A Wedding Tombstone.
BY CLARICE IRENE CLINGHAN.
SO you never heard tell of Melindy Barbour's weddin' tombstone?" said grandma in a tone of surprise. "For the land's sake, I thought everybody knew about that."
I confessed the most abject ignorance and immediately drew up to the fire. This was partly to gain information and partly because, although the fireplace was wide and deep throated and big logs were blazing in it, there were biting draughts of stinging November air coming in at the loosely fitting door. For grandmother would not be persuaded to leave the home that had been hers for fifty years, and which now showed some signs of decay. She sat knitting vigorously by the firelight, for, although she had all the modern conveniences of heating and lighting, her big fireplace cast its ruddy glow out into the room through all the long winter evenings. I was an angular schoolgirl of fifteen then, with a great love of the romantic, and was on a four weeks' visit at the old homestead. It seemed never to occur to grandma that, having been raised in a different part of the country, the happenings at Ragged Corner (where she lived) would naturally be unknown to me. She always expressed fresh surprise at my ignorance on these subjects. After knitting a few minutes in silence, she began:
"You've seen the old stone house down on the bank of the river, all shut in with pines and evergreens? It's nigh a hundred years old. When I was born it had been built ten years. When I was a young married woman the Barbours came to live there, and they was proud, high-feelin' people that nobody could get acquainted with. That's what made 'em take it so dretful hard when—but here I am, way ahead of my story. You see, Mr. Barbour embezzled or did something of that kind, and went to prison. After he had been there a year he up and hung himself, and that is the last of him so far as my story goes.
"Then his wife and little boy shut themselves up in the stone house and never went outside the gate hardly. She'd had a good deal of schooling, his mother had, and she taught him herself as long as she could, and then he bought books and studied by himself. He tried going to school when he was a small boy, but one of the scholars threw it at him about his father, and Mortimer nearly killed him, and after that his mother kep' him home. And she was such a proud woman, was Mis' Barbour, and lofty and severe in her ways. She wouldn't let nobody sympathize with her, which everybody wanted to, as there's so little going on in a place like Ragged Corner. Mis' Barbour was real selfish with her grief, so she got herself disliked, besides folks bein' suspicious after the way her husband turned out. What did they live on? Oh, the boy farmed it, and later they do say he wrote books on what they call natural history, though to my mind it was the most unnatural stuff I ever heard tell of,—all about beetles and bugs with three hundred muscles in their heads, and as could carry twelve hundred times their own weight on their own backs, which everybody knows he must have got up as he went along. They were dretfully taken up with each other, he and his mother, and she believed everything he said was so, even about the bugs and beetles. But she was his own born mother, and that explains it.
"When she died, Mortimer liked to went crazy. He planted her grave with vi'lets and pansies, and at the head was a white marble monument he had gone to the city for—nothing nearer would suit him. But he didn't display no taste. Nothing on it, my dear, but the old lady's name and the date she died—not an angel, nor a cherub, or a lamb, or a broken rosebud, nor a bit of verse. And yet he always seemed to set store by her.
"Then Mortimer, he just stuck to the old house, same as ever, though now he was alone. I used to wonder how it seemed to him late at night hearin' the swash of the river and the sighin' of them pine trees. He wore his hair long, as was the custom in them days, and it was curly up at the ends, like the picture of John Wesley. But he had eyes that went right through you and came out the back of your head. And he never set foot into the meeting-house, nohow.
"Now, he was the last man in the village I'd ever said would got married. But as sure as you set there, when the little milliner, Melinda McAllister, came into the place, he was struck. That wasn't nothing strange—all the young fellows was—but, mind you, she was struck, too. No, you wouldn't 'a' thought it. Everybody warned her, and told her about his father's hangin' himself in prison, and how queer his mother was, and that Mortimer was as odd as Dick's hatband and wouldn't come to no good. She listened, with her eyes big and cool and a little hot patch of red on her cheeks like a daub of paint, but she never said a word. That was Melindy McAllister all over, never to say a blessed word, but go and do just as she saw fit. First we knew they was engaged, and it was given out in meeting. Next day her aunt she lived with came in to see me, and wrung her hands, sayin' she wouldn't be surprised if Melindy was murdered before the year was out. What can you think of a man who lives like a hermit, and had a crooked father and a peculiar mother?