Part 6

But the next day his heart failed him again, for she was not at her window--nor the next, nor the next. He could not know that she was peeping through the crack in the shutter, and that her embroidery and her reading and her old thoughts were all thrown aside for his sake. Persis Buckley could do nothing, day nor night, but think of Darius Hopkins, and watch for him to pass her window.

She did not know why, but she did not like to look fairly out of the window at him any longer. She could only peep through the crack in the shutter, with her color coming and going, and her heart beating loud in her ears.

But when Darius saw no more of Persis at the window, he told himself that his conceit had misled him; that no such marvellous creature as that could have looked upon him as he had thought, and that his bold stare had affronted her.

So he did not pass the Buckley house for several days, and Persis watched in vain. One afternoon she rose up suddenly, with her soft cheek all creased where she had leaned it against the shutter. “He will not come; I will watch no longer,” she said to herself, half angrily. And she got out her green silk pelisse and her bonnet, and prepared to walk abroad. She went through the kitchen, and her sister Submit stared up at her from the hearth, which she was washing.

“You have not got on your veil, Persis,” said she.

“I want no veil,” Persis returned, impatiently.

“But you will get burned in the wind; father will not like it,” said Submit, with wondering and dull remonstrance.

“Well,” sighed Persis, resignedly. And Submit got the black-wrought veil, and tied it over her sister’s beautiful face.

Poor Persis, when she was out of the house, glanced hastily through the black maze of leaves and flowers across the meadow, but she saw no one coming. Then she strolled on away down the road through the woods. Just that side of the burying-ground there was an oak grove, and she went in there and sat down a little way from the road, with her back against a tree. It was very cool for the time of year, but the sun shone bright. All the oak-trees trilled sharply with the insects hidden in them, and the leaves rustled together.

Persis sat very stiffly under the oak-tree. Her petticoat was of green flowered chintz, and her pelisse and her bonnet of green silk. She was as undistinguishable as a green plant against the trunk of the tree, and neither Darius Hopkins nor his aunt Tabitha saw her when they passed. Persis heard their voices before they came in sight. She scarcely breathed. She seemed to be fairly hiding within herself, and forcing her very thoughts away from the eyes of Darius and his aunt.

Mistress Tabitha came down the wood, stepping with her fine mincing gait, and leaning upon her nephew’s arm. They never dreamed that Persis was near. The green waving lines of the forest met their eyes on either hand, but all unnoted, being as it were the revolutions of that green wheel of nature of which long acquaintance had dimmed their perception. Only an unusual motion therein could arouse their attention when their thoughts were elsewhere, and they were talking busily.

As they came opposite Persis, Mistress Tabitha cried out suddenly, and her voice was full of dismay. “Not to-morrow!” she cried out. “You go not to-morrow, Darius!”

And Darius replied, sadly: “I must, Aunt Tabitha. I must go back to Boston by the Thursday stage-coach, and to-day is Wednesday.”

Persis heard no more. She felt faint, and there was a strange singing in her ears. As soon as the aunt and nephew were well past, she got up and hastened back to the house. She took off her bonnet and pelisse, and sat down in her old place at the window, where she had watched so many years through her strange warped youth. When she saw Darius and his aunt returning, all her soul seemed to leap forward and look, out of her great dark eyes. But Darius never glanced her way. He knew she was there, for his aunt said, “There is Persis Buckley,” and nodded; but he dared not look, for fear lest he look too boldly, and she be offended.

Persis did not nod in response to Mistress Tabitha. She only looked, and looked at the slight, straight figure of the young man moving past her and out of her life. She thought that it was the last time that she should ever see him--the Boston stage left at daybreak. It seemed to her that he would never come again; and if he did, that she could not live until the time, but should ride away first from her old home forever, in gloomier state than had been planned for so many years.

When Darius and his aunt were out of sight she heard her father’s voice in the kitchen, and she arose and went out there with a sudden resolve. “Father,” she said, standing before Ichabod.

He looked at her in a curious startled way. There was a strange gleam in her soft eyes, and a strange expression about her docile mouth.

