felt well assured that the strong, concentrated study that he would bring
to it would remove all difficulties, as the rays of a lens melt stones; as
the telescope pierces through densest light of stars, and resolves them
into their individual brilliancies. He could afford to spend years upon it
if it were necessary; but earnestness and application should do quickly
the work of years.
Amid these musings he was interrupted by his Aunt Keziah; though generally
observant enough of her nephew's studies, and feeling a sanctity in them,
both because of his intending to be a minister and because she had a great
reverence for learning, even if heathenish, this good old lady summoned
Septimius somewhat peremptorily to chop wood for her domestic purposes.
How strange it is,--the way in which we are summoned from all high
purposes by these little homely necessities; all symbolizing the great
fact that the earthly part of us, with its demands, takes up the greater
portion of all our available force. So Septimius, grumbling and groaning,
went to the woodshed and exercised himself for an hour as the old lady
requested; and it was only by instinct that he worked, hardly conscious
what he was doing. The whole of passing life seemed impertinent; or if,
for an instant, it seemed otherwise, then his lonely speculations and
plans seemed to become impalpable, and to have only the consistency of
vapor, which his utmost concentration succeeded no further than to make
into the likeness of absurd faces, mopping, mowing, and laughing at him.
But that sentence of mystic meaning shone out before him like a
transparency, illuminated in the darkness of his mind; he determined to
take it for his motto until he should be victorious in his quest. When he
took his candle, to retire apparently to bed, he again drew forth the
manuscript, and, sitting down by the dim light, tried vainly to read it;
but he could not as yet settle himself to concentrated and regular effort;
he kept turning the leaves of the manuscript, in the hope that some other
illuminated sentence might gleam out upon him, as the first had done, and
shed a light on the context around it; and that then another would be
discovered, with similar effect, until the whole document would thus be
illuminated with separate stars of light, converging and concentrating in
one radiance that should make the whole visible. But such was his bad
fortune, not another word of the manuscript was he able to read that whole
evening; and, moreover, while he had still an inch of candle left, Aunt
Keziah, in her nightcap,--as witch-like a figure as ever went to a wizard
meeting in the forest with Septimius's ancestor,--appeared at the door of
the room, aroused from her bed, and shaking her finger at him.
"Septimius," said she, "you keep me awake, and you will ruin your eyes, and
turn your head, if you study till midnight in this manner. You'll never
live to be a minister, if this is the way you go on."
"Well, well, Aunt Keziah," said Septimius, covering his manuscript with a
book, "I am just going to bed now."
"Good night, then," said the old woman; "and God bless your labors."
Strangely enough, a glance at the manuscript, as he hid it from the old
woman, had seemed to Septimius to reveal another sentence, of which he had
imperfectly caught the purport; and when she had gone, he in vain sought
the place, and vainly, too, endeavored to recall the meaning of what he
had read. Doubtless his fancy exaggerated the importance of the sentence,
and he felt as if it might have vanished from the book forever. In fact,
the unfortunate young man, excited and tossed to and fro by a variety of
unusual impulses, was got into a bad way, and was likely enough to go mad,
unless the balancing portion of his mind proved to be of greater volume
and effect than as yet appeared to be the case.
* * * * *
The next morning he was up, bright and early, poring over the manuscript
with the sharpened wits of the new day, peering into its night, into its
old, blurred, forgotten dream; and, indeed, he had been dreaming about it,
and was fully possessed with the idea that, in his dream, he had taken up
the inscrutable document, and read it off as glibly as he would the page
of a modern drama, in a continual rapture with the deep truth that it made
clear to his comprehension, and the lucid way in which it evolved the mode
in which man might be restored to his originally undying state. So strong
was the impression, that when he unfolded the manuscript, it was with
almost the belief that the crabbed old handwriting would be plain to him.
