As I have said above, it had already been rumored in the valley that Mr.

Gathergold had turned out to be the prophetic personage so long and

vainly looked for, and that his visage was the perfect and undeniable

similitude of the Great Stone Face. People were the more ready to

believe that this must needs be the fact, when they beheld the splendid

edifice that rose, as if by enchantment, on the site of his father's old

weather-beaten farm-house. The exterior was of marble, so dazzlingly

white that it seemed as though the whole structure might melt away in

the sunshine, like those humbler ones which Mr. Gathergold, in his young

play-days, before his fingers were gifted with the touch of

transmutation, had been accustomed to build of snow. It had a richly

ornamented portico, supported by tall pillars, beneath which was a lofty

door, studded with silver knobs, and made of a kind of variegated wood

that had been brought from beyond the sea. The windows, from the floor

to the ceiling of each stately apartment, were composed, respectively,

of but one enormous pane of glass, so transparently pure that it was

said to be a finer medium than even the vacant atmosphere. Hardly

anybody had been permitted to see the interior of this palace; but it

was reported, and with good semblance of truth, to be far more gorgeous

than the outside, insomuch that whatever was iron or brass in other

houses was silver or gold in this; and Mr. Gathergold's bedchamber,

especially, made such a glittering appearance that no ordinary man would

have been able to close his eyes there. But, on the other hand, Mr.

Gathergold was now so inured to wealth, that perhaps he could not have

closed his eyes unless where the gleam of it was certain to find its way

beneath his eyelids.

In due time, the mansion was finished; next came the upholsterers with

magnificent furniture; then, a whole troop of black and white servants,

the harbingers of Mr. Gathergold, who, in his own majestic person, was

expected to arrive at sunset. Our friend Ernest, meanwhile, had been

deeply stirred by the idea that the great man, the noble man, the man of

prophecy, after so many ages of delay, was at length to be made manifest

to his native valley. He knew, boy as he was, that there were a thousand

ways in which Mr. Gathergold, with his vast wealth, might transform

himself into an angel of beneficence, and assume a control over human

affairs as wide and benignant as the smile of the Great Stone Face. Full

of faith and hope, Ernest doubted not that what the people said was

true, and that now he was to behold the living likeness of those

wondrous features on the mountain-side. While the boy was still gazing

up the valley, and fancying, as he always did, that the Great Stone Face

returned his gaze and looked kindly at him, the rumbling of wheels was

heard, approaching swiftly along the winding road.

"Here he comes!" cried a group of people who were assembled to witness

the arrival. "Here comes the great Mr. Gathergold!"

A carriage, drawn by four horses, dashed round the turn of the road.

Within it, thrust partly out of the window, appeared the physiognomy of

a little old man, with a skin as yellow as if his own Midas-hand had

transmuted it. He had a low forehead, small, sharp eyes, puckered about

with innumerable wrinkles, and very thin lips, which he made still

thinner by pressing them forcibly together.

"The very image of the Great Stone Face!" shouted the people. "Sure

enough, the old prophecy is true; and here we have the great man come,

at last!"

And, what greatly perplexed Ernest, they seemed actually to believe that

here was the likeness which they spoke of. By the roadside there chanced

to be an old beggar-woman and two little beggar-children, stragglers

from some far-off region, who, as the carriage rolled onward, held out

their hands and lifted up their doleful voices, most piteously

beseeching charity. A yellow claw--the very same that had clawed

together so much wealth--poked itself out of the coach-window, and dropt

some copper coins upon the ground; so that, though the great man's name

seems to have been Gathergold, he might just as suitably have been

nicknamed Scattercopper. Still, nevertheless, with an earnest shout, and

evidently with as much good faith as ever, the people bellowed,--

"He is the very image of the Great Stone Face!"

But Ernest turned sadly from the wrinkled shrewdness of that sordid

visage, and gazed up the valley, where, amid a gathering mist, gilded by

the last sunbeams, he could still distinguish those glorious features

which had impressed themselves into his soul. Their aspect cheered him.

What did the benign lips seem to say?

"He will come! Fear not, Ernest; the man will come!"

The years went on, and Ernest ceased to be a boy. He had grown to be a

young man now. He attracted little notice from the other inhabitants of

the valley; for they saw nothing remarkable in his way of life, save

that, when the labor of the day was over, he still loved to go apart and

gaze and meditate upon the Great Stone Face. According to their idea of

the matter, it was a folly, indeed, but pardonable, inasmuch as Ernest

was industrious, kind, and neighborly, and neglected no duty for the

sake of indulging this idle habit. They knew not that the Great Stone

Face had become a teacher to him, and that the sentiment which was

expressed in it would enlarge the young man's heart, and fill it with

wider and deeper sympathies than other hearts. They knew not that thence

would come a better wisdom than could be learned from books, and a

better life than could be moulded on the defaced example of other human

lives. Neither did Ernest know that the thoughts and affections which

came to him so naturally, in the fields and at the fireside, and

wherever he communed with himself, were of a higher tone than those

which all men shared with him. A simple soul,--simple as when his mother

first taught him the old prophecy,--he beheld the marvellous features

beaming adown the valley, and still wondered that their human

counterpart was so long in making his appearance.

By this time poor Mr. Gathergold was dead and buried; and the oddest

part of the matter was, that his wealth, which was the body and spirit

of his existence, had disappeared before his death, leaving nothing of

him but a living skeleton, covered over with a wrinkled, yellow skin.

Since the melting away of his gold, it had been very generally conceded

that there was no such striking resemblance, after all, betwixt the

ignoble features of the ruined merchant and that majestic face upon the

mountain-side. So the people ceased to honor him during his lifetime,

and quietly consigned him to forgetfulness after his decease. Once in a

while, it is true, his memory was brought up in connection with the

magnificent palace which he had built, and which had long ago been

turned into a hotel for the accommodation of strangers, multitudes of

whom came, every summer, to visit that famous natural curiosity, the

Great Stone Face. Thus, Mr. Gathergold being discredited and thrown into

the shade, the man of prophecy was yet to come.

It so happened that a native-born son of the valley, many years before,

had enlisted as a soldier, and, after a great deal of hard fighting, had

now become an illustrious commander. Whatever he may be called in

history, he was known in camps and on the battle-field under the

nickname of Old Blood-and-Thunder. This war-worn veteran, being now

infirm with age and wounds, and weary of the turmoil of a military life,

and of the roll of the drum and the clangor of the trumpet, that had so

long been ringing in his ears, had lately signified a purpose of

returning to his native valley, hoping to find repose where he

remembered to have left it. The inhabitants, his old neighbors and their

grown-up children, were resolved to welcome the renowned warrior with a

salute of cannon and a public dinner; and all the more enthusiastically,

it being affirmed that now, at last, the likeness of the Great Stone

Face had actually appeared. An aid-de-camp of Old Blood-and-Thunder,

travelling through the valley, was said to have been struck with the

resemblance. Moreover the schoolmates and early acquaintances of the

general were ready to testify, on oath, that, to the best of their

recollection, the aforesaid general had been exceedingly like the

majestic image, even when a boy, only that the idea had never occurred

to them at that period. Great, therefore, was the excitement throughout

the valley; and many people, who had never once thought of glancing at

the Great Stone Face for years before, now spent their time in gazing at

it for the sake of knowing exactly how General Blood-and-Thunder looked.

On the day of the great festival, Ernest, with all the other people of

the valley, left their work, and proceeded to the spot where the sylvan

banquet was prepared. As he approached, the loud voice of the Rev. Dr.

Battleblast was heard, beseeching a blessing on the good things set

before them, and on the distinguished friend of peace in whose honor

they were assembled. The tables were arranged in a cleared space of the

woods, shut in by the surrounding trees, except where a vista opened

eastward, and afforded a distant view of the Great Stone Face.

Over the general's chair, which was a relic from the home of Washington,

there was an arch of verdant boughs, with the laurel profusely

intermixed, and surmounted by his country's banner, beneath which he had

won his victories. Our friend Ernest raised himself on his tiptoes, in

hopes to get a glimpse of the celebrated guest; but there was a mighty

crowd about the tables anxious to hear the toasts and speeches, and to

catch any word that might fall from the general in reply; and a

volunteer company, doing duty as a guard, pricked ruthlessly with their

bayonets at any particularly quiet person among the throng. So Ernest,

being of an unobtrusive character, was thrust quite into the background,

where he could see no more of Old Blood-and-Thunder's physiognomy than

if it had been still blazing on the battle-field. To console himself, he

turned towards the Great Stone Face, which, like a faithful and

long-remembered friend, looked back and smiled upon him through the

vista of the forest. Meantime, however, he could overhear the remarks of

various individuals, who were comparing the features of the hero with

the face on the distant mountain-side.

"Tis the same face, to a hair!" cried one man, cutting a caper for joy.

"Wonderfully like, that's a fact!" responded another.

"Like! why, I call it Old Blood-and-Thunder himself, in a monstrous

looking-glass!" cried a third. "And why not? He's the greatest man of

this or any other age, beyond a doubt."

And then all three of the speakers gave a great shout, which

communicated electricity to the crowd, and called forth a roar from a

thousand voices, that went reverberating for miles among the mountains,

until you might have supposed that the Great Stone Face had poured its

thunder-breath into the cry. All these comments, and this vast

enthusiasm served the more to interest our friend; nor did he think of

questioning that now, at length, the mountain-visage had found its human

counterpart. It is true, Ernest had imagined that this long-looked-for

personage would appear in the character of a man of peace, uttering

wisdom, and doing good, and making people happy. But, taking an habitual

breadth of view, with all his simplicity, he contended that Providence

should choose its own method of blessing mankind, and could conceive

that this great end might be effected even by a warrior and a bloody

sword, should inscrutable wisdom see fit to order matters so.

"The general! the general!" was now the cry. "Hush! silence! Old

Blood-and-Thunder's going to make a speech."

Even so; for, the cloth being removed, the general's health had been

drunk amid shouts of applause, and he now stood upon his feet to thank

the company. Ernest saw him. There he was, over the shoulders of the

crowd, from the two glittering epaulets and embroidered collar upward,

beneath the arch of green boughs with interwined laurel, and the banner

drooping as if to shade his brow! And there, too, visible in the same

glance, through the vista of the forest, appeared the Great Stone Face!

And was there, indeed, such a resemblance as the crowd had testified.

Alas, Ernest could not recognize it! He beheld a war-worn and

weather-beaten countenance, full of energy, and expressive of an iron

will; but the gentle wisdom, the deep, broad, tender sympathies, were

altogether wanting in Old Blood-and-Thunder's visage; and even if the

Great Stone Face had assumed his look of stern command, the milder

traits would still have tempered it.

"This is not the man of prophecy," sighed Ernest, to himself, as he made

his way out of the throng. "And must the world wait longer yet?"

The mists had congregated about the distant mountain-side, and there

were seen the grand and awful features of the Great Stone Face, awful

but benignant, as if a mighty angel were sitting among the hills, and

enrobing himself in a cloud-vesture of gold and purple. As he looked,

Ernest could hardly believe but that a smile beamed over the whole

visage, with a radiance still brightening, although without motion of

the lips. It was probably the effect of the western sunshine, melting

through the thinly diffused vapors that had swept between him and the

object that he gazed at. But--as it always did--the aspect of his

marvellous friend made Ernest as hopeful as if he had never hoped in

vain.

"Fear not, Ernest," said his heart, even as if the Great Face were

whispering him,--"fear not, Ernest; he will come."

More years sped swiftly and tranquilly away. Ernest still dwelt in his

native valley, and was now a man of middle age. By imperceptible

degrees, he had become known among the people. Now, as heretofore, he

labored for his bread, and was the same simple-hearted man that he had

always been. But he had thought and felt so much, he had given so many

of the best hours of his life to unworldly hopes for some great good to

mankind, that it seemed as though he had been talking with the angels,

and had imbibed a portion of their wisdom unawares. It was visible in

the calm and well-considered beneficence of his daily life, the quiet

stream of which had made a wide green margin all along its course. Not a

day passed by, that the world was not the better because this man,

humble as he was, had lived. He never stepped aside from his own path,

yet would always reach a blessing to his neighbor. Almost involuntarily,

too, he had become a preacher. The pure and high simplicity of his

thought, which, as one of its manifestations, took shape in the good

deeds that dropped silently from his hand, flowed also forth in speech.

