The minister had found his parishioner in the old Hilbrook homestead,
which Josiah Hilbrook, while he lived, suffered Ransom Hilbrook to
occupy, and when he died bequeathed to him, with a sufficient income for
all his simple wants. They were cousins, and they had both gone out into
the world about the same time: one had made a success of it, and
remained; and the other had made a failure of it, and come back. They
were both Rixonites, as the families of both had been in the generation
before them. It could be supposed that Josiah Hilbrook, since he had
given the money for a Rixonite church and the perpetual pay of a
Rixonite minister in his native place, had died in the faith; and it
might have been supposed that Ransom Hilbrook, from his constant
attendance upon its services, was living in the same faith. What was
certain was that the survivor lived alone in the family homestead on the
slope of the stony hill overlooking the village. The house was gray with
age, and it crouched low on the ground where it had been built a century
before, and anchored fast by the great central chimney characteristic of
the early New England farmhouse. Below it staggered the trees of an
apple orchard belted in with a stone wall, and beside it sagged the
sheds whose stretch united the gray old house to the gray old barn, and
made it possible for Hilbrook to do his chores in rain or snow without
leaving cover. There was a dooryard defined by a picket fence, and near
the kitchen door was a well with a high pent roof, where there had once
been a long sweep.
These simple features showed to the village on the opposite slope with a
distinctness that made the place seem much lonelier than if it had been
much more remote. It gained no cheerfulness from its proximity, and when
the windows of the house lighted up with the pale gleam of the sunset,
they imparted to the village a sense of dreary solitude which its own
lamps could do nothing to relieve.
Ransom Hilbrook came and went among the villagers in the same sort of
inaccessible contiguity. He did not shun passing the time of day with
people he met; he was in and out at the grocer's, the meat man's, the
baker's, upon the ordinary domestic occasions; but he never darkened any
other doors, except on his visits to the bank where he cashed the checks
for his quarterly allowance. There had been a proposition to use him
representatively in the ceremonies celebrating the acceptance of the
various gifts of Josiah Hilbrook; but he had not lent himself to this,
and upon experiment the authorities found that he was right in his guess
that they could get along without him.
He had not said it surlily, but sadly, and with a gentle deprecation of
their insistence. While the several monuments that testified to his
cousin's wealth and munificence rose in the village beyond the brook, he
continued in the old homestead without change, except that when his
housekeeper died he began to do for himself the few things that the
ailing and aged woman had done for him. How he did them was not known,
for he invited no intimacy from his neighbors. But from the extent of
his dealings with the grocer it was imagined that he lived mainly upon
canned goods. The fish man paid him a weekly visit, and once a week he
got from the meat man a piece of salt pork, which it was obvious to the
meanest intelligence was for his Sunday baked beans. From his purchase
of flour and baking powder it was reasonably inferred that he now and
then made himself hot biscuit. Beyond these meagre facts everything was
conjecture, in which the local curiosity played somewhat actively, but,
for the most part, with a growing acquiescence in the general ignorance
none felt authorized to dispel. There had been a time when some
fulfilled a fancied duty to the solitary in trying to see him. But the
visitors who found him out of doors were not asked within, and were
obliged to dismiss themselves, after an interview across the pickets of
the dooryard fence or from the trestles or inverted feed pails on which
they were invited to seats in the barn or shed. Those who happened to
find their host more ceremoniously at home were allowed to come in, but
were received in rooms so comfortless from the drawn blinds or fireless
hearths that they had not the spirits for the task of cheering him up
which they had set themselves, and departed in greater depression than
that they left him to.