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Hetty's Strange History

by Helen Hunt Jackson · English · Gutenberg #29699 · 354,339 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Hetty's Strange History

Author: Helen Hunt Jackson


        
Release date: August 15, 2009 [eBook #29699]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Mary Meehan and the Online
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Produced by David Edwards, Mary Meehan and the Online
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                      HETTY'S STRANGE HISTORY.

                       BY HELEN JACKSON (H.H.)

AUTHOR OF "RAMONA," "A CENTURY OF DISHONOR," "VERSES," "SONNETS AND
LYRICS," "GLIMPSES OF THREE COASTS," "BITS OF TRAVEL," "BITS OF TRAVEL
AT HOME," "ZEPH," "MERCY PHILBRICK'S CHOICE," "BETWEEN WHILES," "BITS OF
TALK ABOUT HOME MATTERS," "BITS OF TALK FOR YOUNG FOLKS," "NELLY'S
SILVER MINE," "CAT STORIES."


BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1886.

Copyright,1877,
BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.

University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.


    _I._

    _What lover best his love doth prove and show?_
    _The one whose words are swiftest, love to state?_
    _The one who measures out his love by weight_
    _In costly gifts which all men see and know?_
    _Nay! words are cheap and easy: they may go_
    _For what men think them worth: or soon or late,_
    _They are but air. And gifts? Still cheaper rate_
    _Are they at which men barter to and fro_
    _Where love is not!_
                       _One thing remains. Oh, Love,_
    _Thou hast so seldom seen it on the earth,_
    _No name for it has ever sprung to birth;_
    _To give one's own life up one's love to prove._
    _Not in the martyr's death, but in the dearth_
    _Of daily life's most wearing daily groove._


    _II_.

    _And unto him who this great thing hath done,_
    _What does Great Love return? No speedy joy!_
    _That swift delight which beareth large alloy_
    _Is guerdon Love bestowed on him who won_
    _A lesser trust: the happiness begun_
    _In happiness, of happiness may cloy,_
    _And, its own subtle foe, itself destroy._
    _But steadfast, tireless, quenchless as the sun_
    _Doth grow that gladness which hath root in pain._
    _Earth's common griefs assail this soul in vain._
    _Great Love himself, too poor to pay such debt,_
    _Doth borrow God's great peace which passeth yet_
    _All understanding. Full tenfold again_
    _Is found the life, laid down without regret!_




HETTY'S STRANGE HISTORY.




I.


When Squire Gunn and his wife died, within three months of each other,
and Hetty their only child was left alone in the big farmhouse,
everybody said, "Well, now Hetty Gunn'll have to make up her mind to
marry somebody." And it certainly looked as if she must. What could be
lonelier than the position of a woman thirty-five years of age sole
possessor of a great stone house, half a dozen barns and out-buildings,
herds of cattle, and a farm of five hundred acres? The place was known
as "Gunn's," far and wide. It had been a rich and prosperous farm ever
since the days of the first Squire Gunn, Hetty's grandfather. He was one
of Massachusetts' earliest militia-men, and had a leg shot off at
Lexington. To the old man's dying day he used to grow red in the face
whenever he told the story, and bring his fist down hard on the table,
with "Damn the leg, sir! 'Twasn't the leg I cared for: 'twas the not
having another chance at those damned British rascals;" and the wooden
leg itself would twitch and rap on the floor in his impatient
indignation. One of Hetty's earliest recollections was of being led
about the farm by this warm-hearted, irascible, old grandfather, whose
wooden leg was a perpetual and unfathomable mystery to her. Where the
flesh leg left off and the wooden leg began, and if, when the wooden leg
stumped so loud and hard on the floor, it did not hurt the flesh leg at
the other end, puzzled little Hetty's head for many a long hour. Her
grandfather's frequent and comic references to the honest old wooden pin
did not diminish her perplexities. He was something of a wag, the old
Squire; and nothing came handier to him, in the way of a joke, than a
joke at his own expense. When he was eighty years old, he had a stroke
of paralysis: he lived six years after that; but he could not walk about
the farm any longer. He used to sit in a big cane-bottomed chair close
to the fireplace, in winter, and under a big lilac-bush, at the
north-east corner of the house, in summer. He kept a stout iron-tipped
cane by his side: in the winter, he used it to poke the fire with; in
the summer, to rap the hens and chickens which he used to lure round his
chair by handfuls of corn and oats. Sometimes he would tap the end of
the wooden leg with this cane, and say, laughingly, "Ha! ha! think of a
leg like that's being paralyzed, if you please. Isn't that a joke? It's
just as paralyzed as the other: damn those British rascals." And only a
few hours before he died, he said to his son: "Look here, Abe, you put
on my grave-stone,--'Here lies Abraham Gunn, all but one leg.' What do
you suppose one-legged men're going to do in the resurrection, hey, Abe?
I'll ask the parson if he comes in this afternoon," he added. But, when
the parson came, the brave, merry eyes were shut for ever, and the old
hero had gone to a new world, on which he no doubt entered as resolutely
and cheerily as he had gone through nearly a century of this. These
glimpses of the old Squire's characteristics are not out of place here,
although he himself has no place in our story, having been dead and
buried for more than twenty years before the story begins. But he lived
again in his granddaughter Hetty. How much of her offhand, comic,
sturdy, resolute, disinterested nature came to her by direct inheritance
from his blood, and how much was absorbed as she might have absorbed it
from any one she loved and associated with, it is impossible to tell.
But by one process or the other, or by both, Hetty Gunn was, as all the
country people round about said, "Just the old Squire over again," and
if they sometimes added, as it must be owned they did, "It's a thousand
pities she wasn't a boy," there was, in this reflection on the Creator,
no reflection on Hetty's womanliness: it was rather on the accepted
theory and sphere of woman's activities and manifestations. Nobody in
this world could have a tenderer heart than Hetty: this also she had
inherited or learned from her grandfather. Many a day the two had spent
together in nursing a sick or maimed chicken, or a half-frozen lamb,
even a woodchuck that had got its leg broken in a trap was not an
outcast to them; and as for beggars and tramps, not one passed "Gunn's,"
from June till October, that was not hailed by the old squire from under
his lilac-bush, and fed by Hetty. Plenty of sarcastic and wholesome
advice the old gentleman gave them, while they sat on the ground eating;
and every word of it sank into Hetty's wide-open ears and sensible soul,
developing in her a very rare sort of thing which, for want of a better
name, we might call common-sense sympathy. To this sturdy common-sense
barrier against the sentimental side of sympathy with other people's
sufferings, Hetty added an equally sturdy, and she would have said
common-sense, fortitude in bearing her own. This invaluable trait she
owed largely to her grandfather's wooden leg. Before she could speak
plain, she had already made his cheerful way of bearing the discomfort
and annoyance of that queer leg her own standard of patience and
equanimity. Nothing that ever happened to her, no pain, no deprivation,
seemed half so dreadful as a wooden leg. She used to stretch out her own
fat, chubby, little legs, and look from them to her grandfather's. Then
she would timidly touch the wooden tip which rested on the floor, and
look up in her grandfather's face, and say, "Poor Grandpa!"

"Pshaw! pshaw! child," he would reply, "that's nothing. It does almost
as well to walk on, and that's all legs are for. I'd have had forty legs
shot off rather than not have helped drive out those damned British
rascals."

Not even for sake of Hetty's young ears could the old Squire mention the
British rascals without his favorite expletive. Here, also, came in
another lesson which sank deep into Hetty's heart. It was for his
country that her grandfather had lost that leg, and would have gladly
lost forty, if he had had so many to lose, not for himself; for
something which he loved better than himself: this was distinct in Hetty
Gunn's comprehension before she was twelve years old, and it was a most
important force in the growth of her nature. No one can estimate the
results on a character of these slow absorptions, these unconscious
biases, from daily contact. All precepts, all religions, are
insignificant agencies by their side. They are like sun and soil to a
plant: they make a moral climate in which certain things are sure to
grow, and certain other things are sure to die; as sure as it is that
orchids and pineapples thrive in the tropics, and would die in New
England.

When old Squire Gunn was buried, all the villages within twenty miles
turned out to his funeral. He was the last revolutionary hero of the
county. An oration was delivered in the meeting-house; and the brass
band of Welbury played "My country, 'tis of thee," all the way from the
meeting-house to the graveyard gate. After the grave was filled up, guns
were fired above it, and the Welbury village choir sang an anthem. The
crowd, the music, the firing of guns, produced an ineffaceable
impression upon Hetty's mind. While her grandfather's body lay in the
house, she had wept inconsolably. But as soon as the funeral services
began, her tears stopped; her eyes grew large and bright with
excitement; she held her head erect; a noble exaltation and pride shone
on her features; she gazed upon the faces of the people with a composure
and dignity which were unchildlike. No emperor's daughter in Rome could
have borne herself, at the burial of her most illustrious ancestor, more
grandly and yet more modestly than did little Hetty Gunn, aged twelve,
at the burial of this unfamed Massachusetts revolutionary soldier: and
well she might; for a greater than royal inheritance had come to her
from him. The echoes of the farewell shots which were fired over the old
man's grave were never to die out of Hetty's ears. Child, girl, woman,
she was to hear them always: signal guns of her life, they meant
courage, cheerfulness, self-sacrifice.

Of Hetty's father, the "young Squire," as to the day of his death he was
called by the older people in Welbury, and of Hetty's mother, his wife,
it is not needful to say much here. The young Squire was a lazy,
affectionate man to whom the good things of life had come without his
taking any trouble for them: even his wife had been more than half wooed
for him by his doting father; and there were those who said that pretty
Mrs. Gunn had been quite as much in love with the old Squire, old as he
was, as with the young one; but that was only an idle village sneer. The
young Squire and his wife loved each other devotedly, and their only
child, Hetty, with an unreasoning and unreasonable affection which would
have been the ruin of her, if she had been any thing else but what she
was, "the old Squire over again." As it was, the only effect of this
overweening affection, on their part, was to produce a slow reversal of
some of the ordinary relations between parents and children. As Hetty
grew into womanhood, she grew more and more to have a sense of
responsibility for her father's and mother's happiness. She was the most
filially docile of creatures, and obeyed like a baby, grown woman as she
was. It was strange to hear and to see.

"Hetty, bring me my overcoat," her father would say to her in her
thirty-fifth year, exactly as he would have said it in her twelfth; and
she would spring with the same alacrity and the same look of pleasure at
being of use. But there was a filial service which she rendered to her
parents much deeper than these surface obediences and attentions. They
were but dimly conscious of it; and yet, had it been taken away from
them, they had found their lives blighted indeed. She was the link
between them and the outside world. She brought merriment, cheer, hearty
friendliness into the house. She was the good comrade of every young
woman and every young man in Welbury; and she compelled them all to
bring a certain half-filial affection and attention to her father and
mother. The best tribute to what she had accomplished in this direction
was in the fact, that you always heard the young people mention Squire
Gunn and his wife as "Hetty Gunn's father" or "Hetty Gunn's mother;" and
the two old people were seen at many a gathering where there was not a
single old face but theirs.

"Hetty won't go without her father and mother," or "Hetty'll be so
pleased if we ask her father and mother," was frequently heard. From
this free and unembarrassed association of the old and the young, grew
many excellent things. In this wholesome atmosphere honesty and good
behavior thrived; but there was little chance for the development of
those secret sentimental preferences and susceptibilities out of which
spring love-making and thoughts of marriage.

There probably was not a marriageable young man in Welbury who had not
at one time or another thought to himself, what a good thing it would be
to marry Hetty Gunn. Hetty was pretty, sensible, affectionate, and rich.
Such girls as that were not to be found every day. A man might look far
and long before he could find such a wife as Hetty would make. But
nothing seemed to be farther from Hetty's thoughts than making a wife of
herself for anybody. And the world may say what it pleases about its
being the exclusive province of men to woo: very few men do woo a woman
who does not show herself ready to be wooed. It is a rare beauty or a
rare spell of some sort which can draw a man past the barrier of a
woman's honest, unaffected, and persistent unconsciousness of any
thoughts of love or matrimony. So between Hetty's unconsciousness and
her perpetual comradeship with her father and mother, the years went on,
and on, and no man asked Hetty to marry him. The odd thing about it was
that every man felt sure that he was the only man who had not asked her;
and a general impression had grown up in the town that Hetty Gunn had
refused nearly everybody. She was so evidently a favorite; "Gunn's" was
so much the headquarters for all the young people; it was so open to
everybody's observation how much all men admired and liked Hetty,--she
was never seen anywhere without one or two or three at her service: it
was the most natural thing in the world for people to think as they did.
Yet not a human being ever accused Hetty of flirting; her manner was
always as open, friendly, and cordial as an honest boy's, and with no
more trace of self-seeking or self-consciousness about it. She was as
full of fun and mischief, too, as any boy could be. She had slid down
hill with the wildest of them, till even her father said sternly,--

"Hetty,--you're too big. It's a shameful sight to see a girl of your
size, out on a sled with boys." And Hetty hung her head, and said
pathetically,--

"I wish I hadn't grown. I'd rather be a dwarf, than not slide down
hill."

But after the sliding was forbidden, there remained the chestnuttings in
the autumn, and the trout fishings in the summer, and the Mayflower
parties in the spring, and colts and horses and dogs. Until Hetty was
twenty-two years old, you might have been quite sure that, whenever you
found her in any out-door party, the masculine element was largely
predominant in that party. After this time, however, life gradually
sobered for Hetty: one by one her friends married; the maidens became
matrons, the young men became heads of houses. In wedding after wedding,
Hetty Gunn was the prettiest of the bridesmaids, and people whispered as
they watched her merry, kindly face,--

"Ain't it the queerest thing in life, Hetty Gunn won't marry. There
isn't a fellow in town she mightn't have."

If anybody had said this to Hetty herself, she would probably have
laughed, and said with entire frankness,--

"You're quite mistaken. They don't want me," which would only have
strengthened her hearers' previous impressions that they did.

In process of time, after the weddings came the christenings, and at
these also Hetty Gunn was still the favorite friend, the desired guest.
Presently, there came to be so many little Hetty Gunns in the village,
that no young mother had courage to use the name more, however much she
loved Hetty. Hetty used to say laughingly that it was well she was an
only child, for she had now more nieces and nephews than she knew what
to do with. Very dearly she loved them all; and the little things all
loved her, the instant she put her arms round them: and more than one
young husband, without meaning to be in the least disloyal to his wife,
thought to himself, when he saw his baby's face nestling down to Hetty
Gunn's brown curls,--

"I wonder if she'd have had me, if I'd asked her. But I don't believe
Hetty'll ever marry,--a girl that's had the offers she has."

And so it had come to pass that, at the time our story begins, Hetty was
thirty-five years old, and singularly alone in the world. The death of
her mother, which had occurred first, was a great shock to her, for it
had been a sudden and a painful death. But the loss of her mother was to
Hetty a trivial one, in comparison with the loss of her father. On the
day of her grandfather's death, she had seemed, child as she was, to
have received her father into her hands, as a sacred legacy of trust;
and he, on his part, seemed fully to reciprocate and accept without
comprehending the new relation. He unconsciously leaned upon Hetty more
and more from that hour until the hour when he died, bolstered up in bed
with his head on her shoulder, and gasping out, between difficult
breaths, his words of farewell,--strange farewell to be spoken to a
middle-aged woman, whose hair was already streaked with gray,--

"Poor little girl! I've got to leave you. You've been a good little
girl, Hetty, a good little girl."

Neighbors and friends crowded around Hetty, in the first moments of her
grief. But they all, even those nearest and most intimate, found
themselves bewildered and baffled, nay almost repelled, by Hetty's
manner. Her noble face was so grief-stricken that she looked years older
in a single day. But her voice and her smile were unaltered; and she
would not listen to any words of sympathy. She wished to hear no
allusions to her trouble, except such as were needfully made in the
arranging of practical points. Her eyes filled with tears frequently,
but no one saw a tear fall. At the funeral, her face wore much the same
look it had worn, twenty-three years before, at her grandfather's
funeral. There were some present who remembered that day well, and
remembered the look, and they said musingly,--

"There's something very queer about Hetty Gunn, after all. Don't you
remember how she acted, when she was a little thing, the day old Squire
Gunn was buried? Anybody'd have thought then a funeral was Fourth of
July, and she looks much the same way now."

Then they fell to discussing the probabilities of her future course. It
was not easy to predict.

"The Squire's left every thing to her, just as if she was a man. She can
sell the property right off, if she wants to, and go and live where she
likes," they said.

"Well, you may set your minds to rest on that," said old Deacon Little,
who had been the young squire's most intimate friend, and who knew Hetty
as well as if she were his own child, and loved her better; for his own
children, poor man, had nearly brought his gray hairs down to the grave
with distress and shame.

"Hetty Gunn'll never sell that farm, not a stick nor a stone on't, any
more than the old Squire himself would. You'll see, she'll keep it a
goin', jest the same's ever. It's a thousand pities, she warn't born a
boy."




II.


The funeral took place late in the afternoon of a warm April day. The
roads were very muddy, and the long procession wound back to the village
about as slowly as it had gone out. One by one, wagon after wagon fell
out of the line, and turned off to the right or left, until there were
left only the Gunns' big carryall, in which sat Hetty, with her two
house-servants,--an old black man and his wife, who had been in her
father's house so long, that their original patronymic had fallen
entirely out of use, and they were known as "Cæsar Gunn" and "Nan Gunn"
the town over. Behind this followed their farm wagon, in which sat the
farmer and his wife with their babies, and the two farm laborers,--all
Irish, and all crying audibly after the fashion of their race. As they
turned into the long avenue of pines which led up to the house, their
grief broke out louder and louder; and, when the wagon stopped in front
of the western piazza, their sobs and cries became howls and shrieks.
Hetty, who was just entering the front-door, turned suddenly, and
walking swiftly toward them, said, in a clear firm tone,--

"Look here! Mike, Dan, Norah, I'm ashamed of you. Don't you see you're
frightening the poor little children? Be quiet. The one who loved my
father most will be the first one to go about his work as if nothing had
happened. Mike, saddle the pony for me at six. I am going to ride over
to Deacon Little's."

The men were too astonished to reply, but gazed at her dumbly. Mike
muttered sullenly, as he drove on,--

"An' it's a quare way to be showin' our love, I'm thinkin'."

"An' it's Miss Hetty's own way thin, by Jasus!" answered Dan; "an' I'd
jist loike to see the man 'ud say, she didn't fairly worship the very
futsteps of 'im."

When Deacon Little heard Hetty Gunn's voice at his door that night, the
old man sprang to his feet as he had not sprung for twenty years.

"Bless my soul!" he exclaimed, "what can have brought Hetty Gunn here
to-night?" and he met her in the hall with outstretched hands.

"Hetty, my dear, what is it?" he exclaimed, in a tone of anxiety.

"Oh!" said Hetty, earnestly. "I have frightened you, haven't I? was it
wrong for me to come to-night? There are so many things I want to talk
over with you. I want to get settled; and all the work on the farm is
belated and I can't have the place run behindhand; that would worry
father so."

The tears stood in her eyes, but she spoke in as matter-of-course a tone
as if she had simply come as her father's messenger to ask advice. The
old deacon pushed his spectacles high upon his forehead, and, throwing
his head back, looked at Hetty a moment, scrutinizingly, in silence.
Then, he said, half to himself, half to her,--

"You're your grandfather all over, Hetty. Now let me know what I can
help you about. You can always come to me, as long as I'm alive, Hetty.
You know that."

"Yes," said Hetty, walking back and forth in the little room, rapidly.
"You are the only person I shall ever ask any thing of in that way."

"Sit down, Hetty, sit down," said the old man. "You must be all worn
out."

"Oh, no! I'm not tired: I was never tired in my life," replied Hetty.
"Let me walk: it does me good to walk; I walked nearly all last night;
it seems to be something to do. You see, Mr. Little," she said,--pausing
suddenly, and folding her arms on her breast, as she looked at him,--"I
don't quite see my way clear yet; and one must see one's way clear
before one can be quiet. It's horrible to grope."

"Yes, yes, child," said the deacon, hesitatingly. He did not understand
metaphor. "You are not thinking of going away, are you, Hetty?"

"Going away!" exclaimed Hetty. "Why, what do you mean? How could I go
away? Besides, I wouldn't go for any thing in the world. What should I
go away for?"

"Well, I'm real glad to hear you say so, Hetty," replied the deacon
warmly; "some folks have said, you'd most likely sell the farm, and go
away."

"What fools! I'd as soon sell myself," said Hetty, curtly. "But I can't
live there all alone. And one thing I wanted to ask you about to-night
was, whether you thought it would do for your James and his wife to come
and live there with me: I would give him a good salary as a sort of
overseer. Of course, I should expect to control every thing; and that's
not much more than I have done for three or four years: but the men will
do better with a man to give them their orders, than they will with me
alone. I could do this better with Jim than I could with a stranger.
I've always liked Jim."

Deacon Little did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the ground, and his
face flushed with agitation. At last he said huskily,--

"Would you really take Jim and Sally home to your house, to live with
you, Hetty?"

"Why, certainly," replied Hetty, in an impatient tone, "that's what I
said: didn't I make it plain?" and she walked faster and faster back and
forth.

