A Book o' Nine Tales.

She. Yes; and how?

He. I was always jealous of Fred Armstrong; he was forever dangling about Annie. Do I understand that you are engaged?

She. Oh, I didn’t say that I expected to marry him; but since Annie confesses such a strong attachment to you —

He. Oh, I didn’t say I was the object of the attachment.

[They sit confronting each other in silence a moment, until the riders, having dismounted, are seen approaching the piazza. Then Chester leans forward impulsively, and speaks with a new intensity.]

He. Agnes!

She. Arthur!

He. Quick! Before they come! You won’t send me away?

She. But —

He. No, no more nonsense; I am in dead earnest now. You know I couldn’t live without you, or I shouldn’t have followed you to Cuba.

She. And Annie Cleaves?

He. Oh, if you had a letter from her yesterday, you must know she’s engaged to Bob Wainwright. Is it yes?

She. (rising.) It would be a pity that you should have come so far for nothing.

[As he rises also he manages to catch her hand, which he clasps joyously before the pair go forward to meet the new-comers.]

He. I hope you had a pleasant ride, Mr. Peltonville? I like Marianao so well that I have concluded to remain a while.

Tale the Ninth.

DELIA GRIMWET

To an ordinary observer, nothing could be more commonplace than Kempton, a decrepit little apology for a village, lying on the coast of Maine. Properly speaking, however, no sea-port can be utterly commonplace, with its suggestion of the mystery of the sea, the ships, the sailors who have been to far lands, the glimpses of unwritten tragedies on every hand. But among sea-side villages Kempton was surely dull enough, and dry enough, and lifeless enough, – as if the sea-winds had sucked its vitality, leaving it empty and pallid and juiceless, like the cockle-shells which bleached upon its sandy beaches.

Yet Kempton had one peculiarity which marked it as singular among all New England towns. It had a woman to dig its graves.

Its one church stood stark and doleful upon the hill at whose foot lay the rotting wharves; and back from the church stretched the church-yard in which the Kempton dead took their long repose, scarcely more monotonous than their colorless lives. The sexton, digging their last resting-places in the ochery loam, might look far off toward the sea where they had wrested from the grudging waters a scanty subsistence; and the dead wives, if so be that their ears were yet sentient, might lie at night and hear below the beat of the waves which afar had rolled over the unmarked graves of their sailor husbands.

To and fro among the grass-grown mounds the sexton went daily, quite unmindful of being the unique feature of Kempton by belonging to the weaker sex. With masculine stride and coarse hands, her unkempt locks blown by the salt winds, the woman went her way and did her work with a steadfastness and a vigor which might have put to shame many a man idling about the boats under the hill. She was not an old woman, – not even middle-aged, except with the premature age of toil and sorrow; but the weather-beaten face, the stooping shoulders, and the faded hair made her seem old. To look at her, it was difficult to realize what her youth could have been like, or to call up any image of sweet or gracious maidenhood in which she could have shared.

It was a gray November day. The white-caps made doubly black the dark waves of the bay, and the bitter wind blew freshly through the withered grass and stubble, chasing the faded leaves over Kempton Hill until they rushed about the old meeting-house like a flight of terrified witches. A stranger was driving slowly up the road from the next town in an open carriage, and as he came to the top of the hill he drew rein before the church and looked about him.

His gaze was not that of one who beheld the scene for the first time. He gazed down at the irregular houses under the hill, cuddled like frightened and weak-kneed sheep. He looked over the bay to the lighthouse, looming ghastly and white against the dark sea and sky. His glance took in all the details of the picture, cold and joyless, devoid alike of warmth and color. He shivered and sighed, his brows drooping more heavily yet over his dark piercing eyes, and then turned his gaze to objects nearer at hand.

Close by was the stark church, with weather-beaten steeple, wherein half a dozen generations of Kempton women, – the men, for the most part, being at sea, – had worshipped the power of the storm, praying more for the escape from evil of the absent than for good to themselves. Beyond the church appeared the first headstones of the graveyard, the ground sloping away so rapidly that little more than the first row of slate slabs was visible from the street. With another shiver Mr. Farnsworth (for by that name the gentleman played his part upon this world’s stage) got down from his carriage, fastened his horse, and walked toward the stones, whose rudely chiselled cherubs leered at him through their tawny rust of moss with a diabolic and sinister mirthfulness.

