Within six hours after the receipt
of this telegram, Mercy was on her way to Penfield.
Her journey would take a night and part of a day.
As the morning dawned, and she drew near the old familiar
scenes, her heart was wrung with conflicting memories
and hopes and fears. The whole landscape was
dreary: the fields were dark and sodden, with
narrow banks of discolored snow lying under the fences,
and thin rims of ice along the edges of the streams
and pools. The sky was gray; the bare trees were
gray: all life looked gray and hopeless to Mercy.
She had had an over-mastering presentiment from the
moment when she read the telegram that she should
reach Penfield too late to see Parson Dorrance alive.
A strange certainty that he had died in the night
settled upon her mind as soon as she waked from her
troubled sleep; and when she reached Lizzy’s
door, and saw standing before it the undertaker’s
wagon, which she so well remembered, there was no
shock of surprise to her in the sight. At the
first sound of Mercy’s voice, Lizzy came swiftly
forward, and fell upon her neck in a passion of crying.
“O Mercy, Mercy, he”-
“Yes, dear, I know it,”
interrupted Mercy, in a calm tone. “I know
he is dead.”
“Why, who told you, Mercy?”
exclaimed Lizzy. “He only died a few hours
ago,-about daybreak,”
“Oh, I thought he died in the
night!” said Mercy, in a strange tone, as if
trying to recollect something accurately about which
her memory was not clear. Her look and her tone
filled Lizzy with terror, and banished her grief for
the time being.
“Mercy, Mercy, don’t look
so!” she exclaimed. “Speak to me!
Oh, do cry, can’t you?” And Lizzy’s
tears flowed afresh.
“No, Lizzy, I don’t think
I can cry,” said Mercy, in the same strange,
low voice. “I wish I could have spoken
to him once, though. Did he leave any word for
me? Perhaps there is something he wanted me to
do.”
Mercy’s face was white, and
her lips trembled; but her look was hardly the look
of one in sorrow: it was a rapt look, as of one
walking on dizzy heights, breathless with some solemn
purpose. Lizzy was convulsed with grief, sobbing
like a child, and pouring out one incoherent sentence
after another. Mercy soothed her and comforted
her as a mother might have done, and finally compelled
her to be more calm. Mercy’s magnetic power
over those whom she loved was almost unlimited.
She forestalled their very wills, and made them desire
what she desired.
“O Mercy, don’t make me
glad he is dead! You frighten me, darling.
I don’t want to stop crying; but you have sealed
up all my tears,” cried Lizzy, later in the
day, when Mercy had been talking like a seer, who could
look into the streets of heaven, and catch the sound
of the songs of angels.
Mercy smiled sadly. “I
don’t want to prevent your crying, dear,”
she said, “if it does you any good. But
I am very sure that Mr. Dorrance sees us at this moment,
and longs to tell us how glad he is, and that we must
be glad for him.” And Mercy’s eyes
shone as they looked steadfastly across the room,
as if the empty space were, to her vision, peopled
with spirits. This mood of exalted communion
did not leave her. Her face seemed transfigured
by it. When she stood by the body of her loved
teacher and friend, she clasped her hands, and, bending
over the face, exclaimed,-
“Oh, how good God was!”
Then, turning suddenly to Lizzy, she exclaimed,-
“Lizzy, did you know that he
loved me, and asked me to be his wife? This is
why I am thanking God for taking him to heaven.”
Lizzy’s face paled. Astonishment,
incredulity, anger, grief, all blended in the sudden
look she turned upon Mercy. “I thought so!
I thought so! But I never believed you knew it.
And you did not love him! Mercy, I will never
forgive you!”
“He forgave me,” said
Mercy, gently; “and so you might. But I
shall never forgive myself!”
“Mercy Philbrick!” exclaimed
Lizzy, “how could you help loving that man?”
And, in her excitement, Lizzy stretched out her right
hand towards the rigid, motionless figure under the
white pall. “He was the most glorious man
God ever made.”
The two women stood side by side,
looking into the face of the dead. It was a strange
place for these words to be spoken. It was as
solemn as eternity.
