Twice-told tales
feather of a sea-gull for a sail. If the voice of ages tell me true,
this is as wise an occupation as to build ships of five hundred tons
and launch them forth upon the main, bound to “Far Cathay.” Yet how
would the merchant sneer at me!
And, after all, can such philosophy be true? Methinks I could find a
thousand arguments against it. Well, then, let yonder shaggy rock
mid-deep in the surf—see! he is somewhat wrathful: he rages and roars
and foams,—let that tall rock be my antagonist, and let me exercise my
oratory like him of Athens who bandied words with an angry sea and got
the victory. My maiden-speech is a triumphant one, for the gentleman in
seaweed has nothing to offer in reply save an immitigable roaring. His
voice, indeed, will be heard a long while after mine is hushed. Once
more I shout and the cliffs reverberate the sound. Oh what joy for a
shy man to feel himself so solitary that he may lift his voice to its
highest pitch without hazard of a listener!—But hush! Be silent, my
good friend! Whence comes that stifled laughter? It was musical, but
how should there be such music in my solitude? Looking upward, I catch
a glimpse of three faces peeping from the summit of the cliff like
angels between me and their native sky.—Ah, fair girls! you may make
yourself merry at my eloquence, but it was my turn to smile when I saw
your white feet in the pool. Let us keep each other’s secrets.
The sunshine has now passed from my hermitage, except a gleam upon the
sand just where it meets the sea. A crowd of gloomy fantasies will come
and haunt me if I tarry longer here in the darkening twilight of these
gray rocks. This is a dismal place in some moods of the mind. Climb we,
therefore, the precipice, and pause a moment on the brink gazing down
into that hollow chamber by the deep where we have been what few can
be—sufficient to our own pastime. Yes, say the word outright:
self-sufficient to our own happiness. How lonesome looks the recess
now, and dreary too, like all other spots where happiness has been!
There lies my shadow in the departing sunshine with its head upon the
sea. I will pelt it with pebbles. A hit! a hit! I clap my hands in
triumph, and see my shadow clapping its unreal hands and claiming the
triumph for itself. What a simpleton must I have been all day, since my
own shadow makes a mock of my fooleries!
Homeward! homeward! It is time to hasten home. It is time—it is time;
for as the sun sinks over the western wave the sea grows melancholy and
the surf has a saddened tone. The distant sails appear astray and not
of earth in their remoteness amid the desolate waste. My spirit wanders
forth afar, but finds no resting-place and comes shivering back. It is
time that I were hence. But grudge me not the day that has been spent
in seclusion which yet was not solitude, since the great sea has been
my companion, and the little sea-birds my friends, and the wind has
told me his secrets, and airy shapes have flitted around me in my
hermitage. Such companionship works an effect upon a man’s character as
if he had been admitted to the society of creatures that are not
mortal. And when, at noontide, I tread the crowded streets, the
influence of this day will still be felt; so that I shall walk among
men kindly and as a brother, with affection and sympathy, but yet shall
not melt into the indistinguishable mass of humankind. I shall think my
own thoughts and feel my own emotions and possess my individuality
unviolated.
But it is good at the eve of such a day to feel and know that there are
men and women in the world. That feeling and that knowledge are mine at
this moment, for on the shore, far below me, the fishing-party have
landed from their skiff and are cooking their scaly prey by a fire of
driftwood kindled in the angle of two rude rocks. The three visionary
girls are likewise there. In the deepening twilight, while the surf is
dashing near their hearth, the ruddy gleam of the fire throws a strange
air of comfort over the wild cove, bestrewn as it is with pebbles and
seaweed and exposed to the “melancholy main.” Moreover, as the smoke
climbs up the precipice, it brings with it a savory smell from a pan of
fried fish and a black kettle of chowder, and reminds me that my dinner
was nothing but bread and water and a tuft of samphire and an apple.
Methinks the party might find room for another guest at that flat rock
which serves them for a table; and if spoons be scarce, I could pick up
a clam-shell on the beach. They see me now; and—the blessing of a
hungry man upon him!—one of them sends up a hospitable shout: “Halloo,
Sir Solitary! Come down and sup with us!” The ladies wave their
handkerchiefs. Can I decline? No; and be it owned, after all my
solitary joys, that this is the sweetest moment of a day by the
seashore.
EDWARD FANE’S ROSEBUD
There is hardly a more difficult exercise of fancy than, while gazing
at a figure of melancholy age, to recreate its youth, and without
entirely obliterating the identity of form and features to restore
those graces which Time has snatched away. Some old people—especially
women—so age-worn and woeful are they, seem never to have been young
and gay. It is easier to conceive that such gloomy phantoms were sent
into the world as withered and decrepit as we behold them now, with
sympathies only for pain and grief, to watch at death-beds and weep at
funerals. Even the sable garments of their widowhood appear essential
to their existence; all their attributes combine to render them
darksome shadows creeping strangely amid the sunshine of human life.
Yet it is no unprofitable task to take one of these doleful creatures
and set Fancy resolutely at work to brighten the dim eye, and darken
the silvery locks, and paint the ashen cheek with rose-color, and
repair the shrunken and crazy form, till a dewy maiden shall be seen in
the old matron’s elbow-chair. The miracle being wrought, then let the
years roll back again, each sadder than the last, and the whole weight
of age and sorrow settle down upon the youthful figure. Wrinkles and
furrows, the handwriting of Time, may thus be deciphered and found to
contain deep lessons of thought and feeling.