Such did not prove to be the case, however; so far from it, that poor
Septimius in vain turned over the yellow pages in quest of the one
sentence which he had been able, or fancied he had been able, to read
yesterday. The illumination that had brought it out was now faded, and all
was a blur, an inscrutableness, a scrawl of unintelligible characters
alike. So much did this affect him, that he had almost a mind to tear it
into a thousand fragments, and scatter it out of the window to the
west-wind, that was then blowing past the house; and if, in that summer
season, there had been a fire on the hearth, it is possible that easy
realization of a destructive impulse might have incited him to fling the
accursed scrawl into the hottest of the flames, and thus returned it to
the Devil, who, he suspected, was the original author of it. Had he done
so, what strange and gloomy passages would I have been spared the pain of
relating! How different would have been the life of Septimius,--a
thoughtful preacher of God's word, taking severe but conscientious views
of man's state and relations, a heavy-browed walker and worker on earth,
and, finally, a slumberer in an honored grave, with an epitaph bearing
testimony to his great usefulness in his generation.
But, in the mean time, here was the troublesome day passing over him, and
pestering, bewildering, and tripping him up with its mere sublunary
troubles, as the days will all of us the moment we try to do anything that
we flatter ourselves is of a little more importance than others are doing.
Aunt Keziah tormented him a great while about the rich field, just across
the road, in front of the house, which Septimius had neglected the
cultivation of, unwilling to spare the time to plough, to plant, to hoe it
himself, but hired a lazy lout of the village, when he might just as well
have employed and paid wages to the scarecrow which Aunt Keziah dressed
out in ancient habiliments, and set up in the midst of the corn. Then came
an old codger from the village, talking to Septimius about the war,--a
theme of which he was weary: telling the rumor of skirmishes that the next
day would prove to be false, of battles that were immediately to take
place, of encounters with the enemy in which our side showed the valor of
twenty-fold heroes, but had to retreat; babbling about shells and mortars,
battalions, manoeuvres, angles, fascines, and other items of military art;
for war had filled the whole brain of the people, and enveloped the whole
thought of man in a mist of gunpowder.
In this way, sitting on his doorstep, or in the very study, haunted by such
speculations, this wretched old man would waste the better part of a
summer afternoon while Septimius listened, returning abstracted
monosyllables, answering amiss, and wishing his persecutor jammed into one
of the cannons he talked about, and fired off, to end his interminable
babble in one roar; [talking] of great officers coming from France and
other countries; of overwhelming forces from England, to put an end to the
war at once; of the unlikelihood that it ever should be ended; of its
hopelessness; of its certainty of a good and speedy end.
Then came limping along the lane a disabled soldier, begging his way home
from the field, which, a little while ago, he had sought in the full vigor
of rustic health he was never to know again; with whom Septimius had to
talk, and relieve his wants as far as he could (though not from the poor
young officer's deposit of English gold), and send him on his way.
Then came the minister to talk with his former pupil, about whom he had
latterly had much meditation, not understanding what mood had taken
possession of him; for the minister was a man of insight, and from
conversations with Septimius, as searching as he knew how to make them, he
had begun to doubt whether he were sufficiently sound in faith to adopt
the clerical persuasion. Not that he supposed him to be anything like a
confirmed unbeliever: but he thought it probable that these doubts, these
strange, dark, disheartening suggestions of the Devil, that so surely
infect certain temperaments and measures of intellect, were tormenting
poor Septimius, and pulling him back from the path in which he was capable
of doing so much good. So he came this afternoon to talk seriously with
him, and to advise him, if the case were as he supposed, to get for a time
out of the track of the thought in which he had so long been engaged; to
enter into active life; and by and by, when the morbid influences should
have been overcome by a change of mental and moral religion, he might
return, fresh and healthy, to his original design.
"What can I do," asked Septimius, gloomily, "what business take up, when
the whole land lies waste and idle, except for this war?"
"There is the very business, then," said the minister. "Do you think God's
work is not to be done in the field as well as in the pulpit? You are
strong, Septimius, of a bold character, and have a mien and bearing that
gives you a natural command among men. Go to the wars, and do a valiant
part for your country, and come back to your peaceful mission when the
enemy has vanished. Or you might go as chaplain to a regiment, and use
either hand in battle,--pray for success before a battle, help win it with
sword or gun, and give thanks to God, kneeling on the bloody field, at its
close. You have already stretched one foe on your native soil."
