But the best exposition of the text is not Michael Hacket's, but Irving
Bacheller's. The whole book is a vivid and arresting and terrible
forth-setting of the impressive words that Barton found in his sealed
envelope.
All through the book two dreadful characters move side by side--Benjamin
Grimshaw and Silent Kate. Benjamin Grimshaw is rich and proud and
pitiless. Everybody is afraid of him. But Roving Kate is not afraid.
Indeed, he seems to be more afraid of her. Wherever he is, she is there.
She is wild and bony and ragged. She is, or pretends to be, half
demented. She tells fortunes with strange antics and gesticulations,
scrawling her prognostications upon stray slips of paper. But Benjamin
Grimshaw is the main object of her attention. She hates him, and hates
him all the more terribly because she once loved him. For Roving Kate,
the Silent Woman, was once Kate Fullerton, Squire Fullerton's pretty
daughter. And Benjamin Grimshaw had loved her, and betrayed her, and
spurned her, and married another. In the village cemetery you might have
seen a tombstone bearing her name. Her father erected it to show that
she was dead _to him_ for ever. Poor Kate had never known her mother.
And so, in the course of the story, Benjamin Grimshaw had two sons, only
one of whom he recognized. For Kate Fullerton was the mother of the
other. And, in her shame and her anger and her hate, Kate resolved to
follow the father of her base-born child all the days of his life; and
there she stands--unkempt, repulsive, menacing--always near him, the
living embodiment of _the sin of his youth_.
Amos Grimshaw, his petted and pampered son, comes to the gallows. He is
convicted of murder upon the highway. The father is in court when the
Judge pronounces the awful sentence. And, of course, Roving Kate is
there. Ragged as ever, the Silent Woman is waiting for him as he comes
down the steps. She shoots out a bony finger at him, as, bowed and
broken, he passes into the street. He turns and strikes at her with his
cane.
'Go away from me,' he cries. 'Take her away, somebody! I can't stand it!
She's killing me! Take her away!'
His face turns purple and then livid. He reels and falls headlong. He is
dead! Three days later they bury him. Roving Kate stands by the
graveside, strangely changed. She is decently dressed; her hair is
neatly combed; the wild look has left her eyes. She looks like one whose
back is relieved of a heavy burden. She scatters little red squares of
paper into the grave, her lips moving silently. These are her last
curses. Barton Baynes and his schoolmaster, Mr. Hacket, are standing by.
'_The scarlet sins of his youth are lying down with him in the dust_,'
whispers the master to his pupil as they walk away together.
V
This is terrible enough--the thought of our sins surrounding our
deathbeds and lying down with us in our graves--but the book contains
something more profound and terrible still!
For, in addition to the grave of Benjamin Grimshaw, from which we have
just turned sadly away, there are two other graves in the book. The one
is a felon's grave--the grave of Amos Grimshaw. And what sins are these
that are lying down with him in the dust? They are some of them his own;
and they are some of them his father's; and they are some of them the
sins of Roving Kate, the Silent Woman. Yes, they are some of them the
woman's sins. For when Amos was but an impressionable boy, Kate had
supplied him with literature by which she hoped to pollute and ruin him.
Out of the deathless hatred that she bore to the father, she longed to
destroy the son, body and soul. She gave him tales that would inflame
his fancy and excite his baser instincts, tales that glorified robbery,
murder and villainy of every kind. If Amos Grimshaw had been a good
man's son, and if ennobling influences had been brought to bear upon
him, he might have lived to old age and gone down at last to an honored
grave. But his father's example was always before him, and Kate's books
did their dreadful work only too well. He became a highway robber; he
shot a stranger on a lonely road. It came out in evidence that the deed
had been perpetrated under circumstances identical with those described
in one of the sensational stories found in the Grimshaw barn--the
stories Kate had given him!
'It's the same with the books you read,' the schoolmaster had said, when
Bart sought from him an explanation of the text in the sealed envelope;
'they go down into your bones and you can't get them out.'
And Kate's books had gone down into Amos Grimshaw's bones; and thus her
sins and his father's sins lay down in the dust of the felon's grave and
mingled with his own. No exposition of Silas Wright's text could be more
arresting or alarming than that. My sins may overflow from my grave and
lie down in the dust with my children!