she was "difficult." Who knows how keenly the sick woman's mind ran on
the possibilities of reef and quicksand for the alien two left alone
without her guiding hand? So she set the warning of her love and fear to
be no more forgotten while she herself should be remembered.
The husband was a silent man. He said very little about his intentions;
performance was enough for him. Therefore it happened that his "parent,"
adopted perforce, knew nothing about this public charge until she came
upon it, on her first Sunday visit, surveying the new glory of the
stone. The story goes that she stood before it, a square, portentous
figure in black alpaca and warlike mitts, and that she uttered these
irrevocable words:--
"Pity on _me_! Well, I guess he won't! I'll go to the poor-farm fust!"
And Monday morning, spite of his loyal dissuasions, she packed her "blue
chist," and drove off to a far-away cousin, who got her "nussin'" to do.
Another lesson from the warning finger of Death: let what was life not
dream that it can sway the life that is, after the two part company.
Not always were mothers-in-law such breakers of the peace. There is a
story in Tiverton of one man who went remorsefully mad after his wife's
death, and whose mind dwelt unceasingly on the things he had denied her.
These were not many, yet the sum seemed to him colossal. It piled the
Ossa of his grief. Especially did he writhe under the remembrance of
certain blue dishes she had desired the week before her sudden death;
and one night, driven by an insane impulse to expiate his blindness, he
walked to town, bought them, and placed them in a foolish order about
her grave. It was a puerile, crazy deed, but no one smiled, not even the
little children who heard of it next day, on the way home from school,
and went trudging up there to see. To their stirring minds it seemed a
strange departure from the comfortable order of things, chiefly because
their elders stood about with furtive glances at one another and
murmurs of "Poor creatur'!" But one man, wiser than the rest, "harnessed
up," and went to tell the dead woman's mother, a mile away. Jonas was
"shackled;" he might "do himself a mischief." In the late afternoon, the
guest so summoned walked quietly into the silent house, where Jonas sat
by the window, beating one hand incessantly upon the sill, and staring
at the air. His sister, also, had come; she was frightened, however, and
had betaken herself to the bedroom, to sob. But in walked this little
plump, soft-footed woman, with her banded hair, her benevolent
spectacles, and her atmosphere of calm.
"I guess I'll blaze a fire, Jonas," said she. "You step out an' git me a
mite o' kindlin'."
The air of homely living enwrapped him once again, and mechanically,
with the inertia of old habit, he obeyed. They had a "cup o' tea"
together; and then, when the dishes were washed, and the peaceful
twilight began to settle down upon them like a sifting mist, she drew a
little rocking chair to the window where he sat opposite, and spoke.
"Jonas," said she, in that still voice which had been harmonized by the
experiences of life, "arter dark, you jest go up an' bring home them
blue dishes. Mary's got an awful lot o' fun in her, an' if she ain't
laughin' over that, I'm beat. Now, Jonas, you do it! Do you s'pose she
wants them nice blue pieces out there through wind an' weather? She'd
ruther by half see 'em on the parlor cluzzet shelves; an' if you'll
fetch 'em home, I'll scallop some white paper, jest as she liked, an'
we'll set 'em up there."
Jonas wakened a little from his mental swoon. Life seemed warmer, more
tangible, again.
"Law, do go," said the mother soothingly. "She don't want the whole
township tramplin' up there to eye over her chiny. Make her as nervous
as a witch. Here's the ha'-bushel basket, an' some paper to put between
'em. You go, Jonas, an' I'll clear off the shelves."
So Jonas, whether he was tired of guiding the impulses of his own
unquiet mind, or whether he had become a child again, glad to yield to
the maternal, as we all do in our grief, took the basket and went. He
stood by, still like a child, while this comfortable woman put the china
on the shelves, speaking warmly, as she worked, of the pretty curving of
the cups, and her belief that the pitcher was "one you could pour out
of." She stayed on at the house, and Jonas, through his sickness of the
mind, lay back upon her soothing will as a baby lies in its mother's
arms. But the china was never used, even when he had come to his normal
estate, and bought and sold as before. The mother's prescience was too
keen for that.
Here in this ground are the ambiguities of life carried over into that
other state, its pathos and its small misunderstandings. This was a
much-married man whose last spouse had been a triple widow. Even to him
the situation proved mathematically complex, and the sumptuous stone to
her memory bears the dizzying legend that "Enoch Nudd who erects this
stone is her fourth husband and his fifth wife." Perhaps it was the
exigencies of space which brought about this amazing elision; but
surely, in its very apparent intention, there is only a modest pride.
For indubitably the much-married may plume themselves upon being also
the widely sought. If it is the crown of sex to be desired, here you
have it, under seal of the civil bond. No baseless, windy boasting that
"I might an if I would!" Nay, here be the marriage ties to testify.
In this pleasant, weedy corner is a little white stone, not so long
erected. "I shall arise in thine image," runs the inscription; and
reading it, you shall remember that the dust within belonged to a little
hunchback, who played the fiddle divinely, and had beseeching eyes. With
that cry he escaped from the marred conditions of the clay. Here, too
(for this is a sort of bachelor nook), is the grave of a man whom we
unconsciously thrust into a permanent masquerade. Years and years ago he
broke into a house,--an unknown felony in our quiet limits,--and was
incontinently shot. The burglar lost his arm, and went about at first
under a cloud of disgrace and horror, which became, with healing of the
public conscience, a veil of sympathy. After his brief imprisonment
indoors, during the healing of the mutilated stump, he came forth among
us again, a man sadder and wiser in that he had learned how slow and
sure may be the road to wealth. He had sown his wild oats in one night's
foolish work, and now he settled down to doing such odd jobs as he might
with one hand. We got accustomed to his loss. Those of us who were
children when it happened never really discovered that it was disgrace
at all; we called it misfortune, and no one said us nay. Then one day it
occurred to us that he must have been shot "in the war," and so, all
unwittingly to himself, the silent man became a hero. We accepted him.