"Hetty, you're an angel," exclaimed the old man, solemnly. "If there's
any thing that could make him hold up his head again, it would be just
that thing. But--" he hesitated, "you know Sally?"

"Yes, yes, I know her. I know all about her. She's a poor, weak thing,"
said Hetty, with no shade of tenderness in her voice; "but Jim was the
most to blame, and it's abominable the way people have treated her. I
always wished I could do something for them both, and now I've got the
chance: that is if you think they'd like to come."

The deacon hesitated again, began to speak, broke off, hesitated, tried
again, and at last stammered:--

"Don't think I don't feel your kindness, Hetty; but, low's Jim's fallen,
I don't quite feel like having them go into anybody's kitchen,
especially with black help."

"Kitchen!" interrupted Hetty. "What do you take me for, Deacon Little?
If Jim comes to live with me as my overseer, he is just the same as my
partner in the place, so far as his position goes. How do you suppose I
thought that the men would respect him, and take orders from him, if I
meant to put him in the kitchen with Cæsar and Nan? No indeed, they
shall live with me as if they were my brother and sister. There are
plenty of rooms in the house for them to have their own sitting-room,
and be by themselves as much as they like. Kitchen indeed! I think
you've forgotten that Jim and I were schoolmates from the time we were
six till we were twenty. I always liked Jim, and he hasn't had half a
chance yet: that miserable affair pulled him down when he was so young."

"That's so, Hetty; that's so," said the deacon, with tears rolling down
his wrinkled cheeks. "Jim wasn't a bad boy. He never meant to harm
anybody, and he hasn't had any chance at all since that happened. It
seems as if it took all the spirit right out of him; and Sally, she
hasn't got any spirit either: she's been nothin' but a millstone round
his neck. It's a mercy the baby died: that's one thing."

"I don't think so at all, Mr. Little," said Hetty, vehemently. "I think
if the baby had lived, it would have strengthened them both. It would
have made Sally much happier, at any rate. She is a motherly little
thing."

"Yes," said the old man, reluctantly. "Sally's affectionate; I won't
deny that: but"--and an expression of exceeding bitterness passed over
his face--"I wish to the Lord I needn't ever lay my eyes on her face
again! I can't feel right towards her, and I don't suppose I ever
shall."

"I wouldn't wonder if the time came when she was a real comfort to you,
Mr. Little," said Hetty, cheerily. "You get them to come and live with
me and see what that'll do. I can afford to give Jim more than he can
make at surveying. I have a notion he's a better farmer than he is
engineer, isn't he?"

"Yes, there's nothing Jim don't know about a farm. I always did hope
he'd settle down here at home with us. But we couldn't have Sally in the
house: it would have killed Mrs. Little. It gives her a day's nervous
headache now, long ago's 'tis, whenever she sees her on the street."

"Well, well," said Hetty, impatiently, "she won't give anybody nervous
headaches in my house, poor little soul, that's certain; and the sooner
they can come the better I shall like it. So you will arrange it all for
me at once, won't you?"

Then Hetty went on to speak of some matters in regard to the farm about
which she was in doubt,--as to certain fields, and crops, and what
should be done with the young stock from last year. Presently the old
clock in the hall struck nine, and the village bells began to ring.

Hetty sprang to her feet.

"Dear me!" she exclaimed, "I had no idea it was so late. I only meant to
stay an hour. Nan will be frightened about me." And she was out of the
house and on her pony's back almost before Deacon Little could say,--

"But, Hetty, ain't you afraid to go home by yourself. I can go with
you's well's not."

"Bless me, no!" said Hetty. "I always ride alone. Polly knows the road
as well as I do;" and she cantered off, saying cheerily, "Good-night,
deacon, I can't tell you how much I'm obliged to you. Please see Jim's
early's you can to-morrow: I want to get settled and begin work."

When Hetty reached home, the house was silent and dark: only one feeble
light glimmered in the hall. As she threw open the door, old Cæsar and
Nan rushed forward together from the kitchen, exclaiming, half
sobbing,--

"Oh, Miss Hetty! Miss Hetty! we made sure you was killed."

"Nonsense, Nan!" said Hetty, goodnaturedly: "what put such an idea into
your head? Haven't I ridden Polly many a darker night than this?"

"Yes'm," sobbed Nan; "but to-night's different. All our luck's gone:
'When the master's dead, the house is shook,' they say where I was
raised. Oh, Miss Hetty! it's lonesome's death in the kitchen."

Hetty threw open the door into the sitting-room. "Put on a stick of
wood, Nan, and make the fire blaze up," she said.

While Nan was doing this, Hetty lighted the lamps, drew down the
curtains, and gave the room its ordinary evening look. Then she said,--

"Now, Nan, sit down: I want to talk with you," and Hetty herself sat
down in her father's chair on the right hand of the fireplace.

"Oh, Miss Hetty!" cried Nan, "don't you go set in that chair: you'll die
before the year's out if you do. Oh please, Miss Hetty! get right up;"
and the poor old woman took forcible hold of her young mistress's arms,
and tried to lift her from the chair.

"To please you, I will sit in another chair now, Nan, because I want you
to be quiet and listen to me. But that will be my chair to sit in
always, just as it used to be my father's; and I shall not die before
the year's out, Nan, nor I hope for a great many years to come yet,"
said Hetty.

"Oh, no! please the Lord, Miss Hetty," sobbed Nan: "who'd take care of
Cæsar an' me ef you was to die."

"But I expect you and Cæsar to take care of me, Nan," replied Hetty,
smiling, "and I want to have a good talk with you now, and make you
understand about our life here. You want to please me, don't you, Nan?"

"Oh, yes! Miss Hetty. You knows I do, and so does Cæsar. We wouldn't
have no other missus, not in all these Norf States: we'd sooner go back
down where we was raised."

Hetty smiled involuntarily at this violent comparison, knowing well that
both Cæsar and Nan would have died sooner than go back to the land where
they were "raised." But she went on,--

"Very well. You never need have any other mistress as long as I live:
and when I die you and Cæsar will have money enough to make you
comfortable, and a nice little house. Now the first thing I want you to
understand is that we are going to live on here in this house, exactly
as we did when my father was here. I shall carry on the farm exactly as
he would if he were alive; that is, as nearly as I can. Now you will
make it very hard for me, if you cry and are lonesome, and say such
things as you said to-night. If you want to please me, you will go right
on with your work cheerfully, and behave just as if your master were
sitting there in his chair all the time. That is what will please him
best, too, if he is looking on, as I don't doubt he very often will be."

"But is you goin' to be here all alone, Miss Hetty? yer don't know what
yer a layin' out for, yer don't," interrupted Nan.

"No," replied Hetty: "Mr. James Little and his wife are coming here to
stay. He will be overseer of the farm."

"What! Her that was Sally Newhall?" exclaimed Nan, in a sharp tone.

"Yes, that was Mrs. Little's name before she was married," replied
Hetty, looking Nan full in the face with a steady expression, intended
to restrain any farther remarks on the subject of Mrs. Little. But Nan
was not to be restrained.

"Before she was married! Yes'm! an' a good deal too late 'twas she was
married too. 'Deed, Miss Hetty, yer ain't never going to take her in to
live with you, be yer?" she muttered.

"Yes, I am, Nan," Hetty said firmly; "and you must never let such a word
as that pass your lips again. You will displease me very much if you do
not treat Mrs. Little respectfully."

"But, Miss Hetty," persisted Nan. "Yer don't know"--

"Yes, I do, Nan: I know it all. But I pity them both very much. We have
all done wrong in one way or another; and it is the Lord's business to
punish people, not ours. You've often told me, Nan, about that pretty
little girl of yours and Cæsar's that died when I was a baby. Supposing
she had lived to be a woman, and some one had led her to do just as
wrong as poor Sally Little did, wouldn't you have thought it very hard
if the whole world had turned against her, and never given her a fair
chance again to show that she was sorry and meant to live a good life?"

Nan was softened.

"'Deed would I, Miss Hetty. But that don't make me feel like seein' that
gal a settin' down to table with you, Miss Hetty, now I tell yer! Cæsar
nor me couldn't stand that nohow!"

"Yes you can, Nan; and you will, when you know that it would make me
very unhappy to have you be unkind to her," answered Hetty, firmly. "She
and her husband both, have done all in their power to atone for their
wrong; and nobody has ever said a word against Mrs. Little since her
marriage; and one thing I want distinctly understood, Nan, by every one
on this place,--any disrespectful word or look towards Mr. or Mrs.
Little will be just the same as if it were towards me myself."

Nan was silenced, but her face wore an obstinate expression which gave
Hetty some misgivings as to the success of her experiment. However, she
knew that Nan could be trusted to repeat to the other servants all that
she had said, and that it would lose nothing in the recital; and, as for
the future, one of Hetty's first principles of action was an old proverb
which her grandfather had explained to her when she was a little girl,--

"Don't cross bridges till you come to them."




III.


The gratitude with which James Little's wife received Hetty's
proposition was so great that it softened even her father-in-law's
heart.

"I do believe, Hetty," he said, when he gave her their answer, "I do
believe that poor girl has suffered more'n we've given her credit for.
When I explained to her that you was goin' to take her right in to be
like one o' your own family, she turned as white as a sheet, and says
she,--

"'You don't mean it, father: she won't ever dare to:' and when I said,
says I,--

"'Yes, she does: Hetty Gunn ain't a girl not to know what she means to
do. And that's just what she says she's goin' to do with you and Jim,'
she broke right out crying, out loud, just like a little baby, and says
she,--

"'If the Lord don't bless Hetty Gunn for bein' so good to us! she
sha'n't ever be sorry for it's long's she lives.'"

"Of course I sha'n't," said Hetty, bluntly. "I never was sorry yet for
any thing I did which was right, and I am as sure this is right as I am
that I am alive. When will they come?"

"Sarah said she would come right over to-day, if you'd like to have her
help you; and Jim he could fix up things at home, and shut the house up.
Jim said they'd better not let the house till you had tried how it
worked havin' 'em here. Jim don't seem very sanguine about it. Poor
fellow, he's got the spirit all taken out of him."

"Well, well, we'll put it back again, see if we don't, before the year
is out," replied Hetty, with a beaming smile, which made her face
beautiful.

It happened fortunately that poor Sarah Little first came to her new
home alone, rather than with her husband. The years of solitude and
disgrace through which they had lived, had made him dogged and defiant
of manner, but had made her humble and quiet. She still kept a good deal
of the beauty of her youth; and there were few persons who could be
unmoved by the upward glance of her saddened blue eyes. In less than
five minutes, she conquered old Nan, and secured her as an ally for
ever. As she entered the house, Hetty met her, and saying cordially,--

"I'm glad to see you, Sally. It was so good of you to come right over at
once; we have a great deal to do,"--she kissed her on her forehead.

Sarah burst into tears. Nan stood by with a sullen face. Turning towards
her involuntarily, perhaps because she hardly dared to speak to Hetty,
Sarah said,--

"Oh, Nan, I'm only crying because she is so kind to me. I can't help
it;" and the poor thing sank into a chair and sobbed. No wonder! it was
six years since she had returned to her native village, a shame-stricken
woman, bearing in her arms the child whose birth had been her disgrace.
That its father was now her husband did little or nothing to repair the
loss which her weakness and wrong-doing had entailed on her. If there be
a pitiless community in this world, it is a small New England village.
Calvinism, in its sternest aspects, broods over it; narrowness and
monotony make rigid the hearts which theology has chilled; and a grim
Pharisaism, born of a certain sort of intellectual keen-wittedness,
completes the cruel inhumanity. It was six years since poor Sarah
Little, baby in arms, had come into such an air as this,--six years, and
until this moment, when Hetty Gunn kissed her forehead and spoke to her
with affection, no woman had ever said to her a kindly word. When the
baby died, not a neighbor came to its funeral. The minister, the weeping
father and mother, and the stern-looking grandfather, alone followed the
little unwelcomed one to its grave. After that, Sarah rarely went out of
her house except at night. The tradesmen with whom she had to deal came
slowly to have a pitying respect for her. The minister went occasionally
to see her, and in his clumsy way thought he perceived what he called
"the right spirit" in her. Sarah dreaded his calls more than any thing
else. What made her isolation much harder to bear was the fact that,
only two years before, every young girl in the county had been her
friend. There was no such milliner in all that region as Sarah Newhall.
In autumn and in spring, her little shop at Lonway Four Corners was
crowded with chattering and eager girls, choosing ribbons and hats, and
all deferring to her taste. Now they all passed her by with only a cold
and silent bow. Not one spoke. To Sarah's affectionate, mirth-loving
temperament, this was misery greater than could be expressed. She said
not a word about it, not even to her husband: she bore it as dumb
animals bear pain, seeking only a shelter, a hiding-place; but she
wished herself dead. Jim's share of the punishment had been in some ways
lighter than hers, in others harder. He had less loneliness; but, on the
other hand, by his constant intercourse with men, he was frequently
reminded of the barrier which separated himself and his wife from all
that went on in the village. He had the same mirthful, social
temperament which she had: the thoughtless, childish, pleasure-loving
quality, which they had in common, had been the root of their sin; and
was now the instrument of their suffering. Stronger people could have
borne up better; worse people might have found a certain evil solace in
evil ways and with evil associates: but Jim and Sally were incapable of
any such course; they were simply two utterly broken-spirited and
hopeless children whose punishment had been greater than they could
bear. In a dogged way, because they must live, Jim went on earning a
little money as surveyor and draughtsman. He often talked of going away
into some new far-away place where they could have, as he said, in the
same words Hetty had used, "a fair chance;" but Sally would not go. "It
would not make a bit of difference," she said: "it would be sure to be
found out, and strange folks would despise us even more than our own
folks do; perhaps things will come round right after a while, if we stay
here."

Jim did not insist, for he loved Sally tenderly; and he felt, to the
core of his heart, that the least he could do for her now was to let her
live where she chose to live: but he grew more sullen and dogged, day by
day; and Sally grew sadder and quieter, and things were fast coming to a
bad pass, when Hetty Gunn's generous offer came to them, like a great
rift of sunlight in a black sky.

When Sally sank into the chair sobbing, Hetty made a quick movement
towards her, and was about to speak; but, seeing that old Nan was
hastening to do the same thing, she wisely waited, thinking to
herself,--

"If Nan will only take her under her wing, all will go well."

Old Nan's tenderness of heart was unlimited. If her worst enemy were in
pain or sorrow, she would succor him: ready perhaps to take up the
threads of her resentment again, as soon as his sufferings were
alleviated; but a very Samaritan of good offices as long as he needed
them. Cæsar, so well understood this trait in her, that in their
matrimonial disputes, which, it must be confessed, were frequent and
sharp, when all other weapons failed him, he fell back on the colic. He
had only to interrupt the torrent of her reproaches, with a groan, and a
twist of his fat abdomen, and "oh, honey, I'm so bad in my stomach!" and
she was transformed, in an instant from a Xantippe into a Florence
Nightingale: the whole current of her wrath deviated from him to the
last meal he had eaten, whatever it might be.

"Now, it's jist nothin' but that pesky bacon you ate this mornin',
Cæsar: you sha'n't never touch a bit again's long's you live; do you
hear?" and with hot water and flannels, she would proceed to comfort and
coddle him as if no anger had ever stirred her heart.

When she saw poor Sarah Little sink crying into a chair, and heard the
humble gratefulness of her words; and, moreover, felt herself, as it
were, distinctly taken into confidence by the implied reference to the
unhappy past,--old Nan melted.

"There, there, honey: don't ye take on so. We're jest powerful glad to
get you here, we be. I was a tellin' Miss Hetty yesterday she couldn't
live here alone, noways: we couldn't any of us stand it. Come along into
the dinin'-room, an' Cæsar he'll give you a glass of his blackberry
wine. Cæsar won't let anybody but hisself touch the blackberry wine, an'
hain't this twenty year."

"Here, Cæsar! you, Cæsar! where be yer? Come right in here, you loafin'
niggah." This was Nan's most affectionate nickname for her husband; it
was always accompanied with a glance of proud admiration, which was the
key to the seemingly opprobrious epithet, and revealed that all it
really meant was a complacent satisfaction in her breast that her
husband was in a position to loaf if he liked to,--a gentleman of
leisure and dignity, so to speak, subject to no orders but her own.

Cæsar could hardly believe his ears when he heard himself called upon to
bring a glass of his blackberry wine to Mrs. Sarah Little. This was not
at all in keeping with the line of conduct which Nan had announced
beforehand that she should pursue in regard to that lady. Bewildered by
his perplexed meditations on this change of policy, he moved even more
slowly than was his wont, and was presently still more bewildered by
finding the glass snatched suddenly from his hand, with a sharp
reprimand from Nan.

"You're asleep, ain't you? p'raps you'd better go back to bed, seein'
it's nigh noon." "There, honey, you jest drink this, an' it'll do you
good," came in the next second from the same lips, in such dulcet tones,
that Cæsar rubbed his head in sheer astonishment, and gazed with open
mouth and eyes upon Nan, who was holding the glass to Sally's mouth, as
caressingly as she would to a sick child's.

The battle was won; won by a tone and a tear; won, as, ever since the
days of Goliath, so many battles have been won by the feebleness of
weapons, and not by their might.

When two days later, James Little, more than half unwillingly, spite of
his gratitude to Hetty, came to take his position as overseer at
"Gunn's," he was met at the great gate by his wife, who had been
watching there for him for an hour. He looked at her with undisguised
wonder. There was a light in her eyes, a color in her cheeks, he had not
seen there for many years. "Why, Sally!" he exclaimed, but gave no other
expression to his amazement. She understood.

"Oh, Jim!" she said, "it is like heaven here: they're all so kind. I
told you things would come round all right if we waited."

The new overseer found himself welcomed because he was Sally's husband,
and the strangeness of this was a bewilderment indeed. He could hardly
understand the atmosphere of cordial good feeling which seemed in so
short time to have grown up between his wife and all the household. He
had become so used to Sally's sweet sad face, that he did not know how
great a charm it held for others; and he had never seen in her the
manner which she now wore to every one. One day's kindly treatment had
been to her like one day's sunlight to a drooping plant.

Hetty was relieved and glad. All her misgivings had vanished; and she
found growing up in her heart a great tenderness toward Sally. She
recollected well the bright rosy face Sally had worn only a few years
before, and the contrast between it and her pale sorrow-stricken
countenance now smote Hetty whenever she looked at her. Her sympathy,
however, took no shape in words or caresses. She was too wise for that.
She simply made it plain that Sally's place in the family was to be a
fixed and a busy one.

"I shall look after the out-door things, Sally," she said. "I have done
that ever since father was so poorly, and I like it best. I shall trust
to you to keep the house going all straight. Old Nan isn't much of a
housekeeper, though she's a good cook: she needs looking after."

And so the new household entered on its first summer. The crops sprang
up, abundant and green: all the cattle throve and increased: the big
garden bloomed full of its old-fashioned flowers; its wide borders of
balm and lavender made the whole road-side sweet: the doors stood open,
and the cheery sounds of brisk farm life were to be heard all day long.
To all passers-by "Gunn's" seemed unchanged, unless it were that it had
grown even more prosperous and active. But in the hall, two knobbed old
canes which used to stand in the corner were hung by purple ribbons from
the great antlers on the wall, and would never be taken down again.
Hetty had hung them there the day after the funeral, and had laid the
squire's riding-whip across them, saying to herself as she did so,--

"There! I'll keep those up there as long as I live, and I wonder what
will become of them then or of the farm either," and she had a long and
sad reverie, standing with the riding-whip in her hand in the doorway,
and tying and untying the purple ribbons. But she shook the thought off
at last, saying to herself,--

"Well, well, I don't suppose the farm'll go begging. There are plenty of
people that would be glad enough to have me give it to them. I expect it
will have to go to Cousin Josiah after all; but father couldn't abide
him. It's a great pity I wasn't a boy, then I could have married and had
children to take it." A sudden flush covered Hetty's face as she said
this, and with a shamefaced, impatient twist of her expressive features,
she ran in hastily and laid the whip above the canes.

The only thing which broke in on the even tenor of this summer at Gunn's
was Cæsar's experiencing religion in a great revival at the Methodist
church. Cæsar had been under conviction again and again; but, as old Nan
said pathetically to her minister, there didn't seem to be "nothin' to
ketch hold by in Cæsar." By the time his emotions had worked up to the
proper climax for a successful result, he was "done tired out," and
would "jest give right up" and "let go," and "there he was as bad's
ever, if not wuss." Poor old Nan was a very ardent and sincere
Christian, spite of her infirmities of temper, and she would wrestle in
prayer with and for her husband till her black cheeks shone under
streams of tears. She wrestled all the harder because the ungodly Cæsar
would sometimes turn upon her, and in the most sarcastic and ungenerous
way ask if he didn't keep his temper better "without religion than she
did with it:" upon which Nan would groan and travail in spirit, and
beseech the Lord not to "go an' let her be a stumbler-block in Cæsar's
way." The Squire's death had produced a great impression on Cæsar: from
that day he had been, Nan declared, "quite a changed pusson;" and the
impression deepened until three months later, in the course of a great
midnight meeting in the Methodist church, Cæsar Gunn suddenly announced
that he had "got religion." The one habit which it was hardest for Cæsar
to give up, in his new character, was the habit of swearing. Profanity
had never been strongly discountenanced at "Gunn's." The old Squire and
the young Squire had both been in the habit of swearing, on occasion, as
roundly as troopers! and black Cæsar was not going to be behind his
masters, not he. So he, too, in spite of old Nan's protestations and
entreaties, had become a confirmed swearer. It had really grown into so
fixed a habit that the words meant nothing: it was no more than a trick
of physical contortion of which a man may be utterly unconscious. How to
break himself of this was Cæsar's difficulty.

