“I’ve never said this before to any man, sir, but I’d have been a better husband to Ellen. Mary was a faithful wife, and better than I deserved. But she was not just aware, like Ellen, of where to bear on hard and where to go a little easy. That’s what a man needs in a woman, sir. Ellen always knew just when and where.”
The next morning, which was Saturday, I was riding down Bare Hill Road—as it chanced, right past Miss Tabby’s—when my horse shied; and that tiny old lady, with an enormous gray cat beside her, rose up from behind the lilac bushes. Bigger people than “little Ellen” have been frightened by Prince’s antics, but she quietly put her hand on his restive neck as if he were only a little larger kitten, and then spoke to me in a soft little purr of a voice:
“I’ve heard—and you’ll excuse me—that you’re a lawyer, Mr. Alden; and I’ve a small matter I don’t wish to entrust to any one here, being private. It’s a letter for Mr. Thomas Sewall, to be delivered upon my demise, which I feel is about to take place.” She spoke with a little note of relief, as if from some long strain.
I took the small envelope.
“It’s just the cats,” she was moved to confide further; “the little ones and the smart ones will all find friends. But the two old ones! Mr. Sewall has a notion for the old things. And”—here she hesitated long, while I breathlessly assured her of my best care for the letter—“there’s—somewhat in the note besides the cats,” she brought out bravely. “You’ll make sure it doesn’t fall into John and Mary’s hands?”
This was Saturday morning. Sunday, as I listened absent-mindedly to the slow toll of the meeting-house bell, my houskeeper remarked, on bringing in my coffee:
“Did you notice, sir? It was eighty-six. There’s an old man and an old woman, both just the same age, in the village, died in the night.”
The old chair, upon which—when they were young together—the little Tom had been spanked and comforted; and the mirror, still treasuring the picture of the round, saucy phiz over his mother’s shoulder, were offered at auction and bid in for a trifle by me. I would have paid gold sovereigns for them, but not into the hands of John and Mary! The cats, likewise, sit by the hearth, on which was burned to ashes the letter “not entirely” about their disposal.
And the “Old Things” that cherished these earthly companions? The minister—himself a rare “old thing”—preached a funeral sermon for the two so strangely united by death; and his thin voice, like the tone of an old, cracked violin, still haunts me:
“Their youth is renewed like the eagle’s.... And they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”