 | I. My third book |  |
1. I.
IT was a wild, wet December night, full of tempest.
Outside the red wooden house in the hollow, where
Moses Grant had lived all his respectable life, the
winds blew with an eerie sound, like a lost spirit's
wail, and the snow fell steadily, folding the earth in
great white shrouds.
Moses Grant and his wife sat before the fire. A
cheerful glow came out from the blazing logs; a mug
of cider was toasting unheeded on the hearth, and a
few apples stood untouched on the stand between
them. Every thing in this peaceful family sitting-room
wore a snug and comfortable look, from the
neat bed standing in a recess in the wall, with homemade
blue woolen spread and snowy linen, to the
brightly-polished powter plates upon the dresser and
the unsoiled sand on the white floor.
Outside, through the snow and the storm, tottered
a single female figure—wearily, painfully, as if every
step must be her last. Forsaken of God and man, the
very elements seemed to do battle with her—the winds
blew her feeble steps backward—the snow piled up
higher and higher drifts before her feet, and yet those
feeble feet tottered on—over the drifts, against the
wind—steadily toward the red house in the hollow.
There was a strange shadow on the face of that meek
woman, Moses Grant's wife. Her knitting had fallen
from her busy fingers, her foot tapped the floor with a
restless beat, and at last, as if she could endure the
stillness no longer, she arose and began moving hurriedly
about the room, giving a touch here and there
to her domestic arrangements, and now and then going
stealthily to the window to look forth into the night.
“Oh!” she cried, in a low voice, “God have mercy
—this pitiless, pitiless storm!”
“You are thinking of Margaret,” said the slow, firm
tones of Moses Grant.
The woman started, and dropped the candlestick she
held in her confusion. She turned ghastly pale, and
grasped the dresser, near which she stood, for support.
If a grave had opened at her very feet she would have
been no more overwhelmed with wonder. For many
months in that household that name—Margaret—had
been dead and buried—a forbidden sound. Perhaps
—her eyes gleamed with a wild hope, and the color
came back to her cheeks—perhaps her husband had
relented; perhaps he would forgive their child—their
Margaret. She went toward him, that meek woman,
and, kneeling at his feet, lifted up her pleading voice.
“Surely, father, I may speak of her, now you have
called her name. It may be you are willing to forgive
her—to let her come back again. Five-and-twenty
years I have walked patiently by your side; I have
tried to be a help-meet to you. God has given us seven
children, and we have made their graves—all but
one—behind the church on the hill-top. And now
she is gone—the last—my one child—Margaret. Oh,
husband, will you forgive her? Will you let her come
And perhaps she has not sinned as we have thought.
She was a good child always, our Margaret. She
loved the church and the Bible, and you used to say
no one else learned their lessons in the catechism so
well as she. We are getting old, father—may I have
my girl back again?”
The old man's face had worked convulsively while
she poured forth her pleading prayer, but it settled
back now into stony, immovable calm. He looked
sternly at the woman crouching at his knees, as if she,
too, had some share in Margaret's sin. He said, in
his cold, resolved tones,
“It is of no use. If we would take the child back
we do not even know where to seek her. She is dead
to us, now and forever. Hear me, Mary: if she lay
at this moment outside that door, with this storm falling
on her bare, unsheltered head, I would not open it
one inch to let her in. She has made her bed; she
shall lie in it. We have lived here many years—I,
and my father, and my father's father—elders, one after
another, in the church—and when did disgrace ever
come to our humble, honest name, till she brought it?
She chose that bad young man and his unholy love,
and father and mother she has none. Hear me, Mary;
we are childless. Let her name never pass your lips
or mine.”
The woman rose and groped blindly to her chair.
She sat there with half-closed eyes, swaying herself to
and fro, muttering now and then, “Oh, this pitiless
storm!”
Outside, the figure tottered on.
Suddenly there was a cry borne upon the blast—a
piercing into the red house, piercing Moses Grant's
firm, stony heart, as he sat before the fire. A weight
seemed to fall helplessly against the outside door, and
then there was silence.
