the village of topham, to which, after an absence of twenty years, cornelius gleazen had returned as a stranger, lay near the sea and yet not beside it, near the post road and yet not upon it. from the lower branches of an old pine that used to stand on the hill behind the tavern we could see a thread of salt water, which gleamed like silver in the sun; and, on the clearest days, if we climbed higher, we could sometimes catch a glimpse of tiny ships working up or down the coast.
in the other direction, if we faced about, we could see, far down a long, broad valley, between low hills, a bit of white road that ran for a mile or two between meadows and marshes; and on the road we sometimes saw moving black dots trailing tiny clouds of dust, which we knew were men and horses and coaches.
in topham i was born, and there i spent my boyhood. i suppose that i was quieter than the average boy and more studious, for i was content to find adventures in the pages of books, and i read from cover to cover all the journals of the day that came to hand. certainly i was a dreamy lad, who knew books better than men, and who cared so little for "practical affairs" that much passed me by unnoticed which many another youth of no more native keenness would instantly have perceived.
when my mother, some years after my father's death, came to live with her brother and keep his house for him, it did not make so great a change in my manner of life as one might have expected. bustling, smart uncle seth[pg 13] ruled the household with a quick, nervous hand; and for the time, as he bent all his energies to the various projects in which he was interested and in which he was more than ordinarily successful, he almost ignored his nephew.
it was not strange that after my mother died uncle seth should give me more thought, for he was left a second time alone in the world, and except for me he had neither close friend nor blood relation. i think that his very shrewdness, which must have shown him how much a man needs friends, perversely kept him from making them; it built around him a fence of cold, calculating, selfish appraisal that repelled most people whom he might have drawn closer to him. but to me, who had on him claims of a kind, and whom he had come by slow stages to know intimately, he gave a queer, testy, impulsive affection; and although the first well-meant but ill-chosen act by which he manifested it was to withdraw me from my books to the store, where he set me to learn the business, for which i was by no means so grateful as i should have been, both i and his two clerks, sim muzzy and arnold lamont, to whom long association had revealed the spontaneous generosity of which he seemed actually to be ashamed, had a very real affection for him.
it was no secret that he intended to make me his heir, and i was regarded through the town as a young man of rare prospects, which reconciled me in a measure to exchanging during the day my worn volumes of goldsmith and defoe for neat columns that represented profit and loss on candles and sugar and spice; and my hard, faithful work won uncle seth's confidence, and with it a curiously grudging acknowledgment. thus our little world of business moved monotonously, though not unpleasantly, round and round the cycle of the seasons, until the day when cornelius gleazen came back to his native town.
[pg 14]
he continued to sit in my uncle's chair, that first morning, while uncle seth, perspiring, it seemed to me, more freely than the heat of the day could have occasioned, bustled about and waited on his customers. i suppose that neil gleazen really saw nothing out of the ordinary in uncle seth's manner; but to me, who knew him so well now, it was plain that, instead of trying to get the troublesome women and their little business of eggs and cloth done with and out of the store as quickly as possible, which under the circumstances was what i should have expected of him, he was trying by every means in his power to prolong their bartering. and whether or not neil gleazen suspected this, with imperturbable assurance he watched uncle seth pass from one end of the store to the other.
when at last the women went away and uncle seth returned to his desk, gleazen removed the beaver from the cracker-box, and blowing a ring of smoke out across the top of the desk, watched the draft from the door tear it into thin blue shreds. "sit down," he said calmly.
i was already staring at them in amazement; but my amazement was fourfold when uncle seth hesitated, gulped, and seated himself on the cracker-box.
"joe," he said in an odd voice, "go help arnold and sim in the back shop."
so i went out and left them; and when i came back, cornelius gleazen was gone. but the next day he came again, and the next, and the next.
that he was the very man the smith and his cronies had thought him, i learned beyond peradventure of a doubt. strange tales were whispered here and there about the village, and women covertly turned their eyes to watch him when he passed. some men who had known him in the old days tried to conceal it, and pretended to[pg 15] be ignorant of all that concerned him, and gave him the coldest of cold stares when they chanced to meet him face to face. others, on the contrary, courted his attention and called on him at the tavern, and went away, red with anger, when he coldly snubbed them.
at the time it seemed to make little difference to him what they thought. strangely enough, the cornelius gleazen who had come back to his boyhood home was a very different cornelius, people found, from the one who, twenty years before, had gone away by night with the town officers hot on his trail.
strange stories of that wild night passed about the town, and i learned, in one way and another, that gleazen was not the only lad who had then disappeared. there was talk of one eli norton, and of foul play, and an ugly word was whispered. but it had all happened long before, much had been forgotten, and some things had never come to light, and the officers who had run gleazen out of town were long since dead. so, as the farmer by the smithy had said would be the case, the old scandals were let lie, and gleazen went his way unmolested.
that my uncle would gladly have been rid of the fellow, for all his grand airs and the pocketfuls of money that he would throw out on the bar at the inn or on the counter at the store, i very well knew; i sometimes saw him wince at gleazen's effrontery, or start to retort with his customary sharpness, and then go red or pale and press his lips to a straight line. yet i could not imagine why this should be. if any other man had treated him so, uncle seth would have turned on him with the sharpest words at his command.
it was not like him to sit meekly down to another's arrogance. he had been too long a leading man in our community. but cornelius gleazen seemed to have cast[pg 16] a spell upon him. the longer gleazen would sit and watch uncle seth, the more overbearing would his manner become and the more nervous would uncle seth grow.
i then believed, and still do, that if my uncle had stood up to him, as man to man, on that first day, neil gleazen would have pursued a very different course. but uncle seth, if he realized it at all, realized it too late.
at the end of a week gleazen seemed to have become a part of the store. he would frown and look away out of the window, and scarcely deign to reply if any of the poorer or less reputable villagers spoke to him, whether their greeting was casual or pretentious; but he would nod affably, and proffer cigars, and exchange observations on politics and affairs of the world, when the minister or the doctor or any other of the solid, substantial men of the place came in.
i sometimes saw uncle seth surreptitiously watching him with a sort of blank wonder; and once, when we had come home together late at night, he broke a silence of a good two hours by remarking as casually as if we had talked of nothing else all the evening, "i declare to goodness, joe, it does seem as if neil gleazen had reformed. i could almost take my oath he's not spoken to one of the old crowd since he returned. who would have thought it? it's strange—passing strange."
it was the question that the whole town was asking—who would have thought it? i had heard enough by now of the old escapades,—drunken revels in the tavern, raids on a score of chicken-roosts and gardens, arrant burglary, and even, some said, arson,—to understand why they asked the question. but more remarkable by far to me was the change that had come over my uncle. never before had the business of the store been better; never[pg 17] before had there been more mortgages and notes locked up in the big safe; never had our affairs of every description flourished so famously. but whereas, in other seasons of greater than ordinary prosperity, uncle seth had become almost genial, i had never seen him so dictatorial and testy as now. some secret fear seemed to haunt him from day to day and from week to week.
thinking back on that morning when cornelius gleazen first came to our store, i remembered a certain sentence he had spoken. "you and me has robbed too many churches together when we was boys—" i wondered if i could not put my finger on the secret of the change that had come over my uncle.
