WRITERS, VOL. 1***


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THE READERS'S LIBRARY

THE GREAT ENGLISH SHORT-STORY WRITERS

VOL. I

WITH INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS BY

WILLIAM J. DAWSON AND CONINGSBY W. DAWSON

MCMX






ACKNOWLEDGMENT

To the publishers and authors who have courteously permitted the use
of copyrighted material in these two volumes, a word of grateful
acknowledgment is hereby given by the editors.




CONTENTS

CHAP.


   I.  THE EVOLUTION OF THE SHORT-STORY

  II.  THE APPARITION OF MRS. VEAL. By Daniel Defoe (1661-1731)

 III.  THE MYSTERIOUS BRIDE. By James Hogg (1770-1835)

  IV.  THE DEVIL AND TOM WALKER. By Washington Irving (1783-1859)

   V.  DR. HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT. By Nathaniel Hawthorne (1807-1864)

  VI.  THE PURLOINED LETTER. By Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

 VII.  RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. By Dr. John Brown (1810-1882)

VIII.  THE BOOTS AT THE HOLLY-TREE INN. By Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

  IX.  A STORY OF SEVEN DEVILS. By Frank R. Stockton. (1834-1902)

   X.  A DOG'S TALE. By Mark Twain (1835)

  XI.  THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT. By Bret Harte (1839-1902)

 XII.  THE THREE STRANGERS. By Thomas Hardy (1840)

XIII.  JULIA BRIDE. By Henry James (1843)

 XIV.  A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT. By Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

INDEX




The Evolution of the Short-Story


I

The short-story commenced its career as a verbal utterance, or, as
Robert Louis Stevenson puts it, with "the first men who told their
stories round the savage camp-fire."

It bears the mark of its origin, for even to-day it is true that the
more it creates the illusion of the speaking-voice, causing the reader
to listen and to see, so that he forgets the printed page, the better
does it accomplish its literary purpose. It is probably an instinctive
appreciation of this fact which has led so many latter-day writers
to narrate their short-stories in dialect. In a story which is
communicated by the living voice our attention is held primarily not
by the excellent deposition of adjectives and poise of style, but by
the striding progress of the plot; it is the plot, and action in the
plot, alone which we remember when the combination of words which
conveyed and made the story real to us has been lost to mind. "Crusoe
recoiling from the foot-print, Achilles shouting over against the
Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his
fingers in his ears; these are each culminating moments, and each has
been printed on the mind's eye for ever."[1]

[Footnote 1: A Gossip on Romance, from _Memories and Portraits_, by
R.L. Stevenson.]

The secondary importance of the detailed language in which an incident
is narrated, when compared with the total impression made by the
naked action contained in the incident, is seen in the case of
ballad poetry, where a man may retain a vivid mental picture of the
localities, atmosphere, and dramatic moments created by Coleridge's
_Ancient Mariner_, or Rossetti's _White Ship_, and yet be quite
incapable of repeating two consecutive lines of the verse. In
literature of narration, whether prose or verse, the dramatic worth of
the action related must be the first consideration.

In earlier days, when much of the current fiction was not written
down, but travelled from mouth to mouth, as it does in the Orient
to-day, this fact must have been realized--that, in the short-story,
plot is superior to style. Among modern writers, however, there has
been a growing tendency to make up for scantiness of plot by
high literary workmanship; the result has been in reality not a
short-story, but a descriptive sketch or vignette, dealing chiefly
with moods and landscapes. So much has this been the case that the
writer of a recent _Practical Treatise on the Art of the Short-Story_
has found it necessary to make the bald statement that "the first
requisite of a short-story is that the writer have a story to
tell."[2]

[Footnote 2: _Short-Story Writing_, by Charles Raymond Barrett.]

However lacking the stories which have come down to us from ancient
times may be in technique, they invariably narrate action--they have
something to tell. If they had not done so, they would not have been
interesting to the men who first heard them, and, had they not been
interesting, they would not have survived. Their paramount worth in
this respect of _action_ is proved by the constant borrowings which
modern writers have made from them. Take one case in illustration. In
the twenty-eighth chapter of Aristotle's _Secretum Secretorum_ appears
a story in which "a queen of India is said to have treacherously sent
to Alexander, among other costly presents, the pretended testimonies
of friendship, a girl of exquisite beauty, who, having been fed with
serpents from her infancy, partook of their nature." It comes to light
again, in an altered and expanded form, in the _Gesta Romanorum_, as
the eleventh tale, being entitled _Of the Poison of Sin_.

"Alexander was a prince of great power, and a disciple of Aristotle,
who instructed him in every branch of learning. The Queen of the
North, having heard of his proficiency, nourished her daughter from
the cradle upon a certain kind of deadly poison; and when she grew up,
she was considered so beautiful, that the sight of her alone affected
many to madness. The queen sent her to Alexander to espouse. He had no
sooner beheld her than he became violently enamoured, and with much
eagerness desired to possess her; but Aristotle, observing his
weakness, said: 'Do not touch her, for if you do, you will certainly
perish. She has been nurtured upon the most deleterious food, which
I will prove to you immediately. Here is a malefactor who is already
condemned to death. He shall be united to her, and you shall soon see
the truth of what I advance.'

"Accordingly the culprit was brought without delay to the girl;
and scarcely had he touched her lips, before his whole frame was
impregnated with poison, and he expired. Alexander, glad at his escape
from such imminent destruction, bestowed all thanks on his instructor,
and returned the girl to her mother."

After which follows the monkish application of the moral, as long as
the entire story: Alexander being made to stand for a good Christian;
the Queen of the North for "a superfluity of the things of life, which
sometimes destroys the spirit, and generally the body"; the Poison
Maid for luxury and gluttony, "which feed men with delicacies that
are poison to the soul"; Aristotle for conscience and reason, which
reprove and oppose any union which would undo the soul; and the
malefactor for the evil man, disobedient unto his God.

There have been at least three writers of English fiction who,
borrowing this germ-plot from the _Gesta Romanorum_, have handled it
with distinction and originality. Nathaniel Hawthorne, having changed
its period and given it an Italian setting, wove about it one of
the finest and most imaginative of his short-stories, _Rappaccini's
Daughter_. Oliver Wendell Holmes, with a freshness and vigor all his
own, developed out of it his fictional biography of _Elsie Venner_.
And so recent a writer as Mr. Richard Garnett, attracted by the subtle
and magic possibilities of the conception, has given us yet another
rendering, restoring to the story its classic setting, in _The
Poison Maid_.[3] Thus, within the space of a hundred years, three
master-craftsmen have found their inspiration in the slender anecdote
which Aristotle, in the opulence of his genius, was content to hurry
into a few sentences and bury beneath the mass of his material.

[Footnote 3: Vide _The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales_,
published by John Lane, 1903.]


II

Probably the first stories of mankind were _true stories_, but the
true story is rarely good art. It is perhaps for this reason that few
true stories of early times have come down to us. Mr. Cable, in his
_Strange True Stories of Louisiana_, explains the difference between
the fabricated tale and the incident as it occurs in life. "The
relations and experiences of real men and women," he writes, "rarely
fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic whole. Until
they have had such treatment as we give stone in the quarry or gems in
the rough, they seldom group themselves with that harmony of values
and brilliant unity of interest that result when art comes in--not
so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself." In
other words, it is not until the true story has been converted into
fiction by the suppression of whatever is discursive or ungainly,
and the addition of a stroke of fantasy, that it becomes integral,
balanced in all its parts, and worthy of literary remembrance.

In the fragments of fiction which have come down to us from the days
when books were not, odd chapters from the Fieldings and Smollets of
the age of Noah, remnants of the verbal libraries which men repeated
one to the other, squatting round "the savage camp-fire," when
the hunt was over and night had gathered, the stroke of fantasy
predominates and tends to comprise the whole. Men spun their fictions
from the materials with which their minds were stored, much as we do
to-day, and the result was a cycle of beast-fables--an Odyssey of the
brute creation. Of these the tales of Aesop are the best examples. The
beast-fable has never quite gone out of fashion, and never will so
long as men retain their world-wonder, and childishness of mind.
A large part of Gulliver's adventures belong to this class of
literature. It was only the other day that Mr. Kipling gave us his
_Just-so Stories_, and his _Jungle-Book_, each of which found an
immediate and secure place in the popular memory.

Mr. Chandler Harris, in his introduction to _Uncle Remus_, warns us
that however humorous his book may appear, "its intention is perfectly
serious." He goes on to insist on its historic value, as a revelation
of primitive modes of thought. At the outset, when he wrote his
stories serially for publication in _The Atlanta Constitution_, he
believed that he was narrating plantation legends peculiar to the
South. He was quickly undeceived. Prof. J.W. Powell, who was engaged
in an investigation of the mythology of the North American Indians,
informed him that some of Uncle Remus's stories appear "in a number of
different languages, and in various modified forms among the Indians."
Mr. Herbert H. Smith had "met with some of these stories among tribes
of South American Indians, and one in particular he had traced to
India, and as far east as Siam." "When did the <DW64> or North American
Indian ever come in contact with the tribes of South America?"
Mr. Harris asks. And he quotes Mr. Smith's reply in answer to the
question: "I am not prepared to form a theory about these stories.
There can be no doubt that some of them, found among the <DW64>s and
the Indians, had a common origin. The most natural solution would be
to suppose that they originated in Africa, and were carried to South
America by the <DW64> slaves. They are certainly found among the Red
<DW64>s; but, unfortunately for the African theory, it is equally
certain that they are told by savage Indians of the Amazon's Valley,
away up on the Tapajos, Red <DW64>, and Tapura. These Indians hardly
ever see a <DW64>.... It is interesting to find a story from Upper
Egypt (that of the fox who pretended to be dead) identical with an
Amazonian story, and strongly resembling one found by you among the
<DW64>s.... One thing is certain. The animal stories told by the
<DW64>s in our Southern States and in Brazil were brought by them
from Africa. Whether they originated there, or with the Arabs, or
Egyptians, or with yet more ancient nations, must still be an open
question. Whether the Indians got them from the <DW64>s or from some
earlier source is equally uncertain." Whatever be the final solution
to this problem, enough has been said to show that the beast-fable is,
in all probability, the most primitive form of short-story which we
possess.


III

For our purpose, that of tracing the evolution of the English
short-story, its history commences with the _Gesta Romanorum_. At the
authorship of this collection of mediaeval tales, many guesses have
been made. Nothing is known with certainty; it seems probable,
however, judging from the idioms which occur, that it took its present
form in England, about the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of
the fourteenth century, and thence passed to the Continent. The work
is written in Latin, and was evidently compiled by a man in holy
orders, for its guiding purpose is to edify. In this we can trace the
influence of Aesop's beast-fables, which were moral lessons drawn from
the animal creation for the instruction of mankind. Every chapter of
the _Gesta Romanorum_ consists of a moral tale; so much so that in
many cases the application of the moral is as long as the tale itself.

The title of the collection, _The Deeds of the Romans_, is scarcely
justified; in the main it is a garnering of all the deathless plots
and dramatic motives which we find scattered up and down the ages, in
the legend and folklore of whatsoever nation. The themes of many of
its stories were being told, their characters passing under other
names, when Romulus and Remus were suckled by their wolf-mother,
before there was a Roman nation or a city named Rome.

In the Bible we have many admirable specimens of the short-story.
Jotham's parable of the trees of the wood choosing a king is as good
an instance of the nature-fable, touched with fine irony and humor, as
could be found. The Hebrew prophet himself was often a story-teller.
Thus, when Nathan would bring home the nature of his guilt to David,
he does it by a story of the most dramatic character, which loses
nothing, and indeed gains all its terrific impact, by being strongly
impregnated with moral passion. Many such instances will occur to
the student of the Bible. In the absence of a written or printed
literature the story-teller had a distinct vocation, as he still has
among the peoples of the East. Every visitor to Tangier has seen in
the market-place the professional story-teller, surrounded from morn
till night with his groups of attentive listeners, whose kindling
eyes, whose faces moved by every emotion of wonder, anger, tenderness,
and sympathy, whose murmured applause and absorbed silence, are the
witnesses and the reward of his art. Through such a scene we recover
the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights, and indeed look back into almost
limitless antiquity. Possibly, could we follow the story which is thus
related, we might discover that this also drew its elemental incidents
from sources as old as the times of Jotham and Nathan.

The most that can be said for the Latin origin of the _Gesta
Romanorum_ is that the nucleus is made up of extracts, frequently of
glaring inaccuracy, from Roman writers and historians. The Cologne
edition comprises one hundred and eighty-one chapters, each consisting
of a tale or anecdote followed by a moral application, commencing
formally with the words, "My beloved, the prince is intended to
represent any good Christian," or, "My beloved, the emperor is Christ;
the soldier is any sinner." They are not so much short-stories as
illustrated homilies. In the literary armory of the lazy parish priest
of the fourteenth century, the _Gesta Romanorum_ must have held the
place which volumes of sermon-outlines occupy upon the book-shelves of
certain of his brethren to-day.

"The method of instructing by fables is a practice of remote
antiquity; and has always been attended with very considerable
benefit. Its great popularity encouraged the monks to adopt this
medium, not only for the sake of illustrating their discourses, but of
making a more durable impression upon the minds of their illiterate
auditors. An abstract argument, or logical deduction (had they been
capable of supplying it), would operate but faintly upon intellects
rendered even more obtuse by the rude nature of their customary
employments; while, on the other hand, an apposite story would arouse
attention and stimulate that blind and unenquiring devotion which is
so remarkably characteristic of the Middle Ages."[4]

[Footnote 4: Introduction to _Gesta Romanorum_, translated by the Rev.
Charles Swan, revised and corrected by Wynnard Hooper, B.A.]

IV


The influence of the _Gesta Romanorum_ is most conspicuously to be
traced in the work of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate; but it has
served as a source of inspiration to the flagging ingenuity of each
succeeding generation. It would be tedious to enter on an enumeration
of the various indebtednesses of English literature to these early
tales. A few instances will serve as illustration.

It seems a far cry from the _The Ingoldsby Legends_ to _The Deeds of
the Romans_, nevertheless _The Leech of Folk-stone_ was directly taken
from the hundred and second tale, _Of the Transgressions and Wounds of
the Soul_. Shakespeare himself was a frequent borrower, and planned
his entire play of _Pericles, Prince of Tyre_, upon the hundred
and fifty-third tale, _Of Temporal Tribulation_. In some cases the
language is almost identical, as for instance in the fifth tale, where
the king warns his son, saying, "Son, I tell thee that thou canst
not confide in her, and consequently ought not to espouse her. _She
deceived her own father when she liberated thee from prison_; for this
did her father lose the price of thy ransom." Compare with this:

    "Look to her, Moor; have a quick eye to see;
    _She has deceived her father, and may thee_."[5]

[Footnote 5: _Othello_, act I, scene III.]

But the ethical treatment of the short-story, as exemplified in these
monkish fables, handicapped its progress and circumscribed its field
of endeavor. Morality necessitated the twisting of incidents, so that
they might harmonize with the sermonic summing-up that was in view.
Life is not always moral; it is more often perplexing, boisterous,
unjust, and flippant. The wicked dwell in prosperity. "There are no
pangs in their death; their strength is firm. They are not in trouble
as other men; neither are they plagued as other men. They have more
than heart could wish." But the art of the teller of tales "is
occupied, and bound to be occupied not so much in making stories true
as in making them typical."[6]

[Footnote 6: From a Humble Remonstrance, in _Memories and Portraits_,
by R.L. Stevenson.]

The ethical method of handling fiction falls between two stools; it
not only fails in portraying that which is true for the individual,
but it incurs the graver error of ceasing to be true to the race,
i.e., typical.

