Twice-Told Tales (22 page)

"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.

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.