CHAPTER I. Dr. Pendegrast.
[figure description] Page 011.[end figure description]
WHAT is this, Lynde?”
Dr. Pendegrast had walked
to the farther end of my room,
and stood looking at a pale, unbloomed
flower sealed in a glass
globe. The globe rested on a
slight Gothic pedestal, and was
covered by a yard or two of
gauze, thrown over it carelessly. The doctor had
drawn aside the covering, and was regarding the
flower with an air of interest.
“That,” said I, closing one finger in my book,
“is where I keep the soul of Cecil Roylstone —
shut up in the calyx.”
-- 012 --
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The doctor started.
“The soul — really! That is quite odd, now
You never told me of this, Lynde.”
Dr. Pendegrast is a physician of considerable
repute with whom I have recently become acquainted.
A singular intimacy has sprung up
between us. Dr. Pendegrast labors under the
delusion that he is treating me professionally for
some sort of mental disorder, and I, indulging the
good-natured whim, throw his prescriptions out of
the window, and in the meantime enjoy unrestrained
intercourse with the dector, who is not
only a skillful practitioner, but a thinker, and —
what is seldom the case with thinkers — a fine
conversationalist.
He frequently drops in to spend an hour with
me, and appears to derive much satisfaction in
examining the microscopes, galvanic batteries,
wooden models, and various knick-knacks in fluor
spar — the accumulation of years — with which
my apartment is crowded. The place has quite
the air of a miniature museum.
-- 013 --
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Dr. Pendegrast stood looking at the imprisoned
flower with fresh curiosity. I drew my chair
nearer to the fire, and fell into a brown study.
The doctor's question had indirectly suggested to
me the expediency of writing out the odd experiences
of my life.
There comes to every man, sooner or later, a
time when he pauses and looks down on his Past,
regarding it as an existence separate from himself.
As one in a dream, stands beside his own coffin,
gazing upon his own features. That moment of
retrospection was mine.
Dr. Pendegrast placed the tip of his forefinger
on the globe.
“And who is Cecil Roylstone?”
“The woman I loved, long ago.”
“Dead?”
“Many years since.”
The doctor mused.
“And her soul, you say —”
“Passed into that flower the day she was
buried.”
-- 014 --
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“But the flower,” said Dr. Pendegrast, stooping
down, “is as fresh as if it were plucked
yesterday.”
“True. By a process well known to chemists,
I have preserved the lily in its original freshness;
even the dew still glistens on it. See! Cecil's
breath has clouded the glass. The flower is
moving! Mute, mute, — if she would but speak
to me!”
“And you really think this pretty world is inhabited
by a spirit?”
“There's not the slightest doubt of it.”
“Would it not be well,” remarked Dr. Pendegrast,
lifting his eyebrows speculatively, “to look
into this? For our own satisfaction, you know,
to say nothing of the spirit, which must be very
uncomfortable in such snug quarters. Suppose,
for instance, we take a peep in at the petals?”
“Not for worlds! Our grosser sense would fail
to perceive the soul within. I have thought of it.
The thin shell which separates us, has baffled my
endeavor to reach her. Once I dared to dream it
-- 015 --
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possible to hold communication with Cecil — by
means of a small magnetic telegraph, my own
invention. But the experiment threatened to annihilate
the flower. Since then, it has lain untouched,
sealed hermetically from the air, in its
transparent prison.”
Dr. Pendegrast smiled.
“You are laughing at me, doctor,” said I,
sharply.
“Not I! It's the most interesting circumstance
that ever came under my observation.”
“No doubt it sounds strangely to you, doctor.
I have, before now, encountered people who
thought me a little out on the subject, and said so
flatly.”
“They were very injudicious.”
“To be sure; but I always observed that they
were persons of inferior intellect — believing only
what they could comprehend, they were necessarily
contracted. To metaphysicians, students of life
and death, the facts which I could unfold relative
-- 016 --
[figure description] Page 016.[end figure description]
to this flower and other matters, would afford
material for serious speculation.”
“I believe you,” said Dr. Pendegrast.
“And I am strongly inclined to give the scientifie
world the benefit of my memoirs. Indeed, it
is a part of my destiny to do so.”
“You delight me,” said Dr. Pendegrast. “Do
it at once. It will be a healthful relaxation. You
are working too hard on that infernal machine of
yours.”
“You mean the Moon-Apparatus.”
“I beg your pardon, I meant the Moon-Apparatus.”
“I will commence my memoirs to-morrow.”
“And I shall hold it a privilege,” said the
doctor courteously, drawing on his glove, “to
follow the progress of your work.”
“You shall do so.”
Dr. Pendegrast took his leave.
“O, Lynde, Lynde!” I heard him exclaim as
he went down stairs.
That man appreciates me.
-- 017 --
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A week has elapsed since this conversation occurred,
and I still linger at the threshhold of my
confessions. I half dread to ring up the curtain on
such a sorrowful play as it is, for the dramatis
personæ are the shades of men and women long
since dead. Their graves lie scattered over the
world, north, south, east, and west. It seems
almost cruel to bring them together on the stage
again. Who that has fretted his brief hour here
would care to return? Yet I must summon
these shadows, for a moment, from the dark.
-- 18 -- p448-027
CHAPTER II. By the Seashore.
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IN the summer of 18— I occupied
an old house near the seashore, in
New England. The beach, a mile
off, stretched along the indented
coast, looking as if it were an immense
mottled serpent that had
been suddenly petrified in the midst
of its writhings. On the right, a
ruined fort stared at the ocean, over the chalky
crags. At the back of the house were some two
hundred acres of woodland, moistened here and
there by ponds filled with marvellous white lilies.
The weather-beaten roofs and steeples of the town
glanced through the breezy elm trees on the left;
-- 019 --
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while far away, over lengths of pastures and sullen
clumps of pines, Mount Agamenticus rose up like
a purple mist.
The scenery has stamped itself into my brain —
the desolate fort, staring with a blind, stunned
look through rain and sunshine; the merciless
coast; the ragged ledges, nurturing only a few
acrid berries; the forest full of gloomy sounds;
the antique spires in the distance; and, over all,
the loose gray clouds.
I had come to the New Hampshire seaboard for
the benefit of my failing health. Having spent
the greater portion of my life in an inland manufacturing
town, than which nothing could be more
common-place, the wild panorama of the coast
opened on me like an enchanted realm. A cold, gray
realm, but enchanted. I avoided society. The
sea and the shifting clouds were society enough.
The solitude that would have driven most men to
distraction, was pregnant with meaning. It left
me free, for once, to breathe, and think, and feel.
At night I wandered along the beach, watching
-- 020 --
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the points of light that dipt and rose in the distance,
and the sails that shimmered ghost-like, for
a second, in the offing, and vanished. But more
than all I brooded over the broken image of the
moon floating on the water: that filled me like a
picture by Claude; it led me into a region of new
thought, and here I first conceived the project of
of my Moon-Apparatus, which, when completed,
will dissolve the misty theories that have deluded
man for the past five centuries. I haunted the
seashore. I lay on the rocks from sundown till
midnight, shaping the vast Idea that had grown
up within me.
My intercourse with the village, near by, was
restricted to one family — the Roylstones. I
might say restricted to one person; for Captain
Roylstone was always at sea; his wife had long
since been laid at rest in the rustic churchyard;
and only Cecil, who lived with an elderly companion,
a distant connection, I believe, represented
the family.
How we met, or how Cecil's fate and mine
-- 021 --
[figure description] Page 021.[end figure description]
became irrevocably linked, seems so strange and
vague to me, that I shall not attempt to speak of
it. It was this woman's melancholy destiny to
love me: it was mine to return the passion a hundred
fold, and follow her to the very margin of
that mysterious world wherein she eluded me.
Wherein she still eludes me.
Alas! what right had I to love, knowing, as I
have known from boyhood, the doom that hangs
over my head, suspended by a tenure as slight as
that which held the sword of Damocles?
To-morrow it may fall!
The arrogant retina of the eye sometimes refuses
to give back the image it has received. Dissolution
alone can break the charmed picture;
and even after death, objects of terror and beauty
have been seen to fade away reluctantly from this
magical mirror. I have read, somewhere, of a
German oculist, who traced the murderer of a
lady in Göttingen, by discovering, at a postmortem
examination, the likeness of the assassin
-- 22 -- p448-031
[figure description] Page 022.[end figure description]
photographed on those curious net-like membranes,
the retinæ.
When I am dead, the face of a fair woman will
be found indelibly engraved on my eyes — not in
faint lines and curves, but sharply, as if the features
had been cut out on steel by the burin of an artist.
Yet I can but poorly describe the idyllic grace and
beauty of Cecil Roylstone.
Her hair was dark brown, and, in its most
becoming arrangement, drawn into one massive
coil over the forehead, giving her brows a Greek-like
stateliness. Her eyes were those unusual ojos
verdes, large and lucent, which the Spanish poets
mention as being the finest type. The mouth
would have been perfect, but for a slight blemish,
visible only at times, on the upper lip. Perhaps
her face was a shade too pale, for perfection, may
be too pensive, in repose — but how can I write
of Cecil as a mere portrait, when she, herself, in
her infinite sweetness, seems to pass before me!
Again she is walking, in her simple white dress,
by the seaside. The moon drifts from cloud to
-- 023 --
[figure description] Page 023.[end figure description]
cloud, edging the gray with silver, and, far off, the
sea sparkles. A plain gold cross on her bosom
catches the moonlight. The salt breeze lifts the
braids of her hair, and blows back the folds of her
dress. I sit on the rocks watching her.
Again we are lounging along the sunny road,
on our way to town. It is an afternoon in May;
the trees are in full bloom, peach and apple.
Cecil is laughing, with an accent like music. I
see her lissome form in the checkered sunshine,
her feet, tripping on in front of me, among the
blossoms. I hardly know which are the blossoms.
Now she is walking demurely at my side, her
fingers locked in mine, and the sleepy sea-port
with its brown roofs and whitewashed chimneys,
comes out distinctly against the neutral tint of the
sky, like a picture on a wizard's glass.
Again I am sitting on the porch of the old
house, dreaming of her. I hear the sound of a
horse's hoofs beating on the dusty road, and then
Cecil — as if she had leaped out of my brain —
dashes up to the garden-gate, on the alert black
-- 024 --
[figure description] Page 024.[end figure description]
mare which her father has sent home. In that
sea-green riding-habit and feather, she is a picture,
I take it, for Memory to press in his thumbed and
dog's-eared volume. I pat the sleek neck of the
mustang, as I speak with Cecil. I look up, and
she is gone. I see her riding madly along the
orchard walls, shaking down the blooms, in the
sunset.
Riding away from me!
-- 025 --
CHAPTER III. The Estrangement.
[figure description] Page 025.[end figure description]
WE were unspeakably happy
in that dream which follows
the confessions of two hearts
each all in all to the other.
Our formal engagement was
but delayed until Captain
Roylstone, who was making
an East Indian voyage,
should return and sanction it. The future
lay before us like a map on which each bright
tint melts into one more brilliant. We were
wildly happy; but not long.
The occult power that moulds my thought,
speaks my words, and even times the pulsations of
-- 026 --
[figure description] Page 026.[end figure description]
my heart, glided in between us. We had been engaged
but three weeks, when I became assured
that Cecil had taken a sudden aversion to me. It
was evident she sought to avoid our usual interviews;
and when we met, was constrained and
absent-minded. The color, what little she had,
shrunk from her cheek; the touch of her fingers
was chilly and nerveless. When I questioned
Cecil, she looked at me wearily, and turned away.
Sometimes with an impatient gesture, sometimes
coldly.
One night — I never hear the monotonous wash
of the waves, but I think of it, — we sat on the
rocks. Cecil wrapt in her shawl. It was October,
and the winds were growing frosty. One
star, in a stormy cincture, struggled through the
dark. The sea moaned, as it moans only in
autumn. The clouds leaned down, hungry, tragic
faces, listening. The landscape seemed cut in
granite, sharp and gray. No color anywhere.
There was something of an expression of human
-- 027 --
[figure description] Page 027.[end figure description]
despair in the half twilight that brooded over it.
It was so hopeless.
Presently the moon rose to the surface of the
water, like a drowned body, bleached and swollen.
It distressed me; and when, at length, it lifted its
full disc slowly up among the clouds, I felt a
sense of relief: the cool clean light revived my
spirits, like a draught of wine. I began speaking,
rapidly, half to myself, partly to Cecil. I forget
the train of reflection that led to it, but, at last, I
touched on the invention of the Moon-Apparatus,
to which I had recently given so much study.
Then Cecil, who had been sitting silent and
motionless, abruptly bent forward, and took my
face between her hands.
“Poor Paul!”
She drew back, then, one hand resting on her
lap, inanimate, like a sculptured hand I had seen
somewhere.
“Cecil!”
She turned away hastily.
“You are cruel, Cecil.”
-- 028 --
[figure description] Page 028.[end figure description]
“No. Do not say that. I—I suffer.”
And she uttered a low moan, like a child.
“Suffer?”
“Bitterly!”
“You are hiding some painful news from me.
What is it?”
Cecil made no reply for a moment: then I
heard her murmuring to herself,
“It was an evil day when we met. I wish it
had never been.”
“An evil day, Cecil? You kill me with your
strangeness. Your very breath seems to freeze
me.”
“Let it! I think I am dying—it is so sudden
and terrible—but you do not understand me—
poor Paul!”
“What is sudden and terrible?'
“Nothing.”
My fingers sunk into her arm until she gave a
quick cry of pain.
“Why do you call me `poor Paul?' ”
“I—I cannot tell.”
-- 029 --
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“For mercy's sake, Cecil, say one word that
has sense in it—if you have any love left for me.”
Cecil threw her arms around my neck, and
locked her fingers, holding me so.
“How you tremble, child! What has happened
to trouble you? Something, I know—
your father? You have had letters from him,
and he is sick? Tell me, little wife.”
“No, no, no!” cried Cecil, recoiling.
For an instant the indistinct blemish on her lip
glowed warmly, like an opal, and faded.
“No, no, no?” I repeated to myself. “How
strange!”
Then the three monosyllables slipped from my
mind, and, oddly enough, I commenced a mental
construction of the Moon-Apparatus, forgetful
of Cecil and our limited world of sorrows.
“The powerful glasses,” said I half aloud,
“shall draw the rays of the moon into the copper
cylinders: the action of the chemicals, let in
through the valves will congeal the atomic matter
-- 030 --
[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]
then comes the granulating process; and after the
calcina—”
“Merciful heaven!” cried Cecil, breaking in
on me, “is it so? I have waited, and hoped,
and prayed. Paul, look at me; take me in your
arms, once, and kiss me. Look at me long!
Never any more! Poor, poor Paul. O misery!
that I should so love a—”
With this, Cecil tore herself away from me,
and, in spite of my cries, fled toward the town.
She melted into the moonlight, past the churchyard,
and was gone. What could it mean?
Then the terrible truth flashed upon me—
Cecil had lost her mind!
-- 31 -- p448-040
CHAPTER IV. A Catastrophe.
[figure description] Page 031.[end figure description]
IT is well that providence keeps our
destiny under lock and key, dealing
it out only by morsels. The whole
of it, at once, would kill us. Suppose
a man, verging on the prime
of life, should chance to come
across his full-grown Biography?
It would not be pleasant reading, to
say it mildly.
I walked home that night, bewildered. The
sky was blanched with incessant lightning, and
dull peals of thunder broke in the far east, like
the sound of distant artillery. There was a fearful
gale, afterwards, I was told. A merchantman,
-- 032 --
[figure description] Page 032.[end figure description]
with all on board, went down at daybreak, on the
shoals off Gosport Light.
Spiteful drops of rain whistled by me before I
reached the door of my isolated abode. I hurried
through the grape-arbor, and had entered the
laboratory on the ground-floor, in the right wing
of the building, when an accident occurred to
which I cannot even now refer with composure.
When I reflect on the months of wasting toil and
the lavish outlay, rendered futile by a moment's
awkwardness, I am again plunged into despair.
A candle, with matches, always stood on the
laboratory mantle-piece, for my convenience. In
searching for these matches, which somebody had
removed, I inadvertently came in contact with the
Moon-Apparatus.
It tottered — and fell with a crash!
A sulphuric vapor immediately diffused itself
throughout the apartment, followed by an explosion
that shook the house from garret to basement.
With the flash and concussion, a keen
pain shot through my temples.
-- 033 --
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Then a darkness came over me.
This darkness must have covered a period of
several months; for when I escaped from it, there
was something in the singing of birds, and the
brushing of foliage against the casement, that told
of spring. I lay in my own chamber, and an old
woman was killing flies with a silk apron.
“What is the time — of year?” I asked faintly.
The woman came to the bedside, and looked at
me.
“Go to sleep.”
I shrunk from her, and turning my face to the
wall, tried to conjecture what had taken place.
I come home one October night from a walk
with Cecil.
I fall over something in the laboratory.
It explodes.
My head aches.
I open my eyes, and it is June! the flowers
growing, the robins singing, an old woman killing
flies. I could make nothing out of it.
-- 034 --
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“Let what is broken, so remain.
The gods are hard to reconcile:
'Tis hard to settle order once again.
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain.”
When the Doctor came, — Dr. Molineux, of
the village, — he attempted, in a hesitating way,
to explain things. I had, he said, been taken
unexpectedly ill in my work-shop, where I was
discovered, one morning, by the person who
brought me my meals. I was found doubled up
among a confused mass of shattered cog-wheels,
steel pistons, copper cylinders, alembics, and glass
retorts. Somewhat battered and considerably senseless.
It was supposed that I had been stunned by
the explosion of some unknown machine, while
engaged in scientific experiments.
Here the Doctor gave a short dry laugh. I am
sure I don't know why. I had been long and
dangerously ill, he said.
“Non compos ment—” the Doctor paused
abruptly, and coughed. “But you are doing well
now, and will soon be a new man,” he added.
-- 035 --
[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]
A new man? To be somebody else, the
antithesis of myself, would indeed be a comfort.
The remembrance of all that had happened
gradually dawned on me. Patience, patience. I
could only lie and think of Cecil, while the long
days, and the longer nights, dragged on.
Finally the Doctor gave me permission to walk
the length of our garden. I paced up and down
several times under the arbor, unconcernedly;
for the brownie nurse was on guard. My eyes
roamed off to the town. I could see the square
chimneys of Cecil's house, above the tree-tops, on
the other side of the bridge.
Watching my chance, I unlatched the gate
noiselessly, and stood in the open road.
The crisp grass scarcely bent under my tread,
as I stole swiftly away from my chaperone, who,
I am now convinced, was merely a harmless
lunatic.
-- 36 -- p448-045
CHAPTER V. The Flight.
[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]
THE day had opened sunnily, but
one of those sudden fogs which
blow from the sea, had drifted in,
and hung over the town like a pall
of smoke. It caught at the sharp
spires and trailed along the flat
roofs. At intervals, a gleam of
light played through the funeral
folds. I thought the place was burning: it had a
disagreeable habit of catching on fire periodically.
A history of the town would involve a series of
conflagrations.
As I crossed the bridge, the cloud of fog grew
darker and heavier, pressing down on the houses.
-- 037 --
[figure description] Page 037.[end figure description]
The boom of a large bell broke sullenly through
the air. It was tolling.
Something in the sound arrested me, nor me
alone, for a decrepit old man, driving a yoke of
oxen, stopped in the middle of the bridge, and
listened.
“Is it a fire?” I asked, walking at his side.
“A fire in town?”
“Ay, ay,” returned the man, vacantly, like a
deaf person; “for old Mrs. Weston, or Capt'n
Roylstone's child. I dunno which.”
“Cecil Roylstone!”
“Ay; she's bin dyin' this six month.”
“Dead?”
Dead, said the bell.
The bridge reeled under my feet.
“No, old man! you lie to me.”
“Ay, ay,” he said, musingly, “misfortune kind
o' follows some families. Only last fall her father
was wrecked right off Gosport Light here, in sight
o' land.”
I have a dim impression of intending to hurl
-- 038 --
[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]
him into the mill-dam, among the slippery eelgrass;
but as I glanced up I beheld Cecil quietly
walking at the farther end of the bridge.
She turned and beckoned me.
Loosening the old man's arm, I hastened after
Cecil, who moved leisurely down the hill, and
took the road that made a détour by the house.
“Cecil!”
But she glided on with unaltered gait.
“She will stop at the porch,” I thought; but
no; Dr. Molineux was standing in the door-way.
He hailed me as I hurried by.
“Well, where now, Mr. Lynde?”
“I'll return presently. I wish to speak with
the lady who has just passed.”
“Lady?” said the Doctor, eyeing me anxiously.
“Nobody has passed here this half-hour — no
lady, surely.”
“What!” I exclaimed, halting with amazement
at such a barefaced falsehood, “did not that
lady” — pointing to Cecil, who had paused at a
-- 039 --
[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]
bend in the road — “did not that lady just pass
within two yards of you?”
And I looked at the Doctor severely.
“I see no one,” replied the Doctor, following
the direction of my finger.
It had been my opinion for sometime that my
poor friend was deranged. This, coupled with
the fact that I once caught him in his sanctum
reading Neville on Insanity, was conclusive.
“I see no one,” he repeated.
“Then you must be blind, or stupid.”
I instantly repented of my brusqueness. Surely,
his infirmity was no fault of his. So I approached
him, and said kindly,
“My dear doctor, you should at once make
your situation known to your friends. You really
should.”
With which words I left him.
Dr. Molineux stared at me.
There stood Cecil. The June air drew back
the clustered coils of hair that fell over her
shoulders, and I then first noticed the unearthly
-- 040 --
[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]
pallor of her face. It was like a piece of pure
Carrara marble.
