Silence, and other stories

By Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

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Title: Silence, and other stories

Author: Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

Release date: September 29, 2025 [eBook #76948]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1898

Credits: Jack Janssen and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SILENCE, AND OTHER STORIES ***

[Illustration:

[Page 38
“‘DAVID!’ SHE CALLED. ‘DAVID! DAVID! DAVID!’”]

SILENCE

_AND OTHER STORIES_

_By_ MARY E. WILKINS
_Author of “Jerome, A Poor
Man” “Madelon” “Jane Field”_

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

[Illustration]

NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

PAGE

+Silence+ 1

+The Buckley Lady+ 55

+Evelina’s Garden+ 111

+A New England Prophet+ 184

+The Little Maid at the Door+ 225

+Lydia Hersey, of East Bridgewater+ 255

ILLUSTRATIONS

“‘DAVID!’ SHE CALLED. ‘DAVID! DAVID!
DAVID!’” _Frontispiece_
AT ENSIGN SHELDON’S HOUSE THE MORNING
AFTER THE MASSACRE _Facing p._ 30
“SHE HEARD RAPID FOOTSTEPS” ” 132
“‘THE LORD MAKE ME WORTHY OF THEE,
EVELINA!’” ” 180

SILENCE

At dusk Silence went down the Deerfield street to Ensign John Sheldon’s
house. She wore her red blanket over her head, pinned closely under her
chin, and her white profile showed whiter between the scarlet folds.
She had been spinning all day, and shreds of wool still clung to her
indigo petticoat; now and then one floated off on the north wind. It
was bitter cold, and the snow was four feet deep. Silence’s breath went
before her in a cloud; the snow creaked under her feet. All over the
village the crust was so firm that men could walk upon it. The houses
were half sunken in sharp, rigid drifts of snow; their roofs were laden
with it; icicles hung from the eaves. All the elms were white with snow
frozen to them so strongly that it was not shaken off when they were
lashed by the fierce wind.

There was an odor of boiling meal in the air; the housewives were
preparing supper. Silence had eaten hers; she and her aunt, Widow
Eunice Bishop, supped early. She had not far to go to Ensign
Sheldon’s. She was nearly there when she heard quick footsteps on the
creaking snow behind her. Her heart beat quickly, but she did not look
around. “Silence,” said a voice. Then she paused, and waited, with her
eyes cast down and her mouth grave, until David Walcott reached her.
“What do you out this cold night, sweetheart?” he said.

“I am going down to Goodwife Sheldon’s,” replied Silence. Then suddenly
she cried out, wildly: “Oh, David, what is that on your cloak? What is
it?”

David looked curiously at his cloak. “I see naught on my cloak save old
weather stains,” said he. “What mean you, Silence?”

Silence quieted down suddenly. “It is gone now,” said she, in a subdued
voice.

“What did you see, Silence?”

Silence turned towards him; her face quivered convulsively. “I saw a
blotch of blood,” she cried. “I have been seeing them everywhere all
day. I have seen them on the snow as I came along.”

David Walcott looked down at her in a bewildered way. He carried
his musket over his shoulder, and was shrugged up in his cloak; his
heavy, flaxen mustache was stiff and white with frost. He had just
been relieved from his post as sentry, and it was no child’s play to
patrol Deerfield village on a day like that, nor had it been for many
previous days. The weather had been so severe that even the French and
Indians, lurking like hungry wolves in the neighborhood, had hesitated
to descend upon the town, and had stayed in camp.

“What mean you, Silence?” he said.

“What I say,” returned Silence, in a strained voice. “I have seen
blotches of blood everywhere all day. The enemy will be upon us.”

David laughed loudly, and Silence caught his arm. “Don’t laugh
so loud,” she whispered. Then David laughed again. “You be all
overwrought, sweetheart,” said he. “I have kept guard all the afternoon
by the northern palisades, and I have seen not so much as a red fox
on the meadow. I tell thee the French and Indians have gone back to
Canada. There is no more need of fear.”

“I have started all day and all last night at the sound of warwhoops,”
said Silence.

“Thy head is nigh turned with these troublous times, poor lass. We must
cross the road now to Ensign Sheldon’s house. Come quickly, or you will
perish in this cold.”

“Nay, my head is not turned,” said Silence, as they hurried on over the
crust; “the enemy be hiding in the forests beyond the meadows. David,
they be not gone.”

“And I tell thee they be gone, sweetheart. Think you not we should
have seen their camp smoke had they been there? And we have had trusty
scouts out. Come in, and my aunt, Hannah Sheldon, shall talk thee out
of this folly.”

The front windows of John Sheldon’s house were all flickering red from
the hearth fire. David flung open the door, and they entered. There was
such a goodly blaze from the great logs in the wide fireplace that even
the shadows in the remote corners of the large keeping-room were dusky
red, and the faces of all the people in the room had a clear red glow
upon them.

Goodwife Hannah Sheldon stood before the fire, stirring some porridge
in a great pot that hung on the crane; some fair-haired children sat
around a basket shelling corn, a slight young girl in a snuff-yellow
gown was spinning, and an old woman in a quilted hood crouched in a
corner of the fireplace, holding out her lean hands to the heat.

Goodwife Sheldon turned around when the door opened. “Good-day,
Mistress Silence Hoit,” she called out, and her voice was sweet, but
deep like a man’s. “Draw near to the fire, for in truth you must be
near perishing with the cold.”

“There’ll be fire enough ere morning, I trow, to warm the whole
township,” said the old woman in the corner. Her small black eyes
gleamed sharply out of the gloom of her great hood; her yellow face
was all drawn and puckered towards the centre of her shrewdly leering
mouth.

“Now you hush your croaking, Goody Crane,” cried Hannah Sheldon. “Draw
the stool near to the fire for Silence, David. I cannot stop stirring,
or the porridge will burn. How fares your aunt this cold weather,
Silence?”

“Well, except for her rheumatism,” replied Silence. She sat down on the
stool that David placed for her, and slipped her blanket back from her
head. Her beautiful face, full of a grave and delicate stateliness,
drooped towards the fire, her smooth fair hair was folded in clear
curves like the leaves of a lily around her ears, and she wore a high,
transparent, tortoise-shell comb like a coronet in the knot at the back
of her head.

David Walcott had pulled off his cap and cloak, and stood looking
down at her. “Silence is all overwrought by this talk of Indians,” he
remarked, presently, and a blush came over his weather-beaten blond
face at the tenderness in his own tone.

“The Indians have gone back to Canada,” said Goodwife Sheldon, in a
magisterial voice. She stirred the porridge faster; it was steaming
fiercely.

“So I tell her,” said David.

Silence looked up in Hannah Sheldon’s sober, masterly face. “Goodwife,
may I have a word in private with you?” she asked, in a half-whisper.

“As soon as I take the porridge off,” replied Goodwife Sheldon.

“God grant it be not the last time she takes the porridge off!” said
the old woman.

Hannah Sheldon laughed. “Here be Goody Crane in a sorry mind to-night,”
said she. “Wait till she have a sup of this good porridge, and I trow
she’ll pack off the Indians to Canada in a half-hour!”

Hannah began dipping out the porridge. When she had placed generous
dishes of it on the table and bidden everybody draw up, she motioned to
Silence. “Now, Mistress Silence,” said she, “come into the bedroom if
you would have a word with me.”

Silence followed her into the little north room opening out of the
keeping-room, where Ensign John Sheldon and his wife Hannah had slept
for many years. It was icy cold, and the thick fur of frost on the
little window-panes sent out sparkles in the candle-light. The two
women stood beside the great chintz draped and canopied bed, Hannah
holding the flaring candle. “Now, what is it?” said she.

“Oh, Goodwife Sheldon!” said Silence. Her face remained quite still,
but it was as if one could see her soul fluttering beneath it.

“You be all overwrought, as David saith,” cried Goodwife Sheldon, and
her voice had a motherly harshness in it. Silence had no mother, and
her lover, David Walcott, had none. Hannah was his aunt, and loved
him like her son, so she felt towards Silence as towards her son’s
betrothed.

“In truth I know not what it is,” said Silence, in a kind of reserved
terror, “but there has been all day a great heaviness of spirit upon
me, and last night I dreamed. All day I have fancied I saw blood here
and there. Sometimes, when I have looked out of the window, the whole
snow hath suddenly glared with red. Goodwife Sheldon, think you the
Indians and the French have in truth gone back to Canada?”

Goodwife Sheldon hesitated a moment, then she spoke up cheerily. “In
truth have they!” cried she. “John said but this noon that naught of
them had been seen for some time.”

“So David said,” returned Silence; “but this heaviness will not be
driven away. You know how Parson Williams hath spoken in warning in the
pulpit and elsewhere, and besought us to be vigilant. He holdeth that
the savages be not gone.”

Hannah Sheldon smiled. “Parson Williams is a godly man, but prone ever
to look upon the dark side,” said she.

“If the Indians should come to-night--” said Silence.

“I tell ye they will not come, child. I shall lay me down in that bed
a-trusting in the Lord, and having no fear against the time I shall
arise from it.”

“If the Indians should come-- Goodwife Sheldon, be not angered; hear
me. If they should come, I pray you keep David here to defend you in
this house, and let him not out to seek me. You know well that our
house is musket-proof as well as this, and it has long been agreed that
they who live nearest, whose houses have not thick walls, shall come
to ours and help us make defence. I pray you let not David out of the
house to seek me, should there be a surprise to-night. I pray you give
me your promise for this, Goodwife Sheldon.”

Hannah Sheldon laughed. “In truth will I give thee the promise, if it
makes thee easier, child,” said she. “At the very first war-screech
will I tie David in the chimney-corner with my apron-string, unless you
lend me yours. But there will be no war-screech to-night, nor to-morrow
night, nor the night after that. The Lord will preserve His people
that trust in Him. To-day have I set a web of linen in the loom, and
I have candles ready to dip to-morrow, and the day after that I have
a quilting. I look not for Indians. If they come I will set them to
work. Fear not for David, sweetheart. In truth you should have a bolder
heart, an’ you look to be a soldier’s wife some day.”

“I would I had never been aught to him, that he might not be put in
jeopardy to defend me!” said Silence, and her words seemed visible in a
white cloud at her mouth.

“We must not stay here in the cold,” said Goodwife Sheldon. “Out with
ye, Silence, and have a sup of hot porridge, and then David shall see
ye home.”

Silence sipped a cup of the hot porridge obediently, then she pinned
her red blanket over her head. Hannah Sheldon assisted her, bringing it
warmly over her face. “’Tis bitter cold,” she said. “Now have no more
fear, Mistress Silence; the Indians will not come to-night; but do you
come over to-morrow, and keep me company while I dip the candles.”

“There’ll be company enough--there’ll be a whole houseful,” muttered
the old woman in the corner; but nobody heeded her. She was a lonely
and wretched old creature whom people sheltered from pity, although she
was somewhat feared and held in ill repute. There were rumors that she
was well versed in all the dark lore of witchcraft, and held commerce
with unlawful beings. The children of Deerfield village looked askance
at her, and clung to their mothers if they met her on the street, for
they whispered among themselves that old Goody Crane rode through the
air on a broom in the night-time.

Silence and David passed out into the keen night. “If you meet my
good-man, hasten him home, for the porridge is cooling,” Hannah
Sheldon called after them.

They met not a soul on Deerfield street, and parted at Silence’s door.
David would have entered had she bidden him, but she said peremptorily
that she had a hard task of spinning that evening, and then she wished
him good-night, and without a kiss, for Silence Hoit was chary of
caresses. But to-night she called him back ere he was fairly in the
street. “David,” she called, and he ran back.

“What is it, Silence?” he asked.

She put back her blanket, threw her arms around his neck, and clung to
him trembling.

“Why, sweetheart,” he whispered, “what has come over thee?”

“You know--this house is made like--a fort,” she said, bringing out
her words in gasps, “and--there are muskets, and--powder stored in it,
and--Captain Moulton, and his sons, and--John Carson will come, and
make--a stand in it. I have--no fear should--the Indians come. Remember
that I have no fear, and shall be safe here, David.”

David laughed, and patted her clinging shoulders. “Yes, I will
remember, Silence,” he said; “but the Indians will not come.”

“Remember that I am safe here, and have no fear,” she repeated. Then
she kissed him of her own accord, as if she had been his wife, and
entered the house, and he went away, wondering.

Silence’s aunt, Widow Eunice Bishop, did not look up when the door
opened; she was knitting by the fire, sitting erect with her mouth
pursed. She had a hostile expression, as if she were listening to
some opposite argument. Silence hung her blanket on a peg; she stood
irresolute a minute, then she breathed on the frosty window and cleared
a space through which she could look out. Her aunt gave a quick, fierce
glance at her, then she tossed back her head and knitted. Silence
stood staring out of the little peep-hole in the frosty pane. Her aunt
glanced at her again, then she spoke.

“I should think if you had been out gossiping and gadding for two
hours, you had better get yourself at some work now,” she said, “unless
your heart be set on idling. A pretty house-wife you’ll make!”

“Come here quick, quick!” Silence cried out.

Her aunt started, but she would not get up; she knitted, scowling. “I
cannot afford to idle if other folk can,” said she. “I have no desire
to keep running to windows and standing there gaping, as you have done
all this day.”

“Oh, aunt, I pray you to come,” said Silence, and she turned her white
face over her shoulder towards her aunt; “there is somewhat wrong
surely.”

Widow Bishop got up, still scowling, and went over to the window.
Silence stood aside and pointed to the little clear circle in the midst
of the frost. “Over there to the north,” she said, in a quick, low
voice.

Her aunt adjusted her horn spectacles and bent her head stiffly. “I see
naught,” said she.

“A red glare in the north!”

“A red glare in the north! Be ye out of your mind, wench! There be no
red glare in the north. Everything be quiet in the town. Get ye away
from the window and to your work. I have no more patience with such
doings. Here have I left my knitting for nothing, and I just about
setting the heel. You’d best keep to your spinning instead of spying
out of the window at your own nightmares, and gadding about the town
after David Walcott. Pretty doings for a modest maid, I call it,
following after young men in this fashion!”

Silence turned on her aunt, and her blue eyes gleamed dark; she held up
her head like a queen. “I follow not after young men,” she said.

“Heard I not David Walcott’s voice at the door? Went you not to
Goodwife Sheldon’s, where he lives? Was it not his voice--hey?”

“Yes, ’twas, an’ I had a right to go there an I chose, an’ ’twas naught
unmaidenly,” said Silence.

“’Twas unmaidenly in my day,” retorted her aunt; “perhaps ’tis
different now.” She had returned to her seat, and was clashing her
knitting-needles like two swords in a duel.

Silence pulled a spinning-wheel before the fire and fell to work. The
wheel turned so rapidly that the spokes were a revolving shadow; there
was a sound as if a bee had entered the room.

“I stayed at home, and your uncle did the courting,” Widow Eunice
Bishop continued, in a voice that demanded response.

But Silence made none. She went on spinning. Her aunt eyed her
maliciously. “I never went after nightfall to his house that he might
see me home,” said she. “I trow my mother would have locked me up in
the garret, and kept me on meal and water for a week, had I done aught
so bold.”

Silence spun on. Her aunt threw her head back, and knitted, jerking
out her elbows. Neither of them spoke again until the clock struck
nine. Then Widow Bishop wound her ball of yarn closer, and stuck in
the knitting-needles, and rose. “’Tis time to put out the candle,” she
said, “and _I_ have done a good day’s work, and feel need of rest.
They that have idled cannot make it up by wasting tallow.” She threw
open the door that led to her bedroom, and a blast of icy confined
air rushed in. She untied the black cap that framed her nervous face
austerely, and her gray head, with its tight rosette of hair on the
crown, appeared. Silence set her spinning-wheel back, and raked the
ashes over the hearth fire. Then she took the candle and climbed the
stairs to her own chamber. Her aunt was already in bed, her pale,
white-frilled face sunk in the icy feather pillow; but she did not
bid her good-night: not on account of her anger; there was seldom any
such formal courtesy exchanged between the women. Silence’s chamber
had one side sloping with the slope of the roof, and in it were two
dormer-windows looking towards the north. She set her candle on
the table, breathed on one of these windows, as she had on the one
down-stairs, and looked out. She stood there several minutes, then she
turned away, shaking her head. The room was very cold. She let down her
smooth fair hair, and her fingers began to redden; she took off her
kerchief; then she stopped, and looked hesitatingly at her bed, with
its blue curtains. She set her mouth hard, and put on her kerchief.
Then she sat down on the edge of her bed and waited. After a while
she pulled a quilt from the bed and wrapped it around her. Still she
did not shiver. She had blown out the candle, and the room was very
dark. All her nerves seemed screwed tight like fiddle-strings, and her
thoughts beat upon them and made terrific waves of sound in her ears.
She saw sparks and flashes like diamond fire in the darkness. She
had her hands clinched tight, but she did not feel her hands nor her
feet--she did not feel her whole body. She sat so until two o’clock in
the morning. When the clock down in the keeping-room struck the hours,
the peals shocked her back for a minute to her old sense of herself;
then she lost it again. Just after the clock struck two, while the
silvery reverberation of the bell tone was still in her ears, and she
was breathing a little freer, a great rosy glow suffused the frosty
windows. A horrible discord of sound arose without. Above everything
else came something like a peal of laughter from wild beasts or fiends.

Silence arose and went down-stairs. Her aunt rushed out of her bedroom,
shrieking, and caught hold of her. “Oh, Silence, what is it, what is
it?” she cried.

“Get away till I light a candle,” said Silence. She fairly pushed her
aunt off, shovelled the ashes from the coals in the fireplace, and
lighted a candle. Then she threw some wood on the smouldering fire. Her
aunt was running around the room screaming. There came a great pound on
the door.

“It’s the Indians! it’s the Indians! don’t let ’em in!” shrieked her
aunt. “Don’t let them in! don’t let them!” She placed her lean shoulder
in her white bed-gown against the door. “Go away! go away!” she yelled.
“You can’t come in! O Lord Almighty, save us!”

“You stand off,” said Silence. She took hold of her aunt’s shoulders.
“Be quiet,” she commanded. Then she called out, in a firm voice, “Who
is there?”

At the shout in response she drew the great iron bolts quickly and
flung open the heavy nail-studded door. There was a press of frantic,
white-faced people into the room; then the door was slammed to and the
bolts shot. It was very still in the room, except for the shuffling
rush of the men’s feet, and now and then a stern, gasping order. The
children did not cry; all the noise was without. The house might have
stood in the midst of some awful wilderness peopled with fiendish
beasts, from the noise without. The cries seemed actually in the room.
The children’s eyes glared white over their mothers’ shoulders.

The men hurriedly strengthened the window-shutters with props of logs,
and fitted the muskets into the loop-holes. Suddenly there was a great
crash at the door, and a wilder yell outside. The muskets opened fire,
and some of the women rushed to the door and pressed fiercely against
it with their delicate shoulders, their white, desperate faces turning
back dumbly, like a spiritual phalanx of defence. Silence and her aunt
were among them.

Suddenly Widow Eunice Bishop, at a fresh onslaught upon the door, and
a fiercer yell, lifted up her voice and shrieked back in a rage as mad
as theirs. Her speech, too, was almost inarticulate, and the sense of
it lost in a savage frenzy; her tongue stuttered over abusive epithets;
but for a second she prevailed over the terrible chorus without. It was
like the solo of a fury. Then louder yells drowned her out; the muskets
cracked faster; the men rammed in the charges; the savages fell back
somewhat; the blows on the door ceased.

Silence ran up the stairs to her chamber, and peeped cautiously out of
a little dormer-window. Deerfield village was roaring with flames, the
sky and snow were red, and leaping through the glare came the painted
savages, a savage white face and the waving sword of a French officer
in their midst. The awful warwhoops and the death-cries of her friends
and neighbors sounded in her ears. She saw, close under her window, the
dark sweep of the tomahawk, the quick glance of the scalping-knife, and
the red starting of caps of blood. She saw infants dashed through the
air, and the backward-straining forms of shrieking women dragged down
the street; but she saw not David Walcott anywhere.

She eyed in an agony some dark bodies lying like logs in the snow. A
wild impulse seized her to run out, turn their dead faces, and see
that none of them was her lover’s. Her room was full of red light;
everything in it showed distinctly. The roof of the next house crashed
in, and the sparks and cinders shot up like a volcano. There was a
great outcry of terror from below, and Silence hurried down. The
Indians were trying to fire the house from the west side. They had
piled a bank of brush against it, and the men had hacked new loop-holes
and were beating them back.

John Carson’s wife clutched Silence as she entered the keeping-room.
“They are trying to set the house on fire,” she gasped, “and--the
bullets are giving out!” The woman held a little child hugged close to
her breast; she strained him closer. “They shall not have him, anyway,”
she said. Her mouth looked white and stiff.

“Put him down and help, then,” said Silence. She began pulling the
pewter plates off the dresser.

“What be you doing with my pewter plates?” screamed her aunt at her
elbow.

Silence said nothing. She went on piling the plates under her arm.

“Think you I will have the pewter plates I have had ever since I was
wed, melted to make bullets for those limbs of Satan?”

Silence carried the plates to the fire; the women piled on wood and
made it hotter. John Carson’s wife laid her baby on the settle and
helped, and Widow Bishop brought out her pewter spoons, and her silver
cream-jug when the pewter ran low, and finally her dead husband’s
knee-buckles from the cedar chest. All the pewter and silver in Widow
Eunice Bishop’s house were melted down that night. The women worked
with desperate zeal to supply the men with bullets, and just before
the ammunition failed, the Indians left Deerfield village, with their
captives in their train.

The men had stopped firing at last. Everything was quiet outside,
except for the flurry of musket-shots down on the meadow, where the
skirmish was going on between the Hatfield men and the retreating
French and Indians. The dawn was breaking, but not a shutter had been
stirred in the Bishop house; the inmates were clustered together, their
ears straining for another outburst of slaughter.

Suddenly there was a strange crackling sound overhead; a puff of hot
smoke came into the room from the stairway. The roof had caught fire
from the shower of sparks, and the stanch house that had withstood all
the fury of the savages was going the way of its neighbors.

The men rushed up the stair, and fell back. “We can’t save it!” Captain
Isaac Moulton said, hoarsely. He was an old man, and his white hair
tossed wildly around his powder-blackened face.

Widow Eunice Bishop scuttled into her bedroom, and got her best
silk hood and her giltframed looking-glass. “Silence, get out the
feather-bed!” she shrieked.

The keeping-room was stifling with smoke. Captain Moulton loosened
a window-shutter cautiously and peered out. “I see no sign of the
savages,” he said. They unbolted the door, and opened it inch by inch,
but there was no exultant shout in response. The crack of muskets on
the meadow sounded louder; that was all.

Widow Eunice Bishop pushed forward before the others; the danger by
fire to her household goods had driven her own danger from her mind,
which could compass but one terror at a time. “Let me forth!” she
cried; and she laid the looking-glass and silk hood on the snow, and
pelted back into the smoke for her feather-bed and the best andirons.

Silence carried out the spinning-wheel, and the others caught up
various articles which they had wit to see in the panic. They piled
them up on the snow outside, and huddled together, staring fearfully
down the village street. They saw, amid the smouldering ruins, Ensign
John Sheldon’s house standing.

“We must make for that,” said Captain Isaac Moulton, and they started.
The men went before and behind, with their muskets in readiness,
and the women and children walked between. Widow Bishop carried the
looking-glass; somebody had helped her to bring out her feather-bed,
and she had dragged it to a clean place well away from the burning
house.

The dawnlight lay pale and cold in the east; it was steadily overcoming
the fire-glow from the ruins. Nobody would have known Deerfield
village. The night before the sun had gone down upon the snowy slants
of humble roofs and the peaceful rise of smoke from pleasant hearth
fires. The curtained windows had gleamed out one by one with mild
candle-light, and serene faces of white-capped matrons preparing supper
had passed them. Now, on both sides of Deerfield street were beds of
glowing red coals; grotesque ruins of door-posts and chimneys in the
semblances of blackened martyrs stood crumbling in the midst of them,
and twisted charred heaps, which the people eyed trembling, lay in the
old doorways. The snow showed great red patches in the gathering light,
and in them lay still bodies that seemed to move.

Silence Hoit sprang out from the hurrying throng, and turned the head
of one dead man whose face she could not see. The horror of his red
crown did not move her. She only saw that he was not David Walcott. She
stooped and wiped off her hands in some snow.

“That is Israel Bennett,” the others groaned.

John Carson’s wife had been the dead man’s sister. She hugged her baby
tighter, and pressed more closely to her husband’s back. There was no
longer any sound of musketry on the meadows. There was not a sound to
be heard except the wind in the dry trees and the panting breaths of
the knot of people.

A dead baby lay directly in the path, and a woman caught it up, and
tried to warm it at her breast. She wrapped her cloak around it, and
wiped its little bloody face with her apron. “’Tis not dead,” she
declared, frantically; “the child is not dead!” She had not shed a
tear nor uttered a wail before, but now she began sobbing aloud over
the dead child. It was Goodwife Barnard’s, and no kin to her; she was
a single woman. The others were looking right and left for lurking
savages; she looked only at the little cold face on her bosom. “The
child breathes,” she said, and hurried on faster that she might get
succor for it.

The party halted before Ensign John Sheldon’s house. The stout door was
fast, but there was a hole in it, as if hacked by a tomahawk. The men
tried it and shook it. “Open, open, Goodwife Sheldon!” they hallooed.
“Friends! friends! Open the door!” But there was no response.

Silence Hoit left the throng at the door, and began clambering up
on a slant of icy snow to a window which was flung wide open. The
window-sill was stained with blood, and so was the snow.

One of the men caught Silence and tried to hold her back. “There may be
Indians in there,” he whispered, hoarsely.

But Silence broke away from him, and was in through the window, and
the men followed her, and unbolted the door for the women, who pressed
in wildly, and flung it to again. A child who was among them, little
Comfort Arms, stationed herself directly with her tiny back against the
door, with her mouth set like a soldier’s, and her blue eyes gleaming
fierce under her flaxen locks. “They shall not get in,” said she.
Somehow she had gotten hold of a great horse-pistol, which she carried
like a doll.

Nobody heeded her, Silence least of all. She stared about the room,
with her lips parted. Right before her on the hearth lay a little
three-year-old girl, Mercy Sheldon, her pretty head in a pool of blood,
but Silence cast only an indifferent glance when the others gathered
about her, groaning and sighing.

Suddenly Silence sprang towards a dark heap near the pantry door, but
it was only a woman’s quilted petticoat.

The spinning-wheel lay broken on the floor, and all the simple
furniture was strewn about wildly. Silence went into Goodwife Sheldon’s
bedroom, and the others followed her, trembling, all except little
Comfort Arms, who stood unflinchingly with her back pressed against
the door, and the single woman, Grace Mather; she stayed behind, and
put wood on the fire, after she had picked up the quilted petticoat,
and laid the dead baby tenderly wrapped in it on the settle. Then she
pulled the settle forward before the fire, and knelt before it, and
fell to chafing the little limbs of the dead baby, weeping as she did
so.

Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom was in wild disorder. A candle still burned,
although it was very low, on the table, whose linen cover had great
red finger-prints on it. Goodwife Sheldon’s decent clothes were tossed
about on the floor; the curtains of the bed were half torn away.
Silence pressed forward unshrinkingly towards the bed; the others, even
the men, hung back. There lay Goodwife Sheldon dead in her bed. All
the light in the room, the candle-light and the low daylight, seemed
to focus upon her white, frozen profile propped stiffly on the pillow,
where she had fallen back when the bullet came through that hole in the
door.

Silence looked at her. “Where is David, Goodwife Sheldon?” said she.

Eunice Bishop sprang forward. “Be you clean out of your mind, Silence
Hoit?” she cried. “Know you not she’s dead? She’s dead! Oh, she’s dead,
she’s dead! An’ here’s her best silk hood trampled underfoot on the
floor!” Eunice snatched up the hood, and seized Silence by the arm, but
she pushed her back.

“Where is David? Where is he gone?” she demanded again of the dead
woman.

The other women came crowding around Silence then, and tried to soothe
her and reason with her, while their own faces were white with horror
and woe. Goodwife Sarah Spear, an old woman whose sons lay dead in the
street outside, put an arm around the girl, and tried to draw her head
to her broad bosom.

“Mayhap you will find him, sweetheart,” she said. “He’s not among the
dead out there.”

But Silence broke away from the motherly arm, and sped wildly through
the other rooms, with the people at her heels, and her aunt crying
vainly after her. They found no more dead in the house; naught but ruin
and disorder, and bloody footprints and handprints of savages.

When they returned to the keeping-room, Silence seated herself on a
stool by the fire, and held out her hands towards the blaze to warm
them. The daylight was broad outside now, and the great clock that had
come from overseas ticked; the Indians had not touched that.

Captain Isaac Moulton lifted little Mercy Sheldon from the hearth and
carried her to her dead mother in the bedroom, and two of the older
women went in there and shut the door. Little Comfort Arms still stood
with her back against the outer door, and Grace Mather tended the dead
baby on the settle.

“What do ye with that dead child?” a woman called out roughly to her.

“I tell ye ’tis not dead; it breathes,” returned Grace Mather; and she
never turned her harsh, plain face from the dead child.

“An’ I tell ye ’tis dead.”

“An’ I tell ye ’tis not dead. I need but some hot posset for it.”

Goodwife Carson began to weep. She hugged her own living baby tighter.
“Let her alone!” she sobbed. “I wonder our wits be not all gone.” She
went sobbing over to little Comfort Arms at the door. “Come away,
sweetheart, and draw near the fire,” she pleaded, brokenly.

The little girl looked obstinately up at her. “They shall not come in,”
she said. “The wicked savages shall not come in again.”

“No more shall they, an’ the Lord be willing, sweet. But, I pray you,
come away from the door now.”

Comfort shook her head, and she looked like her father as he fought on
the Deerfield meadows.

“The savages are gone, sweet.”

But Comfort answered not a word, and Goodwife Carson sat down and began
to nurse her baby. One of the women hung the porridge-kettle over the
fire; another put some potatoes in the ashes to bake. Presently the
two women came out of Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom with grave, strained
faces, and held their stiff blue fingers out to the hearth fire.

Eunice Bishop, who was stirring the porridge, looked at them with sharp
curiosity. “How look they?” she whispered.

“As peaceful as if they slept,” replied Goodwife Spear, who was one of
the women.

“And the child’s head?”

“We put on her little white cap with the lace frills.”

Eunice stirred the bubbling porridge, scowling in the heat and steam;
some of the women laid the table with Hannah Sheldon’s linen cloth and
pewter dishes, and presently the breakfast was dished up.

Little Comfort Arms had sunk at the foot of the nail-studded door
in a deep slumber. She slept at her post like the faithless sentry
whose slumbers the night before had brought about the destruction of
Deerfield village. Goodwife Spear raised her up, but her curly head
drooped helplessly.

“Wake up, Comfort, and have a sup of hot porridge,” she called in her
ear.

She led her over to the table, Comfort stumbling weakly at
arm’s-length, and set her on a stool with a dish of porridge before
her, which she ate uncertainly in a dazed fashion, with her eyes
filming and her head nodding.

They all gathered gravely around the table, except Silence Hoit and
Grace Mather. Silence sat still, staring at the fire, and Grace had
dipped out a little cup of the hot porridge, and was trying to feed it
to the dead baby, with crooning words.

“Silence, why come you not to the table?” her aunt called out.

“I want nothing,” answered Silence.

“I see not why you should so set yourself up before the others, as
having so much more to bear,” said Eunice, sharply. “There is Goodwife
Spear, with her sons unburied on the road yonder, and she eats her
porridge with good relish.”

John Carson’s wife set her baby on her husband’s knee, and carried a
dish of porridge to Silence.

“Try and eat it, sweet,” she whispered. She was near Silence’s age.

Silence looked up at her. “I want it not,” said she.

“But he may not be dead, sweet. He may presently be home. You would not
he should find you spent and fainting. Perchance he may have wounds for
you to tend.”

Silence seized the dish and began to eat the porridge in great
spoonfuls, gulping it down fast.

The people at the table eyed her sadly and whispered, and they also
cast frequent glances at Grace Mather bending over the dead baby. Once
Captain Isaac Moulton called out to her in his gruff old voice, which
he tried to soften, and she answered back, sharply: “Think ye I will
leave this child while it breathes, Captain Isaac Moulton? In faith I
am the only one of ye all who has regard to it.”

But suddenly, when the meal was half over, Grace Mather arose, and
gathered up the little dead baby, carried it into Goodwife Sheldon’s
bedroom, and was gone some time.

“She has lost her wits,” said Eunice Bishop. “Think you not we should
follow her? She may do some harm.”

“Nay, let her be,” said Goodwife Spear.

When at last Grace Mather came out of the bedroom, and they all turned
to look at her, her face was stern but quite composed. “I found a
little clean linen shift in the chest,” she said to Goodwife Spear, who
nodded gravely. Then she sat down at the table and ate.

The people, as they ate, cast frequent glances at the barred door and
the shuttered windows. The daylight was broad outside, but there was
no glimmer of it in the room, and the candles were lighted. They dared
not yet remove the barricades, and the muskets were in readiness: the
Indians might return.

All at once there was a shrill clamor at the door, and men sprang to
their muskets. The women clutched each other, panting.

“Unbar the door!” shrieked a quavering old voice. “I tell ye, unbar the
door! I be nigh frozen a-standing here. Unbar the door! The Indians are
gone hours ago.”

“’Tis Goody Crane!” cried Eunice Bishop.

Captain Isaac Moulton shot back the bolts and opened the door a little
way, while the men stood close at his back, and Goody Crane slid in
like a swift black shadow out of the daylight.

She crouched down close to the fire, trembling and groaning, and the
women gave her some hot porridge.

“Where have ye been?” demanded Eunice Bishop.

“Where they found me not,” replied the old woman, and there was a
sudden leer like a light in the gloom of her great hood. She motioned
towards the bedroom door.

“Goody Sheldon sleeps late this morning, and so doth Mercy,” said she.
“I trow she will not dip her candles to-day.”

The people looked at each other; a subtler horror than that of the
night before shook their spirits.

Captain Isaac Moulton towered over the old woman on the hearth. “How
knew you Goodwife Sheldon and Mercy were dead?” he asked, sternly.

[Illustration: AT ENSIGN SHELDON’S HOUSE THE MORNING AFTER THE MASSACRE]

The old woman leered up at him undauntedly; her head bobbed. There was
a curious grotesqueness about her blanketed and hooded figure when
in motion. There was so little of the old woman herself visible that
motion surprised, as it would have done in a puppet. “Told I not Goody
Sheldon last night she would never stir porridge again?” said she.
“Who stirred the porridge this morning? I trow Goody Sheldon’s hands
be too stiff and too cold, though they have stirred well in their day.
Hath she dipped her candles yet? Hath she begun on her weaving? I trow
’twill be a long day ere Mary Sheldon’s linen-chest be filled, if she
herself go a-gadding to Canada and her mother sleep so late.”

“Eat this hot porridge and stop your croaking,” said Goodwife Spear,
stooping over her.

The old woman extended her two shaking hands for the dish. “That was
what she said last night,” she returned. “The living echo the dead, and
that is enough wisdom for a witch.”

“You’ll be burned for a witch yet, Goody Crane, an you be not careful,”
cried Eunice Bishop.

“There is fire enough outside to burn all the witches in the land,”
muttered the old woman, sipping her porridge. Suddenly she eyed Silence
sitting motionless opposite. “Where be your sweetheart this fine
morning, Silence Hoit?” she inquired.

Silence looked at her. There was a strange likeness between the
glitter in her blue eyes and that in Goody Crane’s black ones.

The old woman’s great hood nodded over the porridge-dish. “I can tell
ye, Mistress Silence,” she said, thickly, as she ate. “He is gone to
Canada on a moose-hunt, and unless I be far wrong, he hath taken thy
wits with him.”

“How know you David Walcott is gone to Canada?” cried Eunice Bishop;
and Silence stared at her with her hard blue eyes.

Silence’s soft fair hair hung all matted like uncombed flax over her
pale cheeks. There was a rigid, dead look about her girlish forehead
and her sweet mouth.

“I know,” returned Goody Crane, nodding her head.

The women washed the pewter dishes, set them back on the dresser, and
swept the floor. Little Comfort Arms had been carried up-stairs and
laid in the bed whence poor Mary Sheldon had been dragged and haled
to Canada. The men stood talking near their stacked muskets. One of
the shutters had been opened and the candles put out. The winter sun
shone in the window as it had shone before, but the poor folk in Ensign
Sheldon’s keeping-room saw it with a certain shock, as if it were a
stranger. That morning their own hearts had in them such strangeness
that they transferred it like motion to all familiar objects. The very
iron dogs in the Sheldon fireplace seemed on the leap with tragedy,
and the porridge-kettle swung darkly out of some former age.

Now and then one of the men opened the door cautiously and peered out
and listened. The reek of the smouldering village came in at the door,
but there was not a sound except the whistling howl of the savage north
wind, which still swept over the valley. There was not a shot to be
heard from the meadows. The men discussed the wisdom of leaving the
women for a short space and going forth to explore, but Widow Eunice
Bishop interposed, thrusting her sharp face in among them.

“Here we be,” scolded she, “a passel of women and children, and Hannah
Sheldon and Mercy a-lying dead, and me with my house burnt down,
and nothing saved except my silk hood and my looking-glass and my
feather-bed, and it’s a mercy if that’s not all smooched, and you talk
of going off and leaving us!”

The men looked doubtfully at one another; then there was the hissing
creak of footsteps on the snow outside, and Widow Bishop screamed. “Oh,
the Indians have come back!” she proclaimed.

Silence looked up.

The door was tried from without.

“Who’s there?” cried out Captain Moulton.

“John Sheldon,” responded a hoarse voice. “Who’s inside?”

Captain Moulton threw open the door, and John Sheldon stood there.
His severe and sober face was painted like an Indian’s with blood and
powder grime; he stood staring in at the company.

“Come in, quick, and let us bar the door!” screamed Eunice Bishop.

John Sheldon came in hesitatingly, and stood looking around the room.

“Have you but just come from the meadows?” inquired Captain Moulton.
But John Sheldon did not seem to hear him. He stared at the company,
who all stood still staring back at him; then he looked hard and long
at the doors, as if expecting some one to enter. The eyes of the others
followed his, but no one spoke.

“Where’s Hannah?” asked John Sheldon.

Then the women began to weep.

