But I must turn now to other scenes and more stirring events, having I trust made the reader well enough acquainted with father, mother, and daughter, at least sufficiently for all the purposes of this tale. It is upon the characters of two of them that all the interest if there be any depends. Let them be marked then and remembered, if the reader would derive pleasure from what follows.
CHAPTER VI.
Reader, can you go back for twenty years? You do it every day. You say, "Twenty years ago I was a boy--twenty years ago I was a youth--twenty years ago I played at peg-top and at marbles--twenty years ago I wooed--was loved--I sinned--I suffered!"
What is there in twenty years that should keep us from going back over them? You go on so fast, so smoothly, so easily on the forward course--why not in retrogression? But let me tell you: it makes a very great difference whether Hope or Memory drives the coach.
But let us see what we can do. Twenty years before the period at which the last chapter broke off, Philip Hastings, now a father of a girl of fifteen, was a lad standing by the side of his brother's grave. Twenty years ago Sir John Hastings was the living lord of these fine lands and broad estates. Twenty years ago he passed, from the mouth of the vault in which he had laid the clay of the first-born, into the open splendor of the day, and felt sorrow's desolation in the sunshine. Twenty years age, he had been confronted on the church-yard path by a tall old woman, and challenged with words high and stern, to do her right in regard to a paltry rood or two of land. Twenty years ago he had given her a harsh, cold answer, and treated her menaces with impatient scorn.
Do you remember her, reader? Well, if you do, that brings us to the point I sought to reach in the dull flat expanse of the far past; and we can stand and look around us for awhile.
That old woman was not one easily to forget or lightly to yield her resentments. There was something perdurable in them as well as in her gaunt, sinewy frame. As she stood there menacing him, she wanted but three years of seventy. She had battled too with many a storm--wind and weather, suffering and persecution, sorrow and privation, had beat upon her hard--very hard. They had but served to stiffen and wither and harden, however.
Her corporeal frame, shattered as it seemed, was destined to outlive many of the young and fair spirit-tabernacles around it--to pass over, by long years, the ordinary allotted space of human life; and it seemed as if even misfortune had with her but a preserving power. It is not wonderful, however, that, while it worked thus upon her body, it should likewise have stiffened and withered and hardened her heart.
I am not sure that conscience itself went untouched in this searing process. It is not clear at all that even her claim upon Sir John Hastings was not an unjust one; but just or unjust his repulse sunk deep and festered.
Let us trace her from the church-yard after she met him. She took her path away from the perk and the hamlet, between two cottages, the ragged boys at the doors of which called her "Old Witch," and spoke about a broomstick.