Twice-Told Tales (56 page)

Homeward! homeward! It is time to hasten home. It is time—it is time;
for as the sun sinks over the western wave the sea grows melancholy
and the surf has a saddened tone. The distant sails appear astray and
not of earth in their remoteness amid the desolate waste. My spirit
wanders forth afar, but finds no resting-place and comes shivering
back. It is time that I were hence. But grudge me not the day that has
been spent in seclusion which yet was not solitude, since the great
sea has been my companion, and the little sea-birds my friends, and
the wind has told me his secrets, and airy shapes have flitted around
me in my hermitage. Such companionship works an effect upon a man's
character as if he had been admitted to the society of creatures that
are not mortal. And when, at noontide, I tread the crowded streets,
the influence of this day will still be felt; so that I shall walk
among men kindly and as a brother, with affection and sympathy, but
yet shall not melt into the indistinguishable mass of humankind. I
shall think my own thoughts and feel my own emotions and possess my
individuality unviolated.

But it is good at the eve of such a day to feel and know that there
are men and women in the world. That feeling and that knowledge are
mine at this moment, for on the shore, far below me, the fishing-party
have landed from their skiff and are cooking their scaly prey by a
fire of driftwood kindled in the angle of two rude rocks. The three
visionary girls are likewise there. In the deepening twilight, while
the surf is dashing near their hearth, the ruddy gleam of the fire
throws a strange air of comfort over the wild cove, bestrewn as it is
with pebbles and seaweed and exposed to the "melancholy main."
Moreover, as the smoke climbs up the precipice, it brings with it a
savory smell from a pan of fried fish and a black kettle of chowder,
and reminds me that my dinner was nothing but bread and water and a
tuft of samphire and an apple. Methinks the party might find room for
another guest at that flat rock which serves them for a table; and if
spoons be scarce, I could pick up a clam-shell on the beach. They see
me now; and—the blessing of a hungry man upon him!—one of them sends
up a hospitable shout: "Halloo, Sir Solitary! Come down and sup with
us!" The ladies wave their handkerchiefs. Can I decline? No; and be it
owned, after all my solitary joys, that this is the sweetest moment of
a day by the seashore.

There is hardly a more difficult exercise of fancy than, while gazing
at a figure of melancholy age, to recreate its youth, and without
entirely obliterating the identity of form and features to restore
those graces which Time has snatched away. Some old people—especially
women—so age-worn and woeful are they, seem never to have been young
and gay. It is easier to conceive that such gloomy phantoms were sent
into the world as withered and decrepit as we behold them now, with
sympathies only for pain and grief, to watch at death-beds and weep at
funerals. Even the sable garments of their widowhood appear essential
to their existence; all their attributes combine to render them
darksome shadows creeping strangely amid the sunshine of human life.
Yet it is no unprofitable task to take one of these doleful creatures
and set Fancy resolutely at work to brighten the dim eye, and darken
the silvery locks, and paint the ashen cheek with rose-color, and
repair the shrunken and crazy form, till a dewy maiden shall be seen
in the old matron's elbow-chair. The miracle being wrought, then let
the years roll back again, each sadder than the last, and the whole
weight of age and sorrow settle down upon the youthful figure.
Wrinkles and furrows, the handwriting of Time, may thus be deciphered
and found to contain deep lessons of thought and feeling.

