Harold Frederic

“ You have had trouble to-night—for all your talk about making a clean breast of it you haven’t told me yet what it was—and your imagination makes a mountain out of what was probably a molehill, and you straightway rush off bareheaded to wander about like a ghost, and frighten people out of their wits; and then, happening to meet a girl who, by the deceptive light of the moon, looks as if she had some sense about her, you take without consideration the most important step a man can take in his whole life. ”

“ Looking him over, a stranger would have been surprised that his aunt should have left him out of her thoughts of the family’s future—or that, once pausing to consider him, she should have dropped the idea so swiftly. But so it was. Miss Sabrina felt cold and aggrieved toward Albert, and she came as near hating John as a deeply devout woman safely could. She simply took no account of Seth at all, as she would have expressed it. To her he was a quiet, harmless sort of youngster, who worked prettily steadily on the farm, and got on civilly with people. ”

“ As he passed his Aunt Sabrina’s door on his way to the stairs, he heard from within this same sound of suppressed weeping. This much at least of the unlocated recollections must have belonged to the first stages of his waking. “Another quarrel with Isabel!” he thought, as he descended the stairs. “Why is it that women must always be rowing it with each other!” Then his own dispute with Albert came fresh and overpowering in distinctness of impression across his mind, and the grounds of his grievance against the temper of the other sex faded away. ”

“ Naturally, such a man would feel himself above kitchen associations.
Of course this defection evoked deep wrath in Alvira’s part of the house, some overflowings of which came to Seth’s notice before he had been a day at the farm. Alvira was not specially changed to the young man’s eyes—indeed her sallow, bilious visage, dark snapping eyes and furrowed forehead seemed the most familiar things about the homestead, and her acidulous tones struck a truer note in his chords of memory than did any other sound. ”

“ I was in the singing party, too. It makes me shudder to think that at that very minute, perhaps——” The girl paused for a moment, with parted lips and troubled face, as if pondering some sudden thought; then exclaimed, “Oh-h! the horse! Could it have been!”
“Could what have been!” Isabel stopped in her caged-panther-like pacing, and looked deep inquiry.
“But no, of course not! What connection could there have been! You see, after I left the wagon, to cut across by the path at the end of the poplars, a horse came galloping like the wind up the road, with some figure lying low on its back. ”

“ CHAPTER V.—THE FUNERAL. The American farm-house funeral is surely, of all the observances with which civilized man marks the ending of this earthly pilgrimage, the most pathetic. The rural life itself is a sad and sterile enough thing, with its unrelieved physical strain, its enervating and destructive diet, its mental barrenness, its sternly narrowed groove of toil and thought and companionship—but death on the farm brings a desolating gloom, a cruel sense of the hopelessness of existence, which one realizes nowhere else. ”

“ She said:
“Tell me, Seth, if you have noticed any change in Alvira.”
“No, I can’t say that I have. In fact, she seems to me the one person about the place who has not altered a bit.”
“See what eyes men have! Why, she has grown ages older. She goes about now muttering to herself like an old, old woman. And the way she looks at one, sometimes, it is enough to give one the chills. I tell Albert often that I am almost afraid to have her in the house.” ”

“ Everybody in Thessaly knows him and likes him and calls him ‘John,’ and that seems to be the height of his ambition. I can’t imagine a man of his abilities being satisfied with so limited a horizon.”
“And, you, Seth, what is your horizon like?” asked Isabel.
They had entered the orchard path, now, and the apple blossoms close above them filled the May morning air with that sweet spring perfume which seems to tell of growth, harvest, the fruition of hope. ”

“ Oh, what it must be to be a man!” She was looking up at him now, with enthusiasm supplanting the repining in her eyes. “And you love your work, so, too! You are so clever and capable! You can be anything you like in your profession—and it is impossible that I should ever be anything that I want to be.”
A month ago, when he first came to the farm, this calm assumption of his ability to carve whatever part he desired out of the journalistic cake would have fallen upon Seth like cruel and calculated sarcasm. ”

“ Seth found it necessary to stand up, to do this subject justice. “No!” he answered. “He doesn’t deserve such a wife. But because one man is incapable of appreciating a treasure which he has won, it’s no reason why another man shouldn’t—shouldn’t say to himself ‘I will either marry that kind of woman or I’ll marry none.’ Now, is it, Isabel?”
“Perhaps this wife is not altogether the treasure you think she is,” the young woman answered, with the indirection of her sex.
Seth found words entirely inadequate to express his dissent. ”