Cecil seemed to smile upon me imploringly, as
she turned into a briery path which branched off
from the highway, and led to that tract of woodland
which I mentioned in describing the location
of my dwelling. I followed.
Her pace now became accelerated. It was
with difficulty that I could keep the flying white
dress in sight.
On the verge of the forest she paused, and
faced me with a hectic light in her eyes. It was
but for an instant, then she plunged into the
dense wood.
An agonizing fancy occurred to me. I connected
Cecil's wild look with the still deep ponds
which lay within the shadow of the vast woodland.
The thought gave wings to my feet; I
darted after her like an arrow, tearing myself on
the vines and briers that stretched forth a million
wiry fingers to impede my progress.
We were nearing the largest pond in the wood
-- 041 --
[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]
Unless Cecil should alter her course, that would
prevent farther flight.
This circular piece of water lay, as it were, in
an immense green basin, the banks on every side
sloping to the edge of the pond, where the
cardinal-flowers bent in groups, staring at the
reflection of their flushed faces. At the belt of
maples enclosing the sheet of water, Cecil stopped
irresolutely. I would have clasped her in my
arms, but she escaped me, and ran swiftly toward
the pond. Then I heard a splash not so loud as
would be made by dropping a pebble into the
water. I leaped half-way down the slope.
Cecil had disappeared.
Near the bank, a circle in the pond widened,
and widened, and was lost in space. A single
silver bubble floated among the tangled weeds
that fringed the lip of the shore, and as I
looked, this bubble opened, and out of it indolently
rose a superb white Water-Lily.
It was no use to look for Cecil — there she
was!
-- 042 --
[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]
“You had better come home now,” said Dr.
Molineux, touching me on the shoulder.
When we reached the main-road, a funeral was
passing along slowly, slowly.
People sometimes smile, half-incredulously, when
I tell them these things: then I point to that
white flower, there, in the glass globe.
-- 43 -- p448-052
CHAPTER VI. Tired to Death.
[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]
NOW that I approach the second
important epoch of my life—
the second link in the chain I am
forging—the joy and anguish
which came to me with Cecil
Roylstone, must be laid aside,
like the fragments of a dream
that lie perdu in the memory,
until some odd moment.
I was residing in New Orleans, an invalid. A
perusal of some of W—'s letters by a wood fire
in the north, had drawn me southward in search
of lost vitality. I am not sure it was the most
efficacious move; but mine is a malady full of
-- 044 --
[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]
surmises, and hopes, and disappointment. Why
do I speak of myself? I am only the walkinggentleman
in this particular act of the melodrame—
the Scaramouch that glides in to darken things.
The hero waits at the side-scenes for his cue.
Enter, A Shadow.
Mark Howland, at twenty-four, was tired to
death. His psychological sickness was not occasioned
by varied experience, like that of the cynic
in the play, who had seen everything, done everything,
and found nothing in it. He came to his
weariness without that painful iteration.
There is a certain kind of woman who becomes
physically perfect long before her heart is developed.
If she chance to have much beauty, she is
dangerous beyond belief, and should not be left
unchained to destroy people.
She goes about, seeking whom she may devour.
It is an uncertain leopardess: it kills with
strokes softer than satin.
Mr. Howland, shortly after leaving college, was
-- 045 --
[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]
so deserted by good fortune as to find himself, one
day, at the instep of such a creature.
Celeste G—— was poor, in humble life, and
lovely as an ideal. But, at eighteen, she had no
more heart than there was an anatomical necessity
for. She was attracted by Mark—swayed by
her glamour over him, rather than by his influence
over her. Imperious, eighteen, and unchained.
What could be hoped of her?
Howland's family, rich and ever so many years
old, (old enough to know better,) opposed the
match with all that superfluous acrimony which
characterizes a domestic quarrel.
This, for Mark was human, increased his passion.
He only grew firm about the lips as Madam
his mother protested.
“This person Celeste,” remarked Madam, loftily,
“is common and poor.”
And poverty is the unpardonable sin from Dan
to Beersheba.
Matters went wretchedly.
At length the contending forces agreed to an
-- 046 --
[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]
armistice, and Howland, worn out by tears, consented
to spend two years abroad, and then, at the
expiration of that time, if his purpose remained
unchanged and unchangeable, why, then, perhaps,
it was more than likely, etc. etc.—the antique
story.
The wilful went abroad. He travelled through
Italy, and wintered at Florence; drifted on the
Rhine, and summered at Schwalbach. The large,
languishing eyes of his Andromache went with
him. His thoughts were full of Celeste: he
beheld her everywhere—in every saintly picture,
in every faultless marble: every beautiful thing in
nature and art was an inferior type of Celeste.
When the two years had elapsed, he returned
home, brown and handsome, wondering, on the
passage, why she had written him only two letters
in twice as many months.
Now, one cannot get up one's trousseau, and
write letters, at the same time. A week before
his arrival, Celeste was married.
“This person Celeste,” said Madam, mighty
drily, “has stepped out!”
-- 047 --
[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]
She had, indeed.
When Howland received the news, he bit his
mustache, and looked steadily at nothing for
twenty minutes. Then he threw a string of cameos
into the grate, whistling an air from Il Giuramento.
As a piece of music, it was a failure.
He was cut to the heart.
For Celeste to wed an opera-singer. Basta!
He smoked uncounted segars that day, and
came out of the clouds a different man. His
chateau had toppled over in one night, and there
was not an atom among the ruins worth picking
up the next morning. In the rush and bubble of
city life, he sought to wring out the remembrance
of his wrong.
But grief is one of the quiet colors that wash.
At this time my health became impaired, and
an immediate visit to some milder climate, was the
only specific. In an evil hour, I urged Howland
to accompany me to New Orleans.
We hired a small, furnished cottage, in a retired
faubourg of the city, and set up our dii penates;
-- 048 --
[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]
the household consisting of Cip, a negro gardener;
Christina, a pretty quadroon girl, who kept our
ménage as tidy as a snow-drift; and Agnes,
Christina's child.
With the new surroundings, Howland for
awhile left the past to bury its dead. But by
degrees his former restlessness returned. Time
pressed on him like lead. He grew haggard and
careworn, and a dim scar, which he never liked
spoken of, brightened on his lip; he played wildly,
got into debt, and was going to the bad by a
through-train.
Of course my remonstrances were thrown
away. What is the use of advising a man who
is tired to death?
In the meanwhile, my own life passed tranquilly
enough, with the reading of books on metallurgy,
and the drawing of plans for a more systematic
construction of the Moon-Apparatus, which,
I regret to say, had been all but demolished by
the accident related.
-- 49 -- p448-058
CHAPTER VII. An Arrival.
[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]
THE fire of my segar glowed in
the dusk like a panther's eye. I
sat in the verandah of our cottage-house
in Rue de —— smoking a
Manilla cheroot, and yielding myself
up to the influences of one of
those southern nights which make
a man forget that he must die.
The stars were heavy and lustrous, and the
clouds sailed through the sky, mere thistle-down.
Every stir of air brought me the odors of orangeblossoms,
and wafted the snaky smoke of my
cheroot among the honeysuckle vines, which
clambered erratically over the portico, shutting me
out from the dense moonlight.
-- 050 --
[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]
Three stone steps led from the porch into the
garden, where a marble Naiad filled a cup of
lapis lazuli from a slender urn of antique design.
The jets of water, breaking on the rim of the
goblet, and dripping down in shattered crystals on
the gold-fish in the bowl of the fountain, made
drowsy music. It was like the uneasy bubbling
of a narghillé.
A sly, white pelican waded in the dank grass,
and would have liked to split a gold-fish with its
long bill.
What a fairy garden it was, with its shelly walks
leading to nowhere in particular; its dwarfish
fig-trees with their pointed leaves; its beds of
mignonette; its house-pots of fragrant jonquelles
and camelias; its one heavy magnolia, growing
alone like Père Antoine's date-palm; and the
picket of mulberries, just within the lattice-fence,
marking the boundaries of our demesne.
It was not an extensive sweep of land, but the
moonlight created interminable vistas, and destroyed
one's idea of distance. It appeared as if
-- 051 --
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the whole earth were a tropical forest, stretching
out from our door-step.
The only sounds that broke, or, rather, mingled
with my reverie, were the gurglings of the fountain,
the sleepy rustling of the leaves, and the
inarticulate music of women's voices, blown to me
from neighboring balconies.
The inhabitants of this arid land dwell out of
doors after sundown. As you stroll through the
streets, in the twilight, you see groups, assembled
on the piazzas of the low-roofed French houses, or
sauntering unceremoniously in front gardens; and
many a creole brunette and many a rich southern
blonde, bends tender eyes on you as you pass.
You catch glimpses of charming domestic tableaux—
Old Age in his arm-chair on the porch, and
Youth and Beauty (with cherry-colored ribbons,)
making love under the rose. I think life is an
easy sort of inconvenience in warm latitudes.
The fountain gurgled, the leaves whispered, and
my cheroot went out, a single spark flying upward—
the soul of St. Nicotine! I sat watching a
-- 052 --
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lithe chameleon that undulated out of the dark,
and clad itself in a suit of moonlight on the stone
step. There it lay, moist, glimmering, dead with
ecstacy. Whether it was the torpor of the animal
that extended itself to me, or the effect of the
opium, sometimes wrapt in cheroots, I am not
able to state; but without warning, a drowsiness
directly overpowered my senses. I slept, and
dreamed.
I scarcely know how to tell the dream which
came to me—if it were a dream.
An unnatural stillness fell upon the world;
the liquid music of the fountain fainted in the
distance; the leaves drooped in the sultry, motionless
air, like velvet. The atmosphere became
strangely oppressive, and the aromas from the potplants
grew so penetrating that it was almost pain
to inhale them.
Rising from my seat, I walked with difficulty to
the open end of the verandah. The sky presented
a startling appearance.
The clouds were opaque and stagnant, the stars
-- 053 --
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shrivelled with waning fires, and a sickly, saffron
tinge around the edge of the moon, made it look
as if it had commenced to decay.
I felt that these phenomena were not the prelude
to one of those tornadoes which frequently
burst upon the breathless quiet of tropical regions;
for there was no electricity in the close air, no
muttering of the elements; but a deep, brooding
silence, infinitely more appalling than any tumult.
A vague apprehension of some awful calamity
took possession of me. I shuddered at being
alone.
The odors grew heavier and heavier, orange,
heliotrope, magnolia — subtle and noxious, they
were, like the exhalations from the poisoned
flowers in Rappaccini's garden. I was faint with
them.
Suddenly the street-gate swung to with a clang.
I heard footfalls on the gravelled walks. Thank
heaven! some one was coming to me.
Cip stumbled up the steps. He saw me, and
paused, resting against the balustrade, his hat
slouched over his face. I called to him.
-- 054 --
[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]
“Tell me, Cip, do you see that dreadful skv, or
am I still dreaming?”
The negro did not lift his head, but said,
huskily,
“Marster, it has come, It has come!”
“What has come?”
“Lord, look down an' help us,” murmured
the negro solemnly.
“Why don't you answer me! Where is Mr.
Howland? Who has come? What has come?”
“The - the —”
“The — what?”
“The Chol'ra, marster!”
-- 55 -- p448-064
CHAPTER VIII. Dark Days.
[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]
THE cholera was upon us; but
not without warning. Year after
year it had pursued its lonely
march through woodland and
desert, as noiseless and implacable
as Fate. For months and months,
rumor had heralded its fell approach.
Now it stole with the
auras of morning into a populous town; now it
glided with the shades of nightfall into some
happy village.
Graves sprung up in its wake, like thistles.
The lank Arab, munching his few dates in the
desert, looked up from the scanty meal, and
-- 056 --
[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]
beheld those basilisk eyes. His camel wandered
off without a master.
The be-nighted traveller by the Ganges, sunk
exhausted on the banks of the muddy river; but
the beasts of the jungle did not growl over him,
for even the nameless birds flew, shrieking, away.
The English mother sat by the hamlet-door,
singing to her babe. The tiny hand clutched at
the air, and the soft white eyelids were ringed
with violet.
Beauty saw a baleful visage in her mirror. No
rouge, nor pearl-powder nor balm could make it
comely again.
The miser hugged and kissed his money-bags;
but where he went he could not take his idols.
Then Dives died in his palace, and the leper at
the groined gate-way.
The fingers of lovers were unknitted.
The Cholera, the Scourge!
In a single night the Afreet spread his wings
over the doomed city. A woman had been
-- 057 --
[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]
stricken down while buying a bunch of flowers in
St. Mary's Market. An unknown man fell headlong
from his horse on the levee. Six persons lay
at the point of death in a café on Rue de Baronne.
The hospitals were already filling up; and the red
flag wilted in the languid breeze at the quarantine.
The streets were strewn with lime, and every precaution
taken by the authorities to extirpate the
plague. And then commenced that long procession
of funerals which never ceased to trail by our
door for so many weary months. It is a question
in my mind, though, whether the cholera is contagious.
How hot, and dull, and dead the days were!
The roofs of the houses lay festering in the
canescent heat; the flowers drooped, and died
cankerous deaths; the outer leaves of the foliage
changed to a livid green hue, and the timid grass
crept up, and withered, in the interstices of the
sidewalk. All day a tawny gold mist hung over
the place. At night, the dews fell, and from
-- 058 --
[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]
cypress swamps, on the skirts of the city, rose
deadly miasma.
No joyous children played at the door-step in
the twilight. The guttural voice of the strolling
marchand was no longer heard crying his creams
and comfits. The small fruit-booths along the
street were tenantless. The St. Charles Theatre
and The Varieties were closed — only the tragedy
of death drew crowded houses. The glittering
bar-rooms, with their fancy glasses, and mirrors,
and snowy drinks, were almost deserted. Even
rondo, roulette, faro, monte and lansquenet, lost
their fascination. Mass was said morning and
evening in the old cathedral at Place d' Armes;
and many of the churches, catholic and protestant,
were open throughout the day.
The wheel of social life was broken.
As to Howland and myself, we were not panicstricken.
The fine edge of my fear of death had
been blunted by a similar experience, at Cuba,
during a yellow-fever season; and Howland
-- 059 --
[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]
regarded the workings of chance with stolid indifference.
When the epidemic first broke out, he had
proposed, for my sake only, a trip across Lake
Ponchartrain, to Pass Christian, or Biloxi; but
I would not listen to him. In overruling Howland's
suggestion, I was simply a puppet, moving
in accordance with my wires. It was predestined
we should remain and face the sorrows of that
year.
I am a fatalist, you see; and have reason to
be one.
We changed our mode of living in no particular;
but ate fruit, drank wine, (rank heresy,)
walked, rode, and slept as usual. And even Cip,
who had somewhat recovered from his first fright,
would sit of an evening by the kitchen-door, and
play plaintive negro melodies on his rickety violin.
“Cip,” I used to say, “this Asiatic cholera is
a countryman of yours.”
“O Lord, marster!”
Still the work went on. People died and lay
-- 060 --
[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]
for days unburied, in obscure garrets. Oftentimes
one cart bore away an entire family — hurried
them off. Lying in my bed, I have been kept
awake by hearses rumbling by — at midnight.
What I write I saw, and was a part of. I would
it were fiction.
Near our house stood a large brick church, the
Church of the Bleeding Heart, I think it was
called. The exterior of the edifice was left in an
elaborate state of unfinish, the costly interior
decorations having, I suppose, exhausted the
parochial funds. It was a habit of mine to pass
an hour, every day, in wandering about the
dimly-lighted aisles, or sitting by the altar and
looking at a painting of the Crucifixion, which
covered a Gothic window back of the dais. The
sun, early in the forenoon, used to rest for five or
ten minutes on the glass directly above the
Savior's head, and, blending with the aureola
which the artist had placed around the angelic
brows, produced a striking effect.
-- 061 --
[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]
The painting, and the soothing twilight of the
spot, lifted me into holy atmospheres. Here I
came and thought of life and the world — not
this world, or this life; but the Life and the
World beyond.
Out of my visits to the church grew an incident
which I cannot resist recording. A story within
a story, says Goethe, is a flaw in art. But life is
made up of episodes — a story within a story.
One morning I was leaving the church when I
heard somebody sound the keys of the organ in
the loft. There is a rich, gloomy pathos about
the instrument that always impresses me. I stood
listening to the mellow, irregular notes, touched
at random. Presently the musician lingered on
an octave, as if to gather strength for a prolonged
flight — then the splendid Wedding March of
Mendelssohn broke along the aisles, and soared up
to the shadowy dome.
How magically those unseen fingers wrung the
meaning of the great maestro from the inanimate
keys! with what power and delicacy of touch!
-- 062 --
[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]
As I listened, the sacred candles were suddenly
lighted, and in their lambent glare a thousand
ghosts crowded into the carven pews, thronged the
gallery; the priest stood in the chancel; and then
the bridal pageant swept by, and then the grand
music burst out beyond control, surging away
among the resonant arches in tumultuous waves
of sound; and then — as if to render the illusion
perfect — the clock in the belfry struck twelve.
At the last stroke, the music ceased, the church
was emptied of its ghostly audience, the scented
candles flickered out, and I stood alone. I could
have wept with an undefined, mysterious sorrow,—
wept the loss of something I had never known,
something that might have been!
Again the music rose, but more gently — a
melody of Beethoven. It was left unfinished.
The organ-lid closed abruptly; I heard the fine
click of the key turning in the wards, and hastened
to the vestibule of the church to catch a glimpse
of the musician.
As I gained the door, a young girl, leading a
-- 063 --
[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]
little boy by the hand, was slowly descending the
broad oaken staircase.
“Were you playing the organ, a moment
since?” I asked, doubtfully.
“Yes.”
“Are you the organist here?”
“No, sir; but my father was.”
“Was?”
“They took papa away last week,” said the
boy simply; “and this is Clara Dujardine, my
sister, who loves him.”
They passed on.
Every morning for several weeks the childmusician
came to the choir. It was not hard to
understand why the poor girl lingered there, day
after day, playing the same glorious music always—
the music which the old organist had loved.
Suddenly her visits ceased.
The sunshine rested on the head of the painted
Christ, and lighted up the stained windows; the
dreary sexton, and, now and then, a priest or two,
found their way into the sanctuary: but I waited
-- 064 --
[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]
in vain for the girl with her spiritual eyes and
fragile hands.
In the ancient French burying-ground, is a
humble mound which the delicate grass, I like to
think, takes pleasures in making beautiful; before
it touches the other graves. Spring-time had
muffled it in flowers, the day I bent down and
read the simple inscription:
Aged 17.
Near the head-stone, with a wreath of immortelles
in his shut hand, sat the little boy — asleep.
The sultry, dreadful days; the huge city in its
swoon-like silence; the busy, busy death! — how
these things stay with my thought. Here, in
pleasant New England, sometimes in the twilight,
invisible fingers play for me the sad strains of
Beethoven, the Wedding March of Mendelssohn.
-- 65 -- p448-074
CHAPTER IX. Agnes.
[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]
FOR heaven's sake, Lynde,” said
Howland, one evening, “let us have
our coffee and segars on the back
piazza. Human nature cannot stand
ten funerals to one cup of Mocha.”
The hearses crawled by the house
day and night, an interminable train.
“Coffee on the back porch, Christina.”
As Christina placed our bamboo chairs on the
verandah, I saw by her swollen eyelids that she
had been weeping.
“Christina?” said I, inquiringly.
“Little Agnes, sir — I'm afraid she is very
sick.”
-- 066 --
[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]
Little Agnes! Christina's child, the only
flower that blossomed for one poor life — the little
pale bloom of love that sprung up in the crevice
of a broken heart.
I do not know Christina's history; but I
imagine it would not be impossible to guess. I
think that a page of it was written on the face of
the child.
Agnes was fairer than her mother; she had her
mother's willowy form, the same ductile voice;
but the light hair, thin lips, and sensitive nostrils,
were not of Christina's race. The passions of two
alien natures were welded in that diminutive
frame.
Howland and I had made a pet of the girl, for
she had a hundred pretty womanly ways, and a
certain sadness older than herself — a sadness
peculiar to such waifs.
The sick child lay up stairs, in Christina's
sleeping-room. One glance at the serene face
assured us there was no hope: the radiance of
another world was dawning on the forehead.
-- 067 --
[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]
That night little Agnes passed away. I was
sorry for Christina, but not for little Agnes!
Christina, in her bereavement, was not noisy
and absurd, like women I have seen. Servitude
had been a hundred years taming the blood in
her veins.
Her grief expressed itself in silent caresses.
She sat by the bedside all day, dressing the child
with flowers. Now she would lay a knot of
pansies on the still heart, now she would smooth
one of the pitiful little hands — yearning, dying
for some faint sign of recognition. Then she
picked off the flowers, one by one, and rearranged
them. Fondly combed the long silk hair over
her fingers, with a sad half-smile, and not a tear
comforting her dry eyelids. There was pathos
in that.
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak,
Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break.”
The carriage which was to convey the child to
the cemetery, drew up at our door early in the
afternoon.
-- 068 --
[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]
When Christina heard the wheels grate on the
curb-stone, her lip quivered, and she reached out
her arms, as if she would fold the babe forever on
the bosom where it could never nestle again.
“Not yet, please — not quite yet!”
The sorrow and supplication of those words
were not to be resisted.
It was almost dark when Cip raised the light
coffin in his arms, and bore it, with a sort of
rough kindness, to the carriage. His violin was
mute, that night, and many a night afterwards.
As the gate shut to, Christina stood on the
piazza, with that same sad half-smile on her lips.
“Good-bye, little Agnes!” she said, with
touching tenderness.
Then Christina went into the house, and closed
the door softly.
-- 69 -- p448-078
CHAPTER X. The Red Domino.
[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]
HOWLAND and myself sat on the
back seat, and Cip outside with the
driver. So we moved on.
