Twice-Told Tales (18 page)

There are two or three honest friends of mine—and true friends I know
they are—who nevertheless by their fiery pugnacity in my behalf do
put me in fearful hazard of a broken nose, or even a total overthrow
upon the pavement and the loss of the treasure which I guard.—I pray
you, gentlemen, let this fault be amended. Is it decent, think you, to
get tipsy with zeal for temperance and take up the honorable cause of
the town-pump in the style of a toper fighting for his brandy-bottle?
Or can the excellent qualities of cold water be no otherwise
exemplified than by plunging slapdash into hot water and woefully
scalding yourselves and other people? Trust me, they may. In the moral
warfare which you are to wage—and, indeed, in the whole conduct of
your lives—you cannot choose a better example than myself, who have
never permitted the dust and sultry atmosphere, the turbulence and
manifold disquietudes, of the world around me to reach that deep, calm
well of purity which may be called my soul. And whenever I pour out
that soul, it is to cool earth's fever or cleanse its stains.

One o'clock! Nay, then, if the dinner-bell begins to speak, I may as
well hold my peace. Here comes a pretty young girl of my acquaintance
with a large stone pitcher for me to fill. May she draw a husband
while drawing her water, as Rachel did of old!—Hold out your vessel,
my dear! There it is, full to the brim; so now run home, peeping at
your sweet image in the pitcher as you go, and forget not in a glass
of my own liquor to drink "SUCCESS TO THE TOWN-PUMP."

[4]

At nightfall once in the olden time, on the rugged side of one of the
Crystal Hills, a party of adventurers were refreshing themselves after
a toilsome and fruitless quest for the Great Carbuncle. They had come
thither, not as friends nor partners in the enterprise, but each, save
one youthful pair, impelled by his own selfish and solitary longing
for this wondrous gem. Their feeling of brotherhood, however, was
strong enough to induce them to contribute a mutual aid in building a
rude hut of branches and kindling a great fire of shattered pines that
had drifted down the headlong current of the Amonoosuck, on the lower
bank of which they were to pass the night. There was but one of their
number, perhaps, who had become so estranged from natural sympathies
by the absorbing spell of the pursuit as to acknowledge no
satisfaction at the sight of human faces in the remote and solitary
region whither they had ascended. A vast extent of wilderness lay
between them and the nearest settlement, while scant a mile above
their heads was that bleak verge where the hills throw off their
shaggy mantle of forest-trees and either robe themselves in clouds or
tower naked into the sky. The roar of the Amonoosuck would have been
too awful for endurance if only a solitary man had listened while the
mountain-stream talked with the wind.

The adventurers, therefore, exchanged hospitable greetings and
welcomed one another to the hut where each man was the host and all
were the guests of the whole company. They spread their individual
supplies of food on the flat surface of a rock and partook of a
general repast; at the close of which a sentiment of good-fellowship
was perceptible among the party, though repressed by the idea that the
renewed search for the Great Carbuncle must make them strangers again
in the morning. Seven men and one young woman, they warmed themselves
together at the fire, which extended its bright wall along the whole
front of their wigwam. As they observed the various and contrasted
figures that made up the assemblage, each man looking like a
caricature of himself in the unsteady light that flickered over him,
they came mutually to the conclusion that an odder society had never
met in city or wilderness, on mountain or plain.

