“I want you to go after William Berry and make him marry Rebecca.”
“Mother!”
“Rebecca is gone. I turned her out of the house this mornin'. I don't know where she is. Go and find her, and make William Berry marry her.”
“Mother, before the Lord, I don't know what you mean!” Barney cried out. “You didn't turn Rebecca out of the house in all this storm! What did you turn her out for? Where is she?”
“I don't know where she is. I turned her out because I wouldn't have her in the house. You brought it all on us; if you hadn't acted so I shouldn't have felt as I did about her marryin'. Now you can go an' find her, and get William Berry an' make him marry her. I ain't got anything more to do with it.”
Deborah turned, and went out of the yard.
“Mother!” Barney called after her, but she kept on. He stood for a second looking after her retreating figure, struggling sternly with the snow-drifts, meeting the buffets of the wind with her head up; then he went in, and put on his boots and his overcoat.
Barney had heard not one word of the village gossip, and the revelation in his mother's words had come to him with a great shock. As he went up the hill to the old tavern he could hardly believe that he had understood her rightly. Once he paused and turned, and was half inclined to go back. He was as pure-minded as a girl, and almost as ignorant; he could not believe that he knew what she meant.
Barney hesitated again before the store; then he opened the great clanging door and went in. A farmer, in a blue frock stiff with snow, had just completed his purchases and was going out. William, who had been waiting upon him, was quite near the door behind the counter. At the farther end of the store could be seen the red glow of a stove and Tommy Ray's glistening fair had. Some one else, who had shrunk out of sight when Barney entered, was also there.
Barney saw no one but William. He looked at him, and all his bewilderment gathered itself into a point. He felt a sudden fierce impulse to spring at him.
William looked at Barney, and his faced changed in a minute. He took up his hat, and came around the counter. “Did you want to see me?” he said, hoarsely.
“Come outside,” said Barney. And the two men went out, and stood in the snow before the store.
“Where is Rebecca?” said Barney. He looked at William, and again the savage impulse seized him. William did not shrink before it.
[Illustration: “‘Where is Rebecca?’ said Barney”]
“What do you mean?” he returned. His lips were quite stiff and white, but he looked back at Barney.
“Don't you know where she is?”
“Before God I don't, Barney. What do you mean?”
“She left home this morning. Mother turned her out.”
“Turned her out!” repeated William.
“Come with me and find her and marry her, or I'll kill you,” said Barney, and he lashed out suddenly with his fist in William's face.
“You won't need to, for I'll kill myself if I don't,” William gasped out. Then he turned and ran.
“Where are you going?” Barney shouted, rushing after him, in a fury.
“To put the horse in the cutter,” William called back. And, indeed, he was headed towards the barn. Barney followed him, and the two men put the horse between the shafts. Once William asked, hoarsely, “Any idea which way?” and Barney shook his head.
“What time did she go?”
“Some time this forenoon.”
William groaned.
The horse was nearly harnessed when Tommy Ray came running out from the store, and beckoned to Barney. “Rose says she see her going up the turnpike this morning,” he said, in a low voice. “She was up in her chamber that looks over the turnpike, and she see somebody goin' up the turnpike. She thought it looked like Rebecca, but she supposed it must be Mis' Jim Sloane. It must have been Rebecca.”
“What time was it?” William asked, thrusting his white face between them. The boy turned aside with a gesture of contempt and dislike. “About half-past ten,” he answered, shortly. Then he turned on his heel and went back to the store. Rose was peering around the half-open door with a white, shocked face. Somehow she had fathomed the cause of the excitement.
“We'll go up the turnpike, then,” said Barney. William nodded. The two men sprang into the cutter, and the snow flew in their faces from the horse's hoofs as they went out the barn door.
The old tavern stood facing the old turnpike road to Boston, but the store and barn faced on the new road at its back, and people generally approached the tavern by that way.
William and Barney had to drive down the hill; then turn the corner, and up the hill again on the old turnpike.
There was not a house on that road for a full mile. William urged the horse as fast as he could through the fresh snow. Both men kept a sharp lookout at the sides of the road. The sun was out now, and the snow was blinding white; the north wind drove a glittering spray as sharp and stinging as diamond-dust in their faces.
Once William cried out, with a dry sob, “My God, she'll freeze in this wind, if she's out in it!”
And Barney answered, “Maybe it would be better for her if she did.”
William looked at him for the first time since they started. “See here, Barney,” he said, “God knows it's not to shield myself—I'm past that; but I've begged her all summer to be married. I've been down on my knees to her to be married before it came to this.”
“Why wouldn't she?”
“I don't know, oh, I don't know! The poor girl was near distracted. Her mother forbade her to marry me, and held up her Aunt Rebecca, who married against her parents' wishes and hung herself, before her, all the time. Your trouble with Charlotte Barnard brought it all about. Her mother never opposed it before. I begged her to marry me, but she was afraid, or something, I don't know what.”
“Can't you drive faster?” said Barney.
William had been urging the horse while he spoke, but now he shook the whip over him again.
Mrs. Jim Sloane's house was a long, unpainted cottage quite near the road. The woman who lived alone there was under a kind of indefinite ban in the village. Her husband, who had died several years before, had been disreputable and drunken, and the mantle of his disgrace had seemed to fall upon his wife, if indeed she was not already provided with such a mantle of her own. Everybody spoke slightingly of Mrs. Jim Sloane. The men laughed meaningly when they saw her pass, wrapped in an old plaid shawl, which she wore summer and winter, and which seemed almost like a uniform. Stories were told of her dirt and shiftlessness, of the hens which roosted in her kitchen. Poor Mrs. Jim Sloane, in her blue plaid shawl, tramping frequently from her solitary house through the village, was a byword and a mocking to all the people.
When William and Barney came abreast of her house they saw the blue flutter of Mrs. Jim Sloane's shawl out before, above the blue dazzle of the snow.
“Hullo!” she was crying out in her shrill voice, and waving her hand to them to stop.
William pulled the horse up short, and the woman came plunging through the snow close to his side.
“She's in here,” she said, with a knowing smile. The faded fair hair blew over her eyes; she pushed it back with a coquettish gesture; there was a battered prettiness about her thin pink-and-white face, turning blue in the sharp wind.
“When did she get here?” asked Barney.
“This forenoon. She fell down out here, couldn't get no farther. I came out an' got her into the house. Didn't know but she was done to; but I fixed her up some hot drink an' made her lay down. I s'posed you'd be along.” She smiled again.
William jumped out of the cutter, and tied the horse to an old fence-post. Then he and Barney followed the woman into the house. Barney looked at the old blue plaid shawl with utter disgust and revulsion. He had always felt a loathing for the woman, and her being a distant relative on his father's side intensified it.
Mrs. Sloane threw open the door, and bade them enter, as if to a festival. “Walk right in,” said she.
There was a wild flutter of hens as they entered. Mrs. Sloane drove them before her. “The hen-house roof fell in, an' I have to keep 'em in here,” she said, and shooed them and shook her shawl at them, until they alighted all croaking with terror upon the bed in the corner.
