Chapter 29

If every ducat in six thousand ducats
Were in six parts, and every part a ducat,
I would not draw them; I would have my bond.

Shakspeare.

The earth had not stopped in its swift face round the sun at Oyster Pond,
while all these events were in the course of occurrence in the antarctic
seas. The summer had passed, that summer which was to have brought back
the sealers; and autumn had come to chill the hopes as as the body. Winter
did not bring any change. Nothing was heard of Roswell and his
companions, nor _could_ anything have been heard of them short of the
intervention of a miracle.

Mary Pratt no longer mentioned Roswell in her prayers. She fully believed
him to be dead; and her puritanical creed taught her that this, the
sweetest and most endearing of all the rites of Christianity, was allied
to a belief that it was sacrilege to entertain. We pretend not to any
distinct impressions on this subject ourselves, beyond a sturdy protestant
disinclination to put any faith in the abuses of purgatory at least; but,
most devoutly do we wish that such petitions _could_ have the efficacy
that so large a portion of the Christian world impute to them. But Mary
Pratt, so much better than we can lay any claim to be in all essentials,
was less liberal than ourselves on this great point of doctrine. Roswell
Gardiner's name now never passed her lips in prayer, therefore; though
scarce a minute went by without his manly person being present to her
imagination. He still lived in her heart, a shrine from which she made no
effort to expel him.

As for the deacon, age, disease, and distress of mind, had brought him to
his last hours. The passions which had so engrossed him when in health,
now turned upon his nature, and preyed upon his vitals, like an ill-omened
bird. It is more than probable that he would have lived some months,
possibly some years longer, had not the evil spirit of covetousness
conspired to heighten the malady that wasted his physical frame. As it
was, the sands of life were running low; and the skilful Dr. Sage,
himself, had admitted to Mary the improbability that her uncle and
protector could long survive.

It is wonderful how the interest in a rich man suddenly revives among his
relatives and possible heirs, as his last hour draws near. Deacon Pratt
was known to be wealthy in a small way; was thought to possess his thirty
or forty thousand dollars, which was regarded as wealth among the
east-enders thirty years since; and every human being in Old Suffolk,
whether of its overwhelming majority or of its more select and wiser
minority, who could by legal possibility claim any right to be remembered
by the dying man, crowded around his bed-side. At that moment, Mary Pratt,
who