“He has grown to be an old man,” his neighbours said pityingly; and it is true that the weight of his years had fallen upon him in a night--as if he had gone to bed in a hale old age, with the sap of youth in his veins, to awaken with bleared eyes and a trembling hand. Since the day of his wife's return from the tavern, when he had peered from his hiding-place in his library window, he had not mentioned his grandson by name; and yet the thought of him seemed forever lying beneath his captious exclamations. He pricked nervously at the subject, made roundabout allusions to the base ingratitude from which he suffered; and the desertion of Big Abel had damned for him the whole faithful race from which the offender sprang.
“They are all alike,” he sweepingly declared. “There is not a trustworthy one among them. They'll eat my bread and steal my chickens, and then run off with the first scapegrace that gives them a chance.”
“I think Big Abel did just right,” said Betty, fearlessly.
The old gentleman squared himself to fix her with his weak red eyes.
“Oh, you're just the same,” he returned pettishly, “just the same.”
“But I don't steal your chickens, sir,” protested the girl, laughing.
The Major grunted and looked down at her in angry silence; then his face relaxed and a frosty smile played about his lips.
“You are young, my child,” he replied, in a kind of austere sadness, “and youth is always an enemy to the old--to the old,” he repeated quietly, and looked at his wrinkled hand.
But in the excitement of the next autumn, he showed for a time a revival of his flagging spirit. When the elections came he followed them with an absorption that had in it all the violence of a mental malady. The four possible Presidents that stood before the people were drawn for him in bold lines of black and white--the outward and visible distinction between, on the one side, the three “adventurers” whom he heartily opposed, and, on the other, the “Kentucky gentleman,” for whom he as heartily voted. There was no wavering in his convictions--no uncertainty; he was troubled by no delicate shades of indecision. What he believed, and that alone, was God-given right; what he did not believe, with all things pertaining to it, was equally God-forsaken error.