Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909). The Country of the Pointed Firs. 1910.
XXIIIWilliam’s Wedding
T
The coast had still a wintry look; it was far on in May, but all the shore looked cold and sterile. One was conscious of going north as well as east, and as the day went on the sea grew colder, and all the warmer air and bracing strength and stimulus of the autumn weather, and storage of the heat of summer, were quite gone. I was very cold and very tired when I came at evening up the lower bay, and saw the white houses of Dunnet Landing climbing the hill. They had a friendly look, these little houses, not as if they were climbing up the shore, but as if they were rather all coming down to meet a fond and weary traveler, and I could hardly wait with patience to step off the boat. It was not the usual eager company on the wharf. The coming-in of the mailboat was the one large public event of a summer day, and I was disappointed at seeing none of my intimate friends but Johnny Bowden, who had evidently done nothing all winter but grow, so that his short sea-smitten clothes gave him a look of poverty.
Johnny’s expression did not change as we greeted each other, but I suddenly felt that I had shown indifference and inconvenient delay by not coming sooner; before I could make an apology he took my small portmanteau, and walking before me in his old fashion he made straight up the hilly road toward Mrs. Todd’s. Yes, he was much grown—it had never occurred to me the summer before that Johnny was likely, with the help of time and other forces, to grow into a young man; he was such a well-framed and well-settled chunk of a boy that nature seemed to have set him aside as something finished, quite satisfactory, and entirely completed.
The wonderful little green garden had been enchanted away by winter. There were a few frost-bitten twigs and some thin shrubbery against the fence, but it was a most unpromising small piece of ground. My heart was beating like a lover’s as I passed it on the way to the door of Mrs. Todd’s house, which seemed to have become much smaller under the influence of winter weather.
“She has n’t gone away?” I asked Johnny Bowden with a sudden anxiety just as we reached the doorstep.
“Gone away!” he faced me with blank astonishment,—“I see her settin’ by Mis’ Caplin’s window, the one nighest the road, about four o’clock!” And eager with suppressed news of my coming he made his entrance as if the house were a burrow.
Then on my homesick heart fell the voice of Mrs. Todd. She stopped, through what I knew to be excess of feeling, to rebuke Johnny for bringing in so much mud, and I dallied without for one moment during the ceremony; then we met again face to face.
“I dare say you can advise me what shapes they are goin’ to wear. My meetin’-bunnit ain’t goin’ to do me again this year; no! I can’t expect ’t would do me forever,” said Mrs. Todd, as soon as she could say anything. “There! do set down and tell me how you have been! We ’ve got a weddin’ in the family, I s’pose you know?”
“A wedding!” said I, still full of excitement.
“Yes; I expect if the tide serves and the line storm don’t overtake him they ’ll come in and appear out on Sunday. I should n’t have concerned me about the bunnit for a month yet, nobody would notice, but havin’ an occasion like this I shall show consider’ble. ’T will be an ordeal for William!”
“For William!” I exclaimed. “What do you mean, Mrs. Todd?”
She gave a comfortable little laugh. “Well, the Lord ’s seen reason at last an’ removed Mis’ Cap’n Hight up to the farm, an’ I don’t know but the weddin ’s goin’ to be this week. Esther ’s had a great deal of business disposin’ of her flock, but she ’s done extra well—the folks that owns the next place goin’ up country are well off. ’T is elegant land north side o’ that bleak ridge, an’ one o’ the boys has been Esther’s right-hand man of late. She instructed him in all matters, and after she markets the early lambs he ’s goin’ to take the farm on halves, an’ she ’s give the refusal to him to buy her out within two years. She ’s reserved the buryin’-lot, an’ the right o’ way in, an’.…”
I could n’t stop for details. I demanded reassurance of the central fact.
“William going to be married?” I repeated; whereat Mrs. Todd gave me a searching look that was not without scorn.
“Old Mis’ Hight’s funeral was a week ago Wednesday, and ’t was very well attended,” she assured me after a moment’s pause.
“Poor thing!” said I, with a sudden vision of her helplessness and angry battle against the fate of illness; “it was very hard for her.”
“I thought it was hard for Esther!” said Mrs. Todd without sentiment.
I had an odd feeling of strangeness: I missed the garden, and the little rooms, to which I had added a few things of my own the summer before, seemed oddly unfamiliar. It was like the hermit crab in a cold new shell,—and with the windows shut against the raw May air, and a strange silence and grayness of the sea all that first night and day of my visit, I felt as if I had after all lost my hold of that quiet life.
