Chapter 23: William’s Wedding.

I.

The hurry of life in a large town, the constant putting aside of preference to yield to a most unsatisfactory activity, began to vex me, and one day I took the train, and only left it for the eastward-bound boat. Carlyle says somewhere that the only happiness a man ought to ask for is happiness enough to get his work done; and against this the complexity and futile ingenuity of social life seems a conspiracy. But the first salt wind from the east, the first sight of a lighthouse set boldly on its outer rock, the flash of a gull, the waiting procession of seaward-bound firs on an island, made me feel solid and definite again, instead of a poor, incoherent being. Life was resumed, and anxious living blew away as if it had not been. I could not breathe deep enough or long enough. It was a return to happiness.

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 hasn’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.

II.

“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 ‘twould 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 shouldn’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. ‘Twill 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. ‘Tis elegant land north side o’ that bleak ridge, an’ one o’ the boys has been Esther’s righthand 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 couldn’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 ‘twas 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.

III.

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.