In maintaining, on a certain Sunday evening, that his ideas were much more adapted to the spiritual nourishment of the president, the dean, and the several professors of Hilbrook University than to that of the hereditary Rixonites who nodded in a slumbrous acceptance of them, Mrs.
Ewbert failed as usual to rouse her husband to a due sense of his grievance with the university people.
"Well," he said, "you know I can"t _make_ them come, my dear."
"Of course not. And I would be the last to have you lift a finger. But I know that you feel about it just as I do."
"Perhaps; but I hope not so much as you _think_ you feel. Of course, I"m very grateful for your indignation. But I know you don"t undervalue the good I may do to my poor sheep--they"re _not_ an intellectual flock--in trying to lead them in the ways of spiritual modesty and unconsciousness. How do we know but they profit more by my preaching than the faculty would? Perhaps our university friends are spiritually unconscious enough already, if not modest."
"I see what you mean," said Mrs. Ewbert, provisionally suspending her sense of the whimsical quality in his suggestion. "But you need never tell me that they wouldn"t appreciate you more."
"More than old Ransom Hilbrook?" he asked.
"Oh, I hope _he_ isn"t coming here to-night, again!" she implored, with a nervous leap from the point in question. "If he"s coming here every Sunday night"--
As he knew she wished, her husband represented that Hilbrook"s having come the last Sunday night was no proof that he was going to make a habit of it.
"But he _stayed_ so late!" she insisted from the safety of her real belief that he was not coming.
"He came very early, though," said Ewbert, with a gentle sigh, in which her sympathetic penetration detected a retrospective exhaustion.
"I shall tell him you"re not well," she went on: "I shall tell him you are lying down. You ought to be, now. You"re perfectly worn out with that long walk you took." She rose, and beat up the sofa pillows with a menacing eye upon him.
"Oh, I"m very comfortable here," he said from the depths of his easy-chair. "Hilbrook won"t come to-night. It"s past the time."
She glanced at the clock with him, and then desisted. "If he does, I"m determined to excuse you somehow. You ought never to have gone near him, Clarence. You"ve brought it upon yourself."
Ewbert could not deny this, though he did not feel himself so much to blame for it as she would have liked to make out in her pity of him. He owned that if he had never gone to see Hilbrook the old man would probably never have come near them, and that if he had not tried so much to interest him when he did come Hilbrook would not have stayed so long; and even in this contrite mind he would not allow that he ought not to have visited him and ought not to have welcomed him.
III.
The minister had found his parishioner in the old Hilbrook homestead, which Josiah Hilbrook, while he lived, suffered Ransom Hilbrook to occupy, and when he died bequeathed to him, with a sufficient income for all his simple wants. They were cousins, and they had both gone out into the world about the same time: one had made a success of it, and remained; and the other had made a failure of it, and come back. They were both Rixonites, as the families of both had been in the generation before them. It could be supposed that Josiah Hilbrook, since he had given the money for a Rixonite church and the perpetual pay of a Rixonite minister in his native place, had died in the faith; and it might have been supposed that Ransom Hilbrook, from his constant attendance upon its services, was living in the same faith. What was certain was that the survivor lived alone in the family homestead on the slope of the stony hill overlooking the village. The house was gray with age, and it crouched low on the ground where it had been built a century before, and anch.o.r.ed fast by the great central chimney characteristic of the early New England farmhouse. Below it staggered the trees of an apple orchard belted in with a stone wall, and beside it sagged the sheds whose stretch united the gray old house to the gray old barn, and made it possible for Hilbrook to do his ch.o.r.es in rain or snow without leaving cover. There was a dooryard defined by a picket fence, and near the kitchen door was a well with a high pent roof, where there had once been a long sweep.
These simple features showed to the village on the opposite slope with a distinctness that made the place seem much lonelier than if it had been much more remote. It gained no cheerfulness from its proximity, and when the windows of the house lighted up with the pale gleam of the sunset, they imparted to the village a sense of dreary solitude which its own lamps could do nothing to relieve.
Ransom Hilbrook came and went among the villagers in the same sort of inaccessible contiguity. He did not shun pa.s.sing the time of day with people he met; he was in and out at the grocer"s, the meat man"s, the baker"s, upon the ordinary domestic occasions; but he never darkened any other doors, except on his visits to the bank where he cashed the checks for his quarterly allowance. There had been a proposition to use him representatively in the ceremonies celebrating the acceptance of the various gifts of Josiah Hilbrook; but he had not lent himself to this, and upon experiment the authorities found that he was right in his guess that they could get along without him.
He had not said it surlily, but sadly, and with a gentle deprecation of their insistence. While the several monuments that testified to his cousin"s wealth and munificence rose in the village beyond the brook, he continued in the old homestead without change, except that when his housekeeper died he began to do for himself the few things that the ailing and aged woman had done for him. How he did them was not known, for he invited no intimacy from his neighbors. But from the extent of his dealings with the grocer it was imagined that he lived mainly upon canned goods. The fish man paid him a weekly visit, and once a week he got from the meat man a piece of salt pork, which it was obvious to the meanest intelligence was for his Sunday baked beans. From his purchase of flour and baking powder it was reasonably inferred that he now and then made himself hot biscuit. Beyond these meagre facts everything was conjecture, in which the local curiosity played somewhat actively, but, for the most part, with a growing acquiescence in the general ignorance none felt authorized to dispel. There had been a time when some fulfilled a fancied duty to the solitary in trying to see him. But the visitors who found him out of doors were not asked within, and were obliged to dismiss themselves, after an interview across the pickets of the dooryard fence or from the trestles or inverted feed pails on which they were invited to seats in the barn or shed. Those who happened to find their host more ceremoniously at home were allowed to come in, but were received in rooms so comfortless from the drawn blinds or fireless hearths that they had not the spirits for the task of cheering him up which they had set themselves, and departed in greater depression than that they left him to.
