OVER HIS CIGAR
I do not believe that there was ever an Aunt Tabithy who could abide cigars. My Aunt Tabithy hated them with a peculiar hatred. She was not only insensible to the rich flavor of a fresh rolling volume of smoke, but she could not so much as tolerate the sight of the rich russet color of an Havana-labeled box. It put her out of all conceit with Guava jelly, to find it advertised in the same tongue, and with the same Cuban coarseness of design.
She could see no good in a cigar.
“But by your leave, my aunt,” said I to her the other morning—“there is very much that is good in a cigar.”
My aunt, who was sweeping, tossed her head, and with it, her curls—done up in paper.
“It is a very excellent matter,” continued I, puffing.
“It is dirty,” said my aunt.
“It is clean and sweet,” said I; “and a most pleasant soother of disturbed feelings; and a capital companion; and a comforter—” and I stopped to puff.
“You know it is a filthy abomination,” said my aunt—“and you ought to be—” and she stopped to put up one of her curls, which, with the energy of her gesticulation, had fallen out of its place.
“It suggests quiet thoughts”—continued I—“and makes a man meditative; and gives a current to his habits of contemplation—as I can show you,” said I, warming with the theme.
My aunt, still fingering her papers—with the pin in her mouth—gave a most incredulous shrug.
“Aunt Tabithy”—said I, and gave two or three violent, consecutive puffs—“Aunt Tabithy, I can make up such a series of reflections out of my cigar as would do your heart good to listen to!”
“About what, pray?” said my aunt, contemptuously.
“About love,” said I, “which is easy enough lighted, but wants constancy to keep it in a glow—or about matrimony, which has a great deal of fire in the beginning, but it is a fire that consumes all that feeds the blaze—or about life,” continued I, earnestly—“which at the first is fresh and odorous, but ends shortly in a withered cinder that is fit only for the ground.”
My aunt, who was forty and unmarried, finished her curl with a flip of the fingers—resumed her hold of the broom, and leaned her chin upon one end of it with an expression of some wonder, some curiosity, and a great deal of expectation.
I could have wished my aunt had been a little less curious, or that I had been a little less communicative; for, though it was all honestly said on my part, yet my contemplations bore that vague, shadowy, and delicious sweetness that it seemed impossible to put them into words—least of all, at the bidding of an old lady leaning on a broomhandle.
“Give me time, Aunt Tabithy,” said I—“a good dinner, and after it a good cigar, and I will serve you such a sunshiny sheet of reverie, all twisted out of the smoke, as will make your kind old heart ache!”
Aunt Tabithy, in utter contempt, either of my mention of the dinner, or of the smoke, or of the old heart, commenced sweeping furiously.
“If I do not,”—continued I, anxious to appease her—“if I do not, Aunt Tabithy, it shall be my last cigar (Aunt Tabithy stopped sweeping); and all my tobacco money (Aunt Tabithy drew near me), shall go to buy ribbons for my most respectable and worthy Aunt Tabithy; and a kinder person could not have them; or one,” continued I, with a generous puff, “whom they would more adorn.”
My Aunt Tabithy gave me a half-playful—half-thankful nudge.
It was in this way that our bargain was struck; my part of it is already stated. On her part, Aunt Tabithy was to allow me, in case of my success, an evening cigar unmolested, upon the front porch, underneath her favorite rose-tree. It was concluded, I say, as I sat; the smoke of my cigar rising gracefully around my Aunt Tabithy’s curls; our right hands joined; my left was holding my cigar, while in hers, was tightly grasped—her broom-stick.
And this reverie, to make the matter short, is what came of the contract.
I
LIGHTED WITH A COAL
I take up a coal with the tongs, and setting the end of my cigar against it, puff—and puff again; but there is no smoke. There is very little hope of lighting from a dead coal—no more hope, thought I, than of kindling one’s heart into flame by contact with a dead heart.
To kindle, there must be warmth and life; and I sat for a moment, thinking—even before I lit my cigar—on the vanity and folly of those poor, purblind fellows, who go on puffing for half a lifetime, against dead coals. It is to be hoped that Heaven, in its mercy, has made their senses so obtuse that they know not when their souls are in a flame, or when they are dead. I can imagine none but the most moderate satisfaction, in continuing to love what has got no ember of love within it. The Italians have a very sensible sort of proverb—amare, e non essere amato, é tempo perduto—to love, and not be loved, is time lost.
I take a kind of rude pleasure in flinging down a coal that has no life in it. And it seemed to me—and may Heaven pardon the ill-nature that belongs to the thought—that there would be much of the same kind of satisfaction in dashing from you a lukewarm creature covered over with the yellow ashes of old combustion that, with ever so much attention, and the nearest approach of the lips, never shows signs of fire. May Heaven forgive me again, but I should long to break away, though the marriage bonds held me, and see what liveliness was to be found elsewhere.
I have seen before now a creeping vine try to grow up against a marble wall; it shoots out its tendrils in all directions, seeking for some crevice by which to fasten and to climb—looking now above and now below—twining upon itself—reaching farther up, but, after all, finding no good foothold, and falling away as if in despair. But nature is not unkind; twining things were made to twine. The longing tendrils take new strength in the sunshine, and in the showers, and shoot out toward some hospitable trunk. They fasten easily to the kindly roughness of the bark, and stretch up, dragging after them the vine, which, by and by, from the topmost bough, will nod its blossoms over at the marble wall, that refused it succor, as if it said—stand there in your pride, cold, white wall! we, the tree and I, are kindred, it the helper, and I the helped! and bound fast together, we riot in the sunshine and in gladness.
The thought of this image made me search for a new coal that should have some brightness in it. There may be a white ash over it indeed; as you will find tender feelings covered with the mask of courtesy, or with the veil of fear; but with a breath it all flies off, and exposes the heat and the glow that you are seeking.
At the first touch the delicate edges of the cigar crimple, a thin line of smoke rises—doubtfully for a while, and with a coy delay; but after a hearty respiration or two it grows strong, and my cigar is fairly lighted.
That first taste of the new smoke, and of the fragrant leaf is very grateful; it has a bloom about it that you wish might last. It is like your first love—fresh, genial and rapturous. Like that, it fills up all the craving of your soul; and the light, blue wreaths of smoke, like the roseate clouds that hang around the morning of your heart-life, cut you off from the chill atmosphere of mere worldly companionship, and make a gorgeous firmament for your fancy to riot in.
I do not speak now of those later and manlier passions, into which judgment must be thrusting its cold tones, and when all the sweet tumult of your heart has mellowed into the sober ripeness of affection. But I mean that boyish burning, which belongs to every poor mortal’s lifetime, and which bewilders him with the thought that he has reached the highest point of human joy before he has tasted any of that bitterness from which alone our highest human joys have sprung. I mean the time when you cut initials with your jack-knife on the smooth bark of beech trees; and went moping under the long shadows at sunset; and thought Louise the prettiest name in the wide world; and picked flowers to leave at her door; and stole out at night to watch the light in her window; and read such novels as those about Helen Mar, or Charlotte, to give some adequate expression to your agonized feelings.
At such a stage you are quite certain that you are deeply and madly in love; you persist in the face of heaven and earth. You would like to meet the individual who dared to doubt it.
You think she has got the tidiest and jauntiest little figure that ever was seen. You think back upon some time when, in your games of forfeit, you gained a kiss from those lips; and it seems as if the kiss was hanging on you yet and warming you all over. And then, again, it seems so strange that your lips did really touch hers! You half question if it could have been actually so—and how you could have dared—and you wonder if you would have courage to do the same thing again?—and upon second thought are quite sure you would—and snap your fingers at the thought of it.
What sweet little hats she does wear; and in the schoolroom, when the hat is hung up—what curls—golden curls, worth a hundred Golcondas! How bravely you study the top lines of the spelling-book that your eyes may run over the edge of the cover, without the schoolmaster’s notice, and feast upon her!
