The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my
bachelor apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the
Veiled Lady, when an elderly man of rather shabby appearance met me in
an obscure part of the street.

"Mr. Coverdale," said he softly, "can I speak with you a moment?"

As I have casually alluded to the Veiled Lady, it may not be amiss to
mention, for the benefit of such of my readers as are unacquainted with
her now forgotten celebrity, that she was a phenomenon in the mesmeric
line; one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a new
science, or the revival of an old humbug.  Since those times her
sisterhood have grown too numerous to attract much individual notice;
nor, in fact, has any one of them come before the public under such
skilfully contrived circumstances of stage effect as those which at
once mystified and illuminated the remarkable performances of the lady
in question.  Nowadays, in the management of his "subject,"
"clairvoyant," or "medium," the exhibitor affects the simplicity and
openness of scientific experiment; and even if he profess to tread a
step or two across the boundaries of the spiritual world, yet carries
with him the laws of our actual life and extends them over his
preternatural conquests.  Twelve or fifteen years ago, on the contrary,
all the arts of mysterious arrangement, of picturesque disposition, and
artistically contrasted light and shade, were made available, in order
to set the apparent miracle in the strongest attitude of opposition to
ordinary facts.  In the case of the Veiled Lady, moreover, the interest
of the spectator was further wrought up by the enigma of her identity,
and an absurd rumor (probably set afloat by the exhibitor, and at one
time very prevalent) that a beautiful young lady, of family and
fortune, was enshrouded within the misty drapery of the veil.  It was
white, with somewhat of a subdued silver sheen, like the sunny side of
a cloud; and, falling over the wearer from head to foot, was supposed
to insulate her from the material world, from time and space, and to
endow her with many of the privileges of a disembodied spirit.

Her pretensions, however, whether miraculous or otherwise, have little
to do with the present narrative--except, indeed, that I had
propounded, for the Veiled Lady's prophetic solution, a query as to the
success of our Blithedale enterprise.  The response, by the bye, was of
the true Sibylline stamp,--nonsensical in its first aspect, yet on
closer study unfolding a variety of interpretations, one of which has
certainly accorded with the event.  I was turning over this riddle in
my mind, and trying to catch its slippery purport by the tail, when the
old man above mentioned interrupted me.

"Mr. Coverdale!--Mr. Coverdale!" said he, repeating my name twice, in
order to make up for the hesitating and ineffectual way in which he
uttered it.  "I ask your pardon, sir, but I hear you are going to
Blithedale tomorrow."

I knew the pale, elderly face, with the red-tipt nose, and the patch
over one eye; and likewise saw something characteristic in the old
fellow's way of standing under the arch of a gate, only revealing
enough of himself to make me recognize him as an acquaintance.  He was
a very shy personage, this Mr. Moodie; and the trait was the more
singular, as his mode of getting his bread necessarily brought him into
the stir and hubbub of the world more than the generality of men.

"Yes, Mr. Moodie," I answered, wondering what interest he could take in
the fact, "it is my intention to go to Blithedale to-morrow.  Can I be
of any service to you before my departure?"

"If you pleased, Mr. Coverdale," said he, "you might do me a very great
favor."

"A very great one?" repeated I, in a tone that must have expressed but
little alacrity of beneficence, although I was ready to do the old man
any amount of kindness involving no special trouble to myself. "A very
great favor, do you say?  My time is brief, Mr. Moodie, and I have a
good many preparations to make.  But be good enough to tell me what you
wish."

"Ah, sir," replied Old Moodie, "I don't quite like to do that; and, on
further thoughts, Mr. Coverdale, perhaps I had better apply to some
older gentleman, or to some lady, if you would have the kindness to
make me known to one, who may happen to be going to Blithedale. You are
a young man, sir!"

"Does that fact lessen my availability for your purpose?" asked I.
"However, if an older man will suit you better, there is Mr.
Hollingsworth, who has three or four years the advantage of me in age,
and is a much more solid character, and a philanthropist to boot.  I am
only a poet, and, so the critics tell me, no great affair at that! But
what can this business be, Mr. Moodie?  It begins to interest me;
especially since your hint that a lady's influence might be found
desirable.  Come, I am really anxious to be of service to you."

But the old fellow, in his civil and demure manner, was both freakish
and obstinate; and he had now taken some notion or other into his head
that made him hesitate in his former design.

"I wonder, sir," said he, "whether you know a lady whom they call
Zenobia?"

"Not personally," I answered, "although I expect that pleasure
to-morrow, as she has got the start of the rest of us, and is already a
resident at Blithedale.  But have you a literary turn, Mr. Moodie? or
have you taken up the advocacy of women's rights? or what else can have
interested you in this lady?  Zenobia, by the bye, as I suppose you
know, is merely her public name; a sort of mask in which she comes
before the world, retaining all the privileges of privacy,--a
contrivance, in short, like the white drapery of the Veiled Lady, only
a little more transparent.  But it is late.  Will you tell me what I
can do for you?"

"Please to excuse me to-night, Mr. Coverdale," said Moodie.  "You are
very kind; but I am afraid I have troubled you, when, after all, there
may be no need.  Perhaps, with your good leave, I will come to your
lodgings to-morrow morning, before you set out for Blithedale. I wish
you a good-night, sir, and beg pardon for stopping you."

And so he slipt away; and, as he did not show himself the next morning,
it was only through subsequent events that I ever arrived at a
plausible conjecture as to what his business could have been. Arriving
at my room, I threw a lump of cannel coal upon the grate, lighted a
cigar, and spent an hour in musings of every hue, from the brightest to
the most sombre; being, in truth, not so very confident as at some
former periods that this final step, which would mix me up irrevocably
with the Blithedale affair, was the wisest that could possibly be
taken.  It was nothing short of midnight when I went to bed, after
drinking a glass of particularly fine sherry on which I used to pride
myself in those days.  It was the very last bottle; and I finished it,
with a friend, the next forenoon, before setting out for Blithedale.



II. BLITHEDALE

There can hardly remain for me (who am really getting to be a frosty
bachelor, with another white hair, every week or so, in my mustache),
there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth, as
that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale.  It was a wood
fire, in the parlor of an old farmhouse, on an April afternoon, but
with the fitful gusts of a wintry snowstorm roaring in the chimney.
Vividly does that fireside re-create itself, as I rake away the ashes
from the embers in my memory, and blow them up with a sigh, for lack of
more inspiring breath.  Vividly for an instant, but anon, with the
dimmest gleam, and with just as little fervency for my heart as for my
finger-ends!  The staunch oaken logs were long ago burnt out. Their
genial glow must be represented, if at all, by the merest phosphoric
glimmer, like that which exudes, rather than shines, from damp
fragments of decayed trees, deluding the benighted wanderer through a
forest.  Around such chill mockery of a fire some few of us might sit
on the withered leaves, spreading out each a palm towards the imaginary
warmth, and talk over our exploded scheme for beginning the life of
Paradise anew.

Paradise, indeed!  Nobody else in the world, I am bold to
affirm--nobody, at least, in our bleak little world of New
England,--had dreamed of Paradise that day except as the pole suggests
the tropic.  Nor, with such materials as were at hand, could the most
skilful architect have constructed any better imitation of Eve's bower
than might be seen in the snow hut of an Esquimaux.  But we made a
summer of it, in spite of the wild drifts.

It was an April day, as already hinted, and well towards the middle of
the month.  When morning dawned upon me, in town, its temperature was
mild enough to be pronounced even balmy, by a lodger, like myself, in
one of the midmost houses of a brick block,--each house partaking of
the warmth of all the rest, besides the sultriness of its individual
furnace--heat.  But towards noon there had come snow, driven along the
street by a northeasterly blast, and whitening the roofs and sidewalks
with a business-like perseverance that would have done credit to our
severest January tempest.  It set about its task apparently as much in
earnest as if it had been guaranteed from a thaw for months to come.
The greater, surely, was my heroism, when, puffing out a final whiff of
cigar-smoke, I quitted my cosey pair of bachelor-rooms,--with a good
fire burning in the grate, and a closet right at hand, where there was
still a bottle or two in the champagne basket and a residuum of claret
in a box,--quitted, I say, these comfortable quarters, and plunged into
the heart of the pitiless snowstorm, in quest of a better life.

The better life!  Possibly, it would hardly look so now; it is enough
if it looked so then.  The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the
doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the
truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to
know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

Yet, after all, let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious, to
follow out one's daydream to its natural consummation, although, if the
vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be
consummated otherwise than by a failure.  And what of that?  Its
airiest fragments, impalpable as they may be, will possess a value that
lurks not in the most ponderous realities of any practicable scheme.
They are not the rubbish of the mind.  Whatever else I may repent of,
therefore, let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies that I
once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world's
destiny--yes!--and to do what in me lay for their accomplishment; even
to the extent of quitting a warm fireside, flinging away a freshly
lighted cigar, and travelling far beyond the strike of city clocks,
through a drifting snowstorm.

There were four of us who rode together through the storm; and
Hollingsworth, who had agreed to be of the number, was accidentally
delayed, and set forth at a later hour alone.  As we threaded the
streets, I remember how the buildings on either side seemed to press
too closely upon us, insomuch that our mighty hearts found barely room
enough to throb between them.  The snowfall, too, looked inexpressibly
dreary (I had almost called it dingy), coming down through an
atmosphere of city smoke, and alighting on the sidewalk only to be
moulded into the impress of somebody's patched boot or overshoe.  Thus
the track of an old conventionalism was visible on what was freshest
from the sky.  But when we left the pavements, and our muffled
hoof-tramps beat upon a desolate extent of country road, and were
effaced by the unfettered blast as soon as stamped, then there was
better air to breathe.  Air that had not been breathed once and again!
air that had not been spoken into words of falsehood, formality, and
error, like all the air of the dusky city!

"How pleasant it is!" remarked I, while the snowflakes flew into my
mouth the moment it was opened.  "How very mild and balmy is this
country air!"

"Ah, Coverdale, don't laugh at what little enthusiasm you have left!"
said one of my companions.  "I maintain that this nitrous atmosphere is
really exhilarating; and, at any rate, we can never call ourselves
regenerated men till a February northeaster shall be as grateful to us
as the softest breeze of June!"

So we all of us took courage, riding fleetly and merrily along, by
stone fences that were half buried in the wave-like drifts; and through
patches of woodland, where the tree-trunks opposed a snow-incrusted
side towards the northeast; and within ken of deserted villas, with no
footprints in their avenues; and passed scattered dwellings, whence
puffed the smoke of country fires, strongly impregnated with the
pungent aroma of burning peat.  Sometimes, encountering a traveller, we
shouted a friendly greeting; and he, unmuffling his ears to the bluster
and the snow-spray, and listening eagerly, appeared to think our
courtesy worth less than the trouble which it cost him.  The churl!  He
understood the shrill whistle of the blast, but had no intelligence for
our blithe tones of brotherhood.  This lack of faith in our cordial
sympathy, on the traveller's part, was one among the innumerable tokens
how difficult a task we had in hand for the reformation of the world.
We rode on, however, with still unflagging spirits, and made such good
companionship with the tempest that, at our journey's end, we professed
ourselves almost loath to bid the rude blusterer good-by. But, to own
the truth, I was little better than an icicle, and began to be
suspicious that I had caught a fearful cold.

And now we were seated by the brisk fireside of the old farmhouse, the
same fire that glimmers so faintly among my reminiscences at the
beginning of this chapter.  There we sat, with the snow melting out of
our hair and beards, and our faces all ablaze, what with the past
inclemency and present warmth.  It was, indeed, a right good fire that
we found awaiting us, built up of great, rough logs, and knotty limbs,
and splintered fragments of an oak-tree, such as farmers are wont to
keep for their own hearths, since these crooked and unmanageable boughs
could never be measured into merchantable cords for the market.  A
family of the old Pilgrims might have swung their kettle over precisely
such a fire as this, only, no doubt, a bigger one; and, contrasting it
with my coal-grate, I felt so much the more that we had transported
ourselves a world-wide distance from the system of society that
shackled us at breakfast-time.

Good, comfortable Mrs. Foster (the wife of stout Silas Foster, who was
to manage the farm at a fair stipend, and be our tutor in the art of
husbandry) bade us a hearty welcome.  At her back--a back of generous
breadth--appeared two young women, smiling most hospitably, but looking
rather awkward withal, as not well knowing what was to be their
position in our new arrangement of the world.  We shook hands
affectionately all round, and congratulated ourselves that the blessed
state of brotherhood and sisterhood, at which we aimed, might fairly be
dated from this moment.  Our greetings were hardly concluded when the
door opened, and Zenobia--whom I had never before seen, important as
was her place in our enterprise--Zenobia entered the parlor.

This (as the reader, if at all acquainted with our literary biography,
need scarcely be told) was not her real name.  She had assumed it, in
the first instance, as her magazine signature; and, as it accorded well
with something imperial which her friends attributed to this lady's
figure and deportment, they half-laughingly adopted it in their
familiar intercourse with her.  She took the appellation in good part,
and even encouraged its constant use; which, in fact, was thus far
appropriate, that our Zenobia, however humble looked her new
philosophy, had as much native pride as any queen would have known what
to do with.



III. A KNOT OF DREAMERS

Zenobia bade us welcome, in a fine, frank, mellow voice, and gave each
of us her hand, which was very soft and warm.  She had something
appropriate, I recollect, to say to every individual; and what she said
to myself was this:--"I have long wished to know you, Mr. Coverdale,
and to thank you for your beautiful poetry, some of which I have
learned by heart; or rather it has stolen into my memory, without my
exercising any choice or volition about the matter.  Of course--permit
me to say you do not think of relinquishing an occupation in which you
have done yourself so much credit.  I would almost rather give you up
as an associate, than that the world should lose one of its true poets!"

"Ah, no; there will not be the slightest danger of that, especially
after this inestimable praise from Zenobia," said I, smiling, and
blushing, no doubt, with excess of pleasure.  "I hope, on the contrary,
now to produce something that shall really deserve to be called
poetry,--true, strong, natural, and sweet, as is the life which we are
going to lead,--something that shall have the notes of wild birds
twittering through it, or a strain like the wind anthems in the woods,
as the case may be."

"Is it irksome to you to hear your own verses sung?" asked Zenobia,
with a gracious smile.  "If so, I am very sorry, for you will certainly
hear me singing them sometimes, in the summer evenings."

"Of all things," answered I, "that is what will delight me most."

While this passed, and while she spoke to my companions, I was taking
note of Zenobia's aspect; and it impressed itself on me so distinctly,
that I can now summon her up, like a ghost, a little wanner than the
life but otherwise identical with it.  She was dressed as simply as
possible, in an American print (I think the dry-goods people call it
so), but with a silken kerchief, between which and her gown there was
one glimpse of a white shoulder.  It struck me as a great piece of good
fortune that there should be just that glimpse.  Her hair, which was
dark, glossy, and of singular abundance, was put up rather soberly and
primly--without curls, or other ornament, except a single flower.  It
was an exotic of rare beauty, and as fresh as if the hothouse gardener
had just clipt it from the stem.  That flower has struck deep root into
my memory.  I can both see it and smell it, at this moment.  So
brilliant, so rare, so costly as it must have been, and yet enduring
only for a day, it was more indicative of the pride and pomp which had
a luxuriant growth in Zenobia's character than if a great diamond had
sparkled among her hair.

Her hand, though very soft, was larger than most women would like to
have, or than they could afford to have, though not a whit too large in
proportion with the spacious plan of Zenobia's entire development. It
did one good to see a fine intellect (as hers really was, although its
natural tendency lay in another direction than towards literature) so
fitly cased.  She was, indeed, an admirable figure of a woman, just on
the hither verge of her richest maturity, with a combination of
features which it is safe to call remarkably beautiful, even if some
fastidious persons might pronounce them a little deficient in softness
and delicacy.  But we find enough of those attributes everywhere.
Preferable--by way of variety, at least--was Zenobia's bloom, health,
and vigor, which she possessed in such overflow that a man might well
have fallen in love with her for their sake only.  In her quiet moods,
she seemed rather indolent; but when really in earnest, particularly if
there were a spice of bitter feeling, she grew all alive to her
finger-tips.

"I am the first comer," Zenobia went on to say, while her smile beamed
warmth upon us all; "so I take the part of hostess for to-day, and
welcome you as if to my own fireside.  You shall be my guests, too, at
supper.  Tomorrow, if you please, we will be brethren and sisters, and
begin our new life from daybreak."

"Have we our various parts assigned?" asked some one.

"Oh, we of the softer sex," responded Zenobia, with her mellow, almost
broad laugh,--most delectable to hear, but not in the least like an
ordinary woman's laugh,--"we women (there are four of us here already)
will take the domestic and indoor part of the business, as a matter of
course.  To bake, to boil, to roast, to fry, to stew,--to wash, and
iron, and scrub, and sweep,--and, at our idler intervals, to repose
ourselves on knitting and sewing,--these, I suppose, must be feminine
occupations, for the present.  By and by, perhaps, when our individual
adaptations begin to develop themselves, it may be that some of us who
wear the petticoat will go afield, and leave the weaker brethren to
take our places in the kitchen."

"What a pity," I remarked, "that the kitchen, and the housework
generally, cannot be left out of our system altogether!  It is odd
enough that the kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just
that which chiefly distinguishes artificial life--the life of
degenerated mortals--from the life of Paradise.  Eve had no dinner-pot,
and no clothes to mend, and no washing-day."

"I am afraid," said Zenobia, with mirth gleaming out of her eyes, "we
shall find some difficulty in adopting the paradisiacal system for at
least a month to come.  Look at that snowdrift sweeping past the
window!  Are there any figs ripe, do you think?  Have the pineapples
been gathered to-day?  Would you like a bread-fruit, or a cocoanut?
Shall I run out and pluck you some roses?  No, no, Mr. Coverdale; the
only flower hereabouts is the one in my hair, which I got out of a
greenhouse this morning.  As for the garb of Eden," added she,
shivering playfully, "I shall not assume it till after May-day!"

Assuredly Zenobia could not have intended it,--the fault must have been
entirely in my imagination.  But these last words, together with
something in her manner, irresistibly brought up a picture of that
fine, perfectly developed figure, in Eve's earliest garment.  Her free,
careless, generous modes of expression often had this effect of
creating images which, though pure, are hardly felt to be quite
decorous when born of a thought that passes between man and woman.  I
imputed it, at that time, to Zenobia's noble courage, conscious of no
harm, and scorning the petty restraints which take the life and color
out of other women's conversation.  There was another peculiarity about
her.  We seldom meet with women nowadays, and in this country, who
impress us as being women at all,--their sex fades away and goes for
nothing, in ordinary intercourse.  Not so with Zenobia.  One felt an
influence breathing out of her such as we might suppose to come from
Eve, when she was just made, and her Creator brought her to Adam,
saying, "Behold! here is a woman!"  Not that I would convey the idea of
especial gentleness, grace, modesty, and shyness, but of a certain warm
and rich characteristic, which seems, for the most part, to have been
refined away out of the feminine system.

"And now," continued Zenobia, "I must go and help get supper.  Do you
think you can be content, instead of figs, pineapples, and all the
other delicacies of Adam's supper-table, with tea and toast, and a
certain modest supply of ham and tongue, which, with the instinct of a
housewife, I brought hither in a basket?  And there shall be bread and
milk, too, if the innocence of your taste demands it."

The whole sisterhood now went about their domestic avocations, utterly
declining our offers to assist, further than by bringing wood for the
kitchen fire from a huge pile in the back yard.  After heaping up more
than a sufficient quantity, we returned to the sitting-room, drew our
chairs close to the hearth, and began to talk over our prospects.
Soon, with a tremendous stamping in the entry, appeared Silas Foster,
lank, stalwart, uncouth, and grizzly-bearded. He came from foddering
the cattle in the barn, and from the field, where he had been
ploughing, until the depth of the snow rendered it impossible to draw a
furrow.  He greeted us in pretty much the same tone as if he were
speaking to his oxen, took a quid from his iron tobacco-box, pulled off
his wet cowhide boots, and sat down before the fire in his
stocking-feet.  The steam arose from his soaked garments, so that the
stout yeoman looked vaporous and spectre-like.

"Well, folks," remarked Silas, "you'll be wishing yourselves back to
town again, if this weather holds."

And, true enough, there was a look of gloom, as the twilight fell
silently and sadly out of the sky, its gray or sable flakes
intermingling themselves with the fast-descending snow.  The storm, in
its evening aspect, was decidedly dreary.  It seemed to have arisen for
our especial behoof,--a symbol of the cold, desolate, distrustful
phantoms that invariably haunt the mind, on the eve of adventurous
enterprises, to warn us back within the boundaries of ordinary life.

But our courage did not quail.  We would not allow ourselves to be
depressed by the snowdrift trailing past the window, any more than if
it had been the sigh of a summer wind among rustling boughs.  There
have been few brighter seasons for us than that.  If ever men might
lawfully dream awake, and give utterance to their wildest visions
without dread of laughter or scorn on the part of the audience,--yes,
and speak of earthly happiness, for themselves and mankind, as an
object to be hopefully striven for, and probably attained, we who made
that little semicircle round the blazing fire were those very men.  We
had left the rusty iron framework of society behind us; we had broken
through many hindrances that are powerful enough to keep most people on
the weary treadmill of the established system, even while they feel its
irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did.  We had stepped down from
the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we
had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is
better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp.  It
was our purpose--a generous one, certainly, and absurd, no doubt, in
full proportion with its generosity--to give up whatever we had
heretofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind the example of a
life governed by other than the false and cruel principles on which
human society has all along been based.

And, first of all, we had divorced ourselves from pride, and were
striving to supply its place with familiar love.  We meant to lessen
the laboring man's great burden of toil, by performing our due share of
it at the cost of our own thews and sinews.  We sought our profit by
mutual aid, instead of wresting it by the strong hand from an enemy, or
filching it craftily from those less shrewd than ourselves (if, indeed,
there were any such in New England), or winning it by selfish
competition with a neighbor; in one or another of which fashions every
son of woman both perpetrates and suffers his share of the common evil,
whether he chooses it or no.  And, as the basis of our institution, we
purposed to offer up the earnest toil of our bodies, as a prayer no
less than an effort for the advancement of our race.

Therefore, if we built splendid castles (phalansteries perhaps they
might be more fitly called), and pictured beautiful scenes, among the
fervid coals of the hearth around which we were clustering, and if all
went to rack with the crumbling embers and have never since arisen out
of the ashes, let us take to ourselves no shame.  In my own behalf, I
rejoice that I could once think better of the world's improvability
than it deserved.  It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in
a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can thus
magnanimously persist in error.

Stout Silas Foster mingled little in our conversation; but when he did
speak, it was very much to some practical purpose.  For
instance:--"Which man among you," quoth he, "is the best judge of
swine?  Some of us must go to the next Brighton fair, and buy half a
dozen pigs."

Pigs!  Good heavens! had we come out from among the swinish multitude
for this?  And again, in reference to some discussion about raising
early vegetables for the market:--"We shall never make any hand at
market gardening," said Silas Foster, "unless the women folks will
undertake to do all the weeding.  We haven't team enough for that and
the regular farm-work, reckoning three of your city folks as worth one
common field-hand.  No, no; I tell you, we should have to get up a
little too early in the morning, to compete with the market gardeners
round Boston."

It struck me as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised,
after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world,
should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the
outside barbarians in their own field of labor.  But, to own the truth,
I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we
stood in a position of new hostility, rather than new brotherhood. Nor
could this fail to be the case, in some degree, until the bigger and
better half of society should range itself on our side. Constituting so
pitiful a minority as now, we were inevitably estranged from the rest
of mankind in pretty fair proportion with the strictness of our mutual
bond among ourselves.

This dawning idea, however, was driven back into my inner consciousness
by the entrance of Zenobia.  She came with the welcome intelligence
that supper was on the table.  Looking at herself in the glass, and
perceiving that her one magnificent flower had grown rather languid
(probably by being exposed to the fervency of the kitchen fire), she
flung it on the floor, as unconcernedly as a village girl would throw
away a faded violet.  The action seemed proper to her character,
although, methought, it would still more have befitted the bounteous
nature of this beautiful woman to scatter fresh flowers from her hand,
and to revive faded ones by her touch. Nevertheless, it was a singular
but irresistible effect; the presence of Zenobia caused our heroic
enterprise to show like an illusion, a masquerade, a pastoral, a
counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up men and women were making a
play-day of the years that were given us to live in.  I tried to
analyze this impression, but not with much success.

"It really vexes me," observed Zenobia, as we left the room, "that Mr.
Hollingsworth should be such a laggard.  I should not have thought him
at all the sort of person to be turned back by a puff of contrary wind,
or a few snowflakes drifting into his face."

"Do you know Hollingsworth personally?"  I inquired.

"No; only as an auditor--auditress, I mean--of some of his lectures,"
said she.  "What a voice he has! and what a man he is!  Yet not so much
an intellectual man, I should say, as a great heart; at least, he moved
me more deeply than I think myself capable of being moved, except by
the stroke of a true, strong heart against my own.  It is a sad pity
that he should have devoted his glorious powers to such a grimy,
unbeautiful, and positively hopeless object as this reformation of
criminals, about which he makes himself and his wretchedly small
audiences so very miserable.  To tell you a secret, I never could
tolerate a philanthropist before.  Could you?"

"By no means," I answered; "neither can I now."

"They are, indeed, an odiously disagreeable set of mortals," continued
Zenobia.  "I should like Mr. Hollingsworth a great deal better if the
philanthropy had been left out.  At all events, as a mere matter of
taste, I wish he would let the bad people alone, and try to benefit
those who are not already past his help.  Do you suppose he will be
content to spend his life, or even a few months of it, among tolerably
virtuous and comfortable individuals like ourselves?"

"Upon my word, I doubt it," said I. "If we wish to keep him with us, we
must systematically commit at least one crime apiece!  Mere peccadillos
will not satisfy him."

Zenobia turned, sidelong, a strange kind of a glance upon me; but,
before I could make out what it meant, we had entered the kitchen,
where, in accordance with the rustic simplicity of our new life, the
supper-table was spread.



IV. THE SUPPER-TABLE

The pleasant firelight!  I must still keep harping on it.  The kitchen
hearth had an old-fashioned breadth, depth, and spaciousness, far
within which lay what seemed the butt of a good-sized oak-tree, with
the moisture bubbling merrily out at both ends.  It was now half an
hour beyond dusk.  The blaze from an armful of substantial sticks,
rendered more combustible by brushwood and pine, flickered powerfully
on the smoke-blackened walls, and so cheered our spirits that we cared
not what inclemency might rage and roar on the other side of our
illuminated windows.  A yet sultrier warmth was bestowed by a goodly
quantity of peat, which was crumbling to white ashes among the burning
brands, and incensed the kitchen with its not ungrateful fragrance.
The exuberance of this household fire would alone have sufficed to
bespeak us no true farmers; for the New England yeoman, if he have the
misfortune to dwell within practicable distance of a wood-market, is as
niggardly of each stick as if it were a bar of California gold.

But it was fortunate for us, on that wintry eve of our untried life, to
enjoy the warm and radiant luxury of a somewhat too abundant fire. If
it served no other purpose, it made the men look so full of youth, warm
blood, and hope, and the women--such of them, at least, as were anywise
convertible by its magic--so very beautiful, that I would cheerfully
have spent my last dollar to prolong the blaze.  As for Zenobia, there
was a glow in her cheeks that made me think of Pandora, fresh from
Vulcan's workshop, and full of the celestial warmth by dint of which he
had tempered and moulded her.

"Take your places, my dear friends all," cried she; "seat yourselves
without ceremony, and you shall be made happy with such tea as not many
of the world's working-people, except yourselves, will find in their
cups to-night.  After this one supper, you may drink buttermilk, if you
please.  To-night we will quaff this nectar, which, I assure you, could
not be bought with gold."

We all sat down,--grizzly Silas Foster, his rotund helpmate, and the
two bouncing handmaidens, included,--and looked at one another in a
friendly but rather awkward way.  It was the first practical trial of
our theories of equal brotherhood and sisterhood; and we people of
superior cultivation and refinement (for as such, I presume, we
unhesitatingly reckoned ourselves) felt as if something were already
accomplished towards the millennium of love.  The truth is, however,
that the laboring oar was with our unpolished companions; it being far
easier to condescend than to accept of condescension.  Neither did I
refrain from questioning, in secret, whether some of us--and Zenobia
among the rest--would so quietly have taken our places among these good
people, save for the cherished consciousness that it was not by
necessity but choice.  Though we saw fit to drink our tea out of
earthen cups to-night, and in earthen company, it was at our own option
to use pictured porcelain and handle silver forks again to-morrow.
This same salvo, as to the power of regaining our former position,
contributed much, I fear, to the equanimity with which we subsequently
bore many of the hardships and humiliations of a life of toil.  If ever
I have deserved (which has not often been the case, and, I think,
never), but if ever I did deserve to be soundly cuffed by a fellow
mortal, for secretly putting weight upon some imaginary social
advantage, it must have been while I was striving to prove myself
ostentatiously his equal and no more.  It was while I sat beside him on
his cobbler's bench, or clinked my hoe against his own in the
cornfield, or broke the same crust of bread, my earth-grimed hand to
his, at our noontide lunch.  The poor, proud man should look at both
sides of sympathy like this.

The silence which followed upon our sitting down to table grew rather
oppressive; indeed, it was hardly broken by a word, during the first
round of Zenobia's fragrant tea.

"I hope," said I, at last, "that our blazing windows will be visible a
great way off.  There is nothing so pleasant and encouraging to a
solitary traveller, on a stormy night, as a flood of firelight seen
amid the gloom.  These ruddy window panes cannot fail to cheer the
hearts of all that look at them.  Are they not warm with the
beacon-fire which we have kindled for humanity?"

"The blaze of that brushwood will only last a minute or two longer,"
observed Silas Foster; but whether he meant to insinuate that our moral
illumination would have as brief a term, I cannot say.

"Meantime," said Zenobia, "it may serve to guide some wayfarer to a
shelter."

And, just as she said this, there came a knock at the house door.

"There is one of the world's wayfarers," said I. "Ay, ay, just so!"
quoth Silas Foster.  "Our firelight will draw stragglers, just as a
candle draws dorbugs on a summer night."

Whether to enjoy a dramatic suspense, or that we were selfishly
contrasting our own comfort with the chill and dreary situation of the
unknown person at the threshold, or that some of us city folk felt a
little startled at the knock which came so unseasonably, through night
and storm, to the door of the lonely farmhouse,--so it happened that
nobody, for an instant or two, arose to answer the summons.  Pretty
soon there came another knock.  The first had been moderately loud; the
second was smitten so forcibly that the knuckles of the applicant must
have left their mark in the door panel.

"He knocks as if he had a right to come in," said Zenobia, laughing.
"And what are we thinking of?--It must be Mr. Hollingsworth!"

Hereupon I went to the door, unbolted, and flung it wide open.  There,
sure enough, stood Hollingsworth, his shaggy greatcoat all covered with
snow, so that he looked quite as much like a polar bear as a modern
philanthropist.

"Sluggish hospitality this!" said he, in those deep tones of his, which
seemed to come out of a chest as capacious as a barrel.  "It would have
served you right if I had lain down and spent the night on the
doorstep, just for the sake of putting you to shame.  But here is a
guest who will need a warmer and softer bed."

And, stepping back to the wagon in which he had journeyed hither,
Hollingsworth received into his arms and deposited on the doorstep a
figure enveloped in a cloak.  It was evidently a woman; or,
rather,--judging from the ease with which he lifted her, and the little
space which she seemed to fill in his arms, a slim and unsubstantial
girl.  As she showed some hesitation about entering the door,
Hollingsworth, with his usual directness and lack of ceremony, urged
her forward not merely within the entry, but into the warm and strongly
lighted kitchen.

"Who is this?" whispered I, remaining behind with him, while he was
taking off his greatcoat.

"Who?  Really, I don't know," answered Hollingsworth, looking at me
with some surprise.  "It is a young person who belongs here, however;
and no doubt she had been expected.  Zenobia, or some of the women
folks, can tell you all about it."

"I think not," said I, glancing towards the new-comer and the other
occupants of the kitchen.  "Nobody seems to welcome her.  I should
hardly judge that she was an expected guest."

"Well, well," said Hollingsworth quietly, "We'll make it right."

The stranger, or whatever she were, remained standing precisely on that
spot of the kitchen floor to which Hollingsworth's kindly hand had
impelled her.  The cloak falling partly off, she was seen to be a very
young woman dressed in a poor but decent gown, made high in the neck,
and without any regard to fashion or smartness.  Her brown hair fell
down from beneath a hood, not in curls but with only a slight wave; her
face was of a wan, almost sickly hue, betokening habitual seclusion
from the sun and free atmosphere, like a flower-shrub that had done its
best to blossom in too scanty light.  To complete the pitiableness of
her aspect, she shivered either with cold, or fear, or nervous
excitement, so that you might have beheld her shadow vibrating on the
fire-lighted wall.  In short, there has seldom been seen so depressed
and sad a figure as this young girl's; and it was hardly possible to
help being angry with her, from mere despair of doing anything for her
comfort.  The fantasy occurred to me that she was some desolate kind of
a creature, doomed to wander about in snowstorms; and that, though the
ruddiness of our window panes had tempted her into a human dwelling,
she would not remain long enough to melt the icicles out of her hair.
Another conjecture likewise came into my mind.  Recollecting
Hollingsworth's sphere of philanthropic action, I deemed it possible
that he might have brought one of his guilty patients, to be wrought
upon and restored to spiritual health by the pure influences which our
mode of life would create.

As yet the girl had not stirred.  She stood near the door, fixing a
pair of large, brown, melancholy eyes upon Zenobia--only upon
Zenobia!--she evidently saw nothing else in the room save that bright,
fair, rosy, beautiful woman.  It was the strangest look I ever
witnessed; long a mystery to me, and forever a memory.  Once she seemed
about to move forward and greet her,--I know not with what warmth or
with what words,--but, finally, instead of doing so, she dropped down
upon her knees, clasped her hands, and gazed piteously into Zenobia's
face. Meeting no kindly reception, her head fell on her bosom.

I never thoroughly forgave Zenobia for her conduct on this occasion.
But women are always more cautious in their casual hospitalities than
men.

"What does the girl mean?" cried she in rather a sharp tone.  "Is she
crazy?  Has she no tongue?"

And here Hollingsworth stepped forward.

"No wonder if the poor child's tongue is frozen in her mouth," said he;
and I think he positively frowned at Zenobia.  "The very heart will be
frozen in her bosom, unless you women can warm it, among you, with the
warmth that ought to be in your own!"

Hollingsworth's appearance was very striking at this moment.  He was
then about thirty years old, but looked several years older, with his
great shaggy head, his heavy brow, his dark complexion, his abundant
beard, and the rude strength with which his features seemed to have
been hammered out of iron, rather than chiselled or moulded from any
finer or softer material.  His figure was not tall, but massive and
brawny, and well befitting his original occupation; which as the reader
probably knows--was that of a blacksmith.  As for external polish, or
mere courtesy of manner, he never possessed more than a tolerably
educated bear; although, in his gentler moods, there was a tenderness
in his voice, eyes, mouth, in his gesture, and in every indescribable
manifestation, which few men could resist and no woman. But he now
looked stern and reproachful; and it was with that inauspicious meaning
in his glance that Hollingsworth first met Zenobia's eyes, and began
his influence upon her life.

To my surprise, Zenobia--of whose haughty spirit I had been told so
many examples--absolutely changed color, and seemed mortified and
confused.

"You do not quite do me justice, Mr. Hollingsworth," said she almost
humbly.  "I am willing to be kind to the poor girl.  Is she a protegee
of yours?  What can I do for her?"

"Have you anything to ask of this lady?" said Hollingsworth kindly to
the girl.  "I remember you mentioned her name before we left town."

"Only that she will shelter me," replied the girl tremulously.  "Only
that she will let me be always near her."

"Well, indeed," exclaimed Zenobia, recovering herself and laughing,
"this is an adventure, and well-worthy to be the first incident in our
life of love and free-heartedness!  But I accept it, for the present,
without further question, only," added she, "it would be a convenience
if we knew your name."

"Priscilla," said the girl; and it appeared to me that she hesitated
whether to add anything more, and decided in the negative.  "Pray do
not ask me my other name,--at least not yet,--if you will be so kind to
a forlorn creature."

Priscilla!--Priscilla!  I repeated the name to myself three or four
times; and in that little space, this quaint and prim cognomen had so
amalgamated itself with my idea of the girl, that it seemed as if no
other name could have adhered to her for a moment.  Heretofore the poor
thing had not shed any tears; but now that she found herself received,
and at least temporarily established, the big drops began to ooze out
from beneath her eyelids as if she were full of them. Perhaps it showed
the iron substance of my heart, that I could not help smiling at this
odd scene of unknown and unaccountable calamity, into which our
cheerful party had been entrapped without the liberty of choosing
whether to sympathize or no.  Hollingsworth's behavior was certainly a
great deal more creditable than mine.

"Let us not pry further into her secrets," he said to Zenobia and the
rest of us, apart; and his dark, shaggy face looked really beautiful
with its expression of thoughtful benevolence.  "Let us conclude that
Providence has sent her to us, as the first-fruits of the world, which
we have undertaken to make happier than we find it.  Let us warm her
poor, shivering body with this good fire, and her poor, shivering heart
with our best kindness.  Let us feed her, and make her one of us.  As
we do by this friendless girl, so shall we prosper. And, in good time,
whatever is desirable for us to know will be melted out of her, as
inevitably as those tears which we see now."

"At least," remarked I, "you may tell us how and where you met with
her."

"An old man brought her to my lodgings," answered Hollingsworth, "and
begged me to convey her to Blithedale, where--so I understood him--she
had friends; and this is positively all I know about the matter."

Grim Silas Foster, all this while, had been busy at the supper-table,
pouring out his own tea and gulping it down with no more sense of its
exquisiteness than if it were a decoction of catnip; helping himself to
pieces of dipt toast on the flat of his knife blade, and dropping half
of it on the table-cloth; using the same serviceable implement to cut
slice after slice of ham; perpetrating terrible enormities with the
butter-plate; and in all other respects behaving less like a civilized
Christian than the worst kind of an ogre.  Being by this time fully
gorged, he crowned his amiable exploits with a draught from the water
pitcher, and then favored us with his opinion about the business in
hand.  And, certainly, though they proceeded out of an unwiped mouth,
his expressions did him honor.

"Give the girl a hot cup of tea and a thick slice of this first-rate
bacon," said Silas, like a sensible man as he was.  "That's what she
wants.  Let her stay with us as long as she likes, and help in the
kitchen, and take the cow-breath at milking time; and, in a week or
two, she'll begin to look like a creature of this world."

So we sat down again to supper, and Priscilla along with us.



V. UNTIL BEDTIME

Silas Foster, by the time we concluded our meal, had stript off his
coat, and planted himself on a low chair by the kitchen fire, with a
lapstone, a hammer, a piece of sole leather, and some waxed-ends, in
order to cobble an old pair of cowhide boots; he being, in his own
phrase, "something of a dab" (whatever degree of skill that may imply)
at the shoemaking business.  We heard the tap of his hammer at
intervals for the rest of the evening.  The remainder of the party
adjourned to the sitting-room.  Good Mrs. Foster took her
knitting-work, and soon fell fast asleep, still keeping her needles in
brisk movement, and, to the best of my observation, absolutely footing
a stocking out of the texture of a dream.  And a very substantial
stocking it seemed to be.  One of the two handmaidens hemmed a towel,
and the other appeared to be making a ruffle, for her Sunday's wear,
out of a little bit of embroidered muslin which Zenobia had probably
given her.

It was curious to observe how trustingly, and yet how timidly, our poor
Priscilla betook herself into the shadow of Zenobia's protection. She
sat beside her on a stool, looking up every now and then with an
expression of humble delight at her new friend's beauty.  A brilliant
woman is often an object of the devoted admiration--it might almost be
termed worship, or idolatry--of some young girl, who perhaps beholds
the cynosure only at an awful distance, and has as little hope of
personal intercourse as of climbing among the stars of heaven.  We men
are too gross to comprehend it.  Even a woman, of mature age, despises
or laughs at such a passion.  There occurred to me no mode of
accounting for Priscilla's behavior, except by supposing that she had
read some of Zenobia's stories (as such literature goes everywhere), or
her tracts in defence of the sex, and had come hither with the one
purpose of being her slave.  There is nothing parallel to this, I
believe,--nothing so foolishly disinterested, and hardly anything so
beautiful,--in the masculine nature, at whatever epoch of life; or, if
there be, a fine and rare development of character might reasonably be
looked for from the youth who should prove himself capable of such
self-forgetful affection.

Zenobia happening to change her seat, I took the opportunity, in an
undertone, to suggest some such notion as the above.

"Since you see the young woman in so poetical a light," replied she in
the same tone, "you had better turn the affair into a ballad.  It is a
grand subject, and worthy of supernatural machinery.  The storm, the
startling knock at the door, the entrance of the sable knight
Hollingsworth and this shadowy snow-maiden, who, precisely at the
stroke of midnight, shall melt away at my feet in a pool of ice-cold
water and give me my death with a pair of wet slippers!  And when the
verses are written, and polished quite to your mind, I will favor you
with my idea as to what the girl really is."

"Pray let me have it now," said I; "it shall be woven into the ballad."

"She is neither more nor less," answered Zenobia, "than a seamstress
from the city; and she has probably no more transcendental purpose than
to do my miscellaneous sewing, for I suppose she will hardly expect to
make my dresses."

"How can you decide upon her so easily?"  I inquired.

"Oh, we women judge one another by tokens that escape the obtuseness of
masculine perceptions!" said Zenobia.  "There is no proof which you
would be likely to appreciate, except the needle marks on the tip of
her forefinger.  Then, my supposition perfectly accounts for her
paleness, her nervousness, and her wretched fragility.  Poor thing! She
has been stifled with the heat of a salamander stove, in a small, close
room, and has drunk coffee, and fed upon doughnuts, raisins, candy, and
all such trash, till she is scarcely half alive; and so, as she has
hardly any physique, a poet like Mr. Miles Coverdale may be allowed to
think her spiritual."

"Look at her now!" whispered I.

Priscilla was gazing towards us with an inexpressible sorrow in her wan
face and great tears running down her cheeks.  It was difficult to
resist the impression that, cautiously as we had lowered our voices,
she must have overheard and been wounded by Zenobia's scornful estimate
of her character and purposes.

"What ears the girl must have!" whispered Zenobia, with a look of
vexation, partly comic and partly real.  "I will confess to you that I
cannot quite make her out.  However, I am positively not an ill-natured
person, unless when very grievously provoked,--and as you, and
especially Mr. Hollingsworth, take so much interest in this odd
creature, and as she knocks with a very slight tap against my own heart
likewise,--why, I mean to let her in.  From this moment I will be
reasonably kind to her.  There is no pleasure in tormenting a person of
one's own sex, even if she do favor one with a little more love than
one can conveniently dispose of; and that, let me say, Mr. Coverdale,
is the most troublesome offence you can offer to a woman."

"Thank you," said I, smiling; "I don't mean to be guilty of it."

She went towards Priscilla, took her hand, and passed her own rosy
finger-tips, with a pretty, caressing movement, over the girl's hair.
The touch had a magical effect.  So vivid a look of joy flushed up
beneath those fingers, that it seemed as if the sad and wan Priscilla
had been snatched away, and another kind of creature substituted in her
place.  This one caress, bestowed voluntarily by Zenobia, was evidently
received as a pledge of all that the stranger sought from her, whatever
the unuttered boon might be.  From that instant, too, she melted in
quietly amongst us, and was no longer a foreign element. Though always
an object of peculiar interest, a riddle, and a theme of frequent
discussion, her tenure at Blithedale was thenceforth fixed.  We no more
thought of questioning it, than if Priscilla had been recognized as a
domestic sprite, who had haunted the rustic fireside of old, before we
had ever been warmed by its blaze.

She now produced, out of a work-bag that she had with her, some little
wooden instruments (what they are called I never knew), and proceeded
to knit, or net, an article which ultimately took the shape of a silk
purse.  As the work went on, I remembered to have seen just such purses
before; indeed, I was the possessor of one.  Their peculiar excellence,
besides the great delicacy and beauty of the manufacture, lay in the
almost impossibility that any uninitiated person should discover the
aperture; although, to a practised touch, they would open as wide as
charity or prodigality might wish.  I wondered if it were not a symbol
of Priscilla's own mystery.

Notwithstanding the new confidence with which Zenobia had inspired her,
our guest showed herself disquieted by the storm.  When the strong
puffs of wind spattered the snow against the windows and made the oaken
frame of the farmhouse creak, she looked at us apprehensively, as if to
inquire whether these tempestuous outbreaks did not betoken some
unusual mischief in the shrieking blast.  She had been bred up, no
doubt, in some close nook, some inauspiciously sheltered court of the
city, where the uttermost rage of a tempest, though it might scatter
down the slates of the roof into the bricked area, could not shake the
casement of her little room.  The sense of vast, undefined space,
pressing from the outside against the black panes of our uncurtained
windows, was fearful to the poor girl, heretofore accustomed to the
narrowness of human limits, with the lamps of neighboring tenements
glimmering across the street.  The house probably seemed to her adrift
on the great ocean of the night. A little parallelogram of sky was all
that she had hitherto known of nature, so that she felt the awfulness
that really exists in its limitless extent.  Once, while the blast was
bellowing, she caught hold of Zenobia's robe, with precisely the air of
one who hears her own name spoken at a distance, but is unutterably
reluctant to obey the call.

We spent rather an incommunicative evening.  Hollingsworth hardly said
a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed. Then,
indeed, he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his
meditations like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply
possible, and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and
mind.  The poor fellow had contracted this ungracious habit from the
intensity with which he contemplated his own ideas, and the infrequent
sympathy which they met with from his auditors,--a circumstance that
seemed only to strengthen the implicit confidence that he awarded to
them.  His heart, I imagine, was never really interested in our
socialist scheme, but was forever busy with his strange, and, as most
people thought it, impracticable plan, for the reformation of criminals
through an appeal to their higher instincts.

Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate him
on this point.  He ought to have commenced his investigation of the
subject by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper person, and
examining the condition of his higher instincts afterwards.

The rest of us formed ourselves into a committee for providing our
infant community with an appropriate name,--a matter of greatly more
difficulty than the uninitiated reader would suppose.  Blithedale was
neither good nor bad.  We should have resumed the old Indian name of
the premises, had it possessed the oil-and-honey flow which the
aborigines were so often happy in communicating to their local
appellations; but it chanced to be a harsh, ill-connected, and
interminable word, which seemed to fill the mouth with a mixture of
very stiff clay and very crumbly pebbles.  Zenobia suggested "Sunny
Glimpse," as expressive of a vista into a better system of society.
This we turned over and over for a while, acknowledging its prettiness,
but concluded it to be rather too fine and sentimental a name (a fault
inevitable by literary ladies in such attempts) for sunburnt men to
work under.  I ventured to whisper "Utopia," which, however, was
unanimously scouted down, and the proposer very harshly maltreated, as
if he had intended a latent satire.  Some were for calling our
institution "The Oasis," in view of its being the one green spot in the
moral sand-waste of the world; but others insisted on a proviso for
reconsidering the matter at a twelvemonths' end, when a final decision
might be had, whether to name it "The Oasis" or "Sahara."  So, at last,
finding it impracticable to hammer out anything better, we resolved
that the spot should still be Blithedale, as being of good augury
enough.

The evening wore on, and the outer solitude looked in upon us through
the windows, gloomy, wild, and vague, like another state of existence,
close beside the little sphere of warmth and light in which we were the
prattlers and bustlers of a moment.  By and by the door was opened by
Silas Foster, with a cotton handkerchief about his head, and a tallow
candle in his hand.

"Take my advice, brother farmers," said he, with a great, broad,
bottomless yawn, "and get to bed as soon as you can.  I shall sound the
horn at daybreak; and we've got the cattle to fodder, and nine cows to
milk, and a dozen other things to do, before breakfast."

Thus ended the first evening at Blithedale.  I went shivering to my
fireless chamber, with the miserable consciousness (which had been
growing upon me for several hours past) that I had caught a tremendous
cold, and should probably awaken, at the blast of the horn, a fit
subject for a hospital.  The night proved a feverish one. During the
greater part of it, I was in that vilest of states when a fixed idea
remains in the mind, like the nail in Sisera's brain, while innumerable
other ideas go and come, and flutter to and fro, combining constant
transition with intolerable sameness.  Had I made a record of that
night's half-waking dreams, it is my belief that it would have
anticipated several of the chief incidents of this narrative, including
a dim shadow of its catastrophe.  Starting up in bed at length, I saw
that the storm was past, and the moon was shining on the snowy
landscape, which looked like a lifeless copy of the world in marble.

From the bank of the distant river, which was shimmering in the
moonlight, came the black shadow of the only cloud in heaven, driven
swiftly by the wind, and passing over meadow and hillock, vanishing
amid tufts of leafless trees, but reappearing on the hither side, until
it swept across our doorstep.

How cold an Arcadia was this!



VI. COVERDALE'S SICK-CHAMBER

The horn sounded at daybreak, as Silas Foster had forewarned us, harsh,
uproarious, inexorably drawn out, and as sleep-dispelling as if this
hard-hearted old yeoman had got hold of the trump of doom.

On all sides I could hear the creaking of the bedsteads, as the
brethren of Blithedale started from slumber, and thrust themselves into
their habiliments, all awry, no doubt, in their haste to begin the
reformation of the world.  Zenobia put her head into the entry, and
besought Silas Foster to cease his clamor, and to be kind enough to
leave an armful of firewood and a pail of water at her chamber door.
Of the whole household,--unless, indeed, it were Priscilla, for whose
habits, in this particular, I cannot vouch,--of all our apostolic
society, whose mission was to bless mankind, Hollingsworth, I
apprehend, was the only one who began the enterprise with prayer. My
sleeping-room being but thinly partitioned from his, the solemn murmur
of his voice made its way to my ears, compelling me to be an auditor of
his awful privacy with the Creator.  It affected me with a deep
reverence for Hollingsworth, which no familiarity then existing, or
that afterwards grew more intimate between us,--no, nor my subsequent
perception of his own great errors,--ever quite effaced. It is so rare,
in these times, to meet with a man of prayerful habits (except, of
course, in the pulpit), that such an one is decidedly marked out by the
light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the divine interview from
which he passes into his daily life.

As for me, I lay abed; and if I said my prayers, it was backward,
cursing my day as bitterly as patient Job himself.  The truth was, the
hot-house warmth of a town residence, and the luxurious life in which I
indulged myself, had taken much of the pith out of my physical system;
and the wintry blast of the preceding day, together with the general
chill of our airy old farmhouse, had got fairly into my heart and the
marrow of my bones.  In this predicament, I seriously wished--selfish
as it may appear--that the reformation of society had been postponed
about half a century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have
put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.

What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society
than I had always lived in?  It had satisfied me well enough. My
pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted,
with the bedchamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with books and
periodicals; my writing-desk with a half-finished poem, in a stanza of
my own contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture
gallery; my noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the
suggestive succession of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life
in which I shared; my dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred
dishes at command, and could banquet as delicately as the wizard
Michael Scott when the Devil fed him from the king of France's kitchen;
my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at
somebody's party, if I pleased,--what could be better than all this?
Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations
of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen
cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and
thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose
vocation I had thrust myself?  Above all, was it better to have a fever
and die blaspheming, as I was like to do?

In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart and another in my
head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point,
yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into
the icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time,
when Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.

"Well, Coverdale," cried he, "you bid fair to make an admirable farmer!
Don't you mean to get up to-day?"

"Neither to-day nor to-morrow," said I hopelessly.  "I doubt if I ever
rise again!"

"What is the matter now?" he asked.

I told him my piteous case, and besought him to send me back to town in
a close carriage.

"No, no!" said Hollingsworth with kindly seriousness.  "If you are
really sick, we must take care of you."

Accordingly he built a fire in my chamber, and, having little else to
do while the snow lay on the ground, established himself as my nurse. A
doctor was sent for, who, being homaeopathic, gave me as much medicine,
in the course of a fortnight's attendance, as would have laid on the
point of a needle.  They fed me on water-gruel, and I speedily became a
skeleton above ground.  But, after all, I have many precious
recollections connected with that fit of sickness.

Hollingsworth's more than brotherly attendance gave me inexpressible
comfort.  Most men--and certainly I could not always claim to be one of
the exceptions--have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely
hostile feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity
of any kind causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our
selfish existence.  The education of Christianity, it is true, the
sympathy of a like experience and the example of women, may soften and,
possibly, subvert this ugly characteristic of our sex; but it is
originally there, and has likewise its analogy in the practice of our
brute brethren, who hunt the sick or disabled member of the herd from
among them, as an enemy.  It is for this reason that the stricken deer
goes apart, and the sick lion grimly withdraws himself into his den.
Except in love, or the attachments of kindred, or other very long and
habitual affection, we really have no tenderness.  But there was
something of the woman moulded into the great, stalwart frame of
Hollingsworth; nor was he ashamed of it, as men often are of what is
best in them, nor seemed ever to know that there was such a soft place
in his heart.  I knew it well, however, at that time, although
afterwards it came nigh to be forgotten.  Methought there could not be
two such men alive as Hollingsworth.  There never was any blaze of a
fireside that warmed and cheered me, in the down-sinkings and
shiverings of my spirit, so effectually as did the light out of those
eyes, which lay so deep and dark under his shaggy brows.

Happy the man that has such a friend beside him when he comes to die!
and unless a friend like Hollingsworth be at hand,--as most probably
there will not,--he had better make up his mind to die alone.  How many
men, I wonder, does one meet with in a lifetime, whom he would choose
for his deathbed companions!  At the crisis of my fever I besought
Hollingsworth to let nobody else enter the room, but continually to
make me sensible of his own presence by a grasp of the hand, a word, a
prayer, if he thought good to utter it; and that then he should be the
witness how courageously I would encounter the worst. It still
impresses me as almost a matter of regret that I did not die then, when
I had tolerably made up my mind to it; for Hollingsworth would have
gone with me to the hither verge of life, and have sent his friendly
and hopeful accents far over on the other side, while I should be
treading the unknown path.  Now, were I to send for him, he would
hardly come to my bedside, nor should I depart the easier for his
presence.

"You are not going to die, this time," said he, gravely smiling. "You
know nothing about sickness, and think your case a great deal more
desperate than it is."

"Death should take me while I am in the mood," replied I, with a little
of my customary levity.

"Have you nothing to do in life," asked Hollingsworth, "that you fancy
yourself so ready to leave it?"

"Nothing," answered I; "nothing that I know of, unless to make pretty
verses, and play a part, with Zenobia and the rest of the amateurs, in
our pastoral.  It seems but an unsubstantial sort of business, as
viewed through a mist of fever.  But, dear Hollingsworth, your own
vocation is evidently to be a priest, and to spend your days and nights
in helping your fellow creatures to draw peaceful dying breaths."

"And by which of my qualities," inquired he, "can you suppose me fitted
for this awful ministry?"

"By your tenderness," I said.  "It seems to me the reflection of God's
own love."

"And you call me tender!" repeated Hollingsworth thoughtfully.  "I
should rather say that the most marked trait in my character is an
inflexible severity of purpose.  Mortal man has no right to be so
inflexible as it is my nature and necessity to be."

"I do not believe it," I replied.

But, in due time, I remembered what he said.

Probably, as Hollingsworth suggested, my disorder was never so serious
as, in my ignorance of such matters, I was inclined to consider it.
After so much tragical preparation, it was positively rather mortifying
to find myself on the mending hand.

All the other members of the Community showed me kindness, according to
the full measure of their capacity.  Zenobia brought me my gruel every
day, made by her own hands (not very skilfully, if the truth must be
told), and, whenever I seemed inclined to converse, would sit by my
bedside, and talk with so much vivacity as to add several gratuitous
throbs to my pulse.  Her poor little stories and tracts never half did
justice to her intellect.  It was only the lack of a fitter avenue that
drove her to seek development in literature.  She was made (among a
thousand other things that she might have been) for a stump oratress.
I recognized no severe culture in Zenobia; her mind was full of weeds.
It startled me sometimes, in my state of moral as well as bodily
faint-heartedness, to observe the hardihood of her philosophy.  She
made no scruple of oversetting all human institutions, and scattering
them as with a breeze from her fan.  A female reformer, in her attacks
upon society, has an instinctive sense of where the life lies, and is
inclined to aim directly at that spot.  Especially the relation between
the sexes is naturally among the earliest to attract her notice.

Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman.  The homely simplicity of her
dress could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of her
presence.  The image of her form and face should have been multiplied
all over the earth.  It was wronging the rest of mankind to retain her
as the spectacle of only a few.  The stage would have been her proper
sphere.  She should have made it a point of duty, moreover, to sit
endlessly to painters and sculptors, and preferably to the latter;
because the cold decorum of the marble would consist with the utmost
scantiness of drapery, so that the eye might chastely be gladdened with
her material perfection in its entireness.  I know not well how to
express that the native glow of coloring in her cheeks, and even the
flesh-warmth over her round arms, and what was visible of her full
bust,--in a word, her womanliness incarnated,--compelled me sometimes
to close my eyes, as if it were not quite the privilege of modesty to
gaze at her.  Illness and exhaustion, no doubt, had made me morbidly
sensitive.

I noticed--and wondered how Zenobia contrived it--that she had always a
new flower in her hair.  And still it was a hot-house flower,--an
outlandish flower,--a flower of the tropics, such as appeared to have
sprung passionately out of a soil the very weeds of which would be
fervid and spicy.  Unlike as was the flower of each successive day to
the preceding one, it yet so assimilated its richness to the rich
beauty of the woman, that I thought it the only flower fit to be worn;
so fit, indeed, that Nature had evidently created this floral gem, in a
happy exuberance, for the one purpose of worthily adorning Zenobia's
head.  It might be that my feverish fantasies clustered themselves
about this peculiarity, and caused it to look more gorgeous and
wonderful than if beheld with temperate eyes.  In the height of my
illness, as I well recollect, I went so far as to pronounce it
preternatural.

"Zenobia is an enchantress!" whispered I once to Hollingsworth.  "She
is a sister of the Veiled Lady.  That flower in her hair is a talisman.
If you were to snatch it away, she would vanish, or be transformed into
something else."

"What does he say?" asked Zenobia.

"Nothing that has an atom of sense in it," answered Hollingsworth. "He
is a little beside himself, I believe, and talks about your being a
witch, and of some magical property in the flower that you wear in your
hair."

"It is an idea worthy of a feverish poet," said she, laughing rather
compassionately, and taking out the flower.  "I scorn to owe anything
to magic.  Here, Mr. Hollingsworth, you may keep the spell while it has
any virtue in it; but I cannot promise you not to appear with a new one
to-morrow.  It is the one relic of my more brilliant, my happier days!"

The most curious part of the matter was that, long after my slight
delirium had passed away,--as long, indeed, as I continued to know this
remarkable woman,--her daily flower affected my imagination, though
more slightly, yet in very much the same way.  The reason must have
been that, whether intentionally on her part or not, this favorite
ornament was actually a subtile expression of Zenobia's character.

One subject, about which--very impertinently, moreover--I perplexed
myself with a great many conjectures, was, whether Zenobia had ever
been married.  The idea, it must be understood, was unauthorized by any
circumstance or suggestion that had made its way to my ears.  So young
as I beheld her, and the freshest and rosiest woman of a thousand,
there was certainly no need of imputing to her a destiny already
accomplished; the probability was far greater that her coming years had
all life's richest gifts to bring.  If the great event of a woman's
existence had been consummated, the world knew nothing of it, although
the world seemed to know Zenobia well.  It was a ridiculous piece of
romance, undoubtedly, to imagine that this beautiful personage, wealthy
as she was, and holding a position that might fairly enough be called
distinguished, could have given herself away so privately, but that
some whisper and suspicion, and by degrees a full understanding of the
fact, would eventually be blown abroad. But then, as I failed not to
consider, her original home was at a distance of many hundred miles.
Rumors might fill the social atmosphere, or might once have filled it,
there, which would travel but slowly, against the wind, towards our
Northeastern metropolis, and perhaps melt into thin air before reaching
it.

There was not--and I distinctly repeat it--the slightest foundation in
my knowledge for any surmise of the kind.  But there is a species of
intuition,--either a spiritual lie or the subtile recognition of a
fact,--which comes to us in a reduced state of the corporeal system.
The soul gets the better of the body, after wasting illness, or when a
vegetable diet may have mingled too much ether in the blood. Vapors
then rise up to the brain, and take shapes that often image falsehood,
but sometimes truth.  The spheres of our companions have, at such
periods, a vastly greater influence upon our own than when robust
health gives us a repellent and self-defensive energy. Zenobia's
sphere, I imagine, impressed itself powerfully on mine, and transformed
me, during this period of my weakness, into something like a mesmerical
clairvoyant.

Then, also, as anybody could observe, the freedom of her deportment
(though, to some tastes, it might commend itself as the utmost
perfection of manner in a youthful widow or a blooming matron) was not
exactly maiden-like.  What girl had ever laughed as Zenobia did? What
girl had ever spoken in her mellow tones?  Her unconstrained and
inevitable manifestation, I said often to myself, was that of a woman
to whom wedlock had thrown wide the gates of mystery.  Yet sometimes I
strove to be ashamed of these conjectures.  I acknowledged it as a
masculine grossness--a sin of wicked interpretation, of which man is
often guilty towards the other sex--thus to mistake the sweet, liberal,
but womanly frankness of a noble and generous disposition. Still, it
was of no avail to reason with myself nor to upbraid myself.
Pertinaciously the thought, "Zenobia is a wife; Zenobia has lived and
loved!  There is no folded petal, no latent dewdrop, in this perfectly
developed rose!"--irresistibly that thought drove out all other
conclusions, as often as my mind reverted to the subject.

Zenobia was conscious of my observation, though not, I presume, of the
point to which it led me.

"Mr. Coverdale," said she one day, as she saw me watching her, while
she arranged my gruel on the table, "I have been exposed to a great
deal of eye-shot in the few years of my mixing in the world, but never,
I think, to precisely such glances as you are in the habit of favoring
me with.  I seem to interest you very much; and yet--or else a woman's
instinct is for once deceived--I cannot reckon you as an admirer.  What
are you seeking to discover in me?"

"The mystery of your life," answered I, surprised into the truth by the
unexpectedness of her attack.  "And you will never tell me."

She bent her head towards me, and let me look into her eyes, as if
challenging me to drop a plummet-line down into the depths of her
consciousness.

"I see nothing now," said I, closing my own eyes, "unless it be the
face of a sprite laughing at me from the bottom of a deep well."

A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects
that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away.  Otherwise,
the matter could have been no concern of mine.  It was purely
speculative, for I should not, under any circumstances, have fallen in
love with Zenobia.  The riddle made me so nervous, however, in my
sensitive condition of mind and body, that I most ungratefully began to
wish that she would let me alone.  Then, too, her gruel was very
wretched stuff, with almost invariably the smell of pine smoke upon it,
like the evil taste that is said to mix itself up with a witch's best
concocted dainties.  Why could not she have allowed one of the other
women to take the gruel in charge?  Whatever else might be her gifts,
Nature certainly never intended Zenobia for a cook.  Or, if so, she
should have meddled only with the richest and spiciest dishes, and such
as are to be tasted at banquets, between draughts of intoxicating wine.



VII. THE CONVALESCENT

As soon as my incommodities allowed me to think of past occurrences, I
failed not to inquire what had become of the odd little guest whom
Hollingsworth had been the medium of introducing among us.  It now
appeared that poor Priscilla had not so literally fallen out of the
clouds, as we were at first inclined to suppose.  A letter, which
should have introduced her, had since been received from one of the
city missionaries, containing a certificate of character and an
allusion to circumstances which, in the writer's judgment, made it
especially desirable that she should find shelter in our Community.
There was a hint, not very intelligible, implying either that Priscilla
had recently escaped from some particular peril or irksomeness of
position, or else that she was still liable to this danger or
difficulty, whatever it might be.  We should ill have deserved the
reputation of a benevolent fraternity, had we hesitated to entertain a
petitioner in such need, and so strongly recommended to our kindness;
not to mention, moreover, that the strange maiden had set herself
diligently to work, and was doing good service with her needle.  But a
slight mist of uncertainty still floated about Priscilla, and kept her,
as yet, from taking a very decided place among creatures of flesh and
blood.

The mysterious attraction, which, from her first entrance on our scene,
she evinced for Zenobia, had lost nothing of its force.  I often heard
her footsteps, soft and low, accompanying the light but decided tread
of the latter up the staircase, stealing along the passage-way by her
new friend's side, and pausing while Zenobia entered my chamber.
Occasionally Zenobia would be a little annoyed by Priscilla's too close
attendance.  In an authoritative and not very kindly tone, she would
advise her to breathe the pleasant air in a walk, or to go with her
work into the barn, holding out half a promise to come and sit on the
hay with her, when at leisure. Evidently, Priscilla found but scanty
requital for her love. Hollingsworth was likewise a great favorite with
her.  For several minutes together sometimes, while my auditory nerves
retained the susceptibility of delicate health, I used to hear a low,
pleasant murmur ascending from the room below; and at last ascertained
it to be Priscilla's voice, babbling like a little brook to
Hollingsworth. She talked more largely and freely with him than with
Zenobia, towards whom, indeed, her feelings seemed not so much to be
confidence as involuntary affection.  I should have thought all the
better of my own qualities had Priscilla marked me out for the third
place in her regards.  But, though she appeared to like me tolerably
well, I could never flatter myself with being distinguished by her as
Hollingsworth and Zenobia were.

One forenoon, during my convalescence, there came a gentle tap at my
chamber door.  I immediately said, "Come in, Priscilla!" with an acute
sense of the applicant's identity.  Nor was I deceived.  It was really
Priscilla,--a pale, large-eyed little woman (for she had gone far
enough into her teens to be, at least, on the outer limit of girlhood),
but much less wan than at my previous view of her, and far better
conditioned both as to health and spirits.  As I first saw her, she had
reminded me of plants that one sometimes observes doing their best to
vegetate among the bricks of an enclosed court, where there is scanty
soil and never any sunshine.  At present, though with no approach to
bloom, there were indications that the girl had human blood in her
veins.

Priscilla came softly to my bedside, and held out an article of
snow-white linen, very carefully and smoothly ironed.  She did not seem
bashful, nor anywise embarrassed.  My weakly condition, I suppose,
supplied a medium in which she could approach me.

"Do not you need this?" asked she.  "I have made it for you."  It was a
nightcap!

"My dear Priscilla," said I, smiling, "I never had on a nightcap in my
life!  But perhaps it will be better for me to wear one, now that I am
a miserable invalid.  How admirably you have done it!  No, no; I never
can think of wearing such an exquisitely wrought nightcap as this,
unless it be in the daytime, when I sit up to receive company."

"It is for use, not beauty," answered Priscilla.  "I could have
embroidered it and made it much prettier, if I pleased."

While holding up the nightcap and admiring the fine needlework, I
perceived that Priscilla had a sealed letter which she was waiting for
me to take.  It had arrived from the village post-office that morning.
As I did not immediately offer to receive the letter, she drew it back,
and held it against her bosom, with both hands clasped over it, in a
way that had probably grown habitual to her.  Now, on turning my eyes
from the nightcap to Priscilla, it forcibly struck me that her air,
though not her figure, and the expression of her face, but not its
features, had a resemblance to what I had often seen in a friend of
mine, one of the most gifted women of the age.  I cannot describe it.
The points easiest to convey to the reader were a certain curve of the
shoulders and a partial closing of the eyes, which seemed to look more
penetratingly into my own eyes, through the narrowed apertures, than if
they had been open at full width.  It was a singular anomaly of
likeness coexisting with perfect dissimilitude.

"Will you give me the letter, Priscilla?" said I.

She started, put the letter into my hand, and quite lost the look that
had drawn my notice.

"Priscilla," I inquired, "did you ever see Miss Margaret Fuller?"

"No," she answered.

"Because," said I, "you reminded me of her just now,--and it happens,
strangely enough, that this very letter is from her."

Priscilla, for whatever reason, looked very much discomposed.

"I wish people would not fancy such odd things in me!" she said rather
petulantly.  "How could I possibly make myself resemble this lady
merely by holding her letter in my hand?"

"Certainly, Priscilla, it would puzzle me to explain it," I replied;
"nor do I suppose that the letter had anything to do with it.  It was
just a coincidence, nothing more."

She hastened out of the room, and this was the last that I saw of
Priscilla until I ceased to be an invalid.

Being much alone during my recovery, I read interminably in Mr.
Emerson's Essays, "The Dial," Carlyle's works, George Sand's romances
(lent me by Zenobia), and other books which one or another of the
brethren or sisterhood had brought with them.  Agreeing in little else,
most of these utterances were like the cry of some solitary sentinel,
whose station was on the outposts of the advance guard of human
progression; or sometimes the voice came sadly from among the shattered
ruins of the past, but yet had a hopeful echo in the future. They were
well adapted (better, at least, than any other intellectual products,
the volatile essence of which had heretofore tinctured a printed page)
to pilgrims like ourselves, whose present bivouac was considerably
further into the waste of chaos than any mortal army of crusaders had
ever marched before.  Fourier's works, also, in a series of horribly
tedious volumes, attracted a good deal of my attention, from the
analogy which I could not but recognize between his system and our own.
There was far less resemblance, it is true, than the world chose to
imagine, inasmuch as the two theories differed, as widely as the zenith
from the nadir, in their main principles.

I talked about Fourier to Hollingsworth, and translated, for his
benefit, some of the passages that chiefly impressed me.

"When, as a consequence of human improvement," said I, "the globe shall
arrive at its final perfection, the great ocean is to be converted into
a particular kind of lemonade, such as was fashionable at Paris in
Fourier's time.  He calls it limonade a cedre.  It is positively a
fact!  Just imagine the city docks filled, every day, with a flood tide
of this delectable beverage!"

"Why did not the Frenchman make punch of it at once?" asked
Hollingsworth.  "The jack-tars would be delighted to go down in ships
and do business in such an element."

I further proceeded to explain, as well as I modestly could, several
points of Fourier's system, illustrating them with here and there a
page or two, and asking Hollingsworth's opinion as to the expediency of
introducing these beautiful peculiarities into our own practice.

"Let me hear no more of it!" cried he, in utter disgust.  "I never will
forgive this fellow!  He has committed the unpardonable sin; for what
more monstrous iniquity could the Devil himself contrive than to choose
the selfish principle,--the principle of all human wrong, the very
blackness of man's heart, the portion of ourselves which we shudder at,
and which it is the whole aim of spiritual discipline to eradicate,--to
choose it as the master workman of his system?  To seize upon and
foster whatever vile, petty, sordid, filthy, bestial, and abominable
corruptions have cankered into our nature, to be the efficient
instruments of his infernal regeneration!  And his consummated
Paradise, as he pictures it, would be worthy of the agency which he
counts upon for establishing it.  The nauseous villain!"

"Nevertheless," remarked I, "in consideration of the promised delights
of his system,--so very proper, as they certainly are, to be
appreciated by Fourier's countrymen,--I cannot but wonder that
universal France did not adopt his theory at a moment's warning.  But
is there not something very characteristic of his nation in Fourier's
manner of putting forth his views?  He makes no claim to inspiration.
He has not persuaded himself--as Swedenborg did, and as any other than
a Frenchman would, with a mission of like importance to
communicate--that he speaks with authority from above.  He promulgates
his system, so far as I can perceive, entirely on his own
responsibility.  He has searched out and discovered the whole counsel
of the Almighty in respect to mankind, past, present, and for exactly
seventy thousand years to come, by the mere force and cunning of his
individual intellect!"

"Take the book out of my sight," said Hollingsworth with great
virulence of expression, "or, I tell you fairly, I shall fling it in
the fire!  And as for Fourier, let him make a Paradise, if he can, of
Gehenna, where, as I conscientiously believe, he is floundering at this
moment!"

"And bellowing, I suppose," said I,--not that I felt any ill-will
towards Fourier, but merely wanted to give the finishing touch to
Hollingsworth's image, "bellowing for the least drop of his beloved
limonade a cedre!"

There is but little profit to be expected in attempting to argue with a
man who allows himself to declaim in this manner; so I dropt the
subject, and never took it up again.

But had the system at which he was so enraged combined almost any
amount of human wisdom, spiritual insight, and imaginative beauty, I
question whether Hollingsworth's mind was in a fit condition to receive
it.  I began to discern that he had come among us actuated by no real
sympathy with our feelings and our hopes, but chiefly because we were
estranging ourselves from the world, with which his lonely and
exclusive object in life had already put him at odds. Hollingsworth
must have been originally endowed with a great spirit of benevolence,
deep enough and warm enough to be the source of as much disinterested
good as Providence often allows a human being the privilege of
conferring upon his fellows.  This native instinct yet lived within
him.  I myself had profited by it, in my necessity.  It was seen, too,
in his treatment of Priscilla.  Such casual circumstances as were here
involved would quicken his divine power of sympathy, and make him seem,
while their influence lasted, the tenderest man and the truest friend
on earth.  But by and by you missed the tenderness of yesterday, and
grew drearily conscious that Hollingsworth had a closer friend than
ever you could be; and this friend was the cold, spectral monster which
he had himself conjured up, and on which he was wasting all the warmth
of his heart, and of which, at last,--as these men of a mighty purpose
so invariably do,--he had grown to be the bond-slave.  It was his
philanthropic theory.

This was a result exceedingly sad to contemplate, considering that it
had been mainly brought about by the very ardor and exuberance of his
philanthropy.  Sad, indeed, but by no means unusual: he had taught his
benevolence to pour its warm tide exclusively through one channel; so
that there was nothing to spare for other great manifestations of love
to man, nor scarcely for the nutriment of individual attachments,
unless they could minister in some way to the terrible egotism which he
mistook for an angel of God.  Had Hollingsworth's education been more
enlarged, he might not so inevitably have stumbled into this pitfall.
But this identical pursuit had educated him.  He knew absolutely
nothing, except in a single direction, where he had thought so
energetically, and felt to such a depth, that no doubt the entire
reason and justice of the universe appeared to be concentrated
thitherward.

It is my private opinion that, at this period of his life,
Hollingsworth was fast going mad; and, as with other crazy people
(among whom I include humorists of every degree), it required all the
constancy of friendship to restrain his associates from pronouncing him
an intolerable bore.  Such prolonged fiddling upon one string--such
multiform presentation of one idea!  His specific object (of which he
made the public more than sufficiently aware, through the medium of
lectures and pamphlets) was to obtain funds for the construction of an
edifice, with a sort of collegiate endowment.  On this foundation he
purposed to devote himself and a few disciples to the reform and mental
culture of our criminal brethren.  His visionary edifice was
Hollingsworth's one castle in the air; it was the material type in
which his philanthropic dream strove to embody itself; and he made the
scheme more definite, and caught hold of it the more strongly, and kept
his clutch the more pertinaciously, by rendering it visible to the
bodily eye.  I have seen him, a hundred times, with a pencil and sheet
of paper, sketching the facade, the side-view, or the rear of the
structure, or planning the internal arrangements, as lovingly as
another man might plan those of the projected home where he meant to be
happy with his wife and children. I have known him to begin a model of
the building with little stones, gathered at the brookside, whither we
had gone to cool ourselves in the sultry noon of haying-time.  Unlike
all other ghosts, his spirit haunted an edifice, which, instead of
being time-worn, and full of storied love, and joy, and sorrow, had
never yet come into existence.

"Dear friend," said I once to Hollingsworth, before leaving my
sick-chamber, "I heartily wish that I could make your schemes my
schemes, because it would be so great a happiness to find myself
treading the same path with you.  But I am afraid there is not stuff in
me stern enough for a philanthropist,--or not in this peculiar
direction,--or, at all events, not solely in this.  Can you bear with
me, if such should prove to be the case?"

"I will at least wait awhile," answered Hollingsworth, gazing at me
sternly and gloomily.  "But how can you be my life-long friend, except
you strive with me towards the great object of my life?"

Heaven forgive me!  A horrible suspicion crept into my heart, and stung
the very core of it as with the fangs of an adder.  I wondered whether
it were possible that Hollingsworth could have watched by my bedside,
with all that devoted care, only for the ulterior purpose of making me
a proselyte to his views!



VIII. A MODERN ARCADIA

May-day--I forget whether by Zenobia's sole decree, or by the unanimous
vote of our community--had been declared a movable festival. It was
deferred until the sun should have had a reasonable time to clear away
the snowdrifts along the lee of the stone walls, and bring out a few of
the readiest wild flowers.  On the forenoon of the substituted day,
after admitting some of the balmy air into my chamber, I decided that
it was nonsense and effeminacy to keep myself a prisoner any longer.
So I descended to the sitting-room, and finding nobody there, proceeded
to the barn, whence I had already heard Zenobia's voice, and along with
it a girlish laugh which was not so certainly recognizable.  Arriving
at the spot, it a little surprised me to discover that these merry
outbreaks came from Priscilla.

The two had been a-maying together.  They had found anemones in
abundance, houstonias by the handful, some columbines, a few
long-stalked violets, and a quantity of white everlasting flowers, and
had filled up their basket with the delicate spray of shrubs and trees.
None were prettier than the maple twigs, the leaf of which looks like a
scarlet bud in May, and like a plate of vegetable gold in October.
Zenobia, who showed no conscience in such matters, had also rifled a
cherry-tree of one of its blossomed boughs, and, with all this variety
of sylvan ornament, had been decking out Priscilla. Being done with a
good deal of taste, it made her look more charming than I should have
thought possible, with my recollection of the wan, frost-nipt girl, as
heretofore described.  Nevertheless, among those fragrant blossoms, and
conspicuously, too, had been stuck a weed of evil odor and ugly aspect,
which, as soon as I detected it, destroyed the effect of all the rest.
There was a gleam of latent mischief--not to call it deviltry--in
Zenobia's eye, which seemed to indicate a slightly malicious purpose in
the arrangement.

As for herself, she scorned the rural buds and leaflets, and wore
nothing but her invariable flower of the tropics.

"What do you think of Priscilla now, Mr. Coverdale?" asked she,
surveying her as a child does its doll.  "Is not she worth a verse or
two?"

"There is only one thing amiss," answered I. Zenobia laughed, and flung
the malignant weed away.

"Yes; she deserves some verses now," said I, "and from a better poet
than myself.  She is the very picture of the New England spring;
subdued in tint and rather cool, but with a capacity of sunshine, and
bringing us a few Alpine blossoms, as earnest of something richer,
though hardly more beautiful, hereafter.  The best type of her is one
of those anemones."

"What I find most singular in Priscilla, as her health improves,"
observed Zenobia, "is her wildness.  Such a quiet little body as she
seemed, one would not have expected that.  Why, as we strolled the
woods together, I could hardly keep her from scrambling up the trees,
like a squirrel.  She has never before known what it is to live in the
free air, and so it intoxicates her as if she were sipping wine. And
she thinks it such a paradise here, and all of us, particularly Mr.
Hollingsworth and myself, such angels!  It is quite ridiculous, and
provokes one's malice almost, to see a creature so happy, especially a
feminine creature."

"They are always happier than male creatures," said I.

"You must correct that opinion, Mr. Coverdale," replied Zenobia
contemptuously, "or I shall think you lack the poetic insight.  Did you
ever see a happy woman in your life?  Of course, I do not mean a girl,
like Priscilla and a thousand others,--for they are all alike, while on
the sunny side of experience,--but a grown woman.  How can she be
happy, after discovering that fate has assigned her but one single
event, which she must contrive to make the substance of her whole life?
A man has his choice of innumerable events."

"A woman, I suppose," answered I, "by constant repetition of her one
event, may compensate for the lack of variety."

"Indeed!" said Zenobia.

While we were talking, Priscilla caught sight of Hollingsworth at a
distance, in a blue frock, and with a hoe over his shoulder, returning
from the field.  She immediately set out to meet him, running and
skipping, with spirits as light as the breeze of the May morning, but
with limbs too little exercised to be quite responsive; she clapped her
hands, too, with great exuberance of gesture, as is the custom of young
girls when their electricity overcharges them. But, all at once, midway
to Hollingsworth, she paused, looked round about her, towards the
river, the road, the woods, and back towards us, appearing to listen,
as if she heard some one calling her name, and knew not precisely in
what direction.

"Have you bewitched her?"  I exclaimed.

"It is no sorcery of mine," said Zenobia; "but I have seen the girl do
that identical thing once or twice before.  Can you imagine what is the
matter with her?"

"No; unless," said I, "she has the gift of hearing those 'airy tongues
that syllable men's names,' which Milton tells about."

From whatever cause, Priscilla's animation seemed entirely to have
deserted her.  She seated herself on a rock, and remained there until
Hollingsworth came up; and when he took her hand and led her back to
us, she rather resembled my original image of the wan and spiritless
Priscilla than the flowery May-queen of a few moments ago.  These
sudden transformations, only to be accounted for by an extreme nervous
susceptibility, always continued to characterize the girl, though with
diminished frequency as her health progressively grew more robust.

I was now on my legs again.  My fit of illness had been an avenue
between two existences; the low-arched and darksome doorway, through
which I crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, on my hands and
knees, as it were, and gained admittance into the freer region that lay
beyond.  In this respect, it was like death.  And, as with death, too,
it was good to have gone through it.  No otherwise could I have rid
myself of a thousand follies, fripperies, prejudices, habits, and other
such worldly dust as inevitably settles upon the crowd along the broad
highway, giving them all one sordid aspect before noon-time, however
freshly they may have begun their pilgrimage in the dewy morning.  The
very substance upon my bones had not been fit to live with in any
better, truer, or more energetic mode than that to which I was
accustomed.  So it was taken off me and flung aside, like any other
worn-out or unseasonable garment; and, after shivering a little while
in my skeleton, I began to be clothed anew, and much more
satisfactorily than in my previous suit.  In literal and physical
truth, I was quite another man.  I had a lively sense of the exultation
with which the spirit will enter on the next stage of its eternal
progress after leaving the heavy burden of its mortality in an early
grave, with as little concern for what may become of it as now affected
me for the flesh which I had lost.

Emerging into the genial sunshine, I half fancied that the labors of
the brotherhood had already realized some of Fourier's predictions.
Their enlightened culture of the soil, and the virtues with which they
sanctified their life, had begun to produce an effect upon the material
world and its climate.  In my new enthusiasm, man looked strong and
stately,--and woman, oh, how beautiful!--and the earth a green garden,
blossoming with many-colored delights.  Thus Nature, whose laws I had
broken in various artificial ways, comported herself towards me as a
strict but loving mother, who uses the rod upon her little boy for his
naughtiness, and then gives him a smile, a kiss, and some pretty
playthings to console the urchin for her severity.

In the interval of my seclusion, there had been a number of recruits to
our little army of saints and martyrs.  They were mostly individuals
who had gone through such an experience as to disgust them with
ordinary pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so
deeply, as to lose their faith in the better time to come. On comparing
their minds one with another they often discovered that this idea of a
Community had been growing up, in silent and unknown sympathy, for
years.  Thoughtful, strongly lined faces were among them; sombre brows,
but eyes that did not require spectacles, unless prematurely dimmed by
the student's lamplight, and hair that seldom showed a thread of
silver.  Age, wedded to the past, incrusted over with a stony layer of
habits, and retaining nothing fluid in its possibilities, would have
been absurdly out of place in an enterprise like this.  Youth, too, in
its early dawn, was hardly more adapted to our purpose; for it would
behold the morning radiance of its own spirit beaming over the very
same spots of withered grass and barren sand whence most of us had seen
it vanish.  We had very young people with us, it is true,--downy lads,
rosy girls in their first teens, and children of all heights above
one's knee; but these had chiefly been sent hither for education, which
it was one of the objects and methods of our institution to supply.
Then we had boarders, from town and elsewhere, who lived with us in a
familiar way, sympathized more or less in our theories, and sometimes
shared in our labors.

On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor,
perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long. Persons
of marked individuality--crooked sticks, as some of us might be
called--are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot.  But, so
long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling, with
a free nature in him, might have sought far and near without finding so
many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward. We were of
all creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on every
imaginable subject.  Our bond, it seems to me, was not affirmative, but
negative.  We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel
with in our past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the
inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any further.  As to
what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity.  We did not
greatly care--at least, I never did--for the written constitution under
which our millennium had commenced.  My hope was, that, between theory
and practice, a true and available mode of life might be struck out;
and that, even should we ultimately fail, the months or years spent in
the trial would not have been wasted, either as regarded passing
enjoyment, or the experience which makes men wise.

Arcadians though we were, our costume bore no resemblance to the
beribboned doublets, silk breeches and stockings, and slippers fastened
with artificial roses, that distinguish the pastoral people of poetry
and the stage.  In outward show, I humbly conceive, we looked rather
like a gang of beggars, or banditti, than either a company of honest
laboring-men, or a conclave of philosophers. Whatever might be our
points of difference, we all of us seemed to have come to Blithedale
with the one thrifty and laudable idea of wearing out our old clothes.
Such garments as had an airing, whenever we strode afield!  Coats with
high collars and with no collars, broad-skirted or swallow-tailed, and
with the waist at every point between the hip and arm-pit; pantaloons
of a dozen successive epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the
humiliations of the wearer before his lady-love,--in short, we were a
living epitome of defunct fashions, and the very raggedest presentment
of men who had seen better days.  It was gentility in tatters.  Often
retaining a scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for
the denizens of Grub Street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood
by agricultural labor; or Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full
experiment; or Candide and his motley associates at work in their
cabbage garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and
most clumsily patched in the rear.  We might have been sworn comrades
to Falstaff's ragged regiment.  Little skill as we boasted in other
points of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have served
admirably to stick up for a scarecrow.  And the worst of the matter
was, that the first energetic movement essential to one downright
stroke of real labor was sure to put a finish to these poor
habiliments.  So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to honest
homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to the plan
recommended, I think, by Virgil,--"Ara nudus; sere nudus, "--which as
Silas Foster remarked, when I translated the maxim, would be apt to
astonish the women-folks.

After a reasonable training, the yeoman life throve well with us. Our
faces took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and our
shoulders in breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked as if
they had never been capable of kid gloves.  The plough, the hoe, the
scythe, and the hay-fork grew familiar to our grasp.  The oxen
responded to our voices.  We could do almost as fair a day's work as
Silas Foster himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake at daybreak
with only a little stiffness of the joints, which was usually quite
gone by breakfast-time.

To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as to our
real proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand.  They told
slanderous fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or to drive
them afield when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from their
conjugal bond at nightfall.  They had the face to say, too, that the
cows laughed at our awkwardness at milking-time, and invariably kicked
over the pails; partly in consequence of our putting the stool on the
wrong side, and partly because, taking offence at the whisking of their
tails, we were in the habit of holding these natural fly-flappers with
one hand and milking with the other.  They further averred that we hoed
up whole acres of Indian corn and other crops, and drew the earth
carefully about the weeds; and that we raised five hundred tufts of
burdock, mistaking them for cabbages; and that by dint of unskilful
planting few of our seeds ever came up at all, or, if they did come up,
it was stern-foremost; and that we spent the better part of the month
of June in reversing a field of beans, which had thrust themselves out
of the ground in this unseemly way.  They quoted it as nothing more
than an ordinary occurrence for one or other of us to crop off two or
three fingers, of a morning, by our clumsy use of the hay-cutter.
Finally, and as an ultimate catastrophe, these mendacious rogues
circulated a report that we communitarians were exterminated, to the
last man, by severing ourselves asunder with the sweep of our own
scythes! and that the world had lost nothing by this little accident.

But this was pure envy and malice on the part of the neighboring
farmers.  The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail
in becoming practical agriculturists, but that we should probably cease
to be anything else.  While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had
pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of
labor.  It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship.
Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom,
heretofore hidden from the sun.  Pausing in the field, to let the wind
exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and
catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth.  In this point of view,
matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated.  It is very
true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of my
toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene
of earth and sky.  There was, at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted
aspect, on the face of Nature, as if she had been taken by surprise and
seen at unawares, with no opportunity to put off her real look, and
assume the mask with which she mysteriously hides herself from mortals.
But this was all.  The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored
and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought.  Our
thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish.  Our labor
symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the
evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of
bodily exercise.  The yeoman and the scholar--the yeoman and the man of
finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and
integrity--are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or
welded into one substance.

Zenobia soon saw this truth, and gibed me about it, one evening, as
Hollingsworth and I lay on the grass, after a hard day's work.

"I am afraid you did not make a song today, while loading the
hay-cart," said she, "as Burns did, when he was reaping barley."

"Burns never made a song in haying-time," I answered very positively.
"He was no poet while a farmer, and no farmer while a poet."

"And on the whole, which of the two characters do you like best?" asked
Zenobia.  "For I have an idea that you cannot combine them any better
than Burns did.  Ah, I see, in my mind's eye, what sort of an
individual you are to be, two or three years hence.  Grim Silas Foster
is your prototype, with his palm of sole-leather, and his joints of
rusty iron (which all through summer keep the stiffness of what he
calls his winter's rheumatize), and his brain of--I don't know what his
brain is made of, unless it be a Savoy cabbage; but yours may be
cauliflower, as a rather more delicate variety.  Your physical man will
be transmuted into salt beef and fried pork, at the rate, I should
imagine, of a pound and a half a day; that being about the average
which we find necessary in the kitchen.  You will make your toilet for
the day (still like this delightful Silas Foster) by rinsing your
fingers and the front part of your face in a little tin pan of water at
the doorstep, and teasing your hair with a wooden pocket-comb before a
seven-by-nine-inch looking-glass.  Your only pastime will be to smoke
some very vile tobacco in the black stump of a pipe."

"Pray, spare me!" cried I. "But the pipe is not Silas's only mode of
solacing himself with the weed."

"Your literature," continued Zenobia, apparently delighted with her
description, "will be the 'Farmer's Almanac;' for I observe our friend
Foster never gets so far as the newspaper.  When you happen to sit
down, at odd moments, you will fall asleep, and make nasal proclamation
of the fact, as he does; and invariably you must be jogged out of a
nap, after supper, by the future Mrs. Coverdale, and persuaded to go
regularly to bed.  And on Sundays, when you put on a blue coat with
brass buttons, you will think of nothing else to do but to go and
lounge over the stone walls and rail fences, and stare at the corn
growing.  And you will look with a knowing eye at oxen, and will have a
tendency to clamber over into pigsties, and feel of the hogs, and give
a guess how much they will weigh after you shall have stuck and dressed
them.  Already I have noticed you begin to speak through your nose, and
with a drawl.  Pray, if you really did make any poetry to-day, let us
hear it in that kind of utterance!"

"Coverdale has given up making verses now," said Hollingsworth, who
never had the slightest appreciation of my poetry.  "Just think of him
penning a sonnet with a fist like that!  There is at least this good in
a life of toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out of a man,
and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to him.  If a farmer can make
poetry at the plough-tail, it must be because his nature insists on it;
and if that be the case, let him make it, in Heaven's name!"

"And how is it with you?" asked Zenobia, in a different voice; for she
never laughed at Hollingsworth, as she often did at me.  "You, I think,
cannot have ceased to live a life of thought and feeling."

"I have always been in earnest," answered Hollingsworth.  "I have
hammered thought out of iron, after heating the iron in my heart!  It
matters little what my outward toil may be.  Were I a slave, at the
bottom of a mine, I should keep the same purpose, the same faith in its
ultimate accomplishment, that I do now.  Miles Coverdale is not in
earnest, either as a poet or a laborer."

"You give me hard measure, Hollingsworth," said I, a little hurt.  "I
have kept pace with you in the field; and my bones feel as if I had
been in earnest, whatever may be the case with my brain!"

"I cannot conceive," observed Zenobia with great emphasis,--and, no
doubt, she spoke fairly the feeling of the moment,--"I cannot conceive
of being so continually as Mr. Coverdale is within the sphere of a
strong and noble nature, without being strengthened and ennobled by its
influence!"

This amiable remark of the fair Zenobia confirmed me in what I had
already begun to suspect, that Hollingsworth, like many other
illustrious prophets, reformers, and philanthropists, was likely to
make at least two proselytes among the women to one among the men.
Zenobia and Priscilla!  These, I believe (unless my unworthy self might
be reckoned for a third), were the only disciples of his mission; and I
spent a great deal of time, uselessly, in trying to conjecture what
Hollingsworth meant to do with them--and they with him!



IX. HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA

It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote
ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If
the person under examination be one's self, the result is pretty
certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch
a second glance.  Or if we take the freedom to put a friend under our
microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations,
magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of
course patch him very clumsily together again.  What wonder, then,
should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after
all,--though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real
personage,--may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.

Thus, as my conscience has often whispered me, I did Hollingsworth a
great wrong by prying into his character; and am perhaps doing him as
great a one, at this moment, by putting faith in the discoveries which
I seemed to make.  But I could not help it.  Had I loved him less, I
might have used him better.  He and Zenobia and Priscilla--both for
their own sakes and as connected with him--were separated from the rest
of the Community, to my imagination, and stood forth as the indices of
a problem which it was my business to solve.  Other associates had a
portion of my time; other matters amused me; passing occurrences
carried me along with them, while they lasted.  But here was the vortex
of my meditations, around which they revolved, and whitherward they too
continually tended.  In the midst of cheerful society, I had often a
feeling of loneliness.  For it was impossible not to be sensible that,
while these three characters figured so largely on my private theatre,
I--though probably reckoned as a friend by all--was at best but a
secondary or tertiary personage with either of them.

I loved Hollingsworth, as has already been enough expressed.  But it
impressed me, more and more, that there was a stern and dreadful
peculiarity in this man, such as could not prove otherwise than
pernicious to the happiness of those who should be drawn into too
intimate a connection with him.  He was not altogether human.  There
was something else in Hollingsworth besides flesh and blood, and
sympathies and affections and celestial spirit.

This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an
overruling purpose.  It does not so much impel them from without, nor
even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all
that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else
save that one principle.  When such begins to be the predicament, it is
not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims.  They have no heart,
no sympathy, no reason, no conscience.  They will keep no friend,
unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and
slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more
readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the
second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly strait
path.  They have an idol to which they consecrate themselves
high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is
most precious; and never once seem to suspect--so cunning has the Devil
been with them--that this false deity, in whose iron features,
immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and
love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the
surrounding darkness.  And the higher and purer the original object,
and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the
probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which
godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.

Of course I am perfectly aware that the above statement is exaggerated,
in the attempt to make it adequate.  Professed philanthropists have
gone far; but no originally good man, I presume, ever went quite so far
as this.  Let the reader abate whatever he deems fit.  The paragraph
may remain, however, both for its truth and its exaggeration, as
strongly expressive of the tendencies which were really operative in
Hollingsworth, and as exemplifying the kind of error into which my mode
of observation was calculated to lead me. The issue was, that in
solitude I often shuddered at my friend.  In my recollection of his
dark and impressive countenance, the features grew more sternly
prominent than the reality, duskier in their depth and shadow, and more
lurid in their light; the frown, that had merely flitted across his
brow, seemed to have contorted it with an adamantine wrinkle.  On
meeting him again, I was often filled with remorse, when his deep eyes
beamed kindly upon me, as with the glow of a household fire that was
burning in a cave.  "He is a man after all," thought I; "his Maker's
own truest image, a philanthropic man!--not that steel engine of the
Devil's contrivance, a philanthropist!" But in my wood-walks, and in my
silent chamber, the dark face frowned at me again.

When a young girl comes within the sphere of such a man, she is as
perilously situated as the maiden whom, in the old classical myths, the
people used to expose to a dragon.  If I had any duty whatever, in
reference to Hollingsworth, it was to endeavor to save Priscilla from
that kind of personal worship which her sex is generally prone to
lavish upon saints and heroes.  It often requires but one smile out of
the hero's eyes into the girl's or woman's heart, to transform this
devotion, from a sentiment of the highest approval and confidence, into
passionate love.  Now, Hollingsworth smiled much upon Priscilla,--more
than upon any other person.  If she thought him beautiful, it was no
wonder.  I often thought him so, with the expression of tender human
care and gentlest sympathy which she alone seemed to have power to call
out upon his features.  Zenobia, I suspect, would have given her eyes,
bright as they were, for such a look; it was the least that our poor
Priscilla could do, to give her heart for a great many of them.  There
was the more danger of this, inasmuch as the footing on which we all
associated at Blithedale was widely different from that of conventional
society.  While inclining us to the soft affections of the golden age,
it seemed to authorize any individual, of either sex, to fall in love
with any other, regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable
and prudent. Accordingly the tender passion was very rife among us, in
various degrees of mildness or virulence, but mostly passing away with
the state of things that had given it origin.  This was all well
enough; but, for a girl like Priscilla and a woman like Zenobia to
jostle one another in their love of a man like Hollingsworth, was
likely to be no child's play.

Had I been as cold-hearted as I sometimes thought myself, nothing would
have interested me more than to witness the play of passions that must
thus have been evolved.  But, in honest truth, I would really have gone
far to save Priscilla, at least, from the catastrophe in which such a
drama would be apt to terminate.

Priscilla had now grown to be a very pretty girl, and still kept
budding and blossoming, and daily putting on some new charm, which you
no sooner became sensible of than you thought it worth all that she had
previously possessed.  So unformed, vague, and without substance, as
she had come to us, it seemed as if we could see Nature shaping out a
woman before our very eyes, and yet had only a more reverential sense
of the mystery of a woman's soul and frame. Yesterday, her cheek was
pale, to-day, it had a bloom.  Priscilla's smile, like a baby's first
one, was a wondrous novelty.  Her imperfections and shortcomings
affected me with a kind of playful pathos, which was as absolutely
bewitching a sensation as ever I experienced.  After she had been a
month or two at Blithedale, her animal spirits waxed high, and kept her
pretty constantly in a state of bubble and ferment, impelling her to
far more bodily activity than she had yet strength to endure.  She was
very fond of playing with the other girls out of doors.  There is
hardly another sight in the world so pretty as that of a company of
young girls, almost women grown, at play, and so giving themselves up
to their airy impulse that their tiptoes barely touch the ground.

Girls are incomparably wilder and more effervescent than boys, more
untamable and regardless of rule and limit, with an ever-shifting
variety, breaking continually into new modes of fun, yet with a
harmonious propriety through all.  Their steps, their voices, appear
free as the wind, but keep consonance with a strain of music inaudible
to us.  Young men and boys, on the other hand, play, according to
recognized law, old, traditionary games, permitting no caprioles of
fancy, but with scope enough for the outbreak of savage instincts.
For, young or old, in play or in earnest, man is prone to be a brute.

Especially is it delightful to see a vigorous young girl run a race,
with her head thrown back, her limbs moving more friskily than they
need, and an air between that of a bird and a young colt.  But
Priscilla's peculiar charm, in a foot-race, was the weakness and
irregularity with which she ran.  Growing up without exercise, except
to her poor little fingers, she had never yet acquired the perfect use
of her legs.  Setting buoyantly forth, therefore, as if no rival less
swift than Atalanta could compete with her, she ran falteringly, and
often tumbled on the grass.  Such an incident--though it seems too
slight to think of--was a thing to laugh at, but which brought the
water into one's eyes, and lingered in the memory after far greater
joys and sorrows were wept out of it, as antiquated trash. Priscilla's
life, as I beheld it, was full of trifles that affected me in just this
way.

When she had come to be quite at home among us, I used to fancy that
Priscilla played more pranks, and perpetrated more mischief, than any
other girl in the Community.  For example, I once heard Silas Foster,
in a very gruff voice, threatening to rivet three horseshoes round
Priscilla's neck and chain her to a post, because she, with some other
young people, had clambered upon a load of hay, and caused it to slide
off the cart.  How she made her peace I never knew; but very soon
afterwards I saw old Silas, with his brawny hands round Priscilla's
waist, swinging her to and fro, and finally depositing her on one of
the oxen, to take her first lessons in riding.  She met with terrible
mishaps in her efforts to milk a cow; she let the poultry into the
garden; she generally spoilt whatever part of the dinner she took in
charge; she broke crockery; she dropt our biggest water pitcher into
the well; and--except with her needle, and those little wooden
instruments for purse-making--was as unserviceable a member of society
as any young lady in the land.  There was no other sort of efficiency
about her.  Yet everybody was kind to Priscilla; everybody loved her
and laughed at her to her face, and did not laugh behind her back;
everybody would have given her half of his last crust, or the bigger
share of his plum-cake.  These were pretty certain indications that we
were all conscious of a pleasant weakness in the girl, and considered
her not quite able to look after her own interests or fight her battle
with the world.  And Hollingsworth--perhaps because he had been the
means of introducing Priscilla to her new abode--appeared to recognize
her as his own especial charge.

Her simple, careless, childish flow of spirits often made me sad. She
seemed to me like a butterfly at play in a flickering bit of sunshine,
and mistaking it for a broad and eternal summer.  We sometimes hold
mirth to a stricter accountability than sorrow; it must show good
cause, or the echo of its laughter comes back drearily. Priscilla's
gayety, moreover, was of a nature that showed me how delicate an
instrument she was, and what fragile harp-strings were her nerves.  As
they made sweet music at the airiest touch, it would require but a
stronger one to burst them all asunder.  Absurd as it might be, I tried
to reason with her, and persuade her not to be so joyous, thinking
that, if she would draw less lavishly upon her fund of happiness, it
would last the longer.  I remember doing so, one summer evening, when
we tired laborers sat looking on, like Goldsmith's old folks under the
village thorn-tree, while the young people were at their sports.

"What is the use or sense of being so very gay?"  I said to Priscilla,
while she was taking breath, after a great frolic.  "I love to see a
sufficient cause for everything, and I can see none for this.  Pray
tell me, now, what kind of a world you imagine this to be, which you
are so merry in."

"I never think about it at all," answered Priscilla, laughing.  "But
this I am sure of, that it is a world where everybody is kind to me,
and where I love everybody.  My heart keeps dancing within me, and all
the foolish things which you see me do are only the motions of my
heart.  How can I be dismal, if my heart will not let me?"

"Have you nothing dismal to remember?"  I suggested.  "If not, then,
indeed, you are very fortunate!"

"Ah!" said Priscilla slowly.

And then came that unintelligible gesture, when she seemed to be
listening to a distant voice.

"For my part," I continued, beneficently seeking to overshadow her with
my own sombre humor, "my past life has been a tiresome one enough; yet
I would rather look backward ten times than forward once. For, little
as we know of our life to come, we may be very sure, for one thing,
that the good we aim at will not be attained.  People never do get just
the good they seek.  If it come at all, it is something else, which
they never dreamed of, and did not particularly want.  Then, again, we
may rest certain that our friends of to-day will not be our friends of
a few years hence; but, if we keep one of them, it will be at the
expense of the others; and most probably we shall keep none.  To be
sure, there are more to be had; but who cares about making a new set of
friends, even should they be better than those around us?"

"Not I!" said Priscilla.  "I will live and die with these!"

"Well; but let the future go," resumed I. "As for the present moment,
if we could look into the hearts where we wish to be most valued, what
should you expect to see?  One's own likeness, in the innermost,
holiest niche?  Ah!  I don't know!  It may not be there at all.  It may
be a dusty image, thrust aside into a corner, and by and by to be flung
out of doors, where any foot may trample upon it.  If not to-day, then
to-morrow!  And so, Priscilla, I do not see much wisdom in being so
very merry in this kind of a world."

It had taken me nearly seven years of worldly life to hive up the
bitter honey which I here offered to Priscilla.  And she rejected it!

"I don't believe one word of what you say!" she replied, laughing anew.
"You made me sad, for a minute, by talking about the past; but the past
never comes back again.  Do we dream the same dream twice? There is
nothing else that I am afraid of."

So away she ran, and fell down on the green grass, as it was often her
luck to do, but got up again, without any harm.

"Priscilla, Priscilla!" cried Hollingsworth, who was sitting on the
doorstep; "you had better not run any more to-night.  You will weary
yourself too much.  And do not sit down out of doors, for there is a
heavy dew beginning to fall."

At his first word, she went and sat down under the porch, at
Hollingsworth's feet, entirely contented and happy.  What charm was
there in his rude massiveness that so attracted and soothed this
shadow-like girl?  It appeared to me, who have always been curious in
such matters, that Priscilla's vague and seemingly causeless flow of
felicitous feeling was that with which love blesses inexperienced
hearts, before they begin to suspect what is going on within them. It
transports them to the seventh heaven; and if you ask what brought them
thither, they neither can tell nor care to learn, but cherish an
ecstatic faith that there they shall abide forever.

Zenobia was in the doorway, not far from Hollingsworth.  She gazed at
Priscilla in a very singular way.  Indeed, it was a sight worth gazing
at, and a beautiful sight, too, as the fair girl sat at the feet of
that dark, powerful figure.  Her air, while perfectly modest, delicate,
and virgin-like, denoted her as swayed by Hollingsworth, attracted to
him, and unconsciously seeking to rest upon his strength. I could not
turn away my own eyes, but hoped that nobody, save Zenobia and myself,
was witnessing this picture.  It is before me now, with the evening
twilight a little deepened by the dusk of memory.

"Come hither, Priscilla," said Zenobia.  "I have something to say to
you."

She spoke in little more than a whisper.  But it is strange how
expressive of moods a whisper may often be.  Priscilla felt at once
that something had gone wrong.

"Are you angry with me?" she asked, rising slowly, and standing before
Zenobia in a drooping attitude.  "What have I done?  I hope you are not
angry!"

"No, no, Priscilla!" said Hollingsworth, smiling.  "I will answer for
it, she is not.  You are the one little person in the world with whom
nobody can be angry!"

"Angry with you, child?  What a silly idea!" exclaimed Zenobia,
laughing.  "No, indeed!  But, my dear Priscilla, you are getting to be
so very pretty that you absolutely need a duenna; and, as I am older
than you, and have had my own little experience of life, and think
myself exceedingly sage, I intend to fill the place of a maiden aunt.
Every day, I shall give you a lecture, a quarter of an hour in length,
on the morals, manners, and proprieties of social life.  When our
pastoral shall be quite played out, Priscilla, my worldly wisdom may
stand you in good stead."

"I am afraid you are angry with me!" repeated Priscilla sadly; for,
while she seemed as impressible as wax, the girl often showed a
persistency in her own ideas as stubborn as it was gentle.

"Dear me, what can I say to the child!" cried Zenobia in a tone of
humorous vexation.  "Well, well; since you insist on my being angry,
come to my room this moment, and let me beat you!"

Zenobia bade Hollingsworth good-night very sweetly, and nodded to me
with a smile.  But, just as she turned aside with Priscilla into the
dimness of the porch, I caught another glance at her countenance.  It
would have made the fortune of a tragic actress, could she have
borrowed it for the moment when she fumbles in her bosom for the
concealed dagger, or the exceedingly sharp bodkin, or mingles the
ratsbane in her lover's bowl of wine or her rival's cup of tea.  Not
that I in the least anticipated any such catastrophe,--it being a
remarkable truth that custom has in no one point a greater sway than
over our modes of wreaking our wild passions.  And besides, had we been
in Italy, instead of New England, it was hardly yet a crisis for the
dagger or the bowl.

It often amazed me, however, that Hollingsworth should show himself so
recklessly tender towards Priscilla, and never once seem to think of
the effect which it might have upon her heart.  But the man, as I have
endeavored to explain, was thrown completely off his moral balance, and
quite bewildered as to his personal relations, by his great excrescence
of a philanthropic scheme.  I used to see, or fancy, indications that
he was not altogether obtuse to Zenobia's influence as a woman.  No
doubt, however, he had a still more exquisite enjoyment of Priscilla's
silent sympathy with his purposes, so unalloyed with criticism, and
therefore more grateful than any intellectual approbation, which always
involves a possible reserve of latent censure.  A man--poet, prophet,
or whatever he may be--readily persuades himself of his right to all
the worship that is voluntarily tendered.  In requital of so rich
benefits as he was to confer upon mankind, it would have been hard to
deny Hollingsworth the simple solace of a young girl's heart, which he
held in his hand, and smelled too, like a rosebud.  But what if, while
pressing out its fragrance, he should crush the tender rosebud in his
grasp!

As for Zenobia, I saw no occasion to give myself any trouble.  With her
native strength, and her experience of the world, she could not be
supposed to need any help of mine.  Nevertheless, I was really generous
enough to feel some little interest likewise for Zenobia. With all her
faults (which might have been a great many besides the abundance that I
knew of), she possessed noble traits, and a heart which must, at least,
have been valuable while new.  And she seemed ready to fling it away as
uncalculatingly as Priscilla herself.  I could not but suspect that, if
merely at play with Hollingsworth, she was sporting with a power which
she did not fully estimate.  Or if in earnest, it might chance, between
Zenobia's passionate force and his dark, self-delusive egotism, to turn
out such earnest as would develop itself in some sufficiently tragic
catastrophe, though the dagger and the bowl should go for nothing in it.

Meantime, the gossip of the Community set them down as a pair of
lovers.  They took walks together, and were not seldom encountered in
the wood-paths: Hollingsworth deeply discoursing, in tones solemn and
sternly pathetic; Zenobia, with a rich glow on her cheeks, and her eyes
softened from their ordinary brightness, looked so beautiful, that had
her companion been ten times a philanthropist, it seemed impossible but
that one glance should melt him back into a man. Oftener than anywhere
else, they went to a certain point on the slope of a pasture,
commanding nearly the whole of our own domain, besides a view of the
river, and an airy prospect of many distant hills.  The bond of our
Community was such, that the members had the privilege of building
cottages for their own residence within our precincts, thus laying a
hearthstone and fencing in a home private and peculiar to all desirable
extent, while yet the inhabitants should continue to share the
advantages of an associated life.  It was inferred that Hollingsworth
and Zenobia intended to rear their dwelling on this favorite spot.

I mentioned those rumors to Hollingsworth in a playful way.

"Had you consulted me," I went on to observe, "I should have
recommended a site farther to the left, just a little withdrawn into
the wood, with two or three peeps at the prospect among the trees. You
will be in the shady vale of years long before you can raise any better
kind of shade around your cottage, if you build it on this bare slope."

"But I offer my edifice as a spectacle to the world," said
Hollingsworth, "that it may take example and build many another like
it.  Therefore, I mean to set it on the open hillside."

Twist these words how I might, they offered no very satisfactory
import.  It seemed hardly probable that Hollingsworth should care about
educating the public taste in the department of cottage architecture,
desirable as such improvement certainly was.



X. A VISITOR FROM TOWN

Hollingsworth and I--we had been hoeing potatoes, that forenoon, while
the rest of the fraternity were engaged in a distant quarter of the
farm--sat under a clump of maples, eating our eleven o'clock lunch,
when we saw a stranger approaching along the edge of the field. He had
admitted himself from the roadside through a turnstile, and seemed to
have a purpose of speaking with us.

And, by the bye, we were favored with many visits at Blithedale,
especially from people who sympathized with our theories, and perhaps
held themselves ready to unite in our actual experiment as soon as
there should appear a reliable promise of its success.  It was rather
ludicrous, indeed (to me, at least, whose enthusiasm had insensibly
been exhaled together with the perspiration of many a hard day's toil),
it was absolutely funny, therefore, to observe what a glory was shed
about our life and labors, in the imaginations of these longing
proselytes.  In their view, we were as poetical as Arcadians, besides
being as practical as the hardest-fisted husbandmen in Massachusetts.
We did not, it is true, spend much time in piping to our sheep, or
warbling our innocent loves to the sisterhood.  But they gave us credit
for imbuing the ordinary rustic occupations with a kind of religious
poetry, insomuch that our very cow-yards and pig-sties were as
delightfully fragrant as a flower garden.  Nothing used to please me
more than to see one of these lay enthusiasts snatch up a hoe, as they
were very prone to do, and set to work with a vigor that perhaps
carried him through about a dozen ill-directed strokes.  Men are
wonderfully soon satisfied, in this day of shameful bodily enervation,
when, from one end of life to the other, such multitudes never taste
the sweet weariness that follows accustomed toil.  I seldom saw the new
enthusiasm that did not grow as flimsy and flaccid as the proselyte's
moistened shirt-collar, with a quarter of an hour's active labor under
a July sun.

But the person now at hand had not at all the air of one of these
amiable visionaries.  He was an elderly man, dressed rather shabbily,
yet decently enough, in a gray frock-coat, faded towards a brown hue,
and wore a broad-brimmed white hat, of the fashion of several years
gone by.  His hair was perfect silver, without a dark thread in the
whole of it; his nose, though it had a scarlet tip, by no means
indicated the jollity of which a red nose is the generally admitted
symbol.  He was a subdued, undemonstrative old man, who would doubtless
drink a glass of liquor, now and then, and probably more than was good
for him,--not, however, with a purpose of undue exhilaration, but in
the hope of bringing his spirits up to the ordinary level of the
world's cheerfulness.  Drawing nearer, there was a shy look about him,
as if he were ashamed of his poverty, or, at any rate, for some reason
or other, would rather have us glance at him sidelong than take a full
front view.  He had a queer appearance of hiding himself behind the
patch on his left eye.

"I know this old gentleman," said I to Hollingsworth, as we sat
observing him; "that is, I have met him a hundred times in town, and
have often amused my fancy with wondering what he was before he came to
be what he is.  He haunts restaurants and such places, and has an odd
way of lurking in corners or getting behind a door whenever
practicable, and holding out his hand with some little article in it
which he wishes you to buy.  The eye of the world seems to trouble him,
although he necessarily lives so much in it.  I never expected to see
him in an open field."

"Have you learned anything of his history?" asked Hollingsworth.

"Not a circumstance," I answered; "but there must be something curious
in it.  I take him to be a harmless sort of a person, and a tolerably
honest one; but his manners, being so furtive, remind me of those of a
rat,--a rat without the mischief, the fierce eye, the teeth to bite
with, or the desire to bite.  See, now!  He means to skulk along that
fringe of bushes, and approach us on the other side of our clump of
maples."

We soon heard the old man's velvet tread on the grass, indicating that
he had arrived within a few feet of where we Sat.

"Good-morning, Mr. Moodie," said Hollingsworth, addressing the stranger
as an acquaintance; "you must have had a hot and tiresome walk from the
city.  Sit down, and take a morsel of our bread and cheese."

The visitor made a grateful little murmur of acquiescence, and sat down
in a spot somewhat removed; so that, glancing round, I could see his
gray pantaloons and dusty shoes, while his upper part was mostly hidden
behind the shrubbery.  Nor did he come forth from this retirement
during the whole of the interview that followed.  We handed him such
food as we had, together with a brown jug of molasses and water (would
that it had been brandy, or some thing better, for the sake of his
chill old heart!), like priests offering dainty sacrifice to an
enshrined and invisible idol.  I have no idea that he really lacked
sustenance; but it was quite touching, nevertheless, to hear him
nibbling away at our crusts.

"Mr. Moodie," said I, "do you remember selling me one of those very
pretty little silk purses, of which you seem to have a monopoly in the
market?  I keep it to this day, I can assure you."

"Ah, thank you," said our guest.  "Yes, Mr. Coverdale, I used to sell a
good many of those little purses."

He spoke languidly, and only those few words, like a watch with an
inelastic spring, that just ticks a moment or two and stops again. He
seemed a very forlorn old man.  In the wantonness of youth, strength,
and comfortable condition,--making my prey of people's individualities,
as my custom was,--I tried to identify my mind with the old fellow's,
and take his view of the world, as if looking through a smoke-blackened
glass at the sun.  It robbed the landscape of all its life.  Those
pleasantly swelling slopes of our farm, descending towards the wide
meadows, through which sluggishly circled the brimful tide of the
Charles, bathing the long sedges on its hither and farther shores; the
broad, sunny gleam over the winding water; that peculiar
picturesqueness of the scene where capes and headlands put themselves
boldly forth upon the perfect level of the meadow, as into a green
lake, with inlets between the promontories; the shadowy woodland, with
twinkling showers of light falling into its depths; the sultry
heat-vapor, which rose everywhere like incense, and in which my soul
delighted, as indicating so rich a fervor in the passionate day, and in
the earth that was burning with its love,--I beheld all these things as
through old Moodie's eyes.  When my eyes are dimmer than they have yet
come to be, I will go thither again, and see if I did not catch the
tone of his mind aright, and if the cold and lifeless tint of his
perceptions be not then repeated in my own.

Yet it was unaccountable to myself, the interest that I felt in him.

"Have you any objection," said I, "to telling me who made those little
purses?"

"Gentlemen have often asked me that," said Moodie slowly; "but I shake
my head, and say little or nothing, and creep out of the way as well as
I can.  I am a man of few words; and if gentlemen were to be told one
thing, they would be very apt, I suppose, to ask me another. But it
happens just now, Mr. Coverdale, that you can tell me more about the
maker of those little purses than I can tell you."

"Why do you trouble him with needless questions, Coverdale?"
interrupted Hollingsworth.  "You must have known, long ago, that it was
Priscilla.  And so, my good friend, you have come to see her? Well, I
am glad of it.  You will find her altered very much for the better,
since that winter evening when you put her into my charge. Why,
Priscilla has a bloom in her cheeks, now!"

"Has my pale little girl a bloom?" repeated Moodie with a kind of slow
wonder.  "Priscilla with a bloom in her cheeks!  Ah, I am afraid I
shall not know my little girl.  And is she happy?"

"Just as happy as a bird," answered Hollingsworth.

"Then, gentlemen," said our guest apprehensively, "I don't think it
well for me to go any farther.  I crept hitherward only to ask about
Priscilla; and now that you have told me such good news, perhaps I can
do no better than to creep back again.  If she were to see this old
face of mine, the child would remember some very sad times which we
have spent together.  Some very sad times, indeed!  She has forgotten
them, I know,--them and me,--else she could not be so happy, nor have a
bloom in her cheeks.  Yes--yes--yes," continued he, still with the same
torpid utterance; "with many thanks to you, Mr. Hollingsworth, I will
creep back to town again."

"You shall do no such thing, Mr. Moodie," said Hollingsworth bluffly.
"Priscilla often speaks of you; and if there lacks anything to make her
cheeks bloom like two damask roses, I'll venture to say it is just the
sight of your face.  Come,--we will go and find her."

"Mr. Hollingsworth!" said the old man in his hesitating way.

"Well," answered Hollingsworth.

"Has there been any call for Priscilla?" asked Moodie; and though his
face was hidden from us, his tone gave a sure indication of the
mysterious nod and wink with which he put the question.  "You know, I
think, sir, what I mean."

"I have not the remotest suspicion what you mean, Mr. Moodie," replied
Hollingsworth; "nobody, to my knowledge, has called for Priscilla,
except yourself.  But come; we are losing time, and I have several
things to say to you by the way."

"And, Mr. Hollingsworth!" repeated Moodie.

"Well, again!" cried my friend rather impatiently.  "What now?"

"There is a lady here," said the old man; and his voice lost some of
its wearisome hesitation.  "You will account it a very strange matter
for me to talk about; but I chanced to know this lady when she was but
a little child.  If I am rightly informed, she has grown to be a very
fine woman, and makes a brilliant figure in the world, with her beauty,
and her talents, and her noble way of spending her riches.  I should
recognize this lady, so people tell me, by a magnificent flower in her
hair."

"What a rich tinge it gives to his colorless ideas, when he speaks of
Zenobia!"  I whispered to Hollingsworth.  "But how can there possibly
be any interest or connecting link between him and her?"

"The old man, for years past," whispered Hollingsworth, "has been a
little out of his right mind, as you probably see."

"What I would inquire," resumed Moodie, "is whether this beautiful lady
is kind to my poor Priscilla."

"Very kind," said Hollingsworth.

"Does she love her?" asked Moodie.

"It should seem so," answered my friend.  "They are always together."

"Like a gentlewoman and her maid-servant, I fancy?" suggested the old
man.

There was something so singular in his way of saying this, that I could
not resist the impulse to turn quite round, so as to catch a glimpse of
his face, almost imagining that I should see another person than old
Moodie.  But there he sat, with the patched side of his face towards me.

"Like an elder and younger sister, rather," replied Hollingsworth.

"Ah!" said Moodie more complacently, for his latter tones had harshness
and acidity in them,--"it would gladden my old heart to witness that.
If one thing would make me happier than another, Mr. Hollingsworth, it
would be to see that beautiful lady holding my little girl by the hand."

"Come along," said Hollingsworth, "and perhaps you may."

After a little more delay on the part of our freakish visitor, they set
forth together, old Moodie keeping a step or two behind Hollingsworth,
so that the latter could not very conveniently look him in the face.  I
remained under the tuft of maples, doing my utmost to draw an inference
from the scene that had just passed.  In spite of Hollingsworth's
off-hand explanation, it did not strike me that our strange guest was
really beside himself, but only that his mind needed screwing up, like
an instrument long out of tune, the strings of which have ceased to
vibrate smartly and sharply. Methought it would be profitable for us,
projectors of a happy life, to welcome this old gray shadow, and
cherish him as one of us, and let him creep about our domain, in order
that he might be a little merrier for our sakes, and we, sometimes, a
little sadder for his. Human destinies look ominous without some
perceptible intermixture of the sable or the gray.  And then, too,
should any of our fraternity grow feverish with an over-exulting sense
of prosperity, it would be a sort of cooling regimen to slink off into
the woods, and spend an hour, or a day, or as many days as might be
requisite to the cure, in uninterrupted communion with this deplorable
old Moodie!

Going homeward to dinner, I had a glimpse of him, behind the trunk of a
tree, gazing earnestly towards a particular window of the farmhouse;
and by and by Priscilla appeared at this window, playfully drawing
along Zenobia, who looked as bright as the very day that was blazing
down upon us, only not, by many degrees, so well advanced towards her
noon.  I was convinced that this pretty sight must have been purposely
arranged by Priscilla for the old man to see.  But either the girl held
her too long, or her fondness was resented as too great a freedom; for
Zenobia suddenly put Priscilla decidedly away, and gave her a haughty
look, as from a mistress to a dependant.  Old Moodie shook his head;
and again and again I saw him shake it, as he withdrew along the road;
and at the last point whence the farmhouse was visible, he turned and
shook his uplifted staff.



XI. THE WOOD-PATH

Not long after the preceding incident, in order to get the ache of too
constant labor out of my bones, and to relieve my spirit of the
irksomeness of a settled routine, I took a holiday.  It was my purpose
to spend it all alone, from breakfast-time till twilight, in the
deepest wood-seclusion that lay anywhere around us.  Though fond of
society, I was so constituted as to need these occasional retirements,
even in a life like that of Blithedale, which was itself characterized
by a remoteness from the world.  Unless renewed by a yet further
withdrawal towards the inner circle of self-communion, I lost the
better part of my individuality.  My thoughts became of little worth,
and my sensibilities grew as arid as a tuft of moss (a thing whose life
is in the shade, the rain, or the noontide dew), crumbling in the
sunshine after long expectance of a shower.  So, with my heart full of
a drowsy pleasure, and cautious not to dissipate my mood by previous
intercourse with any one, I hurried away, and was soon pacing a
wood-path, arched overhead with boughs, and dusky-brown beneath my feet.

At first I walked very swiftly, as if the heavy flood tide of social
life were roaring at my heels, and would outstrip and overwhelm me,
without all the better diligence in my escape.  But, threading the more
distant windings of the track, I abated my pace, and looked about me
for some side-aisle, that should admit me into the innermost sanctuary
of this green cathedral, just as, in human acquaintanceship, a casual
opening sometimes lets us, all of a sudden, into the long-sought
intimacy of a mysterious heart.  So much was I absorbed in my
reflections,--or, rather, in my mood, the substance of which was as yet
too shapeless to be called thought,--that footsteps rustled on the
leaves, and a figure passed me by, almost without impressing either the
sound or sight upon my consciousness.

A moment afterwards, I heard a voice at a little distance behind me,
speaking so sharply and impertinently that it made a complete discord
with my spiritual state, and caused the latter to vanish as abruptly as
when you thrust a finger into a soap-bubble.

"Halloo, friend!" cried this most unseasonable voice.  "Stop a moment,
I say!  I must have a word with you!"

I turned about, in a humor ludicrously irate.  In the first place, the
interruption, at any rate, was a grievous injury; then, the tone
displeased me.  And finally, unless there be real affection in his
heart, a man cannot,--such is the bad state to which the world has
brought itself,--cannot more effectually show his contempt for a
brother mortal, nor more gallingly assume a position of superiority,
than by addressing him as "friend."  Especially does the misapplication
of this phrase bring out that latent hostility which is sure to animate
peculiar sects, and those who, with however generous a purpose, have
sequestered themselves from the crowd; a feeling, it is true, which may
be hidden in some dog-kennel of the heart, grumbling there in the
darkness, but is never quite extinct, until the dissenting party have
gained power and scope enough to treat the world generously.  For my
part, I should have taken it as far less an insult to be styled
"fellow," "clown," or "bumpkin."  To either of these appellations my
rustic garb (it was a linen blouse, with checked shirt and striped
pantaloons, a chip hat on my head, and a rough hickory stick in my
hand) very fairly entitled me.  As the case stood, my temper darted at
once to the opposite pole; not friend, but enemy!

"What do you want with me?" said I, facing about.

"Come a little nearer, friend," said the stranger, beckoning.

"No," answered I. "If I can do anything for you without too much
trouble to myself, say so.  But recollect, if you please, that you are
not speaking to an acquaintance, much less a friend!"

"Upon my word, I believe not!" retorted he, looking at me with some
curiosity; and, lifting his hat, he made me a salute which had enough
of sarcasm to be offensive, and just enough of doubtful courtesy to
render any resentment of it absurd.  "But I ask your pardon!  I
recognize a little mistake.  If I may take the liberty to suppose it,
you, sir, are probably one of the aesthetic--or shall I rather say
ecstatic?--laborers, who have planted themselves hereabouts.  This is
your forest of Arden; and you are either the banished Duke in person,
or one of the chief nobles in his train.  The melancholy Jacques,
perhaps?  Be it so.  In that case, you can probably do me a favor."

I never, in my life, felt less inclined to confer a favor on any man.

"I am busy," said I.

So unexpectedly had the stranger made me sensible of his presence, that
he had almost the effect of an apparition; and certainly a less
appropriate one (taking into view the dim woodland solitude about us)
than if the salvage man of antiquity, hirsute and cinctured with a
leafy girdle, had started out of a thicket.  He was still young,
seemingly a little under thirty, of a tall and well-developed figure,
and as handsome a man as ever I beheld.  The style of his beauty,
however, though a masculine style, did not at all commend itself to my
taste.  His countenance--I hardly know how to describe the
peculiarity--had an indecorum in it, a kind of rudeness, a hard,
coarse, forth-putting freedom of expression, which no degree of
external polish could have abated one single jot.  Not that it was
vulgar.  But he had no fineness of nature; there was in his eyes
(although they might have artifice enough of another sort) the naked
exposure of something that ought not to be left prominent.  With these
vague allusions to what I have seen in other faces as well as his, I
leave the quality to be comprehended best--because with an intuitive
repugnance--by those who possess least of it.

His hair, as well as his beard and mustache, was coal-black; his eyes,
too, were black and sparkling, and his teeth remarkably brilliant. He
was rather carelessly but well and fashionably dressed, in a
summer-morning costume.  There was a gold chain, exquisitely wrought,
across his vest.  I never saw a smoother or whiter gloss than that upon
his shirt-bosom, which had a pin in it, set with a gem that glimmered,
in the leafy shadow where he stood, like a living tip of fire.  He
carried a stick with a wooden head, carved in vivid imitation of that
of a serpent.  I hated him, partly, I do believe, from a comparison of
my own homely garb with his well-ordered foppishness.

"Well, sir," said I, a little ashamed of my first irritation, but still
with no waste of civility, "be pleased to speak at once, as I have my
own business in hand."

"I regret that my mode of addressing you was a little unfortunate,"
said the stranger, smiling; for he seemed a very acute sort of person,
and saw, in some degree, how I stood affected towards him.  "I intended
no offence, and shall certainly comport myself with due ceremony
hereafter.  I merely wish to make a few inquiries respecting a lady,
formerly of my acquaintance, who is now resident in your Community,
and, I believe, largely concerned in your social enterprise.  You call
her, I think, Zenobia."

"That is her name in literature," observed I; "a name, too, which
possibly she may permit her private friends to know and address her
by,--but not one which they feel at liberty to recognize when used of
her personally by a stranger or casual acquaintance."

"Indeed!" answered this disagreeable person; and he turned aside his
face for an instant with a brief laugh, which struck me as a noteworthy
expression of his character.  "Perhaps I might put forward a claim, on
your own grounds, to call the lady by a name so appropriate to her
splendid qualities.  But I am willing to know her by any cognomen that
you may suggest."

Heartily wishing that he would be either a little more offensive, or a
good deal less so, or break off our intercourse altogether, I mentioned
Zenobia's real name.

"True," said he; "and in general society I have never heard her called
otherwise.  And, after all, our discussion of the point has been
gratuitous.  My object is only to inquire when, where, and how this
lady may most conveniently be seen."

"At her present residence, of course," I replied.  "You have but to go
thither and ask for her.  This very path will lead you within sight of
the house; so I wish you good-morning."

"One moment, if you please," said the stranger.  "The course you
indicate would certainly be the proper one, in an ordinary morning
call.  But my business is private, personal, and somewhat peculiar.
Now, in a community like this, I should judge that any little
occurrence is likely to be discussed rather more minutely than would
quite suit my views.  I refer solely to myself, you understand, and
without intimating that it would be other than a matter of entire
indifference to the lady.  In short, I especially desire to see her in
private.  If her habits are such as I have known them, she is probably
often to be met with in the woods, or by the river-side; and I think
you could do me the favor to point out some favorite walk, where, about
this hour, I might be fortunate enough to gain an interview."

I reflected that it would be quite a supererogatory piece of Quixotism
in me to undertake the guardianship of Zenobia, who, for my pains,
would only make me the butt of endless ridicule, should the fact ever
come to her knowledge.  I therefore described a spot which, as often as
any other, was Zenobia's resort at this period of the day; nor was it
so remote from the farmhouse as to leave her in much peril, whatever
might be the stranger's character.

"A single word more," said he; and his black eyes sparkled at me,
whether with fun or malice I knew not, but certainly as if the Devil
were peeping out of them.  "Among your fraternity, I understand, there
is a certain holy and benevolent blacksmith; a man of iron, in more
senses than one; a rough, cross-grained, well-meaning individual,
rather boorish in his manners, as might be expected, and by no means of
the highest intellectual cultivation.  He is a philanthropical
lecturer, with two or three disciples, and a scheme of his own, the
preliminary step in which involves a large purchase of land, and the
erection of a spacious edifice, at an expense considerably beyond his
means; inasmuch as these are to be reckoned in copper or old iron much
more conveniently than in gold or silver.  He hammers away upon his one
topic as lustily as ever he did upon a horseshoe!  Do you know such a
person?"  I shook my head, and was turning away.  "Our friend," he
continued, "is described to me as a brawny, shaggy, grim, and
ill-favored personage, not particularly well calculated, one would say,
to insinuate himself with the softer sex.  Yet, so far has this honest
fellow succeeded with one lady whom we wot of, that he anticipates,
from her abundant resources, the necessary funds for realizing his plan
in brick and mortar!"

Here the stranger seemed to be so much amused with his sketch of
Hollingsworth's character and purposes, that he burst into a fit of
merriment, of the same nature as the brief, metallic laugh already
alluded to, but immensely prolonged and enlarged.  In the excess of his
delight, he opened his mouth wide, and disclosed a gold band around the
upper part of his teeth, thereby making it apparent that every one of
his brilliant grinders and incisors was a sham.  This discovery
affected me very oddly.

I felt as if the whole man were a moral and physical humbug; his
wonderful beauty of face, for aught I knew, might be removable like a
mask; and, tall and comely as his figure looked, he was perhaps but a
wizened little elf, gray and decrepit, with nothing genuine about him
save the wicked expression of his grin.  The fantasy of his spectral
character so wrought upon me, together with the contagion of his
strange mirth on my sympathies, that I soon began to laugh as loudly as
himself.

By and by, he paused all at once; so suddenly, indeed, that my own
cachinnation lasted a moment longer.

"Ah, excuse me!" said he.  "Our interview seems to proceed more merrily
than it began."

"It ends here," answered I. "And I take shame to myself that my folly
has lost me the right of resenting your ridicule of a friend."

"Pray allow me," said the stranger, approaching a step nearer, and
laying his gloved hand on my sleeve.  "One other favor I must ask of
you.  You have a young person here at Blithedale, of whom I have
heard,--whom, perhaps, I have known,--and in whom, at all events, I
take a peculiar interest.  She is one of those delicate, nervous young
creatures, not uncommon in New England, and whom I suppose to have
become what we find them by the gradual refining away of the physical
system among your women.  Some philosophers choose to glorify this
habit of body by terming it spiritual; but, in my opinion, it is rather
the effect of unwholesome food, bad air, lack of outdoor exercise, and
neglect of bathing, on the part of these damsels and their female
progenitors, all resulting in a kind of hereditary dyspepsia.  Zenobia,
even with her uncomfortable surplus of vitality, is far the better
model of womanhood.  But--to revert again to this young person--she
goes among you by the name of Priscilla.  Could you possibly afford me
the means of speaking with her?"

"You have made so many inquiries of me," I observed, "that I may at
least trouble you with one.  What is your name?"

He offered me a card, with "Professor Westervelt" engraved on it.  At
the same time, as if to vindicate his claim to the professorial
dignity, so often assumed on very questionable grounds, he put on a
pair of spectacles, which so altered the character of his face that I
hardly knew him again.  But I liked the present aspect no better than
the former one.

"I must decline any further connection with your affairs," said I,
drawing back.  "I have told you where to find Zenobia.  As for
Priscilla, she has closer friends than myself, through whom, if they
see fit, you can gain access to her."

"In that case," returned the Professor, ceremoniously raising his hat,
"good-morning to you."

He took his departure, and was soon out of sight among the windings of
the wood-path.  But after a little reflection, I could not help
regretting that I had so peremptorily broken off the interview, while
the stranger seemed inclined to continue it.  His evident knowledge of
matters affecting my three friends might have led to disclosures or
inferences that would perhaps have been serviceable.  I was
particularly struck with the fact that, ever since the appearance of
Priscilla, it had been the tendency of events to suggest and establish
a connection between Zenobia and her.  She had come, in the first
instance, as if with the sole purpose of claiming Zenobia's protection.
Old Moodie's visit, it appeared, was chiefly to ascertain whether this
object had been accomplished.  And here, to-day, was the questionable
Professor, linking one with the other in his inquiries, and seeking
communication with both.

Meanwhile, my inclination for a ramble having been balked, I lingered
in the vicinity of the farm, with perhaps a vague idea that some new
event would grow out of Westervelt's proposed interview with Zenobia.
My own part in these transactions was singularly subordinate.  It
resembled that of the Chorus in a classic play, which seems to be set
aloof from the possibility of personal concernment, and bestows the
whole measure of its hope or fear, its exultation or sorrow, on the
fortunes of others, between whom and itself this sympathy is the only
bond.  Destiny, it may be,--the most skilful of stage managers,--seldom
chooses to arrange its scenes, and carry forward its drama, without
securing the presence of at least one calm observer.  It is his office
to give applause when due, and sometimes an inevitable tear, to detect
the final fitness of incident to character, and distil in his
long-brooding thought the whole morality of the performance.

Not to be out of the way in case there were need of me in my vocation,
and, at the same time, to avoid thrusting myself where neither destiny
nor mortals might desire my presence, I remained pretty near the verge
of the woodlands.  My position was off the track of Zenobia's customary
walk, yet not so remote but that a recognized occasion might speedily
have brought me thither.



XII. COVERDALE'S HERMITAGE

Long since, in this part of our circumjacent wood, I had found out for
myself a little hermitage.  It was a kind of leafy cave, high upward
into the air, among the midmost branches of a white-pine tree. A wild
grapevine, of unusual size and luxuriance, had twined and twisted
itself up into the tree, and, after wreathing the entanglement of its
tendrils around almost every bough, had caught hold of three or four
neighboring trees, and married the whole clump with a perfectly
inextricable knot of polygamy.  Once, while sheltering myself from a
summer shower, the fancy had taken me to clamber up into this seemingly
impervious mass of foliage.  The branches yielded me a passage, and
closed again beneath, as if only a squirrel or a bird had passed.  Far
aloft, around the stem of the central pine, behold a perfect nest for
Robinson Crusoe or King Charles!  A hollow chamber of rare seclusion
had been formed by the decay of some of the pine branches, which the
vine had lovingly strangled with its embrace, burying them from the
light of day in an aerial sepulchre of its own leaves.  It cost me but
little ingenuity to enlarge the interior, and open loopholes through
the verdant walls.  Had it ever been my fortune to spend a honeymoon, I
should have thought seriously of inviting my bride up thither, where
our next neighbors would have been two orioles in another part of the
clump.

It was an admirable place to make verses, tuning the rhythm to the
breezy symphony that so often stirred among the vine leaves; or to
meditate an essay for "The Dial," in which the many tongues of Nature
whispered mysteries, and seemed to ask only a little stronger puff of
wind to speak out the solution of its riddle.  Being so pervious to
air-currents, it was just the nook, too, for the enjoyment of a cigar.
This hermitage was my one exclusive possession while I counted myself a
brother of the socialists.  It symbolized my individuality, and aided
me in keeping it inviolate.  None ever found me out in it, except,
once, a squirrel.  I brought thither no guest, because, after
Hollingsworth failed me, there was no longer the man alive with whom I
could think of sharing all.  So there I used to sit, owl-like, yet not
without liberal and hospitable thoughts.  I counted the innumerable
clusters of my vine, and fore-reckoned the abundance of my vintage.  It
gladdened me to anticipate the surprise of the Community, when, like an
allegorical figure of rich October, I should make my appearance, with
shoulders bent beneath the burden of ripe grapes, and some of the
crushed ones crimsoning my brow as with a bloodstain.

Ascending into this natural turret, I peeped in turn out of several of
its small windows.  The pine-tree, being ancient, rose high above the
rest of the wood, which was of comparatively recent growth.  Even where
I sat, about midway between the root and the topmost bough, my position
was lofty enough to serve as an observatory, not for starry
investigations, but for those sublunary matters in which lay a lore as
infinite as that of the planets.  Through one loophole I saw the river
lapsing calmly onward, while in the meadow, near its brink, a few of
the brethren were digging peat for our winter's fuel.  On the interior
cart-road of our farm I discerned Hollingsworth, with a yoke of oxen
hitched to a drag of stones, that were to be piled into a fence, on
which we employed ourselves at the odd intervals of other labor.  The
harsh tones of his voice, shouting to the sluggish steers, made me
sensible, even at such a distance, that he was ill at ease, and that
the balked philanthropist had the battle-spirit in his heart.

"Haw, Buck!" quoth he.  "Come along there, ye lazy ones!  What are ye
about, now?  Gee!"

"Mankind, in Hollingsworth's opinion," thought I, "is but another yoke
of oxen, as stubborn, stupid, and sluggish as our old Brown and Bright.
He vituperates us aloud, and curses us in his heart, and will begin to
prick us with the goad-stick, by and by.  But are we his oxen?  And
what right has he to be the driver?  And why, when there is enough else
to do, should we waste our strength in dragging home the ponderous load
of his philanthropic absurdities?  At my height above the earth, the
whole matter looks ridiculous!"

Turning towards the farmhouse, I saw Priscilla (for, though a great way
off, the eye of faith assured me that it was she) sitting at Zenobia's
window, and making little purses, I suppose; or, perhaps, mending the
Community's old linen.  A bird flew past my tree; and, as it clove its
way onward into the sunny atmosphere, I flung it a message for
Priscilla.

"Tell her," said I, "that her fragile thread of life has inextricably
knotted itself with other and tougher threads, and most likely it will
be broken.  Tell her that Zenobia will not be long her friend. Say that
Hollingsworth's heart is on fire with his own purpose, but icy for all
human affection; and that, if she has given him her love, it is like
casting a flower into a sepulchre.  And say that if any mortal really
cares for her, it is myself; and not even I for her realities,--poor
little seamstress, as Zenobia rightly called her!--but for the
fancy-work with which I have idly decked her out!"

The pleasant scent of the wood, evolved by the hot sun, stole up to my
nostrils, as if I had been an idol in its niche.  Many trees mingled
their fragrance into a thousand-fold odor.  Possibly there was a
sensual influence in the broad light of noon that lay beneath me.  It
may have been the cause, in part, that I suddenly found myself
possessed by a mood of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a
conviction of the folly of attempting to benefit the world. Our
especial scheme of reform, which, from my observatory, I could take in
with the bodily eye, looked so ridiculous that it was impossible not to
laugh aloud.

"But the joke is a little too heavy," thought I. "If I were wise, I
should get out of the scrape with all diligence, and then laugh at my
companions for remaining in it."

While thus musing, I heard with perfect distinctness, somewhere in the
wood beneath, the peculiar laugh which I have described as one of the
disagreeable characteristics of Professor Westervelt.  It brought my
thoughts back to our recent interview.  I recognized as chiefly due to
this man's influence the sceptical and sneering view which just now had
filled my mental vision in regard to all life's better purposes.  And
it was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was looking at
Hollingsworth, with his glorious if impracticable dream, and at the
noble earthliness of Zenobia's character, and even at Priscilla, whose
impalpable grace lay so singularly between disease and beauty.  The
essential charm of each had vanished.  There are some spheres the
contact with which inevitably degrades the high, debases the pure,
deforms the beautiful.  It must be a mind of uncommon strength, and
little impressibility, that can permit itself the habit of such
intercourse, and not be permanently deteriorated; and yet the
Professor's tone represented that of worldly society at large, where a
cold scepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and
makes the rest ridiculous.  I detested this kind of man; and all the
more because a part of my own nature showed itself responsive to him.

Voices were now approaching through the region of the wood which lay in
the vicinity of my tree.  Soon I caught glimpses of two figures--a
woman and a man--Zenobia and the stranger--earnestly talking together
as they advanced.

Zenobia had a rich though varying color.  It was, most of the while, a
flame, and anon a sudden paleness.  Her eyes glowed, so that their
light sometimes flashed upward to me, as when the sun throws a dazzle
from some bright object on the ground.  Her gestures were free, and
strikingly impressive.  The whole woman was alive with a passionate
intensity, which I now perceived to be the phase in which her beauty
culminated.  Any passion would have become her well; and passionate
love, perhaps, the best of all.  This was not love, but anger, largely
intermixed with scorn.  Yet the idea strangely forced itself upon me,
that there was a sort of familiarity between these two companions,
necessarily the result of an intimate love,--on Zenobia's part, at
least,--in days gone by, but which had prolonged itself into as
intimate a hatred, for all futurity.  As they passed among the trees,
reckless as her movement was, she took good heed that even the hem of
her garment should not brush against the stranger's person.  I wondered
whether there had always been a chasm, guarded so religiously, betwixt
these two.

As for Westervelt, he was not a whit more warmed by Zenobia's passion
than a salamander by the heat of its native furnace.  He would have
been absolutely statuesque, save for a look of slight perplexity,
tinctured strongly with derision.  It was a crisis in which his
intellectual perceptions could not altogether help him out.  He failed
to comprehend, and cared but little for comprehending, why Zenobia
should put herself into such a fume; but satisfied his mind that it was
all folly, and only another shape of a woman's manifold absurdity,
which men can never understand.  How many a woman's evil fate has yoked
her with a man like this!  Nature thrusts some of us into the world
miserably incomplete on the emotional side, with hardly any
sensibilities except what pertain to us as animals.  No passion, save
of the senses; no holy tenderness, nor the delicacy that results from
this.  Externally they bear a close resemblance to other men, and have
perhaps all save the finest grace; but when a woman wrecks herself on
such a being, she ultimately finds that the real womanhood within her
has no corresponding part in him.  Her deepest voice lacks a response;
the deeper her cry, the more dead his silence.  The fault may be none
of his; he cannot give her what never lived within his soul.  But the
wretchedness on her side, and the moral deterioration attendant on a
false and shallow life, without strength enough to keep itself sweet,
are among the most pitiable wrongs that mortals suffer.

Now, as I looked down from my upper region at this man and
woman,--outwardly so fair a sight, and wandering like two lovers in the
wood,--I imagined that Zenobia, at an earlier period of youth, might
have fallen into the misfortune above indicated.  And when her
passionate womanhood, as was inevitable, had discovered its mistake,
here had ensued the character of eccentricity and defiance which
distinguished the more public portion of her life.

Seeing how aptly matters had chanced thus far, I began to think it the
design of fate to let me into all Zenobia's secrets, and that therefore
the couple would sit down beneath my tree, and carry on a conversation
which would leave me nothing to inquire.  No doubt, however, had it so
happened, I should have deemed myself honorably bound to warn them of a
listener's presence by flinging down a handful of unripe grapes, or by
sending an unearthly groan out of my hiding-place, as if this were one
of the trees of Dante's ghostly forest.  But real life never arranges
itself exactly like a romance. In the first place, they did not sit
down at all.  Secondly, even while they passed beneath the tree,
Zenobia's utterance was so hasty and broken, and Westervelt's so cool
and low, that I hardly could make out an intelligible sentence on
either side.  What I seem to remember, I yet suspect, may have been
patched together by my fancy, in brooding over the matter afterwards.

"Why not fling the girl off," said Westervelt, "and let her go?"

"She clung to me from the first," replied Zenobia.  "I neither know nor
care what it is in me that so attaches her.  But she loves me, and I
will not fail her."

"She will plague you, then," said he, "in more ways than one."

"The poor child!" exclaimed Zenobia.  "She can do me neither good nor
harm.  How should she?"

I know not what reply Westervelt whispered; nor did Zenobia's
subsequent exclamation give me any clew, except that it evidently
inspired her with horror and disgust.

"With what kind of a being am I linked?" cried she.  "If my Creator
cares aught for my soul, let him release me from this miserable bond!"

"I did not think it weighed so heavily," said her companion..

"Nevertheless," answered Zenobia, "it will strangle me at last!"

And then I heard her utter a helpless sort of moan; a sound which,
struggling out of the heart of a person of her pride and strength,
affected me more than if she had made the wood dolorously vocal with a
thousand shrieks and wails.

Other mysterious words, besides what are above written, they spoke
together; but I understood no more, and even question whether I fairly
understood so much as this.  By long brooding over our recollections,
we subtilize them into something akin to imaginary stuff, and hardly
capable of being distinguished from it.  In a few moments they were
completely beyond ear-shot.  A breeze stirred after them, and awoke the
leafy tongues of the surrounding trees, which forthwith began to
babble, as if innumerable gossips had all at once got wind of Zenobia's
secret.  But, as the breeze grew stronger, its voice among the branches
was as if it said, "Hush!  Hush!" and I resolved that to no mortal
would I disclose what I had heard.  And, though there might be room for
casuistry, such, I conceive, is the most equitable rule in all similar
conjunctures.



XIII. ZENOBIA'S LEGEND

The illustrious Society of Blithedale, though it toiled in downright
earnest for the good of mankind, yet not unfrequently illuminated its
laborious life with an afternoon or evening of pastime.  Picnics under
the trees were considerably in vogue; and, within doors, fragmentary
bits of theatrical performance, such as single acts of tragedy or
comedy, or dramatic proverbs and charades.  Zenobia, besides, was fond
of giving us readings from Shakespeare, and often with a depth of
tragic power, or breadth of comic effect, that made one feel it an
intolerable wrong to the world that she did not at once go upon the
stage.  Tableaux vivants were another of our occasional modes of
amusement, in which scarlet shawls, old silken robes, ruffs, velvets,
furs, and all kinds of miscellaneous trumpery converted our familiar
companions into the people of a pictorial world.  We had been thus
engaged on the evening after the incident narrated in the last chapter.
Several splendid works of art--either arranged after engravings from
the old masters, or original illustrations of scenes in history or
romance--had been presented, and we were earnestly entreating Zenobia
for more.

She stood with a meditative air, holding a large piece of gauze, or
some such ethereal stuff, as if considering what picture should next
occupy the frame; while at her feet lay a heap of many-colored
garments, which her quick fancy and magic skill could so easily convert
into gorgeous draperies for heroes and princesses.

"I am getting weary of this," said she, after a moment's thought. "Our
own features, and our own figures and airs, show a little too
intrusively through all the characters we assume.  We have so much
familiarity with one another's realities, that we cannot remove
ourselves, at pleasure, into an imaginary sphere.  Let us have no more
pictures to-night; but, to make you what poor amends I can, how would
you like to have me trump up a wild, spectral legend, on the spur of
the moment?"

Zenobia had the gift of telling a fanciful little story, off-hand, in a
way that made it greatly more effective than it was usually found to be
when she afterwards elaborated the same production with her pen. Her
proposal, therefore, was greeted with acclamation.

"Oh, a story, a story, by all means!" cried the young girls.  "No
matter how marvellous; we will believe it, every word.  And let it be a
ghost story, if you please."

"No, not exactly a ghost story," answered Zenobia; "but something so
nearly like it that you shall hardly tell the difference.  And,
Priscilla, stand you before me, where I may look at you, and get my
inspiration out of your eyes.  They are very deep and dreamy to-night."

I know not whether the following version of her story will retain any
portion of its pristine character; but, as Zenobia told it wildly and
rapidly, hesitating at no extravagance, and dashing at absurdities
which I am too timorous to repeat,--giving it the varied emphasis of
her inimitable voice, and the pictorial illustration of her mobile
face, while through it all we caught the freshest aroma of the
thoughts, as they came bubbling out of her mind,--thus narrated, and
thus heard, the legend seemed quite a remarkable affair.  I scarcely
knew, at the time, whether she intended us to laugh or be more
seriously impressed.  From beginning to end, it was undeniable
nonsense, but not necessarily the worse for that.



THE SILVERY VEIL

You have heard, my dear friends, of the Veiled Lady, who grew suddenly
so very famous, a few months ago.  And have you never thought how
remarkable it was that this marvellous creature should vanish, all at
once, while her renown was on the increase, before the public had grown
weary of her, and when the enigma of her character, instead of being
solved, presented itself more mystically at every exhibition?  Her last
appearance, as you know, was before a crowded audience.  The next
evening,--although the bills had announced her, at the corner of every
street, in red letters of a gigantic size,--there was no Veiled Lady to
be seen!  Now, listen to my simple little tale, and you shall hear the
very latest incident in the known life--(if life it may be called,
which seemed to have no more reality than the candle-light image of
one's self which peeps at us outside of a dark windowpane)--the life of
this shadowy phenomenon.

A party of young gentlemen, you are to understand, were enjoying
themselves, one afternoon,--as young gentlemen are sometimes fond of
doing,--over a bottle or two of champagne; and, among other ladies less
mysterious, the subject of the Veiled Lady, as was very natural,
happened to come up before them for discussion.  She rose, as it were,
with the sparkling effervescence of their wine, and appeared in a more
airy and fantastic light on account of the medium through which they
saw her.  They repeated to one another, between jest and earnest, all
the wild stories that were in vogue; nor, I presume, did they hesitate
to add any small circumstance that the inventive whim of the moment
might suggest, to heighten the marvellousness of their theme.

"But what an audacious report was that," observed one, "which pretended
to assert the identity of this strange creature with a young
lady,"--and here he mentioned her name,--"the daughter of one of our
most distinguished families!"

"Ah, there is more in that story than can well be accounted for,"
remarked another.  "I have it on good authority, that the young lady in
question is invariably out of sight, and not to be traced, even by her
own family, at the hours when the Veiled Lady is before the public; nor
can any satisfactory explanation be given of her disappearance.  And
just look at the thing: Her brother is a young fellow of spirit.  He
cannot but be aware of these rumors in reference to his sister.  Why,
then, does he not come forward to defend her character, unless he is
conscious that an investigation would only make the matter worse?"

It is essential to the purposes of my legend to distinguish one of
these young gentlemen from his companions; so, for the sake of a soft
and pretty name (such as we of the literary sisterhood invariably
bestow upon our heroes), I deem it fit to call him Theodore.

"Pshaw!" exclaimed Theodore; "her brother is no such fool!  Nobody,
unless his brain be as full of bubbles as this wine, can seriously
think of crediting that ridiculous rumor.  Why, if my senses did not
play me false (which never was the case yet), I affirm that I saw that
very lady, last evening, at the exhibition, while this veiled
phenomenon was playing off her juggling tricks!  What can you say to
that?"

"Oh, it was a spectral illusion that you saw!" replied his friends,
with a general laugh.  "The Veiled Lady is quite up to such a thing."

However, as the above-mentioned fable could not hold its ground against
Theodore's downright refutation, they went on to speak of other stories
which the wild babble of the town had set afloat.  Some upheld that the
veil covered the most beautiful countenance in the world; others,--and
certainly with more reason, considering the sex of the Veiled
Lady,--that the face was the most hideous and horrible, and that this
was her sole motive for hiding it.  It was the face of a corpse; it was
the head of a skeleton; it was a monstrous visage, with snaky locks,
like Medusa's, and one great red eye in the centre of the forehead.
Again, it was affirmed that there was no single and unchangeable set of
features beneath the veil; but that whosoever should be bold enough to
lift it would behold the features of that person, in all the world, who
was destined to be his fate; perhaps he would be greeted by the tender
smile of the woman whom he loved, or, quite as probably, the deadly
scowl of his bitterest enemy would throw a blight over his life.  They
quoted, moreover, this startling explanation of the whole affair: that
the magician who exhibited the Veiled Lady--and who, by the bye, was
the handsomest man in the whole world--had bartered his own soul for
seven years' possession of a familiar fiend, and that the last year of
the contract was wearing towards its close.

If it were worth our while, I could keep you till an hour beyond
midnight listening to a thousand such absurdities as these.  But
finally our friend Theodore, who prided himself upon his common-sense,
found the matter getting quite beyond his patience.

"I offer any wager you like," cried he, setting down his glass so
forcibly as to break the stem of it, "that this very evening I find out
the mystery of the Veiled Lady!"

Young men, I am told, boggle at nothing over their wine; so, after a
little more talk, a wager of considerable amount was actually laid, the
money staked, and Theodore left to choose his own method of settling
the dispute.

How he managed it I know not, nor is it of any great importance to this
veracious legend.  The most natural way, to be sure, was by bribing the
doorkeeper,--or possibly he preferred clambering in at the window.
But, at any rate, that very evening, while the exhibition was going
forward in the hall, Theodore contrived to gain admittance into the
private withdrawing-room whither the Veiled Lady was accustomed to
retire at the close of her performances.  There he waited, listening, I
suppose, to the stifled hum of the great audience; and no doubt he
could distinguish the deep tones of the magician, causing the wonders
that he wrought to appear more dark and intricate, by his mystic
pretence of an explanation.  Perhaps, too, in the intervals of the wild
breezy music which accompanied the exhibition, he might hear the low
voice of the Veiled Lady, conveying her sibylline responses.  Firm as
Theodore's nerves might be, and much as he prided himself on his sturdy
perception of realities, I should not be surprised if his heart
throbbed at a little more than its ordinary rate.

Theodore concealed himself behind a screen.  In due time the
performance was brought to a close, and whether the door was softly
opened, or whether her bodiless presence came through the wall, is more
than I can say, but, all at once, without the young man's knowing how
it happened, a veiled figure stood in the centre of the room.  It was
one thing to be in presence of this mystery in the hall of exhibition,
where the warm, dense life of hundreds of other mortals kept up the
beholder's courage, and distributed her influence among so many; it was
another thing to be quite alone with her, and that, too, with a
hostile, or, at least, an unauthorized and unjustifiable purpose.  I
further imagine that Theodore now began to be sensible of something
more serious in his enterprise than he had been quite aware of while he
sat with his boon-companions over their sparkling wine.

Very strange, it must be confessed, was the movement with which the
figure floated to and fro over the carpet, with the silvery veil
covering her from head to foot; so impalpable, so ethereal, so without
substance, as the texture seemed, yet hiding her every outline in an
impenetrability like that of midnight.  Surely, she did not walk!  She
floated, and flitted, and hovered about the room; no sound of a
footstep, no perceptible motion of a limb; it was as if a wandering
breeze wafted her before it, at its own wild and gentle pleasure.  But,
by and by, a purpose began to be discernible, throughout the seeming
vagueness of her unrest.  She was in quest of something.  Could it be
that a subtile presentiment had informed her of the young man's
presence?  And if so, did the Veiled Lady seek or did she shun him?
The doubt in Theodore's mind was speedily resolved; for, after a moment
or two of these erratic flutterings, she advanced more decidedly, and
stood motionless before the screen.

"Thou art here!" said a soft, low voice.  "Come forth, Theodore!" Thus
summoned by his name, Theodore, as a man of courage, had no choice.  He
emerged from his concealment, and presented himself before the Veiled
Lady, with the wine-flush, it may be, quite gone out of his cheeks.

"What wouldst thou with me?" she inquired, with the same gentle
composure that was in her former utterance.

"Mysterious creature," replied Theodore, "I would know who and what you
are!"

"My lips are forbidden to betray the secret," said the Veiled Lady.

"At whatever risk, I must discover it," rejoined Theodore.

"Then," said the Mystery, "there is no way save to lift my veil."

And Theodore, partly recovering his audacity, stept forward on the
instant, to do as the Veiled Lady had suggested.  But she floated
backward to the opposite side of the room, as if the young man's breath
had possessed power enough to waft her away.

"Pause, one little instant," said the soft, low voice, "and learn the
conditions of what thou art so bold to undertake.  Thou canst go hence,
and think of me no more; or, at thy option, thou canst lift this
mysterious veil, beneath which I am a sad and lonely prisoner, in a
bondage which is worse to me than death.  But, before raising it, I
entreat thee, in all maiden modesty, to bend forward and impress a kiss
where my breath stirs the veil; and my virgin lips shall come forward
to meet thy lips; and from that instant, Theodore, thou shalt be mine,
and I thine, with never more a veil between us.  And all the felicity
of earth and of the future world shall be thine and mine together.  So
much may a maiden say behind the veil.  If thou shrinkest from this,
there is yet another way."  "And what is that?" asked Theodore.  "Dost
thou hesitate," said the Veiled Lady, "to pledge thyself to me, by
meeting these lips of mine, while the veil yet hides my face?  Has not
thy heart recognized me?  Dost thou come hither, not in holy faith, nor
with a pure and generous purpose, but in scornful scepticism and idle
curiosity?  Still, thou mayest lift the veil!  But, from that instant,
Theodore, I am doomed to be thy evil fate; nor wilt thou ever taste
another breath of happiness!"

There was a shade of inexpressible sadness in the utterance of these
last words.  But Theodore, whose natural tendency was towards
scepticism, felt himself almost injured and insulted by the Veiled
Lady's proposal that he should pledge himself, for life and eternity,
to so questionable a creature as herself; or even that she should
suggest an inconsequential kiss, taking into view the probability that
her face was none of the most bewitching.  A delightful idea, truly,
that he should salute the lips of a dead girl, or the jaws of a
skeleton, or the grinning cavity of a monster's mouth!  Even should she
prove a comely maiden enough in other respects, the odds were ten to
one that her teeth were defective; a terrible drawback on the
delectableness of a kiss.

"Excuse me, fair lady," said Theodore, and I think he nearly burst into
a laugh, "if I prefer to lift the veil first; and for this affair of
the kiss, we may decide upon it afterwards."

"Thou hast made thy choice," said the sweet, sad voice behind the veil;
and there seemed a tender but unresentful sense of wrong done to
womanhood by the young man's contemptuous interpretation of her offer.
"I must not counsel thee to pause, although thy fate is still in thine
own hand!"

Grasping at the veil, he flung it upward, and caught a glimpse of a
pale, lovely face beneath; just one momentary glimpse, and then the
apparition vanished, and the silvery veil fluttered slowly down and lay
upon the floor.  Theodore was alone.  Our legend leaves him there. His
retribution was, to pine forever and ever for another sight of that
dim, mournful face,--which might have been his life-long household
fireside joy,--to desire, and waste life in a feverish quest, and never
meet it more.

But what, in good sooth, had become of the Veiled Lady?  Had all her
existence been comprehended within that mysterious veil, and was she
now annihilated?  Or was she a spirit, with a heavenly essence, but
which might have been tamed down to human bliss, had Theodore been
brave and true enough to claim her?  Hearken, my sweet friends,--and
hearken, dear Priscilla,--and you shall learn the little more that
Zenobia can tell you.

Just at the moment, so far as can be ascertained, when the Veiled Lady
vanished, a maiden, pale and shadowy, rose up amid a knot of visionary
people, who were seeking for the better life.  She was so gentle and so
sad,--a nameless melancholy gave her such hold upon their
sympathies,--that they never thought of questioning whence she came.
She might have heretofore existed, or her thin substance might have
been moulded out of air at the very instant when they first beheld her.
It was all one to them; they took her to their hearts. Among them was a
lady to whom, more than to all the rest, this pale, mysterious girl
attached herself.

But one morning the lady was wandering in the woods, and there met her
a figure in an Oriental robe, with a dark beard, and holding in his
hand a silvery veil.  He motioned her to stay.  Being a woman of some
nerve, she did not shriek, nor run away, nor faint, as many ladies
would have been apt to do, but stood quietly, and bade him speak.  The
truth was, she had seen his face before, but had never feared it,
although she knew him to be a terrible magician.

"Lady," said he, with a warning gesture, "you are in peril!"  "Peril!"
she exclaimed.  "And of what nature?"

"There is a certain maiden," replied the magician, "who has come out of
the realm of mystery, and made herself your most intimate companion.
Now, the fates have so ordained it, that, whether by her own will or
no, this stranger is your deadliest enemy.  In love, in worldly
fortune, in all your pursuit of happiness, she is doomed to fling a
blight over your prospects.  There is but one possibility of thwarting
her disastrous influence."

"Then tell me that one method," said the lady.

"Take this veil," he answered, holding forth the silvery texture. "It
is a spell; it is a powerful enchantment, which I wrought for her sake,
and beneath which she was once my prisoner.  Throw it, at unawares,
over the head of this secret foe, stamp your foot, and cry, 'Arise,
Magician!  Here is the Veiled Lady!' and immediately I will rise up
through the earth, and seize her; and from that moment you are safe!"

So the lady took the silvery veil, which was like woven air, or like
some substance airier than nothing, and that would float upward and be
lost among the clouds, were she once to let it go.  Returning homeward,
she found the shadowy girl amid the knot of visionary
transcendentalists, who were still seeking for the better life.  She
was joyous now, and had a rose-bloom in her cheeks, and was one of the
prettiest creatures, and seemed one of the happiest, that the world
could show.  But the lady stole noiselessly behind her and threw the
veil over her head.  As the slight, ethereal texture sank inevitably
down over her figure, the poor girl strove to raise it, and met her
dear friend's eyes with one glance of mortal terror, and deep, deep
reproach.  It could not change her purpose.

"Arise, Magician!" she exclaimed, stamping her foot upon the earth.
"Here is the Veiled Lady!"

At the word, up rose the bearded man in the Oriental robes,--the
beautiful, the dark magician, who had bartered away his soul!  He threw
his arms around the Veiled Lady, and she was his bond-slave for
evermore!


Zenobia, all this while, had been holding the piece of gauze, and so
managed it as greatly to increase the dramatic effect of the legend at
those points where the magic veil was to be described.  Arriving at the
catastrophe, and uttering the fatal words, she flung the gauze over
Priscilla's head; and for an instant her auditors held their breath,
half expecting, I verily believe, that the magician would start up
through the floor, and carry off our poor little friend before our eyes.

As for Priscilla, she stood droopingly in the midst of us, making no
attempt to remove the veil.

"How do you find yourself, my love?" said Zenobia, lifting a corner of
the gauze, and peeping beneath it with a mischievous smile.  "Ah, the
dear little soul!  Why, she is really going to faint!  Mr. Coverdale,
Mr. Coverdale, pray bring a glass of water!"

Her nerves being none of the strongest, Priscilla hardly recovered her
equanimity during the rest of the evening.  This, to be sure, was a
great pity; but, nevertheless, we thought it a very bright idea of
Zenobia's to bring her legend to so effective a conclusion.



XIV. ELIOT'S PULPIT

Our Sundays at Blithedale were not ordinarily kept with such rigid
observance as might have befitted the descendants of the Pilgrims,
whose high enterprise, as we sometimes flattered ourselves, we had
taken up, and were carrying it onward and aloft, to a point which they
never dreamed of attaining.

On that hallowed day, it is true, we rested from our labors.  Our oxen,
relieved from their week-day yoke, roamed at large through the pasture;
each yoke-fellow, however, keeping close beside his mate, and
continuing to acknowledge, from the force of habit and sluggish
sympathy, the union which the taskmaster had imposed for his own hard
ends.  As for us human yoke-fellows, chosen companions of toil, whose
hoes had clinked together throughout the week, we wandered off, in
various directions, to enjoy our interval of repose.  Some, I believe,
went devoutly to the village church.  Others, it may be, ascended a
city or a country pulpit, wearing the clerical robe with so much
dignity that you would scarcely have suspected the yeoman's frock to
have been flung off only since milking-time.  Others took long rambles
among the rustic lanes and by-paths, pausing to look at black old
farmhouses, with their sloping roofs; and at the modern cottage, so
like a plaything that it seemed as if real joy or sorrow could have no
scope within; and at the more pretending villa, with its range of
wooden columns supporting the needless insolence of a great portico.
Some betook themselves into the wide, dusky barn, and lay there for
hours together on the odorous hay; while the sunstreaks and the shadows
strove together,--these to make the barn solemn, those to make it
cheerful,--and both were conquerors; and the swallows twittered a
cheery anthem, flashing into sight, or vanishing as they darted to and
fro among the golden rules of sunshine.  And others went a little way
into the woods, and threw themselves on mother earth, pillowing their
heads on a heap of moss, the green decay of an old log; and, dropping
asleep, the bumblebees and mosquitoes sung and buzzed about their ears,
causing the slumberers to twitch and start, without awaking.

With Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla, and myself, it grew to be a
custom to spend the Sabbath afternoon at a certain rock.  It was known
to us under the name of Eliot's pulpit, from a tradition that the
venerable Apostle Eliot had preached there, two centuries gone by, to
an Indian auditory.  The old pine forest, through which the Apostle's
voice was wont to sound, had fallen an immemorial time ago. But the
soil, being of the rudest and most broken surface, had apparently never
been brought under tillage; other growths, maple and beech and birch,
had succeeded to the primeval trees; so that it was still as wild a
tract of woodland as the great-great-great-great grandson of one of
Eliot's Indians (had any such posterity been in existence) could have
desired for the site and shelter of his wigwam. These after-growths,
indeed, lose the stately solemnity of the original forest.  If left in
due neglect, however, they run into an entanglement of softer wildness,
among the rustling leaves of which the sun can scatter cheerfulness as
it never could among the dark-browed pines.

The rock itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a shattered granite
bowlder, or heap of bowlders, with an irregular outline and many
fissures, out of which sprang shrubs, bushes, and even trees; as if the
scanty soil within those crevices were sweeter to their roots than any
other earth.  At the base of the pulpit, the broken bowlders inclined
towards each other, so as to form a shallow cave, within which our
little party had sometimes found protection from a summer shower.  On
the threshold, or just across it, grew a tuft of pale columbines, in
their season, and violets, sad and shadowy recluses, such as Priscilla
was when we first knew her; children of the sun, who had never seen
their father, but dwelt among damp mosses, though not akin to them.  At
the summit, the rock was overshadowed by the canopy of a birch-tree,
which served as a sounding-board for the pulpit.  Beneath this shade
(with my eyes of sense half shut and those of the imagination widely
opened) I used to see the holy Apostle of the Indians, with the
sunlight flickering down upon him through the leaves, and glorifying
his figure as with the half-perceptible glow of a transfiguration.

I the more minutely describe the rock, and this little Sabbath
solitude, because Hollingsworth, at our solicitation, often ascended
Eliot's pulpit, and not exactly preached, but talked to us, his few
disciples, in a strain that rose and fell as naturally as the wind's
breath among the leaves of the birch-tree.  No other speech of man has
ever moved me like some of those discourses.  It seemed most pitiful--a
positive calamity to the world--that a treasury of golden thoughts
should thus be scattered, by the liberal handful, down among us three,
when a thousand hearers might have been the richer for them; and
Hollingsworth the richer, likewise, by the sympathy of multitudes.
After speaking much or little, as might happen, he would descend from
his gray pulpit, and generally fling himself at full length on the
ground, face downward.  Meanwhile, we talked around him on such topics
as were suggested by the discourse.

Since her interview with Westervelt, Zenobia's continual inequalities
of temper had been rather difficult for her friends to bear.  On the
first Sunday after that incident, when Hollingsworth had clambered down
from Eliot's pulpit, she declaimed with great earnestness and passion,
nothing short of anger, on the injustice which the world did to women,
and equally to itself, by not allowing them, in freedom and honor, and
with the fullest welcome, their natural utterance in public.

"It shall not always be so!" cried she.  "If I live another year, I
will lift up my own voice in behalf of woman's wider liberty!"

She perhaps saw me smile.

"What matter of ridicule do you find in this, Miles Coverdale?"
exclaimed Zenobia, with a flash of anger in her eyes.  "That smile,
permit me to say, makes me suspicious of a low tone of feeling and
shallow thought.  It is my belief--yes, and my prophecy, should I die
before it happens--that, when my sex shall achieve its rights, there
will be ten eloquent women where there is now one eloquent man.  Thus
far, no woman in the world has ever once spoken out her whole heart and
her whole mind.  The mistrust and disapproval of the vast bulk of
society throttles us, as with two gigantic hands at our throats!  We
mumble a few weak words, and leave a thousand better ones unsaid. You
let us write a little, it is true, on a limited range of subjects. But
the pen is not for woman.  Her power is too natural and immediate.  It
is with the living voice alone that she can compel the world to
recognize the light of her intellect and the depth of her heart!"

Now,--though I could not well say so to Zenobia,--I had not smiled from
any unworthy estimate of woman, or in denial of the claims which she is
beginning to put forth.  What amused and puzzled me was the fact, that
women, however intellectually superior, so seldom disquiet themselves
about the rights or wrongs of their sex, unless their own individual
affections chance to lie in idleness, or to be ill at ease. They are
not natural reformers, but become such by the pressure of exceptional
misfortune.  I could measure Zenobia's inward trouble by the animosity
with which she now took up the general quarrel of woman against man.

"I will give you leave, Zenobia," replied I, "to fling your utmost
scorn upon me, if you ever hear me utter a sentiment unfavorable to the
widest liberty which woman has yet dreamed of.  I would give her all
she asks, and add a great deal more, which she will not be the party to
demand, but which men, if they were generous and wise, would grant of
their own free motion.  For instance, I should love dearly--for the
next thousand years, at least--to have all government devolve into the
hands of women.  I hate to be ruled by my own sex; it excites my
jealousy, and wounds my pride.  It is the iron sway of bodily force
which abases us, in our compelled submission.  But how sweet the free,
generous courtesy with which I would kneel before a woman-ruler!"

"Yes, if she were young and beautiful," said Zenobia, laughing.  "But
how if she were sixty, and a fright?"

"Ah! it is you that rate womanhood low," said I. "But let me go on. I
have never found it possible to suffer a bearded priest so near my
heart and conscience as to do me any spiritual good.  I blush at the
very thought!  Oh, in the better order of things, Heaven grant that the
ministry of souls may be left in charge of women!  The gates of the
Blessed City will be thronged with the multitude that enter in, when
that day comes!  The task belongs to woman.  God meant it for her.  He
has endowed her with the religious sentiment in its utmost depth and
purity, refined from that gross, intellectual alloy with which every
masculine theologist--save only One, who merely veiled himself in
mortal and masculine shape, but was, in truth, divine--has been prone
to mingle it.  I have always envied the Catholics their faith in that
sweet, sacred Virgin Mother, who stands between them and the Deity,
intercepting somewhat of his awful splendor, but permitting his love to
stream upon the worshipper more intelligibly to human comprehension
through the medium of a woman's tenderness. Have I not said enough,
Zenobia?"

"I cannot think that this is true," observed Priscilla, who had been
gazing at me with great, disapproving eyes.  "And I am sure I do not
wish it to be true!"

"Poor child!" exclaimed Zenobia, rather contemptuously.  "She is the
type of womanhood, such as man has spent centuries in making it.  He is
never content unless he can degrade himself by stooping towards what he
loves.  In denying us our rights, he betrays even more blindness to his
own interests than profligate disregard of ours!"

"Is this true?" asked Priscilla with simplicity, turning to
Hollingsworth.  "Is it all true, that Mr. Coverdale and Zenobia have
been saying?"

"No, Priscilla!" answered Hollingsworth with his customary bluntness.
"They have neither of them spoken one true word yet."

"Do you despise woman?" said Zenobia.

"Ah, Hollingsworth, that would be most ungrateful!"

"Despise her?  No!" cried Hollingsworth, lifting his great shaggy head
and shaking it at us, while his eyes glowed almost fiercely. "She is
the most admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and character.
Her place is at man's side.  Her office, that of the sympathizer; the
unreserved, unquestioning believer; the recognition, withheld in every
other manner, but given, in pity, through woman's heart, lest man
should utterly lose faith in himself; the echo of God's own voice,
pronouncing, 'It is well done!' All the separate action of woman is,
and ever has been, and always shall be, false, foolish, vain,
destructive of her own best and holiest qualities, void of every good
effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs! Man is a wretch
without woman; but woman is a monster--and, thank Heaven, an almost
impossible and hitherto imaginary monster--without man as her
acknowledged principal!  As true as I had once a mother whom I loved,
were there any possible prospect of woman's taking the social stand
which some of them,--poor, miserable, abortive creatures, who only
dream of such things because they have missed woman's peculiar
happiness, or because nature made them really neither man nor
woman!--if there were a chance of their attaining the end which these
petticoated monstrosities have in view, I would call upon my own sex to
use its physical force, that unmistakable evidence of sovereignty, to
scourge them back within their proper bounds!  But it will not be
needful.  The heart of time womanhood knows where its own sphere is,
and never seeks to stray beyond it!"

Never was mortal blessed--if blessing it were--with a glance of such
entire acquiescence and unquestioning faith, happy in its completeness,
as our little Priscilla unconsciously bestowed on Hollingsworth.  She
seemed to take the sentiment from his lips into her heart, and brood
over it in perfect content.  The very woman whom he pictured--the
gentle parasite, the soft reflection of a more powerful existence--sat
there at his feet.

I looked at Zenobia, however, fully expecting her to resent--as I felt,
by the indignant ebullition of my own blood, that she ought this
outrageous affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of masculine
egotism.  It centred everything in itself, and deprived woman of her
very soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to make it a mere
incident in the great sum of man.  Hollingsworth had boldly uttered
what he, and millions of despots like him, really felt. Without
intending it, he had disclosed the wellspring of all these troubled
waters.  Now, if ever, it surely behooved Zenobia to be the champion of
her sex.

But, to my surprise, and indignation too, she only looked humbled. Some
tears sparkled in her eyes, but they were wholly of grief, not anger.

"Well, be it so," was all she said.  "I, at least, have deep cause to
think you right.  Let man be but manly and godlike, and woman is only
too ready to become to him what you say!"

I smiled--somewhat bitterly, it is true--in contemplation of my own
ill-luck.  How little did these two women care for me, who had freely
conceded all their claims, and a great deal more, out of the fulness of
my heart; while Hollingsworth, by some necromancy of his horrible
injustice, seemed to have brought them both to his feet!

"Women almost invariably behave thus," thought I. "What does the fact
mean?  Is it their nature?  Or is it, at last, the result of ages of
compelled degradation?  And, in either case, will it be possible ever
to redeem them?"

An intuition now appeared to possess all the party, that, for this
time, at least, there was no more to be said.  With one accord, we
arose from the ground, and made our way through the tangled undergrowth
towards one of those pleasant wood-paths that wound among the
overarching trees.  Some of the branches hung so low as partly to
conceal the figures that went before from those who followed. Priscilla
had leaped up more lightly than the rest of us, and ran along in
advance, with as much airy activity of spirit as was typified in the
motion of a bird, which chanced to be flitting from tree to tree, in
the same direction as herself.  Never did she seem so happy as that
afternoon.  She skipt, and could not help it, from very playfulness of
heart.

Zenobia and Hollingsworth went next, in close contiguity, but not with
arm in arm.  Now, just when they had passed the impending bough of a
birch-tree, I plainly saw Zenobia take the hand of Hollingsworth in
both her own, press it to her bosom, and let it fall again!

The gesture was sudden, and full of passion; the impulse had evidently
taken her by surprise; it expressed all!  Had Zenobia knelt before him,
or flung herself upon his breast, and gasped out, "I love you,
Hollingsworth!"  I could not have been more certain of what it meant.
They then walked onward, as before.  But, methought, as the declining
sun threw Zenobia's magnified shadow along the path, I beheld it
tremulous; and the delicate stem of the flower which she wore in her
hair was likewise responsive to her agitation.

Priscilla--through the medium of her eyes, at least could not possibly
have been aware of the gesture above described.  Yet, at that instant,
I saw her droop.  The buoyancy, which just before had been so
bird-like, was utterly departed; the life seemed to pass out of her,
and even the substance of her figure to grow thin and gray. I almost
imagined her a shadow, tiding gradually into the dimness of the wood.
Her pace became so slow that Hollingsworth and Zenobia passed by, and
I, without hastening my footsteps, overtook her.

"Come, Priscilla," said I, looking her intently in the face, which was
very pale and sorrowful, "we must make haste after our friends. Do you
feel suddenly ill?  A moment ago, you flitted along so lightly that I
was comparing you to a bird.  Now, on the contrary, it is as if you had
a heavy heart, and a very little strength to bear it with. Pray take my
arm!"

"No," said Priscilla, "I do not think it would help me.  It is my
heart, as you say, that makes me heavy; and I know not why.  Just now,
I felt very happy."

No doubt it was a kind of sacrilege in me to attempt to come within her
maidenly mystery; but, as she appeared to be tossed aside by her other
friends, or carelessly let fall, like a flower which they had done
with, I could not resist the impulse to take just one peep beneath her
folded petals.

"Zenobia and yourself are dear friends of late," I remarked.  "At
first,--that first evening when you came to us,--she did not receive
you quite so warmly as might have been wished."

"I remember it," said Priscilla.  "No wonder she hesitated to love me,
who was then a stranger to her, and a girl of no grace or beauty,--she
being herself so beautiful!"

"But she loves you now, of course?" suggested I. "And at this very
instant you feel her to be your dearest friend?"

"Why do you ask me that question?" exclaimed Priscilla, as if
frightened at the scrutiny into her feelings which I compelled her to
make.  "It somehow puts strange thoughts into my mind.  But I do love
Zenobia dearly!  If she only loves me half as well, I shall be happy!"

"How is it possible to doubt that, Priscilla?"  I rejoined.  "But
observe how pleasantly and happily Zenobia and Hollingsworth are
walking together.  I call it a delightful spectacle.  It truly rejoices
me that Hollingsworth has found so fit and affectionate a friend!  So
many people in the world mistrust him,--so many disbelieve and
ridicule, while hardly any do him justice, or acknowledge him for the
wonderful man he is,--that it is really a blessed thing for him to have
won the sympathy of such a woman as Zenobia.  Any man might be proud of
that.  Any man, even if he be as great as Hollingsworth, might love so
magnificent a woman.  How very beautiful Zenobia is!  And Hollingsworth
knows it, too."

There may have been some petty malice in what I said.  Generosity is a
very fine thing, at a proper time and within due limits.  But it is an
insufferable bore to see one man engrossing every thought of all the
women, and leaving his friend to shiver in outer seclusion, without
even the alternative of solacing himself with what the more fortunate
individual has rejected.  Yes, it was out of a foolish bitterness of
heart that I had spoken.

"Go on before," said Priscilla abruptly, and with true feminine
imperiousness, which heretofore I had never seen her exercise.  "It
pleases me best to loiter along by myself.  I do not walk so fast as
you."

With her hand she made a little gesture of dismissal.  It provoked me;
yet, on the whole, was the most bewitching thing that Priscilla had
ever done.  I obeyed her, and strolled moodily homeward, wondering--as
I had wondered a thousand times already--how Hollingsworth meant to
dispose of these two hearts, which (plainly to my perception, and, as I
could not but now suppose, to his) he had engrossed into his own huge
egotism.

There was likewise another subject hardly less fruitful of speculation.
In what attitude did Zenobia present herself to Hollingsworth?  Was it
in that of a free woman, with no mortgage on her affections nor
claimant to her hand, but fully at liberty to surrender both, in
exchange for the heart and hand which she apparently expected to
receive?  But was it a vision that I had witnessed in the wood?  Was
Westervelt a goblin?  Were those words of passion and agony, which
Zenobia had uttered in my hearing, a mere stage declamation?  Were they
formed of a material lighter than common air?  Or, supposing them to
bear sterling weight, was it a perilous and dreadful wrong which she
was meditating towards herself and Hollingsworth?

Arriving nearly at the farmhouse, I looked back over the long slope of
pasture land, and beheld them standing together, in the light of
sunset, just on the spot where, according to the gossip of the
Community, they meant to build their cottage.  Priscilla, alone and
forgotten, was lingering in the shadow of the wood.



XV. A CRISIS

Thus the summer was passing away,--a summer of toil, of interest, of
something that was not pleasure, but which went deep into my heart, and
there became a rich experience.  I found myself looking forward to
years, if not to a lifetime, to be spent on the same system.  The
Community were now beginning to form their permanent plans.  One of our
purposes was to erect a Phalanstery (as I think we called it, after
Fourier; but the phraseology of those days is not very fresh in my
remembrance), where the great and general family should have its
abiding-place.  Individual members, too, who made it a point of
religion to preserve the sanctity of an exclusive home, were selecting
sites for their cottages, by the wood-side, or on the breezy swells, or
in the sheltered nook of some little valley, according as their taste
might lean towards snugness or the picturesque.  Altogether, by
projecting our minds outward, we had imparted a show of novelty to
existence, and contemplated it as hopefully as if the soil beneath our
feet had not been fathom-deep with the dust of deluded generations, on
every one of which, as on ourselves, the world had imposed itself as a
hitherto unwedded bride.

Hollingsworth and myself had often discussed these prospects.  It was
easy to perceive, however, that he spoke with little or no fervor, but
either as questioning the fulfilment of our anticipations, or, at any
rate, with a quiet consciousness that it was no personal concern of
his.  Shortly after the scene at Eliot's pulpit, while he and I were
repairing an old stone fence, I amused myself with sallying forward
into the future time.

"When we come to be old men," I said, "they will call us uncles, or
fathers,--Father Hollingsworth and Uncle Coverdale,--and we will look
back cheerfully to these early days, and make a romantic story for the
young People (and if a little more romantic than truth may warrant, it
will be no harm) out of our severe trials and hardships. In a century
or two, we shall, every one of us, be mythical personages, or
exceedingly picturesque and poetical ones, at all events.  They will
have a great public hall, in which your portrait, and mine, and twenty
other faces that are living now, shall be hung up; and as for me, I
will be painted in my shirtsleeves, and with the sleeves rolled up, to
show my muscular development.  What stories will be rife among them
about our mighty strength!" continued I, lifting a big stone and
putting it into its place, "though our posterity will really be far
stronger than ourselves, after several generations of a simple,
natural, and active life.  What legends of Zenobia's beauty, and
Priscilla's slender and shadowy grace, and those mysterious qualities
which make her seem diaphanous with spiritual light!  In due course of
ages, we must all figure heroically in an epic poem; and we will
ourselves--at least, I will--bend unseen over the future poet, and lend
him inspiration while he writes it."

"You seem," said Hollingsworth, "to be trying how much nonsense you can
pour out in a breath."

"I wish you would see fit to comprehend," retorted I, "that the
profoundest wisdom must be mingled with nine tenths of nonsense, else
it is not worth the breath that utters it.  But I do long for the
cottages to be built, that the creeping plants may begin to run over
them, and the moss to gather on the walls, and the trees--which we will
set out--to cover them with a breadth of shadow.  This spick-and-span
novelty does not quite suit my taste.  It is time, too, for children to
be born among us.  The first-born child is still to come.  And I shall
never feel as if this were a real, practical, as well as poetical
system of human life, until somebody has sanctified it by death."

"A pretty occasion for martyrdom, truly!" said Hollingsworth.

"As good as any other," I replied.  "I wonder, Hollingsworth, who, of
all these strong men, and fair women and maidens, is doomed the first
to die.  Would it not be well, even before we have absolute need of it,
to fix upon a spot for a cemetery?  Let us choose the rudest, roughest,
most uncultivable spot, for Death's garden ground; and Death shall
teach us to beautify it, grave by grave.  By our sweet, calm way of
dying, and the airy elegance out of which we will shape our funeral
rites, and the cheerful allegories which we will model into tombstones,
the final scene shall lose its terrors; so that hereafter it may be
happiness to live, and bliss to die.  None of us must die young.  Yet,
should Providence ordain it so, the event shall not be sorrowful, but
affect us with a tender, delicious, only half-melancholy, and almost
smiling pathos!"

"That is to say," muttered Hollingsworth, "you will die like a heathen,
as you certainly live like one.  But, listen to me, Coverdale.  Your
fantastic anticipations make me discern all the more forcibly what a
wretched, unsubstantial scheme is this, on which we have wasted a
precious summer of our lives.  Do you seriously imagine that any such
realities as you, and many others here, have dreamed of, will ever be
brought to pass?"

"Certainly I do," said I. "Of course, when the reality comes, it will
wear the every-day, commonplace, dusty, and rather homely garb that
reality always does put on.  But, setting aside the ideal charm, I hold
that our highest anticipations have a solid footing on common sense."

"You only half believe what you say," rejoined Hollingsworth; "and as
for me, I neither have faith in your dream, nor would care the value of
this pebble for its realization, were that possible.  And what more do
you want of it?  It has given you a theme for poetry.  Let that content
you.  But now I ask you to be, at last, a man of sobriety and
earnestness, and aid me in an enterprise which is worth all our
strength, and the strength of a thousand mightier than we."

There can be no need of giving in detail the conversation that ensued.
It is enough to say that Hollingsworth once more brought forward his
rigid and unconquerable idea,--a scheme for the reformation of the
wicked by methods moral, intellectual, and industrial, by the sympathy
of pure, humble, and yet exalted minds, and by opening to his pupils
the possibility of a worthier life than that which had become their
fate.  It appeared, unless he overestimated his own means, that
Hollingsworth held it at his choice (and he did so choose) to obtain
possession of the very ground on which we had planted our Community,
and which had not yet been made irrevocably ours, by purchase.  It was
just the foundation that he desired.  Our beginnings might readily be
adapted to his great end.  The arrangements already completed would
work quietly into his system. So plausible looked his theory, and, more
than that, so practical,--such an air of reasonableness had he, by
patient thought, thrown over it,--each segment of it was contrived to
dovetail into all the rest with such a complicated applicability, and
so ready was he with a response for every objection, that, really, so
far as logic and argument went, he had the matter all his own way.

"But," said I, "whence can you, having no means of your own, derive the
enormous capital which is essential to this experiment?  State Street,
I imagine, would not draw its purser strings very liberally in aid of
such a speculation."

"I have the funds--as much, at least, as is needed for a
commencement--at command," he answered.  "They can be produced within a
month, if necessary."

My thoughts reverted to Zenobia.  It could only be her wealth which
Hollingsworth was appropriating so lavishly.  And on what conditions
was it to be had?  Did she fling it into the scheme with the
uncalculating generosity that characterizes a woman when it is her
impulse to be generous at all?  And did she fling herself along with
it?  But Hollingsworth did not volunteer an explanation.

"And have you no regrets," I inquired, "in overthrowing this fair
system of our new life, which has been planned so deeply, and is now
beginning to flourish so hopefully around us?  How beautiful it is,
and, so far as we can yet see, how practicable!  The ages have waited
for us, and here we are, the very first that have essayed to carry on
our mortal existence in love and mutual help!  Hollingsworth, I would
be loath to take the ruin of this enterprise upon my conscience."

"Then let it rest wholly upon mine!" he answered, knitting his black
brows.  "I see through the system.  It is full of
defects,--irremediable and damning ones!--from first to last, there is
nothing else!  I grasp it in my hand, and find no substance whatever.
There is not human nature in it."

"Why are you so secret in your operations?"  I asked.  "God forbid that
I should accuse you of intentional wrong; but the besetting sin of a
philanthropist, it appears to me, is apt to be a moral obliquity. His
sense of honor ceases to be the sense of other honorable men. At some
point of his course--I know not exactly when or where--he is tempted to
palter with the right, and can scarcely forbear persuading himself that
the importance of his public ends renders it allowable to throw aside
his private conscience.  Oh, my dear friend, beware this error!  If you
meditate the overthrow of this establishment, call together our
companions, state your design, support it with all your eloquence, but
allow them an opportunity of defending themselves."

"It does not suit me," said Hollingsworth.  "Nor is it my duty to do
so."

"I think it is," replied I.

Hollingsworth frowned; not in passion, but, like fate, inexorably.

"I will not argue the point," said he.  "What I desire to know of you
is,--and you can tell me in one word,--whether I am to look for your
cooperation in this great scheme of good?  Take it up with me!  Be my
brother in it!  It offers you (what you have told me, over and over
again, that you most need) a purpose in life, worthy of the extremest
self-devotion,--worthy of martyrdom, should God so order it!  In this
view, I present it to you.  You can greatly benefit mankind.  Your
peculiar faculties, as I shall direct them, are capable of being so
wrought into this enterprise that not one of them need lie idle. Strike
hands with me, and from this moment you shall never again feel the
languor and vague wretchedness of an indolent or half-occupied man.
There may be no more aimless beauty in your life; but, in its stead,
there shall be strength, courage, immitigable will,--everything that a
manly and generous nature should desire!  We shall succeed!  We shall
have done our best for this miserable world; and happiness (which never
comes but incidentally) will come to us unawares."

It seemed his intention to say no more.  But, after he had quite broken
off, his deep eyes filled with tears, and he held out both his hands to
me.

"Coverdale," he murmured, "there is not the man in this wide world whom
I can love as I could you.  Do not forsake me!"

As I look back upon this scene, through the coldness and dimness of so
many years, there is still a sensation as if Hollingsworth had caught
hold of my heart, and were pulling it towards him with an almost
irresistible force.  It is a mystery to me how I withstood it. But, in
truth, I saw in his scheme of philanthropy nothing but what was odious.
A loathsomeness that was to be forever in my daily work! A great black
ugliness of sin, which he proposed to collect out of a thousand human
hearts, and that we should spend our lives in an experiment of
transmuting it into virtue!  Had I but touched his extended hand,
Hollingsworth's magnetism would perhaps have penetrated me with his own
conception of all these matters.  But I stood aloof.  I fortified
myself with doubts whether his strength of purpose had not been too
gigantic for his integrity, impelling him to trample on considerations
that should have been paramount to every other.

"Is Zenobia to take a part in your enterprise?"  I asked.

"She is," said Hollingsworth.

"She!--the beautiful!--the gorgeous!"  I exclaimed.  "And how have you
prevailed with such a woman to work in this squalid element?"

"Through no base methods, as you seem to suspect," he answered; "but by
addressing whatever is best and noblest in her."

Hollingsworth was looking on the ground.  But, as he often did
so,--generally, indeed, in his habitual moods of thought,--I could not
judge whether it was from any special unwillingness now to meet my
eyes.  What it was that dictated my next question, I cannot precisely
say.  Nevertheless, it rose so inevitably into my mouth, and, as it
were, asked itself so involuntarily, that there must needs have been an
aptness in it.

"What is to become of Priscilla?"

Hollingsworth looked at me fiercely, and with glowing eyes.  He could
not have shown any other kind of expression than that, had he meant to
strike me with a sword.

"Why do you bring in the names of these women?" said he, after a moment
of pregnant silence.  "What have they to do with the proposal which I
make you?  I must have your answer!  Will you devote yourself, and
sacrifice all to this great end, and be my friend of friends forever?"

"In Heaven's name, Hollingsworth," cried I, getting angry, and glad to
be angry, because so only was it possible to oppose his tremendous
concentrativeness and indomitable will, "cannot you conceive that a man
may wish well to the world, and struggle for its good, on some other
plan than precisely that which you have laid down?  And will you cast
off a friend for no unworthiness, but merely because he stands upon his
right as an individual being, and looks at matters through his own
optics, instead of yours?"

"Be with me," said Hollingsworth, "or be against me!  There is no third
choice for you."

"Take this, then, as my decision," I answered.  "I doubt the wisdom of
your scheme.  Furthermore, I greatly fear that the methods by which you
allow yourself to pursue it are such as cannot stand the scrutiny of an
unbiassed conscience."

"And you will not join me?"

"No!"

I never said the word--and certainly can never have it to say
hereafter--that cost me a thousandth part so hard an effort as did that
one syllable.  The heart-pang was not merely figurative, but an
absolute torture of the breast.  I was gazing steadfastly at
Hollingsworth.  It seemed to me that it struck him, too, like a bullet.
A ghastly paleness--always so terrific on a swarthy face--overspread
his features.  There was a convulsive movement of his throat, as if he
were forcing down some words that struggled and fought for utterance.
Whether words of anger, or words of grief, I cannot tell; although many
and many a time I have vainly tormented myself with conjecturing which
of the two they were.  One other appeal to my friendship,--such as
once, already, Hollingsworth had made,--taking me in the revulsion that
followed a strenuous exercise of opposing will, would completely have
subdued me.  But he left the matter there.  "Well!" said he.

And that was all!  I should have been thankful for one word more, even
had it shot me through the heart, as mine did him.  But he did not
speak it; and, after a few moments, with one accord, we set to work
again, repairing the stone fence.  Hollingsworth, I observed, wrought
like a Titan; and, for my own part, I lifted stones which at this
day--or, in a calmer mood, at that one--I should no more have thought
it possible to stir than to carry off the gates of Gaza on my back.



XVI. LEAVE-TAKINGS

A few days after the tragic passage-at-arms between Hollingsworth and
me, I appeared at the dinner-table actually dressed in a coat, instead
of my customary blouse; with a satin cravat, too, a white vest, and
several other things that made me seem strange and outlandish to
myself.  As for my companions, this unwonted spectacle caused a great
stir upon the wooden benches that bordered either side of our homely
board.

"What's in the wind now, Miles?" asked one of them.  "Are you deserting
us?"

"Yes, for a week or two," said I. "It strikes me that my health demands
a little relaxation of labor, and a short visit to the seaside, during
the dog-days."

"You look like it!" grumbled Silas Foster, not greatly pleased with the
idea of losing an efficient laborer before the stress of the season was
well over.  "Now, here's a pretty fellow!  His shoulders have broadened
a matter of six inches since he came among us; he can do his day's
work, if he likes, with any man or ox on the farm; and yet he talks
about going to the seashore for his health!  Well, well, old woman,"
added he to his wife, "let me have a plateful of that pork and cabbage!
I begin to feel in a very weakly way.  When the others have had their
turn, you and I will take a jaunt to Newport or Saratoga!"


"Well, but, Mr. Foster," said I, "you must allow me to take a little
breath."

"Breath!" retorted the old yeoman.  "Your lungs have the play of a pair
of blacksmith's bellows already.  What on earth do you want more?  But
go along!  I understand the business.  We shall never see your face
here again.  Here ends the reformation of the world, so far as Miles
Coverdale has a hand in it!"

"By no means," I replied.  "I am resolute to die in the last ditch, for
the good of the cause."

"Die in a ditch!" muttered gruff Silas, with genuine Yankee intolerance
of any intermission of toil, except on Sunday, the Fourth of July, the
autumnal cattle-show, Thanksgiving, or the annual Fast,--"die in a
ditch!  I believe, in my conscience, you would, if there were no
steadier means than your own labor to keep you out of it!"

The truth was, that an intolerable discontent and irksomeness had come
over me.  Blithedale was no longer what it had been.  Everything was
suddenly faded.  The sunburnt and arid aspect of our woods and
pastures, beneath the August sky, did but imperfectly symbolize the
lack of dew and moisture, that, since yesterday, as it were, had
blighted my fields of thought, and penetrated to the innermost and
shadiest of my contemplative recesses.  The change will be recognized
by many, who, after a period of happiness, have endeavored to go on
with the same kind of life, in the same scene, in spite of the
alteration or withdrawal of some principal circumstance.  They discover
(what heretofore, perhaps, they had not known) that it was this which
gave the bright color and vivid reality to the whole affair.

I stood on other terms than before, not only with Hollingsworth, but
with Zenobia and Priscilla.  As regarded the two latter, it was that
dreamlike and miserable sort of change that denies you the privilege to
complain, because you can assert no positive injury, nor lay your
finger on anything tangible.  It is a matter which you do not see, but
feel, and which, when you try to analyze it, seems to lose its very
existence, and resolve itself into a sickly humor of your own. Your
understanding, possibly, may put faith in this denial.  But your heart
will not so easily rest satisfied.  It incessantly remonstrates,
though, most of the time, in a bass-note, which you do not separately
distinguish; but, now and then, with a sharp cry, importunate to be
heard, and resolute to claim belief.  "Things are not as they were!" it
keeps saying.  "You shall not impose on me!  I will never be quiet!  I
will throb painfully!  I will be heavy, and desolate, and shiver with
cold!  For I, your deep heart, know when to be miserable, as once I
knew when to be happy!  All is changed for us! You are beloved no
more!"  And were my life to be spent over again, I would invariably
lend my ear to this Cassandra of the inward depths, however clamorous
the music and the merriment of a more superficial region.

My outbreak with Hollingsworth, though never definitely known to our
associates, had really an effect upon the moral atmosphere of the
Community.  It was incidental to the closeness of relationship into
which we had brought ourselves, that an unfriendly state of feeling
could not occur between any two members without the whole society being
more or less commoted and made uncomfortable thereby.  This species of
nervous sympathy (though a pretty characteristic enough, sentimentally
considered, and apparently betokening an actual bond of love among us)
was yet found rather inconvenient in its practical operation, mortal
tempers being so infirm and variable as they are. If one of us happened
to give his neighbor a box on the ear, the tingle was immediately felt
on the same side of everybody's head. Thus, even on the supposition
that we were far less quarrelsome than the rest of the world, a great
deal of time was necessarily wasted in rubbing our ears.

Musing on all these matters, I felt an inexpressible longing for at
least a temporary novelty.  I thought of going across the Rocky
Mountains, or to Europe, or up the Nile; of offering myself a volunteer
on the Exploring Expedition; of taking a ramble of years, no matter in
what direction, and coming back on the other side of the world.  Then,
should the colonists of Blithedale have established their enterprise on
a permanent basis, I might fling aside my pilgrim staff and dusty
shoon, and rest as peacefully here as elsewhere.  Or, in case
Hollingsworth should occupy the ground with his School of Reform, as he
now purposed, I might plead earthly guilt enough, by that time, to give
me what I was inclined to think the only trustworthy hold on his
affections.  Meanwhile, before deciding on any ultimate plan, I
determined to remove myself to a little distance, and take an exterior
view of what we had all been about.

In truth, it was dizzy work, amid such fermentation of opinions as was
going on in the general brain of the Community.  It was a kind of
Bedlam, for the time being, although out of the very thoughts that were
wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, and pure,
and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble and
happy life.  But, as matters now were, I felt myself (and, having a
decided tendency towards the actual, I never liked to feel it) getting
quite out of my reckoning, with regard to the existing state of the
world.  I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of a world it
was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be.  It was
impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything
in nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so; that the
crust of the earth in many places was broken, and its whole surface
portentously upheaving; that it was a day of crisis, and that we
ourselves were in the critical vortex. Our great globe floated in the
atmosphere of infinite space like an unsubstantial bubble.  No
sagacious man will long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively
among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning
into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new
observation from that old standpoint.

It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with
the conservatives, the writers of "The North American Review," the
merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those
respectable old blockheads who still, in this intangibility and
mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had
not come into vogue since yesterday morning.

The brethren took leave of me with cordial kindness; and as for the
sisterhood, I had serious thoughts of kissing them all round, but
forbore to do so, because, in all such general salutations, the penance
is fully equal to the pleasure.  So I kissed none of them; and nobody,
to say the truth, seemed to expect it.

"Do you wish me," I said to Zenobia, "to announce in town, and at the
watering-places, your purpose to deliver a course of lectures on the
rights of women?"

"Women possess no rights," said Zenobia, with a half-melancholy smile;
"or, at all events, only little girls and grandmothers would have the
force to exercise them."

She gave me her hand freely and kindly, and looked at me, I thought,
with a pitying expression in her eyes; nor was there any settled light
of joy in them on her own behalf, but a troubled and passionate flame,
flickering and fitful.

"I regret, on the whole, that you are leaving us," she said; "and all
the more, since I feel that this phase of our life is finished, and can
never be lived over again.  Do you know, Mr. Coverdale, that I have
been several times on the point of making you my confidant, for lack of
a better and wiser one?  But you are too young to be my father
confessor; and you would not thank me for treating you like one of
those good little handmaidens who share the bosom secrets of a
tragedy-queen."

"I would, at least, be loyal and faithful," answered I; "and would
counsel you with an honest purpose, if not wisely."

"Yes," said Zenobia, "you would be only too wise, too honest. Honesty
and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's expense!"

"Ah, Zenobia," I exclaimed, "if you would but let me speak!"

"By no means," she replied, "especially when you have just resumed the
whole series of social conventionalisms, together with that
strait-bodied coat.  I would as lief open my heart to a lawyer or a
clergyman!  No, no, Mr. Coverdale; if I choose a counsellor, in the
present aspect of my affairs, it must be either an angel or a madman;
and I rather apprehend that the latter would be likeliest of the two to
speak the fitting word.  It needs a wild steersman when we voyage
through chaos!  The anchor is up,--farewell!"

Priscilla, as soon as dinner was over, had betaken herself into a
corner, and set to work on a little purse.  As I approached her, she
let her eyes rest on me with a calm, serious look; for, with all her
delicacy of nerves, there was a singular self-possession in Priscilla,
and her sensibilities seemed to lie sheltered from ordinary commotion,
like the water in a deep well.

"Will you give me that purse, Priscilla," said I, "as a parting
keepsake?"

"Yes," she answered, "if you will wait till it is finished."

"I must not wait, even for that," I replied.  "Shall I find you here,
on my return?"

"I never wish to go away," said she.

"I have sometimes thought," observed I, smiling, "that you, Priscilla,
are a little prophetess, or, at least, that you have spiritual
intimations respecting matters which are dark to us grosser people. If
that be the case, I should like to ask you what is about to happen; for
I am tormented with a strong foreboding that, were I to return even so
soon as to-morrow morning, I should find everything changed. Have you
any impressions of this nature?"

"Ah, no," said Priscilla, looking at me apprehensively.  "If any such
misfortune is coming, the shadow has not reached me yet.  Heaven
forbid!  I should be glad if there might never be any change, but one
summer follow another, and all just like this."

"No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike," said I,
with a degree of Orphic wisdom that astonished myself.  "Times change,
and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much
the worse for us.  Good-by, Priscilla!"

I gave her hand a pressure, which, I think, she neither resisted nor
returned.  Priscilla's heart was deep, but of small compass; it had
room but for a very few dearest ones, among whom she never reckoned me.

On the doorstep I met Hollingsworth.  I had a momentary impulse to hold
out my hand, or at least to give a parting nod, but resisted both.
When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not well to
mock the sacred past with any show of those commonplace civilities that
belong to ordinary intercourse.  Being dead henceforth to him, and he
to me, there could be no propriety in our chilling one another with the
touch of two corpse-like hands, or playing at looks of courtesy with
eyes that were impenetrable beneath the glaze and the film.  We passed,
therefore, as if mutually invisible.

I can nowise explain what sort of whim, prank, or perversity it was,
that, after all these leave-takings, induced me to go to the pigsty,
and take leave of the swine!  There they lay, buried as deeply among
the straw as they could burrow, four huge black grunters, the very
symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort.  They were asleep,
drawing short and heavy breaths, which heaved their big sides up and
down.  Unclosing their eyes, however, at my approach, they looked dimly
forth at the outer world, and simultaneously uttered a gentle grunt;
not putting themselves to the trouble of an additional breath for that
particular purpose, but grunting with their ordinary inhalation.  They
were involved, and almost stifled and buried alive, in their own
corporeal substance.  The very unreadiness and oppression wherewith
these greasy citizens gained breath enough to keep their life-machinery
in sluggish movement appeared to make them only the more sensible of
the ponderous and fat satisfaction of their existence.  Peeping at me
an instant out of their small, red, hardly perceptible eyes, they dropt
asleep again; yet not so far asleep but that their unctuous bliss was
still present to them, betwixt dream and reality.

"You must come back in season to eat part of a spare-rib," said Silas
Foster, giving my hand a mighty squeeze.  "I shall have these fat
fellows hanging up by the heels, heads downward, pretty soon, I tell
you!"

"O cruel Silas, what a horrible idea!" cried I. "All the rest of us,
men, women, and livestock, save only these four porkers, are bedevilled
with one grief or another; they alone are happy,--and you mean to cut
their throats and eat them!  It would be more for the general comfort
to let them eat us; and bitter and sour morsels we should be!"



XVII. THE HOTEL

Arriving in town (where my bachelor-rooms, long before this time, had
received some other occupant), I established myself, for a day or two,
in a certain, respectable hotel.  It was situated somewhat aloof from
my former track in life; my present mood inclining me to avoid most of
my old companions, from whom I was now sundered by other interests, and
who would have been likely enough to amuse themselves at the expense of
the amateur workingman.  The hotel-keeper put me into a back room of
the third story of his spacious establishment. The day was lowering,
with occasional gusts of rain, and an ugly tempered east wind, which
seemed to come right off the chill and melancholy sea, hardly mitigated
by sweeping over the roofs, and amalgamating itself with the dusky
element of city smoke.  All the effeminacy of past days had returned
upon me at once.  Summer as it still was, I ordered a coal fire in the
rusty grate, and was glad to find myself growing a little too warm with
an artificial temperature.

My sensations were those of a traveller, long sojourning in remote
regions, and at length sitting down again amid customs once familiar.
There was a newness and an oldness oddly combining themselves into one
impression.  It made me acutely sensible how strange a piece of
mosaic-work had lately been wrought into my life.  True, if you look at
it in one way, it had been only a summer in the country.  But,
considered in a profounder relation, it was part of another age, a
different state of society, a segment of an existence peculiar in its
aims and methods, a leaf of some mysterious volume interpolated into
the current history which time was writing off.  At one moment, the
very circumstances now surrounding me--my coal fire and the dingy room
in the bustling hotel--appeared far off and intangible; the next
instant Blithedale looked vague, as if it were at a distance both in
time and space, and so shadowy that a question might be raised whether
the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of a
speculative man.  I had never before experienced a mood that so robbed
the actual world of its solidity.  It nevertheless involved a charm, on
which--a devoted epicure of my own emotions--I resolved to pause, and
enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away.

Whatever had been my taste for solitude and natural scenery, yet the
thick, foggy, stifled element of cities, the entangled life of many men
together, sordid as it was, and empty of the beautiful, took quite as
strenuous a hold upon my mind.  I felt as if there could never be
enough of it.  Each characteristic sound was too suggestive to be
passed over unnoticed.  Beneath and around me, I heard the stir of the
hotel; the loud voices of guests, landlord, or bar-keeper; steps
echoing on the staircase; the ringing of a bell, announcing arrivals or
departures; the porter lumbering past my door with baggage, which he
thumped down upon the floors of neighboring chambers; the lighter feet
of chambermaids scudding along the passages;--it is ridiculous to think
what an interest they had for me! From the street came the tumult of
the pavements, pervading the whole house with a continual uproar, so
broad and deep that only an unaccustomed ear would dwell upon it.  A
company of the city soldiery, with a full military band, marched in
front of the hotel, invisible to me, but stirringly audible both by its
foot-tramp and the clangor of its instruments.  Once or twice all the
city bells jangled together, announcing a fire, which brought out the
engine-men and their machines, like an army with its artillery rushing
to battle. Hour by hour the clocks in many steeples responded one to
another.

In some public hall, not a great way off, there seemed to be an
exhibition of a mechanical diorama; for three times during the day
occurred a repetition of obstreperous music, winding up with the rattle
of imitative cannon and musketry, and a huge final explosion. Then
ensued the applause of the spectators, with clap of hands and thump of
sticks, and the energetic pounding of their heels.  All this was just
as valuable, in its way, as the sighing of the breeze among the
birch-trees that overshadowed Eliot's pulpit.

Yet I felt a hesitation about plunging into this muddy tide of human
activity and pastime.  It suited me better, for the present, to linger
on the brink, or hover in the air above it.  So I spent the first day,
and the greater part of the second, in the laziest manner possible, in
a rocking-chair, inhaling the fragrance of a series of cigars, with my
legs and slippered feet horizontally disposed, and in my hand a novel
purchased of a railroad bibliopolist.  The gradual waste of my cigar
accomplished itself with an easy and gentle expenditure of breath.  My
book was of the dullest, yet had a sort of sluggish flow, like that of
a stream in which your boat is as often aground as afloat.  Had there
been a more impetuous rush, a more absorbing passion of the narrative,
I should the sooner have struggled out of its uneasy current, and have
given myself up to the swell and subsidence of my thoughts.  But, as it
was, the torpid life of the book served as an unobtrusive accompaniment
to the life within me and about me.  At intervals, however, when its
effect grew a little too soporific,--not for my patience, but for the
possibility of keeping my eyes open, I bestirred myself, started from
the rocking-chair, and looked out of the window.

A gray sky; the weathercock of a steeple that rose beyond the opposite
range of buildings, pointing from the eastward; a sprinkle of small,
spiteful-looking raindrops on the window-pane.  In that ebb-tide of my
energies, had I thought of venturing abroad, these tokens would have
checked the abortive purpose.

After several such visits to the window, I found myself getting pretty
well acquainted with that little portion of the backside of the
universe which it presented to my view.  Over against the hotel and its
adjacent houses, at the distance of forty or fifty yards, was the rear
of a range of buildings which appeared to be spacious, modern, and
calculated for fashionable residences.  The interval between was
apportioned into grass-plots, and here and there an apology for a
garden, pertaining severally to these dwellings.  There were
apple-trees, and pear and peach trees, too, the fruit on which looked
singularly large, luxuriant, and abundant, as well it might, in a
situation so warm and sheltered, and where the soil had doubtless been
enriched to a more than natural fertility.  In two or three places
grapevines clambered upon trellises, and bore clusters already purple,
and promising the richness of Malta or Madeira in their ripened juice.
The blighting winds of our rigid climate could not molest these trees
and vines; the sunshine, though descending late into this area, and too
early intercepted by the height of the surrounding houses, yet lay
tropically there, even when less than temperate in every other region.
Dreary as was the day, the scene was illuminated by not a few sparrows
and other birds, which spread their wings, and flitted and fluttered,
and alighted now here, now there, and busily scratched their food out
of the wormy earth.  Most of these winged people seemed to have their
domicile in a robust and healthy buttonwood-tree.  It aspired upward,
high above the roofs of the houses, and spread a dense head of foliage
half across the area.

There was a cat--as there invariably is in such places--who evidently
thought herself entitled to the privileges of forest life in this close
heart of city conventionalisms.  I watched her creeping along the low,
flat roofs of the offices, descending a flight of wooden steps, gliding
among the grass, and besieging the buttonwood-tree, with murderous
purpose against its feathered citizens.  But, after all, they were
birds of city breeding, and doubtless knew how to guard themselves
against the peculiar perils of their position.

Bewitching to my fancy are all those nooks and crannies where Nature,
like a stray partridge, hides her head among the long-established
haunts of men!  It is likewise to be remarked, as a general rule, that
there is far more of the picturesque, more truth to native and
characteristic tendencies, and vastly greater suggestiveness in the
back view of a residence, whether in town or country, than in its
front.  The latter is always artificial; it is meant for the world's
eye, and is therefore a veil and a concealment.  Realities keep in the
rear, and put forward an advance guard of show and humbug.  The
posterior aspect of any old farmhouse, behind which a railroad has
unexpectedly been opened, is so different from that looking upon the
immemorial highway, that the spectator gets new ideas of rural life and
individuality in the puff or two of steam-breath which shoots him past
the premises.  In a city, the distinction between what is offered to
the public and what is kept for the family is certainly not less
striking.

But, to return to my window at the back of the hotel.  Together with a
due contemplation of the fruit-trees, the grapevines, the
buttonwood-tree, the cat, the birds, and many other particulars, I
failed not to study the row of fashionable dwellings to which all these
appertained.  Here, it must be confessed, there was a general sameness.
From the upper story to the first floor, they were so much alike, that
I could only conceive of the inhabitants as cut out on one identical
pattern, like little wooden toy-people of German manufacture.  One
long, united roof, with its thousands of slates glittering in the rain,
extended over the whole.  After the distinctness of separate characters
to which I had recently been accustomed, it perplexed and annoyed me
not to be able to resolve this combination of human interests into
well-defined elements.  It seemed hardly worth while for more than one
of those families to be in existence, since they all had the same
glimpse of the sky, all looked into the same area, all received just
their equal share of sunshine through the front windows, and all
listened to precisely the same noises of the street on which they
boarded.  Men are so much alike in their nature, that they grow
intolerable unless varied by their circumstances.

Just about this time a waiter entered my room.  The truth was, I had
rung the bell and ordered a sherry-cobbler.


"Can you tell me," I inquired, "what families reside in any of those
houses opposite?"

"The one right opposite is a rather stylish boarding-house," said the
waiter.  "Two of the gentlemen boarders keep horses at the stable of
our establishment.  They do things in very good style, sir, the people
that live there."

I might have found out nearly as much for myself, on examining the
house a little more closely, in one of the upper chambers I saw a young
man in a dressing-gown, standing before the glass and brushing his hair
for a quarter of an hour together.  He then spent an equal space of
time in the elaborate arrangement of his cravat, and finally made his
appearance in a dress-coat, which I suspected to be newly come from the
tailor's, and now first put on for a dinner-party.  At a window of the
next story below, two children, prettily dressed, were looking out.  By
and by a middle-aged gentleman came softly behind them, kissed the
little girl, and playfully pulled the little boy's ear.  It was a papa,
no doubt, just come in from his counting-room or office; and anon
appeared mamma, stealing as softly behind papa as he had stolen behind
the children, and laying her hand on his shoulder to surprise him.
Then followed a kiss between papa and mamma; but a noiseless one, for
the children did not turn their heads.

"I bless God for these good folks!" thought I to myself.  "I have not
seen a prettier bit of nature, in all my summer in the country, than
they have shown me here, in a rather stylish boarding-house.  I will
pay them a little more attention by and by."

On the first floor, an iron balustrade ran along in front of the tall
and spacious windows, evidently belonging to a back drawing-room; and
far into the interior, through the arch of the sliding-doors, I could
discern a gleam from the windows of the front apartment.  There were no
signs of present occupancy in this suite of rooms; the curtains being
enveloped in a protective covering, which allowed but a small portion
of their crimson material to be seen.  But two housemaids were
industriously at work; so that there was good prospect that the
boarding-house might not long suffer from the absence of its most
expensive and profitable guests.  Meanwhile, until they should appear,
I cast my eyes downward to the lower regions.  There, in the dusk that
so early settles into such places, I saw the red glow of the kitchen
range.  The hot cook, or one of her subordinates, with a ladle in her
hand, came to draw a cool breath at the back door.  As soon as she
disappeared, an Irish man-servant, in a white jacket, crept slyly
forth, and threw away the fragments of a china dish, which,
unquestionably, he had just broken.  Soon afterwards, a lady, showily
dressed, with a curling front of what must have been false hair, and
reddish-brown, I suppose, in hue,--though my remoteness allowed me only
to guess at such particulars,--this respectable mistress of the
boarding-house made a momentary transit across the kitchen window, and
appeared no more.  It was her final, comprehensive glance, in order to
make sure that soup, fish, and flesh were in a proper state of
readiness, before the serving up of dinner.

There was nothing else worth noticing about the house, unless it be
that on the peak of one of the dormer windows which opened out of the
roof sat a dove, looking very dreary and forlorn; insomuch that I
wondered why she chose to sit there, in the chilly rain, while her
kindred were doubtless nestling in a warm and comfortable dove-cote.
All at once this dove spread her wings, and, launching herself in the
air, came flying so straight across the intervening space, that I fully
expected her to alight directly on my window-sill.  In the latter part
of her course, however, she swerved aside, flew upward, and vanished,
as did, likewise, the slight, fantastic pathos with which I had
invested her.



XVIII. THE BOARDING-HOUSE

The next day, as soon as I thought of looking again towards the
opposite house, there sat the dove again, on the peak of the same
dormer window!  It was by no means an early hour, for the preceding
evening I had ultimately mustered enterprise enough to visit the
theatre, had gone late to bed, and slept beyond all limit, in my
remoteness from Silas Foster's awakening horn.  Dreams had tormented me
throughout the night.  The train of thoughts which, for months past,
had worn a track through my mind, and to escape which was one of my
chief objects in leaving Blithedale, kept treading remorselessly to and
fro in their old footsteps, while slumber left me impotent to regulate
them.  It was not till I had quitted my three friends that they first
began to encroach upon my dreams.  In those of the last night,
Hollingsworth and Zenobia, standing on either side of my bed, had bent
across it to exchange a kiss of passion. Priscilla, beholding
this,--for she seemed to be peeping in at the chamber window,--had
melted gradually away, and left only the sadness of her expression in
my heart.  There it still lingered, after I awoke; one of those
unreasonable sadnesses that you know not how to deal with, because it
involves nothing for common-sense to clutch.

It was a gray and dripping forenoon; gloomy enough in town, and still
gloomier in the haunts to which my recollections persisted in
transporting me.  For, in spite of my efforts to think of something
else, I thought how the gusty rain was drifting over the slopes and
valleys of our farm; how wet must be the foliage that overshadowed the
pulpit rock; how cheerless, in such a day, my hermitage--the
tree-solitude of my owl-like humors--in the vine-encircled heart of the
tall pine!  It was a phase of homesickness.  I had wrenched myself too
suddenly out of an accustomed sphere.  There was no choice, now, but to
bear the pang of whatever heartstrings were snapt asunder, and that
illusive torment (like the ache of a limb long ago cut off) by which a
past mode of life prolongs itself into the succeeding one.  I was full
of idle and shapeless regrets.  The thought impressed itself upon me
that I had left duties unperformed. With the power, perhaps, to act in
the place of destiny and avert misfortune from my friends, I had
resigned them to their fate.  That cold tendency, between instinct and
intellect, which made me pry with a speculative interest into people's
passions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing
my heart.

But a man cannot always decide for himself whether his own heart is
cold or warm.  It now impresses me that, if I erred at all in regard to
Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, it was through too much
sympathy, rather than too little.

To escape the irksomeness of these meditations, I resumed my post at
the window.  At first sight, there was nothing new to be noticed. The
general aspect of affairs was the same as yesterday, except that the
more decided inclemency of to-day had driven the sparrows to shelter,
and kept the cat within doors; whence, however, she soon emerged,
pursued by the cook, and with what looked like the better half of a
roast chicken in her mouth.  The young man in the dress-coat was
invisible; the two children, in the story below, seemed to be romping
about the room, under the superintendence of a nursery-maid.  The
damask curtains of the drawing-room, on the first floor, were now fully
displayed, festooned gracefully from top to bottom of the windows,
which extended from the ceiling to the carpet. A narrower window, at
the left of the drawing-room, gave light to what was probably a small
boudoir, within which I caught the faintest imaginable glimpse of a
girl's figure, in airy drapery.  Her arm was in regular movement, as if
she were busy with her German worsted, or some other such pretty and
unprofitable handiwork.

While intent upon making out this girlish shape, I became sensible that
a figure had appeared at one of the windows of the drawing-room. There
was a presentiment in my mind; or perhaps my first glance, imperfect
and sidelong as it was, had sufficed to convey subtile information of
the truth.  At any rate, it was with no positive surprise, but as if I
had all along expected the incident, that, directing my eyes
thitherward, I beheld--like a full-length picture, in the space between
the heavy festoons of the window curtains--no other than Zenobia!  At
the same instant, my thoughts made sure of the identity of the figure
in the boudoir.  It could only be Priscilla.

Zenobia was attired, not in the almost rustic costume which she had
heretofore worn, but in a fashionable morning-dress.  There was,
nevertheless, one familiar point.  She had, as usual, a flower in her
hair, brilliant and of a rare variety, else it had not been Zenobia.
After a brief pause at the window, she turned away, exemplifying, in
the few steps that removed her out of sight, that noble and beautiful
motion which characterized her as much as any other personal charm. Not
one woman in a thousand could move so admirably as Zenobia.  Many women
can sit gracefully; some can stand gracefully; and a few, perhaps, can
assume a series of graceful positions.  But natural movement is the
result and expression of the whole being, and cannot be well and nobly
performed unless responsive to something in the character.  I often
used to think that music--light and airy, wild and passionate, or the
full harmony of stately marches, in accordance with her varying
mood--should have attended Zenobia's footsteps.

I waited for her reappearance.  It was one peculiarity, distinguishing
Zenobia from most of her sex, that she needed for her moral well-being,
and never would forego, a large amount of physical exercise.  At
Blithedale, no inclemency of sky or muddiness of earth had ever impeded
her daily walks.  Here in town, she probably preferred to tread the
extent of the two drawing-rooms, and measure out the miles by spaces of
forty feet, rather than bedraggle her skirts over the sloppy pavements.
Accordingly, in about the time requisite to pass through the arch of
the sliding-doors to the front window, and to return upon her steps,
there she stood again, between the festoons of the crimson curtains.
But another personage was now added to the scene.  Behind Zenobia
appeared that face which I had first encountered in the wood-path; the
man who had passed, side by side with her, in such mysterious
familiarity and estrangement, beneath my vine curtained hermitage in
the tall pine-tree.  It was Westervelt.  And though he was looking
closely over her shoulder, it still seemed to me, as on the former
occasion, that Zenobia repelled him,--that, perchance, they mutually
repelled each other, by some incompatibility of their spheres.

This impression, however, might have been altogether the result of
fancy and prejudice in me.  The distance was so great as to obliterate
any play of feature by which I might otherwise have been made a
partaker of their counsels.

There now needed only Hollingsworth and old Moodie to complete the knot
of characters, whom a real intricacy of events, greatly assisted by my
method of insulating them from other relations, had kept so long upon
my mental stage, as actors in a drama.  In itself, perhaps, it was no
very remarkable event that they should thus come across me, at the
moment when I imagined myself free.  Zenobia, as I well knew, had
retained an establishment in town, and had not unfrequently withdrawn
herself from Blithedale during brief intervals, on one of which
occasions she had taken Priscilla along with her.  Nevertheless, there
seemed something fatal in the coincidence that had borne me to this one
spot, of all others in a great city, and transfixed me there, and
compelled me again to waste my already wearied sympathies on affairs
which were none of mine, and persons who cared little for me.  It
irritated my nerves; it affected me with a kind of heart-sickness.
After the effort which it cost me to fling them off,--after
consummating my escape, as I thought, from these goblins of flesh and
blood, and pausing to revive myself with a breath or two of an
atmosphere in which they should have no share,--it was a positive
despair to find the same figures arraying themselves before me, and
presenting their old problem in a shape that made it more insoluble
than ever.

I began to long for a catastrophe.  If the noble temper of
Hollingsworth's soul were doomed to be utterly corrupted by the too
powerful purpose which had grown out of what was noblest in him; if the
rich and generous qualities of Zenobia's womanhood might not save her;
if Priscilla must perish by her tenderness and faith, so simple and so
devout, then be it so!  Let it all come!  As for me, I would look on,
as it seemed my part to do, understandingly, if my intellect could
fathom the meaning and the moral, and, at all events, reverently and
sadly.  The curtain fallen, I would pass onward with my poor individual
life, which was now attenuated of much of its proper substance, and
diffused among many alien interests.

Meanwhile, Zenobia and her companion had retreated from the window.
Then followed an interval, during which I directed my eves towards the
figure in the boudoir.  Most certainly it was Priscilla, although
dressed with a novel and fanciful elegance.  The vague perception of
it, as viewed so far off, impressed me as if she had suddenly passed
out of a chrysalis state and put forth wings.  Her hands were not now
in motion.  She had dropt her work, and sat with her head thrown back,
in the same attitude that I had seen several times before, when she
seemed to be listening to an imperfectly distinguished sound.

Again the two figures in the drawing-room became visible.  They were
now a little withdrawn from the window, face to face, and, as I could
see by Zenobia's emphatic gestures, were discussing some subject in
which she, at least, felt a passionate concern.  By and by she broke
away, and vanished beyond my ken.  Westervelt approached the window,
and leaned his forehead against a pane of glass, displaying the sort of
smile on his handsome features which, when I before met him, had let me
into the secret of his gold-bordered teeth.  Every human being, when
given over to the Devil, is sure to have the wizard mark upon him, in
one form or another.  I fancied that this smile, with its peculiar
revelation, was the Devil's signet on the Professor.

This man, as I had soon reason to know, was endowed with a cat-like
circumspection; and though precisely the most unspiritual quality in
the world, it was almost as effective as spiritual insight in making
him acquainted with whatever it suited him to discover.  He now proved
it, considerably to my discomfiture, by detecting and recognizing me,
at my post of observation.  Perhaps I ought to have blushed at being
caught in such an evident scrutiny of Professor Westervelt and his
affairs.  Perhaps I did blush.  Be that as it might, I retained
presence of mind enough not to make my position yet more irksome by the
poltroonery of drawing back.

Westervelt looked into the depths of the drawing-room, and beckoned.
Immediately afterwards Zenobia appeared at the window, with color much
heightened, and eyes which, as my conscience whispered me, were
shooting bright arrows, barbed with scorn, across the intervening
space, directed full at my sensibilities as a gentleman.  If the truth
must be told, far as her flight-shot was, those arrows hit the mark.
She signified her recognition of me by a gesture with her head and
hand, comprising at once a salutation and dismissal.  The next moment
she administered one of those pitiless rebukes which a woman always has
at hand, ready for any offence (and which she so seldom spares on due
occasion), by letting down a white linen curtain between the festoons
of the damask ones.  It fell like the drop-curtain of a theatre, in the
interval between the acts.

Priscilla had disappeared from the boudoir.  But the dove still kept
her desolate perch on the peak of the attic window.



XIX. ZENOBIA'S DRAWING-ROOM

The remainder of the day, so far as I was concerned, was spent in
meditating on these recent incidents.  I contrived, and alternately
rejected, innumerable methods of accounting for the presence of Zenobia
and Priscilla, and the connection of Westervelt with both. It must be
owned, too, that I had a keen, revengeful sense of the insult inflicted
by Zenobia's scornful recognition, and more particularly by her letting
down the curtain; as if such were the proper barrier to be interposed
between a character like hers and a perceptive faculty like mine.  For,
was mine a mere vulgar curiosity? Zenobia should have known me better
than to suppose it.  She should have been able to appreciate that
quality of the intellect and the heart which impelled me (often against
my own will, and to the detriment of my own comfort) to live in other
lives, and to endeavor--by generous sympathies, by delicate intuitions,
by taking note of things too slight for record, and by bringing my
human spirit into manifold accordance with the companions whom God
assigned me--to learn the secret which was hidden even from themselves.

Of all possible observers, methought a woman like Zenobia and a man
like Hollingsworth should have selected me.  And now when the event has
long been past, I retain the same opinion of my fitness for the office.
True, I might have condemned them.  Had I been judge as well as
witness, my sentence might have been stern as that of destiny itself.
But, still, no trait of original nobility of character, no struggle
against temptation,--no iron necessity of will, on the one hand, nor
extenuating circumstance to be derived from passion and despair, on the
other,--no remorse that might coexist with error, even if powerless to
prevent it,--no proud repentance that should claim retribution as a
meed,--would go unappreciated.  True, again, I might give my full
assent to the punishment which was sure to follow. But it would be
given mournfully, and with undiminished love.  And, after all was
finished, I would come as if to gather up the white ashes of those who
had perished at the stake, and to tell the world--the wrong being now
atoned for--how much had perished there which it had never yet known
how to praise.

I sat in my rocking-chair, too far withdrawn from the window to expose
myself to another rebuke like that already inflicted.  My eyes still
wandered towards the opposite house, but without effecting any new
discoveries.  Late in the afternoon, the weathercock on the church
spire indicated a change of wind; the sun shone dimly out, as if the
golden wine of its beams were mingled half-and-half with water.
Nevertheless, they kindled up the whole range of edifices, threw a glow
over the windows, glistened on the wet roofs, and, slowly withdrawing
upward, perched upon the chimney-tops; thence they took a higher
flight, and lingered an instant on the tip of the spire, making it the
final point of more cheerful light in the whole sombre scene.  The next
moment, it was all gone.  The twilight fell into the area like a shower
of dusky snow, and before it was quite dark, the gong of the hotel
summoned me to tea.

When I returned to my chamber, the glow of an astral lamp was
penetrating mistily through the white curtain of Zenobia's
drawing-room.  The shadow of a passing figure was now and then cast
upon this medium, but with too vague an outline for even my adventurous
conjectures to read the hieroglyphic that it presented.

All at once, it occurred to me how very absurd was my behavior in thus
tormenting myself with crazy hypotheses as to what was going on within
that drawing-room, when it was at my option to be personally present
there, My relations with Zenobia, as yet unchanged,--as a familiar
friend, and associated in the same life-long enterprise,--gave me the
right, and made it no more than kindly courtesy demanded, to call on
her.  Nothing, except our habitual independence of conventional rules
at Blithedale, could have kept me from sooner recognizing this duty.
At all events, it should now be performed.

In compliance with this sudden impulse, I soon found myself actually
within the house, the rear of which, for two days past, I had been so
sedulously watching.  A servant took my card, and, immediately
returning, ushered me upstairs.  On the way, I heard a rich, and, as it
were, triumphant burst of music from a piano, in which I felt Zenobia's
character, although heretofore I had known nothing of her skill upon
the instrument.  Two or three canary-birds, excited by this gush of
sound, sang piercingly, and did their utmost to produce a kindred
melody.  A bright illumination streamed through, the door of the front
drawing-room; and I had barely stept across the threshold before
Zenobia came forward to meet me, laughing, and with an extended hand.

"Ah, Mr. Coverdale," said she, still smiling, but, as I thought, with a
good deal of scornful anger underneath, "it has gratified me to see the
interest which you continue to take in my affairs!  I have long
recognized you as a sort of transcendental Yankee, with all the native
propensity of your countrymen to investigate matters that come within
their range, but rendered almost poetical, in your case, by the refined
methods which you adopt for its gratification.  After all, it was an
unjustifiable stroke, on my part,--was it not?--to let down the window
curtain!"

"I cannot call it a very wise one," returned I, with a secret
bitterness, which, no doubt, Zenobia appreciated.  "It is really
impossible to hide anything in this world, to say nothing of the next.
All that we ought to ask, therefore, is, that the witnesses of our
conduct, and the speculators on our motives, should be capable of
taking the highest view which the circumstances of the case may admit.
So much being secured, I, for one, would be most happy in feeling
myself followed everywhere by an indefatigable human sympathy."

"We must trust for intelligent sympathy to our guardian angels, if any
there be," said Zenobia.  "As long as the only spectator of my poor
tragedy is a young man at the window of his hotel, I must still claim
the liberty to drop the curtain."

While this passed, as Zenobia's hand was extended, I had applied the
very slightest touch of my fingers to her own.  In spite of an external
freedom, her manner made me sensible that we stood upon no real terms
of confidence.  The thought came sadly across me, how great was the
contrast betwixt this interview and our first meeting. Then, in the
warm light of the country fireside, Zenobia had greeted me cheerily and
hopefully, with a full sisterly grasp of the hand, conveying as much
kindness in it as other women could have evinced by the pressure of
both arms around my neck, or by yielding a cheek to the brotherly
salute.  The difference was as complete as between her appearance at
that time--so simply attired, and with only the one superb flower in
her hair--and now, when her beauty was set off by all that dress and
ornament could do for it.  And they did much.  Not, indeed, that they
created or added anything to what Nature had lavishly done for Zenobia.
But, those costly robes which she had on, those flaming jewels on her
neck, served as lamps to display the personal advantages which required
nothing less than such an illumination to be fully seen.  Even her
characteristic flower, though it seemed to be still there, had
undergone a cold and bright transfiguration; it was a flower
exquisitely imitated in jeweller's work, and imparting the last touch
that transformed Zenobia into a work of art.

"I scarcely feel," I could not forbear saying, "as if we had ever met
before.  How many years ago it seems since we last sat beneath Eliot's
pulpit, with Hollingsworth extended on the fallen leaves, and Priscilla
at his feet!  Can it be, Zenobia, that you ever really numbered
yourself with our little band of earnest, thoughtful, philanthropic
laborers?"

"Those ideas have their time and place," she answered coldly.  "But I
fancy it must be a very circumscribed mind that can find room for no
other."

Her manner bewildered me.  Literally, moreover, I was dazzled by the
brilliancy of the room.  A chandelier hung down in the centre, glowing
with I know not how many lights; there were separate lamps, also, on
two or three tables, and on marble brackets, adding their white
radiance to that of the chandelier.  The furniture was exceedingly
rich.  Fresh from our old farmhouse, with its homely board and benches
in the dining-room, and a few wicker chairs in the best parlor, it
struck me that here was the fulfilment of every fantasy of an
imagination revelling in various methods of costly self-indulgence and
splendid ease.  Pictures, marbles, vases,--in brief, more shapes of
luxury than there could be any object in enumerating, except for an
auctioneer's advertisement,--and the whole repeated and doubled by the
reflection of a great mirror, which showed me Zenobia's proud figure,
likewise, and my own.  It cost me, I acknowledge, a bitter sense of
shame, to perceive in myself a positive effort to bear up against the
effect which Zenobia sought to impose on me.  I reasoned against her,
in my secret mind, and strove so to keep my footing.  In the
gorgeousness with which she had surrounded herself,--in the redundance
of personal ornament, which the largeness of her physical nature and
the rich type of her beauty caused to seem so suitable,--I malevolently
beheld the true character of the woman, passionate, luxurious, lacking
simplicity, not deeply refined, incapable of pure and perfect taste.
But, the next instant, she was too powerful for all my opposing
struggles.  I saw how fit it was that she should make herself as
gorgeous as she pleased, and should do a thousand things that would
have been ridiculous in the poor, thin, weakly characters of other
women.  To this day, however, I hardly know whether I then beheld
Zenobia in her truest attitude, or whether that were the truer one in
which she had presented herself at Blithedale.  In both, there was
something like the illusion which a great actress flings around her.

"Have you given up Blithedale forever?"  I inquired.

"Why should you think so?" asked she.

"I cannot tell," answered I; "except that it appears all like a dream
that we were ever there together."

"It is not so to me," said Zenobia.  "I should think it a poor and
meagre nature that is capable of but one set of forms, and must convert
all the past into a dream merely because the present happens to be
unlike it.  Why should we be content with our homely life of a few
months past, to the exclusion of all other modes?  It was good; but
there are other lives as good, or better.  Not, you will understand,
that I condemn those who give themselves up to it more entirely than I,
for myself, should deem it wise to do."

It irritated me, this self-complacent, condescending, qualified
approval and criticism of a system to which many individuals--perhaps
as highly endowed as our gorgeous Zenobia--had contributed their all of
earthly endeavor, and their loftiest aspirations.  I determined to make
proof if there were any spell that would exorcise her out of the part
which she seemed to be acting.  She should be compelled to give me a
glimpse of something true; some nature, some passion, no matter whether
right or wrong, provided it were real.

"Your allusion to that class of circumscribed characters who can live
only in one mode of life," remarked I coolly, "reminds me of our poor
friend Hollingsworth.  Possibly he was in your thoughts when you spoke
thus.  Poor fellow!  It is a pity that, by the fault of a narrow
education, he should have so completely immolated himself to that one
idea of his, especially as the slightest modicum of common-sense would
teach him its utter impracticability.  Now that I have returned into
the world, and can look at his project from a distance, it requires
quite all my real regard for this respectable and well-intentioned man
to prevent me laughing at him,--as I find society at large does."

Zenobia's eyes darted lightning, her cheeks flushed, the vividness of
her expression was like the effect of a powerful light flaming up
suddenly within her.  My experiment had fully succeeded.  She had shown
me the true flesh and blood of her heart, by thus involuntarily
resenting my slight, pitying, half-kind, half-scornful mention of the
man who was all in all with her.  She herself probably felt this; for
it was hardly a moment before she tranquillized her uneven breath, and
seemed as proud and self-possessed as ever.

"I rather imagine," said she quietly, "that your appreciation falls
short of Mr. Hollingsworth's just claims.  Blind enthusiasm, absorption
in one idea, I grant, is generally ridiculous, and must be fatal to the
respectability of an ordinary man; it requires a very high and powerful
character to make it otherwise.  But a great man--as, perhaps, you do
not know--attains his normal condition only through the inspiration of
one great idea.  As a friend of Mr. Hollingsworth, and, at the same
time, a calm observer, I must tell you that he seems to me such a man.
But you are very pardonable for fancying him ridiculous.  Doubtless, he
is so--to you!  There can be no truer test of the noble and heroic, in
any individual, than the degree in which he possesses the faculty of
distinguishing heroism from absurdity."

I dared make no retort to Zenobia's concluding apothegm.  In truth, I
admired her fidelity.  It gave me a new sense of Hollingsworth's native
power, to discover that his influence was no less potent with this
beautiful woman here, in the midst of artificial life, than it had been
at the foot of the gray rock, and among the wild birch-trees of the
wood-path, when she so passionately pressed his hand against her heart.
The great, rude, shaggy, swarthy man!  And Zenobia loved him!

"Did you bring Priscilla with you?"  I resumed.  "Do you know I have
sometimes fancied it not quite safe, considering the susceptibility of
her temperament, that she should be so constantly within the sphere of
a man like Hollingsworth.  Such tender and delicate natures, among your
sex, have often, I believe, a very adequate appreciation of the heroic
element in men.  But then, again, I should suppose them as likely as
any other women to make a reciprocal impression. Hollingsworth could
hardly give his affections to a person capable of taking an independent
stand, but only to one whom he might absorb into himself.  He has
certainly shown great tenderness for Priscilla."

Zenobia had turned aside.  But I caught the reflection of her face in
the mirror, and saw that it was very pale,--as pale, in her rich
attire, as if a shroud were round her.

"Priscilla is here," said she, her voice a little lower than usual.
"Have not you learnt as much from your chamber window?  Would you like
to see her?"

She made a step or two into the back drawing-room, and
called,--"Priscilla!  Dear Priscilla!"



XX. THEY VANISH

Priscilla immediately answered the summons, and made her appearance
through the door of the boudoir.  I had conceived the idea, which I now
recognized as a very foolish one, that Zenobia would have taken
measures to debar me from an interview with this girl, between whom and
herself there was so utter an opposition of their dearest interests,
that, on one part or the other, a great grief, if not likewise a great
wrong, seemed a matter of necessity.  But, as Priscilla was only a leaf
floating on the dark current of events, without influencing them by her
own choice or plan, as she probably guessed not whither the stream was
bearing her, nor perhaps even felt its inevitable movement,--there
could be no peril of her communicating to me any intelligence with
regard to Zenobia's purposes.

On perceiving me, she came forward with great quietude of manner; and
when I held out my hand, her own moved slightly towards it, as if
attracted by a feeble degree of magnetism.

"I am glad to see you, my dear Priscilla," said I, still holding her
hand; "but everything that I meet with nowadays makes me wonder whether
I am awake.  You, especially, have always seemed like a figure in a
dream, and now more than ever."

"Oh, there is substance in these fingers of mine," she answered, giving
my hand the faintest possible pressure, and then taking away her own.
"Why do you call me a dream?  Zenobia is much more like one than I; she
is so very, very beautiful!  And, I suppose," added Priscilla, as if
thinking aloud, "everybody sees it, as I do."

But, for my part, it was Priscilla's beauty, not Zenobia's, of which I
was thinking at that moment.  She was a person who could be quite
obliterated, so far as beauty went, by anything unsuitable in her
attire; her charm was not positive and material enough to bear up
against a mistaken choice of color, for instance, or fashion.  It was
safest, in her case, to attempt no art of dress; for it demanded the
most perfect taste, or else the happiest accident in the world, to give
her precisely the adornment which she needed.  She was now dressed in
pure white, set off with some kind of a gauzy fabric, which--as I bring
up her figure in my memory, with a faint gleam on her shadowy hair, and
her dark eyes bent shyly on mine, through all the vanished years--seems
to be floating about her like a mist.  I wondered what Zenobia meant by
evolving so much loveliness out of this poor girl.  It was what few
women could afford to do; for, as I looked from one to the other, the
sheen and splendor of Zenobia's presence took nothing from Priscilla's
softer spell, if it might not rather be thought to add to it.

"What do you think of her?" asked Zenobia.

I could not understand the look of melancholy kindness with which
Zenobia regarded her.  She advanced a step, and beckoning Priscilla
near her, kissed her cheek; then, with a slight gesture of repulse, she
moved to the other side of the room.  I followed.

"She is a wonderful creature," I said.  "Ever since she came among us,
I have been dimly sensible of just this charm which you have brought
out.  But it was never absolutely visible till now.  She is as lovely
as a flower!"

"Well, say so if you like," answered Zenobia.  "You are a poet,--at
least, as poets go nowadays,--and must be allowed to make an
opera-glass of your imagination, when you look at women.  I wonder, in
such Arcadian freedom of falling in love as we have lately enjoyed, it
never occurred to you to fall in love with Priscilla.  In society,
indeed, a genuine American never dreams of stepping across the
inappreciable air-line which separates one class from another.  But
what was rank to the colonists of Blithedale?"

"There were other reasons," I replied, "why I should have demonstrated
myself an ass, had I fallen in love with Priscilla.  By the bye, has
Hollingsworth ever seen her in this dress?"

"Why do you bring up his name at every turn?" asked Zenobia in an
undertone, and with a malign look which wandered from my face to
Priscilla's.  "You know not what you do!  It is dangerous, sir, believe
me, to tamper thus with earnest human passions, out of your own mere
idleness, and for your sport.  I will endure it no longer!  Take care
that it does not happen again!  I warn you!"

"You partly wrong me, if not wholly," I responded.  "It is an uncertain
sense of some duty to perform, that brings my thoughts, and therefore
my words, continually to that one point."

"Oh, this stale excuse of duty!" said Zenobia, in a whisper so full of
scorn that it penetrated me like the hiss of a serpent.  "I have often
heard it before, from those who sought to interfere with me, and I know
precisely what it signifies.  Bigotry; self-conceit; an insolent
curiosity; a meddlesome temper; a cold-blooded criticism, founded on a
shallow interpretation of half-perceptions; a monstrous scepticism in
regard to any conscience or any wisdom, except one's own; a most
irreverent propensity to thrust Providence aside, and substitute one's
self in its awful place,--out of these, and other motives as miserable
as these, comes your idea of duty!  But, beware, sir!  With all your
fancied acuteness, you step blindfold into these affairs.  For any
mischief that may follow your interference, I hold you responsible!"

It was evident that, with but a little further provocation, the lioness
would turn to bay; if, indeed, such were not her attitude already.  I
bowed, and not very well knowing what else to do, was about to
withdraw.  But, glancing again towards Priscilla, who had retreated
into a corner, there fell upon my heart an intolerable burden of
despondency, the purport of which I could not tell, but only felt it to
bear reference to her.  I approached and held out my hand; a gesture,
however, to which she made no response.  It was always one of her
peculiarities that she seemed to shrink from even the most friendly
touch, unless it were Zenobia's or Hollingsworth's. Zenobia, all this
while, stood watching us, but with a careless expression, as if it
mattered very little what might pass.

"Priscilla," I inquired, lowering my voice, "when do you go back to
Blithedale?"

"Whenever they please to take me," said she.

"Did you come away of your own free will?"  I asked.

"I am blown about like a leaf," she replied.  "I never have any free
will."

"Does Hollingsworth know that you are here?" said I.

"He bade me come," answered Priscilla.

She looked at me, I thought, with an air of surprise, as if the idea
were incomprehensible that she should have taken this step without his
agency.

"What a gripe this man has laid upon her whole being!" muttered I
between my teeth.

"Well, as Zenobia so kindly intimates, I have no more business here. I
wash my hands of it all.  On Hollingsworth's head be the consequences!
Priscilla," I added aloud, "I know not that ever we may meet again.
Farewell!"

As I spoke the word, a carriage had rumbled along the street, and stopt
before the house.  The doorbell rang, and steps were immediately
afterwards heard on the staircase.  Zenobia had thrown a shawl over her
dress.

"Mr. Coverdale," said she, with cool courtesy, "you will perhaps excuse
us.  We have an engagement, and are going out."

"Whither?"  I demanded.

"Is not that a little more than you are entitled to inquire?" said she,
with a smile.  "At all events, it does not suit me to tell you."

The door of the drawing-room opened, and Westervelt appeared.  I
observed that he was elaborately dressed, as if for some grand
entertainment.  My dislike for this man was infinite.  At that moment
it amounted to nothing less than a creeping of the flesh, as when,
feeling about in a dark place, one touches something cold and slimy,
and questions what the secret hatefulness may be.  And still I could
not but acknowledge that, for personal beauty, for polish of manner,
for all that externally befits a gentleman, there was hardly another
like him.  After bowing to Zenobia, and graciously saluting Priscilla
in her corner, he recognized me by a slight but courteous inclination.

"Come, Priscilla," said Zenobia; "it is time.  Mr. Coverdale,
good-evening."

As Priscilla moved slowly forward, I met her in the middle of the
drawing-room.

"Priscilla," said I, in the hearing of them all, "do you know whither
you are going?"

"I do not know," she answered.

"Is it wise to go, and is it your choice to go?"  I asked.  "If not, I
am your friend, and Hollingsworth's friend.  Tell me so, at once."

"Possibly," observed Westervelt, smiling, "Priscilla sees in me an
older friend than either Mr. Coverdale or Mr. Hollingsworth.  I shall
willingly leave the matter at her option."

While thus speaking, he made a gesture of kindly invitation, and
Priscilla passed me, with the gliding movement of a sprite, and took
his offered arm.  He offered the other to Zenobia; but she turned her
proud and beautiful face upon him with a look which--judging from what
I caught of it in profile--would undoubtedly have smitten the man dead,
had he possessed any heart, or had this glance attained to it.  It
seemed to rebound, however, from his courteous visage, like an arrow
from polished steel.  They all three descended the stairs; and when I
likewise reached the street door, the carriage was already rolling away.



XXI. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

Thus excluded from everybody's confidence, and attaining no further, by
my most earnest study, than to an uncertain sense of something hidden
from me, it would appear reasonable that I should have flung off all
these alien perplexities.  Obviously, my best course was to betake
myself to new scenes.  Here I was only an intruder.  Elsewhere there
might be circumstances in which I could establish a personal interest,
and people who would respond, with a portion of their sympathies, for
so much as I should bestow of mine.

Nevertheless, there occurred to me one other thing to be done.
Remembering old Moodie, and his relationship with Priscilla, I
determined to seek an interview, for the purpose of ascertaining
whether the knot of affairs was as inextricable on that side as I found
it on all others.  Being tolerably well acquainted with the old man's
haunts, I went, the next day, to the saloon of a certain establishment
about which he often lurked.  It was a reputable place enough,
affording good entertainment in the way of meat, drink, and fumigation;
and there, in my young and idle days and nights, when I was neither
nice nor wise, I had often amused myself with watching the staid humors
and sober jollities of the thirsty souls around me.

At my first entrance, old Moodie was not there.  The more patiently to
await him, I lighted a cigar, and establishing myself in a corner, took
a quiet, and, by sympathy, a boozy kind of pleasure in the customary
life that was going forward.  The saloon was fitted up with a good deal
of taste.  There were pictures on the walls, and among them an
oil-painting of a beefsteak, with such an admirable show of juicy
tenderness, that the beholder sighed to think it merely visionary, and
incapable of ever being put upon a gridiron.  Another work of high art
was the lifelike representation of a noble sirloin; another, the
hindquarters of a deer, retaining the hoofs and tawny fur; another, the
head and shoulders of a salmon; and, still more exquisitely finished, a
brace of canvasback ducks, in which the mottled feathers were depicted
with the accuracy of a daguerreotype. Some very hungry painter, I
suppose, had wrought these subjects of still-life, heightening his
imagination with his appetite, and earning, it is to be hoped, the
privilege of a daily dinner off whichever of his pictorial viands he
liked best.

Then there was a fine old cheese, in which you could almost discern the
mites; and some sardines, on a small plate, very richly done, and
looking as if oozy with the oil in which they had been smothered. All
these things were so perfectly imitated, that you seemed to have the
genuine article before you, and yet with an indescribable, ideal charm;
it took away the grossness from what was fleshiest and fattest, and
thus helped the life of man, even in its earthliest relations, to
appear rich and noble, as well as warm, cheerful, and substantial.
There were pictures, too, of gallant revellers, those of the old time,
Flemish, apparently, with doublets and slashed sleeves, drinking their
wine out of fantastic, long-stemmed glasses; quaffing joyously,
quaffing forever, with inaudible laughter and song; while the champagne
bubbled immortally against their moustaches, or the purple tide of
Burgundy ran inexhaustibly down their throats.

But, in an obscure corner of the saloon, there was a little Picture
excellently done, moreover of a ragged, bloated, New England toper,
stretched out on a bench, in the heavy, apoplectic sleep of
drunkenness.  The death-in-life was too well portrayed.  You smelt the
fumy liquor that had brought on this syncope.  Your only comfort lay in
the forced reflection, that, real as he looked, the poor caitiff was
but imaginary, a bit of painted canvass, whom no delirium tremens, nor
so much as a retributive headache, awaited, on the morrow.

By this time, it being past eleven o'clock, the two bar-keepers of the
saloon were in pretty constant activity.  One of these young men had a
rare faculty in the concoction of gin-cocktails.  It was a spectacle to
behold, how, with a tumbler in each hand, he tossed the contents from
one to the other.  Never conveying it awry, nor spilling the least
drop, he compelled the frothy liquor, as it seemed to me, to spout
forth from one glass and descend into the other, in a great parabolic
curve, as well-defined and calculable as a planet's orbit.  He had a
good forehead, with a particularly large development just above the
eyebrows; fine intellectual gifts, no doubt, which he had educated to
this profitable end; being famous for nothing but gin-cocktails, and
commanding a fair salary by his one accomplishment. These cocktails,
and other artificial combinations of liquor, (of which there were at
least a score, though mostly, I suspect, fantastic in their
differences,) were much in favor with the younger class of customers,
who, at farthest, had only reached the second stage of potatory life.
The staunch, old soakers, on the other hand men who, if put on tap,
would have yielded a red alcoholic liquor, by way of blood usually
confined themselves to plain brandy-and-water, gin, or West India rum;
and, oftentimes, they prefaced their dram with some medicinal remark as
to the wholesomeness and stomachic qualities of that particular drink.
Two or three appeared to have bottles of their own behind the counter;
and, winking one red eye to the bar-keeper, he forthwith produced these
choicest and peculiar cordials, which it was a matter of great interest
and favor, among their acquaintances, to obtain a sip of.

Agreeably to the Yankee habit, under whatever circumstances, the
deportment of all these good fellows, old or young, was decorous and
thoroughly correct.  They grew only the more sober in their cups; there
was no confused babble nor boisterous laughter.  They sucked in the
joyous fire of the decanters and kept it smouldering in their inmost
recesses, with a bliss known only to the heart which it warmed and
comforted.  Their eyes twinkled a little, to be sure; they hemmed
vigorously after each glass, and laid a hand upon the pit of the
stomach, as if the pleasant titillation there was what constituted the
tangible part of their enjoyment.  In that spot, unquestionably, and
not in the brain, was the acme of the whole affair.  But the true
purpose of their drinking--and one that will induce men to drink, or do
something equivalent, as long as this weary world shall endure--was the
renewed youth and vigor, the brisk, cheerful sense of things present
and to come, with which, for about a quarter of an hour, the dram
permeated their systems.  And when such quarters of an hour can be
obtained in some mode less baneful to the great sum of a man's
life,--but, nevertheless, with a little spice of impropriety, to give
it a wild flavor,--we temperance people may ring out our bells for
victory!

The prettiest object in the saloon was a tiny fountain, which threw up
its feathery jet through the counter, and sparkled down again into an
oval basin, or lakelet, containing several goldfishes.  There was a bed
of bright sand at the bottom, strewn with coral and rock-work; and the
fishes went gleaming about, now turning up the sheen of a golden side,
and now vanishing into the shadows of the water, like the fanciful
thoughts that coquet with a poet in his dream.  Never before, I
imagine, did a company of water-drinkers remain so entirely
uncontaminated by the bad example around them; nor could I help
wondering that it had not occurred to any freakish inebriate to empty a
glass of liquor into their lakelet.  What a delightful idea!  Who would
not be a fish, if he could inhale jollity with the essential element of
his existence!

I had begun to despair of meeting old Moodie, when, all at once, I
recognized his hand and arm protruding from behind a screen that was
set up for the accommodation of bashful topers.  As a matter of course,
he had one of Priscilla's little purses, and was quietly insinuating it
under the notice of a person who stood near.  This was always old
Moodie's way.  You hardly ever saw him advancing towards you, but
became aware of his proximity without being able to guess how he had
come thither.  He glided about like a spirit, assuming visibility close
to your elbow, offering his petty trifles of merchandise, remaining
long enough for you to purchase, if so disposed, and then taking
himself off, between two breaths, while you happened to be thinking of
something else.

By a sort of sympathetic impulse that often controlled me in those more
impressible days of my life, I was induced to approach this old man in
a mode as undemonstrative as his own.  Thus, when, according to his
custom, he was probably just about to vanish, he found me at his elbow.

"Ah!" said he, with more emphasis than was usual with him.  "It is Mr.
Coverdale!"

"Yes, Mr. Moodie, your old acquaintance," answered I. "It is some time
now since we ate luncheon together at Blithedale, and a good deal
longer since our little talk together at the street corner."

"That was a good while ago," said the old man.

And he seemed inclined to say not a word more.  His existence looked so
colorless and torpid,--so very faintly shadowed on the canvas of
reality,--that I was half afraid lest he should altogether disappear,
even while my eyes were fixed full upon his figure.  He was certainly
the wretchedest old ghost in the world, with his crazy hat, the dingy
handkerchief about his throat, his suit of threadbare gray, and
especially that patch over his right eye, behind which he always seemed
to be hiding himself.  There was one method, however, of bringing him
out into somewhat stronger relief.  A glass of brandy would effect it.
Perhaps the gentler influence of a bottle of claret might do the same.
Nor could I think it a matter for the recording angel to write down
against me, if--with my painful consciousness of the frost in this old
man's blood, and the positive ice that had congealed about his heart--I
should thaw him out, were it only for an hour, with the summer warmth
of a little wine.  What else could possibly be done for him?  How else
could he be imbued with energy enough to hope for a happier state
hereafter?  How else be inspired to say his prayers?  For there are
states of our spiritual system when the throb of the soul's life is too
faint and weak to render us capable of religious aspiration.

"Mr. Moodie," said I, "shall we lunch together?  And would you like to
drink a glass of wine?"

His one eye gleamed.  He bowed; and it impressed me that he grew to be
more of a man at once, either in anticipation of the wine, or as a
grateful response to my good fellowship in offering it.

"With pleasure," he replied.

The bar-keeper, at my request, showed us into a private room, and soon
afterwards set some fried oysters and a bottle of claret on the table;
and I saw the old man glance curiously at the label of the bottle, as
if to learn the brand.

"It should be good wine," I remarked, "if it have any right to its
label."

"You cannot suppose, sir," said Moodie, with a sigh, "that a poor old
fellow like me knows any difference in wines."

And yet, in his way of handling the glass, in his preliminary snuff at
the aroma, in his first cautious sip of the wine, and the gustatory
skill with which he gave his palate the full advantage of it, it was
impossible not to recognize the connoisseur.

"I fancy, Mr. Moodie," said I, "you are a much better judge of wines
than I have yet learned to be.  Tell me fairly,--did you never drink it
where the grape grows?"

"How should that have been, Mr. Coverdale?" answered old Moodie shyly;
but then he took courage, as it were, and uttered a feeble little
laugh.  "The flavor of this wine," added he, "and its perfume still
more than its taste, makes me remember that I was once a young man."

"I wish, Mr. Moodie," suggested I,--not that I greatly cared about it,
however, but was only anxious to draw him into some talk about
Priscilla and Zenobia,--"I wish, while we sit over our wine, you would
favor me with a few of those youthful reminiscences."

"Ah," said he, shaking his head, "they might interest you more than you
suppose.  But I had better be silent, Mr. Coverdale.  If this good
wine,--though claret, I suppose, is not apt to play such a trick,--but
if it should make my tongue run too freely, I could never look you in
the face again."

"You never did look me in the face, Mr. Moodie," I replied, "until this
very moment."

"Ah!" sighed old Moodie.

It was wonderful, however, what an effect the mild grape-juice wrought
upon him.  It was not in the wine, but in the associations which it
seemed to bring up.  Instead of the mean, slouching, furtive, painfully
depressed air of an old city vagabond, more like a gray kennel-rat than
any other living thing, he began to take the aspect of a decayed
gentleman.  Even his garments--especially after I had myself quaffed a
glass or two--looked less shabby than when we first sat down.  There
was, by and by, a certain exuberance and elaborateness of gesture and
manner, oddly in contrast with all that I had hitherto seen of him.
Anon, with hardly any impulse from me, old Moodie began to talk.  His
communications referred exclusively to a long-past and more fortunate
period of his life, with only a few unavoidable allusions to the
circumstances that had reduced him to his present state.  But, having
once got the clew, my subsequent researches acquainted me with the main
facts of the following narrative; although, in writing it out, my pen
has perhaps allowed itself a trifle of romantic and legendary license,
worthier of a small poet than of a grave biographer.



XXII. FAUNTLEROY

Five-and-twenty years ago, at the epoch of this story, there dwelt in
one of the Middle States a man whom we shall call Fauntleroy; a man of
wealth, and magnificent tastes, and prodigal expenditure.  His home
might almost be styled a palace; his habits, in the ordinary sense,
princely.  His whole being seemed to have crystallized itself into an
external splendor, wherewith he glittered in the eyes of the world, and
had no other life than upon this gaudy surface.  He had married a
lovely woman, whose nature was deeper than his own.  But his affection
for her, though it showed largely, was superficial, like all his other
manifestations and developments; he did not so truly keep this noble
creature in his heart, as wear her beauty for the most brilliant
ornament of his outward state.  And there was born to him a child, a
beautiful daughter, whom he took from the beneficent hand of God with
no just sense of her immortal value, but as a man already rich in gems
would receive another jewel.  If he loved her, it was because she shone.

After Fauntleroy had thus spent a few empty years, coruscating
continually an unnatural light, the source of it--which was merely his
gold--began to grow more shallow, and finally became exhausted. He saw
himself in imminent peril of losing all that had heretofore
distinguished him; and, conscious of no innate worth to fall back upon,
he recoiled from this calamity with the instinct of a soul shrinking
from annihilation.  To avoid it,--wretched man!--or rather to defer it,
if but for a month, a day, or only to procure himself the life of a few
breaths more amid the false glitter which was now less his own than
ever,--he made himself guilty of a crime.  It was just the sort of
crime, growing out of its artificial state, which society (unless it
should change its entire constitution for this man's unworthy sake)
neither could nor ought to pardon.  More safely might it pardon murder.
Fauntleroy's guilt was discovered.  He fled; his wife perished, by the
necessity of her innate nobleness, in its alliance with a being so
ignoble; and betwixt her mother's death and her father's ignominy, his
daughter was left worse than orphaned.

There was no pursuit after Fauntleroy.  His family connections, who had
great wealth, made such arrangements with those whom he had attempted
to wrong as secured him from the retribution that would have overtaken
an unfriended criminal.  The wreck of his estate was divided among his
creditors: His name, in a very brief space, was forgotten by the
multitude who had passed it so diligently from mouth to mouth.  Seldom,
indeed, was it recalled, even by his closest former intimates.  Nor
could it have been otherwise.  The man had laid no real touch on any
mortal's heart.  Being a mere image, an optical delusion, created by
the sunshine of prosperity, it was his law to vanish into the shadow of
the first intervening cloud.  He seemed to leave no vacancy; a
phenomenon which, like many others that attended his brief career, went
far to prove the illusiveness of his existence.

Not, however, that the physical substance of Fauntleroy had literally
melted into vapor.  He had fled northward to the New England
metropolis, and had taken up his abode, under another name, in a
squalid street or court of the older portion of the city.  There he
dwelt among poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn good
people, Irish, and whomsoever else were neediest.  Many families were
clustered in each house together, above stairs and below, in the little
peaked garrets, and even in the dusky cellars.  The house where
Fauntleroy paid weekly rent for a chamber and a closet had been a
stately habitation in its day.  An old colonial governor had built it,
and lived there, long ago, and held his levees in a great room where
now slept twenty Irish bedfellows; and died in Fauntleroy's chamber,
which his embroidered and white-wigged ghost still haunted. Tattered
hangings, a marble hearth, traversed with many cracks and fissures, a
richly carved oaken mantelpiece, partly hacked away for kindling-stuff,
a stuccoed ceiling, defaced with great, unsightly patches of the naked
laths,--such was the chamber's aspect, as if, with its splinters and
rags of dirty splendor, it were a kind of practical gibe at this poor,
ruined man of show.

At first, and at irregular intervals, his relatives allowed Fauntleroy
a little pittance to sustain life; not from any love, perhaps, but lest
poverty should compel him, by new offences, to add more shame to that
with which he had already stained them.  But he showed no tendency to
further guilt.  His character appeared to have been radically changed
(as, indeed, from its shallowness, it well might) by his miserable
fate; or, it may be, the traits now seen in him were portions of the
same character, presenting itself in another phase.  Instead of any
longer seeking to live in the sight of the world, his impulse was to
shrink into the nearest obscurity, and to be unseen of men, were it
possible, even while standing before their eyes.  He had no pride; it
was all trodden in the dust.  No ostentation; for how could it survive,
when there was nothing left of Fauntleroy, save penury and shame!  His
very gait demonstrated that he would gladly have faded out of view, and
have crept about invisibly, for the sake of sheltering himself from the
irksomeness of a human glance.  Hardly, it was averred, within the
memory of those who knew him now, had he the hardihood to show his full
front to the world.  He skulked in corners, and crept about in a sort
of noonday twilight, making himself gray and misty, at all hours, with
his morbid intolerance of sunshine.

In his torpid despair, however, he had done an act which that condition
of the spirit seems to prompt almost as often as prosperity and hope.
Fauntleroy was again married.  He had taken to wife a forlorn,
meek-spirited, feeble young woman, a seamstress, whom he found dwelling
with her mother in a contiguous chamber of the old gubernatorial
residence.  This poor phantom--as the beautiful and noble companion of
his former life had done brought him a daughter. And sometimes, as from
one dream into another, Fauntleroy looked forth out of his present
grimy environment into that past magnificence, and wondered whether the
grandee of yesterday or the pauper of to-day were real.  But, in my
mind, the one and the other were alike impalpable.  In truth, it was
Fauntleroy's fatality to behold whatever he touched dissolve.  After a
few years, his second wife (dim shadow that she had always been) faded
finally out of the world, and left Fauntleroy to deal as he might with
their pale and nervous child.  And, by this time, among his distant
relatives,--with whom he had grown a weary thought, linked with
contagious infamy, and which they were only too willing to get rid
of,--he was himself supposed to be no more.

The younger child, like his elder one, might be considered as the true
offspring of both parents, and as the reflection of their state. She
was a tremulous little creature, shrinking involuntarily from all
mankind, but in timidity, and no sour repugnance.  There was a lack of
human substance in her; it seemed as if, were she to stand up in a
sunbeam, it would pass right through her figure, and trace out the
cracked and dusty window-panes upon the naked floor.  But,
nevertheless, the poor child had a heart; and from her mother's gentle
character she had inherited a profound and still capacity of affection.
And so her life was one of love.  She bestowed it partly on her father,
but in greater part on an idea.

For Fauntleroy, as they sat by their cheerless fireside,--which was no
fireside, in truth, but only a rusty stove,--had often talked to the
little girl about his former wealth, the noble loveliness of his first
wife, and the beautiful child whom she had given him.  Instead of the
fairy tales which other parents tell, he told Priscilla this. And, out
of the loneliness of her sad little existence, Priscilla's love grew,
and tended upward, and twined itself perseveringly around this unseen
sister; as a grapevine might strive to clamber out of a gloomy hollow
among the rocks, and embrace a young tree standing in the sunny warmth
above.  It was almost like worship, both in its earnestness and its
humility; nor was it the less humble--though the more earnest--because
Priscilla could claim human kindred with the being whom she, so
devoutly loved.  As with worship, too, it gave her soul the refreshment
of a purer atmosphere.  Save for this singular, this melancholy, and
yet beautiful affection, the child could hardly have lived; or, had she
lived, with a heart shrunken for lack of any sentiment to fill it, she
must have yielded to the barren miseries of her position, and have
grown to womanhood characterless and worthless. But now, amid all the
sombre coarseness of her father's outward life, and of her own,
Priscilla had a higher and imaginative life within.  Some faint gleam
thereof was often visible upon her face. It was as if, in her spiritual
visits to her brilliant sister, a portion of the latter's brightness
had permeated our dim Priscilla, and still lingered, shedding a faint
illumination through the cheerless chamber, after she came back.

As the child grew up, so pallid and so slender, and with much
unaccountable nervousness, and all the weaknesses of neglected infancy
still haunting her, the gross and simple neighbors whispered strange
things about Priscilla.  The big, red, Irish matrons, whose innumerable
progeny swarmed out of the adjacent doors, used to mock at the pale
Western child.  They fancied--or, at least, affirmed it, between jest
and earnest--that she was not so solid flesh and blood as other
children, but mixed largely with a thinner element.  They called her
ghost-child, and said that she could indeed vanish when she pleased,
but could never, in her densest moments, make herself quite visible.
The sun at midday would shine through her; in the first gray of the
twilight, she lost all the distinctness of her outline; and, if you
followed the dim thing into a dark corner, behold! she was not there.
And it was true that Priscilla had strange ways; strange ways, and
stranger words, when she uttered any words at all.  Never stirring out
of the old governor's dusky house, she sometimes talked of distant
places and splendid rooms, as if she had just left them.  Hidden things
were visible to her (at least so the people inferred from obscure hints
escaping unawares out of her mouth), and silence was audible.  And in
all the world there was nothing so difficult to be endured, by those
who had any dark secret to conceal, as the glance of Priscilla's timid
and melancholy eyes.

Her peculiarities were the theme of continual gossip among the other
inhabitants of the gubernatorial mansion.  The rumor spread thence into
a wider circle.  Those who knew old Moodie, as he was now called, used
often to jeer him, at the very street-corners, about his daughter's
gift of second-sight and prophecy.  It was a period when science
(though mostly through its empirical professors) was bringing forward,
anew, a hoard of facts and imperfect theories, that had partially won
credence in elder times, but which modern scepticism had swept away as
rubbish.  These things were now tossed up again, out of the surging
ocean of human thought and experience.  The story of Priscilla's
preternatural manifestations, therefore, attracted a kind of notice of
which it would have been deemed wholly unworthy a few years earlier.
One day a gentleman ascended the creaking staircase, and inquired which
was old Moodie's chamber door.  And, several times, he came again.  He
was a marvellously handsome man,--still youthful, too, and fashionably
dressed.  Except that Priscilla, in those days, had no beauty, and, in
the languor of her existence, had not yet blossomed into womanhood,
there would have been rich food for scandal in these visits; for the
girl was unquestionably their sole object, although her father was
supposed always to be present.  But, it must likewise be added, there
was something about Priscilla that calumny could not meddle with; and
thus far was she privileged, either by the preponderance of what was
spiritual, or the thin and watery blood that left her cheek so pallid.

Yet, if the busy tongues of the neighborhood spared Priscilla in one
way, they made themselves amends by renewed and wilder babble on
another score.  They averred that the strange gentleman was a wizard,
and that he had taken advantage of Priscilla's lack of earthly
substance to subject her to himself, as his familiar spirit, through
whose medium he gained cognizance of whatever happened, in regions near
or remote.  The boundaries of his power were defined by the verge of
the pit of Tartarus on the one hand, and the third sphere of the
celestial world on the other.  Again, they declared their suspicion
that the wizard, with all his show of manly beauty, was really an aged
and wizened figure, or else that his semblance of a human body was only
a necromantic, or perhaps a mechanical contrivance, in which a demon
walked about.  In proof of it, however, they could merely instance a
gold band around his upper teeth, which had once been visible to
several old women, when he smiled at them from the top of the
governor's staircase.  Of course this was all absurdity, or mostly so.
But, after every possible deduction, there remained certain very
mysterious points about the stranger's character, as well as the
connection that he established with Priscilla.  Its nature at that
period was even less understood than now, when miracles of this kind
have grown so absolutely stale, that I would gladly, if the truth
allowed, dismiss the whole matter from my narrative.

We must now glance backward, in quest of the beautiful daughter of
Fauntleroy's prosperity.  What had become of her?  Fauntleroy's only
brother, a bachelor, and with no other relative so near, had adopted
the forsaken child.  She grew up in affluence, with native graces
clustering luxuriantly about her.  In her triumphant progress towards
womanhood, she was adorned with every variety of feminine
accomplishment.  But she lacked a mother's care.  With no adequate
control, on any hand (for a man, however stern, however wise, can never
sway and guide a female child), her character was left to shape itself.
There was good in it, and evil.  Passionate, self-willed, and
imperious, she had a warm and generous nature; showing the richness of
the soil, however, chiefly by the weeds that flourished in it, and
choked up the herbs of grace.  In her girlhood her uncle died.  As
Fauntleroy was supposed to be likewise dead, and no other heir was
known to exist, his wealth devolved on her, although, dying suddenly,
the uncle left no will.  After his death there were obscure passages in
Zenobia's history.  There were whispers of an attachment, and even a
secret marriage, with a fascinating and accomplished but unprincipled
young man.  The incidents and appearances, however, which led to this
surmise soon passed away, and were forgotten.

Nor was her reputation seriously affected by the report.  In fact, so
great was her native power and influence, and such seemed the careless
purity of her nature, that whatever Zenobia did was generally
acknowledged as right for her to do.  The world never criticised her so
harshly as it does most women who transcend its rules.  It almost
yielded its assent, when it beheld her stepping out of the common path,
and asserting the more extensive privileges of her sex, both
theoretically and by her practice.  The sphere of ordinary womanhood
was felt to be narrower than her development required.

A portion of Zenobia's more recent life is told in the foregoing pages.
Partly in earnest,--and, I imagine, as was her disposition, half in a
proud jest, or in a kind of recklessness that had grown upon her, out
of some hidden grief,--she had given her countenance, and promised
liberal pecuniary aid, to our experiment of a better social state.  And
Priscilla followed her to Blithedale.  The sole bliss of her life had
been a dream of this beautiful sister, who had never so much as known
of her existence.  By this time, too, the poor girl was enthralled in
an intolerable bondage, from which she must either free herself or
perish.  She deemed herself safest near Zenobia, into whose large heart
she hoped to nestle.

One evening, months after Priscilla's departure, when Moodie (or shall
we call him Fauntleroy?) was sitting alone in the state-chamber of the
old governor, there came footsteps up the staircase.  There was a pause
on the landing-place.  A lady's musical yet haughty accents were heard
making an inquiry from some denizen of the house, who had thrust a head
out of a contiguous chamber.  There was then a knock at Moodie's door.
"Come in!" said he.

And Zenobia entered.  The details of the interview that followed being
unknown to me,--while, notwithstanding, it would be a pity quite to
lose the picturesqueness of the situation,--I shall attempt to sketch
it, mainly from fancy, although with some general grounds of surmise in
regard to the old man's feelings.

She gazed wonderingly at the dismal chamber.  Dismal to her, who beheld
it only for an instant; and how much more so to him, into whose brain
each bare spot on the ceiling, every tatter of the paper-hangings, and
all the splintered carvings of the mantelpiece, seen wearily through
long years, had worn their several prints! Inexpressibly miserable is
this familiarity with objects that have been from the first disgustful.

"I have received a strange message," said Zenobia, after a moment's
silence, "requesting, or rather enjoining it upon me, to come hither.
Rather from curiosity than any other motive,--and because, though a
woman, I have not all the timidity of one,--I have complied.  Can it be
you, sir, who thus summoned me?"

"It was," answered Moodie.

"And what was your purpose?" she continued.  "You require charity,
perhaps?  In that case, the message might have been more fitly worded.
But you are old and poor, and age and poverty should be allowed their
privileges.  Tell me, therefore, to what extent you need my aid."

"Put up your purse," said the supposed mendicant, with an inexplicable
smile.  "Keep it,--keep all your wealth,--until I demand it all, or
none!  My message had no such end in view.  You are beautiful, they
tell me; and I desired to look at you."

He took the one lamp that showed the discomfort and sordidness of his
abode, and approaching Zenobia held it up, so as to gain the more
perfect view of her, from top to toe.  So obscure was the chamber, that
you could see the reflection of her diamonds thrown upon the dingy
wall, and flickering with the rise and fall of Zenobia's breath. It was
the splendor of those jewels on her neck, like lamps that burn before
some fair temple, and the jewelled flower in her hair, more than the
murky, yellow light, that helped him to see her beauty. But he beheld
it, and grew proud at heart; his own figure, in spite of his mean
habiliments, assumed an air of state and grandeur.

"It is well," cried old Moodie.  "Keep your wealth.  You are right
worthy of it.  Keep it, therefore, but with one condition only."

Zenobia thought the old man beside himself, and was moved with pity.

"Have you none to care for you?" asked she.  "No daughter?--no
kind-hearted neighbor?--no means of procuring the attendance which you
need?  Tell me once again, can I do nothing for you?"

"Nothing," he replied.  "I have beheld what I wished.  Now leave me.
Linger not a moment longer, or I may be tempted to say what would bring
a cloud over that queenly brow.  Keep all your wealth, but with only
this one condition: Be kind--be no less kind than sisters are--to my
poor Priscilla!"

And, it may be, after Zenobia withdrew, Fauntleroy paced his gloomy
chamber, and communed with himself as follows,--or, at all events, it
is the only solution which I can offer of the enigma presented in his
character:--"I am unchanged,--the same man as of yore!" said he. "True,
my brother's wealth--he dying intestate--is legally my own.  I know it;
yet of my own choice, I live a beggar, and go meanly clad, and hide
myself behind a forgotten ignominy.  Looks this like ostentation?  Ah!
but in Zenobia I live again!  Beholding her, so beautiful,--so fit to
be adorned with all imaginable splendor of outward state,--the cursed
vanity, which, half a lifetime since, dropt off like tatters of once
gaudy apparel from my debased and ruined person, is all renewed for her
sake.  Were I to reappear, my shame would go with me from darkness into
daylight.  Zenobia has the splendor, and not the shame.  Let the world
admire her, and be dazzled by her, the brilliant child of my
prosperity!  It is Fauntleroy that still shines through her!"  But
then, perhaps, another thought occurred to him.

"My poor Priscilla!  And am I just to her, in surrendering all to this
beautiful Zenobia?  Priscilla!  I love her best,--I love her only!--but
with shame, not pride.  So dim, so pallid, so shrinking,--the daughter
of my long calamity!  Wealth were but a mockery in Priscilla's hands.
What is its use, except to fling a golden radiance around those who
grasp it?  Yet let Zenobia take heed! Priscilla shall have no wrong!"
But, while the man of show thus meditated,--that very evening, so far
as I can adjust the dates of these strange incidents,--Priscilla poor,
pallid flower!--was either snatched from Zenobia's hand, or flung
wilfully away!



XXIII. A VILLAGE HALL

Well, I betook myself away, and wandered up and down, like an exorcised
spirit that had been driven from its old haunts after a mighty
struggle.  It takes down the solitary pride of man, beyond most other
things, to find the impracticability of flinging aside affections that
have grown irksome.  The bands that were silken once are apt to become
iron fetters when we desire to shake them off.  Our souls, after all,
are not our own.  We convey a property in them to those with whom we
associate; but to what extent can never be known, until we feel the
tug, the agony, of our abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over
ourselves.  Thus, in all the weeks of my absence, my thoughts
continually reverted back, brooding over the bygone months, and
bringing up incidents that seemed hardly to have left a trace of
themselves in their passage.  I spent painful hours in recalling these
trifles, and rendering them more misty and unsubstantial than at first
by the quantity of speculative musing thus kneaded in with them.
Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla!  These three had absorbed my life
into themselves.  Together with an inexpressible longing to know their
fortunes, there was likewise a morbid resentment of my own pain, and a
stubborn reluctance to come again within their sphere.

All that I learned of them, therefore, was comprised in a few brief and
pungent squibs, such as the newspapers were then in the habit of
bestowing on our socialist enterprise.  There was one paragraph, which
if I rightly guessed its purport bore reference to Zenobia, but was too
darkly hinted to convey even thus much of certainty. Hollingsworth,
too, with his philanthropic project, afforded the penny-a-liners a
theme for some savage and bloody minded jokes; and, considerably to my
surprise, they affected me with as much indignation as if we had still
been friends.

Thus passed several weeks; time long enough for my brown and
toil-hardened hands to reaccustom themselves to gloves.  Old habits,
such as were merely external, returned upon me with wonderful
promptitude.  My superficial talk, too, assumed altogether a worldly
tone.  Meeting former acquaintances, who showed themselves inclined to
ridicule my heroic devotion to the cause of human welfare, I spoke of
the recent phase of my life as indeed fair matter for a jest.  But, I
also gave them to understand that it was, at most, only an experiment,
on which I had staked no valuable amount of hope or fear. It had
enabled me to pass the summer in a novel and agreeable way, had
afforded me some grotesque specimens of artificial simplicity, and
could not, therefore, so far as I was concerned, be reckoned a failure.
In no one instance, however, did I voluntarily speak of my three
friends.  They dwelt in a profounder region.  The more I consider
myself as I then was, the more do I recognize how deeply my connection
with those three had affected all my being.

As it was already the epoch of annihilated space, I might in the time I
was away from Blithedale have snatched a glimpse at England, and been
back again.  But my wanderings were confined within a very limited
sphere.  I hopped and fluttered, like a bird with a string about its
leg, gyrating round a small circumference, and keeping up a restless
activity to no purpose.  Thus it was still in our familiar
Massachusetts--in one of its white country villages--that I must next
particularize an incident.

The scene was one of those lyceum halls, of which almost every village
has now its own, dedicated to that sober and pallid, or rather
drab-colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment, the lecture.  Of
late years this has come strangely into vogue, when the natural
tendency of things would seem to be to substitute lettered for oral
methods of addressing the public.  But, in halls like this, besides the
winter course of lectures, there is a rich and varied series of other
exhibitions.  Hither comes the ventriloquist, with all his mysterious
tongues; the thaumaturgist, too, with his miraculous transformations of
plates, doves, and rings, his pancakes smoking in your hat, and his
cellar of choice liquors represented in one small bottle.  Here, also,
the itinerant professor instructs separate classes of ladies and
gentlemen in physiology, and demonstrates his lessons by the aid of
real skeletons, and manikins in wax, from Paris.  Here is to be heard
the choir of Ethiopian melodists, and to be seen the diorama of Moscow
or Bunker Hill, or the moving panorama of the Chinese wall.  Here is
displayed the museum of wax figures, illustrating the wide catholicism
of earthly renown, by mixing up heroes and statesmen, the pope and the
Mormon prophet, kings, queens, murderers, and beautiful ladies; every
sort of person, in short, except authors, of whom I never beheld even
the most famous done in wax.  And here, in this many-purposed hall
(unless the selectmen of the village chance to have more than their
share of the Puritanism, which, however diversified with later
patchwork, still gives its prevailing tint to New England
character),--here the company of strolling players sets up its little
stage, and claims patronage for the legitimate drama.

But, on the autumnal evening which I speak of, a number of printed
handbills--stuck up in the bar-room, and on the sign-post of the hotel,
and on the meeting-house porch, and distributed largely through the
village--had promised the inhabitants an interview with that celebrated
and hitherto inexplicable phenomenon, the Veiled Lady!

The hall was fitted up with an amphitheatrical descent of seats towards
a platform, on which stood a desk, two lights, a stool, and a capacious
antique chair.  The audience was of a generally decent and respectable
character: old farmers, in their Sunday black coats, with shrewd, hard,
sun-dried faces, and a cynical humor, oftener than any other
expression, in their eyes; pretty girls, in many-colored attire; pretty
young men,--the schoolmaster, the lawyer, or student at law, the
shop-keeper,--all looking rather suburban than rural.  In these days,
there is absolutely no rusticity, except when the actual labor of the
soil leaves its earth-mould on the person.  There was likewise a
considerable proportion of young and middle-aged women, many of them
stern in feature, with marked foreheads, and a very definite line of
eyebrow; a type of womanhood in which a bold intellectual development
seems to be keeping pace with the progressive delicacy of the physical
constitution.  Of all these people I took note, at first, according to
my custom.  But I ceased to do so the moment that my eyes fell on an
individual who sat two or three seats below me, immovable, apparently
deep in thought, with his back, of course, towards me, and his face
turned steadfastly upon the platform.

After sitting awhile in contemplation of this person's familiar
contour, I was irresistibly moved to step over the intervening benches,
lay my hand on his shoulder, put my mouth close to his ear, and address
him in a sepulchral, melodramatic whisper: "Hollingsworth! where have
you left Zenobia?"

His nerves, however, were proof against my attack.  He turned half
around, and looked me in the face with great sad eyes, in which there
was neither kindness nor resentment, nor any perceptible surprise.

"Zenobia, when I last saw her," he answered, "was at Blithedale."

He said no more.  But there was a great deal of talk going on near me,
among a knot of people who might be considered as representing the
mysticism, or rather the mystic sensuality, of this singular age. The
nature of the exhibition that was about to take place had probably
given the turn to their conversation.

I heard, from a pale man in blue spectacles, some stranger stories than
ever were written in a romance; told, too, with a simple, unimaginative
steadfastness, which was terribly efficacious in compelling the auditor
to receive them into the category of established facts.  He cited
instances of the miraculous power of one human being over the will and
passions of another; insomuch that settled grief was but a shadow
beneath the influence of a man possessing this potency, and the strong
love of years melted away like a vapor.  At the bidding of one of these
wizards, the maiden, with her lover's kiss still burning on her lips,
would turn from him with icy indifference; the newly made widow would
dig up her buried heart out of her young husband's grave before the
sods had taken root upon it; a mother with her babe's milk in her bosom
would thrust away her child.  Human character was but soft wax in his
hands; and guilt, or virtue, only the forms into which he should see
fit to mould it. The religious sentiment was a flame which he could
blow up with his breath, or a spark that he could utterly extinguish.
It is unutterable, the horror and disgust with which I listened, and
saw that, if these things were to be believed, the individual soul was
virtually annihilated, and all that is sweet and pure in our present
life debased, and that the idea of man's eternal responsibility was
made ridiculous, and immortality rendered at once impossible, and not
worth acceptance.  But I would have perished on the spot sooner than
believe it.

The epoch of rapping spirits, and all the wonders that have followed in
their train,--such as tables upset by invisible agencies, bells
self-tolled at funerals, and ghostly music performed on
jew's-harps,--had not yet arrived.  Alas, my countrymen, methinks we
have fallen on an evil age!  If these phenomena have not humbug at the
bottom, so much the worse for us.  What can they indicate, in a
spiritual way, except that the soul of man is descending to a lower
point than it has ever before reached while incarnate?  We are pursuing
a downward course in the eternal march, and thus bring ourselves into
the same range with beings whom death, in requital of their gross and
evil lives, has degraded below humanity!  To hold intercourse with
spirits of this order, we must stoop and grovel in some element more
vile than earthly dust.  These goblins, if they exist at all, are but
the shadows of past mortality, outcasts, mere refuse stuff, adjudged
unworthy of the eternal world, and, on the most favorable supposition,
dwindling gradually into nothingness.  The less we have to say to them
the better, lest we share their fate!

The audience now began to be impatient; they signified their desire for
the entertainment to commence by thump of sticks and stamp of
boot-heels.  Nor was it a great while longer before, in response to
their call, there appeared a bearded personage in Oriental robes,
looking like one of the enchanters of the Arabian Nights.  He came upon
the platform from a side door, saluted the spectators, not with a
salaam, but a bow, took his station at the desk, and first blowing his
nose with a white handkerchief, prepared to speak.  The environment of
the homely village hall, and the absence of many ingenious contrivances
of stage effect with which the exhibition had heretofore been set off,
seemed to bring the artifice of this character more openly upon the
surface.  No sooner did I behold the bearded enchanter, than, laying my
hand again on Hollingsworth's shoulder, I whispered in his ear, "Do you
know him?"

"I never saw the man before," he muttered, without turning his head.

But I had seen him three times already.

Once, on occasion of my first visit to the Veiled Lady; a second time,
in the wood-path at Blithedale; and lastly, in Zenobia's drawing-room.
It was Westervelt.  A quick association of ideas made me shudder from
head to foot; and again, like an evil spirit, bringing up reminiscences
of a man's sins, I whispered a question in Hollingsworth's ear,--"What
have you done with Priscilla?"

He gave a convulsive start, as if I had thrust a knife into him,
writhed himself round on his seat, glared fiercely into my eyes, but
answered not a word.

The Professor began his discourse, explanatory of the psychological
phenomena, as he termed them, which it was his purpose to exhibit to
the spectators.  There remains no very distinct impression of it on my
memory.  It was eloquent, ingenious, plausible, with a delusive show of
spirituality, yet really imbued throughout with a cold and dead
materialism.  I shivered, as at a current of chill air issuing out of a
sepulchral vault, and bringing the smell of corruption along with it.
He spoke of a new era that was dawning upon the world; an era that
would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity,
with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one
great, mutually conscious brotherhood.  He described (in a strange,
philosophical guise, with terms of art, as if it were a matter of
chemical discovery) the agency by which this mighty result was to be
effected; nor would it have surprised me, had he pretended to hold up a
portion of his universally pervasive fluid, as he affirmed it to be, in
a glass phial.

At the close of his exordium, the Professor beckoned with his
hand,--once, twice, thrice,--and a figure came gliding upon the
platform, enveloped in a long veil of silvery whiteness.  It fell about
her like the texture of a summer cloud, with a kind of vagueness, so
that the outline of the form beneath it could not be accurately
discerned. But the movement of the Veiled Lady was graceful, free, and
unembarrassed, like that of a person accustomed to be the spectacle of
thousands; or, possibly, a blindfold prisoner within the sphere with
which this dark earthly magician had surrounded her, she was wholly
unconscious of being the central object to all those straining eyes.

Pliant to his gesture (which had even an obsequious courtesy, but at
the same time a remarkable decisiveness), the figure placed itself in
the great chair.  Sitting there, in such visible obscurity, it was,
perhaps, as much like the actual presence of a disembodied spirit as
anything that stage trickery could devise.  The hushed breathing of the
spectators proved how high-wrought were their anticipations of the
wonders to be performed through the medium of this incomprehensible
creature.  I, too, was in breathless suspense, but with a far different
presentiment of some strange event at hand.

"You see before you the Veiled Lady," said the bearded Professor,
advancing to the verge of the platform.  "By the agency of which I have
just spoken, she is at this moment in communion with the spiritual
world.  That silvery veil is, in one sense, an enchantment, having been
dipped, as it were, and essentially imbued, through the potency of my
art, with the fluid medium of spirits.  Slight and ethereal as it
seems, the limitations of time and space have no existence within its
folds.  This hall--these hundreds of faces, encompassing her within so
narrow an amphitheatre--are of thinner substance, in her view, than the
airiest vapor that the clouds are made of.  She beholds the Absolute!"

As preliminary to other and far more wonderful psychological
experiments, the exhibitor suggested that some of his auditors should
endeavor to make the Veiled Lady sensible of their presence by such
methods--provided only no touch were laid upon her person--as they
might deem best adapted to that end.  Accordingly, several deep-lunged
country fellows, who looked as if they might have blown the apparition
away with a breath, ascended the platform.  Mutually encouraging one
another, they shouted so close to her ear that the veil stirred like a
wreath of vanishing mist; they smote upon the floor with bludgeons;
they perpetrated so hideous a clamor, that methought it might have
reached, at least, a little way into the eternal sphere.  Finally, with
the assent of the Professor, they laid hold of the great chair, and
were startled, apparently, to find it soar upward, as if lighter than
the air through which it rose.  But the Veiled Lady remained seated and
motionless, with a composure that was hardly less than awful, because
implying so immeasurable a distance betwixt her and these rude
persecutors.

"These efforts are wholly without avail," observed the Professor, who
had been looking on with an aspect of serene indifference.  "The roar
of a battery of cannon would be inaudible to the Veiled Lady.  And yet,
were I to will it, sitting in this very hall, she could hear the desert
wind sweeping over the sands as far off as Arabia; the icebergs
grinding one against the other in the polar seas; the rustle of a leaf
in an East Indian forest; the lowest whispered breath of the
bashfullest maiden in the world, uttering the first confession of her
love.  Nor does there exist the moral inducement, apart from my own
behest, that could persuade her to lift the silvery veil, or arise out
of that chair."

Greatly to the Professor's discomposure, however, just as he spoke
these words, the Veiled Lady arose.  There was a mysterious tremor that
shook the magic veil.  The spectators, it may be, imagined that she was
about to take flight into that invisible sphere, and to the society of
those purely spiritual beings with whom they reckoned her so near akin.
Hollingsworth, a moment ago, had mounted the platform, and now stood
gazing at the figure, with a sad intentness that brought the whole
power of his great, stern, yet tender soul into his glance.

"Come," said he, waving his hand towards her.  "You are safe!"

She threw off the veil, and stood before that multitude of people pale,
tremulous, shrinking, as if only then had she discovered that a
thousand eyes were gazing at her.  Poor maiden!  How strangely had she
been betrayed!  Blazoned abroad as a wonder of the world, and
performing what were adjudged as miracles,--in the faith of many, a
seeress and a prophetess; in the harsher judgment of others, a
mountebank,--she had kept, as I religiously believe, her virgin reserve
and sanctity of soul throughout it all.  Within that encircling veil,
though an evil hand had flung it over her, there was as deep a
seclusion as if this forsaken girl had, all the while, been sitting
under the shadow of Eliot's pulpit, in the Blithedale woods, at the
feet of him who now summoned her to the shelter of his arms. And the
true heart-throb of a woman's affection was too powerful for the
jugglery that had hitherto environed her.  She uttered a shriek, and
fled to Hollingsworth, like one escaping from her deadliest enemy, and
was safe forever.



XXIV. THE MASQUERADERS

Two nights had passed since the foregoing occurrences, when, in a
breezy September forenoon, I set forth from town, on foot, towards
Blithedale.  It was the most delightful of all days for a walk, with a
dash of invigorating ice-temper in the air, but a coolness that soon
gave place to the brisk glow of exercise, while the vigor remained as
elastic as before.  The atmosphere had a spirit and sparkle in it.
Each breath was like a sip of ethereal wine, tempered, as I said, with
a crystal lump of ice.  I had started on this expedition in an
exceedingly sombre mood, as well befitted one who found himself tending
towards home, but was conscious that nobody would be quite overjoyed to
greet him there.  My feet were hardly off the pavement, however, when
this morbid sensation began to yield to the lively influences of air
and motion.  Nor had I gone far, with fields yet green on either side,
before my step became as swift and light as if Hollingsworth were
waiting to exchange a friendly hand-grip, and Zenobia's and Priscilla's
open arms would welcome the wanderer's reappearance.  It has happened
to me on other occasions, as well as this, to prove how a state of
physical well-being can create a kind of joy, in spite of the
profoundest anxiety of mind.

The pathway of that walk still runs along, with sunny freshness,
through my memory.  I know not why it should be so.  But my mental eye
can even now discern the September grass, bordering the pleasant
roadside with a brighter verdure than while the summer heats were
scorching it; the trees, too, mostly green, although here and there a
branch or shrub has donned its vesture of crimson and gold a week or
two before its fellows.  I see the tufted barberry-bushes, with their
small clusters of scarlet fruit; the toadstools, likewise,--some
spotlessly white, others yellow or red,--mysterious growths, springing
suddenly from no root or seed, and growing nobody can tell how or
wherefore.  In this respect they resembled many of the emotions in my
breast.  And I still see the little rivulets, chill, clear, and bright,
that murmured beneath the road, through subterranean rocks, and
deepened into mossy pools, where tiny fish were darting to and fro, and
within which lurked the hermit frog. But no,--I never can account for
it, that, with a yearning interest to learn the upshot of all my story,
and returning to Blithedale for that sole purpose, I should examine
these things so like a peaceful-bosomed naturalist.  Nor why, amid all
my sympathies and fears, there shot, at times, a wild exhilaration
through my frame.

Thus I pursued my way along the line of the ancient stone wall that
Paul Dudley built, and through white villages, and past orchards of
ruddy apples, and fields of ripening maize, and patches of woodland,
and all such sweet rural scenery as looks the fairest, a little beyond
the suburbs of a town.  Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! They glided
mistily before me, as I walked.  Sometimes, in my solitude, I laughed
with the bitterness of self-scorn, remembering how unreservedly I had
given up my heart and soul to interests that were not mine.  What had I
ever had to do with them?  And why, being now free, should I take this
thraldom on me once again?  It was both sad and dangerous, I whispered
to myself, to be in too close affinity with the passions, the errors,
and the misfortunes of individuals who stood within a circle of their
own, into which, if I stept at all, it must be as an intruder, and at a
peril that I could not estimate.

Drawing nearer to Blithedale, a sickness of the spirits kept
alternating with my flights of causeless buoyancy.  I indulged in a
hundred odd and extravagant conjectures.  Either there was no such
place as Blithedale, nor ever had been, nor any brotherhood of
thoughtful laborers, like what I seemed to recollect there, or else it
was all changed during my absence.  It had been nothing but dream work
and enchantment.  I should seek in vain for the old farmhouse, and for
the greensward, the potato-fields, the root-crops, and acres of Indian
corn, and for all that configuration of the land which I had imagined.
It would be another spot, and an utter strangeness.

These vagaries were of the spectral throng so apt to steal out of an
unquiet heart.  They partly ceased to haunt me, on my arriving at a
point whence, through the trees, I began to catch glimpses of the
Blithedale farm.  That surely was something real.  There was hardly a
square foot of all those acres on which I had not trodden heavily, in
one or another kind of toil.  The curse of Adam's posterity--and, curse
or blessing be it, it gives substance to the life around us--had first
come upon me there.  In the sweat of my brow I had there earned bread
and eaten it, and so established my claim to be on earth, and my
fellowship with all the sons of labor.  I could have knelt down, and
have laid my breast against that soil.  The red clay of which my frame
was moulded seemed nearer akin to those crumbling furrows than to any
other portion of the world's dust.  There was my home, and there might
be my grave.

I felt an invincible reluctance, nevertheless, at the idea of
presenting myself before my old associates, without first ascertaining
the state in which they were.  A nameless foreboding weighed upon me.
Perhaps, should I know all the circumstances that had occurred, I might
find it my wisest course to turn back, unrecognized, unseen, and never
look at Blithedale more.  Had it been evening, I would have stolen
softly to some lighted window of the old farmhouse, and peeped darkling
in, to see all their well-known faces round the supper-board.  Then,
were there a vacant seat, I might noiselessly unclose the door, glide
in, and take my place among them, without a word.  My entrance might be
so quiet, my aspect so familiar, that they would forget how long I had
been away, and suffer me to melt into the scene, as a wreath of vapor
melts into a larger cloud. I dreaded a boisterous greeting.  Beholding
me at table, Zenobia, as a matter of course, would send me a cup of
tea, and Hollingsworth fill my plate from the great dish of pandowdy,
and Priscilla, in her quiet way, would hand the cream, and others help
me to the bread and butter.  Being one of them again, the knowledge of
what had happened would come to me without a shock.  For still, at
every turn of my shifting fantasies, the thought stared me in the face
that some evil thing had befallen us, or was ready to befall.

Yielding to this ominous impression, I now turned aside into the woods,
resolving to spy out the posture of the Community as craftily as the
wild Indian before he makes his onset.  I would go wandering about the
outskirts of the farm, and, perhaps, catching sight of a solitary
acquaintance, would approach him amid the brown shadows of the trees (a
kind of medium fit for spirits departed and revisitant, like myself),
and entreat him to tell me how all things were.

The first living creature that I met was a partridge, which sprung up
beneath my feet, and whirred away; the next was a squirrel, who
chattered angrily at me from an overhanging bough.  I trod along by the
dark, sluggish river, and remember pausing on the bank, above one of
its blackest and most placid pools (the very spot, with the barkless
stump of a tree aslantwise over the water, is depicting itself to my
fancy at this instant), and wondering how deep it was, and if any
overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither, and
if it thus escaped the burden, or only made it heavier. And perhaps the
skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the inscrutable depth,
clinging to some sunken log at the bottom with the gripe of its old
despair.  So slight, however, was the track of these gloomy ideas, that
I soon forgot them in the contemplation of a brood of wild ducks, which
were floating on the river, and anon took flight, leaving each a bright
streak over the black surface.  By and by, I came to my hermitage, in
the heart of the white-pine tree, and clambering up into it, sat down
to rest.  The grapes, which I had watched throughout the summer, now
dangled around me in abundant clusters of the deepest purple,
deliciously sweet to the taste, and, though wild, yet free from that
ungentle flavor which distinguishes nearly all our native and
uncultivated grapes.  Methought a wine might be pressed out of them
possessing a passionate zest, and endowed with a new kind of
intoxicating quality, attended with such bacchanalian ecstasies as the
tamer grapes of Madeira, France, and the Rhine are inadequate to
produce.  And I longed to quaff a great goblet of it that moment!

While devouring the grapes, I looked on all sides out of the peep-holes
of my hermitage, and saw the farmhouse, the fields, and almost every
part of our domain, but not a single human figure in the landscape.
Some of the windows of the house were open, but with no more signs of
life than in a dead man's unshut eyes.  The barn-door was ajar, and
swinging in the breeze.  The big old dog,--he was a relic of the former
dynasty of the farm,--that hardly ever stirred out of the yard, was
nowhere to be seen.  What, then, had become of all the fraternity and
sisterhood?  Curious to ascertain this point, I let myself down out of
the tree, and going to the edge of the wood, was glad to perceive our
herd of cows chewing the cud or grazing not far off.  I fancied, by
their manner, that two or three of them recognized me (as, indeed, they
ought, for I had milked them and been their chamberlain times without
number); but, after staring me in the face a little while, they
phlegmatically began grazing and chewing their cuds again.  Then I grew
foolishly angry at so cold a reception, and flung some rotten fragments
of an old stump at these unsentimental cows.

Skirting farther round the pasture, I heard voices and much laughter
proceeding from the interior of the wood.  Voices, male and feminine;
laughter, not only of fresh young throats, but the bass of grown
people, as if solemn organ-pipes should pour out airs of merriment. Not
a voice spoke, but I knew it better than my own; not a laugh, but its
cadences were familiar.  The wood, in this portion of it, seemed as
full of jollity as if Comus and his crew were holding their revels in
one of its usually lonesome glades.  Stealing onward as far as I durst,
without hazard of discovery, I saw a concourse of strange figures
beneath the overshadowing branches.  They appeared, and vanished, and
came again, confusedly with the streaks of sunlight glimmering down
upon them.

Among them was an Indian chief, with blanket, feathers, and war-paint,
and uplifted tomahawk; and near him, looking fit to be his woodland
bride, the goddess Diana, with the crescent on her head, and attended
by our big lazy dog, in lack of any fleeter hound.  Drawing an arrow
from her quiver, she let it fly at a venture, and hit the very tree
behind which I happened to be lurking.  Another group consisted of a
Bavarian broom-girl, a negro of the Jim Crow order, one or two
foresters of the Middle Ages, a Kentucky woodsman in his trimmed
hunting-shirt and deerskin leggings, and a Shaker elder, quaint,
demure, broad-brimmed, and square-skirted.  Shepherds of Arcadia, and
allegoric figures from the "Faerie Queen," were oddly mixed up with
these.  Arm in arm, or otherwise huddled together in strange
discrepancy, stood grim Puritans, gay Cavaliers, and Revolutionary
officers with three-cornered cocked hats, and queues longer than their
swords.  A bright-complexioned, dark-haired, vivacious little gypsy,
with a red shawl over her head, went from one group to another, telling
fortunes by palmistry; and Moll Pitcher, the renowned old witch of
Lynn, broomstick in hand, showed herself prominently in the midst, as
if announcing all these apparitions to be the offspring of her
necromantic art.  But Silas Foster, who leaned against a tree near by,
in his customary blue frock and smoking a short pipe, did more to
disenchant the scene, with his look of shrewd, acrid, Yankee
observation, than twenty witches and necromancers could have done in
the way of rendering it weird and fantastic.

A little farther off, some old-fashioned skinkers and drawers, all with
portentously red noses, were spreading a banquet on the leaf-strewn
earth; while a horned and long-tailed gentleman (in whom I recognized
the fiendish musician erst seen by Tam O'Shanter) tuned his fiddle, and
summoned the whole motley rout to a dance, before partaking of the
festal cheer.  So they joined hands in a circle, whirling round so
swiftly, so madly, and so merrily, in time and tune with the Satanic
music, that their separate incongruities were blended all together, and
they became a kind of entanglement that went nigh to turn one's brain
with merely looking at it.  Anon they stopt all of a sudden, and
staring at one another's figures, set up a roar of laughter; whereat a
shower of the September leaves (which, all day long, had been
hesitating whether to fall or no) were shaken off by the movement of
the air, and came eddying down upon the revellers.

Then, for lack of breath, ensued a silence, at the deepest point of
which, tickled by the oddity of surprising my grave associates in this
masquerading trim, I could not possibly refrain from a burst of
laughter on my own separate account.

"Hush!"  I heard the pretty gypsy fortuneteller say.  "Who is that
laughing?"

"Some profane intruder!" said the goddess Diana.  "I shall send an
arrow through his heart, or change him into a stag, as I did Actaeon,
if he peeps from behind the trees!"

"Me take his scalp!" cried the Indian chief, brandishing his tomahawk,
and cutting a great caper in the air.

"I'll root him in the earth with a spell that I have at my tongue's
end!" squeaked Moll Pitcher.  "And the green moss shall grow all over
him, before he gets free again!"

"The voice was Miles Coverdale's," said the fiendish fiddler, with a
whisk of his tail and a toss of his horns.  "My music has brought him
hither.  He is always ready to dance to the Devil's tune!"

Thus put on the right track, they all recognized the voice at once, and
set up a simultaneous shout.

"Miles!  Miles!  Miles Coverdale, where are you?" they cried. "Zenobia!
Queen Zenobia! here is one of your vassals lurking in the wood.
Command him to approach and pay his duty!"

The whole fantastic rabble forthwith streamed off in pursuit of me, so
that I was like a mad poet hunted by chimeras.  Having fairly the start
of them, however, I succeeded in making my escape, and soon left their
merriment and riot at a good distance in the rear.  Its fainter tones
assumed a kind of mournfulness, and were finally lost in the hush and
solemnity of the wood.  In my haste, I stumbled over a heap of logs and
sticks that had been cut for firewood, a great while ago, by some
former possessor of the soil, and piled up square, in order to be
carted or sledded away to the farmhouse.  But, being forgotten, they
had lain there perhaps fifty years, and possibly much longer; until, by
the accumulation of moss, and the leaves falling over them, and
decaying there, from autumn to autumn, a green mound was formed, in
which the softened outline of the woodpile was still perceptible.  In
the fitful mood that then swayed my mind, I found something strangely
affecting in this simple circumstance.  I imagined the long-dead
woodman, and his long-dead wife and children, coming out of their chill
graves, and essaying to make a fire with this heap of mossy fuel!

From this spot I strayed onward, quite lost in reverie, and neither
knew nor cared whither I was going, until a low, soft, well-remembered
voice spoke, at a little distance.

"There is Mr. Coverdale!"

"Miles Coverdale!" said another voice,--and its tones were very stern.
"Let him come forward, then!"

"Yes, Mr. Coverdale," cried a woman's voice,--clear and melodious, but,
just then, with something unnatural in its chord,--"you are welcome!
But you come half an hour too late, and have missed a scene which you
would have enjoyed!"

I looked up and found myself nigh Eliot's pulpit, at the base of which
sat Hollingsworth, with Priscilla at his feet and Zenobia standing
before them.



XXV. THE THREE TOGETHER

Hollingsworth was in his ordinary working-dress.  Priscilla wore a
pretty and simple gown, with a kerchief about her neck, and a calash,
which she had flung back from her head, leaving it suspended by the
strings.  But Zenobia (whose part among the maskers, as may be
supposed, was no inferior one) appeared in a costume of fanciful
magnificence, with her jewelled flower as the central ornament of what
resembled a leafy crown, or coronet.  She represented the Oriental
princess by whose name we were accustomed to know her.  Her attitude
was free and noble; yet, if a queen's, it was not that of a queen
triumphant, but dethroned, on trial for her life, or, perchance,
condemned already.  The spirit of the conflict seemed, nevertheless, to
be alive in her.  Her eyes were on fire; her cheeks had each a crimson
spot, so exceedingly vivid, and marked with so definite an outline,
that I at first doubted whether it were not artificial.  In a very
brief space, however, this idea was shamed by the paleness that ensued,
as the blood sunk suddenly away.  Zenobia now looked like marble.

One always feels the fact, in an instant, when he has intruded on those
who love, or those who hate, at some acme of their passion that puts
them into a sphere of their own, where no other spirit can pretend to
stand on equal ground with them.  I was confused,--affected even with a
species of terror,--and wished myself away. The intenseness of their
feelings gave them the exclusive property of the soil and atmosphere,
and left me no right to be or breathe there.

"Hollingsworth,--Zenobia,--I have just returned to Blithedale," said I,
"and had no thought of finding you here.  We shall meet again at the
house.  I will retire."

"This place is free to you," answered Hollingsworth.

"As free as to ourselves," added Zenobia.  "This long while past, you
have been following up your game, groping for human emotions in the
dark corners of the heart.  Had you been here a little sooner, you
might have seen them dragged into the daylight.  I could even wish to
have my trial over again, with you standing by to see fair play!  Do
you know, Mr. Coverdale, I have been on trial for my life?"

She laughed, while speaking thus.  But, in truth, as my eyes wandered
from one of the group to another, I saw in Hollingsworth all that an
artist could desire for the grim portrait of a Puritan magistrate
holding inquest of life and death in a case of witchcraft; in Zenobia,
the sorceress herself, not aged, wrinkled, and decrepit, but fair
enough to tempt Satan with a force reciprocal to his own; and, in
Priscilla, the pale victim, whose soul and body had been wasted by her
spells.  Had a pile of fagots been heaped against the rock, this hint
of impending doom would have completed the suggestive picture.

"It was too hard upon me," continued Zenobia, addressing Hollingsworth,
"that judge, jury, and accuser should all be comprehended in one man!
I demur, as I think the lawyers say, to the jurisdiction.  But let the
learned Judge Coverdale seat himself on the top of the rock, and you
and me stand at its base, side by side, pleading our cause before him!
There might, at least, be two criminals instead of one."

"You forced this on me," replied Hollingsworth, looking her sternly in
the face.  "Did I call you hither from among the masqueraders yonder?
Do I assume to be your judge?  No; except so far as I have an
unquestionable right of judgment, in order to settle my own line of
behavior towards those with whom the events of life bring me in
contact.  True, I have already judged you, but not on the world's
part,--neither do I pretend to pass a sentence!"

"Ah, this is very good!" cried Zenobia with a smile.  "What strange
beings you men are, Mr. Coverdale!--is it not so?  It is the simplest
thing in the world with you to bring a woman before your secret
tribunals, and judge and condemn her unheard, and then tell her to go
free without a sentence.  The misfortune is, that this same secret
tribunal chances to be the only judgment-seat that a true woman stands
in awe of, and that any verdict short of acquittal is equivalent to a
death sentence!"

The more I looked at them, and the more I heard, the stronger grew my
impression that a crisis had just come and gone.  On Hollingsworth's
brow it had left a stamp like that of irrevocable doom, of which his
own will was the instrument.  In Zenobia's whole person, beholding her
more closely, I saw a riotous agitation; the almost delirious
disquietude of a great struggle, at the close of which the vanquished
one felt her strength and courage still mighty within her, and longed
to renew the contest.  My sensations were as if I had come upon a
battlefield before the smoke was as yet cleared away.

And what subjects had been discussed here?  All, no doubt, that for so
many months past had kept my heart and my imagination idly feverish.
Zenobia's whole character and history; the true nature of her
mysterious connection with Westervelt; her later purposes towards
Hollingsworth, and, reciprocally, his in reference to her; and,
finally, the degree in which Zenobia had been cognizant of the plot
against Priscilla, and what, at last, had been the real object of that
scheme.  On these points, as before, I was left to my own conjectures.
One thing, only, was certain.  Zenobia and Hollingsworth were friends
no longer.  If their heartstrings were ever intertwined, the knot had
been adjudged an entanglement, and was now violently broken.

But Zenobia seemed unable to rest content with the matter in the
posture which it had assumed.

"Ah! do we part so?" exclaimed she, seeing Hollingsworth about to
retire.

"And why not?" said he, with almost rude abruptness.  "What is there
further to be said between us?"

"Well, perhaps nothing," answered Zenobia, looking him in the face, and
smiling.  "But we have come many times before to this gray rock, and we
have talked very softly among the whisperings of the birch-trees.  They
were pleasant hours!  I love to make the latest of them, though not
altogether so delightful, loiter away as slowly as may be.  And,
besides, you have put many queries to me at this, which you design to
be our last interview; and being driven, as I must acknowledge, into a
corner, I have responded with reasonable frankness.  But now, with your
free consent, I desire the privilege of asking a few questions, in my
turn."

"I have no concealments," said Hollingsworth.

"We shall see," answered Zenobia.  "I would first inquire whether you
have supposed me to be wealthy?"

"On that point," observed Hollingsworth, "I have had the opinion which
the world holds."

"And I held it likewise," said Zenobia.  "Had I not, Heaven is my
witness the knowledge should have been as free to you as me.  It is
only three days since I knew the strange fact that threatens to make me
poor; and your own acquaintance with it, I suspect, is of at least as
old a date.  I fancied myself affluent.  You are aware, too, of the
disposition which I purposed making of the larger portion of my
imaginary opulence,--nay, were it all, I had not hesitated.  Let me ask
you, further, did I ever propose or intimate any terms of compact, on
which depended this--as the world would consider it--so important
sacrifice?"

"You certainly spoke of none," said Hollingsworth.

"Nor meant any," she responded.  "I was willing to realize your dream
freely,--generously, as some might think,--but, at all events, fully,
and heedless though it should prove the ruin of my fortune. If, in your
own thoughts, you have imposed any conditions of this expenditure, it
is you that must be held responsible for whatever is sordid and
unworthy in them.  And now one other question.  Do you love this girl?"

"O Zenobia!" exclaimed Priscilla, shrinking back, as if longing for the
rock to topple over and hide her.

"Do you love her?" repeated Zenobia.

"Had you asked me that question a short time since," replied
Hollingsworth, after a pause, during which, it seemed to me, even the
birch-trees held their whispering breath, "I should have told
you--'No!' My feelings for Priscilla differed little from those of an
elder brother, watching tenderly over the gentle sister whom God has
given him to protect."

"And what is your answer now?" persisted Zenobia.

"I do love her!" said Hollingsworth, uttering the words with a deep
inward breath, instead of speaking them outright.  "As well declare it
thus as in any other way.  I do love her!"

"Now, God be judge between us," cried Zenobia, breaking into sudden
passion, "which of us two has most mortally offended Him!  At least, I
am a woman, with every fault, it may be, that a woman ever had,--weak,
vain, unprincipled (like most of my sex; for our virtues, when we have
any, are merely impulsive and intuitive), passionate, too, and pursuing
my foolish and unattainable ends by indirect and cunning, though
absurdly chosen means, as an hereditary bond-slave must; false,
moreover, to the whole circle of good, in my reckless truth to the
little good I saw before me,--but still a woman!  A creature whom only
a little change of earthly fortune, a little kinder smile of Him who
sent me hither, and one true heart to encourage and direct me, might
have made all that a woman can be! But how is it with you?  Are you a
man?  No; but a monster!  A cold, heartless, self-beginning and
self-ending piece of mechanism!"

"With what, then, do you charge me!" asked Hollingsworth, aghast, and
greatly disturbed by this attack.  "Show me one selfish end, in all I
ever aimed at, and you may cut it out of my bosom with a knife!"

"It is all self!" answered Zenobia with still intenser bitterness.
"Nothing else; nothing but self, self, self!  The fiend, I doubt not,
has made his choicest mirth of you these seven years past, and
especially in the mad summer which we have spent together.  I see it
now!  I am awake, disenchanted, disinthralled!  Self, self, self! You
have embodied yourself in a project.  You are a better masquerader than
the witches and gypsies yonder; for your disguise is a self-deception.
See whither it has brought you!  First, you aimed a death-blow, and a
treacherous one, at this scheme of a purer and higher life, which so
many noble spirits had wrought out.  Then, because Coverdale could not
be quite your slave, you threw him ruthlessly away.  And you took me,
too, into your plan, as long as there was hope of my being available,
and now fling me aside again, a broken tool!  But, foremost and
blackest of your sins, you stifled down your inmost consciousness!--you
did a deadly wrong to your own heart!--you were ready to sacrifice this
girl, whom, if God ever visibly showed a purpose, He put into your
charge, and through whom He was striving to redeem you!"

"This is a woman's view," said Hollingsworth, growing deadly pale,--"a
woman's, whose whole sphere of action is in the heart, and who can
conceive of no higher nor wider one!"

"Be silent!" cried Zenobia imperiously.  "You know neither man nor
woman!  The utmost that can be said in your behalf--and because I would
not be wholly despicable in my own eyes, but would fain excuse my
wasted feelings, nor own it wholly a delusion, therefore I say it--is,
that a great and rich heart has been ruined in your breast. Leave me,
now.  You have done with me, and I with you.  Farewell!"

"Priscilla," said Hollingsworth, "come."  Zenobia smiled; possibly I
did so too.  Not often, in human life, has a gnawing sense of injury
found a sweeter morsel of revenge than was conveyed in the tone with
which Hollingsworth spoke those two words.  It was the abased and
tremulous tone of a man whose faith in himself was shaken, and who
sought, at last, to lean on an affection.  Yes; the strong man bowed
himself and rested on this poor Priscilla!  Oh, could she have failed
him, what a triumph for the lookers-on!

And, at first, I half imagined that she was about to fail him.  She
rose up, stood shivering like the birch leaves that trembled over her
head, and then slowly tottered, rather than walked, towards Zenobia.
Arriving at her feet, she sank down there, in the very same attitude
which she had assumed on their first meeting, in the kitchen of the old
farmhouse.  Zenobia remembered it.

"Ah, Priscilla!" said she, shaking her head, "how much is changed since
then!  You kneel to a dethroned princess.  You, the victorious one!
But he is waiting for you.  Say what you wish, and leave me."

"We are sisters!" gasped Priscilla.

I fancied that I understood the word and action.  It meant the offering
of herself, and all she had, to be at Zenobia's disposal. But the
latter would not take it thus.

"True, we are sisters!" she replied; and, moved by the sweet word, she
stooped down and kissed Priscilla; but not lovingly, for a sense of
fatal harm received through her seemed to be lurking in Zenobia's
heart.  "We had one father!  You knew it from the first; I, but a
little while,--else some things that have chanced might have been
spared you.  But I never wished you harm.  You stood between me and an
end which I desired.  I wanted a clear path.  No matter what I meant.
It is over now.  Do you forgive me?"

"O Zenobia," sobbed Priscilla, "it is I that feel like the guilty one!"

"No, no, poor little thing!" said Zenobia, with a sort of contempt.
"You have been my evil fate, but there never was a babe with less
strength or will to do an injury.  Poor child!  Methinks you have but a
melancholy lot before you, sitting all alone in that wide, cheerless
heart, where, for aught you know,--and as I, alas! believe,--the fire
which you have kindled may soon go out.  Ah, the thought makes me
shiver for you!  What will you do, Priscilla, when you find no spark
among the ashes?"

"Die!" she answered.

"That was well said!" responded Zenobia, with an approving smile.
"There is all a woman in your little compass, my poor sister.
Meanwhile, go with him, and live!"

She waved her away with a queenly gesture, and turned her own face to
the rock.  I watched Priscilla, wondering what judgment she would pass
between Zenobia and Hollingsworth; how interpret his behavior, so as to
reconcile it with true faith both towards her sister and herself; how
compel her love for him to keep any terms whatever with her sisterly
affection!  But, in truth, there was no such difficulty as I imagined.
Her engrossing love made it all clear.  Hollingsworth could have no
fault.  That was the one principle at the centre of the universe.  And
the doubtful guilt or possible integrity of other people, appearances,
self-evident facts, the testimony of her own senses,--even
Hollingsworth's self-accusation, had he volunteered it,--would have
weighed not the value of a mote of thistledown on the other side.  So
secure was she of his right, that she never thought of comparing it
with another's wrong, but left the latter to itself.

Hollingsworth drew her arm within his, and soon disappeared with her
among the trees.  I cannot imagine how Zenobia knew when they were out
of sight; she never glanced again towards them.  But, retaining a proud
attitude so long as they might have thrown back a retiring look, they
were no sooner departed,--utterly departed,--than she began slowly to
sink down.  It was as if a great, invisible, irresistible weight were
pressing her to the earth.  Settling upon her knees, she leaned her
forehead against the rock, and sobbed convulsively; dry sobs they
seemed to be, such as have nothing to do with tears.



XXVI. ZENOBIA AND COVERDALE

Zenobia had entirely forgotten me.  She fancied herself alone with her
great grief.  And had it been only a common pity that I felt for
her,--the pity that her proud nature would have repelled, as the one
worst wrong which the world yet held in reserve,--the sacredness and
awfulness of the crisis might have impelled me to steal away silently,
so that not a dry leaf should rustle under my feet.  I would have left
her to struggle, in that solitude, with only the eye of God upon her.
But, so it happened, I never once dreamed of questioning my right to be
there now, as I had questioned it just before, when I came so suddenly
upon Hollingsworth and herself, in the passion of their recent debate.
It suits me not to explain what was the analogy that I saw or imagined
between Zenobia's situation and mine; nor, I believe, will the reader
detect this one secret, hidden beneath many a revelation which perhaps
concerned me less.  In simple truth, however, as Zenobia leaned her
forehead against the rock, shaken with that tearless agony, it seemed
to me that the self-same pang, with hardly mitigated torment, leaped
thrilling from her heartstrings to my own.  Was it wrong, therefore, if
I felt myself consecrated to the priesthood by sympathy like this, and
called upon to minister to this woman's affliction, so far as mortal
could?

But, indeed, what could mortal do for her?  Nothing!  The attempt would
be a mockery and an anguish.  Time, it is true, would steal away her
grief, and bury it and the best of her heart in the same grave.  But
Destiny itself, methought, in its kindliest mood, could do no better
for Zenobia, in the way of quick relief; than to cause the impending
rock to impend a little farther, and fall upon her head. So I leaned
against a tree, and listened to her sobs, in unbroken silence.  She was
half prostrate, half kneeling, with her forehead still pressed against
the rock.  Her sobs were the only sound; she did not groan, nor give
any other utterance to her distress.  It was all involuntary.

At length she sat up, put back her hair, and stared about her with a
bewildered aspect, as if not distinctly recollecting the scene through
which she had passed, nor cognizant of the situation in which it left
her.  Her face and brow were almost purple with the rush of blood.
They whitened, however, by and by, and for some time retained this
deathlike hue.  She put her hand to her forehead, with a gesture that
made me forcibly conscious of an intense and living pain there.

Her glance, wandering wildly to and fro, passed over me several times,
without appearing to inform her of my presence.  But, finally, a look
of recognition gleamed from her eyes into mine.

"Is it you, Miles Coverdale?" said she, smiling.  "Ah, I perceive what
you are about!  You are turning this whole affair into a ballad. Pray
let me hear as many stanzas as you happen to have ready."

"Oh, hush, Zenobia!"  I answered.  "Heaven knows what an ache is in my
soul!"

"It is genuine tragedy, is it not?" rejoined Zenobia, with a sharp,
light laugh.  "And you are willing to allow, perhaps, that I have had
hard measure.  But it is a woman's doom, and I have deserved it like a
woman; so let there be no pity, as, on my part, there shall be no
complaint.  It is all right, now, or will shortly be so.  But, Mr.
Coverdale, by all means write this ballad, and put your soul's ache
into it, and turn your sympathy to good account, as other poets do, and
as poets must, unless they choose to give us glittering icicles instead
of lines of fire.  As for the moral, it shall be distilled into the
final stanza, in a drop of bitter honey."

"What shall it be, Zenobia?"  I inquired, endeavoring to fall in with
her mood.

"Oh, a very old one will serve the purpose," she replied.  "There are
no new truths, much as we have prided ourselves on finding some.  A
moral?  Why, this: That, in the battlefield of life, the downright
stroke, that would fall only on a man's steel headpiece, is sure to
light on a woman's heart, over which she wears no breastplate, and
whose wisdom it is, therefore, to keep out of the conflict.  Or, this:
That the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or
Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one
hair's-breadth out of the beaten track.  Yes; and add (for I may as
well own it, now) that, with that one hair's-breadth, she goes all
astray, and never sees the world in its true aspect afterwards."

"This last is too stern a moral," I observed.  "Cannot we soften it a
little?"

"Do it if you like, at your own peril, not on my responsibility," she
answered.  Then, with a sudden change of subject, she went on: "After
all, he has flung away what would have served him better than the poor,
pale flower he kept.  What can Priscilla do for him?  Put passionate
warmth into his heart, when it shall be chilled with frozen hopes?
Strengthen his hands, when they are weary with much doing and no
performance?  No! but only tend towards him with a blind, instinctive
love, and hang her little, puny weakness for a clog upon his arm!  She
cannot even give him such sympathy as is worth the name.  For will he
never, in many an hour of darkness, need that proud intellectual
sympathy which he might have had from me?--the sympathy that would
flash light along his course, and guide, as well as cheer him?  Poor
Hollingsworth! Where will he find it now?"

"Hollingsworth has a heart of ice!" said I bitterly.  "He is a wretch!"

"Do him no wrong," interrupted Zenobia, turning haughtily upon me.
"Presume not to estimate a man like Hollingsworth.  It was my fault,
all along, and none of his.  I see it now!  He never sought me.  Why
should he seek me?  What had I to offer him?  A miserable, bruised, and
battered heart, spoilt long before he met me.  A life, too, hopelessly
entangled with a villain's!  He did well to cast me off. God be
praised, he did it!  And yet, had he trusted me, and borne with me a
little longer, I would have saved him all this trouble."

She was silent for a time, and stood with her eyes fixed on the ground.
Again raising them, her look was more mild and calm.

"Miles Coverdale!" said she.

"Well, Zenobia," I responded.  "Can I do you any service?"

