Saxe Holm's Stories, by Helen
Hunt Jackson
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Title: Saxe Holm's Stories
Author: Helen Hunt Jackson
Release Date: February 3, 2004 [EBook #10926]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAXE
HOLM'S STORIES ***
Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
SAXE HOLM'S STORIES
[by Helen Hunt Jackson]
1873
Content.
Draxy Miller's Dowry The Elder's Wife Whose Wife Was She? The
One-Legged Dancers How One Woman Kept Her Husband Esther
Wynn's Love-Letters
Draxy Miller's Dowry.
Part I.
When Draxy Miller's father was a boy, he read a novel in which the
heroine was a Polish girl, named Darachsa. The name stamped itself
indelibly upon his imagination; and when, at the age of thirty-five, he
took his first-born daughter in his arms, his first words were--"I want
her called Darachsa."
"What!" exclaimed the doctor, turning sharply round, and looking out
above his spectacles; "what heathen kind of a name is that?"
"Oh, Reuben!" groaned a feeble voice from the baby's mother; and the
nurse muttered audibly, as she left the room, "There ain't never no luck
comes of them outlandish names."
The whole village was in a state of excitement before night. Poor
Reuben Miller had never before been the object of half so much interest.
His slowly dwindling fortunes, the mysterious succession of his
ill-lucks, had not much stirred the hearts of the people. He was a
retice'nt man; he loved books, and had hungered for them all his life;
his townsmen unconsciously resented what they pretended to despise;
and so it had slowly come about that in the village where his father had
lived and died, and where he himself had grown up, and seemed likely
to live and die, Reuben Miller was a lonely man, and came and went
almost as a stranger might come and go. His wife was simply a shadow
and echo of himself; one of those clinging, tender, unselfish, will-less
women, who make pleasant, and affectionate, and sunny wives enough
for rich, prosperous, unsentimental husbands, but who are millstones
about the necks of sensitive, impressionable, unsuccessful men. If Jane
Miller had been a strong, determined woman, Reuben would not have
been a failure. The only thing he had needed in life had been persistent
purpose and courage. The right sort of wife would have given him both.
But when he was discouraged, baffled, Jane clasped her hands, sat
down, and looked into his face with streaming eyes. If he smiled, she
smiled; but that was just when it was of least consequence that she
should smile. So the twelve years of their married life had gone on
slowly, very slowly, but still surely, from bad to worse; nothing
prospered in Reuben's hands. The farm which he had inherited from his
father was large, but not profitable. He tried too long to work the whole
of it, and then he sold the parts which he ought to have kept. He sunk a
great portion of his little capital in a flour-mill, which promised to be a
great success, paid well for a couple of years, and then burnt down,
uninsured. He took a contract for building one section of a canal, which
was to pass through part of his land; sub-contractors cheated him, and
he, in his honesty, almost ruined himself to right their wrong. Then he
opened a little store; here, also, he failed. He was too honest, too
sympathizing, too inert. His day-book was a curiosity; he had a vein of
humor which no amount of misfortune could quench; and he used to
enter under the head of "given" all the purchases which he knew were
not likely to be paid for. It was at sight of this book, one day, that Jane
Miller, for the first and only time in her life, lost her temper with
Reuben.
"Well, I must say, Reuben Miller, if I die for it," said she, "I haven't had
so much as a pound of white sugar nor a single lemon in my house for
two years, and I do think it's a burnin' shame for you to go on sellin'
'em to them shiftless Greens, that'll never pay you a cent, and you know
it!"
Reuben was sitting on the counter smoking his pipe and reading an old
tattered copy of Dryden's translation of Virgil. He lifted his clear blue
eyes in astonishment, put down his pipe, and, slowly swinging his long
legs over the counter,
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