Mosses from an old manse
She put Baglioni’s antidote to her lips; and, at the same moment, the
figure of Rappaccini emerged from the portal and came slowly towards
the marble fountain. As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed to
gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as
might an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a
group of statuary and finally be satisfied with his success. He paused;
his bent form grew erect with conscious power; he spread out his hands
over them in the attitude of a father imploring a blessing upon his
children; but those were the same hands that had thrown poison into the
stream of their lives. Giovanni trembled. Beatrice shuddered nervously,
and pressed her hand upon her heart.
“My daughter,” said Rappaccini, “thou art no longer lonely in the
world. Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister shrub and bid
thy bridegroom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him now. My
science and the sympathy between thee and him have so wrought within
his system that he now stands apart from common men, as thou dost,
daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then,
through the world, most dear to one another and dreadful to all
besides!”
“My father,” said Beatrice, feebly,—and still as she spoke she kept her
hand upon her heart,—“wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom
upon thy child?”
“Miserable!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What mean you, foolish girl? Dost
thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts against which
no power nor strength could avail an enemy—misery, to be able to quell
the mightiest with a breath—misery, to be as terrible as thou art
beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak
woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?”
“I would fain have been loved, not feared,” murmured Beatrice, sinking
down upon the ground. “But now it matters not. I am going, father,
where the evil which thou hast striven to mingle with my being will
pass away like a dream-like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers,
which will no longer taint my breath among the flowers of Eden.
Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart;
but they, too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was there not, from the
first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”
To Beatrice,—so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by
Rappaccini’s skill,—as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote
was death; and thus the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of thwarted
nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted
wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at
that moment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and
called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the
thunderstricken man of science, “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is _this_
the upshot of your experiment!”
MRS. BULLFROG
It makes me melancholy to see how like fools some very sensible people
act in the matter of choosing wives. They perplex their judgments by a
most undue attention to little niceties of personal appearance, habits,
disposition, and other trifles which concern nobody but the lady
herself. An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of
perfection, keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered
that no tolerable woman will accept them. Now this is the very height
of absurdity. A kind Providence has so skilfully adapted sex to sex and
the mass of individuals to each other, that, with certain obvious
exceptions, any male and female may be moderately happy in the married
state. The true rule is to ascertain that the match is fundamentally a
good one, and then to take it for granted that all minor objections,
should there be such, will vanish, if you let them alone. Only put
yourself beyond hazard as to the real basis of matrimonial bliss, and
it is scarcely to be imagined what miracles, in the way of recognizing
smaller incongruities, connubial love will effect.
For my own part I freely confess that, in my bachelorship, I was
precisely such an over-curious simpleton as I now advise the reader not
to be. My early habits had gifted me with a feminine sensibility and
too exquisite refinement. I was the accomplished graduate of a dry
goods store, where, by dint of ministering to the whims of fine ladies,
and suiting silken hose to delicate limbs, and handling satins,
ribbons, chintzes calicoes, tapes, gauze, and cambric needles, I grew
up a very ladylike sort of a gentleman. It is not assuming too much to
affirm that the ladies themselves were hardly so ladylike as Thomas
Bullfrog. So painfully acute was my sense of female imperfection, and
such varied excellence did I require in the woman whom I could love,
that there was an awful risk of my getting no wife at all, or of being
driven to perpetrate matrimony with my own image in the looking-glass.
Besides the fundamental principle already hinted at, I demanded the
fresh bloom of youth, pearly teeth, glossy ringlets, and the whole list
of lovely items, with the utmost delicacy of habits and sentiments, a
silken texture of mind, and, above all, a virgin heart. In a word, if a
young angel just from paradise, yet dressed in earthly fashion, had
come and offered me her hand, it is by no means certain that I should
have taken it. There was every chance of my becoming a most miserable
old bachelor, when, by the best luck in the world, I made a journey
into another state, and was smitten by, and smote again, and wooed,
won, and married, the present Mrs. Bullfrog, all in the space of a
fortnight. Owing to these extempore measures, I not only gave my bride
credit for certain perfections which have not as yet come to light, but
also overlooked a few trifling defects, which, however, glimmered on my
perception long before the close of the honeymoon. Yet, as there was no
mistake about the fundamental principle aforesaid, I soon learned, as
will be seen, to estimate Mrs. Bullfrog’s deficiencies and
superfluities at exactly their proper value.
The same morning that Mrs. Bullfrog and I came together as a unit, we
took two seats in the stage-coach and began our journey towards my
place of business. There being no other passengers, we were as much
alone and as free to give vent to our raptures as if I had hired a hack
for the matrimonial jaunt. My bride looked charmingly in a green silk
calash and riding habit of pelisse cloth; and whenever her red lips
parted with a smile, each tooth appeared like an inestimable pearl.
