Twice-Told Tales (57 page)

We have beheld her as the maid, the wife, the widow; now we see her in
a separate and insulated character: she was in all her attributes
Nurse Toothaker. And Nurse Toothaker alone, with her own shrivelled
lips, could make known her experience in that capacity. What a history
might she record of the great sicknesses in which she has gone hand in
hand with the exterminating angel! She remembers when the small-pox
hoisted a red banner on almost every house along the street. She has
witnessed when the typhus fever swept off a whole household, young and
old, all but a lonely mother, who vainly shrieked to follow her last
loved one. Where would be Death's triumph if none lived to weep? She
can speak of strange maladies that have broken out as if
spontaneously, but were found to have been imported from foreign lands
with rich silks and other merchandise, the costliest portion of the
cargo. And once, she recollects, the people died of what was
considered a new pestilence, till the doctors traced it to the ancient
grave of a young girl who thus caused many deaths a hundred years
after her own burial. Strange that such black mischief should lurk in
a maiden's grave! She loves to tell how strong men fight with fiery
fevers, utterly refusing to give up their breath, and how consumptive
virgins fade out of the world, scarcely reluctant, as if their lovers
were wooing them to a far country.—Tell us, thou fearful woman; tell
us the death-secrets. Fain would I search out the meaning of words
faintly gasped with intermingled sobs and broken sentences
half-audibly spoken between earth and the judgment-seat.

An awful woman! She is the patron-saint of young physicians and the
bosom-friend of old ones. In the mansions where she enters the inmates
provide themselves black garments; the coffin-maker follows her, and
the bell tolls as she comes away from the threshold. Death himself has
met her at so many a bedside that he puts forth his bony hand to greet
Nurse Toothaker. She is an awful woman. And oh, is it conceivable that
this handmaid of human infirmity and affliction—so darkly stained, so
thoroughly imbued with all that is saddest in the doom of mortals—can
ever again be bright and gladsome even though bathed in the sunshine
of eternity? By her long communion with woe has she not forfeited her
inheritance of immortal joy? Does any germ of bliss survive within
her?

Hark! an eager knocking st Nurse Toothaker's door. She starts from her
drowsy reverie, sets aside the empty tumbler and teaspoon, and lights
a lamp at the dim embers of the fire. "Rap, rap, rap!" again, and she
hurries adown the staircase, wondering which of her friends can be at
death's door now, since there is such an earnest messenger at Nurse
Toothaker's. Again the peal resounds just as her hand is on the lock.
"Be quick, Nurse Toothaker!" cries a man on the doorstep. "Old General
Fane is taken with the gout in his stomach and has sent for you to
watch by his death-bed. Make haste, for there is no time to
lose."—"Fane! Edward Fane! And has he sent for me at last? I am
ready. I will get on my cloak and begone. So," adds the sable-gowned,
ashen-visaged, funereal old figure, "Edward Fane remembers his
Rosebud."

Our question is answered. There is a germ of bliss within her. Her
long-hoarded constancy, her memory of the bliss that was remaining
amid the gloom of her after-life like a sweet-smelling flower in a
coffin, is a symbol that all may be renewed. In some happier clime the
Rosebud may revive again with all the dewdrops in its bosom.

I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far
as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in
which the spirit and mechanism of the faëry legend should be combined
with the characters and manners of familiar life. In the little tale
which follows a subdued tinge of the wild and wonderful is thrown over
a sketch of New England personages and scenery, yet, it is hoped,
without entirely obliterating the sober hues of nature. Rather than a
story of events claiming to be real, it may be considered as an
allegory such as the writers of the last century would have expressed
in the shape of an Eastern tale, but to which I have endeavored to
give a more lifelike warmth than could be infused into those fanciful
productions.