“I did not help loving him,”
said Mercy, in a lower tone, her white face growing
whiter as she spoke. “But”-she
paused. No words came to her lips, for the bitter
consciousness which filled her heart.
Lizzy’s voice sank to a husky whisper.
“But what?” she said.
“O Mercy, Mercy! is it Stephen White you love?”
And Lizzy’s face, even in that solemn hour,
took a look of scorn. “Are you going to
marry Stephen White?” she continued.
“Never, Lizzy,-never!”
said Mercy, in a tone as concentrated as if a lifetime
ended there; and, stooping low, she kissed the rigid
hands which lay folded on the heart of the man she
ought to have loved, but had not. Then, turning
away, she took Lizzy’s hands in hers, and kissing,
her forehead said earnestly,-
“We will never speak again of
this, Lizzy, remember.” Lizzy was overawed
by her tone, and made no reply.
Parson Dorrance’s funeral was
a scene which will never be forgotten by those who
saw it. It was on one of the fiercest days which
the fierce New England March can show. A storm
of rain and sleet, with occasional softened intervals
of snow, raged all day. The roads were gullies
of swift-running water and icy sloughs; the cold was
severe; and the cutting wind at times drove the sleet
and rain in slanting scourges, before which scarce
man or beast could stand. The funeral was held
in the village church, which was larger than the college
chapel. Long before the hour at which the services
were to begin, every pew was filled, and the aisles
were crowded with those who could not find seats.
From every parish within twenty miles the mourners
had come. There was not one there who had not
heard words of help or comfort from Parson Dorrance’s
lips. The students of the college filled the
body of the church; the Faculty and distinguished
strangers sat in the front pews. The pews under
one of the galleries had been reserved for the negroes
from “The Cedars.” Early in the morning
the poor creatures had begun to flock in. Not
a seat was empty: old women, women with babies,
old men, boys and girls, wet, dripping, ragged, friendless,
more than one hundred of them,-there they
were. They had walked all that distance in that
terrible storm. Each one had brought in his hand
a green bough or a bunch of rock-ferns, something
of green beauty from the woods their teacher had taught
them to love. They sat huddled together, with
an expression of piteous grief on every face, which
was enough to touch the stoniest heart. Now and
then sobs would burst from the women, and some old
figure would be seen rocking to and fro in uncontrollable
sorrow.
The coffin stood on a table in front
of the pulpit. It seemed to be resting on an
altar of cedar and ferns. Mercy had brought from
her old haunts in the woods masses of the glossy evergreen
fern, and interwoven them with the boughs of cedar.
At the end of the services, it was announced that
all who wished could pass by the coffin and take one
last look at their friend.
Slowly and silently the congregation
passed up the right aisle, looked on the face, and
passed out at the left door. It was a pathetic
sight to see the poor, outcast band wait patiently,
humbly, till every one else had gone: then, like
a flock of stricken sheep, they rushed confusedly towards
the pulpit, and gathered round the coffin. Now
burst out the grief which had been pent up: with
cries and ejaculations, they went tottering and stumbling
down the aisles. One old man, with hair as white
as snow,-one of the original fugitive slaves
who had founded the settlement,-bent over
the coffin at its head, and clung with both hands to
its edge, swaying back and forth above it, crying
aloud, till the sexton was obliged to loosen his grasp
and lead him away by force.
The college faculty still sat in the
front pews. There were some of their number,
younger men, scholars and men of the world, who had
not been free from a disposition to make good-natured
fun of Parson Dorrance’s philanthropies.
They shrugged their shoulders sometimes at the mention
of his parish at “The Cedars;” they regarded
him as old-fashioned and unpractical. They sat
conscience-stricken and abashed now; the tears of
these bereaved black people smote their philosophy
and their worldliness, and showed them how shallow
they were. Tears answered to tears, and the college
professors and the negro slaves wept together.
“They have nobody left to love
them now,” exclaimed one of the youngest and
hitherto most cynical of Parson Dorrance’s colleagues,
as he stood watching the grief-stricken creatures.
