Twice-Told Tales (37 page)

Hitherto you have lain perfectly still, because the slightest motion
would dissipate the fragments of your slumber. Now, being irrevocably
awake, you peep through the half-drawn window-curtain, and observe
that the glass is ornamented with fanciful devices in frost-work, and
that each pane presents something like a frozen dream. There will be
time enough to trace out the analogy while waiting the summons to
breakfast. Seen through the clear portion of the glass where the
silvery mountain-peaks of the frost-scenery do not ascend, the most
conspicuous object is the steeple, the white spire of which directs
you to the wintry lustre of the firmament. You may almost distinguish
the figures on the clock that has just told the hour. Such a frosty
sky and the snow-covered roofs and the long vista of the frozen
street, all white, and the distant water hardened into rock, might
make you shiver even under four blankets and a woollen comforter. Yet
look at that one glorious star! Its beams are distinguishable from all
the rest, and actually cast the shadow of the casement on the bed with
a radiance of deeper hue than moonlight, though not so accurate an
outline.

You sink down and muffle your head in the clothes, shivering all the
while, but less from bodily chill than the bare idea of a polar
atmosphere. It is too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad.
You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed
like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of
inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth such
as you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its
train. You think how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds and
narrow coffins through the drear winter of the grave, and cannot
persuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor shiver when the snow
is drifting over their little hillocks and the bitter blast howls
against the door of the tomb. That gloomy thought will collect a
gloomy multitude and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour.

In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the
lights, the music and revelry, above may cause us to forget their
existence and the buried ones or prisoners whom they hide. But
sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung
wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive
sensibility, but no active strength—when the imagination is a mirror
imparting vividness to all ideas without the power of selecting or
controlling them—then pray that your griefs may slumber and the
brotherhood of remorse not break their chain. It is too late. A
funeral train comes gliding by your bed in which passion and feeling
assume bodily shape and things of the mind become dim spectres to the
eye. There is your earliest sorrow, a pale young mourner wearing a
sister's likeness to first love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed
sweetness in her melancholy features and grace in the flow of her
sable robe. Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness with dust among
her golden hair and her bright garments all faded and defaced,
stealing from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach:
she was your fondest hope, but a delusive one; so call her
Disappointment now. A sterner form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles,
a look and gesture of iron authority; there is no name for him unless
it be Fatality—an emblem of the evil influence that rules your
fortunes, a demon to whom you subjected yourself by some error at the
outset of life, and were bound his slave for ever by once obeying him.
See those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip
of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger touching
the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous
folly at which you would blush even in the remotest cavern of the
earth? Then recognize your shame.

Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one if, riotously miserable,
a fiercer tribe do not surround him—the devils of a guilty heart that
holds its hell within itself. What if Remorse should assume the
features of an injured friend? What if the fiend should come in
woman's garments with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie
down by your side? What if he should stand at your bed's foot in the
likeness of a corpse with a bloody stain upon the shroud? Sufficient
without such guilt is this nightmare of the soul, this heavy, heavy
sinking of the spirits, this wintry gloom about the heart, this
indistinct horror of the mind blending itself with the darkness of the
chamber.

By a desperate effort you start upright, breaking from a sort of
conscious sleep and gazing wildly round the bed, as if the fiends were
anywhere but in your haunted mind. At the same moment the slumbering
embers on the hearth send forth a gleam which palely illuminates the
whole outer room and flickers through the door of the bedchamber, but
cannot quite dispel its obscurity. Your eye searches for whatever may
remind you of the living world. With eager minuteness you take note of
the table near the fireplace, the book with an ivory knife between its
leaves, the unfolded letter, the hat and the fallen glove. Soon the
flame vanishes, and with it the whole scene is gone, though its image
remains an instant in your mind's eye when darkness has swallowed the
reality. Throughout the chamber there is the same obscurity as before,
but not the same gloom within your breast.

As your head falls back upon the pillow you think—in a whisper be it
spoken—how pleasant in these night solitudes would be the rise and
fall of a softer breathing than your own, the slight pressure of a
tenderer bosom, the quiet throb of a purer heart, imparting its
peacefulness to your troubled one, as if the fond sleeper were
involving you in her dream. Her influence is over you, though she have
no existence but in that momentary image. You sink down in a flowery
spot on the borders of sleep and wakefulness, while your thoughts rise
before you in pictures, all disconnected, yet all assimilated by a
pervading gladsomeness and beauty. The wheeling of gorgeous squadrons
that glitter in the sun is succeeded by the merriment of children
round the door of a schoolhouse beneath the glimmering shadow of old
trees at the corner of a rustic lane. You stand in the sunny rain of a
summer shower, and wander among the sunny trees of an autumnal wood,
and look upward at the brightest of all rainbows overarching the
unbroken sheet of snow on the American side of Niagara. Your mind
struggles pleasantly between the dancing radiance round the hearth of
a young man and his recent bride and the twittering flight of birds in
spring about their new-made nest. You feel the merry bounding of a
ship before the breeze, and watch the tuneful feet of rosy girls as
they twine their last and merriest dance in a splendid ball-room, and
find yourself in the brilliant circle of a crowded theatre as the
curtain falls over a light and airy scene.

With an involuntary start you seize hold on consciousness, and prove
yourself but half awake by running a doubtful parallel between human
life and the hour which has now elapsed. In both you emerge from
mystery, pass through a vicissitude that you can but imperfectly
control, and are borne onward to another mystery. Now comes the peal
of the distant clock with fainter and fainter strokes as you plunge
farther into the wilderness of sleep. It is the knell of a temporary
death. Your spirit has departed, and strays like a free citizen among
the people of a shadowy world, beholding strange sights, yet without
wonder or dismay. So calm, perhaps, will be the final change—so
undisturbed, as if among familiar things, the entrance of the soul to
its eternal home.

