She came close to him, facing him calmly, her countenance composed and still. ‘I tell you not to interfere,’ she said softly.
‘I am interfering,’ he insisted, angry in his turn, his voice stern now. ‘I will interfere. Jenny, you simply must not do this sort of thing again.’
‘Must not?’ Her eyes were flaming.
‘Must not,’ he repeated inflexibly. There was in him in that moment a firm strength which as their eyes met beat her eyes down and mastered her. She turned away, looked back at him, half-smiling.
‘I wonder what you’d do . . .’ she murmured, more to herself than to him. ‘Would you—beat me, John?’ Then she turned to face him again, and now she was really smiling, in a malicious mirth which touched him with cold fear. ‘You do love me, don’t you, my dear,’ she reflected thoughtfully.
‘Yes.’
‘You righteous, good man—trying to tell me what I must and must not do!’ There was a bite like acid in her tones. She came nearer, walking in a strangely feline way, slowly and gracefully, watching him as she drew near. She came close, stood looking sweetly up at him.
‘John, darling,’ she said, almost whispering. ‘You’ve never really known the strange woman you married. Do you remember all the things Ephraim told you? About me? Before you ever saw me?’ He could not speak, and she insisted: ‘He told you that I tried to seduce him and that I tried to persuade him to kill Isaiah and that I took Ruth’s place in her bed and he did not know me till morning. Do you remember, John?’
He wetted his dry lips, unable to speak, paralyzed with fear of the irrevocable word that was to come.
‘Do you remember?’ she insisted.
He made a hoarse sound, no more than her name. ‘Jenny!’
She said implacably: ‘You said a moment ago that you don’t understand me. Well, I must help you, John—help you to understand. You sec, darling—everything Ephraim told you about me was true.’
VI
Elder Pittridge
1
LINCOLN PITTRIDGE was
born in 1800, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, three or four months after the death of his father. He was an only child. His mother within a year or two married a man named Ball, who, when Lincoln was five or six years old, moved to Old Town and set up a double sawmill at the lower village. He died in 1809, without having fathered any children; and Line’s mother took her son—then nine years old—back to Haverhill. There she Vent out by the day’ to help other women with their housework; and Line earned small sums by doing what chores were within his power.
They lived in two rooms; but Line, though he knew they were desperately poor, found only happiness in this close companionship. His mother lavished on him a bountiful tenderness, and his earliest memories were of lying in her arms, his every sense revelling in her nearness. As he now grew older, she jealously monopolized not only his life but his affections too; so that there was never while she lived any other girl or woman in his life. She absorbed him completely. He lived for her, and as a child and a young man her love was the deepest happiness he knew.
She was a devout church woman—increasingly so as she grew older—and she early decided that her son should become a minister. Line found himself enrolled at the Theological Seminary in Andover; but after a period there, without explanation she announced that they were going back to Maine. In Bangor she rented a small house on Harlow Street. He entered the Theological Seminary while she set up a baking business, making cakes and pies and even bread which she sold to housewives willing either to help a worthy woman with their patronage, or to relieve the burden on their own kitchens.
When a few weeks later she died, the foundations of Line’s life were destroyed. He was left at once emptied and solitary, having no normally easy and friendly relationship with anyone in the world. But worse was to come. Immediately after her death he was called before the trustees of the Seminary and cross-examined about a certificate which his mother had presented on his behalf, and which declared that he was a suitable person to receive charitable assistance in preparation for the ministry. This certificate was signed by a deacon of the church in Haverhill, and also it was signed by Line himself.
Line saw his own signature with a shock of surprise. He had known nothing of this certificate, and he realized at once that his mother must have forged his name. But since she had done it to win for him the education he could not otherwise have achieved, he forgave her; and to protect her name, he said that he had prepared the document. He was then asked what his means were, and he answered that he and his mother had very little, that they had lived with the utmost frugality, and that his mother had been forced to work at her baking to piece out their small income.
The trustees thereupon denounced him as a forger and as a liar. Mrs. Pittridge’s frugal way of life had excited in Bangor some surprise, for there were those who knew that when her husband died she had sold his mill for a substantial sum. A few inquiries even before her death had developed the fact that she had money in the bank, that her poverty was pretense; and this led to an investigation. Letters were dispatched to Haverhill. The deacon there whose name was signed to the certificate which procured Line’s admission to the Bangor Seminary denied his signature; and he added indignantly that a similar imposition had been practised by Mrs. Pittridge on the trustees at Andover and that when it was discovered, she had withdrawn her son and moved away.
Mrs. Pittridge died before she could be called to account, but the trustees confronted Line with these facts, and loyalty to his mother led him, by acknowledging his signature, to convict himself of participation in her greedy fraud. He was denounced as destitute of moral principle and told that he had shown such a disregard for truth as was painful to witness; and his dismissal from the Seminary was immediate.
