“Wal, I ‘ve heerd ’em say,” said San Lawson, “that it would take a woman two days jest to get through cleaning the silver that there was in that ‘ere house, to say nothing about the carpets and the curtains and the tapestry. But then, when the war broke out, Lady Frankland, she took most of it back to England, I guess, and the house has been back and forward to one and another. I never could rightly know jest who did live in it. I heard about some French folks that lived there one time. I thought some day, when I had n’t nothin’ to do, I ‘d jest walk over to old granny Walker’s, that lives over the other side of Hopkinton. She used to be a housekeeper to Lady Frankland, and I could get particulars out o’ her.”
“Well,” said Miss Mehitable, “I know one woman that must go back to a haunted house, and that is this present one.” So saying, she rose and put me off her knee.
“Send this little man over to see me to-morrow,” she said to my mother. “Polly has a cake for him, and I shall find something to amuse him.”
Major Broad, with old-fashioned gallantry, insisted on waiting on Miss Mehitable home; and Sam Lawson reluctantly tore himself from the warm corner to encounter the asperities of his own fireside.
“Here, Sam,” said good-natured Bill, – “here ‘s a great red apple for Hepsy.”
“Ef I dares to go nigh enough to give it to her,” said Sam, with a grimace. “She ‘s allers a castin’ it up at me that I don’t want to set with her at home. But lordy massy, she don’t consider that a fellow don’t want to set and be hectored and lectured when he can do better elsewhere.”
“True enough, Sam; but give my regards to her.”
As to the two Indian women, they gave it as their intention to pass the night by the kitchen fire; and my grandmother, to whom such proceedings were not at all strange, assented, – producing for each a blanket, which had often seem similar service. My grandfather closed the evening by bringing out his great Bible and reading a chapter. Then we all knelt down in prayer.
So passed an evening in my grandmother’s kitchen, – where religion, theology, politics, the gossip of the day, and the legends of the supernatural all conspired to weave a fabric of thought quaint and various. Intense earnestness, a solemn undertone of deep mournful awe, was overlaid with quaint traceries of humor, strange and weird in their effect. I was one of those children who are all ear, – dreamy listeners, who brood over all that they hear, without daring to speak of it; and in this evening’s conversation I had heard enough to keep my eyes broad open long after my mother had lain me in bed. The haunted house and its vague wonders filled my mind, and I determined to question Sam Lawson yet more about it.
But now that I have fairly introduced myself, the scene of my story, and many of the actors in it, I must take my reader off for a while, and relate a history that must at last blend with mine in one story.
CHAPTER VII.
OLD CRAB SMITH.
ON the brow of yonder hill you see that old, red farm-house, with its slanting back roof relieved against the golden sky of the autumn afternoon. The house lifts itself up dark and clear under the shadow of two great elm-trees that droop over it, and is the first of a straggling, irregular cluster of farm-houses that form the village of Needmore. A group of travellers, sitting on a bit of rock in the road below the hill on which the farm-house stands, are looking up to it, in earnest conversation.
“Mother, if you can only get up there, we ‘ll ask them to let you go in and rest,” said a little boy of nine years to a weary, pale, sick-looking woman who sat as in utter exhaustion and discouragement on the rock. A little girl two years younger than the boy sat picking at the moss at her feet, and earnestly listening to her older brother with the air of one who is attending to the words of a leader.
“I don’t feel as if I could get a step farther,” said the woman; and the increasing deadly paleness of her face confirmed her words.
“O mother, don’t give up,” said the boy; “just rest here a little and lean on me, and we ‘ll get you up the hill; and then I ‘m sure they ‘ll take you in. Come, now; I ‘ll run and get you some water in our tin cup, and you ‘ll feel better soon.” And the boy ran to a neighboring brook and filled a small tin cup, and brought the cool water to his mother.
She drank it, and then, fixing a pair of dark, pathetic eyes on the face of her boy, she said: “My dear child, you have always been such a blessing to me! What should I do without you?”
“Well, mother, now if you feel able, just rest on my shoulder, and Tina will take the bundle. You take it, Tina, and we ‘ll find a place to rest.”