Then she looked inquiringly around the room. “Why,” she cried, “she's gone; she was settin' here in this rockin'-chair when I went out. She must have run when she see you comin'!”
Mrs. Sloane hustled through a door, the tattered fringes of her shawl flying, and then her voice, shrilly expostulating, was heard in the next room.
The two men waited, standing side by side near the door in a shamed silence. They did not look at each other.
Presently Mrs. Sloane returned without her shawl. Her old cotton gown showed tattered and patched, and there were glimpses of her sharp white elbows at the sleeves. “She won't come out a step,” she announced. “I can't make her. She's takin' on terribly.”
William made a stride forward. “I'll go in and see her,” he said, hoarsely; but Mrs. Jim Sloane stood suddenly in his way, her slender back against the door.
“No, you ain't goin' in,” said she, “I told her I wouldn't let you go in.”
William looked at her.
“She's dreadful set against either one of you comin' in, an' I told her you shouldn't,” she said, firmly. She smoothed her wild locks down tightly over her ears as she spoke. All the coquettish look was gone.
William turned around, and looked helplessly at Barney, and Barney looked back at him. Then Barney put on his hat, and shrugged himself more closely into his great-coat.
“I'll go and get the minister,” he said.
Mrs. Sloane thrust her chin out alertly. “Goin' to get her married right off?” she asked, with a confidential smile.
Barney ignored her. “I guess it's the best way to do,” he said, sternly, to William; and William nodded.
“Well, I guess 'tis the best way,” Mrs. Sloane said, with cheerful assent. “I don't b'lieve you could hire her to come out of that room an' go to the minister's, nohow. She's terrible upset, poor thing.”
As Barney went out of the door he cast a look full of involuntary suspicion back at William, and hesitated a second on the threshold. Mrs. Sloane intercepted the look. “I'll look out he don't run away while you're gone,” she said; then she laughed.
William's white face flamed up suddenly, but he made no reply. When Barney had gone he drew a chair up close to the hearth, and sat there, bent over, with his elbows on his knees. Mrs. Sloane sat down on the foot of the bed, close to the door of the other room, as if she were mounting guard over it. She kept looking at William, and smiling, and opening her mouth to speak, then checking herself.
“It's a pretty cold day,” she said, finally.
William grunted assent without looking up. Then he motioned with his shoulder towards the door of the other room. “Ain't it cold in there?” he half whispered.
“I rolled her all up in my shawl; I guess she won't ketch cold; it's thick,” responded the woman, effusively, and William said no more. He sat with his chin in his hands and his eyes fixed absently. The fire was smoking over a low, red glow of coals, the chimney-place yawned black before him, the hearth was all strewn with pots and kettles, and the shelf above it was piled high with a vague household litter. It had leaked around the chimney, and there was a great discolored blotch on the wall above the shelf, and the ceiling. Two or three hens came pecking around the kettles at William's feet.
To this young man, brought up in the extreme thrift and neatness of a typical New England household, this strange untidiness, as he viewed it through his strained mental state, seemed to have a deeper significance, and reveal the very shame and squalor of the soul itself, and its own existence and thoughts, by material images.
He might from his own sensations, as he sat there, have been actually translated into a veritable hell, from the utter strangeness of the atmosphere which his thoughts seemed to gasp in. William had never come fully into the atmosphere of his own sin before, but now he had, and somehow the untidy pots and kettles on the hearth made it more real. He was conscious as he sat there of very little pity for the girl in the other room, of very little love for her, and also of very little love or pity for himself; he felt nothing but a kind of horror. He saw suddenly the alien side of life, and the alien side of his own self, which he would always have kept faced out towards space, away from all eyes, like the other side of the moon, and that was for the time all he could grasp.
Once or twice Mrs. Sloane volunteered a remark, but he scarcely responded, and once he heard absently her voice and Rebecca's in the other room. Otherwise he sat in utter silence, except for the low chuckle of the hens and the taps of their beaks against the iron pots, until Barney came with the minister and the minister's wife.
Barney had taken the minister aside, and asked him, stammeringly, if he thought his wife would come. He could not bear the thought of the Sloane woman's being a witness at his sister's wedding. The minister and his wife were both very young, and had not lived long in Pembroke. They looked much alike: the minister's small, pale, peaked face peered with anxious solicitude between the folds of the great green scarf which he tied over his cap, and his wife looked like him out of her great wadded green silk hood, when they got into the sleigh with Barney.
The minister had had a whispered conference with his wife, and now she never once let her eyes rest on either of the two men as they slid swiftly along over the new snow. Her heart beat loudly in her ears, her little thin hands were cold in her great muff. She had married very young, out of a godly New England minister's home. She had never known anything like this before, and a sort of general shame of femininity seemed to be upon her.
When she followed her husband into Mrs. Sloane's house she felt herself as burdened with shame—as if she stood in Rebecca's place. Her little face, all blue with the sharp cold, shrank, shocked and sober, into the depths of her great hood. She stood behind her husband, her narrow girlish shoulders bending under her thick mantilla, and never looked at the face of anybody in the room.
She did not see William at all. He stood up before them as they entered; they all nodded gravely. Nobody spoke but Mrs. Sloane, vibrating nervously in the midst of her clamorous hens, and Barney silenced her.
“We'll go right in,” he said, in a stern, peremptory tone; then he turned to William. “Are you ready?” he asked.
William nodded, with his eyes cast down. The party made a motion towards the other room, but Mrs. Sloane unexpectedly stood before the door.
“I told her there shouldn't nobody come in,” said she, “an' I ain't goin' to have you all bustin' in on her without she knows it. She's terrible upset. You wait a minute.”
Mrs. Sloane's blue eyes glared defiantly at the company. The minister's wife bent her hooded head lower. She had heard about Mrs. Sloane, and felt as if she were confronted by a woman from Revelation and there was a flash of scarlet in the room.
“Go in and tell her we are coming,” said Barney. And Mrs. Sloane slipped out of the room cautiously, opening the door only a little way. Her voice was heard, and suddenly Rebecca's rang out shrill in response, although they could not distinguish the words. Mrs. Sloane looked out. “She says she won't be married,” she whispered.
“You let me see her,” said Barney, and he took a stride forward, but Mrs. Sloane held the door against him.
“You can't,” she whispered again. “I'll talk to her some more. I can talk her over, if anybody can.”
Barney fell back, and again the door was shut and the voices were heard. This time Rebecca's arose into a wail, and they heard her cry out, “I won't, I won't! Go away, and stop talking to me! I won't! Go away!”
William turned around, and hid his face against the corner of the mantel-shelf. Barney went up and clapped him roughly on the shoulder. “Can't you go in there and make her listen to reason?” he said.
But just then Mrs. Sloane opened the door again. “You can walk right in now,” she announced, smiling, her thin mouth sending the lines of her whole face into smirking upward curves.
The whole company edged forward solemnly. Mrs. Sloane was following, but Barney stood in her way. “I guess you'd better not come in,” he said, abruptly.
