The great clock in the dining-room whirred out twelve strokes before
Swan opened his eyes. As soon as the eyes took in the principal features
of the apartment, which process his mental preoccupation had hindered
the night before, he was as much at home as if he had never left Walton.
The great beam across the low room,--the little window-panes,--the
rag-carpet, made of odds and ends patriotically arranged to represent
the American eagle holding stars and stripes in his firm and bounteous
claws, with an open beak that seemed saying,--"Here they be!--'cordin'
as you behave yourselves!--stars _or_ stripes!"--all within was more
familiar to his eye than household words, for it was the old room he had
occupied the year before he left America. He stepped quickly across the
chamber to a certain beam, where he had, fifteen years before, written
four initial letters, and intertwined them so curiously that the Gordian
knot was easy weaving in comparison. The Gordian one was cut;--and this
had been painted and effaced forever.
Swan returned to his trunk with a half-sigh. He selected a suit
of clothes which he had purchased in Boston, put aside his
travelling-dress, and looked out of the window occasionally as he
dressed. It was a warm, sunny day. The Indian summer had relented and
come back to take one more peep, before winter should shut the door on
all the glowing beauty of the year. A dozen persons were crossing the
street. He knew every one of them at sight. Of course there was no
forgetting old Dan Sears, with whom he had forty times gone a-fishing;
nor Phil Sanborn, who had stood behind the counter with him two years
at the old store. Though Phil had grown stout, there was the same look.
There was the old store, too, looking exactly as it did when he went
away, the sign a little more worn in the gilding. He seemed to smell the
mingled odors of rum, salt-fish, and liquorice, with which every beam
and rafter was permeated. And there was old Walsh going home drunk this
minute! with a salt mackerel, as usual, for his family-dinner.
He wrote a short note as he dressed and shaved leisurely. The note was
to Dorcas, and only said,--"Meet me under the old pear-tree before
sunset tonight,"--and was signed with his initials. This note he at
first placed on the little mantel-shelf in plain sight, so that he
should not forget to take it down-stairs when he went to breakfast.
Afterwards he put it into his pocket-book.
His dress----But the dress of 1811 has not arrived at the picturesque,
and could never be classical under any circumstances. He finished his
toilet, and went into the dining-room just as everybody else had dined,
and asked the landlord what he could have for breakfast. Even then, the
landlord hardly looked curious. Taft was certainly failing. In five
minutes he found himself at a well-known little table, with the
tavern-staple for odd meals, ham and eggs, flanked with sweetmeats and
cake, just as he remembered of old. He nibbled at the sharp barberries
lying black in the boiled molasses, and listened eagerly to the talk
about British aggressions which was going on in the bar-room. Suddenly a
face looked in at the low window.
Swan sprang forward, kicked over his chair, and knocked the earthen
pepper-box off the table. Before he reached the window, however, the
shadow had passed round the corner of the house, out of sight.
It was only a youthful figure, surmounted by a broad-brimmed straw hat,
that half hid two sweet, sparkling eyes. Ah! but they were Dorcas's
eyes!
He picked up the pepper-box, and mechanically sifted its contents into
the barberry-dish.
Dorcas's eyes,--lips,--cheeks,--and waving grace! A rocking movement, a
sort of beating, bounding, choking emotion, made the room suddenly dark,
and he fell heavily into a chair.
The landlord opened the door, and said,--
"The hoss and shay ready, any time."
Swan roused himself, and drove away, without speaking to any of the
smoking loungers on the stoop, to whom he was as if he had never been
born. But this, from his preoccupied state, did not strike him as
singular. One little voice, a bird's voice, as he drove along through
the pine woods, sang over and over the same tune,--"Dorcas! Dorcas!"
The silence of the road, when all animated Nature slept in the warm noon
of the late autumn day, when even the wheels scarcely sounded on the
dead pine-spears, made this solitary voice, like Swan's newly awakened
memory, all but angelic.
The sadness, which, through all the beauty of a New-England November,
whispers in the fallen leaves, and through the rustle of the firs,
overspread Swan's soul, not yet strengthened as well as freshened by his
native air. He was melancholy and half stunned. He had been frightened,
as he sat in the chair, by the capacity for enjoyment and suffering that
was left in him. And he peered curiously into his own soul, as if the
sensibilities locked up there belonged to somebody else. Impulsively
he turned his horse towards the graveyard,--forgetting that he had all
along intended to go there,--and fastening him at the broken gate, went
on till he reached his mother's grave. Before his departure he had set
up a slate stone to her memory and that of Robert Day, a soldier in the
English army.