And so, slowly and with difficulty, the three wound their way up to the grassy top of the hill where stood the red house. This house belonged to a man named Caleb Smith, whose character had caused the name he bore to degenerate into another which was held to be descriptive of his nature, namely, “Crab “; and the boys of the vicinity commonly expressed the popular idea of the man by calling him “Old Crab Smith.” His was one of those sour, cross, gnarly natures that now and then are to be met with in New England, which, like, knotty cider-apples, present a compound of hardness, sourness, and bitterness. It was affirmed that a continual free indulgence in very hard cider as a daily beverage was one great cause of this churlishness of temper; but be that as it may, there was not a boy in the village that did not know and take account of it in all his estimates and calculations, as much as of northeast storms and rainy weather. No child ever willingly carried a message to him; no neighbor but dreaded to ask a favor of him; nobody hoped to borrow or beg of him; nobody willingly hired themselves out to him, or did him cheerful service. In short, he was a petrified man, walled out from all neighborhood sympathies, and standing alone in his crabbedness. And it was to this man’s house that the wandering orphan boy was leading his poor sick mother.
The three travellers approached a neat back porch on the shady side of the house, where an old woman sat knitting. This was Old Crab Smith’s wife, or, more properly speaking, his life-long bond-slave, – the only human being whom he could so secure to himself that she should be always at hand for him to vent that residue of ill-humor upon which the rest of the world declined to receive. Why half the women in the world marry the men they do, is a problem that might puzzle any philosopher; how any woman could marry Crab Smith, was the standing wonder of all the neighborhood. And yet Crab’s wife was a modest, industrious, kindly creature, who uncomplainingly toiled from morning till night to serve and please him, and received her daily allowance of grumbling and fault-finding with quiet submission. She tried all she could to mediate between him and the many whom his ill-temper was constantly provoking. She did surreptitious acts of kindness here and there, to do away the effects of his hardness, and shrunk and quivered for fear of being detected in goodness, as much as many another might for fear of being discovered in sin. She had been many times a mother, – had passed through all the trials and weaknesses of maternity without one tender act of consideration, one encouraging word. Her children had grown up and gone from her, always eager to leave the bleak, ungenial home, and go out to shift for themselves in the world, and now, in old age, she was still working. Worn to a shadow, – little, old, wrinkled, bowed, – she was still about the daily round of toil, and still the patient recipient of the murmurs and chidings of her tyrant.
“My mother is so sick she can’t get any farther,” said a little voice from under the veranda; “won’t you let her come in and lie down awhile?”
“Massy, child,” said the little old woman, coming forward with a trembling, uncertain step. “Well, she does look beat out, to be sure. Come up and rest ye a bit.”
“If you ‘ll only let me lie down awhile and rest me,” said a faint, sweet voice.
“Come up here,” said the old woman, standing quivering like a gray shadow on the top doorstep; and, shading her wrinkled forehead with her hand, she looked with a glance of habitual apprehension along the road where the familiar cart and oxen of her tyrant might be expect
ed soon to appear on their homeward way, and rejoiced in her little old heart that he was safe out of sight. “Yes, come in,” she said, opening the door of a small ground-floor bedroom that adjoined the apartment known in New England houses as the sink-room, and showing them a plain bed.
The worn and wasted stranger sunk down on it, and, as she sunk, her whole remaining strength seemed to collapse, and something white and deathly fell, as if it had been a shadow, over her face.
“Massy to us! she ‘s fainted clean away,” said the poor old woman quiveringly. “I must jest run for the camphire.”
The little boy seemed to have that unchildlike judgment and presence of mind that are the precocious development of want and sorrow. He ran to a water-pail, and, dipping his small tin cup, he dashed the water in his mother’s face, and fanned her with his little torn straw hat. When the old woman returned, the invalid was breathing again, and able to take a few swallows of camphor and water which had been mixed for her.
“Sonny,” said the old woman, “you are a nice little nurse – a good boy. You jest take care now; and here ‘s a turkey-feather fan to fan her with; and I ‘ll get on the kettle to make her a cup of tea. We ‘ll bring her round with a little nursing. Been walking a long way, I calculate?”
