Twice-Told Tales (27 page)

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.

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."