Saving an occasional hearse,
intersecting our way, the streets
were silent and deserted as usual.
The tall houses, here and there
looming up against the increasing
twilight, were like the ghosts of houses. The
sweet human life in them had fled. Everything
was spectral and unreal, we most of all, with that
slim black box on the front seat. A phantom
carriage, dragged by phantom horses to a graveyard!
-- 070 --
[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]
We left Agnes in the leafy French cemetery;
and, sending the negro home with the barouche,
followed on leisurely, threading the narrow streets,
arm in arm, as speechless as two statues.
We were in what is termed the French part
of the city, one of the lower municipalities — a
district as distinct from the American precincts as
Paris is. Here, in dangerous times, long ago, a
few brave men laid the foundation of the great
and miserable city. The houses, to all appearances,
were built immediately after the Deluge;
and the streets, crowded with the odd-ends of
architecture, branch off into each other in the
most whimsical fashion.
As we wheeled round the angle of one of these
wrinkled thoroughfares, our ears were saluted by
an exclamation of deep satisfaction, and a merry
peal of girlish laughter; at the same instant we
found ourselves face to face with two persons who
were apparently costumed for a bal masque —
one, with a certain uncouth dignity, in the showy
court-dress of the time of Louis Quatorze, and the
-- 071 --
[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]
other, seemingly a young and pretty woman,
dressed as a page. The faces of both were concealed
by semi-masks, a short fringed curtain
shielding the lower features.
A door at the right of us was thrown open,
and a flood of light fell glitteringly on these two
personages who occupied the confined sidewalk,
and seemed disposed to dispute our passage.*
Howland attempted to push by when the page
laid her small gloved hand on his shoulder.
“By your leave, messieurs,” said the page,
“this is Louis XIV! — is n't it, Charley?”
The man nodded.
“We were instructed by our queen,” continued
the mask, “to fill two vacant seats at her royal
board. She gives a banquet to-night; plates were
set for twenty favorites of the ermine. Eighteen
came, and two didn't — they neglected even to
-- 072 --
[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]
send their regrets. Impolite in them—was n't
it, Charley?”
“Confoundedly,” said the monarch, curtly.
“But they had some slight excuse; they were
quite dead; and we forgive 'em, don't we,
Charley?”
“We forgive 'em.”
“What does all this mummery mean?” said
Howland, impatiently.
“There! don't be cross. It means that we
crave your presence at the feast. O, you must
come! Or we'll have the whole regal household
buzzing at your ears in a pair of seconds!”
While the girl spoke, a dozen maskers—mandarins,
satyrs, and outlandish figures,—crowded
the doorway, and seemed waiting only for the
word to seize us bodily. There was no chance
for retreat.
“Let us go with these jesters,” said Howland,
in a whisper, “since we cannot help ourselves
without trouble. We are among the Romans.
This is a new edition of the Decamerone.”
-- 073 --
[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]
“How fortunately we met you,” cried the
girl. “Come!”
Her mask slipped aside, and for an instant I
caught a profile view of a pretty, aquiline nose,
one sunny eye, and a mouth llke a moss-rose.
“Now, Mollie,” said the man, thrusting his
arm through mine. The page took coquettish
possession of Howland.
We were conducted throught a bare, uncarpeted
entry, at the end of which a green-baize door
opened into a saloon. The masqueraders whom
we had seen at the entrance, now seated themselves
at the table, which extended nearly the
entire length of the room.
Our appearance on the threshold was greeted
with a shout of laughter.
A woman in a blood-red domino and scarlet
satin mask, half rose from a fauteuil, as we
entered, waved her hand to us graciously, and
sunk back on the downy cushions with such unassumed
grace and majesty, that I involuntarily
-- 074 --
[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]
removed my hat. Howland bit his lip, and made
a low bow.
“You are welcome, gentlemen,” said the Red
Domino.
The voice was low, and sweet, and tremulous,
like the sound of a harp-string, lightly touched.
The page proceeded to introduce to us the
motley people, half of whom were women, and all
evidently citizens of Bohemia.
“This,” began the girl, with mock gravity,
“is our light-o'-foot, Zephyr, eating caramels;
that dear creature, there, in blue, who is waiting
for a chance to press Jacques' fingers under the
table, is called Next-to-heaven, but she's only
next to Jacques, which is much the same thing.
The young lady with wings, who looks as if she
were going to fly away, and never does, is
L'Amour. Dear me! some of you have characters,
and some of you have n't. This is Rose
Bonbon, and this, Madam la Marquise with the
snowiest shoulder in Louisiana. You should see
them with their masks off—and be unhappy!”
-- 075 --
[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]
“This,” proceeded the speaker, turning to a
slim harlequin, who resembled the small blade of
a penknife, “is a sentimental gentleman who
writes verses to eyebrows—he makes six copies
of each sonetto, and so kills half a dozen birds
with one stone. This is Robert le—what's-his
name. This is Hamlet, you know him by his
inky cloak: this is Petruchio, the woman-tamer
tamed by a woman, (Mrs. P. lectures him!) and
here is Friar Lawrence, who will confess you for
a picayune, provided, always, you are young,
handsome, and feminine—but you must be the
last, he's so pious!”
“And you,” said Howland, smiling in spite of
himself, “you are—”
“Nobody in particular, very much at your
service!”
And the girl walked archly away on the points
of her toes, like a ballet-dancer.
While this outré introduction was being concluded,
I glanced around the salon. A globed
lamp, suspended by a silver chain, hung like a
-- 076 --
[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]
full moon over the centre of the table. Projecting
from the frescoed walls on either side were
Chinese lanterns, covered with flat landscapes and
hieroglyphics. Ancient, mediæval and modern
furniture was piled about the room in grotesque
confusion. It was like an antiquary's collection.
No two pieces matching. One window was hung
with blue brocade, alive with an Etruscan vinework
of gold thread; a second, unpleasantly green
with a Venitian blind. The floor was muffled in
a Turkish carpet, wrought so naturally with
azaleas and ipomeas, that their perfumes seemed
to fill the chamber.
But the lounges, the drapery, and the inlaid
chairs, as I looked at them more closely, proved
to be only clever imitations of the real thing—
the painted and gilded paraphernalia of the stage.
This room, I have since thought, was probably
the green-room of the Italian Opera House, fitted
up for the occasion, from “the properties.”
We took our places at the table, and the wine
went round; jests flew from lip to lip, like
-- 077 --
[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]
mocking-birds, and “short swallow-flights of
song” from the mouths of mysterious women;
while a band of unseen musicians, somewhere
behind a screen, now and then broke into a
delirious waltz.
All this was so bizarre, so like an ingenious
dream, that I expected every moment to wake up,
and find myself sitting on our verandah, at home,
a burnt-out segar at my feet, and the fountain
laughing in the garden.
Howland alone was silent and distrait, emptying
glass after glass with the mechanical air of an
automaton.
Opposite him sat a bleak, attenuated man clad
in black silk tights, the breast and hips of which
were trimmed with strips of white cloth, in painful
imitation of a skeleton. His hands were long and
bony, and needed no artifice to make them seem
as if they belonged to the pasteboard death's-head
that screened his features.
After some minutes, I became aware that this
singular person regulated his motions by those of
-- 078 --
[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]
Howland, resting his head on one hand, and
draining his glass at the same time Mark drank.
I wondered if Howland noticed him.
“A toast!” cried the Harlequin, springing up
in his chair, and resting one parti-colored foot on
the edge of the table.
We all stood, excepting the Red Domino, with
fresh glasses. I did not hear what the toast was,
for clink! went a glass; and the sharp splinters
sparkled on the cloth.
“The queen has dropt her goblet,” said Rose
Bonbon.
“Then she must sing us a song to take the
sound out of our ears,” cried the Friar.
“A penalty, a penalty!”
“A song!” shrieked a dozen voices.
The Red Domino rose slowly from the fauteuil,
and the voice which I had longed to hear again,
issued tremulously from beneath the chin-curtain
of the mask. I watched her eyes as she sang:
“Dall' imo del mio core
Sorse una sol prece,
-- 079 --
[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]
Che l' idol mio ammiri,
Che io l'ammiri, e muoia.”
Here the skeleton-man leaned heavily against
the table, and Howland smiled — but such a bitter
smile. He had won the drinking match!
Two maskers carried the mime, who had merely
fainted, to an adjoining room.
“That was the cantatrice's husband,” said the
Blue Lady to me, in a whisper,
“Her husband? Good heavens! see how
coolly she takes it!”
“Yes. La Reine does n't worship him.”
“No?”
“The Cholera,” said the Harlequin.
“The dark Death,” said Hamlet, “ `a little
more than kin and less than kind!' ”
“The song, give us the song!” cried a man,
covered from head to feet with spangles, looking
as if he had just been dipt into a bath of quicksilver.
“The song, the song!” shrieked the voices.
The Red Domino had not changed her position
-- 080 --
[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]
during this scene, but stood there like a statue
carved out of a boulder of red chalk-stone.
Howland, with his face deathly pale, bent
forward to listen.
Again that sweet voice, lower and more tremulous
than before, stole into the air.
It was not fancy this time, her eyes burned
through the mask at Mark:
“Alfin, com' alma peccatrice,
Alle porte del ciel io giungo,
Non per entrar cogli eletti,
Oh! giammai..,. soltanto per morir.”
Howland rose wildly from his chair, and staggering
toward the Red Domino, sunk down at her feet.
“I am dying,” said Howland, “but I know
that voice! My heart is breaking with it!”
With an air of love and remorse, she stooped
over Mark, and folded him in her arms.
“Your face!” said Howland. “Your face,
quick! Let me look on your face!”
Then Celeste tore off the mask and rested her
head on his bosom. Then she sobbed and
moaned — the soul that was within her.
-- 081 --
[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]
So she comes to me out of the gray mists and
shadows of the Past — the woman who found her
heart when it was somewhat late.
This was years ago. But every Mardi Gras, it
is said, a sorrowful queenly lady, robed from foot
to forehead in deep crimson, glides in among the
gayer maskers, and whenever she appears, the
laugh dies on the lip.
eaf448n1* This probably took place during that period of festivity
which precedes Lent, it still being a custom, among the Franco-American
population of New Orleans, to “keep the Carnival.” —
Editor.
-- 82 -- p448-091
CHAPTER XI. The Danseuse.
[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]
THE ensuing summer I returned
North depressed by the result of
my sojourn in New Orleans. It
was only by devoting myself, body
and soul, to some intricate pursuit
that I could dispel the gloom which
threatened to seriously affect my
health.
The Moon-Apparatus was insufficient to distract
me. I turned my attention to mechanism,
and was successful in producing several wonderful
pieces of work, among which may be mentioned
a brass butterfly, made to flit so naturally in the
air as to deceive the most acute observers. The
-- 083 --
[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]
motion of the toy, the soft down and gorgeous
damask-stains on the pinions, were declared quite
perfect. The thing is rusty and wont work now,
I tried to set it going for Dr. Pendegrast, the
other day.
A manikin musician, playing a few exquisite
airs on a miniature piano, likewise excited much
admiration. This figure bore such an absurd,
unintentional resemblance to a gentleman who
has since distinguished himself as a pianist, that
I presented the trifle to a lady admirer of
Gottschalk.
I also became a taxidermist, and stuffed a pet
bird with springs and diminutive flutes, causing it
to hop and carol, in its cage, with great glee.
But my master-piece was a nimble white mouse,
with pink eyes, that could scamper up the walls,
and masticate bits of cheese in an extraordinary
style. My chamber-maid shrieked, and
jumped up on a chair, whenever I let the little
fellow loose in her presence. One day, unhappily,
the mouse, while nosing around after its favorite
-- 084 --
[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]
aliment, got snapt in a rat-trap that yawned in
the closet, and I was never able to readjust the
machinery.
Engaged in these useful inventions,—useful.
because no exercise of the human mind is ever in
vain,—my existence for two or three years was
so placid and uneventful, I began to hope that the
shadows which had followed on my path from
childhood, making me unlike other men, had
returned to that unknown world where they
properly belong; but the Fates were only taking
breath to work out more surely the problem of my
destiny. I must keep nothing back. I must
extenuate nothing.
I am about to lift the vail of mystery which,
for nearly seven years, has shrouded the story of
Mary Ware; and though I lay bare my own
weakness, or folly, or what you will, I do not
shrink from the unvailing.
No hand but mine can now perform the task.
There was, indeed, a man who might have done
-- 085 --
[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]
this better than I. But he went his way ir
silence. I like a man who can hold his tongue.
On the corner of Clarke and Crandall streets,
in New York, stands a dingy brown frame-house.
It is a very old house, as its obsolete style of
structure would tell you. It has a morose, unhappy
look, though once it must have been a
blythe mansion. I think that houses, like human
beings, ultimately become dejected or cheerful,
according to their experience. The very air of
some front-doors tells their history.
This house, I repeat, has a morose, unhappy
look, at present, and is tenanted by an incalculable
number of Irish families, while a picturesque
junk-shop is in full blast in the basement; but at
the time of which I write, it was a second-rate
boarding-place, of the more respectable sort, and
rather largely patronized by poor, but honest,
literary men, tragic-actors, members of the chorus,
and such like gilt people.
My apartments on Crandall street, were opposite
this building, to which my attention was
-- 086 --
[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]
directed soon after taking possession of the rooms,
by the discovery of the following facts:
First, that a charming lady lodged on the
second-floor front, and sang like a canary every
morning.
Second, that her name was Mary Ware.
Third, that Mary Ware was a danseuse, and
had two lovers—only two.
Fourth, that Mary Ware and the page, who,
years before, had drawn Howland and myself into
that fatal masquerade, were the same person.
This last discovery moved me strangely, aside
from the fact that her presence opened an old
wound. The power which guides all the actions
of my life constrained me to watch this woman.
Mary Ware was the leading-lady at The
Olympic. Night after night found me in the
parquette. I can think of nothing with which to
compare the airiness and utter abandon of her
dancing. She seemed a part of the music. She
was one of beauty's best thoughts, then. Her
glossy gold hair reached down to her waist,
-- 087 --
[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]
shading one of those mobile faces which remind
you of Guido's picture of Beatrix Cenci —
there was something so fresh and enchanting in
the mouth. Her luminous, almond eyes, looking
out winningly from under their drooping fringes,
were at once the delight and misery of young men.
Ah! you were distracting in your nights of
triumph, when the bouquets nestled about your
elastic ankles, and the kissing of your castanets
made the pulses leap; but I remember when you
lay on your cheerless bed, in the blank daylight,
with the glory faded from your brow, and “none
so poor as to do you reverence.”
Then I stooped down and kissed you — but
not till then.
Mary Ware was to me a finer study than her
lovers. She had two, as I have said. One of
them was commonplace enough — well-made, welldressed,
shallow, flaccid. Nature, when she gets
out of patience with her best works, throws off
such things by the gross, instead of swearing.
-- 088 --
[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]
He was a lieutenant, in the navy I think. The
gilt button has charms to soothe the savage breast.
The other was a man of different mould, and
interested me in a manner for which I could not
then account. The first time I saw him did not
seem like the first time. But this, perhaps, is an
after-impression.
Every line of his countenance denoted character;
a certain capability, I mean, but whether
for good or evil was not so plain. I should have
called him handsome, but for a noticeable scar
which ran at right angles across his mouth, giving
him a sardonic expression when he smiled.
His frame might have set an anatomist wild
with delight — six feet two, deep-chested, knitted
with tendons of steel. Not at all a fellow to
amble on plush carpets.
“Some day,” thought I, as I saw him stride
by the house, “he will throw the little Lieutenant
out of that second-story window.”
I cannot tell, to this hour, which of those two
men Mary Ware loved most — for I think she
-- 089 --
[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]
loved them both. A woman's heart was the
insolvable charade with which the Sphinx nipt
the Egyptians. I was never good at puzzles.
The flirtation, however, was food enough for
the whole neighborhood. But faintly did the
gossips dream of the strange drama that was
being shaped out, as compactly as a tragedy of
Sophocles, under their noses.
They were very industrious in tearing Mary
Ware's good name to pieces. Some laughed at
the gay Lieutenant, and some at Julius Kenneth;
but they all amiably united in condemning Mary
Ware.
This, possibly, was strictly proper, for Mary
Ware was a woman: the woman is always to
blame in such cases; the man is hereditarily and
constitutionally in the right; the woman is born in
the wrong. That is the world's verdict, that is what
Justice says; but we should weigh the opinion of
Justice with care, since she is represented, by
poets and sculptors, not satirically, I trust, as a
blind Woman.
-- 090 --
[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]
It was so from the beginning. Was not the
first lady of the world the cause of all our woe?
I feel safe in leaving it to a jury of gentle dames.
But from all such judges, had I a sister on trial
good Lord deliver her.
This state of affairs had continued for five or
six months, when it was reported that Julius
Kenneth and Mary Ware were affianced. The
Lieutenant was less frequently seen in Crandall
street, and Julius waited upon Mary's footsteps
with the fidelity of a shadow.
Mrs. Grundy was somewhat appeased.
Yet. — though Mary went to the Sunday concerts
with Julius Kenneth, she still wore the
Lieutenant's roses in her bosom.
Mrs. Grundy said that.
-- 91 -- p448-100
CHAPTER XII. A Mystery.
[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]
ONE drizzly November morning —
how well I remember it! — I was
awakened by a series of nervous
raps on my bed-room door. The
noise startled me from an unpleasant
dream.
“O, sir!” cried the chamber-maid
on the landing, “There's
been a dreadful time across the street. They've
gone and killed Mary Ware!”
“Ah!”
That was all I could say. Cold drops of
perspiration stood on my forehead.
I looked at my watch; it was eleven o'clock;
-- 092 --
[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]
I had over-slept myself, having sat up late the
previous night.
I dressed hastily, and, without waiting for
breakfast, pushed my way through the murky
crowd that had collected in front of the house
opposite, and passed up stairs, unquestioned.
When I entered the room, there were six people
present: a thick-set gentleman, in black, with a
bland professional air, a physician; two policemen;
Adelaide Woods, an actress; Mrs. Marston, the
landlady; and Julius Kenneth.
In the centre of the chamber, on the bed, lay
the body of Mary Ware — as pale as Seneca's
wife.
I shall never forget it. The corse haunted me
for years afterwards, the dark streaks under the
eyes, and the wavy hair streaming over the
pillow — the dead gold hair. I stood by her for
a moment, and turned down the counterpane,
which was drawn up closely to the chin.
“There was that across her throat
Which you had hardly cared to see.”
-- 093 --
[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]
At the head of the bed sat Julius Kenneth,
bending over the icy hand which he held in his
own. He was kissing it.
The gentleman in black was conversing in
undertones with Mrs. Marston, who every now
and then glanced furtively toward Mary Ware.
The two policemen were examining the doors,
closets and windows of the apartment with,
obviously, little success.
There was no fire in the air-tight stove, but the
place was suffocatingly close. I opened a window,
and leaned against the casement to get a breath
of fresh air.
The physician approached me. I muttered
something to him indistinctly, for I was partly
sick with the peculiar mouldy smell that pervaded
the room.
“Yes,” he began, scrutinizing me, “the affair
looks very perplexing, as you remark. Professional
man, sir? No? Bless me! — beg pardon.
Never in my life saw anything that looked so
exceedingly like nothing. Thought, at first, 'twas
-- 094 --
[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]
a clear case of suicide — door locked, key on the
inside, place undisturbed; but then we find no
instrument with which the subject could have
inflicted that wound on the neck. Queer. Party
must have escaped up chimney. But how?
Don't know. The windows are at least thirty
feet from the ground. It would be impossible for
a person to jump that far, even if he could clear
the iron railing below. Which he could'nt.
Disagreeable things to jump on, those spikes, sir.
Must have been done with a sharp knife. Queer,
very. Party meant to make sure work of it.
The carotid neatly severed, upon my word.”
The medical gentleman went on in this monologuic
style for fifteen minutes, during which time
Kenneth did not raise his lips from Mary's fingers.
Approaching the bed, I spoke to him; but he
only shook his head in reply.
I understood his grief.
After regaining my chamber, I sat listlessly for
three or four hours, gazing into the grate. The
twilight flitted in from the street; but I did not
-- 095 --
[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]
heed it. A face among the coals fascinated me.
It came and went and came. Now I saw a cavern
hung with lurid stalactites; now a small Vesuvius
vomiting smoke and flame; now a bridge spanning
some tartarean gulf; then these crumbled, each
in its turn, and from out the heated fragments
peered the one inevitable face.
The Evening Mirror, of that day, gave the
following detailed report of the inquest:
“This morning, at eight o'clock, Mary Ware,
the celebrated danseuse, was found dead in her
chamber, at her late residence on the corner of
Clarke and Crandall streets. The perfect order
of the room, and the fact that the door was locked
on the inside, have induced many to believe that
the poor girl was the victim of her own rashness.
But we cannot think so. That the door was
fastened on the inner side, proves nothing except,
indeed, that the murderer was hidden in the
apartment. That the room gave no evidence of a
struggle having taken place, is also an insignificant
-- 096 --
[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]
point. Two men, or even one, grappling suddenly
with the deceased, who was a slight woman, would
have prevented any great resistance. The deceased
was dressed in a ballet-costume, and was,
as we conjecture, murdered directly after her
return from the theatre. On a chair near the
bed, lay several fresh bouquets, and a water-proof
cloak which she was in the habit of wearing over
her dancing-dress, on coming home from the
theatre at night. No weapon whatever was found
on the premises. We give below all the material
testimony elicited by the coroner. It explains
little.
“Josephine Marston deposes: I keep a boarding
house at No. 131 Crandall street. Miss Ware
has boarded with me for the past two years. Has
always borne a good character as far as I know.