“Yes,” said the boy, “she was trying to get to Boston.”
“What, going afoot?”
“We did n’t mind walking, the weather is so pleasant,” said the boy; “and Tina and I like walking; but mother got sick a day or two ago, and ever since she has been so tired!”
“Jes’ so,” said the old woman, looking compassionately on the bed. “Well, I ‘ll make up the fire and get her some tea.”
The fire was soon smoking in the great, old-fashioned kitchen chimney, for the neat, labor-saving cook-stove had as yet no being, and the thin, blue smoke, curing up in the rosy sunset air, received prismatic coloring which a painter would have seized with enthusiasm.
Far otherwise, however, was its effect on the eye of Old Crab Smith, as, coming up the hill, his eye detected the luminous vapor going up from his own particular chimney.
“So, burning out wood, – always burning out wood. I told her that I would n’t have tea got at night. These old women are crazy and bewitched after tea, and they don’t care if they burn up your tables and chairs to help their messes. Why a plague can’t she eat cold pork and potatoes as well as I, and drink her mug of cider? but must go to getting up her fire and biling her kettle. I ‘ll see to that. Halloa there,” he said, as he stamped up on to the porch, “what the devil you up to now? I s’pose you think I hain’t got nothing else to do but split up wood for you to burn out.”
“Father, it ‘s nothing but a little brush and a few chips, jest to bile the kettle.”
“Bile the kettle, bile the kettle! Jest like yer lazy, shif’less ways. What must you be a bilin’ the kettle for?”
“Father, I jest want to make a little tea for a sick woman.”
“A sick woman! What sick woman?”
“There was a poor sick woman came along this afternoon with two little children.”
“Wal, I s’pose you took ’em in. I s’pose you think we keep the poor-house, and that all the trampers belong to us. We shall have to go to the poor-house ourselves before long, I tell ye. But you never believe anything I say. Why could n’t you ‘a’ sent her to the selectmen? I don’t know why I must keep beggars’ tavern.”
“Father, father, don’t speak so loud. The poor critter wa’ n’t able to stir another step, and fainted dead away, and we had to get her on to a bed.”
“And we shall have her and her two brats through a fit of sickness. That ‘s just like you. Wal, we shall all go to the poor-house together before long, and then you ‘ll believe what I say, wont ye? But I won’t have it so. She may stay to-night, but to-morrow morning I ‘ll cart her over to Joe Scran’s, bright and early, brats and all.”
There was within hearing of this conversation a listener whose heart was dying within her, – sinking deeper and deeper at every syllable, – a few words will explain why.
A younger son of a family belonging to the English gentry had come over to America as a commissioned officer near the close of the Revolutionary war. He had persuaded to a private marriage the daughter of a poor country curate, a beautiful young girl, whom he induced to elope with him, and share the fortunes of an officer’s life in America. Her parents died soon after; her husband proved a worthless, drunken, dissipated fellow and this poor woman had been through all the nameless humiliations and agonies which beset helpless womanhood in the sole power of such a man. Submissive, gentle, trusting, praying, entreating, hoping against hope, she had borne with him many vicissitudes and reverses, – always believing that at last the love of his children, if not of her, would awaken a better nature within him. But the man steadily went downward instead of upward, and the better part of him by slow degrees died away, till he came to regard his wife and children only as so many clogs on his life, and to meditate night and day on a scheme to abandon them, and return, without their encumbrance, to his own country. It was with a distant outlook to some such result that he had from the first kept their marriage an entire secret from his own friends. When the English army, at the close of the war, re-embarked for England, he carried his cowardly scheme into execution. He had boarded his wife and children for a season in a country farm-house in the vicinity of Boston, with the excuse of cheapness of lodgings. Then one day his wife received a letter enclosing a sum of money, and saying, in such terms as bad men can find to veil devilish deeds, that all was over between them, and that ere she got this he should be on the ocean. The sorest hurt of all was that the letter denied the validity of their marriage; and the poor child found, to her consternation, that the marriage certificate, which she had always kept among her papers, was gone with her husband.