While the procession formed to bear
the body to the grave, the blacks stood in a group
on the church-steps, watching it. After the last
carriage had fallen into line, they hurried down and
followed on in the storm. In vain some kindly
persons tried to dissuade them. It was two miles
to the cemetery, two miles farther away from their
homes; but they repelled all suggestions of the exposure
with indignant looks, and pressed on. When the
coffin was lowered into the grave, they pushed timidly
forward, and began to throw in their green boughs
and bunches of ferns. Every one else stepped
back respectfully as soon as their intention was discovered,
and in a moment they had formed in solid ranks close
about the grave, each one casting in his green palm
of crown and remembrance,-a body-guard such
as no emperor ever had to stand around him in his
grave.
On the day after Mercy’s arrival
in town, Stephen had called to see her. She had
sent down to him a note with these words:-
“I cannot see you, dear Stephen,
until after all is over. The funeral will be
to-morrow. Come the next morning, as early as
you like.”
The hours had seemed bitterly long
to Stephen. He had watched Mercy at the funeral;
and, when he saw her face bowed in her hands, and felt
rather than saw that she was sobbing, he was stung
by a new sense of loss and wrong that he had no right
to be by her side and comfort her. He forgot
for the time, in the sight of her grief, all the unhappiness
of their relation for the past few months. He
had unconsciously felt all along that, if he could
but once look in her eyes, all would be well.
How could he help feeling so, when he recalled the
expression of childlike trust and devotion which her
sweet face always wore when she lifted it to his?
And now, as his eyes dwelt lingeringly and fondly on
every line of her bowed form, he had but one thought,
but one consciousness,-his desire to throw
his arms about her, and exclaim, “O Mercy, are
you not my own, my very own?”
With his heart full of this new fondness
and warmth, Stephen went at an early hour to seek
Mercy. As he entered the house, he was sensibly
affected by the expression still lingering of the yesterday’s
grief. The decorations of evergreens and flowers
were still untouched. Mercy and Lizzy had made
the whole house gay as for a festival; but the very
blossoms seemed to-day to say that it had been a festival
of sorrow. A large sheaf of callas had stood
on a small table at the head of the coffin. The
table had not yet been moved from the place where it
stood near the centre of the room; but it stood there
now alone, with a strange expression of being left
by accident. Stephen bent over it, looking into
the deep creamy cups, and thinking dreamily that Mercy’s
nature was as fair, as white, as royal as these most
royal of graceful flowers, when the door opened and
Mercy came towards him. He sprang to meet her
with outstretched arms. Something in her look
made the outstretched arms fall nerveless; made his
springing step pause suddenly; made the very words
die away on his lips. “O Mercy!” was
all he could say, and he breathed it rather than said
it.
Mercy smiled a very piteous smile,
and said, “Yes, Stephen, I am here.”
“O Mercy, it is not you!
You are not here. What has done this to you?
Did you so love that man?” exclaimed Stephen,
a sudden pang seizing him of fiercest jealousy of
the dead, whom he had never feared while he was living.
Mercy’s face contracted, as
if a sharp pain had wrenched every nerve.
“No, I did not love him; that
is, not as you mean. You know how very dearly
I did love him, though.”
“Dear darling, you are all worn
out. This shock has been too much for you.
You are not well,” said Stephen, tenderly, coming
nearer to her and taking her hand. “You
must have rest and sleep at once.”
The hand was not Mercy’s hand
any more than the voice had been Mercy’s voice.
Stephen dropped it, and, looking fixedly at Mercy’s
eyes, whispered, “Mercy, you do not love me
as you used to.”
Mercy’s eyes drooped; she locked
her hands tightly together, and said, “I can’t,
Stephen.” No possible form of words could
have been so absolute. “I can’t!”
“I do not,” would have been merciful, would
have held a hope, by the side of this helpless, despairing,
“I can’t.”
Stephen sank into a chair, and covered
his eyes with his hands. Mercy stood still, near
the white callas; her hands clasped, and her eyes fixed
on Stephen. At last she spoke, in a voice of unutterable
yearning and tenderness, “I do love you, Stephen.”
