He had written to Maverick, advising him of the great grief which his confession had caused him, and imploring him to make what reparation he yet might do, by uniting in the holy bonds of matrimony with the erring mother of his child. He had further advised him that his apprehensions with regard to Reuben were, so far as was known, groundless. He further wrote,—"Upon consultation with Miss Johns, who is still at the head of our little household, I am constrained to ask that you take as early a time as may be convenient to relieve her of the further care of your daughter. Age is beginning to tell somewhat upon my sister; and the embarrassment of her position with respect to Adèle is a source, I believe, of great mental distress."
All which the good Doctor honestly believed,—upon Miss Eliza's averment,—and in his own honest way he assured his friend, that, though his sins were as scarlet, he should still implore Heaven in his favor, and should part from Adèle—whenever the parting might come—with real grief, and with an outpouring of his heart.
As for Reuben, a wanton levity had come over him in those latter days of summer that galled the poor Doctor to the quick, and that strangely perplexed the observant spinster. It was not the mischievous spirit of his boyhood revived again, but a cold, passionless, determined levity, such as men wear who have secret griefs to conceal. He talked in a free and easy way about the Doctor's Sunday discourses, that fairly shocked the old people of the parish; rumor said that he had passed some unhallowed jokes with the stolid Deacon Tourtelot about his official duties; and it was further reported that he had talked open infidelity with a young physician who had recently established himself in Ashfield, and who plumed himself—until his tardy practice taught him better—upon certain arrogant physiological notions with regard to death and disease that were quite unbiblical. Long ago the Doctor had given over open expostulation; every such talk seemed to evoke a new and more airy and more adventurous demon in the backslidden Reuben. The good man half feared to cast his eye over the books he might be reading. If it were Voltaire, if it were Hume, he feared lest his rebuke and anathema should give a more appetizing zest.
But he prayed—ah, how he prayed! with the dead Rachel in his thought—as if (and this surely cannot be Popishly wicked)—as if she, too, in some sphere far remote, might with angel voice add tender entreaty to the prayer, whose burden, morning after morning and night after night, was the name and the hope of her boy.
And Adèle? Well, Reuben pitied Adèle,—pitied her subjection to the iron frowns of Miss Eliza; and almost the only earnest words he spoke in those days were little quiet words of good cheer for the French girl. And when Miss Eliza whispered him, as she did, that the poor child's fortune was gone, and her future insecure, Reuben, with a brave sort of antagonism, made his words of cheer and good-feeling even more frequent than ever. But about his passing and kindly attentions to Adèle there was that air of gay mockery which overlaid his whole life, and which neither invited nor admitted of any profound acknowledgement. His kindest words—and some of them, so far as mere language went, were exuberantly tender—were met always by a half-saddened air of thankfulness and a little restrained pressure of the hand, as if Adèle had said,—"Not in earnest yet, Reuben! Earnest in nothing!"
WIND THE CLOCK.
Warden, wind the clock again;
Mighty years are going on,
Through the shadow and the dream,
And the happy-hearted dawn.
Wind again, wind again,—
Fifty hundred years are gone.
Through the harvest and the need,
Wealthy June and dewy May,
Grew the year from the old,
Grows to-morrow from to-day.
Wind again, wind again,—
Who can keep the years at bay?
Four-and-twenty conjurers
Lie in wait on land and sea,
Plucking down the startled ship,
Bud-embroidering the tree.
Wind again, wind again,—
We have neither ship nor tree.