"Very little," she replied.  "But it is my purpose, as you may well
imagine, to remove from Blithedale; and, most likely, I may not see
Hollingsworth again.  A woman in my position, you understand, feels
scarcely at her ease among former friends.  New faces,--unaccustomed
looks,--those only can she tolerate.  She would pine among familiar
scenes; she would be apt to blush, too, under the eyes that knew her
secret; her heart might throb uncomfortably; she would mortify herself,
I suppose, with foolish notions of having sacrificed the honor of her
sex at the foot of proud, contumacious man.  Poor womanhood, with its
rights and wrongs!  Here will be new matter for my course of lectures,
at the idea of which you smiled, Mr. Coverdale, a month or two ago.
But, as you have really a heart and sympathies, as far as they go, and
as I shall depart without seeing Hollingsworth, I must entreat you to
be a messenger between him and me."

"Willingly," said I, wondering at the strange way in which her mind
seemed to vibrate from the deepest earnest to mere levity.  "What is
the message?"

"True,--what is it?" exclaimed Zenobia.  "After all, I hardly know. On
better consideration, I have no message.  Tell him,--tell him something
pretty and pathetic, that will come nicely and sweetly into your
ballad,--anything you please, so it be tender and submissive enough.
Tell him he has murdered me!  Tell him that I'll haunt him! "--She
spoke these words with the wildest energy.--"And give him--no, give
Priscilla--this!"

Thus saying, she took the jewelled flower out of her hair; and it
struck me as the act of a queen, when worsted in a combat, discrowning
herself, as if she found a sort of relief in abasing all her pride.

"Bid her wear this for Zenobia's sake," she continued.  "She is a
pretty little creature, and will make as soft and gentle a wife as the
veriest Bluebeard could desire.  Pity that she must fade so soon! These
delicate and puny maidens always do.  Ten years hence, let
Hollingsworth look at my face and Priscilla's, and then choose betwixt
them.  Or, if he pleases, let him do it now."

How magnificently Zenobia looked as she said this!  The effect of her
beauty was even heightened by the over-consciousness and
self-recognition of it, into which, I suppose, Hollingsworth's scorn
had driven her.  She understood the look of admiration in my face;
and--Zenobia to the last--it gave her pleasure.

"It is an endless pity," said she, "that I had not bethought myself of
winning your heart, Mr. Coverdale, instead of Hollingsworth's.  I think
I should have succeeded, and many women would have deemed you the
worthier conquest of the two.  You are certainly much the handsomest
man.  But there is a fate in these things.  And beauty, in a man, has
been of little account with me since my earliest girlhood, when, for
once, it turned my head.  Now, farewell!"

"Zenobia, whither are you going?"  I asked.

"No matter where," said she.  "But I am weary of this place, and sick
to death of playing at philanthropy and progress.  Of all varieties of
mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery in
our effort to establish the one true system.  I have done with it; and
Blithedale must find another woman to superintend the laundry, and you,
Mr. Coverdale, another nurse to make your gruel, the next time you fall
ill.  It was, indeed, a foolish dream!  Yet it gave us some pleasant
summer days, and bright hopes, while they lasted.  It can do no more;
nor will it avail us to shed tears over a broken bubble.  Here is my
hand!  Adieu!"

She gave me her hand with the same free, whole-souled gesture as on the
first afternoon of our acquaintance, and, being greatly moved, I
bethought me of no better method of expressing my deep sympathy than to
carry it to my lips.  In so doing, I perceived that this white hand--so
hospitably warm when I first touched it, five months since--was now
cold as a veritable piece of snow.

"How very cold!"  I exclaimed, holding it between both my own, with the
vain idea of warming it.  "What can be the reason?  It is really
deathlike!"

"The extremities die first, they say," answered Zenobia, laughing. "And
so you kiss this poor, despised, rejected hand!  Well, my dear friend,
I thank you.  You have reserved your homage for the fallen. Lip of man
will never touch my hand again.  I intend to become a Catholic, for the
sake of going into a nunnery.  When you next hear of Zenobia, her face
will be behind the black veil; so look your last at it now,--for all is
over.  Once more, farewell!"

She withdrew her hand, yet left a lingering pressure, which I felt long
afterwards.  So intimately connected as I had been with perhaps the
only man in whom she was ever truly interested, Zenobia looked on me as
the representative of all the past, and was conscious that, in bidding
me adieu, she likewise took final leave of Hollingsworth, and of this
whole epoch of her life.  Never did her beauty shine out more
lustrously than in the last glimpse that I had of her.  She departed,
and was soon hidden among the trees.  But, whether it was the strong
impression of the foregoing scene, or whatever else the cause, I was
affected with a fantasy that Zenobia had not actually gone, but was
still hovering about the spot and haunting it.  I seemed to feel her
eyes upon me.  It was as if the vivid coloring of her character had
left a brilliant stain upon the air.  By degrees, however, the
impression grew less distinct.  I flung myself upon the fallen leaves
at the base of Eliot's pulpit.  The sunshine withdrew up the tree
trunks and flickered on the topmost boughs; gray twilight made the wood
obscure; the stars brightened out; the pendent boughs became wet with
chill autumnal dews.  But I was listless, worn out with emotion on my
own behalf and sympathy for others, and had no heart to leave my
comfortless lair beneath the rock.

I must have fallen asleep, and had a dream, all the circumstances of
which utterly vanished at the moment when they converged to some
tragical catastrophe, and thus grew too powerful for the thin sphere of
slumber that enveloped them.  Starting from the ground, I found the
risen moon shining upon the rugged face of the rock, and myself all in
a tremble.



XXVII. MIDNIGHT

It could not have been far from midnight when I came beneath
Hollingsworth's window, and, finding it open, flung in a tuft of grass
with earth at the roots, and heard it fall upon the floor.  He was
either awake or sleeping very lightly; for scarcely a moment had gone
by before he looked out and discerned me standing in the moonlight.

"Is it you, Coverdale?" he asked.  "What is the matter?"

"Come down to me, Hollingsworth!"  I answered.  "I am anxious to speak
with you."

The strange tone of my own voice startled me, and him, probably, no
less.  He lost no time, and soon issued from the house-door, with his
dress half arranged.

"Again, what is the matter?" he asked impatiently.

"Have you seen Zenobia," said I, "since you parted from her at Eliot's
pulpit?"

"No," answered Hollingsworth; "nor did I expect it."

His voice was deep, but had a tremor in it,

Hardly had he spoken, when Silas Foster thrust his head, done up in a
cotton handkerchief, out of another window, and took what he called as
it literally was--a squint at us.

"Well, folks, what are ye about here?" he demanded.  "Aha! are you
there, Miles Coverdale?  You have been turning night into day since you
left us, I reckon; and so you find it quite natural to come prowling
about the house at this time o' night, frightening my old woman out of
her wits, and making her disturb a tired man out of his best nap.  In
with you, you vagabond, and to bed!"

"Dress yourself quickly, Foster," said I. "We want your assistance."

I could not, for the life of me, keep that strange tone out of my
voice.  Silas Foster, obtuse as were his sensibilities, seemed to feel
the ghastly earnestness that was conveyed in it as well as
Hollingsworth did.  He immediately withdrew his head, and I heard him
yawning, muttering to his wife, and again yawning heavily, while he
hurried on his clothes.  Meanwhile I showed Hollingsworth a delicate
handkerchief, marked with a well-known cipher, and told where I had
found it, and other circumstances, which had filled me with a suspicion
so terrible that I left him, if he dared, to shape it out for himself.
By the time my brief explanation was finished, we were joined by Silas
Foster in his blue woollen frock.

"Well, boys," cried he peevishly, "what is to pay now?"

"Tell him, Hollingsworth," said I.

Hollingsworth shivered perceptibly, and drew in a hard breath betwixt
his teeth.  He steadied himself, however, and, looking the matter more
firmly in the face than I had done, explained to Foster my suspicions,
and the grounds of them, with a distinctness from which, in spite of my
utmost efforts, my words had swerved aside.  The tough-nerved yeoman,
in his comment, put a finish on the business, and brought out the
hideous idea in its full terror, as if he were removing the napkin from
the face of a corpse.

"And so you think she's drowned herself?" he cried.  I turned away my
face.

"What on earth should the young woman do that for?" exclaimed Silas,
his eyes half out of his head with mere surprise.  "Why, she has more
means than she can use or waste, and lacks nothing to make her
comfortable, but a husband, and that's an article she could have, any
day.  There's some mistake about this, I tell you!"

"Come," said I, shuddering; "let us go and ascertain the truth."

"Well, well," answered Silas Foster; "just as you say.  We'll take the
long pole, with the hook at the end, that serves to get the bucket out
of the draw-well when the rope is broken.  With that, and a couple of
long-handled hay-rakes, I'll answer for finding her, if she's anywhere
to be found.  Strange enough!  Zenobia drown herself! No, no; I don't
believe it.  She had too much sense, and too much means, and enjoyed
life a great deal too well."

When our few preparations were completed, we hastened, by a shorter
than the customary route, through fields and pastures, and across a
portion of the meadow, to the particular spot on the river-bank which I
had paused to contemplate in the course of my afternoon's ramble. A
nameless presentiment had again drawn me thither, after leaving Eliot's
pulpit.  I showed my companions where I had found the handkerchief, and
pointed to two or three footsteps, impressed into the clayey margin,
and tending towards the water.  Beneath its shallow verge, among the
water-weeds, there were further traces, as yet unobliterated by the
sluggish current, which was there almost at a standstill.  Silas Foster
thrust his face down close to these footsteps, and picked up a shoe
that had escaped my observation, being half imbedded in the mud.

"There's a kid shoe that never was made on a Yankee last," observed he.
"I know enough of shoemaker's craft to tell that.  French manufacture;
and see what a high instep! and how evenly she trod in it!  There never
was a woman that stept handsomer in her shoes than Zenobia did.  Here,"
he added, addressing Hollingsworth, "would you like to keep the shoe?"

Hollingsworth started back.

"Give it to me, Foster," said I.

I dabbled it in the water, to rinse off the mud, and have kept it ever
since.  Not far from this spot lay an old, leaky punt, drawn up on the
oozy river-side, and generally half full of water.  It served the
angler to go in quest of pickerel, or the sportsman to pick up his wild
ducks.  Setting this crazy bark afloat, I seated myself in the stern
with the paddle, while Hollingsworth sat in the bows with the hooked
pole, and Silas Foster amidships with a hay-rake.

"It puts me in mind of my young days," remarked Silas, "when I used to
steal out of bed to go bobbing for hornpouts and eels.
Heigh-ho!--well, life and death together make sad work for us all!
Then I was a boy, bobbing for fish; and now I am getting to be an old
fellow, and here I be, groping for a dead body!  I tell you what, lads;
if I thought anything had really happened to Zenobia, I should feel
kind o' sorrowful."

"I wish, at least, you would hold your tongue," muttered I.

The moon, that night, though past the full, was still large and oval,
and having risen between eight and nine o'clock, now shone aslantwise
over the river, throwing the high, opposite bank, with its woods, into
deep shadow, but lighting up the hither shore pretty effectually. Not a
ray appeared to fall on the river itself.  It lapsed imperceptibly
away, a broad, black, inscrutable depth, keeping its own secrets from
the eye of man, as impenetrably as mid-ocean could.

"Well, Miles Coverdale," said Foster, "you are the helmsman.  How do
you mean to manage this business?"

"I shall let the boat drift, broadside foremost, past that stump," I
replied.  "I know the bottom, having sounded it in fishing.  The shore,
on this side, after the first step or two, goes off very abruptly; and
there is a pool, just by the stump, twelve or fifteen feet deep.  The
current could not have force enough to sweep any sunken object, even if
partially buoyant, out of that hollow."

"Come, then," said Silas; "but I doubt whether I can touch bottom with
this hay-rake, if it's as deep as you say.  Mr. Hollingsworth, I think
you'll be the lucky man to-night, such luck as it is."

We floated past the stump.  Silas Foster plied his rake manfully,
poking it as far as he could into the water, and immersing the whole
length of his arm besides.  Hollingsworth at first sat motionless, with
the hooked pole elevated in the air.  But, by and by, with a nervous
and jerky movement, he began to plunge it into the blackness that
upbore us, setting his teeth, and making precisely such thrusts,
methought, as if he were stabbing at a deadly enemy.  I bent over the
side of the boat.  So obscure, however, so awfully mysterious, was that
dark stream, that--and the thought made me shiver like a leaf--I might
as well have tried to look into the enigma of the eternal world, to
discover what had become of Zenobia's soul, as into the river's depths,
to find her body.  And there, perhaps, she lay, with her face upward,
while the shadow of the boat, and my own pale face peering downward,
passed slowly betwixt her and the sky!

Once, twice, thrice, I paddled the boat upstream, and again suffered it
to glide, with the river's slow, funereal motion, downward.  Silas
Foster had raked up a large mass of stuff, which, as it came towards
the surface, looked somewhat like a flowing garment, but proved to be a
monstrous tuft of water-weeds.  Hollingsworth, with a gigantic effort,
upheaved a sunken log.  When once free of the bottom, it rose partly
out of water,--all weedy and slimy, a devilish-looking object, which
the moon had not shone upon for half a hundred years,--then plunged
again, and sullenly returned to its old resting-place, for the remnant
of the century.

"That looked ugly!" quoth Silas.  "I half thought it was the Evil One,
on the same errand as ourselves,--searching for Zenobia."

"He shall never get her," said I, giving the boat a strong impulse.

"That's not for you to say, my boy," retorted the yeoman.  "Pray God he
never has, and never may.  Slow work this, however!  I should really be
glad to find something!  Pshaw!  What a notion that is, when the only
good luck would be to paddle, and drift, and poke, and grope,
hereabouts, till morning, and have our labor for our pains! For my
part, I shouldn't wonder if the creature had only lost her shoe in the
mud, and saved her soul alive, after all.  My stars! how she will laugh
at us, to-morrow morning!"

It is indescribable what an image of Zenobia--at the breakfast-table,
full of warm and mirthful life--this surmise of Silas Foster's brought
before my mind.  The terrible phantasm of her death was thrown by it
into the remotest and dimmest background, where it seemed to grow as
improbable as a myth.

"Yes, Silas, it may be as you say," cried I. The drift of the stream
had again borne us a little below the stump, when I felt--yes, felt,
for it was as if the iron hook had smote my breast--felt
Hollingsworth's pole strike some object at the bottom of the river!

He started up, and almost overset the boat.

"Hold on!" cried Foster; "you have her!"

Putting a fury of strength into the effort, Hollingsworth heaved amain,
and up came a white swash to the surface of the river.  It was the flow
of a woman's garments.  A little higher, and we saw her dark hair
streaming down the current.  Black River of Death, thou hadst yielded
up thy victim!  Zenobia was found!

Silas Foster laid hold of the body; Hollingsworth likewise grappled
with it; and I steered towards the bank, gazing all the while at
Zenobia, whose limbs were swaying in the current close at the boat's
side.  Arriving near the shore, we all three stept into the water, bore
her out, and laid her on the ground beneath a tree.

"Poor child!" said Foster,--and his dry old heart, I verily believe,
vouchsafed a tear, "I'm sorry for her!"

Were I to describe the perfect horror of the spectacle, the reader
might justly reckon it to me for a sin and shame.  For more than twelve
long years I have borne it in my memory, and could now reproduce it as
freshly as if it were still before my eyes.  Of all modes of death,
methinks it is the ugliest.  Her wet garments swathed limbs of terrible
inflexibility.  She was the marble image of a death-agony.  Her arms
had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and were bent before her with
clenched hands; her knees, too, were bent, and--thank God for it!--in
the attitude of prayer.  Ah, that rigidity! It is impossible to bear
the terror of it.  It seemed,--I must needs impart so much of my own
miserable idea,--it seemed as if her body must keep the same position
in the coffin, and that her skeleton would keep it in the grave; and
that when Zenobia rose at the day of judgment, it would be in just the
same attitude as now!

One hope I had, and that too was mingled half with fear.  She knelt as
if in prayer.  With the last, choking consciousness, her soul, bubbling
out through her lips, it may be, had given itself up to the Father,
reconciled and penitent.  But her arms!  They were bent before her, as
if she struggled against Providence in never-ending hostility.  Her
hands!  They were clenched in immitigable defiance. Away with the
hideous thought.  The flitting moment after Zenobia sank into the dark
pool--when her breath was gone, and her soul at her lips was as long,
in its capacity of God's infinite forgiveness, as the lifetime of the
world!

Foster bent over the body, and carefully examined it.

"You have wounded the poor thing's breast," said he to Hollingsworth,
"close by her heart, too!"

"Ha!" cried Hollingsworth with a start.

And so he had, indeed, both before and after death!

"See!" said Foster.  "That's the place where the iron struck her.  It
looks cruelly, but she never felt it!"

He endeavored to arrange the arms of the corpse decently by its side.
His utmost strength, however, scarcely sufficed to bring them down; and
rising again, the next instant, they bade him defiance, exactly as
before.  He made another effort, with the same result.

"In God's name, Silas Foster," cried I with bitter indignation, "let
that dead woman alone!"

"Why, man, it's not decent!" answered he, staring at me in amazement.
"I can't bear to see her looking so!  Well, well," added he, after a
third effort, "'tis of no use, sure enough; and we must leave the women
to do their best with her, after we get to the house.  The sooner
that's done, the better."

We took two rails from a neighboring fence, and formed a bier by laying
across some boards from the bottom of the boat.  And thus we bore
Zenobia homeward.  Six hours before, how beautiful!  At midnight, what
a horror!  A reflection occurs to me that will show ludicrously, I
doubt not, on my page, but must come in for its sterling truth. Being
the woman that she was, could Zenobia have foreseen all these ugly
circumstances of death,--how ill it would become her, the altogether
unseemly aspect which she must put on, and especially old Silas
Foster's efforts to improve the matter,--she would no more have
committed the dreadful act than have exhibited herself to a public
assembly in a badly fitting garment!  Zenobia, I have often thought,
was not quite simple in her death.  She had seen pictures, I suppose,
of drowned persons in lithe and graceful attitudes.  And she deemed it
well and decorous to die as so many village maidens have, wronged in
their first love, and seeking peace in the bosom of the old familiar
stream,--so familiar that they could not dread it,--where, in
childhood, they used to bathe their little feet, wading mid-leg deep,
unmindful of wet skirts.  But in Zenobia's case there was some tint of
the Arcadian affectation that had been visible enough in all our lives
for a few months past.

This, however, to my conception, takes nothing from the tragedy.  For,
has not the world come to an awfully sophisticated pass, when, after a
certain degree of acquaintance with it, we cannot even put ourselves to
death in whole-hearted simplicity?  Slowly, slowly, with many a dreary
pause,--resting the bier often on some rock or balancing it across a
mossy log, to take fresh hold,--we bore our burden onward through the
moonlight, and at last laid Zenobia on the floor of the old farmhouse.
By and by came three or four withered women and stood whispering around
the corpse, peering at it through their spectacles, holding up their
skinny hands, shaking their night-capped heads, and taking counsel of
one another's experience what was to be done.

With those tire-women we left Zenobia.



XXVIII. BLITHEDALE PASTURE

Blithedale, thus far in its progress, had never found the necessity of
a burial-ground.  There was some consultation among us in what spot
Zenobia might most fitly be laid.  It was my own wish that she should
sleep at the base of Eliot's pulpit, and that on the rugged front of
the rock the name by which we familiarly knew her, Zenobia,--and not
another word, should be deeply cut, and left for the moss and lichens
to fill up at their long leisure.  But Hollingsworth (to whose ideas on
this point great deference was due) made it his request that her grave
might be dug on the gently sloping hillside, in the wide pasture,
where, as we once supposed, Zenobia and he had planned to build their
cottage.  And thus it was done, accordingly.

She was buried very much as other people have been for hundreds of
years gone by.  In anticipation of a death, we Blithedale colonists had
sometimes set our fancies at work to arrange a funereal ceremony, which
should be the proper symbolic expression of our spiritual faith and
eternal hopes; and this we meant to substitute for those customary
rites which were moulded originally out of the Gothic gloom, and by
long use, like an old velvet pall, have so much more than their first
death-smell in them.  But when the occasion came we found it the
simplest and truest thing, after all, to content ourselves with the old
fashion, taking away what we could, but interpolating no novelties, and
particularly avoiding all frippery of flowers and cheerful emblems.
The procession moved from the farmhouse.  Nearest the dead walked an
old man in deep mourning, his face mostly concealed in a white
handkerchief, and with Priscilla leaning on his arm.  Hollingsworth and
myself came next.  We all stood around the narrow niche in the cold
earth; all saw the coffin lowered in; all heard the rattle of the
crumbly soil upon its lid,--that final sound, which mortality awakens
on the utmost verge of sense, as if in the vain hope of bringing an
echo from the spiritual world.

I noticed a stranger,--a stranger to most of those present, though
known to me,--who, after the coffin had descended, took up a handful of
earth and flung it first into the grave.  I had given up
Hollingsworth's arm, and now found myself near this man.

"It was an idle thing--a foolish thing--for Zenobia to do," said he.
"She was the last woman in the world to whom death could have been
necessary.  It was too absurd!  I have no patience with her."

"Why so?"  I inquired, smothering my horror at his cold comment, in my
eager curiosity to discover some tangible truth as to his relation with
Zenobia.  "If any crisis could justify the sad wrong she offered to
herself, it was surely that in which she stood.  Everything had failed
her; prosperity in the world's sense, for her opulence was gone,--the
heart's prosperity, in love.  And there was a secret burden on her, the
nature of which is best known to you.  Young as she was, she had tried
life fully, had no more to hope, and something, perhaps, to fear.  Had
Providence taken her away in its own holy hand, I should have thought
it the kindest dispensation that could be awarded to one so wrecked."

"You mistake the matter completely," rejoined Westervelt.

"What, then, is your own view of it?"  I asked.

"Her mind was active, and various in its powers," said he.  "Her heart
had a manifold adaptation; her constitution an infinite buoyancy, which
(had she possessed only a little patience to await the reflux of her
troubles) would have borne her upward triumphantly for twenty years to
come.  Her beauty would not have waned--or scarcely so, and surely not
beyond the reach of art to restore it--in all that time.  She had
life's summer all before her, and a hundred varieties of brilliant
success.  What an actress Zenobia might have been!  It was one of her
least valuable capabilities.  How forcibly she might have wrought upon
the world, either directly in her own person, or by her influence upon
some man, or a series of men, of controlling genius!  Every prize that
could be worth a woman's having--and many prizes which other women are
too timid to desire--lay within Zenobia's reach."

"In all this," I observed, "there would have been nothing to satisfy
her heart."

"Her heart!" answered Westervelt contemptuously.  "That troublesome
organ (as she had hitherto found it) would have been kept in its due
place and degree, and have had all the gratification it could fairly
claim.  She would soon have established a control over it.  Love had
failed her, you say.  Had it never failed her before?  Yet she survived
it, and loved again,--possibly not once alone, nor twice either.  And
now to drown herself for yonder dreamy philanthropist!"

"Who are you," I exclaimed indignantly, "that dare to speak thus of the
dead?  You seem to intend a eulogy, yet leave out whatever was noblest
in her, and blacken while you mean to praise.  I have long considered
you as Zenobia's evil fate.  Your sentiments confirm me in the idea,
but leave me still ignorant as to the mode in which you have influenced
her life.  The connection may have been indissoluble, except by death.
Then, indeed,--always in the hope of God's infinite mercy,--I cannot
deem it a misfortune that she sleeps in yonder grave!"

"No matter what I was to her," he answered gloomily, yet without actual
emotion.  "She is now beyond my reach.  Had she lived, and hearkened to
my counsels, we might have served each other well.  But there Zenobia
lies in yonder pit, with the dull earth over her. Twenty years of a
brilliant lifetime thrown away for a mere woman's whim!"

Heaven deal with Westervelt according to his nature and deserts!--that
is to say, annihilate him.  He was altogether earthy, worldly, made for
time and its gross objects, and incapable--except by a sort of dim
reflection caught from other minds--of so much as one spiritual idea.
Whatever stain Zenobia had was caught from him; nor does it seldom
happen that a character of admirable qualities loses its better life
because the atmosphere that should sustain it is rendered poisonous by
such breath as this man mingled with Zenobia's. Yet his reflections
possessed their share of truth.  It was a woeful thought, that a woman
of Zenobia's diversified capacity should have fancied herself
irretrievably defeated on the broad battlefield of life, and with no
refuge, save to fall on her own sword, merely because Love had gone
against her.  It is nonsense, and a miserable wrong,--the result, like
so many others, of masculine egotism,--that the success or failure of
woman's existence should be made to depend wholly on the affections,
and on one species of affection, while man has such a multitude of
other chances, that this seems but an incident.  For its own sake, if
it will do no more, the world should throw open all its avenues to the
passport of a woman's bleeding heart.

As we stood around the grave, I looked often towards Priscilla,
dreading to see her wholly overcome with grief.  And deeply grieved, in
truth, she was.  But a character so simply constituted as hers has room
only for a single predominant affection.  No other feeling can touch
the heart's inmost core, nor do it any deadly mischief.  Thus, while we
see that such a being responds to every breeze with tremulous
vibration, and imagine that she must be shattered by the first rude
blast, we find her retaining her equilibrium amid shocks that might
have overthrown many a sturdier frame.  So with Priscilla; her one
possible misfortune was Hollingsworth's unkindness; and that was
destined never to befall her, never yet, at least, for Priscilla has
not died.

But Hollingsworth!  After all the evil that he did, are we to leave him
thus, blest with the entire devotion of this one true heart, and with
wealth at his disposal to execute the long-contemplated project that
had led him so far astray?  What retribution is there here?  My mind
being vexed with precisely this query, I made a journey, some years
since, for the sole purpose of catching a last glimpse of
Hollingsworth, and judging for myself whether he were a happy man or
no.  I learned that he inhabited a small cottage, that his way of life
was exceedingly retired, and that my only chance of encountering him or
Priscilla was to meet them in a secluded lane, where, in the latter
part of the afternoon, they were accustomed to walk.  I did meet them,
accordingly.  As they approached me, I observed in Hollingsworth's face
a depressed and melancholy look, that seemed habitual; the powerfully
built man showed a self-distrustful weakness, and a childlike or
childish tendency to press close, and closer still, to the side of the
slender woman whose arm was within his.  In Priscilla's manner there
was a protective and watchful quality, as if she felt herself the
guardian of her companion; but, likewise, a deep, submissive,
unquestioning reverence, and also a veiled happiness in her fair and
quiet countenance.

Drawing nearer, Priscilla recognized me, and gave me a kind and
friendly smile, but with a slight gesture, which I could not help
interpreting as an entreaty not to make myself known to Hollingsworth.
Nevertheless, an impulse took possession of me, and compelled me to
address him.

"I have come, Hollingsworth," said I, "to view your grand edifice for
the reformation of criminals.  Is it finished yet?"

"No, nor begun," answered he, without raising his eyes.  "A very small
one answers all my purposes."

Priscilla threw me an upbraiding glance.  But I spoke again, with a
bitter and revengeful emotion, as if flinging a poisoned arrow at
Hollingsworth's heart.

"Up to this moment," I inquired, "how many criminals have you reformed?"

"Not one," said Hollingsworth, with his eyes still fixed on the ground.
"Ever since we parted, I have been busy with a single murderer."

Then the tears gushed into my eyes, and I forgave him; for I remembered
the wild energy, the passionate shriek, with which Zenobia had spoken
those words, "Tell him he has murdered me!  Tell him that I'll haunt
him!"--and I knew what murderer he meant, and whose vindictive shadow
dogged the side where Priscilla was not.

The moral which presents itself to my reflections, as drawn from
Hollingsworth's character and errors, is simply this, that, admitting
what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often
useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to
the individual whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus
becomes.  It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart, the rich
juices of which God never meant should be pressed violently out and
distilled into alcoholic liquor by an unnatural process, but should
render life sweet, bland, and gently beneficent, and insensibly
influence other hearts and other lives to the same blessed end.  I see
in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most awful truth in Bunyan's
book of such, from the very gate of heaven there is a by-way to the pit!

But, all this while, we have been standing by Zenobia's grave.  I have
never since beheld it, but make no question that the grass grew all the
better, on that little parallelogram of pasture land, for the decay of
the beautiful woman who slept beneath.  How Nature seems to love us!
And how readily, nevertheless, without a sigh or a complaint, she
converts us to a meaner purpose, when her highest one--that of a
conscious intellectual life and sensibility has been untimely balked!
While Zenobia lived, Nature was proud of her, and directed all eyes
upon that radiant presence, as her fairest handiwork.  Zenobia
perished.  Will not Nature shed a tear?  Ah, no!--she adopts the
calamity at once into her system, and is just as well pleased, for
aught we can see, with the tuft of ranker vegetation that grew out of
Zenobia's heart, as with all the beauty which has bequeathed us no
earthly representative except in this crop of weeds.  It is because the
spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.



XXIX. MILES COVERDALE'S CONFESSION

It remains only to say a few words about myself.  Not improbably, the
reader might be willing to spare me the trouble; for I have made but a
poor and dim figure in my own narrative, establishing no separate
interest, and suffering my colorless life to take its hue from other
lives.  But one still retains some little consideration for one's self;
so I keep these last two or three pages for my individual and sole
behoof.

But what, after all, have I to tell?  Nothing, nothing, nothing!  I
left Blithedale within the week after Zenobia's death, and went back
thither no more.  The whole soil of our farm, for a long time
afterwards, seemed but the sodded earth over her grave.  I could not
toil there, nor live upon its products.  Often, however, in these years
that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme of a
noble and unselfish life; and how fair, in that first summer, appeared
the prospect that it might endure for generations, and be perfected, as
the ages rolled away, into the system of a people and a world!  Were my
former associates now there,--were there only three or four of those
true-hearted men still laboring in the sun,--I sometimes fancy that I
should direct my world-weary footsteps thitherward, and entreat them to
receive me, for old friendship's sake.  More and more I feel that we
had struck upon what ought to be a truth.  Posterity may dig it up, and
profit by it.  The experiment, so far as its original projectors were
concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism,
and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher
spirit.  Where once we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the town
paupers, aged, nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly afield.
Alas, what faith is requisite to bear up against such results of
generous effort!

My subsequent life has passed,--I was going to say happily, but, at all
events, tolerably enough.  I am now at middle age, well, well, a step
or two beyond the midmost point, and I care not a fig who knows it!--a
bachelor, with no very decided purpose of ever being otherwise. I have
been twice to Europe, and spent a year or two rather agreeably at each
visit.  Being well to do in the world, and having nobody but myself to
care for, I live very much at my ease, and fare sumptuously every day.
As for poetry, I have given it up, notwithstanding that Dr.
Griswold--as the reader, of course, knows--has placed me at a fair
elevation among our minor minstrelsy, on the strength of my pretty
little volume, published ten years ago. As regards human progress (in
spite of my irrepressible yearnings over the Blithedale reminiscences),
let them believe in it who can, and aid in it who choose.  If I could
earnestly do either, it might be all the better for my comfort.  As
Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a purpose.  How strange!  He was
ruined, morally, by an overplus of the very same ingredient, the want
of which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an
emptiness.  I by no means wish to die.  Yet, were there any cause, in
this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man's dying for, and
which my death would benefit, then--provided, however, the effort did
not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble--methinks I might be bold
to offer up my life.  If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the
battlefield of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and
choose a mild, sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles
Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the levelled
bayonets.  Further than that, I should be loath to pledge myself.

I exaggerate my own defects.  The reader must not take my own word for
it, nor believe me altogether changed from the young man who once hoped
strenuously, and struggled not so much amiss.  Frostier heads than mine
have gained honor in the world; frostier hearts have imbibed new
warmth, and been newly happy.  Life, however, it must be owned, has
come to rather an idle pass with me.  Would my friends like to know
what brought it thither?  There is one secret,--I have concealed it all
along, and never meant to let the least whisper of it escape,--one
foolish little secret, which possibly may have had something to do with
these inactive years of meridian manhood, with my bachelorship, with
the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on life, and my listless
glance towards the future.  Shall I reveal it? It is an absurd thing
for a man in his afternoon,--a man of the world, moreover, with these
three white hairs in his brown mustache and that deepening track of a
crow's-foot on each temple,--an absurd thing ever to have happened, and
quite the absurdest for an old bachelor, like me, to talk about.  But
it rises to my throat; so let it come.

I perceive, moreover, that the confession, brief as it shall be, will
throw a gleam of light over my behavior throughout the foregoing
incidents, and is, indeed, essential to the full understanding of my
story.  The reader, therefore, since I have disclosed so much, is
entitled to this one word more.  As I write it, he will charitably
suppose me to blush, and turn away my face:

I--I myself--was in love--with--Priscilla!
In an ancient though not very populous settlement, in a retired corner of
one of the New England States, arise the walls of a seminary of learning,
which, for the convenience of a name, shall be entitled "Harley College."
This institution, though the number of its years is inconsiderable
compared with the hoar antiquity of its European sisters, is not without
some claims to reverence on the score of age; for an almost countless
multitude of rivals, by many of which its reputation has been eclipsed,
have sprung up since its foundation. At no time, indeed, during an
existence of nearly a century, has it acquired a very extensive fame; and
circumstances, which need not be particularized, have, of late years,
involved it in a deeper obscurity. There are now few candidates for the
degrees that the college is authorized to bestow. On two of its annual
"Commencement Days," there has been a total deficiency of baccalaureates;
and the lawyers and divines, on whom doctorates in their respective
professions are gratuitously inflicted, are not accustomed to consider the
distinction as an honor. Yet the sons of this seminary have always
maintained their full share of reputation, in whatever paths of life they
trod. Few of them, perhaps, have been deep and finished scholars; but the
college has supplied--what the emergencies of the country demanded--a set
of men more useful in its present state, and whose deficiency in
theoretical knowledge has not been found to imply a want of practical
ability.

The local situation of the college, so far secluded from the sight and
sound of the busy world, is peculiarly favorable to the moral, if not to
the literary, habits of its students; and this advantage probably caused
the founders to overlook the inconveniences that were inseparably
connected with it. The humble edifices rear themselves almost at the
farthest extremity of a narrow vale, which, winding through a long extent
of hill-country, is wellnigh as inaccessible, except at one point, as the
Happy Valley of Abyssinia. A stream, that farther on becomes a
considerable river, takes its rise at, a short distance above the college,
and affords, along its wood-fringed banks, many shady retreats, where
even study is pleasant, and idleness delicious. The neighborhood of the
institution is not quite a solitude, though the few habitations scarcely
constitute a village. These consist principally of farm-houses, of rather
an ancient date (for the settlement is much older than the college), and
of a little inn, which even in that secluded spot does not fail of a
moderate support. Other dwellings are scattered up and down the valley;
but the difficulties of the soil will long avert the evils of a too dense
population. The character of the inhabitants does not seem--as there was,
perhaps, room to anticipate--to be in any degree influenced by the
atmosphere of Harley College. They are a set of rough and hardy yeomen,
much inferior, as respects refinement, to the corresponding classes in
most other parts of our country. This is the more remarkable, as there is
scarcely a family in the vicinity that has not provided, for at least one
of its sons, the advantages of a "liberal education."

Having thus described the present state of Harley College, we must proceed
to speak of it as it existed about eighty years since, when its foundation
was recent, and its prospects flattering. At the head of the institution,
at this period, was a learned and Orthodox divine, whose fame was in all
the churches. He was the author of several works which evinced much
erudition and depth of research; and the public, perhaps, thought the more
highly of his abilities from a singularity in the purposes to which he
applied them, that added much to the curiosity of his labors, though
little to their usefulness. But, however fanciful might be his private
pursuits, Dr. Melmoth, it was universally allowed, was diligent and
successful in the arts of instruction. The young men of his charge
prospered beneath his eye, and regarded him with an affection that was
strengthened by the little foibles which occasionally excited their
ridicule. The president was assisted in the discharge of his duties by two
inferior officers, chosen from the alumni of the college, who, while they
imparted to others the knowledge they had already imbibed, pursued the
study of divinity under the direction of their principal. Under such
auspices the institution grew and flourished. Having at that time but two
rivals in the country (neither of them within a considerable distance), it
became the general resort of the youth of the Province in which it was
situated. For several years in succession, its students amounted to nearly
fifty,--a number which, relatively to the circumstances of the country,
was very considerable.

From the exterior of the collegians, an accurate observer might pretty
safely judge how long they had been inmates of those classic walls. The
brown cheeks and the rustic dress of some would inform him that they had
but recently left the plough to labor in a not less toilsome field; the
grave look, and the intermingling of garments of a more classic cut, would
distinguish those who had begun to acquire the polish of their new
residence; and the air of superiority, the paler cheek, the less robust
form, the spectacles of green, and the dress, in general of threadbare
black, would designate the highest class, who were understood to have
acquired nearly all the science their Alma Mater could bestow, and to be
on the point of assuming their stations in the world. There were, it is
true, exceptions to this general description. A few young men had found
their way hither from the distant seaports; and these were the models of
fashion to their rustic companions, over whom they asserted a superiority
in exterior accomplishments, which the fresh though unpolished intellect
of the sons of the forest denied them in their literary competitions. A
third class, differing widely from both the former, consisted of a few
young descendants of the aborigines, to whom an impracticable philanthropy
was endeavoring to impart the benefits of civilization.

If this institution did not offer all the advantages of elder and prouder
seminaries, its deficiencies were compensated to its students by the
inculcation of regular habits, and of a deep and awful sense of religion,
which seldom deserted them in their course through life. The mild and
gentle rule of Dr. Melmoth, like that of a father over his children, was
more destructive to vice than a sterner sway; and though youth is never
without its follies, they have seldom been more harmless than they were
here. The students, indeed, ignorant of their own bliss, sometimes wished
to hasten the time of their entrance on the business of life; but they
found, in after-years, that many of their happiest remembrances, many of
the scenes which they would with least reluctance live over again,
referred to the seat of their early studies. The exceptions to this remark
were chiefly those whose vices had drawn down, even from that paternal
government, a weighty retribution.

Dr. Melmoth, at the time when he is to be introduced to the reader, had
borne the matrimonial yoke (and in his case it was no light burden) nearly
twenty years. The blessing of children, however, had been denied him,--a
circumstance which he was accustomed to consider as one of the sorest
trials that checkered his pathway; for he was a man of a kind and
affectionate heart, that was continually seeking objects to rest itself
upon. He was inclined to believe, also, that a common offspring would have
exerted a meliorating influence on the temper of Mrs. Melmoth, the
character of whose domestic government often compelled him to call to mind
such portions of the wisdom of antiquity as relate to the proper endurance
of the shrewishness of woman. But domestic comforts, as well as comforts
of every other kind, have their drawbacks; and, so long as the balance is
on the side of happiness, a wise man will not murmur. Such was the opinion
of Dr. Melmoth; and with a little aid from philosophy, and more from
religion, he journeyed on contentedly through life. When the storm was
loud by the parlor hearth, he had always a sure and quiet retreat in his
study; and there, in his deep though not always useful labors, he soon
forgot whatever of disagreeable nature pertained to his situation. This
small and dark apartment was the only portion of the house to which, since
one firmly repelled invasion, Mrs. Melmoth's omnipotence did not extend.
Here (to reverse the words of Queen Elizabeth) there was "but one master
and no mistress"; and that man has little right to complain who possesses
so much as one corner in the world where he may be happy or miserable, as
best suits him. In his study, then, the doctor was accustomed to spend
most of the hours that were unoccupied by the duties of his station. The
flight of time was here as swift as the wind, and noiseless as the
snow-flake; and it was a sure proof of real happiness that night often
came upon the student before he knew it was midday.

Dr. Melmoth was wearing towards age (having lived nearly sixty years),
when he was called upon to assume a character to which he had as yet been
a stranger. He had possessed in his youth a very dear friend, with whom
his education had associated him, and who in his early manhood had been
his chief intimate. Circumstances, however, had separated them for nearly
thirty years, half of which had been spent by his friend, who was engaged
in mercantile pursuits, in a foreign country. The doctor had,
nevertheless, retained a warm interest in the welfare of his old
associate, though the different nature of their thoughts and occupations
had prevented them from corresponding. After a silence of so long
continuance, therefore, he was surprised by the receipt of a letter from
his friend, containing a request of a most unexpected nature.

Mr. Langton had married rather late in life; and his wedded bliss had been
but of short continuance. Certain misfortunes in trade, when he was a
Benedict of three years' standing, had deprived him of a large portion of
his property, and compelled him, in order to save the remainder, to leave
his own country for what he hoped would be but a brief residence in
another. But, though he was successful in the immediate objects of his
voyage, circumstances occurred to lengthen his stay far beyond the period
which he had assigned to it. It was difficult so to arrange his extensive
concerns that they could be safely trusted to the management of others;
and, when this was effected, there was another not less powerful obstacle
to his return. His affairs, under his own inspection, were so prosperous,
and his gains so considerable, that, in the words of the old ballad, "He
set his heart to gather gold"; and to this absorbing passion he sacrificed
his domestic happiness. The death of his wife, about four years after his
departure, undoubtedly contributed to give him a sort of dread of
returning, which it required a strong effort to overcome. The welfare of
his only child he knew would be little affected by this event; for she was
under the protection of his sister, of whose tenderness he was well
assured. But, after a few more years, this sister, also, was taken away by
death; and then the father felt that duty imperatively called upon him to
return. He realized, on a sudden, how much of life he had thrown away in
the acquisition of what is only valuable as it contributes to the
happiness of life, and how short a tune was left him for life's true
enjoyments. Still, however, his mercantile habits were too deeply seated
to allow him to hazard his present prosperity by any hasty measures; nor
was Mr. Langton, though capable of strong affections, naturally liable to
manifest them violently. It was probable, therefore, that many months
might yet elapse before he would again tread the shores of his native
country.

But the distant relative, in whose family, since the death of her aunt,
Ellen Langton had remained, had been long at variance with her father, and
had unwillingly assumed the office of her protector. Mr. Langton's
request, therefore, to Dr. Melmoth, was, that his ancient friend (one of
the few friends that time had left him) would be as a father to his
daughter till he could himself relieve him of the charge.

The doctor, after perusing the epistle of his friend, lost no time in
laying it before Mrs. Melmoth, though this was, in truth, one of the very
few occasions on which he had determined that his will should be absolute
law. The lady was quick to perceive the firmness of his purpose, and would
not (even had she been particularly averse to the proposed measure) hazard
her usual authority by a fruitless opposition. But, by long disuse, she
had lost the power of consenting graciously to any wish of her husband's.

"I see your heart is set upon this matter," she observed; "and, in truth,
I fear we cannot decently refuse Mr. Langton's request. I see little good
of such a friend, doctor, who never lets one know he is alive till he has
a favor to ask."

"Nay; but I have received much good at his hand," replied Dr. Melmoth;
"and, if he asked more of me, it should be done with a willing heart. I
remember in my youth, when my worldly goods were few and ill managed (I
was a bachelor, then, dearest Sarah, with none to look after my
household), how many times I have been beholden to him. And see--in his
letter he speaks of presents, of the produce of the country, which he has
sent both to you and me."

"If the girl were country-bred," continued the lady, "we might give her
house-room, and no harm done. Nay, she might even be a help to me; for
Esther, our maid-servant, leaves us at the mouth's end. But I warrant she
knows as little of household matters as you do yourself, doctor."

"My friend's sister was well grounded in the _re familiari_" answered
her husband; "and doubtless she hath imparted somewhat of her skill to
this damsel. Besides, the child is of tender years, and will profit much
by your instruction and mine."

"The child is eighteen years of age, doctor," observed Mrs. Melmoth, "and
she has cause to be thankful that she will have better instruction than
yours."

This was a proposition that Dr. Melmoth did not choose to dispute; though
he perhaps thought that his long and successful experience in the
education of the other sex might make him an able coadjutor to his wife in
the care of Ellen Langton. He determined to journey in person to the
seaport where his young charge resided, leaving the concerns of Harley
College to the direction of the two tutors. Mrs. Melmoth, who, indeed,
anticipated with pleasure the arrival of a new subject to her authority,
threw no difficulties in the way of his intention. To do her justice, her
preparations for his journey, and the minute instructions with which she
favored him, were such as only a woman's true affection could have
suggested. The traveller met with no incidents important to this tale;
and, after an absence of about a fortnight, he and Ellen alighted from
their steeds (for on horseback had the journey been performed) in safety
at his own door.

If pen could give an adequate idea of Ellen Langton's loveliness, it would
achieve what pencil (the pencils, at least, of the colonial artists who
attempted it) never could; for, though the dark eyes might be painted, the
pure and pleasant thoughts that peeped through them could only be seen and
felt. But descriptions of beauty are never satisfactory. It must,
therefore, be left to the imagination of the reader to conceive of
something not more than mortal, nor, indeed, quite the perfection of
mortality, but charming men the more, because they felt, that, lovely as
she was, she was of like nature to themselves.

From the time that Ellen entered Dr. Melmoth's habitation, the sunny days
seemed brighter and the cloudy ones less gloomy, than he had ever before
known them. He naturally delighted in children; and Ellen, though her
years approached to womanhood, had yet much of the gayety and simple
happiness, because the innocence, of a child. She consequently became the
very blessing of his life,--the rich recreation that he promised himself
for hours of literary toil. On one occasion, indeed, he even made her his
companion in the sacred retreat of his study, with the purpose of entering
upon a course of instruction in the learned languages. This measure,
however, he found inexpedient to repeat; for Ellen, having discovered an
old romance among his heavy folios, contrived, by the charm of her sweet
voice, to engage his attention therein till all more important concerns
were forgotten.

With Mrs. Melmoth, Ellen was not, of course, so great a favorite as with
her husband; for women cannot so readily as men, bestow upon the offspring
of others those affections that nature intended for their own; and the
doctor's extraordinary partiality was anything rather than a pledge of his
wife's. But Ellen differed so far from the idea she had previously formed
of her, as a daughter of one of the principal merchants, who were then, as
now, like nobles in the land, that the stock of dislike which Mrs. Melmoth
had provided was found to be totally inapplicable. The young stranger
strove so hard, too (and undoubtedly it was a pleasant labor), to win her
love, that she was successful to a degree of which the lady herself was
not, perhaps, aware. It was soon seen that her education had not been
neglected in those points which Mrs. Melmoth deemed most important. The
nicer departments of cookery, after sufficient proof of her skill, were
committed to her care; and the doctor's table was now covered with
delicacies, simple indeed, but as tempting on account of their intrinsic
excellence as of the small white hands that made them. By such arts as
these,--which in her were no arts, but the dictates of an affectionate
disposition,--by making herself useful where it was possible, and
agreeable on all occasions, Ellen gained the love of everyone within the
sphere of her influence.

But the maiden's conquests were not confined to the members of Dr.
Melmoth's family. She had numerous admirers among those whose situation
compelled them to stand afar off, and gaze upon her loveliness, as if she
were a star, whose brightness they saw, but whose warmth they could not
feel. These were the young men of Harley College, whose chief
opportunities of beholding Ellen were upon the Sabbaths, when she
worshipped with them in the little chapel, which served the purposes of a
church to all the families of the vicinity. There was, about this period
(and the fact was undoubtedly attributable to Ellen's influence,) a
general and very evident decline in the scholarship of the college,
especially in regard to the severer studies. The intellectual powers of
the young men seemed to be directed chiefly to the construction of Latin
and Greek verse, many copies of which, with a characteristic and classic
gallantry, were strewn in the path where Ellen Langton was accustomed to
walk. They, however, produced no perceptible effect; nor were the
aspirations of another ambitious youth, who celebrated her perfections in
Hebrew, attended with their merited success.

But there was one young man, to whom circumstances, independent of his
personal advantages, afforded a superior opportunity of gaining Ellen's
favor. He was nearly related to Dr. Melmoth, on which account he received
his education at Harley College, rather than at one of the English
universities, to the expenses of which his fortune would have been
adequate. This connection entitled him to a frequent and familiar access
to the domestic hearth of the dignitary,--an advantage of which, since
Ellen Langton became a member of the family, he very constantly availed
himself.

Edward Walcott was certainly much superior, in most of the particulars of
which a lady takes cognizance, to those of his fellow-students who had
come under Ellen's notice. He was tall; and the natural grace of his
manners had been improved (an advantage which few of his associates could
boast) by early intercourse with polished society. His features, also,
were handsome, and promised to be manly and dignified when they should
cease to be youthful. His character as a scholar was more than
respectable, though many youthful follies, sometimes, perhaps, approaching
near to vices, were laid to his charge. But his occasional derelictions
from discipline were not such as to create any very serious apprehensions
respecting his future welfare; nor were they greater than, perhaps, might
be expected from a young man who possessed a considerable command of
money, and who was, besides, the fine gentleman of the little community of
which he was a member,--a character which generally leads its possessor
into follies that he would otherwise have avoided.

With this youth Ellen Langton became familiar, and even intimate; for he
was her only companion, of an age suited to her own, and the difference of
sex did not occur to her as an objection. He was her constant companion on
all necessary and allowable occasions, and drew upon himself, in
consequence, the envy of the college.



CHAPTER II.

  "Why, all delights are vain, but that most vain,
  Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain:
    As painfully to pore upon a book
      To seek the light of truth, while truth, the while,
    Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look."
       SHAKESPEARE.


On one of the afternoons which afforded to the students a relaxation from
their usual labors, Ellen was attended by her cavalier in a little
excursion over the rough bridle-roads that led from her new residence. She
was an experienced equestrian,--a necessary accomplishment at that period,
when vehicles of every kind were rare. It was now the latter end of
spring; but the season had hitherto been backward, with only a few warm
and pleasant days. The present afternoon, however, was a delicious
mingling of spring and summer, forming in their union an atmosphere so
mild and pure, that to breathe was almost a positive happiness. There was
a little alternation of cloud across the brow of heaven, but only so much
as to render the sunshine more delightful.

The path of the young travellers lay sometimes among tall and thick
standing trees, and sometimes over naked and desolate hills, whence man
had taken the natural vegetation, and then left the soil to its
barrenness. Indeed, there is little inducement to a cultivator to labor
among the huge stones which there peep forth from the earth, seeming to
form a continued ledge for several miles. A singular contrast to this
unfavored tract of country is seen in the narrow but luxuriant, though
sometimes swampy, strip of interval, on both sides of the stream, that, as
has been noticed, flows down the valley. The light and buoyant spirits of
Edward Walcott and Ellen rose higher as they rode on; and their way was
enlivened, wherever its roughness did not forbid, by their conversation
and pleasant laughter. But at length Ellen drew her bridle, as they
emerged from a thick portion of the forest, just at the foot of a steep
hill.

"We must have ridden far," she observed,--"farther than I thought. It will
be near sunset before we can reach home."

"There are still several hours of daylight," replied Edward Walcott; "and
we will not turn back without ascending this hill. The prospect from the
summit is beautiful, and will be particularly so now, in this rich
sunlight. Come, Ellen,--one light touch of the whip,--your pony is as
fresh as when we started."

On reaching the summit of the hill, and looking back in the direction in
which they had come, they could see the little stream, peeping forth many
times to the daylight, and then shrinking back into the shade. Farther on,
it became broad and deep, though rendered incapable of navigation, in this
part of its course, by the occasional interruption of rapids.

"There are hidden wonders of rock and precipice and cave, in that dark
forest," said Edward, pointing to the space between them and the river.
"If it were earlier in the day, I should love to lead you there. Shall we
try the adventure now, Ellen?"

"Oh no!" she replied. "Let us delay no longer. I fear I must even now
abide a rebuke from Mrs. Melmoth, which I have surely deserved. But who is
this, who rides on so slowly before us?"

She pointed to a horseman, whom they had not before observed. He was
descending the hill; but, as his steed seemed to have chosen his own pace,
he made a very inconsiderable progress.

"Oh, do you not know him? But it is scarcely possible you should,"
exclaimed her companion. "We must do him the good office, Ellen, of
stopping his progress, or he will find himself at the village, a dozen
miles farther on, before he resumes his consciousness."

"Has he then lost his senses?" inquired Miss Langton.

"Not so, Ellen,--if much learning has not made him mad," replied Edward
Walcott. "He is a deep scholar and a noble fellow; but I fear we shall
follow him to his grave erelong. Dr. Melmoth has sent him to ride in
pursuit of his health. He will never overtake it, however, at this pace."

As he spoke, they had approached close to the subject of their
conversation; and Ellen had a moment's space for observation before he
started from the abstraction in which he was plunged. The result of her
scrutiny was favorable, yet very painful.

The stranger could scarcely have attained his twentieth year, and was
possessed of a face and form such as Nature bestows on none but her
favorites. There was a nobleness on his high forehead, which time would
have deepened into majesty; and all his features were formed with a
strength and boldness, of which the paleness, produced by study and
confinement, could not deprive them. The expression of his countenance was
not a melancholy one: on the contrary, it was proud and high, perhaps
triumphant, like one who was a ruler in a world of his own, and
independent of the beings that surrounded him. But a blight, of which his
thin pale cheek, and the brightness of his eye, were alike proofs, seemed
to have come over him ere his maturity.

The scholar's attention was now aroused by the hoof-tramps at his side;
and, starting, he fixed his eyes on Ellen, whose young and lovely
countenance was full of the interest he had excited. A deep blush
immediately suffused his cheek, proving how well the glow of health would
have become it. There was nothing awkward, however, in his manner; and,
soon recovering his self-possession, he bowed to her, and would have rode
on.

"Your ride is unusually long to-day, Fanshawe," observed Edward Walcott.
"When may we look for your return?"

The young man again blushed, but answered, with a smile that had a
beautiful effect upon his countenance, "I was not, at the moment, aware in
which direction my horse's head was turned. I have to thank you for
arresting me in a journey which was likely to prove much longer than I
intended."

The party had now turned their horses, and were about to resume their ride
in a homeward direction; but Edward perceived that Fanshawe, having lost
the excitement of intense thought, now looked weary and dispirited.

"Here is a cottage close at hand," he observed. "We have ridden far, and
stand in need of refreshment. Ellen, shall we alight?"

She saw the benevolent motive of his proposal, and did not hesitate to
comply with it. But, as they paused at the cottage door, she could not but
observe that its exterior promised few of the comforts which they
required. Time and neglect seemed to have conspired for its ruin; and, but
for a thin curl of smoke from its clay chimney, they could not have
believed it to be inhabited. A considerable tract of land in the vicinity
of the cottage had evidently been, at some former period, under
cultivation, but was now overrun by bushes and dwarf pines, among which
many huge gray rocks, ineradicable by human art, endeavored to conceal
themselves. About half an acre of ground was occupied by the young blades
of Indian-corn, at which a half-starved cow gazed wistfully over the
mouldering log-fence. These were the only agricultural tokens. Edward
Walcott, nevertheless, drew the latch of the cottage door, after knocking
loudly but in vain.

The apartment which was thus opened to their view was quite as wretched as
its exterior had given them reason to anticipate. Poverty was there, with
all its necessary and unnecessary concomitants. The intruders would have
retired had not the hope of affording relief detained them.

The occupants of the small and squalid apartment were two women, both of
them elderly, and, from the resemblance of their features, appearing to be
sisters. The expression of their countenances, however, was very
different. One, evidently the younger, was seated on the farther side of
the large hearth, opposite to the door at which the party stood. She had
the sallow look of long and wasting illness; and there was an unsteadiness
of expression about her eyes, that immediately struck the observer. Yet
her face was mild and gentle, therein contrasting widely with that of her
companion.

The other woman was bending over a small fire of decayed branches, the
flame of which was very disproportionate to the smoke, scarcely producing
heat sufficient for the preparation of a scanty portion of food. Her
profile only was visible to the strangers, though, from a slight motion of
her eye, they perceived that she was aware of their presence. Her features
were pinched and spare, and wore a look of sullen discontent, for which
the evident wretchedness of her situation afforded a sufficient reason.
This female, notwithstanding her years, and the habitual fretfulness (that
is more wearing than time), was apparently healthy and robust, with a dry,
leathery complexion. A short space elapsed before she thought proper to
turn her face towards her visitors; and she then regarded them with a
lowering eye, without speaking, or rising from her chair.

"We entered," Edward Walcott began to say, "in the hope"--But he paused,
on perceiving that the sick woman had risen from her seat, and with slow
and tottering footsteps was drawing near to him. She took his hand in both
her own; and, though he shuddered at the touch of age and disease, he did
not attempt to withdraw it. She then perused all his features, with an
expression, at first of eager and hopeful anxiety, which faded by degrees
into disappointment. Then, turning from him, she gazed into Fanshawe's
countenance with the like eagerness, but with the same result. Lastly,
tottering back to her chair, she hid her face and wept bitterly. The
strangers, though they knew not the cause of her grief, were deeply
affected; and Ellen approached the mourner with words of comfort, which,
more from their tone than their meaning, produced a transient effect.

"Do you bring news of him?" she inquired, raising her head. "Will he
return to me? Shall I see him before I die?" Ellen knew not what to
answer; and, ere she could attempt it, the other female prevented her.

"Sister Butler is wandering in her mind," she said, "and speaks of one she
will never behold again. The sight of strangers disturbs her, and you see
we have nothing here to offer you."

The manner of the woman was ungracious; but her words were true. They saw
that their presence could do nothing towards the alleviation of the misery
they witnessed; and they felt that mere curiosity would not authorize a
longer intrusion. So soon, therefore, as they had relieved, according to
their power, the poverty that seemed to be the least evil of this cottage,
they emerged into the open air.

The breath of heaven felt sweet to them, and removed a part of the weight
from their young hearts, which were saddened by the sight of so much
wretchedness. Perceiving a pure and bright little fountain at a short
distance from the cottage, they approached it, and, using the bark of a
birch-tree as a cup, partook of its cool waters. They then pursued their
homeward ride with such diligence, that, just as the sun was setting, they
came in sight of the humble wooden edifice which was dignified with the
name of Harley College. A golden ray rested upon the spire of the little
chapel, the bell of which sent its tinkling murmur down the valley to
summon the wanderers to evening prayers.

Fanshawe returned to his chamber that night, and lighted his lamp as he
had been wont to do. The books were around him which had hitherto been to
him like those fabled volumes of Magic, from which the reader could not
turn away his eye till death were the consequence of his studies. But
there were unaccustomed thoughts in his bosom now; and to these, leaning
his head on one of the unopened volumes, he resigned himself.

He called up in review the years, that, even at his early age, he had
spent in solitary study, in conversation with the dead, while he had
scorned to mingle with the living world, or to be actuated by any of its
motives. He asked himself to what purpose was all this destructive labor,
and where was the happiness of superior knowledge. He had climbed but a
few steps of a ladder that reached to infinity: he had thrown away his
life in discovering, that, after a thousand such lives, he should still
know comparatively nothing. He even looked forward with dread--though once
the thought had been dear to him--to the eternity of improvement that lay
before him. It seemed now a weary way, without a resting-place and without
a termination; and at that moment he would have preferred the dreamless
sleep of the brutes that perish to man's proudest attribute,--of
immortality.

Fanshawe had hitherto deemed himself unconnected with the world,
Unconcerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his
pursuits. In this respect he probably deceived himself. If his inmost
heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that
dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a
thousand realities. But, at any rate, he had seemed, to others and to
himself, a solitary being, upon whom the hopes and fears of ordinary men
were ineffectual.

But now he felt the first thrilling of one of the many ties, that, so long
as we breathe the common air, (and who shall say how much longer?) unite
us to our kind. The sound of a soft, sweet voice, the glance of a gentle
eye, had wrought a change upon him; and in his ardent mind a few hours had
done the work of many. Almost in spite of himself, the new sensation was
inexpressibly delightful. The recollection of his ruined health, of his
habits (so much at variance with those of the world),--all the
difficulties that reason suggested, were inadequate to check the exulting
tide of hope and joy.



CHAPTER III.

  "And let the aspiring youth beware of love,--
  Of the smooth glance beware; for 'tis too late
  When on his heart the torrent softness pours;
  Then wisdom prostrate lies, and fading fame
  Dissolves in air away."
     THOMSON.


A few months passed over the heads of Ellen Langton and her admirers,
unproductive of events, that, separately, were of sufficient importance to
be related. The summer was now drawing to a close; and Dr. Melmoth had
received information that his friend's arrangements were nearly completed,
and that by the next home-bound ship he hoped to return to his native
country. The arrival of that ship was daily expected.

During the time that had elapsed since his first meeting with Ellen, there
had been a change, yet not a very remarkable one, in Fanshawe's habits. He
was still the same solitary being, so far as regarded his own sex; and he
still confined himself as sedulously to his chamber, except for one
hour--the sunset hour--of every day. At that period, unless prevented by
the inclemency of the weather, he was accustomed to tread a path that
wound along the banks of the stream. He had discovered that this was the
most frequent scene of Ellen's walks; and this it was that drew him
thither.

Their intercourse was at first extremely slight,--a bow on the one side, a
smile on the other, and a passing word from both; and then the student
hurried back to his solitude. But, in course of time, opportunities
occurred for more extended conversation; so that, at the period with which
this chapter is concerned, Fanshawe was, almost as constantly as Edward
Walcott himself, the companion of Ellen's walks.

His passion had strengthened more than proportionably to the time that had
elapsed since it was conceived; but the first glow and excitement which
attended it had now vanished. He had reasoned calmly with himself, and
rendered evident to his own mind the almost utter hopelessness of success.
He had also made his resolution strong, that he would not even endeavor to
win Ellen's love, the result of which, for a thousand reasons, could not
be happiness. Firm in this determination, and confident of his power to
adhere to it; feeling, also, that time and absence could not cure his own
passion, and having no desire for such a cure,--he saw no reason for
breaking off the intercourse that was established between Ellen and
himself. It was remarkable, that, notwithstanding the desperate nature of
his love, that, or something connected with it, seemed to have a
beneficial effect upon his health. There was now a slight tinge of color
in his cheek, and a less consuming brightness in his eye. Could it be that
hope, unknown to himself, was yet alive in his breast; that a sense of the
possibility of earthly happiness was redeeming him from the grave?

Had the character of Ellen Langton's mind been different, there might,
perhaps, have been danger to her from an intercourse of this nature with
such a being as Fanshawe; for he was distinguished by many of those
asperities around which a woman's affection will often cling. But she was
formed to walk in the calm and quiet paths of life, and to pluck the
flowers of happiness from the wayside where they grow. Singularity of
character, therefore, was not calculated to win her love. She undoubtedly
felt an interest in the solitary student, and perceiving, with no great
exercise of vanity, that her society drew him from the destructive
intensity of his studies, she perhaps felt it a duty to exert her
influence. But it did not occur to her that her influence had been
sufficiently strong to change the whole current of his thoughts and
feelings.

Ellen and her two lovers (for both, though perhaps not equally, deserved
that epithet) had met, as usual, at the close of a sweet summer day, and
were standing by the side of the stream, just where it swept into a deep
pool. The current, undermining the bank, had formed a recess, which,
according to Edward Walcott, afforded at that moment a hiding-place to a
trout of noble size.

"Now would I give the world," he exclaimed with great interest, "for a
hook and line, a fish-spear, or any piscatorial instrument of death! Look,
Ellen, you can see the waving of his tail from beneath the bank!"

"If you had the means of taking him, I should save him from your cruelty,
thus," said Ellen, dropping a pebble into the water, just over the fish.
"There! he has darted down the stream. How many pleasant caves and
recesses there must be under these banks, where he may be happy! May there
not be happiness in the life of a fish?" she added, turning with a smile
to Fanshawe.

"There may," he replied, "so long as he lives quietly in the caves and
recesses of which you speak, Yes, there may be happiness, though such as
few would envy; but, then, the hook and line"--

"Which, there is reason to apprehend, will shortly destroy the happiness
of our friend the trout," interrupted Edward, pointing down the stream.
"There is an angler on his way toward us, who will intercept him."

"He seems to care little for the sport, to judge by the pace at which he
walks," said Ellen.

"But he sees, now, that we are observing him, and is willing to prove that
he knows something of the art," replied Edward Walcott. "I should think
him well acquainted with the stream; for, hastily as he walks, he has
tried every pool and ripple where a fish usually hides. But that point
will be decided when he reaches yonder old bare oak-tree."

"And how is the old tree to decide the question?" inquired Fanshawe. "It
is a species of evidence of which I have never before heard."

"The stream has worn a hollow under its roots," answered Edward,--"a most
delicate retreat for a trout. Now, a stranger would not discover the spot;
or, if he did, the probable result of a cast would be the loss of hook and
line,--an accident that has occurred to me more than once. If, therefore,
this angler takes a fish from thence, it follows that he knows the
stream."

They observed the fisher, accordingly, as he kept his way up the bank. He
did not pause when he reached the old leafless oak, that formed with its
roots an obstruction very common in American streams; but, throwing his
line with involuntary skill as he passed, he not only escaped the various
entanglements, but drew forth a fine large fish.

"There, Ellen, he has captivated your _protege_, the trout, or, at
least, one very like him in size," observed Edward. "It is singular," he
added, gazing earnestly at the man.

"Why is it singular?" inquired Ellen Langton. "This person, perhaps,
resides in the neighborhood, and may have fished often in the stream."

"Do but look at him, Ellen, and judge whether his life can have been spent
in this lonely valley," he replied. "The glow of many a hotter sun than
ours has darkened his brow; and his step and air have something foreign in
them, like what we see in sailors who have lived more in other countries
than in their own. Is it not so, Ellen? for your education in a seaport
must have given you skill in these matters. But come, let us approach
nearer."

They walked towards the angler, accordingly, who still remained under the
oak, apparently engaged in arranging his fishing-tackle. As the party drew
nigh, he raised his head, and threw one quick, scrutinizing glance towards
them, disclosing, on his part, a set of bold and rather coarse features,
weather-beaten, but indicating the age of the owner to be not above
thirty. In person he surpassed the middle size, was well set, and
evidently strong and active.

"Do you meet with much success, sir?" inquired Edward Walcott, when within
a convenient distance for conversation.

"I have taken but one fish," replied the angler, in an accent which his
hearers could scarcely determine to be foreign, or the contrary. "I am a
stranger to the stream, and have doubtless passed over many a likely place
for sport."

"You have an angler's eye, sir," rejoined Edward.

"I observed that you made your casts as if you had often trod these banks,
and I could scarcely have guided you better myself."

"Yes, I have learned the art, and I love to practise it," replied the man.
"But will not the young lady try her skill?" he continued, casting a bold
eye on Ellen. "The fish will love to be drawn out by such white hands as
those."

Ellen shrank back, though almost imperceptibly, from the free bearing of
the man. It seemed meant for courtesy; but its effect was excessively
disagreeable. Edward Walcott, who perceived and coincided in Ellen's
feelings, replied to the stranger's proposal.

"The young lady will not put the gallantry of the fish to the proof, sir,"
he said, "and she will therefore have no occasion for your own."

"I shall take leave to hear my answer from the young lady's own mouth,"
answered the stranger, haughtily. "If you will step this way, Miss
Langton" (here he interrupted himself),--"if you will cast the line by
yonder sunken log, I think you will meet with success."

Thus saying, the angler offered his rod and line to Ellen. She at first
drew back, then hesitated, but finally held out her hand to receive them.
In thus complying with the stranger's request, she was actuated by a
desire to keep the peace, which, as her notice of Edward Walcott's
crimsoned cheek and flashing eye assured her, was considerably endangered.
The angler led the way to the spot which he had pointed out, which, though
not at such a distance from Ellen's companions but that words in a common
tone could be distinguished, was out of the range of a lowered voice.

Edward Walcott and the student remained by the oak: the former biting his
lip with vexation; the latter, whose abstraction always vanished where
Ellen was concerned, regarding her and the stranger with fixed and silent
attention. The young men could at first hear the words that the angler
addressed to Ellen. They related to the mode of managing the rod; and she
made one or two casts under his direction. At length, however, as if to
offer his assistance, the man advanced close to her side, and seemed to
speak, but in so low a tone, that the sense of what he uttered was lost
before it reached the oak. But its effect upon Ellen was immediate and
very obvious. Her eyes flashed; and an indignant blush rose high on her
cheek, giving to her beauty a haughty brightness, of which the gentleness
of her disposition in general deprived it. The next moment, however, she
seemed to recollect herself, and, restoring the angling-rod to its owner,
she turned away calmly, and approached her companions.

"The evening breeze grows chill; and mine is a dress for a summer day,"
she observed. "Let us walk homeward."

"Miss Langton, is it the evening breeze alone that sends you homeward?"
inquired Edward.

At this moment the angler, who had resumed, and seemed to be intent upon
his occupation, drew a fish from the pool, which he had pointed out to
Ellen.

"I told the young lady," he exclaimed, "that, if she would listen to me a
moment longer, she would be repaid for her trouble; and here is the proof
of my words."

"Come, let us hasten towards home," cried Ellen, eagerly; and she took
Edward Walcott's arm, with a freedom that, at another time, would have
enchanted him. He at first seemed inclined to resist her wishes, but
complied, after exchanging, unperceived by Ellen, a glance with the
stranger, the meaning of which the latter appeared perfectly to
understand. Fanshawe also attended her. Their walk towards Dr. Melmoth's
dwelling was almost a silent one; and the few words that passed between
them did not relate to the adventure which occupied the thoughts of each.
On arriving at the house, Ellen's attendants took leave of her, and
retired.

Edward Walcott, eluding Fanshawe's observation with little difficulty,
hastened back to the old oak-tree. From the intelligence with which the
stranger had received his meaning glance, the young man had supposed that
he would here await his return. But the banks of the stream, upward and
downward, so far as his eye could reach, were solitary. He could see only
his own image in the water, where it swept into a silent depth; and could
hear only its ripple, where stones and sunken trees impeded its course.
The object of his search might, indeed, have found concealment among the
tufts of alders, or in the forest that was near at hand; but thither it
was in vain to pursue him. The angler had apparently set little store by
the fruits of his assumed occupation; for the last fish that he had taken
lay, yet alive, on the bank, gasping for the element to which Edward was
sufficiently compassionate to restore him. After watching him as he glided
down the stream, making feeble efforts to resist its current, the youth
turned away, and sauntered slowly towards the college.

Ellen Langton, on her return from her walk, found Dr. Melmoth's little
parlor unoccupied; that gentleman being deeply engaged in his study, and
his lady busied in her domestic affairs. The evening, notwithstanding
Ellen's remark concerning the chillness of the breeze, was almost sultry;
and the windows of the apartment were thrown open. At one of these, which
looked into the garden, she seated herself, listening, almost
unconsciously, to the monotonous music of a thousand insects, varied
occasionally by the voice of a whippoorwill, who, as the day departed, was
just commencing his song. A dusky tint, as yet almost imperceptible, was
beginning to settle on the surrounding objects, except where they were
opposed to the purple and golden clouds, which the vanished sun had made
the brief inheritors of a portion of his brightness. In these gorgeous
vapors, Ellen's fancy, in the interval of other thoughts, pictured a
fairy-land, and longed for wings to visit it.

But as the clouds lost their brilliancy, and assumed first a dull purple,
and then a sullen gray tint, Ellen's thoughts recurred to the adventure of
the angler, which her imagination was inclined to invest with an undue
singularity. It was, however, sufficiently unaccountable that an entire
stranger should venture to demand of her a private audience; and she
assigned, in turn, a thousand motives for such a request, none of which
were in any degree satisfactory. Her most prevailing thought, though she
could not justify it to her reason, inclined her to believe that the
angler was a messenger from her father. But wherefore he should deem it
necessary to communicate any intelligence that he might possess only by
means of a private interview, and without the knowledge of her friends,
was a mystery she could not solve. In this view of the matter, however,
she half regretted that her instinctive delicacy had impelled her so
suddenly to break off their conference, admitting, in the secrecy of her
own mind, that, if an opportunity were again to occur, it might not again
be shunned. As if that unuttered thought had power to conjure up its
object, she now became aware of a form standing in the garden, at a short
distance from the window where she sat. The dusk had deepened, during
Ellen's abstraction, to such a degree, that the man's features were not
perfectly distinguishable; but the maiden was not long in doubt of his
identity, for he approached, and spoke in the same low tone in which he
had addressed her when they stood by the stream.

"Do you still refuse my request, when its object is but your own good, and
that of one who should be most dear to you?" he asked.

Ellen's first impulse had been to cry out for assistance; her second was
to fly: but, rejecting both these measures, she determined to remain,
endeavoring to persuade herself that she was safe. The quivering of her
voice, however, when she attempted to reply, betrayed her apprehensions.

"I cannot listen to such a request from a stranger," she said. "If you
bring news from--from my father, why is it not told to Dr. Melmoth?"

"Because what I have to say is for your ear alone," was the reply; "and if
you would avoid misfortune now, and sorrow hereafter, you will not refuse
to hear me."

"And does it concern my father?" asked Ellen, eagerly.

"It does--most deeply," answered the stranger.

She meditated a moment, and then replied, "I will not refuse, I will
hear--but speak quickly."

"We are in danger of interruption in this place, and that would be fatal
to my errand," said the stranger. "I will await you in the garden."

With these words, and giving her no opportunity for reply, he drew back;
and his form faded from her eyes. This precipitate retreat from argument
was the most probable method that he could have adopted of gaining his
end. He had awakened the strongest interest in Ellen's mind; and he
calculated justly in supposing that she would consent to an interview upon
his own terms.

Dr. Melmoth had followed his own fancies in the mode of laying out his
garden; and, in consequence, the plan that had undoubtedly existed in his
mind was utterly incomprehensible to every one but himself. It was an
intermixture of kitchen and flower garden, a labyrinth of winding paths,
bordered by hedges, and impeded by shrubbery. Many of the original trees
of the forest were still flourishing among the exotics which the doctor
had transplanted thither. It was not without a sensation of fear, stronger
than she had ever before experienced, that Ellen Langton found herself in
this artificial wilderness, and in the presence of the mysterious
stranger. The dusky light deepened the lines of his dark, strong features;
and Ellen fancied that his countenance wore a wilder and a fiercer look
than when she had met him by the stream. He perceived her agitation, and
addressed her in the softest tones of which his voice was capable.

"Compose yourself," he said; "you have nothing to fear from me. But we are
in open view from the house, where we now stand; and discovery would not
be without danger to both of us."

"No eye can see us here," said Ellen, trembling at the truth of her own
observation, when they stood beneath a gnarled, low-branched pine, which
Dr. Melmoth's ideas of beauty had caused him to retain in his garden.
"Speak quickly; for I dare follow you no farther."

The spot was indeed sufficiently solitary; and the stranger delayed no
longer to explain his errand.

"Your father," he began,--"do you not love him? Would you do aught for his
welfare?"

"Everything that a father could ask I would do," exclaimed Ellen, eagerly.
"Where is my father? and when shall I meet him?"

"It must depend upon yourself, whether you shall meet him in a few days or
never."

"Never!" repeated Ellen. "Is he ill? Is he in danger?"

"He is in danger," replied the man, "but not from illness. Your father is
a ruined man. Of all his friends, but one remains to him. That friend has
travelled far to prove if his daughter has a daughter's affection."

"And what is to be the proof?" asked Ellen, with more calmness than the
stranger had anticipated; for she possessed a large fund of plain sense,
which revolted against the mystery of these proceedings. Such a course,
too, seemed discordant with her father's character, whose strong mind and
almost cold heart were little likely to demand, or even to pardon, the
romance of affection.

"This letter will explain," was the reply to Ellen's question. "You will
see that it is in your father's hand; and that may gain your confidence,
though I am doubted."

She received the letter; and many of her suspicions of the stranger's
truth were vanquished by the apparent openness of his manner. He was
preparing to speak further, but paused, for a footstep was now heard,
approaching from the lower part of the garden. From their situation,--at
some distance from the path, and in the shade of the tree,--they had a
fair chance of eluding discovery from any unsuspecting passenger; and,
when Ellen saw that the intruder was Fanshawe, she hoped that his usual
abstraction would assist their concealment.

But, as the student advanced along the path, his air was not that of one
whose deep inward thoughts withdrew his attention from all outward
objects. He rather resembled the hunter, on the watch for his game; and,
while he was yet at a distance from Ellen, a wandering gust of wind waved
her white garment, and betrayed her.

"It is as I feared," said Fanshawe to himself. He then drew nigh, and
addressed Ellen with a calm authority that became him well,
notwithstanding that his years scarcely exceeded her own. "Miss Langton,"
he inquired, "what do you here at such an hour, and with such a
companion?"

Ellen was sufficiently displeased at what she deemed the unauthorized
intrusion of Fanshawe in her affairs; but his imposing manner and her own
confusion prevented her from replying.

"Permit me to lead you to the house," he continued, in the words of a
request, but in the tone of a command. "The dew hangs dank and heavy on
these branches; and a longer stay would be more dangerous than you are
aware."

Ellen would fain have resisted; but though the tears hung as heavy on her
eyelashes, between shame and anger, as the dew upon the leaves, she felt
compelled to accept the arm that he offered her. But the stranger, who,
since Fanshawe's approach, had remained a little apart, now advanced.

"You speak as one in authority, young man," he said. "Have you the means
of compelling obedience? Does your power extend to men? Or do you rule
only over simple girls? Miss Langton is under my protection, and, till you
can bend me to your will, she shall remain so."

Fanshawe turned calmly, and fixed his eyes on the stranger. "Retire, sir,"
was all he said.

Ellen almost shuddered, as if there were a mysterious and unearthly power
in Fanshawe's voice; for she saw that the stranger endeavored in vain,
borne down by the influence of a superior mind, to maintain the boldness
of look and bearing that seemed natural to him. He at first made a step
forward, then muttered a few half-audible words; but, quailing at length
beneath the young man's bright and steady eye, he turned and slowly
withdrew.

Fanshawe remained silent a moment after his opponent had departed, and,
when he next spoke, it was in a tone of depression. Ellen observed, also,
that his countenance had lost its look of pride and authority; and he
seemed faint and exhausted. The occasion that called forth his energies
had passed; and they had left him.

"Forgive me, Miss Langton," he said almost humbly, "if my eagerness to
serve you has led me too far. There is evil in this stranger, more than
your pure mind can conceive. I know not what has been his errand; but let
me entreat you to put confidence in those to whose care your father has
intrusted you. Or if I--or--or Edward Walcott--But I have no right to
advise you; and your own calm thoughts will guide you best."

He said no more; and, as Ellen did not reply, they reached the house, and
parted in silence.



CHAPTER IV.

  "The seeds by nature planted
  Take a deep root in the soil, and though for a time
  The trenchant share and tearing harrow may
  Sweep all appearance of them from the surface,
  Yet with the first warm rains of spring they'll shoot,
  And with their rankness smother the good grain.
  Heaven grant, it mayn't be so with him."
    RICHES.


The scene of this tale must now be changed to the little inn, which at
that period, as at the present, was situated in the vicinity of Harley
College. The site of the modern establishment is the same with that of the
ancient; but everything of the latter that had been built by hands has
gone to decay and been removed, and only the earth beneath and around it
remains the same. The modern building, a house of two stories, after a
lapse of twenty years, is yet unfinished. On this account, it has retained
the appellation of the "New Inn," though, like many who have frequented
it, it has grown old ere its maturity. Its dingy whiteness, and its
apparent superfluity of windows (many of them being closed with rough
boards), give it somewhat of a dreary look, especially in a wet day.

The ancient inn was a house, of which the eaves approached within about
seven feet of the ground; while the roof, sloping gradually upward, formed
an angle at several times that height. It was a comfortable and pleasant
abode to the weary traveller, both in summer and winter; for the frost
never ventured within the sphere of its huge hearths; and it was protected
from the heat of the sultry season by three large elms that swept the roof
with their long branches, and seemed to create a breeze where there was
not one. The device upon the sign, suspended from one of these trees, was
a hand holding a long-necked bottle, and was much more appropriate than
the present unmeaning representation of a black eagle. But it is necessary
to speak rather more at length of the landlord than of the house over
which he presided.

Hugh Crombie was one for whom most of the wise men, who considered the
course of his early years, had predicted the gallows as an end before he
should arrive at middle age. That these prophets of ill had been deceived
was evident from the fact that the doomed man had now passed the fortieth
year, and was in more prosperous circumstances than most of those who had
wagged their tongues against him. Yet the failure of their forebodings was
more remarkable than their fulfilment would have been.

He had been distinguished, almost from his earliest infancy, by those
precocious accomplishments, which, because they consist in an imitation of
the vices and follies of maturity, render a boy the favorite plaything of
men. He seemed to have received from nature the convivial talents, which,
whether natural or acquired, are a most dangerous possession; and, before
his twelfth year, he was the welcome associate of all the idle and
dissipated of his neighborhood, and especially of those who haunted the
tavern of which he had now become the landlord. Under this course of
education, Hugh Crombie grew to youth and manhood; and the lovers of good
words could only say in his favor, that he was a greater enemy to himself
than to any one else, and that, if he should reform, few would have a
better chance of prosperity than he.

The former clause of this modicum of praise (if praise it may be termed)
was indisputable; but it may be doubted, whether, under any circumstances
where his success depended on his own exertions, Hugh would have made his
way well through the world. He was one of those unfortunate persons, who,
instead of being perfect in any single art or occupation, are superficial
in many, and who are supposed to possess a larger share of talent than
other men, because it consists of numerous scraps, instead of a single
mass. He was partially acquainted with most of the manual arts that gave
bread to others; but not one of them, nor all of them, would give bread to
him. By some fatality, the only two of his multifarious accomplishments in
which his excellence was generally conceded were both calculated to keep
him poor rather than to make him rich. He was a musician and a poet.
There are yet remaining in that portion of the country many ballads and
songs,--set to their own peculiar tunes,--the authorship of which is
attributed to him. In general, his productions were upon subjects of local
and temporary interest, and would consequently require a bulk of
explanatory notes to render them interesting or intelligible to the world
at large. A considerable proportion of the remainder are Anacreontics;
though, in their construction, Hugh Crombie imitated neither the Teian nor
any other bard. These latter have generally a coarseness and sensuality
intolerable to minds even of no very fastidious delicacy. But there are
two or three simple little songs, into which a feeling and a natural
pathos have found their way, that still retain their influence over the
heart. These, after two or three centuries, may perhaps be precious to the
collectors of our early poetry. At any rate, Hugh Crombie's effusions,
tavern-haunter and vagrant though he was, have gained a continuance of
fame (confined, indeed, to a narrow section of the country), which many
who called themselves poets then, and would have scorned such a brother,
have failed to equal.

During the long winter evenings, when the farmers were idle round their
hearths, Hugh was a courted guest; for none could while away the hours
more skilfully than he. The winter, therefore, was his season of
prosperity; in which respect he differed from the butterflies and useless
insects, to which he otherwise bore a resemblance. During the cold months,
a very desirable alteration for the better appeared in his outward man.
His cheeks were plump and sanguine; his eyes bright and cheerful; and the
tip of his nose glowed with a Bardolphian fire,--a flame, indeed, which
Hugh was so far a vestal as to supply with its necessary fuel at all
seasons of the year. But, as the spring advanced, he assumed a lean and
sallow look, wilting and fading in the sunshine that brought life and joy
to every animal and vegetable except himself. His winter patrons eyed him
with an austere regard; and some even practised upon him the modern and
fashionable courtesy of the "cut direct."

Yet, after all, there was good, or something that Nature intended to be
so, in the poor outcast,--some lovely flowers, the sweeter even for the
weeds that choked them. An instance of this was his affection for an aged
father, whose whole support was the broken reed,--his son. Notwithstanding
his own necessities, Hugh contrived to provide food and raiment for the
old man: how, it would be difficult to say, and perhaps as well not to
inquire. He also exhibited traits of sensitiveness to neglect and insult,
and of gratitude for favors; both of which feelings a course of life like
his is usually quick to eradicate.

At length the restraint--for such his father had ever been--upon Hugh
Crombie's conduct was removed by death; and then the wise men and the old
began to shake their heads; and they who took pleasure in the follies,
vices, and misfortunes of their fellow-creatures, looked for a speedy
gratification. They were disappointed, however; for Hugh had apparently
determined, that, whatever might be his catastrophe, he would meet it
among strangers, rather than at home. Shortly after his father's death, he
disappeared altogether from the vicinity; and his name became, in the
course of years, an unusual sound, where once the lack of other topics of
interest had given it a considerable degree of notoriety. Sometimes,
however, when the winter blast was loud round the lonely farm-house, its
inmates remembered him who had so often chased away the gloom of such an
hour, and, though with little expectation of its fulfilment, expressed a
wish to behold him again.

Yet that wish, formed, perhaps, because it appeared so desperate, was
finally destined to be gratified. One summer evening, about two years
previous to the period of this tale, a man of sober and staid deportment,
mounted upon a white horse, arrived at the Hand and Bottle, to which some
civil or military meeting had chanced, that day, to draw most of the
inhabitants of the vicinity. The stranger was well though plainly dressed,
and anywhere but in a retired country town would have attracted no
particular attention; but here, where a traveller was not of every-day
occurrence, he was soon surrounded by a little crowd, who, when his eye
was averted, seized the opportunity diligently to peruse his person. He
was rather a thickset man, but with no superfluous flesh; his hair was of
iron-gray; he had a few wrinkles; his face was so deeply sunburnt, that,
excepting a half-smothered glow on the tip of his nose, a dusky yellow was
the only apparent hue. As the people gazed, it was observed that the
elderly men, and the men of substance, gat themselves silently to their
steeds, and hied homeward with an unusual degree of haste; till at length
the inn was deserted, except by a few wretched objects to whom it was a
constant resort. These, instead of retreating, drew closer to the
traveller, peeping anxiously into his face, and asking, ever and anon, a
question, in order to discover the tone of his voice. At length, with one
consent, and as if the recognition had at once burst upon them, they
hailed their old boon-companion, Hugh Crombie, and, leading him into the
inn, did him the honor to partake of a cup of welcome at his expense.

But, though Hugh readily acknowledged the not very reputable acquaintances
who alone acknowledged him, they speedily discovered that he was an
altered man. He partook with great moderation of the liquor for which he
was to pay; he declined all their flattering entreaties for one of his old
songs; and finally, being urged to engage in a game at all-fours, he
calmly observed, almost in the words of an old clergyman on a like
occasion, that his principles forbade a profane appeal to the decision by
lot.

On the next Sabbath Hugh Crombie made his appearance at public worship in
the chapel of Harley College; and here his outward demeanor was
unexceptionably serious and devout,--a praise which, on that particular
occasion, could be bestowed on few besides. From these favorable symptoms,
the old established prejudices against him began to waver; and as he
seemed not to need, and to have no intention to ask, the assistance of any
one, he was soon generally acknowledged by the rich as well as by the
poor. His account of his past life, and of his intentions for the future,
was brief, but not unsatisfactory. He said that, since his departure, he
had been a seafaring man, and that, having acquired sufficient property to
render him easy in the decline of his days, he had returned to live and
die in the town of his nativity.

There was one person, and the one whom Hugh was most interested to please,
who seemed perfectly satisfied of the verity of his reformation. This was
the landlady of the inn, whom, at his departure, he had left a gay, and,
even at thirty-five, a rather pretty wife, and whom, on his return, he
found a widow of fifty, fat, yellow, wrinkled, and a zealous member of the
church. She, like others, had, at first, cast a cold eye on the wanderer;
but it shortly became evident to close observers, that a change was at
work in the pious matron's sentiments respecting her old acquaintance. She
was now careful to give him his morning dram from her own peculiar bottle,
to fill his pipe from her private box of Virginia, and to mix for him the
sleeping-cup in which her late husband had delighted. Of all these
courtesies Hugh Crombie did partake with a wise and cautious moderation,
that, while it proved them to be welcome, expressed his fear of
trespassing on her kindness. For the sake of brevity, it shall suffice to
say, that, about six weeks after Hugh's return, a writing appeared on one
of the elm-trees in front of the tavern (where, as the place of greatest
resort, such notices were usually displayed) setting forth that marriage
was intended between Hugh Crombie and the Widow Sarah Hutchins. And the
ceremony, which made Hugh a landholder, a householder, and a substantial
man, in due time took place.

As a landlord, his general conduct was very praiseworthy. He was moderate
in his charges, and attentive to his guests; he allowed no gross and
evident disorders in his house, and practised none himself; he was kind
and charitable to such as needed food and lodging, and had not wherewithal
to pay,--for with these his experience had doubtless given him a
fellow-feeling. He was also sufficiently attentive to his wife; though
it must be acknowledged that the religious zeal which had had a
considerable influence in gaining her affections grew, by no moderate
degrees, less fervent. It was whispered, too, that the new landlord could,
when time, place, and company were to his mind, upraise a song as merrily,
and drink a glass as jollily, as in the days of yore. These were the
weightiest charges that could now be brought against him; and wise men
thought, that, whatever might have been the evil of his past life, he
had returned with a desire (which years of vice, if they do not sometimes
produce, do not always destroy) of being honest, if opportunity should
offer; and Hugh had certainly a fair one.

On the afternoon previous to the events related in the last chapter, the
personage whose introduction to the reader has occupied so large a space
was seated under one of the elms in front of his dwelling. The bench which
now sustained him, and on which were carved the names of many former
occupants, was Hugh Crombie's favorite lounging-place, unless when his
attentions were required by his guests. No demand had that day been made
upon the hospitality of the Hand and Bottle; and the landlord was just
then murmuring at the unfrequency of employment. The slenderness of his
profits, indeed, were no part of his concern; for the Widow Hutchins's
chief income was drawn from her farm, nor was Hugh ever miserly inclined.
But his education and habits had made him delight in the atmosphere of the
inn, and in the society of those who frequented it; and of this species of
enjoyment his present situation certainly did not afford an overplus.

Yet had Hugh Crombie an enviable appearance of indolence and ease, as he
sat under the old tree, polluting the sweet air with his pipe, and taking
occasional draughts from a brown jug that stood near at hand. The basis of
the potation contained in this vessel was harsh old cider, from the
widow's own orchard; but its coldness and acidity were rendered innocuous
by a due proportion of yet older brandy. The result of this mixture was
extremely felicitous, pleasant to the taste, and producing a tingling
sensation on the coats of the stomach, uncommonly delectable to so old a
toper as Hugh.

The landlord cast his eye, ever and anon, along the road that led down the
valley in the direction of the village: and at last, when the sun was
wearing west-ward, he discovered the approach of a horseman. He
immediately replenished his pipe, took a long draught from the brown jug,
summoned the ragged youth who officiated in most of the subordinate
departments of the inn, and who was now to act as hostler, and then
prepared himself for confabulation with his guest.

"He comes from the sea-coast," said Hugh to himself, as the traveller
emerged into open view on the level road. "He is two days in advance of
the post, with its news of a fortnight old. Pray Heaven he prove
communicative!" Then, as the stranger drew nigher, "One would judge that
his dark face had seen as hot a sun as mine. He has felt the burning
breeze of the Indies, East and West, I warrant him. Ah, I see we shall
send away the evening merrily! Not a penny shall come out of his
purse,--that is, if his tongue runs glibly. Just the man I was praying
for--Now may the Devil take me if he is!" interrupted Hugh, in accents
of alarm, and starting from his seat. He composed his countenance,
however, with the power that long habit and necessity had given him
over his emotions, and again settled himself quietly on the bench.

The traveller, coming on at a moderate pace, alighted, and gave his horse
to the ragged hostler. He then advanced towards the door near which Hugh
was seated, whose agitation was manifested by no perceptible sign, except
by the shorter and more frequent puffs with which he plied his pipe. Their
eyes did not meet till just as the stranger was about to enter, when he
started apparently with a surprise and alarm similar to those of Hugh
Crombie. He recovered himself, however, sufficiently to return the nod of
recognition with which he was favored, and immediately entered the house,
the landlord following.

"This way, if you please, sir," said Hugh. "You will find this apartment
cool and retired."

He ushered his guest into a small room the windows of which were darkened
by the creeping plants that clustered round them. Entering, and closing
the door, the two gazed at each other a little space without speaking. The
traveller first broke silence.

"Then this is your living self, Hugh Crombie?" he said. The landlord
extended his hand as a practical reply to the question. The stranger took
it, though with no especial appearance of cordiality.

"Ay, this seems to be flesh and blood," he said, in the tone of one who
would willingly have found it otherwise. "And how happens this, friend
Hugh? I little thought to meet you again in this life. When I last heard
from you, your prayers were said, and you were bound for a better world."

"There would have been small danger of your meeting me there," observed
the landlord, dryly.

"It is an unquestionable truth, Hugh," replied the traveller. "For which
reason I regret that your voyage was delayed."

"Nay, that is a hard word to bestow on your old comrade," said Hugh
Crombie. "The world is wide enough for both of us; and why should you wish
me out of it?"

"Wide as it is," rejoined the stranger, "we have stumbled against each
other,--to the pleasure of neither of us, if I may judge from your
countenance. Methinks I am not a welcome guest at Hugh Crombie's inn."

"Your welcome must depend on the cause of your coming, and the length of
your stay," replied the landlord.

"And what if I come to settle down among these quiet hills where I was
born?" inquired the other. "What if I, too, am weary of the life we have
led,--or afraid, perhaps, that it will come to too speedy an end? Shall I
have your good word, Hugh, to set me up in an honest way of life? Or will
you make me a partner in your trade, since you know my qualifications? A
pretty pair of publicans should we be; and the quart pot would have little
rest between us."

"It may be as well to replenish it now," observed Hugh, stepping to the
door of the room, and giving orders accordingly. "A meeting between old
friends should never be dry. But for the partnership, it is a matter in
which you must excuse me. Heaven knows I find it hard enough to be honest,
with no tempter but the Devil and my own thoughts; and, if I have you also
to contend with, there is little hope of me."

"Nay, that is true. Your good resolutions were always like cobwebs, and
your evil habits like five-inch cables," replied the traveller. "I am to
understand, then, that you refuse my offer?"

"Not only that; but, if you have chosen this valley as your place of rest,
Dame Crombie and I must look through the world for another. But hush! here
comes the wine."

The hostler, in the performance of another part of his duty, now appeared,
bearing a measure of the liquor that Hugh had ordered. The wine of that
period, owing to the comparative lowness of the duties, was of more
moderate price than in the mother-country, and of purer and better quality
than at the present day.

"The stuff is well chosen, Hugh," observed the guest, after a draught
large enough to authorize an opinion. "You have most of the requisites for
your present station; and I should be sorry to draw you from it. I trust
there will be no need."

"Yet you have a purpose in your journey hither," observed his comrade.

"Yes; and you would fain be informed of it," replied the traveller. He
arose, and walked once or twice across the room; then, seeming to have
taken his resolution, he paused, and fixed his eye steadfastly on Hugh
Crombie. "I could wish, my old acquaintance," he said, "that your lot had
been cast anywhere rather than here. Yet, if you choose it, you may do me
a good office, and one that shall meet with a good reward. Can I trust
you?"

"My secrecy, you can," answered the host, "but nothing further. I know the
nature of your plans, and whither they would lead me, too well to engage
in them. To say the truth, since it concerns not me, I have little desire
to hear your secret."

"And I as little to tell it, I do assure you," rejoined the guest. "I have
always loved to manage my affairs myself, and to keep them to myself. It
is a good rule; but it must sometimes be broken. And now, Hugh, how is it
that you have become possessed of this comfortable dwelling and of these
pleasant fields?"

"By my marriage with the Widow Sarah Hutchins," replied Hugh Crombie,
staring at a question which seemed to have little reference to the present
topic of conversation.

"It is a most excellent method of becoming a man of substance," continued
the traveller; "attended with little trouble, and honest withal."

"Why, as to the trouble," said the landlord, "it follows such a bargain,
instead of going before it. And for honesty,--I do not recollect that I
have gained a penny more honestly these twenty years."

"I can swear to that," observed his comrade. "Well, mine host, I entirely
approve of your doings, and, moreover, have resolved to prosper after the
same fashion myself."

"If that be the commodity you seek," replied Hugh Crombie, "you will find
none here to your mind. We have widows in plenty, it is true; but most of
them have children, and few have houses and lands. But now to be
serious,--and there has been something serious in your eye all this
while,--what is your purpose in coming hither? You are not safe here.
Your name has had a wider spread than mine, and, if discovered, it will
go hard with you."

"But who would know me now?" asked the guest.

"Few, few indeed!" replied the landlord, gazing at the dark features of
his companion, where hardship, peril, and dissipation had each left their
traces. "No, you are not like the slender boy of fifteen, who stood on the
hill by moonlight to take a last look at his father's cottage. There were
tears in your eyes then; and, as often as I remember them, I repent that I
did not turn you back, instead of leading you on."

"Tears, were there? Well, there have been few enough since," said his
comrade, pressing his eyelids firmly together, as if even then tempted to
give way to the weakness that he scorned. "And, for turning me back, Hugh,
it was beyond your power. I had taken my resolution, and you did but show
me the way to execute it."

"You have not inquired after those you left behind," observed Hugh
Crombie.

"No--no; nor will I have aught of them," exclaimed the traveller, starting
from his seat, and pacing rapidly across the room. "My father, I know, is
dead, and I have forgiven him. My mother--what could I hear of her but
misery? I will hear nothing."

"You must have passed the cottage as you rode hitherward," said Hugh. "How
could you forbear to enter?"

"I did not see it," he replied. "I closed my eyes, and turned away my
head."

"Oh, if I had had a mother, a loving mother! if there had been one being
in the world that loved me, or cared for me, I should not have become an
utter castaway," exclaimed Hugh Crombie.

The landlord's pathos, like all pathos that flows from the winecup, was
sufficiently ridiculous; and his companion, who had already overcome his
own brief feelings of sorrow and remorse, now laughed aloud.

"Come, come, mine host of the Hand and Bottle," he cried in his usual
hard, sarcastic tone; "be a man as much as in you lies. You had always a
foolish trick of repentance; but, as I remember, it was commonly of a
morning, before you had swallowed your first dram. And now, Hugh, fill the
quart pot again, and we will to business."

When the landlord had complied with the wishes of his guest, the latter
resumed in a lower tone than that of his ordinary conversation,--"There is
a young lady lately become a resident hereabouts. Perhaps you can guess
her name; for you have a quick apprehension in these matters."

"A young lady?" repeated Hugh Crombie. "And what is your concern with her?
Do you mean Ellen Langton, daughter of the old merchant Langton, whom you
have some cause to remember?"

"I do remember him; but he is where he will speedily be forgotten,"
answered the traveller. "And this girl,--I know your eye has been upon
her, Hugh,--describe her to me."

"Describe her!" exclaimed Hugh with much animation. "It is impossible in
prose; but you shall have her very picture in a verse of one of my own
songs."

"Nay, mine host, I beseech you to spare me. This is no time for
quavering," said the guest. "However, I am proud of your approbation, my
old friend; for this young lady do I intend to take to wife. What think
you of the plan?"

Hugh Crombie gazed into his companion's face for the space of a moment, in
silence. There was nothing in its expression that looked like a jest. It
still retained the same hard, cold look, that, except when Hugh had
alluded to his home and family, it had worn through their whole
conversation.

"On my word, comrade!" he at length replied, "my advice is, that you give
over your application to the quart pot, and refresh your brain by a short
nap. And yet your eye is cool and steady. What is the meaning of this?"

"Listen, and you shall know," said the guest. "The old man, her father, is
in his grave."

"Not a bloody grave, I trust," interrupted the landlord, starting, and
looking fearfully into his comrade's face.

"No, a watery one," he replied calmly. "You see, Hugh, I am a better man
than you took me for. The old man's blood is not on my head, though my
wrongs are on his. Now listen: he had no heir but this only daughter; and
to her, and to the man she marries, all his wealth will belong. She shall
marry me. Think you her father will rest easy in the ocean, Hugh Crombie,
when I am his son-in-law?"

"No, he will rise up to prevent it, if need be," answered the landlord.
"But the dead need not interpose to frustrate so wild a scheme."

"I understand you," said his comrade. "You are of opinion that the young
lady's consent may not be so soon won as asked. Fear not for that, mine
host. I have a winning way with me, when opportunity serves; and it shall
serve with Ellen Langton. I will have no rivals in my wooing."

"Your intention, if I take it rightly, is to get this poor girl into your
power, and then to force her into a marriage," said Hugh Crombie.

"It is; and I think I possess the means of doing it," replied his comrade.
"But methinks, friend Hugh, my enterprise has not your good wishes."

"No; and I pray you to give it over," said Hugh Crombie, very earnestly.
"The girl is young, lovely, and as good as she is fair. I cannot aid in
her ruin. Nay, more: I must prevent it."

"Prevent it!" exclaimed the traveller, with a darkening countenance.
"Think twice before you stir in this matter, I advise you. Ruin, do you
say? Does a girl call it ruin to be made an honest wedded wife? No, no,
mine host! nor does a widow either, else have you much to answer for."

"I gave the Widow Hutchins fair play, at least, which is more than poor
Ellen is like to get," observed the landlord. "My old comrade, will you
not give up this scheme?"

"My old comrade, I will not give up this scheme," returned the other,
composedly. "Why, Hugh, what has come over you since we last met? Have we
not done twenty worse deeds of a morning, and laughed over them at night?"

"He is right there," said Hugh Crombie, in a meditative tone. "Of a
certainty, my conscience has grown unreasonably tender within the last two
years. This one small sin, if I were to aid in it, would add but a trifle
to the sum of mine. But then the poor girl!"

His companion overheard him thus communing with himself, and having had
much former experience of his infirmity of purpose, doubted not that he
should bend him to his will. In fact, his arguments were so effectual,
that Hugh at length, though reluctantly, promised his cooperation. It was
necessary that their motions should be speedy; for on the second day
thereafter, the arrival of the post would bring intelligence of the
shipwreck by which Mr. Langton had perished.

"And after the deed is done," said the landlord, "I beseech you never to
cross my path again. There have been more wicked thoughts in my head
within the last hour than for the whole two years that I have been an
honest man."

"What a saint art thou become, Hugh!" said his comrade. "But fear not that
we shall meet again. When I leave this valley, it will be to enter it no
more."

"And there is little danger that any other who has known me will chance
upon me here," observed Hugh Crombie. "Our trade was unfavorable to
length of days, and I suppose most of our old comrades have arrived at the
end of theirs."

"One whom you knew well is nearer to you than you think," answered the
traveller; "for I did not travel hitherward entirely alone."



CHAPTER V

  "A naughty night to swim in."--SHAKESPEARE.


The evening of the day succeeding the adventure of the angler was dark
and tempestuous. The rain descended almost in a continuous sheet; and
occasional powerful gusts of wind drove it hard against the northeastern
windows of Hugh Crombie's inn. But at least one apartment of the interior
presented a scene of comfort and of apparent enjoyment, the more
delightful from its contrast with the elemental fury that raged without. A
fire, which the dullness of the evening, though a summer one, made
necessary, was burning brightly on the hearth; and in front was placed a
small round table, sustaining wine and glasses. One of the guests for whom
these preparations had been made was Edward Walcott; the other was a shy,
awkward young man, distinguished, by the union of classic and rural dress,
as having but lately become a student of Harley College. He seemed little
at his ease, probably from a consciousness that he was on forbidden
ground, and that the wine, of which he nevertheless swallowed a larger
share than his companion, was an unlawful draught.

In the catalogue of crimes provided against by the laws of Harley College,
that of tavern-haunting was one of the principal. The secluded situation
of the seminary, indeed, gave its scholars but a very limited choice of
vices; and this was, therefore, the usual channel by which the wildness of
youth discharged itself. Edward Walcott, though naturally temperate, had
been not an unfrequent offender in this respect, for which a superfluity
both of time and money might plead some excuse. But, since his
acquaintance with Ellen Langton, he had rarely entered Hugh Crombie's
doors; and an interruption in that acquaintance was the cause of his
present appearance there.

Edward's jealous pride had been considerably touched on Ellen's compliance
with the request of the angler. He had, by degrees, imperceptible perhaps
to himself, assumed the right of feeling displeased with her conduct; and
she had, as imperceptibly, accustomed herself to consider what would be
his wishes, and to act accordingly. He would, indeed, in no contingency
have ventured an open remonstrance; and such a proceeding would have been
attended by a result the reverse of what he desired. But there existed
between them a silent compact (acknowledged perhaps by neither, but felt
by both), according to which they had regulated the latter part of their
intercourse. Their lips had yet spoken no word of love; but some of love's
rights and privileges had been assumed on the one side, and at least not
disallowed on the other.

Edward's penetration had been sufficiently quick to discover that there
was a mystery about the angler, that there must have been a cause for the
blush that rose so proudly on Ellen's cheek; and his Quixotism had been
not a little mortified, because she did not immediately appeal to his
protection. He had, however, paid his usual visit the next day at Dr.
Melmoth's, expecting that, by a smile of more than common brightness, she
would make amends to his wounded feelings; such having been her usual mode
of reparation in the few instances of disagreement that had occurred
between them. But he was disappointed. He found her cold, silent, and
abstracted, inattentive when he spoke, and indisposed to speak herself.
Her eye was sedulously averted from his; and the casual meeting of their
glances only proved that there were feelings in her bosom which he did not
share. He was unable to account for this change in her deportment; and,
added to his previous conceptions of his wrongs, it produced an effect
upon his rather hasty temper, that might have manifested itself violently,
but for the presence of Mrs. Melmoth. He took his leave in very evident
displeasure; but, just as he closed the door, he noticed an expression in
Ellen's countenance, that, had they been alone, and had not he been quite
so proud, would have drawn him down to her feet. Their eyes met, when,
suddenly, there was a gush of tears into those of Ellen; and a deep
sadness, almost despair, spread itself over her features. He paused a
moment, and then went his way, equally unable to account for her coldness,
or for her grief. He was well aware, however, that his situation in
respect to her was unaccountably changed,--a conviction so disagreeable,
that, but for a hope that is latent even in the despair of youthful
hearts, he would have been sorely tempted to shoot himself.

The gloom of his thoughts--a mood of mind the more intolerable to him,
because so unusual--had driven him to Hugh Crombie's inn in search of
artificial excitement. But even the wine had no attractions; and his first
glass stood now almost untouched before him, while he gazed in heavy
thought into the glowing embers of the fire. His companion perceived his
melancholy, and essayed to dispel it by a choice of such topics of
conversation as he conceived would be most agreeable.

"There is a lady in the house," he observed. "I caught a glimpse of her in
the passage as we came in. Did you see her, Edward?"

"A lady!" repeated Edward, carelessly. "What know you of ladies? No, I did
not see her; but I will venture to say that it was Dame Crombie's self,
and no other."

"Well, perhaps it might," said the other, doubtingly. "Her head was turned
from me, and she was gone like a shadow."

"Dame Crombie is no shadow, and never vanishes like one," resumed Edward.
"You have mistaken the slipshod servant-girl for a lady."

"Ay; but she had a white hand, a small white hand," said the student,
piqued at Edward's contemptuous opinion of his powers of observation; "as
white as Ellen Langton's." He paused; for the lover was offended by the
profanity of the comparison, as was made evident by the blood that rushed
to his brow.

"We will appeal to the landlord," said Edward, recovering his equanimity,
and turning to Hugh, who just then entered the room. "Who is this angel,
mine host, that has taken up her abode in the Hand and Bottle?"

Hugh cast a quick glance from one to another before he answered, "I keep
no angels here, gentlemen. Dame Crombie would make the house anything but
heaven for them and me."

"And yet Glover has seen a vision in the passage-way,--a lady with a small
white hand."

"Ah, I understand! A slight mistake of the young gentleman's," said Hugh,
with the air of one who could perfectly account for the mystery. "Our
passageway is dark; or perhaps the light had dazzled his eyes. It was the
Widow Fowler's daughter, that came to borrow a pipe of tobacco for her
mother. By the same token, she put it into her own sweet mouth, and puffed
as she went along."

"But the white hand," said Glover, only half convinced.

"Nay, I know not," answered Hugh. "But her hand was at least as white as
her face: that I can swear. Well, gentlemen, I trust you find everything
in my house to your satisfaction. When the fire needs renewing, or the
wine runs low, be pleased to tap on the table. I shall appear with the
speed of a sunbeam."

After the departure of the landlord, the conversation of the young men
amounted to little more than monosyllables. Edward Walcott was wrapped in
his own contemplations; and his companion was in a half-slumberous state,
from which he started every quarter of an hour, at the chiming of the
clock that stood in a corner. The fire died gradually away; the lamps
began to burn dim; and Glover, rousing himself from one of his periodical
slumbers, was about to propose a return to their chambers. He was
prevented, however, by the approach of footsteps along the passageway; and
Hugh Crombie, opening the door, ushered a person into the room, and
retired.

The new-comer was Fanshawe. The water that poured plentifully from his
cloak evinced that he had but just arrived at the inn; but, whatever was
his object, he seemed not to have attained it in meeting with the young
men. He paused near the door, as if meditating whether to retire.

"My intrusion is altogether owing to a mistake, either of the landlord's
or mine," he said. "I came hither to seek another person; but, as I could
not mention his name, my inquiries were rather vague."

"I thank Heaven for the chance that sent you to us," replied Edward,
rousing himself. "Glover is wretched company; and a duller evening have I
never spent. We will renew our fire and our wine, and you must sit down
with us. And for the man you seek," he continued in a whisper, "he left
the inn within a half-hour after we encountered him. I inquired of Hugh
Crombie last night."

Fanshawe did not express his doubts of the correctness of the information
on which Edward seemed to rely. Laying aside his cloak, he accepted his
invitation to make one of the party, and sat down by the fireside.

The aspect of the evening now gradually changed. A strange wild glee
spread from one to another of the party, which, much to the surprise of
his companions, began with and was communicated from, Fanshawe. He seemed
to overflow with conceptions inimitably ludicrous, but so singular, that,
till his hearers had imbibed a portion of his own spirit, they could only
wonder at, instead of enjoying them. His applications to the wine were
very unfrequent; yet his conversation was such as one might expect from a
bottle of champagne endowed by a fairy with the gift of speech. The secret
of this strange mirth lay in the troubled state of his spirits, which,
like the vexed ocean at midnight (if the simile be not too magnificent),
tossed forth a mysterious brightness. The undefined apprehensions that had
drawn him to the inn still distracted his mind; but, mixed with them,
there was a sort of joy not easily to be described. By degrees, and by the
assistance of the wine, the inspiration spread, each one contributing such
a quantity, and such quality of wit and whim, as was proportioned to his
genius; but each one, and all, displaying a greater share of both than
they had ever been suspected of possessing.

At length, however, there was a pause,--the deep pause of flagging
spirits, that always follows mirth and wine. No one would have believed,
on beholding the pensive faces, and hearing the involuntary sighs of the
party, that from these, but a moment before, had arisen so loud and wild a
laugh. During this interval Edward Walcott (who was the poet of his class)
volunteered the following song, which, from its want of polish, and from
its application to his present feelings, might charitably be taken for an
extemporaneous production:--

  The wine is bright, the wine is bright;
    And gay the drinkers be:
  Of all that drain the bowl to-night,
    Most jollily drain we.
  Oh, could one search the weary earth,--
    The earth from sea to sea,--
  He'd turn and mingle in our mirth;
    For we're the merriest three.

  Yet there are cares, oh, heavy cares!
    We know that they are nigh:
  When forth each lonely drinker fares,
    Mark then his altered eye.
  Care comes upon us when the jest
    And frantic laughter die;
  And care will watch the parting guest--
    Oh late, then let us fly!

Hugh Crombie, whose early love of song and minstrelsy was still alive, had
entered the room at the sound of Edward's voice, in sufficient time to
accompany the second stanza on the violin. He now, with the air of one who
was entitled to judge in these matters, expressed his opinion of the
performance.

"Really, Master Walcott, I was not prepared for this," he said in the tone
of condescending praise that a great man uses to his inferior when he
chooses to overwhelm him with excess of joy. "Very well, indeed, young
gentleman! Some of the lines, it is true, seem to have been dragged in by
the head and shoulders; but I could scarcely have done much better myself
at your age. With practice, and with such instruction as I might afford
you, I should have little doubt of your becoming a distinguished poet. A
great defect in your seminary, gentlemen,--the want of due cultivation in
this heavenly art."

"Perhaps, sir," said Edward, with much gravity, "you might yourself be
prevailed upon to accept the professorship of poetry?"

"Why, such an offer would require consideration," replied the landlord.
"Professor Hugh Crombie of Harley College: it has a good sound, assuredly.
But I am a public man, Master Walcott; and the public would be loath to
spare me from my present office."

"Will Professor Crombie favor us with a specimen of his productions?"
inquired Edward.

"Ahem, I shall be happy to gratify you, young gentleman," answered Hugh.
"It is seldom, in this rude country, Master Walcott, that we meet with
kindred genius; and the opportunity should never be thrown away."

Thus saying, he took a heavy draught of the liquor by which he was usually
inspired, and the praises of which were the prevailing subject of his
song; then, after much hemming, thrumming, and prelusion, and with many
queer gestures and gesticulations, he began to effuse a lyric in the
following fashion:--

  I've been a jolly drinker this five-and-twenty year,
  And still a jolly drinker, my friends, you see me here:
  I sing the joys of drinking; bear a chorus, every man,
  With pint pot and quart pot and clattering of can.

The sense of the professor's first stanza was not in exact proportion to
the sound; but, being executed with great spirit, it attracted universal
applause. This Hugh appropriated with a condescending bow and smile; and,
making a signal for silence, he went on,--

  King Solomon of old, boys (a jolly king was he),--

But here he was interrupted by a clapping of hands, that seemed a
continuance of the applause bestowed on his former stanza. Hugh Crombie,
who, as is the custom of many great performers, usually sang with his eyes
shut, now opened them, intending gently to rebuke his auditors for their
unseasonable expression of delight. He immediately perceived, however,
that the fault was to be attributed to neither of the three young men;
and, following the direction of their eyes, he saw near the door, in the
dim background of the apartment, a figure in a cloak. The hat was flapped
forward, the cloak muffled round the lower part of the face; and only the
eyes were visible.

The party gazed a moment in silence, and then rushed _en masse_ upon
the intruder, the landlord bringing up the rear, and sounding a charge
upon his fiddle. But, as they drew nigh, the black cloak began to assume a
familiar look; the hat, also, was an old acquaintance; and, these being
removed, from beneath them shone forth the reverend face and form of Dr.
Melmoth.

The president, in his quality of clergyman, had, late in the preceding
afternoon, been called to visit an aged female who was supposed to be at
the point of death. Her habitation was at the distance of several miles
from Harley College; so that it was nightfall before Dr. Melmoth stood at
her bedside. His stay had been lengthened beyond his anticipation, on
account of the frame of mind in which he found the dying woman; and, after
essaying to impart the comforts of religion to her disturbed intellect, he
had waited for the abatement of the storm that had arisen while he was
thus engaged. As the evening advanced, however, the rain poured down in
undiminished cataracts; and the doctor, trusting to the prudence and
sure-footedness of his steed, had at length set forth on his return. The
darkness of the night, and the roughness of the road, might have appalled
him, even had his horsemanship and his courage been more considerable than
they were; but by the special protection of Providence, as he reasonably
supposed (for he was a good man, and on a good errand), he arrived safely
as far as Hugh Crombie's inn. Dr. Melmoth had no intention of making a
stay there; but, as the road passed within a very short distance, he saw
lights in the windows, and heard the sound of song and revelry. It
immediately occurred to him, that these midnight rioters were, probably,
some of the young men of his charge; and he was impelled, by a sense of
duty, to enter and disperse them. Directed by the voices, he found his
way, with some difficulty, to the apartment, just as Hugh concluded his
first stanza; and, amidst the subsequent applause, his entrance had been
un-perceived.

There was a silence of a moment's continuance after the discovery of Dr.
Melmoth, during which he attempted to clothe his round, good-natured face
in a look of awful dignity. But, in spite of himself, there was a little
twisting of the corners of his mouth, and a smothered gleam in his eye.

"This has, apparently, been a very merry meeting, young gentlemen," he at
length said; "but I fear my presence has cast a damp upon it."

"Oh yes! your reverence's cloak is wet enough to cast a damp upon
anything," exclaimed Hugh Crombie, assuming a look of tender anxiety. "The
young gentlemen are affrighted for your valuable life. Fear deprives them
of utterance: permit me to relieve you of these dangerous garments."

"Trouble not yourself, honest man," replied the doctor, who was one of the
most gullible of mortals. "I trust I am in no danger; my dwelling being
near at hand. But for these young men"--

"Would your reverence but honor my Sunday suit,--the gray broadcloth coat,
and the black velvet smallclothes, that have covered my unworthy legs but
once? Dame Crombie shall have them ready in a moment," continued Hugh,
beginning to divest the doctor of his garments.

"I pray you to appease your anxiety," cried Dr. Melmoth, retaining a firm
hold on such parts of his dress as yet remained to him. "Fear not for my
health. I will but speak a word to those misguided youth, and be gone."

"Misguided youth, did your reverence say?" echoed Hugh, in a tone of utter
astonishment. "Never were they better guided than when they entered my
poor house. Oh, had your reverence but seen them, when I heard their
cries, and rushed forth to their assistance. Dripping with wet were they,
like three drowned men at the resurrec--Ahem!" interrupted Hugh,
recollecting that the comparison he meditated might not suit the doctor's
ideas of propriety.

"But why were they abroad on such a night?" inquired the president.

"Ah! doctor, you little know the love these good young gentlemen bear for
you," replied the landlord. "Your absence, your long absence, had alarmed
them; and they rushed forth through the rain and darkness to seek you."

"And was this indeed so?" asked the doctor, in a softened tone, and
casting a tender and grateful look upon the three students. They, it is
but justice to mention, had simultaneously made a step forward in order to
contradict the egregious falsehoods of which Hugh's fancy was so fertile;
but he assumed an expression of such ludicrous entreaty, that it was
irresistible.

"But methinks their anxiety was not of long continuance," observed Dr.
Melmoth, looking at the wine, and remembering the song that his entrance
had interrupted.

"Ah! your reverence disapproves of the wine, I see," answered Hugh
Crombie. "I did but offer them a drop to keep the life in their poor young
hearts. My dame advised strong waters; 'But, Dame Crombie,' says I, 'would
ye corrupt their youth?' And in my zeal for their good, doctor, I was
delighting them, just at your entrance, with a pious little melody of my
own against the sin of drunkenness."

"Truly, I remember something of the kind," observed Dr. Melmoth. "And, as
I think, it seemed to meet with good acceptance."

"Ay, that it did!" said the landlord. "Will it please your reverence to
hear it?--

  King Solomon of old, boys (a wise man I'm thinking),
  Has warned you to beware of the horrid vice of drinking--

"But why talk I of drinking, foolish man that I am! And all this time,
doctor, you have not sipped a drop of my wine. Now I entreat your
reverence, as you value your health and the peace and quiet of these
youth."

Dr. Melmoth drank a glass of wine, with the benevolent intention of
allaying the anxiety of Hugh Crombie and the students. He then prepared to
depart; for a strong wind had partially dispersed the clouds, and
occasioned an interval in the cataract of rain. There was, perhaps, a
little suspicion yet remaining in the good man's mind respecting the truth
of the landlord's story: at least, it was his evident intention to see the
students fairly out of the inn before he quitted it himself. They
therefore proceeded along the passageway in a body. The lamp that Hugh
Crombie held but dimly enlightened them; and the number and contiguity of
the doors caused Dr. Melmoth to lay his hand upon the wrong one.

"Not there, not there, doctor! It is Dame Crombie's bedchamber," shouted
Hugh, most energetically. "Now Beelzebub defend me!" he muttered to
himself, perceiving that his exclamation had been a moment too late.

"Heavens! what do I see?" ejaculated Dr. Melmoth, lifting his hands, and
starting back from the entrance of the room. The three students pressed
forward; Mrs. Crombie and the servant-girl had been drawn to the spot by
the sound of Hugh's voice; and all their wondering eyes were fixed on poor
Ellen Langton.

The apartment in the midst of which she stood was dimly lighted by a
solitary candle at the farther extremity; but Ellen was exposed to the
glare of the three lamps, held by Hugh, his wife, and the servant-girl.
Their combined rays seemed to form a focus exactly at the point where they
reached her; and the beholders, had any been sufficiently calm, might have
watched her features in their agitated workings and frequent change of
expression, as perfectly as by the broad light of day. Terror had at first
blanched her as white as a lily, or as a marble statue, which for a moment
she resembled, as she stood motionless in the centre of the room. Shame
next bore sway; and her blushing countenance, covered by her slender white
fingers, might fantastically be compared to a variegated rose with its
alternate stripes of white and red. The next instant, a sense of her pure
and innocent intentions gave her strength and courage; and her attitude
and look had now something of pride and dignity. These, however, in their
turn, gave way; for Edward Walcott pressed forward, and attempted to
address her.

"Ellen, Ellen!" he said, in an agitated and quivering whisper; but what
was to follow cannot be known; for his emotion checked his utterance. His
tone and look, however, again overcame Ellen Langton, and she burst into
tears. Fanshawe advanced, and took Edward's arm. "She has been deceived,"
he whispered. "She is innocent: you are unworthy of her if you doubt it."

"Why do you interfere, sir?" demanded Edward, whose passions, thoroughly
excited, would willingly have wreaked themselves on any one. "What right
have you to speak of her innocence? Perhaps," he continued, an undefined
and ridiculous suspicion arising in his mind,--"perhaps you are acquainted
with her intentions. Perhaps you are the deceiver."

Fanshawe's temper was not naturally of the meekest character; and having
had a thousand bitter feelings of his own to overcome, before he could
attempt to console Edward, this rude repulse had almost aroused him to
fierceness. But his pride, of which a more moderate degree would have had
a less peaceable effect, came to his assistance; and he turned calmly and
contemptuously away.

Ellen, in the mean time, had been restored to some degree of composure. To
this effect, a feeling of pique against Edward Walcott had contributed.
She had distinguished his voice in the neighboring apartment, had heard
his mirth and wild laughter, without being aware of the state of feeling
that produced them. She had supposed that the terms on which they parted
in the morning (which had been very grievous to herself) would have
produced a corresponding sadness in him. But while she sat in loneliness
and in tears, her bosom distracted by a thousand anxieties and sorrows, of
many of which Edward was the object, his reckless gayety had seemed to
prove the slight regard in which he held her. After the first outbreak of
emotion, therefore, she called up her pride (of which, on proper
occasions, she had a reasonable share), and sustained his upbraiding
glance with a passive composure, which women have more readily at command
than men.

Dr. Melmoth's surprise had during this time kept him silent and inactive.
He gazed alternately from one to another of those who stood around him, as
if to seek some explanation of so strange an event. But the faces of all
were as perplexed as his own; even Hugh Crombie had assumed a look of
speechless wonder,--speechless, because his imagination, prolific as it
was, could not supply a plausible falsehood.

"Ellen, dearest child," at length said the doctor, "what is the meaning of
this?"

Ellen endeavored to reply; but, as her composure was merely external, she
was unable to render her words audible. Fanshawe spoke in a low voice to
Dr. Melmoth, who appeared grateful for his advice.

"True, it will be the better way," he replied. "My wits are utterly
confounded, or I should not have remained thus long. Come, my dear child,"
he continued, advancing to Ellen, and taking her hand, "let us return
home, and defer the explanation till the morrow. There, there: only dry
your eyes, and we will say no more about it."

"And that will be your wisest way, old gentleman," muttered Hugh Crombie.

Ellen at first exhibited but little desire, or, rather, an evident
reluctance, to accompany her guardian. She hung back, while her glance
passed almost imperceptibly over the faces that gazed so eagerly at her;
but the one she sought was not visible among them. She had no alternative,
and suffered herself to be led from the inn.

Edward Walcott alone remained behind, the most wretched being (at least
such was his own opinion) that breathed the vital air. He felt a sinking
and sickness of the heart, and alternately a feverish frenzy, neither of
which his short and cloudless existence had heretofore occasioned him to
experience. He was jealous of, he knew not whom, and he knew not what. He
was ungenerous enough to believe that Ellen--his pure and lovely
Ellen--had degraded herself; though from what motive, or by whose agency,
he could not conjecture. When Dr. Melmoth had taken her in charge, Edward
returned to the apartment where he had spent the evening. The wine was
still upon the table; and, in the desperate hope of stupefying his
faculties, he unwisely swallowed huge successive draughts. The effect of
his imprudence was not long in manifesting itself; though insensibility,
which at another time would have been the result, did not now follow.
Acting upon his previous agitation, the wine seemed to set his blood in a
flame; and, for the time being, he was a perfect madman.

A phrenologist would probably have found the organ of destructiveness in
strong development, just then, upon Edward's cranium; for he certainly
manifested an impulse to break and destroy whatever chanced to be within
his reach. He commenced his operations by upsetting the table, and
breaking the bottles and glasses. Then, seizing a tall heavy chair in each
hand, he hurled them with prodigious force,--one through the window, and
the other against a large looking-glass, the most valuable article of
furniture in Hugh Crombie's inn. The crash and clatter of these outrageous
proceedings soon brought the master, mistress, and maid-servant to the
scene of action; but the two latter, at the first sight of Edward's wild
demeanor and gleaming eyes, retreated with all imaginable expedition. Hugh
chose a position behind the door, from whence, protruding his head, he
endeavored to mollify his inebriated guest. His interference, however, had
nearly been productive of most unfortunate consequences; for a massive
andiron, with round brazen head, whizzed past him, within a hair's-breadth
of his ear.

"I might as safely take my chance in a battle," exclaimed Hugh,
withdrawing his head, and speaking to a man who stood in the passageway.
"A little twist of his hand to the left would have served my turn as well
as if I stood in the path of a forty-two pound ball. And here comes
another broadside," he added, as some other article of furniture rattled
against the door.

"Let us return his fire, Hugh," said the person whom he addressed,
composedly lifting the andiron. "He is in want of ammunition: let us send
him back his own."

The sound of this man's voice produced a most singular effect upon Edward.
The moment before, his actions had been those of a raving maniac; but,
when the words struck his ear, he paused, put his hand to his forehead,
seemed to recollect himself, and finally advanced with a firm and steady
step. His countenance was dark and angry, but no longer wild.

"I have found you, villain!" he said to the angler. "It is you who have
done this."

"And, having done it, the wrath of a boy--his drunken wrath--will not
induce me to deny it," replied the other, scornfully.

"The boy will require a man's satisfaction," returned Edward, "and that
speedily."

"Will you take it now?" inquired the angler, with a cool, derisive smile,
and almost in a whisper. At the same time he produced a brace of pistols,
and held them towards the young man.

"Willingly," answered Edward, taking one of the weapons. "Choose your
distance."

The angler stepped back a pace; but before their deadly intentions, so
suddenly conceived, could be executed, Hugh Crombie interposed himself
between them.

"Do you take my best parlor for the cabin of the Black Andrew, where a
pistol-shot was a nightly pastime?" he inquired of his comrade. "And you,
Master Edward, with what sort of a face will you walk into the chapel to
morning prayers, after putting a ball through this man's head, or
receiving one through your own? Though, in this last case, you will be
past praying for, or praying either."

"Stand aside: I will take the risk. Make way, or I will put the ball
through your own head," exclaimed Edward, fiercely: for the interval of
rationality that circumstances had produced was again giving way to
intoxication.

"You see how it is," said Hugh to his companion, unheard by Edward. "You
shall take a shot at me, sooner than at the poor lad in his present state.
You have done him harm enough already, and intend him more. I propose," he
continued aloud, and with a peculiar glance towards the angler, "that this
affair be decided to-morrow, at nine o'clock, under the old oak, on the
bank of the stream. In the mean time, I will take charge of these popguns,
for fear of accidents."

"Well, mine host, be it as you wish," said his comrade. "A shot more or
less is of little consequence to me." He accordingly delivered his weapon
to Hugh Crombie and walked carelessly away.

"Come, Master Walcott, the enemy has retreated. Victoria! And now, I see,
the sooner I get you to your chamber, the better," added he aside; for the
wine was at last beginning to produce its legitimate effect, in stupefying
the young man's mental and bodily faculties.

Hugh Crombie's assistance, though not, perhaps, quite indispensable, was
certainly very convenient to our unfortunate hero, in the course of the
short walk that brought him to his chamber. When arrived there, and in
bed, he was soon locked in a sleep scarcely less deep than that of death.

The weather, during the last hour, had appeared to be on the point of
changing: indeed, there were, every few minutes, most rapid changes. A
strong breeze sometimes drove the clouds from the brow of heaven, so as to
disclose a few of the stars; but, immediately after, the darkness would
again become Egyptian, and the rain rush like a torrent from the sky.



CHAPTER VI.

  "About her neck a packet-mail
   Fraught with advice, some fresh, some stale,
   Of men that walked when they were dead."
      HUDIBRAS.

Scarcely a word had passed between Dr. Melmoth and Ellen Langton, on
their way home; for, though the former was aware that his duty towards his
ward would compel him to inquire into the motives of her conduct, the
tenderness of his heart prompted him to defer the scrutiny to the latest
moment. The same tenderness induced him to connive at Ellen's stealing
secretly up to her chamber, unseen by Mrs. Melmoth; to render which
measure practicable, he opened the house-door very softly, and stood
before his half-sleeping spouse (who waited his arrival in the parlor)
without any previous notice. This act of the doctor's benevolence was not
destitute of heroism; for he was well assured that, should the affair come
to the lady's knowledge through any other channel, her vengeance would
descend not less heavily on him for concealing, than on Ellen for
perpetrating, the elopement. That she had, thus far, no suspicion of the
fact, was evident from her composure, as well as from the reply to a
question, which, with more than his usual art, her husband put to her
respecting the non-appearance of his ward. Mrs. Melmoth answered, that
Ellen had complained of indisposition, and after drinking, by her
prescription, a large cup of herb-tea, had retired to her chamber early in
the evening. Thankful that all was yet safe, the doctor laid his head upon
his pillow; but, late as was the hour, his many anxious thoughts long
drove sleep from his eyelids.

The diminution in the quantity of his natural rest did not, however,
prevent Dr. Melmoth from rising at his usual hour, which at all seasons of
the year was an early one. He found, on descending to the parlor, that
breakfast was nearly in readiness; for the lady of the house (and, as a
corollary, her servant-girl) was not accustomed to await the rising of the
sun in order to commence her domestic labors. Ellen Langton, however, who
had heretofore assimilated her habits to those of the family, was this
morning invisible,--a circumstance imputed by Mrs. Melmoth to her
indisposition of the preceding evening, and by the doctor, to
mortification on account of her elopement and its discovery.

"I think I will step into Ellen's bedchamber," said Mrs. Melmoth, "and
inquire how she feels herself. The morning is delightful after the storm,
and the air will do her good."

"Had we not better proceed with our breakfast? If the poor child is
sleeping, it were a pity to disturb her," observed the doctor; for,
besides his sympathy with Ellen's feelings, he was reluctant, as if he
were the guilty one, to meet her face.

"Well, be it so. And now sit down, doctor; for the hot cakes are cooling
fast. I suppose you will say they are not so good as those Ellen made
yesterday morning. I know not how you will bear to part with her, though
the thing must soon be."

"It will be a sore trial, doubtless," replied Dr. Melmoth,--"like tearing
away a branch that is grafted on an old tree. And yet there will be a
satisfaction in delivering her safe into her father's hands."

"A satisfaction for which you may thank me, doctor," observed the lady.
"If there had been none but you to look after the poor thing's doings, she
would have been enticed away long ere this, for the sake of her money."

Dr. Melmoth's prudence could scarcely restrain a smile at the thought that
an elopement, as he had reason to believe, had been plotted, and partly
carried into execution, while Ellen was under the sole care of his lady,
and had been frustrated only by his own despised agency. He was not
accustomed, however,--nor was this an eligible occasion,--to dispute any
of Mrs. Melmoth's claims to superior wisdom.

The breakfast proceeded in silence, or, at least, without any conversation
material to the tale. At its conclusion, Mrs. Melmoth was again meditating
on the propriety of entering Ellen's chamber; but she was now prevented by
an incident that always excited much interest both in herself and her
husband.

This was the entrance of the servant, bearing the letters and newspaper,
with which, once a fortnight, the mail-carrier journeyed up the valley.
Dr. Melmoth's situation at the head of a respectable seminary, and his
character as a scholar, had procured him an extensive correspondence among
the learned men of his own country; and he had even exchanged epistles
with one or two of the most distinguished dissenting clergymen of Great
Britain. But, unless when some fond mother enclosed a one-pound note to
defray the private expenses of her son at college, it was frequently the
case that the packets addressed to the doctor were the sole contents of
the mail-bag. In the present instance, his letters were very numerous,
and, to judge from the one he chanced first to open, of an unconscionable
length. While he was engaged in their perusal, Mrs. Melmoth amused herself
with the newspaper,--a little sheet of about twelve inches square, which
had but one rival in the country. Commencing with the title, she labored
on through advertisements old and new, through poetry lamentably deficient
in rhythm and rhymes, through essays, the ideas of which had been trite
since the first week of the creation, till she finally arrived at the
department that, a fortnight before, had contained the latest news from
all quarters. Making such remarks upon these items as to her seemed good,
the dame's notice was at length attracted by an article which her sudden
exclamation proved to possess uncommon interest. Casting her eye hastily
over it, she immediately began to read aloud to her husband; but he,
deeply engaged in a long and learned letter, instead of listening to what
she wished to communicate, exerted his own lungs in opposition to hers, as
is the custom of abstracted men when disturbed. The result was as
follows:--

"A brig just arrived in the outer harbor," began Mrs. Melmoth, "reports,
that on the morning of the 25th ult."--Here the doctor broke in,
"Wherefore I am compelled to differ from your exposition of the said
passage, for those reasons, of the which I have given you a taste;
provided"--The lady's voice was now almost audible, "ship bottom upward,
discovered by the name on her stern to be the Ellen of"--"and in the same
opinion are Hooker, Cotton, and divers learned divines of a later date."

The doctor's lungs were deep and strong, and victory seemed to incline
toward him; but Mrs. Melmoth now made use of a tone whose peculiar
shrillness, as long experience had taught her husband, augured a mood of
mind not to be trifled with.

"On my word, doctor," she exclaimed, "this is most unfeeling and
unchristian conduct! Here am I endeavoring to inform you of the death of
an old friend, and you continue as deaf as a post."

Dr. Melmoth, who had heard the sound, without receiving the sense, of
these words, now laid aside the letter in despair, and submissively
requested to be informed of her pleasure.

"There, read for yourself," she replied, handing him the paper, and
pointing to the passage containing the important intelligence,--"read, and
then finish your letter, if you have a mind."

He took the paper, unable to conjecture how the dame could be so much
interested in any part of its contents; but, before he had read many
words, he grew pale as death. "Good Heavens! what is this?" he exclaimed.
He then read on, "being the vessel wherein that eminent son of New
England, John Langton, Esq., had taken passage for his native country,
after an absence of many years."

"Our poor Ellen, his orphan child!" said Dr. Melmoth, dropping the paper.
"How shall we break the intelligence to her? Alas! her share of the
affliction causes me to forget my own."

"It is a heavy misfortune, doubtless; and Ellen will grieve as a daughter
should," replied Mrs. Melmoth, speaking with the good sense of which she
had a competent share. "But she has never known her father; and her sorrow
must arise from a sense of duty, more than from strong affection. I will
go and inform her of her loss. It is late, and I wonder if she be still
asleep."

"Be cautious, dearest wife," said the doctor. "Ellen has strong feelings,
and a sudden shock might be dangerous."

"I think I may be trusted, Dr. Melmoth," replied the lady, who had a high
opinion of her own abilities as a comforter, and was not averse to
exercise them.

Her husband, after her departure, sat listlessly turning over the letters
that yet remained unopened, feeling little curiosity, after such
melancholy intelligence, respecting their contents. But, by the
handwriting of the direction on one of them, his attention was gradually
arrested, till he found himself gazing earnestly on those strong, firm,
regular characters. They were perfectly familiar to his eye; but from what
hand they came, he could not conjecture. Suddenly, however, the truth
burst upon him; and after noticing the date, and reading a few lines, he
rushed hastily in pursuit of his wife.

He had arrived at the top of his speed and at the middle of the staircase,
when his course was arrested by the lady whom he sought, who came, with a
velocity equal to his own, in an opposite direction. The consequence was a
concussion between the two meeting masses, by which Mrs. Melmoth was
seated securely on the stairs; while the doctor was only preserved from
precipitation to the bottom by clinging desperately to the balustrade. As
soon as the pair discovered that they had sustained no material injury by
their contact, they began eagerly to explain the cause of their mutual
haste, without those reproaches, which, on the lady's part, would at
another time have followed such an accident.

"You have not told her the bad news, I trust?" cried Dr. Melmoth, after
each had communicated his and her intelligence, without obtaining audience
of the other.

"Would you have me tell it to the bare walls?" inquired the lady in her
shrillest tone. "Have I not just informed you that she has gone, fled,
eloped? Her chamber is empty; and her bed has not been occupied."

"Gone!" repeated the doctor. "And, when her father comes to demand his
daughter of me, what answer shall I make?"

"Now, Heaven defend us from the visits of the dead and drowned!" cried
Mrs. Melmoth. "This is a serious affair, doctor, but not, I trust,
sufficient to raise a ghost."

"Mr. Langton is yet no ghost," answered he; "though this event will go
near to make him one. He was fortunately prevented, after he had made
every preparation, from taking passage in the vessel that was lost."

"And where is he now?" she inquired.

"He is in New England. Perhaps he is at this moment on his way to us,"
replied her husband. "His letter is dated nearly a fortnight back; and he
expresses an intention of being with us in a few days."

"Well, I thank Heaven for his safety," said Mrs. Melmoth. "But truly the
poor gentleman could not have chosen a better time to be drowned, nor a
worse one to come to life, than this. What we shall do, doctor, I know
not; but had you locked the doors, and fastened the windows, as I advised,
the misfortune could not have happened."

"Why, the whole country would have flouted us!" answered the doctor. "Is
there a door in all the Province that is barred or bolted, night or day?
Nevertheless it might have been advisable last night, had it occurred to
me."

"And why at that time more than at all times?" she inquired. "We had
surely no reason to fear this event."

Dr. Melmoth was silent; for his worldly wisdom was sufficient to deter him
from giving his lady the opportunity, which she would not fail to use to
the utmost, of laying the blame of the elopement at his door. He now
proceeded, with a heavy heart, to Ellen's chamber, to satisfy himself with
his own eyes of the state of affairs. It was deserted too truly; and the
wild-flowers with which it was the maiden's custom daily to decorate her
premises were drooping, as if in sorrow for her who had placed them there.
Mrs. Melmoth, on this second visit, discovered on the table a note
addressed to her husband, and containing a few words of gratitude from
Ellen, but no explanation of her mysterious flight. The doctor gazed long
on the tiny letters, which had evidently been traced with a trembling
hand, and blotted with many tears.

"There is a mystery in this,--a mystery that I cannot fathom," he said.
"And now I would I knew what measures it would be proper to take."

"Get you on horseback, Dr. Melmoth, and proceed as speedily as may be down
the valley to the town," said the dame, the influence of whose firmer mind
was sometimes, as in the present case, most beneficially exerted over his
own. "You must not spare for trouble, no, nor for danger. Now--Oh, if I
were a man!"--

"Oh, that you were!" murmured the doctor, in a perfectly inaudible voice,
"Well--and when I reach the town, what then?"

"As I am a Christian woman, my patience cannot endure you!" exclaimed Mrs.
Melmoth. "Oh, I love to see a man with the spirit of a man! but you"--And
she turned away in utter scorn.

"But, dearest wife," remonstrated the husband, who was really at a loss
how to proceed, and anxious for her advice, "your worldly experience is
greater than mine, and I desire to profit by it. What should be my next
measure after arriving at the town?"

Mrs. Melmoth was appeased by the submission with which the doctor asked
her counsel; though, if the truth must be told, she heartily despised him
for needing it. She condescended, however, to instruct him in the proper
method of pursuing the runaway maiden, and directed him, before his
departure, to put strict inquiries to Hugh Crombie respecting any stranger
who might lately have visited his inn. That there would be wisdom in this,
Dr. Melmoth had his own reasons for believing; and still, without
imparting them to his lady, he proceeded to do as he had been bid.

The veracious landlord acknowledged that a stranger had spent a night and
day at his inn, and was missing that morning; but he utterly denied all
acquaintance with his character, or privity to his purposes. Had Mrs.
Melmoth, instead of her husband, conducted the examination, the result
might have been different. As the case was, the doctor returned to his
dwelling but little wiser than he went forth; and, ordering his steed to
be saddled, he began a journey of which he knew not what would be the end.

In the mean time, the intelligence of Ellen's disappearance circulated
rapidly, and soon sent forth hunters more fit to follow the chase than Dr.
Melmoth.



CHAPTER VII.

  "There was racing and chasing o'er Cannobie Lee."
    WALTER SCOTT.


When Edward Walcott awoke the next morning from his deep slumber, his
first consciousness was of a heavy weight upon his mind, the cause of
which he was unable immediately to recollect. One by one, however, by
means of the association of ideas, the events of the preceding night came
back to his memory; though those of latest occurrence were dim as dreams.
But one circumstance was only too well remembered,--the discovery of Ellen
Langton. By a strong effort he next attained to an uncertain recollection
of a scene of madness and violence, followed, as he at first thought, by a
duel. A little further reflection, however, informed him that this event
was yet among the things of futurity; but he could by no means recall the
appointed time or place. As he had not the slightest intention
(praiseworthy and prudent as it would unquestionably have been) to give up
the chance of avenging Ellen's wrongs and his own, he immediately arose,
and began to dress, meaning to learn from Hugh Crombie those particulars
which his own memory had not retained. His chief apprehension was, that
the appointed time had already elapsed; for the early Sunbeams of a
glorious morning were now peeping into his chamber.

More than once, during the progress of dressing, he was inclined to
believe that the duel had actually taken place, and been fatal to him, and
that he was now in those regions to which, his conscience told him, such
an event would be likely to send him. This idea resulted from his bodily
sensations, which were in the highest degree uncomfortable. He was
tormented by a raging thirst, that seemed to have absorbed all the
moisture of his throat and stomach; and, in his present agitation, a cup
of icy water would have been his first wish, had all the treasures of
earth and sea been at his command. His head, too, throbbed almost to
bursting; and the whirl of his brain at every movement promised little
accuracy in the aim of his pistol, when he should meet the angler. These
feelings, together with the deep degradation of his mind, made him resolve
that no circumstances should again draw him into an excess of wine. In the
mean time, his head was, perhaps, still too much confused to allow him
fully to realize his unpleasant situation.

Before Edward was prepared to leave his chamber, the door was opened by
one of the college bed-makers, who, perceiving that he was nearly dressed,
entered, and began to set the apartment in order. There were two of these
officials pertaining to Harley College; each of them being (and, for
obvious reasons, this was an indispensable qualification) a model of
perfect ugliness in her own way. One was a tall, raw-boned, huge-jointed,
double-fisted giantess, admirably fitted to sustain the part of
Glumdalia, in the tragedy of "Tom Thumb." Her features were as excellent
as her form, appearing to have been rough-hewn with a broadaxe, and left
unpolished. The other was a short, squat figure, about two thirds the
height, and three times the circumference, of ordinary females. Her hair
was gray, her complexion of a deep yellow; and her most remarkable feature
was a short snub nose, just discernible amid the broad immensity of her
face. This latter lady was she who now entered Edward's chamber.
Notwithstanding her deficiency in personal attractions, she was rather a
favorite of the students, being good-natured, anxious for their comfort,
and, when duly encouraged, very communicative. Edward perceived, as soon
as she appeared, that she only waited his assistance in order to disburden
herself of some extraordinary information; and, more from compassion than
curiosity, he began to question her.

"Well, Dolly, what news this morning?"

"Why, let me see,--oh, yes! It had almost slipped my memory," replied the
bed-maker. "Poor Widow Butler died last night, after her long sickness.
Poor woman! I remember her forty years ago, or so,--as rosy a lass as you
could set eyes on."

"Ah! has she gone?" said Edward, recollecting the sick woman of the
cottage which he had entered with Ellen and Fanshawe. "Was she not out of
her right mind, Dolly?"

"Yes, this seven years," she answered. "They say she came to her senses a
bit, when Dr. Melmoth visited her yesterday, but was raving mad when she
died. Ah, that son of hers!--if he is yet alive. Well, well!"

"She had a son, then?" inquired Edward.

"Yes, such as he was. The Lord preserve me from such a one!" said Dolly.
"It was thought he went off with Hugh Crombie, that keeps the tavern now.
That was fifteen years ago."

"And have they heard nothing of him since?" asked Edward.

"Nothing good,--nothing good," said the bed-maker.

"Stories did travel up the valley now and then; but for five years there
has been no word of him. They say Merchant Langton, Ellen's father, met
him in foreign parts, and would have made a man of him; but there was too
much of the wicked one in him for that. Well, poor woman! I wonder who'll
preach her funeral sermon."

"Dr. Melmoth, probably," observed the student.

"No, no! The doctor will never finish his journey in time. And who knows
but his own funeral will be the end of it," said Dolly, with a sagacious
shake of her head.

"Dr. Melmoth gone a journey!" repeated Edward. "What do you mean? For what
purpose?"

"For a good purpose enough, I may say," replied she. "To search out Miss
Ellen, that was run away with last night."

"In the Devil's name, woman, of what are you speaking?" shouted Edward,
seizing the affrighted bed-maker forcibly by the arm.

Poor Dolly had chosen this circuitous method of communicating her
intelligence, because she was well aware that, if she first told of
Ellen's flight, she should find no ear for her account of the Widow
Butler's death. She had not calculated, however, that the news would
produce so violent an effect upon her auditor; and her voice faltered as
she recounted what she knew of the affair. She had hardly concluded,
before Edward--who, as she proceeded, had been making hasty
preparations--rushed from his chamber, and took the way towards Hugh
Crombie's inn. He had no difficulty in finding the landlord, who had
already occupied his accustomed seat, and was smoking his accustomed
pipe, under the elm-tree.

"Well, Master Walcott, you have come to take a stomach-reliever this
morning, I suppose," said Hugh, taking the pipe from his mouth. "What
shall it be?--a bumper of wine with an egg? or a glass of smooth, old,
oily brandy, such as Dame Crombie and I keep for our own drinking? Come,
that will do it, I know."

"No, no! neither," replied Edward, shuddering involuntarily at the bare
mention of wine and strong drink. "You know well, Hugh Crombie, the errand
on which I come."

"Well, perhaps I do," said the landlord. "You come to order me to saddle
my best horse. You are for a ride, this fine morning."

"True; and I must learn of you in what direction to turn my horse's head,"
replied Edward Walcott.

"I understand you," said Hugh, nodding and smiling. "And now, Master
Edward, I really have taken a strong liking to you; and, if you please to
hearken to it, you shall have some of my best advice."

"Speak," said the young man, expecting to be told in what direction to
pursue the chase.

"I advise you, then," continued Hugh Crombie, in a tone in which some real
feeling mingled with assumed carelessness,--"I advise you to forget that
you have ever known this girl, that she has ever existed; for she is as
much lost to you as if she never had been born, or as if the grave had
covered her. Come, come, man, toss off a quart of my old wine, and kept up
a merry heart. This has been my way in many a heavier sorrow than ever you
have felt; and you see I am alive and merry yet." But Hugh's merriment had
failed him just as he was making his boast of it; for Edward saw a tear in
the corner of his eye.

"Forget her? Never, never!" said the student, while his heart sank within
him at the hopelessness of pursuit which Hugh's words implied. "I will
follow her to the ends of the earth."

"Then so much the worse for you and for my poor nag, on whose back you
shall be in three minutes," rejoined the landlord. "I have spoken to you
as I would to my own son, if I had such an incumbrance.--Here, you
ragamuffin; saddle the gray, and lead him round to the door."

"The gray? I will ride the black," said Edward. "I know your best horse as
well as you do yourself, Hugh."

"There is no black horse in my stable. I have parted with him to an old
comrade of mine," answered the landlord, with a wink of acknowledgment to
what he saw were Edward's suspicions. "The gray is a stout nag, and will
carry you a round pace, though not so fast as to bring you up with them
you seek. I reserved him for you, and put Mr. Fanshawe off with the old
white, on which I travelled hitherward a year or two since."

"Fanshawe! Has he, then, the start of me?" asked Edward.

"He rode off about twenty minutes ago," replied Hugh; "but you will
overtake him within ten miles, at farthest. But, if mortal man could
recover the girl, that fellow would do it, even if he had no better nag
than a broomstick, like the witches of old times."

"Did he obtain any information from you as to the course?" inquired the
student.

"I could give him only this much," said Hugh, pointing down the road in
the direction of the town. "My old comrade trusts no man further than is
needful, and I ask no unnecessary questions."

The hostler now led up to the door the horse which Edward was to ride. The
young man mounted with all expedition; but, as he was about to apply the
spurs, his thirst, which the bed-maker's intelligence had caused him to
forget, returned most powerfully upon him.

"For Heaven's sake, Hugh, a mug of your sharpest cider; and let it be a
large one!" he exclaimed. "My tongue rattles in my mouth like"--

"Like the bones in a dice-box," said the landlord, finishing the
comparison, and hastening to obey Edward's directions. Indeed, he rather
exceeded them, by mingling with the juice of the apple a gill of his old
brandy, which his own experience told him would at that time have a most
desirable effect upon the young man's internal system.

"It is powerful stuff, mine host; and I feel like a new man already,"
observed Edward, after draining the mug to the bottom.

"He is a fine lad, and sits his horse most gallantly," said Hugh Crombie
to himself as the student rode off. "I heartily wish him success. I wish
to Heaven my conscience had suffered me to betray the plot before it was
too late. Well, well, a man must keep his mite of honesty."

The morning was now one of the most bright and glorious that ever shone
for mortals; and, under other circumstances, Edward's bosom would have
been as light, and his spirit would have sung as cheerfully, as one of the
many birds that warbled around him. The raindrops of the preceding night
hung like glittering diamonds on every leaf of every tree, shaken, and
rendered more brilliant, by occasional sighs of wind, that removed from
the traveller the superfluous heat of an unclouded sun. In spite of the
adventure, so mysterious and vexatious, in which he was engaged, Edward's
elastic spirit (assisted, perhaps, by the brandy he had unwittingly
swallowed) rose higher as he rode on; and he soon found himself
endeavoring to accommodate the tune of one of Hugh Crombie's ballads to
the motion of the horse. Nor did this reviving cheerfulness argue anything
against his unwavering faith, and pure and fervent love for Ellen Langton.
A sorrowful and repining disposition is not the necessary accompaniment of
a "leal and loving heart"; and Edward's spirits were cheered, not by
forgetfulness, but by hope, which would not permit him to doubt of the
ultimate success of his pursuit. The uncertainty itself, and the probable
danger of the expedition, were not without their charm to a youthful and
adventurous spirit. In fact, Edward would not have been altogether
satisfied to recover the errant damsel, without first doing battle in her
behalf.

He had proceeded but a few miles before he came in sight of Fanshawe, who
had been accommodated by the landlord with a horse much inferior to his
own. The speed to which he had been put had almost exhausted the poor
animal, whose best pace was now but little beyond a walk. Edward drew his
bridle as he came up with Fanshawe.

"I have been anxious to apologize," he said to him, "for the hasty and
unjust expressions of which I made use last evening. May I hope that, in
consideration of my mental distraction and the causes of it, you will
forget what has passed?"

"I had already forgotten it," replied Fanshawe, freely offering his hand.
"I saw your disturbed state of feeling, and it would have been unjust both
to you and to myself to remember the errors it occasioned."

"A wild expedition this," observed Edward, after shaking warmly the
offered hand. "Unless we obtain some further information at the town, we
shall hardly know which way to continue the pursuit."

"We can scarcely fail, I think, of lighting upon some trace of them," said
Fanshawe. "Their flight must have commenced after the storm subsided,
which would give them but a few hours the start of us. May I beg," he
continued, nothing the superior condition of his rival's horse, "that you
will not attempt to accommodate your pace to mine?"

Edward bowed, and rode on, wondering at the change which a few months had
wrought in Fanshawe's character. On this occasion, especially, the energy
of his mind had communicated itself to his frame. The color was strong and
high in his cheek; and his whole appearance was that of a gallant and
manly youth, whom a lady might love, or a foe might fear. Edward had not
been so slow as his mistress in discovering the student's affection; and
he could not but acknowledge in his heart that he was a rival not to be
despised, and might yet be a successful one, if, by his means, Ellen
Langton were restored to her friends. This consideration caused him to
spur forward with increased ardor; but all his speed could not divest him
of the idea that Fanshawe would finally overtake him, and attain the
object of their mutual pursuit. There was certainly no apparent ground for
this imagination: for every step of his horse increased the advantage
which Edward had gained, and he soon lost sight of his rival.

Shortly after overtaking Fanshawe, the young man passed the lonely cottage
formerly the residence of the Widow Butler, who now lay dead within. He
was at first inclined to alight, and make inquiries respecting the
fugitives; for he observed through the windows the faces of several
persons, whom curiosity, or some better feeling, had led to the house of
mourning. Recollecting, however, that this portion of the road must have
been passed by the angler and Ellen at too early an hour to attract
notice, he forbore to waste time by a fruitless delay.

Edward proceeded on his journey, meeting with no other noticeable event,
till, arriving at the summit of a hill, he beheld, a few hundred yards
before him, the Rev. Dr. Melmoth. The worthy president was toiling onward
at a rate unexampled in the history either of himself or his steed; the
excellence of the latter consisting in sure-footedness rather than
rapidity. The rider looked round, seemingly in some apprehension at the
sound of hoof-tramps behind him, but was unable to conceal his
satisfaction on recognizing Edward Walcott.

In the whole course of his life, Dr. Melmoth had never been placed in
circumstances so embarrassing as the present. He was altogether a child in
the ways of the world, having spent his youth and early manhood in
abstracted study, and his maturity in the solitude of these hills. The
expedition, therefore, on which fate had now thrust him, was an entire
deviation from the quiet pathway of all his former years; and he felt like
one who sets forth over the broad ocean without chart or compass. The
affair would undoubtedly have been perplexing to a man of far more
experience than he; but the doctor pictured to himself a thousand
difficulties and dangers, which, except in his imagination, had no
existence. The perturbation of his spirit had compelled him, more than
once since his departure, to regret that he had not invited Mrs. Melmoth
to a share in the adventure; this being an occasion where her firmness,
decision, and confident sagacity--which made her a sort of domestic
hedgehog--would have been peculiarly appropriate. In the absence of such a
counsellor, even Edward Walcott--young as he was, and indiscreet as the
doctor thought him--was a substitute not to be despised; and it was
singular and rather ludicrous to observe how the gray-haired man
unconsciously became as a child to the beardless youth. He addressed
Edward with an assumption of dignity, through which his pleasure at the
meeting was very obvious.

"Young gentleman, this is not well," he said. "By what authority have you
absented yourself from the walls of Alma Mater during term-time?"

"I conceived that it was unnecessary to ask leave at such a conjuncture,
and when the head of the institution was himself in the saddle," replied
Edward.

"It was a fault, it was a fault," said Dr. Melmoth, shaking his head;
"but, in consideration of the motive, I may pass it over. And now, my dear
Edward, I advise that we continue our journey together, as your youth and
inexperience will stand in need of the wisdom of my gray head. Nay, I pray
you lay not the lash to your steed. You have ridden fast and far; and a
slower pace is requisite for a season."

And, in order to keep up with his young companion, the doctor smote his
own gray nag; which unhappy beast, wondering what strange concatenation of
events had procured him such treatment, endeavored to obey his master's
wishes. Edward had sufficient compassion for Dr. Melmoth (especially as
his own horse now exhibited signs of weariness) to moderate his pace to
one attainable by the former.

"Alas, youth! these are strange times," observed the president, "when a
doctor of divinity and an under-graduate set forth, like a knight-errant
and his squire, in search of a stray damsel. Methinks I am an epitome of
the church militant, or a new species of polemical divinity. Pray Heaven,
however, there be no encounter in store for us; for I utterly forgot to
provide myself with weapons."

"I took some thought for that matter, reverend knight," replied Edward,
whose imagination was highly tickled by Dr. Melmoth's chivalrous
comparison.

"Ay, I see that you have girded on a sword," said the divine. "But
wherewith shall I defend myself, my hand being empty, except of this
golden headed staff, the gift of Mr. Langton?"

"One of these, if you will accept it," answered Edward, exhibiting a brace
of pistols, "will serve to begin the conflict, before you join the battle
hand to hand."

"Nay, I shall find little safety in meddling with that deadly instrument,
since I know not accurately from which end proceeds the bullet," said Dr.
Melmoth. "But were it not better, seeing we are so well provided with
artillery, to betake ourselves, in the event of an encounter, to some
stone-wall or other place of strength?"

"If I may presume to advise," said the squire, "you, as being most valiant
and experienced, should ride forward, lance in hand (your long staff
serving for a lance), while I annoy the enemy from afar."

"Like Teucer behind the shield of Ajax," interrupted Dr. Melmoth, "or
David with his stone and sling. No, no, young man! I have left unfinished
in my study a learned treatise, important not only to the present age, but
to posterity, for whose sakes I must take heed to my safety.--But, lo! who
ride yonder?" he exclaimed, in manifest alarm, pointing to some horsemen
upon the brow of a hill at a short distance before them.

"Fear not, gallant leader," said Edward Walcott, who had already
discovered the objects of the doctor's terror. "They are men of peace, as
we shall shortly see. The foremost is somewhere near your own years, and
rides like a grave, substantial citizen,--though what he does here, I know
not. Behind come two servants, men likewise of sober age and pacific
appearance."

"Truly your eyes are better than mine own. Of a verity, you are in the
right," acquiesced Dr. Melmoth, recovering his usual quantum of
intrepidity. "We will ride forward courageously, as those who, in a just
cause, fear neither death nor bonds."

The reverend knight-errant and his squire, at the time of discovering the
three horsemen, were within a very short distance of the town, which was,
however, concealed from their view by the hill that the strangers were
descending. The road from Harley College, through almost its whole extent,
had been rough and wild, and the country thin of population; but now,
standing frequent, amid fertile fields on each side of the way, were neat
little cottages, from which groups of white-headed children rushed forth
to gaze upon the travellers. The three strangers, as well as the doctor
and Edward, were surrounded, as they approached each other, by a crowd of
this kind, plying their little bare legs most pertinaciously in order to
keep pace with the horses.

As Edward gained a nearer view of the foremost rider, his grave aspect and
stately demeanor struck him with involuntary respect. There were deep
lines of thought across his brow; and his calm yet bright gray eye
betokened a steadfast soul. There was also an air of conscious importance,
even in the manner in which the stranger sat his horse, which a man's good
opinion of himself, unassisted by the concurrence of the world in general,
seldom bestows. The two servants rode at a respectable distance in the
rear; and the heavy portmanteaus at their backs intimated that the party
had journeyed from afar. Dr. Melmoth endeavored to assume the dignity that
became him as the head of Harley College; and with a gentle stroke of his
staff upon his wearied steed and a grave nod to the principal stranger,
was about to commence the ascent of the hill at the foot of which they
were. The gentleman, however, made a halt.

"Dr. Melmoth, am I so fortunate as to meet you?" he exclaimed in accents
expressive of as much surprise and pleasure as were consistent with his
staid demeanor. "Have you, then, forgotten your old friend?"

"Mr. Langton! Can it be?" said the doctor, after looking him in the face a
moment. "Yes, it is my old friend indeed: welcome, welcome! though you
come at an unfortunate time."

"What say you? How is my child? Ellen, I trust, is well?" cried Mr.
Langton, a father's anxiety overcoming the coldness and reserve that were
natural to him, or that long habit had made a second nature.

"She is well in health. She was so, at least, last night," replied Dr.
Melmoth unable to meet the eye of his friend. "But--but I have been a
careless shepherd; and the lamb has strayed from the fold while I slept."

Edward Walcott, who was a deeply interested observer of this scene, had
anticipated that a burst of passionate grief would follow the disclosure.
He was, however, altogether mistaken. There was a momentary convulsion of
Mr. Langton's strong features, as quick to come and go as a flash of
lightning; and then his countenance was as composed--though, perhaps, a
little sterner--as before. He seemed about to inquire into the
particulars of what so nearly concerned him, but changed his purpose on
observing the crowd of children, who, with one or two of their parents,
were endeavoring to catch the words, that passed between the doctor and
himself.

"I will turn back with you to the village," he said in a steady voice;
"and at your leisure I shall desire to hear the particulars of this
unfortunate affair."

He wheeled his horse accordingly, and, side by side with Dr. Melmoth,
began to ascend the hill. On reaching the summit, the little country town
lay before them, presenting a cheerful and busy spectacle. It consisted of
one long, regular street, extending parallel to, and at a short distance
from, the river; which here, enlarged by a junction with another stream,
became navigable, not indeed for vessels of burden, but for rafts of
lumber and boats of considerable size. The houses, with peaked roofs and
jutting stories, stood at wide intervals along the street; and the
commercial character of the place was manifested by the shop door and
windows that occupied the front of almost every dwelling. One or two
mansions, however, surrounded by trees, and standing back at a haughty
distance from the road, were evidently the abodes of the aristocracy of
the village. It was not difficult to distinguish the owners of
these--self-important personages, with canes and well-powdered
periwigs--among the crowd of meaner men who bestowed their attention upon
Dr. Melmoth and his friend as they rode by. The town being the nearest
mart of a large extent of back country, there are many rough farmers and
woodsmen, to whom the cavalcade was an object of curiosity and admiration.
The former feeling, indeed, was general throughout the village. The
shop-keepers left their customers, and looked forth from the doors; the
female portion of the community thrust their heads from the windows; and
the people in the street formed a lane through which, with all eyes
concentrated upon them, the party rode onward to the tavern. The general
aptitude that pervades the populace of a small country town to meddle
with affairs not legitimately concerning them was increased, on this
occasion, by the sudden return of Mr. Langton after passing through the
village. Many conjectures were afloat respecting the cause of this
retrograde movement; and, by degrees, something like the truth, though
much distorted, spread generally among the crowd, communicated, probably,
from Mr. Langton's servants. Edward Walcott, incensed at the uncourteous
curiosity of which he, as well as his companions, was the object, felt
a frequent impulse (though, fortunately for himself, resisted) to make
use of his riding-switch in clearing a passage.

On arriving at the tavern, Dr. Melmoth recounted to his friend the little
he knew beyond the bare fact of Ellen's disappearance. Had Edward Walcott
been called to their conference, he might, by disclosing the adventure of
the angler, have thrown a portion of light upon the affair; but, since his
first introduction, the cold and stately merchant had honored him with no
sort of notice.

Edward, on his part, was not well pleased at the sudden appearance of
Ellen's father, and was little inclined to cooperate in any measures that
he might adopt for her recovery. It was his wish to pursue the chase on
his own responsibility, and as his own wisdom dictated: he chose to be an
independent ally, rather than a subordinate assistant. But, as a step
preliminary to his proceedings of every other kind, he found it absolutely
necessary, having journeyed far, and fasting, to call upon the landlord
for a supply of food. The viands that were set before him were homely but
abundant; nor were Edward's griefs and perplexities so absorbing as to
overcome the appetite of youth and health.

Dr. Melmoth and Mr. Langton, after a short private conversation, had
summoned the landlord, in the hope of obtaining some clew to the
development of the mystery. But no young lady, nor any stranger answering
to the description the doctor had received from Hugh Crombie (which was
indeed a false one), had been seen to pass through the village since
daybreak. Here, therefore, the friends were entirely at a loss in what
direction to continue the pursuit. The village was the focus of several
roads, diverging to widely distant portions of the country; and which of
these the fugitives had taken, it was impossible to determine. One point,
however, might be considered certain,--that the village was the first
stage of their flight; for it commanded the only outlet from the valley,
except a rugged path among the hills, utterly impassable by horse. In this
dilemma, expresses were sent by each of the different roads; and poor
Ellen's imprudence--the tale nowise decreasing as it rolled along--became
known to a wide extent of country. Having thus done everything in his
power to recover his daughter, the merchant exhibited a composure which
Dr. Melmoth admired, but could not equal. His own mind, however, was in a
far more comfortable state than when the responsibility of the pursuit had
rested upon himself.

Edward Walcott, in the mean time, had employed but a very few moments in
satisfying his hunger; after which his active intellect alternately formed
and relinquished a thousand plans for the recovery of Ellen. Fanshawe's
observation, that her flight must have commenced after the subsiding of
the storm, recurred to him. On inquiry, he was informed that the violence
of the rain had continued, with a few momentary intermissions, till near
daylight. The fugitives must, therefore, have passed through the village
long after its inhabitants were abroad; and how, without the gift of
invisibility, they had contrived to elude notice, Edward could not
conceive.

"Fifty years ago," thought Edward, "my sweet Ellen would have been deemed
a witch for this trackless journey. Truly, I could wish I were a wizard,
that I might bestride a broomstick, and follow her."

While the young man, involved in these perplexing thoughts, looked forth
from the open window of the apartment, his attention was drawn to an
individual, evidently of a different, though not of a higher, class than
the countrymen among whom he stood. Edward now recollected that he had
noticed his rough dark face among the most earnest of those who had
watched the arrival of the party. He had then taken him for one of the
boatmen, of whom there were many in the village, and who had much of a
sailor-like dress and appearance. A second and more attentive observation,
however, convinced Edward that this man's life had not been spent upon
fresh water; and, had any stronger evidence than the nameless marks which
the ocean impresses upon its sons been necessary, it would have been found
in his mode of locomotion. While Edward was observing him, he beat slowly
up to one of Mr. Langton's servants who was standing near the door of the
inn. He seemed to question the man with affected carelessness; but his
countenance was dark and perplexed when he turned to mingle again with the
crowd. Edward lost no time in ascertaining from the servant the nature of
his inquiries. They had related to the elopement of Mr. Langton's
daughter, which was, indeed, the prevailing, if not the sole, subject of
conversation in the village.

The grounds for supposing that this man was in any way connected with the
angler were, perhaps, very slight; yet, in the perplexity of the whole
affair, they induced Edward to resolve to get at the heart of his mystery.
To attain this end, he took the most direct method,--by applying to the
man himself.

He had now retired apart from the throng and bustle of the village, and
was seated upon a condemned boat, that was drawn up to rot upon the banks
of the river. His arms were folded, and his hat drawn over his brows. The
lower part of his face, which alone was visible, evinced gloom and
depression, as did also the deep sighs, which, because he thought no one
was near him, he did not attempt to restrain.

"Friend, I must speak with you," said Edward Walcott, laying his hand upon
his shoulder, after contemplating the man a moment, himself unseen.

He started at once from his abstraction and his seat, apparently expecting
violence, and prepared to resist it; but, perceiving the youthful and
solitary intruder upon his privacy, he composed his features with much
quickness.

"What would you with me?" he asked.

"They tarry long,--or you have kept a careless watch," said Edward,
speaking at a venture.

For a moment, there seemed a probability of obtaining such a reply to this
observation as the youth had intended to elicit. If any trust could be put
in the language of the stranger's countenance, a set of words different
from those to which he subsequently gave utterance had risen to his lips.
But he seemed naturally slow of speech; and this defect was now, as is
frequently the case, advantageous in giving him space for reflection.

"Look you, youngster: crack no jokes on me," he at length said,
contemptuously. "Away! back whence you came, or"--And he slightly waved a
small rattan that he held in his right hand.

Edward's eyes sparkled, and his color rose. "You must change this tone,
fellow, and that speedily," he observed. "I order you to lower your hand,
and answer the questions that I shall put to you."

The man gazed dubiously at him, but finally adopted a more conciliatory
mode of speech.

"Well, master; and what is your business with me?" he inquired. "I am a
boatman out of employ. Any commands in my line?"

"Pshaw! I know you, my good friend, and you cannot deceive me," replied
Edward Walcott. "We are private here," he continued, looking around. "I
have no desire or intention to do you harm; and, if you act according to
my directions, you shall have no cause to repent it."

"And what if I refuse to put myself under your orders?" inquired the man.
"You are but a young captain for such an old hulk as mine."

"The ill consequences of a refusal would all be on your own side," replied
Edward. "I shall, in that case, deliver you up to justice: if I have not
the means of capturing you myself," he continued, observing the seaman's
eye to wander rather scornfully over his youthful and slender figure,
"there are hundreds within call whom it will be in vain to resist.
Besides, it requires little strength to use this," he added, laying his
hand on a pistol.

"If that were all, I could suit you there, my lad," muttered the stranger.
He continued aloud, "Well, what is your will with me? D----d ungenteel
treatment this! But put your questions; and, to oblige you, I may answer
them,--if so be that I know anything of the matter."

"You will do wisely," observed the young man. "And now to business. What
reason have you to suppose that the persons for whom you watch are not
already beyond the village?" The seaman paused long before he answered,
and gazed earnestly at Edward, apparently endeavoring to ascertain from
his countenance the amount of his knowledge. This he probably overrated,
but, nevertheless, hazarded a falsehood.

"I doubt not they passed before midnight," he said. "I warrant you they
are many a league towards the sea-coast, ere this."

"You have kept watch, then, since midnight?" asked Edward.

"Ay, that have I! And a dark and rough one it was," answered the stranger.

"And you are certain that, if they passed at all, it must have been before
that hour?"

"I kept my walk across the road till the village was all astir," said the
seaman. "They could not have missed me. So, you see, your best way is to
give chase; for they have a long start of you, and you have no time to
lose."

"Your information is sufficient, my good friend," said Edward, with a
smile. "I have reason to know that they did not commence their flight
before midnight. You have made it evident that they have not passed since:
ergo, they have not passed at all,--an indisputable syllogism. And now
will I retrace my footsteps."

"Stay, young man," said the stranger, placing himself full in Edward's way
as he was about to hasten to the inn. "You have drawn me in to betray my
comrade; but, before you leave this place, you must answer a question or
two of mine. Do you mean to take the law with you? or will you right your
wrongs, if you have any, with your own right hand?"

"It is my intention to take the latter method. But, if I choose the
former, what then?" demanded Edward. "Nay, nothing: only you or I might
not have gone hence alive," replied the stranger. "But as you say he shall
have fair play"--

"On my word, friend," interrupted the young man, "I fear your intelligence
has come too late to do either good or harm. Look towards the inn: my
companions are getting to horse, and, my life on it, they know whither to
ride."

So saying, he hastened away, followed by the stranger. It was indeed
evident that news of some kind or other had reached the village. The
people were gathered in groups, conversing eagerly; and the pale cheeks,
uplifted eyebrows, and outspread hands of some of the female sex filled
Edward's mind with undefined but intolerable apprehensions. He forced his
way to Dr. Melmoth, who had just mounted, and, seizing his bridle,
peremptorily demanded if he knew aught of Ellen Langton.



CHAPTER VIII.

  "Full many a miserable year hath passed:
  She knows him as one dead, or worse than dead:
  And many a change her varied life hath known;
  But her heart none."
    MATURIN.


Since her interview with the angler, which was interrupted by the
appearance of Fanshawe, Ellen Langton's hitherto calm and peaceful mind
had been in a state of insufferable doubt and dismay. She was imperatively
called upon--at least, she so conceived--to break through the rules which
nature and education impose upon her sex, to quit the protection of those
whose desire for her welfare was true and strong, and to trust herself,
for what purpose she scarcely knew, to a stranger, from whom the
instinctive purity of her mind would involuntarily have shrunk, under
whatever circumstances she had met him. The letter which she had received
from the hands of the angler had seemed to her inexperience to prove
beyond a doubt that the bearer was the friend of her father, and
authorized by him, if her duty and affection were stronger than her fears,
to guide her to his retreat. The letter spoke vaguely of losses and
misfortunes, and of a necessity for concealment on her father's part, and
secrecy on hers; and, to the credit of Ellen's not very romantic
understanding, it must be acknowledged that the mystery of the plot had
nearly prevented its success. She did not, indeed, doubt that the letter
was from her father's hand; for every line and stroke, and even many of
its phrases, were familiar to her. Her apprehension was, that his
misfortunes, of what nature soever they were, had affected his intellect,
and that, under such an influence, he had commanded her to take a step
which nothing less than such a command could justify. Ellen did not,
however, remain long in this opinion; for when she reperused the letter,
and considered the firm, regular characters, and the style,--calm and
cold, even in requesting such a sacrifice,--she felt that there was
nothing like insanity here. In fine, she came gradually to the belief that
there were strong reasons, though incomprehensible by her, for the secrecy
that her father had enjoined.

Having arrived at this conviction, her decision lay plain before her. Her
affection for Mr. Langton was not, indeed,--nor was it possible,--so
strong as that she would have felt for a parent who had watched over her
from her infancy. Neither was the conception she had unavoidably formed of
his character such as to promise that in him she would find an equivalent
for all she must sacrifice. On the contrary, her gentle nature and loving
heart, which otherwise would have rejoiced in a new object of affection,
now shrank with something like dread from the idea of meeting her
father,--stately, cold, and stern as she could not but imagine him. A
sense of duty was therefore Ellen's only support in resolving to tread
the dark path that lay before her.

Had there been any person of her own sex in whom Ellen felt confidence,
there is little doubt that she would so far have disobeyed her father's
letter as to communicate its contents, and take counsel as to her
proceedings. But Mrs. Melmoth was the only female--excepting, indeed, the
maid-servant--to whom it was possible to make the communication; and,
though Ellen at first thought of such a step, her timidity, and her
knowledge of the lady's character, did not permit her to venture upon it.
She next reviewed her acquaintances of the other sex; and Dr. Melmoth
first presented himself, as in every respect but one, an unexceptionable
confidant. But the single exception was equivalent to many. The maiden,
with the highest opinion of the doctor's learning and talents, had
sufficient penetration to know, that, in the ways of the world, she was
herself the better skilled of the two. For a moment she thought of Edward
Walcott; but he was light and wild, and, which her delicacy made an
insurmountable objection, there was an untold love between them. Her
thoughts finally centred on Fanshawe. In his judgment, young and
inexperienced though he was, she would have placed a firm trust; and his
zeal, from whatever cause it arose, she could not doubt.

If, in the short time allowed her for reflection, an opportunity had
occurred for consulting him, she would, in all probability, have taken
advantage of it. But the terms on which they had parted the preceding
evening had afforded him no reason to hope for her confidence; and he felt
that there were others who had a better right to it than himself. He did
not, therefore, throw himself in her way; and poor Ellen was consequently
left without an adviser.

The determination that resulted from her own unassisted wisdom has been
seen. When discovered by Dr. Melmoth at Hugh Crombie's inn, she was wholly
prepared for flight, and, but for the intervention of the storm, would,
ere then, have been far away.

The firmness of resolve that had impelled a timid maiden upon such a step
was not likely to be broken by one defeat; and Ellen, accordingly,
confident that the stranger would make a second attempt, determined that
no effort on her part should be wanting to its success. On reaching her
chamber, therefore, instead of retiring to rest (of which, from her
sleepless thoughts of the preceding night, she stood greatly in need), she
sat watching for the abatement of the storm. Her meditations were now
calmer than at any time since her first meeting with the angler. She felt
as if her fate was decided. The stain had fallen upon her reputation: she
was no longer the same pure being in the opinion of those whose
approbation she most valued.

One obstacle to her flight--and, to a woman's mind, a most powerful
one--had thus been removed. Dark and intricate as was the way, it was
easier now to proceed than to pause; and her desperate and forlorn
situation gave her a strength which hitherto she had not felt.

At every cessation in the torrent of rain that beat against the house,
Ellen flew to the window, expecting to see the stranger form beneath it.
But the clouds would again thicken, and the storm recommence with its
former violence; and she began to fear that the approach of morning would
compel her to meet the now dreaded face of Dr. Melmoth. At length,
however, a strong and steady wind, supplying the place of the fitful gusts
of the preceding part of the night, broke and scattered the clouds from
the broad expanse of the sky. The moon, commencing her late voyage not
long before the sun, was now visible, setting forth like a lonely ship
from the dark line of the horizon, and touching at many a little silver
cloud the islands of that aerial deep. Ellen felt that now the time was
come; and, with a calmness wonderful to herself, she prepared for her
final departure.

She had not long to wait ere she saw, between the vacancies of the trees,
the angler advancing along the shady avenue that led to the principal
entrance of Dr. Melmoth's dwelling. He had no need to summon her either by
word or signal; for she had descended, emerged from the door, and stood
before him, while he was yet at some distance from the house.

"You have watched well," he observed in a low, strange tone. "As saith the
Scripture, 'Many daughters have done virtuously; but thou excellest them
all.'"

He took her arm; and they hastened down the avenue. Then, leaving Hugh
Crombie's inn on their right, they found its master in a spot so shaded
that the moonbeams could not enlighten it. He held by the bridle two
horses, one of which the angler assisted Ellen to mount. Then, turning to
the landlord he pressed a purse into his hand; but Hugh drew back, and it
fell to the ground.

"No! this would not have tempted me; nor will it reward me," he said. "If
you have gold to spare, there are some that need it more than I."

"I understand you, mine host. I shall take thought for them; and enough
will remain for you and me," replied his comrade. "I have seen the day
when such a purse would not have slipped between your fingers. Well, be it
so. And now, Hugh, my old friend, a shake of your hand; for we are seeing
our last of each other."

"Pray Heaven it be so! though I wish you no ill," said the landlord,
giving his hand.

He then seemed about to approach Ellen, who had been unable to distinguish
the words of this brief conversation; but his comrade prevented him.
"There is no time to lose," he observed. "The moon is growing pale
already, and we should have been many a mile beyond the valley ere this."
He mounted as he spoke; and, guiding Ellen's rein till they reached the
road, they dashed away.

It was now that she felt herself completely in his power; and with that
consciousness there came a sudden change of feeling, and an altered view
of her conduct. A thousand reasons forced themselves upon her mind,
seeming to prove that she had been deceived; while the motives, so
powerful with her but a moment before, had either vanished from her memory
or lost all their efficacy. Her companion, who gazed searchingly into her
face, where the moonlight, coming down between the pines, allowed him to
read its expression, probably discerned somewhat of the state of her
thoughts.

"Do you repent so soon?" he inquired. "We have a weary way before us.
Faint not ere we have well entered upon it."

"I have left dear friends behind me, and am going I know not whither,"
replied Ellen, tremblingly.

"You have a faithful guide," he observed, turning away his head, and
speaking in the tone of one who endeavors to smother a laugh.

Ellen had no heart to continue the conversation; and they rode on in
silence, and through a wild and gloomy scene. The wind roared heavily
through the forest, and the trees shed their raindrops upon the
travellers. The road, at all times rough, was now broken into deep
gullies, through which streams went murmuring down to mingle with the
river. The pale moonlight combined with the gray of the morning to give a
ghastly and unsubstantial appearance to every object.

The difficulties of the road had been so much increased by the storm, that
the purple eastern clouds gave notice of the near approach of the sun just
as the travellers reached the little lonesome cottage which Ellen
remembered to have visited several months before. On arriving opposite to
it, her companion checked his horse, and gazed with a wild earnestness at
the wretched habitation. Then, stifling a groan that would not altogether
be repressed, he was about to pass on; but at that moment the cottage-door
opened, and a woman, whose sour, unpleasant countenance Ellen recognized,
came hastily forth. She seemed not to heed the travellers; but the angler,
his voice thrilling and quivering with indescribable emotion, addressed
her.

"Woman, whither do you go?" he inquired.

She started, but, after a momentary pause, replied, "There is one within
at the point of death. She struggles fearfully; and I cannot endure to
watch alone by her bedside. If you are Christians, come in with me."

Ellen's companion leaped hastily from his horse, assisted her also to
dismount, and followed the woman into the cottage, having first thrown the
bridles of the horses carelessly over the branch of a tree. Ellen trembled
at the awful scene she would be compelled to witness; but, when death was
so near at hand, it was more terrible to stand alone in the dim morning
light than even to watch the parting of soul and body. She therefore
entered the cottage.

Her guide, his face muffled in his cloak, had taken his stand at a
Distance from the death-bed, in a part of the room which neither the
increasing daylight nor the dim rays of a solitary lamp had yet
enlightened. At Ellen's entrance, the dying woman lay still, and
apparently calm, except that a plaintive, half-articulate sound
occasionally wandered through her lips.

"Hush! For mercy's sake, silence!" whispered the other woman to the
strangers. "There is good hope now that she will die a peaceable death;
but, if she is disturbed, the boldest of us will not dare to stand by her
bedside."

The whisper by which her sister endeavored to preserve quiet perhaps
reached the ears of the dying female; for she now raised herself in bed,
slowly, but with a strength superior to what her situation promised. Her
face was ghastly and wild, from long illness, approaching death, and
disturbed intellect; and a disembodied spirit could scarcely be a more
fearful object than one whose soul was just struggling forth. Her sister,
approaching with the soft and stealing step appropriate to the chamber of
sickness and death, attempted to replace the covering around her, and to
compose her again upon the pillow. "Lie down and sleep, sister," she said;
"and, when the day breaks, I will waken you. Methinks your breath comes
freer already. A little more slumber, and to-morrow you will be well."

"My illness is gone: I am well," said the dying-woman, gasping for breath.
"I wander where the fresh breeze comes sweetly over my face; but a close
and stifled air has choked my lungs."

"Yet a little while, and you will no longer draw your breath in pain,"
observed her sister, again replacing the bedclothes, which she continued
to throw off.

"My husband is with me," murmured the widow. "He walks by my side, and
speaks to me as in old times; but his words come faintly on my ear. Cheer
me and comfort me, my husband; for there is a terror in those dim,
motionless eyes, and in that shadowy voice."

As she spoke thus, she seemed to gaze upon some object that stood by her
bedside; and the eyes of those who witnessed this scene could not but
follow the direction of hers. They observed that the dying woman's own
shadow was marked upon the wall, receiving a tremulous motion from the
fitful rays of the lamp, and from her own convulsive efforts. "My husband
stands gazing on me," she said again; "but my son,--where is he? And, as I
ask, the father turns away his face. Where is our son? For his sake, I
have longed to come to this land of rest. For him I have sorrowed many
years. Will he not comfort me now?"

At these words the stranger made a few hasty steps towards the bed; but,
ere he reached it, he conquered the impulse that drew him thither, and,
shrouding his face more deeply in his cloak, returned to his former
position. The dying woman, in the mean time, had thrown herself back upon
the bed; and her sobbing and wailing, imaginary as was their cause, were
inexpressibly affecting.

"Take me back to earth," she said; "for its griefs have followed me
hither."

The stranger advanced, and, seizing the lamp, knelt down by the bedside,
throwing the light full upon his pale and convulsed features.

"Mother, here is your son!" he exclaimed.

At that unforgotten voice, the darkness burst away at once from her soul.
She arose in bed, her eyes and her whole countenance beaming with joy, and
threw her arms about his neck. A multitude of words seemed struggling for
utterance; but they gave place to a low moaning sound, and then to the
silence of death. The one moment of happiness, that recompensed years of
sorrow, had been her last. Her son laid the lifeless form upon the pillow,
and gazed with fixed eyes on his mother's face.

As he looked, the expression of enthusiastic joy that parting life had
left upon the features faded gradually away; and the countenance, though
no longer wild, assumed the sadness which it had worn through a long
course of grief and pain. On beholding this natural consequence of death,
the thought, perhaps, occurred to him, that her soul, no longer dependent
on the imperfect means of intercourse possessed by mortals, had communed
with his own, and become acquainted with all its guilt and misery. He
started from the bedside, and covered his face with his hands, as if to
hide it from those dead eyes.

Such a scene as has been described could not but have a powerful effect
upon any one who retained aught of humanity; and the grief of the son,
whose natural feelings had been blunted, but not destroyed, by an evil
life, was much more violent than his outward demeanor would have
expressed. But his deep repentance for the misery he had brought upon his
parent did not produce in him a resolution to do wrong no more. The sudden
consciousness of accumulated guilt made him desperate. He felt as if no
one had thenceforth a claim to justice or compassion at his hands, when
his neglect and cruelty had poisoned his mother's life, and hastened her
death.

Thus it was that the Devil wrought with him to his own destruction,
reversing the salutary effect which his mother would have died exultingly
to produce upon his mind. He now turned to Ellen Langton with a demeanor
singularly calm and composed.

"We must resume our journey," he said, in his usual tone of voice. "The
sun is on the point of rising, though but little light finds its way into
this hovel."

Ellen's previous suspicions as to the character of her companion had now
become certainty so far as to convince her that she was in the power of a
lawless and guilty man; though what fate he intended for her she was
unable to conjecture. An open opposition to his will, however, could not
be ventured upon; especially as she discovered, on looking round the
apartment, that, with the exception of the corpse, they were alone.

"Will you not attend your mother's funeral?" she asked, trembling, and
conscious that he would discover her fears.

"The dead must bury their dead," he replied. "I have brought my mother to
her grave,--and what can a son do more? This purse, however, will serve to
lay her in the earth, and leave something for the old hag. Whither is she
gone?" interrupted he, casting a glance round the room in search of the
old woman. "Nay, then, we must speedily to horse. I know her of old."

Thus saying, he threw the purse upon the table, and, without trusting
himself to look again towards the dead, conducted Ellen out of the
cottage. The first rays of the sun at that moment gilded the tallest trees
of the forest.

On looking towards the spot were the horses had stood, Ellen thought that
Providence, in answer to her prayers, had taken care for her deliverance.
They were no longer there,--a circumstance easily accounted for by the
haste with which the bridles had been thrown over the branch of the tree.
Her companion, however, imputed it to another cause.

"The hag! She would sell her own flesh and blood by weight and measure,"
he muttered to himself. "This is some plot of hers, I know well."

He put his hand to his forehead for a moment's space, seeming to reflect
on the course most advisable to be pursued. Ellen, perhaps unwisely,
interposed.

"Would it not be well to return?" she asked, timidly. "There is now no
hope of escaping; but I might yet reach home undiscovered."

"Return!" repeated her guide, with a look and smile from which she turned
away her face. "Have you forgotten your father and his misfortunes? No,
no, sweet Ellen: it is too late for such thoughts as these."

He took her hand, and led her towards the forest, in the rear of the
cottage. She would fain have resisted; but they were all alone, and the
attempt must have been both fruitless and dangerous. She therefore trod
with him a path so devious, so faintly traced, and so overgrown with
bushes and young trees, that only a most accurate acquaintance in his
early days could have enabled her guide to retain it. To him, however, it
seemed so perfectly familiar, that he was not once compelled to pause,
though the numerous windings soon deprived Ellen of all knowledge of the
situation of the cottage. They descended a steep hill, and, proceeding
parallel to the river,--as Ellen judged by its rushing sound,--at length
found themselves at what proved to be the termination of their walk.

Ellen now recollected a remark of Edward Walcott's respecting the wild and
rude scenery through which the river here kept its way; and, in less
agitating circumstances, her pleasure and admiration would have been
great. They stood beneath a precipice, so high that the loftiest pine-tops
(and many of them seemed to soar to heaven) scarcely surmounted it. This
line of rock has a considerable extent, at unequal heights, and with many
interruptions, along the course of the river; and it seems probable that,
at some former period, it was the boundary of the waters, though they are
now confined within far less ambitious limits. The inferior portion of the
crag, beneath which Ellen and her guide were standing, varies so far from
the perpendicular as not to be inaccessible by a careful footstep. But
only one person has been known to attempt the ascent of the superior half,
and only one the descent; yet, steep as is the height, trees and bushes of
various kinds have clung to the rock, wherever their roots could gain the
slightest hold; thus seeming to prefer the scanty and difficult
nourishment of the cliff to a more luxurious life in the rich interval
that extends from its base to the river. But, whether or no these hardy
vegetables have voluntarily chosen their rude resting-place, the cliff is
indebted to them for much of the beauty that tempers its sublimity. When
the eye is pained and wearied by the bold nakedness of the rock, it rests
with pleasure on the cheerful foliage of the birch, or upon the darker
green of the funereal pine. Just at the termination of the accessible
portion of the crag, these trees are so numerous, and their foliage so
dense, that they completely shroud from view a considerable excavation,
formed, probably, hundreds of years since, by the fall of a portion of the
rock. The detached fragment still lies at a little distance from the base,
gray and moss-grown, but corresponding, in its general outline, to the
cavity from which it was rent.

But the most singular and beautiful object in all this scene is a tiny
fount of crystal water, that gushes forth from the high, smooth forehead
of the cliff. Its perpendicular descent is of many feet; after which it
finds its way, with a sweet diminutive murmur, to the level ground.

It is not easy to conceive whence the barren rock procures even the small
supply of water that is necessary to the existence of this stream; it is
as unaccountable as the gush of gentle feeling which sometimes proceeds
from the hardest heart: but there it continues to flow and fall,
undiminished and unincreased. The stream is so slender, that the gentlest
breeze suffices to disturb its descent, and to scatter its pure sweet
waters over the face of the cliff. But in that deep forest there is seldom
a breath of wind; so that, plashing continually upon one spot, the fount
has worn its own little channel of white sand, by which it finds its way
to the river. Alas that the Naiades have lost their old authority! for
what a deity of tiny loveliness must once have presided here!

Ellen's companion paused not to gaze either upon the loveliness or the
sublimity of this scene, but, assisting her where it was requisite, began
the steep and difficult ascent of the lower part of the cliff. The
maiden's ingenuity in vain endeavored to assign reasons for this movement;
but when they reached the tuft of trees, which, as has been noticed, grew
at the ultimate point where mortal footstep might safely tread, she
perceived through their thick branches the recess in the rock. Here they
entered; and her guide pointed to a mossy seat, in the formation of which,
to judge from its regularity, art had probably a share.

"Here you may remain in safety," he observed, "till I obtain the means of
proceeding. In this spot you need fear no intruder; but it will be
dangerous to venture beyond its bounds."

The meaning glance that accompanied these words intimated to poor Ellen,
that, in warning her against danger, he alluded to the vengeance with
which he would visit any attempt to escape. To leave her thus alone,
trusting to the influence of such a threat, was a bold, yet a necessary
and by no means a hopeless measure. On Ellen it produced the desired
effect; and she sat in the cave as motionless, for a time, as if she had
herself been a part of the rock. In other circumstances this shady recess
would have been a delightful retreat during the sultry warmth of a
summer's day. The dewy coolness of the rock kept the air always fresh and
the sunbeams never thrust themselves so as to dissipate the mellow
twilight through the green trees with which the chamber was curtained.
Ellen's sleeplessness and agitation for many preceding hours had perhaps
deadened her feelings; for she now felt a sort of indifference creeping
upon her, an inability to realize the evils of her situation, at the same
time that she was perfectly aware of them all. This torpor of mind
increased, till her eyelids began to grow heavy and the cave and trees to
swim before her sight. In a few moments more she would probably have been
in dreamless slumber; but, rousing herself by a strong effort, she looked
round the narrow limits of the cave in search of objects to excite her
worn-out mind.

She now perceived, wherever the smooth rock afforded place for them, the
initials, or the full-length names of former visitants of the cave. What
wanderer on mountain-tops or in deep solitudes has not felt the influence
of these records of humanity, telling him, when such a conviction is
soothing to his heart, that he is not alone in the world? It was singular,
that, when her own mysterious situation had almost lost its power to
engage her thoughts, Ellen perused these barren memorials with a certain
degree of interest. She went on repeating them aloud, and starting at the
sound of her own voice, till at length, as one name passed through her
lips, she paused, and then, leaning her forehead against the letters,
burst into tears. It was the name of Edward Walcott; and it struck upon
her heart, arousing her to a full sense of her present misfortunes and
dangers, and, more painful still, of her past happiness. Her tears had,
however, a soothing, and at the same time a strengthening effect upon her
mind; for, when their gush was over, she raised her head, and began to
meditate on the means of escape. She wondered at the species of
fascination that had kept her, as if chained to the rock, so long, when
there was, in reality, nothing to bar her pathway. She determined, late as
it was, to attempt her own deliverance, and for that purpose began slowly
and cautiously to emerge from the cave.

Peeping out from among the trees, she looked and listened with most
painful anxiety to discover if any living thing were in that seeming
solitude, or if any sound disturbed the heavy stillness. But she saw only
Nature in her wildest forms, and heard only the plash and murmur (almost
inaudible, because continual) of the little waterfall, and the quick,
short throbbing of her own heart, against which she pressed her hand as if
to hush it. Gathering courage, therefore, she began to descend; and,
starting often at the loose stones that even her light footstep displaced
and sent rattling down, she at length reached the base of the crag in
safety. She then made a few steps in the direction, as nearly as she could
judge, by which she arrived at the spot, but paused, with a sudden
revulsion of the blood to her heart, as her guide emerged from behind a
projecting part of the rock. He approached her deliberately, an ironical
smile writhing his features into a most disagreeable expression; while in
his eyes there was something that seemed a wild, fierce joy. By a species
of sophistry, of which oppressors often make use, he had brought himself
to believe that he was now the injured one, and that Ellen, by her
distrust of him, had fairly subjected herself to whatever evil it
consisted with his will and power to inflict upon her. Her only
restraining influence over him, the consciousness, in his own mind, that
he possessed her confidence, was now done away. Ellen, as well as her
enemy, felt that this was the case. She knew not what to dread; but she
was well aware that danger was at hand, and that, in the deep wilderness,
there was none to help her, except that Being with whose inscrutable
purposes it might consist to allow the wicked to triumph for a season, and
the innocent to be brought low.

"Are you so soon weary of this quiet retreat?" demanded her guide,
continuing to wear the same sneering smile. "Or has your anxiety for your
father induced you to set forth alone in quest of the afflicted old man?"

"Oh, if I were but with him!" exclaimed Ellen. "But this place is lonely
and fearful; and I cannot endure to remain here."

"Lonely, is it, sweet Ellen?" he rejoined; "am I not with you? Yes, it is
lonely,--lonely as guilt could wish. Cry aloud, Ellen, and spare not.
Shriek, and see if there be any among these rocks and woods to hearken to
you!"

"There is, there is One," exclaimed Ellen, shuddering, and affrighted at
the fearful meaning of his countenance. "He is here! He is there!" And she
pointed to heaven.

"It may be so, dearest," he replied. "But if there be an Ear that hears,
and an Eye that sees all the evil of the earth, yet the Arm is slow to
avenge. Else why do I stand before you a living man?"

"His vengeance may be delayed for a time, but not forever," she answered,
gathering a desperate courage from the extremity of her fear.

"You say true, lovely Ellen; and I have done enough, erenow, to insure its
heaviest weight. There is a pass, when evil deeds can add nothing to
guilt, nor good ones take anything from it."

"Think of your mother,--of her sorrow through life, and perhaps even after
death," Ellen began to say. But, as she spoke these words, the expression
of his face was changed, becoming suddenly so dark and fiend-like, that
she clasped her hands, and fell on her knees before him.

"I have thought of my mother," he replied, speaking very low, and putting
his face close to hers. "I remember the neglect, the wrong, the lingering
and miserable death, that she received at my hands. By what claim can
either man or woman henceforth expect mercy from me? If God will help you,
be it so; but by those words you have turned my heart to stone."

At this period of their conversation, when Ellen's peril seemed most
imminent, the attention of both was attracted by a fragment of rock,
which, falling from the summit of the crag, struck very near them. Ellen
started from her knees, and, with her false guide, gazed eagerly
upward,--he in the fear of interruption, she in the hope of deliverance.



CHAPTER IX.

  "At length, he cries, behold the fated spring!
  Yon rugged cliff conceals the fountain blest,
  Dark rocks its crystal source o'ershadowing."
    PSYCHE.


The tale now returns to Fanshawe, who, as will be recollected, after
being overtaken by Edward Walcott, was left with little apparent prospect
of aiding in the deliverance of Ellen Langton.

It would be difficult to analyze the feelings with which the student
pursued the chase, or to decide whether he was influenced and animated by
the same hopes of successful love that cheered his rival. That he was
conscious of such hopes, there is little reason to suppose; for the most
powerful minds are not always the best acquainted with their own feelings.
Had Fanshawe, moreover, acknowledged to himself the possibility of gaining
Ellen's affections, his generosity would have induced him to refrain from
her society before it was too late. He had read her character with
accuracy, and had seen how fit she was to love, and to be loved, by a man
who could find his happiness in the common occupations of the world; and
Fanshawe never deceived himself so far as to suppose that this would be
the case with him. Indeed, he often wondered at the passion with which
Ellen's simple loveliness of mind and person had inspired him, and which
seemed to be founded on the principle of contrariety, rather than of
sympathy. It was the yearning of a soul, formed by Nature in a peculiar
mould, for communion with those to whom it bore a resemblance, yet of whom
it was not. But there was no reason to suppose that Ellen, who differed
from the multitude only as being purer and better, would cast away her
affections on the one, of all who surrounded her, least fitted to make her
happy. Thus Fanshawe reasoned with himself, and of this he believed that
he was convinced. Yet ever and anon he found himself involved in a dream
of bliss, of which Ellen was to be the giver and the sharer. Then would he
rouse himself, and press upon his mind the chilling consciousness that it
was and could be but a dream. There was also another feeling, apparently
discordant with those which have been enumerated. It was a longing for
rest, for his old retirement, that came at intervals so powerfully upon
him, as he rode on, that his heart sickened of the active exertion on
which fate had thrust him.

After being overtaken by Edward Walcott, Fanshawe continued his journey
with as much speed as was attainable by his wearied horse, but at a pace
infinitely too slow for his earnest thoughts. These had carried him far
away, leaving him only such a consciousness of his present situation as to
make diligent use of the spur, when a horse's tread at no great distance
struck upon his ear. He looked forward and behind; but, though a
considerable extent of the narrow, rocky, and grass-grown road was
visible, he was the only traveller there. Yet again he heard the sound,
which, he now discovered, proceeded from among the trees that lined the
roadside. Alighting, he entered the forest, with the intention, if the
steed proved to be disengaged, and superior to his own, of appropriating
him to his own use. He soon gained a view of the object he sought; but the
animal rendered a closer acquaintance unattainable, by immediately taking
to his heels. Fanshawe had, however, made a most interesting discovery;
for the horse was accoutred with a side-saddle; and who but Ellen Langton
could have been his rider? At this conclusion, though his perplexity was
thereby in no degree diminished, the student immediately arrived.
Returning to the road, and perceiving on the summit of the hill a cottage,
which he recognized as the one he had entered with Ellen and Edward
Walcott, he determined there to make inquiry respecting the objects of his
pursuit.

On reaching the door of the poverty-stricken dwelling, he saw that it was
not now so desolate of inmates as on his previous visit. In the single
inhabitable apartment were several elderly women, clad evidently in their
well-worn and well-saved Sunday clothes, and all wearing a deep grievous
expression of countenance. Fanshawe was not long in deciding that death
was within the cottage, and that these aged females were of the class who
love the house of mourning, because to them it is a house of feasting. It
is a fact, disgusting and lamentable, that the disposition which Heaven,
for the best of purposes, has implanted in the female breast--to watch by
the sick and comfort the afflicted--frequently becomes depraved into an
odious love of scenes of pain and death and sorrow. Such women are like
the Ghouls of the Arabian Tales, whose feasting was among tombstones and
upon dead carcasses.

(It is sometimes, though less frequently, the case, that this disposition
to make a "joy of grief" extends to individuals of the other sex. But in
us it is even less excusable and more disgusting, because it is our nature
to shun the sick and afflicted; and, unless restrained by principles other
than we bring into the world with us, men might follow the example of many
animals in destroying the infirm of their own species. Indeed, instances
of this nature might be adduced among savage nations.) Sometimes, however,
from an original _lusus naturae_, or from the influence of
circumstances, a man becomes a haunter of death-beds, a tormentor of
afflicted hearts, and a follower of funerals. Such an abomination now
appeared before Fanshawe, and beckoned him into the cottage. He was
considerably beyond the middle age, rather corpulent, with a broad, fat,
tallow-complexioned countenance. The student obeyed his silent call, and
entered the room, through the open door of which he had been gazing.

He now beheld, stretched out upon the bed where she had so lately lain in
life, though dying, the yet uncoffined corpse of the aged woman, whose
death has been described. How frightful it seemed!--that fixed countenance
of ashy paleness, amid its decorations of muslin and fine linen, as if a
bride were decked for the marriage-chamber, as if death were a bridegroom,
and the coffin a bridal bed. Alas that the vanity of dress should extend
even to the grave!

The female who, as being the near and only relative of the deceased, was
supposed to stand in need of comfort, was surrounded by five or six of her
own sex. These continually poured into her ear the stale, trite maxims
which, where consolation is actually required, add torture insupportable
to the wounded heart. Their present object, however, conducted herself
with all due decorum, holding her handkerchief to her tearless eyes, and
answering with very grievous groans to the words of her comforters. Who
could have imagined that there was joy in her heart, because, since her
sister's death, there was but one remaining obstacle between herself and
the sole property of that wretched cottage?

While Fanshawe stood silently observing this scene, a low, monotonous
voice was uttering some words in his ear, of the meaning of which his mind
did not immediately take note. He turned, and saw that the speaker was the
person who had invited him to enter.

"What is your pleasure with me, sir?" demanded the student.

"I make bold to ask," replied the man, "whether you would choose to
partake of some creature comfort, before joining in prayer with the family
and friends of our deceased sister?" As he spoke, he pointed to a table,
on which was a moderate-sized stone jug and two or three broken glasses;
for then, as now, there were few occasions of joy or grief on which ardent
spirits were not considered indispensable, to heighten the one or to
alleviate the other.

"I stand in no need of refreshment," answered Fanshawe; "and it is not my
intention to pray at present."

"I pray your pardon, reverend sir," rejoined the other; "but your face is
pale, and you look wearied. A drop from yonder vessel is needful to
recruit the outward man. And for the prayer, the sisters will expect it;
and their souls are longing for the outpouring of the Spirit. I was
intending to open my own mouth with such words as are given to my poor
ignorance, but"--

Fanshawe was here about to interrupt this address, which proceeded on the
supposition, arising from his black dress and thoughtful countenance, that
he was a clergyman. But one of the females now approached him, and
intimated that the sister of the deceased was desirous of the benefit of
his conversation. He would have returned a negative to this request, but,
looking towards the afflicted woman, he saw her withdraw her handkerchief
from her eyes, and cast a brief but penetrating and most intelligent
glance upon him. He immediately expressed his readiness to offer such
consolation as might be in his power.

"And in the mean time," observed the lay-preacher, "I will give the
sisters to expect a word of prayer and exhortation, either from you or
from myself."

These words were lost upon the supposed clergyman, who was already at the
side of the mourner. The females withdrew out of ear-shot to give place to
a more legitimate comforter than themselves.

"What know you respecting my purpose?" inquired Fanshawe, bending towards
her.

The woman gave a groan--the usual result of all efforts at consolation--for
the edification of the company, and then replied in a whisper, which
reached only the ear for which it was intended. "I know whom you come to
seek: I can direct you to them. Speak low, for God's sake!" she continued,
observing that Fanshawe was about to utter an exclamation. She then
resumed her groans with greater zeal than before.

"Where--where are they?" asked the student, in a whisper which all his
efforts could scarcely keep below his breath. "I adjure you to tell me."

"And, if I should, how am I like to be bettered by it?" inquired the old
woman, her speech still preceded and followed by a groan.

"O God! The _auri sacra fames!_" thought Fanshawe with, a sickening
heart, looking at the motionless corpse upon the bed, and then at the
wretched being, whom the course of nature, in comparatively a moment of
time, would reduce to the same condition.

He whispered again, however, putting his purse into the hag's hand. "Take
this. Make your own terms when they are discovered. Only tell me where I
must seek them--and speedily, or it may be too late."

"I am a poor woman, and am afflicted," said she, taking the purse, unseen
by any who were in the room. "It is little that worldly goods can do for
me, and not long can I enjoy them." And here she was delivered of a louder
and a more heartfelt groan than ever. She then continued: "Follow the path
behind the cottage, that leads to the river-side. Walk along the foot of
the rock, and search for them near the water-spout. Keep a slow pace till
you are out of sight," she added, as the student started to his feet. The
guests of the cottage did not attempt to oppose Fanshawe's progress, when
they saw him take the path towards the forest, imagining, probably, that
he was retiring for the purpose of secret prayer. But the old woman
laughed behind the handkerchief with which she veiled her face.

"Take heed to your steps, boy," she muttered; "for they are leading you
whence you will not return. Death, too, for the slayer. Be it so."

Fanshawe, in the mean while, contrived to discover, and for a while to
retain, the narrow and winding path that led to the river-side. But it was
originally no more than a track, by which the cattle belonging to the
cottage went down to their watering-place, and by these four-footed
passengers it had long been deserted.

The fern-bushes, therefore, had grown over it; and in several places trees
of considerable size had shot up in the midst. These difficulties could
scarcely have been surmounted by the utmost caution; and as Fanshawe's
thoughts were too deeply fixed upon the end to pay a due regard to the
means, he soon became desperately bewildered both as to the locality of
the river and of the cottage. Had he known, however, in which direction to
seek the latter, he would not, probably, have turned back; not that he was
infected by any chivalrous desire to finish the adventure alone, but
because he would expect little assistance from those he had left there.
Yet he could not but wonder--though he had not in his first eagerness
taken notice of it--at the anxiety of the old woman that he should
proceed singly, and without the knowledge of her guests, on the search. He
nevertheless continued to wander on,--pausing often to listen for the rush
of the river, and then starting forward with fresh rapidity, to rid
himself of the sting of his own thoughts, which became painfully intense
when undisturbed by bodily motion. His way was now frequently interrupted
by rocks, that thrust their huge gray heads from the ground, compelling
him to turn aside, and thus depriving him, fortunately, perhaps, of all
remaining idea of the direction he had intended to pursue.

Thus he went on, his head turned back, and taking little heed to his
footsteps, when, perceiving that he trod upon a smooth, level rock, he
looked forward, and found himself almost on the utmost verge of a
precipice.

After the throbbing of the heart that followed this narrow escape had
subsided, he stood gazing down where the sunbeams slept so pleasantly at
the roots of the tall old trees, with whose highest tops he was upon a
level. Suddenly he seemed to hear voices--one well-remembered
voice--ascending from beneath; and, approaching to the edge of the cliff,
he saw at its base the two whom he sought.

He saw and interpreted Ellen's look and attitude of entreaty, though the
words with which she sought to soften the ruthless heart of her guide
became inaudible ere they reached the height where Fanshawe stood. He felt
that Heaven had sent him thither, at the moment of her utmost need, to be
the preserver of all that was dear to him; and he paused only to consider
the mode in which her deliverance was to be effected. Life he would have
laid down willingly, exultingly: his only care was, that the sacrifice
should not be in vain.

At length, when Ellen fell upon her knees, he lifted a small fragment of
rock, and threw it down the cliff. It struck so near the pair, that it
immediately drew the attention of both.

When the betrayer, at the instant in which he had almost defied the power
of the Omnipotent to bring help to Ellen, became aware of Fanshawe's
presence, his hardihood failed him for a time, and his knees actually
tottered beneath him. There was something awful, to his apprehension, in
the slight form that stood so far above him, like a being from another
sphere, looking down upon his wickedness. But his half-superstitious dread
endured only a moment's space; and then, mustering the courage that in a
thousand dangers had not deserted him, he prepared to revenge the
intrusion by which Fanshawe had a second time interrupted his designs.

"By Heaven, I will cast him down at her feet!" he muttered through his
closed teeth. "There shall be no form nor likeness of man left in him.
Then let him rise up, if he is able, and defend her."

Thus resolving, and overlooking all hazard in his eager hatred and desire
for vengeance, he began a desperate attempt to ascend the cliff. The space
which only had hitherto been deemed accessible was quickly passed; and in
a moment more he was half-way up the precipice, clinging to trees, shrubs,
and projecting portions of the rock, and escaping through hazards which
seemed to menace inevitable destruction.

Fanshawe, as he watched his upward progress, deemed that every step would
be his last; but when he perceived that more than half, and apparently the
most difficult part, of the ascent was surmounted, his opinion changed.
His courage, however, did not fail him as the moment of need drew nigh.
His spirits rose buoyantly; his limbs seemed to grow firm and strong; and
he stood on the edge of the precipice, prepared for the death-struggle
which would follow the success of his enemy's attempt.

But that attempt was not successful. When within a few feet of the summit,
the adventurer grasped at a twig too slenderly rooted to sustain his
weight. It gave way in his hand, and he fell backward down the precipice.
His head struck against the less perpendicular part of the rock, whence
the body rolled heavily down to the detached fragment, of which mention
has heretofore been made. There was no life left in him. With all the
passions of hell alive in his heart, he had met the fate that he intended
for Fanshawe.

The student paused not then to shudder at the sudden and awful overthrow
of his enemy; for he saw that Ellen lay motionless at the foot of the
cliff. She had indeed fainted at the moment she became aware of her
deliverer's presence; and no stronger proof could she have given of her
firm reliance upon his protection.

Fanshawe was not deterred by the danger, of which he had just received so
fearful an evidence, from attempting to descend to her assistance; and,
whether owing to his advantage in lightness of frame, or to superior
caution, he arrived safely at the base of the precipice.

He lifted the motionless form of Ellen in his arms, and, resting her head
against his shoulder, gazed on her cheek of lily paleness with a joy, a
triumph, that rose almost to madness. It contained no mixture of hope; it
had no reference to the future: it was the perfect bliss of a moment,--an
insulated point of happiness. He bent over her, and pressed a kiss--the
first, and he knew it would be the last--on her pale lips; then, bearing
her to the fountain, he sprinkled its waters profusely over her face,
neck, and bosom. She at length opened her eyes, slowly and heavily; but
her mind was evidently wandering, till Fanshawe spoke.

"Fear not, Ellen. You are safe," he said.

At the sound of his voice, her arm, which was thrown over his shoulder,
involuntarily tightened its embrace, telling him, by that mute motion,
with how firm a trust she confided in him. But, as a fuller sense of her
situation returned, she raised herself to her feet, though still retaining
the support of his arm. It was singular, that, although her insensibility
had commenced before the fall of her guide, she turned away her eyes, as
if instinctively, from the spot where the mangled body lay; nor did she
inquire of Fanshawe the manner of her deliverance.

"Let us begone from this place," she said in faint, low accents, and with
an inward shudder.

They walked along the precipice, seeking some passage by which they might
gain its summit, and at length arrived at that by which Ellen and her
guide had descended. Chance--for neither Ellen nor Fanshawe could have
discovered the path--led them, after but little wandering, to the cottage.
A messenger was sent forward to the town to inform Dr. Melmoth of the
recovery of his ward; and the intelligence thus received had interrupted
Edward Walcott's conversation with the seaman.

It would have been impossible, in the mangled remains of Ellen's guide, to
discover the son of the Widow Butler, except from the evidence of her
sister, who became, by his death, the sole inheritrix of the cottage. The
history of this evil and unfortunate man must be comprised within very
narrow limits. A harsh father, and his own untamable disposition, had
driven him from home in his boyhood; and chance had made him the temporary
companion of Hugh Crombie. After two years of wandering, when in a foreign
country and in circumstances of utmost need, he attracted the notice of
Mr. Langton. The merchant took his young countryman under his protection,
afforded him advantages of education, and, as his capacity was above
mediocrity, gradually trusted him in many affairs of importance. During
this period, there was no evidence of dishonesty on his part. On the
contrary, he manifested a zeal for Mr. Langton's interest, and a respect
for his person, that proved his strong sense of the benefits he had
received. But he unfortunately fell into certain youthful indiscretions,
which, if not entirely pardonable, might have been palliated by many
considerations that would have occurred to a merciful man. Mr. Langton's
justice, however, was seldom tempered by mercy; and, on this occasion, he
shut the door of repentance against his erring _protege_, and left
him in a situation not less desperate than that from which he had relieved
him. The goodness and the nobleness, of which his heart was not destitute,
turned, from that time, wholly to evil; and he became irrecoverably ruined
and irreclaimably depraved. His wandering life had led him, shortly before
the period of this tale, to his native country. Here the erroneous
intelligence of Mr. Langton's death had reached him, and suggested the
scheme, which circumstances seemed to render practicable, but the fatal
termination of which has been related.

The body was buried where it had fallen, close by the huge, gray,
moss-grown fragment of rock,--a monument on which centuries can work little
change. The eighty years that have elapsed since the death of the widow's
son have, however, been sufficient to obliterate an inscription, which
some one was at the pains to cut in the smooth surface of the stone.
Traces of letters are still discernible; but the writer's many efforts
could never discover a connected meaning. The grave, also, is overgrown
with fern-bushes, and sunk to a level with the surrounding soil. But the
legend, though my version of it may be forgotten, will long be
traditionary in that lonely spot, and give to the rock and the precipice
and the fountain an interest thrilling to the bosom of the romantic
wanderer.



CHAPTER X.

  "Sitting then in shelter shady,
  To observe and mark his mone.
  Suddenly I saw a lady
  Hasting to him all alone,
  Clad in maiden-white and green,
  Whom I judged the Forest Queen."
    THE WOODMAN'S BEAR.


During several weeks succeeding her danger and deliverance, Ellen Langton
was confined to her chamber by illness, resulting from the agitation she
had endured. Her father embraced the earliest opportunity to express his
deep gratitude to Fanshawe for the inestimable service he had rendered,
and to intimate a desire to requite it to the utmost of his power. He had
understood that the student's circumstances were not prosperous, and, with
the feeling of one who was habituated to give and receive a _quid pro
quo_ he would have rejoiced to share his abundance with the deliverer
of his daughter. But Fanshawe's flushed brow and haughty eye, when he
perceived the thought that was stirring in Mr. Langton's mind,
sufficiently proved to the discerning merchant that money was not, in the
present instance, a circulating medium. His penetration, in fact, very
soon informed him of the motives by which the young man had been actuated
in risking his life for Ellen Langton; but he made no allusion to the
subject, concealing his intentions, if any he had, in his own bosom.

During Ellen's illness, Edward Walcott had manifested the deepest anxiety
respecting her: he had wandered around and within the house, like a
restless ghost, informing himself of the slightest fluctuation in her
health, and thereby graduating his happiness or misery. He was at length
informed that her convalescence had so far progressed, that, on the
succeeding day, she would venture below. From that time Edward's visits to
Dr. Melmoth's mansion were relinquished. His cheek grew pale and his eye
lost its merry light; but he resolutely kept himself a banished man.
Multifarious were the conjectures to which this course of conduct gave
rise; but Ellen understood and approved his motives. The maiden must have
been far more blind than ever woman was in such a matter, if the late
events had not convinced her of Fanshawe's devoted attachment; and she saw
that Edward Walcott, feeling the superior, the irresistible strength of
his rival's claim, had retired from the field. Fanshawe, however,
discovered no intention to pursue his advantage. He paid her no voluntary
visit, and even declined an invitation to tea, with which Mrs. Melmoth,
after extensive preparations, had favored him. He seemed to have resumed
all the habits of seclusion by which he was distinguished previous to his
acquaintance with Ellen, except that he still took his sunset walk on the
banks of the stream.

On one of these occasions, he stayed his footsteps by the old leafless oak
which had witnessed Ellen's first meeting with the angler. Here he mused
upon the circumstances that had resulted from that event, and upon the
rights and privileges (for he was well aware of them all) which those
circumstances had given him. Perhaps the loveliness of the scene and the
recollections connected with it, perhaps the warm and mellow sunset,
perhaps a temporary weakness in himself, had softened his feelings, and
shaken the firmness of his resolution, to leave Ellen to be happy with his
rival. His strong affections rose up against his reason, whispering that
bliss--on earth and in heaven, through time and eternity--might yet be his
lot with her. It is impossible to conceive of the flood of momentary joy
which the bare admission of such a possibility sent through his frame;
and, just when the tide was highest in his heart, a soft little hand was
laid upon his own, and, starting, he beheld Ellen at his side.

Her illness, since the commencement of which Fanshawe had not seen her,
had wrought a considerable, but not a disadvantageous, change in her
appearance. She was paler and thinner; her countenance was more
intellectual, more spiritual; and a spirit did the student almost deem
her, appearing so suddenly in that solitude. There was a quick vibration
of the delicate blood in her cheek, yet never brightening to the glow of
perfect health; a tear was glittering on each of her long, dark eyelashes;
and there was a gentle tremor through all her frame, which compelled her,
for a little space, to support herself against the oak. Fanshawe's first
impulse was to address her in words of rapturous delight; but he checked
himself, and attempted--vainly indeed--to clothe his voice in tones of
calm courtesy. His remark merely expressed pleasure at her restoration to
health; and Ellen's low and indistinct reply had as little relation to the
feelings that agitated her.

"Yet I fear," continued Fanshawe, recovering a degree of composure, and
desirous of assigning a motive (which he felt was not the true one) for
Ellen's agitation,--"I fear that your walk has extended too far for your
strength."

"It would have borne me farther with such a motive," she replied, still
trembling,--"to express my gratitude to my preserver."

"It was needless, Ellen, it was needless; for the deed brought with it its
own reward," exclaimed Fanshawe, with a vehemence that he could not
repress. "It was dangerous, for"--

Here he interrupted himself, and turned his face away.

"And wherefore was it dangerous?" inquired Ellen, laying her hand gently
on his arm; for he seemed about to leave her.

"Because you have a tender and generous heart, and I a weak one," he
replied.

"Not so," answered she, with animation. "Yours is a heart full of strength
and nobleness; and if it have a weakness"--

"You know well that it has, Ellen,--one that has swallowed up all its
strength," said Fanshawe. "Was it wise, then, to tempt it thus, when, if
it yield, the result must be your own misery?"

Ellen did not affect to misunderstand his meaning. On the contrary, with a
noble frankness, she answered to what was implied rather than expressed.

"Do me not this wrong," she said, blushing, yet earnestly. "Can it be
misery? Will it not be happiness to form the tie that shall connect you to
the world? to be your guide--a humble one, it is true, but the one of your
choice--to the quiet paths from which your proud and lonely thoughts have
estranged you? Oh, I know that there will be happiness in such a lot, from
these and a thousand other sources!"

The animation with which Ellen spoke, and, at the same time, a sense of
the singular course to which her gratitude had impelled her, caused her
beauty to grow brighter and more enchanting with every word. And when, as
she concluded, she extended her hand to Fanshawe, to refuse it was like
turning from an angel, who would have guided him to heaven. But, had he
been capable of making the woman he loved a sacrifice to her own
generosity, that act would have rendered him unworthy of her. Yet the
struggle was a severe one ere he could reply.

"Yon have spoken generously and nobly, Ellen," he said. "I have no way to
prove that I deserve your generosity, but by refusing to take advantage of
it. Even if your heart were yet untouched, if no being more happily
constituted than myself had made an impression there, even then, I trust,
a selfish passion would not be stronger than my integrity. But now"--He
would have proceeded; but the firmness which had hitherto sustained him
gave way. He turned aside to hide the tears which all the pride of his
nature could not restrain, and which, instead of relieving, added to his
anguish. At length he resumed, "No, Ellen, we must part now and forever.
Your life will be long and happy. Mine will be short, but not altogether
wretched, nor shorter than if we had never met. When you hear that I am in
my grave, do not imagine that you have hastened me thither. Think that you
scattered bright dreams around my pathway,--an ideal happiness, that you
would have sacrificed your own to realize."

He ceased; and Ellen felt that his determination was unalterable. She
could not speak; but, taking his hand, she pressed it to her lips, and
they saw each other no more. Mr. Langton and his daughter shortly after
returned to the seaport, which, for several succeeding years, was their
residence. After Ellen's departure, Fanshawe returned to his studies with
the same absorbing ardor that had formerly characterized him. His face was
as seldom seen among the young and gay; the pure breeze and the blessed
sunshine as seldom refreshed his pale and weary brow; and his lamp burned
as constantly from the first shade of evening till the gray morning light
began to dim its beams. Nor did he, as weak men will, treasure up his love
in a hidden chamber of his breast. He was in reality the thoughtful and
earnest student that he seemed. He had exerted the whole might of his
spirit over itself, and he was a conqueror. Perhaps, indeed, a summer
breeze of sad and gentle thoughts would sometimes visit him; but, in these
brief memories of his love, he did not wish that it should be revived, or
mourn over its event.

There were many who felt an interest in Fanshawe; but the influence of
none could prevail upon him to lay aside the habits, mental and physical,
by which he was bringing himself to the grave. His passage thither was
consequently rapid, terminating just as he reached his twentieth year. His
fellow-students erected to his memory a monument of rough-hewn granite,
with a white marble slab for the inscription. This was borrowed from the
grave of Nathanael Mather, whom, in his almost insane eagerness for
knowledge, and in his early death, Fanshawe resembled.

  THE ASHES OF A HARD STUDENT
  AND A GOOD SCHOLAR.

Many tears were shed over his grave; but the thoughtful and the wise,
though turf never covered a nobler heart, could not lament that it was so
soon at rest. He left a world for which he was unfit; and we trust, that,
among the innumerable stars of heaven, there is one where he has found
happiness.

Of the other personages of this tale,--Hugh Crombie, being exposed to no
strong temptations, lived and died an honest man. Concerning Dr. Melmoth,
it is unnecessary here to speak. The reader, if he have any curiosity upon
the subject, is referred to his Life, which, together with several sermons
and other productions of the doctor, was published by his successor in the
presidency of Harley College, about the year 1768.

It was not till four years after Fanshawe's death, that Edward Walcott was
united to Ellen Langton. Their future lives were uncommonly happy. Ellen's
gentle, almost imperceptible, but powerful influence drew her husband away
from the passions and pursuits that would have interfered with domestic
felicity; and he never regretted the worldly distinction of which she thus
deprived him. Theirs was a long life of calm and quiet bliss; and what
matters it, that, except in these pages, they have left no name behind
them?
WHEN a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that
he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and
material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had
he professed to be writing a Novel.  The latter form of composition is
presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible,
but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience.  The
former--while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to
laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from
the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth
under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or
creation.  If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical
medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the
shadows of the picture.  He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very
moderate use of the privileges here stated, and, especially, to mingle
the Marvelous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than
as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the
public.  He can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime
even if he disregard this caution.

In the present work, the author has proposed to himself--but with what
success, fortunately, it is not for him to judge--to keep undeviatingly
within his immunities.  The point of view in which this tale comes
under the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone
time with the very present that is flitting away from us.  It is a
legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down
into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its
legendary mist, which the reader, according to his pleasure, may either
disregard, or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the
characters and events for the sake of a picturesque effect.  The
narrative, it may be, is woven of so humble a texture as to require
this advantage, and, at the same time, to render it the more difficult
of attainment.

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at
which they profess to aim their works.  Not to be deficient in this
particular, the author has provided himself with a moral,--the truth,
namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the
successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage,
becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a
singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince
mankind--or, indeed, any one man--of the folly of tumbling down an
avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an
unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the
accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms.  In
good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter
himself with the slightest hope of this kind.  When romances do really
teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually
through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one.  The author
has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to
impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod,--or, rather, as by
sticking a pin through a butterfly,--thus at once depriving it of life,
and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude.  A
high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out,
brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work
of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and
seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.

The reader may perhaps choose to assign an actual locality to the
imaginary events of this narrative.  If permitted by the historical
connection,--which, though slight, was essential to his plan,--the
author would very willingly have avoided anything of this nature.  Not
to speak of other objections, it exposes the romance to an inflexible
and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing his
fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the
moment.  It has been no part of his object, however, to describe local
manners, nor in any way to meddle with the characteristics of a
community for whom he cherishes a proper respect and a natural regard.
He trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending by laying out
a street that infringes upon nobody's private rights, and appropriating
a lot of land which had no visible owner, and building a house of
materials long in use for constructing castles in the air.  The
personages of the tale--though they give themselves out to be of
ancient stability and considerable prominence--are really of the
author's own making, or at all events, of his own mixing; their virtues
can shed no lustre, nor their defects redound, in the remotest degree,
to the discredit of the venerable town of which they profess to be
inhabitants.  He would be glad, therefore, if-especially in the quarter
to which he alludes-the book may be read strictly as a Romance, having
a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead than with any portion
of the actual soil of the County of Essex.

LENOX, January 27, 1851.




THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES


by

Nathaniel Hawthorne




                       I  The Old Pyncheon Family


HALFWAY down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty
wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various
points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst.  The
street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an
elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to
every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.  On my
occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down
Pyncheon Street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these
two antiquities,--the great elm-tree and the weather-beaten edifice.

The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human
countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and
sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and
accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within.  Were these to be
worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest
and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity,
which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement.  But the
story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of
two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a
bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could
prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a
similar period.  It consequently becomes imperative to make short work
with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House,
otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the theme.
With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances amid which the
foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid glimpse at its quaint
exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent east wind,--pointing, too,
here and there, at some spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and
walls,--we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not
very remote from the present day.  Still, there will be a connection
with the long past--a reference to forgotten events and personages, and
to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete--which,
if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how
much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human
life.  Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the
little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the
germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant
time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which
mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more
enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.

The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not the
first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same spot of
ground.  Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation of
Maule's Lane, from the name of the original occupant of the soil,
before whose cottage-door it was a cow-path.  A natural spring of soft
and pleasant water--a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula where the
Puritan settlement was made--had early induced Matthew Maule to build a
hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although somewhat too remote
from what was then the centre of the village.  In the growth of the
town, however, after some thirty or forty years, the site covered by
this rude hovel had become exceedingly desirable in the eyes of a
prominent and powerful personage, who asserted plausible claims to the
proprietorship of this and a large adjacent tract of land, on the
strength of a grant from the legislature.  Colonel Pyncheon, the
claimant, as we gather from whatever traits of him are preserved, was
characterized by an iron energy of purpose.  Matthew Maule, on the
other hand, though an obscure man, was stubborn in the defence of what
he considered his right; and, for several years, he succeeded in
protecting the acre or two of earth which, with his own toil, he had
hewn out of the primeval forest, to be his garden ground and homestead.
No written record of this dispute is known to be in existence.  Our
acquaintance with the whole subject is derived chiefly from tradition.
It would be bold, therefore, and possibly unjust, to venture a decisive
opinion as to its merits; although it appears to have been at least a
matter of doubt, whether Colonel Pyncheon's claim were not unduly
stretched, in order to make it cover the small metes and bounds of
Matthew Maule.  What greatly strengthens such a suspicion is the fact
that this controversy between two ill-matched antagonists--at a period,
moreover, laud it as we may, when personal influence had far more
weight than now--remained for years undecided, and came to a close only
with the death of the party occupying the disputed soil.  The mode of
his death, too, affects the mind differently, in our day, from what it
did a century and a half ago.  It was a death that blasted with strange
horror the humble name of the dweller in the cottage, and made it seem
almost a religious act to drive the plough over the little area of his
habitation, and obliterate his place and memory from among men.

Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of witchcraft.
He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion, which should teach
us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who
take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to
all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.
Clergymen, judges, statesmen,--the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of
their day stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to
applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably
deceived.  If any one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve
less blame than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with
which they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former
judicial massacres, but people of all ranks; their own equals,
brethren, and wives.  Amid the disorder of such various ruin, it is not
strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like Maule, should have
trodden the martyr's path to the hill of execution almost unremarked in
the throng of his fellow sufferers.  But, in after days, when the
frenzy of that hideous epoch had subsided, it was remembered how loudly
Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the general cry, to purge the land from
witchcraft; nor did it fail to be whispered, that there was an
invidious acrimony in the zeal with which he had sought the
condemnation of Matthew Maule.  It was well known that the victim had
recognized the bitterness of personal enmity in his persecutor's
conduct towards him, and that he declared himself hunted to death for
his spoil.  At the moment of execution--with the halter about his neck,
and while Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback, grimly gazing at the scene
Maule had addressed him from the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy, of
which history, as well as fireside tradition, has preserved the very
words.  "God," said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly
look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,--"God will give him
blood to drink!"  After the reputed wizard's death, his humble
homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon's grasp.  When
it was understood, however, that the Colonel intended to erect a family
mansion-spacious, ponderously framed of oaken timber, and calculated to
endure for many generations of his posterity over the spot first
covered by the log-built hut of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking
of the head among the village gossips.  Without absolutely expressing a
doubt whether the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and
integrity throughout the proceedings which have been sketched, they,
nevertheless, hinted that he was about to build his house over an
unquiet grave.  His home would include the home of the dead and buried
wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of
privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which
future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the
Pyncheon blood were to be born.  The terror and ugliness of Maule's
crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the freshly
plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and
melancholy house.  Why, then,--while so much of the soil around him was
bestrewn with the virgin forest leaves,--why should Colonel Pyncheon
prefer a site that had already been accurst?

But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned aside
from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the wizard's ghost,
or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however specious.  Had he
been told of a bad air, it might have moved him somewhat; but he was
ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground.  Endowed with
commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened
together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed
out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an
objection to it.  On the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which
a finer sensibility might have taught him, the Colonel, like most of
his breed and generation, was impenetrable.  He therefore dug his
cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his mansion, on the square of
earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years before, had first swept away
the fallen leaves.  It was a curious, and, as some people thought, an
ominous fact, that, very soon after the workmen began their operations,
the spring of water, above mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness
of its pristine quality.  Whether its sources were disturbed by the
depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the
bottom, it is certain that the water of Maule's Well, as it continued
to be called, grew hard and brackish.  Even such we find it now; and
any old woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of
intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there.

The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new
edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead gripe
the property of the soil had been wrested.  Not improbably he was the
best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought it
expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly to cast
aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist.  Nor was
it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact
character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest
penny, or, rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse
of his father's deadly enemy.  At all events, Thomas Maule became the
architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so
faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still holds
together.

Thus the great house was built.  Familiar as it stands in the writer's
recollection,--for it has been an object of curiosity with him from
boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of
a longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human
interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feudal castle,--familiar as it
stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more difficult
to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine.
The impression of its actual state, at this distance of a hundred and
sixty years, darkens inevitably through the picture which we would fain
give of its appearance on the morning when the Puritan magnate bade all
the town to be his guests.  A ceremony of consecration, festive as well
as religious, was now to be performed.  A prayer and discourse from the
Rev.  Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring of a psalm from the general
throat of the community, was to be made acceptable to the grosser sense
by ale, cider, wine, and brandy, in copious effusion, and, as some
authorities aver, by an ox, roasted whole, or at least, by the weight
and substance of an ox, in more manageable joints and sirloins.  The
carcass of a deer, shot within twenty miles, had supplied material for
the vast circumference of a pasty.  A codfish of sixty pounds, caught
in the bay, had been dissolved into the rich liquid of a chowder.   The
chimney of the new house, in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke,
impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes,
spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance.  The
mere smell of such festivity, making its way to everybody's nostrils,
was at once an invitation and an appetite.

Maule's Lane, or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to call
it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its
way to church.  All, as they approached, looked upward at the imposing
edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations
of mankind.  There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the
street, but in pride, not modesty.  Its whole visible exterior was
ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a
Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed
of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the
walls was overspread.  On every side the seven gables pointed sharply
towards the sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of
edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney.  The
many lattices, with their small, diamond-shaped panes, admitted the
sunlight into hall and chamber, while, nevertheless, the second story,
projecting far over the base, and itself retiring beneath the third,
threw a shadowy and thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms.  Carved
globes of wood were affixed under the jutting stories.  Little spiral
rods of iron beautified each of the seven peaks.  On the triangular
portion of the gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up
that very morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage
of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all
so bright.  All around were scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and
broken halves of bricks; these, together with the lately turned earth,
on which the grass had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression
of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to
make among men's daily interests.

The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a church-door,
was in the angle between the two front gables, and was covered by an
open porch, with benches beneath its shelter.  Under this arched
doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn threshold, now trod the
clergymen, the elders, the magistrates, the deacons, and whatever of
aristocracy there was in town or county.  Thither, too, thronged the
plebeian classes as freely as their betters, and in larger number.
Just within the entrance, however, stood two serving-men, pointing some
of the guests to the neighborhood of the kitchen and ushering others
into the statelier rooms,--hospitable alike to all, but still with a
scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each.  Velvet garments
sombre but rich, stiffly plaited ruffs and bands, embroidered gloves,
venerable beards, the mien and countenance of authority, made it easy
to distinguish the gentleman of worship, at that period, from the
tradesman, with his plodding air, or the laborer, in his leathern
jerkin, stealing awe-stricken into the house which he had perhaps
helped to build.

One inauspicious circumstance there was, which awakened a hardly
concealed displeasure in the breasts of a few of the more punctilious
visitors.  The founder of this stately mansion--a gentleman noted for
the square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor, ought surely to have
stood in his own hall, and to have offered the first welcome to so many
eminent personages as here presented themselves in honor of his solemn
festival.  He was as yet invisible; the most favored of the guests had
not beheld him.  This sluggishness on Colonel Pyncheon's part became
still more unaccountable, when the second dignitary of the province
made his appearance, and found no more ceremonious a reception.  The
lieutenant-governor, although his visit was one of the anticipated
glories of the day, had alighted from his horse, and assisted his lady
from her side-saddle, and crossed the Colonel's threshold, without
other greeting than that of the principal domestic.

This person--a gray-headed man, of quiet and most respectful
deportment--found it necessary to explain that his master still
remained in his study, or private apartment; on entering which, an hour
before, he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed.

"Do not you see, fellow," said the high-sheriff of the county, taking
the servant aside, "that this is no less a man than the
lieutenant-governor? Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that he
received letters from England this morning; and, in the perusal and
consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his
noticing it.  But he will be ill-pleased, I judge, if you suffer him to
neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers, and who may be
said to represent King William, in the absence of the governor himself.
Call your master instantly."

"Nay, please your worship," answered the man, in much perplexity, but
with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and severe
character of Colonel Pyncheon's domestic rule; "my master's orders were
exceeding strict; and, as your worship knows, he permits of no
discretion in the obedience of those who owe him service.  Let who list
open yonder door; I dare not, though the governor's own voice should
bid me do it!"

"Pooh, pooh, master high sheriff!" cried the lieutenant-governor, who
had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high enough in
station to play a little with his dignity.  "I will take the matter
into my own hands.  It is time that the good Colonel came forth to
greet his friends; else we shall be apt to suspect that he has taken a
sip too much of his Canary wine, in his extreme deliberation which cask
it were best to broach in honor of the day! But since he is so much
behindhand, I will give him a remembrancer myself!"

Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots as might
of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven gables, he
advanced to the door, which the servant pointed out, and made its new
panels reecho with a loud, free knock.  Then, looking round, with a
smile, to the spectators, he awaited a response.  As none came,
however, he knocked again, but with the same unsatisfactory result as
at first.  And now, being a trifle choleric in his temperament, the
lieutenant-governor uplifted the heavy hilt of his sword, wherewith he
so beat and banged upon the door, that, as some of the bystanders
whispered, the racket might have disturbed the dead.  Be that as it
might, it seemed to produce no awakening effect on Colonel Pyncheon.
When the sound subsided, the silence through the house was deep,
dreary, and oppressive, notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the
guests had already been loosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine
or spirits.

"Strange, forsooth!--very strange!" cried the lieutenant-governor,
whose smile was changed to a frown.  "But seeing that our host sets us
the good example of forgetting ceremony, I shall likewise throw it
aside, and make free to intrude on his privacy."

He tried the door, which yielded to his hand, and was flung wide open
by a sudden gust of wind that passed, as with a loud sigh, from the
outermost portal through all the passages and apartments of the new
house.  It rustled the silken garments of the ladies, and waved the
long curls of the gentlemen's wigs, and shook the window-hangings and
the curtains of the bedchambers; causing everywhere a singular stir,
which yet was more like a hush.  A shadow of awe and half-fearful
anticipation--nobody knew wherefore, nor of what--had all at once
fallen over the company.

They thronged, however, to the now open door, pressing the
lieutenant-governor, in the eagerness of their curiosity, into the room
in advance of them.  At the first glimpse they beheld nothing
extraordinary:  a handsomely furnished room, of moderate size, somewhat
darkened by curtains; books arranged on shelves; a large map on the
wall, and likewise a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, beneath which sat
the original Colonel himself, in an oaken elbow-chair, with a pen in
his hand.  Letters, parchments, and blank sheets of paper were on the
table before him.  He appeared to gaze at the curious crowd, in front
of which stood the lieutenant-governor; and there was a frown on his
dark and massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the boldness
that had impelled them into his private retirement.

A little boy--the Colonel's grandchild, and the only human being that
ever dared to be familiar with him--now made his way among the guests,
and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing halfway, he began to
shriek with terror.  The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree,
when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there
was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon's
stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was
saturated with it.  It was too late to give assistance.  The
iron-hearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and
strong-willed man was dead! Dead, in his new house! There is a
tradition, only worth alluding to as lending a tinge of superstitious
awe to a scene perhaps gloomy enough without it, that a voice spoke
loudly among the guests, the tones of which were like those of old
Matthew Maule, the executed wizard,--"God hath given him blood to
drink!"

Thus early had that one guest,--the only guest who is certain, at one
time or another, to find his way into every human dwelling,--thus early
had Death stepped across the threshold of the House of the Seven Gables!

Colonel Pyncheon's sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal of noise
in its day.  There were many rumors, some of which have vaguely drifted
down to the present time, how that appearances indicated violence; that
there were the marks of fingers on his throat, and the print of a
bloody hand on his plaited ruff; and that his peaked beard was
dishevelled, as if it had been fiercely clutched and pulled.  It was
averred, likewise, that the lattice window, near the Colonel's chair,
was open; and that, only a few minutes before the fatal occurrence, the
figure of a man had been seen clambering over the garden fence, in the
rear of the house.  But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of
this kind, which are sure to spring up around such an event as that now
related, and which, as in the present case, sometimes prolong
themselves for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where
the fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into the
earth.  For our own part, we allow them just as little credence as to
that other fable of the skeleton hand which the lieutenant-governor was
said to have seen at the Colonel's throat, but which vanished away, as
he advanced farther into the room.  Certain it is, however, that there
was a great consultation and dispute of doctors over the dead body.
One,--John Swinnerton by name,--who appears to have been a man of
eminence, upheld it, if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to
be a case of apoplexy.  His professional brethren, each for himself,
adopted various hypotheses, more or less plausible, but all dressed out
in a perplexing mystery of phrase, which, if it do not show a
bewilderment of mind in these erudite physicians, certainly causes it
in the unlearned peruser of their opinions.  The coroner's jury sat
upon the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an unassailable
verdict of "Sudden Death!"

It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been a serious
suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for implicating any
particular individual as the perpetrator.  The rank, wealth, and
eminent character of the deceased must have insured the strictest
scrutiny into every ambiguous circumstance.  As none such is on record,
it is safe to assume that none existed. Tradition,--which sometimes
brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild
babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now
congeals in newspapers,--tradition is responsible for all contrary
averments.  In Colonel Pyncheon's funeral sermon, which was printed,
and is still extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson enumerates, among the many
felicities of his distinguished parishioner's earthly career, the happy
seasonableness of his death.  His duties all performed,--the highest
prosperity attained,--his race and future generations fixed on a stable
basis, and with a stately roof to shelter them for centuries to
come,--what other upward step remained for this good man to take, save
the final step from earth to the golden gate of heaven! The pious
clergyman surely would not have uttered words like these had he in the
least suspected that the Colonel had been thrust into the other world
with the clutch of violence upon his throat.

The family of Colonel Pyncheon, at the epoch of his death, seemed
destined to as fortunate a permanence as can anywise consist with the
inherent instability of human affairs.  It might fairly be anticipated
that the progress of time would rather increase and ripen their
prosperity, than wear away and destroy it.  For, not only had his son
and heir come into immediate enjoyment of a rich estate, but there was
a claim through an Indian deed, confirmed by a subsequent grant of the
General Court, to a vast and as yet unexplored and unmeasured tract of
Eastern lands.  These possessions--for as such they might almost
certainly be reckoned--comprised the greater part of what is now known
as Waldo County, in the state of Maine, and were more extensive than
many a dukedom, or even a reigning prince's territory, on European
soil.  When the pathless forest that still covered this wild
principality should give place--as it inevitably must, though perhaps
not till ages hence--to the golden fertility of human culture, it would
be the source of incalculable wealth to the Pyncheon blood.  Had the
Colonel survived only a few weeks longer, it is probable that his great
political influence, and powerful connections at home and abroad, would
have consummated all that was necessary to render the claim available.
But, in spite of good Mr. Higginson's congratulatory eloquence, this
appeared to be the one thing which Colonel Pyncheon, provident and
sagacious as he was, had allowed to go at loose ends.  So far as the
prospective territory was concerned, he unquestionably died too soon.
His son lacked not merely the father's eminent position, but the talent
and force of character to achieve it: he could, therefore, effect
nothing by dint of political interest; and the bare justice or legality
of the claim was not so apparent, after the Colonel's decease, as it
had been pronounced in his lifetime.  Some connecting link had slipped
out of the evidence, and could not anywhere be found.

Efforts, it is true, were made by the Pyncheons, not only then, but at
various periods for nearly a hundred years afterwards, to obtain what
they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right.  But, in course of
time, the territory was partly regranted to more favored individuals,
and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers.  These last, if
they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed at the idea
of any man's asserting a right--on the strength of mouldy parchments,
signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead
and forgotten--to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested
from the wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil.  This impalpable
claim, therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from
generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance,
which all along characterized the Pyncheons.   It caused the poorest
member of the race to feel as if he inherited a kind of nobility, and
might yet come into the possession of princely wealth to support it.
In the better specimens of the breed, this peculiarity threw an ideal
grace over the hard material of human life, without stealing away any
truly valuable quality.  In the baser sort, its effect was to increase
the liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the victim of
a shadowy hope to remit all self-effort, while awaiting the realization
of his dreams.  Years and years after their claim had passed out of the
public memory, the Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the Colonel's
ancient map, which had been projected while Waldo County was still an
unbroken wilderness.   Where the old land surveyor had put down woods,
lakes, and rivers, they marked out the cleared spaces, and dotted the
villages and towns, and calculated the progressively increasing value
of the territory, as if there were yet a prospect of its ultimately
forming a princedom for themselves.

In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be some one
descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard, keen sense,
and practical energy, that had so remarkably distinguished the original
founder.  His character, indeed, might be traced all the way down, as
distinctly as if the Colonel himself, a little diluted, had been gifted
with a sort of intermittent immortality on earth.  At two or three
epochs, when the fortunes of the family were low, this representative
of hereditary qualities had made his appearance, and caused the
traditionary gossips of the town to whisper among themselves, "Here is
the old Pyncheon come again! Now the Seven Gables will be
new-shingled!"  From father to son, they clung to the ancestral house
with singular tenacity of home attachment.  For various reasons,
however, and from impressions often too vaguely founded to be put on
paper, the writer cherishes the belief that many, if not most, of the
successive proprietors of this estate were troubled with doubts as to
their moral right to hold it.  Of their legal tenure there could be no
question; but old Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward
from his own age to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep, all the
way, on the conscience of a Pyncheon.  If so, we are left to dispose of
the awful query, whether each inheritor of the property--conscious of
wrong, and failing to rectify it--did not commit anew the great guilt
of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities.  And
supposing such to be the case, would it not be a far truer mode of
expression to say of the Pyncheon family, that they inherited a great
misfortune, than the reverse?

We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down the
history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection with the
House of the Seven Gables; nor to show, as in a magic picture, how the
rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house
itself.  As regards its interior life, a large, dim looking-glass used
to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain within its
depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there,--the old
Colonel himself, and his many descendants, some in the garb of antique
babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or
saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age.  Had we the secret of that
mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its
revelations to our page.  But there was a story, for which it is
difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew
Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and
that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they
could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not
as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and
happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the
crisis of life's bitterest sorrow.  The popular imagination, indeed,
long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and
the wizard Maule; the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold
was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become a
part of the Pyncheon inheritance.  If one of the family did but gurgle
in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper, between
jest and earnest, "He has Maule's blood to drink!"  The sudden death of
a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar
to what have been related of the Colonel's exit, was held as giving
additional probability to the received opinion on this topic.  It was
considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance, that Colonel
Pyncheon's picture--in obedience, it was said, to a provision of his
will--remained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died.  Those
stern, immitigable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence, and
so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine of
the passing hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring
up and blossom there.  To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of
superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the
ghost of a dead progenitor--perhaps as a portion of his own
punishment--is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.

The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for the better part of two
centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has attended
most other New England families during the same period of time.
Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they nevertheless took
the general characteristics of the little community in which they
dwelt; a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and
home-loving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of
its sympathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals,
and, now and then, stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost
anywhere else.  During the Revolution, the Pyncheon of that epoch,
adopting the royal side, became a refugee; but repented, and made his
reappearance, just at the point of time to preserve the House of the
Seven Gables from confiscation.  For the last seventy years the most
noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest
calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent death--for
so it was adjudged--of one member of the family by the criminal act of
another.  Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had
brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased
Pyncheon.  The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but
either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some
lurking doubts in the breast of the executive, or, lastly--an argument
of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a
monarchy,--the high respectability and political influence of the
criminal's connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to
perpetual imprisonment.  This sad affair had chanced about thirty years
before the action of our story commences.  Latterly, there were rumors
(which few believed, and only one or two felt greatly interested in)
that this long-buried man was likely, for some reason or other, to be
summoned forth from his living tomb.

It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of this now
almost forgotten murder.  He was an old bachelor, and possessed of
great wealth, in addition to the house and real estate which
constituted what remained of the ancient Pyncheon property.  Being of
an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to
rummaging old records and hearkening to old traditions, he had brought
himself, it is averred, to the conclusion that Matthew Maule, the
wizard, had been foully wronged out of his homestead, if not out of his
life.  Such being the case, and he, the old bachelor, in possession of
the ill-gotten spoil,--with the black stain of blood sunken deep into
it, and still to be scented by conscientious nostrils,--the question
occurred, whether it were not imperative upon him, even at this late
hour, to make restitution to Maule's posterity.  To a man living so
much in the past, and so little in the present, as the secluded and
antiquarian old bachelor, a century and a half seemed not so vast a
period as to obviate the propriety of substituting right for wrong.  It
was the belief of those who knew him best, that he would positively
have taken the very singular step of giving up the House of the Seven
Gables to the representative of Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable
tumult which a suspicion of the old gentleman's project awakened among
his Pyncheon relatives.  Their exertions had the effect of suspending
his purpose; but it was feared that he would perform, after death, by
the operation of his last will, what he had so hardly been prevented
from doing in his proper lifetime.  But there is no one thing which men
so rarely do, whatever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath
patrimonial property away from their own blood.  They may love other
individuals far better than their relatives,--they may even cherish
dislike, or positive hatred, to the latter; but yet, in view of death,
the strong prejudice of propinquity revives, and impels the testator to
send down his estate in the line marked out by custom so immemorial
that it looks like nature.  In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the
energy of disease.  It was too powerful for the conscientious scruples
of the old bachelor; at whose death, accordingly, the mansion-house,
together with most of his other riches, passed into the possession of
his next legal representative.

This was a nephew, the cousin of the miserable young man who had been
convicted of the uncle's murder.  The new heir, up to the period of his
accession, was reckoned rather a dissipated youth, but had at once
reformed, and made himself an exceedingly respectable member of
society.   In fact, he showed more of the Pyncheon quality, and had won
higher eminence in the world, than any of his race since the time of
the original Puritan.  Applying himself in earlier manhood to the study
of the law, and having a natural tendency towards office, he had
attained, many years ago, to a judicial situation in some inferior
court, which gave him for life the very desirable and imposing title of
judge.  Later, he had engaged in politics, and served a part of two
terms in Congress, besides making a considerable figure in both
branches of the State legislature.   Judge Pyncheon was unquestionably
an honor to his race.  He had built himself a country-seat within a few
miles of his native town, and there spent such portions of his time as
could be spared from public service in the display of every grace and
virtue--as a newspaper phrased it, on the eve of an election--befitting
the Christian, the good citizen, the horticulturist, and the gentleman.

There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the glow of
the Judge's prosperity.  In respect to natural increase, the breed had
not thriven; it appeared rather to be dying out.  The only members of
the family known to be extant were, first, the Judge himself, and a
single surviving son, who was now travelling in Europe; next, the
thirty years' prisoner, already alluded to, and a sister of the latter,
who occupied, in an extremely retired manner, the House of the Seven
Gables, in which she had a life-estate by the will of the old bachelor.
She was understood to be wretchedly poor, and seemed to make it her
choice to remain so; inasmuch as her affluent cousin, the Judge, had
repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life, either in the old
mansion or his own modern residence.  The last and youngest Pyncheon
was a little country-girl of seventeen, the daughter of another of the
Judge's cousins, who had married a young woman of no family or
property, and died early and in poor circumstances.  His widow had
recently taken another husband.

As for Matthew Maule's posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct.
For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the
Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had
suffered so unjust a death.  To all appearance, they were a quiet,
honest, well-meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against
individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them; or
if, at their own fireside, they transmitted from father to child any
hostile recollection of the wizard's fate and their lost patrimony, it
was never acted upon, nor openly expressed.  Nor would it have been
singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the Seven Gables
was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was rightfully
their own.  There is something so massive, stable, and almost
irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank
and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a
right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few
poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in
their secret minds.  Such is the case now, after so many ancient
prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in
ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be
proud, and the low were content to be abased.  Thus the Maules, at all
events, kept their resentments within their own breasts.  They were
generally poverty-stricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with
unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or
following the sea, as sailors before the mast; living here and there
about the town, in hired tenements, and coming finally to the almshouse
as the natural home of their old age.  At last, after creeping, as it
were, for such a length of time along the utmost verge of the opaque
puddle of obscurity, they had taken that downright plunge which, sooner
or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian.
For thirty years past, neither town-record, nor gravestone, nor the
directory, nor the knowledge or memory of man, bore any trace of
Matthew Maule's descendants.  His blood might possibly exist elsewhere;
here, where its lowly current could be traced so far back, it had
ceased to keep an onward course.

So long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out
from other men--not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an
effect that was felt rather than spoken of--by an hereditary character
of reserve.  Their companions, or those who endeavored to become such,
grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules, within the sanctity
or the spell of which, in spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness
and good-fellowship, it was impossible for any man to step.  It was
this indefinable peculiarity, perhaps, that, by insulating them from
human aid, kept them always so unfortunate in life.  It certainly
operated to prolong in their case, and to confirm to them as their only
inheritance, those feelings of repugnance and superstitious terror with
which the people of the town, even after awakening from their frenzy,
continued to regard the memory of the reputed witches.  The mantle, or
rather the ragged cloak, of old Matthew Maule had fallen upon his
children.  They were half believed to inherit mysterious attributes;
the family eye was said to possess strange power.  Among other
good-for-nothing properties and privileges, one was especially assigned
them,--that of exercising an influence over people's dreams.  The
Pyncheons, if all stories were true, haughtily as they bore themselves
in the noonday streets of their native town, were no better than
bond-servants to these plebeian Maules, on entering the topsy-turvy
commonwealth of sleep.  Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavor to
reduce these alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting
them as altogether fabulous.

A descriptive paragraph or two, treating of the seven-gabled mansion in
its more recent aspect, will bring this preliminary chapter to a close.
The street in which it upreared its venerable peaks has long ceased to
be a fashionable quarter of the town; so that, though the old edifice
was surrounded by habitations of modern date, they were mostly small,
built entirely of wood, and typical of the most plodding uniformity of
common life.   Doubtless, however, the whole story of human existence
may be latent in each of them, but with no picturesqueness, externally,
that can attract the imagination or sympathy to seek it there.  But as
for the old structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its
boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered
chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest
part of its reality.  So much of mankind's varied experience had passed
there,--so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed,--that
the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart.  It was
itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of
rich and sombre reminiscences.

The deep projection of the second story gave the house such a
meditative look, that you could not pass it without the idea that it
had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon.  In
front, just on the edge of the unpaved sidewalk, grew the Pyncheon Elm,
which, in reference to such trees as one usually meets with, might well
be termed gigantic.  It had been planted by a great-grandson of the
first Pyncheon, and, though now four-score years of age, or perhaps
nearer a hundred, was still in its strong and broad maturity, throwing
its shadow from side to side of the street, overtopping the seven
gables, and sweeping the whole black roof with its pendant foliage.  It
gave beauty to the old edifice, and seemed to make it a part of nature.
The street having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable
was now precisely on a line with it.  On either side extended a ruinous
wooden fence of open lattice-work, through which could be seen a grassy
yard, and, especially in the angles of the building, an enormous
fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to
say, two or three feet long.  Behind the house there appeared to be a
garden, which undoubtedly had once been extensive, but was now
infringed upon by other enclosures, or shut in by habitations and
outbuildings that stood on another street.  It would be an omission,
trifling, indeed, but unpardonable, were we to forget the green moss
that had long since gathered over the projections of the windows, and
on the slopes of the roof nor must we fail to direct the reader's eye
to a crop, not of weeds, but flower-shrubs, which were growing aloft in
the air, not a great way from the chimney, in the nook between two of
the gables.  They were called Alice's Posies.  The tradition was, that
a certain Alice Pyncheon had flung up the seeds, in sport, and that the
dust of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed a kind of
soil for them, out of which they grew, when Alice had long been in her
grave.  However the flowers might have come there, it was both sad and
sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself this desolate, decaying,
gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the
ever-returning Summer did her best to gladden it with tender beauty,
and grew melancholy in the effort.

There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed, but which, we
greatly fear, may damage any picturesque and romantic impression which
we have been willing to throw over our sketch of this respectable
edifice.  In the front gable, under the impending brow of the second
story, and contiguous to the street, was a shop-door, divided
horizontally in the midst, and with a window for its upper segment,
such as is often seen in dwellings of a somewhat ancient date.  This
same shop-door had been a subject of no slight mortification to the
present occupant of the august Pyncheon House, as well as to some of
her predecessors.  The matter is disagreeably delicate to handle; but,
since the reader must needs be let into the secret, he will please to
understand, that, about a century ago, the head of the Pyncheons found
himself involved in serious financial difficulties.  The fellow
(gentleman, as he styled himself) can hardly have been other than a
spurious interloper; for, instead of seeking office from the king or
the royal governor, or urging his hereditary claim to Eastern lands, he
bethought himself of no better avenue to wealth than by cutting a
shop-door through the side of his ancestral residence.  It was the
custom of the time, indeed, for merchants to store their goods and
transact business in their own dwellings.  But there was something
pitifully small in this old Pyncheon's mode of setting about his
commercial operations; it was whispered, that, with his own hands, all
beruffled as they were, he used to give change for a shilling, and
would turn a half-penny twice over, to make sure that it was a good
one.  Beyond all question, he had the blood of a petty huckster in his
veins, through whatever channel it may have found its way there.

Immediately on his death, the shop-door had been locked, bolted, and
barred, and, down to the period of our story, had probably never once
been opened.  The old counter, shelves, and other fixtures of the
little shop remained just as he had left them.  It used to be affirmed,
that the dead shop-keeper, in a white wig, a faded velvet coat, an
apron at his waist, and his ruffles carefully turned back from his
wrists, might be seen through the chinks of the shutters, any night of
the year, ransacking his till, or poring over the dingy pages of his
day-book.  From the look of unutterable woe upon his face, it appeared
to be his doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts
balance.

And now--in a very humble way, as will be seen--we proceed to open our
narrative.




                        II The Little Shop-Window


IT still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon--we will not say awoke, it being doubtful whether the poor
lady had so much as closed her eyes during the brief night of
midsummer--but, at all events, arose from her solitary pillow, and
began what it would be mockery to term the adornment of her person.
Far from us be the indecorum of assisting, even in imagination, at a
maiden lady's toilet! Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah at
the threshold of her chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, to note some
of the heavy sighs that labored from her bosom, with little restraint
as to their lugubrious depth and volume of sound, inasmuch as they
could be audible to nobody save a disembodied listener like ourself.
The Old Maid was alone in the old house.  Alone, except for a certain
respectable and orderly young man, an artist in the daguerreotype line,
who, for about three months back, had been a lodger in a remote
gable,--quite a house by itself, indeed,--with locks, bolts, and oaken
bars on all the intervening doors.  Inaudible, consequently, were poor
Miss Hepzibah's gusty sighs.  Inaudible the creaking joints of her
stiffened knees, as she knelt down by the bedside.  And inaudible, too,
by mortal ear, but heard with all-comprehending love and pity in the
farthest heaven, that almost agony of prayer--now whispered, now a
groan, now a struggling silence--wherewith she besought the Divine
assistance through the day! Evidently, this is to be a day of more than
ordinary trial to Miss Hepzibah, who, for above a quarter of a century
gone by, has dwelt in strict seclusion, taking no part in the business
of life, and just as little in its intercourse and pleasures.  Not with
such fervor prays the torpid recluse, looking forward to the cold,
sunless, stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerable
yesterdays.

The maiden lady's devotions are concluded.  Will she now issue forth
over the threshold of our story?  Not yet, by many moments.  First,
every drawer in the tall, old-fashioned bureau is to be opened, with
difficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic jerks then, all must
close again, with the same fidgety reluctance.  There is a rustling of
stiff silks; a tread of backward and forward footsteps to and fro
across the chamber.  We suspect Miss Hepzibah, moreover, of taking a
step upward into a chair, in order to give heedful regard to her
appearance on all sides, and at full length, in the oval, dingy-framed
toilet-glass, that hangs above her table.  Truly! well, indeed! who
would have thought it! Is all this precious time to be lavished on the
matutinal repair and beautifying of an elderly person, who never goes
abroad, whom nobody ever visits, and from whom, when she shall have
done her utmost, it were the best charity to turn one's eyes another
way?

Now she is almost ready.  Let us pardon her one other pause; for it is
given to the sole sentiment, or, we might better say,--heightened and
rendered intense, as it has been, by sorrow and seclusion,--to the
strong passion of her life.  We heard the turning of a key in a small
lock; she has opened a secret drawer of an escritoire, and is probably
looking at a certain miniature, done in Malbone's most perfect style,
and representing a face worthy of no less delicate a pencil.  It was
once our good fortune to see this picture.  It is a likeness of a young
man, in a silken dressing-gown of an old fashion, the soft richness of
which is well adapted to the countenance of reverie, with its full,
tender lips, and beautiful eyes, that seem to indicate not so much
capacity of thought, as gentle and voluptuous emotion.  Of the
possessor of such features we shall have a right to ask nothing, except
that he would take the rude world easily, and make himself happy in it.
Can it have been an early lover of Miss Hepzibah? No; she never had a
lover--poor thing, how could she?--nor ever knew, by her own
experience, what love technically means.  And yet, her undying faith
and trust, her fresh remembrance, and continual devotedness towards the
original of that miniature, have been the only substance for her heart
to feed upon.

She seems to have put aside the miniature, and is standing again before
the toilet-glass.  There are tears to be wiped off.  A few more
footsteps to and fro; and here, at last,--with another pitiful sigh,
like a gust of chill, damp wind out of a long-closed vault, the door of
which has accidentally been set, ajar--here comes Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon! Forth she steps into the dusky, time-darkened passage; a tall
figure, clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling her
way towards the stairs like a near-sighted person, as in truth she is.

The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the horizon, was ascending
nearer and nearer to its verge.  A few clouds, floating high upward,
caught some of the earliest light, and threw down its golden gleam on
the windows of all the houses in the street, not forgetting the House
of the Seven Gables, which--many such sunrises as it had
witnessed--looked cheerfully at the present one.  The reflected
radiance served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangement
of the room which Hepzibah entered, after descending the stairs.  It
was a low-studded room, with a beam across the ceiling, panelled with
dark wood, and having a large chimney-piece, set round with pictured
tiles, but now closed by an iron fire-board, through which ran the
funnel of a modern stove.  There was a carpet on the floor, originally
of rich texture, but so worn and faded in these latter years that its
once brilliant figure had quite vanished into one indistinguishable
hue.  In the way of furniture, there were two tables:  one, constructed
with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede;
the other, most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so
apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time
the ancient tea-table had stood upon them.  Half a dozen chairs stood
about the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for
the discomfort of the human person that they were irksome even to
sight, and conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of society
to which they could have been adapted.  One exception there was,
however, in a very antique elbow-chair, with a high back, carved
elaborately in oak, and a roomy depth within its arms, that made up, by
its spacious comprehensiveness, for the lack of any of those artistic
curves which abound in a modern chair.

As for ornamental articles of furniture, we recollect but two, if such
they may be called.  One was a map of the Pyncheon territory at the
eastward, not engraved, but the handiwork of some skilful old
draughtsman, and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians and
wild beasts, among which was seen a lion; the natural history of the
region being as little known as its geography, which was put down most
fantastically awry.  The other adornment was the portrait of old
Colonel Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the stern features
of a Puritanic-looking personage, in a skull-cap, with a laced band and
a grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the other
uplifting an iron sword-hilt.  The latter object, being more
successfully depicted by the artist, stood out in far greater
prominence than the sacred volume.  Face to face with this picture, on
entering the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came to a pause;
regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion of the brow,
which, by people who did not know her, would probably have been
interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will.  But it was
no such thing.  She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage,
of which only a far-descended and time-stricken virgin could be
susceptible; and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of her
near-sightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her powers of vision
as to substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one.

We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor
Hepzibah's brow.  Her scowl,--as the world, or such part of it as
sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly
persisted in calling it,--her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill
office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor
does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dim
looking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown with its
ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression almost as
unjustly as the world did.  "How miserably cross I look!" she must
often have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herself
so, by a sense of inevitable doom.  But her heart never frowned.  It
was naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and
palpitations; all of which weaknesses it retained, while her visage was
growing so perversely stern, and even fierce.  Nor had Hepzibah ever
any hardihood, except what came from the very warmest nook in her
affections.

All this time, however, we are loitering faintheartedly on the
threshold of our story.  In very truth, we have an invincible
reluctance to disclose what Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was about to do.

It has already been observed, that, in the basement story of the gable
fronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor, nearly a century ago, had
fitted up a shop.  Ever since the old gentleman retired from trade, and
fell asleep under his coffin-lid, not only the shop-door, but the inner
arrangements, had been suffered to remain unchanged; while the dust of
ages gathered inch-deep over the shelves and counter, and partly filled
an old pair of scales, as if it were of value enough to be weighed.  It
treasured itself up, too, in the half-open till, where there still
lingered a base sixpence, worth neither more nor less than the
hereditary pride which had here been put to shame.  Such had been the
state and condition of the little shop in old Hepzibah's childhood,
when she and her brother used to play at hide-and-seek in its forsaken
precincts.  So it had remained, until within a few days past.

But now, though the shop-window was still closely curtained from the
public gaze, a remarkable change had taken place in its interior.  The
rich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost a long ancestral
succession of spiders their life's labor to spin and weave, had been
carefully brushed away from the ceiling.  The counter, shelves, and
floor had all been scoured, and the latter was overstrewn with fresh
blue sand.  The brown scales, too, had evidently undergone rigid
discipline, in an unavailing effort to rub off the rust, which, alas!
had eaten through and through their substance.  Neither was the little
old shop any longer empty of merchantable goods.  A curious eye,
privileged to take an account of stock and investigate behind the
counter, would have discovered a barrel, yea, two or three barrels and
half ditto,--one containing flour, another apples, and a third,
perhaps, Indian meal.  There was likewise a square box of pine-wood,
full of soap in bars; also, another of the same size, in which were
tallow candles, ten to the pound.  A small stock of brown sugar, some
white beans and split peas, and a few other commodities of low price,
and such as are constantly in demand, made up the bulkier portion of
the merchandise.  It might have been taken for a ghostly or
phantasmagoric reflection of the old shop-keeper Pyncheon's shabbily
provided shelves, save that some of the articles were of a description
and outward form which could hardly have been known in his day.  For
instance, there was a glass pickle-jar, filled with fragments of
Gibraltar rock; not, indeed, splinters of the veritable stone
foundation of the famous fortress, but bits of delectable candy, neatly
done up in white paper.  Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his
world-renowned dance, in gingerbread.  A party of leaden dragoons were
galloping along one of the shelves, in equipments and uniform of modern
cut; and there were some sugar figures, with no strong resemblance to
the humanity of any epoch, but less unsatisfactorily representing our
own fashions than those of a hundred years ago.  Another phenomenon,
still more strikingly modern, was a package of lucifer matches, which,
in old times, would have been thought actually to borrow their
instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet.

In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was
incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures
of the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew
the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set of
customers.  Who could this bold adventurer be?  And, of all places in
the world, why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the scene
of his commercial speculations?

We return to the elderly maiden.  She at length withdrew her eyes from
the dark countenance of the Colonel's portrait, heaved a sigh,--indeed,
her breast was a very cave of Aolus that morning,--and stept across the
room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women.  Passing
through an intervening passage, she opened a door that communicated
with the shop, just now so elaborately described.  Owing to the
projection of the upper story--and still more to the thick shadow of
the Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front of the
gable--the twilight, here, was still as much akin to night as morning.
Another heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moment's pause on the
threshold, peering towards the window with her near-sighted scowl, as
if frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself into
the shop.  The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the
movement, were really quite startling.

Nervously--in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say--she began to busy
herself in arranging some children's playthings, and other little
wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window.  In the aspect of this
dark-arrayed, pale-faced, ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragic
character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness
of her employment.  It seemed a queer anomaly, that so gaunt and dismal
a personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did not
vanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on
perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to
tempt little boys into her premises!  Yet such is undoubtedly her
object.  Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but
with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the
dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an
elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread.  There,
again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different
ways, and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most
difficult obscurity that it can find.  Heaven help our poor old
Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position!
As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, in
quest of the absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more
inclined to shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must
needs turn aside and laugh at her.  For here,--and if we fail to
impress it suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of
the theme, here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest that
occur in ordinary life.  It was the final throe of what called itself
old gentility.  A lady--who had fed herself from childhood with the
shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was
that a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for
bread,--this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain
to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank.  Poverty, treading
closely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last.  She
must earn her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss
Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the
patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social
life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.  The tragedy is enacted
with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday,
and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary
noble sinks below his order.  More deeply; since, with us, rank is the
grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no
spiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly along
with them.  And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough to
introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat
for a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate.  Let us
behold, in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial, lady--two hundred years old,
on this side of the water, and thrice as many on the other,--with her
antique portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions,
and her claim, as joint heiress, to that princely territory at the
eastward, no longer a wilderness, but a populous fertility,--born, too,
in Pyncheon Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the Pyncheon House,
where she has spent all her days,--reduced.  Now, in that very house,
to be the hucksteress of a cent-shop.

This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the only resource of
women, in circumstances at all similar to those of our unfortunate
recluse.  With her near-sightedness, and those tremulous fingers of
hers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be a seamstress;
although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited some of the
most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework.  A school for little
children had been often in her thoughts; and, at one time, she had
begun a review of her early studies in the New England Primer, with a
view to prepare herself for the office of instructress.  But the love
of children had never been quickened in Hepzibah's heart, and was now
torpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of the
neighborhood from her chamber-window, and doubted whether she could
tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them.  Besides, in our day,
the very ABC has become a science greatly too abstruse to be any longer
taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter.  A modern child could
teach old Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach the child.
So--with many a cold, deep heart-quake at the idea of at last coming
into sordid contact with the world, from which she had so long kept
aloof, while every added day of seclusion had rolled another stone
against the cavern door of her hermitage--the poor thing bethought
herself of the ancient shop-window, the rusty scales, and dusty till.
She might have held back a little longer; but another circumstance, not
yet hinted at, had somewhat hastened her decision.  Her humble
preparations, therefore, were duly made, and the enterprise was now to
be commenced.  Nor was she entitled to complain of any remarkable
singularity in her fate; for, in the town of her nativity, we might
point to several little shops of a similar description, some of them in
houses as ancient as that of the Seven Gables; and one or two, it may
be, where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the counter, as grim an
image of family pride as Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon herself.

It was overpoweringly ridiculous,--we must honestly confess it,--the
deportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for the
public eye. She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if she
conceived some bloody-minded villain to be watching behind the
elm-tree, with intent to take her life. Stretching out her long, lank
arm, she put a paper of pearl-buttons, a jew's-harp, or whatever the
small article might be, in its destined place, and straightway vanished
back into the dusk, as if the world need never hope for another glimpse
of her. It might have been fancied, indeed, that she expected to
minister to the wants of the community unseen, like a disembodied
divinity or enchantress, holding forth her bargains to the reverential
and awe-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But Hepzibah had no
such flattering dream. She was well aware that she must ultimately come
forward, and stand revealed in her proper individuality; but, like
other sensitive persons, she could not bear to be observed in the
gradual process, and chose rather to flash forth on the world's
astonished gaze at once.

The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed.  The sunshine
might now be seen stealing down the front of the opposite house, from
the windows of which came a reflected gleam, struggling through the
boughs of the elm-tree, and enlightening the interior of the shop more
distinctly than heretofore.  The town appeared to be waking up.   A
baker's cart had already rattled through the street, chasing away the
latest vestige of night's sanctity with the jingle-jangle of its
dissonant bells.  A milkman was distributing the contents of his cans
from door to door; and the harsh peal of a fisherman's conch shell was
heard far off, around the corner.  None of these tokens escaped
Hepzibah's notice.  The moment had arrived.  To delay longer would be
only to lengthen out her misery.  Nothing remained, except to take down
the bar from the shop-door, leaving the entrance free--more than
free--welcome, as if all were household friends--to every passer-by,
whose eyes might be attracted by the commodities at the window.  This
last act Hepzibah now performed, letting the bar fall with what smote
upon her excited nerves as a most astounding clatter.  Then--as if the
only barrier betwixt herself and the world had been thrown down, and a
flood of evil consequences would come tumbling through the gap--she
fled into the inner parlor, threw herself into the ancestral
elbow-chair, and wept.

Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer, who
endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances,
in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that so much of the
mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos
which life anywhere supplies to him.  What tragic dignity, for example,
can be wrought into a scene like this! How can we elevate our history
of retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most
prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce--not a young and
lovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered
by affliction--but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a
long-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her
head! Her visage is not even ugly.  It is redeemed from insignificance
only by the contraction of her eyebrows into a near-sighted scowl.
And, finally, her great life-trial seems to be, that, after sixty years
of idleness, she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by
setting up a shop in a small way.  Nevertheless, if we look through all
the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of
something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow.
Life is made up of marble and mud.  And, without all the deeper trust
in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect
the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron
countenance of fate.  What is called poetic insight is the gift of
discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty
and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.




                         III The First Customer


MISS HEPZIBAH PYNCHEON sat in the oaken elbow-chair, with her hands
over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the heart which
most persons have experienced, when the image of hope itself seems
ponderously moulded of lead, on the eve of an enterprise at once
doubtful and momentous.  She was suddenly startled by the tinkling
alarum--high, sharp, and irregular--of a little bell.  The maiden lady
arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at cock-crow; for she was an
enslaved spirit, and this the talisman to which she owed obedience.
This little bell,--to speak in plainer terms,--being fastened over the
shop-door, was so contrived as to vibrate by means of a steel spring,
and thus convey notice to the inner regions of the house when any
customer should cross the threshold.  Its ugly and spiteful little din
(heard now for the first time, perhaps, since Hepzibah's periwigged
predecessor had retired from trade) at once set every nerve of her body
in responsive and tumultuous vibration.  The crisis was upon her! Her
first customer was at the door!

Without giving herself time for a second thought, she rushed into the
shop, pale, wild, desperate in gesture and expression, scowling
portentously, and looking far better qualified to do fierce battle with
a housebreaker than to stand smiling behind the counter, bartering
small wares for a copper recompense.  Any ordinary customer, indeed,
would have turned his back and fled.  And yet there was nothing fierce
in Hepzibah's poor old heart; nor had she, at the moment, a single
bitter thought against the world at large, or one individual man or
woman.  She wished them all well, but wished, too, that she herself
were done with them, and in her quiet grave.

The applicant, by this time, stood within the doorway.  Coming freshly,
as he did, out of the morning light, he appeared to have brought some
of its cheery influences into the shop along with him.  It was a
slender young man, not more than one or two and twenty years old, with
rather a grave and thoughtful expression for his years, but likewise a
springy alacrity and vigor.  These qualities were not only perceptible,
physically, in his make and motions, but made themselves felt almost
immediately in his character.  A brown beard, not too silken in its
texture, fringed his chin, but as yet without completely hiding it; he
wore a short mustache, too, and his dark, high-featured countenance
looked all the better for these natural ornaments.  As for his dress,
it was of the simplest kind; a summer sack of cheap and ordinary
material, thin checkered pantaloons, and a straw hat, by no means of
the finest braid.  Oak Hall might have supplied his entire equipment.
He was chiefly marked as a gentleman--if such, indeed, he made any
claim to be--by the rather remarkable whiteness and nicety of his clean
linen.

He met the scowl of old Hepzibah without apparent alarm, as having
heretofore encountered it and found it harmless.

"So, my dear Miss Pyncheon," said the daguerreotypist,--for it was that
sole other occupant of the seven-gabled mansion,--"I am glad to see
that you have not shrunk from your good purpose.  I merely look in to
offer my best wishes, and to ask if I can assist you any further in
your preparations."

People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the
world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be only
the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the simplest
expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy.  So it proved
with poor Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young man's smile,--looking
so much the brighter on a thoughtful face,--and heard his kindly tone,
she broke first into a hysteric giggle and then began to sob.

"Ah, Mr. Holgrave," cried she, as soon as she could speak, "I never can
go through with it! Never, never, never! I wish I were dead, and in the
old family tomb, with all my forefathers! With my father, and my
mother, and my sister!  Yes, and with my brother, who had far better
find me there than here! The world is too chill and hard,--and I am too
old, and too feeble, and too hopeless!"

"Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah," said the young man quietly, "these
feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are once fairly in
the midst of your enterprise.  They are unavoidable at this moment,
standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and
peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as
unreal as the giants and ogres of a child's story-book.  I find nothing
so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance
the instant one actually grapples with it.  So it will be with what you
think so terrible."

"But I am a woman!" said Hepzibah piteously.  "I was going to say, a
lady,--but I consider that as past."

"Well; no matter if it be past!" answered the artist, a strange gleam
of half-hidden sarcasm flashing through the kindliness of his manner.
"Let it go! You are the better without it.  I speak frankly, my dear
Miss Pyncheon!--for are we not friends? I look upon this as one of the
fortunate days of your life.  It ends an epoch and begins one.
Hitherto, the life-blood has been gradually chilling in your veins as
you sat aloof, within your circle of gentility, while the rest of the
world was fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or
another.  Henceforth, you will at least have the sense of healthy and
natural effort for a purpose, and of lending your strength be it great
or small--to the united struggle of mankind.  This is success,--all the
success that anybody meets with!"

"It is natural enough, Mr. Holgrave, that you should have ideas like
these," rejoined Hepzibah, drawing up her gaunt figure with slightly
offended dignity.  "You are a man, a young man, and brought up, I
suppose, as almost everybody is nowadays, with a view to seeking your
fortune.  But I was born a lady, and have always lived one; no matter
in what narrowness of means, always a lady."

"But I was not born a gentleman; neither have I lived like one," said
Holgrave, slightly smiling; "so, my dear madam, you will hardly expect
me to sympathize with sensibilities of this kind; though, unless I
deceive myself, I have some imperfect comprehension of them. These
names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the
world, and conferred privileges, desirable or otherwise, on those
entitled to bear them. In the present--and still more in the future
condition of society-they imply, not privilege, but restriction!"

"These are new notions," said the old gentlewoman, shaking her head.
"I shall never understand them; neither do I wish it."

"We will cease to speak of them, then," replied the artist, with a
friendlier smile than his last one, "and I will leave you to feel
whether it is not better to be a true woman than a lady.  Do you really
think, Miss Hepzibah, that any lady of your family has ever done a more
heroic thing, since this house was built, than you are performing in it
to-day? Never; and if the Pyncheons had always acted so nobly, I doubt
whether an old wizard Maule's anathema, of which you told me once,
would have had much weight with Providence against them."

"Ah!--no, no!" said Hepzibah, not displeased at this allusion to the
sombre dignity of an inherited curse.  "If old Maule's ghost, or a
descendant of his, could see me behind the counter to-day, he would
call it the fulfillment of his worst wishes.  But I thank you for your
kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my utmost to be a good shop-keeper."

"Pray do" said Holgrave, "and let me have the pleasure of being your
first customer.  I am about taking a walk to the seashore, before going
to my rooms, where I misuse Heaven's blessed sunshine by tracing out
human features through its agency.  A few of those biscuits, dipt in
sea-water, will be just what I need for breakfast.  What is the price
of half a dozen?"

"Let me be a lady a moment longer," replied Hepzibah, with a manner of
antique stateliness to which a melancholy smile lent a kind of grace.
She put the biscuits into his hand, but rejected the compensation.  "A
Pyncheon must not, at all events under her forefathers' roof, receive
money for a morsel of bread from her only friend!"

Holgrave took his departure, leaving her, for the moment, with spirits
not quite so much depressed.  Soon, however, they had subsided nearly
to their former dead level.  With a beating heart, she listened to the
footsteps of early passengers, which now began to be frequent along the
street.  Once or twice they seemed to linger; these strangers, or
neighbors, as the case might be, were looking at the display of toys
and petty commodities in Hepzibah's shop-window.  She was doubly
tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame that strange and
unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because
the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window
was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it
might have been.  It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her
shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or
substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked.  So
she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was
spoiled by it; not recognizing that it was the nervousness of the
juncture, and her own native squeamishness as an old maid, that wrought
all the seeming mischief.

Anon, there was an encounter, just at the door-step, betwixt two
laboring men, as their rough voices denoted them to be.  After some
slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to notice the
shop-window, and directed the other's attention to it.

"See here!" cried he; "what do you think of this? Trade seems to be
looking up in Pyncheon Street!"

"Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure!" exclaimed the other.  "In
the old Pyncheon House, and underneath the Pyncheon Elm! Who would have
thought it? Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop!"

"Will she make it go, think you, Dixey?" said his friend.  "I don't
call it a very good stand.  There's another shop just round the corner."

"Make it go!" cried Dixey, with a most contemptuous expression, as if
the very idea were impossible to be conceived.  "Not a bit of it! Why,
her face--I've seen it, for I dug her garden for her one year--her face
is enough to frighten the Old Nick himself, if he had ever so great a
mind to trade with her.  People can't stand it, I tell you! She scowls
dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure ugliness of temper."

"Well, that's not so much matter," remarked the other man.  "These
sour-tempered folks are mostly handy at business, and know pretty well
what they are about.  But, as you say, I don't think she'll do much.
This business of keeping cent-shops is overdone, like all other kinds
of trade, handicraft, and bodily labor.  I know it, to my cost! My wife
kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay."

"Poor business!" responded Dixey, in a tone as if he were shaking his
head,--"poor business."

For some reason or other, not very easy to analyze, there had hardly
been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the matter as
what thrilled Hepzibah's heart on overhearing the above conversation.
The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important; it
seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the false light of her
self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared not look at it.  She
was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and idle effect that her
setting up shop--an event of such breathless interest to
herself--appeared to have upon the public, of which these two men were
the nearest representatives.  A glance; a passing word or two; a coarse
laugh; and she was doubtless forgotten before they turned the corner.
They cared nothing for her dignity, and just as little for her
degradation.  Then, also, the augury of ill-success, uttered from the
sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her half-dead hope like a clod
into a grave.  The man's wife had already tried the same experiment,
and failed! How could the born lady--the recluse of half a lifetime,
utterly unpractised in the world, at sixty years of age,--how could she
ever dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar, keen, busy, hackneyed
New England woman had lost five dollars on her little outlay! Success
presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild
hallucination.

Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad,
unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing the
great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers.  So many and so
magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops, drygoods stores,
with their immense panes of plate-glass, their gorgeous fixtures, their
vast and complete assortments of merchandise, in which fortunes had
been invested; and those noble mirrors at the farther end of each
establishment, doubling all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista
of unrealities! On one side of the street this splendid bazaar, with a
multitude of perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing,
and measuring out the goods.  On the other, the dusky old House of the
Seven Gables, with the antiquated shop-window under its projecting
story, and Hepzibah herself, in a gown of rusty black silk, behind the
counter, scowling at the world as it went by!  This mighty contrast
thrust itself forward as a fair expression of the odds against which
she was to begin her struggle for a subsistence.  Success?
Preposterous! She would never think of it again! The house might just
as well be buried in an eternal fog while all other houses had the
sunshine on them; for not a foot would ever cross the threshold, nor a
hand so much as try the door!

But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled as if
it were bewitched.  The old gentlewoman's heart seemed to be attached
to the same steel spring, for it went through a series of sharp jerks,
in unison with the sound.  The door was thrust open, although no human
form was perceptible on the other side of the half-window.  Hepzibah,
nevertheless, stood at a gaze, with her hands clasped, looking very
much as if she had summoned up an evil spirit, and were afraid, yet
resolved, to hazard the encounter.

"Heaven help me!" she groaned mentally.  "Now is my hour of need!"

The door, which moved with difficulty on its creaking and rusty hinges,
being forced quite open, a square and sturdy little urchin became
apparent, with cheeks as red as an apple.  He was clad rather shabbily
(but, as it seemed, more owing to his mother's carelessness than his
father's poverty), in a blue apron, very wide and short trousers, shoes
somewhat out at the toes, and a chip hat, with the frizzles of his
curly hair sticking through its crevices.  A book and a small slate,
under his arm, indicated that he was on his way to school.  He stared
at Hepzibah a moment, as an elder customer than himself would have been
likely enough to do, not knowing what to make of the tragic attitude
and queer scowl wherewith she regarded him.

"Well, child," said she, taking heart at sight of a personage so little
formidable,--"well, my child, what did you wish for?"

"That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding out a
cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his
notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that has not a broken
foot."

So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm, and, taking the effigy from the
shop-window, delivered it to her first customer.

"No matter for the money," said she, giving him a little push towards
the door; for her old gentility was contumaciously squeamish at sight
of the copper coin, and, besides, it seemed such pitiful meanness to
take the child's pocket-money in exchange for a bit of stale
gingerbread.  "No matter for the cent.  You are welcome to Jim Crow."

The child, staring with round eyes at this instance of liberality,
wholly unprecedented in his large experience of cent-shops, took the
man of gingerbread, and quitted the premises.  No sooner had he reached
the sidewalk (little cannibal that he was!) than Jim Crow's head was in
his mouth.  As he had not been careful to shut the door, Hepzibah was
at the pains of closing it after him, with a pettish ejaculation or two
about the troublesomeness of young people, and particularly of small
boys.  She had just placed another representative of the renowned Jim
Crow at the window, when again the shop-bell tinkled clamorously, and
again the door being thrust open, with its characteristic jerk and jar,
disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who, precisely two minutes ago,
had made his exit.  The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal feast,
as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible about his mouth.

"What is it now, child?" asked the maiden lady rather impatiently; "did
you come back to shut the door?"

"No," answered the urchin, pointing to the figure that had just been
put up; "I want that other Jim Crow."

"Well, here it is for you," said Hepzibah, reaching it down; but
recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her on any
other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her shop, she
partly drew back her extended hand, "Where is the cent?"

The little boy had the cent ready, but, like a true-born Yankee, would
have preferred the better bargain to the worse.  Looking somewhat
chagrined, he put the coin into Hepzibah's hand, and departed, sending
the second Jim Crow in quest of the former one.  The new shop-keeper
dropped the first solid result of her commercial enterprise into the
till.  It was done! The sordid stain of that copper coin could never be
washed away from her palm.  The little schoolboy, aided by the impish
figure of the negro dancer, had wrought an irreparable ruin.  The
structure of ancient aristocracy had been demolished by him, even as if
his childish gripe had torn down the seven-gabled mansion.  Now let
Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon portraits with their faces to the wall,
and take the map of her Eastern territory to kindle the kitchen fire,
and blow up the flame with the empty breath of her ancestral
traditions! What had she to do with ancestry? Nothing; no more than
with posterity! No lady, now, but simply Hepzibah Pyncheon, a forlorn
old maid, and keeper of a cent-shop!

Nevertheless, even while she paraded these ideas somewhat
ostentatiously through her mind, it is altogether surprising what a
calmness had come over her.  The anxiety and misgivings which had
tormented her, whether asleep or in melancholy day-dreams, ever since
her project began to take an aspect of solidity, had now vanished quite
away.  She felt the novelty of her position, indeed, but no longer with
disturbance or affright.  Now and then, there came a thrill of almost
youthful enjoyment.  It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward
atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life.
So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the strength that we do not know
of!  The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come now
in the dreaded crisis, when, for the first time, she had put forth her
hand to help herself.  The little circlet of the schoolboy's copper
coin--dim and lustreless though it was, with the small services which
it had been doing here and there about the world--had proved a
talisman, fragrant with good, and deserving to be set in gold and worn
next her heart.  It was as potent, and perhaps endowed with the same
kind of efficacy, as a galvanic ring! Hepzibah, at all events, was
indebted to its subtile operation both in body and spirit; so much the
more, as it inspired her with energy to get some breakfast, at which,
still the better to keep up her courage, she allowed herself an extra
spoonful in her infusion of black tea.

Her introductory day of shop-keeping did not run on, however, without
many and serious interruptions of this mood of cheerful vigor.  As a
general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than
just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a
reasonably full exertion of their powers.  In the case of our old
gentlewoman, after the excitement of new effort had subsided, the
despondency of her whole life threatened, ever and anon, to return.  It
was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see obscuring the
sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall,
it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine.  But, always, the
envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial
azure.

Customers came in, as the forenoon advanced, but rather slowly; in some
cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction either to
themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with an aggregate of
very rich emolument to the till.  A little girl, sent by her mother to
match a skein of cotton thread, of a peculiar hue, took one that the
near-sighted old lady pronounced extremely like, but soon came running
back, with a blunt and cross message, that it would not do, and,
besides, was very rotten! Then, there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman,
not old but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair,
like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you
at once recognize as worn to death by a brute--probably a drunken
brute--of a husband, and at least nine children.  She wanted a few
pounds of flour, and offered the money, which the decayed gentlewoman
silently rejected, and gave the poor soul better measure than if she
had taken it.  Shortly afterwards, a man in a blue cotton frock, much
soiled, came in and bought a pipe, filling the whole shop, meanwhile,
with the hot odor of strong drink, not only exhaled in the torrid
atmosphere of his breath, but oozing out of his entire system, like an
inflammable gas.  It was impressed on Hepzibah's mind that this was the
husband of the care-wrinkled woman.  He asked for a paper of tobacco;
and as she had neglected to provide herself with the article, her
brutal customer dashed down his newly-bought pipe and left the shop,
muttering some unintelligible words, which had the tone and bitterness
of a curse.  Hereupon Hepzibah threw up her eyes, unintentionally
scowling in the face of Providence!

No less than five persons, during the forenoon, inquired for
ginger-beer, or root-beer, or any drink of a similar brewage, and,
obtaining nothing of the kind, went off in an exceedingly bad humor.
Three of them left the door open, and the other two pulled it so
spitefully in going out that the little bell played the very deuce with
Hepzibah's nerves.  A round, bustling, fire-ruddy housewife of the
neighborhood burst breathless into the shop, fiercely demanding yeast;
and when the poor gentlewoman, with her cold shyness of manner, gave
her hot customer to understand that she did not keep the article, this
very capable housewife took upon herself to administer a regular rebuke.

"A cent-shop, and no yeast!" quoth she; "That will never do!  Who ever
heard of such a thing? Your loaf will never rise, no more than mine
will to-day.  You had better shut up shop at once."

"Well," said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, "perhaps I had!"

Several times, moreover, besides the above instance, her lady-like
sensibilities were seriously infringed upon by the familiar, if not
rude, tone with which people addressed her.  They evidently considered
themselves not merely her equals, but her patrons and superiors.  Now,
Hepzibah had unconsciously flattered herself with the idea that there
would be a gleam or halo, of some kind or other, about her person,
which would insure an obeisance to her sterling gentility, or, at
least, a tacit recognition of it.  On the other hand, nothing tortured
her more intolerably than when this recognition was too prominently
expressed.  To one or two rather officious offers of sympathy, her
responses were little short of acrimonious; and, we regret to say,
Hepzibah was thrown into a positively unchristian state of mind by the
suspicion that one of her customers was drawn to the shop, not by any
real need of the article which she pretended to seek, but by a wicked
wish to stare at her.  The vulgar creature was determined to see for
herself what sort of a figure a mildewed piece of aristocracy, after
wasting all the bloom and much of the decline of her life apart from
the world, would cut behind a counter.  In this particular case,
however mechanical and innocuous it might be at other times, Hepzibah's
contortion of brow served her in good stead.

"I never was so frightened in my life!" said the curious customer, in
describing the incident to one of her acquaintances.  "She's a real old
vixen, take my word of it! She says little, to be sure; but if you
could only see the mischief in her eye!"

On the whole, therefore, her new experience led our decayed gentlewoman
to very disagreeable conclusions as to the temper and manners of what
she termed the lower classes, whom heretofore she had looked down upon
with a gentle and pitying complaisance, as herself occupying a sphere
of unquestionable superiority.  But, unfortunately, she had likewise to
struggle against a bitter emotion of a directly opposite kind:  a
sentiment of virulence, we mean, towards the idle aristocracy to which
it had so recently been her pride to belong.  When a lady, in a
delicate and costly summer garb, with a floating veil and gracefully
swaying gown, and, altogether, an ethereal lightness that made you look
at her beautifully slippered feet, to see whether she trod on the dust
or floated in the air,--when such a vision happened to pass through
this retired street, leaving it tenderly and delusively fragrant with
her passage, as if a bouquet of tea-roses had been borne along,--then
again, it is to be feared, old Hepzibah's scowl could no longer
vindicate itself entirely on the plea of near-sightedness.

"For what end," thought she, giving vent to that feeling of hostility
which is the only real abasement of the poor in presence of the
rich,--"for what good end, in the wisdom of Providence, does that woman
live?  Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be
kept white and delicate?"

Then, ashamed and penitent, she hid her face.

"May God forgive me!" said she.

Doubtless, God did forgive her.  But, taking the inward and outward
history of the first half-day into consideration, Hepzibah began to
fear that the shop would prove her ruin in a moral and religious point
of view, without contributing very essentially towards even her
temporal welfare.




                   IV A Day Behind the Counter


TOWARDS noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman, large and portly, and
of remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly along on the opposite
side of the white and dusty street.  On coming within the shadow of the
Pyncheon Elm, he stopt, and (taking off his hat, meanwhile, to wipe the
perspiration from his brow) seemed to scrutinize, with especial
interest, the dilapidated and rusty-visaged House of the Seven Gables.
He himself, in a very different style, was as well worth looking at as
the house.  No better model need be sought, nor could have been found,
of a very high order of respectability, which, by some indescribable
magic, not merely expressed itself in his looks and gestures, but even
governed the fashion of his garments, and rendered them all proper and
essential to the man.  Without appearing to differ, in any tangible
way, from other people's clothes, there was yet a wide and rich gravity
about them that must have been a characteristic of the wearer, since it
could not be defined as pertaining either to the cut or material.  His
gold-headed cane, too,--a serviceable staff, of dark polished
wood,--had similar traits, and, had it chosen to take a walk by itself,
would have been recognized anywhere as a tolerably adequate
representative of its master.  This character--which showed itself so
strikingly in everything about him, and the effect of which we seek to
convey to the reader--went no deeper than his station, habits of life,
and external circumstances.  One perceived him to be a personage of
marked influence and authority; and, especially, you could feel just as
certain that he was opulent as if he had exhibited his bank account, or
as if you had seen him touching the twigs of the Pyncheon Elm, and,
Midas-like, transmuting them to gold.

In his youth, he had probably been considered a handsome man; at his
present age, his brow was too heavy, his temples too bare, his
remaining hair too gray, his eye too cold, his lips too closely
compressed, to bear any relation to mere personal beauty.  He would
have made a good and massive portrait; better now, perhaps, than at any
previous period of his life, although his look might grow positively
harsh in the process of being fixed upon the canvas.  The artist would
have found it desirable to study his face, and prove its capacity for
varied expression; to darken it with a frown,--to kindle it up with a
smile.

While the elderly gentleman stood looking at the Pyncheon House, both
the frown and the smile passed successively over his countenance.  His
eye rested on the shop-window, and putting up a pair of gold-bowed
spectacles, which he held in his hand, he minutely surveyed Hepzibah's
little arrangement of toys and commodities.  At first it seemed not to
please him,--nay, to cause him exceeding displeasure,--and yet, the
very next moment, he smiled.  While the latter expression was yet on
his lips, he caught a glimpse of Hepzibah, who had involuntarily bent
forward to the window; and then the smile changed from acrid and
disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence.  He bowed,
with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness, and pursued
his way.

"There he is!" said Hepzibah to herself, gulping down a very bitter
emotion, and, since she could not rid herself of it, trying to drive it
back into her heart.  "What does he think of it, I wonder? Does it
please him? Ah! he is looking back!"

The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself half about,
still with his eyes fixed on the shop-window.  In fact, he wheeled
wholly round, and commenced a step or two, as if designing to enter the
shop; but, as it chanced, his purpose was anticipated by Hepzibah's
first customer, the little cannibal of Jim Crow, who, staring up at the
window, was irresistibly attracted by an elephant of gingerbread.  What
a grand appetite had this small urchin!--Two Jim Crows immediately
after breakfast!--and now an elephant, as a preliminary whet before
dinner.  By the time this latter purchase was completed, the elderly
gentleman had resumed his way, and turned the street corner.

"Take it as you like, Cousin Jaffrey,"  muttered the maiden lady, as
she drew back, after cautiously thrusting out her head, and looking up
and down the street,--"Take it as you like! You have seen my little
shop-window.  Well!--what have you to say?--is not the Pyncheon House
my own, while I'm alive?"

After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor, where she
at first caught up a half-finished stocking, and began knitting at it
with nervous and irregular jerks; but quickly finding herself at odds
with the stitches, she threw it aside, and walked hurriedly about the
room. At length she paused before the portrait of the stern old
Puritan, her ancestor, and the founder of the house. In one sense, this
picture had almost faded into the canvas, and hidden itself behind the
duskiness of age; in another, she could not but fancy that it had been
growing more prominent and strikingly expressive, ever since her
earliest familiarity with it as a child. For, while the physical
outline and substance were darkening away from the beholder's eye, the
bold, hard, and, at the same time, indirect character of the man seemed
to be brought out in a kind of spiritual relief. Such an effect may
occasionally be observed in pictures of antique date. They acquire a
look which an artist (if he have anything like the complacency of
artists nowadays) would never dream of presenting to a patron as his
own characteristic expression, but which, nevertheless, we at once
recognize as reflecting the unlovely truth of a human soul.  In such
cases, the painter's deep conception of his subject's inward traits has
wrought itself into the essence of the picture, and is seen after the
superficial coloring has been rubbed off by time.

While gazing at the portrait, Hepzibah trembled under its eye.  Her
hereditary reverence made her afraid to judge the character of the
original so harshly as a perception of the truth compelled her to do.
But still she gazed, because the face of the picture enabled her--at
least, she fancied so--to read more accurately, and to a greater depth,
the face which she had just seen in the street.

"This is the very man!" murmured she to herself.  "Let Jaffrey Pyncheon
smile as he will, there is that look beneath! Put on him a skull-cap,
and a band, and a black cloak, and a Bible in one hand and a sword in
the other,--then let Jaffrey smile as he might,--nobody would doubt
that it was the old Pyncheon come again.  He has proved himself the
very man to build up a new house!  Perhaps, too, to draw down a new
curse!"

Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old
time.  She had dwelt too much alone,--too long in the Pyncheon
House,--until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its
timbers.  She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane.

By the spell of contrast, another portrait rose up before her, painted
with more daring flattery than any artist would have ventured upon, but
yet so delicately touched that the likeness remained perfect.
Malbone's miniature, though from the same original, was far inferior to
Hepzibah's air-drawn picture, at which affection and sorrowful
remembrance wrought together.  Soft, mildly, and cheerfully
contemplative, with full, red lips, just on the verge of a smile, which
the eyes seemed to herald by a gentle kindling-up of their orbs!
Feminine traits, moulded inseparably with those of the other sex! The
miniature, likewise, had this last peculiarity; so that you inevitably
thought of the original as resembling his mother, and she a lovely and
lovable woman, with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character, that
made it all the pleasanter to know and easier to love her.

"Yes," thought Hepzibah, with grief of which it was only the more
tolerable portion that welled up from her heart to her eyelids, "they
persecuted his mother in him! He never was a Pyncheon!"

But here the shop-bell rang; it was like a sound from a remote
distance,--so far had Hepzibah descended into the sepulchral depths of
her reminiscences.  On entering the shop, she found an old man there, a
humble resident of Pyncheon Street, and whom, for a great many years
past, she had suffered to be a kind of familiar of the house.  He was
an immemorial personage, who seemed always to have had a white head and
wrinkles, and never to have possessed but a single tooth, and that a
half-decayed one, in the front of the upper jaw.  Well advanced as
Hepzibah was, she could not remember when Uncle Venner, as the
neighborhood called him, had not gone up and down the street, stooping
a little and drawing his feet heavily over the gravel or pavement.  But
still there was something tough and vigorous about him, that not only
kept him in daily breath, but enabled him to fill a place which would
else have been vacant in the apparently crowded world.  To go of
errands with his slow and shuffling gait, which made you doubt how he
ever was to arrive anywhere; to saw a small household's foot or two of
firewood, or knock to pieces an old barrel, or split up a pine board
for kindling-stuff; in summer, to dig the few yards of garden ground
appertaining to a low-rented tenement, and share the produce of his
labor at the halves; in winter, to shovel away the snow from the
sidewalk, or open paths to the woodshed, or along the clothes-line;
such were some of the essential offices which Uncle Venner performed
among at least a score of families.  Within that circle, he claimed the
same sort of privilege, and probably felt as much warmth of interest,
as a clergyman does in the range of his parishioners.  Not that he laid
claim to the tithe pig; but, as an analogous mode of reverence, he went
his rounds, every morning, to gather up the crumbs of the table and
overflowings of the dinner-pot, as food for a pig of his own.

In his younger days--for, after all, there was a dim tradition that he
had been, not young, but younger--Uncle Venner was commonly regarded as
rather deficient, than otherwise, in his wits.  In truth he had
virtually pleaded guilty to the charge, by scarcely aiming at such
success as other men seek, and by taking only that humble and modest
part in the intercourse of life which belongs to the alleged
deficiency.  But now, in his extreme old age,--whether it were that his
long and hard experience had actually brightened him, or that his
decaying judgment rendered him less capable of fairly measuring
himself,--the venerable man made pretensions to no little wisdom, and
really enjoyed the credit of it.  There was likewise, at times, a vein
of something like poetry in him; it was the moss or wall-flower of his
mind in its small dilapidation, and gave a charm to what might have
been vulgar and commonplace in his earlier and middle life.  Hepzibah
had a regard for him, because his name was ancient in the town and had
formerly been respectable.  It was a still better reason for awarding
him a species of familiar reverence that Uncle Venner was himself the
most ancient existence, whether of man or thing, in Pyncheon Street,
except the House of the Seven Gables, and perhaps the elm that
overshadowed it.

This patriarch now presented himself before Hepzibah, clad in an old
blue coat, which had a fashionable air, and must have accrued to him
from the cast-off wardrobe of some dashing clerk.  As for his trousers,
they were of tow-cloth, very short in the legs, and bagging down
strangely in the rear, but yet having a suitableness to his figure
which his other garment entirely lacked.  His hat had relation to no
other part of his dress, and but very little to the head that wore it.
Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself,
but, in good measure, somebody else; patched together, too, of
different epochs; an epitome of times and fashions.

"So, you have really begun trade," said he,--"really begun trade!
Well, I'm glad to see it.  Young people should never live idle in the
world, nor old ones neither, unless when the rheumatize gets hold of
them.  It has given me warning already; and in two or three years
longer, I shall think of putting aside business and retiring to my
farm.  That's yonder,--the great brick house, you know,--the workhouse,
most folks call it; but I mean to do my work first, and go there to be
idle and enjoy myself.  And I'm glad to see you beginning to do your
work, Miss Hepzibah!"

"Thank you, Uncle Venner" said Hepzibah, smiling; for she always felt
kindly towards the simple and talkative old man.  Had he been an old
woman, she might probably have repelled the freedom, which she now took
in good part.  "It is time for me to begin work, indeed! Or, to speak
the truth, I have just begun when I ought to be giving it up."

"Oh, never say that, Miss Hepzibah!" answered the old man.  "You are a
young woman yet.  Why, I hardly thought myself younger than I am now,
it seems so little while ago since I used to see you playing about the
door of the old house, quite a small child! Oftener, though, you used
to be sitting at the threshold, and looking gravely into the street;
for you had always a grave kind of way with you,--a grown-up air, when
you were only the height of my knee.  It seems as if I saw you now; and
your grandfather with his red cloak, and his white wig, and his cocked
hat, and his cane, coming out of the house, and stepping so grandly up
the street! Those old gentlemen that grew up before the Revolution used
to put on grand airs.  In my young days, the great man of the town was
commonly called King; and his wife, not Queen to be sure, but Lady.
Nowadays, a man would not dare to be called King; and if he feels
himself a little above common folks, he only stoops so much the lower
to them.  I met your cousin, the Judge, ten minutes ago; and, in my old
tow-cloth trousers, as you see, the Judge raised his hat to me, I do
believe! At any rate, the Judge bowed and smiled!"

"Yes," said Hepzibah, with something bitter stealing unawares into her
tone; "my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile!"

"And so he has" replied Uncle Venner.  "And that's rather remarkable in
a Pyncheon; for, begging your pardon, Miss Hepzibah, they never had the
name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks.  There was no getting
close to them.  But Now, Miss Hepzibah, if an old man may be bold to
ask, why don't Judge Pyncheon, with his great means, step forward, and
tell his cousin to shut up her little shop at once? It's for your
credit to be doing something, but it's not for the Judge's credit to
let you!"

"We won't talk of this, if you please, Uncle Venner," said Hepzibah
coldly.  "I ought to say, however, that, if I choose to earn bread for
myself, it is not Judge Pyncheon's fault.  Neither will he deserve the
blame," added she more kindly, remembering Uncle Venner's privileges of
age and humble familiarity, "if I should, by and by, find it convenient
to retire with you to your farm."

"And it's no bad place, either, that farm of mine!" cried the old man
cheerily, as if there were something positively delightful in the
prospect.  "No bad place is the great brick farm-house, especially for
them that will find a good many old cronies there, as will be my case.
I quite long to be among them, sometimes, of the winter evenings; for
it is but dull business for a lonesome elderly man, like me, to be
nodding, by the hour together, with no company but his air-tight stove.
Summer or winter, there's a great deal to be said in favor of my farm!
And, take it in the autumn, what can be pleasanter than to spend a
whole day on the sunny side of a barn or a wood-pile, chatting with
somebody as old as one's self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with a
natural-born simpleton, who knows how to be idle, because even our busy
Yankees never have found out how to put him to any use?  Upon my word,
Miss Hepzibah, I doubt whether I've ever been so comfortable as I mean
to be at my farm, which most folks call the workhouse.  But
you,--you're a young woman yet,--you never need go there! Something
still better will turn up for you.  I'm sure of it!"

Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable
friend's look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face with
considerable earnestness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning,
if any, might be lurking there.  Individuals whose affairs have reached
an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive
with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less
of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and
moderate expectation of good.  Thus, all the while Hepzibah was
perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she had cherished an
unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would
intervene in her favor.  For example, an uncle--who had sailed for
India fifty years before, and never been heard of since--might yet
return, and adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and
decrepit age, and adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls
and turbans, and make her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable
riches.  Or the member of Parliament, now at the head of the English
branch of the family,--with which the elder stock, on this side of the
Atlantic, had held little or no intercourse for the last two
centuries,--this eminent gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the
ruinous House of the Seven Gables, and come over to dwell with her
kindred at Pyncheon Hall.  But, for reasons the most imperative, she
could not yield to his request.  It was more probable, therefore, that
the descendants of a Pyncheon who had emigrated to Virginia, in some
past generation, and became a great planter there,--hearing of
Hepzibah's destitution, and impelled by the splendid generosity of
character with which their Virginian mixture must have enriched the New
England blood,--would send her a remittance of a thousand dollars, with
a hint of repeating the favor annually.  Or,--and, surely, anything so
undeniably just could not be beyond the limits of reasonable
anticipation,--the great claim to the heritage of Waldo County might
finally be decided in favor of the Pyncheons; so that, instead of
keeping a cent-shop, Hepzibah would build a palace, and look down from
its highest tower on hill, dale, forest, field, and town, as her own
share of the ancestral territory.

These were some of the fantasies which she had long dreamed about; and,
aided by these, Uncle Venner's casual attempt at encouragement kindled
a strange festal glory in the poor, bare, melancholy chambers of her
brain, as if that inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas.  But
either he knew nothing of her castles in the air,--as how should
he?--or else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection, as it might
a more courageous man's.  Instead of pursuing any weightier topic,
Uncle Venner was pleased to favor Hepzibah with some sage counsel in
her shop-keeping capacity.

"Give no credit!"--these were some of his golden maxims,--"Never take
paper-money.  Look well to your change! Ring the silver on the
four-pound weight! Shove back all English half-pence and base copper
tokens, such as are very plenty about town! At your leisure hours, knit
children's woollen socks and mittens! Brew your own yeast, and make
your own ginger-beer!"

And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost to digest the hard little
pellets of his already uttered wisdom, he gave vent to his final, and
what he declared to be his all-important advice, as follows:--

"Put on a bright face for your customers, and smile pleasantly as you
hand them what they ask for! A stale article, if you dip it in a good,
warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've
scowled upon."

To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah responded with a sigh so deep and
heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Venner quite away, like a withered
leaf,--as he was,--before an autumnal gale.  Recovering himself,
however, he bent forward, and, with a good deal of feeling in his
ancient visage, beckoned her nearer to him.

"When do you expect him home?" whispered he.

"Whom do you mean?" asked Hepzibah, turning pale.

"Ah!--You don't love to talk about it," said Uncle Venner.  "Well,
well! we'll say no more, though there's word of it all over town.  I
remember him, Miss Hepzibah, before he could run alone!"

During the remainder of the day, poor Hepzibah acquitted herself even
less creditably, as a shop-keeper, than in her earlier efforts.  She
appeared to be walking in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid life and
reality assumed by her emotions made all outward occurrences
unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of a half-conscious slumber.
She still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of the
shop-bell, and, at the demand of her customers, went prying with vague
eyes about the shop, proffering them one article after another, and
thrusting aside--perversely, as most of them supposed--the identical
thing they asked for.  There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit
thus flits away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in
any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region
and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it
may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life.  It is like
death, without death's quiet privilege,--its freedom from mortal care.
Worst of all, when the actual duties are comprised in such petty
details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman.  As the
animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in
the course of the afternoon.  Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her
small place of business, committing the most unheard-of errors:  now
stringing up twelve, and now seven, tallow-candles, instead of ten to
the pound; selling ginger for Scotch snuff, pins for needles, and
needles for pins; misreckoning her change, sometimes to the public
detriment, and much oftener to her own; and thus she went on, doing her
utmost to bring chaos back again, until, at the close of the day's
labor, to her inexplicable astonishment, she found the money-drawer
almost destitute of coin.  After all her painful traffic, the whole
proceeds were perhaps half a dozen coppers, and a questionable
ninepence which ultimately proved to be copper likewise.

At this price, or at whatever price, she rejoiced that the day had
reached its end.  Never before had she had such a sense of the
intolerable length of time that creeps between dawn and sunset, and of
the miserable irksomeness of having aught to do, and of the better
wisdom that it would be to lie down at once, in sullen resignation, and
let life, and its toils and vexations, trample over one's prostrate
body as they may! Hepzibah's final operation was with the little
devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who now proposed to eat a camel.
In her bewilderment, she offered him first a wooden dragoon, and next a
handful of marbles; neither of which being adapted to his else
omnivorous appetite, she hastily held out her whole remaining stock of
natural history in gingerbread, and huddled the small customer out of
the shop.  She then muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking, and put
up the oaken bar across the door.

During the latter process, an omnibus came to a stand-still under the
branches of the elm-tree.  Hepzibah's heart was in her mouth.  Remote
and dusky, and with no sunshine on all the intervening space, was that
region of the Past whence her only guest might be expected to arrive!
Was she to meet him now?

Somebody, at all events, was passing from the farthest interior of the
omnibus towards its entrance.   A gentleman alighted; but it was only
to offer his hand to a young girl whose slender figure, nowise needing
such assistance, now lightly descended the steps, and made an airy
little jump from the final one to the sidewalk.  She rewarded her
cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen reflected on
his own face as he reentered the vehicle.  The girl then turned towards
the House of the Seven Gables, to the door of which, meanwhile,--not
the shop-door, but the antique portal,--the omnibus-man had carried a
light trunk and a bandbox.  First giving a sharp rap of the old iron
knocker, he left his passenger and her luggage at the door-step, and
departed.

"Who can it be?" thought Hepzibah, who had been screwing her visual
organs into the acutest focus of which they were capable.  "The girl
must have mistaken the house."  She stole softly into the hall, and,
herself invisible, gazed through the dusty side-lights of the portal at
the young, blooming, and very cheerful face which presented itself for
admittance into the gloomy old mansion.  It was a face to which almost
any door would have opened of its own accord.

The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so orderly and
obedient to common rules, as you at once recognized her to be, was
widely in contrast, at that moment, with everything about her.  The
sordid and ugly luxuriance of gigantic weeds that grew in the angle of
the house, and the heavy projection that overshadowed her, and the
time-worn framework of the door,--none of these things belonged to her
sphere.  But, even as a ray of sunshine, fall into what dismal place it
may, instantaneously creates for itself a propriety in being there, so
did it seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the
threshold.  It was no less evidently proper that the door should swing
open to admit her.   The maiden lady herself, sternly inhospitable in
her first purposes, soon began to feel that the door ought to be shoved
back, and the rusty key be turned in the reluctant lock.

"Can it be Phoebe?" questioned she within herself.  "It must be little
Phoebe; for it can be nobody else,--and there is a look of her father
about her, too! But what does she want here? And how like a country
cousin, to come down upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a
day's notice, or asking whether she would be welcome! Well; she must
have a night's lodging, I suppose; and to-morrow the child shall go
back to her mother."

Phoebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the
Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as a native of a rural
part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings of
relationship are still partially kept up.  In her own circle, it was
regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one another
without invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious warning.  Yet, in
consideration of Miss Hepzibah's recluse way of life, a letter had
actually been written and despatched, conveying information of Phoebe's
projected visit.  This epistle, for three or four days past, had been
in the pocket of the penny-postman, who, happening to have no other
business in Pyncheon Street, had not yet made it convenient to call at
the House of the Seven Gables.

"No--she can stay only one night," said Hepzibah, unbolting the door.
"If Clifford were to find her here, it might disturb him!"




                          V May and November


PHOEBE PYNCHEON slept, on the night of her arrival, in a chamber that
looked down on the garden of the old house.  It fronted towards the
east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light came
flooding through the window, and bathed the dingy ceiling and
paper-hangings in its own hue.  There were curtains to Phoebe's bed; a
dark, antique canopy, and ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been
rich, and even magnificent, in its time; but which now brooded over the
girl like a cloud, making a night in that one corner, while elsewhere
it was beginning to be day.  The morning light, however, soon stole
into the aperture at the foot of the bed, betwixt those faded curtains.
Finding the new guest there,--with a bloom on her cheeks like the
morning's own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs, as
when an early breeze moves the foliage,--the dawn kissed her brow.  It
was the caress which a dewy maiden--such as the Dawn is,
immortally--gives to her sleeping sister, partly from the impulse of
irresistible fondness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now
to unclose her eyes.

At the touch of those lips of light, Phoebe quietly awoke, and, for a
moment, did not recognize where she was, nor how those heavy curtains
chanced to be festooned around her.  Nothing, indeed, was absolutely
plain to her, except that it was now early morning, and that, whatever
might happen next, it was proper, first of all, to get up and say her
prayers.  She was the more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of
the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall, stiff chairs; one
of which stood close by her bedside, and looked as if some
old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had
vanished only just in season to escape discovery.

When Phoebe was quite dressed, she peeped out of the window, and saw a
rosebush in the garden.  Being a very tall one, and of luxuriant
growth, it had been propped up against the side of the house, and was
literally covered with a rare and very beautiful species of white rose.
A large portion of them, as the girl afterwards discovered, had blight
or mildew at their hearts; but, viewed at a fair distance, the whole
rosebush looked as if it had been brought from Eden that very summer,
together with the mould in which it grew.  The truth was, nevertheless,
that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheon,--she was Phoebe's
great-great-grand-aunt,--in soil which, reckoning only its cultivation
as a garden-plat, was now unctuous with nearly two hundred years of
vegetable decay.  Growing as they did, however, out of the old earth,
the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their Creator;
nor could it have been the less pure and acceptable because Phoebe's
young breath mingled with it, as the fragrance floated past the window.
Hastening down the creaking and carpetless staircase, she found her way
into the garden, gathered some of the most perfect of the roses, and
brought them to her chamber.

Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive
patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement.  It is a kind of natural
magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden
capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of
comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a
period, may happen to be their home.  A wild hut of underbrush, tossed
together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the
home aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman, and would retain it
long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade.
No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim,
as it were, Phoebe's waste, cheerless, and dusky chamber, which had
been untenanted so long--except by spiders, and mice, and rats, and
ghosts--that it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches to
obliterate every trace of man's happier hours.  What was precisely
Phoebe's process we find it impossible to say.  She appeared to have no
preliminary design, but gave a touch here and another there; brought
some articles of furniture to light and dragged others into the shadow;
looped up or let down a window-curtain; and, in the course of half an
hour, had fully succeeded in throwing a kindly and hospitable smile
over the apartment.  No longer ago than the night before, it had
resembled nothing so much as the old maid's heart; for there was
neither sunshine nor household fire in one nor the other, and, save for
ghosts and ghostly reminiscences, not a guest, for many years gone by,
had entered the heart or the chamber.

There was still another peculiarity of this inscrutable charm.  The
bedchamber, no doubt, was a chamber of very great and varied
experience, as a scene of human life:  the joy of bridal nights had
throbbed itself away here; new immortals had first drawn earthly breath
here; and here old people had died.  But--whether it were the white
roses, or whatever the subtile influence might be--a person of delicate
instinct would have known at once that it was now a maiden's
bedchamber, and had been purified of all former evil and sorrow by her
sweet breath and happy thoughts.  Her dreams of the past night, being
such cheerful ones, had exorcised the gloom, and now haunted the
chamber in its stead.

After arranging matters to her satisfaction, Phoebe emerged from her
chamber, with a purpose to descend again into the garden.  Besides the
rosebush, she had observed several other species of flowers growing
there in a wilderness of neglect, and obstructing one another's
development (as is often the parallel case in human society) by their
uneducated entanglement and confusion.  At the head of the stairs,
however, she met Hepzibah, who, it being still early, invited her into
a room which she would probably have called her boudoir, had her
education embraced any such French phrase.  It was strewn about with a
few old books, and a work-basket, and a dusty writing-desk; and had, on
one side, a large black article of furniture, of very strange
appearance, which the old gentlewoman told Phoebe was a harpsichord.
It looked more like a coffin than anything else; and, indeed,--not
having been played upon, or opened, for years,--there must have been a
vast deal of dead music in it, stifled for want of air.  Human finger
was hardly known to have touched its chords since the days of Alice
Pyncheon, who had learned the sweet accomplishment of melody in Europe.

Hepzibah bade her young guest sit down, and, herself taking a chair
near by, looked as earnestly at Phoebe's trim little figure as if she
expected to see right into its springs and motive secrets.

"Cousin Phoebe," said she, at last, "I really can't see my way clear to
keep you with me."

These words, however, had not the inhospitable bluntness with which
they may strike the reader; for the two relatives, in a talk before
bedtime, had arrived at a certain degree of mutual understanding.
Hepzibah knew enough to enable her to appreciate the circumstances
(resulting from the second marriage of the girl's mother) which made it
desirable for Phoebe to establish herself in another home.  Nor did she
misinterpret Phoebe's character, and the genial activity pervading
it,--one of the most valuable traits of the true New England
woman,--which had impelled her forth, as might be said, to seek her
fortune, but with a self-respecting purpose to confer as much benefit
as she could anywise receive.  As one of her nearest kindred, she had
naturally betaken herself to Hepzibah, with no idea of forcing herself
on her cousin's protection, but only for a visit of a week or two,
which might be indefinitely extended, should it prove for the happiness
of both.

To Hepzibah's blunt observation, therefore, Phoebe replied as frankly,
and more cheerfully.

"Dear cousin, I cannot tell how it will be," said she.  "But I really
think we may suit one another much better than you suppose."

"You are a nice girl,--I see it plainly," continued Hepzibah; "and it
is not any question as to that point which makes me hesitate.  But,
Phoebe, this house of mine is but a melancholy place for a young person
to be in.  It lets in the wind and rain, and the snow, too, in the
garret and upper chambers, in winter-time, but it never lets in the
sunshine.  And as for myself, you see what I am,--a dismal and lonesome
old woman (for I begin to call myself old, Phoebe), whose temper, I am
afraid, is none of the best, and whose spirits are as bad as can be! I
cannot make your life pleasant, Cousin Phoebe, neither can I so much as
give you bread to eat."

"You will find me a cheerful little body" answered Phoebe, smiling, and
yet with a kind of gentle dignity, "and I mean to earn my bread.  You
know I have not been brought up a Pyncheon.  A girl learns many things
in a New England village."

"Ah! Phoebe," said Hepzibah, sighing, "your knowledge would do but
little for you here! And then it is a wretched thought that you should
fling away your young days in a place like this.  Those cheeks would
not be so rosy after a month or two.  Look at my face!" and, indeed,
the contrast was very striking,--"you see how pale I am! It is my idea
that the dust and continual decay of these old houses are unwholesome
for the lungs."

"There is the garden,--the flowers to be taken care of," observed
Phoebe.  "I should keep myself healthy with exercise in the open air."

"And, after all, child," exclaimed Hepzibah, suddenly rising, as if to
dismiss the subject, "it is not for me to say who shall be a guest or
inhabitant of the old Pyncheon House.  Its master is coming."

"Do you mean Judge Pyncheon?" asked Phoebe in surprise.

"Judge Pyncheon!" answered her cousin angrily.  "He will hardly cross
the threshold while I live! No, no! But, Phoebe, you shall see the face
of him I speak of."

She went in quest of the miniature already described, and returned with
it in her hand.  Giving it to Phoebe, she watched her features
narrowly, and with a certain jealousy as to the mode in which the girl
would show herself affected by the picture.

"How do you like the face?" asked Hepzibah.

"It is handsome!--it is very beautiful!" said Phoebe admiringly.  "It
is as sweet a face as a man's can be, or ought to be.  It has something
of a child's expression,--and yet not childish,--only one feels so very
kindly towards him! He ought never to suffer anything.  One would bear
much for the sake of sparing him toil or sorrow.  Who is it, Cousin
Hepzibah?"

"Did you never hear," whispered her cousin, bending towards her, "of
Clifford Pyncheon?"

"Never.  I thought there were no Pyncheons left, except yourself and
our cousin Jaffrey," answered Phoebe.  "And yet I seem to have heard
the name of Clifford Pyncheon.  Yes!--from my father or my mother; but
has he not been a long while dead?"

"Well, well, child, perhaps he has!" said Hepzibah with a sad, hollow
laugh; "but, in old houses like this, you know, dead people are very
apt to come back again! We shall see.  And, Cousin Phoebe, since, after
all that I have said, your courage does not fail you, we will not part
so soon.  You are welcome, my child, for the present, to such a home as
your kinswoman can offer you."

With this measured, but not exactly cold assurance of a hospitable
purpose, Hepzibah kissed her cheek.

They now went below stairs, where Phoebe--not so much assuming the
office as attracting it to herself, by the magnetism of innate
fitness--took the most active part in preparing breakfast.  The
mistress of the house, meanwhile, as is usual with persons of her stiff
and unmalleable cast, stood mostly aside; willing to lend her aid, yet
conscious that her natural inaptitude would be likely to impede the
business in hand.   Phoebe and the fire that boiled the teakettle were
equally bright, cheerful, and efficient, in their respective offices.
Hepzibah gazed forth from her habitual sluggishness, the necessary
result of long solitude, as from another sphere.  She could not help
being interested, however, and even amused, at the readiness with which
her new inmate adapted herself to the circumstances, and brought the
house, moreover, and all its rusty old appliances, into a suitableness
for her purposes.  Whatever she did, too, was done without conscious
effort, and with frequent outbreaks of song, which were exceedingly
pleasant to the ear.  This natural tunefulness made Phoebe seem like a
bird in a shadowy tree; or conveyed the idea that the stream of life
warbled through her heart as a brook sometimes warbles through a
pleasant little dell.  It betokened the cheeriness of an active
temperament, finding joy in its activity, and, therefore, rendering it
beautiful; it was a New England trait,--the stern old stuff of
Puritanism with a gold thread in the web.

Hepzibah brought out some old silver spoons with the family crest upon
them, and a china tea-set painted over with grotesque figures of man,
bird, and beast, in as grotesque a landscape.  These pictured people
were odd humorists, in a world of their own,--a world of vivid
brilliancy, so far as color went, and still unfaded, although the
teapot and small cups were as ancient as the custom itself of
tea-drinking.

"Your great-great-great-great-grandmother had these cups, when she was
married," said Hepzibah to Phoebe.  "She was a Davenport, of a good
family.  They were almost the first teacups ever seen in the colony;
and if one of them were to be broken, my heart would break with it.
But it is nonsense to speak so about a brittle teacup, when I remember
what my heart has gone through without breaking."

The cups--not having been used, perhaps, since Hepzibah's youth--had
contracted no small burden of dust, which Phoebe washed away with so
much care and delicacy as to satisfy even the proprietor of this
invaluable china.

"What a nice little housewife you are!" exclaimed the latter, smiling,
and at the same time frowning so prodigiously that the smile was
sunshine under a thunder-cloud.  "Do you do other things as well?   Are
you as good at your book as you are at washing teacups?"

"Not quite, I am afraid," said Phoebe, laughing at the form of
Hepzibah's question.  "But I was schoolmistress for the little children
in our district last summer, and might have been so still."

"Ah! 'tis all very well!" observed the maiden lady, drawing herself up.
"But these things must have come to you with your mother's blood.  I
never knew a Pyncheon that had any turn for them."

It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally
quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their
available gifts; as was Hepzibah of this native inapplicability, so to
speak, of the Pyncheons to any useful purpose.  She regarded it as an
hereditary trait; and so, perhaps, it was, but unfortunately a morbid
one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the
surface of society.

Before they left the breakfast-table, the shop-bell rang sharply, and
Hepzibah set down the remnant of her final cup of tea, with a look of
sallow despair that was truly piteous to behold.  In cases of
distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the
first.  We return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding
torture in our limbs.  At all events, Hepzibah had fully satisfied
herself of the impossibility of ever becoming wonted to this peevishly
obstreperous little bell.  Ring as often as it might, the sound always
smote upon her nervous system rudely and suddenly.  And especially now,
while, with her crested teaspoons and antique china, she was flattering
herself with ideas of gentility, she felt an unspeakable disinclination
to confront a customer.

"Do not trouble yourself, dear cousin!" cried Phoebe, starting lightly
up.  "I am shop-keeper to-day."

"You, child!" exclaimed Hepzibah.  "What can a little country girl know
of such matters?"

"Oh, I have done all the shopping for the family at our village store,"
said Phoebe.  "And I have had a table at a fancy fair, and made better
sales than anybody.  These things are not to be learnt; they depend
upon a knack that comes, I suppose," added she, smiling, "with one's
mother's blood.  You shall see that I am as nice a little saleswoman as
I am a housewife!"