At these words, he pressed his hands
tighter upon his eyes for one second, then shook them
hastily free, and looking up at Mercy said gently,-
“Yes, dear, I know you do; and
I know you would have loved me always, if you could.
Do not be unhappy. I told you a long time ago
that to have had you once love me was enough for a
lifetime.” And Stephen smiled,-a
smile more pathetic than Mercy’s had been.
He went on, still in the same gentle voice,-a
voice out of which the very life seemed to have died,-“I
hoped, when we met, all would be right. It used
to be so much to you, Mercy, to look into my eyes,
I thought you would trust me when you saw me.”
No reproach, no antagonism, no entreaty.
With the long-trained patience of a lifetime, Stephen
accepted this great grief, and made no effort to gainsay
it. Mercy tried again and again to speak, but
no words came. At last, with a flood of tears,
she exclaimed,-
“I cannot help it, Stephen,-I cannot
help it.”
“No, darling, you cannot help
it; and it is not your fault,” replied Stephen.
Touched to the heart by his sweetness and forbearance,
Mercy went nearer him, and took his hand, and in her
old way was about to lay it to her cheek.
Stephen drew it hastily away, and
a shudder ran over his body. “No, Mercy,
do not try to do that. That is not right, when
you do not trust me. You cannot help loving the
touch of my hand, Mercy,”-and a certain
sad pride lighted Stephen’s face at the thought
of the clinging affection which even now stirred this
woman’s veins for him,-“any
more than you can help having ceased to trust me.
If the trust ever comes back, then”-Stephen
turned his head away, and did not finish the sentence.
A great silence fell upon them both. How inexplicable
it seemed to them that there was nothing to say!
At last Stephen rose, and said gravely,-
“Good-by, Mercy. Unless
there is something I can do to help you, I would rather
not see you again.”
“No,” whispered Mercy. “That
is best.”
“And if the time ever comes,
darling, when you need me, ... or trust me ... again,
will you write to me and say so?”
“Yes,” sobbed Mercy, and
Stephen left her. On the threshold of the door,
he turned and fixed his eyes upon her with one long
look of sorrow, compassion, and infinite love.
Her heart thrilled under it. She made an eager
step forward. If he had returned, she would have
thrown herself into his arms, and cried out, “O
Stephen, I do love you, I do trust you.”
But Stephen made an inexorable gesture of his hand,
which said more than any words, “No! no! do
not deceive yourself,” and was gone.
And thus they parted for ever, this
man and this woman who had been for two years all
in all to each other, who had written on each other’s
hearts and lives characters which eternity itself
could never efface.
Hope lived long in Stephen’s
heart. He built too much on the memories of his
magnetic power over Mercy, and he judged her nature
too much by his own. He would have loved and
followed her to the end, in spite of her having become
a very outcast of crime, if she had continued to love
him; and it was simply impossible for him to conceive
of her love’s being either less or different.
But, when in a volume of poems which Mercy published
one year after their parting, he read the following
sonnet, he knew that all was indeed over:-
Died.
Not by the death that kills the body.
Nay,
By that which even Christ bade us to fear
Hath died my dead.
Ah,
me! if on a bier
I could but see him lifeless stretched
to-day,
I ’d bathe his face with tears of
joy, and lay
My cheek to his in anguish which were
near
To ecstasy, if I could hold him dear
In death as life. Mere separations
weigh
As dust in balances of love. The
death
That kills comes only by dishonor.
Vain
To chide me! vain! And weaker to
implore,
O thou once loved so well, loved now no
more!
There is no resurrection for such slain,
No miracle of God could give thee breath!
Mercy Philbrick lived thirty years
after the events described in these pages. It
was a life rich to overflowing, yet uneventful, as
the world reckons: a life lonely, yet full of
companionship; sady yet full of cheer; hard, and yet
perpetually uplifted by an inward joy which made her
very presence like sunshine, and made men often say
of her, “Oh, she has never known sorrow.”
