Twice-Told Tales (50 page)

My observations gave me the idea, and Mr. Wigglesworth confirmed it,
that husbands were more faithful in setting up memorials to their dead
wives than widows to their dead husbands. I was not ill-natured enough
to fancy that women less than men feel so sure of their own constancy
as to be willing to give a pledge of it in marble. It is more probably
the fact that, while men are able to reflect upon their lost
companions as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the other
hand, are conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the
departed whithersoever he has gone. Soul clings to soul, the living
dust has a sympathy with the dust of the grave; and by the very
strength of that sympathy the wife of the dead shrinks the more
sensitively from reminding the world of its existence. The link is
already strong enough; it needs no visible symbol. And, though a
shadow walks ever by her side and the touch of a chill hand is on her
bosom, yet life, and perchance its natural yearnings, may still be
warm within her and inspire her with new hopes of happiness. Then
would she mark out the grave the scent of which would be perceptible
on the pillow of the second bridal? No, but rather level its green
mound with the surrounding earth, as if, when she dug up again her
buried heart, the spot had ceased to be a grave.

Yet, in spite of these sentimentalities, I was prodigiously amused by
an incident of which I had not the good-fortune to be a witness, but
which Mr. Wigglesworth related with considerable humor. A gentlewoman
of the town, receiving news of her husband's loss at sea, had bespoken
a handsome slab of marble, and came daily to watch the progress of my
friend's chisel. One afternoon, when the good lady and the sculptor
were in the very midst of the epitaph—which the departed spirit might
have been greatly comforted to read—who should walk into the workshop
but the deceased himself, in substance as well as spirit! He had been
picked up at sea, and stood in no present need of tombstone or
epitaph.

"And how," inquired I, "did his wife bear the shock of joyful
surprise?"

"Why," said the old man, deepening the grin of a death's-head on which
his chisel was just then employed, "I really felt for the poor woman;
it was one of my best pieces of marble—and to be thrown away on a
living man!"

A comely woman with a pretty rosebud of a daughter came to select a
gravestone for a twin-daughter, who had died a month before. I was
impressed with the different nature of their feelings for the dead.
The mother was calm and woefully resigned, fully conscious of her
loss, as of a treasure which she had not always possessed, and
therefore had been aware that it might be taken from her; but the
daughter evidently had no real knowledge of what Death's doings were.
Her thoughts knew, but not her heart. It seemed to me that by the
print and pressure which the dead sister had left upon the survivor's
spirit her feelings were almost the same as if she still stood side by
side and arm in arm with the departed, looking at the slabs of marble,
and once or twice she glanced around with a sunny smile, which, as its
sister-smile had faded for ever, soon grew confusedly overshadowed.
Perchance her consciousness was truer than her reflection; perchance
her dead sister was a closer companion than in life.

The mother and daughter talked a long while with Mr. Wigglesworth
about a suitable epitaph, and finally chose an ordinary verse of
ill-matched rhymes which had already been inscribed upon innumerable
tombstones. But when we ridicule the triteness of monumental verses,
we forget that Sorrow reads far deeper in them than we can, and finds
a profound and individual purport in what seems so vague and
inexpressive unless interpreted by her. She makes the epitaph anew,
though the selfsame words may have served for a thousand graves.

"And yet," said I afterward to Mr. Wigglesworth, "they might have made
a better choice than this. While you were discussing the subject I was
struck by at least a dozen simple and natural expressions from the
lips of both mother and daughter. One of these would have formed an
inscription equally original and appropriate."

"No, no!" replied the sculptor, shaking his head; "there is a good
deal of comfort to be gathered from these little old scraps of poetry,
and so I always recommend them in preference to any new-fangled ones.
And somehow they seem to stretch to suit a great grief and shrink to
fit a small one."

