Twice-Told Tales (39 page)

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.

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.