I say I love to linger among the cobwebs and amid the silence of old furniture salerooms—as fruitful a source of meditation to me as loitering among tombs ever was to Harvey. That venerable eight-day clock standing against the wall, behind those slim walnut chairs and couch done up in the bright green repp, its mahogany almost as black as your Sunday hat with age, turns on my thinking faculty just as the ‘auld Scots’ sangs’ moves my guidwife Peggy to tears. I think of all the pairs of eyes that have gazed up at the hands and figures on its olive-tinted face, and wonder how many of them have taken their last look of earth. My imagination transports it to some well-to-do Scottish cottage home, where I see, held up in fond arms, the marvelling youngsters, in striped cotton pinafores, with their wide-open eyes staring at the representatives of the four quarters of the globe, painted in bright dazzling colours on each corner of the dial-plate. Perhaps some of those same youngsters, to whose inquiring and wondering minds the pictures were an every-day exercise, are settled down, old men and women now, in one of these distant quarters of the globe, say America, and are sitting at this very moment in their log-hut in the backwoods, their minds’ eyes reverting to the familiar face of that old clock tick-ticking away in their childhood’s home.
Over against where it stood in that same old home, between the room door and the end of the white scoured wooden dresser with its well-filled delf rack, I picture to myself the wasted face of a sick woman pillowed up in bed. What weary nights she has listened to its tick-tack, and counted the slow hours as they struck, waiting for the dawn! I know that her head aches no longer, and that she sleeps sound enough now, with the summer breeze stirring the green grass on her grave.
Turning away from the venerable time-keeper, my eye falls on an old-fashioned low-set chest of drawers, with dingy folding brass handles, and little bits of the veneer chipped off here and there, and the ivory awanting in some of the keyholes. Where are now, I ask myself, the ashes of those bright household fires, which have winked in the shining depths of their mahogany in the darkening gloaming, before the blinds were drawn and the candles lit? What secrets and treasures have not these same drawers been the repositories of! I see a pensive female form, in striped shortgown and drugget petticoat, stop while she is sweeping the kitchen floor, and, with palpitating heart, pull out the centre small top drawer to take another look at the golden curl, wrapped in a precious letter, in the corner beside two or three well-worn toys. That bruised heart will throb no more with joy or pain; neither will her tears fall any more like scalding lead on the blurred parchment, as she lifts the bright curl to her lips before wrapping it away out of sight again—till, mayhap, the next day, when the old yearning returns, and she must needs go and unfold her treasure, the sight of which brings the little chubby face—over which the curl used to hang—once more before her brimming eyes.
The little bookcase, with the diamond-shaped panes, on the top of the chest of drawers is an object to me of even nobler regard than the drawers themselves. My venerable uncle, who was an author too, had just such a little bookcase on the top of his drawers, about three-fourths filled with sombre-looking volumes. I remember I never looked up at it as a boy, and beheld the dim dusty books, like gray ghosts, sitting erect, or leaning against one another in the twilight shelves, but I associated it in my fancy with the inside of his own gray head. Already I see the titles on the backs of some of these children of dead brains looming out of the empty gloom through the diamond-shaped panes; and I can recognise many of my own favourites among them. The binding is more faded and worn on the backs of some than others, as if they had been more often in the hand and more dear to the heart of the reader. I am almost tempted to stretch forth my hand and renew their acquaintance. One in particular, in faded green-and-gold binding, looking out from amongst a motley company of fiction, The House with the Seven Gables, I have a covetous eye upon.
How I should like to revisit the shadowy chambers of that old puritan mansion, especially that low-studded oak-panelled room with the portrait of the stern old Colonel looking down from the wall; and feel the smell of its decaying timbers, ‘oozy’ with the memories of whole generations of Pyncheons; to see poor perplexed old Hepzibah in the midst of her first day’s shopkeeping, with her wreck of a resurrected brother to care and provide for; and watch—not without reverence, even though we are constrained sometimes to laugh—the miraculously minute workings of her crazed old heart fighting—a kind of comic pathos, as well as rarest heroism in her mimic battling—those troublesome spectres of gentility which she has inherited with her Pyncheon blood.
Alas for this most bewitching of romancers! Well might his friend Longfellow exclaim of him:
Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power,
And the lost clue regain?
The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower
Unfinished must remain!