waves of the bay, and the bitter wind blew freshly through the withered
grass and stubble, chasing the faded leaves over Kempton Hill until they
rushed about the old meeting-house like a flight of terrified witches. A
stranger was driving slowly up the road from the next town in an open
carriage, and as he came to the top of the hill he drew rein before the
church and looked about him.
His gaze was not that of one who beheld the scene for the first time.
He gazed down at the irregular houses under the hill, cuddled like
frightened and weak-kneed sheep. He looked over the bay to the
lighthouse, looming ghastly and white against the dark sea and sky. His
glance took in all the details of the picture, cold and joyless, devoid
alike of warmth and color. He shivered and sighed, his brows drooping
more heavily yet over his dark piercing eyes, and then turned his gaze
to objects nearer at hand.
Close by was the stark church, with weather-beaten steeple, wherein half
a dozen generations of Kempton women,--the men, for the most part, being
at sea,--had worshipped the power of the storm, praying more for the
escape from evil of the absent than for good to themselves. Beyond
the church appeared the first headstones of the graveyard, the ground
sloping away so rapidly that little more than the first row of slate
slabs was visible from the street. With another shiver Mr. Farnsworth
(for by that name the gentleman played his part upon this world's stage)
got down from his carriage, fastened his horse, and walked toward the
stones, whose rudely chiselled cherubs leered at him through their tawny
rust of moss with a diabolic and sinister mirthfulness.
As Mr. Farnsworth opened the sagging and unpainted gate of the
enclosure, he became aware that the place was not empty. The head and
shoulders of a human being were visible half-way down the hill, now
and then obscured by the dull-reddish heap of earth thrown up from a
partially dug grave.
The visitor made his way down the irregular path, so steep as to be
almost like a rude flight of stairs, and as he neared the worker, he
suddenly perceived, with something of a shock, that the grave-digger was
a woman. She worked as if familiar with her task, a man's battered hat
pushed back from her forehead, over which her faded hair straggled in
confusion, and across which certain grimy streaks bore witness that she
had not escaped the primal curse, but labored in the sweat of her brow.
Kempton's peculiarity in the matter of its sexton had not come to
the knowledge of the stranger before, although he once had known the
village life somewhat intimately. He regarded the woman with a double
curiosity,--to see what she was like and to discover whether perchance
he had ever known her. He paused as he neared her, resting one nicely
gloved hand upon a tilted stone which perpetuated the memory and
recorded the virtues of a captain who reposed in some chill cave under
the Northern seas. Some slight sound caught the ear of the sexton,
who until then had not perceived his approach; she looked up at him
stolidly, and as stolidly looked down again, continuing her work without
interruption. If there remained any consciousness of the strangeness of
her occupation, or if there stirred any womanly shame to be so observed,
they were betrayed by no outward sign. She threw up the dull-yellow
earth at the feet of the new-comer as unmoved as if she had still only
the dwellers in the graves as companions of her labor.
"Don't you find this rather hard work, my good woman?" the gentleman
inquired at length, more by way of breaking the silence than from any
especial interest.
"Yes," the sexton returned impassively, "it's hard enough."
"It is rather unusual work for a woman, too," he said.
To this very obvious remark she returned no answer, a stone to which
she had come in her digging seeming to absorb all her attention. She
unearthed the obstacle with some difficulty, seized it with her rough
hands, and threw it up at the feet of the stranger, who watched her with
that idle interest which labor begets in the unconcerned observer.
"Do you always do this work?" Farnsworth asked at length.
"Yes," was the laconic return.
"But the old sexton,--Joe Grimwet,--is he gone?"
The woman looked up with some interest at this indication that the other
had some previous acquaintance with Kempton and its people. She did not,
however, stop her labor, as a man would probably have stopped.
"Yes," she said. "He's buried over yonder,--there beyond the burdocks."
The gentleman changed his position uneasily. Some subtile disquietude
had arisen to disturb his serenity. The wind rustled mournfully
among the dry leaves, the pebbles rattled against the spade of the
grave-digger, increasing the sombreness of a scene which might easily
affect one at all susceptible to outward influences. In such an
atmosphere a sensitive nature not unfrequently experiences a certain
feeling of unreality, as if dealing with scenes and creatures of the
imagination rather than with actualities; and Farnsworth, whatever the
delicacy of his mental fibre, was conscious of such a sense at this
moment. He hastened to speak again, as if the sound of his own voice
were needed to assure him of the genuineness of the place and scene.
