Twice-Told Tales (49 page)

Nevertheless Mr. Brown contrived to burrow a passage through the
snow-drift, and with his bare head bent against the storm floundered
onward to Peter's door. There was such a creaking and groaning and
rattling, and such an ominous shaking, throughout the crazy edifice
that the loudest rap would have been inaudible to those within. He
therefore entered without ceremony, and groped his way to the kitchen.
His intrusion even there was unnoticed. Peter and Tabitha stood with
their backs to the door, stooping over a large chest which apparently
they had just dragged from a cavity or concealed closet on the left
side of the chimney. By the lamp in the old woman's hand Mr. Brown saw
that the chest was barred and clamped with iron, strengthened with
iron plates and studded with iron nails, so as to be a fit receptacle
in which the wealth of one century might be hoarded up for the wants
of another.

Peter Goldthwaite was inserting a key into the lock.

"Oh, Tabitha," cried he, with tremulous rapture, "how shall I endure
the effulgence? The gold!—the bright, bright gold! Methinks I can
remember my last glance at it just as the iron-plated lid fell down.
And ever since, being seventy years, it has been blazing in secret and
gathering its splendor against this glorious moment. It will flash
upon us like the noonday sun."

"Then shade your eyes, Mr. Peter!" said Tabitha, with somewhat less
patience than usual. "But, for mercy's sake, do turn the key!"

And with a strong effort of both hands Peter did force the rusty key
through the intricacies of the rusty lock. Mr. Brown, in the mean
time, had drawn near and thrust his eager visage between those of the
other two at the instant that Peter threw up the lid. No sudden blaze
illuminated the kitchen.

"What's here?" exclaimed Tabitha, adjusting her spectacles and holding
the lamp over the open chest. "Old Peter Goldthwaite's hoard of old
rags!"

"Pretty much so, Tabby," said Mr. Brown, lifting a handful of the
treasure.

Oh what a ghost of dead and buried wealth had Peter Goldthwaite raised
to scare himself out of his scanty wits withal! Here was the semblance
of an incalculable sum, enough to purchase the whole town and build
every street anew, but which, vast as it was, no sane man would have
given a solid sixpence for. What, then, in sober earnest, were the
delusive treasures of the chest? Why, here were old provincial bills
of credit and treasury notes and bills of land-banks, and all other
bubbles of the sort, from the first issue—above a century and a half
ago—down nearly to the Revolution. Bills of a thousand pounds were
intermixed with parchment pennies, and worth no more than they.

"And this, then, is old Peter Goldthwaite's treasure!" said John
Brown. "Your namesake, Peter, was something like yourself; and when
the provincial currency had depreciated fifty or seventy-five per
cent, he bought it up in expectation of a rise. I have heard my
grandfather say that old Peter gave his father a mortgage of this very
house and land to raise cash for his silly project. But the currency
kept sinking till nobody would take it as a gift, and there was old
Peter Goldthwaite, like Peter the second, with thousands in his
strong-box and hardly a coat to his back. He went mad upon the
strength of it. But never mind, Peter; it is just the sort of capital
for building castles in the air."

"The house will be down about our ears," cried Tabitha as the wind
shook it with increasing violence.

"Let it fall," said Peter, folding his arms, as he seated himself upon
the chest.

"No, no, my old friend Peter!" said John Brown. "I have house-room for
you and Tabby, and a safe vault for the chest of treasure. To-morrow
we will try to come to an agreement about the sale of this old house;
real estate is well up, and I could afford you a pretty handsome
price."

"And I," observed Peter Goldthwaite, with reviving spirits, "have a
plan for laying out the cash to great advantage."

"Why, as to that," muttered John Brown to himself, "we must apply to
the next court for a guardian to take care of the solid cash; and if
Peter insists upon speculating, he may do it to his heart's content
with old Peter Goldthwaite's treasure."