“What is it?” he said.

“He will never come, father. I want to be different.”

“Who will never come? What do you mean, Persis?”

“The--gentleman--the grand gentleman with--the coach and four. He will never come for me now. I want to be different, father. I want to work with Submit, and not stay in there by myself. If I have to any longer I shall die, I think. I want to be different. He will never come now, father.”

Ichabod Buckley trembled with long convulsive tremors, which seemed to leave him rigid and stiff as they passed. “He will come!” he returned, and he shouted out the words like an oath.

Submit, who was preparing supper, stopped, and stood pale and staring.

Persis quailed a little, but she spoke again.

“It is too long now, father,” she said. “He has forgotten me. He has married another in England. He will never come, and I want to be different. And should he come, after all, I should be sorely afraid to go with him now. I could never go with him now, father.”

Ichabod turned upon her, and spoke with such force that she shrank, as if before a stormy blast. “I tell ye he will come!” he shouted, hoarsely. “He will come, and you shall go with him, whether you will or no! He will come, and you shall sit there in that room and wait for him until he comes! You should wait there until you were dead, if he came not before. But he will, I tell ye--_he will come!_”

Persis fled before her father back to the best room, and sat there in the gathering dusk. Across the meadows the light of Tabitha Hopkins evening candle shone out suddenly like a low-hung star, and Persis sat watching it. When Submit called, in a scared voice, that supper was ready, she went out at once, and took her place at the table. There were pink spots in her usually pale cheeks; she spoke not a word, and scarcely tasted the little tid-bits grouped as usual around her plate. Her father swallowed his food with nervous gulps, then he left the table and went out. Soon Persis heard the grate of his tools on the gravestone slate, and knew that he had gone to work by candle-light, something he seldom did.

“Father is put out,” Submit said, with a half-scared, half-reproachful look at Persis.

“Oh, Submit!” Persis cried out, with the first appeal she had ever made in her life to her slow-witted elder sister, “I must be different, or I think I shall die!”

“Maybe he will come soon,” said Submit, who did not understand her sister’s appeal. “Maybe he will come soon, Persis. Father thinks so,” she repeated, as she rose from the table and padded heavily about, removing the supper dishes.

Then she added something which filled her sister’s soul with fright and dismay.

“Father he dreamt a dream last night,” said Submit, in her thick drone. “He dreamt that the grand gentleman came with the coach and four, and the black gentleman a-driving, and the grand lady in a velvet hood, just as he came before, and you got in and rode away. And he dreamt he came on a Thursday.”

“To-morrow is Thursday,” gasped Persis.

Submit nodded. “Father thinks he will come to-morrow,” said she. “He bade me not tell you, but I will for your comfort.”

Submit stared wonderingly at her sister’s distressed face as she ran out of the room; then she went on with her work. She presently, in sweeping the hearth, made a long black mark thereon, and straightway told herself that there was another sign that the gentleman was coming. Submit was well versed in New England domestic superstition, that being her only exercise of imagination.

Persis did not light the candles in the best room. She sat at the window in the dark, and watched again Mistress Tabitha’s candle-light across the meadow. She also stared from time to time in a startled way in the other direction towards the woodland road. Persis also was superstitious. She feared lest her father’s dream come true. She seemed to almost see now and then that stately equipage emerge as of old from the woods. She almost thought that she heard the far-away rumble of the wheels. She kept reminding herself that it was Wednesday, and her father’s dream said Thursday; but what if she did have to go away forever with that strange gentleman only the next day! She thought suddenly, not knowing why, of Clarissa Harlowe and Lovelace in her book. Mistress Tabitha’s purpose had not wholly failed in its effect. A great vague horror of something which she was too ignorant to see fairly came over her. The face of that fine strange gentleman, dimly remembered before through all the years, shaped itself suddenly and plainly out of the darkness like the face of a demon. Persis looked away, shuddering, to the candle-gleam over the meadow, and Darius Hopkins’s eyes seemed to look wistfully and lovingly into hers.

