He wrote a short note as he dressed and shaved leisurely. The note was to Dorcas, and only said,--"Meet me under the old pear-tree before sunset tonight,"--and was signed with his initials. This note he at first placed on the little mantel-shelf in plain sight, so that he should not forget to take it down-stairs when he went to breakfast. Afterwards he put it into his pocket-book.
His dress----But the dress of 1811 has not arrived at the picturesque, and could never be classical under any circumstances. He finished his toilet, and went into the dining-room just as everybody else had dined, and asked the landlord what he could have for breakfast. Even then, the landlord hardly looked curious. Taft was certainly failing. In five minutes he found himself at a well-known little table, with the tavern-staple for odd meals, ham and eggs, flanked with sweetmeats and cake, just as he remembered of old. He nibbled at the sharp barberries lying black in the boiled molasses, and listened eagerly to the talk about British aggressions which was going on in the bar-room. Suddenly a face looked in at the low window.
Swan sprang forward, kicked over his chair, and knocked the earthen pepper-box off the table. Before he reached the window, however, the shadow had passed round the corner of the house, out of sight.
It was only a youthful figure, surmounted by a broad-brimmed straw hat, that half hid two sweet, sparkling eyes. Ah! but they were Dorcas's eyes!
He picked up the pepper-box, and mechanically sifted its contents into the barberry-dish.
Dorcas's eyes,--lips,--cheeks,--and waving grace! A rocking movement, a sort of beating, bounding, choking emotion, made the room suddenly dark, and he fell heavily into a chair.
The landlord opened the door, and said,--
Swan roused himself, and drove away, without speaking to any of the smoking loungers on the stoop, to whom he was as if he had never been born. But this, from his preoccupied state, did not strike him as singular. One little voice, a bird's voice, as he drove along through the pine woods, sang over and over the same tune,--"Dorcas! Dorcas!"
The silence of the road, when all animated Nature slept in the warm noon of the late autumn day, when even the wheels scarcely sounded on the dead pine-spears, made this solitary voice, like Swan's newly awakened memory, all but angelic.