Septimius could not but smile within himself at this warlike and bloody
counsel; and, joining it with some similar exhortations from Aunt Keziah,
he was inclined to think that women and clergymen are, in matters of war,
the most uncompromising and bloodthirsty of the community. However, he
replied, coolly, that his moral impulses and his feelings of duty did not
exactly impel him in this direction, and that he was of opinion that war
was a business in which a man could not engage with safety to his
conscience, unless his conscience actually drove him into it; and that
this made all the difference between heroic battle and murderous strife.
The good minister had nothing very effectual to answer to this, and took
his leave, with a still stronger opinion than before that there was
something amiss in his pupil's mind.
By this time, this thwarting day had gone on through its course of little
and great impediments to his pursuit,--the discouragements of trifling and
earthly business, of purely impertinent interruption, of severe and
disheartening opposition from the powerful counteraction of different
kinds of mind,--until the hour had come at which he had arranged to meet
Rose Garfield. I am afraid the poor thwarted youth did not go to his
love-tryst in any very amiable mood; but rather, perhaps, reflecting how
all things earthly and immortal, and love among the rest, whichever
category, of earth or heaven, it may belong to, set themselves against
man's progress in any pursuit that he seeks to devote himself to. It is
one struggle, the moment he undertakes such a thing, of everything else in
the world to impede him.
However, as it turned out, it was a pleasant and happy interview that he
had with Rose that afternoon. The girl herself was in a happy, tuneful
mood, and met him with such simplicity, threw such a light of sweetness
over his soul, that Septimius almost forgot all the wild cares of the day,
and walked by her side with a quiet fulness of pleasure that was new to
him. She reconciled him, in some secret way, to life as it was, to
imperfection, to decay; without any help from her intellect, but through
the influence of her character, she seemed, not to solve, but to smooth
away, problems that troubled him; merely by being, by womanhood, by
simplicity, she interpreted God's ways to him; she softened the stoniness
that was gathering about his heart. And so they had a delightful time of
talking, and laughing, and smelling to flowers; and when they were
parting, Septimius said to her,--
"Rose, you have convinced me that this is a most happy world, and that Life
has its two children, Birth and Death, and is bound to prize them equally;
and that God is very kind to his earthly children; and that all will go
well."
"And have I convinced you of all this?" replied Rose, with a pretty
laughter. "It is all true, no doubt, but I should not have known how to
argue for it. But you are very sweet, and have not frightened me to-day."
"Do I ever frighten you then, Rose?" asked Septimius, bending his black
brow upon her with a look of surprise and displeasure.
"Yes, sometimes," said Rose, facing him with courage, and smiling upon the
cloud so as to drive it away; "when you frown upon me like that, I am a
little afraid you will beat me, all in good time."
"Now," said Septimius, laughing again, "you shall have your choice, to be
beaten on the spot, or suffer another kind of punishment,--which?"
So saying, he snatched her to him, and strove to kiss her, while Rose,
laughing and struggling, cried out, "The beating! the beating!" But
Septimius relented not, though it was only Rose's cheek that he succeeded
in touching. In truth, except for that first one, at the moment of their
plighted troths, I doubt whether Septimius ever touched those soft, sweet
lips, where the smiles dwelt and the little pouts. He now returned to his
study, and questioned with himself whether he should touch that weary,
ugly, yellow, blurred, unintelligible, bewitched, mysterious,
bullet-penetrated, blood-stained manuscript again. There was an
undefinable reluctance to do so, and at the same time an enticement
(irresistible, as it proved) drawing him towards it. He yielded, and
taking it from his desk, in which the precious, fatal treasure was locked
up, he plunged into it again, and this time with a certain degree of
success. He found the line which had before gleamed out, and vanished
again, and which now started out in strong relief; even as when sometimes
we see a certain arrangement of stars in the heavens, and again lose it,
by not seeing its individual stars in the same relation as before; even
so, looking at the manuscript in a different way, Septimius saw this
fragment of a sentence, and saw, moreover, what was necessary to give it a
certain meaning. "Set the root in a grave, and wait for what shall
blossom. It will be very rich, and full of juice." This was the purport,
he now felt sure, of the sentence he had lighted upon; and he took it to
refer to the mode of producing something that was essential to the thing
to be concocted. It might have only a moral being; or, as is generally the
case, the moral and physical truth went hand in hand.
