Mosses from an old manse
light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop. It
was a projecting window; and on the inside were suspended a variety of
watches, pinchbeck, silver, and one or two of gold, all with their
faces turned from the streets, as if churlishly disinclined to inform
the wayfarers what o’clock it was. Seated within the shop, sidelong to
the window with his pale face bent earnestly over some delicate piece
of mechanism on which was thrown the concentrated lustre of a shade
lamp, appeared a young man.
“What can Owen Warland be about?” muttered old Peter Hovenden, himself
a retired watchmaker, and the former master of this same young man
whose occupation he was now wondering at. “What can the fellow be
about? These six months past I have never come by his shop without
seeing him just as steadily at work as now. It would be a flight beyond
his usual foolery to seek for the perpetual motion; and yet I know
enough of my old business to be certain that what he is now so busy
with is no part of the machinery of a watch.”
“Perhaps, father,” said Annie, without showing much interest in the
question, “Owen is inventing a new kind of timekeeper. I am sure he has
ingenuity enough.”
“Poh, child! He has not the sort of ingenuity to invent anything better
than a Dutch toy,” answered her father, who had formerly been put to
much vexation by Owen Warland’s irregular genius. “A plague on such
ingenuity! All the effect that ever I knew of it was to spoil the
accuracy of some of the best watches in my shop. He would turn the sun
out of its orbit and derange the whole course of time, if, as I said
before, his ingenuity could grasp anything bigger than a child’s toy!”
“Hush, father! He hears you!” whispered Annie, pressing the old man’s
arm. “His ears are as delicate as his feelings; and you know how easily
disturbed they are. Do let us move on.”
So Peter Hovenden and his daughter Annie plodded on without further
conversation, until in a by-street of the town they found themselves
passing the open door of a blacksmith’s shop. Within was seen the
forge, now blazing up and illuminating the high and dusky roof, and now
confining its lustre to a narrow precinct of the coal-strewn floor,
according as the breath of the bellows was puffed forth or again
inhaled into its vast leathern lungs. In the intervals of brightness it
was easy to distinguish objects in remote corners of the shop and the
horseshoes that hung upon the wall; in the momentary gloom the fire
seemed to be glimmering amidst the vagueness of unenclosed space.
Moving about in this red glare and alternate dusk was the figure of the
blacksmith, well worthy to be viewed in so picturesque an aspect of
light and shade, where the bright blaze struggled with the black night,
as if each would have snatched his comely strength from the other. Anon
he drew a white-hot bar of iron from the coals, laid it on the anvil,
uplifted his arm of might, and was soon enveloped in the myriads of
sparks which the strokes of his hammer scattered into the surrounding
gloom.
“Now, that is a pleasant sight,” said the old watchmaker. “I know what
it is to work in gold; but give me the worker in iron after all is said
and done. He spends his labor upon a reality. What say you, daughter
Annie?”
“Pray don’t speak so loud, father,” whispered Annie, “Robert Danforth
will hear you.”
“And what if he should hear me?” said Peter Hovenden. “I say again, it
is a good and a wholesome thing to depend upon main strength and
reality, and to earn one’s bread with the bare and brawny arm of a
blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain puzzled by his wheels within a
wheel, or loses his health or the nicety of his eyesight, as was my
case, and finds himself at middle age, or a little after, past labor at
his own trade and fit for nothing else, yet too poor to live at his
ease. So I say once again, give me main strength for my money. And
then, how it takes the nonsense out of a man! Did you ever hear of a
blacksmith being such a fool as Owen Warland yonder?”
“Well said, uncle Hovenden!” shouted Robert Danforth from the forge, in
a full, deep, merry voice, that made the roof re-echo. “And what says
Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I suppose, will think it a genteeler
business to tinker up a lady’s watch than to forge a horseshoe or make
a gridiron.”
Annie drew her father onward without giving him time for reply.
But we must return to Owen Warland’s shop, and spend more meditation
upon his history and character than either Peter Hovenden, or probably
his daughter Annie, or Owen’s old school-fellow, Robert Danforth, would
have thought due to so slight a subject. From the time that his little
fingers could grasp a penknife, Owen had been remarkable for a delicate
ingenuity, which sometimes produced pretty shapes in wood, principally
figures of flowers and birds, and sometimes seemed to aim at the hidden
mysteries of mechanism. But it was always for purposes of grace, and
never with any mockery of the useful. He did not, like the crowd of
school-boy artisans, construct little windmills on the angle of a barn
or watermills across the neighboring brook. Those who discovered such
peculiarity in the boy as to think it worth their while to observe him
closely, sometimes saw reason to suppose that he was attempting to
imitate the beautiful movements of Nature as exemplified in the flight
of birds or the activity of little animals. It seemed, in fact, a new
development of the love of the beautiful, such as might have made him a
poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was as completely refined
from all utilitarian coarseness as it could have been in either of the
fine arts. He looked with singular distaste at the stiff and regular
processes of ordinary machinery. Being once carried to see a
steam-engine, in the expectation that his intuitive comprehension of
mechanical principles would be gratified, he turned pale and grew sick,
as if something monstrous and unnatural had been presented to him. This
horror was partly owing to the size and terrible energy of the iron
laborer; for the character of Owen’s mind was microscopic, and tended
naturally to the minute, in accordance with his diminutive frame and
the marvellous smallness and delicate power of his fingers. Not that
his sense of beauty was thereby diminished into a sense of prettiness.