You half wish that somebody would run away with her, as they did with Amanda, in the Children of the Abbey—and then you might ride up on a splendid black horse and draw a pistol, or blunderbuss, and shoot the villains, and carry her back, all in tears, fainting and languishing upon your shoulder—and have her father (who is judge of the county court) take your hand in both of his and make some eloquent remarks. A great many such recaptures you run over in your mind and think how delightful it would be to peril your life, either by flood, or fire—to cut off your arm, or your head, or any such trifle—for your dear Louise.
You can hardly think of anything more joyous in life than to live with her in some old castle, very far away from steamboats and post-offices, and pick wild geraniums for her hair, and read poetry with her under the shade of very dark ivy vines. And you would have such a charming boudoir in some corner of the old ruin, with a harp in it, and books bound in gilt, with Cupids on the cover, and such a fairy couch, with curtains hung—as you have seen them hung in some illustrated Arabian stories—upon a pair of carved doves.
And when they laugh at you about it, you turn it off, perhaps, with saying—“It isn’t so;” but afterward, in your chamber, or under the tree where you have cut her name, you take Heaven to witness that it is so; and think—what a cold world it is, to be so careless about such holy emotions! You perfectly hate a certain stout boy in a green jacket, who is forever twitting you, and calling her names; but when some old maiden aunt teases you in her kind, gentle way, you bear it very proudly; and with a feeling as if you could bear a great deal more for her sake. And when the minister reads off marriage announcements in the church, you think how it will sound one of these days, to have your name, and hers, read from the pulpit—and how the people will look at you, and how prettily she will blush; and how poor little Dick, who you know loves her, but is afraid to say so, will squirm upon his bench.
—Heigho! mused I—as the blue smoke rolled up around my head—these first kindlings of the love that is in one, are very pleasant! but will they last?
You love to listen to the rustle of her dress, as she stirs about the room. It is better music than grown-up ladies will make upon all their harpischords in the years that are to come. But this, thank Heaven, you do not know.
You think you can trace her foot-mark, on your way to the school; and what a dear little foot-mark it is! And from that single point, if she be out of your sight for days, you conjure up the whole image—the elastic lithe little figure—the springy step—the dotted muslin so light and flowing—the silk kerchief, with its most tempting fringe playing upon the clear white of her throat—how you envy that fringe! And her chin is as round as a peach—and the lips—such lips! and you sigh, and hang your head, and wonder when you shall see her again!
You would like to write her a letter; but then people would talk so coldly about it; and besides you are not quite sure you could write such billets as Thaddeus of Warsaw used to write; and anything less warm or elegant would not do at all. You talk about this one, or that one, whom they call pretty, in the coolest way in the world; you see very little of their prettiness; they are good girls to be sure; and you hope they will get good husbands some day or other; but it is not a matter that concerns you very much. They do not live in your world of romance; they are not the angels of that sky which your heart makes rosy, and to which I have likened the blue waves of this rolling smoke.
You can even joke as you talk of others; you can smile—as you think—very graciously; you can say laughingly that you are deeply in love with them, and think it a most capital joke; you can touch their hands, or steal a kiss from them in your games, most imperturbably—they are very dead coals.
But the live one is very lively. When you take the name on your lip, it seems somehow, to be made of different materials from the rest; you cannot half so easily separate it into letters; write it, indeed you can; for you have had practice—very much private practice—on odd scraps of paper, and on the fly-leaves of geographies, and of your natural philosophy. You know perfectly well how it looks; it seems to be written, indeed, somewhere behind your eyes; and in such happy position with respect to the optic nerve, that you see it all the time, though you are looking in an opposite direction; and so distinctly, that you have great fears lest people looking into your eyes should see it too!
For all this, it is a far more delicate name to handle than most that you know of. Though it is very cool, and pleasant on the brain, it is very hot, and difficult to manage on the lip. It is not, as your schoolmaster would say—a name, so much as it is an idea—not a noun, but a verb—an active, and transitive verb; and yet a most irregular verb, wanting the passive voice.
It is something against your schoolmaster’s doctrine, to find warmth in the moonlight; but with that soft hand—it is very soft—lying within your arm, there is a great deal of warmth, whatever the philosophers may say, even in pale moonlight. The beams, too, breed sympathies, very close-running sympathies—not talked about in the chapters on optics, and altogether too fine for language. And under their influence, you retain the little hand, that you had not dared retain so long before; and her struggle to recover it—if indeed it be a struggle—is infinitely less than it was—nay, it is a kind of struggle, not so much against you, as between gladness and modesty. It makes you as bold as a lion; and the feeble hand, like a poor lamb in the lion’s clutch, is powerless, and very meek—and failing of escape, it will sue for gentle treatment; and will meet your warm promise, with a kind of grateful pressure, that is but half acknowledged, by the hand that makes it.
My cigar is burning with wondrous freeness; and from the smoke flash forth images bright and quick as lightning—with no thunder, but the thunder of the pulse. But will it all last? Damp will deaden the fire of a cigar; and there are hellish damps—alas, too many—that will deaden the early blazing of the heart.
She is pretty—growing prettier to your eye, the more you look upon her, and prettier to your ear, the more you listen to her. But you wonder who the tall boy was, whom you saw walking with her, two days ago? He was not a bad-looking boy; on the contrary you think (with a grit of your teeth) that he was infernally handsome! You look at him very shyly, and very closely, when you pass him; and turn to see how he walks, and how to measure his shoulders, and are quite disgusted with the very modest and gentlemanly way, with which he carries himself. You think you would like to have a fisticuff with him, if you were only sure of having the best of it. You sound the neighborhood coyly, to find out who the strange boy is: and are half ashamed of yourself for doing it.
You gather a magnificent bouquet to send her and tie it with a green ribbon, and love knot—and get a little rose-bud in acknowledgment. That day, you pass the tall boy with a very patronizing look; and wonder if he would not like to have a sail in your boat?
But by and by you find the tall boy walking with her again; and she looks sideways at him, and with a kind of grown-up air, that makes you feel very boylike, and humble and furious. And you look daggers at him when you pass; and touch your cap to her, with quite uncommon dignity; and wonder if he is not sorry, and does not feel very badly, to have got such a look from you?
On some other day, however, you meet her alone; and the sight of her makes your face wear a genial, sunny air; and you talk a little sadly about your fears and your jealousies; she seems a little sad, and a little glad, together; and is sorry she has made you feel badly—and you are sorry too. And with this pleasant twin sorrow, you are knit together again—closer than ever. That one little tear of hers has been worth more to you than a thousand smiles. Now you love her madly; you could swear it—swear it to her, or swear it to the universe. You even say as much to some kind old friend at nightfall; but your mention of her is tremulous and joyful—with a kind of bound in your speech, as if the heart worked too quick for the tongue; and as if the lips were ashamed to be passing over such secrets of the soul, to the mere sense of hearing. At this stage you can not trust yourself to speak her praises or if you venture, the expletives fly away with your thought before you can chain it into language; and your speech, at your best endeavor, is but a succession of broken superlatives that you are ashamed of. You strain for language that will scald the thought of her; but hot as you can make it, it falls back upon your heated fancy like a cold shower.
Heat so intense as this consumes very fast; and the matter it feeds fastest on is—judgment; and with judgment gone, there is room for jealousy to creep in. You grow petulant at another sight of that tall boy; and the one tear, which cured your first petulance, will not cure it now. You let a little of your fever break out in speech—a speech which you go home to mourn over. But she knows nothing of the mourning, while she knows very much of the anger. Vain tears are very apt to breed pride; and when you go again with your petulance, you will find your rosy-lipped girl taking her first studies in dignity.
You will stay away, you say—poor fool, you are feeding on what your disease loves best! You wonder if she is not sighing for your return—and if your name is not running in her thought—and if tears of regret are not moistening those sweet eyes.
