----'DIE, if dying I may give
Life to one who asks to live,
And more nearly,
Dying thus, resemble thee!'
'CIEL! Zat is ze true heroique! Zat is ze very far finest ting in
all ze literature anglaise! Zere have not been made vun more sublime
poesie by your immortel Villiams Shakyspeare! Glorieux! Vat a
grandeur moral of ze woman who vill vonce die for her love!'
'_Once?_ I knew a woman who died _thrice_ for _hers_.'
The enthusiastic admirer of Longfellow was a French Professor in one
of our American Colleges, by name Gautier Bonenfant. The person who
met his panegyric with such a strange response, was Orloff Ruricson,
by birth a Swede, by adoption a New-Yorker, and by trade the
proprietor of a Natural History Museum. These two, with myself, were
sitting on the west piazza of the little inn at Kaaterskill Falls.
All of us hard-working men in the hard-working season; but on this
tenth day of July, eighteen hundred and fifty-nine, soaking the dust
out of our brains in a bath of sunlight and mountain air, forgetting
in company that life was not all one sweet vacation.
Bonenfant and I looked at Ruricson with puzzled faces. Though a good
fellow and a wisely humorous one, he seldom said any thing whose
cleverness lay in a double-entendre.
'Pray, who is that remarkable woman?' said I.
'It is my wife,' replied Orloff Ruricson soberly.
'And she die, von, two, tree time?' asked Bonenfant, with uplifted
eye-brows.
'And she died three times for her love,' repeated Orloff Ruricson.
'Perhaps you would have no objection to tell us exactly what you
mean?' said I.
'None at all, to _you two_. With this proviso. I know that you, John
Tryon, write for the magazines. For aught I know, Bonenfant here,
may be a correspondent of the _Constitutionnel_.'
'Mais non! I am ze mose red of Red Republican!'
'Perhaps you are Ledru Rollin, then, travelling in disguise to
hunt materials for a book. At any rate, I must exact of both of
you a promise, that if a single lineament of the story I am going
to relate, ever gets into print through your agency, it shall be
represented as fictitious, and under assumed names.'
'C'est fait!'
'It's a bargain!'
'You see, I live by my Museum. And if the public once suspected
that I was a visionary man, the press and the pulpit and general
opinion would run me down immediately. I should be accused of
denying the originality of the human race inferentially, through my
orang-outang; of teaching lessons of maternal infidelity through
my stuffed ostrich; of seducing youth into a seafaring life by
my preserved whale. No more schools, at half-price on Saturday
afternoon, accompanied by their principal; no more favorable notices
by editors, 'who have been with their families,' for you, Orloff
Ruricson!
'And what I am going to tell you will seem visionary. Even to you.
Nevertheless, it is as real as any of the hardest facts in my daily
life. Take my solemn word for it.
'When I was ten years old, my parents emigrated from Sweden to
this country. At the age of twelve, I lost my father. At thirteen,
I was apprenticed to a man who stuffed birds in Dutch-street. At
fourteen, I was motherless. At twenty, my term was out, and I began
to think of setting up as a taxidermist on my own hook. There! The
Biographical Dictionary can't beat that summary of ten years, for
compactness!
'I made a very liberal offer to my master; in fact, proposed to
take him into partnership. He nobly refused to avail himself of
my generosity. Bird-stuffing, even in New-York, was not a very
lucrative business, and would hardly support two, he suggested.
What did I think of one of the river towns? Albany, or Hudson, or
Poughkeepsie, for instance? I did not tell him what; but in reality,
I thought so little of them, that within ten days after my indenture
was cancelled, I had taken a little nook in the Bowery, with window
enough to show off three blue-jays, a chameleon, and a very young
wild-cat, (whose domesticity I may, at this day, acknowledge to have
been slandered by that name,) and sufficient door to display the
inscription: 'ORLOFF RURICSON, Taxidermist and Aviarian Professor.'
Even at that day, you see, Bonenfant, we impostors had begun to
steal your literary title.'