I do not think she had many visitors; certainly no
male visitors, excepting a Lieutenant King, and
Mr. Kenneth to whom she was engaged. I do
not know when King was last at the house; not
within three days, I am confident. Deceased told
-- 097 --
[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]
me that he had gone away. I did not see her
last night when she came home. The hall-door is
never locked; each of the boarders has a latchkey.
The last time I saw Miss Ware was just
before she went to the theatre, when she asked me
to call her at eight o'clock (this morning) as she
had promised to walk with `Jules,' meaning Mr.
Kenneth. I knocked at the door nine or ten
times, but received no answer. Then I grew
frightened and called one of the lady boarders,
Miss Woods, who helped me to force the lock.
The key fell on the floor inside as we pushed
against the door. Mary Ware was lying on the
bed, dressed. Some matches were scattered under
the gas-burner by the bureau. The room presented
the same appearance it does now.
“Adelaide Woods deposes: I am an actress by
profession. I occupy the room next to that of the
deceased. Have known her twelve months. It
was half-past eleven when she came home; she
stopped in my chamber for perhaps three-quarters
of an hour. The call-boy of The Olympic usually
-- 098 --
[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]
accompanies her home from the theatre when she
is alone. I let her in. Deceased had misplaced
her night-key. The partition between our rooms
is of brick; but I do not sleep soundly, and should
have heard any unusual noise. Two weeks ago,
Miss Ware told me she was to be married to Mr.
Kenneth in January next. The last time I saw
them together was the day before yesterday. I
assisted Mrs Marston in breaking open the door.
[Describes the position of the body, etc., etc.]
“Here the call-boy was summoned, and testified
to accompanying the deceased home the night
before. He came as far as the steps with her.
The door was opened by a woman; could not
swear it was Miss Woods, though he knows her
by sight. The night was dark, and there was no
lamp burning in the entry.
“Julius Kenneth deposes: I am a mastermachinist.
Reside at No. — Forsythe street.
Miss Ware was my cousin. We were engaged
to be married next — [Here the witness' voice
failed him.] The last time I saw her was on
-- 099 --
[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]
Wednesday morning, on which occasion we walked
out together. I did not leave my room last
evening: was confined by a severe cold. A
Lieutenant King used to visit my cousin frequently;
it created considerable talk in the
neighborhood: I did not like it, and requested
her to break the acquaintance. She informed me,
Wednesday, that King had been ordered to some
foreign station, and would trouble me no more
Was excited at the time, hinted at being tired of
living; then laughed, and was gayer than she had
been for weeks. Deceased was subject to fits of
depression. She had engaged to walk with me
this morning at eight. When I reached Clark
street I learned that she — [Here the witness,
overcome by emotion, was allowed to retire.]
“Dr. Wren deposes: [This gentleman was
very learned and voluble, and had to be suppressed
several times by the coroner. We furnish
a brief synopsis of his testimony.] I was called
in to view the body of the deceased. A deep
incision on the throat, two inches below the
-- 100 --
[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]
lefear, severing the left common carotid and the
internal jugular vein, had been inflicted with some
sharp instrument. Such a wound would, in my
opinion, produce death almost instantaneously.
The body bore no other signs of violence. A slight
mark, almost indistinguishable, in fact, extended
from the upper lip toward the right nostril —
some hurt, I suppose, received in infancy. Deceased
must have been dead a number of hours,
the rigor mortis having already supervened,
etc., etc.
“Dr. Ceccarini corroborated the above testimony.
“The night-watchman and seven other persons
were then placed on the stand; but their statements
threw no fresh light on the case.
“The situation of Julius Kenneth, the lover of
the ill-fated girl, draws forth the deepest commiseration.
Miss Ware was twenty-four years
of age.
“Who the criminal is, and what could have
led to the perpetration of the cruel act, are
-- 101 --
[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]
questions which, at present, threaten to baffle the
sagacity of the police. If such deeds can be
committed with impunity in a crowded city, like
this, who is safe from the assassin's steel?”
-- 102 -- p448-111
CHAPTER XIII. Thou art the Man.
[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]
I COULD but smile on reading all
this serious nonsense.
After breakfast, the next morning,
I made my toilet with extreme
care, and presented myself at the
sheriff's office.
Two gentlemen who were sitting
at a table, busy with papers, started
nervously to their feet, as I announced myself. I
bowed very calmly to the sheriff, and said,
“I am the person who murdered Mary Ware!”
Of course I was instantly arrested; and that
evening, in jail, I had the equivocal pleasure of
reading these paragraphs among the police items
of the Mirror:
-- 103 --
[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]
“The individual who murdered the ballet-girl,
in the night of the third inst., in a house on
Crandall street, surrendered himself to the sheriff
this forenoon.
“He gave his name as Paul Lynde, and resides
opposite the place where the tragedy was enacted.
He is a man of medium stature, has restless gray
eyes, chestnust hair, and a supernaturally pale
countenance. He seems a person of excellent
address, is said to be wealthy, and nearly connected
with an influential New England family.
Notwithstanding his gentlemanly manner, there is
that about him which would lead one to select him
from out a thousand, as a man of cool and desperate
character.
“Mr. Lynde's voluntary surrender is not the
least astonishing feature of this affair; for, had he
preserved silence he would, beyond a doubt, have
escaped even suspicion. The murder was planned
and executed with such deliberate skill, that there
is little or no evidence to complicate him. In
truth, there is no evidence against him, excepting
-- 104 --
[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]
his own confession, which is meagre and confusing
enough. He freely acknowledges the crime, but
stubbornly refuses to enter into any details. He
expresses a desire to be hanged immediately!!
“How Mr. Lynde entered the chamber, and
by what means he left it, after committing the
deed, and why he cruelly killed a lady with
whom he had had (as we gather from the testimony,)
no previous acquaintance, — are enigmas
which still perplex the public mind, and will not
let curiosity sleep. These facts, however, will
probably be brought to light during the impending
trial. In the meantime, we await the dénouement
with interest.”
-- 105 -- p448-114
CHAPTER XIV. Paul's Confession.
[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]
ON the afternoon following this
disclosure, the door of my cell
turned on its hinges, and Julius
Kenneth entered.
In his presence I ought to have
trembled; but I was calm and
collected. He, feverish and dangerous.
“You received my note?”
“Yes; and have come here, as you requested.”
I waved him to a chair, which he refused to
take. Stood leaning on the back of it.
“You of course know, Mr. Kenneth, that I
have refused to reveal the circumstances connected
-- 106 --
[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]
with the death of Mary Ware? I wished to
make the confession to you alone.”
He regarded me for a moment from beneath his
shaggy eyebrows.
“Well?”
“But even to you I will assign no reason for
the course I pursued. It was necessary that Mary
Ware should die.”
“Well?”
“I decided that she should die in her chamber,
and to that end I purloined her night-key.
Julius Kenneth looked through and through me,
as I spoke.
“On Friday night after she had gone to the
theatre, I entered the hall-door by means of the
key, and stole unobserved to her room, where I
secreted myself under the bed, or in that small
clothes-press near the stove — I forget which.
Sometime between eleven and twelve o'clock,
Mary Ware returned. While she was in the act
of lighting the gas, I pressed a handkerchief,
saturated with chloroform, over her mouth. You
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know the effect of chloroform? I will, at this
point spare you further detail, merely remarking
that I threw my gloves and the handkerchief in
the stove; but I'm afraid there was not fire
enough to consume them.”
Kenneth walked up and down the cell greatly
agitated; then seated himself on the foot of
the bed
“Curse you!”
“Are you listening to me, Mr. Kenneth?”
“Yes!”
“I extinguished the light, and proceeded to
make my escape from the room, which I did in a
manner so simple that the detectives, through
their desire to ferret out wonderful things will
never discover it, unless, indeed, you betray me.
The night, you will recollect, was foggy; it was
impossible to discern an object at four yards distance—
this was fortunate for me. I raised the
window-sash and let myself out cautiously, holding
on by the sill, until my feet touched on the
moulding which caps the window below. I then
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drew down the sash. By standing on the extreme
left of the cornice, I was able to reach the tin
water-spout of the adjacent building, and by that
I descended to the sidewalk.”
The man glowered at me like a tiger, his eyes
green and golden with excitement: I have since
wondered that he did not tear me to pieces.
“On gaining the street,” I continued coolly,
“I found that I had brought the knife with me.
It should have been left in the chamber — it
would have given the whole thing the aspect of
suicide. It was too late to repair the blunder, so
I threw the knife —”
“Into the river!” exclaimed Kenneth, involuntarily.
And then I smiled.
“How did you know it was I!” he shricked.
“Hush! they will overhear you in the corridor.
It was as plain as day. I knew it before I had
been five minutes in the room. First, because
you shrank instinctively from the corpse, though
you seemed to be caressing it. Secondly, when I
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looked into the stove, I saw a glove and handkerchief,
partly consumed; and then I instantly accounted
for the faint close smell which had affected
me before the room was ventilated. It was chloroform.
Thirdly, when I went to open the window,
I noticed that the paint was scraped off the
brackets which held the spout to the next house.
This conduit had been newly painted two days
previously — I watched the man at work; the
paint on the brackets was thicker than anywhere
else, and had not dried. On looking at your feet,
which I did critically, while speaking to you, I
saw that the leather on the inner side of each boot
was slightly chafed, paint-marked. It is a way
of mine to put this and that together!”
“If you intend to betray me —”
“O, no, but I don't, or I should not be here —
alone with you. I am, as you may allow, not
quite a fool.”
“Indeed, sir, you are as subtle as —”
“Yes, I would n't mention him.”
“Who?”
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“The devil.”
Kenneth mused.
“May I ask, Mr. Lynde, what you intend
to do?”
“Certainly — remain here.”
“I don't understand you,” said Kenneth with
an air of perplexity.
“If you will listen patiently, you shall learn
why I have acknowledged this deed, why I would
bear the penalty. I believe there are vast, intense
sensations from which we are excluded, by the
conventional fear of a certain kind of death.
Now, this pleasure, this ecstacy, this something,
I don't know what, which I have striven for all
my days, is known only to a privileged few —
innocent men, who, through some oversight of the
law, are hanged by the neck! How rich is
Nature in compensations! Some men are born to
be hung, some have hanging thrust upon them,
and some (as I hope to do,) achieve hanging. It
appears ages since I commenced watching for an
opportunity like this. Worlds could not tempt
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me to divulge your guilt, nor could worlds have
tempted me to commit your crime, for a man's
conscience should be at ease to enjoy, to the
utmost, this delicious death! Our interview is at
at end, Mr. Kenneth. I held it my duty to say
this much to you.”
And I turned my back on him.
“One word, Mr. Lynde.”
Kenneth came to my side, and laid a heavy
hand on my shoulder, that red right hand, which
all the tears of the angels cannot make white
again.
As he stood there, his face suddenly grew so
familiar to me — yet so vaguely familiar — that I
started. It seemed as if I had seen such a face,
somewhere, in my dreams, hundreds of years ago.
The face in the grate.
“Did you send this to me last month?” asked
Kenneth, holding up a slip of paper on which was
scrawled, Watch them — in my handwriting.
“Yes,” I answered.
Then it struck me that these few thoughtless
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words, which some sinister spirit had impelled me
to write, were the indirect cause of the whole
catastrophe.
“Thank you,” he said hurriedly. “I watched
them!” Then, after a pause, “I shall go far
from here. I can not, I will not die yet. Mary
was to have been my wife, so she would have
hidden her shame — O cruel! she, my own
cousin, and we the last two of our race! Life is
not sweet to me, it is bitter, bitter; but I shall live
until I stand front to front with him. And you?
They will not harm you — you are a madman!”
Julius Kenneth was gone before I could reply.
The cell door shut him out forever — shut him
out in the flesh. His spirit was not so easily
exorcised.
After all, it was a wretched fiasce. Two
officious friends of mine, who had played chess
with me, at my lodgings, on the night of the 3rd,
proved an alibi; and I was literally turned out
of the Tombs; for I insisted on being executed.
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Then it was maddening to have the newspapers
call me a monomaniac.
I a monomaniac?
What was Pythagoras, Newton, Fulton? Have
not the great original lights of every age, been
regarded as madmen? Science, like religion, has
its martyrs.
Recent surgical discoveries have, I believe, sustained
me in my theory; or, if not, they ought to
have done so. There is said to be a pleasure in
drowning. Why not in strangulation?
In another field of science, I shall probably
have full justice awarded me — I now allude to
the Moon-Apparatus, which is still in an unfinished
state, but progressing.
-- 114 -- p448-123
CHAPTER XV. A Long Journey.
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JULIUS KENNETH disappeared
from the city. If his sudden departure
was noticed, it excited no
comment. No one suspected the
important rôle he had played in
the tragedy; and the public
ceased to be interested, as new
events crowded it off the stage.
If anybody recalled the circumstance, it was only
to wonder, and be lost in the impenetrable darkness
which wrapt the story of Mary Ware.
I think that twelve months, or more, had
passed when I first got tidings of Julius Kenneth—
he had sailed out of New Bedford, or Marblehead,
or somewhere, in a whaling ship.
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For two years I lost all trace of him. Then he
abruptly turned up at Panama, on the way to
California.
Then I heard of him in a small town on the
coast of South America.
Then in India.
Then in Switzerland.
Afterwards in Egypt, and Syria.
Always wandering.
Travellers, when they came home, spoke of a
tall gaunt man that went stalking about the ends
of the earth.
And I pictured him to myself — roaming moodily
from place to place, incessant, tireless, urged on;
and ever before him flew a frightened little Shape
that was ready to drop dead, whenever it paused
to look back, and saw this perpetual man at
its heels.
And the man, too, I fancied, sometimes looked
back — and then he pressed on more rapidly.
Always wandering.
Whether Julius Kenneth ever caught up with
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this Shape, or even if he were ever searching for
any one in these weary journeys, I never knew:
but I know that the chief trouble of my life, at
that time, was the thought of this man coming
and going, so ceaselessly.
Always wandering. No resting spot. No
tranquil fireside. But on through snow-storms.
Whipped by the sleet.
Burnt by the sun.
Blinded by the bronzed dust of the desert.
I used to lie in bed, and think of him, —
prowling about the Pyramids, in the gray dawn;
or standing alone in the Arctic midnight; or
gazing up at the crags of Ben Nevis; or among
the Caffre huts; or sitting by the camp-fires of
the Bedouins — as fine an Arab as any of them.
Then he drifted down reedy rivers in more boats,
and tossed on the ocean in more ships than were
ever built in the world.
I was unable, even for an hour, to rid myself of
the magnetic influence he exerted over me. I
always knew where he was, or thought I knew.
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If I took up a volume of Travels, this man
went with me from beginning to end — always
the hero of every perilous adventure, always
doing everything but stopping.
If, by any chance, I looked in at Matelli's shopwindow,
where there used to be an Alpine landscape,
composed of confectionary, Julius Kenneth,
in chocolate, was always sure to be scaling sugar
precipices, setting my hair on end with terror.
He became an irrepressible torment to me, an
incubus day and night. I am not clear as to how
many years this lasted.
But one summer morning, I woke up refreshed
from a dream in which he did not intrude. A
weight seemed lifted off my mind; a cloud gone;
and I knew that Julius Kenneth, somewhere and
somehow, had ended his wanderings — or, rather,
that he had started on a very long pilgrimage!
-- 118 -- p448-127
CHAPTER XVI. Out of His Head.
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THE thought that I shall be insane,
some day, that I shall be taken
from the restless world outside, to
some quiet inner retreat where I
can complete the Moon-Apparatus,
and fold my arms, like a man
who has fulfilled his mission; the
thought of this, my probable destiny,
is rather pleasant to me than otherwise.
I say probable destiny, because a certain trivial
aberration of mind has been handed down in our
family from generation to generation, with the
dented silver bowl in which Miles Standish
brewed many a punch in the olden time. This
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punch, I fancy, must have somehow got into the
heads of our family, and put us out. Dr. Pendegrast
thinks so.
At all events, I am to be insane. I have made
up my mind to that.
But not yet.
I am as reasonable and matter-of-fact as a man
may well be. This house in which I pass my
days and nights, writing, is not an asylum: this
mullioned window, I grant you, is substantially
barred; but that is to keep mad folks out. I sit
here, by the grating, and watch them — princes
and beggars, going up and down. Am I to
become mellow in the head like these?
Ay; but not yet.
The man who brings me food three times a day,
is not my keeper; the refined and cheerful
gentlemen with whom I converse in our highwalled
garden, are not monomaniacs.
There is Sir Philip Sidney, who occupies an
elegant suit of drawing-rooms on my left — the
pathetic dandy! I like him, though. When he
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takes off his kids, he has pluck. There is the
learned Magliabechi, on my right, busy with his
rare folios. There is the moon-painter, Claude
Lorraine (fifth floor, back,) who talks in pigments,
as if he had swallowed a spear of the
northern lights. And there is young John Keats,
down stairs, pondering over a vellum-bound missal,
illumined by some monk of the middle ages.
(Keats informs me that he seriously thinks of
finishing that fragment of Hyperion.)
They are not idiots, as the times go; they are
glorious poets and philanthropists whose thoughts
are the blood of the world.
The shadow of the church-steeple has slanted
across the street. It is twilight. The air is full
of uncertain shapes and sounds; the houses over
the way, look as if they were done in sepia;
people are walking dreamily through the hushed
streets, like apparitions; and the agile apothecary,
on the corner, has fired up the amber and emerald
jars in his show-case.
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The girl in the tailor's shop, opposite, leans out
of the window, brown in the dusk, a mere crayon
outline of a girl; she fastens back the blind, showing
me how prettily she is made. Now the lamps
are lighted. The grocery-man's boy lounges,
looking up at her window. I wonder if he is
watching the plump little figure that comes and
goes on the curtain?
It is twilight. Everything is comforted and
subdued: a gentle spirit lays its finger on the lips
of care.... even on my lips...
Here comes that genial man, with the wirecovered
candle, and my supper.
“How do you find yourself, sir?” says the
man, smiling benignantly at the ceiling.
“Extremely well, thank you, what's-yourname,”
I reply. “By the way, I wish you'd
tell Magliabechi that I'd like to have a word
with him.”
“Now, could n't you be so kind as to wait till
morning?” says the man, pleasantly.
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I look upon this as very considerate in him, and
conclude to wait.
I wonder who he is?
He certainly takes great interest in me. I will
do something for him, when the Moon-Apparatus
is completed. He deserves it. Dr. Pendegrast
must know him. If I should ever get out of my
head, and I shall, some day, I know, it would be
pleasant to have such a well-bred, affable fellow
for my —
Alas! how can I speak thus confidently of the
future, when — if my calculations are correct, and
everything assures they are — the long-expected
crisis is at hand? How can I pen these worse
than idle words, when I have barely time to conclude
the task which I dare not leave undone or
slighted?
What people are these hovering silently in the
shadow of my bookcases? Who is the slight girl
that looks upon me with such serious eyes? and
who is she that seems so woe-begone in her
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tinselled dress? There are two men in the group—
a pale, sad man, like one I knew long ago: a
tall, brawny man, stained with travel, his face
scorched by the sun, and his feet red with desert
sand. The end must be near since these have
come to me.
Hasten back, wayworn pilgrims, to the dim
confines of the world we are to share together.
“Stay for me there! I shall not fail
To meet thee in that hollow vale.”
-- 124 -- p448-133
CHAPTER XVII Burning a Witch.
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THE incongruous events of my
life will no longer appear inexplicable,
when read by the light of
the revelation which I am on the
point of copying from this creased
and yellowed manuscript — this
manuscript which I have worn in
my bosom, and read a thousand
times, since the fatal morning when a boyish
curiosity — ah, it was something more than that!—
tempted me to seek for hidden treasures among
my father's papers, in the chest, where they had
lain mouldering years after his death.
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That day I became possessed of the secret
which has tinctured all my life. That day I read
my doom, written out by his own hand — the
hand that was no more lifted up in battle against
the world.
The words are half obliterated, the tattered
pages are falling to pieces. Quick! let me copy
them.
Matthew Lynde's Legend of the Jocelyn House.
“On the seventeenth of August, in the year
16—, the morning sun, resting obliquely on the
gables and roof-tops of Portsmouth, lighted up
one of those grim spectacles not unusual in New
England at that period.
“A woman was to be burnt for witchcraft.
“Goodwife Walforde, who lived with her son
Reuben in a lonely, tumble-down shanty, on the
edge of the village, had been seen at various
times, and in divers places, to wring her hands,
and cry out aloud, without any perceptible cause.
“This was not to be permitted.
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“Witchcraft was then spreading like a pestilence
over the country. Several persons, possessed
of unnatural and un-Godly powers, had already
undergone martyrdom at Salem; and as the woman
Walforde had the doubtful reputation of
telling fortunes, making love-charms, and the like,
the cry of witchery flew like wild-fire from door
to door; and a thousand vagaries, sometimes
coined out of nothing, perhaps, passed current
as truth.
“One woman, by the name of Langdon, declared
that she had repeatedly seen Goodwife
Walforde careering through the mist, on a broomstick,
over Piscataqua river; another had caught
her mumbling to six brindled cats in a wood;
while more than a dozen had frequently noticed
curious puffs of smoke issuing from her nostrils.
“So, of course, she was a Witch.
“The executive authorities took heat at these
facts, and the freckled crone was brought up
before the Court of Assistants, and condemned to
be publicly burnt, “accordinge toe ye ryghteous
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decision of ye Elders of ye Churche — all Godfearinge
menne.”
“Just as the sunlight struck across the spire
of the village meeting-house, a bell commenced
tolling with mournful dissonance; and groups
of men and women, from different streets, moved
thoughtfully toward the Court House.
