The worst is to come.

Eleseus manages his business like a fool.  It flatters him to have folk coming up from the village to buy at Storborg, so that he gives them credit as soon as asked; and when this is noised abroad, there come still more of them to buy the same way.  The whole thing is going to rack and ruin.  Eleseus is an easy man, and lets it go; the store is emptied and the store is filled again.  All costs money.  And who pays it?  His father.

At first, his mother had been a faithful spokesman for him every way.  Eleseus was the clever head of the family; they must help him on and give him a start; then think how cheaply he had got Storborg, and saying straight out what he would give for it!  When his father thought it was going wrong somehow with the business, and naught but foolery, she took him up.  “How can you stand there and say such things!” Ay, she reproved him for using such words about his son; Isak was forgetting his place, it seemed, to speak so of Eleseus.

For look you, his mother had been out in the world herself; she understood how hard it was for Eleseus to live in the wilds, being used to better things, and accustomed to move in society, and with none of his equals near.  He risked too much in his dealings with folk that were none of the soundest; but even so, ’twas not done with any evil intent on his part of ruining his parents, but sheer goodness of heart and noble nature; ’twas his way to help those that were not so fine and grand as himself.  Why, wasn’t he the only man in those parts to use white handkerchiefs that were always having to be washed?  When folk came trustingly to him and asked for credit, if he were to say “No,” they might take it amiss, it might seem as if he were not the noble fellow they had thought, after all.  Also, he had a certain duty towards his fellows, as the town-bred man, the genius among them all.

Ay, his mother bore all these things in mind.

But his father, never understanding it all in the least, opened her eyes and ears one day and said: 

“Look you here.  Here’s all that is left of the money from that mine.”

“That’s all?” said she.  “And what’s come of the rest?”

“Eleseus, he’s had the rest.”

And she clasped her hands at that and declared it was time Eleseus began to use his wits.

Poor Eleseus, all set on end and frittered away.  Better, maybe, if he’d worked on the land all the time, but now he’s a man that has learned to write and use letters; no grip in him, no depth.  For all that, no pitch-black devil of a man, not in love, not ambitious, hardly nothing at all is Eleseus, not even a bad thing of any great dimensions.

Something unfortunate, ill-fated about this young man, as if something were rotting him from within.  That engineer from the town, good man—­better perhaps, if he had not discovered the lad in his youth and taken him up to make something out of him; the child had lost his roothold, and suffered thereby.  All that he turns to now leads back to something wanting in him, something dark against the light....