dew and mist. He wore his habitual air of gentle indifference, and the
doctor saw in him those everlasting hills which persuasion may not
climb. Suddenly there was a rustling from the other room, and Mary
appeared in the doorway, standing there expectant. Her face was pink and
a little vague from sleep, but she looked very dear and good. Though
Nicholas had "lost himself" that night, he had kept time for thought;
and perhaps he realized how precious a thing it is to lay up treasure of
inheritance for one who loves us, and is truly of our kind. He turned
quite meekly to the doctor.
"Should you think," he inquired, "should you think pa'son would be up
an' dressed?"
Ten minutes thereafter, the two were knocking at the parson's door.
Confused and turbulent as Tiverton had become, Nicholas Oldfield settled
her at once. Knowledge dripped from his finger-ends; he had it ready,
like oil to give a clock. Doctor and minister stood breathless while he
laid out the track for the procession by local marks they both knew
well.
"They must ha' come into the town from som'er's nigh the old
cross-road," said he. "No, 't wa'n't where they made the river road.
Then they turned straight to one side--'t was thick woods then, you
understand--an' went up a little ways towards Horn o' the Moon. But they
concluded that wouldn't suit 'em, 't was so barren-like; an' they
wheeled round, took what's now the old turnpike, an' clim' right up
Tiverton Hill, through Tiverton Street that now is. An' there"--Nicholas
Oldfield's eyes burned like blue flame, and again he told the story of
the Flat-iron Lot.
"Indeed!" cried the parson. "What a truly remarkable circumstance! We
might halt on that very spot, and offer prayer, before entering the
church."
"'Pears as if that would be about the rights on't," said Nicholas
quietly. "That is, if anybody wanted to plan it out jest as 't was." He
could free his words from the pride of life, but not his voice; it
quivered and betrayed him.
"Your idea would be to have the services before going down for the
Indian raid?" inquired the doctor. "They're all at logger-heads there."
But Nicholas, hearing how neither faction would forego its glory, had
the remedy ready in a cranny of his brain.
"Well," said he, "you know there was a raid in '53, when both sides gi'n
up an' run. A crazed creatur on a white horse galloped up an' dispersed
'em. He was all wropped up in a sheet, and carried a jack-o'-lantern on
a pole over his head, so 't he seemed more'n nine feet high. The
settlers thought 't was a spirit; an' as for the Injuns, Lord knows what
't was to them. 'T any rate, the raid was over."
"Heaven be praised!" cried the doctor fervently. "Allah is great, and
you, Mr. Oldfield, are his prophet. Stay here and coach the parson while
I start up the town."
The doctor dashed home and mounted his horse. It was said that he did
some tall riding that day. From door to door he galloped, a lesser Paul
Revere, but sowing seeds of harmony. It was true that the soil was
ready. Indians in full costume were lurking down cellar or behind
kitchen doors, swearing they would never ride, but tremblingly eager to
be urged. Settlers, gloomily acquiescent in an unjust fate, brightened
at his heralding. The ghost was the thing. It took the popular fancy;
and everybody wondered, as after all illuminings of genius, why nobody
had thought of it before. Brad Freeman was unanimously elected to act
the part, as the only living man likely to manage a supplementary head
without rehearsal; and Pillsbury's white colt was hastily groomed for
the onslaught. Brad had at once seen the possibilities of the situation
and decided, with an unerring certainty, that as a jack-o'-lantern is
naught by day, the pumpkin face must be cunningly veiled. He was a busy
man that morning; for he not only had to arrange his own ghostly
progress, but settle the elephant on its platform, to be dragged by
vine-wreathed oxen, and also, at the doctor's instigation, to make the
sledge on which the first Nicholas Oldfield should draw his wife into
town. The doctor sought out Young Nick, and asked him to undertake the
part, as tribute to his illustrious name; but he was of a prudent nature
and declined. What if the town should laugh! "I guess I won't," said he.
But Mary, regardless of maternal cacklings, sped after the doctor as he
turned his horse.
"O doctor!" she besought, "let me be the first settler's wife! Please,
_please_ let me be Mary Oldfield!"
