capable; she had borne this man fifteen children, of whom eight had come to life, and had for forty years eaten the bread of blood and tears and joy and grief and terror; she had wanted affection and had been given taunts, abuse, and curses, and somehow her proud and wounded spirit had endured with an anguished but unshaken fortitude all the wrongs and cruelties and injustices of which he had been guilty toward her. And now at the very end her pride still had this pitiable distinction, her spirit still preserved this last integrity: she had not betrayed her wounded soul to a shameful familiarity, he had remained to her—in mind and heart and living word—what he had been from the first day that she met him: the author of her grief and misery, the agent of her suffering, the gaunt and lonely stranger who had come into her hills from a strange land and a distant people—that furious, gaunt, and lonely stranger with whom by fatal accident her destiny—past hate or love or birth or death or human error and confusion—had been insolubly enmeshed, with whom for forty years she had lived, a wife, a mother, and a stranger—and who would to the end remain to her a stranger—“Mr. Gant.”
What was it? What was the secret of this strange and bitter mystery of life that had made of Gant a stranger to all men, and most of all a stranger to his wife? Perhaps some of the answer might have been found in Eliza’s own unconscious words when she described her meeting with him forty years before:
“It was not that he was old,” she said, —“he was only thirty-three—but he looked old—his ways were old—he lived so much among old people.—Pshaw!” she continued, with a little puckered smile, “if anyone had told me that night I saw him sitting there with Lydia and old Mrs. Mason—that was the very day they moved into the house, the night he gave the big dinner—and Lydia was still alive and, of course, she was ten years older than he was, and that may have had something to do with it—but I got to studying him as he sat there; of course, he was tired and run down and depressed and worried over all that trouble that he’d had in Sidney before he came up here, when he lost everything, and he knew that Lydia was dying, and that was preyin’on his mind—but he looked old, thin as a rake you know, and sallow and run down, and with those old ways he had acquired, I reckon, from associatin’with Lydia and old Mrs. Mason and people like that—but I just sat there studying him as he sat there with them and I said—’Well, you’re an old man, aren’t you, sure enough?’—pshaw! if anyone had told me that night