It would be interesting, had we space, to follow Shakespeare in his
borrowings, noticing what he adopts and incorporates in his work
as artistically true, and what he rejects. Like a water-color
landscape-painter, he pauses above the box of crude materials which
others have made, takes a dab here and a dab there with his brush,
rarely takes all of one color, blends them, eyes the result
judicially, and flashes in the combination with swiftness and
certainty of touch.

For instance, from the lengthy story which appears as the hundred and
first tale in Mr. Douce's edition of the _Gesta_, he selects but one
scene of action, yet it is the making of _Macbeth_--one would almost
suppose that this was the germ-thought which kindled his furious
fancy, preceding his discovery of the Macbeth tradition as related in
Holinshed's _Chronicle_.[7]

[Footnote 7: _The Chronicle of England and Scotland_, first published
in 1577.]

The Emperor Manelay has set forth to the Holy Land, leaving his
empress and kingdom in his brother's care. No sooner has he gone than
the regent commences to make love to his brother's wife. She rejects
him scornfully. Angered by her indignation, he leads her into a forest
and hangs her by the hair upon a tree, leaving her there to starve.
As good-fortune will have it, on the third day a noble earl comes by,
and, finding her in that condition, releases her, takes her home with
him, and makes her governess to his only daughter. A feeling of shame
causes her to conceal her noble rank, and so it comes about that the
earl's steward aspires to her affection. Her steadfast refusal of all
his advances turns his love to hatred, so that he plans to bring about
her downfall. Then comes the passage which Shakespeare seized upon
as vital: "It befell upon a night that the earl's chamber door was
forgotten and left unshut, which the steward had anon perceived; and
when they were all asleep he went and espied the light of the lamp
where the empress and the young maid lay together, and with that he
drew out his knife and cut the throat of the earl's daughter and put
the knife into the empress's hand, she being asleep, and nothing
knowing thereof, to the intent that when the earl awakened he should
think that she had cut his daughter's throat, and so would she be put
to a shameful death for his mischievous deed."

The laws of immediateness and concentration, which govern the
short-story, are common also to the drama; by reason of their brevity
both demand a directness of approach which leads up, without break of
sequence or any waste of words, through a dependent series of actions
to a climax which is final. It will usually be found in studying the
borrowings which the masters have made from such sources as the _Gesta
Romanorum_ that the portions which they have discriminated as worth
taking from any one tale have been the only artistically essential
elements which the narrative contains; the remainder, which they
have rejected, is either untrue to art or unnecessary to the plot's
development.

These tales, as told by their monkish compiler, lack "that harmony of
values and brilliant unity of interest that results when art comes
in"--they are splendid jewels badly cut.


V

As has been already stated, a short-story theme, however fine, can
only be converted into good art by the suppression of whatever is
discursive or ungainly, so that it becomes integral and balanced in
all its parts; and by the addition of a stroke of fantasy, so that it
becomes vast, despite its brevity, implying a wider horizon than it
actually describes; but, in excess of these qualities, there is a last
of still greater importance, without which it fails--_the power to
create the impression of having been possible_.

Now the beast-fable, as handled by Aesop, falls short of being high
art by reason of its overwhelming fantasy, which annihilates all
chance of its possibility. The best short-stories represent a struggle
between fantasy and fact. And the mediaeval monkish tale fails by
reason of the discursiveness and huddling together of incidents,
without regard to their dramatic values, which the moral application
necessitates. In a word, both are deficient in technique--the
concealed art which, when it has combined its materials so that they
may accomplish their most impressive effect, causes the total result
to command our credulity because it seems typical of human experience.

The technique of the English prose short-story had a tardy evolution.
That there were any definite laws, such as obtain in poetry, by
which it must abide was not generally realized until Edgar Allan Poe
formulated them in his criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

As he states them, they are five in number, as follows: Firstly, that
the short-story must be short, i.e., capable of being read at one
sitting, in order that it may gain "the immense force derivable
from _totality_." Secondly, that the short-story must possess
_immediateness_; it should aim at a single or unique effect--"if the
very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then
it has failed in its first step." Thirdly, that the short-story must
be subjected to _compression_; "in the whole composition there should
not be one word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is
not to the one pre-established design." Fourthly, that it must assume
the aspect of _verisimilitude_; "truth is often, and in very great
degree, the aim of the tale--some of the finest tales are tales
of ratiocination." Fifthly, that it must give the impression of
_finality_; the story, and the interest in the characters which it
introduces, must begin with the opening sentence and end with the
last.

These laws, and the technique which they formulate, were first
discovered and worked out for the short-story in the medium of
poetry.[8] The ballad and narrative poem must be, by reason of their
highly artificial form, comparatively short, possessing totality,
immediateness, compression, verisimilitude, and finality. The old
ballad which commemorates the battle of Otterbourne, fought on August
10, 1388, is a fine example of the short-story method. Its opening
stanza speaks the last word in immediateness of narration:

    "It felle abowght the Lamasse tyde,
      When husbands wynn ther haye,
    The dowghtye Dowglasse bowynd hym to ryde
      In England to take a praye."

[Footnote 8: Poe himself implies this when he says, in an earlier
passage of his essay on Hawthorne: "The Tale Proper" (i.e.,
short-story), "in my opinion, affords unquestionably the fairest field
for the exercise of the loftiest talent which can be afforded by the
wide domains of mere prose. Were I bidden to say how the highest
genius could be most advantageously employed for the best display
of its own powers, I should answer, without hesitation, in the
composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be
perused in an hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order of
true poetry exist. I need only here say, upon this topic, that in
almost all classes of composition the unity of effect or impression
is a point of the greatest importance. _It is clear_, moreover, _that
this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal
cannot be completed at one sitting_."]

Thomas Hood's poem of _The Dream of Eugene Aram_, written at a time
when the prose short-story, under the guidance of Hawthorne and Poe,
was just beginning to take its place as a separate species of literary
art, has never been surpassed for short-story technique by any of the
practitioners of prose. Prof. Brander Matthews has pointed out that
"there were nine muses in Greece of old, and no one of these daughters
of Apollo was expected to inspire the writer of prose-fiction."[9]

[Footnote 9: In his introduction to _Materials and Methods of
Fiction_, by Clayton Hamilton, published by the Baker & Taylor Co.,
New York.]

He argues from this that "prose seemed to the Greeks, and even to the
Latins who followed in their footsteps, as fit only for pedestrian
purposes." It is more probable that, as regards prose-fiction, they
did not realize that they were called upon to explain the omission of
the tenth muse. Her exclusion was based on no reasoned principle, but
was due to a sensuous art-instinct: the Greeks felt that the unnatural
limitations of the poetic medium were more in keeping with the
unnatural[10] brevity of a story which must be short. The exquisite
prose tales which have been handed down to us belong to the age of
their decadence as a nation; in their great period their tellers of
brief tales unconsciously cast their rendering in the poetic mould.[11]
In natures of the highest genius the most arduous is instinctively the
favorite task.

[Footnote 10: "The short-story is artificial, and to a considerable
degree unnatural. It could hardly be otherwise, for it takes out of
our complex lives a single person or a single incident and treats
that as if it were complete in itself. Such isolation is not known
to nature."--Page 22 of _Short-Story Writing_, by Charles Raymond
Barrett, published by the Baker & Taylor Co., New York.]

[Footnote 11: For example, the story told by Demodocus of _The
Illicit Love of Ares for Aphrodite, and the Revenge which Hephaestus
Planned_--Odyssey, Bk. VIII.]

Chaucer, by reason of his intimate acquaintance with both the poetry
and prose-fiction of Boccaccio, had the opportunity to choose between
these two mediums of short-story narration; and he chose the former.
He was as familiar with Boccaccio's poetic method, as exemplified
in the _Teseide_, as with his prose, as exemplified at much greater
length in the _Decameron_, for he borrowed from them both. Yet in only
two instances in the _Canterbury Tales_ does he relapse into prose.

The _Teseide_ in Chaucer's hands, retaining its poetic medium, is
converted into the _Knight's Tale_; while the _Reeve's Tale_, the
_Franklin's_, and the _Shipman's_, each borrowed from the prose
version of the _Decameron_, are given by him a poetic setting. This
preference for poetry over prose as a medium for short-story narration
cannot have been accidental or unreasoned on his part; nor can it be
altogether accounted for by the explanation that "he was by nature a
poet," for he _did_ experiment with the prose medium to the extent of
using it twice. He had the brilliant and innovating precedent of
the _Decameron_, and yet, while adopting some of its materials, he
abandoned its medium. He was given the opportunity of ante-dating the
introduction of technique into the English prose short-story by four
hundred and fifty years, and he disregarded it almost cavalierly. How
is such wilful neglect to be accounted for? Only by his instinctive
feeling that the technique, which Boccaccio had applied in the
_Decameron_, belonged by right to the realm of poetry, had been
learned in the practising of the poetic art, and could arrive at its
highest level of achievement only in that medium.

That in Chaucer's case this choice was justified cannot be disputed;
the inferiority of the short-story technique contained in his two
prose efforts, when compared with that displayed in the remainder
of the _Canterbury Tales_, is very marked. Take, for instance,
the _Prioress' Tale_ and apply to it the five short-story tests
established by Poe, as a personal discovery, four and a half centuries
later; it survives them all. It attains, in addition, the crowning
glory, coveted by Stevenson, of appearing _typical_. There may never
have been a Christian child who was martyred by the Jews in the
particularly gruesome way described--probably there never was; but, in
listening to the Prioress, it does not enter into our heads to doubt
her word--the picture which she leaves with us of how the Christian
regarded the Jew in the Middle Ages is too vivid to allow any
breathing-space for incredulity. No knowledge of mediaeval anti-Jewish
legislation, however scholarly, can bring us to realize the fury of
race-hatred which then existed more keenly than this story of a little
over two thousand words. By its perusal we gain an illuminating
insight into that ill-directed religious enthusiasm which led men on
frenzied quests for the destruction of the heretic in their own land
and of the Saracen abroad, causing them to become at one and the same
time unjust and heroic. In a word, within the compass of three hundred
lines of verse, Chaucer contrives to body forth his age--to give us
something which is _typical_.

The _Morte D'Arthur_ of Malory is again a collection of traditional
stories, as is the _Gesta Romanorum_, and not the creative work of a
single intellect. As might be expected, it straggles, and overlays its
climax with a too-lavish abundance of incidents; it lacks the
_harmony of values_ which results from the introduction of a unifying
purpose--_i.e_., of art. Imaginative and full of action though the
books of the _Morte D'Arthur_ are, it remained for the latter-day
artist to exhaust their individual incidents of their full dramatic
possibilities. From the eyes of the majority of modern men the
brilliant quality of their magic was concealed, until it had
been disciplined and refashioned by the severe technique of the
short-story.

By the eighteenth century the influence of Malory was scarcely felt
at all; but his imaginativeness, as interpreted by Tennyson, in
_The Idylls of the King_, and by William Morris, in his _Defence
of Guinevere_, has given to the Anglo-Saxon world a new romantic
background for its thoughts. _The Idylls of the King_ are not
Tennyson's most successful interpretation. The finest example of his
superior short-story craftsmanship is seen in the triumphant use which
he makes of the theme contained in _The Book of Elaine_, in his poem
of _The Lady of Shalott_. Not only has he remodelled and added fantasy
to the story, but he has threaded it through with _atmosphere_--an
entirely modern attribute, of which more must be said hereafter.

So much for our contention that the laws and technique of the prose
short-story, as formulated by Poe, were first instinctively discovered
and worked out in the medium of poetry.


VI

"_The Golden Ass_ of Apuleius is, so to say, a beginning of modern
literature. From this brilliant medley of reality and romance, of wit
and pathos, of fantasy and observation, was born that new art,
complex in thought, various in expression, which gives a semblance of
frigidity to perfection itself. An indefatigable youthfulness is its
distinction."[12]

[Footnote 12: From the introduction, by Charles Whibley, to the Tudor
Translations' edition by W.E. Henley, of _The Golden Ass of Apuleius_,
published by David Nutt, London, 1893. All other quotations bearing
upon Apuleius are taken from the same source.]

_An indefatigable youthfulness_ was also the prime distinction of the
Elizabethan era's writings and doings; it was fitting that such a
period should have witnessed the first translation into the English
language of this Benjamin of a classic literature's old age.

Apuleius was an unconventional cosmopolitan in that ancient world
which he so vividly portrays; he was a barbarian by birth, a Greek by
education, and wrote his book in the Romans' language. In his use
of luminous slang for literary purposes he was Rudyard Kipling's
prototype.

"He would twist the vulgar words of every-day into quaint unheard-of
meanings, nor did he deny shelter to those loafers and footpads of
speech which inspire the grammarian with horror. On every page you
encounter a proverb, a catchword, a literary allusion, a flagrant
redundancy. One quality only was distasteful to him--the commonplace."

There are other respects in which we can trace Mr. Kipling's likeness:
in his youthful precocity--he was twenty-five when he wrote his
_Metamorphoses_; in his daring as an innovator; in his manly
stalwartness in dealing with the calamities of life; in his
adventurous note of world-wideness and realistic method of handling
the improbable and uncanny.

Like all great artists, he was a skilful borrower from the literary
achievements of a bygone age; and so successfully does he borrow that
we prefer his copy to the original. The germ-idea of Kipling's _Finest
Story in the World_ is to be found in Poe's _Tale of the Ragged
Mountains_; Apuleius's germ-plot, of the man who was changed by
enchantment into an ass, and could only recover his human shape by
eating rose-leaves, was taken either from Lucian or from Lucius
of Patrae. In at least three of his interpolations he remarkably
foreshadows the prose short-story method, upon which we are wont to
pride ourselves as being a unique discovery of the past eight decades:
these are _Bellepheron's Story; The Story of Cupid and Psyche_, one of
the most exquisite both in form and matter in any language or age; and
the story of _The Deceitful Woman and the Tub_, which Boccaccio made
use of in his _Decameron_ as the second novel for the seventh day.

In the intense and visual quality of the atmosphere with which he
pervades his narrative he has no equal among the writers of English
prose-fiction until Sir Walter Scott appears. "Apuleius has enveloped
his world of marvels in a heavy air of witchery and romance. You
wander with Lucius across the hills and through the dales of Thessaly.
With all the delight of a fresh curiosity you approach its far-seen
towns. You journey at midnight under the stars, listening in terror
for the howling of the wolves or the stealthy ambush. At other whiles
you sit in the robbers' cave and hear the ancient legends of Greece
retold. The spring comes on, and 'the little birds chirp and sing
their steven melodiously.' Secret raids, ravished brides, valiant
rescues, the gayest intrigues--these are the diverse matters of this
many- book."

But as a short-story writer he shares the failing of all his English
brothers in that art, until James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, penned
his tales--namely, that his short-stories do not stand apart, as
things total in themselves, but are woven into a larger narrative by
whose proportions they are dwarfed, so that their true completeness is
disguised. "He cares not how he loiters by the way; he is always ready
to beguile his reader with a Milesian story--one of those quaint and
witty interludes which have travelled the world over and become part,
not merely of every literature, but of every life." It is to three of
these chance loiterings of this Kipling of Rome in its decadence that
we owe the famous stories alluded to above.