The mother sprang up and mechanically threw open
the door, and the snow tumbled in, and the wailing
wind rushed in. What was it lying there, stiff and
helpless, upon the stone step, lifting up, whiter than
the snow, its ghastly human face? The old man
sprang to his wife's side. He had overrated his own
stoicism. He shook her arm, almost harshly.
“What are you thinking of, Mary?” he cried, passionately;
“have you no mother's heart? will you let
her die there before your eyes—our child, Margaret?”
He caught the prostrate figure in his arms—to his
breast; he carried her in, to the warmth, the light, the
father's house whence she had wandered; and then
the cold, iron man wept over her like a helpless child;
while the mother, fully herself now, worked with wild
energy, collecting and applying restoratives, chafing
the thin hands and the numb, half-frozen feet.
Her efforts were successful in so far that the girl, for
she was not more than eighteen, opened her eyes and
came back to life with a gasping shudder. She did
not seem quite restored, however, to the full use of
her faculties. She spoke by snatches, in a strange,
wandering fashion.
“I thought I was dead,” she said, “but I'm not.
This is home, isn't it? and there's father! What do
you cry so for, father? You never used to. I never
saw you do so before. Oh! I know; you are crying
about poor Margaret. You think, now, that she
home.”
“Margaret,” broke in her mother's voice, “were
you deceived? Did you think you were married to
that man—that Gilbert Trumbull?”
It was pitiful to see such fierce passion in one so
gentle as Margaret Grant, who, from childhood, had
never known a thought save of loving submission to
her parents' will, until that stronger love came and
compelled her obedience in another direction. The
blood mantled her pale cheek, and burned there in
one round red spot. She rose up in the bed, and
shrieked out, with her eyes gleaming, her frame trembling,
“You shall not, I say you shall not speak his name
—you who hate him so. You shall not drive me into
betraying his secret. Turn me out again into the
storm, if you will. I can die there as well as here;
but you shall not make me answer your questions.”
“Hush, darling, darling, darling,” murmured Mary
Grant; the mother-love, the mother-tenderness, stronger
than life, choking in her voice, thrilling in her touch,
raining in tears from her eyes: “you shall not tell me
if you do not wish to. Be satisfied. You shall never
go out into the cold world again; you shall never suffer
any more.”
And Moses Grant wept on, the while, his proud,
stony heart melted, for the time, quite into childishness;
saying nothing, only looking now and then at
the girl whom his anger had driven forth, and who
had come back to him—alas! he knew it now, to die.
That night a babe was born in the red house in the
life that awaited her? Outside were the snow, the
darkness, the pitiless, wailing blast; within, only the
girl, so young, so fair even in her ruin, and the two
old people, tearless now and silent, keeping breathless
watch over their one child.
The baby came into the world with a wail. Mary
Grant brought forth from an old bureau, where they
had lain for almost eighteen years, the tiny garments,
soft and delicate in fabric, antique and simple in make,
which her own fingers had fashioned, joyfully, hopefully,
for her youngest-born, Margaret; and in them
she robed Margaret's child.
But death was written on the young mother's brow,
and the parents could not choose but read. She drew
her little one to her arms, and, holding her on her bosom,
she blessed her.
“She shall be called Elinor Trumbull, after the
mother of her father.” When she had said these
words, in a firm, quiet tone of command, she seemed
to sink in unconsciousness. After a time she roused
herself with wild energy.
“Let no one defraud my child of her name,” she
cried out. “It is hers—she has a right to it. Father,
mother, promise me that you will call her by this
name—Elinor Trumbull?”
The two old people, with one consent, faltered the
required promise, and then she said, in a humble tone,
“Before I die, forgive me, my parents. God knows
I have loved you, in spite of all I have done to make
you suffer. Tell me that you forgive me.”
They forgave her without reproach or question.
They blessed her with tender tears, and, sitting at her
sort of drowse, still holding her babe on her breast.