Mrs. Sloane's face flushed a burning red. “I guess,” she began, in a loud voice, but Barney shut the door in her face. She ran noisily, stamping her feet like an angry child, to the fireplace, caught up a heavy kettle, and threw it down on the hearth. The hens flew up with a great clamor and whir of wings; Mrs. Sloane's shrill, mocking laugh arose above it. She began talking in a high-pitched voice, flinging out vituperations which would seem to patter against the closed door like bullets. Suddenly she stopped, as if her ire had failed her, and listened intently to a low murmur from the other room. She nodded her head when it ceased.
The door opened soon, and all except Rebecca came out. They stood consulting together in low voices, and Mrs. Sloane listened. They were deciding where to take Rebecca.
All at once Mrs. Sloane spoke. Her voice was still high-pitched with anger.
“If you want to know where to take her to, I can tell you,” said she. “I'd keep her here an' welcome, but I s'pose you think I ain't good enough, you're all such mighty particular folks, an' ain't never had no disgrace in your own families. William Berry can't take her to his home to-night, for his mother wouldn't leave a whole skin on either of 'em. Her own mother has turned her out, an' Barney can't take her in. She's got to go somewhere where there's a woman; she's terrible upset. There ain't no other way but for you an' Mis' Barnes to take her home to-night, an' keep her till William gets a place fixed to put her in.” Mrs. Sloane turned to the minister and his wife, regarding them with a mixture of defiance, sarcasm, and appeal.
They looked at each other hesitatingly. The minister's wife paled within her hood, and her eyes reddened with tears.
“I shouldn't s'pose you'd need any time to think on it, such good folks as you be,” said Mrs. Sloane. “There ain't no other way. She's got to be where there's a woman.”
Mrs. Barnes turned her head towards her husband. “She can come, if you think she ought to,” she said, in a trembling voice.
The sun was setting when the party started. William led Rebecca out through the kitchen—a muffled, hesitating figure, whose very identity seemed to be lost, for she wore Mrs. Sloane's blue plaid shawl pinned closely over her head and face—and lifted her into his cutter with the minister and his wife. Then he and Barney walked along, plodding through the deep snow behind the cutter. The sun was setting, and it was bitterly cold; the snow creaked and the trees swung with a stiff rattle of bare limbs in the wind.
The two men never spoke to each other. The minister drove slowly, and they could always see Mrs. Jim Sloane's blue plaid shawl ahead.
When they reached the Caleb Thayer house, Barney stopped and William followed on alone after the sleigh.
Barney turned into the yard, and his father was standing in the barn door, looking out.
“Tell mother she's married,” Barney sang out, hoarsely. Then he went back to the road, and home to his own house.
Barney went to see Rebecca the next day, but the minister's wife came to the door and would not admit him. She puckered her lips painfully, and a blush shot over her face and little thin throat as she stood there before him. “I guess you had better not come in,” said she, nervously. “I guess you had better wait until Mrs. Berry gets settled in her house. Mr. Berry is going to hire the old Bennett place. I guess it would be pleasanter.”
Barney turned away, blushing also as he stammered an assent. Always keenly alive to the shame of the matter, it seemed as if his sense of it were for the moment intensified. The minister's wife's whole nature seemed turned into a broadside of mirrors towards Rebecca's shame and misery, and it was as if the reflection was multiplied in Barney as he looked at her.
Still, he could not take the shame to his own nature as she could, being a woman. He looked back furtively at the house as he went down the road, thinking he might catch a glimpse of poor Rebecca at the window.
But Rebecca kept herself well hid. After William had hired the old Bennet house and established her there, she lived with curtains down and doors bolted. Never a neighbor saw her face at door or window, although all the women who lived near did their housework with eyes that way. She would not go to the door if anybody knocked. The caller would hear her scurrying away. Nobody could gain admittance if William were not at home.
Barney went to the door once, and her voice sounded unexpectedly loud and piteously shrill in response to his knock.
“You can't come in! go away!” cried Rebecca.
“I don't want to say anything hard to you,” said Barney.
“Go away, go away!” repeated Rebecca, and then he heard her sob.
“Don't cry,” pleaded Barney, futilely, through the door. But he heard his sister's retreating steps and her sobs dying away in the distance.
He went away, and did not try to see her again.
Rose went to see Rebecca, stealing out of a back door and scudding across snowy fields lest her mother should espy her and stop her. But Rebecca had not come to the door, although Rose had stood there a long time in a bitter wind.
“She wouldn't let me in,” she whispered to her brother in the store, when she returned. She was friendly to him in a shamefaced, evasive sort of way, and she alone of his family. His father and mother scarcely noticed him.
“Much as ever as she'll let me in, poor girl,” responded William, looking miserably aside from his sister's eyes and weighing out some meal.
“She wouldn't let mother in if she went there,” said Rose. She felt a little piqued at Rebecca's refusing her admittance. It was as if all her pity and generous sympathy had been thrust back upon her, and her pride in it swamped.
“There's no danger of her going there,” William returned, bitterly.
And there was not. Hannah Berry would have set herself up in a pillory as soon as she would have visited her son's wife. She scarcely went into a neighbor's lest she should hear some allusion to it.
Rebecca's father often walked past her house with furtive, wistful eyes towards the windows. Once or twice when nobody was looking he knocked timidly, but he never got any response. He always took a circuitous route home, that his wife might not know where he had been. Deborah never spoke of Rebecca; neither Caleb nor Ephraim dared mention her name in her hearing.
Although Deborah never asked a question, and although people were shy of alluding to Rebecca, she yet seemed to know, in some occult and instinctive fashion, all about her.
When a funeral procession passed the Thayer house one afternoon Deborah knew quite well whose little coffin was in the hearse, although she could scarcely have said that anybody had told her.
Caleb came to her after dinner, with a strange, defiant air. “I want a clean dicky, mother; I'm agoin',” said he. And Deborah got out the old man's Sunday clothes for him without a word. She even brushed his hair with hard, careful strokes, and helped him on with his great-coat; but she never said a word about Rebecca and her baby's funeral.
“They had some white posies on it,” Caleb volunteered, tremblingly, when he got home.
Deborah made no reply.
“There was quite a lot there,” added Caleb.
“Go an' bring me in some kindlin' wood,” said Deborah.
Ephraim stood by, staring alternately at his father and mother. He had watched the funeral procession pass with furtive interest.
“It won't hurt you none to make a few lamp-lighters,” said his mother. “You set right down here, an' I'll get you some paper.”
Ephraim clapped his hand to his side, and rolled his eyes agonizingly towards his mother, but she took no notice. She got some paper out of the cupboard, and Ephraim sat down and began quirling it into long spirals with a wretched sulky air.
Since his sister's marriage Ephraim had had a sterner experience than had ever fallen to his lot before. His mother redoubled her discipline over him. It was as if she had resolved, since all her vigorous training had failed in the case of his sister, that she would intensify it to such purpose that it should not fail with him.
So strait and narrow was the path in which Ephraim was forced to tread those wintry days, so bound and fettered was he by precept and admonition, that it seemed as if his very soul could do no more than shuffle along where his mother pointed.
