MY UNCLE BEHAVES QUEERLY
The village of Topham, to which, after an absence of twenty years,
Cornelius Gleazen had returned as a stranger, lay near the sea and
yet not beside it, near the post road and yet not upon it. From the
lower branches of an old pine that used to stand on the hill behind
the tavern we could see a thread of salt water, which gleamed like
silver in the sun; and, on the clearest days, if we climbed higher,
we could sometimes catch a glimpse of tiny ships working up or down
the coast.
In the other direction, if we faced about, we could see, far down a
long, broad valley, between low hills, a bit of white road that ran
for a mile or two between meadows and marshes; and on the road we
sometimes saw moving black dots trailing tiny clouds of dust, which
we knew were men and horses and coaches.
In Topham I was born, and there I spent my boyhood. I suppose that I
was quieter than the average boy and more studious, for I was
content to find adventures in the pages of books, and I read from
cover to cover all the journals of the day that came to hand.
Certainly I was a dreamy lad, who knew books better than men, and
who cared so little for "practical affairs" that much passed me by
unnoticed which many another youth of no more native keenness would
instantly have perceived.
When my mother, some years after my father's death, came to live
with her brother and keep his house for him, it did not make so
great a change in my manner of life as one might have expected.
Bustling, smart Uncle Seth ruled the household with a quick,
nervous hand; and for the time, as he bent all his energies to the
various projects in which he was interested and in which he was more
than ordinarily successful, he almost ignored his nephew.
It was not strange that after my mother died Uncle Seth should give
me more thought, for he was left a second time alone in the world,
and except for me he had neither close friend nor blood relation. I
think that his very shrewdness, which must have shown him how much a
man needs friends, perversely kept him from making them; it built
around him a fence of cold, calculating, selfish appraisal that
repelled most people whom he might have drawn closer to him. But to
me, who had on him claims of a kind, and whom he had come by slow
stages to know intimately, he gave a queer, testy, impulsive
affection; and although the first well-meant but ill-chosen act by
which he manifested it was to withdraw me from my books to the
store, where he set me to learn the business, for which I was by no
means so grateful as I should have been, both I and his two clerks,
Sim Muzzy and Arnold Lamont, to whom long association had revealed
the spontaneous generosity of which he seemed actually to be
ashamed, had a very real affection for him.
It was no secret that he intended to make me his heir, and I was
regarded through the town as a young man of rare prospects, which
reconciled me in a measure to exchanging during the day my worn
volumes of Goldsmith and Defoe for neat columns that represented
profit and loss on candles and sugar and spice; and my hard,
faithful work won Uncle Seth's confidence, and with it a curiously
grudging acknowledgment. Thus our little world of business moved
monotonously, though not unpleasantly, round and round the cycle of
the seasons, until the day when Cornelius Gleazen came back to his
native town.
He continued to sit in my uncle's chair, that first morning, while
Uncle Seth, perspiring, it seemed to me, more freely than the heat
of the day could have occasioned, bustled about and waited on his
customers. I suppose that Neil Gleazen really saw nothing out of the
ordinary in Uncle Seth's manner; but to me, who knew him so well
now, it was plain that, instead of trying to get the troublesome
women and their little business of eggs and cloth done with and out
of the store as quickly as possible, which under the circumstances
was what I should have expected of him, he was trying by every means
in his power to prolong their bartering. And whether or not Neil
Gleazen suspected this, with imperturbable assurance he watched
Uncle Seth pass from one end of the store to the other.
When at last the women went away and Uncle Seth returned to his
desk, Gleazen removed the beaver from the cracker-box, and blowing a
ring of smoke out across the top of the desk, watched the draft from
the door tear it into thin blue shreds. "Sit down," he said calmly.
I was already staring at them in amazement; but my amazement was
fourfold when Uncle Seth hesitated, gulped, and _seated himself on
the cracker-box_.
"Joe," he said in an odd voice, "go help Arnold and Sim in the back
shop."
