Mrs. Hale

“ Even the old half-condescending, half-punctilious gallantry of his greeting of his wife and family was changed, as he introduced his companions with a mingling of familiarity and shyness that was new to him. Did Mrs. Hale regret it, or feel a sense of relief in the absence of his usual seignorial formality? ”

“ Hale. But if she inherits my grandfather's money--that is, my aunt's share--she has no one to leave it to but me. I am an only child."
"Your mother," said Hale deliberately, "is hard as you say; that is, she is as sensible as I am. If you marry against her will, she will not leave you one farthing of this money, which, after all, may never come into her possession."
"But why should she object to Lesbia?" asked George, "when she meets her and sees how lovely she is----"
"Bah!" Hale looked scornful, "you talk like a fool. As if any woman was ever moved by the beauty of another woman. ”

“ Elizabeth Strong, wife of Deacon Richard Hale and mother of Nathan, came from a family more notable than that of her husband. Her grandfather, Joseph Strong, represented Coventry in the General Assembly of Connecticut for sixty-five sessions and presided over town-meeting in his ninetieth year. [Pg 144]
Mrs. Hale had four immediate relatives who were graduates of Yale college. Three of the sons of Deacon Richard Hale and Elizabeth Strong Hale graduated from Yale,—Enoch, the fourth son, Nathan, the sixth child, and David, the eighth son. ”

“ June lost the subtlety in Miss Hale's emphasis, but she fell with instant submission under such gentle authority, and though she could say nothing, her eyes glistened and her lips quivered, and without looking to Hale, she followed his sister out of the room. Hale stood still. He had watched the meeting with apprehension and now, surprised and grateful, he went to Helen's parlour and waited with a hopeful heart. ”

“ Hale’s safe and was killed in the act—”
“By whom?” gasped Mrs. Hale; her face was ashen in color.
“I leave that conundrum to the police,” replied Richards. “It was but a suggestion.”
“Which carries no weight,” retorted John Hale. “This watch isn’t the only thing we have on you, Richards.” He turned to his brother. “What was stolen from your safe on Tuesday night?”
Mrs. Hale’s sudden start was lost on her husband. [Pg 261] Hale looked at Richards queerly, thought a minute, then answered with brevity.
“Ten bonds of the Troy Valve Company belonging to Judith.” ”

“ I'm sure it would be the very best thing for Aunt Hale's health; everybody here is young and well, and our skies are always blue, and our sun always shines, and the band plays deliciously from morning till night; and, to come back to the burden of my ditty, my baby always smiles. I am constantly wanting you to draw him for me, Margaret. It does not signify what he is doing; that very thing is prettiest, gracefulest, best. I think I love him a great deal better than my husband, who is getting stout, and grumpy,—what he calls 'busy.' No! he is not. ”

“ Hale watched her while she munched a striped stick of peppermint. Her crimson bonnet had fallen from her sunlit hair and straight down from it to her bare little foot with its stubbed toe just darkening with dried blood, a sculptor would have loved the rounded slenderness in the curving long lines that shaped her brown throat, her arms and her hands, which were prettily shaped but so very dirty as to the nails, and her dangling bare leg. ”

“ Hale; “you must correct your ideas, and really allow them some humanity, Kate. John says they have a very good compulsory school system in their own country, and can read and write.”
“That would be of little use to you here alone if—if—” Kate hesitated.
“If what?” said Mrs. Hale smiling. “Are you thinking of Manuel's dreadful story of the grizzly tracks across the fields this morning? I promise you that neither I, nor mother, nor Minnie shall stir out of the house until you return, if you wish it.” ”

“ Now, to the mountain eye, Hale appeared no more than the ordinary man, and even a close observer would have seen no more than that his face was clean-cut and thoughtful, that his eye was blue and singularly clear and fearless, and that he was calm with a calmness that might come from anything else than stolidity of temperament—and that, by the way, is the self-control which counts most against the unruly passions of other men—but anybody near Hale, at a time when excitement was high and a crisis was imminent, would have felt the resultant of forces emanating from him that were beyond analysis. ”