“The crowd here assembled was composed of
formal-looking men with long pointed beards and
sugar-loaf hats; children, serious for the moment;
old men who seemed like children; and not a few
of the gentle sex, arrayed in the voluminous gray
hoods which, at that time, were worn by the
lower classes.
“Here and there, under the shadow of the
trees, standing aloof from the common herd, were
knots of the more wealthy and influential citizens.
No one spoke, save in suppressed whispers, and a
hum as of innumerable bees rose up from the
multitude.
“This murmuring suddenly ceased, as Reuben
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Walforde came rushing, like a man demented,
into the Court-yard.
“ `Desist in your unholy purpose!' he cried,
flinging his arms aloft. `Are ye heathen, that
ye would burn a harmless woman, in mid-day
here, in New England?'
“ `That's the witch's whelp,' remarked a lean,
straight-haired Puritan to a neighbor beside him.
“ `What d'ye say?' cried Reuben Walforde,
fiercely, turning on the speaker, `Shall I strangle
ye!'
“He clutched the man's collar, and shook him
so stoutly that the Puritan's crucible-shaped hat
flew several feet into the air; and then the bystanders
laughed.
“At this moment, two persons on horseback
joined the throng.
“The elder of the two was dressed in a handsome
suit of black cut velvet, and wore high
knee-boots of Spanish leather, the tops elaborately
laced with silk cord. The housing of his
horse proclaimed him a man of rank. Behind
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him rode a young gentleman of somewhat foppish
bearing, in a coat of fine maroon-colored cloth
and white satin vest sprinkled with embroidered
tulips. Waves of Mechlin lace broke into foam
at his wrists. His hat was looped up on one side
with an expensive brooch, from which dangled a
fleecy black plume.
“ `The worshipful John Jocelyn,' passed quickly
from mouth to mouth.
“Reuben Walforde released the terrified Puritan,
and stood scowling at him. The worshipful
John Jocelyn, who rode a few paces in advance
of his son Arthur, pressed through the rabble,
never drawing rein until he confronted the disputants.
“ `It ill-behoves thee, Reuben Walforde,' he
said sternly, `to be quarrelling like a drunken
Indian on such a day as this. Thou hadst better
thank Heaven,' he added, in a lower tone, `that
the Evil One hath not laid his claw on thee, as
he hath on thy stricken mother.'
“ `Go thy way, worshipful John Jocelyn,'
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returned the young man, scornfully. `Is it becoming
in thee, or any meaner man, to taunt
misfortune? Go thy way, before I am tempted
to lay hold on thy person, and make thee to bite
the dust!'
“At this violent and rebellious speech, spoken
in a loud, angry voice, the crowd swayed to
and fro.
“The brow of the magistrate threatened a
storm; but the darkness flitted by, and he said
softly,
“ `I know not, Reuben Walforde, if I have ever
injured thee. I see how thou art beside thyself,
this day, and pity thy plight, or else I would
have thee exhibited in the Market-Place for four-and-twenty-hours.'
“And the kind-hearted John Jocelyn would
have ridden on, but Reuben Walforde laid his
powerful hand on the check-rein, and brought the
horse to its haunches.
“A moment, worshipful John Jocelyn! Let
me lead thy horse from these impudent gossips.
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There, now, they cannot hear us. Thou hast two
wives in the church-yard — one whom I never
saw, the mother of thy Arthur, yonder; but the
other was as comely a maiden as there is in all
New England, and her I loved as a man loves
who loves but once. Thou didst win her from
me, and she died. Thou art death to me and
mine. In this trial of my mother, thou hast
shown thyself wonderfully officious, giving willing
credence to all the unseemly lies of the village.
Thy malice, or whatever it is, is her ruin; for the
people look up to thee as a ruler.”
“ `Verily, young man,' responded the magistrate
gently, `thou art blasphemous to name thy
weird mother with that fair saint whom on earth
we called Hepzibah. Of thy love for her who
was Hepzibah Jocelyn, I know naught. As to
thy mother, I acted as became a Christian and a
Magistrate in the sight of Heaven. Let go the
bridle, Reuben Walforde; for my presence must
sanction the ceremony about to take place. Even
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now the procession issueth from the prison-yard.
Release thy hold, I warn thee!'
“Reuben Walforde threw a hurried glance toward
the train, which uncoiled itself from the prisondoor,
like a slender ebony adder, and took a
zig-zag course in the direction of the Court-House.
Then he gave a howl, and sprang upon the
worshipful John Jocelyn.
“ `Ho! good folk! Seize the fellow!' cried
John Jocelyn lustily; then he grew purple in the
face, for the fingers at his throat had well nigh
pressed out his breath.
“Arthur Jocelyn put spurs to the flanks of his
mare, and dealt Walforde a blow on the wrist
with the loaded butt of his riding-whip.
“The magistrate and his assailant were speedily
separated: the former, after arranging his frill and
sleeve-ruffles, rode forward to the Court-House;
and the latter was confined in the Cage, from
which he was liberated at sunset, by the magistrate's
own order, for he harbored no enmity
against the unfortunate youth.
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“That Reuben Walforde had dared to lift his
thoughts so high as Hepzibah's love, was strange
intelligence to John Jocelyn. His prosecution of
Dame Walforde had been actuated by nothing but
a sober desire to burn out the evil power which
had recently displayed itself in many of the
neighboring townships, filling the community with
direst consternation.
“That malignant spirits walked the earth then,
as now, who can doubt?
“The sun went down on Portsmouth, and the
event of the day became a matter to be canvassed
by toothless gossips in the chimney-corner. Then
it was gradually forgotten.
“But mysterious sounds hung in the air for
months afterward—lingered near lonely places
on the river, and in the dismal December woods.
And sometimes, in autumn, in this nineteenth
century, it is said that a voice of supplication and
complaint is heard in the wind and rain at night!
“In those days the old Jocelyn House —
which has been so patched and altered that not an
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original shingle or clapboard remains—stood
somewhat back from the principal thoroughfare,
in the shade of two gigantic elms.
“To-day a brick sidewalk runs by the modernish
door-stoop. The curtailed eaves, the gambrel
roof, and the few quaint devices left on the quoms
and over the dormer-windows, give one no idea of
that imposing pile of architecture as it appeared
in its glory.
“The room with the bay-windows facing westward,
was John Jocelyn's study. His ponderous
sword hung over the wide fire-place in company
with a steel casque and hauberk, dinted and rusty—
once the property of some. Spanish caballero
who had served, perchance, under the gallant
Pedro de Alvarado or, maybe, under Cortes
himself.
“On a venerable book-stand were a few evangelical
volumes, brought over in the May Flower.
“The chairs, and all the scanty furniture of
the apartment, had an air of solemnity in keeping
with a full-length portrait of Sir Godfrey Jocelyn,
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in a plum-colored coat trimmed with tarnished
gold-braid, which frowned abstractedly between
the casements from a filigraned frame.
“In summer, the modest tea-roses looked in at
the window. In winter, a fire of hemlock logs
simmered and sneezed with impish merriment,
throwing a hundred fantastic shapes on the walls,
till the polished oak wainscoting seemed like
mirrors wherein eccentric goblins viewed themselves.
Here, since the death of his young wife, sat the
worshipful magistrate alone, late at night, reading,
cogitating on his official duties, or writing courtly
letters to his kinsmen in England.
“One night very late — for the village watchman
had just cried “twelve, and all's well” —
as Arthur Jocelyn neared the domicile, having
passed the evening at the Green Mermaid, he
saw, or thought he saw the form of a man gliding
stealthily away from under the window of his
father's study.
“Young Jocelyn, who had been drinking
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deeply of something besides the nut-brown ale, sc
famous in those days, stopped short in the middle
of a careless tavern-snatch he was singing, and
cried out,
“ `Hullo! Sir Shadow! What! art thou a
ghost? Then the fiend catch thee, and all graveyard
people who cannot sleep decently o' nights.'
“A coarse laugh startled the echoes in the
village street. Then all was still as death.
“On reaching the house, Arthur hastened with
uneven steps to the study. There he beheld a
scene that drove the vapors of the wine from his
brain.
“John Jocelyn, with a sword wound in his
left breast, lay motionless across the lounge.
“Papers were scattered over the floor; a chair
broken; a glass timepiece splintered on the hearth;
the prints of fingers on the window-sill; the
blinds gaping wide open.
“Arthur took in all at a glance.
“ `Murdered!'
“The ejaculation had barely escaped him,
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when he heard a dry rustling at the further end
of the library.
“His sword leaped out of its sheath like a flash
of lightning.
“The sound proceeded from the portrait of Sir
Godfrey Jocelyn. The crackled canvas had
commenced bulging and warping. Presently the
form of Sir Godfrey impatiently disengaged itself
from the gloomy background of the picture, and
stepped majestically out of the frame.
“Arthur's sword, of its own volition, performed
a military salute: Arthur himself was simply
turned to stone with astonishment and awe.
“ `Arthur Jocelyn!' said Sir Godfrey, in a
tone that seemed to reverberate in the family
vault, `mine eyes have gazed upon a most foul
deed. It is a sorry fate that I, though dead, am
forced through the agency of an impious painter,
to still behold the deviltries of this world. I have
broken out of these vile oil-colors with indignation.
Such a sight! — thy poor father, boy! By
St. George, if my hilt had not tangled in my
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baldric, the same as it did at the battle of Guignegaste,
I would have slain the clown Walforde
myself!'
“ `Walforde! That witch's foal hath done
this, then?'
`Even so,' returned Sir Godfrey laconically;
then his ashen eyes crinkled with sudden heat —
`but the knave hath carried away such a swordcut
on his lip as will mar his family to the last
generation. Now listen: This mad deed which
hath ended the career of a righteous and exemplary
man, hath given thee a long lease of life.
The Elders, Arthur, will hang thee for thy
father's death; but be of good cheer — the end
is not yet.'
“Arthur's head sunk on his bosom.
“ `When a hundred and fifty years have fled,
thou shalt live again: thou shalt wear the face
and form of to-night — and woe then to the
descendants of the Walforde that cross thy path!
Thou shalt see them suffer. Thou shalt sweep
them from the face of the earth; thou shalt
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utterly blot out the race — nay, not by violence,
not even with thine own free will, perchance.
Yet shalt thou lead them directly or indirectly, to
the death. And when the clock is on the stroke
of twelve, a hundred and seventy-five years from
this night, I will appear before thee, Arthur,
though thou wert among the savages of Hindostan,
and lead thee back to the grave, where
thou shalt slumber quietly for all time!'
“Then the sepulchral voice of Sir Godfrey
died away.
“Arthur started with a shock, like one who
wakens from a nightmare at the dead of night.
“The old portrait hung in its accustomed place
on the wall, as flat and burred and crackled as in
Arthur's childhood.
“A wild vibrating cry came from the Jocelyn
House.
“The grim Puritans turned in their beds; the
beadle yawned, and the village undertaker, in his
sleep, dug an imaginary grave.
“ `Help! help!' cried the voice.
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“ `Help' said the echoes, spitefully, retreating
to the woods; and there, among the crags, they
repeated the cry.
“Sick men heard it and shuddered; and wakeful
mothers held their babes nearer to their bosoms.
The town-sentinels discharged their matchlocks at
shadows, then myriads of lanterns twinkled in the
dusky streets, the church-bell began ringing, and
armed men hurried to and fro.
“ `Are the Indians upon us again?' asked one.
“ `No, but a murder has been done in our
midst.'
“Now, when the good people found Arthur
Jocelyn standing by the casement with a naked
sword in his grasp, and saw the worshipful magistrate
lying amort on the lounge, threatening brows
were bent on the young man, and Suspicion
pointed a black finger at him.
“So, in due time, the Elders hanged Arthur
Jocelyn. And that he may slumber softly in the
mould, and rise not until the Angel of the Resur
rection call him, let all good souls pray.
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“ —— Such is the Legend of the Jocelyn
House — an old nurse-wife's tale which I have
preserved simply because my father used to amuse
us children with it, on winter evenings, when the
family were gathered at the hearth-side. He was
a graphic raconteur; and I remember how I
listened and trembled as Sir Godfrey Jocelyn
stepped out of the picture. I cannot explain to
myself why the story, now that I write it down,
affects me so strongly. Curiously enough, if such a
silly old legend could be true, my son Paul is the
descendant who, according to the prophecy of
Sir Godfrey — but, pshaw! this is madness. I
would like for Paul to read this narrative some
time. I dare not trust him with it now, for the
boy is excitable to a degree that often alarms me.
I pray heaven he may be spared the affliction that
obscured his grandfather's last days, and which, I
sometimes think, threatens to darken mine.
Matthew Lynde.
November, 1837.”
-- 142 -- p448-151
CHAPTER XVIII. Two Hundred Years Old.
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SUCH is the key to the meaning
of this sombre chronicle.
In new shapes old spirits are
breathed into the world, and I
am that pale Arthur Jocelyn
whom the Elders persecuted centuries
ago, when bigotry and
superstition fell like a blight on
the Colony — I, Paul Lynde.
Bitterly has the prophecy been fulfilled. Without
my own will, and unconsciously, I have woven
the black threads of my life with the fate of
those who came of a generation that hated me
and mine.
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Cecil is dead. Mark Howland sleeps in an illstarred
city. Mary Ware is dead; and Kenneth—
the last of his race. Kenneth? Kenneth?
I think it was Reuben Walforde that went stalking
about the ends of the earth!
They are gone — the white spirits and the gray.
And the time draws near, ah, so near! when my
grim ancestor shall appear, and take me into that
darkness which awaits us all.
Again I shall behold Sir Godfrey, clad in the
garb of a by-gone age, as I beheld him that
memorable night in John Jocelyn's library.
I shall hear his echoing voice, feel the humid
touch of his hand!
* * * * * *
Listen! — no, the wind brushes the elm-tree
against the house, and the stair-case creaks with
the frost.
Heaven, how the moments whirl by!
People are dancing to dulcet music in fragrant
rooms: lovers are whispering together in shadowy
alcoves: mothers are caressing their children:
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there are millions of happy souls in the world,
and I —
Listen! — I wish the wind would'nt groan so
in the flue. I wish the elm-tree would n't stand
out there, in the night, frantically tossing up its
arms like an old witch at the stake.
Only an hour, now. Only sixty minutes! I
would they were so many centuries: for life is
still sweet, still youth clings to it, and I am young,
though I am Two Hundred Years Old —
Hark! — the clock is striking!
-- 145 -- p448-154
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Mr. Lynde, like the author of The Anatomy,
seems to have predicted the time of his own demise;
but his prediction, unlike that of the melancholy
Burton, proved inaccurate.
Two years after the preceding chapter was penned,
I find Mr. Lynde besieging the Patent Office
at Washington, with a Nautical Self-Speaking
Trumpet, which, on being inflated by an air-pump,
would deliver all the orders necessary for working
a ship, allowing the skipper, in the meanwhile, to
stow himself snugly away in his bunk below.
This, as Mr. Lynde modestly remarked in his letter
to the Department, would be very convenient,
especially in “nasty weather.” As the walls of
that respectable institution, the Patent Office, enclose
the skeletons of numerous inventions nearly
as rational, I fail to see why Mr. Lynde's Trumpet
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was denied a niche in the collection. The Department
refused to listen to it.
The precise date of this unfortunate gentleman's
death is unknown to me, his relatives, with strange
reticence, having declined to furnish me with the
slightest information concerning his last hours.
Dr. Pendegrast, also, when I applied to him, dealt
in such ambiguous and unsatisfactory assertions,
that I left the Asylum more than half convinced
that Mr. Lynde had not died at all; but was still
living and ready to smile, perhaps, over his own
obituary. That he was alive as late as 1861 is
proved by one of the papers in his Sketch-Book,—
a collection of MS placed at my disposal since
this romance went to press. I print the papers
here. As an illustration of a different phase of
Mr. Lynde's mind, I trust they will not prove uninteresting.
-- --
PAUL LYNDE'S SKETCH BOOK.
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-- --
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-- 149 -- p448-158
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IT is useless to disguise the fact:
Miss Badeau is a rebel.
Mr. Beauregard's cannon had not
done battering the walls of Sumter,
when Miss Badeau was packed up,
labelled, and sent North, where she
has remained ever since in a sort of
aromatic, rose-colored state of rebellion.
She is not one of your sanguinary rebels, you
know; she has the good sense to shrink with horror
from the bare mention of those heathen who,
at Manassas and elsewhere, wreaked their unmanly
spite on the bodies of our dead heroes: still she
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is a bitter little rebel, with blond hair, superb eyelashes,
and two brothers in the Confederate service—
if I may be allowed to club the statements.
When I look across the narrow strait of our boarding-house
table, and observe what a handsome
wreten she is, I begin to think that if Mr. Seward
doesn't presently take her in charge, I shall.
The preceding paragraphs have little or nothing
to do with what I am going to relate: they merely
illustrate how wildly a fellow will write, when the
eyelashes of a pretty woman get tangled with his
pen. So I let them stand — as a warning.
My exordium should have taken this shape: —
“I hope and trust,” remarked Miss Badeau, in
that remarkably scathing tone which she assumes
in alluding to the United States Volunteers, “I
hope and trust, that, when your five hundred
thousand, more or less, men capture my New Orleans,
they will have the good taste not to injure
Père Antoine's Date-Palm.”
“Not a hair of its head shall be touched,” I
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replied, without having the faintest idea of what I
was talking about.
“Ah! I hope not,” she said.
There was a certain tenderness in her voice
which struck me.
“Who is Père Antoine?” I ventured to ask.
“And what is this tree that seems to interest
you so?”
“I will tell you.”
Then Miss Badeau told me the following legend,
which I think worth writing down. If it should
appear tame to the reader, it will be because I
haven't a black ribbed-silk dress, and a strip of
point-lace around my throat, like Miss Badeau; it
will be because I haven't her eyes and lips and music
to tell it with, confound me!
Near the levee, and not far from the old French
cathedral, in New Orleans, stands a fine date-palm,
some thirty feet high, growing out in the open air
as sturdily as if its roots were sucking sap from
their native earth.
Sir Charles Lyell, in his “second visit to the
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United States,” mentions this exotic: — “The
tree is seventy or eighty years old; for Père Antoine,
a Roman Catholic priest, who died about
twenty years ago, told Mr. Bringier that he planted
it himself, when he was young. In his will he
provided that they who succeeded to this lot of
ground should forfeit it, if they cut down the palm.”
Wishing to learn something of Père Antoine's
history, Sir Charles Lyell made inquiries among the
ancient creole inhabitants of the faubourg. That
the old priest, in his last days, became very much
emaciated, that he walked about the streets like a
mummy, that he gradually dried up, and finally
blew away, was the meagre result of the tourist's
investigations.
This is all that is generally known of Père Antoine.
Miss Badeau's story clothes these bare
facts.
When Père Antoine was a very young man, he
had a friend whom he loved as he loved his eyes.
Emile Jardin returned his passion, and the two,
on account of their friendship, became the marvel
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of the city where they dwelt. One was never
seen without the other; for they studied, walked,
ate, and slept together.
Antoine and Emile were preparing to enter the
Church; indeed, they had taken the preliminary
steps, when a circumstance occurred which changed
the color of their lives.
A foreign lady, from some far-off island in the
Pacific, had a few months before moved into their
neighborhood. The lady died suddenly, leaving
a girl of sixteen or seventeen entirely friendless
and unprovided for. The young men had been
kind to the woman during her illness, and at her
death, melting with pity at the forlorn situation of
Anglice, the daughter, swore between themselves
to love and watch over her as if she were their
sister.
Now Anglice had a wild, strange beauty, that
made other women seem tame beside her; and in
the course of time the young men found themselves
regarding their ward not so much like brothers
as at first.
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They struggled with their destiny manfully, for
the holy orders which they were about to assume
precluded the idea of love and marriage.
But every day taught them to be more fond of
her. Even priests are human. So they drifted
on. The weak like to temporize.
One night Emile Jardin and Anglice were not
to be found.
They had flown — but whither, nobody knew,
and nobody, save Antoine, cared.
It was a heavy blow to Antoine — for he had
half made up his mind to run away with her himself.
A strip of paper slipped from a volume on Antoine's
desk, and fluttered to his feet.
“Do not be angry,” said the bit of paper, piteously;
“forgive us, for we love.”
Three years went by wearily enough.
Antoine had entered the Church, and was already
looked upon as a rising man; but his face
was pale and his heart leaden, for there was no
sweetness in life for him.
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Four years had elapsed, when a letter, covered
with outlandish stamps, was brought to the young
priest — a letter from Anglice. She was dying;—
would he forgive her? Emile, the year previous,
had fallen a victim to the fever that raged
on the island; and their child, little Anglice, was
likely to follow him. In pitiful terms she begged
Antoine to take charge of the child until she was
old enough to enter a convent. The epistle was
finished by another hand, informing Antoine of
Madame Jardin's death; it also told him that
Anglice had been placed on board a vessel shortly
to leave the island for some Western port.
The letter was hardly read and wept over, when
little Anglice arrived.
On beholding her, Antoine uttered a cry of joy
and surprise — she was so like the woman he had
worshipped.
As a man's tears are more pathetic than a woman's,
so is his love more intense — not more enduring,
or half so subtle, but intenser.
The passion that had been crowded down in his
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[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]
heart broke out and lavished its richness on this
child, who was to him, not only the Anglice of
years ago, but his friend Emile Jardin also.
Anglice possessed the wild, strange beauty of
her mother — the bending, willowy form, the rich
tint of skin, the large tropical eyes, that had almost
made Antoine's sacred robes a mockery to
him.
For a month or two Anglice was wildly unhappy
in her new home. She talked continually of
the bright country where she was born, the fruits
and flowers and blue skies — the tall fan-like trees,
and the streams that went murmuring through
them to the sea. Antoine could not pacify her.