—And wondering thus, you stroll moodily and hopefully toward her father’s home; you pass the door once—twice; you loiter under the shade of an old tree, where you have sometimes bid her adieu; your old fondness is struggling with your pride, and has almost made the mastery; but in the very moment of victory, you see yonder your hated rival, and beside him, looking very gleeful and happy—your perfidious Louise.
How quickly you throw off the marks of your struggle, and put on the boldest air of boyhood; and what a dextrous handling to your knife, and what a wonderful keenness to the edge, as you cut away from the bark of the beech tree all trace of her name! Still there is a little silent relenting, and a few tears at night, and a little tremor of the hand, as you tear out—the next day—every fly-leaf that bears her name. But at sight of your rival—looking so jaunty, and in such capital spirits—you put on the proud man again. You may meet her, but you say nothing of your struggles—oh, no, not one word of that!—but you talk with amazing rapidity about your games, or what not; and you never—never give her another peep into your boyish heart!
For a week you do not see her—nor for a month—nor two months—nor three.
—Puff—puff once more; there is only a little nauseous smoke; and now—my cigar is gone out altogether. I must light again.
II
WITH A WISP OF PAPER
There are those who throw away a cigar, when once gone out; they must needs have plenty more. But nobody that I ever heard of keeps a cedar box of hearts, labeled at Havana. Alas, there is but one to light!
But can a heart once lit be lighted again? Authority on this point is worth something; yet it should be impartial authority. I should be loth to take in evidence, for the fact—however it might tally with my hope—the affidavit of some rakish old widower, who had cast his weeds before the grass had started on the mound of his affliction; and I should be as slow to take, in way of rebutting testimony, the oath of any sweet young girl, just becoming conscious of her heart’s existence—by its loss.
Very much, it seems to me, depends upon the quality of the fire: and I can easily conceive of one so pure, so constant, so exhausting, that if it were once gone out, whether in the chills of death or under the blasts of pitiless fortune, there would be no rekindling, simply because there would be nothing left to kindle. And I can imagine, too, a fire so earnest and so true that, whatever malice might urge, or a devilish ingenuity devise, there could be no other found, high or low, far or near, which should not so contrast with the first as to make it seem cold as ice.
I remember in an old play of Davenport’s, the hero is led to doubt his mistress; he is worked upon by slanders to quit her altogether—though he has loved and does still love passionately. She bids him adieu, with large tears dropping from her eyes (and I lay down my cigar to recite it aloud, fancying all the while, with a varlet impudence, that some Abstemia is repeating it to me):
—Farewell, Lorenzo,
Whom my soul doth love; if you ever marry
May you meet a good wife; so good, that you
May not suspect her, nor may she be worthy
Of your suspicion; and if you hear hereafter
That I am dead, inquire but my last words,
And you shall know that to the last I loved you.
And when you walk forth with your second choice,
Into the pleasant fields, and by chance talk of me
Imagine that you see me thin, and pale,
Strewing your path with flowers!
—Poor Abstemia! Lorenzo never could find such another—there never could be such another, for such Lorenzo.
To blaze anew, it is essential that the old fire be utterly gone; and can any truly-lighted soul ever grow cold, except the grave cover it? The poets all say no: Othello, had he lived a thousand years, would not have loved again—nor Desdemona—nor Andromache—nor Medea—nor Ulysses—nor Hamlet. But in the cool wreaths of the pleasant smoke let us see what truth is in the poets.
—What is love—mused I—at the first, but a mere fancy? There is a prettiness that your soul cleaves to, as your eye to a pleasant flower, or your ear to a soft melody. Presently admiration comes in, as a sort of balance wheel for the eccentric revolutions of your fancy; and your admiration is touched off with such neat quality as respect. Too much of this, indeed, they say, deadens the fancy, and so retards the action of the heart machinery. But with a proper modicum to serve as a stock, devotion is grafted in; and then, by an agreeable and confused mingling, all these qualities, and affections of the soul, become transfused into that vital feeling called love.
Your heart seems to have gone over to another and better counterpart of your humanity; what is left of you seems the mere husk of some kernel that has been stolen. It is not an emotion of yours, which is making very easy voyages toward another soul—that may be shortened or lengthened at will, but it is a passion that is only yours, because it is there; the more it lodges there the more keenly you feel it to be yours.
The qualities that feed this passion may indeed belong to you; but they never gave birth to such an one before, simply because there was no place in which it could grow. Nature is very provident in these matters. The chrysalis does not burst until there is a wing to help the gauze-fly upward. The shell does not break until the bird can breathe; nor does the swallow quit its nest until its wings are tipped with the airy oars.
This passion of love is strong just in proportion as the atmosphere it finds is tender of its life. Let that atmosphere change into too great coldness, and the passion becomes a wreck—not yours, because it is not worth your having—nor vital, because it has lost the soil where it grew. But is it not laying the reproach in a high quarter to say that those qualities of the heart which begot this passion are exhausted and will not thenceforth germinate through all of your lifetime?
—Take away the worm-eaten frame from your arbor plant, and the wrenched arms of the despoiled climber will not at the first touch any new trellis; they can not in a day change the habit of a year. But let the new support stand firmly, and the needy tendrils will presently lay hold upon the stranger! and your plant will regain its pride and pomp, cherishing, perhaps, in its bent figure, a memento of the old, but in its more earnest and abounding life mindful only of its sweet dependence on the new.
Let the poets say what they will; these affections of ours are not blind, stupid creatures, to starve under polar snows when the very breezes of heaven are the appointed messengers to guide them toward warmth and sunshine!
—And with a little suddenness of manner I tear off a wisp of paper, and, holding it in the blaze of my lamp, relight my cigar. It does not burn so easily, perhaps, as at first: it wants warming before it will catch; but presently it is in a broad, full glow that throws light into the corners of my room.
—Just so—thought I—the love of youth, which succeeds the crackling blaze of boyhood, makes a broader flame, though it may not be so easily kindled. A mere dainty step, or a curling lock, or a soft blue eye are not enough; but in her, who has quickened the new blaze, there is a blending of all these, with a certain sweetness of soul that finds expression in whatever feature or motion you look upon. Her charms steal over you gently and almost imperceptibly. You think that she is a pleasant companion—nothing more: and you find the opinion strongly confirmed, day by day; so well confirmed, indeed, that you begin to wonder why it is that she is such a delightful companion? It can not be her eye, for you have seen eyes almost as pretty as Nelly’s; nor can it be her mouth, though Nelly’s mouth is certainly very sweet. And you keep studying what on earth it can be that makes you so earnest to be near her, or to listen to her voice. The study is pleasant. You do not know any study that is more so, or which you accomplish with less mental fatigue.
Upon a sudden, some fine day, when the air is balmy, and the recollection of Nelly’s voice and manner more balmy still, you wonder—if you are in love? When a man has such a wonder, he is either very near love or he is very far away from it; it is a wonder that is either suggested by his hope or by that entanglement of feeling which blunts all his perceptions.
But if not in love, you have at least a strong fancy—so strong that you tell your friends carelessly that she is a nice girl—nay, a beautiful girl; and if your education has been bad, you strengthen the epithet on your own tongue with a very wicked expletive, of which the mildest form would be “deuced fine girl!” Presently, however, you get beyond this, and your companionship and your wonder relapse into a constant, quiet habit of unmistakable love—not impulsive, quick and fiery, like the first, but mature and calm. It is as if it were born with your soul, and the recognition of it was rather an old remembrance than a fresh passion. It does not seek to gratify its exuberance and force with such relief as night serenades, or any Jacques-like meditations in the forest; but it is a quiet, still joy, that floats on your hope into the years to come—making the prospect all sunny and joyful.
It is a kind of oil and balm for whatever was stormy or harmful: it gives a permanence to the smile of existence. It does not make the sea of your life turbulent with high emotions, as if a strong wind were blowing, but it is as if an Aphrodite had broken on the surface, and the ripples were spreading with a sweet, low sound, and widening far out to the very shores of time.
