When John Vincent, after waiting twelve years, married Phebe Etheridge, the whole
neighborhood experienced that sense of relief and satisfaction which follows the triumph
of the right. Not that the fact of a true love is ever generally recognized and respected
when it is first discovered; for there is a perverse quality in American human nature
which will not accept the existence of any fine, unselfish passion, until it has been tested
and established beyond peradventure. There were two views of the case when John
Vincent's love for Phebe, and old Reuben Etheridge's hard prohibition of the match, first
became known to the community. The girls and boys, and some of the matrons, ranged
themselves at once on the side of the lovers, but a large majority of the older men and a
few of the younger supported the tyrannical father.
Reuben Etheridge was rich, and, in addition to what his daughter would naturally inherit
from him, she already possessed more than her lover, at the time of their betrothal. This
in the eyes of one class was a sufficient reason for the father's hostility. When low natures
live (as they almost invariably do) wholly in the present, they neither take tenderness
from the past nor warning from the possibilities of the future. It is the exceptional men
and women who remember their youth. So, these lovers received a nearly equal amount
of sympathy and condemnation; and only slowly, partly through their quiet fidelity and
patience, and partly through the improvement in John Vincent's worldly circumstances,
was the balance changed. Old Reuben remained an unflinching despot to the last: if any
relenting softness touched his heart, he sternly concealed it; and such inference as could
be drawn from the fact that he, certainly knowing what would follow his death,
bequeathed his daughter her proper share of his goods, was all that could be taken for
consent.
They were married: John, a grave man in middle age, weather-beaten and worn by years
of hard work and self-denial, yet not beyond the restoration of a milder second youth; and
Phebe a sad, weary woman, whose warmth of longing had been exhausted, from whom
youth and its uncalculating surrenders of hope and feeling had gone forever. They began
their wedded life under the shadow of the death out of which it grew; and when, after a
ceremony in which neither bridesmaid nor groomsman stood by their side, they united
their divided homes, it seemed to their neighbors that a separated husband and wife had
come together again, not that the relation was new to either.
John Vincent loved his wife with the tenderness of an innocent man, but all his
tenderness could not avail to lift the weight of settled melancholy which had gathered
upon her. Disappointment, waiting, yearning, indulgence in long lament and self-pity, the
morbid cultivation of unhappy fancies--all this had wrought its work upon her, and it was
too late to effect a cure. In the night she awoke to weep at his side, because of the years
when she had awakened to weep alone; by day she kept up her old habit of foreboding,
although the evening steadily refuted the morning; and there were times when, without