Passing a summer several years since at Edgartown, on the island of
Martha's Vineyard, I became acquainted with a certain carver of
tombstones who had travelled and voyaged thither from the interior of
Massachusetts in search of professional employment. The speculation
had turned out so successful that my friend expected to transmute
slate and marble into silver and gold to the amount of at least a
thousand dollars during the few months of his sojourn at Nantucket and
the Vineyard. The secluded life and the simple and primitive spirit
which still characterizes the inhabitants of those islands, especially
of Martha's Vineyard, insure their dead friends a longer and dearer
remembrance than the daily novelty and revolving bustle of the world
can elsewhere afford to beings of the past. Yet, while every family is
anxious to erect a memorial to its departed members, the untainted
breath of Ocean bestows such health and length of days upon the people
of the isles as would cause a melancholy dearth of business to a
resident artist in that line. His own monument, recording his decease
by starvation, would probably be an early specimen of his skill.
Gravestones, therefore, have generally been an article of imported
merchandise.

In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown—where the dead
have lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has
returned to its original barrenness—in that ancient burial-ground I
noticed much variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated
a century back or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers
and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's-heads, crossbones,
scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with
here and there a winged cherub to direct the mourner's spirit upward.
These productions of Gothic taste must have been quite beyond the
colonial skill of the day, and were probably carved in London and
brought across the ocean to commemorate the defunct worthies of this
lonely isle. The more recent monuments are mere slabs of slate in the
ordinary style, without any superfluous flourishes to set off the bald
inscriptions. But others—and those far the most impressive both to my
taste and feelings—were roughly hewn from the gray rocks of the
island, evidently by the unskilled hands of surviving friends and
relatives. On some there were merely the initials of a name; some were
inscribed with misspelt prose or rhyme, in deep letters which the moss
and wintry rain of many years had not been able to obliterate. These,
these were graves where loved ones slept. It is an old theme of
satire, the falsehood and vanity of monumental eulogies; but when
affection and sorrow grave the letters with their own painful labor,
then we may be sure that they copy from the record on their hearts.

My acquaintance the sculptor—he may share that title with Greenough,
since the dauber of signs is a painter as well as Raphael—had found a
ready market for all his blank slabs of marble and full occupation in
lettering and ornamenting them. He was an elderly man, a descendant of
the old Puritan family of Wigglesworth, with a certain simplicity and
singleness both of heart and mind which, methinks, is more rarely
found among us Yankees than in any other community of people. In spite
of his gray head and wrinkled brow, he was quite like a child in all
matters save what had some reference to his own business; he seemed,
unless my fancy misled me, to view mankind in no other relation than
as people in want of tombstones, and his literary attainments
evidently comprehended very little either of prose of poetry which had
not at one time or other been inscribed on slate or marble. His sole
task and office among the immortal pilgrims of the tomb—the duty for
which Providence had sent the old man into the world, as it were with
a chisel in his hand—was to label the dead bodies, lest their names
should be forgotten at the resurrection. Yet he had not failed, within
a narrow scope, to gather a few sprigs of earthly, and more than
earthly, wisdom—the harvest of many a grave. And, lugubrious as his
calling might appear, he was as cheerful an old soul as health and
integrity and lack of care could make him, and used to set to work
upon one sorrowful inscription or another with that sort of spirit
which impels a man to sing at his labor. On the whole, I found Mr.
Wigglesworth an entertaining, and often instructive, if not an
interesting, character; and, partly for the charm of his society, and
still more because his work has an invariable attraction for "man that
is born of woman," I was accustomed to spend some hours a day at his
workshop. The quaintness of his remarks and their not infrequent
truth—a truth condensed and pointed by the limited sphere of his
view—gave a raciness to his talk which mere worldliness and general
cultivation would at once have destroyed.

