First harvests

JUDGE HOLYOKE sat in his library, trying to reconcile good law with good conscience by distinguishing the present case, in which the plaintiff was clearly in the right, from a former one in which he had been as clearly in the wrong. The opinion was a hard one; and the Judge had got no farther than the summing up, when there was a knock at the door. The Judge always wrote his opinions with ease and clearness when law and right coincided; but when they did not, he would lie awake of nights to produce an opinion which would remain a marvel of learning and obscurity. His high brow wrinkled a little when he heard the knock at the door; he hated to be disturbed while in the agonies of judicial creation; and as Arthur came tentatively in, he looked at him sternly, as upon a counsel who ventured upon an unexpected motion, with a curtly short-cutting well?

(He has come for a larger allowance, thought the Judge; he knows that he is of full age, and wants his full income.)

(How shall I ask him for his daughter, thought Arthur. Well—at all events, he must know that she is mine.)

Arthur sat down, still hesitating. The Judge waited impatiently, though he thought he knew what was in his mind; for it was part of his legal training never to give his own ideas until he had fully extracted those of the other side. Thus, mutual misunderstanding like that of a scene in a comedy was averted; for when Arthur did begin, it was to the point.

“Uncle John,” said he, “I am engaged to Gracie.”

Uncle John was in fact more staggered than if he had moved him for a non-suit; but his judicial calm was as unruffled as if it were but a similiter in pleading. “And is Gracie engaged to you?” he answered, illogically, but to the point, in his turn. And Arthur’s hesitation in replying gave him time to hastily adapt himself to the issue and make up his judicial mind; which was, as usual, that the court would reserve its decision. Arthur, however, hesitated but for a moment; and then with a faint blush mantling his ingenuous face, “I think, sir, she might be, if you would consent.”

“But, dear me,” said the Judge, “I don’t consent! Don’t understand me for one moment as consenting! Where’s Gracie? Did you tell her of this—of this surprising motion of yours?”

“No, sir,” said Arthur, “I thought—that——”

“That you wanted an ex parte hearing? Now I can’t pronounce a decision, sir, in the absence of the parties; and Gracie has not made her appearance in this suit as yet!”

“I’ll go get her,” said Arthur, promptly.

“No, sir, you’ll do nothing of the sort,” said the Judge, appalled at this evidence of collusion between the parties. “You’ll go away from here for some years before you get her; and then——”

“And then?” said Arthur, eagerly.

The Judge looked at him curiously over his round spectacles. “What do you propose to live upon?”

“I am coming to that,” said Arthur. “I have fifteen hundred a year——”

“Two thousand,” said the Judge, absently.

“Two thousand?” said Arthur, “I did not think it was so much.” And he began rapidly to calculate how much farther the extra five hundred would carry them.

“Well,” said the Judge, “you don’t propose to marry my daughter and live in Boston on two thousand a year, do you?” But, secretly, it seemed to him the proper thing to do.

“No, sir,” said Arthur; (“Oh,” interpolated the Judge, rather disappointed.) “I—I have decided to go to New York and enter a banking-house. And, in that, sir, I want to ask your help—and your advice.”

The Judge was silent a minute. “In order that you may use the one and decline the other, I suppose, with thanks. Well;—and granting this point (for the sake of argument)—What next?”

“Then,” said Arthur, “I shall try to make some money; and then, if I succeed—will you give your consent to our engagem—to our marriage?”

“Dear, dear,” thought the Judge, “how persistent he is! I haven’t given my consent to your engagement as yet,” he answered. “Why do you wish to go to New York?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Arthur, taken by surprise. “At least, it is a larger field—one may get on in the world more rapidly—and I thought, with my engineering training, as agent of a banking-house I should be sooner able to support a wife.”

“Do you think Gracie would be happier there than in Boston?”

“I don’t know—we had not got to that yet, sir,” said Arthur, cleverly enough. True, they had not; and the Judge smiled a little.

“I mean, in case we should consider this most preposterous scheme?” he added. “Do you mean to be a banker all your life?” he asked, suddenly.

“Oh, no, sir—at least, that is—I should like——”

“Suppose I should ask you to take some practical position on a railroad in the far West?”

“I think I should rather be in New York, sir.—But, of course, I should want to follow your advice.”

“Would you give up the New York plan entirely, if I asked you to?”

“Yes, sir,” said Arthur. “If you gave me Gracie.”

The Judge paused. Arthur sat, twirling his light straw hat in his hand, but looking earnestly at his uncle. “Shall I send her here to you, sir?” he said, finally, finding the suspense intolerable.

The Judge looked at him gravely, over his spectacles.

“On the whole, I think New York will be the best place for you. I will write to Mrs. Livingstone about it to-night. But not a word of this to Gracie, mind. And now, good-night.”

Arthur got up; but he hesitated nervously at the door, before turning the handle.

“And suppose—suppose she asks me, sir?”

“You will tell her I unqualifiedly disapprove of the whole project,” thundered the Judge in his most court-like manner; and Arthur must fain go content with that answer. But he met Gracie in the parlor, and told her that her father would not give his consent as yet; but that he had written to New York, and would find him, Arthur, a place in some banking-house.