Such profit might be derived by a skilful observer from my
much-respected friend the Widow Toothaker, a nurse of great repute who
has breathed the atmosphere of sick-chambers and dying-breaths these
forty years. See! she sits cowering over her lonesome hearth with her
gown and upper petticoat drawn upward, gathering thriftily into her
person the whole warmth of the fire which now at nightfall begins to
dissipate the autumnal chill of her chamber. The blaze quivers
capriciously in front, alternately glimmering into the deepest chasms
of her wrinkled visage, and then permitting a ghostly dimness to mar
the outlines of her venerable figure. And Nurse Toothaker holds a
teaspoon in her right hand with which to stir up the contents of a
tumbler in her left, whence steams a vapory fragrance abhorred of
temperance societies. Now she sips, now stirs, now sips again. Her sad
old heart has need to be revived by the rich infusion of Geneva which
is mixed half and half with hot water in the tumbler. All day long she
has been sitting by a death-pillow, and quitted it for her home only
when the spirit of her patient left the clay and went homeward too.
But now are her melancholy meditations cheered and her torpid blood
warmed and her shoulders lightened of at least twenty ponderous years
by a draught from the true fountain of youth in a case-bottle. It is
strange that men should deem that fount a fable, when its liquor fills
more bottles than the Congress-water.—Sip it again, good nurse, and
see whether a second draught will not take off another score of years,
and perhaps ten more, and show us in your high-backed chair the
blooming damsel who plighted troths with Edward Fane.—Get you gone,
Age and Widowhood!—Come back, unwedded Youth!—But, alas! the charm
will not work. In spite of Fancy's most potent spell, I can see only
an old dame cowering over the fire, a picture of decay and desolation,
while the November blast roars at her in the chimney and fitful
showers rush suddenly against the window.

Yet there was a time when Rose Grafton—such was the pretty
maiden-name of Nurse Toothaker—possessed beauty that would have
gladdened this dim and dismal chamber as with sunshine. It won for her
the heart of Edward Fane, who has since made so great a figure in the
world and is now a grand old gentleman with powdered hair and as gouty
as a lord. These early lovers thought to have walked hand in hand
through life. They had wept together for Edward's little sister Mary,
whom Rose tended in her sickness—partly because she was the sweetest
child that ever lived or died, but more for love of him. She was but
three years old. Being such an infant, Death could not embody his
terrors in her little corpse; nor did Rose fear to touch the dead
child's brow, though chill, as she curled the silken hair around it,
nor to take her tiny hand and clasp a flower within its fingers.
Afterward, when she looked through the pane of glass in the coffin-lid
and beheld Mary's face, it seemed not so much like death or life as
like a wax-work wrought into the perfect image of a child asleep and
dreaming of its mother's smile. Rose thought her too fair a thing to
be hidden in the grave, and wondered that an angel did not snatch up
little Mary's coffin and bear the slumbering babe to heaven and bid
her wake immortal. But when the sods were laid on little Mary, the
heart of Rose was troubled. She shuddered at the fantasy that in
grasping the child's cold fingers her virgin hand had exchanged a
first greeting with mortality and could never lose the earthy taint.
How many a greeting since! But as yet she was a fair young girl with
the dewdrops of fresh feeling in her bosom, and, instead of
"Rose"—which seemed too mature a name for her half-opened beauty—her
lover called her "Rosebud."

The rosebud was destined never to bloom for Edward Fane. His mother
was a rich and haughty dame with all the aristocratic prejudices of
colonial times. She scorned Rose Grafton's humble parentage and caused
her son to break his faith, though, had she let him choose, he would
have prized his Rosebud above the richest diamond. The lovers parted,
and have seldom met again. Both may have visited the same mansions,
but not at the same time, for one was bidden to the festal hall and
the other to the sick-chamber; he was the guest of Pleasure and
Prosperity, and she of Anguish. Rose, after their separation, was long
secluded within the dwelling of Mr. Toothaker, whom she married with
the revengeful hope of breaking her false lover's heart. She went to
her bridegroom's arms with bitterer tears, they say, than young girls
ought to shed at the threshold of the bridal-chamber. Yet, though her
husband's head was getting gray and his heart had been chilled with an
autumnal frost, Rose soon began to love him, and wondered at her own
conjugal affection. He was all she had to love; there were no
children.

