Читать книгу The Gayworthys - Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney - Страница 8

When people decline peremptorily the discussion of affairs, you may be sure they go away and think them over all the more. An idea like this suggested itself to Mrs. Reuben Gair. Her hint of Selport, and something for the boy to do, had not apparently taken direct effect; but it might have set her father to considering, perhaps a little prematurely, as regarded her own secret wishes in the matter. Mrs. Reuben Gair was not mistaken in her surmise.

She had set her father to considering. Or rather, considerations which had long been passively revolving, as it were, within his mind, at this word of hers took shape, came out, and would be looked at. They grew to definite questions, and demanded, suddenly, decisions.

"You couldn't have done more for them, if they'd been your own!" There might be something more that he ought to do, because they were not his own. Somehow, after Jane's words, this thought pressed upon him obstinately, and refused to evaporate itself into mere vague purpose for the future. He finished his cup of tea, and, turning away rather abruptly, walked out upon the doorstone where Rebecca and Say had had their little talk together before the "company" came.

The company—those of it who still remained—were gathered at the front of the house, within and without. Laughter and merry speech of young voices came around from the pleasant dooryard, where the moon shone down upon June roses, and upon human life also in its June.

The good doctor stood musingly and listened; looking up to the still-night heaven, unrolling the same slow-moving, gorgeous scroll as long ago, when it had been blossoming-time with him as well. And, standing there, he felt, rather than thought, how men change, and lives pass, and the great, unaltered skies look down on all. God laid His hand over him so, and sealed thought into action.

He scarcely knew why, but in those moments his "mind was made up."

"I won't leave things at loose ends another hour," said he at last, and turning back from the doorway, he walked straight through the long kitchen, passing on into his own little private room, which adjoined. Here he found his good friend, Parson Fairbrother, who, after having done his social duty among the company, had made his privileged way hither, to mouse, as he was apt to do, among the old books; and was at this moment quite lost in something he had lit upon among the pages of Burton's Anatomy.

"I want a little talk with you, Parson, if you please; and I've got a five-minutes bit of business to do. You shall take old Burton home if you like," said the doctor, closing the door by which he had entered—the parson had already shut that leading to the best parlor, to exclude disturbing sounds—and pushing two great leathern arm-chairs towards the table, in one of which he seated himself, while Mr. Fairbrother, turning down a leaf, carefully closed the volume, and came forward, in compliance, to the other.

When the parsonage party,—Mrs. Fairbrother, Malviny and Gordon King, with Miss Stacy Lawton, who had heedlessly let the Gibsons, her next-door neighbors, go home without her, fifteen minutes before, and who now availed herself of the Fairbrother escort, "only for as far as they went,"—was gathering to take leave, the good minister, after considerable outcry, was found thus cosily closeted with the doctor; and when summoned a second time by Malviny, sent word that they "might step along. He'd come presently." It was nothing unusual. Nobody gave the circumstance a second thought, unless, indeed, the watchful, elder daughter of the house.

Presently—I should think, though, a good half hour after—Mrs. Gair, wondering very much, and waiting to put out the last candles, while her sisters were busied setting other things to rights, heard her father go with the minister to the front gate, and say good-night; returning directly to his own little room again, whence, in a few moments, stole out the deferred fragrance of his evening pipe.

There seemed to be a good deal revolving in various brains that night in the Gayworthy farmhouse. It might have been late tea-drinking, or strawberry short-cake, or the mental stimulus of social contact; whatever it was, people did not go straight to bed and to sleep, according to their wont.

Mrs. Vorse, having with her own hands set every precious bit of china back into the closet sacred to its keeping, departed up the staircase to the kitchen chamber with an armful of linen, enjoining on Huldah, as she went, to see everything safe in the out-room for the night.