"Yer see, Nan!" he said, "I dunno when it's a comin': the fust I know,
it's said and done, an' what am I goin' to do 'bout it then, 'll yer
tell me?" At last, Cæsar hit on a compromise which seemed to him a
singularly happy one. To avoid saying "damn" was manifestly impossible:
the word slipped out perpetually without giving him warning; as soon as
he heard it, however, his righteous soul remorsefully followed up the
syllable by,--

"Bress the Lord," in Stentorian tones. The compound ejaculation thus
formed was one which nobody's gravity could resist; and the surprised
and grieved expression with which poor Cæsar would look round upon an
audience which he had thus convulsed was even more irresistible than the
original expression. Everybody who came to "Gunn's" went away and
said,--

"Have you heard the new oath Cæsar Gunn swears with since he got
religion?" and "Damn bress the Lord" soon became a very by-word in the
town.




IV.


Early in the autumn, Deacon Little's wife came one morning to the house
and asked to see Hetty alone. Hetty met her with great coolness and
remained standing, with evident purpose to regard the interview as
simply one of business. As heartily as it was in Hetty Gunn's nature to
dislike any one, and that was very heartily, she disliked Mrs. Little.
Again and again, during the six months that James and Sally had been
living in her house, Hetty had asked Deacon and Mrs. Little to come and
spend the day with them there. The deacon always had come alone,
bringing feeble apologies for Mrs. Little, on score of headaches,
previous engagements, and so on; but privately, to Hetty, he had
confessed the truth, saying,--

"You see, Hetty, she hasn't spoken to Sally yet; and she says she never
will: just to see her on the street, gives her a dreadful nervous
headache, sometimes for two days. Mrs. Little's nerves are too much for
her always: she ain't strong, you know, Hetty."

"Nonsense!" exclaimed Hetty at last, bluntly. "It isn't nerves, it's
temper, and a most unchristian temper too, begging your pardon. Deacon,
I know she's your wife. If I were Jim, I'd never go near her, never, so
long as she wouldn't speak to Sally. I shan't ask her again, and you may
tell her so; and you may tell her, too, that I say I'd rather take my
chance of being forgiven for what Sally's done than for what she's
doing." And Hetty strode up and down her piazza wrathfully.

"There are plenty of people in town who do come here, and do speak to
Sally," she continued; "and ever so many of them have told me how much
they were coming to like her. She hasn't got any great force I know. If
she had had, such a fellow as your Jim couldn't have led her away as he
did: but she's got all the force the Lord gave her; and if ever there
was a girl that repented for a sin, and atoned for it too, it's Sally;
and I'd a good deal rather be in her place to-day, than in the place of
any of the people that set themselves up as too good to speak to her.
She's a loving, patient-souled creature, and she's been a real comfort
to me ever since she came into my house; and anybody that won't speak
to her needn't speak to me, that's all." Poor Deacon Little twirled his
hat in his hands, and moved about uneasily on his chair, during Hetty's
excited speech. When he spoke, his distress was so evident in his voice
that Hetty relented and was ashamed of herself instantly.

"Don't be too hard on Mrs. Little, Hetty," he said, "you know Jim was
her favorite of all the children; and she can't never see it anyways but
that Sally's been his ruin. Now I don't see it that way; and I've always
tried to be good to Sally, in all ways that I could be, things being as
they were at home. You know a man ain't always free to do's he likes,
Hetty. He can't go against his wife, leastways not when she's feeble
like Mrs. Little."

"No, no, Deacon Little," Hetty hastened to say, "I never meant to
reproach you. Sally always says you've been good to her. I'm very sorry
that I spoke so about Mrs. Little; not that I can take a word of it
back, though," added Hetty, her anger still rising hotly at mention of
the name; "but I'll never say a word to you about it again. It isn't
fair."

Deacon Little repeated this conversation to his wife, and told Hetty
that he had done so. It was therefore with great surprise that Hetty
found herself on this morning face to face in her own home with Mrs.
Little.

"What in the world can have brought her here?" thought Hetty, as she
walked slowly towards the sitting-room, "no good I'll be bound;" and it
was with a look almost of defiance that she stood before her, waiting
for her to speak. Mrs. Little with all her immovability of prejudice was
a timid woman, and moreover was especially afraid of Hetty Gunn. Hetty's
independent, downright, outspoken ways were alarming to her nervous,
conservative, narrow-minded soul.

"I expect you're surprised to see me here, Hetty," she began.

"Very much," interrupted Hetty curtly, in a hard tone. A long silence
ensued, which Hetty made no movement to break, but stood with her arms
folded, looking Mrs. Little in the eye.

"I came--to--tell--to let you know--Mr. Little he wanted me to come and
tell you--he didn't like to--" she stammered.

Hetty's quick instinct took alarm.

"If it's any thing you've got to say against that poor girl out there,"
pointing to the garden, where Sally was busy tying up chrysanthemums
"you may as well save yourself the trouble. I shan't hear it," and
Hetty looked her unwelcome visitor still more defiantly in the face.
Mrs. Little colored, and stung at last into a command of her organs of
speech, said, not without dignity:

"You needn't suppose that I wish to do any thing to injure the woman my
son has married. It was Jim who asked his father to tell you--"

"For goodness' sake, do say what it is you've got to say, can't you?"
burst out Hetty, impatiently. But Mrs. Little was not to be hurried.
Between her uneasiness at being face to face with Hetty, and her false
sense of embarrassment in speaking of the subject she had come to speak
of, it took her a long time to make Hetty understand that poor Sally,
finding that she was to be a mother again, had been afraid to tell Hetty
herself, and had taken this method of letting her know the fact.

Hetty listened breathlessly, her blue eyes opening wide, and her cheeks
growing red. She did not speak. Mrs. Little misinterpreted her silence.

"If you didn't want the baby here, I'd take it," she said almost
beseechingly, "if Sally'd let me: it would break Jim's heart if they
should have to leave here."

"Not want the baby!" shouted Hetty, in a voice which reached Sally in
the garden, and made her look up, thinking she was called. "I should
think you must be crazy, Mrs. Little;" and, with the involuntary words,
there entered for the first time into her mind a wonder whether Mrs.
Little's whole treatment of her son and his wife were not so monstrous
as to warrant a doubt as to her sanity. "Not want the baby! Why I'd give
half the farm to have a baby running about here. How could Sally help
knowing I'd be glad?" and Hetty moved swiftly towards the door, to go
and seek Sally. Recollecting herself suddenly, she turned, and, halting
on the threshold, said in her hardest tone:

"Is there any thing else you wish to say?" There was ignominious
dismissal in her tone, her look, her attitude; and Mrs. Little said
hastily:

"Oh, no, nothing, nothing! I only want to tell you that I'd like to
thank you, though, for all your kindness to Jim;" and Mrs. Little's lips
quivered, and the tears came into her eyes. Hetty was unmoved by them.

"I think more of Sally than I do of Jim," she said severely. "It's all
owing to Sally that he's got a chance to hold up his head again. Good
morning, Mrs. Little;" and Hetty walked out of one door, leaving her
guest to make her own way out of the other.

Sally found it hard to believe in Hetty's readiness to welcome her baby.

"Oh! you don't know, Hetty, how it will set everybody to talking again,"
said the poor girl. "You are so different from other folks. You can't
understand. I don't suppose my children ever would be allowed to play
with other children, do you?" she asked mournfully. "That was one thing
which comforted me when my baby died. I thought she wouldn't live to
have anybody despise her because she had had me for a mother. Somehow it
don't seem fair, does it, Hetty, to have people punished for what their
parents do? But the minister over at the Corners, that used to come and
see me, he said that was what it meant in the Bible, where it said:
'Unto the third and fourth generation.' But I can't think it's so bad as
that. You don't believe, Hetty, do you, that if I should have several
children, and they should be married, that their grandchildren would
ever hear any thing about me, how wicked I had been: do you, Hetty?"

"No, indeed, child!" said Hetty sharply, feeling as if she should cry.
"Of course I don't believe any such thing; and, if I did, I wouldn't
worry over it. Why, I don't even know my great-grandmother's name," she
laughed, "much less whether she were good or bad."

"Oh, but the bad things last so!" said Sally. "Nobody says any thing
about the good things: it's always the bad ones. I don't see why people
like to: if they didn't, there'd be some chance of a thing's being
forgotten."

"Never you mind, Sally," said Hetty, in a tone unusually caressing for
her. "Never you mind, nobody talks about you now, except to say the good
things; and you are always going to stay with me as long as I live, and
when that baby comes we'll just wonder how we ever got along without
him."

"Oh, Hetty, you're just one of the Lord's angels!" cried Sally.

"Humph!" said Hetty. "I hope he's got better ones. There wasn't much
angel about me this morning when that mother-in-law of yours was here, I
can tell you. I wonder if she'll have the heart to keep away after the
baby's born."

"I thought of that, too," said Sally, timidly. "If it should be a boy,
I think maybe she'd be pleased. She always did worship Jim. That's the
reason she hates me so," sighed Sally.

It was the last of March before the longed-for baby came. Never did baby
have a better welcome. It was as if three mothers had awaited his
coming. Hetty's happiness was far greater than Sally's, and Nan's was
hardly less. Hetty had been astonished at herself for the passionate
yearning she had felt towards the little unborn creature from the
beginning, and, when she took the little fellow in her arms, her first
thought was, "Dear me! if mothers feel any more than I feel now, how can
they bear it?" Turning to Jim, she exclaimed, "Oh, Jim! I'm sure you
ought to be happy now. We'll name this little chap after you, James
Little, Junior."

"No!" said Jim, doggedly, "I'll not hand down that name. The sooner it
is forgotten the better." All the sunshine and peace of his new home had
not been enough wholly to brighten or heal Jim's wounded spirit. Hetty
had found herself baffled at every turn by a sort of inertia of sadness,
harder to deal with than any other form of mental depression.

"You're very wrong, Jim," replied Hetty, earnestly. "The name is your
own to make or to mar, and you ought to be proud to hand it down."

"You can't judge about that, Hetty," said Jim. "It stands to reason that
you can't have any idea about the feeling of being disgraced. I don't
believe a man can ever shake it off in this world: if he can in any
other, I have my doubts. I don't know what the orthodox people ever
wanted to get up their theory of a hell for. A man can be a worse hell
to himself, than any hell they can invent to put him into. I know that."

"Jim!" exclaimed Hetty, "how dare you speak so, with this dear little
innocent baby's eyes looking up at you?"

"That's just the reason," answered Jim, bitterly. "If this baby hadn't
come, there seemed to be some chance of our outgrowing the memory of the
things we'd like to forget and have forgotten. But this just rakes it
all up again as bad as ever. You'll see: you don't know people so well
as Sally and I do."

Before many weeks had passed, Hetty was forced to admit that Jim was
partly in the right. Neighbor after neighbor, under the guise of a
friendly interest in the baby, took occasion to go over all the details
of the first baby's life and death; and there was, in their manner to
Sally, a certain new and pitying condescension which filled Hetty with
wrath.

"What a mercy 'tis, 'tis a boy," said one visitor sanctimoniously to
Hetty, as they left Sally's room together. Hetty turned upon her like
lightning.

"I'd like to know what you mean by that," she said sharply. The woman
hesitated, and at last said:

"Why you know, of course, such things are not so much consequence to
men."

"Such things as what?" said Hetty, bluntly. "I don't understand you."
When at last her visitor put her meaning into unmistakable words, Hetty
wheeled (they were walking down the long pine-shaded avenue together);
stood still; and folding her arms on her bosom said:

"There! that was what I wanted. I thought if you were driven to putting
it into plain English, perhaps you'd see how abominable it was to think
it."

"No, no, you needn't try to smooth it down," she continued, interrupting
her guest's efforts to mollify her by a few deprecating words. "You
can't unsay it, now it's said; and saying it's no worse than thinking
it. I don't envy you your thoughts, though. I've always stood up for
Sally, and I always shall, and anybody that is stupid enough to suppose,
because I stand up for her, I justify what she did that was wrong, is
welcome: I don't care. Sally is a good, patient, loving woman to-day; I
don't know anybody more so: I, for one, respect her. I wish I could be
half as patient;" and Hetty stooped, and, picking up a handful of the
pine-needles with which the road was thickly strewn, crumbled them up
fiercely in her hands, and tossing the dust high in the air, exclaimed:

"I wouldn't give that for the character of any woman that can't believe
in another woman's having thoroughly repented of having done wrong."

"Oh! nobody doubts that Sally has repented," said the embarrassed
visitor.

"Oh, they don't?" said Hetty, in a sarcastic tone; "well then I'd like
to ask them what they mean by treating her as they do. I'd like to ask
them what the Lord does to sinners that repent. He says they are to come
and be with him in Heaven, I believe; and I'd like to know whether after
He's taken them to Heaven, they're going to be reminded every minute of
all the sins they've repented of. Oh, but I've no patience with it!"

As Hetty was walking slowly back to the house after this injudicious
outburst, she met Dr. Eben Williams coming down the avenue. Her first
impulse was to plunge into the shrubbery, on the right hand or the left,
and escape him. The baby was now four weeks old, and yet Hetty had never
till to-day seen the doctor. It had been a very sore point between her
and Sally, that Sally would persist in having this young Dr. Williams
from the "Corners," instead of old Dr. Tuthill, who had been the family
doctor at "Gunn's" for nearly fifty years. It was the only quarrel that
Hetty and Sally had ever had; and it came near being a very serious one:
but Hetty suddenly recollected herself, and exclaiming:

"Why bless me, Sally, I haven't any right to decide what doctor you're
to have when you're sick; I'll never say another word about it; only you
needn't expect me ever to speak to that Eben Williams; I never expected
to see him under my roof," she dropped the subject and never alluded to
it again.

Her first impulse, as we said, when she saw the obnoxious doctor coming
towards her now, was to fly; her second one of anger with herself for
the first.

"I'm on my own ground," she thought with some of the old Squire's honest
pride stirring her veins, "I think I will not run away from the
popinjay."

It was hard to know just how such a dislike to Dr. Eben Williams had
grown up in Hetty's friendly heart. He had come some four years before
to practise medicine at Lonway Four Corners. His bright and cordial
face, his social manner, his superior education, readiness, and
resource, had quickly won away many patients from old Dr. Tuthill, who
still drove about the country as he had driven for half a century, with
a ponderous black leather case full of calomel and jalap swung under his
sulky. A few old families, the Gunns among the number, adhered
faithfully to the old doctor, and became bitter partisans against the
new one.

"Let him stick to the Corners: if they like him there, they're welcome
to him. He needn't be trying to get all Welbury besides," they said
angrily. "Welbury's done very well for a doctor, these good many years:
since before Eben Williams was born, for that matter;" and words ran
high in the warfare. Squire Gunn was one of the most violent of Dr.
Williams's opposers; and when, a few days before his death, old Dr.
Tuthill had timidly suggested that it might be well to have a
consultation, the Squire broke out with:

"Not that damned Eben Williams then. I won't have that damned rascal set
foot in this house. You're a fool, Tuthill, to let that young upstart
get all your practice as he's a doing."

The old man smiled sadly. He did not in the least share his friends'
hostility to the handsome, young, and energetic physician who was so
plainly soon to be his successor in the county.

"Ah, Squire!" he said, "you forget how old you and I are. It is nearly
my time to pass on, and make room for a younger man. Eben's a good
doctor. I'd rather he'd have the circuit here than anybody I know."

"Damned interloper! let him wait till you're dead," growled the Squire.
"He shan't have a hand in finishing me off at any rate. I don't want any
of their new-fangled notions." And the Squire died as he had lived, on
the old plan, with the old doctor.

When Eben Williams saw that he was about to meet Hetty Gunn, his
emotions were hardly less conflicting than hers. He, too, would have
liked to escape the meeting, for he had understood clearly that his
presence in her house was most unwelcome to her. But he, too, had his
own pride, as distinct and as strong as hers, and at the very moment
that Hetty was saying to herself, "I'm on my own ground: I won't run
away from the popinjay," Dr. Eben was thinking in his heart, "What a
fool I am to care a straw about meeting her! I'm about my own business,
and she is an obstinate simpleton."

The expressions of their faces as they met, and passed, with cold bows,
were truly comical; each so thoroughly conscious of the other's
antagonism, and endeavoring to look unconscious of it.

"By Jove, she's got a charming face, if she didn't look so obstinate,"
said Dr. Eben to himself, as he hurried on.

"He looked at me as he'd have looked at a snake," thought Hetty. "I
guess he's an honest fellow after all. He's got a handsome beard of his
own."

When she entered Sally's room, Sally exclaimed, "Oh, Hetty! didn't you
meet the doctor?"

"Yes," said Hetty, coolly. Sally looked wistfully at her for a few
seconds. "Oh, Hetty!" she said, "I thought, perhaps, if you saw him,
you'd like him better."

"I never said any thing against his looks, did I?" laughed Hetty. "He is
a very handsome man: he is the handsomest man I ever saw, if that's
all!"

"But it isn't all; it isn't any thing!" exclaimed Sally. "If he were an
ugly dwarf, I should love him just as well. Oh, Hetty, if you only knew
how good he was to me, when I was sick seven years ago! I should have
died if it hadn't been for him. There wasn't a woman at the Corners that
ever came near me, except Mrs. Patrick, the Irish woman I boarded with;
and, he used to stop and make broth for me, on my stove, with his own
hands, and sit and hold the baby on his knees, and talk to me so
beautifully about her. He just kept me alive."

Hetty's face flushed. Sally had never told her so much before; she could
not help a glow at her heart, at the picture of the handsome young
doctor sitting with the poor, outcast baby on his knees, and comforting
the poor outcast mother. But Hetty was a Gunn; and, as Dr. Eben had
said, obstinate. She could not forget her partisanship for Dr. Tuthill.
She was even all the angrier with the young doctor for being so clever,
so kind, so skilful, so handsome, and so pleasant, that everybody wanted
him.

"I dare say," she replied. "He'd do anything to curry favor. He's been
determined from the first to get all the practice of the whole county,
and I suppose as soon as Doctor Tuthill dies, he'll have it; and he may
as well, for I don't doubt he's a good doctor: but I think it was a mean
underhand thing to come in here and try to cut another man out."

"Why, Hetty!" remonstrated Sally, in a tone of unusual vehemence for
her. "Why, Hetty; there wasn't any doctor at the Corners: he didn't cut
anybody out there; and I'm sure they needed a doctor bad enough; and it
was his native place too."

"Oh! that's all very well to say," answered Hetty. "It's a likely story,
isn't it, that anybody'd settle in Lonway Four Corners, just for the
little practice there is in that handful of a village. He knew very well
he'd get Welbury, and Springton, and all the county."

"But, Hetty," persisted Sally. "He wasn't to blame, if people in these
towns sent for him, hearing how good he was. Indeed, indeed, Hetty, he
don't care for the money. He wouldn't take a cent from Jim, and he never
does from poor people. I've heard him say a dozen times, that he should
have come home to live on the old farm, even if they hadn't needed a
doctor there: he loves the country so, he can't be happy in the city;
and he loves every stick and stone of the old farm."

"Humph!" said Hetty. "He looks like a country fellow, doesn't he, with
his fine clothes, and his gauntlet gloves! Don't tell me! I say he is a
popinjay, with all his learning. Now don't talk any more about it,
little woman, for your cheeks are getting too red," and Hetty took up
the baby, and began to toss him and talk to him.

Hetty knew in her heart that she was unjust. More than she would have
owned to herself, and still more than she would have acknowledged to
Sally, she had admired Eben Williams's honest, straightforward,
warm-hearted face. But she preferred to dislike Eben Williams: her
father had disliked him, and had said he should never set foot in the
house; and Hetty felt a certain sort of filial obligation to keep up the
animosity.

But Nature had other plans for Hetty. In fact if one were disposed to be
superstitious, one might well have said that fate itself had determined
to thwart Hetty's resolution of hostility.




V.


Sally did not recover rapidly from her illness: her long mental
suffering had told upon her vitality, and left her unprepared for any
strain. The little baby also languished, sharing its mother's depressed
condition. Day after day, Doctor Eben came to the house. His quick step
sounded in the hall and on the stairs; his voice rang cheery, whenever
the door of Sally's room stood open. Hetty found herself more and more
conscious of his presence: each day she felt a half guilty desire to see
him again; she caught herself watching for his knock, listening for his
step; she even went so far as to wonder in a half impatient way why he
never sent for her, to give her the directions about Sally, instead of
giving them to the nurse. She little dreamed that Doctor Eben was as
anxious to avoid seeing her, as she had been to avoid seeing him. He had
a strangely resentful feeling towards Hetty, as if she were a personal
friend who had been treacherous to him. She was the only one of all the
partisans of Doctor Tuthill that he could not sympathize with and
heartily forgive. He would have found it very hard to explain why he
thus singled out Hetty, but he had done so from the outset. Strange
forerunning instinct of love, which uttered its prophecy in an unknown
tongue in an alien country! There came a day before long, when Doctor
Eben and Hetty were forced to forget all their prejudices, and to come
together on a common ground, where no antagonisms could exist.

