CHAPTER III
IN WHICH KEZIAH ASSUMES A GUARDIANSHIP
Didama would have given her eyeteeth—and, for that matter, the entire upper set—to have been present in that parsonage sitting room when the Rev. John Ellery made his appearance. But the fates were against Didama that day and it was months afterwards before she, or any of what Captain Zeb Mayo called the “Trumet Daily Advertisers,” picked up a hint concerning it. Keziah and Grace, acquainted with the possibilities of these volunteer news gatherers, were silent, and the Reverend John, being in some respects a discreet young man with a brand-new ministerial dignity to sustain, refrained from boasting of the sensation he had caused. He thought of it very often, usually at most inconvenient times, and when, by all the requirements of his high calling, his thought should have been busy with different and much less worldly matters.
“I declare!” said Mrs. Thankful Payne, after the new minister's first call at her residence, a week after his arrival at Trumet, “if Mr. Ellery ain't the most sympathetic man. I was readin' out loud to him the poem my cousin Huldy B.—her that married Hannibal Ellis over to Denboro—made up when my second husband was lost to sea, and I'd just got to the p'int in the ninth verse where it says:
'The cruel billows crash and roar,
And the frail craft is tempest-tossed,
But the bold mariner thinks not of life, but says,
“It is the fust schooner ever I lost.”'
And 'twas, too, and the last, poor thing! Well, I just got fur as this when I looked up and there was the minister lookin' out of the window and his face was just as red, and he kept scowlin' and bitin' his lips. I do believe he was all but sheddin' tears. Sympathy like that I appreciate.”
As a matter of fact, Mr. Ellery had just seen Grace Van Horne pass that window. She had not seen him, but for the moment he was back in that disgusting study, making a frenzied toilet in the dusk and obliged to overhear remarks pointedly personal to himself.
Grace left the parsonage soon after the supposed tramp disclosed his identity. Her farewells were hurried and she firmly refused Mrs. Coffin's not too-insistent appeal to return to the house “up street” and have supper. She said she was glad to meet Mr. Ellery. The young minister affirmed his delight in meeting her. Then she disappeared in the misty twilight and John Ellery surreptitiously wiped his perspiring forehead with his cuff, having in his late desire for the primal necessities forgotten such a trifling incidental as a handkerchief.
“Well, Mr. Ellery,” observed Keziah, turning to her guest, or employer, or incumbrance—at present she was more inclined to consider him the latter—“well, Mr. Ellery, this has been kind of unexpected for all hands, ain't it? If I'd known you was comin' to-day, I'd have done my best to have things ready, but Cap'n Elkanah said not before day after to-morrow and—but there, what's the use of talkin' that way? I didn't know I was goin' to keep house for you till this very forenoon. Mercy me, what a day this has been!”
The minister smiled rather one-sidedly.