There is a certain church, in the city of New York which I have always
regarded with peculiar interest on account of a marriage there
solemnized under very singular circumstances in my grandmother’s
girlhood. That venerable lady chanced to be a spectator of the scene,
and ever after made it her favorite narrative. Whether the edifice now
standing on the same site be the identical one to which she referred I
am not antiquarian enough to know, nor would it be worth while to
correct myself, perhaps, of an agreeable error by reading the date of
its erection on the tablet over the door. It is a stately church
surrounded by an enclosure of the loveliest green, within which appear
urns, pillars, obelisks, and other forms of monumental marble, the
tributes of private affection or more splendid memorials of historic
dust. With such a place, though the tumult of the city rolls beneath
its tower, one would be willing to connect some legendary interest.
The marriage might be considered as the result of an early engagement,
though there had been two intermediate weddings on the lady’s part and
forty years of celibacy on that of the gentleman. At sixty-five Mr.
Ellenwood was a shy but not quite a secluded man; selfish, like all men
who brood over their own hearts, yet manifesting on rare occasions a
vein of generous sentiment; a scholar throughout life, though always an
indolent one, because his studies had no definite object either of
public advantage or personal ambition; a gentleman, high-bred and
fastidiously delicate, yet sometimes requiring a considerable
relaxation in his behalf of the common rules of society. In truth,
there were so many anomalies in his character, and, though shrinking
with diseased sensibility from public notice, it had been his fatality
so often to become the topic of the day by some wild eccentricity of
conduct, that people searched his lineage for a hereditary taint of
insanity. But there was no need of this. His caprices had their origin
in a mind that lacked the support of an engrossing purpose, and in
feelings that preyed upon themselves for want of other food. If he were
mad, it was the consequence, and not the cause, of an aimless and
abortive life.
The widow was as complete a contrast to her third bridegroom in
everything but age as can well be conceived. Compelled to relinquish
her first engagement, she had been united to a man of twice her own
years, to whom she became an exemplary wife, and by whose death she was
left in possession of a splendid fortune. A Southern gentleman
considerably younger than herself succeeded to her hand and carried her
to Charleston, where after many uncomfortable years she found herself
again a widow. It would have been singular if any uncommon delicacy of
feeling had survived through such a life as Mrs. Dabney’s; it could not
but be crushed and killed by her early disappointment, the cold duty of
her first marriage, the dislocation of the heart’s principles
consequent on a second union, and the unkindness of her Southern
husband, which had inevitably driven her to connect the idea of his
death with that of her comfort. To be brief, she was that wisest but
unloveliest variety of woman, a philosopher, bearing troubles of the
heart with equanimity, dispensing with all that should have been her
happiness and making the best of what remained. Sage in most matters,
the widow was perhaps the more amiable for the one frailty that made
her ridiculous. Being childless, she could not remain beautiful by
proxy in the person of a daughter; she therefore refused to grow old
and ugly on any consideration; she struggled with Time, and held fast
her roses in spite of him, till the venerable thief appeared to have
relinquished the spoil as not worth the trouble of acquiring it.
The approaching marriage of this woman of the world with such an
unworldly man as Mr. Ellenwood was announced soon after Mrs. Dabney’s
return to her native city. Superficial observers, and deeper ones,
seemed to concur in supposing that the lady must have borne no inactive
part in arranging the affair; there were considerations of expediency
which she would be far more likely to appreciate than Mr. Ellenwood,
and there was just the specious phantom of sentiment and romance in
this late union of two early lovers which sometimes makes a fool of a
woman who has lost her true feelings among the accidents of life. All
the wonder was how the gentleman, with his lack of worldly wisdom and
agonizing consciousness of ridicule, could have been induced to take a
measure at once so prudent and so laughable. But while people talked
the wedding-day arrived. The ceremony was to be solemnized according to
the Episcopalian forms and in open church, with a degree of publicity
that attracted many spectators, who occupied the front seats of the
galleries and the pews near the altar and along the broad aisle. It had
been arranged, or possibly it was the custom of the day, that the
parties should proceed separately to church. By some accident the
bridegroom was a little less punctual than the widow and her bridal
attendants, with whose arrival, after this tedious but necessary
preface, the action of our tale may be said to commence.
The clumsy wheels of several old-fashioned coaches were heard, and the
gentlemen and ladies composing the bridal-party came through the church
door with the sudden and gladsome effect of a burst of sunshine. The
whole group, except the principal figure, was made up of youth and
gayety. As they streamed up the broad aisle, while the pews and pillars
seemed to brighten on either side, their steps were as buoyant as if
they mistook the church for a ball-room and were ready to dance hand in
hand to the altar. So brilliant was the spectacle that few took notice
of a singular phenomenon that had marked its entrance. At the moment
when the bride’s foot touched the threshold the bell swung heavily in
the tower above her and sent forth its deepest knell. The vibrations
died away, and returned with prolonged solemnity as she entered the
body of the church.
“Good heavens! What an omen!” whispered a young lady to her lover.
