Cacaphodel, with philosophic indignation. ‘Thou art not worthy to
behold, even from afar off, the lustre of this most precious gem that
ever was concocted in the laboratory of Nature. Mine is the sole purpose
for which a wise man may desire the possession of the Great Carbuncle.
‘Immediately on obtaining it--for I have a presentiment, good people,
that the prize is reserved to crown my scientific reputation--I shall
return to Europe, and employ my remaining years in reducing it to
its first elements. A portion of the stone will I grind to impalpable
powder; other parts shall be dissolved in acids, or whatever solvents
will act upon so admirable a composition; and the remainder I design
to melt in the crucible, or set on fire with the blow-pipe. By these
various methods I shall gain an accurate analysis, and finally bestow
the result of my labors upon the world in a folio volume.’
‘Excellent!’ quoth the man with the spectacles. ‘Nor need you hesitate,
learned sir, on account of the necessary destruction of the gem; since
the perusal of your folio may teach every mother’s son of us to concoct
a Great Carbuncle of his own.’
‘But, verily,’ said Master Ichabod Pigsnort, ‘for mine own part I object
to the making of these counterfeits, as being calculated to reduce the
marketable value of the true gem. I tell ye frankly, sirs, I have
an interest in keeping up the price. Here have I quitted my regular
traffic, leaving my warehouse in the care of my clerks, and putting my
credit to great hazard, and, furthermore, have put myself in peril of
death or captivity by the accursed heathen savages--and all this without
daring to ask the prayers of the congregation, because the quest for
the Great Carbuncle is deemed little better than a traffic with the Evil
One. Now think ye that I would have done this grievous wrong to my soul,
body, reputation, and estate, without a reasonable chance of profit?’
‘Not I, pious Master Pigsnort,’ said the man with the spectacles. ‘I
never laid such a great folly to thy charge.’
‘Truly, I hope not,’ said the merchant. ‘Now, as touching this Great
Carbuncle, I am free to own that I have never had a glimpse of it; but
be it only the hundredth part so bright as people tell, it will
surely outvalue the Great Mogul’s best diamond, which he holds at an
incalculable sum. Wherefore, I am minded to put the Great Carbuncle on
shipboard, and voyage with it to England, France, Spain, Italy, or
into Heathendom, if Providence should send me thither, and, in a word,
dispose of the gem to the best bidder among the potentates of the earth,
that he may place it among his crown jewels. If any of ye have a wiser
plan, let him expound it.’
‘That have I, thou sordid man!’ exclaimed the poet. ‘Dost thou desire
nothing brighter than gold that thou wouldst transmute all this ethereal
lustre into such dross as thou wallowest in already? For myself, hiding
the jewel under my cloak, I shall hie me back to my attic chamber, in
one of the darksome alleys of London. There, night and day, will I
gaze upon it; my soul shall drink its radiance; it shall be diffused
throughout my intellectual powers, and gleam brightly in every line of
poesy that I indite. Thus, long ages after I am gone, the splendor of
the Great Carbuncle will blaze around my name?’
‘Well said, Master Poet!’ cried he of the spectacles. ‘Hide it under thy
cloak, sayest thou? Why, it will gleam through the holes, and make thee
look like a jack-o’-lantern!’
‘To think!’ ejaculated the Lord de Vere, rather to himself than
his companions, the best of whom he held utterly unworthy of his
intercourse--‘to think that a fellow in a tattered cloak should talk
of conveying the Great Carbuncle to a garret in Grub Street! Have not I
resolved within myself that the whole earth contains no fitter ornament
for the great hall of my ancestral castle? There shall it flame for
ages, making a noonday of midnight, glittering on the suits of armor,
the banners, and escutcheons, that hang around the wall, and keeping
bright the memory of heroes. Wherefore have all other adventurers sought
the prize in vain but that I might win it, and make it a symbol of
the glories of our lofty line? And never, on the diadem of the White
Mountains, did the Great Carbuncle hold a place half so honored as is
reserved for it in the hall of the De Veres!’
‘It is a noble thought,’ said the Cynic, with an obsequious sneer. ‘Yet,
might I presume to say so, the gem would make a rare sepulchral lamp,
and would display the glories of your lordship’s progenitors more truly
in the ancestral vault than in the castle hall.’
