Twice-Told Tales (44 page)

The Indian had not long been seated ere our merry damsel sought to
draw him into conversation. She, indeed, seemed all made up of
sunshine in the month of May, for there was nothing so dark and dismal
that her pleasant mind could not cast a glow over it; and the wild
man, like a fir tree in his native forest, soon began to brighten into
a sort of sombre cheerfulness. At length she inquired whether his
journey had any particular end or purpose.

"I go shoot at the camp-meeting at Stamford," replied the Indian.

"And here are five more," said the girl, "all aiming at the
camp-meeting too. You shall be one of us, for we travel with light
hearts; and, as for me, I sing merry songs and tell merry tales and am
full of merry thoughts, and I dance merrily along the road, so that
there is never any sadness among them that keep me company. But oh,
you would find it very dull indeed to go all the way to Stamford
alone."

My ideas of the aboriginal character led me to fear that the Indian
would prefer his own solitary musings to the gay society thus offered
him; on the contrary, the girl's proposal met with immediate
acceptance and seemed to animate him with a misty expectation of
enjoyment.

I now gave myself up to a course of thought which, whether it flowed
naturally from this combination of events or was drawn forth by a
wayward fancy, caused my mind to thrill as if I were listening to deep
music. I saw mankind in this weary old age of the world either
enduring a sluggish existence amid the smoke and dust of cities, or,
if they breathed a purer air, still lying down at night with no hope
but to wear out to-morrow, and all the to-morrows which make up life,
among the same dull scenes and in the same wretched toil that had
darkened the sunshine of today. But there were some full of the
primeval instinct who preserved the freshness of youth to their latest
years by the continual excitement of new objects, new pursuits and new
associates, and cared little, though their birthplace might have been
here in New England, if the grave should close over them in Central
Asia. Fate was summoning a parliament of these free spirits;
unconscious of the impulse which directed them to a common centre,
they had come hither from far and near, and last of all appeared the
representatives of those mighty vagrants who had chased the deer
during thousands of years, and were chasing it now in the spirit-land.
Wandering down through the waste of ages, the woods had vanished
around his path; his arm had lost somewhat of its strength, his foot
of its fleetness, his mien of its wild regality, his heart and mind of
their savage virtue and uncultured force, but here, untamable to the
routine of artificial life, roving now along the dusty road as of old
over the forest-leaves,—here was the Indian still.

"Well," said the old showman, in the midst of my meditations, "here is
an honest company of us—one, two, three, four, five, six—all going
to the camp-meeting at Stamford. Now, hoping no offence, I should like
to know where this young gentleman may be going?"

I started. How came I among these wanderers? The free mind that
preferred its own folly to another's wisdom, the open spirit that
found companions everywhere—above all, the restless impulse that had
so often made me wretched in the midst of enjoyments,—these were my
claims to be of their society.

"My friends," cried I, stepping into the centre of the wagon, "I am
going with you to the camp-meeting at Stamford."

"But in what capacity?" asked the old showman, after a moment's
silence. "All of us here can get our bread in some creditable way.
Every honest man should have his livelihood. You, sir, as I take it,
are a mere strolling gentleman."

I proceeded to inform the company that when Nature gave me a
propensity to their way of life she had not left me altogether
destitute of qualifications for it, though I could not deny that my
talent was less respectable, and might be less profitable, than the
meanest of theirs. My design, in short, was to imitate the
story-tellers of whom Oriental travellers have told us, and become an
itinerant novelist, reciting my own extemporaneous fictions to such
audiences as I could collect.

"Either this," said I, "is my vocation, or I have been born in vain."

The fortune-teller, with a sly wink to the company, proposed to take
me as an apprentice to one or other of his professions, either of
which undoubtedly would have given full scope to whatever inventive
talent I might possess. The bibliopolist spoke a few words in
opposition to my plan—influenced partly, I suspect, by the jealousy
of authorship, and partly by an apprehension that the
vivâ-voce
practice would become general among novelists, to the infinite
detriment of the book trade.

Dreading a rejection, I solicited the interest of the merry damsel.

