Twice-Told Tales (3 page)

Here comes the clergyman, slow and solemn, in severe simplicity,
needing no black silk gown to denote his office. His aspect claims my
reverence, but cannot win my love. Were I to picture Saint Peter
keeping fast the gate of Heaven and frowning, more stern than pitiful,
on the wretched applicants, that face should be my study. By middle
age, or sooner, the creed has generally wrought upon the heart or been
attempered by it. As the minister passes into the church the bell
holds its iron tongue and all the low murmur of the congregation dies
away. The gray sexton looks up and down the street and then at my
window-curtain, where through the small peephole I half fancy that he
has caught my eye. Now every loiterer has gone in and the street lies
asleep in the quiet sun, while a feeling of loneliness comes over me,
and brings also an uneasy sense of neglected privileges and duties.
Oh, I ought to have gone to church! The bustle of the rising
congregation reaches my ears. They are standing up to pray. Could I
bring my heart into unison with those who are praying in yonder church
and lift it heavenward with a fervor of supplication, but no distinct
request, would not that be the safest kind of prayer?—"Lord, look
down upon me in mercy!" With that sentiment gushing from my soul,
might I not leave all the rest to him?

Hark! the hymn! This, at least, is a portion of the service which I
can enjoy better than if I sat within the walls, where the full choir
and the massive melody of the organ would fall with a weight upon me.
At this distance it thrills through my frame and plays upon my
heart-strings with a pleasure both of the sense and spirit. Heaven be
praised! I know nothing of music as a science, and the most elaborate
harmonies, if they please me, please as simply as a nurse's lullaby.
The strain has ceased, but prolongs itself in my mind with fanciful
echoes till I start from my reverie and find that the sermon has
commenced. It is my misfortune seldom to fructify in a regular way by
any but printed sermons. The first strong idea which the preacher
utters gives birth to a train of thought and leads me onward step by
step quite out of hearing of the good man's voice unless he be indeed
a son of thunder. At my open window, catching now and then a sentence
of the "parson's saw," I am as well situated as at the foot of the
pulpit stairs. The broken and scattered fragments of this one
discourse will be the texts of many sermons preached by those
colleague pastors—colleagues, but often disputants—my Mind and
Heart. The former pretends to be a scholar and perplexes me with
doctrinal points; the latter takes me on the score of feeling; and
both, like several other preachers, spend their strength to very
little purpose. I, their sole auditor, cannot always understand them.

Suppose that a few hours have passed, and behold me still behind my
curtain just before the close of the afternoon service. The hour-hand
on the dial has passed beyond four o'clock. The declining sun is
hidden behind the steeple and throws its shadow straight across the
street; so that my chamber is darkened as with a cloud. Around the
church door all is solitude, and an impenetrable obscurity beyond the
threshold. A commotion is heard. The seats are slammed down and the
pew doors thrown back; a multitude of feet are trampling along the
unseen aisles, and the congregation bursts suddenly through the
portal. Foremost scampers a rabble of boys, behind whom moves a dense
and dark phalanx of grown men, and lastly a crowd of females with
young children and a few scattered husbands. This instantaneous
outbreak of life into loneliness is one of the pleasantest scenes of
the day. Some of the good people are rubbing their eyes, thereby
intimating that they have been wrapped, as it were, in a sort of holy
trance by the fervor of their devotion. There is a young man, a
third-rate coxcomb, whose first care is always to flourish a white
handkerchief and brush the seat of a tight pair of black silk
pantaloons which shine as if varnished. They must have been made of
the stuff called "everlasting," or perhaps of the same piece as
Christian's garments in the
Pilgrim's Progress
, for he put them
on two summers ago and has not yet worn the gloss off. I have taken a
great liking to those black silk pantaloons. But now, with nods and
greetings among friends, each matron takes her husband's arm and paces
gravely homeward, while the girls also flutter away after arranging
sunset walks with their favored bachelors. The Sabbath eve is the eve
of love. At length the whole congregation is dispersed. No; here, with
faces as glossy as black satin, come two sable ladies and a sable
gentleman, and close in their rear the minister, who softens his
severe visage and bestows a kind word on each. Poor souls! To them the
most captivating picture of bliss in heaven is "There we shall be
white!"