After that she never opened her eyes, but she murmured
dreamily of green fields and fragrant blossoms,
and the babblings of summer brooks, blent now and
then with loving words or tender memories about her
baby's father. Then all was very still, and they
thought her sleeping; but somehow, I know not how,
unseen and silently, from that calm her soul stole forth,
and was translated to the great endless calm lying beyond.
Margaret was dead!
For the next two days the storm raged with unabated
violence. The snow, swept by the fierce wind
from the mountain tops, was piled high in the valleys,
and Moses Grant and his wife were all alone with their
dead child and the living babe she had left them. In
the interim much of his old sternness had come back
to the elder's heart, the self-command and reticence to
his outward life. I think he remembered his promise,
that the little one should be called by the name of her
father's family, with a kind of grim satisfaction in
keeping with the silent pride of his character. The
village where he lived was in the western part of Connecticut,
under the shadows of the mountains, and
Trumbull was an old and proud name in the far eastern
portion. Gilbert Trumbull had won Margaret
Grant's love during a shooting season among the hills,
and, a few months after he left Mayfield, driven forth
by her father's harshness and scorn, she had followed
him. Trumbull was a name any woman might be
proud to wear worthily, and Moses Grant was well resolved
the world should never know, through him, that
it did not legitimately belong to his infant grandchild.
For two days the elements did battle, but the third
morning of Elinor Trumbull's life rose calm, and
bright, and fair. Early in the day Moses Grant went
forth to seek the pastor of the old Presbyterian church,
in which he had been an elder for so many years, and
arrange for his daughter's burial.
That afternoon, where the snow had been scooped
away behind the church on the hill-top, they laid the
elder's last child, beside her six brothers and sisters,
in her narrow grave; and she, the youngest, the fairest,
slept best, perhaps, of all, for the calm is most precious
that comes after the wildest storms.
Very dear was she to the gray-haired pastor who
had baptized her in infancy, and had always accounted
her the gentlest and sweetest among the lambs of
his flock—very dear to every heart among the many
which beat around her grave that winter day. But
they asked few questions concerning her death or her
life. She had been the elder's favorite child, they all
knew, but no one had ever heard him mention her
name since the summer night when she went away
from Mayfield—no one knew whether alone or in company.
So they respected the old man's sorrow and
silence.
It was not many months before over Margaret's
grave there rose a simple head-stone, but no one's curiosity
was gratified by the inscription. It only said,
Margaret—Aged Eighteen Years.
The child was duly christened. The country folk
understood what an old and respectable name she bore;
and at length the wonder died away, and she was left
to grow up in the quiet stillness of the old red house.
Indeed, very few were brought into any near connection
with her, for Moses Grant and his wife neither
made nor received any visits now. Her only regular
education was imparted by her grandparents, who
taught her the three needfuls of an old-fashioned New
England woman—to read, and write, and cipher. In
addition, when she grew older, Parson Blake gave her
a few books and a chance lesson now and then; and
she learned early to form shrewd, self-reliant theories
and opinions, which no one mistrusted, however, that
she possessed.
Mary Grant often remarked that the little Elinor
was her mother's own child. She had the same fair
hair; the same clear blue eyes; the same slight figure;
but beyond these was a difference rather to be felt than
explained. About her mouth was a graver, more
saint-like smile. A tenderer light shone in her blue
eyes, and her voice did not ring out with quite such
joyous music as made Margaret's tones in her early
years such a cheery sound to hear. Elinor's were lower,
quieter—she spoke more slowly, as if, even in childhood,
to address others, she had to come out of an inner
world where she oftenest dwelt—the world of
thought and of dreams. Gentle, quiet child as she
was, her name, her stately name, borne once by the
proudest belle in Norwich, seemed not unsuited to the
simple dignity of her nature.
Sunday after Sunday she sat by Moses Grant's side,
in the old-fashioned Presbyterian church, bowing her
graceful head through the long prayers, lifting up her
clear voice to join in the well-known hymns. Sunday
after Sunday—first as child, then as maiden; and the
old pastor watched her lovingly—lovingly for her own
trees; and all the while, Sunday after Sunday, his
own hair grew whiter and his step more feeble.
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