There is no need now, as with the boy, to bolster up your feelings with extravagant vows; even should you try this in her presence, the words are lacking to put such vows in. So soon as you reach them they fail you, and the oath only quivers on the lip, or tells its story by a pressure of the fingers. You wear a brusque, pleasant air with your acquaintances, and hint—with a sly look—at possible changes in your circumstances. Of an evening you are kind to the most unattractive of the wall-flowers—if only your Nelly is away; and you have a sudden charity for street beggars with pale children. You catch yourself taking a step in one of the new polkas upon a country walk, and wonder immensely at the number of bright days which succeed each other, without leaving a single stormy gap for your old melancholy moods. Even the chambermaids at your hotel never did their duty one-half so well; and as for your man Tom, he is become a perfect pattern of a fellow.
My cigar is in a fine glow; but it has gone out once, and it may go out again.
—You begin to talk of marriage; but some obstinate papa or guardian uncle thinks that it will never do—that it is quite too soon, or that Nelly is a mere girl. Or some of your wild oats—quite forgotten by yourself—shoot up on the vision of a staid mamma and throw a very damp shadow on your character. Or the old lady has an ambition of another sort, which you, a simple, earnest, plodding bachelor, can never gratify—being of only passable appearance, and unschooled in the fashions of the world, you will be eternally rubbing the elbows of the old lady’s pride.
All this will be strangely afflicting to one who has been living for quite a number of weeks, or months, in a pleasant dreamland, where there were no five per cents. or reputations, but only a very full and delirious flow of feeling. What care you for any position except a position near the being that you love? What wealth do you prize, except a wealth of heart that shall never know diminution; or for reputation, except that of truth and of honor? How hard it would break upon these pleasant idealities to have a weazen-faced old guardian set his arm in yours and tell you how tenderly he has at heart the happiness of his niece, and reason with you about your very small and sparse dividends and your limited business, and caution you—for he has a lively regard for your interests—about continuing your addresses?
—The kind old curmudgeon!
Your man Tom has grown suddenly a very stupid fellow, and all your charity for withered wall-flowers is gone. Perhaps in your wrath the suspicion comes over you that she too wishes you were something higher, or more famous, or richer, or anything but what you are!—a very dangerous suspicion: for no man with any true nobility of soul can ever make his heart the slave of another’s condescension.
But no—you will not, you can not believe this of Nelly; that face of hers is too mild and gracious; and her manner, as she takes your hand, after your heart is made sad, and turns away those rich blue eyes—shadowed more deeply than ever by the long and moistened fringe; and the exquisite softness and meaning of the pressure of those little fingers; and the low, half sob, and the heaving of that bosom in its struggles between love and duty—all forbid. Nelly, you could swear, is tenderly indulgent, like the fond creature that she is, toward all your short-comings, and would not barter your strong love and your honest heart for the greatest magnate in the land.
What a spur to effort is the confiding love of a true-hearted woman! That last fond look of hers, hopeful and encouraging, has more power within it to nerve your soul to high deeds than all the admonitions of all your tutors. Your heart, beating large with hope, quickens the flow upon the brain, and you make wild vows to win greatness. But alas, this is a great world—very full, and very rough:
——all up-hill work when we would do;
All down-hill, when we suffer.[[3]]
[3]. Festus.
Hard, withering toil only can achieve a name; and long days, and months, and years, must be passed in the chase of that bubble—reputation, which, when once grasped, breaks in your eager clutch into a hundred lesser bubbles that soar above you still!
A clandestine meeting from time to time, and a note or two tenderly written, keep up the blaze in your heart. But presently the lynx-eyed old guardian—so tender of your interests and hers—forbids even this irregular and unsatisfying correspondence. Now you can feed yourself only on stray glimpses of her figure—as full of sprightliness and grace as ever; and that beaming face, you are half sorry to see from time to time—still beautiful. You struggle with your moods of melancholy, and wear bright looks yourself—bright to her, and very bright to the eye of the old curmudgeon who has snatched your heart away. It will never do to show your weakness to a man.
At length, on some pleasant morning, you learn that she is gone—too far away to be seen, too closely guarded to be reached. For awhile you throw down your books and abandon your toil in despair—thinking very bitter thoughts, and making very helpless resolves.
My cigar is still burning, but it will require constant and strong respiration to keep it in a glow.
A letter or two dispatched at random relieve the excess of your fever, until, with practice, these random letters have even less heat in them than the heat of your study or of your business. Grief—thank God!—is not so progressive or so cumulative as joy. For a time there is a pleasure in the mood with which you recall your broken hopes, and with which you selfishly link hers to the shattered wreck; but absence and ignorance tame the point of your woe. You call up the image of Nelly adorning other and distant scenes. You see the tearful smile give place to a blithesome cheer, and the thought of you that shaded her fair face so long fades under the sunshine of gayety, or, at best, it only seems to cross that white forehead like a playful shadow that a fleecy cloud-remnant will fling upon a sunny lawn.
As for you, the world, with its whirl and roar, is deafening the sweet, distant notes that come up through old choked channels of the affections. Life is calling for earnestness, and not for regrets. So the months and the years slip by; your bachelor habit grows easy and light with wearing; you have mourned enough to smile at the violent mourning of others, and you have enjoyed enough to sigh over their little eddies of delight. Dark shades and delicious streaks of crimson and gold color lie upon your life. Your heart, with all its weight of ashes, can yet sparkle at the sound of a fairy step, and your face can yet open into a round of joyous smiles that are almost hopes—in the presence of some bright-eyed girl.
But amid this there will float over you from time to time a midnight trance, in which you will hear again with a thirsty ear the witching melody of the days that are gone, and you will wake from it with a shudder into the cold resolves of your lonely and manly life. But the shudder passes as easy as night from morning. Tearful regrets and memories that touch to the quick are dull weapons to break through the panoply of your seared, eager and ambitious manhood. They only venture out like timid, white-winged flies when night is come, and at the first glimpse of the dawn they shrivel up and lie without a flutter in some corner of your soul.
And when, years after, you learn that she has returned—a woman—there is a slight glow, but no tumultuous bound of the heart. Life and time have worried you down like a spent hound. The world has given you a habit of easy and unmeaning smiles. You half accuse yourself of ingratitude and forgetfulness; but the accusation does not oppress you. It does not even distract your attention from the morning journal. You can not work yourself into a respectable degree of indignation against the old gentleman—her guardian.
You sigh—poor thing! and in a very flashy waistcoat you venture a morning call.
She meets you kindly—a comely, matronly dame in gingham, with her curls all gathered under a high-topped comb; and she presents to you two little boys in smart crimson jackets dressed up with braid. And you dine with madam—a family party; and the weazen-faced old gentleman meets you with a most pleasant shake of the hand—hints that you were among his niece’s earliest friends, and hopes that you are getting on well?
—Capitally well!
And the boys toddle in at dessert—Dick to get a plum from your own dish, Tom to be kissed by his rosy-faced papa. In short, you are made perfectly at home; and you sit over your wine for an hour, in a cozy smoke with the gentlemanly uncle and with the very courteous husband of your second flame.
It is all very jovial at the table, for good wine is, I find, a great strengthener of the bachelor heart. But afterward, when night has fairly set in and the blaze of your fire goes flickering over your lonely quarters, you heave a deep sigh. And as your thought runs back to the perfidious Louise, and calls up the married and matronly Nelly, you sob over that poor dumb heart within you, which craves so madly a free and joyous utterance! And as you lean over with your forehead in your hands, and your eyes fall upon the old hound slumbering on the rug—the tears start, and you wish—that you had married years ago, and that you too had your pair of prattling boys to drive away the loneliness of your solitary hearthstone.
—My cigar would not go; it was fairly out. But, with true bachelor obstinacy, I vowed that I would light again.
III
LIGHTED
WITH A
MATCH
I hate a match. I feel sure that brimstone matches were never made in heaven; and it is sad to think that, with few exceptions, matches are all of them tipped with brimstone.
