The stairs were steep and narrow; and as she clambered
up, a thousand visions thronged about her and
crowded in her way. At one time she was oppressed
with the gloomy thought that he might be dead and gone:
not to be found any more in that house, or any other
of mortal habitation. Then all the great city, in the
many dreadful and oppressive shapes it had taken in her
mind, whirled past, filling the air with darkness, and confusion
and boundless tumult. It was a gloomy way for a
poor lonely woman to travel—that ill arranged stairway,
lighted only by the chance flickering of cheap candles,
where the doors stood ajar; or by whatever of the public
light strayed in through the entry windows. Every step
brought her nearer to the chamber she sought; and

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although there were many others under that same roof,
children, and women, and aged men, dwelling in many
apartments, (for they were all poor, and poverty straitens
itself to a narrow fold,) she seemed to know that chamber
only, among them all.

At length she stood at the door; she knew it even in
the dark, as her hand passed over it; she paused a moment,
to gather strength and spirit. While she lingered,
in a deep conflict of many emotions, she thought she
heard the murmur of gentle music within; it was fancy
only, associating with the place an incident that raised it
out of its low estate. She entered: there was the room,
lighted by a single candle, gleaming from the corner
where it stood, as cramped and narrow as ever; the asparagus
in bottles; the chain of birds' eggs against the
wall; the pot of plants brought in and stationed on the
shelf; the blackbird in his cage, removed from his old
look-out at the window and hung upon a beam inside;
and underneath these, where his waking eye could command
them all, lay the little tailor, poor, wan, wasted
with sickness, and slumbering from very want of strength.
She looked upon him, scarcely believing it was he: she
looked upon the objects which carried her mind far away,
and she knew it was, indeed, no other. She sank into a
chair by the wall, and looked around: how strong was
the sympathy of her fancy with the fancy of the sick
man! While she gazed upon them, the room broadened
into wide meadows; the asparagus sprigs shot up into
fair, green trees; the birds' eggs, in the instant, swarmed
with many beautiful and melodious lives; and the single
blackbird darkened the air, as if he had been a whole
flock in himself. There was more freedom to her in that
little room, than in all the broad streets she had wandered
through!

Then she watched the sick man himself: so thin, so
pale, he seemed to have come to her a long way out of
the past, divested of all the clogs and shackles that had
held him from her so long. He smiled: by that she
knew him again. It was meant, she was sure, for herself;
and her heart lightened at the thought. Dwelling
upon it, remembering how often such a look had brightened
that pale face in old days, her thoughts were led,
by degrees, to the basket she had laid down at her side.

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Unclasping it with trembling hands, she brought from its
bosom a slip of the wild-rose, which she carried gently
and laid on the pillow by his brow, with the hope that it
might suggest to his dreams scenes, dear to him as life.
She was right; mingling with his own willing thoughts,
what his sense reported to him, there sprang up before
him a fantasy of other days, so sweet, so life-like, so
lively, that he smiled on it as if it had been reality. His
lips moved, and murmured softly, as to a listening ear.
She glided quickly forward, and bent down to catch what
he uttered: she would have given the world had his words—
she thought she knew what they would say—been
audible.

Presently the poor tailor wakened from his charmed
slumber; sate up in his couch, and looked about. His
eyes, which wandered as in search of something not present,
no sooner fell on the pale visiter than they were
fixed at once. So unreal they seemed to each other, and
yet shadows of what both knew well, they sate gazing
each into the other's eyes, without motion or utterance.

“Martha?” at last said Fob, whispering the name, in
doubt whether he would be answered, or whether the vision
would be dispelled, “Martha Upland?”

She started up and rushed to his bedside.

“I thank God for this,” she cried, casting herself upon
his neck; “I had not hoped to see you alive!”

“You should scarcely think of the living,” answered
Fob, with an inexpressible anguish in his look; “you,
who have been dead and buried three long years.”

“Little better than that,” she answered, “or not so
good. A close, silent bondage in one's father's house,
with eyes, colder than the grave-worms, ever fixed on
you; all the motions of nature going on about you, so
that you can hear the murmur and not share it; on the
same earth with friends you love, and yet sundered,
in an everlasting parting, from them: this is death.
There can be no other and no worse.”

“I could not, dear Martha—it was madness for me to
dream, that you would come or could, when I sent for
you. I was going to the grave you have prayed for so
often; and tarried only to shake hands and part.”

“It was only by long watching, and at last, by stealth,
that your message came to my hand. Yesterday at

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daybreak, the cruel guards, who have watched me so long,
grew, for once, drowsy with sleep; I found access to an
upper chamber, clambered to the roof; down upon the
old outhouse, (you remember it well,) and at length
leaped to the ground. In an hour—an hour sacred to
you—I was on my journey, and, now, foot-weary, as you
may guess, but glad of heart, I am here.”

“Three years—what years—since the awful interdict
that divided us was pronounced. It was folly that I, a
poor, outcast, landless tailor, should lift my heart to you;
but with God's blessing, what I then gave has prospered
(I know it has) in your silent prison, as well as it would
with all the summer's sun, and the autumn's bounty, shed
upon it. Three years; and now I look upon what my
eyes have wandered through the whole firmament in
vain, to behold. I have toiled, God knows, for this sight,
and have failed till now.”

“I saw you once, dear Fob,” she answered, returning
his look of truthful fondness, “once only: and that was
a year ago, yesterday, at dusk, gliding by the garden
wall; they seized you and dragged you away before
my sight; and ever after, that window was closed. The
morning light that came that way (they said) was too
strong for my fading eyes.”

