Chapter III: Part 3

The incredulous said quite openly that Ichabod Buckley always did hear things five times as big as they were, and they doubted much if the grand gentleman ever really meant to or said he would come back for Persis. The envious declared that if he did come they mistrusted that it would not be for any good and honest purpose, for he would never think Persis Buckley his equal, in spite of all her fine accomplishments and her gaudy attire. And her face might by that time be no more beautiful than some others, after all.

The incredulous moved the parson to preach many a discourse upon the folly of worldly ambition and trust in the vain promises of princes. The envious instigated sermons upon the sin of any other ornament or accomplishment than a meek and quiet spirit for the daughters of Zion.

Poor little Persis, in her silken attire, lifting her wonderful face to the parson, never dreamed that the discourse was directed at her and her parents, but Ichabod and Sarah knew, and sat up with bristling stiffness. After that they withdrew themselves largely from intercourse with their neighbors. They felt as if the spiritual watch-dog had been set upon them, and they were justly indignant. Sarah Buckley had always been given to staying at home and minding the affairs of her own household; now she kept herself more close than ever. Ichabod was by nature sociable, and liked to fraternize with his kind; but now almost his only dealing with people outside his own family lay in his work upon their gravestones.

The Buckleys lived by themselves in their little house on the windy land past the graveyard, following out their own end in life, and all the time were under a subtle spiritual bombardment of doubt and envy and disapproval from their neighbors in the village.

People talked much about Submit’s patient drudgery, and felt for her the resentment which she did not feel for herself. “It is a shame the way they make that poor girl do all the work to keep her sister in idleness!” said they. They began to call Persis in derision “The Buckley Lady.”

Poor Persis Buckley, shut out of the free air and away from all the mates of her youth, was leading the life of a forlorn princess in a fairy tale. She would have given all the money which her brother Ichabod brought her for his privilege of a cruise over the wild seas. Year after year she waited in her prison, cast about and bound, body and spirit, by the will and ambition of her parents, like steel cobwebs, for the prince who never came.

At first the romance of it all had appealed to her childish imagination. When the high destiny which awaited her had been disclosed, her heart leaped. She had been amused and pleased. She liked to watch out for that grand coach and four. When she remembered the gay blue flash of that grand gentleman’s eyes she blushed, and laughed to herself.

But after a while all that failed. She did not grow incredulous, for she had a simple and long-suffering faith in her parents, but quietly and secretly frightened at the prospect before her. Poor Persis Buckley sometimes felt herself turn fairly cold with dread at the thought of entering that splendid coach and driving away forever out of her old life at that strange gentleman’s side. He became to her as cold and formless as a moving column of mist on the marsh, and even the dreams which sprang of themselves in her girlish heart could not invest him with love and life again.

She did not dare confide her fears to her mother. Sometimes her mother filled her with a vague alarm. Sarah Buckley in ten years grew old, and the eagerness in her face waxed so bright and sharp that one shrank before it involuntarily, as before some blinding on-coming headlight of spirit.

All those years she waited and watched and listened for that grand coach and four which would bring her fortune in her daughter’s. All the ambition of her earthly life, largely balked for herself, had centred in this. Her lot in the world had been to tread out a ceaseless round of sordid toil in her poor little home on the stormy coast, but her beautiful daughter could take a flight above it, and something of herself could follow her.

She never gave up, although year after year she watched and listened in vain; but finally her body failed under this long strain of the spirit. When Persis was twenty-three her mother died, after a short illness. Then Persis found her father as keen a guardian as her mother had been. Sarah had given him her farewell charges, and during her lifetime had imbued his nervous receptive nature with a goodly portion of her own spirit.

He wrought for his dead wife a fine tall stone, and set thereon a verse of his own composition. Ichabod Buckley was somewhat of a poet, publishing himself his effusions upon his gloomy stone pages. Then he fulfilled his own and her part towards their daughter Persis.

* * * * *

Sarah Buckley had been dead two years, and the Buckley Lady was twenty-five years old, sitting at her window in the front room, watching for the prince who never came.

“The fine gentleman will find an old maid waiting for him if he does not come before long,” people said, with sniffs.