“On my honor,” replied the gentleman, “I believe the bell has the good
taste to toll of its own accord. What has she to do with weddings? If
you, dearest Julia, were approaching the altar, the bell would ring out
its merriest peal. It has only a funeral-knell for her.”
The bride and most of her company had been too much occupied with the
bustle of entrance to hear the first boding stroke of the bell—or, at
least, to reflect on the singularity of such a welcome to the altar.
They therefore continued to advance with undiminished gayety. The
gorgeous dresses of the time—the crimson velvet coats, the gold-laced
hats, the hoop-petticoats, the silk, satin, brocade and embroidery, the
buckles, canes and swords, all displayed to the best advantage on
persons suited to such finery—made the group appear more like a
bright-colored picture than anything real. But by what perversity of
taste had the artist represented his principal figure as so wrinkled
and decayed, while yet he had decked her out in the brightest splendor
of attire, as if the loveliest maiden had suddenly withered into age
and become a moral to the beautiful around her? On they went, however,
and had glittered along about a third of the aisle, when another stroke
of the bell seemed to fill the church with a visible gloom, dimming and
obscuring the bright-pageant till it shone forth again as from a mist.
This time the party wavered, stopped and huddled closer together, while
a slight scream was heard from some of the ladies and a confused
whispering among the gentlemen. Thus tossing to and fro, they might
have been fancifully compared to a splendid bunch of flowers suddenly
shaken by a puff of wind which threatened to scatter the leaves of an
old brown, withered rose on the same stalk with two dewy buds, such
being the emblem of the widow between her fair young bridemaids. But
her heroism was admirable. She had started with an irrepressible
shudder, as if the stroke of the bell had fallen directly on her heart;
then, recovering herself, while her attendants were yet in dismay, she
took the lead and paced calmly up the aisle. The bell continued to
swing, strike and vibrate with the same doleful regularity as when a
corpse is on its way to the tomb.
“My young friends here have their nerves a little shaken,” said the
widow, with a smile, to the clergyman at the altar. “But so many
weddings have been ushered in with the merriest peal of the bells, and
yet turned out unhappily, that I shall hope for better fortune under
such different auspices.”
“Madam,” answered the rector, in great perplexity, “this strange
occurrence brings to my mind a marriage-sermon of the famous Bishop
Taylor wherein he mingles so many thoughts of mortality and future woe
that, to speak somewhat after his own rich style, he seems to hang the
bridal-chamber in black and cut the wedding-garment out of a
coffin-pall. And it has been the custom of divers nations to infuse
something of sadness into their marriage ceremonies, so to keep death
in mind while contracting that engagement which is life’s chiefest
business. Thus we may draw a sad but profitable moral from this
funeral-knell.”
But, though the clergyman might have given his moral even a keener
point, he did not fail to despatch an attendant to inquire into the
mystery and stop those sounds so dismally appropriate to such a
marriage. A brief space elapsed, during which the silence was broken
only by whispers and a few suppressed titterings among the
wedding-party and the spectators, who after the first shock were
disposed to draw an ill-natured merriment from the affair. The young
have less charity for aged follies than the old for those of youth. The
widow’s glance was observed to wander for an instant toward a window of
the church, as if searching for the time-worn marble that she had
dedicated to her first husband; then her eyelids dropped over their
faded orbs and her thoughts were drawn irresistibly to another grave.
Two buried men with a voice at her ear and a cry afar off were calling
her to lie down beside them. Perhaps, with momentary truth of feeling,
she thought how much happier had been her fate if, after years of
bliss, the bell were now tolling for her funeral and she were followed
to the grave by the old affection of her earliest lover, long her
husband. But why had she returned to him when their cold hearts shrank
from each other’s embrace?
Still the death-bell tolled so mournfully that the sunshine seemed to
fade in the air. A whisper, communicated from those who stood nearest
the windows, now spread through the church: a hearse with a train of
several coaches was creeping along the street, conveying some dead man
to the churchyard, while the bride awaited a living one at the altar.
Immediately after, the footsteps of the bridegroom and his friends were
heard at the door. The widow looked down the aisle and clenched the arm
of one of her bridemaids in her bony hand with such unconscious
violence that the fair girl trembled.
“You frighten me, my dear madam,” cried she. “For heaven’s sake, what
is the matter?”
“Nothing, my dear—nothing,” said the widow; then, whispering close to
her ear, “There is a foolish fancy that I cannot get rid of. I am
expecting my bridegroom to come into the church with my two first
husbands for groomsmen.”
“Look! look!” screamed the bridemaid. “What is here? The funeral!”
As she spoke a dark procession paced into the church. First came an old
man and woman, like chief mourners at a funeral, attired from head to
foot in the deepest black, all but their pale features and hoary hair,
he leaning on a staff and supporting her decrepit form with his
nerveless arm. Behind appeared another and another pair, as aged, as
black and mournful as the first. As they drew near the widow recognized
in every face some trait of former friends long forgotten, but now
returning as if from their old graves to warn her to prepare a shroud,
or, with purpose almost as unwelcome, to exhibit their wrinkles and
infirmity and claim her as their companion by the tokens of her own
decay. Many a merry night had she danced with them in youth, and now in
joyless age she felt that some withered partner should request her hand
and all unite in a dance of death to the music of the funeral-bell.