Huldah had milkpans to wash, and bread to set; but she sang to herself cheerily, as left apparently alone in all the lower part of the house, she moved, not a whit loath or wearily, from kitchen to dairy, from dairy to the large, lonely out-room, where waited her last work for the night. She sang as she gathered her pans, whose contents had been rifled of their cream for the feasting; as she wiped down sweet-smelling shelves, whose purity neither drop nor dust might defile; as she poured away the skimmed milk into the large, tidy tub that stood in the far corner to accumulate the dainty waste whose destination we know; sang on, with a sudden glee in her voice, as she carried the freshly-scalded tins out presently at the door, and set them gleaming there in the moonlight, catching, as she did so, glimpse of a tall, stalwart figure—not raw-boned and shambling, but sturdy, well-built, albeit Yankee to the vertebral main-shaft—that gathered itself up from leaning over the garden fence, and sauntered with great strides towards her. The song broke into a laugh as she turned back again, ignoring the presence, and said to herself, with a spasm of fun bubbling up among her words:—

"I knew it! I was certain he'd jest go and be redickl'ous again!"

Eben Hatch and Huldah Brown had grown up, boy and girl together, upon the Gayworthy farm.

When Huldah was eighteen, her mother,—who had been "brought up," as the country phrase is for expressing board-and-clothes-remunerated service, by the mother of Dr. Gayworthy, and who had married, had a child, been widowed, and returned to her old employ, as if she had been simply put out at interest,—Huldah, with the eight years' start in the world, standing for the percentage of Mrs. Brown's ten years' absence, and accompanying her mother, to be profitably "brought up" in her turn,—had died, leaving her daughter to the comfortable hereditary position which was practically little less privileged or more precarious than that of a daughter of the house.

Since that time, Eben had had frequent turns of being what Huldah called "redickl'ous"; but as yet, owing, as he thought, to persistent ill-luck,—as Huldah secretly believed, to "special interpositions,"—he had never, however often he had shamefacedly essayed it, got the step beyond, which might have touched the sublime; in his own words he had "somehow never quite made out to fetch it."

They were always nervous occasions these, to Huldah; she wouldn't care to have them go a hair's-breadth further than they did; she hailed devoutly the "interpositions," which Providence—usually, it must be owned, through the instrumentality of her own womanly artifice—threw in; she drew what would have been a long breath, if it hadn't at the same time been a secret chuckle, when Eben, looking a blank surprise, found himself suddenly at the end of his opportunity,—like the sheep fenced in with such a crooked art, that when he had fairly, as he thought, jumped the enclosure, he found himself back upon the same side,—and the danger was for that time over. Nevertheless, at due intervals, she was best pleased after all that the peril should recur. If Eben hadn't now and then been "redickl'ous" at home, there would have been no knowing that he wasn't redickl'ous—nay, even achieving the sublime—elsewhere.

So Huldah drew herself back out of the moonlight, with an instinct of shunning any over-sentimental accessories, and disappeared down the trap stairway to the cellar, for the jug of yeast, as Eben stepped over the threshold.

"You there?" she exclaimed, when she emerged again from below, and found him just where she knew he would be, waiting in the night-shine at the open door.

"Yes. I'm here, Huldy. Jest come an' look at the moon! of all the June nights I ever see, this is the crowner!"

Huldah understood him and his moon-rapture. The heavenly satellite had precious little, in reality, to do with it; the same old story veiled itself so, in his homely New England dialect, that Lorenzo breathed to Jessica out there in Venice, in the verse she never heard of. If there had never been a moon, there would have been lovers, doubtless, all the same, and they might easily have found something else to talk about. What they pretend to look at, or to speak of, is no matter; as well squashes as sunbeams; the subject is but as the indifferent third substance, in chemistry,—thrown in only that the others may unite; the thing is, to bring the two souls together.

Huldah, however, eschewed the whole, as moonshine, all of it; and taking herself away out of its perilous gleams walked straight over to her bread-pan; remarking, only, very unsympathically, as she did so, that "she'd seen the moon afore; she guessed there wasn't anything special about it; at any rate she hadn't time to look."