To the Elizabethan period belong the most masterly translations of
which the English language is possessed; and this not by virtue of
their accuracy and scholarship, but because, to use Doctor Johnson's
words, the translator "exhibits his author's thoughts in such a dress
as the author would have given them had his language been English."
That same "indefatigable youthfulness" which converted courtiers into
sailors and despatched them into unknown seas to ransack new worlds,
urged men of the pen to seek out and to pillage, with an equal ardor
of adventure, the intellectual wealth of their contemporaries in other
lands and the buried and forgotten stores of the ancients upon their
own neighboring book-shelves. A universal and contagious curiosity
was abroad. To this age belong William Paynter's version of the
_Decameron_, entitled _The Palace of Pleasure_, 1566, from which
Shakespeare borrowed; Geoffrey Fenton's translation of Bandello's
_Tragical Discourses_, 1567; Sir Thomas North's rendering of
_Plutarch's Lives_, 1579; Thomas Underdowne's _Heliodorus_, 1587;
Thomas Shelton's _Don Quixote_, 1612; and others too numerous to
mention. It seems extraordinary at first sight that when such models
of advanced technique were set before them, Englishmen were so slow
to follow; for though Professor Baldwin is probably correct in his
analysis of the _Decameron_ when he states that, of the hundred tales,
over fifty are not much more than anecdotes, about forty are but
outlined plots, three follow the modern short-story method only part
way, and, of the hundred, two[13] alone are perfect examples, yet those
two perfect examples remained and were capable of imitation. The
explanation of this neglect is, perhaps, that the Elizabethans were
too busy originating to find time for copying; they were very willing
to borrow ideas, but must be allowed to develop them in their own
way--usually along dramatic lines for stage purposes, because this was
at that time the most financially profitable.

[Footnote 13: The second novel of the second day, and the sixth of the
ninth day.]


VII

The blighting influence of constitutional strife and intestine war
which followed in the Stuarts' reigns turned the serious artist's
thoughts aside to grave and prophetic forms of literary utterance,
while writers of the frivolous sort devoted their talent to a
lighter and less sincere art than that of the short-story--namely,
court-poetry. It was an age of extremes which bred despair and
religious fervor in men of the Puritan party, as represented by Bunyan
and Milton, and conscious artificiality and mock heroics in those
of the Cavalier faction, as represented by Herrick and the Earl of
Rochester.

The examples of semi-fictional prose which can be gathered from this
period serve only to illustrate how the short-story instinct, though
stifled, was still present. Isaak Walton as a diarist had it; Thomas
Fuller as an historian had it; John Bunyan as an ethical writer had
it. Each one was possessed of the short-story faculty, but only
manifested it, as it were, by accident. Not until Daniel Defoe and the
rise of the newspaper do we note any advance in technique. Defoe's
main contribution was the _short-story essay_, which stands midway
between the anecdote, or germ-plot, buried in a mass of extraneous
material, and the short-story proper. The growth of this form, as
developed by Swift, Steel, Addison, Goldsmith, and Lamb, has been
traced and criticised elsewhere.[14] It had this one great advantage
that, whatever its departures from the strict technique of the modern
short-story, it was capable of being read at one sitting, stood by
itself, and gained "the immense force derivable from _totality_."

[Footnote 14: In the third chapter of _The Great English Essayists_,
vol. iii of _The Reader's Library_, published by Messrs. Harper &
Brothers, 1909.]

In the _True Revelation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal_, Defoe
is again strangely in advance of his time, as he is in so many other
ways. Here is an almost perfect example of the most modern method of
handling a ghost-tale. Surely, in whatever department of literature
we seek, we shall find nothing to surpass it in the quality of
_verisimilitude_. The way in which Drelincourt's _Book on Death_ is
introduced and subsequently twice referred to is a master-stroke of
genius. In days gone by, before they were parted, we are told, Mrs.
Veal and Mrs. Bargrave "would often console each other's adverse
fortunes, and read together Drelincourt _On Death_ and other good
books." At the time when the story opens Mrs. Bargrave has gone to
live in Canterbury, and Mrs. Veal is in Dover. To Mrs. Bargrave in
Canterbury the apparition appears, though she does not know that it is
an apparition, for there is nothing to denote that it is not her old
friend still alive. One of the first things the apparition does is
"to remind Mrs. Bargrave of the many friendly offices she did her in
former days, and much of the conversation they had with each other in
the times of their adversity; what books they read, and what comfort
in particular they received from Drelincourt's _Book on Death_.
Drelincourt, she said, had the clearest notions of death and of the
future state of any who had handled that subject. Then she asked Mrs.
Bargrave whether she had Drelincourt. She said, 'Yes,' Says Mrs. Veal,
'Fetch it.' Some days after, when Mrs. Bargrave, having discovered
that the visitor was a ghost, has gone about telling her neighbors,
Defoe observes, 'Drelincourt's _Book on Death_ is, since this
happened, bought up strangely,'"

This masterpiece of Defoe is before its time by a hundred years;
nothing can be found in the realm of the English prose short-story to
approach it in symmetry until the Ettrick Shepherd commenced to write.

Of all the models of prose-fiction which the Tudor translations had
given to English literature, the first to be copied was that of
Cervantes's _Don Quixote_, rendered into English by Thomas Shelton in
1612. Swift must have had the rambling method of Cervantes well in
mind when he wrote his _Gulliver_; and Smollett confessedly took it as
his pattern and set out to imitate. The most that was required by such
a method in the way of initial construction was to select a hero, give
some account of his early history, from the day of his birth up to the
point where the true narrative commences, and then send him upon his
travels. Usually it was thought necessary to have a Sancho to act as
background to Don Quixote; thus Crusoe is given his Man Friday, Tom
Jones his Mr. Partridge, and Roderick Random his Strap; but this was
not always done, for both Gulliver and the hero of the _Sentimental
Journey_ set out on their journeyings unaccompanied. The story which
grew out of such a method usually consisted of a series of plots,
anecdotes, and incidents linked together only by the characters, and
governed by no unifying purpose which made each one a necessary and
ascending step toward a prearranged climax. These early novels are
often books of descriptive travel rather than novels in the modern
sense; the sole connection between their first incident and their last
being the long road which lies between them, and has been traversed
in the continual company of the same leading characters. Many of the
chapters, taken apart from their context, are short-story themes
badly handled. Some of them are mere interpolations introduced on
the flimsiest of excuses, which arrest the progress of the main
narrative--_i.e_., the travel--and give the author an opportunity to
use up some spare material which he does not know what to do with.
Such are "The Man of the Hill," in _Tom Jones_; "The History of
Melopoyn the Playwright" in _Roderick Random_; the "Memoirs of a Lady
of Quality," occupying fifty-three thousand words, in _Peregrine
Pickle_; "The Philosophic Vagabond," in the _Vicar of Wakefield_;
and "Wandering Willie's Tale," in _Redgauntlet_. The reason why
the eighteenth-century novelist did not know what to do with these
materials was, in certain cases, that he had discovered a true
short-story theme and was perplexed by it. He knew that it was
good--his artist's instinct made him aware of that; but somehow, to
his great bewilderment and annoyance, it refused to be expanded. So,
in order that it might not be entirely lost to him, he tied the little
boat on behind the great schooner of his main narration, and set them
afloat together.

By the modern reader, whether of the short-story or the novel,
the lack of atmosphere and of immediateness in eighteenth-century
prose-fiction is particularly felt. There is no use made of
landscapes, moods, and the phenomena of nature; the story happens
at almost any season of the year. Of these things and their use the
modern short-story writer is meticulously careful. By how much would
the worth of Hardy's _The Three Strangers_ be diminished if the
description of the March rain driving across the Wessex moorland were
left out? Before he commences the story contained in _A Lodging for
the Night_, Stevenson occupies three hundred words in painting the
picture of Paris under snow. In the same way, in his story of _The Man
Who Would Be King_, Kipling is at great pains to make us burn with the
scorching heat which, in the popular mind, is associated with India.
For such effects you will search the prose-fiction of the eighteenth
century in vain; whereas the use of _atmosphere_ has been carried to
such extremes to-day by certain writers that the short-story in their
hands is in danger of becoming all atmosphere and no story.

The impression created by the old technique, such as it was, when
contrasted with the new, when legitimately handled, is the difference
between reading a play and seeing it staged.

As regards immediateness of narration, Laurence Sterne may, perhaps,
be pointed out as an example. But he is not immediate in the true
sense; he is abrupt, and this too frequently for his own sly
purposes--which have nothing to do with either technique or the
short-story.

Most of the English short-stories, previous to those written by James
Hogg, are either prefaced with a biography of their main characters
or else the biography is made to do service as though it were a
plot--nothing is left to the imagination. Even in the next century,
when the short-story had come to be recognized in America, through the
example set by Hawthorne and Poe, as a distinct species of literary
art, the productions of British writers were too often nothing more
than compressed novels. In fact, it is true to say that there is more
of short-story technique in the short-story essays of Goldsmith and
Lamb than can be found in many of the brief tales of Dickens and
Anthony Trollope, which in their day passed muster unchallenged as
short-stories.


VIII

But between the irrelevant brief story, interpolated in a larger
narrative, and the perfect short-story, which could not be expanded
and is total in itself, of Hawthorne and Poe, there stands the work
of a man who is little known in America, and by no means popular in
England, that of the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. He was born in
Scotland, among the mountains of Ettrick and Yarrow, the son of a
shepherd. When he was but six years old he commenced to earn his
living as a cowherd, and by his seventh year had received all the
schooling which he was destined to have--two separate periods of three
months. Matthew Arnold, when accounting for the sterility of Gray as
a poet, says that throughout the first nine decades of the eighteenth
century, until the French Revolution roused men to generosity, "a
spiritual east wind was blowing." Hogg's early ignorance of letters
had at least this advantage, that it saved him from the blighting
intellectual influences of his age--left him unsophisticated, free
to find in all things matter for wonder, and to work out his mental
processes unprejudiced by a restraining knowledge of other men's
past achievements. In his eighteenth year he taught himself to read,
choosing as his text-books Henry the Minstrel's _Life and Adventures
of Sir William Wallace_ and the _Gentle Shepherd_ of Allan Ramsay.
Not until his twenty-sixth year did he acquire the art of penmanship,
which he learned "upon the hillside by copying the Italian alphabet,
using his knee as his desk, and having the ink-bottle suspended from
his button." During the next fourteen years he followed his shepherd's
calling, making it romantic with sundry more or less successful
attempts at authorship. He had reached his fortieth year before he
abandoned sheep-raising and journeyed to Edinburgh, there definitely
to adopt the literary career. He was by this time firm in his
philosophy of life and established in his modes of thought; whatever
else he might not be, among townsmen and persons of artificial
training, his very simplicity was sure to make him original. In his
forty-seventh year, having so far cast his most important work
into the poetic form, he contributed to _Blackwood's Magazine_ his
_Shepherd's Calendar_, followed in the same year by the publishing of
_The Brownie of Bodsbeck_; these were his first two serious excursions
into the realm of prose-fiction. From then on until his death, in
1835, he continued his efforts in this direction, pouring out a mass
of country-side tradition and fairy-folklore, amazing in its fantasy
and wealth of drama.

For the imparting of _atmosphere_ to his stories, a talent so
conspicuously lacking not only in his predecessors, but also in many
of his contemporaries, he had a native faculty. The author of _Bonny
Kilmeny_ could scarcely fail in this respect, when he turned his
attention from poetry to prose. He had lived too close to nature to be
able ever to keep the green and silver of woods and rivers far from
his thoughts; they were the mirrors in which his fancy saw itself.
Professor Wilson, who had known him as a friend, writing of him in
_Blackwood's_ after his death, says: "Living for years in solitude,
he unconsciously formed friendships with the springs, the brooks,
the caves, the hills, and with all the more fleeting and faithless
pageantry of the sky, that to him came in place of those human
affections from whose indulgence he was debarred by the necessities
that kept him aloof from the cottage fire and up among the mists of
the mountain-top. The still green beauty of the pastoral hills and
vales where he passed his youth inspired him with ever-brooding
visions of fairyland, till, as he lay musing in his lonely shieling,
the world of fantasy seemed, in the clear depths of his imagination, a
lovelier reflection of that of nature, like the hills and heavens more
softly shining in the water of his native lake."

His taste is often defective, as is that of Burns on occasions. This
is a fault which might be expected in a man of his training; but the
vigor and essential worth of the matters which he relates are beyond
all question. He did not always know where to begin his short-story,
or where to terminate. Some of his tales, if edited with blue-pencil
erasures, would be found to contain a nucleus-technique which, though
far from perfect, is more than equal to that of Washington Irving,
who, like Apuleius, "cared not how he loitered by the way," and very
superior to that of most of his immediate successors in the art. His
story here included, of _The Mysterious Bride_,[15] could scarcely be
bettered in its method. To tell it in fewer words would be to obscure
it; to tell it at greater length would be to rob it of its mystery and
to make it obvious. Moreover, by employing atmosphere he tells it
in such a way as to leave the reader with the impression that this
occurrence, for all its magic, might not only be possible, but even
probable--which achievement is the greatest triumph of the short-story
writer's art.

[Footnote 15: Compare with Kipling's treatment of a similar theme in
_The Brushwood Boy_.]

As this history of the evolution of the English short-story commenced
with a poet, Chaucer,[16] who wrote all save two of his short-stories
in poetry, so it fittingly closes with a poet, the Ettrick Shepherd,
who wrote most of his short-stories in prose. It remained for yet
another poet, Edgar Allan Poe, who may never have heard the name
or have read a line from the writings of James Hogg, to bring to
perfection the task on which he had spent his labor.

[Footnote 16: The _Gesta Romanorum_ was written in Latin.]




THE APPARITION OF MRS. VEAL

_Daniel Defoe_ (1661-1731)


This thing is so rare in all its circumstances, and on so good
authority, that my reading and conversation have not given me anything
like it. It is fit to gratify the most ingenious and serious inquirer.
Mrs. Bargrave is the person to whom Mrs. Veal appeared after her
death; she is my intimate friend, and I can avouch for her reputation
for these fifteen or sixteen years, on my own knowledge; and I can
confirm the good character she had from her youth to the time of my
acquaintance. Though, since this relation, she is calumniated by some
people that are friends to the brother of Mrs. Veal who appeared, who
think the relation of this appearance to be a reflection, and endeavor
what they can to blast Mrs. Bargrave's reputation and to laugh the
story out of countenance. But by the circumstances thereof, and the
cheerful disposition of Mrs. Bargrave, notwithstanding the ill usage
of a very wicked husband, there is not yet the least sign of dejection
in her face; nor did I ever hear her let fall a desponding or
murmuring expression; nay, not when actually under her husband's
barbarity, which I have been a witness to, and several other persons
of undoubted reputation.

Now you must know Mrs. Veal was a maiden gentlewoman of about thirty
years of age, and for some years past had been troubled with fits,
which were perceived coming on her by her going off from her discourse
very abruptly to some impertinence. She was maintained by an only
brother, and kept his house in Dover. She was a very pious woman, and
her brother a very sober man to all appearance; but now he does all he
can to null and quash the story. Mrs. Veal was intimately acquainted
with Mrs. Bargrave from her childhood. Mrs. Veal's circumstances were
then mean; her father did not take care of his children as he ought,
so that they were exposed to hardships. And Mrs. Bargrave in those
days had as unkind a father, though she wanted neither for food nor
clothing; while Mrs. Veal wanted for both, insomuch that she would
often say, "Mrs. Bargrave, you are not only the best, but the only
friend I have in the world; and no circumstance of life shall ever
dissolve my friendship." They would often condole each other's adverse
fortunes, and read together _Drelincourt upon Death_, and other good
books; and so, like two Christian friends, they comforted each other
under their sorrow.

Some time after, Mr. Veal's friends got him a place in the
custom-house at Dover, which occasioned Mrs. Veal, by little and
little, to fall off from her intimacy with Mrs. Bargrave, though there
was never any such thing as a quarrel; but an indifferency came on by
degrees, till at last Mrs. Bargrave had not seen her in two years and
a half, though above a twelvemonth of the time Mrs. Bargrave hath been
absent from Dover, and this last half-year has been in Canterbury
about two months of the time, dwelling in a house of her own.

