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 milkweed 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 Linnaea. 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 fore-handedness.
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."
The lesson was patent. His mother-in-law had always lived with him, and
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.