‘Nay, forsooth,’ observed Matthew, the young rustic, who sat hand
in hand with his bride, ‘the gentleman has bethought himself of a
profitable use for this bright stone. Hannah here and I are seeking it
for a like purpose.’
‘How, fellow!’ exclaimed his lordship, in surprise. ‘What castle hall
hast thou to hang it in?’
‘No castle,’ replied Matthew, ‘but as neat a cottage as any within sight
of the Crystal Hills. Ye must know, friends, that Hannah and I, being
wedded the last week, have taken up the search of the Great Carbuncle,
because we shall need its light in the long winter evenings; and it will
be such a pretty thing to show the neighbors when they visit us. It will
shine through the house so that we may pick up a pin in any corner, and
will set all the windows aglowing as if there were a great fire of pine
knots in the chimney. And then how pleasant, when we awake in the night,
to be able to see one another’s faces!’
There was a general smile among the adventurers at the simplicity of the
young couple’s project in regard to this wondrous and invaluable stone,
with which the greatest monarch on earth might have been proud to adorn
his palace. Especially the man with spectacles, who had sneered at all
the company in turn, now twisted his visage into such an expression of
ill-natured mirth, that Matthew asked him, rather peevishly, what he
himself meant to do with the Great Carbuncle.
‘The Great Carbuncle!’ answered the Cynic, with ineffable scorn. ‘Why,
you blockhead, there is no such thing in rerum natura. I have come three
thousand miles, and am resolved to set my foot on every peak of these
mountains, and poke my head into every chasm, for the sole purpose of
demonstrating to the satisfaction of any man one whit less an ass than
thyself that the Great Carbuncle is all a humbug!’
Vain and foolish were the motives that had brought most of the
adventurers to the Crystal Hills; but none so vain, so foolish, and so
impious too, as that of the scoffer with the prodigious spectacles. He
was one of those wretched and evil men whose yearnings are downward to
the darkness, instead of heavenward, and who, could they but distinguish
the lights which God hath kindled for us, would count the midnight gloom
their chiefest glory. As the Cynic spoke, several of the party were
startled by a gleam of red splendor, that showed the huge shapes of the
surrounding mountains and the rock-bed of the turbulent river with an
illumination unlike that of their fire on the trunks and black boughs
of the forest trees. They listened for the roll of thunder, but heard
nothing, and were glad that the tempest came not near them. The stars,
those dial-points of heaven, now warned the adventurers to close their
eyes on the blazing logs, and open them, in dreams, to the glow of the
Great Carbuncle.
The young married couple had taken their lodgings in the farthest
corner of the wigwam, and were separated from the rest of the party by
a curtain of curiously-woven twigs, such as might have hung, in deep
festoons, around the bridal-bower of Eve. The modest little wife had
wrought this piece of tapestry while the other guests were talking. She
and her husband fell asleep with hands tenderly clasped, and awoke from
visions of unearthly radiance to meet the more blessed light of one
another’s eyes. They awoke at the same instant, and with one happy
smile beaming over their two faces, which grew brighter with their
consciousness of the reality of life and love. But no sooner did she
recollect where they were, than the bride peeped through the interstices
of the leafy curtain, and saw that the outer room of the hut was
deserted.
‘Up, dear Matthew!’ cried she, in haste. ‘The strange folk are all gone!
Up, this very minute, or we shall loose the Great Carbuncle!’
In truth, so little did these poor young people deserve the mighty prize
which had lured them thither, that they had slept peacefully all night,
and till the summits of the hills were glittering with sunshine; while
the other adventurers had tossed their limbs in feverish wakefulness, or
dreamed of climbing precipices, and set off to realize their dreams
with the earliest peep of dawn. But Matthew and Hannah, after their calm
rest, were as light as two young deer, and merely stopped to say their
prayers and wash themselves in a cold pool of the Amonoosuck, and
then to taste a morsel of food, ere they turned their faces to the
mountainside. It was a sweet emblem of conjugal affection, as they
toiled up the difficult ascent, gathering strength from the mutual aid
which they afforded. After several little accidents, such as a torn
robe, a lost shoe, and the entanglement of Hannah’s hair in a bough,
they reached the upper verge of the forest, and were now to pursue a
more adventurous course. The innumerable trunks and heavy foliage of the
trees had hitherto shut in their thoughts, which now shrank affrighted
from the region of wind and cloud and naked rocks and desolate sunshine,
that rose immeasurably above them. They gazed back at the obscure
wilderness which they had traversed, and longed to be buried again
in its depths rather than trust themselves to so vast and visible a
solitude.