A scanty and simple diet had Ephraim, and it seemed to him not so much from a solicitude for his health as from a desire to mortify his flesh for the good of his spirit. Ephraim obeyed perforce; he was sincerely afraid of his mother, but he had within him a dogged and growing resentment against those attempts to improve his spirit.
Not a bit of cake was he allowed to taste. When the door of a certain closet in which pound-cake for possible guests was always kept in a jar, and had been ever since Ephraim could remember, was opened, the boy's eyes would fairly glare with desire. “Jest gimme a little scrap, mother,” he would whine. He had formerly, on rare occasions, been allowed a small modicum of cake, but now his mother was unyielding. He got not a crumb; he could only sniff hungrily at the rich, spicy, and fruity aroma which came forth from the closet, and swallow at it vainly and unsatisfactorily with straining palate.
Ephraim was not allowed a soft-stoned plum from a piece of mince-pie; the pie had always been tabooed. He was not even allowed to pick over the plums for the pies, unless under the steady watch of his mother's eyes. Once she seemed to see him approach a plum to his mouth when her back was towards him.
“What are you doing, Ephraim?” she said, and her voice sounded to the boy like one from the Old Testament. He put the plum promptly into the bowl instead of his mouth.
“I ain't doin' nothin', mother,” said he; but his eyes rolled alarmedly after his mother as she went across the kitchen. That frightened Ephraim. He was a practical boy and not easily imposed upon, but it really seemed to him that his mother had seen him, after some occult and uncanny fashion, from the back of her head. A vague and preposterous fancy actually passed through his bewildered boyish brain that the little, tightly twisted knob of hair on the back of a feminine head might have some strange visual power of its own.
He never dared taste another plum, even if the knob of hair directly faced him.
Every day Ephraim had a double task to learn in his catechism, for Deborah held that no labor, however arduous, which savored of the Word and the Spirit could work him bodily ill. If Ephraim had been enterprising and daring enough, he would have fairly cursed the Westminster divines, as he sat hour after hour, crooking his boyish back painfully over their consolidated wisdom, driving the letter of their dogmas into his boyish brain, while the sense of them utterly escaped him.
There was one whole day during which Ephraim toiled, laboriously conning over the majestic sentences in loud whispers, and received thereby only a vague impression and maudlin hope that he himself might be one of the elect of which they treated, because he was so strenuously deprived of plums in this life, and might therefore reasonably expect his share of them in the life to come.
That day poor Ephraim—glancing between whiles at some boys out coasting over in a field, down a fine icy slope, hearing now and then their shouts of glee—had a certain sense of superiority and complacency along with the piteous and wistful longing which always abode in his heart.
“Maybe,” thought Ephraim, half unconsciously, not framing the thought in words to his mind—“maybe if I am a good boy, and don't have any plums, nor go out coasting like them, I shall go to heaven, and maybe they won't.” Ephraim's poor purple face at the window-pane took on a strange, serious expression as he evolved his childish tenet of theology. His mother came in from another room. “Have you got that learned?” said she, and Ephraim bent over his task again.
Ephraim had not been quite as well as usual this winter, and his mother had been more than usually anxious about him. She called the doctor in finally, and followed him out into the cold entry when he left. “He's worse than he has been, ain't he?” she said, abruptly.
The doctor hesitated. He was an old man with a moderate manner. He buttoned his old great-coat, redolent of drugs, closer, his breath steamed out in the frosty entry. “I guess you had better be a little careful about getting him excited,” he said at last, evasively. “You had better get along as easy as you can with him.” The doctor's manner implied more than his words; he had his own opinion of Deborah Thayer's sternness of rule, and he had sympathy with Rebecca.
Deborah seemed to have an intuition of it, for she looked at him, and raised her voice after a manner which would have become the Deborah of the scriptures.
“What would you have me do?” she demanded. “Would you have me let him have his own way if it were for the injury of his soul?” It was curious that Deborah, as she spoke, seemed to look only at the spiritual side of the matter. The idea that her discipline was actually necessary for her son's bodily weal did not occur to her, and she did not urge it as an argument.
“I guess you had better be a little careful and get along as easy as you can,” repeated the doctor, opening the door.
“That ain't all that's to be thought of,” said Deborah, with stern and tragic emphasis, as the doctor went out.
“What did the doctor say, mother?” Ephraim inquired, when she went into the room again. He looked half scared, half important, as he sat in the great rocking-chair by the fire. He breathed short, and his words were disconnected as he spoke.
His mother, for answer, took the catechism from the shelf, and extended it towards him with a decisive thrust of her arm.
“It is time you studied some more,” said she.
Ephraim jerked himself away from the proffered book. “I don't want to study any more now, mother,” he whined.
“Take it,” said Deborah.
Caleb was paring apples for pies on the other side of the hearth. Ephraim looked across at him desperately. “I want to play holly-gull with father,” he said.
“Ephraim!”
“Can't I play holly-gull with father jest a little while?”
“You take this book and study your lesson,” said Deborah, between nearly closed lips.
Ephraim began to weep; he took the book with a vicious snatch and an angry sob. “Won't never let me do anythin' I want to,” he cried, convulsively.
“Not another word,” said Deborah. Ephraim bent over his catechism with half-suppressed sobs. He dared not weep aloud. Deborah went into the pantry with the medicine-bottle which the doctor had left; she wanted a spoon. Caleb caught hold of her dress as she was passing him.
“What is it?” said she.
“Look here, jest a minute, mother.”
“I can't stop, father; Ephraim has got to have his medicine.”
“Jest look here a minute, mother.”
Deborah bent her head impatiently, and Caleb whispered. “No, he can't; I told him he couldn't,” she said aloud, and passed on into the pantry.
Caleb looked over at Ephraim with piteous and helpless sympathy. “Never you mind, sonny,” he said, cautiously.
“She—makes—” began Ephraim with a responsive plaint; but his mother came out of the pantry, and he stopped short. Caleb dropped a pared apple noisily into the pan.
“You'll dent that pan, father, if you fling the apples in that way,” said Deborah. She had a thick silver spoon, and she measured out a dose of the medicine for Ephraim. She approached him, extending the spoon carefully. “Open your mouth,” commanded she.
“Oh, mother, I don't want to take it!”
“Open your mouth!”
“Oh, mother—I don't—want to—ta-ke it!”
“Now, sonny, I wouldn't mind takin' of it. It's real good medicine that the doctor left you, an' father's payin' consid'able for it. The doctor thinks it's goin' to make you well,” said Caleb, who was looking on anxiously.
“Open your mouth andtakeit!” said Deborah, sternly. She presented the spoon at Ephraim as if it were a bayonet and there were death at the point.
“Oh, mother,” whimpered Ephraim.
“Mebbe mother will let you have a little taste of lasses arter it, if you take it real good,” ventured Caleb.
“No, he won't have any lasses after it,” said Deborah. “I'm a-tendin' to him, father. Now, Ephraim, you take this medicine this minute, or I shall give you somethin' worse than medicine. Open your mouth!” And Ephraim opened his mouth as if his mother's will were a veritable wedge between his teeth, swallowed the medicine with a miserable gulp, and made a grotesque face of wrath and disgust. Caleb, watching, swallowed and grimaced at the same instant that his son did. There were tears in his old eyes as he took up another apple to pare.
