Twice-told tales
his left on his wife’s shoulder, bearing heavily downward like a dead
man’s hand. Thus, a slender woman still looking maiden-like, she
supported his tall, broad-chested frame along the pathway of their
little garden, and plucked the roses for her gray-haired husband, and
spoke soothingly as to an infant. His mind was palsied with his body;
its utmost energy was peevishness. In a few months more she helped him
up the staircase with a pause at every step, and a longer one upon the
landing-place, and a heavy glance behind as he crossed the threshold of
his chamber. He knew, poor man! that the precincts of those four walls
would thenceforth be his world—his world, his home, his tomb, at once a
dwelling-and a burial-place—till he were borne to a darker and a
narrower one. But Rose was with him in the tomb. He leaned upon her in
his daily passage from the bed to the chair by the fireside, and back
again from the weary chair to the joyless bed—his bed and hers, their
marriage-bed—till even this short journey ceased and his head lay all
day upon the pillow and hers all night beside it. How long poor Mr.
Toothaker was kept in misery! Death seemed to draw near the door, and
often to lift the latch, and sometimes to thrust his ugly skull into
the chamber, nodding to Rose and pointing at her husband, but still
delayed to enter. “This bedridden wretch cannot escape me,” quoth
Death. “I will go forth and run a race with the swift and fight a
battle with the strong, and come back for Toothaker at my leisure.” Oh,
when the deliverer came so near, in the dull anguish of her worn-out
sympathies did she never long to cry, “Death, come in”?
But no; we have no right to ascribe such a wish to our friend Rose. She
never failed in a wife’s duty to her poor sick husband. She murmured
not though a glimpse of the sunny sky was as strange to her as him, nor
answered peevishly though his complaining accents roused her from
sweetest dream only to share his wretchedness. He knew her faith, yet
nourished a cankered jealousy; and when the slow disease had chilled
all his heart save one lukewarm spot which Death’s frozen fingers were
searching for, his last words were, “What would my Rose have done for
her first love, if she has been so true and kind to a sick old man like
me?” And then his poor soul crept away and left the body lifeless,
though hardly more so than for years before, and Rose a widow, though
in truth it was the wedding-night that widowed her. She felt glad, it
must be owned, when Mr. Toothaker was buried, because his corpse had
retained such a likeness to the man half alive that she hearkened for
the sad murmur of his voice bidding her shift his pillow. But all
through the next winter, though the grave had held him many a month,
she fancied him calling from that cold bed, “Rose, Rose! Come put a
blanket on my feet!”
So now the Rosebud was the widow Toothaker. Her troubles had come
early, and, tedious as they seemed, had passed before all her bloom was
fled. She was still fair enough to captivate a bachelor, or with a
widow’s cheerful gravity she might have won a widower, stealing into
his heart in the very guise of his dead wife. But the widow Toothaker
had no such projects. By her watchings and continual cares her heart
had become knit to her first husband with a constancy which changed its
very nature and made her love him for his infirmities, and infirmity
for his sake. When the palsied old man was gone, even her early lover
could not have supplied his place. She had dwelt in a sick-chamber and
been the companion of a half-dead wretch till she could scarcely
breathe in a free air and felt ill at ease with the healthy and the
happy. She missed the fragrance of the doctor’s stuff. She walked the
chamber with a noiseless footfall. If visitors came in, she spoke in
soft and soothing accents, and was startled and shocked by their loud
voices. Often in the lonesome evening she looked timorously from the
fireside to the bed, with almost a hope of recognizing a ghastly face
upon the pillow. Then went her thoughts sadly to her husband’s grave.
If one impatient throb had wronged him in his lifetime, if she had
secretly repined because her buoyant youth was imprisoned with his
torpid age, if ever while slumbering beside him a treacherous dream had
admitted another into her heart,—yet the sick man had been preparing a
revenge which the dead now claimed. On his painful pillow he had cast a
spell around her; his groans and misery had proved more captivating
charms than gayety and youthful grace; in his semblance Disease itself
had won the Rosebud for a bride, nor could his death dissolve the
nuptials. By that indissoluble bond she had gained a home in every
sick-chamber, and nowhere else; there were her brethren and sisters;
thither her husband summoned her with that voice which had seemed to
issue from the grave of Toothaker. At length she recognized her
destiny.
We have beheld her as the maid, the wife, the widow; now we see her in
a separate and insulated character: she was in all her attributes Nurse
Toothaker. And Nurse Toothaker alone, with her own shrivelled lips,
could make known her experience in that capacity. What a history might
she record of the great sicknesses in which she has gone hand in hand
with the exterminating angel! She remembers when the small-pox hoisted
a red banner on almost every house along the street. She has witnessed
when the typhus fever swept off a whole household, young and old, all
but a lonely mother, who vainly shrieked to follow her last loved one.
