Elijah Kellogg - The Unseen Hand - Or, James Renfew and His Boy Helpers (Elijah Kellogg) - illustrated - (Literary Thoughts Edition)

“How can we be good to him if he won’t say anything, Maria!” said Bertie.

“Can’t we be good to the cattle, and I’m sure they don’t talk?”

“If they don’t they say something; the cat she purrs, the hens prate, Fowler wags his tail and barks and whines; and the horses neigh, and snort, and put down their heads for me to pat them; but how could you be good to a stone? and he’s just like a stone, when mother put out her hand to shake hands he did not take it, nor look pleased nor anything.”

“Perhaps ‘twas ‘cause he was afraid. When we first got our kitten she hid away up garret, and we didn’t see her for three days, but she got tame, and so perhaps he will.”

They finally made up their minds that James was entitled to all the sympathy and kindness they could manifest towards him, when they were called to supper.

It now became a question between Mr. Whitman and his wife, where to stow James that night.

“Put him in the barn and give him some blankets to-night, and to-morrow we will clean him up.”

“I can’t bear to put him in the barn, husband, I’ll make him a bed of some old ‘duds’ on the floor in the porch. Send him right off to bed; I’ll wash his clothes and dry ‘em before morning. I can fix up some old clothes of yours for him to work in, for I don’t want any of the neighbors to see him in those he has on.”

Mr. Whitman now ushered James to bed, waited till he undressed, and brought in his clothes that were soon in scalding suds. Had Mr. Whitman gone back he would have seen this poor ignorant lad rise from his bed, kneel down and repeat the Lord’s prayer, and though repeated with a very feeble sense of its import may we not believe it was accepted by Him who “requireth according to that a man hath and not according to that he hath not,” and whose hand that through the ocean storm guides the sea-bird to its nest amid the breakers, has directed this wayfarer to the spot where there are hearts to pity and hands to aid him.

A blazing fire in the great kitchen fireplace so nearly accomplished (by bedtime) the drying of the clothes, that in the morning they were perfectly dry, the hot bricks and mouldering log giving out heat all night long. In the morning Mr. Whitman carried to the porch water in a tub, soap and his clean clothes, and told James to wash himself, put them on and then come out to his breakfast.

When James had eaten his breakfast (Mr. Whitman and Peter having eaten and gone to the field), the good wife cut his hair which was of great length, gave his head a thorough scrubbing with warm soapsuds, and completed the process with a fine-toothed comb. Removing carefully the bandages she next examined his leg.

“It was a deep cut, but it’s doing nicely,” she said, “there’s not a bit of proud flesh in it; you must sit in the house till it heals up.” When having bound up the wound she was about to leave him, he murmured,—

“You’re good to me.”

This was not a very fervent manifestation of gratitude, but it betokened that the spirit within was not wholly petrified; as Alice Whitman looked into that vacant face she perceived by the moisture of the eyes, that there was a lack not so much of feeling as of the power to express it.

“God bless you, I’ll act a mother’s part towards you; it shall be your own fault if you are not happy now. I know God sent you here, for I cannot believe that anything short of Divine Power would have ever brought my husband to take a redemptioner.”

Bertie and Maria, who had been looking on in silence, now ran into the field to tell their father and Peter all their mother had said and done, and that the redemptioner had spoken to her.

“Father,” said Maria, “if mother is his mother, will he be our brother?”

“Not exactly; your mother meant that she would treat him just as she does you, and so you must treat him as you do each other, because your mother has said so, and that’s sufficient.”

“Then we mustn’t call him a redemptioner?”

“No; forget all about that and call him James.”

“When we have anything good, and when we find a bumblebee’s nest, shall we give him part, just like we do each other?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Whitman sent for Sally Wood, one of her neighbor’s daughters, to take care of the milk and do the housework; and then set herself to altering over a suit of her husband’s clothes to fit James, who, clean from head to foot, sat with his leg in a chair watching Mrs. Whitman at her work, but the greater portion of the time asleep.

“Let him sleep,” she said; “‘twill do him good to sleep a week; he’ll come to his feeling after that and be another boy. It’s the full meals and the finding out what disposition is to be made of him, and that he’s not to be hurt, makes him sleep. I doubt if he had any too much to eat on the passage over.”

By night the good woman, with the aid of Sally (who, besides doing the work, found some time to sew), had prepared a strong, well-fitting suit of working-clothes and a linsey-woolsey shirt, and, after supper, James put them on. He made no remark in relation to his clothes, but Maria reported that she knew he was as pleased as he could be, because she peeped into the door of the bedroom and saw him looking at himself in the glass and counting the buttons on his waistcoat and jacket.

James improved rapidly, and began in a few days to walk around the door-yard and to the barn, and sit by the hour in the sun on the wood-pile (with Fowler at his feet, for the dog had taken a great liking to him), insomuch that Mrs. Whitman asked her husband if it would not make him better contented to have some light work that he could do sitting down.

“Not yet, wife. I want to see if, when he finds us all at work, he won’t start of his own accord. He has no more idea of earning anything, or of labor in our sense of that word, than my speckled ox has. When I hold up the end of the yoke and tell old Buck to come under, he comes; and so this boy has been put out to hard masters who stood over and got all out of him they could. He has never had reason to suppose that there are any people in this world that care anything about others, except to get all they can out of them.”

“If, as you say, he has always had a task-master, perhaps he thinks because we don’t tell him what to do, that we don’t want him to do anything.”

“We’ll let the thing work; I want to see what he’ll do of his own accord before I interfere. It is my belief that, benumbed as he now appears, there’s enterprise in him, and that the right kind of treatment will bring it out; but I want it to come naturally just as things grow out of the ground. He’s had a surfeit of the other kind of treatment.”

Affairs went on in this way for a week longer, till the boy’s leg had completely healed, during which time it became evident that this apparently unimpressible being was not, after all, insensible to the influence of kindness, for, whenever he perceived that wood or water were wanted, he would anticipate the needs of Mrs. Whitman nor ever permit her to bring either.

Mr. Whitman still manifested no disposition to put the boy to work, and even shelled corn himself, till his wife became somewhat impatient; and though even the grandfather thought the boy might, at least, do that much. Whitman, however, paid no attention to the remonstrances of either, and matters went on as before.

The reader of the opening chapter will, doubtless, be disposed to inquire, “What is a redemptioner? By what fortunate chance has this singular being been flung into the path, and at once domesticated in the family of Bradford Whitman, and admitted without scruple to the inner sanctuary of a mother’s heart.”