“ This friendship had already reached a stage where Aunt Sabrina sniffed at its existence, and she hinted dimly to Seth of the perils which lurked in the lures of a citified siren, with an expression of face and a pointedness of emphasis which clearly had a domestic application. There was nothing in this, of course, but the insensate meddlesomeness of a disagreeable old maid, Seth said to himself, but still it annoyed him. ”

“ By setting himself up to oppose this brother in the chief object of his life, and, as if this were not enough, by yielding weakly to the temptation to rob him of his domestic honor as well! “I must be a villain as well as a fool, must I!” the youngster growled between his set teeth, as he threw himself from the bed, and began the gloomy pacing up and down again.
He had not lighted his lamp. The soft half-darkness of the starlight, sufficing barely to render objects visible in the room, suited his mood. ”

“ Annie stayed after tea, and the three played dominoes. Albert seemed somewhat out of sorts, but they did not mind his silence in the least. They chatted gaily over their games, and time flew so merrily and swiftly, that Seth was surprised when Annie said she must leave, and he discovered that it was a quarter to ten.
“How pleasantly the evening has passed,” Isabel said, and smiled at him, and Annie answered, “Hasn’t it! I don’t know when I have enjoyed myself so much—” and she, too, smiled at him. ”

“ Seth laughed—a reluctant, in-spite-of-himself laugh. “You always would make fun of me when I tried to be serious. But if I ever was serious in my life, it is now. Listen to me, Annie! It is not my fault if I see you now, truly as you are, for the first time. I have been a fool. I know it I said so at the start. But a man is the creature of circumstances, you know. ”

“ Those who cared to look closely could see that the old maid was shaken by her weak brother’s death, and that, though she said little or nothing about it, an augmented sense of loneliness preyed upon her mind. For the rest, the event imposed a day or two of solemnity, some alterations of dress and demeanor, a sombre journey with a few neighbors to the little burial plot beyond the orchard—and then things resumed their wonted aspect.
To the young journalist this aspect was strange and curious. The farm had put on a new guise to his eyes. ”

“ In the middle distance, three elderly men sat smoking long pipes and playing dominoes, silently, save for the sharp clatter of the pieces. Nearer, three other men, seated about a table, were all roaring in German at the top of their lungs, pounding with their glasses on the resounding wood, and making the most excited and menacing gestures. While Seth stared at them, expecting momentarily to see the altercation develop into blows, he felt himself clutched by the arm, and heard Tom say:
“Bismarck, this is Mr. Fairchild, a new Chronicle man. You must use him as well as you do me.” ”

“ In those days it had been a power in politics too. The old court-house which frowned now upon the village green, elbowing the more modern brick jail out of public sight, was supposed to have echoed in its time about the tallest eloquence that any court-house in the State had heard. From Tyre had come to Albany, and Washington as well, a whole cluster of strong, shrewd, stalwart-tongued politicians, who forced their way to speakerships, and judgeships, and even senatorships, like veritable sons of Anak. It was a Tyre man who had beaten Aaron Burr in such and such a memorable contest. ”

“ Samboye said some of the most remarkable things, at once humorous and highly original, and put in an elaborate frame of big unusual words. He was a huge man in frame, with an enormous head, bushy eyebrows, heavy whiskers, a ponderous manner, a tremendous voice—in fact seemed to Seth precisely the kind of man from whom delicate wit, and soft shading of phrases were not to be expected. He happened for the nonce to be in a complaisant mood, and was relaxing himself in the company of “his young men,” as he liked to call his colleagues. ”

“ I never gave him credit for good motives when he came to the farm; neither did Seth. We both thought he was playing his own game, for himself, and nobody else. And here, by George! he turns out to have had more brotherly feeling, more family feeling, than we ever had. It makes me miserable to think of it. It’ll break Seth’s heart, too; he’ll always torture himself with the thought that the last time he ever saw Albert alive they parted in anger. ”

