Twice-told tales
woodland goddess peeping over my shoulder, or the ghost of some
forsaken maid who had drowned herself for love? Or, in good truth, had
a lovely girl with a warm heart and lips that would bear pressure
stolen softly behind me and thrown her image into the spring?
I watched and waited, but no vision came again. I departed, but with a
spell upon me which drew me back that same afternoon to the haunted
spring. There was the water gushing, the sand sparkling and the sunbeam
glimmering. There the vision was not, but only a great frog, the hermit
of that solitude, who immediately withdrew his speckled snout and made
himself invisible—all except a pair of long legs—beneath a stone.
Methought he had a devilish look. I could have slain him as an
enchanter who kept the mysterious beauty imprisoned in the fountain.
Sad and heavy, I was returning to the village. Between me and the
church-spire rose a little hill, and on its summit a group of trees
insulated from all the rest of the wood, with their own share of
radiance hovering on them from the west and their own solitary shadow
falling to the east. The afternoon being far declined, the sunshine was
almost pensive and the shade almost cheerful; glory and gloom were
mingled in the placid light, as if the spirits of the Day and Evening
had met in friendship under those trees and found themselves akin. I
was admiring the picture when the shape of a young girl emerged from
behind the clump of oaks. My heart knew her: it was the vision, but so
distant and ethereal did she seem, so unmixed with earth, so imbued
with the pensive glory of the spot where she was standing, that my
spirit sunk within me, sadder than before. How could I ever reach her?
While I gazed a sudden shower came pattering down upon the leaves. In a
moment the air was full of brightness, each raindrop catching a portion
of sunlight as it fell, and the whole gentle shower appearing like a
mist, just substantial enough to bear the burden of radiance. A rainbow
vivid as Niagara’s was painted in the air. Its southern limb came down
before the group of trees and enveloped the fair vision as if the hues
of heaven were the only garment for her beauty. When the rainbow
vanished, she who had seemed a part of it was no longer there. Was her
existence absorbed in nature’s loveliest phenomenon, and did her pure
frame dissolve away in the varied light? Yet I would not despair of her
return, for, robed in the rainbow, she was the emblem of Hope.
Thus did the vision leave me, and many a doleful day succeeded to the
parting moment. By the spring and in the wood and on the hill and
through the village, at dewy sunrise, burning noon, and at that magic
hour of sunset, when she had vanished from my sight, I sought her, but
in vain. Weeks came and went, months rolled away, and she appeared not
in them. I imparted my mystery to none, but wandered to and fro or sat
in solitude like one that had caught a glimpse of heaven and could take
no more joy on earth. I withdrew into an inner world where my thoughts
lived and breathed, and the vision in the midst of them. Without
intending it, I became at once the author and hero of a romance,
conjuring up rivals, imagining events, the actions of others and my
own, and experiencing every change of passion, till jealousy and
despair had their end in bliss. Oh, had I the burning fancy of my early
youth with manhood’s colder gift, the power of expression, your hearts,
sweet ladies, should flutter at my tale.
In the middle of January I was summoned home. The day before my
departure, visiting the spots which had been hallowed by the vision, I
found that the spring had a frozen bosom, and nothing but the snow and
a glare of winter sunshine on the hill of the rainbow. “Let me hope,”
thought I, “or my heart will be as icy as the fountain and the whole
world as desolate as this snowy hill.” Most of the day was spent in
preparing for the journey, which was to commence at four o’clock the
next morning. About an hour after supper, when all was in readiness, I
descended from my chamber to the sitting-room to take leave of the old
clergyman and his family with whom I had been an inmate. A gust of wind
blew out my lamp as I passed through the entry.
According to their invariable custom—so pleasant a one when the fire
blazes cheerfully—the family were sitting in the parlor with no other
light than what came from the hearth. As the good clergyman’s scanty
stipend compelled him to use all sorts of economy, the foundation of
his fires was always a large heap of tan, or ground bark, which would
smoulder away from morning till night with a dull warmth and no flame.
This evening the heap of tan was newly put on and surmounted with three
sticks of red oak full of moisture, and a few pieces of dry pine that
had not yet kindled. There was no light except the little that came
sullenly from two half-burnt brands, without even glimmering on the
andirons. But I knew the position of the old minister’s arm-chair, and
also where his wife sat with her knitting-work, and how to avoid his
two daughters—one a stout country lass, and the other a consumptive
girl. Groping through the gloom, I found my own place next to that of
the son, a learned collegian who had come home to keep school in the
village during the winter vacation. I noticed that there was less room
than usual to-night between the collegian’s chair and mine.
As people are always taciturn in the dark, not a word was said for some
time after my entrance. Nothing broke the stillness but the regular
click of the matron’s knitting-needles. At times the fire threw out a
brief and dusky gleam which twinkled on the old man’s glasses and
hovered doubtfully round our circle, but was far too faint to portray
the individuals who composed it. Were we not like ghosts? Dreamy as the
scene was, might it not be a type of the mode in which departed people
who had known and loved each other here would hold communion in
eternity? We were aware of each other’s presence, not by sight nor
sound nor touch, but by an inward consciousness. Would it not be so
among the dead?
