It is the exceptional men
and women who remember their youth. So, these lovers received a
nearly equal amount of sympathy and condemnation; and only slowly,
partly through their quiet fidelity and patience, and partly
through the improvement in John Vincent's worldly circumstances,
was the balance changed. Old Reuben remained an unflinching despot
to the last: if any relenting softness touched his heart, he
sternly concealed it; and such inference as could be drawn from the
fact that he, certainly knowing what would follow his death,
bequeathed his daughter her proper share of his goods, was all that
could be taken for consent.
They were married: John, a grave man in middle age, weather-beaten
and worn by years of hard work and self-denial, yet not beyond the
restoration of a milder second youth; and Phebe a sad, weary woman,
whose warmth of longing had been exhausted, from whom youth and its
uncalculating surrenders of hope and feeling had gone forever.
They began their wedded life under the shadow of the death out of
which it grew; and when, after a ceremony in which neither
bridesmaid nor groomsman stood by their side, they united their
divided homes, it seemed to their neighbors that a separated
husband and wife had come together again, not that the relation was
new to either.
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