Persis Buckley arose softly, groped her way across the room in the dark, sliding noiselessly like a shadow, felt for the latch of the door that led into the front entry, lifted it cautiously, stole out into the entry, then opened the outer door with careful pains by degrees, and was out of the house.

Persis fled then past the plumy gloom of the pine-trees that skirted the wood, over the meadow, straight towards that candle-gleam in the Hopkins window.

There was a dry northeaster blowing, and it struck her as she fled, and lashed her clothing about her. She had on no outer wraps, and her head and her delicate face, which had always been veiled before a zephyr, were now all roughened and buffeted by this strong wind, which carried the sting of salt in it.

She never thought of it nor minded it. She fled on and on like a love-compelled bird, with only one single impulse in her whole being. The measure of freedom is always in proportion to the measure of previous restraint. Persis Buckley had been under a restraint which no maiden in this New England village had ever suffered, and she had gotten from it an impetus for a deed which they would have blushed to think of.

She fled on, forcing her way against the wind, which sometimes seemed to meet her like a moving wall, and sometimes like the rushing legions of that Prince of the Powers of the Air of whom she had read in the Bible, making as if they would lift her up bodily and carry her away among them into unknown tumult and darkness.

When Persis reached Tabitha Hopkins’s door, she was nearly spent. Her life had not trained her well for a flight in the teeth of the wind. She leaned against the door for a minute faint and gasping.

Then she raised the knocker, and it fell with only a slight clang; but directly she heard an inner door open, and a step.

Then the door swung back before her, and Darius Hopkins stood there in the dim candle-light shining from the room within.

He could not see Persis’s face plainly at first, only her little white hands reaching out to him like a child’s from the gloom.

“Who is it?” he asked, doubtfully, and his voice trembled.

Persis made a little panting sound that was half a sob. Darius bent forward, peering out. Then he cried out, and caught at those little beseeching hands.

“It is not you!” he cried. “It is not you! You have not come to me! It is not you!”

Darius Hopkins, scarcely knowing what he did, he was so stirred with joy and triumph and doubt and fear, led Persis into the house and the candle-lit room. Then, when he saw in truth before him that beautiful face which he had worshipped from afar, the young man trembled and fell down upon his knees before Persis as if she were indeed a queen, or an angel who had come to bless him, and kissed her hand.

But Persis stood there, trembling and pale, before him, with the tears falling from her wonderful eyes, and her sweet mouth quivering. “Do not let him carry me away,” she pleaded, faintly.

Then Darius sprang to his feet and put his arms around her. “Who is it would carry you away?” he said, angrily and tenderly. “No one shall have you. Who is it?”

“The--gentleman--from over-seas,” whispered Persis. Her soft wet cheek was pressed against Darius’s.

“He has not come?” he questioned, starting fiercely.

“No; but--father has dreamed that he will--to-morrow.”

Then Darius laughed gayly. “Dreams go by contraries,” he said.

“Do not let him carry me away,” Persis pleaded again, and she sobbed on his shoulder, and clung to him.

Darius held her more closely. “He shall never carry you away, even if he comes, against your will,” he said. “Do not fear.”

“I will go with nobody but you,” whispered Persis in his ear.

And he trembled, scarcely believing that he heard aright. And, indeed, he scarcely believed even yet that he was not dreaming, and that he held this beautiful creature in his arms, and, more than all, that she had come to him of her own accord.

“You--do--not--mean-- You cannot--oh, you cannot mean-- You are an angel. There is no one like you. You cannot--you cannot feel so about me?” he whispered, brokenly, at length.

Persis nodded against his breast.

“And--that was why--you came?”

Persis nodded again.

Darius bent her head back until he could see her beautiful, tearful face. He gazed at it with reverent wonder, then he kissed her forehead, and gently loosed her arm from his neck, and led her over to a chair.

He knelt down before her then as if she were a queen upon a throne, and held her hands softly. Then he questioned her as to how she had come, and about the expected coming of her strange gentleman suitor, and she answered him like a docile child.