Sally and the baby were both very ill. Hetty, in her inexperience of
illness, had not realized how serious a symptom Sally's long continued
prostration was. In her own busy and active life, the days flew by
almost uncounted: she was out early and late, walking or riding over the
farm; and when she came back to Sally's room, and found her always with
the same placid smile, and fair untroubled face, and heard always the
same patient reply, "Very comfortable, thank you, dear Hetty," it never
occurred to her that any thing was wrong. It seemed strange to her that
the baby was so still, that he neither cried nor laughed like other
babies; and it seemed to her very hard for Sally to have to be shut up
in the house so long: but this was all; she was totally unprepared for
any thought of danger, and the shock was terrible to her, when the
thought came. It was on a sunny day in May, one of those incredible
summer days which New England sometimes flashes out like frost-set
jewels in her icy spring. Hetty had listened, as usual, to hear the
Doctor leave Sally's room: she was more than usually impatient to have
him go, for she was waiting to take in to Sally a big basket of arbutus
blossoms which old Cæsar had gathered, and had brought to Hetty with a
characteristic speech.

"Seems's if the Lord meant'em for baby's cheeks, don't it, Miss Hetty?
they're so rosy."

"Our poor little man's cheeks are not so pink yet," said Hetty, and as
she looked at the pearly pink bells nestling in their green leaves, she
sighed, and wished that the baby did not look so pale. "But he'll be all
right as soon as we can get him out of doors in the June sunshine," she
added, and turned from the dining-room into the hall, with the great
basket of arbutus in her hand. As she turned, she gave a cry, and
dropped her flowers: there sat Dr. Eben, in a big arm-chair, by the
doorway. He sprang to pick up the flowers. Hetty looked at him without
speaking. "I was waiting here to see you, Miss Gunn," he said, as he
gave back the flowers. "I am very sorry to be obliged to speak to
you,"--here Hetty's eyes twinkled, and a slight, almost imperceptible,
but very comic grimace passed over her face. She was thinking to
herself, "Honest, that! I expect he is very sorry,"--"I am very sorry to
have to speak to you about Mrs. Little," he continued; "but I think it
is my duty to tell you that she is sinking very fast."

"What! Sally! what is the matter with her?" exclaimed Hetty. "Come right
in here, doctor;" and she threw open the sitting-room door, and, leading
him in, sank into the nearest chair, and said, like a little child:

"Oh, dear! what shall I do?"

Dr. Eben looked at her for a second, scrutinizingly.

This was not the sort of person he had expected to see in Miss Hetty
Gunn. This was an impulsive, outspoken, loving woman, without a trace of
any thing masculine about her, unless it were a certain something in the
quality of her frankness, which was masculine rather than feminine; it
was more purely objective than women's frankness is wont to be: this Dr.
Eben thought out later; at present, he only thought:

"Poor girl! I've got to hurt her sadly."

"You don't mean that Sally's going to die, do you?" said Hetty, in a
clear, unflinching tone.

"I am afraid she will, Miss Gunn," replied Dr. Eben, "not immediately;
perhaps not for some months: but there seems to be a general failure of
all the vital forces. I cannot rouse her, body or soul."

"Nonsense!" said Hetty. "If rousing is all she wants, surely we can
rouse her somehow. Isn't there any thing wrong with her anywhere?"

Dr. Eben smiled in spite of himself at this offhand, non-professional
view of the case; but he answered, sadly:

"Not what you mean by any thing wrong; if there were, it would be easier
to cure her."

Hetty knitted her brows, and looked at him in her turn, scrutinizingly.
"Have you had patients like her before?"

"Yes," said Dr. Eben.

"Did they all die? Didn't you cure one?" continued Hetty, inexorably.

"I have known persons in such a condition to recover," said Dr. Eben,
with dignity; "but not by the help of medicine so much as by an entire
change of conditions."

"What do you mean by conditions?" said Hetty, never having heard, in
her simple and healthful life, of anybody's needing what is called a
"change of scene." Dr. Eben smiled again, and, as he smiled, he noted
with an involuntary professional delight the clear, fine skin, the firm
flesh, the lustrous eye, the steady poise of every muscle in this woman,
who was catechising him, with so evident a doubt as to his skill and
information.

"I hardly think, Miss Gunn," he went on, "that I could make you
understand, in your superb health, just all I mean by change of
conditions. It means change of food, air, surroundings; every thing in
short, which addresses itself to the senses. It means an entire new set
of nerve impressions."

"Sally isn't in the least nervous," broke in Hetty. "She's always as
quiet as a mouse."

"You mean that she isn't in the least fidgety," replied the doctor.
"That is quite another thing. Some of the most nervous people I know
have absolute quiet of manner. Mrs. Little's nervous system has been for
several years under a terrible strain. When I was first called to her, I
thought her trouble and suffering would kill her; and I didn't think it
would take so long. But it is that which is killing her now."

Hetty was not listening: she was thinking very perplexedly of what the
doctor had said a few moments before; interrupting him now, she said,
"Would it do Sally good to take her to another place? that is easily
done." Dr. Eben hesitated.

"I think sea-air might help her; but I am not sure," he replied.

"Would you go with us?" asked Hetty. "She wouldn't go without you." The
doctor hesitated again. He looked into Hetty's eyes: they were fixed on
his as steadily, as unembarrassedly, as if he and Hetty had been
comrades for years. "What a woman she is," he thought to himself, "to
coolly ask me to become their travelling physician, when for six weeks I
have been coming to the house every day, and she would not even speak to
me!"

"I am not sure that I could, Miss Gunn," he replied. Hetty's face
changed. A look of distress stamped every feature.

"Oh, Dr. Williams, do!" she exclaimed. "Sally would never go without
you; and she will die, you say, unless she has change." Then hesitating,
and turning very red, Hetty stammered, "I can pay you any thing--which
would be necessary to compensate you: we have money enough." Dr. Eben
bowed, and answered with some asperity:

"The patients that I had hesitancy about leaving are patients who pay me
nothing. It is not in the least a question of money, Miss Gunn."

"Forgive me," exclaimed Hetty, "I did not know--I thought--"

"Your thought was a perfectly natural one, Miss Gunn," interrupted the
doctor, pitying her confusion. "I have never had need to make my
profession a source of income: I have no ambition to be rich; and, as I
am alone in the world, I can afford to do what many other physicians
could not."

"When can you tell if you could go?" continued Hetty, not apparently
hearing what the doctor had said.

"She only thinks of me as she would of a chair or a carriage which would
make her friend more comfortable," thought the doctor; "and why should
she think of me in any other way," he added, impatient with himself for
the selfish thought.

"To-morrow," said he, curtly. "If I can go, I will; and there is no time
to be lost."

Hetty nodded her head, but did not speak another word: she was too near
crying; and to have cried in the presence of Dr. Eben Williams would
have mortified Hetty to the core.

"Oh, to think," she said to herself, "that, after all, I should have to
be under such obligations to that man! But it is all for Sally's sake,
poor dear child. How good he is to her! If he were anybody else, I
should like him with all my heart."

The next morning, as Dr. Williams walked slowly up the avenue, he saw
Hetty standing in the doorway, shading her eyes with her hand and
looking towards him. The morning sun shone full upon her, and made
glints of golden light here and there in her thick brown curls. Hetty
had worn her hair in the same style for fifteen years; short, clustering
curls close to her head on either side, and a great mass of curls
falling over a comb at the back. If Hetty had a vanity it was of her
hair; and it was a vanity one was forced to forgive,--it had such
excellent reason for being. The picture which she made in the doorway,
at this moment, Dr. Eben never forgot: a strange pleasure thrilled
through him at the sight. As he drew near, she ran down the steps
towards him; ran down with no more thought or consciousness of the
appearance of welcoming him, than if she had been a child of seven: she
was impatient to know whether Sally could go to the sea-shore. This man
who approached held the decision in his hands; and he was, at that
moment, no more to Hetty than any messenger bringing word which she was
eager to hear. But Dr. Eben would have been more or less than man, could
he have seen, unmoved, the swift motion, the outstretched hands, the
eager eyes, the bright cheeks, the sunlit hair, of the beautiful woman
who ran to meet him.

"Well?" was all that Hetty said, as, panting for want of breath, she
turned as shortly as a wild creature turns, and began to walk by Dr.
Eben's side. He forgot, for the instant, all the old antagonisms; he
forgot that, until yesterday, he had never spoken with Hetty Gunn; and,
meeting her eager gaze with one about as eager, he said in a familiar
tone:

"Yes; well! I am going."

Hetty stopped short, and, looking up at him, exclaimed:

"Oh, I am so glad!"

The words were simple enough, but the tone made them electric. The
doctor felt the blood mounting in his face, under the unconscious look
of this middle-aged child. She did not perceive his expression. She did
not perceive any thing, except, the fact that Sally's doctor would help
her take Sally away, and save Sally's life. She continued:

"We'll take her to 'The Runs.' Did you ever go there, doctor? It is only
a day's journey from here, the loveliest little sea-side place I ever
saw. It isn't like the big sea-side places with their naked rocks, and
their great, cruel, thundering beaches. I hate those. They make me sad
and desperate. I know Sally wouldn't like them. But this little place is
as sweet and quiet as a lake; and yet it is the sea. It is hugged in
between two tongues of land, and there are ever so many little threads
of the sea, running way up into the meadows, which are thick with high
strong grass, so different from all the grasses we have here. I buy salt
hay from there every year, and the cattle like it, just a little of it,
as well as we like a bit of broiled bacon for breakfast. There is a nice
bit of beach, too,--real beach; but there are trees on it, and it looks
friendly: not as if it were just made on purpose for wrecks to drift up
on, like the big beaches: oh, but I hate a great, long sea-beach! There
is a farmhouse there, not two minutes' walk from this beach, where they
always take summer boarders. In July it wouldn't be pleasant, because it
is crowded; but now it will be empty, and we can have it all to
ourselves. There is a dear, old, retired, sea captain there, too, who
takes people out in such a nice sail-boat. I shall keep Sally and the
baby out on the water all day long. I am afraid you will find it very
dull, Dr. Williams. Do you like the sea? Of course you will stay with us
all the time. I don't mean in the least, that you are to come only once
a day to see Sally, as you do here. You will be our guest, you
understand. I dare say you will do more to cure Sally than all the
sea-air and all the medicine put together. She has had so few people to
love in this world, poor girl, that those she does love are very dear to
her. She is more grateful to you than to anybody else in the world."

"Except you, Miss Gunn," replied the doctor, earnestly. "You have done
for her far more than I ever could. I could show only a personal
sympathy; but you have added to the personal sympathy material aid."

"Yes, yes, I know," said Hetty, absently. She did not wish to hear any
thing said about this. "We can set out to-morrow, if you can be ready,"
she continued. "I shall have Cæsar drive the horses over next week. They
can't very well be spared this week. The worst thing is, we have to set
out so early in the morning, and Sally is always so much weaker then.
Could you"--Hetty hesitated, and fairly stammered in her embarrassment.
"Couldn't you come over here to-night and sleep, so as to be here when
she first wakes up? You might do something to help her." Before Hetty
had finished her sentence, her face was crimson. Dr. Eben's was full of
a humorous amusement. Already, in twenty-four hours, had it come to
this, that Hetty was urging that popinjay Dr. Ebenezer Williams, to come
and sleep under her roof? The twinkle in his face showed her plainly
what he was thinking. He began to reply:

"You are very kind, Miss Gunn"--Hetty interrupted him:

"No, I am not at all kind, Dr. Williams; and I see you are laughing at
me, because I've had to speak to you, after all, as if I liked you. But,
of course, you understand that it is all for Sally's sake. If I were to
be ill myself, I should have Dr. Tuthill," said Hetty, in a tone meant
to be very resolute and dignified, but only succeeding in being comical.

The doctor bowed ceremoniously, replying:

"I will be as frank as you are, Miss Gunn. As you say, 'of course' I
understand that any apparent welcome which you extend to me is entirely
for Mrs. Little's sake; and that it is sorely against your will that you
have been obliged to speak to me; and that it is solely in my capacity
as physician that I am asked to sleep under your roof to-night; and I
beg your pardon for saying that I accept the invitation in that
capacity, and no other, solely because I believe it will be for the
interest of my patient that I do so. Good morning, Miss Gunn," and, as
at that moment they reached the house, Dr. Eben bowed again as
ceremoniously as before, sprang up the piazza steps, and ran up the
staircase, two steps at a time, to Sally's room. Hetty stood still in
the doorway: she felt herself discomfited. She was half angry, half
amused. She did not like what the doctor had said; but she admitted to
herself that it was precisely what she would have said in his place.

"I don't blame him," she thought, "I don't blame him a bit; but, it is
horridly disagreeable. I don't see how we're ever to get on; and it is
so provoking, for, if he were anybody else, we'd be real good friends.
He isn't in the least what I thought he was. I hope he won't come over
before tea. It would be awkward enough. But then, he's got to take all
his meals with us at 'The Runs.' Oh, dear!" and Hetty went about her
preparations for the journey, with feelings by no means of unalloyed
pleasure.

No danger of Dr. Eben's coming before tea. It was very late when he
appeared, valise in hand, and said in a formal tone to Hetty, who met
him at the door, in fact had been nervously watching for him for four
whole hours:

"I am very sorry to see you still up, Miss Gunn. I ought to have
recollected to tell you that I should not be here until late: I have
been saying good-by to my patients. Will you have the kindness to let me
be shown to my room?" and like a very courteous traveller, awaiting a
landlady's pleasure, he stood at foot of the stairs.

With some confusion of manner, and in a constrained tone, unlike her
usual cheery voice, Hetty replied:

"The next door to Sally's, doctor." She wished to say something more,
but she could not think of a word.

"What a fool I am!" she mentally ejaculated, as the doctor, with a hasty
"good-night," entered his room. "What a fool I am to let him make me so
uncomfortable. I don't see what it is. I wish I hadn't asked him to
go."

"That woman's a jewel!" the doctor was saying to himself the other side
of the door: "she is as honest as a man could be. I didn't know there
could be any thing so honest in shape of a woman under fifty: she
doesn't look a day over twenty-five; but, they say she's nearly forty;
it's the strangest thing in life she's never married. I'll wager any
thing, she's wishing this minute I was in Guinea; but she'll put it
through bravely for sake of Sally, as she calls her, and I'll keep out
of her way all I can. If it weren't for the confounded notion she's
taken up against me, I'd like to know her. She's a woman a man could
make a friend of, I do believe," and Dr. Eben jumped into bed, and was
fast asleep in five minutes, and dreamed that Hetty came towards him,
dressed like an Indian, with her brown curls stuck full of painted
porcupine quills, and a tomahawk brandished in her hand.




VI.


The journey was a hard one, though so short. How many times an hour did
Hetty bless the good fortune which had given them Dr. Williams for an
escort! Sally had been so much excited and pleased at the prospect of
the trip to the sea-shore, that she had seemed in the outset far
stronger than she really was. Before mid-day a reaction had set in, and
she had grown so weak that the doctor was evidently alarmed. The baby
disturbed, and frightened by the noise and jar, had wailed almost
incessantly; and Hetty was more nearly at her wits' end than she had
ever been in her life. It was piteous to see her,--usually so brisk, so
authoritative, so unhesitating,--looking helplessly into the face of the
doctor, and saying:

"Oh, what shall we do! what shall we do!" At last, the weary day came to
an end; and when Hetty saw her two sufferers quietly asleep in snowy
beds, in a great airy room, with a blazing log-fire on the hearth, she
drew a long breath, and said to the doctor:

"This is the most awful day I ever lived through."

Dr. Eben smiled. "You have had a life singularly free from troubles,
Miss Gunn."

"No!" said Hetty, "I've had a great deal. But there has always been
something to do. The only things one can't bear, it seems to me, are
where one can't do any thing, like to-day: that poor little baby crying,
crying, and nothing to be done, but to wait for him to stop; and Sally
looking as if she would die any minute; and that screaming steam-engine
whirling us all along as if we were only dead freight. I suppose if
Sally had died, we should have had to keep right on, shouldn't we?"

"Yes," said the doctor. Something in his tone arrested Hetty's ear. She
looked at him inquiringly; then she said slowly:

"I understand you. I am ashamed. We were only three people out of
hundreds: it is just like life, isn't it: how selfish we are without
realizing it! It isn't of any consequence how or where or when any one
of us dies: the train must keep right on. I see."

"Yes," said the doctor again: and this monosyllable meant even more than
the other. Dr. Eben was a philosopher. Epictetus, and that most royal
of royal emperors, Marcus Aurelius, had been his masters: their words
were ever present with him. "It is not possible that the nature of the
universe, either through want of power or want of skill, has made a
mistake;" "nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature
to bear,"--were hourly watchwords of thought with him. In this regard he
and Hetty were alike, though they had reached their common standpoint by
different roads: he by education and reasoning, and a profound
admiration for the ancient classics; she by instinct and healthfulness
of soul, and a profound love for that old Massachusetts militiaman, her
grandfather.

"The Runs" was, as Hetty had said, one of the loveliest of sea-side
places. Dr. Eben, who was familiar with all the well-known sea-side
resorts in America, was forced to admit that this little nook had a
charm of its own, unlike all the others. The epithet "hugged in," which
Hetty had used, was the very phrase to best convey it. It was at the
mouth of a small river, which, as it drew near the sea, widened so
suddenly that it looked like a lake. The country, for miles about, was
threaded by little streams of water: which of them were sea making up,
and which were river coming down, it was hard to tell. In early morning
they were blue as the sky overhead; at sunset they glowed like a fiery
net, suddenly flung over the grasses and rushes. Great flocks of marsh
birds dwelt year after year in these cool, green labyrinths, and made no
small part of the changeful beauty of the picture, rising sometimes,
suddenly, in a dusky cloud, and floating away, soaring, and sinking, and
at last dropping out of sight again, as suddenly as they had risen. The
meadows were vivid green in June, vivid claret in October: no other
grass spreads such splendor of tint on so superb a palette, as the
salt-marsh grasses on the low, wide stretches of some of New England's
southern shores. Sailing down this river, and keeping close to the
left-hand bank, one came almost unawares on a sharp bend to the left:
here the river suddenly ended, and the sea began; the rushes and reeds
and high grasses ceased; a low, rocky barrier stayed them. Rounding this
point, lo, your boat swayed instantly to the left: a gentle surf-wave
took possession of you, and irresistibly bore you towards a yellow sand
beach, which curved inward like a reaper's sickle, not more than a
quarter of a mile long, from the handle to the shining point; smooth
and glistening, strewn with polished pebbles and tiny shells, it seemed
some half-hidden magic beach on which shallops of fairies might any
moment come to moor. On the farther point, so close to the sea that it
seemed to rise out of the water, stood a high stone lighthouse, with a
revolving light, whose rays swept the open sea for many miles. The
opposite river bank was a much higher one, and ran farther out to sea.
On this promontory was Safe Haven, a small, thickly settled town, whose
spires and house-tops, as seen from the beach at "The Runs," looked
always like a picture, painted on the sky; white on gray in the morning,
gray on crimson at sunset. The farmhouse of which we have spoken stood
only a few rods back from the beach, and yet it had green fields on
either hand; and a row of Balm of Gilead trees in front; an old and
sandy road, seldom disturbed by wheels, ran between these trees and the
house, and rambled down towards the lighthouse. Wild pea and pimpernel
made this road gay; white clover and wild rose made it fragrant; and
there branched off from it a lane, on which if you turned and strayed
back into the fields, a mile or so, you came to thickets of wild azalia,
and tracts of pink laurel; and, a little way farther in, you came to
fresh-water ponds which in July were white with lilies. No storm ever
lashed the water high on the beach at "The Runs"; no sultriest summer
calm ever stilled it; the even rhythm and delightsome cooling of its
waves seemed to obey a law of their own, quite independent of the great
booming sea outside the lighthouse bar.