"But how long has he been dead?" he asked. "And his daughter; what
became of her?"
The grave-digger straightened herself to her full height; brushing back
her wind-blown hair with one grimy hand, she raised her face so that her
deep-set eyes were fixed upon the questioner's face.
"So you knew Delia Grimwet?" she said. "When was you here before? It'd
go hard for you to make her out now, if it's long since."
"Is she here still?" Farnsworth persisted, ignoring her question.
"Yes," the sexton replied, suddenly sinking back into the unfinished
grave as a frightened animal might retreat into its den. "Yes; she
lives in the old place."
"Alone?"
"Her and the boy."
He recoiled a step, as if the mention of a child startled or repelled
him. Yet to a close observer it might have seemed as if he were making
an effort to press her with further questions. If so his courage did not
prove sufficient, and he watched in silence while the woman before him
went steadily on with her arduous work. Presently, however, he advanced
again toward the edge of the pit, which was rapidly approaching
completion under her familiar labor.
"Should I find her at home at this time?" he inquired. "Or would she be
out at work?"
The woman started and crouched, much as if she had received or expected
a blow.
"She's out, most likely," she replied in a muffled voice. "She'll be
home along about sundown."
Farnsworth lingered irresolutely a moment or two, as if there were many
things concerning which he could wish to ask; but, as the woman gave him
no encouragement, he turned at last and climbed the slippery, ragged
path up to the church, untethered his horse, and drove slowly down the
hill to the village.
Cap'n Nat Hersey was just coming out of the village store, and to him
Farnsworth addressed an inquiry where he might find shelter for himself
and horse.
"Well," the cap'n responded, with the deliberation of a man who has very
little to say and his whole life to say it in, "well I dunno but ye
might get a chance with Widder Bemis, an' I dunno _as_ ye could; but
there ain't no harm trying, as I knows of."
Further inquiry regarding the whereabouts of the domicile of the Widow
Bemis led to an offer on the part of Cap'n Hersey to act as pilot to
that haven. He declined, however, to take a seat in the buggy. The Cap'n
had his own opinion of land-vehicles. A man might with perfect assurance
trust himself in a boat; but, for his own part, the cap'n had no faith
in those dangerous structures which roam about with nothing better
than dry land under them. He walked along by the side of the carriage,
conversing affably with the stranger under his convoy.
"Isn't it a queer notion to have a woman for a sexton?" Farnsworth
asked, as they wended along.
"Well, yes," the captain returned reflectively. "Yes, it is sort of
curious. Folks mostly speaks of it that comes here. It is curious, if ye
look at it that way. But it all come about as natural as a barnacle on a
keel. Old Sexton Grimwet kept getting considerable feeble, and Dele she
took to helping him with his work. She was sort of cut off from folks,
as ye may say, owing to having a baby and no father to show for it, and
she naturally took to heaving anchor alone, or leastways along with the
old man. And when the old man was took down with a languishment, she
turned to and did all his work for him,--having gradually worked into
it, as you may say."
The cap'n paused to recover from his astonishment at having been
betrayed into so long a speech; but, as the stranger had the air of
expecting him to continue, he presently went on again:
"There was them that wanted her turned out when old Grimwet died. Some
said a woman of that character hadn't ought to have no connection with
the church, even to digging its graves. But Parson Eaton he was good for
'em--I've always noticed that when these pious men gets their regular
mad up they most generally have things their own way; and he preached
'em a sermon about the Samaritan woman, and Mary Magdalene, and a lot
more of them disreputable Scripture women-folks, and, though he never
mentioned Dele by name, they all knew what he was driving at, and they
wilted. 'Twas a pitiful sight to see the girl a-digging her own father's
grave up there. Me and Tom Tobey and Zenas Faston took hold and finished
it for her."