Deborah set the bottle on the shelf and laid the spoon beside it. “You've got to take this every hour for a spell,” said she, “an' I ain't goin' to have any such work, if you be sick; you can make up your mind to it.”
And make up his mind to this unwelcome dose Ephraim did. Once an hour his mother stood over him with the spoon, and the fierce odor of the medicine came to his nostrils; he screwed his eyes tight, opened his mouth, and swallowed without a word. There were limits to his mother's patience which Ephraim dared not pass. He had only vague ideas of what might happen if he did, but he preferred to be on the safe side. So he took the medicine, and did not lift his voice against it, although he had his thoughts.
It did seem as if the medicine benefited him. He breathed more easily after a while, and his color was more natural. Deborah felt encouraged; she even went down upon her stiff knees after her family were in bed, and thanked the Lord from the depths of her sorely chastened but proud heart. She did not foresee what was to come of it; for that very night Ephraim, induced thereto by the salutary effect of the medicine, which removed somewhat the restriction of his laboring heart upon his boyish spirits, perpetrated the crowning act of revolt and rebellion of his short life.
The moon was bright that night. The snow was frozen hard. The long hills where the boys coasted looked like slopes of silver. Ephraim had to go to bed at eight. He lay, well propped up on pillows, in his little bedroom, and he could hear the shouts of the coasting boys. Now that he could breathe more easily the superiority of his enforced deprivation of such joys no longer comforted him as much as it had done. His curtain was up, and the moonlight lay on his bed. The mystic influence of that strange white orb which moves the soul of the lover to dream of love and yearnings after it, which saddens with sweet wounds the soul who has lost it forever, which increases the terrible freedom of the maniac, and perhaps moves the tides, apparently increased the longing in the heart of one poor boy for all the innocent hilarity of his youth which he had missed.
Ephraim lay there in the moonlight, and longed as he had never longed before to go forth and run and play and halloo, to career down those wonderful shining slants of snow, to be free and equal with those other boys, whose hearts told off their healthy lives after the Creator's plan.
The clock in the kitchen struck nine, then ten. Caleb and Deborah went to bed, and Ephraim could hear his father's snores and his mother's heavy breathing from a distant room. Ephraim could not go to sleep. He lay there and longed for the frosty night air, the sled, and the swift flight down the white hill as never lover longed for his mistress.
At half-past ten o'clock Ephraim rose up. He dressed himself in the moonlight—all except his shoes; those he carried in his hand—and stole out in his stocking-feet to the entryway, where his warm coat and cap, which he so seldom wore, hung. Ephraim pulled the cap over his ears, put on the coat, cautiously unbolted the door, and stepped forth like a captive from prison.
He sat down on the doorstep and put on his shoes, tying them with trembling, fumbling fingers. He expected every minute to hear his mother's voice.
Then he ran down the yard to the wood shed. It was so intensely cold that the snow did not yield to his tread, but gave out quick sibilant sounds. It seemed to him like a whispering multitude called up by his footsteps, and as if his mother must hear.
He knew where Barney's old sled hung in the woodshed, and the woodshed door was unlocked.
Presently a boyish figure fled swiftly out of the Thayer yard with a bobbing sled in his wake. He expected every minute to hear the door or window open; but he cleared the yard and dashed up the road, and nobody arrested him.
[Illustration: “A boyish figure fled swiftly out of the Thayer yard”]
Ephraim knew well the way to the coasting-hill, which was considered the best in the village, although he had never coasted there himself, except twice or thrice, surreptitiously, on another boy's sled, and not once this winter. He heard no more shouts; the frosty air was very still. He thought to himself that the other boys had gone home, but he did not care.
However, when he reached the top of the hill there was another boy with his sled. He had been all ready to coast down, but had seen Ephraim coming, and waited.
“Hullo!” he called.
“Hullo!” returned Ephraim, panting.
Then the boy stared. “It ain't you, Ephraim Thayer!” he demanded.
“Why ain't it me?” returned Ephraim, with a manful air, swaggering back his shoulders at the other boy, who was Ezra Ray.
“Why, I didn't know your mother ever let you out,” said Ezra, in a bewildered fashion. In fact, the vision of Ephraim Thayer out with a sled, coasting, at eleven o'clock at night, was startling. Ezra remembered dazedly how he had heard his mother say that very afternoon that Ephraim was worse, that the doctor had been there last Saturday, and she didn't believe he would live long. He looked at Ephraim standing there in the moonlight almost as if he were a spirit.
“She ain't let me for some time; I've been sick,” admitted Ephraim, yet with defiance.
“I heard you was awful sick,” said Ezra.
“I was; but the doctor give me some medicine that cured me.”
Ephraim placed his sled in position and got on stiffly. The other boy still watched. “She know you're out to-night?” he inquired, abruptly.
Ephraim looked up at him. “S'pose you think you'll go an' tell her, if she don't,” said he.
“No, I won't, honest.”
“Hope to die if you do?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, I run out of the side door.”
“Both on 'em asleep?”
Ephraim nodded.
Ezra Ray whistled. “You'll get a whippin' when your mother finds it out.”
“No, I sha'n't. Mother can't whip me, because the doctor says it ain't good for me. You goin' down?”
“Can't go down but once. I've got to go home, or mother 'll give it to me.”
“Does she ever whip you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Mine don't,” said Ephraim, and he felt a superiority over Ezra Ray. He thought, too, that his sled was a better one. It was not painted, nor was it as new as Ezra's, but it had a reputation. Barney had won many coasting laurels with it in his boyhood, and his little brother, who had never used it himself, had always looked upon it with unbounded faith and admiration.
He gathered up his sled-rope, spurred himself into a start with his heels, and went swiftly down the long hill, gathering speed as he went. Poor Ephraim had an instinct for steering; he did not swerve from the track. The frosty wind smote his face, his breath nearly failed him, but half-way down he gave a triumphant whoop. When he reached the foot of the hill he had barely wind enough to get off his sled and drag it to one side, for Ezra Ray was coming down.
Ezra did not slide as far as Ephraim had done. Ephraim watched anxiously lest he should. “That sled of yours ain't no good,” he panted, when Ezra had stopped several yards from where he stood.
“Guess it ain't quite so fast as yours,” admitted Ezra. “That's your brother's, ain't it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that sled can't be beat in town. Mine's 'bout as good as any, 'cept that. I've always heard my brother say that your brother's sled was the best one he ever see.”
Ephraim stood looking at his brother's old battered but distinguished sled as if it had been a blood-horse. “Guess it can't be beat,” he chuckled.
“No sir, it can't,” said Ezra. He started off past Ephraim down the road, with his sled trailing at his heels.
“Hullo!” called Ephraim, “ain't you goin' up again?”
“Can't, got to go home.”
“Less try it jest once more, an' see if you can't go further.”
“No, I can't, nohow. Mother won't like it as 'tis.”
“Whip you?”