If Huldah once got her hands fairly into the dough,—there was where Eben's bread would be, sure enough; so while she measured the yeast, and scooped the orthodox hollow for it in the flour, and began to stir it in, gently, with her wooden spoon, he ventured with a fresh persistence.

"The folks out there in the front yard, was tellin', to-night, about the moon lookin' different to different people; come here, Huldy, jest a minute! I want to know how big you think it is!"

"You great gander!" exploded Huldah, at this very barefaced and absurd artifice. But she glanced out of the open window, nevertheless, up at the moon's jolly disc, that laughed broadly down upon them both, through door and casement; and laughed, heaven knows, at the same moment, on how many others like them, of varied place and degree.

"They made it out," pursued Eben, not a whit abashed, "all the way from a cart-wheel to a tea-plate: for my part, it looks as much as anything like the biggest meller punkin 't ever I see!"

"I can find something that's enough like that, without going to the moon to look for 't!"

As pumpkins are not ordinarily abundant during the strawberry season, there was no resisting the conclusion that Huldah meant to be metaphorical, with a dash of personality.

"Now, Huldy! I'll give in that you're a plaguy smart girl, 'athout your goin' on to hector me, that way, all night.—See here—do you b'lieve all them stars has got people in 'em, like us?"

"I should hope not, exactly. I guess the Lord's got his hands full if they have!"

Huldah would neither be drawn into sentiment nor speculation; she was bent, to-night, upon the purely practical; this was plain from the way in which she plumped her capable hands into the pan, and began the sort of calisthenics that had developed to their comely proportions the not ungraceful limbs whose drapery, tucked up to the shoulders, displayed smooth-curving outlines that many a city belle, with a two-pronged elbow, might have looked upon in a sickening of envy. Eben must choose a shorter road to his object, than all the way around among the constellations.

"Huldy!" began again the long-suffering wooer, approaching shyly the table at which, not devoid of a coquettish consciousness, Huldah tossed, and doubled, and patted and punched the wheaten mass that gave—and nothing, if you knew, gives better—opportunity for such varied charm of attitude,—"you air a master hand at makin' bread, that's a fact! and as to strawberry short-cake! I'll be—buttered—if ever I ate such a one as that was to-night!"

"Seems to me everything suits with you, just now,—from moonshine down."

(Ah, Huldah! that was a very badly played card. Eben had his trump all ready for that. He would have been obtuser, otherwise, than ever yet Yankee lover was.)

"Yes, Huldah,—" and he came as close as the now very vigorously busy elbows would let him, and his voice lowered a tone, and deepened with true feeling that struggled into homely expression,—"I'm pretty well suited! I only wish—everybody else was!—Don't you think—"

I hold that he was doing it very cleverly, now. He would have grown eloquent presently; truth and passion, let them once get utterance, can be nothing else. But there came an interposition, as usual. Huldah was saved the necessity of thinking. There came a tread across the kitchen within, and the tall figure of Dr. Gayworthy, in gown and slippers, appeared upon the upper step at the doorway. He held in his hand a candle that had been blown out.

"Things air overruled, certin," Huldah breathed to herself, as Eben precipitately made his way to the outer door again; thrown back now upon the apparent comparative measurement of spheres, cereal and celestial.

"Durn it all!" muttered the unfortunate suitor, nonsuited. "I never come so nigh fetchin' it, afore! Now I've got it all to dew over ag'in! Lord knows when,—I don't."

Dr. Gayworthy reached his candle to the lamp upon Huldah's table, and borrowed a flame therefrom; saying, as did so—

"When you have finished, Huldah, will you and Eben come to my little room a moment? I should like you to write your names as witnesses, upon a business paper I have had to sign."

"Oh, certin," answered Huldah, giving her ball of dough a final roll and flop over, and smiting her palms up and down against each other, to shake off the flour. "Jest as soon as I've washed my hands."

Very much flustered, inwardly, was Huldah at this summons; first, with curiosity as to the document to be signed; secondly, with the thrill of importance people who never had, nor expect to have, any personal concern with papers of consequence, are apt to feel at being called upon to make valid with their names the instruments that dispose of the affairs of others; thirdly, at the thought of the two names required in juxtaposition; "it seemed so redick'lous; jest as if they was bindin' themselves to something, together."

