Chapter III: 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.