It was not seldom that ludicrous images were excited by what took
place between Mr. Wigglesworth and his customers. A shrewd gentlewoman
who kept a tavern in the town was anxious to obtain two or three
gravestones for the deceased members of her family, and to pay for
these solemn commodities by taking the sculptor to board. Hereupon a
fantasy arose in my mind of good Mr. Wigglesworth sitting down to
dinner at a broad, flat tombstone carving one of his own plump little
marble cherubs, gnawing a pair of crossbones and drinking out of a
hollow death's-head or perhaps a lachrymatory vase or sepulchral urn,
while his hostess's dead children waited on him at the ghastly
banquet. On communicating this nonsensical picture to the old man he
laughed heartily and pronounced my humor to be of the right sort.

"I have lived at such a table all my days," said he, "and eaten no
small quantity of slate and marble."

"Hard fare," rejoined I, smiling, "but you seemed to have found it
excellent of digestion, too."

A man of fifty or thereabouts with a harsh, unpleasant countenance
ordered a stone for the grave of his bitter enemy, with whom he had
waged warfare half a lifetime, to their mutual misery and ruin. The
secret of this phenomenon was that hatred had become the sustenance
and enjoyment of the poor wretch's soul; it had supplied the place of
all kindly affections; it had been really a bond of sympathy between
himself and the man who shared the passion; and when its object died,
the unappeasable foe was the only mourner for the dead. He expressed a
purpose of being buried side by side with his enemy.

"I doubt whether their dust will mingle," remarked the old sculptor to
me; for often there was an earthliness in his conceptions.

"Oh yes," replied I, who had mused long upon the incident; "and when
they rise again, these bitter foes may find themselves dear friends.
Methinks what they mistook for hatred was but love under a mask."

A gentleman of antiquarian propensities provided a memorial for an
Indian of Chabbiquidick—one of the few of untainted blood remaining
in that region, and said to be a hereditary chieftain descended from
the sachem who welcomed Governor Mayhew to the Vineyard. Mr.
Wiggles-worth exerted his best skill to carve a broken bow and
scattered sheaf of arrows in memory of the hunters and warriors whose
race was ended here, but he likewise sculptured a cherub, to denote
that the poor Indian had shared the Christian's hope of immortality.

"Why," observed I, taking a perverse view of the winged boy and the
bow and arrows, "it looks more like Cupid's tomb than an Indian
chief's."

"You talk nonsense," said the sculptor, with the offended pride of
art. He then added with his usual good-nature, "How can Cupid die when
there are such pretty maidens in the Vineyard?"

"Very true," answered I; and for the rest of the day I thought of
other matters than tombstones.

At our next meeting I found him chiselling an open book upon a marble
headstone, and concluded that it was meant to express the erudition of
some black-letter clergyman of the Cotton Mather school. It turned
out, however, to be emblematical of the scriptural knowledge of an old
woman who had never read anything but her Bible, and the monument was
a tribute to her piety and good works from the orthodox church of
which she had been a member. In strange contrast with this Christian
woman's memorial was that of an infidel whose gravestone, by his own
direction, bore an avowal of his belief that the spirit within him
would be extinguished like a flame, and that the nothingness whence he
sprang would receive him again.

Mr. Wigglesworth consulted me as to the propriety of enabling a dead
man's dust to utter this dreadful creed.

"If I thought," said he, "that a single mortal would read the
inscription without a shudder, my chisel should never cut a letter of
it. But when the grave speaks such falsehoods, the soul of man will
know the truth by its own horror."

"So it will," said I, struck by the idea. "The poor infidel may strive
to preach blasphemies from his grave, but it will be only another
method of impressing the soul with a consciousness of immortality."

There was an old man by the name of Norton, noted throughout the
island for his great wealth, which he had accumulated by the exercise
of strong and shrewd faculties combined with a most penurious
disposition. This wretched miser, conscious that he had not a friend
to be mindful of him in his grave, had himself taken the needful
precautions for posthumous remembrance by bespeaking an immense slab
of white marble with a long epitaph in raised letters, the whole to be
as magnificent as Mr. Wigglesworth's skill could make it. There was
something very characteristic in this contrivance to have his money's
worth even from his own tombstone, which, indeed, afforded him more
enjoyment in the few months that he lived thereafter than it probably
will in a whole century, now that it is laid over his bones.