“'Spect so; don't mind it if she does.” Ezra brought a great show of courage to balance the other's immunity from danger. “Don't mind nothin' 'bout a little whippin',” he added, with a brave and contemptuous air. He whistled as he went on.
Ephraim stood watching him. He had enough brave blood in his veins to feel that this contempt of a whipping was a greater thing than not being whipped. He felt an envious admiration of Ezra Ray, but that did not prevent his calling after him:
“Ezra!”
“What say?”
“You ain't goin' to tell my mother?”
“Didn't I say I wasn't? I don't tell fibs. Hope to die if I do.”
Ezra's brave whistle, as cheerfully defiant of his mother's prospective wrath as the note of a bugler advancing to the charge, died away in the distance. For Ephraim now began the one unrestrained hilarity of his whole life. All by himself in the white moonlight and the keen night air he climbed the long hill, and slid down over and over. He ignored his feeble and laboring breath of life. He trod upon, he outspeeded all infirmities of the flesh in his wild triumph of the spirit. He shouted and hallooed as he shot down the hill. His mother could not have recognized his voice had she heard it, for it was the first time that the boy had ever given full cry to the natural voice of youth and his heart. A few stolen races, and sorties up apple-trees, a few stolen slides had poor Ephraim Thayer had; they had been snatched in odd minutes, at the imminent danger of discovery; but now he had the wide night before him; he had broken over all his trammels, and he was free.
Up and down the hill went Ephraim Thayer, having the one playtime of his life, speeding on his brother's famous sled against bondage and deprivation and death. It was after midnight when he went home; all the village lights were out; the white road stretched before him, as still and deserted as a road through solitude itself. Ephraim had never been out-of-doors so late before, he had never been so alone in his life, but he was not afraid. He was not afraid of anything in the lonely night, and he was not afraid of his mother at home. He thought to himself exultantly that Ezra Ray had been no more courageous than he, although, to be sure, he had not a whipping to fear like Ezra. His heart was full of joyful triumph that he was not wholly guilty, since it was the outcome of an innocent desire.
As he walked along he tipped up his face and stared with his stupid boyish eyes at the stars paling in the full moonlight, and the great moon herself overriding the clouds and the stars. It made him think of the catechism and the Commandments, and then a little pang of terror shot through him, but even that did not daunt him. He did not look up at the stars again, but bent his head and trudged on, with the sled-rope pulling at his weak chest.
When he reached his own yard he stepped as carefully as he could; still he was not afraid. He put the sled back in the shed; then he stole into the house. He took off his shoes in the entry, and got safely into his own room. He was in his night-gown and all ready for bed when another daring thought struck him.
Ephraim padded softly on his bare feet out through the kitchen to the pantry. Every third step or so he stopped and listened to the heavy double breathing from the bedroom beyond. So long as that continued he was safe. He listened, and then slid on a pace or two as noiseless as a shadow in the moonlight.
Ephraim knew well where the mince-pies were kept. There was a long row of them covered with towels on an upper shelf.
Ephraim hoisted himself painfully upon a meal-bucket, and clawed a pie over the edge of the shelf. He could scarcely reach, and there was quite a loud grating noise. He stood trembling on the bucket and listened, but the double breathing continued. Deborah had been unusually tired that night; she had gone to bed earlier, and slept more soundly.
Ephraim broke a great jagged half from the mince-pie; then replaced it with another grating slide. Again he listened, but his mother had not been awakened.
Ephraim crept back to his bedroom. There he sat on the edge of his bed and devoured his pie. The rich spicy compound and the fat plums melted on his tongue, and the savor thereof delighted his very soul. Then Ephraim got into bed and pulled the quilts over him. For the first and only occasion in his life he had had a good time.
The next morning Ephraim felt very ill, but he kept it from his mother. He took his medicine of his own accord several times, and turned his head from her, that she might not notice his laboring breath.
In the middle of the forenoon Deborah went out. She had to drive over to Bolton to get some sugar and tea. She would not buy anything now at Berry's store. Caleb had gone down to the lot to cut a little wood; he had harnessed the horse for her before he went. It was a cold day, and she wrapped herself up well in two shawls and a thick veil over her hood. When she was all ready she gave Ephraim his parting instructions, rearing over him with stern gestures, like a veiled justice.
“Now,” said she, “you listen to what I tell you. When your father comes in you tell him I want him to set right down and finish parin' them apples. They are spoilin', an' I'm goin' to make 'em into sauce. You tell him to set right down and go to work on 'em; he can get 'em done by the time I get home, an' I can make the sauce this afternoon. You set here an' take your medicine an' learn your catechism. You can study over the Commandments, too; you ain't got 'em any too well. Do you hear?”
“Yes, ma'am,” said Ephraim. He looked away from his mother as he spoke, and his panting breath clouded the clear space on the frosty window-pane. He sat beside the window in the rocking-chair.
“Mind you tell your father about them apples,” repeated his mother as she went out.
“Yes, ma'am,” said Ephraim. He watched his mother drive out of the yard, guiding the horse carefully through the frozen ridges of the drive. Presently he took another spoonful of his medicine. He felt a little easier, but still very ill. His father came a few minutes after his mother had gone. He heard him stamping in through the back door; then his frost-reddened old face looked in on Ephraim.
“Mother gone?” said he.
“She's jest gone,” replied Ephraim. His father came in. He looked at the boy with a childish and anxious sweetness. “Don't you feel quite as well as you did?” he inquired.
“Dunno as I do.”
“Took your medicine reg'lar?”
Ephraim nodded.
“I guess it's good medicine,” said Caleb; “it come real high; I guess the doctor thought consid'ble of it. I'd take it reg'lar if I was you. I thought you looked as if you didn't feel quite so well as common when I come in.”
Caleb took off his boots and tended the fire. Ephraim began to feel a little better; his heart did not beat quite so laboriously.
He did not say a word to his father about paring the apples. Caleb went into the pantry and came back eating a slice of mince-pie.
“I found there was a pie cut, and I thought mother wouldn't mind if I took a leetle piece,” he remarked, apologetically. He would never have dared take the pie without permission had his wife been at home. “She ain't goin' to be home till arter dinner-time, an' I began to feel kinder gone,” added Caleb. He stood by the fire, and munched the pie with a relish slightly lessened by remorse. “Don't you want nothin'” he asked of Ephraim. “Mebbe a little piece of pie wouldn't hurt you none.”
Caleb's ideas of hygienic food were primitive. He believed, as innocently as if he had lived in Eden before the Prohibition, that all food which he liked was good for him, and he applied his theory to all mankind. He had deferred to Deborah's imperious will, but he had never been able to understand why she would not allow Ephraim to eat mince-pie or anything else which his soul loved and craved.
“No, guess I don't,” Ephraim replied. He gazed moodily out of the window. “Father,” said he, suddenly.
“What say, sonny?”
“I eat some of that pie last night.”
“Mother give it to you?”
“No; I clim up on the meal-bucket, an' got it in the night.”
“You might have fell, an' then I dunno what mother'd ha' said to you,” said Caleb.
“An' I did somethin' else.”
“What else did you do?”
“I went out a-coastin' after you an' her was asleep.”
“You didn't, now?”