“She’s in there,” sobbed John Carson’s wife, pointing to the bedroom
door--“in there with little Mercy, Goodman Sheldon.”

“Is--the child hurt, and--Hannah a-tending her?”

The women wept, and pushed each other forward to tell him, but Captain
Isaac Moulton spoke out, and drove the knife home like an honest
soldier, who will kill if he must, but not mangle.

“Goodwife Sheldon lies yonder, shot dead in her bed, and we found the
child dead on the hearth-stone,” said Isaac Moulton.

John Sheldon turned his gaze on him.

“The judgments of the Lord are just and righteous altogether,” said
Isaac Moulton, confronting him with stern defiance.

“Amen,” returned John Sheldon. He took off his cloak, and hung it up on
the peg as he was used.

“Where is David Walcott?” asked Silence, standing before him.

“David, he is gone with the Indians to Canada, and the boys, Ebenezer
and Remembrance.”

“Where is David?”

“I tell ye, lass, he is gone with the French and Indians to Canada;
and you need be thankful he was but your sweetheart, and ye not wed,
with a half-score of babes to be taken too. The curse that was upon the
women of Jerusalem is upon the women of Deerfield.” John Sheldon looked
sternly into Silence’s white wild face; then his voice softened. “Take
heart, lass,” said he. “Erelong I shall go to Governor Dudley and get
help, and then after them to Canada, and fetch them back. Take heart; I
will fetch thee thy sweetheart presently.”

Silence returned to her seat in the fireplace. Goody Crane looked
across at her. “He will come back over the north meadow,” she
whispered. “Keep watch over the north meadow; but ’twill be a long day
ere ye see him.”

Silence paid seemingly little heed. She paid little heed to Ensign John
Sheldon relating how the French and Indians, with Hertel de Rouville
at their head, were on the road to Canada with their captives; of the
fight on the meadow between the retreating foe and the brave band of
Deerfield and Hatfield men, who had made a stand there to intercept
them; how they had been obliged to cease firing because the captives
were threatened; and the pitiful tale of Parson John Williams, two of
whose children were killed, dragged through the wilderness with the
others, and his sick wife.

“Had folk listened to him, we had all been safe in our good houses with
our belongings,” cried Eunice Bishop.

“They will not drag Goodwife Williams far,” said Goody Crane, “nor the
babe at her breast. I trow well it hath stopped wailing ere now.”

“How know you that?” questioned Eunice Bishop, turning sharply on her.

But the old woman only nodded her head, and Silence paid no heed, for
she was not there. Her slender girlish shape sat by the hearth fire in
John Sheldon’s house in Deerfield, her fair head showed like a delicate
flower, but Silence Hoit was following her lover to Canada. Every step
that he took painfully through pathless forests, on treacherous ice,
and desolate snow fields, she took more painfully still; every knife
gleaming over his head she saw. She bore his every qualm of hunger
and pain and cold, and it was all the harder because they struck on
her bare heart with no flesh between, for she sat in the flesh in
Deerfield, and her heart went with her lover to Canada.

The sun stood higher, but it was still bitter cold; the blue frost on
the windows did not melt, and the icicles on the eaves, which nearly
touched the sharp snow-drifts underneath, did not drip. The desolate
survivors of the terrible night began work among the black ruins of
their homes. They cared as well as they might for the dead in Deerfield
street, and the dead on the meadow where the fight had been. Their
muscles were all tense with the cold, their faces seamed and blue with
it, but their hearts were strained with a fiercer cold than that. Not
one man of them but had one or more slain, with dead face upturned,
seeking his in the morning light, or on that awful road to Canada. Ever
as the men worked they turned their eyes northward, and met grimly the
icy blast of the north wind, and sometimes to their excited fancies
it seemed to bring to their ears the cries of their friends who were
facing it also, and they stood still and listened.

Silence Hoit crept out of the house and down the road a little way,
and then stood looking over the meadow towards the north. Her fair hair
tossed in the wind, her pale cheeks turned pink, the wind struck full
upon her delicate figure. She had come out without her blanket.

“David!” she called. “David! David! David!” The north wind bore down
upon her, shrieking with a wild fury like a savage of the air; the dry
branches of a small tree near her struck her in the face. “David!” she
called again. “David! David!” She swelled out her white throat like
a bird, and her voice was shrill and sweet and far-reaching. The men
moving about on the meadow below, and stooping over the dead, looked up
at her, but she did not heed them. She had come through a break in the
palisades; on each side of her the frozen snow-drifts slanted sharply
to their tops, and they glittered with blue lights like glaciers in the
morning sun over those drifts the enemy had passed the night before.

The men on the meadow saw Silence’s hair blowing like a yellow banner
between the drifts of snow.

“The poor lass has come out bareheaded,” said Ensign Sheldon. “She is
near out of her mind for David Walcott.”

“A man should have no sweetheart in these times, unless he would her
heart be broke,” said a young man beside him. He was hardly more than
a boy, and his face was as rosy as a girl’s in the wind. He kept
close to Ensign Sheldon, and his mind was full of young Mary Sheldon
travelling to Canada on her weary little feet. He had often, on a
Sabbath day, looked across the meeting-house at her, and thought that
there was no maiden like her in Deerfield.

Ensign John Sheldon thought of his sweetheart lying with her heart
still in her freezing bedroom, and stooped over a dead Hatfield man
whose face was frozen into the snow.

The young man, whose name was Freedom Wells, bent over to help him.
Then he started. “What’s that?” he cried.

“’Tis only Silence Hoit calling David Walcott again,” replied Ensign
Sheldon.

The voice had sounded like Mary Sheldon’s to Freedom. The tears rolled
over his boyish cheeks as he put his hands into the snow and tried to
dig it away from the dead man’s face.

“David! David! David!” called Silence.

Suddenly her aunt threw a wiry arm around her. “Be you gone clean
daft,” she shrieked against the wind, “standing here calling David
Walcott? Know you not he is a half-day’s journey towards Canada an the
savages have not scalped him and left him by the way? Standing here
with your hair blowing and no blanket! Into the house with ye!”

Silence followed her aunt unresistingly. The women in Ensign Sheldon’s
house were hard at work. They were baking in the great brick oven,
spinning, and even dipping poor Goodwife Sheldon’s candles.

“Bind up your hair, like an honest maid, and go to spinning,” said
Eunice, and she pointed to the spinning-wheel which had been saved from
her own house. “We that be spared have to work, and not sit down and
trot our own hearts on our knees. There is scarce a yard of linen left
in Deerfield, to say naught of woollen cloth. Bind up your hair!”

And Silence bound up her hair, and sat down by her wheel meekly, and
yet with a certain dignity. Indeed, through all the disorder of her
mind, that delicate maiden dignity never forsook her, and there was
never aught but respect shown her.

As time went on, it became quite evident that although the fair
semblance of Silence Hoit still walked the Deerfield street, sat in the
meeting-house, and toiled at the spinning-wheel and the loom, yet she
was as surely not there as though she had been haled to Canada with the
other captives on that terrible February night. It became the general
opinion that Silence Hoit would never be quite her old self again and
walk in the goodly company of all her fair wits unless David Walcott
should be redeemed from captivity and restored to her. Then, it was
accounted possible, the mending of the calamity which had brought her
disorder upon her might remove it.

“Ye wait,” Widow Eunice Bishop would say, hetchelling flax the while as
though it were the scalp-locks of the enemy--“ye wait. If once David
Walcott show his face, ye’ll see Silence Hoit be not so lacking. She
hath a tenderer heart than some I could mention, who go about smiling
when their nearest of kin lie in torment in Indian lodges. She cares
naught for picking up a new sweetheart. She hath a steady heart that be
not so easy turned as some. Silence was never a light hussy, a-dancing
hither and thither off the bridle-path for a new flower on the bushes.
An’, for all ye call her lacking now, there be not a maid in Deerfield
does such a day’s task as she.”

And that last statement was quite true. All the Deerfield women, the
matrons and maidens, toiled unceasingly, with a kind of stern patience
like that which served their husbands and lovers in the frontier
corn-fields, and which served all the dauntless border settlers, who
were forced continually to rebuild after destruction, like way-side
ants whose nests are always being trampled underfoot. There was need
of unflinching toil at wheel and loom, for there was great scarcity of
household linen in Deerfield, and Silence Hoit’s shapely white maiden
hands flinched less than any.

Nevertheless, many a day, in the morning when the snowy meadows were
full of blue lights, at sunset when all the snow levels were rosy, but
more particularly in wintry moonlight when the country was like a waste
of silver, would Silence Hoit leave suddenly her household task, and
hasten to the terrace overlooking the north meadow, and shriek out:
“David! David! David Walcott!”

The village children never jeered at her, as they would sometimes jeer
at Goody Crane if not restrained by their elders. They eyed with a
mixture of wonder and admiration Silence’s beautiful bewildered face,
with the curves of gold hair around the pink cheeks, and the fretwork
of tortoise-shell surmounting it. David Walcott had given Silence her
shell comb, and she was never seen without it.

Many a time when Silence called to David from the terrace of the north
meadow, some of the little village maids in their homespun pinafores
would join her and call with her. They had no fear of her, as they had
of Goody Crane.

Indeed, Goody Crane, after the massacre, was in worse repute than ever
in Deerfield. There were dark rumors concerning her whereabouts upon
that awful night. Some among the devout and godly were fain to believe
that the old woman had been in league with the powers of darkness and
their allies the savages, and had so escaped harm. Some even whispered
that in the thickest of the slaughter, when Deerfield was in the midst
of that storm of fire, old Goody Crane’s laugh had been heard, and one,
looking up, had spied her high overhead riding her broomstick, her face
red with the glare of the flames. The old woman was sheltered under
protest, and had Deerfield not been a frontier town, and graver matters
continually in mind, she might have come to harm in consequence of the
gloomy suspicions concerning her.

Many a night after the massacre would the windows fly up and anxious
faces peer out. It was as if the ears of the people were tuned up to
the pitch of the Indian warwhoops, and their very thoughts made the
nights ring with them.

The palisades were well looked to; there was never a slope of frozen
snow again to form foothold for the enemy, and the sentry never
slept at his post. But the anxious women listened all winter for the
warwhoops, and many a time it seemed they heard them. In the midst of
their nervous terror it was often a sore temptation to consult old
Goody Crane, since she was held to have occult knowledge.

“I’ll warrant old Goody Crane could tell us in a twinkling whether
or no the Indians would come before morning,” Eunice Bishop said one
fierce windy night that called to mind the one of the massacre.

“Knowledge got in unlawful ways would avail us naught,” returned
Goodwife Spear. “I trow the Lord be yet able to protect His people.”

“I doubt not that,” said Eunice Bishop, “but I would like well to know
if I had best bury my hood and my spinning-wheel and looking-glass in
a snow-drift to-night. I have no mind the Indians shall get them. I
warrant she knows well.”

But Eunice Bishop did not consult Goody Crane, although she watched
her narrowly and had a sharp ear to her mutterings as she sat in the
chimney-corner. Eunice and Silence were living in John Sheldon’s
house, as did many of the survivors for some time after the massacre.
It was the largest house in the village, and most of its original
inhabitants were dead or gone into captivity. The people all huddled
together fearfully in the few houses that were left, and the women’s
spinning-wheels and looms jostled each other.

As soon as the weather moderated, the work of building new dwellings
commenced, and went on bravely with the advance of the spring. The
air was full of the calls of spring birds and the strokes of axes and
hammers. A little house was built on the site of their old one for
Widow Bishop and Silence Hoit. Widow Sarah Spear also lived with them,
and Goody Crane took frequent shelter at their fireside. So they were
a household of women, with loaded muskets at hand, and spinning-wheels
and looms at full hum. They had but a scanty household store, although
Widow Bishop tried in every way to increase it. Several times during
the summer she took perilous journeys to Hatfield and Squakheak, for
the purpose of bartering skeins of yarn or rolls of wool for household
articles. In December, when Ensign Sheldon with young Freedom Wells
went down to Boston to consult with Governor Dudley concerning an
expedition to Canada to redeem the captives, Widow Eunice Bishop,
having saved a few shillings, burdened him with a commission to
purchase for her a new cap and a pair of bellows. She was much angered
when he returned without them, having quite forgotten them in his press
of business.

On the day when John Sheldon and Freedom Wells started upon their
terrible journey of three hundred miles to redeem the captives, Eunice
Bishop scolded well as she spun by her hearth fire.

“I trow they will bring back nobody,” said she, her nose high in air,
and her voice shrilling over the drone of the wheel; “an they could not
do the bidding of a poor lone widow-woman, and fetch her the cap and
bellows from Boston, they’ll fetch nobody home from Canada. I would I
had ear of Governor Dudley. I trow men with minds upon their task would
be sent.” Eunice kept jerking her head as she scolded, and spun like a
bee angry with its own humming.

Silence sat knitting, and paid no heed. She had paid no heed to any of
the talk about Ensign Sheldon’s and Freedom Wells’s journey to Canada.
She had not seemed to listen when Widow Spear had tried to explain the
matter to her. “It may be, sweetheart, if it be the will of the Lord,
that they will bring David back to thee,” she had said over and over,
and Silence had knitted and made no response.

She was the only one in Deerfield who was not torn with excitement and
suspense as the months went by, and the only one unmoved by joy or
disappointment when in May John Sheldon and Freedom Wells returned with
five of the captives. But David Walcott was not among them.

“Said I not ’twould be so?” scolded Eunice Bishop. “Knew I not ’twould
be so when they forgot to get the cap and the bellows in Boston? The
one of all the captives that could have saved a poor maid’s wits they
leave behind. There’s Mary Sheldon come home, and she a-coloring red
before Freedom Wells, and everybody in the room a-seeing it. I trow
they might have done somewhat for poor Silence,” and Eunice broke down
and wailed and wept, but Silence shed not a tear. Before long she stole
out to the terrace and called “David! David! David!” over the north
meadow, and strained her blue eyes towards Canada, and held out her
fair arms, but it was with no new disappointment and desolation.

There was never a day nor a night that Silence called not over the
north meadow like a spring bird from the bush to her absent mate, and
people heard her and sighed and shuddered. One afternoon in the last of
the month of June, as Silence was thrusting her face between the leaves
of a wild cherry-tree and calling “David! David! David!” David himself
broke through the thicket and stood before her. He and three other
young men had escaped from their captivity and come home, and the four,
crawling half dead across the meadow, had heard Silence’s voice from
the terrace above, and David, leaving the others, had made his way to
her.

“Silence!” he said, and held out his poor arms, panting.

But Silence looked past him. “David! David! David Walcott!” she called.

David could scarcely stand for trembling, and he grasped a branch of
the cherry-tree to steady himself, and swayed with it.

“Know--you not--who I am, Silence?” he said.

But she made as though she did not hear, and called again, always
looking past him. And David Walcott, being near spent with fatigue and
starvation, wound himself feebly around the trunk of the tree, and the
tears dropped over his cheeks as he looked at her; and she called past
him, until some women came and led him away and tried to comfort him,
telling him how it was with her, and that she would soon know him when
he looked more like himself.

But the summer wore away and she did not know him, although he
constantly followed her beseechingly. His elders even reproved him for
paying so little heed to his work in the colony. “It is not meet for a
young man to be so weaned from usefulness by grief for a maid,” said
they. But David Walcott would at any time leave his reaping-hook in
the corn and his axe in the tree, leave aught but his post as sentry,
when he heard Silence calling him over the north meadow. He would stand
at her elbow and say, in his voice that broke like a woman’s: “Here I
am, sweetheart, at thy side. I pray thee turn thy head.” But she would
not let her eyes rest upon him for more than a second’s space, turning
them ever past him towards Canada, and calling in his very ears with a
sad longing that tore his heart: “David! David! David!” It was as if
her mind, reaching out always and speeding fast in search of him, had
gotten such impetus that she passed the very object of her search and
knew it not.

Now and then would David Walcott grow desperate, fling his arms around
her, and kiss her upon her cold delicate lips and cheeks as if he would
make her recognize him by force; but she would free herself from him
with a passionless resentment that left him helpless.

One day in autumn, when the borders of the Deerfield meadows were a
smoky purple with wild asters, and golden-rods flashed out like golden
flames in the midst of them, David Walcott had been pleading vainly
with Silence as she stood calling on the north terrace. Suddenly he
turned and rushed away, and his face was all convulsed like a weeping
child’s. As he came out of the thicket he met the old woman Goody
Crane, and would fain have hidden his face from her, but she stopped
him.

“Prithee stop a moment’s space, Master David Walcott,” said she.

“What would you?” David cried out in a surly tone, and he dashed the
back of his hand across his eyes.

“’Tis full moon to-night,” said the old woman, in a whisper. “Come out
here to-night when the moon shall be an hour high, and I promise ye she
shall know ye.”

The young man stared at her.

“I tell ye Mistress Silence Hoit shall know ye to-night,” repeated
the old woman. Her voice sounded hollow in the depths of her great
hood, which she donned early in the fall. Her eyes in the gloom of it
gleamed with a small dark brightness.

“I’ll have no witch-work tried on her,” said David, roughly.

“I’ll try no witch-work but mine own wits,” said Goody Crane. “If they
would hang me for a witch for that, then they may. None but I can cure
her. I tell ye, come out here to-night when the moon is an hour high;
and mind ye wear a white sheep’s fleece over your shoulders. I’ll harm
her not so much with my witch-work as ye’ll do with your love, for all
your prating.”

The old woman pushed past him to where Silence stood calling, and
waited there, standing in the shadow cast by the wild cherry-tree until
she ceased and turned away. Then she caught hold of the skirt of her
gown, and David stood, hidden by the thicket, listening.

“I prithee, Mistress Silence Hoit, listen but a moment,” said Goody
Crane.

Silence paused, and smiled at her gently and wearily.

“Give me your hand,” demanded the old woman.

And Silence held out her hand, flashing white in the green gloom, as if
she cared not.

The old woman turned the palm, bending her hooded head low over it.
“He draweth near!” she cried out suddenly; “he draweth near, with a
white sheep’s fleece over his shoulders! He cometh through the woods
from Canada. He will cross the meadow when the moon is an hour high
to-night. He will wear a white sheep’s fleece over his shoulders, and
ye’ll know him by that.”

Silence’s wandering eyes fastened upon her face.

The old woman caught hold of her shoulders and shook her to and fro.
“David! David! David Walcott!” she screamed. “David Walcott with a
white sheep’s fleece on his back! On the meadow! To-night when the
moon’s an hour high! Be ye out here to-night, Silence Hoit, if ye’d see
him a-coming down from the north!”

Silence gasped faintly when the old woman released her and went
muttering away. Presently she crept home, and sat down with her
knitting-work in the chimney-place.

When Eunice Bishop hung on the porridge-kettle, Goody Crane lifted the
latch-string and came in. It was growing dusky, but the moon would not
rise for an hour yet. Goody Crane sat opposite Silence, with her eyes
fixed upon her, and Silence, in spite of herself, kept looking at her.
A gold brooch at the old woman’s throat glittered in the firelight,
and that seemed to catch Silence’s eyes. She finally knitted with them
fixed upon it.

She scarcely took her eyes away when she ate her supper; then she sat
down to her knitting and knitted, and gazed, in spite of herself, at
the gold spot on the old woman’s throat.

The moon arose; the tree branches before the windows tossed half
in silver light; the air was shrill with crickets. Silence stirred
uneasily, and dropped stitches in her knitting-work. “He draweth near,”
muttered Goody Crane, and Silence quivered.

The moon was a half-hour high. Widow Bishop was spinning, Widow Spear
was winding quills, and Silence knitted. “He draweth near,” muttered
Goody Crane.

“I’ll have no witchcraft!” Silence cried out, suddenly and sharply. Her
aunt stopped spinning, and Widow Spear started.

“What’s that?” said her aunt. But Silence was knitting again.

“What meant you by that?” asked her aunt, sharply.

“I have dropped a stitch,” said Silence.

Her aunt spun again, with occasional wary glances. The moon was
three-quarters of an hour high. Silence gazed steadily at the gold
brooch at Goody Crane’s throat.

“The moon is near an hour high; you had best be going,” said the old
woman, in a low monotone.

Silence arose directly.

“Where go you at this time of night?” grumbled her aunt. But Silence
glided past her.

“You’ll lose your good name as well as your wits,” cried Eunice. But
she did not try to stop Silence, for she knew it was useless.

“A white sheep’s fleece over his shoulders,” muttered Goody Crane as
Silence went out of the door; and the other women marvelled what she
meant.

Silence Hoit went swiftly and softly down Deerfield street to her
old haunt on the north meadow terrace. She pushed in among the wild
cherry-trees, which waved, white with the moonlight, like ghostly arms
in her face. Then she called, setting her face towards Canada and the
north: “David! David! David!” But her voice had a different tone in it,
and it broke with her heart-beats.

David Walcott came slowly across the meadow below; a white fleece of a
sheep thrown over his back caught the moonlight. He came on, and on,
and on; then he went up the terrace to Silence. Her face, white like a
white flower in the moonlight, shone out suddenly close before him. He
waited a second, then he spoke. “Silence!” he said.

Then Silence gave a great cry, and threw her arms around his neck, and
pressed softly and wildly against him with her wet cheek to his.

“Know you who ’tis, sweetheart?”

“Oh, David, David!”

The trees arched like arbors with the weight of the wild grapes, which
made the air sweet; the night insects called from the bushes; Deerfield
village and the whole valley lay in the moonlight like a landscape
of silver. The lovers stood in each other’s arms, motionless, and
seemingly fixed as the New England flora around them, as if they too
might reappear hundreds of spring-times hence, with their loves as
fairly in blossom.

THE BUCKLEY LADY

The dark slate stones that now slant to their falls in the old
burying-ground, or are fallen already, then stood straight. The old
inscriptions, now blurred over by moss and lichen, or worn back into
the face of the stone by the wash of the heavy coast rains, were
then quite plain. The winged cherubim and death-heads--the terrible
religious symbols of the Old Testament, made realistic by New England
minds under stress of grief--were quite fresh from the artist’s hands.

The funeral urns and weeping-willows, a very art of sorrow in
themselves, with their every curve the droop of a mourner’s head, and
all their flowing lines of tears, were still distinct. Indeed, the
man who had graven many of them was still alive, and not yet past
his gloomy toil. He lived in his little house not far beyond the
burying-ground, and his name was Ichabod Buckley. He had a wife Sarah,
a son Ichabod, and three daughters, Submit, Rebecca, and Persis. When
Persis was twelve years old a great change and a romance came into her
life. She was the youngest of the family; her brother was ten years
older than she; her sisters were older still. She had always been to
a certain extent petted and favored from her babyhood; however, until
she was twelve, she had not been exempt from her own little duties and
privations. She had gathered drift-wood on the shore, her delicate
little figure buffeted and shaken by rough winds. She had dug quahaugs,
wading out in the black mud, with her petticoats kilted high over
her slender childish legs. She had spun her daily stint, and knitted
faithfully harsh blue yarn socks for her father and brother. In the
early autumn, when she was twelve years old, all that was changed.

One morning in September it was hot inland, but cool on the point of
land reaching out into the sea where the Buckley house stood. The son,
Ichabod, had gone to sea in a whalingvessel; the father was at home,
working in the little slanting shed behind the house. One could hear
the grating slide of his chisel down the boughs of a weeping-willow on
a new gravestone. A very old woman of the village had died that week.

At the left of the house there was a bright unexpected glint from a
great brass kettle which the eastern sun struck. Ichabod Buckley’s
wife had her dye-kettle out there on forked sticks over a fire. She
was dyeing some cloth an indigo-blue, and her two elder daughters were
helping her. The two daughters Submit and Rebecca looked like their
mother. The three, from their figures, seemed about of an age--all tall
and meagre and long-limbed, moving in their scanty petticoats around
the kettle with a certain dry pliability, like three tall brown weeds
on the windy marsh.

Persis came up from the shore at the front of the house with her arms
full of drift-wood. She was just crossing the front yard when she heard
a sound that startled her, and she stood still and listened, inclining
her head towards the woods on the right. In the midst of these woods
was the cleared space of the graveyard; the rough path to the main road
ran past it.

Seldom any but horseback riders came that way; but now Persis was sure
that she heard the rumble of carriage-wheels, as well as the tramp of
horses’ feet. She turned excitedly to run to her mother and sisters;
but all at once the splendid coach and four emerged with a great
flourish on the open space before the house, and she stood still.

The short coarse grass in the yard had gotten a perpetual slant from
the wind. Just now it was still, but that low bending sweep of the
grass towards the west made it seem as if the wind were transfixed
there. Persis stood in the midst of this still show of wind, her
slender childish figure slanting a little also. All her fair hair was
tucked away tidily beneath a little blue hood tied under her chin. The
oval of her face showed like the oval of a pearl in this circle of
blue, and it had a beauty that could draw the thoughts of people away
from their own hearts. Even the folk of this old New England village,
who had in their stern doctrines no value for a fair face, turned for
a second, as if by some compelling gleam of light under their eyelids,
when this little Buckley maid entered the meeting-house; and her mother
and sisters, although they saw her every day, would stop sometimes
their work or speech when her face came suddenly before their eyes.

Persis had her little looking-glass. She looked in it when she had
washed her face to see if it were clean, and when she braided her hair
to see if it were smooth. Sometimes she paused, herself, and eyed her
face with innocent wonder, but she did not know its value. She was like
a child with a precious coin which had its equivalent in goods beyond
her ken.

To-day Persis had no idea why these fine strangers in the grand coach
sat still with their eyes riveted upon her face.

She stood there in the windy grass, in her little straight blue gown,
clasping her bundle of drift-wood to her breast, and stared, turning
her back altogether upon her own self, at the coach and the trappings,
and the black coachman in his livery, with his head like a mop of black
sheep’s wool, and his white rolling eyes, which half frightened her.
She looked a little more curiously at this black coachman than at the
gentleman and lady in the coach, although they were grand enough; and,
moreover, the gentleman was very handsome, and not old. He thrust his
fair head, which had a slight silvery sheen of powder, out of the coach
window, and the pale old face and velvet hood of the lady showed over
his shoulder, and they both stared at Persis’s face.

Then the gentleman spoke, and Persis started, and blushed, and dropped
a courtesy. She had forgotten that until now, and felt overcome with
shame. “Good-day, my pretty maid,” said the gentleman; and as he spoke
he stepped out of the coach and approached Persis. She saw, with
half-dazzled eyes, his grand fair head, his queue tied with a blue
silk ribbon, his jewelled knee-buckles and silk hose, his flowered
waistcoat and the deep falls of lace over his long white hands. No such
fine gentleman as this had ever come within her vision. She courtesied
again, and looked up in his face when he reached her. Then she looked
down again quickly, and the strange salt savor of the drift-wood,
overpowering a sweet perfume about the stranger’s rich attire, came up
in her blushing face. The gentleman looked very kind, and his eyes were
very gay and blue, yet somehow she was frightened and abashed. It was
as if he saw something within herself of which she had not dreamed, and
suddenly forced her to see it also, to her own confusion.

The gentleman laughed softly when she looked down. “Is it the first
time you have had another pair of eyes for your looking-glass, little
maid?” he asked, with a kind of mocking caress in his tone.

Persis did not lift her eyes from the drift-wood. She blushed more
deeply, and her sweet mouth trembled.

“Nay, tease not the child. Ask if her father be in the house,” called
the lady’s soft voice, with a little impatient ring in it, from the
coach.

“’Tis but the fault of my eyes, your ladyship,” retorted the gentleman,
gayly. “They are ever as lakes reflecting flowers in the presence of
beauty, and I doubt much if this little maid hath ever seen herself so
clearly before--if eyes like mine have come in her way.”

Persis’s mouth quivered more. She wanted to run away, and did not dare;
but suddenly the gentleman spoke again, quite gravely and coldly, and
all the gay banter in his voice was gone.

“Is your father, Ichabod Buckley, within, my good maid?” he said.

Persis felt as if a spell which had been cast over her were broken. She
dropped a courtesy.

“Please, sir, my father is yonder, cutting a weeping-willow on old
Widow Nye’s gravestone,” she replied, pointing towards the rear of the
house; and she spoke with that punctilious courtesy with which she had
been taught to address strangers.

“Will you bid him come this way? I would speak with him,” said the
gentleman.

“And bid him hasten, for this air from the sea is full cold for me!”
called the lady from the coach.

Persis dipped another affirmative courtesy towards her, then fled
swiftly around the corner of the house. She met her mother and her
sister Submit face to face, with a shock. They had been peeping around
the corner at the grand folk. Rebecca had run into the house to put on
her shoes and a clean kerchief, in case one of the elder women had to
go forward to speak to them.

“Father! the gentleman wants father,” said Persis, with soft pants.
“Oh, mother!”

Her mother caught her arm with a jerk. “Who be they?” she hissed in her
ear.

“I--don’t know--such--grand folks, and--the coach and the four, and the
black man--oh, mother!”

“Go bid your father come quick.”

Sarah Buckley gave her daughter a push, and Persis flew on towards the
shed where her father kept his stock of gravestones and worked. But
Rebecca had already given him the alarm, and he was at the well washing
the slate dust from his hands.

“Go quick, father; they want you!” panted Persis.

“Who be they?” queried Ichabod Buckley. His voice was as nervous as a
woman’s, and he was small and delicately made like one. He shook the
water from his small hands, his fingers twitching. The muscles on the
backs glanced under the thin brown skin; the muscles on his temples and
neck glanced also. Ichabod Buckley had, when nervously excited, a look
as if his whole body were based on a system of brown wires.

Persis danced up and down before him, as if his nervous excitement
communicated itself to her. “I know not who they be,” she panted; “but,
oh, father, they be such grand folk!”

When Ichabod Buckley, striving to pace with solemn dignity, as befitted
his profession, but breaking, in spite of himself, into nervous runs,
went around to the front of the house, Persis slunk at his heels, but
her mother arrested her at the corner. “Stay where you be, and not go
out there staring at the gentle-folk like a bold hussy!” she ordered.
So Persis stayed, peeping around the corner with her mother and Submit;
and presently Rebecca in her shoes, with her kerchief pinned over her
lean bosom, joined them.

Once Persis, advancing her beautiful face a little farther around the
corner, caught the gentleman’s gay blue eyes full upon her, and she
drew back with a great start and a blush.

Listen as they might, the women could not catch one word of Ichabod
Buckley’s and the gentleman’s discourse--they stood too far away. But
presently they saw the black coachman turn the coach and four around
with a wide careful sweep, and then the gentleman got in beside the
lady, and Ichabod beside the coachman, and then the horses leaped
forward, and the whole was out of sight behind the spray of pine woods.

* * * * *

Ichabod Buckley was gone about three-quarters of an hour. When he
returned he at once told his curious women-folks somewhat that had
passed, but his face was locked over more. “You have not told us
all,” said his wife, sharply. “It may well be, as you say, that the
gentle-folk wished to find the grave of the man who was their kin, and
died here in the first of the town, but that is not all.”

“I pointed out the grave to them beyond a question,” said Ichabod,
“though there was no stone to it. I knew it well from hearsay. And I
am to make at once a fine stone, with a round top and a winged head,
and here is the pay already.”

Ichabod jingled for the dozenth time a gold coin and some small silver
ones in his nervous hand, and his wife frowned.

“You have told us all this before,” said she. “There is something else
that you keep back.”

Ichabod was smiling importantly, he could not control his mouth; but he
went back without another word to old Widow Nye’s gravestone, and the
weeping-willow thereon grew apace under his hands.

However, he could not keep anything to himself long, least of all from
his wife, with her imperative curiosity. After dinner that noon he
beckoned her into the front room.

“What do you want of me?” she said. “I have the work to do.” She felt
that his previous silence demanded some show of dignity upon her part.

Ichabod glanced at his staring daughters, and beckoned beseechingly.

“Well, I can’t waste much time,” said Sarah; but she followed him
eagerly into the front room. They were shut in there some time. The
daughters, tidying up the kitchen, could hear the low murmur of their
parents’ voices, but that was all. Persis was polishing the brasses on
the hearth--the andirons and the knobs on the shovel and tongs. That
was always her task. It roughened her small hands, but nobody ever
minded that. To-day, as she was scouring away sturdily, her mother came
suddenly out of the front room and caught her plying arm.

“There!” said she; “you need do no more of this. ’Twill get your hands
all out of shape, and make them rough. They are too small for such
work. Submit, come here and finish scouring the brasses.”

Persis looked up at her mother and then at her little red grimy hands
in a bewildered way.

“Go and wash your hands, and then rub some Injun meal on them, and see
if it will not make them a little softer,” ordered her mother. “Submit,
make haste.”

Submit, although she was herself puzzled, and might well have been
resentful, knelt obediently down on the hearth, and fell to work on the
brasses, rubbing vigorously with salt and vinegar.

Persis washed her hands as her mother bade her, and afterwards rubbed
on some Indian meal. Then she was ordered to put on her pink-flowered
chintz gown, and sit down in the front room with her sampler. Her
mother braided her fair hair for her in two tight smooth braids, and
crossed them neatly at the back. She even put her own beautiful high
tortoise-shell comb in her daughter’s head.

“You may wear it a spell if you want to,” said she.

Persis smiled delightedly. Her chief worldly ambition had been to wear
a shell comb like her mother’s.

The window was open. She could hear faintly the rasp of her father’s
chisel upon the boughs of old Widow Nye’s weeping-willow. She could
hear the voices of her mother and sisters, who had gone back to their
work over the dye-kettle. After a while she saw Submit going down
to the shore for more drift-wood. “That is my work,” she thought to
herself with wonder. She could not understand her mother’s treatment of
her. It was very pleasant and grand to be sitting in state in the best
room, with the tortoise-shell comb in her hair, working her sampler,
and be rid of all ruder toil, yet she finally grew uneasy.

She laid down her sampler, and pulled open the front door, which was
seldom used, and hard to move, being swollen with the sea dampness.
Then she stole around the house towards the group at the dye-kettle.
She felt scared and uncertain without knowing why. Her mother called
out sharply when she caught sight of her, and waved her back. “Can’t I
go down for more drift-wood?” pleaded Persis, timidly.

“Back into the house!” ordered her mother, speaking against the wind,
which was now blowing hard. “Back with ye! Out here in this wind! Would
you be as black as an Injun? Go back to your sampler!”

Persis crept back, bewildered. The other two daughters looked at each
other. Then Rebecca spoke out boldly.

“Mother, what is all this?” said she.

“Perhaps you will know sometime,” replied Sarah Buckley, smiling
mysteriously, and she would say no more.

Persis continued to sit at the front-room window with her sampler in
her hands. She crossstitched a letter forlornly and laboriously, with
frequent glances out at the rosy wind-swept marshes and the blue dazzle
of sea beyond. She never dreamed of disputing her mother’s wishes
further. Persis Buckley, although full of nervous force, had also a
strange docility of character. She stitched on her sampler all the
afternoon. When it came time to prepare supper, her mother would not
even then let her out in the kitchen to help, as was her wont. “Stay
where you be,” said she, when Persis appeared on the threshold. And the
little maid remained in her solitary state until the meal was ready,
and she was bidden forth to it. There was a little sweet cake beside
her plate on the table, one of those which her mother kept in a stone
jar for company. Nobody else had one. Persis looked at it doubtfully
when she had finished her bread. “Eat it,” said her mother, and Persis
ate it, but it tasted strange to her. She wondered if her mother had
put anything different in the sweet cake.

Persis had lately sat up until the nine-o’clock bell rang, knitting or
paring sweet apples to dry, but now her mother sent her off to bed at
half past seven.

“Can’t I sit up and help Submit and Rebecca pare apples?” she begged,
but her mother was inexorable.

“I am not going to have your hands spoilt with apple juice,” said she.
“Besides, if you go to bed early ’twill make you grow faster and keep
your cheeks red.” There was an unusual softness in Sarah Buckley’s
voice, and she colored and smiled foolishly, as if she were ashamed of
it.

Ichabod Buckley sat on the hearth whittling chips with lightning jerks
of his clasp-knife. He did everything swiftly. “Do as your mother bids
you,” he said to Persis. He chuckled nervously, and looked meaningly at
his wife.

Persis went laggingly out of the room.

“Stand up straight,” ordered her mother. “The first thing you know
you’ll be all bent over like an old woman.”

Persis threw back her weak girlish shoulders until her slender back
hollowed. She had been trained to obedience. She clattered slowly
up the stairs in her little heavy shoes, still trying to keep her
shoulders back, when her mother called again.

“Come back here, Persis,” called her mother, and Persis returned to
the kitchen. “Sit down here,” said her mother, pointing to a chair,
and Persis sat down. She did not ask any questions; she felt a curious
terror and intimidation. She waited, sitting meekly with her eyes cast
down. She heard the snip of shears and the rattle of stiff paper at her
back, then she felt a sharp tug at her hair. She winced a little.

“You keep still,” said her mother at her back, rolling a lock of hair
vigorously. “I ain’t going to have your hair as straight as a broom if
I can help it.”

When Persis went to bed her head was covered with hard papered knots
of hair, all straining painfully at the roots. When she laid her head
uncomfortably on her pillow, she remembered in a bewildered way how her
mother had smoothed and smoothed and smoothed her hair in former days,
and how she had said many a time that rough and frowsy locks were not
modest or becoming. Her first conviction of the inconsistency of the
human heart was upon little Persis Buckley, and she was dazed. The
whole of this strange experience did not seem real enough to last until
the next day.

But the days went on and on, and she continued to live a life as
widely different from her old one as if she had been translated into
another world. She sat at the front-room window, with her beautiful
face looking out meekly from under her crown of curl-papers. Her mother
had a theory that a long persistency in the use of the papers might
produce a lasting curl, and Persis was seldom freed from them. She
walked abroad on a pleasant day at a genteel pace, with a thick black
embroidered veil over her face to protect her complexion. She never ran
barefoot, and even her thick cowhide shoes were discarded. She wore
now dainty high-heeled red morocco shoes, which made her set her feet
down as delicately as some little pink-footed pigeon. All her coarse
home-spun gowns were laid away in a chest. She wore now fine chintz or
soft boughten wool of a week-day, and she even had a gown of silken
stuff and a fine silk pelisse for Sabbath days.

Going into the meeting-house beside her soberly clad parents and
sisters, she looked like some gay-feathered bird which had somehow
gotten into the wrong nest. All the Buckley family seemed to have
united in a curious reversed tyranny towards this beautiful child. She
was set up as a queen among them, whether she would or no, and she was
made to take the best in their lot, whether she wanted it or not.

