CHAPTER XVII. — HIS FATHER'S FRIENDS
It is the good fortune of some fatherless or motherless children to be adopted into good families where the natural love and care that have been denied them are supplied, as it were, by proxy. With young Quincy it was so, only much more so. It fell to his lot to be adopted by an entire town. Its residents had been, with few exceptions, his father's friends. The sad story of his father's loss at sea was known to all, and the town's heart warmed towards him; the town's arms were open to embrace him, and care for him.
To his Aunt Huldah Pettingill he seemed as though sent from another world. He was her husband's nephew, and hers—but there was a closer tie acknowledged within her own heart, and kept there as a precious secret. He was Quincy Adams Sawyer's son—the son of the man who had taught her what love was. It had been a bitter lesson, for when her heart was awakened, it was but to find that the one who had played upon its sensitive strings did not love her, and that her duty was to another who did love her. She had been a true and loving wife with no unsatisfied heart-longings, but—
“You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.”
So Huldah Mason still kept within a secret corner of her heart a fond remembrance of happy days gone by. And now Quincy's son was one of her family; she could be a mother to him and no one would have a right to question her manifestations of affection. It is often that the human heart thus finds solace for past sad experiences or suffering.
It was only natural that Huldah, after her father's death, should take her mother to her own home. The old Deacon had acquired enough of this world's goods to avoid the necessity of hard labour during the last years of his life. Good books had been his constant companions, and an old-fashioned cane-bottomed rocking chair his favourite seat upon the piazza or by the kitchen fire. Abner Stiles had done the necessary farm work and the household chores. When the Deacon passed away, the town lost one of its broadest-minded, most honest, most helpful citizens.
Mrs. Mason, still hale and hearty, assisted her daughter in her household duties, but allowed Abner to put up the clothes line and take it in.
“And this is his son, and his poor father—” The Deacon's good wife could say no more, but clasped little Quincy close to her motherly breast.
“You told me how it happened, Huldy, and I told father, but it don't seem real even now. His father was such a fine man.”
She stopped, for her daughter had turned her head away, and her mother knew that it was to brush away some tears that could not be kept back.