He uttered truths that wrought upon and moulded the lives of those who

heard him. His auditors, it may be, never suspected that Ernest, their

own neighbor and familiar friend, was more than an ordinary man; least

of all did Ernest himself suspect it; but, inevitably as the murmur of a

rivulet, came thoughts out of his mouth that no other human lips had

spoken.

When the people's minds had had a little time to cool, they were ready

enough to acknowledge their mistake in imagining a similarity between

General Blood-and-Thunder's truculent physiognomy and the benign visage

on the mountain-side. But now, again, there were reports and many

paragraphs in the newspapers, affirming that the likeness of the Great

Stone Face had appeared upon the broad shoulders of a certain eminent

statesman. He, like Mr. Gathergold and Old Blood-and-Thunder, was a

native of the valley, but had left it in his early days, and taken up

the trades of law and politics. Instead of the rich man's wealth and the

warrior's sword, he had but a tongue, and it was mightier than both

together. So wonderfully eloquent was he, that whatever he might choose

to say, his auditors had no choice but to believe him; wrong looked like

right, and right like wrong; for when it pleased him, he could make a

kind of illuminated fog with his mere breath, and obscure the natural

daylight with it. His tongue, indeed, was a magic instrument: sometimes

it rumbled like the thunder; sometimes it warbled like the sweetest

music. It was the blast of war,--the song of peace; and it seemed to

have a heart in it, when there was no such matter. In good truth, he was

a wondrous man; and when his tongue had acquired him all other

imaginable success,--when it had been heard in halls of state, and in

the courts of princes and potentates,--after it had made him known all

over the world, even as a voice crying from shore to shore,--it finally

persuaded his countrymen to select him for the Presidency. Before this

time,--indeed, as soon as he began to grow celebrated,--his admirers had

found out the resemblance between him and the Great Stone Face; and so

much were they struck by it, that throughout the country this

distinguished gentleman was known by the name of Old Stony Phiz. The

phrase was considered as giving a highly favorable aspect to his

political prospects; for, as is likewise the case with the Popedom,

nobody ever becomes President without taking a name other than his own.

While his friends were doing their best to make him President, Old Stony

Phiz, as he was called, set out on a visit to the valley where he was

born. Of course, he had no other object than to shake hands with his

fellow-citizens, and neither thought nor cared about any effect which

his progress through the country might have upon the election.

Magnificent preparations were made to receive the illustrious statesman;

a cavalcade of horsemen set forth to meet him at the boundary line of

the State, and all the people left their business and gathered along the

wayside to see him pass. Among these was Ernest. Though more than once

disappointed, as we have seen, he had such a hopeful and confiding

nature, that he was always ready to believe in whatever seemed beautiful

and good. He kept his heart continually open, and thus was sure to catch

the blessing from on high, when it should come. So now again, as

buoyantly as ever, he went forth to behold the likeness of the Great

Stone Face.

The cavalcade came prancing along the road, with a great clattering of

hoofs and a mighty cloud of dust, which rose up so dense and high that

the visage of the mountain-side was completely hidden from Ernest's

eyes. All the great men of the neighborhood were there on horseback:

militia officers, in uniform; the member of Congress; the sheriff of the

county; the editors of newspapers; and many a farmer, too, had mounted

his patient steed, with his Sunday coat upon his back. It really was a

very brilliant spectacle, especially as there were numerous banners

flaunting over the cavalcade, on some of which were gorgeous portraits

of the illustrious statesman and the Great Stone Face, smiling

familiarly at one another, like two brothers. If the pictures were to be

trusted, the mutual resemblance, it must be confessed, was marvellous.

We must not forget to mention that there was a band of music, which made

the echoes of the mountains ring and reverberate with the loud triumph

of its strains; so that airy and soul-thrilling melodies broke out among

all the heights and hollows, as if every nook of his native valley had

found a voice, to welcome the distinguished guest. But the grandest

effect was when the far-off mountain precipice flung back the music; for

then the Great Stone Face itself seemed to be swelling the triumphant

chorus, in acknowledgment that, at length, the man of prophecy was come.

All this while the people were throwing up their hats and shouting, with

enthusiasm so contagious that the heart of Ernest kindled up, and he

likewise threw up his hat, and shouted, as loudly as the loudest, "Huzza

for the great man! Huzza, for Old Stony Phiz!" But as yet he had not

seen him.

"Here he is, now!" cried those who stood near Ernest. "There! There!

Look at Old Stony Phiz and then at the Old Man of the Mountain, and see

if they are not as like as two twin-brothers!"

In the midst of all this gallant array, came an open barouche, drawn by

four white horses; and in the barouche, with his massive head uncovered,

sat the illustrious statesman, Old Stony Phiz himself.

"Confess it," said one of Ernest's neighbors to him; "the Great Stone

Face has met its match at last!"

Now, it must be owned that, at his first glimpse of the countenance

which was bowing and smiling from the barouche, Ernest did fancy that

there was a resemblance between it and the old familiar face upon the

mountain-side. The brow, with its massive depths and loftiness, and all

the other features, indeed, were boldly and strongly hewn, as if in

emulation of a more than heroic, of a Titanic model. But the sublimity

and stateliness, the grand expression of a divine sympathy, that

illuminated the mountain visage, and etherealized its ponderous granite

substance into spirit, might here be sought in vain. Something had been

originally left out, or had departed. And therefore the marvellously

gifted statesman had always a weary gloom in the deep caverns of his

eyes, as of a child that has outgrown its playthings, or a man of mighty

faculties and little aims, whose life, with all its high performances,

was vague and empty, because no high purpose had endowed it with

reality.

Still, Ernest's neighbor was thrusting his elbow into his side, and

pressing him for an answer.

"Confess! confess! Is not he the very picture of your Old Man of the

Mountain?"

"No!" said Ernest, bluntly, "I see little or no likeness."

"Then so much the worse for the Great Stone Face!" answered his

neighbor; and again he set up a shout for Old Stony Phiz.

But Ernest turned away, melancholy, and almost despondent; for this was

the saddest of his disappointments, to behold a man who might have

fulfilled the prophecy, and had not willed to do so. Meantime, the

cavalcade, the banners, the music, and the barouches swept past him,

with the vociferous crowd in the rear, leaving the dust to settle down,

and the Great Stone Face to be revealed again, with the grandeur that it

had worn for untold centuries.

"Lo, here I am, Ernest!" the benign lips seemed to say. "I have waited

longer than thou, and am not yet weary. Fear not; the man will come."

The years hurried onward, treading in their haste on one another's

heels. And now they began to bring white hairs, and scatter them over

the head of Ernest; they made reverend wrinkles across his forehead, and

furrows in his cheeks. He was an aged man. But not in vain had he grown

old; more than the white hairs on his head were the sage thoughts in his

mind; his wrinkles and furrows were inscriptions that Time had graved,

and in which he had written legends of wisdom that had been tested by

the tenor of a life. And Ernest had ceased to be obscure. Unsought for,

undesired, had come the fame which so many seek, and made him known in

the great world, beyond the limits of the valley in which he had dwelt

so quietly. College professors, and even the active men of cities, came

from far to see and converse with Ernest; for the report had gone abroad

that this simple husbandman had ideas unlike those of other men, not

gained from books, but of a higher tone,--a tranquil and familiar

majesty, as if he had been talking with the angels as his daily friends.

Whether it were sage, statesman, or philanthropist, Ernest received

these visitors with the gentle sincerity that had characterized him from

boyhood, and spoke freely with them of whatever came uppermost, or lay

deepest in his heart or their own. While they talked together, his face

would kindle, unawares, and shine upon them, as with a mild evening

light. Pensive with the fulness of such discourse, his guests took leave

and went their way; and passing up the valley, paused to look at the

Great Stone Face, imagining that they had seen its likeness in a human

countenance, but could not remember where.

While Ernest had been growing up and growing old, a bountiful Providence

had granted a new poet to this earth. He, likewise, was a native of the

valley, but had spent the greater part of his life at a distance from

that romantic region, pouring out his sweet music amid the bustle and

din of cities. Often, however, did the mountains which had been familiar

to him in his childhood lift their snowy peaks into the clear atmosphere

of his poetry. Neither was the Great Stone Face forgotten, for the poet

had celebrated it in an ode, which was grand enough to have been uttered

by its own majestic lips. This man of genius, we may say, had come down

from heaven with wonderful endowments. If he sang of a mountain, the

eyes of all mankind beheld a mightier grandeur reposing on its breast,

or soaring to its summit, than had before been seen there. If his theme

were a lovely lake, a celestial smile had now been thrown over it, to

gleam forever on its surface. If it were the vast old sea, even the deep

immensity of its dread bosom seemed to swell the higher, as if moved by

the emotions of the song. Thus the world assumed another and a better

aspect from the hour that the poet blessed it with his happy eyes. The

Creator had bestowed him, as the last best touch to his own handiwork.

Creation was not finished till the poet came to interpret, and so

complete it.

The effect was no less high and beautiful, when his human brethren were

the subject of his verse. The man or woman, sordid with the common dust

of life, who crossed his daily path, and the little child who played in

it, were glorified if he beheld them in his mood of poetic faith. He

showed the golden links of the great chain that intertwined them with an

angelic kindred; he brought out the hidden traits of a celestial birth

that made them worthy of such kin. Some, indeed, there were, who thought

to show the soundness of their judgment by affirming that all the beauty

and dignity of the natural world existed only in the poet's fancy. Let

such men speak for themselves, who undoubtedly appear to have been

spawned forth by Nature with a contemptuous bitterness; she having

plastered them up out of her refuse stuff, after all the swine were

made. As respects all things else, the poet's ideal was the truest

truth.

The songs of this poet found their way to Ernest. He read them after his

customary toil, seated on the bench before his cottage-door, where for

such a length of time he had filled his repose with thought, by gazing

at the Great Stone Face. And now as he read stanzas that caused the soul

to thrill within him, he lifted his eyes to the vast countenance beaming

on him so benignantly.

"O majestic friend," he murmured, addressing the Great Stone Face, "is

not this man worthy to resemble thee?"

The Face seemed to smile, but answered not a word.

Now it happened that the poet, though he dwelt so far away, had not only

heard of Ernest, but had meditated much upon his character, until he

deemed nothing so desirable as to meet this man, whose untaught wisdom

walked hand in hand with the noble simplicity of his life. One summer

morning, therefore, he took passage by the railroad, and, in the decline

of the afternoon, alighted from the cars at no great distance from

Ernest's cottage. The great hotel, which had formerly been the palace of

Mr. Gathergold, was close at hand, but the poet, with his carpet-bag on

his arm, inquired at once where Ernest dwelt, and was resolved to be

accepted as his guest.

Approaching the door, he there found the good old man, holding a volume

in his hand, which alternately he read, and then, with a finger between

the leaves, looked lovingly at the Great Stone Face.

"Good evening," said the poet. "Can you give a traveller a night's

lodging?"

"Willingly," answered Ernest; and then he added, smiling, "Methinks I

never saw the Great Stone Face look so hospitably at a stranger."

The poet sat down on the bench beside him, and he and Ernest talked

together. Often had the poet held intercourse with the wittiest and the

wisest, but never before with a man like Ernest, whose thoughts and

feelings gushed up with such a natural freedom, and who made great

truths so familiar by his simple utterance of them. Angels, as had been

so often said, seemed to have wrought with him at his labor in the

fields; angels seemed to have sat with him by the fireside; and,

dwelling with angels as friend with friends, he had imbibed the

sublimity of their ideas, and imbued it with the sweet and lowly charm

of household words. So thought the poet. And Ernest, on the other hand,

was moved and agitated by the living images which the poet flung out of

his mind, and which peopled all the air about the cottage-door with

shapes of beauty, both gay and pensive. The sympathies of these two men

instructed them with a profounder sense than either could have attained

alone. Their minds accorded into one strain, and made delightful music

which neither of them could have claimed as all his own, nor

distinguished his own share from the other's. They led one another, as

it were, into a high pavilion of their thoughts, so remote, and hitherto

so dim, that they had never entered it before, and so beautiful that

they desired to be there always.

As Ernest listened to the poet, he imagined that the Great Stone Face

was bending forward to listen too. He gazed earnestly into the poet's

glowing eyes.

"Who are you, my strangely gifted guest?" he said.

The poet laid his finger on the volume that Ernest had been reading.

"You have read these poems," said he. "You know me, then,--for I wrote

them."

Again, and still more earnestly than before, Ernest examined the poet's

features; then turned towards the Great Stone Face; then back, with an

uncertain aspect, to his guest. But his countenance fell; he shook his

head, and sighed.

"Wherefore are you sad?" inquired the poet.

