You will please observe that, so far as the members of the Wick family are concerned, they stand as clear at this point as they did when we got them down to bed-rock level, on the tenth of April, eighteen hundred and tumty-tum. Their ways have been ways of pleasantness, and their paths have been paths of peace. The two Wicks we are dealing with, like all the other Wicks, have kept their engagements and filled their contract. They have minded their own business and nobody else’s. They are, in fact, all straight on the record.
But now we have to recount the fortunes of two social reformers, and it is hard for a reformer to keep straight on the record. Whether they have a genuine reform on their hands, like Martin Luther or the Abolitionists, or whether they are like Mr. Harold Kettledrum Monocle, of New York, who thinks that the Mayor of that city ought to be elected by Harvard College, they are all likely to have what one might call a mote-and-beam sort of time with their neighbors.
Thus did it happen with Mr. Bodger, of Bunker’s Mills, and with Mr. Hackfeather, of Ellenville South Farms, who both found their way to Jericho Pond that pleasant afternoon, the theological student a little in advance of the business man. Mr. Hackfeather came to rebuke a shocking case of impropriety in two so young; Mr. Bodger came to express the sentiment of society at large toward a man who would inflict corporal chastisement on a lady.
Terrible as with an army with banners, and consumed with the fire of righteousness, Mr. Hackfeather bore down on the old-fashioned garden at the back of the bungalow, in the full glory of the Spring afternoon. As to his person, he was attired in a long, black diagonal frock-coat, worn unbuttoned, and so well worn that its flaps waved in the wind with all the easy grace of a linen duster. Trousers of the kind that chorus together: “We are pants,” adorned his long, thin but heavily-kneed legs. A shoestring necktie, a low cut waistcoat, and a whole-souled, oh-be-joyful shirtfront added to this simple but harmonious effect, and his last year’s hat had a mellow tone against the pale Springtime greens. He tackled Miss Hipsy (who had so far relented from her austerity as to take the baby while the nurse got dinner,) in that old-fashioned garden; and the benign influences of budding nature had no effect whatever upon his pious wrath. He pointed out the discrepancy in the dates of the vital statistics of the Wick family, and he told Miss Hipsy that she was
the servant of sin, (who had been a respectable woman for forty-three years, and if some as ought to know better said it was forty-seven there was no truth in it,) that she was the slave of iniquity and abettor of sin, (and if them she knowed of, one leastways, was alive to-day she would not be insulted,) that the demon vice should not rear its hideous head in that unpolluted community, (and she wasn’t rarin’ no heads, but she could go to them she knowed of as could rare their heads as high as him or any of his friends,) and that even if he, Mr. Hackfeather, had to face all the minions of Satan, and all the retinue of the Scarlet Woman, he would purify the stain or die in the attempt. Mr. Hackfeather’s allusion to the Lady of Babylon probably was born of a mixed condition of mind, and a desire to use forcible language. It did not seem clear to him and it did not seem clear to Miss Hipsy, either. She said she was no such a thing, and never expected to live to see the day she would be so called, especially at her time of life. And, tearful and vociferous, Miss Hipsy marched back to the bungalow, delivered over the baby to the Irish nurse, packed her little old hair trunk with the round top, dragged it down herself to the lakefront dock, and there sat on it in stern grandeur until the afternoon boat came down the lake and took her to Ellenville, presumably to the sheltering arms of them that she knowed of.
Meanwhile, a thing she did not know of was happening on the other side of the house in that same old-fashioned garden. Mr. Bodger, accompanied by Mr. Stalls and Mr. Wilkins, had arrived from Bunker’s Mills to interview the new arrival in the county, whose latitude in administering corporal punishment had aroused the indignation of every humane heart that had been made acquainted with the station master’s story. Mr. Bodger saw the departure of the weeping woman of elderly aspect, he heard her wails, and he saw their cause in a strange young man. This was all the evidence that he wanted. Mr. Bodger made no inquiries into identity or relationship. He weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, he had three men behind him, and he fell upon Mr. Hackfeather as the cyclone falls upon the chicken-coop.
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The consequences of these two meetings were so far-reaching, extending to warrants of arrest, counter charges, civil suits and much civiler compromises, that it was July before the ladies of the Bodger and Hackfeather families picked up their threads of social intercourse, which were knotted only at one point. To both of them it occurred on a fine Summer’s day to call on the new comers at the old bungalow by way of seeing whether the innocent causes of so much dire mischief knew anything about the agitation they had caused.