A canopied four-poster filled the center of Madam Cory's bedroom, a neat pleasant room with western windows that would overlook the river by daylight. The quiet woman sat by one of these, pallid hands folded in her gray-skirted lap. Her eyes were, like Reuben's, ocean-gray, but unacquainted with laughter. A table beside her held a leather-bound Bible and one candle in a pewter sconce.
"Well, come to me then! Are you afeared of an old woman?"
Ben was dazed to discover—so vast had been the infantile image—that his grandmother was not large at all. She sat no higher in the little chair than Reuben would have done. "We are not—not too presentable, Grandmother."
"That's no matter. You must be Benjamin—awkward still, I see. And Reuben, whom I never saw—yes, yes, anyone would know you for brothers. You take after your mother's side somewhat, in appearance." Rachel Cory sighed gustily. "Thankful heart, Benjamin—don't cry! We all die, don't we? Pity but men would give more thought to what cometh after. I said don't cry. Your father's death, Benjamin, is a grievous thing, and you will remember that I have lost a son. Am I weeping? Am I, my dear?"
"No, Grandmother."
"Benjamin, let us understand one another from the beginning. I remember you as a child, willful and headstrong. If you and Reuben are to bide here until you can maintain yourselves, as of course you shall, you must walk in the one right way. Your father erred, who might have been one of the Saints; concerning your poor mother, I will not speak. Your father strayed. Benjamin, Reuben, in the Book of Psalms it is written: The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Reuben heard and did not hear his grandmother: the sound of words in her deep, positive voice reached him, but not the meaning—it was not as though she had spoken in a foreign language, but as though his own comprehension were momentarily numb. He saw Ben look away from her in stunned blankness, and then no more reflection was possible, for a wild hoarse singing had broken loose in the night outside.
Rachel Cory winced and leaned to her window; it was too dark, Reuben guessed, for anything to be recognized. "Well," she said with the precision of disgust, "there is one heedless enough. You might as well understand, Springfield is no Canaan."
"Brave Benbow lost his legs, by chain-shot, by chain-shot,
Brave Benbow lost his legs—"