The Desert and the Sown | Page 8

social ways much more in bonds than Paul, who had inherited his father's dreamy speculative habit of thought, with something of the farm-hand's distrust of society and its forms and shibboleth.
Paul's voice took a narrative tone, and Moya gave herself up to listening--to him rather more, perhaps, than to his story.
Few young men of twenty-four can go very deeply into questions of heredity. Of what follows here much was not known to Paul. Much that he did know he would have interpreted differently. The old well at Stone Ridge, for instance, had no place in his recital; and yet out of it sprang the history of his shorn generation. Had Paul's mother grown up in a houseful of brothers and sisters, governed by her mother instead of an old ignorant servant, in all likelihood she would have married differently--more wisely but not perhaps so well, her son would loyally have maintained. The sons of the rich farmers who would have been her suitors were men inferior to their fathers. They inherited the vigor and coarseness of constitution, the unabashed materialism of that earlier generation that spent its energies coping with Nature on its stony farms, but the sons were spared the need of that hard labor which their blood required. They supplied an element of force, but one of great corruption later, in the state politics of their time.

IV
A MAN THAT HAD A WELL IN HIS OWN COURT
In the kitchen court called the "Airy" at Abraham Van Elten's, there was one of those old family wells which our ancestors used to locate so artlessly. And when it tapped the kitchen drain, and typhoid took the elder children, and the mother followed the children, it was called the will of God. A gloomy distinction rested on the house. Abraham felt the importance attaching to any supreme experience in a community where life runs on in the middle key.
A young doctor who had been called in at the close of the last case went prying about the premises, asking foolish questions that angered Abraham. It is easier for some natures to suffer than to change. If the farmer had ever drunk water himself, except as tea or coffee, or mixed with something stronger, he must have been an early victim, to his own crass ignorance. He was a vigorous, heavy-set man, a grand field for typhoid. But he prospered, and the young doctor was turned down with the full weight and breadth of the Van Elten thumb, or the Broderick; Abraham's build was that of his maternal grandmother, Hillotje Broderick.
On the Ridge, which later developed into a valuable slate quarry, there was a spring of water, cold and perpetual, flowing out of the trap-formation. Abraham had piped this water down to his barns and cattle-sheds; it furnished power for the farm-work. But to bring it to the house, in obedience to the doctor's meddlesome advice, would be an acknowledgment of fatal mistakes in the past; would raise talk and blame among the neighbors, and do away with the honor of a special visitation; would cost no trifle of money; would justify the doctor's interference, and insult the old well of his father and his father's father, the fountain of generations. To seal its mouth and bid its usefulness cease in the house where it had ministered for upwards of a hundred years was an act of desecration impossible to the man who in his stolid way loved the very stones that lined its slimy sides. The few sentiments that had taken hold on Abraham's arid nature went as deep as his obstinacy and clung as fast as his distrust of new opinions and new men. The question of water supply was closed in his house; but the well remained open and kept up its illicit connection with the drain.
Old Becky, keeper of the widower's keys, had followed closely the history of those unhappy "cases;" she had listened to discussions, violent or suppressed, she had heard much talk that went on behind her master's back.
Employers of that day and generation were masters; and masters are meant to be outwitted. Emily, the youngest and last of the flock, was now a child of four, dark like her mother, sturdy and strong like her father. On an August day soon after the mother's funeral, Becky took her little charge to the well and showed her a tumbler filled, with water not freshly drawn.
"See them little specks and squirmy things?" Emmy saw them. She followed their wavering motion in the glass as the stern forefinger pointed. "Those are little baby snakes," said Becky mysteriously. "The well is full of 'em. Sometimes you can see 'em, sometimes you can't, but they're always there. They never grow big down the well; it's too dark 'n' cold. But you