Mosses from an old manse
One day he encountered an ambitious statesman, and gravely inquired
after the welfare of his boa constrictor; for of that species, Roderick
affirmed, this gentleman’s serpent must needs be, since its appetite
was enormous enough to devour the whole country and constitution. At
another time, he stopped a close-fisted old fellow, of great wealth,
but who skulked about the city in the guise of a scarecrow, with a
patched blue surtout, brown hat, and mouldy boots, scraping pence
together, and picking up rusty nails. Pretending to look earnestly at
this respectable person’s stomach, Roderick assured him that his snake
was a copper-head and had been generated by the immense quantities of
that base metal with which he daily defiled his fingers. Again, he
assaulted a man of rubicund visage, and told him that few bosom
serpents had more of the devil in them than those that breed in the
vats of a distillery. The next whom Roderick honored with his attention
was a distinguished clergyman, who happened just then to be engaged in
a theological controversy, where human wrath was more perceptible than
divine inspiration.
“You have swallowed a snake in a cup of sacramental wine,” quoth he.
“Profane wretch!” exclaimed the divine; but, nevertheless, his hand
stole to his breast.
He met a person of sickly sensibility, who, on some early
disappointment, had retired from the world, and thereafter held no
intercourse with his fellow-men, but brooded sullenly or passionately
over the irrevocable past. This man’s very heart, if Roderick might be
believed, had been changed into a serpent, which would finally torment
both him and itself to death. Observing a married couple, whose
domestic troubles were matter of notoriety, he condoled with both on
having mutually taken a house adder to their bosoms. To an envious
author, who depreciated works which he could never equal, he said that
his snake was the slimiest and filthiest of all the reptile tribe, but
was fortunately without a sting. A man of impure life, and a brazen
face, asking Roderick if there were any serpent in his breast, he told
him that there was, and of the same species that once tortured Don
Rodrigo, the Goth. He took a fair young girl by the hand, and gazing
sadly into her eyes, warned her that she cherished a serpent of the
deadliest kind within her gentle breast; and the world found the truth
of those ominous words, when, a few months afterwards, the poor girl
died of love and shame. Two ladies, rivals in fashionable life who
tormented one another with a thousand little stings of womanish spite,
were given to understand that each of their hearts was a nest of
diminutive snakes, which did quite as much mischief as one great one.
But nothing seemed to please Roderick better than to lay hold of a
person infected with jealousy, which he represented as an enormous
green reptile, with an ice-cold length of body, and the sharpest sting
of any snake save one.
“And what one is that?” asked a by-stander, overhearing him.
It was a dark-browed man who put the question; he had an evasive eye,
which in the course of a dozen years had looked no mortal directly in
the face. There was an ambiguity about this person’s character,—a stain
upon his reputation,—yet none could tell precisely of what nature,
although the city gossips, male and female, whispered the most
atrocious surmises. Until a recent period he had followed the sea, and
was, in fact, the very shipmaster whom George Herkimer had encountered,
under such singular circumstances, in the Grecian Archipelago.
“What bosom serpent has the sharpest sting?” repeated this man; but he
put the question as if by a reluctant necessity, and grew pale while he
was uttering it.
“Why need you ask?” replied Roderick, with a look of dark intelligence.
“Look into your own breast. Hark! my serpent bestirs himself! He
acknowledges the presence of a master fiend!”
And then, as the by-standers afterwards affirmed, a hissing sound was
heard, apparently in Roderick Elliston’s breast. It was said, too, that
an answering hiss came from the vitals of the shipmaster, as if a snake
were actually lurking there and had been aroused by the call of its
brother reptile. If there were in fact any such sound, it might have
been caused by a malicious exercise of ventriloquism on the part of
Roderick.
Thus making his own actual serpent—if a serpent there actually was in
his bosom—the type of each man’s fatal error, or hoarded sin, or
unquiet conscience, and striking his sting so unremorsefully into the
sorest spot, we may well imagine that Roderick became the pest of the
city. Nobody could elude him—none could withstand him. He grappled with
the ugliest truth that he could lay his hand on, and compelled his
adversary to do the same. Strange spectacle in human life where it is
the instinctive effort of one and all to hide those sad realities, and
leave them undisturbed beneath a heap of superficial topics which
constitute the materials of intercourse between man and man! It was not
to be tolerated that Roderick Elliston should break through the tacit
compact by which the world has done its best to secure repose without
relinquishing evil. The victims of his malicious remarks, it is true,
had brothers enough to keep them in countenance; for, by Roderick’s
theory, every mortal bosom harbored either a brood of small serpents or
one overgrown monster that had devoured all the rest. Still the city
could not bear this new apostle. It was demanded by nearly all, and
particularly by the most respectable inhabitants, that Roderick should
no longer be permitted to violate the received rules of decorum by
obtruding his own bosom serpent to the public gaze, and dragging those
of decent people from their lurking places.
