THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF GRANDPA EDWARDS
There was so much to do at the old farm that we rarely found time to
play games. But we had a croquet set that Theodora, Ellen and their girl
neighbor, Catherine Edwards, occasionally carried out to a little
wicketed court just east of the apple house in the rear of the farm
buildings.
Halstead rather disdained the game as too tame for boys and Addison so
easily outplayed the rest of us that there was not much fun in it for
him, unless, as Theodora used to say, he played with one hand in his
pocket. But as we were knocking the balls about one evening while we
decided which of us should play, we saw Catherine crossing the west
field. She had heard our voices and was making haste to reach us. As she
approached, we saw that she looked anxious.
"Has grandpa been over here to-day?" her first words were. "He's gone.
He went out right after breakfast this morning, and he hasn't come back.
"After he went out, Tom saw him down by the line wall," she continued
hurriedly. "We thought perhaps he had gone to the Corners by the
meadow-brook path. But he didn't come to dinner. We are beginning to
wonder where he is. Tom's just gone to the Corners to see if he is
there."
"Why, no," we said. "He hasn't been here to-day."
The two back windows at the rear of the kitchen were down, and Ellen,
who was washing dishes there, overheard what Catherine had said, and
spoke to grandmother Ruth, who called the old Squire.
"That's a little strange," he said when Catherine had repeated her
tidings to him. "But I rather think it is nothing serious. He may have
gone on from the Corners to the village. I shouldn't worry."
Grandpa Jonathan Edwards--distantly related to the stern New England
divine of that name--was a sturdy, strong old man sixty-seven years of
age, two years older than our old Squire, and a friend and neighbor of
his from boyhood. With this youthful friend, Jock, the old Squire--who
then of course was young--had journeyed to Connecticut to buy merino
sheep: that memorable trip when they met with Anice and Ruth Pepperill,
the two girls whom they subsequently married and brought home.
For the last seventeen years matters had not been going prosperously or
happily at the Edwards farm. Jonathan's only son, Jotham (Catherine and
Tom's father), had married at the age of twenty and come home to live.
The old folks gave him the deed of the farm and accepted only a
"maintenance" on it--not an uncommon mode of procedure. Quite naturally,
no doubt, after taking the farm off his father's hands, marrying and
having a family of his own, this son, Jotham, wished to manage the farm
as he saw fit. He was a fairly kind, well-meaning man, but he had a
hasty temper and was a poor manager. His plans seemed never to prosper,
and the farm ran down, to the great sorrow and dissatisfaction of his
father, Jonathan, whose good advice was wholly disregarded. The farm
lapsed under a mortgage; the buildings went unrepaired, unpainted; and
the older man experienced the constant grief of seeing the place that
had been so dear to him going wrong and getting into worse condition
every year.
Of course we young folks did not at that time know or understand much
about all this; but I have learned since that Jonathan often unbosomed
his troubles to the old Squire, who sympathized with him, but who could
do little to improve matters.
Jotham's wife was a worthy woman, and I never heard that she did not
treat the old folks well. It was the bad management and the constantly
growing stress of straitened circumstances that so worried Jonathan.
Then, two years before we young folks came home to live at the old
Squire's, Aunt Anice, as the neighbors called her, died suddenly of a
sharp attack of pleurisy. That left Jonathan alone in the household of
his son and family. He seemed, so the old Squire told me later, to lose
heart entirely after that, and sat about or wandered over the farm in a
state of constant discontent.
I fear, too, that his grandson, Tom, was not an unmixed comfort to him.
Tom did not mean to hurt his grandfather's feelings. He was a
good-hearted boy, but impetuous and somewhat hasty. More than once we
heard him go on to tell what great things he meant to do at home, "after
grandpa dies." Grandpa, indeed, may sometimes have heard him say that;
and it is the saddest, most hopeless thing in life for elderly people to
come to see that the younger generation is only waiting for them to die.
If Grandpa Edwards had been very infirm, he might not have cared
greatly; but, as I have said, at sixty-seven he was still hale and,
except for a little rheumatism, apparently well.
Tom came home from the Corners that night without having learned
anything of Grandpa Edwards's whereabouts. In the course of the evening
his disappearance became known throughout the vicinity. The first
conjectures were that he had set off on a visit somewhere and would soon
return. Paying visits was not much after his manner of life; yet his
family half believed that he had gone off to cheer himself up a bit.
Jotham and his wife, and Catherine, too, now remembered that he had been
unusually silent for a week. A search of the room he occupied showed
that he had gone away wearing his every-day clothes. I remember that the
old Squire and grandmother Ruth looked grave but said very little.
