"I would not have you practise hypocrisy, my son; but I would not have you withdraw yourself from any of the appointed means of grace."
And at this Reuben went out,—out far upon the hills, from which he saw the village roofs, and the spire, and the naked tree-tops, the fields all bare and brown, the smoke of a near house curling lazily into the sky; and the only sound that broke the solemn stillness was the drumming of a partridge in the woods or the harsh scream of a belated jay.
Never had Reuben been more kind or attentive to the personal wants of the old gentleman than on the days which followed upon this interview. There was something almost like a daughter's solicitude in his watchfulness. On the next Sunday the Doctor preached with an emotion that was but poorly controlled, and which greatly mystified his people. Twice in the afternoon his voice came near to failing. Reuben knew where the grief lay, but wore a composed face; and as he supported the old gentleman home after service, he said, (but not so loudly that Adèle could hear, who was tripping closely behind,)—
"Father, I grieve for you,—upon my soul I do; but it's fate."
"Fate, Reuben?" said the Doctor, but with a less guarded voice,—"fate? God only is fate!"
The Doctor was too much mortified by this revelation of Reuben's present state of feeling to make it the subject of conversation, even with Miss Eliza, and much less with the elders of his flock. To Squire Elderkin, indeed, whose shrewd common-sense he had learned to value even in its bearings upon the "weightier matters of the law," he had dropped some desponding reflections in regard to the wilful impetuosity of his poor son Reuben, from which the shrewd Squire at once suspected the difficulty.
"It's the blood of the old Major," he said. "Let it work, Doctor, let it work!"
From which observation, it must be confessed, the good man derived very little comfort.
Miss Eliza, though she is not made a confidant in these latter secrets of the study, cannot, however, fail to see that Reuben's constancy to the Doctor's big folios is on the wane, and that symptoms of his old boyish recklessness occasionally show themselves under the reserve which had grown out of his later experiences. She has hopes from this—true to her keen worldly wisdom—that the abandoned career of the city may yet win his final decision. But her moral perceptions are not delicate enough to discover the great and tormenting wrangle of his thought. She ventures from time to time, as on his return, and from sharp sense of duty, some wiry, stereotyped religious reflections, which set his whole moral nature on edge. Nor is this the limit of her blindness: perceiving, as she imagines she does, the ripening of all her plans with respect to himself and Adèle, she thinks to further the matter by dropping hints of the rare graces of Adèle and of her brilliant prospects,—assuring him how much that young lady's regard for him has been increased since his conversion, (which word has to Reuben just now a dreary and most detestable sound,) and in a way which she counts playful, but which to him is agaçant to the last degree, she forecasts the time when Reuben will have his pretty French wife, and a rich one.
Left to himself, the youth would very likely have found enough to admire in the face and figure and pleasantly subdued enthusiasm of Adèle; but the counter irritant of the spinster's speech drove him away on many an evening to the charming fireside of the Elderkins, where he spent not a few beguiling hours in listening to the talk of the motherly mistress of the household, and in watching the soft hazel eyes of Rose, as they lifted in eager wonderment at some of his stories of the town, or fell (the long lashes hiding them with other beauty) upon the work where her delicate fingers plied with a white swiftness that teased him into trains of thought which were not wholly French.