My life at Grandfather Warren's was one kind of penance and my life
in Miss Black's school another. Both differed from our home-life.
My filaments found no nourishment, creeping between the two; but
the fibers of youth are strong, and they do not perish. Grandfather
Warren's house reminded me of the casket which imprisoned the Genii.
I had let loose a Presence I had no power over--the embodiment of its
gloom, its sternness, and its silence.
With feeling comes observation; after that, one reasons. I began to
observe. Aunt Mercy was not the Aunt Merce I had known at home. She
wore a mask before her father. There was constraint between them;
each repressed the other. The result of this relation was a formal,
petrifying, unyielding system,--a system which, from the fact of its
satisfying neither, was kept up the more rigidly; on the one side
from a morbid conscience, which reiterated its monitions against
the dictates of the natural heart; on the other, out of respect and
timidity.
Grandfather Warren was a little, lean, leather-colored man. His head
was habitually bent, his eyes cast down; but when he raised them to
peer about, their sharpness and clear intelligence gave his face
a wonderful vitality. He chafed his small, well-shaped hands
continually; his long polished nails clicked together with a shelly
noise, like that which beetles make flying against the ceiling. His
features were delicate and handsome; gentle blood ran in his veins,
as I have said. All classes in Barmouth treated him with invariable
courtesy. He was aboriginal in character, not to be moved by
antecedent or changed by innovation--a Puritan, without gentleness or
tenderness. He scarcely concealed his contempt for the emollients
of life, or for those who needed them. He whined over no misfortune,
pined for no pleasure. His two sons, who broke loose from him, went
into the world, lived a wild, merry life, and died there, he never
named. He found his wife dead by his side one morning. He did not go
frantic, but selected a text for the funeral sermon; and when he stood
by the uncovered grave, took off his hat and thanked his friends for
their kindness with a loud, steady voice. Aunt Mercy told me that
after her mother's death his habit of chafing his hands commenced;
it was all the difference she saw in him, for he never spoke of his
trouble or acknowledged his grief by sign or word.
Though he had been frugal and industrious all his life, he had no more
property than the old, rambling house we lived in, and a long, narrow
garden attached to it, where there were a few plum and quince trees, a
row of currant bushes, Aunt Mercy's beds of chamomile and sage, and a
few flowers. At the end of the garden was a peaked-roof pigsty; it
was cleanly kept, and its inhabitant had his meals served with the
regularity which characterized all that Grandfather Warren did.
Beautiful pigeons lived in the roof, and were on friendly terms with
the occupant on the lower floor. The house was not unpicturesque. It
was built on a corner, facing two streets. One front was a story high,
with a slanting roof; the other, which was two-storied, sloped like
a giraffe's back, down to a wood-shed. Clean cobwebs hung from its
rafters, and neat heaps of fragrant chips were piled on the floor.
The house had many rooms, all more or less dark and irregularly
shaped. The construction of the chambers was so involved, I could
not get out of one without going into another. Some of the ceilings
slanted suddenly, and some so gradually that where I could stand
erect, and where I must stoop, I never remembered, until my head
was unpleasantly grazed, or my eyes filled with flakes of ancient
lime-dust. A long chamber in the middle of the house was the shop,
always smelling of woolen shreds. At sunset, summer or winter, Aunt
Mercy sprinkled water on the unpainted floor, and swept it. While she
swept I made my thumb sore, by snipping the bits of cloth that were
scattered on the long counter by the window with Grand'ther's shears,
or I scrawled figures with gray chalk, where I thought they might
catch his eye. When she had finished sweeping she carefully sorted
the scraps, and put them into boxes under the counter; then she neatly
rolled up the brown-paper curtains, which had been let down to
exclude the afternoon sun; shook the old patchwork cushions in the
osier-bottomed chairs; watered the rose-geranium and the monthly rose,
which flourished wonderfully in that fluffy atmosphere; set every pin
and needle in its place, and shut the door, which was opened again at
sunrise. Of late years, Grand'ther's occupation had declined. No new
customers came. A few, who did not change the fashion of their garb,
still patronized him. His income was barely three hundred dollars a
year--eked out to this amount by some small pay for offices connected
with the church, of which he was a prominent member. From this income
he paid his pulpit tithe, gave to the poor, and lived independent and
respectable. Mother endeavored in an unobtrusive way to add to his
comfort; but he would only accept a few herrings from the Surrey
Weir every spring, and a basket of apples every fall. He invariably
returned her presents by giving her a share of his plums and quinces.
I had only seen Grand'ther Warren at odd intervals. He rarely came
to our house; when he did, he rode down on the top of the Barmouth
stagecoach, returning in a few hours. As mother never liked to go to
Barmouth, she seldom came to see me.