While Septimius was busying himself in this way, the summer advanced, and
with it there appeared a new character, making her way into our pages.
This was a slender and pale girl, whom Septimius was once startled to
find, when he ascended his hill-top, to take his walk to and fro upon the
accustomed path, which he had now worn deep.
What was stranger, she sat down close beside the grave, which none but he
and the minister knew to be a grave; that little hillock, which he had
levelled a little, and had planted with various flowers and shrubs; which
the summer had fostered into richness, the poor young man below having
contributed what he could, and tried to render them as beautiful as he
might, in remembrance of his own beauty. Septimius wished to conceal the
fact of its being a grave: not that he was tormented with any sense that
he had done wrong in shooting the young man, which had been done in fair
battle; but still it was not the pleasantest of thoughts, that he had laid
a beautiful human creature, so fit for the enjoyment of life, there, when
his own dark brow, his own troubled breast, might better, he could not but
acknowledge, have been covered up there. [_Perhaps there might sometimes
be something fantastically gay in the language and behavior of the
girl._]
Well; but then, on this flower and shrub-disguised grave, sat this unknown
form of a girl, with a slender, pallid, melancholy grace about her, simply
dressed in a dark attire, which she drew loosely about her. At first
glimpse, Septimius fancied that it might be Rose; but it needed only a
glance to undeceive him; her figure was of another character from the
vigorous, though slight and elastic beauty of Rose; this was a drooping
grace, and when he came near enough to see her face, he saw that those
large, dark, melancholy eyes, with which she had looked at him, had never
met his gaze before.
"Good-morrow, fair maiden," said Septimius, with such courtesy as he knew
how to use (which, to say truth, was of a rustic order, his way of life
having brought him little into female society). "There is a nice air here
on the hill-top, this sultry morning below the hill!"
As he spoke, he continued to look wonderingly at the strange maiden, half
fancying that she might be something that had grown up out of the grave;
so unexpected she was, so simply unlike anything that had before come
there.
The girl did not speak to him, but as she sat by the grave she kept weeding
out the little white blades of faded autumn grass and yellow pine-spikes,
peering into the soil as if to see what it was all made of, and everything
that was growing there; and in truth, whether by Septimius's care or no,
there seemed to be several kinds of flowers,--those little asters that
abound everywhere, and golden flowers, such as autumn supplies with
abundance. She seemed to be in quest of something, and several times
plucked a leaf and examined it carefully; then threw it down again, and
shook her head. At last she lifted up her pale face, and, fixing her eyes
quietly on Septimius, spoke: "It is not here!"
A very sweet voice it was,--plaintive, low,--and she spoke to Septimius as
if she were familiar with him, and had something to do with him. He was
greatly interested, not being able to imagine who the strange girl was, or
whence she came, or what, of all things, could be her reason for coming
and sitting down by this grave, and apparently botanizing upon it, in
quest of some particular plant.
"Are you in search of flowers?" asked Septimius. "This is but a barren spot
for them, and this is not a good season. In the meadows, and along the
margin of the watercourses, you might find the fringed gentian at this
time. In the woods there are several pretty flowers,--the side-saddle
flower, the anemone; violets are plentiful in spring, and make the whole
hill-side blue. But this hill-top, with its soil strewn over a heap of
pebble-stones, is no place for flowers."
"The soil is fit," said the maiden, "but the flower has not sprung up."
"What flower do you speak of?" asked Septimius.
"One that is not here," said the pale girl. "No matter. I will look for it
again next spring."
"Do you, then, dwell hereabout?" inquired Septimius.