Where would be Death’s triumph if none lived to weep? She can speak of
strange maladies that have broken out as if spontaneously, but were
found to have been imported from foreign lands with rich silks and
other merchandise, the costliest portion of the cargo. And once, she
recollects, the people died of what was considered a new pestilence,
till the doctors traced it to the ancient grave of a young girl who
thus caused many deaths a hundred years after her own burial. Strange
that such black mischief should lurk in a maiden’s grave! She loves to
tell how strong men fight with fiery fevers, utterly refusing to give
up their breath, and how consumptive virgins fade out of the world,
scarcely reluctant, as if their lovers were wooing them to a far
country.—Tell us, thou fearful woman; tell us the death-secrets. Fain
would I search out the meaning of words faintly gasped with
intermingled sobs and broken sentences half-audibly spoken between
earth and the judgment-seat.
An awful woman! She is the patron-saint of young physicians and the
bosom-friend of old ones. In the mansions where she enters the inmates
provide themselves black garments; the coffin-maker follows her, and
the bell tolls as she comes away from the threshold. Death himself has
met her at so many a bedside that he puts forth his bony hand to greet
Nurse Toothaker. She is an awful woman. And oh, is it conceivable that
this handmaid of human infirmity and affliction—so darkly stained, so
thoroughly imbued with all that is saddest in the doom of mortals—can
ever again be bright and gladsome even though bathed in the sunshine of
eternity? By her long communion with woe has she not forfeited her
inheritance of immortal joy? Does any germ of bliss survive within her?
Hark! an eager knocking st Nurse Toothaker’s door. She starts from her
drowsy reverie, sets aside the empty tumbler and teaspoon, and lights a
lamp at the dim embers of the fire. “Rap, rap, rap!” again, and she
hurries adown the staircase, wondering which of her friends can be at
death’s door now, since there is such an earnest messenger at Nurse
Toothaker’s. Again the peal resounds just as her hand is on the lock.
“Be quick, Nurse Toothaker!” cries a man on the doorstep. “Old General
Fane is taken with the gout in his stomach and has sent for you to
watch by his death-bed. Make haste, for there is no time to
lose.”—“Fane! Edward Fane! And has he sent for me at last? I am ready.
I will get on my cloak and begone. So,” adds the sable-gowned,
ashen-visaged, funereal old figure, “Edward Fane remembers his
Rosebud.”
Our question is answered. There is a germ of bliss within her. Her
long-hoarded constancy, her memory of the bliss that was remaining amid
the gloom of her after-life like a sweet-smelling flower in a coffin,
is a symbol that all may be renewed. In some happier clime the Rosebud
may revive again with all the dewdrops in its bosom.
THE THREEFOLD DESTINY
A FAËRY LEGEND
I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far
as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in
which the spirit and mechanism of the faëry legend should be combined
with the characters and manners of familiar life. In the little tale
which follows a subdued tinge of the wild and wonderful is thrown over
a sketch of New England personages and scenery, yet, it is hoped,
without entirely obliterating the sober hues of nature. Rather than a
story of events claiming to be real, it may be considered as an
allegory such as the writers of the last century would have expressed
in the shape of an Eastern tale, but to which I have endeavored to give
a more lifelike warmth than could be infused into those fanciful
productions.
In the twilight of a summer eve a tall dark figure over which long and
remote travel had thrown an outlandish aspect was entering a village
not in “faëry londe,” but within our own familiar boundaries. The staff
on which this traveller leaned had been his companion from the spot
where it grew in the jungles of Hindostan; the hat that overshadowed
his sombre brow, had shielded him from the suns of Spain; but his cheek
had been blackened by the red-hot wind of an Arabian desert and had
felt the frozen breath of an Arctic region. Long sojourning amid wild
and dangerous men, he still wore beneath his vest the ataghan which he
had once struck into the throat of a Turkish robber. In every foreign
clime he had lost something of his New England characteristics, and
perhaps from every people he had unconsciously borrowed a new
peculiarity; so that when the world-wanderer again trod the street of
his native village it is no wonder that he passed unrecognized, though
exciting the gaze and curiosity of all. Yet, as his arm casually
touched that of a young woman who was wending her way to an evening
lecture, she started and almost uttered a cry.
“Ralph Cranfield!” was the name that she half articulated.
“Can that be my old playmate Faith Egerton?” thought the traveller,
looking round at her figure, but without pausing.
Ralph Cranfield from his youth upward had felt himself marked out for a
high destiny. He had imbibed the idea—we say not whether it were
revealed to him by witchcraft or in a dream of prophecy, or that his
brooding fancy had palmed its own dictates upon him as the oracles of a
sybil, but he had imbibed the idea, and held it firmest among his
articles of faith—that three marvellous events of his life were to be
confirmed to him by three signs.
The first of these three fatalities, and perhaps the one on which his
youthful imagination had dwelt most fondly, was the discovery of the
maid who alone of all the maids on earth could make him happy by her
love. He was to roam around the world till he should meet a beautiful
woman wearing on her bosom a jewel in the shape of a heart—whether of
pearl or ruby or emerald or carbuncle or a changeful opal, or perhaps a
priceless diamond, Ralph Cranfield little cared, so long as it were a
heart of one peculiar shape. On encountering this lovely stranger he
was bound to address her thus: “Maiden, I have brought you a heavy
heart. May I rest its weight on you?” And if she were his fated