The doctor was glad enough. All the tides of destiny were surging his
way. Even when he paused, in his progress, to pull the Crane boy's
tooth, it seemed to work out public harmony. For the victim, cannily
anxious to prove his valor, insisted on having the operation conducted
before the front window; and after it was accomplished, the squads of
boys waiting at the gate for his apotheosis or down-fall, gave an
unwilling yet delighted yell. He had not winced; and when, with the fire
of a dear ambition still shining in his eyes, he held up the tooth to
them, through the glass, they realized that he, and he only, could with
justice take the crown of that most glorious day. He must ride inside
the elephant.
So it came to pass that when the procession wound slowly up from the
cross-road, preceded by the elephant, lifting his trunk at rhythmic
intervals, Nicholas Oldfield saw his little Mary, her eyes shining and
her cheeks aglow, sitting proudly upon a sledge, drawn by the handsomest
young man in town. A pang may have struck the old man's heart, realizing
that Phil Marden was so splendid in his strength, and that he wore so
sweet a look of invitation; but he remembered Mary's vow and was
content. A great pride and peace enwrapped him when the procession
halted at the Flat-Iron Lot, and the minister, lifting up his voice,
explained to the townspeople why they were called upon to pause. The
name of Oldfield sounded clearly on the air.
"Now," said the minister, "let us pray." The petition went forth, and
Mr. Oldfield stood brooding there, his thoughts running back through a
long chain of ancestry to the Almighty, Who is the fount of all.
When heads were covered again, and this little world began to surge into
the church, young Nick's Hattie moved closer to her husband and shot out
a sibilant whisper:--
"Did you know that?--about the Flat-Iron Lot?"
Young Nick shook his head. He was entirely dazed.
"Well," continued Hattie, full of awe, "I guess I never was nearer my
end than when I let myself be go-between for Freeman Henry. I wonder
father let me get out alive."
The minister's address was very short and unpretending. He dwelt on the
sacredness of the past, and all its memories, and closed by saying that,
while we need not shrink from signs of progress, we should guard against
tampering with those ancient landmarks which serve as beacon lights, to
point the brighter way. Hearing that, every man steeled his heart
against Memory-of-Me clocks, and resolved to vote against them. Then the
minister explained that, since he had been unable to prepare a suitable
address, Mr. Oldfield had kindly consented to read some precious records
recently discovered by him. A little rustling breath went over the
audience. So this amiable lunacy had its bearing on the economy of life!
They were amazed, as may befall us at any judgment day, when grays are
strangely alchemized to white.
Mr. Oldfield, unmoved as ever, save in a certain dominating quality of
presence, rose and stood before them, the records in his hands. He read
them firmly, explaining here and there, his simple speech untouched by
finer usage; and when the minister interposed a question, he dropped
into such quaintness of rich legendry that his hearers sat astounded. So
they were a part of the world! and not the world to-day, but the
universe in its making.
It was long before Nicholas concluded; but the time seemed brief. He sat
down, and the minister took the floor. He thanked Mr. Oldfield and then
went on to say that, although it might be informal, he would suggest
that the town, with Mr. Oldfield's permission, place an inscription on
the boulder in the Flat-Iron Lot, stating why it was to be held
historically sacred. The town roared and stamped, but meanwhile Nicholas
Oldfield was quietly rising.
"In that case, pa'son," said he, "I should like to state that it would
be my purpose to make over that lot to the town to be held as public
land forever."
Again the village folk outdid themselves in applause, while Young Nick
muttered, "Well, I vum!" beneath his breath, and Hattie replied,
antiphonally, "My soul!" These were not the notes of mere surprise. They
were prayers for guidance in this exigency of finding a despised
intelligence exalted.
The celebration went on to a victorious close. Who shall sing the
sweetness of Isabel North, as she sat by the log-cabin door, placidly
spinning flax, or the horror of the moment when, redskins swooping down
on her and settlers on them, the ghost swept in and put them all to
flight? Who will ever forget the exercises in the hall, when the
"Suwanee River" was sung by minstrels, to a set of tableaux representing
the "old folks" at their cabin door, "playin' wid my brudder" as a game
of stick-knife, and the "Swanny" River itself by a frieze of white
pasteboard swans in the background? There were patriotic songs,
accompanied by remarks laudatory of England; since it was justly felt
that our mother-land might be wounded if, on an occasion of this sort,
we fomented international differences by "America" or the reminiscent
triumph of "The Sword of Bunker Hill." A very noble sentiment pervaded
Tiverton when, at twilight, little groups of tired and very happy people
lingered here and there before "harnessing up" and betaking themselves
to their homes. The homes themselves meant more to them now, not as
shelters, but as sacred shrines; and many a glance sought out Nicholas
Oldfield standing quietly by--the reverential glance accorded those who
find out unsuspected wealth. Young Nick approached his father with an
awkwardness sitting more heavily upon him than usual.
