The end of all living (part 4)

under seal of the civil bond. No baseless, windy boasting that "I might an

if I would!" Nay, here be the marriage ties to testify.

In this pleasant, weedy corner is a little white stone, not so long erected.

"I shall arise in thine image," runs the inscription; and reading it, you

shall remember that the dust within belonged to a little hunchback, who

played the fiddle divinely, and had beseeching eyes. With that cry he

escaped from the marred conditions of the clay. Here, too (for this is a

sort of bachelor nook), is the grave of a man whom we unconsciously

****** into a permanent masquerade. Years and years ago he broke into a

house,--an unknown felony in our quiet limits,--and was incontinently

shot. The burglar lost his arm, and went about at first under a cloud of

disgrace and horror, which became, with healing of the public conscience,

a veil of sympathy. After his brief imprisonment indoors, during the

healing of the mutilated stump, he came forth among us again, a man

sadder and wiser in that he had learned how slow and sure may be the

road to wealth. He had sown his wild oats in one night's foolish work, and

now he settled down to doing such odd jobs as he might with one hand.

We got accustomed to his loss. Those of us who were children when it

happened never really discovered that it was disgrace at all; we called it

misfortune, and no one said us nay. Then one day it occurred to us that

he must have been shot "in the war," and so, all unwittingly to himself,

the silent man became a hero. We accepted him. He was part of our

poetic time, and when he died, we held him still in remembrance among

those who fell worthily. When Decoration Day was first observed in

Tiverton, one of us thought of him, and dropped some apple blossoms on

his grave; and so it had its posy like the rest, although it bore no flag. It

was the doctor who set us right there. "I wouldn't do that," he said,

withholding the hand of one unthinking child; and she took back her flag.

But she left the blossoms, and, being fond of precedent, we still do the

same; unless we stop to think, we know not why. You may say there is

here some perfidy to the republic and the honored dead, or at least some

laxity of morals. We are lax, indeed, but possibly that is why we are so

kind. We are not willing to "hurt folks' feelings" even when they have

migrated to another star; and a flower more or less from the overplus

given to men who made the greater choice will do no harm, tossed to one

whose soul may be sitting, like Lazarus, at their riches' gate.But of all these fleeting legends made to, hold the soul a moment on its

way, and keep it here in fickle permanence, one is more dramatic than

all, more charged with power and pathos. Years ago there came into

Tiverton an unknown man, very handsome, showing the marks of high

breeding, and yet in his bearing strangely solitary and remote. He wore a

cloak, and had a foreign look. He came walking into the town one night,

with dust upon his shoes, and we judged that he had been traveling a

long time. He had the appearance of one who was not nearly at his

journey's end, and would pass through the village, continuing on a longer

way. He glanced at no one, but we all stared at him. He seemed, though

we had not the words to put it so, an exiled prince. He went straight

through Tiverton Street until he came to the parsonage; and something

about it (perhaps its garden, hot with flowers, larkspur, coreopsis, and

the rest) detained his eye, and he walked in. Next day the old doctor was

there also with his little black case, but we were none the wiser for that;

for the old doctor was of the sort who intrench themselves in a

professional reserve. You might draw up beside the road to question him,

but you could as well deter the course of nature. He would give the roan a

flick, and his sulky would flash by.

"What's the matter with so-and-so?" would ask a mousing neighbor.

"He's sick," ran the laconic reply.

"Goin' to die?" one daring querist ventured further.

"Some time," said the doctor.

But though he assumed a right to combat thus the outer world, no one

was gentler with a sick man or with those about him in their grief. To the

latter he would speak; but he used to say he drew his line at second

cousins.

Into his hands and the true old parson's fell the stranger's confidence, if

confidence it were. He may have died solitary and unexplained; but no

matter what he said, his story was safe. In a week he was carried out for

burial; and so solemn was the parson's manner as he spoke a brief

service over him, so thrilling his enunciation of the words "our brother,"that we dared not even ask what else he should be called. And we never

knew. The headstone, set up by the parson, bore the words "Peccator

Maximus." For a long time we thought they made the stranger's name,

and, judged that he must have been a foreigner; but a new

schoolmistress taught us otherwise. It was Latin, she said, and it meant

"the chiefest among sinners." When that report flew round, the parson

got wind of it, and then, in the pulpit one morning, he announced that he

felt it necessary to say that the words had been used "at our brother's

request," and that it was his own decision to write below them, "For this

cause came I into the world."

We have accepted the stranger as we accept many things in Tiverton.

Parson and doctor kept his secret well. He is quite safe from our

questioning; but for years I expected a lady, always young and full of

grief, to seek out his grave and shrive him with her tears. She will not

appear now, unless she come as an old, old woman, to lie beside him. It

is too late.

One more record of our vanished time,--this full of poesy only, and the

pathos of farewell. It was not the aged and heartsick alone who lay down

here to rest We have been no more fortunate than others. Youth and

beauty came also, and returned no more. This, where the white rose-bush

grows untended, was the young daughter of a squire in far-off days: too

young to have known the pangs of love or the sweet desire of Death, save

that, in primrose time, he always paints himself so fair. I have thought

the inscription must have been borrowed from another grave, in some

yard shaded by yews and silent under the cawing of the rooks; perhaps,

from its stiffness, translated from a stately Latin verse. This it is,

snatched not too soon from oblivion; for a few more years will wear it

quite away:--

"Here lies the purple flower of a maid

Having to envious Death due tribute paid.

Her sudden Loss her Parents did lament,

And all her Friends with grief their hearts did Rent.

Life's short. Your wicked Lives amend with care,

For Mortals know we Dust and Shadows "The purple flower of a maid!" All the blossomy sweetness, the fragrant

lamenting of Lycidas, lies in that one line. Alas, poor love-lies-bleeding!

And yet not poor according to the barren pity we accord the dead, but

dowered with another youth set like a crown upon the unstained front of

this. Not going with sparse blossoms ripened or decayed, but heaped with

buds and dripping over in perfume. She seems so sweet in her still

loveliness, the empty promise of her balmy spring, that for a moment fain

are you to snatch her back into the pageant of your day. Reading that

phrase, you feel the earth is poorer for her loss. And yet not so, since the

world holds other greater worlds as well. Elsewhere she may have grown

to age and stature; but here she lives yet in beauteous permanence,--as

true a part of youth and joy and rapture as the immortal figures on the

Grecian Urn. While she was but a flying phantom on the frieze of time,

Death fixed her there forever,--a haunting spirit in perennial bliss.."

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