FullReads

“The first woman. She made the journey to Boston. By stage.”

Here, too, are the ironies whereof departed life is prodigal. This is the tidy lot of Peter Merrick, who had a desire to stand well with the world, in leaving it, and whose purple and fine linen were embodied in the pomp of death. He was a cobbler, and he put his small savings together to erect a modest monument to his own memory. Every Sunday he visited it, “after meetin’,” and perhaps his day-dreams, as he sat leather-aproned on his bench, were still of that white marble idealism. The inscription upon it was full of significant blanks; they seemed an interrogation of the destiny which governs man.

“Here lies Peter Merrick—-” ran the unfinished scroll, “and his wife who died—-“

But ambitious Peter never lay there at all; for in his later prime, with one flash of sharp desire to see the world, he went on a voyage to the Banks, and was drowned. And his wife? The story grows somewhat threadbare. She summoned his step-brother to settle the estate, and he, a marble-cutter by trade, filled in the date of Peter’s death with letters English and illegible. In the process of their carving, the widow stood by, hands folded under her apron from the midsummer sun. The two got excellent well acquainted, and the stone-cutter prolonged his stay. He came again in a little over a year, at Thanksgiving time, and they were married. Which shows that nothing is certain in life,–no, not the proprieties of our leaving it,–and that even there we must walk softly, writing no boastful legend for time to annul.

At one period a certain quatrain had a great run in Tiverton; it was the epitaph of the day. Noting how it overspread that stony soil, you picture to yourself the modest pride of its composer; unless, indeed, it had been copied from an older inscription in an English yard, and transplanted through the heart and brain of some settler whose thoughts were ever flitting back. Thus it runs in decorous metre:–

“Dear husband, now my life is passed,
You have dearly loved me to the last.
Grieve not for me, but pity take
On my dear children for my sake.”

But one sorrowing widower amended it, according to his wife’s direction, so that it bore a new and significant meaning. He was charged to

“pity take
On my dear parent for my sake.”

The lesson was patent. His mother-in-law had always lived with him, and she was “difficult.” Who knows how keenly the sick woman’s mind ran on the possibilities of reef and quicksand for the alien two left alone without her guiding hand? So she set the warning of her love and fear to be no more forgotten while she herself should be remembered.

The husband was a silent man. He said very little about his intentions; performance was enough for him. Therefore it happened that his “parent,” adopted perforce, knew nothing about this public charge until she came upon it, on her first Sunday visit, surveying the new glory of the stone. The story goes that she stood before it, a square, portentous figure in black alpaca and warlike mitts, and that she uttered these irrevocable words:–

“Pity on me! Well, I guess he won’t! I’ll go to the poor-farm fust!”

And Monday morning, spite of his loyal dissuasions, she packed her “blue chist,” and drove off to a far-away cousin, who got her “nussin'” to do. Another lesson from the warning finger of Death: let what was life not dream that it can sway the life that is, after the two part company.

Not always were mothers-in-law such breakers of the peace. There is a story in Tiverton of one man who went remorsefully mad after his wife’s death, and whose mind dwelt unceasingly on the things he had denied her. These were not many, yet the sum seemed to him colossal. It piled the Ossa of his grief. Especially did he writhe under the remembrance of certain blue dishes she had desired the week before her sudden death; and one night, driven by an insane impulse to expiate his blindness, he walked to town, bought them, and placed them in a foolish order about her grave. It was a puerile, crazy deed, but no one smiled, not even the little children who heard of it next day, on the way home from school, and went trudging up there to see. To their stirring minds it seemed a strange departure from the comfortable order of things, chiefly because their elders stood about with furtive glances at one another and murmurs of “Poor creatur’!” But one man, wiser than the rest, “harnessed up,” and went to tell the dead woman’s mother, a mile away. Jonas was “shackled;” he might “do himself a mischief.” In the late afternoon, the guest so summoned walked quietly into the silent house, where Jonas sat by the window, beating one hand incessantly upon the sill, and staring at the air. His sister, also, had come; she was frightened, however, and had betaken herself to the bedroom, to sob. But in walked this little plump, soft-footed woman, with her banded hair, her benevolent spectacles, and her atmosphere of calm.