"Because," replied Ernest, "all through life I have awaited the

fulfilment of a prophecy; and, when I read these poems, I hoped that it

might be fulfilled in you."

"You hoped," answered the poet, faintly smiling, "to find in me the

likeness of the Great Stone Face. And you are disappointed, as formerly

with Mr. Gathergold, and Old Blood-and-Thunder, and Old Stony Phiz. Yes,

Ernest, it is my doom. You must add my name to the illustrious three,

and record another failure of your hopes. For--in shame and sadness do I

speak it, Ernest--I am not worthy to be typified by yonder benign and

majestic image."

"And why?" asked Ernest. He pointed to the volume. "Are not those

thoughts divine?"

"They have a strain of the Divinity," replied the poet. "You can hear in

them the far-off echo of a heavenly song. But my life, dear Ernest, has

not corresponded with my thought. I have had grand dreams, but they have

been only dreams, because I have lived--and that, too, by my own

choice--among poor and mean realities. Sometimes even--shall I dare to

say it?--I lack faith in the grandeur, the beauty, and the goodness,

which my own works are said to have made more evident in nature and in

human life. Why, then, pure seeker of the good and true, shouldst thou

hope to find me, in yonder image of the divine?"

The poet spoke sadly, and his eyes were dim with tears. So, likewise,

were those of Ernest.

At the hour of sunset, as had long been his frequent custom, Ernest was

to discourse to an assemblage of the neighboring inhabitants in the open

air. He and the poet, arm in arm, still talking together as they went

along, proceeded to the spot. It was a small nook among the hills, with

a gray precipice behind, the stern front of which was relieved by the

pleasant foliage of many creeping plants, that made a tapestry for the

naked rock, by hanging their festoons from all its rugged angles. At a

small elevation above the ground, set in a rich framework of verdure,

there appeared a niche, spacious enough to admit a human figure, with

freedom for such gestures as spontaneously accompany earnest thought and

genuine emotion. Into this natural pulpit Ernest ascended, and threw a

look of familiar kindness around upon his audience. They stood, or sat,

or reclined upon the grass, as seemed good to each, with the departing

sunshine falling obliquely over them, and mingling its subdued

cheerfulness with the solemnity of a grove of ancient trees, beneath and

amid the boughs of which the golden rays were constrained to pass. In

another direction was seen the Great Stone Face, with the same cheer,

combined with the same solemnity, in its benignant aspect.

Ernest began to speak, giving to the people of what was in his heart and

mind. His words had power, because they accorded with his thoughts; and

his thoughts had reality and depth, because they harmonized with the

life which he had always lived. It was not mere breath that this

preacher uttered; they were the words of life, because a life of good

deeds and holy love was melted into them. Pearls, pure and rich, had

been dissolved into this precious draught. The poet, as he listened,

felt that the being and character of Ernest were a nobler strain of

poetry than he had ever written. His eyes glistening with tears, he

gazed reverentially at the venerable man, and said within himself that

never was there an aspect so worthy of a prophet and a sage as that

mild, sweet, thoughtful countenance, with the glory of white hair

diffused about it. At a distance, but distinctly to be seen, high up in

the golden light of the setting sun, appeared the Great Stone Face, with

hoary mists around it, like the white hairs around the brow of Ernest.

Its look of grand beneficence seemed to embrace the world.

At that moment, in sympathy with a thought which he was about to utter,

the face of Ernest assumed a grandeur of expression, so imbued with

benevolence, that the poet, by an irresistible impulse, threw his arms

aloft, and shouted,--

"Behold! Behold! Ernest is himself the likeness of the Great Stone

Face!"

Then all the people looked, and saw that what the deep-sighted poet said

was true. The prophecy was fulfilled. But Ernest, having finished what

he had to say, took the poet's arm, and walked slowly homeward, still

hoping that some wiser and better man than himself would by and by

appear, bearing a resemblance to the GREAT STONE FACE.

VII. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS (1858)[*]

[* From "Rab and his Friends and Other Dogs and Men."]

BY DR. JOHN BROWN (1810-1882)

[_Setting_. Dr. Brown was once driving with a friend through a crowded

section of Edinburgh when he stopped in the middle of a sentence,

seeming to be surprised at something behind the carriage. "Is it some

one you know?" the friend asked. "No," was the reply, "it's a dog I

_don't_ know." Needless to say that "Rab and his Friends" is an

Edinburgh story. The time is about 1824-1830. In the Scotch dialect

"weel a weel" means "all right"; "till" means "to"; "I'se" means "I

shall"; "he's" means "he shall"; "ower clean to beil" means "too clean

to suppurate"; "fremyt" means "strange"; "a' the lave" means "all the

rest"; "in the treviss wi' the mear" means "in the stall with the mare."

_Plot_. From Aesop's Fables to Kipling's Jungle Books literature is full

of animal stories. But there is no dog story better told than this and

none that appeals more to our deeper sympathies. It is more of a

character sketch than a short story, the incidents and characters being

bound together by a common relation to Rab. From his leisurely first

appearance in the story, "a huge mastiff, sauntering down the middle of

the causeway, as if with his hands in his pockets," to the unanswerable

last question--"His teeth and his friends gone, why should he keep the

peace, and be civil?"--we follow Rab's pathetic career with the growing

conviction that "his like was na atween this and Thornhill," however

distant Thornhill may have been. Character sketches are apt to be

uninteresting because there is usually too little action and too much

description. The adjectives tend to smother the verbs. "They have," said

Hawthorne of his "Twice-Told Tales," "the pale tint of flowers that

blossomed in too retired a shade,--the coolness of a meditative habit,

which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every

sketch." But no such charge can be laid at the door of "Rab and his

Friends." The very dumbness of Rab, his mute yearning to help, his brave

and loyal ministries in the hospital, doubly affecting because wordless

and impotent, lend an appeal to this sketch that few sketches of men and

women can be said to have.

_Characters_. In a later sketch called "Our Dogs" Dr. Brown tells how

Rab became the property of James and Ailie. He had been terrifying

everybody at Macbie Hill and his owner ordered him to be hanged. As Rab

was getting the better of the contest, his owner commanded that he be

shot. But Ailie, who happened to be near, noticed that he had a big

splinter in his foreleg. "She gave him water," says Dr. Brown, "and by

her woman's wit got his lame paw under a door, so that he couldn't

suddenly get at her; then with a quick firm hand she plucked out the

splinter, and put in an ample meal. She went in some time after, taking

no notice of him, and he came limping up, and laid his great jaws in her

lap." From that moment they became friends. A little later James was in

a lonely part of the woods when a robber sprang at him and demanded his

money. "Weel a weel, let me get it," said James, and stepping back he

whispered to Rab, "Speak till him, my man." Rab had the robber down in

an instant.

In "Rab and his Friends" the great mastiff shows just the qualities that

we should expect from this account of his earlier career. But his

sympathy and affection for Ailie, shown so tenderly in the hospital

scenes, find an added pathos in the thought that he was serving his

first and best friend, one who had healed his hurt as he would have

healed hers if he could.]

Four-and-thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary

Street from the Edinburgh High School, our heads together, and our arms

intertwisted, as only lovers and boys know how, or why.

When we got to the top of the street, and turned north, we espied a

crowd at the Tron Church. "A dog-fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and

so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before we

got up! And is not this boy-nature? and human nature too? and don't we

all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it? Dogs like

fighting; old Isaac says they "delight" in it, and for the best of all

reasons; and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. They

see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or man--courage,

endurance, and skill--in intense action. This is very different from a

love of making dogs fight, and enjoying, and aggravating, and making

gain by their pluck. A boy,--be he ever so fond himself of fighting,--if

he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have run off

with Bob and me fast enough: it is a natural, and a not wicked interest,

that all boys and men have in witnessing intense energy in action.

Does any curious and finely-ignorant woman wish to know how Bob's eye at

a glance announced a dog-fight to his brain? He did not, he could not

see the dogs fighting; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid

induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting is a crowd

masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman,

fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands

freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular,

compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads

all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus.

Well, Bob and I are up, and find it is not over: a small thoroughbred,

white Bull Terrier, is busy throttling a large shepherd's dog,

unaccustomed to war, but not to be trifled with. They are hard at it;

the scientific little fellow doing his work in great style, his pastoral

enemy fighting wildly, but with the sharpest of teeth and a great

courage. Science and breeding, however, soon had their own; the Game

Chicken, as the premature Bob called him, working his way up, took his

final grip of poor Yarrow's throat,--and he lay gasping and done for.

His master, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from Tweedsmuir, would

have liked to have knocked down any man, would "drink up Esil,[*] or eat

a crocodile," for that part, if he had a chance: it was no use kicking

the little dog; that would only make him hold the closer. Many were the

means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it.

"Water!" but there was none near, and many cried for it who might have

got it from the well at Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large,

vague, benevolent, middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some

struggle got the bushy end of _Yarrow's_ tail into his ample mouth, and

bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the

much-enduring, much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over

his broad visage, delivered a terrific facer upon our large, vague,

benevolent, middle-aged friend,--who went down like a shot.

[* Esil, "vinegar" (_Hamlet_, V, I, 299).]

Still the Chicken holds; death not far off. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff!"

observed a calm, highly-dressed young buck, with an eye-glass in his

eye. "Snuff, indeed!" growled the angry crowd, affronted and glaring.

"Snuff! a pinch of snuff!" again observed the buck, but with more

urgency; whereon were produced several open boxes, and from a mull which

may have been at Culloden, he took a pinch, knelt down, and presented it

to the nose of the Chicken. The laws of physiology and of snuff take

their course; the Chicken sneezes, and Yarrow is free!

The young pastoral giant stalks off with Yarrow in his arms,--comforting

him.

But the Bull Terrier's blood is up, and his soul unsatisfied; he grips

the first dog he meets, and discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric

phrase, he makes a brief sort of _amende_, and is off. The boys, with

Bob and me at their head, are after him: down Niddry Street he goes,

bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow--Bob and I, and our small

men, panting behind.

There, under the single arch of the South Bridge, is a huge mastiff,

sauntering down the middle of the causeway, as if with his hands in his

pockets: he is old, gray, brindled, as big as a little Highland bull,

and has the Shakesperian dewlaps shaking as he goes.

The Chicken makes straight at him, and fastens on his throat. To our

astonishment, the great creature does nothing but stand still, hold

himself up, and roar--yes, roar; a long, serious, remonstrative roar.

How is this? Bob and I are up to them. _He is muzzled_! The bailies had

proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength and

economy mainly, had encompassed his huge jaws in a home-made apparatus,

constructed out of the leather of some ancient _breechin_. His mouth was

open as far as it could; his lips curled up in rage--a sort of terrible

grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the darkness; the strap across

his mouth tense as a bowstring; his whole frame stiff with indignation

and surprise; his roar asking us all round, "Did you ever see the like

of this?" He looked a statue of anger and astonishment, done in Aberdeen

granite.

We soon had a crowd: the Chicken held on. "A knife!" cried Bob; and a

cobbler gave him his knife: you know the kind of knife, worn away

obliquely to a point, and always keen. I put its edge to the tense

leather; it ran before it; and then!--one sudden jerk of that enormous

head, a sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise,--and the bright

and fierce little fellow is dropped, limp, and dead. A solemn pause:

this was more than any of us had bargained for. I turned the little

fellow over, and saw he was quite dead; the mastiff had taken him by the

small of the back like a rat, and broken it.

He looked down at his victim appeased, ashamed, and amazed; snuffed him

all over, stared at him, and taking a sudden thought, turned round and

trotted off. Bob took the dead dog up, and said, "John, we'll bury him

after tea." "Yes," said I, and was off after the mastiff. He made up the

Cowgate at a rapid swing; he had forgotten some engagement. He turned up

the Candlemaker Row, and stopped at the Harrow Inn.

There was a carrier's cart ready to start, and a keen, thin, impatient,

black-a-vised little man, his hand at his gray horse's head, looking

about angrily for something. "Rab, ye thief!" said he, aiming a kick at

my great friend, who drew cringing up, and avoiding the heavy shoe with

more agility than dignity, and watching his master's eye, slunk dismayed

under the cart,--his ears down, and as much as he had of tail down too.

What a man this must be--thought I--to whom my tremendous hero turns

tail! The carrier saw the muzzle hanging, cut and useless, from his

neck, and I eagerly told him the story, which Bob and I always thought,

and still think, Homer, or King David, or Sir Walter alone were worthy

to rehearse. The severe little man was mitigated, and condescended to

say, "Rab, my man, puir Rabbie,"--whereupon the stump of a tail rose up,

the ears were cocked, the eyes filled, and were comforted; the two

friends were reconciled. "Hupp!" and a stroke of the whip were given to

Jess; and off went the three.