"Well," said he, "I'm mighty glad you gi'n 'em that lot."
Old Nicholas nodded gravely, and at that moment Hattie came up, all in a
flutter.
"Father," said she quite appealingly, "I wisht you'd come over to
supper. Luella an' Freeman Henry'll be there. It's a great day, an'"--
"Yes, I know 't is," answered Nicholas kindly. "I'm much obleeged, but
Mary's goin' to eat with me. Mebbe we might look in, along in the
evenin'. Come, Mary!"
Mary, very sweet in her plain dress and white kerchief, was talking
with young Marden, her husband for the day; but she turned about
contentedly.
"Yes, gran'ther," said she, without a look behind, "I'm coming!"
THE END OF ALL LIVING
The First Church of Tiverton stands on a hill, whence it overlooks the
little village, with one or two pine-shaded neighborhoods beyond, and,
when the air is clear, a thin blue line of upland delusively like the
sea. Set thus austerely aloft, it seems now a survival of the day when
men used to go to meeting gun in hand, and when one stayed, a lookout by
the door, to watch and listen. But this the present dwellers do not
remember. Conceding not a sigh to the holy and strenuous past, they
lament--and the more as they grow older--the stiff climb up the hill,
albeit to rest in so sweet a sanctuary at the top. For it is sweet
indeed. A soft little wind seems always to be stirring there, on summer
Sundays a messenger of good. It runs whispering about, and wafts in all
sorts of odors: honey of the milk-weed and wild rose, and a Christmas
tang of the evergreens just below. It carries away something,
too--scents calculated to bewilder the thrift-hunting bee: sometimes a
whiff of peppermint from an old lady's pew, but oftener the breath of
musk and southernwood, gathered in ancient gardens, and borne up here
to embroider the preacher's drowsy homilies, and remind us, when we
faint, of the keen savor of righteousness.
Here in the church do we congregate from week to week; but behind it, on
a sloping hillside, is the last home of us all, the old burying-ground,
overrun with a briery tangle, and relieved by Nature's sweet and cunning
hand from the severe decorum set ordinarily about the dead. Our very
faithlessness has made it fair. There was a time when we were a little
ashamed of it. We regarded it with affection, indeed, but affection of
the sort accorded some rusty relative who has lain too supine in the rut
of years. Thus, with growing ambition came, in due course, the project
of a new burying-ground. This we dignified, even in common speech; it
was always grandly "the Cemetery." While it lay unrealized in the
distance, the home of our forbears fell into neglect, and Nature marched
in, according to her lavishness, and adorned what we ignored. The white
alder crept farther and farther from its bounds; tansy and wild rose
rioted in profusion, and soft patches of violets smiled to meet the
spring. Here were, indeed, great riches, "a little of everything" that
pasture life affords: a hardy bed of checkerberry, crimson strawberries
nodding on long stalks, and in one sequestered corner the beloved
Linnæa. It seemed a consecrated pasture shut off from daily use, and so
given up to pleasantness that you could scarcely walk there without
setting foot on some precious outgrowth of the spring, or pushing aside
a summer loveliness better made for wear.
Ambition had its fulfillment. We bought our Cemetery, a large, green
tract, quite square, and lying open to the sun. But our pendulum had
swung too wide. Like many folk who suffer from one discomfort, we had
gone to the utmost extreme and courted another. We were tired of
climbing hills, and so we pressed too far into the lowland; and the
first grave dug in our Cemetery showed three inches of water at the
bottom. It was in "Prince's new lot," and there his young daughter was
to lie. But her lover had stood by while the men were making the grave;
and, looking into the ooze below, he woke to the thought of her fair
young body there.
"God!" they heard him say, "she sha'n't lay so. Leave it as it is, an'
come up into the old buryin'-ground. There's room enough by me."
