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Updated: May 24, 2025
"Yes, what?" Mrs. Ewbert followed him up. "So far as I could make out, Mr. Hilbrook's life hadn't filled up with other interests. He did not care for the events of the day, as far as I tried him on them, and he did not care for the past. I tempted him with autobiography; but he seemed quite indifferent to his own history, though he was not reticent about it.
Ewbert was forced to own that he had heard a story, but he said, mainly in Hilbrook's interest, that he had not paid much attention to it. "Thought there wa'n't much in it? Well, that's right, generally speakin'. Folks like to make up stories about a man that lives alone like me, here; and they usually get in a disappointment. I ain't goin' to go over it.
As he knew she wished, her husband represented that Hilbrook's having come the last Sunday night was no proof that he was going to make a habit of it. "But he stayed so late!" she insisted from the safety of her real belief that he was not coming. "He came very early, though," said Ewbert, with a gentle sigh, in which her sympathetic penetration detected a retrospective exhaustion.
He treated the notion of Hilbrook's visits lightly; but with his return to the familiar environment he felt a shrinking from them in an experience which was like something physical.
He's got cranky living here alone; but there is such a thing as starving to death, and that's the only thing Hilbrook's in danger of. If you're going to stay with him he oughtn't to be left alone" "I can come up, yes, certainly, after supper," said Ewbert, and he fortified himself inwardly for the question this would raise with his wife. "Then you must try to interest him in something.
"Well," the minister returned, with an assumption of cosiness in his tone which he did not feel, and feigning to make himself easy in the hard kitchen chair which he pulled up to the door of Hilbrook's room, "let's see if we can't put that notion together again." "You can, if you want to," said the old man, dryly "I got no interest in it any more; 'twa'n't nothing but a metaphysical toy, anyway."
He touched delicately upon the peculiarities, the eccentricities, of the deceased, and he did cordial justice to his gentleness, his blameless, harmless life, his heroism on the battlefields of his country. He declared that he would not be the one to deny an inner piety, and certainly not a steadfast courage, in Hilbrook's acceptance of whatever his sincere doubts implied.
Hilbrook's reception was wary and non-committal, but it was by no means so grudging as Ewbert had been led to expect. After some ceremonious moments in the cold parlor Hilbrook asked him into the warm kitchen, where apparently he passed most of his own time.
"Don't talk so!" he burst out. "It's horrible!" It was in the first hours after Ewbert's return from Hilbrook's death-bed, and his spent nerves gave way in a gush of tears. "I see what you mean," she said, after a pause in which he controlled his sobs.
He rather set himself to study the lesson of old Hilbrook's life, and in the funeral sermon that he preached he urged upon his hearers the necessity of keeping themselves alive through some relation to the undying frame of things, which they could do only by cherishing earthly ties; and when these were snapped in the removal of their objects, by attaching the broken threads through an effort of the will to yet other objects: the world could furnish these inexhaustibly.
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