Part 4

When Eunice Bishop hung on the porridge-kettle, Goody Crane lifted the latch-string and came in. It was growing dusky, but the moon would not rise for an hour yet. Goody Crane sat opposite Silence, with her eyes fixed upon her, and Silence, in spite of herself, kept looking at her. A gold brooch at the old woman’s throat glittered in the firelight, and that seemed to catch Silence’s eyes. She finally knitted with them fixed upon it.

She scarcely took her eyes away when she ate her supper; then she sat down to her knitting and knitted, and gazed, in spite of herself, at the gold spot on the old woman’s throat.

The moon arose; the tree branches before the windows tossed half in silver light; the air was shrill with crickets. Silence stirred uneasily, and dropped stitches in her knitting-work. “He draweth near,” muttered Goody Crane, and Silence quivered.

The moon was a half-hour high. Widow Bishop was spinning, Widow Spear was winding quills, and Silence knitted. “He draweth near,” muttered Goody Crane.

“I’ll have no witchcraft!” Silence cried out, suddenly and sharply. Her aunt stopped spinning, and Widow Spear started.

“What’s that?” said her aunt. But Silence was knitting again.

“What meant you by that?” asked her aunt, sharply.

“I have dropped a stitch,” said Silence.

Her aunt spun again, with occasional wary glances. The moon was three-quarters of an hour high. Silence gazed steadily at the gold brooch at Goody Crane’s throat.

“The moon is near an hour high; you had best be going,” said the old woman, in a low monotone.

Silence arose directly.

“Where go you at this time of night?” grumbled her aunt. But Silence glided past her.

“You’ll lose your good name as well as your wits,” cried Eunice. But she did not try to stop Silence, for she knew it was useless.

“A white sheep’s fleece over his shoulders,” muttered Goody Crane as Silence went out of the door; and the other women marvelled what she meant.

Silence Hoit went swiftly and softly down Deerfield street to her old haunt on the north meadow terrace. She pushed in among the wild cherry-trees, which waved, white with the moonlight, like ghostly arms in her face. Then she called, setting her face towards Canada and the north: “David! David! David!” But her voice had a different tone in it, and it broke with her heart-beats.

David Walcott came slowly across the meadow below; a white fleece of a sheep thrown over his back caught the moonlight. He came on, and on, and on; then he went up the terrace to Silence. Her face, white like a white flower in the moonlight, shone out suddenly close before him. He waited a second, then he spoke. “Silence!” he said.

Then Silence gave a great cry, and threw her arms around his neck, and pressed softly and wildly against him with her wet cheek to his.

“Know you who ’tis, sweetheart?”

“Oh, David, David!”

The trees arched like arbors with the weight of the wild grapes, which made the air sweet; the night insects called from the bushes; Deerfield village and the whole valley lay in the moonlight like a landscape of silver. The lovers stood in each other’s arms, motionless, and seemingly fixed as the New England flora around them, as if they too might reappear hundreds of spring-times hence, with their loves as fairly in blossom.

THE BUCKLEY LADY

The dark slate stones that now slant to their falls in the old burying-ground, or are fallen already, then stood straight. The old inscriptions, now blurred over by moss and lichen, or worn back into the face of the stone by the wash of the heavy coast rains, were then quite plain. The winged cherubim and death-heads--the terrible religious symbols of the Old Testament, made realistic by New England minds under stress of grief--were quite fresh from the artist’s hands.

The funeral urns and weeping-willows, a very art of sorrow in themselves, with their every curve the droop of a mourner’s head, and all their flowing lines of tears, were still distinct. Indeed, the man who had graven many of them was still alive, and not yet past his gloomy toil. He lived in his little house not far beyond the burying-ground, and his name was Ichabod Buckley. He had a wife Sarah, a son Ichabod, and three daughters, Submit, Rebecca, and Persis. When Persis was twelve years old a great change and a romance came into her life. She was the youngest of the family; her brother was ten years older than she; her sisters were older still. She had always been to a certain extent petted and favored from her babyhood; however, until she was twelve, she had not been exempt from her own little duties and privations. She had gathered drift-wood on the shore, her delicate little figure buffeted and shaken by rough winds. She had dug quahaugs, wading out in the black mud, with her petticoats kilted high over her slender childish legs. She had spun her daily stint, and knitted faithfully harsh blue yarn socks for her father and brother. In the early autumn, when she was twelve years old, all that was changed.

One morning in September it was hot inland, but cool on the point of land reaching out into the sea where the Buckley house stood. The son, Ichabod, had gone to sea in a whalingvessel; the father was at home, working in the little slanting shed behind the house. One could hear the grating slide of his chisel down the boughs of a weeping-willow on a new gravestone. A very old woman of the village had died that week.

