Mosses from an old manse
caused him to see monstrous faces in the household fire, and dragons in
the clouds of sunset, and fiends in the guise of beautiful women, and
something ugly or wicked beneath all the pleasant surfaces of nature.
His neighbor at table was one who, in his early youth, had trusted
mankind too much, and hoped too highly in their behalf, and, in meeting
with many disappointments, had become desperately soured. For several
years back this misanthrope bad employed himself in accumulating
motives for hating and despising his race,—such as murder, lust,
treachery, ingratitude, faithlessness of trusted friends, instinctive
vices of children, impurity of women, hidden guilt in men of saint-like
aspect,—and, in short, all manner of black realities that sought to
decorate themselves with outward grace or glory. But at every atrocious
fact that was added to his catalogue, at every increase of the sad
knowledge which he spent his life to collect, the native impulses of
the poor man’s loving and confiding heart made him groan with anguish.
Next, with his heavy brow bent downward, there stole into the hall a
man naturally earnest and impassioned, who, from his immemorial
infancy, had felt the consciousness of a high message to the world;
but, essaying to deliver it, had found either no voice or form of
speech, or else no ears to listen. Therefore his whole life was a
bitter questioning of himself: “Why have not men acknowledged my
mission? Am I not a self-deluding fool? What business have I on earth?
Where is my grave?” Throughout the festival, he quaffed frequent
draughts from the sepulchral urn of wine, hoping thus to quench the
celestial fire that tortured his own breast and could not benefit his
race.
Then there entered, having flung away a ticket for a ball, a gay
gallant of yesterday, who had found four or five wrinkles in his brow,
and more gray hairs than he could well number on his head. Endowed with
sense and feeling, he had nevertheless spent his youth in folly, but
had reached at last that dreary point in life where Folly quits us of
her own accord, leaving us to make friends with Wisdom if we can. Thus,
cold and desolate, he had come to seek Wisdom at the banquet, and
wondered if the skeleton were she. To eke out the company, the stewards
had invited a distressed poet from his home in the almshouse, and a
melancholy idiot from the street-corner. The latter had just the
glimmering of sense that was sufficient to make him conscious of a
vacancy, which the poor fellow, all his life long, had mistily sought
to fill up with intelligence, wandering up and down the streets, and
groaning miserably because his attempts were ineffectual. The only lady
in the hall was one who had fallen short of absolute and perfect
beauty, merely by the trifling defect of a slight cast in her left eye.
But this blemish, minute as it was, so shocked the pure ideal of her
soul, rather than her vanity, that she passed her life in solitude, and
veiled her countenance even from her own gaze. So the skeleton sat
shrouded at one end of the table, and this poor lady at the other.
One other guest remains to be described. He was a young man of smooth
brow, fair cheek, and fashionable mien. So far as his exterior
developed him, he might much more suitably have found a place at some
merry Christmas table, than have been numbered among the blighted,
fate-stricken, fancy-tortured set of ill-starred banqueters. Murmurs
arose among the guests as they noted, the glance of general scrutiny
which the intruder threw over his companions. What had he to do among
them? Why did not the skeleton of the dead founder of the feast unbend
its rattling joints, arise, and motion the unwelcome stranger from the
board?
“Shameful!” said the morbid man, while a new ulcer broke out in his
heart. “He comes to mock us! we shall be the jest of his tavern friends
I—he will make a farce of our miseries, and bring it out upon the
stage!”
“O, never mind him!” said the hypochondriac, smiling sourly. “He shall
feast from yonder tureen of viper-soup; and if there is a fricassee of
scorpions on the table, pray let him have his share of it. For the
dessert, he shall taste the apples of Sodom, then, if he like our
Christmas fare, let him return again next year!”
“Trouble him not,” murmured the melancholy man, with gentleness. “What
matters it whether the consciousness of misery come a few years sooner
or later? If this youth deem himself happy now, yet let him sit with us
for the sake of the wretchedness to come.”
The poor idiot approached the young man with that mournful aspect of
vacant inquiry which his face continually wore, and which caused people
to say that he was always in search of his missing wits. After no
little examination he touched the stranger’s hand, but immediately drew
back his own, shaking his head and shivering.
“Cold, cold, cold!” muttered the idiot.
The young man shivered too, and smiled.
“Gentlemen, and you, madam,” said one of the stewards of the festival,
“do not conceive so ill either of our caution or judgment, as to
imagine that we have admitted this young stranger—Gervayse Hastings by
name—without a full investigation and thoughtful balance of his claims.
Trust me, not a guest at the table is better entitled to his seat.”
The steward’s guaranty was perforce satisfactory. The company,
therefore, took their places, and addressed themselves to the serious
business of the feast, but were soon disturbed by the hypochondriac,
who thrust back his chair, complaining that a dish of stewed toads and
vipers was set before him, and that there was green ditchwater in his
cup of wine. This mistake being amended, he quietly resumed his seat.
