The men spoke, according to their dispositions, with the fiery emphasis
or gravity common to great crises. The air was charged with a sense of
imminence, the vague discomfort of pending catastrophe. Elim listened
without comment, his eyes narrowed, his long countenance severe. Most
of the men had gone into Boston, to the Parker House, where hourly
bulletins were being posted. Those on the steps rose to follow, all
except Elim Meikeljohn--in Boston he knew money would be spent.
He went within, stopping to glance through a number of lately arrived
letters on a table and found one for himself, addressed in his father's
painstaking script. Alone, once more without his coat, he opened the
letter. Its beginning was commonplace--"My dear son, Elim"--but what
followed confused him by the totally unexpected shock it contained:
Hester, his wife, was dead.
At first he was unable to comprehend the details of what had happened
to him; the fact itself was of such disturbing significance. He had
never considered the possibility of Hester's dying; he had come to
think of her as a lifelong responsibility. She had seemed, in her
invalid's chair, withdrawn from the pressure of life as it bore upon
others, more enduring than his father's haggard concern over the
increasing difficulties of material existence and spiritual salvation,
than his mother's flushed toiling.
Elim had lived with no horizon wider than the impoverished daily
necessity; he had accepted this with mingled fatality and fortitude;
any rebellion had been immediately suppressed as a wicked reflection
upon Deity.
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