brutal man, pondering over his past life. He will be hung to-morrow.
Would you ever suppose that man was once a smooth-faced, bright little
fellow like you? Do you see any signs of a mother's tender caress on his
sullen brow? Does it look as though it had ever been held up close and
lovingly to a fond woman's heart? Are there any remains of that clear,
pure light which once looked out innocently from those bloodshot eyes?
All this was so once. What does he think of now? Is he acting over the
dark deed which brought him into this uninviting sleeping-place? Does he
see that silent chamber into which a guilty man is stealing, with crime
in his heart,--no, not in his heart; for he has none!--but in his
thoughts, and remorseless ferocity to execute it? Does he see the
gigantic shadows cast on the walls around by the miserable candle he
holds? the still face of the sleeper? and does he hear the smothered
groan and the bubbling sigh? Does he see in his hand the paltry metal
which he has secured, and hear his own hurried, flying steps? Or is he
counting the cost of that light which showed him where to strike? Is he
making that never-ending computation,--throwing into one scale
innocence, happiness, manhood, love, life, and into the other a
miserable candle-end? My boy, you and I will get a slate and pencil
before we go into such a chandlery operation!
Why do I tell such horrible stories?--My dear, sweet, tender-hearted
Mrs. G., people commit murder every day: I mean polite, fashionable
murder. They give a stab at your reputation and mine, and smile sweetly
all the while. They watch and wait till our backs are turned, and then
they whip out their long tongues, and--have at you! Your good name is so
mercilessly hacked, cut, slashed, and gashed, that there is scarcely
enough fair outside left to recognize you by. They swear that your most
innocent and gentle pastime is the abomination of decent people; and,
with that happy faculty of judging others by themselves,--a mark of
broad, comprehensive minds,--they run up a list of grievances, among
which swindling and adultery are common trifles. Peeping out from their
hole in the curtain, swelling with the nobleness of their occupation,
and filled with honest indignation at your goings on, they see, with a
clairvoyance which puts Hume in the background, all the errors of
omission and commission your guilty hands and hearts achieve. To be
sure, they back them like a whale or neck them like a camel, according
to the exuberance of their imagination, or the strength of their
ill-will, or the innate suspicion of their natures. But when your broad
back is towards them, they whet those sharp tongues against each other,
and--thug! you have them under your fifth rib, and out at the other
side. Well, perhaps you, Mrs. G., have used such a weapon. Perhaps, when
you found out how innocent the poor victim was, you may have been
rewarded by a scrape of that old saw across your conscience, and the
smoke of the smouldering wick may have smelled nauseous to you.--You
never did? Well, I am glad of it, Mrs. G., because, I assure you, that
fogo must be a sickening one to carry about under one's nose.
But if you object to the horrible, I will gently slide into the pathetic
and melancholic. There is our friend Atticus,--I call him so in public,
because it would not do to name Brown right out, when telling his
private griefs. Atticus, when he read a book lately, having "A man
married is a man marred" for a motto, smiled a grim smile, and muttered
audibly, "Mrs. Atticus is charming, isn't she?--pretty and nice and
neat. Why shouldn't Atticus be the happiest man in the world? You say
that everybody thinks he is. Ah, yes! that's because everybody behind
the blinds or beside the curtains doesn't see the real things that go
wrong,--only the imaginary ones." Atticus, when all alone in his
library, with no holes in the curtains, might tell a different story. He
might tell of a desolate heart, a solitary intellect,--hopes, dreams,
buried. He might ask himself the use of lifting the mind above the level
of common things,--of hoping to carry another one with him in equal
companionship,--of allowing the vulgarities of life to become
disgusting,--and of striving for a clearer, brighter, loftier sphere.
Why refine the thoughts, elevate the aspirations, and broaden the heart,
till the nature shrinks from contact with commonplaces, and shudders at
the coarse touch of worldly tongues? You see that Atticus uses broad
generalities, and never once individualizes Mrs. Atticus. And if Mrs.
Atticus were to steal down stairs in her night-gown, he would be ever so
kind and gentle, and playfully tell her she would catch cold, that she
had not enough clothing on, that the season was raw, that the mercury
stood at thirty, that it would snow to-morrow, etc., etc. And when Mrs.