* * * * *

Bob and I buried the Game Chicken that night (we had not much of a tea)

in the back-green of his house in Melville Street, No. 17, with

considerable gravity and silence; and being at the time in the Iliad,

and, like all boys, Trojans, we called him Hector of course.

Six years have passed,--a long time for a boy and a dog: Bob Ainslie is

off to the wars; I am a medical student, and clerk at Minto House

Hospital.

Rab I saw almost every week, on the Wednesday, and we had much pleasant

intimacy. I found the way to his heart by frequent scratching of his

huge head, and an occasional bone. When I did not notice him he would

plant himself straight before me, and stand wagging that bud of a tail,

and looking up, with his head a little to the one side. His master I

occasionally saw; he used to call me "Maister John," but was laconic as

any Spartan.

One fine October afternoon, I was leaving the hospital, when I saw the

large gate open, and in walked Rab, with that great and easy saunter of

his. He looked as if taking general possession of the place; like the

Duke of Wellington entering a subdued city, satiated with victory and

peace. After him came Jess, now white from age, with her cart; and in it

a woman, carefully wrapped up,--the carrier leading the horse anxiously,

and looking back. When he saw me, James (for his name was James Noble)

made a curt and grotesque "boo," and said, "Maister John, this is the

mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest--some kind o' an income

we're thinking."

By this time I saw the woman's face; she was sitting on a sack filled

with straw, her husband's plaid round her, and his big-coat with its

large white metal buttons, over her feet.

I never saw a more unforgettable face--pale, serious, _lonely_,[*]

delicate, sweet, without being at all what we call fine. She looked

sixty, and had on a mutch, white as snow, with its black ribbon; her

silvery, smooth hair setting off her dark-gray eyes--eyes such as one

sees only twice or thrice in a lifetime, full of suffering, full also of

the overcoming of it: her eyebrows black and delicate, and her mouth

firm, patient, and contented, which few mouths ever are.

[* It is not easy giving this look by one word; it was expressive of her

being so much of her life alone.]

As I have said, I never saw a more beautiful countenance, or one more

subdued to settled quiet. "Ailie," said James, "this is Maister John,

the young doctor; Rab's freend, ye ken. We often speak aboot you,

doctor." She smiled, and made a movement, but said nothing; and prepared

to come down, putting her plaid aside and rising. Had Solomon, in all

his glory, been handing down the Queen of Sheba at his palace gate he

could not have done it more daintily, more tenderly, more like a

gentleman, than did James the Howgate carrier, when he lifted down Ailie

his wife. The contrast of his small, swarthy, weather-beaten, keen,

worldly face to hers--pale, subdued, and beautiful--was something

wonderful. Rab looked on concerned and puzzled, but ready for anything

that might turn up,--were it to strangle the nurse, the porter, or even

me. Ailie and he seemed great friends.

"As I was sayin' she's got a kind o' trouble in her breest, doctor; wull

ye tak' a look at it?" We walked into the consulting-room, all four; Rab

grim and comic, willing to be happy and confidential if cause could be

shown, willing also to be the reverse, on the same terms. Ailie sat

down, undid her open gown and her lawn handkerchief round her neck, and

without a word, showed me her right breast. I looked at and examined it

carefully,--she and James watching me, and Rab eying all three. What

could I say? there it was, that had once been so soft, so shapely, so

white, so gracious and bountiful, so "full of all blessed

conditions,"--hard as a stone, a centre of horrid pain, making that pale

face, with its gray, lucid, reasonable eyes, and its sweet resolved

mouth, express the full measure of suffering overcome. Why was that

gentle, modest, sweet woman, clean and lovable, condemned by God to bear

such a burden?

I got her away to bed. "May Rab and me bide?" said James. "_You_ may;

and Rab, if he will behave himself." "I'se warrant he's do that,

doctor;" and in slank the faithful beast. I wish you could have seen

him. There are no such dogs now. He belonged to a lost tribe. As I have

said, he was brindled and gray like Rubislaw granite; his hair short,

hard, and close, like a lion's; his body thick set, like a little

bull--a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He must have been ninety

pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt head; his muzzle

black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth or two--being

all he had--gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His head was scarred

with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of fields of battle all

over it; one eye out, one ear cropped as close as was Archbishop

Leighton's father's; the remaining eye had the power of two; and above

it, and in constant communication with it, was a tattered rag of an ear,

which was forever unfurling itself, like an old flag; and then that bud

of a tail, about one inch long, if it could in any sense be said to be

long, being as broad as long--the mobility, the instantaneousness of

that bud were very funny and surprising, and its expressive twinklings

and winkings, the intercommunications between the eye, the ear, and it,

were of the oddest and swiftest.

Rab had the dignity and simplicity of great size; and having fought his

way all along the road to absolute supremacy, he was as mighty in his

own line as Julius Cæsar or the Duke of Wellington, and had the

gravity[*] of all great fighters.

[* A Highland game-keeper, when asked why a certain terrier, of singular

pluck, was so much more solemn than the other dogs, said, "Oh, Sir,

life's full o' sairiousness to him--he just never can get enuff o'

fechtin'."]

You must have often observed the likeness of certain men to certain

animals, and of certain dogs to men. Now, I never looked at Rab without

thinking of the great Baptist preacher, Andrew Fuller.[*] The same

large, heavy, menacing, combative, sombre, honest countenance, the same

deep inevitable eye, the same look,--as of thunder asleep, but

ready,--neither a dog nor a man to be trifled with.

[* Fuller was, in early life, when a farmer lad at Soham, famous as a

boxer; not quarrelsome, but not without "the stern delight" a man of

strength and courage feels in their exercise. Dr. Charles Stewart, of

Dunearn, whose rare gifts and graces as a physician, a divine, a

scholar, and a gentleman, live only in the memory of those few who knew

and survive him, liked to tell how Mr. Fuller used to say, that when he

was in the pulpit, and saw a _buirdly_ man come along the passage, he

would instinctively draw himself up, measure his imaginary antagonist,

and forecast how he would deal with him, his hands meanwhile condensing

into fists, and tending to "square." He must have been a hard hitter if

he boxed as he preached--what "The Fancy" would call "an ugly

customer."]

Next day, my master, the surgeon, examined Ailie. There was no doubt it

must kill her, and soon. It could be removed--it might never return--it

would give her speedy relief--she should have it done. She curtsied,

looked at James, and said, "When?" "To-morrow," said the kind surgeon--a

man of few words. She and James and Rab and I retired. I noticed that he

and she spoke little, but seemed to anticipate everything in each other.

The following day, at noon, the students came in, hurrying up the great

stair. At the first landing-place, on a small well-known blackboard, was

a bit of paper fastened by wafers and many remains of old wafers beside

it. On the paper were the words,--"An operation to-day. J.B. _Clerk_."

Up ran the youths, eager to secure good places; in they crowded, full of

interest and talk. "What's the case?" "Which side is it?"

Don't think them heartless; they are neither better nor worse than you

or I; they get over their professional horrors, and into their proper

work--and in them pity--as an _emotion_, ending in itself or at best in

tears and a long-drawn breath--lessens, while pity as a _motive_ is

quickened, and gains power and purpose. It is well for poor human nature

that it is so.

The operating theatre is crowded; much talk and fun, and all the

cordiality and stir of youth. The surgeon with his staff of assistants

is there. In comes Ailie: one look at her quiets and abates the eager

students. That beautiful old woman is too much for them; they sit down,

and are dumb, and gaze at her. These rough boys feel the power of her

presence. She walks in quickly, but without haste; dressed in her mutch,

her neckerchief, her white dimity short-gown, her black bombazine

petticoat, showing her white worsted stockings and her carpet-shoes.

Behind her was James with Rab. James sat down in the distance, and took

that huge and noble head between his knees. Rab looked perplexed and

dangerous; forever cocking his ear and dropping it as fast.

Ailie stepped up on a seat, and laid herself on the table, as her friend

the surgeon told her; arranged herself, gave a rapid look at James, shut

her eyes, rested herself on me, and took my hand. The operation was at

once begun; it was necessarily slow; and chloroform--one of God's best

gifts to his suffering children--was then unknown. The surgeon did his

work. The pale face showed its pain, but was still and silent. Rab's

soul was working within him; he saw that something strange was going

on,--blood flowing from his mistress, and she suffering; his ragged ear

was up, and importunate; he growled and gave now and then a sharp

impatient yelp; he would have liked to have done something to that man.

But James had him firm, and gave him a _glower_ from time to time, and

an intimation of a possible kick;--all the better for James, it kept his

eye and his mind off Ailie.

It is over: she is dressed, steps gently and decently down from the

table, looks for James; then, turning to the surgeon and the students,

she curtsies,--and in a low, clear voice, begs their pardon if she has

behaved ill. The students--all of us--wept like children; the surgeon

happed her up carefully,--and, resting on James and me, Ailie went to

her room, Rab following. We put her to bed. James took off his heavy

shoes, crammed with tackets, heel-capt, and toe-capt and put them

carefully under the table, saying, "Maister John, I'm for nane o' yer

strynge nurse bodies for Ailie. I'll be her nurse, and I'll gang aboot

on my stockin' soles as canny as pussy." And so he did; and handy and

clever, and swift and tender as any woman, was that horny-handed, snell,

peremptory little man. Everything she got he gave her: he seldom slept;

and often I saw his small shrewd eyes out of the darkness, fixed on her.

As before, they spoke little.

Rab behaved well, never moving, showing us how meek and gentle he could

be, and occasionally, in his sleep, letting us know that he was

demolishing some adversary. He took a walk with me every day, generally

to the Candlemaker Row; but he was sombre and mild; declined doing

battle, though some fit cases offered, and indeed submitted to sundry

indignities; and was always very ready to turn, and came faster back,

and trotted up the stair with much lightness, and went straight to that

door.

Jess, the mare, had been sent, with her weather-worn cart, to Howgate,

and had doubtless her own dim and placid meditations and confusions, on

the absence of her master and Rab, and her unnatural freedom from the

road and her cart.

For some days Ailie did well. The wound healed "by the first intention;"

for as James said, "Our Ailie's skin's ower clean to beil." The students

came in quiet and anxious, and surrounded her bed. She said she liked to

see their young, honest faces. The surgeon dressed her, and spoke to her

in his own short kind way, pitying her through his eyes, Rab and James

outside the circle,--Rab being now reconciled, and even cordial, and

having made up his mind that as yet nobody required worrying, but, as

you may suppose, _semper paratus_.

So far well: but, four days after the operation, my patient had a sudden

and long shivering, a "groosin'," as she called it. I saw her soon

after; her eyes were too bright, her cheek colored; she was restless,

and ashamed of being so; the balance was lost; mischief had begun. On

looking at the wound, a blush of red told the secret: her pulse was

rapid, her breathing anxious and quick, she wasn't herself, as she said,

and was vexed at her restlessness. We tried what we could; James did

everything, was everywhere; never in the way, never out of it; Rab

subsided under the table into a dark place, and was motionless, all but

his eye, which followed every one. Ailie got worse; began to wander in

her mind, gently; was more demonstrative in her ways to James, rapid in

her questions, and sharp at times. He was vexed, and said, "She was

never that way afore; no, never." For a time she knew her head was

wrong, and was always asking our pardon--the dear, gentle old woman:

then delirium set in strong, without pause. Her brain gave way, and then

came that terrible spectacle,--

The intellectual power, through words and things,

Went sounding on its dim and perilous way,

she sang bits of old songs and Psalms, stopping suddenly, mingling the

Psalms of David and the diviner words of his Son and Lord, with homely

odds and ends and scraps of ballads.

Nothing more touching, or in a sense more strangely beautiful, did I

ever witness. Her tremulous, rapid, affectionate, eager, Scotch

voice,--the swift, aimless, bewildered mind, the baffled utterance, the

bright and perilous eye; some wild words, some household cares,

something for James, the names of the dead, Rab called rapidly and in a

"fremyt" voice, and he starting up surprised, and slinking off as if he

were to blame somehow, or had been dreaming he heard; many eager

questions and beseechings which James and I could make nothing of, and

on which she seemed to set her all, and then sink back ununderstood. It

was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad. James

hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever; read

to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and

metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing

great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and doating

over her as his "ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ain bonnie wee

dawtie!"

