UNCLE ZACH AND CRAIG MASON.
Craig Mason was feeling tired and wondering how he was to pass the hot
morning with no one to talk to and nowhere to go and nothing to see if
he went there. His mother was spending the day at East Ridgefield, and,
as most of the boarders in the house were men who had their business to
attend to, he was rather lonely and sometimes wished he had chosen a
gayer place than Ridgefield, where there was some excitement and now and
then a girl to amuse himself with. Not that he cared particularly for
girls as a whole. They were mostly a frivolous lot, fond of dress and
fashion and flirting, and caring nothing for anything solid, like
Browning. But they were better than nothing when one was bored. In
college he had devoted himself to his studies and seldom attended the
social gatherings where he would have been warmly welcomed and lionized,
for his family was one of the best in Boston, and he had about him an
air of refinement and culture which would have won favor without the
prestige of family and wealth. The students called him proud and the
young ladies cold and cynical. They did not interest him particularly,
and, as he was not strong enough to join in the athletic sports of his
companions, he kept mostly to himself in his handsome rooms and took his
exercise behind his fleet horse, the only real extravagance in which he
indulged. He had wanted to bring Dido to Ridgefield, but had been
dissuaded by his mother, who said there were probably plenty of horses
to be had,—that it might look airy and she hated anything like
ostentation. So Dido was left at home and Craig had tried some of the
stable horses and found them lacking. He had visited the library and the
big shoe shop and had seen the crowd of girls and boys pour out of it at
twelve and six o’clock, and wondered how he should like to be one of
them, shut up in a close, smelly place for hours in company with Tom,
Dick and Harry and their sisters. The last would have hurt him the most,
for although courteous to every one, he was fastidious with regard to
his associates and shrank from contact with anything common and vulgar,
especially if there was pretension with it. Uncle Zach was ignorant and
common, but he was genuine, and Craig had taken a great fancy to him.
They had driven together a few times in what Uncle Zacheus said was the
finest turnout in town, with his two blooded horses, Paul and Virginia.
“You’ve got to keep a sharp lookout or they’ll take the bits in their
teeth and run away with you,” he said to Craig, who had expressed a wish
to drive. “Mebby I’d better take the lines. Them white hands don’t look
strong enough to hold such bloods as Paul and Virginny.”
Craig thought he could manage them, and wondered what Uncle Zach would
say to Dido if he could once see her carry herself up hill and down with
no sign of fatigue or need of a whip, while these plugs, as he mentally
designated Uncle Zach’s bloods, had to be urged after the second long
hill and stopped of their own accord to rest after the third, while at
the fourth Uncle Zach suggested that they get out and walk “to rest the
critters.” Craig took no more drives after Uncle Zach’s blooded horses,
but he went rowing with him on the river once or twice and always
treated him with a deference which was not lost on the little man.
“He’s a gentleman, every inch of him,” Mr. Taylor often said of him, and
nothing could have pleased him better than his wife’s permission to join
him on the north piazza.
Craig was glad to see him. He had given up Browning for the time
being,—had nearly finished his lemonade, and was quite ready for a chat
with his loquacious landlord, who, after inveighing against the
propensity of women to clean house when there was nothing to clean, and
inquiring after Craig’s health and declaring himself comfortable two or
three times, commenced a eulogy on Ridgefield.
“The greatest town in the county, with the finest views and most
notorious people and places. See that hill over there?” he asked,
pointing to the west. “Wall, there’s the suller hole where the Injuns
pushed their wagons of blazin’ hemp, and the garrison would have been
burnt to the ground and the people scalped, if the Lord hadn’t done a
miracle and sent a thunder shower in the nick of time. One of Dot’s
ancestors was there shut up, so it’s true. Dot’s great on ancestory;
goes back to the flood, I do b’lieve. She’s got the door latch of that
old house. I’ll show it to you if you don’t b’lieve it. Yes, ’twas a
miracle, that shower, like the sun standin’ still in one of our battles,
I don’t remember which. In the Revolution, wa’n’t it, when Washington
licked the British?”
Craig smiled and answered that he believed it was in the old testament
times when Joshua was the general.