‘Shall we go on?’ said Matthew, throwing his arm round Hannah’s waist,
both to protect her and to comfort his heart by drawing her close to it.
But the little bride, simple as she was, had a woman’s love of jewels,
and could not forego the hope of possessing the very brightest in the
world, in spite of the perils with which it must be won.
‘Let us climb a little higher,’ whispered she, yet tremulously, as she
turned her face upward to the lonely sky.
‘Come, then,’ said Matthew, mustering his manly courage and drawing her
along with him, for she became timid again the moment that he grew bold.
And upward, accordingly, went the pilgrims of the Great Carbuncle, now
treading upon the tops and thickly-interwoven branches of dwarf pines,
which, by the growth of centuries, though mossy with age, had barely
reached three feet in altitude. Next, they came to masses and fragments
of naked rock heaped confusedly together, like a cairn reared by giants
in memory of a giant chief. In this bleak realm of upper air nothing
breathed, nothing grew; there was no life but what was concentrated in
their two hearts; they had climbed so high that Nature herself seemed no
longer to keep them company. She lingered beneath them, within the verge
of the forest trees, and sent a farewell glance after her children as
they strayed where her own green footprints had never been. But soon
they were to be hidden from her eye. Densely and dark the mists began to
gather below, casting black spots of shadow on the vast landscape, and
sailing heavily to one centre, as if the loftiest mountain peak had
summoned a council of its kindred clouds. Finally, the vapors welded
themselves, as it were, into a mass, presenting the appearance of a
pavement over which the wanderers might have trodden, but where they
would vainly have sought an avenue to the blessed earth which they had
lost. And the lovers yearned to behold that green earth again, more
intensely, alas! than, beneath a clouded sky, they had ever desired a
glimpse of heaven. They even felt it a relief to their desolation when
the mists, creeping gradually up the mountain, concealed its lonely
peak, and thus annihilated, at least for them, the whole region
of visible space. But they drew closely together, with a fond and
melancholy gaze, dreading lest the universal cloud should snatch them
from each other’s sight.
Still, perhaps, they would have been resolute to climb as far and as
high, between earth and heaven, as they could find foothold, if Hannah’s
strength had not begun to fail, and with that, her courage also. Her
breath grew short. She refused to burden her husband with her weight,
but often tottered against his side, and recovered herself each time by
a feebler effort. At last, she sank down on one of the rocky steps of
the acclivity.
‘We are lost, dear Matthew,’ said she, mournfully. ‘We shall never find
our way to the earth again. And oh how happy we might have been in our
cottage!’
‘Dear heart! we will yet be happy there,’ answered Matthew. ‘Look! In
this direction, the sunshine penetrates the dismal mist. By its aid, I
can direct our course to the passage of the Notch. Let us go back, love,
and dream no more of the Great Carbuncle!’
‘The sun cannot be yonder,’ said Hannah, with despondence. ‘By this time
it must be noon. If there could ever be any sunshine here, it would come
from above our heads.’
‘But look!’ repeated Matthew, in a somewhat altered tone. ‘It is
brightening every moment. If not sunshine, what can it be?’
Nor could the young bride any longer deny that a radiance was breaking
through the mist, and changing its dim hue to a dusky red, which
continually grew more vivid, as if brilliant particles were interfused
with the gloom. Now, also, the cloud began to roll away from the
mountain, while, as it heavily withdrew, one object after another
started out of its impenetrable obscurity into sight, with precisely the
effect of a new creation, before the indistinctness of the old chaos
had been completely swallowed up. As the process went on, they saw the
gleaming of water close at their feet, and found themselves on the very
border of a mountain lake, deep, bright, clear, and calmly beautiful,
spreading from brim to brim of a basin that had been scooped out of
the solid rock. A ray of glory flashed across its surface. The pilgrims
looked whence it should proceed, but closed their eyes with a thrill of
awful admiration, to exclude the fervid splendor that glowed from the
brow of a cliff impending over the enchanted lake. For the simple pair
had reached that lake of mystery, and found the long-sought shrine of
the Great Carbuncle!