“ HALE, HORATIO (1817–1896) , anthropologist, born on 3 May 1817, at Newport, New Hampshire, in the United States, was the son of David Hale, a prominent lawyer of Newport, and of Sarah Josepha, his wife. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Hale turned her attention to literature. Entering Harvard College in 1833, Hale showed a marked faculty for languages. ”

“ Hale walked long that night in the moonlit woods up and around Imboden Hill, along a shadow-haunted path, between silvery beech-trunks, past the big hole in the earth from which dead trees tossed out their crooked arms as if in torment, and to the top of the ridge under which the valley slept and above which the dark bulk of Powell's Mountain rose. It was absurd, but he found himself strangely stirred. She was a child, he kept repeating to himself, in spite of the fact that he knew she was no child among her own people, and that mountain girls were even wives who were younger still. ”

“ But though Hale had beaten him, out-maneuvered him, and, perhaps, laughed behind his back, he had hardly seen one glance of the eye, or heard one word or tone which suggested that Hale loved Lady Anne, in the old Barbados days when they all met at Bridgetown.
Nevertheless, although a man's intellect is beaten his instinct may be true. Hector had always felt that but for Hale Lady Anne could have loved him. Had she loved Sir George? He rose from the desk in agitation and paced the room. ”

“ To Elizabeth Strong Hale we can give but a passing notice. There is not, it is believed, one word that she wrote now in existence, nor any record left of that gracious womanhood, save a [Pg 6] name on an obscure gravestone. But what brave-hearted mother would not count it well worth while to leave, for the coming years, the impress she left upon her many children; one of them alone destined to carry to coming generations of Americans the assurance that such a son could only have been borne by one of the noblest of mothers. ”

“ Lee very amusing always, but I sometimes fancy he lacks feeling.”
“Feeling! You don't know him, Kate,” said Mrs. Hale quickly. She stopped herself, but with a half-smiling recollection in her dropped eyelids.
“Well, he doesn't look very amiable now, stamping up and down the veranda. Perhaps you'd better go and soothe him.”
“I'm really SO busy just now,” said Mrs. Hale, with sudden and inconsequent energy; “things have got dreadfully behind in the last week. You had better go, Kate, and make him sit down, or he'll be overdoing it. These men never know any medium—in anything.” ”

“ A light sense of the propinquity of beauty, of her confidence, of their isolation, of the eloquence of her dark eyes, at first tempted Hale to a reply of simple gallantry; a graver consideration of the same circumstances froze it upon his lips.
“I don't know,” he returned awkwardly.
“Well, I'll tell you,” she said. “You didn't cotton to the Kernel and Rawlins much more than you did to Stanner. They ain't your kind.”
In his embarrassment Hale blundered upon the thought he had honorably avoided.
“Suppose,” he said, with a constrained laugh, “I had stayed to see you.” ”

“ She shall never scorn me out of doing what I please. A pretty joke, indeed, if, for fear of a haughty girl, I failed in doing a kindness to a man I liked! I do it for Mr. Hale; I do it in defiance of her."
He went at an unusual pace, and was soon at Crampton. He went upstairs two steps at a time, and entered the drawing-room before Dixon could announce him,—his face flushed, his eyes shining with kindly earnestness. Mrs. Hale lay on the sofa, heated with fever. Mr. Hale was reading aloud. Margaret was working on a low stool by her mother's side. ”

“ I love the dear, shy thing; it has blown from the lowlands, and it keeps one’s courage up.”
Something made Hale look full at her, and there were tears clinging to her lashes as if ready to fall and betray her, but at the same moment they came out upon the hilltop and stood looking at the world together. ”

“ They came up, reeling in their saddles—neither one the girl's sweetheart, as he saw at once from her face—and began to ask what the girl characterized afterward as “unnecessary questions”: who he was, who she was, and where they were going. Hale answered so shortly that the girl thought there was going to be a fight, and she was on the point of slipping from the mule.
“Sit still,” said Hale, quietly. “There's not going to be a fight so long as you are here.”
“Thar hain't!” said one of the men. ”