The wine, as it flowed freely from the sepulchral urn, seemed to come
imbued with all gloomy inspirations; so that its influence was not to
cheer, but either to sink the revellers into a deeper melancholy, or
elevate their spirits to an enthusiasm of wretchedness. The
conversation was various. They told sad stories about people who might
have been Worthy guests at such a festival as the present. They talked
of grisly incidents in human history; of strange crimes, which, if
truly considered, were but convulsions of agony; of some lives that had
been altogether wretched, and of others, which, wearing a general
semblance of happiness, had yet been deformed, sooner or later, by
misfortune, as by the intrusion of a grim face at a banquet; of
death-bed scenes, and what dark intimations might be gathered from the
words of dying men; of suicide, and whether the more eligible mode were
by halter, knife, poison, drowning, gradual starvation, or the fumes of
charcoal. The majority of the guests, as is the custom with people
thoroughly and profoundly sick at heart, were anxious to make their own
woes the theme of discussion, and prove themselves most excellent in
anguish. The misanthropist went deep into the philosophy of evil, and
wandered about in the darkness, with now and then a gleam of discolored
light hovering on ghastly shapes and horrid scenery. Many a miserable
thought, such as men have stumbled upon from age to age, did he now
rake up again, and gloat over it as an inestimable gem, a diamond, a
treasure far preferable to those bright, spiritual revelations of a
better world, which are like precious stones from heaven’s pavement.
And then, amid his lore of wretchedness he hid his face and wept.
It was a festival at which the woful man of Uz might suitably have been
a guest, together with all, in each succeeding age, who have tasted
deepest of the bitterness of life. And be it said, too, that every son
or daughter of woman, however favored with happy fortune, might, at one
sad moment or another, have claimed the privilege of a stricken heart,
to sit down at this table. But, throughout the feast, it was remarked
that the young stranger, Gervayse Hastings, was unsuccessful in his
attempts to catch its pervading spirit. At any deep, strong thought
that found utterance, and which was torn out, as it were, from the
saddest recesses of human consciousness, he looked mystified and
bewildered; even more than the poor idiot, who seemed to grasp at such
things with his earnest heart, and thus occasionally to comprehend
them. The young man’s conversation was of a colder and lighter kind,
often brilliant, but lacking the powerful characteristics of a nature
that had been developed by suffering.
“Sir,” said the misanthropist, bluntly, in reply to some observation by
Gervayse Hastings, “pray do not address me again. We have no right to
talk together. Our minds have nothing in common. By what claim you
appear at this banquet I cannot guess; but methinks, to a man who could
say what you have just now said, my companions and myself must seem no
more than shadows flickering on the wall. And precisely such a shadow
are you to us.”
The young man smiled and bowed, but, drawing himself back in his chair,
he buttoned his coat over his breast, as if the banqueting-ball were
growing chill. Again the idiot fixed his melancholy stare upon the
youth, and murmured, “Cold! cold! cold!”
The banquet drew to its conclusion, and the guests departed. Scarcely
had they stepped across the threshold of the hall, when the scene that
had there passed seemed like the vision of a sick fancy, or an
exhalation from a stagnant heart. Now and then, however, during the
year that ensued, these melancholy people caught glimpses of one
another, transient, indeed, but enough to prove that they walked the
earth with the ordinary allotment of reality. Sometimes a pair of them
came face to face, while stealing through the evening twilight,
enveloped in their sable cloaks. Sometimes they casually met in
churchyards. Once, also, it happened that two of the dismal banqueters
mutually started at recognizing each other in the noonday sunshine of a
crowded street, stalking there like ghosts astray. Doubtless they
wondered why the skeleton did not come abroad at noonday too.
But whenever the necessity of their affairs compelled these Christmas
guests into the bustling world, they were sure to encounter the young
man who had so unaccountably been admitted to the festival. They saw
him among the gay and fortunate; they caught the sunny sparkle of his
eye; they heard the light and careless tones of his voice, and muttered
to themselves with such indignation as only the aristocracy of
wretchedness could kindle, “The traitor! The vile impostor! Providence,
in its own good time, may give him a right to feast among us!” But the
young man’s unabashed eye dwelt upon their gloomy figures as they
passed him, seeming to say, perchance with somewhat of a sneer, “First,
know my secret then, measure your claims with mine!”
The step of Time stole onward, and soon brought merry Christmas round
again, with glad and solemn worship in the churches, and sports, games,
festivals, and everywhere the bright face of Joy beside the household
fire. Again likewise the hall, with its curtains of dusky purple, was
illuminated by the death-torches gleaming on the sepulchral decorations
of the banquet. The veiled, skeleton sat in state, lifting the
cypress-wreath above its head, as the guerdon of some guest illustrious
in the qualifications which there claimed precedence. As the stewards
deemed the world inexhaustible in misery, and were desirous of
recognizing it in all its forms, they had not seen fit to reassemble
the company of the former year. New faces now threw their gloom across
the table.
There was a man of nice conscience, who bore a blood-stain in his
heart—the death of a fellow-creature—which, for his more exquisite
torture, had chanced with such a peculiarity of circumstances, that he
could not absolutely determine whether his will had entered into the