In the quiet, and the beauty, and the keen salt air of this charmed
spot, poor Sally Little lifted up her head, and began to live again,
like a flower taken from desert sands and set by a spring. The baby also
bloomed like a rose. In an incredibly short time, both mother and child
had so altered that one would hardly have known them. The days went by,
to them all, as days go by for children: unnamed, uncounted; only marked
by joy of sleep, and the delight of waking. In after years, when Hetty
looked back upon these weeks, they seemed to her, not like a dream,
which is usually the heart's first choice of a phrase to describe the
swift flight of a happy time, but like a few days spent on some other
planet, where, for the interval, she had been changed into a sort of
supernatural child. Except at night, they were never in the house. The
harsh New England May laid aside for them all its treacheries, and was
indeed the month of spring. Their mornings they spent on the water,
rowing or sailing; their afternoons in driving through the budding and
blossoming country. Always the baby lay in Hetty's lap: from the
beginning, his nurse had found herself perpetually set aside by Hetty's
imperious affection. As Eben Williams looked, day after day, on the
picture which Hetty and the baby made, he found himself day after day
more and more bewildered by Hetty. She had adopted towards him a uniform
manner of cordial familiarity, which had in it, however, no shade of
intimacy. If Hetty had been the veriest coquette living, she could not
have devised a more effectual charm to a man of Eben Williams's
temperament. He had come out unscathed from many sieges which had been
laid to him by women. He knew very well the ordinary methods, the
atmosphere of the average wooing or wooable woman, and he was proof
against them all. He was thirty years old and he had never yet been in
love. But this woman, who treated him with the same easy, unconscious
frankness with which men treat men, who never seemed to observe his
going or his coming, otherwise than as it might affect her friend's need
of him as a physician; this woman who seemed all mother while she was
holding the baby, and all boy while she was trying, under old Captain
Mayhew's guidance to learn to sail a boat; this woman who was a spinster
in years, and a child in simplicity and directness; who was beautiful,
and never once thought of her beauty; who was alone, and never seemed
lonely: she was a perpetual problem and fascination to him. Dr. Eben was
not usually given to concerning himself much as to other people's
opinion of him: but he found himself for ever wondering what Hetty Gunn
thought of him; whether she were beginning to lose any of her old
prejudice against him; and whether, after this sea-side idyl were over,
he should ever see her again. The more he pondered, the less he could
solve the question. No wonder. The simple truth was that Hetty was not
thinking about him at all. She had accepted the whole situation with
frankness and good sense: she found him kind, helpful, cheery, and
entertaining; the embarrassments she had feared, did not arise, and she
was very glad of it. She often said to herself: "The doctor is very
sensible. He does not show any foolish feeling of resentment;" and she
felt a sincere and increasing gratitude to him, because Sally and her
child were fast regaining health under his care. But, beyond this, Hetty
did not occupy her thoughts with Dr. Eben. It had never been her way to
think about men, as most women think about them: good comradeship seemed
to be all that she was capable of towards a man. Dr. Eben said this to
himself hundreds of times each day; and then hundreds of other times
each day, as he watched the looks which she bent on the baby in her
arms, he knew that he had said what was not true; that there must be
unstirred depths in her nature, which only the great forces of love
could move. All this time Dr. Eben fancied that he was simply analyzing
Hetty as a psychological study. He would have admitted frankly to any
one, that she interested him more than any woman he had ever seen,
puzzled him more, occupied his thoughts more; but that he could be in
love with this rather eccentric middle-aged woman, beautiful though she
was, Dr. Eben would have warmly denied. His ideal maiden, the woman whom
he had been for ten years confidently expecting some day to find, woo,
and win, was quite unlike Hetty; unlike even what Hetty must have been
in her youth: she was to be slender and graceful; gentle as a dove;
vivacious, but in no wise opinionated, gracious and suave and versed in
all elegancies; cultured too, and of a rare, fine wit: so easy is it for
the heart to garnish its unfilled chambers, and picture forth the sort
of guest it will choose to entertain. Meanwhile, by doors which the
heart knows not of, quietly enters a guest of quite different presence,
takes up abode, is lodged and fed by angels, till grown a very monarch
in possession and control, it suddenly surprises the heart into an
absolute and unconditional allegiance; and this is like what the apostle
meant, when he said,--

"The kingdom of God cometh not by observation."

When Hetty said to Dr. Eben, one night, "I really think we must go home.
Sally seems perfectly well, and baby too: do you not think it will be
quite safe to take them back?" he gave an actual start, and colored.
Professionally, Dr. Eben was more ashamed of himself in that instant
than he had ever been in his life. He had absolutely forgotten, for many
days, that it was in the capacity of a physician that he was living on
this shore of the sea. They had been at "The Runs" now two months; and,
except in his weekly visits to Lonway Corners, he had hardly
recollected that he was a physician at all. The sea and the wind had
been Sally's real physicians, and the baby's; and as for the other two,
in the happy quartette, had they needed a physician? Perhaps; but no
physician was there for them.

"Certainly! certainly!" he stammered, "it will be safe;" and his face
grew redder and redder, as he spoke. Hetty looked at him in honest
amazement. She could put but one interpretation on his manner.

"Why, there is no need of our going yet, if it isn't best. Don't look
so! Sally can stay here all summer if it will do her good."

"You misunderstood me, Miss Gunn," said the doctor, now himself again.
"It will really be perfectly safe for Mrs. Little to go home. She is
entirely well."

"What did you mean then?" said Hetty, looking him straight in the eye
with honest perplexity in her face. "You looked as if you didn't think
it best to go."

"No, Miss Gunn," replied Dr. Eben. "I looked as if I did not want to go.
It has been so pleasant here: that was all."

"Oh," said Hetty, in a relieved tone, "was that it? I feel just so, too:
it has been delightful; it is the only real play-spell I ever had in my
life. But for all that I'm really impatient to get home: they need me on
the farm; the men have not been doing just as they ought to. Jim Little
is all right when I'm there; but they take advantage of him when I'm
away. I really must get home before haying. I think we must certainly go
some day next week."

Dr. Eben was just going over to town for the letters. As he walked
slowly down to the beach, he said to himself:

"Haying! By Jove!" and this was pretty much all he thought during the
whole of the hour that he spent in rowing to and from the Safe Haven
wharf. "Haying!" he ejaculated again, and again. "What a woman that is!
I believe if we were all dead, she'd have just as keen an eye to that
haying!"

By "we all" in that sentence of his soliloquy, Dr. Eben really meant
"I." He was beginning to be half aware of a personal unhappiness,
because Hetty showed no more consciousness of his existence. Her few
words this morning about returning home had produced startling results
in his mind; like those a chemist sometimes sees in his crucible, when,
on throwing in a single drop of some powerful agent, he discovers by its
instantaneous and infallible test, the presence of things he had not
suspected were there. Dr. Eben Williams clenched his hands as he paced
up and down the beach. He did not wish to love Hetty Gunn. He did not
approve of loving Hetty Gunn; but love her he did with the whole
strength of his soul. In this one brief hour, he had become aware of it.
What would be its result, in vain he tried to conjecture. One moment, he
said to himself that it was not in Hetty's nature to love any man; the
next moment, with a lover's inconsistency, he reproached himself for a
thought so unjust to her: one moment, he rated himself soundly for his
weakness, and told himself sternly that it was plain Hetty cared no more
for him than she did for one of her farm laborers; the next moment, he
fell into reverie full of a vague and hopeful recalling of all the kind
and familiar things she had ever done or said. The sum and substance of
his meditations was, however, that nothing should lead him to commit the
folly of asking Hetty to marry him, unless her present manner toward him
changed.

"I dare say she would laugh in my face," thought he; "I don't know but
that she would in any man's face who should ask her," and, armed and
panoplied in this resolution, Dr. Eben walked up to the spot where Hetty
sat under one of the old Balm of Gilead trees sewing, with the baby in
its cradle at her feet. It was still early morning: the Safe Haven
spires shone in the sun, and the little fishing schooners were racing
out to sea before the wind. This was one of the prettiest sights from
the beach at "The Runs." Every morning scores of little fishing vessels
came down the river, shot past like arrows, and disappeared beyond the
bar. At night they came home again slowly; sometimes with their sails
cross-set, which made them look like great white butterflies skimming
the water. Hetty never wearied of watching them: still pictures never
wholly pleased her. The things in nature which had motion, evident aim,
purpose, arrested her eye, and gave her delight.

"I haven't learned to sail a boat yet, after all," she said regretfully,
as the doctor came up. "Only see how lovely they are. I wish I could buy
this whole place, and carry it home. I think we will all come here again
next summer."

"Not all," said Dr. Eben; "I shall not be here with you."

"No, I hope not," replied Hetty, unconsciously.

Dr. Eben laughed outright: her tone was so unaffectedly honest.

"Oh, you know what I mean," exclaimed Hetty, "I mean, I hope Sally will
not have to bring you as a physician. Of course, there is nothing to
hinder your coming here at any time, if you like," she added, in a
kindly but indifferent tone.

"But I should not want to come alone," said the doctor.

"No," said Hetty, reflectively. "It would be dull, I shouldn't like it
myself, to be here all alone. The sea is the loneliest of things in the
universe, I think. The fields and the woods and the hills all look as if
they had good fellowship with each other perpetually; but the great,
blank, bare sea, looks for ever alone; and sometimes the waves seem to
me to run up on the shore as fiercely as starved wolves leaping on
prey!"

"Not on this little comfortable beach, though," said Dr. Eben.

"Oh, no!" replied Hetty, "I did not mean such sea-shore as this. But
even here, I should find it sad if I were alone."

"All places are sad if one is alone, Miss Gunn," replied the doctor, in
a pensive tone, rare with him.

Hetty turned a surprised glance at him, and did not speak for a moment.
Then she said:

"Yes; but nobody need be alone: there are always plenty of people to
take into one's house. If you are lonely, why don't you get somebody to
live with you, or you might be married," she added, in as purely
matter-of-fact a tone, as she would have said, "you might take a
journey," or "you might build on a wing to your house."

This suggestion sounded oddly enough, coming so soon from the lips of
the woman whom the doctor had just been ardently wishing he could marry;
but its cool and unembarrassed tone was sufficient to corroborate his
utmost disheartenment.

"Ah!" he thought, "I knew she didn't care any thing for me!" and he fell
into a silent brown study which Hetty did not attempt to break. This was
one among her many charms to Dr. Eben, that she was capable of sitting
quietly by a person's side for long intervals of silence. The average
woman, when she is in the company of even a single person, seems to
consider herself derelict in duty, if conversation is not what she calls
"kept up;" an instinctive phrase, which, by its universal use, is the
bitterest comment on its own significance. Men have no such feeling. Two
men will sit by each other's side, it may be for hours, in silence, and
feel no derogation from good comradeship. Why should not women? The
answer is too evident. Women have a perpetual craving to be recognized,
to be admired; and a large part of their ceaseless chatter is no more
nor less than a surface device to call your attention to them; as little
children continually pull your gown to make you look at them. Hetty was
incapable of this. She was a vivacious talker when she had any thing to
say; but a most dogged holder of her tongue when she had not. In this
instance she had nothing to say, and she did not speak: the doctor had
so much to say that he did not speak, and they sat in silence till the
shrill bell from the farmhouse door called them to dinner. As they
walked slowly up to the house, the doctor said:

"You don't wonder that I hate to go away from this lovely place, do you,
Miss Gunn?"

Any other woman but Hetty would have felt something which was in his
tone, though not in his words. But Hetty answered bluntly:

"Yes, I do wonder; it is very lovely here: but I should think you'd want
to be at work; I do. I think we've had play-spell enough; for, after
all, it hasn't been any thing but play-spell for you and me."

"Now she despises me," thought poor Dr. Eben. "She hasn't any tolerance
in her, anyhow," and he was grave and preoccupied all through dinner.




VII.


It was settled that they should set out for home a week from that day.
"Only seven days left," said the doctor. "What can I do in that time?"

Never was man so baffled in attempts to woo. Hetty saw nothing, heard
nothing, understood nothing; unwittingly she defeated every project he
made for seeing her alone; unconsciously she chilled and dampened and
arrested every impulse he had to speak to her, till Dr. Eben's temper
was tried as well as his love. Sally, the baby, the nurse, all three,
were simply a wall of protection around Hetty. Her eyes, her ears, her
hands were full; and as for her heart and soul, they were walled about
even better than her body. Nothing can be such a barrier to love's
approach as an honest nature's honest unconsciousness. Dr. Eben was
wellnigh beside himself. The days flew by. He had done nothing, gained
nothing. How he cursed his folly in having let two whole months slip
away, before he found out that he loved this woman, whom now he could no
more hope to impress in a few hours' time than a late afternoon sun
might think to melt an iceberg.

"It would take a man a lifetime to make her understand that he loved
her," groaned the doctor, "and I've only got two days;" and more than
ever his anxiety deepened as he wondered whether, after they returned
home, she would allow him to continue these friendly and familiar
relations. This uncertainty led to a most unfortunate precipitation on
his part. The night before they were to go, he found Hetty at sunset
sitting under the trees, and looking dreamily out to sea. Her attitude
and her look were pensive. He had never seen such an expression on
Hetty's face or figure, and it gave him a warmer yearning towards her
than he had ever yet dared to let himself feel. It was just time for the
lamp in the lighthouse to be lit, and Hetty was watching for it. As the
doctor approached her, she said, "I am waiting for the lighthouse light
to flash out. I like so to see its first ray. It is like seeing a new
planet made." Dr. Eben sat down by her side, and they both waited in
silence for the light. The whole western and southern sky glowed red; a
high wind had been blowing all day, and the water was covered with foamy
white caps; the tall, slender obelisk of the lighthouse stood out black
against the red sky, and the shining waves leaped up and broke about its
base. But all was quiet in the sheltered curve of the beach on which
Hetty and Dr. Eben were sitting: the low surf rose and fell as gently as
if it had a tide of its own, which no storm could touch. Presently the
bright light flashed from the tower, shone one moment on the water of
the river's mouth, then was gone.

"Now it is lighting the open sea," said Hetty. In a few moments more the
lantern had swung round, and again the bright rays streamed towards the
beach, almost reaching the shore.

"And now it is lighting us," said Dr. Eben: "I wish it were as easy to
get light upon one's path in life, as it is to hang a lantern in a
tower."

Hetty laughed.

"Are you often puzzled?" she asked lightly.

"No," said the doctor, "I never have been, but I am now."

"What about?" asked Hetty, innocently: "I don't see what there is to
puzzle you here."

"You, Miss Gunn," stoutly answered Dr. Eben, feeling as if he were
taking a header into unfathomed waters.

"Me!" exclaimed Hetty, in a tone of utmost surprise. "Why, what do you
mean?"

Dr. Eben hesitated a single instant. He had not intended to do this
thing, but the occasion had been too much for him. "I may as well do it
first as last," he said; "she can but refuse me:" and, in a very few
manly words, Dr. Eben Williams straightway asked Hetty Gunn to marry
him. He was not prepared for what followed, although in a soliloquy,
only a few days before, he had predicted it to himself. Hetty laughed
merrily, unaffectedly, in his very face.

"Why, Dr. Williams!" she said, "you can't know what you're saying. You
can't want to marry me: I'm not the sort of woman men want to marry"--

He interrupted her. His voice was husky with deep feeling.

"Miss Gunn," he said, "I implore you not to speak in this way. I do know
what I am saying, and I do love you with all my heart."

"Nonsense," answered Hetty in the kindliest of tones; "of course you
think you do: but it is only because you have been shut up here two
whole months, with nothing else to do but fancy that you were in love. I
told you it was time we went home. Don't say any thing more about it.
I'll promise you to forget it all," and Hetty laughed again, a merry
little laugh. A sharp suspicion crossed the doctor's mind that she was
coquetting with him. In a constrained tone he said:

"Miss Gunn, do you really wish me to understand that you reject me?"

"Not at all," said Hetty, gayly. "I wish you to understand that I
haven't permitted you to offer yourself. I have simply assured you that
you are mistaken: you'll see it for yourself as soon as we get home. Do
you suppose I shouldn't know if you were really in love with me?"

"I didn't know it myself till a week ago," replied Dr. Eben: "I did not
understand myself. I never loved any woman before."

"And no man ever asked me to marry him before," answered the honest
Hetty, like a child, and with an amused tone in her voice. "It is very
odd, isn't it?"

Dr. Eben was confounded. In spite of himself, he felt the contagion of
Hetty's merry and unsentimental view of the situation; and it was with a
trace of obstinacy rather than of a lover's pain in his tones that he
continued:

"But, Miss Gunn, indeed you must not make light of this matter in this
way. It is not treating me fairly. With all the love of a man's heart I
love you, and have asked you to be my wife: are you sure that you could
not love me?"

"I don't really think I could," said Hetty, "but I shall not try, because
I am sure you are mistaken. I am too old to be married, for one thing: I
shall be thirty-seven in the fall. That's reason enough, if there were
no other. A man can't fall in love with a woman after she's as old as
that."

Dr. Eben laughed outright. He could not help it.

"There!" said Hetty, triumphantly; "that's right; I like to hear you
laugh now; for goodness' sake, let's forget all this. I will, if you
will; and we will be all the better friends for it perhaps. At any rate,
you'll be all the more friend to me for having saved you from making
such a blunder as thinking you were in love with me."

Dr. Eben was on the point of persisting farther; but he suddenly thought
to himself:

"I'd better not: I might make her angry. I'll take the friendship
platform for the present: that is some gain."

"You will permit me then to be your friend, Miss Gunn," he said.

"Why, certainly," said Hetty, in a matter-of-fact way: "I thought we
were very good friends now."

"But you recollect, you distinctly told me I was to come only as
physician to Mrs. Little," retorted the doctor.

Hetty colored: the darkness sheltered her.

"Oh! that was a long time ago," she said in a remorseful tone: "I should
be very ungrateful if I had not forgotten that."

And with this Dr. Eben was forced to be contented. When he thought the
whole thing over, he admitted to himself that he had fared as well as he
had a right to expect, and that he had gained a very sure vantage, in
having committed the loyal Hetty to the assertion that they were
friends. He half dreaded to see her the next morning, lest there should
be some change, some constraint in her manner; not a shade of it. He
could have almost doubted his own recollections of the evening before,
if such a thing had been possible, so absolutely unaltered was Hetty's
treatment of him. She had been absolutely honest in all she said: she
did honestly believe that his fancied love for her was a sentimental
mistake, a caprice born of idleness and lack of occupation, and she did
honestly intend to forget the whole thing, and to make him forget it.
And so they went back to the farm, where the summer awaited them with
overflowing harvests of every thing, and Hetty's hands were so full that
very soon she had almost ceased to recollect the life at "The Runs."
Sally and the baby were strong and well. The whole family seemed newly
glad and full of life. All odd hours they could snatch from work, Old
Cæsar and Nan roamed about in the sun, following the baby, as his nurse
carried him in her arms. He had been christened Abraham Gunn Little;
poor James Little having persistently refused to let his own name be
given to the child, and Hetty having been cordially willing to give her
father's. To speak to a baby as Abraham was manifestly impossible, and
the little fellow was called simply "Baby" month after month, until, one
day, one of Norah's toddlers, who could not speak plain, hit upon a
nickname so fortunate that it was at once adopted by everybody. "Raby,"
little Mike called him, by some original process of compounding
"Abraham" and "Baby;" and "Raby" he was from that day out. He was a
beautiful child: his mother's blue eyes, his father's dark hair, and a
skin like a ripe peach, but not over fair,--made a combination of color
which was rarely lovely. He was a joyous child, as joyous as if no
shadow had ever rested on his mother's heart. Sally watched him day by
day with delight; but the delight was never wholly free from pain: the
wound she had received, the wound she had inflicted on herself, could
never wholly heal. A deep, moral hurt must for ever leave its trace, as
surely as a deep wound in a man's flesh must leave its scar. It is of no
use for us to think to evade this law; neither is it a law wholly of
retribution. The scar on the flesh is token of nature's process of
healing: so is the scar of a perpetual sorrow, which is left on a soul
which has sinned and repented. Sally and Jim were leading healthful and
good lives now; and each day brought them joys and satisfactions: but
their souls were scarred; the fulness of joy which might have been
theirs they could never taste. And the loss fell where it could never be
overlooked for a moment,--on their joy in their child. In the very
holiest of holies, in the temple of the mother's heart, stood for ever a
veiled shape, making ceaseless sin-offering for the past.

As the winter set in, an anxiety fell on the family which had passed so
sunny a summer. With the first sharp cold winds, little Raby developed a
tendency to croup. Neither Sally nor Hetty had ever seen a case of this
terrible and alarming disease; and, in Raby's first attack of it, they
had both thought the child dying. Now was Doctor Eben brought again into
close and intimate relations with Hetty. During the months of the
summer, he had, in spite of all his efforts, in spite of his frequent
visits to her house, in spite of all Hetty's frank cordiality of manner,
felt himself slowly slipping away from the vantage-ground he hoped he
had gained with her. This was the result of two things,--one which he
knew, and one which he did not dream of: the cause which he knew, was a
very simple and evident one, Hetty's constant preoccupation. Hetty was a
very busy woman: what with Raby, the farm, the house, her social
relations with the whole village, she had never a moment of leisure.
Often when Dr. Eben came to the house, he found her away; and often when
he found her at home, she was called away before he had talked with her
half an hour. The other reason, which, if Dr. Eben had only known it,
would have more than comforted him for all he felt he had lost on the
surface, was that Hetty, in the bottom of her heart, was slowly growing
conscious that she cared a great deal about him. No woman, whatever she
may say and honestly mean, can entirely dismiss from her thoughts the
memory of the words in which a man has told her he loves her. Especially
is this true when those words are the first words of love which have
ever been spoken to her. Morning and night, as Hetty came and went, in
her brisk cheery way, in and out of the house and about the farm, she
wore a new look on her face. The words, "I love you with all my heart,"
haunted her. She did not believe them any more now than before; but they
had a very sweet sound. She was no nearer now than then to any impulse
to take Dr. Williams at his word: nothing could be deeper implanted in a
soul than the conviction was in Hetty's that no man was likely to love
her. But she was no longer so sure that she herself could not love.
Vague and wistful reveries began to interrupt her activity. She would
stand sometimes, with her arms folded, leaning on a stile, and idly
watching her men at work, till they wondered what had happened to their
mistress. She lost a little of the color from her cheeks, and the full
moulded lines of her chin grew sharper.