When Persis was fourteen, her sister Rebecca went some fifty miles
away to keep house for a widowed uncle and take care of his family of
children. She was not needed at home, and in this way the cost of her
support was saved for Persis. Submit was a dull woman, and hard work
was making her duller. She broadened her patient back for her own and
her sister’s burdens without a murmur, and became a contented drudge
that Persis might sit in state in the front room, keeping her hands
soft and white.

As for Persis’s brother Ichabod, nearly all his savings were given to
her, but, after all, not with any especial self-denial. This beautiful
young sister represented all the faint ambition in his life; he had
none left for himself, and nobody had tried to arouse any. He made
perilous voyages on a whaling-ship for his living. When he came home,
with his face browned and stiffened by his hard fight with the icy
winds of the North Atlantic, he sat down by the fire in his father’s
kitchen. Then he chewed tobacco, and never stirred if he could help it
until his next voyage.

At thirty, Ichabod had become as old as his father. All the dreams of
youth had gone out of him, and he slumbered in the present like a very
old man. Always as he sat chewing by the fire his face wore that look
of set resistance, as if the lash of the North Atlantic wind still
threatened it. Ever since she could remember, Persis Buckley had seen
her brother sit there between his voyages, a dull reflective bulk
before the hearth, like some figure-head of a stranded whaler.

The morning after his return from his voyage, Persis, passing her
brother, would be arrested by an inarticulate command, and would pause
while he dragged out his old leather bag, heavy with his hard-earned
coins. Then Persis would hold up her apron by the two lower corners,
and he would pour in a goodly portion of his wealth, while his face
looked more smiling and animated than she ever saw it at any other
time. “’Twill buy you something as good as anybody when you go among
the grand folk,” he would say, with a half-chuckle, when Persis thanked
him.

Sarah Buckley hid away all this money for Persis in the till of the
chest. “It will come handy some day,” she would remark, with a meaning
smile. This fund was not drawn upon for the purchase of Persis’s daily
needs and luxuries. Her father’s earnings and her mother’s thrift
provided them, and with seemingly little stint. People said that the
materials for Persis Buckley’s crewel-work alone cost a pretty sum.
After she had finished her sampler she worked a mourning-piece, and
after that a great picture, all in cross-stitch, which was held to be a
marvel.

Persis’s very soul flagged over the house and the green trees, the
river, and the red rose-bushes, and the blue sky, all wrought with
her needle, stitch by stitch. Once in the depths of her docile heart
a sudden wish, which seemed as foreign to her as an impious spirit,
leaped up that all this had never been created, since she was forced to
reproduce it in cross-stitch.

“I wish,” said Persis, quite out loud to herself when she was all
alone in the front room--“I wish the trees had never been made, nor
the roses, nor the river, nor the sky; then I shouldn’t have had to
work them.” Then she fairly trembled at her wickedness, and counted the
stitches in a corner of the sky with renewed zeal and faithfulness.

When Persis was sixteen, her mother, in her anxiety to provide her with
accomplishments, went a step beyond all previous efforts, and a piano
was bought for her. It was the very first piano which had ever come to
this little seaport town. Ichabod had commissioned a sea-captain to
purchase it in England.

When it was set up on its slender fluted legs in the Buckley front
room, all the people came and craved permission to see it, and viewed
its satiny surface and inlaid-work in mother-of-pearl with admiration
and awe. Then they went away, and discoursed among themselves as to the
folly and sinful extravagance of Ichabod Buckley and his wife.

There was in the village an ancient maiden lady who had lived in Boston
in her youth, and had learned to play several tunes on the harpsichord.
These, for a small stipend, she imparted to Persis. They were simple
and artless melodies, and Persis had a ready ear. In a short time she
had learned all the maiden lady knew. She could sing three old songs,
innocently imitating her teacher’s quaver with her sweet young voice,
and she could finger out quite correctly one battle piece and two
jigs. The two jigs she played very slowly, according to her teacher’s
instructions. Persis herself did not know why, but this elderly maiden
was astute. She did not wish Ichabod Buckley and his family to be
tormented with scruples themselves, neither did she wish to be called
to account for teaching light and worldly tunes.

“Play these very slowly, my dear,” she said. She shook the two bunches
of gray curls which bobbed outside her cap over her thin red cheeks;
her old blue eyes winked with a light which Persis did not understand.

“Be they psalm tunes?” she inquired, innocently.

“’Tis according to the way you play them,” replied her teacher,
evasively.

And Persis never knew, nor any of her family, that she played jigs.
However, one worldly amusement, which was accounted distinctly sinful,
was Persis taught with the direct connivance of her parents.

This old maiden lady, although she was constant in the meeting-house
on the Sabbath day, and was not seen to move a muscle of dissent when
the parson proclaimed the endless doom of the wicked, had Unitarian
traditions, and her life in her youth had been more gayly and broadly
ordered than that of those about her. It had always been whispered that
she had played cards, and had even danced, in days gone by. To the
most rigidly sanctified nostrils there was always perceptible a faint
spiritual odor of past frivolity when she came into the meeting-house,
although she seemed to subscribe faithfully to all the orthodox tenets.
The parson often felt it his duty to call upon her, and enter into
wordy expounding of the truth, and tempt her with argument. She never
questioned his precepts, and never argued, yet a suspicion as to her
inmost heresy was always abroad. Had it not been so, Sarah Buckley
would never have dared make one proposition to her with regard to her
daughter’s accomplishments.

One day the shutters in the Buckley front room were carefully closed,
as if some one lay dead therein; the candles were lighted, and this
ancient maiden lady, holding with both hands her petticoats above
her thin ankles in their black silk hose, taught Persis Buckley some
dancing steps. That, nobody in the village ever knew. All the parties
concerned would have been brought before the church had that secret
been disclosed. The Buckleys scarcely dared mention it to one another.

This old teacher of Persis Buckley had still some relatives left in
Boston, and now and then she went to them on a visit. On one of these
occasions Sarah Buckley commissioned her to purchase some books for
Persis. All the literature in the Buckley house consisted of the Bible,
Watts’s Hymns, and Doddridge’s _Rise and Progress_, and Sarah fancied
that another book or two of possibly an ornamental and decorative
tendency might be of use in her daughter’s education.

When Mistress Tabitha Hopkins returned from Boston she brought with her
a volume of Young’s _Night Thoughts_ and one of Richardson’s _Clarissa
Harlowe_. The first she presented with confidence, the second with some
excuses.

“I know well that the poetry is of a nature that will elevate her soul
and tend to form her mind,” said she, “and I have myself no doubt as to
the other. If it be a tale, ’tis one she can read to her profit, and
the pleasure she may take in it may lead her to peruse it more closely.
’Tis well sometimes to season hard doctrines with sugar if you would
have them gulped down at all.” Mistress Hopkins made a wry face, as
if the said doctrines were even then like bitter pills in her mouth,
and Sarah Buckley glanced at her suspiciously. However, she took the
books, and paid for them a goodly sum, and Persis was henceforth made
acquainted with the lofty admonitions to Lorenzo and the woes of the
unfortunate and virtuous Clarissa.

It might well have been that Tabitha Hopkins’s recommendation of the
story of poor Clarissa Harlowe and her desperate experience at the
hands of a faithless lover had its object. Mistress Tabitha Hopkins’s
single life had not predisposed her to implicit reliance upon the good
faith or the motives of gay gallants who, in the course of some little
trip out of their world, chanced to notice a beautiful rustic maiden.
Everybody in the village knew now the reason for Ichabod Buckley’s and
his wife’s strange treatment of their daughter Persis. They knew that
the grand gentleman who had come to town with the coach and four had
seen Persis, and cried out at her beauty, and made her father give his
promise that she should be kept for him until she was grown up, when he
would come over seas from England and marry her.

Ichabod had vainly tried to keep this secret, but he had told it before
a week had passed to old Thomas Knapp, who was helping him to set Widow
Nye’s gravestone.

Then the sun had not set before the news was widely spread. Marvellous
tales were told of this gentleman and his lady mother, who had come in
the coach with him. Persis, when she was wedded, would dwell in marble
halls, wear satin and velvet of a week-day, and eat off gold and silver
dishes. No wonder that Ichabod Buckley and his wife Sarah were doing
their poor best to fit their daughter for such a high estate! No wonder
that they kept her all day in the best room embroidering and reading
poetry and playing music! No wonder that they never let her walk abroad
without morocco shoes and a veil over her face!

“It ain’t likely,” said old man Knapp, “that she’ll ever have any call
to so much as dye a hank of yarn or dip a candle arter she’s married.”

Still, although people acquiesced in the wisdom of fitting Persis for
this grand station, if there were any prospect of her reaching it, they
were mostly incredulous or envious.

The incredulous said quite openly that Ichabod Buckley always did
hear things five times as big as they were, and they doubted much if
the grand gentleman ever really meant to or said he would come back
for Persis. The envious declared that if he did come they mistrusted
that it would not be for any good and honest purpose, for he would
never think Persis Buckley his equal, in spite of all her fine
accomplishments and her gaudy attire. And her face might by that time
be no more beautiful than some others, after all.

The incredulous moved the parson to preach many a discourse upon the
folly of worldly ambition and trust in the vain promises of princes.
The envious instigated sermons upon the sin of any other ornament or
accomplishment than a meek and quiet spirit for the daughters of Zion.

Poor little Persis, in her silken attire, lifting her wonderful face
to the parson, never dreamed that the discourse was directed at her
and her parents, but Ichabod and Sarah knew, and sat up with bristling
stiffness. After that they withdrew themselves largely from intercourse
with their neighbors. They felt as if the spiritual watch-dog had
been set upon them, and they were justly indignant. Sarah Buckley had
always been given to staying at home and minding the affairs of her own
household; now she kept herself more close than ever. Ichabod was by
nature sociable, and liked to fraternize with his kind; but now almost
his only dealing with people outside his own family lay in his work
upon their gravestones.

The Buckleys lived by themselves in their little house on the windy
land past the graveyard, following out their own end in life, and all
the time were under a subtle spiritual bombardment of doubt and envy
and disapproval from their neighbors in the village.

People talked much about Submit’s patient drudgery, and felt for her
the resentment which she did not feel for herself. “It is a shame
the way they make that poor girl do all the work to keep her sister
in idleness!” said they. They began to call Persis in derision “The
Buckley Lady.”

Poor Persis Buckley, shut out of the free air and away from all the
mates of her youth, was leading the life of a forlorn princess in
a fairy tale. She would have given all the money which her brother
Ichabod brought her for his privilege of a cruise over the wild seas.
Year after year she waited in her prison, cast about and bound, body
and spirit, by the will and ambition of her parents, like steel
cobwebs, for the prince who never came.

At first the romance of it all had appealed to her childish
imagination. When the high destiny which awaited her had been
disclosed, her heart leaped. She had been amused and pleased. She liked
to watch out for that grand coach and four. When she remembered the gay
blue flash of that grand gentleman’s eyes she blushed, and laughed to
herself.

But after a while all that failed. She did not grow incredulous, for
she had a simple and long-suffering faith in her parents, but quietly
and secretly frightened at the prospect before her. Poor Persis Buckley
sometimes felt herself turn fairly cold with dread at the thought of
entering that splendid coach and driving away forever out of her old
life at that strange gentleman’s side. He became to her as cold and
formless as a moving column of mist on the marsh, and even the dreams
which sprang of themselves in her girlish heart could not invest him
with love and life again.

She did not dare confide her fears to her mother. Sometimes her mother
filled her with a vague alarm. Sarah Buckley in ten years grew old, and
the eagerness in her face waxed so bright and sharp that one shrank
before it involuntarily, as before some blinding on-coming headlight of
spirit.

All those years she waited and watched and listened for that grand
coach and four which would bring her fortune in her daughter’s. All the
ambition of her earthly life, largely balked for herself, had centred
in this. Her lot in the world had been to tread out a ceaseless round
of sordid toil in her poor little home on the stormy coast, but her
beautiful daughter could take a flight above it, and something of
herself could follow her.

She never gave up, although year after year she watched and listened in
vain; but finally her body failed under this long strain of the spirit.
When Persis was twenty-three her mother died, after a short illness.
Then Persis found her father as keen a guardian as her mother had
been. Sarah had given him her farewell charges, and during her lifetime
had imbued his nervous receptive nature with a goodly portion of her
own spirit.

He wrought for his dead wife a fine tall stone, and set thereon a
verse of his own composition. Ichabod Buckley was somewhat of a poet,
publishing himself his effusions upon his gloomy stone pages. Then he
fulfilled his own and her part towards their daughter Persis.

* * * * *

Sarah Buckley had been dead two years, and the Buckley Lady was
twenty-five years old, sitting at her window in the front room,
watching for the prince who never came.

“The fine gentleman will find an old maid waiting for him if he does
not come before long,” people said, with sniffs.

But Persis had really grown more and more beautiful. Her complexion,
although she had lived so much within-doors, was not sickly, but pale
and fine as a white lily. Her eyes were like dark stars, and her hair
was a braided cap of gold, with light curls falling from it around her
face and her sweet neck. Of late Persis had rebelled upon one minor
point: she never, even of a morning, would sit at the window with
her hair rolled up in curl-papers. She argued with her father, with
a duplicity which was unlike her, that should the gentleman arrive
suddenly, she would have no time to take them down before he saw her.
But that was not the reason. Ichabod never suspected, neither did the
stupid Submit, padding faithfully in her household tracks; the son,
Ichabod, was away at sea. Nobody knew how the Buckley Lady, sitting
in her window watching, had seen Darius Hopkins pass by, with never a
coach and four, but striding bravely along on his own stalwart young
legs, and how her heart had gone out to him and followed him, whether
she would or not.

Darius Hopkins was Mistress Tabitha Hopkins’s nephew, and he had
come from Boston to pay his aunt a visit. People whispered that he
had expectations, and had come with a purpose. Mistress Tabitha had
received within two years a legacy, nobody knew how large, by the death
of a relative. However that may have been, the young man treated his
aunt with exceeding deference and tenderness. Her pride and delight
were great. She held her head high, and swung out her slim foot with
almost the motion of her old dancing steps when she went up the
meeting-house aisle on a Sabbath day, leaning on her nephew’s arm.
Darius was finely dressed, and he was also a personable young man of
whom she might well be proud. She kept glancing at him almost with the
shy delight of a sweetheart. Darius had a glossy dark head and a dark
complexion, but his eyes were blue and light, and somewhat, as she
fondly thought, like her own.

Darius had arrived on a Thursday, and it was on that day Persis Buckley
had seen him, and he had seen her at her window. Tabitha Hopkins’s
house was past the Buckleys’, fairly out at sea, on the point, across
the marshy meadows.

The young man glanced up carelessly at the Buckley house as he passed;
then he started, and fairly stopped, and his heart leaped almost with
fear, for it actually seemed to him that he saw the face of an angel in
the window.

“Who was the maid in the window of the house back yonder?” he said to
his aunt as soon as he had greeted her. He waved his hand carelessly
backward, and tried to speak as carelessly, but his aunt gave him a
sharp look.

“It must have been Persis Buckley,” said she.

“There is not another face like that in the whole country,” said the
young man, and in spite of himself his tongue betrayed him.

“Yes, it is generally considered that she has a fair face,” said
Tabitha, dryly. “She has accomplishments also. She can play music, and
she has a pretty voice for a song. She can dance, though that’s not
to be spoke of in this godly town, and she is well versed in polite
literature. Persis Buckley is fitted to adorn any high estate to which
she may be called.”

There was a mysterious tone in Tabitha’s voice, and her nephew looked
at her with eager inquiry.

“What mean you, aunt?” he said.

“What I have said,” replied she, aggravatingly, and would tell him no
more. She was secretly a little jealous that her nephew had shortened
his greeting to her to inquire about Persis. Old single woman though
she was, her feminine birthright of jealousy of the love of men, be
they lovers or sons or nephews, still survived in her heart.

The young man dared not ask her any more questions, but the next day
he passed the Buckley house many a time with sidelong glances at the
window where Persis sat. He would not stare too boldly at that fair
vision. And in the evening he stole out and strolled slowly over the
meadows, and came to the Buckley house again. She was not at the window
then, but the sweet tinkle of her piano came out to him from the
candle-lit room, and he listened in rapture to her tender little voice
trilling and quavering. Then peeping cautiously, he saw her graceful
head thrown back, and her white throat swelling with her song like a
bird’s.

When he returned, his aunt looked at him sharply, but she did not ask
where he had been. When he took his candle to retire for the night, her
old blue eyes twinkled at him suddenly.

“How did the little bird sing to-night?” she said.

The young man stared at her a second, then he blushed and laughed.
“Bravely, aunt, bravely,” he replied.

“’Tis a bird in the bush, nephew,” said she, and her voice was mocking,
yet shrewdly tender.

Darius’s face fell. “What do you mean, aunt?” he said.

“’Tis a bird that will always sing in the bush, and never in hand.”

Darius made as if he would question his aunt further, but he did not.
He bade her good-night in a downcast and confused manner, and was out
of the room like a shy girl.

Mistress Tabitha chuckled to herself, then she looked grave, and sat in
her rocking-chair for a long time thinking.

Darius Hopkins marvelled much what his aunt could mean by her warning,
and was uneasy over it. But the next day also he had many an errand
across the meadows, down the forest road, to the village, and always he
saw, without seeming to see, Persis at the window, and always she saw,
without seeming to see, him.

On the Sabbath day, when he and his aunt went by the Buckley house on
their way to meeting, Persis was not at the window. His aunt surprised
his sly glances. “They go to meeting early,” said she, demurely.
Darius laughed in a shamefaced fashion.

After he and his aunt were seated in the meeting-house, he scarcely
dared look up for a while, for he feared, should he see Persis suddenly
and near at hand, his face might alter in spite of himself. And, in
truth, when he did look up, and saw Persis close before him in a pew at
the side of the pulpit, a tremor ran over him, his lips twitched, and
all the color left his face. His aunt pressed her bottle of salts into
his hand, and he pressed it back almost sharply, and turned red as a
girl to the roots of his black hair. Then he sat up straight and looked
over almost defiantly at Persis. Her face in her blue satin bonnet,
with its drooping blue plume and lace veil thrown to one side, was fair
enough to stir the heart of any mortal man who looked at her.

There were, indeed, in that meeting-house, certain godly men who kept
their eyes sternly turned away, and would not look upon her, thinking
it a sin, although it was a sin to their own hearts alone.

But many a young man besides Darius Hopkins, although he had seen
her in that selfsame place Sabbath after Sabbath, still regarded her
furtively with looks of almost startled adoration. Not one of them
had ever spoken to her or heard her speak, or seen her except in the
meeting-house, or at her window, or thickly veiled on the village
street.

Persis to-day kept her eyes fixed upon the parson, exhorting under his
echoing sounding-board. She never looked around, although she knew that
Darius was sitting beside his aunt in her pew. She also was afraid, and
she never recovered courage, like Darius. Her father, Ichabod, fiercely
intent upon the discourse, his nervous face screwed to a very point of
attention, sat on one side; her sister Submit, her back bowed like an
old woman’s, on the other.

When meeting was over, Ichabod shot down the aisle, with his daughters
following, as was his wont, and reached the door before many that sat
farther back.

When Darius and his aunt came out of the meeting-house, the Buckleys
were quite out of sight. When they emerged from the road past the
graveyard through the woods, Persis was already at the window, with her
bonnet off, but she kept her head turned far to one side, as if intent
upon something in the room, and only the pink curve of one cheek was
visible.

Darius had grown bold in the meeting-house; this time he looked, and
forgot himself in looking.

“She is a pretty maid, but she is not for you, nor for any other
young man unless he come for her with a coach and four, with a black
gentleman a-driving,” said his aunt’s voice half mockingly at his side.

Then the young man turned and questioned her quite boldly. “I beg of
you to tell me what you mean, aunt,” he said.

Then Mistress Tabitha Hopkins, holding her Sabbath gown high above her
hooped satin petticoat as she stepped along, unfolded to her nephew
Darius Hopkins the strange romance of Persis Buckley’s life.

“’Tis a shame!” cried the young man, indignantly, when she had
finished--“a shame, to keep her a prisoner in this fashion!”

“’Tis only a prince with a coach and four can set her free. A prince
from over seas, with a black gentleman a-driving,” said his aunt.

Darius turned, and stared back across the flat meadow-land at Ichabod
Buckley’s house. It was late August now, and the meadow had great
rosy patches of marsh-rosemary flung upon it like silken cloaks of
cavaliers, and far-seen purple plumes of blazing-star. Darius studied
slowly the low gray walls and long slant of gray roofs in the distance.

“A strong right arm and a willing heart might free her, were he prince
or not!” said he. And he flung out his own right arm as if it were the
one to do it.

“Were the maid willing to be freed,” said Mistress Tabitha, softly.

Darius colored. “That is true, aunt,” he said, with a downcast and
humbled air, and he turned and went on soberly.

Mistress Tabitha looked at her nephew’s handsome face, and thought to
herself, with loving but jealous pride, that no maid could refuse him
as a deliverer. But she would not tell him so, for her heart was still
sore at his preference of Persis to herself.

Darius Hopkins had an uneasy visit at his aunt Tabitha’s. He did not
speak again of Persis Buckley, but he thought the more. Useless, as
he told himself, as either hopes or fears were, they sprang up in his
heart like persistent flames, and could not be trodden out.

He told himself that it was not sensible to think that the grand
Englishman would ever come for Persis after all these years, and that
it was nothing to him if he did. Yet he often trembled when he came in
sight of her house lest he see a coach and four standing before it, and
see her carried away before his very eyes.

And sometimes he would look at his own comely face in the glass, and
look into his own heart, and feel as if the love therein must compel
her even against her will; for she was not an angel or a goddess, after
all, beautiful as she was, but only a mortal woman. “She cannot love
this man whom she has not seen since she was a child, and he must be
an old man now,” reasoned Darius, viewing his own gallant young face
in the glass. And he smiled with hope, although he knew that he could
not reasonably expect to have more of Persis than the sight of her face
in the meeting-house or at the window were he to stay in the village a
year.

For a long time Darius was not sure that Persis even noticed him
when he passed by, but there came a day when he had that at least
for his comfort. That day he had not passed her house until late; on
the day before her face had been so far turned from the window that
his heart had sunk. He had said to himself that he would be such a
love-cracked fool no longer; he would not pass her house again unless
of a necessity. So all that day he had sat moodily with his aunt, but
just before dusk his resolution had failed him. He had strolled slowly
across the meadow, while his aunt watched him from her window, smiling
shrewdly.

He had not meant to glance even when he passed the Buckley house,
but in spite of himself his eyes turned. And there was Persis at the
window, leaning towards him, with her face all radiant with joy. It
was only a second, and she was gone. Darius had no time for anything
but that one look, but that was enough. He felt as if he had already
routed the gallant with the coach and four. He meditated all sorts of
audacious schemes as he went home. What could he not do, if Persis
would only smile upon him? He felt like marching straight upon her
house, like a soldier upon a castle, and demanding her of her father,
who was her jailer.

But the next day his heart failed him again, for she was not at her
window--nor the next, nor the next. He could not know that she was
peeping through the crack in the shutter, and that her embroidery and
her reading and her old thoughts were all thrown aside for his sake.
Persis Buckley could do nothing, day nor night, but think of Darius
Hopkins, and watch for him to pass her window.

She did not know why, but she did not like to look fairly out of the
window at him any longer. She could only peep through the crack in the
shutter, with her color coming and going, and her heart beating loud in
her ears.

But when Darius saw no more of Persis at the window, he told himself
that his conceit had misled him; that no such marvellous creature as
that could have looked upon him as he had thought, and that his bold
stare had affronted her.

So he did not pass the Buckley house for several days, and Persis
watched in vain. One afternoon she rose up suddenly, with her soft
cheek all creased where she had leaned it against the shutter. “He will
not come; I will watch no longer,” she said to herself, half angrily.
And she got out her green silk pelisse and her bonnet, and prepared to
walk abroad. She went through the kitchen, and her sister Submit stared
up at her from the hearth, which she was washing.

“You have not got on your veil, Persis,” said she.

“I want no veil,” Persis returned, impatiently.

“But you will get burned in the wind; father will not like it,” said
Submit, with wondering and dull remonstrance.

“Well,” sighed Persis, resignedly. And Submit got the black-wrought
veil, and tied it over her sister’s beautiful face.

Poor Persis, when she was out of the house, glanced hastily through the
black maze of leaves and flowers across the meadow, but she saw no one
coming. Then she strolled on away down the road through the woods. Just
that side of the burying-ground there was an oak grove, and she went in
there and sat down a little way from the road, with her back against a
tree. It was very cool for the time of year, but the sun shone bright.
All the oak-trees trilled sharply with the insects hidden in them, and
the leaves rustled together.

Persis sat very stiffly under the oak-tree. Her petticoat was of green
flowered chintz, and her pelisse and her bonnet of green silk. She
was as undistinguishable as a green plant against the trunk of the
tree, and neither Darius Hopkins nor his aunt Tabitha saw her when
they passed. Persis heard their voices before they came in sight. She
scarcely breathed. She seemed to be fairly hiding within herself, and
forcing her very thoughts away from the eyes of Darius and his aunt.

Mistress Tabitha came down the wood, stepping with her fine mincing
gait, and leaning upon her nephew’s arm. They never dreamed that Persis
was near. The green waving lines of the forest met their eyes on either
hand, but all unnoted, being as it were the revolutions of that green
wheel of nature of which long acquaintance had dimmed their perception.
Only an unusual motion therein could arouse their attention when their
thoughts were elsewhere, and they were talking busily.

As they came opposite Persis, Mistress Tabitha cried out suddenly, and
her voice was full of dismay. “Not to-morrow!” she cried out. “You go
not to-morrow, Darius!”

And Darius replied, sadly: “I must, Aunt Tabitha. I must go back to
Boston by the Thursday stage-coach, and to-day is Wednesday.”

Persis heard no more. She felt faint, and there was a strange singing
in her ears. As soon as the aunt and nephew were well past, she got up
and hastened back to the house. She took off her bonnet and pelisse,
and sat down in her old place at the window, where she had watched so
many years through her strange warped youth. When she saw Darius and
his aunt returning, all her soul seemed to leap forward and look, out
of her great dark eyes. But Darius never glanced her way. He knew she
was there, for his aunt said, “There is Persis Buckley,” and nodded;
but he dared not look, for fear lest he look too boldly, and she be
offended.

Persis did not nod in response to Mistress Tabitha. She only looked,
and looked at the slight, straight figure of the young man moving past
her and out of her life. She thought that it was the last time that
she should ever see him--the Boston stage left at daybreak. It seemed
to her that he would never come again; and if he did, that she could
not live until the time, but should ride away first from her old home
forever, in gloomier state than had been planned for so many years.

When Darius and his aunt were out of sight she heard her father’s voice
in the kitchen, and she arose and went out there with a sudden resolve.
“Father,” she said, standing before Ichabod.

He looked at her in a curious startled way. There was a strange gleam
in her soft eyes, and a strange expression about her docile mouth.

“What is it?” he said.

“He will never come, father. I want to be different.”

“Who will never come? What do you mean, Persis?”

“The--gentleman--the grand gentleman with--the coach and four. He will
never come for me now. I want to be different, father. I want to work
with Submit, and not stay in there by myself. If I have to any longer
I shall die, I think. I want to be different. He will never come now,
father.”

Ichabod Buckley trembled with long convulsive tremors, which seemed to
leave him rigid and stiff as they passed. “He will come!” he returned,
and he shouted out the words like an oath.

Submit, who was preparing supper, stopped, and stood pale and staring.

Persis quailed a little, but she spoke again.

“It is too long now, father,” she said. “He has forgotten me. He has
married another in England. He will never come, and I want to be
different. And should he come, after all, I should be sorely afraid to
go with him now. I could never go with him now, father.”

Ichabod turned upon her, and spoke with such force that she shrank,
as if before a stormy blast. “I tell ye he will come!” he shouted,
hoarsely. “He will come, and you shall go with him, whether you will or
no! He will come, and you shall sit there in that room and wait for
him until he comes! You should wait there until you were dead, if he
came not before. But he will, I tell ye--_he will come!_”

Persis fled before her father back to the best room, and sat there in
the gathering dusk. Across the meadows the light of Tabitha Hopkins
evening candle shone out suddenly like a low-hung star, and Persis sat
watching it. When Submit called, in a scared voice, that supper was
ready, she went out at once, and took her place at the table. There
were pink spots in her usually pale cheeks; she spoke not a word, and
scarcely tasted the little tid-bits grouped as usual around her plate.
Her father swallowed his food with nervous gulps, then he left the
table and went out. Soon Persis heard the grate of his tools on the
gravestone slate, and knew that he had gone to work by candle-light,
something he seldom did.

“Father is put out,” Submit said, with a half-scared, half-reproachful
look at Persis.

“Oh, Submit!” Persis cried out, with the first appeal she had ever made
in her life to her slow-witted elder sister, “I must be different, or I
think I shall die!”

“Maybe he will come soon,” said Submit, who did not understand her
sister’s appeal. “Maybe he will come soon, Persis. Father thinks so,”
she repeated, as she rose from the table and padded heavily about,
removing the supper dishes.

Then she added something which filled her sister’s soul with fright and
dismay.

“Father he dreamt a dream last night,” said Submit, in her thick drone.
“He dreamt that the grand gentleman came with the coach and four, and
the black gentleman a-driving, and the grand lady in a velvet hood,
just as he came before, and you got in and rode away. And he dreamt he
came on a Thursday.”

“To-morrow is Thursday,” gasped Persis.

Submit nodded. “Father thinks he will come to-morrow,” said she. “He
bade me not tell you, but I will for your comfort.”

Submit stared wonderingly at her sister’s distressed face as she ran
out of the room; then she went on with her work. She presently, in
sweeping the hearth, made a long black mark thereon, and straightway
told herself that there was another sign that the gentleman was coming.
Submit was well versed in New England domestic superstition, that being
her only exercise of imagination.

Persis did not light the candles in the best room. She sat at the
window in the dark, and watched again Mistress Tabitha’s candle-light
across the meadow. She also stared from time to time in a startled
way in the other direction towards the woodland road. Persis also was
superstitious. She feared lest her father’s dream come true. She
seemed to almost see now and then that stately equipage emerge as of
old from the woods. She almost thought that she heard the far-away
rumble of the wheels. She kept reminding herself that it was Wednesday,
and her father’s dream said Thursday; but what if she did have to go
away forever with that strange gentleman only the next day! She thought
suddenly, not knowing why, of Clarissa Harlowe and Lovelace in her
book. Mistress Tabitha’s purpose had not wholly failed in its effect.
A great vague horror of something which she was too ignorant to see
fairly came over her. The face of that fine strange gentleman, dimly
remembered before through all the years, shaped itself suddenly and
plainly out of the darkness like the face of a demon. Persis looked
away, shuddering, to the candle-gleam over the meadow, and Darius
Hopkins’s eyes seemed to look wistfully and lovingly into hers.

Persis Buckley arose softly, groped her way across the room in the
dark, sliding noiselessly like a shadow, felt for the latch of the door
that led into the front entry, lifted it cautiously, stole out into the
entry, then opened the outer door with careful pains by degrees, and
was out of the house.

Persis fled then past the plumy gloom of the pine-trees that skirted
the wood, over the meadow, straight towards that candle-gleam in the
Hopkins window.

There was a dry northeaster blowing, and it struck her as she fled, and
lashed her clothing about her. She had on no outer wraps, and her head
and her delicate face, which had always been veiled before a zephyr,
were now all roughened and buffeted by this strong wind, which carried
the sting of salt in it.

She never thought of it nor minded it. She fled on and on like a
love-compelled bird, with only one single impulse in her whole being.
The measure of freedom is always in proportion to the measure of
previous restraint. Persis Buckley had been under a restraint which
no maiden in this New England village had ever suffered, and she had
gotten from it an impetus for a deed which they would have blushed to
think of.

She fled on, forcing her way against the wind, which sometimes seemed
to meet her like a moving wall, and sometimes like the rushing legions
of that Prince of the Powers of the Air of whom she had read in the
Bible, making as if they would lift her up bodily and carry her away
among them into unknown tumult and darkness.

When Persis reached Tabitha Hopkins’s door, she was nearly spent. Her
life had not trained her well for a flight in the teeth of the wind.
She leaned against the door for a minute faint and gasping.

Then she raised the knocker, and it fell with only a slight clang; but
directly she heard an inner door open, and a step.

Then the door swung back before her, and Darius Hopkins stood there in
the dim candle-light shining from the room within.

He could not see Persis’s face plainly at first, only her little white
hands reaching out to him like a child’s from the gloom.

“Who is it?” he asked, doubtfully, and his voice trembled.

Persis made a little panting sound that was half a sob. Darius bent
forward, peering out. Then he cried out, and caught at those little
beseeching hands.

“It is not you!” he cried. “It is not you! You have not come to me! It
is not you!”

Darius Hopkins, scarcely knowing what he did, he was so stirred with
joy and triumph and doubt and fear, led Persis into the house and the
candle-lit room. Then, when he saw in truth before him that beautiful
face which he had worshipped from afar, the young man trembled and fell
down upon his knees before Persis as if she were indeed a queen, or an
angel who had come to bless him, and kissed her hand.

But Persis stood there, trembling and pale, before him, with the tears
falling from her wonderful eyes, and her sweet mouth quivering. “Do
not let him carry me away,” she pleaded, faintly.

Then Darius sprang to his feet and put his arms around her. “Who is it
would carry you away?” he said, angrily and tenderly. “No one shall
have you. Who is it?”

“The--gentleman--from over-seas,” whispered Persis. Her soft wet cheek
was pressed against Darius’s.

“He has not come?” he questioned, starting fiercely.

“No; but--father has dreamed that he will--to-morrow.”

Then Darius laughed gayly. “Dreams go by contraries,” he said.

“Do not let him carry me away,” Persis pleaded again, and she sobbed on
his shoulder, and clung to him.

Darius held her more closely. “He shall never carry you away, even if
he comes, against your will,” he said. “Do not fear.”

“I will go with nobody but you,” whispered Persis in his ear.

And he trembled, scarcely believing that he heard aright. And, indeed,
he scarcely believed even yet that he was not dreaming, and that he
held this beautiful creature in his arms, and, more than all, that she
had come to him of her own accord.

“You--do--not--mean-- You cannot--oh, you cannot mean-- You are an
angel. There is no one like you. You cannot--you cannot feel so about
me?” he whispered, brokenly, at length.

Persis nodded against his breast.

“And--that was why--you came?”

Persis nodded again.

Darius bent her head back until he could see her beautiful, tearful
face. He gazed at it with reverent wonder, then he kissed her forehead,
and gently loosed her arm from his neck, and led her over to a chair.

He knelt down before her then as if she were a queen upon a throne, and
held her hands softly. Then he questioned her as to how she had come,
and about the expected coming of her strange gentleman suitor, and she
answered him like a docile child.

Mistress Tabitha Hopkins stood for quite a time in the doorway, and
neither of them saw her. Then she spoke up.

“I want to know what this means,” said she. “How came she here?” She
pointed a sharp forefinger at Persis, who shrank before it.

But Darius arose quickly and went forward, blushing, but full of manly
confidence. “Come out with me a moment, Aunt Tabitha,” he said; “I have
something to say to you privately.” He took his aunt’s arm and led her
out of the room, and, as he went, smiled back at Persis. “Do not be
afraid, sweetheart,” he said.

“Sweetheart!” sniffed Mistress Tabitha, before the door closed.

Persis Buckley had been gone no longer than an hour from her own home
when Darius and his aunt Tabitha escorted her back. She was wrapped
then in a warm cloak of Mistress Tabitha’s and clung to her lover’s
arm, and he leaned between her and the rough wind, and sheltered her.
Poor Mistress Tabitha, with her skirts whipping about her and her ears
full of wind, forced often by the onset of the gale at her back into
staggering runs, pressed along after them. She had declined with some
asperity her nephew’s proffered assistance. “You look out for her,”
she said, shortly. And then she added to temper her refusal, that she
could better keep her cloak around her if both her arms were free. All
her life had Mistress Tabitha Hopkins seen love only from the outside,
shining in her neighbor’s window. It was to her credit to-night if she
was not all bitter when its light fell on her solitary old maiden face,
but got a certain reflected warmth and joy from it.

Nobody had missed Persis. Submit was fairly knitting in her sleep, by
the kitchen fire. Ichabod was still out in his shed at work.

Mistress Tabitha stood back a little while her nephew bade Persis
good-bye at her door. “Remember, do not be frightened, whatever
happens to-morrow,” he whispered in her ear. “If the gentleman comes
with the coach and four, go with him, and trust in me.”

“I will do whatever you bid me,” whispered Persis. Then Darius kissed
her hand, and she stole softly through the dark doorway into the gloom
of the house, while her faith in her lover was as a lamp to all her
thoughts.

On the next afternoon there was a sensation in this little seaport
town. A grand coach and four, with a black man driving, a fine
gentleman’s head at one window, and a fine lady’s at another, came
dashing through the place at two o’clock. The women all ran to the
doors and windows. Lounging old men straightened themselves languidly
to stare, and turned their vacant faces over their shoulders. A
multitude of small lads, with here and there a little petticoat among
them, collected rapidly, and pelted along in the wake of this grand
equipage. They followed it quite through the town to the road that
led through the woods, past the graveyard, to the Buckley house, then
up the road, panting but eager, the smaller children dragging at the
hands of their elder brothers. When they reached the Buckley house,
this small rabble separated itself into decorously silent, primly
courtesying rows on either side of the way. Then the grand coach and
four at length turned about, and moved between the courtesying rows of
children, while Ichabod Buckley stood proudly erect in his best green
surtout watching it, and poor Submit, with a scrubbing-cloth in her
hand, peeped around the house corner, and the Buckley Lady rode away.

And all the people saw the coach and four dash at a rattling pace back
through the town, with the Buckley Lady’s face set like a white lily
in a window, and her grand suitor’s fair head opposite. They also saw
another lady beside Persis; her face was well hidden in her great
velvet hood and wrought veil, but she sat up with a stately air.

The children followed the coach on the Boston road as far as they were
able, then they straggled homeward, and the coach went out of sight in
a great billow of dust.

It was several days before the people knew what had really
happened--that Persis Buckley had gone away with Darius Hopkins, with a
fair wig over his black hair, and the fine lady in the velvet hood had
been nobody but Mistress Tabitha.