Mistress Tabitha Hopkins stood for quite a time in the doorway, and neither of them saw her. Then she spoke up.

“I want to know what this means,” said she. “How came she here?” She pointed a sharp forefinger at Persis, who shrank before it.

But Darius arose quickly and went forward, blushing, but full of manly confidence. “Come out with me a moment, Aunt Tabitha,” he said; “I have something to say to you privately.” He took his aunt’s arm and led her out of the room, and, as he went, smiled back at Persis. “Do not be afraid, sweetheart,” he said.

“Sweetheart!” sniffed Mistress Tabitha, before the door closed.

Persis Buckley had been gone no longer than an hour from her own home when Darius and his aunt Tabitha escorted her back. She was wrapped then in a warm cloak of Mistress Tabitha’s and clung to her lover’s arm, and he leaned between her and the rough wind, and sheltered her. Poor Mistress Tabitha, with her skirts whipping about her and her ears full of wind, forced often by the onset of the gale at her back into staggering runs, pressed along after them. She had declined with some asperity her nephew’s proffered assistance. “You look out for her,” she said, shortly. And then she added to temper her refusal, that she could better keep her cloak around her if both her arms were free. All her life had Mistress Tabitha Hopkins seen love only from the outside, shining in her neighbor’s window. It was to her credit to-night if she was not all bitter when its light fell on her solitary old maiden face, but got a certain reflected warmth and joy from it.

Nobody had missed Persis. Submit was fairly knitting in her sleep, by the kitchen fire. Ichabod was still out in his shed at work.

Mistress Tabitha stood back a little while her nephew bade Persis good-bye at her door. “Remember, do not be frightened, whatever happens to-morrow,” he whispered in her ear. “If the gentleman comes with the coach and four, go with him, and trust in me.”

“I will do whatever you bid me,” whispered Persis. Then Darius kissed her hand, and she stole softly through the dark doorway into the gloom of the house, while her faith in her lover was as a lamp to all her thoughts.

On the next afternoon there was a sensation in this little seaport town. A grand coach and four, with a black man driving, a fine gentleman’s head at one window, and a fine lady’s at another, came dashing through the place at two o’clock. The women all ran to the doors and windows. Lounging old men straightened themselves languidly to stare, and turned their vacant faces over their shoulders. A multitude of small lads, with here and there a little petticoat among them, collected rapidly, and pelted along in the wake of this grand equipage. They followed it quite through the town to the road that led through the woods, past the graveyard, to the Buckley house, then up the road, panting but eager, the smaller children dragging at the hands of their elder brothers. When they reached the Buckley house, this small rabble separated itself into decorously silent, primly courtesying rows on either side of the way. Then the grand coach and four at length turned about, and moved between the courtesying rows of children, while Ichabod Buckley stood proudly erect in his best green surtout watching it, and poor Submit, with a scrubbing-cloth in her hand, peeped around the house corner, and the Buckley Lady rode away.

And all the people saw the coach and four dash at a rattling pace back through the town, with the Buckley Lady’s face set like a white lily in a window, and her grand suitor’s fair head opposite. They also saw another lady beside Persis; her face was well hidden in her great velvet hood and wrought veil, but she sat up with a stately air.

The children followed the coach on the Boston road as far as they were able, then they straggled homeward, and the coach went out of sight in a great billow of dust.

It was several days before the people knew what had really happened--that Persis Buckley had gone away with Darius Hopkins, with a fair wig over his black hair, and the fine lady in the velvet hood had been nobody but Mistress Tabitha.

