3
A good young man is taken in a witch’s net.
This Titus Thumb, to whom Mr. Zelley referred, was the oldest child and only son of Deacon Ephraim Thumb, whose lands lay south of and adjoining to the lands of Mr. Bilby. There had always been intimacy between the two farms, for the men of one helped the men of the other at harvesting, planting, and building. The two women were gossips. The two men were cronies. Titus had been much away because he was a scholar at the new college in Cambridge. For one year he was home again to help in the opening-up of certain new lands. He was a studious youth who hoped in time to prepare himself for the ministry of God. This, however, never came to pass, for God willed otherwise, and, on completing his studies at Cambridge, he remains there, known to hundreds of young Latinists as ‘Tutor Thumb.’
He was a young man of special parts and handsome person. He would be a minister and his father was rich. The wenches of the village flocked to him like moths to flame, ignoring often in the exuberance of the chase (for they were unmannerly and bold to him) proper female conduct. They mocked him among themselves, saying he was his mother’s darling or cosset; that he would never seek out a woman for himself. They would torment him, pulling him behind doors and kissing him, pushing their bodies against him when he could not escape them, etc., etc. For which wanton conduct they were well served, for he would have none of them, and, keeping the fifth commandment well in mind, stayed close to his parents’ house.
He had two younger sisters, born at one time, for they were twins. They were sad and puny children, and many who saw them wondered that God had seen fit to cut His cloth so close—that is, it seemed to many that He had but enough material (brains, bones, spirits, hair, vitals, etc.) to make one proper child, yet out of this little He had made two. In answer to this questioning of Divine Wisdom, Mr. Zelley said no one body could have endured as many diseases and ills as the Thumb twins were heir to. Perhaps it was as well to divide up the maladies as well as the strength. Labour had a falling sickness. She would stiffen with a horrid din, foam, and go into convulsions. Nor was Sorrow of much hardier stock. She was subject to nightmares and other delusions (which Mr. Kleaver insisted arose from a cold stomach). Their mother vexed herself greatly over them, and where another woman might think it well if the miserable things but made a good end and returned early to that God Who had sent them thus poorly fortified into the world, she was always calling upon Mr. Kleaver or Goody Greene to dose them, or Mr. Zelley to pray over them. They were pretty children with soft brown eyes and yellow hair, fine and finicky, but their limbs were miserably thin and their bellies somewhat swollen.
Mrs. Thumb told them not to play with Bilby’s Doll. She feared the girl because her foster mother said she was a witch. Like most sickly children, they were poorly trained in obedience. They met Bilby’s Doll, whenever they could, by the willow brook which separated the two farms. Of these meetings, however, they said little or nothing. The mother often heard them whispering and laughing to each other, and, because she would hear them talk of Mistress Dolly, she knew they saw her. As they were too feeble to be whipped or even shaken, she had little control over them.
She would have been vexed to know that often her husband, sitting at the Black Moon Tavern with Mr. Bilby, planned that in due time this same girl, whom Mrs. Thumb considered too dangerous even to cast an eye upon the twins, should marry the handsome Titus. On such occasions Mr. Bilby (although he would clap him on the back, and protest his friendship) always put him off—Doll was but a child, not old enough to marry. She had the immature body of a girl of twelve. Give her time and she would grow. Deacon Thumb would not be put off. Was she not sixteen at the youngest? Had not his own mother married before that?
He was most cupidous. He wanted his son to become heir to the fine estate of Bilby. He did not heed what his wife said of danger. He cared more that his son should have a great property in this world than that his soul should be saved for the next. He was not an evil man, for he was a deacon in the Church. He was a heedless man, and too easily dismissed as gossip the true stories his wife forever whispered in his ear, in regard to this same Doll.
Mrs. Bilby was anxious that the girl should marry and so be out of the house. One day she said, ‘What shall we ever do with your Doll? There’s not a man in the town that would marry her.’ Mr. Bilby said that every unmarried man in the town would be glad to get her. Mrs. Bilby said, ‘You mean they would be glad to get a slice off your meadows.’ He said he would box her ears for her. She said Doll would be lucky if she got herself a vagabond, or a widowed man, or an old man of eighty. Mr. Bilby boxed her ears and went down to the tavern. Then he told Deacon Thumb that, although it broke his heart even to think of parting with his treasure, yet was marriage the one and only proper state for woman, and he would put her happiness even before his own. Moreover, his wife still hated the girl, even more than she had the night she first saw her, and although a good woman (and very handsome), yet she was hard. He said he had just boxed her ears and suggested that he was now willing to talk of the marriage settlement. He would do something very handsome by Doll. ‘For God knows,’ he said, ‘she is dear to me.’