This incident reminds me of a young girl—a pale, slender, feeble
creature most unlike the other rosy and healthful damsels of the
Vineyard, amid whose brightness she was fading away. Day after day did
the poor maiden come to the sculptor's shop and pass from one piece of
marble to another, till at last she pencilled her name upon a slender
slab which, I think, was of a more spotless white than all the rest. I
saw her no more, but soon afterward found Mr. Wigglesworth cutting her
virgin-name into the stone which she had chosen.

"She is dead, poor girl!" said he, interrupting the tune which he was
whistling, "and she chose a good piece of stuff for her headstone.
Now, which of these slabs would you like best to see your own name
upon?"

"Why, to tell you the truth, my good Mr. Wigglesworth," replied I,
after a moment's pause, for the abruptness of the question had
somewhat startled me—"to be quite sincere with you, I care little or
nothing about a stone for my own grave, and am somewhat inclined to
scepticism as to the propriety of erecting monuments at all over the
dust that once was human. The weight of these heavy marbles, though
unfelt by the dead corpse or the enfranchised soul, presses drearily
upon the spirit of the survivor and causes him to connect the idea of
death with the dungeon-like imprisonment of the tomb, instead of with
the freedom of the skies. Every gravestone that you ever made is the
visible symbol of a mistaken system. Our thoughts should soar upward
with the butterfly, not linger with the exuviæ that confined him. In
truth and reason, neither those whom we call the living, and still
less the departed, have anything to do with the grave."

"I never heard anything so heathenish," said Mr. Wigglesworth,
perplexed and displeased at sentiments which controverted all his
notions and feelings and implied the utter waste, and worse, of his
whole life's labor. "Would you forget your dead friends the moment
they are under the sod?"

"They are not under the sod," I rejoined; "then why should I mark the
spot where there is no treasure hidden? Forget them? No; but, to
remember them aright, I would forget what they have cast off. And to
gain the truer conception of death I would forget the grave."

But still the good old sculptor murmured, and stumbled, as it were,
over the gravestones amid which he had walked through life. Whether he
were right or wrong, I had grown the wiser from our companionship and
from my observations of nature and character as displayed by those who
came, with their old griefs or their new ones, to get them recorded
upon his slabs of marble. And yet with my gain of wisdom I had
likewise gained perplexity; for there was a strange doubt in my mind
whether the dark shadowing of this life, the sorrows and regrets, have
not as much real comfort in them—leaving religious influences out of
the question—as what we term life's joys.

One day, in the sick-chamber of Father Ephraim, who had been forty
years the presiding elder over the Shaker settlement at Goshen, there
was an assemblage of several of the chief men of the sect. Individuals
had come from the rich establishment at Lebanon, from Canterbury,
Harvard and Alfred, and from all the other localities where this
strange people have fertilized the rugged hills of New England by
their systematic industry. An elder was likewise there who had made a
pilgrimage of a thousand miles from a village of the faithful in
Kentucky to visit his spiritual kindred the children of the sainted
Mother Ann. He had partaken of the homely abundance of their tables,
had quaffed the far-famed Shaker cider, and had joined in the sacred
dance every step of which is believed to alienate the enthusiast from
earth and bear him onward to heavenly purity and bliss. His brethren
of the North had now courteously invited him to be present on an
occasion when the concurrence of every eminent member of their
community was peculiarly desirable.

The venerable Father Ephraim sat in his easy-chair, not only
hoary-headed and infirm with age, but worn down by a lingering disease
which it was evident would very soon transfer his patriarchal staff to
other hands. At his footstool stood a man and woman, both clad in the
Shaker garb.

"My brethren," said Father Ephraim to the surrounding elders, feebly
exerting himself to utter these few words, "here are the son and
daughter to whom I would commit the trust of which Providence is about
to lighten my weary shoulders. Read their faces, I pray you, and say
whether the inward movement of the spirit hath guided my choice
aright."