“Good land, I or’to know that, though I ain’t up in scripter as I should
be, seein’ I’m a member in good standin’, though I hain’t always been,”
Uncle Zach replied, and continued: “You know the meetin’ house across
the street,—the Methodis’, I mean,—not the ’Piscopal, where you go.”
Craig said he knew it, and Uncle Zach went on: “I belong there; so does
Dotty. We joined the same day. Dot has stuck, but I’ve backslid two or
three times. I repented bitterly, for I mean to be a good man, but I’ll
be dumbed if it ain’t hard work for a feller to keep in the straight and
narrer way and run a tavern.”
Craig thought the share Uncle Zach had in running the tavern was hardly
a sufficient excuse for backsliding, but he made no comment, and Uncle
Zach went on: “I was goin’ to tell you about some of the noted
folks,—moved away now,—but always had Ridgefield for their native town.
There’s that Woman’s Rights and Temperance Woman, Miss Waters. Everybody
has heard of her from Dan to Beersheby. Good woman, too,—and lectures
smart about women’s votin’. I’d as soon they would as not. B’lieve the
country’d be better off if they did, but I don’t want ’em to wear
trouses. Miss Waters did a spell,—then left ’em off, and I’m glad on’t.
Dot b’lieves everything she does is gospel, and I wouldn’t like to have
Dot wear my trouses, s’posin’ she could get into ’em. A man or’to hold
on to them, if nothin’ more. Then there’s another woman,—writes books,
piles on ’em, the papers say, and if you b’lieve it some folks who came
here are that foolish that they have my bloods, Paul and Virginny, and
go over to see where she was born. An old yaller house, with a big
popple tree at the corner. No great of a place to be born in, or go to
see, but you can’t calcilate what city folks’ll do. I knew her when she
was knee high and wore a sun bonnet hanging down her back, with the
strings chawed into a hard knot. Knew her folks, too. She’s a lot of ’em
down in the cemetery. Good honest stock, all of ’em, and belonged to the
Orthodox church; but you can’t make me b’lieve she wrote all them books
the papers say. No, sir.”
“You mean sold,” Craig suggested, and Uncle Zach replied: “Mabby I do,
but it amounts to the same thing. If they are sold they are wrote, and
nobody ever wrote so many. No, _sir_. I’ll bet I never read twenty books
in my life, includin’ the Bible. Hello, Mark, what is it? Does Dot want
me?” and he turned to his clerk, who came round the corner with a paper
in his hand.
Mark Hilton, who had been in Mr. Taylor’s employ for three years, was
tall and straight, with finely cut features and eyes which saw
everything in you, around you and beyond you. Watchful eyes, which
seemed always on the alert, and which might have belonged to a
detective. Out of a hundred men, he would have been selected as the most
distinguished looking and the one who bore himself with the air of one
born to the purple rather than to the position of clerk in a country
hotel. Nothing could be pleasanter or more magnetic than his smile and
voice and manner. Craig had felt drawn to him at once, and, finding him
intelligent and well educated, had seen a good deal of him during the
short time he had been at the Prospect House. Uncle Zach adored him and
treated him with a consideration not common between employer and
employee. Pushing a chair towards him, he said: “Set down a spell and
rest. It’s all fired hot in that office with the east sun blazin’ inter
the winder.”
Mark declined the chair with thanks, and passing the paper to Mr. Taylor
said: “Peterson is here again with the subscription for the fence on the
south side of the cemetery. I have been to Mrs. Taylor, who is too busy
to see to it, and she sent me to you, saying you must use your judgment
and give what you think best.”
It was so seldom that Zacheus had the privilege of using his own
judgment that he sprang up like a boy, and, taking the paper from Mark’s
hand, read aloud, “Thomas Walker, ten dollars. Pretty fair for him. Miss
Wilson, five dollars. Wall, I’ll be dumbed if she’s hurt herself with
all her money. Why, the Widder Wilson could buy out Tom Walker fifty
times, but she’s tight as the bark of a tree. William Hewitt, five
dollars. Hello, he’s come round, has he? When they fust asked him to
give towards the fence, he said, No. It was good enough as ’twas. Nobody
outside the yard ever wanted to git in, and nobody inside could git out
if he wanted to. Pretty good, wa’n’t it? I guess I’ll give ten dollars.
I can afford it as well as Tom Walker. Widder Wilson, only five dollars.
