The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 64, February, 1863

Swan collected his energies and his clothes, finished his remaining last words and duties, and took his seat with the mail-carrier, who had the only public conveyance at that period from the town of Walton to the town of Boston. His parents were dead; his immediate relatives were scattered already in different States; and he left Walton with his heart full of one image, that of Dorcas Fox.

CHAPTER III

"They du say Swan Day's gun off for good!" said Cely Temple, as she returned from the store, with a Dutch-oven in her hand, which she had purchased,—"an' to th' East Injees!"

"I want to know!" rejoined Mrs. Fox.

"I know some'll be sorry!" continued Cely, while Dorcas diligently stirred a five-pail kettle of apple-sauce, that hung stewing over the low fire.

Mrs. Fox looked up quickly at her daughter, but Dorcas continued quietly stirring, and without turning round.

"Mahala Dorr, I guess," said she.

"Wall, M'hala'll be, an' so'll others," answered Cely, prudently. "But I expect likely Swan'll do well, ef he don't die. They say the atemuspere is pison there!—especially for dark-complected folks."

To this hopeful remark Mrs. Fox rejoined, that "old Miss Day come herself from a warm country, and 't was likely her son would settle there for good, and enjoy his health there better than what he would here."

"He'll look out well for Number One, anyhow!" said Cely, lifting the lid of the Dutch-oven from the fire.

Dorcas shot an angry glance at the apple-sauce.

Nothing further passed on the subject, and Dorcas somehow felt, as she stirred, as if Swan were already a long, long way off,—as if the ship had sailed, and would stay sailed, like an enchanted ship, hovering on the horizon, and never come near enough for the passengers to be distinguished,—or else, maybe, go up into the clouds, and rest there with all its masts and spars distinct against the rose-mist, as she had read of once in a book of travels,—or, perhaps, even be inverted, and stand there on its head, as it were, always: but everything must be upside down, of course, in China. Already the thought of Swan Day had mingled with the mists of the past. The outline became indefinite, and softened into a golden splendor, that belonged no more to her, but was essentially of another hemisphere. He had by this time cut loose from home and country. Whether a hundred, or a hundred thousand miles, it mattered not. Since she could not grasp the idea, the distance was as good as infinite to her.

This, you see, is not exactly coquetry. But events drifted her.

When supper was over, and Dinah had gone to sleep, and Cely to visit the neighbors, as usual, Dorcas shyly approached the subject which occupied her thoughts, by getting the little box of jewelry, and looking at it. Her mother called her from the kitchen, out of which the bed-room opened.

"Does mother want me?" asked Dorcas, turning round, with the box in her hand.

"No, no matter," answered the mother; and, possibly with an intuitive feeling of what was in her daughter's thought, she went into the bed-room, and looked with her at the pin and ring of Aunt Dorcas.

"Was it—was it a long time, mother,—I mean, before he came back?" said Dorcas.

"Who? Captain Waterhouse? Bless you! they was as good as merried for ten year, an' he was goin' all the time, an' then, jest at the last minute, to be 'racked! It's 'most always so, when people goes to sea," added she, in a plaintive tone.

Dorcas meditated; she looked wistfully at her mother.

"It's a pretty pin,—dreadful pretty round the edge."

"Yes, 't is! I expect likely them's di'mon's. 'T was made over in foreign parts. He was goin' to bring his picter, too, from there. But he's lost and gone! Your Aunt Dorcas never had no more suitors after that, and she kind o' gin in, and never had no sperits."

Dorcas's eyes filled, and she closed the box.

Henry Mowers would not come to the Fox farm till the next Sunday night. That was as much settled as the new moon. So Dorcas had the whole week to herself, to be thoroughly unhappy in,—all the more so, a thousand times more so, for being utterly incapable of saying or seeing why. An instinctive delicacy kept her from showing to any of the family that she was even depressed; and her voice was heard steadily warbling one of Wesley's hymns, or "Wolfe's Address to his Army," in clear, brilliant tones, that rang up-stairs and down. The general impression of distance and water associated her absent lover with all that was heroic and romantic in song; for of novels she knew nothing,—the Colonel's library being limited, in the imaginative line, to a torn copy of the "Iliad," which had been left at the house by a travelling cobbler.

However, romance is before all rules, and shapes its own adventures. The beauty of Swan Day, which, dark and slight as it was, gleamed with a power for Dorcas's eye and heart before which Buonarotti's would have been only pale stone forever,—that beauty dwelt in her imagination and memory, as only first romantic impressions can. Distance canonized him, enthroned him, glorified him. And when she thought of his setting forth so boldly, so bravely, to tread the wide water, to tempt the hot sun, the foreign exposure, the perpetual dangers of heathen countries, for her unworthy sake, all that was tenderest, most grateful, in her now first wakened nature, rose up in distressful tumult, and agitated the depths that are in all women's souls.