Mrs. Todd made the apt suggestion that city persons were prone to run themselves to death, and advised me to stay and get properly rested now that I had taken the trouble to come. She did not know how long I had been homesick for the conditions of life at the Landing the autumn before—it was natural enough to feel a little unsupported by compelling incidents on my return.
Some one has said that one never leaves a place, or arrives at one, until the next day! But on the second morning I woke with the familiar feeling of interest and ease, and the bright May sun was streaming in, while I could hear Mrs. Todd’s heavy footsteps pounding about in the other part of the house as if something were going to happen. There was the first golden robin singing somewhere close to the house, and a lovely aspect of spring now, and I looked at the garden to see that in the warm night some of its treasures had grown a hand’s breadth; the determined spikes of yellow daffies stood tall against the doorsteps, and the bloodroot was unfolding leaf and flower. The belated spring which I had left behind farther south had overtaken me on this northern coast. I even saw a presumptuous dandelion in the garden border.
“I ain’t seen his comin’ sail yet; he ’ll be likely to dodge round among the islands so he ’ll be the less observed,” continued Mrs. Todd. “You can get a dory up the bay, even a clean new painted one, if you know as how, keepin’ it against the high land.” She stepped to the door and looked off to sea as she spoke. I could see her eye follow the gray shores to and fro, and then a bright light spread over her calm face. “There he comes, and he ’s strikin’ right in across the open bay like a man!” she said with splendid approval. “See, there he comes! Yes, there ’s William, and he ’s bent his new sail.”
I looked too, and saw the fleck of white no larger than a gull’s wing yet, but present to her eager vision.
I was going to France for the whole long summer that year, and the more I thought of such an absence from these simple scenes the more dear and delightful they became. Santa Teresa says that the true proficiency of the soul is not in much thinking, but in much loving, and sometimes I believed that I had never found love in its simplicity as I had found it at Dunnet Landing in the various hearts of Mrs. Blackett and Mrs. Todd and William. It is only because one came to know them, these three, loving and wise and true, in their own habitations. Their counterparts are in every village in the world, thank heaven, and the gift to one’s life is only in its discernment. I had only lived in Dunnet until the usual distractions and artifices of the world were no longer in control, and I saw these simple natures clear. “The happiness of life is in its recognitions. It seems that we are not ignorant of these truths, and even that we believe them; but we are so little accustomed to think of them, they are so strange to us—”
I remembered Esther’s weather-worn face. She was like a Frenchwoman who had spent her life in the fields. I remembered her pleasant look, her childlike eyes, and thought of the astonishment of joy she would feel now in being taken care of and tenderly sheltered from wind and weather after all these years. They were going to be young again now, she and William, to forget work and care in the spring weather. I could hardly wait for the boat to come to land, I was so eager to see his happy face.
“Cake an’ wine I ’m goin’ to set ’em out!” said Mr. Todd. “They won’t stop to set down for an ordered meal, they ’ll want to get right out home quick ’s they can. Yes, I ’ll give ’em some cake an’ wine—I ’ve got a rare plum-cake from my best receipt, and a bottle o’ wine that the old Cap’n Denton of all give me, one of two, the day I was married, one we had and one we saved, and I ’ve never touched it till now. He said there wa’n’t none like it in the State o’ Maine.”
It was a day of waiting, that day of spring; the May weather was as expectant as our fond hearts, and one could see the grass grow green hour by hour. The warm air was full of birds, there was a glow of light on the sea instead of the cold shining of chilly weather which had lingered late. There was a look on Mrs. Todd’s face which I saw once and could not meet again. She was in her highest mood. Then I went out early for a walk, and when I came back we sat in different rooms for the most part. There was such a thrill in the air that our only conversation was in her most abrupt and incisive manner. She was knitting, I believe, and as for me I dallied with a book. I heard her walking to and fro, and, the door being wide open now, she went out and paced the front walk to the gate as if she walked a quarter-deck.
It is very solemn to sit waiting for the great events of life—most of us have done it again and again—to be expectant of life or expectant of death gives one the same feeling.
But at the last Mrs. Todd came quickly back from the gate, and standing in the sunshine at the door, she beckoned me as if she were a sibyl.
“I thought you comprehended everything the day you was up there,” she added with a little more patience in her tone, but I felt that she thought I had lost instead of gained since we parted the autumn before.
“William ’s made this pretext o’ goin’ fishin’ for the last time. ’T would n’t done to take notice, ’t would ’a scared him to death! but there never was nobody took less comfort out o’ forty years courtin’. No, he won’t have to make no further pretexts,” said Mrs. Todd, with an air of triumph.