But my taper having burned out, and the coals being all dead upon the hearth, a match is all that is left to me.
All matches will not blaze on the first trial, and there are those that with the most indefatigable coaxings never show a spark. They may indeed leave in their trail phosphorescent streaks; but you can no more light your cigar at them than you can kindle your heart at the covered wife-trails which the infernal gossiping old match-makers will lay in your path.
Was there ever a bachelor of seven and twenty, I wonder, who has not been haunted by pleasant old ladies and trim, excellent, good-natured married friends, who talk to him about nice matches—“very nice matches,” matches which never go off? And who, pray, has not had some kind old uncle to fill two sheets for him (perhaps in the time of heavy postages) about some most eligible connection—“of highly respectable parentage!”
What a delightful thing, surely, for a withered bachelor to bloom forth in the dignity of an ancestral tree! What a precious surprise for him, who has all his life worshiped the wing-heeled Mercury, to find on a sudden a great stock of preserved and most respectable Penates!
—In God’s name—thought I, puffing vehemently—what is a man’s heart given him for, if not to choose, where his heart’s blood, every drop of it is flowing? Who is going to dam these billowy tides of the soul, whose roll is ordered by a planet greater than the moon—and that planet—Venus? Who is going to shift this vane of my desires, when every breeze that passes in my heaven is keeping it all the more strongly, to its fixed bearings?
Besides this, there are the money matches, urged upon you by disinterested bachelor friends, who would be very proud to see you at the head of an establishment. And I must confess that this kind of talk has a pleasant jingle about it; and is one of the cleverest aids to a bachelor’s day-dreams, that can well be imagined. And let not the pouting lady condemn me, without a hearing.
It is certainly cheerful to think—for a contemplative bachelor—that the pretty ermine which so sets off the transparent hue of your imaginary wife, or the lace which lies so bewitchingly upon the superb roundness of her form—or the graceful bodice, trimmed to a line, which is of such exquisite adaptation to her lithe figure, will be always at her command—nay, that these are only units among the chameleon hues, under which you shall feed upon her beauty! I want to know if it is not a pretty cabinet picture for fancy to luxuriate upon—that of a sweet wife, who is cheating hosts of friends into love, sympathy and admiration, by the modest munificence of her wealth? Is it not rather agreeable, to feed your hopeful soul upon that abundance which, while it supplies her need, will give a range to her loving charities—which will keep from her brow the shadows of anxiety, and will sublime her gentle nature by adding to it the grace of an angel of mercy?
Is it not rich, in those days when the pestilent humors of bachelorhood hang heavy on you, to foresee in that shadowy realm, where hope is a native, the quiet of a home, made splendid with attractions; and made real by the presence of her who bestows them? Upon my word—thought I, as I continued puffing—such a match must make a very grateful lighting of one’s inner sympathies; nor am I prepared to say that such associations would not add force to the most abstract love imaginable.
Think of it for a moment—what is it that we poor fellows love? We love, if one may judge for himself, over his cigar—gentleness, beauty, refinement, generosity and intelligence—and far above these, a returning love, made up of all these qualities, and gaining upon your love, day by day, and month by month, like a sunny morning gaining upon the frosts of night.
But wealth is a great means of refinement; and it is a security for gentleness, since it removes disturbing anxieties; and it is a pretty promoter of intelligence, since it multiplies the avenues for its reception; and it is a good basis for a generous habit of life; it even equips beauty, neither hardening its hand with toil, nor tempting the wrinkles to come early. But whether it provokes greatly that returning passion—that abnegation of soul—that sweet trustfulness, and abiding affection, which are to clothe your heart with joy, is far more doubtful. Wealth, while it gives so much, asks much in return; and the soul that is grateful to mammon, is not over ready to be grateful for intensity of love. It is hard to gratify those who have nothing left to gratify.
Heaven help the man who having wearied his soul with delays and doubts, or exhausted the freshness and exuberance of his youth—by a hundred little dallyings with love—consigns himself at length to the issues of what people call a nice match—whether of money, or of a family!
Heaven help you (I brush the ashes from my cigar) when you begin to regard marriage as only a respectable institution, and under the advices of staid old friends, begin to look about you for some very respectable wife. You may admire her figure, and her family; and bear pleasantly in mind the very casual mention which has been made by some of your penetrating friends—that she has large expectations. You think that she would make a very capital appearance at the head of your table; nor, in the event of your coming to any public honor, would she make you blush for her breeding. She talks well, exceedingly well; and her face has its charms; especially under a little excitement. Her dress is elegant, and tasteful, and she is constantly remarked upon by all your friends, as a “nice person.” Some good old lady, in whose pew she occasionally sits on a Sunday, or to whom she has sometime sent a papier maché card-case, for the show-box of some Dorcas benevolent society, thinks—with a sly wink—that she would make a fine wife for—somebody.
She certainly has an elegant figure; and the marriage of some half dozen of your old flames warns you that time is slipping and your chances failing. And in the pleasant warmth of some after-dinner mood, you resolve—with her image in her prettiest pelisses drifting across your brain—that you will marry. Now comes the pleasant excitement of the chase; and whatever family dignity may surround her only adds to the pleasurable glow of the pursuit. You give an hour more to your toilette, and a hundred or two more, a year, to your tailor. All is orderly, dignified, and gracious. Charlotte is a sensible woman, everybody says; and you believe it yourself. You agree in your talk about books, and churches, and flowers. Of course she has good taste—for she accepts you. The acceptance is dignified, elegant, and even courteous.
You receive numerous congratulations; and your old friend Tom writes you—that he hears you are going to marry a splendid woman; and all the old ladies say—what a capital match! And your business partner, who is a married man, and something of a wag—“sympathizes sincerely.” Upon the whole, you feel a little proud of your arrangement. You write to an old friend in the country, that you are to marry presently Miss Charlotte of such a street, whose father was something very fine, in his way; and whose father before him was very distinguished; you add, in a postscript, that she is easily situated, and has “expectations.” Your friend, who has a wife that he loves, and that loves him, writes back kindly—“hoping you may be happy;” and hoping so yourself, you light your cigar—one of your last bachelor cigars—with the margin of his letter.
The match goes off with a brilliant marriage; at which you receive a very elegant welcome from your wife’s spinster cousins—and drink a great deal of champagne with her bachelor uncles. And as you take the dainty hand of your bride—very magnificent under that bridal wreath, and with her face lit up by a brilliant glow—your eye, and your soul, for the first time, grow full. And as your arm circles that elegant figure, and you draw her toward you, feeling that she is yours—there is a bound at your heart, that makes you think your soul-life is now whole, and earnest. All your early dreams, and imaginations, come flowing on your thought, like bewildering music; and as you gaze upon her—the admiration of that crowd—it seems to you, that all that your heart prizes is made good by the accident of marriage.
—Ah—thought I, brushing off the ashes again—bridal pictures are not home pictures; and the hour at the altar is but a poor type of the waste of years!
Your household is elegantly ordered; Charlotte has secured the best of housekeepers, and she meets the compliments of your old friends who come to dine with you with a suavity that is never at fault. And they tell you—after the cloth is removed, and you sit quietly smoking in memory of the olden times—that she is a splendid woman. Even the old ladies who come for occasional charities, think madame a pattern of a lady; and so think her old admirers, whom she receives still with an easy grace, that half puzzles you. And as you stand by the ball-room door, at two of the morning, with your Charlotte’s shawl upon your arm, some little panting fellow will confirm the general opinion, by telling you that madame is a magnificent dancer; and Monsieur le Comte will praise extravagantly her French. You are grateful for all this; but you have an uncommonly serious way of expressing your gratitude.