By and by she ceased to weep, and went about
the cottage with a dreary, disconsolate air that cut
Antoine to the heart. A long-tailed paroquet,
which she had brought with her in the ship,
walked solemnly behind her from room to room,
mutely pining, it seemed, for those heavy orient
airs that used to ruffle its brilliant plumage.
Before the year ended, he noticed that the
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ruddy tinge had fled from her cheek, that her eyes
had grown languid, and her slight figure more
willowy than ever.
A physician was consulted. He could discover
nothing wrong with the child, except this fading
and drooping. He failed to account for that. It
was some vague disease of the mind, he said, beyond
his skill.
So Anglice faded day after day. She seldom
left the room now. Antoine could not shut out
the fact that the child was passing away. He had
learned to love her so!
“Dear heart,” he said once, “what is't that ails
thee?”
“Nothing, mon père,” for so she called him.
The winter passed, the balmy spring air had
come, and Anglice seemed to revive. In her little
bamboo chair, on the porch, she swayed to and
fro in the fragrant breeze, with a peculiar undulating
motion, like a graceful tree.
At times something seemed to weigh upon her
mind. Antoine noticed it, and waited.
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At length she spoke.
“Near our house,” said little Anglice—“near
our house, on the island, the palm-trees are waving
under the blue sky. Oh, how beautiful! I seem
to lie beneath them all day long. I am very, very
happy. I yearned for them so much that I grew
sick — dont you think it was so, mon père?”
“Mon Dieu, yes!” exclaimed Antoine, suddenly.
“Let us hasten to those pleasant islands
where the palms are waving.”
Anglice smiled.
“I am going there, mon père!”
Ay, indeed. A week from that evening the
wax candles burned at her feet and forehead, lighting
her on her journey.
All was over. Now was Antoine's heart empty.
Death, like another Emile, had stolen his new
Anglice. He had nothing to do but to lay the
blighted flower away.
Père Antoine made a shallow grave in his garden,
and heaped the fresh brown mould over his
idol.
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In the genial spring evenings the priest was
seen sitting by the mound, his finger closed in the
unread prayer-book.
The summer broke on that sunny land; and in
the cool morning twilight and after nightfall Antoine
lingered by the grave. He could never be
with it enough.
One morning he observed a delicate stem, with
two curiously shaped emerald leaves, springing up
from the centre of the mound. At first he merely
noticed it casually: but at length the plant grew
so tall, and was so strangely unlike anything he
had ever seen before, that he examined it with
care.
How straight and graceful and exquisite it was!
When it swung to and fro with the summer wind,
in the twilight, it seemed to Antoine as if little
Anglice were standing there in the garden!
The days stole by, and Antoine tended the fragile
shoot, wondering what sort of blossom it would
unfold, white, or scarlet, or golden. One Sunday,
a stranger, with a bronzed, weather-beaten face
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like a sailor's, leaned over the garden rail, and
said to him:
“What a fine young date-palm you have there,
sir!”
“Mon Dieu!” cried Père Antoine, “and is it
a palm?”
“Yes, indeed,” returned the man. “I had no
idea the tree would flourish in this climate.”
“Mon Dieu!” was all the priest could say.
If Père Antoine loved the tree before, he worshipped
it now. He watered it, and nurtured it,
and could have clasped it in his arms. Here were
Emile and Anglice and the child, all in one!
The years flew by, and the date palm and the
priest grew together—only one became vigorous
and the other feeble. Père Antoine had long
passed the meridian of life. The tree was in its
youth. It no longer stood in an isolated garden;
for homely brick and wooden houses had clustered
about Antoine's cottage. They looked down
scowling on the humble thatched roof. The city
was edging up, trying to crowd him off his land.
But he clung to it, and refused to sell.
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Speculators piled gold on his doorsteps, and he
laughed at them. Sometimes he was hungry, but
he laughed none the less.
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” said the old
priest's smile.
Père Antoine was very old now, scarcely able
to walk; but he could sit under the pliant, caressing
leaves of his tree, and there he sat till the
grimmest of speculators came to him. But even
in death Père Antoine was faithful to his trust.
The owner of that land loses it, if he harm the
date-tree.
And there it stands in the narrow, dingy street,
a beautiful, dreamy stranger, an exquisite foreign
lady whose grace is a joy to the eye, the incense
of whose breath makes the air enamored. A
precious boon is she to the wretched city; and
when loyal men again walk those streets, may the
hand wither that touches her ungently.
“Because it grew from the heart of little Anglice,”
said Miss Badeau, tenderly.
-- 162 -- p448-171
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CORYDON may neglect his flock,
if he will, and brust an oaten pipe
for Phillida, if he wants to; Amyntas
may lie on a sunny hill-side in
Arcady if such is his pleasure, and
bake himself as brown as a bun;
but as for me, I will have none of
the country.
The country is rainy and muddy in spring, hot
and dusty in summer, and unendurable in winter.
It is true, there is a bit of Indian summer, run in
parenthetically, at the close of the year. And
this is is pleasant, providing you have bright
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company, picturesque scenery, and the prospect of returning
to town before Nature begins her annual
world-cleaning and whitewashing.
But when the autumnal pageant has passed;
when the ochre and crimson, and chocolate-colored
leaves are rotting under foot; when the trees
about the house shiver and moan in the twilight,
like rheumatic old ladies; when the wind whistles
down the chimney, and up your coat-sleeves; when
you can no longer walk with Mademoiselle Sylvia
in the moonlight; when, in short, the Indian summer
has gone off in a whiff, then it is time for you
to be out of the country. You should not linger
there for winter to tuck you up under its white
coverlid.
But the Town!
Ay, that is the place not for a day, but for all
time. That we have rain and mud in spring, and
wretched snow in winter, is not to be denied; but
then we have sidewalks, and Amaryllis is particularly
tempting during these periods. The grace,
care, and coquettishness with which she keeps her
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[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]
snowy drapery immaculate, are wonderful. A
single glimpse of Amaryllis, as she crosses over to
Stewart's, more than pays one for the moist inconveniences
of bad weather.
Spring in the city! You get such delicate hints
of spring! The dried up old crone of a geranium,
on your window-sill, has put forth a tiny
green leaf. It hesitates, as if it would fold itself
up again, it is such a modest, non-committal little
leaf. Is it not one of Nature's diminutive prodigies?
You discover a single blade of grass shooting
sharply up from between two bricks in your
backyard. Would a dozen acres of meadow-land
delight you more?
Amaryllis has hung her canaries at the window.
What shrill music they make! They wake you
early in the morning, and you see Amaryllis in a
distracting robe de chambre. It has sky-blue
rosettes up and down in front, and is tightened
at the waist with a silk girdle.
“What monarch but would give his crown
His arms might do what this has done?”
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You see the five cunning, white birds of Amaryllis's
right-hand feeding the noisy yellow idiots,
in the villa-like cages. The air is full of sweet
messages from the south. You select a neck-tie
of gorgeous colors. You go down town without
your overcoat. You smile genially on Jones.
You don't generally smile on Jones, for he lives
next door to Amaryllis. You are good natured;
you cannot tell why. You kick a strip of lemon
peel off the curbstone, You are philanthropic,
also, but you don't know why. It is spring!
After several weeks of torturing suspense, you
conclude that Amaryllis must have gone to Nahant
or Newport. She has. The fair Capulet
does not take her “cue” now, and the windowscene
is a failure. Biddy feeds the canaries. You
are not entirely miserable, though.
It is midsummer.
There is a shady side to the street; there are
parks and fountains pro bono publico; there are
Roman punches and strawberry ices at Maillard's,
and a promenade concert at the Academy. You
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[figure description] Page 166.[end figure description]
like music, and you spend your evenings, when
you are not somewhere else, at the Academy.
You hear Agnes Robertson sing. She captivates
you with her woman's eyes and her boy's costume.
You immediately hate her husband. You do
more — you forget Amaryllis. There is a maritime
view from the battery, and a salt-sea breeze at
Coney island, and certain leafy nooks over the
river, where you can sip maraschino, or discuss
omlette rouflée within hearing of the rich bass
voice of the city hall bell. You can hire a boat
at Whitehall and float down the Narrows, or you
can sweep by the Palisades in the Thomas Powell,
and catch a glimpse of the wrong side of Fred.
Cozzen's house, at Yonkers; and, little farther up,
the cocked-hat gables of Washington Irving's
“Sunnyside.” You can drink lager-beer, and devour
schweizer kese and pretzeln at Hoboken.
You can also purchase a knot of flowers at the
Sybil's cave.
What an epitome of sweet things is a bouquet!
You have the grace and the goodness,
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the perfumes and the tints of summer-time, for
a shilling. You have the delights of meadow and
woodland bound together by an ell of claretcolored
ribbon. You have a fragment of the sky,
and a tangle of grass with merry red buds, such
as Coleman and Shattuck like to paint; you have
dews, and stars, and sunset things! You have a
portable flower-garden. You can put it into your
waistcoat pocket. You can give it to Chloe, who
hasn't gone to Nahant. Or, better still, keep it,
though it fade, for Amaryllis.
The summer solstice is over, and the temptation
has returned to town. She does not, indeed, hang
her canaries at the open window, and your eyes
are seldom ravished by a sight of that morning
robe with the blue rosettes in front; but, now and
then, when you come home rather late at night
you see the shadow of Amaryllis on the buff window-curtain,
and you are not wholly unhappy.
Your existence becomes worth cultivating. You
lounge in your lazy easy-chair, you fill your meerschaum
with fragrant Oranoko or May-Blossom,
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and picture to yourself the paradise that lies just
the other side of that provoking curtain. Amaryllis
has been to the Opera, and is robbing her
heavy black tresses of their burning ornaments.
You can see the shadow on the curtain lifting its
arms. It appears and disappears, and tantalizes
you. It is unlacing something, you dont know
what—but you mustn't look any more. You remember
Keat's description of Madeline, as she disrobes
on St. Agnes' eve? Ten to one you repeat
the lines half aloud:
“Of all its wreathéd pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels, one by one;
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams.”
You will paint some such picture. Of course you should not. But the probability is you will.
The time has come when you have to examine
the thermometer to ascertain how cold you are.
You are very cold when you find the quicksilver
some ten degrees below zero; in fact, just twice
as cold as you were before you obtained that
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knowledge. Your pitcher of water says click in the
middle of the night, and you are tempted to throw
your boot at it. It is something mysterious and
awful to have your pitcher of water express its
opinion of the weather. When you get up in the
morning, you discover some very bizarre pictures
on your window-panes. They are chiefly representations
of polar scenery—weird, terrible, Icelandic
pictures. You look at them as you dress
yourself, and think of Dr. Kane.
It is Christmas time. Merry Christmas? Ah,
but it used to be some twenty years syne. It was
fine, then, to loiter through the crowded streets,
gazing into the shop windows—El Dorados of
fancy articles, Australian lands of bon-bons and
rock-candy. What visions you had of St. Nick.,
with his reindeer equipage on the house-top. You
could hear the pawing of the silver hoofs.
Something of the old pleasure in Christmas,
something of the old faith in Santa Claus, warms
in your heart as you stroll down Broadway with
the chilly stars sparkling over head and the white
spangles under your feet.
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The street is illuminated with lights of a hundred
colors. It is one long bazaar where you may
feast your eyes with the riches of all nations.
Turkish looms have been busy for you.
Quarries have been opened and streams searched
that you might look on clusters of precious
jewels.
The patient Chinaman has carved his dreamy
fantasies in ivory, and the oily Esquimau has fashioned
seal-skin snow-shoes for you.
Here you have curious instruments, of brass
and wood, and pearl, within whose tubes and under
whose keys lurk passionate music—the spirits
of joy and woe.
There you have fantastic pipes from Tuscany,
wines from Germany, sweetmeats from the Indies,
and confections from Paris; Malaga grapes and
creamy bananas, and oranges that turned to gold
in the warm air of Cuba.
Your slaves in the East have sent you attars,
and gums, and scented woods. What is there in
all the climes, from
“Lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon,”
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to a marble mosque or a Chinese pagoda, that does
not lie within your reach?
You are Haroun al Raschid in Bagdad, you are
Haitalnefous, you are anybody you please, with
the world's wealth heaped about you.
Have the kidness to help yourself!
You wander through the street in a midwinter
night's dream. What do you care for the bleak
wind, or the snow-flakes, or the people who jostle
you? You stare at the brilliant shops; you do
not know which to enter, for each one is more
beautiful than the other, like the Khaleef's forty
wives. You pause at Tiffany's. Tiffany's windows
are on fire with diamonds.
All the water in the underground pipes, which,
like huge arteries, traverse the city, could not
quench the fire that burns in those stones.
You flatten your nose on the plate-glass; you
see a necklace which you would like to clasp on
Amaryllis's perfect throat; you would also like
to manacle her white wrists with those turquoise
bracelets; you would like —
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Listen! High up in the belfry, in the rain, and
the sleet, and the dark night, there is a nest of
merry birds. They have quiet, airy hymns which
they chirp on summer evenings. But how clamorous
and jubilant they are this winter night!
Why are their happiest, wildest songs kept for the
snow and the sleet? Why are they so joyous
when
“The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing?”
Why, indeed, let us think of that.
If I should ever move into the country it will
be on one condition — that I take the Town with
me.
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NO one looking at Miss Hepzibah,
in this year of our Lord,
18—, would suppose that Miss
Hepzibah ever had a lover. Until
last summer, it would have
been true to say that she never
had.
There is, indeed, a vague story
concerning a certain old young gentleman who,
some ten years subsequent to the war of 1812,
was imagined to have entertained a tender and pathetic
feeling for Miss Hepzibah; but as he never
told his love, and as concealment never appeared
to have become apoplectic by feeding on his damask
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cheek, I am strongly inclined to doubt the tradition.
Miss Hepzibah was born an old maid.
She was born with the intention of never sacrificing
her independence on the altar of matrimony,
unless she should happen to meet with what she
called her Beau Ideal. Until this miraculous and
winning creature should make his advent, Miss
Hepzibah refrained from fanning any minor spark
into a flame.
Miss Hepzibah vestalized.
Now it came to pass that her Beau Ideal,
(owing to various causes, among which may be
placed the laws of gravitation) never turned up:
for Miss Hepzibah's Ideal involved the possession
of such an impossible catalogue of angelicisms and
such a plentiful lack of human weaknesses, as to entirely
shut out the whole race of Man.
Miss Hepzibah's youth glided decorously away;
her prime came and went with the utmost propriety;
epoch faded into epoch; until, at last, there
was a sarcastic yellow on the page of the family
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Bible, wherein was recorded, in large round characters,
the date of her birth.
She put on her spectacles one day, and found
that the golden girls of her childhood had passed
on. Little faces, with strangely familiar eyes and
lips, grew up about her, and cold white head-stones
whereon were engraved names familiar to her
youth.
She had become the last leaf on her ancestral
tree; she had also become the last leaf anybody
would think of gathering. Not that Miss Hepzibah
had lost any of her beauty, for it may be
truthfully said that she never lost an atom.
But she had lost the charm of her teens, the
magnetism of her twenties, the splendor of her
thirties, and, it must be confessed, of her forties
also. But while time had left inviolate the peculiar
points of her person, which was all points, it
had seen proper to work a remarkable change in
her mind, and had led her to indulge in several illusions,
to the supreme astonishment and consternation
of her friends.
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She had ceased to regard the animal, Man, with
bitterness!
Indeed, she had grown to regard him, as a race,
with such tenderness, that it seemed as if she intended,
with the warmth of later days, to make
the amende honorable for the coldness of her teens.
To such an extent she carried her reparation,
that Mr. Higgins, her second cousin, with whom
she resided, felt it his duty, as a human being, to
remove his Milesian gardener from the Vivian-like
witchery of her presence. But Miss Hepzibah directed
her attention to the colored coachman (a
gentleman of a migrative turn of mind, who abruptly
graduated from Virginia one day,) and it was
through her affability that he was ultimately induced
to fall in love and elope with — the family
plate.
Miss Hepzibah now labored under the impression
that a very ornate and juvenile style of costume
became her figure and complexion.
She dawned upon the world in light shotted
silks and blossomy baréges.
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She also assumed, with the gorgeousness of apparel,
the artless gaiety of a sea-side belle in her
bloom. Her naivete and freshness were perfectly
startling.
“Cousin says I'm so giddy,” she remarked to
Clarence Adolphus, as they walked on the piazza
of the hotel at Nahant.
Clarence Adolphus was heard to reply:
“Ye—yes, I think you are, werry.”
The affair with the colored coachman was the
feather that broke Miss Hepzibah's second cousin's
back. They had some low words in a high tone,
and parted. Miss Hepzibah retired from the inhospitable
roof, and tacked a codicil to her will,
leaving the bulk of her personal property to the
“Seaman's Disabled Home Association.”
Miss Hepzibah resided in the enchanted city of
Manhattan during the Winter months; but the
Summer solstice was passed on the New Hampshire
coast, in a cottage Gothique of her own, contiguous
to a fashionable hotel.
It was during the height of the watering-place
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fever, one year ago, that what happened did happen.
Miss Hepzibah had a lover!
After waiting for nearly half a century, the
Coming Man came — not her Beau Ideal, to be
sure; she had long ceased to dream of him; but a
real flesh and blood lover, with faults and virtues,
to whom Miss Hepzibah sometimes grimly alludes
as “that person.”
The Atlantic House was crowded with all sorts
of people — fops and belles, tinsel and gold: the
broken merchant with his three thin daughters
looking out, in smiling despair, for an itinerant
Rothschild: the everlasting family from the South
with a great deal of jewelry: the rich, obese old
gentleman, who always reminds you of Pickwick,
talks to everybody, loves fishing, is a favorite with
the young ladies, and calls the young gentlemen
“sad dogs,” slapping them heartily on the back, just
like the merry heavy father in a genteel comedy:
there was the small city clerk, putting on airs:
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the peripatetic artist, a veritable Bohemian, in a
sensible slouched hat, making studies for studiomanipulation:
the pale gentleman who corresponds
with a metropolitan newpaper, and is said to have
once had a joke in London Punch: the retired
catholicon-maker, and several nondescript persons,
with a happy sprinkling of pretty girls in racy
basquines and distracting Godenskis.
Among this motley crowd were two persons who
figure in this chronicle.
Mr. Philip Winter was a young lawyer, aged 24,
with no end of money, and not the slightest ghost
of a client. Mr. Winter was a gentleman of a
good deal of “personal appearance,” and seemed
to be on very off-hand amiable terms with himself,
and a Miss Kate Brandon, of Brandon Fork,
a blithe Kentucky girl (what pretty women they
do get up in Kentucky,) who cultivated a blushrose
in either cheek, guarding the same with a
pair of rather splendid eyes, which, when they
looked at you, seemed to run up and down the
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gamut of your character, ascertaining just how
many octaves you were.
I should not omit to mention Brandon senior —
Brandon padre — a courteous old gentleman and
very slim, who read the papers all day on the porch,
and looked as if he had tried to extinguish himself
with his hat, nothing but two ears preventing it
from resting on his shoulders.
It has been intimated that Mr. Winter and the
Kentucky beauty were on amiable terms. A
chance overhearing of the following fragment of
dialogue led me to that conclusion:
Scene: The sea-shore: the sun, shorn of all
its rays, attempting to balance itself, like an acrobat,
on the thin line of the horizon; the Atlantic,
with a languid lip, lapping long miles of snowy
beach; Mr. Philip Winter and Miss Kate Brandon
lounging by the bath-houses, in one of which is
the subscriber, getting himself up regardless of expense.
Philip. — but I love you, Kate.
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Kate (looking out to sea) — Isn't that a fishing
smack?
Philip. — Hang the fishing smack! Won't you
be kind once?
Kate (opening those eyes) — Kind? how?
Philip. — By being serious with me.
Kate. — Nonsense; don't bother me. I declare
that's a fishing boat.
Philip. — Miss Kate Brandon!
Kate. — Mr. Philip Winter!
Philip. — Kate, I'm going back to New York.
Kate (dryly) — Good-by!
Philip. — How you torment me! Was there
ever such a Kate? Yes, one other, Petruchio's.
She got tame, at last. But I know you love me.
Haven't you told me so? Did you not rest your
lips, once, for a blissful half moment, on my forehead!
Kate (trying to remember.) — I really forget.
It must have been last week. (With sudden conviction.)
Now, wasn't it last week?
Philip. (wanting to eat her.) — I shall go quite
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mad some day! Come, Kate, be good; and let
me kiss the cruelty from those——
Here the voices melted away, Miss Kate's musical
laugh sounded a fairy chime, now and then,
faintly in the distance.
I immediately made up my mind with regard to
the ultimate destiny of that precious pair. Youth
and beauty, and the currency of the realm — what
could be pleasanter?
Three nights after this gay glimpse into the affairs
of Miss Kate and her special pleader, I was
the luckless witness of another interview of a different
character, which was instrumental in forcing
upon my understanding the baseness and duplicity
of the human race.
The room I tenanted was in an L of the hotel,
and my one window, with its twelve square eyes,
looked plump into Miss Hepzibah's front garden,
with the intention, I think, of staring Miss Hepzibah's
Gothic cottage out of countenance.
It must have been sometime near midnight.
The intolerable heat had driven me to the open
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window, where I filled a pipe with Latakia, and
blew rings of smoke out into the moonlight. I
was engaged in this intellectual enjoyment when I
heard Miss Hepzibah's cane rocking-chair creaking
on the porch opposite. There, in the silvery shadow,
sat Miss Hepzibah, like a festive old apparition,
bobbing to and fro, and cooling herself with
a large palm-leaf fan.
At that moment I saw Mr. Philip Winter walking
somewhat stiffly down the road. He paused
at the gate, it grated on its hinges, and the young
gentleman, passing through the arbor, stood before
Miss Hepzibah. And this is what I saw and
heard.
