PAGE 6
A Difficult Case
by
“Well, what?”
“If I didn’t fatigue Hilbrook, I came away feeling perfectly exhausted myself. Were you uneasy at my being out so late?”
V.
It was some time after the Ewberts had given up expecting him that old Hilbrook came to return the minister’s visit. Then, as if some excuse were necessary, he brought a dozen eggs in a paper bag, which he said he hoped Mrs. Ewbert could use, because his hens were giving him more than he knew what to do with. He came to the back door with them; but Mrs. Ewbert always let her maid of all work go out Sunday evening, and she could receive him in the kitchen herself. She felt obliged to make him the more welcome on account of his humility, and she showed him into the library with perhaps exaggerated hospitality.
It was a chilly evening of April, and so early that the lamp was not lighted; but there was a pleasant glow from the fire on the hearth, and Ewbert made his guest sit down before it. As he lay back in the easy-chair, stretching his thin old hands toward the blaze, the delicacy of his profile was charming, and that senile parting of the lips with which he listened reminded Ewbert of his own father’s looks in his last years; so that it was with an affectionate eagerness he set about making Hilbrook feel his presence acceptable, when Mrs. Ewbert left them to finish up the work she had promised herself not to leave for the maid. It was much that Hilbrook had come at all, and he ought to be made to realize that Ewbert appreciated his coming. But Hilbrook seemed indifferent to his efforts, or rather, insensible to them, in the several topics that Ewbert advanced; and there began to be pauses, in which the minister racked his brain for some new thing to say, or found himself saying something he cared nothing for in a voice of hollow resolution, or falling into commonplaces which he tried to give vitality by strenuousness of expression. He heard his wife moving about in the kitchen and dining room, with a clicking of spoons and knives and a faint clash of china, as she put the supper things away, and he wished that she would come in and help him with old Hilbrook; but he could not very well call her, and she kept at her work, with no apparent purpose of leaving it.
Hilbrook was a farmer, so far as he was anything industrially, and Ewbert tried him with questions of crops, soils, and fertilizers; but he tried him in vain. The old man said he had never cared much for those things, and now it was too late for him to begin. He generally sold his grass standing, and his apples on the trees; and he had no animals about the place except his chickens,–they took care of themselves. Ewbert urged, for the sake of conversation, even of a disputative character, that poultry were liable to disease, if they were not looked after; but Hilbrook said, Not if there were not too many of them, and so made an end of that subject. Ewbert desperately suggested that he must find them company,–they seemed sociable creatures; and then, in his utter dearth, he asked how the old dog was getting on.
“Oh, he’s dead,” said Hilbrook, and the minister’s heart smote him with a pity for the survivor’s forlornness which the old man’s apathetic tone had scarcely invited. He inquired how and when the old dog had died, and said how much Hilbrook must miss him.
“Well, I don’t know,” Hilbrook returned. “He wa’n’t much comfort, and he’s out of his misery, anyway.” After a moment he added, with a gleam of interest: “I’ve been thinkin’, since he went, of what we talked about the other night,–I don’t mean animals, but men. I tried to go over what you said, in my own mind, but I couldn’t seem to make it.”