As one lives his life, so he must be pitied in death. Soft deeds father soft memories. There never was but one man who rose with the recollection of pleasant dreams from pillowing his head upon a stone, and that man was under the hand of God. Isom Chase had planted bitterness; his memory was gall.
She was safe, and she was free. She had come into her expectations; the pre-nuptial dreams of enjoying Isom Chase’s wealth were suddenly at hand.
Together with the old rifle and Isom’s blood-stained garments, the coroner had taken away the little bag of gold, to be used as evidence, he said. He had taken the money, just as it was in the little sack, a smear of blood on it, after counting it before witnesses and giving her a receipt for the amount. Two thousand dollars; one hundred pieces of twenty dollars each. That was the tale of the contents of the canvas bag which had lain grinning on Isom’s pulseless heart. It was not a great amount of money, considering Isom’s faculty for gaining and holding it. It was the general belief that he had ten, twenty, times that amount, besides his loans, hidden away, and the secret of his hiding-place had gone out of the world with Isom.
Others said that he had put his money into lands, pointing to the many farms which he owned and rented in the county. 156 But be that as it might, there was Ollie, young and handsome, well paid for her hard year as Isom’s wife, free now, and doubtless already willing at heart to make some young man happy. Nobody blamed her for that.
It was well known that Isom had abused her, that her life had been cheerless and lonely under his roof. Those who did not know it from first-hand facts believed it on the general notoriety of the man. Contact with Isom Chase had been like sleeping on a corn-husk bed; there was no comfort in it, no matter which way one turned.
Ollie, her eyes closed languidly, now languidly opened to follow the track of the lamb-fleece clouds, her young body feeling warm and pleasant, as if lately released from a sorely cramped state; Ollie, with little fleeting dreams in her pretty, shallow head, was believed by the women of the neighborhood to be in the way of realizing on Isom’s expectations of an heir. It was a little fiction that had taken its beginning from Sol Greening’s early talk, and owing to that rumor the coroner had been gentle with her beyond the inclination of his heart.
The young widow smiled as she lay on her pillow and thought of the little intimate touches of tenderness which this baseless rumor had made her the beneficiary of at her neighbor’s hands. She was selfish enough to take advantage of their mistaken kindnesses and to surrender to their vigorous elbows the work below stairs. That was her day of freedom; it was her dawn of peace.
It was pleasant to have come through stress and hardship to this restful eddy in the storm of life; to have faced peril and disgrace and come away still clean in the eyes of men. Ollie was content with things as they were, as the evening shadows closed the door upon the events of that trying day.
Quite different was the case of Sarah Newbolt, once more back in her poor shelter, nested in bramble and clambering 157 vine. She was dazed, the song was gone out of her heart. She was bereaved, and her lips were moving in endless repetition of supplication to the Almighty for the safety and restoration of her son.
What was this grim thing of which they had accused her Joe? She could not yet get to the bottom of it, she could not understand how men could be so warped and blind. Why, Joe had told them how it happened, he had explained it as clear as well water, but they didn’t believe him. She went out and sat on the porch to think it out, if possible, and come to some way of helping Joe. There was not a friend to turn to, not a counselor to lean upon.