A certain order had been established at the house in Roxbury by the end of the summer months of confusion. Four friends—Reuben was well aware of it—had built a sort of wall of defense around a youth who was legally not yet a man and an old man who could scarcely move or speak: Amadeus Welland, William Heath the captain of the sloop Hebe, Sam Tench, and Gideon Hibbs. Reuben was formally apprenticed to the doctor; Harvard, by Reuben's wish, vetoed. On a morning when, according to his own tortured speech, his mind was very clear, John Kenny wrote out in a wild but readable scrawl his desire that Welland, Heath, Tench and Hibbs be appointed trustees for his affairs while he remained disabled; the court allowed it, giving Tench a limited power of attorney. The warehouse and wharf were mortgaged, and rented to Mr. Riggs of Salem, the most merciful of Kenny's creditors.
Reuben discovered with no surprise that it was quite simple to get along without five pairs of shoes; also to tend the garden and scythe the lawn at odd moments without the aid of Rob Grimes. Hibbs too had been obliged to find employment with another family at Roxbury whose son and heir required cramming, but he continued to live at Kenny's house, insisting on paying for his room and board, nagging Reuben to continue his Greek—was not Hippocrates a Greek?—and trying to drive a little more general learning into the boy, but underhandedly as it were, under the pretense that he was merely keeping up with his own studies at the borders of philosophy. The sloop Hebe, unmortgaged, ran her small profitable errands between Boston and Newport like a dog who will go on herding sheep or guarding the house into the shadows of old age, not even asking for a pat on the head. Even Rob Grimes strolled over occasionally, pecking peevishly at odd jobs and refusing pay for it; he ceased perhaps only because Kate was singularly short and cold with him.
It seemed to Reuben that by spending a lifetime in contemplation of human love and loyalty, you might learn one or two things about people, but not their limits. One could simply note: under certain conditions, certain members of the human race—most, maybe—are capable of supreme goodness. The Preacher Ecclesiastes was old, weary, holding some unreal scale of value; disappointed, like enough, because these bewildered passion-ridden beings fell so far short of his private image of the godlike. You could not watch Amadeus Welland making grave monkey faces under his wig for the hilarious comfort of a sick child, and say that all is vanity. That was no fair example, because Amadeus was not as other men; so consider—well, Kate Dobson, who called herself common and stupid, and would be spending uncalculated kindness to the day she died.
The Preacher's namesake was loyal too. Through all vicissitudes he remained a beat-up yellow tomcat, charging not a farthing for the privilege of scratching him under his evil chin....
The same human race included that devil Shawn, the bronze butchers who fell upon Deerfield, a smiling murderer with one eye. Of course.
Sometimes also Reuben speculated: If they—Heath, or Hibbs, or Tench, or even dear Kate—if ever they knew that I am a monster, a lusus naturae, a two-headed calf, a moral leper so outlandish and beyond hope of forgiveness that, were my nature known, even the children in the street would be a bit afraid to throw dead cats and dung—what then? Would there then be any part of this earth where Amadeus and I might go, and not be hated, driven, feared, utterly condemned?... The thought came only in the darkest hours; seldom if ever when he was with Mr. Welland, the world excluded, the ugly pockmarked face an unfathomable essay in the beautiful, the moment blazing or peaceful as sun on summer grass. Here in the mist, the fear touched him as an almost trivial thing, an arrow missing the mark, a fire burning somewhere else, a lesson glimpsed further on in the book. Blessed be the mask—and yet I hate it, will ever hate it, wearing it only because I wish to live, remembering it was not worn in the time that some have named the Golden Age.
If I am a monster—who seem to myself a young man not incapable of the earthly virtues, who love the sun and rain as well as any man and would never willingly do a dishonest thing or hurt anyone, who need and rejoice like any man in all the harmless glory of the senses—then who made me a monster? If I am evil, who set the standard whereby men and women are to be judged? Let Mr. Cotton Mather tell me God did so and will punish the transgressor: I am not interested, nor is Amadeus, who doth believe in God after his own fashion.
Reuben knew he was near the beech tree. He put out his hand to find the amiable tower of it and leaned against it in the mist, remembering. I stood here last year, having made certain discoveries. A good day—April, I think. Ben rode home smiling. A long time ago.
It was never possible to hold away for any long stretch of minutes the knowledge that Ben was gone. One schooled the mind to repeat that lesson, though it might whimper and snarl miserably in repeating it: He is probably lost. Then, the lesson driven home once more, he turned usually to Vesalius, or Micrographia, or Neurologia Universalis (Ben's gift!), or the collected works of Ambroise Paré, or the Severall Surgical Treatises of Richard Wiseman, because Mr. Welland said it was time for him to acquire a small preliminary hint of the enigmas of knife and suture.
"But why do so many die after trifling minor surgery? Don't we all suffer small cuts and bruises repeatedly and take no harm by it?"