Darius Hopkins had sent a letter to the parson, and begged him to
acquaint Ichabod Buckley with the truth, and humbly to crave his pardon
for himself and Persis, who was now his wife, for the deceit they had
practised. “But, in truth,” wrote Darius Hopkins, “my beloved wife was
not acquaint with the plan at all, it being contrived by my aunt, who
hath a shrewd head, and carried out by myself; and I doubt much if she
fairly knew with whom she went at the very first, being quite overcome
by her fright and bewilderment.” And Darius Hopkins begged the parson
also to acquaint Ichabod Buckley, for his comfort, with this fact:
Although his daughter Persis had not wedded with a gentleman of high
estate from over-seas, yet he, Darius Hopkins, was of no mean birth,
and had a not inconsiderable share of this world’s goods, with more in
expectation, as his esteemed aunt bade him mention. And furthermore,
Darius Hopkins stated that had he believed any other way than the one
he had taken to be available for the purpose of winning his beloved
wife and freeing her from a hard and unhappy lot, he would much have
preferred it. But he had taken this, believing there was no other, in
all honesty and purity of purpose, and he again humbly begged Ichabod
Buckley’s pardon.

One afternoon the parson paced solemnly up to the Buckley house with
the great red-sealed letter in his hand. Ichabod was not at work.
His nervous old face was visible at the window where his daughter’s
beautiful one had been so long, and the parson went in the front door.

It was two hours before he came out, and went with his head bent
gravely down the road. He never told exactly what had passed between
himself and Ichabod Buckley, but it was whispered that the parson had
striven in prayer for him for the space of an hour and a half, but had
not reconciled him to his disappointment.

After his daughter had departed in state, Ichabod Buckley, while not
returning to his old garrulous ways, but comporting himself with a
dignity that would have befitted a squire, was seen frequently in the
store and on the street, and he wore always his best green surtout,
which he had heretofore kept for Sabbath days.

But after the truth was revealed to him Ichabod Buckley was seen no
more abroad. He shut himself up in his poor workshed, and all day long
his chisel rasped on the dark slate. Persis wrote to him, and Darius,
and he read the letters, scowling fiercely and painfully through his
iron-bowed spectacles, then put them away in his beetling old desk in
the kitchen, and fell to work again.

It was not three weeks after Persis went away when Submit, with her
apron over her head, went one morning through the woods with lumbering
swiftness and called the doctor, for her father lay on his bed as
motionless as if he were dead, and could not speak.

They sent for Persis, but her father was dead before she reached her
old home and went weeping over the threshold, leaning on her young
husband’s arm. Not a word did she have of blame or forgiveness from
her father’s lips; but she knew his last mind towards her when she saw
what his work had been since the day she left him.

Out in Ichabod Buckley’s workshop stood a tall slate stone, shaped like
the one he had erected for his dearly beloved wife. On it were cut his
name, and the years of his birth and death, and under that a verse. In
his own poor brain, strained almost asunder with its awful stress of
one idea in life, he had devised this verse; with his poor old failing
hands he had cut it on the stone:

“Stranger, view well this speaking stone,
And drop a pitying tear;
Ingratitude had overthrown,
And Death then laid me here.”

Ichabod Buckley had left a space below, as if he had designed to make
still larger his appeal to the pity of those who should pause in the
future by his grave; and thereon did Darius Hopkins, to comfort his
wife Persis, who grieved as if she could never be comforted when she
read the first, cut another verse.

When the stone was set up over Ichabod’s grave, people kneeling before
it read, after the piteous complaint and prayer for sympathy of the
dead man, Darius’s verse:

“Who doth his clearer sight possess
In brighter realms above,
May come his earthly woe to bless,
And know that all was Love.”

And it has so happened, because Darius cut with his strong young hands
more firmly and deeply his verse in the stone, that his has endured and
can be read, while Ichabod’s is all worn away by the rain-storms of the
years, as it might have been by the tears of mortal life.

EVELINA’S GARDEN

On the south a high arbor-vitæ hedge separated Evelina’s garden from
the road. The hedge was so high that when the school-children lagged
by, and the secrets behind it fired them with more curiosity than those
between their battered book covers, the tallest of them by stretching
up on tiptoe could not peer over. And so they were driven to childish
engineering feats, and would set to work and pick away sprigs of the
arbor-vitæ with their little fingers, and make peep-holes--but small
ones, that Evelina might not discern them. Then they would thrust their
pink faces into the hedge, and the enduring fragrance of it would come
to their nostrils like a gust of aromatic breath from the mouth of the
northern woods, and peer into Evelina’s garden as through the green
tubes of vernal telescopes.

Then suddenly hollyhocks, blooming in rank and file, seemed to be
marching upon them like platoons of soldiers, with detonations of
color that dazzled their peeping eyes; and, indeed, the whole garden
seemed charging with its mass of riotous bloom upon the hedge. They
could scarcely take in details of marigold and phlox and pinks and
London-pride and cock’s-combs, and prince’s-feathers waving overhead
like standards.

Sometimes also there was the purple flutter of Evelina’s gown; and
Evelina’s face, delicately faded, hung about with softly drooping
gray curls, appeared suddenly among the flowers, like another flower
uncannily instinct with nervous melancholy.

Then the children would fall back from their peep-holes, and huddle
off together with scared giggles. They were afraid of Evelina. There
was a shade of mystery about her which stimulated their childish
fancies when they heard her discussed by their elders. They might
easily have conceived her to be some baleful fairy intrenched in her
green stronghold, withheld from leaving it by the fear of some dire
penalty for magical sins. Summer and winter, spring and fall, Evelina
Adams never was seen outside her own domain of old mansion-house and
garden, and she had not set her slim lady feet in the public highway
for nearly forty years, if the stories were true.

People differed as to the reason why. Some said she had had an
unfortunate love affair, that her heart had been broken, and she
had taken upon herself a vow of seclusion from the world, but nobody
could point to the unworthy lover who had done her this harm. When
Evelina was a girl, not one of the young men of the village had dared
address her. She had been set apart by birth and training, and also
by a certain exclusiveness of manner, if not of nature. Her father,
old Squire Adams, had been the one man of wealth and college learning
in the village. He had owned the one fine old mansion-house, with
its white front propped on great Corinthian pillars, overlooking the
village like a broad brow of superiority.

He had owned the only coach and four. His wife during her short life
had gone dressed in rich brocades and satins that rustled loud in the
ears of the village women, and her nodding plumes had dazzled the eyes
under their modest hoods. Hardly a woman in the village but could
tell--for it had been handed down like a folk-lore song from mother to
daughter--just what Squire Adams’s wife wore when she walked out first
as bride to meeting. She had been clad all in blue.

“Squire Adams’s wife, when she walked out bride, she wore a blue satin
brocade gown, all wrought with blue flowers of a darker blue, cut low
neck and short sleeves. She wore long blue silk mitts wrought with
blue, blue satin shoes, and blue silk clocked stockings. And she wore
a blue crape mantle that was brought from over-seas, and a blue velvet
hat, with a long blue ostrich feather curled over it--it was so long
it reached her shoulder, and waved when she walked; and she carried a
little blue crape fan with ivory sticks.” So the women and girls told
each other when the Squire’s bride had been dead nearly seventy years.

The blue bride attire was said to be still in existence, packed away in
a cedar chest, as the Squire had ordered after his wife’s death. “He
stood over the woman that took care of his wife whilst she packed the
things away, and he never shed a tear, but she used to hear him a-goin’
up to the north chamber nights, when he couldn’t sleep, to look at
’em,” the women told.

People had thought the Squire would marry again. They said Evelina,
who was only four years old, needed a mother, and they selected one
and another of the good village girls. But the Squire never married.
He had a single woman, who dressed in black silk, and wore always a
black wrought veil over the side of her bonnet, come to live with them,
to take charge of Evelina. She was said to be a distant relative of
the Squire’s wife, and was much looked up to by the village people,
although she never did more than interlace, as it were, the fringes
of her garments with theirs. “She’s stuck up,” they said, and felt,
curiously enough, a certain pride in the fact when they met her in the
street and she ducked her long chin stiffly into the folds of her black
shawl by way of salutation.

When Evelina was fifteen years old this single woman died, and the
village women went to her funeral, and bent over her lying in a last
helpless dignity in her coffin, and stared with awed freedom at her
cold face. After that Evelina was sent away to school, and did not
return, except for a yearly vacation, for six years to come. Then she
returned, and settled down in her old home to live out her life, and
end her days in a perfect semblance of peace, if it were not peace.

Evelina never had any young school friend to visit her; she had never,
so far as any one knew, a friend of her own age. She lived alone with
her father and three old servants. She went to meeting, and drove with
the Squire in his chaise. The coach was never used after his wife’s
death, except to carry Evelina to and from school. She and the Squire
also took long walks, but they never exchanged aught but the merest
civilities of good-days and nods with the neighbors whom they met,
unless indeed the Squire had some matter of business to discuss. Then
Evelina stood aside and waited, her fair face drooping gravely aloof.
She was very pretty, with a gentle high-bred prettiness that impressed
the village folk, although they looked at it somewhat askance.

Evelina’s figure was tall, and had a fine slenderness; her silken
skirts hung straight from the narrow silk ribbon that girt her slim
waist; there was a languidly graceful bend in her long white throat;
her long delicate hands hung inertly at her sides among her skirt
folds, and were never seen to clasp anything; her softly clustering
fair curls hung over her thin blooming cheeks, and her face could
scarce be seen, unless, as she seldom did, she turned and looked full
upon one. Then her dark blue eyes, with a little nervous frown between
them, shone out radiantly; her thin lips showed a warm red, and her
beauty startled one.

Everybody wondered why she did not have a lover, why some fine young
man had not been smitten by her while she had been away at school.
They did not know that the school had been situated in another little
village, the counterpart of the one in which she had been born, wherein
a fitting mate for a bird of her feather could hardly be found. The
simple young men of the country-side were at once attracted and
intimidated by her. They cast fond sly glances across the meeting-house
at her lovely face, but they were confused before her when they jostled
her in the doorway and the rose and lavender scent of her lady garments
came in their faces. Not one of them dared accost her, much less march
boldly upon the great Corinthian-pillared house, raise the brass
knocker, and declare himself a suitor for the Squire’s daughter.

One young man there was, indeed, who treasured in his heart an
experience so subtle and so slight that he could scarcely believe in it
himself. He never recounted it to mortal soul, but kept it as a secret
sacred between himself and his own nature, but something to be scoffed
at and set aside by others.

It had happened one Sabbath day in summer, when Evelina had not been
many years home from school, as she sat in the meeting-house in her
Sabbath array of rose-colored satin gown, and white bonnet trimmed with
a long white feather and a little wreath of feathery green, that of a
sudden she raised her head and turned her face, and her blue eyes met
this young man’s full upon hers, with all his heart in them, and it was
for a second as if her own heart leaped to the surface, and he saw it,
although afterwards he scarce believed it to be true.

Then a pallor crept over Evelina’s delicately brilliant face. She
turned it away, and her curls falling softly from under the green
wreath on her bonnet brim hid it. The young man’s cheeks were a hot
red, and his heart beat loudly in his ears when he met her in the
doorway after the sermon was done. His eager, timorous eyes sought
her face, but she never looked his way. She laid her slim hand in its
cream-colored silk mitt on the Squire’s arm; her satin gown rustled
softly as she passed before him, shrinking against the wall to give
her room, and a faint fragrance which seemed like the very breath of
the unknown delicacy and exclusiveness of life came to his bewildered
senses.

Many a time he cast furtive glances across the meeting-house at
Evelina, but she never looked his way again. If his timid boy-eyes
could have seen her cheek behind its veil of curls, he might have
discovered that the color came and went before his glances, although
it was strange how she could have been conscious of them; but he never
knew.

And he also never knew how, when he walked past the Squire’s house
of a Sunday evening, dressed in his best, with his shoulders thrust
consciously back, and the windows in the westering sun looked full of
blank gold to his furtive eyes, Evelina was always peeping at him from
behind a shutter, and he never dared go in. His intuitions were not
like hers, and so nothing happened that might have, and he never fairly
knew what he knew. But that he never told, even to his wife when he
married; for his hot young blood grew weary and impatient with this
vain courtship, and he turned to one of his villagemates, who met him
fairly half way, and married her within a year.

On the Sunday when he and his bride first appeared in the
meeting-house Evelina went up the aisle behind her father in an array
of flowered brocade, stiff with threads of silver, so wonderful that
people all turned their heads to stare at her. She wore also a new
bonnet of rose-colored satin, and her curls were caught back a little,
and her face showed as clear and beautiful as an angel’s.

The young bridegroom glanced at her once across the meeting-house, then
he looked at his bride in her gay wedding finery with a faithful look.

When Evelina met them in the doorway, after meeting was done, she bowed
with a sweet cold grace to the bride, who courtesied blushingly in
return, with an awkward sweep of her foot in the bridal satin shoe. The
bridegroom did not look at Evelina at all. He held his chin well down
in his stock with solemn embarrassment, and passed out stiffly, his
bride on his arm.

Evelina, shining in the sun like a silver lily, went up the street, her
father stalking beside her with stately swings of his cane, and that
was the last time she was ever seen at meeting. Nobody knew why.

When Evelina was a little over thirty her father died. There was not
much active grief for him in the village; he had really figured therein
more as a stately monument of his own grandeur than anything else.
He had been a man of little force of character, and that little had
seemed to degenerate since his wife died. An inborn dignity of manner
might have served to disguise his weakness with any others than these
shrewd New-Englanders, but they read him rightly. “The Squire wa’n’t
ever one to set the river a-fire,” they said. Then, moreover, he left
none of his property to the village to build a new meeting-house or a
town-house. It all went to Evelina.

People expected that Evelina would surely show herself in her mourning
at meeting the Sunday after the Squire died, but she did not. Moreover,
it began to be gradually discovered that she never went out in the
village street nor crossed the boundaries of her own domains after her
father’s death. She lived in the great house with her three servants--a
man and his wife, and the woman who had been with her mother when she
died. Then it was that Evelina’s garden began. There had always been a
garden at the back of the Squire’s house, but not like this, and only a
low fence had separated it from the road. Now one morning in the autumn
the people saw Evelina’s man-servant, John Darby, setting out the
arbor-vitæ hedge, and in the spring after that there were ploughing and
seed-sowing extending over a full half-acre, which later blossomed out
in glory.

Before the hedge grew so high Evelina could be seen at work in her
garden. She was often stooping over the flower-beds in the early
morning when the village was first astir, and she moved among them with
her watering-pot in the twilight--a shadowy figure that might, from her
grace and her constancy to the flowers, have been Flora herself.

As the years went on, the arbor-vitæ hedge got each season a new growth
and waxed taller, until Evelina could no longer be seen above it. That
was an annoyance to people, because the quiet mystery of her life kept
their curiosity alive, until it was in a constant struggle, as it were,
with the green luxuriance of the hedge.

“John Darby had ought to trim that hedge,” they said. They accosted him
in the street: “John, if ye don’t cut that hedge down a little it’ll
all die out.” But he only made a surly grunting response, intelligible
to himself alone, and passed on. He was an Englishman, and had lived in
the Squire’s family since he was a boy.

He had a nature capable of only one simple line of force, with no
radiations or parallels, and that had early resolved itself into
the service of the Squire and his house. After the Squire’s death
he married a woman who lived in the family. She was much older than
himself, and had a high temper, but was a good servant, and he married
her to keep her to her allegiance to Evelina. Then he bent her,
without her knowledge, to take his own attitude towards his mistress.
No more could be gotten out of John Darby’s wife than out of John
Darby concerning the doings at the Squire’s house. She met curiosity
with a flash of hot temper, and he with surly taciturnity, and both
intimidated.

The third of Evelina’s servants was the woman who had nursed her
mother, and she was naturally subdued and undemonstrative, and rendered
still more so by a ceaseless monotony of life. She never went to
meeting, and was seldom seen outside the house. A passing vision of a
long white-capped face at a window was about all the neighbors ever saw
of this woman.

So Evelina’s gentle privacy was well guarded by her own household,
as by a faithful system of domestic police. She grew old peacefully
behind her green hedge, shielded effectually from all rough bristles of
curiosity. Every new spring her own bloom showed paler beside the new
bloom of her flowers, but people could not see it.

Some thirty years after the Squire’s death the man John Darby died; his
wife, a year later. That left Evelina alone with the old woman who had
nursed her mother. She was very old, but not feeble, and quite able
to perform the simple household tasks for herself and Evelina. An old
man, who saved himself from the almshouse in such ways, came daily to
do the rougher part of the garden-work in John Darby’s stead. He was
aged and decrepit; his muscles seemed able to perform their appointed
tasks only through the accumulated inertia of a patiently toilsome
life in the same tracks. Apparently they would have collapsed had he
tried to force them to aught else than the holding of the ploughshare,
the pulling of weeds, the digging around the roots of flowers, and the
planting of seeds.

Every autumn he seemed about to totter to his fall among the
fading flowers; every spring it was like Death himself urging on
the resurrection; but he lived on year after year, and tended well
Evelina’s garden, and the gardens of other maiden-women and widows
in the village. He was taciturn, grubbing among his green beds as
silently as a worm, but now and then he warmed a little under a fire of
questions concerning Evelina’s garden. “Never see none sech flowers in
nobody’s garden in this town, not sence I knowed ’nough to tell a pink
from a piny,” he would mumble. His speech was thick; his words were
all uncouthly slurred; the expression of his whole life had come more
through his old knotted hands of labor than through his tongue. But
he would wipe his forehead with his shirt-sleeve and lean a second on
his spade, and his face would change at the mention of the garden. Its
wealth of bloom illumined his old mind, and the roses and honeysuckles
and pinks seemed for a second to be reflected in his bleared old eyes.

There had never been in the village such a garden as this of Evelina
Adams’s. All the old blooms which had come over the seas with the
early colonists, and started as it were their own colony of flora in
the new country, flourished there. The naturalized pinks and phlox
and hollyhocks and the rest, changed a little in color and fragrance
by the conditions of a new climate and soil, were all in Evelina’s
garden, and no one dreamed what they meant to Evelina; and she did not
dream herself, for her heart was always veiled to her own eyes, like
the face of a nun. The roses and pinks, the poppies and heart’s-ease,
were to this maiden-woman, who had innocently and helplessly outgrown
her maiden heart, in the place of all the loves of life which she had
missed. Her affections had forced an outlet in roses; they exhaled
sweetness in pinks, and twined and clung in honeysuckle-vines. The
daffodils, when they came up in the spring, comforted her like the
smiles of children; when she saw the first rose, her heart leaped as at
the face of a lover.

She had lost the one way of human affection, but her feet had found a
little single side-track of love, which gave her still a zest in the
journey of life. Even in the winter Evelina had her flowers, for she
kept those that would bear transplanting in pots, and all the sunny
windows in her house were gay with them. She would also not let a
rose leaf fall and waste in the garden soil, or a sprig of lavender
or thyme. She gathered them all, and stored them away in chests and
drawers and old china bowls--the whole house seemed laid away in rose
leaves and lavender. Evelina’s clothes gave out at every motion that
fragrance of dead flowers which is like the fragrance of the past, and
has a sweetness like that of sweet memories. Even the cedar chest where
Evelina’s mother’s blue bridal array was stored had its till heaped
with rose leaves and lavender.

When Evelina was nearly seventy years old the old nurse who had lived
with her her whole life died. People wondered then what she would do.
“She can’t live all alone in that great house,” they said. But she did
live there alone six months, until spring, and people used to watch
her evening lamp when it was put out, and the morning smoke from her
kitchen chimney. “It ain’t safe for her to be there alone in that great
house,” they said.

But early in April a young girl appeared one Sunday in the old Squire’s
pew. Nobody had seen her come to town, and nobody knew who she was or
where she came from, but the old people said she looked just as Evelina
Adams used to when she was young, and she must be some relation. The
old man who had used to look across the meeting-house at Evelina,
over forty years ago, looked across now at this young girl, and gave
a great start, and his face paled under his gray beard stubble. His
old wife gave an anxious, wondering glance at him, and crammed a
peppermint into his hand. “Anything the matter, father?” she whispered;
but he only gave his head a half-surly shake, and then fastened his
eyes straight ahead upon the pulpit. He had reason to that day, for
his only son, Thomas, was going to preach his first sermon therein
as a candidate. His wife ascribed his nervousness to that. She put a
peppermint in her own mouth and sucked it comfortably. “That’s all
’tis,” she thought to herself. “Father always was easy worked up,” and
she looked proudly up at her son sitting on the hair-cloth sofa in the
pulpit, leaning his handsome young head on his hand, as he had seen
old divines do. She never dreamed that her old husband sitting beside
her was possessed of an inner life so strange to her that she would
not have known him had she met him in the spirit. And, indeed, it had
been so always, and she had never dreamed of it. Although he had been
faithful to his wife, the image of Evelina Adams in her youth, and that
one love-look which she had given him, had never left his soul, but had
given it a guise and complexion of which his nearest and dearest knew
nothing.

It was strange; but now, as he looked up at his own son as he arose in
the pulpit, he could seem to see a look of that fair young Evelina, who
had never had a son to inherit her beauty. He had certainly a delicate
brilliancy of complexion, which he could have gotten directly from
neither father nor mother; and whence came that little nervous frown
between his dark blue eyes? His mother had blue eyes, but not like his;
they flashed over the great pulpit Bible with a sweet fire that matched
the memory in his father’s heart.

But the old man put the fancy away from him in a minute; it was one
which his stern common-sense always overcame. It was impossible that
Thomas Merriam should resemble Evelina Adams; indeed, people always
called him the very image of his father.

The father tried to fix his mind upon his son’s sermon, but presently
he glanced involuntarily across the meeting-house at the young girl,
and again his heart leaped and his face paled; but he turned his eyes
gravely back to the pulpit, and his wife did not notice. Now and then
she thrust a sharp elbow in his side to call his attention to a grand
point in their son’s discourse. The odor of peppermint was strong in
his nostrils, but through it all he seemed to perceive the rose and
lavender scent of Evelina Adams’s youthful garments. Whether it was
with him simply the memory of an odor, which affected him like the odor
itself, or not, those in the vicinity of the Squire’s pew were plainly
aware of it. The gown which the strange young girl wore was, as many
an old woman discovered to her neighbor with loud whispers, one of
Evelina’s, which had been laid away in a sweet-smelling chest since her
old girlhood. It had been somewhat altered to suit the fashion of a
later day, but the eyes which had fastened keenly upon it when Evelina
first wore it up the meeting-house aisle could not mistake it. “It’s
Evelina Adams’s lavender satin made over,” one whispered, with a sharp
hiss of breath, in the other’s ear.

The lavender satin, deepening into purple in the folds, swept in a
rich circle over the knees of the young girl in the Squire’s pew. She
folded her little hands, which were encased in Evelina’s cream-colored
silk mitts, over it, and looked up at the young minister, and listened
to his sermon with a grave and innocent dignity, as Evelina had done
before her. Perhaps the resemblance between this young girl and the
young girl of the past was more one of mien than aught else, although
the type of face was the same. This girl had the same fine sharpness
of feature and delicately bright color, and she also wore her hair in
curls, although they were tied back from her face with a black velvet
ribbon, and did not veil it when she drooped her head, as Evelina’s
used to do.

The people divided their attention between her and the new minister.
Their curiosity goaded them in equal measure with their spiritual zeal,
“I can’t wait to find out who that girl is,” one woman whispered to
another.

The girl herself had no thought of the commotion which she awakened.
When the service was over, and she walked with a gentle maiden
stateliness, which seemed a very copy of Evelina’s own, out of the
meeting-house, down the street to the Squire’s house, and entered it,
passing under the stately Corinthian pillars, with a last purple gleam
of her satin skirts, she never dreamed of the eager attention that
followed her.

It was several days before the village people discovered who she
was. The information had to be obtained, by a process like mental
thumbscrewing, from the old man who tended Evelina’s garden, but at
last they knew. She was the daughter of a cousin of Evelina’s on the
father’s side. Her name was Evelina Leonard; she had been named for
her father’s cousin. She had been finely brought up, and had attended
a Boston school for young ladies. Her mother had been dead many years,
and her father had died some two years ago, leaving her with only
a very little money, which was now all gone, and Evelina Adams had
invited her to live with her. Evelina Adams had herself told the old
gardener, seeing his scant curiosity was somewhat awakened by the sight
of the strange young lady in the garden, but he seemed to have almost
forgotten it when the people questioned him.

“She’ll leave her all her money, most likely,” they said, and they
looked at this new Evelina in the old Evelina’s perfumed gowns with awe.

However, in the space of a few months the opinion upon this matter was
divided. Another cousin of Evelina Adams’s came to town, and this time
an own cousin--a widow in fine black bombazine, portly and florid,
walking with a majestic swell, and, moreover, having with her two
daughters, girls of her own type, not so far advanced. This woman hired
one of the village cottages, and it was rumored that Evelina Adams paid
the rent. Still, it was considered that she was not very intimate with
these last relatives. The neighbors watched, and saw, many a time, Mrs.
Martha Loomis and her girls try the doors of the Adams house, scudding
around angrily from front, to side and back, and knock and knock again,
but with no admittance. “Evelina she won’t let none of ’em in more’n
once a week,” the neighbors said. It was odd that, although they had
deeply resented Evelina’s seclusion on their own accounts, they were
rather on her side in this matter, and felt a certain delight when they
witnessed a crestfallen retreat of the widow and her daughters. “I
don’t s’pose she wants them Loomises marchin’ in on her every minute,”
they said.

The new Evelina was not seen much with the other cousins, and she made
no acquaintances in the village. Whether she was to inherit all the
Adams property or not, she seemed, at any rate, heiress to all the
elder Evelina’s habits of life. She worked with her in the garden, and
wore her old girlish gowns, and kept almost as close at home as she.
She often, however, walked abroad in the early dusk, stepping along
in a grave and stately fashion, as the elder Evelina had used to do,
holding her skirts away from the dewy roadside weeds, her face showing
out in the twilight like a white flower, as if it had a pale light of
its own.

Nobody spoke to her; people turned furtively after she had passed and
stared after her, but they never spoke. This young Evelina did not seem
to expect it. She passed along with the lids cast down over her blue
eyes, and the rose and lavender scent of her garments came back in
their faces.

But one night when she was walking slowly along, a full half-mile from
home, she heard rapid footsteps behind, and the young minister, Thomas
Merriam, came up beside her and spoke.

“Good-evening,” said he, and his voice was a little hoarse through
nervousness.

Evelina started, and turned her fair face up towards his.
“Good-evening,” she responded, and courtesied as she had been taught
at school, and stood close to the wall, that he might pass; but Thomas
Merriam paused also.

“I--” he began, but his voice broke. He cleared his throat angrily,
and went on. “I have seen you in meeting,” he said, with a kind of
defiance, more of himself than of her. After all, was he not the
minister, and had he not the right to speak to everybody in the
congregation? Why should he embarrass himself?

“Yes, sir,” replied Evelina. She stood drooping her head before him,
and yet there was a certain delicate hauteur about her. Thomas was
afraid to speak again. They both stood silent for a moment, and then
Evelina stirred softly, as if to pass on, and Thomas spoke out bravely.
“Is your cousin, Miss Adams, well?” said he.

“She is pretty well, I thank you, sir.”

“I have been wanting to--call,” he began; then he hesitated again. His
handsome young face was blushing crimson.

Evelina’s own color deepened. She turned her face away. “Cousin Evelina
never sees callers,” she said, with grave courtesy; “perhaps you did
not know. She has not for a great many years.”

“Yes, I did know it,” returned Thomas Merriam; “that’s the reason I
haven’t called.”

“Cousin Evelina is not strong,” remarked the young girl, and there was
a savor of apology in her tone.

“But--” stammered Thomas; then he stopped again. “May I--has she any
objections to--anybody’s coming to see you?”

[Illustration: “SHE HEARD RAPID FOOTSTEPS”]

Evelina started. “I am afraid Cousin Evelina would not approve,”
she answered, primly. Then she looked up in his face, and a girlish
piteousness came into her own. “I am very sorry,” she said, and there
was a catch in her voice.

Thomas bent over her impetuously. All his ministerial state fell from
him like an outer garment of the soul. He was young, and he had seen
this girl Sunday after Sunday. He had written all his sermons with her
image before his eyes, he had preached to her, and her only, and she
had come between his heart and all the nations of the earth in his
prayers. “Oh,” he stammered out, “I am afraid you can’t be very happy
living there the way you do. Tell me--”

Evelina turned her face away with sudden haughtiness. “My cousin
Evelina is very kind to me sir,” she said.

“But--you must be lonesome with nobody--of your own age--to speak to,”
persisted Thomas, confusedly.

“I never cared much for youthful company. It is getting dark; I must be
going,” said Evelina. “I wish you good-evening, sir.”

“Sha’n’t I--walk home with you?” asked Thomas, falteringly.

“It isn’t necessary, thank you, and I don’t think Cousin Evelina would
approve,” she replied, primly; and her light dress fluttered away into
the dusk and out of sight like the pale wing of a moth.

Poor Thomas Merriam walked on with his head in a turmoil. His heart
beat loud in his ears. “I’ve made her mad with me,” he said to himself,
using the old rustic school-boy vernacular, from which he did not
always depart in his thoughts, although his ministerial dignity guarded
his conversations. Thomas Merriam came of a simple homely stock, whose
speech came from the emotions of the heart, all unregulated by the
usages of the schools. He was the first for generations who had aspired
to college learning and a profession, and had trained his tongue by the
models of the educated and polite. He could not help, at times, the
relapse of his thoughts, and their speaking to himself in the dialect
of his family and his ancestors. “She’s ’way above me, and I ought to
ha’ known it,” he further said, with the meekness of an humble but
fiercely independent race, which is meek to itself alone. He would have
maintained his equality with his last breath to an opponent; in his
heart of hearts he felt himself below the scion of the one old gentle
family of his native village.

This young Evelina, by the fine dignity which had been born with her
and not acquired by precept and example, by the sweetly formal diction
which seemed her native tongue, had filled him with awe. Now, when he
thought she was angered with him, he felt beneath her lady-feet, his
nostrils choked with a spiritual dust of humiliation.

He went forward blindly. The dusk had deepened; from either side of the
road, from the mysterious gloom of the bushes, came the twangs of the
katydids, like some coarse rustic quarrellers, each striving for the
last word in a dispute not even dignified by excess of passion.

Suddenly somebody jostled him to his own side of the path. “That you,
Thomas? Where you been?” said a voice in his ear.

“That you, father? Down to the post-office.”

“Who was that you was talkin’ with back there?”

“Miss Evelina Leonard.”

“That girl that’s stayin’ there--to the old Squire’s?”

“Yes.” The son tried to move on, but his father stood before him dumbly
for a minute. “I must be going, father. I’ve got to work on my sermon,”
Thomas said, impatiently.

“Wait a minute,” said his father. “I’ve got something to say to ye,
Thomas, an’ this is as good a time to say it as any. There ain’t
anybody ’round. I don’t know as ye’ll thank me for it--but mother said
the other day that she thought you’d kind of an idea--she said you
asked her if she thought it would be anything out of the way for you
to go up to the Squire’s to make a call. Mother she thinks you can
step in anywheres, but I don’t know. I know your book-learnin’ and your
bein’ a minister has set you up a good deal higher than your mother
and me and any of our folks, and I feel as if you were good enough
for anybody, as far as that goes; but that ain’t all. Some folks have
different startin’-points in this world, and they see things different;
and when they do, it ain’t much use tryin’ to make them walk alongside
and see things alike. Their eyes have got different cants, and they
ain’t able to help it. Now this girl she’s related to the old Squire,
and she’s been brought up different, and she started ahead, even if her
father did lose all his property. She ’ain’t never eat in the kitchen,
nor been scart to set down in the parlor, and satin and velvet, and
silver spoons, and cream-pots ’ain’t never looked anything out of the
common to her, and they always will to you. No matter how many such
things you may live to have, they’ll always get a little the better of
ye. She’ll be ’way above ’em; and you won’t, no matter how hard you
try. Some ideas can’t never mix; and when ideas can’t mix, folks can’t.”

“I never said they could,” returned Thomas, shortly. “I can’t stop to
talk any longer, father. I must go home.”

“No, you wait a minute, Thomas. I’m goin’ to say out what I started to,
and then I sha’n’t ever bring it up again. What I was comin’ at was
this: I wanted to warn ye a little. You musn’t set too much store by
little things that you think mean consider’ble when they don’t. Looks
don’t count for much, and I want you to remember it, and not be upset
by ’em.”

Thomas gave a great start, and colored high. “I’d like to know what you
mean, father,” he cried, sharply.

“Nothin’. I don’t mean nothin’, only I’m older ’n you, and it’s come in
my way to know some things, and it’s fittin’ you should profit by it.
A young woman’s looks at you don’t count for much. I don’t s’pose she
knows why she gives ’em herself half the time; they ain’t like us. It’s
best you should make up your mind to it; if you don’t, you may find it
out by the hardest. That’s all. I ain’t never goin’ to bring this up
again.”

“I’d like to know what you mean, father.” Thomas’s voice shook with
embarrassment and anger.

“I ain’t goin’ to say anything more about it,” replied the old man.
“Mary Ann Pease and Arabella Mann are both in the settin’-room with
your mother. I thought I’d tell ye, in case ye didn’t want to see ’em,
and wanted to go to work on your sermon.”

Thomas made an impatient ejaculation as he strode off. When he reached
the large white house where he lived he skirted it carefully. The
chirping treble of girlish voices came from the open sitting-room
window, and he caught a glimpse of a smooth brown head and a high shell
comb in front of the candle-light. The young minister tiptoed in the
back door and across the kitchen to the back stairs. The sitting-room
door was open, and the candle-light streamed out, and the treble voices
rose high. Thomas, advancing through the dusky kitchen with cautious
steps, encountered suddenly a chair in the dark corner by the stairs,
and just saved himself from falling. There was a startled outcry from
the sitting-room, and his mother came running into the kitchen with a
candle.

“Who is it?” she demanded, valiantly. Then she started and gasped
as her son confronted her. He shook a furious warning fist at the
sitting-room door and his mother, and edged towards the stairs. She
followed him close. “Hadn’t you better jest step in a minute?” she
whispered. “Them girls have been here an hour, and I know they’re
waitin’ to see you.” Thomas shook his head fiercely, and swung himself
around the corner into the dark crook of the back stairs. His mother
thrust the candle into his hand. “Take this, or you’ll break your neck
on them stairs,” she whispered.

Thomas, stealing up the stairs like a cat, heard one of the girls call
to his mother--“Is it robbers, Mis’ Merriam? Want us to come an’ help
tackle ’em?”--and he fairly shuddered; for Evelina’s gentle-lady
speech was still in his ears, and this rude girlish call seemed to jar
upon his sensibilities.

“The idea of any girl screeching out like that,” he muttered. And if he
had carried speech as far as his thought, he would have added, “when
Evelina is a girl!”

He was so angry that he did not laugh when he heard his mother answer
back, in those conclusive tones of hers that were wont to silence all
argument: “It ain’t anything. Don’t be scared. I’m coming right back.”
Mrs. Merriam scorned subterfuges. She took always a silent stand in a
difficulty, and let people infer what they would. When Mary Ann Pease
inquired if it was the cat that had made the noise, she asked if her
mother had finished her blue and white counterpane.

The two girls waited a half-hour longer, then they went home. “What do
you s’pose made that noise out in the kitchen?” asked Arabella Mann of
Mary Ann Pease, the minute they were out-of-doors.

“I don’t know,” replied Mary Ann Pease. She was a broad-backed young
girl, and looked like a matron as she hurried along in the dusk.

“Well, I know what I think it was,” said Arabella Mann, moving ahead
with sharp jerks of her little dark body.

“What?”

“It was him.”

“You don’t mean--”

“I think it was Thomas Merriam, and he was tryin’ to get up the back
stairs unbeknownst to anybody, and he run into something.”

“What for?”

“Because he didn’t want to see us.”

“Now, Arabella Mann, I don’t believe it! He’s always real pleasant to
me.”

“Well, I do believe it, and I guess he’ll know it when I set foot in
that house again. I guess he’ll find out I didn’t go there to see him!
He needn’t feel so fine, if he is the minister; his folks ain’t any
better than mine, an’ we’ve got ’nough sight handsomer furniture in our
parlor.”

“Did you see how the tallow had all run down over the candles?”

“Yes, I did. She gave that candle she carried out in the kitchen to
him, too. Mother says she wasn’t never any kind of a housekeeper.”

“Hush! Arabella: here he is coming now.”

But it was not Thomas; it was his father, advancing through the evening
with his son’s gait and carriage. When the two girls discovered that,
one tittered out quite audibly, and they scuttled past. They were not
rivals; they simply walked faithfully side by side in pursuit of the
young minister, giving him as it were an impartial choice. There were
even no heart-burnings between them; one always confided in the other
when she supposed herself to have found some slight favor in Thomas’s
sight; and, indeed, the young minister could scarcely bow to one upon
the street unless she flew to the other with the news.

Thomas Merriam himself was aware of all this devotion on the part of
the young women of his flock, and it filled him with a sort of angry
shame. He could not have told why, but he despised himself for being
the object of their attention more than he despised them. His heart
sank at the idea of Evelina’s discovering it. What would she think of
him if she knew all those young women haunted his house and lagged
after meeting on the chance of getting a word from him? Suppose she
should see their eyes upon his face in meeting time, and decipher
their half-unconscious boldness, as he had done against his will.
Once Evelina had looked at him, even as the older Evelina had looked
at his father, and all other looks of maidens seemed to him like
profanations of that, even although he doubted afterwards that he
had rightly interpreted it. Full it had seemed to him of that tender
maiden surprise and wonder, of that love that knows not itself, and
sees its own splendor for the first time in another’s face, and flees
at the sight. It had happened once when he was coming down the aisle
after the sermon and Evelina had met him at the door of her pew. But
she had turned her head quickly, and her soft curls flowed over her
red cheek, and he doubted ever after if he had read the look aright.
When he had gotten the courage to speak to her, and she had met him
with the gentle coldness which she had learned of her lady aunt and
her teacher in Boston, his doubt was strong upon him. The next Sunday
he looked not her way at all. He even tried faithfully from day to day
to drive her image from his mind with prayer and religious thoughts,
but in spite of himself he would lapse into dreams about her, as if
borne by a current of nature too strong to be resisted. And sometimes,
upon being awakened from them, as he sat over his sermon with the ink
drying on his quill, by the sudden outburst of treble voices in his
mother’s sitting-room below, the fancy would seize him that possibly
these other young damsels took fond liberties with him in their dreams,
as he with Evelina, and he resented it with a fierce maidenliness of
spirit, although he was a man. The thought that possibly they, over
their spinning or their quilting, had in their hearts the image of
himself with fond words upon his lips and fond looks in his eyes,
filled him with shame and rage, although he took the same liberty with
the delicately haughty maiden Evelina.

