Chapter 18

"Now," said the minister, "let us pray." The petition went forth, and Mr. Oldfield stood brooding there, his thoughts running back through a long chain of ancestry to the Almighty, Who is the fount of all.

When heads were covered again, and this little world began to surge into the church, young Nick's Hattie moved closer to her husband and shot out a sibilant whisper:--

"Did you know that?--about the Flat-Iron Lot?"

Young Nick shook his head. He was entirely dazed.

"Well," continued Hattie, full of awe, "I guess I never was nearer my end than when I let myself be go-between for Freeman Henry. I wonder father let me get out alive."

The minister's address was very short and unpretending. He dwelt on the sacredness of the past, and all its memories, and closed by saying that, while we need not shrink from signs of progress, we should guard against tampering with those ancient landmarks which serve as beacon lights, to point the brighter way. Hearing that, every man steeled his heart against Memory-of-Me clocks, and resolved to vote against them. Then the minister explained that, since he had been unable to prepare a suitable address, Mr. Oldfield had kindly consented to read some precious records recently discovered by him. A little rustling breath went over the audience. So this amiable lunacy had its bearing on the economy of life! They were amazed, as may befall us at any judgment day, when grays are strangely alchemized to white.

Mr. Oldfield, unmoved as ever, save in a certain dominating quality of presence, rose and stood before them, the records in his hands. He read them firmly, explaining here and there, his simple speech untouched by finer usage; and when the minister interposed a question, he dropped into such quaintness of rich legendry that his hearers sat astounded. So they were a part of the world! and not the world to-day, but the universe in its making.

It was long before Nicholas concluded; but the time seemed brief. He sat down, and the minister took the floor. He thanked Mr. Oldfield and then went on to say that, although it might be informal, he would suggest that the town, with Mr. Oldfield's permission, place an inscription on the boulder in the Flat-Iron Lot, stating why it, was to be held historically sacred. The town roared and stamped, but meanwhile Nicholas Oldfield was quietly rising.

"In that case, pa'son," said he, "I should like to state that it would be my purpose to make over that lot to the town to be held as public land forever."

Again the village folk outdid themselves in applause, while Young Nick muttered, "Well, I vum!" beneath his breath, and Hattie replied, antiphonally, "My soul!" These were not the notes of mere surprise. They were prayers for guidance in this exigency of finding a despised intelligence exalted.

The celebration went on to a victorious close. Who shall sing the sweetness of Isabel North, as she sat by the log-cabin door, placidly spinning flax, or the horror of the moment when, redskins swooping down on her and settlers on them, the ghost swept in and put them all to flight? Who will ever forget the exercises in the hall, when the "Suwanee River" was sung by minstrels, to a set of tableaux representing the "old folks" at their cabin door, "playin' wid my brudder" as a game of stick-knife, and the "Swanny" River itself by a frieze of white pasteboard swans in the background? There were patriotic songs, accompanied by remarks laudatory of England; since it was justly felt that our mother-land might be wounded if, on an occasion of this sort, we fomented international differences by "America" or the reminiscent triumph of "The Sword of Bunker Hill." A very noble sentiment pervaded Tiverton when, at twilight, little groups of tired and very happy people lingered here and there before "harnessing up" and betaking themselves to their homes. The homes themselves meant more to them now, not as shelters, but as sacred shrines; and many a glance sought out Nicholas Oldfield standing quietly by--the reverential glance accorded those who find out unsuspected wealth. Young Nick approached his father with an awkwardness sitting more heavily upon him than usual.

"Well," said he, "I'm mighty glad you gi'n 'em that lot."

Old Nicholas nodded gravely, and at that moment Hattie came up, all in a flutter.

"Father," said she quite appealingly, "I wisht you'd come over to supper. Luella an' Freeman Henry'll be there. It's a great day, an'"--

"Yes, I know 'tis," answered Nicholas kindly. "I'm much obleeged, but Mary's goin' to eat with me. Mebbe we might look in, along in the evenin'. Come, Mary!"

Mary, very sweet in her plain dress and white kerchief, was talking with young Marden, her husband for the day; but she turned about contentedly.

"Yes, gran'ther," said she, without a look behind, "I'm coming!"

THE END OF ALL LIVING

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.