Elim paused with an impatient snort at this exhibition of shiftlessness. If the negroes were not soon freed they would be ruined beyond redemption. He read the remainder of the paper rigid and unapproving. It gave, he considered, such an excellent picture of Southern iniquities that he marked it B plus, the highest rating his responsibility had allowed Rosemary Roselle. Now he was certain that her very name held a dangerous potentiality—it came too easily to the tongue; it had a wanton sound like a silk skirt.
The warm glow faded from the room; without, the tenuous and bare upper branches of the maples wavered in the oncoming dusk. The river had disappeared. Elim was acutely conscious of the approaching hour of supper; and in preparation to go out to it he donned again the nankeen waistcoat and solemn garment that had served his father so long and so well.
IV
The following day was almost hot; at its decline coming across Winthrop Common Elim was oppressed and weary. Nothing unusual was happening at the boarding house; a small customary group was seated on the veranda steps, and he joined it. The conversation hung exclusively to the growing tension between North and South, to the forming of a Confederate States of America in February, the scattered condition of the Union forces, the probable fate of the forts in Charleston harbor.
The men spoke, according to their dispositions, with the fiery emphasis or gravity common to great crises. The air was charged with a sense of imminence, the vague discomfort of pending catastrophe. Elim listened without comment, his eyes narrowed, his long countenance severe. Most of the men had gone into Boston, to the Parker House, where hourly bulletins were being posted. Those on the steps rose to follow, all except Elim Meikeljohn—in Boston he knew money would be spent.
He went within, stopping to glance through a number of lately arrived letters on a table and found one for himself, addressed in his father's painstaking script. Alone, once more without his coat, he opened the letter. Its beginning was commonplace—“My dear son, Elim”—but what followed confused him by the totally unexpected shock it contained: Hester, his wife, was dead.
At first he was unable to comprehend the details of what had happened to him; the fact itself was of such disturbing significance. He had never considered the possibility of Hester's dying; he had come to think of her as a lifelong responsibility. She had seemed, in her invalid's chair, withdrawn from the pressure of life as it bore upon others, more enduring than his father's haggard concern over the increasing difficulties of material existence and spiritual salvation, than his mother's flushed toiling.
Elim had lived with no horizon wider than the impoverished daily necessity; he had accepted this with mingled fatality and fortitude; any rebellion had been immediately suppressed as a wicked reflection upon Deity. His life had been ordered in this course; he had accepted it the more readily from his inherited distrust of worldly values and aspirations; it had, in short, been he, and now the foundations of his entire existence had been overthrown.
He read the letter more carefully, realizing the probable necessity of his immediate return home for the funeral. But that was dispelled—his father wrote that it had been necessary to bury Hester at once. The elder Meikeljohn proceeded relentlessly to an exact exposition of why this had been done. “A black swelling” was included in the details. He finished:
“And if it would be inconvenient for you to leave your work at this time it is not necessary for you to come here. In some ways it would be better for you to stay. There is little enough for you to do and it would stop your money at college.... The Lord is a swift and terrible Being Who worketh His will in the night.”