As Mr. Farnsworth opened the sagging and unpainted gate of the enclosure, he became aware that the place was not empty. The head and shoulders of a human being were visible half-way down the hill, now and then obscured by the dull-reddish heap of earth thrown up from a partially dug grave.

The visitor made his way down the irregular path, so steep as to be almost like a rude flight of stairs, and as he neared the worker, he suddenly perceived, with something of a shock, that the grave-digger was a woman. She worked as if familiar with her task, a man’s battered hat pushed back from her forehead, over which her faded hair straggled in confusion, and across which certain grimy streaks bore witness that she had not escaped the primal curse, but labored in the sweat of her brow.

Kempton’s peculiarity in the matter of its sexton had not come to the knowledge of the stranger before, although he once had known the village life somewhat intimately. He regarded the woman with a double curiosity, – to see what she was like and to discover whether perchance he had ever known her. He paused as he neared her, resting one nicely gloved hand upon a tilted stone which perpetuated the memory and recorded the virtues of a captain who reposed in some chill cave under the Northern seas. Some slight sound caught the ear of the sexton, who until then had not perceived his approach; she looked up at him stolidly, and as stolidly looked down again, continuing her work without interruption. If there remained any consciousness of the strangeness of her occupation, or if there stirred any womanly shame to be so observed, they were betrayed by no outward sign. She threw up the dull-yellow earth at the feet of the new-comer as unmoved as if she had still only the dwellers in the graves as companions of her labor.

“Don’t you find this rather hard work, my good woman?” the gentleman inquired at length, more by way of breaking the silence than from any especial interest.

“Yes,” the sexton returned impassively, “it’s hard enough.”

“It is rather unusual work for a woman, too,” he said.

To this very obvious remark she returned no answer, a stone to which she had come in her digging seeming to absorb all her attention. She unearthed the obstacle with some difficulty, seized it with her rough hands, and threw it up at the feet of the stranger, who watched her with that idle interest which labor begets in the unconcerned observer.

“Do you always do this work?” Farnsworth asked at length.

“Yes,” was the laconic return.

“But the old sexton, – Joe Grimwet, – is he gone?”

The woman looked up with some interest at this indication that the other had some previous acquaintance with Kempton and its people. She did not, however, stop her labor, as a man would probably have stopped.

“Yes,” she said. “He’s buried over yonder, – there beyond the burdocks.”

The gentleman changed his position uneasily. Some subtile disquietude had arisen to disturb his serenity. The wind rustled mournfully among the dry leaves, the pebbles rattled against the spade of the grave-digger, increasing the sombreness of a scene which might easily affect one at all susceptible to outward influences. In such an atmosphere a sensitive nature not unfrequently experiences a certain feeling of unreality, as if dealing with scenes and creatures of the imagination rather than with actualities; and Farnsworth, whatever the delicacy of his mental fibre, was conscious of such a sense at this moment. He hastened to speak again, as if the sound of his own voice were needed to assure him of the genuineness of the place and scene.

“But how long has he been dead?” he asked. “And his daughter; what became of her?”

The grave-digger straightened herself to her full height; brushing back her wind-blown hair with one grimy hand, she raised her face so that her deep-set eyes were fixed upon the questioner’s face.

“So you knew Delia Grimwet?” she said. “When was you here before? It’d go hard for you to make her out now, if it’s long since.”

“Is she here still?” Farnsworth persisted, ignoring her question.

“Yes,” the sexton replied, suddenly sinking back into the unfinished grave as a frightened animal might retreat into its den. “Yes; she lives in the old place.”

“Alone?”

“Her and the boy.”

He recoiled a step, as if the mention of a child startled or repelled him. Yet to a close observer it might have seemed as if he were making an effort to press her with further questions. If so his courage did not prove sufficient, and he watched in silence while the woman before him went steadily on with her arduous work. Presently, however, he advanced again toward the edge of the pit, which was rapidly approaching completion under her familiar labor.