The end was drawing on: the golden bowl was breaking; the silver cord

was fast being loosed--that _animula blandula, vagula, hospes,

comesque_[*] was about to flee. The body and the soul--companions for

sixty years--were being sundered, and taking leave. She was walking

alone, through the valley of that shadow, into which one day we must all

enter,--and yet she was not alone, for we know whose rod and staff were

comforting her.

[* "Little, gentle, wandering soul, guest and comrade."--Hadrian's

"Address to his Soul"]

One night she had fallen quiet, and as we hoped, asleep; her eyes were

shut. We put down the gas, and sat watching her. Suddenly she sat up in

bed, and taking a bed-gown which was lying on it rolled up, she held it

eagerly to her breast,--to the right side. We could see her eyes bright

with a surprising tenderness and joy, bending over this bundle of

clothes. She held it as a woman holds her sucking child; opening out her

night-gown impatiently, and holding it close, and brooding over it, and

murmuring foolish little words, as over one whom his mother comforteth,

and who sucks and is satisfied. It was pitiful and strange to see her

wasted dying look, keen and yet vague--her immense love.

"Preserve me!" groaned James, giving way. And then she rocked back and

forward, as if to make it sleep, hushing it, and wasting on it her

infinite fondness. "Wae's me, doctor; I declare she's thinkin' it's that

bairn." "What bairn?" "The only bairn we ever had; our wee Mysie, and

she's in the Kingdom, forty years and mair." It was plainly true: the

pain in the breast, telling its urgent story to a bewildered, ruined

brain, was misread and mistaken; it suggested to her the uneasiness of a

breast full of milk, and then the child; and so again once more they

were together, and she had her ain wee Mysie in her bosom.

This was the close. She sank rapidly: the delirium left her; but, as she

whispered, she was "clean silly;" it was the lightening before the final

darkness. After having for some time lain still--her eyes shut, she said

"James!" He came close to her, and lifting up her calm, clear, beautiful

eyes, she gave him a long look, turned to me kindly but shortly, looked

for Rab but could not see him, then turned to her husband again, as if

she would never leave off looking, shut her eyes, and composed herself.

She lay for some time breathing quick, and passed away so gently that,

when we thought she was gone, James, in his old-fashioned way, held the

mirror to her face. After a long pause, one small spot of dimness was

breathed out; it vanished away, and never returned, leaving the blank

clear darkness of the mirror without a stain. "What is our life? it is

even a vapor, which appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth

away."

Rab all this time had been full awake and motionless; he came forward

beside us: Ailie's hand, which James had held, was hanging down; it was

soaked with his tears; Rab licked it all over carefully, looked at her,

and returned to his place under the table.

James and I sat, I don't know how long, but for some time,--saying

nothing: he started up abruptly, and with some noise went to the table,

and putting his right fore and middle fingers each into a shoe, pulled

them out, and put them on, breaking one of the leather latchets, and

muttering in anger, "I never did the like o' that afore!"

I believe he never did; nor after either. "Rab!" he said roughly, and

pointing with his thumb to the bottom of the bed. Rab leapt up, and

settled himself; his head and eye to the dead face. "Maister John, ye'll

wait for me," said the carrier; and disappeared in the darkness,

thundering down-stairs in his heavy shoes. I ran to a front window;

there he was, already round the house, and out at the gate, fleeing like

a shadow.

I was afraid about him, and yet not afraid; so I sat down beside Rab,

and being wearied, fell asleep. I awoke from a sudden noise outside. It

was November, and there had been a heavy fall of snow. Rab was _in statu

quo_; he heard the noise too, and plainly knew it, but never moved. I

looked out; and there, at the gate, in the dim morning--for the sun was

not up--was Jess and the cart,--a cloud of steam rising from the old

mare. I did not see James; he was already at the door, and came up the

stairs, and met me. It was less than three hours since he left, and he

must have posted out--who knows how?--to Howgate, full nine miles off;

yoked Jess, and driven her astonished into town. He had an armful of

blankets, and was streaming with perspiration. He nodded to me, spread

out on the floor two pairs of clean old blankets having at their

corners, "A.G., 1794," in large letters in red worsted. These were the

initials of Alison Græme, and James may have looked in at her from

without--himself unseen but not unthought of--when he was "wat, wat, and

weary," and after having walked many a mile over the hills, may have

seen her sitting, while "a' the lave were sleepin':" and by the

firelight working her name on the blankets, for her ain James's bed.

He motioned Rab down, and taking his wife in his arms, laid her in the

blankets, and happed her carefully and firmly up, leaving the face

uncovered; and then lifting her, he nodded again sharply to me, and with

a resolved but utterly miserable face, strode along the passage, and

down-stairs, followed by Rab. I followed with a light; but he didn't

need it. I went out, holding stupidly the candle in my hand in the calm

frosty air; we were soon at the gate. I could have helped him, but I saw

he was not to be meddled with, and he was strong, and did not need it.

He laid her down as tenderly, as safely, as he had lifted her out ten

days before--as tenderly as when he had her first in his arms when she

was only "A.G.,"--sorted her, leaving that beautiful sealed face open to

the heavens; and then taking Jess by the head, he moved away. He did not

notice me, neither did Rab, who presided behind the cart.

I stood till they passed through the long shadow of the College, and

turned up Nicolson Street. I heard the solitary cart sound through the

streets, and die away and come again; and I returned, thinking of that

company going up Libberton Brae, then along Roslin Muir, the morning

light touching the Pentlands and making them like on-looking ghosts,

then down the hill through Auchindinny woods, past "haunted

Woodhouselee;" and as daybreak came sweeping up the bleak Lammermuirs,

and fell on his own door, the company would stop, and James would take

the key, and lift Ailie up again, laying her on her own bed, and, having

put Jess up, would return with Rab and shut the door.

James buried his wife, with his neighbors mourning, Rab inspecting the

solemnity from a distance. It was snow, and that black ragged hole would

look strange in the midst of the swelling spotless cushion of white.

James looked after everything; then rather suddenly fell ill, and took

to bed; was insensible when the doctor came, and soon died. A sort of

low fever was prevailing in the village, and his want of sleep, his

exhaustion, and his misery made him apt to take it. The grave was not

difficult to reopen. A fresh fall of snow had again made all things

white and smooth; Rab once more looked on, and slunk home to the stable.

* * * * *

And what of Rab? I asked for him next week of the new carrier who got

the goodwill of James's business, and was now master of Jess and her

cart. "How's Rab?" He put me off, and said rather rudely, "What's _your_

business wi' the dowg?" I was not to be so put off. "Where's Rab?" He,

getting confused and red, and intermeddling with his hair, said, "Deed,

sir, Rab's deid." "Dead! what did he die of?" "Weel, sir," said he,

getting redder, "he did na exactly dee; he was killed. I had to brain

him wi' a rack-pin; there was nae doin' wi' him. He lay in the treviss

wi' the mear, and wad na come oot. I tempit him wi' kail and meat, but

he wad tak naething, and keepit me frae feedin' the beast, and he was

aye gur gurrin', and grup gruppin' me by the legs. I was laith to make

awa wi' the auld dowg, his like was na atween this and Thornhill,--but,

'deed, sir, I could do naething else." I believed him. Fit end for Rab,

quick and complete. His teeth and his friends gone, why should he keep

the peace, and be civil?

VIII. THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT[*] (1869)

[* Used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton

Mifflin Company, publishers of Bret Harte's Works.]

BY BRET HARTE (1836-1902)

[_Setting_. The group tragedy enacted in this story took place between

November 23 and December 7, 1850, on the road from Poker Flat to Sandy

Bar, in Sierra County, California. The time and place are those that

Bret Harte has made peculiarly his own. The austerity and wildness of

the scenery seem somehow to favor the intimate revelation of character

that the story displays. There is no intervention of cities, crops,

fashions, or conventions between the different members of the character

group or between the group as a whole and the reader. All is bare like a

white mountain peak. Notice also how the background of a common peril

draws the characters together and brings out at last the best in each.

_Plot_. The story sets forth and interprets a dramatic situation. The

plot is staged so as to answer the question, "Do not the people whom

society regards as outcasts have yet some redeeming virtue?" Notice

especially how a sense of common fellowship is developed in these

outcasts. First, they are subjected to a common humiliation in being

driven from Poker Flat by persons whom the outcasts consider no whit

better than themselves. Next, they are exposed to a common danger, a

danger that leads the stronger to care instinctively for the weaker, and

the weaker to recognize that it is nobler to give than to receive. At

last, in the unexpected entrance of the innocent Tom Simson and the

guileless Piney Woods, the outcasts find a common challenge to the

native goodness that had long lain dormant within them. Innocence and

guilelessness may be laughed at, as they are here, but their appeal is

often stronger than the appeal of disciplined virtue or of

self-conscious superiority. When Bret Harte was charged with confusing

the boundary lines of vice and virtue he replied that his plots

"conformed to the rules laid down by a Great Poet who created the

parable of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan."

_Characters_. Oakhurst, who is always called "Mr." Oakhurst, is of

course the dominant character. The story begins with him and ends with

him. He is "the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker

Flat,"--strong while there was anything to be done, weak even to suicide

when he had only to wait for the inevitable end. He was a brave,

desperate, solitary man, whose thought and speech and action, however,

were always those of the professional gambler. Bret Harte, who has put

him into several stories, says of him in another place: "Go where he

would and with whom, he was always a notable man in ten thousand." The

admiration that we yield to such a man, though it is only a qualified

admiration, is doubtless the admiration of power which, we cannot help

thinking, might be used beneficently if it could only be harnessed to a

noble cause.

But if Oakhurst is the dominant character, Piney Woods is, I think, the

central character. She is central in this story just as little Aglaïa is

central in Tennyson's "Princess," or Eppie in George Eliot's "Silas

Marner," or the baby offspring of Cherokee Sal in "The Luck of Roaring

Camp." Bret Harte had just written the last-named story when he began

the composition of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat." The same great theme,

the radiating and redeeming power of innocence and purity, was carried

over from the first story to the second. The ministry of the baby and

the ministry of the fifteen-year-old bride is the same in both. Like the

Great Stone Face in Hawthorne's story or like little Pippa in Browning's

poem, they awaken the better nature of those about them. They restore

hopes that had become but memories and memories that had almost ceased

to be hopes.]

As Mr. John Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker

Flat on the morning of the twenty-third of November, 1850, he was

conscious of a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night.

Two or three men, conversing earnestly together, ceased as he

approached, and exchanged significant glances. There was a Sabbath lull

in the air, which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked

ominous.

Mr. Oakhurst's calm, handsome face betrayed small concern in these

indications. Whether he was conscious of any predisposing cause, was

another question. "I reckon they're after somebody," he reflected;

"likely it's me." He returned to his pocket the handkerchief with which

he had been whipping away the red dust of Poker Flat from his neat

boots, and quietly discharged his mind of any further conjecture.

In point of fact, Poker Flat was "after somebody." It had lately

suffered the loss of several thousand dollars, two valuable horses, and

a prominent citizen. It was experiencing a spasm of virtuous reaction,

quite as lawless and ungovernable as any of the acts that had provoked

it. A secret committee had determined to rid the town of all improper

persons. This was done permanently in regard of two men who were then

hanging from the boughs of a sycamore in the gulch, and temporarily in

the banishment of certain other objectionable characters. I regret to

say that some of these were ladies. It is but due to the sex, however,

to state that their impropriety was professional, and it was only in

such easily established standards of evil that Poker Flat ventured to

sit in judgment.

Mr. Oakhurst was right in supposing that he was included in this

category. A few of the committee had urged hanging him as a possible

example, and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his pockets of

the sums he had won from them. "It's agin justice," said Jim Wheeler,

"to let this yer young man from Roaring Camp--an entire stranger--carry

away our money." But a crude sentiment of equity residing in the breasts

of those who had been fortunate enough to win from Mr. Oakhurst

overruled this narrower local prejudice.

Mr. Oakhurst received his sentence with philosophic calmness, none the

less coolly that he was aware of the hesitation of his judges. He was

too much of a gambler not to accept Fate. With him life was at best an

uncertain game, and he recognized the usual percentage in favor of the

dealer.

A body of armed men accompanied the deported wickedness of Poker Flat to

the outskirts of the settlement. Besides Mr. Oakhurst, who was known to

be a coolly desperate man, and for whose intimidation the armed escort

was intended, the expatriated party consisted of a young woman

familiarly known as "The Duchess"; another, who had won the title of

"Mother Shipton"; and "Uncle Billy," a suspected sluice-robber and

confirmed drunkard. The cavalcade provoked no comments from the

spectators, nor was any word uttered by the escort. Only, when the gulch

which marked the uttermost limit of Poker Flat was reached, the leader

spoke briefly and to the point. The exiles were forbidden to return at

the peril of their lives.