Darius Hopkins had sent a letter to the parson, and begged him to acquaint Ichabod Buckley with the truth, and humbly to crave his pardon for himself and Persis, who was now his wife, for the deceit they had practised. “But, in truth,” wrote Darius Hopkins, “my beloved wife was not acquaint with the plan at all, it being contrived by my aunt, who hath a shrewd head, and carried out by myself; and I doubt much if she fairly knew with whom she went at the very first, being quite overcome by her fright and bewilderment.” And Darius Hopkins begged the parson also to acquaint Ichabod Buckley, for his comfort, with this fact: Although his daughter Persis had not wedded with a gentleman of high estate from over-seas, yet he, Darius Hopkins, was of no mean birth, and had a not inconsiderable share of this world’s goods, with more in expectation, as his esteemed aunt bade him mention. And furthermore, Darius Hopkins stated that had he believed any other way than the one he had taken to be available for the purpose of winning his beloved wife and freeing her from a hard and unhappy lot, he would much have preferred it. But he had taken this, believing there was no other, in all honesty and purity of purpose, and he again humbly begged Ichabod Buckley’s pardon.

One afternoon the parson paced solemnly up to the Buckley house with the great red-sealed letter in his hand. Ichabod was not at work. His nervous old face was visible at the window where his daughter’s beautiful one had been so long, and the parson went in the front door.

It was two hours before he came out, and went with his head bent gravely down the road. He never told exactly what had passed between himself and Ichabod Buckley, but it was whispered that the parson had striven in prayer for him for the space of an hour and a half, but had not reconciled him to his disappointment.

After his daughter had departed in state, Ichabod Buckley, while not returning to his old garrulous ways, but comporting himself with a dignity that would have befitted a squire, was seen frequently in the store and on the street, and he wore always his best green surtout, which he had heretofore kept for Sabbath days.

But after the truth was revealed to him Ichabod Buckley was seen no more abroad. He shut himself up in his poor workshed, and all day long his chisel rasped on the dark slate. Persis wrote to him, and Darius, and he read the letters, scowling fiercely and painfully through his iron-bowed spectacles, then put them away in his beetling old desk in the kitchen, and fell to work again.

It was not three weeks after Persis went away when Submit, with her apron over her head, went one morning through the woods with lumbering swiftness and called the doctor, for her father lay on his bed as motionless as if he were dead, and could not speak.

They sent for Persis, but her father was dead before she reached her old home and went weeping over the threshold, leaning on her young husband’s arm. Not a word did she have of blame or forgiveness from her father’s lips; but she knew his last mind towards her when she saw what his work had been since the day she left him.

Out in Ichabod Buckley’s workshop stood a tall slate stone, shaped like the one he had erected for his dearly beloved wife. On it were cut his name, and the years of his birth and death, and under that a verse. In his own poor brain, strained almost asunder with its awful stress of one idea in life, he had devised this verse; with his poor old failing hands he had cut it on the stone:

“Stranger, view well this speaking stone, And drop a pitying tear; Ingratitude had overthrown, And Death then laid me here.”

Ichabod Buckley had left a space below, as if he had designed to make still larger his appeal to the pity of those who should pause in the future by his grave; and thereon did Darius Hopkins, to comfort his wife Persis, who grieved as if she could never be comforted when she read the first, cut another verse.

When the stone was set up over Ichabod’s grave, people kneeling before it read, after the piteous complaint and prayer for sympathy of the dead man, Darius’s verse:

“Who doth his clearer sight possess In brighter realms above, May come his earthly woe to bless, And know that all was Love.”

And it has so happened, because Darius cut with his strong young hands more firmly and deeply his verse in the stone, that his has endured and can be read, while Ichabod’s is all worn away by the rain-storms of the years, as it might have been by the tears of mortal life.

EVELINA’S GARDEN

On the south a high arbor-vitæ hedge separated Evelina’s garden from the road. The hedge was so high that when the school-children lagged by, and the secrets behind it fired them with more curiosity than those between their battered book covers, the tallest of them by stretching up on tiptoe could not peer over. And so they were driven to childish engineering feats, and would set to work and pick away sprigs of the arbor-vitæ with their little fingers, and make peep-holes--but small ones, that Evelina might not discern them. Then they would thrust their pink faces into the hedge, and the enduring fragrance of it would come to their nostrils like a gust of aromatic breath from the mouth of the northern woods, and peer into Evelina’s garden as through the green tubes of vernal telescopes.