A Busy Year at the Old Squire's Part 19

Grandfather Jonathan had walked away no one knew where; Jotham and his wife knew no more than their neighbors. They did not know what to think.

Perhaps they feared they had not treated their father well. They said little, but Catherine and Tom talked of it in all innocence. Supposed clues were reported, but they led to nothing and were soon abandoned.

The baffling mystery of it remained and throughout that entire season cast its shadow on the community. It pa.s.sed from the minds of us young people much sooner than from the minds of our elders. In the rush of life we largely ceased to think of it; but I am sure it was often in the thoughts of the old Squire and grandmother. With them months and even years made little difference in their sense of loss, for no tidings came--none at least that were ever made public; but thereby hangs the strangest part of this story.

The old Squire, as I have often said, was a lumberman as well as a farmer. For a number of years he was in company with a Canadian at Three Rivers in the Province of Quebec, and had lumber camps on the St.

Maurice River as well as nearer home in Maine. After the age of seventy-three he gave up active partic.i.p.ation in the Quebec branch of the business, but still retained an interest in it; and this went on for ten years or more. The former partner in Canada then died, and the business had to be wound up.

Long before that time Theodora, Halstead and finally Ellen had left home and gone out into the world for themselves, and as the old Squire was now past eighty we did not quite like to have him journey to Canada. He was still alert, but after an attack of rheumatic fever in the winter of 1869 his heart had disclosed slight defects; it was safer for him not to exert himself so vigorously as formerly; and as the partnership had to be terminated legally he gave me the power of attorney to go to Three Rivers and act for him.

I was at a sawmill fifteen miles out of Three Rivers for a week or more; but the day I left I came back to that place on a buckboard driven by a French _habitant_ of the locality. On our way we pa.s.sed a little stumpy clearing where there was a small, new, very tidy house, neatly shingled and clapboarded, with plots of bright asters and marigolds about the door. Adjoining was an equally tidy barn, and in front one of the best-kept, most luxuriant gardens I had ever seen in Canada. Farther away was an acre of ripening oats and another of potatoes. A Jersey cow with her tinkling bell was feeding at the borders of the clearing. Such evidences of care and thrift were so unusual in that northerly region that I spoke of it to my driver.

"Ah, heem ole Yarnkee man," the _habitant_ said. "Heem work all time."

As if in confirmation of this remark an aged man, hearing our wheels, rose suddenly in the garden where he was weeding, with his face toward us. Something strangely familiar in his looks at once riveted my attention. I bade the driver stop and, jumping out, climbed the log fence inclosing the garden and approached the old man.

"Isn't your name Edwards--Jonathan Edwards?" I exclaimed.

He stood for some moments regarding me without speaking. "Wal, they don't call me that here," he said at last, still regarding me fixedly.

I told him then who I was and how I had come to be there. I was not absolutely certain that it was Grandpa Edwards, yet I felt pretty sure.

His hair was a little whiter and his face somewhat more wrinkled; yet he had changed surprisingly little. His hearing, too, did not appear to be much impaired, and he was doing a pretty good job of weeding without gla.s.ses.

I could see that he was in doubt about admitting his ident.i.ty to me. "It is only by accident I saw you," I said. "I did not come to find you."

Still he did not speak and seemed disinclined to do so, or to admit anything about himself. I was sorry that I had stopped to accost him, but now that I had done so I went on quite as a matter of course to give him tidings of the old Squire and of grandmother Ruth. "They are both living and well; they speak of you at times," I said. "Your disappearance grieved them. I don't think they ever blamed you."

His face worked strangely; his hands, grasping the hoe handle, shook; but still he said nothing.

"Have you ever had word from your folks at the old farm?" I asked him at length. "Have you had any news of them at all?"

He shook his head. I then informed him that his son Jotham had died four years before; that Tom had gone abroad as an engineer; that Catherine was living at home, managing the old place and doing it well; that she had paid off the mortgage and was prospering.

He listened in silence; but his face worked painfully at times.

As I was speaking an elderly woman came to the door of the house and stood looking toward us.

"That is my wife," he said, noticing that I saw her. "She is a good woman. She takes good care of me."

I felt that it would be unkind to press him further and turned to go.

"Would you like to send any word to your folks or to grandmother and the old Squire?" I asked.

"Better not," said he with a kind of solemn sullenness. "I am out of all that. I'm the same's dead."