“Should I find her at home at this time?” he inquired. “Or would she be out at work?”

The woman started and crouched, much as if she had received or expected a blow.

“She’s out, most likely,” she replied in a muffled voice. “She’ll be home along about sundown.”

Farnsworth lingered irresolutely a moment or two, as if there were many things concerning which he could wish to ask; but, as the woman gave him no encouragement, he turned at last and climbed the slippery, ragged path up to the church, untethered his horse, and drove slowly down the hill to the village.

Cap’n Nat Hersey was just coming out of the village store, and to him Farnsworth addressed an inquiry where he might find shelter for himself and horse.

“Well,” the cap’n responded, with the deliberation of a man who has very little to say and his whole life to say it in, “well I dunno but ye might get a chance with Widder Bemis, an’ I dunno as ye could; but there ain’t no harm trying, as I knows of.”

Further inquiry regarding the whereabouts of the domicile of the Widow Bemis led to an offer on the part of Cap’n Hersey to act as pilot to that haven. He declined, however, to take a seat in the buggy. The Cap’n had his own opinion of land-vehicles. A man might with perfect assurance trust himself in a boat; but, for his own part, the cap’n had no faith in those dangerous structures which roam about with nothing better than dry land under them. He walked along by the side of the carriage, conversing affably with the stranger under his convoy.

“Isn’t it a queer notion to have a woman for a sexton?” Farnsworth asked, as they wended along.

“Well, yes,” the captain returned reflectively. “Yes, it is sort of curious. Folks mostly speaks of it that comes here. It is curious, if ye look at it that way. But it all come about as natural as a barnacle on a keel. Old Sexton Grimwet kept getting considerable feeble, and Dele she took to helping him with his work. She was sort of cut off from folks, as ye may say, owing to having a baby and no father to show for it, and she naturally took to heaving anchor alone, or leastways along with the old man. And when the old man was took down with a languishment, she turned to and did all his work for him, – having gradually worked into it, as you may say.”

The cap’n paused to recover from his astonishment at having been betrayed into so long a speech; but, as the stranger had the air of expecting him to continue, he presently went on again:

“There was them that wanted her turned out when old Grimwet died. Some said a woman of that character hadn’t ought to have no connection with the church, even to digging its graves. But Parson Eaton he was good for ’em – I’ve always noticed that when these pious men gets their regular mad up they most generally have things their own way; and he preached ’em a sermon about the Samaritan woman, and Mary Magdalene, and a lot more of them disreputable Scripture women-folks, and, though he never mentioned Dele by name, they all knew what he was driving at, and they wilted. ’Twas a pitiful sight to see the girl a-digging her own father’s grave up there. Me and Tom Tobey and Zenas Faston took hold and finished it for her.”

They moved on in silence a moment or two. Farnsworth’s gaze was fixed upon the darkening bay, and no longer interrogated his companion; but the latter soon again took up his narrative: —

“’Twas well the parson stood up for Dele, too; women-folks is so cussed hard on each other. They wouldn’t ha’ let the girl live, I believe. I always were of the notion there warn’t no harm in Dele. Some – city chap got the better of her. She never was over-smart, but she was awful pretty; and I never believed there was any harm in her. At any rate, she digs a grave as well as a man, and I guess them that’s in ’em don’t lay awake none thinking who tucked ’em in.”

The house of the Widow Bemis was by this time reached, and that estimable lady, who in the summer furnished accommodations to a boarder whenever that rare blessing was to be secured in Kempton, readily undertook the charge of Mr. Farnsworth and his horse for the night. The latter was given into the care of her daughter, for the frequent absences of the men had accustomed the damsels of Kempton to those labors which in inland villages are more frequently left to their brothers; and Farnsworth strolled off toward the wharves, leaving the widow Bemis and Cap’n Hersey in an agony of curiosity in regard to himself and his errand.

