Twice-told tales
ever was concocted in the laboratory of Nature. Mine is the sole
purpose for which a wise man may desire the possession of the Great
Carbuncle. Immediately on obtaining it--for I have a presentiment, good
people, that the prize is reserved to crown my scientific reputation--I
shall return to Europe, and employ my remaining years in reducing it to
its first elements. A portion of the stone will I grind to impalpable
powder; other parts shall be dissolved in acids, or whatever solvents
will act upon so admirable a composition; and the remainder I design to
melt in the crucible, or set on fire with the blow-pipe. By these
various methods, I shall gain an accurate analysis, and finally bestow
the result of my labours upon the world, in a folio volume.”
“Excellent!” quoth the man with the spectacles. “Nor need you hesitate,
learned Sir, on account of the necessary destruction of the gem; since
the perusal of your folio may teach every mother’s son of us to concoct
a Great Carbuncle of his own.”
“But, verily,” said Master Ichabod Pigsnort, “for mine own part, I
object to the making of these counterfeits, as being calculated to
reduce the marketable value of the true gem. I tell ye frankly, Sirs, I
have an interest in keeping up the price. Here have I quitted my
regular traffic, leaving my warehouse in the care of my clerks, and
putting my credit to great hazard, and furthermore, have put myself to
peril of death or captivity by the accursed heathen savages--and all
this without daring to ask the prayers of the congregation, because the
quest for the Great Carbuncle is deemed little better than a traffic
with the evil one. Now think ye that I would have done this grievous
wrong to my soul, body, reputation and estate, without a reasonable
chance of profit?”
“Not I, pious Master Pigsnort,” said the man with the spectacles. “I
never laid such a great folly to thy charge.”
“Truly, I hope not,” said the merchant. “Now, as touching this Great
Carbuncle, I am free to own that I have never had a glimpse of it, but,
be it only the hundredth part so bright as people tell, it will surely
outvalue the Great Mogul’s best diamond, which he holds at an
incalculable sum; wherefore I am minded to put the Great Carbuncle on
shipboard and voyage with it to England, France, Spain, Italy, or into
heathendom if Providence should send me thither, and, in a word,
dispose of the gem to the best bidder among the potentates of the
earth, that he may place it among his crown-jewels. If any of ye have a
wiser plan, let him expound it.”
“That have I, thou sordid man!” exclaimed the poet. “Dost thou desire
nothing brighter than gold, that thou wouldst transmute all this
ethereal lustre into such dross as thou wallowest in already? For
myself, hiding the jewel under my cloak, I shall hie me back to my
attic-chamber in one of the darksome alleys of London. There night and
day will I gaze upon it. My soul shall drink its radiance; it shall be
diffused throughout my intellectual powers and gleam brightly in every
line of poesy that I indite. Thus long ages after I am gone the
splendor of the Great Carbuncle will blaze around my name.”
“Well said, Master Poet!” cried he of the spectacles. “Hide it under
thy cloak, sayest thou? Why, it will gleam through the holes and make
thee look like a jack-o’-lantern!”
“To think,” ejaculated the lord De Vere, rather to himself than his
companions, the best of whom he held utterly unworthy of his
intercourse—“to think that a fellow in a tattered cloak should talk of
conveying the Great Carbuncle to a garret in Grubb street! Have not I
resolved within myself that the whole earth contains no fitter ornament
for the great hall of my ancestral castle? There shall it flame for
ages, making a noonday of midnight, glittering on the suits of armor,
the banners and escutcheons, that hang around the wall, and keeping
bright the memory of heroes. Wherefore have all other adventurers
sought the prize in vain but that I might win it and make it a symbol
of the glories of our lofty line? And never on the diadem of the White
Mountains did the Great Carbuncle hold a place half so honored as is
reserved for it in the hall of the De Veres.”
“It is a noble thought,” said the cynic, with an obsequious sneer.
“Yet, might I presume to say so, the gem would make a rare sepulchral
lamp, and would display the glories of Your Lordship’s progenitors more
truly in the ancestral vault than in the castle-hall.”
“Nay, forsooth,” observed Matthew, the young rustic, who sat hand in
hand with his bride, “the gentleman has bethought himself of a
profitable use for this bright stone. Hannah here and I are seeking it
for a like purpose.”
“How, fellow?” exclaimed His Lordship, in surprise. “What castle-hall
hast thou to hang it in?”
“No castle,” replied Matthew, “but as neat a cottage as any within
sight of the Crystal Hills. Ye must know, friends, that Hannah and I,
being wedded the last week, have taken up the search of the Great
Carbuncle because we shall need its light in the long winter evenings
and it will be such a pretty thing to show the neighbors when they
visit us! It will shine through the house, so that we may pick up a pin
in any corner, and will set all the windows a-glowing as if there were
a great fire of pine-knots in the chimney. And then how pleasant, when
we awake in the night, to be able to see one another’s faces!”
There was a general smile among the adventurers at the simplicity of
the young couple’s project in regard to this wondrous and invaluable
stone, with which the greatest monarch on earth might have been proud
to adorn his palace. Especially the man with spectacles, who had
sneered at all the company in turn, now twisted his visage into such an
expression of ill-natured mirth that Matthew asked him rather peevishly
what he himself meant to do with the Great Carbuncle.
