“How perfectly abominable!” burst out Esther. “I don’t wonder she despises the men if that’s the way she was treated.”
“She needn’t despise ’em all, need she?” said her grandfather, sharply. “There have been men that could wait as long as any woman. There was Jacob, for instance. He waited seven years for Rachel, working for a hard man all the time, and the Bible says they seemed like only a few days to him for the love he bore her. And then he worked for her seven years more.”
Esther was silent. There was no answer to this case of Jacob, dear old Jacob, a prince indeed, with all his meanness, since he could love like that!
“Do you suppose Aunt Katharine really cared for that man?” she asked after a moment.
“I guess most likely she did,” said her grandfather, nodding his head slowly. “She wasn’t the kind to say she’d marry a man unless she loved him. But she never made a sound after he left her. She held her head higher than ever, and the way she worked! You’d have thought she had the strength of ten women in her.”
He drew his hand reflectively across his chin for a moment, then added: “But somehow I never thought ’twas that affair with Levi that soured your Aunt Katharine as much as it was the way John Proctor acted. It was strange about Proctor. You see, in those days they could put a man in prison for debt, and he had got in debt—not so very deep, only a matter of three or four hundred dollars; but the man he owed it to was threatening to have the law of him if he didn’t pay, and there warn’t any way John could turn to get that money. There was nothing he could do but get out of the country, and I’m free to confess now that I helped him go.
“You see, we thought if he could once get into Canada, and work at his trade—he was a first-rate carpenter—he could pay off that money in a little while, and I agreed to do what I could for his family while he was gone. We went over everything together, and he talked as fair as a man could, and then I drove with him one day ’n’ night, and the relatives up New Hampshire way gave him a lift when he got there, and between us all he was over the border before folks round here knew he was gone. I thought then that I was doing my duty, for it was an unjust law, and they did away with it pretty soon after that; but looking back now, and seeing how things turned out, I sometimes wish I’d let John Proctor stay here, and take what came of it.”
“Why, didn’t he pay that money, after all?” asked Esther, as her grandfather paused.
“Pay it!” he repeated. “Not a cent of it; and what’s more we never saw hide or hair of him in this country again. For a while he wrote to his wife, and now ’n’ then sent her some money, but it got longer between times, and by’m by the letters stopped for good, though we heard of him now ’n’ then, and knew he was alive and earning a good living. I never could figure it out why he acted that way, for Nancy was a good wife, and up to the time he went away John seemed to think as much of his family as other men. There was such a thing in Bible times as folks being possessed with the devil,” he added solemnly, “and I have my suspicions that that was what ailed John Proctor.”
He paused when he had made this not wholly unkind suggestion, then went on: “It was terrible hard for all of us, but somehow it seemed as if it worked on Katharine more ’n anybody else. She hated the very name of John Proctor, but she took up the cudgels for his wife ’n’ children, and I always thought ’twas slaving for them, and seeing all they went through with, that set her so against the men. Mebbe she might have got over it some, when the children grew older, and times eased up a little, but then came that trouble to Ruth, the oldest of Nancy’s girls, and the one Katharine thought the most of.