Left quite alone, without occupation or amusement, Miss Hyde naturally grasped at anything that came in her way to do or to see to; the lawyer who had been executor of her father's will had settled the estate and gone back to his home, and Miss Hyde went with him, the first journey of her life, that she might select a monument for her father's grave. It was now near a year since Judge Hyde's death, and the monument was on its way from Boston; the elder Dimock monopolized the cartage of freight as well as passengers to the next town, and to him Miss Hyde intrusted the care of the great granite pillar she had purchased; and it was for his father that Abner Dimock called on the young lady for directions as to the disposal of the tombstone just arrived. Hitty was in the garden; her white morning-dress shone among the roses, and the morning air had flushed her pale cheek; she looked fair and delicate and gracious; but her helpless ignorance of the world's ways and usages attracted the world-hardened man more than her face. He had not spent a roué life in a great city for nothing; he had lived enough with gentlemen, broken-down and lost, it is true, but well-bred, to be able to ape their manners; and the devil's instinct that such people possess warned him of Hitty Hyde's weakest points. So, too, he contrived to make that first errand lead to another, and still another,—to make the solitary woman depend on his help, and expect his coming; fifty thousand dollars, with no more incumbrance than such a woman, was worth scheming for, and the prey was easily snared.
It is not to be expected that any country village of two streets, much less Greenfield, could long remain ignorant of such a new and amazing phase as the devotion of any man to any woman therein; but, as nobody liked to interfere too soon in what might only be, after all, a mere business arrangement, Greenfield contented itself with using its eyes, its ears, and its tongues, with one exception to the latter organ's clatter, in favor of Hitty Hyde; to her no one dared as yet approach with gossip or advice.
In the mean time Hitty went on her way, all regardless of the seraphs at the gate. Abner Dimock was handsome, agreeable, gentlemanly to a certain lackered extent;—who had cared for Hitty, in all her life, enough to aid and counsel her as he had already done? At first she was half afraid of him; then she liked him; then he was "so good to me!" and then—she pitied him! for he told her, sitting on that hard old sofa, in the June twilight, how he had no mother, how he had been cast upon the charities of a cruel and evil world from his infancy; reminded her of the old red school-house where they had been to school together, and the tyranny of the big boys over him,—a little curly, motherless boy. So he enlarged upon his life; talked a mildly bitter misanthropy; informed Miss Hyde by gradual insinuations that she was an angel sent on earth to console and reform a poor sinner like him; and before the last September rose had droped, so far had Abner Dimock succeeded in his engineering, that his angel was astounded one night by the undeniably terrestrial visitation of an embrace and a respectfully fervid kiss.
Perhaps it would have been funny, perhaps pathetic, to analyze the mixed consternation and delight of Mehitable Hyde at such bonâ-fide evidence of a lover. Poor woman's heart!—altogether solitary and desolate,—starved of its youth and its joy,—given over to the chilly reign of patience and resignation,—afraid of life,—without strength, or hope, or pleasure,—and all at once Paradise dawns!—her cold, innocent life bursts into fiery and odorous bloom; she has found her fate, and its face is keen with splendor, like a young angel's. Poor, deluded, blessed, rapture-smitten woman!
Blame her as you will, indignant maidens of Greenfield, Miss Flint, and Miss Sharp, and Miss Skinner! You may have had ten lovers and twenty flirtations apiece, and refused half-a-dozen good matches for the best of reasons; you, no doubt, would have known better than to marry a man who was a villain from his very physiognomy; but my heart must needs grow tender toward Miss Hyde; a great joy is as pathetic as a sorrow. Did you never cry over a doting old man?
But when Mrs. Smith's son John, a youth of ten, saw, by the light of an incautious lamp that illuminated a part of the south parlor, a good-night kiss bestowed upon the departing Abner by Miss Hitty Hyde and absolutely returned by said Abner, and when John told his mother, and his mother revealed it to Miss Flint, Miss Flint to Miss Skinner, and so forth, and so on, till it reached the minister's wife, great was the uproar in Greenfield; and the Reverend Mrs. Perkins put on her gray bonnet and went over to remonstrate with Hitty on the spot.
Whether people will ever learn the uselessness of such efforts is yet a matter for prophecy. Miss Hyde heard all that was said, and replied very quietly, "I don't believe it." And as Mrs. Perkins had no tangible proofs of Abner Dimock's unfitness to marry Judge Hyde's daughter, the lady in question got the better of her adviser, so far as any argument was concerned, and effectually put an end to remonstrance by declaring with extreme quiet and unblushing front,—
"I am going to marry him next week. Will you be so good as to notify Mr. Perkins?"
Mrs. Perkins held up both hands and cried. Words might have hardened Hitty; but what woman that was not half tigress ever withstood another woman's tears?
Hitty's heart melted directly; she sat down by Mrs. Perkins, and cried, too.
"Please, don't be vexed with me," sobbed she. "I love him, Mrs. Perkins, and I haven't got anybody else to love,—and—and—I never shall have. He's very good to love me,—I am so old and homely."
"Very good!" exclaimed Mrs. Perkins, in great wrath, "good! to marry Judge Hyde's daughter, and—fifty thousand dollars," Mrs. Perkins bit off. She would not put such thoughts into Hitty's head, since her marriage was inevitable.
"At any rate," sighed Hitty, on the breath of a long-drawn sob, "nobody else ever loved me, if I am Judge Hyde's daughter."
So Mrs. Perkins went away, and declared that things had gone too far to be prevented; and Abner Dimock came on her retreating steps, and Hitty forgot everything but that he loved her; and the next week they were married.
Here, by every law of custom, ought my weary pen to fall flat and refuse its office; for it is here that the fate of every heroine culminates. For what are women born but to be married? Old maids are excrescences in the social system,—disagreeable utilities,—persons who have failed to fulfil their destiny,—and of whom it should have been said, rather than of ghosts, that they are always in the wrong. But life, with pertinacious facts, is too apt to transcend custom and the usage of novel-writers; and though the one brings a woman's legal existence to an end when she merges her independence in that of a man, and the other curtails her historic existence at the same point, because the novelist's catechism hath for its preface this creed,—"The chief end of woman is to get married"; still, neither law nor novelists altogether displace this same persistent fact, and a woman lives, in all capacities of suffering and happiness, not only her wonted, but a double life, when legally and religiously she binds herself with bond and vow to another soul.
Happy would it have been for Hitty Hyde, if with the legal fiction had chimed the actual existent fact!—happy indeed for Abner Dimock's wife to have laid her new joy down at the altar, and been carried to sleep by her mother under the mulleins and golden-rods on Greenfield Hill! Scarce was the allotted period of rapture past half its term, scarce had she learned to phrase the tender words aloud that her heart beat and choked with, before Abner Dimock began to tire of his incumbrance, and to invent plans and excuses for absence; for he dared not openly declare as yet that he left his patient, innocent wife for such scenes of vice and reckless dissipation as she had not even dreamed could exist.
Yet for week after week he lingered away from Greenfield; even months rolled by, and, except for rare and brief visits home, Hitty saw no more of her husband than if he were not hers. She lapsed into her old solitude, varied only by the mutterings and grumblings of old Keery, who had lifted up her voice against Hitty's marriage with more noise and less effect than Mrs. Perkins, and, though she still staid by her old home and haunts, revenged herself on fate in general and her mistress in particular by a continual course of sulking, all the time hiding under this general quarrel with life a heart that ached with the purest tenderness and pity. So some people are made, like chestnuts; one gets so scratched and wounded in the mere attempt to get at the kernel within,