Whatever may have been Farnsworth’s feelings at the discovery that the daughter of the dead sexton and the woman of whom he had asked tidings of her were identical, – and they must have been both deep and strong – he had given no outward sign. But now the settling of his brows, and the disquiet apparent in his eyes betrayed his inward conflict. He strolled out upon one of the rotting wharves about which the tide lapped in mournful iteration, folded his arms upon a breast-high post, and stood gazing seaward.

The retrospect which occupied his mind was scarcely more cheerful than the gray scene which spread before his eyes. How awful are the corpses of dead sins which memory casts up, as the sea its victims! The betrayal of a woman is a ghastly thing when one looks back upon it stripped of the garlands and enchantments of passion and temptation; and to Farnsworth, with the image fresh in his rememberance of that faded, earth-stained woman digging a grave upon the bleak hillside, the fault of his youth seemed an incredible dream which only stubborn and stinging memory converted into a possibility. A retrospect is apt to be essentially a plea for self against conscience; but in his gloomy revery Farnsworth found scant excuse for the wreck he had made of the life of Delia Grimwet. He had gone away, married, and lived honored and prosperous. He would have forgotten, had not some nobility of his nature prevented. With the stubbornness of his race, he had fought long and determinedly against his conscience, but he had been forced to yield at last. The death of his wife, to whom he had been tenderly attached, had at once left him free to make such reparation as might still be possible, and had softened him as only sharp sorrow can. He had come to Kempton with the determination of finding Delia, and of doing whatever could be done, at whatever cost to himself.

He had been unprepared, however, for the woman he found. He had left a fresh, beautiful young girl; ten years had transformed her into a repulsive old woman. He had no means of adequately measuring the force of the storms of scorn and poverty and sorrow which had beaten upon Delia Grimwet in the years that had made of him the cultured, delicately nurtured man he was. What man ever appreciated the woe of the woman he betrays? Indeed, what measure has a man of the sorrow of any woman? Farnsworth had painfully to adjust himself to a condition of affairs for which he should have been prepared, yet which took him absolutely by surprise.

He lingered upon the bleak wharf, unconsciously the object of much mildly speculative curiosity, until the twilight began to fall. Then with a shiver, no less of mind than of body, he shook off his painful abstraction, and turned his steps toward the path, once well known, which led to the house of Delia Grimwet. It seemed to him, as he paused a brief instant with his hand upon the old knocker, as if nothing here had changed in ten years. The sunlight would have shown him traces of decay, but in the gathering dusk the house seemed a pallid phantom from the past, unchanged but lifeless.

But his knock at once destroyed all illusions, since it summoned the woman who belonged not at all to that past which he remembered, but to the pitiful and too tangible present. She held her guttering candle up without a word, and, having identified him, made him, without speaking, a signal to enter.

When Farnsworth had left her in the afternoon, Delia crouched in the bottom of the grave she was digging, her first feeling being an unreasoning desire for concealment. She thought she should remain passive if the sides of the pit collapsed and buried her. In the old days before her boy was born she had been night after night out on the old wharves, praying for courage to drown herself. After the child came, her feelings changed, and she longed only to escape and to take her son away from the scorn and the sordid life which surrounded them. Gradually she had become hardened; hers was one of those common natures to which custom and pain are opiates, mercifully dulling all sensibilities. To-day the appearance of her betrayer had revivified all the old impressions, and for a moment seemed to transport her to the early days when her anguish was new. The keenest pangs of sorrow stabbed her afresh, and she lived again the bitter moments of her sin and shame. Her instinct was to flee from the man whose presence meant to her only pain.

But habit is strong, and presently the fading light reminded the sexton that her work was still unfinished, and that Widow Pettigrove, who was past all earthly tribulation, must have her last bed prepared, whatever the woe of the living woman who worked at it with trembling hands and a sensation as if a demon had clutched her by the throat. Yet work was not unmerciful; it brought some relief, since it served to dilute the thought which rushed dizzyingly to her brain, and by the time her toil was completed she was steadier. When she opened the door to Farnsworth she was not unlike her usual stolid self. She perceived at a glance that he had learned who she was, and she hoped in a blind, aching way, that he had not betrayed his presence to the neighbors, thus to re-awaken all the old stinging flight of bitter words.