“Did you know where he was going that day?” I asked, with a sudden burst of admiration at such discernment.
“I did!” replied Mrs. Todd grandly.
“Oh! but that pennyroyal lotion,” I indignantly protested, remembering that under pretext of mosquitoes she had besmeared the poor lover in an awful way—why, it was outrageous! Medea could not have been more conscious of high ultimate purposes.
“Darlin’,” said Mrs. Todd, in the excitement of my arrival and the great concerns of marriage, “he ’s got a beautiful shaped face, and they pison him very unusual—you would n’t have had him present himself to his lady all lop-sided with a mosquito-bite? Once when we was young I rode up with him, and they set upon him in concert the minute we entered the woods.” She stood before me reproachfully, and I was conscious of deserved rebuke. “Yes, you ’ve come just in the nick of time to advise me about a bunnit. They say large bows on top is liable to be worn.”
The period of waiting was one of direct contrast to these high moments of recognition. The very slowness of the morning hours wasted that sense of excitement with which we had begun the day. Mrs. Todd came down from the mount where her face had shone so bright, to the cares of common life, and some acquaintances from Black Island for whom she had little natural preference or liking came, bringing a poor, sickly child to get medical advice. They were noisy women, with harsh, clamorous voices, and they stayed a long time. I heard the clink of teacups, however, and could detect no impatience in the tones of Mrs. Todd’s voice; but when they were at last going away, she did not linger unduly over her leave-taking, and returned to me to explain that they were people she had never liked, and they had made an excuse of a friendly visit to save their doctor’s bill; but she pitied the poor little child, and knew beside that the doctor was away.
“I had to give ’em the remedies right out,” she told me; “they would n’t have bought a cent’s worth o’ drugs down to the store for that dwindlin’ thing. She needed feedin’ up, and I don’t expect she gets milk enough; they ’re great butter-makers down to Black Island, ’t is excellent pasturage, but they use no milk themselves, and their butter is heavy laden with salt to make weight, so that you ’d think all their ideas come down from Sodom.”
She was very indignant and very wistful about the pale little girl. “I wish they ’d let me kept her,” she said. “I kind of advised it, and her eyes was so wishful in that pinched face when she heard me, so that I could see what was the matter with her, but they said she wa’n’t prepared. Prepared!” And Mrs. Todd snuffed like an offended war-horse, and departed; but I could hear her still grumbling and talking to herself in high dudgeon an hour afterward.
At the end of that time her arch enemy, Mari’ Harris, appeared at the side-door with a gingham handkerchief over her head. She was always on hand for the news, and made some formal excuse for her presence,—she wished to borrow the weekly paper. Captain Littlepage, whose housekeeper she was, had taken it from the post-office in the morning, but had forgotten, being of failing memory, what he had done with it.
“How is the poor old gentleman?” asked Mrs. Todd with solicitude, ignoring the present errand of Maria and all her concerns.
I had spoken the evening before of intended visits to Captain Littlepage and Elijah Tilley, and I now heard Mrs. Todd repeating my inquiries and intentions, and fending off with unusual volubility of her own the curious questions that were sure to come. But at last Maria Harris secured an opportunity and boldly inquired if she had not seen William ashore early that morning.
“I don’t say he was n’t,” replied Mrs. Todd; “Thu’sday ’s a very usual day with him to come ashore.”
“He was all dressed up,” insisted Maria—she really had no sense of propriety. “I did n’t know but they was going to be married?”
Mrs. Todd did not reply. I recognized from the sounds that reached me that she had retired to the fastnesses of the kitchen-closet and was clattering the tins.
“I expect they ’ll marry soon anyway,” continued the visitor.
“I expect they will if they want to,” answered Mrs. Todd. “I don’t know nothin’ ’t all about it; that ’s what folks say.” And presently the gingham handkerchief retreated past my window.
“I routed her, horse and foot,” said Mrs. Todd proudly, coming at once to stand at my door. “Who ’s comin’ now?” as two figures passed inward bound to the kitchen.
They were Mrs. Begg and Johnny Bowden’s mother, who were favorites, and were received with Mrs. Todd’s usual civilities. Then one of the Mrs. Caplins came with a cup in hand to borrow yeast. On one pretext or another nearly all our acquaintances came to satisfy themselves of the facts, and see what Mrs. Todd would impart about the wedding. But she firmly avoided the subject through the length of every call and errand, and answered the final leading question of each curious guest with her noncommittal phrase, “I don’t know nothin’ ’t all about it; that ’s what folks say!”