“For many long days,” said Fob, “I was the ghost of
that dwelling: I haunted all the ways that led to it—
sometimes in the orchard, sometimes in the meadow,
sometimes, as you saw, under the very eaves of the house
itself. But to what purpose? I had been driven, you
know, by the iron hand that no man can resist, the relentless
law, from fields that were mine; and men followed
in its scent, and yelled on my steps, like so many
hounds. I was buffeted, reproached, driven off like a
dog, till I came to curse the very house that held your
enemies and mine. I have failed not, as you learned
by what I wrote, to visit our old haunts, and to dream
you back again to the life we once led in woods and
meadows, and by the margins of smiling streams. How
has the time gone with you?” he asked in a choking
voice, for he knew the answer too well. “You have
had no free air for three weary years.”

“No breath whatever,” she said, and a deeper paleness
struck through her features as she spoke, “closely

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housed—stealthily watched all that time; while the story
has gone abroad that I was deadly sick, of a sickness
so frail and delicate, that nearest friends could not see me
without endangering life. A physician—a false, corrupt
villain as God ever made—came at studious intervals as
if to my bedside, and went forth with a piteous sigh,
shaking his head over the sad malady that could not be
cured. So they thought. They deemed that disease of
horrid bondage would never be conquered; but, thanks
to Heaven, thanks, never too many nor too devout, I am
a free child of the air and the open light once more!”

Even while she spake, swift, copious tears gushed into
her eyes; she fell upon her knees, and bowing her head
upon the couch of her sick friend, felt that her heart was
bursting with thoughts of past sufferance and present joy!
Could Fob behold this, and fail to be moved? He looked
upon her a moment; a pang writhed his countenance,
and clasping one of her pale hands in his, he wept like
a child. The wild slip with which she had soothed his
sleep, lay where all their tears fell upon it; and if it had
budded that moment, and shot forth there, in fair green
leaves and brighter flowers than bush or tree ever bore,
would it have been less than a true testimony to the beautiful
and gentle spirit of the hour?

When they looked up again, the sorrow had passed
from their brows, and they smiled on each other, with
something like the gladness of a happier time.

“I have brought down all of the old homestead that I
could,” said Martha, who had her willow basket at the
bedside; “and it is here.”

She unclasped it; and as Fob glanced down into its
fragrant womb, his eyes shone with a new light. He saw
whole tracts and acres there.

“These, you know,” continued Martha, producing a
handful of green cresses, “I plucked them from the
Mower's Nook in the wood, so calm and shady in the summer
time. You remember it?”

“I think I should,” answered Fob, who could not fail
to detect a ruddy tinge that crossed the questioner's countenance.
“Had that Nook a memory of its own, and
could echo what it has heard, how many gentle stories it
could tell: that you know as well as I.”

“Here is clover too,” said Martha, “you know that?”

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“To be sure I do,” answered Fob, quickly, “The
sweet, red-blossomed clover that grows by the great Rock
in the lane—you found it there, I know. Is the shadow
of the old Rock as broad and cheerful as ever?”

“You forget, my dear friend,” she replied; “I have
not seen its summer shadow for three long years.
Boards and casements, thin and frail, have held me in
faster than if I had been walled round with rocks as massy
and cold as that!”

“What a fool I am!” said Fob, “I knew that well;—
but here—what is this?” (taking up a green plant that
she had produced, and looking on his pale visiter in wonder)
“you have not truly trusted yourself in the dark old
Hollow, always so full of midnight and gloomy thoughts,
to pluck this for me?”

“From no other place has it come!” answered Martha.
“It was the first I sought after my escape. Dark, dreary,
cheerless as you think it—though we have had many a
pleasant ramble in its ways—it glared as with sunshine,
to my long darkened eye. The dismal pines that dwell
on its sides, seemed to laugh in my ear, as the wind
whispered with them; the dark bats and ill-omened owls
glanced about as glorious as eagles!”

“Our gloomy old friend, the Hollow—you think so
hardly of—see what he has yielded,” said Martha, after a
moment's pause, lifting in her hand a bunch of sparkling
red berries, and waving them before the little tailor till they
danced again, and shone brighter than his own pleased eyes.

Then there were buttercups gathered from the heart of
a meadow, where they had often lingered together, gathering
them before; green rushes, from the brook; feathers
of the blue-bird, that had moulted where they were
found. On each they dwelt, babbling over old memories
and associations like children; and finding a solace and
joy in those simple treasures, that the costliest banquet
might have failed to yield.

All the green and fanciful treasures she had brought,
lay spread about him; and his eye gleamed with a tearful
joy, as it passed from one to the other.

“I have something more here,” said Martha, dipping
again into the basket, “something to please you for the
sake of others, and not yourself.”

“I shall shed no tears, even if it be so,” said Fob,
smiling. “Let us see.”

p264-169

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She brought forth, from the very bottom of the basket,
an old, tattered, patched-up parchment, and held it up
exultingly before his eyes. He no sooner caught sight of
it and learned what it was, than he clapped his hands and
stretched them forth, to pluck it gently from her. It was
the deed, the very deed, rent in pieces so long ago—
which he thought lost forever, rescued to the light by
bright eyes that had peered for it amid dust and tumbling
fragments, because she knew it would pleasure him.
Here was joy—joy for Puffer Hopkins; joy for Hobbleshank;
and as he held it close to his eye, it seemed, as
every good act and record should, to have a fragrance of
all the sweet and fair things among which it had lurked
in the basket of the fair fugitive. So they sate there many
hours, in which Fob gathered new strength and spirit,
talking over the recovery, past times, scenes, occasions—
too sacred for a record. If unseen angels, as some have
fondly deemed, watch in our chambers, linger at our bedsides,
and bless us in act of doing well, how must they
have swarmed in that little chamber, and through the
holiest hours of night, held joyful watch over two spirits
so like themselves!