In a year or two poor Mr. Toothaker was visited with a wearisome
infirmity which settled in his joints and made him weaker than a
child. He crept forth about his business, and came home at dinner-time
and eventide, not with the manly tread that gladdens a wife's heart,
but slowly, feebly, jotting down each dull footstep with a melancholy
dub of his staff. We must pardon his pretty wife if she sometimes
blushed to own him. Her visitors, when they heard him coming, looked
for the appearance of some old, old man, but he dragged his nerveless
limbs into the parlor—and there was Mr. Toothaker! The disease
increasing, he never went into the sunshine save with a staff in his
right hand and his left on his wife's shoulder, bearing heavily
downward like a dead man's hand. Thus, a slender woman still looking
maiden-like, she supported his tall, broad-chested frame along the
pathway of their little garden, and plucked the roses for her
gray-haired husband, and spoke soothingly as to an infant. His mind
was palsied with his body; its utmost energy was peevishness. In a few
months more she helped him up the staircase with a pause at every
step, and a longer one upon the landing-place, and a heavy glance
behind as he crossed the threshold of his chamber. He knew, poor man!
that the precincts of those four walls would thenceforth be his
world—his world, his home, his tomb, at once a dwelling-and a
burial-place—till he were borne to a darker and a narrower one. But
Rose was with him in the tomb. He leaned upon her in his daily passage
from the bed to the chair by the fireside, and back again from the
weary chair to the joyless bed—his bed and hers, their
marriage-bed—till even this short journey ceased and his head lay all
day upon the pillow and hers all night beside it. How long poor Mr.
Toothaker was kept in misery! Death seemed to draw near the door, and
often to lift the latch, and sometimes to thrust his ugly skull into
the chamber, nodding to Rose and pointing at her husband, but still
delayed to enter. "This bedridden wretch cannot escape me," quoth
Death. "I will go forth and run a race with the swift and fight a
battle with the strong, and come back for Toothaker at my leisure."
Oh, when the deliverer came so near, in the dull anguish of her
worn-out sympathies did she never long to cry, "Death, come in"?

But no; we have no right to ascribe such a wish to our friend Rose.
She never failed in a wife's duty to her poor sick husband. She
murmured not though a glimpse of the sunny sky was as strange to her
as him, nor answered peevishly though his complaining accents roused
her from sweetest dream only to share his wretchedness. He knew her
faith, yet nourished a cankered jealousy; and when the slow disease
had chilled all his heart save one lukewarm spot which Death's frozen
fingers were searching for, his last words were, "What would my Rose
have done for her first love, if she has been so true and kind to a
sick old man like me?" And then his poor soul crept away and left the
body lifeless, though hardly more so than for years before, and Rose a
widow, though in truth it was the wedding-night that widowed her. She
felt glad, it must be owned, when Mr. Toothaker was buried, because
his corpse had retained such a likeness to the man half alive that she
hearkened for the sad murmur of his voice bidding her shift his
pillow. But all through the next winter, though the grave had held him
many a month, she fancied him calling from that cold bed, "Rose, Rose!
Come put a blanket on my feet!"

So now the Rosebud was the widow Toothaker. Her troubles had come
early, and, tedious as they seemed, had passed before all her bloom
was fled. She was still fair enough to captivate a bachelor, or with a
widow's cheerful gravity she might have won a widower, stealing into
his heart in the very guise of his dead wife. But the widow Toothaker
had no such projects. By her watchings and continual cares her heart
had become knit to her first husband with a constancy which changed
its very nature and made her love him for his infirmities, and
infirmity for his sake. When the palsied old man was gone, even her
early lover could not have supplied his place. She had dwelt in a
sick-chamber and been the companion of a half-dead wretch till she
could scarcely breathe in a free air and felt ill at ease with the
healthy and the happy. She missed the fragrance of the doctor's stuff.
She walked the chamber with a noiseless footfall. If visitors came in,
she spoke in soft and soothing accents, and was startled and shocked
by their loud voices. Often in the lonesome evening she looked
timorously from the fireside to the bed, with almost a hope of
recognizing a ghastly face upon the pillow. Then went her thoughts
sadly to her husband's grave. If one impatient throb had wronged him
in his lifetime, if she had secretly repined because her buoyant youth
was imprisoned with his torpid age, if ever while slumbering beside
him a treacherous dream had admitted another into her heart,—yet the
sick man had been preparing a revenge which the dead now claimed. On
his painful pillow he had cast a spell around her; his groans and
misery had proved more captivating charms than gayety and youthful
grace; in his semblance Disease itself had won the Rosebud for a
bride, nor could his death dissolve the nuptials. By that indissoluble
bond she had gained a home in every sick-chamber, and nowhere else;
there were her brethren and sisters; thither her husband summoned her
with that voice which had seemed to issue from the grave of Toothaker.
At length she recognized her destiny.