Such profit might be derived by a skilful observer from my
much-respected friend the Widow Toothaker, a nurse of great repute who
has breathed the atmosphere of sick-chambers and dying-breaths these
forty years. See! she sits cowering over her lonesome hearth with her
gown and upper petticoat drawn upward, gathering thriftily into her
person the whole warmth of the fire which now at nightfall begins to
dissipate the autumnal chill of her chamber. The blaze quivers
capriciously in front, alternately glimmering into the deepest chasms
of her wrinkled visage, and then permitting a ghostly dimness to mar
the outlines of her venerable figure. And Nurse Toothaker holds a
teaspoon in her right hand with which to stir up the contents of a
tumbler in her left, whence steams a vapory fragrance abhorred of
temperance societies. Now she sips, now stirs, now sips again. Her sad
old heart has need to be revived by the rich infusion of Geneva which
is mixed half and half with hot water in the tumbler. All day long she
has been sitting by a death-pillow, and quitted it for her home only
when the spirit of her patient left the clay and went homeward too. But
now are her melancholy meditations cheered and her torpid blood warmed
and her shoulders lightened of at least twenty ponderous years by a
draught from the true fountain of youth in a case-bottle. It is strange
that men should deem that fount a fable, when its liquor fills more
bottles than the Congress-water.—Sip it again, good nurse, and see
whether a second draught will not take off another score of years, and
perhaps ten more, and show us in your high-backed chair the blooming
damsel who plighted troths with Edward Fane.—Get you gone, Age and
Widowhood!—Come back, unwedded Youth!—But, alas! the charm will not
work. In spite of Fancy’s most potent spell, I can see only an old dame
cowering over the fire, a picture of decay and desolation, while the
November blast roars at her in the chimney and fitful showers rush
suddenly against the window.
Yet there was a time when Rose Grafton—such was the pretty maiden-name
of Nurse Toothaker—possessed beauty that would have gladdened this dim
and dismal chamber as with sunshine. It won for her the heart of Edward
Fane, who has since made so great a figure in the world and is now a
grand old gentleman with powdered hair and as gouty as a lord. These
early lovers thought to have walked hand in hand through life. They had
wept together for Edward’s little sister Mary, whom Rose tended in her
sickness—partly because she was the sweetest child that ever lived or
died, but more for love of him. She was but three years old. Being such
an infant, Death could not embody his terrors in her little corpse; nor
did Rose fear to touch the dead child’s brow, though chill, as she
curled the silken hair around it, nor to take her tiny hand and clasp a
flower within its fingers. Afterward, when she looked through the pane
of glass in the coffin-lid and beheld Mary’s face, it seemed not so
much like death or life as like a wax-work wrought into the perfect
image of a child asleep and dreaming of its mother’s smile. Rose
thought her too fair a thing to be hidden in the grave, and wondered
that an angel did not snatch up little Mary’s coffin and bear the
slumbering babe to heaven and bid her wake immortal. But when the sods
were laid on little Mary, the heart of Rose was troubled. She shuddered
at the fantasy that in grasping the child’s cold fingers her virgin
hand had exchanged a first greeting with mortality and could never lose
the earthy taint. How many a greeting since! But as yet she was a fair
young girl with the dewdrops of fresh feeling in her bosom, and,
instead of “Rose”—which seemed too mature a name for her half-opened
beauty—her lover called her “Rosebud.”
The rosebud was destined never to bloom for Edward Fane. His mother was
a rich and haughty dame with all the aristocratic prejudices of
colonial times. She scorned Rose Grafton’s humble parentage and caused
her son to break his faith, though, had she let him choose, he would
have prized his Rosebud above the richest diamond. The lovers parted,
and have seldom met again. Both may have visited the same mansions, but
not at the same time, for one was bidden to the festal hall and the
other to the sick-chamber; he was the guest of Pleasure and Prosperity,
and she of Anguish. Rose, after their separation, was long secluded
within the dwelling of Mr. Toothaker, whom she married with the
revengeful hope of breaking her false lover’s heart. She went to her
bridegroom’s arms with bitterer tears, they say, than young girls ought
to shed at the threshold of the bridal-chamber. Yet, though her
husband’s head was getting gray and his heart had been chilled with an
autumnal frost, Rose soon began to love him, and wondered at her own
conjugal affection. He was all she had to love; there were no children.
In a year or two poor Mr. Toothaker was visited with a wearisome
infirmity which settled in his joints and made him weaker than a child.
He crept forth about his business, and came home at dinner-time and
eventide, not with the manly tread that gladdens a wife’s heart, but
slowly, feebly, jotting down each dull footstep with a melancholy dub
of his staff. We must pardon his pretty wife if she sometimes blushed
to own him. Her visitors, when they heard him coming, looked for the
appearance of some old, old man, but he dragged his nerveless limbs
into the parlor—and there was Mr. Toothaker! The disease increasing, he
never went into the sunshine save with a staff in his right hand and