"Surely," said the maiden, with a look of surprise; "where else should I
dwell? My home is on this hilltop."
It not a little startled Septimius, as may be supposed, to find his
paternal inheritance, of which he and his forefathers had been the only
owners since the world began (for they held it by an Indian deed), claimed
as a home and abiding-place by this fair, pale, strange-acting maiden, who
spoke as if she had as much right there as if she had grown up out of the
soil like one of the wild, indigenous flowers which she had been gazing at
and handling. However that might be, the maiden seemed now about to
depart, rising, giving a farewell touch or two to the little verdant
hillock, which looked much the neater for her ministrations.
"Are you going?" said Septimius, looking at her in wonder.
"For a time," said she.
"And shall I see you again?" asked he.
"Surely," said the maiden, "this is my walk, along the brow of the hill."
It again smote Septimius with a strange thrill of surprise to find the walk
which he himself had made, treading it, and smoothing it, and beating it
down with the pressure of his continual feet, from the time when the
tufted grass made the sides all uneven, until now, when it was such a
pathway as you may see through a wood, or over a field, where many feet
pass every day,--to find this track and exemplification of his own secret
thoughts and plans and emotions, this writing of his body, impelled by the
struggle and movement of his soul, claimed as her own by a strange girl
with melancholy eyes and voice, who seemed to have such a sad familiarity
with him.
"You are welcome to come here," said he, endeavoring at least to keep such
hold on his own property as was implied in making a hospitable surrender
of it to another.
"Yes," said the girl, "a person should always be welcome to his own."
A faint smile seemed to pass over her face as she said this, vanishing,
however, immediately into the melancholy of her usual expression. She went
along Septimius's path, while he stood gazing at her till she reached the
brow where it sloped towards Robert Hagburn's house; then she turned, and
seemed to wave a slight farewell towards the young man, and began to
descend. When her figure had entirely sunk behind the brow of the hill,
Septimius slowly followed along the ridge, meaning to watch from that
elevated station the course she would take; although, indeed, he would not
have been surprised if he had seen nothing, no trace of her in the whole
nearness or distance; in short, if she had been a freak, an illusion, of a
hard-working mind that had put itself ajar by deeply brooding on abstruse
matters, an illusion of eyes that he had tried too much by poring over the
inscrutable manuscript, and of intellect that was mystified and bewildered
by trying to grasp things that could not be grasped. A thing of
witchcraft, a sort of fungus-growth out of the grave, an unsubstantiality
altogether; although, certainly, she had weeded the grave with bodily
fingers, at all events. Still he had so much of the hereditary mysticism
of his race in him, that he might have held her supernatural, only that on
reaching the brow of the hill he saw her feet approach the dwelling of
Robert Hagburn's mother, who, moreover, appeared at the threshold
beckoning her to come, with a motherly, hospitable air, that denoted she
knew the strange girl, and recognized her as human.
It did not lessen Septimius's surprise, however, to think that such a
singular being was established in the neighborhood without his knowledge;
considered as a real occurrence of this world, it seemed even more
unaccountable than if it had been a thing of ghostology and witchcraft.
Continually through the day the incident kept introducing its recollection
among his thoughts and studies; continually, as he paced along his path,
this form seemed to hurry along by his side on the track that she had
claimed for her own, and he thought of her singular threat or promise,
whichever it were to be held, that he should have a companion there in
future. In the decline of the day, when he met the schoolmistress coming
home from her little seminary, he snatched the first opportunity to
mention the apparition of the morning, and ask Rose if she knew anything
of her.
"Very little," said Rose, "but she is flesh and blood, of that you may be
quite sure. She is a girl who has been shut up in Boston by the siege;
perhaps a daughter of one of the British officers, and her health being
frail, she requires better air than they have there, and so permission was
got for her, from General Washington, to come and live in the country; as
any one may see, our liberties have nothing to fear from this poor
brain-stricken girl. And Robert Hagburn, having to bring a message from
camp to the selectmen here, had it in charge to bring the girl, whom his
mother has taken to board."
"Then the poor thing is crazy?" asked Septimius.