At the left of the house there was a bright unexpected glint from a great brass kettle which the eastern sun struck. Ichabod Buckley’s wife had her dye-kettle out there on forked sticks over a fire. She was dyeing some cloth an indigo-blue, and her two elder daughters were helping her. The two daughters Submit and Rebecca looked like their mother. The three, from their figures, seemed about of an age--all tall and meagre and long-limbed, moving in their scanty petticoats around the kettle with a certain dry pliability, like three tall brown weeds on the windy marsh.

Persis came up from the shore at the front of the house with her arms full of drift-wood. She was just crossing the front yard when she heard a sound that startled her, and she stood still and listened, inclining her head towards the woods on the right. In the midst of these woods was the cleared space of the graveyard; the rough path to the main road ran past it.

Seldom any but horseback riders came that way; but now Persis was sure that she heard the rumble of carriage-wheels, as well as the tramp of horses’ feet. She turned excitedly to run to her mother and sisters; but all at once the splendid coach and four emerged with a great flourish on the open space before the house, and she stood still.

The short coarse grass in the yard had gotten a perpetual slant from the wind. Just now it was still, but that low bending sweep of the grass towards the west made it seem as if the wind were transfixed there. Persis stood in the midst of this still show of wind, her slender childish figure slanting a little also. All her fair hair was tucked away tidily beneath a little blue hood tied under her chin. The oval of her face showed like the oval of a pearl in this circle of blue, and it had a beauty that could draw the thoughts of people away from their own hearts. Even the folk of this old New England village, who had in their stern doctrines no value for a fair face, turned for a second, as if by some compelling gleam of light under their eyelids, when this little Buckley maid entered the meeting-house; and her mother and sisters, although they saw her every day, would stop sometimes their work or speech when her face came suddenly before their eyes.

Persis had her little looking-glass. She looked in it when she had washed her face to see if it were clean, and when she braided her hair to see if it were smooth. Sometimes she paused, herself, and eyed her face with innocent wonder, but she did not know its value. She was like a child with a precious coin which had its equivalent in goods beyond her ken.

To-day Persis had no idea why these fine strangers in the grand coach sat still with their eyes riveted upon her face.

She stood there in the windy grass, in her little straight blue gown, clasping her bundle of drift-wood to her breast, and stared, turning her back altogether upon her own self, at the coach and the trappings, and the black coachman in his livery, with his head like a mop of black sheep’s wool, and his white rolling eyes, which half frightened her. She looked a little more curiously at this black coachman than at the gentleman and lady in the coach, although they were grand enough; and, moreover, the gentleman was very handsome, and not old. He thrust his fair head, which had a slight silvery sheen of powder, out of the coach window, and the pale old face and velvet hood of the lady showed over his shoulder, and they both stared at Persis’s face.

Then the gentleman spoke, and Persis started, and blushed, and dropped a courtesy. She had forgotten that until now, and felt overcome with shame. “Good-day, my pretty maid,” said the gentleman; and as he spoke he stepped out of the coach and approached Persis. She saw, with half-dazzled eyes, his grand fair head, his queue tied with a blue silk ribbon, his jewelled knee-buckles and silk hose, his flowered waistcoat and the deep falls of lace over his long white hands. No such fine gentleman as this had ever come within her vision. She courtesied again, and looked up in his face when he reached her. Then she looked down again quickly, and the strange salt savor of the drift-wood, overpowering a sweet perfume about the stranger’s rich attire, came up in her blushing face. The gentleman looked very kind, and his eyes were very gay and blue, yet somehow she was frightened and abashed. It was as if he saw something within herself of which she had not dreamed, and suddenly forced her to see it also, to her own confusion.

The gentleman laughed softly when she looked down. “Is it the first time you have had another pair of eyes for your looking-glass, little maid?” he asked, with a kind of mocking caress in his tone.

Persis did not lift her eyes from the drift-wood. She blushed more deeply, and her sweet mouth trembled.

“Nay, tease not the child. Ask if her father be in the house,” called the lady’s soft voice, with a little impatient ring in it, from the coach.

“’Tis but the fault of my eyes, your ladyship,” retorted the gentleman, gayly. “They are ever as lakes reflecting flowers in the presence of beauty, and I doubt much if this little maid hath ever seen herself so clearly before--if eyes like mine have come in her way.”

Persis’s mouth quivered more. She wanted to run away, and did not dare; but suddenly the gentleman spoke again, quite gravely and coldly, and all the gay banter in his voice was gone.

“Is your father, Ichabod Buckley, within, my good maid?” he said.

Persis felt as if a spell which had been cast over her were broken. She dropped a courtesy.