She had time to think all this, as she washed her hands and let down her sleeves, and Dr. Gayworthy, setting down the lighted candle, followed Eben out into the moonlight, to make sure of him, and to say something about the next day's mowing.

There had been time, also, for certain other things to be thought and done, elsewhere.

The excitement she had had, and the strawberry short-cake she had eaten, had made little Sarah Gair restless to-night. So she had tossings and dreams and starts, and wakings; and at ten o'clock she roused, agitatedly, from a fearful vision,—of a horse's head without any body, that came in at the windows and chased her about the house, till her feet struggled vainly to move, and she stood paralyzed, with his hot breath pouring close upon her, and enveloping her,—to find her mother standing by the open sash, where nothing worse came in than the sweet night gleam, and the warm southwest sighs of June.

Mrs. Gair was thinking. No,—not thinking, purely; for thinking is a good thing. Worrying, scheming, wishing, anticipating,—which half that we call thinking really is,—may be very different things; very far from good in themselves or likely to work good when they ripen into action. This is the sort of "taking thought," that we are warned against. Mrs. Gair would better have gone to bed, and said her prayer for forgiveness, and deliverance, and daily bread, and left the details she was anxious about to the Knowledge and the Power that were beyond her own, than have stood there in the beauty of that summer night, striving selfishly to conjecture and to plan.

What was there, you may wonder, for her to conjecture and to plan about? Here was no lordly inheritance, whose bestowal was a question for the forethought and competition of long years; that might rationally, according to the common acceptance of human nature, suggest motive for rivalry, and strategy and craft. Here was only a plain New England homestead, and the property resulting from the thrift and industry that had held sway through a couple of generations, in which father and son, worthy and intelligent farmer-physicians, had done simple credit and worked steady benefit to name and estate. This was all. Therefore you need not expect, O devourer of high-flown and deep-laid romance, to find in these pages profound mysteries, diabolical contrivance, unheard-of wrongs, and a general crash of retribution and ecstasy at the end. Yet in ever so simple a New England family, there may be privacies and secrets; there may be conflicting interests; the Tempter may find a cranny wherethrough to whisper, beguiling souls by mean motives to questionable acts. "There is a great deal of human nature in the world;" and it isn't all over the water, where there are lords and ladies, and manorial estates; for upwards of two centuries it has been growing in these New England hills, and bringing forth fruit after its kind. Besides, even among the granite, gold does gather; and the well-harvested results of two careful lives may present an aggregate at last, not at all to be despised, even in its distribution according to a law which recognizes no closer sonship in the first child than in the ninth.

Also I have never noticed that, as the children of a household go out and meet their own varied fortunes in the world, there is apt to be any greater indifference to original claims, when money comes to be in question, with them upon whom success has so broadly smiled that their share of patrimony might seem almost as coals to Newcastle, than with the rest. On the contrary, these Newcastles are curiously ready to take in all the coal they can get, if ever a little ship comes along and brings any.

So Mrs. Gair, with her husband owning four or five vessels upon the high seas, in thriving communication with West Indian and South American ports,—holding himself as a merchant of consequence on Change,—troubled her mind here at the old homestead, in Hilbury, during her little summer stay, as to what might befall, regarding it, some ten, twenty, who knows but even thirty or more, years hence.

And neither she nor little Say could sleep well this June night.

Say, after she had cried out and called her mother to the bedside, and gasped out the horror of her dream, and been soothed and hushed, and laughed at, and had the sheets and pillows smoothed,—got over her fright, and grew wide awake, and wanted a story.

"Tell me, mother," she said, "about the earthquake when you were a little girl."

Every child who has a mother, has also certain stereotyped "stories," for which, at all sorts of incongruous and inconvenient conjunctures, it teases her. This, of the earthquake, was chief favorite among Sarah Gair's.