If there had been anybody to whom she could confide the sad wrenching of her spirit, any one who would have cleared her vision, and taught her to look on "this picture and on this," she might not have been so puzzled between her two Hyperions. But as it was, it was a sorrowful struggle. One had the advantage of distance and imagination,—one of presence, and of the magnetism of eye and lip.

"I am a wicked, wicked girl!" said she, as she stood before the glass, and loosened the locks that fell like sunshine over her shoulders. But this confession, with true New-England reticence, was uttered only to one listener,—herself.

Then, she recalled, for it was Monday night once more, the frank and noble nature of Henry: how he had not asked her to promise him, but seemed to take for granted her truth and faith; how he had looked so fondly, so clearly into her eyes, not for what he might find there, but to show the transparent goodness and sincerity of his own; and how he had told her of all his plans and hopes, of his wish and her father's intention that they should be married that very fall; how little he had said of his own overflowing affection, only that "he had never thought of anybody else." Dorcas only felt, without putting the sense into language, that in this life-boat there was safety. But then had she not sent her heart on a venture in the other,—that other which even now was tossing on the waves of a future, full-freighted with hope, and faith in her truth?

She opened the little box again, and looked at the ring and painted pin. How sorrowfully she looked at them now, seen through tears of conscious experience! How mournful seemed the ground hair, and the tints woven of so many broken hopes, sad thoughts, and wrecked expectations! the hair, kissed so many times in the weary years of waiting, and then wept over in the drearier desolation, when the sight could only bring thoughts of the salt waves dashing amongst it in the deep sea! What a life that had been of poor Aunt Dorcas! Then came across her busy thought the words of her mother,—"It's 'most always so!"

Swan sailed very far away, in these tearful reveries, and took hope and life with him.

When the next Sunday evening came, and the next, and the next,—and when Dorcas had ceased to say, blushing and smiling,—"Don't, Henry! you know I should make such a poor kind of a wife for you! and your mother wouldn't think anything of me!"—and when, Henry had had an offer to go to Western New York, where there were nobody knew how many beautiful girls, all waiting to pounce on the tall, fine-looking young farmer,—when Colonel Fox forgot he was a deacon, and swore that Dorcas was undeserving of such a happy lot as was offered to her,—when the tears, and the reveries, and the pictures of far-away lands, and the hopes that might wither with long years of waiting, were all merged and effaced in the healthy happiness of the present,—Dorcas dried her tears, and applied herself diligently to building up her flaxen trousseau, and smothered in her heart the image of dark and brilliant beauty that had for a time occupied it.

"She waited—a long time!—years—and years!" murmured Dorcas, sorrowfully, as she looked at the pin and ring, which in her mind were associated strongly with only one person,—and that one hereafter to be dead to her. As soon as events clearly defined her duties, Dorcas had no further questions with herself. If the box had been Pandora's, not the less resolutely would she have shut it forever, and so crushed the hope that it could never have leaped out.

So, with choking tears, and throbbing pulses, she followed many brilliant fancies and hopes to their last resting-place. Henceforth her path was open and clear, her duties defined, and with daily occupation of hand and thought she strove to displace all that had ever made her other than the cheerful and busy Dorcas. For the last time, she closed and put away the box.

* * * * *

THRENODY

[Among the imprinted papers of the author of "Charles Auchester" and "Counterparts" was found this poem, addressed to a father on the death of a favorite son, whose noble disposition and intellectual gifts were all enlisted on the side of suffering humanity.]

O mourner by the ever-mourning deep,
Full as the sea of tears! imperial heart,
King in thy sorrow over all who weep!
O wrestler with the darkness set apart

In clouds of woe whose lightnings are the throb
Of thy fast-flashing pulses! pause to hear
The lullabies of many an alien sob,
A storm of alien sighs,—so far! so near!

Oh that our vigils with thy gentle dead
Could charm thee from thy night-long agonies,
Could steep thy brain in slumber mild, and shed
Elysian dreams upon thy closing eyes!

In vain! all vain!—'tis yet the feast of tears;
Sorrow for sorrow is the only spell;
Nor wanders yet to melt in unspent years
The wringing murmur of our fresh farewell!

Thousands bereft strew wide the ashes dim;
Rich hearts, poor hands, the lovely, the unlearned,
Bemoan the angel of the age in him,
A star unto its starlight strength returned,

The City of Delights hath lost its gem,
The Sea the changeful glance so like its own,
Genius the darling of her diadem,
Whose smile made moonlight round her awful throne.