We can be but partially acquainted even with the events which actually
influence our course through life and our final destiny. There are
innumerable other events, if such they may be called, which come close
upon us, yet pass away without actual results or even betraying their
near approach by the reflection of any light or shadow across our
minds. Could we know all the vicissitudes of our fortunes, life would
be too full of hope and fear, exultation or disappointment, to afford
us a single hour of true serenity. This idea may be illustrated by a
page from the secret history of David Swan.
We have nothing to do with David until we find him, at the age of
twenty, on the high road from his native place to the city of Boston,
where his uncle, a small dealer in the grocery line, was to take him
behind the counter. Be it enough to say that he was a native of New
Hampshire, born of respectable parents, and had received an ordinary
school education with a classic finish by a year at Gilmanton Academy.
After journeying on foot from sunrise till nearly noon of a summer’s
day, his weariness and the increasing heat determined him to sit down
in the first convenient shade and await the coming up of the
stage-coach. As if planted on purpose for him, there soon appeared a
little tuft of maples with a delightful recess in the midst, and such a
fresh bubbling spring that it seemed never to have sparkled for any
wayfarer but David Swan. Virgin or not, he kissed it with his thirsty
lips and then flung himself along the brink, pillowing his head upon
some shirts and a pair of pantaloons tied up in a striped cotton
handkerchief. The sunbeams could not reach him; the dust did not yet
rise from the road after the heavy rain of yesterday, and his grassy
lair suited the young man better than a bed of down. The spring
murmured drowsily beside him; the branches waved dreamily across the
blue sky overhead, and a deep sleep, perchance hiding dreams within its
depths, fell upon David Swan. But we are to relate events which he did
not dream of.
While he lay sound asleep in the shade other people were wide awake,
and passed to and fro, afoot, on horseback and in all sorts of
vehicles, along the sunny road by his bedchamber. Some looked neither
to the right hand nor the left and knew not that he was there; some
merely glanced that way without admitting the slumberer among their
busy thoughts; some laughed to see how soundly he slept, and several
whose hearts were brimming full of scorn ejected their venomous
superfluity on David Swan. A middle-aged widow, when nobody else was
near, thrust her head a little way into the recess, and vowed that the
young fellow looked charming in his sleep. A temperance lecturer saw
him, and wrought poor David into the texture of his evening’s discourse
as an awful instance of dead drunkenness by the roadside.
But censure, praise, merriment, scorn and indifference were all one—or,
rather, all nothing—to David Swan. He had slept only a few moments when
a brown carriage drawn by a handsome pair of horses bowled easily along
and was brought to a standstill nearly in front of David’s
resting-place. A linch-pin had fallen out and permitted one of the
wheels to slide off. The damage was slight and occasioned merely a
momentary alarm to an elderly merchant and his wife, who were returning
to Boston in the carriage. While the coachman and a servant were
replacing the wheel the lady and gentleman sheltered themselves beneath
the maple trees, and there espied the bubbling fountain and David Swan
asleep beside it. Impressed with the awe which the humblest sleeper
usually sheds around him, the merchant trod as lightly as the gout
would allow, and his spouse took good heed not to rustle her silk gown
lest David should start up all of a sudden.
“How soundly he sleeps!” whispered the old gentleman. “From what a
depth he draws that easy breath! Such sleep as that, brought on without
an opiate, would be worth more to me than half my income, for it would
suppose health and an untroubled mind.”
“And youth besides,” said the lady. “Healthy and quiet age does not
sleep thus. Our slumber is no more like his than our wakefulness.”
The longer they looked, the more did this elderly couple feel
interested in the unknown youth to whom the wayside and the maple shade
were as a secret chamber with the rich gloom of damask curtains
brooding over him. Perceiving that a stray sunbeam glimmered down upon
his face, the lady contrived to twist a branch aside so as to intercept
it, and, having done this little act of kindness, she began to feel
like a mother to him.
“Providence seems to have laid him here,” whispered she to her husband,
“and to have brought us hither to find him, after our disappointment in
our cousin’s son. Methinks I can see a likeness to our departed Henry.
Shall we waken him?”
“To what purpose?” said the merchant, hesitating. “We know nothing of
the youth’s character.”
“That open countenance!” replied his wife, in the same hushed voice,
yet earnestly. “This innocent sleep!”
While these whispers were passing, the sleeper’s heart did not throb,
nor his breath become agitated, nor his features betray the least token
of interest. Yet Fortune was bending over him, just ready to let fall a
burden of gold. The old merchant had lost his only son, and had no heir
to his wealth except a distant relative with whose conduct he was
dissatisfied. In such cases people sometimes do stranger things than to
act the magician and awaken a young man to splendor who fell asleep in
poverty.
“Shall we not waken him?” repeated the lady, persuasively.
“The coach is ready, sir,” said the servant, behind.
The old couple started, reddened and hurried away, mutually wondering
that they should ever have dreamed of doing anything so very
ridiculous. The merchant threw himself back in the carriage and
occupied his mind with the plan of a magnificent asylum for unfortunate
men of business. Meanwhile, David Swan enjoyed his nap.