So at one blow the young man—he was then just twenty years old—not only lost his beloved mother, but learned beyond question that she had been a liar and a cheat. He found himself endowed by her death with a modest fortune; but except in worldly ways he was bankrupt, disgraced and without friends. For a few weeks he moved like a ghost through the empty house on Harlow Street, seldom appearing in the haunts of men; but thereafter, in unbearable loneliness, he turned to the taverns and the dives for companionship. Within the year, his debauched life was a matter of awed wonder even to his boon companions, and his debasement seemed complete.
When he left Bangor, no one missed him. He drifted eventually to Albany, where he married a young woman who was attracted by his unhappiness and sure that her love would reform him; but he went from bad to worse, and she presently left him and returned to her father’s house. Line proceeded to Hartford, where—his money by this time all wasted—he began to teach school; but a few months later he seduced one of his pupils and—since his previous marriage prevented his making the conventional amends—he was driven out of Hartford by the indignant townsfolk.
He was in Boston when his alcoholic excesses led to a protracted illness so that he lay for weeks at the point of death, tended by the wife of the tavern keeper where he had been taken ill. Her sympathies had been enlisted by the tragic unhappiness which she sensed in him; and she persuaded her husband to give Line shelter while she nursed him back to life. When he recovered, he vowed never to touch liquor again in any form; and at the same time, as sometimes happens, he made other resolutions. He went back to Albany to seek a reconciliation with his wife, but since their separation she had died. He returned to Hartford to offer marriage to his victim there, only to find her happily wed to a decent farmer outside of town. Since in these directions no atonement could be made, he turned to Bangor, passionately vowing to redeem there not only his own past but his mother’s memory.
For a while after this return, still weak from his long illness, he thought that his dead mother sometimes communicated with him; and he attracted some attention from morbid minds by pseudopsychic manifestations, going into self-induced trances, muttering mumbo-jumbo, seeing and hearing sights and so
unds not visible to normal eyes. When gradually his health improved, this half-madness passed, but there was no slackening in his moral force. He found work as a laborer, lived frugally, saved every penny; and as soon as he was able, he began to repay to the Seminary the sums of which his mother had defrauded that institution. This so pleased the trustees that he was invited to resume his studies there. He did so, perfecting himself in the various categories of Systematic Theology, Ecclesiastical History, Sacred Rhetoric and Literature, and Pastoral Duties, till he was found ready for ordination as a minister; but without cant he humbly avowed that he felt himself unworthy to lead other men in spiritual ways. The fact that he had justified his mother’s faith and fulfilled the letter of her hopes contented him and brought him peace. He was quickly accepted as one of the most respected members of the congregation to which as a lay member he attached himself; and his ecclesiastical education earned for him the appellation of ‘Elder’ which he thereafter wore.
II
When his studies were done, to find some avenue of self-support, Elder Pittridge opened a school—not for children, but for ladies and gentlemen—designed to teach composition and grammar. His success was considerable; but it was not always convenient for his pupils—most of whom were men—to come to classes at regular hours, so the school gradually became a system of tutoring. There were many men in Bangor who, as the riotous speculation of the thirties got under way, suddenly found themselves possessed of means, and—arriving at a consciousness of their intellectual deficiencies—sought him out to learn how to speak and to write with a certain elegance.
Among his private pupils was, for a short time, Rufus Dwinel himself; and when in 1832 Mr. Dwinel, Ira Wadleigh and Asa Babcock organized the project to build the Bangor, Old Town and Milford Railway, Dwinel promised Elder Pittridge a part in the work of bringing that dream to life. Three years later, when stock began to be sold to build the road from Bangor to Old Town, Elder Pittridge, out of commissions which he received for selling stock, was able to buy one of the thousand shares; and when the construction work began, he followed it with a lively interest, not only in the road itself but in the moral welfare of the men employed.
His interest in railroad construction, which was aroused during these years, continued. After the original Bangor-Old Town road was completed, he explored the possibility of building another along the riverfront; but though he enlisted capital and the work was begun, the objections of property-owners along the projected route put an end to it. He surveyed a right of way from Bucksport to Milford, some twenty-eight miles, and estimated the probable cost of construction, including cars and storehouses, at eight thousand dollars a mile. He was one of the first to urge that a railroad should be built from Bangor to Portland, and to advocate state aid for the work.
In his enthusiasm for the Old Town road he had come into friendly contact with Sam Smith, and Sam first advised him to buy and then to sell timber lands, so that Elder Pittridge found himself after the panic of 1837 swept the city reasonably well-to-do. This fact won for him the respect of men of business, just as his diligent and honorable life, and his loyal advocacy of every good cause, had earned for him a universal esteem.
