University of Virginia Library

3. III.
MR. ARCHIBALD AND MRS. BENJAMIN.

The cottage was quiet; a single lamp was lighted; the
grief-stricken widow took a seat rather near the surviving
brother. As they discussed the lamentable news the last
steamer had brought, she drew her chair closer still, allowing
her head, weighed down by affliction, to droop sympathetically
toward his shoulder. Archy was deeply troubled.

“I am more than ever convinced that I shall be a
victim,” he thought, as he glanced sideways at his companion;
“but, really, and upon my soul, there 's something
pleasing about her!”

In the abandonment of grief she let her hand drop
upon his knee. She was too much absorbed by her sorrows
to think of removing it. Archy experienced a very
strange sensation. He had never in his life known anything
to produce precisely such an effect as that hand
upon his knee; and he wondered if his companion was
really aware that it had gone a-visiting. Then Archy suffered
his own hand (in the abandonment of grief) to drop
near the widow's. There is something magnetic in hands.
They attract by laws more subtle than the loadstone's.
Two peculiarly charged hands upon the same knee must
inevitably touch. Archy's palm lay in the most careless
manner upon the back of Priscilla's hand. Gradually his
fingers tended to encircle hers; an encouraging movement
on her part, then a nestling together of thrilling
palms, then an ardent mutual pressure, — and Archy found
himself in a position which he would have deemed utterly
impossible an hour ago. With that soft, warm, flexible, electric
conductor pouring its vital streams into his veins, he
comprehended, as never before, how men are entrapped into
matrimony. He saw how his brother (the lamented Benjamin)
had been entrapped, and forgave him. It was Archy's
left hand that clasped Priscilla's left, she sitting upon his
right; and now his other arm (all in the abandonment of
grief) fell from the top of her chair and lodged near her
waist. Her right hand met his, — not to remove it, but to
draw it ever so gently about her. At the same time her
head, which had been drooping so long, touched his shoulder.
Silence, and two deep breaths. Very natural: he
had lost a brother, she a husband; and this was consolation.

“My dear sister,” said Archy, “you must not let — ah
— circumstances trouble you. I have a little property, —
enough to keep me comfortable, — and I have put by a little

to — to — provide against such a day as this; for I
always felt sure Benjamin's projects would turn out in
some such way; and, you see, you are not to want for anything,
Priscilla —”

“O dear, dear Archy! bless you!” said the widow,
with so much emotion that tears were drawn right out of
Archy's eyes. “But it is n't money I want! True, I have
four children, — they are friendless orphans, — I am poor;
but I can work for them with my last breath. It is n't
money I want! but sympathy, — a brother's love, — somebody
to talk to that knew him, — to keep my heart from
breaking while my dear children live! O, promise me
that!” She clung to Archy. He knew he was a victim,
but he also perceived that to be a victim might be sweeter
than he had deemed.