They threw their arms around each other, and trembled at their own
success; for, as the legends of this wondrous gem rushed thick
upon their memory, they felt themselves marked out by fate and the
consciousness was fearful. Often, from childhood upward, they had seen
it shining like a distant star. And now that star was throwing its
intensest lustre on their hearts. They seemed changed to one another’s
eyes, in the red brilliancy that flamed upon their cheeks, while it lent
the same fire to the lake, the rocks, and sky, and to the mists which
had rolled back before its power. But, with their next glance, they
beheld an object that drew their attention even from the mighty stone.
At the base of the cliff, directly beneath the Great Carbuncle, appeared
the figure of a man, with his arms extended in the act of climbing, and
his face turned upward, as if to drink the full gush of splendor. But he
stirred not, no more than if changed to marble.
‘It is the Seeker,’ whispered Hannah, convulsively grasping her
husband’s arm. ‘Matthew, he is dead.’
‘The joy of success has killed him,’ replied Matthew, trembling
violently. ‘Or, perhaps, the very light of the Great Carbuncle was
death!’
‘The Great Carbuncle,’ cried a peevish voice behind them. ‘The Great
Humbug! If you have found it, prithee point it out to me.’
They turned their heads, and there was the Cynic, with his prodigious
spectacles set carefully on his nose, staring now at the lake, now at
the rocks, now at the distant masses of vapor, now right at the Great
Carbuncle itself, yet seemingly as unconscious of its light as if
all the scattered clouds were condensed about his person. Though its
radiance actually threw the shadow of the unbeliever at his own feet,
as he turned his back upon the glorious jewel, he would not be convinced
that there was the least glimmer there.
‘Where is your Great Humbug?’ he repeated. ‘I challenge you to make me
see it!’
‘There,’ said Matthew, incensed at such perverse blindness, and
turning the Cynic round towards the illuminated cliff. ‘Take off those
abominable spectacles, and you cannot help seeing it!’
Now these colored spectacles probably darkened the Cynic’s sight, in at
least as great a degree as the smoked glasses through which people gaze
at an eclipse. With resolute bravado, however, he snatched them from
his nose, and fixed a bold stare full upon the ruddy blaze of the
Great Carbuncle. But scarcely had he encountered it, when, with a deep,
shuddering groan, he dropped his head, and pressed both hands across his
miserable eyes. Thenceforth there was, in very truth, no light of the
Great Carbuncle, nor any other light on earth, nor light of heaven
itself, for the poor Cynic. So long accustomed to View all objects
through a medium that deprived them of every glimpse of brightness,
a single flash of so glorious a phenomenon, striking upon his naked
vision, had blinded him forever.
‘Matthew,’ said Hannah, clinging to him, ‘let us go hence!’
Matthew saw that she was faint, and kneeling down, supported her in his
arms, while he threw some of the thrillingly cold water of the enchanted
lake upon her face and bosom. It revived her, but could not renovate her
courage.
‘Yes, dearest!’ cried Matthew, pressing her tremulous form to his
breast--‘we will go hence, and return to our humble cottage. The blessed
sunshine and the quiet moonlight shall come through our window. We will
kindle the cheerful glow of our hearth, at eventide, and be happy in its
light. But never again will we desire more light than all the world may
share with us.’
‘No,’ said his bride, ‘for how could we live by day, or sleep by night,
in this awful blaze of the Great Carbuncle!’
Out of the hollow of their hands, they drank each a draught from the
lake, which presented them its waters uncontaminated by an earthly lip.
Then, lending their guidance to the blinded Cynic, who uttered not a
word, and even stifled his groans in his own most wretched heart, they
began to descend the mountain. Yet, as they left the shore, till then
untrodden, of the spirit’s lake, they threw a farewell glance towards
the cliff, and beheld the vapors gathering in dense volumes, through
which the gem burned duskily.