Atticus retreated to her warm bed, he might look round on the weighty
volumes, and their wealth of lore, and think how he trod the path they
pointed out in solitary silence; and then, as he passed up stairs, a
great, coarse rasp might make his fine-strung nerves quiver, and he
might look at the candle he carried and it would suggest to him the old
Gallic saw which had just given him the spasm. So you see that the
curtains and peepholes had never discovered the price-current of the
Atticus brand of candles.
Nobody knows where some folks buy or burn their candles. Some people
keep them in closets when they do not find it convenient to procure
well-mounted skeletons. There is Mrs. Hidehart,--you know whom I
mean,--when she was a blooming young girl, she fell in love with the
Colonel, and, like a foolish thing as she was, she poured out all the
wealth of her affection upon him, as if the cruse had a magic power of
recuperation. Well, the Colonel turned out to be a rotten one; and
bitter was the taste in the poor girl's mouth for many a day! By-and-by,
when she thought she had washed it well out, and when Sm----, (was I
going to say Smith? No!) when Hidehart came along and bent and begged
and prayed for her, she said "Yes!" as she might have assented to an
invitation to hear Patti. Well, that sort of thing don't answer in the
long run. It is all very well to have love without money; but money
without love is another matter. Mr. Hidehart turned out worse than the
Colonel; for he was stupid, vulgar, and mean. And she was so nice, so
delicate, so bright, so intellectual! Oh, what hours of bitter regret,
what biting of lips, what flushes of shame, what heart-shocks that
stopped the life-blood, and--well, truth must out--what caressing
memories of the young hero who first leaped over her young love's
ramparts! what loathing of the sensual lout who had been carelessly
suffered to take command of the fortress!--Why, Mr. Asmodeus! you don't
mean my friend, Mrs. Smith!--Did I mention any such name? No, Mrs.
Grundy, I mean Mrs. Hidehart, a mild, patient, smiling wife. But, up in
a little corner closet of her chamber, she keeps, not a skeleton,--for
those are shocking things to lie near a lady's slumbers, they are bad
enough in the shape of crinoline,--but a candle; and when she is very
much tried, she sits all alone there by its nickering light, and thinks.
What a life's fortune she has paid for the privilege! and how fortunate
that the Colonel doesn't come back reformed!
The Quaker poet of New England, who has written one of the most
beautiful things in the language, has hit off our friends Atticus and
Hidehart most admirably. He was not personally acquainted with them; and
so he has invested them with a tender, imaginative romance, and made the
one a barefooted lass and the other a grave judge. Did you ever read it,
Mrs. Grundy? It is called "Maud Muller"; and Asmodeus would buy a gross
of the best wax lights, if he could get a quarter of the illumination
out of them which shone on the pen that traced those lines.
Why, Mr. Asmodeus, you frighten me! What! Mr. Brown and Mrs. Smith?--My
dear Madam, I mentioned no names, did I? But you may be sure that
expensive candles are burned in houses where you think gas only is used.
How do you know how Jones lights his house? I don't mean the parlor,
where you and Mrs. Asmodeus display the family jewels on grand
occasions, and where Mrs. Jones exhibits the splendor of her beauty and
the radiance of her smiles. That is gas,--bright, beaming, brilliant
gas. What else should irradiate the loving tenderness which unites Mr.
and Mrs. Jones on such occasions? You don't suppose that Jones is goose
enough to show his decayed home-grown fruit to you, when he invites you
to sup with him in that frescoed dining-room? He picks out the
rosy-cheeks for your entertainment; and the sour grapes, the spotted
pomes, the mildewed berries are tucked away up-stairs. Now you are not
invited into that store-room. You are, in fact, jealously kept out of
it. Let us creep round the corner and look up at that window, now the
company is all gone. You see a light there, don't you? Do you know what
is burning? Is it gas, or oil, or kerosene, or spermaceti, or wax, or
tallow? You will never know, Mrs. G.; for Jones trims that light
himself. Bridget never saw it yet. Strange, isn't it, that Jones, a rich
man, with plenty of servants, should humble himself to such a menial
occupation? My own impression is, that he uses a candle in that room,
and has paid so high a price for it that he doesn't dare to trust any
one else with it.