IV.
Ewbert felt all the more impelled to his own first visit by the fame of these failures, but he was not hastened in it. He thought best to wait for some sign or leading from Hilbrook; but when none came, except the apparent attention with which Hilbrook listened to his preaching, and the sympathy which he believed he detected at times in the old eyes blinking upon him through his sermons, he felt urged to the visit which he had vainly delayed.
Hilbrook"s reception was wary and non-committal, but it was by no means so grudging as Ewbert had been led to expect. After some ceremonious moments in the cold parlor Hilbrook asked him into the warm kitchen, where apparently he pa.s.sed most of his own time. There was something cooking in a pot on the stove, and a small room opened out of the kitchen, with a bed in it, which looked as if it were going to be made, as Ewbert handsomely maintained. There was an old dog stretched on the hearth behind the stove, who whimpered with rheumatic apprehension when his master went to put the lamp on the mantel above him.
In describing the incident to his wife Ewbert stopped at this point, and then pa.s.sed on to say that after they got to talking Hilbrook seemed more and more gratified, and even glad, to see him.
"Everybody"s glad to see _you_, Clarence," she broke out, with tender pride. "But why do you say, "After we got to talking"? Didn"t you go to talking at once?"
"Well, no," he answered, with a vague smile; "we did a good deal of listening at first, both of us. I didn"t know just where to begin, after I got through my excuses for coming, and Mr. Hilbrook didn"t offer any opening. Don"t you think he"s a very handsome old man?"
"He has a pretty head, and his close-cut white hair gives it a neat effect, like a nice child"s. He has a refined face; such a straight nose and a delicate chin. Yes, he is certainly good-looking. But what"--
"Oh, nothing. Only, all at once I realized that he had a sensitive nature. I don"t know why I shouldn"t have realized it before. I had somehow taken it for granted that he was a self-conscious hermit, who lived in a squalid seclusion because he liked being wondered at. But he did not seem to be anything of the kind. I don"t know whether he"s a good cook, for he didn"t ask me to eat anything; but I don"t think he"s a bad housekeeper."
"With his bed unmade at eight o"clock in the evening!"
"He may have got up late," said Ewbert. "The house seemed very orderly, otherwise; and what is really the use of making up a bed till you need it!"
Mrs. Ewbert pa.s.sed the point, and asked, "What did you talk about when you got started?"
"I found he was a reader, or had been. There was a case of good books in the parlor, and I began by talking with him about them."
"Well, what did he say about them?"
"That he wasn"t interested in them. He had been once, but he was not now."
"I can understand that," said Mrs. Ewbert philosophically. "Books _are_ crowded out after your life fills up with other interests."
"Yes."
"Yes, what?" Mrs. Ewbert followed him up.
"So far as I could make out, Mr. Hilbrook"s life hadn"t filled up with other interests. He did not care for the events of the day, as far as I tried him on them, and he did not care for the past. I tempted him with autobiography; but he seemed quite indifferent to his own history, though he was not reticent about it. I proposed the history of his cousin in the boyish days which he said they had spent together; but he seemed no more interested in his cousin than in himself. Then I tried his dog and his pathetic sufferings, and I said something about the pity of the poor old fellow"s last days being so miserable. That seemed to strike a gleam of interest from him, and he asked me if I thought animals might live again. And I found--I don"t know just how to put it so as to give you the right sense of his psychological att.i.tude."
"No matter! Put it any way, and I will take care of the right sense. Go on!" said Mrs. Ewbert.
"I found that his question led up to the question whether men lived again, and to a confession that he didn"t or couldn"t believe they did."
"Well, upon my word!" Mrs. Ewbert exclaimed. "I don"t see what business he has coming to church, then. Doesn"t he understand that the idea of immortality is the very essence of Rixonitism! I think it was personally insulting to _you_, Clarence. What did you say?"
"I didn"t take a very high hand with him. You know I don"t embody the idea of immortality, and the church is no bad place even for unbelievers. The fact is, it struck me as profoundly pathetic. He wasn"t arrogant about it, as people sometimes are,--they seem proud of not believing; but he was sufficiently ignorant in his premises. He said he had seen too many dead people. You know he was in the civil war."
"No!"
"Yes,--through it all. It came out on my asking him if he were going to the Decoration Day services. He said that the sight of the first great battlefield deprived him of the power of believing in a life hereafter.
He was not very explanatory, but as I understood it the overwhelming presence of death had extinguished his faith in immortality; the dead riders were just like their dead horses"--
"Shocking!" Mrs. Ewbert broke in.
"He said something went out of him." Ewbert waited a moment before adding: "It was very affecting, though Hilbrook himself was as apathetic about it as he was about everything else. He was not interested in not believing, even, but I could see that it had taken the heart out of life for him. If our life here does not mean life elsewhere, the interest of it must end with our activities. When it comes to old age, as it has with poor Hilbrook, it has no meaning at all, unless it has the hope of more life in it. I felt his forlornness, and I strongly wished to help him. I stayed a long time talking; I tried to interest him in the fact that he was not interested, and"--
"Well, what?"
"If I didn"t fatigue Hilbrook, I came away feeling perfectly exhausted myself. Were you uneasy at my being out so late?"