In this house, on the eighth of September, one thousand seven hundred
and five, she was sitting alone in the forenoon, thinking over her
unfortunate life, and arguing herself into a due resignation to
Providence, though her condition seemed hard: "And," said she, "I have
been provided for hitherto, and doubt not but I shall be still, and am
well satisfied that my afflictions shall end when it is most fit for
me." And then took up her sewing work, which she had no sooner done
but she hears a knocking at the door; she went to see who was there,
and this proved to be Mrs. Veal, her old friend, who was in a
riding-habit. At that moment of time the clock struck twelve at noon.

"Madam," says Mrs. Bargrave, "I am surprised to see you, you have been
so long a stranger"; but told her she was glad to see her, and offered
to salute her, which Mrs. Veal complied with, till their lips almost
touched, and then Mrs. Veal drew her hand across her own eyes, and
said, "I am not very well," and so waived it. She told Mrs. Bargrave
she was going a journey, and had a great mind to see her first. "But,"
says Mrs. Bargrave, "how can you take a journey alone? I am amazed at
it, because I know you have a fond brother." "Oh," says Mrs. Veal,
"I gave my brother the slip, and came away, because I had so great a
desire to see you before I took my journey." So Mrs. Bargrave went in
with her into another room within the first, and Mrs. Veal sat her
down in an elbow-chair, in which Mrs. Bargrave was sitting when she
heard Mrs. Veal knock. "Then," says Mrs. Veal, "my dear friend, I am
come to renew our old friendship again, and beg your pardon for my
breach of it; and if you can forgive me, you are the best of women."
"Oh," says Mrs. Bargrave, "do not mention such a thing; I have not had
an uneasy thought about it." "What did you think of me?" says Mrs.
Veal. Says Mrs. Bargrave, "I thought you were like the rest of the
world, and that prosperity had made you forget yourself and me." Then
Mrs. Veal reminded Mrs. Bargrave of the many friendly offices she did
her in former days, and much of the conversation they had with each
other in the times of their adversity; what books they read, and
what comfort in particular they received from Drelincourt's _Book of
Death_, which was the best, she said, on the subject ever wrote.
She also mentioned Doctor Sherlock, and two Dutch books, which were
translated, wrote upon death, and several others. But Drelincourt, she
said, had the clearest notions of death and of the future state of any
who had handled that subject. Then she asked Mrs. Bargrave whether she
had Drelincourt. She said, "Yes." Says Mrs. Veal, "Fetch it." And so
Mrs. Bargrave goes up-stairs and brings it down. Says Mrs. Veal, "Dear
Mrs. Bargrave, if the eyes of our faith were as open as the eyes of
our body, we should see numbers of angels about us for our guard.
The notions we have of Heaven now are nothing like what it is, as
Drelincourt says; therefore be comforted under your afflictions, and
believe that the Almighty has a particular regard to you, and that
your afflictions are marks of God's favor; and when they have done
the business they are sent for, they shall be removed from you. And
believe me, my dear friend, believe what I say to you, one minute of
future happiness will infinitely reward you for all your sufferings.
For I can never believe" (and claps her hand upon her knee with great
earnestness, which, indeed, ran through most of her discourse) "that
ever God will suffer you to spend all your days in this afflicted
state. But be assured that your afflictions shall leave you, or you
them, in a short time." She spake in that pathetical and heavenly
manner that Mrs. Bargrave wept several times, she was so deeply
affected with it.

Then Mrs. Veal mentioned Doctor Kendrick's _Ascetic_, at the end of
which he gives an account of the lives of the primitive Christians.
Their pattern she recommended to our imitation, and said, "Their
conversation was not like this of our age. For now," says she, "there
is nothing but vain, frothy discourse, which is far different from
theirs. Theirs was to edification, and to build one another up in
faith, so that they were not as we are, nor are we as they were. But,"
said she, "we ought to do as they did; there was a hearty friendship
among them; but where is it now to be found?" Says Mrs. Bargrave, "It
is hard indeed to find a true friend in these days." Says Mrs.
Veal, "Mr. Norris has a fine copy of verses, called _Friendship in
Perfection_, which I wonderfully admire. Have you seen the book?" says
Mrs. Veal. "No," says Mrs. Bargrave, "but I have the verses of my own
writing out." "Have you?" says Mrs. Veal; "then fetch them"; which
she did from above stairs, and offered them to Mrs. Veal to read, who
refused, and waived the thing, saying, "holding down her head would
make it ache"; and then desiring Mrs. Bargrave to read them to her,
which she did. As they were admiring _Friendship_, Mrs. Veal said,
"Dear Mrs. Bargrave, I shall love you forever." In these verses there
is twice used the word "Elysian." "Ah!" says Mrs. Veal, "these poets
have such names for Heaven." She would often draw her hand across her
own eyes, and say, "Mrs. Bargrave, do not you think I am mightily
impaired by my fits?" "No," says Mrs. Bargrave; "I think you look as
well as ever I knew you."

After this discourse, which the apparition put in much finer words
than Mrs. Bargrave said she could pretend to, and as much more than
she can remember--for it cannot be thought that an hour and three
quarters' conversation could all be retained, though the main of it
she thinks she does--she said to Mrs. Bargrave she would have her
write a letter to her brother, and tell him she would have him give
rings to such and such; and that there was a purse of gold in her
cabinet, and that she would have two broad pieces given to her cousin
Watson.

Talking at this rate, Mrs. Bargrave thought that a fit was coming upon
her, and so placed herself on a chair just before her knees, to keep
her from falling to the ground, if her fits should occasion it; for
the elbow-chair, she thought, would keep her from falling on either
side. And to divert Mrs. Veal, as she thought, took hold of her
gown-sleeve several times, and commended it. Mrs. Veal told her it
was a scoured silk, and newly made up. But, for all this, Mrs. Veal
persisted in her request, and told Mrs. Bargrave she must not deny
her. And she would have her tell her brother all their conversation
when she had the opportunity. "Dear Mrs. Veal," says Mrs. Bargrave,
"this seems so impertinent that I cannot tell how to comply with
it; and what a mortifying story will our conversation be to a young
gentleman. Why," says Mrs. Bargrave, "it is much better, methinks, to
do it yourself." "No," says Mrs. Veal; "though it seems impertinent to
you now, you will see more reasons for it hereafter." Mrs. Bargrave,
then, to satisfy her importunity, was going to fetch a pen and ink,
but Mrs. Veal said, "Let it alone now, but do it when I am gone; but
you must be sure to do it"; which was one of the last things she
enjoined her at parting, and so she promised her.

Then Mrs. Veal asked for Mrs. Bargrave's daughter. She said she was
not at home. "But if you have a mind to see her," says Mrs. Bargrave,
"I'll send for her." "Do," says Mrs. Veal; on which she left her, and
went to a neighbor's to see her; and by the time Mrs. Bargrave was
returning, Mrs. Veal was got without the door in the street, in the
face of the beast-market, on a Saturday (which is market-day), and
stood ready to part as soon as Mrs. Bargrave came to her. She asked
her why she was in such haste. She said she must be going, though
perhaps she might not go her journey till Monday; and told Mrs.
Bargrave she hoped she should see her again at her cousin Watson's
before she went whither she was going. Then she said she would take
her leave of her, and walked from Mrs. Bargrave, in her view, till a
turning interrupted the sight of her, which was three-quarters after
one in the afternoon.

Mrs. Veal died the seventh of September, at twelve o'clock at noon, of
her fits, and had not above four hours' senses before her death, in
which time she received the sacrament. The next day after Mrs. Veal's
appearance, being Sunday, Mrs. Bargrave was mightily indisposed with
a cold and sore throat, that she could not go out that day; but on
Monday morning she sends a person to Captain Watson's to know if Mrs.
Veal was there. They wondered at Mrs. Bargrave's inquiry, and sent
her word she was not there, nor was expected. At this answer, Mrs.
Bargrave told the maid she had certainly mistook the name or made some
blunder. And though she was ill, she put on her hood and went herself
to Captain Watson's, though she knew none of the family, to see if
Mrs. Veal was there or not. They said they wondered at her asking, for
that she had not been in town; they were sure, if she had, she would
have been there. Says Mrs. Bargrave, "I am sure she was with me on
Saturday almost two hours." They said it was impossible, for they must
have seen her if she had. In comes Captain Watson, while they were
in dispute, and said that Mrs. Veal was certainly dead, and the
escutcheons were making. This strangely surprised Mrs. Bargrave, when
she sent to the person immediately who had the care of them, and found
it true. Then she related the whole story to Captain Watson's family;
and what gown she had on, and how striped; and that Mrs. Veal told her
that it was scoured. Then Mrs. Watson cried out, "You have seen her
indeed, for none knew but Mrs. Veal and myself that the gown was
scoured." And Mrs. Watson owned that she described the gown exactly;
"for," said she, "I helped her to make it up." This Mrs. Watson blazed
all about the town, and avouched the demonstration of truth of Mrs.
Bargrave's seeing Mrs. Veal's apparition. And Captain Watson carried
two gentlemen immediately to Mrs. Bargrave's house to hear the
relation from her own mouth. And when it spread so fast that gentlemen
and persons of quality, the judicious and sceptical part of the world,
flocked in upon her, it at last became such a task that she was forced
to go out of the way; for they were in general extremely satisfied
of the truth of the thing, and plainly saw that Mrs. Bargrave was no
hypochondriac, for she always appears with such a cheerful air and
pleasing mien that she has gained the favor and esteem of all the
gentry, and it is thought a great favor if they can but get the
relation from her own mouth. I should have told you before that Mrs.
Veal told Mrs. Bargrave that her sister and brother-in-law were just
come down from London to see her. Says Mrs. Bargrave, "How came you to
order matters so strangely?" "It could not be helped," said Mrs. Veal.
And her brother and sister did come to see her, and entered the town
of Dover just as Mrs. Veal was expiring. Mrs. Bargrave asked her
whether she would drink some tea. Says Mrs. Veal, "I do not care if
I do; but I'll warrant you this mad fellow"--meaning Mrs. Bargrave's
husband--"has broke all your trinkets." "But," says Mrs. Bargrave,
"I'll get something to drink in for all that"; but Mrs. Veal waived
it, and said, "It is no matter; let it alone"; and so it passed.

All the time I sat with Mrs. Bargrave, which was some hours, she
recollected fresh sayings of Mrs. Veal. And one material thing more
she told Mrs. Bargrave, that old Mr. Bretton allowed Mrs. Veal ten
pounds a year, which was a secret, and unknown to Mrs. Bargrave till
Mrs. Veal told her.

Mrs. Bargrave never varies in her story, which puzzles those who
doubt of the truth, or are unwilling to believe it. A servant in the
neighbor's yard adjoining to Mrs. Bargrave's house heard her talking
to somebody an hour of the time Mrs. Veal was with her. Mrs. Bargrave
went out to her next neighbor's the very moment she parted with Mrs.
Veal, and told her what ravishing conversation she had had with an old
friend, and told the whole of it. Drelincourt's _Book of Death_ is,
since this happened, bought up strangely. And it is to be observed
that, notwithstanding all the trouble and fatigue Mrs. Bargrave has
undergone upon this account, she never took the value of a farthing,
nor suffered her daughter to take anything of anybody, and therefore
can have no interest in telling the story.

But Mr. Veal does what he can to stifle the matter, and said he would
see Mrs. Bargrave; but yet it is certain matter of fact that he has
been at Captain Watson's since the death of his sister, and yet never
went near Mrs. Bargrave; and some of his friends report her to be a
liar, and that she knew of Mr. Bretton's ten pounds a year. But the
person who pretends to say so has the reputation to be a notorious
liar among persons whom I know to be of undoubted credit. Now, Mr.
Veal is more of a gentleman than to say she lies, but says a bad
husband has crazed her; but she needs only present herself, and it
will effectually confute that pretence. Mr. Veal says he asked his
sister on her death-bed whether she had a mind to dispose of anything.
And she said no. Now the things which Mrs. Veal's apparition would
have disposed of were so trifling, and nothing of justice aimed at in
the disposal, that the design of it appears to me to be only in order
to make Mrs. Bargrave satisfy the world of the reality thereof as to
what she had seen and heard, and to secure her reputation among the
reasonable and understanding part of mankind. And then, again, Mr.
Veal owns that there was a purse of gold; but it was not found in
her cabinet, but in a comb-box. This looks improbable; for that Mrs.
Watson owned that Mrs. Veal was so very careful of the key of her
cabinet that she would trust nobody with it; and if so, no doubt she
would not trust her gold out of it. And Mrs. Veal's often drawing her
hands over her eyes, and asking Mrs. Bargrave whether her fits had not
impaired her, looks to me as if she did it on purpose to remind Mrs.
Bargrave of her fits, to prepare her not to think it strange that she
should put her upon writing to her brother, to dispose of rings and
gold, which look so much like a dying person's request; and it took
accordingly with Mrs. Bargrave as the effect of her fits coming upon
her, and was one of the many instances of her wonderful love to her
and care of her, that she should not be affrighted, which, indeed,
appears in her whole management, particularly in her coming to her in
the daytime, waiving the salutation, and when she was alone; and then
the manner of her parting, to prevent a second attempt to salute her.

Now, why Mr. Veal should think this relation a reflection--as it is
plain he does, by his endeavoring to stifle it--I cannot imagine;
because the generality believe her to be a good spirit, her discourse
was so heavenly. Her two great errands were, to comfort Mrs. Bargrave
in her affliction, and to ask her forgiveness for her breach of
friendship, and with a pious discourse to encourage her. So that,
after all, to suppose that Mrs. Bargrave could hatch such an invention
as this, from Friday noon to Saturday noon--supposing that she knew
of Mrs. Veal's death the very first moment--without jumbling
circumstances, and without any interest, too, she must be more witty,
fortunate, and wicked, too, than any indifferent person, I dare say,
will allow. I asked Mrs. Bargrave several times if she was sure she
felt the gown. She answered, modestly, "If my senses be to be relied
on, I am sure of it." I asked her if she heard a sound when she
clapped her hand upon her knee. She said she did not remember she did,
but said she appeared to be as much a substance as I did who talked
with her. "And I may," said she, "be as soon persuaded that your
apparition is talking to me now as that I did not really see her;
for I was under no manner of fear, and received her as a friend, and
parted with her as such. I would not," says she, "give one farthing to
make any one believe it; I have no interest in it; nothing but trouble
is entailed upon me for a long time, for aught I know; and, had it not
come to light by accident, it would never have been made public." But
now she says she will make her own private use of it, and keep herself
out of the way as much as she can; and so she has done since. She says
she had a gentleman who came thirty miles to her to hear the relation;
and that she had told it to a roomful of people at the time. Several
particular gentlemen have had the story from Mrs. Bargrave's own
mouth.

This thing has very much affected me, and I am as well satisfied as
I am of the best-grounded matter of fact. And why we should dispute
matter of fact, because we cannot solve things of which we can have no
certain or demonstrative notions, seems strange to me; Mrs. Bargrave's
authority and sincerity alone would have been undoubted in any other
case.




THE MYSTERIOUS BRIDE[1]

[Footnote 1: From _Tales and Sketches_, by the Ettrick Shepherd.]

_James Hogg_ (1770-1835)


A great number of people nowadays are beginning broadly to insinuate
that there are no such things as ghosts, or spiritual beings visible
to mortal sight. Even Sir Walter Scott is turned renegade, and, with
his stories made up of half-and-half, like Nathaniel Gow's toddy,
is trying to throw cold water on the most certain, though most
impalpable, phenomena of human nature. The bodies are daft. Heaven
mend their wits! Before they had ventured to assert such things, I
wish they had been where I have often been; or, in particular, where
the Laird of Birkendelly was on St. Lawrence's Eve, in the year 1777,
and sundry times subsequent to that.