So I went out and left them; and when I came back, Cornelius Gleazen
was gone. But the next day he came again, and the next, and the
next.
That he was the very man the smith and his cronies had thought him,
I learned beyond peradventure of a doubt. Strange tales were
whispered here and there about the village, and women covertly
turned their eyes to watch him when he passed. Some men who had
known him in the old days tried to conceal it, and pretended to be
ignorant of all that concerned him, and gave him the coldest of cold
stares when they chanced to meet him face to face. Others, on the
contrary, courted his attention and called on him at the tavern, and
went away, red with anger, when he coldly snubbed them.
At the time it seemed to make little difference to him what they
thought. Strangely enough, the Cornelius Gleazen who had come back
to his boyhood home was a very different Cornelius, people found,
from the one who, twenty years before, had gone away by night with
the town officers hot on his trail.
Strange stories of that wild night passed about the town, and I
learned, in one way and another, that Gleazen was not the only lad
who had then disappeared. There was talk of one Eli Norton, and of
foul play, and an ugly word was whispered. But it had all happened
long before, much had been forgotten, and some things had never come
to light, and the officers who had run Gleazen out of town were long
since dead. So, as the farmer by the smithy had said would be the
case, the old scandals were let lie, and Gleazen went his way
unmolested.
That my uncle would gladly have been rid of the fellow, for all his
grand airs and the pocketfuls of money that he would throw out on
the bar at the inn or on the counter at the store, I very well knew;
I sometimes saw him wince at Gleazen's effrontery, or start to
retort with his customary sharpness, and then go red or pale and
press his lips to a straight line. Yet I could not imagine why this
should be. If any other man had treated him so, Uncle Seth would
have turned on him with the sharpest words at his command.
It was not like him to sit meekly down to another's arrogance. He
had been too long a leading man in our community. But Cornelius
Gleazen seemed to have cast a spell upon him. The longer Gleazen
would sit and watch Uncle Seth, the more overbearing would his
manner become and the more nervous would Uncle Seth grow.
I then believed, and still do, that if my uncle had stood up to him,
as man to man, on that first day, Neil Gleazen would have pursued a
very different course. But Uncle Seth, if he realized it at all,
realized it too late.
At the end of a week Gleazen seemed to have become a part of the
store. He would frown and look away out of the window, and scarcely
deign to reply if any of the poorer or less reputable villagers
spoke to him, whether their greeting was casual or pretentious; but
he would nod affably, and proffer cigars, and exchange observations
on politics and affairs of the world, when the minister or the
doctor or any other of the solid, substantial men of the place came
in.
I sometimes saw Uncle Seth surreptitiously watching him with a sort
of blank wonder; and once, when we had come home together late at
night, he broke a silence of a good two hours by remarking as
casually as if we had talked of nothing else all the evening, "I
declare to goodness, Joe, it does seem as if Neil Gleazen had
reformed. I could almost take my oath he's not spoken to one of the
old crowd since he returned. Who would have thought it? It's
strange--passing strange."
It was the question that the whole town was asking--who would have
thought it? I had heard enough by now of the old escapades,--drunken
revels in the tavern, raids on a score of chicken-roosts and
gardens, arrant burglary, and even, some said, arson,--to understand
why they asked the question. But more remarkable by far to me was
the change that had come over my uncle. Never before had the
business of the store been better; never before had there been more
mortgages and notes locked up in the big safe; never had our affairs
of every description flourished so famously. But whereas, in other
seasons of greater than ordinary prosperity, Uncle Seth had become
almost genial, I had never seen him so dictatorial and testy as now.
Some secret fear seemed to haunt him from day to day and from week
to week.
Thinking back on that morning when Cornelius Gleazen first came to
our store, I remembered a certain sentence he had spoken. "You and
me has robbed too many churches together when we was boys--" I
wondered if I could not put my finger on the secret of the change
that had come over my uncle.