This was largely the result of her unquenchable gift
of song, of the true poet’s temperament, to
which life is for ever new, beautiful, and glad.
It was also the result of her ever-increasing spirituality
of nature. This took no shape of creed, worship,
or what the world’s common consent calls religion.
Most of the words spoken by the teachers of churches
repelled Mercy by their monotonous iteration of the
letter which killeth. But her realization of the
solemn significance of the great fact of being alive
deepened every hour; her tenderness, her sense of
brotherhood to every human being, and her sense of
the actual presence and near love of God. Her
old intolerance was softened, or rather it had changed
from antagonisms on the surface to living principles
at the core. Truth, truth, truth, was still the
war-cry of her soul; and there was an intensity in
every word of her written or spoken pleadings on this
subject which might well have revealed to a careful
analyzer of them that they had sprung out of the depths
of the profoundest experiences. Her influence
as a writer was very great. As she grew older,
she wrote less and less for the delight of the ear,
more and more for the stirring of the heart.
To do a little towards making people glad, towards
making them kind to one another, towards opening their
eyes to the omnipresent beauty,-these were
her ambitions. “Oh, the tender, unutterable
beauty of all created things!” were the opening
lines of one of her sweetest songs; and it might have
been said to be one of the watchwords of her life.
It took many years for her to reach
this plane, to attain to the fulness of this close
spiritual communion with things seen and unseen.
The double bereavement and strain of her two years
of life in Penfield left her for a long time bruised
and sore. Her relation with Stephen, as she looked
back upon it, hurt her in every fibre of her nature.
Sometimes she was filled with remorse for the grief
she had caused him, and sometimes with poignant distress,
of doubt whether she had not after all been unjust
to him. Underlying all this remorse, all this
doubt was a steadily growing consciousness that her
love for him was in the very outset a mistake, an
abnormal emotion, born of temporary and insufficient
occasion, and therefore sure to have sooner or later
proved too weak for the tests of life. On the
other hand, her thoughts of Parson Dorrance grew constantly
warmer, tenderer, more assured. His character,
his love for her, his beautiful life, rose steadily
higher and higher, and brighter and brighter on her
horizon, as the lofty snow-clad peaks of a mountain
land reveal themselves in all their grandeur to our
vision only when we have journeyed away from their
base. Slowly the whole allegiance of her heart
transferred itself to the dead man’s memory;
slowly her grief for his loss deepened, and yet with
the deepened grief came a certain new and holy joy.
It surely could not be impossible for him to know
in heaven that she was his on earth? As confidently
as if she had been wedded to him here, she looked
forward to the reunion with him there, and found in
her secret consciousness of this eternal bond a hidden
rapture, such as has been the stay of many a widowed
heart through long lifetimes of loneliness. This
secret bond was like an impalpable yet impenetrable
veil between her soul and the souls of all men who
came into relation with her. Men loved her and
sought her,-loved her warmly and sought
her with long years of devotion. The world often
judged her uncharitably by reason of these friendships,
which were only friendships, and yet pointed to a warmer
regard than the world consents that friends may feel.
But there was never a man, of all the men who loved
Mercy, who did not feel himself, spite of all her
frank and loving intimacy, withheld, debarred, separated
from her at a certain point, as if there stood drawn
up there a cordon of viewless spirits.
The one grief above which she could
not wholly rise, which at times smote her and bowed
her down, was her sense of her loss in being childless.
The heart of mother was larger in her even than the
heart of wife. Her longing for children of her
own was so great that it was often more than she could
bear to watch little children at their play. She
stood sometimes at her window at dusk, and watched
the poor laboring men and women going home, leading
or carrying their children; and it seemed as if her
heart would break. Everywhere, her eye noted
the swarming groups of children, poor, uncared for,
so often unwelcome; and she said sadly to herself,
“So many! so many! and not one for me.”
Yet she never felt any desire to adopt children.
She distrusted her own patience and justice too much;
and she feared too deeply the development of hereditary
traits which she could not conquer; “I might
find that I had taken a liar,” she thought; “and
I should hate him.”
