In the morning the shutters were closed, and all about the house was still. The pigeons were cooing on the roof of the porch; and Captain David was dead, without seeing any reason to grumble. Down at the mill the miller watched his monotonous millstones grinding slowly.
The Elders' Seat was moved once more after Captain David died, not back to the Mediterranean, but further up the yellow road and into the minister's yard, facing westward. From there the captain's white slab could be seen through the cemetery gate. The two Elders occupied the seat some years, and then went in through the gate.
But the Elders' Seat and its journeys from place to place seemed to have some curious meaning, hardly to be spelled. I imagine this far, at least: that at a certain point it became to the two more natural, more quiet and happy, to turn their eyes in the direction the captain had gone than in the direction they had all come. It pleased them then to move the Elders' Seat a little nearer to the gate. And when the late hour came, it was rather a familiar matter. The minister went in to look for his Master, and the miller according to his' notion of things.
THE ROMANCE OF THE INSTITUTE
Not quite two centuries of human life have gone quietly in Wimberton, and for the most part it has been on Main and Chester Streets. Main Street is a quarter of a mile long and three hundred feet wide, with double roads, and between them a clean lawn shaded by old elms. Chester Street is narrow and crowded with shops, and runs from the middle of Main down-hill to the railway and the river. It is the business street for Wimberton and the countryside of fifteen miles about. Main Street is surrounded by old houses of honorable frontage, two churches, and the Solley Institute, which used to be called “Solley's Folly” by frivolous aliens.
Mr. Solley, who owned the mines up the river and the foundries that have been empty and silent these many years, founded it in 1840. At the time I remember best the Institute had twenty-one trustees, lady patronesses, matrons, and nurses; and three beneficiaries, or representatives of the “aged, but not destitute, of Hamilton County.” That seemed odd to the alien.
Mr. Solley need not have been so rigid about the equipment and requirements of admission, except that he had in mind an institution of dignity. It stood at the head of Main Street, with wide piazzas like a hotel. The aristocracy of old Wimberton used to meet there and pass the summer afternoons. The young people gave balls in the great parlors, and the three beneficiaries looked on, and found nothing to complain of in the management. What matter if it were odd? True Wimberton folk never called the Institute a folly, but only newcomers, before years of residence made them endurable and able to understand Wimberton. Failure is a lady of better manners than Success, who is forward, complacent, taking herself with unpleasant seriousness. Imagine the Institute swarming with people from all parts of the county, a staring success in beneficence!
Mr. Solley's idea was touched with delicacy. It was not a home for Hamilton County poor, but for those who, merely lingering somewhat on the slow descent, found it a lonely road. For there is a period in life, of varying length, when, one's purposes having failed or been unfulfilled, the world seems quite occupied by other people who are busy with themselves. Life belongs at any one time to the generation which is making the most of it. A beneficiary was in a certain position of respectable humility. But I suppose it was not so much Mr. Solley's discrimination as that in 1840 his own house was empty of all but a few servants; and so out of his sense of loneliness grew his idea of a society of the superannuated. That was the Solley Institute.