They moved on in silence a moment or two. Farnsworth's gaze was fixed
upon the darkening bay, and no longer interrogated his companion; but
the latter soon again took up his narrative:--
"'Twas well the parson stood up for Dele, too; women-folks is so cussed
hard on each other. They wouldn't ha' let the girl live, I believe. I
always were of the notion there warn't no harm in Dele. Some ---- city
chap got the better of her. She never was over-smart, but she was awful
pretty; and I never believed there was any harm in her. At any rate, she
digs a grave as well as a man, and I guess them that's in 'em don't lay
awake none thinking who tucked 'em in."
The house of the Widow Bemis was by this time reached, and that
estimable lady, who in the summer furnished accommodations to a boarder
whenever that rare blessing was to be secured in Kempton, readily
undertook the charge of Mr. Farnsworth and his horse for the night.
The latter was given into the care of her daughter, for the frequent
absences of the men had accustomed the damsels of Kempton to those
labors which in inland villages are more frequently left to their
brothers; and Farnsworth strolled off toward the wharves, leaving the
widow Bemis and Cap'n Hersey in an agony of curiosity in regard to
himself and his errand.
Whatever may have been Farnsworth's feelings at the discovery that the
daughter of the dead sexton and the woman of whom he had asked tidings
of her were identical,--and they must have been both deep and strong--he
had given no outward sign. But now the settling of his brows, and the
disquiet apparent in his eyes betrayed his inward conflict. He strolled
out upon one of the rotting wharves about which the tide lapped in
mournful iteration, folded his arms upon a breast-high post, and stood
gazing seaward.
The retrospect which occupied his mind was scarcely more cheerful than
the gray scene which spread before his eyes. How awful are the corpses
of dead sins which memory casts up, as the sea its victims! The betrayal
of a woman is a ghastly thing when one looks back upon it stripped
of the garlands and enchantments of passion and temptation; and to
Farnsworth, with the image fresh in his rememberance of that faded,
earth-stained woman digging a grave upon the bleak hillside, the
fault of his youth seemed an incredible dream which only stubborn and
stinging memory converted into a possibility. A retrospect is apt to be
essentially a plea for self against conscience; but in his gloomy revery
Farnsworth found scant excuse for the wreck he had made of the life
of Delia Grimwet. He had gone away, married, and lived honored and
prosperous. He would have forgotten, had not some nobility of his nature
prevented. With the stubbornness of his race, he had fought long and
determinedly against his conscience, but he had been forced to yield
at last. The death of his wife, to whom he had been tenderly attached,
had at once left him free to make such reparation as might still be
possible, and had softened him as only sharp sorrow can. He had come to
Kempton with the determination of finding Delia, and of doing whatever
could be done, at whatever cost to himself.
He had been unprepared, however, for the woman he found. He had left
a fresh, beautiful young girl; ten years had transformed her into a
repulsive old woman. He had no means of adequately measuring the force
of the storms of scorn and poverty and sorrow which had beaten upon
Delia Grimwet in the years that had made of him the cultured, delicately
nurtured man he was. What man ever appreciated the woe of the woman he
betrays? Indeed, what measure has a man of the sorrow of any woman?
Farnsworth had painfully to adjust himself to a condition of affairs for
which he should have been prepared, yet which took him absolutely by
surprise.
He lingered upon the bleak wharf, unconsciously the object of much
mildly speculative curiosity, until the twilight began to fall. Then
with a shiver, no less of mind than of body, he shook off his painful
abstraction, and turned his steps toward the path, once well known,
which led to the house of Delia Grimwet. It seemed to him, as he paused
a brief instant with his hand upon the old knocker, as if nothing here
had changed in ten years. The sunlight would have shown him traces of
decay, but in the gathering dusk the house seemed a pallid phantom from
the past, unchanged but lifeless.
But his knock at once destroyed all illusions, since it summoned the
woman who belonged not at all to that past which he remembered, but to
the pitiful and too tangible present. She held her guttering candle up
without a word, and, having identified him, made him, without speaking,
a signal to enter.