All is solitude again. But hark! A broken warbling of voices, and now,
attuning its grandeur to their sweetness, a stately peal of the organ.
Who are the choristers? Let me dream that the angels who came down
from heaven this blessed morn to blend themselves with the worship of
the truly good are playing and singing their farewell to the earth. On
the wings of that rich melody they were borne upward.

This, gentle reader, is merely a flight of poetry. A few of the
singing-men and singing-women had lingered behind their fellows and
raised their voices fitfully and blew a careless note upon the organ.
Yet it lifted my soul higher than all their former strains. They are
gone—the sons and daughters of Music—and the gray sexton is just
closing the portal. For six days more there will be no face of man in
the pews and aisles and galleries, nor a voice in the pulpit, nor
music in the choir. Was it worth while to rear this massive edifice to
be a desert in the heart of the town and populous only for a few hours
of each seventh day? Oh, but the church is a symbol of religion. May
its site, which was consecrated on the day when the first tree was
felled, be kept holy for ever, a spot of solitude and peace amid the
trouble and vanity of our week-day world! There is a moral, and a
religion too, even in the silent walls. And may the steeple still
point heavenward and be decked with the hallowed sunshine of the
Sabbath morn!

There is a certain church, in the city of New York which I have always
regarded with peculiar interest on account of a marriage there
solemnized under very singular circumstances in my grandmother's
girlhood. That venerable lady chanced to be a spectator of the scene,
and ever after made it her favorite narrative. Whether the edifice now
standing on the same site be the identical one to which she referred I
am not antiquarian enough to know, nor would it be worth while to
correct myself, perhaps, of an agreeable error by reading the date of
its erection on the tablet over the door. It is a stately church
surrounded by an enclosure of the loveliest green, within which appear
urns, pillars, obelisks, and other forms of monumental marble, the
tributes of private affection or more splendid memorials of historic
dust. With such a place, though the tumult of the city rolls beneath
its tower, one would be willing to connect some legendary interest.

The marriage might be considered as the result of an early engagement,
though there had been two intermediate weddings on the lady's part and
forty years of celibacy on that of the gentleman. At sixty-five Mr.
Ellenwood was a shy but not quite a secluded man; selfish, like all
men who brood over their own hearts, yet manifesting on rare occasions
a vein of generous sentiment; a scholar throughout life, though always
an indolent one, because his studies had no definite object either of
public advantage or personal ambition; a gentleman, high-bred and
fastidiously delicate, yet sometimes requiring a considerable
relaxation in his behalf of the common rules of society. In truth,
there were so many anomalies in his character, and, though shrinking
with diseased sensibility from public notice, it had been his fatality
so often to become the topic of the day by some wild eccentricity of
conduct, that people searched his lineage for a hereditary taint of
insanity. But there was no need of this. His caprices had their origin
in a mind that lacked the support of an engrossing purpose, and in
feelings that preyed upon themselves for want of other food. If he
were mad, it was the consequence, and not the cause, of an aimless and
abortive life.

The widow was as complete a contrast to her third bridegroom in
everything but age as can well be conceived. Compelled to relinquish
her first engagement, she had been united to a man of twice her own
years, to whom she became an exemplary wife, and by whose death she
was left in possession of a splendid fortune. A Southern gentleman
considerably younger than herself succeeded to her hand and carried
her to Charleston, where after many uncomfortable years she found
herself again a widow. It would have been singular if any uncommon
delicacy of feeling had survived through such a life as Mrs. Dabney's;
it could not but be crushed and killed by her early disappointment,
the cold duty of her first marriage, the dislocation of the heart's
principles consequent on a second union, and the unkindness of her
Southern husband, which had inevitably driven her to connect the idea
of his death with that of her comfort. To be brief, she was that
wisest but unloveliest variety of woman, a philosopher, bearing
troubles of the heart with equanimity, dispensing with all that should
have been her happiness and making the best of what remained. Sage in
most matters, the widow was perhaps the more amiable for the one
frailty that made her ridiculous. Being childless, she could not
remain beautiful by proxy in the person of a daughter; she therefore
refused to grow old and ugly on any consideration; she struggled with
Time, and held fast her roses in spite of him, till the venerable
thief appeared to have relinquished the spoil as not worth the trouble
of acquiring it.

