But Daggett did not appear to be disposed to be more communicative than heretofore. He went over the narrative of the discovery of the sealing-island, and gave a graphic account of the number and tame condition of the animals who frequented it. A man might walk in their midst without giving the smallest alarm. In a word, all that a gang of good hands would have to do, would be to kill, and skin, and secure the oil. It would be like picking up dollars on a sea-beach. Sadly! sadly! indeed, was the deacon's cupidity excited by this account; a vivid picture of whales, or seals, having some such effect on the imagination of a true Suffolk county man, or more properly on that of an East-ender, as those who live beyond Riverhead are termed, as a glowing account of a prairie covered with wheat has on that of a Wolverine or a Buck eye; or an enumeration of cent per cent. has on the feelings of a Wall-street broker. Never before had Deacon Pratt been so much "exercised" with a love of Mammon. The pirate's tale, which was also recapitulated with much gusto, scarce excited him as much as Daggett's glowing account of the number, condition, and size of the seals.
Nothing was withheld but the latitudes and longitudes. No art of the deacon's, and he practised many, could extort from the mariner these most material facts, without which all the rest were useless; and the old man worked himself into a fever almost as high as that which soon came over Daggett, in the effort to come at these facts--but all in vain.
At that hour the pulse of the sick man usually quickened; but, on this occasion, it fairly thumped. He had excited himself, as well as his listener; and the inconsiderate manner in which both had yielded up their energies to these enticing images of wealth, contributed largely to increase the evil. At length, exhaustion came to put an end to the scene, which was getting to be dramatic as well as revolting.
So conscious was the deacon, on returning home that evening, that his mind was not in such a condition as it behoved him to keep it in on the Lord's Day, that he was afraid to encounter the placid eye of his devout and single-minded niece. Instead of joining her, and uniting in the services that were customary at that hour, he walked in the adjoining orchard until near nine o'clock. Mammon was uppermost in the place of the Deity, and habit offered too strong a barrier to permit him to bring, as it were, the false god openly into the presence of the true.
Chapter IV.
"Oh! mourn not for them, their grief is o'er,
Oh! weep not for them, they weep no more;
For deep is their sleep, though cold and hard
Their pillow may be in the old kirk-yard."
Bayly.
Early on the succeeding morning, the whole household of deacon Pratt, himself included, were up and doing. It was as the sun came up out of the waters that Mary and her uncle met in the porch, as if to greet each other.
"Yonder comes the Widow White, and seemingly in a great hurry," said the niece, anxiously; "I am afraid her patient is worse!"
"He seemed better when I left him last evening, though a little tired with talking," returned the uncle. "The man would talk, do all I could to stop him. I wanted to get but two or three words from him, and he used a thousand, without once using the few I wished most to hear. A talking man is that Daggett, I can tell you, Mary!"
"He'll never talk ag'in, deacon!" exclaimed the Widow White, who had got so near as to hear the concluding words of the last speaker--"He'll never say good or evil more!"
The deacon was so confounded as to be speechless. As for Mary, she expressed her deep regrets that the summons should have been so sudden, and that the previous preparation was so small; matters that gave her far more concern than any other consideration. They were not long left to conjectures, the voluble widow soon supplying all the facts that had occurred. It appeared that Daggett died in the night, the widow having found him stiff and cold on visiting his bed-side a few minutes before. That this somewhat unexpected event, as to the time at least, was hastened by the excitement of the conversation mentioned, there can be little doubt, though no comment was made on the circumstance. The immediate cause of death was suffocation from the effects of suppuration, as so often occurs in rapid consumption.
It would be representing deacon Pratt as a worse man than he actually was, to say that this sudden death had no effect on his feelings. For a short time it brought him back to a sense of his own age, and condition, and prospects. For half an hour these considerations troubled him, but the power of Mammon gradually resumed its sway, and the unpleasant images slowly disappeared in others that he found more agreeable. Then he began seriously to bethink him of what the circumstances required to be done.
As there was nothing unusual in the death of Daggett, the investigations of the coroner were not required. It was clearly a natural, though a sudden death. It remained, therefore, only to give directions about the funeral, and to have an eye to the safe-keeping of the effects of the deceased. The deacon assumed the duty of taking charge of everything. The chest of Daggett was removed to his house for safe-keeping, the key having been taken from the pocket of his vest, and the necessary orders were given for the final disposition of the body.
The deacon had another serious, and even painful half hour, when he first looked upon the corpse. There it lay, a senseless shell, deserted by its immortal tenant, and totally unconscious of that subject which had so lately and so intensely interested them both. It appeared as if the ghastly countenance expressed its sense of the utter worthlessness of all earthly schemes of wealth and happiness. Eternity seemed stamped upon the pinched and sunken features; not eternity in the sense of imperishable matter, but in the sense of the fate of man. Had all the gold of the Indies lain within his reach, the arm of Daggett was now powerless to touch it. His eye could no longer gloat upon treasure, nor any part of his corporeal system profit by its possession. A more striking commentary on the vanity of human wishes could not, just then, have been offered to the consideration of the deacon. His moral being was very strangely constituted. From early childhood he had been accustomed to the cant of religion; and, in many instances, impressions had been made on him that produced effects that it was easy to confound with the fruits that real piety brings forth. This is a result that we often find in a state of society in which appearances are made to take the place of reality. What is more, it is a result that we may look for equally among the formalists of established sects, and among the descendants of those who once deserted the homes of their fathers in order to escape from the impiety of so meretricious an abuse of the substance of godliness. In the case of the latter, appearances occupy the mind more than that love of God which is the one great test of human conversion from sin to an improving state of that holiness, without which we are told no man shall see his Creator; without which, indeed, no man could endure to look upon that dread Being face to face.
The deacon had all the forms of godliness in puritanical perfection. He had never taken the "name of his God in vain," throughout the course of a long life; but, he had abstained from this revolting and gratuitous sin, more because it was a part of the teachings of his youth so to do, and because the neighbours would have been shocked at its commission, than because he felt the deep reverence for his Maker, which it became the insignificant being that was the work of his hand to entertain; and which would, of itself, most effectually have prevented any wanton use of his holy name, let the neighbours feel or think as they might on the subject. In this way Deacon Pratt might be said to have respected most of the commands of the decalogue; not, however, because the spirit of God impelled him, through love, to reverence and obey, but because he had been brought up in a part of the country where it was considered seemly and right to be moral, to the senses, at least, if not to the all-seeing eye above. It was in this way that the deacon had arrived at his preferment in the meeting. He had all the usual sectarian terms at the end of his tongue; never uttered a careless expression; was regular at meeting; apparently performed all the duties that his church required of its professors, in the way of mere religious observances; yet was he as far from being in that state