III
Elder Pittridge first met Jenny in the winter before Isaiah’s death. In view of his own former dissipations, it was not surprising that he had become an ardent advocate of the temperance cause; and at public meetings where the subject was discussed he proved himself a persuasive speaker. He was a tall, gaunt man with dark hair and sallow skin, thin to the verge of emaciation, and he seemed to burn with an inner fire of conviction which he was able to pass on to his hearers. Jenny on her part was equally zealous; and their common interest in the fight against the rum traffic led to a certain bond between them. She found in him much to admire, and although his interest in her was scrupulously impersonal, she seemed to him remarkable for the clarity of her thinking and for the spiritual strength which was evidenced by the purity and beauty of her habitual expression.
When the news of Isaiah’s death reached Bangor, he called upon her to offer sympathy and prayers; and when afterward Ephraim, crushed and shattered by his sense of guilt and shame, turned to the dives of the town, she asked Elder Pittridge to try to save the wretched young man. That she should turn to him was natural enough, since the Elder’s own early dissipations were as well known as his present fine way of life. He was eager to serve her in any way. So long as Isaiah lived, his thoughts of her had been admiring and respectful; but now in her widowhood he allowed himself to remember that she was beautiful, and young, and that in a year or two she might marry again. There was already a spiritual sympathy between them. He dreamed of a more personal attraction.
At her request, he sought Ephraim out and labored with him; but Ephraim grinned in cheerful mockery.
‘She sent you, I suppose!’ he jeered, without naming Jenny. ‘And you trotted to do her bidding. Look out for her, Mr. Pittridge! She’s ruined a better man than you will ever be.’
‘You’re wrong to talk so,’ Pittridge assured him, and since Ephraim’s words hit so near the mark, his color rose resentfully. ‘She’s almost your only friend in Bangor today. She alone has defended you when others said your cowardly folly was the cause of your father’s death. It’s true that she sent me, yes; but it was her truly Christian kindliness which led her to do it!’
Ephraim watched him in a dry amusement. ‘Got you hooked already, has she?’ he challenged. The phrase made Elder Pittridge stiffen with anger. ‘Well, look out for yourself, or you’ll end up where I am!’
‘You’re a lost man,’ the Elder said severely. ‘You’ve chosen your own damnation, so damned you shall be!’ And he left Ephraim to his cups.
But when he reported to Jenny the result of his interview, she was deeply distressed. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said ruefully, in that soft, warm tone which seemed to him so deeply moving. ‘I want to help him, but I don’t know how.’
It was his suggestion that Ephraim’s only chance was to leave Bangor and seek redemption where his crime was not known. He helped her draft that letter to Ephraim which John Evered presently would read, and he went with her to consult Deacon Adams about it and get his approval. It was he and Pat Tierney who put Ephraim on the Bangor, and it was he who gave the letter, and Ephraim’s money, to Captain Howes.
When later Jenny, having discovered that Ruth was to bear Ephraim’s child, and learning from Mr. Richardson that Ephraim was in New York, came to Elder Pittridge for advice, he offered to find Ephraim and bring him home; but Jenny insisted that it was her duty to do this. He wished to go with her, to protect her against the hazards of the journey; but she reminded him gently that if they went away together, even on such an errand, people might not understand; and he was touched by her wise and tolerant understanding.
The news of her marriage to John Evered, when it came back to Bangor, filled him at first with a stern reprobation. He had not realized the hold which even thus soon she had laid upon him, did not in fact realize it now. He thought it was not jealousy he felt, but disapproval of this unseemly marriage so soon after her husband’s death. But when he found that almost without exception everyone else in Bangor was glad she had so soon found the happiness she deserved, after her loyal years with old Isaiah whom few liked, he held his tongue, spoke no critical word, blamed himself for his own thoughts, and prayed sincerely and honestly enough that he might become a better and more Christian man.
When Pat and Ruth were married, he proposed to write and tell Jenny the news; and he was disappointed when Pat said they wished to surprise her. The thought of writing to her had evoked in him such a deep pleasure that he awoke to the necessity of remembering that she was now another’s wife; but when he heard from Pat of her imminent return, he could not resist going to the wharf, lurking unseen in the crowd there. He saw happiness writ plain in her eyes; and he told himself that John was a fine- looking young man, was surely the husband she deserved.
IV
When Captain Philbrook brought Atticus to Bangor, Elder Pittridge was inclined to agree with John that they should be prepared to yield up the slave if his master came to fetch him; but Jenny’s insistence moved him too. When John went to Augusta, there had been no word from the Savannah man, but Elder Pittridge was in John’s office when Mr. Sagurs came there.
The Southerner introduced himself, and asked for Mr. Evered, and Elder Pittridge explained that John was out of town. ‘I’ve come for my slave, Atticus, Mr. Pittridge,’ the Georgia man said in stern formality. ‘He stowed away on Mr. Evered’s schooner when she was in Savannah. I assume he’s been held for me?’
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