The approaching marriage of this woman of the world with such an
unworldly man as Mr. Ellenwood was announced soon after Mrs. Dabney's
return to her native city. Superficial observers, and deeper ones,
seemed to concur in supposing that the lady must have borne no
inactive part in arranging the affair; there were considerations of
expediency which she would be far more likely to appreciate than Mr.
Ellenwood, and there was just the specious phantom of sentiment and
romance in this late union of two early lovers which sometimes makes a
fool of a woman who has lost her true feelings among the accidents of
life. All the wonder was how the gentleman, with his lack of worldly
wisdom and agonizing consciousness of ridicule, could have been
induced to take a measure at once so prudent and so laughable. But
while people talked the wedding-day arrived. The ceremony was to be
solemnized according to the Episcopalian forms and in open church,
with a degree of publicity that attracted many spectators, who
occupied the front seats of the galleries and the pews near the altar
and along the broad aisle. It had been arranged, or possibly it was
the custom of the day, that the parties should proceed separately to
church. By some accident the bridegroom was a little less punctual
than the widow and her bridal attendants, with whose arrival, after
this tedious but necessary preface, the action of our tale may be said
to commence.

The clumsy wheels of several old-fashioned coaches were heard, and the
gentlemen and ladies composing the bridal-party came through the
church door with the sudden and gladsome effect of a burst of
sunshine. The whole group, except the principal figure, was made up of
youth and gayety. As they streamed up the broad aisle, while the pews
and pillars seemed to brighten on either side, their steps were as
buoyant as if they mistook the church for a ball-room and were ready
to dance hand in hand to the altar. So brilliant was the spectacle
that few took notice of a singular phenomenon that had marked its
entrance. At the moment when the bride's foot touched the threshold
the bell swung heavily in the tower above her and sent forth its
deepest knell. The vibrations died away, and returned with prolonged
solemnity as she entered the body of the church.

"Good heavens! What an omen!" whispered a young lady to her lover.

"On my honor," replied the gentleman, "I believe the bell has the good
taste to toll of its own accord. What has she to do with weddings? If
you, dearest Julia, were approaching the altar, the bell would ring
out its merriest peal. It has only a funeral-knell for her."

The bride and most of her company had been too much occupied with the
bustle of entrance to hear the first boding stroke of the bell—or, at
least, to reflect on the singularity of such a welcome to the altar.
They therefore continued to advance with undiminished gayety. The
gorgeous dresses of the time—the crimson velvet coats, the gold-laced
hats, the hoop-petticoats, the silk, satin, brocade and embroidery,
the buckles, canes and swords, all displayed to the best advantage on
persons suited to such finery—made the group appear more like a
bright-colored picture than anything real. But by what perversity of
taste had the artist represented his principal figure as so wrinkled
and decayed, while yet he had decked her out in the brightest splendor
of attire, as if the loveliest maiden had suddenly withered into age
and become a moral to the beautiful around her? On they went, however,
and had glittered along about a third of the aisle, when another
stroke of the bell seemed to fill the church with a visible gloom,
dimming and obscuring the bright-pageant till it shone forth again as
from a mist.

This time the party wavered, stopped and huddled closer together,
while a slight scream was heard from some of the ladies and a confused
whispering among the gentlemen. Thus tossing to and fro, they might
have been fancifully compared to a splendid bunch of flowers suddenly
shaken by a puff of wind which threatened to scatter the leaves of an
old brown, withered rose on the same stalk with two dewy buds, such
being the emblem of the widow between her fair young bridemaids. But
her heroism was admirable. She had started with an irrepressible
shudder, as if the stroke of the bell had fallen directly on her
heart; then, recovering herself, while her attendants were yet in
dismay, she took the lead and paced calmly up the aisle. The bell
continued to swing, strike and vibrate with the same doleful
regularity as when a corpse is on its way to the tomb.