Four years have passed away since that Thanksgiving dinner, and for the
deacon, who, then, did not expect to see another, there seem to be many
yet in store. Hale, hearty and happy, he sits in his arm-chair, smoking
his accustomed pipe; and when the villagers, who come often to see him,
tell him how the old farm-house is improved, and how they should
scarcely know it, he always answers:
"Yes, Seth has good taste, and Seth is rich. He could buy Deerwood, if
he tried. He built those new houses for the poor down there by the
river; he built the factory, too, and gives them all employment. Seth is
a blessed boy."
Others, too, there were, besides the deacon, who called Seth Marshall
blessed, and never since his return had a voice been raised against him.
After becoming somewhat accustomed to his new position as a free and
respected man, his first wish was to modernize the farm-house a little
more according to his ideas of taste and comfort. Once he thought to
build a splendid mansion near by, but to this suggestion the father
said:
"No; I like the old place best. The new house might be handsomer, but it
would not be the one where you and I, and all of us were born, and your
mother died. Wait till I'm dead, and then do as you please."
And so Seth is waiting, and as he waits he sets out trees and shrubbery,
and beautifies a plot of ground, on which he will sometime erect a
dwelling as a summer residence for his son, who lives in the city, and
calls Mrs. Bartow grandma.
When the first Christmas snows were falling after his father's return,
Walter made Jessie his bride, and there now plays at his fireside a
chubby, black-eyed boy, whom they call Graham Marshall, and who spends
more time in Deerwood than he does in New York. Quite as old as the
hoary man in the corner, who sometimes calls him Walter, but oftener
Seth, he "rides to Boston" on the deacon's knee, pulls the deacon's
beard, wears the deacon's glasses, smokes a stick of candy, and spits in
imitation of the deacon, and then falls away to sleep in the deacon's
lap,--the two forming a most beautiful picture of old age and infancy
together.
At Mr. Graham's house, there is a beautiful six-months' baby, whose hair
looks golden in the sunlight, and whose eyes of blue are much like those
of Ellen Howland. They call her Nellie, and in all the world there is
nothing one-half so precious as this child to the broken, melancholy
man, who often comes to see her, and when no one can hear him, whispers
sadly:
"Sweet Nellie,--darling Nellie,--little snow drop!" But whether he means
the infant in the crib, or the Nellie dead long ago, is difficult to
tell.
For eighteen months he toiled inside the prison walls, and then the
powerful influence of Mr. Graham, Seth Marshall and Walter combined,
procured him a pardon. An humbled and a better man, he would not leave
the city. He would rather remain, he said, and live down his disgrace,
than have it follow him as it was sure to do. So he stayed, accepting
thankfully a situation which Walter procured for him, and Mrs.
Bellenger, when she saw that he was really changed, gladly gave him a
home with herself, for she was lonely now that Walter was gone.
Old Mrs. Reeves was very much astonished that the Grahams and Marshalls
should make so much of one who had been in State prison, and said:
"She was glad that Charlotte had married a Southern planter and gone to
Mississippi, as there was no knowing what notions might have entered her
brain."
Every summer there is a family gathering of the Grahams and Marshalls
with Mrs. Bellenger and Mrs. Bartow at Deerwood, where the deacon seems
as young and happy as any of them. And now, where our story opened we
will bring it to a close, at the farm-house where the old man sits
smoking in the twilight with his son and grandson, and great-grandson
around him,--representatives of four generations, with a difference of
nearly eighty years between the first and fourth.
_The End_.