When Farnsworth had left her in the afternoon, Delia crouched in
the bottom of the grave she was digging, her first feeling being an
unreasoning desire for concealment. She thought she should remain
passive if the sides of the pit collapsed and buried her. In the old
days before her boy was born she had been night after night out on the
old wharves, praying for courage to drown herself. After the child came,
her feelings changed, and she longed only to escape and to take her son
away from the scorn and the sordid life which surrounded them. Gradually
she had become hardened; hers was one of those common natures to which
custom and pain are opiates, mercifully dulling all sensibilities.
To-day the appearance of her betrayer had revivified all the old
impressions, and for a moment seemed to transport her to the early
days when her anguish was new. The keenest pangs of sorrow stabbed her
afresh, and she lived again the bitter moments of her sin and shame.
Her instinct was to flee from the man whose presence meant to her only
pain.
But habit is strong, and presently the fading light reminded the sexton
that her work was still unfinished, and that Widow Pettigrove, who was
past all earthly tribulation, must have her last bed prepared, whatever
the woe of the living woman who worked at it with trembling hands and
a sensation as if a demon had clutched her by the throat. Yet work was
not unmerciful; it brought some relief, since it served to dilute the
thought which rushed dizzyingly to her brain, and by the time her toil
was completed she was steadier. When she opened the door to Farnsworth
she was not unlike her usual stolid self. She perceived at a glance that
he had learned who she was, and she hoped in a blind, aching way, that
he had not betrayed his presence to the neighbors, thus to re-awaken all
the old stinging flight of bitter words.
Farnsworth followed Delia into the kitchen, without even those greetings
which habit renders so involuntary that only in the most poignant
moments are they disregarded. With their past between them it was not
easy to break the silence. Farnsworth seated himself, and the woman
stood regarding him. There was in her attitude all the questioning, all
the agony, of her years of suffering. Her wrongs and her sorrows gave
her a dignity before which he shrank as he could not have quailed under
the most withering reproaches. Whatever words he would have spoken--and
no man can come deliberately to so important a crisis without
formulating, even if unconsciously, the plea which his self-defence will
make--were forgotten, or seemed miserably inadequate now. What were
words to this woman, pallid and worn before her time with privation,
anguish, and unwomanly toil? The contrast between his rich and careful
dress and her coarse garb, between his white hands and her knotted
fingers, between his high-bred, pale face and her cowed, weather-beaten
countenance, was too violent not to be apparent to them both,--as if
they were in some strange way merely spectators looking dispassionately
at this wretched meeting of those who had once been passionate lovers.
With each moment the silence became more oppressive; yet as each moment
dragged by it became more difficult to break the stillness. Only a man
utterly devoid of remorse or feeling could have framed upon his tongue
commonplace phrases at such a time. It seemed to Farnsworth as if he
were brought to judgment before the whole universe. His throat became
parched. He longed to have the candle and the flames flickering in the
old fireplace go out in darkness, and take from his sight the Nemesis
that confronted him.
He broke the silence at last with a cry:--
"Ah, my God, Delia! What have I done?"
She wavered as she stood, putting out her hand as if reaching for
support. Then she half staggered backward into a chair.
"There is nothing I can say!" Farnsworth went on vehemently. "There is
nothing I can do! I came here dreaming of making reparation; but there
is no reparation I can make. There is nothing that can change the
past,--nothing that will undo what I have done to you. Oh, my God! How
little I dreamed it would be like this!"
"No," she said slowly, almost stupidly, "nothing can undo it."
"Why did you not tell me?" he began. "Why--"
But the words rebuked him before they were spoken. He buried his face in
his hands, and again they were silent. What the woman,--this woman who
had never been able to think much, even in her best days, and who now
was blunted and dulled almost to stupidity,--what she felt in those
bitter moments, who can tell? The man's soul was a tumult of wild regret
and unavailing remorse, while she waited again for him to speak.
"But," Farnsworth said at length, a new idea seizing him, "but the--our
child, Delia? The boy?"
A shuddering seized her. Unused to giving way to her emotions, she was
torn by her excited feelings almost to the verge of convulsions. She
clutched the arms of her chair and set her teeth together. In her
incoherent attempts at thought, as she had delved among her graves,
there had occurred to her the possibility that the father might sometime
take his child from her. Now this fear possessed her like a physical
epilepsy. Twice she tried to speak, and only emitted a gurgling sound
as if strangling. He sprang toward her, but a sudden repulsion gave her
self-control. She put out her hands as if to ward him off.