There are many such lighted windows; and who knows the game that is
going on behind the curtain? _Va-lent-ils la chandelle?_ When Pinxit
looks around on the accumulating canvases gathering dust in his
unfrequented studio, and thinks of the dreams which gave fairy tints to
his palette, that none else could perceive,--when he feels that his
genius is unacknowledged, and his toil in vain,--when he sees Dorb's
crudities in every window, and Dorb's praises in the "Art-Journals,"
while Pinxit is starving unknown,--doesn't he take down the old saw from
his easel, and try its edge over his proud, swelling heart? When
Scripsit, who has dipped his pen in his soul to inscribe those glowing
lines which were to bear him up and set him across the golden spire of
the pinnacle of Fame, and whose fine frenzy has as yet given him but a
scurvy mundane support, when Scripsit brings home his modest rasher, and
finds, on unfolding it, that it is wrapped in the unsold sheets of his
last lyric,--doesn't he think that the tallow which helped him to pen
the thoughts in the midnight watches was the costliest of _feu sacre_?
When Senator Patriota sits brooding over the speech which has carried
the opposition against him, and sees his honorable friend slipping into
the place he has manoeuvred for at the expense of manliness, truth,
consistency, and honesty, does he not conjugate the verb _valoir_
negatively? When Madame Favorita has made her last curtsy for the night
behind the foot-lights, has thrown off her tawdry frippery, and sits in
her lonely chamber, glowering at the image of the young rival who has
won all the applause,--when she bemoans her waning charms and the
wearisome life which has lost its sparkle, and sees its emptiness and
hollowness,--does she not look wistfully at that little flame which
flickers on her hollowing cheek, from which the stage-blush has been
washed, and think the game a losing one? The Senator lives near by, and
that is Madame's room over the way. Did not Caesar have a candle that he
bought of Brutus? And how many Mesdames have cursed the name of
Mademoiselle!
And don't we, all of us, Mrs. G., take out our French Grammars, and
learn, at some period of our lives, to translate that Gallic phrase?
Don't we all get that old saw down and try its teeth on our tender
flesh? When the old friends drop off, and the dear eyes we have loved
look strange to us,--when the darling of our hearts is ruthlessly torn
away, and we sit in the darkness of the tomb,--when shame for the living
lost bows us to the earth in anguish,--when life has become meaningless,
and nothing remains to vitalize the monotony of existence,--when we look
upon our own past hopes, ambitions, interests, as though they
characterized some other being, long since departed,--when the morning
light and the evening shade, May's sweet flowers and November's yellow
leaves, are only the symbols of Time's weary flight, and awaken neither
cheer nor gloom,--do we not all of us hear, in the silence of our
hearts, the grating of that blade? Statues of Memnon are we all. The
bright morning sun brings melodious music from our hearts; the soft,
perfumed air bears afar the strains of jocund hope, passionate love, and
aspiring faith. But when the shadows fall, the strains lose their
sweetness and beauty; one by one, the rich harmonies change into harsh
dissonance, then cease altogether; and the sun sets on a silent form
which in the morning sent forth seraphic tones.
My dear boy, let us hope that you and I and all those we love so dearly
will always have a bright sun above our earthly horizon to give us
cheer, and to light our way, and to bring sweet songs from our hearts.
And if it should set in the night of suffering and sorrow, let us guide
ourselves by a holier, purer, steadier light than mortal hands can mould
or kindle. So pass me those snuffers, and I will put out the candle, and
we will go to bed. For all this paper of candle-ends I have collected,
Bridget will find our beautiful wax-light scarcely burned; and,
certainly, I think it a very cheap and excellent purchase, _N'est-ce
pas, mon fils_?
DOCTOR JOHNS.
XXIV.
At nine next morning, prayers and breakfast being despatched,--during
which Parson Brummem had determined to leave Reuben to the sting of his
conscience,--the master appears in the school-room with his wristbands
turned up, and his ferule in hand, to enforce judgment upon the culprit.
It had been a frosty night, and the cool October air had not tempted the
boys to any wide movement out of doors, so that no occupant of the
parsonage had as yet detected the draggled white banner that hung from
the prison-window.
Through Keziah, the parson gave orders for Master Johns to report
himself at once in the school-room. The maid returned presently,
clattering down the stairs in a great fright,--
"Reuben's gone, Sir!"
"Gone?" says the tall master, astounded. He represses a wriggle of
healthful satisfaction on the part of his pupils by a significant lift
of his ferule, then moves ponderously up the stairs for a personal visit
to the chamber of the culprit. The maid had given true report; there was
no one there. Never had he been met with such barefaced rebellion.
Truants, indeed, there had been in days gone by; but that a pupil under
discipline should have tied together Mistress Brummem's linen and left
it draggling in this way, in the sight of every passer-by, was an
affront to his authority which he had not deemed possible.