As the escort disappeared, their pent-up feelings found vent in a few

hysterical tears from the Duchess, some bad language from Mother

Shipton, and a Parthian volley of expletives from Uncle Billy. The

philosophic Oakhurst alone remained silent. He listened calmly to Mother

Shipton's desire to cut somebody's heart out, to the repeated statements

of the Duchess that she would die in the road, and to the alarming oaths

that seemed to be bumped out of Uncle Billy as he rode forward. With the

easy good-humor characteristic of his class, he insisted upon exchanging

his own riding-horse, "Five Spot," for the sorry mule which the Duchess

rode. But even this act did not draw the party into any closer sympathy.

The young woman readjusted her somewhat draggled plumes with a feeble,

faded coquetry; Mother Shipton eyed the possessor of "Five Spot" with

malevolence, and Uncle Billy included the whole party in one sweeping

anathema.

The road to Sandy Bar--a camp that, not having as yet experienced the

regenerating influences of Poker Flat, consequently seemed to offer some

invitation to the emigrants--lay over a steep mountain range. It was

distant a day's severe travel. In that advanced season, the party soon

passed out of the moist, temperate regions of the foot-hills into the

dry, cold, bracing air of the Sierras. The trail was narrow and

difficult. At noon the Duchess, rolling out of her saddle upon the

ground, declared her intention of going no farther, and the party

halted.

The spot was singularly wild and impressive. A wooded amphitheatre,

surrounded on three sides by precipitous cliffs of naked granite, sloped

gently toward the crest of another precipice that overlooked the valley.

It was, undoubtedly, the most suitable spot for a camp, had camping been

advisable. But Mr. Oakhurst knew that scarcely half the journey to Sandy

Bar was accomplished, and the party were not equipped or provisioned for

delay. This fact he pointed out to his companions curtly, with a

philosophic commentary on the folly of "throwing up their hand before

the game was played out." But they were furnished with liquor, which in

this emergency stood them in place of food, fuel, rest, and prescience.

In spite of his remonstrances, it was not long before they were more or

less under its influence. Uncle Billy passed rapidly from a bellicose

state into one of stupor, the Duchess became maudlin, and Mother Shipton

snored. Mr. Oakhurst alone remained erect, leaning against a rock,

calmly surveying them.

Mr. Oakhurst did not drink. It interfered with a profession which

required coolness, impassiveness, and presence of mind, and, in his own

language, he "couldn't afford it." As he gazed at his recumbent

fellow-exiles, the loneliness begotten of his pariah-trade, his habits

of life, his very vices, for the first time seriously oppressed him. He

bestirred himself in dusting his black clothes, washing his hands and

face, and other acts characteristic of his studiously neat habits, and

for a moment forgot his annoyance. The thought of deserting his weaker

and more pitiable companions never perhaps occurred to him. Yet he could

not help feeling the want of that excitement which, singularly enough,

was most conducive to that calm equanimity for which he was notorious.

He looked at the gloomy walls that rose a thousand feet sheer above the

circling pines around him; at the sky, ominously clouded; at the valley

below, already deepening into shadow. And, doing so, suddenly he heard

his own name called.

A horseman slowly ascended the trail. In the fresh, open face of the

new-comer Mr. Oakhurst recognized Tom Simson, otherwise known as "The

Innocent" of Sandy Bar. He had met him some months before over a "little

game," and had, with perfect equanimity, won the entire

fortune--amounting to some forty dollars--of that guileless youth. After

the game was finished, Mr. Oakhurst drew the youthful speculator behind

the door and thus addressed him: "Tommy, you're a good little man, but

you can't gamble worth a cent. Don't try it over again." He then handed

him his money back, pushed him gently from the room, and so made a

devoted slave of Tom Simson.

There was a remembrance of this in his boyish and enthusiastic greeting

of Mr. Oakhurst. He had started, he said, to go to Poker Flat to seek

his fortune. "Alone?" No, not exactly alone; in fact (a giggle), he had

run away with Piney Woods. Didn't Mr. Oakhurst remember Piney? She that

used to wait on the table at the Temperance House? They had been engaged

a long time, but old Jake Woods had objected, and so they had run away,

and were going to Poker Flat to be married, and here they were. And they

were tired out, and how lucky it was they had found a place to camp and

company. All this the Innocent delivered rapidly, while Piney, a stout,

comely damsel of fifteen, emerged from behind the pine-tree, where she

had been blushing unseen, and rode to the side of her lover.

Mr. Oakhurst seldom troubled himself with sentiment, still less with

propriety; but he had a vague idea that the situation was not fortunate.

He retained, however, his presence of mind sufficiently to kick Uncle

Billy, who was about to say something, and Uncle Billy was sober enough

to recognize in Mr. Oakhurst's kick a superior power that would not bear

trifling. He then endeavored to dissuade Tom Simson from delaying

further, but in vain. He even pointed out the fact that there was no

provision, nor means of making a camp. But, unluckily, the Innocent met

this objection by assuring the party that he was provided with an extra

mule loaded with provisions, and by the discovery of a rude attempt at a

log-house near the trail. "Piney can stay with Mrs. Oakhurst," said the

Innocent, pointing to the Duchess, "and I can shift for myself."

Nothing but Mr. Oakhurst's admonishing foot saved Uncle Billy from

bursting into a roar of laughter. As it was, he felt compelled to retire

up the cañon until he could recover his gravity. There he confided the

joke to the tall pine-trees, with many slaps of his leg, contortions of

his face, and the usual profanity. But when he returned to the party, he

found them seated by a fire--for the air had grown strangely chill and

the sky overcast--in apparently amicable conversation. Piney was

actually talking in an impulsive, girlish fashion to the Duchess, who

was listening with an interest and animation she had not shown for many

days. The Innocent was holding forth, apparently with equal effect, to

Mr. Oakhurst and Mother Shipton, who was actually relaxing into

amiability. "Is this yer a d----d picnic?" said Uncle Billy, with inward

scorn, as he surveyed the sylvan group, the glancing firelight, and the

tethered animals in the foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the

alcoholic fumes that disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular

nature, for he felt impelled to slap his leg again and cram his fist

into his mouth.

As the shadows crept slowly up the mountain, a slight breeze rocked the

tops of the pine-trees, and moaned through their long and gloomy aisles.

The ruined cabin, patched and covered with pine-boughs, was set apart

for the ladies. As the lovers parted, they unaffectedly exchanged a

kiss, so honest and sincere that it might have been heard above the

swaying pines. The frail Duchess and the malevolent Mother Shipton were

probably too stunned to remark upon this last evidence of simplicity,

and so turned without a word to the hut. The fire was replenished, the

men lay down before the door, and in a few minutes were asleep.

Mr. Oakhurst was a light sleeper. Toward morning he awoke benumbed and

cold. As he stirred the dying fire, the wind, which was now blowing

strongly, brought to his cheek that which caused the blood to leave

it,--snow!

He started to his feet with the intention of awakening the sleepers, for

there was no time to lose. But turning to where Uncle Billy had been

lying, he found him gone. A suspicion leaped to his brain and a curse to

his lips. He ran to the spot where the mules had been tethered; they

were no longer there. The tracks were already rapidly disappearing in

the snow.

The momentary excitement brought Mr. Oakhurst back to the fire with his

usual calm. He did not waken the sleepers. The Innocent slumbered

peacefully, with a smile on his good-humored, freckled face; the virgin

Piney slept beside her frailer sisters as sweetly as though attended by

celestial guardians, and Mr. Oakhurst, drawing his blanket over his

shoulders, stroked his mustaches and waited for the dawn. It came slowly

in a whirling mist of snow-flakes, that dazzled and confused the eye.

What could be seen of the landscape appeared magically changed. He

looked over the valley, and summoned up the present and future in two

words,--"snowed in!"

A careful inventory of the provisions, which, fortunately for the party,

had been stored within the hut, and so escaped the felonious fingers of

Uncle Billy, disclosed the fact that with care and prudence they might

last ten days longer. "That is," said Mr. Oakhurst, _sotto voce_ to the

Innocent, "if you're willing to board us. If you ain't--and perhaps

you'd better not--you can wait till Uncle Billy gets back with

provisions." For some occult reason, Mr. Oakhurst could not bring

himself to disclose Uncle Billy's rascality, and so offered the

hypothesis that he had wandered from the camp and had accidentally

stampeded the animals. He dropped a warning to the Duchess and Mother

Shipton, who of course knew the facts of their associate's defection.

"They'll find out the truth about us _all_ when they find out anything,"

he added, significantly, "and there's no good frightening them now."

Tom Simson not only put all his worldly store at the disposal of Mr.

Oakhurst, but seemed to enjoy the prospect of their enforced seclusion.

"We'll have a good camp for a week, and then the snow'll melt, and we'll

all go back together." The cheerful gayety of the young man, and Mr.

Oakhurst's calm infected the others. The Innocent, with the aid of

pine-boughs, extemporized a thatch for the roofless cabin, and the

Duchess directed Piney in the rearrangement of the interior with a taste

and tact that opened the blue eyes of that provincial maiden to their

fullest extent. "I reckon now you're used to fine things at Poker Flat,"

said Piney. The Duchess turned away sharply to conceal something that

reddened her cheeks through its professional tint, and Mother Shipton

requested Piney not to "chatter." But when Mr. Oakhurst returned from a

weary search for the trail, he heard the sound of happy laughter echoed

from the rocks. He stopped in some alarm, and his thoughts first

naturally reverted to the whiskey, which he had prudently _cachéd_. "And

yet it don't somehow sound like whiskey," said the gambler. It was not

until he caught sight of the blazing fire through the still blinding

storm and the group around it that he settled to the conviction that it

was "square fun."

Whether Mr. Oakhurst had _cachéd_ his cards with the whiskey as

something debarred the free access of the community, I cannot say. It

was certain that, in Mother Shipton's words, he "didn't say cards once"

during that evening. Haply the time was beguiled by an accordion,

produced somewhat ostentatiously by Tom Simson from his pack.

Notwithstanding some difficulties attending the manipulation of his

instrument, Piney Woods managed to pluck several reluctant melodies from

its keys, to an accompaniment by the Innocent on a pair of bone

castanets. But the crowning festivity of the evening was reached in a

rude camp-meeting hymn, which the lovers, joining hands, sang with great

earnestness and vociferation. I fear that a certain defiant tone and

Covenanter's swing to its chorus, rather than any devotional quality,

caused it speedily to infect the others, who at last joined in the

refrain:--

"I'm proud to live in the service of the Lord,

And I'm bound to die in His army."

The pines rocked, the storm eddied and whirled above the miserable

group, and the flames of their altar leaped heavenward, as if in token

of the vow.

At midnight the storm abated, the rolling clouds parted, and the stars

glittered keenly above the sleeping camp. Mr. Oakhurst, whose

professional habits had enabled him to live on the smallest possible

amount of sleep, in dividing the watch with Tom Simson, somehow managed

to take upon himself the greater part of that duty. He excused himself

to the Innocent, by saying that he had "often been a week without

sleep." "Doing what?" asked Tom. "Poker!" replied Oakhurst,

sententiously; "when a man gets a streak of luck,--nigger-luck,--he

don't get tired. The luck gives in first. Luck," continued the gambler,

reflectively, "is a mighty queer thing. All you know about it for

certain is that it's bound to change. And it's finding out when it's

going to change that makes you. We've had a streak of bad luck since we

left Poker Flat,--you come along, and slap you get into it, too. If you

can hold your cards right along, you're all right. For," added the

gambler, with cheerful irrelevance,--

"I'm proud to live in the service of the Lord,

And I'm bound to die in His army."

The third day came, and the sun, looking through the white-curtained

valley, saw the outcasts divide their slowly decreasing store of

provisions for the morning meal. It was one of the peculiarities of that

mountain climate that its rays diffused a kindly warmth over the wintry

landscape, as if in regretful commiseration of the past. But it revealed

drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut,--a hopeless,

uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which

the castaways still clung. Through the marvellously clear air the smoke

of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton

saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky fastness, hurled in that

direction a final malediction. It was her last vituperative attempt, and

perhaps for that reason was invested with a certain degree of sublimity.

