Then he took the girl tenderly up and faced about upon the father, actually foaming with wrath.
'This comes of psalm singing,' he cried. 'Clear the way there!' and he bore the still unconscious maiden toward his own house.
Then a sudden and strange revulsion came over Deacon Fletcher. For the first time, perhaps, in twenty-one years, the father's heart triumphed over the Deacon's prejudices. As he saw his son—his only son—lying pale and bleeding on the ground, all recollection of his offense, all thought of sinfulness or godliness in connection with his conduct, vanished, and he only considered whether this pride of his, this strong and beautiful son, were to die there, or to live and bless him. He stooped, sobbing, over the boy, reconciled, at last, to humanity, and conscious of a strong human love.
Not more tenderly was poor Hannah Lee borne to the house of Peter Hopkins than the father carried the son he had only just received into his own dwelling. There were no thoughts of husks now, but only a sorrowful joy that one so long dead to him was at length alive, that a new heart, full of human instincts, had found birth within his bosom. But mingled with this joy was the fear that he had only, at length, possessed his son to lose him.
While Jason Fletcher lay tossing, week after week, through the fever that followed the scene of violence in the arbor, poor Hannah went sadly but patiently about the light duties that farmer Hopkins and his wife allowed her to perform.
Thoroughly convinced, through his wife's communications with Hannah, of the innocence of the pair, Peter Hopkins had gone to Deacon Fletcher and remonstrated with him on his outrageous conduct.
'Your son is a fine lad,' he said, 'and Hannah is fit to be queen anywhere; and if you don't give her a fitting out when he's well enough to marry her, hang me if I won't! I owe the boy something for the ill trick I played him in my hot-headedness, and he shall have it, too! Say, now, that they shall be man and wife!'
Deacon Fletcher astonished the hot-hearted man beyond measure by quietly telling him that, God willing, his dear son should marry Hannah as soon as the visitation that now kept him on a bed of raving illness was taken away. He added meekly that he hoped God would forgive him if he had abused the trust placed in him, and, misled by a vanity of holiness, had done his son great wrong, these many years.
'Give us your hand, Deacon,' cried the delighted pleader; 'you are a good man, if you are a Deacon, and that's more'n I'd have said a week ago! You have hurt that boy, and no mistake! You've either beaten the spirit all out of him, or you have shut up a devil in him that'll break out one o' these days, worse'n them that went into the pigs that we read about! But 'tain't too late to mend, an' if a stitch in time does save nine, it's better to take the nine stitches than to wait till they are ninety times nine. You've got to be a thousand times kinder to the boy than you would if you hadn't been so hard on him all his life.'
It was agreed that while the fever held its course nothing should be said to poor Hannah, and so the two men parted—warm friends for the first time in their lives.