"Faith, an' Miss Hetty's goin' off, sooner'n she's any right to," said
Mike to Norah one day.

"What puts such a notion in your head thin, Mike?" retorted Norah, "sure
she's as foine a crayther as's in all the county, an' foiner too."

"Foine enough, but I say for all that that she's a goin' off in her
looks mighty fast," replied the keen-eyed Mike. "You don't think she'd
be a pinin' for anybody, do you?"

Norah gave a hearty Irish laugh.

"Miss Hetty a pinin'!" she repeated over and over with bursts of
merriment:

"Ah, but yez are all alike, ye men. Miss Hetty a pinin'! I 'd like to
see the man Miss Hetty wud pine fur."

Mike and Norah were both right. There was no "pining" in Hetty's busy
and sensible soul; but there had been planted in it a germ of new life,
whose slow quickening and growth were perplexing and disturbing
elements: not as yet did she recognize them; she only felt the
disturbance, and its link with Dr. Eben was sufficiently clear to make
her manner to him undergo an indefinable change. It was no less cordial,
no less frank: you could not have said where the change was; but it was
there, and he felt it. He ought to have understood it and taken heart.
But he was ignorant like Hetty, only felt the disturbance, and taking
counsel of his fears believed that things were going wrong. Sometimes he
would stay away for many days, and then watch closely Hetty's manner
when they met. Never a trace of resentment or even wonder at his
absence. Sometimes he would go there daily for an interval; never a
trace of expectation or of added familiarity. But now things were
changed. Little Raby's illness seemed to put them all back where they
were during the days of the sea-side idyl. Now the doctor felt himself
again needed. Both Hetty and Sally lived upon his words, even his looks.
Again and again the child's life seemed hanging in even balances, and it
was with a gratitude almost like that they felt to God that the two
women blessed Dr. Eben for his recovery. Night after night, the three
watched by the baby's bed, listening to his shrill and convulsive
breathings.

Morning after morning, Dr. Eben and Hetty went together out of the
chamber, and stood in the open doorway, watching the crimson dawn on the
eastern hills. At such times, the doctor felt so near Hetty that he was
repeatedly on the point of saying again the words of love he had spoken
six months before. But a great fear deterred him.

"If she refuses me once more, that would settle it for ever," he said to
himself, and forced the words back.

One morning after a night of great anxiety and fear, they left Sally's
room while it was yet dark. It was bitterly cold; the winter stars shone
keen and glittering in the bleak sky. Hetty threw on a heavy cloak, and
opening the hall-door, said:

"Let us go out into the cold air; it will do us good."

Silently they walked up and down the piazza. The great pines were
weighed down to the ground by masses of snow. Now and then, when the
wind stirred the upper branches, avalanches slid noiselessly off, and
built themselves again into banks below. There was no moon, but the
starlight was so brilliant that the snow crystals glistened in it. As
they looked at the sky, a star suddenly fell. It moved very slowly, and
was more than a minute in full sight.

"One lighthouse less," said Dr. Eben.

"Oh," exclaimed Hetty, "what a lovely idea! who said that? Who called
the stars light-houses?"

"I forget," said the doctor; "in fact I think I never knew; I think it
was an anonymous little poem in which I saw the idea, years ago. It
struck me at the time as being a singularly happy one. I think I can
repeat a stanza or two of it."

              GOD'S LIGHT-HOUSES.

    When night falls on the earth, the sea
      From east to west lies twinkling bright
    With shining beams from beacons high,
      Which send afar their friendly light.

    The sailors' eyes, like eyes in prayer,
      Turn unto them for guiding ray:
    If storms obscure their radiance,
      The great ships helpless grope their way.

    When night falls on the earth, the sky
      Looks like a wide, a boundless main;
    Who knows what voyagers sail there?
      Who names the ports they seek and gain?

    Are not the stars like beacons set,
      To guide the argosies that go
    From universe to universe,
      Our little world above, below?

    On their great errands solemn bent,
      In their vast journeys unaware
    Of our small planet's name or place
      Revolving in the lower air.

    Oh thought too vast! oh thought too glad:
      An awe most rapturous it stirs.
    From world to world God's beacons shine:
      God means to save his mariners!

Hetty was silent. The mention of light-houses had carried her thoughts
back to that last night at "The Runs," when, with Dr. Eben by her side,
she had watched the great revolving light in the stone tower on the bar.

Dr. Eben was thinking of the same thing; he wondered if Hetty were not:
after a few moments' silence, he became so sure of it that he said:

"You have not forgotten that night, have you?"

"Oh, no!" replied Hetty, in a low voice.

"I should like to think that you did not wish to forget it," said the
doctor, in a tender tone.

"Oh, don't, please don't say any thing about it," exclaimed Hetty, in a
tone so full of emotion, that Dr. Eben's heart gave a bound of joy. In
that second, he believed that the time would come when Hetty would love
him. He had never heard such a tone from her lips before. Her hand
rested on his arm. He laid his upon it,--the first caressing touch he
had ever dared to offer to Hetty; the first caressing touch which Hetty
had ever received from hand of man.

"I will not, Hetty, till you are willing I should," he said. He had
never called her "Hetty" before. A tumult filled Hetty's heart; but all
she said was, in a most matter-of-fact tone:

"That's right! we must go in now. It is too cold out here."

Dr. Eben did not care what her words were: nature had revealed herself
in a tone.

"I'll make her love me yet," he thought. "It won't take a great while
either; she's beginning, and she doesn't know it." He was so happy that
he did not know at first that Hetty had left him alone in front of the
fire. When he found she had gone, he drew up a big arm-chair, sank back
in its depths, put his feet on the fender, and fell to thinking how, by
spring, perhaps, he might marry Hetty. In the midst of this lover-like
reverie, he fell asleep in the most unlover-like way. He was worn out
with his long night's watching. In a few minutes, Hetty came back with
hot broth which she had prepared for him. Her light step did not rouse
him. She stood still by his chair, looking down on his face. His
clear-cut features, always handsome, were grand in sleep. The solemnity
of closed eyes adds to a noble face something which is always very
impressive. He stirred uneasily, and said in his sleep, "Hetty." A great
wave of passionate feeling swept over her face, as, standing there, she
heard this tender sound of her name on his unconscious lips.

"Oh what will become of me if I love him after all," she thought.

"Why not, why not?" answered her heart; wakened now and struggling for
its craved and needed rights. "Why not, why not?" and no answer came to
Hetty's mind.

Moving noiselessly, she set the broth on a low table by the doctor's
side, covered him carefully with her own heavy cloak, and left the room.
On the threshold, she turned back and looked again at his face. Her
conscious thoughts were more than she could bear. In sudden impatience
with herself, she exclaimed, "Pshaw! how silly I am!" and hastened
upstairs, more like the old original Hetty than she had been for many
days. Love could not enthrone himself easily in Hetty's nature: it was a
rebellious kingdom. "Thirty-seven years old! Hetty Gunn, you 're a
goose," were Hetty's last thoughts as she fell asleep that night. But
when she awoke the next morning, the same refrain, "Why not, why not?"
filled her thoughts; and, when she bade Dr. Eben good-morning, the rosy
color that mounted to her very temples gave him a new happiness.

Why prolong the story of the next few days? They were just such days as
every man and every woman who has loved has lived through, and knows
far better than can be said or sung. Love's beginnings are varied, and
his final crises of avowal take individual shape in each individual
instance: but his processes and symptoms of growth are alike in all
cases; the indefinable delight,--the dreamy wondering joy,--the half
avoidance which really means seeking,--the seeking which shelters itself
under endless pleas,--the ceaseless questioning of faces,--the mute
caresses of looks, and the eloquent caresses of tones,--are they not
written in the books of the chronicles of all lovers? What matter how or
when the crowning moment of full surrender comes? It came to Eben and
Hetty, however, more suddenly at last than it often comes; came in a way
so characteristic of them both, that perhaps to tell it may not be a
sin, since we aim at a complete setting forth of their characters.




VIII.


For three days little Raby had been so ill that the doctor had not left
the house day nor night, except for imperative calls from other
patients. Each night the paroxysms of croup returned with great
severity, and the little fellow's strength seemed fast giving way under
them. Sally and Hetty, his two mothers, were very differently affected
by the grief they bore in common. Sally was speechless, calm, almost
dogged in her silence. When Dr. Eben trying to comfort her, said:

"Don't feel so, Mrs. Little: I think we shall pull the boy through all
right." She looked up in his face, and shook her head, speaking no word.
"I am not saying it merely to comfort you; indeed, I am not, Mrs.
Little," said the doctor. "I really believe he will get well. These
attacks of croup seem much worse than they really are."

"I don't know that it comforts me," replied Sally, speaking very
slowly. "I don't know that I want him to live; but I think perhaps he
might be allowed to die easier, if I didn't need so much punishing. It
is worse than death to see him suffer so."

"Oh, Mrs. Little! how can you think thus of God?" exclaimed the doctor.
"He never treats us like that, any more than you could Raby."

"The minister at the Corners said so," moaned Sally. "He said it was
till the third and fourth generations."

At such moments, Dr. Eben, in his heart, thought undevoutly of
ministers. "A bruised reed, he will not break," came to his mind, often
as he looked at this anguish-stricken woman, watching her only child's
suffering, and morbidly believing that it was the direct result of her
own sin. But Dr. Eben found little time to spare for his ministrations
to Sally, when Hetty was in such distress. He had never seen any thing
like it. She paced the house like a wounded lioness. She could not bear
to stay in the room: all day, all night, she walked, walked, walked; now
in the hall outside his door; now in the rooms below. Every few moments,
she questioned the doctor fiercely: "Is he no better?" "Will he have
another?" "Can't you do something more?" "Do you think there is a
possibility that any other doctor might know something you do not?"
"Shan't I send Cæsar over to Springton for Dr. Wilkes; he might think of
something different?" These, and a thousand other such questions, Hetty
put to the harassed and tortured Dr. Eben, over and over, till even his
loving patience was wellnigh outworn. It was strengthened, however, by
his anxiety for her. She did not eat; she did not drink; she looked
haggard and feverish. This child had been to her from the day of his
birth like her own: she loved him with all the pent-up forces of the
great womanhood within her, which thus far had not found the natural
outlet of its affections.

"Doctor," she would cry vehemently, "why should Raby die? God never
means that any children should die. It is all our ignorance and
carelessness; all the result of broken law. I've heard you say a hundred
times, that it is a thwarting of God's plan whenever a child dies: why
don't you cure Raby?"

"That is all true, Hetty," Dr. Eben would reply; "all very true: it is a
thwarting of God's plan whenever any human being dies before he is fully
ripe of old age. But the accumulated weight of generations of broken law
is on our heads. Raby's little life has been all well ordered, so far
as we can see; but, farther back, was something wrong or he would not be
ill to-day. I have done my best to learn, in my little life, all that is
known of methods of cure; but I have only the records of human ignorance
to learn from, and I must fail again and again."

At last, on the fourth night, Raby slept: slept for hours, quietly,
naturally, and with a gentle dew on his fair forehead. The doctor sat
motionless by his bed and watched him. Sally, exhausted by the long
watch, had fallen asleep on a lounge. The sound of Hetty's restless
steps, in the hall outside, had ceased for some time. The doctor sat
wondering uneasily where she had gone. She had not entered the room for
more than an hour; the house grew stiller and stiller; not a sound was
to be heard except little Raby's heavy breathing, and now and then one
of those fine and mysterious noises which the timbers of old houses have
a habit of making in the night-time. At last the lover got the better of
the physician. Doctor Eben rose, and, stealing softly to the door,
opened it as cautiously as a thief. All was dark.

"Hetty," he whispered. No answer. He looked back at Raby. The child was
sleeping so soundly it seemed impossible that he could wake for some
time. Doctor Eben groped his way to the head of the great stairway, and
listened again. All was still.

"Hetty!" he called in a low voice, "Hetty!" No answer.

"She must have fallen asleep somewhere. She will surely take cold," the
doctor said to himself; persuading his conscience that it was his duty
to go and find her. Slowly feeling his way, he crept down the staircase.
On the last step but one, he suddenly stumbled, fell, and barely
recovered himself by his firm hold of the banisters, in time to hear
Hetty's voice in a low imperious whisper:

"Good heavens, doctor! what do you want?"

"Oh Hetty! did I hurt you?" he exclaimed; "I never dreamed of your being
on the stairs."

"I sat down a minute to listen. It was all so still in the room, I was
frightened; and I must have been asleep a good while, I think, I am so
cold," answered Hetty; her teeth beginning to chatter, and her whole
body shaking with cold. "Why, how dark it is!" she continued; "the hall
lamp has gone out: let me get a match."

But Dr. Eben had her two cold hands in his. "No, Hetty," he said, "come
right back into the room: Raby is so sound asleep it will not wake him;
and Sally is asleep too;" and he led her slowly towards the door. The
night-lamp was burning low; its pale flame, and the flickering blaze of
the big hickory logs on the hearth, made a glimmering twilight, whose
fantastic lights and shadows shot out through the doorway into the gloom
of the hall. As the first of these lights fell on Hetty's face, Dr. Eben
started to see how white it was. Involuntarily he put his arm around
her; and exclaimed "How pale you are, my poor Hetty! you are all worn
out;" and, half supporting her with his arm, he laid his free hand
gently on her hair.

Hetty was very tired; very cold; half asleep, and half frightened. She
dropped her head on his shoulder for a second, and said: "Oh, what a
comfort you are!"

The words had hardly left her lips when Doctor Eben threw both his arms
around her, and held her tightly to his breast, whispering:

"Indeed, I will be a comfort to you, Hetty, if you will only let me."

Hetty struggled and began to speak.

"Hush! you will wake Raby," he said, and still held her firmly, looking
unpityingly down into her face.

"You do love me, Hetty," he whispered triumphantly.

The front stick on the fire broke, fell in two blazing upright brands to
right and left, and cast a sudden flood of light on the two figures in
the doorway. Sally and Raby slept on. Still Doctor Eben held Hetty
close, and looked with a keen and exultant gaze into her eyes.

"It isn't fair when I am so cold and sleepy," whispered Hetty, with a
half twinkle in her half-open eyes.

"It is fair! It is fair! Any thing is fair! Every thing is fair,"
exclaimed the doctor in a whisper which seemed to ring like a shout, and
he kissed Hetty again and again. Still Sally and Raby slept on: the
hickory fire leaped up as in joy; and a sudden wind shook the windows.

Hetty struggled once more to free herself, but the arms were like arms
of oak.

"Say that you love me, Hetty," pleaded the doctor.

"When you let me go, perhaps I will," whispered Hetty.

Instantly the arms fell; and the doctor stood opposite her in the
doorway, his head bent forward and his eyes fixed on her face.

Hetty cast her eyes down. Words did not come. It would have been easier
to have said them while she was held close to Doctor Eben's side.
Suddenly, before he had a suspicion of what she was about to do, she had
darted away, was lost in the darkness, and in a second more he heard her
door shut at the farther end of the hall.

Dr. Eben laughed a low and pleasant laugh. "She might as well have said
it," he thought: "she will say it to-morrow. I have won!" and he sank
into the great white dimity-covered chair, at the head of Raby's bed,
and looked into the fire. The very coals seemed to marshal themselves
into shapes befitting his triumph: castles rose and fell; faces grew,
smiled, and faded away smiling; roses and lilies and palms glowed ruby
red, turned to silver, and paled into spiritual gray. The silence of the
night seemed resonant with a very symphony of joy. Still Sally and Raby
slept on. The boy's sweet face took each hour a more healthful tint;
and, as Doctor Eben watched the blessed change, he said to himself:

"What a night! what a night! Two lives saved! Raby's and mine." As the
morning drew near, he threw up the shades of the eastern window, and
watched for the dawn. "I will see this day's sun rise," he said with a
thrill of devout emotion; and he watched the horizon while it changed
like a great flower calyx from gray to pearly yellow, from yellow to
pale green, and at last, when it could hold back the day no longer, to a
vast rose red with a golden sun in its centre.




IX.


That morning's light could have fallen on no happier house, the world
over, than "Gunn's." A little child brought back to life, out of the
gates of death; two hearts entering anew on life, through the gates of
love; half a score of hearts, each glad in the gladness of each other,
and in the gladness of all,--what a morning it was!

Doctor Eben and Hetty met at the head of the stairs.

"Oh, Hetty!" exclaimed the doctor.

"Well?" said Hetty, in a half-defiant tone, without looking up. He came
nearer, and was about to kiss her.

She darted back, and lifting her eyes gave him a glance of such mingled
love and reproof that he was bewildered.

"Why, Hetty, surely I may kiss you?" he exclaimed.

"I was asleep last night," she answered gravely, "and you did very
wrong," and without another word or look she passed on.

Doctor Eben was thoroughly angry.

"What does she mean?" he said to himself. "She needn't think I am to be
played with like a boy;" and the doctor took his seat at the breakfast
table, with a sterner countenance than Hetty had ever seen him wear. In
a few moments she began to cast timid and deprecating looks at him. His
displeasure hurt her indescribably. She had not intended to offend or
repel him. She did not know precisely what she had intended: in fact she
had not intended any thing. If the doctor had understood more about
love, he would have known that all manifestations in Hetty at this time
were simply like the unconscious flutterings of a bird in the hand in
which it is just about to nestle and rest. But he did not understand,
and when Hetty, following him into the hall, stood shyly by his side,
and looking up into his face said inquiringly, "Doctor?" he answered her
as she had answered him, a short time before, with the curt
monosyllable, "Well?" His tone was curter than his words. Hetty colored,
and saying gently, "No matter; nothing now," turned away. Her whole
movement was so significant of wounded feeling that it smote Doctor
Eben's heart. He sprang after her and laid his hand on her arm. "Hetty,"
he said, "do tell me what it was you were going to say; I did not mean
to hurt your feelings: but I don't know what to make of you."

"Not--know--what--to--make--of--me!" repeated Hetty, very slowly, in a
tone of the intensest astonishment.

"You wouldn't say you loved me," replied the doctor, beginning to feel a
little ashamed of himself.

Hetty's eyes were fixed on his now, with no wavering in their gaze. She
looked at him, as if her life lay in the balance of what she might read
in his face.

"Did you not know that I loved you before you asked me to say so?" she
said with emphasis. It was the doctor's turn now to color. He answered
evasively:

"A man has no right to know that, Hetty, until a woman tells him so."

"Did you not think that I loved you," repeated Hetty, with the same
emphasis, and a graver expression on her face.

Dr. Eben hesitated. Already, he felt a sort of fear of the incalculable
processes and changes in this woman's mind. Would she be angry if he
said, he had thought she loved him? Would she be sure to recognize any
equivocation, and be angrier at that?

"Hetty," he said, taking her hand in his, "I did hope very strongly that
you loved me, or else I should never have asked you to say so; but you
ought to be willing to say so, if it be true. Think how many times I
have said it to you."

Hetty's eyes did not leave his: their expression deepened until they
seemed to darken and enlarge. She did not speak.

"Will you not say it now, Hetty?" urged the doctor.

"I can't," replied Hetty, and turned and walked slowly away. Presently
she turned again, and walked swiftly back to him, and exclaimed:

"What do you suppose is the reason it is so hard for me to say it?"

Dr. Eben laughed. "I can't imagine, Hetty. The only thing that is hard
for me, is not to keep saying it all the time."

Hetty smiled.

"There must be something wrong in me. I think I shall never say it. But
I suppose"--She hesitated, and her eyes twinkled. "I suppose you might
come to be very sure of it without my ever saying it?"

"I am sure of it now, you darling," exclaimed the doctor; and threw both
his arms around her, and this time Hetty did not struggle.

When Welbury heard that Hetty Gunn was to marry Doctor Ebenezer
Williams, there was a fine hubbub of talk. There was no half-way opinion
in anybody's mind on the question. Everybody was vehement, one way or
the other. All Doctor Eben's friends were hilarious; and the greater
part of Hetty's were gloomy. They said, he was marrying her for her
money; that Hetty was too old, and too independent in all her ways, to
be married at all; that they would be sure to fall out quickly; and a
hundred other things equally meddlesome and silly. But nobody so
disapproved of the match that he stayed away from the wedding, which was
the largest and the gayest wedding Welbury had ever seen. It went sorely
against the grain with Hetty to invite Mrs. Deacon Little, but Sally
entreated for it so earnestly that she gave way.

"I think if she once sees me with Raby in my arms, may be she'll feel
kinder," said Sally. James Little had carried the beautiful boy, and
laid him in his grandmother's arms many times; but, although she showed
great tenderness toward the child, she had never yet made any allusion
to Sally; and James, who had the same odd combination of weakness and
tenacity which his mother had, had never broken the resolution which he
had taken years ago: not to mention his wife's name in his mother's
presence. Mrs. Little had almost as great a struggle with herself before
accepting the invitation, as Hetty had had before giving it. Only her
husband's earnest remonstrances decided her wavering will.

"It's only once, Mrs. Little," he said, "and there'll be such a crowd
there that very likely you won't come near Sally at all. It don't look
right for you to stay away. You don't know how much folks think of Sally
now. She's been asked to the minister's to tea, she and James, with
Hetty and the doctor, several times."