As touching the other pilgrims of the Great Carbuncle, the legend goes
on to tell, that the worshipful Master Ichabod Pigsnort soon gave up the
quest as a desperate speculation, and wisely resolved to betake himself
again to his warehouse, near the town dock, in Boston. But, as he passed
through the Notch of the mountains, a war party of Indians captured
our unlucky merchant, and carried him to Montreal, there holding him
in bondage, till, by the payment of a heavy ransom, he had woefully
subtracted from his hoard of pine-tree shillings. By his long absence,
moreover, his affairs had become so disordered that, for the rest of his
life, instead of wallowing in silver, he had seldom a sixpence worth
of copper. Doctor Cacaphodel, the alchemist, returned to his laboratory
with a prodigious fragment of granite, which he ground to powder,
dissolved in acids, melted in the crucible, and burned with the
blow-pipe, and published the result of his experiments in one of the
heaviest folios of the day. And, for all these purposes, the gem itself
could not have answered better than the granite. The poet, by a somewhat
similar mistake, made prize of a great piece of ice, which he found in
a sunless chasm of the mountains, and swore that it corresponded, in all
points, with his idea of the Great Carbuncle. The critics say, that, if
his poetry lacked the splendor of the gem, it retained all the coldness
of the ice. The Lord de Vere went back to his ancestral hall, where
he contented himself with a wax-lighted chandelier, and filled, in due
course of time, another coffin in the ancestral vault. As the funeral
torches gleamed within that dark receptacle, there was no need of the
Great Carbuncle to show the vanity of earthly pomp.
The Cynic, having cast aside his spectacles, wandered about the world,
a miserable object, and was punished with an agonizing desire of light,
for the wilful blindness of his former life. The whole night long, he
would lift his splendor-blasted orbs to the moon and stars; he turned
his face eastward, at sunrise, as duly as a Persian idolater; he made
a pilgrimage to Rome, to witness the magnificent illumination of St.
Peter’s Church; and finally perished in the great fire of London, into
the midst of which he had thrust himself, with the desperate idea of
catching one feeble ray from the blaze that was kindling earth and
heaven.
Matthew and his bride spent many peaceful years, and were fond of
telling the legend of the Great Carbuncle. The tale, however, towards
the close of their lengthened lives, did not meet with the full credence
that had been accorded to it by those who remembered the ancient lustre
of the gem. For it is affirmed that, from the hour when two mortals had
shown themselves so simply wise as to reject a jewel which would have
dimmed all earthly things, its splendor waned. When other pilgrims
reached the cliff, they found only an opaque stone, with particles of
mica glittering on its surface. There is also a tradition that, as the
youthful pair departed, the gem was loosened from the forehead of the
cliff, and fell into the enchanted lake, and that, at noontide, the
Seeker’s form may still be seen to bend over its quenchless gleam.
Some few believe that this inestimable stone is blazing as of old,
and say that they have caught its radiance, like a flash of summer
lightning, far down the valley of the Saco. And be it owned that, many
a mile from the Crystal Hills, I saw a wondrous light around their
summits, and was lured, by the faith of poesy, to be the latest pilgrim
of the GREAT CARBUNCLE.
SKETCHES FROM MEMORY
THE NOTCH OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS
IT was now the middle of September. We had come since sunrise from
Bartlett, passing up through the valley of the Saco, which extends
between mountainous walls, sometimes with a steep ascent, but often as
level as a church aisle. All that day and two preceding ones we had been
loitering towards the heart of the White Mountains--those old crystal
hills, whose mysterious brilliancy had gleamed upon our distant
wanderings before we thought of visiting them. Height after height had
risen and towered one above another till the clouds began to hang below
the peaks. Down their slopes were the red pathways of the slides, those
avalanches of earth, stones and trees, which descend into the hollows,
leaving vestiges of their track hardly to be effaced by the vegetation
of ages. We had mountains behind us and mountains on each side, and a
group of mightier ones ahead. Still our road went up along the Saco,
right towards the centre of that group, as if to climb above the clouds
in its passage to the farther region.
In old times the settlers used to be astounded by the inroads of the
northern Indians coming down upon them from this mountain rampart
through some defile known only to themselves. It is, indeed, a wondrous
path. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans, was travelling
up the valley, elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he passed, till
at length a great mountain took its stand directly across his intended
road. He tarries not for such an obstacle, but, rending it asunder
a thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of hidden
minerals, its sunless waters, all the secrets of the mountain’s inmost
heart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side. This
is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me that I have attempted to
describe it by so mean an image--feeling, as I do, that it is one of
those symbolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not
to the conception, of Omnipotence.