Twice-Told Tales (19 page)

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 naturâ
. 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.