“Seemed as if she didn’t want to commit him, and the other deacons thought ’twas a clear case he ought to marry Polly. It sort of ’peared to me that it or’ to be Huldy, but of course I couldn’t prove it, and anyway ’twas three to one. So I gave in to the rest, and to settle all the talk, we had Jotham and Polly published in church the next Sunday. They did say Jotham turned dreadful white when they told him how we’d settled it, but he married Polly at the set time, and as far as I know they always got along well together.”
“What become of Huldah?” queried Esther.
“Huldy?” said the deacon, reflecting. “Well, she stayed single till she must have been upward of thirty; then she married a widower, and everybody said ’twas a good match.”
There was silence for some time, then Esther said, with her eyes on the sky, over which the clouds were shifting uneasily, “Grandfather, do you think a person could have any doubt in his own mind as to which one of two people he cared for most, if—if he was really in love with either of them?”
“I ain’t sure but he might,” said the deacon, slowly. “It takes a good while to get acquainted with folks, and I don’t know but it’s about as hard sometimes to know your own mind, as ’tis to know anybody else’s—even if ’tis inside of you.” And then he added briskly, “But it stan’s to reason that a man or’ to have a care how far he goes before he gets things cleared up.”
She seemed not to hear the last remark. “But if you had known a person for a long, long time,” she said insistently, “there couldn’t be any doubt then, could there?”
Again, like the wise man he was, the deacon answered slowly, “Well, a body or’ to get his mind made up in a reasonable length of time,” he said. “There was Nathan Weyler went to see Patty Foster every Saturday night for thirty years before he asked her to marry him. I should call that slow! But there is such a thing as seeing so much of folks—being so close to ’em, you know—that you don’t really get as good a sight at ’em as you would if they were farther off. It’s getting your attention drawn somewhere else, and seeing what’s in other folks sometimes, that wakes you up to what there is in those you thought you knew best.”
Esther, whose eyes had been fixed on her grandfather’s face intently during this reply, looked suddenly back at the sky. She had thought there were no stars to-night, but she was aware, all at once, that there were four or five shining straight before her. Had they all come out in the last moment, or was it an illustration of what he had just been saying?
Her voice shook a little, and she did not look at her grandfather as she asked her next question. “But if it came to you that there was more in somebody than you had realized—if you saw more to admire than you ever did before—that wouldn’t be enough, would it? I mean, it wouldn’t be right to marry for anything but love, would it?” She broke suddenly off, then began again with a nervous, half-incoherent swiftness. “That man, for instance, that you were telling me about, and Huldah. If he had just felt sorry for her, and it kept coming to him all the time that he hated to leave her, because—because he had known her so long, and he knew it would be hard for her, and she was so good and true—all that wouldn’t be enough to make him marry her, would it?”
Strange that she should be so deeply stirred over that old story of so long ago! Her hands trembled so much that she had to press them together to hold them still when she had finished.