"She shall have a marble monument now, poor mother!" thought the son,
picking his way through the long, tangled grass of the dreary place. Not
a tree, not a shrub in sight. Not even the sward kept carefully. The
slate had fallen flat, or, more likely, had been thrown down, and no
hand had cared to raise again a stone to the memory of a despised enemy,
who had never been even seen in Walton.
When Swan tried to move the stone, a thousand ugly things swarmed from
beneath it. He dropped it, shuddering, and passed on. A white marble
tablet of some pretension stood near, and recorded the names of
ZEPHANIAH FOX,
AND
AZUBAH, HIS WIFE.
_They died the, same day and their bones rest
here, till the final resurrection_.
He glanced at the date,--
JUNE 14th, 1805.
And he had never heard of it!--never guessed it! But then, he had not
heard at all from Dorcas. Poor Dorcas! how had she borne this sudden and
terrible bereavement? All that he might have been to her in her sorrow,
for one moment all that he had _not_ been, floated by him. The yellow
melted away that had so long incrusted his soul, and he felt on his
bared breast, as it were, the fresh air of truth and constancy,--of all
that makes life worth the having.
He drove away,--away over the broad fields and the well-remembered
meadows, out upon the Dummerston road, and over the Ridge Hill. Well,
life was not all behind him!
He took out his watch. It was time to keep his appointment. He left
the horse at the tavern-door, and walked up the road towards the
trysting-place, the old pear-tree. He looked wistfully at it, and sprang
over the wall, with considerable effort, as he could not but admit
to himself. That old pear-tree! They had called it old fifteen years
ago,--and here it stood, as proud and strong as then! The two great
branches that stretched towards the south, and which he had often
thought had something benignant in their aspect, as if they would bless
the wayfarer or the sojourner under their shade, still reached forth
and spread abroad their strong arms. But to-night, whether from his own
excited imagination, or because the early frosts had stripped it of
its leaves and so bereaved it of all that gave grace to its aspect, or
perhaps from the deepening twilight,--however it was, the old tree had a
different expression, and stretched forth two skeleton arms with a sort
of half-warning, half-mocking gesture, that sent a shudder over his
frame, already disturbed by the successive presence, in the last two or
three hours, of more emotions than he could comfortably sustain.
Swan was not an imaginative person. Yet the tree looked to him like
a living, sentient thing, dooming him and warning him. As in the
compression of the brain in drowning, it is said forgotten memories are
hustled uppermost, and the events of early life vividly written on
the consciousness,--so in this unwonted stir of past and present
associations, Swan found himself remembering, with a thrill of pleasure
that was chased by a spasm of pain, the last evening on which he had
parted from Dorcas. He remembered, as if it were but now, how he had
turned towards the pear-tree, when Dorcas had gone out of sight and he
dared not follow her, and that the pear-tree had seemed to hear, to see,
to sympathize with him,--that it had spread out great blessing arms on
the southern air, and had seemed to encourage and strengthen his hopes
of a happy return.
Was the fearful expression it now wore a shadow, a forerunner of what he
might expect? He shook off, with an effort that was less painful than
the sufferance of the thought, both fears and prognostics. He turned his
back and walked rapidly and uneasily up and down the path between the
tree and the old well.
He had left Dorcas blooming, lovely, and twenty-two. As blooming, as
lovely, as lithe, and as sparkling, she was now. His own eyes had seen
the vision.
But would she remember and love him still? For the first time it
occurred to him that he must himself be somewhat changed,--changed
certainly, since old Taft did not recognize him, after all the hogsheads
of rum he had sold him! For the first time he felt a little thrill of
fear, lest Dorcas should have been inconstant,--or lest, seeing him now,
she might not love him as she once did. A faint blush passed over his
face.
He raised his eyes, and Dorcas stood before him at the distance of a few
feet: the bloom on her delicate cheek the same,--the dimpled chin, the
serene forehead, the arch and laughing eyes!
Somehow, she seemed like a ghost, too; for, when he stepped towards her,
she retreated, keeping the same distance between them.
"Dorcas!" said Swan, imploringly.
"What do you want of me?" answered a sweet voice, trembling and low.
"Are you really Dorcas? really, really _my_ Dorcas?" said Swan, in an
agony of uncertain emotion.
"To be sure I am Dorcas!" answered the girl, in a half-terrified,
half-petulant tone.
In a moment she darted up the path out of sight, just as Dorcas had done
on the last night he had seen her!