The men, all mates of his, stopped work without a glance and followed
him; and up there in the dearer shrine her place was made. The father
said but a word at her changed estate. Neighbors had hurried in to bring
him the news; he went first to the unfinished grave in the Cemetery, and
then strode up the hill, where the men had not yet done. After watching
them for a while in silence, he turned aside; but he came back to drop a
trembling hand upon the lover's arm.
"I guess," he said miserably, "she'd full as lieves lay here by you."
And she will be quite beside him, though, in the beaten ways of earth,
others have come between. For years he lived silently and apart; but
when his mother died, and he and his father were left staring at the
dulled embers of life, he married a good woman, who perhaps does not
deify early dreams; yet she is tender of them, and at the death of her
own child it was she who went toiling up to the graveyard, to see that
its little place did not encroach too far. She gave no reason, but we
all knew it was because she meant to let her husband lie there by the
long-loved guest.
Naturally enough, after this incident of the forsaken grave, we
conceived a strange horror of the new Cemetery, and it has remained
deserted to this day. It is nothing but a meadow now, with that one
little grassy hollow in it to tell a piteous tale. It is mown by any
farmer who chooses to take it for a price; but we regard it differently
from any other plot of ground. It is "the Cemetery," and always will be.
We wonder who has bought the grass. "Eli's got the Cemetery this year,"
we say. And sometimes awe-stricken little squads of school children
lead one another there, hand in hand, to look at the grave where Annie
Prince was going to be buried when her beau took her away. They never
seem to connect that heart-broken wraith of a lover with the bent farmer
who goes to and fro driving the cows. He wears patched overalls, and has
sciatica in winter; but I have seen the gleam of youth awakened, though
remotely, in his eyes. I do not believe he ever quite forgets; there are
moments, now and then, at dusk or midnight, all his for poring over
those dulled pages of the past.
After we had elected to abide by our old home, we voted an enlargement
of its bounds; and thereby hangs a tale of outlawed revenge. Long years
ago "old Abe Eaton" quarreled with his twin brother, and vowed, as the
last fiat of an eternal divorce, "I won't be buried in the same yard
with ye!"
The brother died first; and because he lay within a little knoll beside
the fence, Abe willfully set a public seal on that iron oath by
purchasing a strip of land outside, wherein he should himself be buried.
Thus they would rest in a hollow correspondence, the fence between. It
all fell out as he ordained, for we in Tiverton are cheerfully willing
to give the dead their way. Lax enough is the helpless hand in the
fictitious stiffness of its grasp; and we are not the people to deny it
holding, by courtesy at least. Soon enough does the sceptre of
mortality crumble and fall. So Abe was buried according to his wish. But
when necessity commanded us to add unto ourselves another acre, we took
in his grave with it, and the fence, falling into decay, was never
renewed. There he lies, in affectionate decorum, beside the brother he
hated; and thus does the greater good wipe out the individual wrong.
So now, as in ancient times, we toil steeply up here, with the dead upon
his bier; for not often in Tiverton do we depend on that uncouth
monstrosity, the hearse. It is not that we do not own one,--a rigid box
of that name has belonged to us now for many a year; and when Sudleigh
came out with a new one, plumes, trappings, and all, we broached the
idea of emulating her. But the project fell through after Brad Freeman's
contented remark that he guessed the old one would last us out. He
"never heard no complaint from anybody 't ever rode in it." That placed
our last journey on a homely, humorous basis, and we smiled, and
reflected that we preferred going up the hill borne by friendly hands,
with the light of heaven falling on our coffin-lids.
The antiquary would set much store by our headstones, did he ever find
them out. Certain of them are very ancient, according to our ideas; for
they came over from England, and are now fallen into the grayness of
age. They are woven all over with lichens, and the blackberry binds
them fast. Well, too, for them! They need the grace of some such
veiling; for most of them are alive, even to this day, with warning
skulls, and awful cherubs compounded of bleak, bald faces and sparsely
feathered wings. One discovery, made there on a summer day, has not, I
fancy, been duplicated in another New England town. On six of the larger
tombstones are carved, below the grass level, a row of tiny imps,
grinning faces and humanized animals. Whose was the hand that wrought?
