IV. — A MAN THAT HAD A WELL IN HIS OWN COURT
In the kitchen court called the “Airy” at Abraham Van Elten's, there was one of those old family wells which our ancestors used to locate so artlessly. And when it tapped the kitchen drain, and typhoid took the elder children, and the mother followed the children, it was called the will of God. A gloomy distinction rested on the house. Abraham felt the importance attaching to any supreme experience in a community where life runs on in the middle key.
A young doctor who had been called in at the close of the last case went prying about the premises, asking foolish questions that angered Abraham. It is easier for some natures to suffer than to change. If the farmer had ever drunk water himself, except as tea or coffee, or mixed with something stronger, he must have been an early victim, to his own crass ignorance. He was a vigorous, heavy-set man, a grand field for typhoid. But he prospered, and the young doctor was turned down with the full weight and breadth of the Van Elten thumb, or the Broderick; Abraham's build was that of his maternal grandmother, Hillotje Broderick.
On the Ridge, which later developed into a valuable slate quarry, there was a spring of water, cold and perpetual, flowing out of the trap-formation. Abraham had piped this water down to his barns and cattle-sheds; it furnished power for the farm-work. But to bring it to the house, in obedience to the doctor's meddlesome advice, would be an acknowledgment of fatal mistakes in the past; would raise talk and blame among the neighbors, and do away with the honor of a special visitation; would cost no trifle of money; would justify the doctor's interference, and insult the old well of his father and his father's father, the fountain of generations. To seal its mouth and bid its usefulness cease in the house where it had ministered for upwards of a hundred years was an act of desecration impossible to the man who in his stolid way loved the very stones that lined its slimy sides. The few sentiments that had taken hold on Abraham's arid nature went as deep as his obstinacy and clung as fast as his distrust of new opinions and new men. The question of water supply was closed in his house; but the well remained open and kept up its illicit connection with the drain.
Old Becky, keeper of the widower's keys, had followed closely the history of those unhappy “cases;” she had listened to discussions, violent or suppressed, she had heard much talk that went on behind her master's back.
Employers of that day and generation were masters; and masters are meant to be outwitted. Emily, the youngest and last of the flock, was now a child of four, dark like her mother, sturdy and strong like her father. On an August day soon after the mother's funeral, Becky took her little charge to the well and showed her a tumbler filled, with water not freshly drawn.
“See them little specks and squirmy things?” Emmy saw them. She followed their wavering motion in the glass as the stern forefinger pointed. “Those are little baby snakes,” said Becky mysteriously. “The well is full of 'em. Sometimes you can see 'em, sometimes you can't, but they're always there. They never grow big down the well; it's too dark 'n' cold. But you drink that water and the snakes will grow and wriggle and work all through ye, and eat your insides out, and you'll die. Your mother”—in a whisper—“she drunk that water, and she died. Your sister Ruth, and Dirck, and Jimmy, they drunk it, and they died. Now if Emmy wants to die”—Large eyes of horror fastened on the speaker's face. “No—o, she don't want to die, the Loveums! She don't want Becky to have no little girl left at all! No; we mustn't ever drink any of that bad water—all full of snakes, ugh! But if Emmy's thirsty, see here! Here's good nice water. It's going to be always here in this pail—same water the little lambs drink up in the fields. Becky 'll take Emmy up on the hill sometime and show where the little lambs drink.”
Grief had not clouded the farmer's oversight in petty things. He noticed the innocent pail on the area bench, never empty, always specklessly clean.
“What is this water?” he asked.