“ Lady Hale declares he was the very best of men and practically a saint. I suspect her hagiology. I own I have doubts as to what he was behind the curtain. I should like to do the man as he is, or as he was, but I fear I sha'n't be able to do it; Lady Hale will be an obstacle. ”

“ A woman of original ideas and forceful will, Mrs. Hale in her day, the middle quarters of the nineteenth century, took the initiative in various public movements of patriotic, philanthropic, or religious nature. In Philadelphia, whither she removed from Boston in 1841, and where she died on April 30, 1879, she founded the Ladies' Medical Missionary Society of that city, and also the Seamen's Aid Society, of which she was the first president. ”

“ The women stood motionless and silent, listening to the footsteps, first upon the stairs, then in the room above them.
Then, as if releasing herself from something strange, Mrs. Hale began to arrange the dirty pans under the sink, which the county attorney's disdainful push of the foot had deranged.
"I'd hate to have men comin' into my kitchen," she said testily—"snoopin' round and criticizin'."
"Of course it's no more than their duty," said the sheriff's wife, in her manner of timid acquiescence.
"Duty's all right," replied Mrs. Hale bluffly ”

“ Hale said, “stand aside, Judd!” Bub leaped to the door with a Winchester—his eyes wild and his face white.
“Watch out, men!” Hale called, and as the men raised their guns there was a shriek inside the cabin and June stood at Bub's side, barefooted, her hair tumbled about her shoulders, and her hand clutching the little cross at her throat.
“Stop!” she shrieked. “He isn't here. He's—he's gone!” For a moment a sudden sickness smote Hale's face, then Devil Judd's ruse flashed to him and, wheeling, he sprang to the ground. ”

“ Mr. Digby began to tell her what a lovely day it was, and to ask her why [269] she had not gone out for a walk, too; and then, when she explained that she had had letters to write, and found herself, unfortunately, unable to do so without blushing over it (blushing because she feared she was going to blush) , Mr. Hale broke in; and Mr. Hale in conversation was, in his very different way, worse than Mrs. Hale.
"To Melbourne, I presume?" insinuated this little monster, with an arch smile. Rachel, the colour of a peony, lifted her head an inch nearer to the ceiling. ”

“ I always like it in cream gravy.”
Glad of an escape into the fresh air Ellen skipped off. She wished the parsley bed were on the other side of the garden, that she might, perhaps, see Mr. Todd again, but it was in the part which bordered upon the Hale property. From the Hale house came the sound of a phonograph which was clashing out jazz music. Ellen smiled as she thought of the contrast between the two neighbors. She had not met any of the Hale family, had merely seen that Mrs. Hale was a pretty young woman who wore startling costumes and seemed always to be on the go. ”

“ Hale as its animating spirit, first suggested the plan of a “Home for Sailors,” and, showed its practicability by establishing one in Boston, which became completely successful. The many establishments of this kind, now existing in various ports, all took their origin in that of the Boston “Seaman’s Aid Society,” and in the ideas and reasonings of their first seven annual reports, all of which were from the pen of Mrs. Hale. Nothing that she has ever written, probably, has been more productive of good than this series of annual reports ”

“ She rose presently, and, going to the little sideboard, brought out a number of glasses; these she handed to each of the party, and then, producing a demijohn of whiskey, slung it dexterously and gracefully over her arm, so that it rested on her elbow like a cradle, and, going to each one in succession, filled their glasses. It obliged each one to rise to accept the libation, and as Hale did so in his turn he met the dark eyes of the girl full on his own. There was a pleased curiosity in her glance that made this married man of thirty-five color as awkwardly as a boy. ”

“ Hale. Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried without repining the burden of three crippled lives. But Mrs. Hale had said "You've had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome," and he felt less alone with his misery. ”