The Tivertonians know nothing about it. They say there was a certain old
Veasey who, some eighty odd years ago, used to steal into the graveyard
with his tools, and there, for love, scrape the mosses from the stones
and chip the letters clear. He liked to draw, "creatur's" especially,
and would trace them for children on their slates. He lived alone in a
little house long since fallen, and he would eat no meat. That is all
they know of him. I can guess but one thing more: that when no looker-on
was by, he pushed away the grass, and wrote his little jokes, safe in
the kindly tolerance of the dead. This was the identical soul who
should, in good old days, have been carving gargoyles and misereres;
here his only field was the obscurity of Tiverton churchyard, his only
monument these grotesqueries so cunningly concealed.
We have epitaphs, too,--all our own as yet, for the world has not
discovered them. One couple lies in well-to-do respectability under a
tiny monument not much taller than the conventional gravestone, but
shaped on a pretentious model.
"We'd ruther have it nice," said the builders, "even if there ain't much
of it."
These were Eliza Marden and Peleg her husband, who worked from sun to
sun, with scant reward save that of pride in their own forehandedness. I
can imagine them as they drove to church in the open wagon, a couple
portentously large and prosperous: their one child, Hannah, sitting
between them, and glancing about her, in a flickering, intermittent way,
at the pleasant holiday world. Hannah was no worker; she liked a long
afternoon in the sun, her thin little hands busied about nothing
weightier than crochet; and her mother regarded her with a horrified
patience, as one who might some time be trusted to sow all her wild oats
of idleness. The well-mated pair died within the same year, and it was
Hannah who composed their epitaph, with an artistic accuracy, but a
defective sense of rhyme:--
"Here lies Eliza She was a striver Here lies Peleg He was a select Man"
We townsfolk found something haunting and bewildering in the lines; they
drew, and yet they baffled us, with their suggested echoes luring only
to betray. Hannah never wrote anything else, but we always cherished the
belief that she could do "'most anything" with words and their
possibilities. Still, we accepted her one crowning achievement, and
never urged her to further proof. In Tiverton we never look genius in
the mouth. Nor did Hannah herself propose developing her gift. Relieved
from the spur of those two unquiet spirits who had begotten her, she
settled down to sit all day in the sun, learning new patterns of
crochet; and having cheerfully let her farm run down, she died at last
in a placid poverty.
Then there was Desire Baker, who belonged to the era of colonial
hardship, and who, through a redundant punctuation, is relegated to a
day still more remote. For some stone-cutter, scornful of working by the
card, or born with an inordinate taste for periods, set forth, below her
_obiit_, the astounding statement:--
"The first woman. She made the journey to Boston. By stage."
Here, too, are the ironies whereof departed life is prodigal. This is
the tidy lot of Peter Merrick, who had a desire to stand well with the
world, in leaving it, and whose purple and fine linen were embodied in
the pomp of death. He was a cobbler, and he put his small savings
together to erect a modest monument to his own memory. Every Sunday he
visited it, "after meetin'," and perhaps his day-dreams, as he sat
leather-aproned on his bench, were still of that white marble idealism.
The inscription upon it was full of significant blanks; they seemed an
interrogation of the destiny which governs man.
"Here lies Peter Merrick----" ran the unfinished scroll, "and his wife
who died----"
But ambitious Peter never lay there at all; for in his later prime, with
one flash of sharp desire to see the world, he went on a voyage to the
Banks, and was drowned. And his wife? The story grows somewhat
threadbare. She summoned his step-brother to settle the estate, and he,
a marble-cutter by trade, filled in the date of Peter's death with
letters English and illegible. In the process of their carving, the
widow stood by, hands folded under her apron from the midsummer sun. The
two got excellent well acquainted, and the stone-cutter prolonged his
stay. He came again in a little over a year, at Thanksgiving time, and
they were married. Which shows that nothing is certain in life,--no, not
the proprieties of our leaving it,--and that even there we must walk
softly, writing no boastful legend for time to annul.
At one period a certain quatrain had a great run in Tiverton; it was the
epitaph of the day. Noting how it overspread that stony soil, you
picture to yourself the modest pride of its composer; unless indeed, it
had been copied from an older inscription in an English yard, and
transplanted through the heart and brain of some settler whose thoughts
were ever flitting back. Thus it runs in decorous metre:--
"Dear husband, now my life is passed, You have dearly loved me to the
last. Grieve not for me, but pity take On my dear children for my sake."
But one sorrowing widower amended it, according to his wife's direction,
so that it bore a new and significant meaning. He was charged to
"pity take On my dear parent for my sake."