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قراءة كتاب David Fleming's Forgiveness
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David Fleming's Forgiveness
that his obligation was to him. He was growing an old man, conscious of his increasing weakness and inability to cope with difficulties, and he believed his “enemy,” as he called him, to be capable of taking advantage of these. His faith failed him sometimes, and in his anxiety and unhappiness, he uttered harder words than he knew.
Everybody in Gershom knew of his debt, but no one knew what made the bitterness of his indebtedness to the old man. The part which Jacob Holt had had in the trouble, that had come on him through his son, had never been clearly understood, and was now well-nigh forgotten in the place. But the father had not forgotten it. He would gladly have mortgaged his farm, or even have given up half of it altogether, to any friend who could have advanced him the money to pay his debt, but no such friend was at hand, and it ended, as all knew it must end, in a seven years’ mortgage being taken by Jacob Holt, and the only thing the old man could do now was to keep silence and hope for better days.
The little Flemings were growing up healthy and happy, a great comfort and a great care to their grandparents. They were bright and pretty children, and good children on the whole, the neighbours said, and they said also, that there seemed to be no reason why the last days of the old people should not be contented and comfortable, notwithstanding their burden of debt. For the Holts would never be hard on such old neighbours, and as the boys grew up, to take the weight of the farm-work on them, the debt might be paid, and all would go well. This was the hopeful view of the matter taken by Mrs Fleming also, but the old man always listened in silence to such words.
When five years had past, no part of the debt had yet been paid. Even the interest had been in part paid with borrowed money, and there were other signs and tokens that the Flemings were going back in the world. It was not to be wondered at; for Mr Fleming was an old man, and the greater part of the farm-work had to be done by hired help, at a cost which the farm could ill bear. And the chances were, that for a while at least the state of affairs would be worse rather than better.
Then there came to Mr Fleming this proposal from Jacob Holt. If twenty-five acres of the swampy land that bordered the Beaver River just where the brook fell into it were given up to him the mortgage should be cancelled, and the debt should be considered paid. He declared that the proposal was made solely in the interest of the Fleming family, and there were a good many people in Gershom who believed him.
To this proposal, however, Mr Fleming returned a prompt and brief refusal. He said little about it, but it was known that he believed evil of Jacob Holt with regard to the matter, and though he kept silence, others spoke. The North Gore people took the matter up, and so did the people of the village. Mr Fleming had friends in both sections of the town, and some of them did not spare hard words in the discussion.
Jacob Holt was now the rich man of Gershom, one of the chief supporters of the church and of every good cause encouraged in the town, and all this did not promise well for the union in church matters so earnestly desired by many good people in Gershom.
Chapter Three.
The Holts.
Gershom Holt was to all appearance a hale old man, but for a long time before this he had had little to do with the management of the business of Holt and Son. He still lived in the great square house which had succeeded the log-house built by him in the early days of the settlement. Two of his children lived with him—Elizabeth, the youngest child of his first wife, and Clifton, the only child of his second wife, who had died in giving him birth.
Elizabeth was good, pretty, and clever, and still single at twenty-four. The persons she loved best in the world were her father and her younger brother. Her father loved and trusted her entirely, and every passing day made him more dependent on her for comfort and for counsel; for he was a very old man, and in many ways needed the care which it was his daughter’s first duty and pleasure to give. Her brother loved and trusted her too in his way, but he was only a lad, and too well contented with himself and his life to know the value of her love as yet, and she was not without anxious thoughts about him. He was supposed to be distinguishing himself in a New England College as he had before distinguished himself in the High-School of the village, and only spent his vacations at home.
There was a difference of nearly twenty years in the ages of Gershom Holt’s two sons, and they had little in common except their father’s name. Elizabeth loved them both, and respected the youngest most. Jacob was a little afraid of his sister, and took pains to be on the best of terms with her, and he could not forget sometimes in her presence that he had done some things in his life which he was glad she did not know.
He had married, early in life, a pretty, commonplace woman, who had grown thin and querulous in the years that had passed since then, and who was not at all fitted to be the great lady of Gershom, as the rich man’s wife might have been. That place was filled by Elizabeth, who filled it well and enjoyed it.
With its large garden and orchard, and its sloping lawn, shaded by trees beginning to look old and venerable beside those of more recent growth in the village street, the old square house looked far more like the great house of the village than the finer mansion lately built by Jacob further up the hill. Under Elizabeth’s direction it had been modernised and beautified by the throwing out of a bow-window and the addition of a wide veranda on two sides. Everything about it, without and within, indicated wealth moderately used, for comfort and not for display. It was the pleasantest house in the village to visit at, everybody said; for the squire—so old Mr Holt was generally called—was very hospitable, and all sorts of people were made welcome there.
There were by this time people in Gershom who had outlived the remembrance of the days when all the settlers, rich and poor alike, were socially on a level, and who spoke smoothly and loftily about “station” and “position” and “the working classes,” but the young Holts were not among them. Elizabeth and Clifton deserved less credit than was given them on account of their unassuming and agreeable manners with the village people, for they did not need to assert themselves as some others did. Miss Elizabeth, for all her unpretending ways, was the great lady of the village, and liked it, and very likely would have resented it had a rival appeared to call her right in question.
The Holts of the Hill were, in most respects, very different from the Holts of the village. They lived and worked and dressed and conducted themselves generally very much as they had been used to do in the early days of the settlement. The old man had been long dead, and his widow and her two daughters lived on the farm. One of the daughters was a childless widow, Betsey, the other had never married. “A good woman with an uncertain temper,” was the character which many of her friends would have given her, and some of them might have added that she had had a hard life and many cares, and no wonder that she was a little hard and sour after all she had passed through. But this was by no means all that could be said of Miss Betsey.
There was little intercourse between the Holts of the Hill and the village Holts, and it was not the fault of Elizabeth. It was Betsey who decidedly withdrew from any intimacy with her cousins. She was too old-fashioned, too “set” in her way to fall in with all their new notions, she said, and from the time that Elizabeth came home from school to be the mistress of her father’s house, and the most popular person in Gershom, she had had but little to do with her. It hurt Elizabeth that it should