I’ll be dumbed!”
He wrote his name with ten dollars against it and gave the paper to
Mark, who, with a nod and smile for Craig, returned to the office, while
Zacheus resumed his chair.
“Maybe ten dollars is more’n Dot’ll think I or’to have giv,” he said,
“but I have a hankerin’ after that cemetery. Johnny is buried there, you
know.”
“Who is Johnny?” Craig asked, struck with the pathos in Mr. Taylor’s
voice and the inexpressibly sad expression of his face.
Working hard to keep his tears back, he replied: “Johnny was our little
boy who died when he was three days and two hours old, and with him died
the best part of me. I’d lotted so much on what we’d do as he grew up.
He’d been three-and-twenty if he’d lived, a young man like you, but I
allus think of him as a little shaver beginnin’ to walk and me a leadin’
him, and many’s the time I’ve thought I heard his little feet and have
put my hand down, so—and taken his’n in mine,—a soft baby hand,—and
called him sonny,—and I—I——”
Here he stopped, while the tears rolled down his cheeks, and Craig felt
his own eyes grow moist with sympathy for this child man, who, after a
moment, recovered himself and continued: “You must excuse my cryin’. I
can’t help it when I think of Johnny and all he’d of been to me if he
hadn’t died. I tell you what, I b’lieve I’d been a good deal more of a
man if he’d of lived.”
Craig had no doubt of it, and was trying to think of something to say
when their attention was attracted to Mark Hilton, who was walking up
the street.
“Look at him,” Mr. Taylor said. “Don’t he carry himself like a king!
Sometimes I think Johnny might have looked like him, only not so well,
maybe, and I don’t b’lieve he would have been better to me than Mark. Do
you b’lieve in hereditary?—b’lieve that bad blood trickles along down
from mother to son, and son to mother, and busts out somewhere when you
least expect it?”
“Yes,” Craig said, “I believe in heredity and environment, too.”
“Envyrimen’? What’s that?” Uncle Zach asked, and Craig replied:
“As connected with heredity, it means
surroundings,—education,—influence,—circumstances.”
“Jest so,” Uncle Zach interrupted. “You mean the way one is brung up
will offset bad blood. Mebby, but I don’t b’lieve in hereditary. No,
sir! There’s Mark now,—the best and honestest feller that was ever
born,—right every way. His great-grandmother was hung, with three more
men, and my grandmother went to the hangin’, more’s the pity,—but there
warn’t so many excitin’ things in them days as there is now, with a
circus and caravan every summer, and a hangin’ was a godsend, especially
as there was a woman in it,—a high-stepper, too. You see ’twas this way:
You know about the haunted house half a mile from town, a little off the
main road at the end of the lane?”
Craig had passed the house two or three times on his way to the woods
beyond, and had looked curiously at its grey, weather-beaten walls and
slanting roof, from which the shingles had fallen in places. Once he
went close to it and looked through a window, from which every pane of
glass was gone, into a large, square room, with a big fire place in it,
and had wondered if it were there the young wife had sat that stormy
night and heard her name called, while outside in the darkness the awful
tragedy was enacted. From the wide hearth some bricks were loosened,
and, while he stood there, a monstrous rat leaped out, and, followed by
three or four smaller rats, went scurrying across the floor, the patter
of their feet, as they disappeared behind the wainscoting and jumped
into the cellar below, making a weird kind of sound which timid people
might mistake for something supernatural. Craig himself had experienced
a creepy kind of feeling as he left the old ruin and went next to look
into the well, which had been a part of the tragedy. An old bucket was
still swinging on a pole after the fashion of years ago, and he let it
down into the deep well and drew it up full of water, which he fancied
had a reddish tinge of blood. Hastily pouring it back, he heard it fall
with a splash into the depth below, and hurried from the place. He had
not been near the house since, and had never heard the full particulars
of the story, which, now that Mark was connected with it, had an added
interest, and he asked Uncle Zach to tell it.
Getting out of his chair, Mr. Taylor walked briskly across the piazza,
saying, “It’s very excitin’ and harrerin’ in some places, and I must get
braced up before I tackle it.” After a few turns, he declared himself
sufficiently braced, and, resuming his seat, began a story which I heard
in my childhood, and which in many of its details is true.