"She hain't, has she?" exclaimed Mrs. Little, quite thrown off her
balance by this unexpected piece of news, which the wary deacon had been
holding in reserve, as a good general holds his biggest guns, for some
special occasion. "You don't tell me so! Well, well, folks must do as
they like. For my part, I call that downright countenancing of iniquity.
And I don't know how she could have the face to go, either. I must say,
I have some curiosity to see how she behaves among folks."

"She's as modest and pretty in her ways as ever a girl could be,"
replied the deacon, who had learned during the past year to love his
son's wife; "you won't have any call to be ashamed of her. I can tell
you that much beforehand."

When Mrs. Little's eyes first fell upon her daughter-in-law, she gave an
involuntary start. In the two years during which Mrs. Little had not
seen her, Sally had changed from a timid, nervous, restless woman to a
calm and dignified one. Very much of her old girlish beauty had returned
to her, with an added sweetness from her sorrow. As she moved among the
guests, speaking with gentle greeting to each, all eyes followed her
with evident pleasure and interest. She wore a soft gray gown, which
clung closely to her graceful figure: one pale pink carnation at her
throat, and one in her hair, were her only ornaments. When Raby, with
his white frock and blue ribbons, was in her arms, the picture was one
which would have delighted an artist's eye. Mrs. Little felt a strange
mingling of pride and irritation at what she saw. Very keenly James
watched her: he hovered near her continually, ready to forestall any
thing unpleasant or to assist any reconciliation. She observed this;
observed, also, how his gaze followed each movement of Sally's: she
understood it.

"You needn't hang round so, Jim," she said: "I can see for myself. If
it's any comfort to you, I'll say that your wife's the most improved
woman I ever saw; and I'm very glad on't. But I ain't going to speak to
her: I've said I won't, and I won't. People must lie on their beds as
they make 'em."

James made no reply, but walked away. It seemed to him that, at that
instant, a chord in his filial love snapped, and was for ever lost.

Moment by moment, Sally watched and waited for the recognition which
never came. Bearing Raby in her arms, she passed and repassed, drawing
as near Mrs. Little as she dared. "Surely she must see that nobody else
here wholly despises me," thought the poor woman; and, whenever any one
spoke with especial kindness to her, she glanced involuntarily to see if
her mother-in-law were observing it. But all in vain. Mrs. Little's pale
and weak blue eyes roamed everywhere, but never seemed to rest on Sally
for a second. Gradually Sally comprehended that all her hopes had been
unfounded, and a deep sadness settled on her expressive face. "It's no
use," she thought, "she'll never speak to me in the world, if she won't
to-night."

Even during the moments of the marriage ceremony, Hetty observed the
woe on Sally's countenance; and, strange as it may seem,--or would seem
in any one but Hetty,--while the minister was making his most impressive
addresses and petitions, she was thinking to herself: "The hard-hearted
old woman! She hasn't spoken to Sally. I wish I hadn't asked her. I'll
pay her off yet, before the evening is over."

After the ceremony was done, and the guests were crowding up to
congratulate Hetty, she whispered to James:

"Bring Sally up here."

When Sally came, Hetty said:

"Stand here close to me, Sally. Don't go away."

Presently Deacon Little approached with Mrs. Little. Hetty kissed the
good old man as heartily as if he had been her father; then, turning to
Mrs. Little, she said in a clear voice:

"I am very glad to see you in my house at last, Mrs. Little. Have you
seen Sally yet? She has been so busy receiving our friends, that I am
afraid you have hardly had a chance to talk with her. Sally," she
continued, turning and taking Sally by the hand, "I shall be at liberty
now to attend to my friends, and you must devote yourself to Mrs.
Little;" and, with the unquestioning gesture of an empress, Hetty passed
Mrs. Little over into Sally's charge.

Nobody could read on Hetty's features at this moment any thing except
most cordial good-will and the tender happiness of a bride; but her
heart was fighting like a knight in a tournament for rescue of one
beset, and she was inwardly saying: "If she dares to refuse speak to her
now, I'll expose her before this whole roomful of people."

Mrs. Little did not dare. More than ever she dreaded Hetty at this
moment, and her surprise and fear added something to her manner towards
Sally which might almost have passed for eagerness, as they walked away
together; poor Sally lifting one quick deprecating look at Hetty's
smiling and inexorable face. Deacon Little hastily retreated to a
corner, where he stood wiping his forehead, endeavoring not to look
alarmed, and thinking to himself:

"Well, if Hetty don't beat all! What'll Mrs. Little do now, I wonder?"
And presently, as cautiously as a man stalking a deer, he followed the
couple, and tried to judge, by the expression of his wife's face, how
things were going. Things were going very well. Mrs. Little had, in
common with all weak and obstinate persons, a very foolish fear of ever
being supposed to be dictated to or controlled by anybody. She was
distinctly aware that Hetty had checkmated her. She had strong
suspicions that there might be others looking on who understood the
game; and the only subterfuge left her, the only shadow of pretence of
not having been outwitted, was to appear as if she were glad of the
opportunity of talking with Sally. Sally's appealing affectionateness of
manner went very far to make this easy. She had no resentment to
conceal: all these years she had never blamed Jim's mother; she had only
yearned to win her love, to be permitted to love her. She looked up in
her face now, and said, as they walked on:

"Oh! I did so want to speak to you, but I did not dare to."

It consoled weak Mrs. Little, for her present consciousness of being
very much afraid of Hetty, to hear that she herself had inspired a great
terror in some one else; and she answered, condescendingly:

"I have always wished you well,"--she hesitated for a word, but finally
said,--"Sally."

"Thank you," said Sally. "I know you did. I never wondered."

Mrs. Little was much appeased. She had not counted on such humility. At
this moment they were met by the nurse, carrying Raby; and he was a
fruitful subject of conversation. Presently he began to cry; and Sally,
taking him in her arms, said, as if by a sudden inspiration, "I think I
had better take him upstairs. Wouldn't you like to go up with me, and
see what lovely rooms Hetty has given to Jim and me?"

The friendliness of the bedroom, the disarming presence of the baby,
completed Mrs. Little's surrender; and when James Little, missing his
wife, went to her room to seek her, he stood still on the threshold,
mute with surprise. There sat his mother with Raby on her lap; Sally on
her knees by an opened bureau-drawer, was showing her all Raby's
clothes, and the two women's faces were aglow with pleasure. James stole
in softly, came behind his mother, and kissed her as he had not kissed
her since he was a boy. Neither of the three spoke; but little Raby
crowed out a sudden and unexplained laugh, which seemed a fitting sign
and seal of the happy moment, and set them all at ease. When Sally
described the scene to Hetty, she said:

"Oh, I was so frightened when Jim came in! I thought he'd be sure to say
something to his mother that would spoil every thing. But the Lord put
it into Raby's head to go off in one of his great laughs at nothing, and
that made us all laugh, and the first thing that came into my head was
that verse, 'And a little child shall lead them.'"

"Dear me, Sally, does any thing happen that doesn't put you in mind of
some verse in the Bible?" laughed Hetty.

"Not many things, Hetty," replied Sally. "Those years that I was alone
all the time, I used to read it so much that it's always coming into my
head now, whatever happens."

After the last guest had gone, Doctor Eben and Hetty stood alone before
the blazing fire. Hetty was beautiful on this night: no white lace, no
orange blossoms, to make the ill-natured sneer at the middle-aged bride
attired like a girl; no useless finery to be laid away in chests and
cherished as sentimental mementos of an occasion. A substantial heavy
silk of a useful shade of useful gray was Hetty Gunn's wedding gown; and
she wore on her breast and in her hair white roses, "which will do for
my summer bonnets for years," Hetty had said, when she bought them.

But her cheeks were pink, her eyes bright, and her brown curls lovelier
than ever. Dr. Eben might well be pardoned the pride and delight with
which he drew her to his side and exclaimed, "Oh, Hetty! are you really
mine? How beautiful you look!"

"Do you think so?" said Hetty, taking a survey of herself in the
old-fashioned glass slanted at a steep angle above the mantel-piece. "I
don't. I hate fine gowns and flowers on me. If I'd have dared to, I'd
have been married in my old purple."

"I shouldn't have cared," replied her husband. "But it is better as it
is. Welbury people would have never left off talking, if you had done
that."

They were a beautiful sight, the two, as they stood with their arms
around each other, in the fire-light. Dr. Eben was tall and of a
commanding figure; his head was almost too massive for even his broad
shoulders; his black hair was wellnigh shaggy in its thickness; and his
dark gray eyes looked out from under eyebrows which were like projecting
eaves, and threw shadows on his cheeks below. Hetty's fair, rosy face,
and golden-brown curls, were thrown out into relief by all this dark
coloring so near, as a sunbeam is when it plays on a dark cloud. The
rooms were full of the delicate fragrance of apple blossoms. The
corners were filled with them; the walls were waving with them. Sally
had begged permission to have, for once, all the apple blossoms she
desired; and, despite groans and grumblings from Mike, she had rifled
the orchards.

"Faith, an' a good tin bushel she's taken off the russets," Mike said to
Norah; "an' as for thim gillies yer was so fond of, there's none left to
spake of on any o' the trees. Now if she'd er tuk thim old blue pearmain
trees, I wouldn't have said a word. But, 'Oh no!' sez she, 'I must have
all pink uns;' an' it was jest the pink uns that was our best trees;
that's jest as much sinse as ye wimmin's got."

"Wull, thin, an' I'm thinkin' yer wouldn't have grudged Miss Hetty her
own apples, if it was in barrls ye had 'em," replied the practical
Norah, "an' I don't see where's the differ."

"Yer don't!" said Mike, angrily. "If it had ha plazed God to make a man
o' yer, ye'd ha known more 'n yer do;" and with this characteristically
masculine shifting of his premises, Mike turned his back on Norah.

Neither Hetty nor Doctor Eben had ever heard that lovers should not wed
in May; and, as they looked up at the great fragrant pink and white
boughs on the walls, Hetty exclaimed:

"Nobody ought to be married except when apple-trees are in bloom.
Nothing else could have been half so lovely in the rooms, and the
fire-light makes them all the prettier. What a genius Sally has for
arranging flowers. Who would have thought common stone jars could look
so well?"

Sally had taken the largest sized gray stone jars she could buy in
Welbury, and in these had set boughs six and seven feet long, looking
like young trees. On the walls she had placed deep wooden boxes with
shield-shaped fronts; these fronts were covered with gray lichens from
the rocks; the rosy blossoms waved from out these boxes, looking as much
at home as they did above the lichen-covered trunks of the trees in the
orchard.

"Poor dear Sally!" Hetty continued, "she had a hard time the first part
of the evening. That stony old woman wouldn't speak to her. But I took
her in hand afterward. Did you observe?"

"Observe!" shouted Dr. Eben. "I should think so. You hardly waited till
the minister had got through with us."

"I didn't wait till then," replied Hetty, demurely. "I was planning it
all the while he was telling me about my duty to you. I didn't believe
he could tell me much about that, anyway; and the duty that weighed on
my mind most at that minute was my duty to Sally."

And thus, in the flickering fire-light and the apple-blossom fragrance,
the two wedded lovers sat talking and dreaming, and taking joy of each
other while the night wore on. There was no violent transition, no great
change of atmosphere, in the beginnings of their wedded life. Dr. Eben
had now lived so much at "Gunn's," that it seemed no strange thing for
him to live there altogether. If it chafed him sometimes that it was
Hetty's house and not his, Hetty's estate, Hetty's right and rule, he
never betrayed it. And there was little reason that it should chafe him;
for, from the day of Hetty Gunn's marriage, she was a changed woman in
the habits and motives of her whole life. The farm was to her, as if it
were not. All the currents of her being were set now in a new channel,
and flowed as impetuously there as they had been wont to flow in the old
ones. Her husband, his needs, his movements, were now the centre around
which her fine and ceaseless activity revolved. There was not a trace of
sentimental expression to this absorption. A careless observer might
have said that her manner was deficient in tenderness; that she was
singularly chary of caresses and words of love. But one who saw deeper
would observe that not the smallest motion of the doctor's escaped her
eye; not his lightest word failed to reach her ear; and every act of
hers was planned with either direct or indirect reference to him. In his
absence, she was preoccupied and uneasy; in his presence, she was
satisfied, at rest, and her face wore a sort of quiet radiance hard to
describe, but very beautiful to see. As for Dr. Eben, he thought he had
entered into a new world. Warmly as he had loved and admired Hetty, he
had not been prepared for these depths in her nature. Every day he said
to her, "Oh, Hetty, Hetty! I never knew you. I did not dream you were
like this." She would answer lightly, laughingly, perhaps almost
brusquely; but intense feeling would glow in her face as a light shines
through glass; and often, when she turned thus lightly away from him,
there were passionate tears in her eyes. It very soon became her habit
to drive with him wherever he went. Old Doctor Tuthill had died some
months before, and now the county circuit was Doctor Eben's. His love
of his profession was a passion, and nothing now stood in the way of
his gratifying it to the utmost. Books, journals, all poured in upon
him. Hetty would have liked to be omniscient that she might procure for
him all he could desire. Every morning they might be seen dashing over
the country with a pair of fleet, strong gray horses. In the afternoon,
they drove a pair of black ponies for visits nearer home. Sometimes,
while the doctor paid his visits, Hetty sat in the carriage; and, when
she suspected that he had fallen into some discussion not relative to
the patient's case, she would call out merrily, with tones clear and
ringing enough to penetrate any walls: "Come, come, doctor! we must be
off." And the doctor would spring to his feet, and run hastily, saying:
"You see I am under orders too: my doctor is waiting outside." Under the
seat, side by side with the doctor's medicine case, always went a hamper
which Hetty called "the other medicine case;" and far the more important
it was of the two. Many a poor patient got well by help of Hetty's soups
and jellies and good bread. Nothing made her so happy as to have the
doctor come home, saying: "I've got a patient to-day that we must feed
to cure him." Then only, Hetty felt that she was of real help to her
husband: of any other help that she might give him Hetty was still
incredulous; intangible things were a little out of Hetty's range. Even
her great and passionate love had not fully opened her eyes to all
love's needs and expressions. All that it meant to her was a perpetual
doing, ministration, a compelling of the happiness of the loved object.
And here, as everywhere else in her life, she was fully content only
when there was something evident and ready to be done. If her husband
had taken the same view of love,--had insisted on perpetual ministerings
to her in tangible forms,--she would have been bewildered and
uncomfortable; and would, no doubt, have replied most illogically: "Oh,
don't be taking so much trouble about me. I can take care of myself; I
always have." But Doctor Eben was in no danger of disturbing Hetty in
this way. Without being consciously a selfish man, he had a temperament
to which acceptance came easy. And really Hetty left him no time, no
room, for any such manifestations towards her, even had they been
spontaneously natural. Moreover, Hetty was a most difficult person for
anybody to help in any way. She never seemed to have needs or wants: she
was always well, brisk, cheery, prepared for whatever occurred. There
really seemed to be nothing to do for Hetty but to kiss her; and that
Doctor Eben did most heartily, and of persistence; and Hetty liked it
better than any thing in this world. With his whole heart and strength,
Eben Williams loved his wife; and he loved her better and better, day by
day. But she herself, by her peculiar temperament, her habits of
activity, and disinterestedness, made it, in the outset, out of the
question that any man living with her as her husband should ever fully
learn a husband's duties and obligations.




X.


And now we shall pass over an interval of eight years in the history of
"Gunn's." For it is only the "strange history" of Eben and Hetty that
was to be told in this story, and in these years' history was nothing
strange; unless, indeed, it might be said that they were strangely happy
years. The household remained unchanged, except that there were three
more babies in Mike's cottage, and Hetty had been obliged to build on
another room for him. Old Nan and Cæsar still reigned. Cæsar's head was
as white and tight-curled as the fleece of a pet lamb. He was now a
shining light in the Methodist meeting; but he had not yet broken
himself of his oaths. "Damn--bress de Lord" was still heard on occasion:
but everybody, even Nan, had grown so used to it that it did not pass
for an oath; and, no doubt, even the recording angel had long since
ceased to put it down.

James Little and his wife were now as much a part of the family as if
they had had the old Squire's blood in their veins; and nobody thought
about the old time of their disgrace,--nobody but Jim and Sally
themselves. From their thoughts it was never absent, when they looked on
the beautiful, joyous face of Raby. He had grown beyond his years, and
looked like a boy of twelve. He was manly, frank, impulsive; a child
after Hetty's own heart, and much more like her than he was like his
father or his mother. It was a question, also, if he did not love her
more than he loved either of his parents: all his hours with her were
unclouded; over his intercourse with them, there always hung the
undefined cloud of an unexpressed sadness.

Hetty was changed. Her hair was gray; her fair skin weather-beaten; and
the fine wrinkles around the corners of her merry eyes radiated like the
spokes of a wheel. She had looked young at thirty-seven; she looked old
at forty-five. The phlegmatic and lazy sometimes seem to keep their
youth better than the sanguine and active. It is a cruel thing that
laughter should age a woman's face almost as much as weeping; but it
does. Sunny as Hetty's face was, it had come to have a look older than
it ought, simply because the kindly eyes had so often twinkled and half
closed in merry laughter.

Time had dealt more kindly with Doctor Eben. He was a handsomer man at
forty-one than he had been at thirty-three: the eight years had left no
other trace upon him. Face, figure, step, all were as full of youth and
vigor as upon the day when Hetty first met him walking down the
pine-shaded road. The precise moment when the first pang of
consciousness of the discrepancy between her husband's looks and her own
entered Hetty's mind would be hard to determine. It began probably in
some thoughtless jest of her own, or even of his; for, in his absolute
loyalty of love, his unquestioning and long-established acceptance of
their relation as a perfect one, it would never have crossed Doctor
Eben's mind that Hetty could possibly care whether she looked older or
younger than he. He never thought about her age at all: in fact, he
could not have told either her age or his own with exactness; he was
curiously forgetful of such matters. He did not see the wrinkles around
her eyes. He did not know that her skin was weather-beaten, her figure
less graceful, her hair fast turning gray. To him she was simply
"Hetty:" the word meant as it always had meant, fulness of love,
delight, life. Doctor Eben was a man of that fine fibre of organic
loyalty, to which there is not possible, even a temptation to forsake or
remove from its object. Men having this kind of uprightness and loyalty,
rarely are much given to words or demonstrations of affection. To them
love takes its place, side by side with the common air, the course of
the sun, the succession of days and nights, and all other unquestioned
and unalterable things in the world. To suggest to such a man the
possibility of lessening in his allegiance to a wife, is like proposing
to him to overthrow the whole course of nature. He simply cannot
conceive of such a thing; and he has no tolerance for it. He is by the
very virtue of his organic structure incapable of charity for men who
sin in that way. There are not many such men, but the type exists; and
well may any woman felicitate herself to whom it is given to rest her
life on such sure foundations. If there be some lack of the daily
manifestations of tenderness, the ready word, the ever-present caress,
she may recollect that these are often the first fruits of a passion
whose early way-side harvest will be scorched and shrivelled as soon as
the sun is high; while the seed which bringeth forth a hundred, nay a
thousand fold, of true grain, sleeps in long silence, and grows up
noiseless and slow.

Doctor Eben did not know that he was in many small ways an unlover-like
husband. He did not know that his absorption in his professional studies
made him often seem unaware of Hetty's presence for hours together, when
she was watching and waiting for a word. He did not know that he
sometimes did not hear when she spoke, and did not answer when he heard.
He did not know a hundred things which he would have known, if he had
been a less upright and loyal man, and if Hetty had been a less
unselfish woman. Neither did Hetty know any of these things, or note
them, until the poisoned consciousness awoke in her mind that she was
fast growing old, and her face was growing less lovely. This was the
first germ of Hetty's unhappiness. It had been very hard for her in the
beginning to believe herself loved: now all her old incredulity returned
with fourfold strength; and now it was not met as then by constant and
vehement evidence to conquer it. Here again, had Hetty been like other
women, she might have been spared her suffering. Had it been possible
for her to demand, to even invite, she would have won from her husband,
at any instant, all that her anxiety could have asked; but it was not
possible. She simply went on silently, day after day, watching her
husband more intently; keeping record, in her morbid feeling, of every
moment, every look, every word which she misapprehended. Beyond this
morbidness of misapprehension, there was no other morbidness in Hetty's
state. She did not pine or grieve; she only began slowly to wonder what
she could do for Eben now. Her sense of loss and disappointment, in that
she had borne him no children, began to weigh more heavily upon her. "If
I were mother of his children," she said to herself, "it would not make
so much difference if I did grow old and ugly. He would have the
children to give him pleasure." "I don't see what there is left for me
to do," she said again and again. Sometimes she made pathetic attempts
to change the simplicity of her dress. "Perhaps if I wore better
clothes, I should look younger," she thought. But the result was not
satisfactory. Her severe style had always been so essentially her own
that any departure from it only made her look still more altered. All
this undercurrent of annoyance and distress added continually to the
change in her face: gradually its expression grew more grave; she smiled
less frequently; had fits of abstraction and reverie, which she had
never been known to have before.

