Twice-Told Tales (26 page)

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. Vet 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.

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?"