“Please, sir, my father is yonder, cutting a weeping-willow on old Widow Nye’s gravestone,” she replied, pointing towards the rear of the house; and she spoke with that punctilious courtesy with which she had been taught to address strangers.

“Will you bid him come this way? I would speak with him,” said the gentleman.

“And bid him hasten, for this air from the sea is full cold for me!” called the lady from the coach.

Persis dipped another affirmative courtesy towards her, then fled swiftly around the corner of the house. She met her mother and her sister Submit face to face, with a shock. They had been peeping around the corner at the grand folk. Rebecca had run into the house to put on her shoes and a clean kerchief, in case one of the elder women had to go forward to speak to them.

“Father! the gentleman wants father,” said Persis, with soft pants. “Oh, mother!”

Her mother caught her arm with a jerk. “Who be they?” she hissed in her ear.

“I--don’t know--such--grand folks, and--the coach and the four, and the black man--oh, mother!”

“Go bid your father come quick.”

Sarah Buckley gave her daughter a push, and Persis flew on towards the shed where her father kept his stock of gravestones and worked. But Rebecca had already given him the alarm, and he was at the well washing the slate dust from his hands.

“Go quick, father; they want you!” panted Persis.

“Who be they?” queried Ichabod Buckley. His voice was as nervous as a woman’s, and he was small and delicately made like one. He shook the water from his small hands, his fingers twitching. The muscles on the backs glanced under the thin brown skin; the muscles on his temples and neck glanced also. Ichabod Buckley had, when nervously excited, a look as if his whole body were based on a system of brown wires.

Persis danced up and down before him, as if his nervous excitement communicated itself to her. “I know not who they be,” she panted; “but, oh, father, they be such grand folk!”

When Ichabod Buckley, striving to pace with solemn dignity, as befitted his profession, but breaking, in spite of himself, into nervous runs, went around to the front of the house, Persis slunk at his heels, but her mother arrested her at the corner. “Stay where you be, and not go out there staring at the gentle-folk like a bold hussy!” she ordered. So Persis stayed, peeping around the corner with her mother and Submit; and presently Rebecca in her shoes, with her kerchief pinned over her lean bosom, joined them.

Once Persis, advancing her beautiful face a little farther around the corner, caught the gentleman’s gay blue eyes full upon her, and she drew back with a great start and a blush.

Listen as they might, the women could not catch one word of Ichabod Buckley’s and the gentleman’s discourse--they stood too far away. But presently they saw the black coachman turn the coach and four around with a wide careful sweep, and then the gentleman got in beside the lady, and Ichabod beside the coachman, and then the horses leaped forward, and the whole was out of sight behind the spray of pine woods.

* * * * *

Ichabod Buckley was gone about three-quarters of an hour. When he returned he at once told his curious women-folks somewhat that had passed, but his face was locked over more. “You have not told us all,” said his wife, sharply. “It may well be, as you say, that the gentle-folk wished to find the grave of the man who was their kin, and died here in the first of the town, but that is not all.”

“I pointed out the grave to them beyond a question,” said Ichabod, “though there was no stone to it. I knew it well from hearsay. And I am to make at once a fine stone, with a round top and a winged head, and here is the pay already.”

Ichabod jingled for the dozenth time a gold coin and some small silver ones in his nervous hand, and his wife frowned.

“You have told us all this before,” said she. “There is something else that you keep back.”

Ichabod was smiling importantly, he could not control his mouth; but he went back without another word to old Widow Nye’s gravestone, and the weeping-willow thereon grew apace under his hands.

However, he could not keep anything to himself long, least of all from his wife, with her imperative curiosity. After dinner that noon he beckoned her into the front room.

“What do you want of me?” she said. “I have the work to do.” She felt that his previous silence demanded some show of dignity upon her part.

Ichabod glanced at his staring daughters, and beckoned beseechingly.

“Well, I can’t waste much time,” said Sarah; but she followed him eagerly into the front room. They were shut in there some time. The daughters, tidying up the kitchen, could hear the low murmur of their parents’ voices, but that was all. Persis was polishing the brasses on the hearth--the andirons and the knobs on the shovel and tongs. That was always her task. It roughened her small hands, but nobody ever minded that. To-day, as she was scouring away sturdily, her mother came suddenly out of the front room and caught her plying arm.

“There!” said she; “you need do no more of this. ’Twill get your hands all out of shape, and make them rough. They are too small for such work. Submit, come here and finish scouring the brasses.”

Persis looked up at her mother and then at her little red grimy hands in a bewildered way.

“Go and wash your hands, and then rub some Injun meal on them, and see if it will not make them a little softer,” ordered her mother. “Submit, make haste.”

Submit, although she was herself puzzled, and might well have been resentful, knelt obediently down on the hearth, and fell to work on the brasses, rubbing vigorously with salt and vinegar.