Be it known, then, to every reader of this relation of facts that
happened in my own remembrance that the road from Birkendelly to the
great muckle village of Balmawhapple (commonly called the muckle town,
in opposition to the little town that stood on the other side of the
burn)--that road, I say, lay between two thorn-hedges, so well kept
by the Laird's hedger, so close, and so high, that a rabbit could not
have escaped from the highway into any of the adjoining fields. Along
this road was the Laird riding on the Eve of St. Lawrence, in a
careless, indifferent manner, with his hat to one side, and his cane
dancing a hornpipe before him. He was, moreover, chanting a song to
himself, and I have heard people tell what song it was too. There was
once a certain, or rather uncertain, bard, ycleped Robert Burns, who
made a number of good songs; but this that the Laird sang was an
amorous song of great antiquity, which, like all the said bard's best
songs, was sung one hundred and fifty years before he was born. It
began thus:

  "I am the Laird of Windy-wa's,
  I cam nae here without a cause,
  An' I hae gotten forty fa's
    In coming o'er the knowe, joe.
  The night it is baith wind and weet;
  The morn it will be snaw and sleet;
  My shoon are frozen to my feet;
    O, rise an' let me in, joe!
      Let me in this ae night," etc.

This song was the Laird singing, while, at the same time, he was
smudging and laughing at the catastrophe, when, ere ever aware, he
beheld, a short way before him, an uncommonly elegant and beautiful
girl walking in the same direction with him. "Aye," said the Laird to
himself, "here is something very attractive indeed! Where the deuce
can she have sprung from? She must have risen out of the earth, for I
never saw her till this breath. Well, I declare I have not seen such a
female figure--I wish I had such an assignation with her as the Laird
of Windy-wa's had with his sweetheart."

As the Laird was half-thinking, half-speaking this to himself, the
enchanting creature looked back at him with a motion of intelligence
that she knew what he was half-saying, half-thinking, and then
vanished over the summit of the rising ground before him, called the
Birky Brow. "Aye, go your ways!" said the Laird; "I see by you, you'll
not be very hard to overtake. You cannot get off the road, and I'll
have a chat with you before you make the Deer's Den."

The Laird jogged on. He did not sing the _Laird of Windy-wa's_ any
more, for he felt a stifling about his heart; but he often repeated to
himself, "She's a very fine woman!--a very fine woman indeed!--and to
be walking here by herself! I cannot comprehend it."

When he reached the summit of the Birky Brow he did not see her,
although he had a longer view of the road than before. He thought this
very singular, and began to suspect that she wanted to escape him,
although apparently rather lingering on him before. "I shall have
another look at her, however," thought the Laird, and off he set at a
flying trot. No. He came first to one turn, then another. There was
nothing of the young lady to be seen. "Unless she take wings and fly
away, I shall be up with her," quoth the Laird, and off he set at the
full gallop.

In the middle of his career he met with Mr. McMurdie, of Aulton, who
hailed him with, "Hilloa, Birkendelly! Where the deuce are you flying
at that rate?"

"I was riding after a woman," said the Laird, with great simplicity,
reining in his steed.

"Then I am sure no woman on earth can long escape you, unless she be
in an air balloon."

"I don't know that. Is she far gone?"

"In which way do you mean?"

"In this."

"Aha-ha-ha! Hee-hee-hee!" nichered McMurdie, misconstruing the Laird's
meaning.

"What do you laugh at, my dear sir? Do you know her, then?"

"Ho-ho-ho! Hee-hee-hee! How should I, or how can I, know her,
Birkendelly, unless you inform me who she is?"

"Why, that is the very thing I want to know of you. I mean the young
lady whom you met just now."

"You are raving, Birkendelly. I met no young lady, nor is there a
single person on the road I have come by, while you know that for a
mile and a half forward your way she could not get out of it."

"I know that," said the Laird, biting his lip and looking greatly
puzzled; "but confound me if I understand this; for I was within
speech of her just now on the top of the Birky Brow there, and, when I
think of it, she could not have been even thus far as yet. She had on
a pure white gauze frock, a small green bonnet and feathers, and a
green veil, which, flung back over her left shoulder, hung below her
waist, and was altogether such an engaging figure that no man could
have passed her on the road without taking some note of her. Are you
not making game of me? Did you not really meet with her?"

"On my word of truth and honor, I did not. Come, ride back with me,
and we shall meet her still, depend on it. She has given you the go-by
on the road. Let us go; I am only to call at the mill about some
barley for the distillery, and will return with you to the big town."

Birkendelly returned with his friend. The sun was not yet set, yet
M'Murdie could not help observing that the Laird looked thoughtful
and confused, and not a word could he speak about anything save this
lovely apparition with the white frock and the green veil; and lo!
when they reached the top of Birky Brow there was the maiden again
before them, and exactly at the same spot where the Laird first saw
her before, only walking in the contrary direction.

"Well, this is the most extraordinary thing that I ever knew!"
exclaimed the Laird.

"What is it, sir?" said M'Murdie.

"How that young lady could have eluded me," returned the Laird. "See,
here she is still!"

"I beg your pardon, sir, I don't see her. Where is she?"

"There, on the other side of the angle; but you are shortsighted. See,
there she is ascending the other eminence in her white frock and green
veil, as I told you. What a lovely creature!"

"Well, well, we have her fairly before us now, and shall see what she
is like at all events," said McMurdie.

Between the Birky Brow and this other slight eminence there is an
obtuse angle of the road at the part where it is lowest, and, in
passing this, the two friends necessarily lost sight of the object
of their curiosity. They pushed on at a quick pace, cleared the low
angle--the maiden was not there! They rode full speed to the top of
the eminence from whence a long extent of road was visible before
them--there was no human creature in view. McMurdie laughed aloud, but
the Laird turned pale as death and bit his lip. His friend asked him
good-humoredly why he was so much affected. He said, because he could
not comprehend the meaning of this singular apparition or illusion,
and it troubled him the more as he now remembered a dream of the same
nature which he had, and which terminated in a dreadful manner.

"Why, man, you are dreaming still," said McMurdie. "But never mind;
it is quite common for men of your complexion to dream of beautiful
maidens with white frocks, and green veils, bonnets, feathers, and
slender waists. It is a lovely image, the creation of your own
sanguine imagination, and you may worship it without any blame. Were
her shoes black or green? And her stockings--did you note them? The
symmetry of the limbs, I am sure you did! Good-bye; I see you are not
disposed to leave the spot. Perhaps she will appear to you again."

So saying, McMurdie rode on toward the mill, and Birkendelly, after
musing for some time, turned his beast's head slowly round, and began
to move toward the great muckle village.

The Laird's feelings were now in terrible commotion. He was taken
beyond measure with the beauty and elegance of the figure he had seen,
but he remembered, with a mixture of admiration and horror, that a
dream of the same enchanting object had haunted his slumbers all
the days of his life; yet, how singular that he should never have
recollected the circumstance till now! But farther, with the dream
there were connected some painful circumstances which, though terrible
in their issue, he could not recollect so as to form them into any
degree of arrangement.

As he was considering deeply of these things and riding slowly down
the declivity, neither dancing his cane nor singing the _Laird of
Windy-wa's_, he lifted up his eyes, and there was the girl on the same
spot where he saw her first, walking deliberately up the Birky Brow.
The sun was down, but it was the month of August and a fine evening,
and the Laird, seized with an unconquerable desire to see and speak
with that incomparable creature, could restrain himself no longer, but
shouted out to her to stop till he came up. She beckoned acquiescence,
and slackened her pace into a slow movement. The Laird turned the
corner quickly, but when he had rounded it the maiden was still there,
though on the summit of the brow. She turned round, and, with an
ineffable smile and curtsy, saluted him, and again moved slowly on.
She vanished gradually beyond the summit, and while the green feathers
were still nodding in view, and so nigh that the Laird could have
touched them with a fishing-rod, he reached the top of the brow
himself. There was no living soul there, nor onward, as far as his
view reached. He now trembled in every limb, and, without knowing what
he did, rode straight on to the big town, not daring well to return
and see what he had seen for three several times; and certain he would
see it again when the shades of evening were deepening, he deemed
it proper and prudent to decline the pursuit of such a phantom any
farther.

He alighted at the Queen's Head, called for some brandy and water,
quite forgot what was his errand to the great muckle town that
afternoon, there being nothing visible to his mental sight but lovely
images, with white gauze frocks and green veils. His friend M'Murdie
joined him; they drank deep, bantered, reasoned, got angry, reasoned
themselves calm again, and still all would not do. The Laird was
conscious that he had seen the beautiful apparition, and, moreover,
that she was the very maiden, or the resemblance of her, who, in the
irrevocable decrees of Providence, was destined to be his. It was in
vain that M'Murdie reasoned of impressions on the imagination, and

  "Of fancy moulding in the mind,
  Light visions on the passing wind."

Vain also was a story that he told him of a relation of his own, who
was greatly harassed by the apparition of an officer in a red uniform
that haunted him day and night, and had very nigh put him quite
distracted several times, till at length his physician found out the
nature of this illusion so well that he knew, from the state of his
pulse, to an hour when the ghost of the officer would appear, and by
bleeding, low diet, and emollients contrived to keep the apparition
away altogether.

The Laird admitted the singularity of this incident, but not that it
was one in point; for the one, he said, was imaginary, the other
real, and that no conclusions could convince him in opposition to the
authority of his own senses. He accepted of an invitation to spend
a few days with M'Murdie and his family, but they all acknowledged
afterward that the Laird was very much like one bewitched.

As soon as he reached home he went straight to the Birky Brow, certain
of seeing once more the angelic phantom, but she was not there. He
took each of his former positions again and again, but the desired
vision would in no wise make its appearance. He tried every day
and every hour of the day, all with the same effect, till he grew
absolutely desperate, and had the audacity to kneel on the spot and
entreat of Heaven to see her. Yes, he called on Heaven to see her once
more, whatever she was, whether a being of earth, heaven, or hell.

He was now in such a state of excitement that he could not exist; he
grew listless, impatient, and sickly, took to his bed, and sent for
M'Murdie and the doctor; and the issue of the consultation was that
Birkendelly consented to leave the country for a season, on a visit to
his only sister in Ireland, whither we must accompany him for a short
space.

His sister was married to Captain Bryan, younger, of Scoresby, and
they two lived in a cottage on the estate, and the Captain's parents
and sisters at Scoresby Hall. Great was the stir and preparation when
the gallant young Laird of Birkendelly arrived at the cottage,
it never being doubted that he came to forward a second bond of
connection with the family, which still contained seven dashing
sisters, all unmarried, and all alike willing to change that solitary
and helpless state for the envied one of matrimony--a state highly
popular among the young women of Ireland. Some of the Misses Bryan
had now reached the years of womanhood, several of them scarcely, but
these small disqualifications made no difference in the estimation of
the young ladies themselves; each and all of them brushed up for the
competition with high hopes and unflinching resolutions. True,
the elder ones tried to check the younger in their good-natured,
forthright Irish way; but they retorted, and persisted in their
superior pretensions. Then there was such shopping in the county town!
It was so boundless that the credit of the Hall was finally exhausted,
and the old Squire was driven to remark that "Och, and to be sure it
was a dreadful and tirrabell concussion, to be put upon the equipment
of seven daughters all at the same moment, as if the young gentleman
could marry them all! Och, then, poor dear shoul, he would be after
finding that one was sufficient, if not one too many. And therefore
there was no occasion, none at all, at all, and that there was not,
for any of them to rig out more than one."

It was hinted that the Laird had some reason for complaint at this
time, but as the lady sided with her daughters, he had no chance. One
of the items of his account was thirty-seven buckling-combs, then
greatly in vogue. There were black combs, pale combs, yellow combs,
and gilt ones, all to suit or set off various complexions; and if
other articles bore any proportion at all to these, it had been better
for the Laird and all his family that Birkendelly had never set foot
in Ireland.

The plan was all concocted. There was to be a grand dinner at the
Hall, at which the damsels were to appear in all their finery. A ball
to follow, and note be taken which of the young ladies was their
guest's choice, and measures taken accordingly. The dinner and
the ball took place; and what a pity I may not describe that
entertainment, the dresses, and the dancers, for they were all
exquisite in their way, and _outre_ beyond measure. But such details
only serve to derange a winter evening's tale such as this.

Birkendelly having at this time but one model for his choice among
womankind, all that ever he did while in the presence of ladies was to
look out for some resemblance to her, the angel of his fancy; and it
so happened that in one of old Bryan's daughters named Luna, or,
more familiarly, <DW38>, he perceived, or thought he perceived, some
imaginary similarity in form and air to the lovely apparition. This
was the sole reason why he was incapable of taking his eyes off from
her the whole of that night; and this incident settled the point, not
only with the old people, but even the young ladies were forced, after
every exertion on their own parts, to "yild the p'int to their sister
<DW38>, who certainly was not the mist genteelest nor mist handsomest
of that guid-lucking fimily."

The next day Lady Luna was dispatched off to the cottage in grand
style, there to live hand in glove with her supposed lover. There was
no standing all this. There were the two parrocked together, like a
ewe and a lamb, early and late; and though the Laird really appeared
to have, and probably had, some delight in her company, it was only in
contemplating that certain indefinable air of resemblance which she
bore to the sole image impressed on his heart. He bought her a white
gauze frock, a green bonnet and feather, with a veil, which she was
obliged to wear thrown over her left shoulder, and every day after,
six times a day, was she obliged to walk over a certain eminence at a
certain distance before her lover. She was delighted to oblige him;
but still, when he came up, he looked disappointed, and never said,
"Luna, I love you; when are we to be married?" No, he never said any
such thing, for all her looks and expressions of fondest love; for,
alas! in all this dalliance he was only feeding a mysterious flame
that preyed upon his vitals, and proved too severe for the powers
either of reason or religion to extinguish. Still, time flew lighter
and lighter by, his health was restored, the bloom of his cheek
returned, and the frank and simple confidence of Luna had a certain
charm with it that reconciled him to his sister's Irish economy. But a
strange incident now happened to him which deranged all his immediate
plans.

He was returning from angling one evening, a little before sunset,
when he saw Lady Luna awaiting him on his way home. But instead of
brushing up to meet him as usual, she turned, and walked up the rising
ground before him. "Poor sweet girl! how condescending she is," said
he to himself, "and how like she is in reality to the angelic being
whose form and features are so deeply impressed on my heart! I now see
it is no fond or fancied resemblance. It is real! real! real! How I
long to clasp her in my arms, and tell her how I love her; for, after
all, that is the girl that is to be mine, and the former a vision to
impress this the more on my heart."

He posted up the ascent to overtake her. When at the top she turned,
smiled, and curtsied. Good heavens! it was the identical lady of his
fondest adoration herself, but lovelier, far lovelier, than ever. He
expected every moment that she would vanish, as was her wont; but she
did not--she awaited him, and received his embraces with open arms.
She was a being of real flesh and blood, courteous, elegant, and
affectionate. He kissed her hand, he kissed her glowing cheek, and
blessed all the powers of love who had thus restored her to him again,
after undergoing pangs of love such as man never suffered.

"But, dearest heart, here we are standing in the middle of the
highway," said he; "suffer me to conduct you to my sister's house,
where you shall have an apartment with a child of nature having some
slight resemblance to yourself." She smiled, and said, "No, I will not
sleep with Lady Luna to-night. Will you please to look round you, and
see where you are." He did so, and behold they were standing on the
Birky Brow, on the only spot where he had ever seen her. She smiled at
his embarrassed look, and asked if he did not remember aught of his
coming over from Ireland. He said he thought he did remember something
of it, but love with him had long absorbed every other sense. He then
asked her to his own house, which she declined, saying she could only
meet him on that spot till after their marriage, which could not be
before St. Lawrence's Eve come three years. "And now," said she, "we
must part. My name is Jane Ogilvie, and you were betrothed to me
before you were born. But I am come to release you this evening, if
you have the slightest objection."

