall. One lifted a fallen rose-branch on
the lawn, the other snatched the reddest blossom from it.
One leaned against the trunk of the old hemlock-tree, the
other fluttered in and out among the clumps of shrubbery;
but the lonely green was wonderfully brightened by these
visions of pink and white, and Joseph enjoyed the fancy
without troubling himself to think what it meant.

The house was seated upon a gentle knoll, near the head
of a side-valley sunk like a dimple among the hills which enclosed
the river-meadows, scarcely a quarter of a mile away.
It was nearly a hundred years old, and its massive walls

were faced with checkered bricks, alternately red and black,
to which the ivy clung with tenacious feet wherever it was
allowed to run. The gables terminated in broad double
chimneys, between which a railed walk, intended for a lookout,
but rarely used for that or any other purpose, rested on
the peak of the roof. A low portico paved with stone extended
along the front, which was further shaded by two
enormous sycamore-trees as old as the house itself. The
evergreens and ornamental shrubs which occupied the remainder
of the little lawn denoted the taste of a later generation.
To the east, an open turfy space, in the centre of
which stood a superb weeping-willow, divided the house
from the great stone barn with its flanking cribs and “overshoots;”
on the opposite side lay the sunny garden, with
gnarled grape-vines clambering along its walls, and a double
row of tall old box-bushes, each grown into a single solid
mass, stretching down the centre.

The fields belonging to the property, softly rising and
following the undulations of the hills, limited the landscape
on three sides; but on the south there was a fair view of the
valley of the larger stream, with its herd-speckled meadows,
glimpses of water between the fringing trees, and farm-houses
sheltered among the knees of the farther hills. It was a region
of peace and repose and quiet, drowsy beauty, and
there were few farms which were not the ancestral homes of
the families who held them. The people were satisfied, for
they lived upon a bountiful soil; and if but few were notably
rich, still fewer were absolutely poor. They had a sluggish
sense of content, a half-conscious feeling that their lines
were cast in pleasant places; they were orderly, moral, and
generally honest, and their own types were so constantly reproduced
and fixed, both by intermarriage and intercourse,

that any variation therein was a thing to be suppressed if
possible. Any sign of an unusual taste, or a different view
of life, excited their suspicion, and the most of them were
incapable of discriminating between independent thought on
moral and social questions, and “free-thinking” in the religious
significance which they attached to the word. Political
excitements, it is true, sometimes swept over the neighborhood,
but in a mitigated form; and the discussions which
then took place between neighbors of opposite faith were
generally repetitions of the arguments furnished by their respective
county papers.

To one whose twofold nature conformed to the common
mould,—into whom, before his birth, no mysterious element
had been infused, to be the basis of new sensations,
desires, and powers,—the region was a paradise of peaceful
days. Even as a boy the probable map of his life was
drawn: he could behold himself as young man, as husband,
father, and comfortable old man, by simply looking upon
these various stages in others.

If, however, his senses were not sluggish, but keen; if
his nature reached beyond the ordinary necessities, and
hungered for the taste of higher things; if he longed to
share in that life of the world, the least part of which was
known to his native community; if, not content to accept
the mechanical faith of passive minds, he dared to repeat
the long struggle of the human race in his own spiritual and
mental growth; then,—why, then, the region was not a
paradise of peaceful days.

Rachel Miller, now that the dangerous evening was over,
was shrewd enough to resume her habitual manner towards
her nephew. Her curiosity to know what had been done,
and how Joseph had been affected by the merry-making,

rendered her careful not to frighten him from the subject by
warnings or reproaches. He was frank and communicative,
and Rachel found, to her surprise, that the evening at Warriner's
was much, and not wholly unpleasantly, in her
thoughts during her knitting-hours. The farm-work was
briskly forwarded; Joseph was active in the field, and decidedly
brighter in the house; and when he announced the
new engagement, with an air which hinted that his attendance
was a matter of course, she was only able to say:—

“I'm very much mistaken if that's the end. Get agoing
once, and there's no telling where you'll fetch up. I suppose
that town's girl won't stay much longer,—the farm-work
of the neighborhood couldn't stand it,—and so she
means to have all she can while her visit lasts.”

“Indeed, Aunt,” Joseph protested, “Elwood Withers
first proposed it, and the others all agreed.”

“And ready enough they were, I'll be bound.”

“Yes, they were,” Joseph replied, with a little more firmness
than usual. “All of them. And there was no respectable
family in the neighborhood that wasn't represented.”

Rachel made an effort and kept silence. The innovation
might be temporary, and in that case it were prudent to
take no further notice; or it might be the beginning of a
change in the ways of the young people, and if so, she
needed further knowledge in order to work successfully
against it in Joseph's case.

