Those who know say that Xoa knelt all night in her new bow window, with her face against the glass, and when morning came she called the carpenters again, and with clamour of hammers and rasp of saws they took off the bow window and boarded the side of the building up. And then—it being a case where the solemn ceremony could be deferred till all was ready—she secured a casket from the city, put into it all the pathetic old clothes that had been turned over to her with Moses’s dunnage-bag, called in the parson and the neighbours, and the funeral of Moses Britt was decorously carried out in a house upon which the soul of the bridegroom-elect could look down from on high and not take exceptions.
For forty years after that, until death took her, Xoa lived an old maid in the bow-windowless house.
It is not likely that Squire Phin Look used this case or any others similar for precedents in heart affairs, as he would have employed law-court decisions in his legal practice, but he had in his New England temperament a finer grade of the same iron-stone that is found in such dispositions as those of Moses and Xoa.
So much for the steadiness and the reserve of his affection in the past.
Since that unfortunate day in the fall there had been something else than reserve to make him walk hastily past the Willard place, to keep him away from the little social gatherings in the meeting-house vestry, and he avoided Sylvena Willard with as much anxiety as she appeared to avoid him. He was as ashamed of that blow as he would have been of a crime. Now that the rage of the provocation had departed, he knew that his act had been a vulgar street affray—there was no other word for it in his vocabulary.
When some of the jesters in the attorneys’ room at county court mentioned the affair at the December term with many humorous inquiries, he was so overwhelmed with shame that he asked continuance for most of his cases and hurried home.
Yet he heard other things at that term of court that disquieted him more.
“Why, Look, I know it!” one of his lawyer friends had insisted, when he ventured to remonstrate at certain gossip. “I don’t know how much property Judge Willard has got, nor what resources are back of him. But I do know that he is as pinched for ready money as the devil. I can talk with you without it’s going any farther; but being a trustee in a savings bank and a director in a national bank, I come pretty near knowing when a man is hustling hard for loans, and you can tell how hard he is hustling from the kind of collateral he is offering. I’ve got nothing against the Judge, but I’m afraid he’s in over his head with Bradish. Your Bradish has been a country plunger for a long time—and the country plunger is the worst of the breed. He thinks he knows it all and is working the stock market at arm’s length. I know, myself, that one bucket shop let him down for sixteen thousand in a single blind pool. Willard seems to have played fox with you folks in Palermo through it all, and, of course, he’s had a great start of you with his reputation and all that. But if he’s your town treasurer, as I hear he is, and custodian of about all the funds of widows and orphans and old codgers in your town, give him a looking over and do it right away. You can’t afford to let even a Willard dump the whole of you—especially when it looks to me as though this Bradish is the chap responsible for getting him into this mess and has gobbled most of the money.”
But even with that warning to spur him, Squire Look allowed the weeks to pass without setting about any thorough investigation of Judge Willard’s finances. If he were any other than Seth Look’s boy—-Hiram Look’s brother, he felt that the case would be different. Whenever he paused in his work to ponder on the matter and on his duty to the citizens, he groaned under his breath and put the thing away from him once more.
And as the winter went on the Squire found less and less time to think upon anything but his own matters.