But Persis had really grown more and more beautiful. Her complexion, although she had lived so much within-doors, was not sickly, but pale and fine as a white lily. Her eyes were like dark stars, and her hair was a braided cap of gold, with light curls falling from it around her face and her sweet neck. Of late Persis had rebelled upon one minor point: she never, even of a morning, would sit at the window with her hair rolled up in curl-papers. She argued with her father, with a duplicity which was unlike her, that should the gentleman arrive suddenly, she would have no time to take them down before he saw her. But that was not the reason. Ichabod never suspected, neither did the stupid Submit, padding faithfully in her household tracks; the son, Ichabod, was away at sea. Nobody knew how the Buckley Lady, sitting in her window watching, had seen Darius Hopkins pass by, with never a coach and four, but striding bravely along on his own stalwart young legs, and how her heart had gone out to him and followed him, whether she would or not.

Darius Hopkins was Mistress Tabitha Hopkins’s nephew, and he had come from Boston to pay his aunt a visit. People whispered that he had expectations, and had come with a purpose. Mistress Tabitha had received within two years a legacy, nobody knew how large, by the death of a relative. However that may have been, the young man treated his aunt with exceeding deference and tenderness. Her pride and delight were great. She held her head high, and swung out her slim foot with almost the motion of her old dancing steps when she went up the meeting-house aisle on a Sabbath day, leaning on her nephew’s arm. Darius was finely dressed, and he was also a personable young man of whom she might well be proud. She kept glancing at him almost with the shy delight of a sweetheart. Darius had a glossy dark head and a dark complexion, but his eyes were blue and light, and somewhat, as she fondly thought, like her own.

Darius had arrived on a Thursday, and it was on that day Persis Buckley had seen him, and he had seen her at her window. Tabitha Hopkins’s house was past the Buckleys’, fairly out at sea, on the point, across the marshy meadows.

The young man glanced up carelessly at the Buckley house as he passed; then he started, and fairly stopped, and his heart leaped almost with fear, for it actually seemed to him that he saw the face of an angel in the window.

“Who was the maid in the window of the house back yonder?” he said to his aunt as soon as he had greeted her. He waved his hand carelessly backward, and tried to speak as carelessly, but his aunt gave him a sharp look.

“It must have been Persis Buckley,” said she.

“There is not another face like that in the whole country,” said the young man, and in spite of himself his tongue betrayed him.

“Yes, it is generally considered that she has a fair face,” said Tabitha, dryly. “She has accomplishments also. She can play music, and she has a pretty voice for a song. She can dance, though that’s not to be spoke of in this godly town, and she is well versed in polite literature. Persis Buckley is fitted to adorn any high estate to which she may be called.”

There was a mysterious tone in Tabitha’s voice, and her nephew looked at her with eager inquiry.

“What mean you, aunt?” he said.

“What I have said,” replied she, aggravatingly, and would tell him no more. She was secretly a little jealous that her nephew had shortened his greeting to her to inquire about Persis. Old single woman though she was, her feminine birthright of jealousy of the love of men, be they lovers or sons or nephews, still survived in her heart.

The young man dared not ask her any more questions, but the next day he passed the Buckley house many a time with sidelong glances at the window where Persis sat. He would not stare too boldly at that fair vision. And in the evening he stole out and strolled slowly over the meadows, and came to the Buckley house again. She was not at the window then, but the sweet tinkle of her piano came out to him from the candle-lit room, and he listened in rapture to her tender little voice trilling and quavering. Then peeping cautiously, he saw her graceful head thrown back, and her white throat swelling with her song like a bird’s.

When he returned, his aunt looked at him sharply, but she did not ask where he had been. When he took his candle to retire for the night, her old blue eyes twinkled at him suddenly.

“How did the little bird sing to-night?” she said.

The young man stared at her a second, then he blushed and laughed. “Bravely, aunt, bravely,” he replied.

“’Tis a bird in the bush, nephew,” said she, and her voice was mocking, yet shrewdly tender.

Darius’s face fell. “What do you mean, aunt?” he said.

“’Tis a bird that will always sing in the bush, and never in hand.”