She little suspected how swiftly and closely the question
would be brought to her own door.

A week afterwards the second of the evening parties was
held, and was even more successful than the first. Everybody
was there, bringing a cheerful memory of the former

occasion, and Miss Julia Blessing, no longer dreaded as an
unknown scrutinizing element, was again the life and soul
of the company. It was astonishing how correctly she retained
the names and characteristics of all those whom she
had already met, and how intelligently she seemed to enjoy
the gossip of the neighborhood. It was remarked that her
dress was studiously simple, as if to conform to country
ways, yet the airy, graceful freedom of her manner gave it a
character of elegance which sufficiently distinguished her
from the other girls.

Joseph felt that she looked to him, as by an innocent
natural instinct, for a more delicate and intimate recognition
than she expected to find elsewhere. Fragments of
sentences, parenthetical expressions, dropped in her lively
talk, were always followed by a quick glance which said to
him: “We have one feeling in common; I know that you
understand me.” He was fascinated, but the experience
was so new that it was rather bewildering. He was drawn
to catch her seemingly random looks,—to wait for them,
and then shrink timidly when they came, feeling all the
while the desire to be in the quiet corner, outside the merry
circle of talkers, where sat Lucy Henderson.

When, at last, a change in the diversions of the evening
brought him to Lucy's side, she seemed to him grave and
preoccupied. Her words lacked the pleasant directness and
self-possession which had made her society so comfortable to
him. She no longer turned her full face towards him while
speaking, and he noticed that her eyes were wandering over
the company with a peculiar expression, as if she were trying
to listen with them. It seemed to him, also, that Elwood
Withers, who was restlessly moving about the room,
was watching some one, or waiting for something.

“I have it!” suddenly cried Miss Blessing, floating towards
Joseph and Lucy; “it shall be you, Mr. Asten!”

“Yes,” echoed Anna Warriner, following; “if it could
be, how delightful!”

“Hush, Anna dear! Let us keep the matter secret!”
whispered Miss Blessing, assuming a mysterious air; “we
will slip away and consult; and, of course, Lucy must come
with us.”

“Now,” she resumed, when the four found themselves
alone in the old-fashioned dining-room, “we must, first of
all, explain everything to Mr. Asten The question is,
where we shall meet, next week. McNaughtons are building
an addition (I believe you call it) to their barn, and a
child has the measles at another place, and something else is
wrong somewhere else. We cannot interfere with the
course of nature; but neither should we give up these
charming evenings without making an effort to continue
them. Our sole hope and reliance is on you, Mr. Asten.”

She pronounced the words with a mock solemnity, clasping
her hands, and looking into his face with bright, eager,
laughing eyes.

“If it depended on myself—” Joseph began.

“O, I know the difficulty, Mr. Asten!” she exclaimed;
“and really, it's unpardonable in me to propose such a thing.
But isn't it possible—just possible—that Miss Miller might
be persuaded by us?”

“Julia dear!” cried Anna Warriner, “I believe there's
nothing you'd be afraid to undertake.”

Joseph scarcely knew what to say. He looked from one
to the other, coloring slightly, and ready to turn pale the
next moment, as he endeavored to imagine how his aunt
would receive such an astounding proposition.

“There is no reason why she should be asked,” said
Lucy. “It would be a great annoyance to her.”

“Indeed?” said Miss Blessing; “then I should be so
sorry! But I caught a glimpse of your lovely place the
other day as were driving up the valley. It was a perfect
picture,—and I have such a desire to see it nearer!”

“Why will you not come, then?” Joseph eagerly asked.
Lucy's words seemed to him blunt and unfriendly, although
he knew they had been intended for his relief.

“It would be a great pleasure; yet, if I thought your
aunt would be annoyed—”

“I am sure she will be glad to make your acquaintance,”
said Joseph, with a reproachful side-glance at Lucy.

Miss Blessing noticed the glance. “I am more sure,” she
said, playfully, “that she will be very much amused at my
ignorance and inexperience. And I don't believe Lucy
meant to frighten me. As for the party, we won't think of
that now; but you will go with us, Lucy, won't you,—with
Anna and myself, to make a neighborly afternoon call?”

Lucy felt obliged to accede to a request so amiably made,
after her apparent rudeness. Yet she could not force herself
to affect a hearty acquiescence, and Joseph thought her
singularly cold.

He did not doubt but that Miss Blessing, whose warm,
impulsive nature seemed to him very much what his own
might be if he dared to show it, would fulfil her promise.
Neither did he doubt that so much innocence and sweetness
as she possessed would make a favorable impression upon
his aunt; but he judged it best not to inform the latter of
the possible visit.