"Oh, my boy, my boy!" she cried, breaking out into hysterical sobs. "My
boy, my boy!"
She wrung her hands, and twisted them together in fierce contortions
which frightened Farnsworth; but she still would not allow him to
approach her. She struggled for composure, writhing in paroxysms
dreadful to see.
"Oh, my child!" she cried out, in a tone new and piercing; "no, no! not
him! Oh, God! You cannot have my boy!"
Farnsworth retreated sharply.
He had not considered this. Indeed, so different was everything he found
from everything he had expected, that whatever he had preconsidered
was swept out of existence as irrelevant. He was confronted with a
catastrophe in which it was necessary to judge unerringly and to act
instantly, yet which paralyzed all his powers by its strangeness and
its horror. He groped his way back to his chair and sat down, leaving
the silence again unbroken save by her convulsive breathing and his
deep-drawn sighs.
All at once a new sound broke in upon them, and the mother started to
her feet.
"He is coming!" she gasped hoarsely. "I sent him away; but he has come
back. He could not keep away, my beautiful boy."
Her face was illumined with a love which wellnigh transfigured it. The
door was opened violently, and the boy came rudely in,--a gaunt, rough
whelp of a dozen summers, defiant, bold, and curious.
"I knew there was something up," the young rascal observed with much
self-complacency. "I knew when you sent me off to stay all night that
somebody's funeral was comin' off, and I was bound I'd be here to see
it."
Neither the mother nor the father returned any answer. Ordinary feelings
were so absolutely swept away that the woman did not even remember that
she should have attempted to quiet and to excuse the intruder. Even the
maternal pride which would usually have been troubled by the impression
the child's rudeness must make upon her guest was overwhelmed by the
greater emotion which possessed her whole being.
Farnsworth had never been more keenly alive in every fibre of his being
than at this moment. All his family pride, his refined tastes, his
delicate nature, revolted from a kinship with the ugly, uncouth child
who stood grinning maliciously upon his guilty parents. His impulse,
almost too strong to be resisted, was to turn back and hide himself
again in the world from which he had come,--to leave this woman and her
loutish child in the quiet and obscurity in which he had found them.
But he was nobler than his impulses and had paid already too dearly for
rashness; the claim of a son upon the father who has brought him into
the world grasped his sense of justice like a hand of steel.
He rose to his feet firm and determined.
"Go away now," he said to the boy quietly, but in a voice which even
the urchin felt admitted of no disobedience. "I wish to talk with your
mother. I will see you to-morrow."
"Yes, Farnsworth," the mother said pleadingly. "Go to bed now. I will
come to you before long. That's a good boy."
The boy slowly and unwillingly withdrew, his reluctance showing how rare
obedience was to him, and the parents were once more alone.
"You have given him my name," were Farnsworth's first words, as the door
closed behind his son.
"It was father who did that. He said he should remember to curse you
every time the name was spoken."
"And you?" the other asked, almost with a shudder.
"I did not care. Cursing could not change things. Only I would not let
him do it before the boy. I didn't want him to know what sort of a
father he had."
In the midst of his self-abasement some hidden fibre of resentment and
wounded vanity tingled at her words; but he would not heed it.
"I am not so wholly bad, Delia," he said in a moment. "I came back to
marry you. It will not change or mend the past; but it is the best I can
do now."
"It is no use to talk of that," she returned wearily; "you and I are
done with each other. Even I can see that."
She was spent with the violence of her emotions, and only longed to have
Farnsworth leave her. She was keenly sensitive now of the nicety of
his attire, the contrast between him and her meagre surroundings. The
shamefacedness of the poor overwhelmed her. She rose with uneven steps
and trembling hands, and began to put things to rights a little. She
snuffed the ill-conditioned candle, and trimmed the fire, whose
drift-wood sent out tongues of colored flame. She set back into their
usual gaunt and vulgar order the chairs which had been disturbed.
Farnsworth watched her with an aching heart.
"Delia," he said at length, "come and sit down. We must decide what it
is best to do."