Mosses from an old manse
can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more. Unfathomable to
mere mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was sung; and
still the chorus of the desert swelled between like the deepest tone of
a mighty organ; and with the final peal of that dreadful anthem there
came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling
beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were
mingling and according with the voice of guilty man in homage to the
prince of all. The four blazing pines threw up a loftier flame, and
obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke wreaths
above the impious assembly. At the same moment the fire on the rock
shot redly forth and formed a glowing arch above its base, where now
appeared a figure. With reverence be it spoken, the figure bore no
slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the
New England churches.
“Bring forth the converts!” cried a voice that echoed through the field
and rolled into the forest.
At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees
and approached the congregation, with whom he felt a loathful
brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart. He
could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father
beckoned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke wreath, while a
woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him
back. Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step, nor
to resist, even in thought, when the minister and good old Deacon
Gookin seized his arms and led him to the blazing rock. Thither came
also the slender form of a veiled female, led between Goody Cloyse,
that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had
received the devil’s promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was
she. And there stood the proselytes beneath the canopy of fire.
“Welcome, my children,” said the dark figure, “to the communion of your
race. Ye have found thus young your nature and your destiny. My
children, look behind you!”
They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the
fiend worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on
every visage.
“There,” resumed the sable form, “are all whom ye have reverenced from
youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own
sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful
aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping
assembly. This night it shall be granted you to know their secret
deeds: how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton
words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager
for widows’ weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him
sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste
to inherit their fathers’ wealth; and how fair damsels—blush not, sweet
ones—have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole
guest to an infant’s funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for
sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bedchamber,
street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall
exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood
spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every
bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and
which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power—than
my power at its utmost—can make manifest in deeds. And now, my
children, look upon each other.”
They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the
wretched man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband, trembling
before that unhallowed altar.
“Lo, there ye stand, my children,” said the figure, in a deep and
solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his once
angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. “Depending upon
one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a
dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must
be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of
your race.”
“Welcome,” repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair and
triumph.
And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet
hesitating on the verge of wickedness in this dark world. A basin was
hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water, reddened by the
lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame? Herein did
the shape of evil dip his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism
upon their foreheads, that they might be partakers of the mystery of
sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and
thought, than they could now be of their own. The husband cast one look
at his pale wife, and Faith at him. What polluted wretches would the
next glance show them to each other, shuddering alike at what they
disclosed and what they saw!
“Faith! Faith!” cried the husband, “look up to heaven, and resist the
wicked one.”
Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when he found
himself amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind
which died heavily away through the forest. He staggered against the
rock, and felt it chill and damp; while a hanging twig, that had been
all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.
The next morning young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of
Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old
minister was taking a walk along the graveyard to get an appetite for
breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he
passed, on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to
avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the
holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window. “What God
doth the wizard pray to?” quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that
excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine at her own
lattice, catechizing a little girl who had brought her a pint of
morning’s milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child as from the grasp
of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied
the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and
bursting into such joy at sight of him that she skipped along the
street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But
Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on
without a greeting.
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild
dream of a witch-meeting?
Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young
Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if
not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream.
On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he
could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear
and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the
pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open
Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives
and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then
did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down
upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, waking suddenly at
midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or
eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered
to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he
had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by
Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly
procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse
upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.
RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER
A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the
more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University
of Padua. Giovanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in his
pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice
which looked not unworthy to have been the palace of a Paduan noble,
and which, in fact, exhibited over its entrance the armorial bearings
of a family long since extinct. The young stranger, who was not
unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that one of the
ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion,
had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his
Inferno. These reminiscences and associations, together with the
tendency to heartbreak natural to a young man for the first time out of
his native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily as he looked around
the desolate and ill-furnished apartment.
“Holy Virgin, signor!” cried old Dame Lisabetta, who, won by the
youth’s remarkable beauty of person, was kindly endeavoring to give the
chamber a habitable air, “what a sigh was that to come out of a young
man’s heart! Do you find this old mansion gloomy? For the love of
Heaven, then, put your head out of the window, and you will see as
bright sunshine as you have left in Naples.”
Guasconti mechanically did as the old woman advised, but could not
quite agree with her that the Paduan sunshine was as cheerful as that
of southern Italy. Such as it was, however, it fell upon a garden
beneath the window and expended its fostering influences on a variety
of plants, which seemed to have been cultivated with exceeding care.
“Does this garden belong to the house?” asked Giovanni.
“Heaven forbid, signor, unless it were fruitful of better pot herbs
than any that grow there now,” answered old Lisabetta. “No; that garden
is cultivated by the own hands of Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous
doctor, who, I warrant him, has been heard of as far as Naples. It is
said that he distils these plants into medicines that are as potent as
a charm. Oftentimes you may see the signor doctor at work, and
perchance the signora, his daughter, too, gathering the strange flowers
that grow in the garden.”
The old woman had now done what she could for the aspect of the
chamber; and, commending the young man to the protection of the saints,
took her departure.
Giovanni still found no better occupation than to look down into the
garden beneath his window. From its appearance, he judged it to be one
of those botanic gardens which were of earlier date in Padua than
elsewhere in Italy or in the world. Or, not improbably, it might once
have been the pleasure-place of an opulent family; for there was the
ruin of a marble fountain in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but
so wofully shattered that it was impossible to trace the original
design from the chaos of remaining fragments. The water, however,
continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever.
A little gurgling sound ascended to the young man’s window, and made
him feel as if the fountain were an immortal spirit that sung its song
unceasingly and without heeding the vicissitudes around it, while one
century imbodied it in marble and another scattered the perishable
garniture on the soil. All about the pool into which the water subsided
grew various plants, that seemed to require a plentiful supply of
moisture for the nourishment of gigantic leaves, and in some instances,
flowers gorgeously magnificent. There was one shrub in particular, set
in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of
purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and richness of a gem;
and the whole together made a show so resplendent that it seemed enough
to illuminate the garden, even had there been no sunshine. Every
portion of the soil was peopled with plants and herbs, which, if less