The Case of Charles Dexter Ward | Page 9

local distillers, the Narragansett dairymen and horse-breeders, and
the Newport candle-makers, made him one of the prime exporters of the Colony.
Ostracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort. When the Colony
House burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which the new brick
one - still standing at the head of its parade in the old main street - was built in 1761. In
that same year, too, he helped rebuild the Great Bridge after the October gale. He
replaced many of the books of the public library consumed in the Colony House fire, and
bought heavily in the lottery that gave the muddy Market Parade and deep-rutted Town
Street their pavement of great round stones with a brick footwalk or "causey" in the
middle. About this time, also, he built the plain but excellent new house whose doorway

is still such a triumph of carving. When the Whitefield adherents broke off from Dr.
Cotton's hill church in 1743 and founded Deacon Snow's church across the Bridge,
Curwen had gone with them; though his zeal and attendance soon abated. Now, however,
he cultivated piety once more; as if to dispel the shadow which had thrown him into
isolation and would soon begin to wreck his business fortunes if not sharply checked.
2
The sight of this strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect yet certainly not less
than a full century old, seeking at last to emerge from a cloud of fright and detestation too
vague to pin down or analyse, was at once a pathetic, a dramatic, and a contemptible
thing. Such is the power of wealth and of surface gestures, however, that there came
indeed a slight abatement in the visible aversion displayed toward him; especially after
the rapid disappearances of his sailors abruptly ceased. He must likewise have begun to
practice an extreme care and secrecy in his graveyard expeditions, for he was never again
caught at such wanderings; whilst the rumours of uncanny sounds and manoeuvres at his
Pawtuxet farm diminished in proportion. His rate of food consumption and cattle
replacement remained abnormally high; but not until modern times, when Charles Ward
examined a set of his accounts and invoices in the Shepley Library, did it occur to any
person - save one embittered youth, perhaps - to make dark comparisons between the
large number of Guinea blacks he imported until 1766, and the disturbingly small number
for whom he could produce bona fide bills of sale either to slave-dealers at the Great
Bridge or to the planters of the Narragansett Country. Certainly, the cunning and
ingenuity of this abhorred character were uncannily profound, once the necessity for their
exercise had become impressed upon him.
But of course the effect of all this belated mending was necessarily slight. Curwen
continued to be avoided and distrusted, as indeed the one fact of his continued air of
youth at a great age would have been enough to warrant; and he could see that in the end
his fortunes would be likely to suffer. His elaborate studies and experiments, whatever
they may have been, apparently required a heavy income for their maintenance; and since
a change of environment would deprive him of the trading advantages he had gained, it
would not have profited him to begin anew in a different region just then. Judgement
demanded that he patch up his relations with the townsfolk of Providence, so that his
presence might no longer be a signal for hushed conversation, transparent excuses or
errands elsewhere, and a general atmosphere of constraint and uneasiness. His clerks,
being now reduced to the shiftless and impecunious residue whom no one else would
employ, were giving him much worry; and he held to his sea-captains and mates only by
shrewdness in gaining some kind of ascendancy over them - a mortgage, a promissory
note, or a bit of information very pertinent to their welfare. In many cases, diarists have
recorded with some awe, Curwen shewed almost the power of a wizard in unearthing
family secrets for questionable use. During the final five years of his life it seemed as
though only direct talks with the long-dead could possibly have furnished some of the
data which he had so glibly at his tongue's end.
About this time the crafty scholar hit upon a last desperate expedient to regain his footing
in the community. Hitherto a complete hermit, he now determined to contract an

advantageous marriage; securing as a bride some lady whose unquestioned position
would make all ostracism of his home impossible. It may be that he also had deeper
reasons for wishing an alliance; reasons so far outside the known cosmic sphere that only
papers found a century and a half after his death caused anyone to