The old gentlewoman stole behind Phoebe, and peeped from the passageway
into the shop, to note how she would manage her undertaking.  It was a
case of some intricacy.  A very ancient woman, in a white short gown
and a green petticoat, with a string of gold beads about her neck, and
what looked like a nightcap on her head, had brought a quantity of yarn
to barter for the commodities of the shop.  She was probably the very
last person in town who still kept the time-honored spinning-wheel in
constant revolution.  It was worth while to hear the croaking and
hollow tones of the old lady, and the pleasant voice of Phoebe,
mingling in one twisted thread of talk; and still better to contrast
their figures,--so light and bloomy,--so decrepit and dusky,--with only
the counter betwixt them, in one sense, but more than threescore years,
in another.  As for the bargain, it was wrinkled slyness and craft
pitted against native truth and sagacity.

"Was not that well done?" asked Phoebe, laughing, when the customer was
gone.

"Nicely done, indeed, child!" answered Hepzibah.  "I could not have
gone through with it nearly so well.  As you say, it must be a knack
that belongs to you on the mother's side."

It is a very genuine admiration, that with which persons too shy or too
awkward to take a due part in the bustling world regard the real actors
in life's stirring scenes; so genuine, in fact, that the former are
usually fain to make it palatable to their self-love, by assuming that
these active and forcible qualities are incompatible with others, which
they choose to deem higher and more important.  Thus, Hepzibah was well
content to acknowledge Phoebe's vastly superior gifts as a
shop-keeper'--she listened, with compliant ear, to her suggestion of
various methods whereby the influx of trade might be increased, and
rendered profitable, without a hazardous outlay of capital.  She
consented that the village maiden should manufacture yeast, both liquid
and in cakes; and should brew a certain kind of beer, nectareous to the
palate, and of rare stomachic virtues; and, moreover, should bake and
exhibit for sale some little spice-cakes, which whosoever tasted would
longingly desire to taste again.  All such proofs of a ready mind and
skilful handiwork were highly acceptable to the aristocratic
hucksteress, so long as she could murmur to herself with a grim smile,
and a half-natural sigh, and a sentiment of mixed wonder, pity, and
growing affection:--

"What a nice little body she is! If she only could be a lady; too--but
that's impossible! Phoebe is no Pyncheon.  She takes everything from
her mother!"

As to Phoebe's not being a lady, or whether she were a lady or no, it
was a point, perhaps, difficult to decide, but which could hardly have
come up for judgment at all in any fair and healthy mind.  Out of New
England, it would be impossible to meet with a person combining so many
ladylike attributes with so many others that form no necessary (if
compatible) part of the character.  She shocked no canon of taste; she
was admirably in keeping with herself, and never jarred against
surrounding circumstances.  Her figure, to be sure,--so small as to be
almost childlike, and so elastic that motion seemed as easy or easier
to it than rest, would hardly have suited one's idea of a countess.
Neither did her face--with the brown ringlets on either side, and the
slightly piquant nose, and the wholesome bloom, and the clear shade of
tan, and the half dozen freckles, friendly remembrances of the April
sun and breeze--precisely give us a right to call her beautiful.  But
there was both lustre and depth in her eyes.  She was very pretty; as
graceful as a bird, and graceful much in the same way; as pleasant
about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a
shadow of twinkling leaves, or as a ray of firelight that dances on the
wall while evening is drawing nigh.   Instead of discussing her claim
to rank among ladies, it would be preferable to regard Phoebe as the
example of feminine grace and availability combined, in a state of
society, if there were any such, where ladies did not exist.  There it
should be woman's office to move in the midst of practical affairs, and
to gild them all, the very homeliest,--were it even the scouring of
pots and kettles,--with an atmosphere of loveliness and joy.

Such was the sphere of Phoebe.  To find the born and educated lady, on
the other hand, we need look no farther than Hepzibah, our forlorn old
maid, in her rustling and rusty silks, with her deeply cherished and
ridiculous consciousness of long descent, her shadowy claims to
princely territory, and, in the way of accomplishment, her
recollections, it may be, of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord,
and walked a minuet, and worked an antique tapestry-stitch on her
sampler.  It was a fair parallel between new Plebeianism and old
Gentility.

It really seemed as if the battered visage of the House of the Seven
Gables, black and heavy-browed as it still certainly looked, must have
shown a kind of cheerfulness glimmering through its dusky windows as
Phoebe passed to and fro in the interior.  Otherwise, it is impossible
to explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of
the girl's presence.  There was a great run of custom, setting steadily
in, from about ten o' clock until towards noon,--relaxing, somewhat, at
dinner-time, but recommencing in the afternoon, and, finally, dying
away a half an hour or so before the long day's sunset.  One of the
stanchest patrons was little Ned Higgins, the devourer of Jim Crow and
the elephant, who to-day signalized his omnivorous prowess by
swallowing two dromedaries and a locomotive.  Phoebe laughed, as she
summed up her aggregate of sales upon the slate; while Hepzibah, first
drawing on a pair of silk gloves, reckoned over the sordid accumulation
of copper coin, not without silver intermixed, that had jingled into
the till.

"We must renew our stock, Cousin Hepzibah!" cried the little
saleswoman.  "The gingerbread figures are all gone, and so are those
Dutch wooden milkmaids, and most of our other playthings.  There has
been constant inquiry for cheap raisins, and a great cry for whistles,
and trumpets, and jew's-harps; and at least a dozen little boys have
asked for molasses-candy.  And we must contrive to get a peck of russet
apples, late in the season as it is.  But, dear cousin, what an
enormous heap of copper!  Positively a copper mountain!"

"Well done! well done! well done!" quoth Uncle Venner, who had taken
occasion to shuffle in and out of the shop several times in the course
of the day.  "Here's a girl that will never end her days at my farm!
Bless my eyes, what a brisk little soul!"

"Yes, Phoebe is a nice girl!" said Hepzibah, with a scowl of austere
approbation.  "But, Uncle Venner, you have known the family a great
many years.  Can you tell me whether there ever was a Pyncheon whom she
takes after?"

"I don't believe there ever was," answered the venerable man.  "At any
rate, it never was my luck to see her like among them, nor, for that
matter, anywhere else.  I've seen a great deal of the world, not only
in people's kitchens and back-yards but at the street-corners, and on
the wharves, and in other places where my business calls me; and I'm
free to say, Miss Hepzibah, that I never knew a human creature do her
work so much like one of God's angels as this child Phoebe does!"

Uncle Venner's eulogium, if it appear rather too high-strained for the
person and occasion, had, nevertheless, a sense in which it was both
subtile and true.  There was a spiritual quality in Phoebe's activity.
The life of the long and busy day--spent in occupations that might so
easily have taken a squalid and ugly aspect--had been made pleasant,
and even lovely, by the spontaneous grace with which these homely
duties seemed to bloom out of her character; so that labor, while she
dealt with it, had the easy and flexible charm of play.  Angels do not
toil, but let their good works grow out of them; and so did Phoebe.

The two relatives--the young maid and the old one--found time before
nightfall, in the intervals of trade, to make rapid advances towards
affection and confidence.  A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays
remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being
absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse;
like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when
once overcome.

The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading
Phoebe from room to room of the house, and recounting the traditions
with which, as we may say, the walls were lugubriously frescoed.  She
showed the indentations made by the lieutenant-governor's sword-hilt in
the door-panels of the apartment where old Colonel Pyncheon, a dead
host, had received his affrighted visitors with an awful frown.  The
dusky terror of that frown, Hepzibah observed, was thought to be
lingering ever since in the passageway.  She bade Phoebe step into one
of the tall chairs, and inspect the ancient map of the Pyncheon
territory at the eastward.  In a tract of land on which she laid her
finger, there existed a silver mine, the locality of which was
precisely pointed out in some memoranda of Colonel Pyncheon himself,
but only to be made known when the family claim should be recognized by
government.  Thus it was for the interest of all New England that the
Pyncheons should have justice done them.  She told, too, how that there
was undoubtedly an immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere
about the house, or in the cellar, or possibly in the garden.

"If you should happen to find it, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, glancing
aside at her with a grim yet kindly smile, "we will tie up the
shop-bell for good and all!"

"Yes, dear cousin," answered Phoebe; "but, in the mean time, I hear
somebody ringing it!"

When the customer was gone, Hepzibah talked rather vaguely, and at
great length, about a certain Alice Pyncheon, who had been exceedingly
beautiful and accomplished in her lifetime, a hundred years ago.  The
fragrance of her rich and delightful character still lingered about the
place where she had lived, as a dried rose-bud scents the drawer where
it has withered and perished.  This lovely Alice had met with some
great and mysterious calamity, and had grown thin and white, and
gradually faded out of the world.  But, even now, she was supposed to
haunt the House of the Seven Gables, and, a great many times,--especially
when one of the Pyncheons was to die,--she had been heard playing sadly
and beautifully on the harpsichord.  One of these tunes, just as it had
sounded from her spiritual touch, had been written down by an amateur of
music; it was so exquisitely mournful that nobody, to this day, could
bear to hear it played, unless when a great sorrow had made them know
the still profounder sweetness of it.

"Was it the same harpsichord that you showed me?" inquired Phoebe.

"The very same," said Hepzibah.  "It was Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.
When I was learning music, my father would never let me open it.  So,
as I could only play on my teacher's instrument, I have forgotten all
my music long ago."

Leaving these antique themes, the old lady began to talk about the
daguerreotypist, whom, as he seemed to be a well-meaning and orderly
young man, and in narrow circumstances, she had permitted to take up
his residence in one of the seven gables.  But, on seeing more of Mr.
Holgrave, she hardly knew what to make of him.  He had the strangest
companions imaginable; men with long beards, and dressed in linen
blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments;
reformers, temperance lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking
philanthropists; community-men, and come-outers, as Hepzibah believed,
who acknowledged no law, and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent
of other people's cookery, and turned up their noses at the fare.  As
for the daguerreotypist, she had read a paragraph in a penny paper, the
other day, accusing him of making a speech full of wild and
disorganizing matter, at a meeting of his banditti-like associates.
For her own part, she had reason to believe that he practised animal
magnetism, and, if such things were in fashion nowadays, should be apt
to suspect him of studying the Black Art up there in his lonesome
chamber.

"But, dear cousin," said Phoebe, "if the young man is so dangerous, why
do you let him stay? If he does nothing worse, he may set the house on
fire!"

"Why, sometimes," answered Hepzibah, "I have seriously made it a
question, whether I ought not to send him away.  But, with all his
oddities, he is a quiet kind of a person, and has such a way of taking
hold of one's mind, that, without exactly liking him (for I don't know
enough of the young man), I should be sorry to lose sight of him
entirely.  A woman clings to slight acquaintances when she lives so
much alone as I do."

"But if Mr. Holgrave is a lawless person!" remonstrated Phoebe, a part
of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law.

"Oh!" said Hepzibah carelessly,--for, formal as she was, still, in her
life's experience, she had gnashed her teeth against human law,--"I
suppose he has a law of his own!"




                            VI Maule's Well


AFTER an early tea, the little country-girl strayed into the garden.
The enclosure had formerly been very extensive, but was now contracted
within small compass, and hemmed about, partly by high wooden fences,
and partly by the outbuildings of houses that stood on another street.
In its centre was a grass-plat, surrounding a ruinous little structure,
which showed just enough of its original design to indicate that it had
once been a summer-house.  A hop-vine, springing from last year's root,
was beginning to clamber over it, but would be long in covering the
roof with its green mantle.  Three of the seven gables either fronted
or looked sideways, with a dark solemnity of aspect, down into the
garden.

The black, rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of
time; such as fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the stalks and
seed--vessels of vagrant and lawless plants, more useful after their
death than ever while flaunting in the sun.  The evil of these departed
years would naturally have sprung up again, in such rank weeds
(symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to
root themselves about human dwellings.  Phoebe saw, however, that their
growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor, bestowed
daily and systematically on the garden.  The white double rosebush had
evidently been propped up anew against the house since the commencement
of the season; and a pear-tree and three damson-trees, which, except a
row of currant-bushes, constituted the only varieties of fruit, bore
marks of the recent amputation of several superfluous or defective
limbs.  There were also a few species of antique and hereditary
flowers, in no very flourishing condition, but scrupulously weeded; as
if some person, either out of love or curiosity, had been anxious to
bring them to such perfection as they were capable of attaining.  The
remainder of the garden presented a well-selected assortment of
esculent vegetables, in a praiseworthy state of advancement.  Summer
squashes almost in their golden blossom; cucumbers, now evincing a
tendency to spread away from the main stock, and ramble far and wide;
two or three rows of string-beans and as many more that were about to
festoon themselves on poles; tomatoes, occupying a site so sheltered
and sunny that the plants were already gigantic, and promised an early
and abundant harvest.

Phoebe wondered whose care and toil it could have been that had planted
these vegetables, and kept the soil so clean and orderly.  Not surely
her cousin Hepzibah's, who had no taste nor spirits for the lady-like
employment of cultivating flowers, and--with her recluse habits, and
tendency to shelter herself within the dismal shadow of the
house--would hardly have come forth under the speck of open sky to weed
and hoe among the fraternity of beans and squashes.

It being her first day of complete estrangement from rural objects,
Phoebe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and
foliage, and aristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables.  The eye of
Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar
smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and
driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a
breathing-place.  The spot acquired a somewhat wilder grace, and yet a
very gentle one, from the fact that a pair of robins had built their
nest in the pear-tree, and were making themselves exceedingly busy and
happy in the dark intricacy of its boughs.  Bees, too,--strange to
say,--had thought it worth their while to come hither, possibly from
the range of hives beside some farm-house miles away.  How many aerial
voyages might they have made, in quest of honey, or honey-laden,
betwixt dawn and sunset! Yet, late as it now was, there still arose a
pleasant hum out of one or two of the squash-blossoms, in the depths of
which these bees were plying their golden labor.  There was one other
object in the garden which Nature might fairly claim as her inalienable
property, in spite of whatever man could do to render it his own.  This
was a fountain, set round with a rim of old mossy stones, and paved, in
its bed, with what appeared to be a sort of mosaic-work of variously
colored pebbles.  The play and slight agitation of the water, in its
upward gush, wrought magically with these variegated pebbles, and made
a continually shifting apparition of quaint figures, vanishing too
suddenly to be definable.  Thence, swelling over the rim of moss-grown
stones, the water stole away under the fence, through what we regret to
call a gutter, rather than a channel.  Nor must we forget to mention a
hen-coop of very reverend antiquity that stood in the farther corner of
the garden, not a great way from the fountain.   It now contained only
Chanticleer, his two wives, and a solitary chicken.  All of them were
pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an
heirloom in the Pyncheon family, and were said, while in their prime,
to have attained almost the size of turkeys, and, on the score of
delicate flesh, to be fit for a prince's table.  In proof of the
authenticity of this legendary renown, Hepzibah could have exhibited
the shell of a great egg, which an ostrich need hardly have been
ashamed of.  Be that as it might, the hens were now scarcely larger
than pigeons, and had a queer, rusty, withered aspect, and a gouty kind
of movement, and a sleepy and melancholy tone throughout all the
variations of their clucking and cackling.  It was evident that the
race had degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of
too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure.  These feathered people had
existed too long in their distinct variety; a fact of which the present
representatives, judging by their lugubrious deportment, seemed to be
aware.  They kept themselves alive, unquestionably, and laid now and
then an egg, and hatched a chicken; not for any pleasure of their own,
but that the world might not absolutely lose what had once been so
admirable a breed of fowls.  The distinguishing mark of the hens was a
crest of lamentably scanty growth, in these latter days, but so oddly
and wickedly analogous to Hepzibah's turban, that Phoebe--to the
poignant distress of her conscience, but inevitably--was led to fancy a
general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable
relative.

The girl ran into the house to get some crumbs of bread, cold potatoes,
and other such scraps as were suitable to the accommodating appetite of
fowls.  Returning, she gave a peculiar call, which they seemed to
recognize.  The chicken crept through the pales of the coop and ran,
with some show of liveliness, to her feet; while Chanticleer and the
ladies of his household regarded her with queer, sidelong glances, and
then croaked one to another, as if communicating their sage opinions of
her character.  So wise, as well as antique, was their aspect, as to
give color to the idea, not merely that they were the descendants of a
time-honored race, but that they had existed, in their individual
capacity, ever since the House of the Seven Gables was founded, and
were somehow mixed up with its destiny.  They were a species of
tutelary sprite, or Banshee; although winged and feathered differently
from most other guardian angels.

"Here, you odd little chicken!" said Phoebe; "here are some nice crumbs
for you!"

The chicken, hereupon, though almost as venerable in appearance as its
mother--possessing, indeed, the whole antiquity of its progenitors in
miniature,--mustered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on
Phoebe's shoulder.

"That little fowl pays you a high compliment!" said a voice behind
Phoebe.

Turning quickly, she was surprised at sight of a young man, who had
found access into the garden by a door opening out of another gable
than that whence she had emerged.  He held a hoe in his hand, and,
while Phoebe was gone in quest of the crumbs, had begun to busy himself
with drawing up fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes.

"The chicken really treats you like an old acquaintance," continued he
in a quiet way, while a smile made his face pleasanter than Phoebe at
first fancied it.  "Those venerable personages in the coop, too, seem
very affably disposed.  You are lucky to be in their good graces so
soon! They have known me much longer, but never honor me with any
familiarity, though hardly a day passes without my bringing them food.
Miss Hepzibah, I suppose, will interweave the fact with her other
traditions, and set it down that the fowls know you to be a Pyncheon!"

"The secret is," said Phoebe, smiling, "that I have learned how to talk
with hens and chickens."

"Ah, but these hens," answered the young man,--"these hens of
aristocratic lineage would scorn to understand the vulgar language of a
barn-yard fowl.  I prefer to think--and so would Miss Hepzibah--that
they recognize the family tone.  For you are a Pyncheon?"

"My name is Phoebe Pyncheon," said the girl, with  a manner of some
reserve; for she was aware that her new acquaintance could be no other
than the daguerreotypist, of whose lawless propensities the old maid
had given her a disagreeable idea.  "I did not know that my cousin
Hepzibah's garden was under another person's care."

"Yes," said Holgrave, "I dig, and hoe, and weed, in this black old
earth, for the sake of refreshing myself with what little nature and
simplicity may be left in it, after men have so long sown and reaped
here.  I turn up the earth by way of pastime.  My sober occupation, so
far as I have any, is with a lighter material.  In short, I make
pictures out of sunshine; and, not to be too much dazzled with my own
trade, I have prevailed with Miss Hepzibah to let me lodge in one of
these dusky gables.  It is like a bandage over one's eyes, to come into
it.  But would you like to see a specimen of my productions?"

"A daguerreotype likeness, do you mean?" asked Phoebe with less
reserve; for, in spite of prejudice, her own youthfulness sprang
forward to meet his.  "I don't much like pictures of that sort,--they
are so hard and stern; besides dodging away from the eye, and trying to
escape altogether.  They are conscious of looking very unamiable, I
suppose, and therefore hate to be seen."

"If you would permit me," said the artist, looking at Phoebe, "I should
like to try whether the daguerreotype can bring out disagreeable traits
on a perfectly amiable face.  But there certainly is truth in what you
have said.  Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very
sufficient reason, I fancy, is, because the originals are so.  There is
a wonderful insight in Heaven's broad and simple sunshine.  While we
give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually
brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever
venture upon, even could he detect it.  There is, at least, no flattery
in my humble line of art.  Now, here is a likeness which I have taken
over and over again, and still with no better result.  Yet the original
wears, to common eyes, a very different expression.  It would gratify
me to have your judgment on this character."

He exhibited a daguerreotype miniature in a morocco case.  Phoebe
merely glanced at it, and gave it back.

"I know the face," she replied; "for its stern eye has been following
me about all day.  It is my Puritan ancestor, who hangs yonder in the
parlor.  To be sure, you have found some way of copying the portrait
without its black velvet cap and gray beard, and have given him a
modern coat and satin cravat, instead of his cloak and band.  I don't
think him improved by your alterations."

"You would have seen other differences had you looked a little longer,"
said Holgrave, laughing, yet apparently much struck.  "I can assure you
that this is a modern face, and one which you will very probably meet.
Now, the remarkable point is, that the original wears, to the world's
eye,--and, for aught I know, to his most intimate friends,--an
exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, openness
of heart, sunny good-humor, and other praiseworthy qualities of that
cast.  The sun, as you see, tells quite another story, and will not be
coaxed out of it, after half a dozen patient attempts on my part.  Here
we have the man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and, withal, cold as
ice.  Look at that eye! Would you like to be at its mercy? At that
mouth! Could it ever smile? And yet, if you could only see the benign
smile of the original! It is so much the more unfortunate, as he is a
public character of some eminence, and the likeness was intended to be
engraved."

"Well, I don't wish to see it any more," observed Phoebe, turning away
her eyes.  "It is certainly very like the old portrait.  But my cousin
Hepzibah has another picture,--a miniature.  If the original is still
in the world, I think he might defy the sun to make him look stern and
hard."

"You have seen that picture, then!" exclaimed the artist, with an
expression of much interest.  "I never did, but have a great curiosity
to do so.  And you judge favorably of the face?"

"There never was a sweeter one," said Phoebe.  "It is almost too soft
and gentle for a man's."

"Is there nothing wild in the eye?" continued Holgrave, so earnestly
that it embarrassed Phoebe, as did also the quiet freedom with which he
presumed on their so recent acquaintance.  "Is there nothing dark or
sinister anywhere? Could you not conceive the original to have been
guilty of a great crime?"

"It is nonsense," said Phoebe a little impatiently, "for us to talk
about a picture which you have never seen.  You mistake it for some
other.  A crime, indeed! Since you are a friend of my cousin
Hepzibah's, you should ask her to show you the picture."

"It will suit my purpose still better to see the original," replied the
daguerreotypist coolly.  "As to his character, we need not discuss its
points; they have already been settled by a competent tribunal, or one
which called itself competent.  But, stay! Do not go yet, if you
please! I have a proposition to make you."

Phoebe was on the point of retreating, but turned back, with some
hesitation; for she did not exactly comprehend his manner, although, on
better observation, its feature seemed rather to be lack of ceremony
than any approach to offensive rudeness.  There was an odd kind of
authority, too, in what he now proceeded to say, rather as if the
garden were his own than a place to which he was admitted merely by
Hepzibah's courtesy.

"If agreeable to you," he observed, "it would give me pleasure to turn
over these flowers, and those ancient and respectable fowls, to your
care.  Coming fresh from country air and occupations, you will soon
feel the need of some such out-of-door employment.  My own sphere does
not so much lie among flowers.  You can trim and tend them, therefore,
as you please; and I will ask only the least trifle of a blossom, now
and then, in exchange for all the good, honest kitchen vegetables with
which I propose to enrich Miss Hepzibah's table.  So we will be
fellow-laborers, somewhat on the community system."

Silently, and rather surprised at her own compliance, Phoebe
accordingly betook herself to weeding a flower-bed, but busied herself
still more with cogitations respecting this young man, with whom she so
unexpectedly found herself on terms approaching to familiarity.  She
did not altogether like him.  His character perplexed the little
country-girl, as it might a more practised observer; for, while the
tone of his conversation had generally been playful, the impression
left on her mind was that of gravity, and, except as his youth modified
it, almost sternness.  She rebelled, as it were, against a certain
magnetic element in the artist's nature, which he exercised towards
her, possibly without being conscious of it.

After a little while, the twilight, deepened by the shadows of the
fruit-trees and the surrounding buildings, threw an obscurity over the
garden.

"There," said Holgrave, "it is time to give over work! That last stroke
of the hoe has cut off a beanstalk.  Good-night, Miss Phoebe Pyncheon!
Any bright day, if you will put one of those rosebuds in your hair, and
come to my rooms in Central Street, I will seize the purest ray of
sunshine, and make a picture of the flower and its wearer."  He retired
towards his own solitary gable, but turned his head, on reaching the
door, and called to Phoebe, with a tone which certainly had laughter in
it, yet which seemed to be more than half in earnest.

"Be careful not to drink at Maule's well!" said he.  "Neither drink nor
bathe your face in it!"

"Maule's well!" answered Phoebe.  "Is that it with the rim of mossy
stones? I have no thought of drinking there,--but why not?"

"Oh," rejoined the daguerreotypist, "because, like an old lady's cup of
tea, it is water bewitched!"

He vanished; and Phoebe, lingering a moment, saw a glimmering light,
and then the steady beam of a lamp, in a chamber of the gable.  On
returning into Hepzibah's apartment of the house, she found the
low-studded parlor so dim and dusky that her eyes could not penetrate
the interior.  She was indistinctly aware, however, that the gaunt
figure of the old gentlewoman was sitting in one of the straight-backed
chairs, a little withdrawn from the window, the faint gleam of which
showed the blanched paleness of her cheek, turned sideways towards a
corner.

"Shall I light a lamp, Cousin Hepzibah?" she asked.

"Do, if you please, my dear child," answered Hepzibah.  "But put it on
the table in the corner of the passage.  My eyes are weak; and I can
seldom bear the lamplight on them."

What an instrument is the human voice! How wonderfully responsive to
every emotion of the human soul! In Hepzibah's tone, at that moment,
there was a certain rich depth and moisture, as if the words,
commonplace as they were, had been steeped in the warmth of her heart.
Again, while lighting the lamp in the kitchen, Phoebe fancied that her
cousin spoke to her.

"In a moment, cousin!" answered the girl.  "These matches just glimmer,
and go out."

But, instead of a response from Hepzibah, she seemed to hear the murmur
of an unknown voice.  It was strangely indistinct, however, and less
like articulate words than an unshaped sound, such as would be the
utterance of feeling and sympathy, rather than of the intellect.  So
vague was it, that its impression or echo in Phoebe's mind was that of
unreality.  She concluded that she must have mistaken some other sound
for that of the human voice; or else that it was altogether in her
fancy.

She set the lighted lamp in the passage, and again entered the parlor.
Hepzibah's form, though its sable outline mingled with the dusk, was
now less imperfectly visible.  In the remoter parts of the room,
however, its walls being so ill adapted to reflect light, there was
nearly the same obscurity as before.

"Cousin," said Phoebe, "did you speak to me just now?"

"No, child!" replied Hepzibah.

Fewer words than before, but with the same mysterious music in them!
Mellow, melancholy, yet not mournful, the tone seemed to gush up out of
the deep well of Hepzibah's heart, all steeped in its profoundest
emotion.  There was a tremor in it, too, that--as all strong feeling is
electric--partly communicated itself to Phoebe.  The girl sat silently
for a moment.  But soon, her senses being very acute, she became
conscious of an irregular respiration in an obscure corner of the room.
Her physical organization, moreover, being at once delicate and
healthy, gave her a perception, operating with almost the effect of a
spiritual medium, that somebody was near at hand.

"My dear cousin," asked she, overcoming an indefinable reluctance, "is
there not some one in the room with us?"

"Phoebe, my dear little girl," said Hepzibah, after a moment's pause,
"you were up betimes, and have been busy all day.  Pray go to bed; for
I am sure you must need rest.  I will sit in the parlor awhile, and
collect my thoughts.  It has been my custom for more years, child, than
you have lived!"  While thus dismissing her, the maiden lady stept
forward, kissed Phoebe, and pressed her to her heart, which beat
against the girl's bosom with a strong, high, and tumultuous swell.
How came there to be so much love in this desolate old heart, that it
could afford to well over thus abundantly?

"Goodnight, cousin," said Phoebe, strangely affected by Hepzibah's
manner.  "If you begin to love me, I am glad!"

She retired to her chamber, but did not soon fall asleep, nor then very
profoundly.  At some uncertain period in the depths of night, and, as
it were, through the thin veil of a dream, she was conscious of a
footstep mounting the stairs heavily, but not with force and decision.
The voice of Hepzibah, with a hush through it, was going up along with
the footsteps; and, again, responsive to her cousin's voice, Phoebe
heard that strange, vague murmur, which might be likened to an
indistinct shadow of human utterance.




                            VII The Guest


WHEN Phoebe awoke,--which she did with the early twittering of the
conjugal couple of robins in the pear-tree,--she heard movements below
stairs, and, hastening down, found Hepzibah already in the kitchen.
She stood by a window, holding a book in close contiguity to her nose,
as if with the hope of gaining an olfactory acquaintance with its
contents, since her imperfect vision made it not very easy to read
them.  If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom in the
mode suggested, it would certainly have been the one now in Hepzibah's
hand; and the kitchen, in such an event, would forthwith have streamed
with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, capons, larded partridges,
puddings, cakes, and Christmas pies, in all manner of elaborate mixture
and concoction.  It was a cookery book, full of innumerable old
fashions of English dishes, and illustrated with engravings, which
represented the arrangements of the table at such banquets as it might
have befitted a nobleman to give in the great hall of his castle.  And,
amid these rich and potent devices of the culinary art (not one of
which, probably, had been tested, within the memory of any man's
grandfather), poor Hepzibah was seeking for some nimble little titbit,
which, with what skill she had, and such materials as were at hand, she
might toss up for breakfast.

Soon, with a deep sigh, she put aside the savory volume, and inquired
of Phoebe whether old Speckle, as she called one of the hens, had laid
an egg the preceding day.  Phoebe ran to see, but returned without the
expected treasure in her hand.  At that instant, however, the blast of
a fish-dealer's conch was heard, announcing his approach along the
street.  With energetic raps at the shop-window, Hepzibah summoned the
man in, and made purchase of what he warranted as the finest mackerel
in his cart, and as fat a one as ever he felt with his finger so early
in the season.  Requesting Phoebe to roast some coffee,--which she
casually observed was the real Mocha, and so long kept that each of the
small berries ought to be worth its weight in gold,--the maiden lady
heaped fuel into the vast receptacle of the ancient fireplace in such
quantity as soon to drive the lingering dusk out of the kitchen.  The
country-girl, willing to give her utmost assistance, proposed to make
an Indian cake, after her mother's peculiar method, of easy
manufacture, and which she could vouch for as possessing a richness,
and, if rightly prepared, a delicacy, unequalled by any other mode of
breakfast-cake.  Hepzibah gladly assenting, the kitchen was soon the
scene of savory preparation.  Perchance, amid their proper element of
smoke, which eddied forth from the ill-constructed chimney, the ghosts
of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on, or peeped down the great
breadth of the flue, despising the simplicity of the projected meal,
yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each
inchoate dish.  The half-starved rats, at any rate, stole visibly out
of their hiding-places, and sat on their hind-legs, snuffing the fumy
atmosphere, and wistfully awaiting an opportunity to nibble.

Hepzibah had no natural turn for cookery, and, to say the truth, had
fairly incurred her present meagreness by often choosing to go without
her dinner rather than be attendant on the rotation of the spit, or
ebullition of the pot.  Her zeal over the fire, therefore, was quite an
heroic test of sentiment.  It was touching, and positively worthy of
tears (if Phoebe, the only spectator, except the rats and ghosts
aforesaid, had not been better employed than in shedding them), to see
her rake out a bed of fresh and glowing coals, and proceed to broil the
mackerel.  Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry.
She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of
attention as if,--we know not how to express it otherwise,--as if her
own heart were on the gridiron, and her immortal happiness were
involved in its being done precisely to a turn!

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged
and well-provisioned breakfast-table.  We come to it freshly, in the
dewy youth of the day, and when our spiritual and sensual elements are
in better accord than at a later period; so that the material delights
of the morning meal are capable of being fully enjoyed, without any
very grievous reproaches, whether gastric or conscientious, for
yielding even a trifle overmuch to the animal department of our nature.
The thoughts, too, that run around the ring of familiar guests have a
piquancy and mirthfulness, and oftentimes a vivid truth, which more
rarely find their way into the elaborate intercourse of dinner.
Hepzibah's small and ancient table, supported on its slender and
graceful legs, and covered with a cloth of the richest damask, looked
worthy to be the scene and centre of one of the cheerfullest of
parties.  The vapor of the broiled fish arose like incense from the
shrine of a barbarian idol, while the fragrance of the Mocha might have
gratified the nostrils of a tutelary Lar, or whatever power has scope
over a modern breakfast-table.  Phoebe's Indian cakes were the sweetest
offering of all,--in their hue befitting the rustic altars of the
innocent and golden age,--or, so brightly yellow were they, resembling
some of the bread which was changed to glistening gold when Midas tried
to eat it.  The butter must not be forgotten,--butter which Phoebe
herself had churned, in her own rural home, and brought it to her
cousin as a propitiatory gift,--smelling of clover-blossoms, and
diffusing the charm of pastoral scenery through the dark-panelled
parlor.  All this, with the quaint gorgeousness of the old china cups
and saucers, and the crested spoons, and a silver cream-jug (Hepzibah's
only other article of plate, and shaped like the rudest porringer), set
out a board at which the stateliest of old Colonel Pyncheon's guests
need not have scorned to take his place.  But the Puritan's face
scowled down out of the picture, as if nothing on the table pleased his
appetite.

By way of contributing what grace she could, Phoebe gathered some roses
and a few other flowers, possessing either scent or beauty, and
arranged them in a glass pitcher, which, having long ago lost its
handle, was so much the fitter for a flower-vase.  The early
sunshine--as fresh as that which peeped into Eve's bower while she and
Adam sat at breakfast there--came twinkling through the branches of the
pear-tree, and fell quite across the table.  All was now ready.  There
were chairs and plates for three.  A chair and plate for Hepzibah,--the
same for Phoebe,--but what other guest did her cousin look for?

Throughout this preparation there had been a constant tremor in
Hepzibah's frame; an agitation so powerful that Phoebe could see the
quivering of her gaunt shadow, as thrown by the firelight on the
kitchen wall, or by the sunshine on the parlor floor.  Its
manifestations were so various, and agreed so little with one another,
that the girl knew not what to make of it.  Sometimes it seemed an
ecstasy of delight and happiness.  At such moments, Hepzibah would
fling out her arms, and infold Phoebe in them, and kiss her cheek as
tenderly as ever her mother had; she appeared to do so by an inevitable
impulse, and as if her bosom were oppressed with tenderness, of which
she must needs pour out a little, in order to gain breathing-room.  The
next moment, without any visible cause for the change, her unwonted joy
shrank back, appalled, as it were, and clothed itself in mourning; or
it ran and hid itself, so to speak, in the dungeon of her heart, where
it had long lain chained, while a cold, spectral sorrow took the place
of the imprisoned joy, that was afraid to be enfranchised,--a sorrow as
black as that was bright.  She often broke into a little, nervous,
hysteric laugh, more touching than any tears could be; and forthwith,
as if to try which was the most touching, a gush of tears would follow;
or perhaps the laughter and tears came both at once, and surrounded our
poor Hepzibah, in a moral sense, with a kind of pale, dim rainbow.
Towards Phoebe, as we have said, she was affectionate,--far tenderer
than ever before, in their brief acquaintance, except for that one kiss
on the preceding night,--yet with a continually recurring pettishness
and irritability.  She would speak sharply to her; then, throwing aside
all the starched reserve of her ordinary manner, ask pardon, and the
next instant renew the just-forgiven injury.

At last, when their mutual labor was all finished, she took Phoebe's
hand in her own trembling one.

"Bear with me, my dear child," she cried; "for truly my heart is full
to the brim! Bear with me; for I love you, Phoebe, though I speak so
roughly.  Think nothing of it, dearest child! By and by, I shall be
kind, and only kind!"

"My dearest cousin, cannot you tell me what has happened?" asked
Phoebe, with a sunny and tearful sympathy.  "What is it that moves you
so?"

"Hush! hush! He is coming!" whispered Hepzibah, hastily wiping her
eyes. "Let him see you first, Phoebe; for you are young and rosy, and
cannot help letting a smile break out whether or no.  He always liked
bright faces! And mine is old now, and the tears are hardly dry on it.
He never could abide tears.  There; draw the curtain a little, so that
the shadow may fall across his side of the table! But let there be a
good deal of sunshine, too; for he never was fond of gloom, as some
people are.  He has had but little sunshine in his life,--poor
Clifford,--and, oh, what a black shadow.  Poor, poor Clifford!"

Thus murmuring in an undertone, as if speaking rather to her own heart
than to Phoebe, the old gentlewoman stepped on tiptoe about the room,
making such arrangements as suggested themselves at the crisis.

Meanwhile there was a step in the passage-way, above stairs.  Phoebe
recognized it as the same which had passed upward, as through her
dream, in the night-time.  The approaching guest, whoever it might be,
appeared to pause at the head of the staircase; he paused twice or
thrice in the descent; he paused again at the foot.  Each time, the
delay seemed to be without purpose, but rather from a forgetfulness of
the purpose which had set him in motion, or as if the person's feet
came involuntarily to a stand-still because the motive-power was too
feeble to sustain his progress.  Finally, he made a long pause at the
threshold of the parlor.  He took hold of the knob of the door; then
loosened his grasp without opening it.  Hepzibah, her hands
convulsively clasped, stood gazing at the entrance.

"Dear Cousin Hepzibah, pray don't look so!" said Phoebe, trembling; for
her cousin's emotion, and this mysteriously reluctant step, made her
feel as if a ghost were coming into the room.  "You really frighten me!
Is something awful going to happen?"

"Hush!" whispered Hepzibah.  "Be cheerful! whatever may happen, be
nothing but cheerful!"

The final pause at the threshold proved so long, that Hepzibah, unable
to endure the suspense, rushed forward, threw open the door, and led in
the stranger by the hand.  At the first glance, Phoebe saw an elderly
personage, in an old-fashioned dressing-gown of faded damask, and
wearing his gray or almost white hair of an unusual length.  It quite
overshadowed his forehead, except when he thrust it back, and stared
vaguely about the room.  After a very brief inspection of his face, it
was easy to conceive that his footstep must necessarily be such an one
as that which, slowly and with as indefinite an aim as a child's first
journey across a floor, had just brought him hitherward.  Yet there
were no tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a
free and determined gait.  It was the spirit of the man that could not
walk.  The expression of his countenance--while, notwithstanding it had
the light of reason in it--seemed to waver, and glimmer, and nearly to
die away, and feebly to recover itself again.  It was like a flame
which we see twinkling among half-extinguished embers; we gaze at it
more intently than if it were a positive blaze, gushing vividly
upward,--more intently, but with a certain impatience, as if it ought
either to kindle itself into satisfactory splendor, or be at once
extinguished.

For an instant after entering the room, the guest stood still,
retaining Hepzibah's hand instinctively, as a child does that of the
grown person who guides it.  He saw Phoebe, however, and caught an
illumination from her youthful and pleasant aspect, which, indeed,
threw a cheerfulness about the parlor, like the circle of reflected
brilliancy around the glass vase of flowers that was standing in the
sunshine.  He made a salutation, or, to speak nearer the truth, an
ill-defined, abortive attempt at curtsy.  Imperfect as it was, however,
it conveyed an idea, or, at least, gave a hint, of indescribable grace,
such as no practised art of external manners could have attained.  It
was too slight to seize upon at the instant; yet, as recollected
afterwards, seemed to transfigure the whole man.

"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah, in the tone with which one soothes a
wayward infant, "this is our cousin Phoebe,--little Phoebe
Pyncheon,--Arthur's only child, you know.  She has come from the
country to stay with us awhile; for our old house has grown to be very
lonely now."

"Phoebe--Phoebe Pyncheon?--Phoebe?" repeated the guest, with a strange,
sluggish, ill-defined utterance.  "Arthur's child! Ah, I forget! No
matter.  She is very welcome!"

"Come, dear Clifford, take this chair," said Hepzibah, leading him to
his place.  "Pray, Phoebe, lower the curtain a very little more.  Now
let us begin breakfast."

The guest seated himself in the place assigned him, and looked
strangely around.  He was evidently trying to grapple with the present
scene, and bring it home to his mind with a more satisfactory
distinctness.  He desired to be certain, at least, that he was here, in
the low-studded, cross-beamed, oaken-panelled parlor, and not in some
other spot, which had stereotyped itself into his senses.  But the
effort was too great to be sustained with more than a fragmentary
success.  Continually, as we may express it, he faded away out of his
place; or, in other words, his mind and consciousness took their
departure, leaving his wasted, gray, and melancholy figure--a
substantial emptiness, a material ghost--to occupy his seat at table.
Again, after a blank moment, there would be a flickering taper-gleam in
his eyeballs.  It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and
was doing its best to kindle the heart's household fire, and light up
intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion, where it was doomed
to be a forlorn inhabitant.

At one of these moments of less torpid, yet still imperfect animation,
Phoebe became convinced of what she had at first rejected as too
extravagant and startling an idea.  She saw that the person before her
must have been the original of the beautiful miniature in her cousin
Hepzibah's possession.  Indeed, with a feminine eye for costume, she
had at once identified the damask dressing-gown, which enveloped him,
as the same in figure, material, and fashion, with that so elaborately
represented in the picture.  This old, faded garment, with all its
pristine brilliancy extinct, seemed, in some indescribable way, to
translate the wearer's untold misfortune, and make it perceptible to
the beholder's eye.  It was the better to be discerned, by this
exterior type, how worn and old were the soul's more immediate
garments; that form and countenance, the beauty and grace of which had
almost transcended the skill of the most exquisite of artists.  It
could the more adequately be known that the soul of the man must have
suffered some miserable wrong, from its earthly experience.  There he
seemed to sit, with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him and the
world, but through which, at flitting intervals, might be caught the
same expression, so refined, so softly imaginative, which
Malbone--venturing a happy touch, with suspended breath--had imparted
to the miniature! There had been something so innately characteristic
in this look, that all the dusky years, and the burden of unfit
calamity which had fallen upon him, did not suffice utterly to destroy
it.

Hepzibah had now poured out a cup of deliciously fragrant coffee, and
presented it to her guest.  As his eyes met hers, he seemed bewildered
and disquieted.

"Is this you, Hepzibah?" he murmured sadly; then, more apart, and
perhaps unconscious that he was overheard, "How changed!  how changed!
And is she angry with me? Why does she bend her brow so?"

Poor Hepzibah! It was that wretched scowl which time and her
near-sightedness, and the fret of inward discomfort, had rendered so
habitual that any vehemence of mood invariably evoked it.  But at the
indistinct murmur of his words her whole face grew tender, and even
lovely, with sorrowful affection; the harshness of her features
disappeared, as it were, behind the warm and misty glow.

"Angry!" she repeated; "angry with you, Clifford!"

Her tone, as she uttered the exclamation, had a plaintive and really
exquisite melody thrilling through it, yet without subduing a certain
something which an obtuse auditor might still have mistaken for
asperity. It was as if some transcendent musician should draw a
soul-thrilling sweetness out of a cracked instrument, which makes its
physical imperfection heard in the midst of ethereal harmony,--so deep
was the sensibility that found an organ in Hepzibah's voice!

"There is nothing but love here, Clifford," she added,--"nothing but
love! You are at home!"

The guest responded to her tone by a smile, which did not half light up
his face.  Feeble as it was, however, and gone in a moment, it had a
charm of wonderful beauty.  It was followed by a coarser expression; or
one that had the effect of coarseness on the fine mould and outline of
his countenance, because there was nothing intellectual to temper it.
It was a look of appetite.  He ate food with what might almost be
termed voracity; and seemed to forget himself, Hepzibah, the young
girl, and everything else around him, in the sensual enjoyment which
the bountifully spread table afforded.  In his natural system, though
high-wrought and delicately refined, a sensibility to the delights of
the palate was probably inherent.  It would have been kept in check,
however, and even converted into an accomplishment, and one of the
thousand modes of intellectual culture, had his more ethereal
characteristics retained their vigor.  But as it existed now, the
effect was painful and made Phoebe droop her eyes.

In a little while the guest became sensible of the fragrance of the yet
untasted coffee.  He quaffed it eagerly.  The subtle essence acted on
him like a charmed draught, and caused the opaque substance of his
animal being to grow transparent, or, at least, translucent; so that a
spiritual gleam was transmitted through it, with a clearer lustre than
hitherto.

"More, more!" he cried, with nervous haste in his utterance, as if
anxious to retain his grasp of what sought to escape him.  "This is
what I need! Give me more!"

Under this delicate and powerful influence he sat more erect, and
looked out from his eyes with a glance that took note of what it rested
on.  It was not so much that his expression grew more intellectual;
this, though it had its share, was not the most peculiar effect.
Neither was what we call the moral nature so forcibly awakened as to
present itself in remarkable prominence.  But a certain fine temper of
being was now not brought out in full relief, but changeably and
imperfectly betrayed, of which it was the function to deal with all
beautiful and enjoyable things.  In a character where it should exist
as the chief attribute, it would bestow on its possessor an exquisite
taste, and an enviable susceptibility of happiness.  Beauty would be
his life; his aspirations would all tend toward it; and, allowing his
frame and physical organs to be in consonance, his own developments
would likewise be beautiful.  Such a man should have nothing to do with
sorrow; nothing with strife; nothing with the martyrdom which, in an
infinite variety of shapes, awaits those who have the heart, and will,
and conscience, to fight a battle with the world.  To these heroic
tempers, such martyrdom is the richest meed in the world's gift.  To
the individual before us, it could only be a grief, intense in due
proportion with the severity of the infliction.  He had no right to be
a martyr; and, beholding him so fit to be happy and so feeble for all
other purposes, a generous, strong, and noble spirit would, methinks,
have been ready to sacrifice what little enjoyment it might have
planned for itself,--it would have flung down the hopes, so paltry in
its regard,--if thereby the wintry blasts of our rude sphere might come
tempered to such a man.

Not to speak it harshly or scornfully, it seemed Clifford's nature to
be a Sybarite.  It was perceptible, even there, in the dark old parlor,
in the inevitable polarity with which his eyes were attracted towards
the quivering play of sunbeams through the shadowy foliage.  It was
seen in his appreciating notice of the vase of flowers, the scent of
which he inhaled with a zest almost peculiar to a physical organization
so refined that spiritual ingredients are moulded in with it.  It was
betrayed in the unconscious smile with which he regarded Phoebe, whose
fresh and maidenly figure was both sunshine and flowers,--their
essence, in a prettier and more agreeable mode of manifestation.  Not
less evident was this love and necessity for the Beautiful, in the
instinctive caution with which, even so soon, his eyes turned away from
his hostess, and wandered to any quarter rather than come back.  It was
Hepzibah's misfortune,--not Clifford's fault.  How could he,--so yellow
as she was, so wrinkled, so sad of mien, with that odd uncouthness of a
turban on her head, and that most perverse of scowls contorting her
brow,--how could he love to gaze at her? But, did he owe her no
affection for so much as she had silently given? He owed her nothing.
A nature like Clifford's can contract no debts of that kind.  It is--we
say it without censure, nor in diminution of the claim which it
indefeasibly possesses on beings of another mould--it is always selfish
in its essence; and we must give it leave to be so, and heap up our
heroic and disinterested love upon it so much the more, without a
recompense.  Poor Hepzibah knew this truth, or, at least, acted on the
instinct of it.  So long estranged from what was lovely as Clifford had
been, she rejoiced--rejoiced, though with a present sigh, and a secret
purpose to shed tears in her own chamber that he had brighter objects
now before his eyes than her aged and uncomely features.  They never
possessed a charm; and if they had, the canker of her grief for him
would long since have destroyed it.

The guest leaned back in his chair.  Mingled in his countenance with a
dreamy delight, there was a troubled look of effort and unrest.  He was
seeking to make himself more fully sensible of the scene around him;
or, perhaps, dreading it to be a dream, or a play of imagination, was
vexing the fair moment with a struggle for some added brilliancy and
more durable illusion.

"How pleasant!--How delightful!" he murmured, but not as if addressing
any one.  "Will it last? How balmy the atmosphere through that open
window! An open window! How beautiful that play of sunshine! Those
flowers, how very fragrant! That young girl's face, how cheerful, how
blooming!--a flower with the dew on it, and sunbeams in the dew-drops!
Ah! this must be all a dream!  A dream! A dream! But it has quite
hidden the four stone walls!"

Then his face darkened, as if the shadow of a cavern or a dungeon had
come over it; there was no more light in its expression than might have
come through the iron grates of a prison-window--still lessening, too,
as if he were sinking farther into the depths.  Phoebe (being of that
quickness and activity of temperament that she seldom long refrained
from taking a part, and generally a good one, in what was going
forward) now felt herself moved to address the stranger.

"Here is a new kind of rose, which I found this morning in the garden,"
said she, choosing a small crimson one from among the flowers in the
vase.  "There will be but five or six on the bush this season.  This is
the most perfect of them all; not a speck of blight or mildew in it.
And how sweet it is!--sweet like no other rose! One can never forget
that scent!"

"Ah!--let me see!--let me hold it!" cried the guest, eagerly seizing
the flower, which, by the spell peculiar to remembered odors, brought
innumerable associations along with the fragrance that it exhaled.
"Thank you! This has done me good.  I remember how I used to prize this
flower,--long ago, I suppose, very long ago!--or was it only yesterday?
It makes me feel young again!  Am I young? Either this remembrance is
singularly distinct, or this consciousness strangely dim! But how kind
of the fair young girl! Thank you! Thank you!"

The favorable excitement derived from this little crimson rose afforded
Clifford the brightest moment which he enjoyed at the breakfast-table.
It might have lasted longer, but that his eyes happened, soon
afterwards, to rest on the face of the old Puritan, who, out of his
dingy frame and lustreless canvas, was looking down on the scene like a
ghost, and a most ill-tempered and ungenial one.  The guest made an
impatient gesture of the hand, and addressed Hepzibah with what might
easily be recognized as the licensed irritability of a petted member of
the family.

"Hepzibah!--Hepzibah!" cried he with no little force and distinctness,
"why do you keep that odious picture on the wall?  Yes, yes!--that is
precisely your taste! I have told you, a thousand times, that it was
the evil genius of the house!--my evil genius particularly! Take it
down, at once!"

"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah sadly, "you know it cannot be!"

"Then, at all events," continued he, still speaking with some energy,
"pray cover it with a crimson curtain, broad enough to hang in folds,
and with a golden border and tassels.  I cannot bear it! It must not
stare me in the face!"

"Yes, dear Clifford, the picture shall be covered," said Hepzibah
soothingly.  "There is a crimson curtain in a trunk above stairs,--a
little faded and moth-eaten, I'm afraid,--but Phoebe and I will do
wonders with it."

"This very day, remember" said he; and then added, in a low,
self-communing voice, "Why should we live in this dismal house at all?
Why not go to the South of France?--to Italy?--Paris, Naples, Venice,
Rome? Hepzibah will say we have not the means.  A droll idea that!"

He smiled to himself, and threw a glance of fine sarcastic meaning
towards Hepzibah.

But the several moods of feeling, faintly as they were marked, through
which he had passed, occurring in so brief an interval of time, had
evidently wearied the stranger.  He was probably accustomed to a sad
monotony of life, not so much flowing in a stream, however sluggish, as
stagnating in a pool around his feet.  A slumberous veil diffused
itself over his countenance, and had an effect, morally speaking, on
its naturally delicate and elegant outline, like that which a brooding
mist, with no sunshine in it, throws over the features of a landscape.
He appeared to become grosser,--almost cloddish.  If aught of interest
or beauty--even ruined beauty--had heretofore been visible in this man,
the beholder might now begin to doubt it, and to accuse his own
imagination of deluding him with whatever grace had flickered over that
visage, and whatever exquisite lustre had gleamed in those filmy eyes.

Before he had quite sunken away, however, the sharp and peevish tinkle
of the shop-bell made itself audible.  Striking most disagreeably on
Clifford's auditory organs and the characteristic sensibility of his
nerves, it caused him to start upright out of his chair.

"Good heavens, Hepzibah! what horrible disturbance have we now in the
house?" cried he, wreaking his resentful impatience--as a matter of
course, and a custom of old--on the one person in the world that loved
him.  "I have never heard such a hateful clamor! Why do you permit it?
In the name of all dissonance, what can it be?"

It was very remarkable into what prominent relief--even as if a dim
picture should leap suddenly from its canvas--Clifford's character was
thrown by this apparently trifling annoyance.  The secret was, that an
individual of his temper can always be pricked more acutely through his
sense of the beautiful and harmonious than through his heart.  It is
even possible--for similar cases have often happened--that if Clifford,
in his foregoing life, had enjoyed the means of cultivating his taste
to its utmost perfectibility, that subtile attribute might, before this
period, have completely eaten out or filed away his affections.  Shall
we venture to pronounce, therefore, that his long and black calamity
may not have had a redeeming drop of mercy at the bottom?

"Dear Clifford, I wish I could keep the sound from your ears," said
Hepzibah, patiently, but reddening with a painful suffusion of shame.
"It is very disagreeable even to me.  But, do you know, Clifford, I
have something to tell you? This ugly noise,--pray run, Phoebe, and see
who is there!--this naughty little tinkle is nothing but our shop-bell!"

"Shop-bell!" repeated Clifford, with a bewildered stare.

"Yes, our shop-bell," said Hepzibah, a certain natural dignity, mingled
with deep emotion, now asserting itself in her manner.  "For you must
know, dearest Clifford, that we are very poor.  And there was no other
resource, but either to accept assistance from a hand that I would push
aside (and so would you!) were it to offer bread when we were dying for
it,--no help, save from him, or else to earn our subsistence with my
own hands! Alone, I might have been content to starve.  But you were to
be given back to me! Do you think, then, dear Clifford," added she,
with a wretched smile, "that I have brought an irretrievable disgrace
on the old house, by opening a little shop in the front gable?  Our
great-great-grandfather did the same, when there was far less need! Are
you ashamed of me?"

"Shame! Disgrace! Do you speak these words to me, Hepzibah?" said
Clifford,--not angrily, however; for when a man's spirit has been
thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offences, but never
resentful of great ones.  So he spoke with only a grieved emotion.  "It
was not kind to say so, Hepzibah! What shame can befall me now?"

And then the unnerved man--he that had been born for enjoyment, but had
met a doom so very wretched--burst into a woman's passion of tears.  It
was but of brief continuance, however; soon leaving him in a quiescent,
and, to judge by his countenance, not an uncomfortable state.  From
this mood, too, he partially rallied for an instant, and looked at
Hepzibah with a smile, the keen, half-derisory purport of which was a
puzzle to her.

"Are we so very poor, Hepzibah?" said he.

Finally, his chair being deep and softly cushioned, Clifford fell
asleep.  Hearing the more regular rise and fall of his breath (which,
however, even then, instead of being strong and full, had a feeble kind
of tremor, corresponding with the lack of vigor in his
character),--hearing these tokens of settled slumber, Hepzibah seized
the opportunity to peruse his face more attentively than she had yet
dared to do.  Her heart melted away in tears; her profoundest spirit
sent forth a moaning voice, low, gentle, but inexpressibly sad.  In
this depth of grief and pity she felt that there was no irreverence in
gazing at his altered, aged, faded, ruined face.  But no sooner was she
a little relieved than her conscience smote her for gazing curiously at
him, now that he was so changed; and, turning hastily away, Hepzibah
let down the curtain over the sunny window, and left Clifford to
slumber there.




                   VIII The Pyncheon of To-day


PHOEBE, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of
the little devourer--if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright--of Jim
Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive.
Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the
purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman's
present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs
and half a pound of raisins.  These articles Phoebe accordingly
supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a
slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a
whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of
Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of
fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him.  This remarkable
urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in
respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because
he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked
almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.

After partly closing the door, the child turned back, and mumbled
something to Phoebe, which, as the whale was but half disposed of, she
could not perfectly understand.

"What did you say, my little fellow?" asked she.

"Mother wants to know" repeated Ned Higgins more distinctly, "how Old
Maid Pyncheon's brother does? Folks say he has got home."

"My cousin Hepzibah's brother?" exclaimed Phoebe, surprised at this
sudden explanation of the relationship between Hepzibah and her guest.
"Her brother! And where can he have been?"

The little boy only put his thumb to his broad snub-nose, with that
look of shrewdness which a child, spending much of his time in the
street, so soon learns to throw over his features, however
unintelligent in themselves.  Then as Phoebe continued to gaze at him,
without answering his mother's message, he took his departure.

As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made
his entrance into the shop.  It was the portly, and, had it possessed
the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately
figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black
suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible.
A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high
respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost
snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots.  His dark,
square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was
naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had
not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the
harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence.  Owing,
however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about
the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather
than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not
altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be.  A
susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording
very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it
purported to be the outward reflection.  And if the observer chanced to
be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably
suspect that the smile on the gentleman's face was a good deal akin to
the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his
boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and
preserve them.

As the stranger entered the little shop, where the projection of the
second story and the thick foliage of the elm-tree, as well as the
commodities at the window, created a sort of gray medium, his smile
grew as intense as if he had set his heart on counteracting the whole
gloom of the atmosphere (besides any moral gloom pertaining to Hepzibah
and her inmates) by the unassisted light of his countenance.  On
perceiving a young rose-bud of a girl, instead of the gaunt presence of
the old maid, a look of surprise was manifest.  He at first knit his
brows; then smiled with more unctuous benignity than ever.

"Ah, I see how it is!" said he in a deep voice,--a voice which, had it
come from the throat of an uncultivated man, would have been gruff,
but, by dint of careful training, was now sufficiently agreeable,--"I
was not aware that Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon had commenced business under
such favorable auspices.  You are her assistant, I suppose?"

"I certainly am," answered Phoebe, and added, with a little air of
lady-like assumption (for, civil as the gentleman was, he evidently
took her to be a young person serving for wages), "I am a cousin of
Miss Hepzibah, on a visit to her."

"Her cousin?--and from the country? Pray pardon me, then," said the
gentleman, bowing and smiling, as Phoebe never had been bowed to nor
smiled on before; "in that case, we must be better acquainted; for,
unless I am sadly mistaken, you are my own little kinswoman likewise!
Let me see,--Mary?--Dolly?--Phoebe?--yes, Phoebe is the name! Is it
possible that you are Phoebe Pyncheon, only child of my dear cousin and
classmate, Arthur?  Ah, I see your father now, about your mouth! Yes,
yes! we must be better acquainted! I am your kinsman, my dear.  Surely
you must have heard of Judge Pyncheon?"

As Phoebe curtsied in reply, the Judge bent forward, with the
pardonable and even praiseworthy purpose--considering the nearness of
blood and the difference of age--of bestowing on his young relative a
kiss of acknowledged kindred and natural affection.  Unfortunately
(without design, or only with such instinctive design as gives no
account of itself to the intellect) Phoebe, just at the critical
moment, drew back; so that her highly respectable kinsman, with his
body bent over the counter and his lips protruded, was betrayed into
the rather absurd predicament of kissing the empty air.  It was a
modern parallel to the case of Ixion embracing a cloud, and was so much
the more ridiculous as the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy
matter, and never mistaking a shadow for a substance.  The truth
was,--and it is Phoebe's only excuse,--that, although Judge Pyncheon's
glowing benignity might not be absolutely unpleasant to the feminine
beholder, with the width of a street, or even an ordinary-sized room,
interposed between, yet it became quite too intense, when this dark,
full-fed physiognomy (so roughly bearded, too, that no razor could ever
make it smooth) sought to bring itself into actual contact with the
object of its regards.  The man, the sex, somehow or other, was
entirely too prominent in the Judge's demonstrations of that sort.
Phoebe's eyes sank, and, without knowing why, she felt herself blushing
deeply under his look.   Yet she had been kissed before, and without
any particular squeamishness, by perhaps half a dozen different
cousins, younger as well as older than this dark-browned,
grisly-bearded, white-neck-clothed, and unctuously-benevolent Judge!
Then, why not by him?

On raising her eyes, Phoebe was startled by the change in Judge
Pyncheon's face.  It was quite as striking, allowing for the difference
of scale, as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just
before a thunder-storm; not that it had the passionate intensity of the
latter aspect, but was cold, hard, immitigable, like a day-long
brooding cloud.

"Dear me! what is to be done now?" thought the country-girl to herself.
"He looks as if there were nothing softer in him than a rock, nor
milder than the east wind! I meant no harm! Since he is really my
cousin, I would have let him kiss me, if I could!"

Then, all at once, it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pyncheon was
the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypist had shown her
in the garden, and that the hard, stern, relentless look, now on his
face, was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing
out.  Was it, therefore, no momentary mood, but, however skilfully
concealed, the settled temper of his life?  And not merely so, but was
it hereditary in him, and transmitted down, as a precious heirloom,
from that bearded ancestor, in whose picture both the expression and,
to a singular degree, the features of the modern Judge were shown as by
a kind of prophecy?  A deeper philosopher than Phoebe might have found
something very terrible in this idea.  It implied that the weaknesses
and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral
diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to
another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been
able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to
entail upon posterity.

But, as it happened, scarcely had Phoebe's eyes rested again on the
Judge's countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished; and she found
herself quite overpowered by the sultry, dog-day heat, as it were, of
benevolence, which this excellent man diffused out of his great heart
into the surrounding atmosphere,--very much like a serpent, which, as a
preliminary to fascination, is said to fill the air with his peculiar
odor.

"I like that, Cousin Phoebe!" cried he, with an emphatic nod of
approbation. "I like it much, my little cousin! You are a good child,
and know how to take care of yourself. A young girl--especially if she
be a very pretty one--can never be too chary of her lips."

"Indeed, sir," said Phoebe, trying to laugh the matter off, "I did not
mean to be unkind."

Nevertheless, whether or no it were entirely owing to the inauspicious
commencement of their acquaintance, she still acted under a certain
reserve, which was by no means customary to her frank and genial
nature.  The fantasy would not quit her, that the original Puritan, of
whom she had heard so many sombre traditions,--the progenitor of the
whole race of New England Pyncheons, the founder of the House of the
Seven Gables, and who had died so strangely in it,--had now stept into
the shop.  In these days of off-hand equipment, the matter was easily
enough arranged.  On his arrival from the other world, he had merely
found it necessary to spend a quarter of an hour at a barber's, who had
trimmed down the Puritan's full beard into a pair of grizzled whiskers,
then, patronizing a ready-made clothing establishment, he had exchanged
his velvet doublet and sable cloak, with the richly worked band under
his chin, for a white collar and cravat, coat, vest, and pantaloons;
and lastly, putting aside his steel-hilted broadsword to take up a
gold-headed cane, the Colonel Pyncheon of two centuries ago steps
forward as the Judge of the passing moment!

Of course, Phoebe was far too sensible a girl to entertain this idea in
any other way than as matter for a smile.  Possibly, also, could the
two personages have stood together before her eye, many points of
difference would have been perceptible, and perhaps only a general
resemblance.  The long lapse of intervening years, in a climate so
unlike that which had fostered the ancestral Englishman, must
inevitably have wrought important changes in the physical system of his
descendant.  The Judge's volume of muscle could hardly be the same as
the Colonel's; there was undoubtedly less beef in him.  Though looked
upon as a weighty man among his contemporaries in respect of animal
substance, and as favored with a remarkable degree of fundamental
development, well adapting him for the judicial bench, we conceive that
the modern Judge Pyncheon, if weighed in the same balance with his
ancestor, would have required at least an old-fashioned fifty-six to
keep the scale in equilibrio.  Then the Judge's face had lost the ruddy
English hue that showed its warmth through all the duskiness of the
Colonel's weather-beaten cheek, and had taken a sallow shade, the
established complexion of his countrymen.  If we mistake not, moreover,
a certain quality of nervousness had become more or less manifest, even
in so solid a specimen of Puritan descent as the gentleman now under
discussion.  As one of its effects, it bestowed on his countenance a
quicker mobility than the old Englishman's had possessed, and keener
vivacity, but at the expense of a sturdier something, on which these
acute endowments seemed to act like dissolving acids.  This process,
for aught we know, may belong to the great system of human progress,
which, with every ascending footstep, as it diminishes the necessity
for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us, by
refining away our grosser attributes of body.  If so, Judge Pyncheon
could endure a century or two more of such refinement as well as most
other men.

The similarity, intellectual and moral, between the Judge and his
ancestor appears to have been at least as strong as the resemblance of
mien and feature would afford reason to anticipate.  In old Colonel
Pyncheon's funeral discourse the clergyman absolutely canonized his
deceased parishioner, and opening, as it were, a vista through the roof
of the church, and thence through the firmament above, showed him
seated, harp in hand, among the crowned choristers of the spiritual
world.  On his tombstone, too, the record is highly eulogistic; nor
does history, so far as he holds a place upon its page, assail the
consistency and uprightness of his character.  So also, as regards the
Judge Pyncheon of to-day, neither clergyman, nor legal critic, nor
inscriber of tombstones, nor historian of general or local politics,
would venture a word against this eminent person's sincerity as a
Christian, or respectability as a man, or integrity as a judge, or
courage and faithfulness as the often-tried representative of his
political party.  But, besides these cold, formal, and empty words of
the chisel that inscribes, the voice that speaks, and the pen that
writes, for the public eye and for distant time,--and which inevitably
lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so
doing,--there were traditions about the ancestor, and private diurnal
gossip about the Judge, remarkably accordant in their testimony.  It is
often instructive to take the woman's, the private and domestic, view
of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast
discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the
pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the original's back.

For example:  tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy of
wealth; the Judge, too, with all the show of liberal expenditure, was
said to be as close-fisted as if his gripe were of iron.  The ancestor
had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindliness, a rough
heartiness of word and manner, which most people took to be the genuine
warmth of nature, making its way through the thick and inflexible hide
of a manly character.  His descendant, in compliance with the
requirements of a nicer age, had etherealized this rude benevolence
into that broad benignity of smile wherewith he shone like a noonday
sun along the streets, or glowed like a household fire in the
drawing-rooms of his private acquaintance.  The Puritan--if not belied
by some singular stories, murmured, even at this day, under the
narrator's breath--had fallen into certain transgressions to which men
of his great animal development, whatever their faith or principles,
must continue liable, until they put off impurity, along with the gross
earthly substance that involves it.  We must not stain our page with
any contemporary scandal, to a similar purport, that may have been
whispered against the Judge.  The Puritan, again, an autocrat in his
own household, had worn out three wives, and, merely by the remorseless
weight and hardness of his character in the conjugal relation, had sent
them, one after another, broken-hearted, to their graves.  Here the
parallel, in some sort, fails.  The Judge had wedded but a single wife,
and lost her in the third or fourth year of their marriage.  There was
a fable, however,--for such we choose to consider it, though, not
impossibly, typical of Judge Pyncheon's marital deportment,--that the
lady got her death-blow in the honeymoon, and never smiled again,
because her husband compelled her to serve him with coffee every
morning at his bedside, in token of fealty to her liege-lord and master.

But it is too fruitful a subject, this of hereditary resemblances,--the
frequent recurrence of which, in a direct line, is truly unaccountable,
when we consider how large an accumulation of ancestry lies behind
every man at the distance of one or two centuries.  We shall only add,
therefore, that the Puritan--so, at least, says chimney-corner
tradition, which often preserves traits of character with marvellous
fidelity--was bold, imperious, relentless, crafty; laying his purposes
deep, and following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew
neither rest nor conscience; trampling on the weak, and, when essential
to his ends, doing his utmost to beat down the strong.  Whether the
Judge in any degree resembled him, the further progress of our
narrative may show.

Scarcely any of the items in the above-drawn parallel occurred to
Phoebe, whose country birth and residence, in truth, had left her
pitifully ignorant of most of the family traditions, which lingered,
like cobwebs and incrustations of smoke, about the rooms and
chimney-corners of the House of the Seven Gables.  Yet there was a
circumstance, very trifling in itself, which impressed her with an odd
degree of horror.  She had heard of the anathema flung by Maule, the
executed wizard, against Colonel Pyncheon and his posterity,--that God
would give them blood to drink,--and likewise of the popular notion,
that this miraculous blood might now and then be heard gurgling in
their throats.  The latter scandal--as became a person of sense, and,
more especially, a member of the Pyncheon family--Phoebe had set down
for the absurdity which it unquestionably was.  But ancient
superstitions, after being steeped in human hearts and embodied in
human breath, and passing from lip to ear in manifold repetition,
through a series of generations, become imbued with an effect of homely
truth.  The smoke of the domestic hearth has scented them through and
through.  By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look
like them, and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home
that their influence is usually greater than we suspect.  Thus it
happened, that when Phoebe heard a certain noise in Judge Pyncheon's
throat,--rather habitual with him, not altogether voluntary, yet
indicative of nothing, unless it were a slight bronchial complaint, or,
as some people hinted, an apoplectic symptom,--when the girl heard this
queer and awkward ingurgitation (which the writer never did hear, and
therefore cannot describe), she very foolishly started, and clasped her
hands.

Of course, it was exceedingly ridiculous in Phoebe to be discomposed by
such a trifle, and still more unpardonable to show her discomposure to
the individual most concerned in it.  But the incident chimed in so
oddly with her previous fancies about the Colonel and the Judge, that,
for the moment, it seemed quite to mingle their identity.

"What is the matter with you, young woman?" said Judge Pyncheon, giving
her one of his harsh looks.  "Are you afraid of anything?"

"Oh, nothing, sir--nothing in the world!" answered Phoebe, with a
little laugh of vexation at herself.  "But perhaps you wish to speak
with my cousin Hepzibah.  Shall I call her?"

"Stay a moment, if you please," said the Judge, again beaming sunshine
out of his face.  "You seem to be a little nervous this morning.  The
town air, Cousin Phoebe, does not agree with your good, wholesome
country habits.  Or has anything happened to disturb you?--anything
remarkable in Cousin Hepzibah's family?--  An arrival, eh? I thought
so! No wonder you are out of sorts, my little cousin.  To be an inmate
with such a guest may well startle an innocent young girl!"

"You quite puzzle me, sir," replied Phoebe, gazing inquiringly at the
Judge.  "There is no frightful guest in the house, but only a poor,
gentle, childlike man, whom I believe to be Cousin Hepzibah's brother.
I am afraid (but you, sir, will know better than I) that he is not
quite in his sound senses; but so mild and quiet he seems to be, that a
mother might trust her baby with him; and I think he would play with
the baby as if he were only a few years older than itself.  He startle
me!--Oh, no indeed!"

"I rejoice to hear so favorable and so ingenuous an account of my
cousin Clifford," said the benevolent Judge.  "Many years ago, when we
were boys and young men together, I had a great affection for him, and
still feel a tender interest in all his concerns.  You say, Cousin
Phoebe, he appears to be weak minded.  Heaven grant him at least enough
of intellect to repent of his past sins!"

"Nobody, I fancy," observed Phoebe, "can have fewer to repent of."

"And is it possible, my dear," rejoined the Judge, with a commiserating
look, "that you have never heard of Clifford Pyncheon?--that you know
nothing of his history? Well, it is all right; and your mother has
shown a very proper regard for the good name of the family with which
she connected herself.   Believe the best you can of this unfortunate
person, and hope the best!  It is a rule which Christians should always
follow, in their judgments of one another; and especially is it right
and wise among near relatives, whose characters have necessarily a
degree of mutual dependence.  But is Clifford in the parlor? I will
just step in and see."

"Perhaps, sir, I had better call my cousin Hepzibah," said Phoebe;
hardly knowing, however, whether she ought to obstruct the entrance of
so affectionate a kinsman into the private regions of the house.  "Her
brother seemed to be just falling asleep after breakfast; and I am sure
she would not like him to be disturbed.  Pray, sir, let me give her
notice!"

But the Judge showed a singular determination to enter unannounced; and
as Phoebe, with the vivacity of a person whose movements unconsciously
answer to her thoughts, had stepped towards the door, he used little or
no ceremony in putting her aside.

"No, no, Miss Phoebe!" said Judge Pyncheon in a voice as deep as a
thunder-growl, and with a frown as black as the cloud whence it issues.
"Stay you here! I know the house, and know my cousin Hepzibah, and know
her brother Clifford likewise.--nor need my little country cousin put
herself to the trouble of announcing me!"--in these latter words, by
the bye, there were symptoms of a change from his sudden harshness into
his previous benignity of manner.  "I am at home here, Phoebe, you must
recollect, and you are the stranger.  I will just step in, therefore,
and see for myself how Clifford is, and assure him and Hepzibah of my
kindly feelings and best wishes.  It is right, at this juncture, that
they should both hear from my own lips how much I desire to serve them.
Ha! here is Hepzibah herself!"

Such was the case.  The vibrations of the Judge's voice had reached the
old gentlewoman in the parlor, where she sat, with face averted,
waiting on her brother's slumber.  She now issued forth, as would
appear, to defend the entrance, looking, we must needs say, amazingly
like the dragon which, in fairy tales, is wont to be the guardian over
an enchanted beauty.  The habitual scowl of her brow was undeniably too
fierce, at this moment, to pass itself off on the innocent score of
near-sightedness; and it was bent on Judge Pyncheon in a way that
seemed to confound, if not alarm him, so inadequately had he estimated
the moral force of a deeply grounded antipathy.   She made a repelling
gesture with her hand, and stood a perfect picture of prohibition, at
full length, in the dark frame of the doorway.  But we must betray
Hepzibah's secret, and confess that the native timorousness of her
character even now developed itself in a quick tremor, which, to her
own perception, set each of her joints at variance with its fellows.

Possibly, the Judge was aware how little true hardihood lay behind
Hepzibah's formidable front.  At any rate, being a gentleman of steady
nerves, he soon recovered himself, and failed not to approach his
cousin with outstretched hand; adopting the sensible precaution,
however, to cover his advance with a smile, so broad and sultry, that,
had it been only half as warm as it looked, a trellis of grapes might
at once have turned purple under its summer-like exposure.  It may have
been his purpose, indeed, to melt poor Hepzibah on the spot, as if she
were a figure of yellow wax.

"Hepzibah, my beloved cousin, I am rejoiced!" exclaimed the Judge most
emphatically.  "Now, at length, you have something to live for.  Yes,
and all of us, let me say, your friends and kindred, have more to live
for than we had yesterday.  I have lost no time in hastening to offer
any assistance in my power towards making Clifford comfortable.  He
belongs to us all.  I know how much he requires,--how much he used to
require,--with his delicate taste, and his love of the beautiful.
Anything in my house,--pictures, books, wine, luxuries of the
table,--he may command them all! It would afford me most heartfelt
gratification to see him! Shall I step in, this moment?"

"No," replied Hepzibah, her voice quivering too painfully to allow of
many words.  "He cannot see visitors!"

"A visitor, my dear cousin!--do you call me so?" cried the Judge, whose
sensibility, it seems, was hurt by the coldness of the phrase.  "Nay,
then, let me be Clifford's host, and your own likewise.  Come at once
to my house.  The country air, and all the conveniences,--I may say
luxuries,--that I have gathered about me, will do wonders for him.  And
you and I, dear Hepzibah, will consult together, and watch together,
and labor together, to make our dear Clifford happy.  Come! why should
we make more words about what is both a duty and a pleasure on my part?
Come to me at once!"

On hearing these so hospitable offers, and such generous recognition of
the claims of kindred, Phoebe felt very much in the mood of running up
to Judge Pyncheon, and giving him, of her own accord, the kiss from
which she had so recently shrunk away.  It was quite otherwise with
Hepzibah; the Judge's smile seemed to operate on her acerbity of heart
like sunshine upon vinegar, making it ten times sourer than ever.

"Clifford," said she,--still too agitated to utter more than an abrupt
sentence,--"Clifford has a home here!"

"May Heaven forgive you, Hepzibah," said Judge Pyncheon,--reverently
lifting his eyes towards that high court of equity to which he
appealed,--"if you suffer any ancient prejudice or animosity to weigh
with you in this matter.  I stand here with an open heart, willing and
anxious to receive yourself and Clifford into it.  Do not refuse my
good offices,--my earnest propositions for your welfare! They are such,
in all respects, as it behooves your nearest kinsman to make.  It will
be a heavy responsibility, cousin, if you confine your brother to this
dismal house and stifled air, when the delightful freedom of my
country-seat is at his command."

"It would never suit Clifford," said Hepzibah, as briefly as before.

"Woman!" broke forth the Judge, giving way to his resentment, "what is
the meaning of all this? Have you other resources? Nay, I suspected as
much! Take care, Hepzibah, take care! Clifford is on the brink of as
black a ruin as ever befell him yet! But why do I talk with you, woman
as you are? Make way!--I must see Clifford!"

Hepzibah spread out her gaunt figure across the door, and seemed really
to increase in bulk; looking the more terrible, also, because there was
so much terror and agitation in her heart.  But Judge Pyncheon's
evident purpose of forcing a passage was interrupted by a voice from
the inner room; a weak, tremulous, wailing voice, indicating helpless
alarm, with no more energy for self-defence than belongs to a
frightened infant.

"Hepzibah, Hepzibah!" cried the voice; "go down on your knees to him!
Kiss his feet! Entreat him not to come in! Oh, let him have mercy on
me! Mercy! mercy!"

For the instant, it appeared doubtful whether it were not the Judge's
resolute purpose to set Hepzibah aside, and step across the threshold
into the parlor, whence issued that broken and miserable murmur of
entreaty.  It was not pity that restrained him, for, at the first sound
of the enfeebled voice, a red fire kindled in his eyes, and he made a
quick pace forward, with something inexpressibly fierce and grim
darkening forth, as it were, out of the whole man.  To know Judge
Pyncheon was to see him at that moment.  After such a revelation, let
him smile with what sultriness he would, he could much sooner turn
grapes purple, or pumpkins yellow, than melt the iron-branded
impression out of the beholder's memory.  And it rendered his aspect
not the less, but more frightful, that it seemed not to express wrath
or hatred, but a certain hot fellness of purpose, which annihilated
everything but itself.

Yet, after all, are we not slandering an excellent and amiable man?
Look at the Judge now! He is apparently conscious of having erred, in
too energetically pressing his deeds of loving-kindness on persons
unable to appreciate them.  He will await their better mood, and hold
himself as ready to assist them then as at this moment.  As he draws
back from the door, an all-comprehensive benignity blazes from his
visage, indicating that he gathers Hepzibah, little Phoebe, and the
invisible Clifford, all three, together with the whole world besides,
into his immense heart, and gives them a warm bath in its flood of
affection.

"You do me great wrong, dear Cousin Hepzibah!" said he, first kindly
offering her his hand, and then drawing on his glove preparatory to
departure.  "Very great wrong! But I forgive it, and will study to make
you think better of me.  Of course, our poor Clifford being in so
unhappy a state of mind, I cannot think of urging an interview at
present.  But I shall watch over his welfare as if he were my own
beloved brother; nor do I at all despair, my dear cousin, of
constraining both him and you to acknowledge your injustice.  When that
shall happen, I desire no other revenge than your acceptance of the
best offices in my power to do you."

With a bow to Hepzibah, and a degree of paternal benevolence in his
parting nod to Phoebe, the Judge left the shop, and went smiling along
the street.  As is customary with the rich, when they aim at the honors
of a republic, he apologized, as it were, to the people, for his
wealth, prosperity, and elevated station, by a free and hearty manner
towards those who knew him; putting off the more of his dignity in due
proportion with the humbleness of the man whom he saluted, and thereby
proving a haughty consciousness of his advantages as irrefragably as if
he had marched forth preceded by a troop of lackeys to clear the way.
On this particular forenoon, so excessive was the warmth of Judge
Pyncheon's kindly aspect, that (such, at least, was the rumor about
town) an extra passage of the water-carts was found essential, in order
to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine!

No sooner had he disappeared than Hepzibah grew deadly white, and,
staggering towards Phoebe, let her head fall on the young girl's
shoulder.

"O Phoebe!" murmured she, "that man has been the horror of my life!
Shall I never, never have the courage,--will my voice never cease from
trembling long enough to let me tell him what he is?"

"Is he so very wicked?" asked Phoebe.  "Yet his offers were surely
kind!"

"Do not speak of them,--he has a heart of iron!" rejoined Hepzibah.
"Go, now, and talk to Clifford! Amuse and keep him quiet! It would
disturb him wretchedly to see me so agitated as I am.  There, go, dear
child, and I will try to look after the shop."

Phoebe went accordingly, but perplexed herself, meanwhile, with queries
as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed, and also
whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp
and respectability, could really, in any single instance, be otherwise
than just and upright men.   A doubt of this nature has a most
disturbing influence, and, if shown to be a fact, comes with fearful
and startling effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limit-loving
class, in which we find our little country-girl.  Dispositions more
boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery,
since there must be evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to
grasp his share of it as a low one.  A wider scope of view, and a
deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station, all proved
illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not
feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos.  But
Phoebe, in order to keep the universe in its old place, was fain to
smother, in some degree, her own intuitions as to Judge Pyncheon's
character.  And as for her cousin's testimony in disparagement of it,
she concluded that Hepzibah's judgment was embittered by one of those
family feuds which render hatred the more deadly by the dead and
corrupted love that they intermingle with its native poison.




                           IX Clifford and Phoebe


TRULY was there something high, generous, and noble in the native
composition of our poor old Hepzibah! Or else,--and it was quite as
probably the case,--she had been enriched by poverty, developed by
sorrow, elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life, and
thus endowed with heroism, which never could have characterized her in
what are called happier circumstances.  Through dreary years Hepzibah
had looked forward--for the most part despairingly, never with any
confidence of hope, but always with the feeling that it was her
brightest possibility--to the very position in which she now found
herself.  In her own behalf, she had asked nothing of Providence but
the opportunity of devoting herself to this brother, whom she had so
loved,--so admired for what he was, or might have been,--and to whom
she had kept her faith, alone of all the world, wholly, unfalteringly,
at every instant, and throughout life.  And here, in his late decline,
the lost one had come back out of his long and strange misfortune, and
was thrown on her sympathy, as it seemed, not merely for the bread of
his physical existence, but for everything that should keep him morally
alive.   She had responded to the call.  She had come forward,--our
poor, gaunt Hepzibah, in her rusty silks, with her rigid joints, and
the sad perversity of her scowl,--ready to do her utmost; and with
affection enough, if that were all, to do a hundred times as much!
There could be few more tearful sights,--and Heaven forgive us if a
smile insist on mingling with our conception of it!--few sights with
truer pathos in them, than Hepzibah presented on that first afternoon.

How patiently did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great, warm
love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no
torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without!  Her little
efforts to amuse him! How pitiful, yet magnanimous, they were!

Remembering his early love of poetry and fiction, she unlocked a
bookcase, and took down several books that had been excellent reading
in their day.  There was a volume of Pope, with the Rape of the Lock in
it, and another of the Tatler, and an odd one of Dryden's Miscellanies,
all with tarnished gilding on their covers, and thoughts of tarnished
brilliancy inside.  They had no success with Clifford.  These, and all
such writers of society, whose new works glow like the rich texture of
a just-woven carpet, must be content to relinquish their charm, for
every reader, after an age or two, and could hardly be supposed to
retain any portion of it for a mind that had utterly lost its estimate
of modes and manners.  Hepzibah then took up Rasselas, and began to
read of the Happy Valley, with a vague idea that some secret of a
contented life had there been elaborated, which might at least serve
Clifford and herself for this one day.  But the Happy Valley had a
cloud over it.  Hepzibah troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable
sins of emphasis, which he seemed to detect, without any reference to
the meaning; nor, in fact, did he appear to take much note of the sense
of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture, without
harvesting its profit.  His sister's voice, too, naturally harsh, had,
in the course of her sorrowful lifetime, contracted a kind of croak,
which, when it once gets into the human throat, is as ineradicable as
sin.  In both sexes, occasionally, this lifelong croak, accompanying
each word of joy or sorrow, is one of the symptoms of a settled
melancholy; and wherever it occurs, the whole history of misfortune is
conveyed in its slightest accent.  The effect is as if the voice had
been dyed black; or,--if we must use a more moderate simile,--this
miserable croak, running through all the variations of the voice, is
like a black silken thread, on which the crystal beads of speech are
strung, and whence they take their hue.  Such voices have put on
mourning for dead hopes; and they ought to die and be buried along with
them!

Discerning that Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts, Hepzibah
searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime.
At one time, her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.
It was a moment of great peril; for,--despite the traditionary awe that
had gathered over this instrument of music, and the dirges which
spiritual fingers were said to play on it,--the devoted sister had
solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Clifford's benefit, and
accompanying the performance with her voice.  Poor Clifford! Poor
Hepzibah! Poor harpsichord! All three would have been miserable
together.  By some good agency,--possibly, by the unrecognized
interposition of the long-buried Alice herself,--the threatening
calamity was averted.

But the worst of all--the hardest stroke of fate for Hepzibah to
endure, and perhaps for Clifford, too was his invincible distaste for
her appearance.  Her features, never the most agreeable, and now harsh
with age and grief, and resentment against the world for his sake; her
dress, and especially her turban; the queer and quaint manners, which
had unconsciously grown upon her in solitude,--such being the poor
gentlewoman's outward characteristics, it is no great marvel, although
the mournfullest of pities, that the instinctive lover of the Beautiful
was fain to turn away his eyes.  There was no help for it.  It would be
the latest impulse to die within him.  In his last extremity, the
expiring breath stealing faintly through Clifford's lips, he would
doubtless press Hepzibah's hand, in fervent recognition of all her
lavished love, and close his eyes,--but not so much to die, as to be
constrained to look no longer on her face! Poor Hepzibah! She took
counsel with herself what might be done, and thought of putting ribbons
on her turban; but, by the instant rush of several guardian angels, was
withheld from an experiment that could hardly have proved less than
fatal to the beloved object of her anxiety.

To be brief, besides Hepzibah's disadvantages of person, there was an
uncouthness pervading all her deeds; a clumsy something, that could but
ill adapt itself for use, and not at all for ornament.  She was a grief
to Clifford, and she knew it.  In this extremity, the antiquated virgin
turned to Phoebe.  No grovelling jealousy was in her heart.  Had it
pleased Heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her
personally the medium of Clifford's happiness, it would have rewarded
her for all the past, by a joy with no bright tints, indeed, but deep
and true, and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies.  This could not be.
She therefore turned to Phoebe, and resigned the task into the young
girl's hands.  The latter took it up cheerfully, as she did everything,
but with no sense of a mission to perform, and succeeding all the
better for that same simplicity.

By the involuntary effect of a genial temperament, Phoebe soon grew to
be absolutely essential to the daily comfort, if not the daily life, of
her two forlorn companions.  The grime and sordidness of the House of
the Seven Gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there;
the gnawing tooth of the dry-rot was stayed among the old timbers of
its skeleton frame; the dust had ceased to settle down so densely, from
the antique ceilings, upon the floors and furniture of the rooms
below,--or, at any rate, there was a little housewife, as light-footed
as the breeze that sweeps a garden walk, gliding hither and thither to
brush it all away.  The shadows of gloomy events that haunted the else
lonely and desolate apartments; the heavy, breathless scent which death
had left in more than one of the bedchambers, ever since his visits of
long ago,--these were less powerful than the purifying influence
scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of
one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart.  There was no
morbidness in Phoebe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon House was the
very locality to ripen it into incurable disease.  But now her spirit
resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of
Hepzibah's huge, iron-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the
various articles of linen and wrought-lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings,
folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there.  As
every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the rose-scent, so
did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepzibah and Clifford, sombre as
they might seem, acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phoebe's
intermixture with them.  Her activity of body, intellect, and heart
impelled her continually to perform the ordinary little toils that
offered themselves around her, and to think the thought proper for the
moment, and to sympathize,--now with the twittering gayety of the
robins in the pear-tree, and now to such a depth as she could with
Hepzibah's dark anxiety, or the vague moan of her brother.  This facile
adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best
preservative.

A nature like Phoebe's has invariably its due influence, but is seldom
regarded with due honor.  Its spiritual force, however, may be
partially estimated by the fact of her having found a place for
herself, amid circumstances so stern as those which surrounded the
mistress of the house; and also by the effect which she produced on a
character of so much more mass than her own.   For the gaunt, bony
frame and limbs of Hepzibah, as compared with the tiny lightsomeness of
Phoebe's figure, were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral
weight and substance, respectively, of the woman and the girl.

To the guest,--to Hepzibah's brother,--or Cousin Clifford, as Phoebe
now began to call him,--she was especially necessary. Not that he could
ever be said to converse with her, or often manifest, in any other very
definite mode, his sense of a charm in her society. But if she were a
long while absent he became pettish and nervously restless, pacing the
room to and fro with the uncertainty that characterized all his
movements; or else would sit broodingly in his great chair, resting his
head on his hands, and evincing life only by an electric sparkle of
ill-humor, whenever Hepzibah endeavored to arouse him.  Phoebe's
presence, and the contiguity of her fresh life to his blighted one, was
usually all that he required. Indeed, such was the native gush and play
of her spirit, that she was seldom perfectly quiet and undemonstrative,
any more than a fountain ever ceases to dimple and warble with its
flow. She possessed the gift of song, and that, too, so naturally, that
you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it, or
what master had taught her, as of asking the same questions about a
bird, in whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the
Creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder. So long
as Phoebe sang, she might stray at her own will about the house.
Clifford was content, whether the sweet, airy homeliness of her tones
came down from the upper chambers, or along the passageway from the
shop, or was sprinkled through the foliage of the pear-tree, inward
from the garden, with the twinkling sunbeams. He would sit quietly,
with a gentle pleasure gleaming over his face, brighter now, and now a
little dimmer, as the song happened to float near him, or was more
remotely heard. It pleased him best, however, when she sat on a low
footstool at his knee.

It is perhaps remarkable, considering her temperament, that Phoebe
oftener chose a strain of pathos than of gayety.  But the young and
happy are not ill pleased to temper their life with a transparent
shadow.  The deepest pathos of Phoebe's voice and song, moreover, came
sifted through the golden texture of a cheery spirit, and was somehow
so interfused with the quality thence acquired, that one's heart felt
all the lighter for having wept at it.  Broad mirth, in the sacred
presence of dark misfortune, would have jarred harshly and irreverently
with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepzibah's
and her brother's life.  Therefore, it was well that Phoebe so often
chose sad themes, and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad while she
was singing them.

Becoming habituated to her companionship, Clifford readily showed how
capable of imbibing pleasant tints and gleams of cheerful light from
all quarters his nature must originally have been.  He grew youthful
while she sat by him.  A beauty,--not precisely real, even in its
utmost manifestation, and which a painter would have watched long to
seize and fix upon his canvas, and, after all, in vain,--beauty,
nevertheless, that was not a mere dream, would sometimes play upon and
illuminate his face.  It did more than to illuminate; it transfigured
him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an
exquisite and happy spirit.  That gray hair, and those furrows,--with
their record of infinite sorrow so deeply written across his brow, and
so compressed, as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale, that
the whole inscription was made illegible,--these, for the moment,
vanished.  An eye at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man
some shadow of what he was meant to be.  Anon, as age came stealing,
like a sad twilight, back over his figure, you would have felt tempted
to hold an argument with Destiny, and affirm, that either this being
should not have been made mortal, or mortal existence should have been
tempered to his qualities.  There seemed no necessity for his having
drawn breath at all; the world never wanted him; but, as he had
breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air.  The
same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regard to natures that
tend to feed exclusively upon the Beautiful, let their earthly fate be
as lenient as it may.

Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the
character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell.  Nor was it
necessary.  The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of
faces round about it, but need not know the individuality of one among
them all.  Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in
Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay
so much in the Actual as Phoebe's did.  For Clifford, however, the
reality, and simplicity, and thorough homeliness of the girl's nature
were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed.  Beauty, it is
true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable.
Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice,
and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts,
beneath this unfortunate exterior, and still, so long as she wore the
guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford, and depressed him by
her lack of beauty.  But nothing more beautiful--nothing prettier, at
least--was ever made than Phoebe.  And, therefore, to this man,--whose
whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence heretofore, and until
both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dream,--whose
images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and
been frozen, like the pictures of secluded artists, into the chillest
ideality,--to him, this little figure of the cheeriest household life
was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world.
Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of
things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to
be led back.  They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain-top
or in a dungeon.  Now, Phoebe's presence made a home about her,--that
very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate,--the wretch
beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above
it,--instinctively pines after,--a home! She was real! Holding her
hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance, and a warm
one:  and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you
might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic
chain of human nature.  The world was no longer a delusion.

By looking a little further in this direction, we might suggest an
explanation of an often-suggested mystery.  Why are poets so apt to
choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for
qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman
as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit?  Because,
probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human
intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.

There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between
this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a
waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers.  On
Clifford's part it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the
liveliest sensibility to feminine influence, but who had never quaffed
the cup of passionate love, and knew that it was now too late.  He knew
it, with the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual
decay.  Thus, his sentiment for Phoebe, without being paternal, was not
less chaste than if she had been his daughter.  He was a man, it is
true, and recognized her as a woman.  She was his only representative
of womankind.  He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained
to her sex, and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal
development of her bosom.   All her little womanly ways, budding out of
her like blossoms on a young fruit-tree, had their effect on him, and
sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of
pleasure.  At such moments,--for the effect was seldom more than
momentary,--the half-torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just
as a long-silent harp is full of sound, when the musician's fingers
sweep across it.  But, after all, it seemed rather a perception, or a
sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual.  He
read Phoebe as he would a sweet and simple story; he listened to her as
if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his
bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him,
to warble through the house.  She was not an actual fact for him, but
the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home
to his conception; so that this mere symbol, or life-like picture, had
almost the comfort of reality.

But we strive in vain to put the idea into words.  No adequate
expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us
is attainable.  This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so
miserably failing to be happy,--his tendencies so hideously thwarted,
that, some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character,
never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now
imbecile,--this poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in
a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung, by the last
mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbor.  There, as he lay
more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly
rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odors will, had summoned up
reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid
which he should have had his home.  With his native susceptibility of
happy influences, he inhales the slight, ethereal rapture into his
soul, and expires!

And how did Phoebe regard Clifford? The girl's was not one of those
natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in
human character.  The path which would best have suited her was the
well-worn track of ordinary life; the companions in whom she would most
have delighted were such as one encounters at every turn.  The mystery
which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an
annoyance, rather than the piquant charm which many women might have
found in it.  Still, her native kindliness was brought strongly into
play, not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much,
even, by the finer graces of his character, as by the simple appeal of
a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers.
She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love,
and seemed to have received so little.  With a ready tact, the result
of ever-active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good
for him, and did it.  Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience
she ignored; and thereby kept their intercourse healthy, by the
incautious, but, as it were, heaven-directed freedom of her whole
conduct.  The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more
darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease,
mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them;
they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in
infinite repetition.  But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of
purer air.  She impregnated it, too, not with a wild-flower scent,--for
wildness was no trait of hers,--but with the perfume of garden-roses,
pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and man have
consented together in making grow from summer to summer, and from
century to century.  Such a flower was Phoebe in her relation with
Clifford, and such the delight that he inhaled from her.

Yet, it must be said, her petals sometimes drooped a little, in
consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her.  She grew more
thoughtful than heretofore.  Looking aside at Clifford's face, and
seeing the dim, unsatisfactory elegance and the intellect almost
quenched, she would try to inquire what had been his life.  Was he
always thus? Had this veil been over him from his birth?--this veil,
under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed, and
through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual world,--or was its
gray texture woven of some dark calamity?  Phoebe loved no riddles, and
would have been glad to escape the perplexity of this one.
Nevertheless, there was so far a good result of her meditations on
Clifford's character, that, when her involuntary conjectures, together
with the tendency of every strange circumstance to tell its own story,
had gradually taught her the fact, it had no terrible effect upon her.
Let the world have done him what vast wrong it might, she knew Cousin
Clifford too well--or fancied so--ever to shudder at the touch of his
thin, delicate fingers.

Within a few days after the appearance of this remarkable inmate, the
routine of life had established itself with a good deal of uniformity
in the old house of our narrative.  In the morning, very shortly after
breakfast, it was Clifford's custom to fall asleep in his chair; nor,
unless accidentally disturbed, would he emerge from a dense cloud of
slumber or the thinner mists that flitted to and fro, until well
towards noonday.  These hours of drowsihead were the season of the old
gentlewoman's attendance on her brother, while Phoebe took charge of
the shop; an arrangement which the public speedily understood, and
evinced their decided preference of the younger shopwoman by the
multiplicity of their calls during her administration of affairs.
Dinner over, Hepzibah took her knitting-work,--a long stocking of gray
yarn, for her brother's winter wear,--and with a sigh, and a scowl of
affectionate farewell to Clifford, and a gesture enjoining watchfulness
on Phoebe, went to take her seat behind the counter.  It was now the
young girl's turn to be the nurse,--the guardian, the playmate,--or
whatever is the fitter phrase,--of the gray-haired man.




                         X The Pyncheon Garden


CLIFFORD, except for Phoebe's More active instigation would ordinarily
have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of
being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair
till eventide.  But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the
garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such
repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor, or summer-house, that it was
now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers.  The
hop-vine, too, had begun to grow luxuriantly over the sides of the
little edifice, and made an interior of verdant seclusion, with
innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden.

Here, sometimes, in this green play-place of flickering light, Phoebe
read to Clifford.  Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a
literary turn, had supplied her with works of fiction, in pamphlet
form,--and a few volumes of poetry, in altogether a different style and
taste from those which Hepzibah selected for his amusement.  Small
thanks were due to the books, however, if the girl's readings were in
any degree more successful than her elderly cousin's.  Phoebe's voice
had always a pretty music in it, and could either enliven Clifford by
its sparkle and gayety of tone, or soothe him by a continued flow of
pebbly and brook-like cadences.  But the fictions--in which the
country-girl, unused to works of that nature, often became deeply
absorbed--interested her strange auditor very little, or not at all.
Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and
pathos, were all thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford;
either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth, or
because his own griefs were a touch-stone of reality that few feigned
emotions could withstand.  When Phoebe broke into a peal of merry
laughter at what she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy,
but oftener respond with a troubled, questioning look.  If a tear--a
maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe--dropped upon some melancholy
page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else
grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume.  And wisely
too! Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a
pastime of mock sorrows?

With poetry it was rather better.  He delighted in the swell and
subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme.  Nor was
Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry,--not, perhaps,
where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and
ethereal.  It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the
awakening spell might lurk; but, on raising her eyes from the page to
Clifford's face, Phoebe would be made aware, by the light breaking
through it, that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a
lambent flame from what she read.  One glow of this kind, however, was
often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because, when
the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power,
and groped about for them, as if a blind man should go seeking his lost
eyesight.

It pleased him more, and was better for his inward welfare, that Phoebe
should talk, and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her
accompanying description and remarks.  The life of the garden offered
topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best.  He never
failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday.  His
feeling for flowers was very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste
as an emotion; he was fond of sitting with one in his hand, intently
observing it, and looking from its petals into Phoebe's face, as if the
garden flower were the sister of the household maiden.  Not merely was
there a delight in the flower's perfume, or pleasure in its beautiful
form, and the delicacy or brightness of its hue; but Clifford's
enjoyment was accompanied with a perception of life, character, and
individuality, that made him love these blossoms of the garden, as if
they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence.  This affection and
sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a woman's trait.  Men, if
endowed with it by nature, soon lose, forget, and learn to despise it,
in their contact with coarser things than flowers.  Clifford, too, had
long forgotten it; but found it again now, as he slowly revived from
the chill torpor of his life.

It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually came to pass in
that secluded garden-spot when once Phoebe had set herself to look for
them.  She had seen or heard a bee there, on the first day of her
acquaintance with the place.  And often,--almost continually,
indeed,--since then, the bees kept coming thither, Heaven knows why, or
by what pertinacious desire, for far-fetched sweets, when, no doubt,
there were broad clover-fields, and all kinds of garden growth, much
nearer home than this.  Thither the bees came, however, and plunged
into the squash-blossoms, as if there were no other squash-vines within
a long day's flight, or as if the soil of Hepzibah's garden gave its
productions just the very quality which these laborious little wizards
wanted, in order to impart the Hymettus odor to their whole hive of New
England honey.  When Clifford heard their sunny, buzzing murmur, in the
heart of the great yellow blossoms, he looked about him with a joyful
sense of warmth, and blue sky, and green grass, and of God's free air
in the whole height from earth to heaven.  After all, there need be no
question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town.
God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford.  They brought the
rich summer with them, in requital of a little honey.

When the bean-vines began to flower on the poles, there was one
particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom.  The
daguerreotypist had found these beans in a garret, over one of the
seven gables, treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some
horticultural Pyncheon of days gone by, who doubtless meant to sow them
the next summer, but was himself first sown in Death's garden-ground.
By way of testing whether there were still a living germ in such
ancient seeds, Holgrave had planted some of them; and the result of his
experiment was a splendid row of bean-vines, clambering, early, to the
full height of the poles, and arraying them, from top to bottom, in a
spiral profusion of red blossoms.  And, ever since the unfolding of the
first bud, a multitude of humming-birds had been attracted thither.  At
times, it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was
one of these tiniest fowls of the air,--a thumb's bigness of burnished
plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean-poles.  It was with
indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that
Clifford watched the humming-birds.   He used to thrust his head softly
out of the arbor to see them the better; all the while, too, motioning
Phoebe to be quiet, and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face,
so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy.  He had
not merely grown young;--he was a child again.

Hepzibah, whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of
miniature enthusiasm, would shake her head, with a strange mingling of
the mother and sister, and of pleasure and sadness, in her aspect.  She
said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the humming-birds
came,--always, from his babyhood,--and that his delight in them had
been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for
beautiful things.  And it was a wonderful coincidence, the good lady
thought, that the artist should have planted these scarlet-flowering
beans--which the humming-birds sought far and wide, and which had not
grown in the Pyncheon garden before for forty years--on the very summer
of Clifford's return.

Then would the tears stand in poor Hepzibah's eyes, or overflow them
with a too abundant gush, so that she was fain to betake herself into
some corner, lest Clifford should espy her agitation.  Indeed, all the
enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears.  Coming so late as
it did, it was a kind of Indian summer, with a mist in its balmiest
sunshine, and decay and death in its gaudiest delight.  The more
Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the
difference to be recognized.  With a mysterious and terrible Past,
which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had
only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely
at it, is nothing.  He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms,
lay darkly behind his pleasure, and knew it to be a baby-play, which he
was to toy and trifle with, instead of thoroughly believing.  Clifford
saw, it may be, in the mirror of his deeper consciousness, that he was
an example and representative of that great class of people whom an
inexplicable Providence is continually putting at cross-purposes with
the world:  breaking what seems its own promise in their nature;
withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a
banquet; and thus--when it might so easily, as one would think, have
been adjusted otherwise--making their existence a strangeness, a
solitude, and torment.  All his life long, he had been learning how to
be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson
thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little
airy happiness.  Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his
eyes.  "Take my hand, Phoebe," he would say, "and pinch it hard with
your little fingers! Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and
prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain!"  Evidently, he desired
this prick of a trifling anguish, in order to assure himself, by that
quality which he best knew to be real, that the garden, and the seven
weather-beaten gables, and Hepzibah's scowl, and Phoebe's smile, were
real likewise.  Without this signet in his flesh, he could have
attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of
imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit, until even that poor
sustenance was exhausted.

The author needs great faith in his reader's sympathy; else he must
hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so
trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this garden-life.  It
was the Eden of a thunder-smitten Adam, who had fled for refuge thither
out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original
Adam was expelled.

One of the available means of amusement, of which Phoebe made the most
in Clifford's behalf, was that feathered society, the hens, a breed of
whom, as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the
Pyncheon family.  In compliance with a whim of Clifford, as it troubled
him to see them in confinement, they had been set at liberty, and now
roamed at will about the garden; doing some little mischief, but
hindered from escape by buildings on three sides, and the difficult
peaks of a wooden fence on the other.  They spent much of their
abundant leisure on the margin of Maule's well, which was haunted by a
kind of snail, evidently a titbit to their palates; and the brackish
water itself, however nauseous to the rest of the world, was so greatly
esteemed by these fowls, that they might be seen tasting, turning up
their heads, and smacking their bills, with precisely the air of
wine-bibbers round a probationary cask.  Their generally quiet, yet
often brisk, and constantly diversified talk, one to another, or
sometimes in soliloquy,--as they scratched worms out of the rich, black
soil, or pecked at such plants as suited their taste,--had such a
domestic tone, that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish
a regular interchange of ideas about household matters, human and
gallinaceous.  All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and
rich variety of their manners; but by no possibility can there have
been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these
ancestral ones.  They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities
of their whole line of progenitors, derived through an unbroken
succession of eggs; or else this individual Chanticleer and his two
wives had grown to be humorists, and a little crack-brained withal, on
account of their solitary way of life, and out of sympathy for
Hepzibah, their lady-patroness.

Queer, indeed, they looked! Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two
stilt-like legs, with the dignity of interminable descent in all his
gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge; his two wives
were about the size of quails; and as for the one chicken, it looked
small enough to be still in the egg, and, at the same time,
sufficiently old, withered, wizened, and experienced, to have been
founder of the antiquated race.  Instead of being the youngest of the
family, it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages, not
only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers
and foremothers, whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed
into its little body.  Its mother evidently regarded it as the one
chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the world's
continuance, or, at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system
of affairs, whether in church or state.  No lesser sense of the infant
fowl's importance could have justified, even in a mother's eyes, the
perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small
person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybody's face that so
much as looked towards her hopeful progeny.  No lower estimate could
have vindicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched, and
her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable,
for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root.  Her nervous cluck, when
the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass or under the
squash-leaves; her gentle croak of satisfaction, while sure of it
beneath her wing; her note of ill-concealed fear and obstreperous
defiance, when she saw her arch-enemy, a neighbor's cat, on the top of
the high fence,--one or other of these sounds was to be heard at almost
every moment of the day.  By degrees, the observer came to feel nearly
as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the mother-hen
did.

Phoebe, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes
permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of
grasping its cubic inch or two of body.  While she curiously examined
its hereditary marks,--the peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny
tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legs,--the little biped, as
she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink.  The daguerreotypist
once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the
Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life
of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an
unintelligible one, as such clews generally are.  It was a feathered
riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if
the egg had been addle!

The second of Chanticleer's two wives, ever since Phoebe's arrival, had
been in a state of heavy despondency, caused, as it afterwards
appeared, by her inability to lay an egg.  One day, however, by her
self-important gait, the sideways turn of her head, and the cock of her
eye, as she pried into one and another nook of the garden,--croaking to
herself, all the while, with inexpressible complacency,--it was made
evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her,
carried something about her person the worth of which was not to be
estimated either in gold or precious stones.  Shortly after, there was
a prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and all his
family, including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand the
matter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt.  That
afternoon Phoebe found a diminutive egg,--not in the regular nest, it
was far too precious to be trusted there,--but cunningly hidden under
the currant-bushes, on some dry stalks of last year's grass.  Hepzibah,
on learning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it to
Clifford's breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor, for
which, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous.  Thus
unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance,
perhaps, of an ancient feathered race, with no better end than to
supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a
tea-spoon! It must have been in reference to this outrage that
Chanticleer, the next day, accompanied by the bereaved mother of the
egg, took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford, and delivered
himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own
pedigree, but for a fit of merriment on Phoebe's part.  Hereupon, the
offended fowl stalked away on his long stilts, and utterly withdrew his
notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature, until she made her
peace with an offering of spice-cake, which, next to snails, was the
delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste.

We linger too long, no doubt, beside this paltry rivulet of life that
flowed through the garden of the Pyncheon House.  But we deem it
pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights, because
they proved so greatly to Clifford's benefit.  They had the earth-smell
in them, and contributed to give him health and substance.  Some of his
occupations wrought less desirably upon him.  He had a singular
propensity, for example, to hang over Maule's well, and look at the
constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation
of the water over the mosaic-work of colored pebbles at the bottom.  He
said that faces looked upward to him there,--beautiful faces, arrayed
in bewitching smiles,--each momentary face so fair and rosy, and every
smile so sunny, that he felt wronged at its departure, until the same
flitting witchcraft made a new one.  But sometimes he would suddenly
cry out, "The dark face gazes at me!" and be miserable the whole day
afterwards.  Phoebe, when she hung over the fountain by Clifford's
side, could see nothing of all this,--neither the beauty nor the
ugliness,--but only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of the
waters shook and disarranged them.  And the dark face, that so troubled
Clifford, was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of
the damson-trees, and breaking the inner light of Maule's well.  The
truth was, however, that his fancy--reviving faster than his will and
judgment, and always stronger than they--created shapes of loveliness
that were symbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern
and dreadful shape that typified his fate.

On Sundays, after Phoebe had been at church,--for the girl had a
church-going conscience, and would hardly have been at ease had she
missed either prayer, singing, sermon, or benediction,--after
church-time, therefore, there was, ordinarily, a sober little festival
in the garden.  In addition to Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe, two
guests made up the company.  One was the artist Holgrave, who, in spite
of his consociation with reformers, and his other queer and
questionable traits, continued to hold an elevated place in Hepzibah's
regard.  The other, we are almost ashamed to say, was the venerable
Uncle Venner, in a clean shirt, and a broadcloth coat, more respectable
than his ordinary wear, inasmuch as it was neatly patched on each
elbow, and might be called an entire garment, except for a slight
inequality in the length of its skirts.   Clifford, on several
occasions, had seemed to enjoy the old man's intercourse, for the sake
of his mellow, cheerful vein, which was like the sweet flavor of a
frost-bitten apple, such as one picks up under the tree in December.  A
man at the very lowest point of the social scale was easier and more
agreeable for the fallen gentleman to encounter than a person at any of
the intermediate degrees; and, moreover, as Clifford's young manhood
had been lost, he was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful,
now, in apposition with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner.  In fact,
it was sometimes observable that Clifford half wilfully hid from
himself the consciousness of being stricken in years, and cherished
visions of an earthly future still before him; visions, however, too
indistinctly drawn to be followed by disappointment--though, doubtless,
by depression--when any casual incident or recollection made him
sensible of the withered leaf.

So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the
ruinous arbor.  Hepzibah--stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an
inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as
justifying a princess-like condescension--exhibited a not ungraceful
hospitality.   She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage
counsel--lady as she was--with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of
everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher.  And Uncle Venner,
who had studied the world at street-corners, and other posts equally
well adapted for just observation, was as ready to give out his wisdom
as a town-pump to give water.

"Miss Hepzibah, ma'am," said he once, after they had all been cheerful
together, "I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a Sabbath
afternoon.  They are very much like what I expect to have after I
retire to my farm!"

"Uncle Venner" observed Clifford in a drowsy, inward tone, "is always
talking about his farm.  But I have a better scheme for him, by and by.
We shall see!"

"Ah, Mr. Clifford Pyncheon!" said the man of patches, "you may scheme
for me as much as you please; but I'm not going to give up this one
scheme of my own, even if I never bring it really to pass.  It does
seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up
property upon property.  If I had done so, I should feel as if
Providence was not bound to take care of me; and, at all events, the
city wouldn't be! I'm one of those people who think that infinity is
big enough for us all--and eternity long enough."

"Why, so they are, Uncle Venner," remarked Phoebe after a pause; for
she had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this
concluding apothegm.  "But for this short life of ours, one would like
a house and a moderate garden-spot of one's own."

"It appears to me," said the daguerreotypist, smiling, "that Uncle
Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only
they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the
systematizing Frenchman."

"Come, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, "it is time to bring the currants."

And then, while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still
fell into the open space of the garden, Phoebe brought out a loaf of
bread and a china bowl of currants, freshly gathered from the bushes,
and crushed with sugar.  These, with water,--but not from the fountain
of ill omen, close at hand,--constituted all the entertainment.
Meanwhile, Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with
Clifford, actuated, it might seem, entirely by an impulse of
kindliness, in order that the present hour might be cheerfuller than
most which the poor recluse had spent, or was destined yet to spend.
Nevertheless, in the artist's deep, thoughtful, all-observant eyes,
there was, now and then, an expression, not sinister, but questionable;
as if he had some other interest in the scene than a stranger, a
youthful and unconnected adventurer, might be supposed to have.  With
great mobility of outward mood, however, he applied himself to the task
of enlivening the party; and with so much success, that even dark-hued
Hepzibah threw off one tint of melancholy, and made what shift she
could with the remaining portion.  Phoebe said to herself,--"How
pleasant he can be!"  As for Uncle Venner, as a mark of friendship and
approbation, he readily consented to afford the young man his
countenance in the way of his profession,--not metaphorically, be it
understood, but literally, by allowing a daguerreotype of his face, so
familiar to the town, to be exhibited at the entrance of Holgrave's
studio.

Clifford, as the company partook of their little banquet, grew to be
the gayest of them all.  Either it was one of those up-quivering
flashes of the spirit, to which minds in an abnormal state are liable,
or else the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical
vibration.  Indeed, what with the pleasant summer evening, and the
sympathy of this little circle of not unkindly souls, it was perhaps
natural that a character so susceptible as Clifford's should become
animated, and show itself readily responsive to what was said around
him.  But he gave out his own thoughts, likewise, with an airy and
fanciful glow; so that they glistened, as it were, through the arbor,
and made their escape among the interstices of the foliage.  He had
been as cheerful, no doubt, while alone with Phoebe, but never with
such tokens of acute, although partial intelligence.

But, as the sunlight left the peaks of the Seven Gables, so did the
excitement fade out of Clifford's eyes.  He gazed vaguely and
mournfully about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it
the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was.

"I want my happiness!" at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly,
hardly shaping out the words.  "Many, many years have I waited for it!
It is late! It is late! I want my happiness!"

Alas, poor Clifford! You are old, and worn with troubles that ought
never to have befallen you.  You are partly crazy and partly imbecile;
a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,--though some in less degree,
or less perceptibly, than their fellows.  Fate has no happiness in
store for you; unless your quiet home in the old family residence with
the faithful Hepzibah, and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and
these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist,
deserve to be called happiness!  Why not? If not the thing itself, it
is marvellously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and
intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an
introspection.  Take it, therefore, while you may. Murmur
not,--question not,--but make the most of it!




                            XI The Arched Window


FROM the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character, of
his ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend
one day after another, interminably,--or, at least, throughout the
summer-time,--in just the kind of life described in the preceding
pages.  Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefit
occasionally to diversify the scene, Phoebe sometimes suggested that he
should look out upon the life of the street.  For this purpose, they
used to mount the staircase together, to the second story of the house,
where, at the termination of a wide entry, there was an arched window,
of uncommonly large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains.  It
opened above the porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, the
balustrade of which had long since gone to decay, and been removed.  At
this arched window, throwing it open, but keeping himself in
comparative obscurity by means of the curtain, Clifford had an
opportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great world's movement
as might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of a
not very populous city.  But he and Phoebe made a sight as well worth
seeing as any that the city could exhibit.  The pale, gray, childish,
aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately
intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson
of the curtain,--watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a
kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty
throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the
bright young girl!

If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street would
hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its
extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, and
titillate, if not engross, his observation.  Things familiar to the
youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange
to him.  A cab; an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here
and there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that
vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere
and nowhere; these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but
forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled
along their track.  As regarded novelties (among which cabs and
omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its
proper gripe and retentiveness.  Twice or thrice, for example, during
the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pyncheon
House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white
dust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall; it was like a summer
shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled
it into the commonest routine of their convenience.  With the
water-cart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him
with just the same surprise as at first.  His mind took an apparently
sharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of this
perambulatory shower, before its next reappearance, as completely as
did the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white
dust again.  It was the same with the railroad.  Clifford could hear
the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil, and, by leaning a little way
from the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars,
flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street.  The idea
of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence,
and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much
surprise, the hundredth time as the first.

Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of
the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the
swiftness of the passing moment.  It can merely be a suspended
animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be
little use of immortality.  We are less than ghosts, for the time
being, whenever this calamity befalls us.

Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives.  All the
antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were
characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his
fastidious senses.  He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the
former track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, as
the observer of to-day finds the wheel-tracks of ancient vehicles in
Herculaneum.  The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was an
acceptable object; so was the fish-cart, heralded by its horn; so,
likewise, was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plodding from door
to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a
trade in turnips, carrots, summer-squashes, string-beans, green peas,
and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood.  The
baker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect
on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very
dissonance of yore.  One afternoon a scissor-grinder chanced to set his
wheel a-going under the Pyncheon Elm, and just in front of the arched
window.   Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the
carving-knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an
edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits), that the grinder might
apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.
Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the
scissor-grinder's foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard
stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as
fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium,
though squeezed into smaller compass.  It was an ugly, little, venomous
serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears.  But
Clifford listened with rapturous delight.  The sound, however
disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and, together with the circle
of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to
give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sunshiny existence
than he had attained in almost any other way.  Nevertheless, its charm
lay chiefly in the past; for the scissor-grinder's wheel had hissed in
his childish ears.

He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stage-coaches
nowadays.  And he asked in an injured tone what had become of all those
old square-topped chaises, with wings sticking out on either side, that
used to be drawn by a plough-horse, and driven by a farmer's wife and
daughter, peddling whortle-berries and blackberries about the town.
Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries had
not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country
lanes.

But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, in however humble a
way, did not require to be recommended by these old associations.  This
was observable when one of those Italian boys (who are rather a modern
feature of our streets) came along with his barrel-organ, and stopped
under the wide and cool shadows of the elm.  With his quick
professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the
arched window, and, opening his instrument, began to scatter its
melodies abroad.  He had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in a
Highland plaid; and, to complete the sum of splendid attractions
wherewith he presented himself to the public, there was a company of
little figures, whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case of
his organ, and whose principle of life was the music which the Italian
made it his business to grind out.  In all their variety of
occupation,--the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with
her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by her
cow--this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a
harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance.  The Italian
turned a crank; and, behold! every one of these small individuals
started into the most curious vivacity.  The cobbler wrought upon a
shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier waved his
glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jolly
toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book with
eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro along the
page; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted
gold into his strong-box,--all at the same turning of a crank.  Yes;
and, moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on
her lips! Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to
signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our
business or amusement,--however serious, however trifling,--all dance
to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring
nothing finally to pass.  For the most remarkable aspect of the affair
was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at
once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor.  Neither was
the cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out; nor
was there a drop less of brandy in the toper's bottle, nor a drop more
of milk in the milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser's
strong-box, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book.  All were
precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so
ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to
become wise.  Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier
for the maiden's granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too
acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.

The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous
prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian's
feet.  He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every
passer-by, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, and
to Hepzibah's shop-door, and upward to the arched window, whence Phoebe
and Clifford were looking down.  Every moment, also, he took off his
Highland bonnet, and performed a bow and scrape.  Sometimes, moreover,
he made personal application to individuals, holding out his small
black palm, and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for
whatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybody's pocket.  The mean
and low, yet strangely man-like expression of his wilted countenance;
the prying and crafty glance, that showed him ready to gripe at every
miserable advantage; his enormous tail (too enormous to be decently
concealed under his gabardine), and the deviltry of nature which it
betokened,--take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could
desire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin, symbolizing the
grossest form of the love of money.  Neither was there any possibility
of satisfying the covetous little devil.  Phoebe threw down a whole
handful of cents, which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handed
them over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommenced a
series of pantomimic petitions for more.

Doubtless, more than one New-Englander--or, let him be of what country
he might, it is as likely to be the case--passed by, and threw a look
at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral
condition was here exemplified.  Clifford, however, was a being of
another order.  He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled,
too, at the figures which it set in motion.  But, after looking awhile
at the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness,
spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears; a
weakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of the
fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid,
when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to
them.

Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing
pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with
them.  With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with
the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the
rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him.  This was
made evident, one day, when a political procession, with hundreds of
flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals,
reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town,
and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequent
uproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables.  As a mere
object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than
a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets.  The spectator
feels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tedious
commonplace of each man's visage, with the perspiration and weary
self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the
stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of
his black coat.  In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from
some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the
centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for
then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which
it is made up, into one broad mass of existence,--one great life,--one
collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating
it.  But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing alone
over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in
its atoms, but in its aggregate,--as a mighty river of life, massive in
its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to
the kindred depth within him,--then the contiguity would add to the
effect.  It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained
from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies.

So it proved with Clifford.  He shuddered; he grew pale; he threw an
appealing look at Hepzibah and Phoebe, who were with him at the window.
They comprehended nothing of his emotions, and supposed him merely
disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult.  At last, with tremulous limbs,
he started up, set his foot on the window-sill, and in an instant more
would have been in the unguarded balcony.  As it was, the whole
procession might have seen him, a wild, haggard figure, his gray locks
floating in the wind that waved their banners; a lonely being,
estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again, by virtue
of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him.  Had Clifford
attained the balcony, he would probably have leaped into the street;
but whether impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its
victim over the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a natural
magnetism, tending towards the great centre of humanity, it were not
easy to decide.  Both impulses might have wrought on him at once.

But his companions, affrighted by his gesture,--which was that of a man
hurried away in spite of himself,--seized Clifford's garment and held
him back.  Hepzibah shrieked.  Phoebe, to whom all extravagance was a
horror, burst into sobs and tears.

"Clifford, Clifford! are you crazy?" cried his sister.

"I hardly know, Hepzibah," said Clifford, drawing a long breath.  "Fear
nothing,--it is over now,--but had I taken that plunge, and survived
it, methinks it would have made me another man!"

Possibly, in some sense, Clifford may have been right.  He needed a
shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the
ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its
profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the
world and to himself.  Perhaps again, he required nothing less than the
great final remedy--death!

A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his
kind sometimes showed itself in a milder form; and once it was made
beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself.  In the
incident now to be sketched, there was a touching recognition, on
Clifford's part, of God's care and love towards him,--towards this
poor, forsaken man, who, if any mortal could, might have been pardoned
for regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten, and left to be the
sport of some fiend, whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief.

It was the Sabbath morning; one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, with
its own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over
the earth's face in a solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn.  On such
a Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be
conscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames,
on whatever spot of ground we stood.  The church-bells, with various
tones, but all in harmony, were calling out and responding to one
another,--"It is the Sabbath!--The Sabbath!--Yea; the Sabbath!"--and
over the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds, now slowly,
now with livelier joy, now one bell alone, now all the bells together,
crying earnestly,--"It is the Sabbath!"--and flinging their accents
afar off, to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word.  The
air with God's sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it, was meet for
mankind to breathe into their hearts, and send it forth again as the
utterance of prayer.

Clifford sat at the window with Hepzibah, watching the neighbors as
they stepped into the street.  All of them, however unspiritual on
other days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence; so that their
very garments--whether it were an old man's decent coat well brushed
for the thousandth time, or a little boy's first sack and trousers
finished yesterday by his mother's needle--had somewhat of the quality
of ascension-robes.  Forth, likewise, from the portal of the old house
stepped Phoebe, putting up her small green sunshade, and throwing
upward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the
arched window.  In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and a
holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as
ever.  She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of
one's mother-tongue.  Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in
her apparel; as if nothing that she wore--neither her gown, nor her
small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy
stockings--had ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all the
fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the
rosebuds.

The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up the
street; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance
that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven.

"Hepzibah," asked Clifford, after watching Phoebe to the corner, "do
you never go to church?"

"No, Clifford!" she replied,--"not these many, many years!"

"Were I to be there," he rejoined, "it seems to me that I could pray
once more, when so many human souls were praying all around me!"

She looked into Clifford's face, and beheld there a soft natural
effusion; for his heart gushed out, as it were, and ran over at his
eyes, in delightful reverence for God, and kindly affection for his
human brethren.  The emotion communicated itself to Hepzibah.  She
yearned to take him by the hand, and go and kneel down, they two
together,--both so long separate from the world, and, as she now
recognized, scarcely friends with Him above,--to kneel down among the
people, and be reconciled to God and man at once.

"Dear brother," said she earnestly, "let us go! We belong nowhere.  We
have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go to
some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle.  Poor and
forsaken as we are, some pew-door will be opened to us!"

So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves, ready--as ready as they
could in the best of their old-fashioned garments, which had hung on
pegs, or been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness and mouldy
smell of the past was on them,--made themselves ready, in their faded
bettermost, to go to church.  They descended the staircase
together,--gaunt, sallow Hepzibah, and pale, emaciated, age-stricken
Clifford! They pulled open the front door, and stepped across the
threshold, and felt, both of them, as if they were standing in the
presence of the whole world, and with mankind's great and terrible eye
on them alone.  The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, and
gave them no encouragement.  The warm sunny air of the street made them
shiver.   Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one
step farther.

"It cannot be, Hepzibah!--it is too late," said Clifford with deep
sadness.  "We are ghosts! We have no right among human beings,--no
right anywhere but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and
which, therefore, we are doomed to haunt! And, besides," he continued,
with a fastidious sensibility, inalienably characteristic of the man,
"it would not be fit nor beautiful to go! It is an ugly thought that I
should be frightful to my fellow-beings, and that children would cling
to their mothers' gowns at sight of me!"

They shrank back into the dusky passage-way, and closed the door.  But,
going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of the
house tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the
glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched.  They could
not flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood
behind it to watch them stealing out.  At the threshold, they felt his
pitiless gripe upon them.  For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's
own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

But it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind were we to
represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched.  On the
contrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of
so much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless
moments as himself.  He had no burden of care upon him; there were none
of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled
which wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having by
the very process of providing for their support.  In this respect he
was a child,--a child for the whole term of his existence, be it long
or short.  Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period
little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences
about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the
sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably
behind the accident that stupefied him.  He sometimes told Phoebe and
Hepzibah his dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child,
or a very young man.  So vivid were they, in his relation of them, that
he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or
print of a chintz morning-dress which he had seen their mother wear, in
the dream of the preceding night.  Hepzibah, piquing herself on a
woman's accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from
what Clifford described; but, producing the very gown from an old
trunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it.  Had
Clifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike,
undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and
broken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much
to bear.  It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the
morning twilight, all the day through, until bedtime; and even then
would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue of
misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber.
But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist, and
enveloped him as in a robe, which he hugged about his person, and
seldom let realities pierce through; he was not often quite awake, but
slept open-eyed, and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then.

Thus, lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies with
children, and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir into
which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountain-head.  Though
prevented, by a subtile sense of propriety, from desiring to associate
with them, he loved few things better than to look out of the arched
window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, or
schoolboys at a game of ball.  Their voices, also, were very pleasant
to him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together as
flies do in a sunny room.

Clifford would, doubtless, have been glad to share their sports.  One
afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow
soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that had
been a favorite one with her brother when they were both children.
Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in
his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over
his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst
enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had
survived so long!  Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from the
window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those
soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as
imagination, on the nothing of their surface.  It was curious to see
how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came
floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them.
Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of
the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily
upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty
afloat so near their dusty pathway.  A great many put out their fingers
or their walking-sticks to touch, withal; and were perversely
gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and
sky scene, vanished as if it had never been.

At length, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence
happened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, and
burst right against his nose! He looked up,--at first with a stern,
keen glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the
arched window,--then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing
a dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him.

"Aha, Cousin Clifford!" cried Judge Pyncheon.  "What! Still blowing
soap-bubbles!"

The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had a
bitterness of sarcasm in it.  As for Clifford, an absolute palsy of
fear came over him.  Apart from any definite cause of dread which his
past experience might have given him, he felt that native and original
horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and
apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength.  Strength
is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.
There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle
of his own connections.




                          XII The Daguerreotypist


IT must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so
active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the
old Pyncheon House.  Clifford's demands upon her time were usually
satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset.  Quiet
as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the
resources by which he lived.  It was not physical exercise that
overwearied him,--for except that he sometimes wrought a little with a
hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy weather, traversed a large
unoccupied room,--it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as
regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles.  But, either there was a
smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the
monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a
mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford.  Possibly, he
was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly
assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights,
sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more
practised with the world.  As all is activity and vicissitude to the
new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had
undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.

Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest,
thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his
window-curtains, or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall.
And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of
childhood, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder
of the day and evening.

This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so
little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe.  The old
house, as we have already said, had both the dry-rot and the damp-rot
in its walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that.
Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown
to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place,
with no other company than a single series of ideas, and but one
affection, and one bitter sense of wrong.  Clifford, the reader may
perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his
fellow-creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with
him.  But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile
and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes
of organized life, and vibrates from one to another.  A flower, for
instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in
Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law,
converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two
sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much
sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast.  Unless she had
now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a
suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,--had occasionally
obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a
metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile
panorama, or listening to a concert,--had gone shopping about the city,
ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a
ribbon,--had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in her
chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her
native place--unless for such moral medicines as the above, we should
soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached,
unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of
old-maidenhood and a cheerless future.

Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly to be regretted,
although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another,
perhaps more precious.  She was not so constantly gay, but had her
moods of thought, which Clifford, on the whole, liked better than her
former phase of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she understood him
better and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted him to
himself.  Her eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep, at
some silent moments, that they seemed like Artesian wells, down, down,
into the infinite.  She was less girlish than when we first beheld her
alighting from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman.

The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent
intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist.  Inevitably, by the
pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought into habits
of some familiarity.  Had they met under different circumstances,
neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much
thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme dissimilarity
should have proved a principle of mutual attraction.  Both, it is true,
were characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common
ground, therefore, in their more external developments; but as unlike,
in their respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at
world-wide distance.  During the early part of their acquaintance,
Phoebe had held back rather more than was customary with her frank and
simple manners from Holgrave's not very marked advances.  Nor was she
yet satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met
and talked together, in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a
familiar way.

The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phoebe something of
his history.  Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the
point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very
creditably, an autobiographic volume.  A romance on the plan of Gil
Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a
romance.  The experience of many individuals among us, who think it
hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the
Spaniard's earlier life; while their ultimate success, or the point
whither they tend, may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist
would imagine for his hero.  Holgrave, as he told Phoebe somewhat
proudly, could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly
humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the scantiest
possible, and obtained by a few winter-months' attendance at a district
school.  Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be
self-dependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to
his natural force of will.  Though now but twenty-two years old
(lacking some months, which are years in such a life), he had already
been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a country
store; and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor
of a country newspaper.  He had subsequently travelled New England and
the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut
manufactory of cologne-water and other essences.  In an episodical way
he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering
success, especially in many of the factory-towns along our inland
streams.  As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a
packet-ship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return,
to see Italy, and part of France and Germany.  At a later period he had
spent some months in a community of Fourierists.  Still more recently
he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he
assured Phoebe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting
Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had
very remarkable endowments.

His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in
his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the
preceding ones.  It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an
adventurer, who had his bread to earn.  It would be thrown aside as
carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other
equally digressive means.  But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps,
showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that,
amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity.
Homeless as he had been,--continually changing his whereabout, and,
therefore, responsible neither to public opinion nor to
individuals,--putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be
soon shifted for a third,--he had never violated the innermost man, but
had carried his conscience along with him.  It was impossible to know
Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact.   Hepzibah had seen
it.  Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence
which such a certainty inspires.  She was startled, however, and
sometimes repelled,--not by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law
he acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from her own.  He
made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his
lack of reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment's warning, it
could establish its right to hold its ground.

Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature.
He was too calm and cool an observer.  Phoebe felt his eye, often; his
heart, seldom or never.  He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah
and her brother, and Phoebe herself.  He studied them attentively, and
allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape
him.  He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all,
he never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable
evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more.
In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food,
not heart-sustenance.  Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so
much in her friends and herself, intellectually, since he cared nothing
for them, or, comparatively, so little, as objects of human affection.

Always, in his interviews with Phoebe, the artist made especial inquiry
as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he
seldom saw.

"Does he still seem happy?" he asked one day.

"As happy as a child," answered Phoebe; "but--like a child, too--very
easily disturbed."

"How disturbed?" inquired Holgrave.  "By things without, or by thoughts
within?"

"I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?" replied Phoebe with simple
piquancy.  "Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be
guessed at, just as a cloud comes over the sun.  Latterly, since I have
begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look
closely into his moods.  He has had such a great sorrow, that his heart
is made all solemn and sacred by it.  When he is cheerful,--when the
sun shines into his mind,--then I venture to peep in, just as far as
the light reaches, but no further.  It is holy ground where the shadow
falls!"

"How prettily you express this sentiment!" said the artist.  "I can
understand the feeling, without possessing it.  Had I your
opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to
the full depth of my plummet-line!"

"How strange that you should wish it!" remarked Phoebe involuntarily.
"What is Cousin Clifford to you?"

"Oh, nothing,--of course, nothing!" answered Holgrave with a smile.
"Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look
at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man's
bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.  Men and women, and
children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be
certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been
from what he sees them to be now.  Judge Pyncheon! Clifford! What a
complex riddle--a complexity of complexities--do they present! It
requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girl's, to solve it.  A mere
observer, like myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at best,
only subtile and acute), is pretty certain to go astray."

The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that
which they had touched upon.  Phoebe and he were young together; nor
had Holgrave, in his premature experience of life, wasted entirely that
beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart
and fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as
bright as on the first day of creation.  Man's own youth is the world's
youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's
granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould
into whatever shape he likes.  So it was with Holgrave.  He could talk
sagely about the world's old age, but never actually believed what he
said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the
world--that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without
being venerable--as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into
all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest
promise of becoming.  He had that sense, or inward prophecy,--which a
young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a
mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,--that we
are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this
very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be
accomplished in his own lifetime.  It seemed to Holgrave,--as doubtless
it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam's
grandchildren,--that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown
and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be
thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to
begin anew.

As to the main point,--may we never live to doubt it!--as to the better
centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right.  His error lay
in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is
destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new
suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in
applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable
achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything
to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or
against it.  Yet it was well for him to think so.  This enthusiasm,
infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking
an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth
pure, and make his aspirations high.  And when, with the years settling
down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by
inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution
of his sentiments.  He would still have faith in man's brightening
destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize
his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which
he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its
close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a
kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.

Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the
thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was
necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one
and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly
their own.  He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a
thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly
yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think.  The true
value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward
strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a
change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew
of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid
his hand on; in that personal ambition, hidden--from his own as well as
other eyes--among his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a
certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the
champion of some practicable cause.  Altogether in his culture and want
of culture,--in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the
practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his
magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever
the ages had established in man's behalf; in his faith, and in his
infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked,--the artist might
fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his
native land.

His career it would be difficult to prefigure.  There appeared to be
qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is free
to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the
world's prizes within his reach.  But these matters are delightfully
uncertain.  At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of
just about Holgrave's age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but
of whom, even after much and careful inquiry, we never happen to hear
another word.  The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh
gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false
brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people.  Like
certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their
first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very
sober aspect after washing-day.

But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular
afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden.  In that point of
view, it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so much
faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powers,--so
little harmed, too, by the many tests that had tried his metal,--it was
pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe.  Her thought
had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold; or, if so,
he had grown warmer now.  Without such purpose on her part, and
unconsciously on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a
home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct.  With the insight on
which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phoebe,
and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child's
story-book.  But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their
depth; those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us
than we think.  Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebe's
capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of
what he dreamed of doing in the world.  He poured himself out as to
another self.   Very possibly, he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her,
and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered
sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe
reservoir which it finds.  But, had you peeped at them through the
chinks of the garden-fence, the young man's earnestness and heightened
color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the
young girl!

At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for
Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin
Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon
House.  Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future,
which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to
speak of the influences of the Past.  One subject, indeed, is but the
reverberation of the other.

"Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?" cried he, keeping up the
earnest tone of his preceding conversation.  "It lies upon the Present
like a giant's dead body In fact, the case is just as if a young giant
were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse
of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
needs to be decently buried.  Just think a moment, and it will startle
you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give
the matter the right word!"

"But I do not see it," observed Phoebe.

"For example, then," continued Holgrave:  "a dead man, if he happens to
have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
longer dead than he.  A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and
living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions.  We read in
dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's
pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die
of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We
worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand
obstructs us!  Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white,
immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
interfere.  I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's
houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!"

"And why not," said Phoebe, "so long as we can be comfortable in them?"

"But we shall live to see the day, I trust," went on the artist, "when
no man shall build his house for posterity.  Why should he? He might
just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes,--leather, or
guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longest,--so that his
great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely
the same figure in the world that he himself does.  If each generation
were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change,
comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform
which society is now suffering for.  I doubt whether even our public
edifices--our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-hall, and
churches,--ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or
brick.  It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty
years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and
reform the institutions which they symbolize."

"How you hate everything old!" said Phoebe in dismay.  "It makes me
dizzy to think of such a shifting world!"

"I certainly love nothing mouldy," answered Holgrave.  "Now, this old
Pyncheon House! Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black
shingles, and the green moss that shows how damp they are?--its dark,
low-studded rooms--its grime and sordidness, which are the
crystallization on its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn
and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be
purified with fire,--purified till only its ashes remain!"

"Then why do you live in it?" asked Phoebe, a little piqued.

"Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however," replied
Holgrave.  "The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and
abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just
been declaiming.  I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better
how to hate it.  By the bye, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the
wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably
great-grandfather?"

"Yes, indeed!" said Phoebe; "I heard it long ago, from my father, and
two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have
been here.  She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons
began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him.  And you, Mr.
Holgrave look as if you thought so too!  How singular that you should
believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many things that are a
great deal worthier of credit!"

"I do believe it," said the artist seriously; "not as a superstition,
however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a
theory.  Now, see:  under those seven gables, at which we now look
up,--and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his
descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond
the present,--under that roof, through a portion of three centuries,
there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated
hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death,
dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,--all, or most of which calamity I
have the means of tracing to the old Puritan's inordinate desire to
plant and endow a family.  To plant a family! This idea is at the
bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do.  The truth is,
that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged
into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its
ancestors.  Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in
hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean
pipes.  In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for
instance,--forgive me Phoebe, but I cannot think of you as one of
them,--in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough
to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another."

"You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred," said Phoebe, debating
with herself whether she ought to take offence.

"I speak true thoughts to a true mind!" answered Holgrave, with a
vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him.   "The truth is
as I say! Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this
mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the
street,--at least, his very image, in mind and body,--with the fairest
prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an
inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the daguerreotype, and
its resemblance to the old portrait?"

"How strangely in earnest you are!" exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him
with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to
laugh.  "You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?"

"I understand you!" said the artist, coloring and laughing.  "I believe
I am a little mad.  This subject has taken hold of my mind with the
strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable.
As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the
Pyncheon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the
form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine."

"Do you write for the magazines?" inquired Phoebe.

"Is it possible you did not know it?" cried Holgrave.  "Well, such is
literary fame! Yes.  Miss Phoebe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my
marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories; and my name has
figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as
respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the
canonized bead-roll with which it was associated.  In the humorous
line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for
pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion.  But shall I read you
my story?"

"Yes, if it is not very long," said Phoebe,--and added
laughingly,--"nor very dull."

As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide
for himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while
the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables, began to read.




                          XIII Alice Pyncheon


THERE was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse
Pyncheon to young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate
presence at the House of the Seven Gables.

"And what does your master want with me?" said the carpenter to Mr.
Pyncheon's black servant.  "Does the house need any repair?  Well it
may, by this time; and no blame to my father who built it, neither! I
was reading the old Colonel's tombstone, no longer ago than last
Sabbath; and, reckoning from that date, the house has stood
seven-and-thirty years.  No wonder if there should be a job to do on
the roof."

"Don't know what massa wants," answered Scipio.  "The house is a berry
good house, and old Colonel Pyncheon think so too, I reckon;--else why
the old man haunt it so, and frighten a poor nigga, As he does?"

"Well, well, friend Scipio; let your master know that I'm coming," said
the carpenter with a laugh.  "For a fair, workmanlike job, he'll find
me his man.  And so the house is haunted, is it? It will take a tighter
workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables.  Even if
the Colonel would be quiet," he added, muttering to himself, "my old
grandfather, the wizard, will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons
as long as their walls hold together."

"What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scipio.
"And what for do you look so black at me?"

"No matter, darky," said the carpenter.  "Do you think nobody is to
look black but yourself? Go tell your master I'm coming; and if you
happen to see Mistress Alice, his daughter, give Matthew Maule's humble
respects to her.  She has brought a fair face from Italy,--fair, and
gentle, and proud,--has that same Alice Pyncheon!"

"He talk of Mistress Alice!" cried Scipio, as he returned from his
errand.  "The low carpenter-man! He no business so much as to look at
her a great way off!"

This young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a
person little understood, and not very generally liked, in the town
where he resided; not that anything could be alleged against his
integrity, or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he
exercised.  The aversion (as it might justly be called) with which many
persons regarded him was partly the result of his own character and
deportment, and partly an inheritance.

He was the grandson of a former Matthew Maule, one of the early
settlers of the town, and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in
his day.  This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton
Mather, and his brother ministers, and the learned judges, and other
wise men, and Sir William Phipps, the sagacious governor, made such
laudable efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls, by sending a
multitude of his adherents up the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill.  Since
those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence
of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the
proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the
Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were intended
to distress and utterly overwhelm.  It is not the less certain,
however, that awe and terror brooded over the memories of those who
died for this horrible crime of witchcraft.  Their graves, in the
crevices of the rocks, were supposed to be incapable of retaining the
occupants who had been so hastily thrust into them.  Old Matthew Maule,
especially, was known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in
rising out of his grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed, and
was as often seen at midnight as living people at noonday.  This
pestilent wizard (in whom his just punishment seemed to have wrought no
manner of amendment) had an inveterate habit of haunting a certain
mansion, styled the House of the Seven Gables, against the owner of
which he pretended to hold an unsettled claim for ground-rent.  The
ghost, it appears,--with the pertinacity which was one of his
distinguishing characteristics while alive,--insisted that he was the
rightful proprietor of the site upon which the house stood.  His terms
were, that either the aforesaid ground-rent, from the day when the
cellar began to be dug, should be paid down, or the mansion itself
given up; else he, the ghostly creditor, would have his finger in all
the affairs of the Pyncheons, and make everything go wrong with them,
though it should be a thousand years after his death.  It was a wild
story, perhaps, but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who
could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard
Maule had been.

Now, the wizard's grandson, the young Matthew Maule of our story, was
popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestor's
questionable traits.  It is wonderful how many absurdities were
promulgated in reference to the young man.  He was fabled, for example,
to have a strange power of getting into people's dreams, and regulating
matters there according to his own fancy, pretty much like the
stage-manager of a theatre.  There was a great deal of talk among the
neighbors, particularly the petticoated ones, about what they called
the witchcraft of Maule's eye.  Some said that he could look into
people's minds; others, that, by the marvellous power of this eye, he
could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do
errands to his grandfather, in the spiritual world; others, again, that
it was what is termed an Evil Eye, and possessed the valuable faculty
of blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with the heartburn.
But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenter's disadvantage
was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and
next, the fact of his not being a church-communicant, and the suspicion
of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity.

After receiving Mr. Pyncheon's message, the carpenter merely tarried to
finish a small job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took
his way towards the House of the Seven Gables.  This noted edifice,
though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was still as
respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town.  The
present owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, was said to have contracted a dislike
to the house, in consequence of a shock to his sensibility, in early
childhood, from the sudden death of his grandfather.  In the very act
of running to climb Colonel Pyncheon's knee, the boy had discovered the
old Puritan to be a corpse.  On arriving at manhood, Mr. Pyncheon had
visited England, where he married a lady of fortune, and had
subsequently spent many years, partly in the mother country, and partly
in various cities on the continent of Europe.  During this period, the
family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman, who was
allowed to make it his home for the time being, in consideration of
keeping the premises in thorough repair.  So faithfully had this
contract been fulfilled, that now, as the carpenter approached the
house, his practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its
condition.  The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply; the shingled
roof looked thoroughly water-tight; and the glittering plaster-work
entirely covered the exterior walls, and sparkled in the October sun,
as if it had been new only a week ago.

The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery
expression of comfortable activity in the human countenance.  You could
see, at once, that there was the stir of a large family within it.  A
huge load of oak-wood was passing through the gateway, towards the
outbuildings in the rear; the fat cook--or probably it might be the
housekeeper--stood at the side door, bargaining for some turkeys and
poultry which a countryman had brought for sale.  Now and then a
maid-servant, neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of a
slave, might be seen bustling across the windows, in the lower part of
the house.  At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging
over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowers,--exotics, but which
had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England
autumn,--was the figure of a young lady, an exotic, like the flowers,
and beautiful and delicate as they.  Her presence imparted an
indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice.  In other
respects, it was a substantial, jolly-looking mansion, and seemed fit
to be the residence of a patriarch, who might establish his own
headquarters in the front gable and assign one of the remainder to each
of his six children, while the great chimney in the centre should
symbolize the old fellow's hospitable heart, which kept them all warm,
and made a great whole of the seven smaller ones.

There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter
passed beneath it, he looked up and noted the hour.

"Three o'clock!" said he to himself.  "My father told me that dial was
put up only an hour before the old Colonel's death.  How truly it has
kept time these seven-and-thirty years past! The shadow creeps and
creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine!"

It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent
for to a gentleman's house, to go to the back door, where servants and
work-people were usually admitted; or at least to the side entrance,
where the better class of tradesmen made application.  But the
carpenter had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature; and,
at this moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with the sense of
hereditary wrong, because he considered the great Pyncheon House to be
standing on soil which should have been his own.  On this very site,
beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the
pine-trees and built a cottage, in which children had been born to him;
and it was only from a dead man's stiffened fingers that Colonel
Pyncheon had wrested away the title-deeds.  So young Maule went
straight to the principal entrance, beneath a portal of carved oak, and
gave such a peal of the iron knocker that you would have imagined the
stern old wizard himself to be standing at the threshold.

Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious, hurry; but showed
the whites of his eyes in amazement on beholding only the carpenter.

"Lord-a-mercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fellow!" mumbled
Scipio, down in his throat.  "Anybody think he beat on the door with
his biggest hammer!"

"Here I am!" said Maule sternly.  "Show me the way to your master's
parlor."

As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music
thrilled and vibrated along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the
rooms above stairs.  It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had
brought with her from beyond the sea.  The fair Alice bestowed most of
her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although the former were
apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad.  She was of foreign
education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life,
in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed.

As Mr. Pyncheon had been impatiently awaiting Maule's arrival, black
Scipio, of course, lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his
master's presence. The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of
moderate size, looking out upon the garden of the house, and having its
windows partly shadowed by the foliage of fruit-trees. It was Mr.
Pyncheon's peculiar apartment, and was provided with furniture, in an
elegant and costly style, principally from Paris; the floor (which was
unusual at that day) being covered with a carpet, so skilfully and
richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers. In one
corner stood a marble woman, to whom her own beauty was the sole and
sufficient garment. Some pictures--that looked old, and had a mellow
tinge diffused through all their artful splendor--hung on the walls.
Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful cabinet of ebony,
inlaid with ivory; a piece of antique furniture, which Mr. Pyncheon had
bought in Venice, and which he used as the treasure-place for medals,
ancient coins, and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had
picked up on his travels. Through all this variety of decoration,
however, the room showed its original characteristics; its low stud,
its cross-beam, its chimney-piece, with the old-fashioned Dutch tiles;
so that it was the emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign
ideas, and elaborated into artificial refinement, but neither larger,
nor, in its proper self, more elegant than before.

There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very
handsomely furnished room.  One was a large map, or surveyor's plan, of
a tract of land, which looked as if it had been drawn a good many years
ago, and was now dingy with smoke, and soiled, here and there, with the
touch of fingers.  The other was a portrait of a stern old man, in a
Puritan garb, painted roughly, but with a bold effect, and a remarkably
strong expression of character.

At a small table, before a fire of English sea-coal, sat Mr. Pyncheon,
sipping coffee, which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him
in France.  He was a middle-aged and really handsome man, with a wig
flowing down upon his shoulders; his coat was of blue velvet, with lace
on the borders and at the button-holes; and the firelight glistened on
the spacious breadth of his waistcoat, which was flowered all over with
gold.  On the entrance of Scipio, ushering in the carpenter, Mr.
Pyncheon turned partly round, but resumed his former position, and
proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee, without immediate
notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence.  It was not
that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect,--which, indeed, he
would have blushed to be guilty of,--but it never occurred to him that
a person in Maule's station had a claim on his courtesy, or would
trouble himself about it one way or the other.

The carpenter, however, stepped at once to the hearth, and turned
himself about, so as to look Mr. Pyncheon in the face.

"You sent for me," said he.  "Be pleased to explain your business, that
I may go back to my own affairs."

"Ah! excuse me," said Mr. Pyncheon quietly.  "I did not mean to tax
your time without a recompense.  Your name, I think, is Maule,--Thomas
or Matthew Maule,--a son or grandson of the builder of this house?"

"Matthew Maule," replied the carpenter,--"son of him who built the
house,--grandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil."

"I know the dispute to which you allude," observed Mr. Pyncheon with
undisturbed equanimity.  "I am well aware that my grandfather was
compelled to resort to a suit at law, in order to establish his claim
to the foundation-site of this edifice.  We will not, if you please,
renew the discussion.  The matter was settled at the time, and by the
competent authorities,--equitably, it is to be presumed,--and, at all
events, irrevocably.  Yet, singularly enough, there is an incidental
reference to this very subject in what I am now about to say to you.
And this same inveterate grudge,--excuse me, I mean no offence,--this
irritability, which you have just shown, is not entirely aside from the
matter."

"If you can find anything for your purpose, Mr. Pyncheon," said the
carpenter, "in a man's natural resentment for the wrongs done to his
blood, you are welcome to it."

"I take you at your word, Goodman Maule," said the owner of the Seven
Gables, with a smile, "and will proceed to suggest a mode in which your
hereditary resentments--justifiable or otherwise--may have had a
bearing on my affairs.  You have heard, I suppose, that the Pyncheon
family, ever since my grandfather's days, have been prosecuting a still
unsettled claim to a very large extent of territory at the Eastward?"

"Often," replied Maule,--and it is said that a smile came over his
face,--"very often,--from my father!"

"This claim," continued Mr. Pyncheon, after pausing a moment, as if to
consider what the carpenter's smile might mean, "appeared to be on the
very verge of a settlement and full allowance, at the period of my
grandfather's decease.  It was well known, to those in his confidence,
that he anticipated neither difficulty nor delay.  Now, Colonel
Pyncheon, I need hardly say, was a practical man, well acquainted with
public and private business, and not at all the person to cherish
ill-founded hopes, or to attempt the following out of an impracticable
scheme.  It is obvious to conclude, therefore, that he had grounds, not
apparent to his heirs, for his confident anticipation of success in the
matter of this Eastern claim.  In a word, I believe,--and my legal
advisers coincide in the belief, which, moreover, is authorized, to a
certain extent, by the family traditions,--that my grandfather was in
possession of some deed, or other document, essential to this claim,
but which has since disappeared."

"Very likely," said Matthew Maule,--and again, it is said, there was a
dark smile on his face,--"but what can a poor carpenter have to do with
the grand affairs of the Pyncheon family?"

"Perhaps nothing," returned Mr. Pyncheon, "possibly much!"

Here ensued a great many words between Matthew Maule and the proprietor
of the Seven Gables, on the subject which the latter had thus broached.
It seems (although Mr. Pyncheon had some hesitation in referring to
stories so exceedingly absurd in their aspect) that the popular belief
pointed to some mysterious connection and dependence, existing between
the family of the Maules and these vast unrealized possessions of the
Pyncheons.  It was an ordinary saying that the old wizard, hanged
though he was, had obtained the best end of the bargain in his contest
with Colonel Pyncheon; inasmuch as he had got possession of the great
Eastern claim, in exchange for an acre or two of garden-ground.  A very
aged woman, recently dead, had often used the metaphorical expression,
in her fireside talk, that miles and miles of the Pyncheon lands had
been shovelled into Maule's grave; which, by the bye, was but a very
shallow nook, between two rocks, near the summit of Gallows Hill.
Again, when the lawyers were making inquiry for the missing document,
it was a by-word that it would never be found, unless in the wizard's
skeleton hand.  So much weight had the shrewd lawyers assigned to these
fables, that (but Mr. Pyncheon did not see fit to inform the carpenter
of the fact) they had secretly caused the wizard's grave to be
searched.  Nothing was discovered, however, except that, unaccountably,
the right hand of the skeleton was gone.

Now, what was unquestionably important, a portion of these popular
rumors could be traced, though rather doubtfully and indistinctly, to
chance words and obscure hints of the executed wizard's son, and the
father of this present Matthew Maule.  And here Mr. Pyncheon could
bring an item of his own personal evidence into play.  Though but a
child at the time, he either remembered or fancied that Matthew's
father had had some job to perform on the day before, or possibly the
very morning of the Colonel's decease, in the private room where he and
the carpenter were at this moment talking.  Certain papers belonging to
Colonel Pyncheon, as his grandson distinctly recollected, had been
spread out on the table.

Matthew Maule understood the insinuated suspicion.

"My father," he said,--but still there was that dark smile, making a
riddle of his countenance,--"my father was an honester man than the
bloody old Colonel! Not to get his rights back again would he have
carried off one of those papers!"

"I shall not bandy words with you," observed the foreign-bred Mr.
Pyncheon, with haughty composure.  "Nor will it become me to resent any
rudeness towards either my grandfather or myself.  A gentleman, before
seeking intercourse with a person of your station and habits, will
first consider whether the urgency of the end may compensate for the
disagreeableness of the means.  It does so in the present instance."

He then renewed the conversation, and made great pecuniary offers to
the carpenter, in case the latter should give information leading to
the discovery of the lost document, and the consequent success of the
Eastern claim. For a long time Matthew Maule is said to have turned a
cold ear to these propositions. At last, however, with a strange kind
of laugh, he inquired whether Mr. Pyncheon would make over to him the
old wizard's homestead-ground, together with the House of the Seven
Gables, now standing on it, in requital of the documentary evidence so
urgently required.

The wild, chimney-corner legend (which, without copying all its
extravagances, my narrative essentially follows) here gives an account
of some very strange behavior on the part of Colonel Pyncheon's
portrait.  This picture, it must be understood, was supposed to be so
intimately connected with the fate of the house, and so magically built
into its walls, that, if once it should be removed, that very instant
the whole edifice would come thundering down in a heap of dusty ruin.
All through the foregoing conversation between Mr. Pyncheon and the
carpenter, the portrait had been frowning, clenching its fist, and
giving many such proofs of excessive discomposure, but without
attracting the notice of either of the two colloquists.  And finally,
at Matthew Maule's audacious suggestion of a transfer of the
seven-gabled structure, the ghostly portrait is averred to have lost
all patience, and to have shown itself on the point of descending
bodily from its frame.  But such incredible incidents are merely to be
mentioned aside.

"Give up this house!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, in amazement at the
proposal.  "Were I to do so, my grandfather would not rest quiet in his
grave!"

"He never has, if all stories are true," remarked the carpenter
composedly.  "But that matter concerns his grandson more than it does
Matthew Maule.  I have no other terms to propose."

Impossible as he at first thought it to comply with Maule's conditions,
still, on a second glance, Mr. Pyncheon was of opinion that they might
at least be made matter of discussion.  He himself had no personal
attachment for the house, nor any pleasant associations connected with
his childish residence in it.  On the contrary, after seven-and-thirty
years, the presence of his dead grandfather seemed still to pervade it,
as on that morning when the affrighted boy had beheld him, with so
ghastly an aspect, stiffening in his chair.  His long abode in foreign
parts, moreover, and familiarity with many of the castles and ancestral
halls of England, and the marble palaces of Italy, had caused him to
look contemptuously at the House of the Seven Gables, whether in point
of splendor or convenience.  It was a mansion exceedingly inadequate to
the style of living which it would be incumbent on Mr. Pyncheon to
support, after realizing his territorial rights.  His steward might
deign to occupy it, but never, certainly, the great landed proprietor
himself.  In the event of success, indeed, it was his purpose to return
to England; nor, to say the truth, would he recently have quitted that
more congenial home, had not his own fortune, as well as his deceased
wife's, begun to give symptoms of exhaustion.  The Eastern claim once
fairly settled, and put upon the firm basis of actual possession, Mr.
Pyncheon's property--to be measured by miles, not acres--would be worth
an earldom, and would reasonably entitle him to solicit, or enable him
to purchase, that elevated dignity from the British monarch.  Lord
Pyncheon!--or the Earl of Waldo!--how could such a magnate be expected
to contract his grandeur within the pitiful compass of seven shingled
gables?

In short, on an enlarged view of the business, the carpenter's terms
appeared so ridiculously easy that Mr. Pyncheon could scarcely forbear
laughing in his face.  He was quite ashamed, after the foregoing
reflections, to propose any diminution of so moderate a recompense for
the immense service to be rendered.

"I consent to your proposition, Maule!" cried he. "Put me in possession
of the document essential to establish my rights, and the House of the
Seven Gables is your own!"

According to some versions of the story, a regular contract to the
above effect was drawn up by a lawyer, and signed and sealed in the
presence of witnesses.  Others say that Matthew Maule was contented
with a private written agreement, in which Mr. Pyncheon pledged his
honor and integrity to the fulfillment of the terms concluded upon.
The gentleman then ordered wine, which he and the carpenter drank
together, in confirmation of their bargain.  During the whole preceding
discussion and subsequent formalities, the old Puritan's portrait seems
to have persisted in its shadowy gestures of disapproval; but without
effect, except that, as Mr. Pyncheon set down the emptied glass, he
thought he beheld his grandfather frown.

"This sherry is too potent a wine for me; it has affected my brain
already," he observed, after a somewhat startled look at the picture.
"On returning to Europe, I shall confine myself to the more delicate
vintages of Italy and France, the best of which will not bear
transportation."

"My Lord Pyncheon may drink what wine he will, and wherever he
pleases," replied the carpenter, as if he had been privy to Mr.
Pyncheon's ambitious projects.  "But first, sir, if you desire tidings
of this lost document, I must crave the favor of a little talk with
your fair daughter Alice."

"You are mad, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon haughtily; and now, at
last, there was anger mixed up with his pride.  "What can my daughter
have to do with a business like this?"

Indeed, at this new demand on the carpenter's part, the proprietor of
the Seven Gables was even more thunder-struck than at the cool
proposition to surrender his house.  There was, at least, an assignable
motive for the first stipulation; there appeared to be none whatever
for the last.  Nevertheless, Matthew Maule sturdily insisted on the
young lady being summoned, and even gave her father to understand, in a
mysterious kind of explanation,--which made the matter considerably
darker than it looked before,--that the only chance of acquiring the
requisite knowledge was through the clear, crystal medium of a pure and
virgin intelligence, like that of the fair Alice.  Not to encumber our
story with Mr. Pyncheon's scruples, whether of conscience, pride, or
fatherly affection, he at length ordered his daughter to be called.  He
well knew that she was in her chamber, and engaged in no occupation
that could not readily be laid aside; for, as it happened, ever since
Alice's name had been spoken, both her father and the carpenter had
heard the sad and sweet music of her harpsichord, and the airier
melancholy of her accompanying voice.

So Alice Pyncheon was summoned, and appeared.  A portrait of this young
lady, painted by a Venetian artist, and left by her father in England,
is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of
Devonshire, and to be now preserved at Chatsworth; not on account of
any associations with the original, but for its value as a picture, and
the high character of beauty in the countenance.  If ever there was a
lady born, and set apart from the world's vulgar mass by a certain
gentle and cold stateliness, it was this very Alice Pyncheon.  Yet
there was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness, or, at least, the
tender capabilities.  For the sake of that redeeming quality, a man of
generous nature would have forgiven all her pride, and have been
content, almost, to lie down in her path, and let Alice set her slender
foot upon his heart.  All that he would have required was simply the
acknowledgment that he was indeed a man, and a fellow-being, moulded of
the same elements as she.

As Alice came into the room, her eyes fell upon the carpenter, who was
standing near its centre, clad in green woollen jacket, a pair of loose
breeches, open at the knees, and with a long pocket for his rule, the
end of which protruded; it was as proper a mark of the artisan's
calling as Mr. Pyncheon's full-dress sword of that gentleman's
aristocratic pretensions.  A glow of artistic approval brightened over
Alice Pyncheon's face; she was struck with admiration--which she made
no attempt to conceal--of the remarkable comeliness, strength, and
energy of Maule's figure.  But that admiring glance (which most other
men, perhaps, would have cherished as a sweet recollection all through
life) the carpenter never forgave.  It must have been the devil himself
that made Maule so subtile in his preception.

"Does the girl look at me as if I were a brute beast?" thought he,
setting his teeth.  "She shall know whether I have a human spirit; and
the worse for her, if it prove stronger than her own!"

"My father, you sent for me," said Alice, in her sweet and harp-like
voice.  "But, if you have business with this young man, pray let me go
again.  You know I do not love this room, in spite of that Claude, with
which you try to bring back sunny recollections."

"Stay a moment, young lady, if you please!" said Matthew Maule.  "My
business with your father is over.  With yourself, it is now to begin!"

Alice looked towards her father, in surprise and inquiry.

"Yes, Alice," said Mr. Pyncheon, with some disturbance and confusion.
"This young man--his name is Matthew Maule--professes, so far as I can
understand him, to be able to discover, through your means, a certain
paper or parchment, which was missing long before your birth.  The
importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect
no possible, even if improbable, method of regaining it.  You will
therefore oblige me, my dear Alice, by answering this person's
inquiries, and complying with his lawful and reasonable requests, so
far as they may appear to have the aforesaid object in view.  As I
shall remain in the room, you need apprehend no rude nor unbecoming
deportment, on the young man's part; and, at your slightest wish, of
course, the investigation, or whatever we may call it, shall
immediately be broken off."

"Mistress Alice Pyncheon," remarked Matthew Maule, with the utmost
deference, but yet a half-hidden sarcasm in his look and tone, "will no
doubt feel herself quite safe in her father's presence, and under his
all-sufficient protection."

"I certainly shall entertain no manner of apprehension, with my father
at hand," said Alice with maidenly dignity.  "Neither do I conceive
that a lady, while true to herself, can have aught to fear from
whomsoever, or in any circumstances!"

Poor Alice! By what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on
terms of defiance against a strength which she could not estimate?

"Then, Mistress Alice," said Matthew Maule, handing a
chair,--gracefully enough, for a craftsman, "will it please you only to
sit down, and do me the favor (though altogether beyond a poor
carpenter's deserts) to fix your eyes on mine!"

Alice complied, She was very proud.  Setting aside all advantages of
rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a power--combined of
beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of
womanhood--that could make her sphere impenetrable, unless betrayed by
treachery within.  She instinctively knew, it may be, that some
sinister or evil potency was now striving to pass her barriers; nor
would she decline the contest.  So Alice put woman's might against
man's might; a match not often equal on the part of woman.

Her father meanwhile had turned away, and seemed absorbed in the
contemplation of a landscape by Claude, where a shadowy and
sun-streaked vista penetrated so remotely into an ancient wood, that it
would have been no wonder if his fancy had lost itself in the picture's
bewildering depths.  But, in truth, the picture was no more to him at
that moment than the blank wall against which it hung.  His mind was
haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard, attributing
mysterious if not supernatural endowments to these Maules, as well the
grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors.  Mr. Pyncheon's
long residence abroad, and intercourse with men of wit and
fashion,--courtiers, worldings, and free-thinkers,--had done much
towards obliterating the grim Puritan superstitions, which no man of
New England birth at that early period could entirely escape.  But, on
the other hand, had not a whole community believed Maule's grandfather
to be a wizard? Had not the crime been proved? Had not the wizard died
for it? Had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the Pyncheons
to this only grandson, who, as it appeared, was now about to exercise a
subtle influence over the daughter of his enemy's house?  Might not
this influence be the same that was called witchcraft?

Turning half around, he caught a glimpse of Maule's figure in the
looking-glass.  At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the
air, the carpenter made a gesture as if directing downward a slow,
ponderous, and invisible weight upon the maiden.

"Stay, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, stepping forward.  "I forbid
your proceeding further!"

"Pray, my dear father, do not interrupt the young man," said Alice,
without changing her position.  "His efforts, I assure you, will prove
very harmless."

Again Mr. Pyncheon turned his eyes towards the Claude.  It was then his
daughter's will, in opposition to his own, that the experiment should
be fully tried.  Henceforth, therefore, he did but consent, not urge
it.  And was it not for her sake far more than for his own that he
desired its success? That lost parchment once restored, the beautiful
Alice Pyncheon, with the rich dowry which he could then bestow, might
wed an English duke or a German reigning-prince, instead of some New
England clergyman or lawyer! At the thought, the ambitious father
almost consented, in his heart, that, if the devil's power were needed
to the accomplishment of this great object, Maule might evoke him.
Alice's own purity would be her safeguard.

With his mind full of imaginary magnificence, Mr. Pyncheon heard a
half-uttered exclamation from his daughter.  It was very faint and low;
so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape out the words,
and too undefined a purport to be intelligible.  Yet it was a call for
help!--his conscience never doubted it;--and, little more than a
whisper to his ear, it was a dismal shriek, and long reechoed so, in
the region round his heart! But this time the father did not turn.

After a further interval, Maule spoke.

"Behold your daughter," said he.

Mr. Pyncheon came hastily forward.  The carpenter was standing erect in
front of Alice's chair, and pointing his finger towards the maiden with
an expression of triumphant power, the limits of which could not be
defined, as, indeed, its scope stretched vaguely towards the unseen and
the infinite.  Alice sat in an attitude of profound repose, with the
long brown lashes drooping over her eyes.

"There she is!" said the carpenter.  "Speak to her!"

"Alice! My daughter!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon.  "My own Alice!"

She did not stir.

"Louder!" said Maule, smiling.

"Alice! Awake!" cried her father.  "It troubles me to see you thus!
Awake!"

He spoke loudly, with terror in his voice, and close to that delicate
ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord.  But the sound
evidently reached her not.  It is indescribable what a sense of remote,
dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on
the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his voice.

"Best touch her!" said Matthew Maule "Shake the girl, and roughly, too!
My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and plane,--else I
might help you!"

Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of
startled emotion.  He kissed her, with so great a heart-throb in the
kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it.  Then, in a gust of anger
at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which,
the next moment, it affrighted him to remember.  He withdrew his
encircling arms, and Alice--whose figure, though flexible, had been
wholly impassive--relapsed into the same attitude as before these
attempts to arouse her.  Maule having shifted his position, her face
was turned towards him slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference
of her very slumber to his guidance.

Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities
shook the powder out of his periwig; how the reserved and stately
gentleman forgot his dignity; how the gold-embroidered waistcoat
flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage,
terror, and sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it.

"Villain!" cried Mr. Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule.
"You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter.  Give her
back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your
grandfather's footsteps!"

"Softly, Mr. Pyncheon!" said the carpenter with scornful composure.
"Softly, an' it please your worship, else you will spoil those rich
lace-ruffles at your wrists! Is it my crime if you have sold your
daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into
your clutch? There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep.  Now let Matthew
Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her awhile
since."

He spoke, and Alice responded, with a soft, subdued, inward
acquiescence, and a bending of her form towards him, like the flame of
a torch when it indicates a gentle draught of air.  He beckoned with
his hand, and, rising from her chair,--blindly, but undoubtingly, as
tending to her sure and inevitable centre,--the proud Alice approached
him.  He waved her back, and, retreating, Alice sank again into her
seat.

"She is mine!" said Matthew Maule.  "Mine, by the right of the
strongest spirit!"

In the further progress of the legend, there is a long, grotesque, and
occasionally awe-striking account of the carpenter's incantations (if
so they are to be called), with a view of discovering the lost
document.  It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of
Alice into a kind of telescopic medium, through which Mr. Pyncheon and
himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world.  He succeeded,
accordingly, in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse, at one
remove, with the departed personages in whose custody the so much
valued secret had been carried beyond the precincts of earth.  During
her trance, Alice described three figures as being present to her
spiritualized perception.  One was an aged, dignified, stern-looking
gentleman, clad as for a solemn festival in grave and costly attire,
but with a great blood-stain on his richly wrought band; the second, an
aged man, meanly dressed, with a dark and malign countenance, and a
broken halter about his neck; the third, a person not so advanced in
life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse
woollen tunic and leather breeches, and with a carpenter's rule
sticking out of his side pocket.  These three visionary characters
possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document.  One of them, in
truth,--it was he with the blood-stain on his band,--seemed, unless his
gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchment in his immediate
keeping, but was prevented by his two partners in the mystery from
disburdening himself of the trust.  Finally, when he showed a purpose
of shouting forth the secret loudly enough to be heard from his own
sphere into that of mortals, his companions struggled with him, and
pressed their hands over his mouth; and forthwith--whether that he were
choked by it, or that the secret itself was of a crimson hue--there was
a fresh flow of blood upon his band.  Upon this, the two meanly dressed
figures mocked and jeered at the much-abashed old dignitary, and
pointed their fingers at the stain.

At this juncture, Maule turned to Mr. Pyncheon.

"It will never be allowed," said he.  "The custody of this secret, that
would so enrich his heirs, makes part of your grandfather's
retribution.  He must choke with it until it is no longer of any value.
And keep you the House of the Seven Gables! It is too dear bought an
inheritance, and too heavy with the curse upon it, to be shifted yet
awhile from the Colonel's posterity."

Mr. Pyncheon tried to speak, but--what with fear and passion--could
make only a gurgling murmur in his throat.  The carpenter smiled.

"Aha, worshipful sir!--so you have old Maule's blood to drink!" said he
jeeringly.

"Fiend in man's shape! why dost thou keep dominion over my child?"
cried Mr. Pyncheon, when his choked utterance could make way.  "Give me
back my daughter.  Then go thy ways; and may we never meet again!"

"Your daughter!" said Matthew Maule.  "Why, she is fairly mine!
Nevertheless, not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice, I will leave
her in your keeping; but I do not warrant you that she shall never have
occasion to remember Maule, the carpenter."

He waved his hands with an upward motion; and, after a few repetitions
of similar gestures, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon awoke from her
strange trance.  She awoke without the slightest recollection of her
visionary experience; but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie,
and returning to the consciousness of actual life, in almost as brief
an interval as the down-sinking flame of the hearth should quiver again
up the chimney.  On recognizing Matthew Maule, she assumed an air of
somewhat cold but gentle dignity, the rather, as there was a certain
peculiar smile on the carpenter's visage that stirred the native pride
of the fair Alice.   So ended, for that time, the quest for the lost
title-deed of the Pyncheon territory at the Eastward; nor, though often
subsequently renewed, has it ever yet befallen a Pyncheon to set his
eye upon that parchment.

But, alas for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice!  A
power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden
soul.  A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque
and fantastic bidding.  Her father as it proved, had martyred his poor
child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead
of acres.  And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maule's
slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousand-fold, than that which
binds its chain around the body.  Seated by his humble fireside, Maule
had but to wave his hand; and, wherever the proud lady chanced to
be,--whether in her chamber, or entertaining her father's stately
guests, or worshipping at church,--whatever her place or occupation,
her spirit passed from beneath her own control, and bowed itself to
Maule.  "Alice, laugh!"--the carpenter, beside his hearth, would say;
or perhaps intensely will it, without a spoken word.  And, even were it
prayer-time, or at a funeral, Alice must break into wild laughter.
"Alice, be sad!"--and, at the instant, down would come her tears,
quenching all the mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a
bonfire.  "Alice, dance."--and dance she would, not in such court-like
measures as she had learned abroad, but some high-paced jig, or
hop-skip rigadoon, befitting the brisk lasses at a rustic merry-making.
It seemed to be Maule's impulse, not to ruin Alice, nor to visit her
with any black or gigantic mischief, which would have crowned her
sorrows with the grace of tragedy, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn
upon her.  Thus all the dignity of life was lost.  She felt herself too
much abased, and longed to change natures with some worm!

One evening, at a bridal party (but not her own; for, so lost from
self-control, she would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was
beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer
white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean
dwelling of a laboring-man.  There was laughter and good cheer within;
for Matthew Maule, that night, was to wed the laborer's daughter, and
had summoned proud Alice Pyncheon to wait upon his bride.  And so she
did; and when the twain were one, Alice awoke out of her enchanted
sleep.  Yet, no longer proud,--humbly, and with a smile all steeped in
sadness,--she kissed Maule's wife, and went her way.  It was an
inclement night; the southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain
into her thinly sheltered bosom; her satin slippers were wet through
and through, as she trod the muddy sidewalks.  The next day a cold;
soon, a settled cough; anon, a hectic cheek, a wasted form, that sat
beside the harpsichord, and filled the house with music!  Music in
which a strain of the heavenly choristers was echoed! Oh; joy! For
Alice had borne her last humiliation! Oh, greater joy! For Alice was
penitent of her one earthly sin, and proud no more!

The Pyncheons made a great funeral for Alice.  The kith and kin were
there, and the whole respectability of the town besides.  But, last in
the procession, came Matthew Maule, gnashing his teeth, as if he would
have bitten his own heart in twain,--the darkest and wofullest man that
ever walked behind a corpse! He meant to humble Alice, not to kill her;
but he had taken a woman's delicate soul into his rude gripe, to play
with--and she was dead!




                            XIV Phoebe's Good-Bye


HOLGRAVE, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural
to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable
of being developed and exemplified in that manner.  He now observed
that a certain remarkable drowsiness (wholly unlike that with which the
reader possibly feels himself affected) had been flung over the senses
of his auditress.  It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic
gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Phoebe's
perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter.  With the lids
drooping over her eyes,--now lifted for an instant, and drawn down
again as with leaden weights,--she leaned slightly towards him, and
seemed almost to regulate her breath by his.  Holgrave gazed at her, as
he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that
curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Phoebe,
he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing.  A veil was
beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him,
and live only in his thoughts and emotions.  His glance, as he fastened
it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated; in his
attitude there was the consciousness of power, investing his hardly
mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical
manifestation.  It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and
a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over
Phoebe's yet free and virgin spirit:  he could establish an influence
over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as
disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and
exercised over the ill-fated Alice.

To a disposition like Holgrave's, at once speculative and active, there
is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over
the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to
become the arbiter of a young girl's destiny.  Let us,
therefore,--whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite
of his scorn for creeds and institutions,--concede to the
daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another's
individuality.  Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be
confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which
might have rendered his spell over Phoebe indissoluble.

He made a slight gesture upward with his hand.

"You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phoebe!" he exclaimed, smiling
half-sarcastically at her.  "My poor story, it is but too evident, will
never do for Godey or Graham! Only think of your falling asleep at what
I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant,
powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up! Well, the
manuscript must serve to light lamps with;--if, indeed, being so imbued
with my gentle dulness, it is any longer capable of flame!"

"Me asleep! How can you say so?" answered Phoebe, as unconscious of the
crisis through which she had passed as an infant of the precipice to
the verge of which it has rolled.  "No, no! I consider myself as having
been very attentive; and, though I don't remember the incidents quite
distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and
calamity,--so, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive."

By this time the sun had gone down, and was tinting the clouds towards
the zenith with those bright hues which are not seen there until some
time after sunset, and when the horizon has quite lost its richer
brilliancy.  The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and
unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure,--like an ambitious
demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue
of popular sentiment,--now began to shine out, broad and oval, in its
middle pathway.  These silvery beams were already powerful enough to
change the character of the lingering daylight.  They softened and
embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows fell
deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the
projecting story, and within the half-open door.  With the lapse of
every moment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruit-trees,
shrubbery, and flower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them.  The
commonplace characteristics--which, at noontide, it seemed to have
taken a century of sordid life to accumulate--were now transfigured by
a charm of romance.  A hundred mysterious years were whispering among
the leaves, whenever the slight sea-breeze found its way thither and
stirred them.  Through the foliage that roofed the little summer-house
the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark
floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and
play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs
admitted or shut out the glimmer.

So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that
the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid
moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.
Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human
heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of
nature.  The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence
fell.  It made him feel--what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so
early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man--how
youthful he still was.

"It seems to me," he observed, "that I never watched the coming of so
beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness
as at this moment.  After all, what a good world we live in! How good,
and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or
age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has
positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And
this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I
were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now
possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the
earth's first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and
the house!--it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the
earliest roses that God ever made.  Moonlight, and the sentiment in
man's heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and
reformers.  And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove
to be no better than moonshine!"

"I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer," said Phoebe
thoughtfully.  "Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening
moonlight; and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away
reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon.  I never cared
much about moonlight before.  What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in
it, to-night?"

"And you have never felt it before?" inquired the artist, looking
earnestly at the girl through the twilight.

"Never," answered Phoebe; "and life does not look the same, now that I
have felt it so.  It seems as if I had looked at everything, hitherto,
in broad daylight, or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire,
glimmering and dancing through a room.  Ah, poor me!" she added, with a
half-melancholy laugh.  "I shall never be so merry as before I knew
Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford.  I have grown a great deal
older, in this little time.  Older, and, I hope, wiser, and,--not
exactly sadder,--but, certainly, with not half so much lightness in my
spirits! I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it;
but, of course, I cannot both give and keep it.  They are welcome,
notwithstanding!"

"You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was
possible to keep," said Holgrave after a pause.  "Our first youth is of
no value; for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone.  But
sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly
unfortunate--there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the
heart's joy at being in love; or, possibly, it may come to crown some
other grand festival in life, if any other such there be.  This
bemoaning of one's self (as you do now) over the first, careless,
shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth
regained,--so much deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential
to the soul's development.  In some cases, the two states come almost
simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one
mysterious emotion."

"I hardly think I understand you," said Phoebe.

"No wonder," replied Holgrave, smiling; "for I have told you a secret
which I hardly began to know before I found myself giving it utterance.
Remember it, however; and when the truth becomes clear to you, then
think of this moonlight scene!"

"It is entirely moonlight now, except only a little flush of faint
crimson, upward from the west, between those buildings," remarked
Phoebe.  "I must go in.  Cousin Hepzibah is not quick at figures, and
will give herself a headache over the day's accounts, unless I help
her."

But Holgrave detained her a little longer.

"Miss Hepzibah tells me," observed he, "that you return to the country
in a few days."

"Yes, but only for a little while," answered Phoebe; "for I look upon
this as my present home.  I go to make a few arrangements, and to take
a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends.  It is pleasant to
live where one is much desired and very useful; and I think I may have
the satisfaction of feeling myself so here."

"You surely may, and more than you imagine," said the artist.
"Whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house is
embodied in your person.  These blessings came along with you, and will
vanish when you leave the threshold.  Miss Hepzibah, by secluding
herself from society, has lost all true relation with it, and is, in
fact, dead; although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of life,
and stands behind her counter, afflicting the world with a
greatly-to-be-deprecated scowl.  Your poor cousin Clifford is another
dead and long-buried person, on whom the governor and council have
wrought a necromantic miracle.  I should not wonder if he were to
crumble away, some morning, after you are gone, and nothing be seen of
him more, except a heap of dust.  Miss Hepzibah, at any rate, will lose
what little flexibility she has.  They both exist by you."

"I should be very sorry to think so," answered Phoebe gravely.  "But it
is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed; and I
have a real interest in their welfare,--an odd kind of motherly
sentiment,--which I wish you would not laugh at!  And let me tell you
frankly, Mr. Holgrave, I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you wish
them well or ill."

"Undoubtedly," said the daguerreotypist, "I do feel an interest in this
antiquated, poverty-stricken old maiden lady, and this degraded and
shattered gentleman,--this abortive lover of the beautiful.  A kindly
interest, too, helpless old children that they are! But you have no
conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own.  It is
not my impulse, as regards these two individuals, either to help or
hinder; but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and
to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been
dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread.  If
permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral
satisfaction from it, go matters how they may.  There is a conviction
within me that the end draws nigh.  But, though Providence sent you
hither to help, and sends me only as a privileged and meet spectator, I
pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I can!"

"I wish you would speak more plainly," cried Phoebe, perplexed and
displeased; "and, above all, that you would feel more like a Christian
and a human being! How is it possible to see people in distress without
desiring, more than anything else, to help and comfort them? You talk
as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem to look at Hepzibah's
and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of generations before them, as a
tragedy, such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country hotel, only
the present one appears to be played exclusively for your amusement.  I
do not like this.  The play costs the performers too much, and the
audience is too cold-hearted."

"You are severe," said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of
truth in the piquant sketch of his own mood.

"And then," continued Phoebe, "what can you mean by your conviction,
which you tell me of, that the end is drawing near? Do you know of any
new trouble hanging over my poor relatives? If so, tell me at once, and
I will not leave them!"

"Forgive me, Phoebe!" said the daguerreotypist, holding out his hand,
to which the girl was constrained to yield her own.  "I am somewhat of
a mystic, it must be confessed.  The tendency is in my blood, together
with the faculty of mesmerism, which might have brought me to Gallows
Hill, in the good old times of witchcraft.  Believe me, if I were
really aware of any secret, the disclosure of which would benefit your
friends,--who are my own friends, likewise,--you should learn it before
we part.  But I have no such knowledge."

"You hold something back!" said Phoebe.

"Nothing,--no secrets but my own," answered Holgrave.  "I can perceive,
indeed, that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford, in whose
ruin he had so large a share.  His motives and intentions, however are
a mystery to me.  He is a determined and relentless man, with the
genuine character of an inquisitor; and had he any object to gain by
putting Clifford to the rack, I verily believe that he would wrench his
joints from their sockets, in order to accomplish it.  But, so wealthy
and eminent as he is,--so powerful in his own strength, and in the
support of society on all sides,--what can Judge Pyncheon have to hope
or fear from the imbecile, branded, half-torpid Clifford?"

"Yet," urged Phoebe, "you did speak as if misfortune were impending!"

"Oh, that was because I am morbid!" replied the artist.  "My mind has a
twist aside, like almost everybody's mind, except your own.  Moreover,
it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pyncheon House,
and sitting in this old garden--(hark, how Maule's well is
murmuring!)--that, were it only for this one circumstance, I cannot
help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a
catastrophe."

"There!"  cried Phoebe with renewed vexation; for she was by nature as
hostile to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner.  "You puzzle me
more than ever!"

"Then let us part friends!" said Holgrave, pressing her hand.  "Or, if
not friends, let us part before you entirely hate me.  You, who love
everybody else in the world!"

"Good-by, then," said Phoebe frankly.  "I do not mean to be angry a
great while, and should be sorry to have you think so.   There has
Cousin Hepzibah been standing in the shadow of the doorway, this
quarter of an hour past! She thinks I stay too long in the damp garden.
So, good-night, and good-by."

On the second morning thereafter, Phoebe might have been seen, in her
straw bonnet, with a shawl on one arm and a little carpet-bag on the
other, bidding adieu to Hepzibah and Cousin Clifford.  She was to take
a seat in the next train of cars, which would transport her to within
half a dozen miles of her country village.

The tears were in Phoebe's eyes; a smile, dewy with affectionate
regret, was glimmering around her pleasant mouth.  She wondered how it
came to pass, that her life of a few weeks, here in this heavy-hearted
old mansion, had taken such hold of her, and so melted into her
associations, as now to seem a more important centre-point of
remembrance than all which had gone before.  How had Hepzibah--grim,
silent, and irresponsive to her overflow of cordial sentiment--contrived
to win so much love? And Clifford,--in his abortive decay, with the
mystery of fearful crime upon him, and the close prison-atmosphere yet
lurking in his breath,--how had he transformed himself into the simplest
child, whom Phoebe felt bound to watch over, and be, as it were, the
providence of his unconsidered hours! Everything, at that instant of
farewell, stood out prominently to her view.  Look where she would, lay
her hand on what she might, the object responded to her consciousness,
as if a moist human heart were in it.

She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more
regretful at leaving this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an
age-long growth of weeds, than joyful at the idea of again scenting her
pine forests and fresh clover-fields.  She called Chanticleer, his two
wives, and the venerable chicken, and threw them some crumbs of bread
from the breakfast-table.  These being hastily gobbled up, the chicken
spread its wings, and alighted close by Phoebe on the window-sill,
where it looked gravely into her face and vented its emotions in a
croak.  Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and
promised to bring it a little bag of buckwheat.

"Ah, Phoebe!" remarked Hepzibah, "you do not smile so naturally as when
you came to us! Then, the smile chose to shine out; now, you choose it
should.  It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into
your native air.  There has been too much weight on your spirits.  The
house is too gloomy and lonesome; the shop is full of vexations; and as
for me, I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are.
Dear Clifford has been your only comfort!"

"Come hither, Phoebe," suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said
very little all the morning.  "Close!--closer!--and look me in the
face!"

Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and
leaned her face towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as
he would.  It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour
had revived, in some degree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties.  At
any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer,
yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation, was making her heart
the subject of its regard.  A moment before, she had known nothing
which she would have sought to hide.  Now, as if some secret were
hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of another's
perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford's
gaze.  A blush, too,--the redder, because she strove hard to keep it
down,--ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until
even her brow was all suffused with it.

"It is enough, Phoebe," said Clifford, with a melancholy smile.  "When
I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and
now you have deepened into beauty.  Girlhood has passed into womanhood;
the bud is a bloom! Go, now--I feel lonelier than I did."

Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop,
twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dew-drop; for--considering how
brief her absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down
about it--she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them
with her handkerchief.  On the doorstep, she met the little urchin
whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier
pages of our narrative.  She took from the window some specimen or
other of natural history,--her eyes being too dim with moisture to
inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus,--put
it into the child's hand as a parting gift, and went her way.  Old
Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a wood-horse and saw
on his shoulder; and, trudging along the street, he scrupled not to
keep company with Phoebe, so far as their paths lay together; nor, in
spite of his patched coat and rusty beaver, and the curious fashion of
his tow-cloth trousers, could she find it in her heart to outwalk him.

"We shall miss you, next Sabbath afternoon," observed the street
philosopher.  "It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks
to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath; and, begging your
pardon, Miss Phoebe (though there can be no offence in an old man's
saying it), that's just what you've grown to me!  My years have been a
great many, and your life is but just beginning; and yet, you are
somehow as familiar to me as if I had found you at my mother's door,
and you had blossomed, like a running vine, all along my pathway since.
Come back soon, or I shall be gone to my farm; for I begin to find
these wood-sawing jobs a little too tough for my back-ache."

"Very soon, Uncle Venner," replied Phoebe.

"And let it be all the sooner, Phoebe, for the sake of those poor souls
yonder," continued her companion.  "They can never do without you,
now,--never, Phoebe; never--no more than if one of God's angels had
been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and
comfortable! Don't it seem to you they'd be in a sad case, if, some
pleasant summer morning like this, the angel should spread his wings,
and fly to the place he came from? Well, just so they feel, now that
you're going home by the railroad!  They can't bear it, Miss Phoebe; so
be sure to come back!"

"I am no angel, Uncle Venner," said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him
her hand at the street-corner.  "But, I suppose, people never feel so
much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may.  So
I shall certainly come back!"

Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl; and Phoebe took the wings of
the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed
with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so
graciously compared her.




                         XV The Scowl and Smile


SEVERAL days passed over the Seven Gables, heavily and drearily enough.
In fact (not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one
inauspicious circumstance of Phoebe's departure), an easterly storm had
set in, and indefatigably apply itself to the task of making the black
roof and walls of the old house look more cheerless than ever before.
Yet was the outside not half so cheerless as the interior.  Poor
Clifford was cut off, at once, from all his scanty resources of
enjoyment.  Phoebe was not there; nor did the sunshine fall upon the
floor.  The garden, with its muddy walks, and the chill, dripping
foliage of its summer-house, was an image to be shuddered at.  Nothing
flourished in the cold, moist, pitiless atmosphere, drifting with the
brackish scud of sea-breezes, except the moss along the joints of the
shingle-roof, and the great bunch of weeds, that had lately been
suffering from drought, in the angle between the two front gables.

As for Hepzibah, she seemed not merely possessed with the east wind,
but to be, in her very person, only another phase of this gray and
sullen spell of weather; the East-Wind itself, grim and disconsolate,
in a rusty black silk gown, and with a turban of cloud-wreaths on its
head.  The custom of the shop fell off, because a story got abroad that
she soured her small beer and other damageable commodities, by scowling
on them.  It is, perhaps, true that the public had something reasonably
to complain of in her deportment; but towards Clifford she was neither
ill-tempered nor unkind, nor felt less warmth of heart than always, had
it been possible to make it reach him.  The inutility of her best
efforts, however, palsied the poor old gentlewoman.   She could do
little else than sit silently in a corner of the room, when the wet
pear-tree branches, sweeping across the small windows, created a
noonday dusk, which Hepzibah unconsciously darkened with her woe-begone
aspect.  It was no fault of Hepzibah's.  Everything--even the old
chairs and tables, that had known what weather was for three or four
such lifetimes as her own--looked as damp and chill as if the present
were their worst experience.  The picture of the Puritan Colonel
shivered on the wall.  The house itself shivered, from every attic of
its seven gables down to the great kitchen fireplace, which served all
the better as an emblem of the mansion's heart, because, though built
for warmth, it was now so comfortless and empty.

Hepzibah attempted to enliven matters by a fire in the parlor.  But the
storm demon kept watch above, and, whenever a flame was kindled, drove
the smoke back again, choking the chimney's sooty throat with its own
breath.  Nevertheless, during four days of this miserable storm,
Clifford wrapt himself in an old cloak, and occupied his customary
chair.  On the morning of the fifth, when summoned to breakfast, he
responded only by a broken-hearted murmur, expressive of a
determination not to leave his bed.  His sister made no attempt to
change his purpose.  In fact, entirely as she loved him, Hepzibah could
hardly have borne any longer the wretched duty--so impracticable by her
few and rigid faculties--of seeking pastime for a still sensitive, but
ruined mind, critical and fastidious, without force or volition.  It
was at least something short of positive despair, that to-day she might
sit shivering alone, and not suffer continually a new grief, and
unreasonable pang of remorse, at every fitful sigh of her fellow
sufferer.

But Clifford, it seemed, though he did not make his appearance below
stairs, had, after all, bestirred himself in quest of amusement.  In
the course of the forenoon, Hepzibah heard a note of music, which
(there being no other tuneful contrivance in the House of the Seven
Gables) she knew must proceed from Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.  She
was aware that Clifford, in his youth, had possessed a cultivated taste
for music, and a considerable degree of skill in its practice.  It was
difficult, however, to conceive of his retaining an accomplishment to
which daily exercise is so essential, in the measure indicated by the
sweet, airy, and delicate, though most melancholy strain, that now
stole upon her ear.  Nor was it less marvellous that the long-silent
instrument should be capable of so much melody.  Hepzibah involuntarily
thought of the ghostly harmonies, prelusive of death in the family,
which were attributed to the legendary Alice.  But it was, perhaps,
proof of the agency of other than spiritual fingers, that, after a few
touches, the chords seemed to snap asunder with their own vibrations,
and the music ceased.

But a harsher sound succeeded to the mysterious notes; nor was the
easterly day fated to pass without an event sufficient in itself to
poison, for Hepzibah and Clifford, the balmiest air that ever brought
the humming-birds along with it.  The final echoes of Alice Pyncheon's
performance (or Clifford's, if his we must consider it) were driven
away by no less vulgar a dissonance than the ringing of the shop-bell.
A foot was heard scraping itself on the threshold, and thence somewhat
ponderously stepping on the floor.  Hepzibah delayed a moment, while
muffling herself in a faded shawl, which had been her defensive armor
in a forty years' warfare against the east wind.  A characteristic
sound, however,--neither a cough nor a hem, but a kind of rumbling and
reverberating spasm in somebody's capacious depth of chest;--impelled
her to hurry forward, with that aspect of fierce faint-heartedness so
common to women in cases of perilous emergency.  Few of her sex, on
such occasions, have ever looked so terrible as our poor scowling
Hepzibah.  But the visitor quietly closed the shop-door behind him,
stood up his umbrella against the counter, and turned a visage of
composed benignity, to meet the alarm and anger which his appearance
had excited.

Hepzibah's presentiment had not deceived her.  It was no other than
Judge Pyncheon, who, after in vain trying the front door, had now
effected his entrance into the shop.

"How do you do, Cousin Hepzibah?--and how does this most inclement
weather affect our poor Clifford?" began the Judge; and wonderful it
seemed, indeed, that the easterly storm was not put to shame, or, at
any rate, a little mollified, by the genial benevolence of his smile.
"I could not rest without calling to ask, once more, whether I can in
any manner promote his comfort, or your own."

"You can do nothing," said Hepzibah, controlling her agitation as well
as she could.  "I devote myself to Clifford.  He has every comfort
which his situation admits of."

"But allow me to suggest, dear cousin," rejoined the Judge, "you
err,--in all affection and kindness, no doubt, and with the very best
intentions,--but you do err, nevertheless, in keeping your brother so
secluded.  Why insulate him thus from all sympathy and kindness?
Clifford, alas! has had too much of solitude.  Now let him try
society,--the society, that is to say, of kindred and old friends.  Let
me, for instance, but see Clifford, and I will answer for the good
effect of the interview."

"You cannot see him," answered Hepzibah.  "Clifford has kept his bed
since yesterday."

"What! How! Is he ill?" exclaimed Judge Pyncheon, starting with what
seemed to be angry alarm; for the very frown of the old Puritan
darkened through the room as he spoke.  "Nay, then, I must and will see
him! What if he should die?"

"He is in no danger of death," said Hepzibah,--and added, with
bitterness that she could repress no longer, "none; unless he shall be
persecuted to death, now, by the same man who long ago attempted it!"

"Cousin Hepzibah," said the Judge, with an impressive earnestness of
manner, which grew even to tearful pathos as he proceeded, "is it
possible that you do not perceive how unjust, how unkind, how
unchristian, is this constant, this long-continued bitterness against
me, for a part which I was constrained by duty and conscience, by the
force of law, and at my own peril, to act? What did I do, in detriment
to Clifford, which it was possible to leave undone?  How could you, his
sister,--if, for your never-ending sorrow, as it has been for mine, you
had known what I did,--have, shown greater tenderness? And do you
think, cousin, that it has cost me no pang?--that it has left no
anguish in my bosom, from that day to this, amidst all the prosperity
with which Heaven has blessed me?--or that I do not now rejoice, when
it is deemed consistent with the dues of public justice and the welfare
of society that this dear kinsman, this early friend, this nature so
delicately and beautifully constituted,--so unfortunate, let us
pronounce him, and forbear to say, so guilty,--that our own Clifford,
in fine, should be given back to life, and its possibilities of
enjoyment? Ah, you little know me, Cousin Hepzibah! You little know
this heart! It now throbs at the thought of meeting him! There lives
not the human being (except yourself,--and you not more than I) who has
shed so many tears for Clifford's calamity.  You behold some of them
now.  There is none who would so delight to promote his happiness!  Try
me, Hepzibah!--try me, Cousin!--try the man whom you have treated as
your enemy and Clifford's!--try Jaffrey Pyncheon, and you shall find
him true, to the heart's core!"

"In the name of Heaven," cried Hepzibah, provoked only to intenser
indignation by this outgush of the inestimable tenderness of a stern
nature,--"in God's name, whom you insult, and whose power I could
almost question, since he hears you utter so many false words without
palsying your tongue,--give over, I beseech you, this loathsome
pretence of affection for your victim! You hate him! Say so, like a
man! You cherish, at this moment, some black purpose against him in
your heart! Speak it out, at once!--or, if you hope so to promote it
better, hide it till you can triumph in its success! But never speak
again of your love for my poor brother.  I cannot bear it! It will
drive me beyond a woman's decency! It will drive me mad! Forbear! Not
another word!  It will make me spurn you!"

For once, Hepzibah's wrath had given her courage.  She had spoken.
But, after all, was this unconquerable distrust of Judge Pyncheon's
integrity, and this utter denial, apparently, of his claim to stand in
the ring of human sympathies,--were they founded in any just perception
of his character, or merely the offspring of a woman's unreasonable
prejudice, deduced from nothing?

The Judge, beyond all question, was a man of eminent respectability.
The church acknowledged it; the state acknowledged it.  It was denied
by nobody.  In all the very extensive sphere of those who knew him,
whether in his public or private capacities, there was not an
individual--except Hepzibah, and some lawless mystic, like the
daguerreotypist, and, possibly, a few political opponents--who would
have dreamed of seriously disputing his claim to a high and honorable
place in the world's regard.  Nor (we must do him the further justice
to say) did Judge Pyncheon himself, probably, entertain many or very
frequent doubts, that his enviable reputation accorded with his
deserts.  His conscience, therefore, usually considered the surest
witness to a man's integrity,--his conscience, unless it might be for
the little space of five minutes in the twenty-four hours, or, now and
then, some black day in the whole year's circle,--his conscience bore
an accordant testimony with the world's laudatory voice.  And yet,
strong as this evidence may seem to be, we should hesitate to peril our
own conscience on the assertion, that the Judge and the consenting
world were right, and that poor Hepzibah with her solitary prejudice
was wrong.  Hidden from mankind,--forgotten by himself, or buried so
deeply under a sculptured and ornamented pile of ostentatious deeds
that his daily life could take no note of it,--there may have lurked
some evil and unsightly thing.  Nay, we could almost venture to say,
further, that a daily guilt might have been acted by him, continually
renewed, and reddening forth afresh, like the miraculous blood-stain of
a murder, without his necessarily and at every moment being aware of it.

Men of strong minds, great force of character, and a hard texture of
the sensibilities, are very capable of falling into mistakes of this
kind.  They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount
importance.  Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of
life.  They possess vast ability in grasping, and arranging, and
appropriating to themselves, the big, heavy, solid unrealities, such as
gold, landed estate, offices of trust and emolument, and public honors.
With these materials, and with deeds of goodly aspect, done in the
public eye, an individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall
and stately edifice, which, in the view of other people, and ultimately
in his own view, is no other than the man's character, or the man
himself.  Behold, therefore, a palace! Its splendid halls and suites of
spacious apartments are floored with a mosaic-work of costly marbles;
its windows, the whole height of each room, admit the sunshine through
the most transparent of plate-glass; its high cornices are gilded, and
its ceilings gorgeously painted; and a lofty dome--through which, from
the central pavement, you may gaze up to the sky, as with no
obstructing medium between--surmounts the whole.  With what fairer and
nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character? Ah!
but in some low and obscure nook,--some narrow closet on the
ground-floor, shut, locked and bolted, and the key flung away,--or
beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant water-puddle, with the
richest pattern of mosaic-work above,--may lie a corpse, half decayed,
and still decaying, and diffusing its death-scent all through the
palace! The inhabitant will not be conscious of it, for it has long
been his daily breath!  Neither will the visitors, for they smell only
the rich odors which the master sedulously scatters through the palace,
and the incense which they bring, and delight to burn before him! Now
and then, perchance, comes in a seer, before whose sadly gifted eye the
whole structure melts into thin air, leaving only the hidden nook, the
bolted closet, with the cobwebs festooned over its forgotten door, or
the deadly hole under the pavement, and the decaying corpse within.
Here, then, we are to seek the true emblem of the man's character, and
of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses to his life.  And,
beneath the show of a marble palace, that pool of stagnant water, foul
with many impurities, and, perhaps, tinged with blood,--that secret
abomination, above which, possibly, he may say his prayers, without
remembering it,--is this man's miserable soul!

To apply this train of remark somewhat more closely to Judge Pyncheon.
We might say (without in the least imputing crime to a personage of his
eminent respectability) that there was enough of splendid rubbish in
his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtile conscience
than the Judge was ever troubled with.  The purity of his judicial
character, while on the bench; the faithfulness of his public service
in subsequent capacities; his devotedness to his party, and the rigid
consistency with which he had adhered to its principles, or, at all
events, kept pace with its organized movements; his remarkable zeal as
president of a Bible society; his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer
of a widow's and orphan's fund; his benefits to horticulture, by
producing two much esteemed varieties of the pear and to agriculture,
through the agency of the famous Pyncheon bull; the cleanliness of his
moral deportment, for a great many years past; the severity with which
he had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated
son, delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of
the young man's life; his prayers at morning and eventide, and graces
at meal-time; his efforts in furtherance of the temperance cause; his
confining himself, since the last attack of the gout, to five diurnal
glasses of old sherry wine; the snowy whiteness of his linen, the
polish of his boots, the handsomeness of his gold-headed cane, the
square and roomy fashion of his coat, and the fineness of its material,
and, in general, the studied propriety of his dress and equipment; the
scrupulousness with which he paid public notice, in the street, by a
bow, a lifting of the hat, a nod, or a motion of the hand, to all and
sundry of his acquaintances, rich or poor; the smile of broad
benevolence wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole
world,--what room could possibly be found for darker traits in a
portrait made up of lineaments like these? This proper face was what he
beheld in the looking-glass.  This admirably arranged life was what he
was conscious of in the progress of every day.  Then might not he claim
to be its result and sum, and say to himself and the community, "Behold
Judge Pyncheon there"?

And allowing that, many, many years ago, in his early and reckless
youth, he had committed some one wrong act,--or that, even now, the
inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one
questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy, or, at least,
blameless ones,--would you characterize the Judge by that one necessary
deed, and that half-forgotten act, and let it overshadow the fair
aspect of a lifetime? What is there so ponderous in evil, that a
thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which
were heaped into the other scale! This scale and balance system is a
favorite one with people of Judge Pyncheon's brotherhood. A hard, cold
man, thus unfortunately situated, seldom or never looking inward, and
resolutely taking his idea of himself from what purports to be his
image as reflected in the mirror of public opinion, can scarcely arrive
at true self-knowledge, except through loss of property and reputation.
Sickness will not always help him do it; not always the death-hour!

But our affair now is with Judge Pyncheon as he stood confronting the
fierce outbreak of Hepzibah's wrath.  Without premeditation, to her own
surprise, and indeed terror, she had given vent, for once, to the
inveteracy of her resentment, cherished against this kinsman for thirty
years.

Thus far the Judge's countenance had expressed mild forbearance,--grave
and almost gentle deprecation of his cousin's unbecoming
violence,--free and Christian-like forgiveness of the wrong inflicted
by her words.  But when those words were irrevocably spoken, his look
assumed sternness, the sense of power, and immitigable resolve; and
this with so natural and imperceptible a change, that it seemed as if
the iron man had stood there from the first, and the meek man not at
all.  The effect was as when the light, vapory clouds, with their soft
coloring, suddenly vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous
mountain, and leave there the frown which you at once feel to be
eternal.  Hepzibah almost adopted the insane belief that it was her old
Puritan ancestor, and not the modern Judge, on whom she had just been
wreaking the bitterness of her heart.  Never did a man show stronger
proof of the lineage attributed to him than Judge Pyncheon, at this
crisis, by his unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the inner
room.

"Cousin Hepzibah," said he very calmly, "it is time to have done with
this."

"With all my heart!" answered she.  "Then, why do you persecute us any
longer? Leave poor Clifford and me in peace.  Neither of us desires
anything better!"

"It is my purpose to see Clifford before I leave this house," continued
the Judge.  "Do not act like a madwoman, Hepzibah! I am his only
friend, and an all-powerful one.  Has it never occurred to you,--are
you so blind as not to have seen,--that, without not merely my consent,
but my efforts, my representations, the exertion of my whole influence,
political, official, personal, Clifford would never have been what you
call free? Did you think his release a triumph over me? Not so, my good
cousin; not so, by any means!  The furthest possible from that! No; but
it was the accomplishment of a purpose long entertained on my part.  I
set him free!"

"You!" answered Hepzibah.  "I never will believe it! He owed his
dungeon to you; his freedom to God's providence!"

"I set him free!" reaffirmed Judge Pyncheon, with the calmest
composure.  "And I came hither now to decide whether he shall retain
his freedom.  It will depend upon himself.  For this purpose, I must
see him."

"Never!--it would drive him mad!" exclaimed Hepzibah, but with an
irresoluteness sufficiently perceptible to the keen eye of the Judge;
for, without the slightest faith in his good intentions, she knew not
whether there was most to dread in yielding or resistance. "And why
should you wish to see this wretched, broken man, who retains hardly a
fraction of his intellect, and will hide even that from an eye which
has no love in it?"

"He shall see love enough in mine, if that be all!" said the Judge,
with well-grounded confidence in the benignity of his aspect.  "But,
Cousin Hepzibah, you confess a great deal, and very much to the
purpose.  Now, listen, and I will frankly explain my reasons for
insisting on this interview.  At the death, thirty years since, of our
uncle Jaffrey, it was found,--I know not whether the circumstance ever
attracted much of your attention, among the sadder interests that
clustered round that event,--but it was found that his visible estate,
of every kind, fell far short of any estimate ever made of it.  He was
supposed to be immensely rich.  Nobody doubted that he stood among the
weightiest men of his day.  It was one of his eccentricities,
however,--and not altogether a folly, neither,--to conceal the amount
of his property by making distant and foreign investments, perhaps
under other names than his own, and by various means, familiar enough
to capitalists, but unnecessary here to be specified.  By Uncle
Jaffrey's last will and testament, as you are aware, his entire
property was bequeathed to me, with the single exception of a life
interest to yourself in this old family mansion, and the strip of
patrimonial estate remaining attached to it."

"And do you seek to deprive us of that?" asked Hepzibah, unable to
restrain her bitter contempt.  "Is this your price for ceasing to
persecute poor Clifford?"

"Certainly not, my dear cousin!" answered the Judge, smiling
benevolently.  "On the contrary, as you must do me the justice to own,
I have constantly expressed my readiness to double or treble your
resources, whenever you should make up your mind to accept any kindness
of that nature at the hands of your kinsman.  No, no!  But here lies
the gist of the matter.  Of my uncle's unquestionably great estate, as
I have said, not the half--no, not one third, as I am fully
convinced--was apparent after his death.  Now, I have the best possible
reasons for believing that your brother Clifford can give me a clew to
the recovery of the remainder."

"Clifford!--Clifford know of any hidden wealth? Clifford have it in his
power to make you rich?" cried the old gentlewoman, affected with a
sense of something like ridicule at the idea.   "Impossible!  You
deceive yourself! It is really a thing to laugh at!"

"It is as certain as that I stand here!" said Judge Pyncheon, striking
his gold-headed cane on the floor, and at the same time stamping his
foot, as if to express his conviction the more forcibly by the whole
emphasis of his substantial person.  "Clifford told me so himself!"

"No, no!" exclaimed Hepzibah incredulously.  "You are dreaming, Cousin
Jaffrey."

"I do not belong to the dreaming class of men," said the Judge quietly.
"Some months before my uncle's death, Clifford boasted to me of the
possession of the secret of incalculable wealth.  His purpose was to
taunt me, and excite my curiosity.  I know it well.  But, from a pretty
distinct recollection of the particulars of our conversation, I am
thoroughly convinced that there was truth in what he said.  Clifford,
at this moment, if he chooses,--and choose he must!--can inform me
where to find the schedule, the documents, the evidences, in whatever
shape they exist, of the vast amount of Uncle Jaffrey's missing
property.  He has the secret.  His boast was no idle word.  It had a
directness, an emphasis, a particularity, that showed a backbone of
solid meaning within the mystery of his expression."

"But what could have been Clifford's object," asked Hepzibah, "in
concealing it so long?"

"It was one of the bad impulses of our fallen nature," replied the
Judge, turning up his eyes.  "He looked upon me as his enemy.  He
considered me as the cause of his overwhelming disgrace, his imminent
peril of death, his irretrievable ruin.  There was no great
probability, therefore, of his volunteering information, out of his
dungeon, that should elevate me still higher on the ladder of
prosperity.  But the moment has now come when he must give up his
secret."

"And what if he should refuse?" inquired Hepzibah.  "Or,--as I
steadfastly believe,--what if he has no knowledge of this wealth?"

"My dear cousin," said Judge Pyncheon, with a quietude which he had the
power of making more formidable than any violence, "since your
brother's return, I have taken the precaution (a highly proper one in
the near kinsman and natural guardian of an individual so situated) to
have his deportment and habits constantly and carefully overlooked.
Your neighbors have been eye-witnesses to whatever has passed in the
garden.  The butcher, the baker, the fish-monger, some of the customers
of your shop, and many a prying old woman, have told me several of the
secrets of your interior.  A still larger circle--I myself, among the
rest--can testify to his extravagances at the arched window.  Thousands
beheld him, a week or two ago, on the point of flinging himself thence
into the street.  From all this testimony, I am led to
apprehend--reluctantly, and with deep grief--that Clifford's
misfortunes have so affected his intellect, never very strong, that he
cannot safely remain at large.  The alternative, you must be
aware,--and its adoption will depend entirely on the decision which I
am now about to make,--the alternative is his confinement, probably for
the remainder of his life, in a public asylum for persons in his
unfortunate state of mind."

"You cannot mean it!" shrieked Hepzibah.

"Should my cousin Clifford," continued Judge Pyncheon, wholly
undisturbed, "from mere malice, and hatred of one whose interests ought
naturally to be dear to him,--a mode of passion that, as often as any
other, indicates mental disease,--should he refuse me the information
so important to myself, and which he assuredly possesses, I shall
consider it the one needed jot of evidence to satisfy my mind of his
insanity.  And, once sure of the course pointed out by conscience, you
know me too well, Cousin Hepzibah, to entertain a doubt that I shall
pursue it."

"O Jaffrey,--Cousin Jaffrey,"  cried Hepzibah mournfully, not
passionately, "it is you that are diseased in mind, not Clifford!  You
have forgotten that a woman was your mother!--that you have had
sisters, brothers, children of your own!--or that there ever was
affection between man and man, or pity from one man to another, in this
miserable world! Else, how could you have dreamed of this? You are not
young, Cousin Jaffrey!--no, nor middle-aged,--but already an old man!
The hair is white upon your head! How many years have you to live? Are
you not rich enough for that little time? Shall you be hungry,--shall
you lack clothes, or a roof to shelter you,--between this point and the
grave? No! but, with the half of what you now possess, you could revel
in costly food and wines, and build a house twice as splendid as you
now inhabit, and make a far greater show to the world,--and yet leave
riches to your only son, to make him bless the hour of your death!
Then, why should you do this cruel, cruel thing?--so mad a thing, that
I know not whether to call it wicked! Alas, Cousin Jaffrey, this hard
and grasping spirit has run in our blood these two hundred years.  You
are but doing over again, in another shape, what your ancestor before
you did, and sending down to your posterity the curse inherited from
him!"

"Talk sense, Hepzibah, for Heaven's sake!" exclaimed the Judge, with
the impatience natural to a reasonable man, on hearing anything so
utterly absurd as the above, in a discussion about matters of business.
"I have told you my determination.  I am not apt to change.  Clifford
must give up his secret, or take the consequences.  And let him decide
quickly; for I have several affairs to attend to this morning, and an
important dinner engagement with some political friends."

"Clifford has no secret!" answered Hepzibah.  "And God will not let you
do the thing you meditate!"

"We shall see," said the unmoved Judge.  "Meanwhile, choose whether you
will summon Clifford, and allow this business to be amicably settled by
an interview between two kinsmen, or drive me to harsher measures,
which I should be most happy to feel myself justified in avoiding.  The
responsibility is altogether on your part."

"You are stronger than I," said Hepzibah, after a brief consideration;
"and you have no pity in your strength! Clifford is not now insane; but
the interview which you insist upon may go far to make him so.
Nevertheless, knowing you as I do, I believe it to be my best course to
allow you to judge for yourself as to the improbability of his
possessing any valuable secret.  I will call Clifford.  Be merciful in
your dealings with him!--be far more merciful than your heart bids you
be!--for God is looking at you, Jaffrey Pyncheon!"

The Judge followed his cousin from the shop, where the foregoing
conversation had passed, into the parlor, and flung himself heavily
into the great ancestral chair.  Many a former Pyncheon had found
repose in its capacious arms:  rosy children, after their sports; young
men, dreamy with love; grown men, weary with cares; old men, burdened
with winters,--they had mused, and slumbered, and departed to a yet
profounder sleep.  It had been a long tradition, though a doubtful one,
that this was the very chair, seated in which the earliest of the
Judge's New England forefathers--he whose picture still hung upon the
wall--had given a dead man's silent and stern reception to the throng
of distinguished guests.  From that hour of evil omen until the
present, it may be,--though we know not the secret of his heart,--but
it may be that no wearier and sadder man had ever sunk into the chair
than this same Judge Pyncheon, whom we have just beheld so immitigably
hard and resolute.  Surely, it must have been at no slight cost that he
had thus fortified his soul with iron.  Such calmness is a mightier
effort than the violence of weaker men.  And there was yet a heavy task
for him to do.  Was it a little matter--a trifle to be prepared for in
a single moment, and to be rested from in another moment,--that he must
now, after thirty years, encounter a kinsman risen from a living tomb,
and wrench a secret from him, or else consign him to a living tomb
again?

"Did you speak?" asked Hepzibah, looking in from the threshold of the
parlor; for she imagined that the Judge had uttered some sound which
she was anxious to interpret as a relenting impulse.  "I thought you
called me back."

"No, no" gruffly answered Judge Pyncheon with a harsh frown, while his
brow grew almost a black purple, in the shadow of the room.  "Why
should I call you back? Time flies! Bid Clifford come to me!"

The Judge had taken his watch from his vest pocket and now held it in
his hand, measuring the interval which was to ensue before the
appearance of Clifford.




                       XVI Clifford's Chamber


NEVER had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she
departed on that wretched errand.  There was a strange aspect in it.
As she trode along the foot-worn passages, and opened one crazy door
after another, and ascended the creaking staircase, she gazed wistfully
and fearfully around.  It would have been no marvel, to her excited
mind, if, behind or beside her, there had been the rustle of dead
people's garments, or pale visages awaiting her on the landing-place
above.  Her nerves were set all ajar by the scene of passion and terror
through which she had just struggled.  Her colloquy with Judge
Pyncheon, who so perfectly represented the person and attributes of the
founder of the family, had called back the dreary past.  It weighed
upon her heart.  Whatever she had heard, from legendary aunts and
grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the
Pyncheons,--stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her
remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with
them,--now recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages
of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood.  The whole
seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in
successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little,
save the outline.  But Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford,
and herself,--they three together,--were on the point of adding another
incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and
sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest.  Thus it
is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an
individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose
after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the
grave or glad events of many years ago.  It is but for a moment,
comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling,--a truth that
has the bitter and the sweet in it.

But Hepzibah could not rid herself of the sense of something
unprecedented at that instant passing and soon to be accomplished.  Her
nerves were in a shake.  Instinctively she paused before the arched
window, and looked out upon the street, in order to seize its permanent
objects with her mental grasp, and thus to steady herself from the reel
and vibration which affected her more immediate sphere.  It brought her
up, as we may say, with a kind of shock, when she beheld everything
under the same appearance as the day before, and numberless preceding
days, except for the difference between sunshine and sullen storm.  Her
eyes travelled along the street, from doorstep to doorstep, noting the
wet sidewalks, with here and there a puddle in hollows that had been
imperceptible until filled with water.  She screwed her dim optics to
their acutest point, in the hope of making out, with greater
distinctness, a certain window, where she half saw, half guessed, that
a tailor's seamstress was sitting at her work.   Hepzibah flung herself
upon that unknown woman's companionship, even thus far off.  Then she
was attracted by a chaise rapidly passing, and watched its moist and
glistening top, and its splashing wheels, until it had turned the
corner, and refused to carry any further her idly trifling, because
appalled and overburdened, mind.  When the vehicle had disappeared, she
allowed herself still another loitering moment; for the patched figure
of good Uncle Venner was now visible, coming slowly from the head of
the street downward, with a rheumatic limp, because the east wind had
got into his joints.  Hepzibah wished that he would pass yet more
slowly, and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer.  Anything
that would take her out of the grievous present, and interpose human
beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to her,--whatever would
defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was bound,--all
such impediments were welcome.  Next to the lightest heart, the
heaviest is apt to be most playful.

Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain, and far less for
what she must inflict on Clifford.  Of so slight a nature, and so
shattered by his previous calamities, it could not well be short of
utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard, relentless man who
had been his evil destiny through life.  Even had there been no bitter
recollections, nor any hostile interest now at stake between them, the
mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive,
weighty, and unimpressible one, must, in itself, have been disastrous
to the former.  It would be like flinging a porcelain vase, with
already a crack in it, against a granite column.  Never before had
Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin
Jaffrey,--powerful by intellect, energy of will, the long habit of
acting among men, and, as she believed, by his unscrupulous pursuit of
selfish ends through evil means.  It did but increase the difficulty
that Judge Pyncheon was under a delusion as to the secret which he
supposed Clifford to possess.  Men of his strength of purpose and
customary sagacity, if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in
practical matters, so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be
true, that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult
than pulling up an oak.  Thus, as the Judge required an impossibility
of Clifford, the latter, as he could not perform it, must needs perish.
For what, in the grasp of a man like this, was to become of Clifford's
soft poetic nature, that never should have had a task more stubborn
than to set a life of beautiful enjoyment to the flow and rhythm of
musical cadences! Indeed, what had become of it already? Broken!
Blighted! All but annihilated! Soon to be wholly so!

For a moment, the thought crossed Hepzibah's mind, whether Clifford
might not really have such knowledge of their deceased uncle's vanished
estate as the Judge imputed to him.  She remembered some vague
intimations, on her brother's part, which--if the supposition were not
essentially preposterous--might have been so interpreted.  There had
been schemes of travel and residence abroad, day-dreams of brilliant
life at home, and splendid castles in the air, which it would have
required boundless wealth to build and realize.  Had this wealth been
in her power, how gladly would Hepzibah have bestowed it all upon her
iron-hearted kinsman, to buy for Clifford the freedom and seclusion of
the desolate old house!  But she believed that her brother's schemes
were as destitute of actual substance and purpose as a child's pictures
of its future life, while sitting in a little chair by its mother's
knee.  Clifford had none but shadowy gold at his command; and it was
not the stuff to satisfy Judge Pyncheon!

Was there no help in their extremity? It seemed strange that there
should be none, with a city round about her.  It would be so easy to
throw up the window, and send forth a shriek, at the strange agony of
which everybody would come hastening to the rescue, well understanding
it to be the cry of a human soul, at some dreadful crisis! But how
wild, how almost laughable, the fatality,--and yet how continually it
comes to pass, thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a
world,--that whosoever, and with however kindly a purpose, should come
to help, they would be sure to help the strongest side! Might and wrong
combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible
attraction.  There would be Judge Pyncheon,--a person eminent in the
public view, of high station and great wealth, a philanthropist, a
member of Congress and of the church, and intimately associated with
whatever else bestows good name,--so imposing, in these advantageous
lights, that Hepzibah herself could hardly help shrinking from her own
conclusions as to his hollow integrity.  The Judge, on one side! And
who, on the other? The guilty Clifford! Once a byword! Now, an
indistinctly remembered ignominy!

Nevertheless, in spite of this perception that the Judge would draw all
human aid to his own behalf, Hepzibah was so unaccustomed to act for
herself, that the least word of counsel would have swayed her to any
mode of action. Little Phoebe Pyncheon would at once have lighted up
the whole scene, if not by any available suggestion, yet simply by the
warm vivacity of her character. The idea of the artist occurred to
Hepzibah. Young and unknown, mere vagrant adventurer as he was, she had
been conscious of a force in Holgrave which might well adapt him to be
the champion of a crisis. With this thought in her mind, she unbolted a
door, cobwebbed and long disused, but which had served as a former
medium of communication between her own part of the house and the gable
where the wandering daguerreotypist had now established his temporary
home. He was not there. A book, face downward, on the table, a roll of
manuscript, a half-written sheet, a newspaper, some tools of his
present occupation, and several rejected daguerreotypes, conveyed an
impression as if he were close at hand. But, at this period of the day,
as Hepzibah might have anticipated, the artist was at his public rooms.
With an impulse of idle curiosity, that flickered among her heavy
thoughts, she looked at one of the daguerreotypes, and beheld Judge
Pyncheon frowning at her. Fate stared her in the face. She turned back
from her fruitless quest, with a heartsinking sense of disappointment.
In all her years of seclusion, she had never felt, as now, what it was
to be alone. It seemed as if the house stood in a desert, or, by some
spell, was made invisible to those who dwelt around, or passed beside
it; so that any mode of misfortune, miserable accident, or crime might
happen in it without the possibility of aid.  In her grief and wounded
pride, Hepzibah had spent her life in divesting herself of friends; she
had wilfully cast off the support which God has ordained his creatures
to need from one another; and it was now her punishment, that Clifford
and herself would fall the easier victims to their kindred enemy.

Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyes,--scowling, poor,
dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of Heaven!--and strove hard to send
up a prayer through the dense gray pavement of clouds.  Those mists had
gathered, as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble,
doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better
regions.  Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus
uplifted.  It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart.  It smote her
with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these
petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for
these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed its justice, and its
mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once.  Its
vastness made it nothing.  But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there
comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of
God's care and pity for every separate need.

At last, finding no other pretext for deferring the torture that she
was to inflict on Clifford,--her reluctance to which was the true cause
of her loitering at the window, her search for the artist, and even her
abortive prayer,--dreading, also, to hear the stern voice of Judge
Pyncheon from below stairs, chiding her delay,--she crept slowly, a
pale, grief-stricken figure, a dismal shape of woman, with almost
torpid limbs, slowly to her brother's door, and knocked!

There was no reply.

And how should there have been? Her hand, tremulous with the shrinking
purpose which directed it, had smitten so feebly against the door that
the sound could hardly have gone inward.  She knocked again.  Still no
response! Nor was it to be wondered at.  She had struck with the entire
force of her heart's vibration, communicating, by some subtile
magnetism, her own terror to the summons.  Clifford would turn his face
to the pillow, and cover his head beneath the bedclothes, like a
startled child at midnight.  She knocked a third time, three regular
strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for,
modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help
playing some tune of what we feel upon the senseless wood.

Clifford returned no answer.

"Clifford! Dear brother!"  said Hepzibah.  "Shall I come in?"

A silence.

Two or three times, and more, Hepzibah repeated his name, without
result; till, thinking her brother's sleep unwontedly profound, she
undid the door, and entering, found the chamber vacant.  How could he
have come forth, and when, without her knowledge?  Was it possible
that, in spite of the stormy day, and worn out with the irksomeness
within doors he had betaken himself to his customary haunt in the
garden, and was now shivering under the cheerless shelter of the
summer-house? She hastily threw up a window, thrust forth her turbaned
head and the half of her gaunt figure, and searched the whole garden
through, as completely as her dim vision would allow.  She could see
the interior of the summer-house, and its circular seat, kept moist by
the droppings of the roof.  It had no occupant.  Clifford was not
thereabouts; unless, indeed, he had crept for concealment (as, for a
moment, Hepzibah fancied might be the case) into a great, wet mass of
tangled and broad-leaved shadow, where the squash-vines were clambering
tumultuously upon an old wooden framework, set casually aslant against
the fence.  This could not be, however; he was not there; for, while
Hepzibah was looking, a strange grimalkin stole forth from the very
spot, and picked his way across the garden.  Twice he paused to snuff
the air, and then anew directed his course towards the parlor window.
Whether it was only on account of the stealthy, prying manner common to
the race, or that this cat seemed to have more than ordinary mischief
in his thoughts, the old gentlewoman, in spite of her much perplexity,
felt an impulse to drive the animal away, and accordingly flung down a
window stick.  The cat stared up at her, like a detected thief or
murderer, and, the next instant, took to flight.  No other living
creature was visible in the garden.  Chanticleer and his family had
either not left their roost, disheartened by the interminable rain, or
had done the next wisest thing, by seasonably returning to it.
Hepzibah closed the window.

But where was Clifford? Could it be that, aware of the presence of his
Evil Destiny, he had crept silently down the staircase, while the Judge
and Hepzibah stood talking in the shop, and had softly undone the
fastenings of the outer door, and made his escape into the street?
With that thought, she seemed to behold his gray, wrinkled, yet
childlike aspect, in the old-fashioned garments which he wore about the
house; a figure such as one sometimes imagines himself to be, with the
world's eye upon him, in a troubled dream.  This figure of her wretched
brother would go wandering through the city, attracting all eyes, and
everybody's wonder and repugnance, like a ghost, the more to be
shuddered at because visible at noontide.  To incur the ridicule of the
younger crowd, that knew him not,--the harsher scorn and indignation of
a few old men, who might recall his once familiar features! To be the
sport of boys, who, when old enough to run about the streets, have no
more reverence for what is beautiful and holy, nor pity for what is
sad,--no more sense of sacred misery, sanctifying the human shape in
which it embodies itself,--than if Satan were the father of them all!
Goaded by their taunts, their loud, shrill cries, and cruel
laughter,--insulted by the filth of the public ways, which they would
fling upon him,--or, as it might well be, distracted by the mere
strangeness of his situation, though nobody should afflict him with so
much as a thoughtless word,--what wonder if Clifford were to break into
some wild extravagance which was certain to be interpreted as lunacy?
Thus Judge Pyncheon's fiendish scheme would be ready accomplished to
his hands!

Then Hepzibah reflected that the town was almost completely
water-girdled.  The wharves stretched out towards the centre of the
harbor, and, in this inclement weather, were deserted by the ordinary
throng of merchants, laborers, and sea-faring men; each wharf a
solitude, with the vessels moored stem and stern, along its misty
length.  Should her brother's aimless footsteps stray thitherward, and
he but bend, one moment, over the deep, black tide, would he not
bethink himself that here was the sure refuge within his reach, and
that, with a single step, or the slightest overbalance of his body, he
might be forever beyond his kinsman's gripe? Oh, the temptation! To
make of his ponderous sorrow a security! To sink, with its leaden
weight upon him, and never rise again!

The horror of this last conception was too much for Hepzibah.  Even
Jaffrey Pyncheon must help her now She hastened down the staircase,
shrieking as she went.

"Clifford is gone!" she cried.  "I cannot find my brother.  Help,
Jaffrey Pyncheon! Some harm will happen to him!"

She threw open the parlor-door.  But, what with the shade of branches
across the windows, and the smoke-blackened ceiling, and the dark
oak-panelling of the walls, there was hardly so much daylight in the
room that Hepzibah's imperfect sight could accurately distinguish the
Judge's figure.  She was certain, however, that she saw him sitting in
the ancestral arm-chair, near the centre of the floor, with his face
somewhat averted, and looking towards a window.  So firm and quiet is
the nervous system of such men as Judge Pyncheon, that he had perhaps
stirred not more than once since her departure, but, in the hard
composure of his temperament, retained the position into which accident
had thrown him.

"I tell you, Jaffrey," cried Hepzibah impatiently, as she turned from
the parlor-door to search other rooms, "my brother is not in his
chamber! You must help me seek him!"

But Judge Pyncheon was not the man to let himself be startled from an
easy-chair with haste ill-befitting either the dignity of his character
or his broad personal basis, by the alarm of an hysteric woman.  Yet,
considering his own interest in the matter, he might have bestirred
himself with a little more alacrity.

"Do you hear me, Jaffrey Pyncheon?" screamed Hepzibah, as she again
approached the parlor-door, after an ineffectual search elsewhere.
"Clifford is gone."

At this instant, on the threshold of the parlor, emerging from within,
appeared Clifford himself! His face was preternaturally pale; so deadly
white, indeed, that, through all the glimmering indistinctness of the
passageway, Hepzibah could discern his features, as if a light fell on
them alone.  Their vivid and wild expression seemed likewise sufficient
to illuminate them; it was an expression of scorn and mockery,
coinciding with the emotions indicated by his gesture.   As Clifford
stood on the threshold, partly turning back, he pointed his finger
within the parlor, and shook it slowly as though he would have
summoned, not Hepzibah alone, but the whole world, to gaze at some
object inconceivably ridiculous.   This action, so ill-timed and
extravagant,--accompanied, too, with a look that showed more like joy
than any other kind of excitement,--compelled Hepzibah to dread that
her stern kinsman's ominous visit had driven her poor brother to
absolute insanity.  Nor could she otherwise account for the Judge's
quiescent mood than by supposing him craftily on the watch, while
Clifford developed these symptoms of a distracted mind.

"Be quiet, Clifford!" whispered his sister, raising her hand to impress
caution.  "Oh, for Heaven's sake, be quiet!"

"Let him be quiet! What can he do better?" answered Clifford, with a
still wilder gesture, pointing into the room which he had just quitted.
"As for us, Hepzibah, we can dance now!--we can sing, laugh, play, do
what we will! The weight is gone, Hepzibah!  It is gone off this weary
old world, and we may be as light-hearted as little Phoebe herself."

And, in accordance with his words, he began to laugh, still pointing
his finger at the object, invisible to Hepzibah, within the parlor.
She was seized with a sudden intuition of some horrible thing.  She
thrust herself past Clifford, and disappeared into the room; but almost
immediately returned, with a cry choking in her throat.  Gazing at her
brother with an affrighted glance of inquiry, she beheld him all in a
tremor and a quake, from head to foot, while, amid these commoted
elements of passion or alarm, still flickered his gusty mirth.

"My God! what is to become of us?" gasped Hepzibah.

"Come!" said Clifford in a tone of brief decision, most unlike what was
usual with him.  "We stay here too long! Let us leave the old house to
our cousin Jaffrey! He will take good care of it!"

Hepzibah now noticed that Clifford had on a cloak,--a garment of long
ago,--in which he had constantly muffled himself during these days of
easterly storm.  He beckoned with his hand, and intimated, so far as
she could comprehend him, his purpose that they should go together from
the house.  There are chaotic, blind, or drunken moments, in the lives
of persons who lack real force of character,--moments of test, in which
courage would most assert itself,--but where these individuals, if left
to themselves, stagger aimlessly along, or follow implicitly whatever
guidance may befall them, even if it be a child's.  No matter how
preposterous or insane, a purpose is a Godsend to them.   Hepzibah had
reached this point.  Unaccustomed to action or responsibility,--full of
horror at what she had seen, and afraid to inquire, or almost to
imagine, how it had come to pass,--affrighted at the fatality which
seemed to pursue her brother,--stupefied by the dim, thick, stifling
atmosphere of dread which filled the house as with a death-smell, and
obliterated all definiteness of thought,--she yielded without a
question, and on the instant, to the will which Clifford expressed.
For herself, she was like a person in a dream, when the will always
sleeps.  Clifford, ordinarily so destitute of this faculty, had found
it in the tension of the crisis.

"Why do you delay so?" cried he sharply.  "Put on your cloak and hood,
or whatever it pleases you to wear! No matter what; you cannot look
beautiful nor brilliant, my poor Hepzibah! Take your purse, with money
in it, and come along!"

Hepzibah obeyed these instructions, as if nothing else were to be done
or thought of.  She began to wonder, it is true, why she did not wake
up, and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her
spirit would struggle out of the maze, and make her conscious that
nothing of all this had actually happened.  Of course it was not real;
no such black, easterly day as this had yet begun to be; Judge Pyncheon
had not talked with, her.  Clifford had not laughed, pointed, beckoned
her away with him; but she had merely been afflicted--as lonely
sleepers often are--with a great deal of unreasonable misery, in a
morning dream!

"Now--now--I shall certainly awake!" thought Hepzibah, as she went to
and fro, making her little preparations.  "I can bear it no longer I
must wake up now!"

But it came not, that awakening moment! It came not, even when, just
before they left the house, Clifford stole to the parlor-door, and made
a parting obeisance to the sole occupant of the room.

"What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now!" whispered he to
Hepzibah.  "Just when he fancied he had me completely under his thumb!
Come, come; make haste! or he will start up, like Giant Despair in
pursuit of Christian and Hopeful, and catch us yet!"

As they passed into the street, Clifford directed Hepzibah's attention
to something on one of the posts of the front door.  It was merely the
initials of his own name, which, with somewhat of his characteristic
grace about the forms of the letters, he had cut there when a boy.  The
brother and sister departed, and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old
home of his forefathers, all by himself; so heavy and lumpish that we
can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which had
perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on
the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might!




                     XVII The Flight of Two Owls


SUMMER as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibah's few remaining teeth
chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up
Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town.  Not merely was it
the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame (although her
feet and hands, especially, had never seemed so death-a-cold as now),
but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical
chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body.  The
world's broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless! Such, indeed,
is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he
plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his
veins.  What, then, must it have been to Hepzibah and Clifford,--so
time-stricken as they were, yet so like children in their
inexperience,--as they left the doorstep, and passed from beneath the
wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm! They were wandering all abroad, on
precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world's
end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket.  In
Hepzibah's mind, there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift.
She had lost the faculty of self-guidance; but, in view of the
difficulties around her, felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it,
and was, moreover, incapable of making one.

As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a
look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was
possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement.  It was this, indeed,
that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly,
established over his movements.  It not a little resembled the
exhilaration of wine.  Or, it might more fancifully be compared to a
joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered
instrument.  As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as
it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was
there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver
while he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity
to skip in his gait.

They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired
neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily
the more thronged and busier portion of the town.  Glistening
sidewalks, with little pools of rain, here and there, along their
unequal surface; umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the
shop-windows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that
one article; wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm-trees, torn off
untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way; an unsightly,
accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew
the more unclean for its long and laborious washing,--these were the
more definable points of a very sombre picture.  In the way of movement
and human life, there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its
driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the
forlorn figure of an old man, who seemed to have crept out of some
subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the kennel, and poking the
wet rubbish with a stick, in quest of rusty nails; a merchant or two,
at the door of the post-office, together with an editor and a
miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail; a few visages of
retired sea-captains at the window of an insurance office, looking out
vacantly at the vacant street, blaspheming at the weather, and fretting
at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip.  What a
treasure-trove to these venerable quidnuncs, could they have guessed
the secret which Hepzibah and Clifford were carrying along with them!
But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a
young girl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her
skirt a trifle too high above her ankles.  Had it been a sunny and
cheerful day, they could hardly have gone through the streets without
making themselves obnoxious to remark.  Now, probably, they were felt
to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather, and therefore did
not stand out in strong relief, as if the sun were shining on them, but
melted into the gray gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone.

Poor Hepzibah! Could she have understood this fact, it would have
brought her some little comfort; for, to all her other
troubles,--strange to say!--there was added the womanish and
old-maiden-like misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her
attire.  Thus, she was fain to shrink deeper into herself, as it were,
as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak
and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst
of the storm, without any wearer!

As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly
hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that
one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other.  Any
certainty would have been preferable to this.  She whispered to
herself, again and again, "Am I awake?--Am I awake?" and sometimes
exposed her face to the chill spatter of the wind, for the sake of its
rude assurance that she was.  Whether it was Clifford's purpose, or
only chance, had led them thither, they now found themselves passing
beneath the arched entrance of a large structure of gray stone.
Within, there was a spacious breadth, and an airy height from floor to
roof, now partially filled with smoke and steam, which eddied
voluminously upward and formed a mimic cloud-region over their heads.
A train of cars was just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting
and fuming, like a steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell
rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which
life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career.  Without question or
delay,--with the irresistible decision, if not rather to be called
recklessness, which had so strangely taken possession of him, and
through him of Hepzibah,--Clifford impelled her towards the cars, and
assisted her to enter.  The signal was given; the engine puffed forth
its short, quick breaths; the train began its movement; and, along with
a hundred other passengers, these two unwonted travellers sped onward
like the wind.

At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that
the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current
of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate
itself.

Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents,
inclusive of Judge Pyncheon's visit, could be real, the recluse of the
Seven Gables murmured in her brother's ear,--

"Clifford! Clifford! Is not this a dream?"

"A dream, Hepzibah!" repeated he, almost laughing in her face.  "On the
contrary, I have never been awake before!"

Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing
past them.  At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the
next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it
had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake.  The spires of
meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the
broad-based hills glided away.  Everything was unfixed from its
age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to
their own.

Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad,
offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of
novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners.  It was
novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close
relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by
the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its
grasp.  It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so
quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in
their behalf.  Some, with tickets in their hats (long travellers these,
before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad), had plunged into the
English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels, and were keeping
company with dukes and earls.  Others, whose briefer span forbade their
devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium
of the way with penny-papers.  A party of girls, and one young man, on
opposite sides of the car, found huge amusement in a game of ball.
They tossed it to and fro, with peals of laughter that might be
measured by mile-lengths; for, faster than the nimble ball could fly,
the merry players fled unconsciously along, leaving the trail of their
mirth afar behind, and ending their game under another sky than had
witnessed its commencement.  Boys, with apples, cakes, candy, and rolls
of variously tinctured lozenges,--merchandise that reminded Hepzibah of
her deserted shop,--appeared at each momentary stopping-place, doing up
their business in a hurry, or breaking it short off, lest the market
should ravish them away with it.  New people continually entered.  Old
acquaintances--for such they soon grew to be, in this rapid current of
affairs--continually departed.  Here and there, amid the rumble and the
tumult, sat one asleep.  Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter
study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life
itself!

Clifford's naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused.  He caught
the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly
than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and
portentous hue.  Hepzibah, on the other hand, felt herself more apart
from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had just quitted.

"You are not happy, Hepzibah!" said Clifford apart, in a tone of
approach.  "You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin
Jaffrey"--here came the quake through him,--"and of Cousin Jaffrey
sitting there, all by himself! Take my advice,--follow my example,--and
let such things slip aside.  Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah!--in
the midst of life!--in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I
be happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game
of ball!"

"Happy--" thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the word, of her
dull and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in it,--"happy.  He is mad
already; and, if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad
too!"

If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it.  Fast
and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, they
might just as well, as regarded Hepzibah's mental images, have been
passing up and down Pyncheon Street.  With miles and miles of varied
scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old
gable-peaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one of the
angles, and the shop-window, and a customer shaking the door, and
compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing
Judge Pyncheon! This one old house was everywhere! It transported its
great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself
phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at.  The quality of
Hepzibah's mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily
as Clifford's.  He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable
kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots.
Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her
brother and herself was changed.  At home, she was his guardian; here,
Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to
their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence.  He had
been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a
condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and
transitory.

The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford, who had made
himself the purse-bearer, put a bank-note into his hand, as he had
observed others do.

"For the lady and yourself?" asked the conductor.  "And how far?"

"As far as that will carry us," said Clifford.  "It is no great matter.
We are riding for pleasure merely."

"You choose a strange day for it, sir!" remarked a gimlet-eyed old
gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his
companion, as if curious to make them out.  "The best chance of
pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man's own house, with
a nice little fire in the chimney."

"I cannot precisely agree with you," said Clifford, courteously bowing
to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clew of conversation
which the latter had proffered.  "It had just occurred to me, on the
contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad--with the vast
and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and
convenience--is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and
fireside, and substitute something better."

"In the name of common-sense," asked the old gentleman rather testily,
"what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimney-corner?"

"These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to
them," replied Clifford.  "They may be said, in few and pithy words, to
have ill served a poor purpose.  My impression is, that our wonderfully
increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to
bring us around again to the nomadic state.  You are aware, my dear
sir,--you must have observed it in your own experience,--that all human
progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful
figure, in an ascending spiral curve.  While we fancy ourselves going
straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new
position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried
and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and
perfected to its ideal.  The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy
of the present and the future.  To apply this truth to the topic now
under discussion.  In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in
temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a
bird's-nest, and which they built,--if it should be called building,
when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made
with hands,--which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where
fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most
especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier
shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,
and hill.  This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted
it, has vanished from existence.  And it typified something better than
itself.  It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement
weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over
barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their
fertility and beauty.  But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this.
These railroads--could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble
and the jar got rid of--are positively the greatest blessing that the
ages have wrought out for us.  They give us wings; they annihilate the
toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being
so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,
therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily
be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life
in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as
easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,--in a better sense, wherever the
fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"

Clifford's countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory; a youthful
character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid
duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask.  The merry girls let
their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him.  They said to
themselves, perhaps, that, before his hair was gray and the crow's-feet
tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the
impress of his features on many a woman's heart.  But, alas! no woman's
eye had seen his face while it was beautiful.

"I should scarcely call it an improved state of things," observed
Clifford's new acquaintance, "to live everywhere and nowhere!"

"Would you not?" exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy.  "It is as
clear to me as sunshine,--were there any in the sky,--that the greatest
possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and
improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with
mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men
painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!
The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it.  Morbid
influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and
pollute the life of households.  There is no such unwholesome
atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one's defunct
forefathers and relatives.  I speak of what I know.  There is a certain
house within my familiar recollection,--one of those peaked-gable
(there are seven of them), projecting-storied edifices, such as you
occasionally see in our older towns,--a rusty, crazy, creaky,
dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched
window over the porch, and a little shop-door on one side, and a great,
melancholy elm before it!  Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this
seven-gabled mansion (the fact is so very curious that I must needs
mention it), immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man, of
remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair, dead,
stone-dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirt-bosom! Dead, but
with open eyes! He taints the whole house, as I remember it.  I could
never flourish there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me
to do and enjoy."

His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and
wither into age.

"Never, sir!" he repeated.  "I could never draw cheerful breath there!"

"I should think not," said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford
earnestly, and rather apprehensively.  "I should conceive not, sir,
with that notion in your head!"

"Surely not," continued Clifford; "and it were a relief to me if that
house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it,
and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation.  Not that I should
ever visit its site again! for, sir, the farther I get away from it,
the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the
intellectual dance, the youth, in short,--yes, my youth, my youth!--the
more does it come back to me.  No longer ago than this morning, I was
old.  I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray
hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the
furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow's-feet
about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no
right to come! I had not lived!  But now do I look old? If so, my
aspect belies me strangely; for--a great weight being off my mind--I
feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days
before me!"

"I trust you may find it so," said the old gentleman, who seemed rather
embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford's
wild talk drew on them both.  "You have my best wishes for it."

"For Heaven's sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!" whispered his sister.
"They think you mad."

"Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!" returned her brother.  "No matter what
they think! I am not mad.  For the first time in thirty years my
thoughts gush up and find words ready for them.  I must talk, and I
will!"

He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the conversation.

"Yes, my dear sir," said he, "it is my firm belief and hope that these
terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody
something sacred, are soon to pass out of men's daily use, and be
forgotten.  Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will
crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate--the solid
ground to build a house on--is the broad foundation on which nearly all
the guilt of this world rests.  A man will commit almost any wrong,--he
will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and
which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,--only to
build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in,
and for his posterity to be miserable in.  He lays his own dead corpse
beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning
picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil
destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there.  I
do not speak wildly.  I have just such a house in my mind's eye!"

"Then, sir," said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the
subject, "you are not to blame for leaving it."

"Within the lifetime of the child already born," Clifford went on, "all
this will be done away.  The world is growing too ethereal and
spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer.  To me,
though, for a considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in
retirement, and know less of such things than most men,--even to me,
the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable.  Mesmerism, now! Will
that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out
of human life?"

"All a humbug!" growled the old gentleman.

"These rapping spirits, that little Phoebe told us of, the other day,"
said Clifford,--"what are these but the messengers of the spiritual
world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide
open!"

"A humbug, again!" cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy
at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics.  "I should like to rap
with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such
nonsense!"

"Then there is electricity,--the demon, the angel, the mighty physical
power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford.  "Is that a
humbug, too?  Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of
electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating
thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round
globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!  Or, shall
we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the
substance which we deemed it!"

"If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye
toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, "it is an excellent
thing,--that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics
don't get possession of it.  A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly
as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers."

"I don't quite like it, in that point of view," replied Clifford.  "A
bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights,
which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so
much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to
controvert their existence.  An almost spiritual medium, like the
electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and
holy missions.  Lovers, day by, day--hour by hour, if so often moved to
do it,--might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some
such words as these 'I love you forever!'--'My heart runs over with
love!'--'I love you more than I can!' and, again, at the next message
'I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!' Or, when a
good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an
electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him 'Your
dear friend is in bliss!' Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings
thus 'An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment
come from God!' and immediately its little voice would seem to have
reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart.  But for these poor
rogues, the bank-robbers,--who, after all, are about as honest as nine
people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and
prefer to transact business at midnight rather than 'Change-hours,--and
for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the
motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public
benefactors, if we consider only its result,--for unfortunate
individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an
immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world-hunt at their
heels!"

"You can't, hey?" cried the old gentleman, with a hard look.

"Positively, no!" answered Clifford.  "It puts them too miserably at
disadvantage.  For example, sir, in a dark, low, cross-beamed, panelled
room of an old house, let us suppose a dead man, sitting in an
arm-chair, with a blood-stain on his shirt-bosom,--and let us add to
our hypothesis another man, issuing from the house, which he feels to
be over-filled with the dead man's presence,--and let us lastly imagine
him fleeing, Heaven knows whither, at the speed of a hurricane, by
railroad! Now, sir, if the fugitive alight in some distant town, and
find all the people babbling about that self-same dead man, whom he has
fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that
his natural rights have been infringed? He has been deprived of his
city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion, has suffered infinite wrong!"

"You are a strange man; Sir!" said the old gentleman, bringing his
gimlet-eye to a point on Clifford, as if determined to bore right into
him.  "I can't see through you!"

"No, I'll be bound you can't!" cried Clifford, laughing.  "And yet, my
dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of Maule's well!  But come,
Hepzibah! We have flown far enough for once.  Let us alight, as the
birds do, and perch ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult wither
we shall fly next!"

Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary way-station.
Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew
Hepzibah along with him.  A moment afterwards, the train--with all the
life of its interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so
conspicuous an object--was gliding away in the distance, and rapidly
lessening to a point which, in another moment, vanished.  The world had
fled away from these two wanderers.  They gazed drearily about them.
At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a
dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift
through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the
top of the square tower.  Farther off was a farm-house, in the old
style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward
from the three-story peak, to within a man's height of the ground.  It
seemed uninhabited.  There were the relics of a wood-pile, indeed, near
the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered
logs.  The small rain-drops came down aslant; the wind was not
turbulent, but sullen, and full of chilly moisture.

Clifford shivered from head to foot.  The wild effervescence of his
mood--which had so readily supplied thoughts, fantasies, and a strange
aptitude of words, and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of
giving vent to this bubbling-up gush of ideas had entirely subsided.  A
powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity.  Its operation
over, he forthwith began to sink.

"You must take the lead now, Hepzibah!" murmured he, with a torpid and
reluctant utterance.  "Do with me as you will!" She knelt down upon the
platform where they were standing and lifted her clasped hands to the
sky.  The dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no
hour for disbelief,--no juncture this to question that there was a sky
above, and an Almighty Father looking from it!

"O God!"--ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibah,--then paused a moment, to
consider what her prayer should be,--"O God,--our Father,--are we not
thy children? Have mercy on us!"




                            XVIII Governor Pyncheon


JUDGE PYNCHEON, while his two relatives have fled away with such
ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as
the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants.  To
him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now
betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening
back to his hollow tree.

The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now.  He has
not stirred hand or foot, nor withdrawn his eyes so much as a
hair's-breadth from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room,
since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage,
and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit.  He holds
his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you
cannot see the dial-plate.  How profound a fit of meditation! Or,
supposing him asleep, how infantile a quietude of conscience, and what
wholesome order in the gastric region, are betokened by slumber so
entirely undisturbed with starts, cramp, twitches, muttered dreamtalk,
trumpet-blasts through the nasal organ, or any slightest irregularity
of breath!  You must hold your own breath, to satisfy yourself whether
he breathes at all.  It is quite inaudible.  You hear the ticking of
his watch; his breath you do not hear.  A most refreshing slumber,
doubtless!  And yet, the Judge cannot be asleep.  His eyes are open! A
veteran politician, such as he, would never fall asleep with wide-open
eyes, lest some enemy or mischief-maker, taking him thus at unawares,
should peep through these windows into his consciousness, and make
strange discoveries among the reminiscences, projects, hopes,
apprehensions, weaknesses, and strong points, which he has heretofore
shared with nobody.  A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with
one eye open.  That may be wisdom.  But not with both; for this were
heedlessness! No, no! Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep.

It is odd, however, that a gentleman so burdened with engagements,--and
noted, too, for punctuality,--should linger thus in an old lonely
mansion, which he has never seemed very fond of visiting.  The oaken
chair, to be sure, may tempt him with its roominess.  It is, indeed, a
spacious, and, allowing for the rude age that fashioned it, a
moderately easy seat, with capacity enough, at all events, and offering
no restraint to the Judge's breadth of beam.  A bigger man might find
ample accommodation in it.  His ancestor, now pictured upon the wall,
with all his English beef about him, used hardly to present a front
extending from elbow to elbow of this chair, or a base that would cover
its whole cushion.  But there are better chairs than this,--mahogany,
black walnut, rosewood, spring-seated and damask-cushioned, with varied
slopes, and innumerable artifices to make them easy, and obviate the
irksomeness of too tame an ease,--a score of such might be at Judge
Pyncheon's service.  Yes! in a score of drawing-rooms he would be more
than welcome.  Mamma would advance to meet him, with outstretched hand;
the virgin daughter, elderly as he has now got to be,--an old widower,
as he smilingly describes himself,--would shake up the cushion for the
Judge, and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable.  For the Judge
is a prosperous man.  He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other
people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least,
as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable half-drowse, planning the
business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next
fifteen years.  With his firm health, and the little inroad that age
has made upon him, fifteen years or twenty--yes, or perhaps
five-and-twenty!--are no more than he may fairly call his own.
Five-and-twenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and
country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States
stock,--his wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or
soon to be acquired; together with the public honors that have fallen
upon him, and the weightier ones that are yet to fall! It is good! It
is excellent! It is enough!

Still lingering in the old chair! If the Judge has a little time to
throw away, why does not he visit the insurance office, as is his
frequent custom, and sit awhile in one of their leathern-cushioned
arm-chairs, listening to the gossip of the day, and dropping some
deeply designed chance-word, which will be certain to become the gossip
of to-morrow.  And have not the bank directors a meeting at which it
was the Judge's purpose to be present, and his office to preside?
Indeed they have; and the hour is noted on a card, which is, or ought
to be, in Judge Pyncheon's right vest-pocket.  Let him go thither, and
loll at ease upon his moneybags! He has lounged long enough in the old
chair!

This was to have been such a busy day.  In the first place, the
interview with Clifford.  Half an hour, by the Judge's reckoning, was
to suffice for that; it would probably be less, but--taking into
consideration that Hepzibah was first to be dealt with, and that these
women are apt to make many words where a few would do much better--it
might be safest to allow half an hour.  Half an hour? Why, Judge, it is
already two hours, by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer.
Glance your eye down at it and see! Ah; he will not give himself the
trouble either to bend his head, or elevate his hand, so as to bring
the faithful time-keeper within his range of vision! Time, all at once,
appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!

And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda?  Clifford's
affair arranged, he was to meet a State Street broker, who has
undertaken to procure a heavy percentage, and the best of paper, for a
few loose thousands which the Judge happens to have by him, uninvested.
The wrinkled note-shaver will have taken his railroad trip in vain.
Half an hour later, in the street next to this, there was to be an
auction of real estate, including a portion of the old Pyncheon
property, originally belonging to Maule's garden ground.  It has been
alienated from the Pyncheons these four-score years; but the Judge had
kept it in his eye, and had set his heart on reannexing it to the small
demesne still left around the Seven Gables; and now, during this odd
fit of oblivion, the fatal hammer must have fallen, and transferred our
ancient patrimony to some alien possessor.  Possibly, indeed, the sale
may have been postponed till fairer weather.  If so, will the Judge
make it convenient to be present, and favor the auctioneer with his
bid, On the proximate occasion?

The next affair was to buy a horse for his own driving.  The one
heretofore his favorite stumbled, this very morning, on the road to
town, and must be at once discarded.  Judge Pyncheon's neck is too
precious to be risked on such a contingency as a stumbling steed.
Should all the above business be seasonably got through with, he might
attend the meeting of a charitable society; the very name of which,
however, in the multiplicity of his benevolence, is quite forgotten; so
that this engagement may pass unfulfilled, and no great harm done.  And
if he have time, amid the press of more urgent matters, he must take
measures for the renewal of Mrs. Pyncheon's tombstone, which, the
sexton tells him, has fallen on its marble face, and is cracked quite
in twain.  She was a praiseworthy woman enough, thinks the Judge, in
spite of her nervousness, and the tears that she was so oozy with, and
her foolish behavior about the coffee; and as she took her departure so
seasonably, he will not grudge the second tombstone.  It is better, at
least, than if she had never needed any! The next item on his list was
to give orders for some fruit-trees, of a rare variety, to be
deliverable at his country-seat in the ensuing autumn.  Yes, buy them,
by all means; and may the peaches be luscious in your mouth, Judge
Pyncheon! After this comes something more important.  A committee of
his political party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars,
in addition to his previous disbursements, towards carrying on the fall
campaign.  The Judge is a patriot; the fate of the country is staked on
the November election; and besides, as will be shadowed forth in
another paragraph, he has no trifling stake of his own in the same
great game.  He will do what the committee asks; nay, he will be
liberal beyond their expectations; they shall have a check for five
hundred dollars, and more anon, if it be needed.  What next? A decayed
widow, whose husband was Judge Pyncheon's early friend, has laid her
case of destitution before him, in a very moving letter.  She and her
fair daughter have scarcely bread to eat.  He partly intends to call on
her to-day,--perhaps so--perhaps not,--accordingly as he may happen to
have leisure, and a small bank-note.

Another business, which, however, he puts no great weight on (it is
well, you know, to be heedful, but not over-anxious, as respects one's
personal health),--another business, then, was to consult his family
physician.  About what, for Heaven's sake? Why, it is rather difficult
to describe the symptoms.  A mere dimness of sight and dizziness of
brain, was it?--or disagreeable choking, or stifling, or gurgling, or
bubbling, in the region of the thorax, as the anatomists say?--or was
it a pretty severe throbbing and kicking of the heart, rather
creditable to him than otherwise, as showing that the organ had not
been left out of the Judge's physical contrivance?  No matter what it
was.  The doctor probably would smile at the statement of such trifles
to his professional ear; the Judge would smile in his turn; and meeting
one another's eyes, they would enjoy a hearty laugh together! But a fig
for medical advice.  The Judge will never need it.

Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, Now! What--not a
glance! It is within ten minutes of the dinner hour! It surely cannot
have slipped your memory that the dinner of to-day is to be the most
important, in its consequences, of all the dinners you ever ate.  Yes,
precisely the most important; although, in the course of your somewhat
eminent career, you have been placed high towards the head of the
table, at splendid banquets, and have poured out your festive eloquence
to ears yet echoing with Webster's mighty organ-tones.  No public
dinner this, however.  It is merely a gathering of some dozen or so of
friends from several districts of the State; men of distinguished
character and influence, assembling, almost casually, at the house of a
common friend, likewise distinguished, who will make them welcome to a
little better than his ordinary fare.  Nothing in the way of French
cookery, but an excellent dinner, nevertheless.  Real turtle, we
understand, and salmon, tautog, canvas-backs, pig, English mutton, good
roast beef, or dainties of that serious kind, fit for substantial
country gentlemen, as these honorable persons mostly are.  The
delicacies of the season, in short, and flavored by a brand of old
Madeira which has been the pride of many seasons.  It is the Juno
brand; a glorious wine, fragrant, and full of gentle might; a
bottled-up happiness, put by for use; a golden liquid, worth more than
liquid gold; so rare and admirable, that veteran wine-bibbers count it
among their epochs to have tasted it!  It drives away the heart-ache,
and substitutes no head-ache!  Could the Judge but quaff a glass, it
might enable him to shake off the unaccountable lethargy which (for the
ten intervening minutes, and five to boot, are already past) has made
him such a laggard at this momentous dinner.  It would all but revive a
dead man! Would you like to sip it now, Judge Pyncheon?

Alas, this dinner.  Have you really forgotten its true object?  Then
let us whisper it, that you may start at once out of the oaken chair,
which really seems to be enchanted, like the one in Comus, or that in
which Moll Pitcher imprisoned your own grandfather.  But ambition is a
talisman more powerful than witchcraft.  Start up, then, and, hurrying
through the streets, burst in upon the company, that they may begin
before the fish is spoiled! They wait for you; and it is little for
your interest that they should wait.  These gentlemen--need you be told
it?--have assembled, not without purpose, from every quarter of the
State.  They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled
to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people,
without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers.  The
popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as
thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall
speak, under their breath, at your friend's festive board.  They meet
to decide upon their candidate.  This little knot of subtle schemers
will control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party.
And what worthier candidate,--more wise and learned, more noted for
philanthropic liberality, truer to safe principles, tried oftener by
public trusts, more spotless in private character, with a larger stake
in the common welfare, and deeper grounded, by hereditary descent, in
the faith and practice of the Puritans,--what man can be presented for
the suffrage of the people, so eminently combining all these claims to
the chief-rulership as Judge Pyncheon here before us?

Make haste, then! Do your part! The meed for which you have toiled, and
fought, and climbed, and crept, is ready for your grasp! Be present at
this dinner!--drink a glass or two of that noble wine!--make your
pledges in as low a whisper as you will!--and you rise up from table
virtually governor of the glorious old State! Governor Pyncheon of
Massachusetts!

And is there no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like
this? It has been the grand purpose of half your lifetime to obtain it.
Now, when there needs little more than to signify your acceptance, why
do you sit so lumpishly in your great-great-grandfather's oaken chair,
as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one? We have all heard of King
Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will
hardly win the race for an elective chief-magistracy.

Well; it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, tautog,
woodcock, boiled turkey, South-Down mutton, pig, roast-beef, have
vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and
gravies crusted over with cold fat.  The Judge, had he done nothing
else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork.  It was he,
you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogre-like
appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the
dinner-hour made him a great beast.  Persons of his large sensual
endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding-time.  But, for
once, the Judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too late, we fear,
even to join the party at their wine! The guests are warm and merry;
they have given up the Judge; and, concluding that the Free-Soilers
have him, they will fix upon another candidate.  Were our friend now to
stalk in among them, with that wide-open stare, at once wild and
stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer.
Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally so scrupulous
in his attire, to show himself at a dinner-table with that crimson
stain upon his shirt-bosom.  By the bye, how came it there? It is an
ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button
his coat closely over his breast, and, taking his horse and chaise from
the livery stable, to make all speed to his own house.  There, after a
glass of brandy and water, and a mutton-chop, a beefsteak, a broiled
fowl, or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one, he had
better spend the evening by the fireside.  He must toast his slippers a
long while, in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this
vile old house has sent curdling through his veins.

Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day.  But to-morrow
will be here anon.  Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it?
To-morrow.  To-morrow! To-morrow.  We, that are alive, may rise betimes
to-morrow.  As for him that has died to-day, his morrow will be the
resurrection morn.

Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the
room.  The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first
become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their
distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were,
that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure
sitting in the midst of them.  The gloom has not entered from without;
it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time,
will possess itself of everything.  The Judge's face, indeed, rigid and
singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent.  Fainter
and fainter grows the light.  It is as if another double-handful of
darkness had been scattered through the air.  Now it is no longer gray,
but sable.  There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a
glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,--any phrase of light would express
something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather,
that there is a window there.  Has it yet vanished?  No!--yes!--not
quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness,--we shall venture to
marry these ill-agreeing words,--the swarthy whiteness of Judge
Pyncheon's face.  The features are all gone: there is only the paleness
of them left.  And how looks it now?  There is no window! There is no
face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where
is our universe?  All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos,
may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and
murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!

Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one.  It is the
ticking of the Judge's watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left the room
in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand.  Be the cause
what it may, this little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time's pulse,
repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge
Pyncheon's motionless hand, has an effect of terror, which we do not
find in any other accompaniment of the scene.

But, listen! That puff of the breeze was louder.  It had a tone unlike
the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself, and afflicted all
mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past.  The wind has
veered about! It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and, taking
hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a shake, like
a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist.  Another and
another sturdy tussle with the blast! The old house creaks again, and
makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty
throat (the big flue, we mean, of its wide chimney), partly in
complaint at the rude wind, but rather, as befits their century and a
half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance.  A rumbling kind of a
bluster roars behind the fire-board.  A door has slammed above stairs.
A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an
unruly gust.  It is not to be conceived, before-hand, what wonderful
wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with
the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and
sob, and shriek,--and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous,
in some distant chamber,--and to tread along the entries as with
stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks
miraculously stiff,--whenever the gale catches the house with a window
open, and gets fairly into it.  Would that we were not an attendant
spirit here! It is too awful! This clamor of the wind through the
lonely house; the Judge's quietude, as he sits invisible; and that
pertinacious ticking of his watch!

As regards Judge Pyncheon's invisibility, however, that matter will
soon be remedied.  The northwest wind has swept the sky clear.  The
window is distinctly seen.  Through its panes, moreover, we dimly catch
the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside, fluttering with a
constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight,
now here, now there.  Oftener than any other object, these glimpses
illuminate the Judge's face.  But here comes more effectual light.
Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the pear-tree,
and now a little lower, and now on the whole mass of boughs, while,
through their shifting intricacies, the moonbeams fall aslant into the
room.  They play over the Judge's figure and show that he has not
stirred throughout the hours of darkness.  They follow the shadows, in
changeful sport, across his unchanging features.  They gleam upon his
watch.  His grasp conceals the dial-plate,--but we know that the
faithful hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight.

A man of sturdy understanding, like Judge Pyncheon, cares no more for
twelve o'clock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon.
However just the parallel drawn, in some of the preceding pages,
between his Puritan ancestor and himself, it fails in this point.  The
Pyncheon of two centuries ago, in common with most of his
contemporaries, professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations,
although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character.  The Pyncheon
of to-night, who sits in yonder arm-chair, believes in no such
nonsense.  Such, at least, was his creed, some few hours since.  His
hair will not bristle, therefore, at the stories which--in times when
chimney-corners had benches in them, where old people sat poking into
the ashes of the past, and raking out traditions like live coals--used
to be told about this very room of his ancestral house.  In fact, these
tales are too absurd to bristle even childhood's hair.  What sense,
meaning, or moral, for example, such as even ghost-stories should be
susceptible of, can be traced in the ridiculous legend, that, at
midnight, all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor?
And, pray, for what? Why, to see whether the portrait of their ancestor
still keeps its place upon the wall, in compliance with his
testamentary directions! Is it worth while to come out of their graves
for that?

We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea.  Ghost-stories are
hardly to be treated seriously any longer.  The family-party of the
defunct Pyncheons, we presume, goes off in this wise.

First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeple-hat, and
trunk-breeches, girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which
hangs his steel-hilted sword; he has a long staff in his hand, such as
gentlemen in advanced life used to carry, as much for the dignity of
the thing as for the support to be derived from it.  He looks up at the
portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image! All
is safe.  The picture is still there.  The purpose of his brain has
been kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in
graveyard grass.  See! he lifts his ineffectual hand, and tries the
frame.  All safe! But is that a smile?--is it not, rather a frown of
deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features? The stout
Colonel is dissatisfied!  So decided is his look of discontent as to
impart additional distinctness to his features; through which,
nevertheless, the moonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond.
Something has strangely vexed the ancestor! With a grim shake of the
head, he turns away.  Here come other Pyncheons, the whole tribe, in
their half a dozen generations, jostling and elbowing one another, to
reach the picture.  We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with
the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated
officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping
Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his
wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's
legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out
of her virgin grave.  All try the picture-frame.  What do these ghostly
people seek? A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch
it! There is evidently a mystery about the picture, that perplexes
these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest.  In a corner,
meanwhile, stands the figure of an elderly man, in a leathern jerkin
and breeches, with a carpenter's rule sticking out of his side pocket;
he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants,
nodding, jeering, mocking, and finally bursting into obstreperous,
though inaudible laughter.

Indulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of
restraint and guidance.  We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our
visionary scene.  Among those ancestral people there is a young man,
dressed in the very fashion of to-day:  he wears a dark frock-coat,
almost destitute of skirts, gray pantaloons, gaiter boots of patent
leather, and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast, and a
little silver-headed whalebone stick in his hand.  Were we to meet this
figure at noonday, we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon, the
Judge's only surviving child, who has been spending the last two years
in foreign travel.  If still in life, how comes his shadow hither?  If
dead, what a misfortune! The old Pyncheon property, together with the
great estate acquired by the young man's father, would devolve on whom?
On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phoebe!
But another and a greater marvel greets us!  Can we believe our eyes? A
stout, elderly gentleman has made his appearance; he has an aspect of
eminent respectability, wears a black coat and pantaloons, of roomy
width, and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire, but for
a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his
shirt-bosom.  Is it the Judge, or no? How can it be Judge Pyncheon? We
discern his figure, as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us
anything, still seated in the oaken chair! Be the apparition whose it
may, it advances to the picture, seems to seize the frame, tries to
peep behind it, and turns away, with a frown as black as the ancestral
one.

The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as
forming an actual portion of our story.  We were betrayed into this
brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; they dance
hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the looking-glass,
which, you are aware, is always a kind of window or doorway into the
spiritual world.  We needed relief, moreover, from our too long and
exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair.  This wild wind,
too, has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion, but without
tearing them away from their one determined centre.  Yonder leaden
Judge sits immovably upon our soul.  Will he never stir again? We shall
go mad unless he stirs! You may the better estimate his quietude by the
fearlessness of a little mouse, which sits on its hind legs, in a
streak of moonlight, close by Judge Pyncheon's foot, and seems to
meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk.  Ha! what
has startled the nimble little mouse? It is the visage of grimalkin,
outside of the window, where he appears to have posted himself for a
deliberate watch.  This grimalkin has a very ugly look.  Is it a cat
watching for a mouse, or the devil for a human soul? Would we could
scare him from the window!

Thank Heaven, the night is well-nigh past! The moonbeams have no longer
so silvery a gleam, nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the
shadows among which they fall.  They are paler now; the shadows look
gray, not black.  The boisterous wind is hushed.  What is the hour? Ah!
the watch has at last ceased to tick; for the Judge's forgetful fingers
neglected to wind it up, as usual, at ten o'clock, being half an hour
or so before his ordinary bedtime,--and it has run down, for the first
time in five years.  But the great world-clock of Time still keeps its
beat.  The dreary night--for, oh, how dreary seems its haunted waste,
behind us!--gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn.
Blessed, blessed radiance! The daybeam--even what little of it finds
its way into this always dusky parlor--seems part of the universal
benediction, annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible, and
happiness attainable.  Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair?
Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on his brow? Will he
begin this new day,--which God has smiled upon, and blessed, and given
to mankind,--will he begin it with better purposes than the many that
have been spent amiss? Or are all the deep-laid schemes of yesterday as
stubborn in his heart, and as busy in his brain, as ever?

In this latter case, there is much to do.  Will the Judge still insist
with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford? Will he buy a safe,
elderly gentleman's horse? Will he persuade the purchaser of the old
Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor?  Will he see
his family physician, and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him, to
be an honor and blessing to his race, until the utmost term of
patriarchal longevity? Will Judge Pyncheon, above all, make due
apologies to that company of honorable friends, and satisfy them that
his absence from the festive board was unavoidable, and so fully
retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of
Massachusetts?  And all these great purposes accomplished, will he walk
the streets again, with that dog-day smile of elaborate benevolence,
sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it? Or will he, after
the tomb-like seclusion of the past day and night, go forth a humbled
and repentant man, sorrowful, gentle, seeking no profit, shrinking from
worldly honor, hardly daring to love God, but bold to love his fellow
man, and to do him what good he may? Will he bear about with him,--no
odious grin of feigned benignity, insolent in its pretence, and
loathsome in its falsehood,--but the tender sadness of a contrite
heart, broken, at last, beneath its own weight of sin? For it is our
belief, whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it, that there
was heavy sin at the base of this man's being.

Rise up, Judge Pyncheon! The morning sunshine glimmers through the
foliage, and, beautiful and holy as it is, shuns not to kindle up your
face.  Rise up, thou subtle, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted hypocrite,
and make thy choice whether still to be subtle, worldly, selfish,
iron-hearted, and hypocritical, or to tear these sins out of thy
nature, though they bring the lifeblood with them! The Avenger is upon
thee! Rise up, before it be too late!

What! Thou art not stirred by this last appeal? No, not a jot!  And
there we see a fly,--one of your common house-flies, such as are always
buzzing on the window-pane,--which has smelt out Governor Pyncheon, and
alights, now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us!
is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be
chief-magistrate's wide-open eyes! Canst thou not brush the fly away?
Art thou too sluggish? Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects
yesterday! Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful?  Not brush away a
fly? Nay, then, we give thee up!

And hark! the shop-bell rings.  After hours like these latter ones,
through which we have borne our heavy tale, it is good to be made
sensible that there is a living world, and that even this old, lonely
mansion retains some manner of connection with it.  We breathe more
freely, emerging from Judge Pyncheon's presence into the street before
the Seven Gables.




                            XIX Alice's Posies


UNCLE VENNER, trundling a wheelbarrow, was the earliest person stirring
in the neighborhood the day after the storm.

Pyncheon Street, in front of the House of the Seven Gables, was a far
pleasanter scene than a by-lane, confined by shabby fences, and
bordered with wooden dwellings of the meaner class, could reasonably be
expected to present.  Nature made sweet amends, that morning, for the
five unkindly days which had preceded it.  It would have been enough to
live for, merely to look up at the wide benediction of the sky, or as
much of it as was visible between the houses, genial once more with
sunshine.  Every object was agreeable, whether to be gazed at in the
breadth, or examined more minutely.  Such, for example, were the
well-washed pebbles and gravel of the sidewalk; even the sky-reflecting
pools in the centre of the street; and the grass, now freshly verdant,
that crept along the base of the fences, on the other side of which, if
one peeped over, was seen the multifarious growth of gardens.
Vegetable productions, of whatever kind, seemed more than negatively
happy, in the juicy warmth and abundance of their life.  The Pyncheon
Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the
morning sun and a sweet-tempered little breeze, which lingered within
this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leafy tongues a-whispering all
at once.  This aged tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the
gale.  It had kept its boughs unshattered, and its full complement of
leaves; and the whole in perfect verdure, except a single branch, that,
by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the
autumn, had been transmuted to bright gold.  It was like the golden
branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades.

This one mystic branch hung down before the main entrance of the Seven
Gables, so nigh the ground that any passer-by might have stood on
tiptoe and plucked it off.  Presented at the door, it would have been a
symbol of his right to enter, and be made acquainted with all the
secrets of the house.  So little faith is due to external appearance,
that there was really an inviting aspect over the venerable edifice,
conveying an idea that its history must be a decorous and happy one,
and such as would be delightful for a fireside tale.  Its windows
gleamed cheerfully in the slanting sunlight.  The lines and tufts of
green moss, here and there, seemed pledges of familiarity and
sisterhood with Nature; as if this human dwelling-place, being of such
old date, had established its prescriptive title among primeval oaks
and whatever other objects, by virtue of their long continuance, have
acquired a gracious right to be.  A person of imaginative temperament,
while passing by the house, would turn, once and again, and peruse it
well:  its many peaks, consenting together in the clustered chimney;
the deep projection over its basement-story; the arched window,
imparting a look, if not of grandeur, yet of antique gentility, to the
broken portal over which it opened; the luxuriance of gigantic
burdocks, near the threshold; he would note all these characteristics,
and be conscious of something deeper than he saw.  He would conceive
the mansion to have been the residence of the stubborn old Puritan,
Integrity, who, dying in some forgotten generation, had left a blessing
in all its rooms and chambers, the efficacy of which was to be seen in
the religion, honesty, moderate competence, or upright poverty and
solid happiness, of his descendants, to this day.

One object, above all others, would take root in the imaginative
observer's memory.  It was the great tuft of flowers,--weeds, you would
have called them, only a week ago,--the tuft of crimson-spotted
flowers, in the angle between the two front gables. The old people used
to give them the name of Alice's Posies, in remembrance of fair Alice
Pyncheon, who was believed to have brought their seeds from Italy.
They were flaunting in rich beauty and full bloom to-day, and seemed,
as it were, a mystic expression that something within the house was
consummated.

It was but little after sunrise, when Uncle Venner made his appearance,
as aforesaid, impelling a wheelbarrow along the street. He was going
his matutinal rounds to collect cabbage-leaves, turnip-tops,
potato-skins, and the miscellaneous refuse of the dinner-pot, which the
thrifty housewives of the neighborhood were accustomed to put aside, as
fit only to feed a pig. Uncle Venner's pig was fed entirely, and kept
in prime order, on these eleemosynary contributions; insomuch that the
patched philosopher used to promise that, before retiring to his farm,
he would make a feast of the portly grunter, and invite all his
neighbors to partake of the joints and spare-ribs which they had helped
to fatten. Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon's housekeeping had so greatly
improved, since Clifford became a member of the family, that her share
of the banquet would have been no lean one; and Uncle Venner,
accordingly, was a good deal disappointed not to find the large earthen
pan, full of fragmentary eatables, that ordinarily awaited his coming
at the back doorstep of the Seven Gables.

"I never knew Miss Hepzibah so forgetful before," said the patriarch to
himself.  "She must have had a dinner yesterday,--no question of that!
She always has one, nowadays.  So where's the pot-liquor and
potato-skins, I ask? Shall I knock, and see if she's stirring yet? No,
no,--'t won't do! If little Phoebe was about the house, I should not
mind knocking; but Miss Hepzibah, likely as not, would scowl down at me
out of the window, and look cross, even if she felt pleasantly.  So,
I'll come back at noon."

With these reflections, the old man was shutting the gate of the little
back-yard.  Creaking on its hinges, however, like every other gate and
door about the premises, the sound reached the ears of the occupant of
the northern gable, one of the windows of which had a side-view towards
the gate.

"Good-morning, Uncle Venner!" said the daguerreotypist, leaning out of
the window.  "Do you hear nobody stirring?"

"Not a soul," said the man of patches.  "But that's no wonder.  'Tis
barely half an hour past sunrise, yet.  But I'm really glad to see you,
Mr. Holgrave! There's a strange, lonesome look about this side of the
house; so that my heart misgave me, somehow or other, and I felt as if
there was nobody alive in it.  The front of the house looks a good deal
cheerier; and Alice's Posies are blooming there beautifully; and if I
were a young man, Mr. Holgrave, my sweetheart should have one of those
flowers in her bosom, though I risked my neck climbing for it! Well,
and did the wind keep you awake last night?"

"It did, indeed!" answered the artist, smiling.  "If I were a believer
in ghosts,--and I don't quite know whether I am or not,--I should have
concluded that all the old Pyncheons were running riot in the lower
rooms, especially in Miss Hepzibah's part of the house.  But it is very
quiet now."

"Yes, Miss Hepzibah will be apt to over-sleep herself, after being
disturbed, all night, with the racket," said Uncle Venner.  "But it
would be odd, now, wouldn't it, if the Judge had taken both his cousins
into the country along with him? I saw him go into the shop yesterday."

"At what hour?" inquired Holgrave.

"Oh, along in the forenoon," said the old man.  "Well, well! I must go
my rounds, and so must my wheelbarrow.  But I'll be back here at
dinner-time; for my pig likes a dinner as well as a breakfast.  No
meal-time, and no sort of victuals, ever seems to come amiss to my pig.
Good morning to you! And, Mr. Holgrave, if I were a young man, like
you, I'd get one of Alice's Posies, and keep it in water till Phoebe
comes back."

"I have heard," said the daguerreotypist, as he drew in his head, "that
the water of Maule's well suits those flowers best."

Here the conversation ceased, and Uncle Venner went on his way.  For
half an hour longer, nothing disturbed the repose of the Seven Gables;
nor was there any visitor, except a carrier-boy, who, as he passed the
front doorstep, threw down one of his newspapers; for Hepzibah, of
late, had regularly taken it in.  After a while, there came a fat
woman, making prodigious speed, and stumbling as she ran up the steps
of the shop-door.  Her face glowed with fire-heat, and, it being a
pretty warm morning, she bubbled and hissed, as it were, as if all
a-fry with chimney-warmth, and summer-warmth, and the warmth of her own
corpulent velocity.  She tried the shop-door; it was fast.  She tried
it again, with so angry a jar that the bell tinkled angrily back at her.

"The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon!" muttered the irascible housewife.
"Think of her pretending to set up a cent-shop, and then lying abed
till noon! These are what she calls gentlefolk's airs, I suppose!  But
I'll either start her ladyship, or break the door down!"

She shook it accordingly, and the bell, having a spiteful little temper
of its own, rang obstreperously, making its remonstrances heard,--not,
indeed, by the ears for which they were intended,--but by a good lady
on the opposite side of the street.  She opened the window, and
addressed the impatient applicant.

"You'll find nobody there, Mrs. Gubbins."

"But I must and will find somebody here!" cried Mrs. Gubbins,
inflicting another outrage on the bell.  "I want a half-pound of pork,
to fry some first-rate flounders for Mr. Gubbins's breakfast; and, lady
or not, Old Maid Pyncheon shall get up and serve me with it!"

"But do hear reason, Mrs. Gubbins!" responded the lady opposite.  "She,
and her brother too, have both gone to their cousin's, Judge Pyncheon's
at his country-seat.  There's not a soul in the house, but that young
daguerreotype-man that sleeps in the north gable.  I saw old Hepzibah
and Clifford go away yesterday; and a queer couple of ducks they were,
paddling through the mud-puddles!  They're gone, I'll assure you."

"And how do you know they're gone to the Judge's?" asked Mrs. Gubbins.
"He's a rich man; and there's been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah
this many a day, because he won't give her a living.  That's the main
reason of her setting up a cent-shop."

"I know that well enough," said the neighbor.  "But they're
gone,--that's one thing certain.  And who but a blood relation, that
couldn't help himself, I ask you, would take in that awful-tempered old
maid, and that dreadful Clifford? That's it, you may be sure."

Mrs. Gubbins took her departure, still brimming over with hot wrath
against the absent Hepzibah.  For another half-hour, or, perhaps,
considerably more, there was almost as much quiet on the outside of the
house as within.  The elm, however, made a pleasant, cheerful, sunny
sigh, responsive to the breeze that was elsewhere imperceptible; a
swarm of insects buzzed merrily under its drooping shadow, and became
specks of light whenever they darted into the sunshine; a locust sang,
once or twice, in some inscrutable seclusion of the tree; and a
solitary little bird, with plumage of pale gold, came and hovered about
Alice's Posies.

At last our small acquaintance, Ned Higgins, trudged up the street, on
his way to school; and happening, for the first time in a fortnight, to
be the possessor of a cent, he could by no means get past the shop-door
of the Seven Gables.  But it would not open.  Again and again, however,
and half a dozen other agains, with the inexorable pertinacity of a
child intent upon some object important to itself, did he renew his
efforts for admittance.  He had, doubtless, set his heart upon an
elephant; or, possibly, with Hamlet, he meant to eat a crocodile.  In
response to his more violent attacks, the bell gave, now and then, a
moderate tinkle, but could not be stirred into clamor by any exertion
of the little fellow's childish and tiptoe strength.  Holding by the
door-handle, he peeped through a crevice of the curtain, and saw that
the inner door, communicating with the passage towards the parlor, was
closed.

"Miss Pyncheon!" screamed the child, rapping on the window-pane, "I
want an elephant!"

There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons, Ned began
to grow impatient; and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over,
he picked up a stone, with a naughty purpose to fling it through the
window; at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath.  A
man--one of two who happened to be passing by--caught the urchin's arm.

"What's the trouble, old gentleman?" he asked.

"I want old Hepzibah, or Phoebe, or any of them!" answered Ned,
sobbing.  "They won't open the door; and I can't get my elephant!"

"Go to school, you little scamp!" said the man.  "There's another
cent-shop round the corner.  'T is very strange, Dixey," added he to
his companion, "what's become of all these Pyncheon's! Smith, the
livery-stable keeper, tells me Judge Pyncheon put his horse up
yesterday, to stand till after dinner, and has not taken him away yet.
And one of the Judge's hired men has been in, this morning, to make
inquiry about him.  He's a kind of person, they say, that seldom breaks
his habits, or stays out o' nights."

"Oh, he'll turn up safe enough!" said Dixey.  "And as for Old Maid
Pyncheon, take my word for it, she has run in debt, and gone off from
her creditors.  I foretold, you remember, the first morning she set up
shop, that her devilish scowl would frighten away customers.  They
couldn't stand it!"

"I never thought she'd make it go," remarked his friend.  "This
business of cent-shops is overdone among the women-folks.  My wife
tried it, and lost five dollars on her outlay!"

"Poor business!" said Dixey, shaking his head.  "Poor business!"

In the course of the morning, there were various other attempts to open
a communication with the supposed inhabitants of this silent and
impenetrable mansion.  The man of root-beer came, in his neatly painted
wagon, with a couple of dozen full bottles, to be exchanged for empty
ones; the baker, with a lot of crackers which Hepzibah had ordered for
her retail custom; the butcher, with a nice titbit which he fancied she
would be eager to secure for Clifford.  Had any observer of these
proceedings been aware of the fearful secret hidden within the house,
it would have affected him with a singular shape and modification of
horror, to see the current of human life making this small eddy
hereabouts,--whirling sticks, straws and all such trifles, round and
round, right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen!

The butcher was so much in earnest with his sweetbread of lamb, or
whatever the dainty might be, that he tried every accessible door of
the Seven Gables, and at length came round again to the shop, where he
ordinarily found admittance.

"It's a nice article, and I know the old lady would jump at it," said
he to himself.  "She can't be gone away! In fifteen years that I have
driven my cart through Pyncheon Street, I've never known her to be away
from home; though often enough, to be sure, a man might knock all day
without bringing her to the door.  But that was when she'd only herself
to provide for."

Peeping through the same crevice of the curtain where, only a little
while before, the urchin of elephantine appetite had peeped, the
butcher beheld the inner door, not closed, as the child had seen it,
but ajar, and almost wide open.  However it might have happened, it was
the fact.  Through the passage-way there was a dark vista into the
lighter but still obscure interior of the parlor.  It appeared to the
butcher that he could pretty clearly discern what seemed to be the
stalwart legs, clad in black pantaloons, of a man sitting in a large
oaken chair, the back of which concealed all the remainder of his
figure.  This contemptuous tranquillity on the part of an occupant of
the house, in response to the butcher's indefatigable efforts to
attract notice, so piqued the man of flesh that he determined to
withdraw.

"So," thought he, "there sits Old Maid Pyncheon's bloody brother, while
I've been giving myself all this trouble! Why, if a hog hadn't more
manners, I'd stick him! I call it demeaning a man's business to trade
with such people; and from this time forth, if they want a sausage or
an ounce of liver, they shall run after the cart for it!"

He tossed the titbit angrily into his cart, and drove off in a pet.

Not a great while afterwards there was a sound of music turning the
corner and approaching down the street, with several intervals of
silence, and then a renewed and nearer outbreak of brisk melody.  A mob
of children was seen moving onward, or stopping, in unison with the
sound, which appeared to proceed from the centre of the throng; so that
they were loosely bound together by slender strains of harmony, and
drawn along captive; with ever and anon an accession of some little
fellow in an apron and straw-hat, capering forth from door or gateway.
Arriving under the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, it proved to be the
Italian boy, who, with his monkey and show of puppets, had once before
played his hurdy-gurdy beneath the arched window.  The pleasant face of
Phoebe--and doubtless, too, the liberal recompense which she had flung
him--still dwelt in his remembrance.  His expressive features kindled
up, as he recognized the spot where this trifling incident of his
erratic life had chanced.  He entered the neglected yard (now wilder
than ever, with its growth of hog-weed and burdock), stationed himself
on the doorstep of the main entrance, and, opening his show-box, began
to play.  Each individual of the automatic community forthwith set to
work, according to his or her proper vocation:  the monkey, taking off
his Highland bonnet, bowed and scraped to the by-standers most
obsequiously, with ever an observant eye to pick up a stray cent; and
the young foreigner himself, as he turned the crank of his machine,
glanced upward to the arched window, expectant of a presence that would
make his music the livelier and sweeter.  The throng of children stood
near; some on the sidewalk; some within the yard; two or three
establishing themselves on the very door-step; and one squatting on the
threshold.  Meanwhile, the locust kept singing in the great old
Pyncheon Elm.

"I don't hear anybody in the house," said one of the children to
another.  "The monkey won't pick up anything here."

"There is somebody at home," affirmed the urchin on the threshold.  "I
heard a step!"

Still the young Italian's eye turned sidelong upward; and it really
seemed as if the touch of genuine, though slight and almost playful,
emotion communicated a juicier sweetness to the dry, mechanical process
of his minstrelsy.  These wanderers are readily responsive to any
natural kindness--be it no more than a smile, or a word itself not
understood, but only a warmth in it--which befalls them on the roadside
of life.  They remember these things, because they are the little
enchantments which, for the instant,--for the space that reflects a
landscape in a soap-bubble,--build up a home about them.  Therefore,
the Italian boy would not be discouraged by the heavy silence with
which the old house seemed resolute to clog the vivacity of his
instrument.  He persisted in his melodious appeals; he still looked
upward, trusting that his dark, alien countenance would soon be
brightened by Phoebe's sunny aspect.  Neither could he be willing to
depart without again beholding Clifford, whose sensibility, like
Phoebe's smile, had talked a kind of heart's language to the foreigner.
He repeated all his music over and over again, until his auditors were
getting weary.  So were the little wooden people in his show-box, and
the monkey most of all.  There was no response, save the singing of the
locust.

"No children live in this house," said a schoolboy, at last.  "Nobody
lives here but an old maid and an old man.  You'll get nothing here!
Why don't you go along?"

"You fool, you, why do you tell him?" whispered a shrewd little Yankee,
caring nothing for the music, but a good deal for the cheap rate at
which it was had. "Let him play as he likes!  If there's nobody to pay
him, that's his own lookout!"

Once more, however, the Italian ran over his round of melodies.  To the
common observer--who could understand nothing of the case, except the
music and the sunshine on the hither side of the door--it might have
been amusing to watch the pertinacity of the street-performer.  Will he
succeed at last? Will that stubborn door be suddenly flung open? Will a
group of joyous children, the young ones of the house, come dancing,
shouting, laughing, into the open air, and cluster round the show-box,
looking with eager merriment at the puppets, and tossing each a copper
for long-tailed Mammon, the monkey, to pick up?

But to us, who know the inner heart of the Seven Gables as well as its
exterior face, there is a ghastly effect in this repetition of light
popular tunes at its door-step. It would be an ugly business, indeed,
if Judge Pyncheon (who would not have cared a fig for Paganini's fiddle
in his most harmonious mood) should make his appearance at the door,
with a bloody shirt-bosom, and a grim frown on his swarthily white
visage, and motion the foreign vagabond away! Was ever before such a
grinding out of jigs and waltzes, where nobody was in the cue to dance?
Yes, very often. This contrast, or intermingling of tragedy with mirth,
happens daily, hourly, momently. The gloomy and desolate old house,
deserted of life, and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude,
was the emblem of many a human heart, which, nevertheless, is compelled
to hear the thrill and echo of the world's gayety around it.

Before the conclusion of the Italian's performance, a couple of men
happened to be passing, On their way to dinner.   "I say, you young
French fellow!" called out one of them,--"come away from that doorstep,
and go somewhere else with your nonsense! The Pyncheon family live
there; and they are in great trouble, just about this time.  They don't
feel musical to-day.  It is reported all over town that Judge Pyncheon,
who owns the house, has been murdered; and the city marshal is going to
look into the matter.  So be off with you, at once!"

As the Italian shouldered his hurdy-gurdy, he saw on the doorstep a
card, which had been covered, all the morning, by the newspaper that
the carrier had flung upon it, but was now shuffled into sight.  He
picked it up, and perceiving something written in pencil, gave it to
the man to read.  In fact, it was an engraved card of Judge Pyncheon's
with certain pencilled memoranda on the back, referring to various
businesses which it had been his purpose to transact during the
preceding day.  It formed a prospective epitome of the day's history;
only that affairs had not turned out altogether in accordance with the
programme.  The card must have been lost from the Judge's vest-pocket
in his preliminary attempt to gain access by the main entrance of the
house.  Though well soaked with rain, it was still partially legible.

"Look here; Dixey!" cried the man.  "This has something to do with
Judge Pyncheon.  See!--here's his name printed on it; and here, I
suppose, is some of his handwriting."

"Let's go to the city marshal with it!" said Dixey.  "It may give him
just the clew he wants.  After all," whispered he in his companion's
ear, "it would be no wonder if the Judge has gone into that door and
never come out again! A certain cousin of his may have been at his old
tricks.  And Old Maid Pyncheon having got herself in debt by the
cent-shop,--and the Judge's pocket-book being well filled,--and bad
blood amongst them already! Put all these things together and see what
they make!"

"Hush, hush!" whispered the other.  "It seems like a sin to be the
first to speak of such a thing.  But I think, with you, that we had
better go to the city marshal."

"Yes, yes!" said Dixey.  "Well!--I always said there was something
devilish in that woman's scowl!"

The men wheeled about, accordingly, and retraced their steps up the
street.  The Italian, also, made the best of his way off, with a
parting glance up at the arched window.  As for the children, they took
to their heels, with one accord, and scampered as if some giant or ogre
were in pursuit, until, at a good distance from the house, they stopped
as suddenly and simultaneously as they had set out.  Their susceptible
nerves took an indefinite alarm from what they had overheard.  Looking
back at the grotesque peaks and shadowy angles of the old mansion, they
fancied a gloom diffused about it which no brightness of the sunshine
could dispel.  An imaginary Hepzibah scowled and shook her finger at
them, from several windows at the same moment.  An imaginary
Clifford--for (and it would have deeply wounded him to know it) he had
always been a horror to these small people--stood behind the unreal
Hepzibah, making awful gestures, in a faded dressing-gown.  Children
are even more apt, if possible, than grown people, to catch the
contagion of a panic terror.  For the rest of the day, the more timid
went whole streets about, for the sake of avoiding the Seven Gables;
while the bolder signalized their hardihood by challenging their
comrades to race past the mansion at full speed.

It could not have been more than half an hour after the disappearance
of the Italian boy, with his unseasonable melodies, when a cab drove
down the street.  It stopped beneath the Pyncheon Elm; the cabman took
a trunk, a canvas bag, and a bandbox, from the top of his vehicle, and
deposited them on the doorstep of the old house; a straw bonnet, and
then the pretty figure of a young girl, came into view from the
interior of the cab.  It was Phoebe! Though not altogether so blooming
as when she first tripped into our story,--for, in the few intervening
weeks, her experiences had made her graver, more womanly, and
deeper-eyed, in token of a heart that had begun to suspect its
depths,--still there was the quiet glow of natural sunshine over her.
Neither had she forfeited her proper gift of making things look real,
rather than fantastic, within her sphere.  Yet we feel it to be a
questionable venture, even for Phoebe, at this juncture, to cross the
threshold of the Seven Gables.  Is her healthful presence potent enough
to chase away the crowd of pale, hideous, and sinful phantoms, that
have gained admittance there since her departure? Or will she,
likewise, fade, sicken, sadden, and grow into deformity, and be only
another pallid phantom, to glide noiselessly up and down the stairs,
and affright children as she pauses at the window?

At least, we would gladly forewarn the unsuspecting girl that there is
nothing in human shape or substance to receive her, unless it be the
figure of Judge Pyncheon, who--wretched spectacle that he is, and
frightful in our remembrance, since our night-long vigil with
him!--still keeps his place in the oaken chair.

Phoebe first tried the shop-door.  It did not yield to her hand; and
the white curtain, drawn across the window which formed the upper
section of the door, struck her quick perceptive faculty as something
unusual.  Without making another effort to enter here, she betook
herself to the great portal, under the arched window.  Finding it
fastened, she knocked.  A reverberation came from the emptiness within.
She knocked again, and a third time; and, listening intently, fancied
that the floor creaked, as if Hepzibah were coming, with her ordinary
tiptoe movement, to admit her.  But so dead a silence ensued upon this
imaginary sound, that she began to question whether she might not have
mistaken the house, familiar as she thought herself with its exterior.

Her notice was now attracted by a child's voice, at some distance.  It
appeared to call her name.  Looking in the direction whence it
proceeded, Phoebe saw little Ned Higgins, a good way down the street,
stamping, shaking his head violently, making deprecatory gestures with
both hands, and shouting to her at mouth-wide screech.

"No, no, Phoebe!" he screamed.  "Don't you go in! There's something
wicked there! Don't--don't--don't go in!"

But, as the little personage could not be induced to approach near
enough to explain himself, Phoebe concluded that he had been
frightened, on some of his visits to the shop, by her cousin Hepzibah;
for the good lady's manifestations, in truth, ran about an equal chance
of scaring children out of their wits, or compelling them to unseemly
laughter.  Still, she felt the more, for this incident, how
unaccountably silent and impenetrable the house had become.  As her
next resort, Phoebe made her way into the garden, where on so warm and
bright a day as the present, she had little doubt of finding Clifford,
and perhaps Hepzibah also, idling away the noontide in the shadow of
the arbor.  Immediately on her entering the garden gate, the family of
hens half ran, half flew to meet her; while a strange grimalkin, which
was prowling under the parlor window, took to his heels, clambered
hastily over the fence, and vanished.  The arbor was vacant, and its
floor, table, and circular bench were still damp, and bestrewn with
twigs and the disarray of the past storm.  The growth of the garden
seemed to have got quite out of bounds; the weeds had taken advantage
of Phoebe's absence, and the long-continued rain, to run rampant over
the flowers and kitchen-vegetables.  Maule's well had overflowed its
stone border, and made a pool of formidable breadth in that corner of
the garden.

The impression of the whole scene was that of a spot where no human
foot had left its print for many preceding days,--probably not since
Phoebe's departure,--for she saw a side-comb of her own under the table
of the arbor, where it must have fallen on the last afternoon when she
and Clifford sat there.

The girl knew that her two relatives were capable of far greater
oddities than that of shutting themselves up in their old house, as
they appeared now to have done.  Nevertheless, with indistinct
misgivings of something amiss, and apprehensions to which she could not
give shape, she approached the door that formed the customary
communication between the house and garden.  It was secured within,
like the two which she had already tried.  She knocked, however; and
immediately, as if the application had been expected, the door was
drawn open, by a considerable exertion of some unseen person's
strength, not wide, but far enough to afford her a sidelong entrance.
As Hepzibah, in order not to expose herself to inspection from without,
invariably opened a door in this manner, Phoebe necessarily concluded
that it was her cousin who now admitted her.

Without hesitation, therefore, she stepped across the threshold, and
had no sooner entered than the door closed behind her.




                          XX The Flower of Eden


PHOEBE, coming so suddenly from the sunny daylight, was altogether
bedimmed in such density of shadow as lurked in most of the passages of
the old house.  She was not at first aware by whom she had been
admitted.  Before her eyes had adapted themselves to the obscurity, a
hand grasped her own with a firm but gentle and warm pressure, thus
imparting a welcome which caused her heart to leap and thrill with an
indefinable shiver of enjoyment.  She felt herself drawn along, not
towards the parlor, but into a large and unoccupied apartment, which
had formerly been the grand reception-room of the Seven Gables.  The
sunshine came freely into all the uncurtained windows of this room, and
fell upon the dusty floor; so that Phoebe now clearly saw--what,
indeed, had been no secret, after the encounter of a warm hand with
hers--that it was not Hepzibah nor Clifford, but Holgrave, to whom she
owed her reception.  The subtile, intuitive communication, or, rather,
the vague and formless impression of something to be told, had made her
yield unresistingly to his impulse.  Without taking away her hand, she
looked eagerly in his face, not quick to forebode evil, but unavoidably
conscious that the state of the family had changed since her departure,
and therefore anxious for an explanation.

The artist looked paler than ordinary; there was a thoughtful and
severe contraction of his forehead, tracing a deep, vertical line
between the eyebrows.  His smile, however, was full of genuine warmth,
and had in it a joy, by far the most vivid expression that Phoebe had
ever witnessed, shining out of the New England reserve with which
Holgrave habitually masked whatever lay near his heart.  It was the
look wherewith a man, brooding alone over some fearful object, in a
dreary forest or illimitable desert, would recognize the familiar
aspect of his dearest friend, bringing up all the peaceful ideas that
belong to home, and the gentle current of every-day affairs.  And yet,
as he felt the necessity of responding to her look of inquiry, the
smile disappeared.

"I ought not to rejoice that you have come, Phoebe," said he.  "We meet
at a strange moment!"

"What has happened!" she exclaimed.  "Why is the house so deserted?
Where are Hepzibah and Clifford?"

"Gone! I cannot imagine where they are!" answered Holgrave.  "We are
alone in the house!"

"Hepzibah and Clifford gone?" cried Phoebe.  "It is not possible!  And
why have you brought me into this room, instead of the parlor?  Ah,
something terrible has happened! I must run and see!"

"No, no, Phoebe!" said Holgrave holding her back.  "It is as I have
told you.  They are gone, and I know not whither.  A terrible event
has, indeed happened, but not to them, nor, as I undoubtingly believe,
through any agency of theirs.  If I read your character rightly,
Phoebe," he continued, fixing his eyes on hers with stern anxiety,
intermixed with tenderness, "gentle as you are, and seeming to have
your sphere among common things, you yet possess remarkable strength.
You have wonderful poise, and a faculty which, when tested, will prove
itself capable of dealing with matters that fall far out of the
ordinary rule."

"Oh, no, I am very weak!" replied Phoebe, trembling.  "But tell me what
has happened!"

"You are strong!" persisted Holgrave.  "You must be both strong and
wise; for I am all astray, and need your counsel.  It may be you can
suggest the one right thing to do!"

"Tell me!--tell me!" said Phoebe, all in a tremble.  "It oppresses,--it
terrifies me,--this mystery! Anything else I can bear!"

The artist hesitated.  Notwithstanding what he had just said, and most
sincerely, in regard to the self-balancing power with which Phoebe
impressed him, it still seemed almost wicked to bring the awful secret
of yesterday to her knowledge.  It was like dragging a hideous shape of
death into the cleanly and cheerful space before a household fire,
where it would present all the uglier aspect, amid the decorousness of
everything about it.  Yet it could not be concealed from her; she must
needs know it.

"Phoebe," said he, "do you remember this?" He put into her hand a
daguerreotype; the same that he had shown her at their first interview
in the garden, and which so strikingly brought out the hard and
relentless traits of the original.

"What has this to do with Hepzibah and Clifford?" asked Phoebe, with
impatient surprise that Holgrave should so trifle with her at such a
moment.  "It is Judge Pyncheon! You have shown it to me before!"

"But here is the same face, taken within this half-hour" said the
artist, presenting her with another miniature.  "I had just finished it
when I heard you at the door."

"This is death!" shuddered Phoebe, turning very pale.  "Judge Pyncheon
dead!"

"Such as there represented," said Holgrave, "he sits in the next room.
The Judge is dead, and Clifford and Hepzibah have vanished!  I know no
more.  All beyond is conjecture.  On returning to my solitary chamber,
last evening, I noticed no light, either in the parlor, or Hepzibah's
room, or Clifford's; no stir nor footstep about the house.  This
morning, there was the same death-like quiet.  From my window, I
overheard the testimony of a neighbor, that your relatives were seen
leaving the house in the midst of yesterday's storm.  A rumor reached
me, too, of Judge Pyncheon being missed.  A feeling which I cannot
describe--an indefinite sense of some catastrophe, or
consummation--impelled me to make my way into this part of the house,
where I discovered what you see.  As a point of evidence that may be
useful to Clifford, and also as a memorial valuable to myself,--for,
Phoebe, there are hereditary reasons that connect me strangely with
that man's fate,--I used the means at my disposal to preserve this
pictorial record of Judge Pyncheon's death."

Even in her agitation, Phoebe could not help remarking the calmness of
Holgrave's demeanor.  He appeared, it is true, to feel the whole
awfulness of the Judge's death, yet had received the fact into his mind
without any mixture of surprise, but as an event preordained, happening
inevitably, and so fitting itself into past occurrences that it could
almost have been prophesied.

"Why have you not thrown open the doors, and called in witnesses?"
inquired she with a painful shudder.  "It is terrible to be here alone!"

"But Clifford!" suggested the artist.  "Clifford and Hepzibah! We must
consider what is best to be done in their behalf.  It is a wretched
fatality that they should have disappeared! Their flight will throw the
worst coloring over this event of which it is susceptible.  Yet how
easy is the explanation, to those who know them! Bewildered and
terror-stricken by the similarity of this death to a former one, which
was attended with such disastrous consequences to Clifford, they have
had no idea but of removing themselves from the scene.  How miserably
unfortunate! Had Hepzibah but shrieked aloud,--had Clifford flung wide
the door, and proclaimed Judge Pyncheon's death,--it would have been,
however awful in itself, an event fruitful of good consequences to
them.  As I view it, it would have gone far towards obliterating the
black stain on Clifford's character."

"And how," asked Phoebe, "could any good come from what is so very
dreadful?"

"Because," said the artist, "if the matter can be fairly considered and
candidly interpreted, it must be evident that Judge Pyncheon could not
have come unfairly to his end.  This mode of death had been an
idiosyncrasy with his family, for generations past; not often
occurring, indeed, but, when it does occur, usually attacking
individuals about the Judge's time of life, and generally in the
tension of some mental crisis, or, perhaps, in an access of wrath.  Old
Maule's prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical
predisposition in the Pyncheon race.  Now, there is a minute and almost
exact similarity in the appearances connected with the death that
occurred yesterday and those recorded of the death of Clifford's uncle
thirty years ago.   It is true, there was a certain arrangement of
circumstances, unnecessary to be recounted, which made it possible nay,
as men look at these things, probable, or even certain--that old
Jaffrey Pyncheon came to a violent death, and by Clifford's hands."

"Whence came those circumstances?" exclaimed Phoebe.  "He being
innocent, as we know him to be!"

"They were arranged," said Holgrave,--"at least such has long been my
conviction,--they were arranged after the uncle's death, and before it
was made public, by the man who sits in yonder parlor.  His own death,
so like that former one, yet attended by none of those suspicious
circumstances, seems the stroke of God upon him, at once a punishment
for his wickedness, and making plain the innocence of Clifford. But
this flight,--it distorts everything! He may be in concealment, near at
hand.  Could we but bring him back before the discovery of the Judge's
death, the evil might be rectified."

"We must not hide this thing a moment longer!" said Phoebe.  "It is
dreadful to keep it so closely in our hearts.  Clifford is innocent.
God will make it manifest! Let us throw open the doors, and call all
the neighborhood to see the truth!"

"You are right, Phoebe," rejoined Holgrave.  "Doubtless you are right."

Yet the artist did not feel the horror, which was proper to Phoebe's
sweet and order-loving character, at thus finding herself at issue with
society, and brought in contact with an event that transcended ordinary
rules.  Neither was he in haste, like her, to betake himself within the
precincts of common life.  On the contrary, he gathered a wild
enjoyment,--as it were, a flower of strange beauty, growing in a
desolate spot, and blossoming in the wind,--such a flower of momentary
happiness he gathered from his present position.  It separated Phoebe
and himself from the world, and bound them to each other, by their
exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheon's mysterious death, and the
counsel which they were forced to hold respecting it.  The secret, so
long as it should continue such, kept them within the circle of a
spell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that
of an island in mid-ocean; once divulged, the ocean would flow betwixt
them, standing on its widely sundered shores.   Meanwhile, all the
circumstances of their situation seemed to draw them together; they
were like two children who go hand in hand, pressing closely to one
another's side, through a shadow-haunted passage.  The image of awful
Death, which filled the house, held them united by his stiffened grasp.

These influences hastened the development of emotions that might not
otherwise have flowered so.  Possibly, indeed, it had been Holgrave's
purpose to let them die in their undeveloped germs.  "Why do we delay
so?" asked Phoebe.  "This secret takes away my breath! Let us throw
open the doors!"

"In all our lives there can never come another moment like this!" said
Holgrave.  "Phoebe, is it all terror?--nothing but terror?  Are you
conscious of no joy, as I am, that has made this the only point of life
worth living for?"

"It seems a sin," replied Phoebe, trembling, "to think of joy at such a
time!"

"Could you but know, Phoebe, how it was with me the hour before you
came!" exclaimed the artist.  "A dark, cold, miserable hour!  The
presence of yonder dead man threw a great black shadow over everything;
he made the universe, so far as my perception could reach, a scene of
guilt and of retribution more dreadful than the guilt.  The sense of it
took away my youth.  I never hoped to feel young again! The world
looked strange, wild, evil, hostile; my past life, so lonesome and
dreary; my future, a shapeless gloom, which I must mould into gloomy
shapes!  But, Phoebe, you crossed the threshold; and hope, warmth, and
joy came in with you! The black moment became at once a blissful one.
It must not pass without the spoken word.  I love you!"

"How can you love a simple girl like me?" asked Phoebe, compelled by
his earnestness to speak.  "You have many, many thoughts, with which I
should try in vain to sympathize.  And I,--I, too,--I have tendencies
with which you would sympathize as little.  That is less matter.  But I
have not scope enough to make you happy."

"You are my only possibility of happiness!" answered Holgrave.  "I have
no faith in it, except as you bestow it on me!"

"And then--I am afraid!" continued Phoebe, shrinking towards Holgrave,
even while she told him so frankly the doubts with which he affected
her.  "You will lead me out of my own quiet path.  You will make me
strive to follow you where it is pathless.  I cannot do so.  It is not
my nature.  I shall sink down and perish!"

"Ah, Phoebe!" exclaimed Holgrave, with almost a sigh, and a smile that
was burdened with thought.

"It will be far otherwise than as you forebode.  The world owes all its
onward impulses to men ill at ease.  The happy man inevitably confines
himself within ancient limits.  I have a presentiment that, hereafter,
it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences,--perhaps, even, in
due time, to build a house for another generation,--in a word, to
conform myself to laws and the peaceful practice of society.  Your
poise will be more powerful than any oscillating tendency of mine."

"I would not have it so!" said Phoebe earnestly.

"Do you love me?" asked Holgrave.  "If we love one another, the moment
has room for nothing more.  Let us pause upon it, and be satisfied.  Do
you love me, Phoebe?"

"You look into my heart," said she, letting her eyes drop.  "You know I
love you!"

And it was in this hour, so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle
was wrought, without which every human existence is a blank.  The bliss
which makes all things true, beautiful, and holy shone around this
youth and maiden.  They were conscious of nothing sad nor old.  They
transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two
first dwellers in it.  The dead man, so close beside them, was
forgotten.  At such a crisis, there is no death; for immortality is
revealed anew, and embraces everything in its hallowed atmosphere.

But how soon the heavy earth-dream settled down again!

"Hark!" whispered Phoebe.  "Somebody is at the street door!"

"Now let us meet the world!" said Holgrave.  "No doubt, the rumor of
Judge Pyncheon's visit to this house, and the flight of Hepzibah and
Clifford, is about to lead to the investigation of the premises.  We
have no way but to meet it.  Let us open the door at once."

But, to their surprise, before they could reach the street door,--even
before they quitted the room in which the foregoing interview had
passed,--they heard footsteps in the farther passage.  The door,
therefore, which they supposed to be securely locked,--which Holgrave,
indeed, had seen to be so, and at which Phoebe had vainly tried to
enter,--must have been opened from without.  The sound of footsteps was
not harsh, bold, decided, and intrusive, as the gait of strangers would
naturally be, making authoritative entrance into a dwelling where they
knew themselves unwelcome.  It was feeble, as of persons either weak or
weary; there was the mingled murmur of two voices, familiar to both the
listeners.

"Can it be?" whispered Holgrave.

"It is they!" answered Phoebe.  "Thank God!--thank God!"

And then, as if in sympathy with Phoebe's whispered ejaculation, they
heard Hepzibah's voice more distinctly.

"Thank God, my brother, we are at home!"

"Well!--Yes!--thank God!" responded Clifford.  "A dreary home,
Hepzibah! But you have done well to bring me hither! Stay! That parlor
door is open.  I cannot pass by it! Let me go and rest me in the arbor,
where I used,--oh, very long ago, it seems to me, after what has
befallen us,--where I used to be so happy with little Phoebe!"

But the house was not altogether so dreary as Clifford imagined it.
They had not made many steps,--in truth, they were lingering in the
entry, with the listlessness of an accomplished purpose, uncertain what
to do next,--when Phoebe ran to meet them.  On beholding her, Hepzibah
burst into tears.  With all her might, she had staggered onward beneath
the burden of grief and responsibility, until now that it was safe to
fling it down.  Indeed, she had not energy to fling it down, but had
ceased to uphold it, and suffered it to press her to the earth.
Clifford appeared the stronger of the two.

"It is our own little Phoebe!--Ah! and Holgrave with, her" exclaimed
he, with a glance of keen and delicate insight, and a smile, beautiful,
kind, but melancholy.  "I thought of you both, as we came down the
street, and beheld Alice's Posies in full bloom.  And so the flower of
Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house to-day."




                                XXI The Departure


THE sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the
Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the
circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly
quite subsided in a fortnight.

It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a
person's biography, there is scarcely one--none, certainly, of anything
like a similar importance--to which the world so easily reconciles
itself as to his death.  In most other cases and contingencies, the
individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of
affairs, and affording a definite point for observation.  At his
decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy,--very small, as
compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,--and a
bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the
surface.  As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first
blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and
longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a
distinguished man.  But when it came to be understood, on the highest
professional authority, that the event was a natural, and--except for
some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy--by no
means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary
alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived.  In short, the
honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the
country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and
publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary.

Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent
person had haunted in his lifetime, there was a hidden stream of
private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly
at the street-corners.  It is very singular, how the fact of a man's
death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether
for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and
acting among them.  Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes
falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the
gold, and dishonors the baser metal.  Could the departed, whoever he
may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably
find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied,
on the scale of public appreciation.  But the talk, or scandal, to
which we now allude, had reference to matters of no less old a date
than the supposed murder, thirty or forty years ago, of the late Judge
Pyncheon's uncle.  The medical opinion with regard to his own recent
and regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a
murder was committed in the former case.  Yet, as the record showed,
there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had
gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon's private apartments, at or near
the moment of his death.  His desk and private drawers, in a room
contiguous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable
articles were missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man's
linen; and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the
guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford,
then residing with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables.

Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that undertook so to
account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Clifford's
agency.  Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the
facts, long so mysterious, had been obtained by the daguerreotypist
from one of those mesmerical seers who, nowadays, so strangely perplex
the aspect of human affairs, and put everybody's natural vision to the
blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut.

According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we
have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently
irreclaimable scapegrace.  The brutish, the animal instincts, as is
often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual
qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards
remarkable.  He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low
pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and
recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his
uncle.  This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelor's
affection, once strongly fixed upon him.  Now it is averred,--but
whether on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend
to have investigated,--that the young man was tempted by the devil, one
night, to search his uncle's private drawers, to which he had
unsuspected means of access.  While thus criminally occupied, he was
startled by the opening of the chamber-door.  There stood old Jaffrey
Pyncheon, in his nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his
agitation, alarm, and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to
which the old bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke
with blood, and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow
against the corner of a table.  What was to be done? The old man was
surely dead! Assistance would come too late! What a misfortune, indeed,
should it come too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring
the recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his
nephew in the very act of committing!

But he never did revive.  With the cool hardihood that always pertained
to him, the young man continued his search of the drawers, and found a
will, of recent date, in favor of Clifford,--which he destroyed,--and
an older one, in his own favor, which he suffered to remain.  But
before retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these
ransacked drawers, that some one had visited the chamber with sinister
purposes.  Suspicion, unless averted, might fix upon the real offender.
In the very presence of the dead man, therefore, he laid a scheme that
should free himself at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose
character he had at once a contempt and a repugnance.  It is not
probable, be it said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving
Clifford in a charge of murder.  Knowing that his uncle did not die by
violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis,
that such an inference might be drawn.  But, when the affair took this
darker aspect, Jaffrey's previous steps had already pledged him to
those which remained.  So craftily had he arranged the circumstances,
that, at Clifford's trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to
swear to anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive
explanation, by refraining to state what he had himself done and
witnessed.

Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon's inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,
indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive
commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a
sin.  This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent
respectability finds it easiest to dispose of.  It was suffered to fade
out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon's long subsequent survey of his own life.  He shuffled it
aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and
seldom thought of it again.

We leave the Judge to his repose.  He could not be styled fortunate at
the hour of death.  Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving
to add more wealth to his only child's inheritance.  Hardly a week
after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of
the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the point of
embarkation for his native land.  By this misfortune Clifford became
rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through
her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,--the wild
reformer,--Holgrave!

It was now far too late in Clifford's life for the good opinion of
society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.
What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even
the respect, of the unknown many.  The latter might probably have been
won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he
might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness.  After such wrong as he
had suffered, there is no reparation.  The pitiable mockery of it,
which the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long
after the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to
provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of.  It
is a truth (and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes
which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in
our mortal sphere, is ever really set right.   Time, the continual
vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of
death, render it impossible.  If, after long lapse of years, the right
seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in.  The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought
his irreparable ruin far behind him.

The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had a permanently invigorating and
ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford.  That strong and ponderous
man had been Clifford's nightmare.  There was no free breath to be
drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an influence.  The first
effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight,
was a tremulous exhilaration.  Subsiding from it, he did not sink into
his former intellectual apathy.  He never, it is true, attained to
nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties.  But he
recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to
display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it,
and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy
interest than heretofore.  He was evidently happy.   Could we pause to
give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at
command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes,
that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.

Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little
Phoebe, with the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the
dismal old House of the Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the
present, at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.
Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where
the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of
egg-laying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and conscience,
to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a
century past.  On the day set for their departure, the principal
personages of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in
the parlor.

"The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan
goes," observed Holgrave, as the party were discussing their future
arrangements.  "But I wonder that the late Judge--being so opulent, and
with a reasonable prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of
his own--should not have felt the propriety of embodying so excellent a
piece of domestic architecture in stone, rather than in wood.  Then,
every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit
its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of
years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and
thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to
the happiness of any one moment."

"Why," cried Phoebe, gazing into the artist's face with infinite
amazement, "how wonderfully your ideas are changed! A house of stone,
indeed! It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people
to live in something as fragile and temporary as a bird's-nest!"

"Ah, Phoebe, I told you how it would be!" said the artist, with a
half-melancholy laugh.  "You find me a conservative already!  Little
did I think ever to become one.  It is especially unpardonable in this
dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder
portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character, rendered
himself so long the evil destiny of his race."

"That picture!" said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance.
"Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting
me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind.  Wealth, it seems to
say!--boundless wealth!--unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when
I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich
secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden
opulence.  But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! What
could this dream have been?"

"Perhaps I can recall it," answered Holgrave.  "See! There are a
hundred chances to one that no person, unacquainted with the secret,
would ever touch this spring."

"A secret spring!" cried Clifford.  "Ah, I remember now! I did discover
it, one summer afternoon, when I was idling and dreaming about the
house, long, long ago.  But the mystery escapes me."

The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred.
In former days, the effect would probably have been to cause the
picture to start forward.  But, in so long a period of concealment, the
machinery had been eaten through with rust; so that at Holgrave's
pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tumbled suddenly from its
position, and lay face downward on the floor.  A recess in the wall was
thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with a
century's dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded
sheet of parchment.  Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed,
signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, and
conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of
territory at the Eastward.

"This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the
beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life," said the artist,
alluding to his legend.  "It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain,
while it was valuable; and now that they find the treasure, it has long
been worthless."

"Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him," exclaimed Hepzibah.
"When they were young together, Clifford probably made a kind of
fairy-tale of this discovery.  He was always dreaming hither and
thither about the house, and lighting up its dark corners with
beautiful stories.  And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if
it were real, thought my brother had found out his uncle's wealth.  He
died with this delusion in his mind!"

"But," said Phoebe, apart to Holgrave, "how came you to know the
secret?"

"My dearest Phoebe," said Holgrave, "how will it please you to assume
the name of Maule? As for the secret, it is the only inheritance that
has come down to me from my ancestors.  You should have known sooner
(only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long
drama of wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard, and am
probably as much a wizard as ever he was.  The son of the executed
Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to
construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended
the immense land-claim of the Pyncheons.  Thus they bartered their
eastern territory for Maule's garden-ground."

"And now" said Uncle Venner "I suppose their whole claim is not worth
one man's share in my farm yonder!"

"Uncle Venner," cried Phoebe, taking the patched philosopher's hand,
"you must never talk any more about your farm! You shall never go
there, as long as you live! There is a cottage in our new garden,--the
prettiest little yellowish-brown cottage you ever saw; and the
sweetest-looking place, for it looks just as if it were made of
gingerbread,--and we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose
for you.  And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall be as
happy as the day is long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits
with the wisdom and pleasantness which is always dropping from your
lips!"

"Ah! my dear child," quoth good Uncle Venner, quite overcome, "if you
were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of
keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons
on my waistcoat! And--soul alive!--that great sigh, which you made me
heave, has burst off the very last of them! But, never mind! It was the
happiest sigh I ever did heave; and it seems as if I must have drawn in
a gulp of heavenly breath, to make it with.  Well, well, Miss Phoebe!
They'll miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors;
and Pyncheon Street, I'm afraid, will hardly look the same without old
Uncle Venner, who remembers it with a mowing field on one side, and the
garden of the Seven Gables on the other.  But either I must go to your
country-seat, or you must come to my farm,--that's one of two things
certain; and I leave you to choose which!"

"Oh, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner!" said Clifford, who had
a remarkable enjoyment of the old man's mellow, quiet, and simple
spirit.  "I want you always to be within five minutes, saunter of my
chair.  You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has
not a drop of bitter essence at the bottom!"

"Dear me!" cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realize what manner
of man he was.  "And yet folks used to set me down among the simple
ones, in my younger days! But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet,--a
great deal the better, the longer I can be kept.  Yes; and my words of
wisdom, that you and Phoebe tell me of, are like the golden dandelions,
which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among
the withered grass, and under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as
December.  And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if
there were twice as many!"

A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of
the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house.  The party came forth, and
(with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few
days) proceeded to take their places.  They were chatting and laughing
very pleasantly together; and--as proves to be often the case, at
moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility--Clifford and
Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers, with
hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to
return thither at tea-time.  Several children were drawn to the spot by
so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray horses.
Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah put her hand into
her pocket, and presented the urchin, her earliest and staunchest
customer, with silver enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his
interior with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the
ark.

Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off.

"Well, Dixey," said one of them, "what do you think of this? My wife
kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay.
Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off
in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand,--reckoning her
share, and Clifford's, and Phoebe's,--and some say twice as much! If
you choose to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we are to take
it as the will of Providence, why, I can't exactly fathom it!"

"Pretty good business!" quoth the sagacious Dixey,--"pretty good
business!"

Maule's well, all this time, though left in solitude, was throwing up a
succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have
seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the
descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village maiden, over whom
he had thrown love's web of sorcery.  The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with
what foliage the September gale had spared to it, whispered
unintelligible prophecies.  And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from
the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that
sweet Alice Pyncheon--after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and
this present happiness, of her kindred mortals--had given one farewell
touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward
from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!
Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest
the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the
sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first,
after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble
and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his
death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian
Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still
shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life,
although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps
corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here,
likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand
years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close
at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom,
but assaulted by a snake.

From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad
stone steps, descending alongside the antique and massive foundation of
the Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimius Severus,
right below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate
Forum (where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun), passing
over a shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up with
ancient brick and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches,
built on the old pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very
pillars that once upheld them. At a distance beyond--yet but a little
way, considering how much history is heaped into the intervening
space--rises the great sweep of the Coliseum, with the blue sky
brightening through its upper tier of arches. Far off, the view is shut
in by the Alban Mountains, looking just the same, amid all this decay
and change, as when Romulus gazed thitherward over his half finished
wall.

We glance hastily at these things,--at this bright sky, and those
blue distant mountains, and at the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian,
venerable with a threefold antiquity, and at the company of world-famous
statues in the saloon,--in the hope of putting the reader into that
state of feeling which is experienced oftenest at Rome. It is a vague
sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such weight and density
in a bygone life, of which this spot was the centre, that the present
moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual affairs and
interests are but half as real here as elsewhere. Viewed through this
medium, our narrative--into which are woven some airy and unsubstantial
threads, intermixed with others, twisted out of the commonest stuff of
human existence--may seem not widely different from the texture of all
our lives.

Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we
handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike.

It might be that the four persons whom we are seeking to introduce were
conscious of this dreamy character of the present, as compared with the
square blocks of granite wherewith the Romans built their lives. Perhaps
it even contributed to the fanciful merriment which was just now their
mood. When we find ourselves fading into shadows and unrealities, it
seems hardly worth while to be sad, but rather to laugh as gayly as we
may, and ask little reason wherefore.

Of these four friends of ours, three were artists, or connected with
art; and, at this moment, they had been simultaneously struck by a
resemblance between one of the antique statues, a well-known masterpiece
of Grecian sculpture, and a young Italian, the fourth member of their
party.

"You must needs confess, Kenyon," said a dark-eyed young woman, whom
her friends called Miriam, "that you never chiselled out of marble, nor
wrought in clay, a more vivid likeness than this, cunning a bust-maker
as you think yourself. The portraiture is perfect in character,
sentiment, and feature. If it were a picture, the resemblance might be
half illusive and imaginary; but here, in this Pentelic marble, it is a
substantial fact, and may be tested by absolute touch and measurement.
Our friend Donatello is the very Faun of Praxiteles. Is it not true,
Hilda?"

"Not quite--almost--yes, I really think so," replied Hilda, a slender,
brown-haired, New England girl, whose perceptions of form and expression
were wonderfully clear and delicate. "If there is any difference between
the two faces, the reason may be, I suppose, that the Faun dwelt in
woods and fields, and consorted with his like; whereas Donatello has
known cities a little, and such people as ourselves. But the resemblance
is very close, and very strange."

"Not so strange," whispered Miriam mischievously; "for no Faun in
Arcadia was ever a greater simpleton than Donatello. He has hardly a
man's share of wit, small as that may be. It is a pity there are no
longer any of this congenial race of rustic creatures for our friend to
consort with!"

"Hush, naughty one!" returned Hilda. "You are very ungrateful, for you
well know he has wit enough to worship you, at all events."

"Then the greater fool he!" said Miriam so bitterly that Hilda's quiet
eyes were somewhat startled.

"Donatello, my dear friend," said Kenyon, in Italian, "pray gratify us
all by taking the exact attitude of this statue."

The young man laughed, and threw himself into the position in which
the statue has been standing for two or three thousand years. In truth,
allowing for the difference of costume, and if a lion's skin could have
been substituted for his modern talma, and a rustic pipe for his stick,
Donatello might have figured perfectly as the marble Faun, miraculously
softened into flesh and blood.

"Yes; the resemblance is wonderful," observed Kenyon, after examining
the marble and the man with the accuracy of a sculptor's eye. "There
is one point, however, or, rather, two points, in respect to which our
friend Donatello's abundant curls will not permit us to say whether the
likeness is carried into minute detail."

And the sculptor directed the attention of the party to the ears of the
beautiful statue which they were contemplating.

But we must do more than merely refer to this exquisite work of art; it
must be described, however inadequate may be the effort to express its
magic peculiarity in words.

The Faun is the marble image of a young man, leaning his right arm on
the trunk or stump of a tree; one hand hangs carelessly by his side;
in the other he holds the fragment of a pipe, or some such sylvan
instrument of music. His only garment--a lion's skin, with the claws
upon his shoulder--falls halfway down his back, leaving the limbs
and entire front of the figure nude. The form, thus displayed, is
marvellously graceful, but has a fuller and more rounded outline, more
flesh, and less of heroic muscle, than the old sculptors were wont to
assign to their types of masculine beauty. The character of the face
corresponds with the figure; it is most agreeable in outline and
feature, but rounded and somewhat voluptuously developed, especially
about the throat and chin; the nose is almost straight, but very
slightly curves inward, thereby acquiring an indescribable charm of
geniality and humor. The mouth, with its full yet delicate lips, seems
so nearly to smile outright, that it calls forth a responsive smile. The
whole statue--unlike anything else that ever was wrought in that severe
material of marble--conveys the idea of an amiable and sensual creature,
easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not incapable of being touched
by pathos. It is impossible to gaze long at this stone image without
conceiving a kindly sentiment towards it, as if its substance were warm
to the touch, and imbued with actual life. It comes very close to some
of our pleasantest sympathies.