Darius made as if he would question his aunt further, but he did not. He bade her good-night in a downcast and confused manner, and was out of the room like a shy girl.

Mistress Tabitha chuckled to herself, then she looked grave, and sat in her rocking-chair for a long time thinking.

Darius Hopkins marvelled much what his aunt could mean by her warning, and was uneasy over it. But the next day also he had many an errand across the meadows, down the forest road, to the village, and always he saw, without seeming to see, Persis at the window, and always she saw, without seeming to see, him.

On the Sabbath day, when he and his aunt went by the Buckley house on their way to meeting, Persis was not at the window. His aunt surprised his sly glances. “They go to meeting early,” said she, demurely. Darius laughed in a shamefaced fashion.

After he and his aunt were seated in the meeting-house, he scarcely dared look up for a while, for he feared, should he see Persis suddenly and near at hand, his face might alter in spite of himself. And, in truth, when he did look up, and saw Persis close before him in a pew at the side of the pulpit, a tremor ran over him, his lips twitched, and all the color left his face. His aunt pressed her bottle of salts into his hand, and he pressed it back almost sharply, and turned red as a girl to the roots of his black hair. Then he sat up straight and looked over almost defiantly at Persis. Her face in her blue satin bonnet, with its drooping blue plume and lace veil thrown to one side, was fair enough to stir the heart of any mortal man who looked at her.

There were, indeed, in that meeting-house, certain godly men who kept their eyes sternly turned away, and would not look upon her, thinking it a sin, although it was a sin to their own hearts alone.

But many a young man besides Darius Hopkins, although he had seen her in that selfsame place Sabbath after Sabbath, still regarded her furtively with looks of almost startled adoration. Not one of them had ever spoken to her or heard her speak, or seen her except in the meeting-house, or at her window, or thickly veiled on the village street.

Persis to-day kept her eyes fixed upon the parson, exhorting under his echoing sounding-board. She never looked around, although she knew that Darius was sitting beside his aunt in her pew. She also was afraid, and she never recovered courage, like Darius. Her father, Ichabod, fiercely intent upon the discourse, his nervous face screwed to a very point of attention, sat on one side; her sister Submit, her back bowed like an old woman’s, on the other.

When meeting was over, Ichabod shot down the aisle, with his daughters following, as was his wont, and reached the door before many that sat farther back.

When Darius and his aunt came out of the meeting-house, the Buckleys were quite out of sight. When they emerged from the road past the graveyard through the woods, Persis was already at the window, with her bonnet off, but she kept her head turned far to one side, as if intent upon something in the room, and only the pink curve of one cheek was visible.

Darius had grown bold in the meeting-house; this time he looked, and forgot himself in looking.

“She is a pretty maid, but she is not for you, nor for any other young man unless he come for her with a coach and four, with a black gentleman a-driving,” said his aunt’s voice half mockingly at his side.

Then the young man turned and questioned her quite boldly. “I beg of you to tell me what you mean, aunt,” he said.

Then Mistress Tabitha Hopkins, holding her Sabbath gown high above her hooped satin petticoat as she stepped along, unfolded to her nephew Darius Hopkins the strange romance of Persis Buckley’s life.

“’Tis a shame!” cried the young man, indignantly, when she had finished--“a shame, to keep her a prisoner in this fashion!”

“’Tis only a prince with a coach and four can set her free. A prince from over seas, with a black gentleman a-driving,” said his aunt.

Darius turned, and stared back across the flat meadow-land at Ichabod Buckley’s house. It was late August now, and the meadow had great rosy patches of marsh-rosemary flung upon it like silken cloaks of cavaliers, and far-seen purple plumes of blazing-star. Darius studied slowly the low gray walls and long slant of gray roofs in the distance.

“A strong right arm and a willing heart might free her, were he prince or not!” said he. And he flung out his own right arm as if it were the one to do it.

“Were the maid willing to be freed,” said Mistress Tabitha, softly.

Darius colored. “That is true, aunt,” he said, with a downcast and humbled air, and he turned and went on soberly.

Mistress Tabitha looked at her nephew’s handsome face, and thought to herself, with loving but jealous pride, that no maid could refuse him as a deliverer. But she would not tell him so, for her heart was still sore at his preference of Persis to herself.