The eldest of the group—a tall, lean, weatherbeaten man some sixty
years of age—was clad in the skins of wild animals whose fashion of
dress he did well to imitate, since the deer, the wolf and the bear
had long been his most intimate companions. He was one of those
ill-fated mortals, such as the Indians told of, whom in their early
youth the Great Carbuncle smote with a peculiar madness and became the
passionate dream of their existence. All who visited that region knew
him as "the Seeker," and by no other name. As none could remember when
he first took up the search, there went a fable in the valley of the
Saco that for his inordinate lust after the Great Carbuncle he had
been condemned to wander among the mountains till the end of time,
still with the same feverish hopes at sunrise, the same despair at
eve. Near this miserable Seeker sat a little elderly personage wearing
a high-crowned hat shaped somewhat like a crucible. He was from beyond
the sea—a Doctor Cacaphodel, who had wilted and dried himself into a
mummy by continually stooping over charcoal-furnaces and inhaling
unwholesome fumes during his researches in chemistry and alchemy. It
was told of him—whether truly or not—that at the commencement of his
studies he had drained his body of all its richest blood and wasted
it, with other inestimable ingredients, in an unsuccessful experiment,
and had never been a well man since. Another of the adventurers was
Master Ichabod Pigsnort, a weighty merchant and selectman of Boston,
and an elder of the famous Mr. Norton's church. His enemies had a
ridiculous story that Master Pigsnort was accustomed to spend a whole
hour after prayer-time every morning and evening in wallowing naked
among an immense quantity of pine-tree shillings, which were the
earliest silver coinage of Massachusetts. The fourth whom we shall
notice had no name that his companions knew of, and was chiefly
distinguished by a sneer that always contorted his thin visage, and by
a prodigious pair of spectacles which were supposed to deform and
discolor the whole face of nature to this gentleman's perception. The
fifth adventurer likewise lacked a name, which was the greater pity,
as he appeared to be a poet. He was a bright-eyed man, but woefully
pined away, which was no more than natural if, as some people
affirmed, his ordinary diet was fog, morning mist and a slice of the
densest cloud within his reach, sauced with moonshine whenever he
could get it. Certain it is that the poetry which flowed from him had
a smack of all these dainties. The sixth of the party was a young man
of haughty mien and sat somewhat apart from the rest, wearing his
plumed hat loftily among his elders, while the fire glittered on the
rich embroidery of his dress and gleamed intensely on the jewelled
pommel of his sword. This was the lord De Vere, who when at home was
said to spend much of his time in the burial-vault of his dead
progenitors rummaging their mouldy coffins in search of all the
earthly pride and vainglory that was hidden among bones and dust; so
that, besides his own share, he had the collected haughtiness of his
whole line of ancestry. Lastly, there was a handsome youth in rustic
garb, and by his side a blooming little person in whom a delicate
shade of maiden reserve was just melting into the rich glow of a young
wife's affection. Her name was Hannah, and her husband's Matthew—two
homely names, yet well enough adapted to the simple pair who seemed
strangely out of place among the whimsical fraternity whose wits had
been set agog by the Great Carbuncle.

Beneath the shelter of one hut, in the bright blaze of the same fire,
sat this varied group of adventurers, all so intent upon a single
object that of whatever else they began to speak their closing words
were sure to be illuminated with the Great Carbuncle. Several related
the circumstances that brought them thither. One had listened to a
traveller's tale of this marvellous stone in his own distant country,
and had immediately been seized with such a thirst for beholding it as
could only be quenched in its intensest lustre. Another, so long ago
as when the famous Captain Smith visited these coasts, had seen it
blazing far at sea, and had felt no rest in all the intervening years
till now that he took up the search. A third, being encamped on a
hunting-expedition full forty miles south of the White Mountains,
awoke at midnight and beheld the Great Carbuncle gleaming like a
meteor, so that the shadows of the trees fell backward from it. They
spoke of the innumerable attempts which had been made to reach the
spot, and of the singular fatality which had hitherto withheld success
from all adventurers, though it might seem so easy to follow to its
source a light that overpowered the moon and almost matched the sun.
It was observable that each smiled scornfully at the madness of every
other in anticipating better fortune than the past, yet nourished a
scarcely-hidden conviction that he would himself be the favored one.
As if to allay their too sanguine hopes, they recurred to the Indian
traditions that a spirit kept watch about the gem and bewildered those
who sought it either by removing it from peak to peak of the higher
hills or by calling up a mist from the enchanted lake over which it
hung. But these tales were deemed unworthy of credit, all professing
to believe that the search had been baffled by want of sagacity or
perseverance in the adventurers, or such other causes as might
naturally obstruct the passage to any given point among the
intricacies of forest, valley and mountain.

In a pause of the conversation the wearer of the prodigious spectacles
looked round upon the party, making each individual in turn the object
of the sneer which invariably dwelt upon his countenance.