Perhaps it is the very lack of moral severity, of any high and heroic
ingredient in the character of the Faun, that makes it so delightful an
object to the human eye and to the frailty of the human heart. The being
here represented is endowed with no principle of virtue, and would be
incapable of comprehending such; but he would be true and honest by dint
of his simplicity. We should expect from him no sacrifice or effort for
an abstract cause; there is not an atom of martyr's stuff in all that
softened marble; but he has a capacity for strong and warm attachment,
and might act devotedly through its impulse, and even die for it at
need. It is possible, too, that the Faun might be educated through the
medium of his emotions, so that the coarser animal portion of his nature
might eventually be thrown into the background, though never utterly
expelled.

The animal nature, indeed, is a most essential part of the Faun's
composition; for the characteristics of the brute creation meet and
combine with those of humanity in this strange yet true and natural
conception of antique poetry and art. Praxiteles has subtly diffused
throughout his work that mute mystery, which so hopelessly perplexes us
whenever we attempt to gain an intellectual or sympathetic knowledge of
the lower orders of creation. The riddle is indicated, however, only by
two definite signs: these are the two ears of the Faun, which are leaf
shaped, terminating in little peaks, like those of some species of
animals. Though not so seen in the marble, they are probably to be
considered as clothed in fine, downy fur. In the coarser representations
of this class of mythological creatures, there is another token of brute
kindred,--a certain caudal appendage; which, if the Faun of Praxiteles
must be supposed to possess it at all, is hidden by the lion's skin that
forms his garment. The pointed and furry ears, therefore, are the sole
indications of his wild, forest nature.

Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, the most delicate taste, the
sweetest feeling, and the rarest artistic skill--in a word, a sculptor
and a poet too--could have first dreamed of a Faun in this guise, and
then have succeeded in imprisoning the sportive and frisky thing in
marble. Neither man nor animal, and yet no monster, but a being in whom
both races meet on friendly ground. The idea grows coarse as we handle
it, and hardens in our grasp. But, if the spectator broods long over
the statue, he will be conscious of its spell; all the pleasantness of
sylvan life, all the genial and happy characteristics of creatures that
dwell in woods and fields, will seem to be mingled and kneaded into one
substance, along with the kindred qualities in the human soul. Trees,
grass, flowers, woodland streamlets, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated
man. The essence of all these was compressed long ago, and still exists,
within that discolored marble surface of the Faun of Praxiteles.

And, after all, the idea may have been no dream, but rather a poet's
reminiscence of a period when man's affinity with nature was more
strict, and his fellowship with every living thing more intimate and
dear.




CHAPTER II


THE FAUN


"Donatello," playfully cried Miriam, "do not leave us in this perplexity!
Shake aside those brown curls, my friend, and let us see whether this
marvellous resemblance extends to the very tips of the ears. If so, we
shall like you all the better!"

"No, no, dearest signorina," answered Donatello, laughing, but with
a certain earnestness. "I entreat you to take the tips of my ears for
granted." As he spoke, the young Italian made a skip and jump, light
enough for a veritable faun; so as to place himself quite beyond the
reach of the fair hand that was outstretched, as if to settle the matter
by actual examination. "I shall be like a wolf of the Apennines," he
continued, taking his stand on the other side of the Dying Gladiator,
"if you touch my ears ever so softly. None of my race could endure it.
It has always been a tender point with my forefathers and me."

He spoke in Italian, with the Tuscan rusticity of accent, and an
unshaped sort of utterance, betokening that he must heretofore have been
chiefly conversant with rural people.

"Well, well," said Miriam, "your tender point--your two tender points,
if you have them--shall be safe, so far as I am concerned. But how
strange this likeness is, after all! and how delightful, if it really
includes the pointed ears! O, it is impossible, of course," she
continued, in English, "with a real and commonplace young man like
Donatello; but you see how this peculiarity defines the position of
the Faun; and, while putting him where he cannot exactly assert his
brotherhood, still disposes us kindly towards the kindred creature. He
is not supernatural, but just on the verge of nature, and yet within
it. What is the nameless charm of this idea, Hilda? You can feel it more
delicately than I."

"It perplexes me," said Hilda thoughtfully, and shrinking a little;
"neither do I quite like to think about it."

"But, surely," said Kenyon, "you agree with Miriam and me that there is
something very touching and impressive in this statue of the Faun. In
some long-past age, he must really have existed. Nature needed, and
still needs, this beautiful creature; standing betwixt man and animal,
sympathizing with each, comprehending the speech of either race, and
interpreting the whole existence of one to the other. What a pity that
he has forever vanished from the hard and dusty paths of life,--unless,"
added the sculptor, in a sportive whisper, "Donatello be actually he!"

"You cannot conceive how this fantasy takes hold of me," responded
Miriam, between jest and earnest. "Imagine, now, a real being, similar
to this mythic Faun; how happy, how genial, how satisfactory would be
his life, enjoying the warm, sensuous, earthy side of nature; revelling
in the merriment of woods and streams; living as our four-footed kindred
do,--as mankind did in its innocent childhood; before sin, sorrow or
morality itself had ever been thought of! Ah! Kenyon, if Hilda and you
and I--if I, at least--had pointed ears! For I suppose the Faun had
no conscience, no remorse, no burden on the heart, no troublesome
recollections of any sort; no dark future either."

"What a tragic tone was that last, Miriam!" said the sculptor;
and, looking into her face, he was startled to behold it pale and
tear-stained. "How suddenly this mood has come over you!"

"Let it go as it came," said Miriam, "like a thunder-shower in this
Roman sky. All is sunshine again, you see!"

Donatello's refractoriness as regarded his ears had evidently cost him
something, and he now came close to Miriam's side, gazing at her with an
appealing air, as if to solicit forgiveness. His mute, helpless gesture
of entreaty had something pathetic in it, and yet might well enough
excite a laugh, so like it was to what you may see in the aspect of a
hound when he thinks himself in fault or disgrace. It was difficult to
make out the character of this young man. So full of animal life as
he was, so joyous in his deportment, so handsome, so physically
well-developed, he made no impression of incompleteness, of maimed or
stinted nature. And yet, in social intercourse, these familiar friends
of his habitually and instinctively allowed for him, as for a child or
some other lawless thing, exacting no strict obedience to conventional
rules, and hardly noticing his eccentricities enough to pardon them.
There was an indefinable characteristic about Donatello that set him
outside of rules.

He caught Miriam's hand, kissed it, and gazed into her eyes without
saying a word. She smiled, and bestowed on him a little careless caress,
singularly like what one would give to a pet dog when he puts himself in
the way to receive it. Not that it was so decided a caress either, but
only the merest touch, somewhere between a pat and a tap of the finger;
it might be a mark of fondness, or perhaps a playful pretence of
punishment. At all events, it appeared to afford Donatello exquisite
pleasure; insomuch that he danced quite round the wooden railing that
fences in the Dying Gladiator.

"It is the very step of the Dancing Faun," said Miriam, apart, to Hilda.
"What a child, or what a simpleton, he is! I continually find myself
treating Donatello as if he were the merest unfledged chicken; and yet
he can claim no such privileges in the right of his tender age, for he
is at least--how old should you think him, Hilda?"

"Twenty years, perhaps," replied Hilda, glancing at Donatello; "but,
indeed, I cannot tell; hardly so old, on second thoughts, or possibly
older. He has nothing to do with time, but has a look of eternal youth
in his face."

"All underwitted people have that look," said Miriam scornfully.

"Donatello has certainly the gift of eternal youth, as Hilda suggests,"
observed Kenyon, laughing; "for, judging by the date of this statue,
which, I am more and more convinced, Praxiteles carved on purpose for
him, he must be at least twenty-five centuries old, and he still looks
as young as ever."

"What age have you, Donatello?" asked Miriam.

"Signorina, I do not know," he answered; "no great age, however; for I
have only lived since I met you."

"Now, what old man of society could have turned a silly compliment more
smartly than that!" exclaimed Miriam. "Nature and art are just at one
sometimes. But what a happy ignorance is this of our friend Donatello!
Not to know his own age! It is equivalent to being immortal on earth. If
I could only forget mine!"

"It is too soon to wish that," observed the sculptor; "you are scarcely
older than Donatello looks."

"I shall be content, then," rejoined Miriam, "if I could only forget
one day of all my life." Then she seemed to repent of this allusion, and
hastily added, "A woman's days are so tedious that it is a boon to leave
even one of them out of the account."

The foregoing conversation had been carried on in a mood in which all
imaginative people, whether artists or poets, love to indulge. In this
frame of mind, they sometimes find their profoundest truths side by side
with the idlest jest, and utter one or the other, apparently without
distinguishing which is the most valuable, or assigning any considerable
value to either. The resemblance between the marble Faun and their
living companion had made a deep, half-serious, half-mirthful impression
on these three friends, and had taken them into a certain airy region,
lifting up, as it is so pleasant to feel them lifted, their heavy
earthly feet from the actual soil of life. The world had been set
afloat, as it were, for a moment, and relieved them, for just so long,
of all customary responsibility for what they thought and said.

It might be under this influence--or, perhaps, because sculptors always
abuse one another's works--that Kenyon threw in a criticism upon the
Dying Gladiator.

"I used to admire this statue exceedingly," he remarked, "but, latterly,
I find myself getting weary and annoyed that the man should be such a
length of time leaning on his arm in the very act of death. If he is so
terribly hurt, why does he not sink down and die without further ado?
Flitting moments, imminent emergencies, imperceptible intervals between
two breaths, ought not to be incrusted with the eternal repose of
marble; in any sculptural subject, there should be a moral standstill,
since there must of necessity be a physical one. Otherwise, it is
like flinging a block of marble up into the air, and, by some trick of
enchantment, causing it to stick there. You feel that it ought to come
down, and are dissatisfied that it does not obey the natural law."

"I see," said Miriam mischievously, "you think that sculpture should
be a sort of fossilizing process. But, in truth, your frozen art has
nothing like the scope and freedom of Hilda's and mine. In painting
there is no similar objection to the representation of brief snatches
of time,--perhaps because a story can be so much more fully told in
picture, and buttressed about with circumstances that give it an epoch.
For instance, a painter never would have sent down yonder Faun out of
his far antiquity, lonely and desolate, with no companion to keep his
simple heart warm."

"Ah, the Faun!" cried Hilda, with a little gesture of impatience; "I
have been looking at him too long; and now, instead of a beautiful
statue, immortally young, I see only a corroded and discolored stone.
This change is very apt to occur in statues."

"And a similar one in pictures, surely," retorted the sculptor. "It is
the spectator's mood that transfigures the Transfiguration itself.
I defy any painter to move and elevate me without my own consent and
assistance."

"Then you are deficient of a sense," said Miriam.

The party now strayed onward from hall to hall of that rich gallery,
pausing here and there, to look at the multitude of noble and lovely
shapes, which have been dug up out of the deep grave in which old Rome
lies buried. And still, the realization of the antique Faun, in the
person of Donatello, gave a more vivid character to all these marble
ghosts. Why should not each statue grow warm with life! Antinous might
lift his brow, and tell us why he is forever sad. The Lycian Apollo
might strike his lyre; and, at the first vibration, that other Faun in
red marble, who keeps up a motionless dance, should frisk gayly forth,
leading yonder Satyrs, with shaggy goat-shanks, to clatter their little
hoofs upon the floor, and all join hands with Donatello! Bacchus, too,
a rosy flush diffusing itself over his time-stained surface, could
come down from his pedestal, and offer a cluster of purple grapes to
Donatello's lips; because the god recognizes him as the woodland elf
who so often shared his revels. And here, in this sarcophagus, the
exquisitely carved figures might assume life, and chase one another
round its verge with that wild merriment which is so strangely
represented on those old burial coffers: though still with some subtile
allusion to death, carefully veiled, but forever peeping forth amid
emblems of mirth and riot.

As the four friends descended the stairs, however, their play of fancy
subsided into a much more sombre mood; a result apt to follow upon such
exhilaration as that which had so recently taken possession of them.

"Do you know," said Miriam confidentially to Hilda, "I doubt the reality
of this likeness of Donatello to the Faun, which we have been talking so
much about? To say the truth, it never struck me so forcibly as it did
Kenyon and yourself, though I gave in to whatever you were pleased to
fancy, for the sake of a moment's mirth and wonder." "I was certainly
in earnest, and you seemed equally so," replied Hilda, glancing back
at Donatello, as if to reassure herself of the resemblance. "But faces
change so much, from hour to hour, that the same set of features has
often no keeping with itself; to an eye, at least, which looks at
expression more than outline. How sad and sombre he has grown all of a
sudden!" "Angry too, methinks! nay, it is anger much more than sadness,"
said Miriam. "I have seen Donatello in this mood once or twice before.
If you consider him well, you will observe an odd mixture of
the bulldog, or some other equally fierce brute, in our friend's
composition; a trait of savageness hardly to be expected in such a
gentle creature as he usually is. Donatello is a very strange young man.
I wish he would not haunt my footsteps so continually."

"You have bewitched the poor lad," said the sculptor, laughing. "You
have a faculty of bewitching people, and it is providing you with a
singular train of followers. I see another of them behind yonder pillar;
and it is his presence that has aroused Donatello's wrath."

They had now emerged from the gateway of the palace; and partly
concealed by one of the pillars of the portico stood a figure such as
may often be encountered in the streets and piazzas of Rome, and nowhere
else. He looked as if he might just have stepped out of a picture, and,
in truth, was likely enough to find his way into a dozen pictures; being
no other than one of those living models, dark, bushy bearded, wild
of aspect and attire, whom artists convert into saints or assassins,
according as their pictorial purposes demand.

"Miriam," whispered Hilda, a little startled, "it is your model!"




CHAPTER III


SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES


Miriam's model has so important a connection with our story, that it is
essential to describe the singular mode of his first appearance, and
how he subsequently became a self-appointed follower of the young female
artist. In the first place, however, we must devote a page or two to
certain peculiarities in the position of Miriam herself.

There was an ambiguity about this young lady, which, though it did not
necessarily imply anything wrong, would have operated unfavorably as
regarded her reception in society, anywhere but in Rome. The truth was,
that nobody knew anything about Miriam, either for good or evil. She had
made her appearance without introduction, had taken a studio, put her
card upon the door, and showed very considerable talent as a painter in
oils. Her fellow professors of the brush, it is true, showered abundant
criticisms upon her pictures, allowing them to be well enough for the
idle half-efforts of an amateur, but lacking both the trained skill and
the practice that distinguish the works of a true artist.

Nevertheless, be their faults what they might, Miriam's pictures met
with good acceptance among the patrons of modern art. Whatever technical
merit they lacked, its absence was more than supplied by a warmth
and passionateness, which she had the faculty of putting into her
productions, and which all the world could feel. Her nature had a great
deal of color, and, in accordance with it, so likewise had her pictures.

Miriam had great apparent freedom of intercourse; her manners were so
far from evincing shyness, that it seemed easy to become acquainted with
her, and not difficult to develop a casual acquaintance into intimacy.
Such, at least, was the impression which she made, upon brief contact,
but not such the ultimate conclusion of those who really sought to know
her. So airy, free, and affable was Miriam's deportment towards all who
came within her sphere, that possibly they might never be conscious of
the fact, but so it was, that they did not get on, and were seldom any
further advanced into her good graces to-day than yesterday. By some
subtile quality, she kept people at a distance, without so much as
letting them know that they were excluded from her inner circle. She
resembled one of those images of light, which conjurers evoke and cause
to shine before us, in apparent tangibility, only an arm's length beyond
our grasp: we make a step in advance, expecting to seize the illusion,
but find it still precisely so far out of our reach. Finally, society
began to recognize the impossibility of getting nearer to Miriam, and
gruffly acquiesced.

There were two persons, however, whom she appeared to acknowledge as
friends in the closer and truer sense of the word; and both of these
more favored individuals did credit to Miriam's selection. One was
a young American sculptor, of high promise and rapidly increasing
celebrity; the other, a girl of the same country, a painter like Miriam
herself, but in a widely different sphere of art. Her heart flowed out
towards these two; she requited herself by their society and friendship
(and especially by Hilda's) for all the loneliness with which, as
regarded the rest of the world, she chose to be surrounded. Her two
friends were conscious of the strong, yearning grasp which Miriam laid
upon them, and gave her their affection in full measure; Hilda, indeed,
responding with the fervency of a girl's first friendship, and Kenyon
with a manly regard, in which there was nothing akin to what is
distinctively called love.

A sort of intimacy subsequently grew up between these three friends
and a fourth individual; it was a young Italian, who, casually visiting
Rome, had been attracted by the beauty which Miriam possessed in a
remarkable degree. He had sought her, followed her, and insisted, with
simple perseverance, upon being admitted at least to her acquaintance; a
boon which had been granted, when a more artful character, seeking it by
a more subtle mode of pursuit, would probably have failed to obtain it.
This young man, though anything but intellectually brilliant, had many
agreeable characteristics which won him the kindly and half-contemptuous
regard of Miriam and her two friends. It was he whom they called
Donatello, and whose wonderful resemblance to the Faun of Praxiteles
forms the keynote of our narrative.

Such was the position in which we find Miriam some few months after her
establishment at Rome. It must be added, however, that the world did not
permit her to hide her antecedents without making her the subject of
a good deal of conjecture; as was natural enough, considering the
abundance of her personal charms, and the degree of notice that she
attracted as an artist. There were many stories about Miriam's origin
and previous life, some of which had a very probable air, while others
were evidently wild and romantic fables. We cite a few, leaving the
reader to designate them either under the probable or the romantic head.

It was said, for example, that Miriam was the daughter and heiress of
a great Jewish banker (an idea perhaps suggested by a certain rich
Oriental character in her face), and had fled from her paternal home
to escape a union with a cousin, the heir of another of that golden
brotherhood; the object being to retain their vast accumulation of
wealth within the family. Another story hinted that she was a German
princess, whom, for reasons of state, it was proposed to give in
marriage either to a decrepit sovereign, or a prince still in his
cradle. According to a third statement, she was the off-spring of a
Southern American planter, who had given her an elaborate education and
endowed her with his wealth; but the one burning drop of African
blood in her veins so affected her with a sense of ignominy, that she
relinquished all and fled her country. By still another account she was
the lady of an English nobleman; and, out of mere love and honor of
art, had thrown aside the splendor of her rank, and come to seek a
subsistence by her pencil in a Roman studio.

In all the above cases, the fable seemed to be instigated by the large
and bounteous impression which Miriam invariably made, as if necessity
and she could have nothing to do with one another. Whatever deprivations
she underwent must needs be voluntary. But there were other surmises,
taking such a commonplace view as that Miriam was the daughter of a
merchant or financier, who had been ruined in a great commercial crisis;
and, possessing a taste for art, she had attempted to support herself by
the pencil, in preference to the alternative of going out as governess.

Be these things how they might, Miriam, fair as she looked, was plucked
up out of a mystery, and had its roots still clinging to her. She was a
beautiful and attractive woman, but based, as it were, upon a cloud, and
all surrounded with misty substance; so that the result was to render
her sprite-like in her most ordinary manifestations. This was the case
even in respect to Kenyon and Hilda, her especial friends. But such was
the effect of Miriam's natural language, her generosity, kindliness, and
native truth of character, that these two received her as a dear friend
into their hearts, taking her good qualities as evident and genuine, and
never imagining that what was hidden must be therefore evil.

We now proceed with our narrative.

The same party of friends, whom we have seen at the sculpture-gallery of
the Capitol, chanced to have gone together, some months before, to the
catacomb of St. Calixtus. They went joyously down into that vast
tomb, and wandered by torchlight through a sort of dream, in which
reminiscences of church aisles and grimy cellars--and chiefly the
latter--seemed to be broken into fragments, and hopelessly intermingled.
The intricate passages along which they followed their guide had been
hewn, in some forgotten age, out of a dark-red, crumbly stone. On either
side were horizontal niches, where, if they held their torches closely,
the shape of a human body was discernible in white ashes, into which the
entire mortality of a man or woman had resolved itself. Among all this
extinct dust, there might perchance be a thigh-bone, which crumbled at
a touch; or possibly a skull, grinning at its own wretched plight, as is
the ugly and empty habit of the thing.

Sometimes their gloomy pathway tended upward, so that, through a
crevice, a little daylight glimmered down upon them, or even a streak of
sunshine peeped into a burial niche; then again, they went downward by
gradual descent, or by abrupt, rudely hewn steps, into deeper and deeper
recesses of the earth. Here and there the narrow and tortuous passages
widened somewhat, developing themselves into small chapels;--which
once, no doubt, had been adorned with marble-work and lighted with
ever-burning lamps and tapers. All such illumination and ornament,
however, had long since been extinguished and stript away; except,
indeed, that the low roofs of a few of these ancient sites of worship
were covered with dingy stucco, and frescoed with scriptural scenes and
subjects, in the dreariest stage of ruin.

In one such chapel, the guide showed them a low arch, beneath which the
body of St. Cecilia had been buried after her martyrdom, and where it
lay till a sculptor saw it, and rendered it forever beautiful in marble.

In a similar spot they found two sarcophagi, one containing a skeleton,
and the other a shrivelled body, which still wore the garments of its
former lifetime.

"How dismal all this is!" said Hilda, shuddering. "I do not know why we
came here, nor why we should stay a moment longer."

"I hate it all!" cried Donatello with peculiar energy. "Dear friends,
let us hasten back into the blessed daylight!"

From the first, Donatello had shown little fancy for the expedition;
for, like most Italians, and in especial accordance with the law of his
own simple and physically happy nature, this young man had an infinite
repugnance to graves and skulls, and to all that ghastliness which the
Gothic mind loves to associate with the idea of death. He shuddered,
and looked fearfully round, drawing nearer to Miriam, whose attractive
influence alone had enticed him into that gloomy region.

"What a child you are, poor Donatello!" she observed, with the freedom
which she always used towards him. "You are afraid of ghosts!"

"Yes, signorina; terribly afraid!" said the truthful Donatello.

"I also believe in ghosts," answered Miriam, "and could tremble at them,
in a suitable place. But these sepulchres are so old, and these skulls
and white ashes so very dry, that methinks they have ceased to be
haunted. The most awful idea connected with the catacombs is their
interminable extent, and the possibility of going astray into this
labyrinth of darkness, which broods around the little glimmer of our
tapers."

"Has any one ever been lost here?" asked Kenyon of the guide.

"Surely, signor; one, no longer ago than my father's time," said the
guide; and he added, with the air of a man who believed what he was
telling, "but the first that went astray here was a pagan of old Rome,
who hid himself in order to spy out and betray the blessed saints, who
then dwelt and worshipped in these dismal places. You have heard the
story, signor? A miracle was wrought upon the accursed one; and, ever
since (for fifteen centuries at least), he has been groping in the
darkness, seeking his way out of the catacomb."

"Has he ever been seen?" asked Hilda, who had great and tremulous faith
in marvels of this kind.

"These eyes of mine never beheld him, signorina; the saints forbid!"
answered the guide. "But it is well known that he watches near parties
that come into the catacomb, especially if they be heretics, hoping to
lead some straggler astray. What this lost wretch pines for, almost as
much as for the blessed sunshine, is a companion to be miserable with
him."

"Such an intense desire for sympathy indicates something amiable in the
poor fellow, at all events," observed Kenyon.

They had now reached a larger chapel than those heretofore seen; it
was of a circular shape, and, though hewn out of the solid mass of red
sandstone, had pillars, and a carved roof, and other tokens of a regular
architectural design. Nevertheless, considered as a church, it was
exceedingly minute, being scarcely twice a man's stature in height, and
only two or three paces from wall to wall; and while their collected
torches illuminated this one small, consecrated spot, the great darkness
spread all round it, like that immenser mystery which envelops our
little life, and into which friends vanish from us, one by one. "Why,
where is Miriam?" cried Hilda. The party gazed hurriedly from face to
face, and became aware that one of their party had vanished into
the great darkness, even while they were shuddering at the remote
possibility of such a misfortune.




CHAPTER IV


THE SPECTRE OF THE CATACOMB


"Surely, she cannot be lost!" exclaimed Kenyon. "It is but a moment since
she was speaking."

"No, no!" said Hilda, in great alarm. "She was behind us all; and it is
a long while since we have heard her voice!"

"Torches! torches!" cried Donatello desperately. "I will seek her, be
the darkness ever so dismal!"

But the guide held him back, and assured them all that there was no
possibility of assisting their lost companion, unless by shouting at
the very top of their voices. As the sound would go very far along these
close and narrow passages, there was a fair probability that Miriam
might hear the call, and be able to retrace her steps.

Accordingly, they all--Kenyon with his bass voice; Donatello with his
tenor; the guide with that high and hard Italian cry, which makes the
streets of Rome so resonant; and Hilda with her slender scream, piercing
farther than the united uproar of the rest--began to shriek, halloo, and
bellow, with the utmost force of their lungs. And, not to prolong the
reader's suspense (for we do not particularly seek to interest him
in this scene, telling it only on account of the trouble and strange
entanglement which followed), they soon heard a responsive call, in a
female voice.

"It was the signorina!" cried Donatello joyfully.

"Yes; it was certainly dear Miriam's voice," said Hilda. "And here she
comes! Thank Heaven! Thank Heaven!"

The figure of their friend was now discernible by her own torchlight,
approaching out of one of the cavernous passages. Miriam came forward,
but not with the eagerness and tremulous joy of a fearful girl, just
rescued from a labyrinth of gloomy mystery. She made no immediate
response to their inquiries and tumultuous congratulations; and, as they
afterwards remembered, there was something absorbed, thoughtful, and
self-concentrated in her deportment. She looked pale, as well she might,
and held her torch with a nervous grasp, the tremor of which was seen
in the irregular twinkling of the flame. This last was the chief
perceptible sign of any recent agitation or alarm.

"Dearest, dearest Miriam," exclaimed Hilda, throwing her arms about her
friend, "where have you been straying from us? Blessed be Providence,
which has rescued you out of that miserable darkness!"

"Hush, dear Hilda!" whispered Miriam, with a strange little laugh. "Are
you quite sure that it was Heaven's guidance which brought me back?
If so, it was by an odd messenger, as you will confess. See; there he
stands."

Startled at Miriam's words and manner, Hilda gazed into the duskiness
whither she pointed, and there beheld a figure standing just on the
doubtful limit of obscurity, at the threshold of the small, illuminated
chapel. Kenyon discerned him at the same instant, and drew nearer with
his torch; although the guide attempted to dissuade him, averring that,
once beyond the consecrated precincts of the chapel, the apparition
would have power to tear him limb from limb. It struck the sculptor,
however, when he afterwards recurred to these circumstances, that the
guide manifested no such apprehension on his own account as he professed
on behalf of others; for he kept pace with Kenyon as the latter
approached the figure, though still endeavoring to restrain 'him.

In fine, they both drew near enough to get as good a view of the spectre
as the smoky light of their torches, struggling with the massive gloom,
could supply.

The stranger was of exceedingly picturesque, and even melodramatic
aspect. He was clad in a voluminous cloak, that seemed to be made of a
buffalo's hide, and a pair of those goat-skin breeches, with the hair
outward, which are still commonly worn by the peasants of the Roman
Campagna. In this garb, they look like antique Satyrs; and, in truth,
the Spectre of the Catacomb might have represented the last survivor
of that vanished race, hiding himself in sepulchral gloom, and mourning
over his lost life of woods and streams.

Furthermore, he had on a broad-brimmed, conical hat, beneath the shadow
of which a wild visage was indistinctly seen, floating away, as it were,
into a dusky wilderness of mustache and beard. His eyes winked, and
turned uneasily from the torches, like a creature to whom midnight would
be more congenial than noonday.

On the whole, the spectre might have made a considerable impression
on the sculptor's nerves, only that he was in the habit of observing
similar figures, almost every day, reclining on the Spanish steps,
and waiting for some artist to invite them within the magic realm of
picture. Nor, even thus familiarized with the stranger's peculiarities
of appearance, could Kenyon help wondering to see such a personage,
shaping himself so suddenly out of the void darkness of the catacomb.

"What are you?" said the sculptor, advancing his torch nearer. "And how
long have you been wandering here?"

"A thousand and five hundred years!" muttered the guide, loud enough to
be heard by all the party. "It is the old pagan phantom that I told you
of, who sought to betray the blessed saints!"

"Yes; it is a phantom!" cried Donatello, with a shudder. "Ah, dearest
signorina, what a fearful thing has beset you in those dark corridors!"

"Nonsense, Donatello," said the sculptor. "The man is no more a phantom
than yourself. The only marvel is, how he comes to be hiding himself in
the catacomb. Possibly our guide might solve the riddle."

The spectre himself here settled the point of his tangibility, at all
events, and physical substance, by approaching a step nearer, and laying
his hand on Kenyon's arm.

"Inquire not what I am, nor wherefore I abide in the darkness," said he,
in a hoarse, harsh voice, as if a great deal of damp were clustering in
his throat. "Henceforth, I am nothing but a shadow behind her footsteps.
She came to me when I sought her not. She has called me forth, and must
abide the consequences of my reappearance in the world."

"Holy Virgin! I wish the signorina joy of her prize," said the guide,
half to himself. "And in any case, the catacomb is well rid of him."

We need follow the scene no further. So much is essential to the
subsequent narrative, that, during the short period while astray in
those tortuous passages, Miriam had encountered an unknown man, and
led him forth with her, or was guided back by him, first into the
torchlight, thence into the sunshine.

It was the further singularity of this affair, that the connection, thus
briefly and casually formed, did not terminate with the incident
that gave it birth. As if her service to him, or his service to her,
whichever it might be, had given him an indefeasible claim on Miriam's
regard and protection, the Spectre of the Catacomb never long allowed
her to lose sight of him, from that day forward. He haunted her
footsteps with more than the customary persistency of Italian
mendicants, when once they have recognized a benefactor. For days
together, it is true, he occasionally vanished, but always reappeared,
gliding after her through the narrow streets, or climbing the hundred
steps of her staircase and sitting at her threshold.

Being often admitted to her studio, he left his features, or some shadow
or reminiscence of them, in many of her sketches and pictures. The moral
atmosphere of these productions was thereby so influenced, that rival
painters pronounced it a case of hopeless mannerism, which would destroy
all Miriam's prospects of true excellence in art.

The story of this adventure spread abroad, and made its way beyond
the usual gossip of the Forestieri, even into Italian circles, where,
enhanced by a still potent spirit of superstition, it grew far more
wonderful than as above recounted. Thence, it came back among the
Anglo-Saxons, and was communicated to the German artists, who so richly
supplied it with romantic ornaments and excrescences, after their
fashion, that it became a fantasy worthy of Tieck or Hoffmann. For
nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a
marvellous tale.

The most reasonable version of the incident, that could anywise be
rendered acceptable to the auditors, was substantially the one suggested
by the guide of the catacomb, in his allusion to the legend of Memmius.
This man, or demon, or man-demon, was a spy during the persecutions
of the early Christians, probably under the Emperor Diocletian, and
penetrated into the catacomb of St. Calixtus, with the malignant purpose
of tracing out the hiding-places of the refugees. But, while he stole
craftily through those dark corridors, he chanced to come upon a little
chapel, where tapers were burning before an altar and a crucifix, and
a priest was in the performance of his sacred office. By divine
indulgence, there was a single moment's grace allowed to Memmius, during
which, had he been capable of Christian faith and love, he might have
knelt before the cross, and received the holy light into his soul, and
so have been blest forever. But he resisted the sacred impulse. As
soon, therefore, as that one moment had glided by, the light of the
consecrated tapers, which represent all truth, bewildered the wretched
man with everlasting error, and the blessed cross itself was stamped
as a seal upon his heart, so that it should never open to receive
conviction.

Thenceforth, this heathen Memmius has haunted the wide and dreary
precincts of the catacomb, seeking, as some say, to beguile new victims
into his own misery; but, according to other statements, endeavoring to
prevail on any unwary visitor to take him by the hand, and guide him out
into the daylight. Should his wiles and entreaties take effect, however,
the man-demon would remain only a little while above ground. He would
gratify his fiendish malignity by perpetrating signal mischief on his
benefactor, and perhaps bringing some old pestilence or other forgotten
and long-buried evil on society; or, possibly, teaching the modern
world some decayed and dusty kind of crime, which the antique Romans
knew,--and then would hasten back to the catacomb, which, after so long
haunting it, has grown his most congenial home.

Miriam herself, with her chosen friends, the sculptor and the gentle
Hilda, often laughed at the monstrous fictions that had gone abroad in
reference to her adventure. Her two confidants (for such they were,
on all ordinary subjects) had not failed to ask an explanation of the
mystery, since undeniably a mystery there was, and one sufficiently
perplexing in itself, without any help from the imaginative faculty.
And, sometimes responding to their inquiries with a melancholy sort of
playfulness, Miriam let her fancy run off into wilder fables than any
which German ingenuity or Italian superstition had contrived.

For example, with a strange air of seriousness over all her face, only
belied by a laughing gleam in her dark eyes, she would aver that the
spectre (who had been an artist in his mortal lifetime) had promised
to teach her a long-lost, but invaluable secret of old Roman fresco
painting. The knowledge of this process would place Miriam at the head
of modern art; the sole condition being agreed upon, that she should
return with him into his sightless gloom, after enriching a certain
extent of stuccoed wall with the most brilliant and lovely designs. And
what true votary of art would not purchase unrivalled excellence, even
at so vast a sacrifice!

Or, if her friends still solicited a soberer account, Miriam replied,
that, meeting the old infidel in one of the dismal passages of the
catacomb, she had entered into controversy with him, hoping to achieve
the glory and satisfaction of converting him to the Christian faith. For
the sake of so excellent a result; she had even staked her own salvation
against his, binding herself to accompany him back into his penal gloom,
if, within a twelvemonth's space, she should not have convinced him of
the errors through which he had so long groped and stumbled. But, alas!
up to the present time, the controversy had gone direfully in favor of
the man-demon; and Miriam (as she whispered in Hilda's ear) had awful
forebodings, that, in a few more months, she must take an eternal
farewell of the sun!

It was somewhat remarkable that all her romantic fantasies arrived at
this self-same dreary termination,--it appeared impossible for her even
to imagine any other than a disastrous result from her connection with
her ill-omened attendant.

This singularity might have meant nothing, however, had it not suggested
a despondent state of mind, which was likewise indicated by many other
tokens. Miriam's friends had no difficulty in perceiving that, in
one way or another, her happiness was very seriously compromised. Her
spirits were often depressed into deep melancholy. If ever she was gay,
it was seldom with a healthy cheerfulness. She grew moody, moreover, and
subject to fits of passionate ill temper; which usually wreaked itself
on the heads of those who loved her best. Not that Miriam's indifferent
acquaintances were safe from similar outbreaks of her displeasure,
especially if they ventured upon any allusion to the model. In such
cases, they were left with little disposition to renew the subject, but
inclined, on the other hand, to interpret the whole matter as much to
her discredit as the least favorable coloring of the facts would allow.

It may occur to the reader, that there was really no demand for so much
rumor and speculation in regard to an incident, Which might well enough
have been explained without going many steps beyond the limits of
probability. The spectre might have been merely a Roman beggar, whose
fraternity often harbor in stranger shelters than the catacombs; or one
of those pilgrims, who still journey from remote countries to kneel
and worship at the holy sites, among which these haunts of the early
Christians are esteemed especially sacred. Or, as was perhaps a more
plausible theory, he might be a thief of the city, a robber of the
Campagna, a political offender, or an assassin, with blood upon his
hand; whom the negligence or connivance of the police allowed to take
refuge in those subterranean fastnesses, where such outlaws have been
accustomed to hide themselves from a far antiquity downward. Or he might
have been a lunatic, fleeing instinctively from man, and making it his
dark pleasure to dwell among the tombs, like him whose awful cry echoes
afar to us from Scripture times.

And, as for the stranger's attaching himself so devotedly to Miriam, her
personal magnetism might be allowed a certain weight in the explanation.
For what remains, his pertinacity need not seem so very singular to
those who consider how slight a link serves to connect these vagabonds
of idle Italy with any person that may have the ill-hap to bestow
charity, or be otherwise serviceable to them, or betray the slightest
interest in their fortunes.

Thus little would remain to be accounted for, except the deportment of
Miriam herself; her reserve, her brooding melancholy, her petulance,
and moody passion. If generously interpreted, even these morbid symptoms
might have sufficient cause in the stimulating and exhaustive influences
of imaginative art, exercised by a delicate young woman, in the nervous
and unwholesome atmosphere of Rome. Such, at least, was the view of the
case which Hilda and Kenyon endeavored to impress on their own minds,
and impart to those whom their opinions might influence.

One of Miriam's friends took the matter sadly to heart. This was the
young Italian. Donatello, as we have seen, had been an eyewitness of
the stranger's first appearance, and had ever since nourished a singular
prejudice against the mysterious, dusky, death-scented apparition.
It resembled not so much a human dislike or hatred, as one of those
instinctive, unreasoning antipathies which the lower animals sometimes
display, and which generally prove more trustworthy than the acutest
insight into character. The shadow of the model, always flung into the
light which Miriam diffused around her, caused no slight trouble to
Donatello. Yet he was of a nature so remarkably genial and joyous, so
simply happy, that he might well afford to have something subtracted
from his comfort, and make tolerable shift to live upon what remained.




CHAPTER V


MIRIAM'S STUDIO


The courtyard and staircase of a palace built three hundred years ago
are a peculiar feature of modern Rome, and interest the stranger more
than many things of which he has heard loftier descriptions. You pass
through the grand breadth and height of a squalid entrance-way, and
perhaps see a range of dusky pillars, forming a sort of cloister round
the court, and in the intervals, from pillar to pillar, are strewn
fragments of antique statues, headless and legless torsos, and busts
that have invariably lost what it might be well if living men could lay
aside in that unfragrant atmosphere--the nose. Bas-reliefs, the spoil of
some far older palace, are set in the surrounding walls, every stone of
which has been ravished from the Coliseum, or any other imperial ruin
which earlier barbarism had not already levelled with the earth. Between
two of the pillars, moreover, stands an old sarcophagus without its
lid, and with all its more prominently projecting sculptures broken
off; perhaps it once held famous dust, and the bony framework of some
historic man, although now only a receptacle for the rubbish of the
courtyard, and a half-worn broom.

In the centre of the court, under the blue Italian sky, and with the
hundred windows of the vast palace gazing down upon it from four sides,
appears a fountain. It brims over from one stone basin to another,
or gushes from a Naiad's urn, or spurts its many little jets from the
mouths of nameless monsters, which were merely grotesque and artificial
when Bernini, or whoever was their unnatural father, first produced
them; but now the patches of moss, the tufts of grass, the trailing
maiden-hair, and all sorts of verdant weeds that thrive in the cracks
and crevices of moist marble, tell us that Nature takes the fountain
back into her great heart, and cherishes it as kindly as if it were a
woodland spring. And hark, the pleasant murmur, the gurgle, the plash!
You might hear just those tinkling sounds from any tiny waterfall in the
forest, though here they gain a delicious pathos from the stately
echoes that reverberate their natural language. So the fountain is not
altogether glad, after all its three centuries at play!

In one of the angles of the courtyard, a pillared doorway gives access
to the staircase, with its spacious breadth of low marble steps, up
which, in former times, have gone the princes and cardinals of the great
Roman family who built this palace. Or they have come down, with still
grander and loftier mien, on their way to the Vatican or the Quirinal,
there to put off their scarlet hats in exchange for the triple crown.
But, in fine, all these illustrious personages have gone down
their hereditary staircase for the last time, leaving it to be the
thoroughfare of ambassadors, English noblemen, American millionnaires,
artists, tradesmen, washerwomen, and people of every degree,--all of
whom find such gilded and marble-panelled saloons as their pomp and
luxury demand, or such homely garrets as their necessity can pay for,
within this one multifarious abode. Only, in not a single nook of the
palace (built for splendor, and the accommodation of a vast retinue, but
with no vision of a happy fireside or any mode of domestic enjoyment)
does the humblest or the haughtiest occupant find comfort.

Up such a staircase, on the morning after the scene at the sculpture
gallery, sprang the light foot of Donatello. He ascended from story
to story, passing lofty doorways, set within rich frames of sculptured
marble, and climbing unweariedly upward, until the glories of the first
piano and the elegance of the middle height were exchanged for a sort of
Alpine region, cold and naked in its aspect. Steps of rough stone, rude
wooden balustrades, a brick pavement in the passages, a dingy whitewash
on the walls; these were here the palatial features. Finally, he paused
before an oaken door, on which was pinned a card, bearing the name of
Miriam Schaefer, artist in oils. Here Donatello knocked, and the door
immediately fell somewhat ajar; its latch having been pulled up by means
of a string on the inside. Passing through a little anteroom, he found
himself in Miriam's presence.

"Come in, wild Faun," she said, "and tell me the latest news from
Arcady!"

The artist was not just then at her easel, but was busied with the
feminine task of mending a pair of gloves.

There is something extremely pleasant, and even touching,--at least,
of very sweet, soft, and winning effect,--in this peculiarity of
needlework, distinguishing women from men. Our own sex is incapable of
any such by-play aside from the main business of life; but women--be
they of what earthly rank they may, however gifted with intellect or
genius, or endowed with awful beauty--have always some little handiwork
ready to fill the tiny gap of every vacant moment. A needle is familiar
to the fingers of them all. A queen, no doubt, plies it on occasion; the
woman poet can use it as adroitly as her pen; the woman's eye, that has
discovered a new star, turns from its glory to send the polished little
instrument gleaming along the hem of her kerchief, or to darn a casual
fray in her dress. And they have greatly the advantage of us in this
respect. The slender thread of silk or cotton keeps them united with
the small, familiar, gentle interests of life, the continually operating
influences of which do so much for the health of the character, and
carry off what would otherwise be a dangerous accumulation of morbid
sensibility. A vast deal of human sympathy runs along this electric
line, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humblest
seamstress, and keeping high and low in a species of communion with
their kindred beings. Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle
characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love
to sew; especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts
than while so occupied.

And when the work falls in a woman's lap, of its own accord, and the
needle involuntarily ceases to fly, it is a sign of trouble, quite as
trustworthy as the throb of the heart itself. This was what happened
to Miriam. Even while Donatello stood gazing at her, she seemed to have
forgotten his presence, allowing him to drop out of her thoughts, and
the torn glove to fall from her idle fingers. Simple as he was, the
young man knew by his sympathies that something was amiss.

"Dear lady, you are sad," said he, drawing close to her.

"It is nothing, Donatello," she replied, resuming her work; "yes;
a little sad, perhaps; but that is not strange for us people of the
ordinary world, especially for women. You are of a cheerfuller race, my
friend, and know nothing of this disease of sadness. But why do you come
into this shadowy room of mine?"

"Why do you make it so shadowy?" asked he.

"We artists purposely exclude sunshine, and all but a partial light,"
said Miriam, "because we think it necessary to put ourselves at
odds with Nature before trying to imitate her. That strikes you very
strangely, does it not? But we make very pretty pictures sometimes with
our artfully arranged lights and shadows. Amuse yourself with some
of mine, Donatello, and by and by I shall be in the mood to begin the
portrait we were talking about."

The room had the customary aspect of a painter's studio; one of those
delightful spots that hardly seem to belong to the actual world, but
rather to be the outward type of a poet's haunted imagination, where
there are glimpses, sketches, and half-developed hints of beings and
objects grander and more beautiful than we can anywhere find in reality.
The windows were closed with shutters, or deeply curtained, except one,
which was partly open to a sunless portion of the sky, admitting only
from high upward that partial light which, with its strongly marked
contrast of shadow, is the first requisite towards seeing objects
pictorially. Pencil-drawings were pinned against the wall or scattered
on the tables. Unframed canvases turned their backs on the spectator,
presenting only a blank to the eye, and churlishly concealing whatever
riches of scenery or human beauty Miriam's skill had depicted on the
other side.

In the obscurest part of the room Donatello was half startled at
perceiving duskily a woman with long dark hair, who threw up her arms
with a wild gesture of tragic despair, and appeared to beckon him into
the darkness along with her.

"Do not be afraid, Donatello," said Miriam, smiling to see him peering
doubtfully into the mysterious dusk. "She means you no mischief, nor
could perpetrate any if she wished it ever so much. It is a lady of
exceedingly pliable disposition; now a heroine of romance, and now a
rustic maid; yet all for show; being created, indeed, on purpose to wear
rich shawls and other garments in a becoming fashion. This is the true
end of her being, although she pretends to assume the most varied duties
and perform many parts in life, while really the poor puppet has nothing
on earth to do. Upon my word, I am satirical unawares, and seem to be
describing nine women out of ten in the person of my lay-figure. For
most purposes she has the advantage of the sisterhood. Would I were like
her!"

"How it changes her aspect," exclaimed Donatello, "to know that she is
but a jointed figure! When my eyes first fell upon her, I thought her
arms moved, as if beckoning me to help her in some direful peril."

"Are you often troubled with such sinister freaks of fancy?" asked
Miriam. "I should not have supposed it."

"To tell you the truth, dearest signorina," answered the young Italian,
"I am apt to be fearful in old, gloomy houses, and in the dark. I love
no dark or dusky corners, except it be in a grotto, or among the thick
green leaves of an arbor, or in some nook of the woods, such as I know
many in the neighborhood of my home. Even there, if a stray sunbeam
steal in, the shadow is all the better for its cheerful glimmer."

"Yes; you are a Faun, you know," said the fair artist, laughing at the
remembrance of the scene of the day before. "But the world is sadly
changed nowadays; grievously changed, poor Donatello, since those happy
times when your race used to dwell in the Arcadian woods, playing hide
and seek with the nymphs in grottoes and nooks of shrubbery. You have
reappeared on earth some centuries too late."

"I do not understand you now," answered Donatello, looking perplexed;
"only, signorina, I am glad to have my lifetime while you live; and
where you are, be it in cities or fields, I would fain be there too."

"I wonder whether I ought to allow you to speak in this way," said
Miriam, looking thoughtfully at him. "Many young women would think it
behooved them to be offended. Hilda would never let you speak so, I dare
say. But he is a mere boy," she added, aside, "a simple boy, putting his
boyish heart to the proof on the first woman whom he chances to meet.
If yonder lay-figure had had the luck to meet him first, she would have
smitten him as deeply as I."

"Are you angry with me?" asked Donatello dolorously.

"Not in the least," answered Miriam, frankly giving him her hand. "Pray
look over some of these sketches till I have leisure to chat with you
a little. I hardly think I am in spirits enough to begin your portrait
to-day."

Donatello was as gentle and docile as a pet spaniel; as playful, too, in
his general disposition, or saddening with his mistress's variable mood
like that or any other kindly animal which has the faculty of
bestowing its sympathies more completely than men or women can ever do.
Accordingly, as Miriam bade him, he tried to turn his attention to a
great pile and confusion of pen and ink sketches and pencil drawings
which lay tossed together on a table. As it chanced, however, they gave
the poor youth little delight.

The first that he took up was a very impressive sketch, in which the
artist had jotted down her rough ideas for a picture of Jael driving the
nail through the temples of Sisera. It was dashed off with remarkable
power, and showed a touch or two that were actually lifelike and
deathlike, as if Miriam had been standing by when Jael gave the first
stroke of her murderous hammer, or as if she herself were Jael, and felt
irresistibly impelled to make her bloody confession in this guise.

Her first conception of the stern Jewess had evidently been that of
perfect womanhood, a lovely form, and a high, heroic face of lofty
beauty; but, dissatisfied either with her own work or the terrible story
itself, Miriam had added a certain wayward quirk of her pencil, which at
once converted the heroine into a vulgar murderess. It was evident that
a Jael like this would be sure to search Sisera's pockets as soon as the
breath was out of his body.

In another sketch she had attempted the story of Judith, which we see
represented by the old masters so often, and in such various styles.
Here, too, beginning with a passionate and fiery conception of the
subject in all earnestness, she had given the last touches in utter
scorn, as it were, of the feelings which at first took such powerful
possession of her hand. The head of Holofernes (which, by the bye, had a
pair of twisted mustaches, like those of a certain potentate of the
day) being fairly cut off, was screwing its eyes upward and twirling
its features into a diabolical grin of triumphant malice, which it flung
right in Judith's face. On her part, she had the startled aspect that
might be conceived of a cook if a calf's head should sneer at her when
about to be popped into the dinner-pot.

Over and over again, there was the idea of woman, acting the part of a
revengeful mischief towards man. It was, indeed, very singular to
see how the artist's imagination seemed to run on these stories of
bloodshed, in which woman's hand was crimsoned by the stain; and how,
too,--in one form or another, grotesque or sternly sad,--she failed not
to bring out the moral, that woman must strike through her own heart to
reach a human life, whatever were the motive that impelled her.

One of the sketches represented the daughter of Herodias receiving the
head of John the Baptist in a charger. The general conception appeared
to be taken from Bernardo Luini's picture, in the Uffizzi Gallery at
Florence; but Miriam had imparted to the saint's face a look of gentle
and heavenly reproach, with sad and blessed eyes fixed upward at the
maiden; by the force of which miraculous glance, her whole womanhood was
at once awakened to love and endless remorse.

These sketches had a most disagreeable effect on Donatello's peculiar
temperament. He gave a shudder; his face assumed a look of trouble,
fear, and disgust; he snatched up one sketch after another, as if about
to tear it in pieces. Finally, shoving away the pile of drawings, he
shrank back from the table and clasped his hands over his eyes.

"What is the matter, Donatello?" asked Miriam, looking up from a
letter which she was now writing. "Ah! I did not mean you to see those
drawings. They are ugly phantoms that stole out of my mind; not things
that I created, but things that haunt me. See! here are some trifles
that perhaps will please you better."

She gave him a portfolio, the sketches in which indicated a happier mood
of mind, and one, it is to be hoped, more truly characteristic of the
artist. Supposing neither of these classes of subject to show anything
of her own individuality, Miriam had evidently a great scope of fancy,
and a singular faculty of putting what looked like heart into her
productions. The latter sketches were domestic and common scenes, so
finely and subtilely idealized that they seemed such as we may see
at any moment, and eye, where; while still there was the indefinable
something added, or taken away, which makes all the difference between
sordid life and an earthly paradise. The feeling and sympathy in all of
them were deep and true. There was the scene, that comes once in every
life, of the lover winning the soft and pure avowal of bashful affection
from the maiden whose slender form half leans towards his arm, half
shrinks from it, we know not which. There was wedded affection in its
successive stages, represented in a series of delicately conceived
designs, touched with a holy fire, that burned from youth to age in
those two hearts, and gave one identical beauty to the faces throughout
all the changes of feature.

There was a drawing of an infant's shoe, half worn out, with the airy
print of the blessed foot within; a thing that would make a mother smile
or weep out of the very depths of her heart; and yet an actual mother
would not have been likely to appreciate the poetry of the little shoe,
until Miriam revealed it to her. It was wonderful, the depth and force
with which the above, and other kindred subjects, were depicted, and the
profound significance which they often acquired. The artist, still in
her fresh youth, could not probably have drawn any of these dear and
rich experiences from her own life; unless, perchance, that first sketch
of all, the avowal of maiden affection, were a remembered incident, and
not a prophecy. But it is more delightful to believe that, from first to
last, they were the productions of a beautiful imagination, dealing with
the warm and pure suggestions of a woman's heart, and thus idealizing
a truer and lovelier picture of the life that belongs to woman, than
an actual acquaintance with some of its hard and dusty facts could have
inspired. So considered, the sketches intimated such a force and variety
of imaginative sympathies as would enable Miriam to fill her life richly
with the bliss and suffering of womanhood, however barren it might
individually be.

There was one observable point, indeed, betokening that the artist
relinquished, for her personal self, the happiness which she could so
profoundly appreciate for others. In all those sketches of common life,
and the affections that spiritualize it, a figure was portrayed apart,
now it peeped between the branches of a shrubbery, amid which two lovers
sat; now it was looking through a frosted window, from the outside,
while a young wedded pair sat at their new fireside within; and once it
leaned from a chariot, which six horses were whirling onward in pomp
and pride, and gazed at a scene of humble enjoyment by a cottage door.
Always it was the same figure, and always depicted with an expression of
deep sadness; and in every instance, slightly as they were brought out,
the face and form had the traits of Miriam's own.

"Do you like these sketches better, Donatello?" asked Miriam. "Yes,"
said Donatello rather doubtfully. "Not much, I fear," responded she,
laughing. "And what should a boy like you--a Faun too,--know about the
joys and sorrows, the intertwining light and shadow, of human life? I
forgot that you were a Faun. You cannot suffer deeply; therefore you
can but half enjoy. Here, now, is a subject which you can better
appreciate."

The sketch represented merely a rustic dance, but with such extravagance
of fun as was delightful to behold; and here there was no drawback,
except that strange sigh and sadness which always come when we are
merriest.

"I am going to paint the picture in oils," said the artist; "and I want
you, Donatello, for the wildest dancer of them all. Will you sit for me,
some day?--or, rather, dance for me?"

"O, most gladly, signorina!" exclaimed Donatello. "See; it shall be like
this."

And forthwith he began to dance, and flit about the studio, like an
incarnate sprite of jollity, pausing at last on the extremity of one
toe, as if that were the only portion of himself whereby his frisky
nature could come in contact with the earth. The effect in that shadowy
chamber, whence the artist had so carefully excluded the sunshine, was
as enlivening as if one bright ray had contrived to shimmer in and
frolic around the walls, and finally rest just in the centre of the
floor.

"That was admirable!" said Miriam, with an approving smile. "If I can
catch you on my canvas, it will be a glorious picture; only I am afraid
you will dance out of it, by the very truth of the representation, just
when I shall have given it the last touch. We will try it one of these
days. And now, to reward you for that jolly exhibition, you shall see
what has been shown to no one else."

She went to her easel, on which was placed a picture with its back
turned towards the spectator. Reversing the position, there appeared the
portrait of a beautiful woman, such as one sees only two or three, if
even so many times, in all a lifetime; so beautiful, that she seemed to
get into your consciousness and memory, and could never afterwards be
shut out, but haunted your dreams, for pleasure or for pain; holding
your inner realm as a conquered territory, though without deigning to
make herself at home there.

She was very youthful, and had what was usually thought to be a Jewish
aspect; a complexion in which there was no roseate bloom, yet neither
was it pale; dark eyes, into which you might look as deeply as your
glance would go, and still be conscious of a depth that you had not
sounded, though it lay open to the day. She had black, abundant hair,
with none of the vulgar glossiness of other women's sable locks; if she
were really of Jewish blood, then this was Jewish hair, and a dark glory
such as crowns no Christian maiden's head. Gazing at this portrait, you
saw what Rachel might have been, when Jacob deemed her worth the wooing
seven years, and seven more; or perchance she might ripen to be what
Judith was, when she vanquished Holofernes with her beauty, and slew him
for too much adoring it.

Miriam watched Donatello's contemplation of the picture, and seeing his
simple rapture, a smile of pleasure brightened on her face, mixed with a
little scorn; at least, her lips curled, and her eyes gleamed, as if she
disdained either his admiration or her own enjoyment of it.

"Then you like the picture, Donatello?" she asked.

"O, beyond what I can tell!" he answered. "So beautiful!--so beautiful!"

"And do you recognize the likeness?"

"Signorina," exclaimed Donatello, turning from the picture to the
artist, in astonishment that she should ask the question, "the
resemblance is as little to be mistaken as if you had bent over the
smooth surface of a fountain, and possessed the witchcraft to call forth
the image that you made there! It is yourself!"

Donatello said the truth; and we forebore to speak descriptively of
Miriam's beauty earlier in our narrative, because we foresaw this
occasion to bring it perhaps more forcibly before the reader.

We know not whether the portrait were a flattered likeness; probably
not, regarding it merely as the delineation of a lovely face; although
Miriam, like all self-painters, may have endowed herself with certain
graces which Other eyes might not discern. Artists are fond of painting
their own portraits; and, in Florence, there is a gallery of hundreds
of them, including the most illustrious, in all of which there are
autobiographical characteristics, so to speak,--traits, expressions,
loftinesses, and amenities, which would have been invisible, had they
not been painted from within. Yet their reality and truth are none
the less. Miriam, in like manner, had doubtless conveyed some of the
intimate results of her heart knowledge into her own portrait, and
perhaps wished to try whether they would be perceptible to so simple and
natural an observer as Donatello.

"Does the expression please you?" she asked.

"Yes," said Donatello hesitatingly; "if it would only smile so like the
sunshine as you sometimes do. No, it is sadder than I thought at first.
Cannot you make yourself smile a little, signorina?"

"A forced smile is uglier than a frown," said Miriam, a bright, natural
smile breaking out over her face even as she spoke.

"O, catch it now!" cried Donatello, clapping his hands. "Let it shine
upon the picture! There! it has vanished already! And you are sad again,
very sad; and the picture gazes sadly forth at me, as if some evil had
befallen it in the little time since I looked last."

"How perplexed you seem, my friend!" answered Miriam. "I really half
believe you are a Faun, there is such a mystery and terror for you in
these dark moods, which are just as natural as daylight to us people of
ordinary mould. I advise you, at all events, to look at other faces with
those innocent and happy eyes, and never more to gaze at mine!"

"You speak in vain," replied the young man, with a deeper emphasis than
she had ever before heard in his voice; "shroud yourself in what gloom
you will, I must needs follow you."

"Well, well, well," said Miriam impatiently; "but leave me now; for to
speak plainly, my good friend, you grow a little wearisome. I walk
this afternoon in the Borghese grounds. Meet me there, if it suits your
pleasure."




CHAPTER VI


THE VIRGIN'S SHRINE


After Donatello had left the studio, Miriam herself came forth, and
taking her way through some of the intricacies of the city, entered what
might be called either a widening of a street, or a small piazza. The
neighborhood comprised a baker's oven, emitting the usual fragrance of
sour bread; a shoe shop; a linen-draper's shop; a pipe and cigar shop; a
lottery office; a station for French soldiers, with a sentinel pacing in
front; and a fruit-stand, at which a Roman matron was selling the
dried kernels of chestnuts, wretched little figs, and some bouquets of
yesterday. A church, of course, was near at hand, the facade of which
ascended into lofty pinnacles, whereon were perched two or three winged
figures of stone, either angelic or allegorical, blowing stone trumpets
in close vicinity to the upper windows of an old and shabby palace.
This palace was distinguished by a feature not very common in the
architecture of Roman edifices; that is to say, a mediaeval tower,
square, massive, lofty, and battlemented and machicolated at the summit.

At one of the angles of the battlements stood a shrine of the Virgin,
such as we see everywhere at the street corners of Rome, but seldom or
never, except in this solitary, instance, at a height above the ordinary
level of men's views and aspirations. Connected with this old tower and
its lofty shrine, there is a legend which we cannot here pause to tell;
but for centuries a lamp has been burning before the Virgin's image, at
noon, at midnight, and at all hours of the twenty-four, and must be kept
burning forever, as long as the tower shall stand; or else the tower
itself, the palace, and whatever estate belongs to it, shall pass from
its hereditary possessor, in accordance with an ancient vow, and become
the property of the Church.

As Miriam approached, she looked upward, and saw,--not, indeed, the
flame of the never-dying lamp, which was swallowed up in the broad
sunlight that brightened the shrine, but a flock of white doves,
skimming, fluttering, and wheeling about the topmost height of the
tower, their silver wings flashing in the pure transparency of the
air. Several of them sat on the ledge of the upper window, pushing one
another off by their eager struggle for this favorite station, and all
tapping their beaks and flapping their wings tumultuously against the
panes; some had alighted in the street, far below, but flew hastily
upward, at the sound of the window being thrust ajar, and opening in the
middle, on rusty hinges, as Roman windows do.

A fair young girl, dressed in white, showed herself at the aperture for
a single instant, and threw forth as much as her two small hands could
hold of some kind of food, for the flock of eleemosynary doves. It
seemed greatly to the taste of the feathered people; for they tried to
snatch beakfuls of it from her grasp, caught it in the air, and rushed
downward after it upon the pavement.

"What a pretty scene this is," thought Miriam, with a kindly smile, "and
how like a dove she is herself, the fair, pure creature! The other doves
know her for a sister, I am sure."

Miriam passed beneath the deep portal of the palace, and turning to the
left, began to mount flight after flight of a staircase, which, for the
loftiness of its aspiration, was worthy to be Jacob's ladder, or, at all
events, the staircase of the Tower of Babel. The city bustle, which
is heard even in Rome, the rumble of wheels over the uncomfortable
paving-stones, the hard harsh cries reechoing in the high and narrow
streets, grew faint and died away; as the turmoil of the world will
always die, if we set our faces to climb heavenward. Higher, and higher
still; and now, glancing through the successive windows that threw in
their narrow light upon the stairs, her view stretched across the roofs
of the city, unimpeded even by the stateliest palaces. Only the domes of
churches ascend into this airy region, and hold up their golden crosses
on a level with her eye; except that, out of the very heart of Rome,
the column of Antoninus thrusts itself upward, with St. Paul upon its
summit, the sole human form that seems to have kept her company.

Finally, the staircase came to an end; save that, on one side of the
little entry where it terminated, a flight of a dozen steps gave access
to the roof of the tower and the legendary shrine. On the other side was
a door, at which Miriam knocked, but rather as a friendly announcement
of her presence than with any doubt of hospitable welcome; for, awaiting
no response, she lifted the latch and entered.

"What a hermitage you have found for yourself, dear Hilda!" she,
exclaimed. "You breathe sweet air, above all the evil scents of Rome;
and even so, in your maiden elevation, you dwell above our vanities and
passions, our moral dust and mud, with the doves and the angels for your
nearest neighbors. I should not wonder if the Catholics were to make a
saint of you, like your namesake of old; especially as you have almost
avowed yourself of their religion, by undertaking to keep the lamp
alight before the Virgin's shrine."

"No, no, Miriam!" said Hilda, who had come joyfully forward to greet
her friend. "You must not call me a Catholic. A Christian girl--even
a daughter of the Puritans--may surely pay honor to the idea of divine
Womanhood, without giving up the faith of her forefathers. But how kind
you are to climb into my dove-cote!"

"It is no trifling proof of friendship, indeed," answered Miriam; "I
should think there were three hundred stairs at least."

"But it will do you good," continued Hilda. "A height of some fifty feet
above the roofs of Rome gives me all the advantages that I could get
from fifty miles of distance. The air so exhilarates my spirits, that
sometimes I feel half inclined to attempt a flight from the top of my
tower, in the faith that I should float upward."

"O, pray don't try it!" said Miriam, laughing; "If it should turn out
that you are less than an angel, you would find the stones of the Roman
pavement very hard; and if an angel, indeed, I am afraid you would never
come down among us again."

This young American girl was an example of the freedom of life which
it is possible for a female artist to enjoy at Rome. She dwelt in her
tower, as free to descend into the corrupted atmosphere of the city
beneath, as one of her companion doves to fly downward into the
street;--all alone, perfectly independent, under her own sole
guardianship, unless watched over by the Virgin, whose shrine she
tended; doing what she liked without a suspicion or a shadow upon the
snowy whiteness of her fame. The customs of artist life bestow such
liberty upon the sex, which is elsewhere restricted within so much
narrower limits; and it is perhaps an indication that, whenever we admit
women to a wider scope of pursuits and professions, we must also remove
the shackles of our present conventional rules, which would then become
an insufferable restraint on either maid or wife. The system seems to
work unexceptionably in Rome; and in many other cases, as in Hilda's,
purity of heart and life are allowed to assert themselves, and to be
their own proof and security, to a degree unknown in the society of
other cities.

Hilda, in her native land, had early shown what was pronounced by
connoisseurs a decided genius for the pictorial art. Even in her
schooldays--still not so very distant--she had produced sketches that
were seized upon by men of taste, and hoarded as among the choicest
treasures of their portfolios; scenes delicately imagined, lacking,
perhaps, the reality which comes only from a close acquaintance with
life, but so softly touched with feeling and fancy that you seemed to
be looking at humanity with angels' eyes. With years and experience
she might be expected to attain a darker and more forcible touch, which
would impart to her designs the relief they needed. Had Hilda remained
in her own country, it is not improbable that she might have produced
original works worthy to hang in that gallery of native art which,
we hope, is destined to extend its rich length through many future
centuries. An orphan, however, without near relatives, and possessed of
a little property, she had found it within her possibilities to come
to Italy; that central clime, whither the eyes and the heart of every
artist turn, as if pictures could not be made to glow in any other
atmosphere, as if statues could not assume grace and expression, save in
that land of whitest marble.

Hilda's gentle courage had brought her safely over land and sea; her
mild, unflagging perseverance had made a place for her in the famous
city, even like a flower that finds a chink for itself, and a little
earth to grow in, on whatever ancient wall its slender roots may fasten.
Here she dwelt, in her tower, possessing a friend or two in Rome, but
no home companion except the flock of doves, whose cote was in a ruinous
chamber contiguous to her own. They soon became as familiar with the
fair-haired Saxon girl as if she were a born sister of their brood; and
her customary white robe bore such an analogy to their snowy plumage
that the confraternity of artists called Hilda the Dove, and recognized
her aerial apartment as the Dovecote. And while the other doves flew far
and wide in quest of what was good for them, Hilda likewise spread
her wings, and sought such ethereal and imaginative sustenance as God
ordains for creatures of her kind.

We know not whether the result of her Italian studies, so far as it
could yet be seen, will be accepted as a good or desirable one. Certain
it is, that since her arrival in the pictorial land, Hilda seemed to
have entirely lost the impulse of original design, which brought her
thither. No doubt the girl's early dreams had been of sending forms and
hues of beauty into the visible world out of her own mind; of compelling
scenes of poetry and history to live before men's eyes, through
conceptions and by methods individual to herself. But more and more, as
she grew familiar with the miracles of art that enrich so many galleries
in Rome, Hilda had ceased to consider herself as an original artist. No,
wonder that this change should have befallen her. She was endowed with
a deep and sensitive faculty of appreciation; she had the gift of
discerning and worshipping excellence in a most unusual measure. No
other person, it is probable, recognized so adequately, and enjoyed with
such deep delight, the pictorial wonders that were here displayed. She
saw no, not saw, but felt through and through a picture; she bestowed
upon it all the warmth and richness of a woman's sympathy; not by any
intellectual effort, but by this strength of heart, and this guiding
light of sympathy, she went straight to the central point, in which the
master had conceived his work. Thus she viewed it, as it were, with his
own eyes, and hence her comprehension of any picture that interested her
was perfect.

This power and depth of appreciation depended partly upon Hilda's
physical organization, which was at once healthful and exquisitely
delicate; and, connected with this advantage, she had a command of
hand, a nicety and force of touch, which is an endowment separate from
pictorial genius, though indispensable to its exercise.

It has probably happened in many other instances, as it did in Hilda's
case, that she ceased to aim at original achievement in consequence of
the very gifts which so exquisitely fitted her to profit by familiarity
with the works of the mighty old masters. Reverencing these wonderful
men so deeply, she was too grateful for all they bestowed upon her,
too loyal, too humble, in their awful presence, to think of enrolling
herself in their society. Beholding the miracles of beauty which they
had achieved, the world seemed already rich enough in original designs,
and nothing more was so desirable as to diffuse those self-same beauties
more widely among mankind. All the youthful hopes and ambitions, the
fanciful ideas which she had brought from home, of great pictures to be
conceived in her feminine mind, were flung aside, and, so far as those
most intimate with her could discern, relinquished without a sigh. All
that she would henceforth attempt and that most reverently, not to say
religiously was to catch and reflect some of the glory which had been
shed upon canvas from the immortal pencils of old.

So Hilda became a copyist: in the Pinacotheca of the Vatican, in the
galleries of the Pam-fili-Doria palace, the Borghese, the Corsini, the
Sciarra, her easel was set up before many a famous picture by Guido,
Domenichino, Raphael, and the devout painters of earlier schools than
these. Other artists and visitors from foreign lands beheld the slender,
girlish figure in front of some world-known work, absorbed, unconscious
of everything around her, seeming to live only in what she sought to do.
They smiled, no doubt, at the audacity which led her to dream of
copying those mighty achievements. But, if they paused to look over her
shoulder, and had sensibility enough to understand what was before their
eyes, they soon felt inclined to believe that the spirits of the old
masters were hovering over Hilda, and guiding her delicate white hand.
In truth, from whatever realm of bliss and many colored beauty those
spirits might descend, it would have been no unworthy errand to help so
gentle and pure a worshipper of their genius in giving the last divine
touch to her repetitions of their works.

Her copies were indeed marvellous. Accuracy was not the phrase for them;
a Chinese copy is accurate. Hilda's had that evanescent and ethereal
life--that flitting fragrance, as it were, of the originals--which it
is as difficult to catch and retain as it would be for a sculptor to
get the very movement and varying color of a living man into his marble
bust. Only by watching the efforts of the most skilful copyists--men who
spend a lifetime, as some of them do, in multiplying copies of a
single picture--and observing how invariably they leave out just the
indefinable charm that involves the last, inestimable value, can we
understand the difficulties of the task which they undertake.

It was not Hilda's general practice to attempt reproducing the whole of
a great picture, but to select some high, noble, and delicate portion
of it, in which the spirit and essence of the picture culminated: the
Virgin's celestial sorrow, for example, or a hovering angel, imbued
with immortal light, or a saint with the glow of heaven in his dying
face,--and these would be rendered with her whole soul. If a picture had
darkened into an indistinct shadow through time and neglect, or had been
injured by cleaning, or retouched by some profane hand, she seemed to
possess the faculty of seeing it in its pristine glory. The copy would
come from her hands with what the beholder felt must be the light which
the old master had left upon the original in bestowing his final and
most ethereal touch. In some instances even (at least, so those believed
who best appreciated Hilda's power and sensibility) she had been enabled
to execute what the great master had conceived in his imagination, but
had not so perfectly succeeded in putting upon canvas; a result surely
not impossible when such depth of sympathy as she possessed was assisted
by the delicate skill and accuracy of her slender hand. In such cases
the girl was but a finer instrument, a more exquisitely effective piece
of mechanism, by the help of which the spirit of some great departed
painter now first achieved his ideal, centuries after his own earthly
hand, that other tool, had turned to dust.

Not to describe her as too much a wonder, however, Hilda, or the Dove,
as her well-wishers half laughingly delighted to call her, had been
pronounced by good judges incomparably the best copyist in Rome. After
minute examination of her works, the most skilful artists declared that
she had been led to her results by following precisely the same process
step by step through which the original painter had trodden to the
development of his idea. Other copyists--if such they are worthy to be
called--attempt only a superficial imitation. Copies of the old masters
in this sense are produced by thousands; there are artists, as we have
said, who spend their lives in painting the works, or perhaps one single
work, of one illustrious painter over and over again: thus they
convert themselves into Guido machines, or Raphaelic machines. Their
performances, it is true, are often wonderfully deceptive to a careless
eye; but working entirely from the outside, and seeking only to
reproduce the surface, these men are sure to leave out that indefinable
nothing, that inestimable something, that constitutes the life and
soul through which the picture gets its immortality. Hilda was no
such machine as this; she wrought religiously, and therefore wrought a
miracle.

It strikes us that there is something far higher and nobler in all this,
in her thus sacrificing herself to the devout recognition of the highest
excellence in art, than there would have been in cultivating her not
inconsiderable share of talent for the production of works from her own
ideas. She might have set up for herself, and won no ignoble name; she
might have helped to fill the already crowded and cumbered world with
pictures, not destitute of merit, but falling short, if by ever so
little, of the best that has been done; she might thus have gratified
some tastes that were incapable of appreciating Raphael. But this could
be done only by lowering the standard of art to the comprehension of
the spectator. She chose the better and loftier and more unselfish
part, laying her individual hopes, her fame, her prospects of enduring
remembrance, at the feet of those great departed ones whom she so loved
and venerated; and therefore the world was the richer for this feeble
girl.

Since the beauty and glory of a great picture are confined within
itself, she won out that glory by patient faith and self-devotion,
and multiplied it for mankind. From the dark, chill corner of a
gallery,--from some curtained chapel in a church, where the light came
seldom and aslant,--from the prince's carefully guarded cabinet, where
not one eye in thousands was permitted to behold it, she brought the
wondrous picture into daylight, and gave all its magic splendor for the
enjoyment of the world. Hilda's faculty of genuine admiration is one of
the rarest to be found in human nature; and let us try to recompense her
in kind by admiring her generous self-surrender, and her brave, humble
magnanimity in choosing to be the handmaid of those old magicians,
instead of a minor enchantress within a circle of her own.

The handmaid of Raphael, whom she loved with a virgin's love! Would it
have been worth Hilda's while to relinquish this office for the sake of
giving the world a picture or two which it would call original; pretty
fancies of snow and moonlight; the counterpart in picture of so many
feminine achievements in literature!




CHAPTER VII


BEATRICE


Miriam was glad to find the Dove in her turret-home; for being endowed
with an infinite activity, and taking exquisite delight in the sweet
labor of which her life was full, it was Hilda's practice to flee abroad
betimes, and haunt the galleries till dusk. Happy were those (but they
were very few) whom she ever chose to be the companions of her day; they
saw the art treasures of Rome, under her guidance, as they had never
seen them before. Not that Hilda could dissertate, or talk learnedly
about pictures; she would probably have been puzzled by the technical
terms of her own art. Not that she had much to say about what she most
profoundly admired; but even her silent sympathy was so powerful that
it drew your own along with it, endowing you with a second-sight that
enabled you to see excellences with almost the depth and delicacy of her
own perceptions.

All the Anglo-Saxon denizens of Rome, by this time, knew Hilda by sight.
Unconsciously, the poor child had become one of the spectacles of the
Eternal City, and was often pointed out to strangers, sitting at her
easel among the wild-bearded young men, the white-haired old ones, and
the shabbily dressed, painfully plain women, who make up the throng of
copyists. The old custodes knew her well, and watched over her as their
own child. Sometimes a young artist, instead of going on with a copy
of the picture before which he had placed his easel, would enrich
his canvas with an original portrait of Hilda at her work. A lovelier
subject could not have been selected, nor one which required nicer skill
and insight in doing it anything like justice. She was pretty at all
times, in our native New England style, with her light-brown ringlets,
her delicately tinged, but healthful cheek, her sensitive, intelligent,
yet most feminine and kindly face. But, every few moments, this pretty
and girlish face grew beautiful and striking, as some inward thought and
feeling brightened, rose to the surface, and then, as it were, passed
out of sight again; so that, taking into view this constantly recurring
change, it really seemed as if Hilda were only visible by the sunshine
of her soul.

In other respects, she was a good subject for a portrait, being
distinguished by a gentle picturesqueness, which was perhaps
unconsciously bestowed by some minute peculiarity of dress, such as
artists seldom fail to assume. The effect was to make her appear like an
inhabitant of pictureland, a partly ideal creature, not to be handled,
nor even approached too closely. In her feminine self, Hilda was
natural, and of pleasant deportment, endowed with a mild cheerfulness of
temper, not overflowing with animal spirits, but never long despondent.
There was a certain simplicity that made every one her friend, but it
was combined with a subtile attribute of reserve, that insensibly kept
those at a distance who were not suited to her sphere.

Miriam was the dearest friend whom she had ever known. Being a year or
two the elder, of longer acquaintance with Italy, and better fitted to
deal with its crafty and selfish inhabitants, she had helped Hilda to
arrange her way of life, and had encouraged her through those first
weeks, when Rome is so dreary to every newcomer.

"But how lucky that you are at home today," said Miriam, continuing the
conversation which was begun, many pages back. "I hardly hoped to find
you, though I had a favor to ask,--a commission to put into your charge.
But what picture is this?"

"See!" said Hilda, taking her friend's hand, and leading her in front of
the easel. "I wanted your opinion of it."

"If you have really succeeded," observed Miriam, recognizing the picture
at the first glance, "it will be the greatest miracle you have yet
achieved."

The picture represented simply a female head; a very youthful, girlish,
perfectly beautiful face, enveloped in white drapery, from beneath which
strayed a lock or two of what seemed a rich, though hidden luxuriance
of auburn hair. The eyes were large and brown, and met those of the
spectator, but evidently with a strange, ineffectual effort to escape.
There was a little redness about the eyes, very slightly indicated, so
that you would question whether or no the girl had been weeping. The
whole face was quiet; there was no distortion or disturbance of any
single feature; nor was it easy to see why the expression was not
cheerful, or why a single touch of the artist's pencil should not
brighten it into joyousness. But, in fact, it was the very saddest
picture ever painted or conceived; it involved an unfathomable depth of
sorrow, the sense of which came to the observer by a sort of intuition.
It was a sorrow that removed this beautiful girl out of the sphere
of humanity, and set her in a far-off region, the remoteness of
which--while yet her face is so close before us--makes us shiver as at a
spectre.

"Yes, Hilda," said her friend, after closely examining the picture,
"you have done nothing else so wonderful as this. But by what unheard-of
solicitations or secret interest have you obtained leave to copy Guido's
Beatrice Cenci? It is an unexampled favor; and the impossibility
of getting a genuine copy has filled the Roman picture shops with
Beatrices, gay, grievous, or coquettish, but never a true one among
them."

"There has been one exquisite copy, I have heard," said Hilda, "by
an artist capable of appreciating the spirit of the picture. It was
Thompson, who brought it away piecemeal, being forbidden (like the
rest of us) to set up his easel before it. As for me, I knew the Prince
Barberini would be deaf to all entreaties; so I had no resource but
to sit down before the picture, day after day, and let it sink into my
heart. I do believe it is now photographed there. It is a sad face to
keep so close to one's heart; only what is so very beautiful can never
be quite a pain. Well; after studying it in this way, I know not how
many times, I came home, and have done my best to transfer the image to
canvas."

"Here it is, then," said Miriam, contemplating Hilda's work with great
interest and delight, mixed with the painful sympathy that the picture
excited. "Everywhere we see oil-paintings, crayon sketches, cameos,
engravings, lithographs, pretending to be Beatrice, and representing the
poor girl with blubbered eyes, a leer of coquetry, a merry look as if
she were dancing, a piteous look as if she were beaten, and twenty other
modes of fantastic mistake. But here is Guido's very Beatrice; she that
slept in the dungeon, and awoke, betimes, to ascend the scaffold, And
now that you have done it, Hilda, can you interpret what the feeling
is, that gives this picture such a mysterious force? For my part, though
deeply sensible of its influence, I cannot seize it."

"Nor can I, in words," replied her friend. "But while I was painting
her, I felt all the time as if she were trying to escape from my gaze.
She knows that her sorrow is so strange and so immense, that she ought
to be solitary forever, both for the world's sake and her own; and this
is the reason we feel such a distance between Beatrice and ourselves,
even when our eyes meet hers. It is infinitely heart-breaking to meet
her glance, and to feel that nothing can be done to help or comfort her;
neither does she ask help or comfort, knowing the hopelessness of her
case better than we do. She is a fallen angel,--fallen, and yet sinless;
and it is only this depth of sorrow, with its weight and darkness, that
keeps her down upon earth, and brings her within our view even while it
sets her beyond our reach."

"You deem her sinless?" asked Miriam; "that is not so plain to me. If
I can pretend to see at all into that dim region, whence she gazes so
strangely and sadly at us, Beatrice's own conscience does not acquit her
of something evil, and never to be forgiven!"

"Sorrow so black as hers oppresses her very nearly as sin would," said
Hilda.

"Then," inquired Miriam, "do you think that there was no sin in the deed
for which she suffered?"

"Ah!" replied Hilda, shuddering, "I really had quite forgotten
Beatrice's history, and was thinking of her only as the picture seems
to reveal her character. Yes, yes; it was terrible guilt, an inexpiable
crime, and she feels it to be so. Therefore it is that the forlorn
creature so longs to elude our eyes, and forever vanish away into
nothingness! Her doom is just!"

"O Hilda, your innocence is like a sharp steel sword!" exclaimed her
friend. "Your judgments are often terribly severe, though you seem all
made up of gentleness and mercy. Beatrice's sin may not have been so
great: perhaps it was no sin at all, but the best virtue possible in the
circumstances. If she viewed it as a sin, it may have been because her
nature was too feeble for the fate imposed upon her. Ah!" continued
Miriam passionately, "if I could only get within her consciousness!--if
I could but clasp Beatrice Cenci's ghost, and draw it into myself! I
would give my life to know whether she thought herself innocent, or the
one great criminal since time began."

As Miriam gave utterance to these words, Hilda looked from the picture
into her face, and was startled to observe that her friend's expression
had become almost exactly that of the portrait; as if her passionate
wish and struggle to penetrate poor Beatrice's mystery had been
successful.

"O, for Heaven's sake, Miriam, do not look so!" she cried. "What an
actress you are! And I never guessed it before. Ah! now you are yourself
again!" she added, kissing her. "Leave Beatrice to me in future."

"Cover up your magical picture, then," replied her friend, "else I
never can look away from it. It is strange, dear Hilda, how an innocent,
delicate, white soul like yours has been able to seize the subtle
mystery of this portrait; as you surely must, in order to reproduce it
so perfectly. Well; we will not talk of it any more. Do you know, I
have come to you this morning on a small matter of business. Will you
undertake it for me?"

"O, certainly," said Hilda, laughing; "if you choose to trust me with
business."

"Nay, it is not a matter of any difficulty," answered Miriam; "merely to
take charge of this packet, and keep it for me awhile."

"But why not keep it yourself?" asked Hilda.

"Partly because it will be safer in your charge," said her friend. "I
am a careless sort of person in ordinary things; while you, for all you
dwell so high above the world, have certain little housewifely ways of
accuracy and order. The packet is of some slight importance; and yet, it
may be, I shall not ask you for it again. In a week or two, you know,
I am leaving Rome. You, setting at defiance the malarial fever, mean to
stay here and haunt your beloved galleries through the summer. Now, four
months hence, unless you hear more from me, I would have you deliver the
packet according to its address."

Hilda read the direction; it was to Signore Luca Barboni, at the Plazzo
Cenci, third piano.

"I will deliver it with my own hand," said she, "precisely four months
from to-day, unless you bid me to the contrary. Perhaps I shall meet the
ghost of Beatrice in that grim old palace of her forefathers."

"In that case," rejoined Miriam, "do not fail to speak to her, and
try to win her confidence. Poor thing! she would be all the better for
pouring her heart out freely, and would be glad to do it, if she were
sure of sympathy. It irks my brain and heart to think of her, all shut
up within herself." She withdrew the cloth that Hilda had drawn over the
picture, and took another long look at it. "Poor sister Beatrice! for
she was still a woman, Hilda, still a sister, be her sin or sorrow what
they might. How well you have done it, Hilda! I knot not whether Guido
will thank you, or be jealous of your rivalship."

"Jealous, indeed!" exclaimed Hilda. "If Guido had not wrought through
me, my pains would have been thrown away."

"After all," resumed Miriam, "if a woman had painted the original
picture, there might have been something in it which we miss now. I
have a great mind to undertake a copy myself; and try to give it what
it lacks. Well; goodby. But, stay! I am going for a little airing to
the grounds of the Villa Borghese this afternoon. You will think it very
foolish, but I always feel the safer in your company, Hilda, slender
little maiden as you are. Will you come?"

"Ah, not to-day, dearest Miriam," she replied; "I have set my heart on
giving another touch or two to this picture, and shall not stir abroad
till nearly sunset."

"Farewell, then," said her visitor. "I leave you in your dove-cote. What
a sweet, strange life you lead here; conversing with the souls of the
old masters, feeding and fondling your sister doves, and trimming the
Virgin's lamp! Hilda, do you ever pray to the Virgin while you tend her
shrine?"

"Sometimes I have been moved to do so," replied the Dove, blushing,
and lowering her eyes; "she was a woman once. Do you think it would be
wrong?"

"Nay, that is for you to judge," said Miriam; "but when you pray next,
dear friend, remember me!"

She went down the long descent of the lower staircase, and just as she
reached the street the flock of doves again took their hurried flight
from the pavement to the topmost window. She threw her eyes upward
and beheld them hovering about Hilda's head; for, after her friend's
departure, the girl had been more impressed than before by something
very sad and troubled in her manner. She was, therefore, leaning forth
from her airy abode, and flinging down a kind, maidenly kiss, and a
gesture of farewell, in the hope that these might alight upon Miriam's
heart, and comfort its unknown sorrow a little. Kenyon the sculptor, who
chanced to be passing the head of the street, took note of that ethereal
kiss, and wished that he could have caught it in the air and got Hilda's
leave to keep it.




CHAPTER VIII


THE SUBURBAN VILLA


Donatello, while it was still a doubtful question betwixt afternoon and
morning, set forth to keep the appointment which Miriam had carelessly
tendered him in the grounds of the Villa Borghese. The entrance to these
grounds (as all my readers know, for everybody nowadays has been in
Rome) is just outside of the Porta del Popolo. Passing beneath that not
very impressive specimen of Michael Angelo's architecture, a minute's
walk will transport the visitor from the small, uneasy, lava stones
of the Roman pavement into broad, gravelled carriage-drives, whence
a little farther stroll brings him to the soft turf of a beautiful
seclusion. A seclusion, but seldom a solitude; for priest, noble, and
populace, stranger and native, all who breathe Roman air, find free
admission, and come hither to taste the languid enjoyment of the
day-dream that they call life.

But Donatello's enjoyment was of a livelier kind. He soon began to draw
long and delightful breaths among those shadowy walks. Judging by the
pleasure which the sylvan character of the scene excited in him, it
might be no merely fanciful theory to set him down as the kinsman, not
far remote, of that wild, sweet, playful, rustic creature, to whose
marble image he bore so striking a resemblance. How mirthful a discovery
would it be (and yet with a touch of pathos in it), if the breeze which
sported fondly with his clustering locks were to waft them suddenly
aside, and show a pair of leaf-shaped, furry ears! What an honest strain
of wildness would it indicate! and into what regions of rich mystery
would it extend Donatello's sympathies, to be thus linked (and by no
monstrous chain) with what we call the inferior trioes of being, whose
simplicity, mingled with his human intelligence, might partly restore
what man has lost of the divine!

The scenery amid which the youth now strayed was such as arrays itself
in the imagination when we read the beautiful old myths, and fancy a
brighter sky, a softer turf, a more picturesque arrangement of venerable
trees, than we find in the rude and untrained landscapes of the Western
world. The ilex-trees, so ancient and time-honored were they, seemed to
have lived for ages undisturbed, and to feel no dread of profanation by
the axe any more than overthrow by the thunder-stroke. It had already
passed out of their dreamy old memories that only a few years ago they
were grievously imperilled by the Gaul's last assault upon the walls of
Rome. As if confident in the long peace of their lifetime, they assumed
attitudes of indolent repose. They leaned over the green turf in
ponderous grace, throwing abroad their great branches without danger
of interfering with other trees, though other majestic trees grew near
enough for dignified society, but too distant for constraint. Never
was there a more venerable quietude than that which slept among their
sheltering boughs; never a sweeter sunshine than that now gladdening
the gentle gloom which these leafy patriarchs strove to diffuse over the
swelling and subsiding lawns.

In other portions of the grounds the stone-pines lifted their dense
clump of branches upon a slender length of stem, so high that they
looked like green islands in the air, flinging down a shadow upon the
turf so far off that you hardly knew which tree had made it. Again,
there were avenues of cypress, resembling dark flames of huge funeral
candles, which spread dusk and twilight round about them instead of
cheerful radiance. The more open spots were all abloom, even so early in
the season, with anemones of wondrous size, both white and rose-colored,
and violets that betrayed themselves by their rich fragrance, even if
their blue eyes failed to meet your own. Daisies, too, were abundant,
but larger than the modest little English flower, and therefore of small
account.

These wooded and flowery lawns are more beautiful than the finest
of English park scenery, more touching, more impressive, through the
neglect that leaves Nature so much to her own ways and methods. Since
man seldom interferes with her, she sets to work in her quiet way
and makes herself at home. There is enough of human care, it is true,
bestowed, long ago and still bestowed, to prevent wildness from growing
into deformity; and the result is an ideal landscape, a woodland scene
that seems to have been projected out of the poet's mind. If the ancient
Faun were other than a mere creation of old poetry, and could have
reappeared anywhere, it must have been in such a scene as this.

In the openings of the wood there are fountains plashing into marble
basins, the depths of which are shaggy with water-weeds; or they tumble
like natural cascades from rock to rock, sending their murmur afar, to
make the quiet and silence more appreciable. Scattered here and there
with careless artifice, stand old altars bearing Roman inscriptions.
Statues, gray with the long corrosion of even that soft atmosphere, half
hide and half reveal themselves, high on pedestals, or perhaps fallen
and broken on the turf. Terminal figures, columns of marble or granite
porticos, arches, are seen in the vistas of the wood-paths, either
veritable relics of antiquity, or with so exquisite a touch of artful
ruin on them that they are better than if really antique. At all events,
grass grows on the tops of the shattered pillars, and weeds and flowers
root themselves in the chinks of the massive arches and fronts of
temples, and clamber at large over their pediments, as if this were the
thousandth summer since their winged seeds alighted there.

What a strange idea--what a needless labor--to construct artificial
ruins in Rome, the native soil of ruin! But even these sportive
imitations, wrought by man in emulation of what time has done to temples
and palaces, are perhaps centuries old, and, beginning as illusions,
have grown to be venerable in sober earnest. The result of all is a
scene, pensive, lovely, dreamlike, enjoyable and sad, such as is to
be found nowhere save in these princely villa-residences in the
neighborhood of Rome; a scene that must have required generations and
ages, during which growth, decay, and man's intelligence wrought kindly
together, to render it so gently wild as we behold it now.

The final charm is bestowed by the malaria. There is a piercing,
thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea of so much beauty thrown
away, or only enjoyable at its half-development, in winter and early
spring, and never to be dwelt amongst, as the home scenery of any human
being. For if you come hither in summer, and stray through these glades
in the golden sunset, fever walks arm in arm with you, and death awaits
you at the end of the dim vista. Thus the scene is like Eden in its
loveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes it beyond
the scope of man's actual possessions. But Donatello felt nothing of
this dream-like melancholy that haunts the spot. As he passed among the
sunny shadows, his spirit seemed to acquire new elasticity. The flicker
of the sunshine, the sparkle of the fountain's gush, the dance of the
leaf upon the bough, the woodland fragrance, the green freshness,
the old sylvan peace and freedom, were all intermingled in those long
breaths which he drew.

The ancient dust, the mouldiness of Rome, the dead atmosphere in which
he had wasted so many months, the hard pavements, the smell of ruin and
decaying generations, the chill palaces, the convent bells, the heavy
incense of altars, the life that he had led in those dark, narrow
streets, among priests, soldiers, nobles, artists, and women,--all the
sense of these things rose from the young man's consciousness like a
cloud which had darkened over him without his knowing how densely.

He drank in the natural influences of the scene, and was intoxicated as
by an exhilarating wine. He ran races with himself along the gleam and
shadow of the wood-paths. He leapt up to catch the overhanging bough of
an ilex, and swinging himself by it alighted far onward, as if he had
flown thither through the air. In a sudden rapture he embraced the
trunk of a sturdy tree, and seemed to imagine it a creature worthy of
affection and capable of a tender response; he clasped it closely in his
arms, as a Faun might have clasped the warm feminine grace of the nymph,
whom antiquity supposed to dwell within that rough, encircling rind.
Then, in order to bring himself closer to the genial earth, with which
his kindred instincts linked him so strongly, he threw himself at full
length on the turf, and pressed down his lips, kissing the violets and
daisies, which kissed him back again, though shyly, in their maiden
fashion.

While he lay there, it was pleasant to see how the green and blue
lizards, who had beta basking on some rock or on a fallen pillar that
absorbed the warmth of the sun, scrupled not to scramble over him with
their small feet; and how the birds alighted on the nearest twigs and
sang their little roundelays unbroken by any chirrup of alarm; they
recognized him, it may be, as something akin to themselves, or else they
fancied that he was rooted and grew there; for these wild pets of nature
dreaded him no more in his buoyant life than if a mound of soil and
grass and flowers had long since covered his dead body, converting it
back to the sympathies from which human existence had estranged it.

All of us, after a long abode in cities, have felt the blood gush more
joyously through our veins with the first breath of rural air; few could
feel it so much as Donatello, a creature of simple elements, bred in
the sweet sylvan life of Tuscany, and for months back dwelling amid the
mouldy gloom and dim splendor of old Rome. Nature has been shut out for
numberless centuries from those stony-hearted streets, to which he had
latterly grown accustomed; there is no trace of her, except for what
blades of grass spring out of the pavements of the less trodden piazzas,
or what weeds cluster and tuft themselves on the cornices of ruins.
Therefore his joy was like that of a child that had gone astray from
home, and finds him suddenly in his mother's arms again.

At last, deeming it full time for Miriam to keep her tryst, he climbed
to the tiptop of the tallest tree, and thence looked about him, swaying
to and fro in the gentle breeze, which was like the respiration of that
great leafy, living thing. Donatello saw beneath him the whole circuit
of the enchanted ground; the statues and columns pointing upward from
among the shrubbery, the fountains flashing in the sunlight, the paths
winding hither and thither, and continually finding out some nook of new
and ancient pleasantness. He saw the villa, too, with its marble front
incrusted all over with basreliefs, and statues in its many niches. It
was as beautiful as a fairy palace, and seemed an abode in which the
lord and lady of this fair domain might fitly dwell, and come forth each
morning to enjoy as sweet a life as their happiest dreams of the past
night could have depicted. All this he saw, but his first glance had
taken in too wide a sweep, and it was not till his eyes fell almost
directly beneath him, that Donatello beheld Miriam just turning into the
path that led across the roots of his very tree.

He descended among the foliage, waiting for her to come close to the
trunk, and then suddenly dropped from an impending bough, and alighted
at her side. It was as if the swaying of the branches had let a ray
of sunlight through. The same ray likewise glimmered among the gloomy
meditations that encompassed Miriam, and lit up the pale, dark beauty of
her face, while it responded pleasantly to Donatello's glance.

"I hardly know," said she, smiling, "whether you have sprouted out of
the earth, or fallen from the clouds. In either case you are welcome."

And they walked onward together.




CHAPTER IX


THE FAUN AND NYMPH


Miriam's sadder mood, it might be, had at first an effect on Donatello's
spirits. It checked the joyous ebullition into which they would
otherwise have effervesced when he found himself in her society, not, as
heretofore, in the old gloom of Rome, but under that bright soft sky and
in those Arcadian woods. He was silent for a while; it being, indeed,
seldom Donatello's impulse to express himself copiously in words. His
usual modes of demonstration were by the natural language of gesture,
the instinctive movement of his agile frame, and the unconscious play
of his features, which, within a limited range of thought and emotion,
would speak volumes in a moment.

By and by, his own mood seemed to brighten Miriam's, and was reflected
back upon himself. He began inevitably, as it were, to dance along
the wood-path; flinging himself into attitudes of strange comic grace.
Often, too, he ran a little way in advance of his companion, and then
stood to watch her as she approached along the shadowy and sun-fleckered
path. With every step she took, he expressed his joy at her nearer
and nearer presence by what might be thought an extravagance of
gesticulation, but which doubtless was the language of the natural man,
though laid aside and forgotten by other men, now that words have been
feebly substituted in the place of signs and symbols. He gave Miriam the
idea of a being not precisely man, nor yet a child, but, in a high and
beautiful sense, an animal, a creature in a state of development less
than what mankind has attained, yet the more perfect within itself
for that very deficiency. This idea filled her mobile imagination with
agreeable fantasies, which, after smiling at them herself, she tried to
convey to the young man.

"What are you, my friend?" she exclaimed, always keeping in mind his
singular resemblance to the Faun of the Capitol. "If you are, in good
truth, that wild and pleasant creature whose face you wear, pray make me
known to your kindred. They will be found hereabouts, if anywhere. Knock
at the rough rind of this ilex-tree, and summon forth the Dryad! Ask the
water-nymph to rise dripping from yonder fountain, and exchange a moist
pressure of the hand with me! Do not fear that I shall shrink; even if
one of your rough cousins, a hairy Satyr, should come capering on his
goat-legs out of the haunts of far antiquity, and propose to dance with
me among these lawns! And will not Bacchus,--with whom you consorted so
familiarly of old, and who loved you so well,--will he not meet us here,
and squeeze rich grapes into his cup for you and me?"

Donatello smiled; he laughed heartily, indeed, in sympathy with the
mirth that gleamed out of Miriam's deep, dark eyes. But he did not seem
quite to understand her mirthful talk, nor to be disposed to explain
what kind of creature he was, or to inquire with what divine or poetic
kindred his companion feigned to link him. He appeared only to know that
Miriam was beautiful, and that she smiled graciously upon him; that
the present moment was very sweet, and himself most happy, with the
sunshine, the sylvan scenery, and woman's kindly charm, which it
enclosed within its small circumference. It was delightful to see the
trust which he reposed in Miriam, and his pure joy in her propinquity;
he asked nothing, sought nothing, save to be near the beloved object,
and brimmed over with ecstasy at that simple boon. A creature of the
happy tribes below us sometimes shows the capacity of this enjoyment; a
man, seldom or never.

"Donatello," said Miriam, looking at him thoughtfully, but amused, yet
not without a shade of sorrow, "you seem very happy; what makes you so?"

"Because I love you!" answered Donatello.

He made this momentous confession as if it were the most natural
thing in the world; and on her part,--such was the contagion of his
simplicity,--Miriam heard it without anger or disturbance, though with
no responding emotion. It was as if they had strayed across the limits
of Arcadia; and come under a civil polity where young men might avow
their passion with as little restraint as a bird pipes its note to a
similar purpose.

"Why should you love me, foolish boy?" said she. "We have no points of
sympathy at all. There are not two creatures more unlike, in this wide
world, than you and I!"

"You are yourself, and I am Donatello," replied he. "Therefore I love
you! There needs no other reason."

Certainly, there was no better or more explicable reason. It might
have been imagined that Donatello's unsophisticated heart would be more
readily attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own,
than to one already turbid with grief or wrong, as Miriam's seemed to
be. Perhaps, On the other hand, his character needed the dark element,
which it found in her. The force and energy of will, that sometimes
flashed through her eyes, may have taken him captive; or, not
improbably, the varying lights and shadows of her temper, now so
mirthful, and anon so sad with mysterious gloom, had bewitched the
youth. Analyze the matter as we may, the reason assigned by Donatello
himself was as satisfactory as we are likely to attain.

Miriam could not think seriously of the avowal that had passed. He held
out his love so freely, in his open palm, that she felt it could be
nothing but a toy, which she might play with for an instant, and give
back again. And yet Donatello's heart was so fresh a fountain, that,
had Miriam been more world-worn than she was, she might have found
it exquisite to slake her thirst with the feelings that welled up and
brimmed over from it. She was far, very far, from the dusty mediaeval
epoch, when some women have a taste for such refreshment. Even for
her, however, there was an inexpressible charm in the simplicity that
prompted Donatello's words and deeds; though, unless she caught them
in precisely the true light, they seemed but folly, the offspring of
a maimed or imperfectly developed intellect. Alternately, she almost
admired, or wholly scorned him, and knew not which estimate resulted
from the deeper appreciation. But it could not, she decided for herself,
be other than an innocent pastime, if they two--sure to be separated by
their different paths in life, to-morrow--were to gather up some of the
little pleasures that chanced to grow about their feet, like the violets
and wood-anemones, to-day.

Yet an impulse of rectitude impelled Miriam to give him what she still
held to be a needless warning against an imaginary peril.

"If you were wiser, Donatello, you would think me a dangerous person,"
said she, "If you follow my footsteps, they will lead you to no good.
You ought to be afraid of me."

"I would as soon think of fearing the air we breathe," he replied.

"And well you may, for it is full of malaria," said Miriam; she went on,
hinting at an intangible confession, such as persons with overburdened
hearts often make to children or dumb animals, or to holes in the earth,
where they think their secrets may be at once revealed and buried.
"Those who come too near me are in danger of great mischiefs, I do
assure you. Take warning, therefore! It is a sad fatality that has
brought you from your home among the Apennines,--some rusty old castle,
I suppose, with a village at its foot, and an Arcadian environment of
vineyards, fig-trees, and olive orchards,--a sad mischance, I say, that
has transported you to my side. You have had a happy life hitherto, have
you not, Donatello?"

"O, yes," answered the young man; and, though not of a retrospective
turn, he made the best effort he could to send his mind back into the
past. "I remember thinking it happiness to dance with the contadinas at
a village feast; to taste the new, sweet wine at vintage-time, and the
old, ripened wine, which our podere is famous for, in the cold winter
evenings; and to devour great, luscious figs, and apricots, peaches,
cherries, and melons. I was often happy in the woods, too, with hounds
and horses, and very happy in watching all sorts, of creatures and birds
that haunt the leafy solitudes. But never half so happy as now!"

"In these delightful groves?" she asked.

"Here, and with you," answered Donatello. "Just as we are now."

"What a fulness of content in him! How silly, and how delightful!" said
Miriam to herself. Then addressing him again: "But, Donatello, how long
will this happiness last?"

"How long!" he exclaimed; for it perplexed him even more to think of the
future than to remember the past. "Why should it have any end? How long!
Forever! forever! forever!"

"The child! the simpleton!" said Miriam, with sudden laughter, and
checking it as suddenly. "But is he a simpleton indeed? Here, in those
few natural words, he has expressed that deep sense, that profound
conviction of its own immortality, which genuine love never fails to
bring. He perplexes me,--yes, and bewitches me,--wild, gentle, beautiful
creature that he is! It is like playing with a young greyhound!"

Her eyes filled with tears, at the same time that a smile shone out of
them. Then first she became sensible of a delight and grief at once, in
feeling this zephyr of a new affection, with its untainted freshness,
blow over her weary, stifled heart, which had no right to be revived by
it. The very exquisiteness of the enjoyment made her know that it ought
to be a forbidden one.

"Donatello," she hastily exclaimed, "for your own sake, leave me! It is
not such a happy thing as you imagine it, to wander in these woods with
me, a girl from another land, burdened with a doom that she tells to
none. I might make you dread me,--perhaps hate me,--if I chose; and I
must choose, if I find you loving me too well!"

"I fear nothing!" said Donatello, looking into her unfathomable eyes
with perfect trust. "I love always!"

"I speak in vain," thought Miriam within herself.

"Well, then, for this one hour, let me be such as he imagines me.
To-morrow will be time enough to come back to my reality. My reality!
what is it? Is the past so indestructible? the future so immitigable?
Is the dark dream, in which I walk, of such solid, stony substance, that
there can be no escape out of its dungeon? Be it so! There is, at
least, that ethereal quality in my spirit, that it can make me as gay as
Donatello himself,--for this one hour!"

And immediately she brightened up, as if an inward flame, heretofore
stifled, were now permitted to fill her with its happy lustre, glowing
through her cheeks and dancing in her eye-beams.

Donatello, brisk and cheerful as he seemed before, showed a sensibility
to Miriam's gladdened mood by breaking into still wilder and
ever-varying activity. He frisked around her, bubbling over with joy,
which clothed itself in words that had little individual meaning, and
in snatches of song that seemed as natural as bird notes. Then they both
laughed together, and heard their own laughter returning in the echoes,
and laughed again at the response, so that the ancient and solemn grove
became full of merriment for these two blithe spirits. A bird happening
to sing cheerily, Donatello gave a peculiar call, and the little
feathered creature came fluttering about his head, as if it had known
him through many summers.

"How close he stands to nature!" said Miriam, observing this pleasant
familiarity between her companion and the bird. "He shall make me as
natural as himself for this one hour."

As they strayed through that sweet wilderness, she felt more and more
the influence of his elastic temperament. Miriam was an impressible
and impulsive creature, as unlike herself, in different moods, as if a
melancholy maiden and a glad one were both bound within the girdle about
her waist, and kept in magic thraldom by the brooch that clasped it.
Naturally, it is true, she was the more inclined to melancholy,
yet fully capable of that high frolic of the spirits which richly
compensates for many gloomy hours; if her soul was apt to lurk in the
darkness of a cavern, she could sport madly in the sunshine before
the cavern's mouth. Except the freshest mirth of animal spirits, like
Donatello's, there is no merriment, no wild exhilaration, comparable to
that of melancholy people escaping from the dark region in which it is
their custom to keep themselves imprisoned.

So the shadowy Miriam almost outdid Donatello on his own ground. They
ran races with each other, side by side, with shouts and laughter; they
pelted one another with early flowers, and gathering them up twined
them with green leaves into garlands for both their heads. They played
together like children, or creatures of immortal youth. So much had they
flung aside the sombre habitudes of daily life, that they seemed born
to be sportive forever, and endowed with eternal mirthfulness instead
of any deeper joy. It was a glimpse far backward into Arcadian life, or,
further still, into the Golden Age, before mankind was burdened with
sin and sorrow, and before pleasure had been darkened with those shadows
that bring it into high relief, and make it happiness.

"Hark!" cried Donatello, stopping short, as he was about to bind
Miriam's fair hands with flowers, and lead her along in triumph, "there
is music somewhere in the grove!"

"It is your kinsman, Pan, most likely," said Miriam, "playing on his
pipe. Let us go seek him, and make him puff out his rough cheeks and
pipe his merriest air! Come; the strain of music will guide us onward
like a gayly colored thread of silk."

"Or like a chain of flowers," responded Donatello, drawing her along by
that which he had twined. "This way!--Come!"




CHAPTER X


THE SYLVAN DANCE


As the music came fresher on their ears, they danced to its cadence,
extemporizing new steps and attitudes. Each varying movement had a grace
which might have been worth putting into marble, for the long delight of
days to come, but vanished with the movement that gave it birth, and was
effaced from memory by another. In Miriam's motion, freely as she flung
herself into the frolic of the hour, there was still an artful beauty;
in Donatello's, there was a charm of indescribable grotesqueness hand
in hand with grace; sweet, bewitching, most provocative of laughter,
and yet akin to pathos, so deeply did it touch the heart. This was the
ultimate peculiarity, the final touch, distinguishing between the sylvan
creature and the beautiful companion at his side. Setting apart only
this, Miriam resembled a Nymph, as much as Donatello did a Faun.

There were flitting moments, indeed, when she played the sylvan
character as perfectly as he. Catching glimpses of her, then, you would
have fancied that an oak had sundered its rough bark to let her dance
freely forth, endowed with the same spirit in her human form as that
which rustles in the leaves; or that she had emerged through the
pebbly bottom of a fountain, a water-nymph, to play and sparkle in
the sunshine, flinging a quivering light around her, and suddenly
disappearing in a shower of rainbow drops.

As the fountain sometimes subsides into its basin, so in Miriam there
were symptoms that the frolic of her spirits would at last tire itself
out.

"Ah! Donatello," cried she, laughing, as she stopped to take a breath;
"you have an unfair advantage over me! I am no true creature of the
woods; while you are a real Faun, I do believe. When your curls shook
just now, methought I had a peep at the pointed ears."

Donatello snapped his fingers above his head, as fauns and satyrs taught
us first to do, and seemed to radiate jollity out of his whole nimble
person. Nevertheless, there was a kind of dim apprehension in his face,
as if he dreaded that a moment's pause might break the spell, and snatch
away the sportive companion whom he had waited for through so many
dreary months.

"Dance! dance!" cried he joyously. "If we take breath, we shall be as
we were yesterday. There, now, is the music, just beyond this clump of
trees. Dance, Miriam, dance!"

They had now reached an open, grassy glade (of which there are many in
that artfully constructed wilderness), set round with stone seats,
on which the aged moss had kindly essayed to spread itself instead of
cushions. On one of the stone benches sat the musicians, whose strains
had enticed our wild couple thitherward. They proved to be a vagrant
band, such as Rome, and all Italy, abounds with; comprising a harp,
a flute, and a violin, which, though greatly the worse for wear,
the performers had skill enough to provoke and modulate into tolerable
harmony. It chanced to be a feast-day; and, instead of playing in
the sun-scorched piazzas of the city, or beneath the windows of some
unresponsive palace, they had bethought themselves to try the echoes
of these woods; for, on the festas of the Church, Rome scatters its
merrymakers all abroad, ripe for the dance or any other pastime.

As Miriam and Donatello emerged from among the trees, the musicians
scraped, tinkled, or blew, each according to his various kind of
instrument, more inspiringly than ever. A darkchecked little girl,
with bright black eyes, stood by, shaking a tambourine set round
with tinkling bells, and thumping it on its parchment head. Without
interrupting his brisk, though measured movement, Donatello snatched
away this unmelodious contrivance, and, flourishing it above his head,
produced music of indescribable potency, still dancing with frisky step,
and striking the tambourine, and ringing its little bells, all in one
jovial act.

It might be that there was magic in the sound, or contagion, at least,
in the spirit which had got possession of Miriam and himself, for very
soon a number of festal people were drawn to the spot, and struck
into the dance, singly or in pairs, as if they were all gone mad with
jollity. Among them were some of the plebeian damsels whom we meet
bareheaded in the Roman streets, with silver stilettos thrust through
their glossy hair; the contadinas, too, from the Campagna and the
villages, with their rich and picturesque costumes of scarlet and all
bright hues, such as fairer maidens might not venture to put on. Then
came the modern Roman from Trastevere, perchance, with his old cloak
drawn about him like a toga, which anon, as his active motion heated
him, he flung aside. Three French soldiers capered freely into the
throng, in wide scarlet trousers, their short swords dangling at their
sides; and three German artists in gray flaccid hats and flaunting
beards; and one of the Pope's Swiss guardsmen in the strange motley garb
which Michael Angelo contrived for them. Two young English tourists (one
of them a lord) took contadine partners and dashed in, as did also a
shaggy man in goat-skin breeches, who looked like rustic Pan in person,
and footed it as merrily as he. Besides the above there was a herdsman
or two from the Campagna, and a few peasants in sky-blue jackets, and
small-clothes tied with ribbons at the knees; haggard and sallow were
these last, poor serfs, having little to eat and nothing but the malaria
to breathe; but still they plucked up a momentary spirit and joined
hands in Donatello's dance.

Here, as it seemed, had the Golden Age come back again within the
Precincts of this sunny glade, thawing mankind out of their cold
formalities, releasing them from irksome restraint, mingling them
together in such childlike gayety that new flowers (of which the old
bosom of the earth is full) sprang up beneath their footsteps. The sole
exception to the geniality of the moment, as we have understood, was
seen in a countryman of our own, who sneered at the spectacle, and
declined to compromise his dignity by making part of it.

The harper thrummed with rapid fingers; the violin player flashed his
bow back and forth across the strings; the flautist poured his breath in
quick puffs of jollity, while Donatello shook the tambourine above his
head, and led the merry throng with unweariable steps. As they followed
one another in a wild ring of mirth, it seemed the realization of one
of those bas-reliefs where a dance of nymphs, satyrs, or bacchanals
is twined around the circle of an antique vase; or it was like the
sculptured scene on the front and sides of a sarcophagus, where, as
often as any other device, a festive procession mocks the ashes and
white bones that are treasured up within. You might take it for a
marriage pageant; but after a while, if you look at these merry-makers,
following them from end to end of the marble coffin, you doubt whether
their gay movement is leading them to a happy close. A youth has
suddenly fallen in the dance; a chariot is overturned and broken,
flinging the charioteer headlong to the ground; a maiden seems to have
grown faint or weary, and is drooping on the bosom of a friend. Always
some tragic incident is shadowed forth or thrust sidelong into the
spectacle; and when once it has caught your eye you can look no more
at the festal portions of the scene, except with reference to this one
slightly suggested doom and sorrow.

As in its mirth, so in the darker characteristic here alluded to, there
was an analogy between the sculptured scene on the sarcophagus and the
wild dance which we have been describing. In the midst of its madness
and riot Miriam found herself suddenly confronted by a strange figure
that shook its fantastic garments in the air, and pranced before her on
its tiptoes, almost vying with the agility of Donatello himself. It was
the model.

A moment afterwards Donatello was aware that she had retired from the
dance. He hastened towards her, and flung himself on the grass beside
the stone bench on which Miriam was sitting. But a strange distance and
unapproachableness had all at once enveloped her; and though he saw her
within reach of his arm, yet the light of her eyes seemed as far off as
that of a star, nor was there any warmth in the melancholy smile with
which she regarded him.

"Come back!" cried he. "Why should this happy hour end so soon?"

"It must end here, Donatello," said she, in answer to his words and
outstretched hand; "and such hours, I believe, do not often repeat
themselves in a lifetime. Let me go, my friend; let me vanish from you
quietly among the shadows of these trees. See, the companions of our
pastime are vanishing already!"

Whether it was that the harp-strings were broken, the violin out of
tune, or the flautist out of breath, so it chanced that the music had
ceased, and the dancers come abruptly to a pause. All that motley throng
of rioters was dissolved as suddenly as it had been drawn together. In
Miriam's remembrance the scene had a character of fantasy. It was as if
a company of satyrs, fauns, and nymphs, with Pan in the midst of them,
had been disporting themselves in these venerable woods only a moment
ago; and now in another moment, because some profane eye had looked at
them too closely, or some intruder had cast a shadow on their mirth,
the sylvan pageant had utterly disappeared. If a few of the merry-makers
lingered among the trees, they had hidden their racy peculiarities under
the garb and aspect of ordinary people, and sheltered themselves in the
weary commonplace of daily life. Just an instant before it was Arcadia
and the Golden Age. The spell being broken, it was now only that old
tract of pleasure ground, close by the people's gate of Rome,--a
tract where the crimes and calamities of ages, the many battles, blood
recklessly poured out, and deaths of myriads, have corrupted all the
soil, creating an influence that makes the air deadly to human lungs.

"You must leave me," said Miriam to Donatello more imperatively than
before; "have I not said it? Go; and look not behind you."

"Miriam," whispered Donatello, grasping her hand forcibly, "who is it
that stands in the shadow yonder, beckoning you to follow him?"

"Hush; leave me!" repeated Miriam. "Your hour is past; his hour has
come."

Donatello still gazed in the direction which he had indicated, and
the expression of his face was fearfully changed, being so disordered,
perhaps with terror,--at all events with anger and invincible
repugnance,--that Miriam hardly knew him. His lips were drawn apart so
as to disclose his set teeth, thus giving him a look of animal rage,
which we seldom see except in persons of the simplest and rudest
natures. A shudder seemed to pass through his very bones.

"I hate him!" muttered he.

"Be satisfied; I hate him too!" said Miriam.

She had no thought of making this avowal, but was irresistibly drawn to
it by the sympathy of the dark emotion in her own breast with that so
strongly expressed by Donatello. Two drops of water or of blood do not
more naturally flow into each other than did her hatred into his.

"Shall I clutch him by the throat?" whispered Donatello, with a savage
scowl. "Bid me do so, and we are rid of him forever."

"In Heaven's name, no violence!" exclaimed Miriam, affrighted out of the
scornful control which she had hitherto held over her companion, by
the fierceness that he so suddenly developed. "O, have pity on
me, Donatello, if for nothing else, yet because in the midst of my
wretchedness I let myself be your playmate for this one wild
hour! Follow me no farther. Henceforth leave me to my doom. Dear
friend,--kind, simple, loving friend,--make me not more wretched by the
remembrance of having thrown fierce hates or loves into the wellspring
of your happy life!"

"Not follow you!" repeated Donatello, soothed from anger into sorrow,
less by the purport of what she said, than by the melancholy sweetness
of her voice,--"not follow you! What other path have I?"

"We will talk of it once again," said Miriam still soothingly;
"soon--to-morrow when you will; only leave me now."




CHAPTER XI


FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES


In the Borghese Grove, so recently uproarious with merriment and music,
there remained only Miriam and her strange follower.

A solitude had suddenly spread itself around them. It perhaps symbolized
a peculiar character in the relation of these two, insulating them, and
building up an insuperable barrier between their life-streams and other
currents, which might seem to flow in close vicinity. For it is one of
the chief earthly incommodities of some species of misfortune, or of a
great crime, that it makes the actor in the one, or the sufferer of
the other, an alien in the world, by interposing a wholly unsympathetic
medium betwixt himself and those whom he yearns to meet.

Owing, it may be, to this moral estrangement,--this chill remoteness of
their position,--there have come to us but a few vague whisperings
of what passed in Miriam's interview that afternoon with the sinister
personage who had dogged her footsteps ever since the visit to the
catacomb. In weaving these mystic utterances into a continuous scene, we
undertake a task resembling in its perplexity that of gathering up
and piecing together the fragments ora letter which has been torn and
scattered to the winds. Many words of deep significance, many entire
sentences, and those possibly the most important ones, have flown
too far on the winged breeze to be recovered. If we insert our own
conjectural amendments, we perhaps give a purport utterly at variance
with the true one. Yet unless we attempt something in this way,
there must remain an unsightly gap, and a lack of continuousness
and dependence in our narrative; so that it would arrive at certain
inevitable catastrophes without due warning of their imminence.

Of so much we are sure, that there seemed to be a sadly mysterious
fascination in the influence of this ill-omened person over Miriam;
it was such as beasts and reptiles of subtle and evil nature sometimes
exercise upon their victims. Marvellous it was to see the hopelessness
with which being naturally of so courageous a spirit she resigned
herself to the thraldom in which he held her. That iron chain, of which
some of the massive links were round her feminine waist, and the others
in his ruthless hand,--or which, perhaps, bound the pair together by
a bond equally torturing to each,--must have been forged in some such
unhallowed furnace as is only kindled by evil passions, and fed by evil
deeds.

Yet, let us trust, there may have been no crime in Miriam, but only
one of those fatalities which are among the most insoluble riddles
propounded to mortal comprehension; the fatal decree by which every
crime is made to be the agony of many innocent persons, as well as of
the single guilty one.

It was, at any rate, but a feeble and despairing kind of remonstrance
which she had now the energy to oppose against his persecution.

"You follow me too closely," she said, in low, faltering accents; "you
allow me too scanty room to draw my breath. Do you know what will be the
end of this?" "I know well what must be the end," he replied.

"Tell me, then," said Miriam, "that I may compare your foreboding with
my own. Mine is a very dark one."

"There can be but one result, and that soon," answered the model. "You
must throw off your present mask and assume another. You must vanish out
of the scene: quit Rome with me, and leave no trace whereby to follow
you. It is in my power, as you well know, to compel your acquiescence in
my bidding. You are aware of the penalty of a refusal."

"Not that penalty with which you would terrify me," said Miriam;
"another there may be, but not so grievous." "What is that other?"
he inquired. "Death! simply death!" she answered. "Death," said her
persecutor, "is not so simple and opportune a thing as you imagine. You
are strong and warm with life. Sensitive and irritable as your spirit
is, these many months of trouble, this latter thraldom in which I hold
you, have scarcely made your cheek paler than I saw it in your girlhood.
Miriam,--for I forbear to speak another name, at which these leaves
would shiver above our heads,--Miriam, you cannot die!"

"Might not a dagger find my heart?" said she, for the first time meeting
his eyes. "Would not poison make an end of me? Will not the Tiber drown
me?"

"It might," he answered; "for I allow that you are mortal. But, Miriam,
believe me, it is not your fate to die while there remains so much to be
sinned and suffered in the world. We have a destiny which we must needs
fulfil together. I, too, have struggled to escape it. I was as anxious
as yourself to break the tie between us,--to bury the past in a
fathomless grave,--to make it impossible that we should ever meet, until
you confront me at the bar of Judgment! You little can imagine what
steps I took to render all this secure; and what was the result?
Our strange interview in the bowels of the earth convinced me of the
futility of my design."

"Ah, fatal chance!" cried Miriam, covering her face with her hands.

"Yes, your heart trembled with horror when you recognized me," rejoined
he; "but you did not guess that there was an equal horror in my own!"

"Why would not the weight of earth above our heads have crumbled down
upon us both, forcing us apart, but burying us equally?" cried Miriam,
in a burst of vehement passion. "O, that we could have wandered in those
dismal passages till we both perished, taking opposite paths in the
darkness, so that when we lay down to die, our last breaths might not
mingle!"

"It were vain to wish it," said the model. "In all that labyrinth of
midnight paths, we should have found one another out to live or die
together. Our fates cross and are entangled. The threads are twisted
into a strong cord, which is dragging us to an evil doom. Could the
knots be severed, we might escape. But neither can your slender fingers
untie these knots, nor my masculine force break them. We must submit!"

"Pray for rescue, as I have," exclaimed Miriam. "Pray for deliverance
from me, since I am your evil genius, as you mine. Dark as your life has
been, I have known you to pray in times past!"

At these words of Miriam, a tremor and horror appeared to seize upon her
persecutor, insomuch that he shook and grew ashy pale before her eyes.
In this man's memory there was something that made it awful for him to
think of prayer; nor would any torture be more intolerable than to be
reminded of such divine comfort and succor as await pious souls
merely for the asking; This torment was perhaps the token of a native
temperament deeply susceptible of religious impressions, but which had
been wronged, violated, and debased, until, at length, it was capable
only of terror from the sources that were intended for our purest and
loftiest consolation. He looked so fearfully at her, and with such
intense pain struggling in his eyes, that Miriam felt pity.

And now, all at once, it struck her that he might be mad. It was an idea
that had never before seriously occurred to her mind, although, as soon
as suggested, it fitted marvellously into many circumstances that
lay within her knowledge. But, alas! such was her evil fortune, that,
whether mad or no, his power over her remained the same, and was likely
to be used only the more tyrannously, if exercised by a lunatic.

"I would not give you pain," she said, soothingly; "your faith allows you
the consolations of penance and absolution. Try what help there may be
in these, and leave me to myself."

"Do not think it, Miriam," said he; "we are bound together, and can
never part again." "Why should it seem so impossible?" she rejoined.
"Think how I had escaped from all the past! I had made for myself a
new sphere, and found new friends, new occupations, new hopes and
enjoyments. My heart, methinks, was almost as unburdened as if there had
been no miserable life behind me. The human spirit does not perish of a
single wound, nor exhaust itself in a single trial of life. Let us
but keep asunder, and all may go well for both." "We fancied ourselves
forever sundered," he replied. "Yet we met once, in the bowels of the
earth; and, were we to part now, our fates would fling us together again
in a desert, on a mountain-top, or in whatever spot seemed safest. You
speak in vain, therefore."

"You mistake your own will for an iron necessity," said Miriam;
"otherwise, you might have suffered me to glide past you like a ghost,
when we met among those ghosts of ancient days. Even now you might bid
me pass as freely."

"Never!" said he, with unmitigable will; "your reappearance has
destroyed the work of years. You know the power that I have over you.
Obey my bidding; or, within a short time, it shall be exercised: nor
will I cease to haunt you till the moment comes."

"Then," said Miriam more calmly, "I foresee the end, and have already
warned you of it. It will be death!"

"Your own death, Miriam,--or mine?" he asked, looking fixedly at her.

"Do you imagine me a murderess?" said she, shuddering; "you, at least,
have no right to think me so!"

"Yet," rejoined he, with a glance of dark meaning, "men have said that
this white hand had once a crimson stain." He took her hand as he spoke,
and held it in his own, in spite of the repugnance, amounting to nothing
short of agony, with which she struggled to regain it. Holding it up
to the fading light (for there was already dimness among the trees),
he appeared to examine it closely, as if to discover the imaginary
blood-stain with which he taunted her. He smiled as he let it go. "It
looks very white," said he; "but I have known hands as white, which all
the water in the ocean would not have washed clean."

"It had no stain," retorted Miriam bitterly, "until you grasped it in
your own."

The wind has blown away whatever else they may have spoken.

They went together towards the town, and, on their way, continued to
make reference, no doubt, to some strange and dreadful history of their
former life, belonging equally to this dark man and to the fair and
youthful woman whom he persecuted. In their words, or in the breath that
uttered them, there seemed to be an odor of guilt, and a scent of blood.
Yet, how can we imagine that a stain of ensanguined crime should attach
to Miriam! Or how, on the other hand, should spotless innocence be
subjected to a thraldom like that which she endured from the spectre,
whom she herself had evoked out of the darkness! Be this as it might,
Miriam, we have reason to believe, still continued to beseech him,
humbly, passionately, wildly, only to go his way, and leave her free to
follow her own sad path.

Thus they strayed onward through the green wilderness of the Borghese
grounds, and soon came near the city wall, where, had Miriam raised her
eyes, she might have seen Hilda and the sculptor leaning on the parapet.
But she walked in a mist of trouble, and could distinguish little beyond
its limits. As they came within public observation, her persecutor fell
behind, throwing off the imperious manner which he had assumed during
their solitary interview. The Porta del Popolo swarmed with life. The
merry-makers, who had spent the feast-day outside the walls, were now
thronging in; a party of horsemen were entering beneath the arch; a
travelling carriage had been drawn up just within the verge, and was
passing through the villainous ordeal of the papal custom-house. In the
broad piazza, too, there was a motley crowd.

But the stream of Miriam's trouble kept its way through this flood of
human life, and neither mingled with it nor was turned aside. With a sad
kind of feminine ingenuity, she found a way to kneel before her tyrant
undetected, though in full sight of all the people, still beseeching him
for freedom, and in vain.




CHAPTER XII


A STROLL ON THE PINCIAN


Hilda, after giving the last touches to the picture of Beatrice Cenci,
had flown down from her dove-cote, late in the afternoon, and gone to
the Pincian Hill, in the hope of hearing a strain or two of exhilarating
music. There, as it happened, she met the sculptor, for, to say the
truth, Kenyon had well noted the fair artist's ordinary way of life,
and was accustomed to shape his own movements so as to bring him often
within her sphere.

The Pincian Hill is the favorite promenade of the Roman aristocracy. At
the present day, however, like most other Roman possessions, it belongs
less to the native inhabitants than to the barbarians from Gaul, Great
Britain, anti beyond the sea, who have established a peaceful usurpation
over whatever is enjoyable or memorable in the Eternal City. These
foreign guests are indeed ungrateful, if they do not breathe a prayer
for Pope Clement, or whatever Holy Father it may have been, who levelled
the summit of the mount so skilfully, and bounded it with the parapet of
the city wall; who laid out those broad walks and drives, and overhung
them with the deepening shade of many kinds of tree; who scattered the
flowers, of all seasons and of every clime, abundantly over those green,
central lawns; who scooped out hollows in fit places, and, setting great
basins of marble in them, caused ever-gushing fountains to fill them to
the brim; who reared up the immemorial obelisk out of the soil that had
long hidden it; who placed pedestals along the borders of the avenues,
and crowned them with busts of that multitude of worthies--statesmen,
heroes, artists, men of letters and of song--whom the whole world claims
as its chief ornaments, though Italy produced them all. In a word, the
Pincian garden is one of the things that reconcile the stranger (since
he fully appreciates the enjoyment, and feels nothing of the cost) to
the rule of an irresponsible dynasty of Holy Fathers, who seem to have
aimed at making life as agreeable an affair as it can well be.

In this pleasant spot, the red-trousered French soldiers are always to
be seen; bearded and grizzled veterans, perhaps with medals of Algiers
or the Crimea on their breasts. To them is assigned the peaceful duty of
seeing that children do not trample on the flower beds, nor any youthful
lover rifle them of their fragrant blossoms to stick in the beloved
one's hair. Here sits (drooping upon some marble bench, in the
treacherous sunshine) the consumptive girl, whose friends have brought
her, for cure, to a climate that instils poison into its very purest
breath. Here, all day, come nursery-maids, burdened with rosy English
babies, or guiding the footsteps of little travellers from the far
Western world. Here, in the sunny afternoons, roll and rumble all kinds
of equipages, from the cardinal's old-fashioned and gorgeous purple
carriage to the gay barouche of modern date. Here horsemen gallop on
thoroughbred steeds. Here, in short, all the transitory population of
Rome, the world's great watering-place, rides, drives, or promenades!
Here are beautiful sunsets; and here, whichever way you turn your eyes,
are scenes as well worth gazing at, both in themselves and for their
historic interest, as any that the sun ever rose and set upon. Here,
too, on certain afternoons of the week, a French military band flings
out rich music over the poor old city, floating her with strains as loud
as those of her own echoless triumphs.

Hilda and the sculptor (by the contrivance of the latter, who loved best
to be alone with his young countrywoman) had wandered beyond the throng
of promenaders, whom they left in a dense cluster around the music. They
strayed, indeed, to the farthest point of the Pincian Hill, and leaned
over the parapet, looking down upon the Muro Torto, a massive fragment
of the oldest Roman wall, which juts over, as if ready to tumble down
by its own weight, yet seems still the most indestructible piece of work
that men's hands ever piled together. In the blue distance rose Soracte,
and other heights, which have gleamed afar, to our imaginations, but
look scarcely real to our bodily eyes, because, being dreamed about so
much, they have taken the aerial tints which belong only to a dream.
These, nevertheless, are the solid framework of hills that shut in Rome,
and its wide surrounding Campagna,--no land of dreams, but the broadest
page of history, crowded so full with memorable events that one
obliterates another; as if Time had crossed and recrossed his own
records till they grew illegible.

But, not to meddle with history,--with which our narrative is no
otherwise concerned, than that the very dust of Rome is historic, and
inevitably settles on our page and mingles with our ink,--we will return
to our two friends, who were still leaning over the wall. Beneath them
lay the broad sweep of the Borghese grounds, covered with trees, amid
which appeared the white gleam of pillars and statues, and the flash of
an upspringing fountain, all to be overshadowed at a later period of the
year by the thicker growth of foliage.

The advance of vegetation, in this softer climate, is less abrupt than
the inhabitant of the cold North is accustomed to observe. Beginning
earlier,--even in February,--Spring is not compelled to burst into
Summer with such headlong haste; there is time to dwell upon each
opening beauty, and to enjoy the budding leaf, the tender green, the
sweet youth and freshness of the year; it gives us its maiden charm,
before, settling into the married Summer, which, again, does not so soon
sober itself into matronly Autumn. In our own country, the virgin Spring
hastens to its bridal too abruptly. But here, after a month or two of
kindly growth, the leaves of the young trees, which cover that portion
of the Borghese grounds nearest the city wall, were still in their
tender half-development.

In the remoter depths, among the old groves of ilex-trees, Hilda and
Kenyon heard the faint sound of music, laughter, and mingling voices. It
was probably the uproar--spreading even so far as the walls of Rome,
and growing faded and melancholy in its passage--of that wild sylvan
merriment, which we have already attempted to describe. By and by it
ceased--although the two listeners still tried to distinguish it between
the bursts of nearer music from the military band. But there was no
renewal of that distant mirth. Soon afterwards they saw a solitary
figure advancing along one of the paths that lead from the obscurer part
of the ground towards the gateway.

"Look! is it not Donatello?" said Hilda.

"He it is, beyond a doubt," replied the sculptor. "But how gravely he
walks, and with what long looks behind him! He seems either very weary,
or very sad. I should not hesitate to call it sadness, if Donatello were
a creature capable of the sin and folly of low spirits. In all these
hundred paces, while we have been watching him, he has not made one
of those little caprioles in the air which are characteristic of his
natural gait. I begin to doubt whether he is a veritable Faun."

"Then," said Hilda, with perfect simplicity, "you have thought him--and
do think him--one of that strange, wild, happy race of creatures, that
used to laugh and sport in the woods, in the old, old times? So do
I, indeed! But I never quite believed, till now, that fauns existed
anywhere but in poetry."

The sculptor at first merely smiled. Then, as the idea took further
possession of his mind, he laughed outright, and wished from the bottom
of his heart (being in love with Hilda, though he had never told her
so) that he could have rewarded or punished her for its pretty absurdity
with a kiss.

"O Hilda, what a treasure of sweet faith and pure imagination you hide
under that little straw hat!" cried he, at length. "A Faun! a Faun!
Great Pan is not dead, then, after all! The whole tribe of mythical
creatures yet live in the moonlit seclusion of a young girl's fancy,
and find it a lovelier abode and play-place, I doubt not, than their
Arcadian haunts of yore. What bliss, if a man of marble, like myself,
could stray thither, too!"

"Why do you laugh so?" asked Hilda, reddening; for she was a little
disturbed at Kenyon's ridicule, however kindly expressed. "What can I
have said, that you think so very foolish?"

"Well, not foolish, then," rejoined the sculptor, "but wiser, it may
be, than I can fathom. Really, however, the idea does strike one as
delightfully fresh, when we consider Donatello's position and external
environment. Why, my dear Hilda, he is a Tuscan born, of an old noble
race in that part of Italy; and he has a moss-grown tower among the
Apennines, where he and his forefathers have dwelt, under their own
vines and fig-trees, from an unknown antiquity. His boyish passion
for Miriam has introduced him familiarly to our little circle; and our
republican and artistic simplicity of intercourse has included this
young Italian, on the same terms as one of ourselves. But, if we
paid due respect to rank and title, we should bend reverentially to
Donatello, and salute him as his Excellency the Count di Monte Beni."

"That is a droll idea, much droller than his being a Faun!" said
Hilda, laughing in her turn. "This does not quite satisfy me, however,
especially as you yourself recognized and acknowledged his wonderful
resemblance to the statue."

"Except as regards the pointed ears," said Kenyon; adding, aside, "and
one other little peculiarity, generally observable in the statues of
fauns."

"As for his Excellency the Count di Monte Beni's ears," replied Hilda,
smiling again at the dignity with which this title invested their
playful friend, "you know we could never see their shape, on account of
his clustering curls. Nay, I remember, he once started back, as shyly as
a wild deer, when Miriam made a pretence of examining them. How do you
explain that?"

"O, I certainly shall not contend against such a weight of evidence,
the fact of his faunship being otherwise so probable," answered the
sculptor, still hardly retaining his gravity. "Faun or not, Donatello or
the Count di Monte Beni--is a singularly wild creature, and, as I have
remarked on other occasions, though very gentle, does not love to be
touched. Speaking in no harsh sense, there is a great deal of animal
nature in him, as if he had been born in the woods, and had run wild all
his childhood, and were as yet but imperfectly domesticated. Life, even
in our day, is very simple and unsophisticated in some of the shaggy
nooks of the Apennines."

"It annoys me very much," said Hilda, "this inclination, which
most people have, to explain away the wonder and the mystery out
of everything. Why could not you allow me--and yourself, too--the
satisfaction of thinking him a Faun?"

"Pray keep your belief, dear Hilda, if it makes you any happier," said
the sculptor; "and I shall do my best to become a convert. Donatello has
asked me to spend the summer with him, in his ancestral tower, where
I purpose investigating the pedigree of these sylvan counts, his
forefathers; and if their shadows beckon me into dreamland, I shall
willingly follow. By the bye, speaking of Donatello, there is a point on
which I should like to be enlightened."

"Can I help you, then?" said Hilda, in answer to his look.

"Is there the slightest chance of his winning Miriam's affections?"
suggested Kenyon.

"Miriam! she, so accomplished and gifted!" exclaimed Hilda; "and he, a
rude, uncultivated boy! No, no, no!"

"It would seem impossible," said the sculptor. "But, on the other hand,
a gifted woman flings away her affections so unaccountably, sometimes!
Miriam of late has been very morbid and miserable, as we both know.
Young as she is, the morning light seems already to have faded out of
her life; and now comes Donatello, with natural sunshine enough for
himself and her, and offers her the opportunity of making her heart and
life all new and cheery again. People of high intellectual endowments do
not require similar ones in those they love. They are just the persons
to appreciate the wholesome gush of natural feeling, the honest
affection, the simple joy, the fulness of contentment with what
he loves, which Miriam sees in Donatello. True; she may call him a
simpleton. It is a necessity of the case; for a man loses the capacity
for this kind of affection, in proportion as he cultivates and refines
himself."

"Dear me!" said Hilda, drawing imperceptibly away from her companion.
"Is this the penalty of refinement? Pardon me; I do not believe it.
It is because you are a sculptor, that you think nothing can be finely
wrought except it be cold and hard, like the marble in which your ideas
take shape. I am a painter, and know that the most delicate beauty may
be softened and warmed throughout."

"I said a foolish thing, indeed," answered the sculptor. "It surprises
me, for I might have drawn a wiser knowledge out of my own experience.
It is the surest test of genuine love, that it brings back our early
simplicity to the worldliest of us."

Thus talking, they loitered slowly along beside the parapet which
borders the level summit of the Pincian with its irregular sweep. At
intervals they looked through the lattice-work of their thoughts at the
varied prospects that lay before and beneath them.

From the terrace where they now stood there is an abrupt descent towards
the Piazza del Popolo; and looking down into its broad space they
beheld the tall palatial edifices, the church domes, and the ornamented
gateway, which grew and were consolidated out of the thought of Michael
Angelo. They saw, too, the red granite obelisk, oldest of things,
even in Rome, which rises in the centre of the piazza, with a fourfold
fountain at its base. All Roman works and ruins (whether of the
empire, the far-off republic, or the still more distant kings) assume a
transient, visionary, and impalpable character when we think that this
indestructible monument supplied one of the recollections which Moses
and the Israelites bore from Egypt into the desert. Perchance, on
beholding the cloudy pillar and the fiery column, they whispered
awestricken to one another, "In its shape it is like that old obelisk
which we and our fathers have so often seen on the borders of the Nile."
And now that very obelisk, with hardly a trace of decay upon it, is the
first thing that the modern traveller sees after entering the Flaminian
Gate!

Lifting their eyes, Hilda and her companion gazed westward, and saw
beyond the invisible Tiber the Castle of St. Angelo; that immense tomb
of a pagan emperor, with the archangel at its summit.

Still farther off appeared a mighty pile of buildings, surmounted by the
vast dome, which all of us have shaped and swelled outward, like a huge
bubble, to the utmost Scope of our imaginations, long before we see it
floating over the worship of the city. It may be most worthily seen
from precisely the point where our two friends were now standing. At
any nearer view the grandeur of St. Peter's hides itself behind the
immensity of its separate parts,--so that we see only the front, only
the sides, only the pillared length and loftiness of the portico, and
not the mighty whole. But at this distance the entire outline of the
world's cathedral, as well as that of the palace of the world's
chief priest, is taken in at once. In such remoteness, moreover, the
imagination is not debarred from lending its assistance, even while
we have the reality before our eyes, and helping the weakness of human
sense to do justice to so grand an object. It requires both faith and
fancy to enable us to feel, what is nevertheless so true, that yonder,
in front of the purple outline of hills, is the grandest edifice ever
built by man, painted against God's loveliest sky.

After contemplating a little while a scene which their long residence in
Rome had made familiar to them, Kenyon and Hilda again let their glances
fall into the piazza at their feet. They there beheld Miriam, who had
just entered the Porta del Popolo, and was standing by the obelisk and
fountain. With a gesture that impressed Kenyon as at once suppliant and
imperious, she seemed to intimate to a figure which had attended her
thus far, that it was now her desire to be left alone. The pertinacious
model, however, remained immovable.

And the sculptor here noted a circumstance, which, according to the
interpretation he might put upon it, was either too trivial to be
mentioned, or else so mysteriously significant that he found it
difficult to believe his eyes. Miriam knelt down on the steps of the
fountain; so far there could be no question of the fact. To other
observers, if any there were, she probably appeared to take this
attitude merely for the convenience of dipping her fingers into the gush
of water from the mouth of one of the stone lions. But as she clasped
her hands together after thus bathing them, and glanced upward at the
model, an idea took strong possession of Kenyon's mind that Miriam was
kneeling to this dark follower there in the world's face!

"Do you see it?" he said to Hilda.

"See what?" asked she, surprised at the emotion of his tone. "I see
Miriam, who has just bathed her hands in that delightfully cool water. I
often dip my fingers into a Roman fountain, and think of the brook that
used to be one of my playmates in my New England village."

"I fancied I saw something else," said Kenyon; "but it was doubtless a
mistake."

But, allowing that he had caught a true glimpse into the hidden
significance of Miriam's gesture, what a terrible thraldom did it
suggest! Free as she seemed to be,--beggar as he looked,--the nameless
vagrant must then be dragging the beautiful Miriam through the streets
of Rome, fettered and shackled more cruelly than any captive queen of
yore following in an emperor's triumph. And was it conceivable that
she would have been thus enthralled unless some great error--how great
Kenyon dared not think--or some fatal weakness had given this dark
adversary a vantage ground?

"Hilda," said he abruptly, "who and what is Miriam? Pardon me; but are
you sure of her?"

"Sure of her!" repeated Hilda, with an angry blush, for her friend's
sake. "I am sure that she is kind, good, and generous; a true and
faithful friend, whom I love dearly, and who loves me as well! What more
than this need I be sure of?"

"And your delicate instincts say all this in her favor?--nothing against
her?" continued the sculptor, without heeding the irritation of Hilda's
tone. "These are my own impressions, too. But she is such a mystery!
We do not even know whether she is a countrywoman of ours, or an
Englishwoman, or a German. There is Anglo-Saxon blood in her veins, one
would say, and a right English accent on her tongue, but much that is
not English breeding, nor American. Nowhere else but in Rome, and as an
artist, could she hold a place in society without giving some clew to
her past life."

"I love her dearly," said Hilda, still with displeasure in her tone,
"and trust her most entirely."

"My heart trusts her at least, whatever my head may do," replied Kenyon;
"and Rome is not like one of our New England villages, where we need the
permission of each individual neighbor for every act that we do, every
word that we utter, and every friend that we make or keep. In these
particulars the papal despotism allows us freer breath than our native
air; and if we like to take generous views of our associates, we can do
so, to a reasonable extent, without ruining ourselves."

"The music has ceased," said Hilda; "I am going now."

There are three streets that, beginning close beside each other, diverge
from the Piazza del Popolo towards the heart of Rome: on the left, the
Via del Babuino; on the right, the Via della Ripetta; and between these
two that world-famous avenue, the Corso. It appeared that Miriam and her
strange companion were passing up the first mentioned of these three,
and were soon hidden from Hilda and the sculptor.

The two latter left the Pincian by the broad and stately walk that
skirts along its brow. Beneath them, from the base of the abrupt
descent, the city spread wide away in a close contiguity of red-earthen
roofs, above which rose eminent the domes of a hundred churches, beside
here and there a tower, and the upper windows of some taller or higher
situated palace, looking down on a multitude of palatial abodes. At a
distance, ascending out of the central mass of edifices, they could see
the top of the Antonine column, and near it the circular roof of the
Pantheon looking heavenward with its ever-open eye.

Except these two objects, almost everything that they beheld was
mediaeval, though built, indeed, of the massive old stones and
indestructible bricks of imperial Rome; for the ruins of the Coliseum,
the Golden House, and innumerable temples of Roman gods, and mansions of
Caesars and senators, had supplied the material for all those gigantic
hovels, and their walls were cemented with mortar of inestimable cost,
being made of precious antique statues, burnt long ago for this petty
purpose.

Rome, as it now exists, has grown up under the Popes, and seems like
nothing but a heap of broken rubbish, thrown into the great chasm
between our own days and the Empire, merely to fill it up; and, for the
better part of two thousand years, its annals of obscure policies,
and wars, and continually recurring misfortunes, seem also but broken
rubbish, as compared with its classic history.

If we consider the present city as at all connected with the famous one
of old, it is only because we find it built over its grave. A depth of
thirty feet of soil has covered up the Rome of ancient days, so that it
lies like the dead corpse of a giant, decaying for centuries, with no
survivor mighty enough even to bury it, until the dust of all those
years has gathered slowly over its recumbent form and made a casual
sepulchre.

We know not how to characterize, in any accordant and compatible
terms, the Rome that lies before us; its sunless alleys, and streets
of palaces; its churches, lined with the gorgeous marbles that were
originally polished for the adornment of pagan temples; its thousands of
evil smells, mixed up with fragrance of rich incense, diffused from as
many censers; its little life, deriving feeble nutriment from what
has long been dead. Everywhere, some fragment of ruin suggesting the
magnificence of a former epoch; everywhere, moreover, a Cross,--and
nastiness at the foot of it. As the sum of all, there are recollections
that kindle the soul, and a gloom and languor that depress it beyond any
depth of melancholic sentiment that can be elsewhere known.

Yet how is it possible to say an unkind or irreverential word of Rome?
The city of all time, and of all the world! The spot for which man's
great life and deeds have done so much, and for which decay has done
whatever glory and dominion could not do! At this moment, the evening
sunshine is flinging its golden mantle over it, making all that we
thought mean magnificent; the bells of all the churches suddenly ring
out, as if it were a peal of triumph because Rome is still imperial.

"I sometimes fancy," said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene
always made a strong impression, "that Rome--mere Rome--will crowd
everything else out of my heart."

"Heaven forbid!" ejaculated the sculptor. They had now reached the grand
stairs that ascend from the Piazza di Spagna to the hither brow of the
Pincian Hill. Old Beppo, the millionnaire of his ragged fraternity,
it is a wonder that no artist paints him as the cripple whom St. Peter
heals at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,--was just mounting his donkey
to depart, laden with the rich spoil of the day's beggary.

Up the stairs, drawing his tattered cloak about his face, came the
model, at whom Beppo looked askance, jealous of an encroacher on his
rightful domain. The figure passed away, however, up the Via Sistina. In
the piazza below, near the foot of the magnificent steps, stood Miriam,
with her eyes bent on the ground, as if she were counting those
little, square, uncomfortable paving-stones, that make it a penitential
pilgrimage to walk in Rome. She kept this attitude for several minutes,
and when, at last, the importunities of a beggar disturbed her from it,
she seemed bewildered and pressed her hand upon her brow.

"She has been in some sad dream or other, poor thing!" said Kenyon
sympathizingly; "and even now she is imprisoned there in a kind of cage,
the iron bars of which are made of her own thoughts."

"I fear she is not well," said Hilda. "I am going down the stairs, and
will join Miriam."

"Farewell, then," said the sculptor. "Dear Hilda, this is a perplexed
and troubled world! It soothes me inexpressibly to think of you in your
tower, with white doves and white thoughts for your companions, so high
above us all, and With the Virgin for your household friend. You know
not how far it throws its light, that lamp which you keep burning at her
shrine! I passed beneath the tower last night, and the ray cheered me,
because you lighted it."

"It has for me a religious significance," replied Hilda quietly, "and
yet I am no Catholic."

They parted, and Kenyon made haste along the Via Sistina, in the hope
of overtaking the model, whose haunts and character he was anxious to
investigate, for Miriam's sake. He fancied that he saw him a long way
in advance, but before he reached the Fountain of the Triton the dusky
figure had vanished.




CHAPTER XIII


A SCULPTOR'S STUDIO


About this period, Miriam seems to have been goaded by a weary
restlessness that drove her abroad on any errand or none. She went one
morning to visit Kenyon in his studio, whither he had invited her to
see a new statue, on which he had staked many hopes, and which was now
almost completed in the clay. Next to Hilda, the person for whom
Miriam felt most affection and confidence was Kenyon; and in all the
difficulties that beset her life, it was her impulse to draw near Hilda
for feminine sympathy, and the sculptor for brotherly counsel.

Yet it was to little purpose that she approached the edge of the
voiceless gulf between herself and them. Standing on the utmost verge of
that dark chasm, she might stretch out her hand, and never clasp a hand
of theirs; she might strive to call out, "Help, friends! help!" but, as
with dreamers when they shout, her voice would perish inaudibly in
the remoteness that seemed such a little way. This perception of an
infinite, shivering solitude, amid which we cannot come close enough to
human beings to be warmed by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly
shapes of mist, is one of the most forlorn results of any accident,
misfortune, crime, or peculiarity of character, that puts an individual
ajar with the world. Very often, as in Miriam's case, there is an
insatiable instinct that demands friendship, love, and intimate
communion, but is forced to pine in empty forms; a hunger of the heart,
which finds only shadows to feed upon.

Kenyon's studio was in a cross-street, or, rather, an ugly and dirty
little lane, between the Corso and the Via della Ripetta; and though
chill, narrow, gloomy, and bordered with tall and shabby structures,
the lane was not a whit more disagreeable than nine tenths of the Roman
streets. Over the door of one of the houses was a marble tablet, bearing
an inscription, to the purport that the sculpture-rooms within had
formerly been occupied by the illustrious artist Canova. In these
precincts (which Canova's genius was not quite of a character to render
sacred, though it certainly made them interesting) the young American
sculptor had now established himself.

The studio of a sculptor is generally but a rough and dreary-looking
place, with a good deal the aspect, indeed, of a stone-mason's workshop.
Bare floors of brick or plank, and plastered walls,--an old chair
or two, or perhaps only a block of marble (containing, however, the
possibility of ideal grace within it) to sit down upon; some hastily
scrawled sketches of nude figures on the whitewash of the wall. These
last are probably the sculptor's earliest glimpses of ideas that may
hereafter be solidified into imperishable stone, or perhaps may remain
as impalpable as a dream. Next there are a few very roughly modelled
little figures in clay or plaster, exhibiting the second stage of the
idea as it advances towards a marble immortality; and then is seen the
exquisitely designed shape of clay, more interesting than even the
final marble, as being the intimate production of the sculptor himself,
moulded throughout with his loving hands, and nearest to his imagination
and heart. In the plaster-cast, from this clay model, the beauty of
the statue strangely disappears, to shine forth again with pure white
radiance, in the precious marble of Carrara. Works in all these stages
of advancement, and some with the final touch upon them, might be found
in Kenyon's studio.

Here might be witnessed the process of actually chiselling the marble,
with which (as it is not quite satisfactory to think) a sculptor in
these days has very little to do. In Italy, there is a class of men
whose merely mechanical skill is perhaps more exquisite than was
possessed by the ancient artificers, who wrought out the designs of
Praxiteles; or, very possibly, by Praxiteles himself. Whatever of
illusive representation can be effected in marble, they are capable of
achieving, if the object be before their eyes. The sculptor has but to
present these men with a plaster-cast of his design, and a sufficient
block of marble, and tell them that the figure is imbedded in the stone,
and must be freed from its encumbering superfluities; and, in due time,
without the necessity of his touching the work with his own finger,
he will see before him the statue that is to make him renowned. His
creative power has wrought it with a word.

In no other art, surely, does genius find such effective instruments,
and so happily relieve itself of the drudgery, of actual performance;
doing wonderfully nice things by the hands of other people, when it may
be suspected they could not always be done by the sculptor's own. And
how much of the admiration which our artists get for their buttons
and buttonholes, their shoe-ties, their neckcloths,--and these, at our
present epoch of taste, make a large share of the renown,--would be
abated, if we were generally aware that the sculptor can claim no credit
for such pretty performances, as immortalized in marble! They are not
his work, but that of some nameless machine in human shape.

Miriam stopped an instant in an antechamber, to look at a half-finished
bust, the features of which seemed to be struggling out of the stone;
and, as it were, scattering and dissolving its hard substance by the
glow of feeling and intelligence. As the skilful workman gave stroke
after stroke of the chisel with apparent carelessness, but sure effect,
it was impossible not to think that the outer marble was merely an
extraneous environment; the human countenance within its embrace must
have existed there since the limestone ledges of Carrara were first
made. Another bust was nearly completed, though still one of Kenyon's
most trustworthy assistants was at work, giving delicate touches,
shaving off an impalpable something, and leaving little heaps of marble
dust to attest it.

"As these busts in the block of marble," thought Miriam, "so does our
individual fate exist in the limestone of time. We fancy that we carve
it out; but its ultimate shape is prior to all our action."

Kenyon was in the inner room, but, hearing a step in the antechamber, he
threw a veil over what he was at work upon, and came out to receive his
visitor. He was dressed in a gray blouse, with a little cap on the top
of his head; a costume which became him better than the formal garments
which he wore whenever he passed out of his own domains. The sculptor
had a face which, when time had done a little more for it, would offer a
worthy subject for as good an artist as himself: features finely cut, as
if already marble; an ideal forehead, deeply set eyes, and a mouth much
hidden in a light-brown beard, but apparently sensitive and delicate.

"I will not offer you my hand," said he; "it is grimy with Cleopatra's
clay."

"No; I will not touch clay; it is earthy and human," answered Miriam.
"I have come to try whether there is any calm and coolness among
your marbles. My own art is too nervous, too passionate, too full of
agitation, for me to work at it whole days together, without intervals
of repose. So, what have you to show me?"

"Pray look at everything here," said Kenyon. "I love to have painters
see my work. Their judgment is unprejudiced, and more valuable than that
of the world generally, from the light which their own art throws on
mine. More valuable, too, than that of my brother sculptors, who never
judge me fairly,--nor I them, perhaps."

To gratify him, Miriam looked round at the specimens in marble or
plaster, of which there were several in the room, comprising originals
or casts of most of the designs that Kenyon had thus far produced. He
was still too young to have accumulated a large gallery of such things.
What he had to show were chiefly the attempts and experiments, in
various directions, of a beginner in art, acting as a stern tutor to
himself, and profiting more by his failures than by any successes of
which he was yet capable. Some of them, however, had great merit; and
in the pure, fine glow of the new marble, it may be, they dazzled the
judgment into awarding them higher praise than they deserved. Miriam
admired the statue of a beautiful youth, a pearlfisher; who had got
entangled in the weeds at the bottom of the sea, and lay dead among the
pearl-oysters, the rich shells, and the seaweeds, all of like value to
him now.

"The poor young man has perished among the prizes that he sought,"
remarked she. "But what a strange efficacy there is in death! If we
cannot all win pearls, it causes an empty shell to satisfy us just as
well. I like this statue, though it is too cold and stern in its moral
lesson; and, physically, the form has not settled itself into sufficient
repose."

In another style, there was a grand, calm head of Milton, not copied
from any one bust or picture, yet more authentic than any of them,
because all known representations of the poet had been profoundly
studied, and solved in the artist's mind. The bust over the tomb in
Grey Friars Church, the original miniatures and pictures, wherever to
be found, had mingled each its special truth in this one work; wherein,
likewise, by long perusal and deep love of the Paradise Lost, the Comus,
the Lycidas, and L'Allegro, the sculptor had succeeded, even better than
he knew, in spiritualizing his marble with the poet's mighty genius. And
this was a great thing to have achieved, such a length of time after the
dry bones and dust of Milton were like those of any other dead man.

There were also several portrait-busts, comprising those of two or three
of the illustrious men of our own country, whom Kenyon, before he left
America, had asked permission to model. He had done so, because he
sincerely believed that, whether he wrought the busts in marble or
bronze, the one would corrode and the other crumble in the long lapse
of time, beneath these great men's immortality. Possibly, however, the
young artist may have underestimated the durability of his material.
Other faces there were, too, of men who (if the brevity of their
remembrance, after death, can be augured from their little value in
life) should have been represented in snow rather than marble. Posterity
will be puzzled what to do with busts like these, the concretions and
petrifactions of a vain self-estimate; but will find, no doubt, that they
serve to build into stone walls, or burn into quicklime, as well as if
the marble had never been blocked into the guise of human heads.

But it is an awful thing, indeed, this endless endurance, this almost
indestructibility, of a marble bust! Whether in our own case, or that of
other men, it bids us sadly measure the little, little time during which
our lineaments are likely to be of interest to any human being. It
is especially singular that Americans should care about perpetuating
themselves in this mode. The brief duration of our families, as
a hereditary household, renders it next to a certainty that the
great-grandchildren will not know their father's grandfather, and that
half a century hence at furthest, the hammer of the auctioneer will
thump its knock-down blow against his blockhead, sold at so much for the
pound of stone! And it ought to make us shiver, the idea of leaving
our features to be a dusty-white ghost among strangers of another
generation, who will take our nose between their thumb and fingers (as
we have seen men do by Caesar's), and infallibly break it off if they
can do so without detection!

"Yes," said Miriam, who had been revolving some such thoughts as the
above, "it is a good state of mind for mortal man, when he is content to
leave no more definite memorial than the grass, which will sprout kindly
and speedily over his grave, if we do not make the spot barren with
marble. Methinks, too, it will be a fresher and better world, when it
flings off this great burden of stony memories, which the ages have
deemed it a piety to heap upon its back."

"What you say," remarked Kenyon, "goes against my whole art. Sculpture,
and the delight which men naturally take in it, appear to me a proof
that it is good to work with all time before our view."

"Well, well," answered Miriam, "I must not quarrel with you for flinging
your heavy stones at poor Posterity; and, to say the truth, I think you
are as likely to hit the mark as anybody. These busts, now, much as I
seem to scorn them, make me feel as if you were a magician.. You turn
feverish men into cool, quiet marble. What a blessed change for them!
Would you could do as much for me!"

"O, gladly!" cried Kenyon, who had long wished to model that beautiful
and most expressive face. "When will you begin to sit?"

"Poh! that was not what I meant," said Miriam. "Come, show me something
else."

"Do you recognize this?" asked the sculptor.

He took out of his desk a little old-fashioned ivory coffer, yellow
with age; it was richly carved with antique figures and foliage; and had
Kenyon thought fit to say that Benvenuto Cellini wrought this precious
box, the skill and elaborate fancy of the work would by no means have
discredited his word, nor the old artist's fame. At least, it was
evidently a production of Benvenuto's school and century, and might
once have been the jewel-case of some grand lady at the court of the De'
Medici.

Lifting the lid, however, no blaze of diamonds was disclosed, but
only, lapped in fleecy cotton, a small, beautifully shaped hand, most
delicately sculptured in marble. Such loving care and nicest art had
been lavished here, that the palm really seemed to have a tenderness
in its very substance. Touching those lovely fingers,--had the jealous
sculptor allowed you to touch,--you could hardly believe that a virgin
warmth would not steal from them into your heart.

"Ah, this is very beautiful!" exclaimed Miriam, with a genial smile.
"It is as good in its way as Loulie's hand with its baby-dimples, which
Powers showed me at Florence, evidently valuing it as much as if he
had wrought it out of a piece of his great heart. As good as Harriet
Hosmer's clasped hands of Browning and his wife, symbolizing the
individuality and heroic union of two high, poetic lives! Nay, I do not
question that it is better than either of those, because you must
have wrought it passionately, in spite of its maiden palm and dainty
fingertips."

"Then you do recognize it?" asked Kenyon.

"There is but one right hand on earth that could have supplied
the model," answered Miriam; "so small and slender, so perfectly
symmetrical, and yet with a character of delicate energy. I have watched
it a hundred times at its work; but I did not dream that you had won
Hilda so far! How have you persuaded that shy maiden to let you take her
hand in marble?"

"Never! She never knew it!" hastily replied Kenyon, anxious to vindicate
his mistress's maidenly reserve. "I stole it from her. The hand is a
reminiscence. After gazing at it so often, and even holding it once for
an instant, when Hilda was not thinking of me, I should be a bungler
indeed, if I could not now reproduce it to something like the life."

"May you win the original one day!" said Miriam kindly.

"I have little ground to hope it," answered the sculptor despondingly;
"Hilda does not dwell in our mortal atmosphere; and gentle and soft as
she appears, it will be as difficult to win her heart as to entice down
a white bird from its sunny freedom in the sky. It is strange, with all
her delicacy and fragility, the impression she makes of being utterly
sufficient to herself. No; I shall never win her. She is abundantly
capable of sympathy, and delights to receive it, but she has no need of
love."

"I partly agree with you," said Miriam. "It is a mistaken idea, which
men generally entertain, that nature has made women especially prone to
throw their whole being into what is technically called love. We have,
to say the least, no more necessity for it than yourselves; only we have
nothing else to do with our hearts. When women have other objects
in life, they are not apt to fall in love. I can think of many women
distinguished in art, literature, and science,--and multitudes whose
hearts and minds find good employment in less ostentatious ways,--who
lead high, lonely lives, and are conscious of no sacrifice so far as
your sex is concerned."

"And Hilda will be one of these!" said Kenyon sadly; "the thought makes
me shiver for myself, and and for her, too."

"Well," said Miriam, smiling, "perhaps she may sprain the delicate wrist
which you have sculptured to such perfection. In that case you may hope.
These old masters to whom she has vowed herself, and whom her slender
hand and woman's heart serve so faithfully, are your only rivals."

The sculptor sighed as he put away the treasure of Hilda's marble hand
into the ivory coffer, and thought how slight was the possibility
that he should ever feel responsive to his own the tender clasp of the
original. He dared not even kiss the image that he himself had made: it
had assumed its share of Hilda's remote and shy divinity.

"And now," said Miriam, "show me the new statue which you asked me
hither to see."




CHAPTER XIV


CLEOPATRA


"My new statue!" said Kenyon, who had positively forgotten it in the
thought of Hilda; "here it is, under this veil." "Not a nude figure,
I hope," observed Miriam. "Every young sculptor seems to think that he
must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it
Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of
decent clothing. I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such
things. Nowadays people are as good as born in their clothes, and
there is practically not a nude human being in existence. An artist,
therefore, as you must candidly confess, cannot sculpture nudity with a
pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses
at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such
circumstances. An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the
open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude
statues of antiquity are as modest as violets, and sufficiently draped
in their own beauty. But as for Mr. Gibson's colored Venuses (stained, I
believe, with tobacco juice), and all other nudities of to-day, I really
do not understand what they have to say to this generation, and would be
glad to see as many heaps of quicklime in their stead."

"You are severe upon the professors of my art," said Kenyon, half
smiling, half seriously; "not that you are wholly wrong, either. We are
bound to accept drapery of some kind, and make the best of it. But
what are we to do? Must we adopt the costume of to-day, and carve, for
example, a Venus in a hoop-petticoat?"

"That would be a boulder, indeed!" rejoined Miriam, laughing. "But
the difficulty goes to confirm me in my belief that, except for
portrait-busts, sculpture has no longer a right to claim any place among
living arts. It has wrought itself out, and come fairly to an end. There
is never a new group nowadays; never even so much as a new attitude.
Greenough (I take my examples among men of merit) imagined nothing new;
nor Crawford either, except in the tailoring line. There are not, as you
will own, more than half a dozen positively original statues or groups
in the world, and these few are of immemorial antiquity. A person
familiar with the Vatican, the Uffizzi Gallery, the Naples Gallery,
and the Louvre, will at once refer any modern production to its antique
prototype; which, moreover, had begun to get out of fashion, even in old
Roman days."

"Pray stop, Miriam," cried Kenyon, "or I shall fling away the chisel
forever!"

"Fairly own to me, then, my friend," rejoined Miriam, whose disturbed
mind found a certain relief in this declamation, "that you sculptors
are, of necessity, the greatest plagiarists in the world."

"I do not own it," said Kenyon, "yet cannot utterly contradict you, as
regards the actual state of the art. But as long as the Carrara quarries
still yield pure blocks, and while my own country has marble mountains,
probably as fine in quality, I shall steadfastly believe that future
sculptors will revive this noblest of the beautiful arts, and people the
world with new shapes of delicate grace and massive grandeur. Perhaps,"
he added, smiling, "mankind will consent to wear a more manageable
costume; or, at worst, we sculptors shall get the skill to make
broadcloth transparent, and render a majestic human character visible
through the coats and trousers of the present day."

"Be it so!" said Miriam; "you are past my counsel. Show me the veiled
figure, which, I am afraid, I have criticised beforehand. To make
amends, I am in the mood to praise it now."

But, as Kenyon was about to take the cloth off the clay model, she laid
her hand on his arm.

"Tell me first what is the subject," said she, "for I have sometimes
incurred great displeasure from members of your brotherhood by being
too obtuse to puzzle out the purport of their productions. It is so
difficult, you know, to compress and define a character or story,
and make it patent at a glance, within the narrow scope attainable
by sculpture! Indeed, I fancy it is still the ordinary habit with
sculptors, first to finish their group of statuary,--in such development
as the particular block of marble will allow,--and then to choose the
subject; as John of Bologna did with his Rape of the Sabines. Have you
followed that good example?"

"No; my statue is intended for Cleopatra," replied Kenyon, a little
disturbed by Miriam's raillery. "The special epoch of her history you
must make out for yourself."

He drew away the cloth that had served to keep the moisture of the clay
model from being exhaled. The sitting figure of a woman was seen. She
was draped from head to foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously
studied from that of ancient Egypt, as revealed by the strange sculpture
of that country, its coins, drawings, painted mummy-cases, and whatever
other tokens have been dug out of its pyramids, graves, and catacombs.
Even the stiff Egyptian head-dress was adhered to, but had been softened
into a rich feminine adornment, without losing a particle of its
truth. Difficulties that might well have seemed insurmountable had been
courageously encountered and made flexible to purposes of grace and
dignity; so that Cleopatra sat attired in a garb proper to her historic
and queenly state, as a daughter of the Ptolemies, and yet such as
the beautiful woman would have put on as best adapted to heighten the
magnificence of her charms, and kindle a tropic fire in the cold eyes of
Octavius.

A marvellous repose--that rare merit in statuary, except it be the
lumpish repose native to the block of stone--was diffused throughout the
figure. The spectator felt that Cleopatra had sunk down out of the fever
and turmoil of her life, and for one instant--as it were, between two
pulse throbs--had relinquished all activity, and was resting throughout
every vein and muscle. It was the repose of despair, indeed; for
Octavius had seen her, and remained insensible to her enchantments. But
still there was a great smouldering furnace deep down in the woman's
heart. The repose, no doubt, was as complete as if she were never to
stir hand or foot again; and yet, such was the creature's latent energy
and fierceness, she might spring upon you like a tigress, and stop the
very breath that you were now drawing midway in your throat.

The face was a miraculous success. The sculptor had not shunned to
give the full Nubian lips, and other characteristics of the Egyptian
physiognomy. His courage and integrity had been abundantly rewarded; for
Cleopatra's beauty shone out richer, warmer, more triumphantly beyond
comparison, than if, shrinking timidly from the truth, he had chosen
the tame Grecian type. The expression was of profound, gloomy, heavily
revolving thought; a glance into her past life and present emergencies,
while her spirit gathered itself up for some new struggle, or was
getting sternly reconciled to impending doom. In one view, there was a
certain softness and tenderness,--how breathed into the statue, among so
many strong and passionate elements, it is impossible to say. Catching
another glimpse, you beheld her as implacable as a stone and cruel as
fire.

In a word, all Cleopatra--fierce, voluptuous, passionate, tender,
wicked, terrible, and full of poisonous and rapturous enchantment--was
kneaded into what, only a week or two before, had been a lump of wet
clay from the Tiber. Soon, apotheosized in an indestructible material,
she would be one of the images that men keep forever, finding a heat in
them which does not cool down, throughout the centuries?

"What a woman is this!" exclaimed Miriam, after a long pause. "Tell me,
did she ever try, even while you were creating her, to overcome you with
her fury or her love? Were you not afraid to touch her, as she grew more
and more towards hot life beneath your hand? My dear friend, it is a
great work! How have you learned to do it?"

"It is the concretion of a good deal of thought, emotion, and toil of
brain and hand," said Kenyon, not without a perception that his work was
good; "but I know not how it came about at last. I kindled a great fire
within my mind, and threw in the material,--as Aaron threw the gold
of the Israelites into the furnace,--and in the midmost heat uprose
Cleopatra, as you see her."

"What I most marvel at," said Miriam, "is the womanhood that you have so
thoroughly mixed up with all those seemingly discordant elements. Where
did you get that secret? You never found it in your gentle Hilda, yet I
recognize its truth."

"No, surely, it was not in Hilda," said Kenyon. "Her womanhood is of the
ethereal type, and incompatible with any shadow of darkness or evil."

"You are right," rejoined Miriam; "there are women of that ethereal
type, as you term it, and Hilda is one of them. She would die of her
first wrong-doing,--supposing for a moment that she could be capable of
doing wrong. Of sorrow, slender as she seems, Hilda might bear a great
burden; of sin, not a feather's weight. Methinks now, were it my doom, I
could bear either, or both at once; but my conscience is still as white
as Hilda's. Do you question it?"

"Heaven forbid, Miriam!" exclaimed the sculptor.

He was startled at the strange turn which she had so suddenly given to
the conversation. Her voice, too,--so much emotion was stifled rather
than expressed in it, sounded unnatural.

"O, my friend," cried she, with sudden passion, "will you be my friend
indeed? I am lonely, lonely, lonely! There is a secret in my heart that
burns me,--that tortures me! Sometimes I fear to go mad of it; sometimes
I hope to die of it; but neither of the two happens. Ah, if I could but
whisper it to only one human soul! And you--you see far into womanhood;
you receive it widely into your large view. Perhaps--perhaps, but Heaven
only knows, you might understand me! O, let me speak!"

"Miriam, dear friend," replied the sculptor, "if I can help you, speak
freely, as to a brother."

"Help me? No!" said Miriam.

Kenyon's response had been perfectly frank and kind; and yet the
subtlety of Miriam's emotion detected a certain reserve and alarm in his
warmly expressed readiness to hear her story. In his secret soul, to
say the truth, the sculptor doubted whether it were well for this
poor, suffering girl to speak what she so yearned to say, or for him
to listen. If there were any active duty of friendship to be performed,
then, indeed, he would joyfully have come forward to do his best. But if
it were only a pent-up heart that sought an outlet? in that case it was
by no means so certain that a confession would do good. The more her
secret struggled and fought to be told, the more certain would it be to
change all former relations that had subsisted between herself and the
friend to whom she might reveal it. Unless he could give her all the
sympathy, and just the kind of sympathy that the occasion required,
Miriam would hate him by and by, and herself still more, if he let her
speak.

This was what Kenyon said to himself; but his reluctance, after all, and
whether he were conscious of it or no, resulted from a suspicion that
had crept into his heart and lay there in a dark corner. Obscure as it
was, when Miriam looked into his eyes, she detected it at once.

"Ah, I shall hate you!" cried she, echoing the thought which he had
not spoken; she was half choked with the gush of passion that was thus
turned back upon her. "You are as cold and pitiless as your own marble."

"No; but full of sympathy, God knows!" replied he.

In truth, his suspicions, however warranted by the mystery in which
Miriam was enveloped, had vanished in the earnestness of his kindly and
sorrowful emotion. He was now ready to receive her trust.

"Keep your sympathy, then, for sorrows that admit of such solace," said
she, making a strong effort to compose herself. "As for my griefs, I
know how to manage them. It was all a mistake: you can do nothing for
me, unless you petrify me into a marble companion for your Cleopatra
there; and I am not of her sisterhood, I do assure you. Forget this
foolish scene, my friend, and never let me see a reference to it in your
eyes when they meet mine hereafter."

"Since you desire it, all shall be forgotten," answered the sculptor,
pressing her hand as she departed; "or, if ever I can serve you, let my
readiness to do so be remembered. Meanwhile, dear Miriam, let us meet in
the same clear, friendly light as heretofore."

"You are less sincere than I thought you," said Miriam, "if you try to
make me think that there will be no change."

As he attended her through the antechamber, she pointed to the statue of
the pearl-diver.

"My secret is not a pearl," said she; "yet a man might drown himself in
plunging after it."

After Kenyon had closed the door, she went wearily down the staircase,
but paused midway, as if debating with herself whether to return.

"The mischief was done," thought she; "and I might as well have had the
solace that ought to come with it. I have lost,--by staggering a little
way beyond the mark, in the blindness of my distress, I have lost, as
we shall hereafter find, the genuine friendship of this clear-minded,
honorable, true-hearted young man, and all for nothing. What if I should
go back this moment and compel him to listen?"

She ascended two or three of the stairs, but again paused, murmured to
herself, and shook her head.

"No, no, no," she thought; "and I wonder how I ever came to dream of
it. Unless I had his heart for my own,--and that is Hilda's, nor would I
steal it from her,--it should never be the treasure Place of my secret.
It is no precious pearl, as I just now told him; but my dark-red
carbuncle--red as blood--is too rich a gem to put into a stranger's
casket."

She went down the stairs, and found her shadow waiting for her in the
street.




CHAPTER XV


AN AESTHETIC COMPANY


On the evening after Miriam's visit to Kenyon's studio, there was an
assemblage composed almost entirely of Anglo-Saxons, and chiefly of
American artists, with a sprinkling of their English brethren; and some
few of the tourists who still lingered in Rome, now that Holy Week was
past. Miriam, Hilda, and the sculptor were all three present, and with
them Donatello, whose life was so far turned from fits natural bent
that, like a pet spaniel, he followed his beloved mistress wherever he
could gain admittance.

The place of meeting was in the palatial, but somewhat faded and gloomy
apartment of an eminent member of the aesthetic body. It was no more
formal an occasion than one of those weekly receptions, common among
the foreign residents of Rome, at which pleasant people--or disagreeable
ones, as the case may be--encounter one another with little ceremony.

If anywise interested in art, a man must be difficult to please who
cannot find fit companionship among a crowd of persons, whose ideas and
pursuits all tend towards the general purpose of enlarging the world's
stock of beautiful productions.

One of the chief causes that make Rome the favorite residence of
artists--their ideal home which they sigh for in advance, and are so
loath to migrate from, after once breathing its enchanted air--is,
doubtless, that they there find themselves in force, and are numerous
enough to create a congenial atmosphere. In every other clime they are
isolated strangers; in this land of art, they are free citizens.

Not that, individually, or in the mass, there appears to be any large
stock of mutual affection among the brethren of the chisel and the
pencil. On the contrary, it will impress the shrewd observer that the
jealousies and petty animosities, which the poets of our day have flung
aside, still irritate and gnaw into the hearts of this kindred class of
imaginative men. It is not difficult to suggest reasons why this should
be the fact. The public, in whose good graces lie the sculptor's or the
painter's prospects of success, is infinitely smaller than the public to
which literary men make their appeal. It is composed of a very limited
body of wealthy patrons; and these, as the artist well knows, are but
blind judges in matters that require the utmost delicacy of perception.
Thus, success in art is apt to become partly an affair of intrigue; and
it is almost inevitable that even a gifted artist should look askance at
his gifted brother's fame, and be chary of the good word that might help
him to sell still another statue or picture. You seldom hear a painter
heap generous praise on anything in his special line of art; a sculptor
never has a favorable eye for any marble but his own.

Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are
conscious of a social warmth from each other's presence and contiguity.
They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the
unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such
brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from
galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality
dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.

The company this evening included several men and women whom the world
has heard of, and many others, beyond all question, whom it ought to
know. It would be a pleasure to introduce them upon our humble pages,
name by name, and had we confidence enough in our own taste--to crown
each well-deserving brow according to its deserts. The opportunity
is tempting, but not easily manageable, and far too perilous, both in
respect to those individuals whom we might bring forward, and the far
greater number that must needs be left in the shade. Ink, moreover, is
apt to have a corrosive quality, and might chance to raise a blister,
instead of any more agreeable titillation, on skins so sensitive as
those of artists. We must therefore forego the delight of illuminating
this chapter with personal allusions to men whose renown glows richly on
canvas, or gleams in the white moonlight of marble.

Otherwise we might point to an artist who has studied Nature with
such tender love that she takes him to her intimacy, enabling him to
reproduce her in landscapes that seem the reality of a better earth,
and yet are but the truth of the very scenes around us, observed by the
painter's insight and interpreted for us by his skill. By his magic,
the moon throws her light far out of the picture, and the crimson of
the summer night absolutely glimmers on the beholder's face. Or we might
indicate a poet-painter, whose song has the vividness of picture, and
whose canvas is peopled with angels, fairies, and water sprites, done to
the ethereal life, because he saw them face to face in his poetic mood.
Or we might bow before an artist, who has wrought too sincerely, too
religiously, with too earnest a feeling, and too delicate a touch, for
the world at once to recognize how much toil and thought are compressed
into the stately brow of Prospero, and Miranda's maiden loveliness; or
from what a depth within this painter's heart the Angel is leading forth
St. Peter.

Thus it would be easy to go on, perpetrating a score of little
epigrammatical allusions, like the above, all kindly meant, but none
of them quite hitting the mark, and often striking where they were not
aimed. It may be allowable to say, however, that American art is much
better represented at Rome in the pictorial than in the sculpturesque
department. Yet the men of marble appear to have more weight with the
public than the men of canvas; perhaps on account of the greater density
and solid substance of the material in which they work, and the sort
of physical advantage which their labors thus acquire over the illusive
unreality of color. To be a sculptor seems a distinction in itself;
whereas a painter is nothing, unless individually eminent.

One sculptor there was, an Englishman, endowed with a beautiful fancy,
and possessing at his fingers' ends the capability of doing beautiful
things. He was a quiet, simple, elderly personage, with eyes brown and
bright, under a slightly impending brow, and a Grecian profile, such as
he might have cut with his own chisel. He had spent his life, for forty
years, in making Venuses, Cupids, Bacchuses, and a vast deal of other
marble progeny of dreamwork, or rather frostwork: it was all a vapory
exhalation out of the Grecian mythology, crystallizing on the dull
window-panes of to-day. Gifted with a more delicate power than any other
man alive, he had foregone to be a Christian reality, and perverted
himself into a Pagan idealist, whose business or efficacy, in our
present world, it would be exceedingly difficult to define. And, loving
and reverencing the pure material in which he wrought, as surely this
admirable sculptor did, he had nevertheless robbed the marble of its
chastity, by giving it an artificial warmth of hue. Thus it became a sin
and shame to look at his nude goddesses. They had revealed themselves
to his imagination, no doubt, with all their deity about them; but,
bedaubed with buff color, they stood forth to the eyes of the profane in
the guise of naked women. But, whatever criticism may be ventured on
his style, it was good to meet a man so modest and yet imbued with such
thorough and simple conviction of his own right principles and practice,
and so quietly satisfied that his kind of antique achievement was all
that sculpture could effect for modern life.


This eminent person's weight and authority among his artistic brethren
were very evident; for beginning unobtrusively to utter himself on
a topic of art, he was soon the centre of a little crowd of younger
sculptors. They drank in his wisdom, as if it would serve all the
purposes of original inspiration; he, meanwhile, discoursing with
gentle calmness, as if there could possibly be no other side, and often
ratifying, as it were, his own conclusions by a mildly emphatic "Yes."

The veteran Sculptor's unsought audience was composed mostly of our own
countrymen. It is fair to say, that they were a body of very dexterous
and capable artists, each of whom had probably given the delighted
public a nude statue, or had won credit for even higher skill by the
nice carving of buttonholes, shoe-ties, coat-seams, shirt-bosoms, and
other such graceful peculiarities of modern costume. Smart, practical
men they doubtless were, and some of them far more than this, but still
not precisely what an uninitiated person looks for in a sculptor. A
sculptor, indeed, to meet the demands which our preconceptions make upon
him, should be even more indispensably a poet than those who deal in
measured verse and rhyme. His material, or instrument, which serves
him in the stead of shifting and transitory language, is a pure, white,
undecaying substance. It insures immortality to whatever is wrought in
it, and therefore makes it a religious obligation to commit no idea
to its mighty guardianship, save such as may repay the marble for
its faithful care, its incorruptible fidelity, by warming it with an
ethereal life. Under this aspect, marble assumes a sacred character; and
no man should dare to touch it unless he feels within himself a certain
consecration and a priesthood, the only evidence of which, for the
public eye, will be the high treatment of heroic subjects, or the
delicate evolution of spiritual, through material beauty.

No ideas such as the foregoing--no misgivings suggested by them
probably, troubled the self-complacency of most of these clever
sculptors. Marble, in their view, had no such sanctity as we impute
to it. It was merely a sort of white limestone from Carrara, cut into
convenient blocks, and worth, in that state, about two or three dollars
per pound; and it was susceptible of being wrought into certain shapes
(by their own mechanical ingenuity, or that of artisans in their
employment) which would enable them to sell it again at a much higher
figure. Such men, on the strength of some small knack in handling clay,
which might have been fitly employed in making wax-work, are bold to
call themselves sculptors. How terrible should be the thought that the
nude woman whom the modern artist patches together, bit by bit, from a
dozen heterogeneous models, meaning nothing by her, shall last as long
as the Venus of the Capitol!--that his group of--no matter what, since
it has no moral or intellectual existence will not physically crumble
any sooner than the immortal agony of the Laocoon!

Yet we love the artists, in every kind; even these, whose merits we are
not quite able to appreciate. Sculptors, painters, crayon sketchers, or
whatever branch of aesthetics they adopted, were certainly pleasanter
people, as we saw them that evening, than the average whom we meet
in ordinary society. They were not wholly confined within the sordid
compass of practical life; they had a pursuit which, if followed
faithfully out, would lead them to the beautiful, and always had a
tendency thitherward, even if they lingered to gather up golden dross
by the wayside. Their actual business (though they talked about it very
much as other men talk of cotton, politics, flour barrels, and sugar)
necessarily illuminated their conversation with something akin to the
ideal. So, when the guests collected themselves in little groups, here
and there, in the wide saloon, a cheerful and airy gossip began to be
heard. The atmosphere ceased to be precisely that of common life; a
hint, mellow tinge, such as we see in pictures, mingled itself with the
lamplight.

This good effect was assisted by many curious little treasures of
art, which the host had taken care to strew upon his tables. They
were principally such bits of antiquity as the soil of Rome and its
neighborhood are still rich in; seals, gems, small figures of bronze,
mediaeval carvings in ivory; things which had been obtained at little
cost, yet might have borne no inconsiderable value in the museum of a
virtuoso.

As interesting as any of these relics was a large portfolio of old
drawings, some of which, in the opinion of their possessor, bore
evidence on their faces of the touch of master-hands. Very ragged and
ill conditioned they mostly were, yellow with time, and tattered with
rough usage; and, in their best estate, the designs had been scratched
rudely with pen and ink, on coarse paper, or, if drawn with charcoal or
a pencil, were now half rubbed out. You would not anywhere see rougher
and homelier things than these. But this hasty rudeness made the
sketches only the more valuable; because the artist seemed to have
bestirred himself at the pinch of the moment, snatching up whatever
material was nearest, so as to seize the first glimpse of an idea
that might vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Thus, by the spell of
a creased, soiled, and discolored scrap of paper, you were enabled to
steal close to an old master, and watch him in the very effervescence of
his genius.

According to the judgment of several connoisseurs, Raphael's own
hand had communicated its magnetism to one of these sketches; and, if
genuine, it was evidently his first conception of a favorite Madonna,
now hanging in the private apartment of the Grand Duke, at Florence.
Another drawing was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and appeared to be
a somewhat varied design for his picture of Modesty and Vanity, in the
Sciarra Palace. There were at least half a dozen others, to which the
owner assigned as high an origin. It was delightful to believe in their
authenticity, at all events; for these things make the spectator more
vividly sensible of a great painter's power, than the final glow
and perfected art of the most consummate picture that may have been
elaborated from them. There is an effluence of divinity in the first
sketch; and there, if anywhere, you find the pure light of inspiration,
which the subsequent toil of the artist serves to bring out in stronger
lustre, indeed, but likewise adulterates it with what belongs to an
inferior mood. The aroma and fragrance of new thoughts were perceptible
in these designs, after three centuries of wear and tear. The charm lay
partly in their very imperfection; for this is suggestive, and sets
the imagination at work; whereas, the finished picture, if a good one,
leaves the spectator nothing to do, and, if bad, confuses, stupefies,
disenchants, and disheartens him.

Hilda was greatly interested in this rich portfolio. She lingered so
long over one particular sketch, that Miriam asked her what discovery
she had made.

"Look at it carefully," replied Hilda, putting the sketch into her
hands. "If you take pains to disentangle the design from those
pencil-marks that seem to have been scrawled over it, I think you will
see something very curious."

"It is a hopeless affair, I am afraid," said Miriam. "I have neither
your faith, dear Hilda, nor your perceptive faculty. Fie! what a blurred
scrawl it is indeed!"

The drawing had originally been very slight, and had suffered more
from time and hard usage than almost any other in the collection; it
appeared, too, that there had been an attempt (perhaps by the very hand
that drew it) to obliterate the design. By Hilda's help, however, Miriam
pretty distinctly made out a winged figure with a drawn sword, and a
dragon, or a demon, prostrate at his feet.

"I am convinced," said Hilda in a low, reverential tone, "that Guido's
own touches are on that ancient scrap of paper! If so, it must be his
original sketch for the picture of the Archangel Michael setting his
foot upon the demon, in the Church of the Cappuccini. The composition
and general arrangement of the sketch are the same with those of the
picture; the only difference being, that the demon has a more upturned
face, and scowls vindictively at the Archangel, who turns away his eyes
in painful disgust."

"No wonder!" responded Miriam. "The expression suits the daintiness of
Michael's character, as Guido represents him. He never could have looked
the demon in the face!"

"Miriam!" exclaimed her friend reproachfully, "you grieve me, and you
know it, by pretending to speak contemptuously of the most beautiful and
the divinest figure that mortal painter ever drew."

"Forgive me, Hilda!" said Miriam. "You take these matters more
religiously than I can, for my life. Guido's Archangel is a fine
picture, of course, but it never impressed me as it does _you_."

"Well; we will not talk of that," answered Hilda. "What I wanted you to
notice, in this sketch, is the face of the demon. It is entirely unlike
the demon of the finished picture. Guido, you know, always affirmed that
the resemblance to Cardinal Pamfili was either casual or imaginary. Now,
here is the face as he first conceived it."

"And a more energetic demon, altogether, than that of the finished
picture," said Kenyon, taking the sketch into his hand. "What a spirit
is conveyed into the ugliness of this strong, writhing, squirming
dragon, under the Archangel's foot! Neither is the face an impossible
one. Upon my word, I have seen it somewhere, and on the shoulders of a
living man!"

"And so have I," said Hilda. "It was what struck me from the first."

"Donatello, look at this face!" cried Kenyon.

The young Italian, as may be supposed, took little interest in matters
of art, and seldom or never ventured an opinion respecting them. After
holding the sketch a single instant in his hand, he flung it from him
with a shudder of disgust and repugnance, and a frown that had all the
bitterness of hatred.

"I know the face well!" whispered he. "It is Miriam's model!"

It was acknowledged both by Kenyon and Hilda that they had detected, or
fancied, the resemblance which Donatello so strongly affirmed; and it
added not a little to the grotesque and weird character which, half
playfully, half seriously, they assigned to Miriam's attendant, to think
of him as personating the demon's part in a picture of more than two
centuries ago. Had Guido, in his effort to imagine the utmost of sin
and misery, which his pencil could represent, hit ideally upon just this
face? Or was it an actual portrait of somebody, that haunted the old
master, as Miriam was haunted now? Did the ominous shadow follow him
through all the sunshine of his earlier career, and into the gloom that
gathered about its close? And when Guido died, did the spectre betake
himself to those ancient sepulchres, there awaiting a new victim, till
it was Miriam's ill-hap to encounter him?

"I do not acknowledge the resemblance at all," said Miriam, looking
narrowly at the sketch; "and, as I have drawn the face twenty times, I
think you will own that I am the best judge."

A discussion here arose, in reference to Guido's Archangel, and it was
agreed that these four friends should visit the Church of the Cappuccini
the next morning, and critically examine the picture in question;
the similarity between it and the sketch being, at all events, a very
curious circumstance.

It was now a little past ten o'clock, when some of the company, who had
been standing in a balcony, declared the moonlight to be resplendent.
They proposed a ramble through the streets, taking in their way some
of those scenes of ruin which produced their best effects under the
splendor of the Italian moon.




CHAPTER XVI


A MOONLIGHT RAMBLE


The proposal for a moonlight ramble was received with acclamation by
all the younger portion of the company. They immediately set forth and
descended from story to story, dimly lighting their way by waxen tapers,
which are a necessary equipment to those whose thoroughfare, in the
night-time, lies up and down a Roman staircase. Emerging from the
courtyard of the edifice, they looked upward and saw the sky full of
light, which seemed to have a delicate purple or crimson lustre, or, at
least some richer tinge than the cold, white moonshine of other
skies. It gleamed over the front of the opposite palace, showing the
architectural ornaments of its cornice and pillared portal, as well as
the iron-barred basement windows, that gave such a prison-like aspect to
the structure, and the shabbiness and Squalor that lay along its base.
A cobbler was just shutting up his little shop, in the basement of the
palace; a cigar vender's lantern flared in the blast that came through
the archway; a French sentinel paced to and fro before the portal; a
homeless dog, that haunted thereabouts, barked as obstreperously at the
party as if he were the domestic guardian of the precincts.

The air was quietly full of the noise of falling water, the cause
of which was nowhere visible, though apparently near at hand. This
pleasant, natural sound, not unlike that of a distant cascade in the
forest, may be heard in many of the Roman streets and piazzas, when
the tumult of the city is hushed; for consuls, emperors, and popes, the
great men of every age, have found no better way of immortalizing their
memories than by the shifting, indestructible, ever new, yet unchanging,
upgush and downfall of water. They have written their names in that
unstable element, and proved it a more durable record than brass or
marble.

"Donatello, you had better take one of those gay, boyish artists for
your companion," said Miriam, when she found the Italian youth at
her side. "I am not now in a merry mood, as when we set all the world
a-dancing the other afternoon, in the Borghese grounds."

"I never wish to dance any more," answered Donatello.

"What a melancholy was in that tone!" exclaimed Miriam. "You are getting
spoilt in this dreary Rome, and will be as wise and as wretched as all
the rest of mankind, unless you go back soon to your Tuscan vineyards.
Well; give me your arm, then! But take care that no friskiness comes
over you. We must walk evenly and heavily to-night!"

The party arranged itself according to its natural affinities or casual
likings; a sculptor generally choosing a painter, and a painter a
sculp--tor, for his companion, in preference to brethren of their own
art. Kenyon would gladly have taken Hilda to himself, and have drawn
her a little aside from the throng of merry wayfarers. But she kept near
Miriam, and seemed, in her gentle and quiet way, to decline a separate
alliance either with him or any other of her acquaintances.

So they set forth, and had gone but a little way, when the narrow street
emerged into a piazza, on one side of which, glistening and dimpling in
the moonlight, was the most famous fountain in Rome. Its murmur--not
to say its uproar--had been in the ears of the company, ever since they
came into the open air. It was the Fountain of Trevi, which draws its
precious water from a source far beyond the walls, whence it flows
hitherward through old subterranean aqueducts, and sparkles forth as
pure as the virgin who first led Agrippa to its well-spring, by her
father's door.

"I shall sip as much of this water as the hollow of my hand will hold,"
said Miriam.

"I am leaving Rome in a few days; and the tradition goes, that a
parting draught at the Fountain of Trevi insures the traveller's return,
whatever obstacles and improbabilities may seem to beset him. Will you
drink, Donatello?"

"Signorina, what you drink, I drink," said the youth.

They and the rest of the party descended some steps to the water's
brim, and, after a sip or two, stood gazing at the absurd design of the
fountain, where some sculptor of Bernini's school had gone absolutely
mad in marble. It was a great palace front, with niches and many
bas-reliefs, out of which looked Agrippa's legendary virgin, and several
of the allegoric sisterhood; while, at the base, appeared Neptune, with
his floundering steeds, and Tritons blowing their horns about him, and
twenty other artificial fantasies, which the calm moonlight soothed into
better taste than was native to them.

And, after all, it was as magnificent a piece of work as ever human
skill contrived. At the foot of the palatial facade was strewn, with
careful art and ordered irregularity, a broad and broken heap of massive
rock, looking is if it might have lain there since the deluge. Over a
central precipice fell the water, in a semicircular cascade; and from
a hundred crevices, on all sides, snowy jets gushed up, and streams
spouted out of the mouths and nostrils of stone monsters, and fell in
glistening drops; while other rivulets, that had run wild, came leaping
from one rude step to another, over stones that were mossy, slimy, and
green with sedge, because, in a Century of their wild play, Nature had
adopted the Fountain of Trevi, with all its elaborate devices, for her
own. Finally, the water, tumbling, sparkling, and dashing, with
joyous haste and never-ceasing murmur, poured itself into a great
marble-brimmed reservoir, and filled it with a quivering tide; on which
was seen, continually, a snowy semicircle of momentary foam from the
principal cascade, as well as a multitude of snow points from smaller
jets. The basin occupied the whole breadth of the piazza, whence flights
of steps descended to its border. A boat might float, and make voyages
from one shore to another in this mimic lake.


In the daytime, there is hardly a livelier scene in Rome than the
neighborhood of the Fountain of Trevi; for the piazza is then filled
with the stalls of vegetable and fruit dealers, chestnut roasters,
cigar venders, and other people, whose petty and wandering traffic
is transacted in the open air. It is likewise thronged with idlers,
lounging over the iron railing, and with Forestieri, who came hither to
see the famous fountain. Here, also, are seen men with buckets, urchins
with cans, and maidens (a picture as old as the patriarchal times)
bearing their pitchers upon their heads. For the water of Trevi is in
request, far and wide, as the most refreshing draught for feverish lips,
the pleasantest to mingle with wine, and the wholesomest to drink,
in its native purity, that can anywhere be found. But now, at early
midnight, the piazza was a solitude; and it was a delight to behold this
untamable water, sporting by itself in the moonshine, and compelling
all the elaborate trivialities of art to assume a natural aspect, in
accordance with its own powerful simplicity.

"What would be done with this water power," suggested an artist, "if we
had it in one of our American cities? Would they employ it to turn the
machinery of a cotton mill, I wonder?"

"The good people would pull down those rampant marble deities," said
Kenyon, "and, possibly, they would give me a commission to carve the
one-and-thirty (is that the number?) sister States, each pouring a
silver stream from a separate can into one vast basin, which should
represent the grand reservoir of national prosperity."

"Or, if they wanted a bit of satire," remarked an English artist, "you
could set those same one-and-thirty States to cleansing the national
flag of any stains that it may have incurred. The Roman washerwomen at
the lavatory yonder, plying their labor in the open air, would serve
admirably as models."

"I have often intended to visit this fountain by moonlight,", said
Miriam, "because it was here that the interview took place between
Corinne and Lord Neville, after their separation and temporary
estrangement. Pray come behind me, one of you, and let me try whether
the face can be recognized in the water."

Leaning over the stone brim of the basin, she heard footsteps stealing
behind her, and knew that somebody was looking over her shoulder. The
moonshine fell directly behind Miriam, illuminating the palace front and
the whole scene of statues and rocks, and filling the basin, as it were,
with tremulous and palpable light. Corinne, it will be remembered, knew
Lord Neville by the reflection of his face in the water. In Miriam's
case, however (owing to the agitation of the water, its transparency,
and the angle at which she was compelled to lean over), no reflected
image appeared; nor, from the same causes, would it have been possible
for the recognition between Corinne and her lover to take place. The
moon, indeed, flung Miriam's shadow at the bottom of the basin, as well
as two more shadows of persons who had followed her, on either side.

"Three shadows!" exclaimed Miriam--"three separate shadows, all so black
and heavy that they sink in the water! There they lie on the bottom,
as if all three were drowned together. This shadow on my right is
Donatello; I know him by his curls, and the turn of his head. My
left-hand companion puzzles me; a shapeless mass, as indistinct as the
premonition of calamity! Which of you can it be? Ah!"

She had turned round, while speaking, and saw beside her the strange
creature whose attendance on her was already familiar, as a marvel and
a jest; to the whole company of artists. A general burst of laughter
followed the recognition; while the model leaned towards Miriam, as she
shrank from him, and muttered something that was inaudible to those who
witnessed the scene. By his gestures, however, they concluded that he
was inviting her to bathe her hands.

"He cannot be an Italian; at least not a Roman," observed an artist. "I
never knew one of them to care about ablution. See him now! It is as
if he were trying to wash off' the time-stains and earthly soil of a
thousand years!"

Dipping his hands into the capacious washbowl before him, the model
rubbed them together with the utmost vehemence. Ever and anon, too,
he peeped into the water, as if expecting to see the whole Fountain of
Trevi turbid with the results of his ablution. Miriam looked at him,
some little time, with an aspect of real terror, and even imitated him
by leaning over to peep into the basin. Recovering herself, she took up
some of the water in the hollow of her hand, and practised an old form
of exorcism by flinging it in her persecutor's face.

"In the name of all the Saints," cried she, "vanish, Demon, and let me
be free of you now and forever!"

"It will not suffice," said some of the mirthful party, "unless the
Fountain of Trevi gushes with holy water."

In fact, the exorcism was quite ineffectual upon the pertinacious demon,
or whatever the apparition might be. Still he washed his brown, bony
talons; still he peered into the vast basin, as if all the water of that
great drinking-cup of Rome must needs be stained black or sanguine; and
still he gesticulated to Miriam to follow his example. The spectators
laughed loudly, but yet with a kind of constraint; for the creature's
aspect was strangely repulsive and hideous.

Miriam felt her arm seized violently by Donatello. She looked at him,
and beheld a tigerlike fury gleaming from his wild eyes.

"Bid me drown him!" whispered he, shuddering between rage and horrible
disgust. "You shall hear his death gurgle in another instant!"

"Peace, peace, Donatello!" said Miriam soothingly, for this naturally
gentle and sportive being seemed all aflame with animal rage. "Do him no
mischief! He is mad; and we are as mad as he, if we suffer ourselves to
be disquieted by his antics. Let us leave him to bathe his hands till
the fountain run dry, if he find solace and pastime in it. What is it to
you or me, Donatello? There, there! Be quiet, foolish boy!"

Her tone and gesture were such as she might have used in taming down the
wrath of a faithful hound, that had taken upon himself to avenge some
supposed affront to his mistress. She smoothed the young man's curls
(for his fierce and sudden fury seemed to bristle among his hair), and
touched his cheek with her soft palm, till his angry mood was a little
assuaged.

"Signorina, do I look as when you first knew me?" asked he, with a
heavy, tremulous sigh, as they went onward, somewhat apart from their
companions. "Methinks there has been a change upon me, these many
months; and more and more, these last few days. The joy is gone out of
my life; all gone! all gone! Feel my hand! Is it not very hot? Ah; and
my heart burns hotter still!"

"My poor Donatello, you are ill!" said Miriam, with deep sympathy and
pity. "This melancholy and sickly Rome is stealing away the rich, joyous
life that belongs to you. Go back, my dear friend, to your home among
the hills, where (as I gather from what you have told me) your days were
filled with simple and blameless delights. Have you found aught in the
world that is worth' what you there enjoyed? Tell me truly, Donatello!"

"Yes!" replied the young man.

"And what, in Heaven's name?" asked she.

"This burning pain in my heart," said Donatello; "for you are in the
midst of it."

By this time, they had left the Fountain of Trevi considerably behind
them. Little further allusion was made to the scene at its margin; for
the party regarded Miriam's persecutor as diseased in his wits, and were
hardly to be surprised by any eccentricity in his deportment.

Threading several narrow streets, they passed through the Piazza of the
Holy Apostles, and soon came to Trajan's Forum. All over the surface
of what once was Rome, it seems to be the effort of Time to bury up the
ancient city, as if it were a corpse, and he the sexton; so that, in
eighteen centuries, the soil over its grave has grown very deep, by the
slow scattering of dust, and the accumulation of more modern decay upon
older ruin.

This was the fate, also, of Trajan's Forum, until some papal antiquary,
a few hundred years ago, began to hollow it out again, and disclosed the
full height of the gigantic column wreathed round with bas-reliefs of
the old emperor's warlike deeds. In the area before it stands a grove of
stone, consisting of the broken and unequal shafts of a vanished temple,
still keeping a majestic order, and apparently incapable of further
demolition. The modern edifices of the piazza (wholly built, no doubt,
out of the spoil of its old magnificence) look down into the hollow
space whence these pillars rise.

One of the immense gray granite shafts lay in the piazza, on the verge
of the area. It was a great, solid fact of the Past, making old Rome
actually sensible to the touch and eye; and no study of history, nor
force of thought, nor magic of song, could so vitally assure us that
Rome once existed, as this sturdy specimen of what its rulers and people
wrought.

"And see!" said Kenyon, laying his hand upon it, "there is still a
polish remaining on the hard substance of the pillar; and even now, late
as it is, I can feel very sensibly the warmth of the noonday sun, which
did its best to heat it through. This shaft will endure forever. The
polish of eighteen centuries ago, as yet but half rubbed off, and the
heat of to-day's sunshine, lingering into the night, seem almost equally
ephemeral in relation to it."

"There is comfort to be found in the pillar," remarked Miriam, "hard
and heavy as it is. Lying here forever, as it will, it makes all human
trouble appear but a momentary annoyance."

"And human happiness as evanescent too," observed Hilda, sighing; "and
beautiful art hardly less so! I do not love to think that this dull
stone, merely by its massiveness, will last infinitely longer than
any picture, in spite of the spiritual life that ought to give it
immortality!"

"My poor little Hilda," said Miriam, kissing her compassionately, "would
you sacrifice this greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from
the transitoriness of all things, from the right of saying, in every
conjecture, 'This, too, will pass away,' would you give up this
unspeakable boon, for the sake of making a picture eternal?"

Their moralizing strain was interrupted by a demonstration from the rest
of the party, who, after talking and laughing together, suddenly joined
their voices, and shouted at full pitch,

"Trajan! Trajan!"

"Why do you deafen us with such an uproar?" inquired Miriam.

In truth, the whole piazza had been filled with their idle vociferation;
the echoes from the surrounding houses reverberating the cry of
"Trajan," on all sides; as if there was a great search for that imperial
personage, and not so much as a handful of his ashes to be found.

"Why, it was a good opportunity to air our voices in this resounding
piazza," replied one of the artists. "Besides, we had really some hopes
of summoning Trajan to look at his column, which, you know, he never
saw in his lifetime. Here is your model (who, they say, lived and sinned
before Trajan's death) still wandering about Rome; and why not the
Emperor Trajan?"

"Dead emperors have very little delight in their columns, I am afraid,"
observed Kenyon. "All that rich sculpture of Trajan's bloody warfare,
twining from the base of the pillar to its capital, may be but an ugly
spectacle for his ghostly eyes, if he considers that this huge, storied
shaft must be laid before the judgment-seat, as a piece of the evidence
of what he did in the flesh. If ever I am employed to sculpture a hero's
monument, I shall think of this, as I put in the bas-reliefs of the
pedestal!"

"There are sermons in stones," said Hilda thoughtfully, smiling at
Kenyon's morality; "and especially in the stones of Rome."

The party moved on, but deviated a little from the straight way, in
order to glance at the ponderous remains of the temple of Mars Ultot,
within which a convent of nuns is now established,--a dove-cote, in the
war-god's mansion. At only a little distance, they passed the portico
of a Temple of Minerva, most rich and beautiful in architecture, but
woefully gnawed by time and shattered by violence, besides being buried
midway in the accumulation of soil, that rises over dead Rome like a
flood tide. Within this edifice of antique sanctity, a baker's shop
was now established, with an entrance on one side; for, everywhere, the
remnants of old grandeur and divinity have been made available for the
meanest necessities of today.

"The baker is just drawing his loaves out of the oven," remarked Kenyon.
"Do you smell how sour they are? I should fancy that Minerva (in revenge
for the desecration of her temple) had slyly poured vinegar into the
batch, if I did not know that the modern Romans prefer their bread in
the acetous fermentation."

They turned into the Via Alessandria, and thus gained the rear of the
Temple of Peace, and, passing beneath its great arches, pursued their
way along a hedge-bordered lane. In all probability, a stately Roman
street lay buried beneath that rustic-looking pathway; for they had now
emerged from the close and narrow avenues of the modern city, and were
treading on a soil where the seeds of antique grandeur had not yet
produced the squalid crop that elsewhere sprouts from them. Grassy as
the lane was, it skirted along heaps of shapeless ruin, and the bare
site of the vast temple that Hadrian planned and built. It terminated
on the edge of a somewhat abrupt descent, at the foot of which, with a
muddy ditch between, rose, in the bright moonlight, the great curving
wall and multitudinous arches of the Coliseum.




CHAPTER XVII


MIRIAM'S TROUBLE


As usual of a moonlight evening, several carriages stood at the entrance
of this famous ruin, and the precincts and interior were anything but a
solitude. The French sentinel on duty beneath the principal archway eyed
our party curiously, but offered no obstacle to their admission. Within,
the moonlight filled and flooded the great empty space; it glowed upon
tier above tier of ruined, grass-grown arches, and made them even
too distinctly visible. The splendor of the revelation took away that
inestimable effect of dimness and mystery by which the imagination
might be assisted to build a grander structure than the Coliseum, and to
shatter it with a more picturesque decay. Byron's celebrated description
is better than the reality. He beheld the scene in his mind's eye,
through the witchery of many intervening years, and faintly illuminated
it as if with starlight instead of this broad glow of moonshine.

The party of our friends sat down, three or four of them on a prostrate
column, another on a shapeless lump of marble, once a Roman altar;
others on the steps of one of the Christian shrines. Goths and
barbarians though they were, they chatted as gayly together as if they
belonged to the gentle and pleasant race of people who now inhabit
Italy. There was much pastime and gayety just then in the area of the
Coliseum, where so many gladiators and Wild beasts had fought and died,
and where so much blood of Christian martyrs had been lapped up by that
fiercest of wild beasts, the Roman populace of yore. Some youths and
maidens were running merry races across the open space, and playing at
hide and seek a little way within the duskiness of the ground tier of
arches, whence now and then you could hear the half-shriek, halflaugh of
a frolicsome girl, whom the shadow had betrayed into a young man's
arms. Elder groups were seated on the fragments of pillars and blocks
of marble that lay round the verge of the arena, talking in the quick,
short ripple of the Italian tongue. On the steps of the great black
cross in the centre of the Coliseum sat a party singing scraps of songs,
with much laughter and merriment between the stanzas.

It was a strange place for song and mirth. That black cross marks one of
the special blood-spots of the earth where, thousands of times over, the
dying gladiator fell, and more of human agony has been endured for the
mere pastime of the multitude than on the breadth of many battlefields.
From all this crime and suffering, however, the spot has derived a more
than common sanctity. An inscription promises seven years' indulgence,
seven years of remission from the pains of purgatory, and earlier
enjoyment of heavenly bliss, for each separate kiss imprinted on the
black cross. What better use could be made of life, after middle age,
when the accumulated sins are many and the remaining temptations few,
than to spend it all in kissing the black cross of the Coliseum!

Besides its central consecration, the whole area has been made sacred
by a range of shrines, which are erected round the circle, each
commemorating some scene or circumstance of the Saviour's passion and
suffering. In accordance with an ordinary custom, a pilgrim was
making his progress from shrine to shrine upon his knees, and saying a
penitential prayer at each. Light-footed girls ran across the path along
which he crept, or sported with their friends close by the shrines
where he was kneeling. The pilgrim took no heed, and the girls meant
no irreverence; for in Italy religion jostles along side by side
with business and sport, after a fashion of its own, and people are
accustomed to kneel down and pray, or see others praying, between two
fits of merriment, or between two sins.

To make an end of our description, a red twinkle of light was visible
amid the breadth of shadow that fell across the upper part of the
Coliseum. Now it glimmered through a line of arches, or threw a broader
gleam as it rose out of some profound abyss of ruin; now it was muffled
by a heap of shrubbery which had adventurously clambered to that dizzy
height; and so the red light kept ascending to loftier and loftier
ranges of the structure, until it stood like a star where the blue sky
rested against the Coliseum's topmost wall. It indicated a party of
English or Americans paying the inevitable visit by moonlight, and
exalting themselves with raptures that were Byron's, not their own.

Our company of artists sat on the fallen column, the pagan altar, and
the steps of the Christian shrine, enjoying the moonlight and shadow,
the present gayety and the gloomy reminiscences of the scene, in almost
equal share. Artists, indeed, are lifted by the ideality of their
pursuits a little way off the earth, and are therefore able to catch
the evanescent fragrance that floats in the atmosphere of life above
the heads of the ordinary crowd. Even if they seem endowed with little
imagination individually, yet there is a property, a gift, a talisman,
common to their class, entitling them to partake somewhat more
bountifully than other people in the thin delights of moonshine and
romance.

"How delightful this is!" said Hilda; and she sighed for very pleasure.

"Yes," said Kenyon, who sat on the column, at her side. "The Coliseum
is far more delightful, as we enjoy it now, than when eighty thousand
persons sat squeezed together, row above row, to see their fellow
creatures torn by lions and tigers limb from limb. What a strange
thought that the Coliseum was really built for us, and has not come to
its best uses till almost two thousand years after it was finished!"

"The Emperor Vespasian scarcely had us in his mind," said Hilda,
smiling; "but I thank him none the less for building it."

"He gets small thanks, I fear, from the people whose bloody instincts
he pampered," rejoined Kenyon. "Fancy a nightly assemblage of eighty
thousand melancholy and remorseful ghosts, looking down from those tiers
of broken arches, striving to repent of the savage pleasures which they
once enjoyed, but still longing to enjoy them over again."

"You bring a Gothic horror into this peaceful moonlight scene," said
Hilda.


"Nay, I have good authority for peopling the Coliseum with phantoms,"
replied the sculptor. "Do you remember that veritable scene in Benvenuto
Cellini's autobiography, in which a necromancer of his acquaintance
draws a magic circle--just where the black cross stands now, I
suppose--and raises myriads of demons? Benvenuto saw them with his
own eyes,--giants, pygmies, and other creatures of frightful aspect,
capering and dancing on yonder walls. Those spectres must have been
Romans, in their lifetime, and frequenters of this bloody amphitheatre."

"I see a spectre, now!" said Hilda, with a little thrill of uneasiness.
"Have you watched that pilgrim, who is going round the whole circle of
shrines, on his knees, and praying with such fervency at every one? Now
that he has revolved so far in his orbit, and has the moonshine on his
face as he turns towards us, methinks I recognize him!"

"And so do I," said Kenyon. "Poor Miriam! Do you think she sees him?"

They looked round, and perceived that Miriam had risen from the steps of
the shrine and disappeared. She had shrunk back, in fact, into the deep
obscurity of an arch that opened just behind them.

Donatello, whose faithful watch was no more to be eluded than that of
a hound, had stolen after her, and became the innocent witness of a
spectacle that had its own kind of horror. Unaware of his presence,
and fancying herself wholly unseen, the beautiful Miriam began to
gesticulate extravagantly, gnashing her teeth, flinging her arms wildly
abroad, stamping with her foot.

It was as if she had stepped aside for an instant, solely to snatch the
relief of a brief fit of madness. Persons in acute trouble, or laboring
under strong excitement, with a necessity for concealing it, are prone
to relieve their nerves in this wild way; although, when practicable,
they find a more effectual solace in shrieking aloud.

Thus, as soon as she threw off her self-control, under the dusky arches
of the Coliseum, we may consider Miriam as a mad woman, concentrating
the elements of a long insanity into that instant.

"Signorina! signorina! have pity on me!" cried Donatello, approaching
her; "this is too terrible!"

"How dare you look, at me!" exclaimed Miriam, with a start; then,
whispering below her breath, "men have been struck dead for a less
offence!"

"If you desire it, or need it," said Donatello humbly, "I shall not be
loath to die."

"Donatello," said Miriam, coming close to the young man, and speaking
low, but still the almost insanity of the moment vibrating in her voice,
"if you love yourself; if you desire those earthly blessings, such as
you, of all men, were made for; if you would come to a good old age
among your olive orchards and your Tuscan vines, as your forefathers
did; if you would leave children to enjoy the same peaceful, happy,
innocent life, then flee from me. Look not behind you! Get you gone
without another word." He gazed sadly at her, but did not stir. "I tell
you," Miriam went on, "there is a great evil hanging over me! I know
it; I see it in the sky; I feel it in the air! It will overwhelm me
as utterly as if this arch should crumble down upon our heads! It will
crush you, too, if you stand at my side! Depart, then; and make the sign
of the cross, as your faith bids you, when an evil spirit is nigh. Cast
me off, or you are lost forever."

A higher sentiment brightened upon Donatello's face than had hitherto
seemed to belong to its simple expression and sensuous beauty.

"I will never quit you," he said; "you cannot drive me from you."

"Poor Donatello!" said Miriam in a changed tone, and rather to herself
than him. "Is there no other that seeks me out, follows me,--is
obstinate to share my affliction and my doom,--but only you! They call
me beautiful; and I used to fancy that, at my need, I could bring the
whole world to my feet. And lo! here is my utmost need; and my beauty
and my gifts have brought me only this poor, simple boy. Half-witted,
they call him; and surely fit for nothing but to be happy. And I accept
his aid! To-morrow, to-morrow, I will tell him all! Ah! what a sin to
stain his joyous nature with the blackness of a woe like mine!"

She held out her hand to him, and smiled sadly as Donatello pressed it
to his lips. They were now about to emerge from the depth of the arch;
but just then the kneeling pilgrim, in his revolution round the orbit of
the shrines, had reached the one on the steps of which Miriam had been
sitting. There, as at the other shrines, he prayed, or seemed to
pray. It struck Kenyon, however,--who sat close by, and saw his face
distinctly, that the suppliant was merely performing an enjoined
penance, and without the penitence that ought to have given it effectual
life. Even as he knelt, his eyes wandered, and Miriam soon felt that
he had detected her, half hidden as she was within the obscurity of the
arch.

"He is evidently a good Catholic, however," whispered one of the party.
"After all, I fear we cannot identify him with the ancient pagan who
haunts the catacombs."

"The doctors of the Propaganda may have converted him," said another;
"they have had fifteen hundred years to perform the task."

The company now deemed it time to continue their ramble. Emerging from
a side entrance of the Coliseum, they had on their left the Arch of
Constantine, and above it the shapeless ruins of the Palace of the
Caesars; portions of which have taken shape anew, in mediaeval convents
and modern villas. They turned their faces cityward, and, treading over
the broad flagstones of the old Roman pavement, passed through the
Arch of Titus. The moon shone brightly enough within it to show the
seven-branched Jewish candlestick, cut in the marble of the interior.
The original of that awful trophy lies buried, at this moment, in the
yellow mud of the Tiber; and, could its gold of Ophir again be brought
to light, it would be the most precious relic of past ages, in the
estimation of both Jew and Gentile.

Standing amid so much ancient dust, it is difficult to spare the reader
the commonplaces of enthusiasm, on which hundreds of tourists have
already insisted. Over this half-worn pavement, and beneath this Arch
of Titus, the Roman armies had trodden in their outward march, to fight
battles a world's width away. Returning victorious, with royal captives
and inestimable spoil, a Roman triumph, that most gorgeous pageant of
earthly pride, had streamed and flaunted in hundred-fold succession
over these same flagstones, and through this yet stalwart archway. It is
politic, however, to make few allusions to such a past; nor, if we would
create an interest in the characters of our story, is it wise to suggest
how Cicero's foot may have stepped on yonder stone, or how Horace was
wont to stroll near by, making his footsteps chime with the measure of
the ode that was ringing in his mind. The very ghosts of that massive
and stately epoch have so much density that the actual people of to-day
seem the thinner of the two, and stand more ghost-like by the arches
and columns, letting the rich sculpture be discerned through their
ill-compacted substance.

The party kept onward, often meeting pairs and groups of midnight
strollers like themselves. On such a moonlight night as this, Rome keeps
itself awake and stirring, and is full of song and pastime, the noise of
which mingles with your dreams, if you have gone betimes to bed. But it
is better to be abroad, and take our own share of the enjoyable time;
for the languor that weighs so heavily in the Roman atmosphere by day is
lightened beneath the moon and stars.

They had now reached the precincts of the Forum.




CHAPTER XVIII


ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE


"Let us settle it," said Kenyon, stamping his foot firmly down, "that
this is precisely the spot where the chasm opened, into which Curtius
precipitated his good steed and himself. Imagine the great, dusky gap,
impenetrably deep, and with half-shaped monsters and hideous faces
looming upward out of it, to the vast affright of the good citizens who
peeped over the brim! There, now, is a subject, hitherto unthought of,
for a grim and ghastly story, and, methinks, with a moral as deep as
the gulf itself. Within it, beyond a question, there were prophetic
visions,--intimations of all the future calamities of Rome,--shades of
Goths, and Gauls, and even of the French soldiers of to-day. It was a
pity to close it up so soon! I would give much for a peep into such a
chasm."

"I fancy," remarked Miriam, "that every person takes a peep into it
in moments of gloom and despondency; that is to say, in his moments of
deepest insight."

"Where is it, then?" asked Hilda. "I never peeped into it."

"Wait, and it will open for you," replied her friend. "The chasm was
merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath
us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin
crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive
stage scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the
chasm. A footstep, a little heavier than ordinary, will serve; and we
must step very daintily, not to break through the crust at any moment.
By and by, we inevitably sink! It was a foolish piece of heroism in
Curtius to precipitate himself there, in advance; for all Rome, you see,
has been swallowed up in that gulf, in spite of him. The Palace of the
Caesars has gone down thither, with a hollow, rumbling sound of its
fragments! All the temples have tumbled into it; and thousands of
statues have been thrown after! All the armies and the triumphs have
marched into the great chasm, with their martial music playing, as they
stepped over the brink. All the heroes, the statesmen, and the poets!
All piled upon poor Curtius, who thought to have saved them all! I am
loath to smile at the self-conceit of that gallant horseman, but cannot
well avoid it."

"It grieves me to hear you speak thus, Miriam," said Hilda, whose
natural and cheerful piety was shocked by her friend's gloomy view of
human destinies. "It seems to me that there is no chasm, nor any hideous
emptiness under our feet, except what the evil within us digs. If there
be such a chasm, let us bridge it over with good thoughts and deeds, and
we shall tread safely to the other side. It was the guilt of Rome, no
doubt, that caused this gulf to open; and Curtius filled it up with his
heroic self-sacrifice and patriotism, which was the best virtue that the
old Romans knew. Every wrong thing makes the gulf deeper; every right
one helps to fill it up. As the evil of Rome was far more than its good,
the whole commonwealth finally sank into it, indeed, but of no original
necessity."

"Well, Hilda, it came to the same thing at last," answered Miriam
despondingly.

"Doubtless, too," resumed the sculptor (for his imagination was greatly
excited by the idea of this wondrous chasm), "all the blood that the
Romans shed, whether on battlefields, or in the Coliseum, or on the
cross,--in whatever public or private murder,--ran into this fatal gulf,
and formed a mighty subterranean lake of gore, right beneath our feet.
The blood from the thirty wounds in Caesar's breast flowed hitherward,
and that pure little rivulet from Virginia's bosom, too! Virginia,
beyond all question, was stabbed by her father, precisely where we are
standing."

"Then the spot is hallowed forever!" said Hilda.

"Is there such blessed potency in bloodshed?" asked Miriam. "Nay, Hilda,
do not protest! I take your meaning rightly."

They again moved forward. And still, from the Forum and the Via Sacra,
from beneath the arches of the Temple of Peace on one side, and the
acclivity of the Palace of the Caesars on the other, there arose singing
voices of parties that were strolling through the moonlight. Thus,
the air was full of kindred melodies that encountered one another, and
twined themselves into a broad, vague music, out of which no single
strain could be disentangled. These good examples, as well as the
harmonious influences of the hour, incited our artist friends to make
proof of their own vocal powers. With what skill and breath they had,
they set up a choral strain,--"Hail, Columbia!" we believe, which
those old Roman echoes must have found it exceeding difficult to repeat
aright. Even Hilda poured the slender sweetness of her note into her
country's song. Miriam was at first silent, being perhaps unfamiliar
with the air and burden. But suddenly she threw out such a swell and
gush of sound, that it seemed to pervade the whole choir of other
voices, and then to rise above them all, and become audible in what
would else have been thee silence of an upper region. That volume of
melodious voice was one of the tokens of a great trouble. There had long
been an impulse upon her--amounting, at last, to a necessity to shriek
aloud; but she had struggled against it, till the thunderous anthem gave
her an opportunity to relieve her heart by a great cry.

They passed the solitary Column of Phocas, and looked down into the
excavated space, where a confusion of pillars, arches, pavements, and
shattered blocks and shafts--the crumbs of various ruin dropped from the
devouring maw of Time stand, or lie, at the base of the Capitoline Hill.
That renowned hillock (for it is little more) now arose abruptly above
them. The ponderous masonry, with which the hillside is built up, is as
old as Rome itself, and looks likely to endure while the world retains
any substance or permanence. It once sustained the Capitol, and now
bears up the great pile which the mediaeval builders raised on the
antique foundation, and that still loftier tower, which looks abroad
upon a larger page of deeper historic interest than any other scene
can show. On the same pedestal of Roman masonry, other structures will
doubtless rise, and vanish like ephemeral things.

To a spectator on the spot, it is remarkable that the events of Roman
history, and Roman life itself, appear not so distant as the Gothic ages
which succeeded them. We stand in the Forum, or on the height of the
Capitol, and seem to see the Roman epoch close at hand. We forget that
a chasm extends between it and ourselves, in which lie all those dark,
rude, unlettered centuries, around the birth-time of Christianity, as
well as the age of chivalry and romance, the feudal system, and the
infancy of a better civilization than that of Rome. Or, if we remember
these mediaeval times, they look further off than the Augustan age. The
reason may be, that the old Roman literature survives, and creates for
us an intimacy with the classic ages, which we have no means of forming
with the subsequent ones.

The Italian climate, moreover, robs age of its reverence and makes it
look newer than it is. Not the Coliseum, nor the tombs of the Appian
Way, nor the oldest pillar in the Forum, nor any other Roman ruin, be
it as dilapidated as it may, ever give the impression of venerable
antiquity which we gather, along with the ivy, from the gray walls of an
English abbey or castle. And yet every brick or stone, which we pick up
among the former, had fallen ages before the foundation of the latter
was begun. This is owing to the kindliness with which Natures takes an
English ruin to her heart, covering it with ivy, as tenderly as Robin
Redbreast covered the dead babes with forest leaves. She strives to make
it a part of herself, gradually obliterating the handiwork of man, and
supplanting it with her own mosses and trailing verdure, till she has
won the whole structure back. But, in Italy, whenever man has once hewn
a stone, Nature forthwith relinquishes her right to it, and never lays
her finger on it again. Age after age finds it bare and naked, in the
barren sunshine, and leaves it so. Besides this natural disadvantage,
too, each succeeding century, in Rome, has done its best to ruin the
very ruins, so far as their picturesque effect is concerned, by stealing
away the marble and hewn stone, and leaving only yellow bricks, which
never can look venerable.


The party ascended the winding way that leads from the Forum to the
Piazza of the Campidoglio on the summit of the Capitoline Hill. They
stood awhile to contemplate the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus
Aurelius. The moonlight glistened upon traces of the gilding which
had once covered both rider and steed; these were almost gone, but the
aspect of dignity was still perfect, clothing the figure as it were with
an imperial robe of light. It is the most majestic representation of
the kingly character that ever the world has seen. A sight of the old
heathen emperor is enough to create an evanescent sentiment of loyalty
even in a democratic bosom, so august does he look, so fit to rule,
so worthy of man's profoundest homage and obedience, so inevitably
attractive of his love. He stretches forth his hand with an air of grand
beneficence and unlimited authority, as if uttering a decree from which
no appeal was permissible, but in which the obedient subject would
find his highest interests consulted; a command that was in itself a
benediction.

"The sculptor of this statue knew what a king should be," observed
Kenyon, "and knew, likewise, the heart of mankind, and how it craves a
true ruler, under whatever title, as a child its father."

"O, if there were but one such man as this?" exclaimed Miriam. "One such
man in an age, and one in all the world; then how speedily would the
strife, wickedness, and sorrow of us poor creatures be relieved. We
would come to him with our griefs, whatever they might be,--even a poor,
frail woman burdened with her heavy heart,--and lay them at his feet,
and never need to take them up again. The rightful king would see to
all."

"What an idea of the regal office and duty!" said Kenyon, with a smile.
"It is a woman's idea of the whole matter to perfection. It is Hilda's,
too, no doubt?"

"No," answered the quiet Hilda; "I should never look for such assistance
from an earthly king."

"Hilda, my religious Hilda," whispered Miriam, suddenly drawing the girl
close to her, "do you know how it is with me? I would give all I have or
hope--my life, O how freely--for one instant of your trust in God! You
little guess my need of it. You really think, then, that He sees and
cares for us?"

"Miriam, you frighten me."

"Hush, hush? do not let them hear yet!" whispered Miriam. "I frighten
you, you say; for Heaven's sake, how? Am I strange? Is there anything
wild in my behavior?"

"Only for that moment," replied Hilda, "because you seemed to doubt
God's providence."

"We will talk of that another time," said her friend. "Just now it is
very dark to me."

On the left of the Piazza of the Campidoglio, as you face cityward, and
at the head of the long and stately flight of steps descending from the
Capitoline Hill to the level of lower Rome, there is a narrow lane
or passage. Into this the party of our friends now turned. The path
ascended a little, and ran along under the walls of a palace, but soon
passed through a gateway, and terminated in a small paved courtyard. It
was bordered by a low parapet.

The spot, for some reason or other, impressed them as exceedingly
lonely. On one side was the great height of the palace, with the
moonshine falling over it, and showing all the windows barred and
shuttered. Not a human eye could look down into the little courtyard,
even if the seemingly deserted palace had a tenant. On all other sides
of its narrow compass there was nothing but the parapet, which as it now
appeared was built right on the edge of a steep precipice. Gazing
from its imminent brow, the party beheld a crowded confusion of roofs
spreading over the whole space between them and the line of hills that
lay beyond the Tiber. A long, misty wreath, just dense enough to catch
a little of the moonshine, floated above the houses, midway towards the
hilly line, and showed the course of the unseen river. Far away on the
right, the moon gleamed on the dome of St. Peter's as well as on many
lesser and nearer domes.

"What a beautiful view of the city!" exclaimed Hilda; "and I never saw
Rome from this point before."

"It ought to afford a good prospect," said the sculptor; "for it
was from this point--at least we are at liberty to think so, if we
choose--that many a famous Roman caught his last glimpse of his native
city, and of all other earthly things. This is one of the sides of the
Tarpeian Rock. Look over the parapet, and see what a sheer tumble there
might still be for a traitor, in spite of the thirty feet of soil that
have accumulated at the foot of the precipice."

They all bent over, and saw that the cliff fell perpendicularly downward
to about the depth, or rather more, at which the tall palace rose in
height above their heads. Not that it was still the natural, shaggy
front of the original precipice; for it appeared to be cased in ancient
stonework, through which the primeval rock showed its face here and
there grimly and doubtfully. Mosses grew on the slight projections, and
little shrubs sprouted out of the crevices, but could not much soften
the stern aspect of the cliff. Brightly as the Italian moonlight fell
adown the height, it scarcely showed what portion of it was man's work
and what was nature's, but left it all in very much the same kind of
ambiguity and half-knowledge in which antiquarians generally leave the
identity of Roman remains.

The roofs of some poor-looking houses, which had been built against the
base and sides of the cliff, rose nearly midway to the top; but from an
angle of the parapet there was a precipitous plunge straight downward
into a stonepaved court.

"I prefer this to any other site as having been veritably the Traitor's
Leap," said Kenyon, "because it was so convenient to the Capitol. It was
an admirable idea of those stern old fellows to fling their political
criminals down from the very summit on which stood the Senate House and
Jove's Temple, emblems of the institutions which they sought to violate.
It symbolizes how sudden was the fall in those days from the utmost
height of ambition to its profoundest ruin."

"Come, come; it is midnight," cried another artist, "too late to be
moralizing here. We are literally dreaming on the edge of a precipice.
Let us go home."

"It is time, indeed," said Hilda.

The sculptor was not without hopes that he might be favored with the
sweet charge of escorting Hilda to the foot of her tower. Accordingly,
when the party prepared to turn back, he offered her his arm. Hilda at
first accepted it; but when they had partly threaded the passage between
the little courtyard and the Piazza del Campidoglio, she discovered that
Miriam had remained behind.

"I must go back," said she, withdrawing her arm from Kenyon's; "but pray
do not come with me. Several times this evening I have had a fancy that
Miriam had something on her mind, some sorrow or perplexity, which,
perhaps, it would relieve her to tell me about. No, no; do not turn
back! Donatello will be a sufficient guardian for Miriam and me."

The sculptor was a good deal mortified, and perhaps a little angry: but
he knew Hilda's mood of gentle decision and independence too well not to
obey her. He therefore suffered the fearless maiden to return alone.

Meanwhile Miriam had not noticed the departure of the rest of the
company; she remained on the edge of the precipice and Donatello along
with her.

"It would be a fatal fall, still," she said to herself, looking over the
parapet, and shuddering as her eye measured the depth. "Yes; surely yes!
Even without the weight of an overburdened heart, a human body would
fall heavily enough upon those stones to shake all its joints asunder.
How soon it would be over!"

Donatello, of whose presence she was possibly not aware, now pressed
closer to her side; and he, too, like Miriam, bent over the low parapet
and trembled violently. Yet he seemed to feel that perilous fascination
which haunts the brow of precipices, tempting the unwary one to fling
himself over for the very horror of the thing; for, after drawing
hastily back, he again looked down, thrusting himself out farther than
before. He then stood silent a brief space, struggling, perhaps, to make
himself conscious of the historic associations of the scene.

"What are you thinking of, Donatello?" asked Miriam.

"Who are they," said he, looking earnestly in her face, "who have been
flung over here in days gone by?"

"Men that cumbered the world," she replied. "Men whose lives were the
bane of their fellow creatures. Men who poisoned the air, which is the
common breath of all, for their own selfish purposes. There was short
work with such men in old Roman times. Just in the moment of their
triumph, a hand, as of an avenging giant, clutched them, and dashed the
wretches down this precipice."

"Was it well done?" asked the young man.

"It was well done," answered Miriam; "innocent persons were saved by the
destruction of a guilty one, who deserved his doom."

While this brief conversation passed, Donatello had once or twice
glanced aside with a watchful air, just as a hound may often be seen to
take sidelong note of some suspicious object, while he gives his more
direct attention to something nearer at, hand. Miriam seemed now first
to become aware of the silence that had followed upon the cheerful talk
and laughter of a few moments before.

Looking round, she perceived that all her company of merry friends had
retired, and Hilda, too, in whose soft and quiet presence she had always
an indescribable feeling of security. All gone; and only herself and
Donatello left hanging over the brow of the ominous precipice.

Not so, however; not entirely alone! In the basement wall of the palace,
shaded from the moon, there was a deep, empty niche, that had probably
once contained a statue; not empty, either; for a figure now came forth
from it and approached Miriam. She must have had cause to dread some
unspeakable evil from this strange persecutor, and to know that this was
the very crisis of her calamity; for as he drew near, such a cold, sick
despair crept over her that it impeded her breath, and benumbed her
natural promptitude of thought. Miriam seemed dreamily to remember
falling on her knees; but, in her whole recollection of that wild
moment, she beheld herself as in a dim show, and could not well
distinguish what was done and suffered; no, not even whether she were
really an actor and sufferer in the scene.

Hilda, meanwhile, had separated herself from the sculptor, and turned
back to rejoin her friend. At a distance, she still heard the mirth of
her late companions, who were going down the cityward descent of the
Capitoline Hill; they had set up a new stave of melody, in which her
own soft voice, as well as the powerful sweetness of Miriam's, was sadly
missed.

The door of the little courtyard had swung upon its hinges, and
partly closed itself. Hilda (whose native gentleness pervaded all her
movements) was quietly opening it, when she was startled, midway, by the
noise of a struggle within, beginning and ending all in one breathless
instant. Along with it, or closely succeeding it, was a loud, fearful
cry, which quivered upward through the air, and sank quivering
downward to the earth. Then, a silence! Poor Hilda had looked into the
court-yard, and saw the whole quick passage of a deed, which took but
that little time to grave itself in the eternal adamant.




CHAPTER XIX


THE FAUN'S TRANSFORMATION


The door of the courtyard swung slowly, and closed itself of its own
accord. Miriam and Donatello were now alone there. She clasped her
hands, and looked wildly at the young man, whose form seemed to have
dilated, and whose eyes blazed with the fierce energy that had suddenly
inspired him. It had kindled him into a man; it had developed within him
an intelligence which was no native characteristic of the Donatello whom
we have heretofore known. But that simple and joyous creature was gone
forever.

"What have you done?" said Miriam, in a horror-stricken whisper.

The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello's face, and now flashed
out again from his eyes.

"I did what ought to be done to a traitor!" he replied. "I did what your
eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over
the precipice!"

These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it be so? Had her
eyes provoked or assented to this deed? She had not known it. But, alas!
looking back into the frenzy and turmoil of the scene just acted, she
could not deny--she was not sure whether it might be so, or no--that a
wild joy had flamed up in her heart, when she beheld her persecutor in
his mortal peril. Was it horror?--or ecstasy? or both in one? Be the
emotion what it might, it had blazed up more madly, when Donatello
flung his victim off the cliff, and more and more, while his shriek went
quivering downward. With the dead thump upon the stones below had come
an unutterable horror.

"And my eyes bade you do it!" repeated she.

They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as if
some inestimable treasure had fallen over, and were yet recoverable.
On the pavement below was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little or
nothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretched
out, as if they might have clutched for a moment at the small square
stones. But there was no motion in them now. Miriam watched the heap of
mortality while she could count a hundred, which she took pains to do.
No stir; not a finger moved!

"You have killed him, Donatello! He is quite dead!" said she. "Stone
dead! Would I were so, too!"

"Did you not mean that he should die?" sternly asked Donatello, still in
the glow of that intelligence which passion had developed in him. "There
was short time to weigh the matter; but he had his trial in that breath
or two while I held him over the cliff, and his sentence in that one
glance, when your eyes responded to mine! Say that I have slain him
against your will,--say that he died without your whole consent,--and,
in another breath, you shall see me lying beside him."

"O, never!" cried Miriam. "My one, own friend! Never, never, never!"

She turned to him,--the guilty, bloodstained, lonely woman,--she turned
to her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had
drawn into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a
clinging embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror
and agony of each was combined into one emotion, and that a kind of
rapture.

"Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!" said she; "my heart consented to
what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together, for
time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!"

They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assure
themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing. Then
they turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the courtyard,
arm in arm, heart in heart. Instinctively, they were heedful not to
sever themselves so much as a pace or two from one another, for fear
of the terror and deadly chill that would thenceforth wait for them
in solitude. Their deed--the crime which Donatello wrought, and Miriam
accepted on the instant--had wreathed itself, as she said, like a
serpent, in inextricable links about both their souls, and drew them
into one, by its terrible contractile power. It was closer than a
marriage bond. So intimate, in those first moments, was the union, that
it seemed as if their new sympathy annihilated all other ties, and that
they were released from the chain of humanity; a new sphere, a special
law, had been created for them alone. The world could not come near
them; they were safe!

When they reached the flight of steps leading downward from the Capitol,
there was a faroff noise of singing and laughter. Swift, indeed, had
been the rush of the crisis that was come and gone! This was still the
merriment of the party that had so recently been their companions. They
recognized the voices which, a little while ago, had accorded and sung
in cadence with their own. But they were familiar voices no more; they
sounded strangely, and, as it were, out of the depths of space; so
remote was all that pertained to the past life of these guilty ones, in
the moral seclusion that had suddenly extended itself around them. But
how close, and ever closer, did the breath of the immeasurable waste,
that lay between them and all brotherhood or sisterhood, now press them
one within the other!

"O friend!" cried Miriam, so putting her soul into the word that it
took a heavy richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been spoken
before, "O friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this companionship
that knits our heart-strings together?"

"I feel it, Miriam," said Donatello. "We draw one breath; we live one
life!"

"Only yesterday," continued Miriam; "nay, only a short half-hour ago,
I shivered in an icy solitude. No friendship, no sisterhood, could come
near enough to keep the warmth within my heart. In an instant all is
changed! There can be no more loneliness!"

"None, Miriam!" said Donatello.

"None, my beautiful one!" responded Miriam, gazing in his face, which
had taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect, from the strength of
passion. "None, my innocent one! Surely, it is no crime that we have
committed. One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement
two other lives for evermore."

"For evermore, Miriam!" said Donatello; "cemented with his blood!"

The young man started at the word which he had himself spoken; it may be
that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he had
not before dreamed of,--the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a union
that consists in guilt. Cemented with blood, which would corrupt and
grow more noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the less
strictly for that.


"Forget it! Cast it all behind you!" said Miriam, detecting, by her
sympathy, the pang that was in his heart. "The deed has done its office,
and has no existence any more."

They flung the past behind them, as she counselled, or else distilled
from it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly
through those first moments of their doom. For guilt has its moment of
rapture too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic
sense of freedom. And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark
sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an
insanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy
innocence that was forever lost to them.

As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went
onward, not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a stately gait and
aspect. Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief
nobility of carriage. They trod through the streets of Rome, as if they,
too, were among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages
long gone by, have haunted the blood-stained city. And, at Miriam's
suggestion, they turned aside, for the sake of treading loftily past the
old site of Pompey's Forum.

"For there was a great deed done here!" she said,--"a deed of blood
like ours! Who knows but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of
Caesar's murderers, and exchange a salutation?"

"Are they our brethren, now?" asked Donatello.

"Yes; all of them," said Miriam,--"and many another, whom the world
little dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what we
have done within this hour!"

And at the thought she shivered. Where then was the seclusion, the
remoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which she and her one
companion had been transported by their crime? Was there, indeed, no
such refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng of
criminals? And was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on
it,--or had poured out poison,--or strangled a babe at its birth,--or
clutched a grandsire's throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his few
last breaths,--had now the right to offer itself in fellowship with
their two hands? Too certainly, that right existed. It is a terrible
thought, that an individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of
human crime, and makes us, who dreamed only of our own little separate
sin,--makes us guilty of the whole. And thus Miriam and her lover were
not an insulated pair, but members of an innumerable confraternity of
guilty ones, all shuddering at each other.

"But not now; not yet," she murmured to herself. "To-night, at least,
there shall be no remorse!"

Wandering without a purpose, it so chanced that they turned into a
street, at one extremity of which stood Hilda's tower. There was a
light in her high chamber; a light, too, at the Virgin's shrine; and the
glimmer of these two was the loftiest light beneath the stars. Miriam
drew Donatello's arm, to make him stop, and while they stood at some
distance looking at Hilda's window, they beheld her approach and throw
it open. She leaned far forth, and extended her clasped hands towards
the sky.

"The good, pure child! She is praying, Donatello," said Miriam, with a
kind of simple joy at witnessing the devoutness of her friend. Then her
own sin rushed upon her, and she shouted, with the rich strength of her
voice, "Pray for us, Hilda; we need it!"

Whether Hilda heard and recognized the voice we cannot tell. The window
was immediately closed, and her form disappeared from behind the snowy
curtain. Miriam felt this to be a token that the cry of her condemned
spirit was shut out of heaven.




CHAPTER XX


THE BURIAL CHANT


The Church of the Capuchins (where, as the reader may remember, some of
our acquaintances had made an engagement to meet) stands a little aside
from the Piazza Barberini. Thither, at the hour agreed upon, on the
morning after the scenes last described, Miriam and Donatello directed
their steps. At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their
trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus
put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that
if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.

Yet how tame and wearisome is the impression of all ordinary things in
the contrast with such a fact! How sick and tremulous, the next morning,
is the spirit that has dared so much only the night before! How icy cold
is the heart, when the fervor, the wild ecstasy of passion has faded
away, and sunk down among the dead ashes of the fire that blazed so
fiercely, and was fed by the very substance of its life! How faintly
does the criminal stagger onward, lacking the impulse of that strong
madness that hurried him into guilt, and treacherously deserts him in
the midst of it!

When Miriam and Donatello drew near the church, they found only Kenyon
awaiting them on the steps. Hilda had likewise promised to be of the
party, but had not yet appeared. Meeting the sculptor, Miriam put a
force upon herself and succeeded in creating an artificial flow
of spirits, which, to any but the nicest observation, was quite as
effective as a natural one. She spoke sympathizingly to the sculptor on
the subject of Hilda's absence, and somewhat annoyed him by alluding in
Donatello's hearing to an attachment which had never been openly avowed,
though perhaps plainly enough betrayed. He fancied that Miriam did not
quite recognize the limits of the strictest delicacy; he even went so
far as to generalize, and conclude within himself, that this deficiency
is a more general failing in woman than in man, the highest refinement
being a masculine attribute.

But the idea was unjust to the sex at large, and especially so to this
poor Miriam, who was hardly responsible for her frantic efforts to be
gay. Possibly, moreover, the nice action of the mind is set ajar by any
violent shock, as of great misfortune or great crime, so that the finer
perceptions may be blurred thenceforth, and the effect be traceable in
all the minutest conduct of life.

"Did you see anything of the dear child after you left us?" asked
Miriam, still keeping Hilda as her topic of conversation. "I missed her
sadly on my way homeward; for nothing insures me such delightful and
innocent dreams (I have experienced it twenty times) as a talk late in
the evening with Hilda."

"So I should imagine," said the sculptor gravely; "but it is an
advantage that I have little or no opportunity of enjoying. I know not
what became of Hilda after my parting from you. She was not especially
my companion in any part of our walk. The last I saw of her she
was hastening back to rejoin you in the courtyard of the Palazzo
Caffarelli."

"Impossible!" cried Miriam, starting.

"Then did you not see her again?" inquired Kenyon, in some alarm.

"Not there," answered Miriam quietly; "indeed, I followed pretty closely
on the heels of the rest of the party. But do not be alarmed on Hilda's
account; the Virgin is bound to watch over the good child, for the sake
of the piety with which she keeps the lamp alight at her shrine. And
besides, I have always felt that Hilda is just as safe in these evil
streets of Rome as her white doves when they fly downwards from the
tower top, and run to and fro among the horses' feet. There is certainly
a providence on purpose for Hilda, if for no other human creature."

"I religiously believe it," rejoined the sculptor; "and yet my mind
would be the easier, if I knew that she had returned safely to her
tower."

"Then make yourself quite easy," answered Miriam. "I saw her (and it
is the last sweet sight that I remember) leaning from her window midway
between earth and sky!"

Kenyon now looked at Donatello.

"You seem out of spirits, my dear friend," he observed. "This languid
Roman atmosphere is not the airy wine that you were accustomed to
breathe at home. I have not forgotten your hospitable invitation to
meet you this summer at your castle among the Apennines. It is my fixed
purpose to come, I assure you. We shall both be the better for some deep
draughts of the mountain breezes."

"It may he," said Donatello, with unwonted sombreness; "the old house
seemed joyous when I was a child. But as I remember it now it was a grim
place, too."

The sculptor looked more attentively at the young man, and was surprised
and alarmed to observe how entirely the fine, fresh glow of animal
spirits had departed out of his face. Hitherto, moreover, even while he
was standing perfectly still, there had been a kind of possible gambol
indicated in his aspect. It was quite gone now. All his youthful gayety,
and with it his simplicity of manner, was eclipsed, if not utterly
extinct.


"You are surely ill, my dear fellow," exclaimed Kenyon.

"Am I? Perhaps so," said Donatello indifferently; "I never have been
ill, and know not what it may be."

"Do not make the poor lad fancy-sink," whispered Miriam, pulling the
sculptor's sleeve. "He is of a nature to lie down and die at once, if he
finds himself drawing such melancholy breaths as we ordinary people are
enforced to burden our lungs withal. But we must get him away from this
old, dreamy and dreary Rome, where nobody but himself ever thought of
being gay. Its influences are too heavy to sustain the life of such a
creature."

The above conversation had passed chiefly on the steps of the
Cappuccini; and, having said so much, Miriam lifted the leathern curtain
that hangs before all church-doors in italy. "Hilda has forgotten her
appointment," she observed, "or else her maiden slumbers are very sound
this morning. We will wait for her no longer."

They entered the nave. The interior of the church was of moderate
compass, but of good architecture, with a vaulted roof over the nave,
and a row of dusky chapels on either side of it instead of the customary
side-aisles. Each chapel had its saintly shrine, hung round with
offerings; its picture above the altar, although closely veiled, if by
any painter of renown; and its hallowed tapers, burning continually, to
set alight the devotion of the worshippers. The pavement of the nave was
chiefly of marble, and looked old and broken, and was shabbily patched
here and there with tiles of brick; it was inlaid, moreover, with
tombstones of the mediaeval taste, on which were quaintly sculptured
borders, figures, and portraits in bas-relief, and Latin epitaphs,
now grown illegible by the tread of footsteps over them. The church
appertains to a convent of Capuchin monks; and, as usually happens when
a reverend brotherhood have such an edifice in charge, the floor seemed
never to have been scrubbed or swept, and had as little the aspect of
sanctity as a kennel; whereas, in all churches of nunneries, the maiden
sisterhood invariably show the purity of their own hearts by the virgin
cleanliness and visible consecration of the walls and pavement.

As our friends entered the church, their eyes rested at once on a
remarkable object in the centre of the nave. It was either the actual
body, or, as might rather have been supposed at first glance, the
cunningly wrought waxen face and suitably draped figure of a dead monk.
This image of wax or clay-cold reality, whichever it might be, lay on
a slightly elevated bier, with three tall candles burning on each side,
another tall candle at the head, and another at the foot. There was
music, too; in harmony with so funereal a spectacle. From beneath
the pavement of the church came the deep, lugubrious strain of a De
Profundis, which sounded like an utterance of the tomb itself; so
dismally did it rumble through the burial vaults, and ooze up among the
flat gravestones and sad epitaphs, filling the church as with a gloomy
mist.

"I must look more closely at that dead monk before we leave the church,"
remarked the sculptor. "In the study of my art, I have gained many a
hint from the dead which the living could never have given me."

"I can well imagine it," answered Miriam. "One clay image is readily
copied from another. But let us first see Guido's picture. The light is
favorable now."

Accordingly, they turned into the first chapel on the right hand, as you
enter the nave; and there they beheld,--not the picture, indeed,--but
a closely drawn curtain. The churchmen of Italy make no scruple of
sacrificing the very purpose for which a work of sacred art has been
created; that of opening the way; for religious sentiment through the
quick medium of sight, by bringing angels, saints, and martyrs down
visibly upon earth; of sacrificing this high purpose, and, for aught
they know, the welfare of many souls along with it, to the hope of a
paltry fee. Every work by an artist of celebrity is hidden behind a
veil, and seldom revealed, except to Protestants, who scorn it as an
object of devotion, and value it only for its artistic merit.

The sacristan was quickly found, however, and lost no time in disclosing
the youthful Archangel, setting his divine foot on the head of his
fallen adversary. It was an image of that greatest of future events,
which we hope for so ardently, at least, while we are young,--but find
so very long in coming, the triumph of goodness over the evil principle.

"Where can Hilda be?" exclaimed Kenyon. "It is not her custom ever to
fail in an engagement; and the present one was made entirely on
her account. Except herself, you know, we were all agreed in our
recollection of the picture."

"But we were wrong, and Hilda right, as you perceive," said Miriam,
directing his attention to the point on which their dispute of the night
before had arisen. "It is not easy to detect her astray as regards any
picture on which those clear, soft eyes of hers have ever rested."

"And she has studied and admired few pictures so much as this," observed
the sculptor. "No wonder; for there is hardly another so beautiful in
the world. What an expression of heavenly severity in the Archangel's
face! There is a degree of pain, trouble, and disgust at being brought
in contact with sin, even for the purpose of quelling and punishing it;
and yet a celestial tranquillity pervades his whole being."

"I have never been able," said Miriam, "to admire this picture nearly so
much as Hilda does, in its moral and intellectual aspect. If it cost her
more trouble to be good, if her soul were less white and pure, she would
be a more competent critic of this picture, and would estimate it not
half so high. I see its defects today more clearly than ever before."

"What are some of them?" asked Kenyon.

"That Archangel, now," Miriam continued; "how fair he looks, with his
unruffled wings, with his unhacked sword, and clad in his bright
armor, and that exquisitely fitting sky-blue tunic, cut in the latest
Paradisiacal mode! What a dainty air of the first celestial society!
With what half-scornful delicacy he sets his prettily sandalled foot
on the head of his prostrate foe! But, is it thus that virtue looks the
moment after its death struggle with evil? No, no; I could have told
Guido better. A full third of the Archangel's feathers should have been
torn from his wings; the rest all ruffled, till they looked like Satan's
own! His sword should be streaming with blood, and perhaps broken
halfway to the hilt; his armor crushed, his robes rent, his breast gory;
a bleeding gash on his brow, cutting right across the stern scowl of
battle! He should press his foot hard down upon the old serpent, as
if his very soul depended upon it, feeling him squirm mightily, and
doubting whether the fight were half over yet, and how the victory might
turn! And, with all this fierceness, this grimness, this unutterable
horror, there should still be something high, tender, and holy in
Michael's eyes, and around his mouth. But the battle never was such a
child's play as Guido's dapper Archangel seems to have found it."

"For Heaven's sake, Miriam," cried Kenyon, astonished at the wild energy
of her talk; "paint the picture of man's struggle against sin according
to your own idea! I think it will be a masterpiece."

"The picture would have its share of truth, I assure you," she answered;
"but I am sadly afraid the victory would fail on the wrong side. Just
fancy a smoke-blackened, fiery-eyed demon bestriding that nice young
angel, clutching his white throat with one of his hinder claws; and
giving a triumphant whisk of his scaly tail, with a poisonous dart at
the end of it! That is what they risk, poor souls, who do battle with
Michael's enemy."

It now, perhaps, struck Miriam that her mental disquietude was impelling
her to an undue vivacity; for she paused, and turned away from the
picture, without saying a word more about it. All this while, moreover,
Donatello had been very ill at ease, casting awe-stricken and inquiring
glances at the dead monk; as if he could look nowhere but at that
ghastly object, merely because it shocked him. Death has probably a
peculiar horror and ugliness, when forced upon the contemplation of a
person so naturally joyous as Donatello, who lived with completeness in
the present moment, and was able to form but vague images of the future.

"What is the matter, Donatello?" whispered Miriam soothingly. "You are
quite in a tremble, my poor friend! What is it?"

"This awful chant from beneath the church," answered Donatello; "it
oppresses me; the air is so heavy with it that I can scarcely draw my
breath. And yonder dead monk! I feel as if he were lying right across my
heart."

"Take courage!" whispered she again "come, we will approach close to
the dead monk. The only way, in such cases, is to stare the ugly horror
right in the face; never a sidelong glance, nor half-look, for those are
what show a frightfull thing in its frightfullest aspect. Lean on me,
dearest friend! My heart is very strong for both of us. Be brave; and
all is well."

Donatello hung back for a moment, but then pressed close to Miriam's
side, and suffered her to lead him up to the bier. The sculptor
followed. A number of persons, chiefly women, with several children
among them, were standing about the corpse; and as our three friends
drew nigh, a mother knelt down, and caused her little boy to kneel,
both kissing the beads and crucifix that hung from the monk's girdle.
Possibly he had died in the odor of sanctity; or, at all events, death
and his brown frock and cowl made a sacred image of this reverend
father.




CHAPTER XXI


THE DEAD CAPUCHIN


The dead monk was clad, as when alive, in the brown woollen frock of
the Capuchins, with the hood drawn over his head, but so as to leave the
features and a portion of the beard uncovered. His rosary and cross hung
at his side; his hands were folded over his breast; his feet (he was of
a barefooted order in his lifetime, and continued so in death) protruded
from beneath his habit, stiff and stark, with a more waxen look than
even his face. They were tied together at the ankles with a black
ribbon.

The countenance, as we have already said, was fully displayed. It had a
purplish hue upon it, unlike the paleness of an ordinary corpse, but
as little resembling the flush of natural life. The eyelids were
but partially drawn down, and showed the eyeballs beneath; as if the
deceased friar were stealing a glimpse at the bystanders, to watch
whether they were duly impressed with the solemnity of his obsequies.
The shaggy eyebrows gave sternness to the look. Miriam passed between
two of the lighted candles, and stood close beside the bier.

"My God!" murmured she. "What is this?"

She grasped Donatello's hand, and, at the same instant, felt him give a
convulsive shudder, which she knew to have been caused by a sudden
and terrible throb of the heart. His hand, by an instantaneous change,
became like ice within hers, which likewise grew so icy that their
insensible fingers might have rattled, one against the other. No wonder
that their blood curdled; no wonder that their hearts leaped and paused!
The dead face of the monk, gazing at them beneath its half-closed
eyelids, was the same visage that had glared upon their naked souls, the
past midnight, as Donatello flung him over the precipice.

The sculptor was standing at the foot of the bier, and had not yet seen
the monk's features.

"Those naked feet!" said he. "I know not why, but they affect me
strangely. They have walked to and fro over the hard pavements of Rome,
and through a hundred other rough ways of this life, where the monk went
begging for his brotherhood; along the cloisters and dreary corridors
of his convent, too, from his youth upward! It is a suggestive idea, to
track those worn feet backward through all the paths they have trodden,
ever since they were the tender and rosy little feet of a baby, and
(cold as they now are) were kept warm in his mother's hand."

As his companions, whom the sculptor supposed to be close by him, made
no response to his fanciful musing, he looked up, and saw them at the
head of the bier. He advanced thither himself.

"Ha!" exclaimed he.

He cast a horror-stricken and bewildered glance at Miriam, but withdrew
it immediately. Not that he had any definite suspicion, or, it may be,
even a remote idea, that she could be held responsible in the least
degree for this man's sudden death. In truth, it seemed too wild a
thought to connect, in reality, Miriam's persecutor of many past months
and the vagabond of the preceding night, with the dead Capuchin
of to-day. It resembled one of those unaccountable changes and
interminglings of identity, which so often occur among the personages
of a dream. But Kenyon, as befitted the professor of an imaginative art,
was endowed with an exceedingly quick sensibility, which was apt to give
him intimations of the true state of matters that lay beyond his actual
vision. There was a whisper in his ear; it said, "Hush!" Without asking
himself wherefore, he resolved to be silent as regarded the mysterious
discovery which he had made, and to leave any remark or exclamation
to be voluntarily offered by Miriam. If she never spoke, then let the
riddle be unsolved.

And now occurred a circumstance that would seem too fantastic to be
told, if it had not actually happened, precisely as we set it down. As
the three friends stood by the bier, they saw that a little stream of
blood had begun to ooze from the dead monk's nostrils; it crept slowly
towards the thicket of his beard, where, in the course of a moment or
two, it hid itself.

"How strange!" ejaculated Kenyon. "The monk died of apoplexy, I suppose,
or by some sudden accident, and the blood has not yet congealed."

"Do you consider that a sufficient explanation?" asked Miriam, with a
smile from which the sculptor involuntarily turned away his eyes. "Does
it satisfy you?"

"And why not?" he inquired.

"Of course, you know the old superstition about this phenomenon of blood
flowing from a dead body," she rejoined. "How can we tell but that the
murderer of this monk (or, possibly, it may be only that privileged
murderer, his physician) may have just entered the church?"

"I cannot jest about it," said Kenyon. "It is an ugly sight!"

"True, true; horrible to see, or dream of!" she replied, with one of
those long, tremulous sighs, which so often betray a sick heart by
escaping unexpectedly. "We will not look at it any more. Come away,
Donatello. Let us escape from this dismal church. The sunshine will do
you good."

When had ever a woman such a trial to sustain as this! By no possible
supposition could Miriam explain the identity of the dead Capuchin,
quietly and decorously laid out in the nave of his convent church, with
that of her murdered persecutor, flung heedlessly at the foot of the
precipice. The effect upon her imagination was as if a strange and
unknown corpse had miraculously, while she was gazing at it, assumed the
likeness of that face, so terrible henceforth in her remembrance. It was
a symbol, perhaps, of the deadly iteration with which she was doomed
to behold the image of her crime reflected back upon her in a thousand
ways, and converting the great, calm face of Nature, in the whole, and
in its innumerable details, into a manifold reminiscence of that one
dead visage.

No sooner had Miriam turned away from the bier, and gone a few steps,
than she fancied the likeness altogether an illusion, which would vanish
at a closer and colder view. She must look at it again, therefore, and
at once; or else the grave would close over the face, and leave the
awful fantasy that had connected itself therewith fixed ineffaceably in
her brain.

"Wait for me, one moment!" she said to her companions. "Only a moment!"

So she went back, and gazed once more at the corpse. Yes; these were
the features that Miriam had known so well; this was the visage that she
remembered from a far longer date than the most intimate of her friends
suspected; this form of clay had held the evil spirit which blasted her
sweet youth, and compelled her, as it were, to stain her womanhood
with crime. But, whether it were the majesty of death, or something
originally noble and lofty in the character of the dead, which the soul
had stamped upon the features, as it left them; so it was that Miriam
now quailed and shook, not for the vulgar horror of the spectacle, but
for the severe, reproachful glance that seemed to come from between
those half-closed lids. True, there had been nothing, in his lifetime,
viler than this man. She knew it; there was no other fact within her
consciousness that she felt to be so certain; and yet, because her
persecutor found himself safe and irrefutable in death, he frowned upon
his victim, and threw back the blame on her!

"Is it thou, indeed?" she murmured, under her breath. "Then thou hast
no right to scowl upon me so! But art thou real, or a vision?" She bent
down over the dead monk, till one of her rich curls brushed against his
forehead. She touched one of his folded hands with her finger.

"It is he," said Miriam. "There is the scar, that I know so well, on his
brow. And it is no vision; he is palpable to my touch! I will question
the fact no longer, but deal with it as I best can."

It was wonderful to see how the crisis developed in Miriam its own
proper strength, and the faculty of sustaining the demands which it made
upon her fortitude. She ceased to tremble; the beautiful woman gazed
sternly at her dead enemy, endeavoring to meet and quell the look of
accusation that he threw from between his half-closed eyelids.

"No; thou shalt not scowl me down!" said she. "Neither now, nor when
we stand together at the judgment-seat. I fear not to meet thee there.
Farewell, till that next encounter!"

Haughtily waving her hand, Miriam rejoined her friends, who were
awaiting her at the door of the church. As they went out, the sacristan
stopped them, and proposed to show the cemetery of the convent, where
the deceased members of the fraternity are laid to rest in sacred earth,
brought long ago from Jerusalem.

"And will yonder monk be buried there?" she asked.

"Brother Antonio?" exclaimed the sacristan.

"Surely, our good brother will be put to bed there! His grave is already
dug, and the last occupant has made room for him. Will you look at it,
signorina?"

"I will!" said Miriam.

"Then excuse me," observed Kenyon; "for I shall leave you. One dead monk
has more than sufficed me; and I am not bold enough to face the whole
mortality of the convent."

It was easy to see, by Donatello's looks, that he, as well as the
sculptor, would gladly have escaped a visit to the famous cemetery of
the Cappuccini. But Miriam's nerves were strained to such a pitch, that
she anticipated a certain solace and absolute relief in passing from
one ghastly spectacle to another of long-accumulated ugliness; and there
was, besides, a singular sense of duty which impelled her to look at
the final resting-place of the being whose fate had been so disastrously
involved with her own. She therefore followed the sacristan's guidance,
and drew her companion along with her, whispering encouragement as they
went.

The cemetery is beneath the church, but entirely above ground, and
lighted by a row of iron-grated windows without glass. A corridor runs
along beside these windows, and gives access to three or four vaulted
recesses, or chapels, of considerable breadth and height, the floor of
which consists of the consecrated earth of Jerusalem. It is smoothed
decorously over the deceased brethren of the convent, and is kept
quite free from grass or weeds, such as would grow even in these gloomy
recesses, if pains were not bestowed to root them up. But, as the
cemetery is small, and it is a precious privilege to sleep in holy
ground, the brotherhood are immemorially accustomed, when one of their
number dies, to take the longest buried skeleton out of the oldest
grave, and lay the new slumberer there instead. Thus, each of the good
friars, in his turn, enjoys the luxury of a consecrated bed, attended
with the slight drawback of being forced to get up long before daybreak,
as it were, and make room for another lodger.

The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special
interest of the cemetery. The arched and vaulted walls of the burial
recesses are supported by massive pillars and pilasters made of
thigh-bones and skulls; the whole material of the structure appears
to be of a similar kind; and the knobs and embossed ornaments of this
strange architecture are represented by the joints of the spine, and
the more delicate tracery by the Smaller bones of the human frame. The
summits of the arches are adorned with entire skeletons, looking as if
they were wrought most skilfully in bas-relief. There is no possibility
of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a
certain artistic merit, nor how much perverted ingenuity has been shown
in this queer way, nor what a multitude of dead monks, through how many
hundred years, must have contributed their bony framework to build
up these great arches of mortality. On some of the skulls there are
inscriptions, purporting that such a monk, who formerly made use of
that particular headpiece, died on such a day and year; but vastly the
greater number are piled up indistinguishably into the architectural
design, like the many deaths that make up the one glory of a victory.

In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or
stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life, and labelled
with their names and the dates of their decease. Their skulls (some
quite bare, and others still covered with yellow skin, and hair that
has known the earth-damps) look out from beneath their hoods, grinning
hideously repulsive. One reverend father has his mouth wide open, as if
he had died in the midst of a howl of terror and remorse, which perhaps
is even now screeching through eternity. As a general thing, however,
these frocked and hooded skeletons seem to take a more cheerful view of
their position, and try with ghastly smiles to turn it into a jest. But
the cemetery of the Capuchins is no place to nourish celestial hopes:
the soul sinks forlorn and wretched under all this burden of dusty
death; the holy earth from Jerusalem, so imbued is it with mortality,
has grown as barren of the flowers of Paradise as it is of earthly weeds
and grass. Thank Heaven for its blue sky; it needs a long, upward gaze
to give us back our faith. Not here can we feel ourselves immortal,
where the very altars in these chapels of horrible consecration are
heaps of human bones.

Yet let us give the cemetery the praise that it deserves. There is no
disagreeable scent, such as might have been expected from the decay of
so many holy persons, in whatever odor of sanctity they may have taken
their departure. The same number of living monks would not smell half so
unexceptionably.

Miriam went gloomily along the corridor, from one vaulted Golgotha to
another, until in the farthest recess she beheld an open grave.

"Is that for him who lies yonder in the nave?" she asked.

"Yes, signorina, this is to be the resting-place of Brother Antonio, who
came to his death last night," answered the sacristan; "and in yonder
niche, you see, sits a brother who was buried thirty years ago, and has
risen to give him place."

"It is not a satisfactory idea," observed Miriam, "that you poor friars
cannot call even your graves permanently your own. You must lie down
in them, methinks, with a nervous anticipation of being disturbed, like
weary men who know that they shall be summoned out of bed at midnight.
Is it not possible (if money were to be paid for the privilege) to leave
Brother Antonio--if that be his name--in the occupancy of that narrow
grave till the last trumpet sounds?"

"By no means, signorina; neither is it needful or desirable," answered
the sacristan. "A quarter of a century's sleep in the sweet earth
of Jerusalem is better than a thousand years in any other soil. Our
brethren find good rest there. No ghost was ever known to steal out of
this blessed cemetery."

"That is well," responded Miriam; "may he whom you now lay to sleep
prove no exception to the rule!"

As they left the cemetery she put money into the sacristan's hand to an
amount that made his eyes open wide and glisten, and requested that it
might be expended in masses for the repose of Father Antonio's soul.




CHAPTER XXII


THE MEDICI GARDENS


"Donatello," said Miriam anxiously, as they came through the Piazza
Barberini, "what can I do for you, my beloved friend? You are shaking as
with the cold fit of the Roman fever." "Yes," said Donatello; "my heart
shivers." As soon as she could collect her thoughts, Miriam led the
young man to the gardens of the Villa Medici, hoping that the quiet
shade and sunshine of that delightful retreat would a little revive his
spirits. The grounds are there laid out in the old fashion of straight
paths, with borders of box, which form hedges of great height and
density, and are shorn and trimmed to the evenness of a wall of
stone, at the top and sides. There are green alleys, with long vistas
overshadowed by ilex-trees; and at each intersection of the paths, the
visitor finds seats of lichen-covered stone to repose upon, and marble
statues that look forlornly at him, regretful of their lost noses. In
the more open portions of the garden, before the sculptured front of
the villa, you see fountains and flower-beds, and in their season
a profusion of roses, from which the genial sun of Italy distils a
fragrance, to be scattered abroad by the no less genial breeze.

But Donatello drew no delight from these things. He walked onward in
silent apathy, and looked at Miriam with strangely half-awakened and
bewildered eyes, when she sought to bring his mind into sympathy with
hers, and so relieve his heart of the burden that lay lumpishly upon it.

She made him sit down on a stone bench, where two embowered alleys
crossed each other; so that they could discern the approach of any
casual intruder a long way down the path.

"My sweet friend," she said, taking one of his passive hands in both of
hers, "what can I say to comfort you?"

"Nothing!" replied Donatello, with sombre reserve. "Nothing will ever
comfort me."

"I accept my own misery," continued Miriam, "my own guilt, if guilt it
be; and, whether guilt or misery, I shall know how to deal with it. But
you, dearest friend, that were the rarest creature in all this world,
and seemed a being to whom sorrow could not cling,--you, whom I
half fancied to belong to a race that had vanished forever, you only
surviving, to show mankind how genial and how joyous life used to be, in
some long-gone age,--what had you to do with grief or crime?"

"They came to me as to other men," said Donatello broodingly. "Doubtless
I was born to them."

"No, no; they came with me," replied Miriam. "Mine is the
responsibility! Alas! wherefore was I born? Why did we ever meet? Why
did I not drive you from me, knowing for my heart foreboded it--that the
cloud in which I walked would likewise envelop you!"

Donatello stirred uneasily, with the irritable impatience that is often
combined With a mood of leaden despondency. A brown lizard with two
tails--a monster often engendered by the Roman sunshine--ran across his
foot, and made him start. Then he sat silent awhile, and so did Miriam,
trying to dissolve her whole heart into sympathy, and lavish it all upon
him, were it only for a moment's cordial.

The young man lifted his hand to his breast, and, unintentionally, as
Miriam's hand was within his, he lifted that along with it. "I have a
great weight here!" said he. The fancy struck Miriam (but she drove it
resolutely down) that Donatello almost imperceptibly shuddered, while,
in pressing his own hand against his heart, he pressed hers there too.

"Rest your heart on me, dearest one!" she resumed. "Let me bear all its
weight; I am well able to bear it; for I am a woman, and I love you! I
love you, Donatello! Is there no comfort for you in this avowal? Look
at me! Heretofore you have found me pleasant to your sight. Gaze into my
eyes! Gaze into my soul! Search as deeply as you may, you can never see
half the tenderness and devotion that I henceforth cherish for you. All
that I ask is your acceptance of the utter self-sacrifice (but it shall
be no sacrifice, to my great love) with which I seek to remedy the evil
you have incurred for my sake!"

All this fervor on Miriam's part; on Donatello's, a heavy silence.

"O, speak to me!" she exclaimed. "Only promise me to be, by and by, a
little happy!"

"Happy?" murmured Donatello. "Ah, never again! never again!"

"Never? Ah, that is a terrible word to say to me!" answered Miriam. "A
terrible word to let fall upon a woman's heart, when she loves you, and
is conscious of having caused your misery! If you love me, Donatello,
speak it not again. And surely you did love me?"

"I did," replied Donatello gloomily and absently.

Miriam released the young man's hand, but suffered one of her own to
lie close to his, and waited a moment to see whether he would make
any effort to retain it. There was much depending upon that simple
experiment.

With a deep sigh--as when, sometimes, a slumberer turns over in a
troubled dream Donatello changed his position, and clasped both his
hands over his forehead. The genial warmth of a Roman April kindling
into May was in the atmosphere around them; but when Miriam saw
that involuntary movement and heard that sigh of relief (for so she
interpreted it), a shiver ran through her frame, as if the iciest wind
of the Apennines were blowing over her.

"He has done himself a greater wrong than I dreamed of," thought she,
with unutterable compassion. "Alas! it was a sad mistake! He might
have had a kind of bliss in the consequences of this deed, had he been
impelled to it by a love vital enough to survive the frenzy of that
terrible moment, mighty enough to make its own law, and justify itself
against the natural remorse. But to have perpetrated a dreadful murder
(and such was his crime, unless love, annihilating moral distinctions,
made it otherwise) on no better warrant than a boy's idle fantasy! I
pity him from the very depths of my soul! As for myself, I am past my
own or other's pity."

She arose from the young man's side, and stood before him with a sad,
commiserating aspect; it was the look of a ruined soul, bewailing,
in him, a grief less than what her profounder sympathies imposed upon
herself.

"Donatello, we must part," she said, with melancholy firmness. "Yes;
leave me! Go back to your old tower, which overlooks the green valley
you have told me of among the Apennines. Then, all that has passed will
be recognized as but an ugly dream. For in dreams the conscience sleeps,
and we often stain ourselves with guilt of which we should be incapable
in our waking moments. The deed you seemed to do, last night, was
no more than such a dream; there was as little substance in what you
fancied yourself doing. Go; and forget it all!"

"Ah, that terrible face!" said Donatello, pressing his hands over his
eyes. "Do you call that unreal?"

"Yes; for you beheld it with dreaming eyes," replied Miriam. "It was
unreal; and, that you may feel it so, it is requisite that you see this
face of mine no more. Once, you may have thought it beautiful; now, it
has lost its charm. Yet it would still retain a miserable potency' to
bring back the past illusion, and, in its train, the remorse and anguish
that would darken all your life. Leave me, therefore, and forget me."

"Forget you, Miriam!" said Donatello, roused somewhat from his apathy of
despair.

"If I could remember you, and behold you, apart from that frightful
visage which stares at me over your shoulder, that were a consolation,
at least, if not a joy."

"But since that visage haunts you along with mine," rejoined Miriam,
glancing behind her, "we needs must part. Farewell, then! But if
ever--in distress, peril, shame, poverty, or whatever anguish is most
poignant, whatever burden heaviest--you should require a life to be
given wholly, only to make your own a little easier, then summon me! As
the case now stands between us, you have bought me dear, and find me of
little worth. Fling me away, therefore! May you never need me more! But,
if otherwise, a wish--almost an unuttered wish will bring me to you!"

She stood a moment, expecting a reply. But Donatello's eyes had again
fallen on the ground, and he had not, in his bewildered mind and
overburdened heart, a word to respond.

"That hour I speak of may never come," said Miriam. "So
farewell--farewell forever."

"Farewell," said Donatello.

His voice hardly made its way through the environment of unaccustomed
thoughts and emotions which had settled over him like a dense and dark
cloud. Not improbably, he beheld Miriam through so dim a medium that she
looked visionary; heard her speak only in a thin, faint echo.

She turned from the young man, and, much as her heart yearned towards
him, she would not profane that heavy parting by an embrace, or even a
pressure of the hand. So soon after the semblance of such mighty love,
and after it had been the impulse to so terrible a deed, they parted,
in all outward show, as coldly as people part whose whole mutual
intercourse has been encircled within a single hour.

And Donatello, when Miriam had departed, stretched himself at full
length on the stone bench, and drew his hat over his eyes, as the idle
and light-hearted youths of dreamy Italy are accustomed to do, when they
lie down in the first convenient shade, and snatch a noonday slumber.
A stupor was upon him, which he mistook for such drowsiness as he had
known in his innocent past life. But, by and by, he raised himself
slowly and left the garden. Sometimes poor Donatello started, as if
he heard a shriek; sometimes he shrank back, as if a face, fearful to
behold, were thrust close to his own. In this dismal mood, bewildered
with the novelty of sin and grief, he had little left of that singular
resemblance, on account of which, and for their sport, his three friends
had fantastically recognized him as the veritable Faun of Praxiteles.




CHAPTER XXIII


MIRIAM AND HILDA


On leaving the Medici Gardens Miriam felt herself astray in the world;
and having no special reason to seek one place more than another, she
suffered chance to direct her steps as it would. Thus it happened, that,
involving herself in the crookedness of Rome, she saw Hilda's tower
rising before her, and was put in mind to climb to the young girl's
eyry, and ask why she had broken her engagement at the church of the
Capuchins. People often do the idlest acts of their lifetime in their
heaviest and most anxious moments; so that it would have been no wonder
had Miriam been impelled only by so slight a motive of curiosity as we
have indicated. But she remembered, too, and with a quaking heart, what
the sculptor had mentioned of Hilda's retracing her steps towards the
courtyard of the Palazzo Caffarelli in quest of Miriam herself. Had she
been compelled to choose between infamy in the eyes of the whole world,
or in Hilda's eyes alone, she would unhesitatingly have accepted the
former, on condition of remaining spotless in the estimation of her
white-souled friend. This possibility, therefore, that Hilda had
witnessed the scene of the past night, was unquestionably the cause
that drew Miriam to the tower, and made her linger and falter as she
approached it.

As she drew near, there were tokens to which her disturbed mind gave a
sinister interpretation. Some of her friend's airy family, the doves,
with their heads imbedded disconsolately in their bosoms, were huddled
in a corner of the piazza; others had alighted on the heads, wings,
shoulders, and trumpets of the marble angels which adorned the facade
of the neighboring church; two or three had betaken themselves to the
Virgin's shrine; and as many as could find room were sitting on Hilda's
window-sill. But all of them, so Miriam fancied, had a look of weary
expectation and disappointment, no flights, no flutterings, no cooing
murmur; something that ought to have made their day glad and bright
was evidently left out of this day's history. And, furthermore, Hilda's
white window-curtain was closely drawn, with only that one little
aperture at the side, which Miriam remembered noticing the night before.

"Be quiet," said Miriam to her own heart, pressing her hand hard upon
it. "Why shouldst thou throb now? Hast thou not endured more terrible
things than this?"

Whatever were her apprehensions, she would not turn back. It might
be--and the solace would be worth a world--that Hilda, knowing nothing
of the past night's calamity, would greet her friend with a sunny smile,
and so restore a portion of the vital warmth, for lack of which her soul
was frozen. But could Miriam, guilty as she was, permit Hilda to kiss
her cheek, to clasp her hand, and thus be no longer so unspotted from
the world as heretofore.

"I will never permit her sweet touch again," said Miriam, toiling up
the staircase, "if I can find strength of heart to forbid it. But, O! it
would be so soothing in this wintry fever-fit of my heart. There can be
no harm to my white Hilda in one parting kiss. That shall be all!"

But, on reaching the upper landing-place, Miriam paused, and stirred not
again till she had brought herself to an immovable resolve.

"My lips, my hand, shall never meet Hilda's more," said she.

Meanwhile, Hilda sat listlessly in her painting-room. Had you looked
into the little adjoining chamber, you might have seen the slight
imprint of her figure on the bed, but would also have detected at once
that the white counterpane had not been turned down. The pillow was more
disturbed; she had turned her face upon it, the poor child, and bedewed
it with some of those tears (among the most chill and forlorn that gush
from human sorrow) which the innocent heart pours forth at its first
actual discovery that sin is in the world. The young and pure are not
apt to find out that miserable truth until it is brought home to them by
the guiltiness of some trusted friend. They may have heard much of
the evil of the world, and seem to know it, but only as an impalpable
theory. In due time, some mortal, whom they reverence too highly,
is commissioned by Providence to teach them this direful lesson; he
perpetrates a sin; and Adam falls anew, and Paradise, heretofore in
unfaded bloom, is lost again, and dosed forever, with the fiery swords
gleaming at its gates.

The chair in which Hilda sat was near the portrait of Beatrice Cenci,
which had not yet been taken from the easel. It is a peculiarity of
this picture, that its profoundest expression eludes a straightforward
glance, and can only be caught by side glimpses, or when the eye
falls casually upon it; even as if the painted face had a life and
consciousness of its own, and, resolving not to betray its secret of
grief or guilt, permitted the true tokens to come forth only when it
imagined itself unseen. No other such magical effect has ever been
wrought by pencil.

Now, opposite the easel hung a looking-glass, in which Beatrice's face
and Hilda's were both reflected. In one of her weary, nerveless changes
of position, Hilda happened to throw her eyes on the glass, and took in
both these images at one unpremeditated glance. She fancied--nor was it
without horror--that Beatrice's expression, seen aside and vanishing in
a moment, had been depicted in her own face likewise, and flitted from
it as timorously.

"Am I, too, stained with guilt?" thought the poor girl, hiding her face
in her hands.

Not so, thank Heaven! But, as regards Beatrice's picture, the incident
suggests a theory which may account for its unutterable grief and
mysterious shadow of guilt, without detracting from the purity which we
love to attribute to that ill-fated girl. Who, indeed, can look at that
mouth,--with its lips half apart, as innocent as a babe's that has
been crying, and not pronounce Beatrice sinless? It was the intimate
consciousness of her father's sin that threw its shadow over her, and
frightened her into a remote and inaccessible region, where no sympathy
could come. It was the knowledge of Miriam's guilt that lent the same
expression to Hilda's face.

But Hilda nervously moved her chair, so that the images in the glass
should be no longer Visible. She now watched a speck of sunshine that
came through a shuttered window, and crept from object to object,
indicating each with a touch of its bright finger, and then letting them
all vanish successively. In like manner her mind, so like sunlight
in its natural cheerfulness, went from thought to thought, but found
nothing that it could dwell upon for comfort. Never before had this
young, energetic, active spirit known what it is to be despondent. It
was the unreality of the world that made her so. Her dearest friend,
whose heart seemed the most solid and richest of Hilda's possessions,
had no existence for her any more; and in that dreary void, out of which
Miriam had disappeared, the substance, the truth, the integrity of life,
the motives of effort, the joy of success, had departed along with her.

It was long past noon, when a step came up the staircase. It had passed
beyond the limits where there was communication with the lower regions
of the palace, and was mounting the successive flights which led only to
Hilda's precincts. Faint as the tread was, she heard and recognized it.
It startled her into sudden life. Her first impulse was to spring to
the door of the studio, and fasten it with lock and bolt. But a second
thought made her feel that this would be an unworthy cowardice, on her
own part, and also that Miriam--only yesterday her closest friend had
a right to be told, face to face, that thenceforth they must be forever
strangers.

She heard Miriam pause, outside of the door. We have already seen what
was the latter's resolve with respect to any kiss or pressure of
the hand between Hilda and herself. We know not what became of the
resolution. As Miriam was of a highly impulsive character, it may have
vanished at the first sight of Hilda; but, at all events, she appeared
to have dressed herself up in a garb of sunshine, and was disclosed, as
the door swung open, in all the glow of her remarkable beauty. The truth
was, her heart leaped conclusively towards the only refuge that it had,
or hoped. She forgot, just one instant, all cause for holding herself
aloof. Ordinarily there was a certain reserve in Miriam's demonstrations
of affection, in consonance with the delicacy of her friend. To-day, she
opened her arms to take Hilda in.

"Dearest, darling Hilda!" she exclaimed. "It gives me new life to see
you!"

Hilda was standing in the middle of the room. When her friend made a
step or two from the door, she put forth her hands with an involuntary
repellent gesture, so expressive that Miriam at once felt a great chasm
opening itself between them two. They might gaze at one another from the
opposite side, but without the possibility of ever meeting more; or, at
least, since the chasm could never be bridged over, they must tread
the whole round of Eternity to meet on the other side. There was even
a terror in the thought of their meeting again. It was as if Hilda or
Miriam were dead, and could no longer hold intercourse without violating
a spiritual law.

Yet, in the wantonness of her despair, Miriam made one more step towards
the friend whom she had lost. "Do not come nearer, Miriam!" said
Hilda. Her look and tone were those of sorrowful entreaty, and yet
they expressed a kind of confidence, as if the girl were conscious of a
safeguard that could not be violated.

"What has happened between us, Hilda?" asked Miriam. "Are we not
friends?"

"No, no!" said Hilda, shuddering.

"At least we have been friends," continued Miriam. "I loved you dearly!
I love you still! You were to me as a younger sister; yes, dearer than
sisters of the same blood; for you and I were so lonely, Hilda, that the
whole world pressed us together by its solitude and strangeness. Then,
will you not touch my hand? Am I not the same as yesterday?"

"Alas! no, Miriam!" said Hilda.

"Yes, the same, the same for you, Hilda," rejoined her lost friend.
"Were you to touch my hand, you would find it as warm to your grasp as
ever. If you were sick or suffering, I would watch night and day for
you. It is in such simple offices that true affection shows itself;
and so I speak of them. Yet now, Hilda, your very look seems to put me
beyond the limits of human kind!"

"It is not I, Miriam," said Hilda; "not I that have done this."

"You, and you only, Hilda," replied Miriam, stirred up to make her own
cause good by the repellent force which her friend opposed to her. "I am
a woman, as I was yesterday; endowed with the same truth of nature, the
same warmth of heart, the same genuine and earnest love, which you
have always known in me. In any regard that concerns yourself, I am not
changed. And believe me, Hilda, when a human being has chosen a friend
out of all the world, it is only some faithlessness between themselves,
rendering true intercourse impossible, that can justify either friend in
severing the bond. Have I deceived you? Then cast me off! Have I wronged
you personally? Then forgive me, if you can. But, have I sinned against
God and man, and deeply sinned? Then be more my friend than ever, for I
need you more."

"Do not bewilder me thus, Miriam!" exclaimed Hilda, who had not forborne
to express, by look and gesture, the anguish which this interview
inflicted on her. "If I were one of God's angels, with a nature
incapable of stain, and garments that never could be spotted, I would
keep ever at your side, and try to lead you upward. But I am a poor,
lonely girl, whom God has set here in an evil world, and given her only
a white robe, and bid her wear it back to Him, as white as when she put
it on. Your powerful magnetism would be too much for me. The pure, white
atmosphere, in which I try to discern what things are good and true,
would be discolored. And therefore, Miriam, before it is too late, I
mean to put faith in this awful heartquake which warns me henceforth to
avoid you."

"Ah, this is hard! Ah, this is terrible!" murmured Miriam, dropping her
forehead in her hands. In a moment or two she looked up again, as pale
as death, but with a composed countenance: "I always said, Hilda, that
you were merciless; for I had a perception of it, even while you
loved me best. You have no sin, nor any conception of what it is; and
therefore you are so terribly severe! As an angel, you are not amiss;
but, as a human creature, and a woman among earthly men and women, you
need a sin to soften you."

"God forgive me," said Hilda, "if I have said a needlessly cruel word!"

"Let it pass," answered Miriam; "I, whose heart it has smitten upon,
forgive you. And tell me, before we part forever, what have you seen or
known of me, since we last met?"

"A terrible thing, Miriam," said Hilda, growing paler than before.

"Do you see it written in my face, or painted in my eyes?" inquired
Miriam, her trouble seeking relief in a half-frenzied raillery. "I would
fain know how it is that Providence, or fate, brings eye-witnesses to
watch us, when we fancy ourselves acting in the remotest privacy. Did
all Rome see it, then? Or, at least, our merry company of artists? Or is
it some blood-stain on me, or death-scent in my garments? They say that
monstrous deformities sprout out of fiends, who once were lovely angels.
Do you perceive such in me already? Tell me, by our past friendship,
Hilda, all you know."

Thus adjured, and frightened by the wild emotion which Miriam could not
suppress, Hilda strove to tell what she had witnessed.

"After the rest of the party had passed on, I went back to speak to
you," she said; "for there seemed to be a trouble on your mind, and I
wished to share it with you, if you could permit me. The door of the
little courtyard was partly shut; but I pushed it open, and saw you
within, and Donatello, and a third person, whom I had before noticed in
the shadow of a niche. He approached you, Miriam. You knelt to him! I
saw Donatello spring upon him! I would have shrieked, but my throat
was dry. I would have rushed forward, but my limbs seemed rooted to the
earth. It was like a flash of lightning. A look passed from your eyes to
Donatello's--a look."--"Yes, Hilda, yes!" exclaimed Miriam, with intense
eagerness. "Do not pause now! That look?"

"It revealed all your heart, Miriam," continued Hilda, covering her
eyes as if to shut out the recollection; "a look of hatred, triumph,
vengeance, and, as it were, joy at some unhoped-for relief."

"Ah! Donatello was right, then," murmured Miriam, who shook throughout
all her frame. "My eyes bade him do it! Go on, Hilda."

"It all passed so quickly, all like a glare of lightning," said Hilda,
"and yet it seemed to me that Donatello had paused, while one might draw
a breath. But that look! Ah, Miriam, spare me. Need I tell more?"

"No more; there needs no more, Hilda," replied Miriam, bowing her head,
as if listening to a sentence of condemnation from a supreme tribunal.
"It is enough! You have satisfied my mind on a point where it was
greatly disturbed. Henceforward I shall be quiet. Thank you, Hilda."

She was on the point of departing, but turned back again from the
threshold.

"This is a terrible secret to be kept in a young girl's bosom," she
observed; "what will you do with it, my poor child?"

"Heaven help and guide me," answered Hilda, bursting into tears; "for
the burden of it crushes me to the earth! It seems a crime to know
of such a thing, and to keep it to myself. It knocks within my heart
continually, threatening, imploring, insisting to be let out! O my
mother!--my mother! Were she yet living, I would travel over land and
sea to tell her this dark secret, as I told all the little troubles of
my infancy. But I am alone--alone! Miriam, you were my dearest, only
friend. Advise me what to do."

This was a singular appeal, no doubt, from the stainless maiden to the
guilty woman, whom she had just banished from her heart forever. But
it bore striking testimony to the impression which Miriam's natural
uprightness and impulsive generosity had made on the friend who knew her
best; and it deeply comforted the poor criminal, by proving to her that
the bond between Hilda and herself was vital yet.

As far as she was able, Miriam at once responded to the girl's cry for
help.

"If I deemed it good for your peace of mind," she said, "to bear
testimony against me for this deed in the face of all the world, no
consideration of myself should weigh with me an instant. But I believe
that you would find no relief in such a course. What men call justice
lies chiefly in outward formalities, and has never the close application
and fitness that would be satisfactory to a soul like yours. I cannot be
fairly tried and judged before an earthly tribunal; and of this, Hilda,
you would perhaps become fatally conscious when it was too late. Roman
justice, above all things, is a byword. What have you to do with it?
Leave all such thoughts aside! Yet, Hilda, I would not have you keep my
secret imprisoned in your heart if it tries to leap out, and stings you,
like a wild, venomous thing, when you thrust it back again. Have you no
other friend, now that you have been forced to give me up?"

"No other," answered Hilda sadly.

"Yes; Kenyon!" rejoined Miriam.

"He cannot be my friend," said Hilda, "because--because--I have fancied
that he sought to be something more."

"Fear nothing!" replied Miriam, shaking her head, with a strange smile.
"This story will frighten his new-born love out of its little life, if
that be what you wish. Tell him the secret, then, and take his wise and
honorable counsel as to what should next be done. I know not what else
to say."

"I never dreamed," said Hilda,--"how could you think it?--of betraying
you to justice. But I see how it is, Miriam. I must keep your secret,
and die of it, unless God sends me some relief by methods which are now
beyond my power to imagine. It is very dreadful. Ah! now I understand
how the sins of generations past have created an atmosphere of sin
for those that follow. While there is a single guilty person in the
universe, each innocent one must feel his innocence tortured by that
guilt. Your deed, Miriam, has darkened the whole sky!"

Poor Hilda turned from her unhappy friend, and, sinking on her knees in
a corner of the chamber, could not be prevailed upon to utter another
word. And Miriam, with a long regard from the threshold, bade farewell
to this doves' nest, this one little nook of pure thoughts and innocent
enthusiasms, into which she had brought such trouble. Every crime
destroys more Edens than our own!



THE MARBLE FAUN

Volume II




CHAPTER XXIV


THE TOWER AMONG THE APENNINES


It was in June that the sculptor, Kenyon, arrived on horseback at the
gate of an ancient country house (which, from some of its features,
might almost be called a castle) situated in a part of Tuscany somewhat
remote from the ordinary track of tourists. Thither we must now
accompany him, and endeavor to make our story flow onward, like a
streamlet, past a gray tower that rises on the hillside, overlooking a
spacious valley, which is set in the grand framework of the Apennines.

The sculptor had left Rome with the retreating tide of foreign
residents. For, as summer approaches, the Niobe of Nations is made to
bewail anew, and doubtless with sincerity, the loss of that large
part of her population which she derives from other lands, and on whom
depends much of whatever remnant of prosperity she still enjoys. Rome,
at this season, is pervaded and overhung with atmospheric terrors, and
insulated within a charmed and deadly circle. The crowd of wandering
tourists betake themselves to Switzerland, to the Rhine, or, from this
central home of the world, to their native homes in England or America,
which they are apt thenceforward to look upon as provincial, after
once having yielded to the spell of the Eternal City. The artist, who
contemplates an indefinite succession of winters in this home of art
(though his first thought was merely to improve himself by a brief
visit), goes forth, in the summer time, to sketch scenery and costume
among the Tuscan hills, and pour, if he can, the purple air of Italy
over his canvas. He studies the old schools of art in the mountain towns
where they were born, and where they are still to be seen in the faded
frescos of Giotto and Cimabue, on the walls of many a church, or in
the dark chapels, in which the sacristan draws aside the veil from a
treasured picture of Perugino. Thence, the happy painter goes to walk
the long, bright galleries of Florence, or to steal glowing colors from
the miraculous works, which he finds in a score of Venetian palaces.
Such summers as these, spent amid whatever is exquisite in art, or wild
and picturesque in nature, may not inadequately repay him for the chill
neglect and disappointment through which he has probably languished, in
his Roman winter. This sunny, shadowy, breezy, wandering life, in which
he seeks for beauty as his treasure, and gathers for his winter's honey
what is but a passing fragrance to all other men, is worth living for,
come afterwards what may. Even if he die unrecognized, the artist has
had his share of enjoyment and success.

Kenyon had seen, at a distance of many miles, the old villa or castle
towards which his journey lay, looking from its height over a broad
expanse of valley. As he drew nearer, however, it had been hidden among
the inequalities of the hillside, until the winding road brought him
almost to the iron gateway. The sculptor found this substantial barrier
fastened with lock and bolt. There was no bell, nor other instrument
of sound; and, after summoning the invisible garrison with his voice,
instead of a trumpet, he had leisure to take a glance at the exterior of
the fortress.

About thirty yards within the gateway rose a square tower, lofty
enough to be a very prominent object in the landscape, and more than
sufficiently massive in proportion to its height. Its antiquity was
evidently such that, in a climate of more abundant moisture, the ivy
would have mantled it from head to foot in a garment that might, by this
time, have been centuries old, though ever new. In the dry Italian air,
however, Nature had only so far adopted this old pile of stonework as to
cover almost every hand's-breadth of it with close-clinging lichens
and yellow moss; and the immemorial growth of these kindly productions
rendered the general hue of the tower soft and venerable, and took away
the aspect of nakedness which would have made its age drearier than now.

Up and down the height of the tower were scattered three or four
windows, the lower ones grated with iron bars, the upper ones vacant
both of window frames and glass. Besides these larger openings, there
were several loopholes and little square apertures, which might be
supposed to light the staircase, that doubtless climbed the
interior towards the battlemented and machicolated summit. With this
last-mentioned warlike garniture upon its stern old head and brow,
the tower seemed evidently a stronghold of times long past. Many a
crossbowman had shot his shafts from those windows and loop-holes, and
from the vantage height of those gray battlements; many a flight of
arrows, too, had hit all round about the embrasures above, or the
apertures below, where the helmet of a defender had momentarily
glimmered. On festal nights, moreover, a hundred lamps had often gleamed
afar over the valley, suspended from the iron hooks that were ranged for
the purpose beneath the battlements and every window.

Connected with the tower, and extending behind it, there seemed to be
a very spacious residence, chiefly of more modern date. It perhaps owed
much of its fresher appearance, however, to a coat of stucco and
yellow wash, which is a sort of renovation very much in vogue with the
Italians. Kenyon noticed over a doorway, in the portion of the edifice
immediately adjacent to the tower, a cross, which, with a bell suspended
above the roof, indicated that this was a consecrated precinct, and the
chapel of the mansion.

Meanwhile, the hot sun so incommoded the unsheltered traveller, that he
shouted forth another impatient summons. Happening, at the same moment,
to look upward, he saw a figure leaning from an embrasure of the
battlements, and gazing down at him.

"Ho, Signore Count!" cried the sculptor, waving his straw hat, for he
recognized the face, after a moment's doubt. "This is a warm reception,
truly! Pray bid your porter let me in, before the sun shrivels me quite
into a cinder."

"I will come myself," responded Donatello, flinging down his voice out
of the clouds, as it were; "old Tomaso and old Stella are both asleep,
no doubt, and the rest of the people are in the vineyard. But I have
expected you, and you are welcome!"

The young Count--as perhaps we had better designate him in his ancestral
tower--vanished from the battlements; and Kenyon saw his figure
appear successively at each of the windows, as he descended. On every
reappearance, he turned his face towards the sculptor and gave a nod and
smile; for a kindly impulse prompted him thus to assure his visitor of a
welcome, after keeping him so long at an inhospitable threshold.

Kenyon, however (naturally and professionally expert at reading the
expression of the human countenance), had a vague sense that this was
not the young friend whom he had known so familiarly in Rome; not the
sylvan and untutored youth, whom Miriam, Hilda, and himself had liked,
laughed at, and sported with; not the Donatello whose identity they had
so playfully mixed up with that of the Faun of Praxiteles.

Finally, when his host had emerged from a side portal of the mansion,
and approached the gateway, the traveller still felt that there was
something lost, or something gained (he hardly knew which), that set the
Donatello of to-day irreconcilably at odds with him of yesterday. His
very gait showed it, in a certain gravity, a weight and measure of step,
that had nothing in common with the irregular buoyancy which used to
distinguish him. His face was paler and thinner, and the lips less full
and less apart.

"I have looked for you a long while," said Donatello; and, though his
voice sounded differently, and cut out its words more sharply than had
been its wont, still there was a smile shining on his face, that, for
the moment, quite brought back the Faun. "I shall be more cheerful,
perhaps, now that you have come. It is very solitary here."

"I have come slowly along, often lingering, often turning aside,"
replied Kenyon; "for I found a great deal to interest me in the
mediaeval sculpture hidden away in the churches hereabouts. An artist,
whether painter or sculptor, may be pardoned for loitering through such
a region. But what a fine old tower! Its tall front is like a page of
black letter, taken from the history of the Italian republics."

"I know little or nothing of its history," said the Count, glancing
upward at the battlements, where he had just been standing. "But I thank
my forefathers for building it so high. I like the windy summit better
than the world below, and spend much of my time there, nowadays."

"It is a pity you are not a star-gazer," observed Kenyon, also looking
up. "It is higher than Galileo's tower, which I saw, a week or two ago,
outside of the walls of Florence."

"A star-gazer? I am one," replied Donatello. "I sleep in the tower,
and often watch very late on the battlements. There is a dismal old
staircase to climb, however, before reaching the top, and a succession
of dismal chambers, from story to story. Some of them were prison
chambers in times past, as old Tomaso will tell you."

The repugnance intimated in his tone at the idea of this gloomy
staircase and these ghostly, dimly lighted rooms, reminded Kenyon of the
original Donatello, much more than his present custom of midnight vigils
on the battlements.

"I shall be glad to share your watch," said the guest; "especially by
moonlight. The prospect of this broad valley must be very fine. But I
was not aware, my friend, that these were your country habits. I have
fancied you in a sort of Arcadian life, tasting rich figs, and squeezing
the juice out of the sunniest grapes, and sleeping soundly all night,
after a day of simple pleasures."

"I may have known such a life, when I was younger," answered the Count
gravely. "I am not a boy now. Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow
behind."

The sculptor could not but smile at the triteness of the remark, which,
nevertheless, had a kind of originality as coming from Donatello. He had
thought it out from his own experience, and perhaps considered himself
as communicating a new truth to mankind.

They were now advancing up the courtyard; and the long extent of the
villa, with its iron-barred lower windows and balconied upper ones,
became visible, stretching back towards a grove of trees.

"At some period of your family history," observed Kenyon, "the Counts
of Monte Beni must have led a patriarchal life in this vast house. A
great-grandsire and all his descendants might find ample verge here, and
with space, too, for each separate brood of little ones to play within
its own precincts. Is your present household a large one?"

"Only myself," answered Donatello, "and Tomaso, who has been butler
since my grandfather's time, and old Stella, who goes sweeping and
dusting about the chambers, and Girolamo, the cook, who has but an idle
life of it. He shall send you up a chicken forthwith. But, first of all,
I must summon one of the contadini from the farmhouse yonder, to take
your horse to the stable."

Accordingly, the young Count shouted again, and with such effect that,
after several repetitions of the outcry, an old gray woman protruded
her head and a broom-handle from a chamber window; the venerable butler
emerged from a recess in the side of the house, where was a well, or
reservoir, in which he had been cleansing a small wine cask; and
a sunburnt contadino, in his shirt-sleeves, showed himself on the
outskirts of the vineyard, with some kind of a farming tool in his
hand. Donatello found employment for all these retainers in providing
accommodation for his guest and steed, and then ushered the sculptor
into the vestibule of the house.

It was a square and lofty entrance-room, which, by the solidity of its
construction, might have been an Etruscan tomb, being paved and walled
with heavy blocks of stone, and vaulted almost as massively overhead.
On two sides there were doors, opening into long suites of anterooms
and saloons; on the third side, a stone staircase of spacious breadth,
ascending, by dignified degrees and with wide resting-places, to another
floor of similar extent. Through one of the doors, which was ajar,
Kenyon beheld an almost interminable vista of apartments, opening one
beyond the other, and reminding him of the hundred rooms in Blue Beard's
castle, or the countless halls in some palace of the Arabian Nights.

It must have been a numerous family, indeed, that could ever have
sufficed to people with human life so large an abode as this, and impart
social warmth to such a wide world within doors. The sculptor confessed
to himself, that Donatello could allege reason enough for growing
melancholy, having only his own personality to vivify it all.

"How a woman's face would brighten it up!" he ejaculated, not intending
to be overheard.

But, glancing at Donatello, he saw a stern and sorrowful look in his
eyes, which altered his youthful face as if it had seen thirty years of
trouble; and, at the same moment, old Stella showed herself through one
of the doorways, as the only representative of her sex at Monte Beni.





CHAPTER XXV


SUNSHINE


"Come," said the Count, "I see you already find the old house dismal.
So do I, indeed! And yet it was a cheerful place in my boyhood. But, you
see, in my father's days (and the same was true of all my endless line
of grandfathers, as I have heard), there used to be uncles, aunts, and
all manner of kindred, dwelling together as one family. They were
a merry and kindly race of people, for the most part, and kept one
another's hearts warm."

"Two hearts might be enough for warmth," observed the sculptor, "even in
so large a house as this. One solitary heart, it is true, may be apt to
shiver a little. But, I trust, my friend, that the genial blood of your
race still flows in many veins besides your own?"

"I am the last," said Donatello gloomily. "They have all vanished from
me, since my childhood. Old Tomaso will tell you that the air of Monte
Beni is not so favorable to length of days as it used to be. But that is
not the secret of the quick extinction of my kindred."

"Then you are aware of a more satisfactory reason?" suggested Kenyon.

"I thought of one, the other night, while I was gazing at the stars,"
answered Donatello; "but, pardon me, I do not mean to tell it. One
cause, however, of the longer and healthier life of my forefathers was,
that they had many pleasant customs, and means of making themselves
glad, and their guests and friends along with them. Nowadays we have but
one!"

"And what is that?" asked the sculptor.

"You shall see!" said his young host.

By this time, he had ushered the sculptor into one of the numberless
saloons; and, calling for refreshment, old Stella placed a cold fowl
upon the table, and quickly followed it with a savory omelet, which
Girolamo had lost no time in preparing. She also brought some cherries,
plums, and apricots, and a plate full of particularly delicate figs, of
last year's growth. The butler showing his white head at the door, his
master beckoned to him. "Tomaso, bring some Sunshine!" said he. The
readiest method of obeying this order, one might suppose, would have
been to fling wide the green window-blinds, and let the glow of the
summer noon into the carefully shaded room. But, at Monte Beni, with
provident caution against the wintry days, when there is little
sunshine, and the rainy ones, when there is none, it was the hereditary
custom to keep their Sunshine stored away in the cellar. Old Tomaso
quickly produced some of it in a small, straw-covered flask, out of
which he extracted the cork, and inserted a little cotton wool, to
absorb the olive oil that kept the precious liquid from the air.

"This is a wine," observed the Count, "the secret of making which has
been kept in our family for centuries upon centuries; nor would it avail
any man to steal the secret, unless he could also steal the vineyard, in
which alone the Monte Beni grape can be produced. There is little else
left me, save that patch of vines. Taste some of their juice, and tell
me whether it is worthy to be called Sunshine! for that is its name."
"A glorious name, too!" cried the sculptor. "Taste it," said Donatello,
filling his friend's glass, and pouring likewise a little into his own.
"But first smell its fragrance; for the wine is very lavish of it, and
will scatter it all abroad."

"Ah, how exquisite!" said Kenyon. "No other wine has a bouquet like
this. The flavor must be rare, indeed, if it fulfill the promise of this
fragrance, which is like the airy sweetness of youthful hopes, that no
realities will ever satisfy!"

This invaluable liquor was of a pale golden hue, like other of the
rarest Italian wines, and, if carelessly and irreligiously quaffed,
might have been mistaken for a very fine sort of champagne. It was not,
however, an effervescing wine, although its delicate piquancy produced
a somewhat similar effect upon the palate. Sipping, the guest longed
to sip again; but the wine demanded so deliberate a pause, in order to
detect the hidden peculiarities and subtile exquisiteness of its flavor,
that to drink it was really more a moral than a physical enjoyment.
There was a deliciousness in it that eluded analysis, and--like whatever
else is superlatively good--was perhaps better appreciated in the memory
than by present consciousness.

One of its most ethereal charms lay in the transitory life of the wine's
richest qualities; for, while it required a certain leisure and delay,
yet, if you lingered too long upon the draught, it became disenchanted
both of its fragrance and its flavor.

The lustre should not be forgotten, among the other admirable endowments
of the Monte Beni wine; for, as it stood in Kenyon's glass, a little
circle of light glowed on the table round about it, as if it were really
so much golden sunshine.

"I feel myself a better man for that ethereal potation," observed the
sculptor. "The finest Orvieto, or that famous wine, the Est Est Est of
Montefiascone, is vulgar in comparison. This is surely the wine of the
Golden Age, such as Bacchus himself first taught mankind to press from
the choicest of his grapes. My dear Count, why is it not illustrious?
The pale, liquid gold, in every such flask as that, might be solidified
into golden scudi, and would quickly make you a millionaire!"

Tomaso, the old butler, who was standing by the table, and enjoying
the praises of the wine quite as much as if bestowed upon himself, made
answer,--"We have a tradition, Signore," said he, "that this rare wine
of our vineyard would lose all its wonderful qualities, if any of it
were sent to market. The Counts of Monte Beni have never parted with a
single flask of it for gold. At their banquets, in the olden time, they
have entertained princes, cardinals, and once an emperor and once a
pope, with this delicious wine, and always, even to this day, it has
been their custom to let it flow freely, when those whom they love and
honor sit at the board. But the grand duke himself could not drink that
wine, except it were under this very roof!"

"What you tell me, my good friend," replied Kenyon, "makes me venerate
the Sunshine of Monte Beni even more abundantly than before. As I
understand you, it is a sort of consecrated juice, and symbolizes the
holy virtues of hospitality and social kindness?"

"Why, partly so, Signore," said the old butler, with a shrewd twinkle
in his eye; "but, to speak out all the truth, there is another excellent
reason why neither a cask nor a flask of our precious vintage should
ever be sent to market. The wine, Signore, is so fond of its native
home, that a transportation of even a few miles turns it quite sour. And
yet it is a wine that keeps well in the cellar, underneath this floor,
and gathers fragrance, flavor, and brightness, in its dark dungeon. That
very flask of Sunshine, now, has kept itself for you, sir guest (as a
maid reserves her sweetness till her lover comes for it), ever since a
merry vintage-time, when the Signore Count here was a boy!"

"You must not wait for Tomaso to end his discourse about the wine,
before drinking off your glass," observed Donatello. "When once the
flask is uncorked, its finest qualities lose little time in making their
escape. I doubt whether your last sip will be quite so delicious as you
found the first."

And, in truth, the sculptor fancied that the Sunshine became almost
imperceptibly clouded, as he approached the bottom of the flask. The
effect of the wine, however, was a gentle exhilaration, which did not so
speedily pass away.

Being thus refreshed, Kenyon looked around him at the antique saloon
in which they sat. It was constructed in a most ponderous style, with
a stone floor, on which heavy pilasters were planted against the wall,
supporting arches that crossed one another in the vaulted ceiling. The
upright walls, as well as the compartments of the roof, were completely
Covered with frescos, which doubtless had been brilliant when first
executed, and perhaps for generations afterwards. The designs were of
a festive and joyous character, representing Arcadian scenes, where
nymphs, fauns, and satyrs disported themselves among mortal youths and
maidens; and Pan, and the god of wine, and he of sunshine and music,
disdained not to brighten some sylvan merry-making with the scarcely
veiled glory of their presence. A wreath of dancing figures, in
admirable variety of shape and motion, was festooned quite round the
cornice of the room.

In its first splendor, the saloon must have presented an aspect both
gorgeous and enlivening; for it invested some of the cheerfullest ideas
and emotions of which the human mind is susceptible with the external
reality of beautiful form, and rich, harmonious glow and variety of
color. But the frescos were now very ancient. They had been rubbed and
scrubbed by old Stein and many a predecessor, and had been defaced in
one spot, and retouched in another, and had peeled from the wall in
patches, and had hidden some of their brightest portions under dreary
dust, till the joyousness had quite vanished out of them all. It was
often difficult to puzzle out the design; and even where it was more
readily intelligible, the figures showed like the ghosts of dead and
buried joys,--the closer their resemblance to the happy past, the
gloomier now. For it is thus, that with only an inconsiderable change,
the gladdest objects and existences become the saddest; hope fading
into disappointment; joy darkening into grief, and festal splendor into
funereal duskiness; and all evolving, as their moral, a grim identity
between gay things and sorrowful ones. Only give them a little time, and
they turn out to be just alike!

"There has been much festivity in this saloon, if I may judge by the
character of its frescos," remarked Kenyon, whose spirits were still
upheld by the mild potency of the Monte Beni wine. "Your forefathers,
my dear Count, must have been joyous fellows, keeping up the vintage
merriment throughout the year. It does me good to think of them
gladdening the hearts of men and women, with their wine of Sunshine,
even in the Iron Age, as Pan and Bacchus, whom we see yonder, did in the
Golden one!"

"Yes; there have been merry times in the banquet hall of Monte Beni,
even within my own remembrance," replied Donatello, looking gravely
at the painted walls. "It was meant for mirth, as you see; and when
I brought my own cheerfulness into the saloon, these frescos looked
cheerful too. But, methinks, they have all faded since I saw them last."

"It would be a good idea," said the sculptor, falling into his
companion's vein, and helping him out with an illustration which
Donatello himself could not have put into shape, "to convert this saloon
into a chapel; and when the priest tells his hearers of the instability
of earthly joys, and would show how drearily they vanish, he may point
to these pictures, that were so joyous and are so dismal. He could not
illustrate his theme so aptly in any other way."

"True, indeed," answered the Count, his former simplicity strangely
mixing itself up with ah experience that had changed him; "and yonder,
where the minstrels used to stand, the altar shall be placed. A sinful
man might do all the more effective penance in this old banquet hall."

"But I should regret to have suggested so ungenial a transformation in
your hospitable saloon," continued Kenyon, duly noting the change in
Donatello's characteristics. "You startle me, my friend, by so ascetic a
design! It would hardly have entered your head, when we first met. Pray
do not,--if I may take the freedom of a somewhat elder man to advise
you," added he, smiling,--"pray do not, under a notion of improvement,
take upon yourself to be sombre, thoughtful, and penitential, like all
the rest of us."

Donatello made no answer, but sat awhile, appearing to follow with
his eyes one of the figures, which was repeated many times over in the
groups upon the walls and ceiling. It formed the principal link of an
allegory, by which (as is often the case in such pictorial designs)
the whole series of frescos were bound together, but which it would be
impossible, or, at least, very wearisome, to unravel. The sculptor's
eyes took a similar direction, and soon began to trace through the
vicissitudes,--once gay, now sombre,--in which the old artist had
involved it, the same individual figure. He fancied a resemblance in it
to Donatello himself; and it put him in mind of one of the purposes with
which he had come to Monte Beni.

"My dear Count," said he, "I have a proposal to make. You must let me
employ a little of my leisure in modelling your bust. You remember what
a striking resemblance we all of us--Hilda, Miriam, and I--found between
your features and those of the Faun of Praxiteles. Then, it seemed an
identity; but now that I know your face better, the likeness is far less
apparent. Your head in marble would be a treasure to me. Shall I have
it?"

"I have a weakness which I fear I cannot overcome," replied the Count,
turning away his face. "It troubles me to be looked at steadfastly."

"I have observed it since we have been sitting here, though never
before," rejoined the sculptor. "It is a kind of nervousness, I
apprehend, which, you caught in the Roman air, and which grows upon you,
in your solitary life. It need be no hindrance to my taking your bust;
for I will catch the likeness and expression by side glimpses, which
(if portrait painters and bust makers did but know it) always bring home
richer results than a broad stare."

"You may take me if you have the power," said Donatello; but, even as he
spoke, he turned away his face; "and if you can see what makes me shrink
from you, you are welcome to put it in the bust. It is not my will, but
my necessity, to avoid men's eyes. Only," he added, with a smile which
made Kenyon doubt whether he might not as well copy the Faun as model a
new bust,--"only, you know, you must not insist on my uncovering these
ears of mine!"

"Nay; I never should dream of such a thing," answered the sculptor,
laughing, as the young Count shook his clustering curls. "I could not
hope to persuade you, remembering how Miriam once failed!"

Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a
spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, so distinctly that
no utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be conscious of
the same thought, in which one or both take the profoundest interest;
but as long as it remains unspoken, their familiar talk flows quietly
over the hidden idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something
sunken in its bed. But speak the word, and it is like bringing up a
drowned body out of the deepest pool of the rivulet, which has been
aware of the horrible secret all along, in spite of its smiling surface.

And even so, when Kenyon chanced to make a distinct reference to
Donatello's relations with Miriam (though the subject was already in
both their minds), a ghastly emotion rose up out of the depths of the
young Count's heart. He trembled either with anger or terror, and
glared at the sculptor with wild eyes, like a wolf that meets you in
the forest, and hesitates whether to flee or turn to bay. But, as Kenyon
still looked calmly at him, his aspect gradually became less disturbed,
though far from resuming its former quietude.

"You have spoken her name," said he, at last, in an altered and
tremulous tone; "tell me, now, all that you know of her."

"I scarcely think that I have any later intelligence than yourself,"
answered Kenyon; "Miriam left Rome at about the time of your own
departure. Within a day or two after our last meeting at the Church of
the Capuchins, I called at her studio and found it vacant. Whither she
has gone, I cannot tell."

Donatello asked no further questions.

They rose from table, and strolled together about the premises, whiling
away the afternoon with brief intervals of unsatisfactory conversation,
and many shadowy silences. The sculptor had a perception of change in
his companion,--possibly of growth and development, but certainly of
change,--which saddened him, because it took away much of the simple
grace that was the best of Donatello's peculiarities.

Kenyon betook himself to repose that night in a grim, old, vaulted
apartment, which, in the lapse of five or six centuries, had probably
been the birth, bridal, and death chamber of a great many generations
of the Monte Beni family. He was aroused, soon after daylight, by the
clamor of a tribe of beggars who had taken their stand in a little
rustic lane that crept beside that portion of the villa, and were
addressing their petitions to the open windows. By and by they appeared
to have received alms, and took their departure.

"Some charitable Christian has sent those vagabonds away," thought the
sculptor, as he resumed his interrupted nap; "who could it be? Donatello
has his own rooms in the tower; Stella, Tomaso, and the cook are a
world's width off; and I fancied myself the only inhabitant in this part
of the house."

In the breadth and space which so delightfully characterize an Italian
villa, a dozen guests might have had each his suite of apartments
without infringing upon one another's ample precincts. But, so far as
Kenyon knew, he was the only visitor beneath Donatello's widely extended
roof.





CHAPTER XXVI


THE PEDIGREE OF MONTE BENI


From the old butler, whom he found to be a very gracious and affable
personage, Kenyon soon learned many curious particulars about the family
history and hereditary peculiarities of the Counts of Monte Beni. There
was a pedigree, the later portion of which--that is to say, for a little
more than a thousand years--a genealogist would have found delight in
tracing out, link by link, and authenticating by records and documentary
evidences. It would have been as difficult, however, to follow up the
stream of Donatello's ancestry to its dim source, as travellers have
found it to reach the mysterious fountains of the Nile. And, far beyond
the region of definite and demonstrable fact, a romancer might have
strayed into a region of old poetry, where the rich soil, so long
uncultivated and untrodden, had lapsed into nearly its primeval state
of wilderness. Among those antique paths, now overgrown with tangled and
riotous vegetation, the wanderer must needs follow his own guidance, and
arrive nowhither at last.

The race of Monte Beni, beyond a doubt, was one of the oldest in Italy,
where families appear to survive at least, if not to flourish, on their
half-decayed roots, oftener than in England or France. It came down in
a broad track from the Middle Ages; but, at epochs anterior to those,
it was distinctly visible in the gloom of the period before chivalry put
forth its flower; and further still, we are almost afraid to say, it was
seen, though with a fainter and wavering course, in the early morn of
Christendom, when the Roman Empire had hardly begun to show symptoms of
decline. At that venerable distance, the heralds gave up the lineage in
despair.

But where written record left the genealogy of Monte Beni, tradition
took it up, and carried it without dread or shame beyond the Imperial
ages into the times of the Roman republic; beyond those, again, into the
epoch of kingly rule. Nor even so remotely among the mossy centuries did
it pause, but strayed onward into that gray antiquity of which there
is no token left, save its cavernous tombs, and a few bronzes, and some
quaintly wrought ornaments of gold, and gems with mystic figures and
inscriptions. There, or thereabouts, the line was supposed to have had
its origin in the sylvan life of Etruria, while Italy was yet guiltless
of Rome.

Of course, as we regret to say, the earlier and very much the larger
portion of this respectable descent--and the same is true of many
briefer pedigrees--must be looked upon as altogether mythical. Still,
it threw a romantic interest around the unquestionable antiquity of the
Monte Beni family, and over that tract of their own vines and fig-trees
beneath the shade of which they had unquestionably dwelt for immemorial
ages. And there they had laid the foundations of their tower, so long
ago that one half of its height was said to be sunken under the surface
and to hide subterranean chambers which once were cheerful with the
olden sunshine.

One story, or myth, that had mixed itself up with their mouldy
genealogy, interested the sculptor by its wild, and perhaps grotesque,
yet not unfascinating peculiarity. He caught at it the more eagerly,
as it afforded a shadowy and whimsical semblance of explanation for the
likeness which he, with Miriam and Hilda, had seen or fancied between
Donatello and the Faun of Praxiteles.

The Monte Beni family, as this legend averred, drew their origin
from the Pelasgic race, who peopled Italy in times that may be called
prehistoric. It was the same noble breed of men, of Asiatic birth,
that settled in Greece; the same happy and poetic kindred who dwelt in
Arcadia, and--whether they ever lived such life or not--enriched the
world with dreams, at least, and fables, lovely, if unsubstantial, of a
Golden Age. In those delicious times, when deities and demigods appeared
familiarly on earth, mingling with its inhabitants as friend with
friend,--when nymphs, satyrs, and the whole train of classic faith or
fable hardly took pains to hide themselves in the primeval woods,--at
that auspicious period the lineage of Monte Beni had its rise. Its
progenitor was a being not altogether human, yet partaking so largely of
the gentlest human qualities, as to be neither awful nor shocking to
the imagination. A sylvan creature, native among the woods, had loved
a mortal maiden, and--perhaps by kindness, and the subtile courtesies
which love might teach to his simplicity, or possibly by a ruder
wooing--had won her to his haunts. In due time he gained her womanly
affection; and, making their bridal bower, for aught we know, in the
hollow of a great tree, the pair spent a happy wedded life in that
ancient neighborhood where now stood Donatello's tower.

From this union sprang a vigorous progeny that took its place
unquestioned among human families. In that age, however, and long
afterwards, it showed the ineffaceable lineaments of its wild paternity:
it was a pleasant and kindly race of men, but capable of savage
fierceness, and never quite restrainable within the trammels of social
law. They were strong, active, genial, cheerful as the sunshine,
passionate as the tornado. Their lives were rendered blissful by art
unsought harmony with nature.

But, as centuries passed away, the Faun's wild blood had necessarily
been attempered with constant intermixtures from the more ordinary
streams of human life. It lost many of its original qualities, and
served for the most part only to bestow an unconquerable vigor, which
kept the family from extinction, and enabled them to make their own part
good throughout the perils and rude emergencies of their interminable
descent. In the constant wars with which Italy was plagued, by the
dissensions of her petty states and republics, there was a demand for
native hardihood.

The successive members of the Monte Beni family showed valor and policy
enough' at all events, to keep their hereditary possessions out of the
clutch of grasping neighbors, and probably differed very little from the
other feudal barons with whom they fought and feasted. Such a degree
of conformity with the manners of the generations through which it
survived, must have been essential to the prolonged continuance of the
race.

It is well known, however, that any hereditary peculiarity--as a
supernumerary finger, or an anomalous shape of feature, like the
Austrian lip--is wont to show itself in a family after a very wayward
fashion. It skips at its own pleasure along the line, and, latent for
half a century or so, crops out again in a great-grandson. And thus, it
was said, from a period beyond memory or record, there had ever and
anon been a descendant of the Monte Benis bearing nearly all the
characteristics that were attributed to the original founder of the
race. Some traditions even went so far as to enumerate the ears, covered
with a delicate fur, and shaped like a pointed leaf, among the proofs
of authentic descent which were seen in these favored individuals. We
appreciate the beauty of such tokens of a nearer kindred to the great
family of nature than other mortals bear; but it would be idle to ask
credit for a statement which might be deemed to partake so largely of
the grotesque.

But it was indisputable that, once in a century or oftener, a son of
Monte Beni gathered into himself the scattered qualities of his
race, and reproduced the character that had been assigned to it from
immemorial times. Beautiful, strong, brave, kindly, sincere, of
honest impulses, and endowed with simple tastes and the love of homely
pleasures, he was believed to possess gifts by which he could associate
himself with the wild things of the forests, and with the fowls of the
air, and could feel a sympathy even with the trees; among which it was
his joy to dwell. On the other hand, there were deficiencies both of
intellect and heart, and especially, as it seemed, in the development of
the higher portion of man's nature. These defects were less perceptible
in early youth, but showed themselves more strongly with advancing
age, when, as the animal spirits settled down upon a lower level, the
representative of the Monte Benis was apt to become sensual, addicted to
gross pleasures, heavy, unsympathizing, and insulated within the narrow
limits of a surly selfishness.

A similar change, indeed, is no more than what we constantly observe to
take place in persons who are not careful to substitute other graces for
those which they inevitably lose along with the quick sensibility and
joyous vivacity of youth. At worst, the reigning Count of Monte Beni,
as his hair grew white, was still a jolly old fellow over his flask of
wine, the wine that Bacchus himself was fabled to have taught his sylvan
ancestor how to express, and from what choicest grapes, which would
ripen only in a certain divinely favored portion of the Monte Beni
vineyard.

The family, be it observed, were both proud and ashamed of these
legends; but whatever part of them they might consent to incorporate
into their ancestral history, they steadily repudiated all that referred
to their one distinctive feature, the pointed and furry ears. In a great
many years past, no sober credence had been yielded to the mythical
portion of the pedigree. It might, however, be considered as typifying
some such assemblage of qualities--in this case, chiefly remarkable for
their simplicity and naturalness--as, when they reappear in successive
generations, constitute what we call family character. The sculptor
found, moreover, on the evidence of some old portraits, that the
physical features of the race had long been similar to what he now saw
them in Donatello. With accumulating years, it is true, the Monte
Beni face had a tendency to look grim and savage; and, in two or three
instances, the family pictures glared at the spectator in the eyes like
some surly animal, that had lost its good humor when it outlived its
playfulness.

The young Count accorded his guest full liberty to investigate the
personal annals of these pictured worthies, as well as all the rest
of his progenitors; and ample materials were at hand in many chests of
worm-eaten papers and yellow parchments, that had been gathering into
larger and dustier piles ever since the dark ages. But, to confess the
truth, the information afforded by these musty documents was so much
more prosaic than what Kenyon acquired from Tomaso's legends, that even
the superior authenticity of the former could not reconcile him to its
dullness. What especially delighted the sculptor was the analogy between
Donatello's character, as he himself knew it, and those peculiar traits
which the old butler's narrative assumed to have been long hereditary
in the race. He was amused at finding, too, that not only Tomaso but the
peasantry of the estate and neighboring village recognized his friend
as a genuine Monte Beni, of the original type. They seemed to cherish a
great affection for the young Count, and were full of stories about his
sportive childhood; how he had played among the little rustics, and been
at once the wildest and the sweetest of them all; and how, in his very
infancy, he had plunged into the deep pools of the streamlets and never
been drowned, and had clambered to the topmost branches of tall trees
without ever breaking his neck. No such mischance could happen to the
sylvan child because, handling all the elements of nature so fearlessly
and freely, nothing had either the power or the will to do him harm.

He grew up, said these humble friends, the playmate not only of all
mortal kind, but of creatures of the woods; although, when Kenyon
pressed them for some particulars of this latter mode of companionship,
they could remember little more than a few anecdotes of a pet fox, which
used to growl and snap at everybody save Donatello himself.

But they enlarged--and never were weary of the theme--upon the
blithesome effects of Donatello's presence in his rosy childhood and
budding youth. Their hovels had always glowed like sunshine when he
entered them; so that, as the peasants expressed it, their young master
had never darkened a doorway in his life. He was the soul of vintage
festivals. While he was a mere infant, scarcely able to run alone, it
had been the custom to make him tread the winepress with his tender
little feet, if it were only to crush one cluster of the grapes. And the
grape-juice that gushed beneath his childish tread, be it ever so small
in quantity, sufficed to impart a pleasant flavor to a whole cask of
wine. The race of Monte Beni--so these rustic chroniclers assured
the sculptor--had possessed the gift from the oldest of old times of
expressing good wine from ordinary grapes, and a ravishing liquor from
the choice growth of their vineyard.

In a word, as he listened to such tales as these, Kenyon could have
imagined that the valleys and hillsides about him were a veritable
Arcadia; and that Donatello was not merely a sylvan faun, but the genial
wine god in his very person. Making many allowances for the poetic
fancies of Italian peasants, he set it down for fact that his friend, in
a simple way and among rustic folks, had been an exceedingly delightful
fellow in his younger days.

But the contadini sometimes added, shaking their heads and sighing, that
the young Count was sadly changed since he went to Rome. The village
girls now missed the merry smile with which he used to greet them.

The sculptor inquired of his good friend Tomaso, whether he, too,
had noticed the shadow which was said to have recently fallen over
Donatello's life.

"Ah, yes, Signore!" answered the old butler, "it is even so, since
he came back from that wicked and miserable city. The world has grown
either too evil, or else too wise and sad, for such men as the old
Counts of Monte Beni used to be. His very first taste of it, as you see,
has changed and spoilt my poor young lord. There had not been a single
count in the family these hundred years or more, who was so true a Monte
Beni, of the antique stamp, as this poor signorino; and now it brings
the tears into my eyes to hear him sighing over a cup of Sunshine! Ah,
it is a sad world now!"

"Then you think there was a merrier world once?" asked Kenyon.

"Surely, Signore," said Tomaso; "a merrier world, and merrier Counts of
Monte Beni to live in it! Such tales of them as I have heard, when I was
a child on my grandfather's knee! The good old man remembered a lord of
Monte Beni--at least, he had heard of such a one, though I will not make
oath upon the holy crucifix that my grandsire lived in his time who used
to go into the woods and call pretty damsels out of the fountains, and
out of the trunks of the old trees. That merry lord was known to dance
with them a whole long summer afternoon! When shall we see such frolics
in our days?"

"Not soon, I am afraid," acquiesced the sculptor. "You are right,
excellent Tomaso; the world is sadder now!"

And, in truth, while our friend smiled at these wild fables, he sighed
in the same breath to think how the once genial earth produces, in every
successive generation, fewer flowers than used to gladden the preceding
ones. Not that the modes and seeming possibilities of human enjoyment
are rarer in our refined and softened era,--on the contrary, they never
before were nearly so abundant,--but that mankind are getting so far
beyond the childhood of their race that they scorn to be happy any
longer. A simple and joyous character can find no place for itself
among the sage and sombre figures that would put his unsophisticated
cheerfulness to shame. The entire system of man's affairs, as at present
established, is built up purposely to exclude the careless and happy
soul. The very children would upbraid the wretched individual who should
endeavor to take life and the world as w what we might naturally suppose
them meant for--a place and opportunity for enjoyment.