"'Mirth,'" cried I, most aptly appropriating the words of L'Allegro,
"'to thee I sue! Mirth, admit me of thy crew!'"

"Let us indulge the poor youth," said Mirth, with a kindness which
made me love her dearly, though I was no such coxcomb as to
misinterpret her motives. "I have espied much promise in him. True, a
shadow sometimes flits across his brow, but the sunshine is sure to
follow in a moment. He is never guilty of a sad thought but a merry
one is twin-born with it. We will take him with us, and you shall see
that he will set us all a-laughing before we reach the camp-meeting at
Stamford." Her voice silenced the scruples of the rest and gained me
admittance into the league; according to the terms of which, without a
community of goods or profits, we were to lend each other all the aid
and avert all the harm that might be in our power.

This affair settled, a marvellous jollity entered into the whole tribe
of us, manifesting itself characteristically in each individual. The
old showman, sitting down to his barrel-organ, stirred up the souls of
the pigmy people with one of the quickest tunes in the music-book;
tailors, blacksmiths, gentlemen and ladies all seemed to share in the
spirit of the occasion, and the Merry Andrew played his part more
facetiously than ever, nodding and winking particularly at me. The
young foreigner flourished his fiddle-bow with a master's hand, and
gave an inspiring echo to the showman's melody. The bookish man and
the merry damsel started up simultaneously to dance, the former
enacting the double shuffle in a style which everybody must have
witnessed ere election week was blotted out of time, while the girl,
setting her arms akimbo with both hands at her slim waist, displayed
such light rapidity of foot and harmony of varying attitude and motion
that I could not conceive how she ever was to stop, imagining at the
moment that Nature had made her, as the old showman had made his
puppets, for no earthly purpose but to dance jigs. The Indian bellowed
forth a succession of most hideous outcries, somewhat affrighting us
till we interpreted them as the war-song with which, in imitation of
his ancestors, he was prefacing the assault on Stamford. The conjurer,
meanwhile, sat demurely in a corner extracting a sly enjoyment from
the whole scene, and, like the facetious Merry Andrew, directing his
queer glance particularly at me. As for myself, with great
exhilaration of fancy, I began to arrange and color the incidents of a
tale wherewith I proposed to amuse an audience that very evening; for
I saw that my associates were a little ashamed of me, and that no time
was to be lost in obtaining a public acknowledgment of my abilities.

"Come, fellow-laborers," at last said the old showman, whom we had
elected president; "the shower is over, and we must be doing our duty
by these poor souls at Stamford."

"We'll come among them in procession, with music and dancing," cried
the merry damsel.

Accordingly—for it must be understood that our pilgrimage was to be
performed on foot—we sallied joyously out of the wagon, each of us,
even the old gentleman in his white top-boots, giving a great skip as
we came down the ladder. Above our heads there was such a glory of
sunshine and splendor of clouds, and such brightness of verdure below,
that, as I modestly remarked at the time, Nature seemed to have washed
her face and put on the best of her jewelry and a fresh green gown in
honor of our confederation. Casting our eyes northward, we beheld a
horseman approaching leisurely and splashing through the little puddle
on the Stamford road. Onward he came, sticking up in his saddle with
rigid perpendicularity, a tall, thin figure in rusty black, whom the
showman and the conjurer shortly recognized to be what his aspect
sufficiently indicated—a travelling preacher of great fame among the
Methodists. What puzzled us was the fact that his face appeared turned
from, instead of to, the camp-meeting at Stamford. However, as this
new votary of the wandering life drew near the little green space
where the guide-post and our wagon were situated, my six
fellow-vagabonds and myself rushed forward and surrounded him, crying
out with united voices, "What news? What news from the camp-meeting at
Stamford?"

The missionary looked down in surprise at as singular a knot of people
as could have been selected from all his heterogeneous auditors.
Indeed, considering that we might all be classified under the general
head of Vagabond, there was great diversity of character among the
grave old showman, the sly, prophetic beggar, the fiddling foreigner
and his merry damsel, the smart bibliopolist, the sombre Indian and
myself, the itinerant novelist, a slender youth of eighteen. I even
fancied that a smile was endeavoring to disturb the iron gravity of
the preacher's mouth.