"So, fellow-pilgrims," said he, "here we are, seven wise men and one
fair damsel, who doubtless is as wise as any graybeard of the company.
Here we are, I say, all bound on the same goodly enterprise. Methinks,
now, it were not amiss that each of us declare what he proposes to do
with the Great Carbuncle, provided he have the good hap to clutch
it.—What says our friend in the bearskin? How mean you, good sir, to
enjoy the prize which you have been seeking the Lord knows how long
among the Crystal Hills?"

"How enjoy it!" exclaimed the aged Seeker, bitterly. "I hope for no
enjoyment from it: that folly has past long ago. I keep up the search
for this accursed stone because the vain ambition of my youth has
become a fate upon me in old age. The pursuit alone is my strength,
the energy of my soul, the warmth of my blood and the pith and marrow
of my bones. Were I to turn my back upon it, I should fall down dead
on the hither side of the notch which is the gateway of this
mountain-region. Yet not to have my wasted lifetime back again would I
give up my hopes of is deemed little better than a traffic with the
evil one. Now, think ye that I would have done this grievous wrong to
my soul, body, reputation and estate without a reasonable chance of
profit?"

"Not I, pious Master Pigsnort," said the man with the spectacles. "I
never laid such a great folly to thy charge."

"Truly, I hope not," said the merchant. "Now, as touching this Great
Carbuncle, I am free to own that I have never had a glimpse of it,
but, be it only the hundredth part so bright as people tell, it will
surely outvalue the Great Mogul's best diamond, which he holds at an
incalculable sum; wherefore I am minded to put the Great Carbuncle on
shipboard and voyage with it to England, France, Spain, Italy, or into
heathendom if Providence should send me thither, and, in a word,
dispose of the gem to the best bidder among the potentates of the
earth, that he may place it among his crown-jewels. If any of ye have
a wiser plan, let him expound it."

"That have I, thou sordid man!" exclaimed the poet. "Dost thou desire
nothing brighter than gold, that thou wouldst transmute all this
ethereal lustre into such dross as thou wallowest in already? For
myself, hiding the jewel under my cloak, I shall hie me back to my
attic-chamber in one of the darksome alleys of London. There night and
day will I gaze upon it. My soul shall drink its radiance; it shall be
diffused throughout my intellectual powers and gleam brightly in every
line of poesy that I indite. Thus long ages after I am gone the
splendor of the Great Carbuncle will blaze around my name."

"Well said, Master Poet!" cried he of the spectacles. "Hide it under
thy cloak, sayest thou? Why, it will gleam through the holes and make
thee look like a jack-o'-lantern!"

"To think," ejaculated the lord De Vere, rather to himself than his
companions, the best of whom he held utterly unworthy of his
intercourse—"to think that a fellow in a tattered cloak should talk
of conveying the Great Carbuncle to a garret in Grubb street! Have not
I resolved within myself that the whole earth contains no fitter
ornament for the great hall of my ancestral castle? There shall it
flame for ages, making a noonday of midnight, glittering on the suits
of armor, the banners and escutcheons, that hang around the wall, and
keeping bright the memory of heroes. Wherefore have all other
adventurers sought the prize in vain but that I might win it and make
it a symbol of the glories of our lofty line? And never on the diadem
of the White Mountains did the Great Carbuncle hold a place half so
honored as is reserved for it in the hall of the De Veres."

"It is a noble thought," said the cynic, with an obsequious sneer.
"Yet, might I presume to say so, the gem would make a rare sepulchral
lamp, and would display the glories of Your Lordship's progenitors
more truly in the ancestral vault than in the castle-hall."

"Nay, forsooth," observed Matthew, the young rustic, who sat hand in
hand with his bride, "the gentleman has bethought himself of a
profitable use for this bright stone. Hannah here and I are seeking it
for a like purpose."

"How, fellow?" exclaimed His Lordship, in surprise. "What castle-hall
hast thou to hang it in?"

"No castle," replied Matthew, "but as neat a cottage as any within
sight of the Crystal Hills. Ye must know, friends, that Hannah and I,
being wedded the last week, have taken up the search of the Great
Carbuncle because we shall need its light in the long winter evenings
and it will be such a pretty thing to show the neighbors when they
visit us! It will shine through the house, so that we may pick up a
pin in any corner, and will set all the windows a-glowing as if there
were a great fire of pine-knots in the chimney. And then how pleasant,
when we awake in the night, to be able to see one another's faces!"