Miss Hepzibah gives a little scream.
Mr. Winter speaks to her in low musical tones.
Miss Hepzibah listens to the same.
Mr. Winter takes her hand with an air of infinite
tenderness.
Miss Hepzibah smirks.
Mr. Winter raises the hand to his lips.
Miss Hepzibah purrs.
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Mr. Winter whispers something in her ear, and
then walks leisurely through the grape-arbor out
into the road, Miss Hepzibah looking after him,
fondly, like a Maltese cat.
Could I believe my eyes! I pinched myself,
and said the multiplication-table (as far as I
knew,) backwards and forwards: then tumbled
into bed, thinking how the light-hearted and bonny
Kate was dreaming a dream that would end in bitter
tears; and shaking my fist at the old wretch in
the Gothic cottage, I fell asleep.
The next morning the anger flew into my fingers'
ends at beholding Miss Brandon leaning cozily
on Philip Winter's arm, and caressing him with
her large brown eyes.
As the pair walked up from the beach, they met
Miss Hepzibah, robed in ridiculous splendor.
I watched the encounter without drawing a
breath.
Miss Brandon was making a bracelet of sea-kelp,
and did not observe her rival: Miss Hepzibah gave
a galvanic start; and Philip Winter lounged by
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her unconcernedly, as if she were a part of the
landscape.
I never saw anything more neatly done.
That night the same pantomine and whispers
were repeated on Miss Hepzibah's piazza, Miss
Hepzibah seeming even more pleased than previously
with Mr. Winter's dramatic adoration.
Now heaven knows that, though I seldom mind
my own business, I never meddle with any body
else's. But here was an aggravated case.
I took Mr. Brandon by the button hole one
afternoon, and disclosed to him the perfidy of his
intended son-in-law.
I never did a more injudicious thing.
When I had concluded, Mr. Brandon bowed
icily, and informed me that what I had told him
was simply impossible; Mr. Philip Winter was the
son of his dearest friend, a friend of forty years'
standing; he loved Philip himself as if he were
his own son; and then intimated the pain it
gave him (Mr. Brandon) to see a young man
(obliquely me) dulling his faculties and blighting
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his prospects in life, by a too devoted adherence to
Still Catawba, and other spiritous liquors.
Miss Brandon, with a priceless tear hesitating on
either eyelash, hinted with charming candor that
there was, of course, one liar in the world who
was greater than any other liar, and that that particular
liar was at present an occupant of No. 97,—
my apartment.
Mr. Philip Winter, after denying point-blank,
that he had ever laid eyes on Miss Hepzibah, assured
me confidentially that if I and my traps (he
alluded to my trunks) were not out of the Atlantic
House within the brief space of two days, he
should take the liberty of pulling somebody's ears
in a manner more violent than might, perhaps, be
agreeable.
I was wild with mortification.
I thought of appealing to Miss Hepzibah herself;
but Miss Hepzibah was evidently Mr. Winter's acaccomplice;
I could hope for no justice in that
quarter.
Here, through mere kindliness of heart, I had
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placed myself in an unamiable light, and probably
inaugurated a deadly quarrel with a reckless man
of the world.
I sat in my chamber, the victim of the darkest
melancholy. My pipe went out, and the moon
wrapped itself up in a cloud. Everybody had
gone to bed, the house was as silent as a tomb, and
and there I sat, face to face with my own dark
thoughts.
I began to imagine that may be I was insane;
that the midnight interview on the porch, the
whisper, the kiss, Miss Hepzibah, and everything
else, were only the vagaries of a disordered intellect.
Presently — as I sat there, falling out of one
depth of gloom into another — I heard Miss Hepzibah's
garden gate creak cautiously. I stole to
the window, hardly daring to hope what I hoped.
I gave but one glance, and then rushed to Mr.
Brandon's room on the opposite side of the hall.
I seized that gentleman half asleep, and dragged
him to my window.
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Mr. Philip Winter was kneeling gracefully at
Miss Hepzibah's feet, in the act of kissing her
very venerable right hand.
There they were in the damaging white moonlight.
“Now sir,” I whispered, tremulous with triumph,
“there's some still and very sly Catawba
for you!”
I considered that a neat thing at the time.
There was not a drop of blood in Mr. Brandon's
face as he rested his hands on the window-sill,
with two fierce hazel eyes fixed upon Miss
Hepzibah and her lover.
“Sir,” he said, in a fearfully calm voice, wheeling
round on one heel, “allow me to bring a witness
to this.”
“Certainly.”
He left the room and presently returned, accompanied
by an elderly gentleman, an aged fac simile
of young Winter. I remembered being struck by
the likeness, when he alighted from the stage-coach
that evening.
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“This,” said Mr. Brandon in the same unnaturally
calm voice, “this is Mr. Joseph Winter. I
wish to call his attention to those two persons on
the porch.”
With this he pushed the elderly gentleman to
the window.
Mr. Winter somewhat perplexed, looked, started,
and finally rubbed his nose with an impatient forefinger.
“Why,” he cried, “that's my Phil! Gracious
me! what is the boy doing? What, kissin —
good Lord, Phil is in one of his walking-fits!
He's subject to spells of somnambulism, you know,
and goes walking about on ridge-poles and millwheels,
and things like that fool-woman in the
opera. “You Phil!” thundered Mr. Winter.
“You Phil!”
I heard Miss Hepzibah give a scream like the
shrill whistle of a steam engine. It broke the
charm of young Winter's slumber. He stood, bewildered,
leaning against the garden-gate, while
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his father from my window above was affectionately
inquiring of him if he intended to be a born fool
all the days of his life.
As to myself, my existence became a burden to
me.
“I'm sure” said bonny Kate, the next morning,
one cheek burning like the under side of a peony
petal, “I'm sure I can't think of marrying a man
who doesn't know when he's asleep!”
But she did, nevertheless; for the following antumn,
in the small whitewashed church that sanctifies
the primeval village of Rye, I heard these
two people say the life-long words together. I
then and there forgave Miss Kate's allusion to
No. 97, and promised to wear her name like a
rose in my memory, holding myself fortunate
moreover, in having a loyal friend in Miss Hepzibah's
lover.
As to Miss Hepzibah herself, she is, I believe,
still open to sealed proposals. Here's a chance for
you, young gentlemen! It would compensate a
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man for many of the petty miseries of life to hear
her talk about Philip Winter.
She thinks he was not so fast asleep as he appeared
to be!
-- 192 -- p448-201
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IF you will, for the sake of dramatic
propriety, imagine that I am not
myself, but my friend Mr. Tibbs, I
will tell you his story precisely as
that facetious gentleman related it
to me. Mr. Tibbs began and went
on as follows.
“By Jove!” cried Mr. Frederick Markem,
throwing back my chamber door with such violence
that the knob went into the wall about two inches.
I immediately upset my inkstand, for I am a nervous
man. The least noise startles me.
-- 193 --
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“O by Jove!” continued Mr. Markem, stretching
himself out in the arm-chair.
“Jove,” I remarked, “was a very estimable
person, in his way.”
“I have seen women,” said Mr. Markem, quietly
ignoring me, “I should think I had; handsome
women, too, by the streetful; but never in my
life did I ever lay eyes on such a glorious, superb,
magnificent, divine out-and-out ring-tailed snorter,
if I may be permitted to use the expression.”
I objected. I did not consider “ring-tailed
snorter,” whatever it might be, the proper phrase
under the circumstances; I did not know what
the circumstances were; it did not make any difference
what they were — there could be no circumstances
that would sanction such infelicity of
language. No, I objected.
Still Mr. Markem went on in an extravagant
manner, describing a lady whom he had met some
twenty minutes previously on the corner of Broadway
and Thirteenth street.
Juno, Hebe and Eurydice (so far as Mr.
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[figure description] Page 194.[end figure description]
Markem knew them through Keightley's Mythology,)
paled their ineffectual fires beside this later-day divinity;
and, as to the Venus de Medici — I quote
Mr. Markem — she knocked her higher than a
kite!
I myself am not aware of the height which
kites are popularly supposed to attain; but, accepting
his rodomontade at its proper value, I pictured
in my mind's eye the airy situation of the Venus
de Medici, and made no comment.
The lady whose beauty had robbed Mr. Markem
of what nature had not lavishly endowed him
with, had, it seems rendered his destruction complete
by sporting a red-and-black balmoral skirt,
conveniently short enough to make a modest display
of the prettiest feet and ankles in the world.
“You should have seen those feet,” said Mr.
Markem.
Mr. Markem then launched into a dissertation
on pedal extremities, drawing a comparison between
the feet of a Hong-kong belle and those
of the unknown, much in the manner of the
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[figure description] Page 195.[end figure description]
celebrated comparison between Pope and Dryden.
Thus:
If the foot of Tai-ping-wang was small, that of
the unknown was diminutive: if one was arched
like an eyebrow, the other was bent like a crescent;
one was faultless and the other perfection.
I was vastly relieved when Mr. Markem at length
retired to his own room to drown his restless soul,
as he intimated, in the intoxicating bowl. The inebriating
vessel so tragically alluded to was the
bowl of his meerschaum pipe. In a few minutes
such volumes of smoke came pouring through the
key-hole of the door which separated our apartments
that I rushed frantically into his chamber
with the vague apprehension of finding him a mass
of fire and cinder, bearing no distant resemblance
to a half-consumed balmoral.
“Pleasant, this!” said Mr. Markem, emitting
from his mouth a cloud of smoke that would have
done infinite credit to a moderately ambitious crater.
“It eases the soul so!”
I am an impressible man — nervous men always
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[figure description] Page 196.[end figure description]
are; and although Mr. Markem's description of
the fair one with the golden locks was entirely toc
preposterous for a moment's thought, I lay wide
awake half the night thinking about it. Then I
sunk into a troubled sleep, only to dream that I
and the lady with the balmoral were being smoked
in an immense meerschaum pipe by a gigantic Mr.
Markem.
To disport with such trifles will the most vigorous
minds sometimes condescend!
The next day, in spite of myself, I thought of
Mr. Markem's adventure — if it is an adventure
to meet a pretty woman. In fact, I did nothing
but think of her and the tortuous dream of the
previous night. The hot aromatic meerschaum,
the lady with the balmoral, and the brobdignagic
Mr. Markem, flitted through my vision all day;
and in the evening when I went to see Clementina—
we had been engaged two weeks — I was meditative
and unhappy.
I felt that I was wronging Clementina.
Two days after this Mr. Markem again rushed
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[figure description] Page 197.[end figure description]
into my room. He had seen her — had ridden in
the same stage with her — her dress had brushed
against him — her dress! Eastern perfumes had
saluted his nostrils — the perfumes she used! He
had touched her exquisite finger-tips in passing the
change; and language was as milk-and-water to
express his emotions. The Venus de Medici was
again placed in an elevated position; and several
uncomplimentary remarks made relative to Mesdames
Juno, Hebe, and Eurydice.
“By Jove, Sir,” said Mr. Markem, “see what
I have done!”
And he jerked his watch out so violently that I
expcted to see the brass brains of that domestic
animal scattered over the floor.
“By Jove, Sir! when she passed me her fare,
two three-cent pieces, what did I do with 'em but
drop 'em into my vest pocket, and hand the whip
two gold dollars instead, by Jove! Look at'
em!”
And Mr. Markem opened the watch-case and
spilled the two bits of silver into the palm of his
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hand. Mere money — mere gold dollars, piled up
as high as the top of Trinity steeple — could not
buy those sacred souvenirs. No, Sir! He would
have 'em put on a silk cord, and his children, in
future generations, should wear 'em around their
necks, and cut their teeth on 'em, by Jove! Part
with them! Would I accept his heart's blood as a
slight testimonial of his affectionate regards?
With this friendly offer Mr. Markem shut up the
three-cent pieces in his watch, and restored it to his
pocket.
“When the lady got out,” said I, hesitatingly,
“did you follow her?”
“Follow her? No, Sir! Could I imagine for
an instant that so ineffable a creature resided any
where? She's an inhabitant of the air — a denizen
of the milky-way! Follow her? I was entranced—
petrified — knocked higher than a kite!”
I could not help asking Mr. Markem if he met
the Venus de Medici coming down on his way up?
But this show of pleasantry on my part was the
merest counterfeit of jocularity.
-- 199 --
[figure description] Page 199.[end figure description]
The second meeting, and Mr. Markem's consequent
enthusiasm, worked like madness in my brain
I went to bed to lie awake for hours; and on fall
ing asleep to dream that I was crushed to death by
an avalanche of three-cent pieces which slid from
the roof of a palatial mansion in Fifth Avenue.
Then I was cast, heels over head, on an uninhabited
South Sea island, where the bananas and
cocoa-nuts were stuffed with the same scarce metal;
and, being on the verge of starvation, I devoured
a large quantity, and was about to die of indigestion
when the breakfast-bell rescued me from that
unpleasant alternative.
I was miserable and feverish, and a cup of strong
coffee at breakfast only made me more feverish
and more miserable.
I felt that I was doing Clementina an egregious
wrong by continuing our present relations; she
had ceased to hold that place in my heart which
only Mrs. Tibbs elect should occupy, and I had
ceased to give her that constant adoration which
only Mrs. Tibbs elect should receive. I
-- 200 --
[figure description] Page 200.[end figure description]
determined to see her once more, and break the painful intelligence
to her as gently as possible. I dreaded
the interview, for, as I have remarked I am a
nervous man, and I hate scenes. But it was an
imperative duty.
Still, I delayed the heart-rending moment; and
every evening found me sitting with Clementina,
who was all modesty and fondness, and gave me
such intoxicating little kisses in the library that, at
times, I was not quite so certain that I did not love
her.
Indeed I did, while I was with her; but when I
returned to my room, and was no longer in the
entrancing atmosphere which always surrounds a
refined woman, I felt that we could never be happy
together.
Clementina, I argued, is not so very superior to
fifty other ladies of my acquaintance. It is true
she has beautiful hair, fine eyes and teeth, a stylish
figure, and a voice like Cordelia's,
—“ever soft,
Gentle, and low: an excellent thing in woman!”
-- 201 --
[figure description] Page 201.[end figure description]
She is bright, too, and can shoot off a repartee that
snaps like an enthusiastic fire-craker. But then
these qualities are not peculiar to Clementina.
There is the sarcastic Miss Badinage, and the
fascinating Miss Bonton.
To be honest, I was trying to convince myself
that I wasn't a knave. But I was.
In the mean time Mr. Markem had twice seen
the ineffable creature of the milky-way — once on
the street, and once taking lunch at Thompson's.
I do not dare to remember how wretched I was.
I gave my best razors to our old book-keeper at the
office, and never ventured to trust myself within
two blocks of the North River. I was irrevocably
in love with Mr. Markem's sweet stranger; and
Clementina —
I nerved myself for a final interview with my
victim. One afternoon, in calm despair, I dressed
myself for that purpose. I had brushed my hat
for the four hundred and seventh time, growing
calmer and more despairing at each stroke, when
Mr. Markem sailed into my room.
-- 202 --
[figure description] Page 202.[end figure description]
I am aware that “sailed” is not a happy expression,
but no other word will describe the easy,
swan-like grace with which Mr. Markem entered
my apartment. He was gotten up without any
regard to expense. Lord Dundreary was never
so nobbily ganté. Solomon in all his glory was
not arrayed like Mr. Markem.
He was going to air his magnificence on Broadway,
with the hope of meeting the ineffable.
“Tibbs,” said Mr. Markem, familiarly, “behold! —
“the glass of fashion and the mould of
form.' By Jove! if this sort of thing doesn't take
her!”
“By-the-by, Markem, I am going down Broadway.
I'll walk a block or so with you.”
Mr. Markem hesitated.
“O you are?”
“Yes.”
“By Jove! now, I don't know about that. I'm
a trifle tender on this subject — tender for you also.
If you should see her and become unhappy, it
would be no use for you to — to —”
-- 203 --
[figure description] Page 203.[end figure description]
And Mr. Markem picked out the ends of his
cherry-colored neck-ribbon with a noli-me-tangere
air quite delightful.
“Oh! of course not,” said I.
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
“Then, by Jove! I'll trust you. But, honor
bright, Tibbs! honor bright!”
We sauntered out of Clinton place into Broadway.
I was very ill at ease, not only from the fact of
walking with so gorgeous a person, but at the
thought of meeting that woman, the mere description
of whose exceeding loveliness had filled my
brain with visions like so much hasheesh. I was,
moreover, somewhat ashamed of myself for having
taken advantage of Mr. Markem's confiding
nature; and could not wring the smallest drop of
consolation from the accepted assertion that all is
fair in war and love.
It was rather too early in the afternoon, as Mr.
Markem poetically remarked, for the flowers of
-- 204 --
[figure description] Page 204.[end figure description]
beauty to blossom in the garden of fashion; so we
dropped into Delmonico's, to flirt with a thimbleful
of Maderia and eat an omelette souflée, which,
to my idea, is nothing but a heavenly kind of soapsuds.
When we again sallied forth the fashionable side
of Broadway was a perfect parterre of human lilies
and roses. We walked slowly up town, looking
earnestly among the eddying throng, for that
divine perfection of a woman who had unconsciously
made me the most miserable of men.
We had reached Bleecker street.
An omnibus on the crossing and an apple-stand
on the corner hemmed us in.
Mr. Markem suddenly grasped my arm.
“There! there she is!” he whispered.
“Where?”
“There!”
“I dont see her.”
“Why there, Tibbs.”
“Oh,” said I, with bitter disappointment, “that
is only Miss Bonton!”
-- 205 --
[figure description] Page 205.[end figure description]
“No, no — not she, but the one behind her on
the crossing — the lady with the balmoral!”
“Why, you villain!” I shrieked, “that's my
Clementina!”
At the same time I gracefully upset the apple-stand.
Mr. Frederick Markem drew his hat over his
brows and rushed down Bleecker street.
That evening he and his Coblentz pipes, his
French lithographs, and his Florentine vases disappeared
abruptly in a hackney-coach, in search
of a new boarding-place.
Clementina — now the blossoming Mrs. Tibbs—
leans over my shoulder, and protests against my
airing all this nonsense about “that odious Mr.
Markem;” but I have promised the article for the
æsthetic Monthly, and I am going to print it, in
spite of the Lady with the Balmoral.
-- 206 -- p448-215
[figure description] Page 206.[end figure description]
LONG before General Washington
snubbed a senile king, and set up
a coat-of-arms on his own account,
there stood near the mouth of the
Piscataqua river, a large square
wooden building, that seemed seriously
proud of having violated
every known rule of architecture.
It being just the sort of structure that would not
admit of a cupola, it sported a very massive one,
from which might have been seen the garrison
house at Portsmouth, and beyond, the white caps
of the Atlantic, breaking in silver and azure on
Newcastle Light.
-- 207 --
[figure description] Page 207.[end figure description]
Something like two hundred years ago, there
dwelt between the walls of this eccentric habitation
the following more or less interesting personages.
Mr. Jeffrey Langdon (the Heavy Father of our
drama.)
Mrs. Mehitable Langdon (the Mercenary Mother.)
And Miss Gervase Langdon (the Heroine coming
to grief.)
Mr. Langdon had once been a man of great
wealth; but a series of disasters, including a scalping
frolic on the part of the neighboring Womponsags,
a playful tribe, had reduced his fortune to
about forty acres of good land, the Langdon
mansion, and the Langdon family. In the last
was his greatest wealth — Gervase Langdon.
I shall spare her the martyrdom of heroines.
I shall not describe her. Never, since gentlemen
were invented; never, since the first author wet the
first goosequill in the first ink-horn, preparatory to
dashing off his first chapter, was there ever a
-- 208 --
[figure description] Page 208.[end figure description]
heroine so hard to describe as this same Gervase. I
might, indeed, tell you something about the trimmest
figure, and the sauciest blue eyes, that ever
fell to the lot of a Puritan maiden; but then you
would have no more idea of her than if I had
done her in wax.
The lads of the village were distracted about
Gervase; the old men looked at her sunny face,
and immediately remembered their courting-days;
and even her rivals forgave her beauty, she was
such a warm-hearted little buccaneer.
It would take me all day to draw up merely a
list of the hearts which this playful Lamb split in
two, at divers times, from the moment she put on
long dresses until her seventeenth year. So I
shall not do it. But at last Gervase herself came
to grief, and it is at this momentous epoch that our
curtain rises.
It was snowing, as it can snow only in New England.
Great white feathers came floating down
from the blank clouds, darkening the whole atmosphere.
Stone-walls, and roads, and barns, and fat
-- 209 --
[figure description] Page 209.[end figure description]
comfortable farmhouses, appeared to sink gradually
into the earth, threatening to leave everything
level.
At one of the diamond-shaped windows of the
Langdon house, stood Gervase, looking out at the
snow. She was weeping and trying not to weep.
The instant a tear came, she brushed it aside with
a handkerchief small enough to be the personal
property of a fairy; but scarcely was one tear
wiped away when another sprung up to take its
place. Now, as a general thing I am not fond
of Niobe. Women are not pretty when they cry.
But please imagine Gervase. Imagine one of
Eytinge's clear-eyed women looking out of a
Gothic window by Vaux, upon one of George
Boughton's winter landscapes.
In the same room with Gervase Langdon was
her mother, an oldish lady with sharp features,
who sat by the wide-mouthed fireplace, toasting
her feet in the face and eyes of two grotesque andirons.
While we stood outside, admiring the
troubled face at the window, there had been a
-- 210 --
[figure description] Page 210.[end figure description]
lengthy and stormy conversation going on between
these two. We are just in time to catch the last
of it.
Gervase has laid her hot cheek against the cool
window-glass, over which the frost has woven a
curtain, shutting out the bleak snowscape; old
Mrs. Langdon sits with her hands folded on her
lap. It is truce between them.
