The Story of a Country Town

by E. W. Howe

WHETHER Jo left a message with me for Mateel I do not now remember, it seems so long ago, but it must have been an unimportant one if he did, for, from the time of their separation to his death, he talked of her only as one who had deliberately meditated and agreed to his disgrace. Although he always loved her, he believed that his memory must have passed entirely out of her mind during the time they lived apart, and was ashamed to confess it, even to me, in the face of her contemplated marriage to Clinton Bragg, which she must have known was the greatest humiliation to which she could subject him, and if he left any word at all, it was only a regret that their lives had been mutually so unhappy. I had not seen her, or talked with any one who had, since the dreadful night when I carried her moaning into her father’s house, and I knew nothing of her except occasional rumors which came to me from people who passed that way that she was very ill, and that but few went to the Shepherds’, and that none of those who did ever saw Mateel.

But the appearance of her father at Jo’s grave, and his tender tribute to the memory of my dead friend, affected me so much that I felt it my duty to call at their house before I slept. I cannot explain this determination further than that I was anxious to appear among them; it may have been that I wanted to tell them how good and brave Jo had always been, and how much he loved his wife to the last, or it might have been that I was convinced there was some terrible mistake on our part, for the appearance of Mr. Shepherd as we stood around the grave implied that he had one friend among them, although we had always imagined that they were all against him. However it was, I could not resist the impulse to call at their house that night, and when we arrived at the mill after the burial, I informed Barker and Agnes of my determination. They offered no objection, if they said anything at all, and I still remember that both bade me good-night tenderly when I drove away into the darkness, leaving them standing at their door.

There was a road from Barker’s to the home of the Shepherds’ which followed the river a distance, and then led up on to the divide where their house was built, and I was very familiar with it, having travelled it many times. It was the road which Jo had used on his visits to Mateel when he was an apprentice at Barker’s, and part of it the road which Clinton Bragg had travelled on his fatal journey the night he was married to Mateel, and if I saw one spectre in the darkness around me, I saw a thousand. The story I have written was produced in white lines etched on the darkness of the night—Jo returning from the minister’s house, young and hopeful; Jo going to his own home, with Mateel by his side, a little older, and looking careworn, but still hopeful; Jo coming toward Barker’s after the separation from Mateel, with a frown upon his face so fierce and distressed that I could not tell whether his enemy should pity or fear him; Jo skulking behind the trees, and watching up the road; Jo carrying Mateel in his arms, and clambering up the hill which led from the mill to his house; Jo in jail, with the white shroud about him, under which none of us was to look, and wherever I turned my eyes, upward or downward, to the right or to the left, ahead or behind, was his grave, which I had just left at Fairview. Clinton Bragg was lying under every tree, first as I had seen him dead in the woods, and then as he lay surrounded by the crowd in the town, and walking wearily in front of me was my father, bending low under a heavy burden which he carried. If I whipped up the horses, and hurried on, the spectre disappeared for a moment, but after I had slowed up again, and had almost forgotten it in feeling my way through the trees, it appeared ahead of me as before, only that the load he carried was heavier, and that he pursued his journey with more difficulty. This fancy took such hold upon my imagination that I thought of the distant light which finally appeared as the lamp which always burned in my mother’s room, toward which the bending figure was always travelling, and when it turned out to be a light in Mr. Shepherd’s window, I looked about for the man with the load on his back, but he had disappeared, with Jo, and Bragg, and the rest of them.

My timid knock at the door was answered by Mr. Shepherd himself, who carried a light in his hand, as he did on the night when I had seen him last, and he seemed as much surprised as when I had stood on the same steps a few months before, bearing his moaning child in my arms, for he started back, and, throwing his unoccupied hand to his head, looked first at me and then around the room, as though he ought to recollect, but somehow could not. When he recovered himself, which he did apparently on discovering that I carried no insensible form in my arms, he set down the light he carried to the door, and asked me to be seated, which I did, feeling uncertain whether, after all, I had not better have remained away, not knowing what to say my errand was should he ask the question.

He put his hand to his head again, as if he always felt a pain there now, and could only forget it in moments of excitement, and then, resting his arm on the table at which he had seated himself, looked at the floor in the piteous, helpless way which was common to him. I thought if he had spoken it would have been that he was very sorry, but really he could not help it. He brushed the tears out of his eyes with his sleeve, as my father did when I had seen him last, and as though he had been warned not to cry, and for the first time in my life I thought the two were much alike; perhaps all men are alike when they are old, and poor, and broken. I knew now for the first time that he was distressed as much on Jo’s account as on Mateel’s; that there was equal pity in his heart for them both, for his manner indicated it as much as if he had made the declaration.

“My poor children,” he said, as if they both stood before him, “how you both have suffered! And neither to blame. Both of them were always doing what they thought to be for the best, but always wrong. My poor children!”

I had never thought of this before; neither to blame, and always wrong, but I felt now that it was true. In my own mind I had accused Mateel, but her good old father called them both his unhappy children, and said neither was to blame, and in my heart I could not think less.

“When Mateel came home after the unfortunate separation,” Mr. Shepherd continued, timidly looking about the room, as if to assure himself that no ghosts were present to accuse him, “although I thought it was but a temporary affair, I regretted it no more on account of the one than the other, and through it all—during the long months which have brought nothing to this house but bruised and broken hearts—I have had this sentiment, and no one has spoken ill of him here any more than they have spoken ill of Mateel. This is as true as that I have spoken it, for with the graves filling up around me so rapidly, I could not give reason for a wrong inference, even if I were anxious to excuse a mistaken action. Jo has always had justice done him here the same as Mateel.”

I was surprised to hear this, for I had felt that Mrs. Shepherd and Bragg had upbraided Jo to Mateel, to induce her to take the step she did, and that her father held his peace, if he did not approve of it. We never talked about it, but this was the understanding Jo and I had, and I think we accepted it so thoroughly that we blamed Mateel that she permitted it. We thought she had little regard for her husband that she allowed her mother and Clinton Bragg to counsel her against him, and I began to realize that in this we had been cruel and unjust.

“I allowed them to do what they pleased,” he went on again slowly and painfully, “hoping and praying it would all turn out for the best, but I always thought of Jo as one of my children, and have been tempted to call on him in his lonely home and tell him how sorry I was it had happened. I knew how unhappy a man of his fine ability must have been under such unfortunate circumstances, but my pride kept me from it. I see now that there has been too much pride all around in this affair; I have known it all the time, but—” I knew what he was going to say—“but I could not help it; really, I could not; I have done the best I could, but it has gone wrong in spite of me.”