Farnsworth followed Delia into the kitchen, without even those greetings which habit renders so involuntary that only in the most poignant moments are they disregarded. With their past between them it was not easy to break the silence. Farnsworth seated himself, and the woman stood regarding him. There was in her attitude all the questioning, all the agony, of her years of suffering. Her wrongs and her sorrows gave her a dignity before which he shrank as he could not have quailed under the most withering reproaches. Whatever words he would have spoken – and no man can come deliberately to so important a crisis without formulating, even if unconsciously, the plea which his self-defence will make – were forgotten, or seemed miserably inadequate now. What were words to this woman, pallid and worn before her time with privation, anguish, and unwomanly toil? The contrast between his rich and careful dress and her coarse garb, between his white hands and her knotted fingers, between his high-bred, pale face and her cowed, weather-beaten countenance, was too violent not to be apparent to them both, – as if they were in some strange way merely spectators looking dispassionately at this wretched meeting of those who had once been passionate lovers.

With each moment the silence became more oppressive; yet as each moment dragged by it became more difficult to break the stillness. Only a man utterly devoid of remorse or feeling could have framed upon his tongue commonplace phrases at such a time. It seemed to Farnsworth as if he were brought to judgment before the whole universe. His throat became parched. He longed to have the candle and the flames flickering in the old fireplace go out in darkness, and take from his sight the Nemesis that confronted him.

He broke the silence at last with a cry: —

“Ah, my God, Delia! What have I done?”

She wavered as she stood, putting out her hand as if reaching for support. Then she half staggered backward into a chair.

“There is nothing I can say!” Farnsworth went on vehemently. “There is nothing I can do! I came here dreaming of making reparation; but there is no reparation I can make. There is nothing that can change the past, – nothing that will undo what I have done to you. Oh, my God! How little I dreamed it would be like this!”

“No,” she said slowly, almost stupidly, “nothing can undo it.”

“Why did you not tell me?” he began. “Why – ”

But the words rebuked him before they were spoken. He buried his face in his hands, and again they were silent. What the woman, – this woman who had never been able to think much, even in her best days, and who now was blunted and dulled almost to stupidity, – what she felt in those bitter moments, who can tell? The man’s soul was a tumult of wild regret and unavailing remorse, while she waited again for him to speak.

“But,” Farnsworth said at length, a new idea seizing him, “but the – our child, Delia? The boy?”

A shuddering seized her. Unused to giving way to her emotions, she was torn by her excited feelings almost to the verge of convulsions. She clutched the arms of her chair and set her teeth together. In her incoherent attempts at thought, as she had delved among her graves, there had occurred to her the possibility that the father might sometime take his child from her. Now this fear possessed her like a physical epilepsy. Twice she tried to speak, and only emitted a gurgling sound as if strangling. He sprang toward her, but a sudden repulsion gave her self-control. She put out her hands as if to ward him off.

“Oh, my boy, my boy!” she cried, breaking out into hysterical sobs. “My boy, my boy!”

She wrung her hands, and twisted them together in fierce contortions which frightened Farnsworth; but she still would not allow him to approach her. She struggled for composure, writhing in paroxysms dreadful to see.

“Oh, my child!” she cried out, in a tone new and piercing; “no, no! not him! Oh, God! You cannot have my boy!”

Farnsworth retreated sharply.

He had not considered this. Indeed, so different was everything he found from everything he had expected, that whatever he had preconsidered was swept out of existence as irrelevant. He was confronted with a catastrophe in which it was necessary to judge unerringly and to act instantly, yet which paralyzed all his powers by its strangeness and its horror. He groped his way back to his chair and sat down, leaving the silence again unbroken save by her convulsive breathing and his deep-drawn sighs.

All at once a new sound broke in upon them, and the mother started to her feet.

“He is coming!” she gasped hoarsely. “I sent him away; but he has come back. He could not keep away, my beautiful boy.”

Her face was illumined with a love which wellnigh transfigured it. The door was opened violently, and the boy came rudely in, – a gaunt, rough whelp of a dozen summers, defiant, bold, and curious.