You think you ought to be a very happy fellow; and yet long shadows do steal over your thought; and you wonder that the sight of your Charlotte in the dress you used to admire so much, does not scatter them to the winds; but it does not. You feel coy about putting your arm around that delicately-robed figure—you might derange the plaiting of her dress. She is civil toward you; and tender toward your bachelor friends. She talks with dignity—adjusts her lace cap—and hopes you will make a figure in the world, for the sake of the family. Her cheek is never soiled with a tear; and her smiles are frequent, especially when you have some spruce young fellows at your table.
You catch sight of occasional notes, perhaps, whose superscription you do not know; and some of her admirers’ attentions become so pointed, and constant, that your pride is stirred. It would be silly to show jealousy; but you suggest to your “dear”—as you sip your tea—the slight impropriety of her action.
Perhaps you fondly long for some little scene, as a proof of wounded confidence; but no—nothing of that; she trusts (calling you “my dear”), that she knows how to sustain the dignity of her position.
You are too sick at heart for comment, or for reply.
—And is this the intertwining of soul of which you had dreamed in the days that are gone? Is this the blending of sympathies that was to steal from life its bitterness; and spread over care and suffering, the sweet, ministering hand of kindness, and of love? Ay, you may well wander back to your bachelor club, and make the hours long at the journals, or at play—killing the flagging lapse of your life! Talk sprightly with your old friends—and mimic the joy you have not; or you will wear a bad name upon your hearth and head. Never suffer your Charlotte to catch sight of the tears which in bitter hours may start from your eye; or to hear the sighs which in your times of solitary musings may break forth sudden and heavy. Go on counterfeiting your life, as you have begun. It was a nice match; and you are a nice husband!
But you have a little boy, thank God, toward whom your heart runs out freely; and you love to catch him in his respite from your well-ordered nursery, and the tasks of his teachers—alone; and to spend upon him a little of that depth of feeling, which through so many years has scarce been stirred. You play with him at his games; you fondle him; you take him to your bosom.
But papa—he says—see how you have tumbled my collar. What shall I tell mamma?
—Tell her, my boy, that I love you!
Ah, thought I—my cigar was getting dull, and nauseous—is there not a spot in your heart that the gloved hand of your elegant wife has never reached: that you wish it might reach?
You go to see a far-away friend: his was not a “nice match;” he was married years before you; and yet the beaming looks of his wife and his lively smile are as fresh and honest as they were years ago; and they make you ashamed of your disconsolate humor. Your stay is lengthened, but the home letters are not urgent for your return; yet they are marvelously proper letters, and rounded with a French adieu. You could have wished a little scrawl from your boy at the bottom, in the place of the postscript, which gives you the names of a new opera troupe; and you hint as much—a very bold stroke for you.
Ben—she says—writes too shamefully.
And at your return there is no great anticipation of delight; in contrast with the old dreams, that a pleasant summer’s journey has called up, your parlor as you enter it—so elegant, so still—so modish—seems the charnel-house of your heart.
By and by you fall into weary days of sickness; you have capital nurses—nurses highly recommended—nurses who never make mistakes—nurses who have served long in the family. But alas for that heart of sympathy, and for that sweet face, shaded with your pain—like a soft landscape with flying clouds—you have none of them! Your pattern wife may come in, from time to time, to look after your nurse, or to ask after your sleep, and glide out—her silk dress rustling upon the door—like dead leaves in the cool night breezes of winter. Or, perhaps, after putting this chair in its place, and adjusting to a more tasteful fold that curtain—she will ask you, with a tone that might mean sympathy, if it were not a stranger to you—if she can do anything more.
Thank her—as kindly as you can, and close your eyes, and dream—or rouse up, to lay your hand upon the head of your little boy—to drink in health and happiness from his earnest look as he gazes strangely upon your pale and shrunken forehead. Your smile even, ghastly with long suffering, disturbs him; there is no interpreter, save the heart, between you.
Your parched lips feel strangely to his flushed, healthful face; and he steps about on tip-toe, at a motion from the nurse, to look at all those rosy-colored medicines upon the table—and he takes your cane from the corner, and passes his hand over the smooth ivory head; and he runs his eye along the wall from picture to picture, till it rests on one he knows—a figure in bridal dress—beautiful, almost fond—and he forgets himself, and says aloud—“There’s mamma!”
The nurse puts her finger to her lip; you waken from your doze to see where your eager boy is looking; and your eyes, too, take in much as they can of that figure—now shadowy to your fainting vision—doubly shadowy to your fainting heart!
From day to day you sink from life: the physician says the end is not far off; why should it be? There is very little elastic force within you to keep the end away. Madame is called, and your little boy. Your sight is dim, but they whisper that she is beside your bed; and you reach out your hand—both hands. You fancy you hear a sob—a strange sound! It seems as if it came from distant years—a confused, broken, sigh, sweeping over the long stretch of your life: and a sigh from your heart—not audible—answers it.
Your trembling fingers clutch the hand of your little boy, and you drag him toward you, and move your lips, as if you would speak to him; and they place his head near you, so that you feel his fine hair brushing your cheek—“My boy, you must love—your mother!”
Your other hand feels a quick, convulsive grasp, and something like a tear drops upon your face. Good God! Can it be indeed a tear?
You strain your vision, and a feeble smile flits over your features as you seem to see her figure—the figure of the painting—bending over you; and you feel a bound at your heart—the same bound that you felt on your bridal morning; the same bound which you used to feel in the springtime of your life.
—Only one—rich, full bound of the heart—that is all!
—My cigar is out. I could not have lit it again if I would. It was wholly burned.
“Aunt Tabithy”—said I, as I finished reading—“may I smoke now under your rose tree?”
Aunt Tabithy, who had laid down her knitting to hear me—smiled—brushed a tear from her old eyes, said—“Yes—Isaac,” and having scratched the back of her head with the disengaged needle, resumed her knitting.
FOURTH REVERIE
MORNING, NOON AND EVENING
It is a spring day under the oaks—the loved oaks of a once cherished home—now, alas, mine no longer!
I had sold the old farmhouse, and the groves, and the cool springs, where I had bathed my head in the heats of summer; and with the first warm days of May, they were to pass from me forever. Seventy years they had been in the possession of my mother’s family; for seventy years they had borne the same name of proprietorship; for seventy years, the Lares of our country home, often neglected, almost forgotten—yet brightened from time to time by gleams of heart-worship, had held their place in the sweet valley of Elmgrove.
And in this changeful, bustling, American life of ours seventy years is no child’s holiday. The hurry of action, and progress may pass over it with quick step; but the footprints are many and deep. You surely will not wonder that it made me sad and thoughtful to break the chain of years that bound to my heart the oaks, the hills, the springs, the valley—and such a valley!
A wild stream runs through it—large enough to make a river for English landscape—winding between rich banks where, in summer time, the swallows build their nests and brood by myriads.
Tall elms rise here and there along the margin, and with their uplifted arms and leafy spray throw great patches of shade upon the meadow. Old lion-like oaks, too, where the meadow-soil hardens into rolling upland, fasten to the ground with their ridgy roots; and with their gray, scraggy limbs make delicious shelter for the panting workers, or for the herds of August.
Westward of the stream, where I am lying, the banks roll up swiftly into sloping hills, covered with groves of oaks and green pasture lands dotted with mossy rocks. And farther on, where some wood has been swept down, some ten years gone, by the ax, the new growth, heavy with the luxuriant foliage of spring, covers wide spots of the slanting land; while some dead tree in the midst still stretches out its bare arms to the blast—a solitary mourner over the wreck of its forest brothers.
Eastward the ridgy bank passes into wavy meadows, upon whose farther edge you see the roofs of an old mansion, with tall chimneys and taller elm-trees shading it. Beyond, the hills rise gently, and sweep away into wood-crowned heights that are blue with distance. At the upper end of the valley the stream is lost to the eye in a wide swamp-wood, which in the autumn time is covered with a scarlet sheet, blotched here and there by the dark crimson stains of the ash-tops. Farther on the hills crowd close to the brook, and come down with granite boulders, and scattered birch-trees, and beeches—under which, upon the smoky mornings of May, I have time and again loitered, and thrown my line into the pools which curl dark and still under their tangled roots.