But Thomas Merriam was not given to undue appreciation of his own
fascination, as was proved by his ready discouragement in the case
of Evelina. He had the knowledge of his conquests forced upon his
understanding until he could no longer evade it. Every day were
offerings laid upon his shrine, of pound-cakes and flaky pies, and
loaves of white bread, and cups of jelly, whereby the culinary skill
of his devotees might be proved. Silken purses and beautiful socks
knitted with fancy stitches, and holy book-marks for his Bible, and
even a wonderful bedquilt, and a fine linen shirt with hem-stitched
bands, poured in upon him. He burned with angry blushes when his
mother, smiling meaningly, passed them over to him. “Put them away,
mother; I don’t want them,” he would growl out, in a distress that was
half comic and half pathetic. He would never taste of the tempting
viands which were brought to him. “How you act, Thomas!” his mother
would say. She was secretly elated by these feminine libations upon
the altar of her son. They did not grate upon her sensibilities, which
were not delicate. She even tried to assist two or three of the young
women in their designs; she would often praise them and their handiwork
to her son--and in this she was aided by an old woman aunt of hers who
lived with the family. “Nancy Winslow is as handsome a girl as ever
I set eyes on, an’ I never see any nicer sewin’,” Mrs. Merriam said,
after the advent of the linen shirt, and she held it up to the light
admiringly. “Jest look at that hem-stitchin’!” she said.

“I guess whoever made that shirt calkilated ’twould do for a weddin’
one,” said old Aunt Betty Green, and Thomas made an exclamation and
went out of the room, tingling all over with shame and disgust.

“Thomas don’t act nateral,” said the old woman, glancing after him
through her iron-bound spectacles.

“I dun’no’ what’s got into him,” returned his mother.

“Mebbe they foller him up a leetle too close,” said Aunt Betty. “I
dun’no’ as I should have ventured on a shirt when I was a gal. I made a
satin vest once for Joshua, but that don’t seem quite as p’inted as a
shirt. It didn’t scare Joshua, nohow. He asked me to have him the next
week.”

“Well, I dun’no’,” said Mrs. Merriam again. “I kind of wish Thomas
would settle on somebody, for I’m pestered most to death with ’em, an’
I feel as if ’twas kind of mean takin’ all these things into the house.”

“They’ve ’bout kept ye in sweet cake, ’ain’t they, lately?”

“Yes; but I don’t feel as if it was jest right for us to eat it up,
when ’twas brought for Thomas. But he won’t touch it. I can’t see as he
has the least idee of any one of them. I don’t believe Thomas has ever
seen anybody he wanted for a wife.”

“Well, he’s got the pick of ’em, a-settin’ their caps right in his
face,” said Aunt Betty.

Neither of them dreamed how the young man, sleeping and eating and
living under the same roof, beloved of them since he entered the world,
holding himself coldly aloof from this crowd of half-innocently,
half-boldly ardent young women, had set up for himself his own divinity
of love, before whom he consumed himself in vain worship. His father
suspected, and that was all, and he never mentioned the matter again to
his son.

After Thomas had spoken to Evelina the weeks went on, and they never
exchanged another word, and their eyes never met. But they dwelt
constantly within each other’s thoughts, and were ever present to
each other’s spiritual vision. Always as the young minister bent over
his sermon-paper, laboriously tracing out with sputtering quill his
application of the articles of the orthodox faith, Evelina’s blue eyes
seemed to look out at him between the stern doctrines like the eyes of
an angel. And he could not turn the pages of the Holy Writ unless he
found some passage therein which to his mind treated directly of her,
setting forth her graces like a prophecy. “The fairest among women,”
read Thomas Merriam, and nodded his head, while his heart leaped with
the satisfied delight of all its fancies, at the image of his love’s
fair and gentle face. “Her price is far above rubies,” read Thomas
Merriam, and he nodded his head again, and saw Evelina shining as with
gold and pearls, more precious than all the jewels of the earth. In
spite of all his efforts, when Thomas Merriam studied the Scriptures in
those days he was more nearly touched by those old human hearts which
throbbed down to his through the ages, welding the memories of their
old loves to his living one until they seemed to prove its eternity,
than by the Messianic prophecies. Often he spent hours upon his knees,
but arose with Evelina’s face before his very soul in spite of all.

And as for Evelina, she tended the flowers in the elder Evelina’s
garden with her poor cousin, whose own love-dreams had been illustrated
as it were by the pinks and lilies blooming around them when they
had all gone out of her heart, and Thomas Merriam’s half-bold,
half-imploring eyes looked up at her out of every flower and stung her
heart like bees. Poor young Evelina feared much lest she had offended
Thomas, and yet her own maiden decorum had been offended by him, and
she had offended it herself, and she was faint with shame and distress
when she thought of it. How had she been so bold and shameless as to
give him that look in the meeting-house? and how had he been so cruel
as to accost her afterwards? She told herself she had done right for
the maintenance of her own maiden dignity, and yet she feared lest she
had angered him and hurt him. “Suppose he had been fretted by her
coolness?” she thought, and then a great wave of tender pity went over
her heart, and she would almost have spoken to him of her own accord.
But then she would reflect how he continued to write such beautiful
sermons, and prove so clearly and logically the tenets of the faith;
and how could he do that with a mind in distress? Scarcely could she
herself tend the flower-beds as she should, nor set her embroidery
stitches finely and evenly, she was so ill at ease. It must be that
Thomas had not given the matter an hour’s worry, since he continued
to do his work so faithfully and well. And then her own heart would
be sorer than ever with the belief that his was happy and at rest,
although she would chide herself for it.

And yet this young Evelina was a philosopher and an analyst of human
nature in a small way, and she got some slight comfort out of a shrewd
suspicion that the heart of a man might love and suffer on a somewhat
different principle from the heart of a woman. “It may be,” thought
Evelina, sitting idle over her embroidery with far-away blue eyes,
“that a man’s heart can always turn a while from love to other things
as weighty and serious, although he be just as fond, while a woman’s
heart is always fixed one way by loving, and cannot be turned unless it
breaks. And it may be wise,” thought young Evelina, “else how could
the state be maintained and governed, battles for independence be
fought, and even souls be saved, and the gospel carried to the heathen,
if men could not turn from the concerns of their own hearts more easily
than women? Women should be patient,” thought Evelina, “and consider
that if they suffer ’tis due to the lot which a wise Providence has
given them.” And yet tears welled up in her earnest blue eyes and fell
over her fair cheeks and wet the embroidery--when the elder Evelina was
not looking, as she seldom was. The elder Evelina was kind to her young
cousin, but there were days when she seemed to dwell alone in her own
thoughts, apart from the whole world, and she seldom spoke either to
Evelina or her old servant-man.

Young Evelina, trying to atone for her former indiscretion and
establish herself again on her height of maiden reserve in Thomas
Merriam’s eyes, sat resolutely in the meeting-house of a Sabbath day,
with her eyes cast down, and after service she glided swiftly down the
aisle and was out of the door before the young minister could much more
than descend the pulpit stairs, unless he ran an indecorous race.

And young Evelina never at twilight strolled up the road in the
direction of Thomas Merriam’s home, where she might quite reasonably
hope to meet him, since he was wont to go to the store when the
evening stage-coach came in with the mail from Boston.

Instead she paced the garden paths, or, when there was not too heavy
a dew, rambled across the fields; and there was also a lane where she
loved to walk. Whether or not Thomas Merriam suspected this, or had
ever seen, as he passed the mouth of the lane, the flutter of maidenly
draperies in the distance, it so happened that one evening he also went
a-walking there, and met Evelina. He had entered the lane from the
highway, and she from the fields at the head. So he saw her first afar
off, and could not tell fairly whether her light muslin skirt might
not be only a white flowering bush. For, since his outlook upon life
had been so full of Evelina, he had found that often the most common
and familiar things would wear for a second a look of her to startle
him. And many a time his heart had leaped at the sight of a white bush
ahead stirring softly in the evening wind, and he had thought it might
be she. Now he said to himself impatiently that this was only another
fancy; but soon he saw that it was indeed Evelina, in a light muslin
gown, with a little lace kerchief on her head. His handsome young face
was white; his lips twitched nervously; but he reached out and pulled
a spray of white flowers from a bush, and swung it airily to hide his
agitation as he advanced.

As for Evelina, when she first espied Thomas she started and half
turned, as if to go back; then she held up her white kerchiefed head
with gentle pride and kept on. When she came up to Thomas she walked
so far to one side that her muslin skirt was in danger of catching and
tearing on the bushes, and she never raised her eyes, and not a flicker
of recognition stirred her sweet pale face as she passed him.

But Thomas started as if she had struck him, and dropped his spray of
white flowers, and could not help a smothered cry that was half a sob,
as he went on, knocking blindly against the bushes. He went a little
way, then he stopped and looked back with his piteous hurt eyes. And
Evelina had stopped also, and she had the spray of white flowers which
he had dropped, in her hand, and her eyes met his. Then she let the
flowers fall again, and clapped both her little hands to her face to
cover it, and turned to run; but Thomas was at her side, and he put out
his hand and held her softly by her white arm.

“Oh,” he panted, “I--did not mean to be--too presuming, and offend you.
I--crave your pardon--”

Evelina had recovered herself. She stood with her little hands clasped,
and her eyes cast down before him; but not a quiver stirred her pale
face, which seemed turned to marble by this last effort of her maiden
pride. “I have nothing to pardon,” said she. “It was I, whose bold
behavior, unbecoming a modest and well-trained young woman, gave rise
to what seemed like presumption on your part.” The sense of justice was
strong within her, but she made her speech haughtily and primly, as if
she had learned it by rote from some maiden school-mistress, and pulled
her arm away and turned to go; but Thomas’s words stopped her.

“Not--unbecoming if it came--from the heart,” said he, brokenly,
scarcely daring to speak, and yet not daring to be silent.

Then Evelina turned on him, with a sudden strange pride that lay
beneath all other pride, and was of a nobler and truer sort. “Do you
think I would have given you the look that I did if it had not come
from my heart?” she demanded. “What did you take me to be--false
and a jilt? I may be a forward young woman, who has overstepped the
bounds of maidenly decorum, and I shall never get over the shame of
it, but I am truthful, and I am no jilt.” The brilliant color flamed
out on Evelina’s cheeks. Her blue eyes met Thomas’s with that courage
of innocence and nature which dares all shame. But it was only for a
second; the tears sprung into them. “I beg you to let me go home,” she
said, pitifully; but Thomas caught her in his arms, and pressed her
troubled maiden face against his breast.

“Oh, I love you so!” he whispered--“I love you so, Evelina, and I was
afraid you were angry with me for it.”

“And I was afraid,” she faltered, half weeping and half shrinking
from him, “lest you were angry with me for betraying the state of my
feelings, when you could not return them.” And even then she used that
gentle formality of expression with which she had been taught by her
maiden preceptors to veil decorously her most ardent emotions. And,
in truth, her training stood her in good stead in other ways; for she
presently commanded, with that mild dignity of hers which allowed of no
remonstrance, that Thomas should take away his arm from her waist, and
give her no more kisses for that time.

“It is not becoming for any one,” said she, “and much less for a
minister of the gospel. And as for myself, I know not what Mistress
Perkins would say to me. She has a mind much above me, I fear.”

“Mistress Perkins is enjoying her mind in Boston,” said Thomas Merriam,
with the laugh of a triumphant young lover.

But Evelina did not laugh. “It might be well for both you and me if she
were here,” said she, seriously. However, she tempered a little her
decorous following of Mistress Perkins’s precepts, and she and Thomas
went hand in hand up the lane and across the fields.

There was no dew that night, and the moon was full. It was after nine
o’clock when Thomas left her at the gate in the fence which separated
Evelina Adams’s garden from the field, and watched her disappear
between the flowers. The moon shone full on the garden. Evelina walked
as it were over a silver dapple, which her light gown seemed to brush
away and dispel for a moment. The bushes stood in sweet mysterious
clumps of shadow.

Evelina had almost reached the house, and was close to the great althea
bush, which cast a wide circle of shadow, when it seemed suddenly to
separate and move into life.

The elder Evelina stepped out from the shadow of the bush. “Is that
you, Evelina?” she said, in her soft melancholy voice, which had in it
a nervous vibration.

“Yes, Cousin Evelina.”

The elder Evelina’s pale face, drooped about with gray curls, had an
unfamiliar, almost uncanny, look in the moonlight, and might have been
the sorrowful visage of some marble nymph, lovelorn, with unceasing
grace. “Who--was with you?” she asked.

“The minister,” replied young Evelina.

“Did he meet you?”

“He met me in the lane, Cousin Evelina.”

“And he walked home with you across the field?”

“Yes, Cousin Evelina.”

Then the two entered the house, and nothing more was said about the
matter. Young Evelina and Thomas Merriam agreed that their affection
was to be kept a secret for a while. “For,” said young Evelina, “I
cannot leave Cousin Evelina yet a while, and I cannot have her pestered
with thinking about it, at least before another spring, when she has
the garden fairly growing again.”

“That is nearly a whole year; it is August now,” said Thomas, half
reproachfully, and he tightened his clasp of Evelina’s slender fingers.

“I cannot help that,” replied Evelina. “It is for you to show Christian
patience more than I, Thomas. If you could have seen poor Cousin
Evelina, as I have seen her, through the long winter days, when her
garden is dead, and she has only the few plants in her window left!
When she is not watering and tending them she sits all day in the
window and looks out over the garden and the naked bushes and the
withered flower-stalks. She used not to be so, but would read her Bible
and good books, and busy herself somewhat over fine needle-work, and at
one time she was compiling a little floral book, giving a list of the
flowers, and poetical selections and sentiments appropriate to each.
That was her pastime for three winters, and it is now nearly done; but
she has given that up, and all the rest, and sits there in the window
and grows older and feebler until spring. It is only I who can divert
her mind, by reading aloud to her and singing; and sometimes I paint
the flowers she loves the best on card-board with water-colors. I have
a poor skill in it, but Cousin Evelina can tell which flower I have
tried to represent, and it pleases her greatly. I have even seen her
smile. No, I cannot leave her, nor even pester her with telling her
before another spring, and you must wait, Thomas,” said young Evelina.

And Thomas agreed, as he was likely to do to all which she proposed
which touched not his own sense of right and honor. Young Evelina gave
Thomas one more kiss for his earnest pleading, and that night wrote out
the tale in her journal. “It may be that I overstepped the bounds of
maidenly decorum,” wrote Evelina, “but my heart did so entreat me,” and
no blame whatever did she lay upon Thomas.

Young Evelina opened her heart only to her journal, and her cousin was
told nothing, and had little cause for suspicion. Thomas Merriam never
came to the house to see his sweetheart; he never walked home with her
from meeting. Both were anxious to avoid village gossip, until the
elder Evelina could be told.

Often in the summer evenings the lovers met, and strolled hand in hand
across the fields, and parted at the garden gate with the one kiss
which Evelina allowed, and that was all.

Sometimes when young Evelina came in with her lover’s kiss still warm
upon her lips the elder Evelina looked at her wistfully, with a strange
retrospective expression in her blue eyes, as if she were striving to
remember something that the girl’s face called to mind. And yet she
could have had nothing to remember except dreams.

And once, when young Evelina sat sewing through a long summer afternoon
and thinking about her lover, the elder Evelina, who was storing rose
leaves mixed with sweet spices in a jar, said, suddenly, “He looks as
his father used to.”

Young Evelina started. “Whom do you mean, Cousin Evelina?” she asked,
wonderingly; for the elder Evelina had not glanced at her, nor even
seemed to address her at all.

“Nothing,” said the elder Evelina, and a soft flush stole over her
withered face and neck, and she sprinkled more cassia on the rose
leaves in the jar.

Young Evelina said no more; but she wondered, partly because Thomas
was always in her mind, and it seemed to her naturally that nearly
everything must have a savor of meaning of him, if her cousin Evelina
could possibly have referred to him and his likeness to his father. For
it was commonly said that Thomas looked very like his father, although
his figure was different. The young man was taller and more firmly
built, and he had not the meek forward curve of shoulder which had
grown upon his father of late years.

When the frosty nights came Thomas and Evelina could not meet and walk
hand in hand over the fields behind the Squire’s house, and they very
seldom could speak to each other. It was nothing except a “good-day”
on the street, and a stolen glance, which set them both a-trembling
lest all the congregation had noticed, in the meeting-house. When the
winter set fairly in they met no more, for the elder Evelina was taken
ill, and her young cousin did not leave her even to go to meeting.
People said they guessed it was Evelina Adams’s last sickness, and they
furthermore guessed that she would divide her property between her
cousin Martha Loomis and her two girls and Evelina Leonard, and that
Evelina would have the house as her share.

Thomas Merriam heard this last with a satisfaction which he did not
try to disguise from himself, because he never dreamed of there being
any selfish element in it. It was all for Evelina. Many a time he had
looked about the humble house where he had been born, and where he
would have to take Evelina after he had married her, and striven to see
its poor features with her eyes--not with his, for which familiarity
had tempered them. Often, as he sat with his parents in the old
sitting-room, in which he had kept so far an unquestioning belief, as
in a friend of his childhood, the scales of his own personality would
fall suddenly from his eyes. Then he would see, as Evelina, the poor,
worn, humble face of his home, and his heart would sink. “I don’t see
how I ever can bring her here,” he thought. He began to save, a few
cents at a time out of his pitiful salary, to at least beautify his own
chamber a little when Evelina should come. He made up his mind that she
should have a little dressing-table, with an oval mirror, and a white
muslin frill around it, like one he had seen in Boston. “She shall have
that to sit before while she combs her hair,” he thought, with defiant
tenderness, when he stowed away another shilling in a little box in his
trunk. It was money which he ordinarily bestowed upon foreign missions;
but his Evelina had come between him and the heathen. To procure some
dainty furnishings for her bridal-chamber he took away a good half of
his tithes for the spread of the gospel in the dark lands. Now and
then his conscience smote him, he felt shamefaced before his deacons,
but Evelina kept her first claim. He resolved that another year he
would hire a piece of land, and combine farming with his ministerial
work, and so try to eke out his salary, and get a little more money to
beautify his poor home for his bride.

Now if Evelina Adams had come to the appointed time for the closing of
her solitary life, and if her young cousin should inherit a share of
her goodly property and the fine old mansion-house, all necessity for
anxiety of this kind was over. Young Evelina would not need to be taken
away, for the sake of her love, from all these comforts and luxuries.
Thomas Merriam rejoiced innocently, without a thought for himself.

In the course of the winter he confided in his father; he couldn’t keep
it to himself any longer. Then there was another reason. Seeing Evelina
so little made him at times almost doubt the reality of it all. There
were days when he was depressed, and inclined to ask himself if he had
not dreamed it. Telling somebody gave it substance.

His father listened soberly when he told him; he had grown old of late.

“Well,” said he, “she ’ain’t been used to living the way you have,
though you have had advantages that none of your folks ever had; but if
she likes you, that’s all there is to it, I s’pose.”

The old man sighed wearily. He sat in his arm-chair at the kitchen
fireplace; his wife had gone in to one of the neighbors, and the two
were alone.

“Of course,” said Thomas, simply, “if Evelina Adams shouldn’t live, the
chances are that I shouldn’t have to bring her here. She wouldn’t have
to give up anything on my account--you know that, father.”

Then the young man started, for his father turned suddenly on him with
a pale, wrathful face. “You ain’t countin’ on that!” he shouted. “You
ain’t countin’ on that--a son of mine countin’ on anything like that!”

Thomas colored. “Why, father,” he stammered, “you don’t think--you
know, it’s all for _her_--and they say she can’t live anyway. I had
never thought of such a thing before. I was wondering how I could make
it comfortable for Evelina here.”

But his father did not seem to listen. “Countin’ on that!” he repeated.
“Countin’ on a poor old soul, that ’ain’t ever had anything to set her
heart on but a few posies, dyin’ to make room for other folks to have
what she’s been cheated out on. Countin’ on that!” The old man’s voice
broke into a hoarse sob; he got up, and went hurriedly out of the room.

“Why, father!” his son called after him, in alarm. He got up to follow
him, but his father waved him back and shut the door hard.

“Father must be getting childish,” Thomas thought, wonderingly. He did
not bring up the subject to him again.

Evelina Adams died in March. One morning the bell tolled seventy long
melancholy tones before people had eaten their breakfasts. They ran
to their doors and counted. “It’s her,” they said, nodding, when they
had waited a little after the seventieth stroke. Directly Mrs. Martha
Loomis and her two girls were seen hustling importantly down the road,
with their shawls over their heads, to the Squire’s house. “Mis’ Loomis
can lay her out,” they said. “It ain’t likely that young Evelina knows
anything about such things. Guess she’ll be thankful she’s got somebody
to call on now, if she ’ain’t mixed much with the Loomises.” Then they
wondered when the funeral would be, and the women furbished up their
black gowns and bonnets, and even in a few cases drove to the next town
and borrowed from relatives; but there was a great disappointment in
store for them.

Evelina Adams died on a Saturday. The next day it was announced from
the pulpit that the funeral would be private, by the particular request
of the deceased. Evelina Adams had carried her delicate seclusion
beyond death, to the very borders of the grave. Nobody, outside the
family, was bidden to the funeral, except the doctor, the minister, and
the two deacons of the church. They were to be the bearers. The burial
also was to be private, in the Squire’s family burial-lot, at the north
of the house. The bearers would carry the coffin across the yard, and
there would not only be no funeral, but no funeral procession, and no
hearse. “It don’t seem scarcely decent,” the women whispered to each
other; “and more than all that, she ain’t goin’ to be _seen_.” The
deacons’ wives were especially disturbed by this last, as they might
otherwise have gained many interesting particulars by proxy.

Monday was the day set for the burial. Early in the morning old Thomas
Merriam walked feebly up the road to the Squire’s house. People noticed
him as he passed. “How terrible fast he’s grown old lately!” they said.
He opened the gate which led into the Squire’s front yard with fumbling
fingers, and went up the walk to the front door, under the Corinthian
pillars, and raised the brass knocker.

Evelina opened the door, and started and blushed when she saw him. She
had been crying; there were red rings around her blue eyes, and her
pretty lips were swollen. She tried to smile at Thomas’s father, and
she held out her hand with shy welcome.

“I want to see her,” the old man said, abruptly.

Evelina started, and looked at him wonderingly. “I--don’t believe--I
know who you mean,” said she. “Do you want to see Mrs. Loomis?”

“No; I want to see her.”

“_Her?_”

“Yes, _her_.”

Evelina turned pale as she stared at him. There was something strange
about his face. “But--Cousin Evelina,” she faltered--“she--didn’t
want--Perhaps you don’t know: she left special directions that nobody
was to look at her.”

“I _want to see her_,” said the old man, and Evelina gave way. She
stood aside for him to enter, and led him into the great north parlor,
where Evelina Adams lay in her mournful state. The shutters were
closed, and one on entering could distinguish nothing but that long
black shadow in the middle of the room. Young Evelina opened a shutter
a little way, and a slanting shaft of spring sunlight came in and shot
athwart the coffin. The old man tiptoed up and leaned over and looked
at the dead woman. Evelina Adams had left further instructions about
her funeral, which no one understood, but which were faithfully carried
out. She wished, she had said, to be attired for her long sleep in a
certain rose-colored gown, laid away in rose leaves and lavender in a
certain chest in a certain chamber. There were also silken hose and
satin shoes with it, and these were to be put on, and a wrought lace
tucker fastened with a pearl brooch.

It was the costume she had worn one Sabbath day back in her youth, when
she had looked across the meeting-house and her eyes had met young
Thomas Merriam’s; but nobody knew nor remembered; even young Evelina
thought it was simply a vagary of her dead cousin’s.

“It don’t seem to me decent to lay away anybody dressed so,” said Mrs.
Martha Loomis; “but of course last wishes must be respected.”

The two Loomis girls said they were thankful nobody was to see the
departed in her rose-colored shroud.

Even old Thomas Merriam, leaning over poor Evelina, cold and dead in
the garb of her youth, did not remember it, and saw no meaning in it.
He looked at her long. The beautiful color was all faded out of the
yellow-white face; the sweet full lips were set and thin; the closed
blue eyes sunken in dark hollows; the yellow hair showed a line of gray
at the edge of her old woman’s cap, and thin gray curls lay against the
hollow cheeks. But old Thomas Merriam drew a long breath when he looked
at her. It was like a gasp of admiration and wonder; a strange rapture
came into his dim eyes; his lips moved as if he whispered to her, but
young Evelina could not hear a sound. She watched him, half frightened,
but finally he turned to her. “I ’ain’t seen her--fairly,” said he,
hoarsely--“I ’ain’t seen her, savin’ a glimpse of her at the window,
for over forty year, and she ’ain’t changed, not a look. I’d have known
her anywheres. She’s the same as she was when she was a girl. It’s
wonderful--wonderful!”

Young Evelina shrank a little. “We think she looks natural,” she said,
hesitatingly.

“She looks jest as she did when she was a girl and used to come into
the meetin’-house. She is jest the same,” the old man repeated, in
his eager, hoarse voice. Then he bent over the coffin, and his lips
moved again. Young Evelina would have called Mrs. Loomis, for she was
frightened, had he not been Thomas’s father, and had it not been for
her vague feeling that there might be some old story to explain this
which she had never heard. “Maybe he was in love with poor Cousin
Evelina, as Thomas is with me,” thought young Evelina, using her own
leaping-pole of love to land straight at the truth. But she never told
her surmise to any one except Thomas, and that was long afterwards,
when the old man was dead. Now she watched him with her blue dilated
eyes. But soon he turned away from the coffin and made his way straight
out of the room, without a word. Evelina followed him through the entry
and opened the outer door. He turned on the threshold and looked back
at her, his face working.

“Don’t ye go to lottin’ too much on what ye’re goin’ to get through
folks that have died an’ not had anything,” he said; and he shook his
head almost fiercely at her.

“No, I won’t. I don’t think I understand what you mean, sir,” stammered
Evelina.

The old man stood looking at her a moment. Suddenly she saw the tears
rolling over his old cheeks. “I’m much obliged to ye for lettin’ of me
see her,” he said, hoarsely, and crept feebly down the steps.

Evelina went back trembling to the room where her dead cousin lay, and
covered her face, and closed the shutter again. Then she went about
her household duties, wondering. She could not understand what it all
meant; but one thing she understood--that in some way this old dead
woman, Evelina Adams, had gotten immortal youth and beauty in one human
heart. “She looked to him just as she did when she was a girl,” Evelina
kept thinking to herself with awe. She said nothing about it to Mrs.
Martha Loomis or her daughters. They had been in the back part of the
house, and had not heard old Thomas Merriam come in, and they never
knew about it.

Mrs. Loomis and the two girls stayed in the house day and night until
after the funeral. They confidently expected to live there in the
future. “It isn’t likely that Evelina Adams thought a young woman
no older than Evelina Leonard could live here alone in this great
house with nobody but that old Sarah Judd. It would not be proper nor
becoming,” said Martha Loomis to her two daughters; and they agreed,
and brought over many of their possessions under cover of night to the
Squire’s house during the interval before the funeral.

But after the funeral and the reading of the will the Loomises made
sundry trips after dusk back to their old home, with their best
petticoats and cloaks over their arms, and their bonnets dangling
by their strings at their sides. For Evelina Adams’s last will and
testament had been read, and therein provision was made for the
continuance of the annuity heretofore paid them for their support, with
the condition affixed that not one night should they spend after the
reading of the will in the house known as the Squire Adams house. The
annuity was an ample one, and would provide the widow Martha Loomis and
her daughters, as it had done before, with all the needfuls of life;
but upon hearing the will they stiffened their double chins into their
kerchiefs with indignation, for they had looked for more.

Evelina Adams’s will was a will of conditions, for unto it she had
affixed two more, and those affected her beloved cousin Evelina
Leonard. It was notable that “beloved” had not preceded her cousin
Martha Loomis’s name in the will. No pretence of love, when she felt
none, had she ever made in her life. The entire property of Evelina
Adams, spinster, deceased, with the exception of Widow Martha Loomis’s
provision, fell to this beloved young Evelina Leonard, subject to two
conditions--firstly, she was never to enter into matrimony, with any
person whomsoever, at any time whatsoever; secondly, she was never to
let the said spinster Evelina Adams’s garden, situated at the rear and
southward of the house known as the Squire Adams house, die through any
neglect of hers. Due allowance was to be made for the dispensations of
Providence: for hail and withering frost and long-continued drought,
and for times wherein the said Evelina Leonard might, by reason of
being confined to the house by sickness, be prevented from attending to
the needs of the growing plants, and the verdict in such cases was to
rest with the minister and the deacons of the church. But should this
beloved Evelina love and wed, or should she let, through any wilful
neglect, that garden perish in the season of flowers, all that goodly
property would she forfeit to a person unknown, whose name, enclosed
in a sealed envelope, was to be held meantime in the hands of the
executor, who had also drawn up the will, Lawyer Joshua Lang.

There was great excitement in the village over this strange and
unwonted will. Some were there who held that Evelina Adams had not been
of sound mind, and it should be contested. It was even rumored that
Widow Martha Loomis had visited Lawyer Joshua Lang and broached the
subject, but he had dismissed the matter peremptorily by telling her
that Evelina Adams, spinster, deceased, had been as much in her right
mind at the time of drawing the will as anybody of his acquaintance.

“Not setting store by relations, and not wanting to have them under
your roof, doesn’t go far in law nor common-sense to send folks to
the madhouse,” old Lawyer Lang, who was famed for his sharp tongue,
was reported to have said. However, Mrs. Martha Loomis was somewhat
comforted by her firm belief that either her own name or that of one of
her daughters was in that sealed envelope kept by Lawyer Joshua Lang in
his strong-box, and by her firm purpose to watch carefully lest Evelina
prove derelict in fulfilling the two conditions whereby she held the
property.

Larger peep-holes were soon cut away mysteriously in the high
arbor-vitæ hedge, and therein were often set for a few moments, when
they passed that way, the eager eyes of Mrs. Martha or her daughter
Flora or Fidelia Loomis. Frequent calls they also made upon Evelina,
living alone with the old woman Sarah Judd, who had been called in
during her cousin’s illness, and they strolled into the garden, spying
anxiously for withered leaves or dry stalks. They at every opportunity
interviewed the old man who assisted Evelina in her care of the garden
concerning its welfare. But small progress they made with him, standing
digging at the earth with his spade while they talked, as if in truth
his wits had gone therein before his body and he would uncover them.

Moreover, Mrs. Martha Loomis talked much slyly to mothers of young
men, and sometimes with bold insinuations to the young men themselves,
of the sad lot of poor young Evelina, condemned to a solitary and
loveless life, and of her sweetness and beauty and desirability in
herself, although she could not bring the old Squire’s money to her
husband. And once, but no more than that, she touched lightly upon the
subject to the young minister, Thomas Merriam, when he was making a
pastoral call.

“My heart bleeds for the poor child living all alone in that great
house,” said she. And she looked down mournfully, and did not see how
white the young minister’s face turned. “It seems almost a pity,”
said she, furthermore--“Evelina is a good housekeeper, and has rare
qualities in herself, and so many get poor wives nowadays--that some
godly young man should not court her in spite of the will. I doubt,
too, if she would not have a happier lot than growing old over that
garden, as poor Cousin Evelina did before her, even if she has a fine
house to live in and a goodly sum in the bank. She looks pindling
enough lately. I’ll warrant she has lost a good ten pound since poor
Evelina was laid away, and--”

But Thomas Merriam cut her short. “I see no profit in discussing
matters which do not concern us,” said he, and only his ministerial
estate saved him from the charge of impertinence.

As it was, Martha Loomis colored high. “I’ll warrant he’ll look out
which side his bread is buttered on; ministers always do,” she said to
her daughters after he had gone. She never dreamed how her talk had cut
him to the heart.

Had he not seen more plainly than any one else, Sunday after Sunday,
when he glanced down at her once or twice cautiously from his pulpit,
how weary-looking and thin she was growing? And her bright color was
wellnigh gone, and there were pitiful downward lines at the corners
of her sweet mouth. Poor young Evelina was fading like one of her own
flowers, as if some celestial gardener had failed in his care of her.
And Thomas saw it, and in his heart of hearts he knew the reason, and
yet he would not yield. Not once had he entered the old Squire’s house
since he attended the dead Evelina’s funeral, and stood praying and
eulogizing, with her coffin between him and the living Evelina, with
her pale face shrouded in black bombazine. He had never spoken to her
since, nor entered the house; but he had written her a letter, in which
all the fierce passion and anguish of his heart was cramped and held
down by formal words and phrases, and poor young Evelina did not see
beneath them. When her lover wrote her that he felt it inconsistent
with his Christian duty and the higher aims of his existence to take
any further steps towards a matrimonial alliance, she felt merely that
Thomas either cared no more for her, or had come to consider, upon
due reflection, that she was not fit to undertake the responsible
position of a minister’s wife. “It may be that in some way I failed in
my attendance upon Cousin Evelina,” thought poor young Evelina, “or it
may be that he thinks I have not enough dignity of character to inspire
respect among the older women in the church.” And sometimes, with a
sharp thrust of misery that shook her out of her enforced patience and
meekness, she wondered if indeed her own loving freedom with him had
turned him against her, and led him in his later and sober judgment to
consider her too light-minded for a minister’s wife. “It may be that
I was guilty of great indecorum, and almost indeed forfeited my claim
to respect for maidenly modesty, inasmuch as I suffered him to give
me kisses, and did almost bring myself to return them in kind. But my
heart did so entreat me, and in truth it seemed almost like a lack of
sincerity for me to wholly withstand it,” wrote poor young Evelina in
her journal at that time; and she further wrote: “It is indeed hard
for one who has so little knowledge to be fully certain of what is or
is not becoming and a Christian duty in matters of this kind; but if I
have in any manner, through my ignorance or unwarrantable affection,
failed, and so lost the love and respect of a good man, and the
opportunity to become his helpmeet during life, I pray that I may be
forgiven--for I sinned not wilfully--that the lesson may be sanctified
unto me, and that I may live as the Lord order, in Christian patience
and meekness, and not repining.” It never occurred to young Evelina
that possibly Thomas Merriam’s sense of duty might be strengthened by
the loss of all her cousin’s property should she marry him, and neither
did she dream that he might hesitate to take her from affluence into
poverty for her own sake. For herself the property, as put in the
balance beside her love, was lighter than air itself. It was so light
that it had no place in her consciousness. She simply had thought, upon
hearing the will, of Martha Loomis and her daughters in possession of
the property, and herself with Thomas, with perfect acquiescence and
rapture.

Evelina Adams’s disapprobation of her marriage, which was supposedly
expressed in the will, had indeed, without reference to the property,
somewhat troubled her tender heart, but she told herself that Cousin
Evelina had not known she had promised to marry Thomas; that she would
not wish her to break her solemn promise. And furthermore, it seemed to
her quite reasonable that the condition had been inserted in the will
mainly through concern for the beloved garden.

“Cousin Evelina might have thought perhaps I would let the flowers die
when I had a husband and children to take care of,” said Evelina. And
so she had disposed of all the considerations which had disturbed her,
and had thought of no others.

She did not answer Thomas’s letter. It was so worded that it seemed to
require no reply, and she felt that he must be sure of her acquiescence
in whatever he thought best. She laid the letter away in a little
rosewood box, in which she had always kept her dearest treasures since
her school-days. Sometimes she took it out and read it, and it seemed
to her that the pain in her heart would put an end to her in spite of
all her prayers for Christian fortitude; and yet she could not help
reading it again.

It was seldom that she stole a look at her old lover as he stood in
the pulpit in the meeting-house, but when she did she thought with an
anxious pang that he looked worn and ill, and that night she prayed
that the Lord would restore his health to him for the sake of his
people.

It was four months after Evelina Adams’s death, and her garden was in
the full glory of midsummer, when one evening, towards dusk, young
Evelina went slowly down the street. She seldom walked abroad now, but
kept herself almost as secluded as her cousin had done before her. But
that night a great restlessness was upon her, and she put a little
black silk shawl over her shoulders and went out. It was quite cool,
although it was midsummer. The dusk was deepening fast; the katydids
called back and forth from the way-side bushes. Evelina met nobody for
some distance. Then she saw a man coming towards her, and her heart
stood still, and she was about to turn back, for she thought for a
minute it was the young minister. Then she saw it was his father, and
she went on slowly, with her eyes downcast. When she met him she looked
up and said good-evening, gravely, and would have passed on, but he
stood in her way.

“I’ve got a word to say to ye, if ye’ll listen,” he said.

Evelina looked at him tremblingly. There was something strained and
solemn in his manner. “I’ll hear whatever you have to say, sir,” she
said.

The old man leaned his pale face over her and raised a shaking
forefinger. “I’ve made up my mind to say something,” said he. “I don’t
know as I’ve got any right to, and maybe my son will blame me, but I’m
goin’ to see that you have a chance. It’s been borne in upon me that
women folks don’t always have a fair chance. It’s jest this I’m goin’
to say: I don’t know whether you know how my son feels about it or not.
I don’t know how open he’s been with you. Do you know jest why he quit
you?”

Evelina shook her head. “No,” she panted--“I don’t--I never knew. He
said it was his duty.”

“Duty can get to be an idol of wood and stone, an’ I don’t know but
Thomas’s is,” said the old man. “Well, I’ll tell you. He don’t think
it’s right for him to marry you, and make you leave that big house, and
lose all that money. He don’t care anything about it for himself, but
it’s for you. Did you know that?”

Evelina grasped the old man’s arm hard with her little fingers.

“You don’t mean that--was why he did it!” she gasped.

“Yes, that was why.”

Evelina drew away from him. She was ashamed to have Thomas’s father see
the joy in her face. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “I did not understand.
I--will write to him.”

“Maybe my son will think I have done wrong coming betwixt him and his
idees of duty,” said old Thomas Merriam, “but sometimes there’s a good
deal lost for lack of a word, and I wanted you to have a fair chance
an’ a fair say. It’s been borne in upon me that women folks don’t
always have it. Now you can do jest as you think best, but you must
remember one thing--riches ain’t all. A little likin’ for you that’s
goin’ to last, and keep honest and faithful to you as long as you live,
is worth more; an’ it’s worth more to women folks than ’tis to men,
an’ it’s worth enough to them. My son’s poorly. His mother and I are
worried about him. He don’t eat nor sleep--walks his chamber nights.
His mother don’t know what the matter is, but he let on to me some time
since.”