She had just repeated this for the fourth or fifth time and shut the door upon the last comers, when we met in the little front entry. Mrs. Todd was not in a bad temper, but highly amused. “I ’ve been havin’ all sorts o’ social privileges, you may have observed. They did n’t seem to consider that if they could only hold out till afternoon they ’d know as much as I did. There wa’n’t but one o’ the whole sixteen that showed real interest, the rest demeaned themselves to ask out o’ cheap curiosity; no, there wa’n’t but one showed any real feelin’.”
“Miss Maria Harris, you mean?” and Mrs. Todd laughed.
“Certain, dear,” she agreed, “how you do understand poor human natur’!”
A short distance down the hilly street stood a narrow house that was newly painted white. It blinded one’s eyes to catch the reflection of the sun. It was the house of the minister, and a wagon had just stopped before it; a man was helping a woman to alight, and they stood side by side for a moment, while Johnny Bowden appeared as if by magic, and climbed to the wagon-seat. Then they went into the house and shut the door. Mrs. Todd and I stood close together and watched; the tears were running down her cheeks. I watched Johnny Bowden, who made light of so great a moment by so handling the whip that the old white Caplin horse started up from time to time and was inexorably stopped as if he had some idea of running away. There was something in the back of the wagon which now and then claimed the boy’s attention; he leaned over as if there were something very precious left in his charge; perhaps it was only Esther’s little trunk going to its new home.
At last the door of the parsonage opened, and two figures came out. The minister followed them and stood in the doorway, delaying them with parting words; he could not have thought it was a time for admonition.
“He ’s all alone; his wife ’s up to Portland to her sister’s,” said Mrs. Todd aloud, in a matter-of-fact voice. “She ’s a nice woman, but she might ha’ talked too much. There! see, they ’re comin’ here. I did n’t know how ’t would be. Yes, they ’re comin’ up to see us before they go home. I declare, if William ain’t lookin’ just like a king!”
Mrs. Todd took one step forward, and we stood and waited. The happy pair came walking up the street, Johnny Bowden driving ahead. I heard a plaintive little cry from time to time to which in the excitement of the moment I had not stopped to listen; but when William and Esther had come and shaken hands with Mr. Todd and then with me, all in silence, Esther stepped quickly to the back of the wagon, and unfastening some cords returned to us carrying a little white lamb. She gave a shy glance at William as she fondled it and held it to her heart, and then, still silent, we went into the house together. The lamb had stopped bleating. It was lovely to see Esther carry it in her arms.
When we got into the house, all the repression of Mrs. Todd’s usual manner was swept away by her flood of feeling. She took Esther’s thin figure, lamb and all, to her heart and held her there, kissing her as she might have kissed a child, and then held out her hand to William and they gave each other the kiss of peace. This was so moving, so tender, so free from their usual fetters of self-consciousness, that Esther and I could not help giving each other a happy glance of comprehension. I never saw a young bride half so touching in her happiness as Esther was that day of her wedding. We took the cake and wine of the marriage feast together, always in silence, like a true sacrament, and then to my astonishment I found that sympathy and public interest in so great an occasion were going to have their way. I shrank from the thought of William’s possible sufferings, but he welcomed both the first group of neighbors and the last with heartiness; and when at last they had gone, for there were thoughtless loiterers in Dunnet Landing, I made ready with eager zeal and walked with William and Esther to the water-side. It was only a little way, and kind faces nodded reassuringly from the windows, while kind voices spoke from the doors. Esther carried the lamb on one arm; she had found time to tell me that its mother had died that morning and she could not bring herself to the thought of leaving it behind. She kept the other hand on William’s arm until we reached the landing. Then he shook hands with me, and looked me full in the face to be sure I understood how happy he was, and stepping into the boat held out his arms to Esther—at last she was his own.
I watched him make a nest for the lamb out of an old sea-cloak at Esther’s feet, and then he wrapped her own shawl round her shoulders, and finding a pin in the lapel of his Sunday coat he pinned it for her. She looked at him fondly while he did this, and then glanced up at us, a pretty, girlish color brightening her cheeks.
We stood there together and watched them go far out into the bay. The sunshine of the May day was low now, but there was a steady breeze, and the boat moved well.
“Mother ’ll be watching for them,” said Mrs. Todd. “Yes, mother ’ll be watching all day, and waiting. She ’ll be so happy to have Esther come.”
We went home together up the hill, and Mrs. Todd said nothing more; but we held each other’s hands all the way.