So Mrs. Gair, with her mind running upon other things, told, mechanically, how, when she was quite a little girl, she and Aunt Prue were left by themselves one winter night, in the house; their father and mother having gone over to Deepwater to stay with a sick aunt; and how, after they had popped corn, and roasted apples, and eaten simballs, and told stories till ten o'clock, they had all gone to bed, and to sleep. How, long after, they were wakened by a strange trembling, and a noise as if a great wind shook the house, though it was a calm, still, clear night,—or as if somebody walked about heavily, down-stairs. How they—the sisters—called out from their room to Serena, Huldah's mother, who lived here then.

"And the china rattled, mother! You left out that."

Whatever variety children demand otherwise, they will have none in the telling of a story. Leave out a phrase or a circumstance at your peril.

"Yes, the china rattled,—and they thought robbers were in the house. And Serena, half awake, laughed at them, and told them to turn over and go to sleep again. And then, in a minute, it came again—"

Something at this instant actually rolled, or rumbled, faintly, in the house below.

"Mother!" cried Say, bolt upright in bed, "there's one now, Hark!"

And something surely rumbled back again.

"Nonsense, child! Lie down again. It's only Huldah, I suppose, rolling back the great table."

But, for all that, Mrs. Gair didn't quite think so; and after waiting a little while and listening, she said, suddenly, "I'll go down and get you a drink of water, Say, and then you must go to sleep."

"But you haven't finished the story, mother!"

"Never mind. Let it be till to-morrow morning. I'll finish 't then. I wouldn't think any more about earthquakes, to-night."

It was a simple thing, on the outside, Mrs. Gair's going down to fetch a glass of water for her wakeful child. If she had had nothing else in her mind, she might have gone and come back, and been led into no harm. As it was, it involved consequences that afterward she would gladly have gone back from. It is the double motive that makes the smallest doing perilous; that takes us out of the track of Providence, concerning us, and puts us where we have no business to be. Single-heartedness, alone, goes safely even among trivial things. If it had really been but care for the child which prompted her, Mrs. Gair would doubtless have finished her story, and gone quietly to bed. But she knew that people were still up and moving below; she had not heard her father go to his chamber; she was eager, restless, vaguely uneasy; so she would go down and get a drink of water for Say, and look about herself a little, as she went.

The staircase upon which she stepped from her chamber door, and descended softly, came down to close within the front entrance of the house. On either side at the foot, opened doors; that on the right into the family sitting-room; on the left into the best parlor, between which and the kitchen was the Doctor's "little room,"—office, library, or study,—so phrased.

Mrs. Gair set her light upon the lower stair and passed noiselessly into the parlor. Here the shutters had been closed, and it was dark. The door communicating thence with the little room was ajar; the aperture showing by a faint gleam,—but only of the moon.

There was no other light there; and all was still.

But voices were distinguishable away out in the house beyond. Mrs. Gair glided back and took up her candle. She would just see how things looked. Without any definite idea, she wondered what her father could have been about, or occupied with in thought, to be kept so beyond his usual regular hour.

Very little, it seemed.

On the writing-table which stood in the center of the floor, lay a half sheet of paper, folded back across the middle,—the doubled edge uppermost. Below the fold, a couple of lines, in the large, nervous, handwriting of her father, were visible to Mrs. Gair. Possibly only a prescription or a bill. She would see. Jane Gair! Are you in the line of Providential orderings, now? Has God or the devil brought you hither to search out this? In five minutes you will hold that in your knowledge which, hereafter, you would almost give five years of your life, if it might only, so, be stricken from your memory. So you should have had no sin. Henceforth, your sin remaineth.

"Signed, this night, June 27, 18——

"Benjamin Gayworthy.

"In presence of

Felix Fairbrother."

Jane Gair turned the paper. There were, perhaps, fifteen lines upon the upper half of the page. Her eye glanced over them quickly, and a sudden flame flashed into her cheeks. Not shame. She had not begun to think of that, though it should surely come. For she laid the folded paper back, deliberately, as she had found it, walked out into the parlor again, blew out her candle, stood still, and listened.