“Yes, I did.”
“An' we didn't neither on us wake up?”
“You was a-snorin' the whole time.”
“I don't s'pose you'd oughter have done it, Ephraim,” said Caleb, and he tried to make his tone severe.
“I never went a-coastin' in my whole life before,” said Ephraim; “it ain't fair.”
“I dunno what mother 'd say if she was to find out about it,” said Caleb, and he shook his head.
“Ezra Ray was the only one that was out there, an' he said he wouldn't tell.”
“Well, mebbe he won't, mebbe he won't. I guess you most hadn't oughter gone unbeknownst to your mother, sonny.”
“Barney's sled jest beat Ezra's all holler.”
“It did, hey? That allers was a good sled,” returned the old man, chuckling.
Caleb went into the pantry again, and returned rattling a handful of corn. “Want a game of holly-gull?” he asked. “I've got a leetle time to spare now while mother's gone.”
“Guess so,” replied Ephraim. He dragged his chair forward to the hearth; he and his father sat opposite each other and played the old childish game of holly-gull. Ephraim was very fond of the game, and would have played it happily hour after hour had not Deborah esteemed it a sinful waste of time. When Caleb held up his old fist, wherein he had securely stowed a certain number of kernels of corn, and demanded, “Holly-gull, hand full, passel how many?” Ephraim's spirit was thrilled with a fine stimulation, of which he had known little in his life. If he guessed the number of kernels right and confiscated the contents of his father's hand, he felt the gratified ambition of a successful financier; if he lost, his heart sank, only to bound higher with new hope for the next chance. A veritable gambling game was holly-gull, but they gambled for innocent Indian-corn instead of the coin of the realm, and nobody suspected it. The lack of value of the stakes made the game quite harmless and unquestioned in public opinion.
The waste of time was all Deborah's objection to the game. Caleb and Ephraim said not a word about it to each other, but both kept an anxious ear towards Deborah's returning sleigh-bells.
At last they both heard the loud, brazen jingle entering the yard, and Caleb gathered all the corn together and stowed it away in his pocket. Then he stood on the hearth, looking like a guilty child. Ephraim went slowly over to the window; he did not feel quite so well again.
Deborah's harsh “Whoa!” sounded before the door; presently she came in, her garments radiating cold air, her arms full of bundles.
“What you standin' there for, father?” she demanded of Caleb. “Why didn't you come out an' take some of these bundles? Why ain't you goin' out an' puttin' the horse up instead of standin' there starin'?”
“I'm goin' right off, mother,” Caleb answered, apologetically; and he turned his old back towards her and scuffled out in haste.
“Put on your cap!” Deborah called after him.
She laid off her many wraps, her hood and veil, and mufflers and shawls, folded them carefully, and carried them into her bedroom, to be laid in her bureau drawers. Deborah was very orderly and methodical.
“Did you take your medicine?” she asked Ephraim as she went out of the room.
“Yes, ma'am,” said he. He did not feel nearly as well; he kept his face turned from his mother. Ephraim was accustomed to complain freely, but now the coasting and the mince-pie had made him patient. He was quite sure that his bad feelings were due to that, and suppose his mother should suspect and ask him what he had been doing! He was also terrified by the thought of the holly-gull and her unfulfilled order about the apple-paring. He sat very still; his heart shook his whole body, which had grown thin lately. He looked very small, in spite of his sturdy build.
Deborah was gone quite a while; she had left some work unfinished in her bedroom that morning. Caleb returned before she did, and pulled up a chair close to the fire. He was holding his reddened fingers out towards the blaze to warm them when Deborah came in.
She looked at him, then around the room, inquiringly.
“Where did you put the apples?” said she to Caleb.
Caleb stared around at her. “What apples, mother?” he asked, feebly.
“The apples I left for you to pare. I want to put 'em on before I get dinner.”
“I ain't heard nothin' about apples, mother.”
“Ain't you pared any apples this forenoon?”
“I didn't know as you wanted any pared, mother.”
Deborah turned fiercely on Ephraim.
“Ephraim Thayer, look here!” said she. Ephraim turned his poor blue face slowly; his breath came shortly between his parted lips; he clapped one hand to his side. “Didn't you tell your father to pare them apples, the way I told you to?” she demanded.
Ephraim dropped his chin lower.
“Answer me!”
“No, ma'am.”
“What have you been a-doin' of?”
“Playin'.”
“Playin' what?”
“Holly-gull.”
Deborah stood quite still for a moment. Her mouth tightened; she grew quite pale. Ephraim and Caleb watched her. Deborah strode across the room, out into the shed.
“I guess she won't say much; don't you be scared, Ephraim,” whispered Caleb.
But Ephraim, curious to say, did not feel scared. Suddenly his mother seemed to have lost all her terrifying influence over him. He felt very strange, and as if he were sinking away from it all through deep abysses.
His mother came back, and she held a stout stick in her right hand. Caleb gasped when he saw it. “Mother, you ain't goin' to whip him?” he cried out.
“Father, you keep still!” commanded Deborah. “Ephraim, you come with me!”
She led the way into Ephraim's little bedroom, and he stumbled up and followed her. He saw the stick before him in his mother's hand; he knew she was going to whip him, but he did not feel in the least disturbed or afraid. Ezra Ray could not have faced a whipping any more courageously than Ephraim. But he staggered as he went, and his feet met the floor with strange shocks, since he had prepared his steps for those deep abysses.
He and his mother stood together in his little bedroom. She, when she faced him, saw how ill he looked, but she steeled herself against that. She had seen him look as badly before; she was not to be daunted by that from her high purpose. For it was a high purpose to Deborah Thayer. She did not realize the part which her own human will had in it.
She lifted up her voice and spoke solemnly. Caleb, listening, all trembling, at the kitchen door, heard her.
“Ephraim,” said his mother, “I have spared the rod with you all my life because you were sick. Your brother and your sister have both rebelled against the Lord and against me. You are all the child I've got left. You've got to mind me and do right. I ain't goin' to spare you any longer because you ain't well. It is better you should be sick than be well and wicked and disobedient. It is better that your body should suffer than your immortal soul. Stand still.”
Deborah raised her stick, and brought it down. She raised it again, but suddenly Ephraim made a strange noise and sunk away before it, down in a heap on the floor.
Caleb heard him fall, and came quickly.
“Oh, mother,” he sobbed, “is he dead? What ails him?”
“He's got a bad spell,” said Deborah. “Help me lay him on the bed.” Her face was ghastly. She spoke with hoarse pulls for breath, but she did not flinch. She and Caleb laid Ephraim on his bed; then she worked over him for a few minutes with mustard and hot-water—all the simple remedies in which she was skilled. She tried to pour a little of the doctor's medicine into his mouth, but he did not swallow, and she wiped it away.
“Go an' get Barney to run for the doctor, quick!” she told Caleb at last. Caleb fled, sobbing aloud like a child, out of the house. Deborah closed the boy's eyes, and straightened him a little in the bed. Then she stood over him there, and began to pray aloud. It was a strange prayer, full of remorse, of awful agony, of self-defense of her own act, and her own position as the vicar of God upon earth for her child. “I couldn't let him go astray too!” she shrieked out. “I couldn't, I couldn't! O Lord, thou knowest that I couldn't! I would—have lain him upon—the altar, as Abraham laid Isaac! Oh, Ephraim, my son, my son, my son!”