Sometimes we would discuss the respective merits of the various
qualities of marble, numerous slabs of which were resting against the
walls of the shop, or sometimes an hour or two would pass quietly
without a word on either side while I watched how neatly his chisel
struck out letter after letter of the names of the Nortons, the
Mayhews, the Luces, the Daggets, and other immemorial families of the
Vineyard. Often with an artist's pride the good old sculptor would
speak of favorite productions of his skill which were scattered
throughout the village graveyards of New England. But my chief and
most instructive amusement was to witness his interviews with his
customers, who held interminable consultations about the form and
fashion of the desired monuments, the buried excellence to be
commemorated, the anguish to be expressed, and finally the lowest
price in dollars and cents for which a marble transcript of their
feelings might be obtained. Really, my mind received many fresh ideas
which perhaps may remain in it even longer than Mr. Wigglesworth's
hardest marble will retain the deepest strokes of his chisel.

An elderly lady came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had
been killed by a whale in the Pacific Ocean no less than forty years
before. It was singular that so strong an impression of early feeling
should have survived through the changes of her subsequent life, in
the course of which she had been a wife and a mother, and, so far as I
could judge, a comfortable and happy woman. Reflecting within myself,
it appeared to me that this lifelong sorrow—as, in all good faith,
she deemed it—was one of the most fortunate circumstances of her
history. It had given an ideality to her mind; it had kept her purer
and less earthy than she would otherwise have been by drawing a
portion of her sympathies apart from earth. Amid the throng of
enjoyments and the pressure of worldly care and all the warm
materialism of this life she had communed with a vision, and had been
the better for such intercourse. Faithful to the husband of her
maturity, and loving him with a far more real affection than she ever
could have felt for this dream of her girlhood, there had still been
an imaginative faith to the ocean-buried; so that an ordinary
character had thus been elevated and refined. Her sighs had been the
breath of Heaven to her soul. The good lady earnestly desired that the
proposed monument should be ornamented with a carved border of marine
plants interwined with twisted sea-shells, such as were probably
waving over her lover's skeleton or strewn around it in the far depths
of the Pacific. But, Mr. Wigglesworth's chisel being inadequate to the
task, she was forced to content herself with a rose hanging its head
from a broken stem.

After her departure I remarked that the symbol was none of the most
apt.

"And yet," said my friend the sculptor, embodying in this image the
thoughts that had been passing through my own mind, "that broken rose
has shed its sweet smell through forty years of the good woman's
life."

It was seldom that I could find such pleasant food for contemplation
as in the above instance. None of the applicants, I think, affected me
more disagreeably than an old man who came, with his fourth wife
hanging on his arm, to bespeak gravestones for the three former
occupants of his marriage-bed. I watched with some anxiety to see
whether his remembrance of either were more affectionate than of the
other two, but could discover no symptom of the kind. The three
monuments were all to be of the same material and form, and each
decorated in bas-relief with two weeping willows, one of these
sympathetic trees bending over its fellow, which was to be broken in
the midst and rest upon a sepulchral urn. This, indeed, was Mr.
Wigglesworth's standing emblem of conjugal bereavement. I shuddered at
the gray polygamist who had so utterly lost the holy sense of
individuality in wedlock that methought he was fain to reckon upon his
fingers how many women who had once slept by his side were now
sleeping in their graves. There was even—if I wrong him, it is no
great matter—a glance sidelong at his living spouse, as if he were
inclined to drive a thriftier bargain by bespeaking four gravestones
in a lot.

I was better pleased with a rough old whaling-captain who gave
directions for a broad marble slab divided into two compartments, one
of which was to contain an epitaph on his deceased wife and the other
to be left vacant till death should engrave his own name there. As is
frequently the case among the whalers of Martha's Vineyard, so much of
this storm-beaten widower's life had been tossed away on distant seas
that out of twenty years of matrimony he had spent scarce three, and
those at scattered intervals, beneath his own roof. Thus the wife of
his youth, though she died in his and her declining age, retained the
bridal dewdrops fresh around her memory.