Persis washed her hands as her mother bade her, and afterwards rubbed on some Indian meal. Then she was ordered to put on her pink-flowered chintz gown, and sit down in the front room with her sampler. Her mother braided her fair hair for her in two tight smooth braids, and crossed them neatly at the back. She even put her own beautiful high tortoise-shell comb in her daughter’s head.

“You may wear it a spell if you want to,” said she.

Persis smiled delightedly. Her chief worldly ambition had been to wear a shell comb like her mother’s.

The window was open. She could hear faintly the rasp of her father’s chisel upon the boughs of old Widow Nye’s weeping-willow. She could hear the voices of her mother and sisters, who had gone back to their work over the dye-kettle. After a while she saw Submit going down to the shore for more drift-wood. “That is my work,” she thought to herself with wonder. She could not understand her mother’s treatment of her. It was very pleasant and grand to be sitting in state in the best room, with the tortoise-shell comb in her hair, working her sampler, and be rid of all ruder toil, yet she finally grew uneasy.

She laid down her sampler, and pulled open the front door, which was seldom used, and hard to move, being swollen with the sea dampness. Then she stole around the house towards the group at the dye-kettle. She felt scared and uncertain without knowing why. Her mother called out sharply when she caught sight of her, and waved her back. “Can’t I go down for more drift-wood?” pleaded Persis, timidly.

“Back into the house!” ordered her mother, speaking against the wind, which was now blowing hard. “Back with ye! Out here in this wind! Would you be as black as an Injun? Go back to your sampler!”

Persis crept back, bewildered. The other two daughters looked at each other. Then Rebecca spoke out boldly.

“Mother, what is all this?” said she.

“Perhaps you will know sometime,” replied Sarah Buckley, smiling mysteriously, and she would say no more.

Persis continued to sit at the front-room window with her sampler in her hands. She crossstitched a letter forlornly and laboriously, with frequent glances out at the rosy wind-swept marshes and the blue dazzle of sea beyond. She never dreamed of disputing her mother’s wishes further. Persis Buckley, although full of nervous force, had also a strange docility of character. She stitched on her sampler all the afternoon. When it came time to prepare supper, her mother would not even then let her out in the kitchen to help, as was her wont. “Stay where you be,” said she, when Persis appeared on the threshold. And the little maid remained in her solitary state until the meal was ready, and she was bidden forth to it. There was a little sweet cake beside her plate on the table, one of those which her mother kept in a stone jar for company. Nobody else had one. Persis looked at it doubtfully when she had finished her bread. “Eat it,” said her mother, and Persis ate it, but it tasted strange to her. She wondered if her mother had put anything different in the sweet cake.

Persis had lately sat up until the nine-o’clock bell rang, knitting or paring sweet apples to dry, but now her mother sent her off to bed at half past seven.

“Can’t I sit up and help Submit and Rebecca pare apples?” she begged, but her mother was inexorable.

“I am not going to have your hands spoilt with apple juice,” said she. “Besides, if you go to bed early ’twill make you grow faster and keep your cheeks red.” There was an unusual softness in Sarah Buckley’s voice, and she colored and smiled foolishly, as if she were ashamed of it.

Ichabod Buckley sat on the hearth whittling chips with lightning jerks of his clasp-knife. He did everything swiftly. “Do as your mother bids you,” he said to Persis. He chuckled nervously, and looked meaningly at his wife.

Persis went laggingly out of the room.

“Stand up straight,” ordered her mother. “The first thing you know you’ll be all bent over like an old woman.”

Persis threw back her weak girlish shoulders until her slender back hollowed. She had been trained to obedience. She clattered slowly up the stairs in her little heavy shoes, still trying to keep her shoulders back, when her mother called again.

“Come back here, Persis,” called her mother, and Persis returned to the kitchen. “Sit down here,” said her mother, pointing to a chair, and Persis sat down. She did not ask any questions; she felt a curious terror and intimidation. She waited, sitting meekly with her eyes cast down. She heard the snip of shears and the rattle of stiff paper at her back, then she felt a sharp tug at her hair. She winced a little.

“You keep still,” said her mother at her back, rolling a lock of hair vigorously. “I ain’t going to have your hair as straight as a broom if I can help it.”

When Persis went to bed her head was covered with hard papered knots of hair, all straining painfully at the roots. When she laid her head uncomfortably on her pillow, she remembered in a bewildered way how her mother had smoothed and smoothed and smoothed her hair in former days, and how she had said many a time that rough and frowsy locks were not modest or becoming. Her first conviction of the inconsistency of the human heart was upon little Persis Buckley, and she was dazed. The whole of this strange experience did not seem real enough to last until the next day.