As she reached middle age, this unsatisfied
desire ceased to be so great a grief. She became
more and more like a motherly friend to the young people
surrounding her. Her house was a home to them
all, and she reproduced in her own life very nearly
the relation which Parson Dorrance had held to the
young people of Danby. Her friend Lizzy Hunter
was now the mother of four girls, all in their first
young womanhood. They all strove eagerly for
the privilege of living with “Aunt Mercy,”
and went in turn to spend whole seasons with her.
On Stephen White’s thirty-sixth
birthday, his mother died. The ten years which
had passed since Mercy left him had grown harder and
harder, day by day; but he bore the last as silently
and patiently as he bore the first, and Mrs. White’s
last words to the gray-haired man who bent over her
bed were,-
“You have been a good boy, Steve,-a
good boy. You’ll have some rest now.”
Since the day he bade good-by to Mercy
in the room from which Parson Dorrance had just been
buried, Stephen had never written to her, never heard
from her, except as all the world heard from her, in
her published writings. These he read eagerly,
and kept them carefully in scrap-books. He took
great delight in collecting all the copies of her verses.
Sometimes a little verse of hers would go the rounds
of the newspapers for months, and each reappearance
of it was a new pleasure to Stephen. He knew
most of them by heart; and he felt that he knew Mercy
still, as well as he knew her when she looked up in
his face. On the night of his mother’s
death he wrote to her these words:-
“Mercy,-It is
ten years since we parted. I love you as I loved
you then. I shall never love any other woman.
I am free now. My mother has died this night.
May I come and see you? I ask nothing of you,
except to be your friend. Can I not be that?
“Stephen.”
If a ghost of one dead for ten years
had entered her presence, Mercy had hardly been more
startled. Stephen had ceased to be a personality
to her. Striving very earnestly with herself
to be kind, and to do for this stranger whom she knew
not what would be the very best and most healing thing
for his soul, Mercy wrote to him as follows:-
“Dear Stephen,-Your
note was a very great surprise to me. I am most
heartily thankful that you are at last free to live
your life like other men. I think that the future
ought to hold some very great and good gifts in store
for you, to reward you for your patience. I have
never known any human being so patient as you.
“You must forgive me for saying
that I do not believe it is possible for us to be
friends. I could be yours, and would be glad to
be so. But you could not be mine while you continue
so to set me apart from all other women, as you say
you do, in your affection. I am truly grieved
that you do this, and I hope that in your new free
life you will very soon find other relations which
will make you forget your old one with me. I did
you a great harm, but we were both ignorant of our
mistake. I pray that it may yet be repaired,
and that you may soon be at rest in a happy home with
a wife and children. Then I should be glad to
see you: until then, it is not best.
“Yours most honestly,
“Mercy.”
Until he read this letter, Stephen
had not known that secretly in the bottom of his heart
he riad all these years cherished a hope that there
might yet be a future in store for him and Mercy.
Now, by the new sense of desolation which he felt,
he knew that there must have been a little more life
than he thought left; in him to die.
As soon as his mother was buried,
he closed the house and went abroad. There he
roamed about listlessly from country to country, for
many years, acquiring a certain desultory culture,
and buying, so far as his income would permit, every
thing he saw which he thought Mercy would like.
Then he went home, bought the old Jacobs house back
again, and fitted it up in every respect as Mercy
had once suggested. This done, he sat down to
wait-for he knew not what. He had a
vague feeling that he would die soon, and leave the
house and his small fortune to Mercy; and she would
come and spend her summers there, and so he would
recall to her their old life together. He led
the life of a hermit,-rarely went out, and
still more rarely saw any one at home. He looked
like a man of sixty rather than like one of fifty.
He was fast becoming an invalid, more, however, from
the lack of purpose and joy than from any disease.
Life had been very hard to Stephen.
Nothing seemed more probable, contrasting
his listless figure, gray hair, and jaded face with
Mercy’s full, fresh countenance and bounding
elasticity, than that his dream of going first, and
leaving to her the gift of all he had, would be realized;
but he was destined to outlive her by many a long
year.