He declared he had none; and kneeling, swore the most solemn oath to
be hers forever, and to meet her there on St. Lawrence's Eve next,
and every St. Lawrence's Eve until that blessed day on which she had
consented to make him happy by becoming his own forever. She then
asked him affectionately to change rings with her, in pledge of their
faith and troth, in which he joyfully acquiesced; for she could not
have then asked any conditions which, in the fulness of his heart's
love, he would not have granted; and after one fond and affectionate
kiss, and repeating all their engagements over again, they parted.

Birkendelly's heart was now melted within him, and all his senses
overpowered by one overwhelming passion. On leaving his fair and kind
one, he got bewildered, and could not find the road to his own house,
believing sometimes that he was going there, and sometimes to his
sister's, till at length he came, as he thought, upon the Liffey, at
its junction with Loch Allan; and there, in attempting to call for a
boat, he awoke from a profound sleep, and found himself lying in his
bed within his sister's house, and the day sky just breaking.

If he was puzzled to account for some things in the course of his
dream, he was much more puzzled to account for them now that he was
wide awake. He was sensible that he had met his love, had embraced,
kissed, and exchanged vows and rings with her, and, in token of the
truth and reality of all these, her emerald ring was on his finger,
and his own away; so there was no doubt that they had met--by what
means it was beyond the power of man to calculate.

There was then living with Mrs. Bryan an old Scotswoman, commonly
styled Lucky Black. She had nursed Birkendelly's mother, and been
dry-nurse to himself and sister; and having more than a mother's
attachment for the latter, when she was married, old Lucky left her
country to spend the last of her days in the house of her beloved
young lady. When the Laird entered the breakfast-parlor that morning
she was sitting in her black velvet hood, as usual, reading _The
Fourfold State of Man_, and, being paralytic and somewhat deaf, she
seldom regarded those who went or came. But chancing to hear him say
something about the 9th of August, she quitted reading, turned round
her head to listen, and then asked, in a hoarse, tremulous voice:
"What's that he's saying? What's the unlucky callant saying about the
9th of August? Aih? To be sure it is St. Lawrence's Eve, although the
10th be his day. It's ower true, ower true, ower true for him an' a'
his kin, poor man! Aih? What was he saying then?"

The men smiled at her incoherent earnestness, but the lady, with true
feminine condescension, informed her, in a loud voice, that Allan had
an engagement in Scotland on St. Lawrence's Eve. She then started up,
extended her shrivelled hands, that shook like the aspen, and panted
out: "Aih, aih? Lord preserve us! Whaten an engagement has he on St.
Lawrence's Eve? Bind him! bind him! Shackle him wi' bands of steel,
and of brass, and of iron! O may He whose blessed will was pleased
to leave him an orphan sae soon, preserve him from the fate which I
tremble to think on!"

She then tottered round the table, as with supernatural energy, and
seizing the Laird's right hand, she drew it close to her unstable
eyes, and then perceiving the emerald ring chased in blood, she threw
up her arms with a jerk, opened her skinny jaws with a fearful gape,
and uttering a shriek that made all the house yell, and every one
within it to tremble, she fell back lifeless and rigid on the floor.
The gentlemen both fled, out of sheer terror; but a woman never
deserts her friends in extremity. The lady called her maids about her,
had her old nurse conveyed to bed, where every means were used to
restore animation. But, alas, life was extinct! The vital spark
had fled forever, which filled all their hearts with grief,
disappointment, and horror, as some dreadful tale of mystery was now
sealed up from their knowledge which, in all likelihood, no other
could reveal. But to say the truth, the Laird did not seem greatly
disposed to probe it to the bottom.

Not all the arguments of Captain Bryan and his lady, nor the simple
entreaties of Lady Luna, could induce Birkendelly to put off his
engagement to meet his love on the Birky Brow on the evening of the
9th of August; but he promised soon to return, pretending that some
business of the utmost importance called him away. Before he went,
however, he asked his sister if ever she had heard of such a lady in
Scotland as Jane Ogilvie. Mrs. Bryan repeated the name many times to
herself, and said that name undoubtedly was once familiar to her,
although she thought not for good, but at that moment she did not
recollect one single individual of the name. He then showed her the
emerald ring that had been the death of Lucky Black; but the moment
the lady looked at it, she made a grasp at it to take it off by force,
which she had very nearly effected. "Oh, burn it! burn it!" cried she;
"it is not a right ring! Burn it!"

"My dear sister, what fault is in the ring?" said he. "It is a very
pretty ring, and one that I set great value by."

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, burn it, and renounce the giver!" cried she.
"If you have any regard for your peace here or your soul's welfare
hereafter, burn that ring! If you saw with your own eyes, you would
easily perceive that that is not a ring befitting a Christian to
wear."

This speech confounded Birkendelly a good deal. He retired by himself
and examined the ring, and could see nothing in it unbecoming a
Christian to wear. It was a chased gold ring, with a bright emerald,
which last had a red foil, in some lights giving it a purple gleam,
and inside was engraven "_Elegit_," much defaced, but that his
sister could not see; therefore he could not comprehend her vehement
injunctions concerning it. But that it might no more give her offence,
or any other, he sewed it within his vest, opposite his heart, judging
that there was something in it which his eyes were withholden from
discerning.

Thus he left Ireland with his mind in great confusion, groping his
way, as it were, in a hole of mystery, yet with the passion that
preyed on his heart and vitals more intense than ever. He seems to
have had an impression all his life that some mysterious fate awaited
him, which the correspondence of his dreams and day visions tended
to confirm. And though he gave himself wholly up to the sway of one
overpowering passion, it was not without some yearnings of soul,
manifestations of terror, and so much earthly shame, that he never
more mentioned his love, or his engagements, to any human being, not
even to his friend M'Murdie, whose company he forthwith shunned.

It is on this account that I am unable to relate what passed between
the lovers thenceforward. It is certain they met at the Birky Brow
that St. Lawrence's Eve, for they were seen in company together; but
of the engagements, vows, or dalliance that passed between them I can
say nothing; nor of all their future meetings, until the beginning of
August, 1781, when the Laird began decidedly to make preparations for
his approaching marriage; yet not as if he and his betrothed had been
to reside at Birkendelly, all his provisions rather bespeaking a
meditated journey.

On the morning of the 9th he wrote to his sister, and then arraying
himself in his new wedding suit, and putting the emerald ring on his
finger, he appeared all impatience, until toward evening, when he
sallied out on horseback to his appointment. It seems that his
mysterious inamorata had met him, for he was seen riding through the
big town before sunset, with a young lady behind him, dressed in white
and green, and the villagers affirmed that they were riding at the
rate of fifty miles an hour! They were seen to pass a cottage called
Mosskilt, ten miles farther on, where there was no highway, at the
same tremendous speed; and I could never hear that they were any more
seen, until the following morning, when Birkendelly's fine bay horse
was found lying dead at his own stable door; and shortly after his
master was likewise discovered lying, a blackened corpse, on the Birky
Brow at the very spot where the mysterious but lovely dame had always
appeared to him. There was neither wound, bruise, nor dislocation in
his whole frame; but his skin was of a livid color, and his features
terribly distorted.

This woful catastrophe struck the neighborhood with great
consternation, so that nothing else was talked of. Every ancient
tradition and modern incident were raked together, compared, and
combined; and certainly a most rare concatenation of misfortunes was
elicited. It was authenticated that his father had died on the same
spot that day twenty years, and his grandfather that day forty years,
the former, as was supposed, by a fall from his horse when in liquor,
and the latter, nobody knew how; and now this Allan was the last of
his race, for Mrs. Bryan had no children.

It was, moreover, now remembered by many, and among the rest by the
Rev. Joseph Taylor, that he had frequently observed a young lady, in
white and green, sauntering about the spot on a St. Lawrence's Eve.

When Captain Bryan and his lady arrived to take possession of the
premises, they instituted a strict inquiry into every circumstance;
but nothing further than what was related to them by Mr. M'Murdie
could be learned of this Mysterious Bride, besides what the Laird's
own letter bore. It ran thus:

"DEAREST SISTER,--I shall before this time to-morrow be the most
happy, or most miserable, of mankind, having solemnly engaged myself
this night to wed a young and beautiful lady, named Jane Ogilvie, to
whom it seems I was betrothed before I was born. Our correspondence
has been of a most private and mysterious nature; but my troth is
pledged, and my resolution fixed. We set out on a far journey to the
place of her abode on the nuptial eve, so that it will be long before
I see you again. Yours till death,

"ALLAN GEORGE SANDISON.

"BIRKENDELLY, _August 8_, 1781."

That very same year, an old woman, named Marion Haw, was returned upon
that, her native parish, from Glasgow. She had led a migratory life
with her son--who was what he called a bell-hanger, but in fact a
tinker of the worst grade--for many years, and was at last returned
to the muckle town in a state of great destitution. She gave the
parishioners a history of the Mysterious Bride, so plausibly correct,
but withal so romantic, that everybody said of it (as is often said of
my narratives, with the same narrow-minded prejudice and injustice)
that it was a _made story_. There were, however, some strong
testimonies of its veracity.

She said the first Allan Sandison, who married the great heiress of
Birkendelly, was previously engaged to a beautiful young lady named
Jane Ogilvie, to whom he gave anything but fair play; and, as she
believed, either murdered her, or caused her to be murdered, in the
midst of a thicket of birch and broom, at a spot which she mentioned;
and she had good reason for believing so, as she had seen the red
blood and the new grave, when she was a little girl, and ran home and
mentioned it to her grandfather, who charged her as she valued her
life never to mention that again, as it was only the nombles and hide
of a deer which he himself had buried there. But when, twenty years
subsequent to that, the wicked and unhappy Allan Sandison was found
dead on that very spot, and lying across the green mound, then nearly
level with the surface, which she had once seen a new grave, she then
for the first time ever thought of a Divine Providence; and she added,
"For my grandfather, Neddy Haw, he dee'd too; there's naebody kens
how, nor ever shall."

As they were quite incapable of conceiving from Marion's description
anything of the spot, Mr. M'Murdie caused her to be taken out to the
Birky Brow in a cart, accompanied by Mr. Taylor and some hundreds of
the town's folks; but whenever she saw it, she said, "Aha, birkies!
the haill kintra's altered now. There was nae road here then; it gaed
straight ower the tap o' the hill. An' let me see--there's the thorn
where the cushats biggit; an' there's the auld birk that I ance fell
aff an' left my shoe sticking i' the cleft. I can tell ye, birkies,
either the deer's grave or bonny Jane Ogilvie's is no twa yards aff
the place where that horse's hind-feet are standin'; sae ye may howk,
an' see if there be ony remains."

The minister and M'Murdie and all the people stared at one another,
for they had purposely caused the horse to stand still on the very
spot where both the father and son had been found dead. They digged,
and deep, deep below the road they found part of the slender bones
and skull of a young female, which they deposited decently in the
church-yard. The family of the Sandisons is extinct, the Mysterious
Bride appears no more on the Eve of St. Lawrence, and the wicked
people of the great muckle village have got a lesson on divine justice
written to them in lines of blood.




THE DEVIL AND TOM WALKER [1]

[Footnote 1: From _The Money-diggers_.]

_Washington Irving_ (1783-1859)


A few miles from Boston, in Massachusetts, there is a deep inlet
winding several miles into the interior of the country from Charles
Bay, and terminating in a thickly wooded swamp or morass. On one side
of this inlet is a beautiful dark grove; on the opposite side the land
rises abruptly from the water's edge into a high ridge, on which grow
a few scattered oaks of great age and immense size. Under one of these
gigantic trees, according to old stories, there was a great amount of
treasure buried by Kidd the pirate. The inlet allowed a facility to
bring the money in a boat secretly, and at night, to the very foot of
the hill; the elevation of the place permitted a good lookout to be
kept that no one was at hand; while the remarkable trees formed good
landmarks by which the place might easily be found again. The old
stories add, moreover, that the devil presided at the hiding of the
money, and took it under his guardianship; but this, it is well known,
he always does with buried treasure, particularly when it has been
ill-gotten. Be that as it may, Kidd never returned to recover his
wealth; being shortly after seized at Boston, sent out to England, and
there hanged for a pirate.

About the year 1727, just at the time that earthquakes were prevalent
in New England, and shook many tall sinners down upon their knees,
there lived near this place a meagre, miserly fellow, of the name of
Tom Walker. He had a wife as miserly as himself; they were so miserly
that they even conspired to cheat each other. Whatever the woman could
lay hands on she hid away; a hen could not cackle but she was on the
alert to secure the new-laid egg. Her husband was continually prying
about to detect her secret hoards, and many and fierce were the
conflicts that took place about what ought to have been common
property. They lived in a forlorn-looking house that stood alone and
had an air of starvation. A few straggling savin-trees, emblems of
sterility, grew near it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no
traveller stopped at its door. A miserable horse, whose ribs were as
articulate as the bars of a gridiron, stalked about a field, where
a thin carpet of moss, scarcely covering the ragged beds of
pudding-stone, tantalized and balked his hunger; and sometimes he
would lean his head over the fence, look piteously at the passer-by,
and seem to petition deliverance from this land of famine.

The house and its inmates had altogether a bad name. Tom's wife was a
tall termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and strong of arm.
Her voice was often heard in wordy warfare with her husband; and his
face sometimes showed signs that their conflicts were not confined to
words. No one ventured, however, to interfere between them. The
lonely wayfarer shrank within himself at the horrid clamor and
clapper-clawing; eyed the den of discord askance; and hurried on his
way, rejoicing, if a bachelor, in his celibacy.

One day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the
neighborhood, he took what he considered a short-cut homeward, through
the swamp. Like most short-cuts, it was an ill-chosen route. The swamp
was thickly grown with great, gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them
ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday and a retreat for
all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires,
partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often
betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black, smothering mud; there
were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the
bull-frog, and the water-snake, where the trunks of pines and hemlocks
lay half-drowned, half-rotting, looking like alligators sleeping in
the mire.

Tom had long been picking his way cautiously through this treacherous
forest, stepping from tuft to tuft of rushes and roots, which afforded
precarious footholds among deep sloughs, or pacing carefully, like a
cat, along the prostrate trunks of trees, startled now and then by
the sudden screaming of the bittern, or the quacking of a wild duck,
rising on the wing from some solitary pool. At length he arrived at a
firm piece of ground, which ran like a peninsula into the deep bosom
of the swamp. It had been one of the strongholds of the Indians during
their wars with the first colonists. Here they had thrown up a kind of
fort, which they had looked upon as almost impregnable, and had used
as a place of refuge for their squaws and children. Nothing remained
of the old Indian fort but a few embankments, gradually sinking to the
level of the surrounding earth, and already overgrown in part by oaks
and other forest trees, the foliage of which formed a contrast to the
dark pines and hemlocks of the swamps.

It was late in the dusk of evening when Tom Walker reached the old
fort, and he paused there awhile to rest himself. Any one but he would
have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely, melancholy place, for
the common people had a bad opinion of it, from the stories handed
down from the times of the Indian wars, when it was asserted that the
savages held incantations here and made sacrifices to the Evil Spirit.

Tom Walker, however, was not a man to be troubled with any fears of
the kind. He reposed himself for some time on the trunk of a fallen
hemlock, listening to the boding cry of the tree-toad, and delving
with his walking-staff into a mound of black mould at his feet. As he
turned up the soil unconsciously, his staff struck against something
hard. He raked it out of the vegetable mould, and lo! a cloven skull,
with an Indian tomahawk buried deep in it, lay before him. The rust on
the weapon showed the time that had elapsed since this death-blow had
been given. It was a dreary memento of the fierce struggle that had
taken place in this last foothold of the Indian warriors.