In the twilight of a summer eve a tall dark figure over which long and
remote travel had thrown an outlandish aspect was entering a village
not in "faëry londe," but within our own familiar boundaries. The
staff on which this traveller leaned had been his companion from the
spot where it grew in the jungles of Hindostan; the hat that
overshadowed his sombre brow, had shielded him from the suns of Spain;
but his cheek had been blackened by the red-hot wind of an Arabian
desert and had felt the frozen breath of an Arctic region. Long
sojourning amid wild and dangerous men, he still wore beneath his vest
the ataghan which he had once struck into the throat of a Turkish
robber. In every foreign clime he had lost something of his New
England characteristics, and perhaps from every people he had
unconsciously borrowed a new peculiarity; so that when the
world-wanderer again trod the street of his native village it is no
wonder that he passed unrecognized, though exciting the gaze and
curiosity of all. Yet, as his arm casually touched that of a young
woman who was wending her way to an evening lecture, she started and
almost uttered a cry.

"Ralph Cranfield!" was the name that she half articulated.

"Can that be my old playmate Faith Egerton?" thought the traveller,
looking round at her figure, but without pausing.

Ralph Cranfield from his youth upward had felt himself marked out for
a high destiny. He had imbibed the idea—we say not whether it were
revealed to him by witchcraft or in a dream of prophecy, or that his
brooding fancy had palmed its own dictates upon him as the oracles of
a sybil, but he had imbibed the idea, and held it firmest among his
articles of faith—that three marvellous events of his life were to be
confirmed to him by three signs.

The first of these three fatalities, and perhaps the one on which his
youthful imagination had dwelt most fondly, was the discovery of the
maid who alone of all the maids on earth could make him happy by her
love. He was to roam around the world till he should meet a beautiful
woman wearing on her bosom a jewel in the shape of a heart—whether of
pearl or ruby or emerald or carbuncle or a changeful opal, or perhaps
a priceless diamond, Ralph Cranfield little cared, so long as it were
a heart of one peculiar shape. On encountering this lovely stranger he
was bound to address her thus: "Maiden, I have brought you a heavy
heart. May I rest its weight on you?" And if she were his fated
bride—if their kindred souls were destined to form a union here below
which all eternity should only bind more closely—she would reply,
with her finger on the heart-shaped jewel, "This token which I have
worn so long is the assurance that you may."

And, secondly, Ralph Cranfield had a firm belief that there was a
mighty treasure hidden somewhere in the earth of which the
burial-place would be revealed to none but him. When his feet should
press upon the mysterious spot, there would be a hand before him
pointing downward—whether carved of marble or hewn in gigantic
dimensions on the side of a rocky precipice, or perchance a hand of
flame in empty air, he could not tell, but at least he would discern a
hand, the forefinger pointing downward, and beneath it the Latin word
"
Effode
"—"Dig!" And, digging thereabouts, the gold in coin or
ingots, the precious stones, or of whatever else the treasure might
consist, would be certain to reward his toil.

The third and last of the miraculous events in the life of this
high-destined man was to be the attainment of extensive influence and
sway over his fellow-creatures. Whether he were to be a king and
founder of a hereditary throne, or the victorious leader of a people
contending for their freedom, or the apostle of a purified and
regenerated faith, was left for futurity to show. As messengers of the
sign by which Ralph Cranfield might recognize the summons, three
venerable men were to claim audience of him. The chief among them—a
dignified and majestic person arrayed, it may be supposed, in the
flowing garments of an ancient sage—would be the bearer of a wand or
prophet's rod. With this wand or rod or staff the venerable sage would
trace a certain figure in the air, and then proceed to make known his
Heaven-instructed message, which, if obeyed, must lead to glorious
results.