And so, these two went on to talk of more important matters; or rather, Arthur did; as, how long he had loved her, and how much, and how he had come to speak upon just that day; until Gracie, hearing nothing from her father, feared that he might be ill or worried, and gave Arthur his dismissal, and with more formality than usual. A certain constraint was between these two now, most new and delightful, to Arthur, at least; but quite different from the old cousinly ease.

Meantime, the Judge had dropped his papers from him and set to considering this last case, that was so much nearer home. He had no objections—of course, he had no serious objection to his daughter’s marrying Arthur—if Arthur was good enough for her; for cousinship is but a slight objection in New England. The Judge had always looked up to his elder brother, the clergyman, as being far his own superior; but somehow, with his son and his own daughter, it seemed otherwise. The Judge strenuously kept out of his mind any consideration of Gracie’s leaving him, lest it should bias his decision; he felt an odd desire to submit the case to someone else, as one in which he was too much interested to sit.

Perhaps in every middle-aged or elderly mind, there is a slight impatience with the matrimonial doings of the younger, as being always somewhat premature and ill-considered. When one’s own life is neatly rounded off, when one has duly weighed its emptiness, and properly resigned one’s self to it; when that resignation, which once seemed so unlike content, has become a habit; there must be a certain impertinence,—you being so ready to say enfin!—in anyone’s starting up and crying recommençons! Of course, Judge Holyoke knew that Gracie would some day wed—of course, he wished her to be well, i.e., happily married—but not exactly here—not now—not to this one nor to that one. Not that he doubted that Arthur was in earnest—or that he spoke the truth in saying Gracie loved him—nor did he think that they were both too young to know their own minds. It is the fashion to scoff at first loves, but the Judge believed in them; whether rightly or wrongly, we cannot say; but this was part of that which made him trusted, even by the prisoner upon whom he was passing sentence; and yet, a just judge, too.

But somehow, things had changed so much since the Judge was young, that he did not see how any one could soberly contract to see them change much further, or take the risk of any new beginning. He himself had been a Rousseau, a Robespierre, a Lovelace with a dash of folly and Tom Paine, to the worthy people of the town where he then sat, the people who were then sleeping in the hillside yonder; and yet, how fine a town these same good folk had made, in the days when he was a young law-student under old Judge Sewall! But in middle life, the world and its movement had passed him; and now, the gay folk and the band were almost out of sight ahead of him, and he behind with the feeble and the stragglers, the old and the obstructive, and no longer any hankering to be drum-major.

For it seemed as if the old prizes had lost their lustre; and there were no longer any public for a man; an honest one getting so little applause, in this world’s stage, and the general taste being vitiated, and too coarse to relish the finer flavors of the human soul. He believed Arthur to be an honest man, with the education and breeding of a gentleman; more he did not ask, his smartness, or his faculty for getting on. The old Judge had little of the avarice miscalled of age; he thought too little of the worth of money for one who grieved so much that it alone had worth; perhaps Arthur, in his way, thought as much of this. With Gracie married, he at least might well go off the stage. Many creatures live but to their time of reproduction; this is all that nature seems to care; and the time which is given to live with and cherish his children to nature would seem but surplusage. He had lived and married; he had found all that even his youthful ambitions had dared to formulate or hope; but was he quite content? Somehow, the sky, so blue in the morning, had grown troubled and overcast toward the twilight. There was no one thing he could say was wanting; he had done what he had sought to do; he had been honored more than he had hoped; he would leave—what? A few well-wrought opinions, valuable until the next statute; a reputation as a nice old fogy; a few poor dollars, some books, and—

The door opened softly, but the Judge did not hear it; and his daughter entered and placed her soft hand on his. He started, as if he had been dreaming. Gracie was troubled by his absence of mind, and feared she might be the cause; she looked at him, not timidly, nor inquiringly, and yet so that the old man’s eyes grew softer as he looked at hers. “No, dear, you did not disturb me,—neither you nor Arthur,” he added, at her half-spoken word. “Tell me, do you care for him very much?”

“No more than I do for you, dear,” said the girl; but in her manner the Judge could read her silent strength of love. And more was said between them; but come, we are not fit for such scenes, you and I; let us go out gently and leave these two alone.

Meantime, Arthur, the cause of all this, was sleeping quietly, with the sleep of a hunter of any manner of wild-fowl, and the dreamlessness of insouciant youth. For Gracie loved him—that was clear, both to happy Arthur and the wakeful Judge.

There is a curious timeliness in our modern ailments; a timeliness which would be still more striking if we could know the elements of each man’s life. In older times, men wore out slowly, by labor or by rust; they set about dying deliberately, as they worked their land or managed their daily concernments. But in these days of steam and dynamite, our mode of death is sudden, quick and certain, like an explosion or a railway catastrophe; less like the processes of nature than those of man. Paralysis, like nihilism, has developed in the nineteenth century, and chooses, as if by some secret intelligence, its moment with a terrible skill.

So, one such night as this, and not long after—of the exact date I am not sure—death came upon the Judge, as he was sitting with his papers, working late at night and lonely, striving to fashion human statutes to fit diviner laws, that justice might be seen of men.