He was part of our poetic time, and when he died, we held him still in
remembrance among those who fell worthily. When Decoration Day was first
observed in Tiverton, one of us thought of him, and dropped some apple
blossoms on his grave; and so it had its posy like the rest, although it
bore no flag. It was the doctor who set us right there. "I wouldn't do
that," he said, withholding the hand of one unthinking child; and she
took back her flag. But she left the blossoms, and, being fond of
precedent, we still do the same; unless we stop to think, we know not
why. You may say there is here some perfidy to the republic and the
honored dead, or at least some laxity of morals. We are lax, indeed, but
possibly that is why we are so kind. We are not willing to "hurt folks'
feelings" even when they have migrated to another star; and a flower
more or less from the overplus given to men who made the greater choice
will do no harm, tossed to one whose soul may be sitting, like Lazarus,
at their riches' gate.
But of all these fleeting legends made to hold the soul a moment on its
way, and keep it here in fickle permanence, one is more dramatic than
all, more charged with power and pathos. Years ago there came into
Tiverton an unknown man, very handsome, showing the marks of high
breeding, and yet in his bearing strangely solitary and remote. He wore
a cloak, and had a foreign look. He came walking into the town one
night, with dust upon his shoes, and we judged that he had been
traveling a long time. He had the appearance of one who was not nearly
at his journey's end, and would pass through the village, continuing on
a longer way. He glanced at no one, but we all stared at him. He seemed,
though we had not the words to put it so, an exiled prince. He went
straight through Tiverton Street until he came to the parsonage; and
something about it (perhaps its garden, hot with flowers, larkspur,
coreopsis, and the rest) detained his eye, and he walked in. Next day
the old doctor was there also with his little black case, but we were
none the wiser for that; for the old doctor was of the sort who intrench
themselves in a professional reserve. You might draw up beside the road
to question him, but you could as well deter the course of nature. He
would give the roan a flick, and his sulky would flash by.
"What's the matter with so-and-so?" would ask a mousing neighbor.
"He's sick," ran the laconic reply.
"Goin' to die?" one daring querist ventured further.
"Some time," said the doctor.
But though he assumed a right to combat thus the outer world, no one was
gentler with a sick man or with those about him in their grief. To the
latter he would speak; but he used to say he drew his line at second
cousins.
Into his hands and the true old parson's fell the stranger's confidence,
if confidence it were. He may have died solitary and unexplained; but no
matter what he said, his story was safe. In a week he was carried out
for burial; and so solemn was the parson's manner as he spoke a brief
service over him, so thrilling his enunciation of the words "our
brother," that we dared not even ask what else he should be called. And
we never knew. The headstone, set up by the parson, bore the words
"Peccator Maximus." For a long time we thought they made the stranger's
name, and judged that he must have been a foreigner; but a new
schoolmistress taught us otherwise. It was Latin, she said, and it meant
"the chiefest among sinners." When that report flew round, the parson
got wind of it, and then, in the pulpit one morning, he announced that
he felt it necessary to say that the words had been used "at our
brother's request," and that it was his own decision to write below
them, "For this cause came I into the world."
We have accepted the stranger as we accept many things in Tiverton.
Parson and doctor kept his secret well. He is quite safe from our
questioning; but for years I expected a lady, always young and full of
grief, to seek out his grave and shrive him with her tears. She will not
appear now, unless she come as an old, old woman, to lie beside him. It
is too late.
One more record of our vanished time,--this full of poesy only, and the
pathos of farewell. It was not the aged and heartsick alone who lay down
here to rest. We have been no more fortunate than others. Youth and
beauty came also, and returned no more. This, where the white rose-bush
grows untended, was the young daughter of a squire in far-off days: too
young to have known the pangs of love or the sweet desire of Death, save
that, in primrose time, he always paints himself so fair. I have
thought the inscription must have been borrowed from another grave, in
some yard shaded by yews and silent under the cawing of the rooks;
perhaps, from its stiffness, translated from a stately Latin verse. This
it is, snatched not too soon from oblivion; for a few more years will
wear it quite away:--
"Here lies the purple flower of a maid Having to envious Death due
tribute paid. Her sudden Loss her Parents did lament, And all her
Friends with grief their hearts did Rent. Life's short. Your wicked
Lives amend with care, For Mortals know we Dust and Shadows are."
"The purple flower of a maid!" All the blossomy sweetness, the fragrant
lamenting of Lycidas, lies in that one line. Alas, poor
love-lies-bleeding! And yet not poor according to the barren pity we
accord the dead, but dowered with another youth set like a crown upon
the unstained front of this. Not going with sparse blossoms ripened or
decayed, but heaped with buds and dripping over in perfume. She seems so
sweet in her still loveliness, the empty promise of her balmy spring,
that for a moment fain are you to snatch her back into the pageant of
your day. Reading that phrase, you feel the earth is poorer for her
loss. And yet not so, since the world holds other greater worlds as
well. Elsewhere she may have grown to age and stature; but here she
lives yet in beauteous permanence,--as true a part of youth and joy and
rapture as the immortal figures on the Grecian Urn. While she was but a
flying phantom on the frieze of time, Death fixed her there forever,--a
haunting spirit in perennial bliss.