An hour thereafter, and he had assigned the morning's task to the boys
(which he had ventured to lengthen by a third, in view--as he said, with
a grim humor--of their extremely cheerful spirits); established
Mistress Brummem in temporary charge, and was driving his white-faced
nag down the road which led toward Ashfield. The frosted pools crackled
under the wheels of the old chaise; the heaving horse wheezed as the
stern parson gave his loins a thwack with the slackened reins and urged
him down the turnpike which led away through the ill-kept fields, from
the rambling, slatternly town. Stone walls that had borne the upheaval
of twenty winters reeled beside the way. Broad scars of ochreous earth,
from which the turnpike-menders had dug material to patch the
wheel-track, showed ooze of yellow mud with honeycombs of ice rimming
their edges, and supporting a thin film of sod made up of lichens and
the roots of five-fingers. Raw, shapeless stones, and bald, gray rocks,
only half unearthed, cumbered the road; while bunches of dwarfed
birches, browsed by straying cattle, added to the repulsiveness of the
scene. Nor were the inclosed lands scarcely more inviting. Lean shocks
of corn that had swayed under the autumn winds stretched at long
intervals across fields of thin stubble; a few half-ripened pumpkins,
hanging yet to the seared vines,--whose leaves had long since been
shrivelled by the frost,--showed their shining green faces on the dank
soil. In other fields, overrun with a great shaggy growth of rag-weed,
some of the parson's flock--father and blue-nosed boys--were lifting
poor crops of "bile-whites" or "merinos." From time to time, a tall
house jutted upon the road, with unctuous pig-sty under the lee of the
garden-fence and wood-pile sprawling into the highway, where the parson
would rein up his nag, and make inquiry after the truant Reuben.
A half-dozen of these stops and inquiries proved wholly vain; yet the
sturdy parson urged his poor, heaving nag forward, until he had come to
the little gatehouse which thrust itself quite across the high road at
some six miles' distance from Bolton Church. No stray boy had passed
that day. Thereupon the parson turned, and, after retracing his way for
two miles or more, struck into a cross-road which led westward. There
were the same fruitless inquiries here at the scattered houses, and when
he came at length upon the great river-road along which the boy had
passed at the first dawn there was no one who could tell anything of
him; and by noon the parson reentered the village, disconsolate and
hungry. He was by no means a vindictive man, and could very likely have
forgiven Reuben the blow he had struck. He had no conception of the
hidden causes which had wrought in the lad such burst of anger. He
conceived only that Satan had taken hold of him, and he had strong faith
in the efficacy of the rod for driving Satan out.
After dinner he administered a sharp lecture to his pupils, admonishing
them of the evils of disobedience, and warning them that "God sometimes
left bad boys to their own evil courses, and to run like the herd of
swine into which the unclean spirits entered,--of which account might be
found in Mark v. 13,--down a steep place, and be choked."
The parson still had hope that Reuben might appear at evening; and he
forecast a good turn which he would make, in such event, upon the
parable of the Prodigal Son (with the omission, however, of the fatted
calf). But the prodigal did not return. Next day there was the same
hope, but fainter. Still, the prodigal Reuben did not return. Whereupon
the parson thought it his duty to write to Brother Johns, advising him
of the escape of Reuben,--"he having stolen away in the night, tying
together and much draggling Mrs. Brummem's pair of company sheets, (no
other being out of wash,) and myself following after vainly, the best
portion of a day, much, perturbed in spirit, in my chaise. I duly
instructed my parishioners to report him, if found, which has not been
the case. I trust that in the paternal home, if he has made his way
thither, he may be taught to open his 'ear to discipline,' and 'return
from iniquity.' Job xxxvi. 10."
The good parson was a type of not a few retired country ministers in
New England forty years ago: a heavy-minded, right-meaning man; utterly
inaccessible to any of the graces of life; no bird ever sang in his ear;
no flower ever bloomed for his eye; a man to whom life was only a
serious spiritual toil, and all human joys a vanity to be spurned;
preaching tediously long sermons, and counting the fatigue of the
listeners a fitting oblation to spiritual truth; staggering through life
with a great burden of theologies on his back, which it was his constant
struggle to pack into smaller and smaller compass,--not so much, we
fear, for the relief of others as of himself. Let us hope that the
burden--like that of Christian in the "Pilgrim's Progress"--slipped away
before he entered the Celestial Presence, and left him free to enjoy and
admire, more than he found time to do on earth, the beauty of that
blessed angel in the higher courts whose name is Charity.
