The Story of a Country Town

by E. W. Howe

I said she probably knew all about him already, and was satisfied.

“Do you suppose she does?” he inquired with the look of a pleasant hope in his face. “It would be comforting to know that, as it would be humiliating to tell her everything to my discredit I can think of. But if ever I become convinced that she loves me, I will tell her everything if it kills me.”

He talked as though he had been a great criminal in his time, but there was really nothing more serious against him than that his father was an eccentric shingle-maker, and his mother a midwife, if I except the circumstance that everybody said he came of a shiftless family.

“There seems to be no doubt that I am madly in love,” he repeated again, looking at the flame of his lantern, as though it were likely to give an opinion as to whether he was or not. “I don’t know whether to regard it as a serious circumstance or a pleasant one. They say that one’s first love does not amount to anything, and that one soon forgets it. It will not be that way with me, I am certain. I should be ashamed to offer my affections to another girl after having loved Mateel as madly as I do now, and I should feel that I was offering a poor return for the love I should expect of a wife. I am convinced that a man who has loved but once makes a better husband than one who is in doubt as to whether he ever loved at all. I would as soon marry a widow with children as a woman who has been engaged, and permitted the familiarities which are common under such circumstances. If there is anything in love at all, it is wrong to break an engagement. A man or woman who is so uncertain in matters of the heart as to contract a new fancy four or five times a year, is likely to be mistaken at last. I am not acquainted with many people who are happily married, but I am convinced that plenty of them may be found in looking the world over, and inquiry will no doubt reveal the fact that they were never in love but once. If I should marry, it would seriously affect my happiness to know that another man—I despise a man, anyhow—had caressed and fondled my wife as an accepted lover. I wouldn’t live in the same country with him, and I should be forever unhappy for fear that she loved him the best. It would be a circumstance very much in favor of a happy married life for a man to know that his wife had never seen anyone else she would marry; to know that her lips had touched only his, and that she was innocent as well as virtuous.”

I did not know much about such matters, but I thought Jo expected a great deal; perhaps too much. But he had grown so serious that I knew he was deeply concerned, and though I tried to change the subject, and talk about the mill, he answered me in such a way as to indicate that he would talk of nothing but Mateel that night. He was uneasy and worried in his manner, too, although I could not understand why, unless it was regret that he had been raised so poorly, and that he was only given opportunity to learn at seventeen; for I knew that in his affair with Mateel he had every reason to feel satisfied, except that he was so young and poor as to render thoughts of his marrying her almost ridiculous. It may have been that a knowledge of the possibilities of his future made him chafe and fret that he was compelled, from no fault of his own, to begin life so late, and that he feared failure under such circumstances, although success would have been certain under circumstances more favorable.

As if the thought were disagreeable, he picked up the lantern abruptly, and went down under the mill, leaving me in the dark, and he remained so long that at last I followed. I found him leaning against a heavy timber, looking at the flame in his lantern again, as though it could enlighten him if it would on certain matters of which he was anxious to know more.

“You are becoming as great a thinker as father, Jo,” I said, touching him on the shoulder, for he had been so occupied with his thoughts that he had not noticed my approach. “You used to dislike him very much for that.”

Recollecting himself, he pretended that he had come down to look at something, and after seeing that it was all right, we went up again.

“If I was thinking,” he said good-naturedly, “it was that I had never thought of loving until Mateel came in my way. The possibility that some day I should marry was so remote that I never considered it, and when you came down there just now, I was hoping that if ever I should marry Mateel—I don’t suppose I ever shall; it was only a fancy, and there is no harm in telling it—she would confess to me that thoughts of loving and marrying never came to her until she met me, as I intend to confess to her, and it will be God’s holy truth. I have never even divided my poor affection among my relatives; you have had it all, but I don’t think Mateel would object to that.”

Although he had only been there a short time, I thought Jo had grown to be a man since I had seen him last. He looked larger, and older, and acted and talked more like one than he did two months before, when he was a boy.