'Sacrebleu! I do very moshe vish zat ze only ting ze plenty humbug
professors now-a-days _stuff_ vas ze _birds_!'
'Well, _I_ may have stuffed the public a little, too. At any rate,
they patronized me far better than I had any reason to expect. By
the time I was of age, I had moved my business one door farther up,
to a shop treble the size of the first; and instead of sleeping
under and eating on top of my show-case, as I began, I occupied
lodgings with a respectable cutler's widow, second-story front of a
brick house on Third Avenue, and came down to my store every morning
at nine o'clock, like any wholesale grocer.
'I had been installed in my comfortable quarters only six weeks,
when a new lodger came to the boarding-house. The first thing that
I knew of it, was my beholding, directly opposite me at a Sunday
dinner, the most preternaturally homely face I had ever seen. As
I took my seat, and opened my napkin, the cutler's widow inclined
her head in the direction of the apparition, and uttered the words:
'Miss Brentnall.' I cast a glance and a bow in the same quarter,
pronouncing the name after her. 'Mr. Ruricson,' said the landlady
laconically, and nodded toward me. 'Mr. Ruricson,' repeated the
miracle of plainness, in a voice so sweet that I could not rid
myself of the impression that it must be the ventriloquism of
some one else. At the same moment she smiled. The smile was as
incongruous with the face as the voice; and for that glancing
half-minute, Miss Brentnall was a dozen shades more endurable.
'Cruikshank, acting as collaborator with Salvator Rosa, would fall
short of any thing more ambitious than a slight sketch of the
woman's unearthly homeliness. I dare hardly attempt describing her
in words, but for your sake, let me try.
'Her hair was like Bonenfant's Republicanism, 'the most red of red,'
but without the usual characteristic of that color, silky fineness.
In fact, unless you have been through a New-England corn-field in
the dog-days, and noticed the very crispest of all the crisp tassels
which a brazen sun has been at work baking for the month previous;
unless you have seen some peculiarly unsheltered specimen, to the
eye like dried blood, and to the fingers like dust and ashes, you
cannot imagine the impression produced by Miss Brentnall's hair. I
really trembled lest our awkward waiter's sleeve should touch it,
in serving the vegetables, and send it crumbling from her head in
the form of a crimson powder. Her forehead was in every respect
immense--high, broad, and protuberant enough for the tallest man
who ever prided himself on his intellect; still, it might have been
pardoned, if it had been fair withal, instead of sallow, wrinkled
and freckled. A nose, whose only excuse for its mammoth maturity
of size and its Spitzenberg depth of color, lay in the fact that
it was exposed to the torrid glare of the tresses, depended, like
the nest of the hanging-bird, between a pair of ferrety eyes, which
seemed mere pen-knife gashes in a piece of red morocco. At that day,
I could not swear to the pupils; but a profane man of sensitive
mind, might have sworn at them, for they seemed to be a damp--not a
swimming but a soaked damp--pale blue. Flanking the nose, imagine an
inch and a half on either side, of dingy parchment, stretched almost
to tearing, and you will get the general idea of the sides of Miss
Brentnall's face; I will not travesty the word 'cheeks,' by calling
them that. Below the nose, a mouth which would have been deformedly
small for a child two weeks old; below that, a chin which hardly
showed at all in front, and, taking a side view, seemed only an
eccentric protraction of the scraggy neck to which it was attached.
Now for the figure. High, stooping shoulders; a long, flat, narrow,
mannish waist; the lower extremities immoderately short; immense
feet: group these in one person, and you have a form to which I know
only two parallels out of the world of nightmare, a German wooden
doll, and Miss Brentnall.'
'Diable de laideur! You see zat viz your own eyes?'
'Yes, Bonenfant.'
'And yet you be yourself not vare ugly, after all!'
'So I have heard, Bonenfant. You will be still more surprised to
feel that this is the case, when you know that I lodged in the same
house with Miss Brentnall a whole year. Indeed, she occupied the
very next room to me. I was second-story front, she second-story
back, during all that time; and do you know that I became very well
acquainted with her?'