Accordingly, his relatives interfered and placed him in a private
asylum for the insane. When the news was noised abroad, it was observed
that many persons walked the streets with freer countenances and
covered their breasts less carefully with their hands.
His confinement, however, although it contributed not a little to the
peace of the town, operated unfavorably upon Roderick himself. In
solitude his melancholy grew more black and sullen. He spent whole
days—indeed, it was his sole occupation—in communing with the serpent.
A conversation was sustained, in which, as it seemed, the hidden
monster bore a part, though unintelligibly to the listeners, and
inaudible except in a hiss. Singular as it may appear, the sufferer had
now contracted a sort of affection for his tormentor, mingled, however,
with the intensest loathing and horror. Nor were such discordant
emotions incompatible. Each, on the contrary, imparted strength and
poignancy to its opposite. Horrible love—horrible antipathy—embracing
one another in his bosom, and both concentrating themselves upon a
being that had crept into his vitals or been engendered there, and
which was nourished with his food, and lived upon his life, and was as
intimate with him as his own heart, and yet was the foulest of all
created things! But not the less was it the true type of a morbid
nature.
Sometimes, in his moments of rage and bitter hatred against the snake
and himself, Roderick determined to be the death of him, even at the
expense of his own life. Once he attempted it by starvation; but, while
the wretched man was on the point of famishing, the monster seemed to
feed upon his heart, and to thrive and wax gamesome, as if it were his
sweetest and most congenial diet. Then he privily took a dose of active
poison, imagining that it would not fail to kill either himself or the
devil that possessed him, or both together. Another mistake; for if
Roderick had not yet been destroyed by his own poisoned heart nor the
snake by gnawing it, they had little to fear from arsenic or corrosive
sublimate. Indeed, the venomous pest appeared to operate as an antidote
against all other poisons. The physicians tried to suffocate the fiend
with tobacco smoke. He breathed it as freely as if it were his native
atmosphere. Again, they drugged their patient with opium and drenched
him with intoxicating liquors, hoping that the snake might thus be
reduced to stupor and perhaps be ejected from the stomach. They
succeeded in rendering Roderick insensible; but, placing their hands
upon his breast, they were inexpressibly horror stricken to feel the
monster wriggling, twining, and darting to and fro within his narrow
limits, evidently enlivened by the opium or alcohol, and incited to
unusual feats of activity. Thenceforth they gave up all attempts at
cure or palliation. The doomed sufferer submitted to his fate, resumed
his former loathsome affection for the bosom fiend, and spent whole
miserable days before a looking-glass, with his mouth wide open,
watching, in hope and horror, to catch a glimpse of the snake’s head
far down within his throat. It is supposed that he succeeded; for the
attendants once heard a frenzied shout, and, rushing into the room,
found Roderick lifeless upon the floor.
He was kept but little longer under restraint. After minute
investigation, the medical directors of the asylum decided that his
mental disease did not amount to insanity, nor would warrant his
confinement, especially as its influence upon his spirits was
unfavorable, and might produce the evil which it was meant to remedy.
His eccentricities were doubtless great; he had habitually violated
many of the customs and prejudices of society; but the world was not,
without surer ground, entitled to treat him as a madman. On this
decision of such competent authority Roderick was released, and had
returned to his native city the very day before his encounter with
George Herkimer.
As soon as possible after learning these particulars the sculptor,
together with a sad and tremulous companion, sought Elliston at his own
house. It was a large, sombre edifice of wood, with pilasters and a
balcony, and was divided from one of the principal streets by a terrace
of three elevations, which was ascended by successive flights of stone
steps. Some immense old elms almost concealed the front of the mansion.
This spacious and once magnificent family residence was built by a
grandee of the race early in the past century, at which epoch, land
being of small comparative value, the garden and other grounds had
formed quite an extensive domain. Although a portion of the ancestral
heritage had been alienated, there was still a shadowy enclosure in the
rear of the mansion where a student, or a dreamer, or a man of stricken
heart might lie all day upon the grass, amid the solitude of murmuring
boughs, and forget that a city had grown up around him.
Into this retirement the sculptor and his companion were ushered by
Scipio, the old black servant, whose wrinkled visage grew almost sunny
with intelligence and joy as he paid his humble greetings to one of the
two visitors.
“Remain in the arbor,” whispered the sculptor to the figure that leaned
upon his arm. “You will know whether, and when, to make your
appearance.”
“God will teach me,” was the reply. “May He support me too!”
Roderick was reclining on the margin of a fountain which gushed into
the fleckered sunshine with the same clear sparkle and the same voice
of airy quietude as when trees of primeval growth flung their shadows
cross its bosom. How strange is the life of a fountain!—born at every
moment, yet of an age coeval with the rocks, and far surpassing the
venerable antiquity of a forest.
“You are come! I have expected you,” said Elliston, when he became
aware of the sculptor’s presence.
His manner was very different from that of the preceding day—quiet,
courteous, and, as Herkimer thought, watchful both over his guest and