Had he kept the kiss on his lips with which he had parted from
her,--that kiss which, to him at least, had been one of betrothal?
The short day was nearly dead. In the gloom of the darkening twilight,
Swan stood leaning against the old tree and looking up the path where
the figure had disappeared, doubting whether a vision had deluded his
senses or not.
Was Dorcas indeed separated from him? Was there no bringing back the
sweet, olden time of love to her? She had seemed to shrink from him and
fade out of sight. Could she never indeed love him again?
It was getting dark. But for the great, broad moon, that just then shone
out from behind the Ridge Hill, he would not have seen another figure
coming down the path from the house. Swan felt as if he had lived a long
time in the last half-hour.
A woman walked cautiously towards him, apparently proceeding to the
well. She stooped a little, and a wooden hoop round her person supported
a pail on each side, which she had evidently come to fill. It was no
angel that came to trouble the fountain to-night. She pulled down the
chained bucket with a strong, heavy sweep, and the beam rose high in the
air, with the stone securely fastened to the end. While she drew up and
poured the water into the pails, she looked several times covertly at
the stranger. The stranger, on his part, scanned her as closely. She
belonged to the house, he thought. Probably she had come to live on
the Fox farm at the death of the old people,--to take care of Dorcas,
possibly. Again he scanned her curiously.
The face was an ordinary one. A farmer's wife, even of the well-to-do,
fore-handed sort, had many cares, and often heavy labors. Fifty years
ago, inventive science had given no assistance to domestic labor, and
all household work was done in the hardest manner. This woman might
have had her day of being good-looking, possibly. But the face, even by
moonlight, was now swarthy with exposure; the once round arm was dark
and sinewy; and the plainly parted hair was confined and concealed by
a blue-and-white handkerchief knotted under her chin. The forehead
was freely lined; and the lips opened, when they did open, on dark,
unfrequent teeth. These observations Swan made as he moved forward to
speak to her; for there was no special expressiveness or animation to
relieve the literal stamp of her features.
"Can you tell me, Madam,--hem!--who lives now on this place? It used to
belong to Colonel Fox, I think."
He called her "Madam" at a venture, though she might, for all he could
see, be a "help" on the farm. But it wasn't Cely, nor yet Dinah.
At the sound of his voice the woman's whole expression changed. Her
quick eyes fell back into a look of dreamy inquiry and softness. She
dropped her pails to the ground, and stood, fenced in by the hoop, like
a statue of bewilderment,--if such a statue could be carved.
Was his face transfigured in the moonlight, as she slowly gathered up
old memories, and compared the form before her with the painted shadows
of the past? She answered not a word, but clasped her hands tightly
together, and bent her head to listen again to the voice.
"I say! good _woman_!"--this time with a raised tone, for he thought she
might be deaf,--"is not this the old Fox farm? Please tell me who lives
here now. The family are dead, I think."
The woman opened her clenched hands and spread the palms outward and
upward. Then, in a low tone of astonishment, she said,--
"Good Lord o' mercy! if it a'n't him!"
He moved nearer, and put his hand on her shoulder to reassure her.
"To be sure it is, my good soul. Don't be frightened. I give you my
word, I am myself, and nobody else. And pray, now, who may you be? Do
you live here?" he added, with a short laugh.
He addressed her jocosely; for he saw the poor frightened thing would
never give him the information he wanted, unless he could contrive to
compose her. It was odd, too, that he should frighten everybody so.
Dorcas had hurried off like a lapwing.
"Swan Day!" said the woman, softly.
"That is my name, Goody! But I am ashamed to say, I don't remember you.
Pray, did you live here when I went away?"
"Yes," said she, softly again, and this time looking into his eyes.
"Tell me, then, if you can tell me, whose hands this farm fell into? Who
owns the place? Has it gone out of the family? Where is Dorcas Fox?"
He spoke hastily, and held her by the arm, as if he feared she would
slide away in the moonlight.
"Dorcas Fox is here, Swan. I am Dorcas."
"You? you Dorcas Fox?" said he, roughly. "Was it a ghost I saw?" he
murmured,--"or is this a ghost?"
He had seen a bud, fresh, dewy, and blooming; and now he brushed away
from his thought the wilted and brown substitute. Not a line of the
face, not a tone of the voice, did he remember.
"Don't you see anything about me, Swan,--anything that reminds you of
Dorcas Fox?" said the woman, eagerly, and clasping her hands again.
His eyes glared at her in the moonlight, as he exclaimed,--
"No, my God! not a feature!"