“I’ll write a letter to him,” gasped Evelina again. “Good-night, sir.”
She pulled her little black silk shawl over her head and hastened home,
and all night long her candle burned, while her weary little fingers
toiled over pages of foolscap-paper to convince Thomas Merriam fully,
and yet in terms not exceeding maidenly reserve, that the love of his
heart and the companionship of his life were worth more to her than all
the silver and gold in the world. Then the next morning she despatched
it, all neatly folded and sealed, and waited.

It was strange that a letter like that could not have moved Thomas
Merriam, when his heart too pleaded with him so hard to be moved. But
that might have been the very reason why he could withstand her, and
why the consciousness of his own weakness gave him strength. Thomas
Merriam was one, when he had once fairly laid hold of duty, to grasp it
hard, although it might be to his own pain and death, and maybe to that
of others. He wrote to poor young Evelina another letter, in which he
emphasized and repeated his strict adherence to what he believed the
line of duty in their separation, and ended it with a prayer for her
welfare and happiness, in which, indeed, for a second, the passionate
heart of the man showed forth. Then he locked himself in his chamber,
and nobody ever knew what he suffered there. But one pang he did not
suffer which Evelina would have suffered in his place. He mourned not
over nor realized the grief of her tender heart when she should read
his letter, otherwise he could not have sent it. He writhed under his
own pain alone, and his duty hugged him hard, like the iron maiden of
the old tortures, but he would not yield.

As for Evelina, when she got his letter, and had read it through, she
sat still and white for a long time, and did not seem to hear when old
Sarah Judd spoke to her. But at last she rose and went to her chamber,
and knelt down, and prayed for a long time; and then she went out in
the garden and cut all the most beautiful flowers, and tied them in
wreaths and bouquets, and carried them out to the north side of the
house, where her cousin Evelina was buried, and covered her grave with
them. And then she knelt down there and hid her face among them, and
said, in a low voice, as if in a listening ear, “I pray you, Cousin
Evelina, forgive me for what I am about to do.”

And then she returned to the house, and sat at her needle-work as
usual; but the old woman kept looking at her, and asking if she were
sick, for there was a strange look in her face.

She and old Sarah Judd had always their tea at five o’clock, and put
the candles out at nine, and this night they did as they were wont.
But at one o’clock in the morning young Evelina stole softly down the
stairs with her lighted candle, and passed through into the kitchen;
and a half-hour after she came forth into the garden, which lay in full
moonlight, and she had in her hand a steaming teakettle, and she passed
around among the shrubs and watered them, and a white cloud of steam
rose around them. Back and forth she went to the kitchen; for she had
heated the great copper wash-kettle full of water; and she watered all
the shrubs in the garden, moving amid curling white wreaths of steam,
until the water was gone. And then she set to work and tore up by the
roots with her little hands and trampled with her little feet all the
beautiful tender flower-beds; all the time weeping, and moaning softly:
“Poor Cousin Evelina! poor Cousin Evelina! Oh, forgive me, poor Cousin
Evelina!”

And at dawn the garden lay in ruin, for all the tender plants she had
torn up by the roots and trampled down, and all the stronger-rooted
shrubs she had striven to kill with boiling water and salt.

Then Evelina went into the house, and made herself tidy as well as she
could when she trembled so, and put her little shawl over her head, and
went down the road to the Merriams’ house. It was so early the village
was scarcely astir, but there was smoke coming out of the kitchen
chimney at the Merriams’; and when she knocked, Mrs. Merriam opened the
door at once, and stared at her.

“Is Sarah Judd dead?” she cried; for her first thought was that
something must have happened when she saw the girl standing there with
her wild pale face.

“I want to see the minister,” said Evelina, faintly, and she looked at
Thomas’s mother with piteous eyes.

“Be you sick?” asked Mrs. Merriam. She laid a hard hand on the
girl’s arm, and led her into the sitting-room, and put her into the
rocking-chair with the feather cushion. “You look real poorly,” said
she. “Sha’n’t I get you a little of my elderberry wine?”

“I want to see him,” said Evelina, and she almost sobbed.

“I’ll go right and speak to him,” said Mrs. Merriam. “He’s up, I guess.
He gets up early to write. But hadn’t I better get you something to
take first? You do look sick.”

But Evelina only shook her head. She had her face covered with her
hands, and was weeping softly. Mrs. Merriam left the room, with a long
backward glance at her. Presently the door opened and Thomas came in.
Evelina stood up before him. Her pale face was all wet with tears, but
there was an air of strange triumph about her.

[Illustration: “‘THE LORD MAKE ME WORTHY OF THEE, EVELINA!’”]

“The garden is dead,” said she.

“What do you mean?” he cried out, staring at her, for indeed he thought
for a minute that her wits had left her.

“The garden is dead,” said she. “Last night I watered the roses with
boiling water and salt, and I pulled the other flowers up by their
roots. The garden is dead, and I have lost all Cousin Evelina’s money,
and it need not come between us any longer.” She said that, and looked
up in his face with her blue eyes, through which the love of the whole
race of loving women from which she had sprung, as well as her own,
seemed to look, and held out her little hands; but even then Thomas
Merriam could not understand, and stood looking at her.

“Why--did you do it?” he stammered.

“Because you would have me no other way, and--I couldn’t bear that
anything like that should come between us,” she said, and her voice
shook like a harp-string, and her pale face went red, then pale again.

But Thomas still stood staring at her. Then her heart failed her. She
thought that he did not care, and she had been mistaken. She felt as if
it were the hour of her death, and turned to go. And then he caught her
in his arms.

“Oh,” he cried, with a great sob, “the Lord make me worthy of thee,
Evelina!”

There had never been so much excitement in the village as when the
fact of the ruined garden came to light. Flora Loomis, peeping through
the hedge on her way to the store, had spied it first. Then she had
run home for her mother, who had in turn sought Lawyer Lang, panting
bonnetless down the road. But before the lawyer had started for the
scene of disaster, the minister, Thomas Merriam, had appeared, and
asked for a word in private with him. Nobody ever knew just what that
word was, but the lawyer was singularly uncommunicative and reticent as
to the ruined garden.

“Do you think the young woman is out of her mind?” one of the deacons
asked him, in a whisper.

“I wish all the young women were as much in their minds; we’d have a
better world,” said the lawyer, gruffly.

“When do you think we can begin to move in here?” asked Mrs. Martha
Loomis, her wide skirts sweeping a bed of uprooted verbenas.

“When your claim is established,” returned the lawyer, shortly, and
turned on his heel and went away, his dry old face scanning the ground
like a dog on a scent. That afternoon he opened the sealed document
in the presence of witnesses, and the name of the heir to whom the
property fell was disclosed. It was “Thomas Merriam, the beloved and
esteemed minister of this parish,” and young Evelina would gain her
wealth instead of losing it by her marriage. And furthermore, after
the declaration of the name of the heir was this added: “This do I in
the hope and belief that neither the greed of riches nor the fear of
them shall prevent that which is good and wise in the sight of the
Lord, and with the surety that a love which shall triumph over so much
in its way shall endure, and shall be a blessing and not a curse to my
beloved cousin, Evelina Leonard.”

Thomas Merriam and Evelina were married before the leaves fell in
that same year, by the minister of the next village, who rode over in
his chaise, and brought his wife, who was also a bride, and wore her
wedding-dress of a pink and pearl shot silk. But young Evelina wore the
blue bridal array which had been worn by old Squire Adams’s bride, all
remodelled daintily to suit the fashion of the times; and as she moved,
the fragrances of roses and lavender of the old summers during which it
had been laid away were evident, like sweet memories.

A NEW ENGLAND PROPHET

At half-past six o’clock a little company of people passed down the
village street in the direction of the Lennox farm-house.

They advanced in silence, stepping along the frozen ridges of the road.
It was cold, but there was no snow. There was a young moon shining
through thin white clouds like nebulæ.

Now and then, as the company went on, new recruits were gathered from
the scattered houses. A man would emerge darkly from a creaking gate,
with maybe a second and third dark figure following, with a flirt of
feminine draperies. “There’s Deacon Scranton,” or “There’s Thomas
Jennings and his wife and Ellen,” the people would murmur to one
another.

Once a gleam of candle-light from an open door lay across the road in
advance, and wavered into darkness with a slam of the door when the
company drew near. Then a solitary woman came ponderously down the
front walk, seeming to jar the frozen earth with the jolt of her great
feminine bulk. “There’s Abby Mosely,” somebody muttered. Sometimes
two young girls fluttered out of a door-yard, clinging together with
nervous giggles and outcries, which were soon hushed. They moved along
with the others, their little cold fingers clinging together with a
rigid clutch. It was as if a strange, solemn atmosphere surrounded this
group moving along the country road in the starlit night. Whoever came
into their midst felt it, and his emotions changed involuntarily as
respiration changes on a mountaintop.

When the party reached a windy hill-top in sight of the lighted windows
of the Lennox house in the valley below, it numbered nearly twenty.
Half-way down the hill somebody else joined them. He had been standing
ahead of them, waiting in the long shadow of a poplar, and they had not
discerned him until they were close to him. Then he stepped forward
and the shadow of the tree was left motionless. The young girls half
screamed, he appeared so suddenly, and their nerves were strained. The
elders made a solemn hushed murmur of greeting. They knew as soon as
he moved that he was Isaac Penfield. He had a martial carriage of his
shoulders, he was a captain in the militia, and he wore an ash-colored
cloak, which distinguished him.

The young girls cast glances, bolder from the darkness, towards his
stately ash-colored shoulders and the pale gleam of his face. Not one
of them who had not her own lover but had her innocent secret dreams
about this Isaac Penfield. Now, had a light shone out suddenly in the
darkness, their dreams would have shown in their faces.

One slender girl slunk softly around in the rear darkness and crept so
close to Isaac Penfield that his ash-colored cloak, swinging out in the
wind, brushed her cheek. He did not notice her; indeed, after his first
murmur of salutation, he did not speak to any one.

They all went in silence down the hill, and flocked into the yard of
the Lennox house. There was a red flicker of light in the kitchen
windows from the great hearth fire, but a circle of dark heads and
shoulders hid the fire itself from the new-comers. There was evidently
a number of people inside.

Deacon Scranton raised the knocker, and the door was opened
immediately. Melissa Lennox stood there holding a candle in a brass
candlestick, with the soft light streaming up on her fair face. She
looked through it with innocent, anxious blue eyes at the company.
“Won’t you walk in?” she said, tremulously, and the people passed into
the south entry, and through the door on the left into the great Lennox
kitchen. Some dozen persons who had come from the other end of the
village were already there.

Isaac Penfield entered last. Melissa did not see him until he stepped
suddenly within her radius of candle-light. Then she started, and bent
her head before him, blushing. The candle shook in her outstretched
hand.

Isaac Penfield took the candle without a word and set it on the stairs.
Then he took Melissa’s slim right hand in his, and stood a moment
looking down at her bent head, with its parted gloss of hair. His
forehead was frowning, and yet he half smiled with tender triumph.

“Come out in the front yard with me a moment,” he whispered. He pulled
her with gentle force towards the door, and the girl yielded, after a
faint murmur of expostulation.

Out in the front yard Isaac Penfield folded a corner of his ash-colored
cloak around Melissa’s slender shoulders.

“Now I want you to tell me, Melissa,” he whispered. “You are not still
carried away by all this?” He jerked his head towards the kitchen
windows.

Melissa trembled against the young man’s side under the folds of his
cloak.

“You are not, after all I said to you, Melissa?”

She nodded against his breast, with a faint sob.

“I hoped you would do as I asked you, and cut loose from this folly,”
Isaac Penfield said, sternly.

“Father--says--it’s true. Oh, I am afraid--I am afraid! My sins are so
great, and I cannot hide from the eyes of the Lord. I am afraid!”

Isaac Penfield tightened his clasp of the girl’s trembling figure, and
bent his head low down over hers. “Melissa, dear, can’t you listen to
me?” he whispered.

Suddenly the kitchen door opened, and a new light streamed across the
entry.

“Melissa, where be you?” called a woman’s voice, high-pitched and
melancholy.

“There’s mother calling,” Melissa said, in a frightened whisper, and
she broke away and ran into the house.

Her mother stood in the kitchen door. “Where have you been?” she began.
Then she stopped, and looked at Isaac Penfield with a half-shrinking,
half-antagonistic air. This stalwart young man, radiant with the
knowledge of his own strength, represented to this delicate woman, who
was held to the earth more by the tension of nerves than the weight of
matter, the very pride of life, the material power which she was to
fear and fight for herself and for her daughter.

“I thought I would step into your meeting to-night, if I were
permitted,” Isaac Penfield said.

Mrs. Lennox looked at him with deep blue eyes under high, thin temples.
“All are permitted who listen to the truth with the right spirit,”
said she, and turned shortly and glided into the kitchen. Melissa and
Isaac followed.

The company sat in wide semicircles, three deep, before the fire. In
the open space between the first semicircle and the fire, his wide
arm-chair on the bricks of the broad hearth, half facing the company,
sat Solomon Lennox. Near him sat his deaf-and-dumb son Alonzo. He held
up a large slate so the firelight fell upon it, and marked upon it with
a grating pencil. He screwed his face with every stroke, so it seemed
that one watching attentively might discern the picture itself from his
changing features.

Alonzo Lennox was fourteen years old, but he looked no more than ten,
and he had been deaf and dumb from his birth. The firelight gave a
reddish tinge to his silvery blond hair, spreading out stiffly from the
top of his head over his ears like the thatch of a hut. His delicate
irregular profile bent over the slate; now and then a spasm of silent
merriment shook his narrow chest, and the surrounding people looked at
him with awe. They regarded it as the mystic ecstasy of a seer.

Melissa and her mother had slid softly through the semicircles to the
chairs they had left. Isaac Penfield stood on the outskirts, towering
over all the people, refusing a seat which somebody offered him. He
threw off his ash-colored cloak and held it on his arm. His costume of
fine broadcloth and flowered satin and glittering buttons surpassed
any there, as did his face and his height and his carriage; and, more
than all, he stood among the others raised upon a spiritual eminence,
unseen, but none the less real, which his ancestors had reared for
him before his birth. The Penfield name had been a great one in that
vicinity for three generations. Once Penfields had owned the larger
part of the township. Isaac’s father, and his grandfather before him,
had been esquires, and held as nearly the position of lords of this
little village as was possible in New England. Now this young man was
the last of his race, living, with his housekeeper and an old servant,
in the Penfield homestead; and the village adulation which had been
accorded to his ancestors was his also in a large measure.

To-night, as he entered, people glanced at him, away from Alonzo and
his slate, but only for a moment. The matter under discussion that
night was too solemn and terrible to be lost sight of long.

In about ten minutes after Isaac Penfield entered, the boy gave a
shout, grating and hideous, with a discord of human thoughts and senses
in it. A shudder passed over the company like a wind.

Alonzo Lennox sprang up and waved the slate, and his father reached
out for it. “Give it to me,” he demanded, sternly, as if the boy could
hear. But Alonzo gave another shout, and leaped aside, and waved the
slate out of his father’s reach. Then he danced lightly up and down
on the tips of his toes, shaking his head and flinging out fantastic
heels. His shock of hair flew out wildly, and looked like a luminous
crown; the firelight struck his dilated eyes, and they gleamed red.

The people watched him with sobbing breaths and pale faces, all except
Isaac Penfield and one other. Isaac stood looking at him, with his
mouth curling in a scornful smile. Solomon Lennox stood aside with a
startled air, then he caught the boy firmly by the arm and grasped the
slate.

Alonzo grinned impishly in his father’s face, then he let go the
slate, and sank down on his stool in the chimney-corner. There he sat
submissive and inactive, except for the cunning, sharp flash of his
blue eyes under his thatch of hair.

Solomon Lennox held the slate to the light and looked at it, while the
people waited breathless, their pale intent faces bent forward. Then he
handed the slate, without a word, to the man at the end of the first
semicircle, and it was circulated through the entire company. As one
passed the slate to another a shuddering thrill like an electric shock
seemed to be passed with it, and there was a faint murmur of horror.

Isaac Penfield held the slate longest, and examined it closely. Drawn
with a free hand, which certainly gave evidence of some inborn artistic
skill aside from aught else, were great sweeping curves of wings
upbearing an angel with a trumpet at his mouth. Under his feet were
lashing tongues as of flames, with upturned faces of agony in the midst
of them. And everywhere, between the wings and the angel and the flames
and the faces, were, in groups of five, those grotesque little symbols
of the sun, a disk with human features therein, which one sees in the
almanacs.

After Isaac Penfield had finished looking at the mystic slate he passed
it to Solomon Lennox’s elder brother, Simeon, who sat at his right. The
old man’s hard shaven jaws widened in a sardonic grin; his small black
eyes twinkled derisively over the drawings. “Pretty pictures,” he said,
half aloud. Then he passed the slate along with a contemptuous chuckle,
which was heard in the solemn stillness all over the room.

Solomon Lennox gave a furious glance in his brother’s direction. “This
is no time nor season for scoffers!” cried he. And his voice seemed to
shock the air like a musket-shot.

Simeon Lennox chuckled again. Solomon’s right hand clinched. He
arose; then sat down again, with his mouth compressed. He sat still
until the slate had gone its rounds and returned to the boy, who sat
contemplating it with uncouth delight; then he stood up, and the words
flowed from his mouth in torrents. Never at a loss for subject-matter
of speech was Solomon Lennox. By the fluency of his discourse he might
well have been thought inspired. He spoke of visions of wings and holy
candlesticks and beasts and cups of abomination as if he had with his
own eyes seen them like the prophet of old. He expounded strange and
subtle mathematical calculations and erratic interpretations of history
as applied to revelation with a fervor which brought conviction to his
audience. He caught the slate from his deaf-and-dumb son, and explained
the weird characters thereon. The five suns were five days. Five times
the sun should arise in the east, as it had done from the creation;
then should the angel, upborne on those great white wings, sound his
trumpet, and the flames burst forth from the lower pit, and those
upturned faces in the midst of them gnash with despair.

“Repent, for the day of the Lord is at hand!” shouted Solomon Lennox at
the close of his arguments, and his voice itself rang like a trumpet
full of all intonations and reverberations, of awe and dread. “Repent,
for the great and dreadful day of the Lord is at hand! Repent while
there is yet time, while there is yet a foothold on the shore of the
lake of fire! Repent, repent! Prepare your ascension robes! Renounce
the world, and all the lust and the vanity thereof! Repent, for the
day of judgment is here! Soon shall ye choke with the smoke of the
everlasting burning, soon shall your eyes be scorched with the fiery
scroll of the heavens, your ears be deafened with the blast of the
trumpet of wrath, and the cry against you of your own sins! Repent,
repent, repent!”

Solomon Lennox’s slight figure writhed with his own emotion as with
internal fire; the veins swelled out on his high bald forehead; his
eyes blazed with fanatical light. Aside from the startling nature of
his discourse, he himself was a marvel, and a terror to his neighbors.
His complete deviation from a former line of life produced among them
the horror of the supernatural. He affected them like his own ghost. He
had always been a man of few and quiet words, who had never expressed
his own emotions in public beyond an inaudible, muttered prayer at a
conference meeting, and now this flood of fiery eloquence from him
seemed like a very convulsion of human nature.

When a great physical malady is epidemic there are often isolated
cases in remote localities whose connection with the main disturbance
cannot be established. So in this little New England village, far from
a railroad, scarcely reached by the news of the day, Solomon Lennox
had developed within himself, with seeming spontaneity, some of the
startling tenets of Joseph Miller, and had established his own small
circle of devoted disciples and followers. It was as if some germs of
a great spiritual disturbance had sought, through some unknown medium,
this man’s mind as their best ripening place.

After Solomon had arisen one night in conference meeting and poured
forth his soul to his startled neighbors in a strain of fiery prophecy,
Millerite publications had been sent for, and he had strengthened
his own theories with those of the original leader, although in many
respects his maintained a distinct variance.

The effect of Solomon’s prophecies had been greatly enhanced by the
drawings of his deaf-and-dumb son. Alonzo Lennox’s slate, covered with
rude representations of beasts and trumpets and winged creatures--the
weird symbolic figures of the prophet Daniel--had aroused a tumult of
awe and terror in the village. And the more so because the boy had
never learned the language of the deaf and dumb, and had no ordinary
and comprehensible means of acquiring information upon such topics.

To-night, as his father spoke, he kept his blue eyes upon his face
with such a keen look that it seemed almost impossible that he did not
hear and comprehend every word. Unbelievers in this new movement were
divided between the opinion that Lonny Lennox had heard more than folks
had given him credit for right along, and the one that he understood
by some strange power which the loss of his other faculties had
sharpened.

“The boy has developed the sixth sense,” Isaac Penfield thought as he
watched his intent face upturned towards his father’s; and he also
thought impatiently that he should be cuffed and sent to bed for his
uncanny sharpness. He grew more and more indignant as the time went on
and the excitement deepened. He watched Melissa grow paler and paler,
and finally press her slender hands over her face, and shake with sobs,
and made a sudden motion as if he would go to her. Then he restrained
himself, and muttered something between his teeth.

Old Simeon Lennox watched him curiously, then he hit him in the side
with a sharp elbow. “Made up your mind to go up in our family chariot
on the last day?” he whispered, with a hoarse whistle of breath in
Isaac’s ear. Then he leaned back, with a long cackle of laughter in his
throat, which was unheard in the din of his brother’s raging voice and
the responsive groans and sobs.

Isaac Penfield colored, and kept his eyes straight forward and his head
up with a haughty air. Presently the old man nudged him again, with the
sharpness of malice protected by helplessness. “Guess,” he whispered,
craning up to the young man’s handsome, impatient face--“guess you
’ain’t much opinion of all this darned tomfoolery neither.”

Isaac shook his head fiercely.

“Well,” said the old man, “let ’em go it,” and he cackled with laughter
again.

After Solomon Lennox had finished his fervid appeal, two or three
offered prayers, and many testified and confessed sins, and professed
repentance, and terror of the wrath to come, in hoarse, strained
voices, half drowned by sobs and cries.

It was nearly midnight before Solomon Lennox declared the meeting at
a close, and recommended the brethren and sisters to repair to their
homes, not to sleep, but to pray, and appointed another session for
the next forenoon, for these meetings of terror-stricken and contrite
souls were held three times a day--morning, afternoon, and evening. In
those days the housewives’ kitchen tables were piled high with unwashed
dishes, the hearths were unswept and the fires low, the pantry shelves
were bare, and often the children went to bed with only the terrors of
the judgment for sustenance.

In those days the cattle grew lean, and stood lowing piteously long
after nightfall at the pasture bars. Even the horses turned in their
stalls at every footfall and whinnied for food. Men lost all thought
for their earthly goods in their fierce concern for their own souls.

The people flocked out of Solomon Lennox’s kitchen, some with rapt
eyes, some white-faced and trembling, huddling together as if with a
forlorn hope that human companionship might avail somewhat even against
divine judgment. The deaf-and-dumb boy went sleepily out of the room
and up-stairs with his candle, leaving his slate on the hearthstone.
Isaac Penfield stood a few minutes looking irresolutely at Melissa, who
sat still with her hands pressed tightly over her face, as if she were
weeping. Her mother stood near her, talking to Abby Mosely, who was
Simeon Lennox’s housekeeper. The woman was fairly gasping with emotion;
her broad shawled bosom heaved.

“Repent!” cried Mrs. Lennox, loud, in her ears, like an echo of her
husband. “Repent; there is yet time! There are five days before the
heavens open! Repent!” Her nervous hands served to intensify her weak,
straining voice. They pointed and threatened in the woman’s piteous,
scared face. Isaac started to approach Melissa; then her mother half
turned and seemed to shriek out her warning cry towards him, and he
tossed his gray cloak over his shoulders, strode out of the room, and
out of the house.

Old Simeon Lennox lingered behind the others.

“I’m a-comin’ right along, Abby,” he called to his housekeeper when she
started to leave the room. “If ye go to bed afore I come, mind ye put
the cat out, so she won’t get afoul of that pig meat in the pantry.”
Simeon spoke with cool disregard of the distressed sobs and moans with
which the woman was making her exit.

“D’ye hear what I say, Abby?” he called, sharply, when she did not
reply.

The housekeeper groaned a faint assent over her shoulder as she crossed
the threshold.

“Well, mind ye don’t forgit it,” said Simeon, “for I tell ye what ’tis,
if that cat does git afoul of that pig meat, there’ll be a jedgement
afore Thursday.”

The old man clamped leisurely across the room, drew an arm-chair close
to the fire, and settled into it with a grunting yawn.

“Fire feels good,” he remarked. His voice was thick, for he had tobacco
in his mouth.

“Woe be unto you, Simeon Lennox, if you can still think of the comfort
of your poor body which will soon be ashes,” cried his sister-in-law.
She waved before him like a pale flame; her white face seemed fairly
luminous.

Simeon shifted his tobacco into one cheek as he stared at her. “You’d
better go to bed, Sophy Anne; you’re gittin’ highstericky,” said he,
and chewed again.

“Woe be unto you, fer the bed you shall lie on, unless you repent,
Simeon Lennox!”

“Look at here, Sophy Anne,” said Simeon, “ain’t you got no mince-pies
in the house?”

Mrs. Lennox looked at him, speechless, for a moment.

“If you have,” Simeon went on, “I wish you’d give me a piece. I ’ain’t
had no mince-pie fit to eat I dun’no’ when. Abby Mosely wa’n’t never
much of a cook, and sence she’s took to goin’ to your meetin’ here
three times a day, it’s much as ever’s I get anything. It ain’t no
more’n fair, Sophy Anne, that you should give me a piece of mince-pie,
if you’ve got any.”

Mrs. Lennox broke in upon him with a cry which was almost a shriek. “I
shall make no more pies in this world, Simeon Lennox. Woe be unto you!
Woe be unto you if you think of such things in the face of death and
eternal condemnation!”

Solomon Lennox had followed the departing people into the yard. His
exhorting voice could still be heard out there, for the doors were open.

Simeon looked around and shivered. “If you ’ain’t got no mince-pie, I
wish you’d shet that door, Sophy Anne,” he said.

Sophia Anne Lennox stood looking at him for a minute. He chuckled in
her face. She snatched a candle from the shelf and went out of the room
with an air of desperation.

Melissa rose up and crept after her, her face like a drooping white
flower, gliding so closely in her mother’s wake that she seemed to have
no individual motion of her own. Simeon looked hard at her as she went.

“Sophy Anne is wiry,” he said, when his brother came in. “She’ll go it
all right if the wires don’t snap, an’ I reckon they won’t; but you’d
better look out for Melissy. She can’t stan’ such tearin’ work as this
very long. She’ll have a fever or somethin’.”

“What matters that?” cried Solomon. “What matters any tribulation
of the flesh when the end of all flesh is at hand?” His voice was
hoarse with his long clamor. He leaned over and shook a nervous fist
impressively before his brother’s face.

Simeon chewed on, and looked at the fist without winking. “You don’t
mean to say, Solomon Lennox,” said he at length, “that you believe all
this darned tomfoolery?”

His brother looked at him with solemn wrath. “Do I believe revelation
and the prophets?” he cried. “Woe be unto all scoffers, even though
they be my own flesh and blood!”

“Now, Solomon, I’ll jest stump ye to point out any passage in the
Scripturs that says, up an’ down, square an’ fair, that the world’s
comin’ to an end next Thursday. I’ll jest stump ye to do it.”

“There are passages that point to the truth, and I have repeated them
to-night,” replied Solomon, hotly.

“Passages that ye’ve had to twist hind-side foremost, an’ bottom-side
up, an’ add, an’ subtract, an’ divide, an’ multiply, an’ hammer, an’
saw, an’ bile down, an’ take to a grist-mill, afore you got at the
meanin’ you wanted,” returned his brother, contemptuously. “That
ain’t the kind of passage I’m after. There’s too much two-facedness
an’ double-dealin’ about the Scripturs anyway, judgin’ by some of you
folks. What I want is a square up an’ down passage that says, without
no chance of its meanin’ anything else, ‘The world is comin’ to an end
next week Thursday.’ I stump ye to show me sech a passage as that. _Ye
can’t do it!_”

The habits of a lifetime are strong even in strained and exalted
states, acting like the lash of a familiar whip. Solomon Lennox was
the younger brother; all his life he had borne a certain docility of
attitude towards Simeon, which asserted itself now.

The fervid orator stood for a moment silent before this sceptical,
sneering elder brother. “I’d like to know how you account for Lonny’s
drawin’s,” he said at length, in a tone which he might have used when
bullied by Simeon in their boyhood.

“Drawin’s,” drawled Simeon, and sarcasm itself seemed to hiss in the
final s--“dr-r-awin’s! The little scamp is sharp as steel, an’ he’s
watched an’ he’s eyed till he’s put two an’ two together. It’s easy
enough to account for the drawin’s. The air here has been so thick
lately with wings an’ wheels an’ horns an’ trumpets an’ everlastin’
fire that anybody that wa’n’t an idgit could breathe it in. An’ I miss
my guess if his mother ’ain’t showed him the picturs in the big Bible
mor’n once when you’ve been talkin’, an’ pointed out the hearth fire
an’ the candlesticks an’ the powder-horn. Sophy Anne’s sharp, an’ she’s
done more to learn that boy than anybody knows of, though I’ve got my
doubts now as to how straight he’s really got it in his mind. Lord,
them drawin’s ain’t nothin’. Solomon Lennox, you can’t look me in the
face an’ say that you actilly believe all this darned tomfoolery!”

Solomon for these few minutes had been on the old level of a brotherly
argument, but now he arose suddenly to his latter heights.

“I believe that the end of the world is near, that the great and
dreadful day of the Lord is at hand, accordin’ to prophecy and
revelation,” he proclaimed, and his eyes shone under his high forehead
as under a majestic dome of thought and inspiration.

Simeon whistled. “Ye don’t, though. Look at here, Solomon; tell ye what
I’ll do. I’ll put ye to the test. Look at here, you say the world’s
comin’ to an end next Thursday. Well, it stands to reason if it is,
that you ’ain’t got no more need of temporal goods. S’pose--you give me
a deed of this ’ere farm?”

Solomon stared at his brother.

Simeon shook his fist at him slowly. “_Ye won’t do it_,” he said, with
a triumphant chuckle.

“I _will_ do it.”

“Git Lawyer Bascombe to draw up the papers to-morrow?”

“_I will_.”

“Me to take possession by daylight next Friday mornin’, if the world
don’t come to an end Thursday night?”

“_Yes_,” replied Solomon, hurling the word at his brother like a stone.

Simeon got up and buttoned his coat over his lean chest. “Well,” said
he, “I’ve had pretty hard luck. I’ve lost three wives, and I’ve been
burnt out twice, an’ the last house ain’t none too tight. I’ll move
right in here next Friday mornin’ at daylight. Mebbe I’ll get married
again.”

“Much good will the heaping up of barns an’ storehouses do when you
hear the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Thou fool, this night shall thy
soul be required of thee,’” returned his brother; but he spoke the
fervid words with a certain feebleness. All his life since he was a
boy had Solomon Lennox toiled and saved to own this noble farm. The
bare imagination of giving it up to another cost him much, although he
firmly believed that in a week’s space it would be only a modicum of
the blackened ashes of a world. He stood the test of his faith, but he
felt the scorch of sacrificial flame.

“It ain’t me that’s the fool,” said Simeon, shrugging himself into his
great-coat. “I ain’t goin’ to hang back with my soul when it’s required
of me, but I ain’t goin’ to keep chuckin’ of it in the face of the Lord
afore He’s ready for it, like some folks I know. Them’s the fools.
When’ll you be down to Lawyer Bascombe’s to-morrow, Solomon, to deed
away these barns an’ storehouses that you ’ain’t no more use for?”

“I’ll be down there at nine o’clock to-morrow mornin’.”

“All right; you can count on me,” said Simeon. He went out, and
Solomon bolted the door after him promptly. But he had no sooner
returned to the kitchen than there came a sharp tap on the window, and
there was Simeon’s hard leering old face pressed against the pane.
“You’ll--have--to--fetch Sophy Anne down there to-morrow,” he called.
“She’ll--have to sign that deed too, or it won’t stan’.”

“All right,” shouted Solomon, and the face at the window, with a
parting nod, disappeared.

Lawyer Bascombe’s office was in the centre of the village, over the
store. A steep flight of stairs at the right of the store led to it. Up
these stairs, at nine o’clock the next morning, climbed Solomon Lennox
and his wife Sophia Anne, with pale devoted faces, and signed away all
their earthly goods as an evidence of their faith.

In some way the matter had become known in the village. When Solomon
and Sophia Anne came down the stairs there was quite a crowd before the
door, standing back with awed curiosity to let them pass. Simeon Lennox
did not leave at once after the signing of the deed. When he appeared
in the doorway with a roll of paper in his hand the crowd had dispersed.

Without any doubt this act of Solomon Lennox and his wife materially
strengthened their cause. When it became known that they had
actually signed away their property in their confidence that days of
property-holding were over, even scoffers began to look serious. That
evening the meeting at Solomon Lennox’s house numbered a third more
than usual. The next evening it was doubled, and the best room as well
as the kitchen was filled. Solomon stood at the foot of the stairs in
the entry between the rooms and exhorted, while the deaf-and-dumb boy’s
slate circulated among the awe-stricken people.

Isaac Penfield came to no more meetings, and he did not see Melissa
again until Tuesday. Late Tuesday afternoon she went up to the village
store with a basket of eggs. The days of barter were nearly over,
as she had been taught to believe, but there was no molasses in the
house, and the poor deaf-and-dumb boy was weeping for it with uncouth
grief, and could not be comforted by the prospect of eternal joys.
When Melissa came out of the store with the bottle of molasses in her
basket, Isaac Penfield’s bay mare and chaise were drawn up before the
platform, and Isaac stood waiting. Melissa started and colored when she
saw him.

“Get in, please,” he said, motioning her towards the chaise.

She looked at him falteringly.

“Get in, please, Melissa; I want to speak to you.”

The bay mare was restive, tossing her head and pawing with one delicate
fore foot. Isaac could scarcely keep her quiet until Melissa got in.
When he took the reins she gave a leap forward, and the chaise swung
about with a lurch. Isaac threw himself back and held the reins taut;
the mare flew down the road, pulling hard on her bits; the chaise
rocked high on the frozen road. Melissa sat still, her delicate face
retired within the dark depths of her silk hood.

Isaac did not speak to her until they reached the foot of a long hill.
“I want to ask you something,” he said then, with a wary eye still on
the straining shoulders of the mare. “I want to ask you again to give
this up.”

Melissa did not speak.

“Won’t you promise me?”

“I can’t,” she said, faintly.

“You can if you will.” Suddenly Isaac leaned over her. “Won’t you
promise _me_, Melissa?”

She shrank away from him. “I--can’t. I believe father.”

“Melissa, you don’t.”

“I do,” said she, with a despairing sob.

Isaac Penfield bent his face down close to hers. “Can’t you believe me
as well as your father? Melissa, look at me.”

Melissa bent her head down over her hands.

“Look at me, Melissa.”

She raised her head slowly as if there were a constraining hand under
her chin, and her eyes met his.

“Can’t you, Melissa?”

Fair locks of hair fell over the girl’s gentle cheeks; her soft mouth
quivered. It seemed as if her piteous blue eyes were only upheld by
the look in the young man’s, and as if all the individual thought and
purpose in her face and her whole soul were being overcast by his
imperious will, but she shook her head.

“Can’t you, Melissa?”

She shook her head again.

Isaac Penfield’s face turned white. He touched the whip to the mare,
and she gave a sharp bound forward. They had not much farther to go.
Neither of them spoke again until Isaac assisted Melissa out of the
chaise at her own gate.

“Good-bye,” he said then, shortly.

Melissa looked up at him and caught her breath. She could not speak.
Isaac sprang into his chaise, and was out of the yard with a sharp
grate of wheels, and she went into the house.

Her mother was setting chairs in order for the evening meeting. She
looked up sharply as Melissa entered.

“Who was that brought you home?” said she.

“Isaac Penfield,” replied Melissa, turning her face from her mother’s
eyes.

“I hope you ain’t letting your thoughts dwell on anything of that kind
now,” said her mother.

“I met him as I was coming out of the store, and he asked me to ride. I
sha’n’t ever see him again,” Melissa returned, faintly.

The deaf-and-dumb boy had been dozing with gaping mouth in his
chimney-corner. Now he waked, and caught sight of his sister and the
basket, and hastened to her with a cry of uncouth hunger and greediness.

“In a minute, sonny,” Melissa said, in a sobbing voice; “wait a
minute.” She held the basket aloof while she removed her hood and shawl.

“You may see him on his way to the outer darkness,” said her mother,
with solemn vindictiveness.

“Mother, he has repented; he is a member of the church,” Melissa cried
out, with sudden sharpness.

“Repentance avails nothing without faith,” returned her mother, setting
down a chair so heavily that the deaf-and-dumb boy started at the
concussion and looked about him wonderingly.

“He has repented; he is a member of the church; he is safe,” Melissa
cried again.

“I tell you he is not,” said her mother.

Melissa went into the pantry with her brother at her elbow, and
prepared for him a plate of bread and molasses. The tears fell over
her cheeks, but Alonzo noticed nothing. His greedy eyes were fixed on
the food. When it was ready for him he sat down on his stool in the
chimney-corner and devoured it with loud smacks of his lips. That was
all the evening meal prepared in the Lennox house that night. After
the chairs were set in order for the meeting, Melissa and her mother
sat down close to the fire and sewed on some white stuff which flowed
in voluminous folds over their knees to the floor. Solomon came in
presently, and seated himself with the great Bible on his knees. He
read silently, but now and then gesticulated fiercely, as if he read
aloud.

The meeting began at half-past six. About a quarter of an hour before,
the outer door was heard opening, and there was a shuffling step and a
clearing cough in the entry.

“It’s your uncle Simeon,” whispered Mrs. Lennox to Melissa, and her
mouth took on a severer tension.

Solomon frowned over the Holy Writ on his knee.

Simeon advanced into the room, his heavy boots clapping the floor
with a dull clatter as of wood, dispelling the solemn stillness. His
grinning old face, blue with the cold, was sunk in the collar of his
great-coat. He rubbed his hands together as he approached the fire.

“Well, how are ye all?” he remarked, with a chuckle, as if there were a
joke in the speech.