"Humph!" said Tom Walker, as he gave it a kick to shake the dirt from
it.

"Let that skull alone!" said a gruff voice. Tom lifted up his eyes and
beheld a great black man seated directly opposite him, on the stump of
a tree. He was exceedingly surprised, having neither heard nor seen
any one approach; and he was still more perplexed on observing, as
well as the gathering gloom would permit, that the stranger was
neither <DW64> nor Indian. It is true he was dressed in a rude Indian
garb, and had a red belt or sash swathed round his body; but his
face was neither black nor copper-color, but swarthy and dingy, and
begrimed with soot, as if he had been accustomed to toil among fires
and forges. He had a shock of coarse black hair, that stood out from
his head in all directions, and bore an axe on his shoulder.

He scowled for a moment at Tom with a pair of great red eyes.

"What are you doing on my grounds?" said the black man, with a hoarse,
growling voice.

"Your grounds!" said Tom, with a sneer; "no more your grounds than
mine; they belong to Deacon Peabody."

"Deacon Peabody be damned," said the stranger, "as I flatter myself he
will be, if he does not look more to his own sins and less to those of
his neighbors. Look yonder, and see how Deacon Peabody is faring."

Tom looked in the direction that the stranger pointed, and beheld one
of the great trees, fair and flourishing without, but rotten at the
core, and saw that it had been nearly hewn through, so that the first
high wind was likely to blow it down. On the bark of the tree was
scored the name of Deacon Peabody, an eminent man who had waxed
wealthy by driving shrewd bargains with the Indians. He now looked
around, and found most of the tall trees marked with the name of some
great man of the colony, and all more or less scored by the axe. The
one on which he had been seated, and which had evidently just been
hewn down, bore the name of Crowninshield; and he recollected a mighty
rich man of that name, who made a vulgar display of wealth, which it
was whispered he had acquired by buccaneering.

"He's just ready for burning!" said the black man, with a growl of
triumph. "You see I am likely to have a good stock of firewood for
winter."

"But what right have you," said Tom, "to cut down Deacon Peabody's
timber?"

"The right of a prior claim," said the other. "This woodland belonged
to me long before one of your white-faced race put foot upon the
soil."

"And, pray, who are you, if I may be so bold?" said Tom.

"Oh, I go by various names. I am the wild huntsman in some countries;
the black miner in others. In this neighborhood I am known by the name
of the black woodsman. I am he to whom the red men consecrated this
spot, and in honor of whom they now and then roasted a white man,
by way of sweet-smelling sacrifice. Since the red men have been
exterminated by you white savages, I amuse myself by presiding at the
persecutions of Quakers and Anabaptists; I am the great patron and
prompter of slave-dealers and the grand-master of the Salem witches."

"The upshot of all which is, that, if I mistake not," said Tom,
sturdily, "you are he commonly called Old Scratch."

"The same, at your service!" replied the black man, with a half-civil
nod.

Such was the opening of this interview, according to the old story;
though it has almost too familiar an air to be credited. One would
think that to meet with such a singular personage in this wild, lonely
place would have shaken any man's nerves; but Tom was a hard-minded
fellow, not easily daunted, and he had lived so long with a termagant
wife that he did not even fear the devil.

It is said that after this commencement they had a long and earnest
conversation together, as Tom returned homeward. The black man told
him of great sums of money buried by Kidd the pirate under the
oak-trees on the high ridge, not far from the morass. All these were
under his command, and protected by his power, so that none could find
them but such as propitiated his favor. These he offered to place
within Tom Walker's reach, having conceived an especial kindness for
him; but they were to be had only on certain conditions. What these
conditions were may be easily surmised, though Tom never disclosed
them publicly. They must have been very hard, for he required time to
think of them, and he was not a man to stick at trifles when money was
in view. When they had reached the edge of the swamp, the stranger
paused. "What proof have I that all you have been telling me is true?"
said Tom. "There's my signature," said the black man, pressing his
finger on Tom's forehead. So saying, he turned off among the thickets
of the swamp, and seemed, as Tom said, to go down, down, down, into
the earth, until nothing but his head and shoulders could be seen, and
so on, until he totally disappeared.

When Tom reached home he found the black print of a finger burned, as
it were, into his forehead, which nothing could obliterate.

The first news his wife had to tell him was the sudden death of
Absalom Crowninshield, the rich buccaneer. It was announced in the
papers, with the usual flourish, that "A great man had fallen in
Israel."

Tom recollected the tree which his black friend had just hewn down,
and which was ready for burning. "Let the freebooter roast," said Tom;
"who cares!" He now felt convinced that all he had heard and seen was
no illusion.

He was not prone to let his wife into his confidence; but as this was
an uneasy secret, he willingly shared it with her. All her avarice was
awakened at the mention of hidden gold, and she urged her husband to
comply with the black man's terms, and secure what would make them
wealthy for life. However Tom might have felt disposed to sell himself
to the devil, he was determined not to do so to oblige his wife; so
he flatly refused, out of the mere spirit of contradiction. Many and
bitter were the quarrels they had on the subject; but the more she
talked, the more resolute was Tom not to be damned to please her.

At length she determined to drive the bargain on her own account, and,
if she succeeded, to keep all the gain to herself. Being of the same
fearless temper as her husband, she set off for the old Indian fort
toward the close of a summer's day. She was many hours absent. When
she came back, she was reserved and sullen in her replies. She spoke
something of a black man, whom she had met about twilight hewing at
the root of a tall tree. He was sulky, however, and would not come to
terms; she was to go again with a propitiatory offering, but what it
was she forbore to say.

The next evening she set off again for the swamp, with her apron
heavily laden. Tom waited and waited for her, but in vain; midnight
came, but she did not make her appearance; morning, noon, night
returned, but still she did not come. Tom now grew uneasy for her
safety, especially as he found she had carried off in her apron the
silver tea-pot and spoons, and every portable article of value.
Another night elapsed, another morning came; but no wife. In a word,
she was never heard of more.

What was her real fate nobody knows, in consequence of so many
pretending to know. It is one of those facts which have become
confounded by a variety of historians. Some asserted that she lost her
way among the tangled mazes of the swamp, and sank into some pit or
slough; others, more uncharitable, hinted that she had eloped with the
household booty, and made off to some other province; while others
surmised that the tempter had decoyed her into a dismal quagmire, on
the top of which her hat was found lying. In confirmation of this, it
was said a great black man, with an axe on his shoulder, was seen late
that very evening coming out of the swamp, carrying a bundle tied in a
check apron, with an air of surly triumph.

The most current and probable story, however, observes that Tom Walker
grew so anxious about the fate of his wife and his property that he
set out at length to seek them both at the Indian fort. During a long
summer's afternoon he searched about the gloomy place, but no wife was
to be seen. He called her name repeatedly, but she was nowhere to be
heard. The bittern alone responded to his voice, as he flew screaming
by; or the bull-frog croaked dolefully from a neighboring pool. At
length, it is said, just in the brown hour of twilight, when the owls
began to hoot and the bats to flit about, his attention was attracted
by the clamor of carrion crows hovering about a cypress-tree. He
looked up and beheld a bundle tied in a check apron and hanging in
the branches of the tree, with a great vulture perched hard by, as
if keeping watch upon it. He leaped with joy, for he recognized his
wife's apron, and supposed it to contain the household valuables.

"Let us get hold of the property," said he, consolingly, to himself,
"and we will endeavor to do without the woman."

As he scrambled up the tree, the vulture spread its wide wings and
sailed off, screaming, into the deep shadows of the forest. Tom seized
the checked apron, but, woful sight! found nothing but a heart and
liver tied up in it!

Such, according to this most authentic old story, was all that was to
be found of Tom's wife. She had probably attempted to deal with the
black man as she had been accustomed to deal with her husband; but
though a female scold is generally considered a match for the devil,
yet in this instance she appears to have had the worst of it. She must
have died game, however; for it is said Tom noticed many prints of
cloven feet deeply stamped about the tree, and found handfuls of hair,
that looked as if they had been plucked from the coarse black shock of
the woodsman. Tom knew his wife's prowess by experience. He shrugged
his shoulders as he looked at the signs of fierce clapper-clawing.
"Egad," said he to himself, "Old Scratch must have had a tough time of
it!"

Tom consoled himself for the loss of his property, with the loss of
his wife, for he was a man of fortitude. He even felt something like
gratitude toward the black woodsman, who, he considered, had done him
a kindness. He sought, therefore, to cultivate a further acquaintance
with him, but for some time without success; the old black-legs played
shy, for, whatever people may think, he is not always to be had for
the calling; he knows how to play his cards when pretty sure of his
game.

At length, it is said, when delay had whetted Tom's eagerness to the
quick and prepared him to agree to anything rather than not gain the
promised treasure, he met the black man one evening in his usual
woodsman's dress, with his axe on his shoulder, sauntering along the
swamp and humming a tune. He affected to receive Tom's advances with
great indifference, made brief replies, and went on humming his tune.

By degrees, however, Tom brought him to business, and they began to
haggle about the terms on which the former was to have the pirate's
treasure. There was one condition which need not be mentioned, being
generally understood in all cases where the devil grants favors; but
there were others about which, though of less importance, he was
inflexibly obstinate. He insisted that the money found through his
means should be employed in his service. He proposed, therefore, that
Tom should employ it in the black traffic; that is to say, that he
should fit out a slave-ship. This, however, Tom resolutely refused;
he was bad enough in all conscience, but the devil himself could not
tempt him to turn slave-trader.

Finding Tom so squeamish on this point, he did not insist upon it,
but proposed, instead, that he should turn usurer; the devil being
extremely anxious for the increase of usurers, looking upon them as
his peculiar people.

To this no objections were made, for it was just to Tom's taste.

"You shall open a broker's shop in Boston next month," said the black
man.

"I'll do it to-morrow, if you wish," said Tom Walker.

"You shall lend money at two per cent. a month."

"Egad, I'll charge four!" replied Tom Walker.

"You shall extort bonds, foreclose mortgages, drive the merchants to
bankruptcy--"

"I'll drive them to the devil," cried Tom Walker.

"_You_ are the usurer for my money!" said black-legs with delight.
"When will you want the rhino?"

"This very night."

"Done!" said the devil.

"Done!" said Tom Walker. So they shook hands and struck a bargain.

A few days' time saw Tom Walker seated behind his desk in a
counting-house in Boston.

His reputation for a ready-moneyed man, who would lend money out for a
good consideration, soon spread abroad. Everybody remembers the time
of Governor Belcher, when money was particularly scarce. It was a time
of paper credit. The country had been deluged with government bills;
the famous Land Bank had been established; there had been a rage for
speculating; the people had run mad with schemes for new settlements,
for building cities in the wilderness; land-jobbers went about with
maps of grants and townships and Eldorados, lying nobody knew where,
but which everybody was ready to purchase. In a word, the great
speculating fever which breaks out every now and then in the country
had raged to an alarming degree, and everybody was dreaming of making
sudden fortunes from nothing. As usual, the fever had subsided, the
dream had gone off, and the imaginary fortunes with it; the patients
were left in doleful plight, and the whole country resounded with the
consequent cry of "hard times."

At this propitious time of public distress did Tom Walker set up as
usurer in Boston. His door was soon thronged by customers. The needy
and adventurous, the gambling speculator, the dreaming land-jobber,
the thriftless tradesman, the merchant with cracked credit--in short,
everyone driven to raise money by desperate means and desperate
sacrifices hurried to Tom Walker.

Thus Tom was the universal friend to the needy, and acted like "a
friend in need"; that is to say, he always exacted good pay and
security. In proportion to the distress of the applicant was the
hardness of his terms. He accumulated bonds and mortgages, gradually
squeezed his customers closer and closer, and sent them at length, dry
as a sponge, from his door.

In this way he made money hand over hand, became a rich and mighty
man, and exalted his cocked hat upon "Change." He built himself, as
usual, a vast house, out of ostentation, but left the greater part
of it unfinished and unfurnished, out of parsimony. He even set up a
carriage in the fulness of his vain-glory, though he nearly starved
the horses which drew it; and, as the ungreased wheels groaned and
screeched on the axle-trees, you would have thought you heard the
souls of the poor debtors he was squeezing.

As Tom waxed old, however, he grew thoughtful. Having secured the good
things of this world, he began to feel anxious about those of the
next. He thought with regret of the bargain he had made with his black
friend, and set his wits to work to cheat him out of the conditions.
He became, therefore, all of a sudden, a violent church-goer. He
prayed loudly and strenuously, as if heaven were to be taken by force
of lungs. Indeed, one might always tell when he had sinned most during
the week by the clamor of his Sunday devotion. The quiet Christians
who had been modestly and steadfastly travelling Zionward were struck
with self-reproach at seeing themselves so suddenly outstripped in
their career by this new-made convert. Tom was as rigid in religious
as in money matters; he was a stern supervisor and censurer of his
neighbors, and seemed to think every sin entered up to their account
became a credit on his own side of the page. He even talked of the
expediency of reviving the persecution of Quakers and Anabaptists. In
a word, Tom's zeal became as notorious as his riches.

Still, in spite of all this strenuous attention to forms, Tom had a
lurking dread that the devil, after all, would have his due. That he
might not be taken unawares, therefore, it is said he always carried a
small Bible in his coat-pocket. He had also a great folio Bible on his
counting-house desk, and would frequently be found reading it when
people called on business; on such occasions he would lay his green
spectacles in the book, to mark the place, while he turned round to
drive some usurious bargain.

Some say that Tom grew a little crack-brained in his old days, and
that, fancying his end approaching, he had his horse new shod,
saddled, and bridled, and buried with his feet uppermost; because he
supposed that at the last day the world would be turned upside-down;
in which case he should find his horse standing ready for mounting,
and he was determined at the worst to give his old friend a run for
it. This, however, is probably a mere old wives' fable. If he really
did take such a precaution, it was totally superfluous; at least so
says the authentic old legend, which closes his story in the following
manner:

One hot summer afternoon in the dog-days, just as a terrible black
thunder-gust was coming up, Tom sat in his counting-house, in his
white linen cap and India silk morning-gown. He was on the point of
foreclosing a mortgage, by which he would complete the ruin of an
unlucky land-speculator for whom he had professed the greatest
friendship. The poor land-jobber begged him to grant a few months'
indulgence. Tom had grown testy and irritated, and refused another
delay.

"My family will be ruined, and brought upon the parish," said the
land-jobber.

"Charity begins at home," replied Tom; "I must take care of myself in
these hard times."

"You have made so much money out of me," said the speculator.

Tom lost his patience and his piety. "The devil take me," said he, "if
I have made a farthing!"

Just then there were three loud knocks at the street door. He stepped
out to see who was there. A black man was holding a black horse, which
neighed and stamped with impatience.

"Tom, you're come for," said the black fellow, gruffly. Tom shrank
back, but too late. He had left his little Bible at the bottom of his
coat-pocket and his big Bible on the desk buried under the mortgage
he was about to foreclose: never was sinner taken more unawares. The
black man whisked him like a child into the saddle, gave the horse the
lash, and away he galloped, with Tom on his back, in the midst of the
thunder-storm. The clerks stuck their pens behind their ears, and
stared after him from the windows. Away went Tom Walker, dashing down
the streets, his white cap bobbing up and down, his morning-gown
fluttering in the wind, and his steed striking fire out of the
pavement at every bound. When the clerks turned to look for the black
man, he had disappeared.

Tom Walker never returned to foreclose the mortgage. A countryman, who
lived on the border of the swamp, reported that in the height of the
thunder-gust he had heard a great clattering of hoofs and a howling
along the road, and running to the window caught sight of a figure,
such as I have described, on a horse that galloped like mad across the
fields, over the hills, and down into the black hemlock swamp toward
the old Indian fort, and that shortly after a thunder-bolt falling in
that direction seemed to set the whole forest in a blaze.