Come! another log upon the hearth. True, our little parlor is
comfortable, especially here where the old man sits in his old
arm-chair; but on Thanksgiving-night the blaze should dance higher up
the chimney and send a shower of sparks into the outer darkness. Toss
on an armful of those dry oak chips, the last relicts of the Mermaid's
knee-timbers—the bones of your namesake, Susan. Higher yet, and
clearer, be the blaze, till our cottage windows glow the ruddiest in
the village and the light of our household mirth flash far across the
bay to Nahant.

And now come, Susan; come, my children. Draw your chairs round me, all
of you. There is a dimness over your figures. You sit quivering
indistinctly with each motion of the blaze, which eddies about you
like a flood; so that you all have the look of visions or people that
dwell only in the firelight, and will vanish from existence as
completely as your own shadows when the flame shall sink among the
embers.

Hark! let me listen for the swell of the surf; it should be audible a
mile inland on a night like this. Yes; there I catch the sound, but
only an uncertain murmur, as if a good way down over the beach, though
by the almanac it is high tide at eight o'clock, and the billows must
now be dashing within thirty yards of our door. Ah! the old man's ears
are failing him, and so is his eyesight, and perhaps his mind, else
you would not all be so shadowy in the blaze of his Thanksgiving fire.

How strangely the past is peeping over the shoulders of the present!
To judge by my recollections, it is but a few moments since I sat in
another room. Yonder model of a vessel was not there, nor the old
chest of drawers, nor Susan's profile and mine in that gilt
frame—nothing, in short, except this same fire, which glimmered on
books, papers and a picture, and half discovered my solitary figure in
a looking-glass. But it was paler than my rugged old self, and
younger, too, by almost half a century.

Speak to me, Susan; speak, my beloved ones; for the scene is
glimmering on my sight again, and as it brightens you fade away. Oh, I
should be loth to lose my treasure of past happiness and become once
more what I was then—a hermit in the depths of my own mind,
sometimes yawning over drowsy volumes and anon a scribbler of wearier
trash than what I read; a man who had wandered out of the real world
and got into its shadow, where his troubles, joys and vicissitudes
were of such slight stuff that he hardly knew whether he lived or only
dreamed of living. Thank Heaven I am an old man now and have done with
all such vanities!

Still this dimness of mine eyes!—Come nearer, Susan, and stand before
the fullest blaze of the hearth. Now I behold you illuminated from
head to foot, in your clean cap and decent gown, with the dear lock of
gray hair across your forehead and a quiet smile about your mouth,
while the eyes alone are concealed by the red gleam of the fire upon
your spectacles. There! you made me tremble again. When the flame
quivered, my sweet Susan, you quivered with it and grew indistinct, as
if melting into the warm light, that my last glimpse of you might be
as visionary as the first was, full many a year since. Do you remember
it? You stood on the little bridge over the brook that runs across
King's Beach into the sea. It was twilight, the waves rolling in, the
wind sweeping by, the crimson clouds fading in the west and the silver
moon brightening above the hill; and on the bridge were you,
fluttering in the breeze like a sea-bird that might skim away at your
pleasure. You seemed a daughter of the viewless wind, a creature of
the ocean-foam and the crimson light, whose merry life was spent in
dancing on the crests of the billows that threw up their spray to
support your footsteps. As I drew nearer I fancied you akin to the
race of mermaids, and thought how pleasant it would be to dwell with
you among the quiet coves in the shadow of the cliffs, and to roam
along secluded beaches of the purest sand, and, when our Northern
shores grew bleak, to haunt the islands, green and lonely, far amid
summer seas. And yet it gladdened me, after all this nonsense, to find
you nothing but a pretty young girl sadly perplexed with the rude
behavior of the wind about your petticoats. Thus I did with Susan as
with most other things in my earlier days, dipping her image into my
mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues before I could see
her as she really was.

Now, Susan, for a sober picture of our village. It was a small
collection of dwellings that seemed to have been cast up by the sea
with the rock-weed and marine plants that it vomits after a storm, or
to have come ashore among the pipe-staves and other lumber which had
been washed from the deck of an Eastern schooner. There was just space
for the narrow and sandy street between the beach in front and a
precipitous hill that lifted its rocky forehead in the rear among a
waste of juniper-bushes and the wild growth of a broken pasture. The
village was picturesque in the variety of its edifices, though all
were rude. Here stood a little old hovel, built, perhaps, of
driftwood, there a row of boat-houses, and beyond them a two-story
dwelling of dark and weatherbeaten aspect, the whole intermixed with
one or two snug cottages painted white, a sufficiency of pig-styes and
a shoemaker's shop. Two grocery stores stood opposite each other in
the centre of the village. These were the places of resort at their
idle hours of a hardy throng of fishermen in red baize shirts,
oilcloth trousers and boots of brown leather covering the whole
leg—true seven-league boots, but fitter to wade the ocean than walk
the earth. The wearers seemed amphibious, as if they did but creep out
of salt water to sun themselves; nor would it have been wonderful to
see their lower limbs covered with clusters of little shellfish such
as cling to rocks and old ship-timber over which the tide ebbs and
flows. When their fleet of boats was weather-bound, the butchers
raised their price, and the spit was busier than the frying-pan; for
this was a place of fish, and known as such to all the country round
about. The very air was fishy, being perfumed with dead sculpins,
hard-heads and dogfish strewn plentifully on the beach.—You see,
children, the village is but little changed since your mother and I
were young.