Darius Hopkins had an uneasy visit at his aunt Tabitha’s. He did not speak again of Persis Buckley, but he thought the more. Useless, as he told himself, as either hopes or fears were, they sprang up in his heart like persistent flames, and could not be trodden out.

He told himself that it was not sensible to think that the grand Englishman would ever come for Persis after all these years, and that it was nothing to him if he did. Yet he often trembled when he came in sight of her house lest he see a coach and four standing before it, and see her carried away before his very eyes.

And sometimes he would look at his own comely face in the glass, and look into his own heart, and feel as if the love therein must compel her even against her will; for she was not an angel or a goddess, after all, beautiful as she was, but only a mortal woman. “She cannot love this man whom she has not seen since she was a child, and he must be an old man now,” reasoned Darius, viewing his own gallant young face in the glass. And he smiled with hope, although he knew that he could not reasonably expect to have more of Persis than the sight of her face in the meeting-house or at the window were he to stay in the village a year.

For a long time Darius was not sure that Persis even noticed him when he passed by, but there came a day when he had that at least for his comfort. That day he had not passed her house until late; on the day before her face had been so far turned from the window that his heart had sunk. He had said to himself that he would be such a love-cracked fool no longer; he would not pass her house again unless of a necessity. So all that day he had sat moodily with his aunt, but just before dusk his resolution had failed him. He had strolled slowly across the meadow, while his aunt watched him from her window, smiling shrewdly.

He had not meant to glance even when he passed the Buckley house, but in spite of himself his eyes turned. And there was Persis at the window, leaning towards him, with her face all radiant with joy. It was only a second, and she was gone. Darius had no time for anything but that one look, but that was enough. He felt as if he had already routed the gallant with the coach and four. He meditated all sorts of audacious schemes as he went home. What could he not do, if Persis would only smile upon him? He felt like marching straight upon her house, like a soldier upon a castle, and demanding her of her father, who was her jailer.

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.

Then suddenly hollyhocks, blooming in rank and file, seemed to be marching upon them like platoons of soldiers, with detonations of color that dazzled their peeping eyes; and, indeed, the whole garden seemed charging with its mass of riotous bloom upon the hedge. They could scarcely take in details of marigold and phlox and pinks and London-pride and cock’s-combs, and prince’s-feathers waving overhead like standards.

Sometimes also there was the purple flutter of Evelina’s gown; and Evelina’s face, delicately faded, hung about with softly drooping gray curls, appeared suddenly among the flowers, like another flower uncannily instinct with nervous melancholy.

Then the children would fall back from their peep-holes, and huddle off together with scared giggles. They were afraid of Evelina. There was a shade of mystery about her which stimulated their childish fancies when they heard her discussed by their elders. They might easily have conceived her to be some baleful fairy intrenched in her green stronghold, withheld from leaving it by the fear of some dire penalty for magical sins. Summer and winter, spring and fall, Evelina Adams never was seen outside her own domain of old mansion-house and garden, and she had not set her slim lady feet in the public highway for nearly forty years, if the stories were true.

People differed as to the reason why. Some said she had had an unfortunate love affair, that her heart had been broken, and she had taken upon herself a vow of seclusion from the world, but nobody could point to the unworthy lover who had done her this harm. When Evelina was a girl, not one of the young men of the village had dared address her. She had been set apart by birth and training, and also by a certain exclusiveness of manner, if not of nature. Her father, old Squire Adams, had been the one man of wealth and college learning in the village. He had owned the one fine old mansion-house, with its white front propped on great Corinthian pillars, overlooking the village like a broad brow of superiority.

He had owned the only coach and four. His wife during her short life had gone dressed in rich brocades and satins that rustled loud in the ears of the village women, and her nodding plumes had dazzled the eyes under their modest hoods. Hardly a woman in the village but could tell--for it had been handed down like a folk-lore song from mother to daughter--just what Squire Adams’s wife wore when she walked out first as bride to meeting. She had been clad all in blue.