The silence was interrupted by the consumptive daughter addressing a
remark to some one in the circle whom she called Rachel. Her tremulous
and decayed accents were answered by a single word, but in a voice that
made me start and bend toward the spot whence it had proceeded. Had I
ever heard that sweet, low tone? If not, why did it rouse up so many
old recollections, or mockeries of such, the shadows of things familiar
yet unknown, and fill my mind with confused images of her features who
had spoken, though buried in the gloom of the parlor? Whom had my heart
recognized, that it throbbed so? I listened to catch her gentle
breathing, and strove by the intensity of my gaze to picture forth a
shape where none was visible.
Suddenly the dry pine caught; the fire blazed up with a ruddy glow, and
where the darkness had been, there was she—the vision of the fountain.
A spirit of radiance only, she had vanished with the rainbow and
appeared again in the firelight, perhaps to flicker with the blaze and
be gone. Yet her cheek was rosy and lifelike, and her features, in the
bright warmth of the room, were even sweeter and tenderer than my
recollection of them. She knew me. The mirthful expression that had
laughed in her eyes and dimpled over her countenance when I beheld her
faint beauty in the fountain was laughing and dimpling there now. One
moment our glance mingled; the next, down rolled the heap of tan upon
the kindled wood, and darkness snatched away that daughter of the
light, and gave her back to me no more!
Fair ladies, there is nothing more to tell. Must the simple mystery be
revealed, then, that Rachel was the daughter of the village squire and
had left home for a boarding-school the morning after I arrived and
returned the day before my departure? If I transformed her to an angel,
it is what every youthful lover does for his mistress. Therein consists
the essence of my story. But slight the change, sweet maids, to make
angels of yourselves.
FANCY’S SHOW-BOX
A MORALITY
What is guilt? A stain upon the soul. And it is a point of vast
interest whether the soul may contract such stains in all their depth
and flagrancy from deeds which may have been plotted and resolved upon,
but which physically have never had existence. Must the fleshly hand
and visible frame of man set its seal to the evil designs of the soul,
in order to give them their entire validity against the sinner? Or,
while none but crimes perpetrated are cognizable before an earthly
tribunal, will guilty thoughts—of which guilty deeds are no more than
shadows,—will these draw down the full weight of a condemning sentence
in the supreme court of eternity? In the solitude of a midnight chamber
or in a desert afar from men or in a church while the body is kneeling
the soul may pollute itself even with those crimes which we are
accustomed to deem altogether carnal. If this be true, it is a fearful
truth.
Let us illustrate the subject by an imaginary example. A venerable
gentleman—one Mr. Smith—who had long been regarded as a pattern of
moral excellence was warming his aged blood with a glass or two of
generous wine. His children being gone forth about their worldly
business and his grandchildren at school, he sat alone in a deep
luxurious arm-chair with his feet beneath a richly-carved mahogany
table. Some old people have a dread of solitude, and when better
company may not be had rejoice even to hear the quiet breathing of a
babe asleep upon the carpet. But Mr. Smith, whose silver hair was the
bright symbol of a life unstained except by such spots as are
inseparable from human nature—he had no need of a babe to protect him
by its purity, nor of a grown person to stand between him and his own
soul. Nevertheless, either manhood must converse with age, or womanhood
must soothe him with gentle cares, or infancy must sport around his
chair, or his thoughts will stray into the misty region of the past and
the old man be chill and sad. Wine will not always cheer him.
Such might have been the case with Mr. Smith, when, through the
brilliant medium of his glass of old Madeira, he beheld three figures
entering the room. These were Fancy, who had assumed the garb and
aspect of an itinerant showman, with a box of pictures on her back; and
Memory, in the likeness of a clerk, with a pen behind her ear, an
inkhorn at her buttonhole and a huge manuscript volume beneath her arm;
and lastly, behind the other two, a person shrouded in a dusky mantle
which concealed both face and form. But Mr. Smith had a shrewd idea
that it was Conscience. How kind of Fancy, Memory and Conscience to
visit the old gentleman just as he was beginning to imagine that the
wine had neither so bright a sparkle nor so excellent a flavor as when
himself and the liquor were less aged! Through the dim length of the
apartment, where crimson curtains muffled the glare of sunshine and
created a rich obscurity, the three guests drew near the silver-haired
old man. Memory, with a finger between the leaves of her huge volume,
placed herself at his right hand; Conscience, with her face still
hidden in the dusky mantle, took her station on the left, so as to be
next his heart; while Fancy set down her picture-box upon the table
with the magnifying-glass convenient to his eye.
We can sketch merely the outlines of two or three out of the many
pictures which at the pulling of a string successively peopled the box
with the semblances of living scenes. One was a moonlight picture, in
the background a lowly dwelling, and in front, partly shadowed by a
tree, yet besprinkled with flakes of radiance, two youthful figures,