It is the iron rule in our day to require an object and a purpose in
life. It makes us all parts of a complicated scheme of progress, which
can only result in our arrival at a colder and drearier region than
we were born in. It insists upon everybody's adding somewhat--a mite,
perhaps, but earned by incessant effort--to an accumulated pile of
usefulness, of which the only use will be, to burden our posterity with
even heavier thoughts and more inordinate labor than our own. No life
now wanders like an unfettered stream; there is a mill-wheel for the
tiniest rivulet to turn. We go all wrong, by too strenuous a resolution
to go all right.

Therefore it was--so, at least, the sculptor thought, although partly
suspicious of Donatello's darker misfortune--that the young Count found
it impossible nowadays to be what his forefathers had been. He could
not live their healthy life of animal spirits, in their sympathy with
nature, and brotherhood with all that breathed around them. Nature, in
beast, fowl, and tree, and earth, flood, and sky, is what it was of old;
but sin, care, and self-consciousness have set the human portion of the
world askew; and thus the simplest character is ever the soonest to go
astray.

"At any rate, Tomaso," said Kenyon, doing his best to comfort the old
man, "let us hope that your young lord will still enjoy himself at
vintage time. By the aspect of the vineyard, I judge that this will be
a famous year for the golden wine of Monte Beni. As long as your grapes
produce that admirable liquor, sad as you think the world, neither the
Count nor his guests will quite forget to smile."

"Ah, Signore," rejoined the butler with a sigh, "but he scarcely wets
his lips with the sunny juice."

"There is yet another hope," observed Kenyon; "the young Count may fall
in love, and bring home a fair and laughing wife to chase the gloom out
of yonder old frescoed saloon. Do you think he could do a better thing,
my good Tomaso?"

"Maybe not, Signore," said the sage butler, looking earnestly at him;
"and, maybe, not a worse!"

The sculptor fancied that the good old man had it partly in his mind to
make some remark, or communicate some fact, which, on second thoughts,
he resolved to keep concealed in his own breast. He now took his
departure cellarward, shaking his white head and muttering to himself,
and did not reappear till dinner-time, when he favored Kenyon, whom he
had taken far into his good graces, with a choicer flask of Sunshine
than had yet blessed his palate.

To say the truth, this golden wine was no unnecessary ingredient towards
making the life of Monte Beni palatable. It seemed a pity that Donatello
did not drink a little more of it, and go jollily to bed at least,
even if he should awake with an accession of darker melancholy the next
morning.

Nevertheless, there was no lack of outward means for leading an
agreeable life in the old villa. Wandering musicians haunted the
precincts of Monte Beni, where they seemed to claim a prescriptive
right; they made the lawn and shrubbery tuneful with the sound of
fiddle, harp, and flute, and now and then with the tangled squeaking of
a bagpipe. Improvisatori likewise came and told tales or recited verses
to the contadini--among whom Kenyon was often an auditor--after their
day's work in the vineyard. Jugglers, too, obtained permission to do
feats of magic in the hall, where they set even the sage Tomaso, and
Stella, Girolamo, and the peasant girls from the farmhouse, all of a
broad grin, between merriment and wonder. These good people got food and
lodging for their pleasant pains, and some of the small wine of Tuscany,
and a reasonable handful of the Grand Duke's copper coin, to keep up
the hospitable renown of Monte Beni. But very seldom had they the young
Count as a listener or a spectator.

There were sometimes dances by moonlight on the lawn, but never since he
came from Rome did Donatello's presence deepen the blushes of the
pretty contadinas, or his footstep weary out the most agile partner or
competitor, as once it was sure to do.

Paupers--for this kind of vermin infested the house of Monte Beni worse
than any other spot in beggar-haunted Italy--stood beneath all the
windows, making loud supplication, or even establishing themselves on
the marble steps of the grand entrance. They ate and drank, and filled
their bags, and pocketed the little money that was given them, and went
forth on their devious ways, showering blessings innumerable on the
mansion and its lord, and on the souls of his deceased forefathers, who
had always been just such simpletons as to be compassionate to
beggary. But, in spite of their favorable prayers, by which Italian
philanthropists set great store, a cloud seemed to hang over these once
Arcadian precincts, and to be darkest around the summit of the tower
where Donatello was wont to sit and brood.





CHAPTER XXVII


MYTHS


After the sculptor's arrival, however, the young Count sometimes
came down from his forlorn elevation, and rambled with him among the
neighboring woods and hills. He led his friend to many enchanting nooks,
with which he himself had been familiar in his childhood. But of late,
as he remarked to Kenyon, a sort of strangeness had overgrown them,
like clusters of dark shrubbery, so that he hardly recognized the places
which he had known and loved so well.

To the sculptor's eye, nevertheless, they were still rich with beauty.
They were picturesque in that sweetly impressive way where wildness, in
a long lapse of years, has crept over scenes that have been once adorned
with the careful art and toil of man; and when man could do no more for
them, time and nature came, and wrought hand in hand to bring them to a
soft and venerable perfection. There grew the fig-tree that had run wild
and taken to wife the vine, which likewise had gone rampant out of
all human control; so that the two wild things had tangled and
knotted themselves into a wild marriage bond, and hung their various
progeny--the luscious figs, the grapes, oozy with the Southern juice,
and both endowed with a wild flavor that added the final charm--on the
same bough together.

In Kenyon's opinion, never was any other nook so lovely as a certain
little dell which he and Donatello visited. It was hollowed in among the
hills, and open to a glimpse of the broad, fertile valley. A fountain
had its birth here, and fell into a marble basin, which was all covered
with moss and shaggy with water-weeds. Over the gush of the small
stream, with an urn in her arms, stood a marble nymph, whose nakedness
the moss had kindly clothed as with a garment; and the long trails and
tresses of the maidenhair had done what they could in the poor thing's
behalf, by hanging themselves about her waist, In former days--it might
be a remote antiquity--this lady of the fountain had first received the
infant tide into her urn and poured it thence into the marble basin.
But now the sculptured urn had a great crack from top to bottom; and the
discontented nymph was compelled to see the basin fill itself through
a channel which she could not control, although with water long ago
consecrated to her.

For this reason, or some other, she looked terribly forlorn; and you
might have fancied that the whole fountain was but the overflow of her
lonely tears.

"This was a place that I used greatly to delight in," remarked
Donatello, sighing. "As a child, and as a boy, I have been very happy
here."

"And, as a man, I should ask no fitter place to be happy in," answered
Kenyon. "But you, my friend, are of such a social nature, that I should
hardly have thought these lonely haunts would take your fancy. It is
a place for a poet to dream in, and people it with the beings of his
imagination."

"I am no poet, that I know of," said Donatello, "but yet, as I tell you,
I have been very happy here, in the company of this fountain and this
nymph. It is said that a Faun, my oldest forefather, brought home hither
to this very spot a human maiden, whom he loved and wedded. This spring
of delicious water was their household well."

"It is a most enchanting fable!" exclaimed Kenyon; "that is, if it be
not a fact."

"And why not a fact?" said the simple Donatello. "There is, likewise,
another sweet old story connected with this spot. But, now that I
remember it, it seems to me more sad than sweet, though formerly the
sorrow, in which it closes, did not so much impress me. If I had the
gift of tale-telling, this one would be sure to interest you mightily."

"Pray tell it," said Kenyon; "no matter whether well or ill. These wild
legends have often the most powerful charm when least artfully told."

So the young Count narrated a myth of one of his Progenitors,--he might
have lived a century ago, or a thousand years, or before the Christian
epoch, for anything that Donatello knew to the contrary,--who had made
acquaintance with a fair creature belonging to this fountain. Whether
woman or sprite was a mystery, as was all else about her, except that
her life and soul were somehow interfused throughout the gushing water.
She was a fresh, cool, dewy thing, sunny and shadowy, full of pleasant
little mischiefs, fitful and changeable with the whim of the moment, but
yet as constant as her native stream, which kept the same gush and flow
forever, while marble crumbled over and around it. The fountain woman
loved the youth,--a knight, as Donatello called him,--for, according
to the legend, his race was akin to hers. At least, whether kin or no,
there had been friendship and sympathy of old betwixt an ancestor of
his, with furry ears, and the long-lived lady of the fountain. And,
after all those ages, she was still as young as a May morning, and as
frolicsome as a bird upon a tree, or a breeze that makes merry with the
leaves.

She taught him how to call her from her pebbly source, and they spent
many a happy hour together, more especially in the fervor of the summer
days. For often as he sat waiting for her by the margin of the spring,
she would suddenly fall down around him in a shower of sunny raindrops,
with a rainbow glancing through them, and forthwith gather herself up
into the likeness of a beautiful girl, laughing--or was it the warble of
the rill over the pebbles?--to see the youth's amazement.


Thus, kind maiden that she was, the hot atmosphere became deliciously
cool and fragrant for this favored knight; and, furthermore, when he
knelt down to drink out of the spring, nothing was more common than for
a pair of rosy lips to come up out of its little depths, and touch his
mouth with the thrill of a sweet, cool, dewy kiss!

"It is a delightful story for the hot noon of your Tuscan summer,"
observed the sculptor, at this point. "But the deportment of the watery
lady must have had a most chilling influence in midwinter. Her lover
would find it, very literally, a cold reception!"

"I suppose," said Donatello rather sulkily, "you are making fun of the
story. But I see nothing laughable in the thing itself, nor in what you
say about it."

He went on to relate, that for a long While the knight found infinite
pleasure and comfort in the friendship of the fountain nymph. In his
merriest hours, she gladdened him with her sportive humor. If ever he
was annoyed with earthly trouble, she laid her moist hand upon his brow,
and charmed the fret and fever quite away.

But one day--one fatal noontide--the young knight came rushing with
hasty and irregular steps to the accustomed fountain. He called the
nymph; but--no doubt because there was something unusual and frightful
in his tone she did not appear, nor answer him. He flung himself down,
and washed his hands and bathed his feverish brow in the cool, pure
water. And then there was a sound of woe; it might have been a woman's
voice; it might have been only the sighing of the brook over the
pebbles. The water shrank away from the youth's hands, and left his brow
as dry and feverish as before.

Donatello here came to a dead pause.

"Why did the water shrink from this unhappy knight?" inquired the
sculptor.

"Because he had tried to wash off a bloodstain!" said the young Count,
in a horror-stricken whisper. "The guilty man had polluted the pure
water. The nymph might have comforted him in sorrow, but could not
cleanse his conscience of a crime."

"And did he never behold her more?" asked Kenyon.

"Never but once," replied his friend. "He never beheld her blessed face
but once again, and then there was a blood-stain on the poor nymph's
brow; it was the stain his guilt had left in the fountain where he tried
to wash it off. He mourned for her his whole life long, and employed
the best sculptor of the time to carve this statue of the nymph from his
description of her aspect. But, though my ancestor would fain have had
the image wear her happiest look, the artist, unlike yourself, was so
impressed with the mournfulness of the story, that, in spite of his best
efforts, he made her forlorn, and forever weeping, as you see!"

Kenyon found a certain charm in this simple legend. Whether so intended
or not, he understood it as an apologue, typifying the soothing and
genial effects of an habitual intercourse with nature in all ordinary
cares and griefs; while, on the other hand, her mild influences fall
short in their effect upon the ruder passions, and are altogether
powerless in the dread fever-fit or deadly chill of guilt.

"Do you say," he asked, "that the nymph's race has never since been
shown to any mortal? Methinks you, by your native qualities, are as well
entitled to her favor as ever your progenitor could have been. Why have
you not summoned her?"

"I called her often when I was a silly child," answered Donatello; and
he added, in an inward voice, "Thank Heaven, she did not come!"

"Then you never saw her?" said the sculptor.

"Never in my life!" rejoined the Count. "No, my dear friend, I have
not seen the nymph; although here, by her fountain, I used to make many
strange acquaintances; for, from my earliest childhood, I was familiar
with whatever creatures haunt the woods. You would have laughed to see
the friends I had among them; yes, among the wild, nimble things, that
reckon man their deadliest enemy! How it was first taught me, I cannot
tell; but there was a charm--a voice, a murmur, a kind of chant--by
which I called the woodland inhabitants, the furry people, and the
feathered people, in a language that they seemed to understand."

"I have heard of such a gift," responded the sculptor gravely, "but
never before met with a person endowed with it. Pray try the charm;
and lest I should frighten your friends away, I will withdraw into this
thicket, and merely peep at them."

"I doubt," said Donatello, "whether they will remember my voice now. It
changes, you know, as the boy grows towards manhood."

Nevertheless, as the young Count's good-nature and easy persuadability
were among his best characteristics, he set about complying with
Kenyon's request. The latter, in his concealment among the shrubberies,
heard him send forth a sort of modulated breath, wild, rude, yet
harmonious. It struck the auditor as at once the strangest and the
most natural utterance that had ever reached his ears. Any idle boy,
it should seem, singing to himself and setting his wordless song to
no other or more definite tune than the play of his own pulses,
might produce a sound almost identical with this; and yet, it was as
individual as a murmur of the breeze. Donatello tried it, over and over
again, with many breaks, at first, and pauses of uncertainty; then with
more confidence, and a fuller swell, like a wayfarer groping out
of obscurity into the light, and moving with freer footsteps as it
brightens around him.

Anon, his voice appeared to fill the air, yet not with an obtrusive
clangor. The sound was of a murmurous character, soft, attractive,
persuasive, friendly. The sculptor fancied that such might have been
the original voice and utterance of the natural man, before the
sophistication of the human intellect formed what we now call language.
In this broad dialect--broad as the sympathies of nature--the human
brother might have spoken to his inarticulate brotherhood that prowl the
woods, or soar upon the wing, and have been intelligible to such extent
as to win their confidence.

The sound had its pathos too. At some of its simple cadences, the tears
came quietly into Kenyon's eyes. They welled up slowly from his heart,
which was thrilling with an emotion more delightful than he had often
felt before, but which he forbore to analyze, lest, if he seized it, it
should at once perish in his grasp.

Donatello paused two or three times, and seemed to listen,--then,
recommencing, he poured his spirit and life more earnestly into the
strain. And finally,--or else the sculptor's hope and imagination
deceived him,--soft treads were audible upon the fallen leaves. There
was a rustling among the shrubbery; a whir of wings, moreover, that
hovered in the air. It may have been all an illusion; but Kenyon fancied
that he could distinguish the stealthy, cat-like movement of some small
forest citizen, and that he could even see its doubtful shadow, if not
really its substance. But, all at once, whatever might be the reason,
there ensued a hurried rush and scamper of little feet; and then the
sculptor heard a wild, sorrowful cry, and through the crevices of the
thicket beheld Donatello fling himself on the ground.

Emerging from his hiding-place, he saw no living thing, save a brown
lizard (it was of the tarantula species) rustling away through the
sunshine. To all present appearance, this venomous reptile was the only
creature that had responded to the young Count's efforts to renew his
intercourse with the lower orders of nature.

"What has happened to you?" exclaimed Kenyon, stooping down over his
friend, and wondering at the anguish which he betrayed.

"Death, death!" sobbed Donatello. "They know it!"

He grovelled beside the fountain, in a fit of such passionate sobbing
and weeping, that it seemed as if his heart had broken, and spilt its
wild sorrows upon the ground. His unrestrained grief and childish tears
made Kenyon sensible in how small a degree the customs and restraints of
society had really acted upon this young man, in spite of the quietude
of his ordinary deportment. In response to his friend's efforts to
console him, he murmured words hardly more articulate than the strange
chant which he had so recently been breathing into the air.

"They know it!" was all that Kenyon could yet distinguish,--"they know
it!"

"Who know it?" asked the sculptor. "And what is it their know?" "They
know it!" repeated Donatello, trembling. "They shun me! All nature
shrinks from me, and shudders at me! I live in the midst of a curse,
that hems me round with a circle of fire! No innocent thing can come
near me."

"Be comforted, my dear friend," said Kenyon, kneeling beside him. "You
labor under some illusion, but no curse. As for this strange, natural
spell, which you have been exercising, and of which I have heard before,
though I never believed in, nor expected to witness it, I am satisfied
that you still possess it. It was my own half-concealed presence, no
doubt, and some involuntary little movement of mine, that scared away
your forest friends."

"They are friends of mine no longer," answered Donatello.

"We all of us, as we grow older," rejoined Kenyon, "lose somewhat of our
proximity to nature. It is the price we pay for experience."

"A heavy price, then!" said Donatello, rising from the ground. "But we
will speak no more of it. Forget this scene, my dear friend. In your
eyes, it must look very absurd. It is a grief, I presume, to all men, to
find the pleasant privileges and properties of early life departing from
them. That grief has now befallen me. Well; I shall waste no more tears
for such a cause!"

Nothing else made Kenyon so sensible of a change in Donatello, as his
newly acquired power of dealing with his own emotions, and, after a
struggle more or less fierce, thrusting them down into the prison cells
where he usually kept them confined. The restraint, which he now put
upon himself, and the mask of dull composure which he succeeded in
clasping over his still beautiful, and once faun-like face, affected the
sensitive sculptor more sadly than even the unrestrained passion of the
preceding scene. It is a very miserable epoch, when the evil necessities
of life, in our tortuous world, first get the better of us so far as to
compel us to attempt throwing a cloud over our transparency. Simplicity
increases in value the longer we can keep it, and the further we carry
it onward into life; the loss of a child's simplicity, in the inevitable
lapse of years, causes but a natural sigh or two, because even his
mother feared that he could not keep it always. But after a young man
has brought it through his childhood, and has still worn it in
his bosom, not as an early dewdrop, but as a diamond of pure white
lustre,--it is a pity to lose it, then. And thus, when Kenyon saw how
much his friend had now to hide, and how well he hid it, he would have
wept, although his tears would have been even idler than those which
Donatello had just shed.

They parted on the lawn before the house, the Count to climb his tower,
and the sculptor to read an antique edition of Dante, which he had found
among some old volumes of Catholic devotion, in a seldom-visited room,
Tomaso met him in the entrance hall, and showed a desire to speak.

"Our poor signorino looks very sad to-day!" he said.

"Even so, good Tomaso," replied the sculptor. "Would that we could raise
his spirits a little!"

"There might be means, Signore," answered the old butler, "if one might
but be sure that they were the right ones. We men are but rough nurses
for a sick body or a sick spirit."

"Women, you would say, my good friend, are better," said the sculptor,
struck by an intelligence in the butler's face. "That is possible! But
it depends."

"Ah; we will wait a little longer," said Tomaso, with the customary
shake of his head.





CHAPTER XXVIII


THE OWL TOWER


"Will you not show me your tower?" said the sculptor one day to his
friend.

"It is plainly enough to be seen, methinks," answered the Count, with
a kind of sulkiness that often appeared in him, as one of the little
symptoms of inward trouble.

"Yes; its exterior is visible far and wide," said Kenyon. "But such
a gray, moss-grown tower as this, however valuable as an object of
scenery, will certainly be quite as interesting inside as out. It cannot
be less than six hundred years old; the foundations and lower story are
much older than that, I should judge; and traditions probably cling to
the walls within quite as plentifully as the gray and yellow lichens
cluster on its face without."

"No doubt," replied Donatello,--"but I know little of such things, and
never could comprehend the interest which some of you Forestieri take
in them. A year or two ago an English signore, with a venerable white
beard--they say he was a magician, too--came hither from as far off as
Florence, just to see my tower."

"Ah, I have seen him at Florence," observed Kenyon. "He is a
necromancer, as you say, and dwells in an old mansion of the Knights
Templars, close by the Ponte Vecchio, with a great many ghostly books,
pictures, and antiquities, to make the house gloomy, and one bright-eyed
little girl, to keep it cheerful!"

"I know him only by his white beard," said Donatello; "but he could
have told you a great deal about the tower, and the sieges which it has
stood, and the prisoners who have been confined in it. And he gathered
up all the traditions of the Monte Beni family, and, among the rest,
the sad one which I told you at the fountain the other day. He had known
mighty poets, he said, in his earlier life; and the most illustrious
of them would have rejoiced to preserve such a legend in immortal
rhyme,--especially if he could have had some of our wine of Sunshine to
help out his inspiration!"

"Any man might be a poet, as well as Byron, with such wine and such
a theme," rejoined the sculptor. "But shall we climb your tower The
thunder-storm gathering yonder among the hills will be a spectacle worth
witnessing."

"Come, then," said the Count, adding, with a sigh, "it has a weary
staircase, and dismal chambers, and it is very lonesome at the summit!"

"Like a man's life, when he has climbed to eminence," remarked the
sculptor; "or, let us rather say, with its difficult steps, and the dark
prison cells you speak of, your tower resembles the spiritual experience
of many a sinful soul, which, nevertheless, may struggle upward into the
pure air and light of Heaven at last!"

Donatello sighed again, and led the way up into the tower.

Mounting the broad staircase that ascended from the entrance hall,
they traversed the great wilderness of a house, through some obscure
passages, and came to a low, ancient doorway. It admitted them to a
narrow turret stair which zigzagged upward, lighted in its progress by
loopholes and iron-barred windows. Reaching the top of the first flight,
the Count threw open a door of worm-eaten oak, and disclosed a chamber
that occupied the whole area of the tower. It was most pitiably forlorn
of aspect, with a brick-paved floor, bare holes through the massive
walls, grated with iron, instead of windows, and for furniture an
old stool, which increased the dreariness of the place tenfold, by
suggesting an idea of its having once been tenanted.

"This was a prisoner's cell in the old days," said Donatello; "the
white-bearded necromancer, of whom I told you, found out that a certain
famous monk was confined here, about five hundred years ago. He was a
very holy man, and was afterwards burned at the stake in the Grand-ducal
Square at Firenze. There have always been stories, Tomaso says, of
a hooded monk creeping up and down these stairs, or standing in the
doorway of this chamber. It must needs be the ghost of the ancient
prisoner. Do you believe in ghosts?"

"I can hardly tell," replied Kenyon; "on the whole, I think not."

"Neither do I," responded the Count; "for, if spirits ever come back,
I should surely have met one within these two months past. Ghosts never
rise! So much I know, and am glad to know it!"

Following the narrow staircase still higher, they came to another room
of similar size and equally forlorn, but inhabited by two personages of
a race which from time immemorial have held proprietorship and occupancy
in ruined towers. These were a pair of owls, who, being doubtless
acquainted with Donatello, showed little sign of alarm at the entrance
of visitors. They gave a dismal croak or two, and hopped aside into the
darkest corner, since it was not yet their hour to flap duskily abroad.

"They do not desert me, like my other feathered acquaintances," observed
the young Count, with a sad smile, alluding to the scene which Kenyon
had witnessed at the fountain-side. "When I was a wild, playful boy, the
owls did not love me half so well."

He made no further pause here, but led his friend up another flight of
steps--while, at every stage, the windows and narrow loopholes afforded
Kenyon more extensive eye-shots over hill and valley, and allowed him
to taste the cool purity of mid-atmosphere. At length they reached the
topmost chamber, directly beneath the roof of the tower.

"This is my own abode," said Donatello; "my own owl's nest."

In fact, the room was fitted up as a bedchamber, though in a style of
the utmost simplicity. It likewise served as an oratory; there being
a crucifix in one corner, and a multitude of holy emblems, such as
Catholics judge it necessary to help their devotion withal. Several
ugly little prints, representing the sufferings of the Saviour, and the
martyrdoms of saints, hung on the wall; and behind the crucifix there
was a good copy of Titian's Magdalen of the Pitti Palace, clad only in
the flow of her golden ringlets. She had a confident look (but it was
Titian's fault, not the penitent woman's), as if expecting to win
heaven by the free display of her earthly charms. Inside of a glass case
appeared an image of the sacred Bambino, in the guise of a little waxen
boy, very prettily made, reclining among flowers, like a Cupid, and
holding up a heart that resembled a bit of red sealing-wax. A small vase
of precious marble was full of holy water.

Beneath the crucifix, on a table, lay a human skull, which looked as if
it might have been dug up out of some old grave. But, examining it
more closely, Kenyon saw that it was carved in gray alabaster; most
skillfully done to the death, with accurate imitation of the teeth,
the sutures, the empty eye-caverns, and the fragile little bones of the
nose. This hideous emblem rested on a cushion of white marble, so nicely
wrought that you seemed to see the impression of the heavy skull in a
silken and downy substance.

Donatello dipped his fingers into the holy-water vase, and crossed
himself. After doing so he trembled.

"I have no right to make the sacred symbol on a sinful breast!" he said.

"On what mortal breast can it be made, then?" asked the sculptor. "Is
there one that hides no sin?"

"But these blessed emblems make you smile, I fear," resumed the Count,
looking askance at his friend. "You heretics, I know, attempt to pray
without even a crucifix to kneel at."

"I, at least, whom you call a heretic, reverence that holy symbol,"
answered Kenyon. "What I am most inclined to murmur at is this death's
head. I could laugh, moreover, in its ugly face! It is absurdly
monstrous, my dear friend, thus to fling the dead weight of our
mortality upon our immortal hopes. While we live on earth, 't is true,
we must needs carry our skeletons about with us; but, for Heaven's sake,
do not let us burden our spirits with them, in our feeble efforts to
soar upward! Believe me, it will change the whole aspect of death, if
you can once disconnect it, in your idea, with that corruption from
which it disengages our higher part."

"I do not well understand you," said Donatello; and he took up the
alabaster skull, shuddering, and evidently feeling it a kind of penance
to touch it. "I only know that this skull has been in my family for
centuries. Old Tomaso has a story that it was copied by a famous
sculptor from the skull of that same unhappy knight who loved the
fountain lady, and lost her by a blood-stain. He lived and died with a
deep sense of sin upon him, and on his death-bed he ordained that this
token of him should go down to his posterity. And my forefathers, being
a cheerful race of men in their natural disposition, found it needful to
have the skull often before their eyes, because they dearly loved life
and its enjoyments, and hated the very thought of death."

"I am afraid," said Kenyon, "they liked it none the better, for seeing
its face under this abominable mask."

Without further discussion, the Count led the way up one more flight of
stairs, at the end of which they emerged upon the summit of the tower.
The sculptor felt as if his being were suddenly magnified a hundredfold;
so wide was the Umbrian valley that suddenly opened before him, set in
its grand framework of nearer and more distant hills. It seemed as if
all Italy lay under his eyes in that one picture. For there was the
broad, sunny smile of God, which we fancy to be spread over that favored
land more abundantly than on other regions, and beneath it glowed a
most rich and varied fertility. The trim vineyards were there, and the
fig-trees, and the mulberries, and the smoky-hued tracts of the olive
orchards; there, too, were fields of every kind of grain, among which,
waved the Indian corn, putting Kenyon in mind of the fondly remembered
acres of his father's homestead. White villas, gray convents, church
spires, villages, towns, each with its battlemented walls and towered
gateway, were scattered upon this spacious map; a river gleamed across
it; and lakes opened their blue eyes in its face, reflecting heaven,
lest mortals should forget that better land when they beheld the earth
so beautiful.


What made the valley look still wider was the two or three varieties
of weather that were visible on its surface, all at the same instant of
time. Here lay the quiet sunshine; there fell the great black patches
of ominous shadow from the clouds; and behind them, like a giant of
league-long strides, came hurrying the thunderstorm, which had already
swept midway across the plain. In the rear of the approaching tempest,
brightened forth again the sunny splendor, which its progress had
darkened with so terrible a frown.

All round this majestic landscape, the bald-peaked or forest-crowned
mountains descended boldly upon the plain. On many of their spurs and
midway declivities, and even on their summits, stood cities, some of
them famous of old; for these had been the seats and nurseries of early
art, where the flower of beauty sprang out of a rocky soil, and in
a high, keen atmosphere, when the richest and most sheltered gardens
failed to nourish it.

"Thank God for letting me again behold this scene!" Said the sculptor, a
devout man in his way, reverently taking off his hat. "I have viewed it
from many points, and never without as full a sensation of gratitude
as my heart seems capable of feeling. How it strengthens the poor human
spirit in its reliance on His providence, to ascend but this little way
above the common level, and so attain a somewhat wider glimpse of His
dealings with mankind! He doeth all things right! His will be done!"

"You discern something that is hidden from me," observed Donatello
gloomily, yet striving with unwonted grasp to catch the analogies
which so cheered his friend. "I see sunshine on one spot, and cloud in
another, and no reason for it in either ease. The sun on you; the cloud
on me! What comfort can I draw from this?"

"Nay; I cannot preach," said Kenyon, "with a page of heaven and a page
of earth spread wide open before us! Only begin to read it, and you
will find it interpreting itself without the aid of words. It is a great
mistake to try to put our best thoughts into human language. When we
ascend into the higher regions of emotion and spiritual enjoyment, they
are only expressible by such grand hieroglyphics as these around us."

They stood awhile, contemplating the scene; but, as inevitably happens
after a spiritual flight, it was not long before the sculptor felt his
wings flagging in the rarity of the upper atmosphere. He was glad to let
himself quietly downward out of the mid-sky, as it were, and alight on
the solid platform of the battlemented tower. He looked about him,
and beheld growing out of the stone pavement, which formed the roof, a
little shrub, with green and glossy leaves. It was the only green thing
there; and Heaven knows how its seeds had ever been planted, at that
airy height, or how it had found nourishment for its small life in the
chinks of the stones; for it had no earth, and nothing more like soil
than the crumbling mortar, which had been crammed into the crevices in a
long-past age.

Yet the plant seemed fond of its native site; and Donatello said it
had always grown there from his earliest remembrance, and never, he
believed, any smaller or any larger than they saw it now.

"I wonder if the shrub teaches you any good lesson," said he, observing
the interest with which Kenyon examined it. "If the wide valley has a
great meaning, the plant ought to have at least a little one; and it has
been growing on our tower long enough to have learned how to speak it."

"O, certainly!" answered the sculptor; "the shrub has its moral, or
it would have perished long ago. And, no doubt, it is for your use and
edification, since you have had it before your eyes all your lifetime,
and now are moved to ask what may be its lesson."

"It teaches me nothing," said the simple Donatello, stooping over the
plant, and perplexing himself with a minute scrutiny. "But here was a
worm that would have killed it; an ugly creature, which I will fling
over the battlements."





CHAPTER XXIX


ON THE BATTLEMENTS


The sculptor now looked through art embrasure, and threw down a bit of
lime, watching its fall, till it struck upon a stone bench at the rocky
foundation of the tower, and flew into many fragments.

"Pray pardon me for helping Time to crumble away your ancestral walls,"
said he. "But I am one of those persons who have a natural tendency to
climb heights, and to stand on the verge of them, measuring the depth
below. If I were to do just as I like, at this moment, I should fling
myself down after that bit of lime. It is a very singular temptation,
and all but irresistible; partly, I believe, because it might be so
easily done, and partly because such momentous consequences would ensue,
without my being compelled to wait a moment for them. Have you never
felt this strange impulse of an evil spirit at your back, shoving you
towards a precipice?"

"Ah, no!" cried. Donatello, shrinking from the battlemented wall with a
face of horror. "I cling to life in a way which you cannot conceive; it
has been so rich, so warm, so sunny!--and beyond its verge, nothing
but the chilly dark! And then a fall from a precipice is such an awful
death!"

"Nay; if it be a great height," said Kenyon, "a man would leave his life
in the air, and never feel the hard shock at the bottom."

"That is not the way with this kind of death!" exclaimed Donatello, in a
low, horror-stricken voice, which grew higher and more full of emotion
as he proceeded. "Imagine a fellow creature,--breathing now, and looking
you in the face,--and now tumbling down, down, down, with a long shriek
wavering after him, all the way! He does not leave his life in the air!
No; but it keeps in him till he thumps against the stones, a horribly
long while; then he lies there frightfully quiet, a dead heap of bruised
flesh and broken bones! A quiver runs through the crushed mass; and no
more movement after that! No; not if you would give your soul to make
him stir a finger! Ah, terrible! Yes, yes; I would fain fling myself
down for the very dread of it, that I might endure it once for all, and
dream of it no more!"

"How forcibly, how frightfully you conceive this!" said the sculptor,
aghast at the passionate horror which was betrayed in the Count's words,
and still more in his wild gestures and ghastly look. "Nay, if the
height of your tower affects your imagination thus, you do wrong to
trust yourself here in solitude, and in the night-time, and at all
unguarded hours. You are not safe in your chamber. It is but a step or
two; and what if a vivid dream should lead you up hither at midnight,
and act itself out as a reality!"

Donatello had hidden his face in his hands, and was leaning against the
parapet.

"No fear of that!" said he. "Whatever the dream may be, I am too genuine
a coward to act out my own death in it."

The paroxysm passed away, and the two friends continued their desultory
talk, very much as if no such interruption had occurred. Nevertheless,
it affected the sculptor with infinite pity to see this young man, who
had been born to gladness as an assured heritage, now involved in a
misty bewilderment of grievous thoughts, amid which he seemed to go
staggering blindfold. Kenyon, not without an unshaped suspicion of
the definite fact, knew that his condition must have resulted from the
weight and gloom of life, now first, through the agency of a secret
trouble, making themselves felt on a character that had heretofore
breathed only an atmosphere of joy. The effect of this hard lesson,
upon Donatello's intellect and disposition, was very striking. It was
perceptible that he had already had glimpses of strange and subtle
matters in those dark caverns, into which all men must descend, if
they would know anything beneath the surface and illusive pleasures of
existence. And when they emerge, though dazzled and blinded by the first
glare of daylight, they take truer and sadder views of life forever
afterwards.

From some mysterious source, as the sculptor felt assured, a soul had
been inspired into the young Count's simplicity, since their intercourse
in Rome. He now showed a far deeper sense, and an intelligence that
began to deal with high subjects, though in a feeble and childish way.
He evinced, too, a more definite and nobler individuality, but developed
out of grief and pain, and fearfully conscious of the pangs that had
given it birth. Every human life, if it ascends to truth or delves down
to reality, must undergo a similar change; but sometimes, perhaps, the
instruction comes without the sorrow; and oftener the sorrow teaches
no lesson that abides with us. In Donatello's case, it was pitiful, and
almost ludicrous, to observe the confused struggle that he made; how
completely he was taken by surprise; how ill-prepared he stood, on this
old battlefield of the world, to fight with such an inevitable foe as
mortal calamity, and sin for its stronger ally.

"And yet," thought Kenyon, "the poor fellow bears himself like a hero,
too! If he would only tell me his trouble, or give me an opening to
speak frankly about it, I might help him; but he finds it too horrible
to be uttered, and fancies himself the only mortal that ever felt the
anguish of remorse. Yes; he believes that nobody ever endured his agony
before; so that--sharp enough in itself--it has all the additional zest
of a torture just invented to plague him individually."

The sculptor endeavored to dismiss the painful subject from his mind;
and, leaning against the battlements, he turned his face southward and
westward, and gazed across the breadth of the valley. His thoughts
flew far beyond even those wide boundaries, taking an air-line from
Donatello's tower to another turret that ascended into the sky of the
summer afternoon, invisibly to him, above the roofs of distant Rome.
Then rose tumultuously into his consciousness that strong love for
Hilda, which it was his habit to confine in one of the heart's inner
chambers, because he had found no encouragement to bring it forward. But
now he felt a strange pull at his heart-strings. It could not have been
more perceptible, if all the way between these battlements and Hilda's
dove-cote had stretched an exquisitely sensitive cord, which, at the
hither end, was knotted with his aforesaid heart-strings, and, at the
remoter one, was grasped by a gentle hand. His breath grew tremulous. He
put his hand to his breast; so distinctly did he seem to feel that cord
drawn once, and again, and again, as if--though still it was bashfully
intimated there were an importunate demand for his presence. O for the
white wings of Hilda's doves, that he might, have flown thither, and
alighted at the Virgin's shrine!

But lovers, and Kenyon knew it well, project so lifelike a copy of
their mistresses out of their own imaginations, that it can pull at
the heartstrings almost as perceptibly as the genuine original. No airy
intimations are to be trusted; no evidences of responsive affection less
positive than whispered and broken words, or tender pressures of the
hand, allowed and half returned; or glances, that distil many passionate
avowals into one gleam of richly colored light. Even these should
be weighed rigorously, at the instant; for, in another instant, the
imagination seizes on them as its property, and stamps them with its
own arbitrary value. But Hilda's maidenly reserve had given her lover no
such tokens, to be interpreted either by his hopes or fears.

"Yonder, over mountain and valley, lies Rome," said the sculptor; "shall
you return thither in the autumn?"

"Never! I hate Rome," answered Donatello; "and have good cause."

"And yet it was a pleasant winter that we spent there," observed
Kenyon, "and with pleasant friends about us. You would meet them again
there--all of them."

"All?" asked Donatello.

"All, to the best of my belief," said the sculptor: "but you need not go
to Rome to seek them. If there were one of those friends whose lifetime
was twisted with your own, I am enough of a fatalist to feel assured
that you will meet that one again, wander whither you may. Neither can
we escape the companions whom Providence assigns for us, by climbing an
old tower like this."

"Yet the stairs are steep and dark," rejoined the Count; "none but
yourself would seek me here, or find me, if they sought."

As Donatello did not take advantage of this opening which his friend had
kindly afforded him to pour out his hidden troubles, the latter again
threw aside the subject, and returned to the enjoyment of the scene
before him. The thunder-storm, which he had beheld striding across the
valley, had passed to the left of Monte Beni, and was continuing its
march towards the hills that formed the boundary on the eastward.
Above the whole valley, indeed, the sky was heavy with tumbling vapors,
interspersed with which were tracts of blue, vividly brightened by the
sun; but, in the east, where the tempest was yet trailing its ragged
skirts, lay a dusky region of cloud and sullen mist, in which some of
the hills appeared of a dark purple hue. Others became so indistinct,
that the spectator could not tell rocky height from impalpable cloud.
Far into this misty cloud region, however,--within the domain of chaos,
as it were,--hilltops were seen brightening in the sunshine; they looked
like fragments of the world, broken adrift and based on nothingness,
or like portions of a sphere destined to exist, but not yet finally
compacted.

The sculptor, habitually drawing many of the images and illustrations
of his thoughts from the plastic art, fancied that the scene represented
the process of the Creator, when he held the new, imperfect earth in his
hand, and modelled it.

"What a magic is in mist and vapor among the mountains!" he exclaimed.
"With their help, one single scene becomes a thousand. The cloud scenery
gives such variety to a hilly landscape that it would be worth while to
journalize its aspect from hour to hour. A cloud, however,--as I have
myself experienced,--is apt to grow solid and as heavy as a stone the
instant that you take in hand to describe it, But, in my own heart,
I have found great use in clouds. Such silvery ones as those to the
northward, for example, have often suggested sculpturesque groups,
figures, and attitudes; they are especially rich in attitudes of living
repose, which a sculptor only hits upon by the rarest good fortune. When
I go back to my dear native land, the clouds along the horizon will be
my only gallery of art!"

"I can see cloud shapes, too," said Donatello; "yonder is one that
shifts strangely; it has been like people whom I knew. And now, if I
watch it a little longer, it will take the figure of a monk reclining,
with his cowl about his head and drawn partly over his face, and--well!
did I not tell you so?"

"I think," remarked Kenyon, "we can hardly be gazing at the same cloud.
What I behold is a reclining figure, to be sure, but feminine, and with
a despondent air, wonderfully well expressed in the wavering outline
from head to foot. It moves my very heart by something indefinable that
it suggests."

"I see the figure, and almost the face," said the Count; adding, in a
lower voice, "It is Miriam's!"

"No, not Miriam's," answered the sculptor. While the two gazers thus
found their own reminiscences and presentiments floating among the
clouds, the day drew to its close, and now showed them the fair
spectacle of an Italian sunset. The sky was soft and bright, but not so
gorgeous as Kenyon had seen it, a thousand times, in America; for there
the western sky is wont to be set aflame with breadths and depths of
color with which poets seek in vain to dye their verses, and which
painters never dare to copy. As beheld from the tower of Monte Beni, the
scene was tenderly magnificent, with mild gradations of hue and a lavish
outpouring of gold, but rather such gold as we see on the leaf of a
bright flower than the burnished glow of metal from the mine. Or, if
metallic, it looked airy and unsubstantial, like the glorified dreams
of an alchemist. And speedily--more speedily than in our own clime--came
the twilight, and, brightening through its gray transparency, the stars.

A swarm of minute insects that had been hovering all day round the
battlements were now swept away by the freshness of a rising breeze.
The two owls in the chamber beneath Donatello's uttered their soft
melancholy cry,--which, with national avoidance of harsh sounds, Italian
owls substitute for the hoot of their kindred in other countries,--and
flew darkling forth among the shrubbery. A convent bell rang out near at
hand, and was not only echoed among the hills, but answered by another
bell, and still another, which doubtless had farther and farther
responses, at various distances along the valley; for, like the English
drumbeat around the globe, there is a chain of convent bells from end
to end, and crosswise, and in all possible directions over priest-ridden
Italy.

"Come," said the sculptor, "the evening air grows cool. It is time to
descend."

"Time for you, my friend," replied the Count; and he hesitated a little
before adding, "I must keep a vigil here for some hours longer. It is my
frequent custom to keep vigils,--and sometimes the thought occurs to me
whether it were not better to keep them in yonder convent, the bell of
which just now seemed to summon me. Should I do wisely, do you think, to
exchange this old tower for a cell?"

"What! Turn monk?" exclaimed his friend. "A horrible idea!"

"True," said Donatello, sighing. "Therefore, if at all, I purpose doing
it."

"Then think of it no more, for Heaven's sake!" cried the sculptor.
"There are a thousand better and more poignant methods of being
miserable than that, if to be miserable is what you wish. Nay; I
question whether a monk keeps himself up to the intellectual and
spiritual height which misery implies. A monk I judge from their sensual
physiognomies, which meet me at every turn--is inevitably a beast! Their
souls, if they have any to begin with, perish out of them, before their
sluggish, swinish existence is half done. Better, a million times, to
stand star-gazing on these airy battlements, than to smother your new
germ of a higher life in a monkish cell!"

"You make me tremble," said Donatello, "by your bold aspersion of men
who have devoted themselves to God's service!"

"They serve neither God nor man, and themselves least of all, though
their motives be utterly selfish," replied Kenyon. "Avoid the convent,
my dear friend, as you would shun the death of the soul! But, for my own
part, if I had an insupportable burden,--if, for any cause, I were
bent upon sacrificing every earthly hope as a peace-offering towards
Heaven,--I would make the wide world my cell, and good deeds to mankind
my prayer. Many penitent men have done this, and found peace in it."

"Ah, but you are a heretic!" said the Count.

Yet his face brightened beneath the stars; and, looking at it through
the twilight, the sculptor's remembrance went back to that scene in the
Capitol, where, both in features and expression, Donatello had seemed
identical with the Faun. And still there was a resemblance; for now,
when first the idea was suggested of living for the welfare of his
fellow-creatures, the original beauty, which sorrow had partly effaced,
came back elevated and spiritualized. In the black depths the Faun had
found a soul, and was struggling with it towards the light of heaven.

The illumination, it is true, soon faded out of Donatello's face. The
idea of lifelong and unselfish effort was too high to be received by
him with more than a momentary comprehension. An Italian, indeed,
seldom dreams of being philanthropic, except in bestowing alms among the
paupers, who appeal to his beneficence at every step; nor does it
occur to him that there are fitter modes of propitiating Heaven than
by penances, pilgrimages, and offerings at shrines. Perhaps, too, their
system has its share of moral advantages; they, at all events, cannot
well pride themselves, as our own more energetic benevolence is apt to
do, upon sharing in the counsels of Providence and kindly helping out
its otherwise impracticable designs.

And now the broad valley twinkled with lights, that glimmered through
its duskiness like the fireflies in the garden of a Florentine palace. A
gleam of lightning from the rear of the tempest showed the circumference
of hills and the great space between, as the last cannon-flash of a
retreating army reddens across the field where it has fought. The
sculptor was on the point of descending the turret stair, when,
somewhere in the darkness that lay beneath them, a woman's voice was
heard, singing a low, sad strain.

"Hark!" said he, laying his hand on Donatello's arm.

And Donatello had said "Hark!" at the same instant.

The song, if song it could be called, that had only a wild rhythm, and
flowed forth in the fitful measure of a wind-harp, did not clothe itself
in the sharp brilliancy of the Italian tongue. The words, so far as they
could be distinguished, were German, and therefore unintelligible to the
Count, and hardly less so to the sculptor; being softened and molten,
as it were, into the melancholy richness of the voice that sung them. It
was as the murmur of a soul bewildered amid the sinful gloom of earth,
and retaining only enough memory of a better state to make sad music
of the wail, which would else have been a despairing shriek. Never was
there profounder pathos than breathed through that mysterious voice;
it brought the tears into the sculptor's eyes, with remembrances and
forebodings of whatever sorrow he had felt or apprehended; it made
Donatello sob, as chiming in with the anguish that he found unutterable,
and giving it the expression which he vaguely sought.

But, when the emotion was at its profoundest depth, the voice rose out
of it, yet so gradually that a gloom seemed to pervade it, far upward
from the abyss, and not entirely to fall away as it ascended into a
higher and purer region. At last, the auditors would have fancied that
the melody, with its rich sweetness all there, and much of its sorrow
gone, was floating around the very summit of the tower.

"Donatello," said the sculptor, when there was silence again, "had that
voice no message for your ear?"

"I dare not receive it," said Donatello; "the anguish of which it spoke
abides with me: the hope dies away with the breath that brought it
hither. It is not good for me to hear that voice."

The sculptor sighed, and left the poor penitent keeping his vigil on the
tower.





CHAPTER XXX


DONATELLO'S BUST


Kenyon, it will be remembered, had asked Donatello's permission to model
his bust. The work had now made considerable progress, and necessarily
kept the sculptor's thoughts brooding much and often upon his host's
personal characteristics. These it was his difficult office to bring out
from their depths, and interpret them to all men, showing them what they
could not discern for themselves, yet must be compelled to recognize at
a glance, on the surface of a block of marble.

He had never undertaken a portrait-bust which gave him so much trouble
as Donatello's; not that there was any special difficulty in hitting
the likeness, though even in this respect the grace and harmony of
the features seemed inconsistent with a prominent expression of
individuality; but he was chiefly perplexed how to make this genial and
kind type of countenance the index of the mind within. His acuteness and
his sympathies, indeed, were both somewhat at fault in their efforts
to enlighten him as to the moral phase through which the Count was now
passing. If at one sitting he caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a
genuine and permanent trait, it would probably be less perceptible on
a second occasion, and perhaps have vanished entirely at a third. So
evanescent a show of character threw the sculptor into despair; not
marble or clay, but cloud and vapor, was the material in which it
ought to be represented. Even the ponderous depression which constantly
weighed upon Donatello's heart could not compel him into the kind of
repose which the plastic art requires.

Hopeless of a good result, Kenyon gave up all preconceptions about the
character of his subject, and let his hands work uncontrolled with the
clay, somewhat as a spiritual medium, while holding a pen, yields it
to an unseen guidance other than that of her own will. Now and then he
fancied that this plan was destined to be the successful one. A skill
and insight beyond his consciousness seemed occasionally to take up the
task. The mystery, the miracle, of imbuing an inanimate substance
with thought, feeling, and all the intangible attributes of the soul,
appeared on the verge of being wrought. And now, as he flattered
himself, the true image of his friend was about to emerge from the
facile material, bringing with it more of Donatello's character than
the keenest observer could detect at any one moment in the face of the
original Vain expectation!--some touch, whereby the artist thought to
improve or hasten the result, interfered with the design of his unseen
spiritual assistant, and spoilt the whole. There was still the moist,
brown clay, indeed, and the features of Donatello, but without any
semblance of intelligent and sympathetic life.

"The difficulty will drive me mad, I verily believe!" cried the sculptor
nervously. "Look at the wretched piece of work yourself, my dear friend,
and tell me whether you recognize any manner of likeness to your inner
man?"

"None," replied Donatello, speaking the simple truth. "It is like
looking a stranger in the face."

This frankly unfavorable testimony so wrought with the sensitive artist,
that he fell into a passion with the stubborn image, and cared not what
might happen to it thenceforward. Wielding that wonderful power which
sculptors possess over moist clay, however refractory it may show itself
in certain respects, he compressed, elongated, widened, and otherwise
altered the features of the bust in mere recklessness, and at every
change inquired of the Count whether the expression became anywise more
satisfactory.

"Stop!" cried Donatello at last, catching the sculptor's hand. "Let
it remain so!" By some accidental handling of the clay, entirely
independent of his own will, Kenyon had given the countenance a
distorted and violent look, combining animal fierceness with intelligent
hatred. Had Hilda, or had Miriam, seen the bust, with the expression
which it had now assumed, they might have recognized Donatello's face as
they beheld it at that terrible moment when he held his victim over the
edge of the precipice.

"What have I done?" said the sculptor, shocked at his own casual
production. "It were a sin to let the clay which bears your features
harden into a look like that. Cain never wore an uglier one."

"For that very reason, let it remain!" answered the Count, who had grown
pale as ashes at the aspect of his crime, thus strangely presented to
him in another of the many guises under which guilt stares the criminal
in the face. "Do not alter it! Chisel it, rather, in eternal marble!
I will set it up in my oratory and keep it continually before my eyes.
Sadder and more horrible is a face like this, alive with my own crime,
than the dead skull which my forefathers handed down to me!"

But, without in the least heeding Donatello's remonstrances, the
sculptor again applied his artful fingers to the clay, and compelled the
bust to dismiss the expression that had so startled them both.

"Believe me," said he, turning his eyes upon his friend, full of grave
and tender sympathy, "you know not what is requisite for your spiritual
growth, seeking, as you do, to keep your soul perpetually in the
unwholesome region of remorse. It was needful for you to pass through
that dark valley, but it is infinitely dangerous to linger there too
long; there is poison in the atmosphere, when we sit down and brood in
it, instead of girding up our loins to press onward. Not despondency,
not slothful anguish, is what you now require,--but effort! Has there
been an unalterable evil in your young life? Then crowd it out with
good, or it will lie corrupting there forever, and cause your capacity
for better things to partake its noisome corruption!"

"You stir up many thoughts," said Donatello, pressing his hand upon his
brow, "but the multitude and the whirl of them make me dizzy."

They now left the sculptor's temporary studio, without observing that
his last accidental touches, with which he hurriedly effaced the look of
deadly rage, had given the bust a higher and sweeter expression than it
had hitherto worn. It is to be regretted that Kenyon had not seen
it; for only an artist, perhaps, can conceive the irksomeness, the
irritation of brain, the depression of spirits, that resulted from his
failure to satisfy himself, after so much toil and thought as he had
bestowed on Donatello's bust. In case of success, indeed, all this
thoughtful toil would have been reckoned, not only as well bestowed,
but as among the happiest hours of his life; whereas, deeming himself to
have failed, it was just so much of life that had better never have
been lived; for thus does the good or ill result of his labor throw back
sunshine or gloom upon the artist's mind. The sculptor, therefore, would
have done well to glance again at his work; for here were still the
features of the antique Faun, but now illuminated with a higher meaning,
such as the old marble never bore.

Donatello having quitted him, Kenyon spent the rest of the day strolling
about the pleasant precincts of Monte Beni, where the summer was now
so far advanced that it began, indeed, to partake of the ripe wealth of
autumn. Apricots had long been abundant, and had passed away, and plums
and cherries along with them. But now came great, juicy pears, melting
and delicious, and peaches of goodly size and tempting aspect, though
cold and watery to the palate, compared with the sculptor's rich
reminiscences of that fruit in America. The purple figs had already
enjoyed their day, and the white ones were luscious now. The contadini
(who, by this time, knew Kenyon well) found many clusters of ripe grapes
for him, in every little globe of which was included a fragrant draught
of the sunny Monte Beni wine.

Unexpectedly, in a nook close by the farmhouse, he happened upon a spot
where the vintage had actually commenced. A great heap of early ripened
grapes had been gathered, and thrown into a mighty tub. In the middle
of it stood a lusty and jolly contadino, nor stood, merely, but stamped
with all his might, and danced amain; while the red juice bathed his
feet, and threw its foam midway up his brown and shaggy legs. Here,
then, was the very process that shows so picturesquely in Scripture
and in poetry, of treading out the wine-press and dyeing the feet and
garments with the crimson effusion as with the blood of a battlefield.
The memory of the process does not make the Tuscan wine taste more
deliciously. The contadini hospitably offered Kenyon a sample of the new
liquor, that had already stood fermenting for a day or two. He had tried
a similar draught, however, in years past, and was little inclined to
make proof of it again; for he knew that it would be a sour and bitter
juice, a wine of woe and tribulation, and that the more a man drinks of
such liquor, the sorrier he is likely to be.

The scene reminded the sculptor of our New England vintages, where the
big piles of golden and rosy apples lie under the orchard trees, in the
mild, autumnal sunshine; and the creaking cider-mill, set in motion by
a circumgyratory horse, is all a-gush with the luscious juice. To speak
frankly, the cider-making is the more picturesque sight of the two,
and the new, sweet cider an infinitely better drink than the ordinary,
unripe Tuscan wine. Such as it is, however, the latter fills thousands
upon thousands of small, flat barrels, and, still growing thinner and
sharper, loses the little life it had, as wine, and becomes apotheosized
as a more praiseworthy vinegar.

Yet all these vineyard scenes, and the processes connected with the
culture of the grape, had a flavor of poetry about them. The toil that
produces those kindly gifts of nature which are not the substance of
life, but its luxury, is unlike other toil. We are inclined to fancy
that it does not bend the sturdy frame and stiffen the overwrought
muscles, like the labor that is devoted in sad, hard earnest to
raise grain for sour bread. Certainly, the sunburnt young men and
dark-cheeked, laughing girls, who weeded the rich acres of Monte Beni,
might well enough have passed for inhabitants of an unsophisticated
Arcadia. Later in the season, when the true vintage time should come,
and the wine of Sunshine gush into the vats, it was hardly too wild a
dream that Bacchus himself might revisit the haunts which he loved of
old. But, alas! where now would he find the Faun with whom we see him
consorting in so many an antique group?

Donatello's remorseful anguish saddened this primitive and delightful
life. Kenyon had a pain of his own, moreover, although not all a pain,
in the never quiet, never satisfied yearning of his heart towards Hilda.
He was authorized to use little freedom towards that shy maiden, even
in his visions; so that he almost reproached himself when sometimes his
imagination pictured in detail the sweet years that they might spend
together, in a retreat like this. It had just that rarest quality of
remoteness from the actual and ordinary world B a remoteness
through which all delights might visit them freely, sifted from all
troubles--which lovers so reasonably insist upon, in their ideal
arrangements for a happy union. It is possible, indeed, that even
Donatello's grief and Kenyon's pale, sunless affection lent a charm
to Monte Beni, which it would not have retained amid a more abundant
joyousness. The sculptor strayed amid its vineyards and orchards,
its dells and tangled shrubberies, with somewhat the sensations of an
adventurer who should find his way to the site of ancient Eden, and
behold its loveliness through the transparency of that gloom which has
been brooding over those haunts of innocence ever since the fall. Adam
saw it in a brighter sunshine, but never knew the shade of Pensive
beauty which Eden won from his expulsion.

It was in the decline of the afternoon that Kenyon returned from his
long, musing ramble, Old Tomaso--between whom and himself for some time
past there had been a mysterious understanding,--met him in the entrance
hall, and drew him a little aside.

"The signorina would speak with you," he whispered.

"In the chapel?" asked the sculptor.

"No; in the saloon beyond it," answered the butler: "the entrance you
once saw the signorina appear through it is near the altar, hidden
behind the tapestry."

Kenyon lost no time in obeying the summons.





CHAPTER XXXI


THE MARBLE SALOON


In an old Tuscan villa, a chapel ordinarily makes one among the numerous
apartments; though it often happens that the door is permanently closed,
the key lost, and the place left to itself, in dusty sanctity, like that
chamber in man's heart where he hides his religious awe. This was very
much the case with the chapel of Monte Beni. One rainy day, however,
in his wanderings through the great, intricate house, Kenyon had
unexpectedly found his way into it, and been impressed by its solemn
aspect. The arched windows, high upward in the wall, and darkened with
dust and cobweb, threw down a dim light that showed the altar, with a
picture of a martyrdom above, and some tall tapers ranged before it.
They had apparently been lighted, and burned an hour or two, and been
extinguished perhaps half a century before. The marble vase at the
entrance held some hardened mud at the bottom, accruing from the dust
that had settled in it during the gradual evaporation of the holy water;
and a spider (being an insect that delights in pointing the moral of
desolation and neglect) had taken pains to weave a prodigiously thick
tissue across the circular brim. An old family banner, tattered by
the moths, drooped from the vaulted roof. In niches there were some
mediaeval busts of Donatello's forgotten ancestry; and among them, it
might be, the forlorn visage of that hapless knight between whom and the
fountain-nymph had occurred such tender love passages.

Throughout all the jovial prosperity of Monte Beni, this one spot within
the domestic walls had kept itself silent, stern, and sad. When the
individual or the family retired from song and mirth, they here sought
those realities which men do not invite their festive associates to
share. And here, on the occasion above referred to, the sculptor had
discovered--accidentally, so far as he was concerned, though with a
purpose on her part--that there was a guest under Donatello's roof,
whose presence the Count did not suspect. An interview had since taken
place, and he was now summoned to another.

He crossed the chapel, in compliance with Tomaso's instructions, and,
passing through the side entrance, found himself in a saloon, of no
great size, but more magnificent than he had supposed the villa to
contain. As it was vacant, Kenyon had leisure to pace it once or twice,
and examine it with a careless sort of scrutiny, before any person
appeared.

This beautiful hall was floored with rich marbles, in artistically
arranged figures and compartments. The walls, likewise, were almost
entirely cased in marble of various kinds, the prevalent, variety
being giallo antico, intermixed with verd-antique, and others equally
precious. The splendor of the giallo antico, however, was what gave
character to the saloon; and the large and deep niches, apparently
intended for full length statues, along the walls, were lined with the
same costly material. Without visiting Italy, one can have no idea of
the beauty and magnificence that are produced by these fittings-up of
polished marble. Without such experience, indeed, we do not even know
what marble means, in any sense, save as the white limestone of which
we carve our mantelpieces. This rich hall of Monte Beni, moreover, was
adorned, at its upper end, with two pillars that seemed to consist of
Oriental alabaster; and wherever there was a space vacant of precious
and variegated marble, it was frescoed with ornaments in arabesque.
Above, there was a coved and vaulted ceiling, glowing with pictured
scenes, which affected Kenyon with a vague sense of splendor, without
his twisting his neck to gaze at them.

It is one of the special excellences of such a saloon of polished and
richly colored marble, that decay can never tarnish it. Until the house
crumbles down upon it, it shines indestructibly, and, with a little
dusting, looks just as brilliant in its three hundredth year as the day
after the final slab of giallo antico was fitted into the wall. To the
sculptor, at this first View of it, it seemed a hall where the sun was
magically imprisoned, and must always shine. He anticipated Miriam's
entrance, arrayed in queenly robes, and beaming with even more than the
singular beauty that had heretofore distinguished her.

While this thought was passing through his mind, the pillared door, at
the upper end of the saloon, was partly opened, and Miriam appeared. She
was very pale, and dressed in deep mourning. As she advanced towards the
sculptor, the feebleness of her step was so apparent that he made haste
to meet her, apprehending that she might sink down on the marble floor,
without the instant support of his arm.

But, with a gleam of her natural self-reliance, she declined his aid,
and, after touching her cold hand to his, went and sat down on one of
the cushioned divans that were ranged against the wall.

"You are very ill, Miriam!" said Kenyon, much shocked at her appearance.
"I had not thought of this."

"No; not so ill as I seem to you," she answered; adding despondently,
"yet I am ill enough, I believe, to die, unless some change speedily
occurs."

"What, then, is your disorder?" asked the sculptor; "and what the
remedy?"

"The disorder!" repeated Miriam. "There is none that I know of save too
much life and strength, without a purpose for one or the other. It is
my too redundant energy that is slowly--or perhaps rapidly--wearing me
away, because I can apply it to no use. The object, which I am bound to
consider my only one on earth, fails me utterly. The sacrifice which I
yearn to make of myself, my hopes, my everything, is coldly put aside.
Nothing is left for me but to brood, brood, brood, all day, all night,
in unprofitable longings and repinings."

"This is very sad, Miriam," said Kenyon.

"Ay, indeed; I fancy so," she replied, with a short, unnatural laugh.

"With all your activity of mind," resumed he, "so fertile in plans as
I have known you, can you imagine no method of bringing your resources
into play?"

"My mind is not active any longer," answered Miriam, in a cold,
indifferent tone. "It deals with one thought and no more. One
recollection paralyzes it. It is not remorse; do not think it! I put
myself out of the question, and feel neither regret nor penitence on
my own behalf. But what benumbs me, what robs me of all power,-it is
no secret for a woman to tell a man, yet I care not though you know it,
--is the certainty that I am, and must ever be, an object of horror in
Donatello's sight."

The sculptor--a young man, and cherishing a love which insulated
him from the wild experiences which some men gather--was startled to
perceive how Miriam's rich, ill-regulated nature impelled her to
fling herself, conscience and all, on one passion, the object of which
intellectually seemed far beneath her.

"How have you obtained the certainty of which you speak?" asked he,
after a pause.

"O, by a sure token," said Miriam; "a gesture, merely; a shudder, a cold
shiver, that ran through him one sunny morning when his hand happened to
touch mine! But it was enough."

"I firmly believe, Miriam," said the sculptor, "that he loves you
still."

She started, and a flush of color came tremulously over the paleness of
her cheek.

"Yes," repeated Kenyon, "if my interest in Donatello--and in yourself,
Miriam--endows me with any true insight, he not only loves you still,
but with a force and depth proportioned to the stronger grasp of his
faculties, in their new development."

"Do not deceive me," said Miriam, growing pale again.

"Not for the world!" replied Kenyon. "Here is what I take to be
the truth. There was an interval, no doubt, when the horror of some
calamity, which I need not shape out in my conjectures, threw Donatello
into a stupor of misery. Connected with the first shock there was an
intolerable pain and shuddering repugnance attaching themselves to
all the circumstances and surroundings of the event that so terribly
affected him. Was his dearest friend involved within the horror of that
moment? He would shrink from her as he shrank most of all from himself.
But as his mind roused itself,--as it rose to a higher life than he had
hitherto experienced,--whatever had been true and permanent within him
revived by the selfsame impulse. So has it been with his love."

"But, surely," said Miriam, "he knows that I am here! Why, then, except
that I am odious to him, does he not bid me welcome?"

"He is, I believe, aware of your presence here," answered the sculptor.
"Your song, a night or two ago, must have revealed it to him, and, in
truth, I had fancied that there was already a consciousness of it in
his mind. But, the more passionately he longs for your society, the more
religiously he deems himself bound to avoid it. The idea of a lifelong
penance has taken strong possession of Donatello. He gropes blindly
about him for some method of sharp self-torture, and finds, of course,
no other so efficacious as this."

"But he loves me," repeated Miriam, in a low voice, to herself. "Yes; he
loves me!"

It was strange to observe the womanly softness that came over her,
as she admitted that comfort into her bosom. The cold, unnatural
indifference of her manner, a kind of frozen passionateness which had
shocked and chilled the sculptor, disappeared. She blushed, and turned
away her eyes, knowing that there was more surprise and joy in their
dewy glances than any man save one ought to detect there.

"In other respects," she inquired at length, "is he much changed?"

"A wonderful process is going forward in Donatello's mind," answered the
sculptor. "The germs of faculties that have heretofore slept are fast
springing into activity. The world of thought is disclosing itself to
his inward sight. He startles me, at times, with his perception of deep
truths; and, quite as often, it must be owned, he compels me to smile by
the intermixture of his former simplicity with a new intelligence. But
he is bewildered with the revelations that each day brings. Out of
his bitter agony, a soul and intellect, I could almost say, have been
inspired into him."

"Ah, I could help him here!" cried Miriam, clasping her hands. "And
how sweet a toil to bend and adapt my whole nature to do him good! To
instruct, to elevate, to enrich his mind with the wealth that would flow
in upon me, had I such a motive for acquiring it! Who else can perform
the task? Who else has the tender sympathy which he requires? Who else,
save only me,--a woman, a sharer in the same dread secret, a partaker in
one identical guilt,--could meet him on such terms of intimate equality
as the case demands? With this object before me, I might feel a right to
live! Without it, it is a shame for me to have lived so long."

"I fully agree with you," said Kenyon, "that your true place is by his
side."

"Surely it is," replied Miriam. "If Donatello is entitled to aught on
earth, it is to my complete self-sacrifice for his sake. It does not
weaken his claim, methinks, that my only prospect of happiness a
fearful word, however lies in the good that may accrue to him from our
intercourse. But he rejects me! He will not listen to the whisper of his
heart, telling him that she, most wretched, who beguiled him into evil,
might guide him to a higher innocence than that from which he fell. How
is this first great difficulty to be obviated?"

"It lies at your own option, Miriam, to do away the obstacle, at any
moment," remarked the sculptor. "It is but to ascend Donatello's tower,
and you will meet him there, under the eye of God."

"I dare not," answered Miriam. "No; I dare not!"

"Do you fear," asked the sculptor, "the dread eye-witness whom I have
named?"

"No; for, as far as I can see into that cloudy and inscrutable thing, my
heart, it has none but pure motives," replied Miriam. "But, my friend,
you little know what a weak or what a strong creature a woman is! I
fear not Heaven, in this case, at least, but--shall I confess it? I
am greatly in dread of Donatello. Once he shuddered at my touch. If he
shudder once again, or frown, I die!"

Kenyon could not but marvel at the subjection into which this proud and
self-dependent woman had willfully flung herself, hanging her life upon
the chance of an angry or favorable regard from a person who, a little
while before, had seemed the plaything of a moment. But, in Miriam's
eyes, Donatello was always, thenceforth, invested with the tragic
dignity of their hour of crime; and, furthermore, the keen and deep
insight, with which her love endowed her, enabled her to know him
far better than he could be known by ordinary observation. Beyond all
question, since she loved him so, there was a force in Donatello worthy
of her respect and love.

"You see my weakness," said Miriam, flinging out her hands, as a person
does when a defect is acknowledged, and beyond remedy. "What I need,
now, is an opportunity to show my strength."

"It has occurred to me," Kenyon remarked, "that the time is come when
it may be desirable to remove Donatello from the complete seclusion in
which he buries himself. He has struggled long enough with one idea.
He now needs a variety of thought, which cannot be otherwise so readily
supplied to him, as through the medium of a variety of scenes. His mind
is awakened, now; his heart, though full of pain, is no longer benumbed.
They should have food and solace. If he linger here much longer, I fear
that he may sink back into a lethargy. The extreme excitability, which
circumstances have imparted to his moral system, has its dangers and
its advantages; it being one of the dangers, that an obdurate scar may
supervene upon its very tenderness. Solitude has done what it could for
him; now, for a while, let him be enticed into the outer world."

"What is your plan, then?" asked Miriam.

"Simply," replied Kenyon, "to persuade Donatello to be my companion in
a ramble among these hills and valleys. The little adventures and
vicissitudes of travel will do him infinite good. After his recent
profound experience, he will re-create the world by the new eyes with
which he will regard it. He will escape, I hope, out of a morbid life,
and find his way into a healthy one."

"And what is to be my part in this process?" inquired Miriam sadly, and
not without jealousy. "You are taking him from me, and putting yourself,
and all manner of living interests, into the place which I ought to
fill!"

"It would rejoice me, Miriam, to yield the entire responsibility of this
office to yourself," answered the sculptor. "I do not pretend to be
the guide and counsellor whom Donatello needs; for, to mention no
other obstacle, I am a man, and between man and man there is always an
insuperable gulf. They can never quite grasp each other's hands; and
therefore man never derives any intimate help, any heart sustenance,
from his brother man, but from woman--his mother, his sister, or his
wife. Be Donatello's friend at need, therefore, and most gladly will I
resign him!"

"It is not kind to taunt me thus," said Miriam. "I have told you that I
cannot do what you suggest, because I dare not."

"Well, then," rejoined the sculptor, "see if there is any possibility of
adapting yourself to my scheme. The incidents of a journey often fling
people together in the oddest and therefore the most natural way.
Supposing you were to find yourself on the same route, a reunion with
Donatello might ensue, and Providence have a larger hand in it than
either of us."

"It is not a hopeful plan," said Miriam, shaking her head, after a
moment's thought; "yet I will not reject it without a trial. Only in
case it fail, here is a resolution to which I bind myself, come what
come may! You know the bronze statue of Pope Julius in the great square
of Perugia? I remember standing in the shadow of that statue one sunny
noontime, and being impressed by its paternal aspect, and fancying that
a blessing fell upon me from its outstretched hand. Ever since, I have
had a superstition, you will call it foolish, but sad and ill-fated
persons always dream such things,--that, if I waited long enough in
that same spot, some good event would come to pass. Well, my friend,
precisely a fortnight after you begin your tour,--unless we sooner
meet,--bring Donatello, at noon, to the base of the statue. You will
find me there!"

Kenyon assented to the proposed arrangement, and, after some
conversation respecting his contemplated line of travel, prepared to
take his leave. As he met Miriam's eyes, in bidding farewell, he was
surprised at the new, tender gladness that beamed out of them, and at
the appearance of health and bloom, which, in this little while, had
overspread her face.'

"May I tell you, Miriam," said he, smiling, "that you are still as
beautiful as ever?"

"You have a right to notice it," she replied, "for, if it be so, my
faded bloom has been revived by the hopes you give me. Do you, then,
think me beautiful? I rejoice, most truly. Beauty--if I possess
it--shall be one of the instruments by which I will try to educate and
elevate him, to whose good I solely dedicate myself."

The sculptor had nearly reached the door, when, hearing her call him, he
turned back, and beheld Miriam still standing where he had left her, in
the magnificent hall which seemed only a fit setting for her beauty. She
beckoned him to return.

"You are a man of refined taste," said she; "more than that,--a man of
delicate sensibility. Now tell me frankly, and on your honor! Have I not
shocked you many times during this interview by my betrayal of woman's
cause, my lack of feminine modesty, my reckless, passionate, most
indecorous avowal, that I live only in the life of one who, perhaps,
scorns and shudders at me?"

Thus adjured, however difficult the point to which she brought him, the
sculptor was not a man to swerve aside from the simple truth.

"Miriam," replied he, "you exaggerate the impression made upon my
mind; but it has been painful, and somewhat of the character which you
suppose."

"I knew it," said Miriam, mournfully, and with no resentment. "What
remains of my finer nature would have told me so, even if it had not
been perceptible in all your manner. Well, my dear friend, when you
go back to Rome, tell Hilda what her severity has done! She was all
womanhood to me; and when she cast me off, I had no longer any terms to
keep with the reserves and decorums of my sex. Hilda has set me free!
Pray tell her so, from Miriam, and thank her!"

"I shall tell Hilda nothing that will give her pain," answered Kenyon.
"But, Miriam, though I know not what passed between her and yourself, I
feel,--and let the noble frankness of your disposition forgive me if
I say so,--I feel that she was right. You have a thousand admirable
qualities. Whatever mass of evil may have fallen into your life,
--pardon me, but your own words suggest it,--you are still as capable
as ever of many high and heroic virtues. But the white shining purity
of Hilda's nature is a thing apart; and she is bound, by the undefiled
material of which God moulded her, to keep that severity which I, as
well as you, have recognized."

"O, you are right!" said Miriam; "I never questioned it; though, as
I told you, when she cast me off, it severed some few remaining bonds
between me and decorous womanhood. But were there anything to forgive, I
do forgive her. May you win her virgin heart; for methinks there can
be few men in this evil world who are not more unworthy of her than
yourself."





CHAPTER XXXII


SCENES BY THE WAY


When it came to the point of quitting the reposeful life of Monte Beni,
the sculptor was not without regrets, and would willingly have dreamed a
little longer of the sweet paradise on earth that Hilda's presence
there might make. Nevertheless, amid all its repose, he had begun to be
sensible of a restless melancholy, to which the cultivators of the ideal
arts are more liable than sturdier men. On his own part, therefore, and
leaving Donatello out of the case, he would have judged it well to go.
He made parting visits to the legendary dell, and to other delightful
spots with which he had grown familiar; he climbed the tower again, and
saw a sunset and a moonrise over the great valley; he drank, on the
eve of his departure, one flask, and then another, of the Monte Beni
Sunshine, and stored up its flavor in his memory as the standard of what
is exquisite in wine. These things accomplished, Kenyon was ready for
the journey.

Donatello had not very easily been stirred out of the peculiar
sluggishness, which enthralls and bewitches melancholy people. He had
offered merely a passive resistance, however, not an active one, to his
friend's schemes; and when the appointed hour came, he yielded to the
impulse which Kenyon failed not to apply; and was started upon the
journey before he had made up his mind to undertake it. They wandered
forth at large, like two knights-errant, among the valleys, and the
mountains, and the old mountain towns of that picturesque and
lovely region. Save to keep the appointment with Miriam, a fortnight
thereafter, in the great square of Perugia, there was nothing more
definite in the sculptor's plan than that they should let themselves
be blown hither and thither like Winged seeds, that mount upon each
wandering breeze. Yet there was an idea of fatality implied in the
simile of the winged seeds which did not altogether suit Kenyon's fancy;
for, if you look closely into the matter, it will be seen that whatever
appears most vagrant, and utterly purposeless, turns out, in the end,
to have been impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswerving
track. Chance and change love to deal with men's settled plans, not with
their idle vagaries. If we desire unexpected and unimaginable events,
we should contrive an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the
future to take one inevitable shape; then comes in the unexpected, and
shatters our design in fragments.

The travellers set forth on horseback, and purposed to perform much of
their aimless journeyings under the moon, and in the cool of the morning
or evening twilight; the midday sun, while summer had hardly begun to
trail its departing skirts over Tuscany, being still too fervid to allow
of noontide exposure.

For a while, they wandered in that same broad valley which Kenyon had
viewed with such delight from the Monte Beni tower. The sculptor soon
began to enjoy the idle activity of their new life, which the lapse of
a day or two sufficed to establish as a kind of system; it is so natural
for mankind to be nomadic, that a very little taste of that primitive
mode of existence subverts the settled habits of many preceding years.
Kenyon's cares, and whatever gloomy ideas before possessed him, seemed
to be left at Monte Beni, and were scarcely remembered by the time
that its gray tower grew undistinguishable on the brown hillside. His
perceptive faculties, which had found little exercise of late, amid so
thoughtful a way of life, became keen, and kept his eyes busy with a
hundred agreeable scenes.

He delighted in the picturesque bits of rustic character and manners, so
little of which ever comes upon the surface of our life at home. There,
for example, were the old women, tending pigs or sheep by the wayside.
As they followed the vagrant steps of their charge, these venerable
ladies kept spinning yarn with that elsewhere forgotten contrivance,
the distaff; and so wrinkled and stern looking were they, that you might
have taken them for the Parcae, spinning the threads of human destiny.
In contrast with their great-grandmothers were the children, leading
goats of shaggy beard, tied by the horns, and letting them browse on
branch and shrub. It is the fashion of Italy to add the petty industry
of age and childhood to the hum of human toil. To the eyes of an
observer from the Western world, it was a strange spectacle to see
sturdy, sunburnt creatures, in petticoats, but otherwise manlike,
toiling side by side with male laborers, in the rudest work of the
fields. These sturdy women (if as such we must recognize them) wore the
high-crowned, broad brimmed hat of Tuscan straw, the customary female
head-apparel; and, as every breeze blew back its breadth of brim, the
sunshine constantly added depth to the brown glow of their cheeks. The
elder sisterhood, however, set off their witch-like ugliness to the
worst advantage with black felt hats, bequeathed them, one would fancy,
by their long-buried husbands.

Another ordinary sight, as sylvan as the above and more agreeable, was
a girl, bearing on her back a huge bundle of green twigs and shrubs,
or grass, intermixed with scarlet poppies and blue flowers; the verdant
burden being sometimes of such size as to hide the bearer's figure, and
seem a self-moving mass of fragrant bloom and verdure. Oftener, however,
the bundle reached only halfway down the back of the rustic nymph,
leaving in sight her well-developed lower limbs, and the crooked knife,
hanging behind her, with which she had been reaping this strange
harvest sheaf. A pre-Raphaelite artist (he, for instance, who painted
so marvellously a wind-swept heap of autumnal leaves) might find an
admirable subject in one of these Tuscan girls, stepping with a free,
erect, and graceful carriage. The miscellaneous herbage and tangled
twigs and blossoms of her bundle, crowning her head (while her ruddy,
comely face looks out between the hanging side festoons like a
larger flower), would give the painter boundless scope for the minute
delineation which he loves.

Though mixed up with what was rude and earthlike, there was still a
remote, dreamlike, Arcadian charm, which is scarcely to be found in the
daily toil of other lands. Among the pleasant features of the wayside
were always the vines, clambering on fig-trees, or other sturdy trunks;
they wreathed themselves in huge and rich festoons from one tree to
another, suspending clusters of ripening grapes in the interval between.
Under such careless mode of culture, the luxuriant vine is a lovelier
spectacle than where it produces a more precious liquor, and is
therefore more artificially restrained and trimmed. Nothing can be
more picturesque than an old grapevine, with almost a trunk of its own,
clinging fast around its supporting tree. Nor does the picture lack its
moral. You might twist it to more than one grave purpose, as you saw how
the knotted, serpentine growth imprisoned within its strong embrace
the friend that had supported its tender infancy; and how (as seemingly
flexible natures are prone to do) it converted the sturdier tree
entirely to its own selfish ends, extending its innumerable arms on
every bough, and permitting hardly a leaf to sprout except its own. It
occurred to Kenyon, that the enemies of the vine, in his native land,
might here have seen an emblem of the remorseless gripe, which the habit
of vinous enjoyment lays upon its victim, possessing him wholly, and
letting him live no life but such as it bestows.

The scene was not less characteristic when their path led the two
wanderers through some small, ancient town. There, besides the
peculiarities of present life, they saw tokens of the life that had long
ago been lived and flung aside. The little town, such as we see in our
mind's eye, would have its gate and its surrounding walls, so ancient
and massive that ages had not sufficed to crumble them away; but in the
lofty upper portion of the gateway, still standing over the empty arch,
where there was no longer a gate to shut, there would be a dove-cote,
and peaceful doves for the only warders. Pumpkins lay ripening in the
open chambers of the structure. Then, as for the town wall, on the
outside an orchard extends peacefully along its base, full, not of
apple-trees, but of those old humorists with gnarled trunks and twisted
boughs, the olives. Houses have been built upon the ramparts, or
burrowed out of their ponderous foundation. Even the gray, martial
towers, crowned with ruined turrets, have been converted into rustic
habitations, from the windows of which hang ears of Indian corn. At a
door, that has been broken through the massive stonework where it
was meant to be strongest, some contadini are winnowing grain. Small
windows, too, are pierced through the whole line of ancient wall, so
that it seems a row of dwellings with one continuous front, built in a
strange style of needless strength; but remnants of the old battlements
and machicolations are interspersed with the homely chambers and
earthen-tiled housetops; and all along its extent both grapevines and
running flower-shrubs are encouraged to clamber and sport over the
roughness of its decay.

Finally the long grass, intermixed with weeds and wild flowers, waves
on the uppermost height of the shattered rampart; and it is exceedingly
pleasant in the golden sunshine of the afternoon to behold the warlike
precinct so friendly in its old days, and so overgrown with rural
peace. In its guard rooms, its prison chambers, and scooped out of its
ponderous breadth, there are dwellings nowadays where happy human lives
are spent. Human parents and broods of children nestle in them, even as
the swallows nestle in the little crevices along the broken summit of
the wall.

Passing through the gateway of this same little town, challenged only
by those watchful sentinels, the pigeons, we find ourselves in a long,
narrow street, paved from side to side with flagstones, in the old Roman
fashion. Nothing can exceed the grim ugliness of the houses, most of
which are three or four stories high, stone built, gray, dilapidated, or
half-covered with plaster in patches, and contiguous all along from
end to end of the town. Nature, in the shape of tree, shrub, or grassy
sidewalk, is as much shut out from the one street of the rustic village
as from the heart of any swarming city. The dark and half ruinous
habitations, with their small windows, many of which are drearily closed
with wooden shutters, are but magnified hovels, piled story upon story,
and squalid with the grime that successive ages have left behind them.
It would be a hideous scene to contemplate in a rainy day, or when
no human life pervaded it. In the summer noon, however, it possesses
vivacity enough to keep itself cheerful; for all the within-doors of
the village then bubbles over upon the flagstones, or looks out from the
small windows, and from here and there a balcony. Some of the populace
are at the butcher's shop; others are at the fountain, which gushes into
a marble basin that resembles an antique sarcophagus. A tailor is sewing
before his door with a young priest seated sociably beside him; a burly
friar goes by with an empty wine-barrel on his head; children are at
play; women, at their own doorsteps, mend clothes, embroider, weave hats
of Tuscan straw, or twirl the distaff. Many idlers, meanwhile, strolling
from one group to another, let the warm day slide by in the sweet,
interminable task of doing nothing.

From all these people there comes a babblement that seems quite
disproportioned to the number of tongues that make it. So many words are
not uttered in a New England village throughout the year--except it
be at a political canvass or town-meeting--as are spoken here, with no
especial purpose, in a single day. Neither so many words, nor so much
laughter; for people talk about nothing as if they were terribly
in earnest, and make merry at nothing as if it were the best of all
possible jokes. In so long a time as they have existed, and within such
narrow precincts, these little walled towns are brought into a closeness
of society that makes them but a larger household. All the inhabitants
are akin to each, and each to all; they assemble in the street as their
common saloon, and thus live and die in a familiarity of intercourse,
such as never can be known where a village is open at either end, and
all roundabout, and has ample room within itself.

Stuck up beside the door of one house, in this village street, is a
withered bough; and on a stone seat, just under the shadow of the
bough, sits a party of jolly drinkers, making proof of the new wine, or
quaffing the old, as their often-tried and comfortable friend. Kenyon
draws bridle here (for the bough, or bush, is a symbol of the wine-shop
at this day in Italy, as it was three hundred years ago in England), and
calls for a goblet of the deep, mild, purple juice, well diluted with
water from the fountain. The Sunshine of Monte Beni would be welcome
now. Meanwhile, Donatello has ridden onward, but alights where a shrine,
with a burning lamp before it, is built into the wall of an inn stable.
He kneels and crosses himself, and mutters a brief prayer, without
attracting notice from the passers-by, many of whom are parenthetically
devout in a similar fashion. By this time the sculptor has drunk off his
wine-and-water, and our two travellers resume their way, emerging from
the opposite gate of the village.

Before them, again, lies the broad valley, with a mist so thinly
scattered over it as to be perceptible only in the distance, and most so
in the nooks of the hills. Now that we have called it mist, it seems
a mistake not rather to have called it sunshine; the glory of so much
light being mingled with so little gloom, in the airy material of that
vapor. Be it mist or sunshine, it adds a touch of ideal beauty to the
scene, almost persuading the spectator that this valley and those hills
are visionary, because their visible atmosphere is so like the substance
of a dream.

Immediately about them, however, there were abundant tokens that the
country was not really the paradise it looked to be, at a casual glance.
Neither the wretched cottages nor the dreary farmhouses seemed to
partake of the prosperity, with which so kindly a climate, and so
fertile a portion of Mother Earth's bosom, should have filled them, one
and all. But possibly the peasant inhabitants do not exist in so grimy
a poverty, and in homes so comfortless, as a stranger, with his native
ideas of those matters, would be likely to imagine. The Italians appear
to possess none of that emulative pride which we see in our New England
villages, where every householder, according to his taste and
means, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the grassy
and elm-shadowed wayside. In Italy there are no neat doorsteps
and thresholds; no pleasant, vine-sheltered porches; none of those
grass-plots or smoothly shorn lawns, which hospitably invite the
imagination into the sweet domestic interiors of English life.
Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is
especially disheartening in the immediate neighborhood of an Italian
home.

An artist, it is true, might often thank his stars for those old houses,
so picturesquely time-stained, and with the plaster falling in blotches
from the ancient brick-work. The prison-like, iron-barred windows, and
the wide arched, dismal entrance, admitting on one hand to the stable,
on the other to the kitchen, might impress him as far better worth
his pencil than the newly painted pine boxes, in which--if he be an
American--his countrymen live and thrive. But there is reason to suspect
that a people are waning to decay and ruin the moment that their life
becomes fascinating either in the poet's imagination or the painter's
eye.

As usual on Italian waysides, the wanderers passed great, black crosses,
hung with all the instruments of the sacred agony and passion: there
were the crown of thorns, the hammer and nails, the pincers, the spear,
the sponge; and perched over the whole, the cock that crowed to St.
Peter's remorseful conscience. Thus, while the fertile scene showed the
never-failing beneficence of the Creator towards man in his transitory
state, these symbols reminded each wayfarer of the Saviour's infinitely
greater love for him as an immortal spirit. Beholding these consecrated
stations, the idea seemed to strike Donatello of converting the
otherwise aimless journey into a penitential pilgrimage. At each of them
he alighted to kneel and kiss the cross, and humbly press his forehead
against its foot; and this so invariably, that the sculptor soon learned
to draw bridle of his own accord. It may be, too, heretic as he was,
that Kenyon likewise put up a prayer, rendered more fervent by the
symbols before his eyes, for the peace of his friend's conscience and
the pardon of the sin that so oppressed him.

Not only at the crosses did Donatello kneel, but at each of the many
shrines, where the Blessed Virgin in fresco--faded with sunshine and
half washed out with showers--looked benignly at her worshipper; or
where she was represented in a wooden image, or a bas-relief of plaster
or marble, as accorded with the means of the devout person who built,
or restored from a mediaeval antiquity, these places of wayside worship.
They were everywhere: under arched niches, or in little penthouses with
a brick tiled roof just large enough to shelter them; or perhaps in
some bit of old Roman masonry, the founders of which had died before the
Advent; or in the wall of a country inn or farmhouse; or at the midway
point of a bridge; or in the shallow cavity of a natural rock; or high
upward in the deep cuts of the road. It appeared to the sculptor that
Donatello prayed the more earnestly and the more hopefully at these
shrines, because the mild face of the Madonna promised him to intercede
as a tender mother betwixt the poor culprit and the awfulness of
judgment.

It was beautiful to observe, indeed, how tender was the soul of man and
woman towards the Virgin mother, in recognition of the tenderness which,
as their faith taught them, she immortally cherishes towards all human
souls. In the wire-work screen 'before each shrine hung offerings of
roses, or whatever flower was sweetest and most seasonable; some already
wilted and withered, some fresh with that very morning's dewdrops.
Flowers there were, too, that, being artificial, never bloomed on earth,
nor would ever fade. The thought occurred to Kenyon, that flower-pots
with living plants might be set within the niches, or even that
rose-trees, and all kinds of flowering shrubs, might be reared under the
shrines, and taught to twine and wreathe themselves around; so that
the Virgin should dwell within a bower of verdure, bloom, and fragrant
freshness, symbolizing a homage perpetually new. There are many things
in the religious customs of these people that seem good; many things,
at least, that might be both good and beautiful, if the soul of goodness
and the sense of beauty were as much alive in the Italians now as they
must have been when those customs were first imagined and adopted. But,
instead of blossoms on the shrub, or freshly gathered, with the dewdrops
on their leaves, their worship, nowadays, is best symbolized by the
artificial flower.

The sculptor fancied, moreover (but perhaps it was his heresy that
suggested the idea), that it would be of happy influence to place a
comfortable and shady seat beneath every wayside shrine. Then the weary
and sun-scorched traveller, while resting himself under her protecting
shadow, might thank the Virgin for her hospitality. Nor, perchance,
were he to regale himself, even in such a consecrated spot, with the
fragrance of a pipe, would it rise to heaven more offensively than
the smoke of priestly incense. We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly
estimate the Holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment,
good in itself, is not good to do religiously.

Whatever may be the iniquities of the papal system, it was a wise and
lovely sentiment that set up the frequent shrine and cross along the
roadside. No wayfarer, bent on whatever worldly errand, can fail to be
reminded, at every mile or two, that this is not the business which
most concerns him. The pleasure-seeker is silently admonished to look
heavenward for a joy infinitely greater than he now possesses. The
wretch in temptation beholds the cross, and is warned that, if he yield,
the Saviour's agony for his sake will have been endured in vain. The
stubborn criminal, whose heart has long been like a stone, feels it
throb anew with dread and hope; and our poor Donatello, as he went
kneeling from shrine to cross, and from cross to shrine, doubtless found
an efficacy in these symbols that helped him towards a higher penitence.

Whether the young Count of Monte Beni noticed the fact, or no, there was
more than one incident of their journey that led Kenyon to believe that
they were attended, or closely followed, or preceded, near at hand, by
some one who took an interest in their motions. As it were, the
step, the sweeping garment, the faintly heard breath, of an invisible
companion, was beside them, as they went on their way. It was like a
dream that had strayed out of their slumber, and was haunting them in
the daytime, when its shadowy substance could have neither density nor
outline, in the too obtrusive light. After sunset, it grew a little more
distinct.

"On the left of that last shrine," asked the sculptor, as they rode,
under the moon, "did you observe the figure of a woman kneeling, with
her, face hidden in her hands?"

"I never looked that way," replied Donatello. "I was saying my own
prayer. It was some penitent, perchance. May the Blessed Virgin be the
more gracious to the poor soul, because she is a woman."





CHAPTER XXXIII


PICTURED WINDOWS


After wide wanderings through the valley, the two travellers directed
their course towards its boundary of hills. Here, the natural scenery
and men's modifications of it immediately took a different aspect from
that of the fertile and smiling plain. Not unfrequently there was a
convent on the hillside; or, on some insulated promontory, a mined
castle, once the den of a robber chieftain, who was accustomed to dash
down from his commanding height upon the road that wound below. For ages
back, the old fortress had been flinging down its crumbling ramparts,
stone by stone, towards the grimy village at its foot.

Their road wound onward among the hills, which rose steep and lofty from
the scanty level space that lay between them. They continually thrust
their great bulks before the wayfarers, as if grimly resolute to forbid
their passage, or closed abruptly behind them, when they still dared to
proceed. A gigantic hill would set its foot right down before them, and
only at the last moment would grudgingly withdraw it, just far enough to
let them creep towards another obstacle. Adown these rough heights were
visible the dry tracks of many a mountain torrent that had lived a life
too fierce and passionate to be a long one. Or, perhaps, a stream was
yet hurrying shyly along the edge of a far wider bed of pebbles and
shelving rock than it seemed to need, though not too wide for the
swollen rage of which this shy rivulet was capable. A stone bridge
bestrode it, the ponderous arches of which were upheld and rendered
indestructible by the weight of the very stones that threatened to crush
them down. Old Roman toil was perceptible in the foundations of that
massive bridge; the first weight that it ever bore was that of an army
of the Republic.

Threading these defiles, they would arrive at some immemorial city,
crowning the high summit of a hill with its cathedral, its many
churches, and public edifices, all of Gothic architecture. With no more
level ground than a single piazza in the midst, the ancient town tumbled
its crooked and narrow streets down the mountainside, through arched
passages and by steps of stone. The aspect of everything was awfully
old; older, indeed, in its effect on the imagination than Rome itself,
because history does not lay its finger on these forgotten edifices and
tell us all about their origin. Etruscan princes may have dwelt in them.
A thousand years, at all events, would seem but a middle age for these
structures. They are built of such huge, square stones, that their
appearance of ponderous durability distresses the beholder with the idea
that they can never fall,--never crumble away,--never be less fit than
now for human habitation. Many of them may once have been palaces, and
still retain a squalid grandeur. But, gazing at them, we recognize how
undesirable it is to build the tabernacle of our brief lifetime out of
permanent materials, and with a view to their being occupied by future
'generations.

All towns should be made capable of purification by fire, or of decay,
within each half-century. Otherwise, they become the hereditary haunts
of vermin and noisomeness, besides standing apart from the possibility
of such improvements as are constantly introduced into the rest of
man's contrivances and accommodations. It is beautiful, no doubt, and
exceedingly satisfactory to some of our natural instincts, to imagine
our far posterity dwelling under the same roof-tree as ourselves. Still,
when people insist on building indestructible houses, they incur, or
their children do, a misfortune analogous to that of the Sibyl, when
she obtained the grievous boon of immortality. So we may build almost
immortal habitations, it is true; but we cannot keep them from growing
old, musty, unwholesome, dreary,--full of death scents, ghosts, and
murder stains; in short, such habitations as one sees everywhere in
Italy, be they hovels or palaces.

"You should go with me to my native country," observed the sculptor to
Donatello. "In that fortunate land, each generation has only its own
sins and sorrows to bear. Here, it seems as if all the weary and dreary
Past were piled upon the back of the Present. If I were to lose my
spirits in this country,--if I were to suffer any heavy misfortune
here,--methinks it would be impossible to stand up against it, under
such adverse influences."

"The sky itself is an old roof, now," answered the Count; "and, no
doubt, the sins of mankind have made it gloomier than it used to be."
"O, my poor Faun," thought Kenyon to himself, "how art thou changed!"

A city, like this of which we speak, seems a sort of stony growth out
of the hillside, or a fossilized town; so ancient and strange it looks,
without enough of life and juiciness in it to be any longer susceptible
of decay. An earthquake would afford it the only chance of being ruined,
beyond its present ruin.

Yet, though dead to all the purposes for which we live to-day, the place
has its glorious recollections, and not merely rude and warlike ones,
but those of brighter and milder triumphs, the fruits of which we still
enjoy. Italy can count several of these lifeless towns which, four or
five hundred years ago, were each the birthplace of its own school of
art; nor have they yet forgotten to be proud of the dark old pictures,
and the faded frescos, the pristine beauty of which was a light and
gladness to the world. But now, unless one happens to be a painter,
these famous works make us miserably desperate. They are poor, dim
ghosts of what, when Giotto or Cimabue first created them, threw a
splendor along the stately aisles; so far gone towards nothingness,
in our day, that scarcely a hint of design or expression can glimmer
through the dusk. Those early artists did well to paint their frescos.
Glowing on the church-walls, they might be looked upon as symbols of the
living spirit that made Catholicism a true religion, and that glorified
it as long as it retained a genuine life; they filled the transepts with
a radiant throng of saints and angels, and threw around the high altar
a faint reflection--as much as mortals could see, or bear--of a Diviner
Presence. But now that the colors are so wretchedly bedimmed,--now that
blotches of plastered wall dot the frescos all over, like a mean reality
thrusting itself through life's brightest illusions,--the next best
artist to Cimabue or Giotto or Ghirlandaio or Pinturicchio will be he
that shall reverently cover their ruined masterpieces with whitewash!

Kenyon, however, being an earnest student and critic of Art, lingered
long before these pathetic relics; and Donatello, in his present phase
of penitence, thought no time spent amiss while he could be kneeling
before an altar. Whenever they found a cathedral, therefore, or a Gothic
church, the two travellers were of one mind to enter it. In some of
these holy edifices they saw pictures that time had not dimmed nor
injured in the least, though they perhaps belonged to as old a school
of Art as any that were perishing around them. These were the painted
windows; and as often as he gazed at them the sculptor blessed the
medieval time, and its gorgeous contrivances of splendor; for surely the
skill of man has never accomplished, nor his mind imagined, any other
beauty or glory worthy to be compared with these.

It is the special excellence of pictured glass, that the light, which
falls merely on the outside of other pictures, is here interfused
throughout the work; it illuminates the design, and invests it with
a living radiance; and in requital the unfading colors transmute the
common daylight into a miracle of richness and glory in its passage
through the heavenly substance of the blessed and angelic shapes which
throng the high-arched window.

"It is a woeful thing," cried Kenyon, while one of these frail yet
enduring and fadeless pictures threw its hues on his face, and on the
pavement of the church around him,--"a sad necessity that any Christian
soul should pass from earth without once seeing an antique painted
window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing through it! There is
no other such true symbol of the glories of the better world, where
a celestial radiance will be inherent in all things and persons, and
render each continually transparent to the sight of all."

"But what a horror it would be," said Donatello sadly, "if there were a
soul among them through which the light could not be transfused!"

"Yes; and perhaps this is to be the punishment of sin," replied the
sculptor; "not that it shall be made evident to the universe, which can
profit nothing by such knowledge, but that it shall insulate the sinner
from all sweet society by rendering him impermeable to light, and,
therefore, unrecognizable in the abode of heavenly simplicity and truth.
Then, what remains for him, but the dreariness of infinite and eternal
solitude?"

"That would be a horrible destiny, indeed!" said Donatello.

His voice as he spoke the words had a hollow and dreary cadence, as if
he anticipated some such frozen solitude for himself. A figure in a dark
robe was lurking in the obscurity of a side chapel close by, and made an
impulsive movement forward, but hesitated as Donatello spoke again.

"But there might be a more miserable torture than to be solitary
forever," said he. "Think of having a single companion in eternity, and
instead of finding any consolation, or at all events variety of torture,
to see your own weary, weary sin repeated in that inseparable soul."

"I think, my dear Count, you have never read Dante," observed Kenyon.
"That idea is somewhat in his style, but I cannot help regretting that
it came into your mind just then."

The dark-robed figure had shrunk back, and was quite lost to sight among
the shadows of the chapel.

"There was an English poet," resumed Kenyon, turning again towards the
window, "who speaks of the 'dim, religious light,' transmitted through
painted glass. I always admired this richly descriptive phrase; but,
though he was once in Italy, I question whether Milton ever saw any
but the dingy pictures in the dusty windows of English cathedrals,
imperfectly shown by the gray English daylight. He would else have
illuminated that word 'dim' with some epithet that should not chase
away the dimness, yet should make it glow like a million of rubies,
sapphires, emeralds, and topazes. Is it not so with yonder window? The
pictures are most brilliant in themselves, yet dim with tenderness and
reverence, because God himself is shining through them."

"The pictures fill me with emotion, but not such as you seem to
experience," said Donatello. "I tremble at those awful saints; and, most
of all, at the figure above them. He glows with Divine wrath!"

"My dear friend," said Kenyon, "how strangely your eyes have transmuted
the expression of the figure! It is divine love, not wrath!"

"To my eyes," said Donatello stubbornly, "it is wrath, not love! Each
must interpret for himself."

The friends left the church, and looking up, from the exterior, at
the window which they had just been contemplating within, nothing; was
visible but the merest outline of dusky shapes, Neither the individual
likeness of saint, angel, nor Saviour, and far less the combined scheme
and purport of the picture, could anywise be made out. That miracle of
radiant art, thus viewed, was nothing better than an incomprehensible
obscurity, without a gleam of beauty to induce the beholder to attempt
unravelling it.

"All this," thought the sculptor, "is a most forcible emblem of the
different aspect of religious truth and sacred story, as viewed from the
warm interior of belief, or from its cold and dreary outside. Christian
faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing
without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any; standing
within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors."

After Kenyon and Donatello emerged from the church, however, they had
better opportunity for acts of charity and mercy than for religious
contemplation; being immediately surrounded by a swarm of beggars, who
are the present possessors of Italy, and share the spoil of the stranger
with the fleas and mosquitoes, their formidable allies. These pests--the
human ones--had hunted the two travellers at every stage of their
journey. From village to village, ragged boys and girls kept almost
under the horses' feet; hoary grandsires and grandames caught glimpses
of their approach, and hobbled to intercept them at some point of
vantage; blind men stared them out of countenance with their sightless
orbs; women held up their unwashed babies; cripples displayed their
wooden legs, their grievous scars, their dangling, boneless arms, their
broken backs, their burden of a hump, or whatever infirmity or deformity
Providence had assigned them for an inheritance. On the highest mountain
summit--in the most shadowy ravine--there was a beggar waiting for them.
In one small village, Kenyon had the curiosity to count merely how many
children were crying, whining, and bellowing all at once for alms. They
proved to be more than forty of as ragged and dirty little imps as any
in the world; besides whom, all the wrinkled matrons, and most of the
village maids, and not a few stalwart men, held out their hands grimly,
piteously, or smilingly in the forlorn hope of whatever trifle of
coin might remain in pockets already so fearfully taxed. Had they
been permitted, they would gladly have knelt down and worshipped the
travellers, and have cursed them, without rising from their knees, if
the expected boon failed to be awarded.

Yet they were not so miserably poor but that the grown people kept
houses over their heads.

In the way of food, they had, at least, vegetables in their little
gardens, pigs and chickens to kill, eggs to fry into omelets with oil,
wine to drink, and many other things to make life comfortable. As for
the children, when no more small coin appeared to be forthcoming, they
began to laugh and play, and turn heels over head, showing themselves
jolly and vivacious brats, and evidently as well fed as needs be. The
truth is, the Italian peasantry look upon strangers as the almoners of
Providence, and therefore feel no more shame in asking and receiving
alms, than in availing themselves of providential bounties in whatever
other form.

In accordance with his nature, Donatello was always exceedingly
charitable to these ragged battalions, and appeared to derive a certain
consolation from the prayers which many of them put up in his behalf. In
Italy a copper coin of minute value will often make all the difference
between a vindictive curse--death by apoplexy being the favorite
one-mumbled in an old witch's toothless jaws, and a prayer from the same
lips, so earnest that it would seem to reward the charitable soul with
at least a puff of grateful breath to help him heavenward. Good wishes
being so cheap, though possibly not very efficacious, and anathemas so
exceedingly bitter,--even if the greater portion of their poison remain
in the mouth that utters them,--it may be wise to expend some reasonable
amount in the purchase of the former. Donatello invariably did so; and
as he distributed his alms under the pictured window, of which we have
been speaking, no less than seven ancient women lifted their hands and
besought blessings on his head.

"Come," said the sculptor, rejoicing at the happier expression which he
saw in his friend's face. "I think your steed will not stumble with you
to-day. Each of these old dames looks as much like Horace's Atra Cura
as can well be conceived; but, though there are seven of them, they will
make your burden on horseback lighter instead of heavier."

"Are we to ride far?" asked the Count.

"A tolerable journey betwixt now and to-morrow noon," Kenyon replied;
"for, at that hour, I purpose to be standing by the Pope's statue in the
great square of Perugia."





CHAPTER XXXIV


MARKET DAY IN PERUGIA


Perugia, on its lofty hilltop, was reached by the two travellers before
the sun had quite kissed away the early freshness of the morning. Since
midnight, there had been a heavy, rain, bringing infinite refreshment to
the scene of verdure and fertility amid which this ancient civilization
stands; insomuch that Kenyon loitered, when they came to the gray city
wall, and was loath to give up the prospect of the sunny wilderness that
lay below. It was as green as England, and bright as Italy alone. There
was all the wide valley, sweeping down and spreading away on all sides
from the weed grown ramparts, and bounded afar by mountains, which lay
asleep in the sun, with thin mists and silvery clouds floating about
their heads by way of morning dreams.

"It lacks still two hours of noon," said the sculptor to his friend, as
they stood under the arch of the gateway, waiting for their passports
to be examined; "will you come with me to see some admirable frescos by
Perugino? There is a hall in the Exchange, of no great magnitude, but
covered with what must have been--at the time it was painted--such
magnificence and beauty as the world had not elsewhere to show."

"It depresses me to look at old frescos," responded the Count; "it is a
pain, yet not enough of a pain to answer as a penance."

"Will you look at some pictures by Fra Angelico in the Church of San
Domenico?" asked Kenyon; "they are full of religious sincerity, When
one studies them faithfully, it is like holding a conversation about
heavenly things with a tender and devout-minded man."

"You have shown me some of Fra Angelico's pictures, I remember,"
answered Donatello; "his angels look as if they had never taken a flight
out of heaven; and his saints seem to have been born saints, and always
to have lived so. Young maidens, and all innocent persons, I doubt not,
may find great delight and profit in looking at such holy pictures. But
they are not for me."

"Your criticism, I fancy, has great moral depth," replied Kenyon; "and
I see in it the reason why Hilda so highly appreciates Fra Angelico's
pictures. Well; we will let all such matters pass for to-day, and stroll
about this fine old city till noon."

They wandered to and fro, accordingly, and lost themselves among the
strange, precipitate passages, which, in Perugia, are called streets,
Some of them are like caverns, being arched all over, and plunging down
abruptly towards an unknown darkness; which, when you have fathomed
its depths, admits you to a daylight that you scarcely hoped to behold
again. Here they met shabby men, and the careworn wives and mothers
of the people, some of whom guided children in leading strings through
those dim and antique thoroughfares, where a hundred generations had
passed before the little feet of to-day began to tread them. Thence they
climbed upward again, and came to the level plateau, on the summit of
the hill, where are situated the grand piazza and the principal public
edifices.

It happened to be market day in Perugia. The great square, therefore,
presented a far more vivacious spectacle than would have been witnessed
in it at any other time of the week, though not so lively as to overcome
the gray solemnity of the architectural portion of the scene. In the
shadow of the cathedral and other old Gothic structures--seeking shelter
from the sunshine that fell across the rest of the piazza--was a crowd
of people, engaged as buyers or sellers in the petty traffic of a
country fair. Dealers had erected booths and stalls on the pavement,
and overspread them with scanty awnings, beneath which they stood,
vociferously crying their merchandise; such as shoes, hats and caps,
yarn stockings, cheap jewelry and cutlery, books, chiefly little volumes
of a religious Character, and a few French novels; toys, tinware,
old iron, cloth, rosaries of beads, crucifixes, cakes, biscuits,
sugar-plums, and innumerable little odds and ends, which we see no
object in advertising. Baskets of grapes, figs, and pears stood on the
ground. Donkeys, bearing panniers stuffed out with kitchen vegetables,
and requiring an ample roadway, roughly shouldered aside the throng.

Crowded as the square was, a juggler found room to spread out a white
cloth upon the pavement, and cover it with cups, plates, balls, cards,
w the whole material of his magic, in short,--wherewith he proceeded to
work miracles under the noonday sun. An organ grinder at one point, and
a clarion and a flute at another, accomplished what their could towards
filling the wide space with tuneful noise, Their small uproar,
however, was nearly drowned by the multitudinous voices of the people,
bargaining, quarrelling, laughing, and babbling copiously at random;
for the briskness of the mountain atmosphere, or some other cause, made
everybody so loquacious, that more words were wasted in Perugia on this
one market day, than the noisiest piazza of Rome would utter in a month.

Through all this petty tumult, which kept beguiling one's eyes and upper
strata of thought, it was delightful to catch glimpses of the grand
old architecture that stood around the square. The life of the
flitting moment, existing in the antique shell of an age gone by, has a
fascination which we do not find in either the past or present, taken by
themselves. It might seem irreverent to make the gray cathedral and
the tall, time-worn palaces echo back the exuberant vociferation of the
market; but they did so, and caused the sound to assume a kind of
poetic rhythm, and themselves looked only the more majestic for their
condescension.

On one side, there was an immense edifice devoted to public purposes,
with an antique gallery, and a range of arched and stone-mullioned
windows, running along its front; and by way of entrance it had a
central Gothic arch, elaborately wreathed around with sculptured
semicircles, within which the spectator was aware of a stately and
impressive gloom. Though merely the municipal council-house and exchange
of a decayed country town, this structure was worthy to have held in
one portion of it the parliament hall of a nation, and in the other, the
state apartments of its ruler. On another side of the square rose the
mediaeval front of the cathedral, where the imagination of a Gothic
architect had long ago flowered out indestructibly, in the first place,
a grand design, and then covering it with such abundant detail of
ornament, that the magnitude of the work seemed less a miracle than its
minuteness. You would suppose that he must have softened the stone
into wax, until his most delicate fancies were modelled in the pliant
material, and then had hardened it into stone again. The whole was a
vast, black-letter page of the richest and quaintest poetry. In fit
keeping with all this old magnificence was a great marble fountain,
where again the Gothic imagination showed its overflow and gratuity of
device in the manifold sculptures which it lavished as freely as the
water did its shifting shapes.

Besides the two venerable structures which we have described, there were
lofty palaces, perhaps of as old a date, rising story above Story, and
adorned with balconies, whence, hundreds of years ago, the princely
occupants had been accustomed to gaze down at the sports, business, and
popular assemblages of the piazza. And, beyond all question, they thus
witnessed the erection of a bronze statue, which, three centuries since,
was placed on the pedestal that it still occupies.

"I never come to Perugia," said Kenyon, "without spending as much time
as I can spare in studying yonder statue of Pope Julius the Third. Those
sculptors of the Middle Age have fitter lessons for the professors of
my art than we can find in the Grecian masterpieces. They belong to our
Christian civilization; and, being earnest works, they always express
something which we do not get from the antique. Will you look at it?"

"Willingly," replied the Count, "for I see, even so far off, that the
statue is bestowing a benediction, and there is a feeling in my heart
that I may be permitted to share it."

Remembering the similar idea which Miriam a short time before had
expressed, the sculptor smiled hopefully at the coincidence. They made
their way through the throng of the market place, and approached close
to the iron railing that protected the pedestal of the statue.

It was the figure of a pope, arrayed in his pontifical robes, and
crowned with the tiara. He sat in a bronze chair, elevated high above
the pavement, and seemed to take kindly yet authoritative cognizance
of the busy scene which was at that moment passing before his eye. His
right hand was raised and spread abroad, as if in the act of shedding
forth a benediction, which every man--so broad, so wise, and so serenely
affectionate was the bronze pope's regard--might hope to feel quietly
descending upon the need, or the distress, that he had closest at his
heart. The statue had life and observation in it, as well as patriarchal
majesty. An imaginative spectator could not but be impressed with
the idea that this benignly awful representative of divine and human
authority might rise from his brazen chair, should any great public
exigency demand his interposition, and encourage or restrain the people
by his gesture, or even by prophetic utterances worthy of so grand a
presence.

And in the long, calm intervals, amid the quiet lapse of ages, the
pontiff watched the daily turmoil around his seat, listening with
majestic patience to the market cries, and all the petty uproar that
awoke the echoes of the stately old piazza. He was the enduring friend
of these men, and of their forefathers and children, the familiar face
of generations.

"The pope's blessing, methinks, has fallen upon you," observed the
sculptor, looking at his friend.

In truth, Donatello's countenance indicated a healthier spirit than
while he was brooding in his melancholy tower. The change of scene, the
breaking up of custom, the fresh flow of incidents, the sense of being
homeless, and therefore free, had done something for our poor Faun;
these circumstances had at least promoted a reaction, which might else
have been slower in its progress. Then, no doubt, the bright day, the
gay spectacle of the market place, and the sympathetic exhilaration
of so many people's cheerfulness, had each their suitable effect on a
temper naturally prone to be glad. Perhaps, too, he was magnetically
conscious of a presence that formerly sufficed to make him happy. Be the
cause what it might, Donatello's eyes shone with a serene and hopeful
expression while looking upward at the bronze pope, to whose widely
diffused blessing, it may be, he attributed all this good influence.

"Yes, my dear friend," said he, in reply to the sculptor's remark, "I
feel the blessing upon my spirit."

"It is wonderful," said Kenyon, with a smile, "wonderful and delightful
to think how long a good man's beneficence may be potent, even after his
death. How great, then, must have been the efficacy of this excellent
pontiff's blessing while he was alive!"

"I have heard," remarked the Count, "that there was a brazen image set
up in the wilderness, the sight of which healed the Israelites of their
poisonous and rankling wounds. If it be the Blessed Virgin's pleasure,
why should not this holy image before us do me equal good? A wound has
long been rankling in my soul, and filling it with poison."

"I did wrong to smile," answered Kenyon. "It is not for me to limit
Providence in its operations on man's spirit."

While they stood talking, the clock in the neighboring cathedral told
the hour, with twelve reverberating strokes, which it flung down upon
the crowded market place, as if warning one and all to take advantage
of the bronze pontiff's benediction, or of Heaven's blessing, however
proffered, before the opportunity were lost.

"High noon," said the sculptor. "It is Miriam's hour!"





CHAPTER XXXV


THE BRONZE PONTIFF'S BENEDICTION


When the last of the twelve strokes had fallen from the cathedral clock,
Kenyon threw his eyes over the busy scene of the market place, expecting
to discern Miriam somewhere in the 'crowd. He looked next towards the
cathedral itself, where it was reasonable to imagine that she might have
taken shelter, while awaiting her appointed time. Seeing no trace of
her in either direction, his eyes came back from their quest somewhat
disappointed, and rested on a figure which was leaning, like Donatello
and himself, on the iron balustrade that surrounded the statue. Only a
moment before, they two had been alone.

It was the figure of a woman, with her head bowed on her hands, as if
she deeply felt--what we have been endeavoring to convey into our feeble
description--the benign and awe-inspiring influence which the pontiff's
statue exercises upon a sensitive spectator. No matter though it were
modelled for a Catholic chief priest, the desolate heart, whatever be
its religion, recognizes in that image the likeness of a father.

"Miriam," said the sculptor, with a tremor in his voice, "is it
yourself?"

"It is I," she replied; "I am faithful to my engagement, though with
many fears." She lifted her head, and revealed to Kenyon--revealed to
Donatello likewise--the well-remembered features of Miriam. They were
pale and worn, but distinguished even now, though less gorgeously, by
a beauty that might be imagined bright enough to glimmer with its own
light in a dim cathedral aisle, and had no need to shrink from the
severer test of the mid-day sun. But she seemed tremulous, and hardly
able to go through with a scene which at a distance she had found
courage to undertake.

"You are most welcome, Miriam!" said the sculptor, seeking to afford
her the encouragement which he saw she so greatly required. "I have
a hopeful trust that the result of this interview will be propitious.
Come; let me lead you to Donatello."

"No, Kenyon, no!" whispered Miriam, shrinking back; "unless of his own
accord he speaks my name,--unless he bids me stay,--no word shall ever
pass between him and me. It is not that I take upon me to be proud at
this late hour. Among other feminine qualities, I threw away my pride
when Hilda cast me off."

"If not pride, what else restrains you?" Kenyon asked, a little angry at
her unseasonable scruples, and also at this half-complaining reference
to Hilda's just severity. "After daring so much, it is no time for fear!
If we let him part from you without a word, your opportunity of doing
him inestimable good is lost forever."

"True; it will be lost forever!" repeated Miriam sadly. "But, dear
friend, will it be my fault? I willingly fling my woman's pride at his
feet. But--do you not see?--his heart must be left freely to its own
decision whether to recognize me, because on his voluntary choice
depends the whole question whether my devotion will do him good or
harm. Except he feel an infinite need of me, I am a burden and fatal
obstruction to him!"

"Take your own course, then, Miriam," said Kenyon; "and, doubtless,
the crisis being what it is, your spirit is better instructed for its
emergencies than mine."

While the foregoing words passed between them they had withdrawn a
little from the immediate vicinity of the statue, so as to be out of
Donatello's hearing. Still, however, they were beneath the pontiff's
outstretched hand; and Miriam, with her beauty and her sorrow, looked up
into his benignant face, as if she had come thither for his pardon and
paternal affection, and despaired of so vast a boon.

Meanwhile, she had not stood thus long in the public square of Perugia,
without attracting the observation of many eyes. With their quick sense
of beauty, these Italians had recognized her loveliness, and spared not
to take their fill of gazing at it; though their native gentleness and
courtesy made their homage far less obtrusive than that of Germans,
French, or Anglo-Saxons might have been. It is not improbable that
Miriam had planned this momentous interview, on so public a spot and at
high noon, with an eye to the sort of protection that would be thrown
over it by a multitude of eye-witnesses. In circumstances of profound
feeling and passion, there is often a sense that too great a seclusion
cannot be endured; there is an indefinite dread of being quite alone
with the object of our deepest interest. The species of solitude that
a crowd harbors within itself is felt to be preferable, in certain
conditions of the heart, to the remoteness of a desert or the depths
of an untrodden wood. Hatred, love, or whatever kind of too
intense emotion, or even indifference, where emotion has once been,
instinctively seeks to interpose some barrier between itself and the
corresponding passion in another breast. This, we suspect, was what
Miriam had thought of, in coming to the thronged piazza; partly this,
and partly, as she said, her superstition that the benign statue held
good influences in store.

But Donatello remained leaning against the balustrade. She dared not
glance towards him, to see whether he were pale and agitated, or calm as
ice. Only, she knew that the moments were fleetly lapsing away, and that
his heart must call her soon, or the voice would never reach her. She
turned quite away from him and spoke again to the sculptor.

"I have wished to meet you," said she, "for more than one reason. News
has come to me respecting a dear friend of ours. Nay, not of mine! I
dare not call her a friend of mine, though once the dearest."

"Do you speak of Hilda?" exclaimed Kenyon, with quick alarm. "Has
anything befallen her? When I last heard of her, she was still in Rome,
and well."

"Hilda remains in Rome," replied Miriam, "nor is she ill as regards
physical health, though much depressed in spirits. She lives quite alone
in her dove-cote; not a friend near her, not one in Rome, which, you
know, is deserted by all but its native inhabitants. I fear for her
health, if she continue long in such solitude, with despondency preying
on her mind. I tell you this, knowing the interest which the rare beauty
of her character has awakened in you."

"I will go to Rome!" said the sculptor, in great emotion. "Hilda has
never allowed me to manifest more than a friendly regard; but, at least,
she cannot prevent my watching over her at a humble distance. I will set
out this very hour."

"Do not leave us now!" whispered Miriam imploringly, and laying her hand
on his arm. "One moment more! Ah; he has no word for me!"

"Miriam!" said Donatello.

Though but a single word, and the first that he had spoken, its tone was
a warrant of the sad and tender depth from which it came. It told Miriam
things of infinite importance, and, first of all, that he still loved
her. The sense of their mutual crime had stunned, but not destroyed, the
vitality of his affection; it was therefore indestructible. That tone,
too, bespoke an altered and deepened character; it told of a vivified
intellect, and of spiritual instruction that had come through sorrow and
remorse; so that instead of the wild boy, the thing of sportive,
animal nature, the sylvan Faun, here was now the man of feeling and
intelligence.

She turned towards him, while his voice still reverberated in the depths
of her soul.

"You have called me!" said she.

"Because my deepest heart has need of you!" he replied. "Forgive,
Miriam, the coldness, the hardness with which I parted from you! I was
bewildered with strange horror and gloom."

"Alas! and it was I that brought it on you," said she. "What repentance,
what self-sacrifice, can atone for that infinite wrong? There was
something so sacred in the innocent and joyous life which you were
leading! A happy person is such an unaccustomed and holy creature in
this sad world! And, encountering so rare a being, and gifted with the
power of sympathy with his sunny life, it was my doom, mine, to bring
him within the limits of sinful, sorrowful mortality! Bid me depart,
Donatello! Fling me off! No good, through my agency, can follow upon
such a mighty evil!"

"Miriam," said he, "our lot lies together. Is it not so? Tell me, in
Heaven's name, if it be otherwise."

Donatello's conscience was evidently perplexed with doubt, whether the
communion of a crime, such as they two were jointly stained with, ought
not to stifle all the instinctive motions of their hearts, impelling
them one towards the other. Miriam, on the other hand, remorsefully
questioned with herself whether the misery, already accruing from
her influence, should not warn her to withdraw from his path. In this
momentous interview, therefore, two souls were groping for each other in
the darkness of guilt and sorrow, and hardly were bold enough to grasp
the cold hands that they found.

The sculptor stood watching the scene with earnest sympathy.

"It seems irreverent," said he, at length; "intrusive, if not
irreverent, for a third person to thrust himself between the two solely
concerned in a crisis like the present. Yet, possibly as a bystander,
though a deeply interested one, I may discern somewhat of truth that
is hidden from you both; nay, at least interpret or suggest some ideas
which you might not so readily convey to each other."

"Speak!" said Miriam. "We confide in you." "Speak!" said Donatello. "You
are true and upright."

"I well know," rejoined Kenyon, "that I shall not succeed in uttering
the few, deep words which, in this matter, as in all others, include the
absolute truth. But here, Miriam, is one whom a terrible misfortune has
begun to educate; it has taken him, and through your agency, out of a
wild and happy state, which, within circumscribed limits, gave him joys
that he cannot elsewhere find on earth. On his behalf, you have incurred
a responsibility which you cannot fling aside. And here, Donatello, is
one whom Providence marks out as intimately connected with your destiny.
The mysterious process, by which our earthly life instructs us for
another state of being, was begun for you by her. She has rich gifts of
heart and mind, a suggestive power, a magnetic influence, a sympathetic
knowledge, which, wisely and religiously exercised, are what your
condition needs. She possesses what you require, and, with utter self
devotion, will use it for your good. The bond betwixt you, therefore,
is a true one, and never--except by Heaven's own act--should be rent
asunder."

"Ah; he has spoken the truth!" cried Donatello, grasping Miriam's hand.


"The very truth, dear friend," cried Miriam.

"But take heed," resumed the sculptor, anxious not to violate the
integrity of his own conscience, "take heed; for you love one another,
and yet your bond is twined with such black threads that you must never
look upon it as identical with the ties that unite other loving souls.
It is for mutual support; it is for one another's final good; it is for
effort, for sacrifice, but not for earthly happiness. If such be your
motive, believe me, friends, it were better to relinquish each other's
hands at this sad moment. There would be no holy sanction on your wedded
life."

"None," said Donatello, shuddering. "We know it well."

"None," repeated Miriam, also shuddering. "United--miserably entangled
with me, rather--by a bond of guilt, our union might be for eternity,
indeed, and most intimate;--but, through all that endless duration, I
should be conscious of his horror."

"Not for earthly bliss, therefore," said Kenyon, "but for mutual
elevation, and encouragement towards a severe and painful life, you take
each other's hands. And if, out of toil, sacrifice, prayer, penitence,
and earnest effort towards right things, there comes at length a sombre
and thoughtful, happiness, taste it, and thank Heaven! So that you live
not for it,--so that it be a wayside flower, springing along a path that
leads to higher ends,--it will be Heaven's gracious gift, and a token
that it recognizes your union here below."

"Have you no more to say?" asked Miriam earnestly. "There is matter of
sorrow and lofty consolation strangely mingled in your words."

"Only this, dear Miriam," said the sculptor; "if ever in your lives
the highest duty should require from either of you the sacrifice of the
other, meet the occasion without shrinking. This is all."

While Kenyon spoke, Donatello had evidently taken in the ideas which he
propounded, and had ennobled them by the sincerity of his reception.
His aspect unconsciously assumed a dignity, which, elevating his former
beauty, accorded with the change that had long been taking place in his
interior self. He was a man, revolving grave and deep thoughts in his
breast. He still held Miriam's hand; and there they stood, the beautiful
man, the beautiful woman, united forever, as they felt, in the
presence of these thousand eye-witnesses, who gazed so curiously at the
unintelligible scene. Doubtless the crowd recognized them as lovers,
and fancied this a betrothal that was destined to result in lifelong
happiness. And possibly it might be so. Who can tell where happiness may
come; or where, though an expected guest, it may never show its face?
Perhaps--shy, subtle thing--it had crept into this sad marriage bond,
when the partners would have trembled at its presence as a crime.

"Farewell!" said Kenyon; "I go to Rome."

"Farewell, true friend!" said Miriam.

"Farewell!" said Donatello too. "May you be happy. You have no guilt to
make you shrink from happiness."

At this moment it so chanced that all the three friends by one impulse
glanced upward at the statue of Pope Julius; and there was the majestic
figure stretching out the hand of benediction over them, and bending
down upon this guilty and repentant pair its visage of grand benignity.
There is a singular effect oftentimes when, out of the midst of
engrossing thought and deep absorption, we suddenly look up, and catch a
glimpse of external objects. We seem at such moments to look farther and
deeper into them, than by any premeditated observation; it is as if they
met our eyes alive, and with all their hidden meaning on the surface,
but grew again inanimate and inscrutable the instant that they became
aware of our glances. So now, at that unexpected glimpse, Miriam,
Donatello, and the sculptor, all three imagined that they beheld the
bronze pontiff endowed with spiritual life. A blessing was felt
descending upon them from his outstretched hand; he approved by look and
gesture the pledge of a deep union that had passed under his auspices.





CHAPTER XXXVI


HILDA'S TOWER


When we have once known Rome, and left her where she lies, like a
long-decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but
with accumulated dust and a fungous growth overspreading all its more
admirable features, left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her
narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little
squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so
indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun
never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our
lungs,--left her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied,
yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary
in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing
those staircases, which ascend from a ground-floor of cook shops,
cobblers' stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region
of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists,
just beneath the unattainable sky,--left her, worn out with shivering
at the cheerless and smoky fireside by day, and feasting with our own
substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed at night,--left
her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever
faith in man's integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach
of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly
bestowed on evil meats,--left her, disgusted with the pretence of
holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipresent,--left
her, half lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle
of which has been used up long ago, or corrupted by myriads of
slaughters,--left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her
ruin, and the hopelessness of her future,--left her, in short, hating
her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the infinite
anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down,--when we
have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery,
by and by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves
to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were
more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we
were born.

It is with a kindred sentiment, that we now follow the course of our
story back through the Flaminian Gate, and, treading our way to the Via
Portoghese, climb the staircase to the upper chamber of the tower where
we last saw Hilda.

Hilda all along intended to pass the summer in Rome; for she had laid
out many high and delightful tasks, which she could the better complete
while her favorite haunts were deserted by the multitude that thronged
them throughout the winter and early spring. Nor did she dread the
summer atmosphere, although generally held to be so pestilential. She
had already made trial of it, two years before, and found no worse
effect than a kind of dreamy languor, which was dissipated by the first
cool breezes that came with autumn. The thickly populated centre of the
city, indeed, is never affected by the feverish influence that lies in
wait in the Campagna, like a besieging foe, and nightly haunts those
beautiful lawns and woodlands, around the suburban villas, just at the
season when they most resemble Paradise. What the flaming sword was to
the first Eden, such is the malaria to these sweet gardens and grove. We
may wander through them, of an afternoon, it is true, but they cannot
be made a home and a reality, and to sleep among them is death. They are
but illusions, therefore, like the show of gleaming waters and shadowy
foliage in a desert.

But Rome, within the walls, at this dreaded season, enjoys its festal
days, and makes itself merry with characteristic and hereditary
pas-times, for which its broad piazzas afford abundant room. It leads
its own life with a freer spirit, now that the artists and foreign
visitors are scattered abroad. No bloom, perhaps, would be visible in
a cheek that should be unvisited, throughout the summer, by more
invigorating winds than any within fifty miles of the city; no bloom,
but yet, if the mind kept its healthy energy, a subdued and colorless
well-being. There was consequently little risk in Hilda's purpose to
pass the summer days in the galleries of Roman palaces, and her nights
in that aerial chamber, whither the heavy breath of the city and its
suburbs could not aspire. It would probably harm her no more than it
did the white doves, who sought the same high atmosphere at sunset, and,
when morning came, flew down into the narrow streets, about their daily
business, as Hilda likewise did.

With the Virgin's aid and blessing, which might be hoped for even by
a heretic, who so religiously lit the lamp before her shrine, the New
England girl would sleep securely in her old Roman tower, and go forth
on her pictorial pilgrimages without dread or peril. In view of such
a summer, Hilda had anticipated many months of lonely, but unalloyed
enjoyment. Not that she had a churlish disinclination to society, or
needed to be told that we taste one intellectual pleasure twice, and
with double the result, when we taste it with a friend. But, keeping a
maiden heart within her bosom, she rejoiced in the freedom that enabled
her still to choose her own sphere, and dwell in it, if she pleased,
without another inmate.

Her expectation, however, of a delightful summer was woefully
disappointed. Even had she formed no previous plan of remaining there,
it is improbable that Hilda would have gathered energy to stir from
Rome. A torpor, heretofore unknown to her vivacious though quiet
temperament, had possessed itself of the poor girl, like a half-dead
serpent knotting its cold, inextricable wreaths about her limbs. It
was that peculiar despair, that chill and heavy misery, which only
the innocent can experience, although it possesses many of the gloomy
characteristics that mark a sense of guilt. It was that heartsickness,
which, it is to be hoped, we may all of us have been pure enough to
feel, once in our lives, but the capacity for which is usually exhausted
early, and perhaps with a single agony. It was that dismal certainty of
the existence of evil in the world, which, though we may fancy ourselves
fully assured of the sad mystery long before, never becomes a portion of
our practical belief until it takes substance and reality from the sin
of some guide, whom we have deeply trusted and revered, or some friend
whom we have dearly loved.

When that knowledge comes, it is as if a cloud had suddenly gathered
over the morning light; so dark a cloud, that there seems to be
no longer any sunshine behind it or above it. The character of our
individual beloved one having invested itself with all the attributes
of right,--that one friend being to us the symbol and representative of
whatever is good and true,--when he falls, the effect is almost as if
the sky fell with him, bringing down in chaotic ruin the columns
that upheld our faith. We struggle forth again, no doubt, bruised and
bewildered. We stare wildly about us, and discover--or, it may be, we
never make the discovery--that it was not actually the sky that has
tumbled down, but merely a frail structure of our own rearing, which
never rose higher than the housetops, and has fallen because we founded
it on nothing. But the crash, and the affright and trouble, are as
overwhelming, for the time, as if the catastrophe involved the whole
moral world. Remembering these things, let them suggest one generous
motive for walking heedfully amid the defilement of earthly ways! Let us
reflect, that the highest path is pointed out by the pure Ideal of those
who look up to us, and who, if we tread less loftily, may never look so
high again.

Hilda's situation was made infinitely more wretched by the necessity of
Confining all her trouble within her own consciousness. To this innocent
girl, holding the knowledge of Miriam's crime within her tender and
delicate soul, the effect was almost the same as if she herself had
participated in the guilt. Indeed, partaking the human nature of
those who could perpetrate such deeds, she felt her own spotlessness
impugnent.

Had there been but a single friend,--or not a friend, since friends were
no longer to be confided in, after Miriam had betrayed her trust,--but,
had there been any calm, wise mind, any sympathizing intelligence; or,
if not these, any dull, half-listening ear into which she might have
flung the dreadful secret, as into an echoless cavern, what a relief
would have ensued! But this awful loneliness! It enveloped her
whithersoever she went. It was a shadow in the sunshine of festal days;
a mist between her eyes and the pictures at which she strove to look; a
chill dungeon, which kept her in its gray twilight and fed her with its
unwholesome air, fit only for a criminal to breathe and pine in! She
could not escape from it. In the effort to do so, straying farther into
the intricate passages of our nature, she stumbled, ever and again, over
this deadly idea of mortal guilt.

Poor sufferer for another's sin! Poor wellspring of a virgin's heart,
into which a murdered corpse had casually fallen, and whence it could
not be drawn forth again, but lay there, day after day, night after
night, tainting its sweet atmosphere with the scent of crime and ugly
death!

The strange sorrow that had befallen Hilda did not fail to impress
its mysterious seal upon her face, and to make itself perceptible to
sensitive observers in her manner and carriage. A young Italian artist,
who frequented the same galleries which Hilda haunted, grew deeply
interested in her expression. One day, while she stood before Leonardo
da Vinci's picture of Joanna of Aragon, but evidently without seeing
it,--for, though it had attracted her eyes, a fancied resemblance to
Miriam had immediately drawn away her thoughts,--this artist drew a
hasty sketch which he afterwards elaborated into a finished portrait. It
represented Hilda as gazing with sad and earnest horror at a bloodspot
which she seemed just then to have discovered on her white robe. The
picture attracted considerable notice. Copies of an engraving from
it may still be found in the print shops along the Corso. By many
connoisseurs, the idea of the face was supposed to have been suggested
by the portrait of Beatrice Cenci; and, in fact, there was a look
somewhat similar to poor Beatrice's forlorn gaze out of the dreary
isolation and remoteness, in which a terrible doom had involved a tender
soul. But the modern artist strenuously upheld the originality of his
own picture, as well as the stainless purity its subject, and chose
to call it--and was laughed at for his pains--"Innocence, dying of a
Blood-stain!"

"Your picture, Signore Panini, does you credit," remarked the picture
dealer, who had bought it of the young man for fifteen scudi, and
afterwards sold it for ten times the sum; "but it would be worth a
better price if you had given it a more intelligible title. Looking at
the face and expression of this fair signorina, we seem to comprehend
readily enough, that she is undergoing one or another of those troubles
of the heart to which young ladies are but too liable. But what is this
blood-stain? And what has innocence to do with it? Has she stabbed her
perfidious lover with a bodkin?"

"She! she commit a crime!" cried the young artist. "Can you look at the
innocent anguish in her face, and ask that question? No; but, as I
read the mystery, a man has been slain in her presence, and the blood,
spurting accidentally on her white robe, has made a stain which eats
into her life."

"Then, in the name of her patron saint," exclaimed the picture dealer,
"why don't she get the robe made white again at the expense of a few
baiocchi to her washerwoman? No, no, my dear Panini. The picture being
now my property, I shall call it 'The Signorina's Vengeance.' She
has stabbed her lover overnight, and is repenting it betimes the next
morning. So interpreted, the picture becomes an intelligible and very
natural representation of a not uncommon fact."

Thus coarsely does the world translate all finer griefs that meet its
eye. It is more a coarse world than an unkind one.

But Hilda sought nothing either from the world's delicacy or its pity,
and never dreamed of its misinterpretations. Her doves often flew in
through the windows of the tower, winged messengers, bringing her what
sympathy they could, and uttering soft, tender, and complaining sounds,
deep in their bosoms, which soothed the girl more than a distincter
utterance might. And sometimes Hilda moaned quietly among the doves,
teaching her voice to accord with theirs, and thus finding a temporary
relief from the burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as if a little
portion of it, at least, had been told to these innocent friends, and
been understood and pitied.

When she trimmed the lamp before the Virgin's shrine, Hilda gazed at
the sacred image, and, rude as was the workmanship, beheld, or fancied,
expressed with the quaint, powerful simplicity which sculptors sometimes
had five hundred years ago, a woman's tenderness responding to her
gaze. If she knelt, if she prayed, if her oppressed heart besought the
sympathy of divine womanhood afar in bliss, but not remote, because
forever humanized by the memory of mortal griefs, was Hilda to be
blamed? It was not a Catholic kneeling at an idolatrous shrine, but a
child lifting its tear-stained face to seek comfort from a mother.





CHAPTER XXXVII


THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES


Hilda descended, day by day, from her dove-cote, and went to one or
another of the great old palaces,--the Pamfili Doria, the Corsini, the
Sciarra, the Borghese, the Colonna,--where the doorkeepers knew her
well, and offered her a kindly greeting. But they shook their heads and
sighed, on observing the languid step with which the poor girl toiled up
the grand marble staircases. There was no more of that cheery alacrity
with which she used to flit upward, as if her doves had lent her their
wings, nor of that glow of happy spirits which had been wont to set the
tarnished gilding of the picture frames and the shabby splendor of the
furniture all a-glimmer, as she hastened to her congenial and delightful
toil.

An old German artist, whom she often met in the galleries, once laid a
paternal hand on Hilda's head, and bade her go back to her own country.


"Go back soon," he said, with kindly freedom and directness, "or you
will go never more. And, if you go not, why, at least, do you spend the
whole summer-time in Rome? The air has been breathed too often, in so
many thousand years, and is not wholesome for a little foreign
flower like you, my child, a delicate wood-anemone from the western
forest-land."

"I have no task nor duty anywhere but here," replied Hilda. "The old
masters will not set me free!"

"Ah, those old masters!" cried the veteran artist, shaking his head.
"They are a tyrannous race! You will find them of too mighty a spirit to
be dealt with, for long together, by the slender hand, the fragile mind,
and the delicate heart, of a young girl. Remember that Raphael's genius
wore out that divinest painter before half his life was lived. Since you
feel his influence powerfully enough to reproduce his miracles so well,
it will assuredly consume you like a flame."

"That might have been my peril once," answered Hilda. "It is not so
now."

"Yes, fair maiden, you stand in that peril now!" insisted the kind old
man; and he added, smiling, yet in a melancholy vein, and with a
German grotesqueness of idea, "Some fine morning, I shall come to the
Pinacotheca of the Vatican, with my palette and my brushes, and shall
look for my little American artist that sees into the very heart of the
grand pictures! And what shall I behold? A heap of white ashes on the
marble floor, just in front of the divine Raphael's picture of the
Madonna da Foligno! Nothing more, upon my word! The fire, which the poor
child feels so fervently, will have gone into her innermost, and burnt
her quite up!"

"It would be a happy martyrdom!" said Hilda, faintly smiling. "But I
am far from being worthy of it. What troubles me much, among other
troubles, is quite the reverse of what you think. The old masters hold
me here, it is true, but they no longer warm me with their influence.
It is not flame consuming, but torpor chilling me, that helps to make me
wretched."

"Perchance, then," said the German, looking keenly at her, "Raphael has
a rival in your heart? He was your first love; but young maidens are not
always constant, and one flame is sometimes extinguished by another!"
Hilda shook her head, and turned away. She had spoken the truth,
however, in alleging that torpor, rather than fire, was what she had
to dread. In those gloomy days that had befallen her, it was a great
additional calamity that she felt conscious of the present dimness of an
insight which she once possessed in more than ordinary measure. She had
lost--and she trembled lest it should have departed forever--the faculty
of appreciating those great works of art, which heretofore had made so
large a portion of her happiness. It was no wonder.

A picture, however admirable the painter's art, and wonderful his power,
requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with
the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you
must look with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you.
There is always the necessity of helping out the painter's art with your
own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities
shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must
be put so entirely under his control, and work along with him to such
an extent, that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical,
instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits
of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating.

Like all revelations of the better life, the adequate perception of a
great work of art demands a gifted simplicity of vision. In this, and
in her self-surrender, and the depth and tenderness of her sympathy, had
lain Hilda's remarkable power as a copyist of the old masters. And now
that her capacity of emotion was choked up with a horrible experience,
it inevitably followed that she should seek in vain, among those friends
so venerated and beloved, for the marvels which they had heretofore
shown her. In spite of a reverence that lingered longer than her
recognition, their poor worshipper became almost an infidel, and
sometimes doubted whether the pictorial art be not altogether a
delusion.

For the first time in her life, Hilda now grew acquainted with that
icy demon of weariness, who haunts great picture galleries. He is
a plausible Mephistopheles, and possesses the magic that is the
destruction of all other magic. He annihilates color, warmth, and, more
especially, sentiment and passion, at a touch. If he spare anything, it
will be some such matter as an earthen pipkin, or a bunch of herrings by
Teniers; a brass kettle, in which you can see your rice, by Gerard Douw;
a furred robe, or the silken texture of a mantle, or a straw hat, by Van
Mieris; or a long-stalked wineglass, transparent and full of shifting
reflection, or a bit of bread and cheese, or an over-ripe peach with
a fly upon it, truer than reality itself, by the school of Dutch
conjurers. These men, and a few Flemings, whispers the wicked demon,
were the only painters. The mighty Italian masters, as you deem them,
were not human, nor addressed their work to human sympathies, but to
a false intellectual taste, which they themselves were the first to
create. Well might they call their doings "art," for they substituted
art instead of nature. Their fashion is past, and ought, indeed, to have
died and been buried along with them.

Then there is such a terrible lack of variety in their subjects. The
churchmen, their great patrons, suggested most of their themes, and
a dead mythology the rest. A quarter part, probably, of any large
collection of pictures consists of Virgins and infant Christs, repeated
over and over again in pretty much an identical spirit, and generally
with no more mixture of the Divine than just enough to spoil them as
representations of maternity and childhood, with which everybody's heart
might have something to do. Half of the other pictures are Magdalens,
Flights into Egypt, Crucifixions, Depositions from the Cross, Pietas,
Noli-me-tangeres, or the Sacrifice of Abraham, or martyrdoms of saints,
originally painted as altar-pieces, or for the shrines of chapels, and
woefully lacking the accompaniments which the artist haft in view.

The remainder of the gallery comprises mythological subjects, such as
nude Venuses, Ledas, Graces, and, in short, a general apotheosis of
nudity, once fresh and rosy perhaps, but yellow and dingy in our day,
and retaining only a traditionary charm. These impure pictures are from
the same illustrious and impious hands that adventured to call before
us the august forms of Apostles and Saints, the Blessed Mother of the
Redeemer, and her Son, at his death, and in his glory, and even the
awfulness of Him, to whom the martyrs, dead a thousand years ago, have
not yet dared to raise their eyes. They seem to take up one task or the
other w the disrobed woman whom they call Venus, or the type of highest
and tenderest womanhood in the mother of their Saviour with equal
readiness, but to achieve the former with far more satisfactory success.
If an artist sometimes produced a picture of the Virgin, possessing
warmth enough to excite devotional feelings, it was probably the object
of his earthly love to whom he thus paid the stupendous and fearful
homage of setting up her portrait to be worshipped, not figuratively as
a mortal, but by religious souls in their earnest aspirations towards
Divinity. And who can trust the religious sentiment of Raphael, or
receive any of his Virgins as heaven-descended likenesses, after seeing,
for example, the Fornarina of the Barberini Palace, and feeling how
sensual the artist must have been to paint such a brazen trollop of his
own accord, and lovingly? Would the Blessed Mary reveal herself to his
spiritual vision, and favor him with sittings alternately with that type
of glowing earthliness, the Fornarina?

But no sooner have we given expression to this irreverent criticism,
than a throng of spiritual faces look reproachfully upon us. We see
cherubs by Raphael, whose baby innocence could only have been nursed
in paradise; angels by Raphael as innocent as they, but whose serene
intelligence embraces both earthly and celestial things; madonnas by
Raphael, on whose lips he has impressed a holy and delicate reserve,
implying sanctity on earth, and into whose soft eyes he has thrown a
light which he never could have imagined except by raising his own
eyes with a pure aspiration heavenward. We remember, too, that divinest
countenance in the Transfiguration, and withdraw all that we have said.

Poor Hilda, however, in her gloomiest moments, was never guilty of the
high treason suggested in the above remarks against her beloved and
honored Raphael. She had a faculty (which, fortunately for themselves,
pure women often have) of ignoring all moral blotches in a character
that won her admiration. She purified the objects; of her regard by the
mere act of turning such spotless eyes upon them.

Hilda's despondency, nevertheless, while it dulled her perceptions in
one respect, had deepened them in another; she saw beauty less vividly,
but felt truth, or the lack of it, more profoundly. She began to suspect
that some, at least, of her venerated painters, had left an inevitable
hollowness in their works, because, in the most renowned of them, they
essayed to express to the world what they had not in their own souls.
They deified their light and Wandering affections, and were continually
playing off the tremendous jest, alluded to above, of offering the
features of some venal beauty to be enshrined in the holiest places. A
deficiency of earnestness and absolute truth is generally discoverable
in Italian pictures, after the art had become consummate. When you
demand what is deepest, these painters have not wherewithal to respond.
They substituted a keen intellectual perception, and a marvellous knack
of external arrangement, instead of the live sympathy and sentiment
which should have been their inspiration. And hence it happens, that
shallow and worldly men are among the best critics of their works; a
taste for pictorial art is often no more than a polish upon the hard
enamel of an artificial character. Hilda had lavished her whole heart
upon it, and found (just as if she had lavished it upon a human idol)
that the greater part was thrown away.

For some of the earlier painters, however, she still retained much
of her former reverence. Fra Angelico, she felt, must have breathed a
humble aspiration between every two touches of his brush, in order to
have made the finished picture such a visible prayer as we behold it, in
the guise of a prim angel, or a saint without the human nature. Through
all these dusky centuries, his works may still help a struggling heart
to pray. Perugino was evidently a devout man; and the Virgin, therefore,
revealed herself to him in loftier and sweeter faces of celestial
womanhood, and yet with a kind of homeliness in their human mould, than
even the genius of Raphael could imagine. Sodoma, beyond a question,
both prayed and wept, while painting his fresco, at Siena, of Christ
bound to a pillar.

In her present need and hunger for a spiritual revelation, Hilda felt a
vast and weary longing to see this last-mentioned picture once again. It
is inexpressibly touching. So weary is the Saviour and utterly worn out
with agony, that his lips have fallen apart from mere exhaustion; his
eyes seem to be set; he tries to lean his head against the pillar, but
is kept from sinking down upon the ground only by the cords that
bind him. One of the most striking effects produced is the sense of
loneliness. You behold Christ deserted both in heaven and earth; that
despair is in him which wrung forth the saddest utterance man ever made,
"Why hast Thou forsaken me?" Even in this extremity, however, he is
still divine. The great and reverent painter has not suffered the Son of
God to be merely an object of pity, though depicting him in a state so
profoundly pitiful. He is rescued from it, we know not how,--by nothing
less than miracle,--by a celestial majesty and beauty, and some quality
of which these are the outward garniture. He is as much, and as visibly,
our Redeemer, there bound, there fainting, and bleeding from the
scourge, with the cross in view, as if he sat on his throne of glory in
the heavens! Sodoma, in this matchless picture, has done more towards
reconciling the incongruity of Divine Omnipotence and outraged,
suffering Humanity, combined in one person, than the theologians ever
did.

This hallowed work of genius shows what pictorial art, devoutly
exercised, might effect in behalf of religious truth; involving, as it
does, deeper mysteries of revelation, and bringing them closer to man's
heart, and making him tenderer to be impressed by them, than the most
eloquent words of preacher or prophet.

It is not of pictures like the above that galleries, in Rome or
elsewhere, are made up, but of productions immeasurably below them,
and requiring to be appreciated by a very different frame of mind. Few
amateurs are endowed with a tender susceptibility to the sentiment of
a picture; they are not won from an evil life, nor anywise morally
improved by it. The love of art, therefore, differs widely in its
influence from the love of nature; whereas, if art had not strayed away
from its legitimate paths and aims, it ought to soften and sweeten
the lives of its worshippers, in even a more exquisite degree than the
contemplation of natural objects. But, of its own potency, it has no
such effect; and it fails, likewise, in that other test of its moral
value which poor Hilda was now involuntarily trying upon it. It cannot
comfort the heart in affliction; it grows dim when the shadow is upon
us.

So the melancholy girl wandered through those long galleries, and over
the mosaic pavements of vast, solitary saloons, wondering what had
become of the splendor that used to beam upon her from the walls. She
grew sadly critical, and condemned almost everything that she was wont
to admire. Heretofore, her sympathy went deeply into a picture, yet
seemed to leave a depth which it was inadequate to sound; now, on the
contrary, her perceptive faculty penetrated the canvas like a steel
probe, and found but a crust of paint over an emptiness. Not that she
gave up all art as worthless; only it had lost its consecration. One
picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of
mankind, from generation to generation, until the colors fade and
blacken out of sight, or the canvas rot entirely away. For the rest, let
them be piled in garrets, just as the tolerable poets are shelved, when
their little day is over. Is a painter more sacred than a poet?

And as for these galleries of Roman palaces, they were to Hilda,
--though she still trod them with the forlorn hope of getting back her
sympathies,--they were drearier than the whitewashed walls of a prison
corridor. If a magnificent palace were founded, as was generally the
case, on hardened guilt and a stony conscience,--if the prince or
cardinal who stole the marble of his vast mansion from the Coliseum, or
some Roman temple, had perpetrated still deadlier crimes, as probably he
did,--there could be no fitter punishment for his ghost than to wander,
perpetually through these long suites of rooms, over the cold marble or
mosaic of the floors, growing chiller at every eternal footstep. Fancy
the progenitor of the Dorias thus haunting those heavy halls where
his posterity reside! Nor would it assuage his monotonous misery, but
increase it manifold, to be compelled to scrutinize those masterpieces
of art, which he collected with so much cost and care, and gazing at
them unintelligently, still leave a further portion of his vital warmth
at every one.

Such, or of a similar kind, is the torment of those who seek to enjoy
pictures in an uncongenial mood. Every haunter of picture galleries,
we should imagine, must have experienced it, in greater or less degree;
Hilda never till now, but now most bitterly.

And now, for the first time in her lengthened absence, comprising
so many years of her young life, she began to be acquainted with the
exile's pain. Her pictorial imagination brought up vivid scenes of her
native village, with its great old elm-trees; and the neat, comfortable
houses, scattered along the wide, grassy margin of its street, and the
white meeting-house, and her mother's very door, and the stream of gold
brown water, which her taste for color had kept flowing, all this
while, through her remembrance. O dreary streets, palaces, churches, and
imperial sepulchres of hot and dusty Rome, with the muddy Tiber eddying
through the midst, instead of the gold-brown rivulet! How she pined
under this crumbly magnificence, as if it were piled all upon her
human heart! How she yearned for that native homeliness, those familiar
sights, those faces which she had known always, those days that never
brought any strange event; that life of sober week-days, and a solemn
sabbath at the close! The peculiar fragrance of a flower-bed, which
Hilda used to cultivate, came freshly to her memory, across the windy
sea, and through the long years since the flowers had withered. Her
heart grew faint at the hundred reminiscences that were awakened by that
remembered smell of dead blossoms; it was like opening a drawer, where
many things were laid away, and every one of them scented with lavender
and dried rose-leaves.

We ought not to betray Hilda's secret; but it is the truth, that being
so sad, and so utterly alone, and in such great need of sympathy, her
thoughts sometimes recurred to the sculptor. Had she met him now, her
heart, indeed, might not have been won, but her confidence would have
flown to him like a bird to its nest. One summer afternoon, especially,
Hilda leaned upon the battlements of her tower, and looked over Rome
towards the distant mountains, whither Kenyon had told her that he was
going.

"O that he were here!" she sighed; "I perish under this terrible secret;
and he might help me to endure it. O that he were here!"

That very afternoon, as the reader may remember, Kenyon felt
Hilda's hand pulling at the silken cord that was connected with his
heart-strings, as he stood looking towards Rome from the battlements of
Monte Beni.





CHAPTER XXXVIII


ALTARS AND INCENSE


Rome has a certain species of consolation readier at hand, for all the
necessitous, than any other spot under the sun; and Hilda's despondent
state made her peculiarly liable to the peril, if peril it can justly be
termed, of seeking, or consenting, to be thus consoled.

Had the Jesuits known the situation of this troubled heart, her
inheritance of New England Puritanism would hardly have protected the
poor girl from the pious strategy of those good fathers. Knowing, as
they do, how to work each proper engine, it would have been ultimately
impossible for Hilda to resist the attractions of a faith, which so
marvellously adapts itself to every human need. Not, indeed, that it can
satisfy the soul's cravings, but, at least, it can sometimes help
the soul towards a higher satisfaction than the faith contains within
itself. It supplies a multitude of external forms, in which the
spiritual may be clothed and manifested; it has many painted windows,
as it were, through which the celestial sunshine, else disregarded, may
make itself gloriously perceptible in visions of beauty and splendor.
There is no one want or weakness of human nature for which Catholicism
will own itself without a remedy; cordials, certainly, it possesses in
abundance, and sedatives in inexhaustible variety, and what may once
have been genuine medicaments, though a little the worse for long
keeping.

To do it justice, Catholicism is such a miracle of fitness for its
own ends, many of which might seem to be admirable ones, that it is
difficult to imagine it a contrivance of mere man. Its mighty machinery
was forged and put together, not on middle earth, but either above
or below. If there were but angels to work it, instead of the very
different class of engineers who now manage its cranks and safety
valves, the system would soon vindicate the dignity and holiness of its
origin.

Hilda had heretofore made many pilgrimages among the churches of Rome,
for the sake of wondering at their gorgeousness. Without a glimpse at
these palaces of worship, it is impossible to imagine the magnificence
of the religion that reared them. Many of them shine with burnished
gold. They glow with pictures. Their walls, columns, and arches seem a
quarry of precious stones, so beautiful and costly are the marbles
with which they are inlaid. Their pavements are often a mosaic, of rare
workmanship. Around their lofty cornices hover flights of sculptured
angels; and within the vault of the ceiling and the swelling interior
of the dome, there are frescos of such brilliancy, and wrought with so
artful a perspective, that the sky, peopled with sainted forms, appears
to be opened only a little way above the spectator. Then there are
chapels, opening from the side aisles and transepts, decorated by
princes for their own burial places, and as shrines for their especial
saints. In these, the splendor of the entire edifice is intensified
and gathered to a focus. Unless words were gems, that would flame with
many-colored light upon the page, and throw thence a tremulous glimmer
into the reader's eyes, it were wain to attempt a description of a
princely chapel.

Restless with her trouble, Hilda now entered upon another pilgrimage
among these altars and shrines. She climbed the hundred steps of the Ara
Coeli; she trod the broad, silent nave of St. John Lateran; she stood
in the Pantheon, under the round opening in the dome, through which
the blue sunny sky still gazes down, as it used to gaze when there were
Roman deities in the antique niches. She went into every church that
rose before her, but not now to wonder at its magnificence, when she
hardly noticed more than if it had been the pine-built interior of a New
England meeting-house.

She went--and it was a dangerous errand--to observe how closely and
comfortingly the popish faith applied itself to all human occasions. It
was impossible to doubt that multitudes of people found their spiritual
advantage in it, who would find none at all in our own formless mode of
worship; which, besides, so far as the sympathy of prayerful souls is
concerned, can be enjoyed only at stated and too unfrequent periods. But
here, whenever the hunger for divine nutriment came upon the soul, it
could on the instant be appeased. At one or another altar, the incense
was forever ascending; the mass always being performed, and carrying
upward with it the devotion of such as had not words for their own
prayer. And yet, if the worshipper had his individual petition to offer,
his own heart-secret to whisper below his breath, there were divine
auditors ever ready to receive it from his lips; and what encouraged him
still more, these auditors had not always been divine, but kept, within
their heavenly memories, the tender humility of a human experience. Now
a saint in heaven, but once a man on earth.

Hilda saw peasants, citizens, soldiers, nobles, women with bare heads,
ladies in their silks, entering the churches individually, kneeling for
moments or for hours, and directing their inaudible devotions to the
shrine of some saint of their own choice. In his hallowed person, they
felt themselves possessed of an own friend in heaven. They were too
humble to approach the Deity directly. Conscious of their unworthiness,
they asked the mediation of their sympathizing patron, who, on the score
of his ancient martyrdom, and after many ages of celestial life, might
venture to talk with the Divine Presence, almost as friend with friend.
Though dumb before its Judge, even despair could speak, and pour out the
misery of its soul like water, to an advocate so wise to comprehend the
case, and eloquent to plead it, and powerful to win pardon whatever
were the guilt. Hilda witnessed what she deemed to be an example of this
species of confidence between a young man and his saint. He stood before
a shrine, writhing, wringing his hands, contorting his whole frame in
an agony of remorseful recollection, but finally knelt down to weep and
pray. If this youth had been a Protestant, he would have kept all that
torture pent up in his heart, and let it burn there till it seared him
into indifference.

Often and long, Hilda lingered before the shrines and chapels of the
Virgin, and departed from them with reluctant steps. Here, perhaps,
strange as it may seem, her delicate appreciation of art stood her
in good stead, and lost Catholicism a convert. If the painter had
represented Mary with a heavenly face, poor Hilda was now in the very
mood to worship her, and adopt the faith in which she held so elevated
a position. But she saw that it was merely the flattered portrait of
an earthly beauty; the wife, at best, of the artist; or, it might be, a
peasant girl of the Campagna, or some Roman princess, to whom he desired
to pay his court. For love, or some even less justifiable motive, the
old painter had apotheosized these women; he thus gained for them, as
far as his skill would go, not only the meed of immortality, but the
privilege of presiding over Christian altars, and of being worshipped
with far holier fervors than while they dwelt on earth. Hilda's fine
sense of the fit and decorous could not be betrayed into kneeling at
such a shrine.

She never found just the virgin mother whom she needed. Here it was
an earthly mother, worshipping the earthly baby in her lap, as any and
every mother does, from Eve's time downward. In another picture, there
was a dim sense, shown in the mother's face, of some divine quality
in the child. In a third, the artist seemed to have had a higher
perception, and had striven hard to shadow out the Virgin's joy at
bringing the Saviour into the world, and her awe and love, inextricably
mingled, of the little form which she pressed against her bosom. So
far was good. But still, Hilda looked for something more; a face of
celestial beauty, but human as well as heavenly, and with the shadow
of past grief upon it; bright with immortal youth, yet matronly and
motherly; and endowed with a queenly dignity, but infinitely tender, as
the highest and deepest attribute of her divinity.

"Ah," thought Hilda to herself, "why should not there be a woman to
listen to the prayers of women? A mother in heaven for all motherless
girls like me? In all God's thought and care for us, can he have
withheld this boon, which our weakness so much needs?"

Oftener than to the other churches, she wandered into St. Peter's.
Within its vast limits, she thought, and beneath the sweep of its great
dome, there should be space for all forms of Christian truth; room both
for the faithful and the heretic to kneel; due help for every creature's
spiritual want.

Hilda had not always been adequately impressed by the grandeur of this
mighty cathedral. When she first lifted the heavy leathern curtain, at
one of the doors, a shadowy edifice in her imagination had been dazzled
out of sight by the reality. Her preconception of St. Peter's was a
structure of no definite outline, misty in its architecture, dim
and gray and huge, stretching into an interminable perspective, and
overarched by a dome like the cloudy firmament. Beneath that vast
breadth and height, as she had fancied them, the personal man might
feel his littleness, and the soul triumph in its immensity. So, in
her earlier visits, when the compassed splendor Of the actual interior
glowed before her eyes, she had profanely called it a great prettiness;
a gay piece of cabinet work, on a Titanic scale; a jewel casket,
marvellously magnified.

This latter image best pleased her fancy; a casket, all inlaid in the
inside with precious stones of various hue, so that there Should not be
a hair's-breadth of the small interior unadorned with its resplendent
gem. Then, conceive this minute wonder of a mosaic box, increased to
the magnitude of a cathedral, without losing the intense lustre of its
littleness, but all its petty glory striving to be sublime. The magic
transformation from the minute to the vast has not been so cunningly
effected but that the rich adornment still counteracts the impression of
space and loftiness. The spectator is more sensible of its limits than
of its extent.

Until after many visits, Hilda continued to mourn for that dim,
illimitable interior, which with her eyes shut she had seen from
childhood, but which vanished at her first glimpse through the actual
door. Her childish vision seemed preferable to the cathedral which
Michael Angelo, and all the great architects, had built; because, of
the dream edifice, she had said, "How vast it is!" while of the real St.
Peter's she could only say, "After all, it is not so immense!" Besides,
such as the church is, it can nowhere be made visible at one glance.
It stands in its own way. You see an aisle, or a transept; you see the
nave, or the tribune; but, on account of its ponderous piers and other
obstructions, it is only by this fragmentary process that you get an
idea of the cathedral.

There is no answering such objections. The great church smiles calmly
upon its critics, and, for all response, says, "Look at me!" and if you
still murmur for the loss of your shadowy perspective, there comes no
reply, save, "Look at me!" in endless repetition, as the one thing to
be said. And, after looking many times, with long intervals between, you
discover that the cathedral has gradually extended itself over the whole
compass of your idea; it covers all the site of your visionary temple,
and has room for its cloudy pinnacles beneath the dome.

One afternoon, as Hilda entered St. Peter's in sombre mood, its interior
beamed upon her with all the effect of a new creation. It seemed an
embodiment of whatever the imagination could conceive, or the heart
desire, as a magnificent, comprehensive, majestic symbol of religious
faith. All splendor was included within its verge, and there was space
for all. She gazed with delight even at the multiplicity of ornament.
She was glad at the cherubim that fluttered upon the pilasters, and of
the marble doves, hovering unexpectedly, with green olive-branches
of precious stones. She could spare nothing, now, of the manifold
magnificence that had been lavished, in a hundred places, richly enough
to have made world-famous shrines in any other church, but which
here melted away into the vast sunny breadth, and were of no separate
account. Yet each contributed its little all towards the grandeur of the
whole.

She would not have banished one of those grim popes, who sit each over
his own tomb, scattering cold benedictions out of their marble hands;
nor a single frozen sister of the Allegoric family, to whom--as, like
hired mourners at an English funeral, it costs them no wear and tear of
heart--is assigned the office of weeping for the dead. If you choose to
see these things, they present themselves; if you deem them unsuitable
and out of place, they vanish, individually, but leave their life upon
the walls.

The pavement! it stretched out illimitably, a plain of many-colored
marble, where thousands of worshippers might kneel together, and
shadowless angels tread among them without brushing their heavenly
garments against those earthly ones. The roof! the dome! Rich, gorgeous,
filled with sunshine, cheerfully sublime, and fadeless after
centuries, those lofty depths seemed to translate the heavens to mortal
comprehension, and help the spirit upward to a yet higher and wider
sphere. Must not the faith, that built this matchless edifice, and
warmed, illuminated, and overflowed from it, include whatever can
satisfy human aspirations at the loftiest, or minister to human
necessity at the sorest? If Religion had a material home, was it not
here?

As the scene which we but faintly suggest shone calmly before the New
England maiden at her entrance, she moved, as if by very instinct, to
one of the vases of holy water, upborne against a column by two mighty
cherubs. Hilda dipped her fingers, and had almost signed the cross upon
her breast, but forbore, and trembled, while shaking the water from her
finger-tips. She felt as if her mother's spirit, somewhere within
the dome, were looking down upon her child, the daughter of Puritan
forefathers, and weeping to behold her ensnared by these gaudy
superstitions. So she strayed sadly onward, up the nave, and towards the
hundred golden lights that swarm before the high altar. Seeing a woman;
a priest, and a soldier kneel to kiss the toe of the brazen St. Peter,
who protrudes it beyond his pedestal for the purpose, polished bright
with former salutations, while a child stood on tiptoe to do the same,
the glory of the church was darkened before Hilda's eyes. But again she
went onward into remoter regions. She turned into the right transept,
and thence found her way to a shrine, in the extreme corner of the
edifice, which is adorned with a mosaic copy of Guido's beautiful
Archangel, treading on the prostrate fiend.

This was one of the few pictures, which, in these dreary days, had not
faded nor deteriorated in Hilda's estimation; not that it was better
than many in which she no longer took an interest; but the subtile
delicacy of the painter's genius was peculiarly adapted to her
character. She felt, while gazing at it, that the artist had done a
great thing, not merely for the Church of Rome, but for the cause of
Good. The moral of the picture, the immortal youth and loveliness of
virtue, and its irresistibles might against ugly Evil, appealed as much
to Puritans as Catholics.

Suddenly, and as if it were done in a dream, Hilda found herself
kneeling before the shrine, under the ever-burning lamp that throws
its rays upon the Archangel's face. She laid her forehead on the marble
steps before the altar, and sobbed out a prayer; she hardly knew to
whom, whether Michael, the Virgin, or the Father; she hardly knew for
what, save only a vague longing, that thus the burden of her spirit
might be lightened a little.

In an instant she snatched herself up, as it were, from her knees, all
a-throb with the emotions which were struggling to force their way out
of her heart by the avenue that had so nearly been opened for them. Yet
there was a strange sense of relief won by that momentary, passionate
prayer; a strange joy, moreover, whether from what she had done, or for
what she had escaped doing, Hilda could not tell. But she felt as one
half stifled, who has stolen a breath of air.

Next to the shrine where she had knelt there is another, adorned with
a picture by Guercino, representing a maiden's body in the jaws of the
sepulchre, and her lover weeping over it; while her beatified spirit
looks down upon the scene, in the society of the Saviour and a throng
of saints. Hilda wondered if it were not possible, by some miracle of
faith, so to rise above her present despondency that she might look down
upon what she was, just as Petronilla in the picture looked at her own
corpse. A hope, born of hysteric trouble, fluttered in her heart. A
presentiment, or what she fancied such, whispered her, that, before she
had finished the circuit of the cathedral, relief would come.

The unhappy are continually tantalized by similar delusions of succor
near at hand; at least, the despair is very dark that has no such
will-o'-the-wisp to glimmer in it.





CHAPTER XXXIX


THE WORLD'S CATHEDRAL


Still gliding onward, Hilda now looked up into the dome, where the
sunshine came through the western windows, and threw across long shafts
of light. They rested upon the mosaic figures of two evangelists above
the cornice. These great beams of radiance, traversing what seemed the
empty space, were made visible in misty glory, by the holy cloud of
incense, else unseen, which had risen into the middle dome. It was to
Hilda as if she beheld the worship of the priest and people ascending
heavenward, purified from its alloy of earth, and acquiring celestial
substance in the golden atmosphere to which it aspired, She wondered if
angels did not sometimes hover within the dome, and show themselves, in
brief glimpses, floating amid the sunshine and the glorified vapor, to
those who devoutly worshipped on the pavement.

She had now come into the southern transept. Around this portion of the
church are ranged a number of confessionals. They are small tabernacles
of carved wood, with a closet for the priest in the centre; and, on
either side, a space for a penitent to kneel, and breathe his confession
through a perforated auricle into the good father's ear. Observing this
arrangement, though already familiar to her, our poor Hilda was anew
impressed with the infinite convenience--if we may use so poor a
phrase--of the Catholic religion to its devout believers.

Who, in truth, that considers the matter, can resist a similar
impression! In the hottest fever-fit of life, they can always find,
ready for their need, a cool, quiet, beautiful place of worship. They
may enter its sacred precincts at any hour, leaving the fret and trouble
of the world behind them, and purifying themselves with a touch of
holy water at the threshold. In the calm interior, fragrant of rich and
soothing incense, they may hold converse with some saint, their awful,
kindly friend. And, most precious privilege of all, whatever perplexity,
sorrow, guilt, may weigh upon their souls, they can fling down the dark
burden at the foot of the cross, and go forth--to sin no more, nor be
any longer disquieted; but to live again in the freshness and elasticity
of innocence.

"Do not these inestimable advantages," thought Hilda, "or some of them
at least, belong to Christianity itself? Are they not a part of the
blessings which the system was meant to bestow upon mankind? Can the
faith in which I was born and bred be perfect, if it leave a weak girl
like me to wander, desolate, with this great trouble crushing me down?"

A poignant anguish thrilled within her breast; it was like a thing that
had life, and was struggling to get out.

"O help! O help!" cried Hilda; "I cannot, cannot bear it!"

Only by the reverberations that followed--arch echoing the sound to
arch, and a pope of bronze repeating it to a pope of marble, as each
sat enthroned over his tomb--did Hilda become aware that she had really
spoken above her breath. But, in that great space, there is no need to
hush up the heart within one's own bosom, so carefully as elsewhere;
and if the cry reached any distant auditor, it came broken into many
fragments, and from various quarters of the church.

Approaching one of the confessionals, she saw a woman kneeling within.
Just as Hilda drew near, the penitent rose, came forth, and kissed the
hand of the priest, who regarded her with a look of paternal benignity,
and appeared to be giving her some spiritual counsel, in a low voice.
She then knelt to receive his blessing, which was fervently bestowed.
Hilda was so struck with the peace and joy in the woman's face, that, as
the latter retired, she could not help speaking to her.

"You look very happy!" said she. "Is it so sweet, then, to go to the
confessional?"

"O, very sweet, my dear signorina!" answered the woman, with moistened
eyes and an affectionate smile; for she was so thoroughly softened with
what she had been doing, that she felt as if Hilda were her younger
sister. "My heart is at rest now. Thanks be to the Saviour, and the
Blessed Virgin and the saints, and this good father, there is no more
trouble for poor Teresa!"

"I am glad for your sake," said Hilda, sighing for her own. "I am a poor
heretic, but a human sister; and I rejoice for you!"

She went from one to another of the confessionals, and, looking at
each, perceived that they were inscribed with gilt letters: on one,
Pro Italica Lingua; on another, Pro Flandrica Lingua; on a third, Pro
Polonica Lingua; on a fourth, Pro Illyrica Lingua; on a fifth, Pro
Hispanica Lingua. In this vast and hospitable cathedral, worthy to be
the religious heart of the whole world, there was room for all nations;
there was access to the Divine Grace for every Christian soul; there was
an ear for what the overburdened heart might have to murmur, speak in
what native tongue it would.

When Hilda had almost completed the circuit of the transept, she came to
a confessional--the central part was closed, but a mystic room protruded
from it, indicating the presence of a priest within--on which was
inscribed, Pro Anglica Lingua.

It was the word in season! If she had heard her mother's voice from
within the tabernacle, calling her, in her own mother-tongue, to come
and lay her poor head in her lap, and sob out all her troubles, Hilda
could not have responded with a more inevitable obedience. She did not
think; she only felt. Within her heart was a great need. Close at hand,
within the veil of the confessional, was the relief. She flung herself
down in the penitent's place; and, tremulously, passionately, with sobs,
tears, and the turbulent overflow of emotion too long repressed, she
poured out the dark story which had infused its poison into her innocent
life.

Hilda had not seen, nor could she now see, the visage of the priest.
But, at intervals, in the pauses of that strange confession, half choked
by the struggle of her feelings toward an outlet, she heard a mild, calm
voice, somewhat mellowed by age. It spoke soothingly; it encouraged her;
it led her on by apposite questions that seemed to be suggested by a
great and tender interest, and acted like magnetism in attracting the
girl's confidence to this unseen friend. The priest's share in the
interview, indeed, resembled that of one who removes the stones,
clustered branches, or whatever entanglements impede the current of a
swollen stream. Hilda could have imagined--so much to the purpose were
his inquiries--that he was already acquainted with some outline of what
she strove to tell him.

Thus assisted, she revealed the whole of her terrible secret! The whole,
except that no name escaped her lips.

And, ah, what a relief! When the hysteric gasp, the strife between words
and sobs, had subsided, what a torture had passed away from her soul! It
was all gone; her bosom was as pure now as in her childhood. She was a
girl again; she was Hilda of the dove-cote; not that doubtful creature
whom her own doves had hardly recognized as their mistress and playmate,
by reason of the death-scent that clung to her garments!

After she had ceased to speak, Hilda heard the priest bestir
himself with an old man's reluctant movement. He stepped out of the
confessional; and as the girl was still kneeling in the penitential
corner, he summoned her forth.

"Stand up, my daughter," said the mild voice of the confessor; "what we
have further to say must be spoken face to face."

Hilda did his bidding, and stood before him with a downcast visage,
which flushed and grew pale again. But it had the wonderful beauty which
we may often observe in those who have recently gone through a great
struggle, and won the peace that lies just on the other side. We see
it in a new mother's face; we see it in the faces of the dead; and
in Hilda's countenance--which had always a rare natural charm for her
friends--this glory of peace made her as lovely as an angel.

On her part, Hilda beheld a venerable figure with hair as white as snow,
and a face strikingly characterized by benevolence. It bore marks of
thought, however, and penetrative insight; although the keen glances of
the eyes were now somewhat bedimmed with tears, which the aged shed, or
almost shed, on lighter stress of emotion than would elicit them from
younger men.

"It has not escaped my observation, daughter," said the priest, "that
this is your first acquaintance with the confessional. How is this?"

"Father," replied Hilda, raising her eyes, and again letting them fall,
"I am of New Eng land birth, and was bred as what you call a heretic."

"From New England!" exclaimed the priest. "It was my own birthplace,
likewise; nor have fifty years of absence made me cease to love it. But
a heretic! And are you reconciled to the Church?"

"Never, father," said Hilda.

"And, that being the case," demanded the old man, "on what ground, my
daughter, have you sought to avail yourself of these blessed privileges,
confined exclusively to members of the one true Church, of confession
and absolution?"

"Absolution, father?" exclaimed Hilda, shrinking back. "O no, no! I
never dreamed of that! Only our Heavenly Father can forgive my sins; and
it is only by sincere repentance of whatever wrong I may have done, and
by my own best efforts towards a higher life, that I can hope for his
forgiveness! God forbid that I should ask absolution from mortal man!"

"Then wherefore," rejoined the priest, with somewhat less mildness in
his tone,--"wherefore, I ask again, have you taken possession, as I may
term it, of this holy ordinance; being a heretic, and neither seeking to
share, nor having faith in, the unspeakable advantages which the Church
offers to its penitents?"

"Father," answered Hilda, trying to tell the old man the simple truth,
"I am a motherless girl, and a stranger here in Italy. I had only God
to take care of me, and be my closest friend; and the terrible, terrible
crime, which I have revealed to you, thrust itself between him and me;
so that I groped for him in the darkness, as it were, and found him
not,--found nothing but a dreadful solitude, and this crime in the midst
of it! I could not bear it. It seemed as if I made the awful guilt my
own, by keeping it hidden in my heart. I grew a fearful thing to myself.
I was going mad!"

"It was a grievous trial, my poor child!" observed the confessor. "Your
relief, I trust, will prove to be greater than you yet know!"

"I feel already how immense it is!" said Hilda, looking gratefully in
his face. "Surely, father, it was the hand of Providence that led me
hither, and made me feel that this vast temple of Christianity, this
great home of religion, must needs contain some cure, some ease, at
least, for my unutterable anguish. And it has proved so. I have told the
hideous secret; told it under the sacred seal of the confessional; and
now it will burn my poor heart no more!"

"But, daughter," answered the venerable priest, not unmoved by what
Hilda said, "you forget! you mistake!--you claim a privilege to which
you have not entitled yourself! The seal of the confessional, do you
say? God forbid that it should ever be broken where it has been fairly
impressed; but it applies only to matters that have been confided to its
keeping in a certain prescribed method, and by persons, moreover, who
have faith in the sanctity of the ordinance. I hold myself, and any
learned casuist of the Church would hold me, as free to disclose all the
particulars of what you term your confession, as if they had come to my
knowledge in a secular way."

"This is not right, father!" said Hilda, fixing her eyes on the old
man's.

"Do not you see, child," he rejoined, with some little heat, "with all
your nicety of conscience, cannot you recognize it as my duty to make
the story known to the proper authorities; a great crime against public
justice being involved, and further evil consequences likely to ensue?"

"No, father, no!" answered Hilda, courageously, her cheeks flushing and
her eyes brightening as she spoke. "Trust a girl's simple heart sooner
than any casuist of your Church, however learned he may be. Trust your
own heart, too! I came to your confessional, father, as I devoutly
believe, by the direct impulse of Heaven, which also brought you hither
to-day, in its mercy and love, to relieve me of a torture that I could
no longer bear. I trusted in the pledge which your Church has always
held sacred between the priest and the human soul, which, through his
medium, is struggling towards its Father above. What I have confided to
you lies sacredly between God and yourself. Let it rest there, father;
for this is right, and if you do otherwise, you will perpetrate a great
wrong, both as a priest and a man! And believe me, no question, no
torture, shall ever force my lips to utter what would be necessary,
in order to make my confession available towards the punishment of the
guilty ones. Leave Providence to deal with them!"

"My quiet little countrywoman," said the priest, with half a smile on
his kindly old face, "you can pluck up a spirit, I perceive, when you
fancy an occasion for one."

"I have spirit only to do what I think right," replied Hilda simply. "In
other respects I am timorous."

"But you confuse yourself between right feelings and very foolish
inferences," continued the priest, "as is the wont of women,--so much
I have learnt by long experience in the confessional,--be they young or
old. However, to set your heart at rest, there is no probable need
for me to reveal the matter. What you have told, if I mistake not, and
perhaps more, is already known in the quarter which it most concerns."

"Known!" exclaimed Hilda. "Known to the authorities of Rome! And what
will be the consequence?"

"Hush!" answered the confessor, laying his finger on his lips. "I tell
you my supposition--mind, it is no assertion of the fact--in order
that you may go the more cheerfully on your way, not deeming yourself
burdened with any responsibility as concerns this dark deed. And now,
daughter, what have you to give in return for an old man's kindness and
sympathy?"

"My grateful remembrance," said Hilda, fervently, "as long as I live!"

"And nothing more?" the priest inquired, with a persuasive smile. "Will
you not reward him with a great joy; one of the last joys that he may
know on earth, and a fit one to take with him into the better world? In
a word, will you not allow me to bring you as a stray lamb into the true
fold? You have experienced some little taste of the relief and comfort
which the Church keeps abundantly in store for all its faithful
children. Come home, dear child,--poor wanderer, who hast caught a
glimpse of the heavenly light,--come home, and be at rest."

"Father," said Hilda, much moved by his kindly earnestness, in
which, however, genuine as it was, there might still be a leaven of
professional craft, "I dare not come a step farther than Providence
shall guide me. Do not let it grieve you, therefore, if I never return
to the confessional; never dip my fingers in holy water; never sign my
bosom with the cross. I am a daughter of the Puritans. But, in spite of
my heresy," she added with a sweet, tearful smile, "you may one day
see the poor girl, to whom you have done this great Christian kindness,
coming to remind you of it, and thank you for it, in the Better Land."

The old priest shook his head. But, as he stretched out his hands at the
same moment, in the act of benediction, Hilda knelt down and received
the blessing with as devout a simplicity as any Catholic of them all.





CHAPTER XL


HILDA AND A FRIEND


When Hilda knelt to receive the priest's benediction, the act was
witnessed by a person who stood leaning against the marble balustrade
that surrounds the hundred golden lights, before the high altar. He had
stood there, indeed, from the moment of the girl's entrance into the
confessional. His start of surprise, at first beholding her, and
the anxious gloom that afterwards settled on his face, sufficiently
betokened that he felt a deep and sad interest in what was going
forward.

After Hilda had bidden the priest farewell, she came slowly towards the
high altar. The individual to whom we have alluded seemed irresolute
whether to advance or retire. His hesitation lasted so long that the
maiden, straying through a happy reverie, had crossed the wide extent
of the pavement between the confessional and the altar, before he had
decided whether to meet her. At last, when within a pace or two, she
raised her eyes and recognized Kenyon.

"It is you!" she exclaimed, with joyful surprise. "I am so happy."

In truth, the sculptor had never before seen, nor hardly imagined, such
a figure of peaceful beatitude as Hilda now presented. While coming
towards him in the solemn radiance which, at that period of the day, is
diffused through the transept, and showered down beneath the dome, she
seemed of the same substance as the atmosphere that enveloped her. He
could scarcely tell whether she was imbued with sunshine, or whether it
was a glow of happiness that shone out of her.

At all events, it was a marvellous change from the sad girl, who had
entered the confessional bewildered with anguish, to this bright, yet
softened image of religious consolation that emerged from it. It was
as if one of the throng of angelic people, who might be hovering in the
sunny depths of the dome, had alighted on the pavement. Indeed, this
capability of transfiguration, which we often see wrought by inward
delight on persons far less capable of it than Hilda, suggests how
angels come by their beauty, it grows out of their happiness, and lasts
forever only because that is immortal.

She held out her hand, and Kenyon was glad to take it in his own, if
only to assure himself that she was made of earthly material.

"Yes, Hilda, I see that you are very happy," he replied gloomily, and
withdrawing his hand after a single pressure. "For me, I never was less
so than at this moment."

"Has any misfortune befallen you?" asked Hilda with earnestness. "Pray
tell me, and you shall have my sympathy, though I must still be very
happy. Now I know how it is that the saints above are touched by the
sorrows of distressed people on earth, and yet are never made wretched
by them. Not that I profess to be a saint, you know," she added, smiling
radiantly. "But the heart grows so large, and so rich, and so variously
endowed, when it has a great sense of bliss, that it can give smiles to
some, and tears to others, with equal sincerity, and enjoy its own peace
throughout all."

"Do not say you are no saint!" answered Kenyon with a smile, though he
felt that the tears stood in his eves. "You will still be Saint Hilda,
whatever church may canonize you."

"Ah! you would not have said so, had you seen me but an hour ago!"
murmured she. "I was so wretched, that there seemed a grievous sin in
it."

"And what has made you so suddenly happy?" inquired the sculptor. "But
first, Hilda, will you not tell me why you were so wretched?"

"Had I met you yesterday, I might have told you that," she replied.
"To-day, there is no need."

"Your happiness, then?" said the sculptor, as sadly as before. "Whence
comes it?"

"A great burden has been lifted from my heart--from my conscience, I had
almost said,"--answered Hilda, without shunning the glance that he fixed
upon her. "I am a new creature, since this morning, Heaven be praised
for it! It was a blessed hour--a blessed impulse--that brought me
to this beautiful and glorious cathedral. I shall hold it in loving
remembrance while I live, as the spot where I found infinite peace after
infinite trouble."

Her heart seemed so full, that it spilt its new gush of happiness, as
it were, like rich and sunny wine out of an over-brimming goblet. Kenyon
saw that she was in one of those moods of elevated feeling, when the
soul is upheld by a strange tranquility, which is really more passionate
and less controllable than emotions far exceeding it in violence. He
felt that there would be indelicacy, if he ought not rather to call it
impiety, in his stealing upon Hilda, while she was thus beyond her
own guardianship, and surprising her out of secrets which she might
afterwards bitterly regret betraying to him. Therefore, though yearning
to know what had happened, he resolved to forbear further question.

Simple and earnest people, however, being accustomed to speak from their
genuine impulses, cannot easily, as craftier men do, avoid the subject
which they have at heart. As often as the sculptor unclosed his lips,
such words as these were ready to burst out:--"Hilda, have you flung
your angelic purity into that mass of unspeakable corruption, the Roman
Church?"

"What were you saying?" she asked, as Kenyon forced back an almost
uttered exclamation of this kind.

"I was thinking of what you have just remarked about the cathedral,"
said he, looking up into the mighty hollow of the dome. "It is indeed
a magnificent structure, and an adequate expression of the Faith which
built it. When I behold it in a proper mood,--that is to say, when I
bring my mind into a fair relation with the minds and purposes of its
spiritual and material architects,--I see but one or two criticisms to
make. One is, that it needs painted windows."

"O, no!" said Hilda. "They would be quite inconsistent with so much
richness of color in the interior of the church. Besides, it is a Gothic
ornament, and only suited to that style of architecture, which requires
a gorgeous dimness."

"Nevertheless," continued the sculptor, "yonder square apertures,
filled with ordinary panes of glass, are quite out of keeping with the
superabundant splendor of everything about them. They remind me of that
portion of Aladdin's palace which he left unfinished, in order that
his royal father-in-law might put the finishing touch. Daylight, in its
natural state, ought not to be admitted here. It should stream through a
brilliant illusion of saints and hierarchies, and old scriptural images,
and symbolized dogmas, purple, blue, golden, and a broad flame of
scarlet. Then, it would be just such an illumination as the Catholic
faith allows to its believers. But, give me--to live and die in--the
pure, white light of heaven!"

"Why do you look so sorrowfully at me?" asked Hilda, quietly meeting his
disturbed gaze. "What would you say to me? I love the white light too!"

"I fancied so," answered Kenyon. "Forgive me, Hilda; but I must needs
speak. You seemed to me a rare mixture of impressibility, sympathy,
sensitiveness to many influences, with a certain quality of common
sense;--no, not that, but a higher and finer attribute, for which I find
no better word. However tremulously you might vibrate, this quality,
I supposed, would always bring you back to the equipoise. You were a
creature of imagination, and yet as truly a New England girl as any with
whom you grew up in your native village. If there were one person in
the world whose native rectitude of thought, and something deeper, more
reliable, than thought, I would have trusted against all the arts of a
priesthood,--whose taste alone, so exquisite and sincere that it rose
to be a moral virtue, I would have rested upon as a sufficient
safeguard,--it was yourself!"

"I am conscious of no such high and delicate qualities as you allow me,"
answered Hilda. "But what have I done that a girl of New England birth
and culture, with the right sense that her mother taught her, and the
conscience that she developed in her, should not do?"

"Hilda, I saw you at the confessional!" said Kenyon.

"Ah well, my dear friend," replied Hilda, casting down her eyes, and
looking somewhat confused, yet not ashamed, "you must try to forgive me
for that,--if you deem it wrong, because it has saved my reason, and
made me very happy. Had you been here yesterday, I would have confessed
to you."

"Would to Heaven I had!" ejaculated Kenyon.

"I think," Hilda resumed, "I shall never go to the confessional again;
for there can scarcely come such a sore trial twice in my life. If I had
been a wiser girl, a stronger, and a more sensible, very likely I might
not have gone to the confessional at all. It was the sin of others that
drove me thither; not my own, though it almost seemed so. Being what
I am, I must either have done what you saw me doing, or have gone mad.
Would that have been better?"

"Then you are not a Catholic?" asked the sculptor earnestly.

"Really, I do not quite know what I am," replied Hilda, encountering his
eyes with a frank and simple gaze. "I have a great deal of faith, and
Catholicism seems to have a great deal of good. Why should not I be a
Catholic, if I find there what I need, and what I cannot find elsewhere?
The more I see of this worship, the more I wonder at the exuberance with
which it adapts itself to all the demands of human infirmity. If its
ministers were but a little more than human, above all error, pure from
all iniquity, what a religion would it be!"

"I need not fear your conversion to the Catholic faith," remarked
Kenyon, "if you are at all aware of the bitter sarcasm implied in your
last observation. It is very just. Only the exceeding ingenuity of the
system stamps it as the contrivance of man, or some worse author; not an
emanation of the broad and simple wisdom from on high."

"It may be so," said Hilda; "but I meant no sarcasm."

Thus conversing, the two friends went together down the grand extent
of the nave. Before leaving the church, they turned to admire again its
mighty breadth, the remoteness of the glory behind the altar, and the
effect of visionary splendor and magnificence imparted by the long bars
of smoky sunshine, which travelled so far before arriving at a place of
rest.

"Thank Heaven for having brought me hither!" said Hilda fervently.

Kenyon's mind was deeply disturbed by his idea of her Catholic
propensities; and now what he deemed her disproportionate and misapplied
veneration for the sublime edifice stung him into irreverence.

"The best thing I know of St. Peter's," observed he, "is its equable
temperature. We are now enjoying the coolness of last winter, which, a
few months hence, will be the warmth of the present summer. It has no
cure, I suspect, in all its length and breadth, for a sick soul, but
it would make an admirable atmospheric hospital for sick bodies. What
a delightful shelter would it be for the invalids who throng to Rome,
where the sirocco steals away their strength, and the tramontana stabs
them through and through, like cold steel with a poisoned point! But
within these walls, the thermometer never varies. Winter and summer are
married at the high altar, and dwell together in perfect harmony."

"Yes," said Hilda; "and I have always felt this soft, unchanging climate
of St. Peter's to be another manifestation of its sanctity."

"That is not precisely my idea," replied Kenyon. "But what a delicious
life it would be, if a colony of people with delicate lungs or merely
with delicate fancies--could take up their abode in this ever-mild and
tranquil air. These architectural tombs of the popes might serve for
dwellings, and each brazen sepulchral doorway would become a domestic
threshold. Then the lover, if he dared, might say to his mistress,
'Will you share my tomb with me?' and, winning her soft consent, he
would lead her to the altar, and thence to yonder sepulchre of Pope
Gregory, which should be their nuptial home. What a life would be
theirs, Hilda, in their marble Eden!"

"It is not kind, nor like yourself," said Hilda gently, "to throw
ridicule on emotions which are genuine. I revere this glorious church
for itself and its purposes; and love it, moreover, because here I have
found sweet peace, after' a great anguish."

"Forgive me," answered the sculptor, "and I will do so no more. My heart
is not so irreverent as my words."

They went through the piazza of St. Peter's and the adjacent streets,
silently at first; but, before reaching the bridge of St. Angelo,
Hilda's flow of spirits began to bubble forth, like the gush of a
streamlet that has been shut up by frost, or by a heavy stone over its
source. Kenyon had never found her so delightful as now; so softened
out of the chillness of her virgin pride; so full of fresh thoughts,
at which he was often moved to smile, although, on turning them over
a little more, he sometimes discovered that they looked fanciful only
because so absolutely true.

But, indeed, she was not quite in a normal state. Emerging from gloom
into sudden cheerfulness, the effect upon Hilda was as if she were
just now created. After long torpor, receiving back her intellectual
activity, she derived an exquisite pleasure from the use of her
faculties, which were set in motion by causes that seemed inadequate.
She continually brought to Kenyon's mind the image of a child, making
its plaything of every object, but sporting in good faith, and with
a kind of seriousness. Looking up, for example, at the statue of St.
Michael, on the top of Hadrian's castellated tomb, Hilda fancied an
interview between the Archangel and the old emperor's ghost, who was
naturally displeased at finding his mausoleum, which he had ordained
for the stately and solemn repose of his ashes, converted to its present
purposes.

"But St. Michael, no doubt," she thoughtfully remarked, "would finally
convince the Emperor Hadrian that where a warlike despot is sown as the
seed, a fortress and a prison are the only possible crop."

They stopped on the bridge to look into the swift eddying flow of the
yellow Tiber, a mud puddle in strenuous motion; and Hilda wondered
whether the seven-branched golden candlestick,--the holy candlestick of
the Jews, which was lost at the Ponte Molle, in Constantine's time, had
yet been swept as far down the river as this.

"It probably stuck where it fell," said the sculptor; "and, by this
time, is imbedded thirty feet deep in the mud of the Tiber. Nothing will
ever bring it to light again."

"I fancy you are mistaken," replied Hilda, smiling. "There was a meaning
and purpose in each of its seven branches, and such a candlestick cannot
be lost forever. When it is found again, and seven lights are kindled
and burning in it, the whole world will gain the illumination which
it needs. Would not this be an admirable idea for a mystic story or
parable, or seven-branched allegory, full of poetry, art, philosophy,
and religion? It shall be called 'The Recovery of the Sacred
Candlestick.' As each branch is lighted, it shall have a differently
colored lustre from the other six; and when all the seven are kindled,
their radiance shall combine into the intense white light of truth."

"Positively, Hilda, this is a magnificent conception," cried Kenyon.
"The more I look at it, the brighter it burns."

"I think so too," said Hilda, enjoying a childlike pleasure in her own
idea. "The theme is better suited for verse than prose; and when I go
home to America, I will suggest it to one of our poets. Or seven poets
might write the poem together, each lighting a separate branch of the
Sacred Candlestick."

"Then you think of going home?" Kenyon asked.

"Only yesterday," she replied, "I longed to flee away. Now, all is
changed, and, being happy again, I should feel deep regret at leaving
the Pictorial Land. But I cannot tell. In Rome, there is something
dreary and awful, which we can never quite escape. At least, I thought
so yesterday."

When they reached the Via Portoghese, and approached Hilda's tower, the
doves, who were waiting aloft, flung themselves upon the air, and came
floating down about her head. The girl caressed them, and responded to
their cooings with similar sounds from her own lips, and with words
of endearment; and their joyful flutterings and airy little flights,
evidently impelled by pure exuberance of spirits, seemed to show that
the doves had a real sympathy with their mistress's state of mind. For
peace had descended upon her like a dove.

Bidding the sculptor farewell, Hilda climbed her tower, and came forth
upon its summit to trim the Virgin's lamp. The doves, well knowing her
custom, had flown up thither to meet her, and again hovered about her
head; and very lovely was her aspect, in the evening Sunlight, which had
little further to do with the world just then, save to fling a golden
glory on Hilda's hair, and vanish.

Turning her eyes down into the dusky street which she had just quitted,
Hilda saw the sculptor still there, and waved her hand to him.

"How sad and dim he looks, down there in that dreary street!" she said
to herself. "Something weighs upon his spirits. Would I could comfort
him!"

"How like a spirit she looks, aloft there, with the evening glory round
her head, and those winged creatures claiming her as akin to them!"
thought Kenyon, on his part. "How far above me! how unattainable! Ah,
if I could lift myself to her region! Or--if it be not a sin to wish
it--would that I might draw her down to an earthly fireside!"

What a sweet reverence is that, when a young man deems his mistress a
little more than mortal, and almost chides himself for longing to bring
her close to his heart! A trifling circumstance, but such as lovers
make much of, gave him hope. One of the doves, which had been resting on
Hilda's shoulder, suddenly flew downward, as if recognizing him as its
mistress's dear friend; and, perhaps commissioned with an errand of
regard, brushed his upturned face with its wings, and again soared
aloft.

The sculptor watched the bird's return, and saw Hilda greet it with a
smile.





CHAPTER XLI


SNOWDROPS AND MAIDENLY DELIGHTS


It being still considerably earlier than the period at which artists
and tourists are accustomed to assemble in Rome, the sculptor and Hilda
found themselves comparatively alone there. The dense mass of native
Roman life, in the midst of which they were, served to press them near
one another. It was as if they had been thrown together on a desert
island. Or they seemed to have wandered, by some strange chance, out
of the common world, and encountered each other in a depopulated city,
where there were streets of lonely palaces, and unreckonable treasures
of beautiful and admirable things, of which they two became the sole
inheritors.

In such circumstances, Hilda's gentle reserve must have been stronger
than her kindly disposition permitted, if the friendship between Kenyon
and herself had not grown as warm as a maiden's friendship can ever be,
without absolutely and avowedly blooming into love. On the sculptor's
side, the amaranthine flower was already in full blow. But it is very
beautiful, though the lover's heart may grow chill at the perception, to
see how the snow will sometimes linger in a virgin's breast, even after
the spring is well advanced. In such alpine soils, the summer will not
be anticipated; we seek vainly for passionate flowers, and blossoms
of fervid hue and spicy fragrance, finding only snowdrops and sunless
violets, when it is almost the full season for the crimson rose.

With so much tenderness as Hilda had in her nature, it was strange that
she so reluctantly admitted the idea of love; especially as, in
the sculptor, she found both congeniality and variety of taste, and
likenesses and differences of character; these being as essential as
those to any poignancy of mutual emotion.

So Hilda, as far as Kenyon could discern, still did not love him, though
she admitted him within the quiet circle of her affections as a dear
friend and trusty counsellor. If we knew what is best for us, or could
be content with what is reasonably good, the sculptor might well have
been satisfied, for a season, with this calm intimacy, which so sweetly
kept him a stranger in her heart, and a ceremonious guest; and yet
allowed him the free enjoyment of all but its deeper recesses. The
flowers that grow outside of those minor sanctities have a wild, hasty
charm, which it is well to prove; there may be sweeter ones within the
sacred precinct, but none that will die while you are handling them, and
bequeath you a delicious legacy, as these do, in the perception of their
evanescence and unreality.

And this may be the reason, after all, why Hilda, like so many other
maidens, lingered on the hither side of passion; her finer instinct and
keener sensibility made her enjoy those pale delights in a degree of
which men are incapable. She hesitated to grasp a richer happiness, as
possessing already such measure of it as her heart could hold, and of a
quality most agreeable to her virgin tastes.

Certainly, they both were very happy. Kenyon's genius, unconsciously
wrought upon by Hilda's influence, took a more delicate character than
heretofore. He modelled, among other things, a beautiful little statue
of maidenhood gathering a snowdrop. It was never put into marble,
however, because the sculptor soon recognized it as one of those fragile
creations which are true only to the moment that produces them, and
are wronged if we try to imprison their airy excellence in a permanent
material.

On her part, Hilda returned to her customary Occupations with a fresh
love for them, and yet with a deeper look into the heart of things; such
as those necessarily acquire who have passed from picture galleries into
dungeon gloom, and thence come back to the picture gallery again. It is
questionable whether she was ever so perfect a copyist thenceforth. She
could not yield herself up to the painter so unreservedly as in times
past; her character had developed a sturdier quality, which made her
less pliable to the influence of other minds. She saw into the picture
as profoundly as ever, and perhaps more so, but not with the devout
sympathy that had formerly given her entire possession of the old
master's idea. She had known such a reality, that it taught her to
distinguish inevitably the large portion that is unreal, in every work
of art. Instructed by sorrow, she felt that there is something beyond
almost all which pictorial genius has produced; and she never forgot
those sad wanderings from gallery to gallery, and from church to church,
where she had vainly sought a type of the Virgin Mother, or the Saviour,
or saint, or martyr, which a soul in extreme need might recognize as the
adequate one.

How, indeed, should she have found such? How could holiness be revealed
to the artist of an age when the greatest of them put genius and
imagination in the place of spiritual insight, and when, from the pope
downward, all Christendom was corrupt?

Meanwhile, months wore away, and Rome received back that large portion
of its life-blood which runs in the veins of its foreign and temporary
population. English visitors established themselves in the hotels, and
in all the sunny suites of apartments, in the streets convenient to
the Piazza di Spagna; the English tongue was heard familiarly along the
Corso, and English children sported in the Pincian Gardens.

The native Romans, on the other hand, like the butterflies and
grasshoppers, resigned themselves to the short, sharp misery which
winter brings to a people whose arrangements are made almost exclusively
with a view to summer. Keeping no fire within-doors, except possibly a
spark or two in the kitchen, they crept out of their cheerless houses
into the narrow, sunless, sepulchral streets, bringing their firesides
along with them, in the shape of little earthen pots, vases, or pipkins,
full of lighted charcoal and warm ashes, over which they held their
tingling finger-ends. Even in this half-torpid wretchedness, they still
seemed to dread a pestilence in the sunshine, and kept on the shady side
of the piazzas, as scrupulously as in summer. Through the open doorways
w no need to shut them when the weather within was bleaker than
without--a glimpse into the interior of their dwellings showed the
uncarpeted brick floors, as dismal as the pavement of a tomb.

They drew their old cloaks about them, nevertheless, and threw the
corners over their shoulders, with the dignity of attitude and action
that have come down to these modern citizens, as their sole inheritance
from the togated nation. Somehow or other, they managed to keep up their
poor, frost-bitten hearts against the pitiless atmosphere with a quiet
and uncomplaining endurance that really seems the most respectable point
in the present Roman character. For in New England, or in Russia, or
scarcely in a hut of the Esquimaux, there is no such discomfort to be
borne as by Romans in wintry weather, when the orange-trees bear icy
fruit in the gardens; and when the rims of all the fountains are shaggy
with icicles, and the Fountain of Trevi skimmed almost across with a
glassy surface; and when there is a slide in the piazza of St. Peter's,
and a fringe of brown, frozen foam along the eastern shore of the Tiber,
and sometimes a fall of great snowflakes into the dreary lanes and
alleys of the miserable city. Cold blasts, that bring death with them,
now blow upon the shivering invalids, who came hither in the hope of
breathing balmy airs.

Wherever we pass our summers, may all our inclement months, from
November to April, henceforth be spent in some country that recognizes
winter as an integral portion of its year!

Now, too, there was especial discomfort in the stately picture
galleries, where nobody, indeed,--not the princely or priestly founders,
nor any who have inherited their cheerless magnificence,--ever dreamed
of such an impossibility as fireside warmth, since those great palaces
were built. Hilda, therefore, finding her fingers so much benumbed that
the spiritual influence could not be transmitted to them, was persuaded
to leave her easel before a picture, on one of these wintry days, and
pay a visit to Kenyon's studio. But neither was the studio anything
better than a dismal den, with its marble shapes shivering around the
walls, cold as the snow images which the sculptor used to model in his
boyhood, and sadly behold them weep themselves away at the first thaw.

Kenyon's Roman artisans, all this while, had been at work on the
Cleopatra. The fierce Egyptian queen had now struggled almost out of the
imprisoning stone; or, rather, the workmen had found her within the mass
of marble, imprisoned there by magic, but still fervid to the touch
with fiery life, the fossil woman of an age that produced statelier,
stronger, and more passionate creatures than our own. You already felt
her compressed heat, and were aware of a tiger-like character even in
her repose. If Octavius should make his appearance, though the marble
still held her within its embrace, it was evident that she would tear
herself forth in a twinkling, either to spring enraged at his
throat, or, sinking into his arms, to make one more proof of her rich
blandishments, or, falling lowly at his feet, to try the efficacy of a
woman's tears.

"I am ashamed to tell you how much I admire this statue," said Hilda.
"No other sculptor could have done it."

"This is very sweet for me to hear," replied Kenyon; "and since your
reserve keeps you from saying more, I shall imagine you expressing
everything that an artist would wish to hear said about his work."

"You will not easily go beyond my genuine opinion," answered Hilda, with
a smile.

"Ah, your kind word makes me very happy," said the sculptor, "and I
need it, just now, on behalf of my Cleopatra. That inevitable period has
come,--for I have found it inevitable, in regard to all my works,--when
I look at what I fancied to be a statue, lacking only breath to make it
live, and find it a mere lump of senseless stone, into which I have not
really succeeded in moulding the spiritual part of my idea. I should
like, now,--only it would be such shameful treatment for a discrowned
queen, and my own offspring too,--I should like to hit poor Cleopatra a
bitter blow on her Egyptian nose with this mallet."

"That is a blow which all statues seem doomed to receive, sooner or
later, though seldom from the hand that sculptured them," said Hilda,
laughing. "But you must not let yourself be too much disheartened by
the decay of your faith in what you produce. I have heard a poet express
similar distaste for his own most exquisite poem, and I am afraid that
this final despair, and sense of short-coming, must always be the reward
and punishment of those who try to grapple with a great or beautiful
idea. It only proves that you have been able to imagine things too high
for mortal faculties to execute. The idea leaves you an imperfect image
of itself, which you at first mistake for the ethereal reality, but soon
find that the latter has escaped out of your closest embrace."

"And the only consolation is," remarked Kenyon, "that the blurred and
imperfect image may still make a very respectable appearance in the eyes
of those who have not seen the original."

"More than that," rejoined Hilda; "for there is a class of spectators
whose sympathy will help them to see the perfect through a mist of
imperfection. Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures
or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or
artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness."

"You, Hilda, are yourself the only critic in whom I have much faith,"
said Kenyon. "Had you condemned Cleopatra, nothing should have saved
her."

"You invest me with such an awful responsibility," she replied, "that I
shall not dare to say a single word about your other works."

"At least," said the sculptor, "tell me whether you recognize this
bust?"

He pointed to a bust of Donatello. It was not the one which Kenyon had
begun to model at Monte Beni, but a reminiscence of the Count's face,
wrought under the influence of all the sculptor's knowledge of his
history, and of his personal and hereditary character. It stood on a
wooden pedestal, not nearly finished, but with fine white dust and small
chips of marble scattered about it, and itself incrusted all round with
the white, shapeless substance of the block. In the midst appeared
the features, lacking sharpness, and very much resembling a fossil
countenance,--but we have already used this simile, in reference to
Cleopatra, with the accumulations of long-past ages clinging to it.

And yet, strange to say, the face had an expression, and a more
recognizable one than Kenyon had succeeded in putting into the
clay model at Monte Beni. The reader is probably acquainted with
Thorwaldsen's three-fold analogy,--the clay model, the Life; the plaster
cast, the Death; and the sculptured marble, the Resurrection,--and
it seemed to be made good by the spirit that was kindling up these
imperfect features, like a lambent flame.

"I was not quite sure, at first glance, that I knew the face," observed
Hilda; "the likeness surely is not a striking one. There is a good
deal of external resemblance, still, to the features of the Faun of
Praxiteles, between whom and Donatello, you know, we once insisted that
there was a perfect twin-brotherhood. But the expression is now so very
different!"

"What do you take it to be?" asked the sculptor.

"I hardly know how to define it," she answered. "But it has an effect
as if I could see this countenance gradually brightening while I look
at it. It gives the impression of a growing intellectual power and
moral sense. Donatello's face used to evince little more than a genial,
pleasurable sort of vivacity, and capability of enjoyment. But here, a
soul is being breathed into him; it is the Faun, but advancing towards a
state of higher development."

"Hilda, do you see all this?" exclaimed Kenyon, in considerable
surprise. "I may have had such an idea in my mind, but was quite unaware
that I had succeeded in conveying it into the marble."

"Forgive me," said Hilda, "but I question whether this striking effect
has been brought about by any skill or purpose on the sculptor's part.
Is it not, perhaps, the chance result of the bust being just so far
shaped out, in the marble, as the process of moral growth had advanced
in the original? A few more strokes of the chisel might change the whole
expression, and so spoil it for what it is now worth."

"I believe you are right," answered Kenyon, thoughtfully examining his
work; "and, strangely enough, it was the very expression that I tried
unsuccessfully to produce in the clay model. Well; not another chip
shall be struck from the marble."

And, accordingly, Donatello's bust (like that rude, rough mass of the
head of Brutus, by Michael Angelo, at Florence) has ever since remained
in an unfinished state. Most spectators mistake it for an unsuccessful
attempt towards copying the features of the Faun of Praxiteles. One
observer in a thousand is conscious of something more, and lingers long
over this mysterious face, departing from it reluctantly, and with many
a glance thrown backward. What perplexes him is the riddle that he sees
propounded there; the riddle of the soul's growth, taking its first
impulse amid remorse and pain, and struggling through the incrustations
of the senses. It was the contemplation of this imperfect portrait of
Donatello that originally interested us in his history, and impelled us
to elicit from Kenyon what he knew of his friend's adventures.





CHAPTER XLII


REMINISCENCES OF MIRIAM


When Hilda and himself turned away from the unfinished bust, the
sculptor's mind still dwelt upon the reminiscences which it suggested.
"You have not seen Donatello recently," he remarked, "and therefore
cannot be aware how sadly he is changed."

"No wonder!" exclaimed Hilda, growing pale.

The terrible scene which she had witnessed, when Donatello's face
gleamed out in so fierce a light, came back upon her memory, almost
for the first time since she knelt at the confessional. Hilda, as is
sometimes the case with persons whose delicate organization requires
a peculiar safeguard, had an elastic faculty of throwing off such
recollections as would be too painful for endurance. The first shock
of Donatello's and Miriam's crime had, indeed, broken through the frail
defence of this voluntary forgetfulness; but, once enabled to relieve
herself of the ponderous anguish over which she had so long brooded, she
had practised a subtile watchfulness in preventing its return.

"No wonder, do you say?" repeated the sculptor, looking at her with
interest, but not exactly with surprise; for he had long suspected that
Hilda had a painful knowledge of events which he himself little more
than surmised. "Then you know!--you have heard! But what can you
possibly have heard, and through what channel?"

"Nothing!" replied Hilda faintly. "Not one word has reached my ears from
the lips of any human being. Let us never speak of it again! No, no!
never again!"

"And Miriam!" said Kenyon, with irrepressible interest. "Is it also
forbidden to speak of her?"

"Hush! do not even utter her name! Try not to think of it!" Hilda
whispered. "It may bring terrible consequences!"

"My dear Hilda!" exclaimed Kenyon, regarding her with wonder and deep
sympathy. "My sweet friend, have you had this secret hidden in your
delicate, maidenly heart, through all these many months! No wonder that
your life was withering out of you."

"It was so, indeed!" said Hilda, shuddering. "Even now, I sicken at the
recollection."

"And how could it have come to your knowledge?" continued the sculptor.
"But no matter! Do not torture yourself with referring to the subject.
Only, if at any time it should be a relief to you, remember that we can
speak freely together, for Miriam has herself suggested a confidence
between us."

"Miriam has suggested this!" exclaimed Hilda. "Yes, I remember, now, her
advising that the secret should be shared with you. But I have
survived the death struggle that it cost me, and need make no further
revelations. And Miriam has spoken to you! What manner of woman can
she be, who, after sharing in such a deed, can make it a topic of
conversation with her friends?"

"Ah, Hilda," replied Kenyon, "you do not know, for you could never
learn it from your own heart, which is all purity and rectitude, what
a mixture of good there may be in things evil; and how the greatest
criminal, if you look at his conduct from his own point of view, or from
any side point, may seem not so unquestionably guilty, after all. So
with Miriam; so with Donatello. They are, perhaps, partners in what we
must call awful guilt; and yet, I will own to you,--when I think of the
original cause, the motives, the feelings, the sudden concurrence of
circumstances thrusting them onward, the urgency of the moment, and
the sublime unselfishness on either part,--I know not well how to
distinguish it from much that the world calls heroism. Might we not
render some such verdict as this?--'Worthy of Death, but not unworthy of
Love! '"

"Never!" answered Hilda, looking at the matter through the clear crystal
medium of her own integrity. "This thing, as regards its causes, is all
a mystery to me, and must remain so. But there is, I believe, only one
right and one wrong; and I do not understand, and may God keep me from
ever understanding, how two things so totally unlike can be mistaken for
one another; nor how two mortal foes, as Right and Wrong surely are, can
work together in the same deed. This is my faith; and I should be led
astray, if you could persuade me to give it up."

"Alas for poor human nature, then!" said Kenyon sadly, and yet half
smiling at Hilda's unworldly and impracticable theory. "I always felt
you, my dear friend, a terribly severe judge, and have been perplexed to
conceive how such tender sympathy could coexist with the remorselessness
of a steel blade. You need no mercy, and therefore know not how to show
any."

"That sounds like a bitter gibe," said Hilda, with the tears springing
into her eyes. "But I cannot help it. It does not alter my perception of
the truth. If there be any such dreadful mixture of good and evil as
you affirm,--and which appears to me almost more shocking than
pure evil,--then the good is turned to poison, not the evil to
wholesomeness."

The sculptor seemed disposed to say something more, but yielded to the
gentle steadfastness with which Hilda declined to listen. She grew very
sad; for a reference to this one dismal topic had set, as it were, a
prison door ajar, and allowed a throng of torturing recollections to
escape from their dungeons into the pure air and white radiance of
her soul. She bade Kenyon a briefer farewell than ordinary, and went
homeward to her tower.

In spite of her efforts to withdraw them to other subjects, her thoughts
dwelt upon Miriam; and, as had not heretofore happened, they brought
with them a painful doubt whether a wrong had not been committed on
Hilda's part, towards the friend once so beloved. Something that Miriam
had said, in their final conversation, recurred to her memory, and
seemed now to deserve more weight than Hilda had assigned to it, in her
horror at the crime just perpetrated. It was not that the deed looked
less wicked and terrible in the retrospect; but she asked herself
whether there were not other questions to be considered, aside from that
single one of Miriam's guilt or innocence; as, for example, whether a
close bond of friendship, in which we once voluntarily engage, ought to
be severed on account of any unworthiness, which we subsequently detect
in our friend. For, in these unions of hearts,--call them marriage,
or whatever else,--we take each other for better for worse. Availing
ourselves of our friend's intimate affection, we pledge our own, as
to be relied upon in every emergency. And what sadder, more desperate
emergency could there be, than had befallen Miriam? Who more need the
tender succor of the innocent, than wretches stained with guilt! And
must a selfish care for the spotlessness of our own garments keep us
from pressing the guilty ones close to our hearts, wherein, for the very
reason that we are innocent, lies their securest refuge from further
ill?

It was a sad thing for Hilda to find this moral enigma propounded to her
conscience; and to feel that, whichever way she might settle it, there
would be a cry of wrong on the other side. Still, the idea stubbornly
came back, that the tie between Miriam and herself had been real, the
affection true, and that therefore the implied compact was not to be
shaken off.

"Miriam loved me well," thought Hilda remorsefully, "and I failed her at
her sorest need."

Miriam loved her well; and not less ardent had been the affection which
Miriam's warm, tender, and generous characteristics had excited in
Hilda's more reserved and quiet nature. It had never been extinguished;
for, in part, the wretchedness which Hilda had since endured was but
the struggle and writhing of her sensibility, still yearning towards
her friend. And now, at the earliest encouragement, it awoke again, and
cried out piteously, complaining of the violence that had been done it.

Recurring to the delinquencies of which she fancied (we say "fancied,"
because we do not unhesitatingly adopt Hilda's present view, but rather
suppose her misled by her feelings)--of which she fancied herself guilty
towards her friend, she suddenly remembered a sealed packet that
Miriam had confided to her. It had been put into her hands with earnest
injunctions of secrecy and care, and if unclaimed after a certain
period, was to be delivered according to its address. Hilda had
forgotten it; or, rather, she had kept the thought of this commission in
the background of her consciousness, with all other thoughts referring
to Miriam.

But now the recollection of this packet, and the evident stress which
Miriam laid upon its delivery at the specified time, impelled Hilda to
hurry up the staircase of her tower, dreading lest the period should
already have elapsed.

No; the hour had not gone by, but was on the very point of passing.
Hilda read the brief note of instruction, on a corner of the envelope,
and discovered, that, in case of Miriam's absence from Rome, the packet
was to be taken to its destination that very day.

"How nearly I had violated my promise!" said Hilda. "And, since we are
separated forever, it has the sacredness of an injunction from a dead
friend. There is no time to be lost."

So Hilda set forth in the decline of the afternoon, and pursued her way
towards the quarter of the city in which stands the Palazzo Cenci. Her
habit of self-reliance was so simply strong, so natural, and now so well
established by long use, that the idea of peril seldom or never occurred
to Hilda, in her lonely life.

She differed, in this particular, from the generality of her sex,
--although the customs and character of her native land often produce
women who meet the world with gentle fearlessness, and discover that its
terrors have been absurdly exaggerated by the tradition of mankind. In
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the apprehensiveness of women is
quite gratuitous. Even as matters now stand, they are really safer in
perilous situations and emergencies than men; and might be still more
so, if they trusted themselves more confidingly to the chivalry of
manhood. In all her wanderings about Rome, Hilda had gone and returned
as securely as she had been accustomed to tread the familiar street of
her New England village, where every face wore a look of recognition.
With respect to whatever was evil, foul, and ugly, in this populous and
corrupt city, she trod as if invisible, and not only so, but blind. She
was altogether unconscious of anything wicked that went along the same
pathway, but without jostling or impeding her, any more than gross
substance hinders the wanderings of a spirit. Thus it is, that, bad as
the world is said to have grown, innocence continues to make a paradise
around itself, and keep it still unfallen.

Hilda's present expedition led her into what was--physically, at
least--the foulest and ugliest part of Rome. In that vicinity lies the
Ghetto, where thousands of Jews are crowded within a narrow compass,
and lead a close, unclean, and multitudinous life, resembling that of
maggots when they over-populate a decaying cheese.

Hilda passed on the borders of this region, but had no occasion to
step within it. Its neighborhood, however, naturally partook of
characteristics 'like its own. There was a confusion of black and
hideous houses, piled massively out of the ruins of former ages; rude
and destitute of plan, as a pauper would build his hovel, and yet
displaying here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a pillar, or
a broken arcade, that might have adorned a palace. Many of the houses,
indeed, as they stood, might once have been palaces, and possessed still
a squalid kind of grandeur. Dirt was everywhere, strewing the narrow
streets, and incrusting the tall shabbiness of the edifices, from the
foundations to the roofs; it lay upon the thresholds, and looked out of
the windows, and assumed the guise of human life in the children that
Seemed to be engendered out of it. Their father was the sun, and their
mother--a heap of Roman mud.

It is a question of speculative interest, whether the ancient Romans
were as unclean a people as we everywhere find those who have succeeded
them. There appears to be a kind of malignant spell in the spots that
have been inhabited by these masters of the world, or made famous in
their history; an inherited and inalienable curse, impelling their
successors to fling dirt and defilement upon whatever temple, column,
mined palace, or triumphal arch may be nearest at hand, and on every
monument that the old Romans built. It is most probably a classic trait,
regularly transmitted downward, and perhaps a little modified by the
better civilization of Christianity; so that Caesar may have trod
narrower and filthier ways in his path to the Capitol, than even those
of modern Rome.

As the paternal abode of Beatrice, the gloomy old palace of the Cencis
had an interest for Hilda, although not sufficiently strong, hitherto,
to overcome the disheartening effect of the exterior, and draw her over
its threshold. The adjacent piazza, of poor aspect, contained only an
old woman selling roasted chestnuts and baked squash-seeds; she looked
sharply at Hilda, and inquired whether she had lost her way.


"No," said Hilda; "I seek the Palazzo Cenci."

"Yonder it is, fair signorina," replied the Roman matron. "If you wish
that packet delivered, which I see in your hand, my grandson Pietro
shall run with it for a baiocco. The Cenci palace is a spot of ill omen
for young maidens."

Hilda thanked the old dame, but alleged the necessity of doing her
errand in person. She approached the front of the palace, which, with
all its immensity, had but a mean appearance, and seemed an abode which
the lovely shade of Beatrice would not be apt to haunt, unless her doom
made it inevitable. Some soldiers stood about the portal, and gazed at
the brown-haired, fair-cheeked Anglo-Saxon girl, with approving glances,
but not indecorously. Hilda began to ascend the staircase, three lofty
flights of which were to be surmounted, before reaching the door whither
she was bound.





CHAPTER XLIII


THE EXTINCTION OF A LAMP

Between Hilda and the sculptor there had been a kind of half-expressed
understanding, that both were to visit the galleries of the Vatican
the day subsequent to their meeting at the studio. Kenyon, accordingly,
failed not to be there, and wandered through the vast ranges of
apartments, but saw nothing of his expected friend. The marble faces,
which stand innumerable along the walls, and have kept themselves so
calm through the vicissitudes of twenty centuries, had no sympathy
for his disappointment; and he, on the other hand, strode past these
treasures and marvels of antique art, with the indifference which any
preoccupation of the feelings is apt to produce, in reference to objects
of sculpture. Being of so cold and pure a substance, and mostly deriving
their vitality more from thought than passion, they require to be seen
through a perfectly transparent medium.

And, moreover, Kenyon had counted so much upon Hilda's delicate
perceptions in enabling him to look at two or three of the statues,
about which they had talked together, that the entire purpose of his
visit was defeated by her absence. It is a delicious sort of mutual aid,
when the united power of two sympathetic, yet dissimilar, intelligences
is brought to bear upon a poem by reading it aloud, or upon a picture
or statue by viewing it in each other's company. Even if not a word
of criticism be uttered, the insight of either party is wonderfully
deepened, and the comprehension broadened; so that the inner mystery
of a work of genius, hidden from one, will often reveal itself to two.
Missing such help, Kenyon saw nothing at the Vatican which he had not
seen a thousand times before, and more perfectly than now.

In the chili of his disappointment, he suspected that it was a very
cold art to which he had devoted himself. He questioned, at that moment,
whether sculpture really ever softens and warms the material which it
handles; whether carved marble is anything but limestone, after all;
and whether the Apollo Belvedere itself possesses any merit above
its physical beauty, or is beyond criticism even in that generally
acknowledged excellence. In flitting glances, heretofore, he had seemed
to behold this statue, as something ethereal and godlike, but not now.

Nothing pleased him, unless it were the group of the Laocoon, which,
in its immortal agony, impressed Kenyon as a type of the long, fierce
struggle of man, involved in the knotted entanglements of Error and
Evil, those two snakes, which, if no divine help intervene, will be sure
to strangle him and his children in the end. What he most admired was
the strange calmness diffused through this bitter strife; so that it
resembled the rage of the sea made calm by its immensity,' or the tumult
of Niagara which ceases to be tumult because it lasts forever. Thus, in
the Laocoon, the horror of a moment grew to be the fate of interminable
ages. Kenyon looked upon the group as the one triumph of sculpture,
creating the repose, which is essential to it, in the very acme of
turbulent effort; but, in truth, it was his mood of unwonted despondency
that made him so sensitive to the terrible magnificence, as well as to
the sad moral, of this work. Hilda herself could not have helped him to
see it with nearly such intelligence.

A good deal more depressed than the nature of the disappointment
warranted, Kenyon went to his studio, and took in hand a great lump of
clay. He soon found, however, that his plastic cunning had departed from
him for the time. So he wandered forth again into the uneasy streets
of Rome, and walked up and down the Corso, where, at that period of the
day, a throng of passers-by and loiterers choked up the narrow sidewalk.
A penitent was thus brought in contact with the sculptor.

It was a figure in a white robe, with a kind of featureless mask
over the face, through the apertures of which the eyes threw an
unintelligible light. Such odd, questionable shapes are often seen
gliding through the streets of Italian cities, and are understood to be
usually persons of rank, who quit their palaces, their gayeties, their
pomp and pride, and assume the penitential garb for a season, with a
view of thus expiating some crime, or atoning for the aggregate of petty
sins that make up a worldly life. It is their custom to ask alms, and
perhaps to measure the duration of their penance by the time requisite
to accumulate a sum of money out of the little droppings of individual
charity. The avails are devoted to some beneficent or religious purpose;
so that the benefit accruing to their own souls is, in a manner, linked
with a good done, or intended, to their fellow-men. These figures have
a ghastly and startling effect, not so much from any very impressive
peculiarity in the garb, as from the mystery which they bear about with
them, and the sense that there is an acknowledged sinfulness as the
nucleus of it.

In the present instance, however, the penitent asked no alms of Kenyon;
although, for the space of a minute or two, they stood face to face, the
hollow eyes of the mask encountering the sculptor's gaze. But, just as
the crowd was about to separate them, the former spoke, in a voice not
unfamiliar to Kenyon, though rendered remote and strange by the guilty
veil through which it penetrated.

"Is all well with you, Signore?" inquired the penitent, out of the cloud
in which he walked.

"All is well," answered Kenyon. "And with you?"

But the masked penitent returned no answer, being borne away by the
pressure of the throng.

The sculptor stood watching the figure, and was almost of a mind to
hurry after him and follow up the conversation that had been begun; but
it occurred to him that there is a sanctity (or, as we might rather term
it, an inviolable etiquette) which prohibits the recognition of persons
who choose to walk under the veil of penitence.

"How strange!" thought Kenyon to himself. "It was surely Donatello! What
can bring him to Rome, where his recollections must be so painful, and
his presence not without peril? And Miriam! Can she have accompanied
him?"

He walked on, thinking of the vast change in Donatello, since those days
of gayety and innocence, when the young Italian was new in Rome, and was
just beginning to be sensible of a more poignant felicity than he had
yet experienced, in the sunny warmth of Miriam's smile. The growth of
a soul, which the sculptor half imagined that he had witnessed in his
friend, seemed hardly worth the heavy price that it had cost, in the
sacrifice of those simple enjoyments that were gone forever. A creature
of antique healthfulness had vanished from the earth; and, in his stead,
there was only one other morbid and remorseful man, among millions that
were cast in the same indistinguishable mould.

The accident of thus meeting Donatello the glad Faun of his imagination
and memory, now transformed into a gloomy penitent--contributed to
deepen the cloud that had fallen over Kenyon's spirits. It caused him
to fancy, as we generally do, in the petty troubles which extend not a
hand's-breadth beyond our own sphere, that the whole world was saddening
around him. It took the sinister aspect of an omen, although he could
not distinctly see what trouble it might forebode.

If it had not been for a peculiar sort of pique, with which lovers are
much conversant, a preposterous kind of resentment which endeavors to
wreak itself on the beloved object, and on one's own heart, in requital
of mishaps for which neither are in fault, Kenyon might at once have
betaken himself to Hilda's studio, and asked why the appointment was not
kept. But the interview of to-day was to have been so rich in present
joy, and its results so important to his future life, that the bleak
failure was too much for his equanimity. He was angry with poor Hilda,
and censured her without a hearing; angry with himself, too, and
therefore inflicted on this latter criminal the severest penalty in
his power; angry with the day that was passing over him, and would not
permit its latter hours to redeem the disappointment of the morning.

To confess the truth, it had been the sculptor's purpose to stake all
his hopes on that interview in the galleries of the Vatican. Straying
with Hilda through those long vistas of ideal beauty, he meant, at last,
to utter himself upon that theme which lovers are fain to discuss in
village lanes, in wood paths, on seaside sands, in crowded streets; it
little matters where, indeed, since roses are sure to blush along the
way, and daisies and violets to spring beneath the feet, if the spoken
word be graciously received. He was resolved to make proof whether
the kindness that Hilda evinced for him was the precious token of an
individual preference, or merely the sweet fragrance of her disposition,
which other friends might share as largely as himself. He would try if
it were possible to take this shy, yet frank, and innocently fearless
creature captive, and imprison her in his heart, and make her sensible
of a wider freedom there, than in all the world besides.

It was hard, we must allow, to see the shadow of a wintry sunset falling
upon a day that was to have been so bright, and to find himself just
where yesterday had left him, only with a sense of being drearily
balked, and defeated without an opportunity for struggle. So much had
been anticipated from these now vanished hours, that it seemed as if no
other day could bring back the same golden hopes.

In a case like this, it is doubtful whether Kenyon could have done a
much better thing than he actually did, by going to dine at the Cafe
Nuovo, and drinking a flask of Montefiascone; longing, the while, for a
beaker or two of Donatello's Sunshine. It would have been just the wine
to cure a lover's melancholy, by illuminating his heart with tender
light and warmth, and suggestions of undefined hopes, too ethereal for
his morbid humor to examine and reject them.

No decided improvement resulting from the draught of Montefiascone, he
went to the Teatro Argentino, and sat gloomily to see an Italian
comedy, which ought to have cheered him somewhat, being full of glancing
merriment, and effective over everybody's disabilities except his own.
The sculptor came out, however, before the close of the performance, as
disconsolate as he went in.

As he made his way through the complication of narrow streets, which
perplex that portion of the city, a carriage passed him. It was driven
rapidly, but not too fast for the light of a gas-lamp to flare upon a
face within--especially as it was bent forward, appearing to recognize
him, while a beckoning hand was protruded from the window. On his part,
Kenyon at once knew the face, and hastened to the carriage, which had
now stopped.

"Miriam! you in Rome?" he exclaimed "And your friends know nothing of
it?"

"Is all well with you?" she asked.

This inquiry, in the identical words which Donatello had so recently
addressed to him from beneath the penitent's mask, startled the
sculptor. Either the previous disquietude of his mind, or some tone in
Miriam's voice, or the unaccountableness of beholding her there at all,
made it seem ominous.

"All is well, I believe," answered he doubtfully. "I am aware of no
misfortune. Have you any to announce'?"

He looked still more earnestly at Miriam, and felt a dreamy uncertainty
whether it was really herself to whom he spoke. True; there were those
beautiful features, the contour of which he had studied too often, and
with a sculptor's accuracy of perception, to be in any doubt that it was
Miriam's identical face. But he was conscious of a change, the nature of
which he could not satisfactorily define; it might be merely her dress,
which, imperfect as the light was, he saw to be richer than the simple
garb that she had usually worn. The effect, he fancied, was partly owing
to a gem which she had on her bosom; not a diamond, but something that
glimmered with a clear, red lustre, like the stars in a southern sky.
Somehow or other, this colored light seemed an emanation of herself,
as if all that was passionate and glowing in her native disposition
had crystallized upon her breast, and were just now scintillating more
brilliantly than ever, in sympathy with some emotion of her heart.

Of course there could be no real doubt that it was Miriam, his artist
friend, with whom and Hilda he had spent so many pleasant and familiar
hours, and whom he had last seen at Perugia, bending with Donatello
beneath the bronze pope's benediction. It must be that selfsame Miriam;
but the sensitive sculptor felt a difference of manner, which impressed
him more than he conceived it possible to be affected by so external a
thing. He remembered the gossip so prevalent in Rome on Miriam's first
appearance; how that she was no real artist, but the daughter of an
illustrious or golden lineage, who was merely playing at necessity;
mingling with human struggle for her pastime; stepping out of her native
sphere only for an interlude, just as a princess might alight from her
gilded equipage to go on foot through a rustic lane. And now, after a
mask in which love and death had performed their several parts, she had
resumed her proper character.

"Have you anything to tell me?" cried he impatiently; for nothing causes
a more disagreeable vibration of the nerves than this perception of
ambiguousness in familiar persons or affairs. "Speak; for my spirits and
patience have been much tried to-day."

Miriam put her finger on her lips, and seemed desirous that Kenyon
should know of the presence of a third person. He now saw, indeed, that,
there was some one beside her in the carriage, hitherto concealed by
her attitude; a man, it appeared, with a sallow Italian face, which the
sculptor distinguished but imperfectly, and did not recognize.

"I can tell you nothing," she replied; and leaning towards him, she
whispered,--appearing then more like the Miriam whom he knew than in
what had before passed,--"Only, when the lamp goes out do not despair."

The carriage drove on, leaving Kenyon to muse over this unsatisfactory
interview, which seemed to have served no better purpose than to fill
his mind with more ominous forebodings than before. Why were Donatello
and Miriam in Rome, where both, in all likelihood, might have much to
dread? And why had one and the other addressed him with a question that
seemed prompted by a knowledge of some calamity, either already fallen
on his unconscious head, or impending closely over him?

"I am sluggish," muttered Kenyon, to himself; "a weak, nerveless fool,
devoid of energy and promptitude; or neither Donatello nor Miriam could
have escaped me thus! They are aware of some misfortune that concerns me
deeply. How soon am I to know it too?"

There seemed but a single calamity possible to happen within so narrow
a sphere as that with which the sculptor was connected; and even to that
one mode of evil he could assign no definite shape, but only felt that
it must have some reference to Hilda.

Flinging aside the morbid hesitation, and the dallyings with his own
wishes, which he had permitted to influence his mind throughout the day,
he now hastened to the Via Portoghese. Soon the old palace stood before
him, with its massive tower rising into the clouded night; obscured from
view at its midmost elevation, but revealed again, higher upward, by
the Virgin's lamp that twinkled on the summit. Feeble as it was, in
the broad, surrounding gloom, that little ray made no inconsiderable
illumination among Kenyon's sombre thoughts; for; remembering Miriam's
last words, a fantasy had seized him that he should find the sacred lamp
extinguished.

And even while he stood gazing, as a mariner at the star in which he put
his trust, the light quivered, sank, gleamed up again, and finally went
out, leaving the battlements of Hilda's tower in utter darkness. For the
first time in centuries, the consecrated and legendary flame before the
loftiest shrine in Rome had ceased to burn.





CHAPTER XLIV


THE DESERTED SHRINE


Kenyon knew the sanctity which Hilda (faithful Protestant, and daughter
of the Puritans, as the girl was) imputed to this shrine. He was aware
of the profound feeling of responsibility, as well earthly as religious,
with which her conscience had been impressed, when she became the
occupant of her aerial chamber, and undertook the task of keeping the
consecrated lamp alight. There was an accuracy and a certainty about
Hilda's movements, as regarded all matters that lay deep enough to have
their roots in right or wrong, which made it as possible and safe to
rely upon the timely and careful trimming of this lamp (if she were in
life, and able to creep up the steps), as upon the rising of to-morrow's
sun, with lustre-undiminished from to-day.

The sculptor could scarcely believe his eyes, therefore, when he saw the
flame flicker and expire. His sight had surely deceived him. And now,
since the light did not reappear, there must be some smoke wreath
or impenetrable mist brooding about the tower's gray old head, and
obscuring it from the lower world. But no! For right over the dim
battlements, as the wind chased away a mass of clouds, he beheld a star,
and moreover, by an earnest concentration of his sight, was soon able to
discern even the darkened shrine itself. There was no obscurity around
the tower; no infirmity of his own vision. The flame had exhausted its
supply of oil, and become extinct. But where was Hilda?

A man in a cloak happened to be passing; and Kenyon--anxious to distrust
the testimony of his senses, if he could get more acceptable evidence on
the other side--appealed to him.

"Do me the favor, Signore," said he, "to look at the top of yonder
tower, and tell me whether you see the lamp burning at the Virgin's
shrine."

"The lamp, Signore?" answered the man, without at first troubling
himself to look up. "The lamp that has burned these four hundred years!
How is it possible, Signore, that it should not be burning now?" "But
look!" said the sculptor impatiently. With good-natured indulgence for
what he seemed to consider as the whim of an eccentric Forestiero, the
Italian carelessly threw his eyes upwards; but, as soon as he perceived
that there was really no light, he lifted his hands with a vivid
expression of wonder and alarm.

"The lamp is extinguished!" cried he. "The lamp that has been
burning these four hundred years! This surely must portend some great
misfortune; and, by my advice, Signore, you will hasten hence, lest the
tower tumble on our heads. A priest once told me that, if the Virgin
withdrew her blessing and the light went out, the old Palazzo del Torte
would sink into the earth, with all that dwell in it. There will be a
terrible crash before morning!"

The stranger made the best of his way from the doomed premises; while
Kenyon--who would willingly have seen the tower crumble down before his
eyes, on condition of Hilda's safety--determined, late as it was, to
attempt ascertaining if she were in her dove-cote.

Passing through the arched entrance,--which, as is often the case with
Roman entrances, was as accessible at midnight as at noon,--he groped
his way to the broad staircase, and, lighting his wax taper, went
glimmering up the multitude of steps that led to Hilda's door. The hour
being so unseasonable, he intended merely to knock, and, as soon as
her voice from within should reassure him, to retire, keeping his
explanations and apologies for a fitter time. Accordingly, reaching the
lofty height where the maiden, as he trusted, lay asleep, with angels
watching over her, though the Virgin seemed to have suspended her care,
he tapped lightly at the door panels,--then knocked more forcibly,--then
thundered an impatient summons. No answer came; Hilda, evidently, was
not there.

After assuring himself that this must be the fact, Kenyon descended the
stairs, but made a pause at every successive stage, and knocked at the
door of its apartment, regardless whose slumbers he might disturb, in
his anxiety to learn where the girl had last been seen. But, at each
closed entrance, there came those hollow echoes, which a chamber, or any
dwelling, great or small, never sends out, in response to human knuckles
or iron hammer, as long as there is life within to keep its heart from
getting dreary.

Once indeed, on the lower landing-place, the sculptor fancied that there
was a momentary stir inside the door, as if somebody were listening at
the threshold. He hoped, at least, that the small iron-barred aperture
would be unclosed, through which Roman housekeepers are wont to take
careful cognizance of applicants for admission, from a traditionary
dread, perhaps, of letting in a robber or assassin. But it remained
shut; neither was the sound repeated; and Kenyon concluded that his
excited nerves had played a trick upon his senses, as they are apt to do
when we most wish for the clear evidence of the latter.

There was nothing to be done, save to go heavily away, and await
whatever good or ill to-morrow's daylight might disclose.

Betimes in the morning, therefore, Kenyon went back to the Via
Portoghese, before the slant rays of the sun had descended halfway down
the gray front of Hilda's tower. As he drew near its base, he saw the
doves perched in full session, on the sunny height of the battlements,
and a pair of them--who were probably their mistress's especial pets,
and the confidants of her bosom secrets, if Hilda had any--came shooting
down, and made a feint of alighting on his shoulder. But, though they
evidently recognized him, their shyness would not yet allow so decided
a demonstration. Kenyon's eyes followed them as they flew upward, hoping
that they might have come as joyful messengers of the girl's safety,
and that he should discern her slender form, half hidden by the parapet,
trimming the extinguished lamp at the Virgin's shrine, just as other
maidens set about the little duties of a household. Or, perhaps, he
might see her gentle and sweet face smiling down upon him, midway
towards heaven, as if she had flown thither for a day or two, just to
visit her kindred, but had been drawn earthward again by the spell of
unacknowledged love.

But his eyes were blessed by no such fair vision or reality; nor, in
truth, were the eager, unquiet flutterings of the doves indicative of
any joyful intelligence, which they longed to share with Hilda's friend,
but of anxious inquiries that they knew not how to utter. They could
not tell, any more than he, whither their lost companion had withdrawn
herself, but were in the same void despondency with him, feeling their
sunny and airy lives darkened and grown imperfect, now that her sweet
society was taken out of it.

In the brisk morning air, Kenyon found it much easier to pursue his
researches than at the preceding midnight, when, if any slumberers heard
the clamor that he made, they had responded only with sullen and drowsy
maledictions, and turned to sleep again. It must be a very dear and
intimate reality for which people will be content to give up a dream.
When the sun was fairly up, however, it was quite another thing. The
heterogeneous population, inhabiting the lower floor of the old tower,
and the other extensive regions of the palace, were now willing to tell
all they knew, and imagine a great deal more. The amiability of these
Italians, assisted by their sharp and nimble wits, caused them to
overflow with plausible suggestions, and to be very bounteous in their
avowals of interest for the lost Hilda. In a less demonstrative people,
such expressions would have implied an eagerness to search land and sea,
and never rest till she were found. In the mouths that uttered them they
meant good wishes, and were, so far, better than indifference. There
was little doubt that many of them felt a genuine kindness for the shy,
brown-haired, delicate young foreign maiden, who had flown from some
distant land to alight upon their tower, where she consorted only with
the doves. But their energy expended itself in exclamation, and they
were content to leave all more active measures to Kenyon, and to the
Virgin, whose affair it was to see that the faithful votary of her lamp
received no harm.

In a great Parisian domicile, multifarious as its inhabitants might
be, the concierge under the archway would be cognizant of all their
incomings and issuings forth. But except in rare cases, the general
entrance and main staircase of a Roman house are left as free as the
street, of which they form a sort of by-lane. The sculptor, therefore,
could hope to find information about Hilda's movements only from casual
observers.

On probing the knowledge of these people to the bottom, there was
various testimony as to the period when the girl had last been seen.
Some said that it was four days since there had been a trace of her;
but an English lady, in the second piano of the palace, was rather of
opinion that she had met her, the morning before, with a drawing-book
in her hand. Having no acquaintance with the young person, she had taken
little notice and might have been mistaken. A count, on the piano next
above, was very certain that he had lifted his hat to Hilda, under the
archway, two afternoons ago. An old woman, who had formerly tended the
shrine, threw some light upon the matter, by testifying that the lamp
required to be replenished once, at least, in three days, though its
reservoir of oil was exceedingly capacious.

On the whole, though there was other evidence enough to create some
perplexity, Kenyon could not satisfy himself that she had been visible
since the afternoon of the third preceding day, when a fruit seller
remembered her coming out of the arched passage, with a sealed packet in
her hand. As nearly as he could ascertain, this was within an hour
after Hilda had taken leave of the sculptor at his own studio, with the
understanding that they were to meet at the Vatican the next day. Two
nights, therefore, had intervened, during which the lost maiden was
unaccounted for.

The door of Hilda's apartments was still locked, as on the preceding
night; but Kenyon sought out the wife of the person who sublet them, and
prevailed on her to give him admittance by means of the duplicate key
which the good woman had in her possession. On entering, the maidenly
neatness and simple grace, recognizable in all the arrangements, made
him visibly sensible that this was the daily haunt of a pure soul, in
whom religion and the love of beauty were at one.

Thence, the sturdy Roman matron led the sculptor across a narrow
passage, and threw open the door of a small chamber, on the threshold of
which he reverently paused. Within, there was a bed, covered with white
drapery, enclosed with snowy curtains like a tent, and of barely width
enough for a slender figure to repose upon it. The sight of this cool,
airy, and secluded bower caused the lover's heart to stir as if enough
of Hilda's gentle dreams were lingering there to make him happy for
a single instant. But then came the closer consciousness of her loss,
bringing along with it a sharp sting of anguish.

"Behold, Signore," said the matron; "here is the little staircase by
which the signorina used to ascend and trim the Blessed Virgin's lamp.
She was worthy to be a Catholic, such pains the good child bestowed to
keep it burning; and doubtless the Blessed Mary will intercede for her,
in consideration of her pious offices, heretic though she was. What will
become of the old palazzo, now that the lamp is extinguished, the saints
above us only know! Will you mount, Signore, to the battlements, and see
if she have left any trace of herself there?"

The sculptor stepped across the chamber and ascended the little
staircase, which gave him access to the breezy summit of the tower. It
affected him inexpressibly to see a bouquet of beautiful flowers beneath
the shrine, and to recognize in them an offering of his own to Hilda,
who had put them in a vase of water, and dedicated them to the Virgin,
in a spirit partly fanciful, perhaps, but still partaking of the
religious sentiment which so profoundly influenced her character. One
rosebud, indeed, she had selected for herself from the rich mass of
flowers; for Kenyon well remembered recognizing it in her bosom when he
last saw her at his studio.

"That little part of my great love she took," said he to himself. "The
remainder she would have devoted to Heaven; but has left it withering
in the sun and wind. Ah! Hilda, Hilda, had you given me a right to watch
over you, this evil had not come!"

"Be not downcast, signorino mio," said the Roman matron, in response to
the deep sigh which struggled out of Kenyon's breast. "The dear little
maiden, as we see, has decked yonder blessed shrine as devoutly as
I myself, or any Other good Catholic woman, could have done. It is a
religious act, and has more than the efficacy of a prayer. The signorina
will as surely come back as the sun will fall through the window
to-morrow no less than to-day. Her own doves have often been missing
for a day or two, but they were sure to come fluttering about her head
again, when she least expected them. So will it be with this dove-like
child."

"It might be so," thought Kenyon, with yearning anxiety, "if a pure
maiden were as safe as a dove, in this evil world of ours."

As they returned through the studio, with the furniture and arrangements
of which the sculptor was familiar, he missed a small ebony writing-desk
that he remembered as having always been placed on a table there. He
knew that it was Hilda's custom to deposit her letters in this desk,
as well as other little objects of which she wished to be specially
careful.

"What has become of it?" he suddenly inquired, laying his hand on the
table.

"Become of what, pray?" exclaimed the woman, a little disturbed. "Does
the Signore suspect a robbery, then?"

"The signorina's writing-desk is gone," replied Kenyon; "it always stood
on this table, and I myself saw it there only a few days ago."

"Ah, well!" said the woman, recovering her composure, which she seemed
partly to have lost. "The signorina has doubtless taken it away with
her. The fact is of good omen; for it proves that she did not go
unexpectedly, and is likely to return when it may best suit her
convenience."

"This is very singular," observed Kenyon. "Have the rooms been entered
by yourself, or any other person, since the signorina's disappearance?"

"Not by me, Signore, so help me Heaven and the saints!" said the matron.
"And I question whether there are more than two keys in Rome that will
suit this strange old lock. Here is one; and as for the other, the
signorina carlies it in her pocket."

The sculptor had no reason to doubt the word of this respectable dame.
She appeared to be well meaning and kind hearted, as Roman matrons
generally are; except when a fit of passion incites them to shower
horrible curses on an obnoxious individual, or perhaps to stab him
with the steel stiletto that serves them for a hairpin. But Italian
asseverations of any questionable fact, however true they may chance to
be, have no witness of their truth in the faces of those who utter them.
Their words are spoken with strange earnestness, and yet do not vouch
for themselves as coming from any depth, like roots drawn out of the
substance of the soul, with some of the soil clinging to them. There is
always a something inscrutable, instead of frankness, in their eyes. In
short, they lie so much like truth, and speak truth so much as if they
were telling a lie, that their auditor suspects himself in the wrong,
whether he believes or disbelieves them; it being the one thing certain,
that falsehood is seldom an intolerable burden to the tenderest of
Italian consciences.

"It is very strange what can have become of the desk!" repeated Kenyon,
looking the woman in the face.

"Very strange, indeed, Signore," she replied meekly, without turning
away her eyes in the least, but checking his insight of them at about
half an inch below the surface. "I think the signorina must have taken
it with her."

It seemed idle to linger here any longer. Kenyon therefore departed,
after making an arrangement with the woman, by the terms of which she
was to allow the apartments to remain in their present state, on his
assuming the responsibility for the rent.

He spent the day in making such further search and investigation as he
found practicable; and, though at first trammelled by an unwillingness
to draw public attention to Hilda's affairs, the urgency of the
circumstances soon compelled him to be thoroughly in earnest. In the
course of a week, he tried all conceivable modes of fathoming the
mystery, not merely by his personal efforts and those of his brother
artists and friends, but through the police, who readily undertook the
task, and expressed strong confidence of success. But the Roman police
has very little efficiency, except in the interest of the despotism of
which it is a tool. With their cocked hats, shoulder belts, and swords,
they wear a sufficiently imposing aspect, and doubtless keep their eyes
open wide enough to track a political offender, but are too often blind
to private outrage, be it murder or any lesser crime. Kenyon counted
little upon their assistance, and profited by it not at all.

Remembering the mystic words which Miriam had addressed to him, he
was anxious to meet her, but knew not whither she had gone, nor how
to obtain an interview either with herself or Donatello. The days wore
away, and still there were no tidings of the lost one; no lamp rekindled
before the Virgin's shrine; no light shining into the lover's heart;
no star of Hope--he was ready to say, as he turned his eyes almost
reproachfully upward--in heaven itself!





CHAPTER XLV


THE FLIGHT OF HILDA'S DOVES


Along with the lamp on Hilda's tower, the sculptor now felt that a light
had gone out, or, at least, was ominously obscured, to which he owed
whatever cheerfulness had heretofore illuminated his cold, artistic
life. The idea of this girl had been like a taper of virgin wax, burning
with a pure and steady flame, and chasing away the evil spirits out of
the magic circle of its beams. It had darted its rays afar, and modified
the whole sphere in which Kenyon had his being. Beholding it no more, he
at once found himself in darkness and astray.

This was the time, perhaps, when Kenyon first became sensible what a
dreary city is Rome, and what a terrible weight is there imposed on
human life, when any gloom within the heart corresponds to the spell of
ruin that has been thrown over the site of ancient empire. He wandered,
as it were, and stumbled over the fallen columns, and among the tombs,
and groped his way into the sepulchral darkness of the catacombs, and
found no path emerging from them. The happy may well enough continue to
be such, beneath the brilliant sky of Rome. But, if you go thither in
melancholy mood, if you go with a ruin in your heart, or with a
vacant site there, where once stood the airy fabric of happiness, now
vanished,--all the ponderous gloom of the Roman Past will pile itself
upon that spot, and crush you down as with the heaped-up marble and
granite, the earth-mounds, and multitudinous bricks of its material
decay.

It might be supposed that a melancholy man would here make acquaintance
with a grim philosophy. He should learn to bear patiently his individual
griefs, that endure only for one little lifetime, when here are the
tokens of such infinite misfortune on an imperial scale, and when so
many far landmarks of time, all around him, are bringing the remoteness
of a thousand years ago into the sphere of yesterday. But it is in vain
that you seek this shrub of bitter sweetness among the plants that root
themselves on the roughness of massive walls, or trail downward from the
capitals of pillars, or spring out of the green turf in the palace of
the Caesars. It does not grow in Rome; not even among the five hundred
various weeds which deck the grassy arches of the Coliseum. You look
through a vista of century beyond century,--through much shadow, and a
little sunshine,--through barbarism and civilization, alternating with
one another like actors that have prearranged their parts: through
a broad pathway of progressive generations bordered by palaces and
temples, and bestridden by old, triumphal arches, until, in the
distance, you behold the obelisks, with their unintelligible
inscriptions, hinting at a past infinitely more remote than history
can define. Your own life is as nothing, when compared with that
immeasurable distance; but still you demand, none the less earnestly, a
gleam of sunshine, instead of a speck of shadow, on the step or two that
will bring you to your quiet rest.

How exceedingly absurd! All men, from the date of the earliest
obelisk,--and of the whole world, moreover, since that far epoch, and
before,--have made a similar demand, and seldom had their wish. If they
had it, what are they the better now? But, even while you taunt yourself
with this sad lesson, your heart cries out obstreperously for its small
share of earthly happiness, and will not be appeased by the myriads of
dead hopes that lie crushed into the soil of Rome. How wonderful
that this our narrow foothold of the Present should hold its own so
constantly, and, while every moment changing, should still be like a
rock betwixt the encountering tides of the long Past and the infinite
To-come!

Man of marble though he was, the sculptor grieved for the Irrevocable.
Looking back upon Hilda's way of life, he marvelled at his own blind
stupidity, which had kept him from remonstrating as a friend, if with no
stronger right against the risks that she continually encountered. Being
so innocent, she had no means of estimating those risks, nor even a
possibility of suspecting their existence. But he--who had spent
years in Rome, with a man's far wider scope of observation and
experience--knew things that made him shudder. It seemed to Kenyon,
looking through the darkly colored medium of his fears, that all modes
of crime were crowded into the close intricacy of Roman streets, and
that there was no redeeming element, such as exists in other dissolute
and wicked cities.

For here was a priesthood, pampered, sensual, with red and bloated
cheeks, and carnal eyes. With apparently a grosser development of animal
life than most men, they were placed in an unnatural relation with
woman, and thereby lost the healthy, human conscience that pertains to
other human beings, who own the sweet household ties connecting them
with wife and daughter. And here was an indolent nobility, with no high
aims or opportunities, but cultivating a vicious way of life, as if
it were an art, and the only one which they cared to learn. Here was a
population, high and low, that had no genuine belief in virtue; and
if they recognized any act as criminal, they might throw off all
care, remorse, and memory of it, by kneeling a little while at the
confessional, and rising unburdened, active, elastic, and incited by
fresh appetite for the next ensuing sin. Here was a soldiery who felt
Rome to be their conquered city, and doubtless considered themselves the
legal inheritors of the foul license which Gaul, Goth, and Vandal have
here exercised in days gone by.

And what localities for new crime existed in those guilty sites,
where the crime of departed ages used to be at home, and had its long,
hereditary haunt! What street in Rome, what ancient ruin, what one place
where man had standing-room, what fallen stone was there, unstained with
one or another kind of guilt! In some of the vicissitudes of the city's
pride or its calamity, the dark tide of human evil had swelled over it,
far higher than the Tiber ever rose against the acclivities of the
seven hills. To Kenyon's morbid view, there appeared to be a contagious
element, rising fog-like from the ancient depravity of Rome, and
brooding over the dead and half-rotten city, as nowhere else on earth.
It prolonged the tendency to crime, and developed an instantaneous
growth of it, whenever an opportunity was found; And where could it be
found so readily as here! In those vast palaces, there were a hundred
remote nooks where Innocence might shriek in vain. Beneath meaner houses
there were unsuspected dungeons that had once been princely chambers,
and open to the daylight; but, on account of some wickedness there
perpetrated, each passing age had thrown its handful of dust upon the
spot, and buried it from sight. Only ruffians knew of its existence, and
kept it for murder, and worse crime.

Such was the city through which Hilda, for three years past, had been
wandering without a protector or a guide. She had trodden lightly over
the crumble of old crimes; she had taken her way amid the grime and
corruption which Paganism had left there, and a perverted Christianity
had made more noisome; walking saint-like through it all, with white,
innocent feet; until, in some dark pitfall that lay right across her
path, she had vanished out of sight. It was terrible to imagine what
hideous outrage might have thrust her into that abyss!

Then the lover tried to comfort himself with the idea that Hilda's
sanctity was a sufficient safeguard. Ah, yes; she was so pure! The
angels, that were of the same sisterhood, would never let Hilda come to
harm. A miracle would be wrought on her behalf, as naturally as a father
would stretch out his hand to save a best-beloved child. Providence
would keep a little area and atmosphere about her as safe and wholesome
as heaven itself, although the flood of perilous iniquity might hem
her round, and its black waves hang curling above her head! But these
reflections were of slight avail. No doubt they were the religious
truth. Yet the ways of Providence are utterly inscrutable; and many a
murder has been done, and many an innocent virgin has lifted her white
arms, beseeching its aid in her extremity, and all in vain; so that,
though Providence is infinitely good and wise, and perhaps for that very
reason, it may be half an eternity before the great circle of its scheme
shall bring us the superabundant recompense for all these sorrows! But
what the lover asked was such prompt consolation as might consist with
the brief span of mortal life; the assurance of Hilda's present safety,
and her restoration within that very hour.

An imaginative man, he suffered the penalty of his endowment in the
hundred-fold variety of gloomily tinted scenes that it presented to
him, in which Hilda was always a central figure. The sculptor forgot his
marble. Rome ceased to be anything, for him, but a labyrinth of dismal
streets, in one or another of which the lost girl had disappeared. He
was haunted with the idea that some circumstance, most important to be
known, and perhaps easily discoverable, had hitherto been overlooked,
and that, if he could lay hold of this one clew, it would guide him
directly in the track of Hilda's footsteps. With this purpose in
view, he went, every morning, to the Via Portoghese, and made it
the starting-point of fresh investigations. After nightfall, too, he
invariably returned thither, with a faint hope fluttering at his heart
that the lamp might again be shining on the summit of the tower, and
would dispel this ugly mystery out of the circle consecrated by its
rays. There being no point of which he could take firm hold, his mind
was filled with unsubstantial hopes and fears. Once Kenyon had seemed
to cut his life in marble; now he vaguely clutched at it, and found it
vapor.

In his unstrung and despondent mood, one trifling circumstance affected
him with an idle pang. The doves had at first been faithful to their
lost mistress. They failed not to sit in a row upon her window-sill,
or to alight on the shrine, or the church-angels, and on the roofs
and portals of the neighboring houses, in evident expectation of her
reappearance. After the second week, however, they began to take flight,
and dropping off by pairs, betook themselves to other dove-cotes. Only a
single dove remained, and brooded drearily beneath the shrine. The
flock that had departed were like the many hopes that had vanished
from Kenyon's heart; the one that still lingered, and looked so
wretched,--was it a Hope, or already a Despair?

In the street, one day, the sculptor met a priest of mild and venerable
aspect; and as his mind dwelt continually upon Hilda, and was especially
active in bringing up all incidents that had ever been connected with
her, it immediately struck him that this was the very father with whom
he had seen her at the confessional. Such trust did Hilda inspire
in him, that Kenyon had never asked what was the subject of the
communication between herself and this old priest. He had no reason for
imagining that it could have any relation with her disappearance,
so long subsequently; but, being thus brought face to face with a
personage, mysteriously associated, as he now remembered, with her whom
he had lost, an impulse ran before his thoughts and led the sculptor to
address him.

It might be that the reverend kindliness of the old man's expression
took Kenyon's heart by surprise; at all events, he spoke as if there
were a recognized acquaintanceship, and an object of mutual interest
between them.

"She has gone from me, father," said he.

"Of whom do you speak, my son?" inquired the priest.

"Of that sweet girl," answered Kenyon, "who knelt to you at the
confessional. Surely you remember her, among all the mortals to whose
confessions you have listened! For she alone could have had no sins to
reveal."

"Yes; I remember," said the priest, with a gleam of recollection in his
eyes. "She was made to bear a miraculous testimony to the efficacy of
the divine ordinances of the Church, by seizing forcibly upon one of
them, and finding immediate relief from it, heretic though she was.
It is my purpose to publish a brief narrative of this miracle, for
the edification of mankind, in Latin, Italian, and English, from the
printing press of the Propaganda. Poor child! Setting apart her heresy,
she was spotless, as you say. And is she dead?"

"Heaven forbid, father!" exclaimed Kenyon, shrinking back. "But she has
gone from me, I know not whither. It may be--yes, the idea seizes upon
my mind--that what she revealed to you will suggest some clew to the
mystery of her disappearance.'"

"None, my son, none," answered the priest, shaking his head;
"nevertheless, I bid you be of good cheer. That young maiden is not
doomed to die a heretic. Who knows what the Blessed Virgin may at this
moment be doing for her soul! Perhaps, when you next behold her, she
will be clad in the shining white robe of the true faith."

This latter suggestion did not convey all the comfort which the old
priest possibly intended by it; but he imparted it to the sculptor,
along with his blessing, as the two best things that he could bestow,
and said nothing further, except to bid him farewell.

When they had parted, however, the idea of Hilda's conversion to
Catholicism recurred to her lover's mind, bringing with it certain
reflections, that gave a new turn to his surmises about the mystery into
which she had vanished. Not that he seriously apprehended--although
the superabundance of her religious sentiment might mislead her for
a moment--that the New England girl would permanently succumb to the
scarlet superstitions which surrounded her in Italy. But the incident
of the confessional if known, as probably it was, to the eager
propagandists who prowl about for souls, as cats to catch a mouse--would
surely inspire the most confident expectations of bringing her over to
the faith. With so pious an end in view, would Jesuitical morality be
shocked at the thought of kidnapping the mortal body, for the sake of
the immortal spirit that might otherwise be lost forever? Would not the
kind old priest, himself, deem this to be infinitely the kindest service
that he could perform for the stray lamb, who had so strangely sought
his aid?

If these suppositions were well founded, Hilda was most likely a
prisoner in one of the religious establishments that are so numerous in
Rome. The idea, according to the aspect in which it was viewed, brought
now a degree of comfort, and now an additional perplexity. On the one
hand, Hilda was safe from any but spiritual assaults; on the other,
where was the possibility of breaking through all those barred portals,
and searching a thousand convent cells, to set her free?

Kenyon, however, as it happened, was prevented from endeavoring to
follow out this surmise, which only the state of hopeless uncertainty,
that almost bewildered his reason, could have led him for a moment
to entertain. A communication reached him by an unknown hand, in
consequence of which, and within an hour after receiving it, he took his
way through one of the gates of Rome.





CHAPTER XLVI


A WALK ON THE CAMPAGNA


It was a bright forenoon of February; a month in which the brief
severity of a Roman winter is already past, and when violets and daisies
begin to show themselves in spots favored by the sun. The sculptor came
out of the city by the gate of San Sebastiano, and walked briskly along
the Appian Way.

For the space of a mile or two beyond the gate, this ancient and famous
road is as desolate and disagreeable as most of the other Roman avenues.
It extends over small, uncomfortable paving-stones, between brick and
plastered walls, which are very solidly constructed, and so high as
almost to exclude a view of the surrounding country. The houses are of
most uninviting aspect, neither picturesque, nor homelike and social;
they have seldom or never a door opening on the wayside, but are
accessible only from the rear, and frown inhospitably upon the traveller
through iron-grated windows. Here and there appears a dreary inn or a
wine-shop, designated by the withered bush beside the entrance, within
which you discern a stone-built and sepulchral interior, where guests
refresh themselves with sour bread and goats'-milk cheese, washed down
with wine of dolorous acerbity.

At frequent intervals along the roadside up-rises the ruin of an ancient
tomb. As they stand now, these structures are immensely high and broken
mounds of conglomerated brick, stone, pebbles, and earth, all molten
by time into a mass as solid and indestructible as if each tomb were
composed of a single boulder of granite. When first erected, they were
cased externally, no doubt, with slabs of polished marble, artfully
wrought bas-reliefs, and all such suitable adornments, and were rendered
majestically beautiful by grand architectural designs. This antique
splendor has long since been stolen from the dead, to decorate the
palaces and churches of the living. Nothing remains to the dishonored
sepulchres, except their massiveness.

Even the pyramids form hardly a stranger spectacle, or are more alien
from human sympathies, than the tombs of the Appian Way, with their
gigantic height, breadth, and solidity, defying time and the elements,
and far too mighty to be demolished by an ordinary earthquake. Here you
may see a modern dwelling, and a garden with its vines and olive-trees,
perched on the lofty dilapidation of a tomb, which forms a precipice of
fifty feet in depth on each of the four sides. There is a home on
that funereal mound, where generations of children have been born, and
successive lives been spent, undisturbed by the ghost of the stern Roman
whose ashes were so preposterously burdened. Other sepulchres wear a
crown of grass, shrubbery, and forest-trees, which throw out a broad
sweep of branches, having had time, twice over, to be a thousand years
of age. On one of them stands a tower, which, though immemorially more
modern than the tomb, was itself built by immemorial hands, and is
now rifted quite from top to bottom by a vast fissure of decay; the
tomb-hillock, its foundation, being still as firm as ever, and likely to
endure until the last trump shall rend it wide asunder, and summon forth
its unknown dead.

Yes; its unknown dead! For, except in one or two doubtful instances,
these mountainous sepulchral edifices have not availed to keep so much
as the bare name of an individual or a family from oblivion. Ambitious
of everlasting remembrance, as they were, the slumberers might just
as well have gone quietly to rest, each in his pigeon-hole of a
columbarium, or under his little green hillock in a graveyard, without a
headstone to mark the spot. It is rather satisfactory than otherwise, to
think that all these idle pains have turned out so utterly abortive.

About two miles, or more, from the city gate, and right upon the
roadside, Kenyon passed an immense round pile, sepulchral in its
original purposes, like those already mentioned. It was built of
great blocks of hewn stone, on a vast, square foundation of rough,
agglomerated material, such as composes the mass of all the other
ruinous tombs. But whatever might be the cause, it was in a far
better state of preservation than they. On its broad summit rose the
battlements of a mediaeval fortress, out of the midst of which (so long
since had time begun to crumble the supplemental structure, and cover
it with soil, by means of wayside dust) grew trees, bushes, and thick
festoons of ivy. This tomb of a woman had become the citadel and
donjon-keep of a castle; and all the care that Cecilia Metella's husband
could bestow, to secure endless peace for her beloved relics, had only
sufficed to make that handful of precious ashes the nucleus of battles,
long ages after her death.

A little beyond this point, the sculptor turned aside from the Appian
Way, and directed his course across the Campagna, guided by tokens that
were obvious only to himself. On one side of him, but at a distance, the
Claudian aqueduct was striding over fields and watercourses. Before him,
many miles away, with a blue atmosphere between, rose the Alban hills,
brilliantly silvered with snow and sunshine.

He was not without a companion. A buffalo-calf, that seemed shy and
sociable by the selfsame impulse, had begun to make acquaintance with
him, from the moment when he left the road. This frolicsome creature
gambolled along, now before, now behind; standing a moment to gaze at
him, with wild, curious eyes, he leaped aside and shook his shaggy head,
as Kenyon advanced too nigh; then, after loitering in the rear, he came
galloping up, like a charge of cavalry, but halted, all of a sudden,
when the sculptor turned to look, and bolted across the Campagna at the
slightest signal of nearer approach. The young, sportive thing, Kenyon
half fancied, was serving him as a guide, like the heifer that led
Cadmus to the site of his destined city; for, in spite of a hundred
vagaries, his general course was in the right direction, and along by
several objects which the sculptor had noted as landmarks of his way.

In this natural intercourse with a rude and healthy form of animal life,
there was something that wonderfully revived Kenyon's spirits. The warm
rays of the sun, too, were wholesome for him in body and soul; and so
was a breeze that bestirred itself occasionally, as if for the sole
purpose of breathing upon his cheek and dying softly away, when he would
fain have felt a little more decided kiss. This shy but loving breeze
reminded him strangely of what Hilda's deportment had sometimes been
towards himself.

The weather had very much to do, no doubt, with these genial and
delightful sensations, that made the sculptor so happy with mere life,
in spite of a head and heart full of doleful thoughts, anxieties, and
fears, which ought in all reason to have depressed him. It was like no
weather that exists anywhere, save in Paradise and in Italy; certainly
not in America, where it is always too strenuous on the side either of
heat or cold. Young as the season was, and wintry, as it would have
been under a more rigid sky, it resembled summer rather than what we
New Englanders recognize in our idea of spring. But there was an
indescribable something, sweet, fresh, and remotely affectionate, which
the matronly summer loses, and which thrilled, and, as it were, tickled
Kenyon's heart with a feeling partly of the senses, yet far more a
spiritual delight. In a word, it was as if Hilda's delicate breath were
on his cheek.

After walking at a brisk pace for about half an hour, he reached a
spot where an excavation appeared to have been begun, at some not
very distant period. There was a hollow space in the earth, looking
exceedingly like a deserted cellar, being enclosed within old
subterranean walls, constructed of thin Roman bricks, and made
accessible by a narrow flight of stone steps. A suburban villa had
probably stood over this site, in the imperial days of Rome, and these
might have been the ruins of a bathroom, or some other apartment that
was required to be wholly or partly under ground. A spade can scarcely
be put into that soil, so rich in lost and forgotten things, without
hitting upon some discovery which would attract all eyes, in any other
land. If you dig but a little way, you gather bits of precious marble,
coins, rings, and engraved gems; if you go deeper, you break into
columbaria, or into sculptured and richly frescoed apartments that look
like festive halls, but were only sepulchres.

The sculptor descended into the cellar-like cavity, and sat down on a
block of stone. His eagerness had brought him thither sooner than
the appointed hour. The sunshine fell slantwise into the hollow, and
happened to be resting on what Kenyon at first took to be a shapeless
fragment of stone, possibly marble, which was partly concealed by the
crumbling down of earth.

But his practised eye was soon aware of something artistic in this rude
object. To relieve the anxious tedium of his situation, he cleared
away some of the soil, which seemed to have fallen very recently, and
discovered a headless figure of marble. It was earth stained, as well it
might be, and had a slightly corroded surface, but at once impressed the
sculptor as a Greek production, and wonderfully delicate and beautiful.
The head was gone; both arms were broken off at the elbow. Protruding
from the loose earth, however, Kenyon beheld the fingers of a marble
hand; it was still appended to its arm, and a little further search
enabled him to find the other. Placing these limbs in what the nice
adjustment of the fractures proved to be their true position, the
poor, fragmentary woman forthwith showed that she retained her modest
instincts to the last. She had perished with them, and snatched them
back at the moment of revival. For these long-buried hands immediately
disposed themselves in the manner that nature prompts, as the antique
artist knew, and as all the world has seen, in the Venus de' Medici.

"What a discovery is here!" thought Kenyon to himself. "I seek for
Hilda, and find a marble woman! Is the omen good or ill?"

In a corner of the excavation lay a small round block of stone, much
incrusted with earth that had dried and hardened upon it. So, at least,
you would have described this object, until the sculptor lifted it,
turned it hither and thither in his hands, brushed off the clinging
soil, and finally placed it on the slender neck of the newly discovered
statue. The effect was magical. It immediately lighted up and vivified
the whole figure, endowing it with personality, soul, and intelligence.
The beautiful Idea at once asserted its immortality, and converted that
heap of forlorn fragments into a whole, as perfect to the mind, if not
to the eye, as when the new marble gleamed with snowy lustre; nor was
the impression marred by the earth that still hung upon the exquisitely
graceful limbs, and even filled the lovely crevice of the lips. Kenyon
cleared it away from between them, and almost deemed himself rewarded
with a living smile.

It was either the prototype or a better repetition of the Venus of the
Tribune. But those who have been dissatisfied with the small head, the
narrow, soulless face, the button-hole eyelids, of that famous statue,
and its mouth such as nature never moulded, should see the genial
breadth of this far nobler and sweeter countenance. It is one of the few
works of antique sculpture in which we recognize womanhood, and that,
moreover, without prejudice to its divinity.

Here, then, was a treasure for the sculptor to have found! How happened
it to be lying there, beside its grave of twenty centuries? Why were not
the tidings of its discovery already noised abroad? The world was richer
than yesterday, by something far more precious than gold. Forgotten
beauty had come back, as beautiful as ever; a goddess had risen from her
long slumber, and was a goddess still. Another cabinet in the Vatican
was destined to shine as lustrously as that of the Apollo Belvedere;
or, if the aged pope should resign his claim, an emperor would woo this
tender marble, and win her as proudly as an imperial bride!

Such were the thoughts with which Kenyon exaggerated to himself the
importance of the newly discovered statue, and strove to feel at least
a portion of the interest which this event would have inspired in him a
little while before. But, in reality, he found it difficult to fix
his mind upon the subject. He could hardly, we fear, be reckoned a
consummate artist, because there was something dearer to him than his
art; and, by the greater strength of a human affection, the divine
statue seemed to fall asunder again, and become only a heap of worthless
fragments.

While the sculptor sat listlessly gazing at it, there was a sound of
small hoofs, clumsily galloping on the Campagna; and soon his frisky
acquaintance, the buffalo-calf, came and peeped over the edge of the
excavation. Almost at the same moment he heard voices, which approached
nearer and nearer; a man's voice, and a feminine one, talking the
musical tongue of Italy. Besides the hairy visage of his four footed
friend, Kenyon now saw the figures of a peasant and a contadina, making
gestures of salutation to him, on the opposite verge of the hollow
space.





CHAPTER XLVII


THE PEASANT AND CONTADINA


They descended into the excavation: a young peasant, in the short blue
jacket, the small-clothes buttoned at the knee, and buckled shoes, that
compose one of the ugliest dresses ever worn by man, except the wearer's
form have a grace which any garb, or the nudity of an antique statue,
would equally set off; and, hand in hand with him, a village girl, in
one of those brilliant costumes largely kindled up with scarlet, and
decorated with gold embroidery, in which the contadinas array themselves
on feast-days. But Kenyon was not deceived; he had recognized the voices
of his friends, indeed, even before their disguised figures came between
him and the sunlight. Donatello was the peasant; the contadina, with the
airy smile, half mirthful, though it shone out of melancholy eyes,--was
Miriam.

They both greeted the sculptor with a familiar kindness which reminded
him of the days when Hilda and they and he had lived so happily
together, before the mysterious adventure of the catacomb. What a
succession of sinister events had followed one spectral figure out of
that gloomy labyrinth.

"It is carnival time, you know," said Miriam, as if in explanation of
Donatello's and her own costume. "Do you remember how merrily we spent
the Carnival, last year?"

"It seems many years ago," replied Kenyon. "We are all so changed!"

When individuals approach one another with deep purposes on both sides,
they seldom come at once to the matter which they have most at heart.
They dread the electric shock of a too sudden contact with it. A natural
impulse leads them to steal gradually onward, hiding themselves, as it
were, behind a closer, and still a closer topic, until they stand face
to face with the true point of interest. Miriam was conscious of this
impulse, and partially obeyed it.

"So your instincts as a sculptor have brought you into the presence of
our newly discovered statue," she observed. "Is it not beautiful? A
far truer image of immortal womanhood than the poor little damsel at
Florence, world famous though she be."

"Most beautiful," said Kenyon, casting an indifferent glance at the
Venus. "The time has been when the sight of this statue would have been
enough to make the day memorable."

"And will it not do so now?" Miriam asked.

"I fancied so, indeed, when we discovered it two days ago. It is
Donatello's prize. We were sitting here together, planning an interview
with you, when his keen eyes detected the fallen goddess, almost
entirely buried under that heap of earth, which the clumsy excavators
showered down upon her, I suppose. We congratulated ourselves, chiefly
for your sake. The eyes of us three are the only ones to which she
has yet revealed herself. Does it not frighten you a little, like the
apparition of a lovely woman that livid of old, and has long lain in the
grave?"

"Ah, Miriam! I cannot respond to you," said the sculptor, with
irrepressible impatience. "Imagination and the love of art have both
died out of me."

"Miriam," interposed Donatello with gentle gravity, "why should we keep
our friend in suspense? We know what anxiety he feels. Let us give him
what intelligence we can."

"You are so direct and immediate, my beloved friend!" answered Miriam
with an unquiet smile. "There are several reasons why I should like
to play round this matter a little while, and cover it with fanciful
thoughts, as we strew a grave with flowers."

"A grave!" exclaimed the sculptor.

"No grave in which your heart need be buried," she replied; "you have no
such calamity to dread. But I linger and hesitate, because every word I
speak brings me nearer to a crisis from which I shrink. Ah, Donatello!
let us live a little longer the life of these last few days! It is so
bright, so airy, so childlike, so without either past or future! Here,
on the wild Campagna, you seem to have found, both for yourself and me,
the life that belonged to you in early youth; the sweet irresponsible
life which you inherited from your mythic ancestry, the Fauns of Monte
Beni. Our stern and black reality will come upon us speedily enough.
But, first, a brief time more of this strange happiness."

"I dare not linger upon it," answered Donatello, with an expression
that reminded the sculptor of the gloomiest days of his remorse at Monte
Beni. "I dare to be so happy as you have seen me, only because I have
felt the time to be so brief."

"One day, then!" pleaded Miriam. "One more day in the wild freedom of
this sweet-scented air."

"Well, one more day," said Donatello, smiling; and his smile touched
Kenyon with a pathos beyond words, there being gayety and sadness both
melted into it; "but here is Hilda's friend, and our own. Comfort him,
at least, and set his heart at rest, since you have it partly in your
power."

"Ah, surely he might endure his pangs a little longer!" cried Miriam,
turning to Kenyon with a tricksy, fitful kind of mirth, that served to
hide some solemn necessity, too sad and serious to be looked at in its
naked aspect. "You love us both, I think, and will be content to suffer
for our sakes, one other day. Do I ask too much?"

"Tell me of Hilda," replied the sculptor; "tell me only that she is
safe, and keep back what else you will."

"Hilda is safe," said Miriam. "There is a Providence purposely for
Hilda, as I remember to have told you long ago. But a great trouble--an
evil deed, let us acknowledge it has spread out its dark branches so
widely, that the shadow falls on innocence as well as guilt. There was
one slight link that connected your sweet Hilda with a crime which it
was her unhappy fortune to witness, but of which I need not say she was
as guiltless as the angels that looked out of heaven, and saw it too.
No matter, now, what the consequence has been. You shall have your lost
Hilda back, and--who knows?--perhaps tenderer than she was."

"But when will she return?" persisted the sculptor; "tell me the when,
and where, and how!"

"A little patience. Do not press me so," said Miriam; and again Kenyon
was struck by the sprite-like, fitful characteristic of her manner, and
a sort of hysteric gayety, which seemed to be a will-o'-the-wisp from
a sorrow stagnant at her heart. "You have more time to spare than I.
First, listen to something that I have to tell. We will talk of Hilda by
and by."

Then Miriam spoke of her own life, and told facts that threw a gleam
of light over many things which had perplexed the sculptor in all his
previous knowledge of her. She described herself as springing from
English parentage, on the mother's side, but with a vein, likewise, of
Jewish blood; yet connected, through her father, with one of those few
princely families of Southern Italy, which still retain great wealth and
influence. And she revealed a name at which her auditor started and grew
pale; for it was one that, only a few years before, had been familiar
to the world in connection with a mysterious and terrible event.
The reader, if he think it worth while to recall some of the strange
incidents which have been talked of, and forgotten, within no long time
past, will remember Miriam's name.

"You shudder at me, I perceive," said Miriam, suddenly interrupting her
narrative.

"No; you were innocent," replied the sculptor. "I shudder at the
fatality that seems to haunt your footsteps, and throws a shadow of
crime about your path, you being guiltless."

"There was such a fatality," said Miriam; "yes; the shadow fell upon
me, innocent, but I went astray in it, and wandered--as Hilda could tell
you--into crime."

She went on to say that, while yet a child, she had lost her English
mother. From a very early period of her life, there had been a contract
of betrothal between herself and a certain marchese, the representative
of another branch of her paternal house,--a family arrangement between
two persons of disproportioned ages, and in which feeling went for
nothing. Most Italian girls of noble rank would have yielded themselves
to such a marriage as an affair of course. But there was something
in Miriam's blood, in her mixed race, in her recollections of her
mother,--some characteristic, finally, in her own nature,--which
had given her freedom of thought, and force of will, and made this
prearranged connection odious to her. Moreover, the character of her
destined husband would have been a sufficient and insuperable objection;
for it betrayed traits so evil, so treacherous, so vile, and yet so
strangely subtle, as could only be accounted for by the insanity which
often develops itself in old, close-kept races of men, when long unmixed
with newer blood. Reaching the age when the marriage contract should
have been fulfilled, Miriam had utterly repudiated it.

Some time afterwards had occurred that terrible event to which Miriam
had alluded when she revealed her name; an event, the frightful and
mysterious circumstances of which will recur to many minds, but of which
few or none can have found for themselves a satisfactory explanation. It
only concerns the present narrative, inasmuch as the suspicion of being
at least an accomplice in the crime fell darkly and directly upon Miriam
herself.

"But you know that I am innocent!" she cried, interrupting herself
again, and looking Kenyon in the face.

"I know it by my deepest consciousness," he answered; "and I know it by
Hilda's trust and entire affection, which you never could have won had
you been capable of guilt."

"That is sure ground, indeed, for pronouncing me innocent," said Miriam,
with the tears gushing into her eyes. "Yet I have since become a horror
to your saint-like Hilda, by a crime which she herself saw me help to
perpetrate!"

She proceeded with her story. The great influence of her family
connections had shielded her from some of the consequences of her
imputed guilt. But, in her despair, she had fled from home, and had
surrounded her flight with such circumstances as rendered it the most
probable conclusion that she had committed suicide. Miriam, however, was
not of the feeble nature which takes advantage of that obvious and poor
resource in earthly difficulties. She flung herself upon the world,
and speedily created a new sphere, in which Hilda's gentle purity,
the sculptor's sensibility, clear thought, and genius, and Donatello's
genial simplicity had given her almost her first experience of
happiness. Then came that ill-omened adventure of the catacomb, The
spectral figure which she encountered there was the evil fate that had
haunted her through life.

Looking back upon what had happened, Miriam observed, she now considered
him a madman. Insanity must have been mixed up with his original
composition, and developed by those very acts of depravity which it
suggested, and still more intensified, by the remorse that ultimately
followed them. Nothing was stranger in his dark career than the
penitence which often seemed to go hand in hand with crime. Since his
death she had ascertained that it finally led him to a convent,
where his severe and self-inflicted penance had even acquired him the
reputation of unusual sanctity, and had been the cause of his enjoying
greater freedom than is commonly allowed to monks.

"Need I tell you more?" asked Miriam, after proceeding thus far. "It
is still a dim and dreary mystery, a gloomy twilight into which I guide
you; but possibly you may catch a glimpse of much that I myself can
explain only by conjecture. At all events, you can comprehend what my
situation must have been, after that fatal interview in the catacomb.
My persecutor had gone thither for penance, but followed me forth with
fresh impulses to crime. He had me in his power. Mad as he was, and
wicked as he was, with one word he could have blasted me in the belief
of all the world. In your belief too, and Hilda's! Even Donatello would
have shrunk from me with horror!"

"Never," said Donatello, "my instinct would have known you innocent."

"Hilda and Donatello and myself,--we three would have acquitted you,"
said Kenyon, "let the world say what it might. Ah, Miriam, you should
have told us this sad story sooner!"

"I thought often of revealing it to you," answered Miriam; "on one
occasion, especially,--it was after you had shown me your Cleopatra;
it seemed to leap out of my heart, and got as far as my very lips. But
finding you cold to accept my confidence, I thrust it back again. Had I
obeyed my first impulse, all would have turned out differently."

"And Hilda!" resumed the sculptor. "What can have been her connection
with these dark incidents?"

"She will, doubtless, tell you with her own lips," replied Miriam.
"Through sources of information which I possess in Rome, I can assure
you of her safety. In two days more--by the help of the special
Providence that, as I love to tell you, watches over Hilda--she shall
rejoin you."

"Still two days more!" murmured the sculptor.

"Ah, you are cruel now! More cruel than you know!" exclaimed Miriam,
with another gleam of that fantastic, fitful gayety, which had more than
once marked her manner during this interview. "Spare your poor friends!"

"I know not what you mean, Miriam," said Kenyon.

"No matter," she replied; "you will understand hereafter. But could
you think it? Here is Donatello haunted with strange remorse, and an
unmitigable resolve to obtain what he deems justice upon himself. He
fancies, with a kind of direct simplicity, which I have vainly tried to
combat, that, when a wrong has been done, the doer is bound to submit
himself to whatsoever tribunal takes cognizance of such things, and
abide its judgment. I have assured him that there is no such thing
as earthly justice, and especially none here, under the head of
Christendom."

"We will not argue the point again," said Donatello, smiling. "I have no
head for argument, but only a sense, an impulse, an instinct, I believe,
which sometimes leads me right. But why do we talk now of what may make
us sorrowful? There are still two days more. Let us be happy!"

It appeared to Kenyon that since he last saw Donatello, some of the
sweet and delightful characteristics of the antique Faun had returned
to him. There were slight, careless graces, pleasant and simple
peculiarities, that had been obliterated by the heavy grief through
which he was passing at Monte Beni, and out of which he had hardly
emerged when the sculptor parted with Miriam and him beneath the bronze
pontiffs outstretched hand. These happy blossoms had now reappeared. A
playfulness came out of his heart, and glimmered like firelight in
his actions, alternating, or even closely intermingled, with profound
sympathy and serious thought.

"Is he not beautiful?" said Miriam, watching the sculptor's eye as
it dwelt admiringly on Donatello. "So changed, yet still, in a deeper
sense, so much the same! He has travelled in a circle, as all things
heavenly and earthly do, and now comes back to his original self, with
an inestimable treasure of improvement won from an experience of pain.
How wonderful is this! I tremble at my own thoughts, yet must needs
probe them to their depths. Was the crime--in which he and I were
wedded--was it a blessing, in that strange disguise? Was it a means of
education, bringing a simple and imperfect nature to a point of feeling
and intelligence which it could have reached under no other discipline?"

"You stir up deep and perilous matter, Miriam," replied Kenyon. "I dare
not follow you into the unfathomable abysses whither you are tending."

"Yet there is a pleasure in them! I delight to brood on the verge of
this great mystery," returned she. "The story of the fall of man! Is it
not repeated in our romance of Monte Beni? And may we follow the analogy
yet further? Was that very sin,--into which Adam precipitated himself
and all his race, was it the destined means by which, over a long
pathway of toil and sorrow, we are to attain a higher, brighter, and
profounder happiness, than our lost birthright gave? Will not this idea
account for the permitted existence of sin, as no other theory can?"

"It is too dangerous, Miriam! I cannot follow you!" repeated the
sculptor. "Mortal man has no right to tread on the ground where you now
set your feet."

"Ask Hilda what she thinks of it," said Miriam, with a thoughtful smile.
"At least, she might conclude that sin--which man chose instead of
good--has been so beneficently handled by omniscience and omnipotence,
that, whereas our dark enemy sought to destroy us by it, it has really
become an instrument most effective in the education of intellect and
soul."

Miriam paused a little longer among these meditations, which the
sculptor rightly felt to be so perilous; she then pressed his hand, in
token of farewell.

"The day after to-morrow," said she, "an hour before sunset, go to the
Corso, and stand in front of the fifth house on your left, beyond the
Antonine column. You will learn tidings of a friend."

Kenyon would have besought her for more definite intelligence, but she
shook her head, put her finger on her lips, and turned away with an
illusive smile. The fancy impressed him that she too, like Donatello,
had reached a wayside paradise, in their mysterious life journey, where
they both threw down the burden of the before and after, and, except for
this interview with himself, were happy in the flitting moment. To-day
Donatello was the sylvan Faun; to-day Miriam was his fit companion,
a Nymph of grove or fountain; to-morrow--a remorseful man and woman,
linked by a marriage bond of crime--they would set forth towards an
inevitable goal.





CHAPTER XLVIII


A SCENE IN THE CORSO


On the appointed afternoon, Kenyon failed not to make his appearance in
the Corso, and at an hour much earlier than Miriam had named.

It was carnival time. The merriment of this famous festival was in full
progress; and the stately avenue of the Corso was peopled with hundreds
of fantastic shapes, some of which probably represented the mirth of
ancient times, surviving through all manner of calamity, ever since the
days of the Roman Empire. For a few afternoons of early spring, this
mouldy gayety strays into the sunshine; all the remainder of the
year, it seems to be shut up in the catacombs or some other sepulchral
storehouse of the past.

Besides these hereditary forms, at which a hundred generations have
laughed, there were others of modern date, the humorous effluence of the
day that was now passing. It is a day, however, and an age, that appears
to be remarkably barren, when compared with the prolific originality
of former times, in productions of a scenic and ceremonial character,
whether grave or gay. To own the truth, the Carnival is alive, this
present year, only because it has existed through centuries gone by. It
is traditionary, not actual. If decrepit and melancholy Rome smiles,
and laughs broadly, indeed, at carnival time, it is not in the old
simplicity of real mirth, but with a half-conscious effort, like our
self-deceptive pretence of jollity at a threadbare joke. Whatever it may
once have been, it is now but a narrow stream of merriment, noisy of set
purpose, running along the middle of the Corso, through the solemn heart
of the decayed city, without extending its shallow influence on either
side. Nor, even within its own limits, does it affect the mass of
spectators, but only a comparatively few, in street and balcony, who
carry on the warfare of nosegays and counterfeit sugar plums. The
populace look on with staid composure; the nobility and priesthood take
little or no part in the matter; and, but for the hordes of Anglo-Saxons
who annually take up the flagging mirth, the Carnival might long ago
have been swept away, with the snowdrifts of confetti that whiten all
the pavement.

No doubt, however, the worn-out festival is still new to the youthful
and light hearted, who make the worn-out world itself as fresh as Adam
found it on his first forenoon in Paradise. It may be only age and
care that chill the life out of its grotesque and airy riot, with the
impertinence of their cold criticism.

Kenyon, though young, had care enough within his breast to render the
Carnival the emptiest of mockeries. Contrasting the stern anxiety of his
present mood with the frolic spirit of the preceding year, he fancied
that so much trouble had, at all events, brought wisdom in its train.
But there is a wisdom that looks grave, and sneers at merriment; and
again a deeper wisdom, that stoops to be gay as often as occasion
serves, and oftenest avails itself of shallow and trifling grounds of
mirth; because, if we wait for more substantial ones, we seldom can be
gay at all. Therefore, had it been possible, Kenyon would have done well
to mask himself in some wild, hairy visage, and plunge into the throng
of other maskers, as at the Carnival before. Then Donatello had danced
along the Corso in all the equipment of a Faun, doing the part with
wonderful felicity of execution, and revealing furry ears, which looked
absolutely real; and Miriam had been alternately a lady of the antique
regime, in powder and brocade, and the prettiest peasant girl of the
Campagna, in the gayest of costumes; while Hilda, sitting demurely in a
balcony, had hit the sculptor with a single rosebud,--so sweet and fresh
a bud that he knew at once whose hand had flung it.

These were all gone; all those dear friends whose sympathetic mirth had
made him gay. Kenyon felt as if an interval of many years had passed
since the last Carnival. He had grown old, the nimble jollity was tame,
and the maskers dull and heavy; the Corso was but a narrow and shabby
street of decaying palaces; and even the long, blue streamer of Italian
sky, above it, not half so brightly blue as formerly.

Yet, if he could have beheld the scene with his clear, natural eyesight,
he might still have found both merriment and splendor in it. Everywhere,
and all day long, there had been tokens of the festival, in the baskets
brimming over with bouquets, for sale at the street corners, or borne
about on people's heads; while bushels upon bushels of variously colored
confetti were displayed, looking just like veritable sugar plums; so
that a stranger would have imagined that the whole commerce and business
of stern old Rome lay in flowers and sweets. And now, in the sunny
afternoon, there could hardly be a spectacle more picturesque than the
vista of that noble street, stretching into the interminable distance
between two rows of lofty edifices, from every window of which, and
many a balcony, flaunted gay and gorgeous carpets, bright silks, scarlet
cloths with rich golden fringes, and Gobelin tapestry, still lustrous
with varied hues, though the product of antique looms. Each separate
palace had put on a gala dress, and looked festive for the occasion,
whatever sad or guilty secret it might hide within. Every window,
moreover, was alive with the faces of women, rosy girls, and children,
all kindled into brisk and mirthful expression, by the incidents in the
street below. In the balconies that projected along the palace fronts
stood groups of ladies, some beautiful, all richly dressed, scattering
forth their laughter, shrill, yet sweet, and the musical babble of their
voices, to thicken into an airy tumult over the heads of common mortals.

All these innumerable eyes looked down into the street, the whole
capacity of which was thronged with festal figures, in such fantastic
variety that it had taken centuries to contrive them; and through the
midst of the mad, merry stream of human life rolled slowly onward a
never-ending procession of all the vehicles in Rome, from the ducal
carriage, with the powdered coachman high in front, and the three golden
lackeys clinging in the rear, down to the rustic cart drawn by its
single donkey. Among this various crowd, at windows and in balconies, in
cart, cab, barouche, or gorgeous equipage, or bustling to and fro afoot,
there was a sympathy of nonsense; a true and genial brotherhood and
sisterhood, based on the honest purpose--and a wise one, too--of being
foolish, all together. The sport of mankind, like its deepest earnest,
is a battle; so these festive people fought one another with an
ammunition of sugar plums and flowers.

Not that they were veritable sugar plums, however, but something that
resembled them only as the apples of Sodom look like better fruit.
They were concocted mostly of lime, with a grain of oat, or some other
worthless kernel, in the midst. Besides the hailstorm of confetti, the
combatants threw handfuls of flour or lime into the air, where it hung
like smoke over a battlefield, or, descending, whitened a black coat or
priestly robe, and made the curly locks of youth irreverently hoary.

At the same time with this acrid contest of quicklime, which caused much
effusion of tears from suffering eyes, a gentler warfare of flowers
was carried on, principally between knights and ladies. Originally, no
doubt, when this pretty custom was first instituted, it may have had a
sincere and modest import. Each youth and damsel, gathering bouquets
of field flowers, or the sweetest and fairest that grew in their own
gardens, all fresh and virgin blossoms, flung them with true aim at the
one, or few, whom they regarded with a sentiment of shy partiality at
least, if not with love. Often, the lover in the Corso may thus have
received from his bright mistress, in her father's princely balcony,
the first sweet intimation that his passionate glances had not struck
against a heart of marble. What more appropriate mode of suggesting
her tender secret could a maiden find than by the soft hit of a rosebud
against a young man's cheek?

This was the pastime and the earnest of a more innocent and homelier
age. Nowadays the nosegays are gathered and tied up by sordid hands,
chiefly of the most ordinary flowers, and are sold along the Corso,
at mean price, yet more than such Venal things are worth. Buying a
basketful, you find them miserably wilted, as if they had flown hither
and thither through two or three carnival days already; muddy, too,
having been fished up from the pavement, where a hundred feet have
trampled on them. You may see throngs of men and boys who thrust
themselves beneath the horses' hoofs to gather up bouquets that were
aimed amiss from balcony and carriage; these they sell again, and yet
once more, and ten times over, defiled as they all are with the wicked
filth of Rome.

Such are the flowery favors--the fragrant bunches of sentiment--that fly
between cavalier and dame, and back again, from one end of the Corso to
the other. Perhaps they may symbolize, more aptly than was intended,
the poor, battered, wilted hearts of those who fling them; hearts
which--crumpled and crushed by former possessors, and stained with
various mishap--have been passed from hand to hand along the muddy
street-way of life, instead of being treasured in one faithful bosom.

These venal and polluted flowers, therefore, and those deceptive
bonbons, are types of the small reality that still subsists in the
observance of the Carnival. Yet the government seemed to imagine that
there might be excitement enough,--wild mirth, perchance, following its
antics beyond law, and frisking from frolic into earnest,--to render it
expedient to guard the Corso with an imposing show of military power.
Besides the ordinary force of gendarmes, a strong patrol of papal
dragoons, in steel helmets and white cloaks, were stationed at all the
street corners. Detachments of French infantry stood by their stacked
muskets in the Piazza del Popolo, at one extremity of the course, and
before the palace of the Austrian embassy, at the other, and by the
column of Antoninus, midway between. Had that chained tiger-cat, the
Roman populace, shown only so much as the tip of his claws, the sabres
would have been flashing and the bullets whistling, in right earnest,
among the combatants who now pelted one another with mock sugar plums
and wilted flowers.

But, to do the Roman people justice, they were restrained by a better
safeguard than the sabre or the bayonet; it was their own gentle
courtesy, which imparted a sort of sacredness to the hereditary
festival. At first sight of a spectacle so fantastic and extravagant, a
cool observer might have imagined the whole town gone mad; but, in the
end, he would see that all this apparently unbounded license is kept
strictly within a limit of its own; he would admire a people who can
so freely let loose their mirthful propensities, while muzzling those
fiercer ones that tend to mischief. Everybody seemed lawless; nobody was
rude. If any reveller overstepped the mark, it was sure to be no Roman,
but an Englishman or an American; and even the rougher play of this
Gothic race was still softened by the insensible influence of a moral
atmosphere more delicate, in some respects, than we breathe at home. Not
that, after all, we like the fine Italian spirit better than our own;
popular rudeness is sometimes the symptom of rude moral health. But,
where a Carnival is in question, it would probably pass off more
decorously, as well as more airily and delightfully, in Rome, than in
any Anglo-Saxon city.

When Kenyon emerged from a side lane into the Corso, the mirth was at
its height. Out of the seclusion of his own feelings, he looked forth at
the tapestried and damask-curtained palaces, the slow-moving double line
of carriages, and the motley maskers that swarmed on foot, as if he were
gazing through the iron lattice of a prison window. So remote from
the scene were his sympathies, that it affected him like a thin dream,
through the dim, extravagant material of which he could discern more
substantial objects, while too much under its control to start forth
broad awake. Just at that moment, too, there came another spectacle,
making its way right through the masquerading throng.

It was, first and foremost, a full band of martial music, reverberating,
in that narrow and confined though stately avenue, between the walls of
the lofty palaces, and roaring upward to the sky with melody so powerful
that it almost grew to discord. Next came a body of cavalry and mounted
gendarmes, with great display of military pomp. They were escorting a
long train of equipages, each and all of which shone as gorgeously as
Cinderella's coach, with paint and gilding. Like that, too, they were
provided with coachmen of mighty breadth, and enormously tall footmen,
in immense powdered wigs, and all the splendor of gold-laced, three
cornered hats, and embroidered silk coats and breeches. By the
old-fashioned magnificence of this procession, it might worthily have
included his Holiness in person, with a suite of attendant Cardinals,
if those sacred dignitaries would kindly have lent their aid to heighten
the frolic of the Carnival. But, for all its show of a martial escort,
and its antique splendor of costume, it was but a train of the municipal
authorities of Rome,--illusive shadows, every one, and among them a
phantom, styled the Roman Senator,--proceeding to the Capitol.

The riotous interchange of nosegays and confetti was partially
suspended, while the procession passed. One well-directed shot,
however,--it was a double handful of powdered lime, flung by an impious
New Englander,--hit the coachman of the Roman Senator full in the face,
and hurt his dignity amazingly. It appeared to be his opinion that the
Republic was again crumbling into ruin, and that the dust of it now
filled his nostrils; though, in fact, it would hardly be distinguished
from the official powder with which he was already plentifully bestrewn.

While the sculptor, with his dreamy eyes, was taking idle note of this
trifling circumstance, two figures passed before him, hand in hand. The
countenance of each was covered with an impenetrable black mask; but one
seemed a peasant of the Campagna; the other, a contadina in her holiday
costume.





CHAPTER XLIX


A FROLIC OF THE CARNIVAL


The crowd and confusion, just at that moment, hindered the sculptor from
pursuing these figures,--the peasant and contadina,--who, indeed, were
but two of a numerous tribe that thronged the Corso, in similar costume.
As soon as he could squeeze a passage, Kenyon tried to follow in their
footsteps, but quickly lost sight of them, and was thrown off the track
by stopping to examine various groups of masqueraders, in which he
fancied the objects of his search to be included. He found many a sallow
peasant or herdsman of the Campagna, in such a dress as Donatello
wore; many a contadina, too, brown, broad, and sturdy, in her finery
of scarlet, and decked out with gold or coral beads, a pair of heavy
earrings, a curiously wrought cameo or mosaic brooch, and a silver comb
or long stiletto among her glossy hair. But those shapes of grace and
beauty which he sought had vanished.

As soon as the procession of the Senator had passed, the merry-makers
resumed their antics with fresh spirit, and the artillery of bouquets
and sugar plums, suspended for a moment, began anew. The sculptor
himself, being probably the most anxious and unquiet spectator there,
was especially a mark for missiles from all quarters, and for the
practical jokes which the license of the Carnival permits. In fact,
his sad and contracted brow so ill accorded with the scene, that the
revellers might be pardoned for thus using him as the butt of their idle
mirth, since he evidently could not otherwise contribute to it.

Fantastic figures, with bulbous heads, the circumference of a bushel,
grinned enormously in his face. Harlequins struck him with their wooden
swords, and appeared to expect his immediate transformation into some
jollier shape. A little, long-tailed, horned fiend sidled up to him and
suddenly blew at him through a tube, enveloping our poor friend in a
whole harvest of winged seeds. A biped, with an ass's snout, brayed
close to his ear, ending his discordant uproar with a peal of human
laughter. Five strapping damsels--so, at least, their petticoats bespoke
them, in spite of an awful freedom in the flourish of their legs--joined
hands, and danced around him, inviting him by their gestures to perform
a hornpipe in the midst. Released from these gay persecutors, a clown in
motley rapped him on the back with a blown bladder, in which a handful
of dried peas rattled horribly.

Unquestionably, a care-stricken mortal has no business abroad, when
the rest of mankind are at high carnival; they must either pelt him
and absolutely martyr him with jests, and finally bury him beneath the
aggregate heap; or else the potency of his darker mood, because the
tissue of human life takes a sad dye more readily than a gay one, will
quell their holiday humors, like the aspect of a death's-head at a
banquet. Only that we know Kenyon's errand, we could hardly forgive him
for venturing into the Corso with that troubled face.

Even yet, his merry martyrdom was not half over. There came along a
gigantic female figure, seven feet high, at least, and taking up a third
of the street's breadth with the preposterously swelling sphere of
her crinoline skirts. Singling out the sculptor, she began to make a
ponderous assault upon his heart, throwing amorous glances at him out
of her great goggle eyes, offering him a vast bouquet of sunflowers and
nettles, and soliciting his pity by all sorts of pathetic and passionate
dumb-show. Her suit meeting no favor, the rejected Titaness made a
gesture of despair and rage; then suddenly drawing a huge pistol,
she took aim right at the obdurate sculptor's breast, and pulled the
trigger. The shot took effect, for the abominable plaything went off
by a spring, like a boy's popgun, covering Kenyon with a cloud of lime
dust, under shelter of which the revengeful damsel strode away.

Hereupon, a whole host of absurd figures surrounded him, pretending
to sympathize in his mishap. Clowns and party-colored harlequins;
orang-outangs; bear-headed, bull-headed, and dog-headed individuals;
faces that would have been human, but for their enormous noses; one
terrific creature, with a visage right in the centre of his breast;
and all other imaginable kinds of monstrosity and exaggeration. These
apparitions appeared to be investigating the case, after the fashion
of a coroner's jury, poking their pasteboard countenances close to the
sculptor's with an unchangeable grin, that gave still more ludicrous
effect to the comic alarm and sorrow of their gestures. Just then, a
figure came by, in a gray wig and rusty gown, with an inkhorn at his
buttonhole and a pen behind his ear; he announced himself as a notary,
and offered to make the last will and testament of the assassinated man.
This solemn duty, however, was interrupted by a surgeon, who brandished
a lancet, three feet long, and proposed to him to let him take blood.

The affair was so like a feverish dream, that Kenyon resigned himself to
let it take its course. Fortunately the humors of the Carnival pass from
one absurdity to another, without lingering long enough on any, to wear
out even the slightest of them. The passiveness of his demeanor afforded
too little scope for such broad merriment as the masqueraders sought. In
a few moments they vanished from him, as dreams and spectres do, leaving
him at liberty to pursue his quest, with no impediment except the crowd
that blocked up the footway.

He had not gone far when the peasant and the contadina met him. They
were still hand in hand, and appeared to be straying through the
grotesque and animated scene, taking as little part in it as himself. It
might be because he recognized them, and knew their solemn secret, that
the sculptor fancied a melancholy emotion to be expressed by the very
movement and attitudes of these two figures; and even the grasp of their
hands, uniting them so closely, seemed to set them in a sad remoteness
from the world at which they gazed.

"I rejoice to meet you," said Kenyon. But they looked at him through the
eye-holes of their black masks, without answering a word.

"Pray give me a little light on the matter which I have so much at
heart," said he; "if you know anything of Hilda, for Heaven's sake,
speak!"

Still they were silent; and the sculptor began to imagine that he
must have mistaken the identity of these figures, there being such a
multitude in similar costume. Yet there was no other Donatello, no other
Miriam. He felt, too, that spiritual certainty which impresses us with
the presence of our friends, apart from any testimony of the senses.

"You are unkind," resumed he,--"knowing the anxiety which oppresses me,
--not to relieve it, if in your power."

The reproach evidently had its effect; for the contadina now spoke, and
it was Miriam's voice.

"We gave you all the light we could," said she. "You are yourself
unkind, though you little think how much so, to come between us at this
hour. There may be a sacred hour, even in carnival time."

In another state of mind, Kenyon could have been amused by the
impulsiveness of this response, and a sort of vivacity that he had
often noted in Miriam's conversation. But he was conscious of a profound
sadness in her tone, overpowering its momentary irritation, and assuring
him that a pale, tear-stained face was hidden behind her mask.

"Forgive me!" said he.

Donatello here extended his hand,--not that which was clasping
Miriam's,--and she, too, put her free one into the sculptor's left; so
that they were a linked circle of three, with many reminiscences and
forebodings flashing through their hearts. Kenyon knew intuitively that
these once familiar friends were parting with him now.

"Farewell!" they all three said, in the same breath.

No sooner was the word spoken, than they loosed their hands; and the
uproar of the Carnival swept like a tempestuous sea over the spot which
they had included within their small circle of isolated feeling.

By this interview, the sculptor had learned nothing in reference to
Hilda; but he understood that he was to adhere to the instructions
already received, and await a solution of the mystery in some mode
that he could not yet anticipate. Passing his hands over his eyes, and
looking about him,--for the event just described had made the scene even
more dreamlike than before,--he now found himself approaching that broad
piazza bordering on the Corso, which has for its central object the
sculptured column of Antoninus. It was not far from this vicinity
that Miriam had bid him wait. Struggling onward as fast as the tide of
merrymakers, setting strong against him, would permit, he was now beyond
the Palazzo Colonna, and began to count the houses. The fifth was a
palace, with a long front upon the Corso, and of stately height, but
somewhat grim with age.

Over its arched and pillared entrance there was a balcony, richly hung
with tapestry and damask, and tenanted, for the time, by a gentleman of
venerable aspect and a group of ladies. The white hair and whiskers of
the former, and the winter roses in his cheeks, had an English look; the
ladies, too, showed a fair-haired Saxon bloom, and seemed to taste the
mirth of the Carnival with the freshness of spectators to whom the scene
was new. All the party, the old gentleman with grave earnestness, as if
he were defending a rampart, and his young companions with exuberance of
frolic, showered confetti inexhaustibly upon the passers-by.

In the rear of the balcony, a broad-brimmed, ecclesiastical beaver was
visible. An abbate, probably an acquaintance and cicerone of the English
family, was sitting there, and enjoying the scene, though partially
withdrawn from view, as the decorum for his order dictated.

There seemed no better nor other course for Kenyon than to keep watch at
this appointed spot, waiting for whatever should happen next. Clasping
his arm round a lamp-post, to prevent being carried away by the
turbulent stream of wayfarers, he scrutinized every face, with the idea
that some one of them might meet his eyes with a glance of intelligence.
He looked at each mask,--harlequin, ape, bulbous-headed monster, or
anything that was absurdest,--not knowing but that the messenger might
come, even in such fantastic guise. Or perhaps one of those quaint
figures, in the stately ruff, the cloak, tunic, and trunk-hose of three
centuries ago, might bring him tidings of Hilda, out of that long-past
age. At times his disquietude took a hopeful aspect; and he fancied that
Hilda might come by, her own sweet self, in some shy disguise which the
instinct Of his love would be sure to penetrate. Or, she might be
borne past on a triumphal car, like the one just now approaching, its
slow-moving wheels encircled and spoked with foliage, and drawn by
horses, that were harnessed and wreathed with flowers. Being, at best,
so far beyond the bounds of reasonable conjecture, he might anticipate
the wildest event, or find either his hopes or fears disappointed in
what appeared most probable.

The old Englishman and his daughters, in the opposite balcony, must have
seen something unutterably absurd in the sculptor's deportment, poring
into this whirlpool of nonsense so earnestly, in quest of what was to
make his life dark or bright. Earnest people, who try to get a reality
out of human existence, are necessarily absurd in the view of the
revellers and masqueraders. At all events, after a good deal of mirth at
the expense of his melancholy visage, the fair occupants of the balcony
favored Kenyon with a salvo of confetti, which came rattling about him
like a hailstorm. Looking up instinctively, he was surprised to see
the abbate in the background lean forward and give a courteous sign of
recognition.

It was the same old priest with whom he had seen Hilda, at the
confessional; the same with whom he had talked of her disappearance on
meeting him in the street.

Yet, whatever might be the reason, Kenyon did not now associate this
ecclesiastical personage with the idea of Hilda. His eyes lighted on the
old man, just for an instant, and then returned to the eddying throng of
the Corso, on his minute scrutiny of which depended, for aught he knew,
the sole chance of ever finding any trace of her. There was, about this
moment, a bustle on the other side of the street, the cause of which
Kenyon did not see, nor exert himself to discover. A small party of
soldiers or gendarmes appeared to be concerned in it; they were perhaps
arresting some disorderly character, who, under the influence of an
extra flask of wine, might have reeled across the mystic limitation of
carnival proprieties.

The sculptor heard some people near him talking of the incident.

"That contadina, in a black mask, was a fine figure of a woman."

"She was not amiss," replied a female voice; "but her companion was far
the handsomer figure of the two. Could they be really a peasant and a
contadina, do you imagine?"

"No, no," said the other. "It is some frolic of the Carnival, carried a
little too far."

This conversation might have excited Kenyon's interest; only that, just
as the last words were spoken, he was hit by two missiles, both of a
kind that were flying abundantly on that gay battlefield. One, we are
ashamed to say, was a cauliflower, which, flung by a young man from a
passing carriage, came with a prodigious thump against his shoulder;
the other was a single rosebud, so fresh that it seemed that moment
gathered. It flew from the opposite balcony, smote gently on his lips,
and fell into his hand. He looked upward, and beheld the face of his
lost Hilda!

She was dressed in a white domino, and looked pale and bewildered,
and yet full of tender joy. Moreover, there was a gleam of delicate
mirthfulness in her eyes, which the sculptor had seen there only two or
three times in the course of their acquaintance, but thought it the most
bewitching and fairylike of all Hilda's expressions. That soft, mirthful
smile caused her to melt, as it were, into the wild frolic of the
Carnival, and become not so strange and alien to the scene, as her
unexpected apparition must otherwise have made her.

Meanwhile, the venerable Englishman and his daughters were staring at
poor Hilda in a way that proved them altogether astonished, as well
as inexpressibly shocked, by her sudden intrusion into their private
balcony. They looked,--as, indeed, English people of respectability
would, if an angel were to alight in their circle, without due
introduction from somebody whom they knew, in the court above,--they
looked as if an unpardonable liberty had been taken, and a suitable
apology must be made; after which, the intruder would be expected to
withdraw.

The abbate, however, drew the old gentleman aside, and whispered a few
words that served to mollify him; he bestowed on Hilda a sufficiently
benignant, though still a perplexed and questioning regard, and invited
her, in dumb-show, to put herself at her ease.

But, whoever was in fault, our shy and gentle Hilda had dreamed of no
intrusion. Whence she had come, or where she had been hidden, during
this mysterious interval, we can but imperfectly surmise, and do not
mean, at present, to make it a matter of formal explanation with the
reader. It is better, perhaps, to fancy that she had been snatched away
to a land of picture; that she had been straying with Claude in the
golden light which he used to shed over his landscapes, but which he
could never have beheld with his waking eyes till he awoke in the better
clime. We will imagine that, for the sake of the true simplicity
with which she loved them, Hilda had been permitted, for a season, to
converse with the great, departed masters of the pencil, and behold
the diviner works which they have painted in heavenly colors. Guido had
shown her another portrait of Beatrice Cenci, done from the celestial
life, in which that forlorn mystery of the earthly countenance was
exchanged for a radiant joy. Perugino had allowed her a glimpse at his
easel, on which she discerned what seemed a woman's face, but so divine,
by the very depth and softness of its womanhood, that a gush of happy
tears blinded the maiden's eyes before she had time to look. Raphael
had taken Hilda by the hand, that fine, forcible hand which Kenyon
sculptured,--and drawn aside the curtain of gold-fringed cloud that
hung before his latest masterpiece. On earth, Raphael painted the
Transfiguration. What higher scene may he have since depicted, not from
imagination, but as revealed to his actual sight!

Neither will we retrace the steps by which she returned to the actual
world. For the present, be it enough to say that Hilda had been summoned
forth from a secret place, and led we know not through what mysterious
passages, to a point where the tumult of life burst suddenly upon her
ears. She heard the tramp of footsteps, the rattle of wheels, and the
mingled hum of a multitude of voices, with strains of music and loud
laughter breaking through. Emerging into a great, gloomy hall, a
curtain was drawn aside; she found herself gently propelled into an
open balcony, whence she looked out upon the festal street, with gay
tapestries flaunting over all the palace fronts, the windows thronged
with merry faces, and a crowd of maskers rioting upon the pavement
below.

Immediately she seemed to become a portion of the scene. Her pale,
large-eyed, fragile beauty, her wondering aspect and bewildered grace,
attracted the gaze of many; and there fell around her a shower of
bouquets and bonbons--freshest blossoms and sweetest sugar plums, sweets
to the sweet--such as the revellers of the Carnival reserve as tributes
to especial loveliness. Hilda pressed her hand across her brow; she let
her eyelids fall, and, lifting them again, looked through the grotesque
and gorgeous show, the chaos of mad jollity, in quest of some object
by which she might assure herself that the whole spectacle was not an
illusion.

Beneath the balcony, she recognized a familiar and fondly remembered
face. The spirit of the hour and the scene exercised its influence over
her quick and sensitive nature; she caught up one of the rosebuds that
had been showered upon her, and aimed it at the sculptor; It hit the
mark; he turned his sad eyes upward, and there was Hilda, in whose
gentle presence his own secret sorrow and the obtrusive uproar of the
Carnival alike died away from his perception.

That night, the lamp beneath the Virgin's shrine burned as brightly as
if it had never been extinguished; and though the one faithful dove had
gone to her melancholy perch, she greeted Hilda rapturously the next
morning, and summoned her less constant companions, whithersoever they
had flown, to renew their homage.





CHAPTER L


MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO


The gentle reader, we trust, would not thank us for one of those minute
elucidations, which are so tedious, and, after all, so unsatisfactory,
in clearing up the romantic mysteries of a story. He is too wise to
insist upon looking closely at the wrong side of the tapestry, after the
right one has been sufficiently displayed to him, woven with the best of
the artist's skill, and cunningly arranged with a view to the harmonious
exhibition of its colors. If any brilliant, or beautiful, or even
tolerable effect have been produced, this pattern of kindly readers will
accept it at its worth, without tearing its web apart, with the idle
purpose of discovering how the threads have been knit together; for the
sagacity by which he is distinguished will long ago have taught him that
any narrative of human action and adventure whether we call it history
or romance--is certain to be a fragile handiwork, more easily rent than
mended. The actual experience of even the most ordinary life is full of
events that never explain themselves, either as regards their origin or
their tendency.

It would be easy, from conversations which we have held with the
sculptor, to suggest a clew to the mystery of Hilda's disappearance;
although, as long as she remained in Italy, there was a remarkable
reserve in her communications upon this subject, even to her most
intimate friends. Either a pledge of secrecy had been exacted, or a
prudential motive warned her not to reveal the stratagems of a religious
body, or the secret acts of a despotic government--whichever might be
responsible in the present instance--while still within the scope of
their jurisdiction. Possibly, she might not herself be fully aware what
power had laid its grasp upon her person. What has chiefly perplexed us,
however, among Hilda's adventures, is the mode of her release, in which
some inscrutable tyranny or other seemed to take part in the frolic of
the Carnival. We can only account for it, by supposing that the fitful
and fantastic imagination of a woman--sportive, because she must
otherwise be desperate--had arranged this incident, and made it the
condition of a step which her conscience, or the conscience of another,
required her to take.

A few days after Hilda's reappearance, she and the sculptor were
straying together through the streets of Rome. Being deep in talk, it so
happened that they found themselves near the majestic, pillared portico,
and huge, black rotundity of the Pantheon. It stands almost at the
central point of the labyrinthine intricacies of the modern city, and
often presents itself before the bewildered stranger, when he is in
search of other objects. Hilda, looking up, proposed that they should
enter.

"I never pass it without going in," she said, "to pay my homage at the
tomb of Raphael."

"Nor I," said Kenyon, "without stopping to admire the noblest edifice
which the barbarism of the early ages, and the more barbarous pontiffs
and princes of later ones, have spared to us."

They went in accordingly, and stood in the free space of that great
circle, around which are ranged the arched recesses and stately altars,
formerly dedicated to heathen gods, but Christianized through twelve
centuries gone by. The world has nothing else like the Pantheon. So
grand it is, that the pasteboard statues over the lofty cornice do not
disturb the effect, any more than the tin crowns and hearts, the dusty
artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gew-gaws, hanging at the
saintly shrines. The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the precious
marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and rounds
of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred directions,
showing how roughly the troublesome ages have trampled here; the gray
dome above, with its opening to the sky, as if heaven were looking down
into the interior of this place of worship, left unimpeded for prayers
to ascend the more freely; all these things make an impression of
solemnity, which St. Peter's itself fails to produce.

"I think," said the sculptor, "it is to the aperture in the dome--that
great Eye, gazing heavenward that the Pantheon owes the peculiarity of
its effect. It is so heathenish, as it were,--so unlike all the snugness
of our modern civilization! Look, too, at the pavement, directly beneath
the open space! So much rain has fallen there, in the last two thousand
years, that it is green with small, fine moss, such as grows over
tombstones in a damp English churchyard."

"I like better," replied Hilda, "to look at the bright, blue sky,
roofing the edifice where the builders left it open. It is very
delightful, in a breezy day, to see the masses of white cloud float over
the opening, and then the sunshine fall through it again, fitfully, as
it does now. Would it be any wonder if we were to see angels hovering
there, partly in and partly out, with genial, heavenly faces, not
intercepting the light, but only transmuting it into beautiful colors?
Look at that broad, golden beam--a sloping cataract of sunlight--which
comes down from the aperture and rests upon the shrine, at the right
hand of the entrance!"

"There is a dusky picture over that altar," observed the sculptor. "Let
us go and see if this strong illumination brings out any merit in it."

Approaching the shrine, they found the picture little worth looking at,
but could not forbear smiling, to see that a very plump and comfortable
tabby-cat--whom we ourselves have often observed haunting the
Pantheon--had established herself on the altar, in the genial sunbeam,
and was fast asleep among the holy tapers. Their footsteps disturbing
her, she awoke, raised herself, and sat blinking in the sun, yet with a
certain dignity and self-possession, as if conscious of representing a
saint.

"I presume," remarked Kenyon, "that this is the first of the feline race
that has ever set herself up as an object of worship, in the Pantheon or
elsewhere, since the days of ancient Egypt. See; there is a peasant from
the neighboring market, actually kneeling to her! She seems a gracious
and benignant saint enough."

"Do not make me laugh," said Hilda reproachfully, "but help me to drive
the creature away. It distresses me to see that poor man, or any human
being, directing his prayers so much amiss."

"Then, Hilda," answered the sculptor more seriously, "the only Place
in the Pantheon for you and me to kneel is on the pavement beneath
the central aperture. If we pray at a saint's shrine, we shall give
utterance to earthly wishes; but if we pray face to face with the
Deity, we shall feel it impious to petition for aught that is narrow and
selfish. Methinks it is this that makes the Catholics so delight in the
worship of saints; they can bring up all their little worldly wants and
whims, their individualities and human weaknesses, not as things to be
repented of, but to be humored by the canonized humanity to which they
pray. Indeed, it is very tempting!"

What Hilda might have answered must be left to conjecture; for as she
turned from the shrine, her eyes were attracted to the figure of a
female penitent, kneeling on the pavement just beneath the great central
eye, in the very spot which Kenyon had designated as the only one whence
prayers should ascend. The upturned face was invisible, behind a veil or
mask, which formed a part of the garb.

"It cannot be!" whispered Hilda, with emotion. "No; it cannot be!"

"What disturbs you?" asked Kenyon. "Why do you tremble so?"

"If it were possible," she replied, "I should fancy that kneeling figure
to be Miriam!"

"As you say, it is impossible," rejoined the sculptor; "We know too
well what has befallen both her and Donatello." "Yes; it is impossible!"
repeated Hilda. Her voice was still tremulous, however, and she seemed
unable to withdraw her attention from the kneeling figure. Suddenly,
and as if the idea of Miriam had opened the whole volume of Hilda's
reminiscences, she put this question to the sculptor: "Was Donatello
really a Faun?"

"If you had ever studied the pedigree of the far-descended heir of Monte
Beni, as I did," answered Kenyon, with an irrepressible smile, "you
would have retained few doubts on that point. Faun or not, he had a
genial nature, which, had the rest of mankind been in accordance with
it, would have made earth a paradise to our poor friend. It seems
the moral of his story, that human beings of Donatello's character,
compounded especially for happiness, have no longer any business on
earth, or elsewhere. Life has grown so sadly serious, that such men must
change their nature, or else perish, like the antediluvian creatures
that required, as the condition of their existence, a more summer-like
atmosphere than ours."

"I will not accept your moral!" replied the hopeful and happy-natured
Hilda.

"Then here is another; take your choice!" said the sculptor, remembering
what Miriam had recently suggested, in reference to the same point. "He
perpetrated a great crime; and his remorse, gnawing into his soul,
has awakened it; developing a thousand high capabilities, moral and
intellectual, which we never should have dreamed of asking for, within
the scanty compass of the Donatello whom we knew."

"I know not whether this is so," said Hilda. "But what then?"

"Here comes my perplexity," continued Kenyon. "Sin has educated
Donatello, and elevated him. Is sin, then,--which we deem such a
dreadful blackness in the universe,--is it, like sorrow, merely an
element of human education, through which we struggle to a higher and
purer state than we could otherwise have attained? Did Adam fall, that
we might ultimately rise to a far loftier paradise than his?" "O hush!"
cried Hilda, shrinking from him with an expression of horror which
wounded the poor, speculative sculptor to the soul. "This is terrible;
and I could weep for you, if you indeed believe it. Do not you perceive
what a mockery your creed makes, not only of all religious sentiments,
but of moral law? And how it annuls and obliterates whatever precepts of
Heaven are written deepest within us? You have shocked me beyond words!"

"Forgive me, Hilda!" exclaimed the sculptor, startled by her agitation;
"I never did believe it! But the mind wanders wild and wide; and, so
lonely as I live and work, I have neither pole-star above nor light
of cottage windows here below, to bring me home. Were you my guide, my
counsellor, my inmost friend, with that white wisdom which clothes you
as a celestial garment, all would go well. O Hilda, guide me home!"

"We are both lonely; both far from home!" said Hilda, her eyes filling
with tears. "I am a poor, weak girl, and have no such wisdom as you
fancy in me."

What further may have passed between these lovers, while standing before
the pillared shrine, and the marble Madonna that marks Raphael's tomb;
whither they had now wandered, we are unable to record. But when the
kneeling figure beneath the open eye of the Pantheon arose, she looked
towards the pair and extended her hands with a gesture of benediction.
Then they knew that it was Miriam. They suffered her to glide out of
the portal, however, without a greeting; for those extended hands, even
while they blessed, seemed to repel, as if Miriam stood on the other
side of a fathomless abyss, and warned them from its verge.

So Kenyon won the gentle Hilda's shy affection, and her consent to
be his bride. Another hand must henceforth trim the lamp before the
Virgin's shrine; for Hilda was coming down from her old tower, to be
herself enshrined and worshipped as a household saint, in the light of
her husband's fireside. And, now that life had so much human promise in
it, they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years,
after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on
a foreign shore. We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a
future moment, when we shall again breathe our native air; but, by and
by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the
native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted
its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary
residents. Thus, between two countries, we have none at all, or
only that little space of either in which we finally lay down our
discontented bones. It is wise, therefore, to come back betimes, or
never.

Before they quitted Rome, a bridal gift was laid on Hilda's table. It
was a bracelet, evidently of great cost, being composed of seven ancient
Etruscan gems, dug out of seven sepulchres, and each one of them the
signet of some princely personage, who had lived an immemorial time ago.
Hilda remembered this precious ornament. It had been Miriam's; and once,
with the exuberance of fancy that distinguished her, she had amused
herself with telling a mythical and magic legend for each gem,
comprising the imaginary adventures and catastrophe of its former
wearer. Thus the Etruscan bracelet became the connecting bond of a
series of seven wondrous tales, all of which, as they were dug out of
seven sepulchres, were characterized by a sevenfold sepulchral gloom;
such as Miriam's imagination, shadowed by her own misfortunes, was wont
to fling over its most sportive flights.

And now, happy as Hilda was, the bracelet brought the tears into her
eyes, as being, in its entire circle, the symbol of as sad a mystery
as any that Miriam had attached to the separate gems. For, what was
Miriam's life to be? And where was Donatello? But Hilda had a hopeful
soul, and saw sunlight on the mountain-tops.





CONCLUSION

There comes to the author, from many readers of the foregoing pages, a
demand for further elucidations respecting the mysteries of the story.

He reluctantly avails himself of the opportunity afforded by a new
edition, to explain such incidents and passages as may have been left
too much in the dark; reluctantly, he repeats, because the necessity
makes him sensible that he can have succeeded but imperfectly, at best,
in throwing about this Romance the kind of atmosphere essential to the
effect at which he aimed.

He designed the story and the characters to bear, of course, a certain
relation to human nature and human life, but still to be so artfully and
airily removed from our mundane sphere, that some laws and proprieties
of their own should be implicitly and insensibly acknowledged.

The idea of the modern Faun, for example, loses all the poetry and
beauty which the Author fancied in it, and becomes nothing better than a
grotesque absurdity, if we bring it into the actual light of day. He
had hoped to mystify this anomalous creature between the Real and
the Fantastic, in such a manner that the reader's sympathies might be
excited to a certain pleasurable degree, without impelling him to ask
how Cuvier would have classified poor Donatello, or to insist upon being
told, in so many words, whether he had furry ears or no. As respects all
who ask such questions, the book is, to that extent, a failure.

Nevertheless, the Author fortunately has it in his power to throw light
upon several matters in which some of his readers appear to feel an
interest. To confess the truth, he was himself troubled with a curiosity
similar to that which he has just deprecated on the part of his readers,
and once took occasion to cross-examine his friends, Hilda and the
sculptor, and to pry into several dark recesses of the story, with which
they had heretofore imperfectly acquainted him.

We three had climbed to the top of St. Peter's, and were looking down
upon the Rome we were soon to leave, but which (having already sinned
sufficiently in that way) it is not my purpose further to describe. It
occurred to me, that, being so remote in the upper air, my friends might
safely utter here the secrets which it would be perilous even to whisper
on lower earth.

"Hilda," I began, "can you tell me the contents of that mysterious
packet which Miriam entrusted to your charge, and which was addressed to
Signore Luca Barboni, at the Palazzo Cenci?"

"I never had any further knowledge of it," replied Hilda, "nor felt it
right to let myself be curious upon the subject."

"As to its precise contents," interposed Kenyon, "it is impossible to
speak. But Miriam, isolated as she seemed, had family connections in
Rome, one of whom, there is reason to believe, occupied a position in
the papal government.

"This Signore Luca Barboni was either the assumed name of the personage
in question, or the medium of communication between that individual and
Miriam. Now, under such a government as that of Rome, it is obvious that
Miriam's privacy and isolated life could only be maintained through the
connivance and support of some influential person connected with the
administration of affairs. Free and self-controlled as she appeared, her
every movement was watched and investigated far more thoroughly by the
priestly rulers than by her dearest friends.

"Miriam, if I mistake not, had a purpose to withdraw herself from this
irksome scrutiny, and to seek real obscurity in another land; and the
packet, to be delivered long after her departure, contained a reference
to this design, besides certain family documents, which were to be
imparted to her relative as from one dead and gone."

"Yes, it is clear as a London fog," I remarked. "On this head no further
elucidation can be desired. But when Hilda went quietly to deliver the
packet, why did she so mysteriously vanish?"

"You must recollect," replied Kenyon, with a glance of friendly
commiseration at my obtuseness, "that Miriam had utterly disappeared,
leaving no trace by which her whereabouts could be known. In the
meantime, the municipal authorities had become aware of the murder
of the Capuchin; and from many preceding circumstances, such as his
persecution of Miriam, they must have seen an obvious connection between
herself and that tragical event. Furthermore, there is reason to believe
that Miriam was suspected of connection with some plot, or political
intrigue, of which there may have been tokens in the packet. And when
Hilda appeared as the bearer of this missive, it was really quite
a matter of course, under a despotic government, that she should be
detained."

"Ah, quite a matter of course, as you say," answered I. "How excessively
stupid in me not to have seen it sooner! But there are other riddles.
On the night of the extinction of the lamp, you met Donatello, in a
penitent's garb, and afterwards saw and spoke to Miriam, in a coach,
with a gem glowing on her bosom. What was the business of these two
guilty ones in Rome, and who was Miriam's companion?"

"Who!" repeated Kenyon, "why, her official relative, to be sure; and
as to their business, Donatello's still gnawing remorse had brought him
hitherward, in spite of Miriam's entreaties, and kept him lingering
in the neighborhood of Rome, with the ultimate purpose of delivering
himself up to justice. Hilda's disappearance, which took place the day
before, was known to them through a secret channel, and had brought them
into the city, where Miriam, as I surmise, began to make arrangements,
even then, for that sad frolic of the Carnival."

"And where was Hilda all that dreary time between?" inquired I.

"Where were you, Hilda?" asked Kenyon, smiling.

Hilda threw her eyes on all sides, and seeing that there was not even a
bird of the air to fly away with the secret, nor any human being nearer
than the loiterers by the obelisk in the piazza below, she told us about
her mysterious abode.

"I was a prisoner in the Convent of the Sacre Coeur, in the Trinita
de Monte," said she, "but in such kindly custody of pious maidens, and
watched over by such a dear old priest, that--had it not been for one
or two disturbing recollections, and also because I am a daughter of the
Puritans I could willingly have dwelt there forever.

"My entanglement with Miriam's misfortunes, and the good abbate's
mistaken hope of a proselyte, seem to me a sufficient clew to the whole
mystery."