'Ah! It is pos-_sible_ for a gentleman to be vare polite to vare
ugly woman!'
'Yes, but from preference, I mean. I could shut my eyes, and hear
her voice, or open them at the transient moment when she was
smiling, and forget that she was homely at all. I discovered that
she was the only remnant of a large family: that awakened my pity.
In addition, that she was very well-informed, thought and conversed
well: that aroused my respect. And when, in spite of a face and
figure which by poetic justice should have belonged to Sin itself, I
perceived that she had the kindest of hearts, and the most delicate
of sensibilities, I am not ashamed to confess that I soon became
attached to her.'
'Attach? You have fall in love viz zat e-scary-crow? You have
marri-ed her?'
'Hear me through, Bonenfant, and you will find out. In the
present instance, I mean, by the word 'attached,' nothing but a
pure Platonic friendship. I do not make acquaintances easily. I
visited nobody in New-York at that time. There was no one whose
cheerful fireside I could make my own for an evening; and my
natural tastes, to say nothing of any other feeling, kept me away
from drinking-saloons. Moreover, I had an insatiate longing to
make something of myself. I wanted the means for buying books, for
travelling, for putting myself into what I considered good society.
Accordingly, I often brought home, at evening, the specimens I had
been working upon all day, and continued my labors long into the
night. While I was busily engaged with the knife or the needle, the
gentlest little tap would come at the door, so gentle, so unlike any
other sound, that, however absorbed I might be, I always heard it,
knew it was Miss Brentnall, and said: 'Walk in!' So, in hopped that
little eighth world-wonder of ugliness, now with an orange for my
supper, now with some pretty ornithological engraving, of which, by
the merest chance, she always had a duplicate copy, and whose effect
she would like to see on my wall. When she went out, she always
forgot to take it with her; and in a few months, my room, through
such like little kindnesses, became quite a portrait-gallery of
celebrated birds. Sometimes, Miss Brentnall spent the whole evening
with me. On such occasions, it was her greatest delight to stand by
my table, and see some poor, mussed, shrivelled lark or Canary grow
plump and saucy again, through the transformations of my art. She
called it 'bird-resurrection.' For an hour at a time, she would stay
close at my elbow, perfectly quiet, holding a pair of glass eyes in
her hand. When I asked for one of them, she gave it to me with all
the happiness of a helpful child; and, when at last both eyes were
fixed in the specimen, I have seen her clap her hands, and jump up
and down. In process of time, she became of real assistance to me.
So apt a mind had she, that from merely witnessing my methods, she
learned to stuff birds herself; and one evening, when I called 'come
in,' to the well-known tap, I was surprised by seeing a parrot in
her hands, prepared and mounted almost as well as I could have done
it myself. It was a little present to the Professor, she said: she
had been at work upon it for the last two days. From that time, her
voluntary services were in my constant employ, whenever I worked of
evenings.
'I was not so ungallant, however, as to let Miss Brentnall do all
the visiting. Whenever a lazy fit took me, and I could not have
worked, or studied, or walked, if I had been offered ten dollars
an hour for those exertions, I always forestalled her coming to my
room by going to hers. She had a large rocking-chair, which always
seemed to run up to the fire-place of its own accord, and hold out
its arms for me, the moment I came in. I would drop into that, shut
my eyes, and say, 'Please talk to me,' or, 'Please read to me,'
with as much abandonment as if I were speaking to my own mother. It
never felt like exacting impertinent demands of a stranger, I was so
marvellously at my ease in Miss Brentnall's room.'
'Ze man of mose mauvaise honte be not embarrass, I have observe, viz
ze vare ugly lady.'
'I don't think it was that, Bonenfant. I used to ask myself if it
might not be. But I always came to the conclusion that I should
feel the same, were Miss Brentnall the most beautiful person in the
world. There was something in her mind, especially as expressed
in voice and style of talking, that lulled me when I was most
irritable, that lifted the weight of self and pride quite off me for
the time being. I knew that we both liked to be together; that was
enough: I did not care, indeed I never once thought, how we either
of us seemed to any one else.