Grandpa Edwards was not the kind of man to get lost. Of course he might
have had a fall while tramping about and injured himself seriously or
even fatally; but neither was that likely.
For several days, therefore, his family and his neighbors waited for him
to return of his own accord. But when a week or more passed and he did
not come anxiety deepened; and his son and the neighbors bestirred
themselves to make wider inquiries. Tardily, at last, a considerable
party searched the woods and the lake shores; and finally as many as
fifty persons turned out and spent a day and a night looking for him.
"They will not find him," the old Squire remarked with a kind of sad
certainty; and he did not join the searchers himself or encourage us
boys to do so. I think that both he and grandmother Ruth partly feared
that, as the old lady quaintly expressed it, "Jonathan had been left to
take his own life," in a fit of despondency.
The disappearance was so mysterious, indeed, and some people thought so
suspicious, that the town authorities took it up. The selectmen came to
the Edwards farm and made careful inquiries into all the circumstances
in order to make sure there had been nothing like wrongdoing. There was
not, however, the least circumstance to indicate anything of that kind.
Grandfather Jonathan had walked away no one knew where; Jotham and his
wife knew no more than their neighbors. They did not know what to think.
Perhaps they feared they had not treated their father well. They said
little, but Catherine and Tom talked of it in all innocence. Supposed
clues were reported, but they led to nothing and were soon abandoned.
The baffling mystery of it remained and throughout that entire season
cast its shadow on the community. It passed from the minds of us young
people much sooner than from the minds of our elders. In the rush of
life we largely ceased to think of it; but I am sure it was often in the
thoughts of the old Squire and grandmother. With them months and even
years made little difference in their sense of loss, for no tidings
came--none at least that were ever made public; but thereby hangs the
strangest part of this story.
The old Squire, as I have often said, was a lumberman as well as a
farmer. For a number of years he was in company with a Canadian at Three
Rivers in the Province of Quebec, and had lumber camps on the St.
Maurice River as well as nearer home in Maine. After the age of
seventy-three he gave up active participation in the Quebec branch of
the business, but still retained an interest in it; and this went on for
ten years or more. The former partner in Canada then died, and the
business had to be wound up.
Long before that time Theodora, Halstead and finally Ellen had left home
and gone out into the world for themselves, and as the old Squire was
now past eighty we did not quite like to have him journey to Canada. He
was still alert, but after an attack of rheumatic fever in the winter of
1869 his heart had disclosed slight defects; it was safer for him not to
exert himself so vigorously as formerly; and as the partnership had to
be terminated legally he gave me the power of attorney to go to Three
Rivers and act for him.
I was at a sawmill fifteen miles out of Three Rivers for a week or more;
but the day I left I came back to that place on a buckboard driven by a
French _habitant_ of the locality. On our way we passed a little stumpy
clearing where there was a small, new, very tidy house, neatly shingled
and clapboarded, with plots of bright asters and marigolds about the
door. Adjoining was an equally tidy barn, and in front one of the
best-kept, most luxuriant gardens I had ever seen in Canada. Farther
away was an acre of ripening oats and another of potatoes. A Jersey cow
with her tinkling bell was feeding at the borders of the clearing. Such
evidences of care and thrift were so unusual in that northerly region
that I spoke of it to my driver.
"Ah, heem ole Yarnkee man," the _habitant_ said. "Heem work all time."
As if in confirmation of this remark an aged man, hearing our wheels,
rose suddenly in the garden where he was weeding, with his face toward
us. Something strangely familiar in his looks at once riveted my
attention. I bade the driver stop and, jumping out, climbed the log
fence inclosing the garden and approached the old man.
"Isn't your name Edwards--Jonathan Edwards?" I exclaimed.
He stood for some moments regarding me without speaking. "Wal, they
don't call me that here," he said at last, still regarding me fixedly.
I told him then who I was and how I had come to be there. I was not
absolutely certain that it was Grandpa Edwards, yet I felt pretty sure.
His hair was a little whiter and his face somewhat more wrinkled; yet he
had changed surprisingly little. His hearing, too, did not appear to be
much impaired, and he was doing a pretty good job of weeding without
glasses.
I could see that he was in doubt about admitting his identity to me. "It
is only by accident I saw you," I said. "I did not come to find you."
Still he did not speak and seemed disinclined to do so, or to admit
anything about himself. I was sorry that I had stopped to accost him,
but now that I had done so I went on quite as a matter of course to give
him tidings of the old Squire and of grandmother Ruth. "They are both
living and well; they speak of you at times," I said. "Your
disappearance grieved them. I don't think they ever blamed you."
His face worked strangely; his hands, grasping the hoe handle, shook;
but still he said nothing.