Below, and looking southward, through the openings of the oaks that shade me, I see a broad stretch of meadow, with glimpses of the silver surface of the stream, and of the giant solitary elms, and of some old maple that has yielded to the spring tides, and now dips its lower boughs in the insidious current—and of clumps of alders, and willow tufts—above which, even now, the black-and-white coated Bob-o’-Lincoln is wheeling his musical flight, while his quieter mate sits swaying on the topmost twigs.
A quiet road passes within a short distance of me, and crosses the brook by a rude timber bridge; beside the bridge is a broad glassy pool, shaded by old maples and hickories, where the cattle drink each morning on their way to the hill pastures. A step or two beyond the stream a lane branches across the meadows to the mansion with the tall chimneys. I can just remember now, the stout, broad-shouldered old gentleman, with his white hat, his long white hair, and his white-headed cane, who built the house, and who farmed the whole valley around me. He is gone, long since; and lies in a graveyard looking upon the sea! The elms that he planted shake their weird arms over the mouldering roofs; and his fruit garden shows only a battered phalanx of mossy limbs, which will scarce tempt the July marauders.
In the other direction, upon this side the brook, the road is lost to view among the trees; but if I were to follow the windings upon the hillside, it would bring me shortly upon the old home of my grandfather; there is no pleasure in wandering there now. The woods that sheltered it from the northern winds are cut down; the tall cherries that made the yard one leafy bower are dead. The cornice is straggling from the eaves; the porch has fallen; the stone chimney is yawning with wide gaps. Within, it is even worse; the floors sway upon the mouldering beams; the doors all sag from their hinges; the rude frescos upon the parlor wall are peeling off; all is going to decay—And my grandfather sleeps in a little graveyard by the garden wall.
A lane branches from the country road, within a few yards of me, and leads back, along the edge of the meadow, to the homely cottage, which has been my special care. Its gray porch and chimney are thrown into rich relief by a grove of oaks that skirts the hill behind it; and the doves are flying uneasily about the open doors of the granary and barns. The morning sun shines pleasantly on the gray group of buildings; and the lowing of the cows, not yet driven afield, adds to the charming homeliness of the scene. But alas for the poor azaleas, and laurels, and vines that I had put out upon the little knoll before the cottage door—they are all of them trodden down: only one poor creeper hangs its loose tresses to the lattice, all disheveled and forlorn!
This by-lane which opens upon my farmhouse, leaves the road in the middle of a grove of oaks; the brown gate swings upon an oak tree—the brown gate closes upon an oak tree. There is a rustic seat, built between two veteran trees that rise from a little hillock near by. Half a century ago there was a rustic seat on the same hillock—between the same veteran trees. I can trace marks of the old blotches upon the bark, and the scars of the nails upon the scathed trunks. Time and time again it has been renewed. This, the last, was built by my own hands—a cheerful and a holy duty.
Sixty years ago, they tell me, my grandfather used to loiter here with his gun, while his hounds lay around under the scattered oaks. Now he sleeps, as I said, in the little graveyard yonder, where I can see one or two white tablets glimmering through the foliage. I never knew him; he died, as the brown stone table says, aged twenty-six. Yesterday I climbed the wall that skirts the yard, and plucked a flower from his tomb. I take out now from my pocket-book that flower—a frail, first-blooming violet—and write upon the slip of paper, into which I have thrust its delicate stem—“From my grandfather’s tomb—1850.”
But other feet have trod upon this knoll—far more dear to me. The old neighbors have sometimes told me how they have seen, forty years ago, two rosy-faced girls idling on this spot, under the shade, and gathering acorns, and making oak-leaved garlands for their foreheads—Alas, alas, the garlands they wear now are not earthly garlands!
Upon that spot, and upon that rustic seat, I am lying this May morning. I have placed my gun against a tree; my shot-pouch I have hung upon a broken limb. I have thrown my feet upon the bench, and lean against one of the gnarled oaks, between which the seat is built. My hat is off; my book and paper are beside me; and my pencil trembles in my fingers as I catch sight of those white marble tablets gleaming through the trees, from the height above me, like beckoning angel faces. If they were alive! two more near and dear friends, in a world where we count friends by units.
It is morning—a bright spring morning under the oaks—these loved oaks of a once cherished home. Last night I slept in yonder mansion, under the elms. The cattle going to the pasture are drinking in the pool by the bridge; the boy who drives them is making his shrill halloo echo against the hills. The sun has risen fairly over the eastern heights, and shines brightly upon the meadow-land and brightly upon a bend of the brook below me. The birds—the blue-birds sweetest and noisiest of all—are singing over me in the branches. A woodpecker is hammering at a dry limb aloft; and Carlo pricks up his ears, and looks at me—then stretches out his head upon his paws in a warm bit of the sunshine—and sleeps.
Morning brings back to me the past; and the past brings up not only its actualities, not only its events and memories, but—stranger still—what might have been. Every little circumstance which dawns on the awakened memory is traced not only to its actual, but to its possible issues.
What a wide world that makes of the past! a great and gorgeous—a rich and holy world! Your fancy fills it up artist-like; the darkness is mellowed off into soft shades; the bright spots are veiled in the sweet atmosphere of distance; and fancy and memory together make up a rich dreamland of the past.
And now, as I go on to trace upon paper some of the visions that float across that dreamland of the morning—I will not—I can not say how much comes fancywise, and how much from this vaulting memory. Of this, the kind reader shall himself be judge.
I
THE MORNING
Isabel and I—she is my cousin, and is seven years old, and I am ten—are sitting together on the bank of the stream, under an oak tree that leans half way over to the water. I am much stronger than she, and taller by a head. I hold in my hands a little alder rod, with which I am fishing for the roach and minnows that play in the pool below us.
She is watching the cork tossing on the water, or playing with the captured fish that lie upon the bank. She has auburn ringlets that fall down upon her shoulders; and her straw hat lies back upon them, held only by the strip of ribbon that passes under her chin. But the sun does not shine upon her head; for the oak tree above us is full of leaves; and only here and there a dimple of the sunlight plays upon the pool, where I am fishing.
Her eye is hazel and bright; and now and then she turns it on me with a look of girlish curiosity, as I lift up my rod—and again in playful menace, as she grasps in her little fingers one of the dead fish and threatens to throw it back upon the stream. Her little feet hang over the edge of the bank; and from time to time she reaches down to dip her toe in the water; and laughs a girlish laugh of defiance, as I scold her for frightening away the fishes.
“Bella,” I say, “what if you should tumble in the river?”
“But I won’t.”
“Yes, but if you should?”
“Why then you would pull me out.”
“But if I wouldn’t pull you out?”
“But I know you would; wouldn’t you, Paul?”
“What makes you think so, Bella?”
“Because you love Bella.”
“How do you know I love Bella?”
“Because once you told me so; and because you pick flowers for me that I can not reach; and because you let me take your rod, when you have a fish upon it.”
“But that’s no reason, Bella.”
“Then what is, Paul?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, Bella.”
A little fish has been nibbling for a long time at the bait; the cork has been bobbing up and down—and now he is fairly hooked, and pulls away toward the bank, and you can not see the cork.
—“Here, Bella, quick!”—and she springs eagerly to clasp her little hands around the rod. But the fish has dragged it away on the other side of me; and as she reaches farther, and farther, she slips, cries—“Oh, Paul!” and falls into the water.
The stream they told us, when we came, was over a man’s head—it is surely over little Isabel’s. I fling down the rod, and thrusting one hand into the roots that support the overhanging bank, I grasp at her hat, as she comes up; but the ribbons give way, and I see the terribly earnest look upon her face as she goes down again. Oh, my mother—thought I—if you were only here!