The beautiful idea has no relation to size, and may be as perfectly
developed in a space too minute for any but microscopic investigation
as within the ample verge that is measured by the arc of the rainbow.
But, at all events, this characteristic minuteness in his objects and
accomplishments made the world even more incapable than it might
otherwise have been of appreciating Owen Warland’s genius. The boy’s
relatives saw nothing better to be done—as perhaps there was not—than
to bind him apprentice to a watchmaker, hoping that his strange
ingenuity might thus be regulated and put to utilitarian purposes.
Peter Hovenden’s opinion of his apprentice has already been expressed.
He could make nothing of the lad. Owen’s apprehension of the
professional mysteries, it is true, was inconceivably quick; but he
altogether forgot or despised the grand object of a watchmaker’s
business, and cared no more for the measurement of time than if it had
been merged into eternity. So long, however, as he remained under his
old master’s care, Owen’s lack of sturdiness made it possible, by
strict injunctions and sharp oversight, to restrain his creative
eccentricity within bounds; but when his apprenticeship was served out,
and he had taken the little shop which Peter Hovenden’s failing
eyesight compelled him to relinquish, then did people recognize how
unfit a person was Owen Warland to lead old blind Father Time along his
daily course. One of his most rational projects was to connect a
musical operation with the machinery of his watches, so that all the
harsh dissonances of life might be rendered tuneful, and each flitting
moment fall into the abyss of the past in golden drops of harmony. If a
family clock was intrusted to him for repair,—one of those tall,
ancient clocks that have grown nearly allied to human nature by
measuring out the lifetime of many generations,—he would take upon
himself to arrange a dance or funeral procession of figures across its
venerable face, representing twelve mirthful or melancholy hours.
Several freaks of this kind quite destroyed the young watchmaker’s
credit with that steady and matter-of-fact class of people who hold the
opinion that time is not to be trifled with, whether considered as the
medium of advancement and prosperity in this world or preparation for
the next. His custom rapidly diminished—a misfortune, however, that was
probably reckoned among his better accidents by Owen Warland, who was
becoming more and more absorbed in a secret occupation which drew all
his science and manual dexterity into itself, and likewise gave full
employment to the characteristic tendencies of his genius. This pursuit
had already consumed many months.
After the old watchmaker and his pretty daughter had gazed at him out
of the obscurity of the street, Owen Warland was seized with a
fluttering of the nerves, which made his hand tremble too violently to
proceed with such delicate labor as he was now engaged upon.
“It was Annie herself!” murmured he. “I should have known it, by this
throbbing of my heart, before I heard her father’s voice. Ah, how it
throbs! I shall scarcely be able to work again on this exquisite
mechanism to-night. Annie! dearest Annie! thou shouldst give firmness
to my heart and hand, and not shake them thus; for if I strive to put
the very spirit of beauty into form and give it motion, it is for thy
sake alone. O throbbing heart, be quiet! If my labor be thus thwarted,
there will come vague and unsatisfied dreams which will leave me
spiritless to-morrow.”
As he was endeavoring to settle himself again to his task, the shop
door opened and gave admittance to no other than the stalwart figure
which Peter Hovenden had paused to admire, as seen amid the light and
shadow of the blacksmith’s shop. Robert Danforth had brought a little
anvil of his own manufacture, and peculiarly constructed, which the
young artist had recently bespoken. Owen examined the article and
pronounced it fashioned according to his wish.
“Why, yes,” said Robert Danforth, his strong voice filling the shop as
with the sound of a bass viol, “I consider myself equal to anything in
the way of my own trade; though I should have made but a poor figure at
yours with such a fist as this,” added he, laughing, as he laid his
vast hand beside the delicate one of Owen. “But what then? I put more
main strength into one blow of my sledge hammer than all that you have
expended since you were a ’prentice. Is not that the truth?”
“Very probably,” answered the low and slender voice of Owen. “Strength
is an earthly monster. I make no pretensions to it. My force, whatever
there may be of it, is altogether spiritual.”
“Well, but, Owen, what are you about?” asked his old school-fellow,
still in such a hearty volume of tone that it made the artist shrink,
especially as the question related to a subject so sacred as the
absorbing dream of his imagination. “Folks do say that you are trying
to discover the perpetual motion.”
“The perpetual motion? Nonsense!” replied Owen Warland, with a movement
of disgust; for he was full of little petulances. “It can never be
discovered. It is a dream that may delude men whose brains are
mystified with matter, but not me. Besides, if such a discovery were
possible, it would not be worth my while to make it only to have the
secret turned to such purposes as are now effected by steam and water