Nobody replied. Simeon pulled a chair up close to the fire and sat down.

“It’s tarnal cold,” said he, leaning over and spreading out his old
hands to the blaze.

“The brands are all ready for the burning,” said his sister-in-law, in
a hollow, trembling voice. She drew a long thread through the white
stuff on her knee.

Simeon turned suddenly and looked at her with a flash of small bright
eyes. Then he laughed. “Lord bless ye, Sophy Anne, I forgot how tarnal
hot you folks are calculatin’ to have it day after to-morrow,” said
he. “Well, if you fail in your calculations, an’ the cold continues,
I shall be mighty glad to come in here. My house is darned cold this
weather, and Abby Mosely ain’t particular ’bout the doors; seems to
me sometimes as if I was settin’ in a hurricane the heft of the time,
and as if my idees were gettin’ on a slant. Abby thinks she’s goin’ up
Thursday, and I wish in thunder she would. I wouldn’t have her another
day, if she wa’n’t a lone woman and nowheres to go. She ain’t no kind
of a cook. Look at here, Sophy Anne--”

Mrs. Lennox sewed on with compressed lips.

“Sophy Anne, look at here. You ’ain’t got no mince-pies on hand now,
have you?”

“No, I ’ain’t.”

“Well, I didn’t much s’pose you’d made any, you’ve been so busy gettin’
ready to fly lately. Look at here, Sophy Anne, don’t you feel as if you
could roll me out a few mince-pies to-morrow, hey?”

Mrs. Lennox looked at him.

“I dun’no’ when I’ve eat a decent mince-pie,” pursued Simeon. “Abby
Mosely keeps the commandments, but she can’t make pies that’s fit to
eat. I ’ain’t had a mince-pie I could eat since my last wife died. I
wish you’d contrive an’ roll me out a few, Sophy Anne. Your mince-pies
used to go ahead of Maria’s; she always said they did. If the world
don’t come to an end day after to-morrow, I’d take a sight of comfort
with ’em, and I’ll be darned, if it does come to an end, if I don’t
think I’d have a chance to eat one or two of ’em before the fire got
round to me. Can’t ye do it, Sophy Anne, nohow?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Can’t ye roll me out just half a dozen mince-pies?”

“I will never roll out a mince-pie for you, Simeon Lennox,” said Sophia
Anne, with icy fervor.

“Ye never will?”

“No, I never will.” Sophia Anne’s stern eyes in their hollow blue
orbits met his.

Simeon chuckled; then he turned to his brother. “Well, Sol’mon, s’pose
you’re flappin’ all ready to fly?” he said.

Solomon made no reply. He frowned over the great volume on his knees.
The deaf-and-dumb boy had set his empty plate on the hearth and fallen
asleep again, with his head tilted against the jamb. Melissa sewed, her
pale face bent closely over her work.

“Hear ye are goin’ to fly from Penfield’s hill?” said Simeon.

Still Solomon said nothing.

“Well, I s’pose that’s as good a place as any,” said Simeon, “though
’tain’t a very high hill. I should ’most think you’d want a higher hill
than Penfield’s. I s’pose you’ll be kind of unhandy with your wings
at first, an’ start off something like hens. But then I s’pose a few
feet more or less won’t make no odds when they get fairly to workin’. I
heard the women was makin’ flyin’-petticoats. Them what you’re to work
on, Sophy Anne, you and Melissy?”

Sophia Anne gave one look at him, then she took a stitch.

“Abby Mosely’s to work on one, I guess,” said Simeon. “She’s ben
a-settin’ in a heap of white cloth a-sewin’ for three days. I came in
once, an’ she was tryin’ of it on, an’ she slipped out of it mighty
sudden. All I’ve got to say is she’ll cut a queer figure flyin’. She’s
pretty hefty. I miss my guess if she don’t find it a job to strike out
at first. Now I should think you might take to flyin’ pretty natural,
Sophy Anne.”

Mrs. Lennox’s pale face was flushed with anger, but she sewed on
steadily.

“As for Melissy,” said Simeon, in his chuckling drawl, “I ruther guess
she could fly without much practice too. She’s built light; but it
strikes me she’d better have a weddin’-gown than a flyin’-petticoat.
Young Penfield goin’ to fly with you, Melissy?”

Solomon Lennox closed the Bible with a great clap. “I’ll have no more
of this!” he said, with a shout of long-repressed fury.

“Now, Solomon, don’t ye get riled so near the end of the world,”
drawled his brother, getting up slowly. “I’m a-goin’. I ain’t goin’
to be the means of makin’ you backslide when ye’re so nigh the top of
Zion’s Hill. I’m a-goin’ home. I don’t s’pose I shall get no supper on
account of Abby’s hurryin’ up on her flyin’-petticoat. Sure you ain’t
goin’ to make them mince-pies for me, Sophy Anne?”

“Yes, I be sure.”

The brother-in-law thrust his sharp old face down close to Sophia
Anne’s. “Sure?” he repeated.

Sophia Anne started back and stared at him. There was something strange
in his manner.

The old man laughed, and straightened himself. “Well, I’m a-goin’,”
said he. “Good-bye. Mebbe I sha’n’t see ye again before ye fly. Hope
ye’ll light easy. Good-bye.”

After Simeon had closed the door, he opened it again, and thrust his
sharp features through a narrow aperture. “Look at here, Solomon,” said
he. “Mind ye leave the key in the door when ye go out to fly Thursday
night. I want to come right in.” Then Simeon shut the door again, but
his malicious laugh could be plainly heard in the entry.

He did not go straight home as he had said, but up the road to Lawyer
Bascombe’s office. When he returned, the meeting in his brother’s house
was in session, and the windows were dark with heads against the red
firelight. Old Simeon stared up at them, and laughed aloud to himself
as he went by. “Sophy Anne won’t make me no mince-pies. She’s sure
on’t,” he said, and laughed again.

The next day all the ordinary routine of life seemed at a standstill
in the village. The storekeeper had become a convert, the store was
closed, and the green inside shutters were fastened. Now and then
a village loafer lounged disconsolately up, shook the door on its
rattling lock, stared at the shuttered windows, then lounged away,
muttering. The summer resting-place of his kind, the long, bewhittled
wooden bench on the store platform, could not be occupied that wintry
day. The air was clear, and the dry pastures were white and stiff with
the hoar-frost; the slants of the roofs glistened with it in the sun.
The breaths of the people going to and from Solomon Lennox’s house were
like white smoke. The meeting began at dawn. Children were dragged
hither at their parents’ heels, cold and breakfastless. Not a meal was
cooked that day in the houses of Solomon Lennox’s followers. All the
precious hours were spent in fasting and prayer. Towards night the
excitement deepened. There was present within the village a spiritual
convulsion as real as any other convulsion of nature, and as truly
although more subtly felt. Even they who had scoffed and laughed at
this new movement from the first, and were now practically untouched by
it, grew nervous and ill at ease towards night as from the gathering of
a storm. The air seemed charged with electricity generated by the touch
of human thought and faith with the Unknown. The unbelievers pressed
their faces against the window-panes, shading their eyes from the
light within as the dusk deepened, or stood out in their yards watching
the sky, half fearful they should indeed see some sign or marvel
therein.

But the night came on, and the stars shone out in their order as they
had done from the first, and there was no sign but the old one of
eternal love and beauty in the sky. The moon arose at nine o’clock,
nearly at her full. That, from some interpretation of symbolical
characters on the deaf-and-dumb boy’s slate, had been fixed upon as the
hour of meeting upon Penfield’s hill. The solemn and dreadful moment
which was to mark the climax of all creation was expected between that
hour and dawn.

At half-past eight white-robed figures began to move along the road.
People peeped around their curtains to see them pass; now and then
belated children ran shrieking with terror into the houses at sight of
them.

Beside the road, close to the gate which led to the wide field at the
foot of Penfield’s hill, under the shadow of a clump of hemlocks, Isaac
Penfield had been waiting since quarter past eight o’clock. When the
white company came in sight he drew farther back within the shadow,
scanning the people eagerly as they passed.

Solomon Lennox and Deacon Scranton let down the bars, and the people
passed through silently, crowding each other whitely like a flock of
sheep. Sophia Anne, the deaf-and-dumb boy holding fast to her hand, was
among the first.

Isaac had expected to see Melissa close to her mother; but she had
become separated from her and came among the last.

Her slender figure was hidden in her flowing white robes, but there was
no mistaking her gentle faltering gait and the delicate bend of her
fair uncovered head.

Isaac stepped forward suddenly, threw his arm around Melissa, and
drew her back with him within the shadow of the hemlocks. Nobody saw
it but Abby Mosely, Simeon Lennox’s housekeeper, and she was too
panic-stricken to heed it intelligently; she went panting on after the
others in her voluminous white robe, and left Melissa alone with Isaac
Penfield.

Isaac pressed Melissa’s head close to his breast, leaned his face down
to hers, and whispered long in her ear. She listened trembling and
unresisting; then she broke away from him weakly, “I can’t, I can’t,”
she moaned. But he caught her again, and whispered again with his lips
close to her soft pale cheek, and frequent kisses between the words.

“Come, now, sweetheart,” he said at length, and attempted to draw her
with him into the road; but she pulled herself away from him again, and
stood warding him off with her white-draped arms.

“I can’t, I can’t,” she moaned again. “I must go with father and
mother.”

“I tell you they are wrong; can’t you believe me?”

“I--must--go with them.”

“No; come with me, Melissa.”

Melissa, still with her arms raised against him, looked away over the
meadow, full of moving white figures. The moon shone out over it, and
it gleamed like a field of Paradise peopled with angels. Then she
looked up in her lover’s face, and suddenly it was to her as if she saw
therein the new earth of all her dreams.

Solomon Lennox and his followers kept on to Penfield’s hill, which
arose before them crowned with silver, and Isaac Penfield hastened down
the road to the village, half carrying Melissa’s little white-clad
figure, wrapped against the cold in his own gray cloak.

Early the next morning a small company of pallid shivering people crept
through the village to their homes. Many had weakened and deserted
long before dawn, chilled to their very thoughts and fancies by their
long vigil on the hill-top. Young girls ran home, crying aloud like
children, and men half dragged hysterical wives rigid with chills.
Solomon Lennox and his wife remained until the dawn light shone; then
he beckoned to her and the whimpering deaf-and-dumb boy, and led the
way down the hill without a word. He never looked at the rest of the
company, but they followed silently.

The Penfield house was about a quarter of a mile from the pasture bars.
When they reached it, Isaac stood waiting at the gate. He went up to
Solomon, who was passing without a look, and touched his arm with an
impatient yet respectful gesture. “You and Mrs. Lennox and Lonny had
better come in here, I think,” he said.

Solomon was moving on with dull obstinacy, but Isaac laid his hand
on his arm. “I--think you have--forgotten,” he said. “I am sorry,
but--your brother Simeon has--taken possession of your house.”

Solomon stared at him dully. He did not seem to comprehend. Sophia Anne
looked as blue and bloodless in her white robe as if she were dead.
She had scarce more control of her trembling tongue than if it were
paralyzed, but her highly strung feminine nerves gave out vibrations
still.

“Has Simeon took possession?” she demanded, fiercely.

Isaac Penfield nodded. “I think it would be pleasanter for you to come
in here now,” he said. Then he hesitated, and colored suddenly. “Your
daughter is in here,” he added.

Sophia Anne gave a keen glance at him. Then she turned in at the
gate with a sharp twitch at the arm of the deaf-and-dumb boy, who
was making strange cries and moans, like a distressed animal. “Come,
father,” she called, impatiently; and Solomon also entered the Penfield
gate with a piteous, dazed air.

In the great south room of the Penfield house were Melissa and Mrs.
Martha Joyce, the housekeeper. Mrs. Joyce was mixing something in a
steaming bowl; Melissa sat still, gazing at the fire. She was dressed
in a blue satin gown and fine lace tucker, which had belonged to Isaac
Penfield’s mother. Madam Penfield had been nearly Melissa’s size, and
the gown fitted her slender figure daintily. She sat with her fair head
bent, the color coming and going in her soft cheeks, as if from her own
thoughts. Her little hands were folded in her blue satin lap, and on
one finger gleamed a great pearl, which Madam Penfield had used to wear.

When the door opened and her parents entered, she half started up, with
a great blush; then she sank back, trembling and pale.

Isaac Penfield crossed over to her, and laid his hand on her shoulder.
“She is my wife,” he said. “We were married last night.”

Sophia Anne made a faint gesture, which might have expressed anything.
Solomon staggered to a chair without a look. In truth, when they
entered the warm room, and the long strain of resistance against cold
and fatigue ceased, exhaustion overcame them. Mrs. Joyce administered
hot porridge and cordials, and Melissa knelt down in her blue satin and
rubbed her mother’s benumbed hands.

Solomon took whatever was offered him, meekly, like a child. His face
was changed; the look which it had worn during the greater part of
his life, the expression of himself within his old worn channel, had
returned.

He was sitting by the fire, sipping cordial, when his brother Simeon
came in; he had not even noticed the brazen clang of the knocker.

Simeon came tiptoeing around in front of his brother, thrust down his
face on a level with his, and peered at him with a sharp twinkle of
black eyes. Then he looked at Sophia Anne, and chuckled. “’Pears to me
wings didn’t work very well,” said he.

Simeon had a roll of paper in his hand. He went to the desk, and spread
it out ostentatiously. Then he began to read in a high, solemn voice,
with an undertone of merriment in it. “Know all men by these presents,”
began Simeon Lennox, and read straight through the deed, with all its
strange legal formalities, by which his brother Solomon had conveyed
his worldly goods to him.

Sophia Anne writhed in her chair as Simeon read. She was on a rack of
torture, and every new word was a turn of the screw. Solomon set his
tumbler of cordial on the hearth, and rested his head on his hands.

After Simeon had finished reading the deed, he paused for a moment.
Sophia Anne gave a dry sob.

Then Simeon cleared his throat, and continued: “The foregoing I do
hereby declare null and void, and I do hereby remise, release, sell,
and forever quitclaim, for myself and my heirs, by these presents, the
aforementioned premises, with all the privileges and appurtenances
thereunto belonging, to the said Solomon Lennon, his heirs and assigns
forever, in consideration that Sophia Anne, the wife of said Solomon
Lennox, shall, during the term of her natural life, unless she be
prevented by sickness from so doing, make, mix, season, and bake for
me with her own hands, with her best skill, according to her own
conscience, seven mince pies during every week of the year, with one
extra for every Independence and Thanksgiving day, and that the said
Sophia Anne, the wife of the said Solomon Lennox, shall hereunto set
her hand and seal.”

Simeon looked at Sophia Anne. She stared back at him, speechless.

“Well, what ye goin’ to do about it, Sophy Anne?” said Simeon.

Sophia Anne still looked at him as if he were a blank wall against
which her very spirit had been brought to a standstill.

“Goin’ to sign it, Sophy Anne?”

Sophia Anne got up. Her knees trembled, but she motioned back Isaac
Penfield’s proffered arm. She went to the desk, sat down, took the
quill, dipped it carefully in the inkstand, and shook it lest it blot.
Her lean arm crooked as stiffly as a stick, her lips were a blue line,
but she wrote her name with sharply rippling strokes, and laid the pen
down.

“Sure ye won’t make them mince pies, Sophy Anne?” said Simeon.

Sophia Anne made no reply. She put her elbow on the desk, and leaned
her head on her hand. Simeon looked at her a moment, then he gave her a
rough pat on her shoulder and turned and went to the window, and stood
there, staring out.

Melissa was weeping softly; Isaac stood beside her, smoothing her hair
tenderly. The deaf-and-dumb boy’s fair head hung helplessly over his
shoulder. He had fallen asleep with the tears on his cheeks.

The morning sunlight shone broadly into the room over them all, but
Solomon Lennox did not seem to heed that or anything that was around
him, sitting sadly within himself: a prophet brooding over the ashes of
his own prophetic fire.

THE LITTLE MAID AT THE DOOR

Joseph Bayley and his wife Ann came riding down from Salem village.
They had started from their home in Newbury the day before, and had
stayed overnight with their relative, Sergeant Thomas Putnam, in Salem
village; they were on their way to the election in Boston. The road
wound along through the woods from Salem to Lynn; it was some time
since they had passed a house.

May was nearly gone; the pinks and the blackberry vines were in flower.
All the woods were full of an indefinite and composite fragrance,
made up of the breaths of myriads of green plants and seen and unseen
blossoms, like a very bouquet of spring. The newly leaved trees cast
shadows that were as much a part of the tender surprise of the spring
as the new flowers. They flickered delicately before Joseph Bayley and
his wife Ann on the grassy ridges of the road, but they did not remark
them. Their own fancies cast gigantic projections which eclipsed the
sweet show of the spring and almost their own personalities. That year
the leaves came out and the flowers bloomed in vain for the people in
and about Salem village. There was epidemic a disease of the mind which
deafened and blinded to all save its own pains.

Ann Bayley on the pillion snuggled closely against her husband’s back;
her fearful eyes peered at the road around his shoulder. She was a
young and handsome woman; she had on her best mantle of sad-colored
silk, and a fine black hood with a topknot, but she did not think of
that.

“Joseph, what is that in the road before us?” she whispered, timorously.

He pulled up the horse with a great jerk. “Where?” he whispered back.

“There! there! at the right; just beyond that laurel thicket. ’Tis
somewhat black, an’ it moves. There! there! Oh, Joseph!”

Joseph Bayley sat stiff and straight in his saddle, like a soldier; his
face was pale and stern, his eyes full of horror and defiance.

“See you it?” Ann whispered again. “There! now it moves. What is it?”

“I see it,” said Joseph, in a loud, bold voice. “An’ whatever it be, I
will yield not to it; an’ neither will you, goodwife.”

Ann reached around and caught at the reins. “Let us go back,” she
moaned, faintly. “Oh, Joseph, let us not pass it. My spirit faints
within me. I see its back among the laurel blooms. ’Tis the black beast
they tell of. Let us turn back, Joseph, let us turn back!”

“Be still, woman!” returned her husband, jerking the reins from her
hand. “What think ye ’twould profit us to turn back to Salem village?
I trow if there be one black beast here, there is a full herd of them
there. There is naught left but to ride past it as best we may. Sit
fast, an’ listen you not to it, whatever it promise you.” Joseph looked
down the road towards the laurel bushes, his muscles now as tense as
a bow. Ann hid her face on his shoulder. Suddenly he shouted, with a
great voice like a herald: “Away with ye, ye cursed beast! away with
ye! We are not of your kind; we are gospel folk. We have naught to do
with you or your master. Away with ye!”

The horse leaped forward. There was a great cracking among the laurel
bushes at the right, a glossy black back and some white horns heaved
over them, then some black flanks plunged heavily out of sight.

“Oh!” shrieked Ann, “has it gone? Goodman, has it gone?”

“The Lord hath delivered us from the snare of the enemy,” answered
Joseph, solemnly.

“What looked it like, Joseph, what looked it like?”

“Like no beast that was saved in the ark.”

“Had it fiery eyes?” asked Ann, trembling.

“’Tis well you did not see them.”

“Ride fast! oh, ride fast!” Ann pleaded, clutching hard at her
husband’s cloak. “It may follow on our track.” The horse went down the
road at a quick trot. Ann kept peering back and starting at every sound
in the woods. “Do you mind the tale Samuel Endicott told last night?”
she said, shuddering. “How on his voyage to Barbadoes he, sitting on
the windlass on a bright moonshining night, was shook violently, and
saw the appearance of that witch Goody Bradbury, with a white cap and a
white neckcloth on her? It was a dreadful tale.”

“It was naught to the sight of Mercy Lewis and Sergeant Thomas Putnam’s
daughter Ann, when they were set upon and nigh choked to death by Goody
Proctor. Know you that within a half-mile we must pass the Proctor
house?”

Ann gave a shuddering sigh. “I would I were home again!” she moaned.
“They said ’twas full of evil things, and that the black man himself
kept tavern there since Goodman Proctor and his wife were in jail. Did
you mind what Goodwife Putnam said of the black head, like a hog’s,
that Goodman Perley saw at the keeping-room window as he passed, and
the rumbling noises, and the yellow birds that flew around the chimney
and twittered in a psalm tune? Oh, Joseph, there is a yellow bird now
in the birch-tree--see! see!”

They had come into a little space where the woods were thinner. Joseph
urged his horse forward.

“We will not slack our pace for any black beasts nor any yellow birds,”
he cried, in a valiant voice.

There was a passing gleam of little yellow wings above the birch-tree.

“He has flown away,” said Ann. “’Tis best to front them as you do,
goodman, but I have not the courage. That looked like a common
yellow-bird; his wings shone like gold. Think you it has gone forward
to the Proctor house?”

“It matters not, so it but fly up before us,” said Joseph Bayley.

He was somewhat older than Ann; fair-haired and fair-bearded, with blue
eyes set so deeply under heavy brows that they looked black. His face
was at once stern and nervous, showing not only the spirit of warfare
against his foes, but the elements of strife within himself.

They rode on, and the woods grew thicker; the horse’s hoofs made only a
faint liquid pad on the mossy road. Suddenly he stopped and whinnied.
Ann clutched her husband’s arm; they sat motionless, listening; the
horse whinnied again.

Suddenly Joseph started violently, and stared into the woods on the
left, and Ann also. A long defile of dark evergreens stretched up the
hill, with mysterious depths of blue-black shadows between them; the
air had an earthy dampness.

Joseph shook the reins fiercely over the horse’s back, and shouted to
him in a loud voice.

“Did you see it?” gasped Ann, when they had come into a lighter place.
“Was it not a black man?”

“Fear not; we have outridden him,” said her husband, setting his thin
intense face proudly ahead.

“I would we were safe home in Newbury,” Ann moaned. “I would we had
never set out. Think you not Dr. Mather will ride back from Boston with
us to keep the witches off? I will bide there forever, if he will not.
I will never come this dreadful road again, else. What is that? Oh,
what is that? ’Tis a voice coming out of the woods like a great roar.
_Joseph!_ What is _that_? That was a black cat run across the road
into the bushes. ’Twas a black cat. Joseph, let us turn back! No; the
black man is behind us, and the beast. What shall we do? What shall we
do? Oh, oh, I begin to twitch like Ann and Mercy last night! My feet
move, and I cannot stop them! Now there is a pin thrust in my arm! I am
pinched! There are fingers at my throat! Joseph! Joseph!”

“Go to prayer, sweetheart,” shouted Joseph. “Go to prayer. Be not
afraid. ’Twill drive them away. Away with ye, Goody Bradbury! Away,
Goody Proctor! Go to prayer, go to prayer!”

Joseph bent low in the saddle and lashed the horse, which sprang
forward with a mighty bound; the green branches rushed in their faces.
Joseph prayed in a loud voice. Ann clung to him convulsively, panting
for breath. Suddenly they came out of the woods into a cleared space.

“The Proctor house! the Proctor house!” Ann shrieked. “Mercy Lewis
said ’twas full of devils. What shall we do?” She hid her face on her
husband’s shoulder, sobbing and praying.

The Proctor house stood at the left of the road; there were some
peach-trees in front of it, and their blossoms showed in a pink spray
against the gray unpainted walls. On one side of the house was the
great barn, with its doors wide open; on the other, a deep ploughed
field, with the plough sticking in a furrow. John Proctor had been
arrested and thrown into jail for witchcraft in April, before his
spring planting was done.

Joseph Bayley reined in his horse opposite the Proctor house. “Ann,” he
whispered, and his whisper was full of horror.

“What is it?” she returned, wildly.

“Ann, Goodman Proctor looks forth from the chamber window, and Goody
Proctor stands outside by the well, and they are both in jail in
Boston.” Joseph’s whole frame shook in a strange rigid fashion, as if
his joints were locked. “Look, Ann!” he whispered.

“I cannot.”

“Look!”

Ann turned her head. “Why,” she said, and her voice was quite natural
and sweet, it had even a tone of glad relief in it, “I see naught but a
little maid in the door.”

“See you not Goodman Proctor in the window?”

“Nay,” said Ann, smiling; “I see naught but the little maid in the
door. She is in a blue petticoat, and she has a yellow head, but her
little cheeks are pale, I trow.”

“See you not Goodwife Proctor in the yard by the well?” asked Joseph.

“Nay, goodman; I see naught but the little maid in the door. She has
a fair face, but now she falls a-weeping. Oh, I fear lest she be all
alone in the house.”

“I tell you, Goodman Proctor and Goodwife Proctor are both there,”
returned Joseph. “Think you I see not with my own eyes? Goodman Proctor
has on a red cap, and Goodwife Proctor holds a spindle.” He urged on
the horse with a sudden cry. “Now the prayers do stick in my throat,”
he groaned. “I would we were out of this devil’s nest!”

“Oh, Joseph,” implored Ann, “prithee wait a minute! The little maid
is calling ‘mother’ after me. Saw you not how she favored our little
Susanna who died? Hear her! There was naught there but the little maid.
Joseph, I pray you, stop.”

“Nay; I’ll ride till the nag drops,” said Joseph Bayley, with a lash.
“This last be too much. I tell ye they are there, and they are also in
jail. ’Tis hellish work.”

Ann said no more for a little space; a curve in the road hid the
Proctor house from sight. Suddenly she raised a great cry. “Oh! oh!”
she screamed, “’tis gone; ’tis gone from my foot!”

Joseph stopped. “What is gone?”

“My shoe; but now I missed it from my foot. I must alight, and go back
for it.”

Joseph started the horse again.

Ann caught at the reins. “Stop, goodman,” she cried, imperatively. “I
tell you I must have my shoe.”

“And I tell you I’ll stop for no shoe in this place, were it made of
gold.”

“Goodman, you know not what shoe ’tis. ’Tis one of my fine shoes, in
which I have never taken steps. They have the crimson silk lacings. I
have even carried them in my hand to the meeting-house on a Sabbath,
wearing my old ones, and only put them on at the door. Think you I will
lose that shoe? Stop the nag.”

But Joseph kept on grimly.

“Think you I will go barefoot or with one shoe into Boston?” said Ann.
“Know you that these shoes, which were a present from my mother, cost
bravely? I trow you will needs loosen your purse strings well before we
pass the first shop in Boston. Well, go on, an’ you will, when ’tis but
a matter of my slipping down from the pillion and running back a few
yards.”

Joseph Bayley turned his horse about; but Ann remonstrated.

“Nay,” said she; “I want not to go thus. I am tired of the saddle. I
would like to feel my feet for a space.”

Her husband looked around at her with wonder and suspicion. Dark
thoughts came into his mind.

She laughed. “Nay,” said she, “make no such face at me. I go not back
to meet any black man nor sign any book. I go for my fine shoe with the
crimson lacing.”

“’Tis but a moment since you were afraid,” said Joseph. “Have you no
fear now?” His blue eyes looked sharply into hers.

She looked back at him soberly and innocently. “In truth, I feel no
such fear as I did,” she answered. “If I mistake not, your bold front
and your prayers drove away the evil ones. I will say a psalm as I go,
and I trow naught will harm me.”

Ann slipped lightly down from the pillion, and pulled off her one
remaining shoe and her stockings; they were her fine worked silk ones,
and she could not walk in them over the rough road. Then she set forth
very slowly, peering here and there in the undergrowth beside the road,
until she passed the curve and the reach of her husband’s eyes. Then
she gathered up her crimson taffeta petticoat and ran like a deer, with
long graceful leaps, looking neither to right nor left, straight back
to the Proctor house.

In the door of the house stood a tiny girl with a soft shock of yellow
hair. She wore a little straight blue gown, and her baby feet were
bare, curling over the sunny door-step. When she saw Ann coming she
started as if to run; then she stood still, her soft eyes wary, her
mouth quivering.

Ann Bayley ran up quickly, and threw her arms around her, kneeling down
on the step. “What is your name, little maid?” said she, in a loving,
agitated voice.

“Abigail Proctor,” replied the little maid, shyly, in her sweet
childish treble. Then she tried to free herself, but Ann held her fast.

“Nay, be not afraid, sweet,” said she. “I love you. I once had a little
maid like you for my own. Tell me, dear heart, are you all alone in the
house?”

Then the child fell to crying again, and clung around Ann’s neck.

“Is there anybody in the house, sweet?” Ann whispered, fondling her,
and pressing the wet baby cheek to her own.

“The constables came and took them,” sobbed the little maid. “They put
my poppet down the well, and they pulled mother and Sarah down the
road. They took father before that, and Mary Warren did gibe and point.
The constables pulled Benjamin away too. I want my mother.”

“Your mother shall come again,” said Ann. “Take comfort, dear little
heart, they cannot have the will to keep her long away. There, there,
I tell you she shall come. You watch in the door, and you will see her
come down the road.”

She smoothed back the little maid’s yellow hair, and wiped the tears
from her little face with a corner of her beautiful embroidered
neckerchief. Then she saw that the face was all grimy with tears and
dust, and she went over to the well, which was near the door, and drew
a bucket of water swiftly with her strong young arms; then she wet the
corner of the neckerchief and scrubbed the little maid’s face, bidding
her shut her eyes. Then she kissed her over and over.

“Now you are sweet and clean,” said she. “Dear little heart, I have
some sugar cakes in my bag for you, and then I must be gone.”

The little maid looked at her eagerly, her cheeks were waxen, and the
blue veins showed in her full childish forehead. Ann pulled some little
cakes out of a red velvet satchel she wore at her waist, and Abigail
reached out for one with a hungry cry. The tears sprang to Ann’s eyes;
she put the rest of the cakes in a little pile on the door-stone, and
watched the child eat. Then she gathered her up in her arms.

“Good-bye, sweetheart,” she said, kissing the soft trembling mouth, the
sweet hollow under the chin, and the clinging hands. “Before long I
shall come this way again, and do you stand in the door when I go past.”

She put her down and hastened away, but little Abigail ran after her.
Ann stopped and knelt and fondled her again.

“Go back, deary,” she pleaded; “go back, and eat the sugar cakes.”

But this beautiful kind vision in the crimson taffeta, with the rosy
cheeks and sweet black eyes looking out from the French hood, with the
gleam of gold and delicate embroidery between the silken folds of her
mantilla, with the ways like her mother’s, was more to little deserted
Abigail Proctor than the sugar cakes, although she was sorely hungry
for them. She stood aloof with pitiful determined eyes until Ann’s back
was turned, then, as she followed, Ann looked around and saw her and
caught her up again.

“My dear heart, my dear heart,” she said, and she was half sobbing,
“now must you go back, else I fear harm will come to you. My goodman is
waiting for me yonder, and I know not what he will do or say. Nay; you
must go back. I would I could keep you, my little Abigail, but you must
go back.” Ann Bayley put the little maid down and gave her a gentle
push. “Go back,” she said, smiling, with her eyes full of tears; “go
back, and eat the sugar cakes.”

Then she sped on swiftly; as she neared the curve in the road she
thrust a hand in her pocket, and drew forth a dainty shoe with dangling
lacings of crimson silk. She glanced around with a smile and a backward
wave of her hand; the glowing crimson of her petticoat showed for a
minute through the green mist of the undergrowth; then she disappeared.

The little maid Abigail stood still in the road, gazing after her, her
soft pink mouth open, her hands clutching at her blue petticoat, as if
she would thus hold herself back from following. She heard the tramp of
a horse’s feet beyond the curve; then it died away. She turned about
and went back to the house, with the tears rolling over her cheeks; but
she did not sob aloud, as she would have done had her mother been near
to hear. A pitiful conviction of the hopelessness of all the appeals
of grief was stealing over her childish mind. She had been alone in
the house three nights and two days, ever since her sister Sarah and
her brother Benjamin had been arrested for witchcraft and carried to
jail. Long before that her parents, John and Elizabeth Proctor, had
disappeared down the Boston road in charge of the constables. None of
the family was spared save this little Abigail, who was deemed too
young and insignificant to have dealings with Satan, and was therefore
not thrown into prison, but was left alone in the desolate Proctor
house in the midst of woods said to be full of evil spirits and
witches, to die of fright or starvation as she might. There was but
little mercy shown the families of those accused of witchcraft.

“Let some of Goody Proctor’s familiars minister unto the brat,” one of
the constables had said, with a stern laugh, when Abigail had followed
wailing after her brother and sister on the day of their arrest.

“Yea,” said another; “she can send her yellow-bird or her black hog to
keep her company. I wot her tears will be soon dried.”

Then the stoutly tramping horses had borne out of sight and hearing
the mocking faces of the constables; Sarah’s fair agonized one turned
backward towards her little deserted sister, and Benjamin raised a
brave youthful clamor of indignation.

“Let us loose!” Abigail heard him shout; “let us loose, I tell ye! Ye
are fools, rather than we are witches; ye are fools and murderers! Let
us loose, I tell ye!”

Abigail waited long, thinking her brother’s words would prevail; but
neither he nor Sarah returned, and the sounds all died away, and she
went back to the house sobbing. The damp spring night was settling down
in a palpable mist, and the woods seemed full of voices. The little
maid had heard enough of the terrible talk of the day to fill her
innocent head with vague superstitious horror. She threw her apron over
her head and fled blindly through the woods, and now and then she fell
down and bruised herself, and rose up lamenting sorely, with nobody to
hear her.

As soon as she was in the house she shut the doors, and barred them
with the great bars that had been made as protection against Indians,
and now might wax useless against worse than savages, according to the
belief of the colony.

All night long the little maid shrieked and sobbed, and called on her
father and her mother and her sister and her brother. Men faring in
the road betwixt Boston and Salem village heard her with horror, and
fled past with psalm and prayer, their blood cold in their veins.
They related the next day to the raging, terror-stricken people how
at midnight the accursed Proctor house was full of flitting infernal
lights, and howling with devilish spirits, and added a death-dealing
tale of some godly woman of the village who outrode their horses on a
broomstick and disappeared in the Proctor house.

The next day the little maid unbarred the door, and stood there
watching up and down the road for her mother or some other to come. But
they came not, although she watched all day. That night she did not sob
and call out; she had become afraid of her own voice, and discovered
that it had no effect to bring her help. Then, too, early in the night,
she heard noises about the house which frightened her, and made her
think that perchance the dreadful black beast of which she had heard
them discourse was abroad.

The next morning she found that the two horses and the cow and calf
were gone from the barn; also that there was left scarce anything for
her to eat in the house. There had been some loaves of bread, some
boiled meat, and some cakes; now they were all gone, and also all the
meal from the chest, and the potatoes and pork from the cellar. But
for that last she did not care, since she was not old enough to make a
fire and cook. She had left for food only a little cold porridge in a
blue bowl, and that she ate up at once and had no more, and a little
buttermilk in a crock, which, she being not over-fond of it, served
her longer. But that was all she had had for a day and a night, until
Goodwife Ann Bayley gave her the sugar cakes. These she ate up at once
on her return to the house. Then again she stood watching in the door,
but nothing passed along the road save a partridge or a squirrel. It
was accounted a bold thing for any solitary traveller to come this way,
save a witch, and she, it was supposed, might find many comrades in the
woods beside the road and in the Proctor house, which was held to be a
sort of devils’ tavern. But now no witch came, nor any of her uncanny
friends, unless indeed the squirrel and the partridge were familiar
demons in disguise. Nothing was too harmless and simple to escape that
imputation of the devil’s mask.

Abigail took her little pewter porringer from the cupboard, and got
herself a drink of water from the bucketful that Goodwife Bayley had
drawn; then she stood on a stone, and peered into the well, leaning
over the curb. Her poppet was in there, her dear rag doll that Sarah
had made for her, and dressed in a beautiful silver brocade made from
a piece of a wedding-gown that was brought from England. One of the
constables had caught sight of little Abigail Proctor’s poppet, and
being straightway filled with suspicion that it was an image whereby
Goody Proctor afflicted her victims by proxy, had seized it and thrown
it into the well. The other constables had chidden him for such
rashness, saying it should have been carried to Boston and produced as
evidence at the trial; and little Abigail had shrieked out in a panic
for her poppet.

She could see nothing of it now, and she went back to her
watching-place in the door.

In the afternoon she felt sorely hungry again, and searched through the
house for food; then she went out in the sunny fields behind the house,
and found some honeysuckles on the rocks, and sucked the honey greedily
from their horns. On her return to the house she found a corn-cob,
which she snatched up and folded in her apron, and began tending. She
sat down in the doorway in her little chair, which she dragged out of
the keeping-room, and hugged the poor poppet close, and crooned over it.

“Be not afraid,” said she. “I’ll not let the black beast harm you; I
promise you I will not.”

That night she formed a new plan for her solace and protection in
the lonely darkness. All the garments of her lost parents and sister
and brother that she could find she gathered together, and formed in
a circle on the keeping-room floor; then she crept inside with her
corn-cob poppet, and lay there hugging it all night. The next day she
watched again in the door; but now she was weak and faint, and her
little legs trembled so under her that she could not stand to watch,
but sat in her small straight-backed chair, holding her poppet and
peering forth wistfully.

In the course of the day she made shift to creep out into the fields
again, and lying flat on the sun-heated rocks, she sucked some more
honey drops from the honeysuckles. She found, too, on the edge of the
woods, some young wintergreen leaves, and she even pulled some blue
violets and ate them. But the delicate, sweet, and aromatic fare in the
spring larder of nature was poor nourishment for a human baby.

Poor little Abigail Proctor could scarcely creep home, still clinging
fast to her poppet; scarcely lift herself into her chair in the door;
scarcely crawl inside her fairy-ring of her loved ones’ belongings at
night. She rolled herself tightly in an old cloak of her father’s, and
it was a sweet and harmless outcome of the dreadful superstition of the
day, grafted on an innocent childish brain, that it seemed to partake
of the bodily presence of her father, and protect her.

All night long, as she lay there, her mother cooked good meat and broth
and sweet cakes, and she ate her fill of them; but in the morning she
was too weak to turn her little body over. She could not get to her
watching-place in the door, but that made no difference to her, for
she did not fairly know that she was not there. It seemed to her that
she sat in her little chair looking up the road and down the road; she
saw the green branches weaving together, and hiding the sky to the
northward and the southward; she saw the flushes of white and rose
in the flowering undergrowth; she saw the people coming and going.
There were her father and mother now coming with store of food and
presents for her, now following the constables out of sight. There
was that fine pageant passing, as she had seen it pass once before,
of the two magistrates, their worshipful masters John Hathorne and
Jonathan Corwin, with the marshal, constables, and aids, splendid and
awe-inspiring in all their trappings of office, to examine the accused
in the Salem meeting-house. There were the ministers Parris and Noyes
coming, with severe malignant faces, to question her mother as to
whether she had afflicted Mary Warren, their former maid-servant, who
was now bewitched. There went Benjamin, clamoring out boldly at his
captors. There came Sarah with the poppet, which she had drawn out of
the well, shaking the water from its silver brocade.