It did her good, she privately informed the Duchess. "Just you go out

there and cuss, and see." She then set herself to the task of amusing

"the child," as she and the Duchess were pleased to call Piney. Piney

was no chicken, but it was a soothing and original theory of the pair

thus to account for the fact that she didn't swear and wasn't improper.

When night crept up again through the gorges, the reedy notes of the

accordion rose and fell in fitful spasms and long-drawn gasps by the

flickering camp-fire. But music failed to fill entirely the aching void

left by insufficient food, and a new diversion was proposed by

Piney,--story-telling. Neither Mr. Oakhurst nor his female companions

caring to relate their personal experiences, this plan would have

failed, too, but for the Innocent. Some months before he had chanced

upon a stray copy of Mr. Pope's ingenious translation of the Iliad. He

now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that poem--having

thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the words--in the

current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of that night the

Homeric demigods again walked the earth. Trojan bully and wily Greek

wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the cañon seemed to bow to

the wrath of the son of Peleus. Mr. Oakhurst listened with quiet

satisfaction. Most especially was he interested in the fate of

"Ash-heels," as the Innocent persisted in denominating the "swift-footed

Achilles."

So with small food and much of Homer and the accordion, a week passed

over the heads of the outcasts. The sun again forsook them, and again

from leaden skies the snow-flakes were sifted over the land. Day by day

closer around them drew the snowy circle, until at last they looked from

their prison over drifted walls of dazzling white, that towered twenty

feet above their heads. It became more and more difficult to replenish

their fires, even from the fallen trees beside them, now half hidden in

the drifts. And yet no one complained. The lovers turned from the dreary

prospect and looked into each other's eyes, and were happy. Mr. Oakhurst

settled himself coolly to the losing game before him. The Duchess, more

cheerful than she had been, assumed the care of Piney. Only Mother

Shipton--once the strongest of the party--seemed to sicken and fade. At

midnight on the tenth day she called Oakhurst to her side. "I'm going,"

she said, in a voice of querulous weakness, "but don't say anything

about it. Don't waken the kids. Take the bundle from under my head and

open it." Mr. Oakhurst did so. It contained Mother Shipton's rations for

the last week, untouched. "Give 'em to the child," she said, pointing to

the sleeping Piney. "You've starved yourself," said the gambler. "That's

what they call it," said the woman, querulously, as she lay down again,

and, turning her face to the wall, passed quietly away.

The accordion and the bones were put aside that day, and Homer was

forgotten. When the body of Mother Shipton had been committed to the

snow, Mr. Oakhurst took the Innocent aside, and showed him a pair of

snow-shoes, which he had fashioned from the old pack-saddle. "There's

one chance in a hundred to save her yet," he said, pointing to Piney;

"but it's there," he added, pointing towards Poker Flat. "If you can

reach there in two days she's safe." "And you?" asked Tom Simson. "I'll

stay here," was the curt reply.

The lovers parted with a long embrace. "You are not going, too?" said

the Duchess, as she saw Mr. Oakhurst apparently waiting to accompany

him. "As far as the cañon," he replied. He turned suddenly, and kissed

the Duchess, leaving her pallid face aflame, and her trembling lips

rigid with amazement.

Night came, but not Mr. Oakhurst. It brought the storm again and the

whirling snow. Then the Duchess, feeding the fire, found that some one

had quietly piled beside the hut enough fuel to last a few days longer.

The tears rose to her eyes, but she hid them from Piney.

The women slept but little. In the morning, looking into each other's

faces, they read their fate. Neither spoke; but Piney, accepting the

position of the stronger, drew near and placed her arm around the

Duchess's waist. They kept this attitude for the rest of the day. That

night the storm reached its greatest fury, and, rending asunder the

protecting pines, invaded the very hut.

Toward morning they found themselves unable to feed the fire, which

gradually died away. As the embers slowly blackened, the Duchess crept

closer to Piney, and broke the silence of many hours: "Piney, can you

pray?" "No, dear," said Piney, simply. The Duchess, without knowing

exactly why, felt relieved, and, putting her head upon Piney's shoulder,

spoke no more. And so reclining, the younger and purer pillowing the

head of her soiled sister upon her virgin breast, they fell asleep.

The wind lulled as if it feared to waken them. Feathery drifts of snow,

shaken from the long pine-boughs, flew like white-winged birds, and

settled about them as they slept. The moon through the rifted clouds

looked down upon what had been the camp. But all human stain, all trace

of earthly travail, was hidden beneath the spotless mantle mercifully

flung from above.

They slept all that day and the next, nor did they waken when voices and

footsteps broke the silence of the camp. And when pitying fingers

brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told from

the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had sinned.

Even the law of Poker Flat recognized this, and turned away, leaving

them still locked in each other's arms.

But at the head of the gulch, on one of the largest pine-trees, they

found the deuce of clubs pinned to the bark with a bowie-knife. It bore

the following, written in pencil, in a firm hand:--

BENEATH THIS TREE

LIES THE BODY

OF

JOHN OAKHURST,

WHO STRUCK A STREAK OF BAD LUCK

ON THE 23D OF NOVEMBER, 1850,

AND

HANDED IN HIS CHECKS

ON THE 7TH DECEMBER, 1850.

And pulseless and cold, with a derringer by his side and a bullet in his

heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who was at

once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat.

IX. MARKHEIM[*] (1884)

[* From "The Merry Men." Used by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons,

authorized American publishers of Stevenson's Works.]

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894)

[_Setting_. There is no finer model for the study of setting than this

story affords. It is three o'clock in the afternoon of a foggy Christmas

Day in London. If Markheim's manner and the dimly lighted interior of

the antique shop suggest murder, the garrulous clocks, the nodding

shadows, and the reflecting mirrors seem almost to compel confession and

surrender. "And still as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind

accused him, with a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his

design. He should have chosen a more quiet hour." So he should for the

murder; but for the self-confession, which is Stevenson's ultimate

design, no time or place could have been better.

_Plot_. There is little action in the plot. A man commits a dastardly

murder and then, being alone and undetected, begins to think, think,

think. It is the turning point in his life and he knows it. Instead of

seizing the treasure and escaping, he submits his past career to a rigid

scrutiny and review. This brooding over his past life and present

outlook becomes so absorbing that what bade fair to be a soliloquy

becomes a dialogue, a dialogue between the old self that committed the

murder and the new self that begins to revolt at it. The old self bids

him follow the line of least resistance and go on as he has begun; the

newly awakened self bids him stop at once, check the momentum of other

days, take this last chance, and be a man. His better nature wins.

Markheim finds that though his deeds have been uniformly evil, he can

still "conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyrdoms." Though the

active love of good seems too weak to be reckoned as an asset, he still

has a "hatred of evil"; and on this twin foundation, ability to think

great thoughts and to hate evil deeds, he builds at last his culminating

resolve.

The story is powerfully and yet subtly told. It sweeps the whole gamut

of the moral law. Many stories develop the same theme but none just like

this. Stevenson himself is drawn again to the same problem a little

later in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Hawthorne tried it in "Howe's

Masquerade," in which the cloaked figure is the phantom or reduplication

of Howe himself. In Poe's "William Wilson," to which Stevenson is

plainly indebted, the evil nature triumphs over the good. But

"Markheim," by touching more chords and by sounding lower depths, makes

the triumph at the end seem like a permanent victory for universal human

nature.

_Characters_. If the story is the study of a given situation, Markheim,

who is another type of the developing character, is the central factor

in the situation. We see and interpret the situation only through the

personality of Markheim himself. Another murderer might have acted

differently, even with those clamorous clocks and accusing mirrors

around him, but not this murderer. There is nothing abnormal about him,

however, as a criminal. He is thirty-six years old and through sheer

weakness has gone steadily downward, but he has never before done a deed

approaching this in horror or in the power of sudden self-revelation. He

sees himself now as he never saw himself before and begins to take stock

of his moral assets. They are pitifully meager, though his opportunities

for character building have been good. He has even had emotional

revivals, which did not, however, issue in good deeds. But with it all,

Markheim illustrates the nobility of human nature rather than its

essential depravity. I do not doubt his complete and permanent

conversion. When the terrible last question is put to him--or when he

puts it to himself--whether he is better now in any one particular than

he was, and when he is forced to say, "No, in none! I have gone down in

all," the moral resources of human nature itself seem to be exhausted.

But they are not. "I see clearly what remains for me," said Markheim,

"by way of _duty_." This word, not used before, sounds a new challenge

and marks the crisis of the story. Duty can fight without calling in

reserves from the past and without the vision of victory in the future.

I don't wonder that the features of the visitant "softened with a tender

triumph." The visitant was neither "the devil" as Markheim first thought

him nor "the Saviour of men" as a recent editor pronounces him. He is

only Markheim's old self, the self that entered the antique shop, that

with fear and trembling committed the deed, and that now, half-conscious

all the time of inherent falseness, urges the old arguments and tries to

energize the old purposes. It is this visitant that every man meets and

overthrows when he comes to himself, when he breaks sharply with the old

life and enters resolutely upon the new.]

"Yes," said the dealer, "our windfalls are of various kinds. Some

customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior

knowledge. Some are dishonest," and here he held up the candle, so that

the light fell strongly on his visitor, "and in that case," he

continued, "I profit by my virtue."

Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes

had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the

shop. At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the flame,

he blinked painfully and looked aside.

The dealer chuckled. "You come to me on Christmas-day," he resumed,

"when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and make

a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that; you

will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my

books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of manner that I remark

in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and ask no

awkward questions; but when a customer can not look me in the eye, he

has to pay for it." The dealer once more chuckled; and then, changing to

his usual business voice, though still with a note of irony, "You can

give, as usual, a clean account of how you came into the possession of

the object?" he continued. "Still your uncle's cabinet? A remarkable

collector, sir!"

And the little, pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tip-toe,

looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with

every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite

pity, and a touch of horror.

"This time," said he, "you are in error. I have not come to sell, but to

buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle's cabinet is bare to the

wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock

Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my errand

to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas-present for a lady," he

continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he had

prepared; "and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you

upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I must

produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well know, a

rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected."

There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this

statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious

lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near

thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence.

"Well, sir," said the dealer, "be it so. You are an old customer after

all; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good marriage, far be

it from me to be an obstacle. Here is a nice thing for a lady now," he

went on, "this hand-glass--fifteenth century, warranted; comes from a

good collection, too; but I reserve the name, in the interests of my

customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole

heir of a remarkable collector."

The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting voice, had

stooped to take the object from its place; and, as he had done so, a

shock had passed through Markheim, a start both of hand and foot, a

sudden leap of many tumultuous passions to the face. It passed as

swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a certain trembling of the

hand that now received the glass.

"A glass," he said, hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it more

clearly. "A glass? For Christmas? Surely not?"

"And why not?" cried the dealer. "Why not a glass?"

Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expression. "You ask

me why not?" he said. "Why, look here--look in it--look at yourself! Do

you like to see it? No! nor I--nor any man."

The little man had jumped back when Markheim had so suddenly confronted

him with the mirror; but now, perceiving there was nothing worse on

hand, he chuckled. "Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard favored,"

said he.

"I ask you," said Markheim, "for a Christmas-present, and you give me

this--this damned reminder of years, and sins and follies--this

hand-conscience! Did you mean it? Had you a thought in your mind? Tell

me. It will be better for you if you do. Come, tell me about yourself. I

hazard a guess now, that you are in secret a very charitable man?"

The dealer looked closely, at his companion. It was very odd, Markheim

did not appear to be laughing; there was something in his face like an

eager sparkle of hope, but nothing of mirth.

"What are you driving at?" the dealer asked.

"Not charitable?" returned the other, gloomily. "Not charitable; not

pious; not scrupulous; unloving, unbeloved; a hand to get money, a safe

to keep it. Is that all? Dear God, man, is that all?"

"I will tell you what it is," began the dealer, with some sharpness, and

then broke off again into a chuckle. "But I see this is a love match of

yours, and you have been drinking the lady's health."

"Ah!" cried Markheim, with a strange curiosity. "Ah, have you been in

love? Tell me about that."

"I," cried the dealer. "I in love! I never had the time, nor have I the

time to-day for all this nonsense. Will you take the glass?"

"Where is the hurry?" returned Markheim. "It is very pleasant to stand

here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry

away from any pleasure--no, not even from so mild a one as this. We

should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a

cliff's edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it--a cliff a

mile high--high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of

humanity. Hence it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each

other; why should we wear this mask? Let us be confidential. Who knows,

we might become friends?"

