THE SHADOW.
There is no moment of life, however festive, that does not involve the
near presence of a possible tragedy. When the concert of life is playing
the gayest and airiest music, it requires only the change of a little
flat or sharp to modulate into the minor key.
There seemed at first glance only the elements of joyousness and gayety
in the surroundings at the Pitkin farm. Thanksgiving was come--the
family, healthy, rosy, and noisy, were all under the one roof-tree. There
was energy, youth, intelligence, beauty, a pair of lovers on the eve of
betrothal--just in that misty, golden twilight that precedes the full
sunrise of avowed and accepted love--and yet behind it all was walking
with stealthy step the shadow of a coming sorrow.
"What in the world ails James?" said Diana as she retreated from the door
and surveyed him at a distance from her chamber window. His face was like
a landscape over which a thunder-cloud has drifted, and he walked beside
his father with a peculiar air of proud displeasure and repression.
At that moment the young man was struggling with the bitterest sorrow
that can befall youth--the breaking up of his life-purpose. He had just
come to a decision to sacrifice his hopes of education, his man's
ambition, his love, his home and family, and become a wanderer on the
face of the earth. How this befell requires a sketch of character.
Deacon Silas Pitkin was a fair specimen of a class of men not uncommon in
New England--men too sensitive for the severe physical conditions of New
England life, and therefore both suffering and inflicting suffering. He
was a man of the finest moral traits, of incorruptible probity, of
scrupulous honor, of an exacting conscientiousness, and of a sincere
piety. But he had begun life with nothing; his whole standing in the
world had been gained inch by inch by the most unremitting economy and
self-denial, and he was a man of little capacity for hope, of whom it was
said, in popular phraseology, that he "took things hard." He was never
sanguine of good, always expectant of evil, and seemed to view life like
a sentinel forbidden to sleep and constantly under arms.
For such a man to be harassed by a mortgage upon his homestead was a
steady wear and drain upon his vitality. There were times when a positive
horror of darkness came down upon him--when his wife's untroubled,
patient hopefulness seemed to him like recklessness, when the smallest
item of expense was an intolerable burden, and the very daily bread of
life was full of bitterness; and when these paroxysms were upon him, one
of the heaviest of his burdens was the support of his son in college. It
was true that he was proud of his son's talents and sympathized with his
love for learning--he had to the full that sense of the value of
education which is the very vital force of the New England mind--and in
an hour when things looked brighter to him he had given his consent to
the scheme of a college education freely.
James was industrious, frugal, energetic, and had engaged to pay the most
of his own expenses by teaching in the long winter vacations. But
unfortunately this year the Mapleton Academy, which had been promised to
him for the winter term, had been taken away by a little maneuver of
local politics and given to another, thus leaving him without resource.
This disappointment, coming just at the time when the yearly interest
upon the mortgage was due, had brought upon his father one of those
paroxysms of helpless gloom and discouragement in which the very world
itself seemed clothed in sack-cloth.
From the time that he heard the Academy was gone, Deacon Silas lay awake
nights in the blackness of darkness. "We shall all go to the poorhouse
together--that's where it will end," he said, as he tossed restlessly in
the dark.
"Oh no, no, my dear," said his wife, with those serene eyes that had
looked through so many gloomy hours; "we must cast our care on God."
"It's easy for women to talk. You don't have the interest money to pay,
you are perfectly reckless of expense. Nothing would do but James must go
to college, and now see what it's bringing us to!"
"Why, father, I thought you yourself were in favor of it."
"Well, I did wrong then. You persuaded me into it. I'd no business to
have listened to you and Jim and got all this load on my shoulders."
Yet Mary Pitkin knew in her own calm, clear head that she had not been
reckless of expense. The yearly interest money was ever before her, and
her own incessant toils had wrought no small portion of what was needed
to pay it. Her butter at the store commanded the very highest price, her
straw braiding sold for a little more than that of any other hand, and
she had calculated all the returns so exactly that she felt sure that the
interest money for that year was safe. She had seen her husband pass
through this nervous crisis many times before, and she had learned to be
blamed in silence, for she was a woman out of whom all selfness had long
since died, leaving only the tender pity of the nurse and the consoler.
Her soul rested on her Saviour, the one ever-present, inseparable friend;
and when it did no good to speak to her husband, she spoke to her God for
him, and so was peaceful and peace-giving.