"Have you ever had word from your folks at the old farm?" I asked him at
length. "Have you had any news of them at all?"
He shook his head. I then informed him that his son Jotham had died four
years before; that Tom had gone abroad as an engineer; that Catherine
was living at home, managing the old place and doing it well; that she
had paid off the mortgage and was prospering.
He listened in silence; but his face worked painfully at times.
As I was speaking an elderly woman came to the door of the house and
stood looking toward us.
"That is my wife," he said, noticing that I saw her. "She is a good
woman. She takes good care of me."
I felt that it would be unkind to press him further and turned to go.
"Would you like to send any word to your folks or to grandmother and the
old Squire?" I asked.
"Better not," said he with a kind of solemn sullenness. "I am out of all
that. I'm the same's dead."
I could see that he wished it so. He had not really and in so many words
acknowledged his identity; but when I turned to go he followed me to the
log fence round the garden and as I got over grasped my hand and held on
for the longest time! I thought he would never let go. His hand felt
rather cold. I suppose the sight of me and the home speech brought his
early life vividly back to him. He swallowed hard several times without
speaking, and again I saw his wrinkled face working. He let go at last,
went heavily back and picked up his hoe; and as we drove on I saw him
hoeing stolidly.
The driver said that he had cleared up the little farm and built the log
house and barn all by his own labor. For five years he had lived alone,
but later he had married the widow of a Scotch immigrant. I noticed that
this French-Canadian driver called him "M'sieur Andrews." It would seem
that he had changed his name and begun anew in the world--or had tried
to. How far he had succeeded I am unable to say.
I could not help feeling puzzled as well as depressed. The proper course
under such circumstances is not wholly clear. Had his former friends a
right to know what I had discovered? Right or wrong, what I decided on
was to say nothing so long as the old man lived. Three years afterwards
I wrote to a person whose acquaintance I had made at Three Rivers,
asking him whether an old American, residing at a place I described,
were still living, and received a reply saying that he was and
apparently in good health. But two years later this same Canadian
acquaintance, remembering my inquiry, wrote to say that the old man I
had once asked about had just died, but that his widow was still living
at their little farm and getting along as well as could be expected.
Then one day as the old Squire and I were driving home from a grange
meeting I told him what I had learned five years before concerning the
fate of his old friend. It was news to him, and yet he did not appear to
be wholly surprised.
"I don't know, sir, whether I have done right or not, keeping this from
you so long," I said after a moment of silence.
"I think you did perfectly right," the old Squire said after a pause.
"You did what I myself, I am sure, would have done under the
circumstances."
"Shall you tell grandmother Ruth?" I asked.
The old Squire considered it for several moments before he ventured to
speak again. At last he lifted his head.
"On the whole I think it will be better if we do not," he replied. "It
will give her a great shock, particularly Jonathan's second marriage up
there in Canada. His disappearance has now largely faded from her mind.
It is best so.
"Not that I justify it," he continued. "I think really that he did a
shocking thing. But I understand it and overlook it in him. He bore his
life there with Jotham just as long as he could. Jock had that kind of
temperament. After Anice died there was nothing to keep him there.
"The fault was not all with Jotham," the old Squire continued
reflectively. "Jotham was just what he was, hasty, willful and a poor
head for management. No, the real fault was in the mistake in giving up
the farm and all the rest of the property to Jotham when he came home to
live. Jonathan should have kept his farm in his own hands and managed it
himself as long as he was well and retained his faculties. True, Jotham
was an only child and very likely would have left home if he couldn't
have had his own way; but that would have been better, a thousand times
better, than all the unhappiness that followed.
"No," the old Squire said again with conviction, "I don't much believe
in elderly people's deeding away their farms or other businesses to
their sons as long as they are able to manage them for themselves. It is
a very bad method and has led to a world of trouble."
The old gentleman stopped suddenly and glanced at me.
"My boy, I quite forgot that you are still living at home with me and
perhaps are beginning to think that it is time you had a deed of the old
farm," he said in an apologetic voice.
"No, sir!" I exclaimed vehemently, for I had learned my lesson from what
I had seen up in Canada. "You keep your property in your own hands as
long as you live. If you ever see symptoms in me of wanting to play the
Jotham, I hope that you will put me outside the house door and shut it
on me!"
The old Squire laughed and patted my shoulder affectionately.
"Well, I'm eighty-three now, you know," he said slowly. "It can hardly
be such a very great while."
I shook my head by way of protest, for the thought was an exceedingly
unpleasant one.
However, the old gentleman only laughed again.
"No, it can hardly be such a very great while," he repeated.
But he lived to be ninety-eight, and I can truly say that those last
years with him at the old farm, going about or driving round together,
were the happiest of my life.