Deborah prayed on and on. The doctor and a throng of pale women came in; the yard was full of shocked and staring people. Deborah heeded nothing; she prayed on.
Some of the women got her into her own room. She stayed there, with a sort of rigid settling into the spot where she was placed and she pleaded with the Lord for upholding and justification until the daylight faded, and all night. The women, Mrs. Ray and the doctor's wife, who watched with poor Ephraim, heard her praying all night long. They sat in grave silence, and their eyes kept meeting with shocked significance as they listened to her. Now and then they wet the cloth on Ephraim's face. About two o'clock Mrs. Ray tiptoed into the pantry, and brought forth a mince-pie. “I found one that had been cut on the top shelf,” she whispered. She and the doctor's wife ate the remainder of poor Ephraim's pie.
The two women stayed next day and assisted in preparations for the funeral. Deborah seemed to have no thought for any of her household duties. She stayed in her bedroom most of the time, and her praying voice could be heard at intervals.
Some other women came in, and they went about with silent efficiency, performing their services to the dead and setting the house in order; but they said very little to Deborah. When she came out of her room they eyed her with a certain grim furtiveness, and they never said a word to her about Ephraim.
It was already known all over the village that she had been whipping Ephraim when he died. Poor old Caleb, when the neighbors had come flocking in, had kept repeating with childish sobs, “Mother hadn't ought to have whipped him! mother hadn't ought to have whipped him!”
“Did Mrs. Thayer whip that boy?” the doctor had questioned, sharply, before all the women, and Caleb had sobbed back, hoarsely, “She was jest a-whippin' of him; I told her she hadn't ought to.”
That had been enough. “She whipped him,” the women repeated to each other in shocked pantomime. They all knew how corporal punishment had been tabooed for Ephraim.
The Thayer house was crowded the afternoon of the funeral. The decent black-clad village people, with reddening eyes and mouths drooping with melancholy, came in throngs into the snowy yard. The men in their Sunday gear tiptoed creaking across the floors; the women, feeling for their pocket-handkerchiefs, padded softly and heavily after them, folded in their black shawls like mourning birds.
[Illustration: “The Thayer house was crowded the afternoon of the funeral”]
Caleb and Deborah and Barney sat in the north parlor, where Ephraim lay. Deborah's hoarse laments, which were not like the ordinary hysterical demonstrations of feminine grief, being rather a stern uprising and clamor of herself against her own heart, filled the house.
The minister had to pray and speak against it; scarcely any one beyond the mourners' room could hear his voice. It was a hard task that the poor young minister had. He was quite aware of the feeling against Deborah, and it required finesse to avoid jarring that, and yet display the proper amount of Christian sympathy for the afflicted. Then there were other difficulties. The minister had prayed in his closet for a small share of the wisdom of Solomon before setting forth.
The people in the other rooms leaned forward and strained their ears. The minister's wife sat beside her husband with bright spots of color in her cheeks, her little figure nervously contracted in her chair. They had had a discussion concerning the advisability of his mentioning the sister and daughter in his prayer, and she had pleaded with him strenuously that he should not.
When the minister prayed for the afflicted “sister and daughter, who was now languishing upon a bed of sickness,” his wife's mouth tightened, her feet and hands grew cold. It seemed to her that her own tongue pronounced every word that her husband spoke. And there was, moreover, a little nervous thrill through the audience. Oddly enough, everybody seemed to hear that portion of the minister's prayer quite distinctly. Even one old deaf man in the farthest corner of the kitchen looked meaningly at his neighbor.
The service was a long one. The village hearse and the line of black covered wagons waited in front of the Thayer house over an hour. There had been another fall of snow the night before, and now the north wind blew it over the country. Outside ghostly spirals of snow raised from the new drifts heaped along the road-sides like graves, disappeared over the fields, and moved on the borders of distant woods, while in-doors the minister held forth, and the choir sang funeral hymns with a sweet uneven drone of grief and consolation.
When at last the funeral was over and the people came out, they bent their heads before this wild storm which came from the earth instead of the sky.
The cemetery was a mile out of the village; when the procession came driving rapidly home it was nearly sunset, and the thoughts of the people turned from poor Ephraim to their suppers. It is only for a minute that death can blur life for the living. Still, when the evening smoke hung over the roofs the people talked untiringly of Ephraim and his mother.
As time went on the dark gossip in the village swelled louder. It was said quite openly that Deborah Thayer had killed her son Ephraim. The neighbors did not darken her doors. The minister and his wife called once. The minister offered prayer and spoke formal words of consolation as if he were reading from invisible notes. His wife sat by in stiff, scared silence. Deborah nodded in response; she said very little.
Indeed, Deborah had become very silent. She scarcely spoke to Caleb. For hours after he had gone to bed the poor bewildered old man could hear his wife wrestling in prayer with the terrible angel of the Lord whom she had evoked by the stern magic of grief and remorse. He could hear her harsh, solemn voice in self-justification and agonized appeal. After a while he learned to sleep with it still ringing in his ears, and his heavy breathing kept pace with Deborah's prayer.
Deborah had not the least doubt that she had killed her son Ephraim.
There was some talk of the church's dealing with her, some women declared that they would not go to meeting if she did; but no stringent measures were taken, and she went to church every Sunday all the rest of the winter and during the spring.
It was an afternoon in June when the doctor's wife and Mrs. Ray went into Deborah Thayer's yard. They paused hesitatingly before the door.
“I think you're the one that ought to tell her,” said Mrs. Ray.
“I think it's your place to, seeing as 'twas your Ezra that knew about it,” returned the doctor's wife. Her voice sounded like the hum of a bee, being full of husky vibrations; her double chin sank into her broad heaving bosom, folded over with white plaided muslin.
“Seems to me it belongs to you, as long as you're the doctor's wife,” said Mrs. Ray. She was very small and lean beside the soft bulk of the other woman, but there was a sort of mental uplifting about her which made her unconscious of it. Mrs. Ray had never considered herself a small woman; she seemed always to see the tops of other women's heads.
The doctor's wife looked at her dubiously, panting softly all over her great body. It was a warm afternoon. The low red and white rose-bushes sprayed all around the step-stone, and they were full of roses. The doctor's wife raised the brass knocker. “Well, I'd just as lieves,” said she, resignedly. “She'd ought to be told, anyway; the doctor said so.” The knocker fell with a clang of brass.
Deborah opened the door at once. “Good-afternoon,” said she.
“We thought we'd come over a few minutes, it's so pleasant this afternoon,” said the doctor's wife.
“Walk in,” said Deborah. She aided them in through the kitchen to the north parlor. She always entertained guests there on warm afternoons.
The north parlor was very cool and dark; the curtains were down, and undulated softly like sails. Deborah placed the big haircloth rocking-chair for the doctor's wife, and Mrs. Ray sat down on the sofa.