Mercy’s death was a strange
one. She had gone with two of Lizzy Hunter’s
daughters to spend a few weeks in one of the small
White Mountain villages, which was a favorite haunt
of hers. The day after their arrival, a two days’
excursion to some of the mountains was proposed; and
Mercy, though not feeling well enough to join it herself,
insisted that the girls should go. They were
reluctant to leave her; but, with her usual vehemence,
she resisted all their protestations, and compelled
them to join the party. She was thus left alone
in a house crowded with people, all of whom were strangers
to her. Some of them recollected afterward to
have noticed her sitting on the piazza at sunset, looking
at the mountains with an expression of great delight;
but no one spoke with her, and no one missed her the
next morning, when she did not come to breakfast.
Late in the forenoon, the landlady came running in
great terror and excitement to one of the guests,
exclaiming: “That lady that came yesterday
is dying. The chambermaids could not get into
her room, nor get any answer, so we broke open the
door. The doctor says she’ll never come
to again!”
Helpless, the village doctor, and
the servants, and the landlady, and as many of the
guests as could crowd into the little room, stood around
Mercy’s bed. It seemed a sad way to die,
surrounded by strangers, who did not even know her
name; but Mercy was unconscious. It made no difference
to her. Her heavy breathing told only too well
the nature of the trouble.
“This cannot be the first attack
she has had,” said the doctor; and it was found
afterward that Mercy had told Lizzy Hunter of her having
twice had threatenings of a paralytic seizure.
“If only I die at once,” she had said
to Lizzy, “I would rather go that way than in
most others. I dread the dying part of death.
I don’t want to know when I am going.”
And she did not. All day her
breathing grew slower and more labored, and at night
it stopped. In a few hours, there settled upon
her features an expression of such perfect peace that
each one who came to look at her stole away reverent
and subdued.
The two old crones who had come to
“lay out” the body crept about on tiptoe,
their usual garrulity quenched by the sad and beautiful
spectacle. It was a singular thing that no one
knew the name of the stranger who had died thus suddenly
and alone. In the confusion of their arrival,
Mercy had omitted to register their names. In
the smaller White Mountain houses, this formality
is not rigidly enforced. And so it came to pass
that this woman, so well known, so widely beloved,
lay a night and a day dead, within a few hours’
journey of her home as unknown as if she had been cast
up from a shipwrecked vessel on a strange shore.
The two old crones sat with the body
all night and all the next day. They sewed on
the quaint garments in which it is still the custom
of rural New England to robe the dead. They put
a cap of stiff white muslin over Mercy’s brown
hair, which even now, in her fiftieth year, showed
only here and there a silver thread. They laid
fine plaits of the same stiff white muslin over her
breast, and crossed her hands above them.
“She must ha’ been a handsome
woman in her time, Mis’ Bunker. I ’spect
she was married, don’t you?” said Ann Sweetser,
Mrs. Bunker’s spinster cousin, who always helped
her on these occasions.
“Well, this ere ring looks like
it,” replied Mrs. Bunker, taking up a bit of
the muslin and rubbing the broad gold band on the third
finger of Mercy’s left hand. “But
yer can’t allers tell by that nowadays.
There’s folks wears ’em that ain’t
married. This is a real harndsome ring, ’s
heavy ’s ever I see.”
How Mercy’s heart must have
been touched, and also her fine and pathetic sense
of humor, if her freed spirit hovered still in that
little low-roofed room! This cast-off garment
of hers, so carefully honored, so curiously considered
and speculated upon by these simple-minded people!
There was something rarely dramatic in all the surroundings
of these last hours. Among the guests in the
house was one, a woman, herself a poet, who toward
the end of the second day came into the chamber, bringing
long trailing vines of the sweet Linnea, which was
then in full bloom. Her poet’s heart was
moved to the depths by the thought of this unknown,
dead woman lying there, tended by strangers’
hands. She gazed with an inexplicable feeling
of affection upon Mercy’s placid brow. She
lifted the lifeless hands and laid them down again
in a less constrained position. She, too, noted
the broad gold ring, and said,-
“She has been loved then.
