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
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.