While these aged mourners were passing up the aisle it was observed
that from pew to pew the spectators shuddered with irrepressible awe as
some object hitherto concealed by the intervening figures came full in
sight. Many turned away their faces; others kept a fixed and rigid
stare, and a young girl giggled hysterically and fainted with the
laughter on her lips. When the spectral procession approached the
altar, each couple separated and slowly diverged, till in the centre
appeared a form that had been worthily ushered in with all this gloomy
pomp, the death-knell and the funeral. It was the bridegroom in his
shroud.
No garb but that of the grave could have befitted such a death-like
aspect. The eyes, indeed, had the wild gleam of a sepulchral lamp; all
else was fixed in the stern calmness which old men wear in the coffin.
The corpse stood motionless, but addressed the widow in accents that
seemed to melt into the clang of the bell, which fell heavily on the
air while he spoke.
“Come, my bride!” said those pale lips. “The hearse is ready; the
sexton stands waiting for us at the door of the tomb. Let us be
married, and then to our coffins!”
How shall the widow’s horror be represented? It gave her the
ghastliness of a dead man’s bride. Her youthful friends stood apart,
shuddering at the mourners, the shrouded bridegroom and herself; the
whole scene expressed by the strongest imagery the vain struggle of the
gilded vanities of this world when opposed to age, infirmity, sorrow
and death.
The awestruck silence was first broken by the clergyman.
“Mr. Ellenwood,” said he, soothingly, yet with somewhat of authority,
“you are not well. Your mind has been agitated by the unusual
circumstances in which you are placed. The ceremony must be deferred.
As an old friend, let me entreat you to return home.”
“Home—yes; but not without my bride,” answered he, in the same hollow
accents. “You deem this mockery—perhaps madness. Had I bedizened my
aged and broken frame with scarlet and embroidery, had I forced my
withered lips to smile at my dead heart, that might have been mockery
or madness; but now let young and old declare which of us has come
hither without a wedding-garment—the bridegroom or the bride.”
He stepped forward at a ghostly pace and stood beside the widow,
contrasting the awful simplicity of his shroud with the glare and
glitter in which she had arrayed herself for this unhappy scene. None
that beheld them could deny the terrible strength of the moral which
his disordered intellect had contrived to draw.
“Cruel! cruel!” groaned the heartstricken bride.
“Cruel?” repeated he; then, losing his deathlike composure in a wild
bitterness, “Heaven judge which of us has been cruel to the other! In
youth you deprived me of my happiness, my hopes, my aims; you took away
all the substance of my life and made it a dream without reality enough
even to grieve at—with only a pervading gloom, through which I walked
wearily and cared not whither. But after forty years, when I have built
my tomb and would not give up the thought of resting there—no, not for
such a life as we once pictured—you call me to the altar. At your
summons I am here. But other husbands have enjoyed your youth, your
beauty, your warmth of heart and all that could be termed your life.
What is there for me but your decay and death? And therefore I have
bidden these funeral-friends, and bespoken the sexton’s deepest knell,
and am come in my shroud to wed you as with a burial-service, that we
may join our hands at the door of the sepulchre and enter it together.”
It was not frenzy, it was not merely the drunkenness of strong emotion
in a heart unused to it, that now wrought upon the bride. The stern
lesson of the day had done its work; her worldliness was gone. She
seized the bridegroom’s hand.
“Yes!” cried she; “let us wed even at the door of the sepulchre. My
life is gone in vanity and emptiness, but at its close there is one
true feeling. It has made me what I was in youth: it makes me worthy of
you. Time is no more for both of us. Let us wed for eternity.”
With a long and deep regard the bridegroom looked into her eyes, while
a tear was gathering in his own. How strange that gush of human feeling
from the frozen bosom of a corpse! He wiped away the tear, even with
his shroud.
“Beloved of my youth,” said he, “I have been wild. The despair of my
whole lifetime had returned at once and maddened me. Forgive and be
forgiven. Yes; it is evening with us now, and we have realized none of
our morning dreams of happiness. But let us join our hands before the
altar as lovers whom adverse circumstances have separated through life,
yet who meet again as they are leaving it and find their earthly
affection changed into something holy as religion. And what is time to
the married of eternity?”
Amid the tears of many and a swell of exalted sentiment in those who
felt aright was solemnized the union of two immortal souls. The train
of withered mourners, the hoary bridegroom in his shroud, the pale
features of the aged bride and the death-bell tolling through the whole
till its deep voice overpowered the marriage-words,—all marked the
funeral of earthly hopes. But as the ceremony proceeded, the organ, as
if stirred by the sympathies of this impressive scene, poured forth an
anthem, first mingling with the dismal knell, then rising to a loftier
strain, till the soul looked down upon its woe. And when the awful rite
was finished and with cold hand in cold hand the married of eternity
withdrew, the organ’s peal of solemn triumph drowned the wedding-knell.