The first result of this letter had been a fit of sickness, wherein her little stock of money had melted almost away, and then she had risen from her bed determined to find her way to Boston, and learn, if possible, from certain persons with whom he had lodged before his departure, his address in England, that she might make one more appeal to him. But, before she had walked far the sickness returned upon her, till, dizzy and faint, she had lain down, as we have described, on the bed of charity.
She had thought, ever since she received that letter, that she had reached the bottom of desolation, – that nothing could be added to her misery; but the withering, harsh sounds which reached her ear revealed a lower deep in the lowest depths. Hitherto on her short travels she had met only that kindly country hospitality which New England, from one end to the other, always has shown to the stranger. No one had refused a good meal of brown bread and rich milk to her and her children, and more often the friendly housewife, moved by her delicate appearance, had unlocked the sanctum where was deposited her precious tea caddy, and brewed an amber cup of tea to sustain the sickly-looking wanderer. She and her children had been carried here and there, as occasion offered, a friendly mile or two, when Noah or Job or Sol “hitched up the critter” to go to mill or country store. The voice of harsh, pitiless rejection smote on her ear for the first time, and it seemed to her the drop too much in her cup. She turned her face to the wall and said, “O my God, I cannot bear this! I cannot, I cannot!” She would have said, “Let me die,” but that she was tied to life by the two helpless, innocent ones who shared her misery. The poorest and most desolate mother feels that her little children are poorer and more desolate than she; and, however much her broken spirit may long for the rest of Paradise, she is held back by the thought that to abide in the flesh is needful to them. Even in her uttermost destitution the approaching shadow of the dark valley was a terror to the poor soul, – not for her own sake, but for theirs. The idea of a harsh, unpitiful world arose before her for the first time, and the thought of leaving her little ones in it unprotected was an anguish which rent her heart.
The little girl, over-weary, had ea
ten her supper and fallen asleep beside her, with the trusting, ignorant rest of early childhood; but her boy sat by her bedside with that look of precocious responsibility, that air of anxious thought, which seems unnatural in early childhood, and contrasted painfully with the slight childish figure, the little hands, and little voice. He was, as we have said, but nine years of age, well grown for his years, but with that style of growth which indicates delicacy of fibre rather than strength of organization. His finely formed head, with its clustering curls of yellow hair, his large, clear blue eyes, his exquisitely delicate skin, and the sensitiveness betrayed by his quivering lips, spoke of a lineage of gentle blood, and an organization fitted rather to æsthetic and intellectual development than to sturdy material toil. The little girl, as she lay sleeping, was a beautiful picture. Her head was a wilderness of curls of a golden auburn, and the defined pencilling of the eyebrows, and the long silken veil of the lashes that fell over the sleeping eyes, the delicate polished skin and the finely moulded limbs, all indicated that she was one who ought to have been among the jewels, rather than among the potsherds of this mortal life. And these were the children that she was going to leave alone, without a single friend and protector in this world. For there are intuitions that come to the sick and dying which tell them when the end is near; and as this wanderer sunk down upon her bed this night, there had fallen upon her mind a perfect certainty that she should never be carried thence till carried to the grave; and it was this which had given her soul so deadly a wrench, and caused her to cry out in such utter agony.
What happens to desolate souls, who, thus forsaken by all the world, cry out to God, is a mystery, good brother and sister, which you can never fathom until you have been exactly where they are. But certain it is that there is a very near way to God’s heart, and so to the great heart of all comfort, that sometimes opens like a shaft of light between heaven and the soul, in hours when everything earthly falls away from us. A quaint old writer has said, “God keeps his choicest cordials for the time of our deepest fainting.” And so it came to pass that, as this poor woman closed her eyes and prayed earnestly, there fell a strange clearness into her soul, which calmed every fear, and hushed the voice of every passion, and she lay for a season as if entranced. Words of holy writ, heard years ago in church-readings, in the hours of unconscious girlhood, now seemed to come back, borne in with a living power on her soul. It seemed almost as if a voice within was saying to her: “The Lord hath called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused, saith thy God. For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and thy foundations with sapphires. And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children.”
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 246