'I could not help being aware that the other boarders talked about
us. Having a pair of tolerably good ears, likewise of eyes, it
was difficult not to know that old Mrs. Flitch, my landlady's
half-sister, smelt a match in my intimacy with Miss Brentnall; that
she considered it ill-advised, on the ground that I was twenty-one,
and the lady at least forty; that she could imagine no possible
motive in my mind, except a view to Miss Brentnall's snug little
property; that, as a consequence of these premises, she regarded
one of us a very mean knave, and the other a doting fool. It was
difficult not to understand the meaning of Miss Simmons, an acid
cotemporary of Miss Brentnall's, possessing all her chances of
celibacy, half her homeliness, and one-thousandth of her mind, when,
as I took my seat next her at the breakfast-table, she asked me,
with a pretty simper, if I had spent the last evening as pleasantly
as usual. It was difficult to avoid seeing the gentlemen wink at
each other when they passed us talking together in the entry: it
was also difficult, as I perceive from Bonenfant's face he would
like to suggest, not to pull their noses for it; but reflection
suggested the absurdity of such a course. This is one of the few
objections I have to your native, and my adopted country, Tryon,
that notwithstanding the great benefit which results from that
intimacy between a man and a woman, in which each is _mere friend_,
and neither present nor expectant _lover_, our society will not hear
of such a thing, without making indelicate reference to marriage.
Still, I suppose, they would have talked about us, any where.
'Miss Brentnall knew this as well as I, and like me, never gave
it a thought after the momentary demonstration which recalled it.
We passed one whole delightful year together in the Third Avenue
boarding-house. I felt my own mind growing, becoming richer in all
sorts of knowledge, freer and clearer in every field of thinking,
with each succeeding day. And as for Miss Brentnall, she was so
kind as to say, and I knew she sincerely meant it, that to her, all
lonely in the world, our friendship was in all respects inestimable.
At the end of the year, Miss Brentnall was taken ill. For the first
few days, neither she nor I felt any serious alarm with reference
to her case. The doctor pronounced it a mild type of typhoid fever.
It proceeded, so he said to me in private, more from mental causes
than any tangible physical one. Had she been unfortunate in any way?
he asked me. I could only reply that, as her intimate friend, I was
unaware of the fact. Probably she read late, then, he suggested.
I said that might be. At all events, her mind had been very much
overtaxed: what she needed was perfect quiet, good nursing, and as
little medicine as possible. Upon his giving me this view of the
case, I sought out the most faithful, judicious woman within reach,
and hired her on Miss Brentnall's behalf, to stay by her bedside
night and day. My own income, from the little shop in the Bowery,
was now so fair, that I felt able to repay, in some measure, the
debt of gratitude I owed my kind friend for her many contributions
to the walls of my lonely room. Accordingly, whenever I lighted
on any new engraving or book of art, or any embellishment to a
sick-chamber, which seemed likely to attract without fatiguing a
strained mind, I brought it up to her in the evening. If I had
not been in her debt already, I should have been a thousand times
repaid for these little evidences of friendship, by the appreciative
delight with which the childlike woman talked of them, for their own
sake, and the grateful enthusiasm she bestowed upon them for mine.
'The opportunity to be kind and thoughtful was very short. At the
end of the third week, the doctor gravely told me that typhus
pneumonia was becoming alarmingly prevalent in New-York, and that
Miss Brentnall's disease had taken that form. Furthermore, that
unless some change for the better occurred in the course of the next
twenty-four hours, she would die.
'I heard this piece of news without the least outward sign of
sorrow. It did not seem possible to me that I could lose this
best, kindest friend I had in the world. You will think the reason
whimsical perhaps; but, merely because she was not beautiful, I felt
as if she would not be taken away from me. 'Only the beautiful die,
only the beautiful,' I kept saying to myself all day, in the shop or
at the work-table. In the evening, when I came back to the house,
I found that two things had occurred. Miss Brentnall's pulse had
become feebler, and she did not seem to me so plain as before. Then,
for the first time, I began to be afraid.
