"Did you speak, mother?"
No answer.
"I said we are to be men like him, Tom and I, if we can?"
He knew he had touched her to the quick somehow: his heart beat thick with the old childish terror, as he waited for her answer.
"Yes, you are to try, my son."
Martha Yarrow's frivolous chirruping voice was altered, with meaning in it he never had heard before, as if her answer came out of some depth where God had faced her soul, and forced it to speak truth. But when, after that, the boy, curious to know more, went on with his questions, she quieted him gravely, kissed him good-night, and turned over,—to sleep, he concluded, from her regular breathing. However, when Jem, after a while, began to snore, she got up and went to the kitchen-fire, kneeling down on the stone hearth: her head was on fire, and her body cold.
"So they shall be like him!" she whispered, with a fierce, baited look, as if by her wife's trust in him she defied the whole world. "I have kept my word. I've tried to make his sons what God made him in the beginning."
That was true: she had kept her word. Five years ago, when the great scandal came on the church in ——, and their minister was tried for forgery, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment in the penitentiary, the first letter his wife wrote to him there had these words: "For the boys, my husband, they never shall know of this thing. They shall know you as God and I do, Stephen. I'll make them men like you, if I can: except in your religion; for I believe, before God, the Devil taught you that."
When the man read that in his cell, a dry, quiet smile came over his face. He had not expected such a keen opinion from his shallow, easy-going wife: he did not think there was so much insight in her.
"It's a deep sounding you give, Martha, true or not," folding up the letter. "And so the boys will never know?" going back to his solitary cobbling, for they were making a shoemaker of him.