“ So new generations of county politicians followed precedent without thought of murmuring, and accepted the discomforts of jolting in crowded democrat-wagons over the stony, bleak hills to Tyre, of eating cold, bad dinners in the smoke-dried, draughty barracks which had once been hotels, of drinking limed well-water with the unspeakable whiskey—as natural consequences of being interested in the public affairs of the nation. ”

“ Father hasn’t been a first-rate manager, and things have kind o’ run down.”
“No, Seth, it isn’t that; the trail of the serpent is over it all—rich and poor, big and little. The Nineteenth century is a century of cities; they have given their own twist to the progress of the age—and the farmer is almost as far out of it as if he lived in Alaska. Perhaps there may have been a time when a man could live in what the poet calls daily communion with Nature and not starve his mind and dwarf his soul, but this isn’t the century.” ”

“ This young man was not at all uncivil, but he was delicate, almost effeminate in frame, wore eye-glasses, dressed with fastidious neatness, never made any jokes or laughed heartily at those of others, and rarely joined the daily lounge and smoke around Tyler’s table after the paper had gone to press—and in all these things he grated upon Seth’s sensitiveness. He was the one member of the staff whom Mr. Workman seemed to like and whom Mr. Samboye never humiliated publicly by his ponderous ridicule, and these were added grievances. ”

“ But if there had been so much as a hint about holding a county convention anywhere else than in the Tyre Court House—then, to use Abe Beekman’s homely expression, you would have seen the fur fly! Other towns might indulge their modern and mercenary tastes in county fairs, railroads, gas, reservoirs and the like, to their hearts’ content, but they must keep their hands off political conventions. ”

“ No, Seth, my dear cousin, not at all. I am only showing you the exact situation. You are too excited, or too unpractical, to see it for yourself. You talk now about being at the gates of hell and expressions like that—wild words which signify only that you have had trouble during the evening. I fancy that all men are apt to exaggerate such things—I know you are. ”

“ The cortege had formed just beyond the fateful narrowing of the road, where it crossed the gulf, and the men who were to follow Albert to the homestead, including all the late comers from Tyre and a few neighbors, had looked down the steep declivity, and noted the new breaking away of earth on the road’s edge, before they passed on to fall in line behind the black, shrouded vehicle. ”

“ People began to stroll toward the court house, and casually attach themselves to the outskirts of the cluster of saturnine, clean-shaven, thin-featured old villagers, in high black stocks and broad-brimmed soft hats, who stood on the steps, behind the fluted columns of the building’s ambitious Grecian front, and chewed tobacco voraciously while they set up the rival claims of Martin Van Buren and Francis Granger, or mumblingly wrangled over the life and works of De Witt Clinton. ”

“ There has never a word passed between Seth and me that every soul of you might not have heard, and welcome. He was simply pleasant and friendly to me—and I was grateful to him and fond of him, as I might be of a brother. Where was the harm? In no decent state of society would any one ever have dreamed of suspecting wrong. But here—why, people live and breathe suspicion! It is the breath of their nostrils.”
“I thought you used to correspond,” John said, tentatively.
“Correspond! There it is again! What of it, I should like to know? Why shouldn’t my cousin, my brother, write to me? ”

“ Instead of improving yourself, elevating and polishing yourself, by good reading, by studying the art of writing, above all by choosing your associates among men who are your superiors, and from whom you can learn, you have settled down in a Dutch beer saloon, making associates out of the commonest people in town, and having for your particular chum that rattle-headed loafer Tom Watts. Do you suppose Mr. Workman doesn’t know this? Do you suppose he likes it, or that it encourages him to hope for your future?”
Seth was silent longer than ever, this time. ”

“ John answered, after a pause, “There’s no use of my saying anything to show you what a situation you are in, or to scold you for it. I suppose you realize it fully enough. What’s more to the purpose, we must consider what is to be done. It is safe enough to assume that if Isabel thinks this and has said it to one person, either some one else will think it, or she will hint about it to another. The thing is too terrible to have even one person, even if she were silent as the grave, think about it. ”

“ Annie had begun seriously enough, but the softness of her real mood toward her cousin, together with the woman’s natural desire to have justice done her in affairs of the heart, had led her into a halfplayful revelation of pique. Seth would have answered here, but she held up her hand, and went on: “Wait till I am through. You didn’t know the truth in that matter of the log-jam. I understand that. There are a good many other things the truth of which you don’t know. You don’t, for instance, know the real facts about your own mind. ”