But she rises again; this time I thrust my hand into her dress, and struggling hard, keep her at the top until I can place my foot down upon a projecting root; and, so bracing myself, I drag her to the bank, and having climbed up, take hold of her belt firmly with both hands, and drag her out; and poor Isabel, choked, chilled, and wet, is lying upon the grass.
I commence crying aloud. The workmen in the fields hear me, and come down. One takes Isabel in his arms, and I follow on foot to our uncle’s home upon the hill.
—“Oh, my dear children!” says my mother; and she takes Isabel in her arms; and presently, with dry clothes and blazing wood fire, little Bella smiles again. I am at my mother’s knee.
“I told you so, Paul,” says Isabel—“aunty, doesn’t Paul love me?”
“I hope so, Bella,” said my mother.
“I know so,” said I; and kissed her cheek.
And how did I know it? The boy does not ask; the man does. Oh, the freshness, the honesty, the vigor of a boy’s heart! how the memory of it refreshes like the first gush of spring, or the break of an April shower!
But boyhood has its Pride as well as its Loves.
My uncle is a tall, hard-faced man; I fear him when he calls me—“child;” I love him when he calls me—“Paul.” He is almost always busy with his books; and when I steal into the library door, as I sometimes do, with a string of fish, or a heaping basket of nuts to show him—he looks for a moment curiously at them, sometimes takes them in his fingers—gives them back to me, and turns over the leaves of his book. You are afraid to ask him if you have not worked bravely; yet you want to do so.
You sidle out softly, and go to your mother; she scarce looks at your little stores; but she draws you to her with her arm, and prints a kiss upon your forehead. Now your tongue is unloosened; that kiss and that action have done it; you will tell what capital luck you have had; and you hold up your tempting trophies; “are they not great, mother?” But she is looking in your face, and not at your prize.
“Take them, mother,” and you lay the basket upon her lap.
“Thank you Paul, I do not wish them: but you must give some to Bella.”
And away you go to find laughing, playful, cousin Isabel. And we sit down together on the grass, and I pour out my stores between us. “You shall take, Bella, what you wish in your apron, and then when study hours are over, we will have such a time down by the big rock in the meadow!”
“But I do not know if papa will let me,” says Isabel.
“Bella,” I say, “do you love your papa?”
“Yes,” says Bella, “why not?”
“Because he is so cold; he does not kiss you, Bella, so often as my mother does; and, besides, when he forbids your going away, he does not say, as mother does—my little girl will be tired, she had better not go—but he says only—Isabel must not go. I wonder what makes him talk so?”
“Why, Paul, he is a man, and doesn’t—at any rate, I love him, Paul. Besides, my mother is sick, you know.”
“But Isabel, my mother will be your mother, too. Come, Bella, we will go ask her if we may go.”
And there I am, the happiest of boys, pleading with the kindest of mothers. And the young heart leans into that mother’s heart—none of the void now that will overtake it like an opening Korah gulf, in the years that are to come. It is joyous, full, and running over!
“You may go,” she says, “if your uncle is willing.”
“But mamma, I am afraid to ask him, I do not believe he loves me.”
“Don’t say so, Paul,” and she draws you to her side, as if she would supply by her own love the lacking love of a universe.
“Go, with your cousin Isabel, and ask him kindly; and if he says no—make no reply.”
And with courage, we go hand in hand, and steal in at the library door. There he sits—I seem to see him now—in the old wainscoted room, covered over with books and pictures; and he wears his heavy-rimmed spectacles, and is poring over some big volume, full of hard words, that are not in any spelling-book. We step up softly; and Isabel lays her little hand upon his arm; and he turns, and says—“Well, my little daughter?”
I ask if we may go down to the big rock in the meadow?
He looks at Isabel, and says he is afraid—“we can not go.”
“But why, uncle? It is only a little way, and we will be very careful.”
“I am afraid, my children; do not say any more: you can have the pony, and Tray, and play at home.”
“But, uncle—”
“You need say no more, my child.”
I pinch the hand of little Isabel, and look in her eye—my own half-filling with tears. I feel that my forehead is flushed, and I hide it behind Bella’s tresses—whispering to her at the same time—“Let us go.”
“What, sir,” says my uncle, mistaking my meaning—“do you persuade her to disobey?”
Now I am angry, and say blindly—“No, sir, I didn’t!” And then my rising pride will not let me say that I wished only Isabel should go out with me.
Bella cries; and I shrink out; and am not easy until I have run to bury my head in my mother’s bosom. Alas! pride can not always find such covert! There will be times when it will harass you strangely; when it will peril friendships—will sever old, standing intimacy; and then—no resource but to feed on its own bitterness. Hateful pride!—to be conquered, as a man would conquer an enemy, or it will make whirlpools in the current of your affections—nay, turn the whole tide of the heart into rough, and unaccustomed channels.
But boyhood has its Grief, too, apart from Pride.
You love the old dog, Tray; and Bella loves him as well as you. He is a noble old fellow, with shaggy hair, and long ears, and big paws, that he will put up into your hand, if you ask him. And he never gets angry when you play with him, and tumble him over in the long grass, and pull his silken ears. Sometimes, to be sure, he will open his mouth, as if he would bite, but when he gets your hand fairly in his jaws he will scarce leave the print of his teeth upon it. He will swim, too, bravely, and bring ashore all the sticks you throw upon the water; and when you fling a stone to tease him, he swims round and round, and whines, and looks sorry that he can not find it.
He will carry a heaping basket full of nuts, too, in his mouth, and never spill one of them; and when you come out to your uncle’s home in the spring, after staying a whole winter in the town, he knows you—old Tray does! And he leaps upon you, and lays his paws on your shoulder, and licks your face; and is almost as glad to see you as cousin Bella herself. And when you put Bella on his back for a ride, he only pretends to bite her little feet—but he wouldn’t do it for the world. Ay, Tray is a noble old dog!
But one summer, the farmers say that some of their sheep are killed, and that the dogs have worried them; and one of them comes to talk with my uncle about it.
But Tray never worried sheep; you know he never did; and so does nurse; and so does Bella; for in the spring, she had a pet lamb, and Tray never worried little Fidele.
And one or two of the dogs that belong to the neighbors are shot; though nobody knows who shot them; and you have great fears about poor Tray; and try to keep him at home, and fondle him more than ever. But Tray will sometimes wander off; till finally, one afternoon, he comes back whining piteously, and with his shoulder all bloody.
Little Bella cries loud; and you almost cry, as nurse dresses the wound; and poor old Tray whines very sadly. You pat his head, and Bella pats him; and you sit down together by him on the floor of the porch, and bring a rug for him to lie upon; and try and tempt him with a little milk, and Bella brings a piece of cake for him—but he will eat nothing. You sit up till very late, long after Bella has gone to bed, patting his head, and wishing you could do something for poor Tray; but he only licks your hand, and whines more piteously than ever.
In the morning you dress early and hurry downstairs; but Tray is not lying on the rug; and you run through the house to find him, and whistle, and call—Tray—Tray! At length you see him lying in his old place, out by the cherry tree, and you run to him; but he does not start; and you lean down to pat him—but he is cold, and the dew is wet upon him—poor Tray is dead!
You take his head upon your knees, and pat again those glossy ears, and cry; but you can not bring him to life. And Bella comes, and cries with you. You can hardly bear to have him put in the ground; but uncle says he must be buried. So one of the workmen digs a grave under the cherry tree, where he died—a deep grave, and they round it over with earth, and smooth the sods upon it—even now I can trace Tray’s grave.
You and Bella together put up a little slab for a tombstone; and she hangs flowers upon it, and ties them there with a bit of ribbon. You can scarce play all that day; and afterward, many weeks later, when you are rambling over the fields, or lingering by the brook, throwing off sticks into the eddies, you think of old Tray’s shaggy coat, and of his big paw, and of his honest eye; and the memory of your boyish grief comes upon you; and you say with tears, “Poor Tray!” And Bella, too, in her sad sweet tones, says—“Poor old Tray—he is dead!”