I could see that he wished it so. He had not really and in so many words acknowledged his ident.i.ty; but when I turned to go he followed me to the log fence round the garden and as I got over grasped my hand and held on for the longest time! I thought he would never let go. His hand felt rather cold. I suppose the sight of me and the home speech brought his early life vividly back to him. He swallowed hard several times without speaking, and again I saw his wrinkled face working. He let go at last, went heavily back and picked up his hoe; and as we drove on I saw him hoeing stolidly.

The driver said that he had cleared up the little farm and built the log house and barn all by his own labor. For five years he had lived alone, but later he had married the widow of a Scotch immigrant. I noticed that this French-Canadian driver called him "M'sieur Andrews." It would seem that he had changed his name and begun anew in the world--or had tried to. How far he had succeeded I am unable to say.

I could not help feeling puzzled as well as depressed. The proper course under such circ.u.mstances is not wholly clear. Had his former friends a right to know what I had discovered? Right or wrong, what I decided on was to say nothing so long as the old man lived. Three years afterwards I wrote to a person whose acquaintance I had made at Three Rivers, asking him whether an old American, residing at a place I described, were still living, and received a reply saying that he was and apparently in good health. But two years later this same Canadian acquaintance, remembering my inquiry, wrote to say that the old man I had once asked about had just died, but that his widow was still living at their little farm and getting along as well as could be expected.

Then one day as the old Squire and I were driving home from a grange meeting I told him what I had learned five years before concerning the fate of his old friend. It was news to him, and yet he did not appear to be wholly surprised.

"I don't know, sir, whether I have done right or not, keeping this from you so long," I said after a moment of silence.

"I think you did perfectly right," the old Squire said after a pause.

"You did what I myself, I am sure, would have done under the circ.u.mstances."

"Shall you tell grandmother Ruth?" I asked.

The old Squire considered it for several moments before he ventured to speak again. At last he lifted his head.

"On the whole I think it will be better if we do not," he replied. "It will give her a great shock, particularly Jonathan's second marriage up there in Canada. His disappearance has now largely faded from her mind.

It is best so.

"Not that I justify it," he continued. "I think really that he did a shocking thing. But I understand it and overlook it in him. He bore his life there with Jotham just as long as he could. Jock had that kind of temperament. After Anice died there was nothing to keep him there.

"The fault was not all with Jotham," the old Squire continued reflectively. "Jotham was just what he was, hasty, willful and a poor head for management. No, the real fault was in the mistake in giving up the farm and all the rest of the property to Jotham when he came home to live. Jonathan should have kept his farm in his own hands and managed it himself as long as he was well and retained his faculties. True, Jotham was an only child and very likely would have left home if he couldn't have had his own way; but that would have been better, a thousand times better, than all the unhappiness that followed.

"No," the old Squire said again with conviction, "I don't much believe in elderly people's deeding away their farms or other businesses to their sons as long as they are able to manage them for themselves. It is a very bad method and has led to a world of trouble."

The old gentleman stopped suddenly and glanced at me.

"My boy, I quite forgot that you are still living at home with me and perhaps are beginning to think that it is time you had a deed of the old farm," he said in an apologetic voice.

"No, sir!" I exclaimed vehemently, for I had learned my lesson from what I had seen up in Canada. "You keep your property in your own hands as long as you live. If you ever see symptoms in me of wanting to play the Jotham, I hope that you will put me outside the house door and shut it on me!"

The old Squire laughed and patted my shoulder affectionately.

"Well, I'm eighty-three now, you know," he said slowly. "It can hardly be such a very great while."

I shook my head by way of protest, for the thought was an exceedingly unpleasant one.

However, the old gentleman only laughed again.

"No, it can hardly be such a very great while," he repeated.

But he lived to be ninety-eight, and I can truly say that those last years with him at the old farm, going about or driving round together, were the happiest of my life.

CHAPTER XVII

OUR FOURTH OF JULY AT THE DEN

Farm work as usual occupied us quite closely during May and June that year; and ere long we began to think of what we would do on the approaching Fourth of July. So far as we could hear, no public celebration was being planned either at the village in our own town, or in any of the towns immediately adjoining. Apparently we would have to organize our own celebration, if we had one; and after talking the matter over with the other young folks of the school district, we decided to celebrate the day by making a picnic excursion to the "Den,"

and carrying out a long contemplated plan for exploring it.

The Den was a pokerish cavern near Overset Pond, nine or ten miles to the northeast of the old Squire's place, about which clung many legends.