"The atmosphere is getting delightfully lucid," observed I, "but there
are one or two things that still puzzle me. Could you tell me--and it
shall be kept a profound secret, I assure you what were Miriam's real
name and rank, and precisely the nature of the troubles that led to all
those direful consequences?"

"Is it possible that you need an answer to those questions?" exclaimed
Kenyon, with an aspect of vast surprise. "Have you not even surmised
Miriam's name? Think awhile, and you will assuredly remember it. If not,
I congratulate you most sincerely; for it indicates that your feelings
have never been harrowed by one of the most dreadful and mysterious
events that have occurred within the present century!"

"Well," resumed I, after an interval of deep consideration, "I have but
few things more to ask. Where, at this moment, is Donatello?"

"The Castle of Saint Angelo," said Kenyon sadly, turning his face
towards that sepulchral fortress, "is no longer a prison; but there are
others which have dungeons as deep, and in one of them, I fear, lies our
poor Faun."

"And why, then, is Miriam at large?" I asked.

"Call it cruelty if you like, not mercy," answered Kenyon. "But, after
all, her crime lay merely in a glance. She did no murder!"

"Only one question more," said I, with intense earnestness. "Did
Donatello's ears resemble those of the Faun of Praxiteles?"

"I know, but may not tell," replied Kenyon, smiling mysteriously. "On
that point, at all events, there shall be not one word of explanation."
It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk
overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my
personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my
life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.  The
first time was three or four years since, when I favoured the
reader--inexcusably, and for no earthly reason that either the
indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine--with a
description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old
Manse.  And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough
to find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seize
the public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience
in a Custom-House.  The example of the famous "P. P., Clerk of
this Parish," was never more faithfully followed.  The truth
seems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth upon
the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling
aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will
understand him better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates.
Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge
themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could
fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and
mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at
large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided
segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of
existence by bringing him into communion with it.  It is scarcely
decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak
impersonally.  But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance
benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with
his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a
kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is
listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed
by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances
that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the
inmost Me behind its veil.  To this extent, and within these
limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without
violating either the reader's rights or his own.

It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a
certain propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as
explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into
my possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a
narrative therein contained.  This, in fact--a desire to put
myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of
the most prolix among the tales that make up my volume--this,
and no other, is my true reason for assuming a personal relation
with the public.  In accomplishing the main purpose, it has
appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint
representation of a mode of life not heretofore described,
together with some of the characters that move in it, among whom
the author happened to make one.

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century
ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf--but
which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and
exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps,
a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging
hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out
her cargo of firewood--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated
wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the
base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many
languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass--here, with
a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening
prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious
edifice of brick.  From the loftiest point of its roof, during
precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or
droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with
the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally,
and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military, post of
Uncle Sam's government is here established.  Its front is
ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden pillars,
supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite
steps descends towards the street.  Over the entrance hovers an
enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a
shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of
intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw.  With
the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this
unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye,
and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief
to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all
citizens careful of their safety against intruding on the
premises which she overshadows with her wings.  Nevertheless,
vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this very
moment to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal
eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness
and snugness of an eiderdown pillow.  But she has no great
tenderness even in her best of moods, and, sooner or
later--oftener soon than late--is apt to fling off her nestlings
with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling
wound from her barbed arrows.

The pavement round about the above-described edifice--which we
may as well name at once as the Custom-House of the port--has
grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of
late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business.  In
some months of the year, however, there often chances a forenoon
when affairs move onward with a livelier tread.  Such occasions
might remind the elderly citizen of that period, before the last
war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned,
as she is now, by her own merchants and ship-owners, who permit
her wharves to crumble to ruin while their ventures go to swell,
needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at
New York or Boston.  On some such morning, when three or four
vessels happen to have arrived at once usually from Africa or
South America--or to be on the verge of their departure
thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet passing briskly
up and down the granite steps.  Here, before his own wife has
greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship-master, just in
port, with his vessel's papers under his arm in a tarnished tin
box.  Here, too, comes his owner, cheerful, sombre, gracious or
in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme of the now accomplished
voyage has been realized in merchandise that will readily be
turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of incommodities
such as nobody will care to rid him of.  Here, likewise--the germ
of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn merchant--we
have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a
wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his
master's ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a
mill-pond.  Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound
sailor, in quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one,
pale and feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital.  Nor must we
forget the captains of the rusty little schooners that bring
firewood from the British provinces; a rough-looking set of
tarpaulins, without the alertness of the Yankee aspect, but
contributing an item of no slight importance to our decaying
trade.

Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were,
with other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for
the time being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene.  More
frequently, however, on ascending the steps, you would discern--
in the entry if it were summer time, or in their appropriate
rooms if wintry or inclement weathers--a row of venerable
figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on
their hind legs back against the wall.  Oftentimes they were
asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in
voices between a speech and a snore, and with that lack of
energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all
other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on
monopolized labour, or anything else but their own independent
exertions.  These old gentlemen--seated, like Matthew at the
receipt of custom, but not very liable to be summoned thence,
like him, for apostolic errands--were Custom-House officers.

Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a
certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a
lofty height, with two of its arched windows commanding a view
of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across
a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street.  All three
give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers,
slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers, around the doors of which are
generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old
salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a
seaport.  The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint;
its floor is strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has
elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude,
from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a
sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the
broom and mop, has very infrequent access.  In the way of
furniture, there is a stove with a voluminous funnel; an old
pine desk with a three-legged stool beside it; two or three
wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm; and--not
to forget the library--on some shelves, a score or two of
volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the
Revenue laws.  A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms
a medium of vocal communication with other parts of the edifice.
And here, some six months ago--pacing from corner to corner, or
lounging on the long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk,
and his eyes wandering up and down the columns of the morning
newspaper--you might have recognised, honoured reader, the same
individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study, where
the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches
on the western side of the Old Manse.  But now, should you go
thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco
Surveyor.  The besom of reform hath swept him out of office, and
a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his
emoluments.

This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt
much away from it both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses,
or did possess, a hold on my affection, the force of which I
have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here.
Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its
flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few
or none of which pretend to architectural beauty--its
irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only
tame--its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the
whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea
at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other--such
being the features of my native town, it would be quite as
reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged
checker-board.  And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere,
there is within me a feeling for Old Salem, which, in lack of a
better phrase, I must be content to call affection.  The
sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots
which my family has stuck into the soil.  It is now nearly two
centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest
emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and
forest-bordered settlement which has since become a city.  And
here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled
their earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of
it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a
little while, I walk the streets.  In part, therefore, the
attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of
dust for dust.  Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as
frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need
they consider it desirable to know.

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality.  The figure of
that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and
dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back
as I can remember.  It still haunts me, and induces a sort of
home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference
to the present phase of the town.  I seem to have a stronger
claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded,
sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor--who came so
early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street
with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man
of war and peace--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name
is seldom heard and my face hardly known.  He was a soldier,
legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the
Puritanic traits, both good and evil.  He was likewise a bitter
persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in
their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity
towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to
be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these
were many.  His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and
made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches,
that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon
him.  So deep a stain, indeed, that his dry old bones, in the
Charter-street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have
not crumbled utterly to dust!  I know not whether these ancestors
of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven
for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the
heavy consequences of them in another state of being.  At all
events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby
take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse
incurred by them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and
unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back,
would argue to exist--may be now and henceforth removed.

Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed
Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution
for his sins that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk
of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should
have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself.  No aim
that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no
success of mine--if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever
been brightened by success--would they deem otherwise than
worthless, if not positively disgraceful.  "What is he?" murmurs
one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other.  "A writer of
story books!  What kind of business in life--what mode of
glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and
generation--may that be?  Why, the degenerate fellow might as
well have been a fiddler!"  Such are the compliments bandied
between my great grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time!
And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their
nature have intertwined themselves with mine.

Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by
these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since
subsisted here; always, too, in respectability; never, so far as
I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom
or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations,
performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a
claim to public notice.  Gradually, they have sunk almost out of
sight; as old houses, here and there about the streets, get
covered half-way to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil.
From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the
sea; a grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from
the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took
the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray
and the gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire.
The boy, also in due time, passed from the forecastle to the
cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his
world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with
the natal earth.  This long connexion of a family with one spot,
as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the
human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in
the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him.  It is not
love but instinct.  The new inhabitant--who came himself from a
foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has little
claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the
oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his
third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his
successive generations have been embedded.  It is no matter that
the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden
houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment,
the chill east wind, and the chillest of social
atmospheres;--all these, and whatever faults besides he may see
or imagine, are nothing to the purpose.  The spell survives, and
just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly
paradise.  So has it been in my case.  I felt it almost as a
destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and
cast of character which had all along been familiar here--ever,
as one representative of the race lay down in the grave, another
assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main
street--might still in my little day be seen and recognised in
the old town.  Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence
that the connexion, which has become an unhealthy one, should at
last be severed.  Human nature will not flourish, any more than
a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for too long a series
of generations, in the same worn-out soil.  My children have had
other birth-places, and, so far as their fortunes may be within
my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange,
indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me
to fill a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as
well, or better, have gone somewhere else.  My doom was on me.  It
was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone away--as
it seemed, permanently--but yet returned, like the bad
halfpenny, or as if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of
the universe.  So, one fine morning I ascended the flight of
granite steps, with the President's commission in my pocket, and
was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in
my weighty responsibility as chief executive officer of the
Custom-House.

I doubt greatly--or, rather, I do not doubt at all--whether any
public functionary of the United States, either in the civil or
military line, has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans
under his orders as myself.  The whereabouts of the Oldest
Inhabitant was at once settled when I looked at them.  For
upwards of twenty years before this epoch, the independent
position of the Collector had kept the Salem Custom-House out of
the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes the tenure
of office generally so fragile.  A soldier--New England's most
distinguished soldier--he stood firmly on the pedestal of his
gallant services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of
the successive administrations through which he had held office,
he had been the safety of his subordinates in many an hour of
danger and heart-quake.  General Miller was radically
conservative; a man over whose kindly nature habit had no slight
influence; attaching himself strongly to familiar faces, and
with difficulty moved to change, even when change might have
brought unquestionable improvement.  Thus, on taking charge of my
department, I found few but aged men.  They were ancient
sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tossed on
every sea, and standing up sturdily against life's tempestuous
blast, had finally drifted into this quiet nook, where, with
little to disturb them, except the periodical terrors of a
Presidential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of
existence.  Though by no means less liable than their fellow-men
to age and infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other
that kept death at bay.  Two or three of their number, as I was
assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden, never
dreamed of making their appearance at the Custom-House during a
large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would creep
out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what
they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience,
betake themselves to bed again.  I must plead guilty to the
charge of abbreviating the official breath of more than one of
these venerable servants of the republic.  They were allowed, on
my representation, to rest from their arduous labours, and soon
afterwards--as if their sole principle of life had been zeal for
their country's service--as I verily believe it was--withdrew to
a better world.  It is a pious consolation to me that, through my
interference, a sufficient space was allowed them for repentance
of the evil and corrupt practices into which, as a matter of
course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall.
Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House
opens on the road to Paradise.

The greater part of my officers were Whigs.  It was well for
their venerable brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a
politician, and though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither
received nor held his office with any reference to political
services.  Had it been otherwise--had an active politician been
put into this influential post, to assume the easy task of
making head against a Whig Collector, whose infirmities withheld
him from the personal administration of his office--hardly a man
of the old corps would have drawn the breath of official life
within a month after the exterminating angel had come up the
Custom-House steps.  According to the received code in such
matters, it would have been nothing short of duty, in a
politician, to bring every one of those white heads under the
axe of the guillotine.  It was plain enough to discern that the
old fellows dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands.  It
pained, and at the same time amused me, to behold the terrors
that attended my advent, to see a furrowed cheek, weather-beaten
by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the glance of so
harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or another
addressed me, the tremor of a voice which, in long-past days,
had been wont to bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely
enough to frighten Boreas himself to silence.  They knew, these
excellent old persons, that, by all established rule--and, as
regarded some of them, weighed by their own lack of efficiency
for business--they ought to have given place to younger men,
more orthodox in politics, and altogether fitter than themselves
to serve our common Uncle.  I knew it, too, but could never quite
find in my heart to act upon the knowledge.  Much and deservedly
to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably to the
detriment of my official conscience, they continued, during my
incumbency, to creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down
the Custom-House steps.  They spent a good deal of time, also,
asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted
back against the walls; awaking, however, once or twice in the
forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth
repetition of old sea-stories and mouldy jokes, that had grown
to be passwords and countersigns among them.

The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor
had no great harm in him.  So, with lightsome hearts and the
happy consciousness of being usefully employed--in their own
behalf at least, if not for our beloved country--these good old
gentlemen went through the various formalities of office.
Sagaciously under their spectacles, did they peep into the holds
of vessels.  Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and
marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed greater ones
to slip between their fingers Whenever such a mischance
occurred--when a waggon-load of valuable merchandise had been
smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their
unsuspicious noses--nothing could exceed the vigilance and
alacrity with which they proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and
secure with tape and sealing-wax, all the avenues of the
delinquent vessel.  Instead of a reprimand for their previous
negligence, the case seemed rather to require an eulogium on
their praiseworthy caution after the mischief had happened; a
grateful recognition of the promptitude of their zeal the moment
that there was no longer any remedy.

Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my
foolish habit to contract a kindness for them.  The better part
of my companion's character, if it have a better part, is that
which usually comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type
whereby I recognise the man.  As most of these old Custom-House
officers had good traits, and as my position in reference to
them, being paternal and protective, was favourable to the
growth of friendly sentiments, I soon grew to like them all.  It
was pleasant in the summer forenoons--when the fervent heat,
that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely
communicated a genial warmth to their half torpid systems--it
was pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of
them all tipped against the wall, as usual; while the frozen
witticisms of past generations were thawed out, and came
bubbling with laughter from their lips.  Externally, the jollity
of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the
intellect, any more than a deep sense of humour, has little to
do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon
the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the
green branch and grey, mouldering trunk.  In one case, however,
it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the
phosphorescent glow of decaying wood.

It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to
represent all my excellent old friends as in their dotage.  In
the first place, my coadjutors were not invariably old; there
were men among them in their strength and prime, of marked
ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and
dependent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them.
Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to
be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair.  But,
as respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there will be
no wrong done if I characterize them generally as a set of
wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation
from their varied experience of life.  They seemed to have flung
away all the golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had
enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully
to have stored their memory with the husks.  They spoke with far
more interest and unction of their morning's breakfast, or
yesterday's, to-day's, or tomorrow's dinner, than of the
shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the world's
wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.

The father of the Custom-House--the patriarch, not only of this
little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the
respectable body of tide-waiters all over the United States--was
a certain permanent Inspector.  He might truly be termed a
legitimate son of the revenue system, dyed in the wool, or
rather born in the purple; since his sire, a Revolutionary
colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had created an
office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of the
early ages which few living men can now remember.  This
Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years,
or thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful
specimens of winter-green that you would be likely to discover
in a lifetime's search.  With his florid cheek, his compact
figure smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk
and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether he
seemed--not young, indeed--but a kind of new contrivance of
Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no
business to touch.  His voice and laugh, which perpetually
re-echoed through the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous
quaver and cackle of an old man's utterance; they came strutting
out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a
clarion.  Looking at him merely as an animal--and there was very
little else to look at--he was a most satisfactory object, from
the thorough healthfulness and wholesomeness of his system, and
his capacity, at that extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all,
the delights which he had ever aimed at or conceived of.  The
careless security of his life in the Custom-House, on a regular
income, and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of
removal, had no doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over
him.  The original and more potent causes, however, lay in the
rare perfection of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of
intellect, and the very trifling admixture of moral and
spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in
barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on
all-fours.  He possessed no power of thought, no depth of
feeling, no troublesome sensibilities: nothing, in short, but a
few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper
which grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty
very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart.
He had been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the
father of twenty children, most of whom, at every age of
childhood or maturity, had likewise returned to dust.  Here, one
would suppose, might have been sorrow enough to imbue the
sunniest disposition through and through with a sable tinge.  Not
so with our old Inspector.  One brief sigh sufficed to carry off
the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences.  The next moment
he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant: far readier
than the Collector's junior clerk, who at nineteen years was
much the elder and graver man of the two.

I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I
think, livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there
presented to my notice.  He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so
perfect, in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so
impalpable such an absolute nonentity, in every other.  My
conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing,
as I have already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so
cunningly had the few materials of his character been put
together that there was no painful perception of deficiency,
but, on my part, an entire contentment with what I found in him.
It might be difficult--and it was so--to conceive how he should
exist hereafter, so earthly and sensuous did he seem; but surely
his existence here, admitting that it was to terminate with his
last breath, had been not unkindly given; with no higher moral
responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a larger
scope of enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed
immunity from the dreariness and duskiness of age.

One point in which he had vastly the advantage over his
four-footed brethren was his ability to recollect the good
dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of
his life to eat.  His gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait;
and to hear him talk of roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle
or an oyster.  As he possessed no higher attribute, and neither
sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual endowment by devoting all
his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight and profit
of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him
expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most
eligible methods of preparing them for the table.  His
reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the
actual banquet, seemed to bring the savour of pig or turkey
under one's very nostrils.  There were flavours on his palate
that had lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years,
and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton chop
which he had just devoured for his breakfast.  I have heard him
smack his lips over dinners, every guest at which, except
himself, had long been food for worms.  It was marvellous to
observe how the ghosts of bygone meals were continually rising
up before him--not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful
for his former appreciation, and seeking to reduplicate an
endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual: a
tenderloin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib of
pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey,
which had perhaps adorned his board in the days of the elder
Adams, would be remembered; while all the subsequent experience
of our race, and all the events that brightened or darkened his
individual career, had gone over him with as little permanent
effect as the passing breeze.  The chief tragic event of the old
man's life, so far as I could judge, was his mishap with a
certain goose, which lived and died some twenty or forty years
ago: a goose of most promising figure, but which, at table,
proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife would make
no impression on its carcase, and it could only be divided with
an axe and handsaw.

But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should
be glad to dwell at considerably more length, because of all men
whom I have ever known, this individual was fittest to be a
Custom-House officer.  Most persons, owing to causes which I may
not have space to hint at, suffer moral detriment from this
peculiar mode of life.  The old Inspector was incapable of it;
and, were he to continue in office to the end of time, would be
just as good as he was then, and sit down to dinner with just as
good an appetite.

There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House
portraits would be strangely incomplete, but which my
comparatively few opportunities for observation enable me to
sketch only in the merest outline.  It is that of the Collector,
our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant military
service, subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western
territory, had come hither, twenty years before, to spend the
decline of his varied and honourable life.

The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his
three-score years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his
earthly march, burdened with infirmities which even the martial
music of his own spirit-stirring recollections could do little
towards lightening.  The step was palsied now, that had been
foremost in the charge.  It was only with the assistance of a
servant, and by leaning his hand heavily on the iron balustrade,
that he could slowly and painfully ascend the Custom-House
steps, and, with a toilsome progress across the floor, attain
his customary chair beside the fireplace.  There he used to sit,
gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at the figures
that came and went, amid the rustle of papers, the administering
of oaths, the discussion of business, and the casual talk of the
office; all which sounds and circumstances seemed but
indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to make their way
into his inner sphere of contemplation.  His countenance, in this
repose, was mild and kindly.  If his notice was sought, an
expression of courtesy and interest gleamed out upon his
features, proving that there was light within him, and that it
was only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp that
obstructed the rays in their passage.  The closer you penetrated
to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared.  When no
longer called upon to speak or listen--either of which
operations cost him an evident effort--his face would briefly
subside into its former not uncheerful quietude.  It was not
painful to behold this look; for, though dim, it had not the
imbecility of decaying age.  The framework of his nature,
originally strong and massive, was not yet crumpled into ruin.

To observe and define his character, however, under such
disadvantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build
up anew, in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from
a view of its grey and broken ruins.  Here and there, perchance,
the walls may remain almost complete; but elsewhere may be only
a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and
overgrown, through long years of peace and neglect, with grass
and alien weeds.

Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection--for,
slight as was the communication between us, my feeling towards
him, like that of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might
not improperly be termed so,--I could discern the main points of
his portrait.  It was marked with the noble and heroic qualities
which showed it to be not a mere accident, but of good right,
that he had won a distinguished name.  His spirit could never, I
conceive, have been characterized by an uneasy activity; it
must, at any period of his life, have required an impulse to set
him in motion; but once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome,
and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to
give out or fail.  The heat that had formerly pervaded his
nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never of the kind
that flashes and flickers in a blaze; but rather a deep red
glow, as of iron in a furnace.  Weight, solidity, firmness--this
was the expression of his repose, even in such decay as had
crept untimely over him at the period of which I speak.  But I
could imagine, even then, that, under some excitement which
should go deeply into his consciousness--roused by a trumpet's
peal, loud enough to awaken all of his energies that were not
dead, but only slumbering--he was yet capable of flinging off
his infirmities like a sick man's gown, dropping the staff of
age to seize a battle-sword, and starting up once more a
warrior.  And, in so intense a moment his demeanour would have
still been calm.  Such an exhibition, however, was but to be
pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor desired.  What I
saw in him--as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old
Ticonderoga, already cited as the most appropriate simile--was
the features of stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might
well have amounted to obstinacy in his earlier days; of
integrity, that, like most of his other endowments, lay in a
somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable or unmanageable
as a ton of iron ore; and of benevolence which, fiercely as he
led the bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of
quite as genuine a stamp as what actuates any or all the
polemical philanthropists of the age.  He had slain men with his
own hand, for aught I know--certainly, they had fallen like
blades of grass at the sweep of the scythe before the charge to
which his spirit imparted its triumphant energy--but, be that as
it might, there was never in his heart so much cruelty as would
have brushed the down off a butterfly's wing.  I have not known
the man to whose innate kindliness I would more confidently make
an appeal.

Many characteristics--and those, too, which contribute not the
least forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch--must have
vanished, or been obscured, before I met the General.  All merely
graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent; nor does
nature adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new beauty, that
have their roots and proper nutriment only in the chinks and
crevices of decay, as she sows wall-flowers over the ruined
fortress of Ticonderoga.  Still, even in respect of grace and
beauty, there were points well worth noting.  A ray of humour,
now and then, would make its way through the veil of dim
obstruction, and glimmer pleasantly upon our faces.  A trait of
native elegance, seldom seen in the masculine character after
childhood or early youth, was shown in the General's fondness
for the sight and fragrance of flowers.  An old soldier might be
supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his brow; but here
was one who seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the
floral tribe.

There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit;
while the Surveyor--though seldom, when it could be avoided,
taking upon himself the difficult task of engaging him in
conversation--was fond of standing at a distance, and watching
his quiet and almost slumberous countenance.  He seemed away from
us, although we saw him but a few yards off; remote, though we
passed close beside his chair; unattainable, though we might
have stretched forth our hands and touched his own.  It might be
that he lived a more real life within his thoughts than amid the
unappropriate environment of the Collector's office.  The
evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish
of old heroic music, heard thirty years before--such scenes and
sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his intellectual sense.
Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-masters, the spruce clerks and
uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of his
commercial and Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round
about him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the
General appear to sustain the most distant relation.  He was as
much out of place as an old sword--now rusty, but which had
flashed once in the battle's front, and showed still a bright
gleam along its blade--would have been among the inkstands,
paper-folders, and mahogany rulers on the Deputy Collector's
desk.

There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and
re-creating the stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier--the
man of true and simple energy.  It was the recollection of those
memorable words of his--"I'll try, Sir"--spoken on the very
verge of a desperate and heroic enterprise, and breathing the
soul and spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending all
perils, and encountering all.  If, in our country, valour were
rewarded by heraldic honour, this phrase--which it seems so easy
to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger and
glory before him, has ever spoken--would be the best and fittest
of all mottoes for the General's shield of arms.

It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual
health to be brought into habits of companionship with
individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits,
and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to
appreciate.  The accidents of my life have often afforded me this
advantage, but never with more fulness and variety than during
my continuance in office.  There was one man, especially, the
observation of whose character gave me a new idea of talent.  His
gifts were emphatically those of a man of business; prompt,
acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through all
perplexities, and a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish
as by the waving of an enchanter's wand.  Bred up from boyhood in
the Custom-House, it was his proper field of activity; and the
many intricacies of business, so harassing to the interloper,
presented themselves before him with the regularity of a
perfectly comprehended system.  In my contemplation, he stood as
the ideal of his class.  He was, indeed, the Custom-House in
himself; or, at all events, the mainspring that kept its
variously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution
like this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their
own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading reference
to their fitness for the duty to be performed, they must
perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them.
Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts
steel-filings, so did our man of business draw to himself the
difficulties which everybody met with.  With an easy
condescension, and kind forbearance towards our
stupidity--which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little
short of crime--would he forth-with, by the merest touch of his
finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as daylight.  The
merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric friends.  His
integrity was perfect; it was a law of nature with him, rather
than a choice or a principle; nor can it be otherwise than the
main condition of an intellect so remarkably clear and accurate
as his to be honest and regular in the administration of
affairs.  A stain on his conscience, as to anything that came
within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man very
much in the same way, though to a far greater degree, than an
error in the balance of an account, or an ink-blot on the fair
page of a book of record.  Here, in a word--and it is a rare
instance in my life--I had met with a person thoroughly adapted
to the situation which he held.

Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself
connected.  I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence,
that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past
habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever
profit was to be had.  After my fellowship of toil and
impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm;
after living for three years within the subtle influence of an
intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days on the
Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of
fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau
about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden;
after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement
of Hillard's culture; after becoming imbued with poetic
sentiment at Longfellow's hearthstone--it was time, at length,
that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish
myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite.
Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a
man who had known Alcott.  I looked upon it as an evidence, in
some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking
no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such
associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of
altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change.

Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment
in my regard.  I cared not at this period for books; they were
apart from me.  Nature--except it were human nature--the nature
that is developed in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden
from me; and all the imaginative delight wherewith it had been
spiritualized passed away out of my mind.  A gift, a faculty, if
it had not been departed, was suspended and inanimate within me.
There would have been something sad, unutterably dreary, in all
this, had I not been conscious that it lay at my own option to
recall whatever was valuable in the past.  It might be true,
indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity, be
lived too long; else, it might make me permanently other than I
had been, without transforming me into any shape which it would
be worth my while to take.  But I never considered it as other
than a transitory life.  There was always a prophetic instinct, a
low whisper in my ear, that within no long period, and whenever
a new change of custom should be essential to my good, change
would come.

Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue and, so far as
I have been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be.  A
man of thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the
Surveyor's proportion of those qualities), may, at any time, be
a man of affairs, if he will only choose to give himself the
trouble.  My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains
with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of
connection, viewed me in no other light, and probably knew me in
no other character.  None of them, I presume, had ever read a
page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me
if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter,
in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written
with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a
Custom-House officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good
lesson--though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has
dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among
the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the
narrow circle in which his claims are recognized and to find how
utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that
he achieves, and all he aims at.  I know not that I especially
needed the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke; but
at any rate, I learned it thoroughly: nor, it gives me pleasure
to reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception,
ever cost me a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh.  In
the way of literary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer--an
excellent fellow, who came into the office with me, and went out
only a little later--would often engage me in a discussion about
one or the other of his favourite topics, Napoleon or
Shakespeare.  The Collector's junior clerk, too a young gentleman
who, it was whispered occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle
Sam's letter paper with what (at the distance of a few yards)
looked very much like poetry--used now and then to speak to me
of books, as matters with which I might possibly be conversant.
This was my all of lettered intercourse; and it was quite
sufficient for my necessities.

No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blasoned
abroad on title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another
kind of vogue.  The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a
stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto,
and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise,
in testimony that these commodities had paid the impost, and
gone regularly through the office.  Borne on such queer vehicle
of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a name conveys
it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I hope,
will never go again.

But the past was not dead.  Once in a great while, the thoughts
that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest
so quietly, revived again.  One of the most remarkable occasions,
when the habit of bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings
it within the law of literary propriety to offer the public the
sketch which I am now writing.

In the second storey of the Custom-House there is a large room,
in which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been
covered with panelling and plaster.  The edifice--originally
projected on a scale adapted to the old commercial enterprise of
the port, and with an idea of subsequent prosperity destined
never to be realized--contains far more space than its occupants
know what to do with.  This airy hall, therefore, over the
Collector's apartments, remains unfinished to this day, and, in
spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams, appears
still to await the labour of the carpenter and mason.  At one end
of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels piled one
upon another, containing bundles of official documents.  Large
quantities of similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor.  It was
sorrowful to think how many days, and weeks, and months, and
years of toil had been wasted on these musty papers, which were
now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this
forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at by human eyes.  But
then, what reams of other manuscripts--filled, not with the
dulness of official formalities, but with the thought of
inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts--had gone
equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a
purpose in their day, as these heaped-up papers had,
and--saddest of all--without purchasing for their writers the
comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the Custom-House had
gained by these worthless scratchings of the pen.  Yet not
altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of local history.
Here, no doubt, statistics of the former commerce of Salem might
be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants--old King
Derby--old Billy Gray--old Simon Forrester--and many another
magnate in his day, whose powdered head, however, was scarcely
in the tomb before his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle.
The founders of the greater part of the families which now
compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the
petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods
generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their
children look upon as long-established rank.

Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the
earlier documents and archives of the Custom-House having,
probably, been carried off to Halifax, when all the king's
officials accompanied the British army in its flight from
Boston.  It has often been a matter of regret with me; for, going
back, perhaps, to the days of the Protectorate, those papers
must have contained many references to forgotten or remembered
men, and to antique customs, which would have affected me with
the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian arrow-heads
in the field near the Old Manse.

But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a
discovery of some little interest.  Poking and burrowing into the
heaped-up rubbish in the corner, unfolding one and another
document, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago
foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of
merchants never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily
decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such matters
with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we
bestow on the corpse of dead activity--and exerting my fancy,
sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an
image of the old town's brighter aspect, when India was a new
region, and only Salem knew the way thither--I chanced to lay my
hand on a small package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient
yellow parchment.  This envelope had the air of an official
record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their
stiff and formal chirography on more substantial materials than
at present.  There was something about it that quickened an
instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red tape that
tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure would here
be brought to light.  Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment
cover, I found it to be a commission, under the hand and seal of
Governor Shirley, in favour of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of
His Majesty's Customs for the Port of Salem, in the Province of
Massachusetts Bay.  I remembered to have read (probably in Felt's
"Annals") a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about
fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent
times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the little
graveyard of St. Peter's Church, during the renewal of that
edifice.  Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my
respected predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some
fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle, which,
unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very satisfactory
preservation.  But, on examining the papers which the parchment
commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr. Pue's
mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the
frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull itself.

They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private
nature, or, at least, written in his private capacity, and
apparently with his own hand.  I could account for their being
included in the heap of Custom-House lumber only by the fact
that Mr. Pue's death had happened suddenly, and that these
papers, which he probably kept in his official desk, had never
come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were supposed to relate
to the business of the revenue.  On the transfer of the archives
to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public concern,
was left behind, and had remained ever since unopened.

The ancient Surveyor--being little molested, I suppose, at that
early day with business pertaining to his office--seems to have
devoted some of his many leisure hours to researches as a local
antiquarian, and other inquisitions of a similar nature.  These
supplied material for petty activity to a mind that would
otherwise have been eaten up with rust.

A portion of his facts, by-the-by, did me good service in the
preparation of the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in
the present volume.  The remainder may perhaps be applied to
purposes equally valuable hereafter, or not impossibly may be
worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem,
should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so
pious a task.  Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any
gentleman, inclined and competent, to take the unprofitable
labour off my hands.  As a final disposition I contemplate
depositing them with the Essex Historical Society.  But the
object that most drew my attention to the mysterious package was
a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded, There
were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however, was
greatly frayed and defaced, so that none, or very little, of the
glitter was left.  It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive,
with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am
assured by ladies conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence
of a now forgotten art, not to be discovered even by the process
of picking out the threads.  This rag of scarlet cloth--for time,
and wear, and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little other
than a rag--on careful examination, assumed the shape of a
letter.

It was the capital letter A.  By an accurate measurement, each
limb proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in
length.  It had been intended, there could be no doubt, as an
ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn, or what
rank, honour, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by
it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the
world in these particulars) I saw little hope of solving.  And
yet it strangely interested me.  My eyes fastened themselves upon
the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside.  Certainly
there was some deep meaning in it most worthy of interpretation,
and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol,
subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the
analysis of my mind.

When thus perplexed--and cogitating, among other hypotheses,
whether the letter might not have been one of those decorations
which the white men used to contrive in order to take the eyes
of Indians--I happened to place it on my breast.  It seemed to
me--the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word--it seemed
to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether
physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if the
letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron.  I shuddered,
and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.

In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had
hitherto neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper,
around which it had been twisted.  This I now opened, and had the
satisfaction to find recorded by the old Surveyor's pen, a
reasonably complete explanation of the whole affair.  There were
several foolscap sheets, containing many particulars respecting
the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to
have been rather a noteworthy personage in the view of our
ancestors.  She had flourished during the period between the
early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth
century.  Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue,
and from whose oral testimony he had made up his narrative,
remembered her, in their youth, as a very old, but not decrepit
woman, of a stately and solemn aspect.  It had been her habit,
from an almost immemorial date, to go about the country as a
kind of voluntary nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous good
she might; taking upon herself, likewise, to give advice in all
matters, especially those of the heart, by which means--as a
person of such propensities inevitably must--she gained from
many people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should
imagine, was looked upon by others as an intruder and a
nuisance.  Prying further into the manuscript, I found the record
of other doings and sufferings of this singular woman, for most
of which the reader is referred to the story entitled "THE
SCARLET LETTER"; and it should be borne carefully in mind that
the main facts of that story are authorized and authenticated by
the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue.  The original papers, together
with the scarlet letter itself--a most curious relic--are still
in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever,
induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire a
sight of them.  I must not be understood affirming that, in the
dressing up of the tale, and imagining the motives and modes of
passion that influenced the characters who figure in it, I have
invariably confined myself within the limits of the old
Surveyor's half-a-dozen sheets of foolscap.  On the contrary, I
have allowed myself, as to such points, nearly, or altogether,
as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own
invention.  What I contend for is the authenticity of the
outline.

This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old
track.  There seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale.  It
impressed me as if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a
hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig--which was
buried with him, but did not perish in the grave--had met me in
the deserted chamber of the Custom-House.  In his port was the
dignity of one who had borne His Majesty's commission, and who
was therefore illuminated by a ray of the splendour that shone
so dazzlingly about the throne.  How unlike alas the hangdog look
of a republican official, who, as the servant of the people,
feels himself less than the least, and below the lowest of his
masters.  With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but
majestic, figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol and the
little roll of explanatory manuscript.  With his own ghostly
voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my
filial duty and reverence towards him--who might reasonably
regard himself as my official ancestor--to bring his mouldy and
moth-eaten lucubrations before the public.  "Do this," said the
ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that
looked so imposing within its memorable wig; "do this, and the
profit shall be all your own.  You will shortly need it; for it
is not in your days as it was in mine, when a man's office was a
life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom.  But I charge you, in
this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's
memory the credit which will be rightfully due" And I said to
the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue--"I will".

On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed much thought.
It was the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while
pacing to and fro across my room, or traversing, with a
hundredfold repetition, the long extent from the front door of
the Custom-House to the side entrance, and back again.  Great
were the weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector and the
Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed by the
unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and returning
footsteps.  Remembering their own former habits, they used to say
that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck.  They probably
fancied that my sole object--and, indeed, the sole object for
which a sane man could ever put himself into voluntary
motion--was to get an appetite for dinner.  And, to say the
truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind that generally
blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of so much
indefatigable exercise.  So little adapted is the atmosphere of a
Custom-house to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility,
that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come,
I doubt whether the tale of "The Scarlet Letter" would ever have
been brought before the public eye.  My imagination was a
tarnished mirror.  It would not reflect, or only with miserable
dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it.  The
characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered
malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual
forge.  They would take neither the glow of passion nor the
tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead
corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin
of contemptuous defiance.  "What have you to do with us?" that
expression seemed to say.  "The little power you might have once
possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone!  You have
bartered it for a pittance of the public gold.  Go then, and earn
your wages!"  In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own
fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.

It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle
Sam claimed as his share of my daily life that this wretched
numbness held possession of me.  It went with me on my sea-shore
walks and rambles into the country, whenever--which was seldom
and reluctantly--I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating
charm of Nature which used to give me such freshness and
activity of thought, the moment that I stepped across the
threshold of the Old Manse.  The same torpor, as regarded the
capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and
weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my
study.  Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the
deserted parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and
the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the
next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-hued
description.

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it
might well be deemed a hopeless case.  Moonlight, in a familiar
room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its
figures so distinctly--making every object so minutely visible,
yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility--is a medium the
most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his
illusive guests.  There is the little domestic scenery of the
well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate
individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a
volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
book-case; the picture on the wall--all these details, so
completely seen, are so spiritualised by the unusual light, that
they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of
intellect.  Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this
change, and acquire dignity thereby.  A child's shoe; the doll,
seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse--whatever,
in a word, has been used or played with during the day is now
invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though
still almost as vividly present as by daylight.  Thus, therefore,
the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory,
somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the
Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with
the nature of the other.  Ghosts might enter here without
affrighting us.  It would be too much in keeping with the scene
to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a
form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak
of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt
whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred
from our fireside.

The somewhat dim coal fire has an essential Influence in
producing the effect which I would describe.  It throws its
unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness
upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam upon the
polish of the furniture.  This warmer light mingles itself with
the cold spirituality of the moon-beams, and communicates, as it
were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms
which fancy summons up.  It converts them from snow-images into
men and women.  Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold--deep
within its haunted verge--the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moon-beams on the floor,
and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture,
with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the
imaginative.  Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before
him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things,
and make them look like truth, he need never try to write
romances.

But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just
alike in my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more
avail than the twinkle of a tallow-candle.  An entire class of
susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them--of no great
richness or value, but the best I had--was gone from me.

It is my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order
of composition, my faculties would not have been found so
pointless and inefficacious.  I might, for instance, have
contented myself with writing out the narratives of a veteran
shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most
ungrateful not to mention, since scarcely a day passed that he
did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvelous
gifts as a story-teller.  Could I have preserved the picturesque
force of his style, and the humourous colouring which nature
taught him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I
honestly believe, would have been something new in literature.
Or I might readily have found a more serious task.  It was a
folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so
intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into
another age, or to insist on creating the semblance of a world
out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty
of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual
circumstance.  The wiser effort would have been to diffuse
thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day,
and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise the
burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the
true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and
wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters with which I was
now conversant.  The fault was mine.  The page of life that was
spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace only because I
had not fathomed its deeper import.  A better book than I shall
ever write was there; leaf after leaf presenting itself to me,
just as it was written out by the reality of the flitting hour,
and vanishing as fast as written, only because my brain wanted
the insight, and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it.  At some
future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered
fragments and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find
the letters turn to gold upon the page.

These perceptions had come too late.  At the Instant, I was only
conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a
hopeless toil.  There was no occasion to make much moan about
this state of affairs.  I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably
poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor
of the Customs.  That was all.  But, nevertheless, it is anything
but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect
is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like
ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a
smaller and less volatile residuum.  Of the fact there could be
no doubt and, examining myself and others, I was led to
conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the
character, not very favourable to the mode of life in question.
In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these
effects.  Suffice it here to say that a Custom-House officer of
long continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or
respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure
by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of
his business, which--though, I trust, an honest one--is of such
a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.

An effect--which I believe to be observable, more or less, in
every individual who has occupied the position--is, that while
he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper
strength departs from him.  He loses, in an extent proportioned
to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability
of self-support.  If he possesses an unusual share of native
energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long
upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable.  The ejected
officer--fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth
betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world--may return to
himself, and become all that he has ever been.  But this seldom
happens.  He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his
own ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to
totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may.
Conscious of his own infirmity--that his tempered steel and
elasticity are lost--he for ever afterwards looks wistfully
about him in quest of support external to himself.  His pervading
and continual hope--a hallucination, which, in the face of all
discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him
while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the
cholera, torments him for a brief space after death--is, that
finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of
circumstances, he shall be restored to office.  This faith, more
than anything else, steals the pith and availability out of
whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking.  Why should he
toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out
of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his
Uncle will raise and support him?  Why should he work for his
living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon
to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of
glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket?  It is sadly curious
to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a
poor fellow with this singular disease.  Uncle Sam's
gold--meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman--has, in
this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of the devil's
wages.  Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may
find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his
soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its
courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all
that gives the emphasis to manly character.

Here was a fine prospect in the distance.  Not that the Surveyor
brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be
so utterly undone, either by continuance in office or ejectment.
Yet my reflections were not the most comfortable.  I began to
grow melancholy and restless; continually prying into my mind,
to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what
degree of detriment had already accrued to the remainder.  I
endeavoured to calculate how much longer I could stay in the
Custom-House, and yet go forth a man.  To confess the truth, it
was my greatest apprehension--as it would never be a measure of
policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself; and it
being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign--it was
my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow grey and
decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another
animal as the old Inspector.  Might it not, in the tedious lapse
of official life that lay before me, finally be with me as it
was with this venerable friend--to make the dinner-hour the
nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog
spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the shade?  A dreary
look-forward, this, for a man who felt it to be the best
definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range of
his faculties and sensibilities.  But, all this while, I was
giving myself very unnecessary alarm.  Providence had meditated
better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.

A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship--to
adopt the tone of "P. P. "--was the election of General Taylor
to the Presidency.  It is essential, in order to form a complete
estimate of the advantages of official life, to view the
incumbent at the in-coming of a hostile administration.  His
position is then one of the most singularly irksome, and, in
every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can
possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good on either
hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event
may very probably be the best.  But it is a strange experience,
to a man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests
are within the control of individuals who neither love nor
understand him, and by whom, since one or the other must needs
happen, he would rather be injured than obliged.  Strange, too,
for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to
observe the bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of
triumph, and to be conscious that he is himself among its
objects!  There are few uglier traits of human nature than this
tendency--which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbours--to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the
power of inflicting harm.  If the guillotine, as applied to
office-holders, were a literal fact, instead of one of the most
apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief that the active
members of the victorious party were sufficiently excited to
have chopped off all our heads, and have thanked Heaven for the
opportunity!  It appears to me--who have been a calm and curious
observer, as well in victory as defeat--that this fierce and
bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished the
many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs.
The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they
need them, and because the practice of many years has made it
the law of political warfare, which unless a different system be
proclaimed, it was weakness and cowardice to murmur at.  But the
long habit of victory has made them generous.  They know how to
spare when they see occasion; and when they strike, the axe may
be sharp indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will;
nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head which they
have just struck off.

In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much
reason to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side
rather than the triumphant one.  If, heretofore, I had been none
of the warmest of partisans I began now, at this season of peril
and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with which party my
predilections lay; nor was it without something like regret and
shame that, according to a reasonable calculation of chances, I
saw my own prospect of retaining office to be better than those
of my democratic brethren.  But who can see an inch into futurity
beyond his nose?  My own head was the first that fell.

The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so
serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it,
if the sufferer will but make the best rather than the worst, of
the accident which has befallen him.  In my particular case the
consolatory topics were close at hand, and, indeed, had
suggested themselves to my meditations a considerable time
before it was requisite to use them.  In view of my previous
weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my
fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain
an idea of committing suicide, and although beyond his hopes,
meet with the good hap to be murdered.  In the Custom-House, as
before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years--a term long
enough to rest a weary brain: long enough to break off old
intellectual habits, and make room for new ones: long enough,
and too long, to have lived in an unnatural state, doing what
was really of no advantage nor delight to any human being, and
withholding myself from toil that would, at least, have stilled
an unquiet impulse in me.  Then, moreover, as regarded his
unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether
ill-pleased to be recognised by the Whigs as an enemy; since his
inactivity in political affairs--his tendency to roam, at will,
in that broad and quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather
than confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren of the
same household must diverge from one another--had sometimes made
it questionable with his brother Democrats whether he was a
friend.  Now, after he had won the crown of martyrdom (though
with no longer a head to wear it on), the point might be looked
upon as settled.  Finally, little heroic as he was, it seemed
more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the party with
which he had been content to stand than to remain a forlorn
survivor, when so many worthier men were falling: and at last,
after subsisting for four years on the mercy of a hostile
administration, to be compelled then to define his position
anew, and claim the yet more humiliating mercy of a friendly
one.

Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me for a
week or two careering through the public prints, in my
decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman, ghastly and
grim, and longing to be buried, as a political dead man ought.
So much for my figurative self.  The real human being all this
time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought himself
to the comfortable conclusion that everything was for the best;
and making an investment in ink, paper, and steel pens, had
opened his long-disused writing desk, and was again a literary
man.

Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr.
Surveyor Pue, came into play.  Rusty through long idleness, some
little space was requisite before my intellectual machinery
could be brought to work upon the tale with an effect in any
degree satisfactory.  Even yet, though my thoughts were
ultimately much absorbed in the task, it wears, to my eye, a
stern and sombre aspect: too much ungladdened by genial
sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar
influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real
life, and undoubtedly should soften every picture of them.  This
uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly
accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil, in which
the story shaped itself.  It is no indication, however, of a lack
of cheerfulness in the writer's mind: for he was happier while
straying through the gloom of these sunless fantasies than at
any time since he had quitted the Old Manse.  Some of the briefer
articles, which contribute to make up the volume, have likewise
been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils and
honours of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from
annuals and magazines, of such antique date, that they have gone
round the circle, and come back to novelty again.  Keeping up the
metaphor of the political guillotine, the whole may be
considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR:
and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close, if too
autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime,
will readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond
the grave.  Peace be with all the world!  My blessing on my
friends!  My forgiveness to my enemies!  For I am in the realm of
quiet!

The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me.  The
old Inspector--who, by-the-bye, I regret to say, was overthrown
and killed by a horse some time ago, else he would certainly
have lived for ever--he, and all those other venerable
personages who sat with him at the receipt of custom, are but
shadows in my view: white-headed and wrinkled images, which my
fancy used to sport with, and has now flung aside for ever.  The
merchants--Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram,
Hunt--these and many other names, which had such classic
familiarity for my ear six months ago,--these men of traffic,
who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world--how
little time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not
merely in act, but recollection!  It is with an effort that I
recall the figures and appellations of these few.  Soon,
likewise, my old native town will loom upon me through the haze
of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no
portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in
cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden
houses and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque
prolixity of its main street.  Henceforth it ceases to be a
reality of my life; I am a citizen of somewhere else.  My good
townspeople will not much regret me, for--though it has been as
dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some
importance in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in
this abode and burial-place of so many of my forefathers--there
has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary
man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind.  I
shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it
need hardly be said, will do just as well without me.

It may be, however--oh, transporting and triumphant
thought--that the great-grandchildren of the present race may
sometimes think kindly of the scribbler of bygone days, when the
antiquary of days to come, among the sites memorable in the
town's history, shall point out the locality of THE TOWN PUMP.





THE SCARLET LETTER


I. THE PRISON DOOR

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey
steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing
hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden
edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and
studded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue
and happiness they might originally project, have invariably
recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to
allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another
portion as the site of a prison.  In accordance with this rule it
may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built
the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill,
almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground,
on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which
subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated
sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel.  Certain it is
that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the
town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and
other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its
beetle-browed and gloomy front.  The rust on the ponderous
iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything
else in the New World.  Like all that pertains to crime, it
seemed never to have known a youthful era.  Before this ugly
edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a
grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern,
and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something
congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower
of civilised society, a prison.  But on one side of the portal,
and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush,
covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which
might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to
the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he
came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature
could pity and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in
history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old
wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and
oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is
fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the
footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the
prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine.  Finding it
so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now
about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do
otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the
reader.  It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral
blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the
darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.



II. THE MARKET-PLACE

The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain
summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by
a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with
their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door.
Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the
history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the
bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured
some awful business in hand.  It could have betokened nothing
short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on
whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the
verdict of public sentiment.  But, in that early severity of the
Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so
indubitably be drawn.  It might be that a sluggish bond-servant,
or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the
civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post.  It
might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox
religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle or
vagrant Indian, whom the white man's firewater had made riotous
about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow
of the forest.  It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress
Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die
upon the gallows.  In either case, there was very much the same
solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators, as
befitted a people among whom religion and law were almost
identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly
interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public
discipline were alike made venerable and awful.  Meagre, indeed,
and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for,
from such bystanders, at the scaffold.  On the other hand, a
penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking
infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern
a dignity as the punishment of death itself.

It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our
story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were
several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in
whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue.  The age
had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety
restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from
stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not
unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest
to the scaffold at an execution.  Morally, as well as materially,
there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old
English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants,
separated from them by a series of six or seven generations;
for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother
had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate
and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not
character of less force and solidity than her own.  The women who
were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than
half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had
been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex.
They were her countrywomen: and the beef and ale of their native
land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely
into their composition.  The bright morning sun, therefore, shone
on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and
ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had
hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New
England.  There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech
among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would
startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport
or its volume of tone.

"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell ye a
piece of my mind.  It would be greatly for the public behoof if
we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute,
should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester
Prynne.  What think ye, gossips?  If the hussy stood up for
judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together,
would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful
magistrates have awarded?  Marry, I trow not."

"People say," said another, "that the Reverend Master
Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart
that such a scandal should have come upon his congregation."

"The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful
overmuch--that is a truth," added a third autumnal matron.  "At
the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on
Hester Prynne's forehead.  Madame Hester would have winced at
that, I warrant me.  But she--the naughty baggage--little will
she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown!  Why, look
you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish
adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!"

"Ah, but," interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a
child by the hand, "let her cover the mark as she will, the pang
of it will be always in her heart."

"What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of
her gown or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female,
the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these
self-constituted judges.  "This woman has brought shame upon us
all, and ought to die; is there not law for it?  Truly there is,
both in the Scripture and the statute-book.  Then let the
magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if
their own wives and daughters go astray."

"Mercy on us, goodwife!" exclaimed a man in the crowd, "is there
no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of
the gallows?  That is the hardest word yet!  Hush now, gossips for
the lock is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress
Prynne herself."

The door of the jail being flung open from within there
appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into
sunshine, the grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with
a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand.  This
personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole
dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his
business to administer in its final and closest application to
the offender.  Stretching forth the official staff in his left
hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom
he thus drew forward, until, on the threshold of the
prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural
dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air as
if by her own free will.  She bore in her arms a child, a baby of
some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little
face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence,
heretofore, had brought it acquaintance only with the grey
twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the
prison.

When the young woman--the mother of this child--stood fully
revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to
clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse
of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a
certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress.  In
a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame
would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her
arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a
glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her
townspeople and neighbours.  On the breast of her gown, in fine
red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic
flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so
artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous
luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and
fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore, and which was
of a splendour in accordance with the taste of the age, but
greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of
the colony.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a
large scale.  She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it
threw off the sunshine with a gleam; and a face which, besides
being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of
complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow
and deep black eyes.  She was ladylike, too, after the manner of
the feminine gentility of those days; characterised by a certain
state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and
indescribable grace which is now recognised as its indication.
And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike, in the
antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the
prison.  Those who had before known her, and had expected to
behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were
astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone
out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she
was enveloped.  It may be true that, to a sensitive observer,
there was some thing exquisitely painful in it.  Her attire,
which indeed, she had wrought for the occasion in prison, and
had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the
attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood,
by its wild and picturesque peculiarity.  But the point which
drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer--so that
both men and women who had been familiarly acquainted with
Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they beheld her for the
first time--was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically
embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom.  It had the effect of
a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity,
and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

"She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain," remarked
one of her female spectators; "but did ever a woman, before this
brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it?  Why, gossips,
what is it but to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates,
and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a
punishment?"

"It were well," muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames,
"if we stripped Madame Hester's rich gown off her dainty
shoulders; and as for the red letter which she hath stitched so
curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine own rheumatic flannel to
make a fitter one!"

"Oh, peace, neighbours--peace!" whispered their youngest
companion; "do not let her hear you!  Not a stitch in that
embroidered letter but she has felt it in her heart."

The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff.  "Make way,
good people--make way, in the King's name!" cried he.  "Open a
passage; and I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where
man, woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel
from this time till an hour past meridian.  A blessing on the
righteous colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged
out into the sunshine!  Come along, Madame Hester, and show your
scarlet letter in the market-place!"

A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators.
Preceded by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession
of stern-browed men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne
set forth towards the place appointed for her punishment.  A
crowd of eager and curious schoolboys, understanding little of
the matter in hand, except that it gave them a half-holiday, ran
before her progress, turning their heads continually to stare
into her face and at the winking baby in her arms, and at the
ignominious letter on her breast.  It was no great distance, in
those days, from the prison door to the market-place.  Measured
by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a
journey of some length; for haughty as her demeanour was, she
perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that
thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the
street for them all to spurn and trample upon.  In our nature,
however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful,
that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he
endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that
rankles after it.  With almost a serene deportment, therefore,
Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and
came to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the
market-place.  It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's
earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there.

In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine,
which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely
historical and traditionary among us, but was held, in the old
time, to be as effectual an agent, in the promotion of good
citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of
France.  It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above
it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so
fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and
thus hold it up to the public gaze.  The very ideal of ignominy
was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and
iron.  There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common
nature--whatever be the delinquencies of the individual--no
outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his
face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do.
In Hester Prynne's instance, however, as not unfrequently in
other cases, her sentence bore that she should stand a certain
time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about
the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to which was
the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine.  Knowing
well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was
thus displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height
of a man's shoulders above the street.

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might
have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire
and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind
him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious
painters have vied with one another to represent; something
which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that
sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem
the world.  Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most
sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the
world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more
lost for the infant that she had borne.

The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always
invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature,
before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead
of shuddering at it.  The witnesses of Hester Prynne's disgrace
had not yet passed beyond their simplicity.  They were stern
enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence,
without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the
heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a
theme for jest in an exhibition like the present.  Even had there
been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must
have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of
men no less dignified than the governor, and several of his
counsellors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the town,
all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house,
looking down upon the platform.  When such personages could
constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking the majesty,
or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be inferred
that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest
and effectual meaning.  Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and
grave.  The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman
might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes,
all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom.  It was
almost intolerable to be borne.  Of an impulsive and passionate
nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and
venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every
variety of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible
in the solemn mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather
to behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful
merriment, and herself the object.  Had a roar of laughter burst
from the multitude--each man, each woman, each little
shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual parts--Hester
Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful
smile.  But, under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to
endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out
with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the
scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.

Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was
the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or,
at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of
imperfectly shaped and spectral images.  Her mind, and especially
her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up
other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on
the edge of the western wilderness: other faces than were
lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those
steeple-crowned hats.  Reminiscences, the most trifling and
immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports,
childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden
years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with
recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life;
one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of
similar importance, or all alike a play.  Possibly, it was an
instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the
exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight
and hardness of the reality.

Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of
view that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which
she had been treading, since her happy infancy.  Standing on that
miserable eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old
England, and her paternal home: a decayed house of grey stone,
with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half obliterated
shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility.
She saw her father's face, with its bold brow, and reverend
white beard that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff;
her mother's, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love
which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since
her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle
remonstrance in her daughter's pathway.  She saw her own face,
glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior
of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it.
There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in
years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and
bleared by the lamp-light that had served them to pore over many
ponderous books.  Yet those same bleared optics had a strange,
penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the
human soul.  This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester
Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly
deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right.
Next rose before her in memory's picture-gallery, the intricate
and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, grey houses, the huge
cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint
in architecture, of a continental city; where new life had
awaited her, still in connexion with the misshapen scholar: a
new life, but feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft
of green moss on a crumbling wall.  Lastly, in lieu of these
shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the Puritan
settlement, with all the townspeople assembled, and levelling
their stern regards at Hester Prynne--yes, at herself--who stood
on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the
letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold
thread, upon her bosom.

Could it be true?   She clutched the child so fiercely to her
breast that it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at
the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her finger, to
assure herself that the infant and the shame were real.  Yes
these were her realities--all else had vanished!



III.  THE RECOGNITION

From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe
and universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was
at length relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the
crowd, a figure which irresistibly took possession of her
thoughts.  An Indian in his native garb was standing there; but
the red men were not so infrequent visitors of the English
settlements that one of them would have attracted any notice
from Hester Prynne at such a time; much less would he have
excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind.  By the
Indian's side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with
him, stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized
and savage costume.

He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which as yet
could hardly be termed aged.  There was a remarkable intelligence
in his features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental
part that it could not fail to mould the physical to itself and
become manifest by unmistakable tokens.  Although, by a seemingly
careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had
endeavoured to conceal or abate the peculiarity, it was
sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne that one of this man's
shoulders rose higher than the other.  Again, at the first
instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity
of the figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom with so
convulsive a force that the poor babe uttered another cry of
pain.  But the mother did not seem to hear it.

At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw
him, the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne.  It was
carelessly at first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look
inward, and to whom external matters are of little value and
import, unless they bear relation to something within his mind.
Very soon, however, his look became keen and penetrative.  A
writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake
gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all
its wreathed intervolutions in open sight.  His face darkened
with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so
instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save
at a single moment, its expression might have passed for
calmness.  After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost
imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his
nature.  When he found the eyes of Hester Prynne fastened on his
own, and saw that she appeared to recognize him, he slowly and
calmly raised his finger, made a gesture with it in the air, and
laid it on his lips.

Then touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood near to him,
he addressed him in a formal and courteous manner:

"I pray you, good Sir," said he, "who is this woman?--and
wherefore is she here set up to public shame?"

"You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend," answered
the townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage
companion, "else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester
Prynne and her evil doings.  She hath raised a great scandal, I
promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale's church."

"You say truly," replied the other; "I am a stranger, and have
been a wanderer, sorely against my will.  I have met with
grievous mishaps by sea and land, and have been long held in
bonds among the heathen-folk to the southward; and am now
brought hither by this Indian to be redeemed out of my
captivity.  Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of Hester
Prynne's--have I her name rightly?--of this woman's offences,
and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?"

"Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after
your troubles and sojourn in the wilderness," said the townsman,
"to find yourself at length in a land where iniquity is searched
out and punished in the sight of rulers and people, as here in
our godly New England.  Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the
wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had
long ago dwelt in Amsterdam, whence some good time agone he was
minded to cross over and cast in his lot with us of the
Massachusetts.  To this purpose he sent his wife before him,
remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs.  Marry,
good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a
dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned
gentleman, Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being
left to her own misguidance--"

"Ah!--aha!--I conceive you," said the stranger with a bitter
smile.  "So learned a man as you speak of should have learned
this too in his books.  And who, by your favour, Sir, may be the
father of yonder babe--it is some three or four months old, I
should judge--which Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?"

"Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the
Daniel who shall expound it is yet a-wanting," answered the
townsman.  "Madame Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the
magistrates have laid their heads together in vain.  Peradventure
the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown
of man, and forgetting that God sees him."

"The learned man," observed the stranger with another smile,
"should come himself to look into the mystery."

"It behoves him well if he be still in life," responded the
townsman.  "Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy,
bethinking themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and
doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall, and that, moreover,
as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea,
they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our
righteous law against her.  The penalty thereof is death.  But in
their great mercy and tenderness of heart they have doomed
Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the
platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the
remainder of her natural life to wear a mark of shame upon her
bosom."

"A wise sentence," remarked the stranger, gravely, bowing his
head.  "Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the
ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone.  It irks me,
nevertheless, that the partner of her iniquity should not at
least, stand on the scaffold by her side.  But he will be
known--he will be known!--he will be known!"

He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and
whispering a few words to his Indian attendant, they both made
their way through the crowd.

While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her
pedestal, still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger--so fixed
a gaze that, at moments of intense absorption, all other objects
in the visible world seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her.
Such an interview, perhaps, would have been more terrible than
even to meet him as she now did, with the hot mid-day sun
burning down upon her face, and lighting up its shame; with the
scarlet token of infamy on her breast; with the sin-born infant
in her arms; with a whole people, drawn forth as to a festival,
staring at the features that should have been seen only in the
quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or
beneath a matronly veil at church.  Dreadful as it was, she was
conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand
witnesses.  It was better to stand thus, with so many betwixt him
and her, than to greet him face to face--they two alone.  She
fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded
the moment when its protection should be withdrawn from her.
Involved in these thoughts, she scarcely heard a voice behind
her until it had repeated her name more than once, in a loud and
solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude.

"Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!" said the voice.

It has already been noticed that directly over the platform on
which Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open
gallery, appended to the meeting-house.  It was the place whence
proclamations were wont to be made, amidst an assemblage of the
magistracy, with all the ceremonial that attended such public
observances in those days.  Here, to witness the scene which we
are describing, sat Governor Bellingham himself with four
sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a guard of
honour.  He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of
embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath--a
gentleman advanced in years, with a hard experience written in
his wrinkles.  He was not ill-fitted to be the head and
representative of a community which owed its origin and
progress, and its present state of development, not to the
impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of
manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much,
precisely because it imagined and hoped so little.  The other
eminent characters by whom the chief ruler was surrounded were
distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when
the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of
Divine institutions.  They were, doubtless, good men, just and
sage.  But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been
easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who
should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring
woman's heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than
the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned
her face.  She seemed conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy
she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the
multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes towards the balcony, the
unhappy woman grew pale, and trembled.

The voice which had called her attention was that of the
reverend and famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston,
a great scholar, like most of his contemporaries in the
profession, and withal a man of kind and genial spirit.  This
last attribute, however, had been less carefully developed than
his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth, rather a matter of
shame than self-congratulation with him.  There he stood, with a
border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap, while his grey
eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were winking,
like those of Hester's infant, in the unadulterated sunshine.  He
looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed
to old volumes of sermons, and had no more right than one of
those portraits would have to step forth, as he now did, and
meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish.

"Hester Prynne," said the clergyman, "I have striven with my
young brother here, under whose preaching of the Word you have
been privileged to sit"--here Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the
shoulder of a pale young man beside him--"I have sought, I say,
to persuade this godly youth, that he should deal with you, here
in the face of Heaven, and before these wise and upright rulers,
and in hearing of all the people, as touching the vileness and
blackness of your sin.  Knowing your natural temper better than
I, he could the better judge what arguments to use, whether of
tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over your hardness
and obstinacy, insomuch that you should no longer hide the name
of him who tempted you to this grievous fall.  But he opposes to
me--with a young man's over-softness, albeit wise beyond his
years--that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force
her to lay open her heart's secrets in such broad daylight, and
in presence of so great a multitude.  Truly, as I sought to
convince him, the shame lay in the commission of the sin, and
not in the showing of it forth.  What say you to it, once again,
brother Dimmesdale?  Must it be thou, or I, that shall deal with
this poor sinner's soul?"

There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants of
the balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its
purport, speaking in an authoritative voice, although tempered
with respect towards the youthful clergyman whom he addressed:

"Good Master Dimmesdale," said he, "the responsibility of this
woman's soul lies greatly with you.  It behoves you; therefore,
to exhort her to repentance and to confession, as a proof and
consequence thereof."

The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd
upon the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale--young clergyman, who had come
from one of the great English universities, bringing all the
learning of the age into our wild forest land.  His eloquence and
religious fervour had already given the earnest of high eminence
in his profession.  He was a person of very striking aspect, with
a white, lofty, and impending brow; large, brown, melancholy
eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he forcibly compressed it,
was apt to be tremulous, expressing both nervous sensibility and
a vast power of self restraint.  Notwithstanding his high native
gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an air about this
young minister--an apprehensive, a startled, a half-frightened
look--as of a being who felt himself quite astray, and at a loss
in the pathway of human existence, and could only be at ease in
some seclusion of his own.  Therefore, so far as his duties would
permit, he trod in the shadowy by-paths, and thus kept himself
simple and childlike, coming forth, when occasion was, with a
freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as
many people said, affected them like the speech of an angel.

Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the
Governor had introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding
him speak, in the hearing of all men, to that mystery of a
woman's soul, so sacred even in its pollution.  The trying nature
of his position drove the blood from his cheek, and made his
lips tremulous.

"Speak to the woman, my brother," said Mr. Wilson.  "It is of
moment to her soul, and, therefore, as the worshipful Governor
says, momentous to thine own, in whose charge hers is.  Exhort
her to confess the truth!"

The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer,
as it seemed, and then came forward.

"Hester Prynne," said he, leaning over the balcony and looking
down steadfastly into her eyes, "thou hearest what this good man
says, and seest the accountability under which I labour.  If thou
feelest it to be for thy soul's peace, and that thy earthly
punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I
charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and
fellow-sufferer!  Be not silent from any mistaken pity and
tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to
step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy
pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty
heart through life.  What can thy silence do for him, except it
tempt him--yea, compel him, as it were--to add hypocrisy to sin?
Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou
mayest work out an open triumph over the evil within thee and
the sorrow without.  Take heed how thou deniest to him--who,
perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself--the
bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!"

The young pastor's voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and
broken.  The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than
the direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all
hearts, and brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy.
Even the poor baby at Hester's bosom was affected by the same
influence, for it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr.
Dimmesdale, and held up its little arms with a half-pleased,
half-plaintive murmur.  So powerful seemed the minister's appeal
that the people could not believe but that Hester Prynne would
speak out the guilty name, or else that the guilty one himself
in whatever high or lowly place he stood, would be drawn forth
by an inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend
the scaffold.

Hester shook her head.

"Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven's mercy!"
cried the Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before.  "That
little babe hath been gifted with a voice, to second and confirm
the counsel which thou hast heard.  Speak out the name!  That, and
thy repentance, may avail to take the scarlet letter off thy
breast."

"Never," replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but
into the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman.  "It is
too deeply branded.  Ye cannot take it off.  And would that I
might endure his agony as well as mine!"

"Speak, woman!" said another voice, coldly and sternly,
proceeding from the crowd about the scaffold, "Speak; and give
your child a father!"

"I will not speak!" answered Hester, turning pale as death, but
responding to this voice, which she too surely recognised.  "And
my child must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know an
earthly one!"

"She will not speak!" murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over
the balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the
result of his appeal.  He now drew back with a long respiration.
"Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman's heart!  She will
not speak!"

Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit's mind,
the elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the
occasion, addressed to the multitude a discourse on sin, in all
its branches, but with continual reference to the ignominious
letter.  So forcibly did he dwell upon this symbol, for the hour
or more during which his periods were rolling over the people's
heads, that it assumed new terrors in their imagination, and
seemed to derive its scarlet hue from the flames of the infernal
pit.  Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the pedestal
of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference.
She had borne that morning all that nature could endure; and as
her temperament was not of the order that escapes from too
intense suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only shelter
itself beneath a stony crust of insensibility, while the
faculties of animal life remained entire.  In this state, the
voice of the preacher thundered remorselessly, but unavailingly,
upon her ears.  The infant, during the latter portion of her
ordeal, pierced the air with its wailings and screams; she
strove to hush it mechanically, but seemed scarcely to
sympathise with its trouble.  With the same hard demeanour, she
was led back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within
its iron-clamped portal.  It was whispered by those who peered
after her that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the
dark passage-way of the interior.



IV.   THE INTERVIEW

After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in
a state of nervous excitement, that demanded constant
watchfulness, lest she should perpetrate violence on herself, or
do some half-frenzied mischief to the poor babe.  As night
approached, it proving impossible to quell her insubordination
by rebuke or threats of punishment, Master Brackett, the jailer,
thought fit to introduce a physician.  He described him as a man
of skill in all Christian modes of physical science, and
likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could teach in
respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest.  To
say the truth, there was much need of professional assistance,
not merely for Hester herself, but still more urgently for the
child--who, drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom,
seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish and
despair, which pervaded the mother's system.  It now writhed in
convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little
frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne
throughout the day.

Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment, appeared
that individual, of singular aspect whose presence in the crowd
had been of such deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet
letter.  He was lodged in the prison, not as suspected of any
offence, but as the most convenient and suitable mode of
disposing of him, until the magistrates should have conferred
with the Indian sagamores respecting his ransom.  His name was
announced as Roger Chillingworth.  The jailer, after ushering him
into the room, remained a moment, marvelling at the comparative
quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne had
immediately become as still as death, although the child
continued to moan.

"Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient," said the
practitioner.  "Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have
peace in your house; and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall
hereafter be more amenable to just authority than you may have
found her heretofore."

"Nay, if your worship can accomplish that," answered Master
Brackett, "I shall own you for a man of skill, indeed!  Verily,
the woman hath been like a possessed one; and there lacks little
that I should take in hand, to drive Satan out of her with
stripes."

The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic
quietude of the profession to which he announced himself as
belonging.  Nor did his demeanour change when the withdrawal of
the prison keeper left him face to face with the woman, whose
absorbed notice of him, in the crowd, had intimated so close a
relation between himself and her.  His first care was given to
the child, whose cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the
trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to postpone all
other business to the task of soothing her.  He examined the
infant carefully, and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case,
which he took from beneath his dress.  It appeared to contain
medical preparations, one of which he mingled with a cup of
water.

"My old studies in alchemy," observed he, "and my sojourn, for
above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly
properties of simples, have made a better physician of me than
many that claim the medical degree.  Here, woman!  The child is
yours--she is none of mine--neither will she recognise my voice
or aspect as a father's.  Administer this draught, therefore,
with thine own hand."

Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing
with strongly marked apprehension into his face.  "Wouldst thou
avenge thyself on the innocent babe?" whispered she.

"Foolish woman!" responded the physician, half coldly, half
soothingly.  "What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and
miserable babe?  The medicine is potent for good, and were it my
child--yea, mine own, as well as thine!  I could do no better for
it."

As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state
of mind, he took the infant in his arms, and himself
administered the draught.  It soon proved its efficacy, and
redeemed the leech's pledge.  The moans of the little patient
subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually ceased; and in a few
moments, as is the custom of young children after relief from
pain, it sank into a profound and dewy slumber.  The physician,
as he had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed his attention
on the mother.  With calm and intent scrutiny, he felt her pulse,
looked into her eyes--a gaze that made her heart shrink and
shudder, because so familiar, and yet so strange and cold--and,
finally, satisfied with his investigation, proceeded to mingle
another draught.

"I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe," remarked he; "but I have
learned many new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of
them--a recipe that an Indian taught me, in requital of some
lessons of my own, that were as old as Paracelsus.  Drink it!  It
may be less soothing than a sinless conscience.  That I cannot
give thee.  But it will calm the swell and heaving of thy
passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea."

He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow,
earnest look into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet
full of doubt and questioning as to what his purposes might be.
She looked also at her slumbering child.

"I have thought of death," said she--"have wished for it--would
even have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray
for anything.  Yet, if death be in this cup, I bid thee think
again, ere thou beholdest me quaff it.  See! it is even now at my
lips."

"Drink, then," replied he, still with the same cold composure.
"Dost thou know me so little, Hester Prynne?  Are my purposes
wont to be so shallow?  Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance,
what could I do better for my object than to let thee live--than
to give thee medicines against all harm and peril of life--so
that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?" As he
spoke, he laid his long fore-finger on the scarlet letter, which
forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester's breast, as if it had
been red hot.  He noticed her involuntary gesture, and smiled.
"Live, therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in the eyes
of men and women--in the eyes of him whom thou didst call thy
husband--in the eyes of yonder child!  And, that thou mayest
live, take off this draught."

Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained
the cup, and, at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself
on the bed, where the child was sleeping; while he drew the only
chair which the room afforded, and took his own seat beside her.
She could not but tremble at these preparations; for she felt
that--having now done all that humanity, or principle, or, if so
it were, a refined cruelty, impelled him to do for the relief of
physical suffering--he was next to treat with her as the man
whom she had most deeply and irreparably injured.

"Hester," said he, "I ask not wherefore, nor how thou hast
fallen into the pit, or say, rather, thou hast ascended to the
pedestal of infamy on which I found thee.  The reason is not far
to seek.  It was my folly, and thy weakness.  I--a man of
thought--the book-worm of great libraries--a man already in
decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of
knowledge--what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine
own?  Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself
with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical
deformity in a young girl's fantasy?  Men call me wise.  If sages
were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all
this.  I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and
dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the
very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester
Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people.
Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps
together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of
that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!"

"Thou knowest," said Hester--for, depressed as she was, she
could not endure this last quiet stab at the token of her
shame--"thou knowest that I was frank with thee.  I felt no love,
nor feigned any."

"True," replied he.  "It was my folly!  I have said it.  But, up
to that epoch of my life, I had lived in vain.  The world had
been so cheerless!  My heart was a habitation large enough for
many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire.
I longed to kindle one!  It seemed not so wild a dream--old as I
was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as I was--that the
simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide, for all mankind
to gather up, might yet be mine.  And so, Hester, I drew thee
into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and sought to warm
thee by the warmth which thy presence made there!"

"I have greatly wronged thee," murmured Hester.

"We have wronged each other," answered he.  "Mine was the first
wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and
unnatural relation with my decay.  Therefore, as a man who has
not thought and philosophised in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot
no evil against thee.  Between thee and me, the scale hangs
fairly balanced.  But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us
both!  Who is he?"

"Ask me not!" replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his
face.  "That thou shalt never know!"

"Never, sayest thou?" rejoined he, with a smile of dark and
self-relying intelligence.  "Never know him!  Believe me, Hester,
there are few things whether in the outward world, or, to a
certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought--few things
hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and
unreservedly to the solution of a mystery.  Thou mayest cover up
thy secret from the prying multitude.  Thou mayest conceal it,
too, from the ministers and magistrates, even as thou didst this
day, when they sought to wrench the name out of thy heart, and
give thee a partner on thy pedestal.  But, as for me, I come to
the inquest with other senses than they possess.  I shall seek
this man, as I have sought truth in books: as I have sought gold
in alchemy.  There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of
him.  I shall see him tremble.  I shall feel myself shudder,
suddenly and unawares.  Sooner or later, he must needs be mine."

The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her,
that Hester Prynne clasped her hand over her heart, dreading
lest he should read the secret there at once.

"Thou wilt not reveal his name?   Not the less he is mine,"
resumed he, with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one
with him.  "He bears no letter of infamy wrought into his
garment, as thou dost, but I shall read it on his heart.  Yet
fear not for him!  Think not that I shall interfere with Heaven's
own method of retribution, or, to my own loss, betray him to the
gripe of human law.  Neither do thou imagine that I shall
contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his fame, if as
I judge, he be a man of fair repute.  Let him live!  Let him hide
himself in outward honour, if he may!  Not the less he shall be
mine!"

"Thy acts are like mercy," said Hester, bewildered and appalled;
"but thy words interpret thee as a terror!"

"One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,"
continued the scholar.  "Thou hast kept the secret of thy
paramour.  Keep, likewise, mine!  There are none in this land that
know me.  Breathe not to any human soul that thou didst ever call
me husband!  Here, on this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall
pitch my tent; for, elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from
human interests, I find here a woman, a man, a child, amongst
whom and myself there exist the closest ligaments.  No matter
whether of love or hate: no matter whether of right or wrong!
Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.  My home is where
thou art and where he is.  But betray me not!"

"Wherefore dost thou desire it?" inquired Hester, shrinking, she
hardly knew why, from this secret bond.  "Why not announce
thyself openly, and cast me off at once?"

"It may be," he replied, "because I will not encounter the
dishonour that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman.  It
may be for other reasons.  Enough, it is my purpose to live and
die unknown.  Let, therefore, thy husband be to the world as one
already dead, and of whom no tidings shall ever come.  Recognise
me not, by word, by sign, by look!  Breathe not the secret, above
all, to the man thou wottest of.  Shouldst thou fail me in this,
beware!  His fame, his position, his life will be in my hands.
Beware!"

"I will keep thy secret, as I have his," said Hester.

"Swear it!" rejoined he.

And she took the oath.

"And now, Mistress Prynne," said old Roger Chillingworth, as he
was hereafter to be named, "I leave thee alone: alone with thy
infant and the scarlet letter!  How is it, Hester?  Doth thy
sentence bind thee to wear the token in thy sleep?  Art thou not
afraid of nightmares and hideous dreams?"

"Why dost thou smile so at me?" inquired Hester, troubled at the
expression of his eyes.  "Art thou like the Black Man that haunts
the forest round about us?  Hast thou enticed me into a bond that
will prove the ruin of my soul?"

"Not thy soul," he answered, with another smile.  "No, not
thine!"



V.  HESTER AT HER NEEDLE

Hester Prynne's term of confinement was now at an end.  Her
prison-door was thrown open, and she came forth into the
sunshine, which, falling on all alike, seemed, to her sick and
morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose than to reveal
the scarlet letter on her breast.  Perhaps there was a more real
torture in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of
the prison than even in the procession and spectacle that have
been described, where she was made the common infamy, at which
all mankind was summoned to point its finger.  Then, she was
supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the
combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert
the scene into a kind of lurid triumph.  It was, moreover, a
separate and insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime,
and to meet which, therefore, reckless of economy, she might
call up the vital strength that would have sufficed for many
quiet years.  The very law that condemned her--a giant of stern
features but with vigour to support, as well as to annihilate,
in his iron arm--had held her up through the terrible ordeal of
her ignominy.  But now, with this unattended walk from her prison
door, began the daily custom; and she must either sustain and
carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature, or
sink beneath it.  She could no longer borrow from the future to
help her through the present grief.  Tomorrow would bring its own
trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next:
each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so
unutterably grievous to be borne.  The days of the far-off future
would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take
up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the
accumulating days and added years would pile up their misery
upon the heap of shame.  Throughout them all, giving up her
individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the
preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might
vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful
passion.  Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her,
with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast--at her, the child
of honourable parents--at her, the mother of a babe that would
hereafter be a woman--at her, who had once been innocent--as the
figure, the body, the reality of sin.  And over her grave, the
infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument.

It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her--kept by
no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of
the Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure--free to return
to her birth-place, or to any other European land, and there
hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as
completely as if emerging into another state of being--and
having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to
her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself
with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law
that had condemned her--it may seem marvellous that this woman
should still call that place her home, where, and where only,
she must needs be the type of shame.  But there is a fatality, a
feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of
doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger
around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and
marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still
the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.  Her
sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the
soil.  It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than
the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial
to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild
and dreary, but life-long home.  All other scenes of earth--even
that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless
maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother's keeping, like
garments put off long ago--were foreign to her, in comparison.
The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to
her inmost soul, but could never be broken.

It might be, too--doubtless it was so, although she hid the
secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of
her heart, like a serpent from its hole--it might be that
another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had
been so fatal.  There dwelt, there trode, the feet of one with
whom she deemed herself connected in a union that, unrecognised
on earth, would bring them together before the bar of final
judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint
futurity of endless retribution.  Over and over again, the
tempter of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester's
contemplation, and laughed at the passionate and desperate joy
with which she seized, and then strove to cast it from her.  She
barely looked the idea in the face, and hastened to bar it in
its dungeon.  What she compelled herself to believe--what,
finally, she reasoned upon as her motive for continuing a
resident of New England--was half a truth, and half a
self-delusion.  Here, she said to herself had been the scene of
her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly
punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame
would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than
that which she had lost: more saint-like, because the result of
martyrdom.

Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee.  On the outskirts of the
town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close
vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small thatched
cottage.  It had been built by an earlier settler, and abandoned,
because the soil about it was too sterile for cultivation, while
its comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere of that
social activity which already marked the habits of the
emigrants.  It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the
sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west.  A clump of
scrubby trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so
much conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here
was some object which would fain have been, or at least ought to
be, concealed.  In this little lonesome dwelling, with some
slender means that she possessed, and by the licence of the
magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her,
Hester established herself, with her infant child.  A mystic
shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot.
Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be
shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh
enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or
standing in the doorway, or labouring in her little garden, or
coming forth along the pathway that led townward, and,
discerning the scarlet letter on her breast, would scamper off
with a strange contagious fear.

Lonely as was Hester's situation, and without a friend on earth
who dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of
want.  She possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that
afforded comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply
food for her thriving infant and herself.  It was the art, then,
as now, almost the only one within a woman's grasp--of
needle-work.  She bore on her breast, in the curiously
embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and imaginative
skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have availed
themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of
human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold.  Here, indeed,
in the sable simplicity that generally characterised the
Puritanic modes of dress, there might be an infrequent call for
the finer productions of her handiwork.  Yet the taste of the
age, demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this
kind, did not fail to extend its influence over our stern
progenitors, who had cast behind them so many fashions which it
might seem harder to dispense with.

Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of
magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in
which a new government manifested itself to the people, were, as
a matter of policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted
ceremonial, and a sombre, but yet a studied magnificence.  Deep
ruffs, painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously embroidered
gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official state of men
assuming the reins of power, and were readily allowed to
individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary
laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian
order.  In the array of funerals, too--whether for the apparel of
the dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of
sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors--there
was a frequent and characteristic demand for such labour as
Hester Prynne could supply.  Baby-linen--for babies then wore
robes of state--afforded still another possibility of toil and
emolument.

By degrees, not very slowly, her handiwork became what would now
be termed the fashion.  Whether from commiseration for a woman of
so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives
a fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by
whatever other intangible circumstance was then, as now,
sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in
vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise
have remained vacant; it is certain that she had ready and
fairly requited employment for as many hours as she saw fit to
occupy with her needle.  Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify
itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the
garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands.  Her
needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men
wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked
the baby's little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and
moulder away, in the coffins of the dead.  But it is not recorded
that, in a single instance, her skill was called in to embroider
the white veil which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride.
The exception indicated the ever relentless vigour with which
society frowned upon her sin.

Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of
the plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a
simple abundance for her child.  Her own dress was of the
coarsest materials and the most sombre hue, with only that one
ornament--the scarlet letter--which it was her doom to wear.  The
child's attire, on the other hand, was distinguished by a
fanciful, or, we may rather say, a fantastic ingenuity, which
served, indeed, to heighten the airy charm that early began to
develop itself in the little girl, but which appeared to have
also a deeper meaning.  We may speak further of it hereafter.
Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her
infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on
wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently
insulted the hand that fed them.  Much of the time, which she
might readily have applied to the better efforts of her art, she
employed in making coarse garments for the poor.  It is probable
that there was an idea of penance in this mode of occupation,
and that she offered up a real sacrifice of enjoyment in
devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork.  She had in her
nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic--a taste for
the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite
productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all the
possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon.  Women derive
a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate
toil of the needle.  To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode
of expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life.
Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin.  This morbid
meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it
is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but
something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong
beneath.

In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in
the world.  With her native energy of character and rare
capacity, it could not entirely cast her off, although it had
set a mark upon her, more intolerable to a woman's heart than
that which branded the brow of Cain.  In all her intercourse with
society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she
belonged to it.  Every gesture, every word, and even the silence
of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often
expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she
inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature
by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind.  She
stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a
ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer
make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy,
nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in
manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and
horrible repugnance.  These emotions, in fact, and its bitterest
scorn besides, seemed to be the sole portion that she retained
in the universal heart.  It was not an age of delicacy; and her
position, although she understood it well, and was in little
danger of forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid
self-perception, like a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon
the tenderest spot.  The poor, as we have already said, whom she
sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often reviled the
hand that was stretched forth to succour them.  Dames of elevated
rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her
occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into
her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by
which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles;
and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the
sufferer's defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an
ulcerated wound.  Hester had schooled herself long and well; and
she never responded to these attacks, save by a flush of crimson
that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek, and again subsided
into the depths of her bosom.  She was patient--a martyr,
indeed--but she forebore to pray for enemies, lest, in spite of her
forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should
stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.

Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the
innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly
contrived for her by the undying, the ever-active sentence of
the Puritan tribunal.  Clergymen paused in the streets, to
address words of exhortation, that brought a crowd, with its
mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman.  If she
entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the
Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the
text of the discourse.  She grew to have a dread of children; for
they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something
horrible in this dreary woman gliding silently through the town,
with never any companion but one only child.  Therefore, first
allowing her to pass, they pursued her at a distance with shrill
cries, and the utterances of a word that had no distinct purport
to their own minds, but was none the less terrible to her, as
proceeding from lips that babbled it unconsciously.  It seemed to
argue so wide a diffusion of her shame, that all nature knew of
it; it could have caused her no deeper pang had the leaves of
the trees whispered the dark story among themselves--had the
summer breeze murmured about it--had the wintry blast shrieked
it aloud!  Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new
eye.  When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter--and
none ever failed to do so--they branded it afresh in Hester's
soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet
always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand.  But
then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to
inflict.  Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable.  From
first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful
agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew
callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with
daily torture.

But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months,
she felt an eye--a human eye--upon the ignominious brand, that
seemed to give a momentary relief, as if half of her agony were
shared.  The next instant, back it all rushed again, with still a
deeper throb of pain; for, in that brief interval, she had
sinned anew.  (Had Hester sinned alone?)

Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a
softer moral and intellectual fibre would have been still more
so, by the strange and solitary anguish of her life.  Walking to
and fro, with those lonely footsteps, in the little world with
which she was outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to
Hester--if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to
be resisted--she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter
had endowed her with a new sense.  She shuddered to believe, yet
could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic
knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts.  She was
terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus made.  What were
they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad
angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as
yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was
but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a
scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester
Prynne's?  Or, must she receive those intimations--so obscure,
yet so distinct--as truth?  In all her miserable experience,
there was nothing else so awful and so loathsome as this sense.
It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent
inopportuneness of the occasions that brought it into vivid
action.  Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would give a
sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or
magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of
antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship
with angels.  "What evil thing is at hand?" would Hester say to
herself.  Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing
human within the scope of view, save the form of this earthly
saint!  Again a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert
itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who,
according to the rumour of all tongues, had kept cold snow
within her bosom throughout life.  That unsunned snow in the
matron's bosom, and the burning shame on Hester Prynne's--what
had the two in common?  Or, once more, the electric thrill would
give her warning--"Behold Hester, here is a companion!" and,
looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young maiden glancing
at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly averted,
with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks as if her purity were
somewhat sullied by that momentary glance.  O Fiend, whose
talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing,
whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere?--such
loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin.  Be it
accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim
of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet
struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like
herself.

The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always
contributing a grotesque horror to what interested their
imaginations, had a story about the scarlet letter which we
might readily work up into a terrific legend.  They averred that
the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly
dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen
glowing all alight whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the
night-time.  And we must needs say it seared Hester's bosom so
deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumour than our
modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.



VI.  PEARL

We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little
creature, whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable
decree of Providence, a lovely and immortal flower, out of the
rank luxuriance of a guilty passion.  How strange it seemed to
the sad woman, as she watched the growth, and the beauty that
became every day more brilliant, and the intelligence that threw
its quivering sunshine over the tiny features of this child!  Her
Pearl--for so had Hester called her; not as a name expressive of
her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white, unimpassioned
lustre that would be indicated by the comparison.  But she named
the infant "Pearl," as being of great price--purchased with all
she had--her mother's only treasure!  How strange, indeed!  Man
had marked this woman's sin by a scarlet letter, which had such
potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could
reach her, save it were sinful like herself.  God, as a direct
consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a
lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonoured bosom, to
connect her parent for ever with the race and descent of
mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven!  Yet these
thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than
apprehension.  She knew that her deed had been evil; she could
have no faith, therefore, that its result would be good.  Day
after day she looked fearfully into the child's expanding
nature, ever dreading to detect some dark and wild peculiarity
that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her
being.

Certainly there was no physical defect.  By its perfect shape,
its vigour, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its
untried limbs, the infant was worthy to have been brought forth
in Eden: worthy to have been left there to be the plaything of
the angels after the world's first parents were driven out.  The
child had a native grace which does not invariably co-exist with
faultless beauty; its attire, however simple, always impressed
the beholder as if it were the very garb that precisely became
it best.  But little Pearl was not clad in rustic weeds.  Her
mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better understood
hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be
procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in
the arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child
wore before the public eye.  So magnificent was the small figure
when thus arrayed, and such was the splendour of Pearl's own
proper beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might
have extinguished a paler loveliness, that there was an absolute
circle of radiance around her on the darksome cottage floor.  And
yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child's rude play,
made a picture of her just as perfect.  Pearl's aspect was imbued
with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were
many children, comprehending the full scope between the
wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in
little, of an infant princess.  Throughout all, however, there
was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never
lost; and if in any of her changes, she had grown fainter or
paler, she would have ceased to be herself--it would have been
no longer Pearl!

This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly
express, the various properties of her inner life.  Her nature
appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but--or else
Hester's fears deceived her--it lacked reference and adaptation
to the world into which she was born.  The child could not be
made amenable to rules.  In giving her existence a great law had
been broken; and the result was a being whose elements were
perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder, or with an
order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety
and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.
Hester could only account for the child's character--and even
then most vaguely and imperfectly--by recalling what she herself
had been during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing
her soul from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its
material of earth.  The mother's impassioned state had been the
medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the
rays of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally,
they had taken the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery
lustre, the black shadow, and the untempered light of the
intervening substance.  Above all, the warfare of Hester's spirit
at that epoch was perpetuated in Pearl.  She could recognize her
wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper,
and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency
that had brooded in her heart.  They were now illuminated by the
morning radiance of a young child's disposition, but, later in
the day of earthly existence, might be prolific of the storm and
whirlwind.

The discipline of the family in those days was of a far more
rigid kind than now.  The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent
application of the rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were
used, not merely in the way of punishment for actual offences,
but as a wholesome regimen for the growth and promotion of all
childish virtues.  Hester Prynne, nevertheless, the loving mother
of this one child, ran little risk of erring on the side of
undue severity.  Mindful, however, of her own errors and
misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender but strict
control over the infant immortality that was committed to her
charge.  But the task was beyond her skill.  After testing both
smiles and frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment
possessed any calculable influence, Hester was ultimately
compelled to stand aside and permit the child to be swayed by
her own impulses.  Physical compulsion or restraint was
effectual, of course, while it lasted.  As to any other kind of
discipline, whether addressed to her mind or heart, little Pearl
might or might not be within its reach, in accordance with the
caprice that ruled the moment.  Her mother, while Pearl was yet
an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look, that
warned her when it would be labour thrown away to insist,
persuade or plead.

It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse,
sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow
of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning at such
moments whether Pearl was a human child.  She seemed rather an
airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a
little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a
mocking smile.  Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright,
deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and
intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air, and
might vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not
whence and goes we know not whither.  Beholding it, Hester was
constrained to rush towards the child--to pursue the little elf
in the flight which she invariably began--to snatch her to her
bosom with a close pressure and earnest kisses--not so much from
overflowing love as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and
blood, and not utterly delusive.  But Pearl's laugh, when she was
caught, though full of merriment and music, made her mother more
doubtful than before.

Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so
often came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had
bought so dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes
burst into passionate tears.  Then, perhaps--for there was no
foreseeing how it might affect her--Pearl would frown, and
clench her little fist, and harden her small features into a
stern, unsympathising look of discontent.  Not seldom she would
laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and
unintelligent of human sorrow.  Or--but this more rarely
happened--she would be convulsed with rage of grief and sob out
her love for her mother in broken words, and seem intent on
proving that she had a heart by breaking it.  Yet Hester was
hardly safe in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness: it
passed as suddenly as it came.  Brooding over all these matters,
the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some
irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win
the master-word that should control this new and
incomprehensible intelligence.  Her only real comfort was when
the child lay in the placidity of sleep.  Then she was sure of
her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness;
until--perhaps with that perverse expression glimmering from
beneath her opening lids--little Pearl awoke!

How soon--with what strange rapidity, indeed--did Pearl arrive at
an age that was capable of social intercourse beyond the
mother's ever-ready smile and nonsense-words!  And then what a
happiness would it have been could Hester Prynne have heard her
clear, bird-like voice mingling with the uproar of other
childish voices, and have distinguished and unravelled her own
darling's tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a group of
sportive children.  But this could never be.  Pearl was a born
outcast of the infantile world.  An imp of evil, emblem and
product of sin, she had no right among christened infants.
Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed,
with which the child comprehended her loneliness: the destiny
that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her: the whole
peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to other
children.  Never since her release from prison had Hester met the
public gaze without her.  In all her walks about the town, Pearl,
too, was there: first as the babe in arms, and afterwards as the
little girl, small companion of her mother, holding a forefinger
with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate of three or
four footsteps to one of Hester's.  She saw the children of the
settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the
domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions
as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to
church, perchance, or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in
a sham fight with the Indians, or scaring one another with
freaks of imitative witchcraft.  Pearl saw, and gazed intently,
but never sought to make acquaintance.  If spoken to, she would
not speak again.  If the children gathered about her, as they
sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny
wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill,
incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because
they had so much the sound of a witch's anathemas in some
unknown tongue.

The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most
intolerant brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of
something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary
fashions, in the mother and child, and therefore scorned them in
their hearts, and not unfrequently reviled them with their
tongues.  Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited it with the
bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a childish
bosom.  These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value,
and even comfort for the mother; because there was at least an
intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful
caprice that so often thwarted her in the child's
manifestations.  It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here,
again, a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in
herself.  All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by
inalienable right, out of Hester's heart.  Mother and daughter
stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human
society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated
those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before
Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the
softening influences of maternity.

At home, within and around her mother's cottage, Pearl wanted
not a wide and various circle of acquaintance.  The spell of life
went forth from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated
itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame
wherever it may be applied.  The unlikeliest materials--a stick,
a bunch of rags, a flower--were the puppets of Pearl's
witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became
spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her
inner world.  Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary
personages, old and young, to talk withal.  The pine-trees, aged,
black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy
utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure
as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their
children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted most unmercifully.
It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw
her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and
dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity--soon
sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of
life--and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy.  It
was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the
northern lights.  In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and
the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a little more
than was observable in other children of bright faculties;
except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was thrown
more upon the visionary throng which she created.  The
singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child
regarded all these offsprings of her own heart and mind.  She
never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast
the dragon's teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies,
against whom she rushed to battle.  It was inexpressibly
sad--then what depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own
heart the cause--to observe, in one so young, this constant
recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a training of the
energies that were to make good her cause in the contest that
must ensue.

Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her
knees, and cried out with an agony which she would fain have
hidden, but which made utterance for itself betwixt speech and a
groan--"O Father in Heaven--if Thou art still my Father--what is
this being which I have brought into the world?" And Pearl,
overhearing the ejaculation, or aware through some more subtile
channel, of those throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and
beautiful little face upon her mother, smile with sprite-like
intelligence, and resume her play.

One peculiarity of the child's deportment remains yet to be
told.  The very first thing which she had noticed in her life,
was--what?--not the mother's smile, responding to it, as other
babies do, by that faint, embryo smile of the little mouth,
remembered so doubtfully afterwards, and with such fond
discussion whether it were indeed a smile.  By no means!  But that
first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware was--shall we
say it?--the scarlet letter on Hester's bosom!  One day, as her
mother stooped over the cradle, the infant's eyes had been
caught by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the
letter; and putting up her little hand she grasped at it,
smiling, not doubtfully, but with a decided gleam, that gave her
face the look of a much older child.  Then, gasping for breath,
did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively
endeavouring to tear it away, so infinite was the torture
inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl's baby-hand.  Again,
as if her mother's agonised gesture were meant only to make
sport for her, did little Pearl look into her eyes, and smile.
From that epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester had
never felt a moment's safety: not a moment's calm enjoyment of
her.  Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during which
Pearl's gaze might never once be fixed upon the scarlet letter;
but then, again, it would come at unawares, like the stroke of
sudden death, and always with that peculiar smile and odd
expression of the eyes.

Once this freakish, elvish cast came into the child's eyes while
Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond
of doing; and suddenly--for women in solitude, and with troubled
hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions--she fancied
that she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another
face in the small black mirror of Pearl's eye.  It was a face,
fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of
features that she had known full well, though seldom with a
smile, and never with malice in them.  It was as if an evil
spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in
mockery.  Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though
less vividly, by the same illusion.

In the afternoon of a certain summer's day, after Pearl grew big
enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls
of wild flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother's
bosom; dancing up and down like a little elf whenever she hit
the scarlet letter.  Hester's first motion had been to cover her
bosom with her clasped hands.  But whether from pride or
resignation, or a feeling that her penance might best be wrought
out by this unutterable pain, she resisted the impulse, and sat
erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little Pearl's wild
eyes.  Still came the battery of flowers, almost invariably
hitting the mark, and covering the mother's breast with hurts
for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to
seek it in another.  At last, her shot being all expended, the
child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little laughing
image of a fiend peeping out--or, whether it peeped or no, her
mother so imagined it--from the unsearchable abyss of her black
eyes.

"Child, what art thou?" cried the mother.

"Oh, I am your little Pearl!" answered the child.

But while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and
down with the humoursome gesticulation of a little imp, whose
next freak might be to fly up the chimney.

"Art thou my child, in very truth?" asked Hester.

Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the
moment, with a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was
Pearl's wonderful intelligence, that her mother half doubted
whether she were not acquainted with the secret spell of her
existence, and might not now reveal herself.

"Yes; I am little Pearl!" repeated the child, continuing her
antics.

"Thou art not my child!  Thou art no Pearl of mine!" said the
mother half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive
impulse came over her in the midst of her deepest suffering.
"Tell me, then, what thou art, and who sent thee hither?"

"Tell me, mother!" said the child, seriously, coming up to
Hester, and pressing herself close to her knees.  "Do thou tell
me!"

"Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!" answered Hester Prynne.

But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the
acuteness of the child.  Whether moved only by her ordinary
freakishness, or because an evil spirit prompted her, she put up
her small forefinger and touched the scarlet letter.

"He did not send me!" cried she, positively.  "I have no Heavenly Father!"

"Hush, Pearl, hush!  Thou must not talk so!" answered the
mother, suppressing a groan.  "He sent us all into the world.  He
sent even me, thy mother.  Then, much more thee!  Or, if not, thou
strange and elfish child, whence didst thou come?"

"Tell me!  Tell me!" repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but
laughing and capering about the floor.  "It is thou that must
tell me!"

But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a
dismal labyrinth of doubt.  She remembered--betwixt a smile and a
shudder--the talk of the neighbouring townspeople, who, seeking
vainly elsewhere for the child's paternity, and observing some
of her odd attributes, had given out that poor little Pearl was
a demon offspring: such as, ever since old Catholic times, had
occasionally been seen on earth, through the agency of their
mother's sin, and to promote some foul and wicked purpose.
Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a
brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom
this inauspicious origin was assigned among the New England
Puritans.



VII.  THE GOVERNOR'S HALL

Hester Prynne went one day to the mansion of Governor
Bellingham, with a pair of gloves which she had fringed and
embroidered to his order, and which were to be worn on some
great occasion of state; for, though the chances of a popular
election had caused this former ruler to descend a step or two
from the highest rank, he still held an honourable and
influential place among the colonial magistracy.

Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a
pair of embroidered gloves, impelled Hester, at this time, to
seek an interview with a personage of so much power and activity
in the affairs of the settlement.  It had reached her ears that
there was a design on the part of some of the leading
inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of principles in
religion and government, to deprive her of her child.  On the
supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin,
these good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian
interest in the mother's soul required them to remove such a
stumbling-block from her path.  If the child, on the other hand,
were really capable of moral and religious growth, and possessed
the elements of ultimate salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy
all the fairer prospect of these advantages by being transferred
to wiser and better guardianship than Hester Prynne's.  Among
those who promoted the design, Governor Bellingham was said to
be one of the most busy.  It may appear singular, and, indeed,
not a little ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which in
later days would have been referred to no higher jurisdiction
than that of the select men of the town, should then have been a
question publicly discussed, and on which statesmen of eminence
took sides.  At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however,
matters of even slighter public interest, and of far less
intrinsic weight than the welfare of Hester and her child, were
strangely mixed up with the deliberations of legislators and
acts of state.  The period was hardly, if at all, earlier than
that of our story, when a dispute concerning the right of
property in a pig not only caused a fierce and bitter contest in
the legislative body of the colony, but resulted in an important
modification of the framework itself of the legislature.

Full of concern, therefore--but so conscious of her own right
that it seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public on
the one side, and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of
nature, on the other--Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary
cottage.  Little Pearl, of course, was her companion.  She was now
of an age to run lightly along by her mother's side, and,
constantly in motion from morn till sunset, could have
accomplished a much longer journey than that before her.  Often,
nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she demanded to
be taken up in arms; but was soon as imperious to be let down
again, and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway,
with many a harmless trip and tumble.  We have spoken of Pearl's
rich and luxuriant beauty--a beauty that shone with deep and
vivid tints, a bright complexion, eyes possessing intensity both
of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep, glossy brown, and
which, in after years, would be nearly akin to black.  There was
fire in her and throughout her: she seemed the unpremeditated
offshoot of a passionate moment.  Her mother, in contriving the
child's garb, had allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her
imagination their full play, arraying her in a crimson velvet
tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered in fantasies and
flourishes of gold thread.  So much strength of colouring, which
must have given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter
bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made her the
very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the
earth.

But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of
the child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and
inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester
Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom.  It was the scarlet
letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life!
The mother herself--as if the red ignominy were so deeply
scorched into her brain that all her conceptions assumed its
form--had carefully wrought out the similitude, lavishing many
hours of morbid ingenuity to create an analogy between the
object of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture.
But, in truth, Pearl was the one as well as the other; and only
in consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so
perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.

As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the
children of the Puritans looked up from their play,--or what
passed for play with those sombre little urchins--and spoke
gravely one to another.

"Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter: and
of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet
letter running along by her side!  Come, therefore, and let us
fling mud at them!"

But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping
her foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of
threatening gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her
enemies, and put them all to flight.  She resembled, in her
fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence--the scarlet fever,
or some such half-fledged angel of judgment--whose mission was
to punish the sins of the rising generation.  She screamed and
shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which, doubtless,
caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them.  The
victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and
looked up, smiling, into her face.

Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor
Bellingham.  This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of
which there are specimens still extant in the streets of our
older towns now moss-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy
at heart with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences,
remembered or forgotten, that have happened and passed away
within their dusky chambers.  Then, however, there was the
freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the
cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a human
habitation, into which death had never entered.  It had, indeed,
a very cheery aspect, the walls being overspread with a kind of
stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully
intermixed; so that, when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the
front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds
had been flung against it by the double handful.  The brilliancy
might have be fitted Aladdin's palace rather than the mansion of
a grave old Puritan ruler.  It was further decorated with strange
and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the
quaint taste of the age which had been drawn in the stucco, when
newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the
admiration of after times.

Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house began to caper
and dance, and imperatively required that the whole breadth of
sunshine should be stripped off its front, and given her to play
with.

"No, my little Pearl!" said her mother; "thou must gather thine
own sunshine.  I have none to give thee!"

They approached the door, which was of an arched form, and
flanked on each side by a narrow tower or projection of the
edifice, in both of which were lattice-windows, the wooden
shutters to close over them at need.  Lifting the iron hammer
that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne gave a summons, which was
answered by one of the Governor's bond servant--a free-born
Englishman, but now a seven years' slave.  During that term he
was to be the property of his master, and as much a commodity of
bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool.  The serf wore the
customary garb of serving-men at that period, and long before,
in the old hereditary halls of England.

"Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?" inquired Hester.

"Yea, forsooth," replied the bond-servant, staring with
wide-open eyes at the scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer
in the country, he had never before seen.  "Yea, his honourable
worship is within.  But he hath a godly minister or two with him,
and likewise a leech.  Ye may not see his worship now."

"Nevertheless, I will enter," answered Hester Prynne; and the
bond-servant, perhaps judging from the decision of her air, and
the glittering symbol in her bosom, that she was a great lady in
the land, offered no opposition.

So the mother and little Pearl were admitted into the hall of
entrance.  With many variations, suggested by the nature of his
building materials, diversity of climate, and a different mode
of social life, Governor Bellingham had planned his new
habitation after the residences of gentlemen of fair estate in
his native land.  Here, then, was a wide and reasonably lofty
hall, extending through the whole depth of the house, and
forming a medium of general communication, more or less
directly, with all the other apartments.  At one extremity, this
spacious room was lighted by the windows of the two towers,
which formed a small recess on either side of the portal.  At the
other end, though partly muffled by a curtain, it was more
powerfully illuminated by one of those embowed hall windows
which we read of in old books, and which was provided with a
deep and cushioned seat.  Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome,
probably of the Chronicles of England, or other such substantial
literature; even as, in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes
on the centre table, to be turned over by the casual guest.  The
furniture of the hall consisted of some ponderous chairs, the
backs of which were elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken
flowers; and likewise a table in the same taste, the whole being
of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and heirlooms,
transferred hither from the Governor's paternal home.  On the
table--in token that the sentiment of old English hospitality
had not been left behind--stood a large pewter tankard, at the
bottom of which, had Hester or Pearl peeped into it, they might
have seen the frothy remnant of a recent draught of ale.

On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the
forefathers of the Bellingham lineage, some with armour on their
breasts, and others with stately ruffs and robes of peace.  All
were characterised by the sternness and severity which old
portraits so invariably put on, as if they were the ghosts,
rather than the pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing
with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and
enjoyments of living men.

At about the centre of the oaken panels that lined the hall was
suspended a suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral
relic, but of the most modern date; for it had been manufactured
by a skilful armourer in London, the same year in which Governor
Bellingham came over to New England.  There was a steel
head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget and greaves, with a pair of
gauntlets and a sword hanging beneath; all, and especially the
helmet and breastplate, so highly burnished as to glow with
white radiance, and scatter an illumination everywhere about
upon the floor.  This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle
show, but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster
and training field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of
a regiment in the Pequod war.  For, though bred a lawyer, and
accustomed to speak of Bacon, Coke, Noye, and Finch, as his
professional associates, the exigencies of this new country had
transformed Governor Bellingham into a soldier, as well as a
statesman and ruler.

Little Pearl, who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming
armour as she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the
house, spent some time looking into the polished mirror of the
breastplate.

"Mother," cried she, "I see you here.  Look!  Look!"

Hester looked by way of humouring the child; and she saw that,
owing to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet
letter was represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions,
so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her
appearance.  In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it.
Pearl pointed upwards also, at a similar picture in the
head-piece; smiling at her mother, with the elfish intelligence
that was so familiar an expression on her small physiognomy.
That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in the
mirror, with so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it
made Hester Prynne feel as if it could not be the image of her
own child, but of an imp who was seeking to mould itself into
Pearl's shape.

"Come along, Pearl," said she, drawing her away, "Come and look
into this fair garden.  It may be we shall see flowers there;
more beautiful ones than we find in the woods."

Pearl accordingly ran to the bow-window, at the further end of
the hall, and looked along the vista of a garden walk, carpeted
with closely-shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and
immature attempt at shrubbery.  But the proprietor appeared
already to have relinquished as hopeless, the effort to
perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil, and
amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native English
taste for ornamental gardening.  Cabbages grew in plain sight;
and a pumpkin-vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the
intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products
directly beneath the hall window, as if to warn the Governor
that this great lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament
as New England earth would offer him.  There were a few
rose-bushes, however, and a number of apple-trees, probably the
descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the
first settler of the peninsula; that half mythological personage
who rides through our early annals, seated on the back of a
bull.

Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and
would not be pacified.

"Hush, child--hush!" said her mother, earnestly.  "Do not cry,
dear little Pearl!  I hear voices in the garden.  The Governor is
coming, and gentlemen along with him."

In fact, adown the vista of the garden avenue, a number of
persons were seen approaching towards the house.  Pearl, in utter
scorn of her mother's attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch
scream, and then became silent, not from any notion of
obedience, but because the quick and mobile curiosity of her
disposition was excited by the appearance of those new
personages.



VIII.  THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER

Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap--such as
elderly gentlemen loved to endue themselves with, in their
domestic privacy--walked foremost, and appeared to be showing
off his estate, and expatiating on his projected improvements.
The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff, beneath his grey
beard, in the antiquated fashion of King James's reign, caused
his head to look not a little like that of John the Baptist in a
charger.  The impression made by his aspect, so rigid and severe,
and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age, was hardly in
keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he
had evidently done his utmost to surround himself.  But it is an
error to suppose that our great forefathers--though accustomed
to speak and think of human existence as a state merely of trial
and warfare, and though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods
and life at the behest of duty--made it a matter of conscience
to reject such means of comfort, or even luxury, as lay fairly
within their grasp.  This creed was never taught, for instance,
by the venerable pastor, John Wilson, whose beard, white as a
snow-drift, was seen over Governor Bellingham's shoulders, while
its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might yet be
naturalised in the New England climate, and that purple grapes
might possibly be compelled to flourish against the sunny
garden-wall.  The old clergyman, nurtured at the rich bosom of
the English Church, had a long established and legitimate taste
for all good and comfortable things, and however stern he might
show himself in the pulpit, or in his public reproof of such
transgressions as that of Hester Prynne, still, the genial
benevolence of his private life had won him warmer affection
than was accorded to any of his professional contemporaries.

Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests--one,
the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember as
having taken a brief and reluctant part in the scene of Hester
Prynne's disgrace; and, in close companionship with him, old
Roger Chillingworth, a person of great skill in physic, who for
two or three years past had been settled in the town.  It was
understood that this learned man was the physician as well as
friend of the young minister, whose health had severely suffered
of late by his too unreserved self-sacrifice to the labours and
duties of the pastoral relation.

The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two
steps, and, throwing open the leaves of the great hall window,
found himself close to little Pearl.  The shadow of the curtain
fell on Hester Prynne, and partially concealed her.

"What have we here?" said Governor Bellingham, looking with
surprise at the scarlet little figure before him.  "I profess, I
have never seen the like since my days of vanity, in old King
James's time, when I was wont to esteem it a high favour to be
admitted to a court mask!  There used to be a swarm of these
small apparitions in holiday time, and we called them children
of the Lord of Misrule.  But how gat such a guest into my hall?"

"Ay, indeed!" cried good old Mr. Wilson.  "What little bird of
scarlet plumage may this be?  Methinks I have seen just such
figures when the sun has been shining through a richly painted
window, and tracing out the golden and crimson images across the
floor.  But that was in the old land.  Prithee, young one, who art
thou, and what has ailed thy mother to bedizen thee in this
strange fashion?  Art thou a Christian child--ha?  Dost know thy
catechism?  Or art thou one of those naughty elfs or fairies whom
we thought to have left behind us, with other relics of
Papistry, in merry old England?"

"I am mother's child," answered the scarlet vision, "and my name
is Pearl!"

"Pearl?--Ruby, rather--or Coral!--or Red Rose, at the very
least, judging from thy hue!" responded the old minister,
putting forth his hand in a vain attempt to pat little Pearl on
the cheek.  "But where is this mother of thine?  Ah!  I see," he
added; and, turning to Governor Bellingham, whispered, "This is
the selfsame child of whom we have held speech together; and
behold here the unhappy woman, Hester Prynne, her mother!"

"Sayest thou so?" cried the Governor.  "Nay, we might have
judged that such a child's mother must needs be a scarlet woman,
and a worthy type of her of Babylon!  But she comes at a good
time, and we will look into this matter forthwith."

Governor Bellingham stepped through the window into the hall,
followed by his three guests.

"Hester Prynne," said he, fixing his naturally stern regard on
the wearer of the scarlet letter, "there hath been much question
concerning thee of late.  The point hath been weightily
discussed, whether we, that are of authority and influence, do
well discharge our consciences by trusting an immortal soul,
such as there is in yonder child, to the guidance of one who
hath stumbled and fallen amid the pitfalls of this world.  Speak
thou, the child's own mother!  Were it not, thinkest thou, for
thy little one's temporal and eternal welfare that she be taken
out of thy charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly,
and instructed in the truths of heaven and earth?  What canst
thou do for the child in this kind?"

"I can teach my little Pearl what I have learned from this!"
answered Hester Prynne, laying her finger on the red token.

"Woman, it is thy badge of shame!" replied the stern magistrate.
"It is because of the stain which that letter indicates that we
would transfer thy child to other hands."

"Nevertheless," said the mother, calmly, though growing more
pale, "this badge hath taught me--it daily teaches me--it is
teaching me at this moment--lessons whereof my child may be the
wiser and better, albeit they can profit nothing to myself."

"We will judge warily," said Bellingham, "and look well what we
are about to do.  Good Master Wilson, I pray you, examine this
Pearl--since that is her name--and see whether she hath had such
Christian nurture as befits a child of her age."

The old minister seated himself in an arm-chair and made an
effort to draw Pearl betwixt his knees.  But the child,
unaccustomed to the touch or familiarity of any but her mother,
escaped through the open window, and stood on the upper step,
looking like a wild tropical bird of rich plumage, ready to take
flight into the upper air.  Mr. Wilson, not a little astonished
at this outbreak--for he was a grandfatherly sort of personage,
and usually a vast favourite with children--essayed, however, to
proceed with the examination.

"Pearl," said he, with great solemnity, "thou must take heed to
instruction, that so, in due season, thou mayest wear in thy
bosom the pearl of great price.  Canst thou tell me, my child,
who made thee?"

Now Pearl knew well enough who made her, for Hester Prynne, the
daughter of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the
child about her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of
those truths which the human spirit, at whatever stage of
immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest.  Pearl,
therefore--so large were the attainments of her three years'
lifetime--could have borne a fair examination in the New England
Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechisms,
although unacquainted with the outward form of either of those
celebrated works.  But that perversity, which all children have
more or less of, and of which little Pearl had a tenfold
portion, now, at the most inopportune moment, took thorough
possession of her, and closed her lips, or impelled her to speak
words amiss.  After putting her finger in her mouth, with many
ungracious refusals to answer good Mr. Wilson's question, the
child finally announced that she had not been made at all, but
had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses that
grew by the prison-door.

This phantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of
the Governor's red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window,
together with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which
she had passed in coming hither.

Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his face, whispered
something in the young clergyman's ear.  Hester Prynne looked at
the man of skill, and even then, with her fate hanging in the
balance, was startled to perceive what a change had come over
his features--how much uglier they were, how his dark complexion
seemed to have grown duskier, and his figure more
misshapen--since the days when she had familiarly known him.  She
met his eyes for an instant, but was immediately constrained to
give all her attention to the scene now going forward.

"This is awful!" cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the
astonishment into which Pearl's response had thrown him.  "Here
is a child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her!
Without question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its
present depravity, and future destiny!  Methinks, gentlemen, we
need inquire no further."

Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her
arms, confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a
fierce expression.  Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with
this sole treasure to keep her heart alive, she felt that she
possessed indefeasible rights against the world, and was ready
to defend them to the death.

"God gave me the child!" cried she.  "He gave her in requital of
all things else which ye had taken from me.  She is my
happiness--she is my torture, none the less!  Pearl keeps me here
in life!  Pearl punishes me, too!  See ye not, she is the scarlet
letter, only capable of being loved, and so endowed with a
millionfold the power of retribution for my sin?  Ye shall not
take her!  I will die first!"

"My poor woman," said the not unkind old minister, "the child
shall be well cared for--far better than thou canst do for it."

"God gave her into my keeping!" repeated Hester Prynne, raising
her voice almost to a shriek.  "I will not give her up!"  And here
by a sudden impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr.
Dimmesdale, at whom, up to this moment, she had seemed hardly so
much as once to direct her eyes.  "Speak thou for me!" cried she.
"Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest
me better than these men can.  I will not lose the child!  Speak
for me!  Thou knowest--for thou hast sympathies which these men
lack--thou knowest what is in my heart, and what are a mother's
rights, and how much the stronger they are when that mother has
but her child and the scarlet letter!  Look thou to it!  I will
not lose the child!  Look to it!"

At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated that Hester
Prynne's situation had provoked her to little less than madness,
the young minister at once came forward, pale, and holding his
hand over his heart, as was his custom whenever his peculiarly
nervous temperament was thrown into agitation.  He looked now
more careworn and emaciated than as we described him at the
scene of Hester's public ignominy; and whether it were his
failing health, or whatever the cause might be, his large dark
eyes had a world of pain in their troubled and melancholy depth.

"There is truth in what she says," began the minister, with a
voice sweet, tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall
re-echoed and the hollow armour rang with it--"truth in what
Hester says, and in the feeling which inspires her!  God gave her
the child, and gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of its
nature and requirements--both seemingly so peculiar--which no
other mortal being can possess.  And, moreover, is there not a
quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this mother
and this child?"

"Ay--how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?" interrupted the
Governor.  "Make that plain, I pray you!"

"It must be even so," resumed the minister.  "For, if we deem it
otherwise, do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the
creator of all flesh, hath lightly recognised a deed of sin, and
made of no account the distinction between unhallowed lust and
holy love?  This child of its father's guilt and its mother's
shame has come from the hand of God, to work in many ways upon
her heart, who pleads so earnestly and with such bitterness of
spirit the right to keep her.  It was meant for a blessing--for
the one blessing of her life!  It was meant, doubtless, the
mother herself hath told us, for a retribution, too; a torture
to be felt at many an unthought-of moment; a pang, a sting, an
ever-recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled joy!  Hath she
not expressed this thought in the garb of the poor child, so
forcibly reminding us of that red symbol which sears her bosom?"

"Well said again!" cried good Mr. Wilson.  "I feared the woman
had no better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!"

"Oh, not so!--not so!" continued Mr. Dimmesdale.  "She
recognises, believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath
wrought in the existence of that child.  And may she feel,
too--what, methinks, is the very truth--that this boon was
meant, above all things else, to keep the mother's soul alive,
and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan
might else have sought to plunge her!  Therefore it is good for
this poor, sinful woman, that she hath an infant immortality, a
being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care--to
be trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her, at every
moment, of her fall, but yet to teach her, as if it were by the
Creator's sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven,
the child also will bring its parents thither!  Herein is the
sinful mother happier than the sinful father.  For Hester
Prynne's sake, then, and no less for the poor child's sake, let
us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place them!"

"You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness," said old
Roger Chillingworth, smiling at him.

"And there is a weighty import in what my young brother hath
spoken," added the Rev.  Mr. Wilson.

"What say you, worshipful Master Bellingham?  Hath he not
pleaded well for the poor woman?"

"Indeed hath he," answered the magistrate; "and hath adduced
such arguments, that we will even leave the matter as it now
stands; so long, at least, as there shall be no further scandal
in the woman.  Care must be had nevertheless, to put the child to
due and stated examination in the catechism, at thy hands or
Master Dimmesdale's.  Moreover, at a proper season, the
tithing-men must take heed that she go both to school and to
meeting."

The young minister, on ceasing to speak had withdrawn a few
steps from the group, and stood with his face partially
concealed in the heavy folds of the window-curtain; while the
shadow of his figure, which the sunlight cast upon the floor,
was tremulous with the vehemence of his appeal.  Pearl, that wild
and flighty little elf stole softly towards him, and taking his
hand in the grasp of both her own, laid her cheek against it; a
caress so tender, and withal so unobtrusive, that her mother,
who was looking on, asked herself--"Is that my Pearl?" Yet she
knew that there was love in the child's heart, although it
mostly revealed itself in passion, and hardly twice in her
lifetime had been softened by such gentleness as now.  The
minister--for, save the long-sought regards of woman, nothing is
sweeter than these marks of childish preference, accorded
spontaneously by a spiritual instinct, and therefore seeming to
imply in us something truly worthy to be loved--the minister
looked round, laid his hand on the child's head, hesitated an
instant, and then kissed her brow.  Little Pearl's unwonted mood
of sentiment lasted no longer; she laughed, and went capering
down the hall so airily, that old Mr. Wilson raised a question
whether even her tiptoes touched the floor.

"The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess," said he
to Mr. Dimmesdale.  "She needs no old woman's broomstick to fly
withal!"

"A strange child!" remarked old Roger Chillingworth.  "It is
easy to see the mother's part in her.  Would it be beyond a
philosopher's research, think ye, gentlemen, to analyse that
child's nature, and, from it make a mould, to give a shrewd
guess at the father?"

"Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to follow the clue
of profane philosophy," said Mr. Wilson.  "Better to fast and
pray upon it; and still better, it may be, to leave the mystery
as we find it, unless Providence reveal it of its own accord.
Thereby, every good Christian man hath a title to show a
father's kindness towards the poor, deserted babe."

The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne,
with Pearl, departed from the house.  As they descended the
steps, it is averred that the lattice of a chamber-window was
thrown open, and forth into the sunny day was thrust the face of
Mistress Hibbins, Governor Bellingham's bitter-tempered sister,
and the same who, a few years later, was executed as a witch.

"Hist, hist!" said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed
to cast a shadow over the cheerful newness of the house.  "Wilt
thou go with us to-night?  There will be a merry company in the
forest; and I well-nigh promised the Black Man that comely
Hester Prynne should make one."

"Make my excuse to him, so please you!" answered Hester, with a
triumphant smile.  "I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my
little Pearl.  Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have
gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black
Man's book too, and that with mine own blood!"

"We shall have thee there anon!" said the witch-lady, frowning,
as she drew back her head.

But here--if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins
and Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable--was
already an illustration of the young minister's argument against
sundering the relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of
her frailty.  Even thus early had the child saved her from
Satan's snare.



IX.  THE LEECH

Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth, the reader will
remember, was hidden another name, which its former wearer had
resolved should never more be spoken.  It has been related, how,
in the crowd that witnessed Hester Prynne's ignominious
exposure, stood a man, elderly, travel-worn, who, just emerging
from the perilous wilderness, beheld the woman, in whom he hoped
to find embodied the warmth and cheerfulness of home, set up as
a type of sin before the people.  Her matronly fame was trodden
under all men's feet.  Infamy was babbling around her in the
public market-place.  For her kindred, should the tidings ever
reach them, and for the companions of her unspotted life, there
remained nothing but the contagion of her dishonour; which would
not fail to be distributed in strict accordance and proportion
with the intimacy and sacredness of their previous relationship.
Then why--since the choice was with himself--should the
individual, whose connexion with the fallen woman had been the
most intimate and sacred of them all, come forward to vindicate
his claim to an inheritance so little desirable?  He resolved not
to be pilloried beside her on her pedestal of shame.  Unknown to
all but Hester Prynne, and possessing the lock and key of her
silence, he chose to withdraw his name from the roll of mankind,
and, as regarded his former ties and interest, to vanish out of
life as completely as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the
ocean, whither rumour had long ago consigned him.  This purpose
once effected, new interests would immediately spring up, and
likewise a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of
force enough to engage the full strength of his faculties.

In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the
Puritan town as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction
than the learning and intelligence of which he possessed more
than a common measure.  As his studies, at a previous period of
his life, had made him extensively acquainted with the medical
science of the day, it was as a physician that he presented
himself and as such was cordially received.  Skilful men, of the
medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence in
the colony.  They seldom, it would appear, partook of the
religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic.
In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the
higher and more subtle faculties of such men were materialised,
and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the
intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve
art enough to comprise all of life within itself.  At all events,
the health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had
aught to do with it, had hitherto lain in the guardianship of an
aged deacon and apothecary, whose piety and godly deportment
were stronger testimonials in his favour than any that he could
have produced in the shape of a diploma.  The only surgeon was
one who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with
the daily and habitual flourish of a razor.  To such a
professional body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant
acquisition.  He soon manifested his familiarity with the
ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which
every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and
heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the
proposed result had been the Elixir of Life.  In his Indian
captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the
properties of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from
his patients that these simple medicines, Nature's boon to the
untutored savage, had quite as large a share of his own
confidence as the European Pharmacopoeia, which so many learned
doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.

This learned stranger was exemplary as regarded at least the
outward forms of a religious life; and early after his arrival,
had chosen for his spiritual guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.
The young divine, whose scholar-like renown still lived in
Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little
less than a heavenly ordained apostle, destined, should he live
and labour for the ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds,
for the now feeble New England Church, as the early Fathers had
achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith.  About this
period, however, the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently
begun to fail.  By those best acquainted with his habits, the
paleness of the young minister's cheek was accounted for by his
too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of
parochial duty, and more than all, to the fasts and vigils of
which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the
grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his
spiritual lamp.  Some declared, that if Mr. Dimmesdale were
really going to die, it was cause enough that the world was not
worthy to be any longer trodden by his feet.  He himself, on the
other hand, with characteristic humility, avowed his belief that
if Providence should see fit to remove him, it would be because
of his own unworthiness to perform its humblest mission here on
earth.  With all this difference of opinion as to the cause of
his decline, there could be no question of the fact.  His form
grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a
certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often
observed, on any slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put
his hand over his heart with first a flush and then a paleness,
indicative of pain.

Such was the young clergyman's condition, and so imminent the
prospect that his dawning light would be extinguished, all
untimely, when Roger Chillingworth made his advent to the town.
His first entry on the scene, few people could tell whence,
dropping down as it were out of the sky or starting from the
nether earth, had an aspect of mystery, which was easily
heightened to the miraculous.  He was now known to be a man of
skill; it was observed that he gathered herbs and the blossoms
of wild-flowers, and dug up roots and plucked off twigs from the
forest-trees like one acquainted with hidden virtues in what was
valueless to common eyes.  He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm
Digby and other famous men--whose scientific attainments were
esteemed hardly less than supernatural--as having been his
correspondents or associates.  Why, with such rank in the learned
world, had he come hither?  What, could he, whose sphere was in
great cities, be seeking in the wilderness?  In answer to this
query, a rumour gained ground--and however absurd, was
entertained by some very sensible people--that Heaven had
wrought an absolute miracle, by transporting an eminent Doctor
of Physic from a German university bodily through the air and
setting him down at the door of Mr. Dimmesdale's study!
Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who knew that Heaven
promotes its purposes without aiming at the stage-effect of what
is called miraculous interposition, were inclined to see a
providential hand in Roger Chillingworth's so opportune arrival.

This idea was countenanced by the strong interest which the
physician ever manifested in the young clergyman; he attached
himself to him as a parishioner, and sought to win a friendly
regard and confidence from his naturally reserved sensibility.
He expressed great alarm at his pastor's state of health, but
was anxious to attempt the cure, and, if early undertaken,
seemed not despondent of a favourable result.  The elders, the
deacons, the motherly dames, and the young and fair maidens of
Mr. Dimmesdale's flock, were alike importunate that he should
make trial of the physician's frankly offered skill.  Mr.
Dimmesdale gently repelled their entreaties.

"I need no medicine," said he.

But how could the young minister say so, when, with every
successive Sabbath, his cheek was paler and thinner, and his
voice more tremulous than before--when it had now become a
constant habit, rather than a casual gesture, to press his hand
over his heart?  Was he weary of his labours?  Did he wish to die?
These questions were solemnly propounded to Mr. Dimmesdale by
the elder ministers of Boston, and the deacons of his church,
who, to use their own phrase, "dealt with him," on the sin of
rejecting the aid which Providence so manifestly held out.  He
listened in silence, and finally promised to confer with the
physician.

"Were it God's will," said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, when, in
fulfilment of this pledge, he requested old Roger
Chillingworth's professional advice, "I could be well content
that my labours, and my sorrows, and my sins, and my pains,
should shortly end with me, and what is earthly of them be
buried in my grave, and the spiritual go with me to my eternal
state, rather than that you should put your skill to the proof
in my behalf."

"Ah," replied Roger Chillingworth, with that quietness, which,
whether imposed or natural, marked all his deportment, "it is
thus that a young clergyman is apt to speak.  Youthful men, not
having taken a deep root, give up their hold of life so easily!
And saintly men, who walk with God on earth, would fain be away,
to walk with him on the golden pavements of the New Jerusalem."

"Nay," rejoined the young minister, putting his hand to his
heart, with a flush of pain flitting over his brow, "were I
worthier to walk there, I could be better content to toil here."

"Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly," said the
physician.

In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became
the medical adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.  As not only
the disease interested the physician, but he was strongly moved
to look into the character and qualities of the patient, these
two men, so different in age, came gradually to spend much time
together.  For the sake of the minister's health, and to enable
the leech to gather plants with healing balm in them, they took
long walks on the sea-shore, or in the forest; mingling various
walks with the splash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn
wind-anthem among the tree-tops.  Often, likewise, one was the
guest of the other in his place of study and retirement.  There
was a fascination for the minister in the company of the man of
science, in whom he recognised an intellectual cultivation of no
moderate depth or scope; together with a range and freedom of
ideas, that he would have vainly looked for among the members of
his own profession.  In truth, he was startled, if not shocked,
to find this attribute in the physician.  Mr. Dimmesdale was a
true priest, a true religionist, with the reverential sentiment
largely developed, and an order of mind that impelled itself
powerfully along the track of a creed, and wore its passage
continually deeper with the lapse of time.  In no state of
society would he have been what is called a man of liberal
views; it would always be essential to his peace to feel the
pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it confined him
within its iron framework.  Not the less, however, though with a
tremulous enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of
looking at the universe through the medium of another kind of
intellect than those with which he habitually held converse.  It
was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer
atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was
wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed day-beams,
and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales
from books.  But the air was too fresh and chill to be long
breathed with comfort.  So the minister, and the physician with
him, withdrew again within the limits of what their Church
defined as orthodox.

Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinised his patient carefully, both
as he saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed
pathway in the range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he
appeared when thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of
which might call out something new to the surface of his
character.  He deemed it essential, it would seem, to know the
man, before attempting to do him good.  Wherever there is a heart
and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged
with the peculiarities of these.  In Arthur Dimmesdale, thought
and imagination were so active, and sensibility so intense, that
the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its groundwork
there.  So Roger Chillingworth--the man of skill, the kind and
friendly physician--strove to go deep into his patient's bosom,
delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and
probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker
in a dark cavern.  Few secrets can escape an investigator, who
has opportunity and licence to undertake such a quest, and skill
to follow it up.  A man burdened with a secret should especially
avoid the intimacy of his physician.  If the latter possess
native sagacity, and a nameless something more,--let us call it
intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable
prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power,
which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have
spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such
revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so
often by an uttered sympathy as by silence, an inarticulate
breath, and here and there a word to indicate that all is
understood; if to these qualifications of a confidant be joined
the advantages afforded by his recognised character as a
physician;--then, at some inevitable moment, will the soul of
the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark but
transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the
daylight.

Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most, of the attributes
above enumerated.  Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of
intimacy, as we have said, grew up between these two cultivated
minds, which had as wide a field as the whole sphere of human
thought and study to meet upon; they discussed every topic of
ethics and religion, of public affairs, and private character;
they talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal
to themselves; and yet no secret, such as the physician fancied
must exist there, ever stole out of the minister's consciousness
into his companion's ear.  The latter had his suspicions, indeed,
that even the nature of Mr. Dimmesdale's bodily disease had
never fairly been revealed to him.  It was a strange reserve!

After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the friends of
Mr. Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two were
lodged in the same house; so that every ebb and flow of the
minister's life-tide might pass under the eye of his anxious and
attached physician.  There was much joy throughout the town when
this greatly desirable object was attained.  It was held to be
the best possible measure for the young clergyman's welfare;
unless, indeed, as often urged by such as felt authorised to do
so, he had selected some one of the many blooming damsels,
spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted wife.  This
latter step, however, there was no present prospect that Arthur
Dimmesdale would be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all
suggestions of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were one of his
articles of Church discipline.  Doomed by his own choice,
therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his
unsavoury morsel always at another's board, and endure the
life-long chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself
only at another's fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious,
experienced, benevolent old physician, with his concord of
paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very
man, of all mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice.

The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good
social rank, who dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the
site on which the venerable structure of King's Chapel has since
been built.  It had the graveyard, originally Isaac Johnson's
home-field, on one side, and so was well adapted to call up
serious reflections, suited to their respective employments, in
both minister and man of physic.  The motherly care of the good
widow assigned to Mr. Dimmesdale a front apartment, with a sunny
exposure, and heavy window-curtains, to create a noontide shadow
when desirable.  The walls were hung round with tapestry, said to
be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events, representing the
Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet,
in colours still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the
scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer.
Here the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with
parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis,
and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even
while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet
constrained often to avail themselves.  On the other side of the
house, old Roger Chillingworth arranged his study and
laboratory: not such as a modern man of science would reckon
even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling
apparatus and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals,
which the practised alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose.
With such commodiousness of situation, these two learned persons
sat themselves down, each in his own domain, yet familiarly
passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual
and not incurious inspection into one another's business.

And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning friends, as
we have intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of
Providence had done all this for the purpose--besought in so
many public and domestic and secret prayers--of restoring the
young minister to health.  But, it must now be said, another
portion of the community had latterly begun to take its own view
of the relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and the mysterious old
physician.  When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with
its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived.  When, however,
it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of
its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are
often so profound and so unerring as to possess the character of
truth supernaturally revealed.  The people, in the case of which
we speak, could justify its prejudice against Roger
Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy of serious
refutation.  There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true, who
had been a citizen of London at the period of Sir Thomas
Overbury's murder, now some thirty years agone; he testified to
having seen the physician, under some other name, which the
narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with Dr.
Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was implicated in the
affair of Overbury.  Two or three individuals hinted that the man
of skill, during his Indian captivity, had enlarged his medical
attainments by joining in the incantations of the savage
priests, who were universally acknowledged to be powerful
enchanters, often performing seemingly miraculous cures by their
skill in the black art.  A large number--and many of these were
persons of such sober sense and practical observation that their
opinions would have been valuable in other matters--affirmed
that Roger Chillingworth's aspect had undergone a remarkable
change while he had dwelt in town, and especially since his
abode with Mr. Dimmesdale.  At first, his expression had been
calm, meditative, scholar-like.  Now there was something ugly and
evil in his face, which they had not previously noticed, and
which grew still the more obvious to sight the oftener they
looked upon him.  According to the vulgar idea, the fire in his
laboratory had been brought from the lower regions, and was fed
with infernal fuel; and so, as might be expected, his visage was
getting sooty with the smoke.

To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion
that the Rev.  Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of
special sanctity, in all ages of the Christian world, was
haunted either by Satan himself or Satan's emissary, in the
guise of old Roger Chillingworth.  This diabolical agent had the
Divine permission, for a season, to burrow into the clergyman's
intimacy, and plot against his soul.  No sensible man, it was
confessed, could doubt on which side the victory would turn.  The
people looked, with an unshaken hope, to see the minister come
forth out of the conflict transfigured with the glory which he
would unquestionably win.  Meanwhile, nevertheless, it was sad to
think of the perchance mortal agony through which he must
struggle towards his triumph.

Alas!  to judge from the gloom and terror in the depth of the
poor minister's eyes, the battle was a sore one, and the victory
anything but secure.



X.  THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT

Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in
temperament, kindly, though not of warm affections, but ever,
and in all his relations with the world, a pure and upright man.
He had begun an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe
and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as
if the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and
figures of a geometrical problem, instead of human passions, and
wrongs inflicted on himself.  But, as he proceeded, a terrible
fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity,
seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free
again until he had done all its bidding.  He now dug into the
poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for gold; or,
rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of
a jewel that had been buried on the dead man's bosom, but likely
to find nothing save mortality and corruption.  Alas, for his own
soul, if these were what he sought!

Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning
blue and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us
say, like one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from
Bunyan's awful doorway in the hillside, and quivered on the
pilgrim's face.  The soil where this dark miner was working had
perchance shown indications that encouraged him.

"This man," said he, at one such moment, to himself, "pure as
they deem him--all spiritual as he seems--hath inherited a
strong animal nature from his father or his mother.  Let us dig a
little further in the direction of this vein!"

Then after long search into the minister's dim interior, and
turning over many precious materials, in the shape of high
aspirations for the welfare of his race, warm love of souls,
pure sentiments, natural piety, strengthened by thought and
study, and illuminated by revelation--all of which invaluable
gold was perhaps no better than rubbish to the seeker--he would
turn back, discouraged, and begin his quest towards another
point.  He groped along as stealthily, with as cautious a tread,
and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber where a
man lies only half asleep--or, it may be, broad awake--with
purpose to steal the very treasure which this man guards as the
apple of his eye.  In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the
floor would now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the
shadow of his presence, in a forbidden proximity, would be
thrown across his victim.  In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale, whose
sensibility of nerve often produced the effect of spiritual
intuition, would become vaguely aware that something inimical to
his peace had thrust itself into relation with him.  But Old
Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were almost
intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled eyes towards
him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathising,
but never intrusive friend.

Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual's
character more perfectly, if a certain morbidness, to which sick
hearts are liable, had not rendered him suspicious of all
mankind.  Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize
his enemy when the latter actually appeared.  He therefore still
kept up a familiar intercourse with him, daily receiving the old
physician in his study, or visiting the laboratory, and, for
recreation's sake, watching the processes by which weeds were
converted into drugs of potency.

One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the
sill of the open window, that looked towards the grave-yard, he
talked with Roger Chillingworth, while the old man was examining
a bundle of unsightly plants.

"Where," asked he, with a look askance at them--for it was the
clergyman's peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked
straight forth at any object, whether human or inanimate,
"where, my kind doctor, did you gather those herbs, with such a
dark, flabby leaf?"

"Even in the graveyard here at hand," answered the physician,
continuing his employment.  "They are new to me.  I found them
growing on a grave, which bore no tombstone, no other memorial
of the dead man, save these ugly weeds, that have taken upon
themselves to keep him in remembrance.  They grew out of his
heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was
buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during
his lifetime."

"Perchance," said Mr. Dimmesdale, "he earnestly desired it, but
could not."

"And wherefore?" rejoined the physician.

"Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly
for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up
out of a buried heart, to make manifest, an outspoken crime?"

"That, good sir, is but a phantasy of yours," replied the
minister.  "There can be, if I forbode aright, no power, short of
the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by
type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried in the human
heart.  The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must
perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall
be revealed.  Nor have I so read or interpreted Holy Writ, as to
understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds, then
to be made, is intended as a part of the retribution.  That,
surely, were a shallow view of it.  No; these revelations, unless
I greatly err, are meant merely to promote the intellectual
satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting,
on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain.  A
knowledge of men's hearts will be needful to the completest
solution of that problem.  And, I conceive moreover, that the
hearts holding such miserable secrets as you speak of, will
yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a
joy unutterable."

"Then why not reveal it here?" asked Roger Chillingworth,
glancing quietly aside at the minister.  "Why should not the
guilty ones sooner avail themselves of this unutterable solace?"

"They mostly do," said the clergyman, griping hard at his
breast, as if afflicted with an importunate throb of pain.
"Many, many a poor soul hath given its confidence to me, not
only on the death-bed, but while strong in life, and fair in
reputation.  And ever, after such an outpouring, oh, what a
relief have I witnessed in those sinful brethren! even as in one
who at last draws free air, after a long stifling with his own
polluted breath.  How can it be otherwise?  Why should a wretched
man--guilty, we will say, of murder--prefer to keep the dead
corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at
once, and let the universe take care of it!"

"Yet some men bury their secrets thus," observed the calm
physician.

"True; there are such men," answered Mr. Dimmesdale.  "But not
to suggest more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept
silent by the very constitution of their nature.  Or--can we not
suppose it?--guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a
zeal for God's glory and man's welfare, they shrink from
displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men;
because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil
of the past be redeemed by better service.  So, to their own
unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures,
looking pure as new-fallen snow, while their hearts are all
speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid
themselves."

"These men deceive themselves," said Roger Chillingworth, with
somewhat more emphasis than usual, and making a slight gesture
with his forefinger.  "They fear to take up the shame that
rightfully belongs to them.  Their love for man, their zeal for
God's service--these holy impulses may or may not coexist in
their hearts with the evil inmates to which their guilt has
unbarred the door, and which must needs propagate a hellish
breed within them.  But, if they seek to glorify God, let them
not lift heavenward their unclean hands!  If they would serve
their fellowmen, let them do it by making manifest the power and
reality of conscience, in constraining them to penitential
self-abasement!  Would thou have me to believe, O wise and pious
friend, that a false show can be better--can be more for God's
glory, or man' welfare--than God's own truth?  Trust me, such men
deceive themselves!"

"It may be so," said the young clergyman, indifferently, as
waiving a discussion that he considered irrelevant or
unseasonable.  He had a ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from
any topic that agitated his too sensitive and nervous
temperament.--"But, now, I would ask of my well-skilled
physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have profited
by his kindly care of this weak frame of mine?"

Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear,
wild laughter of a young child's voice, proceeding from the
adjacent burial-ground.  Looking instinctively from the open
window--for it was summer-time--the minister beheld Hester
Prynne and little Pearl passing along the footpath that
traversed the enclosure.  Pearl looked as beautiful as the day,
but was in one of those moods of perverse merriment which,
whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her entirely out of the
sphere of sympathy or human contact.  She now skipped
irreverently from one grave to another; until coming to the
broad, flat, armorial tombstone of a departed worthy--perhaps of
Isaac Johnson himself--she began to dance upon it.  In reply to
her mother's command and entreaty that she would behave more
decorously, little Pearl paused to gather the prickly burrs from
a tall burdock which grew beside the tomb.  Taking a handful of
these, she arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter
that decorated the maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their
nature was, tenaciously adhered.  Hester did not pluck them off.

Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached the window and
smiled grimly down.

"There is no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for
human ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that
child's composition," remarked he, as much to himself as to his
companion.  "I saw her, the other day, bespatter the Governor
himself with water at the cattle-trough in Spring Lane.  What, in
heaven's name, is she?  Is the imp altogether evil?  Hath she
affections?  Hath she any discoverable principle of being?"

"None, save the freedom of a broken law," answered Mr.
Dimmesdale, in a quiet way, as if he had been discussing the
point within himself, "Whether capable of good, I know not."

The child probably overheard their voices, for, looking up to
the window with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and
intelligence, she threw one of the prickly burrs at the Rev.  Mr.
Dimmesdale.  The sensitive clergyman shrank, with nervous dread,
from the light missile.  Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped her
little hands in the most extravagant ecstacy.  Hester Prynne,
likewise, had involuntarily looked up, and all these four
persons, old and young, regarded one another in silence, till
the child laughed aloud, and shouted--"Come away, mother!  Come
away, or yonder old black man will catch you!  He hath got hold
of the minister already.  Come away, mother or he will catch you!
But he cannot catch little Pearl!"

So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking
fantastically among the hillocks of the dead people, like a
creature that had nothing in common with a bygone and buried
generation, nor owned herself akin to it.  It was as if she had
been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be
permitted to live her own life, and be a law unto herself
without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime.

"There goes a woman," resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a
pause, "who, be her demerits what they may, hath none of that
mystery of hidden sinfulness which you deem so grievous to be
borne.  Is Hester Prynne the less miserable, think you, for that
scarlet letter on her breast?"

"I do verily believe it," answered the clergyman.
"Nevertheless, I cannot answer for her.  There was a look of pain
in her face which I would gladly have been spared the sight of.
But still, methinks, it must needs be better for the sufferer to
be free to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to
cover it up in his heart."

There was another pause, and the physician began anew to examine
and arrange the plants which he had gathered.

"You inquired of me, a little time agone," said he, at length,
"my judgment as touching your health."

"I did," answered the clergyman, "and would gladly learn it.
Speak frankly, I pray you, be it for life or death."

"Freely then, and plainly," said the physician, still busy with
his plants, but keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, "the
disorder is a strange one; not so much in itself nor as
outwardly manifested,--in so far, at least as the symptoms have
been laid open to my observation.  Looking daily at you, my good
sir, and watching the tokens of your aspect now for months gone
by, I should deem you a man sore sick, it may be, yet not so
sick but that an instructed and watchful physician might well
hope to cure you.  But I know not what to say, the disease is
what I seem to know, yet know it not."

"You speak in riddles, learned sir," said the pale minister,
glancing aside out of the window.

"Then, to speak more plainly," continued the physician, "and I
crave pardon, sir, should it seem to require pardon, for this
needful plainness of my speech.  Let me ask as your friend, as
one having charge, under Providence, of your life and physical
well being, hath all the operations of this disorder been fairly
laid open and recounted to me?"

"How can you question it?" asked the minister.  "Surely it were
child's play to call in a physician and then hide the sore!"

"You would tell me, then, that I know all?" said Roger
Chillingworth, deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with
intense and concentrated intelligence, on the minister's face.
"Be it so!  But again!  He to whom only the outward and physical
evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which
he is called upon to cure.  A bodily disease, which we look upon
as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a
symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.  Your pardon once
again, good sir, if my speech give the shadow of offence.  You,
sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the
closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with
the spirit whereof it is the instrument."

"Then I need ask no further," said the clergyman, somewhat
hastily rising from his chair.  "You deal not, I take it, in
medicine for the soul!"

"Thus, a sickness," continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in
an unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption, but
standing up and confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked
minister, with his low, dark, and misshapen figure,--"a
sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit
hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily
frame.  Would you, therefore, that your physician heal the bodily
evil?  How may this be unless you first lay open to him the wound
or trouble in your soul?"

"No, not to thee!  not to an earthly physician!" cried Mr.
Dimmesdale, passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright,
and with a kind of fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth.  "Not
to thee!  But, if it be the soul's disease, then do I commit
myself to the one Physician of the soul!  He, if it stand with
His good pleasure, can cure, or he can kill.  Let Him do with me
as, in His justice and wisdom, He shall see good.  But who art
thou, that meddlest in this matter? that dares thrust himself
between the sufferer and his God?"

With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.

"It is as well to have made this step," said Roger Chillingworth
to himself, looking after the minister, with a grave smile.
"There is nothing lost.  We shall be friends again anon.  But see,
now, how passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out
of himself!  As with one passion so with another.  He hath done a
wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot
passion of his heart."

It proved not difficult to re-establish the intimacy of the two
companions, on the same footing and in the same degree as
heretofore.  The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy,
was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had hurried him
into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been
nothing in the physician's words to excuse or palliate.  He
marvelled, indeed, at the violence with which he had thrust back
the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice which it was
his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had expressly
sought.  With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in
making the amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to
continue the care which, if not successful in restoring him to
health, had, in all probability, been the means of prolonging
his feeble existence to that hour.  Roger Chillingworth readily
assented, and went on with his medical supervision of the
minister; doing his best for him, in all good faith, but always
quitting the patient's apartment, at the close of the
professional interview, with a mysterious and puzzled smile upon
his lips.  This expression was invisible in Mr. Dimmesdale's
presence, but grew strongly evident as the physician crossed the
threshold.

"A rare case," he muttered.  "I must needs look deeper into it.
A strange sympathy betwixt soul and body!  Were it only for the
art's sake, I must search this matter to the bottom."

It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, noon-day, and entirely unawares,
fell into a deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a
large black-letter volume open before him on the table.  It must
have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of
literature.  The profound depth of the minister's repose was the
more remarkable, inasmuch as he was one of those persons whose
sleep ordinarily is as light as fitful, and as easily scared
away, as a small bird hopping on a twig.  To such an unwonted
remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into itself
that he stirred not in his chair when old Roger Chillingworth,
without any extraordinary precaution, came into the room.  The
physician advanced directly in front of his patient, laid his
hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that
hitherto had always covered it even from the professional eye.

Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred.

After a brief pause, the physician turned away.

But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror!  With what
a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only
by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through
the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even
riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he
threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon
the floor!  Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that
moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how
Satan comports himself when a precious human soul is lost to
heaven, and won into his kingdom.

But what distinguished the physician's ecstasy from Satan's was
the trait of wonder in it!



XI.  THE INTERIOR OF A HEART

After the incident last described, the intercourse between the
clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was
really of another character than it had previously been.  The
intellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain
path before it.  It was not, indeed, precisely that which he had
laid out for himself to tread.  Calm, gentle, passionless, as he
appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice,
hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man,
which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal
had ever wreaked upon an enemy.  To make himself the one trusted
friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse,
the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of
sinful thoughts, expelled in vain!  All that guilty sorrow,
hidden from the world, whose great heart would have pitied and
forgiven, to be revealed to him, the Pitiless--to him, the
Unforgiving!  All that dark treasure to be lavished on the very
man, to whom nothing else could so adequately pay the debt of
vengeance!

The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve had balked this
scheme.  Roger Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly,
if at all, less satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which
Providence--using the avenger and his victim for its own
purposes, and, perchance, pardoning, where it seemed most to
punish--had substituted for his black devices.  A revelation, he
could almost say, had been granted to him.  It mattered little
for his object, whether celestial or from what other region.  By
its aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr.
Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the very
inmost soul of the latter, seemed to be brought out before his
eyes, so that he could see and comprehend its every movement.  He
became, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor in
the poor minister's interior world.  He could play upon him as he
chose.  Would he arouse him with a throb of agony?  The victim was
for ever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that
controlled the engine: and the physician knew it well.  Would he
startle him with sudden fear?  As at the waving of a magician's
wand, up rose a grisly phantom--up rose a thousand phantoms--in
many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking round
about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his
breast!

All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the
minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil
influence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of its
actual nature.  True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully--even, at
times, with horror and the bitterness of hatred--at the deformed
figure of the old physician.  His gestures, his gait, his
grizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the
very fashion of his garments, were odious in the clergyman's
sight; a token implicitly to be relied on of a deeper antipathy
in the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledge
to himself.  For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for
such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that
the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's entire
substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause.
He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to
Roger Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have
drawn from them, and did his best to root them out.  Unable to
accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a matter of principle,
continued his habits of social familiarity with the old man, and
thus gave him constant opportunities for perfecting the purpose
to which--poor forlorn creature that he was, and more wretched
than his victim--the avenger had devoted himself.

While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and
tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over to
the machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred
office.  He won it indeed, in great part, by his sorrows.  His
intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of
experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of
preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily
life.  His fame, though still on its upward slope, already
overshadowed the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen,
eminent as several of them were.  There are scholars among them,
who had spent more years in acquiring abstruse lore, connected
with the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and
who might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed in such
solid and valuable attainments than their youthful brother.
There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and
endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard iron, or
granite understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair
proportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly
respectable, efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical
species.  There were others again, true saintly fathers, whose
faculties had been elaborated by weary toil among their books,
and by patient thought, and etherealised, moreover, by spiritual
communications with the better world, into which their purity of
life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their
garments of mortality still clinging to them.  All that they
lacked was, the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at
Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem, not
the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that
of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native
language.  These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's
last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of
Flame.  They would have vainly sought--had they ever dreamed of
seeking--to express the highest truths through the humblest
medium of familiar words and images.  Their voices came down,
afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where they
habitually dwelt.

Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr.
Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally
belonged.  To the high mountain peaks of faith and sanctity he
would have climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by the
burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which
it was his doom to totter.  It kept him down on a level with the
lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the
angels might else have listened to and answered!  But this very
burden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with the
sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in
unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself and sent
its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes
of sad, persuasive eloquence.  Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes
terrible!  The people knew not the power that moved them thus.
They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness.  They
fancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, and
rebuke, and love.  In their eyes, the very ground on which he
trod was sanctified.  The virgins of his church grew pale around
him, victims of a passion so imbued with religious sentiment,
that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it openly,
in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice before
the altar.  The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr.
Dimmesdale's frame so feeble, while they were themselves so
rugged in their infirmity, believed that he would go heavenward
before them, and enjoined it upon their children that their old
bones should be buried close to their young pastor's holy grave.
And all this time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was
thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself whether the
grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must
there be buried!

It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration
tortured him.  It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and
to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight
or value, that had not its divine essence as the life within
their life.  Then what was he?--a substance?--or the dimmest of
all shadows?  He longed to speak out from his own pulpit at the
full height of his voice, and tell the people what he was.  "I,
whom you behold in these black garments of the priesthood--I,
who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face heavenward,
taking upon myself to hold communion in your behalf with the
Most High Omniscience--I, in whose daily life you discern the
sanctity of Enoch--I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a
gleam along my earthly track, whereby the Pilgrims that shall
come after me may be guided to the regions of the blest--I, who
have laid the hand of baptism upon your children--I, who have
breathed the parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom the
Amen sounded faintly from a world which they had quitted--I,
your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am utterly a
pollution and a lie!"

More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a
purpose never to come down its steps until he should have spoken
words like the above.  More than once he had cleared his throat,
and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when
sent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of
his soul.  More than once--nay, more than a hundred times--he had
actually spoken!  Spoken!  But how?  He had told his hearers that
he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the
worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable
iniquity, and that the only wonder was that they did not see his
wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes by the burning
wrath of the Almighty!  Could there be plainer speech than this?
Would not the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous
impulse, and tear him down out of the pulpit which he defiled?
Not so, indeed!  They heard it all, and did but reverence him the
more.  They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those
self-condemning words.  "The godly youth!" said they among
themselves.  "The saint on earth!  Alas! if he discern such
sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would he
behold in thine or mine!"  The minister well knew--subtle, but
remorseful hypocrite that he was!--the light in which his vague
confession would be viewed.  He had striven to put a cheat upon
himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had
gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame,
without the momentary relief of being self-deceived.  He had
spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest
falsehood.  And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved
the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did.  Therefore,
above all things else, he loathed his miserable self!

His inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance
with the old, corrupted faith of Rome than with the better light
of the church in which he had been born and bred.  In Mr.
Dimmesdale's secret closet, under lock and key, there was a
bloody scourge.  Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine
had plied it on his own shoulders, laughing bitterly at himself
the while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly because of
that bitter laugh.  It was his custom, too, as it has been that
of many other pious Puritans, to fast--not however, like them,
in order to purify the body, and render it the fitter medium of
celestial illumination--but rigorously, and until his knees
trembled beneath him, as an act of penance.  He kept vigils,
likewise, night after night, sometimes in utter darkness,
sometimes with a glimmering lamp, and sometimes, viewing his own
face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which he
could throw upon it.  He thus typified the constant introspection
wherewith he tortured, but could not purify himself.  In these
lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions seemed to
flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint light
of their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more
vividly and close beside him, within the looking-glass.  Now it
was a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the
pale minister, and beckoned him away with them; now a group of
shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but
grew more ethereal as they rose.  Now came the dead friends of
his youth, and his white-bearded father, with a saint-like
frown, and his mother turning her face away as she passed by.
Ghost of a mother--thinnest fantasy of a mother--methinks she
might yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her son!  And now,
through the chamber which these spectral thoughts had made so
ghastly, glided Hester Prynne leading along little Pearl, in her
scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first at the scarlet
letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman's own breast.

None of these visions ever quite deluded him.  At any moment, by
an effort of his will, he could discern substances through their
misty lack of substance, and convince himself that they were not
solid in their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that
big, square, leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of
divinity.  But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest
and most substantial things which the poor minister now dealt
with.  It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his,
that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities
there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the
spirit's joy and nutriment.  To the untrue man, the whole
universe is false--it is impalpable--it shrinks to nothing
within his grasp.  And he himself in so far as he shows himself
in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.
The only truth that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real
existence on this earth was the anguish in his inmost soul, and
the undissembled expression of it in his aspect.  Had he once
found power to smile, and wear a face of gaiety, there would
have been no such man!

On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at,
but forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his
chair.  A new thought had struck him.  There might be a moment's
peace in it.  Attiring himself with as much care as if it had
been for public worship, and precisely in the same manner, he
stole softly down the staircase, undid the door, and issued
forth.



XII.  THE MINISTER'S VIGIL

Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps
actually under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr.
Dimmesdale reached the spot where, now so long since, Hester
Prynne had lived through her first hours of public ignominy.  The
same platform or scaffold, black and weather-stained with the
storm or sunshine of seven long years, and foot-worn, too, with
the tread of many culprits who had since ascended it, remained
standing beneath the balcony of the meeting-house.  The minister
went up the steps.

It was an obscure night in early May.  An unvaried pall of
cloud muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon.
If the same multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while
Hester Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been
summoned forth, they would have discerned no face above the
platform nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark
grey of the midnight.  But the town was all asleep.  There was no
peril of discovery.  The minister might stand there, if it so
pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without
other risk than that the dank and chill night air would creep
into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog
his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the
expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer and sermon.  No eye
could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in
his closet, wielding the bloody scourge.  Why, then, had he come
hither?  Was it but the mockery of penitence?  A mockery, indeed,
but in which his soul trifled with itself!  A mockery at which
angels blushed and wept, while fiends rejoiced with jeering
laughter!  He had been driven hither by the impulse of that
Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and
closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably
drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other
impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure.  Poor,
miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to burden
itself with crime?  Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their
choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert
their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling
it off at once!  This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could
do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which
intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of
heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.

And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of
expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of
mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his
naked breast, right over his heart.  On that spot, in very truth,
there was, and there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous
tooth of bodily pain.  Without any effort of his will, or power
to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud: an outcry that went
pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to
another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as
if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in
it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to
and fro.

"It is done!" muttered the minister, covering his face with his
hands.  "The whole town will awake and hurry forth, and find me
here!"

But it was not so.  The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far
greater power, to his own startled ears, than it actually
possessed.  The town did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy
slumberers mistook the cry either for something frightful in a
dream, or for the noise of witches, whose voices, at that
period, were often heard to pass over the settlements or lonely
cottages, as they rode with Satan through the air.  The
clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance,
uncovered his eyes and looked about him.  At one of the
chamber-windows of Governor Bellingham's mansion, which stood at
some distance, on the line of another street, he beheld the
appearance of the old magistrate himself with a lamp in his hand
a white night-cap on his head, and a long white gown enveloping
his figure.  He looked like a ghost evoked unseasonably from the
grave.  The cry had evidently startled him.  At another window of
the same house, moreover appeared old Mistress Hibbins, the
Governor's sister, also with a lamp, which even thus far off
revealed the expression of her sour and discontented face.  She
thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously
upward.  Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady
had heard Mr. Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted it, with its
multitudinous echoes and reverberations, as the clamour of the
fiends and night-hags, with whom she was well known to make
excursions in the forest.

Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the old lady
quickly extinguished her own, and vanished.  Possibly, she went
up among the clouds.  The minister saw nothing further of her
motions.  The magistrate, after a wary observation of the
darkness--into which, nevertheless, he could see but little
further than he might into a mill-stone--retired from the
window.

The minister grew comparatively calm.  His eyes, however, were
soon greeted by a little glimmering light, which, at first a
long way off was approaching up the street.  It threw a gleam of
recognition, on here a post, and there a garden fence, and here
a latticed window-pane, and there a pump, with its full trough
of water, and here again an arched door of oak, with an iron
knocker, and a rough log for the door-step.  The Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even while firmly
convinced that the doom of his existence was stealing onward, in
the footsteps which he now heard; and that the gleam of the
lantern would fall upon him in a few moments more, and reveal
his long-hidden secret.  As the light drew nearer, he beheld,
within its illuminated circle, his brother clergyman--or, to
speak more accurately, his professional father, as well as
highly valued friend--the Reverend Mr. Wilson, who, as Mr.
Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of
some dying man.  And so he had.  The good old minister came
freshly from the death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had
passed from earth to heaven within that very hour.  And now
surrounded, like the saint-like personage of olden times, with a
radiant halo, that glorified him amid this gloomy night of
sin--as if the departed Governor had left him an inheritance of
his glory, or as if he had caught upon himself the distant shine
of the celestial city, while looking thitherward to see the
triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates--now, in short, good
Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with a
lighted lantern!  The glimmer of this luminary suggested the
above conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled--nay, almost
laughed at them--and then wondered if he was going mad.

As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely
muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding
the lantern before his breast with the other, the minister could
hardly restrain himself from speaking--

"A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson.  Come up
hither, I pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!"

Good Heavens!  Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken?  For one
instant he believed that these words had passed his lips.  But
they were uttered only within his imagination.  The venerable
Father Wilson continued to step slowly onward, looking carefully
at the muddy pathway before his feet, and never once turning his
head towards the guilty platform.  When the light of the
glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the minister
discovered, by the faintness which came over him, that the last
few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety, although his
mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind
of lurid playfulness.

Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again
stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought.  He felt his
limbs growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the
night, and doubted whether he should be able to descend the
steps of the scaffold.  Morning would break and find him there.
The neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself.  The earliest
riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a
vaguely-defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and
half-crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking from
door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost--as
he needs must think it--of some defunct transgressor.  A dusky
tumult would flap its wings from one house to another.  Then--the
morning light still waxing stronger--old patriarchs would rise
up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames,
without pausing to put off their night-gear.  The whole tribe of
decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a
single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view
with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects.  Old Governor
Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King James' ruff
fastened askew, and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the
forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as
having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good
Father Wilson too, after spending half the night at a death-bed,
and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams
about the glorified saints.  Hither, likewise, would come the
elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church, and the young
virgins who so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine
for him in their white bosoms, which now, by-the-bye, in their
hurry and confusion, they would scantly have given themselves
time to cover with their kerchiefs.  All people, in a word, would
come stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their
amazed and horror-stricken visages around the scaffold.  Whom
would they discern there, with the red eastern light upon his
brow?  Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half-frozen to
death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where Hester Prynne
had stood!

Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the
minister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a
great peal of laughter.  It was immediately responded to by a
light, airy, childish laugh, in which, with a thrill of the
heart--but he knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as
acute--he recognised the tones of little Pearl.

"Pearl!  Little Pearl!" cried he, after a moment's pause; then,
suppressing his voice--"Hester!  Hester Prynne!  Are you there?"

"Yes; it is Hester Prynne!" she replied, in a tone of surprise;
and the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the
side-walk, along which she had been passing.  "It is I, and my
little Pearl."

"Whence come you, Hester?" asked the minister.  "What sent you
hither?"

"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester Prynne
"at Governor Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his measure
for a robe, and am now going homeward to my dwelling."

"Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl," said the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.  "Ye have both been here before, but I
was not with you.  Come up hither once again, and we will stand
all three together."

She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform,
holding little Pearl by the hand.  The minister felt for the
child's other hand, and took it.  The moment that he did so,
there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life
than his own pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying
through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were
communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system.  The
three formed an electric chain.

"Minister!" whispered little Pearl.

"What wouldst thou say, child?" asked Mr. Dimmesdale.

"Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?"
inquired Pearl.

"Nay; not so, my little Pearl," answered the minister; for, with
the new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure,
that had so long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon
him; and he was already trembling at the conjunction in
which--with a strange joy, nevertheless--he now found
himself--"not so, my child.  I shall, indeed, stand with thy
mother and thee one other day, but not to-morrow."

Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand.  But the
minister held it fast.

"A moment longer, my child!" said he.

"But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to take my hand, and
mother's hand, to-morrow noontide?"

"Not then, Pearl," said the minister; "but another time."

"And what other time?" persisted the child.

"At the great judgment day," whispered the minister; and,
strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher
of the truth impelled him to answer the child so.  "Then, and
there, before the judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I
must stand together.  But the daylight of this world shall not
see our meeting!"

Pearl laughed again.

But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far
and wide over all the muffled sky.  It was doubtless caused by
one of those meteors, which the night-watcher may so often
observe burning out to waste, in the vacant regions of the
atmosphere.  So powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly
illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth.
The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp.  It
showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of
mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to
familiar objects by an unaccustomed light.  The wooden houses,
with their jutting storeys and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps
and thresholds with the early grass springing up about them; the
garden-plots, black with freshly-turned earth; the wheel-track,
little worn, and even in the market-place margined with green on
either side--all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect
that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things
of this world than they had ever borne before.  And there stood
the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne,
with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little
Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those
two.  They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn
splendour, as if it were the light that is to reveal all
secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one
another.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes; and her face, as
she glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile
which made its expression frequently so elvish.  She withdrew her
hand from Mr. Dimmesdale's, and pointed across the street.  But
he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his eyes
towards the zenith.

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all
meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena that occurred
with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as
so many revelations from a supernatural source.  Thus, a blazing
spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the
midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare.  Pestilence was known to
have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light.  We doubt
whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New
England, from its settlement down to revolutionary times, of
which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some
spectacle of its nature.  Not seldom, it had been seen by
multitudes.  Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the
faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through
the coloured, magnifying, and distorted medium of his
imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought.
It was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations
should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of
heaven.  A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expensive for
Providence to write a people's doom upon.  The belief was a
favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their
infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of
peculiar intimacy and strictness.  But what shall we say, when an
individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on
the same vast sheet of record.  In such a case, it could only be
the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man,
rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and
secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of
nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a
fitting page for his soul's history and fate.

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye
and heart that the minister, looking upward to the zenith,
beheld there the appearance of an immense letter--the letter
A--marked out in lines of dull red light.  Not but the meteor may
have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil
of cloud, but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave
it, or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another's
guilt might have seen another symbol in it.

There was a singular circumstance that characterised Mr.
Dimmesdale's psychological state at this moment.  All the time
that he gazed upward to the zenith, he was, nevertheless,
perfectly aware that little Pearl was pointing her finger towards
old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance from the
scaffold.  The minister appeared to see him, with the same glance
that discerned the miraculous letter.  To his feature as to all
other objects, the meteoric light imparted a new expression; or
it might well be that the physician was not careful then, as at
all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he looked
upon his victim.  Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky,
and disclosed the earth, with an awfulness that admonished
Hester Prynne and the clergyman of the day of judgment, then
might Roger Chillingworth have passed with them for the
arch-fiend, standing there with a smile and scowl, to claim his
own.  So vivid was the expression, or so intense the minister's
perception of it, that it seemed still to remain painted on the
darkness after the meteor had vanished, with an effect as if the
street and all things else were at once annihilated.

"Who is that man, Hester?" gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with
terror.  "I shiver at him!  Dost thou know the man?  I hate him,
Hester!"

She remembered her oath, and was silent.

"I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!" muttered the minister
again.  "Who is he?  Who is he?  Canst thou do nothing for me?  I
have a nameless horror of the man!"

"Minister," said little Pearl, "I can tell thee who he is!"

"Quickly, then, child!" said the minister, bending his ear close
to her lips.  "Quickly, and as low as thou canst whisper."

Pearl mumbled something into his ear that sounded, indeed, like
human language, but was only such gibberish as children may be
heard amusing themselves with by the hour together.  At all
events, if it involved any secret information in regard to old
Roger Chillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown to the erudite
clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of his mind.
The elvish child then laughed aloud.

"Dost thou mock me now?" said the minister.

"Thou wast not bold!--thou wast not true!" answered the child.
"Thou wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother's hand,
to-morrow noon-tide!"

"Worthy sir," answered the physician, who had now advanced to
the foot of the platform--"pious Master Dimmesdale! can this be
you?  Well, well, indeed!  We men of study, whose heads are in our
books, have need to be straitly looked after!  We dream in our
waking moments, and walk in our sleep.  Come, good sir, and my
dear friend, I pray you let me lead you home!"

"How knewest thou that I was here?" asked the minister,
fearfully.

"Verily, and in good faith," answered Roger Chillingworth, "I
knew nothing of the matter.  I had spent the better part of the
night at the bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing
what my poor skill might to give him ease.  He, going home to a
better world, I, likewise, was on my way homeward, when this
light shone out.  Come with me, I beseech you, Reverend sir, else
you will be poorly able to do Sabbath duty to-morrow.  Aha! see
now how they trouble the brain--these books!--these books!  You
should study less, good sir, and take a little pastime, or these
night whimsies will grow upon you."

"I will go home with you," said Mr. Dimmesdale.

With a chill despondency, like one awakening, all nerveless,
from an ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was
led away.

The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a
discourse which was held to be the richest and most powerful,
and the most replete with heavenly influences, that had ever
proceeded from his lips.  Souls, it is said, more souls than one,
were brought to the truth by the efficacy of that sermon, and
vowed within themselves to cherish a holy gratitude towards Mr.
Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter.  But as he came down
the pulpit steps, the grey-bearded sexton met him, holding up a
black glove, which the minister recognised as his own.

"It was found," said the Sexton, "this morning on the scaffold
where evil-doers are set up to public shame.  Satan dropped it
there, I take it, intending a scurrilous jest against your
reverence.  But, indeed, he was blind and foolish, as he ever and
always is.  A pure hand needs no glove to cover it!"

"Thank you, my good friend," said the minister, gravely, but
startled at heart; for so confused was his remembrance, that he
had almost brought himself to look at the events of the past
night as visionary.

"Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!"

"And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs
handle him without gloves henceforward," remarked the old
sexton, grimly smiling.  "But did your reverence hear of the
portent that was seen last night? a great red letter in the
sky--the letter A, which we interpret to stand for Angel.  For,
as our good Governor Winthrop was made an angel this past night,
it was doubtless held fit that there should be some notice
thereof!"

"No," answered the minister; "I had not heard of it."



XIII.  ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER

In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester
Prynne was shocked at the condition to which she found the
clergyman reduced.  His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed.  His
moral force was abased into more than childish weakness.  It
grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his intellectual
faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps
acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given
them.  With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from
all others, she could readily infer that, besides the legitimate
action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been
brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale's
well-being and repose.  Knowing what this poor fallen man had
once been, her whole soul was moved by the shuddering terror
with which he had appealed to her--the outcast woman--for
support against his instinctively discovered enemy.  She decided,
moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid.  Little
accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her
ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself,
Hester saw--or seemed to see--that there lay a responsibility
upon her in reference to the clergyman, which she owned to no
other, nor to the whole world besides.  The links that united her
to the rest of humankind--links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or
whatever the material--had all been broken.  Here was the iron
link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break.  Like
all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.

Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in
which we beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy.
Years had come and gone.  Pearl was now seven years old.  Her
mother, with the scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in its
fantastic embroidery, had long been a familiar object to the
townspeople.  As is apt to be the case when a person stands out
in any prominence before the community, and, at the same time,
interferes neither with public nor individual interests and
convenience, a species of general regard had ultimately grown up
in reference to Hester Prynne.  It is to the credit of human
nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play,
it loves more readily than it hates.  Hatred, by a gradual and
quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the
change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the
original feeling of hostility.  In this matter of Hester Prynne
there was neither irritation nor irksomeness.  She never battled
with the public, but submitted uncomplainingly to its worst
usage; she made no claim upon it in requital for what she
suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies.  Then, also, the
blameless purity of her life during all these years in which she
had been set apart to infamy was reckoned largely in her favour.
With nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no
hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining anything, it could only
be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought back the poor
wanderer to its paths.

It was perceived, too, that while Hester never put forward even
the humblest title to share in the world's privileges--further
than to breathe the common air and earn daily bread for little
Pearl and herself by the faithful labour of her hands--she was
quick to acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man
whenever benefits were to be conferred.  None so ready as she to
give of her little substance to every demand of poverty, even
though the bitter-hearted pauper threw back a gibe in requital
of the food brought regularly to his door, or the garments
wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered a
monarch's robe.  None so self-devoted as Hester when pestilence
stalked through the town.  In all seasons of calamity, indeed,
whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at
once found her place.  She came, not as a guest, but as a
rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by
trouble, as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she
was entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow-creature.  There
glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly
ray.  Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick
chamber.  It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's hard
extremity, across the verge of time.  It had shown him where to
set his foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming dim,
and ere the light of futurity could reach him.  In such
emergencies Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich--a
well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand,
and inexhaustible by the largest.  Her breast, with its badge of
shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one.
She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy, or, we may rather say,
the world's heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the
world nor she looked forward to this result.  The letter was the
symbol of her calling.  Such helpfulness was found in her--so
much power to do, and power to sympathise--that many people
refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original
signification.  They said that it meant Able, so strong was
Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength.

It was only the darkened house that could contain her.  When
sunshine came again, she was not there.  Her shadow had faded
across the threshold.  The helpful inmate had departed, without
one backward glance to gather up the meed of gratitude, if any
were in the hearts of those whom she had served so zealously.
Meeting them in the street, she never raised her head to receive
their greeting.  If they were resolute to accost her, she laid
her finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on.  This might be
pride, but was so like humility, that it produced all the
softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind.
The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying
common justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but
quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal
is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its
generosity.  Interpreting Hester Prynne's deportment as an appeal
of this nature, society was inclined to show its former victim a
more benign countenance than she cared to be favoured with, or,
perchance, than she deserved.

The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were
longer in acknowledging the influence of Hester's good qualities
than the people.  The prejudices which they shared in common with
the latter were fortified in themselves by an iron frame-work of
reasoning, that made it a far tougher labour to expel them.  Day
by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid wrinkles were
relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might
grow to be an expression of almost benevolence.  Thus it was with
the men of rank, on whom their eminent position imposed the
guardianship of the public morals.  Individuals in private life,
meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty;
nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the
token, not of that one sin for which she had borne so long and
dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since.  "Do you see
that woman with the embroidered badge?" they would say to
strangers.  "It is our Hester--the town's own Hester--who is so
kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the
afflicted!"  Then, it is true, the propensity of human nature to
tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the person of
another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of
bygone years.  It was none the less a fact, however, that in the
eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the
effect of the cross on a nun's bosom.  It imparted to the wearer
a kind of sacredness, which enabled her to walk securely amid
all peril.  Had she fallen among thieves, it would have kept her
safe.  It was reported, and believed by many, that an Indian had
drawn his arrow against the badge, and that the missile struck
it, and fell harmless to the ground.

The effect of the symbol--or rather, of the position in respect
to society that was indicated by it--on the mind of Hester
Prynne herself was powerful and peculiar.  All the light and
graceful foliage of her character had been withered up by this
red-hot brand, and had long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and
harsh outline, which might have been repulsive had she possessed
friends or companions to be repelled by it.  Even the
attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change.  It
might be partly owing to the studied austerity of her dress, and
partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners.  It was a sad
transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either
been cut off, or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a
shining lock of it ever once gushed into the sunshine.  It was
due in part to all these causes, but still more to something
else, that there seemed to be no longer anything in Hester's
face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester's form, though
majestic and statue like, that Passion would ever dream of
clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester's bosom to make it
ever again the pillow of Affection.  Some attribute had departed
from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her
a woman.  Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern
development, of the feminine character and person, when the
woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of
peculiar severity.  If she be all tenderness, she will die.  If
she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her,
or--and the outward semblance is the same--crushed so deeply
into her heart that it can never show itself more.  The latter is
perhaps the truest theory.  She who has once been a woman, and
ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if
there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation.  We
shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched
and so transfigured.

Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be
attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a
great measure, from passion and feeling to thought.  Standing
alone in the world--alone, as to any dependence on society, and
with little Pearl to be guided and protected--alone, and
hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to
consider it desirable--she cast away the fragment of a broken
chain.  The world's law was no law for her mind.  It was an age in
which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more
active and a wider range than for many centuries before.  Men of
the sword had overthrown nobles and kings.  Men bolder than these
had overthrown and rearranged--not actually, but within the
sphere of theory, which was their most real abode--the whole
system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of
ancient principle.  Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit.  She
assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the
other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they
known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that
stigmatised by the scarlet letter.  In her lonesome cottage, by
the seashore, thoughts visited her such as dared to enter no
other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have
been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have
been seen so much as knocking at her door.

It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly
often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external
regulations of society.  The thought suffices them, without
investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.  So it seemed
to be with Hester.  Yet, had little Pearl never come to her from
the spiritual world, it might have been far otherwise.  Then she
might have come down to us in history, hand in hand with Ann
Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious sect.  She might, in
one of her phases, have been a prophetess.  She might, and not
improbably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals
of the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of
the Puritan establishment.  But, in the education of her child,
the mother's enthusiasm of thought had something to wreak itself
upon.  Providence, in the person of this little girl, had
assigned to Hester's charge, the germ and blossom of womanhood,
to be cherished and developed amid a host of difficulties.
Everything was against her.  The world was hostile.  The child's
own nature had something wrong in it which continually betokened
that she had been born amiss--the effluence of her mother's
lawless passion--and often impelled Hester to ask, in bitterness
of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor little
creature had been born at all.

Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with
reference to the whole race of womanhood.  Was existence worth
accepting even to the happiest among them?  As concerned her own
individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative,
and dismissed the point as settled.  A tendency to speculation,
though it may keep women quiet, as it does man, yet makes her
sad.  She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her.
As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down
and built up anew.  Then the very nature of the opposite sex, or
its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to
be essentially modified before woman can be allowed to assume
what seems a fair and suitable position.  Finally, all other
difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of
these preliminary reforms until she herself shall have undergone
a still mightier change, in which, perhaps, the ethereal
essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have
evaporated.  A woman never overcomes these problems by any
exercise of thought.  They are not to be solved, or only in one
way.  If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish.  Thus
Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy
throb, wandered without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind;
now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting
back from a deep chasm.  There was wild and ghastly scenery all
around her, and a home and comfort nowhere.  At times a fearful
doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to
send Pearl at once to Heaven, and go herself to such futurity as
Eternal Justice should provide.

The scarlet letter had not done its office.  Now, however, her
interview with the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the night of his
vigil, had given her a new theme of reflection, and held up to
her an object that appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice
for its attainment.  She had witnessed the intense misery beneath
which the minister struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had
ceased to struggle.  She saw that he stood on the verge of
lunacy, if he had not already stepped across it.  It was
impossible to doubt that, whatever painful efficacy there might
be in the secret sting of remorse, a deadlier venom had been
infused into it by the hand that proffered relief.  A secret
enemy had been continually by his side, under the semblance of a
friend and helper, and had availed himself of the opportunities
thus afforded for tampering with the delicate springs of Mr.
Dimmesdale's nature.  Hester could not but ask herself whether
there had not originally been a defect of truth, courage, and
loyalty on her own part, in allowing the minister to be thrown
into a position where so much evil was to be foreboded and nothing
auspicious to be hoped.  Her only justification lay in the fact
that she had been able to discern no method of rescuing him from
a blacker ruin than had overwhelmed herself except by
acquiescing in Roger Chillingworth's scheme of disguise.  Under
that impulse she had made her choice, and had chosen, as it now
appeared, the more wretched alternative of the two.  She
determined to redeem her error so far as it might yet be
possible.  Strengthened by years of hard and solemn trial, she
felt herself no longer so inadequate to cope with Roger
Chillingworth as on that night, abased by sin and half-maddened
by the ignominy that was still new, when they had talked
together in the prison-chamber.  She had climbed her way since
then to a higher point.  The old man, on the other hand, had
brought himself nearer to her level, or, perhaps, below it, by
the revenge which he had stooped for.

In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and
do what might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on
whom he had so evidently set his gripe.  The occasion was not
long to seek.  One afternoon, walking with Pearl in a retired
part of the peninsula, she beheld the old physician with a
basket on one arm and a staff in the other hand, stooping along
the ground in quest of roots and herbs to concoct his medicine
withal.



XIV.  HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN

Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water,
and play with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should
have talked awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs.  So the child
flew away like a bird, and, making bare her small white feet
went pattering along the moist margin of the sea.  Here and there
she came to a full stop, and peeped curiously into a pool, left
by the retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in.
Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark, glistening
curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image
of a little maid whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited
to take her hand and run a race with her.  But the visionary
little maid on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say--"This
is a better place; come thou into the pool."  And Pearl, stepping
in mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while,
out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of
fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.

Meanwhile her mother had accosted the physician.  "I would speak
a word with you," said she--"a word that concerns us much."

"Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger
Chillingworth?" answered he, raising himself from his stooping
posture.  "With all my heart!  Why, mistress, I hear good tidings
of you on all hands!  No longer ago than yester-eve, a
magistrate, a wise and godly man, was discoursing of your
affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered me that there had been
question concerning you in the council.  It was debated whether
or no, with safety to the commonweal, yonder scarlet letter
might be taken off your bosom.  On my life, Hester, I made my
intreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done
forthwith."

"It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off the
badge," calmly replied Hester.  "Were I worthy to be quit of it,
it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into
something that should speak a different purport."

"Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better," rejoined he, "A
woman must needs follow her own fancy touching the adornment of
her person.  The letter is gaily embroidered, and shows right
bravely on your bosom!"

All this while Hester had been looking steadily at the old man,
and was shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a
change had been wrought upon him within the past seven years.  It
was not so much that he had grown older; for though the traces
of advancing life were visible he bore his age well, and seemed
to retain a wiry vigour and alertness.  But the former aspect of
an intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, which was what
she best remembered in him, had altogether vanished, and been
succeeded by an eager, searching, almost fierce, yet carefully
guarded look.  It seemed to be his wish and purpose to mask this
expression with a smile, but the latter played him false, and
flickered over his visage so derisively that the spectator could
see his blackness all the better for it.  Ever and anon, too,
there came a glare of red light out of his eyes, as if the old
man's soul were on fire and kept on smouldering duskily within
his breast, until by some casual puff of passion it was blown
into a momentary flame.  This he repressed as speedily as
possible, and strove to look as if nothing of the kind had
happened.

In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of
man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will
only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's
office.  This unhappy person had effected such a transformation
by devoting himself for seven years to the constant analysis of
a heart full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment thence, and
adding fuel to those fiery tortures which he analysed and
gloated over.

The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne's bosom.  Here was
another ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to
her.

"What see you in my face," asked the physician, "that you look
at it so earnestly?"

"Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears
bitter enough for it," answered she.  "But let it pass!  It is of
yonder miserable man that I would speak."

"And what of him?" cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he
loved the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it
with the only person of whom he could make a confidant.  "Not to
hide the truth, Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to
be busy with the gentleman.  So speak freely and I will make
answer."

"When we last spake together," said Hester, "now seven years
ago, it was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy as
touching the former relation betwixt yourself and me.  As the
life and good fame of yonder man were in your hands there seemed
no choice to me, save to be silent in accordance with your
behest.  Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that I thus
bound myself, for, having cast off all duty towards other human
beings, there remained a duty towards him, and something
whispered me that I was betraying it in pledging myself to keep
your counsel.  Since that day no man is so near to him as you.
You tread behind his every footstep.  You are beside him,
sleeping and waking.  You search his thoughts.  You burrow and
rankle in his heart!  Your clutch is on his life, and you cause
him to die daily a living death, and still he knows you not.  In
permitting this I have surely acted a false part by the only man
to whom the power was left me to be true!"

"What choice had you?" asked Roger Chillingworth.  "My finger,
pointed at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into
a dungeon, thence, peradventure, to the gallows!"

"It had been better so!" said Hester Prynne.

"What evil have I done the man?" asked Roger Chillingworth
again.  "I tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever
physician earned from monarch could not have bought such care as
I have wasted on this miserable priest!  But for my aid his life
would have burned away in torments within the first two years
after the perpetration of his crime and thine.  For, Hester, his
spirit lacked the strength that could have borne up, as thine
has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter.  Oh, I could
reveal a goodly secret!  But enough.  What art can do, I have
exhausted on him.  That he now breathes and creeps about on earth
is owing all to me!"

"Better he had died at once!" said Hester Prynne.

"Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!" cried old Roger Chillingworth,
letting the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes.
"Better had he died at once!  Never did mortal suffer what this
man has suffered.  And all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy!
He has been conscious of me.  He has felt an influence dwelling
always upon him like a curse.  He knew, by some spiritual
sense--for the Creator never made another being so sensitive as
this--he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his
heartstrings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him,
which sought only evil, and found it.  But he knew not that the
eye and hand were mine!  With the superstition common to his
brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be
tortured with frightful dreams and desperate thoughts, the sting
of remorse and despair of pardon, as a foretaste of what awaits
him beyond the grave.  But it was the constant shadow of my
presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most
vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by this
perpetual poison of the direst revenge!  Yea, indeed, he did not
err, there was a fiend at his elbow!  A mortal man, with once a
human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment."

The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted
his hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some
frightful shape, which he could not recognise, usurping the
place of his own image in a glass.  It was one of those
moments--which sometimes occur only at the interval of
years--when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his
mind's eye.  Not improbably he had never before viewed himself as
he did now.

"Hast thou not tortured him enough?" said Hester, noticing the
old man's look.  "Has he not paid thee all?"

"No, no!  He has but increased the debt!" answered the
physician, and as he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer
characteristics, and subsided into gloom.  "Dost thou remember
me, Hester, as I was nine years agone?  Even then I was in the
autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn.  But all my life
had been made up of earnest, studious, thoughtful, quiet years,
bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine own knowledge, and
faithfully, too, though this latter object was but casual to the
other--faithfully for the advancement of human welfare.  No life
had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich
with benefits conferred.  Dost thou remember me?  Was I not,
though you might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for
others, craving little for himself--kind, true, just and of
constant, if not warm affections?  Was I not all this?"

"All this, and more," said Hester.

"And what am I now?" demanded he, looking into her face, and
permitting the whole evil within him to be written on his
features.  "I have already told thee what I am--a fiend!  Who made
me so?"

"It was myself," cried Hester, shuddering.  "It was I, not less
than he.  Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?"

"I have left thee to the scarlet letter," replied Roger
Chillingworth.  "If that has not avenged me, I can do no more!"

He laid his finger on it with a smile.

"It has avenged thee," answered Hester Prynne.

"I judged no less," said the physician.  "And now what wouldst
thou with me touching this man?"

"I must reveal the secret," answered Hester, firmly.  "He must
discern thee in thy true character.  What may be the result I
know not.  But this long debt of confidence, due from me to him,
whose bane and ruin I have been, shall at length be paid.  So far
as concerns the overthrow or preservation of his fair fame and
his earthly state, and perchance his life, he is in my hands.
Nor do I--whom the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth,
though it be the truth of red-hot iron entering into the
soul--nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer
a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy
mercy.  Do with him as thou wilt!  There is no good for him, no
good for me, no good for thee.  There is no good for little
Pearl.  There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze."

"Woman, I could well-nigh pity thee," said Roger Chillingworth,
unable to restrain a thrill of admiration too, for there was a
quality almost majestic in the despair which she expressed.
"Thou hadst great elements.  Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier
with a better love than mine, this evil had not been.  I pity
thee, for the good that has been wasted in thy nature."

"And I thee," answered Hester Prynne, "for the hatred that has
transformed a wise and just man to a fiend!  Wilt thou yet purge
it out of thee, and be once more human?  If not for his sake,
then doubly for thine own!  Forgive, and leave his further
retribution to the Power that claims it!  I said, but now, that
there could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are
here wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and
stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have strewn
our path.  It is not so!  There might be good for thee, and thee
alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged and hast it at thy
will to pardon.  Wilt thou give up that only privilege?  Wilt thou
reject that priceless benefit?"

"Peace, Hester--peace!" replied the old man, with gloomy
sternness--"it is not granted me to pardon.  I have no such power
as thou tellest me of.  My old faith, long forgotten, comes back
to me, and explains all that we do, and all we suffer.  By thy
first step awry, thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since
that moment it has all been a dark necessity.  Ye that have
wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion;
neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's office from
his hands.  It is our fate.  Let the black flower blossom as it
may!  Now, go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man."

He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of
gathering herbs.




XV.  HESTER AND PEARL

So Roger Chillingworth--a deformed old figure with a face that
haunted men's memories longer than they liked--took leave of
Hester Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth.  He
gathered here and there a herb, or grubbed up a root and put it
into the basket on his arm.  His gray beard almost touched the
ground as he crept onward.  Hester gazed after him a little
while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see whether
the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath
him and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and
brown, across its cheerful verdure.  She wondered what sort of
herbs they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather.
Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the
sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs of species
hitherto unknown, that would start up under his fingers?  Or
might it suffice him that every wholesome growth should be
converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch?
Did the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really
fall upon him?  Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of
ominous shadow moving along with his deformity whichever way he
turned himself?  And whither was he now going?  Would he not
suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot,
where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade,
dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the
climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance?
Or would he spread bat's wings and flee away, looking so much
the uglier the higher he rose towards heaven?

"Be it sin or no," said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as still she
gazed after him, "I hate the man!"

She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome
or lessen it.  Attempting to do so, she thought of those
long-past days in a distant land, when he used to emerge at
eventide from the seclusion of his study and sit down in the
firelight of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile.
He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that
the chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken
off the scholar's heart.  Such scenes had once appeared not
otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal
medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her
ugliest remembrances.  She marvelled how such scenes could have
been!  She marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to
marry him!  She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that
she had ever endured and reciprocated the lukewarm grasp of his
hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle
and melt into his own.  And it seemed a fouler offence committed
by Roger Chillingworth than any which had since been done him,
that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he had
persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side.

"Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester more bitterly than before.
"He betrayed me!  He has done me worse wrong than I did him!"

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along
with it the utmost passion of her heart!  Else it may be their
miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some
mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her
sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the
marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her
as the warm reality.  But Hester ought long ago to have done with
this injustice.  What did it betoken?  Had seven long years, under
the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery
and wrought out no repentance?

The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after
the crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark
light on Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might
not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.

He being gone, she summoned back her child.

"Pearl!  Little Pearl!  Where are you?"

Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no
loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer
of herbs.  At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully
with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom
forth, and--as it declined to venture--seeking a passage for
herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable
sky.  Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was
unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime.  She made little
boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snailshells,
and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant
in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the
shore.  She seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize
of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in
the warm sun.  Then she took up the white foam that streaked the
line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze,
scampering after it with winged footsteps to catch the great
snowflakes ere they fell.  Perceiving a flock of beach-birds that
fed and fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up
her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after
these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting
them.  One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was
almost sure had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a
broken wing.  But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her
sport, because it grieved her to have done harm to a little
being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl
herself.

Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and
make herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus
assume the aspect of a little mermaid.  She inherited her
mother's gift for devising drapery and costume.  As the last
touch to her mermaid's garb, Pearl took some eel-grass and
imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom the decoration
with which she was so familiar on her mother's.  A letter--the
letter A--but freshly green instead of scarlet.  The child bent
her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with
strange interest, even as if the one only thing for which she
had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.

"I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?" thought Pearl.

Just then she heard her mother's voice, and, flitting along as
lightly as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester
Prynne dancing, laughing, and pointing her finger to the
ornament upon her bosom.

"My little Pearl," said Hester, after a moment's silence, "the
green letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport.  But
dost thou know, my child, what this letter means which thy
mother is doomed to wear?"

"Yes, mother," said the child.  "It is the great letter A.  Thou
hast taught me in the horn-book."

Hester looked steadily into her little face; but though there
was that singular expression which she had so often remarked in
her black eyes, she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl
really attached any meaning to the symbol.  She felt a morbid
desire to ascertain the point.

"Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?"

"Truly do I!" answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother's
face.  "It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his
hand over his heart!"

"And what reason is that?" asked Hester, half smiling at the
absurd incongruity of the child's observation; but on second
thoughts turning pale.

"What has the letter to do with any heart save mine?"

"Nay, mother, I have told all I know," said Pearl, more
seriously than she was wont to speak.  "Ask yonder old man whom
thou hast been talking with,--it may be he can tell.  But in good
earnest now, mother dear, what does this scarlet letter
mean?--and why dost thou wear it on thy bosom?--and why does the
minister keep his hand over his heart?"

She took her mother's hand in both her own, and gazed into her
eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and
capricious character.  The thought occurred to Hester, that the
child might really be seeking to approach her with childlike
confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as
she knew how, to establish a meeting-point of sympathy.  It
showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect.  Heretofore, the mother,
while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection,
had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the
waywardness of an April breeze, which spends its time in airy
sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is
petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses
you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which
misdemeanours it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss
your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently
with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business,
leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart.  And this, moreover, was
a mother's estimate of the child's disposition.  Any other
observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have
given them a far darker colouring.  But now the idea came
strongly into Hester's mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable
precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age
when she could have been made a friend, and intrusted with as
much of her mother's sorrows as could be imparted, without
irreverence either to the parent or the child.  In the little
chaos of Pearl's character there might be seen emerging and
could have been from the very first--the steadfast principles of
an unflinching courage--an uncontrollable will--sturdy pride,
which might be disciplined into self-respect--and a bitter scorn
of many things which, when examined, might be found to have the
taint of falsehood in them.  She possessed affections, too,
though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the richest
flavours of unripe fruit.  With all these sterling attributes,
thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from her mother
must be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this
elfish child.

Pearl's inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the
scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being.  From the
earliest epoch of her conscious life, she had entered upon this
as her appointed mission.  Hester had often fancied that
Providence had a design of justice and retribution, in endowing
the child with this marked propensity; but never, until now, had
she bethought herself to ask, whether, linked with that design,
there might not likewise be a purpose of mercy and beneficence.
If little Pearl were entertained with faith and trust, as a
spirit messenger no less than an earthly child, might it not be
her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her
mother's heart, and converted it into a tomb?--and to help her
to overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead
nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like heart?

Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester's
mind, with as much vivacity of impression as if they had
actually been whispered into her ear.  And there was little
Pearl, all this while, holding her mother's hand in both her
own, and turning her face upward, while she put these searching
questions, once and again, and still a third time.

"What does the letter mean, mother?  and why dost thou wear it?
and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?"

"What shall I say?" thought Hester to herself.  "No!  if this be
the price of the child's sympathy, I cannot pay it."

Then she spoke aloud--

"Silly Pearl," said she, "what questions are these?  There are
many things in this world that a child must not ask about.  What
know I of the minister's heart?  And as for the scarlet letter, I
wear it for the sake of its gold thread."

In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before
been false to the symbol on her bosom.  It may be that it was the
talisman of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who
now forsook her; as recognising that, in spite of his strict
watch over her heart, some new evil had crept into it, or some
old one had never been expelled.  As for little Pearl, the
earnestness soon passed out of her face.

But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop.  Two or
three times, as her mother and she went homeward, and as often
at supper-time, and while Hester was putting her to bed, and
once after she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with
mischief gleaming in her black eyes.

"Mother," said she, "what does the scarlet letter mean?"

And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of
being awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and
making that other enquiry, which she had so unaccountably
connected with her investigations about the scarlet letter--

"Mother!--Mother!--Why does the minister keep his hand over his
heart?"

"Hold thy tongue, naughty child!" answered her mother, with an
asperity that she had never permitted to herself before.  "Do not
tease me; else I shall put thee into the dark closet!"



XVI.  A FOREST WALK

Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to
Mr. Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior
consequences, the true character of the man who had crept into
his intimacy.  For several days, however, she vainly sought an
opportunity of addressing him in some of the meditative walks
which she knew him to be in the habit of taking along the shores
of the Peninsula, or on the wooded hills of the neighbouring
country.  There would have been no scandal, indeed, nor peril to
the holy whiteness of the clergyman's good fame, had she visited
him in his own study, where many a penitent, ere now, had
confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as the one betokened by
the scarlet letter.  But, partly that she dreaded the secret or
undisguised interference of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly
that her conscious heart imparted suspicion where none could
have been felt, and partly that both the minister and she would
need the whole wide world to breathe in, while they talked
together--for all these reasons Hester never thought of meeting
him in any narrower privacy than beneath the open sky.

At last, while attending a sick chamber, whither the Rev.  Mr.
Dimmesdale had been summoned to make a prayer, she learnt that
he had gone, the day before, to visit the Apostle Eliot, among
his Indian converts.  He would probably return by a certain hour
in the afternoon of the morrow.  Betimes, therefore, the next
day, Hester took little Pearl--who was necessarily the companion
of all her mother's expeditions, however inconvenient her
presence--and set forth.

The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from the Peninsula
to the mainland, was no other than a foot-path.  It straggled
onward into the mystery of the primeval forest.  This hemmed it
in so narrowly, and stood so black and dense on either side, and
disclosed such imperfect glimpses of the sky above, that, to
Hester's mind, it imaged not amiss the moral wilderness in which
she had so long been wandering.  The day was chill and sombre.
Overhead was a gray expanse of cloud, slightly stirred, however,
by a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering sunshine might now
and then be seen at its solitary play along the path.  This
flitting cheerfulness was always at the further extremity of
some long vista through the forest.  The sportive
sunlight--feebly sportive, at best, in the predominant
pensiveness of the day and scene--withdrew itself as they came
nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the drearier,
because they had hoped to find them bright.

"Mother," said little Pearl, "the sunshine does not love you.
It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something
on your bosom.  Now, see!  There it is, playing a good way off.
Stand you here, and let me run and catch it.  I am but a child.
It will not flee from me--for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!"

"Nor ever will, my child, I hope," said Hester.

"And why not, mother?" asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the
beginning of her race.  "Will not it come of its own accord when
I am a woman grown?"

"Run away, child," answered her mother, "and catch the sunshine.
It will soon be gone."

Pearl set forth at a great pace, and as Hester smiled to
perceive, did actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in
the midst of it, all brightened by its splendour, and
scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid motion.  The
light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a
playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step
into the magic circle too.

"It will go now," said Pearl, shaking her head.

"See!" answered Hester, smiling; "now I can stretch out my hand
and grasp some of it."

As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge
from the bright expression that was dancing on Pearl's features,
her mother could have fancied that the child had absorbed it
into herself, and would give it forth again, with a gleam about
her path, as they should plunge into some gloomier shade.  There
was no other attribute that so much impressed her with a sense
of new and untransmitted vigour in Pearl's nature, as this never
failing vivacity of spirits: she had not the disease of sadness,
which almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with
the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors.  Perhaps
this, too, was a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy
with which Hester had fought against her sorrows before Pearl's
birth.  It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting a hard,
metallic lustre to the child's character.  She wanted--what some
people want throughout life--a grief that should deeply touch
her, and thus humanise and make her capable of sympathy.  But
there was time enough yet for little Pearl.

"Come, my child!" said Hester, looking about her from the spot
where Pearl had stood still in the sunshine--"we will sit down a
little way within the wood, and rest ourselves."

"I am not aweary, mother," replied the little girl.  "But you
may sit down, if you will tell me a story meanwhile."

"A story, child!" said Hester.  "And about what?"

"Oh, a story about the Black Man," answered Pearl, taking hold
of her mother's gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half
mischievously, into her face.

"How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him a big,
heavy book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers
his book and an iron pen to everybody that meets him here among
the trees; and they are to write their names with their own
blood; and then he sets his mark on their bosoms.  Didst thou
ever meet the Black Man, mother?"

"And who told you this story, Pearl," asked her mother,
recognising a common superstition of the period.

"It was the old dame in the chimney corner, at the house where
you watched last night," said the child.  "But she fancied me
asleep while she was talking of it.  She said that a thousand and
a thousand people had met him here, and had written in his book,
and have his mark on them.  And that ugly tempered lady, old
Mistress Hibbins, was one.  And, mother, the old dame said that
this scarlet letter was the Black Man's mark on thee, and that
it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him at midnight,
here in the dark wood.  Is it true, mother?  And dost thou go to
meet him in the nighttime?"

"Didst thou ever awake and find thy mother gone?" asked Hester.
"Not that I remember," said the child.  "If thou fearest to leave
me in our cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee.  I
would very gladly go!  But, mother, tell me now!  Is there such a
Black Man?  And didst thou ever meet him?  And is this his mark?"

"Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?" asked her
mother.

"Yes, if thou tellest me all," answered Pearl.

"Once in my life I met the Black Man!" said her mother.  "This
scarlet letter is his mark!"

Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to
secure themselves from the observation of any casual passenger
along the forest track.  Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap
of moss; which at some epoch of the preceding century, had been
a gigantic pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade,
and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere.  It was a little dell
where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising
gently on either side, and a brook flowing through the midst,
over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves.  The trees impending
over it had flung down great branches from time to time, which
choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black
depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier
passages there appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown,
sparkling sand.  Letting the eyes follow along the course of the
stream, they could catch the reflected light from its water, at
some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces
of it amid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush, and
here and there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens.  All
these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on
making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing,
perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should
whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it
flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a
pool.  Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet
kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like
the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without
playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance
and events of sombre hue.

"Oh, brook!  Oh, foolish and tiresome little brook!" cried
Pearl, after listening awhile to its talk, "Why art thou so sad?
Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and
murmuring!"

But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the
forest trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it
could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else
to say.  Pearl resembled the brook, inasmuch as the current of
her life gushed from a well-spring as mysterious, and had flowed
through scenes shadowed as heavily with gloom.  But, unlike the
little stream, she danced and sparkled, and prattled airily
along her course.

"What does this sad little brook say, mother?" inquired she.

"If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee
of it," answered her mother, "even as it is telling me of mine.
But now, Pearl, I hear a footstep along the path, and the noise
of one putting aside the branches.  I would have thee betake
thyself to play, and leave me to speak with him that comes
yonder."

"Is it the Black Man?" asked Pearl.

"Wilt thou go and play, child?" repeated her mother, "But do not
stray far into the wood.  And take heed that thou come at my
first call."

"Yes, mother," answered Pearl, "But if it be the Black Man, wilt
thou not let me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big
book under his arm?"

"Go, silly child!" said her mother impatiently.  "It is no Black
Man!  Thou canst see him now, through the trees.  It is the
minister!"

"And so it is!" said the child.  "And, mother, he has his hand
over his heart!  Is it because, when the minister wrote his name
in the book, the Black Man set his mark in that place?  But why
does he not wear it outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?"

"Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou wilt another
time," cried Hester Prynne.  "But do not stray far.  Keep where
thou canst hear the babble of the brook."

The child went singing away, following up the current of the
brook, and striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its
melancholy voice.  But the little stream would not be comforted,
and still kept telling its unintelligible secret of some very
mournful mystery that had happened--or making a prophetic
lamentation about something that was yet to happen--within the
verge of the dismal forest.  So Pearl, who had enough of shadow
in her own little life, chose to break off all acquaintance with
this repining brook.  She set herself, therefore, to gathering
violets and wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines that she
found growing in the crevice of a high rock.

When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or
two towards the track that led through the forest, but still
remained under the deep shadow of the trees.  She beheld the
minister advancing along the path entirely alone, and leaning on
a staff which he had cut by the wayside.  He looked haggard and
feeble, and betrayed a nerveless despondency in his air, which
had never so remarkably characterised him in his walks about the
settlement, nor in any other situation where he deemed himself
liable to notice.  Here it was wofully visible, in this intense
seclusion of the forest, which of itself would have been a heavy
trial to the spirits.  There was a listlessness in his gait, as
if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any
desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of
anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree,
and lie there passive for evermore.  The leaves might bestrew
him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock
over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no.
Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.

To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no
symptom of positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as
little Pearl had remarked, he kept his hand over his heart.



XVII.   THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER

Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by before
Hester Prynne could gather voice enough to attract his
observation.  At length she succeeded.

"Arthur Dimmesdale!" she said, faintly at first, then louder,
but hoarsely--"Arthur Dimmesdale!"

"Who speaks?" answered the minister.  Gathering himself quickly
up, he stood more erect, like a man taken by surprise in a mood
to which he was reluctant to have witnesses.  Throwing his eyes
anxiously in the direction of the voice, he indistinctly beheld
a form under the trees, clad in garments so sombre, and so
little relieved from the gray twilight into which the clouded
sky and the heavy foliage had darkened the noontide, that he
knew not whether it were a woman or a shadow.  It may be that his
pathway through life was haunted thus by a spectre that had
stolen out from among his thoughts.

He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.

"Hester!  Hester Prynne!", said he; "is it thou?  Art thou in
life?"

"Even so." she answered.  "In such life as has been mine these
seven years past!  And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet
live?"

It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual
and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own.  So
strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the
first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who
had been intimately connected in their former life, but now
stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar
with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied
beings.  Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.  They
were awe-stricken likewise at themselves, because the crisis
flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each
heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at
such breathless epochs.  The soul beheld its features in the
mirror of the passing moment.  It was with fear, and tremulously,
and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur
Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the
chill hand of Hester Prynne.  The grasp, cold as it was, took
away what was dreariest in the interview.  They now felt
themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere.

Without a word more spoken--neither he nor she assuming the
guidance, but with an unexpressed consent--they glided back into
the shadow of the woods whence Hester had emerged, and sat down
on the heap of moss where she and Pearl had before been sitting.
When they found voice to speak, it was at first only to utter
remarks and inquiries such as any two acquaintances might have
made, about the gloomy sky, the threatening storm, and, next,
the health of each.  Thus they went onward, not boldly, but step
by step, into the themes that were brooding deepest in their
hearts.  So long estranged by fate and circumstances, they needed
something slight and casual to run before and throw open the
doors of intercourse, so that their real thoughts might be led
across the threshold.

After awhile, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne's.

"Hester," said he, "hast thou found peace?"

She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.

"Hast thou?" she asked.

"None--nothing but despair!" he answered.  "What else could I
look for, being what I am, and leading such a life as mine?  Were
I an atheist--a man devoid of conscience--a wretch with coarse
and brutal instincts--I might have found peace long ere now.
Nay, I never should have lost it.  But, as matters stand with my
soul, whatever of good capacity there originally was in me, all
of God's gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers
of spiritual torment.  Hester, I am most miserable!"

"The people reverence thee," said Hester.  "And surely thou
workest good among them!  Doth this bring thee no comfort?"

"More misery, Hester!--Only the more misery!" answered the
clergyman with a bitter smile.  "As concerns the good which I may
appear to do, I have no faith in it.  It must needs be a
delusion.  What can a ruined soul like mine effect towards the
redemption of other souls?--or a polluted soul towards their
purification?  And as for the people's reverence, would that it
were turned to scorn and hatred!  Canst thou deem it, Hester, a
consolation that I must stand up in my pulpit, and meet so many
eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light of heaven were
beaming from it!--must see my flock hungry for the truth, and
listening to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were
speaking!--and then look inward, and discern the black reality
of what they idolise?  I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of
heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!  And
Satan laughs at it!"

"You wrong yourself in this," said Hester gently.  "You have
deeply and sorely repented.  Your sin is left behind you in the
days long past.  Your present life is not less holy, in very
truth, than it seems in people's eyes.  Is there no reality in
the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works?  And
wherefore should it not bring you peace?"

"No, Hester--no!" replied the clergyman.  "There is no substance
in it!  It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for me!  Of
penance, I have had enough!  Of penitence, there has been none!
Else, I should long ago have thrown off these garments of mock
holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me
at the judgment-seat.  Happy are you, Hester, that wear the
scarlet letter openly upon your bosom!  Mine burns in secret!
Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a
seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognises me for
what I am!  Had I one friend--or were it my worst enemy!--to
whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could
daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners,
methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby.  Even thus much
of truth would save me!  But now, it is all falsehood!--all
emptiness!--all death!"

Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak.
Yet, uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he
did, his words here offered her the very point of circumstances
in which to interpose what she came to say.  She conquered her
fears, and spoke:

"Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for," said she,
"with whom to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of
it!"  Again she hesitated, but brought out the words with an
effort.--"Thou hast long had such an enemy, and dwellest with
him, under the same roof!"

The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and
clutching at his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his
bosom.

"Ha!  What sayest thou?" cried he.  "An enemy!  And under mine
own roof!  What mean you?"

Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for
which she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him
to lie for so many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at
the mercy of one whose purposes could not be other than
malevolent.  The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever
mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the
magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale.
There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this
consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own
trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to
herself as a more tolerable doom.  But of late, since the night
of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both
softened and invigorated.  She now read his heart more
accurately.  She doubted not that the continual presence of Roger
Chillingworth--the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all
the air about him--and his authorised interference, as a
physician, with the minister's physical and spiritual
infirmities--that these bad opportunities had been turned to a
cruel purpose.  By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had
been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not
to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his
spiritual being.  Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be
insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good
and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.

Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once--nay,
why should we not speak it?--still so passionately loved!  Hester
felt that the sacrifice of the clergyman's good name, and death
itself, as she had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have
been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she had
taken upon herself to choose.  And now, rather than have had this
grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have laid down on
the forest leaves, and died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet.

"Oh, Arthur!" cried she, "forgive me!  In all things else, I
have striven to be true!  Truth was the one virtue which I might
have held fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity; save
when thy good--thy life--thy fame--were put in question!  Then I
consented to a deception.  But a lie is never good, even though
death threaten on the other side!  Dost thou not see what I would
say?  That old man!--the physician!--he whom they call Roger
Chillingworth!--he was my husband!"

The minister looked at her for an instant, with all that
violence of passion, which--intermixed in more shapes than one
with his higher, purer, softer qualities--was, in fact, the
portion of him which the devil claimed, and through which he
sought to win the rest.  Never was there a blacker or a fiercer
frown than Hester now encountered.  For the brief space that it
lasted, it was a dark transfiguration.  But his character had
been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its lower
energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle.  He
sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands.

"I might have known it," murmured he--"I did know it!  Was not
the secret told me, in the natural recoil of my heart at the
first sight of him, and as often as I have seen him since?  Why
did I not understand?  Oh, Hester Prynne, thou little, little
knowest all the horror of this thing!  And the shame!--the
indelicacy!--the horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick
and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!
Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this!--I cannot forgive
thee!"

"Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, flinging herself on the
fallen leaves beside him.  "Let God punish!  Thou shalt forgive!"

With sudden and desperate tenderness she threw her arms around
him, and pressed his head against her bosom, little caring
though his cheek rested on the scarlet letter.  He would have
released himself, but strove in vain to do so.  Hester would not
set him free, lest he should look her sternly in the face.  All
the world had frowned on her--for seven long years had it
frowned upon this lonely woman--and still she bore it all, nor
ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes.  Heaven, likewise, had
frowned upon her, and she had not died.  But the frown of this
pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester
could not bear, and live!

"Wilt thou yet forgive me?" she repeated, over and over again.
"Wilt thou not frown?  Wilt thou forgive?"

"I do forgive you, Hester," replied the minister at length, with
a deep utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger.  "I
freely forgive you now.  May God forgive us both.  We are not,
Hester, the worst sinners in the world.  There is one worse than
even the polluted priest!  That old man's revenge has been
blacker than my sin.  He has violated, in cold blood, the
sanctity of a human heart.  Thou and I, Hester, never did so!"

"Never, never!" whispered she.  "What we did had a consecration
of its own.  We felt it so!  We said so to each other.  Hast thou
forgotten it?"

"Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground.
"No; I have not forgotten!"

They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on
the mossy trunk of the fallen tree.  Life had never brought them
a gloomier hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so
long been tending, and darkening ever, as it stole along--and
yet it unclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim
another, and another, and, after all, another moment.  The forest
was obscure around them, and creaked with a blast that was
passing through it.  The boughs were tossing heavily above their
heads; while one solemn old tree groaned dolefully to another,
as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or
constrained to forbode evil to come.

And yet they lingered.  How dreary looked the forest-track that
led backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up
again the burden of her ignominy and the minister the hollow
mockery of his good name!  So they lingered an instant longer.  No
golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark
forest.  Here seen only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not
burn into the bosom of the fallen woman!  Here seen only by her
eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one
moment true!

He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.

"Hester!" cried he, "here is a new horror!  Roger Chillingworth
knows your purpose to reveal his true character.  Will he
continue, then, to keep our secret?  What will now be the course
of his revenge?"

"There is a strange secrecy in his nature," replied Hester,
thoughtfully; "and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices
of his revenge.  I deem it not likely that he will betray the
secret.  He will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark
passion."

"And I!--how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with
this deadly enemy?" exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking
within himself, and pressing his hand nervously against his
heart--a gesture that had grown involuntary with him.  "Think for
me, Hester!  Thou art strong.  Resolve for me!"

"Thou must dwell no longer with this man," said Hester, slowly
and firmly.  "Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!"

"It were far worse than death!" replied the minister.  "But how
to avoid it?  What choice remains to me?  Shall I lie down again
on these withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst
tell me what he was?  Must I sink down there, and die at once?"

"Alas!  what a ruin has befallen thee!" said Hester, with the
tears gushing into her eyes.  "Wilt thou die for very weakness?
There is no other cause!"

"The judgment of God is on me," answered the conscience-stricken
priest.  "It is too mighty for me to struggle with!"

"Heaven would show mercy," rejoined Hester, "hadst thou but the
strength to take advantage of it."

"Be thou strong for me!" answered he.  "Advise me what to do."

"Is the world, then, so narrow?" exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing
her deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a
magnetic power over a spirit so shattered and subdued that it
could hardly hold itself erect.  "Doth the universe lie within
the compass of yonder town, which only a little time ago was but
a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this around us?  Whither leads
yonder forest-track?  Backward to the settlement, thou sayest!
Yes; but, onward, too!  Deeper it goes, and deeper into the
wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until some
few miles hence the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the
white man's tread.  There thou art free!  So brief a journey would
bring thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to
one where thou mayest still be happy!  Is there not shade enough
in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of
Roger Chillingworth?"

"Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!" replied the
minister, with a sad smile.

"Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!" continued Hester.
"It brought thee hither.  If thou so choose, it will bear thee
back again.  In our native land, whether in some remote rural
village, or in vast London--or, surely, in Germany, in France,
in pleasant Italy--thou wouldst be beyond his power and
knowledge!  And what hast thou to do with all these iron men, and
their opinions?  They have kept thy better part in bondage too
long already!"

"It cannot be!" answered the minister, listening as if he were
called upon to realise a dream.  "I am powerless to go.  Wretched
and sinful as I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on
my earthly existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed
me.  Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may for
other human souls!  I dare not quit my post, though an unfaithful
sentinel, whose sure reward is death and dishonour, when his
dreary watch shall come to an end!"

"Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight of misery,"
replied Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own
energy.  "But thou shalt leave it all behind thee!  It shall not
cumber thy steps, as thou treadest along the forest-path:
neither shalt thou freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to
cross the sea.  Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath
happened.  Meddle no more with it!  Begin all anew!  Hast thou
exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial?  Not so!
The future is yet full of trial and success.  There is happiness
to be enjoyed!  There is good to be done!  Exchange this false
life of thine for a true one.  Be, if thy spirit summon thee to
such a mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men.  Or, as
is more thy nature, be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and
the most renowned of the cultivated world.  Preach!  Write!  Act!
Do anything, save to lie down and die!  Give up this name of
Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one,
such as thou canst wear without fear or shame.  Why shouldst thou
tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so
gnawed into thy life? that have made thee feeble to will and to
do? that will leave thee powerless even to repent?  Up, and
away!"

"Oh, Hester!" cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful
light, kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away,
"thou tellest of running a race to a man whose knees are
tottering beneath him!  I must die here!  There is not the
strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange,
difficult world alone!"

It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken
spirit.  He lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed
within his reach.

He repeated the word--"Alone, Hester!"

"Thou shall not go alone!" answered she, in a deep whisper.
Then, all was spoken!



XVIII.  A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE

Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which
hope and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and
a kind of horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely
hinted at, but dared not speak.

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity,
and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from
society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation
as was altogether foreign to the clergyman.  She had wandered,
without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as
intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of
which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their
fate.  Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in
desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in
his woods.  For years past she had looked from this estranged
point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or
legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more
reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the
judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the
church.  The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set
her free.  The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where
other women dared not tread.  Shame, Despair, Solitude!  These had
been her teachers--stern and wild ones--and they had made her
strong, but taught her much amiss.

The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an
experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally
received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so
fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them.  But this
had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.
Since that wretched epoch, he had watched with morbid zeal and
minuteness, not his acts--for those it was easy to arrange--but
each breath of emotion, and his every thought.  At the head of
the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was
only the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and
even its prejudices.  As a priest, the framework of his order
inevitably hemmed him in.  As a man who had once sinned, but who
kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the
fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer
within the line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.

Thus we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole
seven years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a
preparation for this very hour.  But Arthur Dimmesdale!  Were such
a man once more to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation
of his crime?  None; unless it avail him somewhat that he was
broken down by long and exquisite suffering; that his mind was
darkened and confused by the very remorse which harrowed it;
that, between fleeing as an avowed criminal, and remaining as a
hypocrite, conscience might find it hard to strike the balance;
that it was human to avoid the peril of death and infamy, and
the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that, finally, to this
poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint, sick,
miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and
sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy
doom which he was now expiating.  And be the stern and sad truth
spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human
soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired.  It may be watched
and guarded, so that the enemy shall not force his way again
into the citadel, and might even in his subsequent assaults,
select some other avenue, in preference to that where he had
formerly succeeded.  But there is still the ruined wall, and near
it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his
unforgotten triumph.

The struggle, if there were one, need not be described.  Let it
suffice that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.

"If in all these past seven years," thought he, "I could recall
one instant of peace or hope, I would yet endure, for the sake
of that earnest of Heaven's mercy.  But now--since I am
irrevocably doomed--wherefore should I not snatch the solace
allowed to the condemned culprit before his execution?  Or, if
this be the path to a better life, as Hester would persuade me,
I surely give up no fairer prospect by pursuing it!  Neither can
I any longer live without her companionship; so powerful is she
to sustain--so tender to soothe!  O Thou to whom I dare not lift
mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me?"

"Thou wilt go!" said Hester calmly, as he met her glance.

The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its
flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast.  It was the
exhilarating effect--upon a prisoner just escaped from the
dungeon of his own heart--of breathing the wild, free atmosphere
of an unredeemed, unchristianised, lawless region.  His spirit
rose, as it were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect
of the sky, than throughout all the misery which had kept him
grovelling on the earth.  Of a deeply religious temperament,
there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in his mood.

"Do I feel joy again?" cried he, wondering at himself.
"Methought the germ of it was dead in me!  Oh, Hester, thou art
my better angel!  I seem to have flung myself--sick, sin-stained,
and sorrow-blackened--down upon these forest leaves, and to have
risen up all made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him that
hath been merciful!  This is already the better life!  Why did we
not find it sooner?"

"Let us not look back," answered Hester Prynne.  "The past is
gone!  Wherefore should we linger upon it now?  See!  With this
symbol I undo it all, and make it as if it had never been!"

So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet
letter, and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance
among the withered leaves.  The mystic token alighted on the
hither verge of the stream.  With a hand's-breadth further
flight, it would have fallen into the water, and have given the
little brook another woe to carry onward, besides the
unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about.  But
there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost jewel,
which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be
haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and
unaccountable misfortune.

The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the
burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit.  O
exquisite relief!  She had not known the weight until she felt
the freedom!  By another impulse, she took off the formal cap
that confined her hair, and down it fell upon her shoulders,
dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its
abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features.
There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a
radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very
heart of womanhood.  A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek,
that had been long so pale.  Her sex, her youth, and the whole
richness of her beauty, came back from what men call the
irrevocable past, and clustered themselves with her maiden hope,
and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this
hour.  And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the
effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their
sorrow.  All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth
burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure
forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow
fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the
solemn trees.  The objects that had made a shadow hitherto,
embodied the brightness now.  The course of the little brook
might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of
mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.

Such was the sympathy of Nature--that wild, heathen Nature of
the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by
higher truth--with the bliss of these two spirits!  Love, whether
newly-born, or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always
create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that
it overflows upon the outward world.  Had the forest still kept
its gloom, it would have been bright in Hester's eyes, and
bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's!

Hester looked at him with a thrill of another joy.

"Thou must know Pearl!" said she.  "Our little Pearl!  Thou hast
seen her--yes, I know it!--but thou wilt see her now with other
eyes.  She is a strange child!  I hardly comprehend her!  But thou
wilt love her dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal
with her!"

"Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?" asked the
minister, somewhat uneasily.  "I have long shrunk from children,
because they often show a distrust--a backwardness to be
familiar with me.  I have even been afraid of little Pearl!"

"Ah, that was sad!" answered the mother.  "But she will love
thee dearly, and thou her.  She is not far off.  I will call her.
Pearl!  Pearl!"

"I see the child," observed the minister.  "Yonder she is,
standing in a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other
side of the brook.  So thou thinkest the child will love me?"

Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible at
some distance, as the minister had described her, like a
bright-apparelled vision in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her
through an arch of boughs.  The ray quivered to and fro, making
her figure dim or distinct--now like a real child, now like a
child's spirit--as the splendour went and came again.  She heard
her mother's voice, and approached slowly through the forest.

Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely while her mother
sat talking with the clergyman.  The great black forest--stern as
it showed itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of
the world into its bosom--became the playmate of the lonely
infant, as well as it knew how.  Sombre as it was, it put on the
kindest of its moods to welcome her.  It offered her the
partridge-berries, the growth of the preceding autumn, but
ripening only in the spring, and now red as drops of blood upon
the withered leaves.  These Pearl gathered, and was pleased with
their wild flavour.  The small denizens of the wilderness hardly
took pains to move out of her path.  A partridge, indeed, with a
brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon
repented of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to
be afraid.  A pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to
come beneath, and uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm.
A squirrel, from the lofty depths of his domestic tree,
chattered either in anger or merriment--for the squirrel is such
a choleric and humorous little personage, that it is hard to
distinguish between his moods--so he chattered at the child, and
flung down a nut upon her head.  It was a last year's nut, and
already gnawed by his sharp tooth.  A fox, startled from his
sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively
at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal off, or
renew his nap on the same spot.  A wolf, it is said--but here the
tale has surely lapsed into the improbable--came up and smelt of
Pearl's robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her
hand.  The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest,
and these wild things which it nourished, all recognised a
kindred wilderness in the human child.

And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of
the settlement, or in her mother's cottage.  The Bowers appeared
to know it, and one and another whispered as she passed, "Adorn
thyself with me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with
me!"--and, to please them, Pearl gathered the violets, and
anemones, and columbines, and some twigs of the freshest green,
which the old trees held down before her eyes.  With these she
decorated her hair and her young waist, and became a nymph
child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest
sympathy with the antique wood.  In such guise had Pearl adorned
herself, when she heard her mother's voice, and came slowly
back.

Slowly--for she saw the clergyman!



XIX.  THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE

"Thou wilt love her dearly," repeated Hester Prynne, as she and
the minister sat watching little Pearl.  "Dost thou not think her
beautiful?  And see with what natural skill she has made those
simple flowers adorn her!  Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds,
and rubies in the wood, they could not have become her better!
She is a splendid child!  But I know whose brow she has!"

"Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an
unquiet smile, "that this dear child, tripping about always at
thy side, hath caused me many an alarm?  Methought--oh, Hester,
what a thought is that, and how terrible to dread it!--that my
own features were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly
that the world might see them!  But she is mostly thine!"

"No, no!  Not mostly!" answered the mother, with a tender smile.
"A little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace
whose child she is.  But how strangely beautiful she looks with
those wild flowers in her hair!  It is as if one of the fairies,
whom we left in dear old England, had decked her out to meet
us."

It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before
experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl's slow advance.  In
her was visible the tie that united them.  She had been offered
to the world, these seven past years, as the living
hieroglyphic, in which was revealed the secret they so darkly
sought to hide--all written in this symbol--all plainly
manifest--had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read
the character of flame!  And Pearl was the oneness of their
being.  Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt
that their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined
when they beheld at once the material union, and the spiritual
idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together;
thoughts like these--and perhaps other thoughts, which they did
not acknowledge or define--threw an awe about the child as she
came onward.

"Let her see nothing strange--no passion or eagerness--in thy
way of accosting her," whispered Hester.  "Our Pearl is a fitful
and fantastic little elf sometimes.  Especially she is generally
intolerant of emotion, when she does not fully comprehend the
why and wherefore.  But the child hath strong affections!  She
loves me, and will love thee!"

"Thou canst not think," said the minister, glancing aside at
Hester Prynne, "how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns
for it!  But, in truth, as I already told thee, children are not
readily won to be familiar with me.  They will not climb my knee,
nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile, but stand apart,
and eye me strangely.  Even little babes, when I take them in my
arms, weep bitterly.  Yet Pearl, twice in her little lifetime,
hath been kind to me!  The first time--thou knowest it well!  The
last was when thou ledst her with thee to the house of yonder
stern old Governor."

"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine!"
answered the mother.  "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl.
Fear nothing.  She may be strange and shy at first, but will soon
learn to love thee!"

By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and
stood on the further side, gazing silently at Hester and the
clergyman, who still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk
waiting to receive her.  Just where she had paused, the brook
chanced to form a pool so smooth and quiet that it reflected a
perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant
picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and
wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the
reality.  This image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl,
seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible
quality to the child herself.  It was strange, the way in which
Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim
medium of the forest gloom, herself, meanwhile, all glorified
with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a
certain sympathy.  In the brook beneath stood another
child--another and the same--with likewise its ray of golden
light.  Hester felt herself, in some indistinct and tantalizing
manner, estranged from Pearl, as if the child, in her lonely
ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in
which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly
seeking to return to it.

There were both truth and error in the impression; the child and
mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's.
Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been
admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so
modified the aspect of them all, that Pearl, the returning
wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where
she was.

"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that
this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou
canst never meet thy Pearl again.  Or is she an elfish spirit,
who, as the legends of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to
cross a running stream?  Pray hasten her, for this delay has
already imparted a tremor to my nerves."

"Come, dearest child!" said Hester encouragingly, and stretching
out both her arms.  "How slow thou art!  When hast thou been so
sluggish before now?  Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy
friend also.  Thou wilt have twice as much love henceforward as
thy mother alone could give thee!  Leap across the brook and come
to us.  Thou canst leap like a young deer!"

Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet
expressions, remained on the other side of the brook.  Now she
fixed her bright wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister,
and now included them both in the same glance, as if to detect
and explain to herself the relation which they bore to one
another.  For some unaccountable reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale
felt the child's eyes upon himself, his hand--with that gesture
so habitual as to have become involuntary--stole over his heart.
At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched
out her hand, with the small forefinger extended, and pointing
evidently towards her mother's breast.  And beneath, in the
mirror of the brook, there was the flower-girdled and sunny
image of little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too.

"Thou strange child!  why dost thou not come to me?" exclaimed
Hester.

Pearl still pointed with her forefinger, and a frown gathered on
her brow--the more impressive from the childish, the almost
baby-like aspect of the features that conveyed it.  As her mother
still kept beckoning to her, and arraying her face in a holiday
suit of unaccustomed smiles, the child stamped her foot with a
yet more imperious look and gesture.  In the brook, again, was
the fantastic beauty of the image, with its reflected frown, its
pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the
aspect of little Pearl.

"Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee!" cried Hester
Prynne, who, however, inured to such behaviour on the
elf-child's part at other seasons, was naturally anxious for a
more seemly deportment now.  "Leap across the brook, naughty
child, and run hither!  Else I must come to thee!"

But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats any more
than mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit
of passion, gesticulating violently, and throwing her small
figure into the most extravagant contortions.  She accompanied
this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks, which the woods
reverberated on all sides, so that, alone as she was in her
childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden
multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement.
Seen in the brook once more was the shadowy wrath of Pearl's
image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot,
wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing
its small forefinger at Hester's bosom.

"I see what ails the child," whispered Hester to the clergyman,
and turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her
trouble and annoyance, "Children will not abide any, the
slightest, change in the accustomed aspect of things that are
daily before their eyes.  Pearl misses something that she has
always seen me wear!"

"I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou hast any means of
pacifying the child, do it forthwith!  Save it were the cankered
wrath of an old witch like Mistress Hibbins," added he,
attempting to smile, "I know nothing that I would not sooner
encounter than this passion in a child.  In Pearl's young beauty,
as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect.  Pacify
her if thou lovest me!"

Hester turned again towards Pearl with a crimson blush upon her
cheek, a conscious glance aside clergyman, and then a heavy
sigh, while, even before she had time to speak, the blush
yielded to a deadly pallor.

"Pearl," said she sadly, "look down at thy feet!  There!--before
thee!--on the hither side of the brook!"

The child turned her eyes to the point indicated, and there lay
the scarlet letter so close upon the margin of the stream that
the gold embroidery was reflected in it.

"Bring it hither!" said Hester.

"Come thou and take it up!" answered Pearl.

"Was ever such a child!" observed Hester aside to the minister.
"Oh, I have much to tell thee about her!  But, in very truth, she
is right as regards this hateful token.  I must bear its torture
yet a little longer--only a few days longer--until we shall have
left this region, and look back hither as to a land which we
have dreamed of.  The forest cannot hide it!  The mid-ocean shall
take it from my hand, and swallow it up for ever!"

With these words she advanced to the margin of the brook, took
up the scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom.
Hopefully, but a moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it
in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon her
as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand of
fate.  She had flung it into infinite space! she had drawn an
hour's free breath! and here again was the scarlet misery
glittering on the old spot!  So it ever is, whether thus typified
or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of
doom.  Hester next gathered up the heavy tresses of her hair and
confined them beneath her cap.  As if there were a withering
spell in the sad letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of
her womanhood, departed like fading sunshine, and a gray shadow
seemed to fall across her.

When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to
Pearl.

"Dost thou know thy mother now, child?", asked she,
reproachfully, but with a subdued tone.  "Wilt thou come across
the brook, and own thy mother, now that she has her shame upon
her--now that she is sad?"

"Yes; now I will!" answered the child, bounding across the
brook, and clasping Hester in her arms "Now thou art my mother
indeed! and I am thy little Pearl!"

In a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her, she drew
down her mother's head, and kissed her brow and both her cheeks.
But then--by a kind of necessity that always impelled this child
to alloy whatever comfort she might chance to give with a throb
of anguish--Pearl put up her mouth and kissed the scarlet
letter, too.

"That was not kind!" said Hester.  "When thou hast shown me a
little love, thou mockest me!"

"Why doth the minister sit yonder?" asked Pearl.

"He waits to welcome thee," replied her mother.  "Come thou, and
entreat his blessing!  He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves
thy mother, too.  Wilt thou not love him?  Come he longs to greet
thee!"

"Doth he love us?" said Pearl, looking up with acute
intelligence into her mother's face.  "Will he go back with us,
hand in hand, we three together, into the town?"

"Not now, my child," answered Hester.  "But in days to come he
will walk hand in hand with us.  We will have a home and fireside
of our own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach
thee many things, and love thee dearly.  Thou wilt love him--wilt
thou not?"

"And will he always keep his hand over his heart?" inquired
Pearl.

"Foolish child, what a question is that!" exclaimed her mother.
"Come, and ask his blessing!"

But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive
with every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from
whatever caprice of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no
favour to the clergyman.  It was only by an exertion of force
that her mother brought her up to him, hanging back, and
manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces; of which, ever since
her babyhood, she had possessed a singular variety, and could
transform her mobile physiognomy into a series of different
aspects, with a new mischief in them, each and all.  The
minister--painfully embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might
prove a talisman to admit him into the child's kindlier
regards--bent forward, and impressed one on her brow.  Hereupon,
Pearl broke away from her mother, and, running to the brook,
stooped over it, and bathed her forehead, until the unwelcome
kiss was quite washed off and diffused through a long lapse of
the gliding water.  She then remained apart, silently watching
Hester and the clergyman; while they talked together and made
such arrangements as were suggested by their new position and
the purposes soon to be fulfilled.

And now this fateful interview had come to a close.  The dell
was to be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which,
with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had
passed there, and no mortal be the wiser.  And the melancholy
brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its
little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept
up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone
than for ages heretofore.



XX.  THE MINISTER IN A MAZE

As the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little
Pearl, he threw a backward glance, half expecting that he should
discover only some faintly traced features or outline of the
mother and the child, slowly fading into the twilight of the
woods.  So great a vicissitude in his life could not at once be
received as real.  But there was Hester, clad in her gray robe,
still standing beside the tree-trunk, which some blast had
overthrown a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever since
been covering with moss, so that these two fated ones, with
earth's heaviest burden on them, might there sit down together,
and find a single hour's rest and solace.  And there was Pearl,
too, lightly dancing from the margin of the brook--now that the
intrusive third person was gone--and taking her old place by her
mother's side.  So the minister had not fallen asleep and
dreamed!

In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity
of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he
recalled and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and
himself had sketched for their departure.  It had been determined
between them that the Old World, with its crowds and cities,
offered them a more eligible shelter and concealment than the
wilds of New England or all America, with its alternatives of an
Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of Europeans scattered
thinly along the sea-board.  Not to speak of the clergyman's
health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a forest life,
his native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would
secure him a home only in the midst of civilization and
refinement; the higher the state the more delicately adapted to
it the man.  In furtherance of this choice, it so happened that a
ship lay in the harbour; one of those unquestionable cruisers,
frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of
the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable
irresponsibility of character.  This vessel had recently arrived
from the Spanish Main, and within three days' time would sail
for Bristol.  Hester Prynne--whose vocation, as a self-enlisted
Sister of Charity, had brought her acquainted with the captain
and crew--could take upon herself to secure the passage of two
individuals and a child with all the secrecy which circumstances
rendered more than desirable.

The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest,
the precise time at which the vessel might be expected to
depart.  It would probably be on the fourth day from the present.
"This is most fortunate!" he had then said to himself.  Now, why
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate we
hesitate to reveal.  Nevertheless--to hold nothing back from the
reader--it was because, on the third day from the present, he
was to preach the Election Sermon; and, as such an occasion
formed an honourable epoch in the life of a New England
Clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode
and time of terminating his professional career.  "At least, they
shall say of me," thought this exemplary man, "that I leave no
public duty unperformed or ill-performed!"  Sad, indeed, that an
introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's
should be so miserably deceived!  We have had, and may still
have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so
pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable,
of a subtle disease that had long since begun to eat into the
real substance of his character.  No man, for any considerable
period, can wear one face to himself and another to the
multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be
the true.

The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings as he returned from
his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical
energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace.  The pathway
among the woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude
natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man, than he
remembered it on his outward journey.  But he leaped across the
plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbrush,
climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in
short, all the difficulties of the track, with an unweariable
activity that astonished him.  He could not but recall how
feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath he had toiled
over the same ground, only two days before.  As he drew near the
town, he took an impression of change from the series of
familiar objects that presented themselves.  It seemed not
yesterday, not one, not two, but many days, or even years ago,
since he had quitted them.  There, indeed, was each former trace
of the street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of
the houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and a
weather-cock at every point where his memory suggested one.  Not
the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of
change.  The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he
met, and all the well-known shapes of human life, about the
little town.  They looked neither older nor younger now; the
beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping babe
of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to
describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on
whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the
minister's deepest sense seemed to inform him of their
mutability.  A similar impression struck him most remarkably as
he passed under the walls of his own church.  The edifice had so
very strange, and yet so familiar an aspect, that Mr.
Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas; either that he had
seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming
about it now.

This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed,
indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a
change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the
intervening space of a single day had operated on his
consciousness like the lapse of years.  The minister's own will,
and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had
wrought this transformation.  It was the same town as heretofore,
but the same minister returned not from the forest.  He might
have said to the friends who greeted him--"I am not the man for
whom you take me!  I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn
into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk, and near a melancholy
brook!  Go, seek your minister, and see if his emaciated figure,
his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be not
flung down there, like a cast-off garment!"  His friends, no
doubt, would still have insisted with him--"Thou art thyself the
man!" but the error would have been their own, not his.

Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other
evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling.
In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral
code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the
impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled
minister.  At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild,
wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once
involuntary and intentional, in spite of himself, yet growing
out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse.
For instance, he met one of his own deacons.  The good old man
addressed him with the paternal affection and patriarchal
privilege which his venerable age, his upright and holy
character, and his station in the church, entitled him to use
and, conjoined with this, the deep, almost worshipping respect,
which the minister's professional and private claims alike
demanded.  Never was there a more beautiful example of how the
majesty of age and wisdom may comport with the obeisance and
respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower social rank, and
inferior order of endowment, towards a higher.  Now, during a
conversation of some two or three moments between the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale and this excellent and hoary-bearded deacon, it
was only by the most careful self-control that the former could
refrain from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose
into his mind, respecting the communion-supper.  He absolutely
trembled and turned pale as ashes, lest his tongue should wag
itself in utterance of these horrible matters, and plead his own
consent for so doing, without his having fairly given it.  And,
even with this terror in his heart, he could hardly avoid
laughing, to imagine how the sanctified old patriarchal deacon
would have been petrified by his minister's impiety.

Again, another incident of the same nature.  Hurrying along the
street, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest
female member of his church, a most pious and exemplary old
dame, poor, widowed, lonely, and with a heart as full of
reminiscences about her dead husband and children, and her dead
friends of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of storied
gravestones.  Yet all this, which would else have been such heavy
sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy to her devout old soul, by
religious consolations and the truths of Scripture, wherewith
she had fed herself continually for more than thirty years.  And
since Mr. Dimmesdale had taken her in charge, the good grandam's
chief earthly comfort--which, unless it had been likewise a
heavenly comfort, could have been none at all--was to meet her
pastor, whether casually, or of set purpose, and be refreshed
with a word of warm, fragrant, heaven-breathing Gospel truth,
from his beloved lips, into her dulled, but rapturously
attentive ear.  But, on this occasion, up to the moment of
putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the
great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of
Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it
then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the
immortality of the human soul.  The instilment thereof into her
mind would probably have caused this aged sister to drop down
dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely poisonous
infusion.  What he really did whisper, the minister could never
afterwards recollect.  There was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder
in his utterance, which failed to impart any distinct idea to
the good widows comprehension, or which Providence interpreted
after a method of its own.  Assuredly, as the minister looked
back, he beheld an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy
that seemed like the shine of the celestial city on her face, so
wrinkled and ashy pale.

Again, a third instance.  After parting from the old church
member, he met the youngest sister of them all.  It was a maiden
newly-won--and won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own sermon,
on the Sabbath after his vigil--to barter the transitory
pleasures of the world for the heavenly hope that was to assume
brighter substance as life grew dark around her, and which would
gild the utter gloom with final glory.  She was fair and pure as
a lily that had bloomed in Paradise.  The minister knew well that
he was himself enshrined within the stainless sanctity of her
heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting
to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity.
Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away
from her mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this
sorely tempted, or--shall we not rather say?--this lost and
desperate man.  As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to
condense into small compass, and drop into her tender bosom a
germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear
black fruit betimes.  Such was his sense of power over this
virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the minister felt
potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one wicked
look, and develop all its opposite with but a word.  So--with a
mightier struggle than he had yet sustained--he held his Geneva
cloak before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of
recognition, and leaving the young sister to digest his rudeness
as she might.  She ransacked her conscience--which was full of
harmless little matters, like her pocket or her work-bag--and
took herself to task, poor thing! for a thousand imaginary
faults, and went about her household duties with swollen eyelids
the next morning.


Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this
last temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more
ludicrous, and almost as horrible.  It was--we blush to tell
it--it was to stop short in the road, and teach some very wicked
words to a knot of little Puritan children who were playing
there, and had but just begun to talk.  Denying himself this
freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met a drunken seaman, one of
the ship's crew from the Spanish Main.  And here, since he had so
valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor Mr. Dimmesdale
longed at least to shake hands with the tarry black-guard, and
recreate himself with a few improper jests, such as dissolute
sailors so abound with, and a volley of good, round, solid,
satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths!  It was not so much a
better principle, as partly his natural good taste, and still
more his buckramed habit of clerical decorum, that carried him
safely through the latter crisis.

"What is it that haunts and tempts me thus?" cried the minister
to himself, at length, pausing in the street, and striking his
hand against his forehead.

"Am I mad?  or am I given over utterly to the fiend?  Did I make
a contract with him in the forest, and sign it with my blood?
And does he now summon me to its fulfilment, by suggesting the
performance of every wickedness which his most foul imagination
can conceive?"

At the moment when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale thus communed
with himself, and struck his forehead with his hand, old
Mistress Hibbins, the reputed witch-lady, is said to have been
passing by.  She made a very grand appearance, having on a high
head-dress, a rich gown of velvet, and a ruff done up with the
famous yellow starch, of which Anne Turner, her especial friend,
had taught her the secret, before this last good lady had been
hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury's murder.  Whether the witch had
read the minister's thoughts or no, she came to a full stop,
looked shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily, and--though
little given to converse with clergymen--began a conversation.

"So, reverend sir, you have made a visit into the forest,"
observed the witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him.
"The next time I pray you to allow me only a fair warning, and I
shall be proud to bear you company.  Without taking overmuch upon
myself my good word will go far towards gaining any strange
gentleman a fair reception from yonder potentate you wot of."

"I profess, madam," answered the clergyman, with a grave
obeisance, such as the lady's rank demanded, and his own good
breeding made imperative--"I profess, on my conscience and
character, that I am utterly bewildered as touching the purport
of your words!  I went not into the forest to seek a potentate,
neither do I, at any future time, design a visit thither, with a
view to gaining the favour of such personage.  My one sufficient
object was to greet that pious friend of mine, the Apostle
Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious souls he hath
won from heathendom!"

"Ha, ha, ha!" cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high
head-dress at the minister.  "Well, well! we must needs talk thus
in the daytime!  You carry it off like an old hand!  But at
midnight, and in the forest, we shall have other talk together!"

She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back
her head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognise a
secret intimacy of connexion.

"Have I then sold myself," thought the minister, "to the fiend
whom, if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag
has chosen for her prince and master?"

The wretched minister!  He had made a bargain very like it!
Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with
deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew
was deadly sin.  And the infectious poison of that sin had been
thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system.  It had
stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid life the
whole brotherhood of bad ones.  Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked
malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was
good and holy, all awoke to tempt, even while they frightened
him.  And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a
real incident, did but show its sympathy and fellowship with
wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits.

He had by this time reached his dwelling on the edge of the
burial ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his
study.  The minister was glad to have reached this shelter,
without first betraying himself to the world by any of those
strange and wicked eccentricities to which he had been
continually impelled while passing through the streets.  He
entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its books,
its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the
walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted
him throughout his walk from the forest dell into the town and
thitherward.  Here he had studied and written; here gone through
fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here striven to pray;
here borne a hundred thousand agonies!  There was the Bible, in
its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets speaking to
him, and God's voice through all.

There on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an
unfinished sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where
his thoughts had ceased to gush out upon the page two days
before.  He knew that it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked
minister, who had done and suffered these things, and written
thus far into the Election Sermon!  But he seemed to stand apart,
and eye this former self with scornful pitying, but half-envious
curiosity.  That self was gone.  Another man had returned out of
the forest--a wiser one--with a knowledge of hidden mysteries
which the simplicity of the former never could have reached.  A
bitter kind of knowledge that!

While occupied with these reflections, a knock came at the door
of the study, and the minister said, "Come in!"--not wholly
devoid of an idea that he might behold an evil spirit.  And so he
did!  It was old Roger Chillingworth that entered.  The minister
stood white and speechless, with one hand on the Hebrew
Scriptures, and the other spread upon his breast.

"Welcome home, reverend sir," said the physician "And how found
you that godly man, the Apostle Eliot?  But methinks, dear sir,
you look pale, as if the travel through the wilderness had been
too sore for you.  Will not my aid be requisite to put you in
heart and strength to preach your Election Sermon?"

"Nay, I think not so," rejoined the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.  "My
journey, and the sight of the holy Apostle yonder, and the free
air which I have breathed have done me good, after so long
confinement in my study.  I think to need no more of your drugs,
my kind physician, good though they be, and administered by a
friendly hand."

All this time Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister
with the grave and intent regard of a physician towards his
patient.  But, in spite of this outward show, the latter was
almost convinced of the old man's knowledge, or, at least, his
confident suspicion, with respect to his own interview with
Hester Prynne.  The physician knew then that in the minister's
regard he was no longer a trusted friend, but his bitterest
enemy.  So much being known, it would appear natural that a part
of it should be expressed.  It is singular, however, how long a
time often passes before words embody things; and with what
security two persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject, may
approach its very verge, and retire without disturbing it.  Thus
the minister felt no apprehension that Roger Chillingworth would
touch, in express words, upon the real position which they
sustained towards one another.  Yet did the physician, in his
dark way, creep frightfully near the secret.

"Were it not better," said he, "that you use my poor skill
tonight?  Verily, dear sir, we must take pains to make you strong
and vigorous for this occasion of the Election discourse.  The
people look for great things from you, apprehending that another
year may come about and find their pastor gone."

"Yes, to another world," replied the minister with pious
resignation.  "Heaven grant it be a better one; for, in good
sooth, I hardly think to tarry with my flock through the
flitting seasons of another year!  But touching your medicine,
kind sir, in my present frame of body I need it not."

"I joy to hear it," answered the physician.  "It may be that my
remedies, so long administered in vain, begin now to take due
effect.  Happy man were I, and well deserving of New England's
gratitude, could I achieve this cure!"

"I thank you from my heart, most watchful friend," said the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale with a solemn smile.  "I thank you, and
can but requite your good deeds with my prayers."

"A good man's prayers are golden recompense!" rejoined old Roger
Chillingworth, as he took his leave.  "Yea, they are the current
gold coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King's own mint mark on
them!"

Left alone, the minister summoned a servant of the house, and
requested food, which, being set before him, he ate with
ravenous appetite.  Then flinging the already written pages of
the Election Sermon into the fire, he forthwith began another,
which he wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and
emotion, that he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered
that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn
music of its oracles through so foul an organ pipe as he.
However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved
for ever, he drove his task onward with earnest haste and
ecstasy.

Thus the night fled away, as if it were a winged steed, and he
careering on it; morning came, and peeped, blushing, through the
curtains; and at last sunrise threw a golden beam into the
study, and laid it right across the minister's bedazzled eyes.
There he was, with the pen still between his fingers, and a
vast, immeasurable tract of written space behind him!



XXI.  THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY

Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was
to receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne
and little Pearl came into the market-place.  It was already
thronged with the craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of
the town, in considerable numbers, among whom, likewise, were
many rough figures, whose attire of deer-skins marked them as
belonging to some of the forest settlements, which surrounded
the little metropolis of the colony.

On this public holiday, as on all other occasions for seven
years past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth.
Not more by its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in
its fashion, it had the effect of making her fade personally out
of sight and outline; while again the scarlet letter brought her
back from this twilight indistinctness, and revealed her under
the moral aspect of its own illumination.  Her face, so long
familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which
they were accustomed to behold there.  It was like a mask; or,
rather like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features;
owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was
actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had
departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.

It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression
unseen before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now;
unless some preternaturally gifted observer should have first
read the heart, and have afterwards sought a corresponding
development in the countenance and mien.  Such a spiritual seer
might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the
multitude through several miserable years as a necessity, a
penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure,
she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and
voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony
into a kind of triumph.  "Look your last on the scarlet letter
and its wearer!"--the people's victim and lifelong bond-slave,
as they fancied her, might say to them.  "Yet a little while, and
she will be beyond your reach!  A few hours longer and the deep,
mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which
ye have caused to burn on her bosom!"  Nor were it an
inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature,
should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester's mind, at the
moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which
had been thus deeply incorporated with her being.  Might there
not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless
draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all
her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavoured.  The wine
of life, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed
rich, delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden
beaker, or else leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the
lees of bitterness wherewith she had been drugged, as with a
cordial of intensest potency.

Pearl was decked out with airy gaiety.  It would have been
impossible to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed
its existence to the shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at
once so gorgeous and so delicate as must have been requisite to
contrive the child's apparel, was the same that had achieved a
task perhaps more difficult, in imparting so distinct a
peculiarity to Hester's simple robe.  The dress, so proper was it
to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or inevitable development
and outward manifestation of her character, no more to be
separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a
butterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright
flower.  As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of
one idea with her nature.  On this eventful day, moreover, there
was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood,
resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that
sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of the breast on
which it is displayed.  Children have always a sympathy in the
agitations of those connected with them: always, especially, a
sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of whatever kind,
in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was the gem
on her mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of
her spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marble
passiveness of Hester's brow.

This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement,
rather than walk by her mother's side.

She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inarticulate, and
sometimes piercing music.  When they reached the market-place,
she became still more restless, on perceiving the stir and
bustle that enlivened the spot; for it was usually more like the
broad and lonesome green before a village meeting-house, than
the centre of a town's business.

"Why, what is this, mother?" cried she.  "Wherefore have all the
people left their work to-day?  Is it a play-day for the whole
world?  See, there is the blacksmith!  He has washed his sooty
face, and put on his Sabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he
would gladly be merry, if any kind body would only teach him
how!  And there is Master Brackett, the old jailer, nodding and
smiling at me.  Why does he do so, mother?"

"He remembers thee a little babe, my child," answered Hester.

"He should not nod and smile at me, for all that--the black,
grim, ugly-eyed old man!" said Pearl.  "He may nod at thee, if he
will; for thou art clad in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter.
But see, mother, how many faces of strange people, and Indians
among them, and sailors!  What have they all come to do, here in
the market-place?"

"They wait to see the procession pass," said Hester.  "For the
Governor and the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers,
and all the great people and good people, with the music and the
soldiers marching before them."

"And will the minister be there?" asked Pearl.  "And will he
hold out both his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him
from the brook-side?"

"He will be there, child," answered her mother, "but he will not
greet thee to-day, nor must thou greet him."

"What a strange, sad man is he!" said the child, as if speaking
partly to herself.  "In the dark nighttime he calls us to him,
and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the
scaffold yonder!  And in the deep forest, where only the old
trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee,
sitting on a heap of moss!  And he kisses my forehead, too, so
that the little brook would hardly wash it off!  But, here, in
the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us not; nor
must we know him!  A strange, sad man is he, with his hand always
over his heart!"

"Be quiet, Pearl--thou understandest not these things," said her
mother.  "Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and
see how cheery is everybody's face to-day.  The children have
come from their schools, and the grown people from their
workshops and their fields, on purpose to be happy, for, to-day,
a new man is beginning to rule over them; and so--as has been
the custom of mankind ever since a nation was first
gathered--they make merry and rejoice: as if a good and golden
year were at length to pass over the poor old world!"

It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that
brightened the faces of the people.  Into this festal season of
the year--as it already was, and continued to be during the
greater part of two centuries--the Puritans compressed whatever
mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity;
thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the
space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave
than most other communities at a period of general affliction.

But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which
undoubtedly characterized the mood and manners of the age.  The
persons now in the market-place of Boston had not been born to
an inheritance of Puritanic gloom.  They were native Englishmen,
whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan
epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed as one great
mass, would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and
joyous, as the world has ever witnessed.  Had they followed their
hereditary taste, the New England settlers would have
illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires,
banquets, pageantries, and processions.  Nor would it have been
impracticable, in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to
combine mirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it
were, a grotesque and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of
state, which a nation, at such festivals, puts on.  There was
some shadow of an attempt of this kind in the mode of
celebrating the day on which the political year of the colony
commenced.  The dim reflection of a remembered splendour, a
colourless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had
beheld in proud old London--we will not say at a royal
coronation, but at a Lord Mayor's show--might be traced in the
customs which our forefathers instituted, with reference to the
annual installation of magistrates.  The fathers and founders of
the commonwealth--the statesman, the priest, and the
soldier--seemed it a duty then to assume the outward state and
majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked
upon as the proper garb of public and social eminence.  All came
forth to move in procession before the people's eye, and thus
impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government
so newly constructed.

Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in
relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes
of rugged industry, which at all other times, seemed of the same
piece and material with their religion.  Here, it is true, were
none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily
have found in the England of Elizabeth's time, or that of
James--no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his
harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape dancing to
his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no
Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a
hundred years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the
very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy.  All such professors
of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly
repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the
general sentiment which give law its vitality.  Not the less,
however, the great, honest face of the people smiled--grimly,
perhaps, but widely too.  Nor were sports wanting, such as the
colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country
fairs and on the village-greens of England; and which it was
thought well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the
courage and manliness that were essential in them.  Wrestling
matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire,
were seen here and there about the market-place; in one corner,
there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and--what attracted
most interest of all--on the platform of the pillory, already so
noted in our pages, two masters of defence were commencing an
exhibition with the buckler and broadsword.  But, much to the
disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off
by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of
permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an
abuse of one of its consecrated places.

It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people
being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the
offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day),
that they would compare favourably, in point of holiday keeping,
with their descendants, even at so long an interval as
ourselves.  Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the
early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so
darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent
years have not sufficed to clear it up.  We have yet to learn
again the forgotten art of gaiety.

The picture of human life in the market-place, though its
general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English
emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue.  A party
of Indians--in their savage finery of curiously embroidered
deerskin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and
feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed
spear--stood apart with countenances of inflexible gravity,
beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain.  Nor, wild as
were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of
the scene.  This distinction could more justly be claimed by some
mariners--a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish
Main--who had come ashore to see the humours of Election Day.
They were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces,
and an immensity of beard; their wide short trousers were
confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough
plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and in some
instances, a sword.  From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of
palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even in good-nature and
merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity.  They transgressed
without fear or scruple, the rules of behaviour that were
binding on all others: smoking tobacco under the beadle's very
nose, although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling;
and quaffing at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae
from pocket flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping
crowd around them.  It remarkably characterised the incomplete
morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a licence was
allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on
shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element.
The sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate
in our own.  There could be little doubt, for instance, that this
very ship's crew, though no unfavourable specimens of the
nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it,
of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have
perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice.

But the sea in those old times heaved, swelled, and foamed very
much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind,
with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law.  The
buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his calling and become at
once if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land; nor, even
in the full career of his reckless life, was he regarded as a
personage with whom it was disreputable to traffic or casually
associate.  Thus the Puritan elders in their black cloaks,
starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not
unbenignantly at the clamour and rude deportment of these jolly
seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor animadversion
when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth, the
physician, was seen to enter the market-place in close and
familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.

The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far
as apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude.  He
wore a profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold lace on his
hat, which was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted
with a feather.  There was a sword at his side and a sword-cut on
his forehead, which, by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed
anxious rather to display than hide.  A landsman could hardly
have worn this garb and shown this face, and worn and shown them
both with such a galliard air, without undergoing stern question
before a magistrate, and probably incurring a fine or
imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks.  As
regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as
pertaining to the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.

After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol
ship strolled idly through the market-place; until happening to
approach the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared
to recognise, and did not hesitate to address her.  As was
usually the case wherever Hester stood, a small vacant area--a
sort of magic circle--had formed itself about her, into which,
though the people were elbowing one another at a little
distance, none ventured or felt disposed to intrude.  It was a
forcible type of the moral solitude in which the scarlet letter
enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve, and
partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly,
withdrawal of her fellow-creatures.  Now, if never before, it
answered a good purpose by enabling Hester and the seaman to
speak together without risk of being overheard; and so changed
was Hester Prynne's repute before the public, that the matron in
town, most eminent for rigid morality, could not have held such
intercourse with less result of scandal than herself.

"So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make
ready one more berth than you bargained for!  No fear of scurvy
or ship fever this voyage.  What with the ship's surgeon and this
other doctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by
token, as there is a lot of apothecary's stuff aboard, which I
traded for with a Spanish vessel."

"What mean you?" inquired Hester, startled more than she
permitted to appear.  "Have you another passenger?"

"Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician
here--Chillingworth he calls himself--is minded to try my
cabin-fare with you?  Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he
tells me he is of your party, and a close friend to the
gentleman you spoke of--he that is in peril from these sour old
Puritan rulers."

"They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien
of calmness, though in the utmost consternation.  "They have long
dwelt together."

Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne.
But at that instant she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself,
standing in the remotest corner of the market-place and smiling
on her; a smile which--across the wide and bustling square, and
through all the talk and laughter, and various thoughts, moods,
and interests of the crowd--conveyed secret and fearful meaning.



XXII.  THE PROCESSION

Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and
consider what was practicable to be done in this new and
startling aspect of affairs, the sound of military music was
heard approaching along a contiguous street.  It denoted the
advance of the procession of magistrates and citizens on its way
towards the meeting-house: where, in compliance with a custom
thus early established, and ever since observed, the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election Sermon.

Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and
stately march, turning a corner, and making its way across the
market-place.  First came the music.  It comprised a variety of
instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and
played with no great skill; but yet attaining the great object
for which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to
the multitude--that of imparting a higher and more heroic air to
the scene of life that passes before the eye.  Little Pearl at
first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant the
restless agitation that had kept her in a continual
effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and
seemed to be borne upward like a floating sea-bird on the long
heaves and swells of sound.  But she was brought back to her
former mood by the shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and
bright armour of the military company, which followed after the
music, and formed the honorary escort of the procession.  This
body of soldiery--which still sustains a corporate existence,
and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honourable
fame--was composed of no mercenary materials.  Its ranks were
filled with gentlemen who felt the stirrings of martial impulse,
and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms, where, as in
an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the
science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the
practices of war.  The high estimation then placed upon the
military character might be seen in the lofty port of each
individual member of the company.  Some of them, indeed, by their
services in the Low Countries and on other fields of European
warfare, had fairly won their title to assume the name and pomp
of soldiership.  The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished
steel, and with plumage nodding over their bright morions, had a
brilliancy of effect which no modern display can aspire to
equal.

And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind
the military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's
eye.  Even in outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty
that made the warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not
absurd.  It was an age when what we call talent had far less
consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce
stability and dignity of character a great deal more.  The people
possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which,
in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller
proportion, and with a vastly diminished force in the selection
and estimate of public men.  The change may be for good or ill,
and is partly, perhaps, for both.  In that old day the English
settler on these rude shores--having left king, nobles, and all
degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and
necessity of reverence was strong in him--bestowed it on the
white hair and venerable brow of age--on long-tried
integrity--on solid wisdom and sad-coloured experience--on
endowments of that grave and weighty order which gave the idea
of permanence, and comes under the general definition of
respectability.  These primitive statesmen,
therefore--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their
compeers--who were elevated to power by the early choice of the
people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished
by a ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect.  They
had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or
peril stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of
cliffs against a tempestuous tide.  The traits of character here
indicated were well represented in the square cast of
countenance and large physical development of the new colonial
magistrates.  So far as a demeanour of natural authority was
concerned, the mother country need not have been ashamed to see
these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into the House
of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the Sovereign.

Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently
distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of
the anniversary was expected.  His was the profession at that era
in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in
political life; for--leaving a higher motive out of the question
it offered inducements powerful enough in the almost worshipping
respect of the community, to win the most aspiring ambition into
its service.  Even political power--as in the case of Increase
Mather--was within the grasp of a successful priest.

It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never,
since Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England
shore, had he exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and
air with which he kept his pace in the procession.  There was no
feebleness of step as at other times; his frame was not bent,
nor did his hand rest ominously upon his heart.  Yet, if the
clergyman were rightly viewed, his strength seemed not of the
body.  It might be spiritual and imparted to him by angelical
ministrations.  It might be the exhilaration of that potent
cordial which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of earnest
and long-continued thought.  Or perchance his sensitive
temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music that
swelled heaven-ward, and uplifted him on its ascending wave.
Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned
whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music.  There was his body,
moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force.  But where was his
mind?  Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, with
preternatural activity, to marshal a procession of stately
thoughts that were soon to issue thence; and so he saw nothing,
heard nothing, knew nothing of what was around him; but the
spiritual element took up the feeble frame and carried it along,
unconscious of the burden, and converting it to spirit like
itself.  Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown morbid,
possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which they
throw the life of many days and then are lifeless for as many
more.

Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a
dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew
not, unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and
utterly beyond her reach.  One glance of recognition she had
imagined must needs pass between them.  She thought of the dim
forest, with its little dell of solitude, and love, and anguish,
and the mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting hand-in-hand, they had
mingled their sad and passionate talk with the melancholy murmur
of the brook.  How deeply had they known each other then!  And was
this the man?  She hardly knew him now!  He, moving proudly past,
enveloped as it were, in the rich music, with the procession of
majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his
worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his
unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him!  Her
spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion,
and that, vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real
bond betwixt the clergyman and herself.  And thus much of woman
was there in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive him--least
of all now, when the heavy footstep of their approaching Fate
might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!--for being able so
completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world--while
she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found
him not.

Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or
herself felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen
around the minister.  While the procession passed, the child was
uneasy, fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of
taking flight.  When the whole had gone by, she looked up into
Hester's face--

"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me
by the brook?"

"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered her mother.  "We
must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in
the forest."

"I could not be sure that it was he--so strange he looked,"
continued the child.  "Else I would have run to him, and bid him
kiss me now, before all the people, even as he did yonder among
the dark old trees.  What would the minister have said, mother?
Would he have clapped his hand over his heart, and scowled on
me, and bid me begone?"

"What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was
no time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the
market-place?  Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not
speak to him!"

Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr.
Dimmesdale, was expressed by a person whose
eccentricities--insanity, as we should term it--led her to do
what few of the townspeople would have ventured on--to begin a
conversation with the wearer of the scarlet letter in public.  It
was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great magnificence, with a
triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and a
gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the procession.  As this
ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently cost her no less
a price than her life) of being a principal actor in all the
works of necromancy that were continually going forward, the
crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch of her
garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous folds.
Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne--kindly as so many now
felt towards the latter--the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins
had doubled, and caused a general movement from that part of the
market-place in which the two women stood.

"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it?" whispered the
old lady confidentially to Hester.  "Yonder divine man!  That
saint on earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as--I must
needs say--he really looks!  Who, now, that saw him pass in the
procession, would think how little while it is since he went
forth out of his study--chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in
his mouth, I warrant--to take an airing in the forest!  Aha! we
know what that means, Hester Prynne!  But truly, forsooth, I find
it hard to believe him the same man.  Many a church member saw I,
walking behind the music, that has danced in the same measure
with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian
powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us!  That is but a
trifle, when a woman knows the world.  But this minister.  Couldst
thou surely tell, Hester, whether he was the same man that
encountered thee on the forest path?"

"Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered Hester Prynne,
feeling Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely
startled and awe-stricken by the confidence with which she
affirmed a personal connexion between so many persons (herself
among them) and the Evil One.  "It is not for me to talk lightly
of a learned and pious minister of the Word, like the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale."

"Fie, woman--fie!" cried the old lady, shaking her finger at
Hester.  "Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many
times, and have yet no skill to judge who else has been there?
Yea, though no leaf of the wild garlands which they wore while
they danced be left in their hair!  I know thee, Hester, for I
behold the token.  We may all see it in the sunshine! and it
glows like a red flame in the dark.  Thou wearest it openly, so
there need be no question about that.  But this minister!  Let me
tell thee in thine ear!  When the Black Man sees one of his own
servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters
so that the mark shall be disclosed, in open daylight, to the
eyes of all the world!  What is that the minister seeks to hide,
with his hand always over his heart?  Ha, Hester Prynne?"

"What is it, good Mistress Hibbins?" eagerly asked little Pearl.
"Hast thou seen it?"

"No matter, darling!" responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a
profound reverence.  "Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or
another.  They say, child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince
of Air!  Wilt thou ride with me some fine night to see thy
father?  Then thou shalt know wherefore the minister keeps his
hand over his heart!"

Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her,
the weird old gentlewoman took her departure.

By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the
meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
were heard commencing his discourse.  An irresistible feeling
kept Hester near the spot.  As the sacred edifice was too much
thronged to admit another auditor, she took up her position
close beside the scaffold of the pillory.  It was in sufficient
proximity to bring the whole sermon to her ears, in the shape of
an indistinct but varied murmur and flow of the minister's very
peculiar voice.

This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment, insomuch that a
listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the
preacher spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the
mere tone and cadence.  Like all other music, it breathed passion
and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to
the human heart, wherever educated.  Muffled as the sound was by
its passage through the church walls, Hester Prynne listened
with such intenseness, and sympathized so intimately, that the
sermon had throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its
indistinguishable words.  These, perhaps, if more distinctly
heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and have clogged
the spiritual sense.  Now she caught the low undertone, as of the
wind sinking down to repose itself; then ascended with it, as it
rose through progressive gradations of sweetness and power,
until its volume seemed to envelop her with an atmosphere of awe
and solemn grandeur.  And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes
became, there was for ever in it an essential character of
plaintiveness.  A loud or low expression of anguish--the whisper,
or the shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity,
that touched a sensibility in every bosom!  At times this deep
strain of pathos was all that could be heard, and scarcely heard
sighing amid a desolate silence.  But even when the minister's
voice grew high and commanding--when it gushed irrepressibly
upward--when it assumed its utmost breadth and power, so
overfilling the church as to burst its way through the solid
walls, and diffuse itself in the open air--still, if the auditor
listened intently, and for the purpose, he could detect the same
cry of pain.  What was it?  The complaint of a human heart,
sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of
guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of mankind; beseeching its
sympathy or forgiveness,--at every moment,--in each accent,--and
never in vain!  It was this profound and continual undertone that
gave the clergyman his most appropriate power.

During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of
the scaffold.  If the minister's voice had not kept her there,
there would, nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism in
that spot, whence she dated the first hour of her life of
ignominy.  There was a sense within her--too ill-defined to be
made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind--that her whole
orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this
spot, as with the one point that gave it unity.

Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was
playing at her own will about the market-place.  She made the
sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as
a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky
foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid
the twilight of the clustering leaves.  She had an undulating,
but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement.  It indicated the
restless vivacity of her spirit, which to-day was doubly
indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was played upon
and vibrated with her mother's disquietude.  Whenever Pearl saw
anything to excite her ever active and wandering curiosity, she
flew thitherward, and, as we might say, seized upon that man or
thing as her own property, so far as she desired it, but without
yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions in
requital.  The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none
the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from
the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone
through her little figure, and sparkled with its activity.  She
ran and looked the wild Indian in the face, and he grew
conscious of a nature wilder than his own.  Thence, with native
audacity, but still with a reserve as characteristic, she flew
into the midst of a group of mariners, the swarthy-cheeked wild
men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the land; and they
gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the
sea-foam had taken the shape of a little maid, and were gifted
with a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in
the night-time.

One of these seafaring men the shipmaster, indeed, who had
spoken to Hester Prynne was so smitten with Pearl's aspect, that
he attempted to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a
kiss.  Finding it as impossible to touch her as to catch a
humming-bird in the air, he took from his hat the gold chain
that was twisted about it, and threw it to the child.  Pearl
immediately twined it around her neck and waist with such happy
skill, that, once seen there, it became a part of her, and it
was difficult to imagine her without it.

"Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the
seaman, "Wilt thou carry her a message from me?"

"If the message pleases me, I will," answered Pearl.

"Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake again with the
black-a-visaged, hump shouldered old doctor, and he engages to
bring his friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him.  So
let thy mother take no thought, save for herself and thee.  Wilt
thou tell her this, thou witch-baby?"

"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!"
cried Pearl, with a naughty smile.  "If thou callest me that
ill-name, I shall tell him of thee, and he will chase thy ship
with a tempest!"

Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child
returned to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had
said.  Hester's strong, calm steadfastly-enduring spirit almost
sank, at last, on beholding this dark and grim countenance of an
inevitable doom, which at the moment when a passage seemed to
open for the minister and herself out of their labyrinth of
misery--showed itself with an unrelenting smile, right in the
midst of their path.

With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the
shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected
to another trial.  There were many people present from the
country round about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter,
and to whom it had been made terrific by a hundred false or
exaggerated rumours, but who had never beheld it with their own
bodily eyes.  These, after exhausting other modes of amusement,
now thronged about Hester Prynne with rude and boorish
intrusiveness.  Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could not
bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards.  At that
distance they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal
force of the repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired.  The
whole gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of
spectators, and learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came
and thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the
ring.  Even the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of
the white man's curiosity and, gliding through the crowd,
fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester's bosom,
conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly
embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity
among her people.  Lastly, the inhabitants of the town (their own
interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by
sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the
same quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all
the rest, with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar
shame.  Hester saw and recognized the selfsame faces of that
group of matrons, who had awaited her forthcoming from the
prison-door seven years ago; all save one, the youngest and only
compassionate among them, whose burial-robe she had since made.
At the final hour, when she was so soon to fling aside the
burning letter, it had strangely become the centre of more
remark and excitement, and was thus made to sear her breast more
painfully, than at any time since the first day she put it on.

While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the
cunning cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her for
ever, the admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred
pulpit upon an audience whose very inmost spirits had yielded to
his control.  The sainted minister in the church!  The woman of
the scarlet letter in the marketplace!  What imagination would
have been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching
stigma was on them both!



XXIII.   THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER


The eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience
had been borne aloft as on the swelling waves of the sea, at
length came to a pause.  There was a momentary silence, profound
as what should follow the utterance of oracles.  Then ensued a
murmur and half-hushed tumult, as if the auditors, released from
the high spell that had transported them into the region of
another's mind, were returning into themselves, with all their
awe and wonder still heavy on them.  In a moment more the crowd
began to gush forth from the doors of the church.  Now that there
was an end, they needed more breath, more fit to support the
gross and earthly life into which they relapsed, than that
atmosphere which the preacher had converted into words of flame,
and had burdened with the rich fragrance of his thought.

In the open air their rapture broke into speech.  The street and
the market-place absolutely babbled, from side to side, with
applauses of the minister.  His hearers could not rest until they
had told one another of what each knew better than he could tell
or hear.

According to their united testimony, never had man spoken in so
wise, so high, and so holy a spirit, as he that spake this day;
nor had inspiration ever breathed through mortal lips more
evidently than it did through his.  Its influence could be seen,
as it were, descending upon him, and possessing him, and
continually lifting him out of the written discourse that lay
before him, and filling him with ideas that must have been as
marvellous to himself as to his audience.  His subject, it
appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and the
communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New
England which they were here planting in the wilderness.  And, as
he drew towards the close, a spirit as of prophecy had come upon
him, constraining him to its purpose as mightily as the old
prophets of Israel were constrained, only with this difference,
that, whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin
on their country, it was his mission to foretell a high and
glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord.  But,
throughout it all, and through the whole discourse, there had
been a certain deep, sad undertone of pathos, which could not be
interpreted otherwise than as the natural regret of one soon to
pass away.  Yes; their minister whom they so loved--and who so
loved them all, that he could not depart heavenward without a
sigh--had the foreboding of untimely death upon him, and would
soon leave them in their tears.  This idea of his transitory stay
on earth gave the last emphasis to the effect which the preacher
had produced; it was as if an angel, in his passage to the skies,
had shaken his bright wings over the people for an instant--at
once a shadow and a splendour--and had shed down a shower of
golden truths upon them.

Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale--as to most
men, in their various spheres, though seldom recognised until
they see it far behind them--an epoch of life more brilliant and
full of triumph than any previous one, or than any which could
hereafter be.  He stood, at this moment, on the very proudest
eminence of superiority, to which the gifts or intellect, rich
lore, prevailing eloquence, and a reputation of whitest
sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New England's earliest
days, when the professional character was of itself a lofty
pedestal.  Such was the position which the minister occupied, as
he bowed his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit at the
close of his Election Sermon.  Meanwhile Hester Prynne was
standing beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the scarlet
letter still burning on her breast!

Now was heard again the clamour of the music, and the measured
tramp of the military escort issuing from the church door.  The
procession was to be marshalled thence to the town hall, where a
solemn banquet would complete the ceremonies of the day.

Once more, therefore, the train of venerable and majestic
fathers were seen moving through a broad pathway of the people,
who drew back reverently, on either side, as the Governor and
magistrates, the old and wise men, the holy ministers, and all
that were eminent and renowned, advanced into the midst of them.
When they were fairly in the marketplace, their presence was
greeted by a shout.  This--though doubtless it might acquire
additional force and volume from the child-like loyalty which
the age awarded to its rulers--was felt to be an irrepressible
outburst of enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by that high
strain of eloquence which was yet reverberating in their ears.
Each felt the impulse in himself, and in the same breath, caught
it from his neighbour.  Within the church, it had hardly been
kept down; beneath the sky it pealed upward to the zenith.  There
were human beings enough, and enough of highly wrought and
symphonious feeling to produce that more impressive sound than
the organ tones of the blast, or the thunder, or the roar of the
sea; even that mighty swell of many voices, blended into one
great voice by the universal impulse which makes likewise one
vast heart out of the many.  Never, from the soil of New England
had gone up such a shout!  Never, on New England soil had stood
the man so honoured by his mortal brethren as the preacher!

How fared it with him, then?  Were there not the brilliant
particles of a halo in the air about his head?  So etherealised
by spirit as he was, and so apotheosised by worshipping
admirers, did his footsteps, in the procession, really tread
upon the dust of earth?

As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all
eyes were turned towards the point where the minister was seen
to approach among them.  The shout died into a murmur, as one
portion of the crowd after another obtained a glimpse of him.
How feeble and pale he looked, amid all his triumph!  The
energy--or say, rather, the inspiration which had held him up,
until he should have delivered the sacred message that had
brought its own strength along with it from heaven--was
withdrawn, now that it had so faithfully performed its office.
The glow, which they had just before beheld burning on his
cheek, was extinguished, like a flame that sinks down hopelessly
among the late decaying embers.  It seemed hardly the face of a
man alive, with such a death-like hue: it was hardly a man with
life in him, that tottered on his path so nervously, yet
tottered, and did not fall!

One of his clerical brethren--it was the venerable John
Wilson--observing the state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by
the retiring wave of intellect and sensibility, stepped forward
hastily to offer his support.  The minister tremulously, but
decidedly, repelled the old man's arm.  He still walked onward,
if that movement could be so described, which rather resembled
the wavering effort of an infant, with its mother's arms in
view, outstretched to tempt him forward.  And now, almost
imperceptible as were the latter steps of his progress, he had
come opposite the well-remembered and weather-darkened scaffold,
where, long since, with all that dreary lapse of time between,
Hester Prynne had encountered the world's ignominious stare.
There stood Hester, holding little Pearl by the hand!  And there
was the scarlet letter on her breast!  The minister here made a
pause; although the music still played the stately and rejoicing
march to which the procession moved.  It summoned him
onward--inward to the festival!--but here he made a pause.

Bellingham, for the last few moments, had kept an anxious eye
upon him.  He now left his own place in the procession, and
advanced to give assistance judging, from Mr. Dimmesdale's
aspect that he must otherwise inevitably fall.  But there was
something in the latter's expression that warned back the
magistrate, although a man not readily obeying the vague
intimations that pass from one spirit to another.  The crowd,
meanwhile, looked on with awe and wonder.  This earthly
faintness, was, in their view, only another phase of the
minister's celestial strength; nor would it have seemed a
miracle too high to be wrought for one so holy, had he ascended
before their eyes, waxing dimmer and brighter, and fading at
last into the light of heaven!

He turned towards the scaffold, and stretched forth his arms.

"Hester," said he, "come hither!  Come, my little Pearl!"

It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them; but there was
something at once tender and strangely triumphant in it.  The
child, with the bird-like motion, which was one of her
characteristics, flew to him, and clasped her arms about his
knees.  Hester Prynne--slowly, as if impelled by inevitable fate,
and against her strongest will--likewise drew near, but paused
before she reached him.  At this instant old Roger Chillingworth
thrust himself through the crowd--or, perhaps, so dark,
disturbed, and evil was his look, he rose up out of some nether
region--to snatch back his victim from what he sought to do!  Be
that as it might, the old man rushed forward, and caught the
minister by the arm.

"Madman, hold!  what is your purpose?" whispered he.  "Wave back
that woman!  Cast off this child!  All shall be well!  Do not
blacken your fame, and perish in dishonour!  I can yet save you!
Would you bring infamy on your sacred profession?"

"Ha, tempter!  Methinks thou art too late!" answered the
minister, encountering his eye, fearfully, but firmly.  "Thy
power is not what it was!  With God's help, I shall escape thee
now!"

He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter.

"Hester Prynne," cried he, with a piercing earnestness, "in the
name of Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at
this last moment, to do what--for my own heavy sin and miserable
agony--I withheld myself from doing seven years ago, come hither
now, and twine thy strength about me!  Thy strength, Hester; but
let it be guided by the will which God hath granted me!  This
wretched and wronged old man is opposing it with all his
might!--with all his own might, and the fiend's!  Come,
Hester--come!  Support me up yonder scaffold."

The crowd was in a tumult.  The men of rank and dignity, who
stood more immediately around the clergyman, were so taken by
surprise, and so perplexed as to the purport of what they
saw--unable to receive the explanation which most readily
presented itself, or to imagine any other--that they remained
silent and inactive spectators of the judgement which Providence
seemed about to work.  They beheld the minister, leaning on
Hester's shoulder, and supported by her arm around him, approach
the scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still the little hand
of the sin-born child was clasped in his.  Old Roger
Chillingworth followed, as one intimately connected with the
drama of guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors, and
well entitled, therefore to be present at its closing scene.

"Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," said he looking darkly
at the clergyman, "there was no one place so secret--no high
place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me--save
on this very scaffold!"

"Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither!" answered the
minister.

Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester, with an expression of
doubt and anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed,
that there was a feeble smile upon his lips.

"Is not this better," murmured he, "than what we dreamed of in
the forest?"

"I know not!  I know not!" she hurriedly replied.  "Better?  Yea;
so we may both die, and little Pearl die with us!"

"For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order," said the
minister; "and God is merciful!  Let me now do the will which He
hath made plain before my sight.  For, Hester, I am a dying man.
So let me make haste to take my shame upon me!"

Partly supported by Hester Prynne, and holding one hand of
little Pearl's, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale turned to the
dignified and venerable rulers; to the holy ministers, who were
his brethren; to the people, whose great heart was thoroughly
appalled yet overflowing with tearful sympathy, as knowing that
some deep life-matter--which, if full of sin, was full of
anguish and repentance likewise--was now to be laid open to
them.  The sun, but little past its meridian, shone down upon the
clergyman, and gave a distinctness to his figure, as he stood
out from all the earth, to put in his plea of guilty at the bar
of Eternal Justice.

"People of New England!" cried he, with a voice that rose over
them, high, solemn, and majestic--yet had always a tremor
through it, and sometimes a shriek, struggling up out of a
fathomless depth of remorse and woe--"ye, that have loved
me!--ye, that have deemed me holy!--behold me here, the one
sinner of the world!  At last--at last!--I stand upon the spot
where, seven years since, I should have stood, here, with this
woman, whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith I have
crept hitherward, sustains me at this dreadful moment, from
grovelling down upon my face!  Lo, the scarlet letter which
Hester wears!  Ye have all shuddered at it!  Wherever her walk
hath been--wherever, so miserably burdened, she may have hoped
to find repose--it hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and horrible
repugnance round about her.  But there stood one in the midst of
you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered!"

It seemed, at this point, as if the minister must leave the
remainder of his secret undisclosed.  But he fought back the
bodily weakness--and, still more, the faintness of heart--that
was striving for the mastery with him.  He threw off all
assistance, and stepped passionately forward a pace before the
woman and the children.

"It was on him!" he continued, with a kind of fierceness; so
determined was he to speak out the whole.  "God's eye beheld it!
The angels were for ever pointing at it! (The Devil knew it
well, and fretted it continually with the touch of his burning
finger!) But he hid it cunningly from men, and walked among you
with the mien of a spirit, mournful, because so pure in a sinful
world!--and sad, because he missed his heavenly kindred!  Now, at
the death-hour, he stands up before you!  He bids you look again
at Hester's scarlet letter!  He tells you, that, with all its
mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears on his
own breast, and that even this, his own red stigma, is no more
than the type of what has seared his inmost heart!  Stand any
here that question God's judgment on a sinner!  Behold!  Behold,
a dreadful witness of it!"

With a convulsive motion, he tore away the ministerial band from
before his breast.  It was revealed!  But it were irreverent to
describe that revelation.  For an instant, the gaze of the
horror-stricken multitude was concentrated on the ghastly
miracle; while the minister stood, with a flush of triumph in
his face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain, had won a
victory.  Then, down he sank upon the scaffold!  Hester partly
raised him, and supported his head against her bosom.  Old Roger
Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull
countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed.

"Thou hast escaped me!" he repeated more than once.  "Thou hast
escaped me!"

"May God forgive thee!" said the minister.  "Thou, too, hast
deeply sinned!"

He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on
the woman and the child.

"My little Pearl," said he, feebly and there was a sweet and
gentle smile over his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep
repose; nay, now that the burden was removed, it seemed almost
as if he would be sportive with the child--"dear little Pearl,
wilt thou kiss me now?  Thou wouldst not, yonder, in the forest!
But now thou wilt?"

Pearl kissed his lips.  A spell was broken.  The great scene of
grief, in which the wild infant bore a part had developed all
her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek,
they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and
sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in
it.  Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of
anguish was fulfilled.

"Hester," said the clergyman, "farewell!"

"Shall we not meet again?" whispered she, bending her face down
close to his.  "Shall we not spend our immortal life together?
Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe!
Thou lookest far into eternity, with those bright dying eyes!
Then tell me what thou seest!"

"Hush, Hester--hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity.  "The
law we broke!--the sin here awfully revealed!--let these alone
be in thy thoughts!  I fear!  I fear!  It may be, that, when we
forgot our God--when we violated our reverence each for the
other's soul--it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet
hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion.  God knows; and He
is merciful!  He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my
afflictions.  By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my
breast!  By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the
torture always at red-heat!  By bringing me hither, to die this
death of triumphant ignominy before the people!  Had either of
these agonies been wanting, I had been lost for ever!  Praised be
His name!  His will be done!  Farewell!"

That final word came forth with the minister's expiring breath.
The multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep
voice of awe and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance,
save in this murmur that rolled so heavily after the departed
spirit.



XXIV.  CONCLUSION

After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange
their thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was
more than one account of what had been witnessed on the
scaffold.


Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast
of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER--the very semblance of
that worn by Hester Prynne--imprinted in the flesh.  As regarded
its origin there were various explanations, all of which must
necessarily have been conjectural.  Some affirmed that the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne
first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of
penance--which he afterwards, in so many futile methods,
followed out--by inflicting a hideous torture on himself.  Others
contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long
time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent
necromancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency of
magic and poisonous drugs.  Others, again and those best able to
appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility, and the
wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body--whispered their
belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever-active
tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and
at last manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment by the visible
presence of the letter.  The reader may choose among these
theories.  We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the
portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office,
erase its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation
has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness.

It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were
spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have
removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that
there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a
new-born infant's.  Neither, by their report, had his dying words
acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any--the
slightest--connexion on his part, with the guilt for which
Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter.  According to
these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that
he was dying--conscious, also, that the reverence of the
multitude placed him already among saints and angels--had
desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen
woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the
choicest of man's own righteousness.  After exhausting life in
his efforts for mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner
of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the
mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite
Purity, we are sinners all alike.  It was to teach them, that the
holiest amongst us has but attained so far above his fellows as
to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and
repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would
look aspiringly upward.  Without disputing a truth so momentous,
we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale's
story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a
man's friends--and especially a clergyman's--will sometimes
uphold his character, when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine
on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained
creature of the dust.

The authority which we have chiefly followed--a manuscript of
old date, drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals,
some of whom had known Hester Prynne, while others had heard the
tale from contemporary witnesses fully confirms the view taken
in the foregoing pages.  Among many morals which press upon us
from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this
into a sentence:--"Be true!  Be true!  Be true!  Show freely to the
world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may
be inferred!"

Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place,
almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale's death, in the
appearance and demeanour of the old man known as Roger
Chillingworth.  All his strength and energy--all his vital and
intellectual force--seemed at once to desert him, insomuch that
he positively withered up, shrivelled away and almost vanished
from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in
the sun.  This unhappy man had made the very principle of his
life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of
revenge; and when, by its completest triumph consummation that
evil principle was left with no further material to support
it--when, in short, there was no more Devil's work on earth for
him to do, it only remained for the unhumanised mortal to betake
himself whither his master would find him tasks enough, and pay
him his wages duly.  But, to all these shadowy beings, so long
our near acquaintances--as well Roger Chillingworth as his
companions we would fain be merciful.  It is a curious subject of
observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same
thing at bottom.  Each, in its utmost development, supposes a
high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one
individual dependent for the food of his affections and
spiritual fife upon another: each leaves the passionate lover,
or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the
withdrawal of his subject.  Philosophically considered,
therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except
that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the
other in a dusky and lurid glow.  In the spiritual world, the old
physician and the minister--mutual victims as they have
been--may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred
and antipathy transmuted into golden love.

Leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter of business to
communicate to the reader.  At old Roger Chillingworth's decease,
(which took place within the year), and by his last will and
testament, of which Governor Bellingham and the Reverend Mr.
Wilson were executors, he bequeathed a very considerable amount
of property, both here and in England to little Pearl, the
daughter of Hester Prynne.

So Pearl--the elf child--the demon offspring, as some people up
to that epoch persisted in considering her--became the richest
heiress of her day in the New World.  Not improbably this
circumstance wrought a very material change in the public
estimation; and had the mother and child remained here, little
Pearl at a marriageable period of life might have mingled her
wild blood with the lineage of the devoutest Puritan among them
all.  But, in no long time after the physician's death, the
wearer of the scarlet letter disappeared, and Pearl along with
her.  For many years, though a vague report would now and then
find its way across the sea--like a shapeless piece of driftwood
tossed ashore with the initials of a name upon it--yet no
tidings of them unquestionably authentic were received.  The
story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend.  Its spell,
however, was still potent, and kept the scaffold awful where the
poor minister had died, and likewise the cottage by the
sea-shore where Hester Prynne had dwelt.  Near this latter spot,
one afternoon some children were at play, when they beheld a
tall woman in a gray robe approach the cottage-door.  In all
those years it had never once been opened; but either she
unlocked it or the decaying wood and iron yielded to her hand,
or she glided shadow-like through these impediments--and, at all
events, went in.

On the threshold she paused--turned partly round--for perchance
the idea of entering alone and all so changed, the home of so
intense a former life, was more dreary and desolate than even
she could bear.  But her hesitation was only for an instant,
though long enough to display a scarlet letter on her breast.

And Hester Prynne had returned, and taken up her long-forsaken
shame!  But where was little Pearl? If still alive she must now
have been in the flush and bloom of early womanhood.  None
knew--nor ever learned with the fulness of perfect
certainty--whether the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a
maiden grave; or whether her wild, rich nature had been softened
and subdued and made capable of a woman's gentle happiness.  But
through the remainder of Hester's life there were indications
that the recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love
and interest with some inhabitant of another land.  Letters came,
with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to
English heraldry.  In the cottage there were articles of comfort
and luxury such as Hester never cared to use, but which only
wealth could have purchased and affection have imagined for her.
There were trifles too, little ornaments, beautiful tokens of a
continual remembrance, that must have been wrought by delicate
fingers at the impulse of a fond heart.  And once Hester was seen
embroidering a baby-garment with such a lavish richness of
golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult had any infant
thus apparelled, been shown to our sober-hued community.

In fine, the gossips of that day believed--and Mr. Surveyor Pue,
who made investigations a century later, believed--and one of
his recent successors in office, moreover, faithfully
believes--that Pearl was not only alive, but married, and happy,
and mindful of her mother; and that she would most joyfully have
entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside.

But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New
England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a
home.  Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet
to be her penitence.  She had returned, therefore, and resumed--of
her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron
period would have imposed it--resumed the symbol of which we
have related so dark a tale.  Never afterwards did it quit her
bosom.  But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and
self-devoted years that made up Hester's life, the scarlet
letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn
and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed
over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too.  And, as
Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for
her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows
and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had
herself gone through a mighty trouble.  Women, more
especially--in the continually recurring trials of wounded,
wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion--or
with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued
and unsought came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were
so wretched, and what the remedy!  Hester comforted and
counselled them, as best she might.  She assured them, too, of
her firm belief that, at some brighter period, when the world
should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth
would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation
between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.
Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself
might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognised
the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious
truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down
with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow.  The angel
and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed,
but lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise; moreover, not through
dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how
sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life
successful to such an end.

So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the
scarlet letter.  And, after many, many years, a new grave was
delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside
which King's Chapel has since been built.  It was near that old
and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of
the two sleepers had no right to mingle.  Yet one tomb-stone
served for both.  All around, there were monuments carved with
armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate--as the
curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with
the purport--there appeared the semblance of an engraved
escutcheon.  It bore a device, a herald's wording of which may
serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded
legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing
point of light gloomier than the shadow:--

"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"
There was once a time when New England groaned under the actual
pressure of heavier wrongs than those threatened ones which brought on
the Revolution. James II., the bigoted successor of Charles the
Voluptuous, had annulled the charters of all the colonies and sent a
harsh and unprincipled soldier to take away our liberties and endanger
our religion. The administration of Sir Edmund Andros lacked scarcely
a single characteristic of tyranny--a governor and council holding
office from the king and wholly independent of the country; laws made
and taxes levied without concurrence of the people, immediate or by
their representatives; the rights of private citizens violated and the
titles of all landed property declared void; the voice of complaint
stifled by restrictions on the press; and finally, disaffection
overawed by the first band of mercenary troops that ever marched on
our free soil. For two years our ancestors were kept in sullen
submission by that filial love which had invariably secured their
allegiance to the mother-country, whether its head chanced to be a
Parliament, Protector or popish monarch. Till these evil times,
however, such allegiance had been merely nominal, and the colonists
had ruled themselves, enjoying far more freedom than is even yet the
privilege of the native subjects of Great Britain.

At length a rumor reached our shores that the prince of Orange had
ventured on an enterprise the success of which would be the triumph of
civil and religious rights and the salvation of New England. It was
but a doubtful whisper; it might be false or the attempt might fail,
and in either case the man that stirred against King James would lose
his head. Still, the intelligence produced a marked effect. The people
smiled mysteriously in the streets and threw bold glances at their
oppressors, while far and wide there was a subdued and silent
agitation, as if the slightest signal would rouse the whole land from
its sluggish despondency. Aware of their danger, the rulers resolved
to avert it by an imposing display of strength, and perhaps to confirm
their despotism by yet harsher measures.

One afternoon in April, 1689, Sir Edmund Andros and his favorite
councillors, being warm with wine, assembled the red-coats of the
governor's guard and made their appearance in the streets of Boston.
The sun was near setting when the march commenced. The roll of the
drum at that unquiet crisis seemed to go through the streets less as
the martial music of the soldiers than as a muster-call to the
inhabitants themselves. A multitude by various avenues assembled in
King street, which was destined to be the scene, nearly a century
afterward, of another encounter between the troops of Britain and a
people struggling against her tyranny.

Though more than sixty years had elapsed since the Pilgrims came, this
crowd of their descendants still showed the strong and sombre features
of their character perhaps more strikingly in such a stern emergency
than on happier occasions. There was the sober garb, the general
severity of mien, the gloomy but undismayed expression, the scriptural
forms of speech and the confidence in Heaven's blessing on a righteous
cause which would have marked a band of the original Puritans when
threatened by some peril of the wilderness. Indeed, it was not yet
time for the old spirit to be extinct, since there were men in the
street that day who had worshipped there beneath the trees before a
house was reared to the God for whom they had become exiles. Old
soldiers of the Parliament were here, too, smiling grimly at the
thought that their aged arms might strike another blow against the
house of Stuart. Here, also, were the veterans of King Philip's war,
who had burned villages and slaughtered young and old with pious
fierceness while the godly souls throughout the land were helping them
with prayer. Several ministers were scattered among the crowd, which,
unlike all other mobs, regarded them with such reverence as if there
were sanctity in their very garments. These holy men exerted their
influence to quiet the people, but not to disperse them.

Meantime, the purpose of the governor in disturbing the peace of the
town at a period when the slightest commotion might throw the country
into a ferment was almost the Universal subject of inquiry, and
variously explained.

"Satan will strike his master-stroke presently," cried some, "because
he knoweth that his time is short. All our godly pastors are to be
dragged to prison. We shall see them at a Smithfield fire in King
street."

Hereupon the people of each parish gathered closer round their
minister, who looked calmly upward and assumed a more apostolic
dignity, as well befitted a candidate for the highest honor of his
profession--a crown of martyrdom. It was actually fancied at that
period that New England might have a John Rogers of her own to take
the place of that worthy in the _Primer_.

"The pope of Rome has given orders for a new St. Bartholomew," cried
others. "We are to be massacred, man and male-child."

Neither was this rumor wholly discredited; although the wiser class
believed the governor's object somewhat less atrocious. His predecessor
under the old charter, Bradstreet, a venerable companion of the first
settlers, was known to be in town. There were grounds for conjecturing
that Sir Edmund Andros intended at once to strike terror by a parade of
military force and to confound the opposite faction by possessing
himself of their chief.

"Stand firm for the old charter-governor!" shouted the crowd, seizing
upon the idea--"the good old Governor Bradstreet!"

While this cry was at the loudest the people were surprised by the
well-known figure of Governor Bradstreet himself, a patriarch of
nearly ninety, who appeared on the elevated steps of a door and with
characteristic mildness besought them to submit to the constituted
authorities.

"My children," concluded this venerable person, "do nothing rashly.
Cry not aloud, but pray for the welfare of New England and expect
patiently what the Lord will do in this matter."

The event was soon to be decided. All this time the roll of the drum
had been approaching through Cornhill, louder and deeper, till with
reverberations from house to house and the regular tramp of martial
footsteps it burst into the street. A double rank of soldiers made
their appearance, occupying the whole breadth of the passage, with
shouldered matchlocks and matches burning, so as to present a row of
fires in the dusk. Their steady march was like the progress of a
machine that would roll irresistibly over everything in its way. Next,
moving slowly, with a confused clatter of hoofs on the pavement, rode
a party of mounted gentlemen, the central figure being Sir Edmund
Andros, elderly, but erect and soldier-like. Those around him were his
favorite councillors and the bitterest foes of New England. At his
right hand rode Edward Randolph, our arch-enemy, that "blasted
wretch," as Cotton Mather calls him, who achieved the downfall of our
ancient government and was followed with a sensible curse-through life
and to his grave. On the other side was Bullivant, scattering jests
and mockery as he rode along. Dudley came behind with a downcast look,
dreading, as well he might, to meet the indignant gaze of the people,
who beheld him, their only countryman by birth, among the oppressors
of his native land. The captain of a frigate in the harbor and two or
three civil officers under the Crown were also there. But the figure
which most attracted the public eye and stirred up the deepest feeling
was the Episcopal clergyman of King's Chapel riding haughtily among
the magistrates in his priestly vestments, the fitting representative
of prelacy and persecution, the union of Church and State, and all
those abominations which had driven the Puritans to the wilderness.
Another guard of soldiers, in double rank, brought up the rear.

The whole scene was a picture of the condition of New England, and its
moral, the deformity of any government that does not grow out of the
nature of things and the character of the people--on one side the
religious multitude with their sad visages and dark attire, and on the
other the group of despotic rulers with the high churchman in the
midst and here and there a crucifix at their bosoms, all magnificently
clad, flushed with wine, proud of unjust authority and scoffing at the
universal groan. And the mercenary soldiers, waiting but the word to
deluge the street with blood, showed the only means by which obedience
could be secured.

"O Lord of hosts," cried a voice among the crowd, "provide a champion
for thy people!"

This ejaculation was loudly uttered, and served as a herald's cry to
introduce a remarkable personage. The crowd had rolled back, and were
now huddled together nearly at the extremity of the street, while the
soldiers had advanced no more than a third of its length. The
intervening space was empty--a paved solitude between lofty edifices
which threw almost a twilight shadow over it. Suddenly there was seen
the figure of an ancient man who seemed to have emerged from among the
people and was walking by himself along the centre of the street to
confront the armed band. He wore the old Puritan dress--a dark cloak
and a steeple-crowned hat in the fashion of at least fifty years
before, with a heavy sword upon his thigh, but a staff in his hand to
assist the tremulous gait of age.

When at some distance from the multitude, the old man turned slowly
round, displaying a face of antique majesty rendered doubly venerable
by the hoary beard that descended on his breast. He made a gesture at
once of encouragement and warning, then turned again and resumed his
way.

"Who is this gray patriarch?" asked the young men of their sires.

"Who is this venerable brother?" asked the old men among themselves.

But none could make reply. The fathers of the people, those of
fourscore years and upward, were disturbed, deeming it strange that
they should forget one of such evident authority whom they must have
known in their early days, the associate of Winthrop and all the old
councillors, giving laws and making prayers and leading them against
the savage. The elderly men ought to have remembered him, too, with
locks as gray in their youth as their own were now. And the young! How
could he have passed so utterly from their memories--that hoary sire,
the relic of long-departed times, whose awful benediction had surely
been bestowed on their uncovered heads in childhood?

"Whence did he come? What is his purpose? Who can this old man be?"
whispered the wondering crowd.

Meanwhile, the venerable stranger, staff in hand, was pursuing his
solitary walk along the centre of the street. As he drew near the
advancing soldiers, and as the roll of their drum came full upon his
ear, the old man raised himself to a loftier mien, while the
decrepitude of age seemed to fall from his shoulders, leaving him in
gray but unbroken dignity. Now he marched onward with a warrior's
step, keeping time to the military music. Thus the aged form advanced
on one side and the whole parade of soldiers and magistrates on the
other, till, when scarcely twenty yards remained between, the old man
grasped his staff by the middle and held it before him like a leader's
truncheon.

"Stand!" cried he.

The eye, the face and attitude of command, the solemn yet warlike peal
of that voice--fit either to rule a host in the battle-field or be
raised to God in prayer--were irresistible. At the old man's word and
outstretched arm the roll of the drum was hushed at once and the
advancing line stood still. A tremulous enthusiasm seized upon the
multitude. That stately form, combining the leader and the saint, so
gray, so dimly seen, in such an ancient garb, could only belong to
some old champion of the righteous cause whom the oppressor's drum had
summoned from his grave. They raised a shout of awe and exultation,
and looked for the deliverance of New England.

The governor and the gentlemen of his party, perceiving themselves
brought to an unexpected stand, rode hastily forward, as if they would
have pressed their snorting and affrighted horses right against the
hoary apparition. He, however, blenched not a step, but, glancing his
severe eye round the group, which half encompassed him, at last bent
it sternly on Sir Edmund Andros. One would have thought that the dark
old man was chief ruler there, and that the governor and council with
soldiers at their back, representing the whole power and authority of
the Crown, had no alternative but obedience.

"What does this old fellow here?" cried Edward Randolph, fiercely.--"On,
Sir Edmund! Bid the soldiers forward, and give the dotard the same
choice that you give all his countrymen--to stand aside or be trampled
on."

"Nay, nay! Let us show respect to the good grandsire," said Bullivant,
laughing. "See you not he is some old round-headed dignitary who hath
lain asleep these thirty years and knows nothing of the change of
times? Doubtless he thinks to put us down with a proclamation in Old
Noll's name."

"Are you mad, old man?" demanded Sir Edmund Andros, in loud and harsh
tones. "How dare you stay the march of King James's governor?"

"I have stayed the march of a king himself ere now," replied the gray
figure, with stern composure. "I am here, Sir Governor, because the
cry of an oppressed people hath disturbed me in my secret place, and,
beseeching this favor earnestly of the Lord, it was vouchsafed me to
appear once again on earth in the good old cause of his saints. And
what speak ye of James? There is no longer a popish tyrant on the
throne of England, and by to-morrow noon his name shall be a by-word
in this very street, where ye would make it a word of terror. Back,
thou that wast a governor, back! With this night thy power is ended.
To-morrow, the prison! Back, lest I foretell the scaffold!"

The people had been drawing nearer and nearer and drinking in the
words of their champion, who spoke in accents long disused, like one
unaccustomed to converse except with the dead of many years ago. But
his voice stirred their souls. They confronted the soldiers, not
wholly without arms and ready to convert the very stones of the street
into deadly weapons. Sir Edmund Andros looked at the old man; then he
cast his hard and cruel eye over the multitude and beheld them burning
with that lurid wrath so difficult to kindle or to quench, and again
he fixed his gaze on the aged form which stood obscurely in an open
space where neither friend nor foe had thrust himself. What were his
thoughts he uttered no word which might discover, but, whether the
oppressor were overawed by the Gray Champion's look or perceived his
peril in the threatening attitude of the people, it is certain that he
gave back and ordered his soldiers to commence a slow and guarded
retreat. Before another sunset the governor and all that rode so
proudly with him were prisoners, and long ere it was known that James
had abdicated King William was proclaimed throughout New England.

But where was the Gray Champion? Some reported that when the troops
had gone from King street and the people were thronging tumultuously
in their rear, Bradstreet, the aged governor, was seen to embrace a
form more aged than his own. Others soberly affirmed that while they
marvelled at the venerable grandeur of his aspect the old man had
faded from their eyes, melting slowly into the hues of twilight, till
where he stood there was an empty space. But all agreed that the hoary
shape was gone. The men of that generation watched for his
reappearance in sunshine and in twilight, but never saw him more, nor
knew when his funeral passed nor where his gravestone was.

And who was the Gray Champion? Perhaps his name might be found in the
records of that stern court of justice which passed a sentence too
mighty for the age, but glorious in all after-times for its humbling
lesson to the monarch and its high example to the subject. I have
heard that whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the
spirit of their sires the old man appears again. When eighty years had
passed, he walked once more in King street. Five years later, in the
twilight of an April morning, he stood on the green beside the
meeting-house at Lexington where now the obelisk of granite with a
slab of slate inlaid commemorates the first-fallen of the Revolution.
And when our fathers were toiling at the breastwork on Bunker's Hill,
all through that night the old warrior walked his rounds. Long, long
may it be ere he comes again! His hour is one of darkness and
adversity and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us or the
invader's step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come! for
he is the type of New England's hereditary spirit, and his shadowy
march on the eve of danger must ever be the pledge that New England's
sons will vindicate their ancestry.




SUNDAY AT HOME.


Every Sabbath morning in the summer-time I thrust back the curtain to
watch the sunrise stealing down a steeple which stands opposite my
chamber window. First the weathercock begins to flash; then a fainter
lustre gives the spire an airy aspect; next it encroaches on the tower
and causes the index of the dial to glisten like gold as it points to
the gilded figure of the hour. Now the loftiest window gleams, and now
the lower. The carved framework of the portal is marked strongly out.
At length the morning glory in its descent from heaven comes down the
stone steps one by one, and there stands the steeple glowing with
fresh radiance, while the shades of twilight still hide themselves
among the nooks of the adjacent buildings. Methinks though the same
sun brightens it every fair morning, yet the steeple has a peculiar
robe of brightness for the Sabbath.

By dwelling near a church a person soon contracts an attachment for
the edifice. We naturally personify it, and conceive its massy walls
and its dim emptiness to be instinct with a calm and meditative and
somewhat melancholy spirit. But the steeple stands foremost in our
thoughts, as well as locally. It impresses us as a giant with a mind
comprehensive and discriminating enough to care for the great and
small concerns of all the town. Hourly, while it speaks a moral to the
few that think, it reminds thousands of busy individuals of their
separate and most secret affairs. It is the steeple, too, that flings
abroad the hurried and irregular accents of general alarm; neither
have gladness and festivity found a better utterance than by its
tongue; and when the dead are slowly passing to their home, the
steeple has a melancholy voice to bid them welcome. Yet, in spite of
this connection with human interests, what a moral loneliness on
week-days broods round about its stately height! It has no kindred
with the houses above which it towers; it looks down into the narrow
thoroughfare--the lonelier because the crowd are elbowing their
passage at its base. A glance at the body of the church deepens this
impression. Within, by the light of distant windows, amid refracted
shadows we discern the vacant pews and empty galleries, the silent
organ, the voiceless pulpit and the clock which tells to solitude how
time is passing. Time--where man lives not--what is it but eternity?
And in the church, we might suppose, are garnered up throughout the
week all thoughts and feelings that have reference to eternity, until
the holy day comes round again to let them forth. Might not, then, its
more appropriate site be in the outskirts of the town, with space for
old trees to wave around it and throw their solemn shadows over a
quiet green? We will say more of this hereafter.

But on the Sabbath I watch the earliest sunshine and fancy that a
holier brightness marks the day when there shall be no buzz of voices
on the Exchange nor traffic in the shops, nor crowd nor business
anywhere but at church. Many have fancied so. For my own part, whether
I see it scattered down among tangled woods, or beaming broad across
the fields, or hemmed in between brick buildings, or tracing out the
figure of the casement on my chamber floor, still I recognize the
Sabbath sunshine. And ever let me recognize it! Some illusions--and
this among them--are the shadows of great truths. Doubts may flit
around me or seem to close their evil wings and settle down, but so
long as I imagine that the earth is hallowed and the light of heaven
retains its sanctity on the Sabbath--while that blessed sunshine lives
within me--never can my soul have lost the instinct of its faith. If
it have gone astray, it will return again.

I love to spend such pleasant Sabbaths from morning till night behind
the curtain of my open window. Are they spent amiss? Every spot so
near the church as to be visited by the circling shadow of the steeple
should be deemed consecrated ground to-day. With stronger truth be it
said that a devout heart may consecrate a den of thieves, as an evil
one may convert a temple to the same. My heart, perhaps, has no such
holy, nor, I would fain trust, such impious, potency. It must suffice
that, though my form be absent, my inner man goes constantly to
church, while many whose bodily presence fills the accustomed seats
have left their souls at home. But I am there even before my friend
the sexton. At length he comes--a man of kindly but sombre aspect, in
dark gray clothes, and hair of the same mixture. He comes and applies
his key to the wide portal. Now my thoughts may go in among the dusty
pews or ascend the pulpit without sacrilege, but soon come forth again
to enjoy the music of the bell. How glad, yet solemn too! All the
steeples in town are talking together aloft in the sunny air and
rejoicing among themselves while their spires point heavenward.
Meantime, here are the children assembling to the Sabbath-school,
which is kept somewhere within the church. Often, while looking at the
arched portal, I have been gladdened by the sight of a score of these
little girls and boys in pink, blue, yellow and crimson frocks
bursting suddenly forth into the sunshine like a swarm of gay
butterflies that had been shut up in the solemn gloom. Or I might
compare them to cherubs haunting that holy place.

About a quarter of an hour before the second ringing of the bell
individuals of the congregation begin to appear. The earliest is
invariably an old woman in black whose bent frame and rounded
shoulders are evidently laden with some heavy affliction which she is
eager to rest upon the altar. Would that the Sabbath came twice as
often, for the sake of that sorrowful old soul! There is an elderly
man, also, who arrives in good season and leans against the corner of
the tower, just within the line of its shadow, looking downward with a
darksome brow. I sometimes fancy that the old woman is the happier of
the two. After these, others drop in singly and by twos and threes,
either disappearing through the doorway or taking their stand in its
vicinity. At last, and always with an unexpected sensation, the bell
turns in the steeple overhead and throws out an irregular clangor,
jarring the tower to its foundation. As if there were magic in the
sound, the sidewalks of the street, both up and down along, are
immediately thronged with two long lines of people, all converging
hitherward and streaming into the church. Perhaps the far-off roar of
a coach draws nearer--a deeper thunder by its contrast with the
surrounding stillness--until it sets down the wealthy worshippers at
the portal among their humblest brethren. Beyond that entrance--in
theory, at least--there are no distinctions of earthly rank; nor,
indeed, by the goodly apparel which is flaunting in the sun would
there seem to be such on the hither side. Those pretty girls! Why will
they disturb my pious meditations? Of all days in the week, they
should strive to look least fascinating on the Sabbath, instead of
heightening their mortal loveliness, as if to rival the blessed angels
and keep our thoughts from heaven. Were I the minister himself, I must
needs look. One girl is white muslin from the waist upward and black
silk downward to her slippers; a second blushes from top-knot to
shoe-tie, one universal scarlet; another shines of a pervading yellow,
as if she had made a garment of the sunshine. The greater part,
however, have adopted a milder cheerfulness of hue. Their veils,
especially when the wind raises them, give a lightness to the general
effect and make them appear like airy phantoms as they flit up the
steps and vanish into the sombre doorway. Nearly all--though it is
very strange that I should know it--wear white stockings, white as
snow, and neat slippers laced crosswise with black ribbon pretty high
above the ankles. A white stocking is infinitely more effective than a
black one.

Here comes the clergyman, slow and solemn, in severe simplicity,
needing no black silk gown to denote his office. His aspect claims my
reverence, but cannot win my love. Were I to picture Saint Peter
keeping fast the gate of Heaven and frowning, more stern than pitiful,
on the wretched applicants, that face should be my study. By middle
age, or sooner, the creed has generally wrought upon the heart or been
attempered by it. As the minister passes into the church the bell
holds its iron tongue and all the low murmur of the congregation dies
away. The gray sexton looks up and down the street and then at my
window-curtain, where through the small peephole I half fancy that he
has caught my eye. Now every loiterer has gone in and the street lies
asleep in the quiet sun, while a feeling of loneliness comes over me,
and brings also an uneasy sense of neglected privileges and duties.
Oh, I ought to have gone to church! The bustle of the rising
congregation reaches my ears. They are standing up to pray. Could I
bring my heart into unison with those who are praying in yonder church
and lift it heavenward with a fervor of supplication, but no distinct
request, would not that be the safest kind of prayer?--"Lord, look
down upon me in mercy!" With that sentiment gushing from my soul,
might I not leave all the rest to him?

Hark! the hymn! This, at least, is a portion of the service which I
can enjoy better than if I sat within the walls, where the full choir
and the massive melody of the organ would fall with a weight upon me.
At this distance it thrills through my frame and plays upon my
heart-strings with a pleasure both of the sense and spirit. Heaven be
praised! I know nothing of music as a science, and the most elaborate
harmonies, if they please me, please as simply as a nurse's lullaby.
The strain has ceased, but prolongs itself in my mind with fanciful
echoes till I start from my reverie and find that the sermon has
commenced. It is my misfortune seldom to fructify in a regular way by
any but printed sermons. The first strong idea which the preacher
utters gives birth to a train of thought and leads me onward step by
step quite out of hearing of the good man's voice unless he be indeed
a son of thunder. At my open window, catching now and then a sentence
of the "parson's saw," I am as well situated as at the foot of the
pulpit stairs. The broken and scattered fragments of this one
discourse will be the texts of many sermons preached by those
colleague pastors--colleagues, but often disputants--my Mind and
Heart. The former pretends to be a scholar and perplexes me with
doctrinal points; the latter takes me on the score of feeling; and
both, like several other preachers, spend their strength to very
little purpose. I, their sole auditor, cannot always understand them.

Suppose that a few hours have passed, and behold me still behind my
curtain just before the close of the afternoon service. The hour-hand
on the dial has passed beyond four o'clock. The declining sun is
hidden behind the steeple and throws its shadow straight across the
street; so that my chamber is darkened as with a cloud. Around the
church door all is solitude, and an impenetrable obscurity beyond the
threshold. A commotion is heard. The seats are slammed down and the
pew doors thrown back; a multitude of feet are trampling along the
unseen aisles, and the congregation bursts suddenly through the
portal. Foremost scampers a rabble of boys, behind whom moves a dense
and dark phalanx of grown men, and lastly a crowd of females with
young children and a few scattered husbands. This instantaneous
outbreak of life into loneliness is one of the pleasantest scenes of
the day. Some of the good people are rubbing their eyes, thereby
intimating that they have been wrapped, as it were, in a sort of holy
trance by the fervor of their devotion. There is a young man, a
third-rate coxcomb, whose first care is always to flourish a white
handkerchief and brush the seat of a tight pair of black silk
pantaloons which shine as if varnished. They must have been made of
the stuff called "everlasting," or perhaps of the same piece as
Christian's garments in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, for he put them
on two summers ago and has not yet worn the gloss off. I have taken a
great liking to those black silk pantaloons. But now, with nods and
greetings among friends, each matron takes her husband's arm and paces
gravely homeward, while the girls also flutter away after arranging
sunset walks with their favored bachelors. The Sabbath eve is the eve
of love. At length the whole congregation is dispersed. No; here, with
faces as glossy as black satin, come two sable ladies and a sable
gentleman, and close in their rear the minister, who softens his
severe visage and bestows a kind word on each. Poor souls! To them the
most captivating picture of bliss in heaven is "There we shall be
white!"

All is solitude again. But hark! A broken warbling of voices, and now,
attuning its grandeur to their sweetness, a stately peal of the organ.
Who are the choristers? Let me dream that the angels who came down
from heaven this blessed morn to blend themselves with the worship of
the truly good are playing and singing their farewell to the earth. On
the wings of that rich melody they were borne upward.

This, gentle reader, is merely a flight of poetry. A few of the
singing-men and singing-women had lingered behind their fellows and
raised their voices fitfully and blew a careless note upon the organ.
Yet it lifted my soul higher than all their former strains. They are
gone--the sons and daughters of Music--and the gray sexton is just
closing the portal. For six days more there will be no face of man in
the pews and aisles and galleries, nor a voice in the pulpit, nor
music in the choir. Was it worth while to rear this massive edifice to
be a desert in the heart of the town and populous only for a few hours
of each seventh day? Oh, but the church is a symbol of religion. May
its site, which was consecrated on the day when the first tree was
felled, be kept holy for ever, a spot of solitude and peace amid the
trouble and vanity of our week-day world! There is a moral, and a
religion too, even in the silent walls. And may the steeple still
point heavenward and be decked with the hallowed sunshine of the
Sabbath morn!




THE WEDDING-KNELL.


There is a certain church, in the city of New York which I have always
regarded with peculiar interest on account of a marriage there
solemnized under very singular circumstances in my grandmother's
girlhood. That venerable lady chanced to be a spectator of the scene,
and ever after made it her favorite narrative. Whether the edifice now
standing on the same site be the identical one to which she referred I
am not antiquarian enough to know, nor would it be worth while to
correct myself, perhaps, of an agreeable error by reading the date of
its erection on the tablet over the door. It is a stately church
surrounded by an enclosure of the loveliest green, within which appear
urns, pillars, obelisks, and other forms of monumental marble, the
tributes of private affection or more splendid memorials of historic
dust. With such a place, though the tumult of the city rolls beneath
its tower, one would be willing to connect some legendary interest.

The marriage might be considered as the result of an early engagement,
though there had been two intermediate weddings on the lady's part and
forty years of celibacy on that of the gentleman. At sixty-five Mr.
Ellenwood was a shy but not quite a secluded man; selfish, like all
men who brood over their own hearts, yet manifesting on rare occasions
a vein of generous sentiment; a scholar throughout life, though always
an indolent one, because his studies had no definite object either of
public advantage or personal ambition; a gentleman, high-bred and
fastidiously delicate, yet sometimes requiring a considerable
relaxation in his behalf of the common rules of society. In truth,
there were so many anomalies in his character, and, though shrinking
with diseased sensibility from public notice, it had been his fatality
so often to become the topic of the day by some wild eccentricity of
conduct, that people searched his lineage for a hereditary taint of
insanity. But there was no need of this. His caprices had their origin
in a mind that lacked the support of an engrossing purpose, and in
feelings that preyed upon themselves for want of other food. If he
were mad, it was the consequence, and not the cause, of an aimless and
abortive life.

The widow was as complete a contrast to her third bridegroom in
everything but age as can well be conceived. Compelled to relinquish
her first engagement, she had been united to a man of twice her own
years, to whom she became an exemplary wife, and by whose death she
was left in possession of a splendid fortune. A Southern gentleman
considerably younger than herself succeeded to her hand and carried
her to Charleston, where after many uncomfortable years she found
herself again a widow. It would have been singular if any uncommon
delicacy of feeling had survived through such a life as Mrs. Dabney's;
it could not but be crushed and killed by her early disappointment,
the cold duty of her first marriage, the dislocation of the heart's
principles consequent on a second union, and the unkindness of her
Southern husband, which had inevitably driven her to connect the idea
of his death with that of her comfort. To be brief, she was that
wisest but unloveliest variety of woman, a philosopher, bearing
troubles of the heart with equanimity, dispensing with all that should
have been her happiness and making the best of what remained. Sage in
most matters, the widow was perhaps the more amiable for the one
frailty that made her ridiculous. Being childless, she could not
remain beautiful by proxy in the person of a daughter; she therefore
refused to grow old and ugly on any consideration; she struggled with
Time, and held fast her roses in spite of him, till the venerable
thief appeared to have relinquished the spoil as not worth the trouble
of acquiring it.

The approaching marriage of this woman of the world with such an
unworldly man as Mr. Ellenwood was announced soon after Mrs. Dabney's
return to her native city. Superficial observers, and deeper ones,
seemed to concur in supposing that the lady must have borne no
inactive part in arranging the affair; there were considerations of
expediency which she would be far more likely to appreciate than Mr.
Ellenwood, and there was just the specious phantom of sentiment and
romance in this late union of two early lovers which sometimes makes a
fool of a woman who has lost her true feelings among the accidents of
life. All the wonder was how the gentleman, with his lack of worldly
wisdom and agonizing consciousness of ridicule, could have been
induced to take a measure at once so prudent and so laughable. But
while people talked the wedding-day arrived. The ceremony was to be
solemnized according to the Episcopalian forms and in open church,
with a degree of publicity that attracted many spectators, who
occupied the front seats of the galleries and the pews near the altar
and along the broad aisle. It had been arranged, or possibly it was
the custom of the day, that the parties should proceed separately to
church. By some accident the bridegroom was a little less punctual
than the widow and her bridal attendants, with whose arrival, after
this tedious but necessary preface, the action of our tale may be said
to commence.

The clumsy wheels of several old-fashioned coaches were heard, and the
gentlemen and ladies composing the bridal-party came through the
church door with the sudden and gladsome effect of a burst of
sunshine. The whole group, except the principal figure, was made up of
youth and gayety. As they streamed up the broad aisle, while the pews
and pillars seemed to brighten on either side, their steps were as
buoyant as if they mistook the church for a ball-room and were ready
to dance hand in hand to the altar. So brilliant was the spectacle
that few took notice of a singular phenomenon that had marked its
entrance. At the moment when the bride's foot touched the threshold
the bell swung heavily in the tower above her and sent forth its
deepest knell. The vibrations died away, and returned with prolonged
solemnity as she entered the body of the church.

"Good heavens! What an omen!" whispered a young lady to her lover.

"On my honor," replied the gentleman, "I believe the bell has the good
taste to toll of its own accord. What has she to do with weddings? If
you, dearest Julia, were approaching the altar, the bell would ring
out its merriest peal. It has only a funeral-knell for her."

The bride and most of her company had been too much occupied with the
bustle of entrance to hear the first boding stroke of the bell--or, at
least, to reflect on the singularity of such a welcome to the altar.
They therefore continued to advance with undiminished gayety. The
gorgeous dresses of the time--the crimson velvet coats, the gold-laced
hats, the hoop-petticoats, the silk, satin, brocade and embroidery,
the buckles, canes and swords, all displayed to the best advantage on
persons suited to such finery--made the group appear more like a
bright-colored picture than anything real. But by what perversity of
taste had the artist represented his principal figure as so wrinkled
and decayed, while yet he had decked her out in the brightest splendor
of attire, as if the loveliest maiden had suddenly withered into age
and become a moral to the beautiful around her? On they went, however,
and had glittered along about a third of the aisle, when another
stroke of the bell seemed to fill the church with a visible gloom,
dimming and obscuring the bright-pageant till it shone forth again as
from a mist.

This time the party wavered, stopped and huddled closer together,
while a slight scream was heard from some of the ladies and a confused
whispering among the gentlemen. Thus tossing to and fro, they might
have been fancifully compared to a splendid bunch of flowers suddenly
shaken by a puff of wind which threatened to scatter the leaves of an
old brown, withered rose on the same stalk with two dewy buds, such
being the emblem of the widow between her fair young bridemaids. But
her heroism was admirable. She had started with an irrepressible
shudder, as if the stroke of the bell had fallen directly on her
heart; then, recovering herself, while her attendants were yet in
dismay, she took the lead and paced calmly up the aisle. The bell
continued to swing, strike and vibrate with the same doleful
regularity as when a corpse is on its way to the tomb.

"My young friends here have their nerves a little shaken," said the
widow, with a smile, to the clergyman at the altar. "But so many
weddings have been ushered in with the merriest peal of the bells, and
yet turned out unhappily, that I shall hope for better fortune under
such different auspices."

"Madam," answered the rector, in great perplexity, "this strange
occurrence brings to my mind a marriage-sermon of the famous Bishop
Taylor wherein he mingles so many thoughts of mortality and future woe
that, to speak somewhat after his own rich style, he seems to hang the
bridal-chamber in black and cut the wedding-garment out of a
coffin-pall. And it has been the custom of divers nations to infuse
something of sadness into their marriage ceremonies, so to keep death
in mind while contracting that engagement which is life's chiefest
business. Thus we may draw a sad but profitable moral from this
funeral-knell."

But, though the clergyman might have given his moral even a keener
point, he did not fail to despatch an attendant to inquire into the
mystery and stop those sounds so dismally appropriate to such a
marriage. A brief space elapsed, during which the silence was broken
only by whispers and a few suppressed titterings among the
wedding-party and the spectators, who after the first shock were
disposed to draw an ill-natured merriment from the affair. The young
have less charity for aged follies than the old for those of youth.
The widow's glance was observed to wander for an instant toward a
window of the church, as if searching for the time-worn marble that
she had dedicated to her first husband; then her eyelids dropped over
their faded orbs and her thoughts were drawn irresistibly to another
grave. Two buried men with a voice at her ear and a cry afar off were
calling her to lie down beside them. Perhaps, with momentary truth of
feeling, she thought how much happier had been her fate if, after
years of bliss, the bell were now tolling for her funeral and she were
followed to the grave by the old affection of her earliest lover, long
her husband. But why had she returned to him when their cold hearts
shrank from each other's embrace?

Still the death-bell tolled so mournfully that the sunshine seemed to
fade in the air. A whisper, communicated from those who stood nearest
the windows, now spread through the church: a hearse with a train of
several coaches was creeping along the street, conveying some dead man
to the churchyard, while the bride awaited a living one at the altar.
Immediately after, the footsteps of the bridegroom and his friends
were heard at the door. The widow looked down the aisle and clenched
the arm of one of her bridemaids in her bony hand with such
unconscious violence that the fair girl trembled.

"You frighten me, my dear madam," cried she. "For heaven's sake, what
is the matter?"

"Nothing, my dear--nothing," said the widow; then, whispering close to
her ear, "There is a foolish fancy that I cannot get rid of. I am
expecting my bridegroom to come into the church with my two first
husbands for groomsmen."

"Look! look!" screamed the bridemaid. "What is here? The funeral!"

As she spoke a dark procession paced into the church. First came an
old man and woman, like chief mourners at a funeral, attired from head
to foot in the deepest black, all but their pale features and hoary
hair, he leaning on a staff and supporting her decrepit form with his
nerveless arm. Behind appeared another and another pair, as aged, as
black and mournful as the first. As they drew near the widow
recognized in every face some trait of former friends long forgotten,
but now returning as if from their old graves to warn her to prepare a
shroud, or, with purpose almost as unwelcome, to exhibit their
wrinkles and infirmity and claim her as their companion by the tokens
of her own decay. Many a merry night had she danced with them in
youth, and now in joyless age she felt that some withered partner
should request her hand and all unite in a dance of death to the music
of the funeral-bell.

While these aged mourners were passing up the aisle it was observed
that from pew to pew the spectators shuddered with irrepressible awe
as some object hitherto concealed by the intervening figures came full
in sight. Many turned away their faces; others kept a fixed and rigid
stare, and a young girl giggled hysterically and fainted with the
laughter on her lips. When the spectral procession approached the
altar, each couple separated and slowly diverged, till in the centre
appeared a form that had been worthily ushered in with all this gloomy
pomp, the death-knell and the funeral. It was the bridegroom in his
shroud.

No garb but that of the grave could have befitted such a death-like
aspect. The eyes, indeed, had the wild gleam of a sepulchral lamp; all
else was fixed in the stern calmness which old men wear in the coffin.
The corpse stood motionless, but addressed the widow in accents that
seemed to melt into the clang of the bell, which fell heavily on the
air while he spoke.

"Come, my bride!" said those pale lips. "The hearse is ready; the
sexton stands waiting for us at the door of the tomb. Let us be
married, and then to our coffins!"

