“Why, for fear, if I should do it, and you should marry me on the strength of it, and we should be poor, see hard times, and people should look down on us, that then you might perhaps feel—” And here he stopped again.
“Feel what?”
“Why,” stammered Ben, finding he must out with it, “feel that if you had only married some of these young men that I know have offered themselves to you, and that had rich fathers, instead of poor Ben Rhines, you wouldn’t have needed to have brought the water to wash your hands.”
“When I marry,” replied Sally, bluntly, “I shall not marry anybody’s father, but the boy I love. Now, let’s hear your plan, Ben.”
“You know,” he replied, more slowly than he had ever spoken before in his whole life, “the island off in the bay that father has had the care of so many years?”
“What, Elm Island?”
“That’s it.”
“Yes, indeed! I’ve been there a hundred times with our Sam and Seth Warren, after berries.”
“It’s the best land that ever lay out doors, covered with a heavy growth of spruce and pine, fit for spars; many of them would run seventy feet without a limb. I think old Mr. Welch would sell it on credit to any one he knew, and that anybody might cut off the timber, and have the land, and wood enough to burn, left clear. It would make a splendid farm, and a man might pick up considerable money by gunning and fishing; but,” said Ben, his countenance falling, “what a place for a woman! No society, no neighbors, right among the breakers; and sometimes, in the winter, there’ll be a month nobody can get on nor off. It would be a good place to get a living, and lay up money; but no woman would go on there, and a man would be a brute to ask her. I’m sorry I said anything about it.”
“There’s one woman will go on there,” replied Sally, “and not repent of it after she gets there either; and that woman’s Sally Hadlock. I hold that if a girl loves a man well enough to marry him, she’ll be contented where he is, and she won’t be contented where he isn’t. As to the society, I had rather be alone with my husband than have all the society in the world without him. I had rather be on an island with my husband, working hard, and carrying my share of the load, than to be in the best society, and have every comfort, and at the same time know that my husband is beating about at sea, in sickly climates, perhaps dying, with nobody to do for him, in order to support me in luxury and laziness, or in circumstances of comfort which he cannot enjoy with me; and I say that any woman, that is a woman, will say amen to it. We may have a hard scratch of it at first, and have to live rough; but I have always been poor; it’s nothing new to me. What reason on earth is there, bating sickness or death, why we should not get along? I’ve always maintained myself, and helped maintain my mother and family. You have maintained yourself, paid your father’s debts, and more too, for you have helped my mother lots.”