Doctor Gayworthy's step was already heard, recrossing the kitchen. He re-entered his room and approached the table. Huldah's true-poised footfall followed, and then the clumsy tread of Eben, behind, making miserable work of trying to walk lightly, as befitted carpets.

Huldah moved straight on, close after the Doctor, and only paused when he did; standing just behind him, leaning a little forward, one arm akimbo, the other hanging by her side, the fingers of its hand rolling, a little nervously, a fold of her gown. Flurried, but alert; all her keen, feminine senses, ready to comprehend quickly, and do creditably. Eben, less eager, more bashful, fell back. He took up his station, waiting, just beside the door-post, on the other side of which, in the dark parlor, stood that other figure, keen and alert also, listening at every pore.

It was only for an instant, but in that instant, Eben Hatch had the vague, strange consciousness that we have all known of an unseen human presence. The room behind him, beside whose open door he stood, did not feel empty. He made an involuntary step into the entrance. Jane Gair shrunk a little, as involuntarily; there was a slight, crisp sound,—it might have been the maple leaves in the night wind,—Eben had not time to conjecture, or to recognize the unfamiliar silken whisper.

The Doctor took up a pen, and glanced round. "This, you see,—both of you,"—Eben came forward,—"to be my signature;" and he rapidly traced over his own bold characters at the right of the sheet. "Now, Huldah, your name here."

Huldah received the pen with a look of shy importance, thinly disguised by an air of matter-of-course acquiescence, and carefully straightening the paper before her, sat down, and occupied perhaps a minute in executing, in her handsomest style of hair lines and bulgy dots, acquired with infinite pains, the letters of her name, which had an appearance, when finished, as if constructed of some minute specimen of the seaweed which grows in an alternation of thin strings and leather bubbles.

Then Eben essayed; and with many slow vibrations of his head from side to side, accompanied with reverse, or balancing motions of his rigidly protruded tongue,—grasping the pen close down toward the nib, and inking himself profusely, accomplished, duly, "Ebenezer Hatch," the "ezer" a little detached and raised above the plane of the "Eben," as long unaccustomed to the conjunction, and the "Hatch" rushing headlong down hill, as if ashamed of, and eager to get away from both.

Doctor Gayworthy's "business paper" was signed. It had become a valid instrument. He dismissed his witnesses with thanks, and the remark that there would be no need for them to mention what they had done. No need, truly. They knew very little about it. The witness who did know all, but who had signed no name, stood passively, in the shade of the room beyond, and looked in, still, toward the light, to see what next.

She saw Doctor Gayworthy turn from the table, folding the paper as he did so, and stand with it in his hands, for two or three minutes, as if in deliberation, before the fireplace. Following his movement with her eyes, she noticed against the quaint, carved panel above the mantel, which formed, as she knew, the sliding door to a chimney cupboard but little used, and for many years but rarely opened, her father's keys; of which one, holding the others pendant, occupied the keyhole. Upon the shelf below, lay a large old, embroidered letter-case, the dim colors of whose cover she well remembered in the childish days when her most valued and eagerly sought privilege had been to see the panel cupboard opened, and be shown the queer old relics of the past which had been laid away there. For years, as I said, this cupboard had been rarely opened. For years, Jane Gair had scarcely thought of its existence. For all her life to come, she would scarcely forget it, now.

Doctor Gayworthy stood, and seemingly considered. Presently, he took up the letter-case, from which the faded string of ribbon hung unbound, and drew from it a packet of several sheets folded together, which he held and turned, hesitatingly, in his hand.

"'Such share and privilege as would so fall,'"—he said, slowly, to himself, in a half audible way. "By will, or law. Yes, that certainly secures it all. And if things should happen backward, and I should change my mind, its only this slip of paper, and the other would still remain. It's all safe, for the present."