In a vague way, Doctor Eben observed these, and wondered what Hetty was
thinking about; but he never asked. Often they drove for a whole day
together, without a dozen words being spoken; but the doctor was buried
in meditations upon his patients, and did not dislike the silence. Hetty
did not realize that the change here was more in her than in him: in the
old days it had been she who talked, not the doctor; now that she was
silent, he went on with his trains of thought undisturbed, and was as
content as before, for she was by his side. He felt her presence
perpetually, even when he gave no sign of doing so.

Many months went by in this way, a summer, a winter, part of a spring,
and Hetty's forty-fifth birthday came, and found her a seriously unhappy
woman. Yet, strange to say, nobody dreamed of it. So unchanged was the
external current of her life: such magnificent self-control had she, and
such absolute disinterestedness. Little Raby was the only one who ever
had a consciousness that things were not right. He was Hetty's closest
comrade and companion now. All the hours that she did not spend driving
with the doctor (and she drove with him less now than had been her
custom) she spent with Raby. They took long rambles together, and long
rides, Raby being already an accomplished and fearless little rider. By
the subtle instinct of a loving child, Raby knew that "Aunt Hetty" was
changed. A certain something was gone out of the delight they used to
take together. Once, as they were riding, he exclaimed:

"Aunt Hetty, you haven't spoken for ever so long! What's the matter? you
don't talk half so much as you used to."

And Hetty, conscience-stricken, thought to herself: "Dear me, how
selfish it makes one to be unhappy! Here I am, letting it fall on this
dear, innocent darling. I ought to be ashamed." But she answered gayly:

"Oh, Raby! aunty is growing old and stupid, isn't she? She must look
out, or you'll get tired of her."

"I shan't either: you 're the nicest aunty in the whole world," cried
Raby. "You ain't a bit old; but I wish you'd talk."

Then and there, Hetty resolved that never again should Raby have
occasion to think thus; and he never did. Before long he had forgotten
all about this conversation, and all was as before. This was in May. One
day, in the following June, as Hetty and the doctor were driving through
Springton, he said suddenly:

"Oh, Hetty! I want you to come in with me at one place this morning.
There is the most perfectly beautiful creature there I ever saw,--the
oldest daughter of a Methodist minister who has just come here to
preach. Poor child! she cannot sit up, or turn herself in bed; but she
is an angel, and has the face of one, if ever a human creature had. They
are very poor and we must help them all we can. I have great hopes of
curing the child, if she can be well fed. It is a serious spinal
disease, but I believe it can be cured."

When Hetty first looked on the face of Rachel Barlow, she said in her
heart: "Eben was right. It is the face of an angel;" and when she heard
Rachel's voice, she added, "and the voice also." Some types of spinal
disease seem to have a marvellously refining effect on the countenance;
producing an ethereal clearness of skin, and brightness of eye, and a
spiritual expression, which are seen on no other faces. Rachel Barlow
was a striking instance of this almost abnormal beauty. As her fair face
looked up at you from her pillow, your impulse was to fall on your
knees. Not till she smiled did you feel sure she was human; but when she
smiled, the smile was so winningly warm, you forgot you had thought her
an angel. For two years she had not moved from her bed, except as she
was lifted in the strong arms of her father. For two years she had not
been free from pain for a moment. Often the pain was so severe that she
fainted. And yet her brow was placid, unmarked by a line, and her face
in repose as serene as a happy child's.

Doctor Eben and Hetty sat together by the bed.

"Rachel," said the doctor, "I have brought my wife to help cure you. She
is as good a doctor as I am." And he turned proudly to Hetty.

Rachel gazed at her earnestly, but did not speak. Hetty felt herself
singularly embarrassed by the gaze.

"I wish I could help you," she said; "but I think my husband will make
you well."

Rachel colored.

"I never permit myself to hope for it," she replied. "If I did, I should
be discontented at once."

"Why! are you contented as it is?" exclaimed Hetty impetuously.

"Oh, yes!" said Rachel. "I enjoy every minute, except when the pain is
too hard: you don't know what a beautiful thing life seems to me. I
always have the sky you know" (glancing at the window), "and that is
enough for a lifetime. Every day birds fly by too; and every day my
father reads to me at least two hours. So I have great deal to think
about."

"Miss Barlow, I envy you," said Hetty in a tone which startled even
herself. Again Rachel bent on her the same clairvoyant gaze which had so
embarrassed her before. Hetty shrank from it still more than at first,
and left the room, saying to her husband: "I will wait for you outside."

As they drove away, Hetty said:

"Eben, what is it in her look which makes me so uneasy? I don't like to
have her look at me."

"Now that is strange," replied the doctor. "After you had left the room,
the child said to me: 'What is the matter with your wife? She is not
well,' and I laughed at the idea, and told her I never knew any woman
half so well or strong. Rachel is a sort of clairvoyant, as persons in
her condition are so apt to be; but she made a wrong guess this time,
didn't she?"

Hetty did not answer; and the doctor turning towards her saw that her
eyes were fixed on the sky with a dreamy expression.

"Why, Hetty!" he exclaimed. "Why do you look so? You are perfectly well,
are you not, dear?"

"Oh, yes! oh, yes!" Hetty answered, quickly rousing herself. "I am
perfectly well; and always have been, ever since I can remember."

After this, Hetty went no more with her husband to see Rachel. When he
asked her, she said: "No, Eben: I am going to see her alone. I will not
go with you again. She makes me uncomfortable. If she makes me feel so,
when I am alone with her, I shall not go at all. I don't like
clairvoyants."

"Why, what a queer notion that is for you, wife!" laughed the doctor,
and thought no more of it.

Hetty's first interview with Rachel was a constrained one. Nothing in
Hetty's life had prepared her for intercourse with so finely organized a
creature: she felt afraid to speak, lest she should wound her; her own
habits of thought and subjects of interest seemed too earthy to be
mentioned in this presence; she was vaguely conscious that all Rachel's
being was set to finer issues than her own. She found in this an
unspeakable attraction; and yet it also withheld her at every point and
made her dumb. In spite of these conflicting emotions, she wanted to
love Rachel, to help her, to be near her; and she went again and again,
until the constraint wore off, and a very genuine affection grew up
between them. Never, after the first day, had she felt any peculiar
embarrassment under Rachel's gaze, and her memory of it had nearly died
away, when one day, late in the autumn, it was suddenly revived with
added intensity. It was a day on which Hetty had been feeling unusually
sad. Even by Rachel's bedside she could not quite throw off the sadness.
Unconsciously, she had been sitting for a long time silent. As she
looked up, she met Rachel's eyes fixed full on hers, with the same
penetrating gaze which had so disturbed her in their first interview.
Rachel did not withdraw her gaze, but continued to look into Hetty's
eyes, steadily, piercingly, with an expression which held Hetty
spell-bound. Presently she said:

"Dear Mrs. Williams, you are thinking something which is not true. Do
not let it stay with you."

"What do you mean, Rachel?" asked Hetty, resentfully. "No one can read
another person's thoughts."

"Not exactly," replied Rachel, in a timid voice, "but very nearly. Since
I have been ill, I have had a strange power of telling what people were
thinking about: I can sometimes tell the exact words. I cannot tell how
it is. I seem to read them in the air, or to hear them spoken. And I can
always tell if a person is thinking either wicked thoughts or untrue
ones. A wicked person always looks to me like a person in a fog. There
have been some people in this room that my father thought very good; but
I knew they were very bad. I could hardly see their faces clear. When a
person is thinking mistaken or untrue thoughts, I see something like a
shimmer of light all around them: it comes and goes, like a flicker from
a candle. When you first came in to see me, you looked so."

"Pshaw, Rachel," said Hetty, resolutely. "That is all nonsense. It is
just the nervous fancy of a sick girl. You mustn't give way to it."

"I should think so too," replied Rachel, meekly. "If it did not so
often come exactly true. My father will tell you how often we have tried
it."

"Well, then, tell me what I was thinking just now," laughed Hetty.

Rachel colored. "I would rather not," she replied, in an earnest tone.

"Oh! you're afraid it won't prove true," said Hetty. "I'll take the
risk, if you will."

Rachel hesitated, but finally repeated her first answer. "I would rather
not."

Hetty persisted, and Rachel, with great reluctance, answered her as
follows:

"You were thinking about yourself: you were dissatisfied about something
in yourself; you are not happy, and you ought to be; you are so good."

Hetty listened with a wonder-struck face. She disliked this more than
she had ever in her life disliked any thing which had happened to her.
She did not speak.

"Do not be angry," said Rachel. "You made me tell you."

"Oh! I am not angry," said Hetty. "I'm not so stupid as that; but it's
the most disagreeable thing, I ever knew. Can you help seeing these
things, if you try?"

"Yes, I suppose I might," said Rachel. "I never try. It interests me to
see what people are thinking about."

"Humph!" said Hetty, sarcastically. "I should think so. You might make
your fortune as a detective, if you were well enough to go about in the
world."

"If I were that, I should lose the power," replied Rachel. "The doctors
say it is part of the disease."

"Rachel," exclaimed Hetty, vehemently, "I'll never come near you again,
if you don't promise not to use this power of yours upon me. I should
never feel comfortable one minute where you are, if I thought you were
reading my thoughts. Not that I have any special secrets," added Hetty,
with a guilty consciousness; "but I suppose everybody thinks thoughts he
would rather not have read."

"I'll promise you, indeed I will, dear Mrs. Williams," cried Rachel,
much distressed. "I never have read you, except that first day. It
seemed forced upon me then, and to-day too. But I promise you, I will
not do it again."

"I suppose I shouldn't know if you were doing it, unless you told me,"
said Hetty, reflectively.

"I think you would," answered Rachel. "Do I not look peculiarly? My
father tells me that I do."

"Yes, you do," replied Hetty, recollecting that, in each of these
instances, she had been much disturbed by Rachel's look. "I will trust
you, then, seeing that you probably can't deceive me."

When Hetty told the doctor of this, expecting that he would dismiss it
as unworthy of attention, she was much surprised at the interest he
showed in the account. He questioned her closely as to the expression of
Rachel's face, her tones of voice, during the interval.

"And was it true, Hetty?" he asked; "was what she said true? Were you
thinking of something in yourself which troubled you?"

"Yes, I was," said Hetty, in a low voice, fearing that her husband would
ask her what; but he was only studying the incident from professional
curiosity.

"You are sure of that, are you?" he asked.

"Yes, very sure," replied Hetty.

"Extraordinary! 'pon my word extraordinary!" ejaculated the doctor. "I
have read of such cases, but I have never more than half believed them.
I'd give my right hand to cure that girl."

"Your right hand is not yours to give," said Hetty, playfully. The
doctor made no reply. He was deep in meditation on Rachel's
clairvoyance. Hetty looked at him for some moments, as earnestly as
Rachel had looked at her. "Oh if I could only have that power Rachel
has!" she thought.

"Eben," she said, "is it impossible for a healthy person to be a
clairvoyant?"

"Quite," answered the doctor, with a sudden instinct of what Hetty
meant. "No chance for you, dear. You'll never get at any of my secrets
that way. You might as well try to make yourself Rachel's age as to
acquire this mysterious power she has."

Unlucky words! Hetty bore them about with her. "That showed that he
feels that I am old," she said, as often as she recalled them.

A month later, as she was sitting with Rachel one morning, there was a
knock at the door. Hetty was sitting in such a position that she could
not be seen from the door, but could see, in the looking-glass at the
foot of Rachel's bed, any person entering the room. As the door opened,
she looked up, and, to her unspeakable surprise, saw her husband coming
in; saw, in the same swift second's glance, the look of gladness and
welcome on his face, and heard him say, in tones of great tenderness:

"How are you to-day, precious child?" In the next instant, he had seen
his wife, and was, in his turn, so much astonished, that the look of
glad welcome which he had bent upon Rachel, was instantaneously
succeeded by one of blank surprise, bent upon Hetty; surprise, and
nothing else, but so great surprise that it looked almost like dismay
and confusion. "Why, Hetty!" he said, "I did not expect to see you
here."

"Nor I you," said Hetty, lightly; but the lightness of tone had a
certain something of constraint in it. This incident was one of those
inexplicably perverse acts of Fate which make one almost believe
sometimes in the depravity of spirits, if not in that of men. When Dr.
Eben had left home that morning, Hetty had said to him:

"Are you going to Springton, to-day?"

"No, not to-day," was the reply.

"I am very sorry," answered Hetty. "I wanted to send some jelly to
Rachel."

"Can't go to-day, possibly," the doctor had said. "I have to go the
other way."

But later in the morning he had met a messenger from Springton, riding
post-haste, with an imperative call which could not be deferred. And, as
he was in the village, he very naturally stopped to see Rachel. All of
this he explained with some confusion; feeling, for the first time in
his long married life, that it was awkward for a man to have to account
for his presence in any particular spot at any particular time. Hetty
betrayed no annoyance or incredulity: she felt none. She was too
sensible and reasonable a woman to have felt either, even if it had been
simply a change of purpose on the doctor's own part which had brought
him to Springton. The thing which had lent the shade of constraint to
Hetty's voice, and which lay like an icy mountain on Hetty's heart, was
the look which she had seen on his face, the tone which she had heard in
his voice, as he greeted Rachel. In that instant was planted the second
germ of unhappiness in Hetty's bosom. Of jealousy, in the ordinary
acceptation of the term; of its caprices, suspicions, subterfuges; and,
above all, of its resentments,--Hetty was totally incapable. If it had
been made evident to her in any one moment, that her husband loved
another woman, her first distinct thoughts would have been of sorrow for
him rather than for herself, and of perplexity as to what could be done
to make him happy again. At this moment, however, nothing took distinct
shape in Hetty's mind. It was merely the vague pain of a loving woman's
sensitive heart, surprised by the sight of tender looks and tones given
by her husband to another woman. It was wholly a vague pain, but it was
the germ of a great one; and, falling as it did on Hetty's already
morbid consciousness of her own loss of youth and beauty and
attractiveness, it fell into soil where such germs ripen as in a
hot-bed. In a less noble nature than Hetty's there would have grown up
side by side with this pain a hatred of Rachel, or, at least, an
antagonism towards her. In the fine equilibrium of Hetty's moral nature,
such a thing was impossible. She felt from that day a new interest in
Rachel. She looked at her, often scrutinizingly, and thought: "Ah, if
she were but well, what a sweet young wife she might make! I wish Eben
could have had such a wife! How much better it would have been for him
than having me!" She began now to go oftener with her husband to visit
Rachel. Closely, but with no sinister motive, no trace of ill-feeling,
she listened to all which they said. She observed the peculiar
gentleness with which the doctor spoke, and the docility with which
Rachel listened; and she said to herself: "That is quite unlike Eben's
manner to me, or mine to him. I wonder if that is not more nearly the
way it ought to be between husbands and wives. The wife ought to look
up to her husband as a little child does." Now, much as Hetty loved Dr.
Eben, passionately as her whole life centred around him, there had never
been such a feeling as this: they were the heartiest of comrades, but
each life was on a plane of absolute independence. Hetty pondered much
on this.




XI.


One day, as they sat by Rachel's bed, the doctor had been counting her
pulse. Her little white hand looked like a baby's hand in his. Holding
it up, he said to Hetty:

"Look at that hand. It couldn't do much work, could it!"

Involuntarily Hetty stretched out her large, well-knit brown hand, and
put it by the side of Rachel's. There are many men who would have
admired Hetty's hand the more of the two. It was a much more significant
hand. To one who could read palmistry, it meant all that Hetty was; and
it was symmetrical and firm. But, at that moment, to Dr. Eben it looked
large and masculine.

"Oh, take it away, Hetty!" he said, thoughtlessly. "It looks like a
man's hand by the side of this child's."

Hetty laughed. She thought so too. But the words remained in her mind,
and allied themselves to words that had gone before, and to things that
had happened, and to thoughts which were restlessly growing, growing in
Hetty's bosom.

If Rachel had remained an invalid, probably Hetty's thoughts of her, as
connected with her husband, would never have gone beyond this vague
stage which we have tried to describe. She would have been to Hetty only
the suggestion of a possible ideal wife, who, had she lived, and had she
entered into Dr. Eben's life, might have made him happier than Hetty
could. But Rachel grew better and stronger every day. Early in the
spring she began to walk,--creeping about, at first, like a little child
just learning to walk, by pushing a chair before her. Then she walked
with a cane and her father's arm; then with the cane alone; and at last,
one day in May,--oddly enough it was the anniversary of Hetty's
wedding-day,--Dr. Eben burst into her room, exclaiming: "Hetty! Hetty!
Rachel has walked several rods alone. She is cured! She is going to be
as well as anybody."

The doctor's face was flushed with excitement. Never had he had what
seemed to him so great a professional triumph. It was the physician and
not the man that felt so intensely. But Hetty could not wholly know
this. She had shared his deep anxiety about the case; and she had shared
much of his strong interest in Rachel, and it was with an unaffected
pleasure that she exclaimed: "Oh, I'm so thankful!" but her next
sentence was one which arrested her husband's attention, and seemed to
him a strange one.

"Then there is nothing to hinder her being married, is there?"

"Why, no," laughed the doctor, "nothing, except the lack of a man fit to
marry her! What put such a thought as that into your head, Hetty? I
don't believe Rachel Barlow will ever be married. I'm sure I don't know
the man that's worthy to so much as kiss the child's feet!" and the
unconscious Dr. Eben hastened away, little dreaming what a shaft he had
sped.

Hetty stood at the open window, watching him, as far as she could see
him, among the pines. The apple orchard, near the house, was in full
bloom, and the fragrance came in at every window. A vase of the blossoms
stood on Hetty's bureau: it was one of her few, tender reminiscences,
the love which she had had for apple blossoms ever since the night of
her marriage. She held a little cluster of them now in her hand, as she
leaned on the window-sill; they had been gathered for some days, and, as
a light wind stirred the air, all the petals fell, and slowly fluttered
down to the ground. Hetty looked wistfully at the bare stems. A distinct
purpose at that moment was forming in her mind; a purpose distinct in
its aim, but, as yet, very vague in its shape. She was saying to
herself: "If I were out of the way, Eben might marry Rachel. He needn't
say, he doesn't know a man fit to do it. He is fit to marry any woman
God ever made, and I believe he would be happier with such a wife as
that, and with children, than he can ever be with me."

Even now there was in Hetty no morbid jealousy, no resentment, no
suspicion that her husband had been disloyal to her even in thought.
There had simply been forced upon her, by the slow accumulations of
little things, the conviction that her husband would be happier with
another woman for his wife than with her. It is probably impossible to
portray in words all the processes of this remarkable woman's mind and
heart during these extraordinary passages of her life. They will seem,
judged by average standards, morbid and unhealthy: yet there was no
morbidness in them; unless we are to call morbid all the great and
glorious army of men and women who have laid down their own lives for
the sake of others. That same fine and rare quality of self-abnegation
which has inspired missionaries' lives and martyrs' deaths, inspired
Hetty now. The morbidness, if there were any, was in the first entering
into her mind of the belief that her husband's happiness could be
secured in any way so well as by her. But here let us be just to Hetty.
The view she took was the common-sense view, which probably would have
been taken by nine out of ten of all Dr. Eben's friends. Who could say
that it did not stand to reason, that a man would be happier with a
wife, young, beautiful, of angelic sweetness of nature, and the mother
of sons and daughters, than with an old, childless, and less attractive
woman. The strange thing was that any wife could take this common-sense
view of such a situation. It was not strange in Hetty, however. It was
simply the carrying out of the impulses and motives which had
characterized her whole life.

About this time, Hetty began with Raby to practise rowing on Welbury
Lake. This lake was a beautiful sheet of water, lying between Welbury
and Springton. It was some two miles long, and one wide; and held two or
three little wooded islands, which were much resorted to in the summer.
On two sides of the lake, rose high, rocky precipices; no landing was
possible there: the other two sides were thick wooded forests of pines
and hemlocks. Nothing could exceed in loveliness the situation of this
lake. Two roads led to it: one from the Springton, the other from the
Welbury side; both running through the hemlock forests. In the winter
these were used for carrying out ice, which was cut in great quantities
on the lake. In the summer, no one crossed these roads, except parties
of pleasure-seekers who went to sail or row on the lake. In a shanty on
the Welbury side, lived an old man, who made a little money every summer
by renting a few rather leaky boats, and taking charge of such boats as
were kept moored at his beach by their owners.

Hetty had promised Raby that when he was ten years old he should have a
fine boat, and learn to row. The time had come now for her to keep this
promise. Every Saturday afternoon during the summer following Rachel's
recovery, Hetty and Raby spent on the lake. Hetty was a strong and
skilful oars-woman. Little Raby soon learned to manage the boat as well
as she did. The lake was considered unsafe for sail-boats, on account of
flaws of wind which often, without any warning, beat down from the hills
on the west side; but rowing there was one of the chief pleasures of the
young people of Welbury and Springton. In Hetty's present frame of mind,
this lonely lake had a strange fascination for her. In her youth she had
never loved it: she had always been eager to land on one of the islands,
and spend hours in the depths of the fragrant woods, rather than on the
dark and silent water. But now she never wearied of rowing round and
round its water margin, and looking down into its unsounded depths. It
was believed that Welbury Lake was unfathomable; but this notion
probably had its foundation in the limited facilities in that region for
sounding deep waters.

One day Hetty rowed across the lake to the point where the Springton
road came down to the shore. Pushing the boat up on the beach, she
sprang out; and, telling Raby to wait there till she return

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