I wonder if he is alive!” The door was closed,
and no one was in the room. With a strange impulse
she could not account for to herself, she said, “I
will kiss her for him,” and bent and kissed
the cold forehead. Then she laid the fragrant
vines around the face and across the bosom, and went
away, feeling an inexplicable sense of nearness to
the woman she had kissed. When the next morning
she knew that it was Mercy Philbrick, the poet, in
whose lifeless presence she had stood, she exclaimed
with a burst of tears, “Oh, I might have known
that there was some subtile bond which made me kiss
her! I have always loved her verses so.”
On the day after Lizzy Hunter returned
from Mercy’s funeral, Stephen White called at
her house and asked to speak to her. She had almost
forgotten his existence, though she knew that he was
living in the Jacobs house. Their paths never
crossed, and Lizzy had long ago forgotten her passing
suspicion of Mercy’s regard for him. The
haggard and bowed man who met her now was so unlike
the Stephen White she recollected, that Lizzy involuntarily
exclaimed. Stephen took no notice of her exclamation.
“No, thank you, I will not sit
down,” he said, as with almost solicitude in
her face she offered him a chair. “I merely
wish to give you something of”-he
hesitated-“Mrs. Philbrick’s.”
He drew from his breast a small package
of papers, yellow, creased, old. He unfolded
one of these and handed it to Lizzy, saying,-
“This is a sonnet of hers which
has never been printed. She gave it to me when,”-he
hesitated again,-“when she was living
in my house. She said at that time that she would
like to have it put on her tombstone. I did not
know any other friend of hers to go to but you.
Will you see that it is done?”
Lizzy took the paper and began to
read the sonnet. Stephen stood leaning heavily
on the back of a chair; his breath was short, and his
face much flushed.
“Oh, pray sit down, Mr. White!
You are ill,” exclaimed Lizzy.
“No, I am not ill. I would
rather stand,” replied Stephen. His eyes
were fixed on the spot where thirty years before Mercy
had stood when she said, “I can’t, Stephen.”
Lizzy read the sonnet with tears rolling down her
cheeks.
“Oh, it is beautiful,-beautiful!”
she exclaimed. “Why did she never have
it printed?”
Stephen colored and hesitated.
One single thrill of pride followed by a bitter wave
of pain, and he replied,-
“Because I asked her not to print it.”
Lizzy’s heart was too full of
tender grief now to have any room for wonder or resentment
at this, or even to realize in that first moment that
there was any thing strange in the reply.
“Indeed, it shall be put on
the stone,” she said. “I am so thankful
you brought it. I have been thinking that there
were no words fit to put above her grave. No
one but she herself could have written any that would
be,” and she was folding up the paper.
Stephen stretched out his hand.
“Pardon me,” he said, “I cannot part
with that. I have brought a copy to leave with
you,” and he gave Lizzy another paper.
Mechanically she restored to him the
first one, and gazed earnestly into his face.
Its worn and harrowed features, its look of graven
patience, smote her like a cry. She was about
to speak to him eagerly and with sympathy, but he
was gone. His errand was finished,-the
last thing he could do for Mercy. She watched
his feeble steps as he walked away, and her pity revealed
to her the history of his past.
“How he loved her! how he loved
her!” she said, and watched his figure lingeringly,
till it was out of sight.
This is the sonnet which was cut on
the stone above Mercy’s grave:-
EMIGRAVIT.
With sails full set, the ship her anchor
weighs;
Strange names shine out beneath her figure-head:
What glad farewells with eager eyes are
said!
What cheer for him who goes, and him who
stays!
Fair skies, rich lands, new homes, and
untried days
Some go to seek: the rest but wait
instead
Until the next stanch ship her flag shall
raise.
Who knows what myriad colonies there are
Of fairest fields, and rich, undreamed-of
gains,
Thick-planted in the distant shining plains
Which we call sky because they lie so
far?
Oh, write of me, not,-“Died
in bitter pains,”
But, “Emigrated to another star!”