Even her husband himself felt her strengthening, rest-giving power, and
for this reason he bore down on her with the burden of all his tremors and
his cares; for while he disputed, he yet believed her, and rested upon
her with an utter helpless trust, as the good angel of his house. Had
_she_ for a moment given way to apprehension, had _her_ step been a
thought less firm, her eye less peaceful, then indeed the world itself
would have seemed to be sinking under his feet. Meanwhile she was to him
that kind of relief which we derive from a person to whom we may say
everything without a fear of its harming them. He felt quite sure that,
say what he would, Mary would always be hopeful and courageous; and he
felt some secret idea that his own gloomy forebodings were of service in
restricting and sobering what seemed to him her too sanguine nature. He
blindly reverenced, without ability fully to comprehend, her exalted
religious fervor and the quietude of soul that it brought. But he did not
know through how many silent conflicts, how many prayers, how many tears,
how many hopes resigned and sorrows welcomed, she had come into that last
refuge of sorrowful souls, that immovable peace when all life's anguish
ceases and the will of God becomes the final rest.
But, unhappily for this present crisis, there was, as there often is in
family life, just enough of the father's nature in the son to bring them
into collision with each other. James had the same nervously anxious
nature, the same intense feeling of responsibility, the same tendency
towards morbid earnestness; and on that day there had come collision.
His father had poured forth upon him his fears and apprehensions in a
manner which implied a censure on his son, as being willing to accept a
life of scholarly ease while his father and mother were, as he expressed
it, "working their lives away."
"But I tell you, father, as God is my witness, I _mean_ to pay all; you
shall not suffer; interest and principal--all that my work would bring--I
engage to pay back."
"You!--you'll never have anything! You'll be a poor man as long as you
live. Lost the Academy this Fall--that tells the story!"
"But, father, it wasn't my fault that I lost the Academy."
"It's no matter whose fault it was--that's neither here nor there--you
lost it, and here you are with the vacation before you and nothing to do!
There's your mother, she's working herself to death; she never gets any
rest. I expect she'll go off in a consumption one of these days."
"There, there, father! that's enough! Please don't say any more. You'll
see I _will_ find something to do!"
There are words spoken at times in life that do not sound bitter though
they come from a pitiable depth of anguish, and as James turned from his
father he had taken a resolution that convulsed him with pain; his strong
arms quivered with the repressed agony, and he hastily sought a distant
part of the field, and began cutting and stacking corn-stalks with a
nervous energy.
"Why, ye work like thunder!" was Biah's comment. "Book l'arnin' hain't
spiled ye yet; your arms are good for suthin'."
"Yes, my arms are good for something, and I'll use them for something,"
said Jim.
There was raging a tempest in his soul. For a young fellow of a Puritan
education in those days to be angry with his father was somewhat that
seemed to him as awful a sacrilege as to be angry with his God, and yet
he felt that his father had been bitterly, cruelly unjust towards him. He
had driven economy to the most stringent extremes; he had avoided the
intimacy of his class fellows, lest he should be drawn into needless
expenses; he had borne with shabby clothing and mean fare among better
dressed and richer associates, and been willing to bear it. He had
studied faithfully, unremittingly, for two years, but at the moment he
turned from his father the throb that wrung his heart was the giving up
of all. He had in his pocket a letter from his townsman and schoolmate,
Sam Allen, mate of an East Indiaman just fitting out at Salem, and it
said:
"We are going to sail with a picked crew, and we want one just such a
fellow as you for third mate. Come along, and you can go right up, and
your college mathematics will be all the better for us. Come right off,
and your berth will be ready, and away for round the world!"
Here, to be sure, was immediate position--wages--employment--freedom from
the intolerable burden of dependence; but it was accepted at the
sacrifice of all his life's hopes. True, that in those days the
experiment of a sea-faring life had often, even in instances which he
recalled, brought forth fortune and an ability to settle down in peaceful
competence in after life. But there was Diana. Would she wait for him?
Encircled on all sides with lovers, would she keep faith with an
adventurer gone for an indefinite quest? The desponding, self-distrusting
side of his nature said, "No. Why should she?" Then, to go was to give
up Diana--to make up his mind to have her belong to some other. Then
there was his mother. An unutterable reverential pathos always to him
encircled the idea of his mother. Her life to him seemed a hard one. From
the outside, as he viewed it, it was all self-sacrifice and renunciation.
Yet he knew that she had set her heart on an education for him, as much
as it could be set on anything earthly. He was her pride, her hope; and
just now that very thought was full of bitterness. There was no help for
it; he must not let her work herself to death for him; he would make the
household vessel lighter by the throwing himself into the sea, to sink or
swim as might happen; and then, perhaps, he might come back with money to
help them all.
All this was what was surging and boiling in his mind when he came in
from his work to the supper that night.