"Good people," answered he, "the camp-meeting is broke up."

So saying, the Methodist minister switched his steed and rode
westward. Our union being thus nullified by the removal of its object,
we were sundered at once to the four winds of heaven. The
fortune-teller, giving a nod to all and a peculiar wink to me,
departed on his Northern tour, chuckling within himself as he took the
Stamford road. The old showman and his literary coadjutor were already
tackling their horses to the wagon with a design to peregrinate
south-west along the sea-coast. The foreigner and the merry damsel
took their laughing leave and pursued the eastern road, which I had
that day trodden; as they passed away the young man played a lively
strain and the girl's happy spirit broke into a dance, and, thus
dissolving, as it were, into sunbeams and gay music, that pleasant
pair departed from my view. Finally, with a pensive shadow thrown
across my mind, yet emulous of the light philosophy of my late
companions, I joined myself to the Penobscot Indian and set forth
toward the distant city.

The moonbeams came through two deep and narrow windows and showed a
spacious chamber richly furnished in an antique fashion. From one
lattice the shadow of the diamond panes was thrown upon the floor; the
ghostly light through the other slept upon a bed, falling between the
heavy silken curtains and illuminating the face of a young man. But
how quietly the slumberer lay! how pale his features! And how like a
shroud the sheet was wound about his frame! Yes, it was a corpse in
its burial-clothes.

Suddenly the fixed features seemed to move with dark emotion. Strange
fantasy! It was but the shadow of the fringed curtain waving betwixt
the dead face and the moonlight as the door of the chamber opened and
a girl stole softly to the bedside. Was there delusion in the
moonbeams, or did her gesture and her eye betray a gleam of triumph as
she bent over the pale corpse, pale as itself, and pressed her living
lips to the cold ones of the dead? As she drew back from that long
kiss her features writhed as if a proud heart were fighting with its
anguish. Again it seemed that the features of the corpse had moved
responsive to her own. Still an illusion. The silken curtains had
waved a second time betwixt the dead face and the moonlight as another
fair young girl unclosed the door and glided ghostlike to the bedside.
There the two maidens stood, both beautiful, with the pale beauty of
the dead between them. But she who had first entered was proud and
stately, and the other a soft and fragile thing.

"Away!" cried the lofty one. "Thou hadst him living; the dead is
mine."

"Thine!" returned the other, shuddering. "Well hast thou spoken; the
dead is thine."

The proud girl started and stared into her face with a ghastly look,
but a wild-and mournful expression passed across the features of the
gentle one, and, weak and helpless, she sank down on the bed, her head
pillowed beside that of the corpse and her hair mingling with his dark
locks. A creature of hope and joy, the first draught of sorrow had
bewildered her.

"Edith!" cried her rival.

Edith groaned as with a sudden compression of the heart, and, removing
her cheek from the dead youth's pillow, she stood upright, fearfully
encountering the eyes of the lofty girl.

"Wilt thou betray me?" said the latter, calmly.

"Till the dead bid me speak I will be silent," answered Edith. "Leave
us alone together. Go and live many years, and then return and tell me
of thy life. He too will be here. Then, if thou tellest of sufferings
more than death, we will both forgive thee."

"And what shall be the token?" asked the proud girl, as if her heart
acknowledged a meaning in these wild words.

"This lock of hair," said Edith, lifting one of the dark clustering
curls that lay heavily on the dead man's brow.

The two maidens joined their hands over the bosom of the corpse and
appointed a day and hour far, far in time to come for their next
meeting in that chamber. The statelier girl gave one deep look at the
motionless countenance and departed, yet turned again and trembled ere
she closed the door, almost believing that her dead lover frowned upon
her. And Edith, too! Was not her white form fading into the moonlight?
Scorning her own weakness, she went forth and perceived that a negro
slave was waiting in the passage with a waxlight, which he held
between her face and his own and regarded her, as she thought, with an
ugly expression of merriment. Lifting his torch on high, the slave
lighted her down the staircase and undid the portal of the mansion.
The young clergyman of the town had just ascended the steps, and,
bowing to the lady, passed in without a word.