How shall the widow's horror be represented? It gave her the
ghastliness of a dead man's bride. Her youthful friends stood apart,
shuddering at the mourners, the shrouded bridegroom and herself; the
whole scene expressed by the strongest imagery the vain struggle of
the gilded vanities of this world when opposed to age, infirmity,
sorrow and death.

The awestruck silence was first broken by the clergyman.

"Mr. Ellenwood," said he, soothingly, yet with somewhat of authority,
"you are not well. Your mind has been agitated by the unusual
circumstances in which you are placed. The ceremony must be deferred.
As an old friend, let me entreat you to return home."

"Home--yes; but not without my bride," answered he, in the same hollow
accents. "You deem this mockery--perhaps madness. Had I bedizened my
aged and broken frame with scarlet and embroidery, had I forced my
withered lips to smile at my dead heart, that might have been mockery
or madness; but now let young and old declare which of us has come
hither without a wedding-garment--the bridegroom or the bride."

He stepped forward at a ghostly pace and stood beside the widow,
contrasting the awful simplicity of his shroud with the glare and
glitter in which she had arrayed herself for this unhappy scene. None
that beheld them could deny the terrible strength of the moral which
his disordered intellect had contrived to draw.

"Cruel! cruel!" groaned the heartstricken bride.

"Cruel?" repeated he; then, losing his deathlike composure in a wild
bitterness, "Heaven judge which of us has been cruel to the other! In
youth you deprived me of my happiness, my hopes, my aims; you took
away all the substance of my life and made it a dream without reality
enough even to grieve at--with only a pervading gloom, through which I
walked wearily and cared not whither. But after forty years, when I
have built my tomb and would not give up the thought of resting
there--no, not for such a life as we once pictured--you call me to the
altar. At your summons I am here. But other husbands have enjoyed your
youth, your beauty, your warmth of heart and all that could be termed
your life. What is there for me but your decay and death? And
therefore I have bidden these funeral-friends, and bespoken the
sexton's deepest knell, and am come in my shroud to wed you as with a
burial-service, that we may join our hands at the door of the
sepulchre and enter it together."

It was not frenzy, it was not merely the drunkenness of strong emotion
in a heart unused to it, that now wrought upon the bride. The stern
lesson of the day had done its work; her worldliness was gone. She
seized the bridegroom's hand.

"Yes!" cried she; "let us wed even at the door of the sepulchre. My
life is gone in vanity and emptiness, but at its close there is one
true feeling. It has made me what I was in youth: it makes me worthy
of you. Time is no more for both of us. Let us wed for eternity."

With a long and deep regard the bridegroom looked into her eyes, while
a tear was gathering in his own. How strange that gush of human
feeling from the frozen bosom of a corpse! He wiped away the tear,
even with his shroud.

"Beloved of my youth," said he, "I have been wild. The despair of my
whole lifetime had returned at once and maddened me. Forgive and be
forgiven. Yes; it is evening with us now, and we have realized none of
our morning dreams of happiness. But let us join our hands before the
altar as lovers whom adverse circumstances have separated through
life, yet who meet again as they are leaving it and find their earthly
affection changed into something holy as religion. And what is time to
the married of eternity?"

Amid the tears of many and a swell of exalted sentiment in those who
felt aright was solemnized the union of two immortal souls. The train
of withered mourners, the hoary bridegroom in his shroud, the pale
features of the aged bride and the death-bell tolling through the
whole till its deep voice overpowered the marriage-words,--all marked
the funeral of earthly hopes. But as the ceremony proceeded, the
organ, as if stirred by the sympathies of this impressive scene,
poured forth an anthem, first mingling with the dismal knell, then
rising to a loftier strain, till the soul looked down upon its woe.
And when the awful rite was finished and with cold hand in cold hand
the married of eternity withdrew, the organ's peal of solemn triumph
drowned the wedding-knell.




THE MINISTER'S BLACK VEIL.

A PARABLE.[1]


The sexton stood in the porch of Milford meeting-house pulling lustily
at the bell-rope. The old people of the village came stooping along
the street. Children with bright faces tripped merrily beside their
parents or mimicked a graver gait in the conscious dignity of their
Sunday clothes. Spruce bachelors looked sidelong at the pretty
maidens, and fancied that the Sabbath sunshine made them prettier than
on week-days. When the throng had mostly streamed into the porch, the
sexton began to toll the bell, keeping his eye on the Reverend Mr.
Hooper's door. The first glimpse of the clergyman's figure was the
signal for the bell to cease its summons.

[Footnote 1: Another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody, of
York, Maine, who died about eighty years since, made himself
remarkable by the same eccentricity that is here related of the
Reverend Mr. Hooper. In his case, however, the symbol had a different
import. In early life he had accidentally killed a beloved friend, and
from that day till the hour of his own death he hid his face from
men.]

"But what has good Parson Hooper got upon his face?" cried the sexton,
in astonishment.

All within hearing immediately turned about and beheld the semblance
of Mr. Hooper pacing slowly his meditative way toward the
meeting-house. With one accord they started, expressing more wonder
than if some strange minister were coming to dust the cushions of Mr.
Hooper's pulpit.

"Are you sure it is our parson?" inquired Goodman Gray of the sexton.

"Of a certainty it is good Mr. Hooper," replied the sexton. "He was to
have exchanged pulpits with Parson Shute of Westbury, but Parson Shute
sent to excuse himself yesterday, being to preach a funeral sermon."

The cause of so much amazement may appear sufficiently slight. Mr.
Hooper, a gentlemanly person of about thirty, though still a bachelor,
was dressed with due clerical neatness, as if a careful wife had
starched his band and brushed the weekly dust from his Sunday's garb.
There was but one thing remarkable in his appearance. Swathed about
his forehead and hanging down over his face, so low as to be shaken by
his breath, Mr. Hooper had on a black veil. On a nearer view it seemed
to consist of two folds of crape, which entirely concealed his
features except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his
sight further than to give a darkened aspect to all living and
inanimate things. With this gloomy shade before him good Mr. Hooper
walked onward at a slow and quiet pace, stooping somewhat and looking
on the ground, as is customary with abstracted men, yet nodding kindly
to those of his parishioners who still waited on the meeting-house
steps. But so wonder-struck were they that his greeting hardly met
with a return.

"I can't really feel as if good Mr. Hooper's face was behind that
piece of crape," said the sexton.

"I don't like it," muttered an old woman as she hobbled into the
meeting-house. "He has changed himself into something awful only by
hiding his face."

"Our parson has gone mad!" cried Goodman Gray, following him across
the threshold.

A rumor of some unaccountable phenomenon had preceded Mr. Hooper into
the meeting-house and set all the congregation astir. Few could
refrain from twisting their heads toward the door; many stood upright
and turned directly about; while several little boys clambered upon
the seats, and came down again with a terrible racket. There was a
general bustle, a rustling of the women's gowns and shuffling of the
men's feet, greatly at variance with that hushed repose which should
attend the entrance of the minister. But Mr. Hooper appeared not to
notice the perturbation of his people. He entered with an almost
noiseless step, bent his head mildly to the pews on each side and
bowed as he passed his oldest parishioner, a white-haired
great-grandsire, who occupied an arm-chair in the centre of the aisle.
It was strange to observe how slowly this venerable man became
conscious of something singular in the appearance of his pastor. He
seemed not fully to partake of the prevailing wonder till Mr. Hooper
had ascended the stairs and showed himself in the pulpit, face to face
with his congregation except for the black veil. That mysterious
emblem was never once withdrawn. It shook with his measured breath as
he gave out the psalm, it threw its obscurity between him and the holy
page as he read the Scriptures, and while he prayed the veil lay
heavily on his uplifted countenance. Did he seek to hide it from the
dread Being whom he was addressing?

Such was the effect of this simple piece of crape that more than one
woman of delicate nerves was forced to leave the meeting-house. Yet
perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to
the minister as his black veil to them.

Mr. Hooper had the reputation of a good preacher, but not an energetic
one: he strove to win his people heavenward by mild, persuasive
influences rather than to drive them thither by the thunders of the
word. The sermon which he now delivered was marked by the same
characteristics of style and manner as the general series of his
pulpit oratory, but there was something either in the sentiment of the
discourse itself or in the imagination of the auditors which made it
greatly the most powerful effort that they had ever heard from their
pastor's lips. It was tinged rather more darkly than usual with the
gentle gloom of Mr. Hooper's temperament. The subject had reference to
secret sin and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and
dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even
forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them. A subtle power was
breathed into his words. Each member of the congregation, the most
innocent girl and the man of hardened breast, felt as if the preacher
had crept upon them behind his awful veil and discovered their hoarded
iniquity of deed or thought. Many spread their clasped hands on their
bosoms. There was nothing terrible in what Mr. Hooper said--at least,
no violence; and yet with every tremor of his melancholy voice the
hearers quaked. An unsought pathos came hand in hand with awe. So
sensible were the audience of some unwonted attribute in their
minister that they longed for a breath of wind to blow aside the veil,
almost believing that a stranger's visage would be discovered, though
the form, gesture and voice were those of Mr. Hooper.

At the close of the services the people hurried out with indecorous
confusion, eager to communicate their pent-up amazement, and conscious
of lighter spirits the moment they lost sight of the black veil. Some
gathered in little circles, huddled closely together, with their
mouths all whispering in the centre; some went homeward alone, wrapped
in silent meditation; some talked loudly and profaned the Sabbath-day
with ostentatious laughter. A few shook their sagacious heads,
intimating that they could penetrate the mystery, while one or two
affirmed that there was no mystery at all, but only that Mr. Hooper's
eyes were so weakened by the midnight lamp as to require a shade.

After a brief interval forth came good Mr. Hooper also, in the rear of
his flock. Turning his veiled face from one group to another, he paid
due reverence to the hoary heads, saluted the middle-aged with kind
dignity as their friend and spiritual guide, greeted the young with
mingled authority and love, and laid his hands on the little
children's heads to bless them. Such was always his custom on the
Sabbath-day. Strange and bewildered looks repaid him for his courtesy.
None, as on former occasions, aspired to the honor of walking by their
pastor's side. Old Squire Saunders--doubtless by an accidental lapse
of memory--neglected to invite Mr. Hooper to his table, where the good
clergyman had been wont to bless the food almost every Sunday since
his settlement. He returned, therefore, to the parsonage, and at the
moment of closing the door was observed to look back upon the people,
all of whom had their eyes fixed upon the minister. A sad smile
gleamed faintly from beneath the black veil and flickered about his
mouth, glimmering as he disappeared.

"How strange," said a lady, "that a simple black veil, such as any
woman might wear on her bonnet, should become such a terrible thing on
Mr. Hooper's face!"

"Something must surely be amiss with Mr. Hooper's intellects,"
observed her husband, the physician of the village. "But the strangest
part of the affair is the effect of this vagary even on a sober-minded
man like myself. The black veil, though it covers only our pastor's
face, throws its influence over his whole person and makes him
ghost-like from head to foot. Do you not feel it so?"

"Truly do I," replied the lady; "and I would not be alone with him for
the world. I wonder he is not afraid to be alone with himself."

"Men sometimes are so," said her husband.

The afternoon service was attended with similar circumstances. At its
conclusion the bell tolled for the funeral of a young lady. The
relatives and friends were assembled in the house and the more distant
acquaintances stood about the door, speaking of the good qualities of
the deceased, when their talk was interrupted by the appearance of Mr.
Hooper, still covered with his black veil. It was now an appropriate
emblem. The clergyman stepped into the room where the corpse was laid,
and bent over the coffin to take a last farewell of his deceased
parishioner. As he stooped the veil hung straight down from his
forehead, so that, if her eye-lids had not been closed for ever, the
dead maiden might have seen his face. Could Mr. Hooper be fearful of
her glance, that he so hastily caught back the black veil? A person
who watched the interview between the dead and living scrupled not to
affirm that at the instant when the clergyman's features were
disclosed the corpse had slightly shuddered, rustling the shroud and
muslin cap, though the countenance retained the composure of death. A
superstitious old woman was the only witness of this prodigy.

From the coffin Mr. Hooper passed into the chamber of the mourners,
and thence to the head of the staircase, to make the funeral prayer.
It was a tender and heart-dissolving prayer, full of sorrow, yet so
imbued with celestial hopes that the music of a heavenly harp swept by
the fingers of the dead seemed faintly to be heard among the saddest
accents of the minister. The people trembled, though they but darkly
understood him, when he prayed that they and himself, and all of
mortal race, might be ready, as he trusted this young maiden had been,
for the dreadful hour that should snatch the veil from their faces.
The bearers went heavily forth and the mourners followed, saddening
all the street, with the dead before them and Mr. Hooper in his black
veil behind.

"Why do you look back?" said one in the procession to his partner.

"I had a fancy," replied she, "that the minister and the maiden's
spirit were walking hand in hand."

"And so had I at the same moment," said the other.

That night the handsomest couple in Milford village were to be joined
in wedlock. Though reckoned a melancholy man, Mr. Hooper had a placid
cheerfulness for such occasions which often excited a sympathetic
smile where livelier merriment would have been thrown away. There was
no quality of his disposition which made him more beloved than this.
The company at the wedding awaited his arrival with impatience,
trusting that the strange awe which had gathered over him throughout
the day would now be dispelled. But such was not the result. When Mr.
Hooper came, the first thing that their eyes rested on was the same
horrible black veil which had added deeper gloom to the funeral and
could portend nothing but evil to the wedding. Such was its immediate
effect on the guests that a cloud seemed to have rolled duskily from
beneath the black crape and dimmed the light of the candles. The
bridal pair stood up before the minister, but the bride's cold fingers
quivered in the tremulous hand of the bridegroom, and her death-like
paleness caused a whisper that the maiden who had been buried a few
hours before was come from her grave to be married. If ever another
wedding were so dismal, it was that famous one where they tolled the
wedding-knell.

After performing the ceremony Mr. Hooper raised a glass of wine to his
lips, wishing happiness to the new-married couple in a strain of mild
pleasantry that ought to have brightened the features of the guests
like a cheerful gleam from the hearth. At that instant, catching a
glimpse of his figure in the looking-glass, the black veil involved
his own spirit in the horror with which it overwhelmed all others. His
frame shuddered, his lips grew white, he spilt the untasted wine upon
the carpet and rushed forth into the darkness, for the Earth too had
on her black veil.

The next day the whole village of Milford talked of little else than
Parson Hooper's black veil. That, and the mystery concealed behind it,
supplied a topic for discussion between acquaintances meeting in the
street and good women gossipping at their open windows. It was the
first item of news that the tavernkeeper told to his guests. The
children babbled of it on their way to school. One imitative little
imp covered his face with an old black handkerchief, thereby so
affrighting his playmates that the panic seized himself and he
wellnigh lost his wits by his own waggery.

It was remarkable that, of all the busybodies and impertinent people
in the parish, not one ventured to put the plain question to Mr.
Hooper wherefore he did this thing. Hitherto, whenever there appeared
the slightest call for such interference, he had never lacked advisers
nor shown himself averse to be guided by their judgment. If he erred
at all, it was by so painful a degree of self-distrust that even the
mildest censure would lead him to consider an indifferent action as a
crime. Yet, though so well acquainted with this amiable weakness, no
individual among his parishioners chose to make the black veil a
subject of friendly remonstrance. There was a feeling of dread,
neither plainly confessed nor carefully concealed, which caused each
to shift the responsibility upon another, till at length it was found
expedient to send a deputation of the church, in order to deal with
Mr. Hooper about the mystery before it should grow into a scandal.
Never did an embassy so ill discharge its duties. The minister
received them with friendly courtesy, but became silent after they
were seated, leaving to his visitors the whole burden of introducing
their important business. The topic, it might be supposed, was obvious
enough. There was the black veil swathed round Mr. Hooper's forehead
and concealing every feature above his placid mouth, on which, at
times, they could perceive the glimmering of a melancholy smile. But
that piece of crape, to their imagination, seemed to hang down before
his heart, the symbol of a fearful secret between him and them. Were
the veil but cast aside, they might speak freely of it, but not till
then. Thus they sat a considerable time, speechless, confused and
shrinking uneasily from Mr. Hooper's eye, which they felt to be fixed
upon them with an invisible glance. Finally, the deputies returned
abashed to their constituents, pronouncing the matter too weighty to
be handled except by a council of the churches, if, indeed, it might
not require a General Synod.

But there was one person in the village unappalled by the awe with
which the black veil had impressed all besides herself. When the
deputies returned without an explanation, or even venturing to demand
one, she with the calm energy of her character determined to chase
away the strange cloud that appeared to be settling round Mr. Hooper
every moment more darkly than before. As his plighted wife it should
be her privilege to know what the black veil concealed. At the
minister's first visit, therefore, she entered upon the subject with a
direct simplicity which made the task easier both for him and her.
After he had seated himself she fixed her eyes steadfastly upon the
veil, but could discern nothing of the dreadful gloom that had so
overawed the multitude; it was but a double fold of crape hanging down
from his forehead to his mouth and slightly stirring with his breath.

"No," said she, aloud, and smiling, "there is nothing terrible in this
piece of crape, except that it hides a face which I am always glad to
look upon. Come, good sir; let the sun shine from behind the cloud.
First lay aside your black veil, then tell me why you put it on."

Mr. Hooper's smile glimmered faintly.

"There is an hour to come," said he, "when all of us shall cast aside
our veils. Take it not amiss, beloved friend, if I wear this piece of
crape till then."

"Your words are a mystery too," returned the young lady. "Take away
the veil from them, at least."

"Elizabeth, I will," said he, "so far as my vow may suffer me. Know,
then, this veil is a type and a symbol, and I am bound to wear it
ever, both in light and darkness, in solitude and before the gaze of
multitudes, and as with strangers, so with my familiar friends. No
mortal eye will see it withdrawn. This dismal shade must separate me
from the world; even you, Elizabeth, can never come behind it."

"What grievous affliction hath befallen you," she earnestly inquired,
"that you should thus darken your eyes for ever?"

"If it be a sign of mourning," replied Mr. Hooper, "I, perhaps, like
most other mortals, have sorrows dark enough to be typified by a black
veil."

"But what if the world will not believe that it is the type of an
innocent sorrow?" urged Elizabeth. "Beloved and respected as you are,
there may be whispers that you hide your face under the consciousness
of secret sin. For the sake of your holy office do away this scandal."

The color rose into her cheeks as she intimated the nature of the
rumors that were already abroad in the village. But Mr. Hooper's
mildness did not forsake him. He even smiled again--that same sad
smile which always appeared like a faint glimmering of light
proceeding from the obscurity beneath the veil.

"If I hide my face for sorrow, there is cause enough," he merely
replied; "and if I cover it for secret sin, what mortal might not do
the same?" And with this gentle but unconquerable obstinacy did he
resist all her entreaties.

At length Elizabeth sat silent. For a few moments she appeared lost in
thought, considering, probably, what new methods might be tried to
withdraw her lover from so dark a fantasy, which, if it had no other
meaning, was perhaps a symptom of mental disease. Though of a firmer
character than his own, the tears rolled down her cheeks. But in an
instant, as it were, a new feeling took the place of sorrow: her eyes
were fixed insensibly on the black veil, when like a sudden twilight
in the air its terrors fell around her. She arose and stood trembling
before him.

"And do you feel it, then, at last?" said he, mournfully.

She made no reply, but covered her eyes with her hand and turned to
leave the room. He rushed forward and caught her arm.

"Have patience with me, Elizabeth!" cried he, passionately. "Do not
desert me though this veil must be between us here on earth. Be mine,
and hereafter there shall be no veil over my face, no darkness between
our souls. It is but a mortal veil; it is not for eternity. Oh, you
know not how lonely I am, and how frightened to be alone behind my
black veil! Do not leave me in this miserable obscurity for ever."

"Lift the veil but once and look me in the face," said she.

"Never! It cannot be!" replied Mr. Hooper.

"Then farewell!" said Elizabeth.

She withdrew her arm from his grasp and slowly departed, pausing at
the door to give one long, shuddering gaze that seemed almost to
penetrate the mystery of the black veil. But even amid his grief Mr.
Hooper smiled to think that only a material emblem had separated him
from happiness, though the horrors which it shadowed forth must be
drawn darkly between the fondest of lovers.

From that time no attempts were made to remove Mr. Hooper's black veil
or by a direct appeal to discover the secret which it was supposed to
hide. By persons who claimed a superiority to popular prejudice it was
reckoned merely an eccentric whim, such as often mingles with the
sober actions of men otherwise rational and tinges them all with its
own semblance of insanity. But with the multitude good Mr. Hooper was
irreparably a bugbear. He could not walk the street with any peace of
mind, so conscious was he that the gentle and timid would turn aside
to avoid him, and that others would make it a point of hardihood to
throw themselves in his way. The impertinence of the latter class
compelled him to give up his customary walk at sunset to the
burial-ground; for when he leaned pensively over the gate, there would
always be faces behind the gravestones peeping at his black veil. A
fable went the rounds that the stare of the dead people drove him
thence. It grieved him to the very depth of his kind heart to observe
how the children fled from his approach, breaking up their merriest
sports while his melancholy figure was yet afar off. Their instinctive
dread caused him to feel more strongly than aught else that a
preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black
crape. In truth, his own antipathy to the veil was known to be so
great that he never willingly passed before a mirror nor stooped to
drink at a still fountain lest in its peaceful bosom he should be
affrighted by himself. This was what gave plausibility to the whispers
that Mr. Hooper's conscience tortured him for some great crime too
horrible to be entirely concealed or otherwise than so obscurely
intimated. Thus from beneath the black veil there rolled a cloud into
the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor
minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him. It was said
that ghost and fiend consorted with him there. With self-shudderings
and outward terrors he walked continually in its shadow, groping
darkly within his own soul or gazing through a medium that saddened
the whole world. Even the lawless wind, it was believed, respected his
dreadful secret and never blew aside the veil. But still good Mr.
Hooper sadly smiled at the pale visages of the worldly throng as he
passed by.

Among all its bad influences, the black veil had the one desirable
effect of making its wearer a very efficient clergyman. By the aid of
his mysterious emblem--for there was no other apparent cause--he
became a man of awful power over souls that were in agony for sin. His
converts always regarded him with a dread peculiar to themselves,
affirming, though but figuratively, that before he brought them to
celestial light they had been with him behind the black veil. Its
gloom, indeed, enabled him to sympathize with all dark affections.
Dying sinners cried aloud for Mr. Hooper and would not yield their
breath till he appeared, though ever, as he stooped to whisper
consolation, they shuddered at the veiled face so near their own. Such
were the terrors of the black veil even when Death had bared his
visage. Strangers came long distances to attend service at his church
with the mere idle purpose of gazing at his figure because it was
forbidden them to behold his face. But many were made to quake ere
they departed. Once, during Governor Belcher's administration, Mr.
Hooper was appointed to preach the election sermon. Covered with his
black veil, he stood before the chief magistrate, the council and the
representatives, and wrought so deep an impression that the
legislative measures of that year were characterized by all the gloom
and piety of our earliest ancestral sway.

In this manner Mr. Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward
act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though
unloved and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their
health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish. As
years wore on, shedding their snows above his sable veil, he acquired
a name throughout the New England churches, and they called him Father
Hooper. Nearly all his parishioners who were of mature age when he was
settled had been borne away by many a funeral: he had one congregation
in the church and a more crowded one in the churchyard; and, having
wrought so late into the evening and done his work so well, it was now
good Father Hooper's turn to rest.

Several persons were visible by the shaded candlelight in the
death-chamber of the old clergyman. Natural connections he had none.
But there was the decorously grave though unmoved physician, seeking
only to mitigate the last pangs of the patient whom he could not save.
There were the deacons and other eminently pious members of his
church. There, also, was the Reverend Mr. Clark of Westbury, a young
and zealous divine who had ridden in haste to pray by the bedside of
the expiring minister. There was the nurse--no hired handmaiden of
Death, but one whose calm affection had endured thus long in secrecy,
in solitude, amid the chill of age, and would not perish even at the
dying-hour. Who but Elizabeth! And there lay the hoary head of good
Father Hooper upon the death-pillow with the black veil still swathed
about his brow and reaching down over his face, so that each more
difficult gasp of his faint breath caused it to stir. All through life
that piece of crape had hung between him and the world; it had
separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love and kept him
in that saddest of all prisons his own heart; and still it lay upon
his face, as if to deepen the gloom of his darksome chamber and shade
him from the sunshine of eternity.

For some time previous his mind had been confused, wavering doubtfully
between the past and the present, and hovering forward, as it were, at
intervals, into the indistinctness of the world to come. There had
been feverish turns which tossed him from side to side and wore away
what little strength he had. But in his most convulsive struggles and
in the wildest vagaries of his intellect, when no other thought
retained its sober influence, he still showed an awful solicitude lest
the black veil should slip aside. Even if his bewildered soul could
have forgotten, there was a faithful woman at his pillow who with
averted eyes would have covered that aged face which she had last
beheld in the comeliness of manhood.

At length the death-stricken old man lay quietly in the torpor of
mental and bodily exhaustion, with an imperceptible pulse and breath
that grew fainter and fainter except when a long, deep and irregular
inspiration seemed to prelude the flight of his spirit.

The minister of Westbury approached the bedside.

"Venerable Father Hooper," said he, "the moment of your release is at
hand. Are you ready for the lifting of the veil that shuts in time
from eternity?"

Father Hooper at first replied merely by a feeble motion of his head;
then--apprehensive, perhaps, that his meaning might be doubtful--he
exerted himself to speak.

"Yea," said he, in faint accents; "my soul hath a patient weariness
until that veil be lifted."

"And is it fitting," resumed the Reverend Mr. Clark, "that a man so
given to prayer, of such a blameless example, holy in deed and
thought, so far as mortal judgment may pronounce,--is it fitting that
a father in the Church should leave a shadow on his memory that may
seem to blacken a life so pure? I pray you, my venerable brother, let
not this thing be! Suffer us to be gladdened by your triumphant aspect
as you go to your reward. Before the veil of eternity be lifted let me
cast aside this black veil from your face;" and, thus speaking, the
Reverend Mr. Clark bent forward to reveal the mystery of so many
years.

But, exerting a sudden energy that made all the beholders stand
aghast, Father Hooper snatched both his hands from beneath the
bedclothes and pressed them strongly on the black veil, resolute to
struggle if the minister of Westbury would contend with a dying man.

"Never!" cried the veiled clergyman. "On earth, never!"

"Dark old man," exclaimed the affrighted minister, "with what horrible
crime upon your soul are you now passing to the judgment?"

Father Hooper's breath heaved: it rattled in his throat; but, with a
mighty effort grasping forward with his hands, he caught hold of life
and held it back till he should speak. He even raised himself in bed,
and there he sat shivering with the arms of Death around him, while
the black veil hung down, awful at that last moment in the gathered
terrors of a lifetime. And yet the faint, sad smile so often there now
seemed to glimmer from its obscurity and linger on Father Hooper's
lips.

"Why do you tremble at me alone?" cried he, turning his veiled face
round the circle of pale spectators. "Tremble also at each other. Have
men avoided me and women shown no pity and children screamed and fled
only for my black veil? What but the mystery which it obscurely
typifies has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows
his inmost heart to his friend, the lover to his best-beloved; when
man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely
treasuring up the secret of his sin,--then deem me a monster for the
symbol beneath which I have lived and die. I look around me, and, lo!
on every visage a black veil!"

While his auditors shrank from one another in mutual affright, Father
Hooper fell back upon his pillow, a veiled corpse with a faint smile
lingering on the lips. Still veiled, they laid him in his coffin, and
a veiled corpse they bore him to the grave. The grass of many years
has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial-stone is
moss-grown, and good Mr. Hooper's face is dust; but awful is still the
thought that it mouldered beneath the black veil.




THE MAYPOLE OF MERRY MOUNT.


    There is an admirable foundation for a philosophic romance in
    the curious history of the early settlement of Mount Wollaston,
    or Merry Mount. In the slight sketch here attempted the facts
    recorded on the grave pages of our New England annalists have
    wrought themselves almost spontaneously into a sort of allegory.
    The masques, mummeries and festive customs described in the text
    are in accordance with the manners of the age. Authority on these
    points may be found in Strutt's _Book of English Sports and
    Pastimes_.

Bright were the days at Merry Mount when the Maypole was the
banner-staff of that gay colony. They who reared it, should their
banner be triumphant, were to pour sunshine over New England's rugged
hills and scatter flower-seeds throughout the soil. Jollity and gloom
were contending for an empire. Midsummer eve had come, bringing deep
verdure to the forest, and roses in her lap of a more vivid hue than
the tender buds of spring. But May, or her mirthful spirit, dwelt all
the year round at Merry Mount, sporting with the summer months and
revelling with autumn and basking in the glow of winter's fireside.
Through a world of toil and care she flitted with a dream-like smile,
and came hither to find a home among the lightsome hearts of Merry
Mount.

Never had the Maypole been so gayly decked as at sunset on Midsummer
eve. This venerated emblem was a pine tree which had preserved the
slender grace of youth, while it equalled the loftiest height of the
old wood-monarchs. From its top streamed a silken banner colored like
the rainbow. Down nearly to the ground the pole was dressed with
birchen boughs, and others of the liveliest green, and some with
silvery leaves fastened by ribbons that fluttered in fantastic knots
of twenty different colors, but no sad ones. Garden-flowers and
blossoms of the wilderness laughed gladly forth amid the verdure, so
fresh and dewy that they must have grown by magic on that happy pine
tree. Where this green and flowery splendor terminated the shaft of
the Maypole was stained with the seven brilliant hues of the banner at
its top. On the lowest green bough hung an abundant wreath of
roses--some that had been gathered in the sunniest spots of the
forest, and others, of still richer blush, which the colonists had
reared from English seed. O people of the Golden Age, the chief of
your husbandry was to raise flowers!

But what was the wild throng that stood hand in hand about the
Maypole? It could not be that the fauns and nymphs, when driven from
their classic groves and homes of ancient fable, had sought refuge, as
all the persecuted did, in the fresh woods of the West. These were
Gothic monsters, though perhaps of Grecian ancestry. On the shoulders
of a comely youth uprose the head and branching antlers of a stag; a
second, human in all other points, had the grim visage of a wolf; a
third, still with the trunk and limbs of a mortal man, showed the
beard and horns of a venerable he-goat. There was the likeness of a
bear erect, brute in all but his hind legs, which were adorned with
pink silk stockings. And here, again, almost as wondrous, stood a real
bear of the dark forest, lending each of his forepaws to the grasp of
a human hand and as ready for the dance as any in that circle. His
inferior nature rose halfway to meet his companions as they stooped.
Other faces wore the similitude of man or woman, but distorted or
extravagant, with red noses pendulous before their mouths, which
seemed of awful depth and stretched from ear to ear in an eternal fit
of laughter. Here might be seen the salvage man--well known in
heraldry--hairy as a baboon and girdled with green leaves. By his
side--a nobler figure, but still a counterfeit--appeared an Indian
hunter with feathery crest and wampum-belt. Many of this strange
company wore foolscaps and had little bells appended to their
garments, tinkling with a silvery sound responsive to the inaudible
music of their gleesome spirits. Some youths and maidens were of
soberer garb, yet well maintained their places in the irregular throng
by the expression of wild revelry upon their features.

Such were the colonists of Merry Mount as they stood in the broad
smile of sunset round their venerated Maypole. Had a wanderer
bewildered in the melancholy forest heard their mirth and stolen a
half-affrighted glance, he might have fancied them the crew of Comus,
some already transformed to brutes, some midway between man and beast,
and the others rioting in the flow of tipsy jollity that foreran the
change; but a band of Puritans who watched the scene, invisible
themselves, compared the masques to those devils and ruined souls with
whom their superstition peopled the black wilderness.

Within the ring of monsters appeared the two airiest forms that had
ever trodden on any more solid footing than a purple-and-golden cloud.
One was a youth in glistening apparel with a scarf of the rainbow
pattern crosswise on his breast. His right hand held a gilded
staff--the ensign of high dignity among the revellers--and his left
grasped the slender fingers of a fair maiden not less gayly decorated
than himself. Bright roses glowed in contrast with the dark and glossy
curls of each, and were scattered round their feet or had sprung up
spontaneously there. Behind this lightsome couple, so close to the
Maypole that its boughs shaded his jovial face, stood the figure of an
English priest, canonically dressed, yet decked with flowers, in
heathen fashion, and wearing a chaplet of the native vine leaves. By
the riot of his rolling eye and the pagan decorations of his holy
garb, he seemed the wildest monster there, and the very Comus of the
crew.

"Votaries of the Maypole," cried the flower-decked priest, "merrily
all day long have the woods echoed to your mirth. But be this your
merriest hour, my hearts! Lo! here stand the Lord and Lady of the May,
whom I, a clerk of Oxford and high priest of Merry Mount, am presently
to join in holy matrimony.--Up with your nimble spirits, ye
morrice-dancers, green men and glee-maidens, bears and wolves and
horned gentlemen! Come! a chorus now rich with the old mirth of Merry
England and the wilder glee of this fresh forest, and then a dance, to
show the youthful pair what life is made of and how airily they should
go through it!--All ye that love the Maypole, lend your voices to the
nuptial song of the Lord and Lady of the May!"

This wedlock was more serious than most affairs of Merry Mount, where
jest and delusion, trick and fantasy, kept up a continual carnival.
The Lord and Lady of the May, though their titles must be laid down at
sunset, were really and truly to be partners for the dance of life,
beginning the measure that same bright eve. The wreath of roses that
hung from the lowest green bough of the Maypole had been twined for
them, and would be thrown over both their heads in symbol of their
flowery union. When the priest had spoken, therefore, a riotous uproar
burst from the rout of monstrous figures.

"Begin you the stave, reverend sir," cried they all, "and never did
the woods ring to such a merry peal as we of the Maypole shall send
up."

Immediately a prelude of pipe, cittern and viol, touched with
practised minstrelsy, began to play from a neighboring thicket in such
a mirthful cadence that the boughs of the Maypole quivered to the
sound. But the May-lord--he of the gilded staff--chancing to look into
his lady's eyes, was wonder-struck at the almost pensive glance that
met his own.

"Edith, sweet Lady of the May," whispered he, reproachfully, "is yon
wreath of roses a garland to hang above our graves that you look so
sad? Oh, Edith, this is our golden time. Tarnish it not by any pensive
shadow of the mind, for it may be that nothing of futurity will be
brighter than the mere remembrance of what is now passing."

"That was the very thought that saddened me. How came it in your mind
too?" said Edith, in a still lower tone than he; for it was high
treason to be sad at Merry Mount. "Therefore do I sigh amid this
festive music. And besides, dear Edgar, I struggle as with a dream,
and fancy that these shapes of our jovial friends are visionary and
their mirth unreal, and that we are no true lord and lady of the May.
What is the mystery in my heart?"

Just then, as if a spell had loosened them, down came a little shower
of withering rose-leaves from the Maypole. Alas for the young lovers!
No sooner had their hearts glowed with real passion than they were
sensible of something vague and unsubstantial in their former
pleasures, and felt a dreary presentiment of inevitable change. From
the moment that they truly loved they had subjected themselves to
earth's doom of care and sorrow and troubled joy, and had no more a
home at Merry Mount. That was Edith's mystery. Now leave we the priest
to marry them, and the masquers to sport round the Maypole till the
last sunbeam be withdrawn from its summit and the shadows of the
forest mingle gloomily in the dance. Meanwhile, we may discover who
these gay people were.

Two hundred years ago, and more, the Old World and its inhabitants
became mutually weary of each other. Men voyaged by thousands to the
West--some to barter glass and such like jewels for the furs of the
Indian hunter, some to conquer virgin empires, and one stern band to
pray. But none of these motives had much weight with the colonists of
Merry Mount. Their leaders were men who had sported so long with life,
that when Thought and Wisdom came, even these unwelcome guests were led
astray by the crowd of vanities which they should have put to flight.
Erring Thought and perverted Wisdom were made to put on masques, and
play the fool. The men of whom we speak, after losing the heart's fresh
gayety, imagined a wild philosophy of pleasure, and came hither to act
out their latest day-dream. They gathered followers from all that giddy
tribe whose whole life is like the festal days of soberer men. In their
train were minstrels, not unknown in London streets; wandering players,
whose theatres had been the halls of noblemen; mummers, rope-dancers,
and mountebanks, who would long be missed at wakes, church ales, and
fairs; in a word, mirth makers of every sort, such as abounded in that
age, but now began to be discountenanced by the rapid growth of
Puritanism. Light had their footsteps been on land, and as lightly they
came across the sea. Many had been maddened by their previous troubles
into a gay despair; others were as madly gay in the flush of youth, like
the May Lord and his Lady; but whatever might be the quality of their
mirth, old and young were gay at Merry Mount. The young deemed
themselves happy. The elder spirits, if they knew that mirth was but the
counterfeit of happiness, yet followed the false shadow wilfully,
because at least her garments glittered brightest. Sworn triflers of a
lifetime, they would not venture among the sober truths of life not even
to be truly blest.

All the hereditary pastimes of Old England were transplanted
hither. The King of Christmas was duly crowned, and the Lord of
Misrule bore potent sway. On the Eve of St. John, they felled
whole acres of the forest to make bonfires, and danced by the
blaze all night, crowned with garlands, and throwing flowers into
the flame. At harvest time, though their crop was of the
smallest, they made an image with the sheaves of Indian corn, and
wreathed it with autumnal garlands, and bore it home
triumphantly. But what chiefly characterized the colonists of
Merry Mount was their veneration for the Maypole. It has made
their true history a poet's tale. Spring decked the hallowed
emblem with young blossoms and fresh green boughs; Summer brought
roses of the deepest blush, and the perfected foliage of the
forest; Autumn enriched it with that red and yellow gorgeousness
which converts each wildwood leaf into a painted flower; and
Winter silvered it with sleet, and hung it round with icicles,
till it flashed in the cold sunshine, itself a frozen sunbeam.
Thus each alternate season did homage to the Maypole, and paid it
a tribute of its own richest splendor. Its votaries danced round
it, once, at least, in every month; sometimes they called it
their religion, or their altar; but always, it was the banner
staff of Merry Mount.

Unfortunately, there were men in the new world of a sterner faith
than those Maypole worshippers. Not far from Merry Mount was a
settlement of Puritans, most dismal wretches, who said their
prayers before daylight, and then wrought in the forest or the
cornfield till evening made it prayer time again. Their weapons
were always at hand to shoot down the straggling savage. When
they met in conclave, it was never to keep up the old English
mirth, but to hear sermons three hours long, or to proclaim
bounties on the heads of wolves and the scalps of Indians. Their
festivals were fast days, and their chief pastime the singing of
psalms. Woe to the youth or maiden who did but dream of a dance!
The selectman nodded to the constable; and there sat the
light-heeled reprobate in the stocks; or if he danced, it was
round the whipping-post, which might be termed the Puritan
Maypole.

A party of these grim Puritans, toiling through the difficult
woods, each with a horseload of iron armor to burden his
footsteps, would sometimes draw near the sunny precincts of Merry
Mount. There were the silken colonists, sporting round their
Maypole; perhaps teaching a bear to dance, or striving to
communicate their mirth to the grave Indian, or masquerading in the
skins of deer and wolves which they had hunted for that especial
purpose. Often the whole colony were playing at Blindman's Buff,
magistrates and all with their eyes bandaged, except a single
scapegoat, whom the blinded sinners pursued by the tinkling of the
bells at his garments. Once, it is said, they were seen following a
flower-decked corpse with merriment and festive music to his grave.
But did the dead man laugh? In their quietest times they sang ballads
and told tales for the edification of their pious visitors, or
perplexed them with juggling tricks, or grinned at them through
horse-collars; and when sport itself grew wearisome, they made game of
their own stupidity and began a yawning-match. At the very least of
these enormities the men of iron shook their heads and frowned so
darkly that the revellers looked up, imagining that a momentary cloud
had overcast the sunshine which was to be perpetual there. On the
other hand, the Puritans affirmed that when a psalm was pealing from
their place of worship the echo which the forest sent them back seemed
often like the chorus of a jolly catch, closing with a roar of
laughter. Who but the fiend and his bond-slaves the crew of Merry
Mount had thus disturbed them? In due time a feud arose, stern and
bitter on one side, and as serious on the other as anything could be
among such light spirits as had sworn allegiance to the Maypole. The
future complexion of New England was involved in this important
quarrel. Should the grisly saints establish their jurisdiction over
the gay sinners, then would their spirits darken all the clime and
make it a land of clouded visages, of hard toil, of sermon and psalm
for ever; but should the banner-staff of Merry Mount be fortunate,
sunshine would break upon the hills, and flowers would beautify the
forest and late posterity do homage to the Maypole.

After these authentic passages from history we return to the nuptials
of the Lord and Lady of the May. Alas! we have delayed too long, and
must darken our tale too suddenly. As we glance again at the Maypole a
solitary sunbeam is fading from the summit, and leaves only a faint
golden tinge blended with the hues of the rainbow banner. Even that
dim light is now withdrawn, relinquishing the whole domain of Merry
Mount to the evening gloom which has rushed so instantaneously from
the black surrounding woods. But some of these black shadows have
rushed forth in human shape.

Yes, with the setting sun the last day of mirth had passed from Merry
Mount. The ring of gay masquers was disordered and broken; the stag
lowered his antlers in dismay; the wolf grew weaker than a lamb; the
bells of the morrice-dancers tinkled with tremulous affright. The
Puritans had played a characteristic part in the Maypole mummeries.
Their darksome figures were intermixed with the wild shapes of their
foes, and made the scene a picture of the moment when waking thoughts
start up amid the scattered fantasies of a dream. The leader of the
hostile party stood in the centre of the circle, while the rout of
monsters cowered around him like evil spirits in the presence of a
dread magician. No fantastic foolery could look him in the face. So
stern was the energy of his aspect that the whole man, visage, frame
and soul, seemed wrought of iron gifted with life and thought, yet all
of one substance with his headpiece and breastplate. It was the
Puritan of Puritans: it was Endicott himself.

"Stand off, priest of Baal!" said he, with a grim frown and laying no
reverent hand upon the surplice. "I know thee, Blackstone![1] Thou art
the man who couldst not abide the rule even of thine own corrupted
Church, and hast come hither to preach iniquity and to give example of
it in thy life. But now shall it be seen that the Lord hath sanctified
this wilderness for his peculiar people. Woe unto them that would
defile it! And first for this flower-decked abomination, the altar of
thy worship!"

[Footnote 1: Did Governor Endicott speak less positively, we should
suspect a mistake here. The Rev. Mr. Blackstone, though an eccentric,
is not known to have been an immoral man. We rather doubt his identity
with the priest of Merry Mount.]

And with his keen sword Endicott assaulted the hallowed Maypole. Nor
long did it resist his arm. It groaned with a dismal sound, it
showered leaves and rosebuds upon the remorseless enthusiast, and
finally, with all its green boughs and ribbons and flowers, symbolic
of departed pleasures, down fell the banner-staff of Merry Mount. As
it sank, tradition says, the evening sky grew darker and the woods
threw forth a more sombre shadow.

"There!" cried Endicott, looking triumphantly on his work; "there lies
the only Maypole in New England. The thought is strong within me that
by its fall is shadowed forth the fate of light and idle mirthmakers
amongst us and our posterity. Amen, saith John Endicott!"

"Amen!" echoed his followers.

But the votaries of the Maypole gave one groan for their idol. At the
sound the Puritan leader glanced at the crew of Comus, each a figure
of broad mirth, yet at this moment strangely expressive of sorrow and
dismay.

"Valiant captain," quoth Peter Palfrey, the ancient of the band, "what
order shall be taken with the prisoners?"

"I thought not to repent me of cutting down a Maypole," replied
Endicott, "yet now I could find in my heart to plant it again and give
each of these bestial pagans one other dance round their idol. It
would have served rarely for a whipping-post."

"But there are pine trees enow," suggested the lieutenant.

"True, good ancient," said the leader. "Wherefore bind the heathen
crew and bestow on them a small matter of stripes apiece as earnest of
our future justice. Set some of the rogues in the stocks to rest
themselves so soon as Providence shall bring us to one of our own
well-ordered settlements where such accommodations may be found.
Further penalties, such as branding and cropping of ears, shall be
thought of hereafter."

"How many stripes for the priest?" inquired Ancient Palfrey.

"None as yet," answered Endicott, bending his iron frown upon the
culprit. "It must be for the Great and General Court to determine
whether stripes and long imprisonment, and other grievous penalty, may
atone for his transgressions. Let him look to himself. For such as
violate our civil order it may be permitted us to show mercy, but woe
to the wretch that troubleth our religion!"

"And this dancing bear?" resumed the officer. "Must he share the
stripes of his fellows?"

"Shoot him through the head!" said the energetic Puritan. "I suspect
witchcraft in the beast."

"Here be a couple of shining ones," continued Peter Palfrey, pointing
his weapon at the Lord and Lady of the May. "They seem to be of high
station among these misdoers. Methinks their dignity will not be
fitted with less than a double share of stripes."

Endicott rested on his sword and closely surveyed the dress and aspect
of the hapless pair. There they stood, pale, downcast and
apprehensive, yet there was an air of mutual support and of pure
affection seeking aid and giving it that showed them to be man and
wife with the sanction of a priest upon their love. The youth in the
peril of the moment, had dropped his gilded staff and thrown his arm
about the Lady of the May, who leaned against his breast too lightly
to burden him, but with weight enough to express that their destinies
were linked together for good or evil. They looked first at each other
and then into the grim captain's face. There they stood in the first
hour of wedlock, while the idle pleasures of which their companions
were the emblems had given place to the sternest cares of life,
personified by the dark Puritans. But never had their youthful beauty
seemed so pure and high as when its glow was chastened by adversity.

"Youth," said Endicott, "ye stand in an evil case--thou and thy
maiden-wife. Make ready presently, for I am minded that ye shall both
have a token to remember your wedding-day."

"Stern man," cried the May-lord, "how can I move thee? Were the means
at hand, I would resist to the death; being powerless, I entreat. Do
with me as thou wilt, but let Edith go untouched."

"Not so," replied the immitigable zealot. "We are not wont to show an
idle courtesy to that sex which requireth the stricter discipline.--What
sayest thou, maid? Shall thy silken bridegroom suffer thy share of the
penalty besides his own?"

"Be it death," said Edith, "and lay it all on me."

Truly, as Endicott had said, the poor lovers stood in a woeful case.
Their foes were triumphant, their friends captive and abased, their
home desolate, the benighted wilderness around them, and a rigorous
destiny in the shape of the Puritan leader their only guide. Yet the
deepening twilight could not altogether conceal that the iron man was
softened. He smiled at the fair spectacle of early love; he almost
sighed for the inevitable blight of early hopes.

"The troubles of life have come hastily on this young couple,"
observed Endicott. "We will see how they comport themselves under
their present trials ere we burden them with greater. If among the
spoil there be any garments of a more decent fashion, let them be put
upon this May-lord and his Lady instead of their glistening vanities.
Look to it, some of you."

"And shall not the youth's hair be cut?" asked Peter Palfrey, looking
with abhorrence at the lovelock and long glossy curls of the young
man.

"Crop it forthwith, and that in the true pumpkin-shell fashion,"
answered the captain. "Then bring them along with us, but more gently
than their fellows. There be qualities in the youth which may make him
valiant to fight and sober to toil and pious to pray, and in the
maiden that may fit her to become a mother in our Israel, bringing up
babes in better nurture than her own hath been.--Nor think ye, young
ones, that they are the happiest, even in our lifetime of a moment,
who misspend it in dancing round a Maypole."

And Endicott, the severest Puritan of all who laid the rock-foundation
of New England, lifted the wreath of roses from the ruin of the
Maypole and threw it with his own gauntleted hand over the heads of
the Lord and Lady of the May. It was a deed of prophecy. As the moral
gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gayety, even so was their
home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest. They returned to
it no more. But as their flowery garland was wreathed of the brightest
roses that had grown there, so in the tie that united them were
intertwined all the purest and best of their early joys. They went
heavenward supporting each other along the difficult path which it was
their lot to tread, and never wasted one regretful thought on the
vanities of Merry Mount.




THE GENTLE BOY.


In the course of the year 1656 several of the people called
Quakers--led, as they professed, by the inward movement of the
spirit--made their appearance in New England. Their reputation as
holders of mystic and pernicious principles having spread before them,
the Puritans early endeavored to banish and to prevent the further
intrusion of the rising sect. But the measures by which it was
intended to purge the land of heresy, though more than sufficiently
vigorous, were entirely unsuccessful. The Quakers, esteeming
persecution as a divine call to the post of danger, laid claim to a
holy courage unknown to the Puritans themselves, who had shunned the
cross by providing for the peaceable exercise of their religion in a
distant wilderness. Though it was the singular fact that every nation
of the earth rejected the wandering enthusiasts who practised peace
toward all men, the place of greatest uneasiness and peril, and
therefore in their eyes the most eligible, was the province of
Massachusetts Bay.

The fines, imprisonments and stripes liberally distributed by our
pious forefathers, the popular antipathy, so strong that it endured
nearly a hundred years after actual persecution had ceased, were
attractions as powerful for the Quakers as peace, honor and reward
would have been for the worldly-minded. Every European vessel brought
new cargoes of the sect, eager to testify against the oppression which
they hoped to share; and when shipmasters were restrained by heavy
fines from affording them passage, they made long and circuitous
journeys through the Indian country, and appeared in the province as
if conveyed by a supernatural power. Their enthusiasm, heightened
almost to madness by the treatment which they received, produced
actions contrary to the rules of decency as well as of rational
religion, and presented a singular contrast to the calm and staid
deportment of their sectarian successors of the present day. The
command of the Spirit, inaudible except to the soul and not to be
controverted on grounds of human wisdom, was made a plea for most
indecorous exhibitions which, abstractedly considered, well deserved
the moderate chastisement of the rod. These extravagances, and the
persecution which was at once their cause and consequence, continued
to increase, till in the year 1659 the government of Massachusetts Bay
indulged two members of the Quaker sect with the crown of martyrdom.

An indelible stain of blood is upon the hands of all who consented to
this act, but a large share of the awful responsibility must rest upon
the person then at the head of the government. He was a man of narrow
mind and imperfect education, and his uncompromising bigotry was made
hot and mischievous by violent and hasty passions; he exerted his
influence indecorously and unjustifiably to compass the death of the
enthusiasts, and his whole conduct in respect to them was marked by
brutal cruelty. The Quakers, whose revengeful feelings were not less
deep because they were inactive, remembered this man and his
associates in after-times. The historian of the sect affirms that by
the wrath of Heaven a blight fell upon the land in the vicinity of the
"bloody town" of Boston, so that no wheat would grow there; and he
takes his stand, as it were, among the graves of the ancient
persecutors, and triumphantly recounts the judgments that overtook
them in old age or at the parting-hour. He tells us that they died
suddenly and violently and in madness, but nothing can exceed the
bitter mockery with which he records the loathsome disease and "death
by rottenness" of the fierce and cruel governor.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the evening of the autumn day that had witnessed the martyrdom of
two men of the Quaker persuasion, a Puritan settler was returning from
the metropolis to the neighboring country-town in which he resided.
The air was cool, the sky clear, and the lingering twilight was made
brighter by the rays of a young moon which had now nearly reached the
verge of the horizon. The traveller, a man of middle age, wrapped in a
gray frieze cloak, quickened his pace when he had reached the
outskirts of the town, for a gloomy extent of nearly four miles lay
between him and his home. The low straw-thatched houses were scattered
at considerable intervals along the road, and, the country having been
settled but about thirty years, the tracts of original forest still
bore no small proportion to the cultivated ground. The autumn wind
wandered among the branches, whirling away the leaves from all except
the pine trees and moaning as if it lamented the desolation of which
it was the instrument. The road had penetrated the mass of woods that
lay nearest to the town, and was just emerging into an open space,
when the traveller's ears were saluted by a sound more mournful than
even that of the wind. It was like the wailing of some one in
distress, and it seemed to proceed from beneath a tall and lonely fir
tree in the centre of a cleared but unenclosed and uncultivated field.
The Puritan could not but remember that this was the very spot which
had been made accursed a few hours before by the execution of the
Quakers, whose bodies had been thrown together into one hasty grave
beneath the tree on which they suffered. He struggled, however,
against the superstitious fears which belonged to the age, and
compelled himself to pause and listen.

"The voice is most likely mortal, nor have I cause to tremble if it be
otherwise," thought he, straining his eyes through the dim moonlight.
"Methinks it is like the wailing of a child--some infant, it may be,
which has strayed from its mother and chanced upon this place of
death. For the ease of mine own conscience I must search this matter
out." He therefore left the path and walked somewhat fearfully across
the field. Though now so desolate, its soil was pressed down and
trampled by the thousand footsteps of those who had witnessed the
spectacle of that day, all of whom had now retired, leaving the dead
to their loneliness.

The traveller at length reached the fir tree, which from the middle
upward was covered with living branches, although a scaffold had been
erected beneath, and other preparations made for the work of death.
Under this unhappy tree--which in after-times was believed to drop
poison with its dew--sat the one solitary mourner for innocent blood.
It was a slender and light-clad little boy who leaned his face upon a
hillock of fresh-turned and half-frozen earth and wailed bitterly, yet
in a suppressed tone, as if his grief might receive the punishment of
crime. The Puritan, whose approach had been unperceived, laid his hand
upon the child's shoulder and addressed him compassionately.

"You have chosen a dreary lodging, my poor boy, and no wonder that you
weep," said he. "But dry your eyes and tell me where your mother
dwells; I promise you, if the journey be not too far, I will leave you
in her arms tonight."

The boy had hushed his wailing at once, and turned his face upward to
the stranger. It was a pale, bright-eyed countenance, certainly not
more than six years old, but sorrow, fear and want had destroyed much
of its infantile expression. The Puritan, seeing the boy's frightened
gaze and feeling that he trembled under his hand, endeavored to
reassure him:

"Nay, if I intended to do you harm, little lad, the readiest way were
to leave you here. What! you do not fear to sit beneath the gallows on
a new-made grave, and yet you tremble at a friend's touch? Take heart,
child, and tell me what is your name and where is your home."

"Friend," replied the little boy, in a sweet though faltering voice,
"they call me Ilbrahim, and my home is here."

The pale, spiritual face, the eyes that seemed to mingle with the
moonlight, the sweet, airy voice and the outlandish name almost made
the Puritan believe that the boy was in truth a being which had sprung
up out of the grave on which he sat; but perceiving that the
apparition stood the test of a short mental prayer, and remembering
that the arm which he had touched was lifelike, he adopted a more
rational supposition. "The poor child is stricken in his intellect,"
thought he, "but verily his words are fearful in a place like this."
He then spoke soothingly, intending to humor the boy's fantasy:

"Your home will scarce be comfortable, Ilbrahim, this cold autumn
night, and I fear you are ill-provided with food. I am hastening to a
warm supper and bed; and if you will go with me, you shall share
them."

"I thank thee, friend, but, though I be hungry and shivering with
cold, thou wilt not give me food nor lodging," replied the boy, in the
quiet tone which despair had taught him even so young. "My father was
of the people whom all men hate; they have laid him under this heap of
earth, and here is my home."

The Puritan, who had laid hold of little Ilbrahim's hand, relinquished
it as if he were touching a loathsome reptile. But he possessed a
compassionate heart which not even religious prejudice could harden
into stone. "God forbid that I should leave this child to perish,
though he comes of the accursed sect," said he to himself. "Do we not
all spring from an evil root? Are we not all in darkness till the
light doth shine upon us? He shall not perish, neither in body nor, if
prayer and instruction may avail for him, in soul." He then spoke
aloud and kindly to Ilbrahim, who had again hid his face in the cold
earth of the grave:

"Was every door in the land shut against you, my child, that you have
wandered to this unhallowed spot?"

"They drove me forth from the prison when they took my father thence,"
said the boy, "and I stood afar off watching the crowd of people; and
when they were gone, I came hither, and found only this grave. I knew
that my father was sleeping here, and I said, 'This shall be my
home.'"

"No, child, no, not while I have a roof over my head or a morsel to
share with you," exclaimed the Puritan, whose sympathies were now
fully excited. "Rise up and come with me, and fear not any harm."

The boy wept afresh, and clung to the heap of earth as if the cold
heart beneath it were warmer to him than any in a living breast. The
traveller, however, continued to entreat him tenderly, and, seeming to
acquire some degree of confidence, he at length arose; but his slender
limbs tottered with weakness, his little head grew dizzy, and he
leaned against the tree of death for support.

"My poor boy, are you so feeble?" said the Puritan. "When did you
taste food last?"

"I ate of bread and water with my father in the prison," replied
Ilbrahim, "but they brought him none neither yesterday nor to-day,
saying that he had eaten enough to bear him to his journey's end.
Trouble not thyself for my hunger, kind friend, for I have lacked food
many times ere now."

The traveller took the child in his arms and wrapped his cloak about
him, while his heart stirred with shame and anger against the
gratuitous cruelty of the instruments in this persecution. In the
awakened warmth of his feelings he resolved that at whatever risk he
would not forsake the poor little defenceless being whom Heaven had
confided to his care. With this determination he left the accursed
field and resumed the homeward path from which the wailing of the boy
had called him. The light and motionless burden scarcely impeded his
progress, and he soon beheld the fire-rays from the windows of the
cottage which he, a native of a distant clime, had built in the
Western wilderness. It was surrounded by a considerable extent of
cultivated ground, and the dwelling was situated in the nook of a
wood-covered hill, whither it seemed to have crept for protection.

"Look up, child," said the Puritan to Ilbrahim, whose faint head had
sunk upon his shoulder; "there is our home."

At the word "home" a thrill passed through the child's frame, but he
continued silent. A few moments brought them to the cottage door, at
which the owner knocked; for at that early period, when savages were
wandering everywhere among the settlers, bolt and bar were
indispensable to the security of a dwelling. The summons was answered
by a bond-servant, a coarse-clad and dull-featured piece of humanity,
who, after ascertaining that his master was the applicant, undid the
door and held a flaring pine-knot torch to light him in. Farther back
in the passageway the red blaze discovered a matronly woman, but no
little crowd of children came bounding forth to greet their father's
return.

As the Puritan entered he thrust aside his cloak and displayed
Ilbrahim's face to the female.

"Dorothy, here is a little outcast whom Providence hath put into our
hands," observed he. "Be kind to him, even as if he were of those dear
ones who have departed from us."

"What pale and bright-eyed little boy is this, Tobias?" she inquired.
"Is he one whom the wilderness-folk have ravished from some Christian
mother?"

"No, Dorothy; this poor child is no captive from the wilderness," he
replied. "The heathen savage would have given him to eat of his scanty
morsel and to drink of his birchen cup, but Christian men, alas! had
cast him out to die." Then he told her how he had found him beneath
the gallows, upon his father's grave, and how his heart had prompted
him like the speaking of an inward voice to take the little outcast
home and be kind unto him. He acknowledged his resolution to feed and
clothe him as if he were his own child, and to afford him the
instruction which should counteract the pernicious errors hitherto
instilled into his infant mind.

Dorothy was gifted with even a quicker tenderness than her husband,
and she approved of all his doings and intentions.

"Have you a mother, dear child?" she inquired.

The tears burst forth from his full heart as he attempted to reply,
but Dorothy at length understood that he had a mother, who like the
rest of her sect was a persecuted wanderer. She had been taken from
the prison a short time before, carried into the uninhabited
wilderness and left to perish there by hunger or wild beasts. This was
no uncommon method of disposing of the Quakers, and they were
accustomed to boast that the inhabitants of the desert were more
hospitable to them than civilized man.

"Fear not, little boy; you shall not need a mother, and a kind one,"
said Dorothy, when she had gathered this information. "Dry your tears,
Ilbrahim, and be my child, as I will be your mother."

The good woman prepared the little bed from which her own children had
successively been borne to another resting-place. Before Ilbrahim
would consent to occupy it he knelt down, and as Dorothy listed to his
simple and affecting prayer she marvelled how the parents that had
taught it to him could have been judged worthy of death. When the boy
had fallen asleep, she bent over his pale and spiritual countenance,
pressed a kiss upon his white brow, drew the bedclothes up about his
neck, and went away with a pensive gladness in her heart.

Tobias Pearson was not among the earliest emigrants from the old
country. He had remained in England during the first years of the
Civil War, in which he had borne some share as a cornet of dragoons
under Cromwell. But when the ambitious designs of his leader began to
develop themselves, he quitted the army of the Parliament and sought a
refuge from the strife which was no longer holy among the people of
his persuasion in the colony of Massachusetts. A more worldly
consideration had perhaps an influence in drawing him thither, for New
England offered advantages to men of unprosperous fortunes as well as
to dissatisfied religionists, and Pearson had hitherto found it
difficult to provide for a wife and increasing family. To this
supposed impurity of motive the more bigoted Puritans were inclined to
impute the removal by death of all the children for whose earthly good
the father had been over-thoughtful. They had left their native
country blooming like roses, and like roses they had perished in a
foreign soil. Those expounders of the ways of Providence, who had thus
judged their brother and attributed his domestic sorrows to his sin,
were not more charitable when they saw him and Dorothy endeavoring to
fill up the void in their hearts by the adoption of an infant of the
accursed sect. Nor did they fail to communicate their disapprobation
to Tobias, but the latter in reply merely pointed at the little quiet,
lovely boy, whose appearance and deportment were indeed as powerful
arguments as could possibly have been adduced in his own favor. Even
his beauty, however, and his winning manners sometimes produced an
effect ultimately unfavorable; for the bigots, when the outer surfaces
of their iron hearts had been softened and again grew hard, affirmed
that no merely natural cause could have so worked upon them. Their
antipathy to the poor infant was also increased by the ill-success of
divers theological discussions in which it was attempted to convince
him of the errors of his sect. Ilbrahim, it is true, was not a skilful
controversialist, but the feeling of his religion was strong as
instinct in him, and he could neither be enticed nor driven from the
faith which his father had died for.

The odium of this stubbornness was shared in a great measure by the
child's protectors, insomuch that Tobias and Dorothy very shortly
began to experience a most bitter species of persecution in the cold
regards of many a friend whom they had valued. The common people
manifested their opinions more openly. Pearson was a man of some
consideration, being a representative to the General Court and an
approved lieutenant in the train-bands, yet within a week after his
adoption of Ilbrahim he had been both hissed and hooted. Once, also,
when walking through a solitary piece of woods, he heard a loud voice
from some invisible speaker, and it cried, "What shall be done to the
backslider? Lo! the scourge is knotted for him, even the whip of nine
cords, and every cord three knots." These insults irritated Pearson's
temper for the moment; they entered also into his heart, and became
imperceptible but powerful workers toward an end which his most secret
thought had not yet whispered.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the second Sabbath after Ilbrahim became a member of their family,
Pearson and his wife deemed it proper that he should appear with them
at public worship. They had anticipated some opposition to this
measure from the boy, but he prepared himself in silence, and at the
appointed hour was clad in the new mourning-suit which Dorothy had
wrought for him. As the parish was then, and during many subsequent
years, unprovided with a bell, the signal for the commencement of
religious exercises was the beat of a drum. At the first sound of that
martial call to the place of holy and quiet thoughts Tobias and
Dorothy set forth, each holding a hand of little Ilbrahim, like two
parents linked together by the infant of their love. On their path
through the leafless woods they were overtaken by many persons of
their acquaintance, all of whom avoided them and passed by on the
other side; but a severer trial awaited their constancy when they had
descended the hill and drew near the pine-built and undecorated house
of prayer. Around the door, from which the drummer still sent forth
his thundering summons, was drawn up a formidable phalanx, including
several of the oldest members of the congregation, many of the
middle-aged and nearly all the younger males. Pearson found it
difficult to sustain their united and disapproving gaze, but Dorothy,
whose mind was differently circumstanced, merely drew the boy closer
to her and faltered not in her approach. As they entered the door they
overheard the muttered sentiments of the assemblage; and when the
reviling voices of the little children smote Ilbrahim's ear, he wept.

The interior aspect of the meeting-house was rude. The low ceiling,
the unplastered walls, the naked woodwork and the undraperied pulpit
offered nothing to excite the devotion which without such external
aids often remains latent in the heart. The floor of the building was
occupied by rows of long cushionless benches, supplying the place of
pews, and the broad aisle formed a sexual division impassable except
by children beneath a certain age.

Pearson and Dorothy separated at the door of the meeting-house, and
Ilbrahim, being within the years of infancy, was retained under the
care of the latter. The wrinkled beldams involved themselves in their
rusty cloaks as he passed by; even the mild-featured maidens seemed to
dread contamination; and many a stern old man arose and turned his
repulsive and unheavenly countenance upon the gentle boy, as if the
sanctuary were polluted by his presence. He was a sweet infant of the
skies that had strayed away from his home, and all the inhabitants of
this miserable world closed up their impure hearts against him, drew
back their earth-soiled garments from his touch and said, "We are
holier than thou."

Ilbrahim, seated by the side of his adopted mother and retaining fast
hold of her hand, assumed a grave and decorous demeanor such as might
befit a person of matured taste and understanding who should find
himself in a temple dedicated to some worship which he did not
recognize, but felt himself bound to respect. The exercises had not
yet commenced, however, when the boy's attention was arrested by an
event apparently of trifling interest. A woman having her face muffled
in a hood and a cloak drawn completely about her form advanced slowly
up the broad aisle and took place upon the foremost bench. Ilbrahim's
faint color varied, his nerves fluttered; he was unable to turn his
eyes from the muffled female.

When the preliminary prayer and hymn were over, the minister arose,
and, having turned the hour-glass which stood by the great Bible,
commenced his discourse. He was now well stricken in years, a man of
pale, thin countenance, and his gray hairs were closely covered by a
black velvet skull-cap. In his younger days he had practically learned
the meaning of persecution from Archbishop Laud, and he was not now
disposed to forget the lesson against which he had murmured then.
Introducing the often-discussed subject of the Quakers, he gave a
history of that sect and a description of their tenets in which error
predominated and prejudice distorted the aspect of what was true. He
adverted to the recent measures in the province, and cautioned his
hearers of weaker parts against calling in question the just severity
which God-fearing magistrates had at length been compelled to
exercise. He spoke of the danger of pity--in some cases a commendable
and Christian virtue, but inapplicable to this pernicious sect. He
observed that such was their devilish obstinacy in error that even the
little children, the sucking babes, were hardened and desperate
heretics. He affirmed that no man without Heaven's especial warrant
should attempt their conversion lest while he lent his hand to draw
them from the slough he should himself be precipitated into its lowest
depths.

The sands of the second hour were principally in the lower half of the
glass when the sermon concluded. An approving murmur followed, and the
clergyman, having given out a hymn, took his seat with much
self-congratulation, and endeavored to read the effect of his
eloquence in the visages of the people. But while voices from all
parts of the house were tuning themselves to sing a scene occurred
which, though not very unusual at that period in the province,
happened to be without precedent in this parish.

The muffled female, who had hitherto sat motionless in the front rank
of the audience, now arose and with slow, stately and unwavering step
ascended the pulpit stairs. The quaverings of incipient harmony were
hushed and the divine sat in speechless and almost terrified
astonishment while she undid the door and stood up in the sacred desk
from which his maledictions had just been thundered. She then divested
herself of the cloak and hood, and appeared in a most singular array.
A shapeless robe of sackcloth was girded about her waist with a
knotted cord; her raven hair fell down upon her shoulders, and its
blackness was defiled by pale streaks of ashes, which she had strewn
upon her head. Her eyebrows, dark and strongly defined, added to the
deathly whiteness of a countenance which, emaciated with want and wild
with enthusiasm and strange sorrows, retained no trace of earlier
beauty. This figure stood gazing earnestly on the audience, and there
was no sound nor any movement except a faint shuddering which every
man observed in his neighbor, but was scarcely conscious of in
himself. At length, when her fit of inspiration came, she spoke for
the first few moments in a low voice and not invariably distinct
utterance. Her discourse gave evidence of an imagination hopelessly
entangled with her reason; it was a vague and incomprehensible
rhapsody, which, however, seemed to spread its own atmosphere round
the hearer's soul, and to move his feelings by some influence
unconnected with the words. As she proceeded beautiful but shadowy
images would sometimes be seen like bright things moving in a turbid
river, or a strong and singularly shaped idea leapt forth and seized
at once on the understanding or the heart. But the course of her
unearthly eloquence soon led her to the persecutions of her sect, and
from thence the step was short to her own peculiar sorrows. She was
naturally a woman of mighty passions, and hatred and revenge now
wrapped themselves in the garb of piety. The character of her speech
was changed; her images became distinct though wild, and her
denunciations had an almost hellish bitterness.

"The governor and his mighty men," she said, "have gathered together,
taking counsel among themselves and saying, 'What shall we do unto
this people--even unto the people that have come into this land to put
our iniquity to the blush?' And, lo! the devil entereth into the
council-chamber like a lame man of low stature and gravely apparelled,
with a dark and twisted countenance and a bright, downcast eye. And he
standeth up among the rulers; yea, he goeth to and fro, whispering to
each; and every man lends his ear, for his word is 'Slay! Slay!' But I
say unto ye, Woe to them that slay! Woe to them that shed the blood of
saints! Woe to them that have slain the husband and cast forth the
child, the tender infant, to wander homeless and hungry and cold till
he die, and have saved the mother alive in the cruelty of their tender
mercies! Woe to them in their lifetime! Cursed are they in the delight
and pleasure of their hearts! Woe to them in their death-hour, whether
it come swiftly with blood and violence or after long and lingering
pain! Woe in the dark house, in the rottenness of the grave, when the
children's children shall revile the ashes of the fathers! Woe, woe,
woe, at the judgment, when all the persecuted and all the slain in
this bloody land, and the father, the mother and the child, shall
await them in a day that they cannot escape! Seed of the faith, seed
of the faith, ye whose hearts are moving with a power that ye know
not, arise, wash your hands of this innocent blood! Lift your voices,
chosen ones, cry aloud, and call down a woe and a judgment with me!"

Having thus given vent to the flood of malignity which she mistook for
inspiration, the speaker was silent. Her voice was succeeded by the
hysteric shrieks of several women, but the feelings of the audience
generally had not been drawn onward in the current with her own. They
remained stupefied, stranded, as it were, in the midst of a torrent
which deafened them by its roaring, but might not move them by its
violence. The clergyman, who could not hitherto have ejected the
usurper of his pulpit otherwise than by bodily force, now addressed
her in the tone of just indignation and legitimate authority.

"Get you down, woman, from the holy place which you profane," he said,
"Is it to the Lord's house that you come to pour forth the foulness of
your heart and the inspiration of the devil? Get you down, and
remember that the sentence of death is on you--yea, and shall be
executed, were it but for this day's work."

"I go, friend, I go, for the voice hath had its utterance," replied
she, in a depressed, and even mild, tone. "I have done my mission unto
thee and to thy people; reward me with stripes, imprisonment or death,
as ye shall be permitted." The weakness of exhausted passion caused
her steps to totter as she descended the pulpit stairs.

The people, in the mean while, were stirring to and fro on the floor
of the house, whispering among themselves and glancing toward the
intruder. Many of them now recognized her as the woman who had
assaulted the governor with frightful language as he passed by the
window of her prison; they knew, also, that she was adjudged to suffer
death, and had been preserved only by an involuntary banishment into
the wilderness. The new outrage by which she had provoked her fate
seemed to render further lenity impossible, and a gentleman in
military dress, with a stout man of inferior rank, drew toward the
door of the meetinghouse and awaited her approach. Scarcely did her
feet press the floor, however, when an unexpected scene occurred. In
that moment of her peril, when every eye frowned with death, a little
timid boy threw his arms round his mother.

"I am here, mother; it is I, and I will go with thee to prison," he
exclaimed.

She gazed at him with a doubtful and almost frightened expression, for
she knew that the boy had been cast out to perish, and she had not
hoped to see his face again. She feared, perhaps, that it was but one
of the happy visions with which her excited fancy had often deceived
her in the solitude of the desert or in prison; but when she felt his
hand warm within her own and heard his little eloquence of childish
love, she began to know that she was yet a mother.

"Blessed art thou, my son!" she sobbed. "My heart was withered--yea,
dead with thee and with thy father--and now it leaps as in the first
moment when I pressed thee to my bosom."

She knelt down and embraced him again and again, while the joy that
could find no words expressed itself in broken accents, like the
bubbles gushing up to vanish at the surface of a deep fountain. The
sorrows of past years and the darker peril that was nigh cast not a
shadow on the brightness of that fleeting moment. Soon, however, the
spectators saw a change upon her face as the consciousness of her sad
estate returned, and grief supplied the fount of tears which joy had
opened. By the words she uttered it would seem that the indulgence of
natural love had given her mind a momentary sense of its errors, and
made her know how far she had strayed from duty in following the
dictates of a wild fanaticism.

"In a doleful hour art thou returned to me, poor boy," she said, "for
thy mother's path has gone darkening onward, till now the end is
death. Son, son, I have borne thee in my arms when my limbs were
tottering, and I have fed thee with the food that I was fainting for;
yet I have ill-performed a mother's part by thee in life, and now I
leave thee no inheritance but woe and shame. Thou wilt go seeking
through the world, and find all hearts closed against thee and their
sweet affections turned to bitterness for my sake. My child, my child,
how many a pang awaits thy gentle spirit, and I the cause of all!"

She hid her face on Ilbrahim's head, and her long raven hair,
discolored with the ashes of her mourning, fell down about him like a
veil. A low and interrupted moan was the voice of her heart's anguish,
and it did not fail to move the sympathies of many who mistook their
involuntary virtue for a sin. Sobs were audible in the female section
of the house, and every man who was a father drew his hand across his
eyes.

Tobias Pearson was agitated and uneasy, but a certain feeling like the
consciousness of guilt oppressed him; so that he could not go forth
and offer himself as the protector of the child. Dorothy, however, had
watched her husband's eye. Her mind was free from the influence that
had begun to work on his, and she drew near the Quaker woman and
addressed her in the hearing of all the congregation.

"Stranger, trust this boy to me, and I will be his mother," she said,
taking Ilbrahim's hand. "Providence has signally marked out my husband
to protect him, and he has fed at our table and lodged under our roof
now many days, till our hearts have grown very strongly unto him.
Leave the tender child with us, and be at ease concerning his
welfare."

The Quaker rose from the ground, but drew the boy closer to her, while
she gazed earnestly in Dorothy's face. Her mild but saddened features
and neat matronly attire harmonized together and were like a verse of
fireside poetry. Her very aspect proved that she was blameless, so far
as mortal could be so, in respect to God and man, while the
enthusiast, in her robe of sackcloth and girdle of knotted cord, had
as evidently violated the duties of the present life and the future by
fixing her attention wholly on the latter. The two females, as they
held each a hand of Ilbrahim, formed a practical allegory: it was
rational piety and unbridled fanaticism contending for the empire of a
young heart.

"Thou art not of our people," said the Quaker, mournfully.

"No, we are not of your people," replied Dorothy, with mildness, "but
we are Christians looking upward to the same heaven with you. Doubt
not that your boy shall meet you there, if there be a blessing on our
tender and prayerful guidance of him. Thither, I trust, my own
children have gone before me, for I also have been a mother. I am no
longer so," she added, in a faltering tone, "and your son will have
all my care."

"But will ye lead him in the path which his parents have trodden?"
demanded the Quaker. "Can ye teach him the enlightened faith which his
father has died for, and for which I--even I--am soon to become an
unworthy martyr? The boy has been baptized in blood; will ye keep the
mark fresh and ruddy upon his forehead?"

"I will not deceive you," answered Dorothy. "If your child become our
child, we must breed him up in the instruction which Heaven has
imparted to us; we must pray for him the prayers of our own faith; we
must do toward him according to the dictates of our own consciences,
and not of yours. Were we to act otherwise, we should abuse your
trust, even in complying with your wishes."

The mother looked down upon her boy with a troubled countenance, and
then turned her eyes upward to heaven. She seemed to pray internally,
and the contention of her soul was evident.

"Friend," she said, at length, to Dorothy, "I doubt not that my son
shall receive all earthly tenderness at thy hands. Nay, I will believe
that even thy imperfect lights may guide him to a better world, for
surely thou art on the path thither. But thou hast spoken of a
husband. Doth he stand here among this multitude of people? Let him
come forth, for I must know to whom I commit this most precious
trust."

She turned her face upon the male auditors, and after a momentary
delay Tobias Pearson came forth from among them. The Quaker saw the
dress which marked his military rank, and shook her head; but then she
noted the hesitating air, the eyes that struggled with her own and
were vanquished, the color that went and came and could find no
resting-place. As she gazed an unmirthful smile spread over her
features, like sunshine that grows melancholy in some desolate spot.
Her lips moved inaudibly, but at length she spake:

"I hear it, I hear it! The voice speaketh within me and saith, 'Leave
thy child, Catharine, for his place is here, and go hence, for I have
other work for thee. Break the bonds of natural affection, martyr thy
love, and know that in all these things eternal wisdom hath its ends.'
I go, friends, I go. Take ye my boy, my precious jewel. I go hence
trusting that all shall be well, and that even for his infant hands
there is a labor in the vineyard."

She knelt down and whispered to Ilbrahim, who at first struggled and
clung to his mother with sobs and tears, but remained passive when she
had kissed his cheek and arisen from the ground. Having held her hands
over his head in mental prayer, she was ready to depart.

"Farewell, friends in mine extremity," she said to Pearson and his
wife; "the good deed ye have done me is a treasure laid up in heaven,
to be returned a thousandfold hereafter.--And farewell, ye mine
enemies, to whom it is not permitted to harm so much as a hair of my
head, nor to stay my footsteps even for a moment. The day is coming
when ye shall call upon me to witness for ye to this one sin
uncommitted, and I will rise up and answer."

She turned her steps toward the door, and the men who had stationed
themselves to guard it withdrew and suffered her to pass. A general
sentiment of pity overcame the virulence of religious hatred.
Sanctified by her love and her affliction, she went forth, and all the
people gazed after her till she had journeyed up the hill and was lost
behind its brow. She went, the apostle of her own unquiet heart, to
renew the wanderings of past years. For her voice had been already
heard in many lands of Christendom, and she had pined in the cells of
a Catholic Inquisition before she felt the lash and lay in the
dungeons of the Puritans. Her mission had extended also to the
followers of the Prophet, and from them she had received the courtesy
and kindness which all the contending sects of our purer religion
united to deny her. Her husband and herself had resided many months in
Turkey, where even the sultan's countenance was gracious to them; in
that pagan land, too, was Ilbrahim's birthplace, and his Oriental name
was a mark of gratitude for the good deeds of an unbeliever.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Pearson and his wife had thus acquired all the rights over
Ilbrahim that could be delegated, their affection for him became, like
the memory of their native land or their mild sorrow for the dead, a
piece of the immovable furniture of their hearts. The boy, also, after
a week or two of mental disquiet, began to gratify his protectors by
many inadvertent proofs that he considered them as parents and their
house as home. Before the winter snows were melted the persecuted
infant, the little wanderer from a remote and heathen country, seemed
native in the New England cottage and inseparable from the warmth and
security of its hearth. Under the influence of kind treatment, and in
the consciousness that he was loved, Ilbrahim's demeanor lost a
premature manliness which had resulted from his earlier situation; he
became more childlike and his natural character displayed itself with
freedom. It was in many respects a beautiful one, yet the disordered
imaginations of both his father and mother had perhaps propagated a
certain unhealthiness in the mind of the boy. In his general state
Ilbrahim would derive enjoyment from the most trifling events and from
every object about him; he seemed to discover rich treasures of
happiness by a faculty analogous to that of the witch-hazel, which
points to hidden gold where all is barren to the eye. His airy gayety,
coming to him from a thousand sources, communicated itself to the
family, and Ilbrahim was like a domesticated sunbeam, brightening
moody countenances and chasing away the gloom from the dark corners of
the cottage.

On the other hand, as the susceptibility of pleasure is also that of
pain, the exuberant cheerfulness of the boy's prevailing temper
sometimes yielded to moments of deep depression. His sorrows could not
always be followed up to their original source, but most frequently
they appeared to flow--though Ilbrahim was young to be sad for such a
cause--from wounded love. The flightiness of his mirth rendered him
often guilty of offences against the decorum of a Puritan household,
and on these occasions he did not invariably escape rebuke. But the
slightest word of real bitterness, which he was infallible in
distinguishing from pretended anger, seemed to sink into his heart and
poison all his enjoyments till he became sensible that he was entirely
forgiven. Of the malice which generally accompanies a superfluity of
sensitiveness Ilbrahim was altogether destitute. When trodden upon, he
would not turn; when wounded, he could but die. His mind was wanting
in the stamina of self-support. It was a plant that would twine
beautifully round something stronger than itself; but if repulsed or
torn away, it had no choice but to wither on the ground. Dorothy's
acuteness taught her that severity would crush the spirit of the
child, and she nurtured him with the gentle care of one who handles a
butterfly. Her husband manifested an equal affection, although it grew
daily less productive of familiar caresses.

The feelings of the neighboring people in regard to the Quaker infant
and his protectors had not undergone a favorable change, in spite of
the momentary triumph which the desolate mother had obtained over
their sympathies. The scorn and bitterness of which he was the object
were very grievous to Ilbrahim, especially when any circumstance made
him sensible that the children his equals in age partook of the enmity
of their parents. His tender and social nature had already overflowed
in attachments to everything about him, and still there was a residue
of unappropriated love which he yearned to bestow upon the little ones
who were taught to hate him. As the warm days of spring came on
Ilbrahim was accustomed to remain for hours silent and inactive within
hearing of the children's voices at their play, yet with his usual
delicacy of feeling he avoided their notice, and would flee and hide
himself from the smallest individual among them. Chance, however, at
length seemed to open a medium of communication between his heart and
theirs; it was by means of a boy about two years older than Ilbrahim,
who was injured by a fall from a tree in the vicinity of Pearson's
habitation. As the sufferer's own home was at some distance, Dorothy
willingly received him under her roof and became his tender and
careful nurse.

Ilbrahim was the unconscious possessor of much skill in physiognomy,
and it would have deterred him in other circumstances from attempting
to make a friend of this boy. The countenance of the latter
immediately impressed a beholder disagreeably, but it required some
examination to discover that the cause was a very slight distortion of
the mouth and the irregular, broken line and near approach of the
eyebrows. Analogous, perhaps, to these trifling deformities was an
almost imperceptible twist of every joint and the uneven prominence of
the breast, forming a body regular in its general outline, but faulty
in almost all its details. The disposition of the boy was sullen and
reserved, and the village schoolmaster stigmatized him as obtuse in
intellect, although at a later period of life he evinced ambition and
very peculiar talents. But, whatever might be his personal or moral
irregularities, Ilbrahim's heart seized upon and clung to him from the
moment that he was brought wounded into the cottage; the child of
persecution seemed to compare his own fate with that of the sufferer,
and to feel that even different modes of misfortune had created a sort
of relationship between them. Food, rest and the fresh air for which
he languished were neglected; he nestled continually by the bedside of
the little stranger and with a fond jealousy endeavored to be the
medium of all the cares that were bestowed upon him. As the boy became
convalescent Ilbrahim contrived games suitable to his situation or
amused him by a faculty which he had perhaps breathed in with the air
of his barbaric birthplace. It was that of reciting imaginary
adventures on the spur of the moment, and apparently in inexhaustible
succession. His tales were, of course, monstrous, disjointed and
without aim, but they were curious on account of a vein of human
tenderness which ran through them all and was like a sweet familiar
face encountered in the midst of wild and unearthly scenery. The
auditor paid much attention to these romances and sometimes
interrupted them by brief remarks upon the incidents, displaying
shrewdness above his years, mingled with a moral obliquity which
grated very harshly against Ilbrahim's instinctive rectitude. Nothing,
however, could arrest the progress of the latter's affection, and
there were many proofs that it met with a response from the dark and
stubborn nature on which it was lavished. The boy's parents at length
removed him to complete his cure under their own roof.

Ilbrahim did not visit his new friend after his departure, but he made
anxious and continual inquiries respecting him and informed himself of
the day when he was to reappear among his playmates. On a pleasant
summer afternoon the children of the neighborhood had assembled in the
little forest-crowned amphitheatre behind the meeting-house, and the
recovering invalid was there, leaning on a staff. The glee of a score
of untainted bosoms was heard in light and airy voices, which danced
among the trees like sunshine become audible; the grown men of this
weary world as they journeyed by the spot marvelled why life,
beginning in such brightness, should proceed in gloom, and their
hearts or their imaginations answered them and said that the bliss of
childhood gushes from its innocence. But it happened that an
unexpected addition was made to the heavenly little band. It was
Ilbrahim, who came toward the children with a look of sweet confidence
on his fair and spiritual face, as if, having manifested his love to
one of them, he had no longer to fear a repulse from their society. A
hush came over their mirth the moment they beheld him, and they stood
whispering to each other while he drew nigh; but all at once the devil
of their fathers entered into the unbreeched fanatics, and, sending up
a fierce, shrill cry, they rushed upon the poor Quaker child. In an
instant he was the centre of a brood of baby-fiends, who lifted sticks
against him, pelted him with stones and displayed an instinct of
destruction far more loathsome than the bloodthirstiness of manhood.

The invalid, in the mean while, stood apart from the tumult, crying
out with a loud voice, "Fear not, Ilbrahim; come hither and take my
hand," and his unhappy friend endeavored to obey him. After watching
the victim's struggling approach with a calm smile and unabashed eye,
the foul-hearted little villain lifted his staff and struck Ilbrahim
on the mouth so forcibly that the blood issued in a stream. The poor
child's arms had been raised to guard his head from the storm of
blows, but now he dropped them at once. His persecutors beat him down,
trampled upon him, dragged him by his long fair locks, and Ilbrahim
was on the point of becoming as veritable a martyr as ever entered
bleeding into heaven. The uproar, however, attracted the notice of a
few neighbors, who put themselves to the trouble of rescuing the
little heretic, and of conveying him to Pearson's door.

Ilbrahim's bodily harm was severe, but long and careful nursing
accomplished his recovery; the injury done to his sensitive spirit was
more serious, though not so visible. Its signs were principally of a
negative character, and to be discovered only by those who had
previously known him. His gait was thenceforth slow, even and unvaried
by the sudden bursts of sprightlier motion which had once corresponded
to his overflowing gladness; his countenance was heavier, and its
former play of expression--the dance of sunshine reflected from moving
water--was destroyed by the cloud over his existence; his notice was
attracted in a far less degree by passing events, and he appeared to
find greater difficulty in comprehending what was new to him than at a
happier period. A stranger founding his judgment upon these
circumstances would have said that the dulness of the child's
intellect widely contradicted the promise of his features, but the
secret was in the direction of Ilbrahim's thoughts, which were
brooding within him when they should naturally have been wandering
abroad. An attempt of Dorothy to revive his former sportiveness was
the single occasion on which his quiet demeanor yielded to a violent
display of grief; he burst into passionate weeping and ran and hid
himself, for his heart had become so miserably sore that even the hand
of kindness tortured it like fire. Sometimes at night, and probably in
his dreams, he was heard to cry, "Mother! Mother!" as if her place,
which a stranger had supplied while Ilbrahim was happy, admitted of no
substitute in his extreme affliction. Perhaps among the many
life-weary wretches then upon the earth there was not one who combined
innocence and misery like this poor broken-hearted infant so soon the
victim of his own heavenly nature.

While this melancholy change had taken place in Ilbrahim, one of an
earlier origin and of different character had come to its perfection
in his adopted father. The incident with which this tale commences
found Pearson in a state of religious dulness, yet mentally disquieted
and longing for a more fervid faith than he possessed. The first
effect of his kindness to Ilbrahim was to produce a softened feeling,
an incipient love for the child's whole sect, but joined to this, and
resulting, perhaps, from self-suspicion, was a proud and ostentatious
contempt of their tenets and practical extravagances. In the course of
much thought, however--for the subject struggled irresistibly into his
mind--the foolishness of the doctrine began to be less evident, and
the points which had particularly offended his reason assumed another
aspect or vanished entirely away. The work within him appeared to go
on even while he slept, and that which had been a doubt when he laid
down to rest would often hold the place of a truth confirmed by some
forgotten demonstration when he recalled his thoughts in the morning.
But, while he was thus becoming assimilated to the enthusiasts, his
contempt, in nowise decreasing toward them, grew very fierce against
himself; he imagined, also, that every face of his acquaintance wore a
sneer, and that every word addressed to him was a gibe. Such was his
state of mind at the period of Ilbrahim's misfortune, and the emotions
consequent upon that event completed the change of which the child had
been the original instrument.

In the mean time, neither the fierceness of the persecutors nor the
infatuation of their victims had decreased. The dungeons were never
empty; the streets of almost every village echoed daily with the lash;
the life of a woman whose mild and Christian spirit no cruelty could
embitter had been sacrificed, and more innocent blood was yet to
pollute the hands that were so often raised in prayer. Early after the
Restoration the English Quakers represented to Charles II. that a
"vein of blood was open in his dominions," but, though the displeasure
of the voluptuous king was roused, his interference was not prompt.
And now the tale must stride forward over many months, leaving Pearson
to encounter ignominy and misfortune; his wife, to a firm endurance of
a thousand sorrows; poor Ilbrahim, to pine and droop like a cankered
rose-bud; his mother, to wander on a mistaken errand, neglectful of
the holiest trust which can be committed to a woman.

       *       *       *       *       *

A winter evening, a night of storm, had darkened over Pearson's
habitation, and there were no cheerful faces to drive the gloom from
his broad hearth. The fire, it is true, sent forth a glowing heat and
a ruddy light, and large logs dripping with half-melted snow lay ready
to cast upon the embers. But the apartment was saddened in its aspect
by the absence of much of the homely wealth which had once adorned it,
for the exaction of repeated fines and his own neglect of temporal
affairs had greatly impoverished the owner. And with the furniture of
peace the implements of war had likewise disappeared; the sword was
broken, the helm and cuirass were cast away for ever: the soldier had
done with battles, and might not lift so much as his naked hand to
guard his head. But the Holy Book remained, and the table on which it
rested was drawn before the fire, while two of the persecuted sect
sought comfort from its pages.

He who listened while the other read was the master of the house, now
emaciated in form and altered as to the expression and healthiness of
his countenance, for his mind had dwelt too long among visionary
thoughts and his body had been worn by imprisonment and stripes. The
hale and weatherbeaten old man who sat beside him had sustained less
injury from a far longer course of the same mode of life. In person he
was tall and dignified, and, which alone would have made him hateful
to the Puritans, his gray locks fell from beneath the broad-brimmed
hat and rested on his shoulders. As the old man read the sacred page
the snow drifted against the windows or eddied in at the crevices of
the door, while a blast kept laughing in the chimney and the blaze
leaped fiercely up to seek it. And sometimes, when the wind struck the
hill at a certain angle and swept down by the cottage across the
wintry plain, its voice was the most doleful that can be conceived; it
came as if the past were speaking, as if the dead had contributed each
a whisper, as if the desolation of ages were breathed in that one
lamenting sound.

The Quaker at length closed the book, retaining, however, his hand
between the pages which he had been reading, while he looked
steadfastly at Pearson. The attitude and features of the latter might
have indicated the endurance of bodily pain; he leaned his forehead on
his hands, his teeth were firmly closed and his frame was tremulous at
intervals with a nervous agitation.

"Friend Tobias," inquired the old man, compassionately, "hast thou
found no comfort in these many blessed passages of Scripture?"

"Thy voice has fallen on my ear like a sound afar off and indistinct,"
replied Pearson, without lifting his eyes. "Yea; and when I have
hearkened carefully, the words seemed cold and lifeless and intended
for another and a lesser grief than mine. Remove the book," he added,
in a tone of sullen bitterness; "I have no part in its consolations,
and they do but fret my sorrow the more."

"Nay, feeble brother; be not as one who hath never known the light,"
said the elder Quaker, earnestly, but with mildness. "Art thou he that
wouldst be content to give all and endure all for conscience' sake,
desiring even peculiar trials that thy faith might be purified and thy
heart weaned from worldly desires? And wilt thou sink beneath an
affliction which happens alike to them that have their portion here
below and to them that lay up treasure in heaven? Faint not, for thy
burden is yet light."

"It is heavy! It is heavier than I can bear!" exclaimed Pearson, with
the impatience of a variable spirit. "From my youth upward I have been
a man marked out for wrath, and year by year--yea, day after day--I
have endured sorrows such as others know not in their lifetime. And
now I speak not of the love that has been turned to hatred, the honor
to ignominy, the ease and plentifulness of all things to danger, want
and nakedness. All this I could have borne and counted myself blessed.
But when my heart was desolate with many losses, I fixed it upon the
child of a stranger, and he became dearer to me than all my buried
ones; and now he too must die as if my love were poison. Verily, I am
an accursed man, and I will lay me down in the dust and lift up my
head no more."

"Thou sinnest, brother, but it is not for me to rebuke thee, for I
also have had my hours of darkness wherein I have murmured against the
cross," said the old Quaker. He continued, perhaps in the hope of
distracting his companion's thoughts from his own sorrows: "Even of
late was the light obscured within me, when the men of blood had
banished me on pain of death and the constables led me onward from
village to village toward the wilderness. A strong and cruel hand was
wielding the knotted cords; they sunk deep into the flesh, and thou
mightst have tracked every reel and totter of my footsteps by the
blood that followed. As we went on--"

"Have I not borne all this, and have I murmured?" interrupted Pearson,
impatiently.

"Nay, friend, but hear me," continued the other. "As we journeyed on
night darkened on our path, so that no man could see the rage of the
persecutors or the constancy of my endurance, though Heaven forbid
that I should glory therein. The lights began to glimmer in the
cottage windows, and I could discern the inmates as they gathered in
comfort and security, every man with his wife and children by their
own evening hearth. At length we came to a tract of fertile land. In
the dim light the forest was not visible around it, and, behold, there
was a straw-thatched dwelling which bore the very aspect of my home
far over the wild ocean--far in our own England. Then came bitter
thoughts upon me--yea, remembrances that were like death to my soul.
The happiness of my early days was painted to me, the disquiet of my
manhood, the altered faith of my declining years. I remembered how I
had been moved to go forth a wanderer when my daughter, the youngest,
the dearest of my flock, lay on her dying-bed, and--"

"Couldst thou obey the command at such a moment?" exclaimed Pearson,
shuddering.

"Yea! yea!" replied the old man, hurriedly. "I was kneeling by her
bedside when the voice spoke loud within me, but immediately I rose
and took my staff and gat me gone. Oh that it were permitted me to
forget her woeful look when I thus withdrew my arm and left her
journeying through the dark valley alone! for her soul was faint and
she had leaned upon my prayers. Now in that night of horror I was
assailed by the thought that I had been an erring Christian and a
cruel parent; yea, even my daughter with her pale dying features
seemed to stand by me and whisper, 'Father, you are deceived; go home
and shelter your gray head.'--O Thou to whom I have looked in my
furthest wanderings," continued the Quaker, raising his agitated eyes
to heaven, "inflict not upon the bloodiest of our persecutors the
unmitigated agony of my soul when I believed that all I had done and
suffered for thee was at the instigation of a mocking fiend!--But I
yielded not; I knelt down and wrestled with the tempter, while the
scourge bit more fiercely into the flesh. My prayer was heard, and I
went on in peace and joy toward the wilderness."

The old man, though his fanaticism had generally all the calmness of
reason, was deeply moved while reciting this tale, and his unwonted
emotion seemed to rebuke and keep down that of his companion. They sat
in silence, with their faces to the fire, imagining, perhaps, in its
red embers new scenes of persecution yet to be encountered. The snow
still drifted hard against the windows, and sometimes, as the blaze of
the logs had gradually sunk, came down the spacious chimney and hissed
upon the hearth. A cautious footstep might now and then be heard in a
neighboring apartment, and the sound invariably drew the eyes of both
Quakers to the door which led thither. When a fierce and riotous gust
of wind had led his thoughts by a natural association to homeless
travellers on such a night, Pearson resumed the conversation.

"I have wellnigh sunk under my own share of this trial," observed he,
sighing heavily; "yet I would that it might be doubled to me, if so
the child's mother could be spared. Her wounds have been deep and
many, but this will be the sorest of all."

"Fear not for Catharine," replied the old Quaker, "for I know that
valiant woman and have seen how she can bear the cross. A mother's
heart, indeed, is strong in her, and may seem to contend mightily with
her faith; but soon she will stand up and give thanks that her son has
been thus early an accepted sacrifice. The boy hath done his work, and
she will feel that he is taken hence in kindness both to him and her.
Blessed, blessed are they that with so little suffering can enter into
peace!"

The fitful rush of the wind was now disturbed by a portentous sound:
it was a quick and heavy knocking at the outer door. Pearson's wan
countenance grew paler, for many a visit of persecution had taught him
what to dread; the old man, on the other hand, stood up erect, and his
glance was firm as that of the tried soldier who awaits his enemy.

"The men of blood have come to seek me," he observed, with calmness.
"They have heard how I was moved to return from banishment, and now am
I to be led to prison, and thence to death. It is an end I have long
looked for. I will open unto them lest they say, 'Lo, he feareth!'"

"Nay; I will present myself before them," said Pearson, with recovered
fortitude. "It may be that they seek me alone and know not that thou
abidest with me."

"Let us go boldly, both one and the other," rejoined his companion.
"It is not fitting that thou or I should shrink."

They therefore proceeded through the entry to the door, which they
opened, bidding the applicant "Come in, in God's name!" A furious
blast of wind drove the storm into their faces and extinguished the
lamp; they had barely time to discern a figure so white from head to
foot with the drifted snow that it seemed like Winter's self come in
human shape to seek refuge from its own desolation.

"Enter, friend, and do thy errand, be it what it may," said Pearson.
"It must needs be pressing, since thou comest on such a bitter night."

"Peace be with this household!" said the stranger, when they stood on
the floor of the inner apartment.

Pearson started; the elder Quaker stirred the slumbering embers of the
fire till they sent up a clear and lofty blaze. It was a female voice
that had spoken; it was a female form that shone out, cold and wintry,
in that comfortable light.

"Catharine, blessed woman," exclaimed the old man, "art thou come to
this darkened land again? Art thou come to bear a valiant testimony as
in former years? The scourge hath not prevailed against thee, and
from the dungeon hast thou come forth triumphant, but strengthen,
strengthen now thy heart, Catharine, for Heaven will prove thee yet
this once ere thou go to thy reward."

"Rejoice, friends!" she replied. "Thou who hast long been of our
people, and thou whom a little child hath led to us, rejoice! Lo, I
come, the messenger of glad tidings, for the day of persecution is
over-past. The heart of the king, even Charles, hath been moved in
gentleness toward us, and he hath sent forth his letters to stay the
hands of the men of blood. A ship's company of our friends hath
arrived at yonder town, and I also sailed joyfully among them."

As Catharine spoke her eyes were roaming about the room in search of
him for whose sake security was dear to her. Pearson made a silent
appeal to the old man, nor did the latter shrink from the painful task
assigned him.

"Sister," he began, in a softened yet perfectly calm tone, "thou
tellest us of his love manifested in temporal good, and now must we
speak to thee of that selfsame love displayed in chastenings.
Hitherto, Catharine, thou hast been as one journeying in a darksome
and difficult path and leading an infant by the hand; fain wouldst
thou have looked heavenward continually, but still the cares of that
little child have drawn thine eyes and thy affections to the earth.
Sister, go on rejoicing, for his tottering footsteps shall impede
thine own no more."

But the unhappy mother was not thus to be consoled. She shook like a
leaf; she turned white as the very snow that hung drifted into her
hair. The firm old man extended his hand and held her up, keeping his
eye upon hers as if to repress any outbreak of passion.

"I am a woman--I am but a woman; will He try me above my strength?"
said Catharine, very quickly and almost in a whisper. "I have been
wounded sore; I have suffered much--many things in the body, many in
the mind; crucified in myself and in them that were dearest to me.
Surely," added she, with a long shudder, "he hath spared me in this
one thing." She broke forth with sudden and irrepressible violence:
"Tell me, man of cold heart, what has God done to me? Hath he cast
me down never to rise again? Hath he crushed my very heart in his
hand?--And thou to whom I committed my child, how hast thou fulfilled
thy trust? Give me back the boy well, sound, alive--alive--or earth
and heaven shall avenge me!"

The agonized shriek of Catharine was answered by the faint--the very
faint--voice of a child.

On this day it had become evident to Pearson, to his aged guest and to
Dorothy that Ilbrahim's brief and troubled pilgrimage drew near its
close. The two former would willingly have remained by him to make use
of the prayers and pious discourses which they deemed appropriate to
the time, and which, if they be impotent as to the departing
traveller's reception in the world whither he goes, may at least
sustain him in bidding adieu to earth. But, though Ilbrahim uttered no
complaint, he was disturbed by the faces that looked upon him; so that
Dorothy's entreaties and their own conviction that the child's feet
might tread heaven's pavement and not soil it had induced the two
Quakers to remove. Ilbrahim then closed his eyes and grew calm, and,
except for now and then a kind and low word to his nurse, might have
been thought to slumber. As nightfall came on, however, and the storm
began to rise, something seemed to trouble the repose of the boy's
mind and to render his sense of hearing active and acute. If a passing
wind lingered to shake the casement, he strove to turn his head toward
it; if the door jarred to and fro upon its hinges, he looked long and
anxiously thitherward; if the heavy voice of the old man as he read
the Scriptures rose but a little higher, the child almost held his
dying-breath to listen; if a snowdrift swept by the cottage with a
sound like the trailing of a garment, Ilbrahim seemed to watch that
some visitant should enter. But after a little time he relinquished
whatever secret hope had agitated him and with one low complaining
whisper turned his cheek upon the pillow. He then addressed Dorothy
with his usual sweetness and besought her to draw near him; she did
so, and Ilbrahim took her hand in both of his, grasping it with a
gentle pressure, as if to assure himself that he retained it. At
intervals, and without disturbing the repose of his countenance, a
very faint trembling passed over him from head to foot, as if a mild
but somewhat cool wind had breathed upon him and made him shiver.

As the boy thus led her by the hand in his quiet progress over the
borders of eternity, Dorothy almost imagined that she could discern
the near though dim delightfulness of the home he was about to reach;
she would not have enticed the little wanderer back, though she
bemoaned herself that she must leave him and return. But just when
Ilbrahim's feet were pressing on the soil of Paradise he heard a voice
behind him, and it recalled him a few, few paces of the weary path
which he had travelled. As Dorothy looked upon his features she
perceived that their placid expression was again disturbed. Her own
thoughts had been so wrapped in him that all sounds of the storm and
of human speech were lost to her; but when Catharine's shriek pierced
through the room, the boy strove to raise himself.

"Friend, she is come! Open unto her!" cried he.

In a moment his mother was kneeling by the bedside; she drew Ilbrahim
to her bosom, and he nestled there with no violence of joy, but
contentedly as if he were hushing himself to sleep. He looked into her
face, and, reading its agony, said with feeble earnestness,

"Mourn not, dearest mother. I am happy now;" and with these words the
gentle boy was dead.

       *       *       *       *       *

The king's mandate to stay the New England persecutors was effectual
in preventing further martyrdoms, but the colonial authorities,
trusting in the remoteness of their situation, and perhaps in the
supposed instability of the royal government, shortly renewed their
severities in all other respects. Catharine's fanaticism had become
wilder by the sundering of all human ties; and wherever a scourge was
lifted, there was she to receive the blow; and whenever a dungeon was
unbarred, thither she came to cast herself upon the floor. But in
process of time a more Christian spirit--a spirit of forbearance,
though not of cordiality or approbation--began to pervade the land in
regard to the persecuted sect. And then, when the rigid old Pilgrims
eyed her rather in pity than in wrath, when the matrons fed her with
the fragments of their children's food and offered her a lodging on a
hard and lowly bed, when no little crowd of schoolboys left their
sports to cast stones after the roving enthusiast,--then did Catharine
return to Pearson's dwelling, and made that her home.

As if Ilbrahim's sweetness yet lingered round his ashes, as if his
gentle spirit came down from heaven to teach his parent a true
religion, her fierce and vindictive nature was softened by the same
griefs which had once irritated it. When the course of years had made
the features of the unobtrusive mourner familiar in the settlement,
she became a subject of not deep but general interest--a being on whom
the otherwise superfluous sympathies of all might be bestowed. Every
one spoke of her with that degree of pity which it is pleasant to
experience; every one was ready to do her the little kindnesses which
are not costly, yet manifest good-will; and when at last she died, a
long train of her once bitter persecutors followed her with decent
sadness and tears that were not painful to her place by Ilbrahim's
green and sunken grave.




MR. HIGGINBOTHAM'S CATASTROPHE.


A young fellow, a tobacco-pedler by trade, was on his way from
Morristown, where he had dealt largely with the deacon of the Shaker
settlement, to the village of Parker's Falls, on Salmon River. He had
a neat little cart painted green, with a box of cigars depicted on
each side-panel, and an Indian chief holding a pipe and a golden
tobacco-stalk on the rear. The pedler drove a smart little mare and
was a young man of excellent character, keen at a bargain, but none
the worse liked by the Yankees, who, as I have heard them say, would
rather be shaved with a sharp razor than a dull one. Especially was he
beloved by the pretty girls along the Connecticut, whose favor he used
to court by presents of the best smoking-tobacco in his stock, knowing
well that the country-lasses of New England are generally great
performers on pipes. Moreover, as will be seen in the course of my
story, the pedler was inquisitive and something of a tattler, always
itching to hear the news and anxious to tell it again.

After an early breakfast at Morristown the tobacco-pedler--whose name
was Dominicus Pike--had travelled seven miles through a solitary piece
of woods without speaking a word to anybody but himself and his little
gray mare. It being nearly seven o'clock, he was as eager to hold a
morning gossip as a city shopkeeper to read the morning paper. An
opportunity seemed at hand when, after lighting a cigar with a
sun-glass, he looked up and perceived a man coming over the brow of
the hill at the foot of which the pedler had stopped his green cart.
Dominicus watched him as he descended, and noticed that he carried a
bundle over his shoulder on the end of a stick and travelled with a
weary yet determined pace. He did not look as if he had started in the
freshness of the morning, but had footed it all night, and meant to do
the same all day.

"Good-morning, mister," said Dominicus, when within speaking-distance.
"You go a pretty good jog. What's the latest news at Parker's Falls?"

The man pulled the broad brim of a gray hat over his eyes, and
answered, rather sullenly, that he did not come from Parker's Falls,
which, as being the limit of his own day's journey, the pedler had
naturally mentioned in his inquiry.

"Well, then," rejoined Dominicus Pike, "let's have the latest news
where you did come from. I'm not particular about Parker's Falls. Any
place will answer."

Being thus importuned, the traveller--who was as ill-looking a fellow
as one would desire to meet in a solitary piece of woods--appeared to
hesitate a little, as if he was either searching his memory for news
or weighing the expediency of telling it. At last, mounting on the
step of the cart, he whispered in the ear of Dominicus, though he
might have shouted aloud and no other mortal would have heard him.

"I do remember one little trifle of news," said he. "Old Mr.
Higginbotham of Kimballton was murdered in his orchard at eight
o'clock last night by an Irishman and a nigger. They strung him up to
the branch of a St. Michael's pear tree where nobody would find him
till the morning."

As soon as this horrible intelligence was communicated the stranger
betook himself to his journey again with more speed than ever, not
even turning his head when Dominicus invited him to smoke a Spanish
cigar and relate all the particulars. The pedler whistled to his mare
and went up the hill, pondering on the doleful fate of Mr.
Higginbotham, whom he had known in the way of trade, having sold him
many a bunch of long nines and a great deal of pig-tail, lady's twist
and fig tobacco. He was rather astonished at the rapidity with which
the news had spread. Kimballton was nearly sixty miles distant in a
straight line; the murder had been perpetrated only at eight o'clock
the preceding night, yet Dominicus had heard of it at seven in the
morning, when, in all probability, poor Mr. Higginbotham's own family
had but just discovered his corpse hanging on the St. Michael's pear
tree. The stranger on foot must have worn seven-league boots, to
travel at such a rate.

"Ill-news flies fast, they say," thought Dominicus Pike, "but this
beats railroads. The fellow ought to be hired to go express with the
President's message."

The difficulty was solved by supposing that the narrator had made a
mistake of one day in the date of the occurrence; so that our friend
did not hesitate to introduce the story at every tavern and
country-store along the road, expending a whole bunch of Spanish
wrappers among at least twenty horrified audiences. He found himself
invariably the first bearer of the intelligence, and was so pestered
with questions that he could not avoid filling up the outline till it
became quite a respectable narrative. He met with one piece of
corroborative evidence. Mr. Higginbotham was a trader, and a former
clerk of his to whom Dominicus related the facts testified that the
old gentleman was accustomed to return home through the orchard about
nightfall with the money and valuable papers of the store in his
pocket. The clerk manifested but little grief at Mr. Higginbotham's
catastrophe, hinting--what the pedler had discovered in his own
dealings with him--that he was a crusty old fellow as close as a vise.
His property would descend to a pretty niece who was now keeping
school in Kimballton.

What with telling the news for the public good and driving bargains
for his own, Dominicus was so much delayed on the road that he chose
to put up at a tavern about five miles short of Parker's Falls. After
supper, lighting one of his prime cigars, he seated himself in the
bar-room and went through the story of the murder, which had grown so
fast that it took him half an hour to tell. There were as many as
twenty people in the room, nineteen of whom received it all for
gospel. But the twentieth was an elderly farmer who had arrived on
horseback a short time before and was now seated in a corner, smoking
his pipe. When the story was concluded, he rose up very deliberately,
brought his chair right in front of Dominicus and stared him full in
the face, puffing out the vilest tobacco-smoke the pedler had ever
smelt.

"Will you make affidavit," demanded he, in the tone of a
country-justice taking an examination, "that old Squire Higginbotham
of Kimballton was murdered in his orchard the night before last and
found hanging on his great pear tree yesterday morning?"

"I tell the story as I heard it, mister," answered Dominicus, dropping
his half-burnt cigar. "I don't say that I saw the thing done, so I
can't take my oath that he was murdered exactly in that way."

"But I can take mine," said the farmer, "that if Squire Higginbotham
was murdered night before last I drank a glass of bitters with his
ghost this morning. Being a neighbor of mine, he called me into his
store as I was riding by, and treated me, and then asked me to do a
little business for him on the road. He didn't seem to know any more
about his own murder than I did."

"Why, then it can't be a fact!" exclaimed Dominicus Pike.

"I guess he'd have mentioned, if it was," said the old farmer; and he
removed his chair back to the corner, leaving Dominicus quite down in
the mouth.

Here was a sad resurrection of old Mr. Higginbotham! The pedler had no
heart to mingle in the conversation any more, but comforted himself
with a glass of gin and water and went to bed, where all night long he
dreamed of hanging on the St. Michael's pear tree.

To avoid the old farmer (whom he so detested that his suspension would
have pleased him better than Mr. Higginbotham's), Dominicus rose in
the gray of the morning, put the little mare into the green cart and
trotted swiftly away toward Parker's Falls. The fresh breeze, the dewy
road and the pleasant summer dawn revived his spirits, and might have
encouraged him to repeat the old story had there been anybody awake to
bear it, but he met neither ox-team, light wagon, chaise, horseman nor
foot-traveller till, just as he crossed Salmon River, a man came
trudging down to the bridge with a bundle over his shoulder, on the
end of a stick.

"Good-morning, mister," said the pedler, reining in his mare. "If you
come from Kimballton or that neighborhood, maybe you can tell me the
real fact about this affair of old Mr. Higginbotham. Was the old
fellow actually murdered two or three nights ago by an Irishman and a
nigger?"

Dominicus had spoken in too great a hurry to observe at first that the
stranger himself had a deep tinge of negro blood. On hearing this
sudden question the Ethiopian appeared to change his skin, its yellow
hue becoming a ghastly white, while, shaking and stammering, he thus
replied:

"No, no! There was no colored man. It was an Irishman that hanged him
last night at eight o'clock; I came away at seven. His folks can't
have looked for him in the orchard yet."

Scarcely had the yellow man spoken, when he interrupted himself and,
though he seemed weary enough before, continued his journey at a pace
which would have kept the pedler's mare on a smart trot. Dominicus
stared after him in great perplexity. If the murder had not been
committed till Tuesday night, who was the prophet that had foretold it
in all its circumstances on Tuesday morning? If Mr. Higginbotham's
corpse were not yet discovered by his own family, how came the
mulatto, at above thirty miles' distance, to know that he was hanging
in the orchard, especially as he had left Kimballton before the
unfortunate man was hanged at all? These ambiguous circumstances, with
the stranger's surprise and terror, made Dominicus think of raising a
hue-and-cry after him as an accomplice in the murder, since a murder,
it seemed, had really been perpetrated.

"But let the poor devil go," thought the pedler. "I don't want his
black blood on my head, and hanging the nigger wouldn't unhang Mr.
Higginbotham. Unhang the old gentleman? It's a sin, I know, but I
should hate to have him come to life a second time and give me the
lie."

With these meditations Dominicus Pike drove into the street of
Parker's Falls, which, as everybody knows, is as thriving a village as
three cotton-factories and a slitting-mill can make it. The machinery
was not in motion and but a few of the shop doors unbarred when he
alighted in the stable-yard of the tavern and made it his first
business to order the mare four quarts of oats. His second duty, of
course, was to impart Mr. Higginbotham's catastrophe to the hostler.
He deemed it advisable, however, not to be too positive as to the date
of the direful fact, and also to be uncertain whether it were
perpetrated by an Irishman and a mulatto or by the son of Erin alone.
Neither did he profess to relate it on his own authority or that of
any one person, but mentioned it as a report generally diffused.

The story ran through the town like fire among girdled trees, and
became so much the universal talk that nobody could tell whence it had
originated. Mr. Higginbotham was as well known at Parker's Falls as
any citizen of the place, being part-owner of the slitting-mill and a
considerable stockholder in the cotton-factories. The inhabitants felt
their own prosperity interested in his fate. Such was the excitement
that the Parker's Falls _Gazette_ anticipated its regular day of
publication, and came out with half a form of blank paper and a column
of double pica emphasized with capitals and headed "HORRID MURDER OF
MR. HIGGINBOTHAM!" Among other dreadful details, the printed account
described the mark of the cord round the dead man's neck and stated
the number of thousand dollars of which he had been robbed; there was
much pathos, also, about the affliction of his niece, who had gone
from one fainting-fit to another ever since her uncle was found
hanging on the St. Michael's pear tree with his pockets inside out.
The village poet likewise commemorated the young lady's grief in
seventeen stanzas of a ballad. The selectmen held a meeting, and in
consideration of Mr. Higginbotham's claims on the town determined to
issue handbills offering a reward of five hundred dollars for the
apprehension of his murderers and the recovery of the stolen property.

Meanwhile, the whole population of Parker's Falls, consisting of
shopkeepers, mistresses of boarding-houses, factory-girls, mill-men
and schoolboys, rushed into the street and kept up such a terrible
loquacity as more than compensated for the silence of the
cotton-machines, which refrained from their usual din out of respect
to the deceased. Had Mr. Higginbotham cared about posthumous renown,
his untimely ghost would have exulted in this tumult.

Our friend Dominicus in his vanity of heart forgot his intended
precautions, and, mounting on the town-pump, announced himself as the
bearer of the authentic intelligence which had caused so wonderful a
sensation. He immediately became the great man of the moment, and had
just begun a new edition of the narrative with a voice like a
field-preacher when the mail-stage drove into the village street. It
had travelled all night, and must have shifted horses at Kimballton at
three in the morning.

"Now we shall hear all the particulars!" shouted the crowd.

The coach rumbled up to the piazza of the tavern followed by a
thousand people; for if any man had been minding his own business till
then, he now left it at sixes and sevens to hear the news. The pedler,
foremost in the race, discovered two passengers, both of whom had been
startled from a comfortable nap to find themselves in the centre of a
mob. Every man assailing them with separate questions, all propounded
at once, the couple were struck speechless, though one was a lawyer
and the other a young lady.

"Mr. Higginbotham! Mr. Higginbotham! Tell us the particulars about old
Mr. Higginbotham!" bawled the mob. "What is the coroner's verdict? Are
the murderers apprehended? Is Mr. Higginbotham's niece come out of her
fainting-fits? Mr. Higginbotham! Mr. Higginbotham!"

The coachman said not a word except to swear awfully at the hostler
for not bringing him a fresh team of horses. The lawyer inside had
generally his wits about him even when asleep; the first thing he did
after learning the cause of the excitement was to produce a large red
pocketbook. Meantime, Dominicus Pike, being an extremely polite young
man, and also suspecting that a female tongue would tell the story as
glibly as a lawyer's, had handed the lady out of the coach. She was a
fine, smart girl, now wide awake and bright as a button, and had such
a sweet, pretty mouth that Dominicus would almost as lief have heard a
love-tale from it as a tale of murder.

"Gentlemen and ladies," said the lawyer to the shopkeepers, the
mill-men and the factory-girls, "I can assure you that some
unaccountable mistake--or, more probably, a wilful falsehood
maliciously contrived to injure Mr. Higginbotham's credit--has excited
this singular uproar. We passed through Kimballton at three o'clock
this morning, and most certainly should have been informed of the
murder had any been perpetrated. But I have proof nearly as strong as
Mr. Higginbotham's own oral testimony in the negative. Here is a note
relating to a suit of his in the Connecticut courts which was
delivered me from that gentleman himself. I find it dated at ten
o'clock last evening."

So saying, the lawyer, exhibited the date and signature of the note,
which irrefragably proved either that this perverse Mr. Higginbotham
was alive when he wrote it, or, as some deemed the more probable case
of two doubtful ones, that he was so absorbed in worldly business as
to continue to transact it even after his death. But unexpected
evidence was forthcoming. The young lady, after listening to the
pedler's explanation, merely seized a moment to smooth her gown and
put her curls in order, and then appeared at the tavern door, making a
modest signal to be heard.

"Good people," said she, "I am Mr. Higginbotham's niece."

A wondering murmur passed through the crowd on beholding her so rosy
and bright--that same unhappy niece whom they had supposed, on the
authority of the Parker's Falls _Gazette_, to be lying at death's
door in a fainting-fit. But some shrewd fellows had doubted all along
whether a young lady would be quite so desperate at the hanging of a
rich old uncle.

"You see," continued Miss Higginbotham, with a smile, "that this
strange story is quite unfounded as to myself, and I believe I may
affirm it to be equally so in regard to my dear uncle Higginbotham. He
has the kindness to give me a home in his house, though I contribute
to my own support by teaching a school. I left Kimballton this morning
to spend the vacation of commencement-week with a friend about five
miles from Parker's Falls. My generous uncle, when he heard me on the
stairs, called me to his bedside and gave me two dollars and fifty
cents to pay my stage-fare, and another dollar for my extra expenses.
He then laid his pocketbook under his pillow, shook hands with me, and
advised me to take some biscuit in my bag instead of breakfasting on
the road. I feel confident, therefore, that I left my beloved relative
alive, and trust that I shall find him so on my return."

The young lady courtesied at the close of her speech, which was so
sensible and well worded, and delivered with such grace and propriety,
that everybody thought her fit to be preceptress of the best academy
in the State. But a stranger would have supposed that Mr. Higginbotham
was an object of abhorrence at Parker's Falls and that a thanksgiving
had been proclaimed for his murder, so excessive was the wrath of the
inhabitants on learning their mistake. The mill-men resolved to bestow
public honors on Dominicus Pike, only hesitating whether to tar and
feather him, ride him on a rail or refresh him with an ablution at the
town-pump, on the top of which he had declared himself the bearer of
the news. The selectmen, by advice of the lawyer, spoke of prosecuting
him for a misdemeanor in circulating unfounded reports, to the great
disturbance of the peace of the commonwealth. Nothing saved Dominicus
either from mob-law or a court of justice but an eloquent appeal made
by the young lady in his behalf. Addressing a few words of heartfelt
gratitude to his benefactress, he mounted the green cart and rode out
of town under a discharge of artillery from the schoolboys, who found
plenty of ammunition in the neighboring clay-pits and mud-holes. As he
turned his head to exchange a farewell glance with Mr. Higginbotham's
niece a ball of the consistence of hasty-pudding hit him slap in the
mouth, giving him a most grim aspect. His whole person was so
bespattered with the like filthy missiles that he had almost a mind to
ride back and supplicate for the threatened ablution at the town-pump;
for, though not meant in kindness, it would now have been a deed of
charity.

However, the sun shone bright on poor Dominicus, and the mud--an
emblem of all stains of undeserved opprobrium--was easily brushed off
when dry. Being a funny rogue, his heart soon cheered up; nor could he
refrain from a hearty laugh at the uproar which his story had excited.
The handbills of the selectmen would cause the commitment of all the
vagabonds in the State, the paragraph in the Parker's Falls _Gazette_
would be reprinted from Maine to Florida, and perhaps form an item in
the London newspapers, and many a miser would tremble for his
moneybags and life on learning the catastrophe of Mr. Higginbotham.
The pedler meditated with much fervor on the charms of the young
schoolmistress, and swore that Daniel Webster never spoke nor looked
so like an angel as Miss Higginbotham while defending him from the
wrathful populace at Parker's Falls.

Dominicus was now on the Kimballton turnpike, having all along
determined to visit that place, though business had drawn, him out of
the most direct road from Morristown. As he approached the scene of
the supposed murder he continued to revolve the circumstances in his
mind, and was astonished at the aspect which the whole case assumed.
Had nothing occurred to corroborate the story of the first traveller,
it might now have been considered as a hoax; but the yellow man was
evidently acquainted either with the report or the fact, and there was
a mystery in his dismayed and guilty look on being abruptly
questioned. When to this singular combination of incidents it was
added that the rumor tallied exactly with Mr. Higginbotham's character
and habits of life, and that he had an orchard and a St. Michael's
pear tree, near which he always passed at nightfall, the
circumstantial evidence appeared so strong that Dominicus doubted
whether the autograph produced by the lawyer, or even the niece's
direct testimony, ought to be equivalent. Making cautious inquiries
along the road, the pedler further learned that Mr. Higginbotham had
in his service an Irishman of doubtful character whom he had hired
without a recommendation, on the score of economy.

"May I be hanged myself," exclaimed Dominicus Pike, aloud, on reaching
the top of a lonely hill, "if I'll believe old Higginbotham is
unhanged till I see him with my own eyes and hear it from his own
mouth. And, as he's a real shaver, I'll have the minister, or some
other responsible man, for an endorser."

It was growing dusk when he reached the toll-house on Kimballton
turnpike, about a quarter of a mile from the village of this name. His
little mare was fast bringing him up with a man on horseback who
trotted through the gate a few rods in advance of him, nodded to the
toll-gatherer and kept on towards the village. Dominicus was
acquainted with the toll-man, and while making change the usual
remarks on the weather passed between them.

"I suppose," said the pedler, throwing back his whiplash to bring it
down like a feather on the mare's flank, "you have not seen anything
of old Mr. Higginbotham within a day or two?"

"Yes," answered the toll-gatherer; "he passed the gate just before you
drove up, and yonder he rides now, if you can see him through the
dusk. He's been to Woodfield this afternoon, attending a sheriff's
sale there. The old man generally shakes hands and has a little chat
with me, but to-night he nodded, as if to say, 'Charge my toll,' and
jogged on; for, wherever he goes, he must always be at home by eight
o'clock."

"So they tell me," said Dominicus.

"I never saw a man look so yellow and thin as the squire does,"
continued the toll-gatherer. "Says I to myself tonight, 'He's more
like a ghost or an old mummy than good flesh and blood.'"

The pedler strained his eyes through the twilight, and could just
discern the horseman now far ahead on the village road. He seemed to
recognize the rear of Mr. Higginbotham, but through the evening
shadows and amid the dust from the horse's feet the figure appeared
dim and unsubstantial, as if the shape of the mysterious old man were
faintly moulded of darkness and gray light.

Dominicus shivered. "Mr. Higginbotham has come back from the other
world by way of the Kimballton turnpike," thought he. He shook the
reins and rode forward, keeping about the same distance in the rear of
the gray old shadow till the latter was concealed by a bend of the
road. On reaching this point the pedler no longer saw the man on
horseback, but found himself at the head of the village street, not
far from a number of stores and two taverns clustered round the
meeting-house steeple. On his left was a stone wall and a gate, the
boundary of a wood-lot beyond which lay an orchard, farther still a
mowing-field, and last of all a house. These were the premises of Mr.
Higginbotham, whose dwelling stood beside the old highway, but had
been left in the background by the Kimballton turnpike.

Dominicus knew the place, and the little mare stopped short by
instinct, for he was not conscious of tightening the reins. "For the
soul of me, I cannot get by this gate!" said he, trembling. "I never
shall be my own man again till I see whether Mr. Higginbotham is
hanging on the St. Michael's pear tree." He leaped from the cart, gave
the rein a turn round the gate-post, and ran along the green path of
the wood-lot as if Old Nick were chasing behind. Just then the village
clock tolled eight, and as each deep stroke fell Dominicus gave a
fresh bound and flew faster than before, till, dim in the solitary
centre of the orchard, he saw the fated pear tree. One great branch
stretched from the old contorted trunk across the path and threw the
darkest shadow on that one spot. But something seemed to struggle
beneath the branch.

The pedler had never pretended to more courage than befits a man of
peaceable occupation, nor could he account for his valor on this awful
emergency. Certain it is, however, that he rushed forward, prostrated
a sturdy Irishman with the butt-end of his whip, and found--not,
indeed, hanging on the St. Michael's pear tree, but trembling beneath
it with a halter round his neck--the old identical Mr. Higginbotham.

"Mr. Higginbotham," said Dominicus, tremulously, "you're an honest
man, and I'll take your word for it. Have you been hanged, or not?"

If the riddle be not already guessed, a few words will explain the
simple machinery by which this "coming event" was made to cast its
"shadow before." Three men had plotted the robbery and murder of Mr.
Higginbotham; two of them successively lost courage and fled, each
delaying the crime one night by their disappearance; the third was in
the act of perpetration, when a champion, blindly obeying the call of
fate, like the heroes of old romance, appeared in the person of
Dominicus Pike.

It only remains to say that Mr. Higginbotham took the pedler into high
favor, sanctioned his addresses to the pretty schoolmistress and
settled his whole property on their children, allowing themselves the
interest. In due time the old gentleman capped the climax of his
favors by dying a Christian death in bed; since which melancholy
event, Dominicus Pike has removed from Kimballton and established a
large tobacco-manufactory in my native village.




LITTLE ANNIE'S RAMBLE.


Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!

The town-crier has rung his bell at a distant corner, and little Annie
stands on her father's doorsteps trying to hear what the man with the
loud voice is talking about. Let me listen too. Oh, he is telling the
people that an elephant and a lion and a royal tiger and a horse with
horns, and other strange beasts from foreign countries, have come to
town and will receive all visitors who choose to wait upon them.
Perhaps little Annie would like to go? Yes, and I can see that the
pretty child is weary of this wide and pleasant street with the green
trees flinging their shade across the quiet sunshine and the pavements
and the sidewalks all as clean as if the housemaid had just swept them
with her broom. She feels that impulse to go strolling away--that
longing after the mystery of the great world--which many children
feel, and which I felt in my childhood. Little Annie shall take a
ramble with me. See! I do but hold out my hand, and like some bright
bird in the sunny air, with her blue silk frock fluttering upward from
her white pantalets, she comes bounding on tiptoe across the street.

Smooth back your brown curls, Annie, and let me tie on your bonnet,
and we will set forth. What a strange couple to go on their rambles
together! One walks in black attire, with a measured step and a heavy
brow and his thoughtful eyes bent down, while the gay little girl
trips lightly along as if she were forced to keep hold of my hand lest
her feet should dance away from the earth. Yet there is sympathy
between us. If I pride myself on anything, it is because I have a
smile that children love; and, on the other hand, there are few grown
ladies that could entice me from the side of little Annie, for I
delight to let my mind go hand in hand with the mind of a sinless
child. So come, Annie; but if I moralize as we go, do not listen to
me: only look about you and be merry.

Now we turn the corner. Here are hacks with two horses and
stage-coaches with four thundering to meet each other, and trucks and
carts moving at a slower pace, being heavily laden with barrels from
the wharves; and here are rattling gigs which perhaps will be smashed
to pieces before our eyes. Hitherward, also, comes a man trundling a
wheelbarrow along the pavement. Is not little Annie afraid of such a
tumult? No; she does not even shrink closer to my side, but passes on
with fearless confidence, a happy child amidst a great throng of grown
people who pay the same reverence to her infancy that they would to
extreme old age. Nobody jostles her: all turn aside to make way for
little Annie; and, what is most singular, she appears conscious of her
claim to such respect. Now her eyes brighten with pleasure. A
street-musician has seated himself on the steps of yonder church and
pours forth his strains to the busy town--a melody that has gone
astray among the tramp of footsteps, the buzz of voices and the war of
passing wheels. Who heeds the poor organ-grinder? None but myself and
little Annie, whose feet begin to move in unison with the lively tune,
as if she were loth that music should be wasted without a dance. But
where would Annie find a partner? Some have the gout in their toes or
the rheumatism in their joints; some are stiff with age, some feeble
with disease; some are so lean that their bones would rattle, and
others of such ponderous size that their agility would crack the
flagstones; but many, many have leaden feet because their hearts are
far heavier than lead. It is a sad thought that I have chanced upon.
What a company of dancers should we be! For I too am a gentleman of
sober footsteps, and therefore, little Annie, let us walk sedately on.

It is a question with me whether this giddy child or my sage self have
most pleasure in looking at the shop-windows. We love the silks of
sunny hue that glow within the darkened premises of the spruce
dry-goods men; we are pleasantly dazzled by the burnished silver and
the chased gold, the rings of wedlock and the costly love-ornaments,
glistening at the window of the jeweller; but Annie, more than I,
seeks for a glimpse of her passing figure in the dusty looking-glasses
at the hardware-stores. All that is bright and gay attracts us both.

Here is a shop to which the recollections of my boyhood as well as
present partialities give a peculiar magic. How delightful to let the
fancy revel on the dainties of a confectioner--those pies with such
white and flaky paste, their contents being a mystery, whether rich
mince with whole plums intermixed, or piquant apple delicately
rose-flavored; those cakes, heart-shaped or round, piled in a lofty
pyramid; those sweet little circlets sweetly named kisses; those dark
majestic masses fit to be bridal-loaves at the wedding of an heiress,
mountains in size, their summits deeply snow-covered with sugar! Then
the mighty treasures of sugarplums, white and crimson and yellow, in
large glass vases, and candy of all varieties, and those little
cockles--or whatever they are called--much prized by children for
their sweetness, and more for the mottoes which they enclose, by
love-sick maids and bachelors! Oh, my mouth waters, little Annie, and
so doth yours, but we will not be tempted except to an imaginary
feast; so let us hasten onward devouring the vision of a plum-cake.

Here are pleasures, as some people would say, of a more exalted kind,
in the window of a bookseller. Is Annie a literary lady? Yes; she is
deeply read in Peter Parley's tomes and has an increasing love for
fairy-tales, though seldom met with nowadays, and she will subscribe
next year to the _Juvenile Miscellany_. But, truth to tell, she
is apt to turn away from the printed page and keep gazing at the
pretty pictures, such as the gay-colored ones which make this
shop-window the continual loitering-place of children. What would
Annie think if, in the book which I mean to send her on New Year's
day, she should find her sweet little self bound up in silk or morocco
with gilt edges, there to remain till she become a woman grown with
children of her own to read about their mother's childhood? That would
be very queer.

Little Annie is weary of pictures and pulls me onward by the hand,
till suddenly we pause at the most wondrous shop in all the town. Oh,
my stars! Is this a toyshop, or is it fairy-land? For here are gilded
chariots in which the king and queen of the fairies might ride side by
side, while their courtiers on these small horses should gallop in
triumphal procession before and behind the royal pair. Here, too, are
dishes of chinaware fit to be the dining-set of those same princely
personages when they make a regal banquet in the stateliest hall of
their palace--full five feet high--and behold their nobles feasting
adown the long perspective of the table. Betwixt the king and queen
should sit my little Annie, the prettiest fairy of them all. Here
stands a turbaned Turk threatening us with his sabre, like an ugly
heathen as he is, and next a Chinese mandarin who nods his head at
Annie and myself. Here we may review a whole army of horse and foot in
red-and-blue uniforms, with drums, fifes, trumpets, and all kinds of
noiseless music; they have halted on the shelf of this window after
their weary march from Liliput. But what cares Annie for soldiers? No
conquering queen is she--neither a Semiramis nor a Catharine; her
whole heart is set upon that doll who gazes at us with such a
fashionable stare. This is the little girl's true plaything. Though
made of wood, a doll is a visionary and ethereal personage endowed by
childish fancy with a peculiar life; the mimic lady is a heroine of
romance, an actor and a sufferer in a thousand shadowy scenes, the
chief inhabitant of that wild world with which children ape the real
one. Little Annie does not understand what I am saying, but looks
wishfully at the proud lady in the window. We will invite her home
with us as we return.--Meantime, good-bye, Dame Doll! A toy yourself,
you look forth from your window upon many ladies that are also toys,
though they walk and speak, and upon a crowd in pursuit of toys,
though they wear grave visages. Oh, with your never-closing eyes, had
you but an intellect to moralize on all that flits before them, what a
wise doll would you be!--Come, little Annie, we shall find toys
enough, go where we may.

Now we elbow our way among the throng again. It is curious in the most
crowded part of a town to meet with living creatures that had their
birthplace in some far solitude, but have acquired a second nature in
the wilderness of men. Look up, Annie, at that canary-bird hanging out
of the window in his cage. Poor little fellow! His golden feathers are
all tarnished in this smoky sunshine; he would have glistened twice as
brightly among the summer islands, but still he has become a citizen
in all his tastes and habits, and would not sing half so well without
the uproar that drowns his music. What a pity that he does not know
how miserable he is! There is a parrot, too, calling out, "Pretty
Poll! Pretty Poll!" as we pass by. Foolish bird, to be talking about
her prettiness to strangers, especially as she is not a pretty Poll,
though gaudily dressed in green and yellow! If she had said "Pretty
Annie!" there would have been some sense in it. See that gray squirrel
at the door of the fruit-shop whirling round and round so merrily
within his wire wheel! Being condemned to the treadmill, he makes it
an amusement. Admirable philosophy!

Here comes a big, rough dog--a countryman's dog--in search of his
master, smelling at everybody's heels and touching little Annie's hand
with his cold nose, but hurrying away, though she would fain have
patted him.--Success to your search, Fidelity!--And there sits a great
yellow cat upon a window-sill, a very corpulent and comfortable cat,
gazing at this transitory world with owl's eyes, and making pithy
comments, doubtless, or what appear such, to the silly beast.--Oh,
sage puss, make room for me beside you, and we will be a pair of
philosophers.

Here we see something to remind us of the town-crier and his
ding-dong-bell. Look! look at that great cloth spread out in the air,
pictured all over with wild beasts, as if they had met together to
choose a king, according to their custom in the days of AEsop. But they
are choosing neither a king nor a President, else we should hear a
most horrible snarling! They have come from the deep woods and the
wild mountains and the desert sands and the polar snows only to do
homage to my little Annie. As we enter among them the great elephant
makes us a bow in the best style of elephantine courtesy, bending
lowly down his mountain bulk, with trunk abased and leg thrust out
behind. Annie returns the salute, much to the gratification of the
elephant, who is certainly the best-bred monster in the caravan. The
lion and the lioness are busy with two beef-bones. The royal tiger,
the beautiful, the untamable, keeps pacing his narrow cage with a
haughty step, unmindful of the spectators or recalling the fierce
deeds of his former life, when he was wont to leap forth upon such
inferior animals from the jungles of Bengal.

Here we see the very same wolf--do not go near him, Annie!--the
selfsame wolf that devoured little Red Riding-Hood and her
grandmother. In the next cage a hyena from Egypt who has doubtless
howled around the pyramids and a black bear from our own forests are
fellow-prisoners and most excellent friends. Are there any two living
creatures who have so few sympathies that they cannot possibly be
friends? Here sits a great white bear whom common observers would call
a very stupid beast, though I perceive him to be only absorbed in
contemplation; he is thinking of his voyages on an iceberg, and of his
comfortable home in the vicinity of the north pole, and of the little
cubs whom he left rolling in the eternal snows. In fact, he is a bear
of sentiment. But oh those unsentimental monkeys! The ugly, grinning,
aping, chattering, ill-natured, mischievous and queer little brutes!
Annie does not love the monkeys; their ugliness shocks her pure,
instinctive delicacy of taste and makes her mind unquiet because it
bears a wild and dark resemblance to humanity. But here is a little
pony just big enough for Annie to ride, and round and round he gallops
in a circle, keeping time with his trampling hoofs to a band of music.
And here, with a laced coat and a cocked hat, and a riding-whip in his
hand--here comes a little gentleman small enough to be king of the
fairies and ugly enough to be king of the gnomes, and takes a flying
leap into the saddle. Merrily, merrily plays the music, and merrily
gallops the pony, and merrily rides the little old gentleman.--Come,
Annie, into the street again; perchance we may see monkeys on
horseback there.

Mercy on us! What a noisy world we quiet people live in! Did Annie
ever read the cries of London city? With what lusty lungs doth yonder
man proclaim that his wheelbarrow is full of lobsters! Here comes
another, mounted on a cart and blowing a hoarse and dreadful blast
from a tin horn, as much as to say, "Fresh fish!" And hark! a voice on
high, like that of a muezzin from the summit of a mosque, announcing
that some chimney-sweeper has emerged from smoke and soot and darksome
caverns into the upper air. What cares the world for that? But,
well-a-day, we hear a shrill voice of affliction--the scream of a
little child, rising louder with every repetition of that smart,
sharp, slapping sound produced by an open hand on tender flesh. Annie
sympathizes, though without experience of such direful woe.

Lo! the town-crier again, with some new secret for the public ear.
Will he tell us of an auction, or of a lost pocket-book or a show of
beautiful wax figures, or of some monstrous beast more horrible than
any in the caravan? I guess the latter. See how he uplifts the bell in
his right hand and shakes it slowly at first, then with a hurried
motion, till the clapper seems to strike both sides at once, and the
sounds are scattered forth in quick succession far and near.

Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!

Now he raises his clear loud voice above all the din of the town. It
drowns the buzzing talk of many tongues and draws each man's mind from
his own business; it rolls up and down the echoing street, and ascends
to the hushed chamber of the sick, and penetrates downward to the
cellar kitchen where the hot cook turns from the fire to listen. Who
of all that address the public ear, whether in church or court-house
or hall of state, has such an attentive audience as the town-crier!
What saith the people's orator?

"Strayed from her home, a LITTLE GIRL of five years old, in a blue
silk frock and white pantalets, with brown curling hair and hazel
eyes. Whoever will bring her back to her afflicted mother--"

Stop, stop, town-crier! The lost is found.--Oh, my pretty Annie, we
forgot to tell your mother of our ramble, and she is in despair and
has sent the town-crier to bellow up and down the streets, affrighting
old and young, for the loss of a little girl who has not once let go
my hand? Well, let us hasten homeward; and as we go forget not to
thank Heaven, my Annie, that after wandering a little way into the
world you may return at the first summons with an untainted and
unwearied heart, and be a happy child again. But I have gone too far
astray for the town-crier to call me back.

Sweet has been the charm of childhood on my spirit throughout my
ramble with little Annie. Say not that it has been a waste of precious
moments, an idle matter, a babble of childish talk and a reverie of
childish imaginations about topics unworthy of a grown man's notice.
Has it been merely this? Not so--not so. They are not truly wise who
would affirm it. As the pure breath of children revives the life of
aged men, so is our moral nature revived by their free and simple
thoughts, their native feeling, their airy mirth for little cause or
none, their grief soon roused and soon allayed. Their influence on us
is at least reciprocal with ours on them. When our infancy is almost
forgotten and our boyhood long departed, though it seems but as
yesterday, when life settles darkly down upon us and we doubt whether
to call ourselves young any more,--then it is good to steal away from
the society of bearded men, and even of gentler woman, and spend an
hour or two with children. After drinking from those fountains of
still fresh existence we shall return into the crowd, as I do now, to
struggle onward and do our part in life--perhaps as fervently as ever,
but for a time with a kinder and purer heart and a spirit more lightly
wise. All this by thy sweet magic, dear little Annie!




WAKEFIELD.


In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story, told as truth,
of a man--let us call him Wakefield--who absented himself for a long
time from his wife. The fact, thus abstractedly stated, is not very
uncommon, nor, without a proper distinction of circumstances, to be
condemned either as naughty or nonsensical. Howbeit, this, though far
from the most aggravated, is perhaps the strangest instance on record
of marital delinquency, and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be
found in the whole list of human oddities. The wedded couple lived in
London. The man, under pretence of going a journey, took lodgings in
the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or
friends and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment,
dwelt upward of twenty years. During that period he beheld his home
every day, and frequently the forlorn Mrs. Wakefield. And after so
great a gap in his matrimonial felicity--when his death was reckoned
certain, his estate settled, his name dismissed from memory and his
wife long, long ago resigned to her autumnal widowhood--he entered the
door one evening quietly as from a day's absence, and became a loving
spouse till death.

This outline is all that I remember. But the incident, though of the
purest originality, unexampled, and probably never to be repeated, is
one, I think, which appeals to the general sympathies of mankind. We
know, each for himself, that none of us would perpetrate such a folly,
yet feel as if some other might. To my own contemplations, at least,
it has often recurred, always exciting wonder, but with a sense that
the story must be true and a conception of its hero's character.
Whenever any subject so forcibly affects the mind, time is well spent
in thinking of it. If the reader choose, let him do his own
meditation; or if he prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years
of Wakefield's vagary, I bid him welcome, trusting that there will be
a pervading spirit and a moral, even should we fail to find them, done
up neatly and condensed into the final sentence. Thought has always
its efficacy and every striking incident its moral.

What sort of a man was Wakefield? We are free to shape out our own
idea and call it by his name. He was now in the meridian of life; his
matrimonial affections, never violent, were sobered into a calm,
habitual sentiment; of all husbands, he was likely to be the most
constant, because a certain sluggishness would keep his heart at rest
wherever it might be placed. He was intellectual, but not actively so;
his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings that tended to no
purpose or had not vigor to attain it; his thoughts were seldom so
energetic as to seize hold of words. Imagination, in the proper
meaning of the term, made no part of Wakefield's gifts. With a cold
but not depraved nor wandering heart, and a mind never feverish with
riotous thoughts nor perplexed with originality, who could have
anticipated that our friend would entitle himself to a foremost place
among the doers of eccentric deeds? Had his acquaintances been asked
who was the man in London the surest to perform nothing to-day which
should be remembered on the morrow, they would have thought of
Wakefield. Only the wife of his bosom might have hesitated. She,
without having analyzed his character, was partly aware of a quiet
selfishness that had rusted into his inactive mind; of a peculiar sort
of vanity, the most uneasy attribute about him; of a disposition to
craft which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping
of petty secrets hardly worth revealing; and, lastly, of what she
called a little strangeness sometimes in the good man. This latter
quality is indefinable, and perhaps non-existent.

Let us now imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife. It is the dusk
of an October evening. His equipment is a drab greatcoat, a hat
covered with an oil-cloth, top-boots, an umbrella in one hand and a
small portmanteau in the other. He has informed Mrs. Wakefield that he
is to take the night-coach into the country. She would fain inquire
the length of his journey, its object and the probable time of his
return, but, indulgent to his harmless love of mystery, interrogates
him only by a look. He tells her not to expect him positively by the
return-coach nor to be alarmed should he tarry three or four days,
but, at all events, to look for him at supper on Friday evening.
Wakefield, himself, be it considered, has no suspicion of what is
before him. He holds out his hand; she gives her own and meets his
parting kiss in the matter-of-course way of a ten years' matrimony,
and forth goes the middle-aged Mr. Wakefield, almost resolved to
perplex his good lady by a whole week's absence. After the door has
closed behind him, she perceives it thrust partly open and a vision of
her husband's face through the aperture, smiling on her and gone in a
moment. For the time this little incident is dismissed without a
thought, but long afterward, when she has been more years a widow than
a wife, that smile recurs and flickers across all her reminiscences of
Wakefield's visage. In her many musings she surrounds the original
smile with a multitude of fantasies which make it strange and awful;
as, for instance, if she imagines him in a coffin, that parting look
is frozen on his pale features; or if she dreams of him in heaven,
still his blessed spirit wears a quiet and crafty smile. Yet for its
sake, when all others have given him up for dead, she sometimes doubts
whether she is a widow.

But our business is with the husband. We must hurry after him along
the street ere he lose his individuality and melt into the great mass
of London life. It would be vain searching for him there. Let us
follow close at his heels, therefore, until, after several superfluous
turns and doublings, we find him comfortably established by the
fireside of a small apartment previously bespoken. He is in the next
street to his own and at his journey's end. He can scarcely trust his
good-fortune in having got thither unperceived, recollecting that at
one time he was delayed by the throng in the very focus of a lighted
lantern, and again there were footsteps that seemed to tread behind
his own, distinct from the multitudinous tramp around him, and anon he
heard a voice shouting afar and fancied that it called his name.
Doubtless a dozen busybodies had been watching him and told his wife
the whole affair.

Poor Wakefield! little knowest thou thine own insignificance in this
great world. No mortal eye but mine has traced thee. Go quietly to thy
bed, foolish man, and on the morrow, if thou wilt be wise, get thee
home to good Mrs. Wakefield and tell her the truth. Remove not thyself
even for a little week from thy place in her chaste bosom. Were she
for a single moment to deem thee dead or lost or lastingly divided
from her, thou wouldst be woefully conscious of a change in thy true
wife for ever after. It is perilous to make a chasm in human
affections--not that they gape so long and wide, but so quickly close
again.

Almost repenting of his frolic, or whatever it may be termed,
Wakefield lies down betimes, and, starting from his first nap, spreads
forth his arms into the wide and solitary waste of the unaccustomed
bed, "No," thinks he, gathering the bedclothes about him; "I will not
sleep alone another night." In the morning he rises earlier than usual
and sets himself to consider what he really means to do. Such are his
loose and rambling modes of thought that he has taken this very
singular step with the consciousness of a purpose, indeed, but without
being able to define it sufficiently for his own contemplation. The
vagueness of the project and the convulsive effort with which he
plunges into the execution of it are equally characteristic of a
feeble-minded man. Wakefield sifts his ideas, however, as minutely as
he may, and finds himself curious to know the progress of matters at
home--how his exemplary wife will endure her widowhood of a week, and,
briefly, how the little sphere of creatures and circumstances in which
he was a central object will be affected by his removal. A morbid
vanity, therefore, lies nearest the bottom of the affair. But how is
he to attain his ends? Not, certainly, by keeping close in this
comfortable lodging, where, though he slept and awoke in the next
street to his home, he is as effectually abroad as if the stage-coach
had been whirling him away all night. Yet should he reappear, the
whole project is knocked in the head. His poor brains being hopelessly
puzzled with this dilemma, he at length ventures out, partly resolving
to cross the head of the street and send one hasty glance toward his
forsaken domicile. Habit--for he is a man of habits--takes him by the
hand and guides him, wholly unaware, to his own door, where, just at
the critical moment, he is aroused by the scraping of his foot upon
the step.--Wakefield, whither are you going?

At that instant his fate was turning on the pivot. Little dreaming of
the doom to which his first backward step devotes him, he hurries
away, breathless with agitation hitherto unfelt, and hardly dares turn
his head at the distant corner. Can it be that nobody caught sight of
him? Will not the whole household--the decent Mrs. Wakefield, the
smart maid-servant and the dirty little footboy--raise a hue-and-cry
through London streets in pursuit of their fugitive lord and master?
Wonderful escape! He gathers courage to pause and look homeward, but
is perplexed with a sense of change about the familiar edifice such as
affects us all when, after a separation of months or years, we again
see some hill or lake or work of art with which we were friends of
old. In ordinary cases this indescribable impression is caused by the
comparison and contrast between our imperfect reminiscences and the
reality. In Wakefield the magic of a single night has wrought a
similar transformation, because in that brief period a great moral
change has been effected. But this is a secret from himself. Before
leaving the spot he catches a far and momentary glimpse of his wife
passing athwart the front window with her face turned toward the head
of the street. The crafty nincompoop takes to his heels, scared with
the idea that among a thousand such atoms of mortality her eye must
have detected him. Right glad is his heart, though his brain be
somewhat dizzy, when he finds himself by the coal-fire of his
lodgings.

So much for the commencement of this long whim-wham. After the initial
conception and the stirring up of the man's sluggish temperament to
put it in practice, the whole matter evolves itself in a natural
train. We may suppose him, as the result of deep deliberation, buying
a new wig of reddish hair and selecting sundry garments, in a fashion
unlike his customary suit of brown, from a Jew's old-clothes bag. It
is accomplished: Wakefield is another man. The new system being now
established, a retrograde movement to the old would be almost as
difficult as the step that placed him in his unparalleled position.
Furthermore, he is rendered obstinate by a sulkiness occasionally
incident to his temper and brought on at present by the inadequate
sensation which he conceives to have been produced in the bosom of
Mrs. Wakefield. He will not go back until she be frightened half to
death. Well, twice or thrice has she passed before his sight, each
time with a heavier step, a paler cheek and more anxious brow, and in
the third week of his non-appearance he detects a portent of evil
entering the house in the guise of an apothecary. Next day the knocker
is muffled. Toward nightfall comes the chariot of a physician and
deposits its big-wigged and solemn burden at Wakefield's door, whence
after a quarter of an hour's visit he emerges, perchance the herald of
a funeral. Dear woman! will she die?

By this time Wakefield is excited to something like energy of feeling,
but still lingers away from his wife's bedside, pleading with his
conscience that she must not be disturbed at such a juncture. If aught
else restrains him, he does not know it. In the course of a few weeks
she gradually recovers. The crisis is over; her heart is sad, perhaps,
but quiet, and, let him return soon or late, it will never be feverish
for him again. Such ideas glimmer through the mist of Wakefield's mind
and render him indistinctly conscious that an almost impassable gulf
divides his hired apartment from his former home. "It is but in the
next street," he sometimes says. Fool! it is in another world.
Hitherto he has put off' his return from one particular day to
another; henceforward he leaves the precise time undetermined--not
to-morrow; probably next week; pretty soon. Poor man! The dead have
nearly as much chance of revisiting their earthly homes as the
self-banished Wakefield.

Would that I had a folio to write, instead of an article of a dozen
pages! Then might I exemplify how an influence beyond our control lays
its strong hand on every deed which we do and weaves its consequences
into an iron tissue of necessity.

Wakefield is spellbound. We must leave him for ten years or so to
haunt around his house without once crossing the threshold, and to be
faithful to his wife with all the affection of which his heart is
capable, while he is slowly fading out of hers. Long since, it must be
remarked, he has lost the perception of singularity in his conduct.

Now for a scene. Amid the throng of a London street we distinguish a
man, now waxing elderly, with few characteristics to attract careless
observers, yet bearing in his whole aspect the handwriting of no
common fate for such as have the skill to read it. He is meagre; his
low and narrow forehead is deeply wrinkled; his eyes, small and
lustreless, sometimes wander apprehensively about him, but oftener
seem to look inward. He bends his head and moves with an indescribable
obliquity of gait, as if unwilling to display his full front to the
world. Watch him long enough to see what we have described, and you
will allow that circumstances--which often produce remarkable men from
Nature's ordinary handiwork--have produced one such here. Next,
leaving him to sidle along the footwalk, cast your eyes in the
opposite direction, where a portly female considerably in the wane of
life, with a prayer-book in her hand, is proceeding to yonder church.
She has the placid mien of settled widowhood. Her regrets have either
died away or have become so essential to her heart that they would be
poorly exchanged for joy. Just as the lean man and well-conditioned
woman are passing a slight obstruction occurs and brings these two
figures directly in contact. Their hands touch; the pressure of the
crowd forces her bosom against his shoulder; they stand face to face,
staring into each other's eyes. After a ten years' separation thus
Wakefield meets his wife. The throng eddies away and carries them
asunder. The sober widow, resuming her former pace, proceeds to
church, but pauses in the portal and throws a perplexed glance along
the street. She passes in, however, opening her prayer-book as she
goes.

And the man? With so wild a face that busy and selfish London stands
to gaze after him he hurries to his lodgings, bolts the door and
throws himself upon the bed. The latent feelings of years break out;
his feeble mind acquires a brief energy from their strength; all the
miserable strangeness of his life is revealed to him at a glance, and
he cries out passionately, "Wakefield, Wakefield! You are mad!"
Perhaps he was so. The singularity of his situation must have so
moulded him to itself that, considered in regard to his
fellow-creatures and the business of life, he could not be said to
possess his right mind. He had contrived--or, rather, he had
happened--to dissever himself from the world, to vanish, to give up
his place and privileges with living men without being admitted among
the dead. The life of a hermit is nowise parallel to his. He was in
the bustle of the city as of old, but the crowd swept by and saw him
not; he was, we may figuratively say, always beside his wife and at
his hearth, yet must never feel the warmth of the one nor the
affection of the other. It was Wakefield's unprecedented fate to
retain his original share of human sympathies and to be still involved
in human interests, while he had lost his reciprocal influence on
them. It would be a most curious speculation to trace out the effect
of such circumstances on his heart and intellect separately and in
unison. Yet, changed as he was, he would seldom be conscious of it,
but deem himself the same man as ever; glimpses of the truth, indeed,
would come, but only for the moment, and still he would keep saying,
"I shall soon go back," nor reflect that he had been saying so for
twenty years.

I conceive, also, that these twenty years would appear in the
retrospect scarcely longer than the week to which Wakefield had at
first limited his absence. He would look on the affair as no more than
an interlude in the main business of his life. When, after a little
while more, he should deem it time to re-enter his parlor, his wife
would clap her hands for joy on beholding the middle-aged Mr.
Wakefield. Alas, what a mistake! Would Time but await the close of our
favorite follies, we should be young men--all of us--and till
Doomsday.

One evening, in the twentieth year since he vanished, Wakefield is
taking his customary walk toward the dwelling which he still calls his
own. It is a gusty night of autumn, with frequent showers that patter
down upon the pavement and are gone before a man can put up his
umbrella. Pausing near the house, Wakefield discerns through the
parlor-windows of the second floor the red glow and the glimmer and
fitful flash of a comfortable fire. On the ceiling appears a grotesque
shadow of good Mrs. Wakefield. The cap, the nose and chin and the
broad waist form an admirable caricature, which dances, moreover, with
the up-flickering and down-sinking blaze almost too merrily for the
shade of an elderly widow. At this instant a shower chances to fall,
and is driven by the unmannerly gust full into Wakefield's face and
bosom. He is quite penetrated with its autumnal chill. Shall he stand
wet and shivering here, when his own hearth has a good fire to warm
him and his own wife will run to fetch the gray coat and small-clothes
which doubtless she has kept carefully in the closet of their
bedchamber? No; Wakefield is no such fool. He ascends the
steps--heavily, for twenty years have stiffened his legs since he came
down, but he knows it not.--Stay, Wakefield! Would you go to the sole
home that is left you? Then step into your grave.--The door opens. As
he passes in we have a parting glimpse of his visage, and recognize
the crafty smile which was the precursor of the little joke that he
has ever since been playing off at his wife's expense. How
unmercifully has he quizzed the poor woman! Well, a good night's rest
to Wakefield!

This happy event--supposing it to be such--could only have occurred at
an unpremeditated moment. We will not follow our friend across the
threshold. He has left us much food for thought, a portion of which
shall lend its wisdom to a moral and be shaped into a figure. Amid the
seeming confusion of our mysterious world individuals are so nicely
adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that
by stepping aside for a moment a man exposes himself to a fearful risk
of losing his place for ever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it
were, the outcast of the universe.




A RILL FROM THE TOWN-PUMP.


(SCENE, _the corner of two principal streets_,[1] _the_ TOWN-PUMP
_talking through its nose_.)


Noon by the north clock! Noon by the east! High noon, too, by these
hot sunbeams, which full, scarcely aslope, upon my head and almost
make the water bubble and smoke in the trough under my nose. Truly,
we public characters have a tough time of it! And among all the
town-officers chosen at March meeting, where is he that sustains for a
single year the burden of such manifold duties as are imposed in
perpetuity upon the town-pump? The title of "town-treasurer" is
rightfully mine, as guardian of the best treasure that the town has.
The overseers of the poor ought to make me their chairman, since I
provide bountifully for the pauper without expense to him that pays
taxes. I am at the head of the fire department and one of the
physicians to the board of health. As a keeper of the peace all
water-drinkers will confess me equal to the constable. I perform some
of the duties of the town-clerk by promulgating public notices when
they are posted on my front. To speak within bounds, I am the chief
person of the municipality, and exhibit, moreover, an admirable
pattern to my brother-officers by the cool, steady, upright, downright
and impartial discharge of my business and the constancy with which I
stand to my post. Summer or winter, nobody seeks me in vain, for all
day long I am seen at the busiest corner, just above the market,
stretching out my arms to rich and poor alike, and at night I hold a
lantern over my head both to show where I am and keep people out of
the gutters. At this sultry noontide I am cupbearer to the parched
populace, for whose benefit an iron goblet is chained to my waist.
Like a dramseller on the mall at muster-day, I cry aloud to all and
sundry in my plainest accents and at the very tiptop of my voice.

[Footnote 1: Essex and Washington streets, Salem.]

Here it is, gentlemen! Here is the good liquor! Walk up, walk up,
gentlemen! Walk up, walk up! Here is the superior stuff! Here is the
unadulterated ale of Father Adam--better than Cognac, Hollands,
Jamaica, strong beer or wine of any price; here it is by the hogshead
or the single glass, and not a cent to pay! Walk up, gentlemen, walk
up, and help yourselves!

It were a pity if all this outcry should draw no customers. Here they
come.--A hot day, gentlemen! Quaff and away again, so as to keep
yourselves in a nice cool sweat.--You, my friend, will need another
cupful to wash the dust out of your throat, if it be as thick there as
it is on your cowhide shoes. I see that you have trudged half a score
of miles to-day, and like a wise man have passed by the taverns and
stopped at the running brooks and well-curbs. Otherwise, betwixt heat
without and fire within, you would have been burnt to a cinder or
melted down to nothing at all, in the fashion of a jelly-fish. Drink
and make room for that other fellow, who seeks my aid to quench the
fiery fever of last night's potations, which he drained from no cup of
mine.--Welcome, most rubicund sir! You and I have been great strangers
hitherto; nor, to confess the truth, will my nose be anxious for a
closer intimacy till the fumes of your breath be a little less potent.
Mercy on you, man! the water absolutely hisses down your red-hot
gullet and is converted quite to steam in the miniature Tophet which
you mistake for a stomach. Fill again, and tell me, on the word of an
honest toper, did you ever, in cellar, tavern, or any kind of a
dram-shop, spend the price of your children's food for a swig half so
delicious? Now, for the first time these ten years, you know the
flavor of cold water. Good-bye; and whenever you are thirsty, remember
that I keep a constant supply at the old stand.--Who next?--Oh, my
little friend, you are let loose from school and come hither to scrub
your blooming face and drown the memory of certain taps of the ferule,
and other schoolboy troubles, in a draught from the town-pump? Take
it, pure as the current of your young life. Take it, and may your
heart and tongue never be scorched with a fiercer thirst than now!
There, my dear child! put down the cup and yield your place to this
elderly gentleman who treads so tenderly over the paving-stones that I
suspect he is afraid of breaking them. What! he limps by without so
much as thanking me, as if my hospitable offers were meant only for
people who have no wine-cellars.--Well, well, sir, no harm done, I
hope? Go draw the cork, tip the decanter; but when your great toe
shall set you a-roaring, it will be no affair of mine. If gentlemen
love the pleasant titillation of the gout, it is all one to the
town-pump. This thirsty dog with his red tongue lolling out does not
scorn my hospitality, but stands on his hind legs and laps eagerly out
of the trough. See how lightly he capers away again!--Jowler, did your
worship ever have the gout?

Are you all satisfied? Then wipe your mouths, my good friends, and
while my spout has a moment's leisure I will delight the town with a
few historical remniscences. In far antiquity, beneath a darksome
shadow of venerable boughs, a spring bubbled out of the leaf-strewn
earth in the very spot where you now behold me on the sunny pavement.
The water was as bright and clear and deemed as precious as liquid
diamonds. The Indian sagamores drank of it from time immemorial till
the fatal deluge of the firewater burst upon the red men and swept
their whole race away from the cold fountains. Endicott and his
followers came next, and often knelt down to drink, dipping their long
beards in the spring. The richest goblet then was of birch-bark.
Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot from Boston, drank here out
of the hollow of his hand. The elder Higginson here wet his palm and
laid it on the brow of the first town-born child. For many years it
was the watering-place, and, as it were, the washbowl, of the
vicinity, whither all decent folks resorted to purify their visages
and gaze at them afterward--at least, the pretty maidens did--in the
mirror which it made. On Sabbath-days, whenever a babe was to be
baptized, the sexton filled his basin here and placed it on the
communion-table of the humble meeting-house, which partly covered the
site of yonder stately brick one. Thus one generation after another
was consecrated to Heaven by its waters, and cast their waxing and
waning shadows into its glassy bosom, and vanished from the earth, as
if mortal life were but a flitting image in a fountain. Finally the
fountain vanished also. Cellars were dug on all sides and cart-loads
of gravel flung upon its source, whence oozed a turbid stream, forming
a mud-puddle at the corner of two streets. In the hot months, when its
refreshment was most needed, the dust flew in clouds over the
forgotten birthplace of the waters, now their grave. But in the course
of time a town-pump was sunk into the source of the ancient spring;
and when the first decayed, another took its place, and then another,
and still another, till here stand I, gentlemen and ladies, to serve
you with my iron goblet. Drink and be refreshed. The water is as pure
and cold as that which slaked the thirst of the red sagamore beneath
the aged boughs, though now the gem of the wilderness is treasured
under these hot stones, where no shadow falls but from the brick
buildings. And be it the moral of my story that, as this wasted and
long-lost fountain is now known and prized again, so shall the virtues
of cold water--too little valued since your fathers' days--be
recognized by all.

Your pardon, good people! I must interrupt my stream of eloquence and
spout forth a stream of water to replenish the trough for this
teamster and his two yoke of oxen, who have come from Topsfield, or
somewhere along that way. No part of my business is pleasanter than
the watering of cattle. Look! how rapidly they lower the water-mark on
the sides of the trough, till their capacious stomachs are moistened
with a gallon or two apiece and they can afford time to breathe it in
with sighs of calm enjoyment. Now they roll their quiet eyes around
the brim of their monstrous drinking-vessel. An ox is your true toper.

But I perceive, my dear auditors, that you are impatient for the
remainder of my discourse. Impute it, I beseech you, to no defect of
modesty if I insist a little longer on so fruitful a topic as my own
multifarious merits. It is altogether for your good. The better you
think of me, the better men and women you will find yourselves. I
shall say nothing of my all-important aid on washing-days, though on
that account alone I might call myself the household god of a hundred
families. Far be it from me, also, to hint, my respectable friends, at
the show of dirty faces which you would present without my pains to
keep you clean. Nor will I remind you how often, when the midnight
bells make you tremble for your combustible town, you have fled to the
town-pump and found me always at my post firm amid the confusion and
ready to drain my vital current in your behalf. Neither is it worth
while to lay much stress on my claims to a medical diploma as the
physician whose simple rule of practice is preferable to all the
nauseous lore which has found men sick, or left them so, since the
days of Hippocrates. Let us take a broader view of my beneficial
influence on mankind.

No; these are trifles, compared with the merits which wise men concede
to me--if not in my single self, yet as the representative of a
class--of being the grand reformer of the age. From my spout, and such
spouts as mine, must flow the stream that shall cleanse our earth of
the vast portion of its crime and anguish which has gushed from the
fiery fountains of the still. In this mighty enterprise the cow shall
be my great confederate. Milk and water--the TOWN-PUMP and the Cow!
Such is the glorious copartnership that shall tear down the
distilleries and brewhouses, uproot the vineyards, shatter the
cider-presses, ruin the tea and coffee trade, and finally monopolize
the whole business of quenching thirst. Blessed consummation! Then
Poverty shall pass away from the land, finding no hovel so wretched
where her squalid form may shelter herself. Then Disease, for lack of
other victims, shall gnaw its own heart and die. Then Sin, if she do
not die, shall lose half her strength. Until now the frenzy of
hereditary fever has raged in the human blood, transmitted from sire
to son and rekindled in every generation by fresh draughts of liquid
flame. When that inward fire shall be extinguished, the heat of
passion cannot but grow cool, and war--the drunkenness of
nations--perhaps will cease. At least, there will be no war of
households. The husband and wife, drinking deep of peaceful joy--a
calm bliss of temperate affections--shall pass hand in hand through
life and lie down not reluctantly at its protracted close. To them the
past will be no turmoil of mad dreams, nor the future an eternity of
such moments as follow the delirium of the drunkard. Their dead faces
shall express what their spirits were and are to be by a lingering
smile of memory and hope.

Ahem! Dry work, this speechifying, especially to an unpractised
orator. I never conceived till now what toil the temperance lecturers
undergo for my sake; hereafter they shall have the business to
themselves.--Do, some kind Christian, pump a stroke or two, just to
wet my whistle.--Thank you, sir!--My dear hearers, when the world
shall have been regenerated by my instrumentality, you will collect
your useless vats and liquor-casks into one great pile and make a
bonfire in honor of the town-pump. And when I shall have decayed like
my predecessors, then, if you revere my memory, let a marble fountain
richly sculptured take my place upon this spot. Such monuments should
be erected everywhere and inscribed with the names of the
distinguished champions of my cause. Now, listen, for something very
important is to come next.

There are two or three honest friends of mine--and true friends I know
they are--who nevertheless by their fiery pugnacity in my behalf do
put me in fearful hazard of a broken nose, or even a total overthrow
upon the pavement and the loss of the treasure which I guard.--I pray
you, gentlemen, let this fault be amended. Is it decent, think you, to
get tipsy with zeal for temperance and take up the honorable cause of
the town-pump in the style of a toper fighting for his brandy-bottle?
Or can the excellent qualities of cold water be no otherwise
exemplified than by plunging slapdash into hot water and woefully
scalding yourselves and other people? Trust me, they may. In the moral
warfare which you are to wage--and, indeed, in the whole conduct of
your lives--you cannot choose a better example than myself, who have
never permitted the dust and sultry atmosphere, the turbulence and
manifold disquietudes, of the world around me to reach that deep, calm
well of purity which may be called my soul. And whenever I pour out
that soul, it is to cool earth's fever or cleanse its stains.

One o'clock! Nay, then, if the dinner-bell begins to speak, I may as
well hold my peace. Here comes a pretty young girl of my acquaintance
with a large stone pitcher for me to fill. May she draw a husband
while drawing her water, as Rachel did of old!--Hold out your vessel,
my dear! There it is, full to the brim; so now run home, peeping at
your sweet image in the pitcher as you go, and forget not in a glass
of my own liquor to drink "SUCCESS TO THE TOWN-PUMP."




THE GREAT CARBUNCLE.[1]

A MYSTERY OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.


At nightfall once in the olden time, on the rugged side of one of the
Crystal Hills, a party of adventurers were refreshing themselves after
a toilsome and fruitless quest for the Great Carbuncle. They had come
thither, not as friends nor partners in the enterprise, but each, save
one youthful pair, impelled by his own selfish and solitary longing
for this wondrous gem. Their feeling of brotherhood, however, was
strong enough to induce them to contribute a mutual aid in building a
rude hut of branches and kindling a great fire of shattered pines that
had drifted down the headlong current of the Amonoosuck, on the lower
bank of which they were to pass the night. There was but one of their
number, perhaps, who had become so estranged from natural sympathies
by the absorbing spell of the pursuit as to acknowledge no
satisfaction at the sight of human faces in the remote and solitary
region whither they had ascended. A vast extent of wilderness lay
between them and the nearest settlement, while scant a mile above
their heads was that bleak verge where the hills throw off their
shaggy mantle of forest-trees and either robe themselves in clouds or
tower naked into the sky. The roar of the Amonoosuck would have been
too awful for endurance if only a solitary man had listened while the
mountain-stream talked with the wind.

[Footnote 1: The Indian tradition on which this somewhat extravagant
tale is founded is both too wild and too beautiful to be adequately
wrought up in prose. Sullivan, in his history of Maine, written since
the Revolution, remarks that even then the existence of the Great
Carbuncle was not entirely discredited.]

The adventurers, therefore, exchanged hospitable greetings and
welcomed one another to the hut where each man was the host and all
were the guests of the whole company. They spread their individual
supplies of food on the flat surface of a rock and partook of a
general repast; at the close of which a sentiment of good-fellowship
was perceptible among the party, though repressed by the idea that the
renewed search for the Great Carbuncle must make them strangers again
in the morning. Seven men and one young woman, they warmed themselves
together at the fire, which extended its bright wall along the whole
front of their wigwam. As they observed the various and contrasted
figures that made up the assemblage, each man looking like a
caricature of himself in the unsteady light that flickered over him,
they came mutually to the conclusion that an odder society had never
met in city or wilderness, on mountain or plain.

The eldest of the group--a tall, lean, weatherbeaten man some sixty
years of age--was clad in the skins of wild animals whose fashion of
dress he did well to imitate, since the deer, the wolf and the bear
had long been his most intimate companions. He was one of those
ill-fated mortals, such as the Indians told of, whom in their early
youth the Great Carbuncle smote with a peculiar madness and became the
passionate dream of their existence. All who visited that region knew
him as "the Seeker," and by no other name. As none could remember when
he first took up the search, there went a fable in the valley of the
Saco that for his inordinate lust after the Great Carbuncle he had
been condemned to wander among the mountains till the end of time,
still with the same feverish hopes at sunrise, the same despair at
eve. Near this miserable Seeker sat a little elderly personage wearing
a high-crowned hat shaped somewhat like a crucible. He was from beyond
the sea--a Doctor Cacaphodel, who had wilted and dried himself into a
mummy by continually stooping over charcoal-furnaces and inhaling
unwholesome fumes during his researches in chemistry and alchemy. It
was told of him--whether truly or not--that at the commencement of his
studies he had drained his body of all its richest blood and wasted
it, with other inestimable ingredients, in an unsuccessful experiment,
and had never been a well man since. Another of the adventurers was
Master Ichabod Pigsnort, a weighty merchant and selectman of Boston,
and an elder of the famous Mr. Norton's church. His enemies had a
ridiculous story that Master Pigsnort was accustomed to spend a whole
hour after prayer-time every morning and evening in wallowing naked
among an immense quantity of pine-tree shillings, which were the
earliest silver coinage of Massachusetts. The fourth whom we shall
notice had no name that his companions knew of, and was chiefly
distinguished by a sneer that always contorted his thin visage, and by
a prodigious pair of spectacles which were supposed to deform and
discolor the whole face of nature to this gentleman's perception. The
fifth adventurer likewise lacked a name, which was the greater pity,
as he appeared to be a poet. He was a bright-eyed man, but woefully
pined away, which was no more than natural if, as some people
affirmed, his ordinary diet was fog, morning mist and a slice of the
densest cloud within his reach, sauced with moonshine whenever he
could get it. Certain it is that the poetry which flowed from him had
a smack of all these dainties. The sixth of the party was a young man
of haughty mien and sat somewhat apart from the rest, wearing his
plumed hat loftily among his elders, while the fire glittered on the
rich embroidery of his dress and gleamed intensely on the jewelled
pommel of his sword. This was the lord De Vere, who when at home was
said to spend much of his time in the burial-vault of his dead
progenitors rummaging their mouldy coffins in search of all the
earthly pride and vainglory that was hidden among bones and dust; so
that, besides his own share, he had the collected haughtiness of his
whole line of ancestry. Lastly, there was a handsome youth in rustic
garb, and by his side a blooming little person in whom a delicate
shade of maiden reserve was just melting into the rich glow of a young
wife's affection. Her name was Hannah, and her husband's Matthew--two
homely names, yet well enough adapted to the simple pair who seemed
strangely out of place among the whimsical fraternity whose wits had
been set agog by the Great Carbuncle.

Beneath the shelter of one hut, in the bright blaze of the same fire,
sat this varied group of adventurers, all so intent upon a single
object that of whatever else they began to speak their closing words
were sure to be illuminated with the Great Carbuncle. Several related
the circumstances that brought them thither. One had listened to a
traveller's tale of this marvellous stone in his own distant country,
and had immediately been seized with such a thirst for beholding it as
could only be quenched in its intensest lustre. Another, so long ago
as when the famous Captain Smith visited these coasts, had seen it
blazing far at sea, and had felt no rest in all the intervening years
till now that he took up the search. A third, being encamped on a
hunting-expedition full forty miles south of the White Mountains,
awoke at midnight and beheld the Great Carbuncle gleaming like a
meteor, so that the shadows of the trees fell backward from it. They
spoke of the innumerable attempts which had been made to reach the
spot, and of the singular fatality which had hitherto withheld success
from all adventurers, though it might seem so easy to follow to its
source a light that overpowered the moon and almost matched the sun.
It was observable that each smiled scornfully at the madness of every
other in anticipating better fortune than the past, yet nourished a
scarcely-hidden conviction that he would himself be the favored one.
As if to allay their too sanguine hopes, they recurred to the Indian
traditions that a spirit kept watch about the gem and bewildered those
who sought it either by removing it from peak to peak of the higher
hills or by calling up a mist from the enchanted lake over which it
hung. But these tales were deemed unworthy of credit, all professing
to believe that the search had been baffled by want of sagacity or
perseverance in the adventurers, or such other causes as might
naturally obstruct the passage to any given point among the
intricacies of forest, valley and mountain.

In a pause of the conversation the wearer of the prodigious spectacles
looked round upon the party, making each individual in turn the object
of the sneer which invariably dwelt upon his countenance.

"So, fellow-pilgrims," said he, "here we are, seven wise men and one
fair damsel, who doubtless is as wise as any graybeard of the company.
Here we are, I say, all bound on the same goodly enterprise. Methinks,
now, it were not amiss that each of us declare what he proposes to do
with the Great Carbuncle, provided he have the good hap to clutch
it.--What says our friend in the bearskin? How mean you, good sir, to
enjoy the prize which you have been seeking the Lord knows how long
among the Crystal Hills?"

"How enjoy it!" exclaimed the aged Seeker, bitterly. "I hope for no
enjoyment from it--that folly has past, long ago! I keep up the search
for this accursed stone, because the vain ambition of my youth has
become a fate upon me, in old age. The pursuit alone is my strength--the
energy of my soul--the warmth of my blood, and the pith and marrow of my
bones! Were I to turn my back upon it, I should fall down dead, on the
hither side of the Notch, which is the gate-way of this mountain region.
Yet, not to have my wasted life time back again, would I give up my
hopes of the Great Carbuncle! Having found it, I shall bear it to a
certain cavern that I wot of, and there, grasping it in my arms, lie
down and die, and keep it buried with me for ever."

"Oh, wretch, regardless of the interests of science!" cried Doctor
Cacaphodel, with philosophic indignation. "Thou art not worthy to
behold, even from afar off, the lustre of this most precious gem that
ever was concocted in the laboratory of Nature. Mine is the sole purpose
for which a wise man may desire the possession of the Great Carbuncle.
Immediately on obtaining it--for I have a presentiment, good people,
that the prize is reserved to crown my scientific reputation--I shall
return to Europe, and employ my remaining years in reducing it to its
first elements. A portion of the stone will I grind to impalpable
powder; other parts shall be dissolved in acids, or whatever solvents
will act upon so admirable a composition; and the remainder I design to
melt in the crucible, or set on fire with the blow-pipe. By these
various methods, I shall gain an accurate analysis, and finally bestow
the result of my labours upon the world, in a folio volume."

"Excellent!" quoth the man with the spectacles. "Nor need you hesitate,
learned Sir, on account of the necessary destruction of the gem; since
the perusal of your folio may teach every mother's son of us to concoct
a Great Carbuncle of his own."

"But, verily," said Master Ichabod Pigsnort, "for mine own part, I
object to the making of these counterfeits, as being calculated to
reduce the marketable value of the true gem. I tell ye frankly, Sirs, I
have an interest in keeping up the price. Here have I quitted my regular
traffic, leaving my warehouse in the care of my clerks, and putting my
credit to great hazard, and furthermore, have put myself to peril of
death or captivity by the accursed heathen savages--and all this without
daring to ask the prayers of the congregation, because the quest for the
Great Carbuncle is deemed little better than a traffic with the evil
one. Now think ye that I would have done this grievous wrong to my soul,
body, reputation and estate, without a reasonable chance of profit?"

"Not I, pious Master Pigsnort," said the man with the spectacles. "I
never laid such a great folly to thy charge."

"Truly, I hope not," said the merchant. "Now, as touching this Great
Carbuncle, I am free to own that I have never had a glimpse of it,
but, be it only the hundredth part so bright as people tell, it will
surely outvalue the Great Mogul's best diamond, which he holds at an
incalculable sum; wherefore I am minded to put the Great Carbuncle on
shipboard and voyage with it to England, France, Spain, Italy, or into
heathendom if Providence should send me thither, and, in a word,
dispose of the gem to the best bidder among the potentates of the
earth, that he may place it among his crown-jewels. If any of ye have
a wiser plan, let him expound it."

"That have I, thou sordid man!" exclaimed the poet. "Dost thou desire
nothing brighter than gold, that thou wouldst transmute all this
ethereal lustre into such dross as thou wallowest in already? For
myself, hiding the jewel under my cloak, I shall hie me back to my
attic-chamber in one of the darksome alleys of London. There night and
day will I gaze upon it. My soul shall drink its radiance; it shall be
diffused throughout my intellectual powers and gleam brightly in every
line of poesy that I indite. Thus long ages after I am gone the
splendor of the Great Carbuncle will blaze around my name."

"Well said, Master Poet!" cried he of the spectacles. "Hide it under
thy cloak, sayest thou? Why, it will gleam through the holes and make
thee look like a jack-o'-lantern!"

"To think," ejaculated the lord De Vere, rather to himself than his
companions, the best of whom he held utterly unworthy of his
intercourse--"to think that a fellow in a tattered cloak should talk
of conveying the Great Carbuncle to a garret in Grubb street! Have not
I resolved within myself that the whole earth contains no fitter
ornament for the great hall of my ancestral castle? There shall it
flame for ages, making a noonday of midnight, glittering on the suits
of armor, the banners and escutcheons, that hang around the wall, and
keeping bright the memory of heroes. Wherefore have all other
adventurers sought the prize in vain but that I might win it and make
it a symbol of the glories of our lofty line? And never on the diadem
of the White Mountains did the Great Carbuncle hold a place half so
honored as is reserved for it in the hall of the De Veres."

"It is a noble thought," said the cynic, with an obsequious sneer.
"Yet, might I presume to say so, the gem would make a rare sepulchral
lamp, and would display the glories of Your Lordship's progenitors
more truly in the ancestral vault than in the castle-hall."

"Nay, forsooth," observed Matthew, the young rustic, who sat hand in
hand with his bride, "the gentleman has bethought himself of a
profitable use for this bright stone. Hannah here and I are seeking it
for a like purpose."

"How, fellow?" exclaimed His Lordship, in surprise. "What castle-hall
hast thou to hang it in?"

"No castle," replied Matthew, "but as neat a cottage as any within
sight of the Crystal Hills. Ye must know, friends, that Hannah and I,
being wedded the last week, have taken up the search of the Great
Carbuncle because we shall need its light in the long winter evenings
and it will be such a pretty thing to show the neighbors when they
visit us! It will shine through the house, so that we may pick up a
pin in any corner, and will set all the windows a-glowing as if there
were a great fire of pine-knots in the chimney. And then how pleasant,
when we awake in the night, to be able to see one another's faces!"

There was a general smile among the adventurers at the simplicity of
the young couple's project in regard to this wondrous and invaluable
stone, with which the greatest monarch on earth might have been proud
to adorn his palace. Especially the man with spectacles, who had
sneered at all the company in turn, now twisted his visage into such
an expression of ill-natured mirth that Matthew asked him rather
peevishly what he himself meant to do with the Great Carbuncle.

"The Great Carbuncle!" answered the cynic, with ineffable scorn. "Why,
you blockhead, there is no such thing in _rerum natura_. I have
come three thousand miles, and am resolved to set my foot on every
peak of these mountains and poke my head into every chasm for the sole
purpose of demonstrating to the satisfaction of any man one whit less
an ass than thyself that the Great Carbuncle is all a humbug."

Vain and foolish were the motives that had brought most of the
adventurers to the Crystal Hills, but none so vain, so foolish, and so
impious too, as that of the scoffer with the prodigious spectacles. He
was one of those wretched and evil men whose yearnings are downward to
the darkness instead of heavenward, and who, could they but extinguish
the lights which God hath kindled for us, would count the midnight
gloom their chiefest glory.

As the cynic spoke several of the party were startled by a gleam of
red splendor that showed the huge shapes of the surrounding mountains
and the rock-bestrewn bed of the turbulent river, with an illumination
unlike that of their fire, on the trunks and black boughs of the
forest-trees. They listened for the roll of thunder, but heard
nothing, and were glad that the tempest came not near them. The
stars--those dial-points of heaven--now warned the adventurers to
close their eyes on the blazing logs and open them in dreams to the
glow of the Great Carbuncle.

The young married couple had taken their lodgings in the farthest
corner of the wigwam, and were separated from the rest of the party by
a curtain of curiously-woven twigs such as might have hung in deep
festoons around the bridal-bower of Eve. The modest little wife had
wrought this piece of tapestry while the other guests were talking.
She and her husband fell asleep with hands tenderly clasped, and awoke
from visions of unearthly radiance to meet the more blessed light of
one another's eyes. They awoke at the same instant and with one happy
smile beaming over their two faces, which grew brighter with their
consciousness of the reality of life and love. But no sooner did she
recollect where they were than the bride peeped through the
interstices of the leafy curtain and saw that the outer room of the
hut was deserted.

"Up, dear Matthew!" cried she, in haste. "The strange folk are all
gone. Up this very minute, or we shall lose the Great Carbuncle!"

In truth, so little did these poor young people deserve the mighty
prize which had lured them thither that they had slept peacefully all
night and till the summits of the hills were glittering with sunshine,
while the other adventurers had tossed their limbs in feverish
wakefulness or dreamed of climbing precipices, and set off to realize
their dreams with the curliest peep of dawn. But Matthew and Hannah
after their calm rest were as light as two young deer, and merely
stopped to say their prayers and wash themselves in a cold pool of the
Amonoosuck, and then to taste a morsel of food ere they turned their
faces to the mountain-side. It was a sweet emblem of conjugal
affection as they toiled up the difficult ascent gathering strength
from the mutual aid which they afforded.

After several little accidents, such as a torn robe, a lost shoe and
the entanglement of Hannah's hair in a bough, they reached the upper
verge of the forest and were now to pursue a more adventurous course.
The innumerable trunks and heavy foliage of the trees had hitherto
shut in their thoughts, which now shrank affrighted from the region of
wind and cloud and naked rocks and desolate sunshine that rose
immeasurably above them. They gazed back at the obscure wilderness
which they had traversed, and longed to be buried again in its depths
rather than trust themselves to so vast and visible a solitude.

"Shall we go on?" said Matthew, throwing his arm round Hannah's waist
both to protect her and to comfort his heart by drawing her close to
it.

But the little bride, simple as she was, had a woman's love of jewels,
and could not forego the hope of possessing the very brightest in the
world, in spite of the perils with which it must be won.

"Let us climb a little higher," whispered she, yet tremulously, as she
turned her face upward to the lonely sky.

"Come, then," said Matthew, mustering his manly courage and drawing
her along with him; for she became timid again the moment that he grew
bold.

And upward, accordingly, went the pilgrims of the Great Carbuncle, now
treading upon the tops and thickly-interwoven branches of dwarf pines
which by the growth of centuries, though mossy with age, had barely
reached three feet in altitude. Next they came to masses and fragments
of naked rock heaped confusedly together like a cairn reared by giants
in memory of a giant chief. In this bleak realm of upper air nothing
breathed, nothing grew; there was no life but what was concentred in
their two hearts; they had climbed so high that Nature herself seemed
no longer to keep them company. She lingered beneath them within the
verge of the forest-trees, and sent a farewell glance after her
children as they strayed where her own green footprints had never
been. But soon they were to be hidden from her eye. Densely and dark
the mists began to gather below, casting black spots of shadow on the
vast landscape and sailing heavily to one centre, as if the loftiest
mountain-peak had summoned a council of its kindred clouds. Finally
the vapors welded themselves, as it were, into a mass, presenting the
appearance of a pavement over which the wanderers might have trodden,
but where they would vainly have sought an avenue to the blessed earth
which they had lost. And the lovers yearned to behold that green earth
again--more intensely, alas! than beneath a clouded sky they had ever
desired a glimpse of heaven. They even felt it a relief to their
desolation when the mists, creeping gradually up the mountain,
concealed its lonely peak, and thus annihilated--at least, for
them--the whole region of visible space. But they drew closer together
with a fond and melancholy gaze, dreading lest the universal cloud
should snatch them from each other's sight. Still, perhaps, they would
have been resolute to climb as far and as high between earth and
heaven as they could find foothold if Hannah's strength had not begun
to fail, and with that her courage also. Her breath grew short. She
refused to burden her husband with her weight, but often tottered
against his side, and recovered herself each time by a feebler effort.
At last she sank down on one of the rocky steps of the acclivity.

"We are lost, dear Matthew," said she, mournfully; "we shall never
find our way to the earth again. And oh how happy we might have been
in our cottage!"

"Dear heart, we will yet be happy there," answered Matthew. "Look! In
this direction the sunshine penetrates the dismal mist; by its aid I
can direct our course to the passage of the Notch. Let us go back,
love, and dream no more of the Great Carbuncle."

"The sun cannot be yonder," said Hannah, with despondence. "By this
time it must be noon; if there could ever be any sunshine here, it
would come from above our heads."

"But look!" repeated Matthew, in a somewhat altered tone. "It is
brightening every moment. If not sunshine, what can it be?"

Nor could the young bride any longer deny that a radiance was breaking
through the mist and changing its dim hue to a dusky red, which
continually grew more vivid, as if brilliant particles were interfused
with the gloom. Now, also, the cloud began to roll away from the
mountain, while, as it heavily withdrew, one object after another
started out of its impenetrable obscurity into sight with precisely
the effect of a new creation before the indistinctness of the old
chaos had been completely swallowed up. As the process went on they
saw the gleaming of water close at their feet, and found themselves on
the very border of a mountain-lake, deep, bright, clear and calmly
beautiful, spreading from brim to brim of a basin that had been
scooped out of the solid rock. A ray of glory flashed across its
surface. The pilgrims looked whence it should proceed, but closed
their eyes, with a thrill of awful admiration, to exclude the fervid
splendor that glowed from the brow of a cliff impending over the
enchanted lake.

For the simple pair had reached that lake of mystery and found the
long-sought shrine of the Great Carbuncle. They threw their arms
around each other and trembled at their own success, for as the
legends of this wondrous gem rushed thick upon their memory they felt
themselves marked out by fate, and the consciousness was fearful.
Often from childhood upward they had seen it shining like a distant
star, and now that star was throwing its intensest lustre on their
hearts. They seemed changed to one another's eyes in the red
brilliancy that flamed upon their cheeks, while it lent the same fire
to the lake, the rocks and sky, and to the mists which had rolled back
before its power. But with their next glance they beheld an object
that drew their attention even from the mighty stone. At the base of
the cliff, directly beneath the Great Carbuncle, appeared the figure
of a man with his arms extended in the act of climbing and his face
turned upward as if to drink the full gush of splendor. But he stirred
not, no more than if changed to marble.

"It is the Seeker," whispered Hannah, convulsively grasping her
husband's arm. "Matthew, he is dead."

"The joy of success has killed him," replied Matthew, trembling
violently. "Or perhaps the very light of the Great Carbuncle was
death."

"'The Great Carbuncle'!" cried a peevish voice behind them. "The great
humbug! If you have found it, prithee point it out to me."

They turned their heads, and there was the cynic with his prodigious
spectacles set carefully on his nose, staring now at the lake, now at
the rocks, now at the distant masses of vapor, now right at the Great
Carbuncle itself, yet seemingly as unconscious of its light as if all
the scattered clouds were condensed about his person. Though its
radiance actually threw the shadow of the unbeliever at his own feet
as he turned his back upon the glorious jewel, he would not be
convinced that there was the least glimmer there.

"Where is your great humbug?" he repeated. "I challenge you to make me
see it."

"There!" said Matthew, incensed at such perverse blindness, and
turning the cynic round toward the illuminated cliff. "Take off those
abominable spectacles, and you cannot help seeing it."

Now, these colored spectacles probably darkened the cynic's sight in
at least as great a degree as the smoked glasses through which people
gaze at an eclipse. With resolute bravado, however, he snatched them
from his nose and fixed a bold stare full upon the ruddy blaze of the
Great Carbuncle. But scarcely had he encountered it when, with a deep,
shuddering groan, he dropped his head and pressed both hands across
his miserable eyes. Thenceforth there was in very truth no light of
the Great Carbuncle, nor any other light on earth, nor light of heaven
itself, for the poor cynic. So long accustomed to view all objects
through a medium that deprived them of every glimpse of brightness, a
single flash of so glorious a phenomenon, striking upon his naked
vision, had blinded him for ever.

"Matthew," said Hannah, clinging to him, "let us go hence."

Matthew saw that she was faint, and, kneeling down, supported her in
his arms while he threw some of the thrillingly-cold water of the
enchanted lake upon her face and bosom. It revived her, but could not
renovate her courage.

"Yes, dearest," cried Matthew, pressing her tremulous form to his
breast; "we will go hence and return to our humble cottage. The
blessed sunshine and the quiet moonlight shall come through our
window. We will kindle the cheerful glow of our hearth at eventide and
be happy in its light. But never again will we desire more light than
all the world may share with us."

"No," said his bride, "for how could we live by day or sleep by night
in this awful blaze of the Great Carbuncle?"

Out of the hollow of their hands they drank each a draught from the
lake, which presented them its waters uncontaminated by an earthly
lip. Then, lending their guidance to the blinded cynic, who uttered
not a word, and even stifled his groans in his own most wretched
heart, they began to descend the mountain. Yet as they left the shore,
till then untrodden, of the spirit's lake, they threw a farewell
glance toward the cliff and beheld the vapors gathering in dense
volumes, through which the gem burned duskily.

As touching the other pilgrims of the Great Carbuncle, the legend goes
on to tell that the worshipful Master Ichabod Pigsnort soon gave up
the quest as a desperate speculation, and wisely resolved to betake
himself again to his warehouse, near the town-dock, in Boston. But as
he passed through the Notch of the mountains a war-party of Indians
captured our unlucky merchant and carried him to Montreal, there
holding him in bondage till by the payment of a heavy ransom he had
woefully subtracted from his hoard of pine-tree shillings. By his long
absence, moreover, his affairs had become so disordered that for the
rest of his life, instead of wallowing in silver, he had seldom a
sixpence-worth of copper. Doctor Cacaphodel, the alchemist, returned
to his laboratory with a prodigious fragment of granite, which he
ground to powder, dissolved in acids, melted in the crucible and burnt
with the blowpipe, and published the result of his experiments in one
of the heaviest folios of the day. And for all these purposes the gem
itself could not have answered better than the granite. The poet, by a
somewhat similar mistake, made prize of a great piece of ice which he
found in a sunless chasm of the mountains, and swore that it
corresponded in all points with his idea of the Great Carbuncle. The
critics say that, if his poetry lacked the splendor of the gem, it
retained all the coldness of the ice. The lord De Vere went back to
his ancestral hall, where he contented himself with a wax-lighted
chandelier, and filled in due course of time another coffin in the
ancestral vault. As the funeral torches gleamed within that dark
receptacle, there was no need of the Great Carbuncle to show the
vanity of earthly pomp.

The cynic, having cast aside his spectacles, wandered about the world
a miserable object, and was punished with an agonizing desire of light
for the wilful blindness of his former life. The whole night long he
would lift his splendor-blasted orbs to the moon and stars; he turned
his face eastward at sunrise as duly as a Persian idolater; he made a
pilgrimage to Rome to witness the magnificent illumination of Saint
Peter's church, and finally perished in the Great Fire of London, into
the midst of which he had thrust himself with the desperate idea of
catching one feeble ray from the blaze that was kindling earth and
heaven.

Matthew and his bride spent many peaceful years and were fond of
telling the legend of the Great Carbuncle. The tale, however, toward
the close of their lengthened lives, did not meet with the full
credence that had been accorded to it by those who remembered the
ancient lustre of the gem. For it is affirmed that from the hour when
two mortals had shown themselves so simply wise as to reject a jewel
which would have dimmed all earthly things its splendor waned. When
our pilgrims reached the cliff, they found only an opaque stone with
particles of mica glittering on its surface. There is also a tradition
that as the youthful pair departed the gem was loosened from the
forehead of the cliff and fell into the enchanted lake, and that at
noontide the Seeker's form may still be seen to bend over its
quenchless gleam.

Some few believe that this inestimable stone is blazing as of old, and
say that they have caught its radiance, like a flash of summer
lightning, far down the valley of the Saco. And be it owned that many
a mile from the Crystal Hills I saw a wondrous light around their
summits, and was lured by the faith of poesy to be the latest pilgrim
of the Great Carbuncle.




THE PROPHETIC PICTURES.[1]


"But this painter!" cried Walter Ludlow, with animation. "He not only
excels in his peculiar art, but possesses vast acquirements in all
other learning and science. He talks Hebrew with Dr. Mather and gives
lectures in anatomy to Dr. Boylston. In a word, he will meet the
best-instructed man among us on his own ground. Moreover, he is a
polished gentleman, a citizen of the world--yes, a true cosmopolite;
for he will speak like a native of each clime and country on the
globe, except our own forests, whither he is now going. Nor is all
this what I most admire in him."

[Footnote 1: This story was suggested by an anecdote of Stuart related
in Dunlap's _History of the Arts of Designs_--a most entertaining
book to the general reader, and a deeply-interesting one, we should
think, to the artist.]

"Indeed!" said Elinor, who had listened with a women's interest to the
description of such a man. "Yet this is admirable enough."

"Surely it is," replied her lover, "but far less so than his natural
gift of adapting himself to every variety of character, insomuch that
all men--and all women too, Elinor--shall find a mirror of themselves
in this wonderful painter. But the greatest wonder is yet to be told."

"Nay, if he have more wonderful attributes than these," said Elinor,
laughing, "Boston is a perilous abode for the poor gentleman. Are you
telling me of a painter, or a wizard?"

"In truth," answered he, "that question might be asked much more
seriously than you suppose. They say that he paints not merely a man's
features, but his mind and heart. He catches the secret sentiments and
passions and throws them upon the canvas like sunshine, or perhaps, in
the portraits of dark-souled men, like a gleam of infernal fire. It is
an awful gift," added Walter, lowering his voice from its tone of
enthusiasm. "I shall be almost afraid to sit to him."

"Walter, are you in earnest?" exclaimed Elinor.

"For Heaven's sake, dearest Elinor, do not let him paint the look
which you now wear," said her lover, smiling, though rather perplexed.
"There! it is passing away now; but when you spoke, you seemed
frightened to death, and very sad besides. What were you thinking of?"

"Nothing, nothing!" answered Elinor, hastily. "You paint my face with
your own fantasies. Well, come for me tomorrow, and we will visit this
wonderful artist."

But when the young man had departed, it cannot be denied that a
remarkable expression was again visible on the fair and youthful face
of his mistress. It was a sad and anxious look, little in accordance
with what should have been the feelings of a maiden on the eve of
wedlock. Yet Walter Ludlow was the chosen of her heart.

"A look!" said Elinor to herself. "No wonder that it startled him if
it expressed what I sometimes feel. I know by my own experience how
frightful a look may be. But it was all fancy. I thought nothing of it
at the time; I have seen nothing of it since; I did but dream it;" and
she busied herself about the embroidery of a ruff in which she meant
that her portrait should be taken.

The painter of whom they had been speaking was not one of those native
artists who at a later period than this borrowed their colors from the
Indians and manufactured their pencils of the furs of wild beasts.
Perhaps, if he could have revoked his life and prearranged his
destiny, he might have chosen to belong to that school without a
master in the hope of being at least original, since there were no
works of art to imitate nor rules to follow. But he had been born and
educated in Europe. People said that he had studied the grandeur or
beauty of conception and every touch of the master-hand in all the
most famous pictures in cabinets and galleries and on the walls of
churches till there was nothing more for his powerful mind to learn.
Art could add nothing to its lessons, but Nature might. He had,
therefore, visited a world whither none of his professional brethren
had preceded him, to feast his eyes on visible images that were noble
and picturesque, yet had never been transferred to canvas. America was
too poor to afford other temptations to an artist of eminence, though
many of the colonial gentry on the painter's arrival had expressed a
wish to transmit their lineaments to posterity by moans of his skill.
Whenever such proposals were made, he fixed his piercing eyes on the
applicant and seemed to look him through and through. If he beheld
only a sleek and comfortable visage, though there were a gold-laced
coat to adorn the picture and golden guineas to pay for it, he civilly
rejected the task and the reward; but if the face were the index of
anything uncommon in thought, sentiment or experience, or if he met a
beggar in the street with a white beard and a furrowed brow, or if
sometimes a child happened to look up and smile, he would exhaust all
the art on them that he denied to wealth.

Pictorial skill being so rare in the colonies, the painter became an
object of general curiosity. If few or none could appreciate the
technical merit of his productions, yet there were points in regard to
which the opinion of the crowd was as valuable as the refined judgment
of the amateur. He watched the effect that each picture produced on
such untutored beholders, and derived profit from their remarks, while
they would as soon have thought of instructing Nature herself as him
who seemed to rival her. Their admiration, it must be owned, was
tinctured with the prejudices of the age and country. Some deemed it
an offence against the Mosaic law, and even a presumptuous mockery of
the Creator, to bring into existence such lively images of his
creatures. Others, frightened at the art which could raise phantoms at
will and keep the form of the dead among the living, were inclined to
consider the painter as a magician, or perhaps the famous Black Man of
old witch-times plotting mischief in a new guise. These foolish
fancies were more than half believed among the mob. Even in superior
circles his character was invested with a vague awe, partly rising
like smoke-wreaths from the popular superstitions, but chiefly caused
by the varied knowledge and talents which he made subservient to his
profession.

Being on the eve of marriage, Walter Ludlow and Elinor were eager to
obtain their portraits as the first of what, they doubtless hoped,
would be a long series of family pictures. The day after the
conversation above recorded they visited the painter's rooms. A
servant ushered them into an apartment where, though the artist
himself was not visible, there were personages whom they could hardly
forbear greeting with reverence. They knew, indeed, that the whole
assembly were but pictures, yet felt it impossible to separate the
idea of life and intellect from such striking counterfeits. Several of
the portraits were known to them either as distinguished characters of
the day or their private acquaintances. There was Governor Burnett,
looking as if he had just received an undutiful communication from the
House of Representatives and were inditing a most sharp response. Mr.
Cooke hung beside the ruler whom he opposed, sturdy and somewhat
puritanical, as befitted a popular leader. The ancient lady of Sir
William Phipps eyed them from the wall in ruff and farthingale, an
imperious old dame not unsuspected of witchcraft. John Winslow, then a
very young man, wore the expression of warlike enterprise which long
afterward made him a distinguished general. Their personal friends
were recognized at a glance. In most of the pictures the whole mind
and character were brought out on the countenance and concentrated
into a single look; so that, to speak paradoxically, the originals
hardly resembled themselves so strikingly as the portraits did.

Among these modern worthies there were two old bearded saints who had
almost vanished into the darkening canvas. There was also a pale but
unfaded Madonna who had perhaps been worshipped in Rome, and now
regarded the lovers with such a mild and holy look that they longed to
worship too.

"How singular a thought," observed Walter Ludlow, "that this beautiful
face has been beautiful for above two hundred years! Oh, if all beauty
would endure so well! Do you not envy her, Elinor?"

"If earth were heaven, I might," she replied. "But, where all things
fade, how miserable to be the one that could not fade!"

"This dark old St. Peter has a fierce and ugly scowl, saint though he
be," continued Walter; "he troubles me. But the Virgin looks kindly at
us."

"Yes, but very sorrowfully, methinks," said Elinor.

The easel stood beneath these three old pictures, sustaining one that
had been recently commenced. After a little inspection they began to
recognize the features of their own minister, the Rev. Dr. Colman,
growing into shape and life, as it were, out of a cloud.

"Kind old man!" exclaimed Elinor. "He gazes at me as if he were about
to utter a word of paternal advice."

"And at me," said Walter, "as if he were about to shake his head and
rebuke me for some suspected iniquity. But so does the original. I
shall never feel quite comfortable under his eye till we stand before
him to be married."

They now heard a footstep on the floor, and, turning, beheld the
painter, who had been some moments in the room and had listened to a
few of their remarks. He was a middle-aged man with a countenance well
worthy of his own pencil. Indeed, by the picturesque though careless
arrangement of his rich dress, and perhaps because his soul dwelt
always among painted shapes, he looked somewhat like a portrait
himself. His visitors were sensible of a kindred between the artist
and his works, and felt as if one of the pictures had stepped from the
canvas to salute them.

Walter Ludlow, who was slightly known to the painter, explained the
object of their visit. While he spoke a sunbeam was falling athwart
his figure and Elinor's with so happy an effect that they also seemed
living pictures of youth and beauty gladdened by bright fortune. The
artist was evidently struck.

"My easel is occupied for several ensuing days, and my stay in Boston
must be brief," said he, thoughtfully; then, after an observant
glance, he added, "But your wishes shall be gratified though I
disappoint the chief-justice and Madame Oliver. I must not lose this
opportunity for the sake of painting a few ells of broadcloth and
brocade."

The painter expressed a desire to introduce both their portraits into
one picture and represent them engaged in some appropriate action.
This plan would have delighted the lovers, but was necessarily
rejected because so large a space of canvas would have been unfit for
the room which it was intended to decorate. Two half-length portraits
were therefore fixed upon. After they had taken leave, Walter Ludlow
asked Elinor, with a smile, whether she knew what an influence over
their fates the painter was about to acquire.

"The old women of Boston affirm," continued he, "that after he has
once got possession of a person's face and figure he may paint him in
any act or situation whatever, and the picture will be prophetic. Do
you believe it?"

"Not quite," said Elinor, smiling. "Yet if he has such magic, there is
something so gentle in his manner that I am sure he will use it well."

It was the painter's choice to proceed with both the portraits at the
same time, assigning as a reason, in the mystical language which he
sometimes used, that the faces threw light upon each other.
Accordingly, he gave now a touch to Walter and now to Elinor, and the
features of one and the other began to start forth so vividly that it
appeared as if his triumphant art would actually disengage them from
the canvas. Amid the rich light and deep shade they beheld their
phantom selves, but, though the likeness promised to be perfect, they
were not quite satisfied with the expression: it seemed more vague
than in most of the painter's works. He, however, was satisfied with
the prospect of success, and, being much interested in the lovers,
employed his leisure moments, unknown to them, in making a crayon
sketch of their two figures. During their sittings he engaged them in
conversation and kindled up their faces with characteristic traits,
which, though continually varying, it was his purpose to combine and
fix. At length he announced that at their next visit both the
portraits would be ready for delivery.

"If my pencil will but be true to my conception in the few last
touches which I meditate," observed he, "these two pictures will be my
very best performances. Seldom indeed has an artist such subjects."
While speaking he still bent his penetrative eye upon them, nor
withdrew it till they had reached the bottom of the stairs.

Nothing in the whole circle of human vanities takes stronger hold of
the imagination than this affair of having a portrait painted. Yet why
should it be so? The looking-glass, the polished globes of the
andirons, the mirror-like water, and all other reflecting surfaces,
continually present us with portraits--or, rather, ghosts--of
ourselves which we glance at and straightway forget them. But we
forget them only because they vanish. It is the idea of duration--of
earthly immortality--that gives such a mysterious interest to our own
portraits.

Walter and Elinor were not insensible to this feeling, and hastened to
the painter's room punctually at the appointed hour to meet those
pictured shapes which were to be their representatives with posterity.
The sunshine flashed after them into the apartment, but left it
somewhat gloomy as they closed the door. Their eyes were immediately
attracted to their portraits, which rested against the farthest wall
of the room. At the first glance through the dim light and the
distance, seeing themselves in precisely their natural attitudes and
with all the air that they recognized so well, they uttered a
simultaneous exclamation of delight.

"There we stand," cried Walter, enthusiastically, "fixed in sunshine
for ever. No dark passions can gather on our faces."

"No," said Elinor, more calmly; "no dreary change can sadden us."

This was said while they were approaching and had yet gained only an
imperfect view of the pictures. The painter, after saluting them,
busied himself at a table in completing a crayon sketch, leaving his
visitors to form their own judgment as to his perfected labors. At
intervals he sent a glance from beneath his deep eyebrows, watching
their countenances in profile with his pencil suspended over the
sketch. They had now stood some moments, each in front of the other's
picture, contemplating it with entranced attention, but without
uttering a word. At length Walter stepped forward, then back, viewing
Elinor's portrait in various lights, and finally spoke.

"Is there not a change?" said he, in a doubtful and meditative tone.
"Yes; the perception of it grows more vivid the longer I look. It is
certainly the same picture that I saw yesterday; the dress, the
features, all are the same, and yet something is altered."

"Is, then, the picture less like than it was yesterday?" inquired the
painter, now drawing near with irrepressible interest.

"The features are perfect Elinor," answered Walter, "and at the first
glance the expression seemed also hers; but I could fancy that the
portrait has changed countenance while I have been looking at it. The
eyes are fixed on mine with a strangely sad and anxious expression.
Nay, it is grief and terror. Is this like Elinor?"

"Compare the living face with the pictured one," said the painter.

Walter glanced sidelong at his mistress, and started. Motionless and
absorbed, fascinated, as it were, in contemplation of Walter's
portrait, Elinor's face had assumed precisely the expression of which
he had just been complaining. Had she practised for whole hours before
a mirror, she could not have caught the look so successfully. Had the
picture itself been a mirror, it could not have thrown back her
present aspect with stronger and more melancholy truth. She appeared
quite unconscious of the dialogue between the artist and her lover.

"Elinor," exclaimed Walter, in amazement, "what change has come over
you?"

She did not hear him nor desist from her fixed gaze till he seized her
hand, and thus attracted her notice; then with a sudden tremor she
looked from the picture to the face of the original.

"Do you see no change in your portrait?" asked she.

"In mine? None," replied Walter, examining it. "But let me see. Yes;
there is a slight change--an improvement, I think, in the picture,
though none in the likeness. It has a livelier expression than
yesterday, as if some bright thought were flashing from the eyes and
about to be uttered from the lips. Now that I have caught the look, it
becomes very decided."

While he was intent on these observations Elinor turned to the
painter. She regarded him with grief and awe, and felt that he repaid
her with sympathy and commiseration, though wherefore she could but
vaguely guess.

"That look!" whispered she, and shuddered. "How came it there?"

"Madam," said the painter, sadly, taking her hand and leading her
apart, "in both these pictures I have painted what I saw. The
artist--the true artist--must look beneath the exterior. It is his
gift--his proudest, but often a melancholy one--to see the inmost
soul, and by a power indefinable even to himself to make it glow or
darken upon the canvas in glances that express the thought and
sentiment of years. Would that I might convince myself of error in the
present instance!"

They had now approached the table, on which were heads in chalk, hands
almost as expressive as ordinary faces, ivied church-towers, thatched
cottages, old thunder-stricken trees, Oriental and antique costume,
and all such picturesque vagaries of an artist's idle moments. Turning
them over with seeming carelessness, a crayon sketch of two figures
was disclosed.

"If I have failed," continued he--"if your heart does not see itself
reflected in your own portrait, if you have no secret cause to trust
my delineation of the other--it is not yet too late to alter them. I
might change the action of these figures too. But would it influence
the event?" He directed her notice to the sketch.

A thrill ran through Elinor's frame; a shriek was upon her lips, but
she stifled it with the self-command that becomes habitual to all who
hide thoughts of fear and anguish within their bosoms. Turning from
the table, she perceived that Walter had advanced near enough to have
seen the sketch, though she could not determine whether it had caught
his eye.

"We will not have the pictures altered," said she, hastily. "If mine
is sad, I shall but look the gayer for the contrast."

"Be it so," answered the painter, bowing. "May your griefs be such
fanciful ones that only your pictures may mourn for them! For your
joys, may they be true and deep, and paint themselves upon this lovely
face till it quite belie my art!"

After the marriage of Walter and Elinor the pictures formed the two
most splendid ornaments of their abode. They hung side by side,
separated by a narrow panel, appearing to eye each other constantly,
yet always returning the gaze of the spectator. Travelled gentlemen
who professed a knowledge of such subjects reckoned these among the
most admirable specimens of modern portraiture, while common observers
compared them with the originals, feature by feature, and were
rapturous in praise of the likeness. But it was on a third
class--neither travelled connoisseurs nor common observers, but people
of natural sensibility--that the pictures wrought their strongest
effect. Such persons might gaze carelessly at first, but, becoming
interested, would return day after day and study these painted faces
like the pages of a mystic volume. Walter Ludlow's portrait attracted
their earliest notice. In the absence of himself and his bride they
sometimes disputed as to the expression which the painter had intended
to throw upon the features, all agreeing that there was a look of
earnest import, though no two explained it alike. There was less
diversity of opinion in regard to Elinor's picture. They differed,
indeed, in their attempts to estimate the nature and depth of the
gloom that dwelt upon her face, but agreed that it was gloom and alien
from the natural temperament of their youthful friend. A certain
fanciful person announced as the result of much scrutiny that both
these pictures were parts of one design, and that the melancholy
strength of feeling in Elinor's countenance bore reference to the more
vivid emotion--or, as he termed it, the wild passion--in that of
Walter. Though unskilled in the art, he even began a sketch in which
the action of the two figures was to correspond with their mutual
expression.

It was whispered among friends that day by day Elinor's face was
assuming a deeper shade of pensiveness which threatened soon to render
her too true a counterpart of her melancholy picture. Walter, on the
other hand, instead of acquiring the vivid look which the painter had
given him on the canvas, became reserved and downcast, with no outward
flashes of emotion, however it might be smouldering within. In course
of time Elinor hung a gorgeous curtain of purple silk wrought with
flowers and fringed with heavy golden tassels before the pictures,
under pretence that the dust would tarnish their hues or the light dim
them. It was enough. Her visitors felt that the massive folds of the
silk must never be withdrawn nor the portraits mentioned in her
presence.

Time wore on, and the painter came again. He had been far enough to
the north to see the silver cascade of the Crystal Hills, and to look
over the vast round of cloud and forest from the summit of New
England's loftiest mountain. But he did not profane that scene by the
mockery of his art. He had also lain in a canoe on the bosom of Lake
George, making his soul the mirror of its loveliness and grandeur till
not a picture in the Vatican was more vivid than his recollection. He
had gone with the Indian hunters to Niagara, and there, again, had
flung his hopeless pencil down the precipice, feeling that he could as
soon paint the roar as aught else that goes to make up the wondrous
cataract. In truth, it was seldom his impulse to copy natural scenery
except as a framework for the delineations of the human form and face,
instinct with thought, passion or suffering. With store of such his
adventurous ramble had enriched him. The stern dignity of Indian
chiefs, the dusky loveliness of Indian girls, the domestic life of
wigwams, the stealthy march, the battle beneath gloomy pine trees, the
frontier fortress with its garrison, the anomaly of the old French
partisan bred in courts, but grown gray in shaggy deserts,--such were
the scenes and portraits that he had sketched. The glow of perilous
moments, flashes of wild feeling, struggles of fierce power, love,
hate, grief, frenzy--in a word, all the worn-out heart of the old
earth--had been revealed to him under a new form. His portfolio was
filled with graphic illustrations of the volume of his memory which
genius would transmute into its own substance and imbue with
immortality. He felt that the deep wisdom in his art which he had
sought so far was found.

But amid stern or lovely nature, in the perils of the forest or its
overwhelming peacefulness, still there had been two phantoms, the
companions of his way. Like all other men around whom an engrossing
purpose wreathes itself, he was insulated from the mass of humankind.
He had no aim, no pleasure, no sympathies, but what were ultimately
connected with his art. Though gentle in manner and upright in intent
and action, he did not possess kindly feelings; his heart was cold: no
living creature could be brought near enough to keep him warm. For
these two beings, however, he had felt in its greatest intensity the
sort of interest which always allied him to the subjects of his
pencil. He had pried into their souls with his keenest insight and
pictured the result upon their features with his utmost skill, so as
barely to fall short of that standard which no genius ever reached,
his own severe conception. He had caught from the duskiness of the
future--at least, so he fancied--a fearful secret, and had obscurely
revealed it on the portraits. So much of himself--of his imagination
and all other powers--had been lavished on the study of Walter and
Elinor that he almost regarded them as creations of his own, like the
thousands with which he had peopled the realms of Picture. Therefore
did they flit through the twilight of the woods, hover on the mist of
waterfalls, look forth from the mirror of the lake, nor melt away in
the noontide sun. They haunted his pictorial fancy, not as mockeries
of life nor pale goblins of the dead, but in the guise of portraits,
each with an unalterable expression which his magic had evoked from
the caverns of the soul. He could not recross the Atlantic till he had
again beheld the originals of those airy pictures.

"O glorious Art!" Thus mused the enthusiastic painter as he trod the
street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable
forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The
dead live again; thou recallest them to their old scenes and givest
their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and
immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeting moments of history. With
thee there is no past, for at thy touch all that is great becomes for
ever present, and illustrious men live through long ages in the
visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are. O
potent Art! as thou bringest the faintly-revealed past to stand in
that narrow strip of sunlight which we call 'now,' canst thou summon
the shrouded future to meet her there? Have I not achieved it? Am I
not thy prophet?"

Thus with a proud yet melancholy fervor did he almost cry aloud as he
passed through the toilsome street among people that knew not of his
reveries nor could understand nor care for them. It is not good for
man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him
by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires and
hopes will become extravagant and he the semblance--perhaps the
reality--of a madman. Reading other bosoms with an acuteness almost
preternatural, the painter failed to see the disorder of his own.

"And this should be the house," said he, looking up and down the front
before he knocked. "Heaven help my brains! That picture! Methinks it
will never vanish. Whether I look at the windows or the door, there it
is framed within them, painted strongly and glowing in the richest
tints--the faces of the portraits, the figures and action of the
sketch!"

He knocked.

"The portraits--are they within?" inquired he of the domestic; then,
recollecting himself, "Your master and mistress--are they at home?"

"They are, sir," said the servant, adding, as he noticed that
picturesque aspect of which the painter could never divest himself,
"and the portraits too."

The guest was admitted into a parlor communicating by a central door
with an interior room of the same size. As the first apartment was
empty, he passed to the entrance of the second, within which his eyes
were greeted by those living personages, as well as their pictured
representatives, who had long been the objects of so singular an
interest. He involuntarily paused on the threshold.

They had not perceived his approach. Walter and Elinor were standing
before the portraits, whence the former had just flung back the rich
and voluminous folds of the silken curtain, holding its golden tassel
with one hand, while the other grasped that of his bride. The
pictures, concealed for months, gleamed forth again in undiminished
splendor, appearing to throw a sombre light across the room rather
than to be disclosed by a borrowed radiance. That of Elinor had been
almost prophetic. A pensiveness, and next a gentle sorrow, had
successively dwelt upon her countenance, deepening with the lapse of
time into a quiet anguish. A mixture of affright would now have made
it the very expression of the portrait. Walter's face was moody and
dull or animated only by fitful flashes which left a heavier darkness
for their momentary illumination. He looked from Elinor to her
portrait, and thence to his own, in the contemplation of which he
finally stood absorbed.

The painter seemed to hear the step of Destiny approaching behind him
on its progress toward its victims. A strange thought darted into his
mind. Was not his own the form in which that Destiny had embodied
itself, and he a chief agent of the coming evil which he had
foreshadowed?

Still, Walter remained silent before the picture, communing with it as
with his own heart and abandoning himself to the spell of evil
influence that the painter had cast upon the features. Gradually his
eyes kindled, while as Elinor watched the increasing wildness of his
face her own assumed a look of terror; and when, at last, he turned
upon her, the resemblance of both to their portraits was complete.

"Our fate is upon us!" howled Walter. "Die!"

Drawing a knife, he sustained her as she was sinking to the ground,
and aimed it at her bosom. In the action and in the look and attitude
of each the painter beheld the figures of his sketch. The picture,
with all its tremendous coloring, was finished.

"Hold, madman!" cried he, sternly.

He had advanced from the door and interposed himself between the
wretched beings with the same sense of power to regulate their destiny
as to alter a scene upon the canvas. He stood like a magician
controlling the phantoms which he had evoked.

"What!" muttered Walter Ludlow as he relapsed from fierce excitement
into sullen gloom. "Does Fate impede its own decree?"

"Wretched lady," said the painter, "did I not warn you?"

"You did," replied Elinor, calmly, as her terror gave place to the
quiet grief which it had disturbed. "But I loved him."

Is there not a deep moral in the tale? Could the result of one or all
our deeds be shadowed forth and set before us, some would call it fate
and hurry onward, others be swept along by their passionate desires,
and none be turned aside by the prophetic pictures.




DAVID SWAN.

A FANTASY.


We can be but partially acquainted even with the events which actually
influence our course through life and our final destiny. There are
innumerable other events, if such they may be called, which come close
upon us, yet pass away without actual results or even betraying their
near approach by the reflection of any light or shadow across our
minds. Could we know all the vicissitudes of our fortunes, life would
be too full of hope and fear, exultation or disappointment, to afford
us a single hour of true serenity. This idea may be illustrated by a
page from the secret history of David Swan.

We have nothing to do with David until we find him, at the age of
twenty, on the high road from his native place to the city of Boston,
where his uncle, a small dealer in the grocery line, was to take him
behind the counter. Be it enough to say that he was a native of New
Hampshire, born of respectable parents, and had received an ordinary
school education with a classic finish by a year at Gilmanton Academy.
After journeying on foot from sunrise till nearly noon of a summer's
day, his weariness and the increasing heat determined him to sit down
in the first convenient shade and await the coming up of the
stage-coach. As if planted on purpose for him, there soon appeared a
little tuft of maples with a delightful recess in the midst, and such
a fresh bubbling spring that it seemed never to have sparkled for any
wayfarer but David Swan. Virgin or not, he kissed it with his thirsty
lips and then flung himself along the brink, pillowing his head upon
some shirts and a pair of pantaloons tied up in a striped cotton
handkerchief. The sunbeams could not reach him; the dust did not yet
rise from the road after the heavy rain of yesterday, and his grassy
lair suited the young man better than a bed of down. The spring
murmured drowsily beside him; the branches waved dreamily across the
blue sky overhead, and a deep sleep, perchance hiding dreams within
its depths, fell upon David Swan. But we are to relate events which he
did not dream of.

While he lay sound asleep in the shade other people were wide awake,
and passed to and fro, afoot, on horseback and in all sorts of
vehicles, along the sunny road by his bedchamber. Some looked neither
to the right hand nor the left and knew not that he was there; some
merely glanced that way without admitting the slumberer among their
busy thoughts; some laughed to see how soundly he slept, and several
whose hearts were brimming full of scorn ejected their venomous
superfluity on David Swan. A middle-aged widow, when nobody else was
near, thrust her head a little way into the recess, and vowed that the
young fellow looked charming in his sleep. A temperance lecturer saw
him, and wrought poor David into the texture of his evening's
discourse as an awful instance of dead drunkenness by the roadside.

But censure, praise, merriment, scorn and indifference were all
one--or, rather, all nothing--to David Swan. He had slept only a few
moments when a brown carriage drawn by a handsome pair of horses
bowled easily along and was brought to a standstill nearly in front of
David's resting-place. A linch-pin had fallen out and permitted one of
the wheels to slide off. The damage was slight and occasioned merely a
momentary alarm to an elderly merchant and his wife, who were
returning to Boston in the carriage. While the coachman and a servant
were replacing the wheel the lady and gentleman sheltered themselves
beneath the maple trees, and there espied the bubbling fountain and
David Swan asleep beside it. Impressed with the awe which the humblest
sleeper usually sheds around him, the merchant trod as lightly as the
gout would allow, and his spouse took good heed not to rustle her silk
gown lest David should start up all of a sudden.

"How soundly he sleeps!" whispered the old gentleman. "From what a
depth he draws that easy breath! Such sleep as that, brought on
without an opiate, would be worth more to me than half my income, for
it would suppose health and an untroubled mind."

"And youth besides," said the lady. "Healthy and quiet age does not
sleep thus. Our slumber is no more like his than our wakefulness."

The longer they looked, the more did this elderly couple feel
interested in the unknown youth to whom the wayside and the maple
shade were as a secret chamber with the rich gloom of damask curtains
brooding over him. Perceiving that a stray sunbeam glimmered down upon
his face, the lady contrived to twist a branch aside so as to
intercept it, and, having done this little act of kindness, she began
to feel like a mother to him.

"Providence seems to have laid him here," whispered she to her
husband, "and to have brought us hither to find him, after our
disappointment in our cousin's son. Methinks I can see a likeness to
our departed Henry. Shall we waken him?"

"To what purpose?" said the merchant, hesitating. "We know nothing of
the youth's character."

"That open countenance!" replied his wife, in the same hushed voice,
yet earnestly. "This innocent sleep!"

While these whispers were passing, the sleeper's heart did not throb,
nor his breath become agitated, nor his features betray the least
token of interest. Yet Fortune was bending over him, just ready to let
fall a burden of gold. The old merchant had lost his only son, and had
no heir to his wealth except a distant relative with whose conduct he
was dissatisfied. In such cases people sometimes do stranger things
than to act the magician and awaken a young man to splendor who fell
asleep in poverty.

"Shall we not waken him?" repeated the lady, persuasively.

"The coach is ready, sir," said the servant, behind.

The old couple started, reddened and hurried away, mutually wondering
that they should ever have dreamed of doing anything so very
ridiculous. The merchant threw himself back in the carriage and
occupied his mind with the plan of a magnificent asylum for
unfortunate men of business. Meanwhile, David Swan enjoyed his nap.

The carriage could not have gone above a mile or two when a pretty
young girl came along with a tripping pace which showed precisely how
her little heart was dancing in her bosom. Perhaps it was this merry
kind of motion that caused--is there any harm in saying it?--her
garter to slip its knot. Conscious that the silken girth--if silk it
were--was relaxing its hold, she turned aside into the shelter of the
maple trees, and there found a young man asleep by the spring.
Blushing as red as any rose that she should have intruded into a
gentleman's bedchamber, and for such a purpose too, she was about to
make her escape on tiptoe. But there was peril near the sleeper. A
monster of a bee had been wandering overhead--buzz, buzz, buzz--now
among the leaves, now flashing through the strips of sunshine, and now
lost in the dark shade, till finally he appeared to be settling on the
eyelid of David Swan. The sting of a bee is sometimes deadly. As
free-hearted as she was innocent, the girl attacked the intruder with
her handkerchief, brushed him soundly and drove him from beneath the
maple shade. How sweet a picture! This good deed accomplished, with
quickened breath and a deeper blush she stole a glance at the youthful
stranger for whom she had been battling with a dragon in the air.

"He is handsome!" thought she, and blushed redder yet.

How could it be that no dream of bliss grew so strong within him that,
shattered by its very strength, it should part asunder and allow him
to perceive the girl among its phantoms? Why, at least, did no smile
of welcome brighten upon his face? She was come, the maid whose soul,
according to the old and beautiful idea, had been severed from his
own, and whom in all his vague but passionate desires he yearned to
meet. Her only could he love with a perfect love, him only could she
receive into the depths of her heart, and now her image was faintly
blushing in the fountain by his side; should it pass away, its happy
lustre would never gleam upon his life again.

"How sound he sleeps!" murmured the girl. She departed, but did not
trip along the road so lightly as when she came.

Now, this girl's father was a thriving country merchant in the
neighborhood, and happened at that identical time to be looking out
for just such a young man as David Swan. Had David formed a wayside
acquaintance with the daughter, he would have become the father's
clerk, and all else in natural succession. So here, again, had good
fortune--the best of fortunes--stolen so near that her garments
brushed against him, and he knew nothing of the matter.

The girl was hardly out of sight when two men turned aside beneath the
maple shade. Both had dark faces set off by cloth caps, which were
drawn down aslant over their brows. Their dresses were shabby, yet had
a certain smartness. These were a couple of rascals who got their
living by whatever the devil sent them, and now, in the interim of
other business, had staked the joint profits of their next piece of
villainy on a game of cards which was to have been decided here under
the trees. But, finding David asleep by the spring, one of the rogues
whispered to his fellow:

"Hist! Do you see that bundle under his head?"

The other villain nodded, winked and leered.

"I'll bet you a horn of brandy," said the first, "that the chap has
either a pocketbook or a snug little hoard of small change stowed away
amongst his shirts. And if not there, we will find it in his
pantaloons pocket."

"But how if he wakes?" said the other.

His companion thrust aside his waistcoat, pointed to the handle of a
dirk and nodded.

"So be it!" muttered the second villain.

They approached the unconscious David, and, while one pointed the
dagger toward his heart, the other began to search the bundle beneath
his head. Their two faces, grim, wrinkled and ghastly with guilt and
fear, bent over their victim, looking horrible enough to be mistaken
for fiends should he suddenly awake. Nay, had the villains glanced
aside into the spring, even they would hardly have known themselves as
reflected there. But David Swan had never worn a more tranquil aspect,
even when asleep on his mother's breast.

"I must take away the bundle," whispered one.

"If he stirs, I'll strike," muttered the other.

But at this moment a dog scenting along the ground came in beneath the
maple trees and gazed alternately at each of these wicked men and then
at the quiet sleeper. He then lapped out of the fountain.

"Pshaw!" said one villain. "We can do nothing now. The dog's master
must be close behind."

"Let's take a drink and be off," said the other.

The man with the dagger thrust back the weapon into his bosom and drew
forth a pocket-pistol, but not of that kind which kills by a single
discharge. It was a flask of liquor with a block-tin tumbler screwed
upon the mouth. Each drank a comfortable dram, and left the spot with
so many jests and such laughter at their unaccomplished wickedness
that they might be said to have gone on their way rejoicing. In a few
hours they had forgotten the whole affair, nor once imagined that the
recording angel had written down the crime of murder against their
souls in letters as durable as eternity. As for David Swan, he still
slept quietly, neither conscious of the shadow of death when it hung
over him nor of the glow of renewed life when that shadow was
withdrawn. He slept, but no longer so quietly as at first. An hour's
repose had snatched from his elastic frame the weariness with which
many hours of toil had burdened it. Now he stirred, now moved his lips
without a sound, now talked in an inward tone to the noonday spectres
of his dream. But a noise of wheels came rattling louder and louder
along the road, until it dashed through the dispersing mist of David's
slumber; and there was the stagecoach. He started up with all his
ideas about him.

"Halloo, driver! Take a passenger?" shouted he.

"Room on top!" answered the driver.

Up mounted David, and bowled away merrily toward Boston without so
much as a parting glance at that fountain of dreamlike vicissitude. He
knew not that a phantom of Wealth had thrown a golden hue upon its
waters, nor that one of Love had sighed softly to their murmur, nor
that one of Death had threatened to crimson them with his blood, all
in the brief hour since he lay down to sleep. Sleeping or waking, we
hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen.
Does it not argue a superintending Providence that, while viewless and
unexpected events thrust themselves continually athwart our path,
there should still be regularity enough in mortal life to render
foresight even partially available?




SIGHTS FROM A STEEPLE.


So! I have climbed high, and my reward is small. Here I stand with
wearied knees--earth, indeed, at a dizzy depth below, but heaven far,
far beyond me still. Oh that I could soar up into the very zenith,
where man never breathed nor eagle ever flew, and where the ethereal
azure melts away from the eye and appears only a deepened shade of
nothingness! And yet I shiver at that cold and solitary thought. What
clouds are gathering in the golden west with direful intent against
the brightness and the warmth of this summer afternoon? They are
ponderous air-ships, black as death and freighted with the tempest,
and at intervals their thunder--the signal-guns of that unearthly
squadron--rolls distant along the deep of heaven. These nearer heaps
of fleecy vapor--methinks I could roll and toss upon them the whole
day long--seem scattered here and there for the repose of tired
pilgrims through the sky. Perhaps--for who can tell?--beautiful
spirits are disporting themselves there, and will bless my mortal eye
with the brief appearance of their curly locks of golden light and
laughing faces fair and faint as the people of a rosy dream. Or where
the floating mass so imperfectly obstructs the color of the firmament
a slender foot and fairy limb resting too heavily upon the frail
support may be thrust through and suddenly withdrawn, while longing
fancy follows them in vain. Yonder, again, is an airy archipelago
where the sunbeams love to linger in their journeyings through space.
Every one of those little clouds has been dipped and steeped in
radiance which the slightest pressure might disengage in silvery
profusion like water wrung from a sea-maid's hair. Bright they are as
a young man's visions, and, like them, would be realized in dullness,
obscurity and tears. I will look on them no more.

In three parts of the visible circle whose centre is this spire I
discern cultivated fields, villages, white country-seats, the waving
lines of rivulets, little placid lakes, and here and there a rising
ground that would fain be termed a hill. On the fourth side is the
sea, stretching away toward a viewless boundary, blue and calm except
where the passing anger of a shadow flits across its surface and is
gone. Hitherward a broad inlet penetrates far into the land; on the
verge of the harbor formed by its extremity is a town, and over it am
I, a watchman, all-heeding and unheeded. Oh that the multitude of
chimneys could speak, like those of Madrid, and betray in smoky
whispers the secrets of all who since their first foundation have
assembled at the hearths within! Oh that the Limping Devil of Le Sage
would perch beside me here, extend his wand over this contiguity of
roofs, uncover every chamber and make me familiar with their
inhabitants! The most desirable mode of existence might be that of a
spiritualized Paul Pry hovering invisible round man and woman,
witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing
brightness from their felicity and shade from their sorrow, and
retaining no emotion peculiar to himself. But none of these things are
possible; and if I would know the interior of brick walls or the
mystery of human bosoms, I can but guess.

Yonder is a fair street extending north and south. The stately
mansions are placed each on its carpet of verdant grass, and a long
flight of steps descends from every door to the pavement. Ornamental
trees--the broadleafed horse-chestnut, the elm so lofty and bending,
the graceful but infrequent willow, and others whereof I know not the
names--grow thrivingly among brick and stone. The oblique rays of the
sun are intercepted by these green citizens and by the houses, so that
one side of the street is a shaded and pleasant walk. On its whole
extent there is now but a single passenger, advancing from the upper
end, and he, unless distance and the medium of a pocket spyglass do
him more than justice, is a fine young man of twenty. He saunters
slowly forward, slapping his left hand with his folded gloves, bending
his eyes upon the pavement, and sometimes raising them to throw a
glance before him. Certainly he has a pensive air. Is he in doubt or
in debt? Is he--if the question be allowable--in love? Does he strive
to be melancholy and gentlemanlike, or is he merely overcome by the
heat? But I bid him farewell for the present. The door of one of the
houses--an aristocratic edifice with curtains of purple and gold
waving from the windows--is now opened, and down the steps come two
ladies swinging their parasols and lightly arrayed for a summer
ramble. Both are young, both are pretty; but methinks the left-hand
lass is the fairer of the twain, and, though she be so serious at this
moment, I could swear that there is a treasure of gentle fun within
her. They stand talking a little while upon the steps, and finally
proceed up the street. Meantime, as their faces are now turned from
me, I may look elsewhere.

Upon that wharf and down the corresponding street is a busy contrast
to the quiet scene which I have just noticed. Business evidently has
its centre there, and many a man is wasting the summer afternoon in
labor and anxiety, in losing riches or in gaining them, when he would
be wiser to flee away to some pleasant country village or shaded lake
in the forest or wild and cool sea-beach. I see vessels unlading at
the wharf and precious merchandise strown upon the ground abundantly
as at the bottom of the sea--that market whence no goods return, and
where there is no captain nor supercargo to render an account of
sales. Here the clerks are diligent with their paper and pencils and
sailors ply the block and tackle that hang over the hold, accompanying
their toil with cries long-drawn and roughly melodious till the bales
and puncheons ascend to upper air. At a little distance a group of
gentlemen are assembled round the door of a warehouse. Grave seniors
be they, and I would wager--if it were safe, in these times, to be
responsible for any one--that the least eminent among them might vie
with old Vincentio, that incomparable trafficker of Pisa. I can even
select the wealthiest of the company. It is the elderly personage in
somewhat rusty black, with powdered hair the superfluous whiteness of
which is visible upon the cape of his coat. His twenty ships are
wafted on some of their many courses by every breeze that blows, and
his name, I will venture to say, though I know it not, is a familiar
sound among the far-separated merchants of Europe and the Indies.

But I bestow too much of my attention in this quarter. On looking
again to the long and shady walk I perceive that the two fair girls
have encountered the young man. After a sort of shyness in the
recognition, he turns back with them. Moreover, he has sanctioned my
taste in regard to his companions by placing himself on the inner side
of the pavement, nearest the Venus to whom I, enacting on a
steeple-top the part of Paris on the top of Ida, adjudged the golden
apple.

In two streets converging at right angles toward my watch-tower I
distinguish three different processions. One is a proud array of
voluntary soldiers in bright uniform, resembling, from the height
whence I look down, the painted veterans that garrison the windows of
a toy-shop. And yet it stirs my heart. Their regular advance, their
nodding plumes, the sun-flash on their bayonets and musket-barrels,
the roll of their drums ascending past me, and the fife ever and anon
piercing through,--these things have wakened a warlike fire, peaceful
though I be. Close to their rear marches a battalion of schoolboys
ranged in crooked and irregular platoons, shouldering sticks, thumping
a harsh and unripe clatter from an instrument of tin and ridiculously
aping the intricate manoeuvres of the foremost band. Nevertheless, as
slight differences are scarcely perceptible from a church-spire, one
might be tempted to ask, "Which are the boys?" or, rather, "Which the
men?" But, leaving these, let us turn to the third procession, which,
though sadder in outward show, may excite identical reflections in the
thoughtful mind. It is a funeral--a hearse drawn by a black and bony
steed and covered by a dusty pall, two or three coaches rumbling over
the stones, their drivers half asleep, a dozen couple of careless
mourners in their every-day attire. Such was not the fashion of our
fathers when they carried a friend to his grave. There is now no
doleful clang of the bell to proclaim sorrow to the town. Was the King
of Terrors more awful in those days than in our own, that wisdom and
philosophy have been able to produce this change? Not so. Here is a
proof that he retains his proper majesty. The military men and the
military boys are wheeling round the corner, and meet the funeral full
in the face. Immediately the drum is silent, all but the tap that
regulates each simultaneous footfall. The soldiers yield the path to
the dusty hearse and unpretending train, and the children quit their
ranks and cluster on the sidewalks with timorous and instinctive
curiosity. The mourners enter the churchyard at the base of the
steeple and pause by an open grave among the burial-stones; the
lightning glimmers on them as they lower down the coffin, and the
thunder rattles heavily while they throw the earth upon its lid.
Verily, the shower is near, and I tremble for the young man and the
girls, who have now disappeared from the long and shady street.

How various are the situations of the people covered by the roofs
beneath me, and how diversified are the events at this moment
befalling them! The new-born, the aged, the dying, the strong in life
and the recent dead are in the chambers of these many mansions. The
full of hope, the happy, the miserable and the desperate dwell
together within the circle of my glance. In some of the houses over
which my eyes roam so coldly guilt is entering into hearts that are
still tenanted by a debased and trodden virtue; guilt is on the very
edge of commission, and the impending deed might be averted; guilt is
done, and the criminal wonders if it be irrevocable. There are broad
thoughts struggling in my mind, and, were I able to give them
distinctness, they would make their way in eloquence. Lo! the
raindrops are descending.

The clouds within a little time have gathered over all the sky,
hanging heavily, as if about to drop in one unbroken mass upon the
earth. At intervals the lightning flashes from their brooding hearts,
quivers, disappears, and then comes the thunder, travelling slowly
after its twin-born flame. A strong wind has sprung up, howls through
the darkened streets, and raises the dust in dense bodies to rebel
against the approaching storm. The disbanded soldiers fly, the funeral
has already vanished like its dead, and all people hurry homeward--all
that have a home--while a few lounge by the corners or trudge on
desperately at their leisure. In a narrow lane which communicates with
the shady street I discern the rich old merchant putting himself to
the top of his speed lest the rain should convert his hair-powder to a
paste. Unhappy gentleman! By the slow vehemence and painful moderation
wherewith he journeys, it is but too evident that Podagra has left its
thrilling tenderness in his great toe. But yonder, at a far more rapid
pace, come three other of my acquaintance, the two pretty girls and
the young man unseasonably interrupted in their walk. Their footsteps
are supported by the risen dust, the wind lends them its velocity,
they fly like three sea-birds driven landward by the tempestuous
breeze. The ladies would not thus rival Atalanta if they but knew that
any one were at leisure to observe them. Ah! as they hasten onward,
laughing in the angry face of nature, a sudden catastrophe has
chanced. At the corner where the narrow lane enters into the street
they come plump against the old merchant, whose tortoise-motion has
just brought him to that point. He likes not the sweet encounter; the
darkness of the whole air gathers speedily upon his visage, and there
is a pause on both sides. Finally he thrusts aside the youth with
little courtesy, seizes an arm of each of the two girls, and plods
onward like a magician with a prize of captive fairies. All this is
easy to be understood. How disconsolate the poor lover stands,
regardless of the rain that threatens an exceeding damage to his
well-fashioned habiliments, till he catches a backward glance of mirth
from a bright eye, and turns away with whatever comfort it conveys!

The old man and his daughters are safely housed, and now the storm
lets loose its fury. In every dwelling I perceive the faces of the
chambermaids as they shut down the windows, excluding the impetuous
shower and shrinking away from the quick fiery glare. The large drops
descend with force upon the slated roofs and rise again in smoke.
There is a rush and roar as of a river through the air, and muddy
streams bubble majestically along the pavement, whirl their dusky foam
into the kennel, and disappear beneath iron grates. Thus did Arethusa
sink. I love not my station here aloft in the midst of the tumult
which I am powerless to direct or quell, with the blue lightning
wrinkling on my brow and the thunder muttering its first awful
syllables in my ear. I will descend. Yet let me give another glance to
the sea, where the foam breaks out in long white lines upon a broad
expanse of blackness or boils up in far-distant points like snowy
mountain-tops in the eddies of a flood; and let me look once more at
the green plain and little hills of the country, over which the giant
of the storm is striding in robes of mist, and at the town whose
obscured and desolate streets might beseem a city of the dead; and,
turning a single moment to the sky, now gloomy as an author's
prospects, I prepare to resume my station on lower earth. But stay! A
little speck of azure has widened in the western heavens; the sunbeams
find a passage and go rejoicing through the tempest, and on yonder
darkest cloud, born like hallowed hopes of the glory of another world
and the trouble and tears of this, brightens forth the rainbow.




THE HOLLOW OF THE THREE HILLS.


In those strange old times when fantastic dreams and madmen's reveries
were realized among the actual circumstances of life, two persons met
together at an appointed hour and place. One was a lady graceful in
form and fair of feature, though pale and troubled and smitten with an
untimely blight in what should have been the fullest bloom of her
years; the other was an ancient and meanly-dressed woman of
ill-favored aspect, and so withered, shrunken and decrepit that even
the space since she began to decay must have exceeded the ordinary
term of human existence. In the spot where they encountered no mortal
could observe them. Three little hills stood near each other, and down
in the midst of them sunk a hollow basin almost mathematically
circular, two or three hundred feet in breadth and of such depth that
a stately cedar might but just be visible above the sides. Dwarf pines
were numerous upon the hills and partly fringed the outer verge of the
intermediate hollow, within which there was nothing but the brown
grass of October and here and there a tree-trunk that had fallen long
ago and lay mouldering with no green successor from its roots. One of
these masses of decaying wood, formerly a majestic oak, rested close
beside a pool of green and sluggish water at the bottom of the basin.
Such scenes as this (so gray tradition tells) were once the resort of
a power of evil and his plighted subjects, and here at midnight or on
the dim verge of evening they were said to stand round the mantling
pool disturbing its putrid waters in the performance of an impious
baptismal rite. The chill beauty of an autumnal sunset was now gilding
the three hill-tops, whence a paler tint stole down their sides into
the hollow.

"Here is our pleasant meeting come to pass," said the aged crone,
"according as thou hast desired. Say quickly what thou wouldst have of
me, for there is but a short hour that we may tarry here."

As the old withered woman spoke a smile glimmered on her countenance
like lamplight on the wall of a sepulchre. The lady trembled and cast
her eyes upward to the verge of the basin, as if meditating to return
with her purpose unaccomplished. But it was not so ordained.

"I am stranger in this land, as you know," said she, at length.
"Whence I come it matters not, but I have left those behind me with
whom my fate was intimately bound, and from whom I am cut off for
ever. There is a weight in my bosom that I cannot away with, and I
have come hither to inquire of their welfare."

"And who is there by this green pool that can bring thee news from the
ends of the earth?" cried the old woman, peering into the lady's face.
"Not from my lips mayst thou hear these tidings; yet be thou bold, and
the daylight shall not pass away from yonder hilltop before thy wish
be granted."

"I will do your bidding though I die," replied the lady, desperately.

The old woman seated herself on the trunk of the fallen tree, threw
aside the hood that shrouded her gray locks and beckoned her companion
to draw near.

"Kneel down," she said, "and lay your forehead on my knees."

She hesitated a moment, but the anxiety that had long been kindling
burned fiercely up within her. As she knelt down the border of her
garment was dipped into the pool; she laid her forehead on the old
woman's knees, and the latter drew a cloak about the lady's face, so
that she was in darkness. Then she heard the muttered words of prayer,
in the midst of which she started and would have arisen.

"Let me flee! Let me flee and hide myself, that they may not look upon
me!" she cried. But, with returning recollection, she hushed herself
and was still as death, for it seemed as if other voices, familiar in
infancy and unforgotten through many wanderings and in all the
vicissitudes of her heart and fortune, were mingling with the accents
of the prayer. At first the words were faint and indistinct--not
rendered so by distance, but rather resembling the dim pages of a book
which we strive to read by an imperfect and gradually brightening
light. In such a manner, as the prayer proceeded, did those voices
strengthen upon the ear, till at length the petition ended, and the
conversation of an aged man and of a woman broken and decayed like
himself became distinctly audible to the lady as she knelt. But those
strangers appeared not to stand in the hollow depth between the three
hills. Their voices were encompassed and re-echoed by the walls of a
chamber the windows of which were rattling in the breeze; the regular
vibration of a clock, the crackling of a fire and the tinkling of the
embers as they fell among the ashes rendered the scene almost as vivid
as if painted to the eye. By a melancholy hearth sat these two old
people, the man calmly despondent, the woman querulous and tearful,
and their words were all of sorrow. They spoke of a daughter, a
wanderer they knew not where, bearing dishonor along with her and
leaving shame and affliction to bring their gray heads to the grave.
They alluded also to other and more recent woe, but in the midst of
their talk their voices seemed to melt into the sound of the wind
sweeping mournfully among the autumn leaves; and when the lady lifted
her eyes, there was she kneeling in the hollow between three hills.

"A weary and lonesome time yonder old couple have of it," remarked the
old woman, smiling in the lady's face.

"And did you also hear them?" exclaimed she, a sense of intolerable
humiliation triumphing over her agony and fear.

"Yea, and we have yet more to hear," replied the old woman, "wherefore
cover thy face quickly."

Again the withered hag poured forth the monotonous words of a prayer
that was not meant to be acceptable in heaven, and soon in the pauses
of her breath strange murmurings began to thicken, gradually
increasing, so as to drown and overpower the charm by which they grew.
Shrieks pierced through the obscurity of sound and were succeeded by
the singing of sweet female voices, which in their turn gave way to a
wild roar of laughter broken suddenly by groanings and sobs, forming
altogether a ghastly confusion of terror and mourning and mirth.
Chains were rattling, fierce and stern voices uttered threats and the
scourge resounded at their command. All these noises deepened and
became substantial to the listener's ear, till she could distinguish
every soft and dreamy accent of the love-songs that died causelessly
into funeral-hymns. She shuddered at the unprovoked wrath which blazed
up like the spontaneous kindling of flume, and she grew faint at the
fearful merriment raging miserably around her. In the midst of this
wild scene, where unbound passions jostled each other in a drunken
career, there was one solemn voice of a man, and a manly and melodious
voice it might once have been. He went to and fro continually, and his
feet sounded upon the floor. In each member of that frenzied company
whose own burning thoughts had become their exclusive world he sought
an auditor for the story of his individual wrong, and interpreted
their laughter and tears as his reward of scorn or pity. He spoke of
woman's perfidy, of a wife who had broken her holiest vows, of a home
and heart made desolate. Even as he went on, the shout, the laugh, the
shriek, the sob, rose up in unison, till they changed into the hollow,
fitful and uneven sound of the wind as it fought among the pine trees
on those three lonely hills.

The lady looked up, and there was the withered woman smiling in her
face.

"Couldst thou have thought there were such merry times in a
mad-house?" inquired the latter.

"True, true!" said the lady to herself; "there is mirth within its
walls, but misery, misery without."

"Wouldst thou hear more?" demanded the old woman.

"There is one other voice I would fain listen to again," replied the
lady, faintly.

"Then lay down thy head speedily upon my knees, that thou mayst get
thee hence before the hour be past."

The golden skirts of day were yet lingering upon the hills, but deep
shades obscured the hollow and the pool, as if sombre night were
rising thence to overspread the world. Again that evil woman began to
weave her spell. Long did it proceed unanswered, till the knolling of
a bell stole in among the intervals of her words like a clang that had
travelled far over valley and rising ground and was just ready to die
in the air. The lady shook upon her companion's knees as she heard
that boding sound. Stronger it grew, and sadder, and deepened into the
tone of a death-bell, knolling dolefully from some ivy-mantled tower
and bearing tidings of mortality and woe to the cottage, to the hall
and to the solitary wayfarer, that all might weep for the doom
appointed in turn to them. Then came a measured tread, passing slowly,
slowly on, as of mourners with a coffin, their garments trailing on
the ground, so that the ear could measure the length of their
melancholy array. Before them went the priest, reading the
burial-service, while the leaves of his book were rustling in the
breeze. And though no voice but his was heard to speak aloud, still
there were revilings and anathemas, whispered but distinct, from women
and from men, breathed against the daughter who had wrung the aged
hearts of her parents, the wife who had betrayed the trusting fondness
of her husband, the mother who had sinned against natural affection
and left her child to die. The sweeping sound of the funeral train
faded away like a thin vapor, and the wind, that just before had
seemed to shake the coffin-pall, moaned sadly round the verge of the
hollow between three hills. But when the old woman stirred the
kneeling lady, she lifted not her head.

"Here has been a sweet hour's sport!" said the withered crone,
chuckling to herself.




THE TOLL-GATHERER'S DAY.

A SKETCH OF TRANSITORY LIFE.


Methinks, for a person whose instinct bids him rather to pore over the
current of life than to plunge into its tumultuous waves, no
undesirable retreat were a toll-house beside some thronged
thoroughfare of the land. In youth, perhaps, it is good for the
observer to run about the earth, to leave the track of his footsteps
far and wide, to mingle himself with the action of numberless
vicissitudes, and, finally, in some calm solitude to feed a musing
spirit on all that he has seen and felt. But there are natures too
indolent or too sensitive to endure the dust, the sunshine or the
rain, the turmoil of moral and physical elements, to which all the
wayfarers of the world expose themselves. For such a man how pleasant
a miracle could life be made to roll its variegated length by the
threshold of his own hermitage, and the great globe, as it were,
perform its revolutions and shift its thousand scenes before his eyes
without whirling him onward in its course! If any mortal be favored
with a lot analogous to this, it is the toll-gatherer. So, at least,
have I often fancied while lounging on a bench at the door of a small
square edifice which stands between shore and shore in the midst of a
long bridge. Beneath the timbers ebbs and flows an arm of the sea,
while above, like the life-blood through a great artery, the travel of
the north and east is continually throbbing. Sitting on the aforesaid
bench, I amuse myself with a conception, illustrated by numerous
pencil-sketches in the air, of the toll-gatherer's day.

In the morning--dim, gray, dewy summer's morn--the distant roll of
ponderous wheels begins to mingle with my old friend's slumbers,
creaking more and more harshly through the midst of his dream and
gradually replacing it with realities. Hardly conscious of the change
from sleep to wakefulness, he finds himself partly clad and throwing
wide the toll-gates for the passage of a fragrant load of hay. The
timbers groan beneath the slow-revolving wheels; one sturdy yeoman
stalks beside the oxen, and, peering from the summit of the hay, by
the glimmer of the half-extinguished lantern over the toll-house is
seen the drowsy visage of his comrade, who has enjoyed a nap some ten
miles long. The toll is paid; creak, creak, again go the wheels, and
the huge hay-mow vanishes into the morning mist. As yet nature is but
half awake, and familiar objects appear visionary. But yonder, dashing
from the shore with a rattling thunder of the wheels and a confused
clatter of hoofs, comes the never-tiring mail, which has hurried
onward at the same headlong, restless rate all through the quiet
night. The bridge resounds in one continued peal as the coach rolls on
without a pause, merely affording the toll-gatherer a glimpse at the
sleepy passengers, who now bestir their torpid limbs and snuff a
cordial in the briny air. The morn breathes upon them and blushes, and
they forget how wearily the darkness toiled away. And behold now the
fervid day in his bright chariot, glittering aslant over the waves,
nor scorning to throw a tribute of his golden beams on the
toll-gatherer's little hermitage. The old man looks eastward, and (for
he is a moralizer) frames a simile of the stage-coach and the sun.

While the world is rousing itself we may glance slightly at the scene
of our sketch. It sits above the bosom of the broad flood--a spot not
of earth, but in the midst of waters which rush with a murmuring sound
among the massive beams beneath. Over the door is a weatherbeaten
board inscribed with the rates of toll in letters so nearly effaced
that the gilding of the sunshine can hardly make them legible. Beneath
the window is a wooden bench on which a long succession of weary
wayfarers have reposed themselves. Peeping within-doors, we perceive
the whitewashed walls bedecked with sundry lithographic prints and
advertisements of various import and the immense show-bill of a
wandering caravan. And there sits our good old toll-gatherer,
glorified by the early sunbeams. He is a man, as his aspect may
announce, of quiet soul and thoughtful, shrewd, yet simple mind, who
of the wisdom which the passing world scatters along the wayside has
gathered a reasonable store.

Now the sun smiles upon the landscape and earth smiles back again upon
the sky. Frequent now are the travellers. The toll-gatherer's
practised ear can distinguish the weight of every vehicle, the number
of its wheels and how many horses beat the resounding timbers with
their iron tramp. Here, in a substantial family chaise, setting forth
betimes to take advantage of the dewy road, come a gentleman and his
wife with their rosy-cheeked little girl sitting gladsomely between
them. The bottom of the chaise is heaped with multifarious bandboxes
and carpet-bags, and beneath the axle swings a leathern trunk dusty
with yesterday's journey. Next appears a four-wheeled carryall peopled
with a round half dozen of pretty girls, all drawn by a single horse
and driven by a single gentleman. Luckless wight doomed through a
whole summer day to be the butt of mirth and mischief among the
frolicsome maidens! Bolt upright in a sulky rides a thin, sour-visaged
man who as he pays his toll hands the toll-gatherer a printed card to
stick upon the wall. The vinegar-faced traveller proves to be a
manufacturer of pickles. Now paces slowly from timber to timber a
horseman clad in black, with a meditative brow, as of one who,
whithersoever his steed might bear him, would still journey through a
mist of brooding thought. He is a country preacher going to labor at a
protracted meeting. The next object passing townward is a butcher's
cart canopied with its arch of snow-white cotton. Behind comes a
"sauceman" driving a wagon full of new potatoes, green ears of corn,
beets, carrots, turnips and summer squashes, and next two wrinkled,
withered witch-looking old gossips in an antediluvian chaise drawn by
a horse of former generations and going to peddle out a lot of
huckleberries. See, there, a man trundling a wheelbarrow-load of
lobsters. And now a milk-cart rattles briskly onward, covered with
green canvas and conveying the contributions of a whole herd of cows,
in large tin canisters.

But let all these pay their toll and pass. Here comes a spectacle that
causes the old toll-gatherer to smile benignantly, as if the
travellers brought sunshine with them and lavished its gladsome
influence all along the road. It is a barouche of the newest style,
the varnished panels of which reflect the whole moving panorama of the
landscape, and show a picture, likewise, of our friend with his visage
broadened, so that his meditative smile is transformed to grotesque
merriment. Within sits a youth fresh as the summer morn, and beside
him a young lady in white with white gloves upon her slender hands and
a white veil flowing down over her face. But methinks her blushing
cheek burns through the snowy veil. Another white-robed virgin sits in
front. And who are these on whom, and on all that appertains to them,
the dust of earth seems never to have settled? Two lovers whom the
priest has blessed this blessed morn and sent them forth, with one of
the bride-maids, on the matrimonial tour.--Take my blessing too, ye
happy ones! May the sky not frown upon you nor clouds bedew you with
their chill and sullen rain! May the hot sun kindle no fever in your
hearts! May your whole life's pilgrimage be as blissful as this first
day's journey, and its close be gladdened with even brighter
anticipations than those which hallow your bridal-night! They pass,
and ere the reflection of their joy has faded from his face another
spectacle throws a melancholy shadow over the spirit of the observing
man. In a close carriage sits a fragile figure muffled carefully and
shrinking even from the mild breath of summer. She leans against a
manly form, and his arm enfolds her as if to guard his treasure from
some enemy. Let but a few weeks pass, and when he shall strive to
embrace that loved one, he will press only desolation to his heart.

And now has Morning gathered up her dewy pearls and fled away. The sun
rolls blazing through the sky, and cannot find a cloud to cool his
face with. The horses toil sluggishly along the bridge, and heave
their glistening sides in short quick pantings when the reins are
tightened at the toll-house. Glisten, too, the faces of the
travellers. Their garments are thickly bestrewn with dust; their
whiskers and hair look hoary; their throats are choked with the dusty
atmosphere which they have left behind them. No air is stirring on the
road. Nature dares draw no breath lest she should inhale a stifling
cloud of dust. "A hot and dusty day!" cry the poor pilgrims as they
wipe their begrimed foreheads and woo the doubtful breeze which the
river bears along with it.--"Awful hot! Dreadful dusty!" answers the
sympathetic toll-gatherer. They start again to pass through the fiery
furnace, while he re-enters his cool hermitage and besprinkles it with
a pail of briny water from the stream beneath. He thinks within
himself that the sun is not so fierce here as elsewhere, and that the
gentle air doth not forget him in these sultry days. Yes, old friend,
and a quiet heart will make a dog-day temperate. He hears a weary
footstep, and perceives a traveller with pack and staff, who sits down
upon the hospitable bench and removes the hat from his wet brow. The
toll-gatherer administers a cup of cold water, and, discovering his
guest to be a man of homely sense, he engages him in profitable talk,
uttering the maxims of a philosophy which he has found in his own
soul, but knows not how it came there. And as the wayfarer makes ready
to resume his journey he tells him a sovereign remedy for blistered
feet.

Now comes the noontide hour--of all the hours, nearest akin to
midnight, for each has its own calmness and repose. Soon, however, the
world begins to turn again upon its axis, and it seems the busiest
epoch of the day, when an accident impedes the march of sublunary
things. The draw being lifted to permit the passage of a schooner
laden with wood from the Eastern forests, she sticks immovably right
athwart the bridge. Meanwhile, on both sides of the chasm a throng of
impatient travellers fret and fume. Here are two sailors in a gig with
the top thrown back, both puffing cigars and swearing all sorts of
forecastle oaths; there, in a smart chaise, a dashingly-dressed
gentleman and lady, he from a tailor's shop-board and she from a
milliner's back room--the aristocrats of a summer afternoon. And what
are the haughtiest of us but the ephemeral aristocrats of a summer's
day? Here is a tin-pedler whose glittering ware bedazzles all
beholders like a travelling meteor or opposition sun, and on the other
side a seller of spruce beer, which brisk liquor is confined in
several dozen of stone bottles. Here conic a party of ladies on
horseback, in green ridings habits, and gentlemen attendant, and there
a flock of sheep for the market, pattering over the bridge with a
multitude nous clatter of their little hoofs; here a Frenchman with a
hand-organ on his shoulder, and there an itinerant Swiss jeweller. On
this side, heralded by a blast of clarions and bugles, appears a train
of wagons conveying all the wild beasts of a caravan; and on that a
company of summer soldiers marching from village to village on a
festival campaign, attended by the "brass band." Now look at the
scene, and it presents an emblem of the mysterious confusion, the
apparently insolvable riddle, in which individuals, or the great world
itself, seem often to be involved. What miracle shall set all things
right again?

But see! the schooner has thrust her bulky carcase through the chasm;
the draw descends; horse and foot pass onward and leave the bridge
vacant from end to end. "And thus," muses the toll-gatherer, "have I
found it with all stoppages, even though the universe seemed to be at
a stand." The sage old man!

Far westward now the reddening sun throws a broad sheet of splendor
across the flood, and to the eyes of distant boatmen gleams brightly
among the timbers of the bridge. Strollers come from the town to quaff
the freshening breeze. One or two let down long lines and haul up
flapping flounders or cunners or small cod, or perhaps an eel. Others,
and fair girls among them, with the flush of the hot day still on
their cheeks, bend over the railing and watch the heaps of seaweed
floating upward with the flowing tide. The horses now tramp heavily
along the bridge and wistfully bethink them of their stables.--Rest,
rest, thou weary world! for to-morrow's round of toil and pleasure
will be as wearisome as to-day's has been, yet both shall bear thee
onward a day's march of eternity.--Now the old toll-gatherer looks
seaward and discerns the lighthouse kindling on a far island, and the
stars, too, kindling in the sky, as if but a little way beyond; and,
mingling reveries of heaven with remembrances of earth, the whole
procession of mortal travellers, all the dusty pilgrimage which he has
witnessed, seems like a flitting show of phantoms for his thoughtful
soul to muse upon.




THE VISION OF THE FOUNTAIN.


At fifteen I became a resident in a country village more than a
hundred miles from home. The morning after my arrival--a September
morning, but warm and bright as any in July--I rambled into a wood of
oaks with a few walnut trees intermixed, forming the closest shade
above my head. The ground was rocky, uneven, overgrown with bushes and
clumps of young saplings and traversed only by cattle-paths. The track
which I chanced to follow led me to a crystal spring with a border of
grass as freshly green as on May morning, and overshadowed by the limb
of a great oak. One solitary sunbeam found its way down and played
like a goldfish in the water.

From my childhood I have loved to gaze into a spring. The water filled
a circular basin, small but deep and set round with stones, some of
which were covered with slimy moss, the others naked and of variegated
hue--reddish, white and brown. The bottom was covered with coarse
sand, which sparkled in the lonely sunbeam and seemed to illuminate
the spring with an unborrowed light. In one spot the gush of the water
violently agitated the sand, but without obscuring the fountain or
breaking the glassiness of its surface. It appeared as if some living
creature were about to emerge--the naiad of the spring, perhaps, in
the shape of a beautiful young woman with a gown of filmy water-moss,
a belt of rainbow-drops and a cold, pure, passionless countenance. How
would the beholder shiver, pleasantly yet fearfully, to see her
sitting on one of the stones, paddling her white feet in the ripples
and throwing up water to sparkle in the sun! Wherever she laid her
hands on grass and flowers, they would immediately be moist, as with
morning dew. Then would she set about her labors, like a careful
housewife, to clear the fountain of withered leaves, and bits of slimy
wood, and old acorns from the oaks above, and grains of corn left by
cattle in drinking, till the bright sand in the bright water were like
a treasury of diamonds. But, should the intruder approach too near, he
would find only the drops of a summer shower glistening about the spot
where he had seen her.

Reclining on the border of grass where the dewy goddess should have
been, I bent forward, and a pair of eyes met mine within the watery
mirror. They were the reflection of my own. I looked again, and, lo!
another face, deeper in the fountain than my own image, more distinct
in all the features, yet faint as thought. The vision had the aspect
of a fair young girl with locks of paly gold. A mirthful expression
laughed in the eyes and dimpled over the whole shadowy countenance,
till it seemed just what a fountain would be if, while dancing merrily
into the sunshine, it should assume the shape of woman. Through the
dim rosiness of the cheeks I could see the brown leaves, the slimy
twigs, the acorns and the sparkling sand. The solitary sunbeam was
diffused among the golden hair, which melted into its faint brightness
and became a glory round that head so beautiful.

My description can give no idea how suddenly the fountain was thus
tenanted and how soon it was left desolate. I breathed, and there was
the face; I held my breath, and it was gone. Had it passed away or
faded into nothing? I doubted whether it had ever been.

My sweet readers, what a dreamy and delicious hour did I spend where
that vision found and left me! For a long time I sat perfectly still,
waiting till it should reappear, and fearful that the slightest
motion, or even the flutter of my breath, might frighten it away. Thus
have I often started from a pleasant dream, and then kept quiet in
hopes to wile it back. Deep were my musings as to the race and
attributes of that ethereal being. Had I created her? Was she the
daughter of my fancy, akin to those strange shapes which peep under
the lids of children's eyes? And did her beauty gladden me for that
one moment and then die? Or was she a water-nymph within the fountain,
or fairy or woodland goddess peeping over my shoulder, or the ghost of
some forsaken maid who had drowned herself for love? Or, in good
truth, had a lovely girl with a warm heart and lips that would bear
pressure stolen softly behind me and thrown her image into the spring?

I watched and waited, but no vision came again. I departed, but with a
spell upon me which drew me back that same afternoon to the haunted
spring. There was the water gushing, the sand sparkling and the
sunbeam glimmering. There the vision was not, but only a great frog,
the hermit of that solitude, who immediately withdrew his speckled
snout and made himself invisible--all except a pair of long
legs--beneath a stone. Methought he had a devilish look. I could have
slain him as an enchanter who kept the mysterious beauty imprisoned in
the fountain.

Sad and heavy, I was returning to the village. Between me and the
church-spire rose a little hill, and on its summit a group of trees
insulated from all the rest of the wood, with their own share of
radiance hovering on them from the west and their own solitary shadow
falling to the east. The afternoon being far declined, the sunshine
was almost pensive and the shade almost cheerful; glory and gloom were
mingled in the placid light, as if the spirits of the Day and Evening
had met in friendship under those trees and found themselves akin. I
was admiring the picture when the shape of a young girl emerged from
behind the clump of oaks. My heart knew her: it was the vision, but so
distant and ethereal did she seem, so unmixed with earth, so imbued
with the pensive glory of the spot where she was standing, that my
spirit sunk within me, sadder than before. How could I ever reach her?

While I gazed a sudden shower came pattering down upon the leaves. In
a moment the air was full of brightness, each raindrop catching a
portion of sunlight as it fell, and the whole gentle shower appearing
like a mist, just substantial enough to bear the burden of radiance. A
rainbow vivid as Niagara's was painted in the air. Its southern limb
came down before the group of trees and enveloped the fair vision as
if the hues of heaven were the only garment for her beauty. When the
rainbow vanished, she who had seemed a part of it was no longer there.
Was her existence absorbed in nature's loveliest phenomenon, and did
her pure frame dissolve away in the varied light? Yet I would not
despair of her return, for, robed in the rainbow, she was the emblem
of Hope.

Thus did the vision leave me, and many a doleful day succeeded to the
parting moment. By the spring and in the wood and on the hill and
through the village, at dewy sunrise, burning noon, and at that magic
hour of sunset, when she had vanished from my sight, I sought her, but
in vain. Weeks came and went, months rolled away, and she appeared not
in them. I imparted my mystery to none, but wandered to and fro or sat
in solitude like one that had caught a glimpse of heaven and could
take no more joy on earth. I withdrew into an inner world where my
thoughts lived and breathed, and the vision in the midst of them.
Without intending it, I became at once the author and hero of a
romance, conjuring up rivals, imagining events, the actions of others
and my own, and experiencing every change of passion, till jealousy
and despair had their end in bliss. Oh, had I the burning fancy of my
early youth with manhood's colder gift, the power of expression, your
hearts, sweet ladies, should flutter at my tale.

In the middle of January I was summoned home. The day before my
departure, visiting the spots which had been hallowed by the vision, I
found that the spring had a frozen bosom, and nothing but the snow and
a glare of winter sunshine on the hill of the rainbow. "Let me hope,"
thought I, "or my heart will be as icy as the fountain and the whole
world as desolate as this snowy hill." Most of the day was spent in
preparing for the journey, which was to commence at four o'clock the
next morning. About an hour after supper, when all was in readiness, I
descended from my chamber to the sitting-room to take leave of the old
clergyman and his family with whom I had been an inmate. A gust of
wind blew out my lamp as I passed through the entry.

According to their invariable custom--so pleasant a one when the fire
blazes cheerfully--the family were sitting in the parlor with no other
light than what came from the hearth. As the good clergyman's scanty
stipend compelled him to use all sorts of economy, the foundation of
his fires was always a large heap of tan, or ground bark, which would
smoulder away from morning till night with a dull warmth and no flame.
This evening the heap of tan was newly put on and surmounted with
three sticks of red oak full of moisture, and a few pieces of dry pine
that had not yet kindled. There was no light except the little that
came sullenly from two half-burnt brands, without even glimmering on
the andirons. But I knew the position of the old minister's arm-chair,
and also where his wife sat with her knitting-work, and how to avoid
his two daughters--one a stout country lass, and the other a
consumptive girl. Groping through the gloom, I found my own place next
to that of the son, a learned collegian who had come home to keep
school in the village during the winter vacation. I noticed that there
was less room than usual to-night between the collegian's chair and
mine.

As people are always taciturn in the dark, not a word was said for
some time after my entrance. Nothing broke the stillness but the
regular click of the matron's knitting-needles. At times the fire
threw out a brief and dusky gleam which twinkled on the old man's
glasses and hovered doubtfully round our circle, but was far too faint
to portray the individuals who composed it. Were we not like ghosts?
Dreamy as the scene was, might it not be a type of the mode in which
departed people who had known and loved each other here would hold
communion in eternity? We were aware of each other's presence, not by
sight nor sound nor touch, but by an inward consciousness. Would it
not be so among the dead?

The silence was interrupted by the consumptive daughter addressing a
remark to some one in the circle whom she called Rachel. Her tremulous
and decayed accents were answered by a single word, but in a voice
that made me start and bend toward the spot whence it had proceeded.
Had I ever heard that sweet, low tone? If not, why did it rouse up so
many old recollections, or mockeries of such, the shadows of things
familiar yet unknown, and fill my mind with confused images of her
features who had spoken, though buried in the gloom of the parlor?
Whom had my heart recognized, that it throbbed so? I listened to catch
her gentle breathing, and strove by the intensity of my gaze to
picture forth a shape where none was visible.

Suddenly the dry pine caught; the fire blazed up with a ruddy glow,
and where the darkness had been, there was she--the vision of the
fountain. A spirit of radiance only, she had vanished with the rainbow
and appeared again in the firelight, perhaps to flicker with the blaze
and be gone. Yet her cheek was rosy and lifelike, and her features, in
the bright warmth of the room, were even sweeter and tenderer than my
recollection of them. She knew me. The mirthful expression that had
laughed in her eyes and dimpled over her countenance when I beheld her
faint beauty in the fountain was laughing and dimpling there now. One
moment our glance mingled; the next, down rolled the heap of tan upon
the kindled wood, and darkness snatched away that daughter of the
light, and gave her back to me no more!

Fair ladies, there is nothing more to tell. Must the simple mystery be
revealed, then, that Rachel was the daughter of the village squire and
had left home for a boarding-school the morning after I arrived and
returned the day before my departure? If I transformed her to an
angel, it is what every youthful lover does for his mistress. Therein
consists the essence of my story. But slight the change, sweet maids,
to make angels of yourselves.




FANCY'S SHOW-BOX.

A MORALITY.


What is guilt? A stain upon the soul. And it is a point of vast
interest whether the soul may contract such stains in all their depth
and flagrancy from deeds which may have been plotted and resolved
upon, but which physically have never had existence. Must the fleshly
hand and visible frame of man set its seal to the evil designs of the
soul, in order to give them their entire validity against the sinner?
Or, while none but crimes perpetrated are cognizable before an earthly
tribunal, will guilty thoughts--of which guilty deeds are no more than
shadows,--will these draw down the full weight of a condemning
sentence in the supreme court of eternity? In the solitude of a
midnight chamber or in a desert afar from men or in a church while the
body is kneeling the soul may pollute itself even with those crimes
which we are accustomed to deem altogether carnal. If this be true, it
is a fearful truth.

Let us illustrate the subject by an imaginary example. A venerable
gentleman--one Mr. Smith--who had long been regarded as a pattern of
moral excellence was warming his aged blood with a glass or two of
generous wine. His children being gone forth about their worldly
business and his grandchildren at school, he sat alone in a deep
luxurious arm-chair with his feet beneath a richly-carved mahogany
table. Some old people have a dread of solitude, and when better
company may not be had rejoice even to hear the quiet breathing of a
babe asleep upon the carpet. But Mr. Smith, whose silver hair was the
bright symbol of a life unstained except by such spots as are
inseparable from human nature--he had no need of a babe to protect him
by its purity, nor of a grown person to stand between him and his own
soul. Nevertheless, either manhood must converse with age, or
womanhood must soothe him with gentle cares, or infancy must sport
around his chair, or his thoughts will stray into the misty region of
the past and the old man be chill and sad. Wine will not always cheer
him.

Such might have been the case with Mr. Smith, when, through the
brilliant medium of his glass of old Madeira, he beheld three figures
entering the room. These were Fancy, who had assumed the garb and
aspect of an itinerant showman, with a box of pictures on her back;
and Memory, in the likeness of a clerk, with a pen behind her ear, an
inkhorn at her buttonhole and a huge manuscript volume beneath her
arm; and lastly, behind the other two, a person shrouded in a dusky
mantle which concealed both face and form. But Mr. Smith had a shrewd
idea that it was Conscience. How kind of Fancy, Memory and Conscience
to visit the old gentleman just as he was beginning to imagine that
the wine had neither so bright a sparkle nor so excellent a flavor as
when himself and the liquor were less aged! Through the dim length of
the apartment, where crimson curtains muffled the glare of sunshine
and created a rich obscurity, the three guests drew near the
silver-haired old man. Memory, with a finger between the leaves of her
huge volume, placed herself at his right hand; Conscience, with her
face still hidden in the dusky mantle, took her station on the left,
so as to be next his heart; while Fancy set down her picture-box upon
the table with the magnifying-glass convenient to his eye.

We can sketch merely the outlines of two or three out of the many
pictures which at the pulling of a string successively peopled the box
with the semblances of living scenes. One was a moonlight picture, in
the background a lowly dwelling, and in front, partly shadowed by a
tree, yet besprinkled with flakes of radiance, two youthful figures,
male and female. The young man stood with folded arms, a haughty smile
upon his lip and a gleam of triumph in his eye as he glanced downward
at the kneeling girl. She was almost prostrate at his feet, evidently
sinking under a weight of shame and anguish which hardly allowed her
to lift her clasped hands in supplication. Her eyes she could not
lift. But neither her agony, nor the lovely features on which it was
depicted, nor the slender grace of the form which it convulsed,
appeared to soften the obduracy of the young man. He was the
personification of triumphant scorn.

Now, strange to say, as old Mr. Smith peeped through the
magnifying-glass, which made the objects start out from the canvas
with magical deception, he began to recognize the farmhouse, the tree
and both the figures of the picture. The young man in times long past
had often met his gaze within the looking-glass; the girl was the very
image of his first love--his cottage-love, his Martha Burroughs. Mr.
Smith was scandalized. "Oh, vile and slanderous picture!" he exclaims.
"When have I triumphed over ruined innocence? Was not Martha wedded in
her teens to David Tomkins, who won her girlish love and long enjoyed
her affection as a wife? And ever since his death she has lived a
reputable widow!"

Meantime, Memory was turning over the leaves of her volume, rustling
them to and fro with uncertain fingers, until among the earlier pages
she found one which had reference to this picture. She reads it close
to the old gentleman's ear: it is a record merely of sinful thought
which never was embodied in an act, but, while Memory is reading,
Conscience unveils her face and strikes a dagger to the heart of Mr.
Smith. Though not a death-blow, the torture was extreme.

The exhibition proceeded. One after another Fancy displayed her
pictures, all of which appeared to have been painted by some malicious
artist on purpose to vex Mr. Smith. Not a shadow of proof could have
been adduced in any earthly court that he was guilty of the slightest
of those sins which were thus made to stare him in the face. In one
scene there was a table set out, with several bottles and glasses half
filled with wine, which threw back the dull ray of an expiring lamp.
There had been mirth and revelry until the hand of the clock stood
just at midnight, when Murder stepped between the boon-companions. A
young man had fallen on the floor, and lay stone dead with a ghastly
wound crushed into his temple, while over him, with a delirium of
mingled rage and horror in his countenance, stood the youthful
likeness of Mr. Smith. The murdered youth wore the features of Edward
Spencer. "What does this rascal of a painter mean?" cries Mr. Smith,
provoked beyond all patience. "Edward Spencer was my earliest and
dearest friend, true to me as I to him through more than half a
century. Neither I nor any other ever murdered him. Was he not alive
within five years, and did he not, in token of our long friendship,
bequeath me his gold-headed cane and a mourning-ring?"

Again had Memory been turning over her volume, and fixed at length
upon so confused a page that she surely must have scribbled it when
she was tipsy. The purport was, however, that while Mr. Smith and
Edward Spencer were heating their young blood with wine a quarrel had
flashed up between them, and Mr. Smith, in deadly wrath, had flung a
bottle at Spencer's head. True, it missed its aim and merely smashed a
looking-glass; and the next morning, when the incident was imperfectly
remembered, they had shaken hands with a hearty laugh. Yet, again,
while Memory was reading, Conscience unveiled her face, struck a
dagger to the heart of Mr. Smith and quelled his remonstrance with her
iron frown. The pain was quite excruciating.

Some of the pictures had been painted with so doubtful a touch, and
in colors so faint and pale, that the subjects could barely be
conjectured. A dull, semi-transparent mist had been thrown over the
surface of the canvas, into which the figures seemed to vanish while
the eye sought most earnestly to fix them. But in every scene, however
dubiously portrayed, Mr. Smith was invariably haunted by his own
lineaments at various ages as in a dusty mirror. After poring several
minutes over one of these blurred and almost indistinguishable
pictures, he began to see that the painter had intended to represent
him, now in the decline of life, as stripping the clothes from the
backs of three half-starved children. "Really, this puzzles me!" quoth
Mr. Smith, with the irony of conscious rectitude. "Asking pardon of
the painter, I pronounce him a fool as well as a scandalous knave. A
man of my standing in the world to be robbing little children of their
clothes! Ridiculous!"

But while he spoke Memory had searched her fatal volume and found a
page which with her sad calm voice she poured into his ear. It was not
altogether inapplicable to the misty scene. It told how Mr. Smith had
been grievously tempted by many devilish sophistries, on the ground of
a legal quibble, to commence a lawsuit against three orphan-children,
joint-heirs to a considerable estate. Fortunately, before he was quite
decided, his claims had turned out nearly as devoid of law as justice.
As Memory ceased to read Conscience again thrust aside her mantle, and
would have struck her victim with the envenomed dagger only that he
struggled and clasped his hands before his heart. Even then, however,
he sustained an ugly gash.

Why should we follow Fancy through the whole series of those awful
pictures? Painted by an artist of wondrous power and terrible
acquaintance with the secret soul, they embodied the ghosts of all the
never-perpetrated sins that had glided through the lifetime of Mr.
Smith. And could such beings of cloudy fantasy, so near akin to
nothingness, give valid evidence against him at the day of judgment?
Be that the case or not, there is reason to believe that one truly
penitential tear would have washed away each hateful picture and left
the canvas white as snow. But Mr. Smith, at a prick of Conscience too
keen to be endured, bellowed aloud with impatient agony, and suddenly
discovered that his three guests were gone. There he sat alone, a
silver-haired and highly-venerated old man, in the rich gloom of the
crimsoned-curtained room, with no box of pictures on the table, but
only a decanter of most excellent Madeira. Yet his heart still seemed
to fester with the venom of the dagger.

Nevertheless, the unfortunate old gentleman might have argued the
matter with Conscience and alleged many reasons wherefore she should
not smite him so pitilessly. Were we to take up his cause, it should
be somewhat in the following fashion. A scheme of guilt, till it be
put in execution, greatly resembles a train of incidents in a
projected tale. The latter, in order to produce a sense of reality in
the reader's mind, must be conceived with such proportionate strength
by the author as to seem in the glow of fancy more like truth, past,
present or to come, than purely fiction. The prospective sinner, on
the other hand, weaves his plot of crime, but seldom or never feels a
perfect certainty that it will be executed. There is a dreaminess
diffused about his thoughts; in a dream, as it were, he strikes the
death-blow into his victim's heart and starts to find an indelible
blood-stain on his hand. Thus a novel-writer or a dramatist, in
creating a villain of romance and fitting him with evil deeds, and the
villain of actual life in projecting crimes that will be perpetrated,
may almost meet each other halfway between reality and fancy. It is
not until the crime is accomplished that Guilt clenches its gripe upon
the guilty heart and claims it for his own. Then, and not before, sin
is actually felt and acknowledged, and, if unaccompanied by repentance,
grows a thousandfold more virulent by its self-consciousness. Be it
considered, also, that men often overestimate their capacity for evil.
At a distance, while its attendant circumstances do not press upon
their notice and its results are dimly seen, they can bear to
contemplate it. They may take the steps which lead to crime, impelled
by the same sort of mental action as in working out a mathematical
problem, yet be powerless with compunction at the final moment. They
knew not what deed it was that they deemed themselves resolved to do.
In truth, there is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full
resolve, either for good or evil, except at the very moment of
execution. Let us hope, therefore, that all the dreadful consequences
of sin will not be incurred unless the act have set its seal upon the
thought.

Yet, with the slight fancy-work which we have framed, some sad and
awful truths are interwoven. Man must not disclaim his brotherhood
even with the guiltiest, since, though his hand be clean, his heart
has surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity. He must
feel that when he shall knock at the gate of heaven no semblance of an
unspotted life can entitle him to entrance there. Penitence must kneel
and Mercy come from the footstool of the throne, or that golden gate
will never open.




DR. HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT.


That very singular man old Dr. Heidegger once invited four venerable
friends to meet him in his study. There were three white-bearded
gentlemen--Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew and Mr. Gascoigne--and a
withered gentlewoman whose name was the widow Wycherly. They were all
melancholy old creatures who had been unfortunate in life, and whose
greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their
graves. Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous
merchant, but had lost his all by a frantic speculation, and was now
little better than a mendicant. Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best
years and his health and substance in the pursuit of sinful pleasures
which had given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout and divers
other torments of soul and body. Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined
politician, a man of evil fame--or, at least, had been so till time
had buried him from the knowledge of the present generation and made
him obscure instead of infamous. As for the widow Wycherly, tradition
tells us that she was a great beauty in her day, but for a long while
past she had lived in deep seclusion on account of certain scandalous
stories which had prejudiced the gentry of the town against her. It is
a circumstance worth mentioning that each of these three old
gentlemen--Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew and Mr. Gascoigne--were
early lovers of the widow Wycherly, and had once been on the point of
cutting each other's throats for her sake. And before proceeding
farther I will merely hint that Dr. Heidegger and all his four guests
were sometimes thought to be a little beside themselves, as is not
infrequently the case with old people when worried either by present
troubles or woeful recollections.

"My dear old friends," said Dr. Heidegger, motioning them to be
seated, "I am desirous of your assistance in one of those little
experiments with which I amuse myself here in my study."

If all stories were true, Dr. Heidegger's study must have been a very
curious place. It was a dim, old-fashioned chamber festooned with
cobwebs and besprinkled with antique dust. Around the walls stood
several oaken bookcases, the lower shelves of which were filled with
rows of gigantic folios and black-letter quartos, and the upper with
little parchment-covered duodecimos. Over the central bookcase was a
bronze bust of Hippocrates, with which, according to some authorities,
Dr. Heidegger was accustomed to hold consultations in all difficult
cases of his practice. In the obscurest corner of the room stood a
tall and narrow oaken closet with its door ajar, within which
doubtfully appeared a skeleton. Between two of the bookcases hung a
looking-glass, presenting its high and dusty plate within a tarnished
gilt frame. Among many wonderful stories related of this mirror, it
was fabled that the spirits of all the doctor's deceased patients
dwelt within its verge and would stare him in the face whenever he
looked thitherward. The opposite side of the chamber was ornamented
with the full-length portrait of a young lady arrayed in the faded
magnificence of silk, satin and brocade, and with a visage as faded as
her dress. Above half a century ago Dr. Heidegger had been on the
point of marriage with this young lady, but, being affected with some
slight disorder, she had swallowed one of her lover's prescriptions
and died on the bridal-evening. The greatest curiosity of the study
remains to be mentioned: it was a ponderous folio volume bound in
black leather, with massive silver clasps. There were no letters on
the back, and nobody could tell the title of the book. But it was well
known to be a book of magic, and once, when a chambermaid had lifted
it merely to brush away the dust, the skeleton had rattled in its
closet, the picture of the young lady had stepped one foot upon the
floor and several ghastly faces had peeped forth from the mirror,
while the brazen head of Hippocrates frowned and said, "Forbear!"

Such was Dr. Heidegger's study. On the summer afternoon of our tale a
small round table as black as ebony stood in the centre of the room,
sustaining a cut-glass vase of beautiful form and elaborate
workmanship. The sunshine came through the window between the heavy
festoons of two faded damask curtains and fell directly across this
vase, so that a mild splendor was reflected from it on the ashen
visages of the five old people who sat around. Four champagne-glasses
were also on the table.

"My dear old friends," repeated Dr. Heidegger, "may I reckon on your
aid in performing an exceedingly curious experiment?"

Now, Dr. Heidegger was a very strange old gentleman whose eccentricity
had become the nucleus for a thousand fantastic stories. Some of these
fables--to my shame be it spoken--might possibly be traced back to
mine own veracious self; and if any passages of the present tale
should startle the reader's faith, I must be content to bear the
stigma of a fiction-monger.

When the doctor's four guests heard him talk of his proposed
experiment, they anticipated nothing more wonderful than the murder of
a mouse in an air-pump or the examination of a cobweb by the
microscope, or some similar nonsense with which he was constantly in
the habit of pestering his intimates. But without waiting for a reply
Dr. Heidegger hobbled across the chamber and returned with the same
ponderous folio bound in black leather which common report affirmed to
be a book of magic. Undoing the silver clasps, he opened the volume
and took from among its black-letter pages a rose, or what was once a
rose, though now the green leaves and crimson petals had assumed one
brownish hue and the ancient flower seemed ready to crumble to dust in
the doctor's hands.

"This rose," said Dr. Heidegger, with a sigh--"this same withered and
crumbling flower--blossomed five and fifty years ago. It was given me
by Sylvia Ward, whose portrait hangs yonder, and I meant to wear it in
my bosom at our wedding. Five and fifty years it has been treasured
between the leaves of this old volume. Now, would you deem it possible
that this rose of half a century could ever bloom again?"

"Nonsense!" said the widow Wycherly, with a peevish toss of her head.
"You might as well ask whether an old woman's wrinkled face could ever
bloom again."

"See!" answered Dr. Heidegger. He uncovered the vase and threw the
faded rose into the water which it contained. At first it lay lightly
on the surface of the fluid, appearing to imbibe none of its moisture.
Soon, however, a singular change began to be visible. The crushed and
dried petals stirred and assumed a deepening tinge of crimson, as if
the flower were reviving from a deathlike slumber, the slender stalk
and twigs of foliage became green, and there was the rose of half a
century, looking as fresh as when Sylvia Ward had first given it to
her lover. It was scarcely full-blown, for some of its delicate red
leaves curled modestly around its moist bosom, within which two or
three dewdrops were sparkling.

"That is certainly a very pretty deception," said the doctor's
friends--carelessly, however, for they had witnessed greater miracles
at a conjurer's show. "Pray, how was it effected?"

"Did you never hear of the Fountain of Youth?" asked Dr. Heidegger,
"which Ponce de Leon, the Spanish adventurer, went in search of two or
three centuries ago?"

"But did Ponce de Leon ever find it?" said the widow Wycherly.

"No," answered Dr. Heidegger, "for he never sought it in the right
place. The famous Fountain of Youth, if I am rightly informed, is
situated in the southern part of the Floridian peninsula, not far from
Lake Macaco. Its source is overshadowed by several gigantic magnolias
which, though numberless centuries old, have been kept as fresh as
violets by the virtues of this wonderful water. An acquaintance of
mine, knowing my curiosity in such matters, has sent me what you see
in the vase."

"Ahem!" said Colonel Killigrew, who believed not a word of the
doctor's story; "and what may be the effect of this fluid on the human
frame?"

"You shall judge for yourself, my dear colonel," replied Dr.
Heidegger.--"And all of you, my respected friends, are welcome to so
much of this admirable fluid as may restore to you the bloom of youth.
For my own part, having had much trouble in growing old, I am in no
hurry to grow young again. With your permission, therefore, I will
merely watch the progress of the experiment."

While he spoke Dr. Heidegger had been filling the four
champagne-glasses with the water of the Fountain of Youth. It was
apparently impregnated with an effervescent gas, for little bubbles
were continually ascending from the depths of the glasses and bursting
in silvery spray at the surface. As the liquor diffused a pleasant
perfume, the old people doubted not that it possessed cordial and
comfortable properties, and, though utter sceptics as to its
rejuvenescent power, they were inclined to swallow it at once. But Dr.
Heidegger besought them to stay a moment.

"Before you drink, my respectable old friends," said he, "it would be
well that, with the experience of a lifetime to direct you, you should
draw up a few general rules for your guidance in passing a second time
through the perils of youth. Think what a sin and shame it would be
if, with your peculiar advantages, you should not become patterns of
virtue and wisdom to all the young people of the age!"

The doctor's four venerable friends made him no answer except by a
feeble and tremulous laugh, so very ridiculous was the idea that,
knowing how closely Repentance treads behind the steps of Error, they
should ever go astray again.

"Drink, then," said the doctor, bowing; "I rejoice that I have so well
selected the subjects of my experiment."

With palsied hands they raised the glasses to their lips. The liquor,
if it really possessed such virtues as Dr. Heidegger imputed to it,
could not have been bestowed on four human beings who needed it more
woefully. They looked as if they had never known what youth or
pleasure was, but had been the offspring of Nature's dotage, and
always the gray, decrepit, sapless, miserable creatures who now sat
stooping round the doctor's table without life enough in their souls
or bodies to be animated even by the prospect of growing young again.
They drank off the water and replaced their glasses on the table.

Assuredly, there was an almost immediate improvement in the aspect of
the party--not unlike what might have been produced by a glass of
generous wine--together with a sudden glow of cheerful sunshine,
brightening over all their visages at once. There was a healthful
suffusion on their cheeks instead of the ashen hue that had made them
look so corpse-like. They gazed at one another, and fancied that some
magic power had really begun to smooth away the deep and sad
inscriptions which Father Time had been so long engraving on their
brows. The widow Wycherly adjusted her cap, for she felt almost like a
woman again.

"Give us more of this wondrous water," cried they, eagerly. "We are
younger, but we are still too old. Quick! give us more!"

"Patience, patience!" quoth Dr. Heidegger, who sat, watching the
experiment with philosophic coolness. "You have been a long time
growing old; surely you might be content to grow young in half an
hour. But the water is at your service." Again he filled their glasses
with the liquor of youth, enough of which still remained in the vase
to turn half the old people in the city to the age of their own
grandchildren.

While the bubbles were yet sparkling on the brim the doctor's four
guests snatched their glasses from the table and swallowed the
contents at a single gulp. Was it delusion? Even while the draught was
passing down their throats it seemed to have wrought a change on their
whole systems. Their eyes grew clear and bright; a dark shade deepened
among their silvery locks: they sat around the table three gentlemen
of middle age and a woman hardly beyond her buxom prime.

"My dear widow, you are charming!" cried Colonel Killigrew, whose eyes
had been fixed upon her face while the shadows of age were flitting
from it like darkness from the crimson daybreak.

The fair widow knew of old that Colonel Killigrew's compliments were
not always measured by sober truth; so she started up and ran to the
mirror, still dreading that the ugly visage of an old woman would meet
her gaze.

Meanwhile, the three gentlemen behaved in such a manner as proved that
the water of the Fountain of Youth possessed some intoxicating
qualities--unless, indeed, their exhilaration of spirits were merely a
lightsome dizziness caused by the sudden removal of the weight of
years. Mr. Gascoigne's mind seemed to run on political topics, but
whether relating to the past, present or future could not easily be
determined, since the same ideas and phrases have been in vogue these
fifty years. Now he rattled forth full-throated sentences about
patriotism, national glory and the people's right; now he muttered
some perilous stuff or other in a sly and doubtful whisper, so
cautiously that even his own conscience could scarcely catch the
secret; and now, again, he spoke in measured accents and a
deeply-deferential tone, as if a royal ear were listening to his
well-turned periods. Colonel Killigrew all this time had been trolling
forth a jolly bottle-song and ringing his glass in symphony with the
chorus, while his eyes wandered toward the buxom figure of the widow
Wycherly. On the other side of the table, Mr. Medbourne was involved
in a calculation of dollars and cents with which was strangely
intermingled a project for supplying the East Indies with ice by
harnessing a team of whales to the polar icebergs. As for the widow
Wycherly, she stood before the mirror courtesying and simpering to her
own image and greeting it as the friend whom she loved better than all
the world besides. She thrust her face close to the glass to see
whether some long-remembered wrinkle or crow's-foot had indeed
vanished; she examined whether the snow had so entirely melted from
her hair that the venerable cap could be safely thrown aside. At last,
turning briskly away, she came with a sort of dancing step to the
table.

"My dear old doctor," cried she, "pray favor me with another glass."

"Certainly, my dear madam--certainly," replied the complaisant doctor.
"See! I have already filled the glasses."

There, in fact, stood the four glasses brimful of this wonderful
water, the delicate spray of which, as it effervesced from the
surface, resembled the tremulous glitter of diamonds.

It was now so nearly sunset that the chamber had grown duskier than
ever, but a mild and moonlike splendor gleamed from within the vase
and rested alike on the four guests and on the doctor's venerable
figure. He sat in a high-backed, elaborately-carved oaken arm-chair
with a gray dignity of aspect that might have well befitted that very
Father Time whose power had never been disputed save by this fortunate
company. Even while quaffing the third draught of the Fountain of
Youth, they were almost awed by the expression of his mysterious
visage. But the next moment the exhilarating gush of young life shot
through their veins. They were now in the happy prime of youth. Age,
with its miserable train of cares and sorrows and diseases, was
remembered only as the trouble of a dream from which they had joyously
awoke. The fresh gloss of the soul, so early lost and without which
the world's successive scenes had been but a gallery of faded
pictures, again threw its enchantment over all their prospects. They
felt like new-created beings in a new-created universe.

"We are young! We are young!" they cried, exultingly.

Youth, like the extremity of age, had effaced the strongly-marked
characteristics of middle life and mutually assimilated them all. They
were a group of merry youngsters almost maddened with the exuberant
frolicsomeness of their years. The most singular effect of their
gayety was an impulse to mock the infirmity and decrepitude of which
they had so lately been the victims. They laughed loudly at their
old-fashioned attire--the wide-skirted coats and flapped waistcoats of
the young men and the ancient cap and gown of the blooming girl. One
limped across the floor like a gouty grandfather; one set a pair of
spectacles astride of his nose and pretended to pore over the
black-letter pages of the book of magic; a third seated himself in an
arm-chair and strove to imitate the venerable dignity of Dr.
Heidegger. Then all shouted mirthfully and leaped about the room.

The widow Wycherly--if so fresh a damsel could be called a
widow--tripped up to the doctor's chair with a mischievous merriment
in her rosy face.

"Doctor, you dear old soul," cried she, "get up and dance with me;"
and then the four young people laughed louder than ever to think what
a queer figure the poor old doctor would cut.

"Pray excuse me," answered the doctor, quietly. "I am old and
rheumatic, and my dancing-days were over long ago. But either of these
gay young gentlemen will be glad of so pretty a partner."

"Dance with me, Clara," cried Colonel Killigrew.

"No, no! I will be her partner," shouted Mr. Gascoigne.

"She promised me her hand fifty years ago," exclaimed Mr. Medbourne.

They all gathered round her. One caught both her hands in his
passionate grasp, another threw his arm about her waist, the third
buried his hand among the glossy curls that clustered beneath the
widow's cap. Blushing, panting, struggling, chiding, laughing, her
warm breath fanning each of their faces by turns, she strove to
disengage herself, yet still remained in their triple embrace. Never
was there a livelier picture of youthful rivalship, with bewitching
beauty for the prize. Yet, by a strange deception, owing to the
duskiness of the chamber and the antique dresses which they still
wore, the tall mirror is said to have reflected the figures of the
three old, gray, withered grand-sires ridiculously contending for the
skinny ugliness of a shrivelled grandam. But they were young: their
burning passions proved them so.

Inflamed to madness by the coquetry of the girl-widow, who neither
granted nor quite withheld her favors, the three rivals began to
interchange threatening glances. Still keeping hold of the fair prize,
they grappled fiercely at one another's throats. As they struggled to
and fro the table was overturned and the vase dashed into a thousand
fragments. The precious Water of Youth flowed in a bright stream
across the floor, moistening the wings of a butterfly which, grown old
in the decline of summer, had alighted there to die. The insect
fluttered lightly through the chamber and settled on the snowy head of
Dr. Heidegger.

"Come, come, gentlemen! Come, Madam Wycherly!" exclaimed the doctor.
"I really must protest against this riot."

They stood still and shivered, for it seemed as if gray Time were
calling them back from their sunny youth far down into the chill and
darksome vale of years. They looked at old Dr. Heidegger, who sat in
his carved armchair holding the rose of half a century, which he had
rescued from among the fragments of the shattered vase. At the motion
of his hand the four rioters resumed their seats--the more readily
because their violent exertions had wearied them, youthful though they
were.

"My poor Sylvia's rose!" ejaculated Dr. Heidegger, holding it in the
light of the sunset clouds. "It appears to be fading again."

And so it was. Even while the party were looking at it the flower
continued to shrivel up, till it became as dry and fragile as when the
doctor had first thrown it into the vase. He shook off the few drops
of moisture which clung to its petals.

"I love it as well thus as in its dewy freshness," observed he,
pressing the withered rose to his withered lips.

While he spoke the butterfly fluttered down from the doctor's snowy
head and fell upon the floor. His guests shivered again. A strange
dullness--whether of the body or spirit they could not tell--was
creeping gradually over them all. They gazed at one another, and
fancied that each fleeting moment snatched away a charm and left a
deepening furrow where none had been before. Was it an illusion? Had
the changes of a lifetime been crowded into so brief a space, and were
they now four aged people sitting with their old friend Dr. Heidegger?

"Are we grown old again so soon?" cried they, dolefully.

In truth, they had. The Water of Youth possessed merely a virtue more
transient than that of wine; the delirium which it created had
effervesced away. Yes, they were old again. With a shuddering impulse
that showed her a woman still, the widow clasped her skinny hands
before her face and wished that the coffin-lid were over it, since it
could be no longer beautiful.

"Yes, friends, ye are old again," said Dr. Heidegger, "and, lo! the
Water of Youth is all lavished on the ground. Well, I bemoan it not;
for if the fountain gushed at my very doorstep, I would not stoop to
bathe my lips in it--no, though its delirium were for years instead of
moments. Such is the lesson ye have taught me."

But the doctor's four friends had taught no such lesson to themselves.
They resolved forthwith to make a pilgrimage to Florida and quaff at
morning, noon and night from the Fountain of Youth.




LEGENDS OF THE PROVINCE-HOUSE.

  I.--HOWE'S MASQUERADE.
 II.--EDWARD RANDOLPH'S PORTRAIT.
III.--LADY ELEANORE'S MANTLE.
 IV.--OLD ESTHER DUDLEY.




I.

HOWE'S MASQUERADE.


One afternoon last summer, while walking along Washington street, my
eye was attracted by a sign-board protruding over a narrow archway
nearly opposite the Old South Church. The sign represented the front
of a stately edifice which was designated as the "OLD PROVINCE HOUSE,
kept by Thomas Waite." I was glad to be thus reminded of a purpose,
long entertained, of visiting and rambling over the mansion of the old
royal governors of Massachusetts, and, entering the arched passage
which penetrated through the middle of a brick row of shops, a few
steps transported me from the busy heart of modern Boston into a small
and secluded court-yard. One side of this space was occupied by the
square front of the Province House, three stories high and surmounted
by a cupola, on the top of which a gilded Indian was discernible, with
his bow bent and his arrow on the string, as if aiming at the
weathercock on the spire of the Old South. The figure has kept this
attitude for seventy years or more, ever since good Deacon Drowne, a
cunning carver of wood, first stationed him on his long sentinel's
watch over the city.

The Province House is constructed of brick, which seems recently to
have been overlaid with a coat of light-colored paint. A flight of red
freestone steps fenced in by a balustrade of curiously wrought iron
ascends from the court-yard to the spacious porch, over which is a
balcony with an iron balustrade of similar pattern and workmanship to
that beneath. These letters and figures--"16 P.S. 79"--are wrought
into the ironwork of the balcony, and probably express the date of the
edifice, with the initials of its founder's name.

A wide door with double leaves admitted me into the hall or entry, on
the right of which is the entrance to the bar-room. It was in this
apartment, I presume, that the ancient governors held their levees
with vice-regal pomp, surrounded by the military men, the counsellors,
the judges, and other officers of the Crown, while all the loyalty of
the province thronged to do them honor. But the room in its present
condition cannot boast even of faded magnificence. The panelled
wainscot is covered with dingy paint and acquires a duskier hue from
the deep shadow into which the Province House is thrown by the brick
block that shuts it in from Washington street. A ray of sunshine never
visits this apartment any more than the glare of the festal torches
which have been extinguished from the era of the Revolution. The most
venerable and ornamental object is a chimney-piece set round with
Dutch tiles of blue-figured china, representing scenes from Scripture,
and, for aught I know, the lady of Pownall or Bernard may have sat
beside this fireplace and told her children the story of each blue
tile. A bar in modern style, well replenished with decanters, bottles,
cigar-boxes and network bags of lemons, and provided with a beer-pump
and a soda-fount, extends along one side of the room.

At my entrance an elderly person was smacking his lips with a zest
which satisfied me that the cellars of the Province House still hold
good liquor, though doubtless of other vintages than were quaffed by
the old governors. After sipping a glass of port-sangaree prepared by
the skilful hands of Mr. Thomas Waite, I besought that worthy
successor and representative of so many historic personages to conduct
me over their time-honored mansion. He readily complied, but, to
confess the truth, I was forced to draw strenuously upon my
imagination in order to find aught that was interesting in a house
which, without its historic associations, would have seemed merely
such a tavern as is usually favored by the custom of decent city
boarders and old-fashioned country gentlemen. The chambers, which were
probably spacious in former times, are now cut up by partitions and
subdivided into little nooks, each affording scanty room for the
narrow bed and chair and dressing-table of a single lodger: The great
staircase, however, may be termed, without much hyperbole, a feature
of grandeur and magnificence. It winds through the midst of the house
by flights of broad steps, each flight terminating in a square
landing-place, whence the ascent is continued toward the cupola. A
carved balustrade, freshly painted in the lower stories, but growing
dingier as we ascend, borders the staircase with its quaintly twisted
and intertwined pillars, from top to bottom. Up these stairs the
military boots, or perchance the gouty shoes, of many a governor have
trodden as the wearers mounted to the cupola which afforded them so
wide a view over their metropolis and the surrounding country. The
cupola is an octagon with several windows, and a door opening upon the
roof. From this station, as I pleased myself with imagining, Gage may
have beheld his disastrous victory on Bunker Hill (unless one of the
tri-mountains intervened), and Howe have marked the approaches of
Washington's besieging army, although the buildings since erected in
the vicinity have shut out almost every object save the steeple of the
Old South, which seems almost within arm's length. Descending from the
cupola, I paused in the garret to observe the ponderous white-oak
framework, so much more massive than the frames of modern houses, and
thereby resembling an antique skeleton. The brick walls, the materials
of which were imported from Holland, and the timbers of the mansion,
are still as sound as ever, but, the floors and other interior parts
being greatly decayed, it is contemplated to gut the whole and build a
new house within the ancient frame-and brickwork. Among other
inconveniences of the present edifice, mine host mentioned that any
jar or motion was apt to shake down the dust of ages out of the
ceiling of one chamber upon the floor of that beneath it.

We stepped forth from the great front window into the balcony where in
old times it was doubtless the custom of the king's representative to
show himself to a loyal populace, requiting their huzzas and tossed-up
hats with stately bendings of his dignified person. In those days the
front of the Province House looked upon the street, and the whole site
now occupied by the brick range of stores, as well as the present
court-yard, was laid out in grass-plats overshadowed by trees and
bordered by a wrought-iron fence. Now the old aristocratic edifice
hides its time-worn visage behind an upstart modern building; at one
of the back windows I observed some pretty tailoresses sewing and
chatting and laughing, with now and then a careless glance toward the
balcony. Descending thence, we again entered the bar-room, where the
elderly gentleman above mentioned--the smack of whose lips had spoken
so favorably for Mr. Waite's good liquor--was still lounging in his
chair. He seemed to be, if not a lodger, at least a familiar visitor
of the house who might be supposed to have his regular score at the
bar, his summer seat at the open window and his prescriptive corner at
the winter's fireside. Being of a sociable aspect, I ventured to
address him with a remark calculated to draw forth his historical
reminiscences, if any such were in his mind, and it gratified me to
discover that, between memory and tradition, the old gentleman was
really possessed of some very pleasant gossip about the Province
House. The portion of his talk which chiefly interested me was the
outline of the following legend. He professed to have received it at
one or two removes from an eye-witness, but this derivation, together
with the lapse of time, must have afforded opportunities for many
variations of the narrative; so that, despairing of literal and
absolute truth, I have not scrupled to make such further changes as
seemed conducive to the reader's profit and delight.

       *       *       *       *       *

At one of the entertainments given at the province-house during the
latter part of the siege of Boston there passed a scene which has
never yet been satisfactorily explained. The officers of the British
army and the loyal gentry of the province, most of whom were collected
within the beleaguered town, had been invited to a masqued ball, for
it was the policy for Sir William Howe to hide the distress and danger
of the period and the desperate aspect of the siege under an
ostentation of festivity. The spectacle of this evening, if the oldest
members of the provincial court circle might be believed, was the most
gay and gorgeous affair that had occurred in the annals of the
government. The brilliantly-lighted apartments were thronged with
figures that seemed to have stepped from the dark canvas of historic
portraits or to have flitted forth from the magic pages of romance, or
at least to have flown hither from one of the London theatres without
a change of garments. Steeled knights of the Conquest, bearded
statesmen of Queen Elizabeth and high-ruffed ladies of her court were
mingled with characters of comedy, such as a parti-colored Merry
Andrew jingling his cap and bells, a Falstaff almost as provocative of
laughter as his prototype, and a Don Quixote with a bean-pole for a
lance and a pot-lid for a shield.

But the broadest merriment was excited by a group of figures
ridiculously dressed in old regimentals which seemed to have been
purchased at a military rag-fair or pilfered from some receptacle of
the cast-off clothes of both the French and British armies. Portions
of their attire had probably been worn at the siege of Louisburg, and
the coats of most recent cut might have been rent and tattered by
sword, ball or bayonet as long ago as Wolfe's victory. One of these
worthies--a tall, lank figure brandishing a rusty sword of immense
longitude--purported to be no less a personage than General George
Washington, and the other principal officers of the American army,
such as Gates, Lee, Putnam, Schuyler, Ward and Heath, were represented
by similar scarecrows. An interview in the mock-heroic style between
the rebel warriors and the British commander-in-chief was received
with immense applause, which came loudest of all from the loyalists of
the colony.

There was one of the guests, however, who stood apart, eying these
antics sternly and scornfully at once with a frown and a bitter smile.
It was an old man formerly of high station and great repute in the
province, and who had been a very famous soldier in his day. Some
surprise had been expressed that a person of Colonel Joliffe's known
Whig principles, though now too old to take an active part in the
contest, should have remained in Boston during the siege, and
especially that he should consent to show himself in the mansion of
Sir William Howe. But thither he had come with a fair granddaughter
under his arm, and there, amid all the mirth and buffoonery, stood
this stern old figure, the best-sustained character in the masquerade,
because so well representing the antique spirit of his native land.
The other guests affirmed that Colonel Joliffe's black puritanical
scowl threw a shadow round about him, although, in spite of his sombre
influence, their gayety continued to blaze higher, like--an ominous
comparison--the flickering brilliancy of a lamp which has but a little
while to burn.

Eleven strokes full half an hour ago had pealed from the clock of the
Old South, when a rumor was circulated among the company that some new
spectacle or pageant was about to be exhibited which should put a
fitting close to the splendid festivities of the night.

"What new jest has Your Excellency in hand?" asked the Reverend Mather
Byles, whose Presbyterian scruples had not kept him from the
entertainment. "Trust me, sir, I have already laughed more than
beseems my cloth at your Homeric confabulation with yonder ragamuffin
general of the rebels. One other such fit of merriment, and I must
throw off my clerical wig and band."

"Not so, good Dr. Byles," answered Sir William Howe; "if mirth were a
crime, you had never gained your doctorate in divinity. As to this new
foolery, I know no more about it than yourself--perhaps not so much.
Honestly, now, doctor, have you not stirred up the sober brains of
some of your countrymen to enact a scene in our masquerade?"

"Perhaps," slyly remarked the granddaughter of Colonel Joliffe, whose
high spirit had been stung by many taunts against New England--"perhaps
we are to have a masque of allegorical figures--Victory with trophies
from Lexington and Bunker Hill, Plenty with her overflowing horn to
typify the present abundance in this good town, and Glory with a
wreath for His Excellency's brow."

Sir William Howe smiled at words which he would have answered with one
of his darkest frowns had they been uttered by lips that wore a beard.
He was spared the necessity of a retort by a singular interruption. A
sound of music was heard without the house, as if proceeding from a
full band of military instruments stationed in the street, playing,
not such a festal strain as was suited to the occasion, but a slow
funeral-march. The drums appeared to be muffled, and the trumpets
poured forth a wailing breath which at once hushed the merriment of
the auditors, filling all with wonder and some with apprehension. The
idea occurred to many that either the funeral procession of some great
personage had halted in front of the province-house, or that a corpse
in a velvet-covered and gorgeously-decorated coffin was about to be
borne from the portal. After listening a moment, Sir William Howe
called in a stern voice to the leader of the musicians, who had
hitherto enlivened the entertainment with gay and lightsome melodies.
The man was drum-major to one of the British regiments.

"Dighton," demanded the general, "what means this foolery? Bid your
band silence that dead march, or, by my word, they shall have
sufficient cause for their lugubrious strains. Silence it, sirrah!"

"Please, Your Honor," answered the drum-major, whose rubicund visage
had lost all its color, "the fault is none of mine. I and my band are
all here together, and I question whether there be a man of us that
could play that march without book. I never heard it but once before,
and that was at the funeral of his late Majesty, King George II."

"Well, well!" said Sir William Howe, recovering his composure; "it is
the prelude to some masquerading antic. Let it pass."

A figure now presented itself, but among the many fantastic masks that
were dispersed through the apartments none could tell precisely from
whence it came. It was a man in an old-fashioned dress of black serge
and having the aspect of a steward or principal domestic in the
household of a nobleman or great English landholder. This figure
advanced to the outer door of the mansion, and, throwing both its
leaves wide open, withdrew a little to one side and looked back toward
the grand staircase, as if expecting some person to descend. At the
same time, the music in the street sounded a loud and doleful summons.
The eyes of Sir William Howe and his guests being directed to the
staircase, there appeared on the uppermost landing-place, that was
discernible from the bottom, several personages descending toward the
door. The foremost was a man of stern visage, wearing a
steeple-crowned hat and a skull-cap beneath it, a dark cloak and huge
wrinkled boots that came halfway up his legs. Under his arm was a
rolled-up banner which seemed to be the banner of England, but
strangely rent and torn; he had a sword in his right hand and grasped
a Bible in his left. The next figure was of milder aspect, yet full of
dignity, wearing a broad ruff, over which descended a beard, a gown of
wrought velvet and a doublet and hose of black satin; he carried a
roll of manuscript in his hand. Close behind these two came a young
man of very striking countenance and demeanor with deep thought and
contemplation on his brow, and perhaps a flash of enthusiasm in his
eye; his garb, like that of his predecessors, was of an antique
fashion, and there was a stain of blood upon his ruff. In the same
group with these were three or four others, all men of dignity and
evident command, and bearing themselves like personages who were
accustomed to the gaze of the multitude. It was the idea of the
beholders that these figures went to join the mysterious funeral that
had halted in front of the province-house, yet that supposition seemed
to be contradicted by the air of triumph with which they waved their
hands as they crossed the threshold and vanished through the portal.

"In the devil's name, what is this?" muttered Sir William Howe to a
gentleman beside him. "A procession of the regicide judges of King
Charles the martyr?"

"These," said Colonel Joliffe, breaking silence almost for the first
time that evening--"these, if I interpret them aright, are the
Puritan governors, the rulers of the old original democracy of
Massachusetts--Endicott with the banner from which he had torn the
symbol of subjection, and Winthrop and Sir Henry Vane and Dudley,
Haynes, Bellingham and Leverett."

"Why had that young man a stain of blood upon his ruff?" asked Miss
Joliffe.

"Because in after-years," answered her grandfather, "he laid down the
wisest head in England upon the block for the principles of liberty."

"Will not Your Excellency order out the guard?" whispered Lord Percy,
who, with other British officers, had now assembled round the general.
"There may be a plot under this mummery."

"Tush! we have nothing to fear," carelessly replied Sir William Howe.
"There can be no worse treason in the matter than a jest, and that
somewhat of the dullest. Even were it a sharp and bitter one, our best
policy would be to laugh it off. See! here come more of these gentry."

Another group of characters had now partly descended the staircase.
The first was a venerable and white-bearded patriarch who cautiously
felt his way downward with a staff. Treading hastily behind him, and
stretching forth his gauntleted hand as if to grasp the old man's
shoulder, came a tall soldier-like figure equipped with a plumed cap
of steel, a bright breastplate and a long sword, which rattled against
the stairs. Next was seen a stout man dressed in rich and courtly
attire, but not of courtly demeanor; his gait had the swinging motion
of a seaman's walk, and, chancing to stumble on the staircase, he
suddenly grew wrathful and was heard to mutter an oath. He was
followed by a noble-looking personage in a curled wig such as are
represented in the portraits of Queen Anne's time and earlier, and the
breast of his coat was decorated with an embroidered star. While
advancing to the door he bowed to the right hand and to the left in a
very gracious and insinuating style, but as he crossed the threshold,
unlike the early Puritan governors, he seemed to wring his hands with
sorrow.

"Prithee, play the part of a chorus, good Dr. Byles," said Sir William
Howe. "What worthies are these?"

"If it please Your Excellency, they lived somewhat before my day,"
answered the doctor; "but doubtless our friend the colonel has been
hand and glove with them."

"Their living faces I never looked upon," said Colonel Joliffe,
gravely; "although I have spoken face to face with many rulers of this
land, and shall greet yet another with an old man's blessing ere I
die. But we talk of these figures. I take the venerable patriarch to
be Bradstreet, the last of the Puritans, who was governor at ninety or
thereabouts. The next is Sir Edmund Andros, a tyrant, as any New
England schoolboy will tell you, and therefore the people cast him
down from his high seat into a dungeon. Then comes Sir William Phipps,
shepherd, cooper, sea-captain and governor. May many of his countrymen
rise as high from as low an origin! Lastly, you saw the gracious earl
of Bellamont, who ruled us under King William."

"But what is the meaning of it all?" asked Lord Percy.

"Now, were I a rebel," said Miss Joliffe, half aloud, "I might fancy
that the ghosts of these ancient governors had been summoned to form
the funeral procession of royal authority in New England."

Several other figures were now seen at the turn of the staircase. The
one in advance had a thoughtful, anxious and somewhat crafty
expression of face, and in spite of his loftiness of manner, which was
evidently the result both of an ambitious spirit and of long
continuance in high stations, he seemed not incapable of cringing to a
greater than himself. A few steps behind came an officer in a scarlet
and embroidered uniform cut in a fashion old enough to have been worn
by the duke of Marlborough. His nose had a rubicund tinge, which,
together with the twinkle of his eye, might have marked him as a lover
of the wine-cup and good-fellowship; notwithstanding which tokens, he
appeared ill at ease, and often glanced around him as if apprehensive
of some secret mischief. Next came a portly gentleman wearing a coat
of shaggy cloth lined with silken velvet; he had sense, shrewdness and
humor in his face and a folio volume under his arm, but his aspect was
that of a man vexed and tormented beyond all patience and harassed
almost to death. He went hastily down, and was followed by a dignified
person dressed in a purple velvet suit with very rich embroidery; his
demeanor would have possessed much stateliness, only that a grievous
fit of the gout compelled him to hobble from stair to stair with
contortions of face and body. When Dr. Byles beheld this figure on the
staircase, he shivered as with an ague, but continued to watch him
steadfastly until the gouty gentleman had reached the threshold, made
a gesture of anguish and despair and vanished into the outer gloom,
whither the funeral music summoned him.

"Governor Belcher--my old patron--in his very shape and dress!" gasped
Dr. Byles. "This is an awful mockery."

"A tedious foolery, rather," said Sir William Howe, with an air of
indifference. "But who were the three that preceded him?"

"Governor Dudley, a cunning politician; yet his craft once brought him
to a prison," replied Colonel Joliffe. "Governor Shute, formerly a
colonel under Marlborough, and whom the people frightened out of the
province, and learned Governor Burnett, whom the legislature tormented
into a mortal fever."

"Methinks they were miserable men--these royal governors of
Massachusetts," observed Miss Joliffe. "Heavens! how dim the light
grows!"

It was certainly a fact that the large lamp which illuminated the
staircase now burned dim and duskily; so that several figures which
passed hastily down the stairs and went forth from the porch appeared
rather like shadows than persons of fleshly substance.

Sir William Howe and his guests stood at the doors of the contiguous
apartments watching the progress of this singular pageant with various
emotions of anger, contempt or half-acknowledged fear, but still with
an anxious curiosity. The shapes which now seemed hastening to join
the mysterious procession were recognized rather by striking
peculiarities of dress or broad characteristics of manner than by any
perceptible resemblance of features to their prototypes. Their faces,
indeed, were invariably kept in deep shadow, but Dr. Byles and other
gentlemen who had long been familiar with the successive rulers of the
province were heard to whisper the names of Shirley, of Pownall, of
Sir Francis Bernard and of the well-remembered Hutchinson, thereby
confessing that the actors, whoever they might be, in this spectral
march of governors had succeeded in putting on some distant
portraiture of the real personages. As they vanished from the door,
still did these shadows toss their arms into the gloom of night with a
dread expression of woe. Following the mimic representative of
Hutchinson came a military figure holding before his face the cocked
hat which he had taken from his powdered head, but his epaulettes and
other insignia of rank were those of a general officer, and something
in his mien reminded the beholders of one who had recently been master
of the province-house and chief of all the land.

"The shape of Gage, as true as in a looking-glass!" exclaimed Lord
Percy, turning pale.

"No, surely," cried Miss Joliffe, laughing hysterically; "it could not
be Gage, or Sir William would have greeted his old comrade in arms.
Perhaps he will not suffer the next to pass unchallenged."

"Of that be assured, young lady," answered Sir William Howe, fixing
his eyes with a very marked expression upon the immovable visage of
her grandfather. "I have long enough delayed to pay the ceremonies of
a host to these departing guests; the next that takes his leave shall
receive due courtesy."

A wild and dreary burst of music came through the open door. It seemed
as it the procession, which had been gradually filling up its ranks,
were now about to move, and that this loud peal of the wailing
trumpets and roll of the muffled drums were a call to some loiterer to
make haste. Many eyes, by an irresistible impulse, were turned upon
Sir William Howe, as if it were he whom the dreary music summoned to
the funeral of departed power.

"See! here comes the last," whispered Miss Joliffe, pointing her
tremulous finger to the staircase.

A figure had come into view as if descending the stairs, although so
dusky was the region whence it emerged some of the spectators fancied
that they had seen this human shape suddenly moulding itself amid the
gloom. Downward the figure came with a stately and martial tread, and,
reaching the lowest stair, was observed to be a tall man booted and
wrapped in a military cloak, which was drawn up around the face so as
to meet the napped brim of a laced hat; the features, therefore, were
completely hidden. But the British officers deemed that they had seen
that military cloak before, and even recognized the frayed embroidery
on the collar, as well as the gilded scabbard of a sword which
protruded from the folds of the cloak and glittered in a vivid gleam
of light. Apart from these trifling particulars there were
characteristics of gait and bearing which impelled the wondering
guests to glance from the shrouded figure to Sir William Howe, as if
to satisfy themselves that their host had not suddenly vanished from
the midst of them. With a dark flush of wrath upon his brow, they saw
the general draw his sword and advance to meet the figure in the cloak
before the latter had stepped one pace upon the floor.

"Villain, unmuffle yourself!" cried he. "You pass no farther."

The figure, without blenching a hair's-breadth from the sword which
was pointed at his breast, made a solemn pause and lowered the cape of
the cloak from about his face, yet not sufficiently for the spectators
to catch a glimpse of it. But Sir William Howe had evidently seen
enough. The sternness of his countenance gave place to a look of wild
amazement, if not horror, while he recoiled several steps from the
figure and let fall his sword upon the floor. The martial shape again
drew the cloak about his features and passed on, but, reaching the
threshold with his back toward the spectators, he was seen to stamp
his foot and shake his clenched hands in the air. It was afterward
affirmed that Sir William Howe had repeated that selfsame gesture of
rage and sorrow when for the last time, and as the last royal
governor, he passed through the portal of the province-house.

"Hark! The procession moves," said Miss Joliffe.

The music was dying away along the street, and its dismal strains were
mingled with the knell of midnight from the steeple of the Old South
and with the roar of artillery which announced that the beleaguered
army of Washington had intrenched itself upon a nearer height than
before. As the deep boom of the cannon smote upon his ear Colonel
Joliffe raised himself to the full height of his aged form and smiled
sternly on the British general.

"Would Your Excellency inquire further into the mystery of the
pageant?" said he.

"Take care of your gray head!" cried Sir William Howe, fiercely,
though with a quivering lip. "It has stood too long on a traitor's
shoulders."

"You must make haste to chop it off, then," calmly replied the
colonel, "for a few hours longer, and not all the power of Sir William
Howe, nor of his master, shall cause one of these gray hairs to fall.
The empire of Britain in this ancient province is at its last gasp
to-night; almost while I speak it is a dead corpse, and methinks the
shadows of the old governors are fit mourners at its funeral."

With these words Colonel Joliffe threw on his cloak, and, drawing his
granddaughter's arm within his own, retired from the last festival
that a British ruler ever held in the old province of Massachusetts
Bay. It was supposed that the colonel and the young lady possessed
some secret intelligence in regard to the mysterious pageant of that
night. However this might be, such knowledge has never become general.
The actors in the scene have vanished into deeper obscurity than even
that wild Indian hand who scattered the cargoes of the tea-ships on
the waves and gained a place in history, yet left no names. But
superstition, among other legends of this mansion, repeats the
wondrous tale that on the anniversary night of Britain's discomfiture
the ghosts of the ancient governors of Massachusetts still glide
through the portal of the Province House. And last of all comes a
figure shrouded in a military cloak, tossing his clenched hands into
the air and stamping his iron-shod boots upon the broad freestone
steps with a semblance of feverish despair, but without the sound of a
foot-tramp.

       *       *       *       *       *

When the truth-telling accents of the elderly gentleman were hushed, I
drew a long breath and looked round the room, striving with the best
energy of my imagination to throw a tinge of romance and historic
grandeur over the realities of the scene. But my nostrils snuffed up a
scent of cigar-smoke, clouds of which the narrator had emitted by way
of visible emblem, I suppose, of the nebulous obscurity of his tale.
Moreover, my gorgeous fantasies were woefully disturbed by the
rattling of the spoon in a tumbler of whiskey-punch which Mr. Thomas
Waite was mingling for a customer. Nor did it add to the picturesque
appearance of the panelled walls that the slate of the Brookline stage
was suspended against them, instead of the armorial escutcheon of some
far-descended governor. A stage-driver sat at one of the windows
reading a penny paper of the day--the Boston _Times_--and presenting a
figure which could nowise be brought into any picture of "Times in
Boston" seventy or a hundred years ago. On the window-seat lay a
bundle neatly done up in brown paper, the direction of which I had the
idle curiosity to read: "MISS SUSAN HUGGINS, at the PROVINCE HOUSE." A
pretty chambermaid, no doubt. In truth, it is desperately hard work
when we attempt to throw the spell of hoar antiquity over localities
with which the living world and the day that is passing over us have
aught to do. Yet, as I glanced at the stately staircase down which the
procession of the old governors had descended, and as I emerged
through the venerable portal whence their figures had preceded me, it
gladdened me to be conscious of a thrill of awe. Then, diving through
the narrow archway, a few strides transported me into the densest
throng of Washington street.




II.

EDWARD RANDOLPH'S PORTRAIT.


The old legendary guest of the Province House abode in my remembrance
from midsummer till January. One idle evening last winter, confident
that he would be found in the snuggest corner of the bar-room, I
resolved to pay him another visit, hoping to deserve well of my
country by snatching from oblivion some else unheard-of fact of
history. The night was chill and raw, and rendered boisterous by
almost a gale of wind which whistled along Washington street, causing
the gaslights to flare and flicker within the lamps.

As I hurried onward my fancy was busy with a comparison between the
present aspect of the street and that which it probably wore when the
British governors inhabited the mansion whither I was now going. Brick
edifices in those times were few till a succession of destructive
fires had swept, and swept again, the wooden dwellings and warehouses
from the most populous quarters of the town. The buildings stood
insulated and independent, not, as now, merging their separate
existences into connected ranges with a front of tiresome identity,
but each possessing features of its own, as if the owner's individual
taste had shaped it, and the whole presenting a picturesque
irregularity the absence of which is hardly compensated by any
beauties of our modern architecture. Such a scene, dimly vanishing
from the eye by the ray of here and there a tallow candle glimmering
through the small panes of scattered windows, would form a sombre
contrast to the street as I beheld it with the gaslights blazing from
corner to corner, flaming within the shops and throwing a noonday
brightness through the huge plates of glass. But the black, lowering
sky, as I turned my eyes upward, wore, doubtless, the same visage as
when it frowned upon the ante-Revolutionary New Englanders. The wintry
blast had the same shriek that was familiar to their ears. The Old
South Church, too, still pointed its antique spire into the darkness
and was lost between earth and heaven, and, as I passed, its clock,
which had warned so many generations how transitory was their
lifetime, spoke heavily and slow the same unregarded moral to myself.
"Only seven o'clock!" thought I. "My old friend's legends will
scarcely kill the hours 'twixt this and bedtime."