The Doctor spoke these concluding words, more nearly aloud, and briskly, as one settling a perplexity; and changing his attitude from the limpness of a momentary indecision to the muscular up-gathering of satisfied and assured purpose, replaced the packet, slipping in behind it, the thinly-folded and just-written sheet, tied up the case, and putting his thumb against a carved projection of the panel-door, rolled it back, and laid all carefully away upon a shelf within.

Jane Gair took advantage of the sliding of the somewhat ponderous and unwilling door, to effect her escape unheard.

"All safe for the present," repeated the doctor, softly, as he turned the lock, and put the keys in his pocket.

For the present. Yes. But that paper, just written, is to lie there, unseen, for seventeen years.

And, meanwhile, many things will have happened.

Huldah had gone, upon being dismissed, straight out, as she had come straight in; crossed the great kitchen, and passed down into the out-room, to put away the few utensils she had had about in her bread-making.

Eben stopped in the great room. There was a door between the fireplace and that leading into the Doctor's study, which opened upon the passage—narrow here, behind the stairs—running the length of these two left-hand rooms, to the front door of the house. In through the fan-light, and side sashes, poured the full moonlight. Eben set the door softly ajar, by a space the width of his eye only, and applied thereto that useful organ. "If there's peekin' and harkin' goin' on, I might as well be in for a share of it," he said to himself.

There was a moment or two of utter silence, in which Eben began almost to think that there could be nobody "harkin'," after all, except himself; but then came the heavy rolling of the cupboard door, and a figure passed across the light, and glided up the stairs. Eben heard also, quite distinctly, even above the other sound, the heavy rustle that was not among the maples.

"The Doctor's a little deef, no doubt, Miss Gair," he said, to himself, again, with an emphatic nodding up and down of his head, as he carefully reclosed the door, and dropped the latch noiselessly, "but I kinder guess I ain't, and I've heerd considerable to-night, one way an' another."

When Huldah came back, he said not a word of this; but human-wise must have one upon the transaction of the night, so far as they had both participated in it. I say, human-wise; for, assert as you will, curiosity is neither male nor female, but belongs to the race. In a case like this, where the two are concerned, let the woman but hold her peace for awhile, and see, then, if the man don't speak!

"I wonder if that air could 'a ben anything about the property, now! 'Twarn't a will, think,—was it, Huldy?"

"Bless your benighted ignorance, Eben, no! Why, there warn't half room for a will. 'Twarn't but a half sheet of paper writ on one side; and we put our names right in the middle o' that. I've seen wills afore now, Eben. Twice. And I can tell you it takes an awful sight o' words to make one. It's jest like the House that Jack built. Whenever they say anything new, they have to begin and say the rest all over ag'in; so't you'd think you'd never get to the end on't. Besides, the Doctor's made his will, long ago. He altered it over jest after Ben died. My mother was knowin' to it. No,—'twarn't a will, nor nothing of the sort. You may make your mind easy about that. Most like 'twas only some little church business, 'twixt him and the Parson."

"Well," said Eben, slowly, leaning his elbow against the kitchen mantel, and availing himself of leverage so obtained to scratch his head effectively,—"I—don't—know! maybe its a——what's name! A——thunder! I know well enough what the word is, only I can't fetch it! Something that's second thoughts to a will. They string on a dozen of 'em, sometimes. You see, when they get the kite all framed and prepared, they begin, then, on the tail; and they can put on jest as many bobs as they like!"

"Blessed be nothing!" ejaculated Huldah, lighting a second candle for Eben, and turning away with her own. "I guess there won't have to be many bobs to my kite-tail; nor your'n, neither, Ebenezer Hatch!"

"Mother!" cried Say, sitting up in bed again, when her mother returned to her at last. "I know there's been an earthquake since you've been down-stairs! I heard it!"

Perhaps there had, in a way. But Mrs. Gair only said "nonsense!" again, and bade the child go to sleep; and cautioned her not to talk about hearing earthquakes to anybody else, for they'd be sure to make fun of her,—especially Gershom.

"But where's my drink of water, mother?"

"I couldn't get it. The light went out. You must go to sleep."