“The Great Carbuncle!” answered the cynic, with ineffable scorn. “Why,
you blockhead, there is no such thing in _rerum naturâ_. I have come
three thousand miles, and am resolved to set my foot on every peak of
these mountains and poke my head into every chasm for the sole purpose
of demonstrating to the satisfaction of any man one whit less an ass
than thyself that the Great Carbuncle is all a humbug.”
Vain and foolish were the motives that had brought most of the
adventurers to the Crystal Hills, but none so vain, so foolish, and so
impious too, as that of the scoffer with the prodigious spectacles. He
was one of those wretched and evil men whose yearnings are downward to
the darkness instead of heavenward, and who, could they but extinguish
the lights which God hath kindled for us, would count the midnight
gloom their chiefest glory.
As the cynic spoke several of the party were startled by a gleam of red
splendor that showed the huge shapes of the surrounding mountains and
the rock-bestrewn bed of the turbulent river, with an illumination
unlike that of their fire, on the trunks and black boughs of the
forest-trees. They listened for the roll of thunder, but heard nothing,
and were glad that the tempest came not near them. The stars—those
dial-points of heaven—now warned the adventurers to close their eyes on
the blazing logs and open them in dreams to the glow of the Great
Carbuncle.
The young married couple had taken their lodgings in the farthest
corner of the wigwam, and were separated from the rest of the party by
a curtain of curiously-woven twigs such as might have hung in deep
festoons around the bridal-bower of Eve. The modest little wife had
wrought this piece of tapestry while the other guests were talking. She
and her husband fell asleep with hands tenderly clasped, and awoke from
visions of unearthly radiance to meet the more blessed light of one
another’s eyes. They awoke at the same instant and with one happy smile
beaming over their two faces, which grew brighter with their
consciousness of the reality of life and love. But no sooner did she
recollect where they were than the bride peeped through the interstices
of the leafy curtain and saw that the outer room of the hut was
deserted.
“Up, dear Matthew!” cried she, in haste. “The strange folk are all
gone. Up this very minute, or we shall lose the Great Carbuncle!”
In truth, so little did these poor young people deserve the mighty
prize which had lured them thither that they had slept peacefully all
night and till the summits of the hills were glittering with sunshine,
while the other adventurers had tossed their limbs in feverish
wakefulness or dreamed of climbing precipices, and set off to realize
their dreams with the curliest peep of dawn. But Matthew and Hannah
after their calm rest were as light as two young deer, and merely
stopped to say their prayers and wash themselves in a cold pool of the
Amonoosuck, and then to taste a morsel of food ere they turned their
faces to the mountain-side. It was a sweet emblem of conjugal affection
as they toiled up the difficult ascent gathering strength from the
mutual aid which they afforded.
After several little accidents, such as a torn robe, a lost shoe and
the entanglement of Hannah’s hair in a bough, they reached the upper
verge of the forest and were now to pursue a more adventurous course.
The innumerable trunks and heavy foliage of the trees had hitherto shut
in their thoughts, which now shrank affrighted from the region of wind
and cloud and naked rocks and desolate sunshine that rose immeasurably
above them. They gazed back at the obscure wilderness which they had
traversed, and longed to be buried again in its depths rather than
trust themselves to so vast and visible a solitude.
“Shall we go on?” said Matthew, throwing his arm round Hannah’s waist
both to protect her and to comfort his heart by drawing her close to
it.
But the little bride, simple as she was, had a woman’s love of jewels,
and could not forego the hope of possessing the very brightest in the
world, in spite of the perils with which it must be won.
“Let us climb a little higher,” whispered she, yet tremulously, as she
turned her face upward to the lonely sky.
“Come, then,” said Matthew, mustering his manly courage and drawing her
along with him; for she became timid again the moment that he grew
bold.
And upward, accordingly, went the pilgrims of the Great Carbuncle, now
treading upon the tops and thickly-interwoven branches of dwarf pines
which by the growth of centuries, though mossy with age, had barely
reached three feet in altitude. Next they came to masses and fragments
of naked rock heaped confusedly together like a cairn reared by giants
in memory of a giant chief. In this bleak realm of upper air nothing
breathed, nothing grew; there was no life but what was concentred in
their two hearts; they had climbed so high that Nature herself seemed
no longer to keep them company. She lingered beneath them within the
verge of the forest-trees, and sent a farewell glance after her
children as they strayed where her own green footprints had never been.
But soon they were to be hidden from her eye. Densely and dark the
mists began to gather below, casting black spots of shadow on the vast
landscape and sailing heavily to one centre, as if the loftiest
mountain-peak had summoned a council of its kindred clouds. Finally the
vapors welded themselves, as it were, into a mass, presenting the
appearance of a pavement over which the wanderers might have trodden,
but where they would vainly have sought an avenue to the blessed earth
which they had lost. And the lovers yearned to behold that green earth
again—more intensely, alas! than beneath a clouded sky they had ever
desired a glimpse of heaven. They even felt it a relief to their
desolation when the mists, creeping gradually up the mountain,