"I have just one word to say to you," said the dealer. "Either make your

purchase, or walk out of my shop."

"True, true," said Markheim. "Enough fooling. To business. Show me

something else."

The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace the glass upon the

shelf, his thin blonde hair falling over his eyes as he did so. Markheim

moved a little nearer, with one hand in the pocket of his great-coat; he

drew himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time many different

emotions were depicted together on his face--terror, horror, and

resolve, fascination and a physical repulsion; and through a haggard

lift of his upper lip, his teeth looked out.

"This, perhaps, may suit," observed the dealer; and then, as he began to

re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long,

skewer-like dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen,

striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a

heap.

Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow

as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried. All

these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings. Then the

passage of a lad's feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in upon

these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness of his

surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the

counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that

inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle

and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots

of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the

portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water.

The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with

a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.

From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim's eyes returned to the body

of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small

and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in

that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim

had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed,

this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent

voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or

direct the miracle of locomotion--there it must lie till it was found.

Found! ay, and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would

ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit. Ay,

dead or not, this was still the enemy. "Time was that when the brains

were out," he thought; and the first word struck into his mind. Time,

now that the deed was accomplished--time, which had closed for the

victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer.

The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and then another, with

every variety of pace and voice--one deep as the bell from a cathedral

turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz--the

clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.

The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered

him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle,

beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance

reflections. In many rich mirrors, some of home designs, some from

Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were

an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of

his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. And

still as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him, with a

sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design. He should

have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he

should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and

only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have

been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all

things otherwise; poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind

to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the

architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this

activity, brute terrors, like scurrying of rats in a deserted attic,

filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the hand of the

constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would jerk

like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping defile, the dock, the

prison, the gallows, and the black coffin.

Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind like a

besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some rumor of

the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their

curiosity; and now, in all the neighboring houses, he divined them

sitting motionless and with uplifted ear--solitary people, condemned to

spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now

startlingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties,

struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised

finger: every degree and age and humor, but all, by their own hearths,

prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him.

Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of

the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by

the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And then,

again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence of the

place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and freeze the

passer-by; and he would step more boldly, and bustle aloud among the

contents of the shop, and imitate, with elaborate bravado, the movements

of a busy man at ease in his own house.

But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one

portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on the

brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold on

his credulity. The neighbor hearkening with white face beside his

window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the

pavement--these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through the

brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate. But here,

within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched the

servant set forth sweethearting, in her poor best, "out for the day"

written in every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course; and

yet, in the bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear a stir

of delicate footing--he was surely conscious, inexplicably conscious of

some presence. Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the house his

imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and yet had

eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet again

behold the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred.

At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door which

still seemed to repel his eyes. The house was tall, the skylight small

and dirty, the day blind with fog; and the light that filtered down to

the ground story was exceedingly faint, and showed dimly on the

threshold of the shop. And yet, in that strip of doubtful brightness,

did there not hang wavering a shadow?

Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to beat

with a staff on the shop-door, accompanying his blows with shouts and

railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon by name.

Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the dead man. But no! he lay

quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows and

shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which

would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had

become an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentleman desisted from

his knocking and departed.

Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to get forth

from this accusing neighborhood, to plunge into a bath of London

multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, that haven of safety

and apparent innocence--his bed. One visitor had come: at any moment

another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the deed, and

yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a failure. The money,

that was now Markheim's concern; and as a means to that, the keys.

He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the shadow was

still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance of the

mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew near the body of his

victim. The human character had quite departed. Like a suit half-stuffed

with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk doubled, on the floor; and

yet the thing repelled him. Although so dingy and inconsiderable to the

eye, he feared it might have more significance to the touch. He took the

body by the shoulders, and turned it on its back. It was strangely light

and supple, and the limbs, as if they had been broken, fell into the

oddest postures. The face was robbed of all expression; but it was as

pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with blood about one temple. That

was, for Markheim, the one displeasing circumstance. It carried him

back, upon the instant, to a certain fair day in a fisher's village: a

gray day, a piping wind, a crowd upon the street, the blare of brasses,

the booming of drums, the nasal voice of a ballad singer; and a boy

going to and fro, buried over head in the crowd and divided between

interest and fear, until, coming out upon the chief place of concourse,

he beheld a booth and a great screen with pictures, dismally designed,

garishly colored: Brownrigg with her apprentice; the Mannings with their

murdered guest; Weare in the death-grip of Thurtell; and a score besides

of famous crimes. The thing was as clear as an illusion; he was once

again that little boy; he was looking once again, and with the same

sense of physical revolt, at these vile pictures; he was still stunned

by the thumping of the drums. A bar of that day's music returned upon

his memory; and at that, for the first time, a qualm came over him, a

breath of nausea, a sudden weakness of the joints, which he must

instantly resist and conquer.

He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these

considerations; looking the more hardily in the dead face, bending his

mind to realize the nature and greatness of his crime. So little awhile

ago that face had moved with every change of sentiment, that pale mouth

had spoken, that body had been all on fire with governable energies; and

now, and by his act, that piece of life had been arrested, as the

horologist, with interjected finger, arrests the beating of the clock.

So he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more remorseful

consciousness; the same heart which had shuddered before the painted

effigies of crime, looked on its reality unmoved. At best, he felt a

gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all those

faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one who had

never lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, with a tremor.

With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he found the

keys and advanced toward the open door of the shop. Outside, it had

begun to rain smartly; and the sound of the shower upon the roof had

banished silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of the house

were haunted by an incessant echoing, which filled the ear and mingled

with the ticking of the clocks. And, as Markheim approached the door, he

seemed to hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps of

another foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated

loosely on the threshold. He threw a ton's weight of resolve upon his

muscles, and drew back the door.

The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and stairs;

on the bright suit of armor posted, halbert in hand, upon the landing;

and on the dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures that hung against the

yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was the beating of the rain

through all the house that, in Markheim's ears, it began to be

distinguished into many different sounds. Footsteps and sighs, the tread

of regiments marching in the distance, the chink of money in the

counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to

mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of

the water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him to

the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted and begirt by

presences. He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop, he

heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a great

effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and followed

stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, how tranquilly he

would possess his soul. And then again, and hearkening with every fresh

attention, he blessed himself for that unresisting sense which held the

outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His head turned

continually on his neck; his eyes, which seemed starting from their

orbits, scouted on every side, and on every side were half-rewarded as

with the tail of something nameless vanishing. The four-and-twenty steps

to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies.

On that first story, the door stood ajar, three of them like three

ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could never

again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men's

observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among

bedclothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he

wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear

they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at

least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous

and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of

his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror,

some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some willful

illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the rules,

calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as the defeated

tyrant overthrew the chessboard, should break the mold of their

succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said) when the

winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might befall

Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doings

like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under

his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; ay, and there

were soberer accidents that might destroy him: if, for instance, the

house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim; the

house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from all

sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense, these things might be

called the hands of God reached forth against sin. But about God himself

he was at ease; his act was doubtless exceptional, but so were his

excuses, which God knew; it was there, and not among men, that he felt

sure of justice.

When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind

him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite

dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing cases and

incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld

himself at various angles, like an actor on the stage; many pictures,

framed and unframed, standing with their faces to the wall; a fine

Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with

tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by great good

fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and this

concealed him from the neighbors. Here, then, Markheim drew in a packing

case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It was a

long business, for there were many; and it was irksome, besides; for,

after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on the

wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him. With the tail of

his eye he saw the door--even glanced at it from time to time directly,

like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good estate of his

defenses. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the street

sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the notes of

a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and the voices of many

children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable was the

melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it

smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was thronged with

answerable ideas and images; church-going children and the pealing of

the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brook-side, ramblers on

the brambly common, kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky;

and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the

somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson

(which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and

the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.

And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his

feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, went

over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted the

stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the knob,

and the lock clicked, and the door opened.

Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not, whether the

dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some

chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But

when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room, looked

at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and then

withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke loose from

his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the visitant returned.

"Did you call me?" he asked, pleasantly, and with that he entered the

room and closed the door behind him.

Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a

film upon his sight, but the outlines of the newcomer seemed to change

and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light of the

shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he

bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror,

there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the

earth and not of God.

And yet the creature had a strange air of the common-place, as he stood

looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: "You are looking

for the money, I believe?" it was in the tones of everyday politeness.

Markheim made no answer.

"I should warn you," resumed the other, "that the maid has left her

sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be

found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences."

"You know me?" cried the murderer.

The visitor smiled. "You have long been a favorite of mine," he said;

"and I have long observed and often sought to help you."

"What are you?" cried Markheim: "the devil?"

"What I may be," returned the other, "can not affect the service I

propose to render you."

"It can," cried Markheim; "it does! Be helped by you? No, never; not by

you! You do not know me yet, thank God, you do not know me!"

"I know you," replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or

rather firmness. "I know you to the soul."

"Know me!" cried Markheim. "Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and

slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men

are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see

each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled

in a cloak. If they had their own control--if you could see their faces,

they would be altogether different, they would shine out for heroes and

saints! I am worse than most; my self is more overlaid; my excuse is

known to me and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose myself."

"To me?" inquired the visitant.

"To you before all," returned the murderer. "I supposed you were

intelligent. I thought--since you exist--you would prove a reader of the

heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of it; my

acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants have

dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother--the giants

of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look

within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you not

see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any

willful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me

for a thing that surely must be common as humanity--the unwilling

sinner?"

"All this is very feelingly expressed," was the reply, "but it regards

me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care

not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so

as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; the

servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures on

the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it is as

if the gallows itself was striding toward you through the Christmas

streets! Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall I tell you where to

find the money?"

"For what price?" asked Markheim.

"I offer you the service for a Christmas gift," returned the other.

Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph.

"No," said he, "I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of

thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should

find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing

to commit myself to evil."

"I have no objection to a death-bed repentance," observed the visitant.

"Because you disbelieve their efficacy!" Markheim cried.

"I do not say so," returned the other; "but I look on these things from

a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man

has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under color of religion, or

to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak

compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance, he

can add but one act of service--to repent, to die smiling, and thus to

build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving

followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please

yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply,

spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and

the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that you

will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your conscience,

and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from such a

death-bed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening to the

man's last words: and when I looked into that face, which had been set

as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope."

"And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?" asked Markheim. "Do you

think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and sin,

and, at last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought. Is this,

then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find me with red

hands that you presume such baseness? and is this crime of murder indeed

so impious as to dry up the very springs of good?"

"Murder is to me no special category," replied the other. "All sins are

murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving

mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and

feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their

acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my

eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on

a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a

murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues

also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes

for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in

action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act,

whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling

cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the

rarest virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but

because you are Markheim, that I offered to forward your escape."

"I will lay my heart open to you," answered Markheim. "This crime on

which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many

lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been

driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty,

driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these

temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day,

and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches--both the power

and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor in

the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents of

good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past;

something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of the

church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble books, or

talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my life; I have

wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of destination."

"You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?" remarked the

visitor; "and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some

thousands?"

"Ah," said Markheim, "but this time I have a sure thing."

"This time, again, you will lose," replied the visitor, quietly.

"Ah, but I keep back the half!" cried Markheim.

"That also you will lose," said the other.

The sweat started upon Markheim's brow. "Well, then, what matter?" he

exclaimed. "Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall one

part of me, and that the worse, continue until the end to override the

better? Evil and good run strong in me, haling me both ways. I do not

love the one thing, I love all. I can conceive great deeds,

renunciations, martyrdoms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as

murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows

their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I

love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but

I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my

virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the mind? Not

so; good, also, is a spring of acts."

But the visitant raised his finger. "For six-and-thirty years that you

have been in this world," said he, "through many changes of fortune and

varieties of humor, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago

you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have

blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty

or meanness, from which you still recoil?--five years from now I shall

detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your way; nor can

anything but death avail to stop you."

"It is true," Markheim said, huskily, "I have in some degree complied

with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere exercise

of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their

surroundings."

"I will propound to you one simple question," said the other; "and as

you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in

many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any

account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any

one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your own

conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?"

"In any one?" repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration. "No,"

he added, with despair, "in none! I have gone down in all."

"Then," said the visitor, "content yourself with what you are, for you

will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are

irrevocably written down."

Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the visitor

who first broke the silence. "That being so," he said, "shall I show you

the money?"

"And grace?" cried Markheim.