The ORDEAL
OF
ELIZABETH
Chapter I
The Van Vorst Homestead stands close to the road-side; a dark, low-built, gloomy old place. The horse-shoe on the door, testifies to its age, and the devout superstition of the Van Vorst who built it. However effectual against witches, the horse-shoe cannot be said to have brought much luck otherwise. The Van Vorsts who lived there, a junior branch of the old colonial house, did not prosper in worldly matters, but sank more and more as time went on, in general respect and consideration.
There was a break in the deterioration, and apparently a revival of old glories, when Peter Van Vorst married his cousin, a brilliant beauty from town, who had refused, as tradition asserts, half the eligible men of her day, and accepted Peter for what seemed a sudden and mysterious caprice. The marriage was a nine days' wonder; but whatever the reasons that prompted her strange choice—whether love, indifference, or some feeling more complicated and subtle; Elizabeth Van Vorst made no effort to avert its consequences, but settled down in silence to a life of monotonous poverty. She did not even try, as less favored women have done under harder circumstances, to keep in touch with the world she had given up. She never wrote to her old friends, never recalled herself, by her presence in town, to her former admirers. As for the Homestead, it wore, under the inert indifference of her rule, the same neglected look which had prevailed for years. The foliage grew in rank profusion about the house till it shut out not only the sunlight, but all view of the river. Perhaps Madam Van Vorst, as people called her, disliked the idea of change; or perhaps she grudged the cost of a day's labor to cut the trees; or it might be that she liked the gloom and the feeling of confinement, and had no desire to feast her eyes on the river, after the fashion of the Neighborhood. It reminded her too much, perhaps, of the outside world.
She was a stately, handsome old lady, and made an imposing appearance when she came into church on Sunday, in the black silk gown which rustled with an old-time dignity, and her puffs of snow-white hair standing out against the rim of her widow's bonnet. Her daughters, following timidly behind her, seemed to belong to a different sphere; dull, faded women, in shabby gowns which the village girls would have disdained. If you spoke to them after church, when the whole Neighborhood exchanges greetings and discusses the news of the week, they would answer you shyly, in embarrassed monosyllables. Still, in some intangible way, you felt the innate breeding, which lurked behind all the uncouthness of voice and manner.
Their life, under their mother's training, had been one long lesson in self-effacement; they never even drove to the village without consulting her, or bought a spool of cotton without her permission. The stress of poverty, as time went on, grew less stringent at the Homestead; but with Madam Van Vorst the penury which had been first the result of necessity, had grown to be second nature. She let the money accumulate and made no change in their manner of life. Her daughters had no books, no teachers; no occupation but house-work; no interest beyond the petty gossip of the country-side.
With Peter, the son, the downward process was more evident and had taken deeper root. His voice was more uncouth than that of his sisters and his manner less refined; it was hard to distinguish him if you saw him in church, from any farmer, ill at ease in his Sunday clothes. He spent his days at work on the farm, and his evenings, more often than his mother dreamed of, at the bar in the village. Like his sisters, he bowed beneath her iron rod and lived in mortal fear of her displeasure. Yet he had his plans, well defined, and frequently boasted (at least at the village bar) of what he should do when he became his own master.