'In the morning, the doctor took me into the entry, and told me that
his patient might live till mid-night, but not longer. Would I take
the painful office of breaking the intelligence to her? 'Yes,' I
replied, hardly knowing what I said.
'I entered the sick-room. As I came toward the bed, Miss Brentnall
opened her eyes and smiled.
''Martha,' said she, in a feeble voice, 'you may go down-stairs, and
get me some arrow-root.'
'As soon as the nurse had shut the door behind her, Miss Brentnall
continued:
''I shall be dead in a few hours, Orloff. I have something to say to
you alone. I am sorry to go away from you. Very sorry. You have been
kind to me, Orloff. More than any body else in the world.'
'I took Miss Brentnall's poor, parched hand, but could not answer.
'Orloff--kind as you are to me--in the bottom of your heart, you
know that I have the most repulsive face you ever saw. Say _yes_,
Orloff. You _do_ know it. I have been sure of it, since I was a
little girl, six years old, thirty-four years ago, yesterday. I was
never sorry for it, more than a moment at a time, _until a year
ago_. And now you may tell me you see it, without hurting me at all.
Pride is past. Say that my face is the most unlovely in the world.
_Say it to please me._'
'I saw she was in deep earnest, and I brought myself to answer for
her sake:
''Well. But your soul is the most lovely.'
''I thank you for saying it, Orloff. And now, now that pride is
past, I may tell you something which life would hide forever, but
death wrings out of my very soul. You have been a _friend_ to me, a
dear, kind friend, Orloff; but nothing more. _I_ have been something
else to _you_. A dying woman may say it. _I have loved you._'
'For a minute we were both silent, and then Miss Brentnall resumed:
'Passionately, passionately. Without once deluding myself; without
once dreaming that there was a shadow of hope. Had you been blind;
had you been deaf; so that you could never have seen what I am,
or heard a word of it from other lips; even had you, under these
circumstances, loved me, I would have felt it base to give you, in
exchange for yourself, such a thing as I. But you did see, you did
hear, and I knew that I loved _impossibly_. You came in, now, to
tell me that I would not live till to-morrow, did you not, Orloff?'
''I meant to, if I could,' was my reply.
''I had a dream just before you came in. I thought I saw you, and
you told me so. Do you know what a strange thing happened, just as
you seemed speaking? But you are not angry with me, for what I have
said already?'
''Angry? My dear friend, no!' said I instantly.
''The strange thing was this. As you spoke, my deformed face fell
off like a veil, and my body, like a cloak, was lifted from me.
At the same moment, I had the power of being outside of myself,
of looking down on myself, and I was--_very beautiful_. I was not
proud, but I was glad. I drank in a whole fountain of peace at
every breath. At that instant, I began to float farther and farther
from you; but as I went, I heard, oh! such a sweet voice! saying:
'Again! Again! You shall meet again!' As you came into the room,
I awoke. And I have dared to uncover my whole soul to you, Orloff
Ruricson, because those words are still in my ears. We _shall_ meet
again! And when we meet, I shall be _beautiful_!'
'With all my respect for Miss Brentnall, it was impossible for me
not to feel that she was raving. Indeed, from this very belief I
took hope. I had seldom heard of cases like hers, in which patients,
almost in the very last hour, continued to be delirious. I therefore
doubted the doctor's diagnosis, and persuaded myself that, since she
had not arrived at the lucid interval preceding death, she was not
so near it as he suspected.
'Comforting myself with the assurance that I should see her well
again, or at least, that there was no immediate danger, I went down
to my shop in the Bowery, leaving orders to send for me immediately,
if any change took place in Miss Brentnall.
'After transacting the business of my trade, all day, I came back
earlier than usual at evening, greatly depressed in spirits, but
without any idea that I had seen my friend for the last time. As I
put my latch-key into the door of the boarding-house, it opened. I
saw the pale, frightened face of Martha, the nurse. She was just
coming out after me. Miss Brentnall was _dead_.
'And again I was alone in the world.'