“Squire Adams’s wife, when she walked out bride, she wore a blue satin brocade gown, all wrought with blue flowers of a darker blue, cut low neck and short sleeves. She wore long blue silk mitts wrought with blue, blue satin shoes, and blue silk clocked stockings. And she wore a blue crape mantle that was brought from over-seas, and a blue velvet hat, with a long blue ostrich feather curled over it--it was so long it reached her shoulder, and waved when she walked; and she carried a little blue crape fan with ivory sticks.” So the women and girls told each other when the Squire’s bride had been dead nearly seventy years.

The blue bride attire was said to be still in existence, packed away in a cedar chest, as the Squire had ordered after his wife’s death. “He stood over the woman that took care of his wife whilst she packed the things away, and he never shed a tear, but she used to hear him a-goin’ up to the north chamber nights, when he couldn’t sleep, to look at ’em,” the women told.

People had thought the Squire would marry again. They said Evelina, who was only four years old, needed a mother, and they selected one and another of the good village girls. But the Squire never married. He had a single woman, who dressed in black silk, and wore always a black wrought veil over the side of her bonnet, come to live with them, to take charge of Evelina. She was said to be a distant relative of the Squire’s wife, and was much looked up to by the village people, although she never did more than interlace, as it were, the fringes of her garments with theirs. “She’s stuck up,” they said, and felt, curiously enough, a certain pride in the fact when they met her in the street and she ducked her long chin stiffly into the folds of her black shawl by way of salutation.

When Evelina was fifteen years old this single woman died, and the village women went to her funeral, and bent over her lying in a last helpless dignity in her coffin, and stared with awed freedom at her cold face. After that Evelina was sent away to school, and did not return, except for a yearly vacation, for six years to come. Then she returned, and settled down in her old home to live out her life, and end her days in a perfect semblance of peace, if it were not peace.

Evelina never had any young school friend to visit her; she had never, so far as any one knew, a friend of her own age. She lived alone with her father and three old servants. She went to meeting, and drove with the Squire in his chaise. The coach was never used after his wife’s death, except to carry Evelina to and from school. She and the Squire also took long walks, but they never exchanged aught but the merest civilities of good-days and nods with the neighbors whom they met, unless indeed the Squire had some matter of business to discuss. Then Evelina stood aside and waited, her fair face drooping gravely aloof. She was very pretty, with a gentle high-bred prettiness that impressed the village folk, although they looked at it somewhat askance.

Evelina’s figure was tall, and had a fine slenderness; her silken skirts hung straight from the narrow silk ribbon that girt her slim waist; there was a languidly graceful bend in her long white throat; her long delicate hands hung inertly at her sides among her skirt folds, and were never seen to clasp anything; her softly clustering fair curls hung over her thin blooming cheeks, and her face could scarce be seen, unless, as she seldom did, she turned and looked full upon one. Then her dark blue eyes, with a little nervous frown between them, shone out radiantly; her thin lips showed a warm red, and her beauty startled one.

Everybody wondered why she did not have a lover, why some fine young man had not been smitten by her while she had been away at school. They did not know that the school had been situated in another little village, the counterpart of the one in which she had been born, wherein a fitting mate for a bird of her feather could hardly be found. The simple young men of the country-side were at once attracted and intimidated by her. They cast fond sly glances across the meeting-house at her lovely face, but they were confused before her when they jostled her in the doorway and the rose and lavender scent of her lady garments came in their faces. Not one of them dared accost her, much less march boldly upon the great Corinthian-pillared house, raise the brass knocker, and declare himself a suitor for the Squire’s daughter.

One young man there was, indeed, who treasured in his heart an experience so subtle and so slight that he could scarcely believe in it himself. He never recounted it to mortal soul, but kept it as a secret sacred between himself and his own nature, but something to be scoffed at and set aside by others.

It had happened one Sabbath day in summer, when Evelina had not been many years home from school, as she sat in the meeting-house in her Sabbath array of rose-colored satin gown, and white bonnet trimmed with a long white feather and a little wreath of feathery green, that of a sudden she raised her head and turned her face, and her blue eyes met this young man’s full upon hers, with all his heart in them, and it was for a second as if her own heart leaped to the surface, and he saw it, although afterwards he scarce believed it to be true.