Presently Mrs. Langdon looks up.
“Davie Howe's grandfather came over in the
Mayflower. A proper good family is Davie Howe's,
and very, very old.”
“So is he,” said the Lamb at the window.
There are none so deaf as those who won't
hear.
“He owns the new wheat-houses. He is a man
of mark. He is as rich as —”
As he can be, Mrs. Langdon was going to say.
As he is ugly, Gervase was going to say.
But neither finished the sentence. It was cut
short by an interruption, and the interruption proceeded
from Gervase herself.
-- 211 --
[figure description] 448EAF. Page 211. In-line image, which is a profile of Davie Howe as drawn in frosty glass by Lamb's
nail.[end figure description]
While Madam Langdon was exploiting Davie
Howe's pedigree, Gervase had been unconsciously
tracing something on the window-pane with one
of her taper fingers. When Gervase's tearful eyes
fell upon her handiwork, she broke out in a silvery
ringing laugh, and pointed to the window.
“What's that, child?” cried Madam Langdon
startled.
“Only see!” said Gervase laughing through
her tears. [I shall not afflict the reader with a
venerable allusion to April.] “Only see! it is
for all the world just like it!”
“Like what?”
And this is what the Lamb's pearl of a nail had
traced in the frosty glass:
“Why, Davie Howe's nose!” shrieked Gervase.
The enemy held up her hands in horror.
-- 212 --
[figure description] Page 212.[end figure description]
At this moment Jeffry Langdon came in from
the barn. As he shook the snow off his long
peruke, he looked at his wife, and the following
silent diologue ensued:
His eyes. Have you told her?
Her eyes. Yes.
His eyes. What does she say?
Her eyes. No!
This is what was the matter.
Next to the Langdon estate was Squire Howe's
farm — the best tilled and most valuable tract of
land in the township. This fact had frequently
impressed itself on old Langdon's mind, but never
so forcibly as when Davie Howe's son, who had
been educated by his father's relatives in England,
returned to the homestead to assist Davie in managing
the establishment, and ultimately, to be its
sole proprietor. Mr. Langdon looked at Gervase,
and then at Richard Howe, and said,
“They were made for each other.”
And when the old gentleman saw his roguish
-- 213 --
[figure description] Page 213.[end figure description]
daughter flirting just a little with his rich neighbor's
son, his heart was glad within him. But at
the very moment when his hopes were brightest,
and his heart was lightest, an event took place
which rather interfered with his plans.
Richard Howe died.
Gervase was sorry, as anybody is when anybody
lies.
Then old Langdon, like the philosopher he was,
said to himself:
“If Gervase can't wed Davie Howe's son —
and she can't, he being dead — she can wed Richard
Howe's father.”
It was a brilliant idea.
But Gervase failed to see it.
In fact, at that time Gervase did not see much
of anything, save Walter Brandt. It was not
quite plain to me how this came about; but one
day as young Brandt stood looking at her with all
his eyes, there was a tumult among the rose-leaves
on Gervase's cheek; and Gervase's heart went
beating against Gervase's corsets in a manner
-- 214 --
[figure description] Page 214.[end figure description]
marvellous to think of. It was all over with the Lamb
as quick as that.
The Lamb flirted no more.
The village lads and lassies knew what that
meant.
So it came to pass that she did not weep
so much for Richard Howe as she might have
done under different circumstances.
When Mr. Langdon was informed of these
things by an observant neighbor, that gentleman
was wroth overmuch.
“Walter Brandt,” he said, “hath not land
enough for a crow to stand on. I'll hear no more
of it!”
Then there was trouble in the family. The
doors of the Langdon house were closed against
Walter, and the Buccaneer was forbidden to hold
converse with the Outcast.
“I cannot get rich here,” said Walter Brandt.
“I'll seek fortune elsewhere. Will you be true to
me? Will you marry me, if I come back in
three years, Gervase?”
-- 215 --
[figure description] Page 215.[end figure description]
“Ay, if you come back within fifty years!”
said the brave hearted little Buccaneer.
So they kissed, and cried, and parted, as many
a pair has done before and since and will again.
Walter had been gone over two years. Only
one letter — which Gervase wore right next to her
warm heart — was all the tidings that had reached
her from the wanderer. In those days, however,
people seldom got more than three or four letters
during their entire lives. She made the most of
one, and waited patiently for the happy day; and
would not have been inconsolable if Davie Howe's
name had not become a familiar word in her family.
Then Davie Howe himself, under favor of
Mr. Langdon's sanction, pressed his suit and made
himself very disagreeable. In the meanwhile
Gervase had been treated with great tenderness by
her parents, who used all their gentle eloquence to
persuade the Lamb to drink at the same stream
with the old wolf. But she wouldn't.
One day things took an unpleasant color.
“Widow Brandt's son is coming back to the
-- 216 --
[figure description] Page 216.[end figure description]
settlement,” said neighbor Goodman to neighbor
Langdon.
Mr. Langdon wheeled about on one heel.
“Coming back?”
“Yes.”
“How d'ye know?” he asked, sharply.
“My brother has writ it to me from Holland,”
said neighbor Goodman proudly. And he drew
out the letter.
“Have you told this to any one?”
“Nay, I have this moment received the document.”
“John, you shall have that strip of hay-land at
your offer.”
“Thank you, neighbor Langdon heartily.”
And Mr. Langdon made a feint of hurrying off;
he walked two paces, paused, and said, in a nervous
manner:
“And, John, you'll not need to mention
that affair — the letter — you know. And, John,
how long would it take to go to Holland?”
-- 217 --
[figure description] Page 217.[end figure description]
He meant how long would it take to come from
there.
“Three months or more,” said John.
Mr. Langdon went home.
“Gervase shall marry Davie Howe this Christmas,”
said he.
“But I wont!” said that young lady, when
Madam Langdon broke the subject to her; and
then ensued that combat which ended in headache
and inglorious tears.
As the old folks sat by the fire that night, and
as the coffin-like clock on the staircase doled out
eight, Mr. Langdon started and looked up at his
wife.
“Four years ago to-night —”
Then she too remembered.
Four years ago that day, their son Will was lost
off Newcastle Light. Four years ago that night,
the waves threw his body, scornfully, on the rocks.
It was a sorry anniversary for the Langdon family.
Hitherto Mr. Langdon had tried by dint of
-- 218 --
[figure description] Page 218.[end figure description]
patient argument to convince Gervase that she loved
Davie Howe; but when he found that Walter
Brandt would probably come to the relief of the
distressed garrison before many months, he changed
his tactics. One day he would expostulate with
her solemnly, then he would take no notice of the
poor child for a week. This was hard to bear.
It was cruel not to be spoken to; it made Gervase
feel like a poor relation at her father's table. But
even that was not so heartbreaking as to have him
coax her, and plead with his eyes — the eyes
which used to look so lovingly on her. That was
bitter almonds.
“I wish I were lying in the churchyard!” said
Gervase white as death.
“You must marry Davie Howe!” cried Mr.
Langdon, out of patience.
In the meantime the color went out of her
cheeks; her eyes wore a lack-lustre look; she
went about the house like somebody's unhappy
shadow; and the lips that used to bud and blossom
into laughter, had forgotten how to smile.
-- 219 --
[figure description] Page 219.[end figure description]
Heartache was “the grim chamberlain that lighted her
to bed.”
Gervase had not a soul to help her in this unequal
bombarding. Now and then she scattered
the old people with a gun loaded to the muzzle
with feminine grape and canister, but not often.
The enemy saw that she was weakened, and plied
their shot unmercifully. Her guns hung fire now.
The small sarcastic shells which she threw at the
allies' outworks broke weakly in the air, and did
no damage. She had parted company with Hope,
and the enemy's lines came down on her. What
could Gervase do? She tried to die; but I have
observed that people never die when they want to.
At last she threw herself on her mother's bosom,
and said:
“I dont care what becomes of me — sell me if
you will. But,” she added, with a show of her
old spirit, “isn't there anybody who will give
more for me than Davie Howe offers? I seem to
be going very cheap!”
This rather dashed the old folks.
-- 220 --
[figure description] Page 220.[end figure description]
But they sent for Davie Howe. Davie Howe
leered, and kissed her hand, and Gervase shrunk
back, as if an asp had stung her.
It was Christmas Eve. It was freezing cold;
the snow had commenced falling shortly after twilight;
flake after flake lighted on the ragged trees
and the stiff fences, like millions of magical white
birds.
It was Christmas Eve. There were bright
lights in the Langdon mansion; the windows glared
out on the darkness like great sinister eyes: Gervase
was to be married.
The peparations for this event were on an extensive
scale. There was to be music; and young
ladies in powder, and crimson farthingales, and
high-heeled shoes, were to float languidly through
monotonous minuets; there was to be a feast, and
a charade, and a puppet-show, and heaven knows
what not.
The ceremony was to take place at eight. At
seven o'clock the rooms were already crowded.
Garmented and garlanded for the sacrifice,
-- 221 --
[figure description] Page 221.[end figure description]
Gervase Langdon sat up stairs surrounded by a bevy
of fair young girls, who, for the first time in their
lives, did not envy the belle of the settlement.
Her pallid face and faded lips told rather a terrible
story. But she looked enchantingly, from the
highest wave of her blonde tresses down to the
diamond-studded buckles on the white satin slippers.
Her costume, ladies?
Silk, and things.
As she sat in the large, heavy-carven oak chair,
two pretty feet were just visible underneath her
tremendous hoop — two supple ankles crossed coquettishly.
The young men of the village, passing
by the half-opened door, beheld them, and grieved.
It was a quarter after seven, and expectation was
on tiptoe for the arrival of the bridegroom.
For several days prior to the time appointed for
the ceremony that ancient gentleman, Davie
Howe, was in a fever with regard to his bridal
costume, which was intended to go a trifle beyond
anything that had been seen in the Colonies.
-- 222 --
[figure description] Page 222.[end figure description]
It was to be a gorgeous affair, gotten up without
regard to expense, or anything else. The village
under—I mean tailor, sent it home piecemeal.
First, the coat, blazing scarlet, richly trimmed
with gold braid, and faced with watered-silk.
Next, the long-waisted waistcoat of maroon cloth.
Then the white silk hose. Then the faint-blue
satin choker.
But the small-clothes, the grand, elaborate, black
velvet knee-breeches, that marvel of human art,—
there had been some mistake in them.
First they were too tight, and a seam was let out.
Then they were too large, and a seam was taken
in.
And then they didn't fit at all.
In the mean time, the happy day had dawned,
and Davie Howe's small-clothes were not finished.
Twenty times that morning did Davie send a messenger
to the distracted artist; and twenty times
was the messenger sent back with the assurance
that the garment should be ready in season.
Six o'clock arrived, and the knee-breeches did
-- 223 --
[figure description] Page 223.[end figure description]
not. In a fit of phrenzy, Davie Howe mounted
his horse, and dashed over the glaring ice to the
village, three miles off, with the unalterable determination
to scalp the luckless tailor.
Half-past seven came, and the elder Langdon
grew uneasy. What could have occurred? And
then a quarter of eight dropped in naturally
enough, like a bore to dinner. The guests looked
perplexed and amused; eight o'clock struck
satirically, and a half-suppressed titter went round
the room. There was an awful pause.
Mrs. Langdon smiled upon the people in a helpless,
ghastly manner.
The bride's maids, up stairs, lounged in groups,
whispering: Gervase sat staring vacantly at the
carpet, the fingers of one hand unconsciously playing
with the carved oak-leaves and acorns on the
arm of the chair.
A measured step was heard on the stairway.
The women ceased whispering, and glanced toward
the door. Gervase lifted her eyes.
Walter Brandt stood looking at her.
-- 224 --
[figure description] Page 224.[end figure description]
That this was his ghost, come to reproach her
on her bridal-night, was the idea that flashed
across Gervase. She shrunk back in the chair.
Walter Brandt stood beside her, and, without
speaking a word, drew from his finger a well-worn
gold ring, which Gervase had given him three
years before. This he dropped in her lap, and
walked wearily away.
Then Gervase sprung from the chair, and
caught him in her arms, and—I know it was terribly
unmaidenly of her, but she kissed him directly
on the mouth.
That instant, Miss Langdon, down stairs, gave
a scream.
“Davie Howe hath slipped up on the ice, and
broken his leg,” was the intelligence conveyed to
Mrs. Langdon from the village.
“Poor Gervase!” said somebody.
But there were some ill-natured persons there
who thought, may be, that Gervase would n't
weep herself to death.
Mr. and Mrs. Langdon, with two or three more
-- 225 --
[figure description] Page 225.[end figure description]
intimate guests hastened up stairs to break the
news to the bride. They found that bereaved
young creature quietly leaning her head on Wal
ter Brandt's shoulder!
“Monster!” shrieked Mrs. Langdon.
Her meaning remained a profound mystery.
Whether she alluded to Walter, or Gervase, or
poor Davie Howe himself, never transpired.
Don't be a fool, my dear,” said Mr. Langdon
in persuasive tones to his wife. “It is clear that
Providence hath been against us in this matter.
I have nothing to say. The girl may wed whom
she likes.”
I trust this remark was disinterested on Mr.
Langdon's part, but suspect that neighbor Goodman
had something to do with it.
“He's made a mint o'money,” remarked Goodman,
sotto voce, to Mr. Langdon.
There was no wedding that night in the Langdon
mansion; but as there was a bride waiting, a
banquet spread, a charade to be solved, and a
-- 226 --
[figure description] Page 226.[end figure description]
minuet to be danced, the affair was not long delayed.
So was Davie Howe left out in the cold.
A stitch in time saves nine. This is true of wed
ding garments and all terrestrial things.
It would be an anachronism for me to wish Gervase
a merry Christmas at this late day; for the
Lamb was taken tenderly to the fold ages and ages
ago. It would be superfluous, too; for I believe
that Gervase and Walter, and all true lovers who
have died, are enjoying eternal Christmas, somewhere.
THE END.
Back matter
-- --
AN ALPINE PICTURE.
[figure description] Tipped-in article.[end figure description]
Stand here and look, and softly hold your breath
Lest the vast avalanche come crashing down!
How many miles away is yonder town
That nestles in the valley? Far beneath—
A scimitar half drawn from out its sheath—
The river curves through meadows newly mown;
The ancient water-courses are all strown
With drifts of snow, fantastic wreath on wreath;
And peak on peak against the turquoise blue
The Alps like towering campanili stand,
Wondrous, with pinnacles of frozen rain,
Silvery, crystal, like the prism in hue.
O tell me, Love, if this be Switzerland,—
Or is it but the frost-work on the pane?
-- --
BOOKS AND SEASONS.
[figure description] 448EAF. Tipped-in poem written by Aldrich. At the base of the poem is an
ornate floral woodcut.[end figure description]
BECAUSE the sky is blue; because blithe May
Masks in the wren's song and the lilac's hue;
Because — in fine, because the sky is blue
I will read none but piteous tales to-day.
Keep happy laughter till the skies be gray,
And the sad season cypress wears, and rue;
Then, when the wind is moaning in the flue,
And ways are dark, bid Chaucer make us gay.
But now a little sadness! All too sweet
This springtide riot, this most poignant air,
This sensuous sphere of color and perfume!
So listen, love, while I the woes repeat
Of Hamlet and Ophelia, and that pair
Whose bridal bed was builded in a tomb.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
-- --
[figure description] Advertisement.[end figure description]
In Thomas Bailey Aldrich, whose death was briefly
announced in The Times of Wednesday, America has lost
the most brilliant man of letters of the generation that
succeeded the Concord group. He was born in Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, in November, 1836, when Longfellow
and Emerson were in their prime, and he reaped
the benefit of their labours by coming into an age which
they had familiarized with literature and cultivation.
Mr. Aldrich early became a journalist, and was connected
with the New York Evening Mirror, Willes's Home
Journal, and other papers. The outbreak of the war
saw him as newspaper correspondent, and in 1865 he
became the editor of Every Saturday. Nine years in
that post were followed by seven of miscellaneous work,
till in 1881 he reached the height of his career as
journalist by becoming editor of the Atlantic Monthly, a
position he held till 1890. Meanwhile he had written
much original matter both in prose and verse. His genius
was many-sided, and it is surprising that so busy an
editor and so prolific a writer should have attained the
perfection of form for which Mr. Aldrich was remarkable.
Among his novels “Prudence Palfrey” and “The
Stillwater Tragedy” are the best known. From his
country home at Porkapog, Mass., he sent out the charming
“Porkapog Papers,” as graceful and delicate as their
title was ungainly. He described with the skill of a
Hawthorne his native town by the sea, and in “Marjorie
Daw” and other works he proved himself an “American
humourist” of a characteristic type. One of his
books, “The Story of a Bad Boy,” has achieved
notable distinction; it has been translated into
French in a series entitled “Education et Récréation,”
and into German as a specimen of American humour. It
is, however, as a poet that Mr. Aldrich was chiefly
entitled to recognition, and on his poetry that his fame
will rest. Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman regarded him
as “the most pointed and exquisite of our lyrical craftsmen”;
and the words are well chosen. He was the
doyen and the leader of the school of American poetry
which is now being displaced by Mr. Bliss Carman and
others, who are apparently more virile than the preceding
generation. His was the poetry of exquisite finish and
not of great force or profundity. To say that his lyrics
are vers de société in the highest form is not to rate their
content too low nor their manner too high; and it is in
lyric song rather than in the longer poems, such as
“Wyndham Towers,” that Mr. Aldrich excelled. Some
of his poems—that on the intaglio head of Minerva,
“When the Sultan goes to Ispahan,” and “Identity”—
are in every anthology of American literature, and have
won their author fame throughout the English-speaking
world.
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THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH DEAD.
[figure description] Tipped-in obituary notice for Thomas Bailey Aldrich.[end figure description]
Suddenly Loses Strength After Partially
Recovering From an Operation.
Boston, March 19.—Thomas Bailey
Aldrich died at his home in Mount Vernon
street, late this afternoon aged 70.
Some weeks ago Mr. Aldrich underwent
a severe surgical operation at the
Homœpathic Hospital in this city, and
although for a time his convalescence was
extremely slow the past two weeks have
been so promising that yesterday the
patient was removed to his home.
It was thought the change would prove
beneficial, although it was recognized
that his condition was still serious.
Early to-day Mr. Aldrich suddenly became
worse and gradually lost his strength.
He died a about 5 o'clock.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was a close link
between the old school of American writers
among whom were Longfellow, Lowell,
Whittier and Holmes, and the men of the
present day. It has been said of him, as
of Oliver Wendell Holmes, that “he was
one of the last leaves dropped from the tree
of distinctively New England literature.”
He was born November 11, 1836, at Portsmouth,
N. H., the seaport of quaint nooks
and fine old houses, which under the name
of Rivermouth forms the setting of many
of Mr. Aldrich's poems and stories, including
his own autobiographical narrative of
“A Bad Boy.” He had not a very thorough
education as a boy and was practically a
self-educated man, because he was obliged
to abandon the plan of a university education
when his father died. Much of his
earlier life was spent at New Orleans, but
he returned to Portsmouth when he was
16 years old. A kinsman who was a merchant
in New York gave the boy a place
as a clerk in his counting house. The work
was rather distasteful because Mr. Aldrich's
tendencies were even then in the direction
of literature.
Of necessity he worked as a clerk for three
years, but he employed all his spare moments
laying the foundation of a career
better suited to his talents and inclinations.
[figure description] Tipped-in insert.[end figure description]
He wrote for several magazines and newspapers,
both prose and verse, and many
of his efforts would have been creditable
for a writer of more mature age. It was not
long before his writings attracted the attention
of the public, and when he was
19 years old the editors of the Home Journal
invited him to Boston. There he met Henry
L. Pierce at the home of a mutual friend.
Mr. Pierce, a man of discrimination, believed
Aldrich was a young man of rare
literary ability and encouraged him.
From 1870 till its suspension in 1874 Mr.
Aldrich was the editor of Every Saturday
a small magazine. Then he became a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly
and worked almost exclusively for it until
1881, when his friend William Dean Howells
resigned its editorship to him. He was
editor of the Atlantic Monthly until 1890,
when he retired from active editorial work.
When his friend and literary patron,
Henry L. Pierce, died in 1896, Mr. Aldrich
found that Mr. Pierce had left a country
estate at Ponkapog, Mass., consisting of a
house, barn, and two acres of land, and in
addition $200,000 in cash to himself and his
wife. The twin sons of Mr. Aldrich, Charles
F. and Talbot F., each received $100,000 from
Mr. Pierce.
Mr. Aldrich tried his hand in turn at
poetry, fiction, the essay and the drama,
and was successful with all. He was a success
as a magazine editor also, a literary
achievement quite distinct from the others
named. The chief criticism of Thomas
Bailey Aldrich often was: “He does not
write enough.”
Among his works are: “The Ballad of Baby
Bell and Other Poems,” “Cloth of Gold.”
“The Story of a Bad Boy,” “Flower and
Thorn,” “Mercedes, and Later Lyrics,”
“Marjorie Daw, and Other People,” “Prudence
Palfry,” “The Queen of Sheba,”
“The Stillwater Tragedy,” “From Ponkapog
to Pesth,” “Wyndham Towers,” “The Sisters'
Tragedy,” “An Old Town by the Sea,”
“Two Bites at a Cherry, and Other Tales,”
“Unguarded Gates.” “Judith and Holofernes,”
“A Sea Turn, and Other Matters,”
“PonkapogPapers” and “Judith of Bethulia,”
a tragedy in four acts.
Mr. Aldrich's home in Boston was on
Beacon Hill.
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Endmatter
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Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 1836-1907 [1862], Out of his head: a romance [Also, Paul Lynde's sketch book]. (Carleton, New York) [word count] [eaf448T].