With this proud fate before him, in the flush of his imaginative youth
Ralph Cranfield had set forth to seek the maid, the treasure, and the
venerable sage with his gift of extended empire. And had he found
them? Alas! it was not with the aspect of a triumphant man who had
achieved a nobler destiny than all his fellows, but rather with the
gloom of one struggling against peculiar and continual adversity, that
he now passed homeward to his mother's cottage. He had come back, but
only for a time, to lay aside the pilgrim's staff, trusting that his
weary manhood would regain somewhat of the elasticity of youth in the
spot where his threefold fate had been foreshown him. There had been
few changes in the village, for it was not one of those thriving
places where a year's prosperity makes more than the havoc of a
century's decay, but, like a gray hair in a young man's head, an
antiquated little town full of old maids and aged elms and moss-grown
dwellings. Few seemed to be the changes here. The drooping elms,
indeed, had a more majestic spread, the weather-blackened houses were
adorned with a denser thatch of verdant moss, and doubtless there were
a few more gravestones in the burial-ground inscribed with names that
had once been familiar in the village street; yet, summing up all the
mischief that ten years had wrought, it seemed scarcely more than if
Ralph Cranfield had gone forth that very morning and dreamed a
day-dream till the twilight, and then turned back again. But his heart
grew cold because the village did not remember him as he remembered
the village.

"Here is the change," sighed he, striking his hand upon his breast.
"Who is this man of thought and care, weary with world-wandering and
heavy with disappointed hopes? The youth returns not who went forth so
joyously."

And now Ralph Cranfield was at his mother's gate, in front of the
small house where the old lady, with slender but sufficient means, had
kept herself comfortable during her son's long absence. Admitting
himself within the enclosure, he leaned against a great old tree,
trifling with his own impatience as people often do in those intervals
when years are summed into a moment. He took a minute survey of the
dwelling—its windows brightened with the sky-gleam, its doorway with
the half of a millstone for a step, and the faintly-traced path waving
thence to the gate. He made friends again with his childhood's
friend—the old tree against which he leaned—and, glancing his eye
down its trunk, beheld something that excited a melancholy smile. It
was a half-obliterated inscription—the Latin word "
Effode
"—which
he remembered to have carved in the bark of the tree with a whole
day's toil when he had first begun to muse about his exalted destiny.
It might be accounted a rather singular coincidence that the bark just
above the inscription had put forth an excrescence shaped not unlike a
hand, with the forefinger pointing obliquely at the word of fate.
Such, at least, was its appearance in the dusky light.

"Now, a credulous man," said Ralph Cranfield, carelessly, to himself,
"might suppose that the treasure which I have sought round the world
lies buried, after all, at the very door of my mother's dwelling. That
would be a jest indeed."

More he thought not about the matter, for now the door was opened and
an elderly woman appeared on the threshold, peering into the dusk to
discover who it might be that had intruded on her premises and was
standing in the shadow of her tree. It was Ralph Cranfield's mother.
Pass we over their greeting, and leave the one to her joy and the
other to his rest—if quiet rest he found.

But when morning broke, he arose with a troubled brow, for his sleep
and his wakefulness had alike been full of dreams. All the fervor was
rekindled with which he had burned of yore to unravel the threefold
mystery of his fate. The crowd of his early visions seemed to have
awaited him beneath his mother's roof and thronged riotously around to
welcome his return. In the well-remembered chamber, on the pillow
where his infancy had slumbered, he had passed a wilder night than
ever in an Arab tent or when he had reposed his head in the ghastly
shades of a haunted forest. A shadowy maid had stolen to his bedside
and laid her finger on the scintillating heart; a hand of flame had
glowed amid the darkness, pointing downward to a mystery within the
earth; a hoary sage had waved his prophetic wand and beckoned the
dreamer onward to a chair of state. The same phantoms, though fainter
in the daylight, still flitted about, the cottage and mingled among
the crowd of familiar faces that were drawn thither by the news of
Ralph Cranfield's return to bid him welcome for his mother's sake.
There they found him, a tall, dark, stately man of foreign aspect,
courteous in demeanor and mild of speech, yet with an abstracted eye
which seemed often to snatch a glance at the invisible.

Meantime, the widow Cranfield went bustling about the house full of
joy that she again had somebody to love and be careful of, and for
whom she might vex and tease herself with the petty troubles of daily
life. It was nearly noon when she looked forth from the door and
descried three personages of note coming along the street through the
hot sunshine and the masses of elm-tree shade. At length they reached
her gate and undid the latch.