The carriage could not have gone above a mile or two when a pretty
young girl came along with a tripping pace which showed precisely how
her little heart was dancing in her bosom. Perhaps it was this merry
kind of motion that caused—is there any harm in saying it?—her garter
to slip its knot. Conscious that the silken girth—if silk it were—was
relaxing its hold, she turned aside into the shelter of the maple
trees, and there found a young man asleep by the spring. Blushing as
red as any rose that she should have intruded into a gentleman’s
bedchamber, and for such a purpose too, she was about to make her
escape on tiptoe. But there was peril near the sleeper. A monster of a
bee had been wandering overhead—buzz, buzz, buzz—now among the leaves,
now flashing through the strips of sunshine, and now lost in the dark
shade, till finally he appeared to be settling on the eyelid of David
Swan. The sting of a bee is sometimes deadly. As free-hearted as she
was innocent, the girl attacked the intruder with her handkerchief,
brushed him soundly and drove him from beneath the maple shade. How
sweet a picture! This good deed accomplished, with quickened breath and
a deeper blush she stole a glance at the youthful stranger for whom she
had been battling with a dragon in the air.
“He is handsome!” thought she, and blushed redder yet.
How could it be that no dream of bliss grew so strong within him that,
shattered by its very strength, it should part asunder and allow him to
perceive the girl among its phantoms? Why, at least, did no smile of
welcome brighten upon his face? She was come, the maid whose soul,
according to the old and beautiful idea, had been severed from his own,
and whom in all his vague but passionate desires he yearned to meet.
Her only could he love with a perfect love, him only could she receive
into the depths of her heart, and now her image was faintly blushing in
the fountain by his side; should it pass away, its happy lustre would
never gleam upon his life again.
“How sound he sleeps!” murmured the girl. She departed, but did not
trip along the road so lightly as when she came.
Now, this girl’s father was a thriving country merchant in the
neighborhood, and happened at that identical time to be looking out for
just such a young man as David Swan. Had David formed a wayside
acquaintance with the daughter, he would have become the father’s
clerk, and all else in natural succession. So here, again, had good
fortune—the best of fortunes—stolen so near that her garments brushed
against him, and he knew nothing of the matter.
The girl was hardly out of sight when two men turned aside beneath the
maple shade. Both had dark faces set off by cloth caps, which were
drawn down aslant over their brows. Their dresses were shabby, yet had
a certain smartness. These were a couple of rascals who got their
living by whatever the devil sent them, and now, in the interim of
other business, had staked the joint profits of their next piece of
villainy on a game of cards which was to have been decided here under
the trees. But, finding David asleep by the spring, one of the rogues
whispered to his fellow:
“Hist! Do you see that bundle under his head?”
The other villain nodded, winked and leered.
“I’ll bet you a horn of brandy,” said the first, “that the chap has
either a pocketbook or a snug little hoard of small change stowed away
amongst his shirts. And if not there, we will find it in his pantaloons
pocket.”
“But how if he wakes?” said the other.
His companion thrust aside his waistcoat, pointed to the handle of a
dirk and nodded.
“So be it!” muttered the second villain.
They approached the unconscious David, and, while one pointed the
dagger toward his heart, the other began to search the bundle beneath
his head. Their two faces, grim, wrinkled and ghastly with guilt and
fear, bent over their victim, looking horrible enough to be mistaken
for fiends should he suddenly awake. Nay, had the villains glanced
aside into the spring, even they would hardly have known themselves as
reflected there. But David Swan had never worn a more tranquil aspect,
even when asleep on his mother’s breast.
“I must take away the bundle,” whispered one.
“If he stirs, I’ll strike,” muttered the other.
But at this moment a dog scenting along the ground came in beneath the
maple trees and gazed alternately at each of these wicked men and then
at the quiet sleeper. He then lapped out of the fountain.
“Pshaw!” said one villain. “We can do nothing now. The dog’s master
must be close behind.”
“Let’s take a drink and be off,” said the other.
The man with the dagger thrust back the weapon into his bosom and drew
forth a pocket-pistol, but not of that kind which kills by a single
discharge. It was a flask of liquor with a block-tin tumbler screwed
upon the mouth. Each drank a comfortable dram, and left the spot with
so many jests and such laughter at their unaccomplished wickedness that
they might be said to have gone on their way rejoicing. In a few hours
they had forgotten the whole affair, nor once imagined that the
recording angel had written down the crime of murder against their
souls in letters as durable as eternity. As for David Swan, he still
slept quietly, neither conscious of the shadow of death when it hung
over him nor of the glow of renewed life when that shadow was
withdrawn. He slept, but no longer so quietly as at first. An hour’s
repose had snatched from his elastic frame the weariness with which
many hours of toil had burdened it. Now he stirred, now moved his lips
without a sound, now talked in an inward tone to the noonday spectres
of his dream. But a noise of wheels came rattling louder and louder
along the road, until it dashed through the dispersing mist of David’s
slumber; and there was the stagecoach. He started up with all his ideas
about him.
“Halloo, driver! Take a passenger?” shouted he.
“Room on top!” answered the driver.
Up mounted David, and bowled away merrily toward Boston without so much
as a parting glance at that fountain of dreamlike vicissitude. He knew
not that a phantom of Wealth had thrown a golden hue upon its waters,
nor that one of Love had sighed softly to their murmur, nor that one of
Death had threatened to crimson them with his blood, all in the brief
hour since he lay down to sleep. Sleeping or waking, we hear not the
airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen. Does it not
argue a superintending Providence that, while viewless and unexpected
events thrust themselves continually athwart our path, there should
still be regularity enough in mortal life to render foresight even
partially available?