If Susanna's path had grown more difficult, more filled with anxieties, so had John Hathaway's. The protracted absence of his wife made the gossips conclude that the break was a final one. Jack was only half contented with his aunt, and would be fairly mutinous in the winter, while Louisa's general attitude was such as to show clearly that she only kept the boy for Susanna's sake.
Now and then there was a terrifying hint of winter in the air, and the days of Susanna's absence seemed eternal to John Hathaway. Yet he was a man about whom there would have been but one opinion: that when deprived of a rather superior and high-minded wife and the steadying influence of home and children, he would go completely “to the dogs,” whither he seemed to be hurrying when Susanna's wifely courage failed. That he had done precisely the opposite and the unexpected thing, shows us perhaps that men are not on the whole as capable of estimating the forces of their fellow men as is God the maker of men, who probably expects something of the worst of them up to the very last.
It was at the end of a hopeless Sunday when John took his boy back to his aunt's towards night. He wondered drearily how a woman dealt with a ten-year-old boy who from sunrise to sunset had done every mortal thing he ought not to have done, and had left undone everything that he had been told to do; and, as if to carry out the very words of the church service, neither was there any health in him; for he had an inflamed throat and a whining, irritable, discontented temper that could be borne only by a mother, a father being wholly inadequate and apparently never destined for the purpose.
It was a mild evening late in October, and Louisa sat on the porch with her pepper-and-salt shawl on and a black wool “rigolette” tied over her head. Jack, very sulky and unresigned, was dispatched to bed under the care of the one servant, who was provided with a cupful of vinegar, salt, and water, for a gargle. John had more than an hour to wait for a returning train to Farnham, and although ordinarily he would have preferred to spend the time in the silent and unreproachful cemetery rather than in the society of his sister Louisa, he was too tired and hopeless to do anything but sit on the steps and smoke fitfully in the semidarkness. Louisa was much as usual. She well knew—who better?—her brother's changed course of life, but neither encouragement nor compliment were in her line. Why should a man be praised for living a respectable life? That John had really turned a sort of moral somersault and come up a different creature, she did not realize in the least, nor the difficulties surmounted in such a feat; but she did give him credit secretly for turning about face and behaving far more decently than she could ever have believed possible. She had no conception of his mental torture at the time, but if he kept on doing well, she privately intended to inform Susanna and at least give her a chance of trying him again, if absence had diminished her sense of injury. One thing that she did not know was that John was on the eve of losing his partnership. When Jack had said that his father was not going back to the store the next week, she thought it meant simply a vacation. Divided hearts, broken vows, ruined lives she could bear the sight of these with considerable philosophy, but a lost income was a very different, a very tangible thing. She almost lost her breath when her brother knocked the ashes from his meerschaum and curtly told her of the proposed change in his business relations.
“I don't know what I shall do yet,” he said, “whether I shall set up for myself in a small way or take a position in another concern,—that is, if I can get one—my stock of popularity seems to be pretty low just now in Farnham. I'd move away tomorrow and cut the whole gossipy, deceitful, hypocritical lot of 'em if I was n't afraid of closing the house and so losing Susanna, if she should ever feel like coming back to us.”
These words and the thought back of them were too much for John's self-control. The darkness helped him and his need of comfort was abject. Suddenly he burst out, “Oh, Louisa, for heaven's sake, give me a little crumb of comfort, if you have any! How can you stand like a stone all these months and see a man suffering as I have suffered, without giving him a word?”
“You brought it on yourself,” said Louisa, in self-exculpation.
“Does that make it any easier to bear?” cried John. “Don't you suppose I remember it every hour, and curse myself the more? You know perfectly well that I'm a different man today. I don't know what made me change; it was as if something had been injected into my blood that turned me against everything I had liked best before. I hate the sight of the men and the women I used to go with, not because they are any worse, but because they remind me of what I have lost. I have reached the point now where I have got to have news of Susanna or go and shoot myself.”
“That would be about the only piece of foolishness you have n't committed already!” replied Louisa, with a biting satire that would have made any man let go of the trigger in case he had gone so far as to begin pulling it.
“Where is she?” John went on, without anger at her sarcasm. “Where is she, how is she, what is she living on, is she well, is she just as bitter as she was at first, does she ever speak of coming back? Tell me something, tell me anything. I will know something. I say I will!”
Louisa's calm demeanor began to show a little agitation, for she was not used to the sight of emotion. “I can't tell you where Susanna is, for I made her a solemn promise I would n't unless you or Jack were in danger of some kind; but I don't mind telling you this much, that she's well and in the safest kind of a shelter, for she's been living from the first in a Shaker Settlement.”
“Shaker Settlement!” cried John, starting up from his seat on the steps. “What's that? I know Shaker egg-beaters and garden-seeds and rocking-chairs and oh, yes, I remember their religion's against marriage. That's the worst thing you could have told me; that ends all hope; if they once get hold of a woman like Susanna, they'll never let go of her; if they don't believe in a woman's marrying a good man, they'd never let her go back to a bad one. Oh, if I had only known this before; if only you'd told me, Louisa, perhaps I could have done something. Maybe they take vows or sign contracts, and so I have lost her altogether.”
“I don't know much about their beliefs, and Susanna never explained them,” returned Lo............