XXV.
Reuben, meantime, pushed boldly down the open road, until broad sunlight
warned him to a safer path across the fields. He had been too much of a
rambler during those long Saturday afternoons at Ashfield, to have any
dread of a tramp through swamp-land or briers. "Who cared for wet feet
or a scratch? Who cared for a rough scramble through the bush, or a wade
(if it came to that) through ever so big a brook? Who cared for old
Brummem and his white-faced nag?" In fact, he had the pleasure of seeing
the parson's venerable chaise lumbering along the public road at a safe
distance away, an hour before noon; and he half wished he were near
enough to give the jolly old nag a good switching across the flanks. He
had begged a bit of warm breakfast in the morning at an outlying house,
and at the hour when he caught sight of his pursuer he was lying under
the edge of a wood, lunching upon the gingerbread Keziah had provided,
and beginning to reckon up soberly what was to be done.
His first impulse had been simply to escape a good flogging and the
taunts of the boys. He had shunned the direct Ashfield turnpike, because
he knew pursuit--if there were any--would lead off in that direction.
From the river road he might diverge into that, if he chose. But if he
went home,--what then? The big gray eyes of Aunt Eliza he knew would
greet him at the door, looking thunderbolts. Adele, and maybe Rose,
would welcome him in kindly way enough,--but very pityingly, when the
Doctor should summon him quietly into his low study. For they knew, and
he knew, that the big rod would presently come down from its place by
the Major's sword,--a rod that never came down, except it had some swift
office to perform. And next day, perhaps,--whatever might be the kindly
pleadings of Adele, (thus far he flattered himself,) the old horse
Dobbins would be in harness to carry him back to Bolton Hill, where of a
surety some new birch was already in pickle for the transgressor. Or, if
this mortification were spared, there would be the same weary round of
limitations and exactions from which he longed to break away. And as he
sits there under the lee of the wood,--seeing presently Brummem's heavy
cavalry wheel and retire from pursuit,--the whole scene of his last
altercation, in the study at Ashfield drifts before him again clear as
day.
"I'm bad," (this was the way he broke out upon the old man after the
usual discipline,)--"I know I'm bad, and all the worse for the way you
try to make me good. There's Phil Elderkin, now,--you say to me, over
and over, 'See Phil, he doesn't do so.' But he does,--only his father
knows he does; he a'n't punished, if he isn't in at nine o'clock for
prayers, without telling where he's been. It's all underhanded with me,
and with Phil it's all aboveboard. I have to read proper books that I
don't care a copper about, and so I steal 'em into my chamber; and Aunt
Eliza, prying about, finds 'Arabian Nights' hid under the sheets; and
then there's a row! Phil reads 'em; and there's nobody forever looking
over his shoulder to see what he's reading. I think Phil's father trusts
him more than you do me."
"But, my son, you tell me you are bad, and that I can't trust you."
"You can't, because you don't; and that makes me feel the Devil in me."
"My son!"
"I know it; you think it's a bad word; but Phil says Devil; and it's
true. And besides, you forbid my going where the other boys go, and that
maddens me and makes me swear, and the fellows laugh; and because I
can't go, I do something worse."
"My poor Reuben, do you know where such badness will lead you?"
"Oh, yes, I know; I've heard it often enough; it'll lead to hell, I
guess."
"Reuben! Reuben! what does this mean?"
"I can't help it, father. There's Phil and Gus Hapgood went chestnutting
the other Saturday, and because you were afraid I shouldn't be back
before sundown you kept me at home. I know I was ten times worse than if
I'd been out chestnutting all night and half Sunday. I hate Sunday!"
"That, Reuben, is because you are wicked."
"Yes, I suppose so."
"I am glad, my son, that you see your sins and admit them."
"There's not much comfort in that," Reuben had said. "I'm none the
better for it."
"It's the first step, my son, toward repentance."
Reuben laughed a bitter laugh,--a laugh that made his father shudder.
"Sit down with me now, Reuben, and read a chapter in God's word; and
after it we will pray for His help."
"There it is again!" the boy had replied. "I knew it would come to
that!"
"And do you refuse, Reuben?"
"No, Sir, I don't, because I know it wouldn't be any use; for if I did,
I should have to go up stairs and mope in my chamber, and have Aunt
Eliza staring in upon me as if I was a murderer. But I sha'n't know what
you read five minutes after."