Such was my passionate warmth that—we had rattled out of the village,
gentle reader, and were lonely as Adam and Eve in paradise—I plead
guilty to no less freedom than a kiss. The gentle eye of Mrs. Bullfrog
scarcely rebuked me for the profanation. Emboldened by her indulgence,
I threw back the calash from her polished brow, and suffered my
fingers, white and delicate as her own, to stray among those dark and
glossy curls which realized my daydreams of rich hair.
“My love,” said Mrs. Bullfrog tenderly, “you will disarrange my curls.”
“Oh, no, my sweet Laura!” replied I, still playing with the glossy
ringlet. “Even your fair hand could not manage a curl more delicately
than mine. I propose myself the pleasure of doing up your hair in
papers every evening at the same time with my own.”
“Mr. Bullfrog,” repeated she, “you must not disarrange my curls.”
This was spoken in a more decided tone than I had happened to hear,
until then, from my gentlest of all gentle brides. At the same time she
put up her hand and took mine prisoner; but merely drew it away from
the forbidden ringlet, and then immediately released it. Now, I am a
fidgety little man, and always love to have something in my fingers; so
that, being debarred from my wife’s curls, I looked about me for any
other plaything. On the front seat of the coach there was one of those
small baskets in which travelling ladies who are too delicate to appear
at a public table generally carry a supply of gingerbread, biscuits and
cheese, cold ham, and other light refreshments, merely to sustain
nature to the journey’s end. Such airy diet will sometimes keep them in
pretty good flesh for a week together. Laying hold of this same little
basket, I thrust my hand under the newspaper with which it was
carefully covered.
“What’s this, my dear?” cried I; for the black neck of a bottle had
popped out of the basket.
“A bottle of Kalydor, Mr. Bullfrog,” said my wife, coolly taking the
basket from my hands and replacing it on the front seat.
There was no possibility of doubting my wife’s word; but I never knew
genuine Kalydor, such as I use for my own complexion, to smell so much
like cherry brandy. I was about to express my fears that the lotion
would injure her skin, when an accident occurred which threatened more
than a skin-deep injury. Our Jehu had carelessly driven over a heap of
gravel and fairly capsized the coach, with the wheels in the air and
our heels where our heads should have been. What became of my wits I
cannot imagine; they have always had a perverse trick of deserting me
just when they were most needed; but so it chanced, that in the
confusion of our overthrow I quite forgot that there was a Mrs.
Bullfrog in the world. Like many men’s wives, the good lady served her
husband as a steppingstone. I had scrambled out of the coach and was
instinctively settling my cravat, when somebody brushed roughly by me,
and I heard a smart thwack upon the coachman’s ear.
“Take that, you villain!” cried a strange, hoarse voice. “You have
ruined me, you blackguard! I shall never be the woman I have been!”
And then came a second thwack, aimed at the driver’s other ear; but
which missed it, and hit him on the nose, causing a terrible effusion
of blood. Now, who or what fearful apparition was inflicting this
punishment on the poor fellow remained an impenetrable mystery to me.
The blows were given by a person of grisly aspect, with a head almost
bald, and sunken cheeks, apparently of the feminine gender, though
hardly to be classed in the gentler sex. There being no teeth to
modulate the voice, it had a mumbled fierceness, not passionate, but
stern, which absolutely made me quiver like calf’s-foot jelly. Who
could the phantom be? The most awful circumstance of the affair is yet
to be told: for this ogre, or whatever it was, had a riding habit like
Mrs. Bullfrog’s, and also a green silk calash dangling down her back by
the strings. In my terror and turmoil of mind I could imagine nothing
less than that the Old Nick, at the moment of our overturn, had
annihilated my wife and jumped into her petticoats. This idea seemed
the most probable, since I could nowhere perceive Mrs. Bullfrog alive,
nor, though I looked very sharply about the coach, could I detect any
traces of that beloved woman’s dead body. There would have been a
comfort in giving her Christian burial.
“Come, sir, bestir yourself! Help this rascal to set up the coach,”
said the hobgoblin to me; then, with a terrific screech at three
countrymen at a distance, “Here, you fellows, ain’t you ashamed to
stand off when a poor woman is in distress?”
The countrymen, instead of fleeing for their lives, came running at
full speed, and laid hold of the topsy-turvy coach. I, also, though a
small-sized man, went to work like a son of Anak. The coachman, too,
with the blood still streaming from his nose, tugged and toiled most
manfully, dreading, doubtless, that the next blow might break his head.
And yet, bemauled as the poor fellow had been, he seemed to glance at
me with an eye of pity, as if my case were more deplorable than his.
But I cherished a hope that all would turn out a dream, and seized the