"I will not care," cried poor Cassie. "I will henceforth set my heart on nothing!"
Cassie was a woman of mighty will; her youth had trained her to strength. When her child climbed her knee, she put him away from her; when she remembered John Hartman's hopes for the occupation of the many rooms he had built in his house, she shook her head with a deep, choking, indrawn breath. It could never, never be!
But the human heart must have some object for its care or it will cease to beat. Upon her possessions, her house, her carpets, her furniture, Cassie set now her affection. These inanimate things had no power to deceive, to betray, to torture. Gradually they became so precious that her great rooms were like shrines, into which she went but seldom, but to which her heart turned as she sat alone by her kitchen window with her sewing or lay awake by her husband's side in the great wonderfully bedecked walnut bed which, to her thinking, human use profaned.
Thus, in the same house, eating at the same table, sitting side by side in church, watching their son grow into a young manhood which was as silent as their middle age, the guilty man and the unforgiving woman had lived side by side for almost fifteen years this Christmas Day. John Hartman had built no great church, rising like a cathedral on the hillside. He had not even presented the church with a communion service, being afraid of rousing suspicion. He had gathered great store for himself—an object in life toward which he had never aimed.
Millerstown suspected nothing, neither of the sin of John Hartman's youth, nor of his strange connection with the disappearance of the communion service, nor of poor Cassie's aching, hardening heart. Millerstown, like the rest of the world, accepted people as they were; it did not seek for excuses or explanations or springs of action. John Hartman was a silent and taciturn man—few persons remembered that he had been otherwise. Cassie was so unpleasantly particular about her belongings that she would not invite her neighbors to quiltings and apple-butter boilings, and so inhumanly unsocial that she would not attend those functions at other houses. There was an end of the Hartmans.
Gradually a second change came over John Hartman. His horror of discovery became a horror of his sin; he was bowed with grief and remorse.
"He has gone crazy over it!" he lamented. "William Koehler has gone crazy over it. I wish"—poor Hartman spoke with agony—"I wish he had proved it against me. Then it would all have been over long ago!"
When William Koehler's wife died, John Hartman struggled terribly with himself, but could not bring himself to make confession. From an upper window he watched the little cortège leave the house on the hill; he saw William lift his little boy into the carriage; he saw the cortège disappear in the whirling snow. But still he was silent.
When William in his insanity mortgaged his little house in order to pay dishonest and thieving men to watch John Hartman, John Hartman secured the mortgage and treasured it against the time when he would prove to William that he had tried to do well by him. John Hartman also bought other mortgages. When Oliver Kuhns, the elder, squandered his little inheritance in the only spree of his life, John Hartman helped him to keep the whole matter from Millerstown and restored to him his house. When one of the Fackenthals, yielding to a mad impulse to speculate, used the money of the school board and lost it, John Hartman gave him the money in secret. Proud Emma Loos never knew that her husband had wasted her little patrimony before he died. Sarah Benner never discovered that for days threat of prison hung over her son and that John Hartman helped him to make good what he had stolen.
But John Hartman's benefactions did not ease his soul. He came to see clearly that he must have peace of mind or he would die. He no longer thought of the disgrace to his wife and son; his thoughts had been for so long fixed upon himself that he could put himself in the place of no one else.