Dominie Dean: A Novel

by Ellis Parker Butler

Wiggett, like many sober and respectable men, had little respect for men like Benedict, and he was never any too well pleased to see David in the doctor's company. To see David and Benedict together at the home of the Copperhead was bad indeed, and to see the evident friendship existing between David and the Copperhead and the Copperhead's wife and daughter was worse. Wiggett climbed into his buggy after a gruff greeting and drove away.

For several days after David's meeting with Wiggett at the farm the young dominie did not see Mary Wiggett. War times were busy times for the ministers as well as for the men at the front, and David's pastoral duties seemed to crowd upon him. Three of the “boys,” sent home to die, lay in their beds and longed for David's visits. He tried to grasp a few minutes to see Mary, but it was often long past midnight when he fell exhausted on his bed.

Gossip, once started in a small town, does not travel—it leaps, growing with each leap. It builds itself up like conglomerate, that mass of pebbles of every sort, shells and mud. In no two heads did the stories that were told about David during those days agree. The tales were a conglomerate of unpleasant lies in which disloyalty, infatuation for the Copperhead's daughter, hypocrisy, unhallowed love and much else were illogically combined. Of all this David suspected nothing. What Mary Wiggett heard can only be guessed, but it set her burning with jealousy of Rose Hinch and weeping with hurt pride.

It was not a week after his last visit to the Hinches that Sam Wiggett's man-of-all-work stopped at the manse, leaving a small parcel and a note for David. The parcel held the cheap little ring David had given Mary as a token of their engagement and the letter broke their engagement.

David was horrified. Again and again he read the letter, seeking to find in it some clew to Mary's act, but in vain. He hastened to her home, but she would not see him. He wrote, and she replied. It was a calmly sensible letter, but it left him more bewildered than ever. She begged him not to be persistent, and said her mind was made up and she could never marry him. She said he could see that if he forced his attentions or even insisted on making a quarrel of what was not one it would be harder for both, since she was a member of his church and, if he became annoying, one of them must leave.

Before giving up all hope David persuaded Dr. Benedict to see Mary. The good doctor returned somewhat dazed.

“She sat on me, Davy; she sat on me hard,” he said. “My general impression is that she meant to convey the idea that what Samuel Wiggett's daughter chooses to do is none of a drunken doctor's infernal business.”

“But would she give you no reason?” asked David.

“Now as to that,” said Benedict, “she implied quite plainly that if you don't know the reason it is none of your business either. She knows the reason and that's enough for the three of us.” David wrote again, and finally Mary consented to see him and set the day and hour; but, as if Fate meant to make everything as bad as possible for David, Benedict came that very afternoon to carry him out to Griggs Township to minister to Mrs. Hinch, who had broken down and was near her end. It was not strange that she should ask for David, but the town found in the two or three visits he made the dying woman additional cause for umbrage, and Mary, receiving David's message telling why he could not keep his appointment, refused to make another.

Through all this David went his way, head high and with an even mind. He felt the change in his people toward him and he felt the changed attitude of the town in general, but until the news reached him through little 'Thusia Fragg he did not know there was talk in some of the barrooms of riding him out of town on a rail.