Passing through the narrow arch, I crossed the courtyard, the confined
precincts of which were made visible by a lantern over the portal of
the Province House. On entering the bar-room, I found, as I expected,
the old tradition-monger seated by a special good fire of anthracite,
compelling clouds of smoke from a corpulent cigar. He recognized me
with evident pleasure, for my rare properties as a patient listener
invariably make me a favorite with elderly gentlemen and ladies of
narrative propensites. Drawing a chair to the fire, I desired mine
host to favor us with a glass apiece of whiskey-punch, which was
speedily prepared, steaming hot, with a slice of lemon at the bottom,
a dark-red stratum of port wine upon the surface and a sprinkling of
nutmeg strewn over all. As we touched our glasses together, my
legendary friend made himself known to me as Mr. Bela Tiffany, and I
rejoiced at the oddity of the name, because it gave his image and
character a sort of individuality in my conception. The old
gentleman's draught acted as a solvent upon his memory, so that it
overflowed with tales, traditions, anecdotes of famous dead people and
traits of ancient manners, some of which were childish as a nurse's
lullaby, while others might have been worth the notice of the grave
historian. Nothing impressed me more than a story of a black
mysterious picture which used to hang in one of the chambers of the
Province House, directly above the room where we were now sitting. The
following is as correct a version of the fact as the reader would be
likely to obtain from any other source, although, assuredly, it has a
tinge of romance approaching to the marvellous.

       *       *       *       *       *

In one of the apartments of the province-house there was long
preserved an ancient picture the frame of which was as black as ebony,
and the canvas itself so dark with age, damp and smoke that not a
touch of the painter's art could be discerned. Time had thrown an
impenetrable veil over it and left to tradition and fable and
conjecture to say what had once been there portrayed. During the rule
of many successive governors it had hung, by prescriptive and
undisputed right, over the mantel piece of the same chamber, and it
still kept its place when Lieutenant-governor Hutchinson assumed the
administration of the province on the departure of Sir Francis
Bernard.

The lieutenant-governor sat one afternoon resting his head against the
carved back of his stately arm-chair and gazing up thoughtfully at the
void blackness of the picture. It was scarcely a time for such
inactive musing, when affairs of the deepest moment required the
ruler's decision; for within that very hour Hutchinson had received
intelligence of the arrival of a British fleet bringing three
regiments from Halifax to overawe the insubordination of the people.
These troops awaited his permission to occupy the fortress of Castle
William and the town itself, yet, instead of affixing his signature to
an official order, there sat the lieutenant-governor so carefully
scrutinizing the black waste of canvas that his demeanor attracted the
notice of two young persons who attended him. One, wearing a military
dress of buff, was his kinsman, Francis Lincoln, the provincial
captain of Castle William; the other, who sat on a low stool beside
his chair, was Alice Vane, his favorite niece. She was clad entirely
in white--a pale, ethereal creature who, though a native of New
England, had been educated abroad and seemed not merely a stranger
from another clime, but almost a being from another world. For several
years, until left an orphan, she had dwelt with her father in sunny
Italy, and there had acquired a taste and enthusiasm for sculpture and
painting which she found few opportunities of gratifying in the
undecorated dwellings of the colonial gentry. It was said that the
early productions of her own pencil exhibited no inferior genius,
though perhaps the rude atmosphere of New England had cramped her hand
and dimmed the glowing colors of her fancy. But, observing her uncle's
steadfast gaze, which appeared to search through the mist of years to
discover the subject of the picture, her curiosity was excited.

"Is it known, my dear uncle," inquired she, "what this old picture
once represented? Possibly, could it be made visible, it might prove a
masterpiece of some great artist; else why has it so long held such a
conspicuous place?"

As her uncle, contrary to his usual custom--for he was as attentive to
all the humors and caprices of Alice as if she had been his own
best-beloved child--did not immediately reply, the young captain of
Castle William took that office upon himself.

"This dark old square of canvas, my fair cousin," said he, "has been
an heirloom in the province-house from time immemorial. As to the
painter, I can tell you nothing; but if half the stories told of it be
true, not one of the great Italian masters has ever produced so
marvellous a piece of work as that before you."

Captain Lincoln proceeded to relate some of the strange fables and
fantasies which, as it was impossible to refute them by ocular
demonstration, had grown to be articles of popular belief in reference
to this old picture. One of the wildest, and at the same time the
best-accredited, accounts stated it to be an original and authentic
portrait of the evil one, taken at a witch-meeting near Salem, and
that its strong and terrible resemblance had been confirmed by several
of the confessing wizards and witches at their trial in open court. It
was likewise affirmed that a familiar spirit or demon abode behind the
blackness of the picture, and had shown himself at seasons of public
calamity to more than one of the royal governors. Shirley, for
instance, had beheld this ominous apparition on the eve of General
Abercrombie's shameful and bloody defeat under the walls of
Ticonderoga. Many of the servants of the province-house had caught
glimpses of a visage frowning down upon them at morning or evening
twilight, or in the depths of night while raking up the fire that
glimmered on the hearth beneath, although, if any were, bold enough to
hold a torch before the picture, it would appear as black and
undistinguishable as ever. The oldest inhabitant of Boston recollected
that his father--in whose days the portrait had not wholly faded out
of sight--had once looked upon it, but would never suffer himself to
be questioned as to the face which was there represented. In
connection with such stories, it was remarkable that over the top of
the frame there were some ragged remnants of black silk, indicating
that a veil had formerly hung down before the picture until the
duskiness of time had so effectually concealed it. But, after all, it
was the most singular part of the affair that so many of the pompous
governors of Massachusetts had allowed the obliterated picture to
remain in the state-chamber of the province-house.

"Some of these fables are really awful," observed Alice Vane, who had
occasionally shuddered as well as smiled while her cousin spoke. "It
would be almost worth while to wipe away the black surface of the
canvas, since the original picture can hardly be so formidable as
those which fancy paints instead of it."

"But would it be possible," inquired her cousin," to restore this dark
picture to its pristine hues?"

"Such arts are known in Italy," said Alice.

The lieutenant-governor had roused himself from his abstracted mood,
and listened with a smile to the conversation of his young relatives.
Yet his voice had something peculiar in its tones when he undertook
the explanation of the mystery.

"I am sorry, Alice, to destroy your faith in the legends of which you
are so fond," remarked he, "but my antiquarian researches have long
since made me acquainted with the subject of this picture--if picture
it can be called--which is no more visible, nor ever will be, than the
face of the long-buried man whom it once represented. It was the
portrait of Edward Randolph, the founder of this house, a person
famous in the history of New England."

"Of that Edward Randolph," exclaimed Captain Lincoln, "who obtained the
repeal of the first provincial charter, under which our forefathers
had enjoyed almost democratic privileges--he that was styled the
arch-enemy of New England, and whose memory is still held in detestation
as the destroyer of our liberties?"

"It was the same Randolph," answered Hutchinson, moving uneasily in
his chair. "It was his lot to taste the bitterness of popular odium."

"Our annals tell us," continued the captain of Castle William, "that
the curse of the people followed this Randolph where he went and
wrought evil in all the subsequent events of his life, and that its
effect was seen, likewise, in the manner of his death. They say, too,
that the inward misery of that curse worked itself outward and was
visible on the wretched man's countenance, making it too horrible to
be looked upon. If so, and if this picture truly represented his
aspect, it was in mercy that the cloud of blackness has gathered over
it."

"These traditions are folly to one who has proved, as I have, how little
of historic truth lies at the bottom," said the lieutenant-governor.
"As regards the life and character of Edward Randolph, too implicit
credence has been given to Dr. Cotton Mather, who--I must say it,
though some of his blood runs in my veins--has filled our early
history with old women's tales as fanciful and extravagant as those of
Greece or Rome."

"And yet," whispered Alice Vane, "may not such fables have a moral?
And methinks, if the visage of this portrait be so dreadful, it is not
without a cause that it has hung so long in a chamber of the
province-house. When the rulers feel themselves irresponsible, it were
well that they should be reminded of the awful weight of a people's
curse."

The lieutenant-governor started and gazed for a moment at his niece,
as if her girlish fantasies had struck upon some feeling in his own
breast which all his policy or principles could not entirely subdue.
He knew, indeed, that Alice, in spite of her foreign education,
retained the native sympathies of a New England girl.

"Peace, silly child!" cried he, at last, more harshly than he had ever
before addressed the gentle Alice. "The rebuke of a king; is more to
be dreaded than the clamor of a wild, misguided multitude.--Captain
Lincoln, it is decided: the fortress of Castle William must be
occupied by the royal troops. The two remaining regiments shall be
billeted in the town or encamped upon the Common. It is time, after
years of tumult, and almost rebellion, that His Majesty's government
should have a wall of strength about it."

"Trust, sir--trust yet a while to the loyalty of the people," said
Captain Lincoln, "nor teach them that they can ever be on other terms
with British soldiers than those of brotherhood, as when they fought
side by side through the French war. Do not convert the streets of
your native town into a camp. Think twice before you give up old
Castle William, the key of the province, into other keeping than that
of true-born New Englanders."

"Young man, it is decided," repeated Hutchinson, rising from his
chair. "A British officer will be in attendance this evening to
receive the necessary instructions for the disposal of the troops.
Your presence also will be required. Till then, farewell."

With these words the lieutenant-governor hastily left the room, while
Alice and her cousin more slowly followed, whispering together, and
once pausing to glance back at the mysterious picture. The captain of
Castle William fancied that the girl's air and mien were such as might
have belonged to one of those spirits of fable--fairies or creatures
of a more antique mythology--who sometimes mingled their agency with
mortal affairs, half in caprice, yet with a sensibility to human weal
or woe. As he held the door for her to pass Alice beckoned to the
picture and smiled.

"Come forth, dark and evil shape!" cried she. "It is thine hour."

In the evening Lieutenant-governor Hutchinson sat in the same chamber
where the foregoing scene had occurred, surrounded by several persons
whose various interests had summoned them together. There were the
selectmen of Boston--plain patriarchal fathers of the people,
excellent representatives of the old puritanical founders whose sombre
strength had stamped so deep an impress upon the New England
character. Contrasting with these were one or two members of council,
richly dressed in the white wigs, the embroidered waistcoats and other
magnificence of the time, and making a somewhat ostentatious display
of courtier-like ceremonial. In attendance, likewise, was a major of
the British army, awaiting the lieutenant-governor's orders for the
landing of the troops, which still remained on board the transports.
The captain of Castle William stood beside Hutchinson's chair, with
folded arms, glancing rather haughtily at the British officer by whom
he was soon to be superseded in his command. On a table in the centre
of the chamber stood a branched silver candlestick, throwing down the
glow of half a dozen waxlights upon a paper apparently ready for the
lieutenant-governor's signature.

Partly shrouded in the voluminous folds of one of the window-curtains,
which fell from the ceiling to the floor, was seen the white drapery
of a lady's robe. It may appear strange that Alice Vane should have
been there at such a time, but there was something so childlike, so
wayward, in her singular character, so apart from ordinary rules, that
her presence did not surprise the few who noticed it. Meantime, the
chairman of the selectmen was addressing to the lieutenant-governor a
long and solemn protest against the reception of the British troops
into the town.

"And if Your Honor," concluded this excellent but somewhat prosy old
gentleman, "shall see fit to persist in bringing these mercenary
sworders and musketeers into our quiet streets, not on our heads be
the responsibility. Think, sir, while there is yet time, that if one
drop of blood be shed, that blood shall be an eternal stain upon Your
Honor's memory. You, sir, have written with an able pen the deeds of
our forefathers; the more to be desired is it, therefore, that
yourself should deserve honorable mention as a true patriot and
upright ruler when your own doings shall be written down in history."

"I am not insensible, my good sir, to the natural desire to stand well
in the annals of my country," replied Hutchinson, controlling his
impatience into courtesy, "nor know I any better method of attaining
that end than by withstanding the merely temporary spirit of mischief
which, with your pardon, seems to have infected older men than myself.
Would you have me wait till the mob shall sack the province-house as
they did my private mansion? Trust me, sir, the time may come when you
will be glad to flee for protection to the king's banner, the raising
of which is now so distasteful to you."

"Yes," said the British major, who was impatiently expecting the
lieutenant-governor's orders. "The demagogues of this province have
raised the devil, and cannot lay him again. We will exorcise him in
God's name and the king's."

"If you meddle with the devil, take care of his claws," answered the
captain of Castle William, stirred by the taunt against his
countrymen.

"Craving your pardon, young sir," said the venerable selectman, "let
not an evil spirit enter into your words. We will strive against the
oppressor with prayer and fasting, as our forefathers would have done.
Like them, moreover, we will submit to whatever lot a wise Providence
may send us--always after our own best exertions to amend it."

"And there peep forth the devil's claws!" muttered Hutchinson, who
well understood the nature of Puritan submission. "This matter shall
be expedited forthwith. When there shall be a sentinel at every corner
and a court of guard before the town-house, a loyal gentleman may
venture to walk abroad. What to me is the outcry of a mob in this
remote province of the realm? The king is my master, and England is my
country; upheld by their armed strength, I set my foot upon the rabble
and defy them."

He snatched a pen and was about to affix his signature to the paper
that lay on the table, when the captain of Castle William placed his
hand upon his shoulder. The freedom of the action, so contrary to the
ceremonious respect which was then considered due to rank and dignity,
awakened general surprise, and in none more than in the
lieutenant-governor himself. Looking angrily up, he perceived that his
young relative was pointing his finger to the opposite wall.
Hutchinson's eye followed the signal, and he saw what had hitherto
been unobserved--that a black silk curtain was suspended before the
mysterious picture, so as completely to conceal it. His thoughts
immediately recurred to the scene of the preceding afternoon, and in
his surprise, confused by indistinct emotions, yet sensible that his
niece must have had an agency in this phenomenon, he called loudly
upon her:

"Alice! Come hither, Alice!"

No sooner had he spoken than Alice Vane glided from her station, and,
pressing one hand across her eyes, with the other snatched away the
sable curtain that concealed the portrait. An exclamation of surprise
burst from every beholder, but the lieutenant-governor's voice had a
tone of horror.

"By Heaven!" said he, in a low inward murmur, speaking rather to
himself than to those around him; "if the spirit of Edward Randolph
were to appear among us from the place of torment, he could not wear
more of the terrors of hell upon his face."

"For some wise end," said the aged selectman, solemnly, "hath
Providence scattered away the mist of years that had so long hid this
dreadful effigy. Until this hour no living man hath seen what we
behold."

Within the antique frame which so recently had enclosed a sable waste
of canvas now appeared a visible picture-still dark, indeed, in its
hues and shadings, but thrown forward in strong relief. It was a
half-length figure of a gentleman in a rich but very old-fashioned
dress of embroidered velvet, with a broad ruff and a beard, and
wearing a hat the brim of which overshadowed his forehead. Beneath
this cloud the eyes had a peculiar glare which was almost lifelike.
The whole portrait started so distinctly out of the background that it
had the effect of a person looking down from the wall at the
astonished and awe-stricken spectators. The expression of the face, if
any words can convey an idea of it, was that of a wretch detected in
some hideous guilt and exposed to the bitter hatred and laughter and
withering scorn of a vast surrounding multitude. There was the
struggle of defiance, beaten down and overwhelmed by the crushing
weight of ignominy. The torture of the soul had come forth upon the
countenance. It seemed as if the picture, while hidden behind the
cloud of immemorial years, had been all the time acquiring an intenser
depth and darkness of expression, till now it gloomed forth again and
threw its evil omen over the present hour. Such, if the wild legend
may be credited, was the portrait of Edward Randolph as he appeared
when a people's curse had wrought its influence upon his nature.

"'Twould drive me mad, that awful face," said Hutchinson, who seemed
fascinated by the contemplation of it.

"Be warned, then," whispered Alice. "He trampled on a people's rights.
Behold his punishment, and avoid a crime like his."

The lieutenant-governor actually trembled for an instant, but,
exerting his energy--which was not, however, his most characteristic
feature--he strove to shake off the spell of Randolph's countenance.

"Girl," cried he, laughing bitterly, as he turned to Alice, "have you
brought hither your painter's art, your Italian spirit of intrigue,
your tricks of stage-effect, and think to influence the councils of
rulers and the affairs of nations by such shallow contrivances? See
here!"

"Stay yet a while," said the selectman as Hutchinson again snatched
the pen; "for if ever mortal man received a warning from a tormented
soul, Your Honor is that man."

"Away!" answered Hutchinson, fiercely. "Though yonder senseless
picture cried 'Forbear!' it should not move me!"

Casting a scowl of defiance at the pictured face--which seemed at that
moment to intensify the horror of its miserable and wicked look--he
scrawled on the paper, in characters that betokened it a deed of
desperation, the name of Thomas Hutchinson. Then, it is said, he
shuddered, as if that signature had granted away his salvation.

"It is done," said he, and placed his hand upon his brow.

"May Heaven forgive the deed!" said the soft, sad accents of Alice
Vane, like the voice of a good spirit flitting away.

When morning came, there was a stifled whisper through the household, and
spreading thence about the town, that the dark mysterious picture had
started from the wall and spoken face to face with Lieutenant-governor
Hutchinson. If such a miracle had been wrought, however, no traces of
it remained behind; for within the antique frame nothing could be
discerned save the impenetrable cloud which had covered the canvas
since the memory of man. If the figure had, indeed, stepped forth, it
had fled back, spirit-like, at the day-dawn, and hidden itself behind
a century's obscurity. The truth probably was that Alice Vane's secret
for restoring the hues of the picture had merely effected a temporary
renovation. But those who in that brief interval had beheld the awful
visage of Edward Randolph desired no second glance, and ever afterward
trembled at the recollection of the scene, as if an evil spirit had
appeared visibly among them. And, as for Hutchinson, when, far over
the ocean, his dying-hour drew on, he gasped for breath and complained
that he was choking with the blood of the Boston Massacre, and Francis
Lincoln, the former captain of Castle William, who was standing at his
bedside, perceived a likeness in his frenzied look to that of Edward
Randolph. Did his broken spirit feel at that dread hour the tremendous
burden of a people's curse?

       *       *       *       *       *

At the conclusion of this miraculous legend I inquired of mine host
whether the picture still remained in the chamber over our heads, but
Mr. Tiffany informed me that it had long since been removed, and was
supposed to be hidden in some out-of-the-way corner of the New England
Museum. Perchance some curious antiquary may light upon it there, and,
with the assistance of Mr. Howorth, the picture-cleaner, may supply a
not unnecessary proof of the authenticity of the facts here set down.

During the progress of the story a storm had been gathering abroad and
raging and rattling so loudly in the upper regions of the Province
House that it seemed as if all the old governors and great men were
running riot above stairs while Mr. Bela Tiffany babbled of them
below. In the course of generations, when many people have lived and
died in an ancient house, the whistling of the wind through its
crannies and the creaking of its beams and rafters become strangely
like the tones of the human voice, or thundering laughter, or heavy
footsteps treading the deserted chambers. It is as if the echoes of
half a century were revived. Such were the ghostly sounds that roared
and murmured in our ears when I took leave of the circle round the
fireside of the Province House and, plunging down the doorsteps,
fought my way homeward against a drifting snow-storm.




III.

LADY ELEANORE'S MANTLE.


Mine excellent friend the landlord of the Province House was pleased
the other evening to invite Mr. Tiffany and myself to an
oyster-supper. This slight mark of respect and gratitude, as he
handsomely observed, was far less than the ingenious tale-teller, and
I, the humble note-taker of his narratives, had fairly earned by the
public notice which our joint lucubrations had attracted to his
establishment. Many a cigar had been smoked within his premises, many
a glass of wine or more potent _aqua vitae_ had been quaffed, many
a dinner had been eaten, by curious strangers who, save for the
fortunate conjunction of Mr. Tiffany and me, would never have ventured
through that darksome avenue which gives access to the historic
precincts of the Province House. In short, if any credit be due to the
courteous assurances of Mr. Thomas Waite, we had brought his forgotten
mansion almost as effectually into public view as if we had thrown
down the vulgar range of shoe-shops and dry-good stores which hides
its aristocratic front from Washington street. It may be unadvisable,
however, to speak too loudly of the increased custom of the house,
lest Mr. Waite should find it difficult to renew the lease on so
favorable terms as heretofore.

Being thus welcomed as benefactors, neither Mr. Tiffany nor myself
felt any scruple in doing full justice to the good things that were
set before us. If the feast were less magnificent than those same
panelled walls had witnessed in a bygone century; if mine host
presided with somewhat less of state than might have befitted a
successor of the royal governors; if the guests made a less imposing
show than the bewigged and powdered and embroidered dignitaries who
erst banqueted at the gubernatorial table and now sleep within their
armorial tombs on Copp's Hill or round King's Chapel,--yet never, I
may boldly say, did a more comfortable little party assemble in the
province-house from Queen Anne's days to the Revolution. The occasion
was rendered more interesting by the presence of a venerable personage
whose own actual reminiscences went back to the epoch of Gage and
Howe, and even supplied him with a doubtful anecdote or two of
Hutchinson. He was one of that small, and now all but extinguished,
class whose attachment to royalty, and to the colonial institutions
and customs that were connected with it, had never yielded to the
democratic heresies of after-times. The young queen of Britain has not
a more loyal subject in her realm--perhaps not one who would kneel
before her throne with such reverential love--as this old grandsire
whose head has whitened beneath the mild sway of the republic which
still in his mellower moments he terms a usurpation. Yet prejudices so
obstinate have not made him an ungentle or impracticable companion. If
the truth must be told, the life of the aged loyalist has been of such
a scrambling and unsettled character--he has had so little choice of
friends and been so often destitute of any--that I doubt whether he
would refuse a cup of kindness with either Oliver Cromwell or John
Hancock, to say nothing of any democrat now upon the stage. In another
paper of this series I may perhaps give the reader a closer glimpse of
his portrait.

Our host in due season uncorked a bottle of Madeira of such exquisite
perfume and admirable flavor that he surely must have discovered it in
an ancient bin down deep beneath the deepest cellar where some jolly
old butler stored away the governor's choicest wine and forgot to
reveal the secret on his death-bed. Peace to his red-nosed ghost and a
libation to his memory! This precious liquor was imbibed by Mr.
Tiffany with peculiar zest, and after sipping the third glass it was
his pleasure to give us one of the oddest legends which he had yet
raked from the storehouse where he keeps such matters. With some
suitable adornments from my own fancy, it ran pretty much as follows.

       *       *       *       *       *

Not long after Colonel Shute had assumed the government of
Massachusetts Bay--now nearly a hundred and twenty years ago--a young
lady of rank and fortune arrived from England to claim his protection
as her guardian. He was her distant relative, but the nearest who had
survived the gradual extinction of her family; so that no more
eligible shelter could be found for the rich and high-born Lady
Eleanore Rochcliffe than within the province-house of a Transatlantic
colony. The consort of Governor Shute, moreover, had been as a mother
to her childhood, and was now anxious to receive her in the hope that
a beautiful young woman would be exposed to infinitely less peril from
the primitive society of New England than amid the artifices and
corruptions of a court. If either the governor or his lady had
especially consulted their own comfort, they would probably have
sought to devolve the responsibility on other hands, since with some
noble and splendid traits of character Lady Eleanore was remarkable
for a harsh, unyielding pride, a haughty consciousness of her
hereditary and personal advantages, which made her almost incapable of
control. Judging from many traditionary anecdotes, this peculiar
temper was hardly less than a monomania; or if the acts which it
inspired were those of a sane person, it seemed due from Providence
that pride so sinful should be followed by as severe a retribution.
That tinge of the marvellous which is thrown over so many of these
half-forgotten legends has probably imparted an additional wildness to
the strange story of Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe.

The ship in which she came passenger had arrived at Newport, whence
Lady Eleanore was conveyed to Boston in the governor's coach, attended
by a small escort of gentlemen on horseback. The ponderous equipage,
with its four black horses, attracted much notice as it rumbled
through Cornhill surrounded by the prancing steeds of half a dozen
cavaliers with swords dangling to their stirrups and pistols at their
holsters. Through the large glass windows of the coach, as it rolled
along, the people could discern the figure of Lady Eleanore, strangely
combining an almost queenly stateliness with the grace and beauty of a
maiden in her teens. A singular tale had gone abroad among the ladies
of the province that their fair rival was indebted for much of the
irresistible charm of her appearance to a certain article of dress--an
embroidered mantle--which had been wrought by the most skilful artist
in London, and possessed even magical properties of adornment. On the
present occasion, however, she owed nothing to the witchery of dress,
being clad in a riding-habit of velvet which would have appeared stiff
and ungraceful on any other form.

The coachman reined in his four black steeds, and the whole cavalcade
came to a pause in front of the contorted iron balustrade that fenced
the province-house from the public street. It was an awkward
coincidence that the bell of the Old South was just then tolling for a
funeral; so that, instead of a gladsome peal with which it was
customary to announce the arrival of distinguished strangers, Lady
Eleanore Rochcliffe was ushered by a doleful clang, as if calamity had
come embodied in her beautiful person.

"A very great disrespect!" exclaimed Captain Langford, an English
officer who had recently brought despatches to Governor Shute. "The
funeral should have been deferred lest Lady Eleanore's spirits be
affected by such a dismal welcome."

"With your pardon, sir," replied Dr. Clarke, a physician and a famous
champion of the popular party, "whatever the heralds may pretend, a
dead beggar must have precedence of a living queen. King Death confers
high privileges."

These remarks-were interchanged while the speakers waited a passage
through the crowd which had gathered on each side of the gateway,
leaving an open avenue to the portal of the province-house. A black
slave in livery now leaped from behind the coach and threw open the
door, while at the same moment Governor Shute descended the flight of
steps from his mansion to assist Lady Eleanore in alighting. But the
governor's stately approach was anticipated in a manner that excited
general astonishment. A pale young man with his black hair all in
disorder rushed from the throng and prostrated himself beside the
coach, thus offering his person as a footstool for Lady Eleanore
Rochcliffe to tread upon. She held back an instant, yet with an
expression as if doubting whether the young man were worthy to bear
the weight of her footstep rather than dissatisfied to receive such
awful reverence from a fellow-mortal.

"Up, sir!" said the governor, sternly, at the same time lifting his
cane over the intruder. "What means the Bedlamite by this freak?"

"Nay," answered Lady Eleanore, playfully, but with more scorn than
pity in her tone; "Your Excellency shall not strike him. When men seek
only to be trampled upon, it were a pity to deny them a favor so
easily granted--and so well deserved!" Then, though as lightly as a
sunbeam on a cloud, she placed her foot upon the cowering form and
extended her hand to meet that of the governor.

There was a brief interval during which Lady Eleanore retained this
attitude, and never, surely, was there an apter emblem of aristocracy
and hereditary pride trampling on human sympathies and the kindred of
nature than these two figures presented at that moment. Yet the
spectators were so smitten with her beauty, and so essential did pride
seem to the existence of such a creature, that they gave a
simultaneous acclamation of applause.

"Who is this insolent young fellow?" inquired Captain Langford, who
still remained beside Dr. Clarke. "If he be in his senses, his
impertinence demands the bastinado; if mad, Lady Eleanore should be
secured from further inconvenience by his confinement."

"His name is Jervase Helwyse," answered the doctor--"a youth of no
birth or fortune, or other advantages save the mind and soul that
nature gave him; and, being secretary to our colonial agent in London,
it was his misfortune to meet this Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe. He loved
her, and her scorn has driven him mad."

"He was mad so to aspire," observed the English officer.

"It may be so," said Dr. Clarke, frowning as he spoke; "but I tell
you, sir, I could wellnigh doubt the justice of the Heaven above us if
no signal humiliation overtake this lady who now treads so haughtily
into yonder mansion. She seeks to place herself above the sympathies
of our common nature, which envelops all human souls; see if that
nature do not assert its claim over her in some mode that shall bring
her level with the lowest."

"Never!" cried Captain Langford, indignantly--"neither in life nor
when they lay her with her ancestors."

Not many days afterward the governor gave a ball in honor of Lady
Eleanore Rochcliffe. The principal gentry of the colony received
invitations, which were distributed to their residences far and near
by messengers on horseback bearing missives sealed with all the
formality of official despatches. In obedience to the summons, there
was a general gathering of rank, wealth and beauty, and the wide door
of the province-house had seldom given admittance to more numerous and
honorable guests than on the evening of Lady Eleanore's ball. Without
much extravagance of eulogy, the spectacle might even be termed
splendid, for, according to the fashion of the times, the ladies shone
in rich silks and satins outspread over wide-projecting hoops, and the
gentlemen glittered in gold embroidery laid unsparingly upon the
purple or scarlet or sky-blue velvet which was the material of their
coats and waistcoats. The latter article of dress was of great
importance, since it enveloped the wearer's body nearly to the knees
and was perhaps bedizened with the amount of his whole year's income
in golden flowers and foliage. The altered taste of the present day--a
taste symbolic of a deep change in the whole system of society--would
look upon almost any of those gorgeous figures as ridiculous, although
that evening the guests sought their reflections in the pier-glasses
and rejoiced to catch their own glitter amid the glittering crowd.
What a pity that one of the stately mirrors has not preserved a
picture of the scene which by the very traits that were so transitory
might have taught us much that would be worth knowing and remembering!

Would, at least, that either painter or mirror could convey to us some
faint idea of a garment already noticed in this legend--the Lady
Eleanore's embroidered mantle, which the gossips whispered was
invested with magic properties, so as to lend a new and untried grace
to her figure each time that she put it on! Idle fancy as it is, this
mysterious mantle has thrown an awe around my image of her, partly
from its fabled virtues and partly because it was the handiwork of a
dying woman, and perchance owed the fantastic grace of its conception
to the delirium of approaching death.

After the ceremonial greetings had been paid, Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe
stood apart from the mob of guests, insulating herself within a small
and distinguished circle to whom she accorded a more cordial favor
than to the general throng. The waxen torches threw their radiance
vividly over the scene, bringing out its brilliant points in strong
relief, but she gazed carelessly, and with now and then an expression
of weariness or scorn tempered with such feminine grace that her
auditors scarcely perceived the moral deformity of which it was the
utterance. She beheld the spectacle not with vulgar ridicule, as
disdaining to be pleased with the provincial mockery of a
court-festival, but with the deeper scorn of one whose spirit held
itself too high to participate in the enjoyment of other human souls.
Whether or no the recollections of those who saw her that evening were
influenced by the strange events with which she was subsequently
connected, so it was that her figure ever after recurred to them as
marked by something wild and unnatural, although at the time the
general whisper was of her exceeding beauty and of the indescribable
charm which her mantle threw around her. Some close observers, indeed,
detected a feverish flush and alternate paleness of countenance, with
a corresponding flow and revulsion of spirits, and once or twice a
painful and helpless betrayal of lassitude, as if she were on the
point of sinking to the ground. Then, with a nervous shudder, she
seemed to arouse her energies, and threw some bright and playful yet
half-wicked sarcasm into the conversation. There was so strange a
characteristic in her manners and sentiments that it astonished every
right-minded listener, till, looking in her face, a lurking and
incomprehensible glance and smile perplexed them with doubts both as
to her seriousness and sanity. Gradually, Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe's
circle grew smaller, till only four gentlemen remained in it. These
were Captain Langford, the English officer before mentioned; a
Virginian planter who had come to Massachusetts on some political
errand; a young Episcopal clergyman, the grandson of a British earl;
and, lastly, the private secretary of Governor Shute, whose
obsequiousness had won a sort of tolerance from Lady Eleanore.

At different periods of the evening the liveried servants of the
province-house passed among the guests bearing huge trays of
refreshments and French and Spanish wines. Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe,
who refused to wet her beautiful lips even with a bubble of champagne,
had sunk back into a large damask chair, apparently overwearied either
with the excitement of the scene or its tedium; and while, for an
instant, she was unconscious of voices, laughter and music, a young
man stole forward and knelt down at her feet. He bore a salver in his
hand on which was a chased silver goblet filled to the brim with wine,
which he offered as reverentially as to a crowned queen--or, rather,
with the awful devotion of a priest doing sacrifice to his idol.
Conscious that some one touched her robe, Lady Eleanore started, and
unclosed her eyes upon the pale, wild features and dishevelled hair of
Jervase Helwyse.

"Why do you haunt me thus?" said she, in a languid tone, but with a
kindlier feeling than she ordinarily permitted herself to express.
"They tell me that I have done you harm."

"Heaven knows if that be so," replied the young man, solemnly. "But,
Lady Eleanore, in requital of that harm, if such there be, and for
your own earthly and heavenly welfare, I pray you to take one sip of
this holy wine and then to pass the goblet round among the guests. And
this shall be a symbol that you have not sought to withdraw yourself
from the chain of human sympathies, which whoso would shake off must
keep company with fallen angels."

"Where has this mad fellow stolen that sacramental vessel?" exclaimed
the Episcopal clergyman.

This question drew the notice of the guests to the silver cup, which
was recognized as appertaining to the communion-plate of the Old South
Church, and, for aught that could be known, it was brimming over with
the consecrated wine.

"Perhaps it is poisoned," half whispered the governor's secretary.

"Pour it down the villain's throat!" cried the Virginian, fiercely.

"Turn him out of the house!" cried Captain Langford, seizing Jervase
Helwyse so roughly by the shoulder that the sacramental cup was
overturned and its contents sprinkled upon Lady Eleanore's mantle.
"Whether knave, fool or Bedlamite, it is intolerable that the fellow
should go at large."

"Pray, gentlemen, do my poor admirer no harm," said Lady Eleanore,
with a faint and weary smile. "Take him out of my sight, if such be
your pleasure, for I can find in my heart to do nothing but laugh at
him, whereas, in all decency and conscience, it would become me to
weep for the mischief I have wrought."

But while the bystanders were attempting to lead away the unfortunate
young man he broke from them and with a wild, impassioned earnestness
offered a new and equally strange petition to Lady Eleanore. It was no
other than that she should throw off the mantle, which while he
pressed the silver cup of wine upon her she had drawn more closely
around her form, so as almost to shroud herself within it.

"Cast it from you," exclaimed Jervase Helwyse, clasping his hands in
an agony of entreaty. "It may not yet be too late. Give the accursed
garment to the flames."

But Lady Eleanore, with a laugh of scorn, drew the rich folds of the
embroidered mantle over her head in such a fashion as to give a
completely new aspect to her beautiful face, which, half hidden, half
revealed, seemed to belong to some being of mysterious character and
purposes.

"Farewell, Jervase Helwyse!" said she. "Keep my image in your
remembrance as you behold it now."

"Alas, lady!" he replied, in a tone no longer wild, but sad as a
funeral-bell; "we must meet shortly when your face may wear another
aspect, and that shall be the image that must abide within me." He
made no more resistance to the violent efforts of the gentlemen and
servants who almost dragged him out of the apartment and dismissed him
roughly from the iron gate of the province-house.

Captain Langford, who had been very active in this affair, was
returning to the presence of Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe, when he
encountered the physician, Dr. Clarke, with whom he had held some
casual talk on the day of her arrival. The doctor stood apart,
separated from Lady Eleanore by the width of the room, but eying her
with such keen sagacity that Captain Langford involuntarily gave him
credit for the discovery of some deep secret.

"You appear to be smitten, after all, with the charms of this queenly
maiden," said he, hoping thus to draw forth the physician's hidden
knowledge.

"God forbid!" answered Dr. Clarke, with a grave smile; "and if you be
wise, you will put up the same prayer for yourself. Woe to those who
shall be smitten by this beautiful Lady Eleanore! But yonder stands
the governor, and I have a word or two for his private ear.
Good-night!" He accordingly advanced to Governor Shute and addressed
him in so low a tone that none of the bystanders could catch a word of
what he said, although the sudden change of His Excellency's hitherto
cheerful visage betokened that the communication could be of no
agreeable import. A very few moments afterward it was announced to the
guests that an unforeseen circumstance rendered it necessary to put a
premature close to the festival.

The ball at the province-house supplied a topic of conversation for
the colonial metropolis for some days after its occurrence, and might
still longer have been the general theme, only that a subject of
all-engrossing interest thrust it for a time from the public
recollection. This was the appearance of a dreadful epidemic which in
that age, and long before and afterward, was wont to slay its hundreds
and thousands on both sides of the Atlantic. On the occasion of which
we speak it was distinguished by a peculiar virulence, insomuch that
it has left its traces--its pitmarks, to use an appropriate figure--on
the history of the country, the affairs of which were thrown into
confusion by its ravages. At first, unlike its ordinary course, the
disease seemed to confine itself to the higher circles of society,
selecting its victims from among the proud, the well-born and the
wealthy, entering unabashed into stately chambers and lying down with
the slumberers in silken beds. Some of the most distinguished guests
of the province-house--even those whom the haughty Lady Eleanore
Rochcliffe had deemed not unworthy of her favor--were stricken by this
fatal scourge. It was noticed with an ungenerous bitterness of feeling
that the four gentlemen--the Virginian, the British officer, the young
clergyman and the governor's secretary--who had been her most devoted
attendants on the evening of the ball were the foremost on whom the
plague-stroke fell. But the disease, pursuing its onward progress,
soon ceased to be exclusively a prerogative of aristocracy. Its red
brand was no longer conferred like a noble's star or an order of
knighthood. It threaded its way through the narrow and crooked
streets, and entered the low, mean, darksome dwellings and laid its
hand of death upon the artisans and laboring classes of the town. It
compelled rich and poor to feel themselves brethren then, and stalking
to and fro across the Three Hills with a fierceness which made it
almost a new pestilence, there was that mighty conqueror--that scourge
and horror of our forefathers--the small-pox.

We cannot estimate the affright which this plague inspired of yore by
contemplating it as the fangless monster of the present day. We must
remember, rather, with what awe we watched the gigantic footsteps of
the Asiatic cholera striding from shore to shore of the Atlantic and
marching like Destiny upon cities far remote which flight had already
half depopulated. There is no other fear so horrible and unhumanizing
as that which makes man dread to breathe heaven's vital air lest it be
poison, or to grasp the hand of a brother or friend lest the grip of
the pestilence should clutch him. Such was the dismay that now
followed in the track of the disease or ran before it throughout the
town. Graves were hastily dug and the pestilential relics as hastily
covered, because the dead were enemies of the living and strove to
draw them headlong, as it were, into their own dismal pit. The public
councils were suspended, as if mortal wisdom might relinquish its
devices now that an unearthly usurper had found his way into the
ruler's mansion. Had an enemy's fleet been hovering on the coast or
his armies trampling on our soil, the people would probably have
committed their defence to that same direful conqueror who had wrought
their own calamity and would permit no interference with his sway.
This conqueror had a symbol of his triumphs: it was a blood-red flag
that fluttered in the tainted air over the door of every dwelling into
which the small-pox had entered.

Such a banner was long since waving over the portal of the
province-house, for thence, as was proved by tracking its footsteps
back, had all this dreadful mischief issued. It had been traced back
to a lady's luxurious chamber, to the proudest of the proud, to her
that was so delicate and hardly owned herself of earthly mould, to the
haughty one who took her stand above human sympathies--to Lady
Eleanore. There remained no room for doubt that the contagion had
lurked in that gorgeous mantle which threw so strange a grace around
her at the festival. Its fantastic splendor had been conceived in the
delirious brain of a woman on her death-bed and was the last toil of
her stiffening fingers, which had interwoven fate and misery with its
golden threads. This dark tale, whispered at first, was now bruited
far and wide. The people raved against the Lady Eleanore and cried out
that her pride and scorn had evoked a fiend, and that between them
both this monstrous evil had been born. At times their rage and
despair took the semblance of grinning mirth; and whenever the red
flag of the pestilence was hoisted over another and yet another door,
they clapped their hands and shouted through the streets in bitter
mockery: "Behold a new triumph for the Lady Eleanore!"

One day in the midst of these dismal times a wild figure approached
the portal of the province-house, and, folding his arms, stood
contemplating the scarlet banner, which a passing breeze shook
fitfully, as if to fling abroad the contagion that it typified. At
length, climbing one of the pillars by means of the iron balustrade,
he took down the flag, and entered the mansion waving it above his
head. At the foot of the staircase he met the governor, booted and
spurred, with his cloak drawn around him, evidently on the point of
setting forth upon a journey.

"Wretched lunatic, what do you seek here?" exclaimed Shute, extending
his cane to guard himself from contact. "There is nothing here but
Death; back, or you will meet him."

"Death will not touch me, the banner-bearer of the pestilence," cried
Jervase Helwyse, shaking the red flag aloft. "Death and the
pestilence, who wears the aspect of the Lady Eleanore, will walk
through the streets to-night, and I must march before them with this
banner."

"Why do I waste words on the fellow?" muttered the governor, drawing
his cloak across his mouth. "What matters his miserable life, when
none of us are sure of twelve hours' breath?--On, fool, to your own
destruction!"

He made way for Jervase Helwyse, who immediately ascended the
staircase, but on the first landing-place was arrested by the firm
grasp of a hand upon his shoulder. Looking fiercely up with a madman's
impulse to struggle with and rend asunder his opponent, he found
himself powerless beneath a calm, stern eye which possessed the
mysterious property of quelling frenzy at its height. The person whom
he had now encountered was the physician, Dr. Clarke, the duties of
whose sad profession had led him to the province-house, where he was
an infrequent guest in more prosperous times.

"Young man, what is your purpose?" demanded he.

"I seek the Lady Eleanore," answered Jervase Helwyse, submissively.

"All have fled from her," said the physician. "Why do you seek her
now? I tell you, youth, her nurse fell death-stricken on the threshold
of that fatal chamber. Know ye not that never came such a curse to our
shores as this lovely Lady Eleanore, that her breath has filled the
air with poison, that she has shaken pestilence and death upon the
land from the folds of her accursed mantle?"

"Let me look upon her," rejoined the mad youth, more wildly. "Let me
behold her in her awful beauty, clad in the regal garments of the
pestilence. She and Death sit on a throne together; let me kneel down
before them."

"Poor youth!" said Dr. Clarke, and, moved by a deep sense of human
weakness, a smile of caustic humor curled his lip even then. "Wilt
thou still worship the destroyer and surround her image with fantasies
the more magnificent the more evil she has wrought? Thus man doth ever
to his tyrants. Approach, then. Madness, as I have noted, has that
good efficacy that it will guard you from contagion, and perhaps its
own cure may be found in yonder chamber." Ascending another flight of
stairs, he threw open a door and signed to Jervase Helwyse that he
should enter.

The poor lunatic, it seems probable, had cherished a delusion that his
haughty mistress sat in state, unharmed herself by the pestilential
influence which as by enchantment she scattered round about her. He
dreamed, no doubt, that her beauty was not dimmed, but brightened into
superhuman splendor. With such anticipations he stole reverentially to
the door at which the physician stood, but paused upon the threshold,
gazing fearfully into the gloom of the darkened chamber.

"Where is the Lady Eleanore?" whispered he.

"Call her," replied the physician.

"Lady Eleanore! princess! queen of Death!" cried Jervase Helwyse,
advancing three steps into the chamber. "She is not here. There, on
yonder table, I behold the sparkle of a diamond which once she wore
upon her bosom. There"--and he shuddered--"there hangs her mantle, on
which a dead woman embroidered a spell of dreadful potency. But where
is the Lady Eleanore?"

Something stirred within the silken curtains of a canopied bed and a
low moan was uttered, which, listening intently, Jervase Helwyse began
to distinguish as a woman's voice complaining dolefully of thirst. He
fancied, even, that he recognized its tones.

"My throat! My throat is scorched," murmured the voice. "A drop of
water!"

"What thing art thou?" said the brain-stricken youth, drawing near the
bed and tearing asunder its curtains. "Whose voice hast thou stolen
for thy murmurs and miserable petitions, as if Lady Eleanore could be
conscious of mortal infirmity? Fie! Heap of diseased mortality, why
lurkest thou in my lady's chamber?"

"Oh, Jervase Helwyse," said the voice--and as it spoke the figure
contorted itself, struggling to hide its blasted face--"look not now
on the woman you once loved. The curse of Heaven hath stricken me
because I would not call man my brother nor woman sister. I wrapped
myself in pride as in a mantle and scorned the sympathies of nature,
and therefore has Nature made this wretched body the medium of a
dreadful sympathy. You are avenged, they are all avenged, Nature is
avenged; for I am Eleanore Rochcliffe."

The malice of his mental disease, the bitterness lurking at the bottom
of his heart, mad as he was, for a blighted and ruined life and love
that had been paid with cruel scorn, awoke within the breast of
Jervase Helwyse. He shook his finger at the wretched girl, and the
chamber echoed, the curtains of the bed were shaken, with his outburst
of insane merriment.

"Another triumph for the Lady Eleanore!" he cried. "All have been her
victims; who so worthy to be the final victim as herself?" Impelled by
some new fantasy of his crazed intellect, he snatched the fatal mantle
and rushed from the chamber and the house.

That night a procession passed by torchlight through the streets,
bearing in the midst the figure of a woman enveloped with a
richly-embroidered mantle, while in advance stalked Jervase Helwyse
waving the red flag of the pestilence. Arriving opposite the
province-house, the mob burned the effigy, and a strong wind came and
swept away the ashes. It was said that from that very hour the
pestilence abated, as if its sway had some mysterious connection, from
the first plague-stroke to the last, with Lady Elcanore's mantle. A
remarkable uncertainty broods over that unhappy lady's fate. There is
a belief, however, that in a certain chamber of this mansion a female
form may sometimes be duskily discerned shrinking into the darkest
corner and muffling her face within an embroidered mantle. Supposing
the legend true, can this be other than the once proud Lady Eleanore?

       *       *       *       *       *

Mine host and the old loyalist and I bestowed no little Warmth of
applause upon this narrative, in which we had all been deeply
interested; for the reader can scarcely conceive how unspeakably the
effect of such a tale is heightened when, as in the present case, we
may repose perfect confidence in the veracity of him who tells it. For
my own part, knowing how scrupulous is Mr. Tiffany to settle the
foundation of his facts, I could not have believed him one whit the
more faithfully had he professed himself an eyewitness of the doings
and sufferings of poor Lady Eleanore. Some sceptics, it is true, might
demand documentary evidence, or even require him to produce the
embroidered mantle, forgetting that--Heaven be praised!--it was
consumed to ashes.

But now the old loyalist, whose blood was warmed by the good cheer,
began to talk, in his turn, about the traditions of the Province
House, and hinted that he, if it were agreeable, might add a few
reminiscences to our legendary stock. Mr. Tiffany, having no cause to
dread a rival, immediately besought him to favor us with a specimen;
my own entreaties, of course, were urged to the same effect; and our
venerable guest, well pleased to find willing auditors, awaited only
the return of Mr. Thomas Waite, who had been summoned forth to provide
accommodations for several new arrivals. Perchance the public--but be
this as its own caprice and ours shall settle the matter--may read the
result in another tale of the Province House.




IV.

OLD ESTHER DUDLEY.


Our host having resumed the chair, he as well as Mr. Tiffany and
myself expressed much eagerness to be made acquainted with the story
to which the loyalist had alluded. That venerable man first of all saw
lit to moisten his throat with another glass of wine, and then,
turning his face toward our coal-fire, looked steadfastly for a few
moments into the depths of its cheerful glow. Finally he poured forth
a great fluency of speech. The generous liquid that he had imbibed,
while it warmed his age-chilled blood, likewise took off the chill
from his heart and mind, and gave him an energy to think and feel
which we could hardly have expected to find beneath the snows of
fourscore winters. His feelings, indeed, appeared to me more excitable
than those of a younger man--or, at least, the same degree of feeling
manifested itself by more visible effects than if his judgment and
will had possessed the potency of meridian life. At the pathetic
passages of his narrative he readily melted into tears. When a breath
of indignation swept across his spirit, the blood flushed his withered
visage even to the roots of his white hair, and he shook his clinched
fist at the trio of peaceful auditors, seeming to fancy enemies in
those who felt very kindly toward the desolate old soul. But ever and
anon, sometimes in the midst of his most earnest talk, this ancient
person's intellect would wander vaguely, losing its hold of the matter
in hand and groping for it amid misty shadows. Then would he cackle
forth a feeble laugh and express a doubt whether his wits--for by that
phrase it pleased our ancient friend to signify his mental
powers--were not getting a little the worse for wear.

Under these disadvantages, the old loyalist's story required more
revision to render it fit for the public eye than those of the series
which have preceded it; nor should it be concealed that the sentiment
and tone of the affair may have undergone some slight--or perchance
more than slight--metamorphosis in its transmission to the reader
through the medium of a thoroughgoing democrat. The tale itself is a
mere sketch with no involution of plot nor any great interest of
events, yet possessing, if I have rehearsed it aright, that pensive
influence over the mind which the shadow of the old Province House
flings upon the loiterer in its court-yard.

       *       *       *       *       *

The hour had come--the hour of defeat and humiliation--when Sir
William Howe was to pass over the threshold of the province-house and
embark, with no such triumphal ceremonies as he once promised himself,
on board the British fleet. He bade his servants and military
attendants go before him, and lingered a moment in the loneliness of
the mansion to quell the fierce emotions that struggled in his bosom
as with a death-throb. Preferable then would he have deemed his fate
had a warrior's death left him a claim to the narrow territory of a
grave within the soil which the king had given him to defend. With an
ominous perception that as his departing footsteps echoed adown the
staircase the sway of Britain was passing for ever from New England,
he smote his clenched hand on his brow and cursed the destiny that had
flung the shame of a dismembered empire upon him.

"Would to God," cried he, hardly repressing his tears of rage, "that
the rebels were even now at the doorstep! A blood-stain upon the floor
should then bear testimony that the last British ruler was faithful to
his trust."

The tremulous voice of a woman replied to his exclamation.

"Heaven's cause and the king's are one," it said. "Go forth, Sir
William Howe, and trust in Heaven to bring back a royal governor in
triumph."

Subduing at once the passion to which he had yielded only in the faith
that it was unwitnessed, Sir William Howe became conscious that an
aged woman leaning on a gold-headed staff was standing betwixt him and
the door. It was old Esther Dudley, who had dwelt almost immemorial
years in this mansion, until her presence seemed as inseparable from
it as the recollections of its history. She was the daughter of an
ancient and once eminent family which had fallen into poverty and
decay and left its last descendant no resource save the bounty of the
king, nor any shelter except within the walls of the province-house.
An office in the household with merely nominal duties had been
assigned to her as a pretext for the payment of a small pension, the
greater part of which she expended in adorning herself with an antique
magnificence of attire. The claims of Esther Dudley's gentle blood
were acknowledged by all the successive governors, and they treated
her with the punctilious courtesy which it was her foible to demand,
not always with success, from a neglectful world. The only actual
share which she assumed in the business of the mansion was to glide
through its passages and public chambers late at night to see that the
servants had dropped no fire from their flaring torches nor left
embers crackling and blazing on the hearths. Perhaps it was this
invariable custom of walking her rounds in the hush of midnight that
caused the superstition of the times to invest the old woman with
attributes of awe and mystery, fabling that she had entered the portal
of the province-house--none knew whence--in the train of the first
royal governor, and that it was her fate to dwell there till the last
should have departed.

But Sir William Howe, if he ever heard this legend, had forgotten it.

"Mistress Dudley, why are you loitering here?" asked he, with some
severity of tone. "It is my pleasure to be the last in this mansion of
the king."

"Not so, if it please Your Excellency," answered the time-stricken
woman. "This roof has sheltered me long; I will not pass from it until
they bear me to the tomb of my forefathers. What other shelter is
there for old Esther Dudley save the province-house or the grave?"

"Now, Heaven forgive me!" said Sir William Howe to himself. "I was
about to leave this wretched old creature to starve or beg.--Take
this, good Mistress Dudley," he added, putting a purse into her hands.
"King George's head on these golden guineas is sterling yet, and will
continue so, I warrant you, even should the rebels crown John Hancock
their king. That purse will buy a better shelter than the
province-house can now afford."

"While the burden of life remains upon me I will have no other shelter
than this roof," persisted Esther Dudley, striking her staff upon the
floor with a gesture that expressed immovable resolve; "and when Your
Excellency returns in triumph, I will totter into the porch to welcome
you."

"My poor old friend!" answered the British general, and all his manly
and martial pride could no longer restrain a gush of bitter tears.
"This is an evil hour for you and me. The province which the king
entrusted to my charge is lost. I go hence in misfortune--perchance in
disgrace--to return no more. And you, whose present being is
incorporated with the past, who have seen governor after governor in
stately pageantry ascend these steps, whose whole life has been an
observance of majestic ceremonies and a worship of the king,--how will
you endure the change? Come with us; bid farewell to a land that has
shaken off its allegiance, and live still under a royal government at
Halifax."

"Never! never!" said the pertinacious old dame. "Here will I abide,
and King George shall still have one true subject in his disloyal
province."

"Beshrew the old fool!" muttered Sir William Howe, growing impatient
of her obstinacy and ashamed of the emotion into which he had been
betrayed. "She is the very moral of old-fashioned prejudice, and could
exist nowhere but in this musty edifice.--Well, then, Mistress Dudley,
since you will needs tarry, I give the province-house in charge to
you. Take this key, and keep it safe until myself or some other royal
governor shall demand it of you." Smiling bitterly at himself and her,
he took the heavy key of the province-house, and, delivering it into
the old lady's hands, drew his cloak around him for departure.

As the general glanced back at Esther Dudley's antique figure he
deemed her well fitted for such a charge, as being so perfect a
representative of the decayed past--of an age gone by, with its
manners, opinions, faith and feelings all fallen into oblivion or
scorn, of what had once been a reality, but was now merely a vision of
faded magnificence. Then Sir William Howe strode forth, smiting his
clenched hands together in the fierce anguish of his spirit, and old
Esther Dudley was left to keep watch in the lonely province-house,
dwelling there with Memory; and if Hope ever seemed to flit around
her, still it was Memory in disguise.

The total change of affairs that ensued on the departure of the
British troops did not drive the venerable lady from her stronghold.
There was not for many years afterward a governor of Massachusetts,
and the magistrates who had charge of such matters saw no objection to
Esther Dudley's residence in the province-house, especially as they
must otherwise have paid a hireling for taking care of the premises,
which with her was a labor of love; and so they left her the
undisturbed mistress of the old historic edifice. Many and strange
were the fables which the gossips whispered about her in all the
chimney-corners of the town.

Among the time-worn articles of furniture that had been left in the
mansion, there was a tall antique mirror which was well worthy of a
tale by itself, and perhaps may hereafter be the theme of one. The
gold of its heavily-wrought frame was tarnished, and its surface so
blurred that the old woman's figure, whenever she paused before it,
looked indistinct and ghostlike. But it was the general belief that
Esther could cause the governors of the overthrown dynasty, with the
beautiful ladies who had once adorned their festivals, the Indian
chiefs who had come up to the province-house to hold council or swear
allegiance, the grim provincial warriors, the severe clergymen--in
short, all the pageantry of gone days, all the figures that ever swept
across the broad-plate of glass in former times,--she could cause the
whole to reappear and people the inner world of the mirror with
shadows of old life. Such legends as these, together with the
singularity of her isolated existence, her age and the infirmity that
each added winter flung upon her, made Mistress Dudley the object both
of fear and pity, and it was partly the result of either sentiment
that, amid all the angry license of the times, neither wrong nor
insult ever fell upon her unprotected head. Indeed, there was so much
haughtiness in her demeanor toward intruders--among whom she reckoned
all persons acting under the new authorities--that it was really an
affair of no small nerve to look her in the face. And, to do the
people justice, stern republicans as they had now become, they were
well content that the old gentlewoman, in her hoop-petticoat and faded
embroidery, should still haunt the palace of ruined pride and
overthrown power, the symbol of a departed system, embodying a history
in her person. So Esther Dudley dwelt year after year in the
province-house, still reverencing all that others had flung aside,
still faithful to her king, who, so long as the venerable dame yet
held her post, might be said to retain one true subject in New England
and one spot of the empire that had been wrested from him.

And did she dwell there in utter loneliness? Rumor said, "Not so."
Whenever her chill and withered heart desired warmth, she was wont to
summon a black slave of Governor Shirley's from the blurred mirror and
send him in search of guests who had long ago been familiar in those
deserted chambers. Forth went the sable messenger, with the starlight
or the moonshine gleaming through him, and did his errand in the
burial-grounds, knocking at the iron doors of tombs or upon the marble
slabs that covered them, and whispering to those within, "My mistress,
old Esther Dudley, bids you to the province-house at midnight;" and
punctually as the clock of the Old South told twelve came the shadows
of the Olivers, the Hutchinsons, the Dudleys--all the grandees of a
bygone generation--gliding beneath the portal into the well-known
mansion, where Esther mingled with them as if she likewise were a
shade. Without vouching for the truth of such traditions, it is
certain that Mistress Dudley sometimes assembled a few of the stanch
though crestfallen old Tories who had lingered in the rebel town
during those days of wrath and tribulation. Out of a cobwebbed bottle
containing liquor that a royal governor might have smacked his lips
over they quaffed healths to the king and babbled treason to the
republic, feeling as if the protecting shadow of the throne were still
flung around them. But, draining the last drops of their liquor, they
stole timorously homeward, and answered not again if the rude mob
reviled them in the street.

Yet Esther Dudley's most frequent and favored guests were the children
of the town. Toward them she was never stern. A kindly and loving
nature hindered elsewhere from its free course by a thousand rocky
prejudices lavished itself upon these little ones. By bribes of
gingerbread of her own making, stamped with a royal crown, she tempted
their sunny sportiveness beneath the gloomy portal of the
province-house, and would often beguile them to spend a whole play-day
there, sitting in a circle round the verge of her hoop-petticoat,
greedily attentive to her stories of a dead world. And when these
little boys and girls stole forth again from the dark, mysterious
mansion, they went bewildered, full of old feelings that graver people
had long ago forgotten, rubbing their eyes at the world around them as
if they had gone astray into ancient times and become children of the
past. At home, when their parents asked where they had loitered such a
weary while and with whom they had been at play, the children would
talk of all the departed worthies of the province as far back as
Governor Belcher and the haughty dame of Sir William Phipps. It would
seem as though they had been sitting on the knees of these famous
personages, whom the grave had hidden for half a century, and had
toyed with the embroidery of their rich waistcoats or roguishly pulled
the long curls of their flowing wigs. "But Governor Belcher has been
dead this many a year," would the mother say to her little boy. "And
did you really see him at the province-house?"--"Oh yes, dear
mother--yes!" the half-dreaming child would answer. "But when old
Esther had done speaking about him, he faded away out of his chair."
Thus, without affrighting her little guests, she led them by the hand
into the chambers of her own desolate heart and made childhood's fancy
discern the ghosts that haunted there.

Living so continually in her own circle of ideas, and never regulating
her mind by a proper reference to present things, Esther Dudley
appears to have grown partially crazed. It was found that she had no
right sense of the progress and true state of the Revolutionary war,
but held a constant faith that the armies of Britain were victorious
on every field and destined to be ultimately triumphant. Whenever the
town rejoiced for a battle won by Washington or Gates or Morgan or
Greene, the news, in passing through the door of the province-house as
through the ivory gate of dreams, became metamorphosed into a strange
tale of the prowess of Howe, Clinton or Cornwallis. Sooner or later,
it was her invincible belief, the colonies would be prostrate at the
footstool of the king. Sometimes she seemed to take for granted that
such was already the case. On one occasion she startled the
townspeople by a brilliant illumination of the province-house with
candles at every pane of glass and a transparency of the king's
initials and a crown of light in the great balcony-window. The figure
of the aged woman in the most gorgeous of her mildewed velvets and
brocades was seen passing from casement to casement, until she paused
before the balcony and flourished a huge key above her head. Her
wrinkled visage actually gleamed with triumph, as if the soul within
her were a festal lamp.

"What means this blaze of light? What does old Esther's joy portend?"
whispered a spectator. "It is frightful to see her gliding about the
chambers and rejoicing there without a soul to bear her company."

"It is as if she were making merry in a tomb," said another.

"Pshaw! It is no such mystery," observed an old man, after some brief
exercise of memory. "Mistress Dudley is keeping jubilee for the king
of England's birthday."

Then the people laughed aloud, and would have thrown mud against the
blazing transparency of the king's crown and initials, only that they
pitied the poor old dame who was so dismally triumphant amid the wreck
and ruin of the system to which she appertained.

Oftentimes it was her custom to climb the weary staircase that wound
upward to the cupola, and thence strain her dimmed eyesight seaward
and countryward, watching for a British fleet or for the march of a
grand procession with the king's banner floating over it. The
passengers in the street below would discern her anxious visage and
send up a shout: "When the golden Indian on the province-house shall
shoot his arrow, and when the cock on the Old South spire shall crow,
then look for a royal governor again!" for this had grown a by-word
through the town. And at last, after long, long years, old Esther
Dudley knew--or perchance she only dreamed--that a royal governor was
on the eve of returning to the province-house to receive the heavy key
which Sir William Howe had committed to her charge. Now, it was the
fact that intelligence bearing some faint analogy to Esther's version
of it was current among the townspeople. She set the mansion in the
best order that her means allowed, and, arraying herself in silks and
tarnished gold, stood long before the blurred mirror to admire her own
magnificence. As she gazed the gray and withered lady moved her ashen
lips, murmuring half aloud, talking to shapes that she saw within the
mirror, to shadows of her own fantasies, to the household friends of
memory, and bidding them rejoice with her and come forth to meet the
governor. And while absorbed in this communion Mistress Dudley heard
the tramp of many footsteps in the street, and, looking out at the
window, beheld what she construed as the royal governor's arrival.

"Oh, happy day! Oh, blessed, blessed hour!" she exclaimed. "Let me but
bid him welcome within the portal, and my task in the province-house
and on earth is done." Then, with tottering feet which age and
tremulous joy caused to tread amiss, she hurried down the grand
staircase, her silks sweeping and rustling as she went; so that the
sound was as if a train of special courtiers were thronging from the
dim mirror.

And Esther Dudley fancied that as soon as the wide door should be
flung open all the pomp and splendor of bygone times would pace
majestically into the province-house and the gilded tapestry of the
past would be brightened by the sunshine of the present. She turned
the key, withdrew it from the lock, unclosed the door and stepped
across the threshold. Advancing up the court-yard appeared a person of
most dignified mien, with tokens, as Esther interpreted them, of
gentle blood, high rank and long-accustomed authority even in his walk
and every gesture. He was richly dressed, but wore a gouty shoe,
which, however, did not lessen the stateliness of his gait. Around and
behind him were people in plain civic dresses and two or three
war-worn veterans--evidently officers of rank--arrayed in a uniform of
blue and buff. But Esther Dudley, firm in the belief that had fastened
its roots about her heart, beheld only the principal personage, and
never doubted that this was the long-looked-for governor to whom she
was to surrender up her charge. As he approached she involuntarily
sank down on her knees and tremblingly held forth the heavy key.

"Receive my trust! Take it quickly," cried she, "for methinks Death is
striving to snatch away my triumph. But he comes too late. Thank
Heaven for this blessed hour! God save King George!"

"That, madam, is a strange prayer to be offered up at such a moment,"
replied the unknown guest of the province-house, and, courteously
removing his hat, he offered his arm to raise the aged woman. "Yet, in
reverence for your gray hairs and long-kept faith, Heaven forbid that
any here should say you nay. Over the realms which still acknowledge
his sceptre, God save King George!"

Esther Dudley started to her feet, and, hastily clutching back the
key, gazed with fearful earnestness at the stranger, and dimly and
doubtfully, as if suddenly awakened from a dream, her bewildered eyes
half recognized his face. Years ago she had known him among the gentry
of the province, but the ban of the king had fallen upon him. How,
then, came the doomed victim here? Proscribed, excluded from mercy,
the monarch's most dreaded and hated foe, this New England merchant
had stood triumphantly against a kingdom's strength, and his foot now
trod upon humbled royalty as he ascended the steps of the
province-house, the people's chosen governor of Massachusetts.

"Wretch, wretch that I am!" muttered the old woman, with such a
heartbroken expression that the tears gushed from the stranger's eyes.
"Have I bidden a traitor welcome?--Come, Death! come quickly!"

"Alas, venerable lady!" said Governor Hancock, lending her his support
with all the reverence that a courtier would have shown to a queen,
"your life has been prolonged until the world has changed around you.
You have treasured up all that time has rendered worthless--the
principles, feelings, manners, modes of being and acting which another
generation has flung aside--and you are a symbol of the past. And I
and these around me--we represent a new race of men, living no longer
in the past, scarcely in the present, but projecting our lives forward
into the future. Ceasing to model ourselves on ancestral superstitions,
it is our faith and principle to press onward--onward.--Yet," continued
he, turning to his attendants, "let us reverence for the last time the
stately and gorgeous prejudices of the tottering past."

While the republican governor spoke he had continued to support the
helpless form of Esther Dudley; her weight grew heavier against his
arm, but at last, with a sudden effort to free herself, the ancient
woman sank down beside one of the pillars of the portal. The key of
the province-house fell from her grasp and clanked against the stone.

"I have been faithful unto death," murmured she. "God save the king!"

"She hath done her office," said Hancock, solemnly. "We will follow her
reverently to the tomb of her ancestors, and then, my fellow-citizens,
onward--onward. We are no longer children of the past."



As the old loyalist concluded his narrative the enthusiasm which had
been fitfully flashing within his sunken eyes and quivering across his
wrinkled visage faded away, as if all the lingering fire of his soul
were extinguished. Just then, too, a lamp upon the mantelpiece threw
out a dying gleam, which vanished as speedily as it shot upward,
compelling our eyes to grope for one another's features by the dim
glow of the hearth. With such a lingering fire, methought, with such a
dying gleam, had the glory of the ancient system vanished from the
province-house when the spirit of old Esther Dudley took its flight.
And now, again, the clock of the Old South threw its voice of ages on
the breeze, knolling the hourly knell of the past, crying out far and
wide through the multitudinous city, and filling our ears, as we sat
in the dusky chamber, with its reverberating depth of tone. In that
same mansion--in that very chamber--what a volume of history had been
told off into hours by the same voice that was now trembling in the
air! Many a governor had heard those midnight accents and longed to
exchange his stately cares for slumber. And, as for mine host and Mr.
Bela Tiffany and the old loyalist and me, we had babbled about dreams
of the past until we almost fancied that the clock was still striking
in a bygone century. Neither of us would have wondered had a
hoop-petticoated phantom of Esther Dudley tottered into the chamber,
walking her rounds in the hush of midnight as of yore, and motioned us
to quench the fading embers of the fire and leave the historic
precincts to herself and her kindred shades. But, as no such vision
was vouchsafed, I retired unbidden, and would advise Mr. Tiffany to
lay hold of another auditor, being resolved not to show my face in the
Province House for a good while hence--if ever.




THE HAUNTED MIND.


What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to
recollect yourself, after starting from midnight slumber! By unclosing
your eyes so suddenly you seem to have surprised the personages of
your dream in full convocation round your bed, and catch one broad
glance at them before they can flit into obscurity. Or, to vary the
metaphor, you find yourself for a single instant wide awake in that
realm of illusions whither sleep has been the passport, and behold its
ghostly inhabitants and wondrous scenery with a perception of their
strangeness such as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed.
The distant sound of a church-clock is borne faintly on the wind. You
question with yourself, half seriously, whether it has stolen to your
waking ear from some gray tower that stood within the precincts of
your dream. While yet in suspense another clock flings its heavy clang
over the slumbering town with so full and distinct a sound, and such a
long murmur in the neighboring air, that you are certain it must
proceed from the steeple at the nearest corner; You count the
strokes--one, two; and there they cease with a booming sound like the
gathering of a third stroke within the bell.

If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night, it
would be this. Since your sober bedtime, at eleven, you have had rest
enough to take off the pressure of yesterday's fatigue, while before
you, till the sun comes from "Far Cathay" to brighten your window,
there is almost the space of a summer night--one hour to be spent in
thought with the mind's eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams, and
two in that strangest of enjoyments the forgetfulness alike of joy and
woe. The moment of rising belongs to another period of time, and
appears so distant that the plunge out of a warm bed into the frosty
air cannot yet be anticipated with dismay. Yesterday has already
vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged
from the future. You have found an intermediate space where the
business of life does not intrude, where the passing moment lingers
and becomes truly the present; a spot where Father Time, when he
thinks nobody is watching him, sits down by the wayside to take
breath. Oh that he would fall asleep and let mortals live on without
growing older!

Hitherto you have lain perfectly still, because the slightest motion
would dissipate the fragments of your slumber. Now, being irrevocably
awake, you peep through the half-drawn window-curtain, and observe
that the glass is ornamented with fanciful devices in frost-work, and
that each pane presents something like a frozen dream. There will be
time enough to trace out the analogy while waiting the summons to
breakfast. Seen through the clear portion of the glass where the
silvery mountain-peaks of the frost-scenery do not ascend, the most
conspicuous object is the steeple, the white spire of which directs
you to the wintry lustre of the firmament. You may almost distinguish
the figures on the clock that has just told the hour. Such a frosty
sky and the snow-covered roofs and the long vista of the frozen
street, all white, and the distant water hardened into rock, might
make you shiver even under four blankets and a woollen comforter. Yet
look at that one glorious star! Its beams are distinguishable from all
the rest, and actually cast the shadow of the casement on the bed with
a radiance of deeper hue than moonlight, though not so accurate an
outline.

You sink down and muffle your head in the clothes, shivering all the
while, but less from bodily chill than the bare idea of a polar
atmosphere. It is too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad.
You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed
like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of
inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth such
as you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its
train. You think how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds and
narrow coffins through the drear winter of the grave, and cannot
persuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor shiver when the snow
is drifting over their little hillocks and the bitter blast howls
against the door of the tomb. That gloomy thought will collect a
gloomy multitude and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour.

In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the
lights, the music and revelry, above may cause us to forget their
existence and the buried ones or prisoners whom they hide. But
sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung
wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive
sensibility, but no active strength--when the imagination is a mirror
imparting vividness to all ideas without the power of selecting or
controlling them--then pray that your griefs may slumber and the
brotherhood of remorse not break their chain. It is too late. A
funeral train comes gliding by your bed in which passion and feeling
assume bodily shape and things of the mind become dim spectres to the
eye. There is your earliest sorrow, a pale young mourner wearing a
sister's likeness to first love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed
sweetness in her melancholy features and grace in the flow of her
sable robe. Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness with dust among
her golden hair and her bright garments all faded and defaced,
stealing from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach:
she was your fondest hope, but a delusive one; so call her
Disappointment now. A sterner form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles,
a look and gesture of iron authority; there is no name for him unless
it be Fatality--an emblem of the evil influence that rules your
fortunes, a demon to whom you subjected yourself by some error at the
outset of life, and were bound his slave for ever by once obeying him.
See those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip
of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger touching
the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous
folly at which you would blush even in the remotest cavern of the
earth? Then recognize your shame.

Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one if, riotously miserable,
a fiercer tribe do not surround him--the devils of a guilty heart that
holds its hell within itself. What if Remorse should assume the
features of an injured friend? What if the fiend should come in
woman's garments with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie
down by your side? What if he should stand at your bed's foot in the
likeness of a corpse with a bloody stain upon the shroud? Sufficient
without such guilt is this nightmare of the soul, this heavy, heavy
sinking of the spirits, this wintry gloom about the heart, this
indistinct horror of the mind blending itself with the darkness of the
chamber.

By a desperate effort you start upright, breaking from a sort of
conscious sleep and gazing wildly round the bed, as if the fiends were
anywhere but in your haunted mind. At the same moment the slumbering
embers on the hearth send forth a gleam which palely illuminates the
whole outer room and flickers through the door of the bedchamber, but
cannot quite dispel its obscurity. Your eye searches for whatever may
remind you of the living world. With eager minuteness you take note of
the table near the fireplace, the book with an ivory knife between its
leaves, the unfolded letter, the hat and the fallen glove. Soon the
flame vanishes, and with it the whole scene is gone, though its image
remains an instant in your mind's eye when darkness has swallowed the
reality. Throughout the chamber there is the same obscurity as before,
but not the same gloom within your breast.

As your head falls back upon the pillow you think--in a whisper be it
spoken--how pleasant in these night solitudes would be the rise and
fall of a softer breathing than your own, the slight pressure of a
tenderer bosom, the quiet throb of a purer heart, imparting its
peacefulness to your troubled one, as if the fond sleeper were
involving you in her dream. Her influence is over you, though she have
no existence but in that momentary image. You sink down in a flowery
spot on the borders of sleep and wakefulness, while your thoughts rise
before you in pictures, all disconnected, yet all assimilated by a
pervading gladsomeness and beauty. The wheeling of gorgeous squadrons
that glitter in the sun is succeeded by the merriment of children
round the door of a schoolhouse beneath the glimmering shadow of old
trees at the corner of a rustic lane. You stand in the sunny rain of a
summer shower, and wander among the sunny trees of an autumnal wood,
and look upward at the brightest of all rainbows overarching the
unbroken sheet of snow on the American side of Niagara. Your mind
struggles pleasantly between the dancing radiance round the hearth of
a young man and his recent bride and the twittering flight of birds in
spring about their new-made nest. You feel the merry bounding of a
ship before the breeze, and watch the tuneful feet of rosy girls as
they twine their last and merriest dance in a splendid ball-room, and
find yourself in the brilliant circle of a crowded theatre as the
curtain falls over a light and airy scene.

With an involuntary start you seize hold on consciousness, and prove
yourself but half awake by running a doubtful parallel between human
life and the hour which has now elapsed. In both you emerge from
mystery, pass through a vicissitude that you can but imperfectly
control, and are borne onward to another mystery. Now comes the peal
of the distant clock with fainter and fainter strokes as you plunge
farther into the wilderness of sleep. It is the knell of a temporary
death. Your spirit has departed, and strays like a free citizen among
the people of a shadowy world, beholding strange sights, yet without
wonder or dismay. So calm, perhaps, will be the final change--so
undisturbed, as if among familiar things, the entrance of the soul to
its eternal home.




THE VILLAGE UNCLE.

AN IMAGINARY RETROSPECT.


Come! another log upon the hearth. True, our little parlor is
comfortable, especially here where the old man sits in his old
arm-chair; but on Thanksgiving-night the blaze should dance higher up
the chimney and send a shower of sparks into the outer darkness. Toss
on an armful of those dry oak chips, the last relicts of the Mermaid's
knee-timbers--the bones of your namesake, Susan. Higher yet, and
clearer, be the blaze, till our cottage windows glow the ruddiest in
the village and the light of our household mirth flash far across the
bay to Nahant.

And now come, Susan; come, my children. Draw your chairs round me, all
of you. There is a dimness over your figures. You sit quivering
indistinctly with each motion of the blaze, which eddies about you
like a flood; so that you all have the look of visions or people that
dwell only in the firelight, and will vanish from existence as
completely as your own shadows when the flame shall sink among the
embers.

Hark! let me listen for the swell of the surf; it should be audible a
mile inland on a night like this. Yes; there I catch the sound, but
only an uncertain murmur, as if a good way down over the beach, though
by the almanac it is high tide at eight o'clock, and the billows must
now be dashing within thirty yards of our door. Ah! the old man's ears
are failing him, and so is his eyesight, and perhaps his mind, else
you would not all be so shadowy in the blaze of his Thanksgiving fire.

How strangely the past is peeping over the shoulders of the present!
To judge by my recollections, it is but a few moments since I sat in
another room. Yonder model of a vessel was not there, nor the old
chest of drawers, nor Susan's profile and mine in that gilt
frame--nothing, in short, except this same fire, which glimmered on
books, papers and a picture, and half discovered my solitary figure in
a looking-glass. But it was paler than my rugged old self, and
younger, too, by almost half a century.

Speak to me, Susan; speak, my beloved ones; for the scene is
glimmering on my sight again, and as it brightens you fade away. Oh, I
should be loth to lose my treasure of past happiness and become once
more what I was then--a hermit in the depths of my own mind,
sometimes yawning over drowsy volumes and anon a scribbler of wearier
trash than what I read; a man who had wandered out of the real world
and got into its shadow, where his troubles, joys and vicissitudes
were of such slight stuff that he hardly knew whether he lived or only
dreamed of living. Thank Heaven I am an old man now and have done with
all such vanities!

Still this dimness of mine eyes!--Come nearer, Susan, and stand before
the fullest blaze of the hearth. Now I behold you illuminated from
head to foot, in your clean cap and decent gown, with the dear lock of
gray hair across your forehead and a quiet smile about your mouth,
while the eyes alone are concealed by the red gleam of the fire upon
your spectacles. There! you made me tremble again. When the flame
quivered, my sweet Susan, you quivered with it and grew indistinct, as
if melting into the warm light, that my last glimpse of you might be
as visionary as the first was, full many a year since. Do you remember
it? You stood on the little bridge over the brook that runs across
King's Beach into the sea. It was twilight, the waves rolling in, the
wind sweeping by, the crimson clouds fading in the west and the silver
moon brightening above the hill; and on the bridge were you,
fluttering in the breeze like a sea-bird that might skim away at your
pleasure. You seemed a daughter of the viewless wind, a creature of
the ocean-foam and the crimson light, whose merry life was spent in
dancing on the crests of the billows that threw up their spray to
support your footsteps. As I drew nearer I fancied you akin to the
race of mermaids, and thought how pleasant it would be to dwell with
you among the quiet coves in the shadow of the cliffs, and to roam
along secluded beaches of the purest sand, and, when our Northern
shores grew bleak, to haunt the islands, green and lonely, far amid
summer seas. And yet it gladdened me, after all this nonsense, to find
you nothing but a pretty young girl sadly perplexed with the rude
behavior of the wind about your petticoats. Thus I did with Susan as
with most other things in my earlier days, dipping her image into my
mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues before I could see
her as she really was.

Now, Susan, for a sober picture of our village. It was a small
collection of dwellings that seemed to have been cast up by the sea
with the rock-weed and marine plants that it vomits after a storm, or
to have come ashore among the pipe-staves and other lumber which had
been washed from the deck of an Eastern schooner. There was just space
for the narrow and sandy street between the beach in front and a
precipitous hill that lifted its rocky forehead in the rear among a
waste of juniper-bushes and the wild growth of a broken pasture. The
village was picturesque in the variety of its edifices, though all
were rude. Here stood a little old hovel, built, perhaps, of
driftwood, there a row of boat-houses, and beyond them a two-story
dwelling of dark and weatherbeaten aspect, the whole intermixed with
one or two snug cottages painted white, a sufficiency of pig-styes and
a shoemaker's shop. Two grocery stores stood opposite each other in
the centre of the village. These were the places of resort at their
idle hours of a hardy throng of fishermen in red baize shirts,
oilcloth trousers and boots of brown leather covering the whole
leg--true seven-league boots, but fitter to wade the ocean than walk
the earth. The wearers seemed amphibious, as if they did but creep out
of salt water to sun themselves; nor would it have been wonderful to
see their lower limbs covered with clusters of little shellfish such
as cling to rocks and old ship-timber over which the tide ebbs and
flows. When their fleet of boats was weather-bound, the butchers
raised their price, and the spit was busier than the frying-pan; for
this was a place of fish, and known as such to all the country round
about. The very air was fishy, being perfumed with dead sculpins,
hard-heads and dogfish strewn plentifully on the beach.--You see,
children, the village is but little changed since your mother and I
were young.

How like a dream it was when I bent over a pool of water one pleasant
morning and saw that the ocean had dashed its spray over me and made
me a fisherman! There was the tarpaulin, the baize shirt, the oilcloth
trousers and seven-league boots, and there my own features, but so
reddened with sunburn and sea-breezes that methought I had another
face, and on other shoulders too. The seagulls and the loons and I had
now all one trade: we skimmed the crested waves and sought our prey
beneath them, the man with as keen enjoyment as the birds. Always when
the east grew purple I launched my dory, my little flat-bottomed
skiff, and rowed cross-handed to Point Ledge, the Middle Ledge, or
perhaps beyond Egg Rock; often, too, did I anchor off Dread Ledge--a
spot of peril to ships unpiloted--and sometimes spread an adventurous
sail and tracked across the bay to South Shore, casting my lines in
sight of Scituate. Ere nightfall I hauled my skiff high and dry on the
beach, laden with red rock-cod or the white-bellied ones of deep
water, haddock bearing the black marks of St. Peter's fingers near the
gills, the long-bearded hake whose liver holds oil enough for a
midnight lamp, and now and then a mighty halibut with a back broad as
my boat. In the autumn I toled and caught those lovely fish the
mackerel. When the wind was high, when the whale-boats anchored off
the Point nodded their slender masts at each other and the dories
pitched and tossed in the surf, when Nahant Beach was thundering three
miles off and the spray broke a hundred feet in the air round the
distant base of Egg Rock, when the brimful and boisterous sea
threatened to tumble over the street of our village,--then I made a
holiday on shore.

Many such a day did I sit snugly in Mr. Bartlett's store, attentive to
the yarns of Uncle Parker--uncle to the whole village by right of
seniority, but of Southern blood, with no kindred in New England. His
figure is before me now enthroned upon a mackerel-barrel--a lean old
man of great height, but bent with years and twisted into an uncouth
shape by seven broken limbs; furrowed, also, and weatherworn, as if
every gale for the better part of a century had caught him somewhere
on the sea. He looked like a harbinger of tempest--a shipmate of the
Flying Dutchman. After innumerable voyages aboard men-of-war and
merchantmen, fishing-schooners and chebacco-boats, the old salt had
become master of a hand-cart, which he daily trundled about the
vicinity, and sometimes blew his fish-horn through the streets of
Salem. One of Uncle Parker's eyes had been blown out with gunpowder,
and the other did but glimmer in its socket. Turning it upward as he
spoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French and
battles with his own shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be
seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike-nail
through his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes he
expatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden, a greasy and
goose-like fowl which the sailors catch with hook and line on the
Grand Banks. He dwelt with rapture on an interminable winter at the
Isle of Sables, where he had gladdened himself amid polar snows with
the rum and sugar saved from the wreck of a West India schooner. And
wrathfully did he shake his fist as he related how a party of Cape Cod
men had robbed him and his companions of their lawful spoils and
sailed away with every keg of old Jamaica, leaving him not a drop to
drown his sorrow. Villains they were, and of that wicked brotherhood
who are said to tie lanterns to horses' tails to mislead the mariner
along the dangerous shores of the Cape.

Even now I seem to see the group of fishermen with that old salt in
the midst. One fellow sits on the counter, a second bestrides an
oil-barrel, a third lolls at his length on a parcel of new cod-lines,
and another has planted the tarry seat of his trousers on a heap of
salt which will shortly be sprinkled over a lot of fish. They are a
likely set of men. Some have voyaged to the East Indies or the
Pacific, and most of them have sailed in Marblehead schooners to
Newfoundland; a few have been no farther than the Middle Banks, and
one or two have always fished along the shore; but, as Uncle Parker
used to say, they have all been christened in salt water and know more
than men ever learn in the bushes. A curious figure, by way of
contrast, is a fish-dealer from far up-country listening with eyes
wide open to narratives that might startle Sinbad the Sailor.--Be it
well with you, my brethren! Ye are all gone--some to your graves
ashore and others to the depths of ocean--but my faith is strong that
ye are happy; for whenever I behold your forms, whether in dream or
vision, each departed friend is puffing his long nine, and a mug of
the right blackstrap goes round from lip to lip.

But where was the mermaid in those delightful times? At a certain
window near the centre of the village appeared a pretty display of
gingerbread men and horses, picture-books and ballads, small
fish-hooks, pins, needles, sugarplums and brass thimbles--articles on
which the young fishermen used to expend their money from pure
gallantry. What a picture was Susan behind the counter! A slender
maiden, though the child of rugged parents, she had the slimmest of
all waists, brown hair curling on her neck, and a complexion rather
pale except when the sea-breeze flushed it. A few freckles became
beauty-spots beneath her eyelids.--How was it, Susan, that you talked
and acted so carelessly, yet always for the best, doing whatever was
right in your own eyes, and never once doing wrong in mine, nor
shocked a taste that had been morbidly sensitive till now? And whence
had you that happiest gift of brightening every topic with an unsought
gayety, quiet but irresistible, so that even gloomy spirits felt your
sunshine and did not shrink from it? Nature wrought the charm. She
made you a frank, simple, kind-hearted, sensible and mirthful girl.
Obeying Nature, you did free things without indelicacy, displayed a
maiden's thoughts to every eye, and proved yourself as innocent as
naked Eve.--It was beautiful to observe how her simple and happy
nature mingled itself with mine. She kindled a domestic fire within my
heart and took up her dwelling there, even in that chill and lonesome
cavern hung round with glittering icicles of fancy. She gave me warmth
of feeling, while the influence of my mind made her contemplative. I
taught her to love the moonlight hour, when the expanse of the
encircled bay was smooth as a great mirror and slept in a transparent
shadow, while beyond Nahant the wind rippled the dim ocean into a
dreamy brightness which grew faint afar off without becoming gloomier.
I held her hand and pointed to the long surf-wave as it rolled calmly
on the beach in an unbroken line of silver; we were silent together
till its deep and peaceful murmur had swept by us. When the Sabbath
sun shone down into the recesses of the cliffs, I led the mermaid
thither and told her that those huge gray, shattered rocks, and her
native sea that raged for ever like a storm against them, and her own
slender beauty in so stern a scene, were all combined into a strain of
poetry. But on the Sabbath-eve, when her mother had gone early to bed
and her gentle sister had smiled and left us, as we sat alone by the
quiet hearth with household things around, it was her turn to make me
feel that here was a deeper poetry, and that this was the dearest hour
of all. Thus went on our wooing, till I had shot wild-fowl enough to
feather our bridal-bed, and the daughter of the sea was mine.

I built a cottage for Susan and myself, and made a gateway in the form
of a Gothic arch by setting up a whale's jaw-bones. We bought a heifer
with her first calf, and had a little garden on the hillside to supply
us with potatoes and green sauce for our fish. Our parlor, small and
neat, was ornamented with our two profiles in one gilt frame, and with
shells and pretty pebbles on the mantelpiece, selected from the sea's
treasury of such things on Nahant Beach. On the desk, beneath the
looking-glass, lay the Bible, which I had begun to read aloud at the
book of Genesis, and the singing-book that Susan used for her evening
psalm. Except the almanac, we had no other literature. All that I
heard of books was when an Indian history or tale of shipwreck was
sold by a pedler or wandering subscription-man to some one in the
village, and read through its owner's nose to a slumbrous auditory.

Like my brother-fishermen, I grew into the belief that all human
erudition was collected in our pedagogue, whose green spectacles and
solemn phiz as he passed to his little schoolhouse amid a waste of
sand might have gained him a diploma from any college in New England.
In truth, I dreaded him.--When our children were old enough to claim
his care, you remember, Susan, how I frowned, though you were pleased
at this learned man's encomiums on their proficiency. I feared to
trust them even with the alphabet: it was the key to a fatal treasure.
But I loved to lead them by their little hands along the beach and
point to nature in the vast and the minute--the sky, the sea, the
green earth, the pebbles and the shells. Then did I discourse of the
mighty works and coextensive goodness of the Deity with the simple
wisdom of a man whose mind had profited by lonely days upon the deep
and his heart by the strong and pure affections of his evening home.
Sometimes my voice lost itself in a tremulous depth, for I felt his
eye upon me as I spoke. Once, while my wife and all of us were gazing
at ourselves in the mirror left by the tide in a hollow of the sand, I
pointed to the pictured heaven below and bade her observe how religion
was strewn everywhere in our path, since even a casual pool of water
recalled the idea of that home whither we were travelling to rest for
ever with our children. Suddenly your image, Susan, and all the little
faces made up of yours and mine, seemed to fade away and vanish around
me, leaving a pale visage like my own of former days within the frame
of a large looking-glass. Strange illusion!

My life glided on, the past appearing to mingle with the present and
absorb the future, till the whole lies before me at a glance. My
manhood has long been waning with a stanch decay; my earlier
contemporaries, after lives of unbroken health, are all at rest
without having known the weariness of later age; and now with a
wrinkled forehead and thin white hair as badges of my dignity I have
become the patriarch--the uncle--of the village. I love that name: it
widens the circle of my sympathies; it joins all the youthful to my
household in the kindred of affection.

Like Uncle Parker, whose rheumatic bones were dashed against Egg Rock
full forty years ago, I am a spinner of long yarns. Seated on the
gunnel of a dory or on the sunny side of a boat-house, where the
warmth is grateful to my limbs, or by my own hearth when a friend or
two are there, I overflow with talk, and yet am never tedious. With a
broken voice I give utterance to much wisdom. Such, Heaven be praised!
is the vigor of my faculties that many a forgotten usage, and
traditions ancient in my youth, and early adventures of myself or
others hitherto effaced by things more recent, acquire new
distinctness in my memory. I remember the happy days when the haddock
were more numerous on all the fishing-grounds than sculpins in the
surf--when the deep-water cod swam close in-shore, and the dogfish,
with his poisonous horn, had not learnt to take the hook. I can number
every equinoctial storm in which the sea has overwhelmed the street,
flooded the cellars of the village and hissed upon our kitchen hearth.
I give the history of the great whale that was landed on Whale Beach,
and whose jaws, being now my gateway, will last for ages after my
coffin shall have passed beneath them. Thence it is an easy digression
to the halibut--scarcely smaller than the whale--which ran out six
codlines and hauled my dory to the mouth of Boston harbor before I
could touch him with the gaff.

If melancholy accidents be the theme of conversation, I tell how a
friend of mine was taken out of his boat by an enormous shark, and the
sad, true tale of a young man on the eve of marriage who had been nine
days missing, when his drowned body floated into the very pathway on
Marble-head Neck that had often led him to the dwelling of his bride,
as if the dripping corpse would have come where the mourner was. With
such awful fidelity did that lover return to fulfil his vows! Another
favorite story is of a crazy maiden who conversed with angels and had
the gift of prophecy, and whom all the village loved and pitied,
though she went from door to door accusing us of sin, exhorting to
repentance and foretelling our destruction by flood or earthquake. If
the young men boast their knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks, I
speak of pilots who knew the wind by its scent and the wave by its
taste, and could have steered blindfold to any port between Boston and
Mount Desert guided only by the rote of the shore--the peculiar sound
of the surf on each island, beach and line of rocks along the coast.
Thus do I talk, and all my auditors grow wise while they deem it
pastime.

I recollect no happier portion of my life than this my calm old age.
It is like the sunny and sheltered slope of a valley where late in the
autumn the grass is greener than in August, and intermixed with golden
dandelions that had not been seen till now since the first warmth of
the year. But with me the verdure and the flowers are not frost-bitten
in the midst of winter. A playfulness has revisited my mind--a
sympathy with the young and gay, an unpainful interest in the business
of others, a light and wandering curiosity--arising, perhaps, from the
sense that my toil on earth is ended and the brief hour till bedtime
may be spent in play. Still, I have fancied that there is a depth of
feeling and reflection under this superficial levity peculiar to one
who has lived long and is soon to die.

Show me anything that would make an infant smile, and you shall behold
a gleam of mirth over the hoary ruin of my visage. I can spend a
pleasant hour in the sun watching the sports of the village children
on the edge of the surf. Now they chase the retreating wave far down
over the wet sand; now it steals softly up to kiss their naked feet;
now it comes onward with threatening front, and roars after the
laughing crew as they scamper beyond its reach. Why should not an old
man be merry too, when the great sea is at play with those little
children? I delight, also, to follow in the wake of a pleasure-party
of young men and girls strolling along the beach after an early supper
at the Point. Here, with handkerchiefs at nose, they bend over a heap
of eel-grass entangled in which is a dead skate so oddly accoutred
with two legs and a long tail that they mistake him for a drowned
animal. A few steps farther the ladies scream, and the gentlemen make
ready to protect them against a young shark of the dogfish kind
rolling with a lifelike motion in the tide that has thrown him up.
Next they are smit with wonder at the black shells of a wagon-load of
live lobsters packed in rock-weed for the country-market. And when
they reach the fleet of dories just hauled ashore after the day's
fishing, how do I laugh in my sleeve, and sometimes roar outright, at
the simplicity of these young folks and the sly humor of the
fishermen! In winter, when our village is thrown into a bustle by the
arrival of perhaps a score of country dealers bargaining for frozen
fish to be transported hundreds of miles and eaten fresh in Vermont or
Canada, I am a pleased but idle spectator in the throng. For I launch
my boat no more.

When the shore was solitary, I have found a pleasure that seemed even
to exalt my mind in observing the sports or contentions of two gulls
as they wheeled and hovered about each other with hoarse screams, one
moment flapping on the foam of the wave, and then soaring aloft till
their white bosoms melted into the upper sunshine. In the calm of the
summer sunset I drag my aged limbs with a little ostentation of
activity, because I am so old, up to the rocky brow of the hill. There
I see the white sails of many a vessel outward bound or homeward from
afar, and the black trail of a vapor behind the Eastern steamboat;
there, too, is the sun, going down, but not in gloom, and there the
illimitable ocean mingling with the sky, to remind me of eternity.

But sweetest of all is the hour of cheerful musing and pleasant talk
that comes between the dusk and the lighted candle by my glowing
fireside. And never, even on the first Thanksgiving-night, when Susan
and I sat alone with our hopes, nor the second, when a stranger had
been sent to gladden us and be the visible image of our affection, did
I feel such joy as now. All that belongs to me are here: Death has
taken none, nor Disease kept them away, nor Strife divided them from
their parents or each other; with neither poverty nor riches to
disturb them, nor the misery of desires beyond their lot, they have
kept New England's festival round the patriarch's board. For I am a
patriarch. Here I sit among my descendants, in my old arm-chair and
immemorial corner, while the firelight throws an appropriate glory
round my venerable frame.--Susan! My children! Something whispers me
that this happiest hour must be the final one, and that nothing
remains but to bless you all and depart with a treasure of recollected
joys to heaven. Will you meet me there? Alas! your figures grow
indistinct, fading into pictures on the air, and now to fainter
outlines, while the fire is glimmering on the walls of a familiar
room, and shows the book that I flung down and the sheet that I left
half written some fifty years ago. I lift my eyes to the
looking-glass, and perceive myself alone, unless those be the
mermaid's features retiring into the depths of the mirror with a
tender and melancholy smile.

Ah! One feels a chilliness--not bodily, but about the heart--and,
moreover, a foolish dread of looking behind him, after these pastimes.
I can imagine precisely how a magician would sit down in gloom and
terror after dismissing the shadows that had personated dead or
distant people and stripping his cavern of the unreal splendor which
had changed it to a palace.

And now for a moral to my reverie. Shall it be that, since fancy can
create so bright a dream of happiness, it were better to dream on from
youth to age than to awake and strive doubtfully for something real?
Oh, the slight tissue of a dream can no more preserve us from the
stern reality of misfortune than a robe of cobweb could repel the
wintry blast. Be this the moral, then: In chaste and warm affections,
humble wishes and honest toil for some useful end there is health for
the mind and quiet for the heart, the prospect of a happy life and the
fairest hope of heaven.




THE AMBITIOUS GUEST.


One September night a family had gathered round their hearth and piled
it high with the driftwood of mountain-streams, the dry cones of the
pine, and the splintered ruins of great trees that had come crashing
down the precipice. Up the chimney roared the fire, and brightened the
room with its broad blaze. The faces of the father and mother had a
sober gladness; the children laughed. The eldest daughter was the
image of Happiness at seventeen, and the aged grandmother, who sat
knitting in the warmest place, was the image of Happiness grown old.
They had found the "herb heart's-ease" in the bleakest spot of all New
England. This family were situated in the Notch of the White Hills,
where the wind was sharp throughout the year and pitilessly cold in
the winter, giving their cottage all its fresh inclemency before it
descended on the valley of the Saco. They dwelt in a cold spot and a
dangerous one, for a mountain towered above their heads so steep that
the stones would often rumble down its sides and startle them at
midnight.

The daughter had just uttered some simple jest that filled them all
with mirth, when the wind came through the Notch and seemed to pause
before their cottage, rattling the door with a sound of wailing and
lamentation before it passed into the valley. For a moment it saddened
them, though there was nothing unusual in the tones. But the family
were glad again when they perceived that the latch was lifted by some
traveller whose footsteps had been unheard amid the dreary blast which
heralded his approach and wailed as he was entering and went moaning
away from the door.

Though they dwelt in such a solitude, these people held daily converse
with the world. The romantic pass of the Notch is a great artery
through which the life-blood of internal commerce is continually
throbbing between Maine on one side and the Green Mountains and the
shores of the St. Lawrence on the other. The stage-coach always drew
up before the door of the cottage. The wayfarer with no companion but
his staff paused here to exchange a word, that the sense of loneliness
might not utterly overcome him ere he could pass through the cleft of
the mountain or reach the first house in the valley. And here the
teamster on his way to Portland market would put up for the night,
and, if a bachelor, might sit an hour beyond the usual bedtime and
steal a kiss from the mountain-maid at parting. It was one of those
primitive taverns where the traveller pays only for food and lodging,
but meets with a homely kindness beyond all price. When the footsteps
were heard, therefore, between the outer door and the inner one, the
whole family rose up, grandmother, children and all, as if about to
welcome some one who belonged to them, and whose fate was linked with
theirs.

The door was opened by a young man. His face at first wore the
melancholy expression, almost despondency, of one who travels a wild
and bleak road at nightfall and alone, but soon brightened up when he
saw the kindly warmth of his reception. He felt his heart spring
forward to meet them all, from the old woman who wiped a chair with
her apron to the little child that held out its arms to him. One
glance and smile placed the stranger on a footing of innocent
familiarity with the eldest daughter.

"Ah! this fire is the right thing," cried he, "especially when there
is such a pleasant circle round it. I am quite benumbed, for the Notch
is just like the pipe of a great pair of bellows; it has blown a
terrible blast in my face all the way from Bartlett."

"Then you are going toward Vermont?" said the master of the house as
he helped to take a light knapsack off the young man's shoulders.

"Yes, to Burlington, and far enough beyond," replied he. "I meant to
have been at Ethan Crawford's to-night, but a pedestrian lingers along
such a road as this. It is no matter; for when I saw this good fire
and all your cheerful faces, I felt as if you had kindled it on
purpose for me and were waiting my arrival. So I shall sit down among
you and make myself at home."

The frank-hearted stranger had just drawn his chair to the fire when
something like a heavy footstep was heard without, rushing down the
steep side of the mountain as with long and rapid strides, and taking
such a leap in passing the cottage as to strike the opposite
precipice. The family held their breath, because they knew the sound,
and their guest held his by instinct.

"The old mountain has thrown a stone at us for fear we should forget
him," said the landlord, recovering himself. "He sometimes nods his
head and threatens to come down, but we are old neighbors, and agree
together pretty well, upon the whole. Besides, we have a sure place of
refuge hard by if he should be coming in good earnest."

Let us now suppose the stranger to have finished his supper of bear's
meat, and by his natural felicity of manner to have placed himself on
a footing of kindness with the whole family; so that they talked as
freely together as if he belonged to their mountain-brood. He was of a
proud yet gentle spirit, haughty and reserved among the rich and
great, but ever ready to stoop his head to the lowly cottage door and
be like a brother or a son at the poor man's fireside. In the
household of the Notch he found warmth and simplicity of feeling, the
pervading intelligence of New England, and a poetry of native growth
which they had gathered when they little thought of it from the
mountain-peaks and chasms, and at the very threshold of their romantic
and dangerous abode. He had travelled far and alone; his whole life,
indeed, had been a solitary path, for, with the lofty caution of his
nature, he had kept himself apart from those who might otherwise have
been his companions. The family, too, though so kind and hospitable,
had that consciousness of unity among themselves and separation from
the world at large which in every domestic circle should still keep a
holy place where no stranger may intrude. But this evening a prophetic
sympathy impelled the refined and educated youth to pour out his heart
before the simple mountaineers, and constrained them to answer him
with the same free confidence. And thus it should have been. Is not
the kindred of a common fate a closer tie than that of birth?

The secret of the young man's character was a high and abstracted
ambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not
to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had been transformed to
hope, and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty that,
obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway,
though not, perhaps, while he was treading it. But when posterity
should gaze back into the gloom of what was now the present, they
would trace the brightness of his footsteps, brightening as meaner
glories faded, and confess that a gifted one had passed from his
cradle to his tomb with none to recognize him.

"As yet," cried the stranger, his cheek glowing and his eye flashing
with enthusiasm--"as yet I have done nothing. Were I to vanish from
the earth to-morrow, none would know so much of me as you--that a
nameless youth came up at nightfall from the valley of the Saco, and
opened his heart to you in the evening, and passed through the Notch
by sunrise, and was seen no more. Not a soul would ask, 'Who was he?
Whither did the wanderer go?' But I cannot die till I have achieved my
destiny. Then let Death come: I shall have built my monument."

There was a continual flow of natural emotion gushing forth amid
abstracted reverie which enabled the family to understand this young
man's sentiments, though so foreign from their own. With quick
sensibility of the ludicrous, he blushed at the ardor into which he
had been betrayed.

"You laugh at me," said he, taking the eldest daughter's hand and
laughing himself. "You think my ambition as nonsensical as if I were
to freeze myself to death on the top of Mount Washington only that
people might spy at me from the country roundabout. And truly that
would be a noble pedestal for a man's statue."

"It is better to sit here by this fire," answered the girl, blushing,
"and be comfortable and contented, though nobody thinks about us."

"I suppose," said her father, after a fit of musing, "there is
something natural in what the young man says; and if my mind had been
turned that way, I might have felt just the same.--It is strange,
wife, how his talk has set my head running on things that are pretty
certain never to come to pass."

"Perhaps they may," observed the wife. "Is the man thinking what he
will do when he is a widower?"

"No, no!" cried he, repelling the idea with reproachful kindness.
"When I think of your death, Esther, I think of mine too. But I was
wishing we had a good farm in Bartlett or Bethlehem or Littleton, or
some other township round the White Mountains, but not where they
could tumble on our heads. I should want to stand well with my
neighbors and be called squire and sent to General Court for a term or
two; for a plain, honest man may do as much good there as a lawyer.
And when I should be grown quite an old man, and you an old woman, so
as not to be long apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, and leave
you all crying around me. A slate gravestone would suit me as well as
a marble one, with just my name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and
something to let people know that I lived an honest man and died a
Christian."

"There, now!" exclaimed the stranger; "it is our nature to desire a
monument, be it slate or marble, or a pillar of granite, or a glorious
memory in the universal heart of man."

"We're in a strange way to-night," said the wife, with tears in her
eyes. "They say it's a sign of something when folks' minds go
a-wandering so. Hark to the children!"

They listened accordingly. The younger children had been put to bed in
another room, but with an open door between; so that they could be
heard talking busily among themselves. One and all seemed to have
caught the infection from the fireside circle, and were outvying each
other in wild wishes and childish projects of what they would do when
they came to be men and women. At length a little boy, instead of
addressing his brothers and sisters, called out to his mother.

"I'll tell you what I wish, mother," cried he: "I want you and father
and grandma'm, and all of us, and the stranger too, to start right
away and go and take a drink out of the basin of the Flume."

Nobody could help laughing at the child's notion of leaving a warm bed
and dragging them from a cheerful fire to visit the basin of the
Flume--a brook which tumbles over the precipice deep within the Notch.

The boy had hardly spoken, when a wagon rattled along the road and
stopped a moment before the door. It appeared to contain two or three
men who were cheering their hearts with the rough chorus of a song
which resounded in broken notes between the cliffs, while the singers
hesitated whether to continue their journey or put up here for the
night.

"Father," said the girl, "they are calling you by name."

But the good man doubted whether they had really called him, and was
unwilling to show himself too solicitous of gain by inviting people to
patronize his house. He therefore did not hurry to the door, and, the
lash being soon applied, the travellers plunged into the Notch, still
singing and laughing, though their music and mirth came back drearily
from the heart of the mountain.

"There, mother!" cried the boy, again; "they'd have given us a ride to
the Flume."

Again they laughed at the child's pertinacious fancy for a
night-ramble. But it happened that a light cloud passed over the
daughter's spirit; she looked gravely into the fire and drew a breath
that was almost a sigh. It forced its way, in spite of a little
struggle to repress it. Then, starting and blushing, she looked
quickly around the circle, as if they had caught a glimpse into her
bosom. The stranger asked what she had been thinking of.

"Nothing," answered she, with a downcast smile; "only I felt lonesome
just then."

"Oh, I have always had a gift of feeling what is in other people's
hearts," said he, half seriously. "Shall I tell the secrets of yours?
For I know what to think when a young girl shivers by a warm hearth
and complains of lonesomeness at her mother's side. Shall I put these
feelings into words?"

"They would not be a girl's feelings any longer if they could be put
into words," replied the mountain-nymph, laughing, but avoiding his
eye.

All this was said apart. Perhaps a germ of love was springing in their
hearts so pure that it might blossom in Paradise, since it could not
be matured on earth; for women worship such gentle dignity as his, and
the proud, contemplative, yet kindly, soul is oftenest captivated by
simplicity like hers. But while they spoke softly, and he was watching
the happy sadness, the lightsome shadows, the shy yearnings, of a
maiden's nature, the wind through the Notch took a deeper and drearier
sound. It seemed, as the fanciful stranger said, like the choral
strain of the spirits of the blast who in old Indian times had their
dwelling among these mountains and made their heights and recesses a
sacred region. There was a wail along the road as if a funeral were
passing. To chase away the gloom, the family threw pine-branches on
their fire till the dry leaves crackled and the flame arose,
discovering once again a scene of peace and humble happiness. The
light hovered about them fondly and caressed them all. There were the
little faces of the children peeping from their bed apart, and here
the father's frame of strength, the mother's subdued and careful mien,
the high-browed youth, the budding girl and the good old grandam,
still knitting in the warmest place.

The aged woman looked up from her task, and with fingers ever busy was
the next to speak.

"Old folks have their notions," said she, "as well as young ones.
You've been wishing and planning and letting your heads run on one
thing and another till you've set my mind a-wandering too. Now, what
should an old woman wish for, when she can go but a step or two before
she comes to her grave? Children, it will haunt me night and day till
I tell you."

"What is it, mother?" cried the husband and wife at once.

Then the old woman, with an air of mystery which drew the circle
closer round the fire, informed them that she had provided her
grave-clothes some years before--a nice linen shroud, a cap with a
muslin ruff, and everything of a finer sort than she had worn since
her wedding-day. But this evening an old superstition had strangely
recurred to her. It used to be said in her younger days that if
anything were amiss with a corpse--if only the ruff were not smooth or
the cap did not set right--the corpse, in the coffin and beneath the
clods, would strive to put up its cold hands and arrange it. The bare
thought made her nervous.

"Don't talk so, grandmother," said the girl, shuddering.

"Now," continued the old woman, with singular earnestness, yet smiling
strangely at her own folly, "I want one of you, my children, when your
mother is dressed and in the coffin,--I want one of you to hold a
looking-glass over my face. Who knows but I may take a glimpse at
myself and see whether all's right?"

"Old and young, we dream of graves and monuments," murmured the
stranger-youth. "I wonder how mariners feel when the ship is sinking
and they, unknown and undistinguished, are to be buried together in
the ocean, that wide and nameless sepulchre?"

For a moment the old woman's ghastly conception so engrossed the minds
of her hearers that a sound abroad in the night, rising like the roar
of a blast, had grown broad, deep and terrible before the fated group
were conscious of it. The house and all within it trembled; the
foundations of the earth seemed to be shaken, as if this awful sound
were the peal of the last trump. Young and old exchanged one wild
glance and remained an instant pale, affrighted, without utterance or
power to move. Then the same shriek burst simultaneously from all
their lips:

"The slide! The slide!"

The simplest words must intimate, but not portray, the unutterable
horror of the catastrophe. The victims rushed from their cottage and
sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot, where, in
contemplation of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared.
Alas! they had quitted their security and fled right into the pathway
of destruction. Down came the whole side of the mountain in a cataract
of ruin. Just before it reached the house the stream broke into two
branches, shivered not a window there, but overwhelmed the whole
vicinity, blocked up the road and annihilated everything in its
dreadful course. Long ere the thunder of that great slide had ceased
to roar among the mountains the mortal agony had been endured and the
victims were at peace. Their bodies were never found.

The next morning the light smoke was seen stealing from the cottage
chimney up the mountain-side. Within, the fire was yet smouldering on
the hearth, and the chairs in a circle round it, as if the inhabitants
had but gone forth to view the devastation of the slide and would
shortly return to thank Heaven for their miraculous escape. All had
left separate tokens by which those who had known the family were made
to shed a tear for each. Who has not heard their name? The story has
been told far and wide, and will for ever be a legend of these
mountains. Poets have sung their fate.

There were circumstances which led some to suppose that a stranger had
been received into the cottage on this awful night, and had shared the
catastrophe of all its inmates; others denied that there were
sufficient grounds for such a conjecture. Woe for the high-souled
youth with his dream of earthly immortality! His name and person
utterly unknown, his history, his way of life, his plans, a mystery
never to be solved, his death and his existence equally a
doubt,--whose was the agony of that death-moment?




THE SISTER-YEARS.


Last night, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the Old Year was
leaving her final footprints on the borders of Time's empire, she
found herself in possession of a few spare moments, and sat down--of
all places in the world--on the steps of our new city-hall. The wintry
moonlight showed that she looked weary of body and sad of heart, like
many another wayfarer of earth. Her garments, having been exposed to
much foul weather and rough usage, were in very ill condition, and, as
the hurry of her journey had never before allowed her to take an
instant's rest, her shoes were so worn as to be scarcely worth the
mending. But after trudging only a little distance farther this poor
Old Year was destined to enjoy a long, long sleep. I forgot to mention
that when she seated herself on the steps she deposited by her side a
very capacious bandbox in which, as is the custom among travellers of
her sex, she carried a great deal of valuable property. Besides this
luggage, there was a folio book under her arm very much resembling the
annual volume of a newspaper. Placing this volume across her knees and
resting her elbows upon it, with her forehead in her hands, the weary,
bedraggled, world-worn Old Year heaved a heavy sigh and appeared to be
taking no very pleasant retrospect of her past existence.

While she thus awaited the midnight knell that was to summon her to
the innumerable sisterhood of departed years, there came a young
maiden treading lightsomely on tip-toe along the street from the
direction of the railroad depot. She was evidently a stranger, and
perhaps had come to town by the evening train of cars. There was a
smiling cheerfulness in this fair maiden's face which bespoke her
fully confident of a kind reception from the multitude of people with
whom she was soon to form acquaintance. Her dress was rather too airy
for the season, and was bedizened with fluttering ribbons and other
vanities which were likely soon to be rent away by the fierce storms
or to fade in the hot sunshine amid which she was to pursue her
changeful course. But still she was a wonderfully pleasant-looking
figure, and had so much promise and such an indescribable hopefulness
in her aspect that hardly anybody could meet her without anticipating
some very desirable thing--the consummation of some long-sought
good--from her kind offices. A few dismal characters there may be here
and there about the world who have so often been trifled with by young
maidens as promising as she that they have now ceased to pin any faith
upon the skirts of the New Year. But, for my own part, I have great
faith in her, and, should I live to see fifty more such, still from
each of those successive sisters I shall reckon upon receiving
something that will be worth living for.

The New Year--for this young maiden was no less a personage--carried
all her goods and chattels in a basket of no great size or weight,
which hung upon her arm. She greeted the disconsolate Old Year with
great affection, and sat down beside her on the steps of the
city-hall, waiting for the signal to begin her rambles through the
world. The two were own sisters, being both granddaughters of Time,
and, though one looked so much older than the other, it was rather
owing to hardships and trouble than to age, since there was but a
twelvemonth's difference between them.

"Well, my dear sister," said the New Year, after the first
salutations, "you look almost tired to death. What have you been about
during your sojourn in this part of infinite space?"

"Oh, I have it all recorded here in my book of chronicles," answered
the Old Year, in a heavy tone. "There is nothing that would amuse you,
and you will soon get sufficient knowledge of such matters from your
own personal experience. It is but tiresome reading."

Nevertheless, she turned over the leaves of the folio and glanced at
them by the light of the moon, feeling an irresistible spell of
interest in her own biography, although its incidents were remembered
without pleasure. The volume, though she termed it her book of
chronicles, seemed to be neither more nor less than the Salem
_Gazette_ for 1838; in the accuracy of which journal this sagacious
Old Year had so much confidence that she deemed it needless to record
her history with her own pen.

"What have you been doing in the political way?" asked the New Year.

"Why, my course here in the United States," said the Old Year--"though
perhaps I ought to blush at the confession--my political course, I
must acknowledge, has been rather vacillatory, sometimes inclining
toward the Whigs, then causing the administration party to shout for
triumph, and now again uplifting what seemed the almost prostrate
banner of the opposition; so that historians will hardly know what to
make of me in this respect. But the Loco-Focos--"

"I do not like these party nicknames," interrupted her sister, who
seemed remarkably touchy about some points. "Perhaps we shall part in
better humor if we avoid any political discussion."

"With all my heart," replied the Old Year, who had already been
tormented half to death with squabbles of this kind. "I care not if
the name of Whig or Tory, with their interminable brawls about banks
and the sub-treasury, abolition, Texas, the Florida war, and a million
of other topics which you will learn soon enough for your own
comfort,--I care not, I say, if no whisper of these matters ever
reaches my ears again. Yet they have occupied so large a share of my
attention that I scarcely know what else to tell you. There has,
indeed been a curious sort of war on the Canada border, where blood
has streamed in the names of liberty and patriotism; but it must
remain for some future, perhaps far-distant, year to tell whether or
no those holy names have been rightfully invoked. Nothing so much
depresses me in my view of mortal affairs as to see high energies
wasted and human life and happiness thrown away for ends that appear
oftentimes unwise, and still oftener remain unaccomplished. But the
wisest people and the best keep a steadfast faith that the progress of
mankind is onward and upward, and that the toil and anguish of the
path serve to wear away the imperfections of the immortal pilgrim, and
will be felt no more when they have done their office."

"Perhaps," cried the hopeful New Year--"perhaps I shall see that happy
day."

"I doubt whether it be so close at hand," answered the Old Year,
gravely smiling. "You will soon grow weary of looking for that blessed
consummation, and will turn for amusement--as has frequently been my
own practice--to the affairs of some sober little city like this of
Salem. Here we sit on the steps of the new city-hall which has been
completed under my administration, and it would make you laugh to see
how the game of politics of which the Capitol at Washington is the
great chess-board is here played in miniature. Burning Ambition finds
its fuel here; here patriotism speaks boldly in the people's behalf
and virtuous economy demands retrenchment in the emoluments of a
lamplighter; here the aldermen range their senatorial dignity around
the mayor's chair of state and the common council feel that they have
liberty in charge. In short, human weakness and strength, passion and
policy, man's tendencies, his aims and modes of pursuing them, his
individual character and his character in the mass, may be studied
almost as well here as on the theatre of nations, and with this great
advantage--that, be the lesson ever so disastrous, its Liliputian
scope still makes the beholder smile."

"Have you done much for the improvement of the city?" asked the New
Year. "Judging from what little I have seen, it appears to be ancient
and time-worn."

"I have opened the railroad," said the elder Year, "and half a dozen
times a day you will hear the bell which once summoned the monks of a
Spanish convent to their devotions announcing the arrival or departure
of the cars. Old Salem now wears a much livelier expression than when
I first beheld her. Strangers rumble down from Boston by hundreds at a
time. New faces throng in Essex street. Railroad-hacks and omnibuses
rattle over the pavements. There is a perceptible increase of
oyster-shops and other establishments for the accommodation of a
transitory diurnal multitude. But a more important change awaits the
venerable town. An immense accumulation of musty prejudices will be
carried off by the free circulation of society. A peculiarity of
character of which the inhabitants themselves are hardly sensible will
be rubbed down and worn away by the attrition of foreign substances.
Much of the result will be good; there will likewise be a few things
not so good. Whether for better or worse, there will be a probable
diminution of the moral influence of wealth, and the sway of an
aristocratic class which from an era far beyond my memory has held
firmer dominion here than in any other New England town."

The Old Year, having talked away nearly all of her little remaining
breath, now closed her book of chronicles, and was about to take her
departure, but her sister detained her a while longer by inquiring the
contents of the huge bandbox which she was so painfully lugging along
with her.

"These are merely a few trifles," replied the Old Year, "which I have
picked up in my rambles and am going to deposit in the receptacle of
things past and forgotten. We sisterhood of years never carry anything
really valuable out of the world with us. Here are patterns of most of
the fashions which I brought into vogue, and which have already lived
out their allotted term; you will supply their place with others
equally ephemeral. Here, put up in little china pots, like rouge, is a
considerable lot of beautiful women's bloom which the disconsolate
fair ones owe me a bitter grudge for stealing. I have likewise a
quantity of men's dark hair, instead of which I have left gray locks
or none at all. The tears of widows and other afflicted mortals who
have received comfort during the last twelve months are preserved in
some dozens of essence-bottles well corked and sealed. I have several
bundles of love-letters eloquently breathing an eternity of burning
passion which grew cold and perished almost before the ink was dry.
Moreover, here is an assortment of many thousand broken promises and
other broken ware, all very light and packed into little space. The
heaviest articles in my possession are a large parcel of disappointed
hopes which a little while ago were buoyant enough to have inflated
Mr. Lauriat's balloon."

"I have a fine lot of hopes here in my basket," remarked the New Year.
"They are a sweet-smelling flower--a species of rose."

"They soon lose their perfume," replied the sombre Old Year. "What
else have you brought to insure a welcome from the discontented race
of mortals?"

"Why, to say the truth, little or nothing else," said her sister, with
a smile, "save a few new _Annuals_ and almanacs, and some New Year's
gifts for the children. But I heartily wish well to poor mortals, and
mean to do all I can for their improvement and happiness."

"It is a good resolution," rejoined the Old Year. "And, by the way, I
have a plentiful assortment of good resolutions which have now grown
so stale and musty that I am ashamed to carry them any farther. Only
for fear that the city authorities would send Constable Mansfield with
a warrant after me, I should toss them into the street at once. Many
other matters go to make up the contents of my bandbox, but the whole
lot would not fetch a single bid even at an auction of worn-out
furniture; and as they are worth nothing either to you or anybody
else, I need not trouble you with a longer catalogue."

"And must I also pick up such worthless luggage in my travels?" asked
the New Year.

"Most certainly, and well if you have no heavier load to bear,"
replied the other. "And now, my dear sister, I must bid you farewell,
earnestly advising and exhorting you to expect no gratitude nor
good-will from this peevish, unreasonable, inconsiderate,
ill-intending and worse-behaving world. However warmly its inhabitants
may seem to welcome you, yet, do what you may and lavish on them what
means of happiness you please, they will still be complaining, still
craving what it is not in your power to give, still looking forward to
some other year for the accomplishment of projects which ought never
to have been formed, and which, if successful, would only provide new
occasions of discontent. If these ridiculous people ever see anything
tolerable in you, it will be after you are gone for ever."

"But I," cried the fresh-hearted New Year--"I shall try to leave men
wiser than I find them. I will offer them freely whatever good gifts
Providence permits me to distribute, and will tell them to be thankful
for what they have and humbly hopeful for more; and surely, if they
are not absolute fools, they will condescend to be happy, and will
allow me to be a happy year. For my happiness must depend on them."

"Alas for you, then, my poor sister!" said the Old Year, sighing, as
she uplifted her burden. "We grandchildren of Time are born to
trouble. Happiness, they say, dwells in the mansions of eternity, but
we can only lead mortals thither step by step with reluctant
murmurings, and ourselves must perish on the threshold. But hark! my
task is done."

The clock in the tall steeple of Dr. Emerson's church struck twelve;
there was a response from Dr. Flint's, in the opposite quarter of the
city; and while the strokes were yet dropping into the air the Old
Year either flitted or faded away, and not the wisdom and might of
angels, to say nothing of the remorseful yearnings of the millions who
had used her ill, could have prevailed with that departed year to
return one step. But she, in the company of Time and all her kindred,
must hereafter hold a reckoning with mankind. So shall it be,
likewise, with the maidenly New Year, who, as the clock ceased to
strike, arose from the steps of the city-hall and set out rather
timorously on her earthly course.

"A happy New Year!" cried a watchman, eying her figure very
questionably, but without the least suspicion that he was addressing
the New Year in person.

"Thank you kindly," said the New Year; and she gave the watchman one
of the roses of hope from her basket. "May this flower keep a sweet
smell long after I have bidden you good-bye!"

Then she stepped on more briskly through the silent streets, and such
as were awake at the moment heard her footfall and said, "The New Year
is come!" Wherever there was a knot of midnight roisterers, they
quaffed her health. She sighed, however, to perceive that the air was
tainted--as the atmosphere of this world must continually be--with the
dying breaths of mortals who had lingered just long enough for her to
bury them. But there were millions left alive to rejoice at her
coming, and so she pursued her way with confidence, strewing
emblematic flowers on the doorstep of almost every dwelling, which
some persons will gather up and wear in their bosoms, and others will
trample under foot. The carrier-boy can only say further that early
this morning she filled his basket with New Year's addresses, assuring
him that the whole city, with our new mayor and the aldermen and
common council at its head, would make a general rush to secure
copies. Kind patrons, will not you redeem the pledge of the New Year?




SNOWFLAKES.


There is snow in yonder cold gray sky of the morning, and through the
partially-frosted window-panes I love to watch the gradual beginning
of the storm. A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the
air and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on
the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the
atmosphere. These are not the big flakes heavy with moisture which
melt as they touch the ground and are portentous of a soaking rain. It
is to be in good earnest a wintry storm. The two or three people
visible on the sidewalks have an aspect of endurance, a blue-nosed,
frosty fortitude, which is evidently assumed in anticipation of a
comfortless and blustering day. By nightfall--or, at least, before the
sun sheds another glimmering smile upon us--the street and our little
garden will be heaped with mountain snowdrifts. The soil, already
frozen for weeks past, is prepared to sustain whatever burden may be
laid upon it, and to a Northern eye the landscape will lose its
melancholy bleakness and acquire a beauty of its own when Mother
Earth, like her children, shall have put on the fleecy garb of her
winter's wear. The cloud-spirits are slowly weaving her white mantle.
As yet, indeed, there is barely a rime like hoar-frost over the brown
surface of the street; the withered green of the grass-plat is still
discernible, and the slated roofs of the houses do but begin to look
gray instead of black. All the snow that has yet fallen within the
circumference of my view, were it heaped up together, would hardly
equal the hillock of a grave. Thus gradually by silent and stealthy
influences are great changes wrought. These little snow-particles
which the storm-spirit flings by handfuls through the air will bury
the great Earth under their accumulated mass, nor permit her to behold
her sister Sky again for dreary months. We likewise shall lose sight
of our mother's familiar visage, and must content ourselves with
looking heavenward the oftener.

Now, leaving the Storm to do his appointed office, let us sit down,
pen in hand, by our fireside. Gloomy as it may seem, there is an
influence productive of cheerfulness and favorable to imaginative
thought in the atmosphere of a snowy day. The native of a Southern
clime may woo the Muse beneath the heavy shade of summer foliage
reclining on banks of turf, while the sound of singing-birds and
warbling rivulets chimes in with the music of his soul. In our brief
summer I do not think, but only exist in the vague enjoyment of a
dream. My hour of inspiration--if that hour ever comes--is when the
green log hisses upon the hearth, and the bright flame, brighter for
the gloom of the chamber, rustles high up the chimney, and the coals
drop tinkling down among the growing heaps of ashes. When the casement
rattles in the gust and the snowflakes or the sleety raindrops pelt
hard against the window-panes, then I spread out my sheet of paper
with the certainty that thoughts and fancies will gleam forth upon it
like stars at twilight or like violets in May, perhaps to fade as
soon. However transitory their glow, they at least shine amid the
darksome shadow which the clouds of the outward sky fling through the
room. Blessed, therefore, and reverently welcomed by me, her true-born
son, be New England's winter, which makes us one and all the nurslings
of the storm and sings a familiar lullaby even in the wildest shriek
of the December blast. Now look we forth again and see how much of his
task the storm-spirit has done.

Slow and sure! He has the day--perchance the week--before him, and may
take his own time to accomplish Nature's burial in snow. A smooth
mantle is scarcely yet thrown over the withered grass-plat, and the
dry stalks of annuals still thrust themselves through the white
surface in all parts of the garden. The leafless rose-bushes stand
shivering in a shallow snowdrift, looking, poor things! as
disconsolate as if they possessed a human consciousness of the dreary
scene. This is a sad time for the shrubs that do not perish with the
summer. They neither live nor die; what they retain of life seems but
the chilling sense of death. Very sad are the flower-shrubs in
midwinter. The roofs of the houses are now all white, save where the
eddying wind has kept them bare at the bleak corners. To discern the
real intensity of the storm, we must fix upon some distant object--as
yonder spire--and observe how the riotous gust fights with the
descending snow throughout the intervening space. Sometimes the entire
prospect is obscured; then, again, we have a distinct but transient
glimpse of the tall steeple, like a giant's ghost; and now the dense
wreaths sweep between, as if demons were flinging snowdrifts at each
other in mid-air. Look next into the street, where we have an amusing
parallel to the combat of those fancied demons in the upper regions.
It is a snow-battle of schoolboys. What a pretty satire on war and
military glory might be written in the form of a child's story by
describing the snow-ball fights of two rival schools, the alternate
defeats and victories of each, and the final triumph of one party, or
perhaps of neither! What pitched battles worthy to be chanted in
Homeric strains! What storming of fortresses built all of massive
snow-blocks! What feats of individual prowess and embodied onsets of
martial enthusiasm! And when some well-contested and decisive victory
had put a period to the war, both armies should unite to build a lofty
monument of snow upon the battlefield and crown it with the victor's
statue hewn of the same frozen marble. In a few days or weeks
thereafter the passer-by would observe a shapeless mound upon the
level common, and, unmindful of the famous victory, would ask, "How
came it there? Who reared it? And what means it?" The shattered
pedestal of many a battle-monument has provoked these questions when
none could answer.

Turn we again to the fireside and sit musing there, lending our ears
to the wind till perhaps it shall seem like an articulate voice and
dictate wild and airy matter for the pen. Would it might inspire me to
sketch out the personification of a New England winter! And that idea,
if I can seize the snow-wreathed figures that flit before my fancy,
shall be the theme of the next page.

How does Winter herald his approach? By the shrieking blast of latter
autumn which is Nature's cry of lamentation as the destroyer rushes
among the shivering groves where she has lingered and scatters the
sear leaves upon the tempest. When that cry is heard, the people wrap
themselves in cloaks and shake their heads disconsolately, saying,
"Winter is at hand." Then the axe of the woodcutter echoes sharp and
diligently in the forest; then the coal-merchants rejoice because each
shriek of Nature in her agony adds something to the price of coal per
ton; then the peat-smoke spreads its aromatic fragrance through the
atmosphere. A few days more, and at eventide the children look out of
the window and dimly perceive the flaunting of a snowy mantle in the
air. It is stern Winter's vesture. They crowd around the hearth and
cling to their mother's gown or press between their father's knees,
affrighted by the hollow roaring voice that bellows adown the wide
flue of the chimney.

It is the voice of Winter; and when parents and children hear it, they
shudder and exclaim, "Winter is come. Cold Winter has begun his reign
already." Now throughout New England each hearth becomes an altar
sending up the smoke of a continued sacrifice to the immitigable deity
who tyrannizes over forest, country-side and town. Wrapped in his
white mantle, his staff a huge icicle, his beard and hair a
wind-tossed snowdrift, he travels over the land in the midst of the
northern blast, and woe to the homeless wanderer whom he finds upon
his path! There he lies stark and stiff, a human shape of ice, on the
spot where Winter overtook him. On strides the tyrant over the rushing
rivers and broad lakes, which turn to rock beneath his footsteps. His
dreary empire is established; all around stretches the desolation of
the pole. Yet not ungrateful be his New England children (for Winter
is our sire, though a stern and rough one)--not ungrateful even for
the severities which have nourished our unyielding strength of
character. And let us thank him, too, for the sleigh-rides cheered by
the music of merry bells; for the crackling and rustling hearth when
the ruddy firelight gleams on hardy manhood and the blooming cheek of
woman: for all the home-enjoyments and the kindred virtues which
flourish in a frozen soil. Not that we grieve when, after some seven
months of storm and bitter frost, Spring, in the guise of a
flower-crowned virgin, is seen driving away the hoary despot, pelting
him with violets by the handful and strewing green grass on the path
behind him. Often ere he will give up his empire old Winter rushes
fiercely buck and hurls a snowdrift at the shrinking form of Spring,
yet step by step he is compelled to retreat northward, and spends the
summer month within the Arctic circle.

Such fantasies, intermixed among graver toils of mind, have made the
winter's day pass pleasantly. Meanwhile, the storm has raged without
abatement, and now, as the brief afternoon declines, is tossing denser
volumes to and fro about the atmosphere. On the window-sill there is a
layer of snow reaching halfway up the lowest pane of glass. The garden
is one unbroken bed. Along the street are two or three spots of
uncovered earth where the gust has whirled away the snow, heaping it
elsewhere to the fence-tops or piling huge banks against the doors of
houses. A solitary passenger is seen, now striding mid-leg deep across
a drift, now scudding over the bare ground, while his cloak is swollen
with the wind. And now the jingling of bells--a sluggish sound
responsive to the horse's toilsome progress through the unbroken
drifts--announces the passage of a sleigh with a boy clinging behind
and ducking his head to escape detection by the driver. Next comes a
sledge laden with wood for some unthrifty housekeeper whom winter has
surprised at a cold hearth. But what dismal equipage now struggles
along the uneven street? A sable hearse bestrewn with snow is bearing
a dead man through the storm to his frozen bed. Oh how dreary is a
burial in winter, when the bosom of Mother Earth has no warmth for her
poor child!

Evening--the early eve of December--begins to spread its deepening
veil over the comfortless scene. The firelight gradually brightens and
throws my flickering shadow upon the walls and ceiling of the chamber,
but still the storm rages and rattles against the windows. Alas! I
shiver and think it time to be disconsolate, but, taking a farewell
glance at dead Nature in her shroud, I perceive a flock of snowbirds
skimming lightsomely through the tempest and flitting from drift to
drift as sportively as swallows in the delightful prime of summer.
Whence come they? Where do they build their nests and seek their food?
Why, having airy wings, do they not follow summer around the earth,
instead of making themselves the playmates of the storm and fluttering
on the dreary verge of the winter's eve? I know not whence they come,
nor why; yet my spirit has been cheered by that wandering flock of
snow-birds.




THE SEVEN VAGABONDS.


Rambling on foot in the spring of my life and the summer of the year,
I came one afternoon to a point which gave me the choice of three
directions. Straight before me the main road extended its dusty length
to Boston; on the left a branch went toward the sea, and would have
lengthened my journey a trifle of twenty or thirty miles, while by the
right-hand path I might have gone over hills and lakes to Canada,
visiting in my way the celebrated town of Stamford. On a level spot of
grass at the foot of the guide-post appeared an object which, though
locomotive on a different principle, reminded me of Gulliver's
portable mansion among the Brobdignags. It was a huge covered
wagon--or, more properly, a small house on wheels--with a door on one
side and a window shaded by green blinds on the other. Two horses
munching provender out of the baskets which muzzled them were fastened
near the vehicle. A delectable sound of music proceeded from the
interior, and I immediately conjectured that this was some itinerant
show halting at the confluence of the roads to intercept such idle
travellers as myself. A shower had long been climbing up the western
sky, and now hung so blackly over my onward path that it was a point
of wisdom to seek shelter here.

"Halloo! Who stands guard here? Is the doorkeeper asleep?" cried I,
approaching a ladder of two or three steps which was let down from the
wagon.

The music ceased at my summons, and there appeared at the door, not
the sort of figure that I had mentally assigned to the wandering
showman, but a most respectable old personage whom I was sorry to have
addressed in so free a style. He wore a snuff-colored coat and
small-clothes, with white top-boots, and exhibited the mild dignity of
aspect and manner which may often be noticed in aged schoolmasters,
and sometimes in deacons, selectmen or other potentates of that kind.
A small piece of silver was my passport within his premises, where I
found only one other person, hereafter to be described.

"This is a dull day for business," said the old gentleman as he
ushered me in; "but I merely tarry here to refresh the cattle, being
bound for the camp-meeting at Stamford."

Perhaps the movable scene of this narrative is still peregrinating New
England, and may enable the reader to test the accuracy of my
description. The spectacle--for I will not use the unworthy term of
"puppet-show"--consisted of a multitude of little people assembled on
a miniature stage. Among them were artisans of every kind in the
attitudes of their toil, and a group of fair ladies and gay gentlemen
standing ready for the dance; a company of foot-soldiers formed a line
across the stage, looking stern, grim and terrible enough to make it a
pleasant consideration that they were but three inches high; and
conspicuous above the whole was seen a Merry Andrew in the pointed cap
and motley coat of his profession. All the inhabitants of this mimic
world were motionless, like the figures in a picture, or like that
people who one moment were alive in the midst of their business and
delights and the next were transformed to statues, preserving an
eternal semblance of labor that was ended and pleasure that could be
felt no more. Anon, however, the old gentleman turned the handle of a
barrel-organ, the first note of which produced a most enlivening
effect upon the figures and awoke them all to their proper occupations
and amusements. By the selfsame impulse the tailor plied his needle,
the blacksmith's hammer descended upon the anvil and the dancers
whirled away on feathery tiptoes; the company of soldiers broke into
platoons, retreated from the stage, and were succeeded by a troop of
horse, who came prancing onward with such a sound of trumpets and
trampling of hoofs as might have startled Don Quixote himself; while
an old toper of inveterate ill-habits uplifted his black bottle and
took off a hearty swig. Meantime, the Merry Andrew began to caper and
turn somersets, shaking his sides, nodding his head and winking his
eyes in as lifelike a manner as if he were ridiculing the nonsense of
all human affairs and making fun of the whole multitude beneath him.
At length the old magician (for I compared the showman to Prospero
entertaining his guests with a masque of shadows) paused that I might
give utterance to my wonder.

"What an admirable piece of work is this!" exclaimed I, lifting up my
hands in astonishment.

Indeed, I liked the spectacle and was tickled with the old man's
gravity as he presided at it, for I had none of that foolish wisdom
which reproves every occupation that is not useful in this world of
vanities. If there be a faculty which I possess more perfectly than
most men, it is that of throwing myself mentally into situations
foreign to my own and detecting with a cheerful eye the desirable
circumstances of each. I could have envied the life of this
gray-headed showman, spent as it had been in a course of safe and
pleasurable adventure in driving his huge vehicle sometimes through
the sands of Cape Cod and sometimes over the rough forest-roads of the
north and east, and halting now on the green before a village
meeting-house and now in a paved square of the metropolis. How often
must his heart have been gladdened by the delight of children as they
viewed these animated figures, or his pride indulged by haranguing
learnedly to grown men on the mechanical powers which produced such
wonderful effects, or his gallantry brought into play--for this is an
attribute which such grave men do not lack--by the visits of pretty
maidens! And then with how fresh a feeling must he return at intervals
to his own peculiar home! "I would I were assured of as happy a life
as his," thought I.

Though the showman's wagon might have accommodated fifteen or twenty
spectators, it now contained only himself and me and a third person,
at whom I threw a glance on entering. He was a neat and trim young man
of two or three and twenty; his drab hat and green frock-coat with
velvet collar were smart, though no longer new, while a pair of green
spectacles that seemed needless to his brisk little eyes gave him
something of a scholar-like and literary air. After allowing me a
sufficient time to inspect the puppets, he advanced with a bow and
drew my attention to some books in a corner of the wagon. These he
forthwith began to extol with an amazing volubility of well-sounding
words and an ingenuity of praise that won him my heart as being myself
one of the most merciful of critics. Indeed, his stock required some
considerable powers of commendation in the salesman. There were
several ancient friends of mine--the novels of those happy days when
my affections wavered between the _Scottish Chiefs_ and _Thomas
Thumb_--besides a few of later date whose merits had not been
acknowledged by the public. I was glad to find that dear little
venerable volume the _New England Primer_, looking as antique as
ever, though in its thousandth new edition; a bundle of superannuated
gilt picture-books made such a child of me that, partly for the
glittering covers and partly for the fairy-tales within, I bought the
whole, and an assortment of ballads and popular theatrical songs drew
largely on my purse. To balance these expenditures, I meddled neither
with sermons nor science nor morality, though volumes of each were
there, nor with a _Life of Franklin_ in the coarsest of paper,
but so showily bound that it was emblematical of the doctor himself in
the court-dress which he refused to wear at Paris, nor with Webster's
spelling-book, nor some of Byron's minor poems, nor half a dozen
little Testaments at twenty-five cents each. Thus far the collection
might have been swept from some great bookstore or picked up at an
evening auction-room, but there was one small blue-covered pamphlet
which the pedler handed me with so peculiar an air that I purchased it
immediately at his own price; and then for the first time the thought
struck me that I had spoken face to face with the veritable author of
a printed book.

The literary-man now evinced a great kindness for me, and I ventured
to inquire which way he was travelling.

"Oh," said he, "I keep company with this old gentlemen here, and we
are moving now toward the camp-meeting at Stamford."

He then explained to me that for the present season he had rented a
corner of the wagon as a book-store, which, as he wittily observed,
was a true circulating library, since there were few parts of the
country where it had not gone its rounds. I approved of the plan
exceedingly, and began to sum up within my mind the many uncommon
felicities in the life of a book-pedler, especially when his character
resembled that of the individual before me. At a high rate was to be
reckoned the daily and hourly enjoyment of such interviews as the
present, in which he seized upon the admiration of a passing stranger
and made him aware that a man of literary taste, and even of literary
achievement, was travelling the country in a showman's wagon. A more
valuable yet not infrequent triumph might be won in his conversations
with some elderly clergyman long vegetating in a rocky, woody, watery
back-settlement of New England, who as he recruited his library from
the pedler's stock of sermons would exhort him to seek a college
education and become the first scholar in his class. Sweeter and
prouder yet would be his sensations when, talking poetry while he sold
spelling-books, he should charm the mind, and haply touch the heart,
of a fair country schoolmistress, herself an unhonored poetess, a
wearer of blue stockings which none but himself took pains to look at.
But the scene of his completest glory would be when the wagon had
halted for the night and his stock of books was transferred to some
crowded bar-room. Then would he recommend to the multifarious company,
whether traveller from the city, or teamster from the hills, or
neighboring squire, or the landlord himself, or his loutish hostler,
works suited to each particular taste and capacity, proving, all the
while, by acute criticism and profound remark, that the lore in his
books was even exceeded by that in his brain. Thus happily would he
traverse the land, sometimes a herald before the march of Mind,
sometimes walking arm in arm with awful Literature, and reaping
everywhere a harvest of real and sensible popularity which the
secluded bookworms by whose toil he lived could never hope for.

"If ever I meddle with literature," thought I, fixing myself in
adamantine resolution, "it shall be as a travelling bookseller."

Though it was still mid-afternoon, the air had now grown dark about
us, and a few drops of rain came down upon the roof of our vehicle,
pattering like the feet of birds that had flown thither to rest. A
sound of pleasant voices made us listen, and there soon appeared
halfway up the ladder the pretty person of a young damsel whose rosy
face was so cheerful that even amid the gloomy light it seemed as if
the sunbeams were peeping under her bonnet. We next saw the dark and
handsome features of a young man who, with easier gallantry than might
have been expected in the heart of Yankee-land, was assisting her into
the wagon. It became immediately evident to us, when the two strangers
stood within the door, that they were of a profession kindred to those
of my companions, and I was delighted with the more than
hospitable--the even paternal--kindness of the old showman's manner as
he welcomed them, while the man of literature hastened to lead the
merry-eyed girl to a seat on the long bench.

"You are housed but just in time, my young friends," said the master
of the wagon; "the sky would have been down upon you within five
minutes."

The young man's reply marked him as a foreigner--not by any variation
from the idiom and accent of good English, but because he spoke with
more caution and accuracy than if perfectly familiar with the
language.

"We knew that a shower was hanging over us," said he, "and consulted
whether it were best to enter the house on the top of yonder hill,
but, seeing your wagon in the road--"

"We agreed to come hither," interrupted the girl, with a smile,
"because we should be more at home in a wandering house like this."

I, meanwhile, with many a wild and undetermined fantasy was narrowly
inspecting these two doves that had flown into our ark. The young man,
tall, agile and athletic, wore a mass of black shining curls
clustering round a dark and vivacious countenance which, if it had not
greater expression, was at least more active and attracted readier
notice, than the quiet faces of our countrymen. At his first
appearance he had been laden with a neat mahogany box of about two
feet square, but very light in proportion to its size, which he had
immediately unstrapped from his shoulders and deposited on the floor
of the wagon.

The girl had nearly as fair a complexion as our own beauties, and a
brighter one than most of them; the lightness of her figure, which
seemed calculated to traverse the whole world without weariness,
suited well with the glowing cheerfulness of her face, and her gay
attire, combining the rainbow hues of crimson, green and a deep
orange, was as proper to her lightsome aspect as if she had been born
in it. This gay stranger was appropriately burdened with that
mirth-inspiring instrument the fiddle, which her companion took from
her hands, and shortly began the process of tuning. Neither of us the
previous company of the wagon needed to inquire their trade, for this
could be no mystery to frequenters of brigade-musters, ordinations,
cattle-shows, commencements, and other festal meetings in our sober
land; and there is a dear friend of mine who will smile when this page
recalls to his memory a chivalrous deed performed by us in rescuing
the show-box of such a couple from a mob of great double-fisted
countrymen.

"Come," said I to the damsel of gay attire; "shall we visit all the
wonders of the world together?"

She understood the metaphor at once, though, indeed, it would not much
have troubled me if she had assented to the literal meaning of my
words. The mahogany box was placed in a proper position, and I peeped
in through its small round magnifying-window while the girl sat by my
side and gave short descriptive sketches as one after another the
pictures were unfolded to my view. We visited together--at least, our
imaginations did--full many a famous city in the streets of which I
had long yearned to tread. Once, I remember, we were in the harbor of
Barcelona, gazing townward; next, she bore me through the air to
Sicily and bade me look up at blazing AEtna; then we took wing to
Venice and sat in a gondola beneath the arch of the Rialto, and anon
she set me down among the thronged spectators at the coronation of
Napoleon. But there was one scene--its locality she could not
tell--which charmed my attention longer than all those gorgeous
palaces and churches, because the fancy haunted me that I myself the
preceding summer had beheld just such a humble meeting-house, in just
such a pine-surrounded nook, among our own green mountains. All these
pictures were tolerably executed, though far inferior to the girl's
touches of description; nor was it easy to comprehend how in so few
sentences, and these, as I supposed, in a language foreign to her, she
contrived to present an airy copy of each varied scene.

When we had travelled through the vast extent of the mahogany box, I
looked into my guide's face.

"'Where are you going, my pretty maid?'" inquired I, in the words of
an old song.

"Ah!" said the gay damsel; "you might as well ask where the summer
wind is going. We are wanderers here and there and everywhere.
Wherever there is mirth our merry hearts are drawn to it. To-day,
indeed, the people have told us of a great frolic and festival in
these parts; so perhaps we may be needed at what you call the
camp-meeting at Stamford."

Then, in my happy youth, and while her pleasant voice yet sounded in
my ears, I sighed; for none but myself, I thought, should have been
her companion in a life which seemed to realize my own wild fancies
cherished all through visionary boyhood to that hour. To these two
strangers the world was in its Golden Age--not that, indeed, it was
less dark and sad than ever, but because its weariness and sorrow had
no community with their ethereal nature. Wherever they might appear in
their pilgrimage of bliss, Youth would echo back their gladness,
care-stricken Maturity would rest a moment from its toil, and Age,
tottering among the graves, would smile in withered joy for their
sakes. The lonely cot, the narrow and gloomy street, the sombre shade,
would catch a passing gleam like that now shining on ourselves as
these bright spirits wandered by. Blessed pair, whose happy home was
throughout all the earth! I looked at my shoulders, and thought them
broad enough to sustain those pictured towns and mountains; mine, too,
was an elastic foot as tireless as the wing of the bird of Paradise;
mine was then an untroubled heart that would have gone singing on its
delightful way.

"Oh, maiden," said I aloud, "why did you not come hither alone?"

While the merry girl and myself were busy with the show-box the
unceasing rain had driven another wayfarer into the wagon. He seemed
pretty nearly of the old showman's age, but much smaller, leaner and
more withered than he, and less respectably clad in a patched suit of
gray; withal, he had a thin, shrewd countenance and a pair of
diminutive gray eyes, which peeped rather too keenly out of their
puckered sockets. This old fellow had been joking with the showman in
a manner which intimated previous acquaintance, but, perceiving that
the damsel and I had terminated our affairs, he drew forth a folded
document and presented it to me. As I had anticipated, it proved to be
a circular, written in a very fair and legible hand and signed by
several distinguished gentlemen whom I had never heard of, stating
that the bearer had encountered every variety of misfortune and
recommending him to the notice of all charitable people. Previous
disbursements had left me no more than a five-dollar bill, out of
which, however, I offered to make the beggar a donation provided he
would give me change for it. The object of my beneficence looked
keenly in my face, and discerned that I had none of that abominable
spirit, characteristic though it be, of a full-blooded Yankee, which
takes pleasure in detecting every little harmless piece of knavery.

"Why, perhaps," said the ragged old mendicant, "if the bank is in good
standing, I can't say but I may have enough about me to change your
bill."

"It is a bill of the Suffolk Bank," said I, "and better than the
specie."

As the beggar had nothing to object, he now produced a small buff
leather bag tied up carefully with a shoe-string. When this was
opened, there appeared a very comfortable treasure of silver coins of
all sorts and sizes, and I even fancied that I saw gleaming among them
the golden plumage of that rare bird in our currency the American
eagle. In this precious heap was my bank-note deposited, the rate of
exchange being considerably against me.

His wants being thus relieved, the destitute man pulled out of his
pocket an old pack of greasy cards which had probably contributed to
fill the buff leather bag in more ways than one.

"Come!" said he; "I spy a rare fortune in your face, and for
twenty-five cents more I'll tell you what it is."

I never refuse to take a glimpse into futurity; so, after shuffling
the cards and when the fair damsel had cut them, I dealt a portion to
the prophetic beggar. Like others of his profession, before predicting
the shadowy events that were moving on to meet me he gave proof of his
preternatural science by describing scenes through which I had already
passed.

Here let me have credit for a sober fact. When the old man had read a
page in his book of fate, he bent his keen gray eyes on mine and
proceeded to relate in all its minute particulars what was then the
most singular event of my life. It was one which I had no purpose to
disclose till the general unfolding of all secrets, nor would it be a
much stranger instance of inscrutable knowledge or fortunate
conjecture if the beggar were to meet me in the street today and
repeat word for word the page which I have here written.

The fortune-teller, after predicting a destiny which time seems loth
to make good, put up his cards, secreted his treasure-bag and began to
converse with the other occupants of the wagon.

"Well, old friend," said the showman, "you have not yet told us which
way your face is turned this afternoon."

"I am taking a trip northward this warm weather," replied the
conjurer, "across the Connecticut first, and then up through Vermont,
and maybe into Canada before the fall. But I must stop and see the
breaking up of the camp-meeting at Stamford."

I began to think that all the vagrants in New England were converging
to the camp-meeting and had made this wagon, their rendezvous by the
way.

The showman now proposed that when the shower was over they should
pursue the road to Stamford together, it being sometimes the policy of
these people to form a sort of league and confederacy.

"And the young lady too," observed the gallant bibliopolist, bowing to
her profoundly, "and this foreign gentleman, as I understand, are on a
jaunt of pleasure to the same spot. It would add incalculably to my
own enjoyment, and I presume to that of my colleague and his friend,
if they could be prevailed upon to join our party."

This arrangement met with approbation on all hands, nor were any of
those concerned more sensible of its advantages than myself, who had
no title to be included in it.

Having already satisfied myself as to the several modes in which the
four others attained felicity, I next set my mind at work to discover
what enjoyments were peculiar to the old "straggler," as the people of
the country would have termed the wandering mendicant and prophet. As
he pretended to familiarity with the devil, so I fancied that he was
fitted to pursue and take delight in his way of life by possessing
some of the mental and moral characteristics--the lighter and more
comic ones--of the devil in popular stories. Among them might be
reckoned a love of deception for its own sake, a shrewd eye and keen
relish for human weakness and ridiculous infirmity, and the talent of
petty fraud. Thus to this old man there would be pleasure even in the
consciousness--so insupportable to some minds--that his whole life was
a cheat upon the world, and that, so far as he was concerned with the
public, his little cunning had the upper hand of its united wisdom.
Every day would furnish him with a succession of minute and pungent
triumphs--as when, for instance, his importunity wrung a pittance out
of the heart of a miser, or when my silly good-nature transferred a
part of my slender purse to his plump leather bag, or when some
ostentatious gentleman should throw a coin to the ragged beggar who
was richer than himself, or when--though he would not always be so
decidedly diabolical--his pretended wants should make him a sharer in
the scanty living of real indigence. And then what an inexhaustible
field of enjoyment, both as enabling him to discern so much folly and
achieve such quantities of minor mischief, was opened to his sneering
spirit by his pretensions to prophetic knowledge.

All this was a sort of happiness which I could conceive of, though I
had little sympathy with it. Perhaps, had I been then inclined to
admit it, I might have found that the roving life was more proper to
him than to either of his companions; for Satan, to whom I had
compared the poor man, has delighted, ever since the time of Job, in
"wandering up and down upon the earth," and, indeed, a crafty
disposition which operates not in deep-laid plans, but in disconnected
tricks, could not have an adequate scope, unless naturally impelled to
a continual change of scene and society.

My reflections were here interrupted.

"Another visitor!" exclaimed the old showman.

The door of the wagon had been closed against the tempest, which was
roaring and blustering with prodigious fury and commotion and beating
violently against our shelter, as if it claimed all those homeless
people for its lawful prey, while we, caring little for the
displeasure of the elements, sat comfortably talking. There was now an
attempt to open the door, succeeded by a voice uttering some strange,
unintelligible gibberish which my companions mistook for Greek and I
suspected to be thieves' Latin. However, the showman stepped forward
and gave admittance to a figure which made me imagine either that our
wagon had rolled back two hundred years into past ages or that the
forest and its old inhabitants had sprung up around us by enchantment.
It was a red Indian armed with his bow and arrow. His dress was a sort
of cap adorned with a single feather of some wild bird, and a frock of
blue cotton girded tight about him; on his breast, like orders of
knighthood, hung a crescent and a circle and other ornaments of
silver, while a small crucifix betokened that our father the pope had
interposed between the Indian and the Great Spirit whom he had
worshipped in his simplicity. This son of the wilderness and pilgrim
of the storm took his place silently in the midst of us. When the
first surprise was over, I rightly conjectured him to be one of the
Penobscot tribe, parties of which I had often seen in their summer
excursions down our Eastern rivers. There they paddle their birch
canoes among the coasting-schooners, and build their wigwam beside
some roaring mill-dam, and drive a little trade in basket-work where
their fathers hunted deer. Our new visitor was probably wandering
through the country toward Boston, subsisting on the careless charity
of the people while he turned his archery to profitable account by
shooting at cents which were to be the prize of his successful aim.

The Indian had not long been seated ere our merry damsel sought to
draw him into conversation. She, indeed, seemed all made up of
sunshine in the month of May, for there was nothing so dark and dismal
that her pleasant mind could not cast a glow over it; and the wild
man, like a fir tree in his native forest, soon began to brighten into
a sort of sombre cheerfulness. At length she inquired whether his
journey had any particular end or purpose.

"I go shoot at the camp-meeting at Stamford," replied the Indian.

"And here are five more," said the girl, "all aiming at the
camp-meeting too. You shall be one of us, for we travel with light
hearts; and, as for me, I sing merry songs and tell merry tales and am
full of merry thoughts, and I dance merrily along the road, so that
there is never any sadness among them that keep me company. But oh,
you would find it very dull indeed to go all the way to Stamford
alone."

My ideas of the aboriginal character led me to fear that the Indian
would prefer his own solitary musings to the gay society thus offered
him; on the contrary, the girl's proposal met with immediate
acceptance and seemed to animate him with a misty expectation of
enjoyment.

I now gave myself up to a course of thought which, whether it flowed
naturally from this combination of events or was drawn forth by a
wayward fancy, caused my mind to thrill as if I were listening to deep
music. I saw mankind in this weary old age of the world either
enduring a sluggish existence amid the smoke and dust of cities, or,
if they breathed a purer air, still lying down at night with no hope
but to wear out to-morrow, and all the to-morrows which make up life,
among the same dull scenes and in the same wretched toil that had
darkened the sunshine of today. But there were some full of the
primeval instinct who preserved the freshness of youth to their latest
years by the continual excitement of new objects, new pursuits and new
associates, and cared little, though their birthplace might have been
here in New England, if the grave should close over them in Central
Asia. Fate was summoning a parliament of these free spirits;
unconscious of the impulse which directed them to a common centre,
they had come hither from far and near, and last of all appeared the
representatives of those mighty vagrants who had chased the deer
during thousands of years, and were chasing it now in the spirit-land.
Wandering down through the waste of ages, the woods had vanished
around his path; his arm had lost somewhat of its strength, his foot
of its fleetness, his mien of its wild regality, his heart and mind of
their savage virtue and uncultured force, but here, untamable to the
routine of artificial life, roving now along the dusty road as of old
over the forest-leaves,--here was the Indian still.

"Well," said the old showman, in the midst of my meditations, "here is
an honest company of us--one, two, three, four, five, six--all going
to the camp-meeting at Stamford. Now, hoping no offence, I should like
to know where this young gentleman may be going?"

I started. How came I among these wanderers? The free mind that
preferred its own folly to another's wisdom, the open spirit that
found companions everywhere--above all, the restless impulse that had
so often made me wretched in the midst of enjoyments,--these were my
claims to be of their society.

"My friends," cried I, stepping into the centre of the wagon, "I am
going with you to the camp-meeting at Stamford."

"But in what capacity?" asked the old showman, after a moment's
silence. "All of us here can get our bread in some creditable way.
Every honest man should have his livelihood. You, sir, as I take it,
are a mere strolling gentleman."

I proceeded to inform the company that when Nature gave me a
propensity to their way of life she had not left me altogether
destitute of qualifications for it, though I could not deny that my
talent was less respectable, and might be less profitable, than the
meanest of theirs. My design, in short, was to imitate the
story-tellers of whom Oriental travellers have told us, and become an
itinerant novelist, reciting my own extemporaneous fictions to such
audiences as I could collect.

"Either this," said I, "is my vocation, or I have been born in vain."

The fortune-teller, with a sly wink to the company, proposed to take
me as an apprentice to one or other of his professions, either of
which undoubtedly would have given full scope to whatever inventive
talent I might possess. The bibliopolist spoke a few words in
opposition to my plan--influenced partly, I suspect, by the jealousy
of authorship, and partly by an apprehension that the _viva-voce_
practice would become general among novelists, to the infinite
detriment of the book trade.

Dreading a rejection, I solicited the interest of the merry damsel.

"'Mirth,'" cried I, most aptly appropriating the words of L'Allegro,
"'to thee I sue! Mirth, admit me of thy crew!'"

"Let us indulge the poor youth," said Mirth, with a kindness which
made me love her dearly, though I was no such coxcomb as to
misinterpret her motives. "I have espied much promise in him. True, a
shadow sometimes flits across his brow, but the sunshine is sure to
follow in a moment. He is never guilty of a sad thought but a merry
one is twin-born with it. We will take him with us, and you shall see
that he will set us all a-laughing before we reach the camp-meeting at
Stamford." Her voice silenced the scruples of the rest and gained me
admittance into the league; according to the terms of which, without a
community of goods or profits, we were to lend each other all the aid
and avert all the harm that might be in our power.

This affair settled, a marvellous jollity entered into the whole tribe
of us, manifesting itself characteristically in each individual. The
old showman, sitting down to his barrel-organ, stirred up the souls of
the pigmy people with one of the quickest tunes in the music-book;
tailors, blacksmiths, gentlemen and ladies all seemed to share in the
spirit of the occasion, and the Merry Andrew played his part more
facetiously than ever, nodding and winking particularly at me. The
young foreigner flourished his fiddle-bow with a master's hand, and
gave an inspiring echo to the showman's melody. The bookish man and
the merry damsel started up simultaneously to dance, the former
enacting the double shuffle in a style which everybody must have
witnessed ere election week was blotted out of time, while the girl,
setting her arms akimbo with both hands at her slim waist, displayed
such light rapidity of foot and harmony of varying attitude and motion
that I could not conceive how she ever was to stop, imagining at the
moment that Nature had made her, as the old showman had made his
puppets, for no earthly purpose but to dance jigs. The Indian bellowed
forth a succession of most hideous outcries, somewhat affrighting us
till we interpreted them as the war-song with which, in imitation of
his ancestors, he was prefacing the assault on Stamford. The conjurer,
meanwhile, sat demurely in a corner extracting a sly enjoyment from
the whole scene, and, like the facetious Merry Andrew, directing his
queer glance particularly at me. As for myself, with great
exhilaration of fancy, I began to arrange and color the incidents of a
tale wherewith I proposed to amuse an audience that very evening; for
I saw that my associates were a little ashamed of me, and that no time
was to be lost in obtaining a public acknowledgment of my abilities.

"Come, fellow-laborers," at last said the old showman, whom we had
elected president; "the shower is over, and we must be doing our duty
by these poor souls at Stamford."

"We'll come among them in procession, with music and dancing," cried
the merry damsel.

Accordingly--for it must be understood that our pilgrimage was to be
performed on foot--we sallied joyously out of the wagon, each of us,
even the old gentleman in his white top-boots, giving a great skip as
we came down the ladder. Above our heads there was such a glory of
sunshine and splendor of clouds, and such brightness of verdure below,
that, as I modestly remarked at the time, Nature seemed to have washed
her face and put on the best of her jewelry and a fresh green gown in
honor of our confederation. Casting our eyes northward, we beheld a
horseman approaching leisurely and splashing through the little puddle
on the Stamford road. Onward he came, sticking up in his saddle with
rigid perpendicularity, a tall, thin figure in rusty black, whom the
showman and the conjurer shortly recognized to be what his aspect
sufficiently indicated--a travelling preacher of great fame among the
Methodists. What puzzled us was the fact that his face appeared turned
from, instead of to, the camp-meeting at Stamford. However, as this
new votary of the wandering life drew near the little green space
where the guide-post and our wagon were situated, my six
fellow-vagabonds and myself rushed forward and surrounded him, crying
out with united voices, "What news? What news from the camp-meeting at
Stamford?"

The missionary looked down in surprise at as singular a knot of people
as could have been selected from all his heterogeneous auditors.
Indeed, considering that we might all be classified under the general
head of Vagabond, there was great diversity of character among the
grave old showman, the sly, prophetic beggar, the fiddling foreigner
and his merry damsel, the smart bibliopolist, the sombre Indian and
myself, the itinerant novelist, a slender youth of eighteen. I even
fancied that a smile was endeavoring to disturb the iron gravity of
the preacher's mouth.

"Good people," answered he, "the camp-meeting is broke up."

So saying, the Methodist minister switched his steed and rode
westward. Our union being thus nullified by the removal of its object,
we were sundered at once to the four winds of heaven. The
fortune-teller, giving a nod to all and a peculiar wink to me,
departed on his Northern tour, chuckling within himself as he took the
Stamford road. The old showman and his literary coadjutor were already
tackling their horses to the wagon with a design to peregrinate
south-west along the sea-coast. The foreigner and the merry damsel
took their laughing leave and pursued the eastern road, which I had
that day trodden; as they passed away the young man played a lively
strain and the girl's happy spirit broke into a dance, and, thus
dissolving, as it were, into sunbeams and gay music, that pleasant
pair departed from my view. Finally, with a pensive shadow thrown
across my mind, yet emulous of the light philosophy of my late
companions, I joined myself to the Penobscot Indian and set forth
toward the distant city.




THE WHITE OLD MAID.


The moonbeams came through two deep and narrow windows and showed a
spacious chamber richly furnished in an antique fashion. From one
lattice the shadow of the diamond panes was thrown upon the floor; the
ghostly light through the other slept upon a bed, falling between the
heavy silken curtains and illuminating the face of a young man. But
how quietly the slumberer lay! how pale his features! And how like a
shroud the sheet was wound about his frame! Yes, it was a corpse in
its burial-clothes.

Suddenly the fixed features seemed to move with dark emotion. Strange
fantasy! It was but the shadow of the fringed curtain waving betwixt
the dead face and the moonlight as the door of the chamber opened and
a girl stole softly to the bedside. Was there delusion in the
moonbeams, or did her gesture and her eye betray a gleam of triumph as
she bent over the pale corpse, pale as itself, and pressed her living
lips to the cold ones of the dead? As she drew back from that long
kiss her features writhed as if a proud heart were fighting with its
anguish. Again it seemed that the features of the corpse had moved
responsive to her own. Still an illusion. The silken curtains had
waved a second time betwixt the dead face and the moonlight as another
fair young girl unclosed the door and glided ghostlike to the bedside.
There the two maidens stood, both beautiful, with the pale beauty of
the dead between them. But she who had first entered was proud and
stately, and the other a soft and fragile thing.

"Away!" cried the lofty one. "Thou hadst him living; the dead is
mine."

"Thine!" returned the other, shuddering. "Well hast thou spoken; the
dead is thine."

The proud girl started and stared into her face with a ghastly look,
but a wild-and mournful expression passed across the features of the
gentle one, and, weak and helpless, she sank down on the bed, her head
pillowed beside that of the corpse and her hair mingling with his dark
locks. A creature of hope and joy, the first draught of sorrow had
bewildered her.

"Edith!" cried her rival.

Edith groaned as with a sudden compression of the heart, and, removing
her cheek from the dead youth's pillow, she stood upright, fearfully
encountering the eyes of the lofty girl.

"Wilt thou betray me?" said the latter, calmly.

"Till the dead bid me speak I will be silent," answered Edith. "Leave
us alone together. Go and live many years, and then return and tell me
of thy life. He too will be here. Then, if thou tellest of sufferings
more than death, we will both forgive thee."

"And what shall be the token?" asked the proud girl, as if her heart
acknowledged a meaning in these wild words.

"This lock of hair," said Edith, lifting one of the dark clustering
curls that lay heavily on the dead man's brow.

The two maidens joined their hands over the bosom of the corpse and
appointed a day and hour far, far in time to come for their next
meeting in that chamber. The statelier girl gave one deep look at the
motionless countenance and departed, yet turned again and trembled ere
she closed the door, almost believing that her dead lover frowned upon
her. And Edith, too! Was not her white form fading into the moonlight?
Scorning her own weakness, she went forth and perceived that a negro
slave was waiting in the passage with a waxlight, which he held
between her face and his own and regarded her, as she thought, with an
ugly expression of merriment. Lifting his torch on high, the slave
lighted her down the staircase and undid the portal of the mansion.
The young clergyman of the town had just ascended the steps, and,
bowing to the lady, passed in without a word.

Years--many years--rolled on. The world seemed new again, so much
older was it grown since the night when those pale girls had clasped
their hands across the bosom of the corpse. In the interval a lonely
woman had passed from youth to extreme age, and was known by all the
town as the "Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet." A taint of insanity had
affected her whole life, but so quiet, sad and gentle, so utterly free
from violence, that she was suffered to pursue her harmless fantasies
unmolested by the world with whose business or pleasures she had
naught to do. She dwelt alone, and never came into the daylight except
to follow funerals. Whenever a corpse was borne along the street, in
sunshine, rain or snow, whether a pompous train of the rich and proud
thronged after it or few and humble were the mourners, behind them
came the lonely woman in a long white garment which the people called
her shroud. She took no place among the kindred or the friends, but
stood at the door to hear the funeral prayer, and walked in the rear
of the procession as one whose earthly charge it was to haunt the
house of mourning and be the shadow of affliction and see that the
dead were duly buried. So long had this been her custom that the
inhabitants of the town deemed her a part of every funeral, as much as
the coffin-pall or the very corpse itself, and augured ill of the
sinner's destiny unless the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet came gliding
like a ghost behind. Once, it is said, she affrighted a bridal-party
with her pale presence, appearing suddenly in the illuminated hall
just as the priest was uniting a false maid to a wealthy man before
her lover had been dead a year. Evil was the omen to that marriage.
Sometimes she stole forth by moonlight and visited the graves of
venerable integrity and wedded love and virgin innocence, and every
spot where the ashes of a kind and faithful heart were mouldering.
Over the hillocks of those favored dead would she stretch out her arms
with a gesture as if she were scattering seeds, and many believed that
she brought them from the garden of Paradise, for the graves which she
had visited were green beneath the snow and covered with sweet flowers
from April to November. Her blessing was better than a holy verse upon
the tombstone. Thus wore away her long, sad, peaceful and fantastic
life till few were so old as she, and the people of later generations
wondered how the dead had ever been buried or mourners had endured
their grief without the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet. Still years
went on, and still she followed funerals and was not yet summoned to
her own festival of death.

One afternoon the great street of the town was all alive with business
and bustle, though the sun now gilded only the upper half of the
church-spire, having left the housetops and loftiest trees in shadow.
The scene was cheerful and animated in spite of the sombre shade
between the high brick buildings. Here were pompous merchants in white
wigs and laced velvet, the bronzed faces of sea-captains, the foreign
garb and air of Spanish Creoles, and the disdainful port of natives of
Old England, all contrasted with the rough aspect of one or two
back-settlers negotiating sales of timber from forests where axe had
never sounded. Sometimes a lady passed, swelling roundly forth in an
embroidered petticoat, balancing her steps in high-heeled shoes and
courtesying with lofty grace to the punctilious obeisances of the
gentlemen. The life of the town seemed to have its very centre not far
from an old mansion that stood somewhat back from the pavement,
surrounded by neglected grass, with a strange air of loneliness rather
deepened than dispelled by the throng so near it. Its site would have
been suitably occupied by a magnificent Exchange or a brick block
lettered all over with various signs, or the large house itself might
have made a noble tavern with the "King's Arms" swinging before it and
guests in every chamber, instead of the present solitude. But, owing
to some dispute about the right of inheritance, the mansion had been
long without a tenant, decaying from year to year and throwing the
stately gloom of its shadow over the busiest part of the town.

Such was the scene, and such the time, when a figure unlike any that
have been described was observed at a distance down the street.

"I espy a strange sail yonder," remarked a Liverpool captain--"that
woman in the long white garment."

The sailor seemed much struck by the object, as were several others
who at the same moment caught a glimpse of the figure that had
attracted his notice. Almost immediately the various topics of
conversation gave place to speculations in an undertone on this
unwonted occurrence.

"Can there be a funeral so late this afternoon?" inquired some.

They looked for the signs of death at every door--the sexton, the
hearse, the assemblage of black-clad relatives, all that makes up the
woeful pomp of funerals. They raised their eyes, also, to the sun-gilt
spire of the church, and wondered that no clang proceeded from its
bell, which had always tolled till now when this figure appeared in
the light of day. But none had heard that a corpse was to be borne to
its home that afternoon, nor was there any token of a funeral except
the apparition of the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.

"What may this portend?" asked each man of his neighbor.

All smiled as they put the question, yet with a certain trouble in
their eyes, as if pestilence, or some other wide calamity, were
prognosticated by the untimely intrusion among the living of one whose
presence had always been associated with death and woe. What a comet
is to the earth was that sad woman to the town. Still she moved on,
while the hum of surprise was hushed at her approach, and the proud
and the humble stood aside that her white garment might not wave
against them. It was a long, loose robe of spotless purity. Its wearer
appeared very old, pale, emaciated and feeble, yet glided onward
without the unsteady pace of extreme age. At one point of her course a
little rosy boy burst forth from a door and ran with open arms toward
the ghostly woman, seeming to expect a kiss from her bloodless lips.
She made a slight pause, fixing her eye upon him with an expression of
no earthly sweetness, so that the child shivered and stood awestruck
rather than affrighted while the Old Maid passed on. Perhaps her
garment might have been polluted even by an infant's touch; perhaps
her kiss would have been death to the sweet boy within the year.

"She is but a shadow," whispered the superstitious. "The child put
forth his arms and could not grasp her robe."

The wonder was increased when the Old Maid passed beneath the porch of
the deserted mansion, ascended the moss-covered steps, lifted the iron
knocker and gave three raps. The people could only conjecture that
some old remembrance, troubling her bewildered brain, had impelled the
poor woman hither to visit the friends of her youth--all gone from
their home long since and for ever unless their ghosts still haunted
it, fit company for the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.

An elderly man approached the steps, and, reverently uncovering his
gray locks, essayed to explain the matter.

"None, madam," said he, "have dwelt in this house these fifteen years
agone--no, not since the death of old Colonel Fenwicke, whose funeral
you may remember to have followed. His heirs, being ill-agreed among
themselves, have let the mansion-house go to ruin."

The Old Maid looked slowly round with a slight gesture of one hand and
a finger of the other upon her lip, appearing more shadow-like than
ever in the obscurity of the porch. But again she lifted the hammer,
and gave, this time, a single rap. Could it be that a footstep was now
heard coming down the staircase of the old mansion which all conceived
to have been so long untenanted? Slowly, feebly, yet heavily, like the
pace of an aged and infirm person, the step approached, more distinct
on every downward stair, till it reached the portal. The bar fell on
the inside; the door was opened. One upward glance toward the
church-spire, whence the sunshine had just faded, was the last that
the people saw of the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.

"Who undid the door?" asked many.

This question, owing to the depth of shadow beneath the porch, no one
could satisfactorily answer. Two or three aged men, while protesting
against an inference which might be drawn, affirmed that the person
within was a negro and bore a singular resemblance to old Caesar,
formerly a slave in the house, but freed by death some thirty years
before.

"Her summons has waked up a servant of the old family," said one, half
seriously.

"Let us wait here," replied another; "more guests will knock at the
door anon. But the gate of the graveyard should be thrown open."

Twilight had overspread the town before the crowd began to separate or
the comments on this incident were exhausted. One after another was
wending his way homeward, when a coach--no common spectacle in those
days--drove slowly into the street. It was an old-fashioned equipage,
hanging close to the ground, with arms on the panels, a footman behind
and a grave, corpulent coachman seated high in front, the whole giving
an idea of solemn state and dignity. There was something awful in the
heavy rumbling of the wheels.

The coach rolled down the street, till, coming to the gateway of the
deserted mansion, it drew up, and the footman sprang to the ground.

"Whose grand coach is this?" asked a very inquisitive body.

The footman made no reply, but ascended the steps of the old house,
gave three taps with the iron hammer, and returned to open the coach
door. An old man possessed of the heraldic lore so common in that day
examined the shield of arms on the panel.

"Azure, a lion's head erased, between three flowers de luce," said he,
then whispered the name of the family to whom these bearings belonged.
The last inheritor of its honors was recently dead, after a long
residence amid the splendor of the British court, where his birth and
wealth had given him no mean station. "He left no child," continued
the herald, "and these arms, being in a lozenge, betoken that the
coach appertains to his widow."

Further disclosures, perhaps, might have been made had not the speaker
been suddenly struck dumb by the stern eye of an ancient lady who
thrust forth her head from the coach, preparing to descend. As she
emerged the people saw that her dress was magnificent, and her figure
dignified in spite of age and infirmity--a stately ruin, but with a
look at once of pride and wretchedness. Her strong and rigid features
had an awe about them unlike that of the white Old Maid, but as of
something evil. She passed up the steps, leaning on a gold-headed
cane. The door swung open as she ascended, and the light of a torch
glittered on the embroidery of her dress and gleamed on the pillars of
the porch. After a momentary pause, a glance backward and then a
desperate effort, she went in.

The decipherer of the coat-of-arms had ventured up the lower step,
and, shrinking back immediately, pale and tremulous, affirmed that the
torch was held by the very image of old Caesar.

"But such a hideous grin," added he, "was never seen on the face of
mortal man, black or white. It will haunt me till my dying-day."

Meantime, the coach had wheeled round with a prodigious clatter on the
pavement and rumbled up the street, disappearing in the twilight,
while the ear still tracked its course. Scarcely was it gone when the
people began to question whether the coach and attendants, the ancient
lady, the spectre of old Caesar and the Old Maid herself were not all a
strangely-combined delusion with some dark purport in its mystery. The
whole town was astir, so that, instead of dispersing, the crowd
continually increased, and stood gazing up at the windows of the
mansion, now silvered by the brightening moon. The elders, glad to
indulge the narrative propensity of age, told of the long-faded
splendor of the family, the entertainments they had given and the
guests, the greatest of the land, and even titled and noble ones from
abroad, who had passed beneath that portal. These graphic
reminiscences seemed to call up the ghosts of those to whom they
referred. So strong was the impression on some of the more imaginative
hearers that two or three were seized with trembling fits at one and
the same moment, protesting that they had distinctly heard three other
raps of the iron knocker.

"Impossible!" exclaimed others. "See! The moon shines beneath the
porch, and shows every part of it except in the narrow shade of that
pillar. There is no one there."

"Did not the door open?" whispered one of these fanciful persons.

"Didst thou see it too?" said his companion, in a startled tone.

But the general sentiment was opposed to the idea that a third
visitant had made application at the door of the deserted house. A
few, however, adhered to this new marvel, and even declared that a red
gleam like that of a torch had shone through the great front window,
as if the negro were lighting a guest up the staircase. This too was
pronounced a mere fantasy.

But at once the whole multitude started, and each man beheld his own
terror painted in the faces of all the rest.

"What an awful thing is this!" cried they.

A shriek too fearfully distinct for doubt had been heard within the
mansion, breaking forth suddenly and succeeded by a deep stillness, as
if a heart had burst in giving it utterance. The people knew not
whether to fly from the very sight of the house or to rush trembling
in and search out the strange mystery. Amid their confusion and
affright they were somewhat reassured by the appearance of their
clergyman, a venerable patriarch, and equally a saint, who had taught
them and their fathers the way to heaven for more than the space of an
ordinary lifetime. He was a reverend figure with long white hair upon
his shoulders, a white beard upon his breast and a back so bent over
his staff that he seemed to be looking downward continually, as if to
choose a proper grave for his weary frame. It was some time before the
good old man, being deaf and of impaired intellect, could be made to
comprehend such portions of the affair as were comprehensible at all.
But when possessed of the facts, his energies assumed unexpected
vigor.

"Verily," said the old gentleman, "it will be fitting that I enter the
mansion-house of the worthy Colonel Fenwicke, lest any harm should
have befallen that true Christian woman whom ye call the 'Old Maid in
the Winding-Sheet.'"

Behold, then, the venerable clergyman ascending the steps of the
mansion with a torch-bearer behind him. It was the elderly man who had
spoken to the Old Maid, and the same who had afterward explained the
shield of arms and recognized the features of the negro. Like their
predecessors, they gave three raps with the iron hammer.

"Old Caesar cometh not," observed the priest. "Well, I wot he no longer
doth service in this mansion."

"Assuredly, then, it was something worse in old Caesar's likeness,"
said the other adventurer.

"Be it as God wills," answered the clergyman. "See! my strength,
though it be much decayed, hath sufficed to open this heavy door. Let
us enter and pass up the staircase."

Here occurred a singular exemplification of the dreamy state of a very
old man's mind. As they ascended the wide flight of stairs the aged
clergyman appeared to move with caution, occasionally standing aside,
and oftener bending his head, as it were in salutation, thus
practising all the gestures of one who makes his way through a throng.
Reaching the head of the staircase, he looked around with sad and
solemn benignity, laid aside his staff, bared his hoary locks, and was
evidently on the point of commencing a prayer.

"Reverend sir," said his attendant, who conceived this a very suitable
prelude to their further search, "would it not be well that the people
join with us in prayer?"

"Well-a-day!" cried the old clergyman, staring strangely around him.
"Art thou here with me, and none other? Verily, past times were
present to me, and I deemed that I was to make a funeral prayer, as
many a time heretofore, from the head of this staircase. Of a truth, I
saw the shades of many that are gone. Yea, I have prayed at their
burials, one after another, and the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet hath
seen them to their graves."

Being now more thoroughly awake to their present purpose, he took his
staff and struck forcibly on the floor, till there came an echo from
each deserted chamber, but no menial to answer their summons. They
therefore walked along the passage, and again paused, opposite to the
great front window, through which was seen the crowd in the shadow and
partial moonlight of the street beneath. On their right hand was the
open door of a chamber, and a closed one on their left.

The clergyman pointed his cane to the carved oak panel of the latter.

"Within that chamber," observed he, "a whole lifetime since, did I sit
by the death-bed of a goodly young man who, being now at the last
gasp--" Apparently, there was some powerful excitement in the ideas
which had now flashed across his mind. He snatched the torch from his
companion's hand, and threw open the door with such sudden violence
that the flame was extinguished, leaving them no other light than the
moonbeams which fell through two windows into the spacious chamber. It
was sufficient to discover all that could be known. In a high-backed
oaken arm-chair, upright, with her hands clasped across her breast and
her head thrown back, sat the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet. The
stately dame had fallen on her knees with her forehead on the holy
knees of the Old Maid, one hand upon the floor and the other pressed
convulsively against her heart. It clutched a lock of hair--once
sable, now discolored with a greenish mould.

As the priest and layman advanced into the chamber the Old Maid's
features assumed such a semblance of shifting expression that they
trusted to hear the whole mystery explained by a single word. But it
was only the shadow of a tattered curtain waving betwixt the dead face
and the moonlight.

"Both dead!" said the venerable man. "Then who shall divulge the
secret? Methinks it glimmers to and fro in my mind like the light and
shadow across the Old Maid's face. And now 'tis gone!"




PETER GOLDTHWAITE'S TREASURE.


"And so, Peter, you won't even consider of the business?" said Mr.
John Brown, buttoning his surtout over the snug rotundity of his
person and drawing on his gloves. "You positively refuse to let me
have this crazy old house, and the land under and adjoining, at the
price named?"

"Neither at that, nor treble the sum," responded the gaunt, grizzled
and threadbare Peter Goldthwaite. "The fact is, Mr. Brown, you must
find another site for your brick block and be content to leave my
estate with the present owner. Next summer I intend to put a splendid
new mansion over the cellar of the old house."

"Pho, Peter!" cried Mr. Brown as he opened the kitchen door; "content
yourself with building castles in the air, where house-lots are
cheaper than on earth, to say nothing of the cost of bricks and
mortar. Such foundations are solid enough for your edifices, while
this underneath us is just the thing for mine; and so we may both be
suited. What say you, again?"

"Precisely what I said before, Mr. Brown," answered Peter Goldthwaite.
"And, as for castles in the air, mine may not be as magnificent as
that sort of architecture, but perhaps as substantial, Mr. Brown, as
the very respectable brick block with dry-goods stores, tailors' shops
and banking-rooms on the lower floor, and lawyers' offices in the
second story, which you are so anxious to substitute."

"And the cost, Peter? Eh?" said Mr. Brown as he withdrew in something
of a pet. "That, I suppose, will be provided for off-hand by drawing a
check on Bubble Bank?"

John Brown and Peter Goldthwaite had been jointly known to the
commercial world between twenty and thirty years before under the firm
of Goldthwaite & Brown; which copartnership, however, was speedily
dissolved by the natural incongruity of its constituent parts. Since
that event, John Brown, with exactly the qualities of a thousand other
John Browns, and by just such plodding methods as they used, had
prospered wonderfully and become one of the wealthiest John Browns on
earth. Peter Goldthwaite, on the contrary, after innumerable schemes
which ought to have collected all the coin and paper currency of the
country into his coffers, was as needy a gentleman as ever wore a
patch upon his elbow. The contrast between him and his former partner
may be briefly marked, for Brown never reckoned upon luck, yet always
had it, while Peter made luck the main condition of his projects, and
always missed it. While the means held out his speculations had been
magnificent, but were chiefly confined of late years to such small
business as adventures in the lottery. Once he had gone on a
gold-gathering expedition somewhere to the South, and ingeniously
contrived to empty his pockets more thoroughly than ever, while
others, doubtless, were filling theirs with native bullion by the
handful. More recently he had expended a legacy of a thousand or two
of dollars in purchasing Mexican scrip, and thereby became the
proprietor of a province; which, however, so far as Peter could find
out, was situated where he might have had an empire for the same
money--in the clouds. From a search after this valuable real estate
Peter returned so gaunt and threadbare that on reaching New England
the scarecrows in the corn-fields beckoned to him as he passed by.
"They did but flutter in the wind," quoth Peter Goldthwaite. No,
Peter, they beckoned, for the scarecrows knew their brother.

At the period of our story his whole visible income would not have
paid the tax of the old mansion in which we find him. It was one of
those rusty, moss-grown, many-peaked wooden houses which are scattered
about the streets of our elder towns, with a beetle-browed second
story projecting over the foundation, as if it frowned at the novelty
around it. This old paternal edifice, needy as he was, and though,
being centrally situated on the principal street of the town, it would
have brought him a handsome sum, the sagacious Peter had his own
reasons for never parting with, either by auction or private sale.
There seemed, indeed, to be a fatality that connected him with his
birthplace; for, often as he had stood on the verge of ruin, and
standing there even now, he had not yet taken the step beyond it which
would have compelled him to surrender the house to his creditors. So
here he dwelt with bad luck till good should come.

Here, then, in his kitchen--the only room where a spark of fire took
off the chill of a November evening--poor Peter Goldthwaite had just
been visited by his rich old partner. At the close of their interview,
Peter, with rather a mortified look, glanced downward at his dress,
parts of which appeared as ancient as the days of Goldthwaite & Brown.
His upper garment was a mixed surtout, woefully faded, and patched
with newer stuff on each elbow; beneath this he wore a threadbare
black coat, some of the silk buttons of which had been replaced with
others of a different pattern; and, lastly, though he lacked not a
pair of gray pantaloons, they were very shabby ones, and had been
partially turned brown by the frequent toasting of Peter's shins
before a scanty fire. Peter's person was in keeping with his goodly
apparel. Gray-headed, hollow-eyed, pale-cheeked and lean-bodied, he
was the perfect picture of a man who had fed on windy schemes and
empty hopes till he could neither live on such unwholesome trash nor
stomach more substantial food. But, withal, this Peter Goldthwaite,
crack-brained simpleton as, perhaps, he was, might have cut a very
brilliant figure in the world had he employed his imagination in the
airy business of poetry instead of making it a demon of mischief in
mercantile pursuits. After all, he was no bad fellow, but as harmless
as a child, and as honest and honorable, and as much of the gentleman
which Nature meant him for, as an irregular life and depressed
circumstances will permit any man to be.

As Peter stood on the uneven bricks of his hearth looking round at the
disconsolate old kitchen his eyes began to kindle with the
illumination of an enthusiasm that never long deserted him. He raised
his hand, clenched it and smote it energetically against the smoky
panel over the fireplace.

"The time is come," said he; "with such a treasure at command, it were
folly to be a poor man any longer. Tomorrow morning I will begin with
the garret, nor desist till I have torn the house down."

Deep in the chimney-corner, like a witch in a dark cavern, sat a
little old woman mending one of the two pairs of stockings wherewith
Peter Goldthwaite kept his toes from being frost-bitten. As the feet
were ragged past all darning, she had cut pieces out of a cast-off
flannel petticoat to make new soles. Tabitha Porter was an old maid
upward of sixty years of age, fifty-five of which she had sat in that
same chimney-corner, such being the length of time since Peter's
grandfather had taken her from the almshouse. She had no friend but
Peter, nor Peter any friend but Tabitha; so long as Peter might have a
shelter for his own head, Tabitha would know where to shelter hers,
or, being homeless elsewhere, she would take her master by the hand
and bring him to her native home, the almshouse. Should it ever be
necessary, she loved him well enough to feed him with her last morsel
and clothe him with her under-petticoat. But Tabitha was a queer old
woman, and, though never infected with Peter's flightiness, had become
so accustomed to his freaks and follies that she viewed them all as
matters of course. Hearing him threaten to tear the house down, she
looked quietly up from her work.

"Best leave the kitchen till the last, Mr. Peter," said she.

"The sooner we have it all down, the better," said Peter Goldthwaite.
"I am tired to death of living in this cold, dark, windy, smoky,
creaking, groaning, dismal old house. I shall feel like a younger man
when we get into my splendid brick mansion, as, please Heaven, we
shall by this time next autumn. You shall have a room on the sunny
side, old Tabby, finished and furnished as best may suit your own
notions."

"I should like it pretty much such a room as this kitchen," answered
Tabitha. "It will never be like home to me till the chimney-corner
gets as black with smoke as this, and that won't be these hundred
years. How much do you mean to lay out on the house, Mr. Peter?"

"What is that to the purpose?" exclaimed Peter, loftily. "Did not my
great-grand-uncle, Peter Goldthwaite, who died seventy years ago, and
whose namesake I am, leave treasure enough to build twenty such?"

"I can't say but he did, Mr. Peter," said Tabitha, threading her
needle.

Tabitha well understood that Peter had reference to an immense hoard
of the precious metals which was said to exist somewhere in the cellar
or walls, or under the floors, or in some concealed closet or other
out-of-the-way nook of the old house. This wealth, according to
tradition, had been accumulated by a former Peter Goldthwaite whose
character seems to have borne a remarkable similitude to that of the
Peter of our story. Like him, he was a wild projector, seeking to heap
up gold by the bushel and the cart-load instead of scraping it
together coin by coin. Like Peter the second, too, his projects had
almost invariably failed, and, but for the magnificent success of the
final one, would have left him with hardly a coat and pair of breeches
to his gaunt and grizzled person. Reports were various as to the
nature of his fortunate speculation, one intimating that the ancient
Peter had made the gold by alchemy; another, that he had conjured it
out of people's pockets by the black art; and a third--still more
unaccountable--that the devil had given him free access to the old
provincial treasury. It was affirmed, however, that some secret
impediment had debarred him from the enjoyment of his riches, and that
he had a motive for concealing them from his heir, or, at any rate,
had died without disclosing the place of deposit. The present Peter's
father had faith enough in the story to cause the cellar to be dug
over. Peter himself chose to consider the legend as an indisputable
truth, and amid his many troubles had this one consolation--that,
should all other resources fail, he might build up his fortunes by
tearing his house down. Yet, unless he felt a lurking distrust of the
golden tale, it is difficult to account for his permitting the
paternal roof to stand so long, since he had never yet seen the moment
when his predecessor's treasure would not have found plenty of room in
his own strong-box. But now was the crisis. Should he delay the search
a little longer, the house would pass from the lineal heir, and with
it the vast heap of gold, to remain in its burial-place till the ruin
of the aged walls should discover it to strangers of a future
generation.

"Yes," cried Peter Goldthwaite, again; "to-morrow I will set about
it."

The deeper he looked at the matter, the more certain of success grew
Peter. His spirits were naturally so elastic that even now, in the
blasted autumn of his age, he could often compete with the springtime
gayety of other people. Enlivened by his brightening prospects, he
began to caper about the kitchen like a hobgoblin, with the queerest
antics of his lean limbs and gesticulations of his starved features.
Nay, in the exuberance of his feelings, he seized both of Tabitha's
hands and danced the old lady across the floor till the oddity of her
rheumatic motions set him into a roar of laughter, which was echoed
back from the rooms and chambers, as if Peter Goldthwaite were
laughing in every one. Finally, he bounded upward, almost out of
sight, into the smoke that clouded the roof of the kitchen, and,
alighting safely on the floor again, endeavored to resume his
customary gravity.

"To-morrow, at sunrise," he repeated, taking his lamp to retire to
bed, "I'll see whether this treasure be hid in the wall of the
garret."

"And, as we're out of wood, Mr. Peter," said Tabitha, puffing and
panting with her late gymnastics, "as fast as you tear the house down
I'll make a fire with the pieces."

Gorgeous that night were the dreams of Peter Goldthwaite. At one time
he was turning a ponderous key in an iron door not unlike the door of
a sepulchre, but which, being opened, disclosed a vault heaped up with
gold coin as plentifully as golden corn in a granary. There were
chased goblets, also, and tureens, salvers, dinner-dishes and
dish-covers of gold or silver-gilt, besides chains and other jewels,
incalculably rich, though tarnished with the damps of the vault; for,
of all the wealth that was irrevocably lost to man, whether buried in
the earth or sunken in the sea, Peter Goldthwaite had found it in this
one treasure-place. Anon he had returned to the old house as poor as
ever, and was received at the door by the gaunt and grizzled figure of
a man whom he might have mistaken for himself, only that his garments
were of a much elder fashion. But the house, without losing its former
aspect, had been changed into a palace of the precious metals. The
floors, walls and ceilings were of burnished silver; the doors, the
window-frames, the cornices, the balustrades and the steps of the
staircase, of pure gold; and silver, with gold bottoms, were the
chairs, and gold, standing on silver legs, the high chests of drawers,
and silver the bedsteads, with blankets of woven gold and sheets of
silver tissue. The house had evidently been transmuted by a single
touch, for it retained all the marks that Peter remembered, but in
gold or silver instead of wood, and the initials of his name--which
when a boy he had cut in the wooden door-post--remained as deep in the
pillar of gold. A happy man would have been Peter Goldthwaite except
for a certain ocular deception which, whenever he glanced backward,
caused the house to darken from its glittering magnificence into the
sordid gloom of yesterday.

Up betimes rose Peter, seized an axe, hammer and saw which he had
placed by his bedside, and hied him to the garret. It was but scantily
lighted up as yet by the frosty fragments of a sunbeam which began to
glimmer through the almost opaque bull-eyes of the window. A moralizer
might find abundant themes for his speculative and impracticable
wisdom in a garret. There is the limbo of departed fashions, aged
trifles of a day and whatever was valuable only to one generation of
men, and which passed to the garret when that generation passed to the
grave--not for safekeeping, but to be out of the way. Peter saw piles
of yellow and musty account-books in parchment covers, wherein
creditors long dead and buried had written the names of dead and
buried debtors in ink now so faded that their moss-grown tombstones
were more legible. He found old moth-eaten garments, all in rags and
tatters, or Peter would have put them on. Here was a naked and rusty
sword--not a sword of service, but a gentleman's small French
rapier--which had never left its scabbard till it lost it. Here were
canes of twenty different sorts, but no gold-headed ones, and
shoebuckles of various pattern and material, but not silver nor set
with precious stones. Here was a large box full of shoes with high
heels and peaked toes. Here, on a shelf, were a multitude of phials
half filled with old apothecary's stuff which, when the other half had
done its business on Peter's ancestors, had been brought hither from
the death-chamber. Here--not to give a longer inventory of articles
that will never be put up at auction--was the fragment of a
full-length looking-glass which by the dust and dimness of its surface
made the picture of these old things look older than the reality. When
Peter, not knowing that there was a mirror there, caught the faint
traces of his own figure, he partly imagined that the former Peter
Goldthwaite had come back either to assist or impede his search for
the hidden wealth. And at that moment a strange notion glimmered
through his brain that he was the identical Peter who had concealed
the gold, and ought to know whereabout it lay. This, however, he had
unaccountably forgotten.

"Well, Mr. Peter!" cried Tabitha, on the garret stairs. "Have you torn
the house down enough to heat the teakettle?"

"Not yet, old Tabby," answered Peter, "but that's soon done, as you
shall see." With the word in his mouth, he uplifted the axe, and laid
about him so vigorously that the dust flew, the boards crashed, and in
a twinkling the old woman had an apron full of broken rubbish.

"We shall get our winter's wood cheap," quoth Tabitha.

The good work being thus commenced, Peter beat down all before him,
smiting and hewing at the joints and timbers, unclenching spike-nails,
ripping and tearing away boards, with a tremendous racket from morning
till night. He took care, however, to leave the outside shell of the
house untouched, so that the neighbors might not suspect what was
going on.

Never, in any of his vagaries, though each had made him happy while it
lasted, had Peter been happier than now. Perhaps, after all, there was
something in Peter Goldthwaite's turn of mind which brought him an
inward recompense for all the external evil that it caused. If he were
poor, ill-clad, even hungry and exposed, as it were, to be utterly
annihilated by a precipice of impending ruin, yet only his body
remained in these miserable circumstances, while his aspiring soul
enjoyed the sunshine of a bright futurity. It was his nature to be
always young, and the tendency of his mode of life to keep him so.
Gray hairs were nothing--no, nor wrinkles nor infirmity; he might look
old, indeed, and be somewhat disagreeably connected with a gaunt old
figure much the worse for wear, but the true, the essential Peter was
a young man of high hopes just entering on the world. At the kindling
of each new fire his burnt-out youth rose afresh from the old embers
and ashes. It rose exulting now. Having lived thus long--not too long,
but just to the right age--a susceptible bachelor with warm and tender
dreams, he resolved, so soon as the hidden gold should flash to light,
to go a-wooing and win the love of the fairest maid in town. What
heart could resist him? Happy Peter Goldthwaite!

Every evening--as Peter had long absented himself from his former
lounging-places at insurance offices, news-rooms, and book-stores, and
as the honor of his company was seldom requested in private
circles--he and Tabitha used to sit down sociably by the kitchen
hearth. This was always heaped plentifully with the rubbish of his
day's labor. As the foundation of the fire there would be a
goodly-sized back-log of red oak, which after being sheltered from
rain or damp above a century still hissed with the heat and distilled
streams of water from each end, as if the tree had been cut down
within a week or two. Next there were large sticks, sound, black and
heavy, which had lost the principle of decay and were indestructible
except by fire, wherein they glowed like red-hot bars of iron. On this
solid basis Tabitha would rear a lighter structure, composed of the
splinters of door-panels, ornamented mouldings, and such quick
combustibles, which caught like straw and threw a brilliant blaze high
up the spacious flue, making its sooty sides visible almost to the
chimney-top. Meantime, the gloom of the old kitchen would be chased
out of the cobwebbed corners and away from the dusky cross-beams
overhead, and driven nobody could tell whither, while Peter smiled
like a gladsome man and Tabitha seemed a picture of comfortable age.
All this, of course, was but an emblem of the bright fortune which the
destruction of the house would shed upon its occupants.

While the dry pine was flaming and crackling like an irregular
discharge of fairy-musketry, Peter sat looking and listening in a
pleasant state of excitement; but when the brief blaze and uproar were
succeeded by the dark-red glow, the substantial heat and the deep
singing sound which were to last throughout the evening, his humor
became talkative. One night--the hundredth time--he teased Tabitha to
tell him something new about his great-granduncle.

"You have been sitting in that chimney-corner fifty-five years, old
Tabby, and must have heard many a tradition about him," said Peter.
"Did not you tell me that when you first came to the house there was
an old woman sitting where you sit now who had been housekeeper to the
famous Peter Goldthwaite?"

"So there was, Mr. Peter," answered Tabitha, "and she was near about a
hundred years old. She used to say that she and old Peter Goldthwaite
had often spent a sociable evening by the kitchen fire--pretty much as
you and I are doing now, Mr. Peter."

"The old fellow must have resembled me in more points than one," said
Peter, complacently, "or he never would have grown so rich. But
methinks he might have invested the money better than he did. No
interest! nothing but good security! and the house to be torn down to
come at it! What made him hide it so snug, Tabby?"

"Because he could not spend it," said Tabitha, "for as often as he
went to unlock the chest the Old Scratch came behind and caught his
arm. The money, they say, was paid Peter out of his purse, and he
wanted Peter to give him a deed of this house and land, which Peter
swore he would not do."

"Just as I swore to John Brown, my old partner," remarked Peter. "But
this is all nonsense, Tabby; I don't believe the story."

"Well, it may not be just the truth," said Tabitha, "for some folks
say that Peter did make over the house to the Old Scratch, and that's
the reason it has always been so unlucky to them that lived in it. And
as soon as Peter had given him the deed the chest flew open, and Peter
caught up a handful of the gold. But, lo and behold! there was nothing
in his fist but a parcel of old rags."

"Hold your tongue, you silly old Tabby!" cried Peter, in great wrath.
"They were as good golden guineas as ever bore the effigies of the
king of England. It seems as if I could recollect the whole
circumstance, and how I, or old Peter, or whoever it was, thrust in my
hand, or his hand, and drew it out all of a blaze with gold. Old rags
indeed!"

But it was not an old woman's legend that would discourage Peter
Goldthwaite. All night long he slept among pleasant dreams, and awoke
at daylight with a joyous throb of the heart which few are fortunate
enough to feel beyond their boyhood. Day after day he labored hard
without wasting a moment except at meal-times, when Tabitha summoned
him to the pork and cabbage, or such other sustenance as she had
picked up or Providence had sent them. Being a truly pious man, Peter
never failed to ask a blessing--if the food were none of the best,
then so much the more earnestly, as it was more needed--nor to return
thanks, if the dinner had been scanty, yet for the good appetite which
was better than a sick stomach at a feast. Then did he hurry back to
his toil, and in a moment was lost to sight in a cloud of dust from
the old walls, though sufficiently perceptible to the ear by the
clatter which he raised in the midst of it.

How enviable is the consciousness of being usefully employed! Nothing
troubled Peter, or nothing but those phantoms of the mind which seem
like vague recollections, yet have also the aspect of presentiments.
He often paused with his axe uplifted in the air, and said to himself,
"Peter Goldthwaite, did you never strike this blow before?" or "Peter,
what need of tearing the whole house down? Think a little while, and
you will remember where the gold is hidden." Days and weeks passed on,
however, without any remarkable discovery. Sometimes, indeed, a lean
gray rat peeped forth at the lean gray man, wondering what devil had
got into the old house, which had always been so peaceable till now.
And occasionally Peter sympathized with the sorrows of a female mouse
who had brought five or six pretty, little, soft and delicate young
ones into the world just in time to see them crushed by its ruin. But
as yet no treasure.

By this time, Peter, being as determined as fate and as diligent as
time, had made an end with the uppermost regions and got down to the
second story, where he was busy in one of the front chambers. It had
formerly been the state-bedchamber, and was honored by tradition as
the sleeping-apartment of Governor Dudley and many other eminent
guests. The furniture was gone. There were remnants of faded and
tattered paper-hangings, but larger spaces of bare wall ornamented
with charcoal sketches, chiefly of people's heads in profile. These
being specimens of Peter's youthful genius, it went more to his heart
to obliterate them than if they had been pictures on a church wall by
Michael Angelo. One sketch, however, and that the best one, affected
him differently. It represented a ragged man partly supporting himself
on a spade and bending his lean body over a hole in the earth, with
one hand extended to grasp something that he had found. But close
behind him, with a fiendish laugh on his features, appeared a figure
with horns, a tufted tail and a cloven hoof.

"Avaunt, Satan!" cried Peter. "The man shall have his gold." Uplifting
his axe, he hit the horned gentleman such a blow on the head as not
only demolished him, but the treasure-seeker also, and caused the
whole scene to vanish like magic. Moreover, his axe broke quite
through the plaster and laths and discovered a cavity.

"Mercy on us, Mr. Peter! Are you quarrelling with the Old Scratch?"
said Tabitha, who was seeking some fuel to put under the dinner-pot.

Without answering the old woman, Peter broke down a further space of
the wall, and laid open a small closet or cupboard on one side of the
fireplace, about breast-high from the ground. It contained nothing but
a brass lamp covered with verdigris, and a dusty piece of parchment.
While Peter inspected the latter, Tabitha seized the lamp and began to
rub it with her apron.

"There is no use in rubbing it, Tabitha," said Peter. "It is not
Aladdin's lamp, though I take it to be a token of as much luck. Look
here, Tabby!"

Tabitha took the parchment and held it close to her nose, which was
saddled with a pair of iron-bound spectacles. But no sooner had she
begun to puzzle over it than she burst into a chuckling laugh, holding
both her hands against her sides.

"You can't make a fool of the old woman," cried she. "This is your own
handwriting, Mr. Peter, the same as in the letter you sent me from
Mexico."

"There is certainly a considerable resemblance," said Peter, again
examining the parchment. "But you know yourself, Tabby, that this
closet must have been plastered up before you came to the house or I
came into the world. No; this is old Peter Goldthwaite's writing.
These columns of pounds, shillings and pence are his figures, denoting
the amount of the treasure, and this, at the bottom, is doubtless a
reference to the place of concealment. But the ink has either faded or
peeled off, so that it is absolutely illegible. What a pity!"

"Well, this lamp is as good as new. That's some comfort," said
Tabitha.

"A lamp!" thought Peter. "That indicates light on my researches."

For the present Peter felt more inclined to ponder on this discovery
than to resume his labors. After Tabitha had gone down stairs he stood
poring over the parchment at one of the front windows, which was so
obscured with dust that the sun could barely throw an uncertain shadow
of the casement across the floor. Peter forced it open and looked out
upon the great street of the town, while the sun looked in at his old
house. The air, though mild, and even warm, thrilled Peter as with a
dash of water.

It was the first day of the January thaw. The snow lay deep upon the
housetops, but was rapidly dissolving into millions of water-drops,
which sparkled downward through the sunshine with the noise of a
summer shower beneath the eaves. Along the street the trodden snow was
as hard and solid as a pavement of white marble, and had not yet grown
moist in the spring-like temperature. But when Peter thrust forth his
head, he saw that the inhabitants, if not the town, were already
thawed out by this warm day, after two or three weeks of winter
weather. It gladdened him--a gladness with a sigh breathing through
it--to see the stream of ladies gliding along the slippery sidewalks
with their red cheeks set off by quilted hoods, boas and sable capes
like roses amidst a new kind of foliage. The sleigh bells jingled to
and fro continually, sometimes announcing the arrival of a sleigh from
Vermont laden with the frozen bodies of porkers or sheep, and perhaps
a deer or two; sometimes, of a regular marketman with chickens, geese
and turkeys, comprising the whole colony of a barn-yard; and
sometimes, of a farmer and his dame who had come to town partly for
the ride, partly to go a-shopping and partly for the sale of some eggs
and butter. This couple rode in an old-fashioned square sleigh which
had served them twenty winters and stood twenty summers in the sun
beside their door. Now a gentleman and lady skimmed the snow in an
elegant car shaped somewhat like a cockle-shell; now a stage-sleigh
with its cloth curtains thrust aside to admit the sun dashed rapidly
down the street, whirling in and out among the vehicles that
obstructed its passage; now came round a corner the similitude of
Noah's ark on runners, being an immense open sleigh with seats for
fifty people and drawn by a dozen horses. This spacious receptacle was
populous with merry maids and merry bachelors, merry girls and boys
and merry old folks, all alive with fun and grinning to the full width
of their mouths. They kept up a buzz of babbling voices and low
laughter, and sometimes burst into a deep, joyous shout which the
spectators answered with three cheers, while a gang of roguish boys
let drive their snow-balls right among the pleasure-party. The sleigh
passed on, and when concealed by a bend of the street was still
audible by a distant cry of merriment.

Never had Peter beheld a livelier scene than was constituted by all
these accessories--the bright sun, the flashing water-drops, the
gleaming snow, the cheerful multitude, the variety of rapid vehicles
and the jingle-jangle of merry bells which made the heart dance to
their music. Nothing dismal was to be seen except that peaked piece of
antiquity Peter Goldthwaite's house, which might well look sad
externally, since such a terrible consumption was preying on its
insides. And Peter's gaunt figure, half visible in the projecting
second story, was worthy of his house.

"Peter! How goes it, friend Peter?" cried a voice across the street as
Peter was drawing in his head. "Look out here, Peter!"

Peter looked, and saw his old partner, Mr. John Brown, on the opposite
sidewalk, portly and comfortable, with his furred cloak thrown open,
disclosing a handsome surtout beneath. His voice had directed the
attention of the whole town to Peter Goldthwaite's window, and to the
dusty scarecrow which appeared at it.

"I say, Peter!" cried Mr. Brown, again; "what the devil are you about
there, that I hear such a racket whenever I pass by? You are repairing
the old house, I suppose, making a new one of it? Eh?"

"Too late for that, I am afraid, Mr. Brown," replied Peter. "If I make
it new, it will be new inside and out, from the cellar upward."

"Had not you better let me take the job?" said Mr. Brown,
significantly.

"Not yet," answered Peter, hastily shutting the window; for ever since
he had been in search of the treasure he hated to have people stare at
him.

As he drew back, ashamed of his outward poverty, yet proud of the
secret wealth within his grasp, a haughty smile shone out on Peter's
visage with precisely the effect of the dim sunbeams in the squalid
chamber. He endeavored to assume such a mien as his ancestor had
probably worn when he gloried in the building of a strong house for a
home to many generations of his posterity. But the chamber was very
dark to his snow-dazzled eyes, and very dismal, too, in contrast with
the living scene that he had just looked upon. His brief glimpse into
the street had given him a forcible impression of the manner in which
the world kept itself cheerful and prosperous by social pleasures and
an intercourse of business, while he in seclusion was pursuing an
object that might possibly be a phantasm by a method which most people
would call madness. It is one great advantage of a gregarious mode of
life that each person rectifies his mind by other minds and squares
his conduct to that of his neighbors, so as seldom to be lost in
eccentricity. Peter Goldthwaite had exposed himself to this influence
by merely looking out of the window. For a while he doubted whether
there were any hidden chest of gold, and in that case whether it was
so exceedingly wise to tear the house down only to be convinced of its
non-existence.

But this was momentary. Peter the Destroyer resumed the task which
Fate had assigned him, nor faltered again till it was accomplished. In
the course of his search he met with many things that are usually
found in the ruins of an old house, and also with some that are not.
What seemed most to the purpose was a rusty key which had been thrust
into a chink of the wall, with a wooden label appended to the handle,
bearing the initials "P.G." Another singular discovery was that of a
bottle of wine walled up in an old oven. A tradition ran in the family
that Peter's grandfather, a jovial officer in the old French war, had
set aside many dozens of the precious liquor for the benefit of topers
then unborn. Peter needed no cordial to sustain his hopes, and
therefore kept the wine to gladden his success. Many half-pence did he
pick up that had been lost through the cracks of the floor, and some
few Spanish coins, and the half of a broken sixpence which had
doubtless been a love-token. There was likewise a silver coronation
medal of George III. But old Peter Goldthwaite's strong-box fled from
one dark corner to another, or otherwise eluded the second Peter's
clutches till, should he seek much farther, he must burrow into the
earth.

We will not follow him in his triumphant progress step by step.
Suffice it that Peter worked like a steam-engine and finished in that
one winter the job which all the former inhabitants of the house, with
time and the elements to aid them, had only half done in a century.
Except the kitchen, every room and chamber was now gutted. The house
was nothing but a shell, the apparition of a house, as unreal as the
painted edifices of a theatre. It was like the perfect rind of a great
cheese in which a mouse had dwelt and nibbled till it was a cheese no
more. And Peter was the mouse.

What Peter had torn down, Tabitha had burnt up, for she wisely
considered that without a house they should need no wood to warm it,
and therefore economy was nonsense. Thus the whole house might be said
to have dissolved in smoke and flown up among the clouds through the
great black flue of the kitchen chimney. It was an admirable parallel
to the feat of the man who jumped down his own throat.

On the night between the last day of winter and the first of spring
every chink and cranny had been ransacked except within the precincts
of the kitchen. This fated evening was an ugly one. A snow-storm had
set in some hours before, and was still driven and tossed about the
atmosphere by a real hurricane which fought against the house as if
the prince of the air in person were putting the final stroke to
Peter's labors. The framework being so much weakened and the inward
props removed, it would have been no marvel if in some stronger
wrestle of the blast the rotten walls of the edifice and all the
peaked roofs had come crashing down upon the owner's head. He,
however, was careless of the peril, but as wild and restless as the
night itself, or as the flame that quivered up the chimney at each
roar of the tempestuous wind.

"The wine, Tabitha," he cried--"my grandfather's rich old wine! We
will drink it now."

Tabitha arose from her smoke-blackened bench in the chimney-corner and
placed the bottle before Peter, close beside the old brass lamp which
had likewise been the prize of his researches. Peter held it before
his eyes, and, looking through the liquid medium, beheld the kitchen
illuminated with a golden glory which also enveloped Tabitha and
gilded her silver hair and converted her mean garments into robes of
queenly splendor. It reminded him of his golden dream.

"Mr. Peter," remarked Tabitha, "must the wine be drunk before the
money is found?"

"The money _is_ found!" exclaimed Peter, with a sort of fierceness.
"The chest is within my reach; I will not sleep till I have turned
this key in the rusty lock. But first of all let us drink."

There being no corkscrew in the house, he smote the neck of the bottle
with old Peter Goldthwaite's rusty key, and decapitated the sealed
cork at a single blow. He then filled two little china teacups which
Tabitha had brought from the cupboard. So clear and brilliant was this
aged wine that it shone within the cups and rendered the sprig of
scarlet flowers at the bottom of each more distinctly visible than
when there had been no wine there. Its rich and delicate perfume
wasted itself round the kitchen.

"Drink, Tabitha!" cried Peter. "Blessings on the honest old fellow who
set aside this good liquor for you and me! And here's to Peter
Goldthwaite's memory!"

"And good cause have we to remember him," quoth Tabitha as she drank.

How many years, and through what changes of fortune and various
calamity, had that bottle hoarded up its effervescent joy, to be
quaffed at last by two such boon-companions! A portion of the
happiness of a former age had been kept for them, and was now set free
in a crowd of rejoicing visions to sport amid the storm and desolation
of the present time. Until they have finished the bottle we must turn
our eyes elsewhere.

It so chanced that on this stormy night Mr. John Brown found himself
ill at ease in his wire-cushioned arm-chair by the glowing grate of
anthracite which heated his handsome parlor. He was naturally a good
sort of a man, and kind and pitiful whenever the misfortunes of others
happened to reach his heart through the padded vest of his own
prosperity. This evening he had thought much about his old partner,
Peter Goldthwaite, his strange vagaries and continual ill-luck, the
poverty of his dwelling at Mr. Brown's last visit, and Peter's crazed
and haggard aspect when he had talked with him at the window.

"Poor fellow!" thought Mr. John Brown. "Poor crack-brained Peter
Goldthwaite! For old acquaintance' sake I ought to have taken care
that he was comfortable this rough winter." These feelings grew so
powerful that, in spite of the inclement weather, he resolved to visit
Peter Goldthwaite immediately.

The strength of the impulse was really singular. Every shriek of the
blast seemed a summons, or would have seemed so had Mr. Brown been
accustomed to hear the echoes of his own fancy in the wind. Much
amazed at such active benevolence, he huddled himself in his cloak,
muffled his throat and ears in comforters and handkerchiefs, and, thus
fortified, bade defiance to the tempest. But the powers of the air had
rather the best of the battle. Mr. Brown was just weathering the
corner by Peter Goldthwaite's house when the hurricane caught him off
his feet, tossed him face downward into a snow-bank and proceeded to
bury his protuberant part beneath fresh drifts. There seemed little
hope of his reappearance earlier than the next thaw. At the same
moment his hat was snatched away and whirled aloft into some
far-distant region whence no tidings have as yet returned.

Nevertheless Mr. Brown contrived to burrow a passage through the
snow-drift, and with his bare head bent against the storm floundered
onward to Peter's door. There was such a creaking and groaning and
rattling, and such an ominous shaking, throughout the crazy edifice
that the loudest rap would have been inaudible to those within. He
therefore entered without ceremony, and groped his way to the kitchen.
His intrusion even there was unnoticed. Peter and Tabitha stood with
their backs to the door, stooping over a large chest which apparently
they had just dragged from a cavity or concealed closet on the left
side of the chimney. By the lamp in the old woman's hand Mr. Brown saw
that the chest was barred and clamped with iron, strengthened with
iron plates and studded with iron nails, so as to be a fit receptacle
in which the wealth of one century might be hoarded up for the wants
of another.

Peter Goldthwaite was inserting a key into the lock.

"Oh, Tabitha," cried he, with tremulous rapture, "how shall I endure
the effulgence? The gold!--the bright, bright gold! Methinks I can
remember my last glance at it just as the iron-plated lid fell down.
And ever since, being seventy years, it has been blazing in secret and
gathering its splendor against this glorious moment. It will flash
upon us like the noonday sun."

"Then shade your eyes, Mr. Peter!" said Tabitha, with somewhat less
patience than usual. "But, for mercy's sake, do turn the key!"

And with a strong effort of both hands Peter did force the rusty key
through the intricacies of the rusty lock. Mr. Brown, in the mean
time, had drawn near and thrust his eager visage between those of the
other two at the instant that Peter threw up the lid. No sudden blaze
illuminated the kitchen.

"What's here?" exclaimed Tabitha, adjusting her spectacles and holding
the lamp over the open chest. "Old Peter Goldthwaite's hoard of old
rags!"

"Pretty much so, Tabby," said Mr. Brown, lifting a handful of the
treasure.

Oh what a ghost of dead and buried wealth had Peter Goldthwaite raised
to scare himself out of his scanty wits withal! Here was the semblance
of an incalculable sum, enough to purchase the whole town and build
every street anew, but which, vast as it was, no sane man would have
given a solid sixpence for. What, then, in sober earnest, were the
delusive treasures of the chest? Why, here were old provincial bills
of credit and treasury notes and bills of land-banks, and all other
bubbles of the sort, from the first issue--above a century and a half
ago--down nearly to the Revolution. Bills of a thousand pounds were
intermixed with parchment pennies, and worth no more than they.

"And this, then, is old Peter Goldthwaite's treasure!" said John
Brown. "Your namesake, Peter, was something like yourself; and when
the provincial currency had depreciated fifty or seventy-five per
cent, he bought it up in expectation of a rise. I have heard my
grandfather say that old Peter gave his father a mortgage of this very
house and land to raise cash for his silly project. But the currency
kept sinking till nobody would take it as a gift, and there was old
Peter Goldthwaite, like Peter the second, with thousands in his
strong-box and hardly a coat to his back. He went mad upon the
strength of it. But never mind, Peter; it is just the sort of capital
for building castles in the air."

"The house will be down about our ears," cried Tabitha as the wind
shook it with increasing violence.

"Let it fall," said Peter, folding his arms, as he seated himself upon
the chest.

"No, no, my old friend Peter!" said John Brown. "I have house-room for
you and Tabby, and a safe vault for the chest of treasure. To-morrow
we will try to come to an agreement about the sale of this old house;
real estate is well up, and I could afford you a pretty handsome
price."

"And I," observed Peter Goldthwaite, with reviving spirits, "have a
plan for laying out the cash to great advantage."

"Why, as to that," muttered John Brown to himself, "we must apply to
the next court for a guardian to take care of the solid cash; and if
Peter insists upon speculating, he may do it to his heart's content
with old Peter Goldthwaite's treasure."




CHIPPINGS WITH A CHISEL.


Passing a summer several years since at Edgartown, on the island of
Martha's Vineyard, I became acquainted with a certain carver of
tombstones who had travelled and voyaged thither from the interior of
Massachusetts in search of professional employment. The speculation
had turned out so successful that my friend expected to transmute
slate and marble into silver and gold to the amount of at least a
thousand dollars during the few months of his sojourn at Nantucket and
the Vineyard. The secluded life and the simple and primitive spirit
which still characterizes the inhabitants of those islands, especially
of Martha's Vineyard, insure their dead friends a longer and dearer
remembrance than the daily novelty and revolving bustle of the world
can elsewhere afford to beings of the past. Yet, while every family is
anxious to erect a memorial to its departed members, the untainted
breath of Ocean bestows such health and length of days upon the people
of the isles as would cause a melancholy dearth of business to a
resident artist in that line. His own monument, recording his decease
by starvation, would probably be an early specimen of his skill.
Gravestones, therefore, have generally been an article of imported
merchandise.

In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown--where the dead
have lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has
returned to its original barrenness--in that ancient burial-ground I
noticed much variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated
a century back or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers
and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's-heads, crossbones,
scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with
here and there a winged cherub to direct the mourner's spirit upward.
These productions of Gothic taste must have been quite beyond the
colonial skill of the day, and were probably carved in London and
brought across the ocean to commemorate the defunct worthies of this
lonely isle. The more recent monuments are mere slabs of slate in the
ordinary style, without any superfluous flourishes to set off the bald
inscriptions. But others--and those far the most impressive both to my
taste and feelings--were roughly hewn from the gray rocks of the
island, evidently by the unskilled hands of surviving friends and
relatives. On some there were merely the initials of a name; some were
inscribed with misspelt prose or rhyme, in deep letters which the moss
and wintry rain of many years had not been able to obliterate. These,
these were graves where loved ones slept. It is an old theme of
satire, the falsehood and vanity of monumental eulogies; but when
affection and sorrow grave the letters with their own painful labor,
then we may be sure that they copy from the record on their hearts.

My acquaintance the sculptor--he may share that title with Greenough,
since the dauber of signs is a painter as well as Raphael--had found a
ready market for all his blank slabs of marble and full occupation in
lettering and ornamenting them. He was an elderly man, a descendant of
the old Puritan family of Wigglesworth, with a certain simplicity and
singleness both of heart and mind which, methinks, is more rarely
found among us Yankees than in any other community of people. In spite
of his gray head and wrinkled brow, he was quite like a child in all
matters save what had some reference to his own business; he seemed,
unless my fancy misled me, to view mankind in no other relation than
as people in want of tombstones, and his literary attainments
evidently comprehended very little either of prose or poetry which had
not at one time or other been inscribed on slate or marble. His sole
task and office among the immortal pilgrims of the tomb--the duty for
which Providence had sent the old man into the world, as it were with
a chisel in his hand--was to label the dead bodies, lest their names
should be forgotten at the resurrection. Yet he had not failed, within
a narrow scope, to gather a few sprigs of earthly, and more than
earthly, wisdom--the harvest of many a grave. And, lugubrious as his
calling might appear, he was as cheerful an old soul as health and
integrity and lack of care could make him, and used to set to work
upon one sorrowful inscription or another with that sort of spirit
which impels a man to sing at his labor. On the whole, I found Mr.
Wigglesworth an entertaining, and often instructive, if not an
interesting, character; and, partly for the charm of his society, and
still more because his work has an invariable attraction for "man that
is born of woman," I was accustomed to spend some hours a day at his
workshop. The quaintness of his remarks and their not infrequent
truth--a truth condensed and pointed by the limited sphere of his
view--gave a raciness to his talk which mere worldliness and general
cultivation would at once have destroyed.

Sometimes we would discuss the respective merits of the various
qualities of marble, numerous slabs of which were resting against the
walls of the shop, or sometimes an hour or two would pass quietly
without a word on either side while I watched how neatly his chisel
struck out letter after letter of the names of the Nortons, the
Mayhews, the Luces, the Daggets, and other immemorial families of the
Vineyard. Often with an artist's pride the good old sculptor would
speak of favorite productions of his skill which were scattered
throughout the village graveyards of New England. But my chief and
most instructive amusement was to witness his interviews with his
customers, who held interminable consultations about the form and
fashion of the desired monuments, the buried excellence to be
commemorated, the anguish to be expressed, and finally the lowest
price in dollars and cents for which a marble transcript of their
feelings might be obtained. Really, my mind received many fresh ideas
which perhaps may remain in it even longer than Mr. Wigglesworth's
hardest marble will retain the deepest strokes of his chisel.

An elderly lady came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had
been killed by a whale in the Pacific Ocean no less than forty years
before. It was singular that so strong an impression of early feeling
should have survived through the changes of her subsequent life, in
the course of which she had been a wife and a mother, and, so far as I
could judge, a comfortable and happy woman. Reflecting within myself,
it appeared to me that this lifelong sorrow--as, in all good faith,
she deemed it--was one of the most fortunate circumstances of her
history. It had given an ideality to her mind; it had kept her purer
and less earthy than she would otherwise have been by drawing a
portion of her sympathies apart from earth. Amid the throng of
enjoyments and the pressure of worldly care and all the warm
materialism of this life she had communed with a vision, and had been
the better for such intercourse. Faithful to the husband of her
maturity, and loving him with a far more real affection than she ever
could have felt for this dream of her girlhood, there had still been
an imaginative faith to the ocean-buried; so that an ordinary
character had thus been elevated and refined. Her sighs had been the
breath of Heaven to her soul. The good lady earnestly desired that the
proposed monument should be ornamented with a carved border of marine
plants interwined with twisted sea-shells, such as were probably
waving over her lover's skeleton or strewn around it in the far depths
of the Pacific. But, Mr. Wigglesworth's chisel being inadequate to the
task, she was forced to content herself with a rose hanging its head
from a broken stem.

After her departure I remarked that the symbol was none of the most
apt.

"And yet," said my friend the sculptor, embodying in this image the
thoughts that had been passing through my own mind, "that broken rose
has shed its sweet smell through forty years of the good woman's
life."

It was seldom that I could find such pleasant food for contemplation
as in the above instance. None of the applicants, I think, affected me
more disagreeably than an old man who came, with his fourth wife
hanging on his arm, to bespeak gravestones for the three former
occupants of his marriage-bed. I watched with some anxiety to see
whether his remembrance of either were more affectionate than of the
other two, but could discover no symptom of the kind. The three
monuments were all to be of the same material and form, and each
decorated in bas-relief with two weeping willows, one of these
sympathetic trees bending over its fellow, which was to be broken in
the midst and rest upon a sepulchral urn. This, indeed, was Mr.
Wigglesworth's standing emblem of conjugal bereavement. I shuddered at
the gray polygamist who had so utterly lost the holy sense of
individuality in wedlock that methought he was fain to reckon upon his
fingers how many women who had once slept by his side were now
sleeping in their graves. There was even--if I wrong him, it is no
great matter--a glance sidelong at his living spouse, as if he were
inclined to drive a thriftier bargain by bespeaking four gravestones
in a lot.

I was better pleased with a rough old whaling-captain who gave
directions for a broad marble slab divided into two compartments, one
of which was to contain an epitaph on his deceased wife and the other
to be left vacant till death should engrave his own name there. As is
frequently the case among the whalers of Martha's Vineyard, so much of
this storm-beaten widower's life had been tossed away on distant seas
that out of twenty years of matrimony he had spent scarce three, and
those at scattered intervals, beneath his own roof. Thus the wife of
his youth, though she died in his and her declining age, retained the
bridal dewdrops fresh around her memory.

My observations gave me the idea, and Mr. Wigglesworth confirmed it,
that husbands were more faithful in setting up memorials to their dead
wives than widows to their dead husbands. I was not ill-natured enough
to fancy that women less than men feel so sure of their own constancy
as to be willing to give a pledge of it in marble. It is more probably
the fact that, while men are able to reflect upon their lost
companions as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the other
hand, are conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the
departed whithersoever he has gone. Soul clings to soul, the living
dust has a sympathy with the dust of the grave; and by the very
strength of that sympathy the wife of the dead shrinks the more
sensitively from reminding the world of its existence. The link is
already strong enough; it needs no visible symbol. And, though a
shadow walks ever by her side and the touch of a chill hand is on her
bosom, yet life, and perchance its natural yearnings, may still be
warm within her and inspire her with new hopes of happiness. Then
would she mark out the grave the scent of which would be perceptible
on the pillow of the second bridal? No, but rather level its green
mound with the surrounding earth, as if, when she dug up again her
buried heart, the spot had ceased to be a grave.

Yet, in spite of these sentimentalities, I was prodigiously amused by
an incident of which I had not the good-fortune to be a witness, but
which Mr. Wigglesworth related with considerable humor. A gentlewoman
of the town, receiving news of her husband's loss at sea, had bespoken
a handsome slab of marble, and came daily to watch the progress of my
friend's chisel. One afternoon, when the good lady and the sculptor
were in the very midst of the epitaph--which the departed spirit might
have been greatly comforted to read--who should walk into the workshop
but the deceased himself, in substance as well as spirit! He had been
picked up at sea, and stood in no present need of tombstone or
epitaph.

"And how," inquired I, "did his wife bear the shock of joyful
surprise?"

"Why," said the old man, deepening the grin of a death's-head on which
his chisel was just then employed, "I really felt for the poor woman;
it was one of my best pieces of marble--and to be thrown away on a
living man!"

A comely woman with a pretty rosebud of a daughter came to select a
gravestone for a twin-daughter, who had died a month before. I was
impressed with the different nature of their feelings for the dead.
The mother was calm and woefully resigned, fully conscious of her
loss, as of a treasure which she had not always possessed, and
therefore had been aware that it might be taken from her; but the
daughter evidently had no real knowledge of what Death's doings were.
Her thoughts knew, but not her heart. It seemed to me that by the
print and pressure which the dead sister had left upon the survivor's
spirit her feelings were almost the same as if she still stood side by
side and arm in arm with the departed, looking at the slabs of marble,
and once or twice she glanced around with a sunny smile, which, as its
sister-smile had faded for ever, soon grew confusedly overshadowed.
Perchance her consciousness was truer than her reflection; perchance
her dead sister was a closer companion than in life.

The mother and daughter talked a long while with Mr. Wigglesworth
about a suitable epitaph, and finally chose an ordinary verse of
ill-matched rhymes which had already been inscribed upon innumerable
tombstones. But when we ridicule the triteness of monumental verses,
we forget that Sorrow reads far deeper in them than we can, and finds
a profound and individual purport in what seems so vague and
inexpressive unless interpreted by her. She makes the epitaph anew,
though the selfsame words may have served for a thousand graves.

"And yet," said I afterward to Mr. Wigglesworth, "they might have made
a better choice than this. While you were discussing the subject I was
struck by at least a dozen simple and natural expressions from the
lips of both mother and daughter. One of these would have formed an
inscription equally original and appropriate."

"No, no!" replied the sculptor, shaking his head; "there is a good
deal of comfort to be gathered from these little old scraps of poetry,
and so I always recommend them in preference to any new-fangled ones.
And somehow they seem to stretch to suit a great grief and shrink to
fit a small one."

It was not seldom that ludicrous images were excited by what took
place between Mr. Wigglesworth and his customers. A shrewd gentlewoman
who kept a tavern in the town was anxious to obtain two or three
gravestones for the deceased members of her family, and to pay for
these solemn commodities by taking the sculptor to board. Hereupon a
fantasy arose in my mind of good Mr. Wigglesworth sitting down to
dinner at a broad, flat tombstone carving one of his own plump little
marble cherubs, gnawing a pair of crossbones and drinking out of a
hollow death's-head or perhaps a lachrymatory vase or sepulchral urn,
while his hostess's dead children waited on him at the ghastly
banquet. On communicating this nonsensical picture to the old man he
laughed heartily and pronounced my humor to be of the right sort.

"I have lived at such a table all my days," said he, "and eaten no
small quantity of slate and marble."

"Hard fare," rejoined I, smiling, "but you seemed to have found it
excellent of digestion, too."

A man of fifty or thereabouts with a harsh, unpleasant countenance
ordered a stone for the grave of his bitter enemy, with whom he had
waged warfare half a lifetime, to their mutual misery and ruin. The
secret of this phenomenon was that hatred had become the sustenance
and enjoyment of the poor wretch's soul; it had supplied the place of
all kindly affections; it had been really a bond of sympathy between
himself and the man who shared the passion; and when its object died,
the unappeasable foe was the only mourner for the dead. He expressed a
purpose of being buried side by side with his enemy.

"I doubt whether their dust will mingle," remarked the old sculptor to
me; for often there was an earthliness in his conceptions.

"Oh yes," replied I, who had mused long upon the incident; "and when
they rise again, these bitter foes may find themselves dear friends.
Methinks what they mistook for hatred was but love under a mask."

A gentleman of antiquarian propensities provided a memorial for an
Indian of Chabbiquidick--one of the few of untainted blood remaining
in that region, and said to be a hereditary chieftain descended from
the sachem who welcomed Governor Mayhew to the Vineyard. Mr.
Wiggles-worth exerted his best skill to carve a broken bow and
scattered sheaf of arrows in memory of the hunters and warriors whose
race was ended here, but he likewise sculptured a cherub, to denote
that the poor Indian had shared the Christian's hope of immortality.

"Why," observed I, taking a perverse view of the winged boy and the
bow and arrows, "it looks more like Cupid's tomb than an Indian
chief's."

"You talk nonsense," said the sculptor, with the offended pride of
art. He then added with his usual good-nature, "How can Cupid die when
there are such pretty maidens in the Vineyard?"

"Very true," answered I; and for the rest of the day I thought of
other matters than tombstones.

At our next meeting I found him chiselling an open book upon a marble
headstone, and concluded that it was meant to express the erudition of
some black-letter clergyman of the Cotton Mather school. It turned
out, however, to be emblematical of the scriptural knowledge of an old
woman who had never read anything but her Bible, and the monument was
a tribute to her piety and good works from the orthodox church of
which she had been a member. In strange contrast with this Christian
woman's memorial was that of an infidel whose gravestone, by his own
direction, bore an avowal of his belief that the spirit within him
would be extinguished like a flame, and that the nothingness whence he
sprang would receive him again.

Mr. Wigglesworth consulted me as to the propriety of enabling a dead
man's dust to utter this dreadful creed.

"If I thought," said he, "that a single mortal would read the
inscription without a shudder, my chisel should never cut a letter of
it. But when the grave speaks such falsehoods, the soul of man will
know the truth by its own horror."

"So it will," said I, struck by the idea. "The poor infidel may strive
to preach blasphemies from his grave, but it will be only another
method of impressing the soul with a consciousness of immortality."

There was an old man by the name of Norton, noted throughout the
island for his great wealth, which he had accumulated by the exercise
of strong and shrewd faculties combined with a most penurious
disposition. This wretched miser, conscious that he had not a friend
to be mindful of him in his grave, had himself taken the needful
precautions for posthumous remembrance by bespeaking an immense slab
of white marble with a long epitaph in raised letters, the whole to be
as magnificent as Mr. Wigglesworth's skill could make it. There was
something very characteristic in this contrivance to have his money's
worth even from his own tombstone, which, indeed, afforded him more
enjoyment in the few months that he lived thereafter than it probably
will in a whole century, now that it is laid over his bones.

This incident reminds me of a young girl--a pale, slender, feeble
creature most unlike the other rosy and healthful damsels of the
Vineyard, amid whose brightness she was fading away. Day after day did
the poor maiden come to the sculptor's shop and pass from one piece of
marble to another, till at last she pencilled her name upon a slender
slab which, I think, was of a more spotless white than all the rest. I
saw her no more, but soon afterward found Mr. Wigglesworth cutting her
virgin-name into the stone which she had chosen.

"She is dead, poor girl!" said he, interrupting the tune which he was
whistling, "and she chose a good piece of stuff for her headstone.
Now, which of these slabs would you like best to see your own name
upon?"

"Why, to tell you the truth, my good Mr. Wigglesworth," replied I,
after a moment's pause, for the abruptness of the question had
somewhat startled me--"to be quite sincere with you, I care little or
nothing about a stone for my own grave, and am somewhat inclined to
scepticism as to the propriety of erecting monuments at all over the
dust that once was human. The weight of these heavy marbles, though
unfelt by the dead corpse or the enfranchised soul, presses drearily
upon the spirit of the survivor and causes him to connect the idea of
death with the dungeon-like imprisonment of the tomb, instead of with
the freedom of the skies. Every gravestone that you ever made is the
visible symbol of a mistaken system. Our thoughts should soar upward
with the butterfly, not linger with the exuviae that confined him. In
truth and reason, neither those whom we call the living, and still
less the departed, have anything to do with the grave."

"I never heard anything so heathenish," said Mr. Wigglesworth,
perplexed and displeased at sentiments which controverted all his
notions and feelings and implied the utter waste, and worse, of his
whole life's labor. "Would you forget your dead friends the moment
they are under the sod?"

"They are not under the sod," I rejoined; "then why should I mark the
spot where there is no treasure hidden? Forget them? No; but, to
remember them aright, I would forget what they have cast off. And to
gain the truer conception of death I would forget the grave."

But still the good old sculptor murmured, and stumbled, as it were,
over the gravestones amid which he had walked through life. Whether he
were right or wrong, I had grown the wiser from our companionship and
from my observations of nature and character as displayed by those who
came, with their old griefs or their new ones, to get them recorded
upon his slabs of marble. And yet with my gain of wisdom I had
likewise gained perplexity; for there was a strange doubt in my mind
whether the dark shadowing of this life, the sorrows and regrets, have
not as much real comfort in them--leaving religious influences out of
the question--as what we term life's joys.




THE SHAKER BRIDAL.


One day, in the sick-chamber of Father Ephraim, who had been forty
years the presiding elder over the Shaker settlement at Goshen, there
was an assemblage of several of the chief men of the sect. Individuals
had come from the rich establishment at Lebanon, from Canterbury,
Harvard and Alfred, and from all the other localities where this
strange people have fertilized the rugged hills of New England by
their systematic industry. An elder was likewise there who had made a
pilgrimage of a thousand miles from a village of the faithful in
Kentucky to visit his spiritual kindred the children of the sainted
Mother Ann. He had partaken of the homely abundance of their tables,
had quaffed the far-famed Shaker cider, and had joined in the sacred
dance every step of which is believed to alienate the enthusiast from
earth and bear him onward to heavenly purity and bliss. His brethren
of the North had now courteously invited him to be present on an
occasion when the concurrence of every eminent member of their
community was peculiarly desirable.

The venerable Father Ephraim sat in his easy-chair, not only
hoary-headed and infirm with age, but worn down by a lingering disease
which it was evident would very soon transfer his patriarchal staff to
other hands. At his footstool stood a man and woman, both clad in the
Shaker garb.

"My brethren," said Father Ephraim to the surrounding elders, feebly
exerting himself to utter these few words, "here are the son and
daughter to whom I would commit the trust of which Providence is about
to lighten my weary shoulders. Read their faces, I pray you, and say
whether the inward movement of the spirit hath guided my choice
aright."

Accordingly, each elder looked at the two candidates with a most
scrutinizing gaze. The man--whose name was Adam Colburn--had a face
sunburnt with labor in the fields, yet intelligent, thoughtful and
traced with cares enough for a whole lifetime, though he had barely
reached middle age. There was something severe in his aspect and a
rigidity throughout his person--characteristics that caused him
generally to be taken for a schoolmaster; which vocation, in fact, he
had formerly exercised for several years. The woman, Martha Pierson,
was somewhat above thirty, thin and pale, as a Shaker sister almost
invariably is, and not entirely free from that corpse-like appearance
which the garb of the sisterhood is so well calculated to impart.

"This pair are still in the summer of their years," observed the elder
from Harvard, a shrewd old man. "I would like better to see the
hoar-frost of autumn on their heads. Methinks, also, they will be
exposed to peculiar temptations on account of the carnal desires which
have heretofore subsisted between them."

"Nay, brother," said the elder from Canterbury; "the hoar-frost and
the black frost hath done its work on Brother Adam and Sister Martha,
even as we sometimes discern its traces in our cornfields while they
are yet green. And why should we question the wisdom of our venerable
Father's purpose, although this pair in their early youth have loved
one another as the world's people love? Are there not many brethren
and sisters among us who have lived long together in wedlock, yet,
adopting our faith, find their hearts purified from all but spiritual
affection?"

Whether or no the early loves of Adam and Martha had rendered it
inexpedient that they should now preside together over a Shaker
village, it was certainly most singular that such should be the final
result of many warm and tender hopes. Children of neighboring
families, their affection was older even than their school-days; it
seemed an innate principle interfused among all their sentiments and
feelings, and not so much a distinct remembrance as connected with
their whole volume of remembrances. But just as they reached a proper
age for their union misfortunes had fallen heavily on both and made it
necessary that they should resort to personal labor for a bare
subsistence. Even under these circumstances Martha Pierson would
probably have consented to unite her fate with Adam Colburn's, and,
secure of the bliss of mutual love, would patiently have awaited the
less important gifts of Fortune. But Adam, being of a calm and
cautious character, was loth to relinquish the advantages which a
single man possesses for raising himself in the world. Year after
year, therefore, their marriage had been deferred.

Adam Colburn had followed many vocations, had travelled far and seen
much of the world and of life. Martha had earned her bread sometimes
as a sempstress, sometimes as help to a farmer's wife, sometimes as
schoolmistress of the village children, sometimes as a nurse or
watcher of the sick, thus acquiring a varied experience the ultimate
use of which she little anticipated. But nothing had gone prosperously
with either of the lovers; at no subsequent moment would matrimony
have been so prudent a measure as when they had first parted, in the
opening bloom of life, to seek a better fortune. Still, they had held
fast their mutual faith. Martha might have been the wife of a man who
sat among the senators of his native State, and Adam could have won
the hand, as he had unintentionally won the heart, of a rich and
comely widow. But neither of them desired good-fortune save to share
it with the other.

At length that calm despair which occurs only in a strong and somewhat
stubborn character and yields to no second spring of hope settled down
on the spirit of Adam Colburn. He sought an interview with Martha and
proposed that they should join the Society of Shakers. The converts of
this sect are oftener driven within its hospitable gates by worldly
misfortune than drawn thither by fanaticism, and are received without
inquisition as to their motives. Martha, faithful still, had placed
her hand in that of her lover and accompanied him to the Shaker
village. Here the natural capacity of each, cultivated and
strengthened by the difficulties of their previous lives, had soon
gained them an important rank in the society, whose members are
generally below the ordinary standard of intelligence. Their faith and
feelings had in some degree become assimilated to those of their
fellow-worshippers. Adam Colburn gradually acquired reputation not
only in the management of the temporal affairs of the society, but as
a clear and efficient preacher of their doctrines. Martha was not less
distinguished in the duties proper to her sex. Finally, when the
infirmities of Father Ephraim had admonished him to seek a successor
in his patriarchal office, he thought of Adam and Martha, and proposed
to renew in their persons the primitive form of Shaker government as
established by Mother Ann. They were to be the father and mother of
the village. The simple ceremony which would constitute them such was
now to be performed.

"Son Adam and daughter Martha," said the venerable Father Ephraim,
fixing his aged eyes piercingly upon them, "if ye can conscientiously
undertake this charge, speak, that the brethren may not doubt of your
fitness."

"Father," replied Adam, speaking with the calmness of his character,
"I came to your village a disappointed man, weary of the world, worn
out with continual trouble, seeking only a security against evil
fortune, as I had no hope of good. Even my wishes of worldly success
were almost dead within me. I came hither as a man might come to a
tomb willing to lie down in its gloom and coldness for the sake of its
peace and quiet. There was but one earthly affection in my breast, and
it had grown calmer since my youth; so that I was satisfied to bring
Martha to be my sister in our new abode. We are brother and sister,
nor would I have it otherwise. And in this peaceful village I have
found all that I hope for--all that I desire. I will strive with my
best strength for the spiritual and temporal good of our community. My
conscience is not doubtful in this matter. I am ready to receive the
trust."

"Thou hast spoken well, son Adam," said the father. "God will bless
thee in the office which I am about to resign."

"But our sister," observed the elder from Harvard. "Hath she not
likewise a gift to declare her sentiments?"

Martha started and moved her lips as if she would have made a formal
reply to this appeal. But, had she attempted it, perhaps the old
recollections, the long-repressed feelings of childhood, youth and
womanhood, might have gushed from her heart in words that it would
have been profanation to utter there.

"Adam has spoken," said she, hurriedly; "his sentiments are likewise
mine."

But while speaking these few words Martha grew so pale that she looked
fitter to be laid in her coffin than to stand in the presence of
Father Ephraim and the elders; she shuddered, also, as if there were
something awful or horrible in her situation and destiny. It required,
indeed, a more than feminine strength of nerve to sustain the fixed
observance of men so exalted and famous throughout the sect as these
were. They had overcome their natural sympathy with human frailties
and affections. One, when he joined the society, had brought with him
his wife and children, but never from that hour had spoken a fond word
to the former or taken his best-loved child upon his knee. Another,
whose family refused to follow him, had been enabled--such was his
gift of holy fortitude--to leave them to the mercy of the world. The
youngest of the elders, a man of about fifty, had been bred from
infancy in a Shaker village, and was said never to have clasped a
woman's hand in his own, and to have no conception of a closer tie
than the cold fraternal one of the sect. Old Father Ephraim was the
most awful character of all. In his youth he had been a dissolute
libertine, but was converted by Mother Ann herself, and had partaken
of the wild fanaticism of the early Shakers. Tradition whispered at
the firesides of the village that Mother Ann had been compelled to
sear his heart of flesh with a red-hot iron before it could be
purified from earthly passions.

However that might be, poor Martha had a woman's heart, and a tender
one, and it quailed within her as she looked round at those strange
old men, and from them to the calm features of Adam Colburn. But,
perceiving that the elders eyed her doubtfully, she gasped for breath
and again spoke.

"With what strength is left me by my many troubles," said she, "I am
ready to undertake this charge, and to do my best in it."

"My children, join your hands," said Father Ephraim.

They did so. The elders stood up around, and the father feebly raised
himself to a more erect position, but continued sitting in his great
chair.

"I have bidden you to join your hands," said he, "not in earthly
affection, for ye have cast off its chains for ever, but as brother
and sister in spiritual love and helpers of one another in your
allotted task. Teach unto others the faith which ye have received.
Open wide your gates--I deliver you the keys thereof--open them wide
to all who will give up the iniquities of the world and come hither to
lead lives of purity and peace. Receive the weary ones who have known
the vanity of earth; receive the little children, that they may never
learn that miserable lesson. And a blessing be upon your labors; so
that the time may hasten on when the mission of Mother Ann shall have
wrought its full effect, when children shall no more be born and die,
and the last survivor of mortal race--some old and weary man like
me--shall see the sun go down nevermore to rise on a world of sin and
sorrow."

The aged father sank back exhausted, and the surrounding elders
deemed, with good reason, that the hour was come when the new heads of
the village must enter on their patriarchal duties. In their attention
to Father Ephraim their eyes were turned from Martha Pierson, who grew
paler and paler, unnoticed even by Adam Colburn. He, indeed, had
withdrawn his hand from hers and folded his arms with a sense of
satisfied ambition. But paler and paler grew Martha by his side, till,
like a corpse in its burial-clothes, she sank down at the feet of her
early lover; for, after many trials firmly borne, her heart could
endure the weight of its desolate agony no longer.




NIGHT-SKETCHES,

BENEATH AN UMBRELLA.


Pleasant is a rainy winter's day within-doors. The best study for such
a day--or the best amusement: call it what you will--is a book of
travels describing scenes the most unlike that sombre one which is
mistily presented through the windows. I have experienced that Fancy
is then most successful in imparting distinct shapes and vivid colors
to the objects which the author has spread upon his page, and that his
words become magic spells to summon up a thousand varied pictures.
Strange landscapes glimmer through the familiar walls of the room, and
outlandish figures thrust themselves almost within the sacred
precincts of the hearth. Small as my chamber is, it has space enough
to contain the ocean-like circumference of an Arabian desert, its
parched sands tracked by the long line of a caravan with the camels
patiently journeying through the heavy sunshine. Though my ceiling be
not lofty, yet I can pile up the mountains of Central Asia beneath it
till their summits shine far above the clouds of the middle
atmosphere. And with my humble means--a wealth that is not taxable--I
can transport hither the magnificent merchandise of an Oriental
bazaar, and call a crowd of purchasers from distant countries to pay a
fair profit for the precious articles which are displayed on all
sides. True it is, however, that amid the bustle of traffic, or
whatever else may seem to be going on around me, the raindrops will
occasionally be heard to patter against my window-panes, which look
forth upon one of the quietest streets in a New England town. After a
time, too, the visions vanish, and will not appear again at my
bidding. Then, it being nightfall, a gloomy sense of unreality
depresses my spirits, and impels me to venture out before the clock
shall strike bedtime to satisfy myself that the world is not entirely
made up of such shadowy materials as have busied me throughout the
day. A dreamer may dwell so long among fantasies that the things
without him will seem as unreal as those within.

When eve has fairly set in, therefore, I sally forth, tightly
buttoning my shaggy overcoat and hoisting my umbrella, the silken dome
of which immediately resounds with the heavy drumming of the invisible
raindrops. Pausing on the lowest doorstep, I contrast the warmth and
cheerfulness of my deserted fireside with the drear obscurity and
chill discomfort into which I am about to plunge. Now come fearful
auguries innumerable as the drops of rain. Did not my manhood cry
shame upon me, I should turn back within-doors, resume my elbow-chair,
my slippers and my book, pass such an evening of sluggish enjoyment as
the day has been, and go to bed inglorious. The same shivering
reluctance, no doubt, has quelled for a moment the adventurous spirit
of many a traveller when his feet, which were destined to measure the
earth around, were leaving their last tracks in the home-paths.

In my own case poor human nature may be allowed a few misgivings. I
look upward and discern no sky, not even an unfathomable void, but
only a black, impenetrable nothingness, as though heaven and all its
lights were blotted from the system of the universe. It is as if
Nature were dead and the world had put on black and the clouds were
weeping for her. With their tears upon my cheek I turn my eyes
earthward, but find little consolation here below. A lamp is burning
dimly at the distant corner, and throws just enough of light along the
street to show, and exaggerate by so faintly showing, the perils and
difficulties which beset my path. Yonder dingily-white remnant of a
huge snowbank, which will yet cumber the sidewalk till the latter days
of March, over or through that wintry waste must I stride onward.
Beyond lies a certain Slough of Despond, a concoction of mud and
liquid filth, ankle-deep, leg-deep, neck-deep--in a word, of unknown
bottom--on which the lamplight does not even glimmer, but which I have
occasionally watched in the gradual growth of its horrors from morn
till nightfall. Should I flounder into its depths, farewell to upper
earth! And hark! how roughly resounds the roaring of a stream the
turbulent career of which is partially reddened by the gleam of the
lamp, but elsewhere brawls noisily through the densest gloom! Oh,
should I be swept away in fording that impetuous and unclean torrent,
the coroner will have a job with an unfortunate gentleman who would
fain end his troubles anywhere but in a mud-puddle.

Pshaw! I will linger not another instant at arm's-length from these
dim terrors, which grow more obscurely formidable the longer I delay
to grapple with them. Now for the onset, and, lo! with little damage
save a dash of rain in the face and breast, a splash of mud high up
the pantaloons and the left boot full of ice-cold water, behold me at
the corner of the street. The lamp throws down a circle of red light
around me, and twinkling onward from corner to corner I discern other
beacons, marshalling my way to a brighter scene. But this is a
lonesome and dreary spot. The tall edifices bid gloomy defiance to the
storm with their blinds all closed, even as a man winks when he faces
a spattering gust. How loudly tinkles the collected rain down the tin
spouts! The puffs of wind are boisterous, and seem to assail me from
various quarters at once. I have often observed that this corner is a
haunt and loitering-place for those winds which have no work to do
upon the deep dashing ships against our iron-bound shores, nor in the
forest tearing up the sylvan giants with half a rood of soil at their
vast roots. Here they amuse themselves with lesser freaks of mischief.
See, at this moment, how they assail yonder poor woman who is passing
just within the verge of the lamplight! One blast struggles for her
umbrella and turns it wrong side outward, another whisks the cape of
her cloak across her eyes, while a third takes most unwarrantable
liberties with the lower part of her attire. Happily, the good dame is
no gossamer, but a figure of rotundity and fleshly substance; else
would these aerial tormentors whirl her aloft like a witch upon a
broomstick, and set her down, doubtless, in the filthiest kennel
hereabout.

From hence I tread upon firm pavements into the centre of the town.
Here there is almost as brilliant an illumination as when some great
victory has been won either on the battlefield or at the polls. Two
rows of shops with windows down nearly to the ground cast a glow from
side to side, while the black night hangs overhead like a canopy, and
thus keeps the splendor from diffusing itself away. The wet sidewalks
gleam with a broad sheet of red light. The raindrops glitter as if the
sky were pouring down rubies. The spouts gush with fire. Methinks the
scene is an emblem of the deceptive glare which mortals throw around
their footsteps in the moral world, thus bedazzling themselves till
they forget the impenetrable obscurity that hems them in, and that can
be dispelled only by radiance from above.

And, after all, it is a cheerless scene, and cheerless are the
wanderers in it. Here comes one who has so long been familiar with
tempestuous weather that he takes the bluster of the storm for a
friendly greeting, as if it should say, "How fare ye, brother?" He is
a retired sea-captain wrapped in some nameless garment of the
pea-jacket order, and is now laying his course toward the
marine-insurance office, there to spin yarns of gale and shipwreck
with a crew of old seadogs like himself. The blast will put in its
word among their hoarse voices, and be understood by all of them. Next
I meet an unhappy slipshod gentleman with a cloak flung hastily over
his shoulders, running a race with boisterous winds and striving to
glide between the drops of rain. Some domestic emergency or other has
blown this miserable man from his warm fireside in quest of a doctor.
See that little vagabond! How carelessly he has taken his stand right
underneath a spout while staring at some object of curiosity in a
shop-window! Surely the rain is his native element; he must have
fallen with it from the clouds, as frogs are supposed to do.

Here is a picture, and a pretty one--a young man and a girl, both
enveloped in cloaks and huddled beneath the scanty protection of a
cotton umbrella. She wears rubber overshoes, but he is in his
dancing-pumps, and they are on their way no doubt, to some
cotillon-party or subscription-ball at a dollar a head, refreshments
included. Thus they struggle against the gloomy tempest, lured onward
by a vision of festal splendor. But ah! a most lamentable disaster!
Bewildered by the red, blue and yellow meteors in an apothecary's
window, they have stepped upon a slippery remnant of ice, and are
precipitated into a confluence of swollen floods at the corner of two
streets. Luckless lovers! Were it my nature to be other than a
looker-on in life, I would attempt your rescue. Since that may not be,
I vow, should you be drowned, to weave such a pathetic story of your
fate as shall call forth tears enough to drown you both anew. Do ye
touch bottom, my young friends? Yes; they emerge like a water-nymph
and a river-deity, and paddle hand in hand out of the depths of the
dark pool. They hurry homeward, dripping, disconsolate, abashed, but
with love too warm to be chilled by the cold water. They have stood a
test which proves too strong for many. Faithful though over head and
ears in trouble!

Onward I go, deriving a sympathetic joy or sorrow from the varied
aspect of mortal affairs even as my figure catches a gleam from the
lighted windows or is blackened by an interval of darkness. Not that
mine is altogether a chameleon spirit with no hue of its own. Now I
pass into a more retired street where the dwellings of wealth and
poverty are intermingled, presenting a range of strongly-contrasted
pictures. Here, too, may be found the golden mean. Through yonder
casement I discern a family circle--the grandmother, the parents and
the children--all flickering, shadow-like, in the glow of a
wood-fire.--Bluster, fierce blast, and beat, thou wintry rain, against
the window-panes! Ye cannot damp the enjoyment of that fireside.--Surely
my fate is hard that I should be wandering homeless here, taking to my
bosom night and storm and solitude instead of wife and children.
Peace, murmurer! Doubt not that darker guests are sitting round the
hearth, though the warm blaze hides all but blissful images.

Well, here is still a brighter scene--a stately mansion illuminated
for a ball, with cut-glass chandeliers and alabaster lamps in every
room, and sunny landscapes hanging round the walls. See! a coach has
stopped, whence emerges a slender beauty who, canopied by two
umbrellas, glides within the portal and vanishes amid lightsome
thrills of music. Will she ever feel the night-wind and the rain?
Perhaps--perhaps! And will Death and Sorrow ever enter that proud
mansion? As surely as the dancers will be gay within its halls
to-night. Such thoughts sadden yet satisfy my heart, for they teach me
that the poor man in this mean, weatherbeaten hovel, without a fire to
cheer him, may call the rich his brother--brethren by Sorrow, who must
be an inmate of both their households; brethren by Death, who will
lead them both to other homes.

Onward, still onward, I plunge into the night. Now have I reached the
utmost limits of the town, where the last lamp struggles feebly with
the darkness like the farthest star that stands sentinel on the
borders of uncreated space. It is strange what sensations of sublimity
may spring from a very humble source. Such are suggested by this
hollow roar of a subterranean cataract where the mighty stream of a
kennel precipitates itself beneath an iron grate and is seen no more
on earth. Listen a while to its voice of mystery, and Fancy will
magnify it till you start and smile at the illusion. And now another
sound--the rumbling of wheels as the mail-coach, outward bound, rolls
heavily off the pavements and splashes through the mud and water of
the road. All night long the poor passengers will be tossed to and fro
between drowsy watch and troubled sleep, and will dream of their own
quiet beds and awake to find themselves still jolting onward. Happier
my lot, who will straightway hie me to my familiar room and toast
myself comfortably before the fire, musing and fitfully dozing and
fancying a strangeness in such sights as all may see. But first let me
gaze at this solitary figure who comes hitherward with a tin lantern
which throws the circular pattern of its punched holes on the ground
about him. He passes fearlessly into the unknown gloom, whither I will
not follow him.

This figure shall supply me with a moral wherewith, for lack of a more
appropriate one, I may wind up my sketch. He fears not to tread the
dreary path before him, because his lantern, which was kindled at the
fireside of his home, will light him back to that same fireside again.
And thus we, night-wanderers through a stormy and dismal world, if we
bear the lamp of Faith enkindled at a celestial fire, it will surely
lead us home to that heaven whence its radiance was borrowed.




ENDICOTT AND THE RED CROSS.


At noon of an autumnal day more than two centuries ago the English
colors were displayed by the standard bearer of the Salem train-band,
which had mustered for martial exercise under the orders of John
Endicott. It was a period when the religious exiles were accustomed
often to buckle on their armor and practise the handling of their
weapons of war. Since the first settlement of New England its
prospects had never been so dismal. The dissensions between Charles I.
and his subjects were then, and for several years afterward, confined
to the floor of Parliament. The measures of the king and ministry were
rendered more tyrannically violent by an opposition which had not yet
acquired sufficient confidence in its own strength to resist royal
injustice with the sword. The bigoted and haughty primate Laud,
archbishop of Canterbury, controlled the religious affairs of the
realm, and was consequently invested with powers which might have
wrought the utter ruin of the two Puritan colonies, Plymouth and
Massachusetts. There is evidence on record that our forefathers
perceived their danger, but were resolved that their infant country
should not fall without a struggle, even beneath the giant strength of
the king's right arm.

Such was the aspect of the times when the folds of the English banner
with the red cross in its field were flung out over a company of
Puritans. Their leader, the famous Endicott, was a man of stern and
resolute countenance, the effect of which was heightened by a grizzled
beard that swept the upper portion of his breastplate. This piece of
armor was so highly polished that the whole surrounding scene had its
image in the glittering steel. The central object in the mirrored
picture was an edifice of humble architecture with neither steeple nor
bell to proclaim it--what, nevertheless, it was--the house of prayer.
A token of the perils of the wilderness was seen in the grim head of a
wolf which had just been slain within the precincts of the town, and,
according to the regular mode of claiming the bounty, was nailed on
the porch of the meeting-house. The blood was still plashing on the
doorstep. There happened to be visible at the same noontide hour so
many other characteristics of the times and manners of the Puritans
that we must endeavor to represent them in a sketch, though far less
vividly than they were reflected in the polished breastplate of John
Endicott.

In close vicinity to the sacred edifice appeared that important engine
of Puritanic authority the whipping-post, with the soil around it well
trodden by the feet of evil-doers who had there been disciplined. At
one corner of the meeting-house was the pillory and at the other the
stocks, and, by a singular good fortune for our sketch, the head of an
Episcopalian and suspected Catholic was grotesquely encased in the
former machine, while a fellow-criminal who had boisterously quaffed a
health to the king was confined by the legs in the latter. Side by
side on the meeting-house steps stood a male and a female figure. The
man was a tall, lean, haggard personification of fanaticism, bearing
on his breast this label, "A WANTON GOSPELLER," which betokened that
he had dared to give interpretations of Holy Writ unsanctioned by the
infallible judgment of the civil and religious rulers. His aspect
showed no lack of zeal to maintain his heterodoxies even at the stake.
The woman wore a cleft stick on her tongue, in appropriate retribution
for having wagged that unruly member against the elders of the church,
and her countenance and gestures gave much cause to apprehend that the
moment the stick should be removed a repetition of the offence would
demand new ingenuity in chastising it.

The above-mentioned individuals had been sentenced to undergo their
various modes of ignominy for the space of one hour at noonday. But
among the crowd were several whose punishment would be lifelong--some
whose ears had been cropped like those of puppy-dogs, others whose
cheeks had been branded with the initials of their misdemeanors; one
with his nostrils slit and seared, and another with a halter about his
neck, which he was forbidden ever to take off or to conceal beneath
his garments. Methinks he must have been grievously tempted to affix
the other end of the rope to some convenient beam or bough. There was
likewise a young woman with no mean share of beauty whose doom it was
to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown in the eyes of all the
world and her own children. And even her own children knew what that
initial signified. Sporting with her infamy, the lost and desperate
creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth with golden
thread and the nicest art of needlework; so that the capital A might
have been thought to mean "Admirable," or anything rather than
"Adulteress."

Let not the reader argue from any of these evidences of iniquity that
the times of the Puritans were more vicious than our own, when as we
pass along the very street of this sketch we discern no badge of
infamy on man or woman. It was the policy of our ancestors to search
out even the most secret sins and expose them to shame, without fear
or favor, in the broadest light of the noonday sun. Were such the
custom now, perchance we might find materials for a no less piquant
sketch than the above.

Except the malefactors whom we have described and the diseased or
infirm persons, the whole male population of the town, between sixteen
years and sixty were seen in the ranks of the train-band. A few
stately savages in all the pomp and dignity of the primeval Indian
stood gazing at the spectacle. Their flint-headed arrows were but
childish weapons, compared with the matchlocks of the Puritans, and
would have rattled harmlessly against the steel caps and hammered iron
breastplates which enclosed each soldier in an individual fortress.
The valiant John Endicott glanced with an eye of pride at his sturdy
followers, and prepared to renew the martial toils of the day.

"Come, my stout hearts!" quoth he, drawing his sword. "Let us show
these poor heathen that we can handle our weapons like men of might.
Well for them if they put us not to prove it in earnest!"

The iron-breasted company straightened their line, and each man drew
the heavy butt of his matchlock close to his left foot, thus awaiting
the orders of the captain. But as Endicott glanced right and left
along the front he discovered a personage at some little distance with
whom it behoved him to hold a parley. It was an elderly gentleman
wearing a black cloak and band and a high-crowned hat beneath which
was a velvet skull-cap, the whole being the garb of a Puritan
minister. This reverend person bore a staff which seemed to have been
recently cut in the forest, and his shoes were bemired, as if he had
been travelling on foot through the swamps of the wilderness. His
aspect was perfectly that of a pilgrim, heightened also by an
apostolic dignity. Just as Endicott perceived him he laid aside his
staff and stooped to drink at a bubbling fountain which gushed into
the sunshine about a score of yards from the corner of the
meeting-house. But ere the good man drank he turned his face
heavenward in thankfulness, and then, holding back his gray beard with
one hand, he scooped up his simple draught in the hollow of the other.

"What ho, good Mr. Williams!" shouted Endicott. "You are welcome back
again to our town of peace. How does our worthy Governor Winthrop? And
what news from Boston?"

"The governor hath his health, worshipful sir," answered Roger
Williams, now resuming his staff and drawing near. "And, for the news,
here is a letter which, knowing I was to travel hitherward to-day, His
Excellency committed to my charge. Belike it contains tidings of much
import, for a ship arrived yesterday from England."

Mr. Williams, the minister of Salem, and of course known to all the
spectators, had now reached the spot where Endicott was standing under
the banner of his company, and put the governor's epistle into his
hand. The broad seal was impressed with Winthrop's coat-of-arms.
Endicott hastily unclosed the letter and began to read, while, as his
eye passed down the page, a wrathful change came over his manly
countenance. The blood glowed through it till it seemed to be kindling
with an internal heat, nor was it unnatural to suppose that his
breastplate would likewise become red hot with the angry fire of the
bosom which it covered. Arriving at the conclusion, he shook the
letter fiercely in his hand, so that it rustled as loud as the flag
above his head.

"Black tidings these, Mr. Williams," said he; "blacker never came to
New England. Doubtless you know their purport?"

"Yea, truly," replied Roger Williams, "for the governor consulted
respecting this matter with my brethren in the ministry at Boston, and
my opinion was likewise asked. And His Excellency entreats you by me
that the news be not suddenly noised abroad, lest the people be
stirred up unto some outbreak, and thereby give the king and the
archbishop a handle against us."

"The governor is a wise man--a wise man, and a meek and moderate,"
said Endicott, setting his teeth grimly. "Nevertheless, I must do
according to my own best judgment. There is neither man, woman nor
child in New England but has a concern as dear as life in these
tidings; and if John Endicott's voice be loud enough, man, woman and
child shall hear them.--Soldiers, wheel into a hollow square.--Ho,
good people! Here are news for one and all of you."

The soldiers closed in around their captain, and he and Roger Williams
stood together under the banner of the red cross, while the women and
the aged men pressed forward and the mothers held up their children to
look Endicott in the face. A few taps of the drum gave signal for
silence and attention.

"Fellow-soldiers, fellow-exiles," began Endicott, speaking under
strong excitement, yet powerfully restraining it, "wherefore did ye
leave your native country? Wherefore, I say, have we left the green
and fertile fields, the cottages, or, perchance, the old gray halls,
where we were born and bred, the churchyards where our forefathers lie
buried? Wherefore have we come hither to set up our own tombstones in
a wilderness? A howling wilderness it is. The wolf and the bear meet
us within halloo of our dwellings. The savage lieth in wait for us in
the dismal shadow of the woods. The stubborn roots of the trees break
our ploughshares when we would till the earth. Our children cry for
bread, and we must dig in the sands of the seashore to satisfy them.
Wherefore, I say again, have we sought this country of a rugged soil
and wintry sky? Was it not for the enjoyment of our civil rights? Was
it not for liberty to worship God according to our conscience?"

"Call you this liberty of conscience?" interrupted a voice on the
steps of the meeting-house.

It was the wanton gospeller. A sad and quiet smile flitted across the
mild visage of Roger Williams, but Endicott, in the excitement of the
moment, shook his sword wrathfully at the culprit--an ominous gesture
from a man like him.

"What hast thou to do with conscience, thou knave?" cried he. "I said
liberty to worship God, not license to profane and ridicule him. Break
not in upon my speech, or I will lay thee neck and heels till this
time to-morrow.--Hearken to me, friends, nor heed that accursed
rhapsodist. As I was saying, we have sacrificed all things, and have
come to a land whereof the Old World hath scarcely heard, that we
might make a new world unto ourselves and painfully seek a path from
hence to heaven. But what think ye now? This son of a Scotch
tyrant--this grandson of a papistical and adulterous Scotch woman
whose death proved that a golden crown doth not always save an
anointed head from the block--"

"Nay, brother, nay," interposed Mr. Williams; "thy words are not meet
for a secret chamber, far less for a public street."

"Hold thy peace, Roger Williams!" answered Endicott, imperiously. "My
spirit is wiser than thine for the business now in hand.--I tell ye,
fellow-exiles, that Charles of England and Laud, our bitterest
persecutor, arch-priest of Canterbury, are resolute to pursue us even
hither. They are taking counsel, saith this letter, to send over a
governor-general in whose breast shall be deposited all the law and
equity of the land. They are minded, also, to establish the idolatrous
forms of English episcopacy; so that when Laud shall kiss the pope's
toe as cardinal of Rome he may deliver New England, bound hand and
foot, into the power of his master."

A deep groan from the auditors--a sound of wrath as well as fear and
sorrow--responded to this intelligence.

"Look ye to it, brethren," resumed Endicott, with increasing energy.
"If this king and this arch-prelate have their will, we shall briefly
behold a cross on the spire of this tabernacle which we have builded,
and a high altar within its walls, with wax tapers burning round it at
noon-day. We shall hear the sacring-bell and the voices of the Romish
priests saying the mass. But think ye, Christian men, that these
abominations may be suffered without a sword drawn, without a shot
fired, without blood spilt--yea, on the very stairs of the pulpit? No!
Be ye strong of hand and stout of heart. Here we stand on our own
soil, which we have bought with our goods, which we have won with our
swords, which we have cleared with our axes, which we have tilled with
the sweat of our brows, which we have sanctified with our prayers to
the God that brought us hither! Who shall enslave us here? What have
we to do with this mitred prelate--with this crowned king? What have
we to do with England?"

Endicott gazed round at the excited countenances of the people, now
full of his own spirit, and then turned suddenly to the
standard-bearer, who stood close behind him.

"Officer, lower your banner," said he.

The officer obeyed, and, brandishing his sword, Endicott thrust it
through the cloth and with his left hand rent the red cross completely
out of the banner. He then waved the tattered ensign above his head.

"Sacrilegious wretch!" cried the high-churchman in the pillory, unable
longer to restrain himself; "thou hast rejected the symbol of our holy
religion."

"Treason! treason!" roared the royalist in the stocks. "He hath
defaced the king's banner!"

"Before God and man I will avouch the deed," answered Endicott.--"Beat
a flourish, drummer--shout, soldiers and people--in honor of the
ensign of New England. Neither pope nor tyrant hath part in it now."

With a cry of triumph the people gave their sanction to one of the
boldest exploits which our history records. And for ever honored be
the name of Endicott! We look back through the mist of ages, and
recognize in the rending of the red cross from New England's banner
the first omen of that deliverance which our fathers consummated after
the bones of the stern Puritan had lain more than a century in the
dust.




THE LILY'S QUEST.

AN APOLOGUE.


Two lovers once upon a time had planned a little summer-house in the
form of an antique temple which it was their purpose to consecrate to
all manner of refined and innocent enjoyments. There they would hold
pleasant intercourse with one another and the circle of their familiar
friends; there they would give festivals of delicious fruit; there
they would hear lightsome music intermingled with the strains of
pathos which make joy more sweet; there they would read poetry and
fiction and permit their own minds to flit away in day-dreams and
romance; there, in short--for why should we shape out the vague
sunshine of their hopes?--there all pure delights were to cluster like
roses among the pillars of the edifice and blossom ever new and
spontaneously.

So one breezy and cloudless afternoon Adam Forrester and Lilias Fay
set out upon a ramble over the wide estate which they were to possess
together, seeking a proper site for their temple of happiness. They
were themselves a fair and happy spectacle, fit priest and priestess
for such a shrine, although, making poetry of the pretty name of
Lilias, Adam Forrester was wont to call her "Lily" because her form
was as fragile and her cheek almost as pale. As they passed hand in
hand down the avenue of drooping elms that led from the portal of
Lilias Fay's paternal mansion they seemed to glance like winged
creatures through the strips of sunshine, and to scatter brightness
where the deep shadows fell.

But, setting forth at the same time with this youthful pair, there was
a dismal figure wrapped in a black velvet cloak that might have been
made of a coffin-pall, and with a sombre hat such as mourners wear
drooping its broad brim over his heavy brows. Glancing behind them,
the lovers well knew who it was that followed, but wished from their
hearts that he had been elsewhere, as being a companion so strangely
unsuited to their joyous errand. It was a near relative of Lilias Fay,
an old man by the name of Walter Gascoigne, who had long labored under
the burden of a melancholy spirit which was sometimes maddened into
absolute insanity and always had a tinge of it. What a contrast
between the young pilgrims of bliss and their unbidden associate! They
looked as if moulded of heaven's sunshine and he of earth's gloomiest
shade; they flitted along like Hope and Joy roaming hand in hand
through life, while his darksome figure stalked behind, a type of all
the woeful influences which life could fling upon them.

But the three had not gone far when they reached a spot that pleased
the gentle Lily, and she paused.

"What sweeter place shall we find than this?" said she. "Why should we
seek farther for the site of our temple?"

It was indeed a delightful spot of earth, though undistinguished by
any very prominent beauties, being merely a nook in the shelter of a
hill, with the prospect of a distant lake in one direction and of a
church-spire in another. There were vistas and pathways leading onward
and onward into the green woodlands and vanishing away in the
glimmering shade. The temple, if erected here, would look toward the
west; so that the lovers could shape all sorts of magnificent dreams
out of the purple, violet and gold of the sunset sky, and few of their
anticipated pleasures were dearer than this sport of fantasy.

"Yes," said Adam Forrester; "we might seek all day and find no
lovelier spot. We will build our temple here."

But their sad old companion, who had taken his stand on the very site
which they proposed to cover with a marble floor, shook his head and
frowned, and the young man and the Lily deemed it almost enough to
blight the spot and desecrate it for their airy temple that his dismal
figure had thrown its shadow there. He pointed to some scattered
stones, the remnants of a former structure, and to flowers such as
young girls delight to nurse in their gardens, but which had now
relapsed into the wild simplicity of nature.

"Not here," cried old Walter Gascoigne. "Here, long ago, other mortals
built their temple of happiness; seek another site for yours."

"What!" exclaimed Lilias Fay. "Have any ever planned such a temple
save ourselves?"

"Poor child!" said her gloomy kinsman. "In one shape or other every
mortal has dreamed your dream." Then he told the lovers, how--not,
indeed, an antique temple, but a dwelling--had once stood there, and
that a dark-clad guest had dwelt among its inmates, sitting for ever
at the fireside and poisoning all their household mirth.

Under this type Adam Forrester and Lilias saw that the old man spake
of sorrow. He told of nothing that might not be recorded in the
history of almost every household, and yet his hearers felt as if no
sunshine ought to fall upon a spot where human grief had left so deep
a stain--or, at least, that no joyous temple should be built there.

"This is very sad," said the Lily, sighing.

"Well, there are lovelier spots than this," said Adam Forrester,
soothingly--"spots which sorrow has not blighted."

So they hastened away, and the melancholy Gascoigne followed them,
looking as if he had gathered up all the gloom of the deserted spot
and was bearing it as a burden of inestimable treasure. But still they
rambled on, and soon found themselves in a rocky dell through the
midst of which ran a streamlet with ripple and foam and a continual
voice of inarticulate joy. It was a wild retreat walled on either side
with gray precipices which would have frowned somewhat too sternly had
not a profusion of green shrubbery rooted itself into their crevices
and wreathed gladsome foliage around their solemn brows. But the chief
joy of the dell was in the little stream which seemed like the
presence of a blissful child with nothing earthly to do save to babble
merrily and disport itself, and make every living soul its playfellow,
and throw the sunny gleams of its spirit upon all.

"Here, here is the spot!" cried the two lovers, with one voice, as
they reached a level space on the brink of a small cascade. "This glen
was made on purpose for our temple."

"And the glad song of the brook will be always in our ears," said
Lilias Fay.

"And its long melody shall sing the bliss of our lifetime," said Adam
Forrester.

"Ye must build no temple here," murmured their dismal companion.

And there again was the old lunatic standing just on the spot where
they meant to rear their lightsome dome, and looking like the embodied
symbol of some great woe that in forgotten days had happened there.
And, alas! there had been woe, nor that alone. A young man more than a
hundred years before had lured hither a girl that loved him, and on
this spot had murdered her and washed his bloody hands in the stream
which sang so merrily, and ever since the victim's death-shrieks were
often heard to echo between the cliffs.

"And see!" cried old Gascoigne; "is the stream yet pure from the stain
of the murderer's hands?"

"Methinks it has a tinge of blood," faintly answered the Lily; and,
being as slight as the gossamer, she trembled and clung to her lover's
arm, whispering, "Let us flee from this dreadful vale."

"Come, then," said Adam Forrester as cheerily as he could; "we shall
soon find a happier spot."

They set forth again, young pilgrims on that quest which
millions--which every child of earth--has tried in turn.

And were the Lily and her lover to be more fortunate than all those
millions? For a long time it seemed not so. The dismal shape of the
old lunatic still glided behind them, and for every spot that looked
lovely in their eyes he had some legend of human wrong or suffering so
miserably sad that his auditors could never afterward connect the idea
of joy with the place where it had happened. Here a heartbroken woman
kneeling to her child had been spurned from his feet; here a desolate
old creature had prayed to the evil one, and had received a fiendish
malignity of soul in answer to her prayer; here a new-born infant,
sweet blossom of life, had been found dead with the impress of its
mother's fingers round its throat; and here, under a shattered oak,
two lovers had been stricken by lightning and fell blackened corpses
in each other's arms. The dreary Gascoigne had a gift to know whatever
evil and lamentable thing had stained the bosom of Mother Earth; and
when his funereal voice had told the tale, it appeared like a prophecy
of future woe as well as a tradition of the past. And now, by their
sad demeanor, you would have fancied that the pilgrim-lovers were
seeking, not a temple of earthly joy, but a tomb for themselves and
their posterity.

"Where in this world," exclaimed Adam Forrester, despondingly, "shall
we build our temple of happiness?"

"Where in this world, indeed?" repeated Lilias Fay; and, being faint
and weary--the more so by the heaviness of her heart--the Lily drooped
her head and sat down on the summit of a knoll, repeating, "Where in
this world shall we build our temple?"

"Ah! have you already asked yourselves that question?" said their
companion, his shaded features growing even gloomier with the smile
that dwelt on them. "Yet there is a place even in this world where ye
may build it."

While the old man spoke Adam Forrester and Lilias had carelessly
thrown their eyes around, and perceived that the spot where they had
chanced to pause possessed a quiet charm which was well enough adapted
to their present mood of mind. It was a small rise of ground with a
certain regularity of shape that had perhaps been bestowed by art, and
a group of trees which almost surrounded it threw their pensive
shadows across and far beyond, although some softened glory of the
sunshine found its way there. The ancestral mansion wherein the lovers
would dwell together appeared on one side, and the ivied church where
they were to worship on another. Happening to cast their eyes on the
ground, they smiled, yet with a sense of wonder, to see that a pale
lily was growing at their feet.

"We will build our temple here," said they, simultaneously, and with
an indescribable conviction that they had at last found the very spot.

Yet while they uttered this exclamation the young man and the Lily
turned an apprehensive glance at their dreary associate, deeming it
hardly possible that some tale of earthly affliction should not make
those precincts loathsome, as in every former case. The old man stood
just behind them, so as to form the chief figure in the group, with
his sable cloak muffling the lower part of his visage and his sombre
hat overshadowing his brows. But he gave no word of dissent from their
purpose, and an inscrutable smile was accepted by the lovers as a
token that here had been no footprint of guilt or sorrow to desecrate
the site of their temple of happiness.

In a little time longer, while summer was still in its prime, the
fairy-structure of the temple arose on the summit of the knoll amid
the solemn shadows of the trees, yet often gladdened with bright
sunshine. It was built of white marble, with slender and graceful
pillars supporting a vaulted dome, and beneath the centre of this
dome, upon a pedestal, was a slab of dark-veined marble on which books
and music might be strewn. But there was a fantasy among the people of
the neighborhood that the edifice was planned after an ancient
mausoleum and was intended for a tomb, and that the central slab of
dark-veined marble was to be inscribed with the names of buried ones.
They doubted, too, whether the form of Lilias Fay could appertain to a
creature of this earth, being so very delicate and growing every day
more fragile, so that she looked as if the summer breeze should snatch
her up and waft her heavenward. But still she watched the daily growth
of the temple, and so did old Walter Gascoigne, who now made that spot
his continual haunt, leaning whole hours together on his staff and
giving as deep attention to the work as though it had been indeed a
tomb. In due time it was finished and a day appointed for a simple
rite of dedication.

On the preceding evening, after Adam Forrester had taken leave of his
mistress, he looked back toward the portal of her dwelling and felt a
strange thrill of fear, for he imagined that as the setting sunbeams
faded from her figure she was exhaling away, and that something of her
ethereal substance was withdrawn with each lessening gleam of light.
With his farewell glance a shadow had fallen over the portal, and
Lilias was invisible. His foreboding spirit deemed it an omen at the
time, and so it proved; for the sweet earthly form by which the Lily
had been manifested to the world was found lifeless the next morning
in the temple with her head resting on her arms, which were folded
upon the slab of dark-veined marble. The chill winds of the earth had
long since breathed a blight into this beautiful flower; so that a
loving hand had now transplanted it to blossom brightly in the garden
of Paradise.

But alas for the temple of happiness! In his unutterable grief Adam
Forrester had no purpose more at heart than to convert this temple of
many delightful hopes into a tomb and bury his dead mistress there.
And, lo! a wonder! Digging a grave beneath the temple's marble floor,
the sexton found no virgin earth such as was meet to receive the
maiden's dust, but an ancient sepulchre in which were treasured up the
bones of generations that had died long ago. Among those forgotten
ancestors was the Lily to be laid; and when the funeral procession
brought Lilias thither in her coffin, they beheld old Walter Gascoigne
standing beneath the dome of the temple with his cloak of pall and
face of darkest gloom, and wherever that figure might take its stand
the spot would seem a sepulchre. He watched the mourners as they
lowered the coffin down.

"And so," said he to Adam Forrester, with the strange smile in which
his insanity was wont to gleam forth, "you have found no better
foundation for your happiness than on a grave?"

But as the shadow of Affliction spoke a vision of hope and joy had its
birth in Adam's mind even from the old man's taunting words, for then
he knew what was betokened by the parable in which the Lily and
himself had acted, and the mystery of life and death was opened to
him.

"Joy! joy!" he cried, throwing his arms toward heaven. "On a grave be
the site of our temple, and now our happiness is for eternity."

With those words a ray of sunshine broke through the dismal sky and
glimmered down into the sepulchre, while at the same moment the shape
of old Walter Gascoigne stalked drearily away, because his gloom,
symbolic of all earthly sorrow, might no longer abide there now that
the darkest riddle of humanity was read.




FOOTPRINTS ON THE SEASHORE.


It must be a spirit much unlike my own which can keep itself in health
and vigor without sometimes stealing from the sultry sunshine of the
world to plunge into the cool bath of solitude. At intervals, and not
infrequent ones, the forest and the ocean summon me--one with the roar
of its waves, the other with the murmur of its boughs--forth from the
haunts of men. But I must wander many a mile ere I could stand beneath
the shadow of even one primeval tree, much less be lost among the
multitude of hoary trunks and hidden from the earth and sky by the
mystery of darksome foliage. Nothing is within my daily reach more
like a forest than the acre or two of woodland near some suburban
farmhouse. When, therefore, the yearning for seclusion becomes a
necessity within me, I am drawn to the seashore which extends its line
of rude rocks and seldom-trodden sands for leagues around our bay.
Setting forth at my last ramble on a September morning, I bound myself
with a hermit's vow to interchange no thoughts with man or woman, to
share no social pleasure, but to derive all that day's enjoyment from
shore and sea and sky, from my soul's communion with these, and from
fantasies and recollections or anticipated realities. Surely here is
enough to feed a human spirit for a single day.--Farewell, then, busy
world! Till your evening lights shall shine along the street--till
they gleam upon my sea-flushed face as I tread homeward--free me from
your ties and let me be a peaceful outlaw.

Highways and cross-paths are hastily traversed, and, clambering down a
crag, I find myself at the extremity of a long beach. How gladly does
the spirit leap forth and suddenly enlarge its sense of being to the
full extent of the broad blue, sunny deep! A greeting and a homage to
the sea! I descend over its margin and dip my hand into the wave that
meets me, and bathe my brow. That far-resounding roar is Ocean's voice
of welcome. His salt breath brings a blessing along with it. Now let
us pace together--the reader's fancy arm in arm with mine--this noble
beach, which extends a mile or more from that craggy promontory to
yonder rampart of broken rocks. In front, the sea; in the rear, a
precipitous bank the grassy verge of which is breaking away year after
year, and flings down its tufts of verdure upon the barrenness below.
The beach itself is a broad space of sand, brown and sparkling, with
hardly any pebbles intermixed. Near the water's edge there is a wet
margin which glistens brightly in the sunshine and reflects objects
like a mirror, and as we tread along the glistening border a dry spot
flashes around each footstep, but grows moist again as we lift our
feet. In some spots the sand receives a complete impression of the
sole, square toe and all; elsewhere it is of such marble firmness that
we must stamp heavily to leave a print even of the iron-shod heel.
Along the whole of this extensive beach gambols the surf-wave. Now it
makes a feint of dashing onward in a fury, yet dies away with a meek
murmur and does but kiss the strand; now, after many such abortive
efforts, it rears itself up in an unbroken line, heightening as it
advances, without a speck of foam on its green crest. With how fierce
a roar it flings itself forward and rushes far up the beach!

As I threw my eyes along the edge of the surf I remember that I was
startled, as Robinson Crusoe might have been, by the sense that human
life was within the magic circle of my solitude. Afar off in the
remote distance of the beach, appearing like sea-nymphs, or some
airier things such as might tread upon the feathery spray, was a group
of girls. Hardly had I beheld them, when they passed into the shadow
of the rocks and vanished. To comfort myself--for truly I would fain
have gazed a while longer--I made acquaintance with a flock of
beach-birds. These little citizens of the sea and air preceded me by
about a stone's-throw along the strand, seeking, I suppose, for food
upon its margin. Yet, with a philosophy which mankind would do well to
imitate, they drew a continual pleasure from their toil for a
subsistence. The sea was each little bird's great playmate. They
chased it downward as it swept back, and again ran up swiftly before
the impending wave, which sometimes overtook them and bore them off
their feet. But they floated as lightly as one of their own feathers
on the breaking crest. In their airy flutterings they seemed to rest
on the evanescent spray. Their images--long-legged little figures with
gray backs and snowy bosoms--were seen as distinctly as the realities
in the mirror of the glistening strand. As I advanced they flew a
score or two of yards, and, again alighting, recommenced their
dalliance with the surf-wave; and thus they bore me company along the
beach, the types of pleasant fantasies, till at its extremity they
took wing over the ocean and were gone. After forming a friendship
with these small surf-spirits, it is really worth a sigh to find no
memorial of them save their multitudinous little tracks in the sand.

When we have paced the length of the beach, it is pleasant and not
unprofitable to retrace our steps and recall the whole mood and
occupation of the mind during the former passage. Our tracks, being
all discernible, will guide us with an observing consciousness through
every unconscious wandering of thought and fancy. Here we followed the
surf in its reflux to pick up a shell which the sea seemed loth to
relinquish. Here we found a seaweed with an immense brown leaf, and
trailed it behind us by its long snake-like stalk. Here we seized a
live horseshoe by the tail, and counted the many claws of that queer
monster. Here we dug into the sand for pebbles, and skipped them upon
the surface of the water. Here we wet our feet while examining a
jelly-fish which the waves, having just tossed it up, now sought to
snatch away again. Here we trod along the brink of a fresh-water
brooklet which flows across the beach, becoming shallower and more
shallow, till at last it sinks into the sand and perishes in the
effort to bear its little tribute to the main. Here some vagary
appears to have bewildered us, for our tracks go round and round and
are confusedly intermingled, as if we had found a labyrinth upon the
level beach. And here amid our idle pastime we sat down upon almost
the only stone that breaks the surface of the sand, and were lost in
an unlooked-for and overpowering conception of the majesty and
awfulness of the great deep. Thus by tracking our footprints in the
sand we track our own nature in its wayward course, and steal a glance
upon it when it never dreams of being so observed. Such glances always
make us wiser.

This extensive beach affords room for another pleasant pastime. With
your staff you may write verses--love-verses if they please you
best--and consecrate them with a woman's name. Here, too, may be
inscribed thoughts, feelings, desires, warm outgushings from the
heart's secret places, which you would not pour upon the sand without
the certainty that almost ere the sky has looked upon them the sea
will wash them out. Stir not hence till the record be effaced. Now
(for there is room enough on your canvas) draw huge faces--huge as
that of the Sphynx on Egyptian sands--and fit them with bodies of
corresponding immensity and legs which might stride halfway to yonder
island. Child's-play becomes magnificent on so grand a scale. But,
after all, the most fascinating employment is simply to write your
name in the sand. Draw the letters gigantic, so that two strides may
barely measure them, and three for the long strokes; cut deep, that
the record may be permanent. Statesmen and warriors and poets have
spent their strength in no better cause than this. Is it accomplished?
Return, then, in an hour or two, and seek for this mighty record of a
name. The sea will have swept over it, even as time rolls its effacing
waves over the names of statesmen and warriors and poets. Hark! the
surf-wave laughs at you.

Passing from the beach, I begin to clamber over the crags, making my
difficult way among the ruins of a rampart shattered and broken by the
assaults of a fierce enemy. The rocks rise in every variety of
attitude. Some of them have their feet in the foam and are shagged
halfway upward with seaweed; some have been hollowed almost into
caverns by the unwearied toil of the sea, which can afford to spend
centuries in wearing away a rock, or even polishing a pebble. One huge
rock ascends in monumental shape, with a face like a giant's
tombstone, on which the veins resemble inscriptions, but in an unknown
tongue. We will fancy them the forgotten characters of an antediluvian
race, or else that Nature's own hand has here recorded a mystery
which, could I read her language, would make mankind the wiser and the
happier. How many a thing has troubled me with that same idea! Pass on
and leave it unexplained. Here is a narrow avenue which might seem to
have been hewn through the very heart of an enormous crag, affording
passage for the rising sea to thunder back and forth, filling it with
tumultuous foam and then leaving its floor of black pebbles bare and
glistening. In this chasm there was once an intersecting vein of
softer stone, which the waves have gnawed away piecemeal, while the
granite walls remain entire on either side. How sharply and with what
harsh clamor does the sea rake back the pebbles as it momentarily
withdraws into its own depths! At intervals the floor of the chasm is
left nearly dry, but anon, at the outlet, two or three great waves are
seen struggling to get in at once; two hit the walls athwart, while
one rushes straight through, and all three thunder as if with rage and
triumph. They heap the chasm with a snow-drift of foam and spray.
While watching this scene I can never rid myself of the idea that a
monster endowed with life and fierce energy is striving to burst his
way through the narrow pass. And what a contrast to look through the
stormy chasm and catch a glimpse of the calm bright sea beyond!

Many interesting discoveries may be made among these broken cliffs.
Once, for example, I found a dead seal which a recent tempest had
tossed into the nook of the rocks, where his shaggy carcase lay rolled
in a heap of eel-grass as if the sea-monster sought to hide himself
from my eye. Another time a shark seemed on the point of leaping from
the surf to swallow me, nor did I wholly without dread approach near
enough to ascertain that the man-eater had already met his own death
from some fisherman in the bay. In the same ramble I encountered a
bird--a large gray bird--but whether a loon or a wild goose or the
identical albatross of the Ancient Mariner was beyond my ornithology
to decide. It reposed so naturally on a bed of dry seaweed, with its
head beside its wing, that I almost fancied it alive, and trod softly
lest it should suddenly spread its wings skyward. But the sea-bird
would soar among the clouds no more, nor ride upon its native waves;
so I drew near and pulled out one of its mottled tail-feathers for a
remembrance. Another day I discovered an immense bone wedged into a
chasm of the rocks; it was at least ten feet long, curved like a
scymitar, bejewelled with barnacles and small shellfish and partly
covered with a growth of seaweed. Some leviathan of former ages had
used this ponderous mass as a jaw-bone. Curiosities of a minuter order
may be observed in a deep reservoir which is replenished with water at
every tide, but becomes a lake among the crags save when the sea is at
its height. At the bottom of this rocky basin grow marine plants, some
of which tower high beneath the water and cast a shadow in the
sunshine. Small fishes dart to and fro and hide themselves among the
seaweed; there is also a solitary crab who appears to lead the life of
a hermit, communing with none of the other denizens of the place, and
likewise several five-fingers; for I know no other name than that
which children give them. If your imagination be at all accustomed to
such freaks, you may look down into the depths of this pool and fancy
it the mysterious depth of ocean. But where are the hulks and
scattered timbers of sunken ships? where the treasures that old Ocean
hoards? where the corroded cannon? where the corpses and skeletons of
seamen who went down in storm and battle?

On the day of my last ramble--it was a September day, yet as warm as
summer--what should I behold as I approached the above-described basin
but three girls sitting on its margin and--yes, it is veritably
so--laving their snowy feet in the sunny water? These, these are the
warm realities of those three visionary shapes that flitted from me on
the beach. Hark their merry voices as they toss up the water with
their feet! They have not seen me. I must shrink behind this rock and
steal away again.

In honest truth, vowed to solitude as I am, there is something in this
encounter that makes the heart flutter with a strangely pleasant
sensation. I know these girls to be realities of flesh and blood, yet,
glancing at them so briefly, they mingle like kindred creatures with
the ideal beings of my mind. It is pleasant, likewise, to gaze down
from some high crag and watch a group of children gathering pebbles
and pearly shells and playing with the surf as with old Ocean's hoary
beard. Nor does it infringe upon my seclusion to see yonder boat at
anchor off the shore swinging dreamily to and fro and rising and
sinking with the alternate swell, while the crew--four gentlemen in
roundabout jackets--are busy with their fishing-lines. But with an
inward antipathy and a headlong flight do I eschew the presence of any
meditative stroller like myself, known by his pilgrim-staff, his
sauntering step, his shy demeanor, his observant yet abstracted eye.

From such a man as if another self had scared me I scramble hastily
over the rocks, and take refuge in a nook which many a secret hour has
given me a right to call my own. I would do battle for it even with
the churl that should produce the title-deeds. Have not my musings
melted into its rocky walls and sandy floor and made them a portion of
myself? It is a recess in the line of cliffs, walled round by a rough,
high precipice which almost encircles and shuts in a little space of
sand. In front the sea appears as between the pillars of a portal; in
the rear the precipice is broken and intermixed with earth which gives
nourishment not only to clinging and twining shrubs, but to trees that
grip the rock with their naked roots and seem to struggle hard for
footing and for soil enough to live upon. These are fir trees, but
oaks hang their heavy branches from above, and throw down acorns on
the beach, and shed their withering foliage upon the waves. At this
autumnal season the precipice is decked with variegated splendor.
Trailing wreaths of scarlet flaunt from the summit downward; tufts of
yellow-flowering shrubs and rose-bushes, with their reddened leaves
and glossy seed-berries, sprout from each crevice; at every glance I
detect some new light or shade of beauty, all contrasting with the
stern gray rock. A rill of water trickles down the cliff and fills a
little cistern near the base. I drain it at a draught, and find it
fresh and pure. This recess shall be my dining-hall. And what the
feast? A few biscuits made savory by soaking them in sea-water, a tuft
of samphire gathered from the beach, and an apple for the dessert. By
this time the little rill has filled its reservoir again, and as I
quaff it I thank God more heartily than for a civic banquet that he
gives me the healthful appetite to make a feast of bread and water.

Dinner being over, I throw myself at length upon the sand and, basking
in the sunshine, let my mind disport itself at will. The walls of this
my hermitage have no tongue to tell my follies, though I sometimes
fancy that they have ears to hear them and a soul to sympathize. There
is a magic in this spot. Dreams haunt its precincts and flit around me
in broad sunlight, nor require that sleep shall blindfold me to real
objects ere these be visible. Here can I frame a story of two lovers,
and make their shadows live before me and be mirrored in the tranquil
water as they tread along the sand, leaving no footprints. Here,
should I will it, I can summon up a single shade and be myself her
lover.--Yes, dreamer, but your lonely heart will be the colder for
such fancies.--Sometimes, too, the Past comes back, and finds me here,
and in her train come faces which were gladsome when I knew them, yet
seem not gladsome now. Would that my hiding-place were lonelier, so
that the Past might not find me!--Get ye all gone, old friends, and
let me listen to the murmur of the sea--a melancholy voice, but less
sad than yours. Of what mysteries is it telling? Of sunken ships and
whereabouts they lie? Of islands afar and undiscovered whose tawny
children are unconscious of other islands and of continents, and deem
the stars of heaven their nearest neighbors? Nothing of all this.
What, then? Has it talked for so many ages and meant nothing all the
while? No; for those ages find utterance in the sea's unchanging
voice, and warn the listener to withdraw his interest from mortal
vicissitudes and let the infinite idea of eternity pervade his soul.
This is wisdom, and therefore will I spend the next half-hour in
shaping little boats of driftwood and launching them on voyages across
the cove, with the feather of a sea-gull for a sail. If the voice of
ages tell me true, this is as wise an occupation as to build ships of
five hundred tons and launch them forth upon the main, bound to "Far
Cathay." Yet how would the merchant sneer at me!

And, after all, can such philosophy be true? Methinks I could find a
thousand arguments against it. Well, then, let yonder shaggy rock
mid-deep in the surf--see! he is somewhat wrathful: he rages and roars
and foams,--let that tall rock be my antagonist, and let me exercise
my oratory like him of Athens who bandied words with an angry sea and
got the victory. My maiden-speech is a triumphant one, for the
gentleman in seaweed has nothing to offer in reply save an immitigable
roaring. His voice, indeed, will be heard a long while after mine is
hushed. Once more I shout and the cliffs reverberate the sound. Oh
what joy for a shy man to feel himself so solitary that he may lift
his voice to its highest pitch without hazard of a listener!--But
hush! Be silent, my good friend! Whence comes that stifled laughter?
It was musical, but how should there be such music in my solitude?
Looking upward, I catch a glimpse of three faces peeping from the
summit of the cliff like angels between me and their native sky.--Ah,
fair girls! you may make yourself merry at my eloquence, but it was my
turn to smile when I saw your white feet in the pool. Let us keep each
other's secrets.

The sunshine has now passed from my hermitage, except a gleam upon the
sand just where it meets the sea. A crowd of gloomy fantasies will
come and haunt me if I tarry longer here in the darkening twilight of
these gray rocks. This is a dismal place in some moods of the mind.
Climb we, therefore, the precipice, and pause a moment on the brink
gazing down into that hollow chamber by the deep where we have been
what few can be--sufficient to our own pastime. Yes, say the word
outright: self-sufficient to our own happiness. How lonesome looks the
recess now, and dreary too, like all other spots where happiness has
been! There lies my shadow in the departing sunshine with its head
upon the sea. I will pelt it with pebbles. A hit! a hit! I clap my
hands in triumph, and see my shadow clapping its unreal hands and
claiming the triumph for itself. What a simpleton must I have been all
day, since my own shadow makes a mock of my fooleries!

Homeward! homeward! It is time to hasten home. It is time--it is time;
for as the sun sinks over the western wave the sea grows melancholy
and the surf has a saddened tone. The distant sails appear astray and
not of earth in their remoteness amid the desolate waste. My spirit
wanders forth afar, but finds no resting-place and comes shivering
back. It is time that I were hence. But grudge me not the day that has
been spent in seclusion which yet was not solitude, since the great
sea has been my companion, and the little sea-birds my friends, and
the wind has told me his secrets, and airy shapes have flitted around
me in my hermitage. Such companionship works an effect upon a man's
character as if he had been admitted to the society of creatures that
are not mortal. And when, at noontide, I tread the crowded streets,
the influence of this day will still be felt; so that I shall walk
among men kindly and as a brother, with affection and sympathy, but
yet shall not melt into the indistinguishable mass of humankind. I
shall think my own thoughts and feel my own emotions and possess my
individuality unviolated.

But it is good at the eve of such a day to feel and know that there
are men and women in the world. That feeling and that knowledge are
mine at this moment, for on the shore, far below me, the fishing-party
have landed from their skiff and are cooking their scaly prey by a
fire of driftwood kindled in the angle of two rude rocks. The three
visionary girls are likewise there. In the deepening twilight, while
the surf is dashing near their hearth, the ruddy gleam of the fire
throws a strange air of comfort over the wild cove, bestrewn as it is
with pebbles and seaweed and exposed to the "melancholy main."
Moreover, as the smoke climbs up the precipice, it brings with it a
savory smell from a pan of fried fish and a black kettle of chowder,
and reminds me that my dinner was nothing but bread and water and a
tuft of samphire and an apple. Methinks the party might find room for
another guest at that flat rock which serves them for a table; and if
spoons be scarce, I could pick up a clam-shell on the beach. They see
me now; and--the blessing of a hungry man upon him!--one of them sends
up a hospitable shout: "Halloo, Sir Solitary! Come down and sup with
us!" The ladies wave their handkerchiefs. Can I decline? No; and be it
owned, after all my solitary joys, that this is the sweetest moment of
a day by the seashore.




EDWARD FANE'S ROSEBUD.


There is hardly a more difficult exercise of fancy than, while gazing
at a figure of melancholy age, to recreate its youth, and without
entirely obliterating the identity of form and features to restore
those graces which Time has snatched away. Some old people--especially
women--so age-worn and woeful are they, seem never to have been young
and gay. It is easier to conceive that such gloomy phantoms were sent
into the world as withered and decrepit as we behold them now, with
sympathies only for pain and grief, to watch at death-beds and weep at
funerals. Even the sable garments of their widowhood appear essential
to their existence; all their attributes combine to render them
darksome shadows creeping strangely amid the sunshine of human life.
Yet it is no unprofitable task to take one of these doleful creatures
and set Fancy resolutely at work to brighten the dim eye, and darken
the silvery locks, and paint the ashen cheek with rose-color, and
repair the shrunken and crazy form, till a dewy maiden shall be seen
in the old matron's elbow-chair. The miracle being wrought, then let
the years roll back again, each sadder than the last, and the whole
weight of age and sorrow settle down upon the youthful figure.
Wrinkles and furrows, the handwriting of Time, may thus be deciphered
and found to contain deep lessons of thought and feeling.

Such profit might be derived by a skilful observer from my
much-respected friend the Widow Toothaker, a nurse of great repute who
has breathed the atmosphere of sick-chambers and dying-breaths these
forty years. See! she sits cowering over her lonesome hearth with her
gown and upper petticoat drawn upward, gathering thriftily into her
person the whole warmth of the fire which now at nightfall begins to
dissipate the autumnal chill of her chamber. The blaze quivers
capriciously in front, alternately glimmering into the deepest chasms
of her wrinkled visage, and then permitting a ghostly dimness to mar
the outlines of her venerable figure. And Nurse Toothaker holds a
teaspoon in her right hand with which to stir up the contents of a
tumbler in her left, whence steams a vapory fragrance abhorred of
temperance societies. Now she sips, now stirs, now sips again. Her sad
old heart has need to be revived by the rich infusion of Geneva which
is mixed half and half with hot water in the tumbler. All day long she
has been sitting by a death-pillow, and quitted it for her home only
when the spirit of her patient left the clay and went homeward too.
But now are her melancholy meditations cheered and her torpid blood
warmed and her shoulders lightened of at least twenty ponderous years
by a draught from the true fountain of youth in a case-bottle. It is
strange that men should deem that fount a fable, when its liquor fills
more bottles than the Congress-water.--Sip it again, good nurse, and
see whether a second draught will not take off another score of years,
and perhaps ten more, and show us in your high-backed chair the
blooming damsel who plighted troths with Edward Fane.--Get you gone,
Age and Widowhood!--Come back, unwedded Youth!--But, alas! the charm
will not work. In spite of Fancy's most potent spell, I can see only
an old dame cowering over the fire, a picture of decay and desolation,
while the November blast roars at her in the chimney and fitful
showers rush suddenly against the window.

Yet there was a time when Rose Grafton--such was the pretty
maiden-name of Nurse Toothaker--possessed beauty that would have
gladdened this dim and dismal chamber as with sunshine. It won for her
the heart of Edward Fane, who has since made so great a figure in the
world and is now a grand old gentleman with powdered hair and as gouty
as a lord. These early lovers thought to have walked hand in hand
through life. They had wept together for Edward's little sister Mary,
whom Rose tended in her sickness--partly because she was the sweetest
child that ever lived or died, but more for love of him. She was but
three years old. Being such an infant, Death could not embody his
terrors in her little corpse; nor did Rose fear to touch the dead
child's brow, though chill, as she curled the silken hair around it,
nor to take her tiny hand and clasp a flower within its fingers.
Afterward, when she looked through the pane of glass in the coffin-lid
and beheld Mary's face, it seemed not so much like death or life as
like a wax-work wrought into the perfect image of a child asleep and
dreaming of its mother's smile. Rose thought her too fair a thing to
be hidden in the grave, and wondered that an angel did not snatch up
little Mary's coffin and bear the slumbering babe to heaven and bid
her wake immortal. But when the sods were laid on little Mary, the
heart of Rose was troubled. She shuddered at the fantasy that in
grasping the child's cold fingers her virgin hand had exchanged a
first greeting with mortality and could never lose the earthy taint.
How many a greeting since! But as yet she was a fair young girl with
the dewdrops of fresh feeling in her bosom, and, instead of
"Rose"--which seemed too mature a name for her half-opened beauty--her
lover called her "Rosebud."

The rosebud was destined never to bloom for Edward Fane. His mother
was a rich and haughty dame with all the aristocratic prejudices of
colonial times. She scorned Rose Grafton's humble parentage and caused
her son to break his faith, though, had she let him choose, he would
have prized his Rosebud above the richest diamond. The lovers parted,
and have seldom met again. Both may have visited the same mansions,
but not at the same time, for one was bidden to the festal hall and
the other to the sick-chamber; he was the guest of Pleasure and
Prosperity, and she of Anguish. Rose, after their separation, was long
secluded within the dwelling of Mr. Toothaker, whom she married with
the revengeful hope of breaking her false lover's heart. She went to
her bridegroom's arms with bitterer tears, they say, than young girls
ought to shed at the threshold of the bridal-chamber. Yet, though her
husband's head was getting gray and his heart had been chilled with an
autumnal frost, Rose soon began to love him, and wondered at her own
conjugal affection. He was all she had to love; there were no
children.

In a year or two poor Mr. Toothaker was visited with a wearisome
infirmity which settled in his joints and made him weaker than a
child. He crept forth about his business, and came home at dinner-time
and eventide, not with the manly tread that gladdens a wife's heart,
but slowly, feebly, jotting down each dull footstep with a melancholy
dub of his staff. We must pardon his pretty wife if she sometimes
blushed to own him. Her visitors, when they heard him coming, looked
for the appearance of some old, old man, but he dragged his nerveless
limbs into the parlor--and there was Mr. Toothaker! The disease
increasing, he never went into the sunshine save with a staff in his
right hand and his left on his wife's shoulder, bearing heavily
downward like a dead man's hand. Thus, a slender woman still looking
maiden-like, she supported his tall, broad-chested frame along the
pathway of their little garden, and plucked the roses for her
gray-haired husband, and spoke soothingly as to an infant. His mind
was palsied with his body; its utmost energy was peevishness. In a few
months more she helped him up the staircase with a pause at every
step, and a longer one upon the landing-place, and a heavy glance
behind as he crossed the threshold of his chamber. He knew, poor man!
that the precincts of those four walls would thenceforth be his
world--his world, his home, his tomb, at once a dwelling-and a
burial-place--till he were borne to a darker and a narrower one. But
Rose was with him in the tomb. He leaned upon her in his daily passage
from the bed to the chair by the fireside, and back again from the
weary chair to the joyless bed--his bed and hers, their
marriage-bed--till even this short journey ceased and his head lay all
day upon the pillow and hers all night beside it. How long poor Mr.
Toothaker was kept in misery! Death seemed to draw near the door, and
often to lift the latch, and sometimes to thrust his ugly skull into
the chamber, nodding to Rose and pointing at her husband, but still
delayed to enter. "This bedridden wretch cannot escape me," quoth
Death. "I will go forth and run a race with the swift and fight a
battle with the strong, and come back for Toothaker at my leisure."
Oh, when the deliverer came so near, in the dull anguish of her
worn-out sympathies did she never long to cry, "Death, come in"?

But no; we have no right to ascribe such a wish to our friend Rose.
She never failed in a wife's duty to her poor sick husband. She
murmured not though a glimpse of the sunny sky was as strange to her
as him, nor answered peevishly though his complaining accents roused
her from sweetest dream only to share his wretchedness. He knew her
faith, yet nourished a cankered jealousy; and when the slow disease
had chilled all his heart save one lukewarm spot which Death's frozen
fingers were searching for, his last words were, "What would my Rose
have done for her first love, if she has been so true and kind to a
sick old man like me?" And then his poor soul crept away and left the
body lifeless, though hardly more so than for years before, and Rose a
widow, though in truth it was the wedding-night that widowed her. She
felt glad, it must be owned, when Mr. Toothaker was buried, because
his corpse had retained such a likeness to the man half alive that she
hearkened for the sad murmur of his voice bidding her shift his
pillow. But all through the next winter, though the grave had held him
many a month, she fancied him calling from that cold bed, "Rose, Rose!
Come put a blanket on my feet!"

So now the Rosebud was the widow Toothaker. Her troubles had come
early, and, tedious as they seemed, had passed before all her bloom
was fled. She was still fair enough to captivate a bachelor, or with a
widow's cheerful gravity she might have won a widower, stealing into
his heart in the very guise of his dead wife. But the widow Toothaker
had no such projects. By her watchings and continual cares her heart
had become knit to her first husband with a constancy which changed
its very nature and made her love him for his infirmities, and
infirmity for his sake. When the palsied old man was gone, even her
early lover could not have supplied his place. She had dwelt in a
sick-chamber and been the companion of a half-dead wretch till she
could scarcely breathe in a free air and felt ill at ease with the
healthy and the happy. She missed the fragrance of the doctor's stuff.
She walked the chamber with a noiseless footfall. If visitors came in,
she spoke in soft and soothing accents, and was startled and shocked
by their loud voices. Often in the lonesome evening she looked
timorously from the fireside to the bed, with almost a hope of
recognizing a ghastly face upon the pillow. Then went her thoughts
sadly to her husband's grave. If one impatient throb had wronged him
in his lifetime, if she had secretly repined because her buoyant youth
was imprisoned with his torpid age, if ever while slumbering beside
him a treacherous dream had admitted another into her heart,--yet the
sick man had been preparing a revenge which the dead now claimed. On
his painful pillow he had cast a spell around her; his groans and
misery had proved more captivating charms than gayety and youthful
grace; in his semblance Disease itself had won the Rosebud for a
bride, nor could his death dissolve the nuptials. By that indissoluble
bond she had gained a home in every sick-chamber, and nowhere else;
there were her brethren and sisters; thither her husband summoned her
with that voice which had seemed to issue from the grave of Toothaker.
At length she recognized her destiny.

We have beheld her as the maid, the wife, the widow; now we see her in
a separate and insulated character: she was in all her attributes
Nurse Toothaker. And Nurse Toothaker alone, with her own shrivelled
lips, could make known her experience in that capacity. What a history
might she record of the great sicknesses in which she has gone hand in
hand with the exterminating angel! She remembers when the small-pox
hoisted a red banner on almost every house along the street. She has
witnessed when the typhus fever swept off a whole household, young and
old, all but a lonely mother, who vainly shrieked to follow her last
loved one. Where would be Death's triumph if none lived to weep? She
can speak of strange maladies that have broken out as if
spontaneously, but were found to have been imported from foreign lands
with rich silks and other merchandise, the costliest portion of the
cargo. And once, she recollects, the people died of what was
considered a new pestilence, till the doctors traced it to the ancient
grave of a young girl who thus caused many deaths a hundred years
after her own burial. Strange that such black mischief should lurk in
a maiden's grave! She loves to tell how strong men fight with fiery
fevers, utterly refusing to give up their breath, and how consumptive
virgins fade out of the world, scarcely reluctant, as if their lovers
were wooing them to a far country.--Tell us, thou fearful woman; tell
us the death-secrets. Fain would I search out the meaning of words
faintly gasped with intermingled sobs and broken sentences
half-audibly spoken between earth and the judgment-seat.

An awful woman! She is the patron-saint of young physicians and the
bosom-friend of old ones. In the mansions where she enters the inmates
provide themselves black garments; the coffin-maker follows her, and
the bell tolls as she comes away from the threshold. Death himself has
met her at so many a bedside that he puts forth his bony hand to greet
Nurse Toothaker. She is an awful woman. And oh, is it conceivable that
this handmaid of human infirmity and affliction--so darkly stained, so
thoroughly imbued with all that is saddest in the doom of mortals--can
ever again be bright and gladsome even though bathed in the sunshine
of eternity? By her long communion with woe has she not forfeited her
inheritance of immortal joy? Does any germ of bliss survive within
her?

Hark! an eager knocking st Nurse Toothaker's door. She starts from her
drowsy reverie, sets aside the empty tumbler and teaspoon, and lights
a lamp at the dim embers of the fire. "Rap, rap, rap!" again, and she
hurries adown the staircase, wondering which of her friends can be at
death's door now, since there is such an earnest messenger at Nurse
Toothaker's. Again the peal resounds just as her hand is on the lock.
"Be quick, Nurse Toothaker!" cries a man on the doorstep. "Old General
Fane is taken with the gout in his stomach and has sent for you to
watch by his death-bed. Make haste, for there is no time to
lose."--"Fane! Edward Fane! And has he sent for me at last? I am
ready. I will get on my cloak and begone. So," adds the sable-gowned,
ashen-visaged, funereal old figure, "Edward Fane remembers his
Rosebud."

Our question is answered. There is a germ of bliss within her. Her
long-hoarded constancy, her memory of the bliss that was remaining
amid the gloom of her after-life like a sweet-smelling flower in a
coffin, is a symbol that all may be renewed. In some happier clime the
Rosebud may revive again with all the dewdrops in its bosom.




THE THREEFOLD DESTINY.

A FAERY LEGEND.


I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far
as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in
which the spirit and mechanism of the faery legend should be combined
with the characters and manners of familiar life. In the little tale
which follows a subdued tinge of the wild and wonderful is thrown over
a sketch of New England personages and scenery, yet, it is hoped,
without entirely obliterating the sober hues of nature. Rather than a
story of events claiming to be real, it may be considered as an
allegory such as the writers of the last century would have expressed
in the shape of an Eastern tale, but to which I have endeavored to
give a more lifelike warmth than could be infused into those fanciful
productions.

In the twilight of a summer eve a tall dark figure over which long and
remote travel had thrown an outlandish aspect was entering a village
not in "faery londe," but within our own familiar boundaries. The
staff on which this traveller leaned had been his companion from the
spot where it grew in the jungles of Hindostan; the hat that
overshadowed his sombre brow, had shielded him from the suns of Spain;
but his cheek had been blackened by the red-hot wind of an Arabian
desert and had felt the frozen breath of an Arctic region. Long
sojourning amid wild and dangerous men, he still wore beneath his vest
the ataghan which he had once struck into the throat of a Turkish
robber. In every foreign clime he had lost something of his New
England characteristics, and perhaps from every people he had
unconsciously borrowed a new peculiarity; so that when the
world-wanderer again trod the street of his native village it is no
wonder that he passed unrecognized, though exciting the gaze and
curiosity of all. Yet, as his arm casually touched that of a young
woman who was wending her way to an evening lecture, she started and
almost uttered a cry.

"Ralph Cranfield!" was the name that she half articulated.

"Can that be my old playmate Faith Egerton?" thought the traveller,
looking round at her figure, but without pausing.

Ralph Cranfield from his youth upward had felt himself marked out for
a high destiny. He had imbibed the idea--we say not whether it were
revealed to him by witchcraft or in a dream of prophecy, or that his
brooding fancy had palmed its own dictates upon him as the oracles of
a sybil, but he had imbibed the idea, and held it firmest among his
articles of faith--that three marvellous events of his life were to be
confirmed to him by three signs.

The first of these three fatalities, and perhaps the one on which his
youthful imagination had dwelt most fondly, was the discovery of the
maid who alone of all the maids on earth could make him happy by her
love. He was to roam around the world till he should meet a beautiful
woman wearing on her bosom a jewel in the shape of a heart--whether of
pearl or ruby or emerald or carbuncle or a changeful opal, or perhaps
a priceless diamond, Ralph Cranfield little cared, so long as it were
a heart of one peculiar shape. On encountering this lovely stranger he
was bound to address her thus: "Maiden, I have brought you a heavy
heart. May I rest its weight on you?" And if she were his fated
bride--if their kindred souls were destined to form a union here below
which all eternity should only bind more closely--she would reply,
with her finger on the heart-shaped jewel, "This token which I have
worn so long is the assurance that you may."

And, secondly, Ralph Cranfield had a firm belief that there was a
mighty treasure hidden somewhere in the earth of which the
burial-place would be revealed to none but him. When his feet should
press upon the mysterious spot, there would be a hand before him
pointing downward--whether carved of marble or hewn in gigantic
dimensions on the side of a rocky precipice, or perchance a hand of
flame in empty air, he could not tell, but at least he would discern a
hand, the forefinger pointing downward, and beneath it the Latin word
"_Effode_"--"Dig!" And, digging thereabouts, the gold in coin or
ingots, the precious stones, or of whatever else the treasure might
consist, would be certain to reward his toil.

The third and last of the miraculous events in the life of this
high-destined man was to be the attainment of extensive influence and
sway over his fellow-creatures. Whether he were to be a king and
founder of a hereditary throne, or the victorious leader of a people
contending for their freedom, or the apostle of a purified and
regenerated faith, was left for futurity to show. As messengers of the
sign by which Ralph Cranfield might recognize the summons, three
venerable men were to claim audience of him. The chief among them--a
dignified and majestic person arrayed, it may be supposed, in the
flowing garments of an ancient sage--would be the bearer of a wand or
prophet's rod. With this wand or rod or staff the venerable sage would
trace a certain figure in the air, and then proceed to make known his
Heaven-instructed message, which, if obeyed, must lead to glorious
results.

With this proud fate before him, in the flush of his imaginative youth
Ralph Cranfield had set forth to seek the maid, the treasure, and the
venerable sage with his gift of extended empire. And had he found
them? Alas! it was not with the aspect of a triumphant man who had
achieved a nobler destiny than all his fellows, but rather with the
gloom of one struggling against peculiar and continual adversity, that
he now passed homeward to his mother's cottage. He had come back, but
only for a time, to lay aside the pilgrim's staff, trusting that his
weary manhood would regain somewhat of the elasticity of youth in the
spot where his threefold fate had been foreshown him. There had been
few changes in the village, for it was not one of those thriving
places where a year's prosperity makes more than the havoc of a
century's decay, but, like a gray hair in a young man's head, an
antiquated little town full of old maids and aged elms and moss-grown
dwellings. Few seemed to be the changes here. The drooping elms,
indeed, had a more majestic spread, the weather-blackened houses were
adorned with a denser thatch of verdant moss, and doubtless there were
a few more gravestones in the burial-ground inscribed with names that
had once been familiar in the village street; yet, summing up all the
mischief that ten years had wrought, it seemed scarcely more than if
Ralph Cranfield had gone forth that very morning and dreamed a
day-dream till the twilight, and then turned back again. But his heart
grew cold because the village did not remember him as he remembered
the village.

"Here is the change," sighed he, striking his hand upon his breast.
"Who is this man of thought and care, weary with world-wandering and
heavy with disappointed hopes? The youth returns not who went forth so
joyously."

And now Ralph Cranfield was at his mother's gate, in front of the
small house where the old lady, with slender but sufficient means, had
kept herself comfortable during her son's long absence. Admitting
himself within the enclosure, he leaned against a great old tree,
trifling with his own impatience as people often do in those intervals
when years are summed into a moment. He took a minute survey of the
dwelling--its windows brightened with the sky-gleam, its doorway with
the half of a millstone for a step, and the faintly-traced path waving
thence to the gate. He made friends again with his childhood's
friend--the old tree against which he leaned--and, glancing his eye
down its trunk, beheld something that excited a melancholy smile. It
was a half-obliterated inscription--the Latin word "_Effode_"--which
he remembered to have carved in the bark of the tree with a whole
day's toil when he had first begun to muse about his exalted destiny.
It might be accounted a rather singular coincidence that the bark just
above the inscription had put forth an excrescence shaped not unlike a
hand, with the forefinger pointing obliquely at the word of fate.
Such, at least, was its appearance in the dusky light.

"Now, a credulous man," said Ralph Cranfield, carelessly, to himself,
"might suppose that the treasure which I have sought round the world
lies buried, after all, at the very door of my mother's dwelling. That
would be a jest indeed."

More he thought not about the matter, for now the door was opened and
an elderly woman appeared on the threshold, peering into the dusk to
discover who it might be that had intruded on her premises and was
standing in the shadow of her tree. It was Ralph Cranfield's mother.
Pass we over their greeting, and leave the one to her joy and the
other to his rest--if quiet rest he found.

But when morning broke, he arose with a troubled brow, for his sleep
and his wakefulness had alike been full of dreams. All the fervor was
rekindled with which he had burned of yore to unravel the threefold
mystery of his fate. The crowd of his early visions seemed to have
awaited him beneath his mother's roof and thronged riotously around to
welcome his return. In the well-remembered chamber, on the pillow
where his infancy had slumbered, he had passed a wilder night than
ever in an Arab tent or when he had reposed his head in the ghastly
shades of a haunted forest. A shadowy maid had stolen to his bedside
and laid her finger on the scintillating heart; a hand of flame had
glowed amid the darkness, pointing downward to a mystery within the
earth; a hoary sage had waved his prophetic wand and beckoned the
dreamer onward to a chair of state. The same phantoms, though fainter
in the daylight, still flitted about the cottage and mingled among
the crowd of familiar faces that were drawn thither by the news of
Ralph Cranfield's return to bid him welcome for his mother's sake.
There they found him, a tall, dark, stately man of foreign aspect,
courteous in demeanor and mild of speech, yet with an abstracted eye
which seemed often to snatch a glance at the invisible.

Meantime, the widow Cranfield went bustling about the house full of
joy that she again had somebody to love and be careful of, and for
whom she might vex and tease herself with the petty troubles of daily
life. It was nearly noon when she looked forth from the door and
descried three personages of note coming along the street through the
hot sunshine and the masses of elm-tree shade. At length they reached
her gate and undid the latch.

"See, Ralph!" exclaimed she, with maternal pride; "here is Squire
Hawkwood and the two other selectmen coming on purpose to see you.
Now, do tell them a good long story about what you have seen in
foreign parts."

The foremost of the three visitors, Squire Hawkwood, was a very
pompous but excellent old gentleman, the head and prime-mover in all
the affairs of the village, and universally acknowledged to be one of
the sagest men on earth. He wore, according to a fashion even then
becoming antiquated, a three-cornered hat, and carried a silver-headed
cane the use of which seemed to be rather for flourishing in the air
than for assisting the progress of his legs. His two companions were
elderly and respectable yeomen who, retaining an ante-Revolutionary
reverence for rank and hereditary wealth, kept a little in the
squire's rear.

As they approached along the pathway Ralph Cranfield sat in an oaken
elbow-chair half unconsciously gazing at the three visitors and
enveloping their homely figures in the misty romance that pervaded his
mental world. "Here," thought he, smiling at the conceit--"here come
three elderly personages, and the first of the three is a venerable
sage with a staff. What if this embassy should bring me the message of
my fate?"

While Squire Hawkwood and his colleagues entered, Ralph rose from his
seat and advanced a few steps to receive them, and his stately figure
and dark countenance as he bent courteously toward his guests had a
natural dignity contrasting well with the bustling importance of the
squire. The old gentleman, according to invariable custom, gave an
elaborate preliminary flourish with his cane in the air, then removed
his three-cornered hat in order to wipe his brow, and finally
proceeded to make known his errand.

"My colleagues and myself," began the squire, "are burdened with
momentous duties, being jointly selectmen of this village. Our minds
for the space of three days past have been laboriously bent on the
selection of a suitable person to fill a most important office and
take upon himself a charge and rule which, wisely considered, may be
ranked no lower than those of kings and potentates. And whereas you,
our native townsman, are of good natural intellect and well cultivated
by foreign travel, and that certain vagaries and fantasies of your
youth are doubtless long ago corrected,--taking all these matters, I
say, into due consideration, we are of opinion that Providence hath
sent you hither at this juncture for our very purpose."

During this harangue Cranfield gazed fixedly at the speaker, as if he
beheld something mysterious and unearthly in his pompous little
figure, and as if the squire had worn the flowing robes of an ancient
sage instead of a square-skirted coat, flapped waistcoat, velvet
breeches and silk stockings. Nor was his wonder without sufficient
cause, for the flourish of the squire's staff, marvellous to relate,
had described precisely the signal in the air which was to ratify the
message of the prophetic sage whom Cranfield had sought around the
world.

"And what," inquired Ralph Cranfield, with a tremor in his
voice--"what may this office be which is to equal me with kings and
potentates?"

"No less than instructor of our village school," answered Squire
Hawkwood, "the office being now vacant by the death of the venerable
Master Whitaker after a fifty years' incumbency."

"I will consider of your proposal," replied Ralph Cranfield,
hurriedly, "and will make known my decision within three days."

After a few more words the village dignitary and his companions took
their leave. But to Cranfield's fancy their images were still present,
and became more and more invested with the dim awfulness of figures
which had first appeared to him in a dream, and afterward had shown
themselves in his waking moments, assuming homely aspects among
familiar things. His mind dwelt upon the features of the squire till
they grew confused with those of the visionary sage and one appeared
but the shadow of the other. The same visage, he now thought, had
looked forth upon him from the Pyramid of Cheops; the same form had
beckoned to him among the colonnades of the Alhambra; the same figure
had mistily revealed itself through the ascending steam of the Great
Geyser. At every effort of his memory he recognized some trait of the
dreamy messenger of destiny in this pompous, bustling, self-important,
little-great man of the village. Amid such musings Ralph Cranfield sat
all day in the cottage, scarcely hearing and vaguely answering his
mother's thousand questions about his travels and adventures. At
sunset he roused himself to take a stroll, and, passing the aged elm
tree, his eye was again caught by the semblance of a hand pointing
downward at the half-obliterated inscription.

As Cranfield walked down the street of the village the level sunbeams
threw his shadow far before him, and he fancied that, as his shadow
walked among distant objects, so had there been a presentiment
stalking in advance of him throughout his life. And when he drew near
each object over which his tall shadow had preceded him, still it
proved to be one of the familiar recollections of his infancy and
youth. Every crook in the pathway was remembered. Even the more
transitory characteristics of the scene were the same as in by-gone
days. A company of cows were grazing on the grassy roadside, and
refreshed him with their fragrant breath. "It is sweeter," thought he,
"than the perfume which was wafted to our ship from the Spice
Islands." The round little figure of a child rolled from a doorway and
lay laughing almost beneath Cranfield's feet. The dark and stately man
stooped down, and, lifting the infant, restored him to his mother's
arms. "The children," said he to himself, and sighed and smiled--"the
children are to be my charge." And while a flow of natural feeling
gushed like a well-spring in his heart he came to a dwelling which he
could nowise forbear to enter. A sweet voice which seemed to come from
a deep and tender soul was warbling a plaintive little air within. He
bent his head and passed through the lowly door. As his foot sounded
upon the threshold a young woman advanced from the dusky interior of
the house, at first hastily, and then with a more uncertain step, till
they met face to face. There was a singular contrast in their two
figures--he dark and picturesque, one who had battled with the world,
whom all suns had shone upon and whom all winds had blown on a varied
course; she neat, comely and quiet--quiet even in her agitation--as if
all her emotions had been subdued to the peaceful tenor of her life.
Yet their faces, all unlike as they were, had an expression that
seemed not so alien--a glow of kindred feeling flashing upward anew
from half-extinguished embers.

"You are welcome home," said Faith Egerton.

But Cranfield did not immediately answer, for his eye had, been caught
by an ornament in the shape of a heart which Faith wore as a brooch
upon her bosom. The material was the ordinary white quartz, and he
recollected having himself shaped it out of one of those Indian
arrowheads which are so often found in the ancient haunts of the red
men. It was precisely on the pattern of that worn by the visionary
maid. When Cranfield departed on his shadowy search, he had bestowed
this brooch, in a gold setting, as a parting gift to Faith Egerton.

"So, Faith, you have kept the heart?" said he, at length.

"Yes," said she, blushing deeply; then, more gayly, "And what else
have you brought me from beyond the sea?"

"Faith," replied Ralph Cranfield, uttering the fated words by an
uncontrollable impulse, "I have brought you nothing but a heavy heart.
May I rest its weight on you?"

"This token which I have worn so long," said Faith, laying her
tremulous finger on the heart, "is the assurance that you may."

"Faith, Faith!" cried Cranfield, clasping her in his arms; "you have
interpreted my wild and weary dream!"

Yes, the wild dreamer was awake at last. To find the mysterious
treasure he was to till the earth around his mother's dwelling and
reap its products; instead of warlike command or regal or religious
sway, he was to rule over the village children; and now the visionary
maid had faded from his fancy, and in her place he saw the playmate of
his childhood.

Would all who cherish such wild wishes but look around them, they
would oftenest find their sphere of duty, of prosperity and happiness,
within those precincts and in that station where Providence itself has
cast their lot. Happy they who read the riddle without a weary
world-search or a lifetime spent in vain!