All this the little maid Abigail Proctor saw through her half-delirious
fancy as she lay weakly on the keeping-room floor, but she saw not the
reality of her sister Sarah coming about four o’clock in the afternoon.

Sarah Proctor, tall and slender, in her limp bedraggled dress, with her
fair severe face set in a circle of red shawl, which she had pinned
under her chin, came resolutely down the road from Boston, driving a
black cow before her with a great green branch. She was nearly fainting
with weariness, but she set her dusty shoes down swiftly among the
road weeds, and her face was as unyielding as an Indian’s.

When she came in sight of the Proctor house she stopped a second.
“Abigail!” she called; “Abigail!”

There was no answer, and she went on more swiftly than before. When she
reached the house she called again, “Abigail!” but did not wait except
while she tied the black cow, by a rope which was around her neck, to
a peach-tree. Then she ran in, and found the little maid, her sister
Abigail, on the floor in the keeping-room.

She got down on her knees beside her, and Abigail smiled up in her face
waveringly. She still thought herself in the door, and that she had
just seen her sister come down the road.

“Abigail, what have they done to you?” asked Sarah, in a sharp voice;
and the little maid only smiled.

“Abigail, Abigail, what is it?” Sarah took hold of the child’s
shoulders and shook her; but she got no word back, only the smile
ceased, and the eyelids drooped faintly.

“Are you hungry, Abigail?”

The little maid shook her head softly.

“It cannot be that,” said Sarah, as if half to herself; “there was
enough in the house; but what is it? Abigail, look at me; how long is
it since you have eaten? Abigail!”

“Yesterday,” whispered the little maid, dreamily.

“What did you eat then?”

“Some posies and leaves out in the field.”

“What became of all the bread that was baked, and the cakes, and the
meat?”

“I--have forgot.”

“No, you have not. Tell me, Abigail.”

“The black beast came in the night and did eat it all up, and the cow,
and calf, and the horses, too.”

“The black beast!”

“I heard him in the night, and in the morning ’twas--gone.”

Sarah sprang up. “Robbers and murderers!” she cried, in a fierce voice;
but the little maid on the floor did not start; she shut her eyes
again, and looked up and down the road.

Sarah got a bucket quickly, and went out in the yard to the cow. Down
on her knees in the grass she went and milked; then she carried in the
bucket, strained the milk with trembling haste, and poured some into
Abigail’s little pewter porringer. “She was wont to love it warm,” she
whispered, with white lips.

She bent close over the little maid, and raised her on one arm, while
she put the porringer to her mouth. “Drink, Abigail,” she said, with
tender command. “’Tis warm--the way you love it.”

The little maid tried to sip, but shut her mouth, and turned her head
with weak loathing, and Sarah could not compel her. She laid her back,
and got a spoon and fed her a little, by dint of much pleading to make
her open her mouth and swallow.

Afterwards she undressed her, and put her to bed in the south-front
room, but the child was so uneasy without the ring of garments which
she had arranged, that Sarah was forced to put them around her on the
bed; then she fell asleep directly, and stood in her dream watching in
the door.

Sarah herself stood in the door, looking up and down the road. There
was the sound of a galloping horse in the distance; it came nearer and
nearer. She went down to the road and stood waiting. The horse was
reined in close to her, and the young man who rode him sprang off the
saddle.

“It is you, Sarah; you are safe home,” he cried, eagerly, and would
have put his arm about her; but she stood aloof sternly.

“For what else did you take me--my apparition?” she said, in a hard
voice.

“Sweetheart!”

“Know you that I have but just come from the jail in Boston, where I
have lain fast chained for witchcraft? See you my fine apparel with the
prison air in it? Know you that they called me a witch, and said that
I did afflict Mary Warren and the rest? I marvel not that you kept your
distance, David Carr; I might perchance have hurt you, and they might
have accused you, since you were in fellowship with a witch. I marvel
not at that. I would have no harm come to you, though far greater than
this came to me, but wherefore did you let my little sister Abigail
starve? That can I not suffer, coming from you, David.”

The young man took her in his arms with a decided motion; and indeed
she did not repulse him, but began to weep.

“Sarah,” said he, earnestly, “I was in Ipswich. I knew naught of you
and Benjamin being cried out upon until within this hour, when I
returned home, and my mother told me. I knew not you were acquitted,
and was on my way to Boston to you when I saw you at the gate. And as
for Abigail, I knew naught at all; and so ’twas with my mother, for she
but now wept when she said the poor little maid had been taken with
the rest. But you mean not that, sweetheart; she has not been let to
starve?”

“They stole away the food in the night,” said Sarah, “and the horses
and the cow and calf. I found the cow straying in the woods but now, on
my way home, and drove her in and milked her; but Abigail would take
scarce a spoonful of the warm milk. She has had but little to eat for
three days, and has been distracted with fear, being left alone. She
has ever been but a delicate child, and now I fear she has a fever on
her, and will die, with her mother away.”

“I will go for my mother, sweetheart,” said David Carr, eagerly.

“Bring her under cover of night, then,” said Sarah; “else she may be
suspected if she come to this witch tavern, as they call it. Oh, David,
think you she will come? I am in a sore strait.”

“I will bring her without fail, sweet, and a flask of wine also, and
needments for the little maid,” cried David. “Only do you keep up good
heart. Perchance, sweet, the child will amend soon, and the others
be soon acquit. Nay, weep not, poor lass! poor lass! Thou hast me,
whatever else fail thee, poor solace though that be, and I will fetch
thee my mother right speedily. She has ever set great store by the
little maid, and knows much about ailments; and I doubt not they will
be soon acquit.”

“They say my mother will,” answered Sarah, tearfully; “and Benjamin is
acquit now, but had best keep for a season out of Salem village. But
my father will not be acquit; he has spoken his mind too boldly before
them all.”

“Nay, sweetheart,” said David Carr, mounting, “’twill all have passed
soon; ’tis but a madness. Go in to the little maid, and be of good
comfort.”

Sarah went sobbing into the house, but her face was quite calm when she
stood over little Abigail. The child was still asleep, and she could
arouse her only for a moment to take a few spoonfuls of milk; then she
turned her head on her pillow with weary obstinacy, and shut her eyes
again. She still held the poor corn-cob poppet fast.

Sarah washed herself, braided her hair, and changed her prison dress
for a clean blue linen one; then she sat beside Abigail, and waited for
David Carr and his mother, who came within an hour. Goodwife Carr was
renowned through Salem village for her knowledge of medicinal herbs and
her nursing. She had a gentle sobriety and decision of manner which
placed her firmly in her neighbors’ confidences, they seeing how she
abode firmly in her own, and arguing from that. Then she had too the
good fortune to have made no enemies, consequently her ability had not
incurred for her the suspicion of being a witch.

Goodwife Carr brought a goodly store of healing herbs, of bread and
cakes and meat, and she brewed drinks, and bent her face, pale and
soberly faithful, in her close white cap, untiringly over Abigail
Proctor. But the little maid never arose again. A fever, engendered by
starvation and fright and grief, had seized upon her, and she lay in
the bed with her little corn-cob baby a few days longer, and then died.

They made a straight white gown for her, and dressed her in it, after
washing her and smoothing her yellow hair; and she lay, looking longer
and older than in life, all set about with flowers--pinks and lilacs
and roses--from Goodwife Carr’s garden, until she was buried. And they
had the Ipswich minister come for the funeral, for David Carr cried
out in a fury that Minister Parris, who had prosecuted this witchcraft
business, was her murderer, and blood would flow from her little body
if he stood beside it, and that it was the same with Minister Noyes;
and Sarah Proctor’s pale face had flushed up fiercely in assent.

The morning after the little maid Abigail Proctor was buried, Joseph
Bayley and his wife Ann came riding down the road from Boston, and they
were in brave company, and needed to have but little fear of witches;
for the great minister Cotton Mather rode with them, his Excellency
the Governor of the colony, two worshipful magistrates, and two other
ministers--all on their way to a witch trial in Salem.

And as they neared the Proctor house there was much discourse
concerning it and the inmates thereof, many strange and dreadful
accounts, and much godly denunciation. And as they reached the curve
in the road they came suddenly in sight of a young man and a tall fair
maid standing together at the side by some white-flowering bushes.
And Sarah Proctor, even with her little sister Abigail dead and her
parents in danger of death, was smiling for a second’s space in David
Carr’s face, for the love and hope in tragedy that make God possible,
and the selfishness of love that makes life possible, were upon her in
spite of herself.

But when she saw the cavalcade approaching, saw the gleam of rich
raiment, and heard the tramp and jingling, the smile faded straightway
from her face, and she stood behind David in the white alder bushes.
And David stood before her, and gazed with a stern and defiant scowl at
the gentry as they passed by. And the great Cotton Mather gazed back at
that beautiful white face rising like another flower out of the bushes,
and he speculated with himself if it were the face of a witch.

But Goodwife Ann Bayley thought only on the little maid at the door.
And when they came to the Proctor house she leaned eagerly from the
pillion, and she smiled and kissed her hand.

“Why do you thus, Ann?” her husband asked, looking about at her.

“See you not the little maid in the door?” she whispered low, for fear
of the goodly company. “I trow she looks better than she did. The roses
are in her cheeks, and they have combed her yellow hair, and put a
clean white gown on her. She holds a little doll, too.”

“I see nobody,” said Joseph Bayley, wonderingly.

“Nay, but she stands there. I never saw aught shine like her hair and
her white gown; the sunlight lies full in the door. See! see! she is
smiling! I trow all her griefs be well over.”

The cavalcade passed the Proctor house, but Goodwife Ann Bayley’s sweet
face was turned backward until it was out of sight, towards the little
maid in the door.

LYDIA HERSEY, OF EAST BRIDGEWATER

Lydia Hersey sat out on the porch carding flax. She had taken her
work out there that she might not litter the house. It was Saturday
afternoon, and she had set every room in fine order for the Sabbath.

Three tall Lombardy poplar-trees stood in a row on the road line, and
their long shadows, like the shadows of giant men, fell athwart the
gray unpainted house and the broad grassy yard. At the south of the
house was a flower bed of pinks and honeysuckles and thyme, and also a
vegetable garden. Beyond that were three beehives in a row, with little
black clouds of bees around them. Lydia carded assiduously, and never
looked up. Her long black lashes lay against her pink cheeks, her full
lips were half-smiling, as if she were saying some pleasant thing to
herself. Lydia wore her black hair in a braided knot at the back of her
head; in front she combed it smoothly down over her ears, then looped
it up behind them in two clusters of soft curls. Her flowered chintz
gown was cut low in the neck, and she wore a string of gold beads
around her long white throat.

Lydia sat very erect as she carded; her shoulders never wavered with
the clapping motion of her hands; she even sat well forward in her
chair, and did not come in contact with its straight back.

Lydia Hersey was noted for the majesty of her carriage as well as her
beauty, and was talked of as far as Boston. Young men had been known
to come from other villages and walk past her house on the chance of
seeing her at a window, although they dared not address her, nor do
more than halt and stand for a second with their hats raised like
school-boys before the parson or the squire, and that might have been
accounted poor reward for a long journey. But there were for these
New-Englanders no great pictures by old masters and no famous statues,
and Lydia Hersey’s beautiful living face, set like a jewel for a moment
in a window of the gray old Hersey house, served them instead. The
young Abington men, the North Bridgewater men, and the Canton men would
go home with their love of beauty all aflame, and never forget Lydia’s
face in the window; indeed, it would turn towards them like a portrait,
whichever way they moved, through their whole lives. Years afterwards,
when these admirers were old men and heard some young beauty praised,
they would look scornful and say, “You ought to have seen Lydia Hersey,
of East Bridgewater.”

A bumblebee flew with a loud buzz past Lydia’s head, and she started
a little. He flew straight into the open window of the keeping-room.
“That’s a sign of company,” she thought, and she thought also
complacently how nicely the house was set in order, and she did not
care who came.

The doors were all open as well as the windows. She heard the bee
buzzing and striking against the ceiling of the keeping-room. Presently
she heard another sound that made her drop her cards in her lap and
listen intently. It came from down the street, and sounded like an
irregular chorus of horns, a medley of harsh, hollow screeches. Lydia
frowned. The sounds grew louder; there were also great shouts of
laughter and clamorous voices. Soon a company of young men came in
sight; there were a dozen of them, and they had great conch shells at
their mouths, which they blew between their laughter and merry calls.

Lydia stood up. She laid the cards down on the chair, folded the linen
cloth which she had spread on the porch floor carefully over the fluffy
heap of carded flax, and brushed all the shreds that she could from her
gown. Then she walked, carrying her beautiful head high, down to the
road. There was a sudden hush when the young men saw her. They took
their conch shells from their lips, and saluted her respectfully. One
young man, who came foremost of the troop, colored high. One of his
comrades nudged him, and he thrust his elbow back angrily in response.
Lydia took no notice of the other young men, she walked straight up to
this one. He stopped, and all the others halted at his back.

“Where are you going, Freelove?” said she.

“Not far,” he returned, evasively.

“Where?” she demanded.

The young man turned towards his companions. “Move on, lads,” he said,
in an imperious voice, which he tried to make good-natured, “I’ll be
with you in a moment.”

His handsome face was burning. The young men trooped on; there was a
subdued chuckle. Freelove Keith looked Lydia full in the face, and his
blue eyes were as haughty as her black ones.

“We’re going down to see Abraham White and Deborah,” said he.

Lydia stared back at him scornfully. “You are going down there with
those loafers to blow those conch shells under the windows?” said she.

“Squire Perkins’s son is one of ’em,” returned Freelove, defiantly.

“The more shame to him!” said Lydia. “And the more shame to you,
Freelove Keith!”

It seemed as if her bright scornful eyes, full on Freelove’s face,
could see all the weaknesses that he hid from himself behind his own
consciousness, but he did not flinch.

“I don’t know what you call shame,” he said. “’Tis what the young
fellows in East Bridgewater have always done when they have not been
asked to a wedding.”

“Asked to a wedding,” repeated Lydia, contemptuously. “A pretty
wedding! Deborah Belcher marrying Abraham White, when he’s twice as old
as she is, and his wife not dead six months. No wonder she asked nobody
to the wedding, marrying old Abraham White for his silver teaspoons and
tankard, and his wife’s silk gowns and satin pelisse!”

“You don’t know that she married him for any such thing,” protested
Freelove, stoutly, although he had started on this very expedition with
a gay contempt for Deborah White. She was a very pretty girl, and once,
before he had dared address Lydia Hersey, people had coupled his name
with hers. He had gone home with her from singing-school, and kissed
her once at a husking.

“Stand up for a girl like that if you want to,” said Lydia. She had
always had a lurking jealousy of Deborah Belcher. Deborah’s hair
was very fair, and she had a delicate evanescent bloom like a wild
rose. Lydia had often wondered if Deborah were not prettier than she
herself, and if men did not love fair hair better than black.

Freelove Keith did not continue the dispute; he looked uneasily
after his comrades, who were nearly out of sight, even at their slow
lingering pace. Now and then the note of a conch shell was heard. “I
must go,” said he. “Good-day, Lydia.”

“Do you mean that you are really going with that noisy crew to blow
conch shells under Abraham White’s windows, Freelove Keith?”

“Yes, I am going, Lydia Hersey,” returned the young man, hotly; “and if
you thought I’d be ordered back by you before them all, like a whipped
puppy, you were mightily mistaken.”

Lydia stared at him, she was so full of proud amazement that she would
say nothing; this Freelove Keith had often fretted beneath her rule,
but never before openly resisted it.

“Go back to your flax-carding, Lydia,” said Freelove, in a softer tone.
“See, the flax is blowing all over the yard. I shall be up to see you
after supper.”

Then Lydia found her tongue. “You haven’t been asked to come that
I know of,” said she. “I don’t know as I care to keep company with
young men that go blowing horns and shouting through the street, and
disturbing decent people.”

“Then you needn’t,” retorted Freelove.

He went quickly down the road after his companions. He was dressed
like a farmer, in slouching homespun, but there was a certain jaunty
grace about him, and a free swing in his gait, which did not accord
with his appearance. He had followed the sea for a living, going as
mate on a merchantman, and had been home only for a year and a half,
since his father’s death, managing the farm.

Lydia went back to the house. She stepped as if she bore a crown on her
head instead of a tortoise-shell comb, and had a train to her cotton
gown. The wind had indeed stirred the linen cloth, and bits of flax
were floating about the yard, but she ignored that. She would not so
far unbend her dignity as to gather it up, even with nobody but herself
for witness. She folded the linen cloth firmly over the remaining flax,
and placed her foot in its buckled shoe on it when she sat down. She
fell to work with the cards again. The wild clamor of horns, which she
had heard break forth when Freelove joined his comrades, died away in
the distance.

Lydia sat there steadily carding flax, as if imbued by nature with the
single instinct of industry, like a bee out in the garden. Her lips
were tight shut, and no longer smiling; her heart was anxious, but she
still made her store of linen as unquestioningly as the bee its honey.

In about an hour the troop of young men with the conch shells returned.
Lydia heard them at a distance, and long before they reached the house
she sat with stiffer majesty, keeping her eyes so closely upon her work
that the flax became a silvery blur. However, she need not have taken
the trouble, for Freelove Keith swung past with as scornful a lift of
his head as she, and never once glanced her way. And, indeed, the young
men all passed very decorously and quietly, and only a few dared raise
their eyes towards the queenly figure on the porch, and then only for a
second. One of them was Abel Perkins, Squire Perkins’s son. He was home
from college on a vacation, and was quite looked up to by the village
youth, as he was the only collegian among them. Abel Perkins was slight
and pale, and walked with a nervous strut; but he wore broadcloth and
a fine flowered waistcoat, and carried a gold watch. He even gave a
hesitating glance back at Lydia on the porch, turning his little face
over his shoulder; but she did not see it. She did not look up from her
work until long after the company had passed.

A half-hour later the stage went by, with the four horses at a gallop.
A fair face overtopped by white plumes looked out of the surging
window. Lydia turned her head hastily, and the red in her cheeks
deepened. It was the bride, Deborah White, going with her new husband
to spend the honeymoon with his relations in Abington. There was a
nice little hair trunk strapped on behind the stage. Lydia eyed it
contemptuously when Deborah could no longer see her. She thought,
“Maybe his first wife’s satin pelisse is in there.”

A man emerged from the cloud of dust in the wake of the stage. He was
old, and wore his white hair in a queue. He had on a green double
cloak, although the day was warm, and walked with a stick, to whose
height he accommodated himself at every step with a downward motion of
his shoulders. He did not seem to need its support.

When he approached the house, Lydia stood up and courtesied low.

“Good-day, Lydia,” said he, in a solemn voice.

“Good-day, sir,” she returned, with stately deference; and she
ushered the minister, Elihu Eaton, into the fore room, and placed the
rocking-chair with the feather cushion for him.

The fore room was close and cool, for the windows had been shut all
day to keep out the flies. There was a smell of mint and lavender. The
great testered bedstead, with its chintz valance and curtains, stood in
one corner. There was a high chest of drawers and a splendid carved oak
linen chest, which Lydia’s grandmother had brought over from England.
On one side of the fireplace was a great cupboard with panelled doors,
and that was filled with gallipots. Lydia’s father had been a doctor.

Lydia sat beside the window, opposite the minister. There was a
restrained defiance in the lift of her chin. Now and then she picked a
bit of the flax from her gown.

She knew well why the minister had come. Aunt Nabby Keith had warned
her. It was ten months since her banns with Freelove had been
published, and she held herself aloof, and would not marry him out of
sheer wilfulness and coquetry, the neighbors said. Freelove’s aunt
Nabby had come to see her only the day before, and talked seriously
with her.

“You ain’t livin’ up to your professions,” the old woman had said, “and
I’m going to speak plain. If you let this year go by and don’t marry
Freelove according to your banns, you’ll have a good deal to answer
for.”

“Well, I’ll ask nobody else to answer for me,” Lydia returned.

“The parson says he’s coming to reason with you, Lydia Hersey.”

“Let him come,” said Lydia; and her head tossed up like a rose in a
wind.

And now the parson had come. It was some little space before he opened
on the subject in hand. In truth, he stood somewhat in awe, although
he did not know it, of this beautiful high-spirited young woman. There
had been always a brisk feminine rule in his own house. Even now he
sweltered under the weight of the green double cloak which his wife
Sarah had hoisted upon his slender shoulders because she thought he had
taken cold. The waistcoat, which she had made to suit her own ideas
and not his requirements, bound his back; his neckcloth, which she had
wound with ardor, half choked him and fretted his chin.

When at length he reasoned with Lydia Hersey on the matter of her
non-fulfilment of the marriage banns, and the report that she was about
to let the lawful year go by and jilt Freelove Keith, it was with
circumspect solemnity. Lydia’s cheeks flamed redder and redder, but her
black eyes never left his face.

“Did you meet Freelove Keith with that noisy crew, who ought to have
been at home at work in the middle of the afternoon, shouting and
blowing conch shells under Mr. Abraham White’s windows?” she demanded.

The minister admitted that he had, and had remonstrated with them.

“It would make a better text for a discourse than some others that
meddlesome folks set,” said Lydia, for she had no fear of any one
before another, not even the minister or the squire. She stood up. The
minister Elihu Eaton’s sober peaked face rising out of his great capes,
which shrugged to his ears, looked up at her. “Either,” said she, in a
masterful way, and yet with a remembering sweetness, for the minister
looked suddenly very old to her--“either Freelove Keith has got to do
as I say or I have got to do as he says before we are married, if the
banns have been cried a thousand years.”

Then she went out into the keeping-room, and presently returned with
a tray, on which were set out a decanter of West India Rum, a little
silver bowl of loaf-sugar, a tumbler, and a plate of pound-cake.

When the minister had partaken of these refreshments, he offered a
prayer and took his leave. Lydia courtesied when he went out the door,
but her lips were tightly shut again, for Elihu Eaton, in his appeal
to the Lord, had spoken with more fire concerning her affairs than he
had dared use towards her. “O Lord, make this, Thy handmaiden, to keep
to the vows which she has spoken, and let not a froward mind lead her
aside into strange paths,” the minister had said, and more, and Lydia
could not expostulate.

She went into the keeping-room and got supper ready. Lydia Hersey
had lived alone ever since her father’s death. All the more reason,
people thought, why she should fulfil her marriage contract with
Freelove Keith. There was she, living all alone in a large house, with
a comfortable income, and there was Freelove, who was no longer so
necessary at home since his sister had married and taken her husband
there to live, and who could easily manage his farm and live in the
Hersey house. There was Freelove, whom everybody liked, yet felt a
certain anxiety about, because he had been to sea, and might have seen
much evil in foreign ports, going too often to the tavern, people said,
and neglecting his farm to go on junketings with idle young men, to
Abington or Braintree, and once even over to Boston, and to be away all
night. It looked no better, people said, because Squire Perkins’s son
went with him, and he was college-learned. It was generally conceded
that Abel was not as reliable, and would not make as smart a man, as
the old squire.

Lydia Hersey saw Abel Perkins again that night. After supper she
strolled down the road a little way. She was mindful that Freelove had
said he was coming, and she wondered if her rebuff would quite drive
him away. Before she started she stood hesitating a moment in the
doorway. The evening was cool, and she had put a yellow blanket over
her head and bare shoulders.

She thought, angrily, that she would not stay at home and watch for
Freelove Keith, when he might not come; but, on the other hand, she did
not want to go away and never know if he had called.

Finally she pulled some sprigs of mint from the bank under the
keeping-room windows, and she shut the house door, and stuck them
carefully under the sill. Then she went on down the road, and soon she
met Abel Perkins. He stood about, and took off his hat in a way he had
learned in college, and Lydia courtesied gravely. Abel was considerably
younger than she, and she had always had a certain disdain for him, in
spite of his being the squire’s son. Still it was quite evident that he
humbly admired her, and some deference was due him for that.

So when he asked humbly if he might walk with her a way, she said yes,
and they went on together. Alder-trees, faintly sweet in a pale mist
of bloom, stood beside the road; there were distant peals of laughter,
tinklings of cow bells, and a hubbub of nestward birds. Lydia stepped
proudly along beside the little anxiously smiling squire’s son; her
beautiful face looked out of her yellow blanket as if it were a frame
of gold.

Abel Perkins kept glancing up at her and blushing. “If you had told me
that you didn’t want me to go to Abraham White’s, I wouldn’t have gone,
Lydia,” he said, after a while.

“I don’t approve of any such goings on,” Lydia returned, severely.

“I don’t know as they are very becoming,” said Abel Perkins.

They sauntered on slowly. The sunset light lay in red-gold patches
on the dusty road, some elm-trees ahead swayed in a mystical, rosy,
smokelike incense. Presently at the right of the road showed the red
walls of Aunt Nabby Keith’s house out of a thicket of purple-topped
lilac-bushes. Freelove suddenly appeared in the road. When he saw Lydia
he started, then went on with a jauntier swing. He scarcely nodded as
he went by. Lydia held her head like a statue.

“Is he huffy?” whispered Abel.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” replied Lydia, coldly. But in a second
she faced about. “I must go home,” said she. “It is getting damp.”

Abel went obediently at her side. Freelove was still visible in the
road ahead. Lydia talked and laughed very loud, but he did not turn his
head, although he must have heard. When they reached the Hersey house,
Lydia turned promptly into the yard. “Good-night, Abel,” she called,
loudly. And Abel Perkins responded with rueful sweetness, for he had
thought to be asked in, and went on down the road in Freelove’s tracks.
Lydia watched him out of sight. She knew he would meet Freelove at the
village store, if he did not overtake him. She did not go into the
house and disturb the mint on the door-sill. She waited a few minutes,
then she also went on a little way to the next house, where lived a
young woman mate of hers. She went in and stayed until nearly nine
o’clock, and the two girls talked over Deborah Belcher’s wedding, but
not a word did Lydia say about her quarrel with Freelove.

When she went home, she got down on her knees in the porch, and
examined the mint carefully. It was bright moonlight; not a sprig had
been disturbed. Lydia opened the door and walked in, trampling the mint
ruthlessly.

The next day was Sunday, and she went to meeting dressed in her best
gown, with roses sprinkled over a blue ground, and her Leghorn bonnet
trimmed with a rose-colored ribbon, and sat fanning herself calmly with
a painted fan when Freelove entered, but he never looked at her.

The minister preached from Psalm lxxv. 5, “Lift not up your horn on
high; speak _not_ with a stiff neck,” and there was much nudging in
the congregation, and uneasiness among the young men who had saluted
Abraham White and his bride. Freelove sat straight and stiff, but his
face was red. Lydia smiled behind her fan.

The next morning Sarah Porter, the girl whom she had visited Saturday
evening, came in. She had heard that Lydia had really jilted her lover.
She and her mother had watched, and knew that he had not come courting
the night before.

“I hear you and Freelove have fallen out,” said she. Her lips were
smiling archly, but her eyes were hard and curious.

“There’s plenty to hear, if folks keep their ears pricked up,” replied
Lydia, and she would say no more.

She smiled scornfully when presently she watched Sarah Porter’s squat
figure go out of the yard. “She didn’t find out much,” she muttered.
“She’d give all her old shoes to get Freelove herself, but he wouldn’t
look at her.”

That forenoon Lydia took her flax-carding out on the porch again.
Soon, as she sat there, she saw Abel Perkins coming. He hesitated at
the gate. He carried a great bunch of white lilacs. Purple lilacs were
plenty in East Bridgewater, but white ones grew nowhere except in the
squire’s yard.

“Ain’t you coming in, Abel?” called Lydia, and she smiled her sweet
imperious smile at him.

Abel came up the path, extending the great bunch of lilacs like a
propitiatory offering to a deity.

“I thought maybe you’d like a bunch of these white lilacs, Lydia,” he
said.

“Thank you, Abel; they’re real handsome, and I’ll put them in a pitcher
when I go in,” replied Lydia, graciously.

This morning she wore a green and white gown, which made her face still
more like a rose. Abel stood leaning against a post of the porch,
looking at her, then looking quickly away.

“Have you got any errands or anything you want done, Lydia?” he
stammered.

Lydia looked at him; a sudden wicked light came into her eyes. There
he stood, in his fine waistcoat and broadcloth, with his handsome
knee-buckles and gold chain. His hands were long and slim and white,
much whiter than hers.

“Why, yes, Abel,” said she; “if you really want something to do, the
pease out in my garden need sticking.”

Abel Perkins stared aghast a minute; then he started eagerly.

“You’ll have to go up in the pasture and cut some brush,” said Lydia.

The truth was that Freelove Keith had taken it upon himself to tend
Lydia’s garden, which was but a small one, and she thought with
spiteful delight how, when he came again, if he came at all, he would
find some of the work done, and wonder. But it did not fall out as she
had planned, for presently she heard loud voices out in the garden, and
peering around the corner of the porch, she saw Freelove and Abel, each
with a bundle of brush.

Lydia gathered up her work hastily, and fled into the house. She went
up to the south chamber, and peeped around the curtain. Both of her
lovers were sticking the pease, Abel awkwardly, with trembling haste,
and Freelove with a sturdy vehemence that might have suited Cadmus
sowing the dragon’s teeth. Just then there was a sullen quiet, but
presently arose another altercation. Lydia spied a long rent in the
skirt of Abel’s fine coat. Soon Abel started towards the house, and she
sat down on the floor of the south chamber and laughed. She heard a
faint voice below calling her, but she did not reply, and Abel dared
not search for her in the house.

Lydia peered out again, and saw Freelove at work alone in the garden,
but he never once glanced up at the house. She saw Sarah Porter’s face,
and her mother’s over her shoulder, at a window of their house across
the yard, and she watched jealously lest Freelove should glance that
way; but he did not. When the pease were finished, he went out of the
yard, looking neither to the right nor left. Lydia went down-stairs
cautiously, to be sure Abel Perkins was gone.

However, when he came again, as he did soon, she greeted him kindly,
and smiled sweetly by way of indirect condolence when he told how
Freelove Keith had driven him from the garden. Lydia spied the rent,
which his mother had neatly mended, in his broadcloth coat.

“Why, Abel, you have torn your fine coat,” said she.

Abel blushed. “I tore it getting the sticks for the pease. But ’tis of
no account,” he said; “and I’m willing to tear it again if there is
anything else you want done, Lydia.”

“Maybe your mother won’t be quite so willing to mend it again,” said
Lydia.

But presently she brought out the churn, and set Abel Perkins, in his
fine clothes, churning cream out on the porch. Sarah Porter called her
mother out into their front yard to see, and Freelove Keith went by; he
went often to see his Aunt Nabby.

Abel churned until the butter came, and it took full long, and his fine
waistcoat was spattered with cream; and then she sent him home like a
little boy. Lydia found many another domestic task for Abel Perkins,
and all on the porch. She set him carding flax, and spinning, and
making candle-wicks. She found errands also for him to do, and many
commands for him to obey. She sent him to Abington with a couple of
feather pillows for her aunt, and awkwardly enough he managed them on
horseback. She forbade his going to Boston on a little trip with some
of the village young men, Freelove being of the party. Abel Perkins
never rebelled against her rule, but there came a time when Lydia
herself arose for him.

One afternoon he sat on the porch spinning at the wheel, and Lydia had
tied one of her blue aprons around his waist, when she suddenly spoke.

“Take off that apron now, and stop spinning, and go home, Abel
Perkins,” said she.

Abel jumped up, and stared at her.

“I mean what I say,” said she. “If you are not ashamed for yourself, I
am ashamed for you, and I am ashamed for myself more than I am for you.
No man can make a woman like him by doing everything she tells him to;
she only despises him for it. You remember it next time. Now you had
better go home and learn your Latin books.”

“Can’t I come again, Lydia?” said Abel. He was quite pale, and tears
stood in his eyes.

But Lydia would not speak softly to him. “No,” she replied, “you can’t.
You mustn’t come here wasting your time any more. You must study your
books. You are not old enough to go courting; get your college books
learned through first.”

“Can I come then, Lydia?” he inquired, faintly.

“No,” said she; “I shall never want anybody coming again. Take off that
apron and go home.”

And Abel Perkins obeyed. He looked very dejected and youthful going out
of the yard. Lydia went into the house and cried.

Abel stayed away for a week; then he came again. Lydia would not have
gone to the door had she known who it was plying the knocker. She never
heard the knocker but with a hope that it might be Freelove, although
he never came now.

When she saw Abel standing there, she frowned.

“Don’t look at me so, Lydia,” he pleaded. “I couldn’t help coming.
I can’t eat, and I haven’t slept any. I’m sick, Lydia. Mother keeps
asking me what the matter is.”

Indeed Abel looked ill; he was paler than usual, and had a pinched
and woe-begone expression that drew his face down, and made it appear
thinner.

“Well, you come in,” said Lydia. “I’m going to mix you up some
medicine, if you’re sick. I know a very good one that my father showed
me how to make. It’ll cure you right up, Abel.”

And Lydia made Abel seat himself on the settle in the keeping-room, and
went with a cup and spoon to the cupboard in the fore room, where her
father’s old gallipots were kept. Then she took from this and that, and
mixed carefully, and returned to Abel.

“Here, drink this,” said she.

Abel held out his hand, but turned his face away.

“’Tis only a little assafœtida that I put in to quiet the nerves that
you smell,” said she. “’Tis mostly for the liver. My father used to say
that the root of all sickness was the liver, and he did not know but it
was the root of all evil. If your liver were in good order you would
not fret, Abel Perkins. Drink it down.”

And Abel drank it down with an effort.

“Now you’d better go home,” said she, “and wait till it takes effect.
I’ll warrant you’ll eat some supper to-night.”

“I sha’n’t, Lydia, if you don’t let me come to see you,” said Abel,
piteously.

“Yes, you will. How long did you go without your supper when that girl
in Abington gave you the mitten? I ain’t the first one you’ve stopped
eating for, Abel Perkins, and you not twenty! You know it’s so.”

Abel blushed, and looked down foolishly.

Lydia laughed. “If you keep on this way, you’ll starve to death before
you come of age,” said she. “Now you’d better go home and study your
books, and leave such matters alone until you get more sense to manage
them. I suppose you will when you’ve got the college books learned
through.”

Abel arose. Lydia followed him to the door, and her voice was softer
as she bade him good-bye. He looked piteously backward at her as he
went out of the yard, but still she was not so touched as she had been
before.

“That story about his being so crazy over that girl in Abington was
true,” she said to herself; and although she was generous enough
to feel relieved that her unlucky lover had an elastic as well as
susceptible temperament, and was likely to recover from his wounds,
still she disliked him the more for it.

It now wanted only a month for the expiration of the year since Lydia
and Freelove’s banns had been published. Should they not marry before
then, they could not legally, unless they were again published.

It was a month since Freelove had set foot in Lydia’s house, or indeed
spoken to her. He came, early in the morning sometimes, and cared for
her garden, but they never exchanged a word. Everybody said that the
marriage was broken off. Lydia kept on as usual. She had some beautiful
linen in the loom, and she wove as if she were certainly going to be
married. Sarah Porter used to come in and wonder, but she found out
nothing from Lydia, who never spoke Freelove’s name.

“She’s making more linen,” Sarah told her mother when she got home, and
the two women speculated anxiously. They knew that Freelove did not go
to see Lydia, at all events, for they and all the neighbors watched.

When the last day of the year since the banns came, there was no longer
doubt in anybody’s mind, nor was there, indeed, in Lydia’s. She stayed
in-doors, and wove her linen in a mechanical fashion. She sat before
the great loom, and it was as if she were playing a harmony of sweet
housewifely industry upon it like a very artist, but the tears rolled
down her cheeks, which were not rosy that morning.

Had she not listened two months for the sound of the knocker, she would
not have heard it above the great hum of the loom that afternoon; but
hear it she did, and went to answer it, wiping her eyes.

Freelove Keith stood in the porch, and out at the gate stood his horse,
with a pillion behind the saddle.

“Come, Lydia,” said Freelove, “I want you to get on the pillion, and
ride over to Aunt Nabby’s with me.”

“I can’t,” said Lydia, faintly. “I’m all over flax lint from the loom.”

“Put on an apron,” said Freelove.

Lydia went into the house, and tied an apron around her waist, and came
out again. Freelove lifted her on the pillion, and they rode down the
street without a word, until they reached the minister Elihu Eaton’s
house, which was about half way to Aunt Nabby’s.

Freelove drew rein. “Now we’ll go in and get married, Lydia,” said he.

“Oh, Freelove, _I_ can’t!” gasped Lydia.

“Now or never,” said Freelove, sternly.

“I was going to have a wedding, Freelove, and a brocade gown, and
cake--”

“Now or never,” said Freelove.

He sprang off the saddle and held up his arms. Lydia slipped down
into them, and followed him, trembling, her head drooping, into the
minister’s house.

When they came out, a stout old woman stood waiting for them at the
gate.

“I’ve got married, Aunt Nabby,” said Freelove, with a gay laugh.

“Well, I should think ’twas time,” replied the old woman. She chuckled;
her iron-bowed spectacles flashed back the light. “I’ve got a bedquilt
made for Liddy, and six yarn socks for you, Freelove,” she said; “and
I’m going home and bake a pound-cake with some plums in it.”

Aunt Nabby went scuttling down the road. Freelove and Lydia remounted,
and went back at a canter. Freelove pulled a conch shell from his
pocket, and blew as lustily as a herald. Folks ran to the windows, and
Lydia hid her blushing face against her husband’s shoulder.

THE END

Transcriber's notes

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.

Itemized changes from the original text:

Page 41: "lay" is modified in "lie". The past tense is rather
confusing.
Page 67 contains a word, starting with "h" that was illegible in the
scan. The most probable completion is "her".
Page 69: "frowsly" has been changed into "frowsy".
Page 168 contains an interchange of the two Evelina's. Originally the
text said "Adams", but in view of the logic of the story it has to be
"Leonard".
Page 180: an exclamation mark has been added to the text below the
picture, in order to balance this text against the list of
illustrations.

The author is not too consequent in the use of hyphens. Several words
are encountered with and without hyphen. A small overview: Over-seas
/ overseas; goodman / good-man; homespun / home-spun; hearth-stone /
hearthstone.

In the text special characters are used surrounding words or phrases to
indicate formatting. Their meaning is as follows.
_word_ means 'word' is in italic;
+WORD+ means 'WORD' is in small capitals;

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