The good people of Boston shook their heads and shrugged their
shoulders, but had been so much accustomed to witches and goblins, and
tricks of the devil, in all kinds of shapes, from the first settlement
of the colony, that they were not so much horror-struck as might
have been expected. Trustees were appointed to take charge of Tom's
effects. There was nothing, however, to administer upon. On searching
his coffers, all his bonds and mortgages were reduced to cinders. In
place of gold and silver, his iron chest was filled with chips and
shavings; two skeletons lay in his stable instead of his half-starved
horses, and the very next day his great house took fire and was burned
to the ground.

Such was the end of Tom Walker and his ill-gotten wealth. Let all
gripping money-brokers lay this story to heart. The truth of it is not
to be doubted. The very hole under the oak-trees, whence he dug Kidd's
money, is to be seen to this day; and the neighboring swamp and
old Indian fort are often haunted in stormy nights by a figure on
horseback, in morning-gown and white cap, which is doubtless the
troubled spirit of the usurer. In fact, the story has resolved itself
into a proverb, and is the origin of that popular saying, so prevalent
throughout New England, of "The devil and Tom Walker."




DR. HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT

_Nathaniel Hawthorne_ (1807-1864)


That very singular man, old Doctor Heidegger, once invited four
venerable friends to meet him in his study. There were three
white-bearded gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr.
Gascoigne, and a withered gentlewoman whose name was the Widow
Wycherley. They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been
unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they
were not long ago in their graves. Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of his
age, had been a prosperous merchant, but had lost his all by a frantic
speculation, and was no little better than a mendicant. Colonel
Killigrew had wasted his best years, and his health and substance, in
the pursuit of sinful pleasures, which had given birth to a brood of
pains, such as the gout and divers other torments of soul and body.
Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician, a man of evil fame, or at
least had been so, till time had buried him from the knowledge of the
present generation, and made him obscure instead of infamous. As for
the Widow Wycherley, tradition tells us that she was a great beauty in
her day; but, for a long while past, she had lived in deep seclusion,
on account of certain scandalous stories which had prejudiced the
gentry of the town against her. It is a circumstance worth mentioning
that each of these three old gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne, Colonel
Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, were early lovers of the Widow
Wycherley, and had once been on the point of cutting each other's
throats for her sake. And, before proceeding further, I will merely
hint that Doctor Heidegger and all his four guests were sometimes
thought to be a little beside themselves; as is not unfrequently the
case with old people, when worried either by present troubles or woful
recollections.

"My dear friends," said Doctor Heidegger, motioning them to be seated,
"I am desirous of your assistance in one of those little experiments
with which I amuse myself here in my study."

If all stories were true, Doctor Heidegger's study must have been a
very curious place. It was a dim, old-fashioned chamber, festooned
with cobwebs and besprinkled with antique dust. Around the walls stood
several oaken bookcases, the lower shelves of which were filled with
rows of gigantic folios and black-letter quartos, and the upper with
little parchment-covered duodecimos. Over the central bookcase was a
bronze bust of Hippocrates, with which, according to some authorities,
Doctor Heidegger was accustomed to hold consultations in all difficult
cases of his practice. In the obscurest corner of the room stood
a tall and narrow oaken closet, with its door ajar, within which
doubtfully appeared a skeleton. Between two of the bookcases hung a
looking-glass, presenting its high and dusty plate within a tarnished
gilt frame. Among many wonderful stories related of this mirror, it
was fabled that the spirits of all the doctor's deceased patients
dwelt within its verge, and would stare him in the face whenever he
looked thitherward. The opposite side of the chamber was ornamented
with the full-length portrait of a young lady, arrayed in the faded
magnificence of silk, satin, and brocade, and with a visage as faded
as her dress. Above half a century ago Doctor Heidegger had been on
the point of marriage with this young lady; but, being affected
with some slight disorder, she had swallowed one of her lover's
prescriptions, and died on the bridal evening. The greatest curiosity
of the study remains to be mentioned; it was a ponderous folio volume,
bound in black leather, with massive silver clasps. There were no
letters on the back, and nobody could tell the title of the book. But
it was well known to be a book of magic; and once, when a chambermaid
had lifted it, merely to brush away the dust, the skeleton had rattled
in its closet, the picture of the young lady had stepped one foot upon
the floor, and several ghastly faces had peeped forth from the mirror;
while the brazen head of Hippocrates frowned, and said: "Forbear!"

Such was Doctor Heidegger's study. On the summer afternoon of our tale
a small round table, as black as ebony, stood in the centre of the
room, sustaining a cut-glass vase of beautiful form and workmanship.
The sunshine came through the window, between the heavy festoons of
two faded damask curtains, and fell directly across this vase; so that
a mild splendor was reflected from it on the ashen visages of the five
old people who sat around. Four champagne glasses were also on the
table.

"My dear old friends," repeated Doctor Heidegger, "may I reckon on
your aid in performing an exceedingly curious experiment?"

Now Doctor Heidegger was a very strange old gentleman, whose
eccentricity had become the nucleus for a thousand fantastic stories.
Some of these fables, to my shame be it spoken, might possibly be
traced back to mine own veracious self; and if any passages of the
present tale should startle the reader's faith, I must be content to
bear the stigma of a fiction-monger.

When the doctor's four guests heard him talk of his proposed
experiment, they anticipated nothing more wonderful than the murder
of a mouse in an air-pump or the examination of a cobweb by the
microscope, or some similiar nonsense, with which he was constantly in
the habit of pestering his intimates. But without waiting for a reply,
Doctor Heidegger hobbled across the chamber, and returned with the
same ponderous folio, bound in black leather, which common report
affirmed to be a book of magic. Undoing the silver clasps, he opened
the volume, and took from among its black-letter pages a rose, or what
was once a rose, though now the green leaves and crimson petals had
assumed one brownish hue, and the ancient flower seemed ready to
crumble to dust in the doctor's hands.

"This rose," said Doctor Heidegger, with a sigh, "this same withered
and crumbling flower, blossomed five and fifty years ago. It was
given me by Sylvia Ward, whose portrait hangs yonder, and I meant to
wear it in my bosom at our wedding. Five and fifty years it has been
treasured between the leaves of this old volume. Now, would you deem
it possible that this rose of half a century could ever bloom again?"

"Nonsense!" said the Widow Wycherley, with a peevish toss of her head.
"You might as well ask whether an old woman's wrinkled face could ever
bloom again."

"See!" answered Doctor Heidegger.

He uncovered the vase, and threw the faded rose into the water which
it contained. At first, it lay lightly on the surface of the fluid,
appearing to imbibe none of its moisture. Soon, however, a singular
change began to be visible. The crushed and dried petals stirred, and
assumed a deepening tinge of crimson, as if the flower were reviving
from a death-like slumber; the slender stalk and twigs of foliage
became green; and there was the rose of half a century, looking as
fresh as when Sylvia Ward had first given it to her lover. It was
scarcely full blown; for some of its delicate red leaves curled
modestly around its moist bosom, within which two or three dewdrops
were sparkling.

"That is certainly a very pretty deception," said the doctor's
friends; careless, however, for they had witnessed greater miracles at
a conjurer's show; "pray how was it effected?"

"Did you ever hear of the 'Fountain of Youth,'" asked Doctor
Heidegger, "which Ponce de Leon, the Spanish adventurer, went in
search of, two or three centuries ago?"

"But did Ponce de Leon ever find it?" said the Widow Wycherley.

"No," answered Doctor Heidegger, "for he never sought it in the right
place. The famous Fountain of Youth, if I am rightly informed, is
situated in the southern part of the Floridian peninsula, not far from
Lake Macaco. Its source is overshadowed by several magnolias, which,
though numberless centuries old, have been kept as fresh as violets,
by the virtues of this wonderful water. An acquaintance of mine,
knowing my curiosity in such matters, has sent me what you see in the
vase."

"Ahem!" said Colonel Killigrew, who believed not a word of the
doctor's story; "and what may be the effect of this fluid on the human
frame?"

"You shall judge for yourself, my dear Colonel," replied Doctor
Heidegger; "and all of you, my respected friends, are welcome to so
much of this admirable fluid as may restore to you the bloom of youth.
For my own part, having had much trouble in growing old, I am in no
hurry to grow young again. With your permission, therefore, I will
merely watch the progress of the experiment."

While he spoke, Doctor Heidegger had been filling the four champagne
glasses with the water of the Fountain of Youth. It was apparently
impregnated with an effervescent gas; for little bubbles were
continually ascending from the depths of the glasses, and bursting
in silvery spray at the surface. As the liquor diffused a pleasant
perfume, the old people doubted now that it possessed cordial
and comfortable properties; and though utter sceptics as to its
rejuvenescent power, they were inclined to swallow it at once. But
Doctor Heidegger besought them to stay a moment.

"Before you drink, my respectable old friends," said he, "it would be
well that, with the experience of a lifetime to direct you, you should
draw up a few general rules for your guidance, in passing a second
time through the perils of youth. Think what a sin and shame it would
be if, with your peculiar advantages, you should not become patterns
of virtue and wisdom to all the young people of the age!"

The doctor's four venerable friends made him no answer, except by a
feeble and tremulous laugh; so very ridiculous was the idea that,
knowing how closely repentance treads behind the steps of error, they
should ever go astray again.

"Drink, then," said the doctor, bowing: "I rejoice that I have so well
selected the subjects of my experiment."

With palsied hands they raised the glasses to their lips. The liquor,
if it really possessed such virtues as Doctor Heidegger imputed to it,
could not have been bestowed on four human beings who needed it more
wofully. They looked as if they had never known what youth or pleasure
was, but had been the offspring of nature's dotage, and always the
gray, decrepit, sapless, miserable creatures, who now sat stooping
round the doctor's table, without life enough in their souls or bodies
to be animated even by the prospect of growing young again. They drank
off the water, and replaced their glasses on the table.

Assuredly there was an almost immediate improvement in the aspect of
the party, not unlike what might have been produced by a glass of
generous wine, together with a sudden glow of cheerful sunshine,
brightening over all their visages at once. There was a healthful
suffusion on their cheeks, instead of the ashen hue that had made them
look so corpselike. They gazed at one another, and fancied that
some magic power had really begun to smooth away the deep and sad
inscriptions which Father Time had been so long engraving on their
brows. The Widow Wycherley adjusted her cap, for she felt almost like
a woman again.

"Give us more of this wondrous water!" cried they, eagerly. "We are
younger--but we are still too old! Quick--give us more!"

"Patience! patience!" quoth Doctor Heidegger, who sat watching the
experiment with philosophic coolness. "You have been a long time
growing old. Surely you might be content to grow young in half an
hour! But the water is at your service."

Again he filled their glasses with the liquor of youth, enough of
which still remained in the vase to turn half the old people in the
city to the age of their own grandchildren. While the bubbles were yet
sparkling on the brim, the doctor's four guests snatched their glasses
from the table, and swallowed the contents at a single gulp. Was it
delusion? Even while the draught was passing down their throats it
seemed to have wrought a change on their whole systems. Their eyes
grew clear and bright; a dark shade deepened among their silvery
locks; they sat round the table, three gentlemen of middle age, and a
woman hardly beyond her buxom prime.

"My dear widow, you are charming!" cried Colonel Killigrew, whose eyes
had been fixed upon her face, while the shadows of age were flitting
from it like darkness from the crimson daybreak.

The fair widow knew of old that Colonel Killigrew's compliments were
not always measured by sober truth; so she started up and ran to the
mirror, still dreading that the ugly visage of an old woman would meet
her gaze. Meanwhile the three gentlemen behaved in such a manner
as proved that the water of the Fountain of Youth possessed some
intoxicating qualities, unless, indeed, their exhilaration of spirits
were merely a lightsome dizziness, caused by the sudden removal of
the weight of years. Mr. Gascoigne's mind seemed to run on political
topics, but whether relating to the past, present, or future could not
easily be determined, since the same ideas and phrases have been in
vogue these fifty years. Now he rattled forth full-throated sentences
about patriotism, national glory, and the people's rights; now he
muttered some perilous stuff or other, in a sly and doubtful whisper,
so cautiously that even his own conscience could scarcely catch the
secret; and now, again, he spoke in measured accents and a deeply
deferential tone, as if a royal ear were listening to his well-turned
periods. Colonel Killigrew all this time had been trolling forth a
jolly battle-song, and ringing his glass toward the buxom figure of
the Widow Wycherley. On the other side of the table Mr. Medbourne
was involved in a calculation of dollars and cents, with which was
strangely intermingled a project for supplying the East Indies with
ice, by harnessing a team of whales to the polar icebergs.

As for the Widow Wycherley, she stood before the mirror, courtesying
and simpering to her own image, and greeting it as the friend whom she
loved better than all the world beside. She thrust her face close to
the glass to see whether some long-remembered wrinkle or crow's-foot
had indeed vanished. She examined whether the snow had so entirely
melted from her hair that the venerable cap could be safely thrown
aside. At last, turning briskly away, she came with a sort of dancing
step to the table.

"My dear old doctor," cried she, "pray favor me with another glass!"

"Certainly, my dear madam, certainly!" replied the complaisant doctor.
"See! I have already filled the glasses."

There, in fact, stood the four glasses, brimful of this wonderful
water, the delicate spray of which, as it effervesced from the
surface, resembled the tremulous glitter of diamonds. It was now so
nearly sunset that the chamber had grown duskier than ever; but a mild
and moon-like splendor gleamed from within the vase, and rested alike
on the four guests, and on the doctor's venerable figure. He sat in a
high-backed, elaborately carved oaken chair, with a gray dignity of
aspect that might have well befitted that very Father Time, whose
power had never been disputed, save by this fortunate company. Even
while quaffing the third draught of the Fountain of Youth, they were
almost awed by the expression of his mysterious visage.

But the next moment the exhilarating gush of young life shot through
their veins. They were now in the happy prime of youth. Age, with its
miserable train of cares, and sorrows, and diseases, was remembered
only as the trouble of a dream, from which they had joyously awoke.
The fresh gloss of the soul, so early lost, and without which the
world's successive scenes had been but a gallery of faded pictures,
again threw its enchantment over all their prospects. They felt like
new-created beings in a new-created universe.

"We are young! We are young!" they cried, exultingly.

Youth, like the extremity of age, had effaced the strongly marked
characteristics of middle life, and mutually assimilated them all.
They were a group of merry youngsters, almost maddened with the
exuberant frolicsomeness of their years. The most singular effect of
their gayety was an impulse to mock the infirmity and decrepitude of
which they had so lately been the victims. They laughed loudly at
their old-fashioned attire--the wide-skirted coats and flapped
waistcoats of the young men, and the ancient cap and gown of the
blooming girl. One limped across the floor like a gouty grandfather;
one set a pair of spectacles astride of his nose, and pretended to
pore over the black-letter pages of the book of magic; a third seated
himself in an arm-chair, and strove to imitate the venerable dignity
of Doctor Heidegger. Then all shouted mirthfully, and leaped about
the room. The Widow Wycherley--if so fresh a damsel could be called a
widow--tripped up to the doctor's chair with a mischievous merriment
in her rosy face.

"Doctor, you dear old soul," cried she, "get up and dance with me!"
And then the four young people laughed louder than ever, to think what
a queer figure the poor old doctor would cut.

"Pray excuse me," answered the doctor, quietly. "I am old and
rheumatic, and my dancing days were over long ago. But either of these
gay young gentlemen will be glad of so pretty a partner."

"Dance with me, Clara!" cried Colonel Killigrew.

"She promised me her hand fifty years ago!" exclaimed Mr. Medbourne.

They all gathered round her. One caught both her hands in his
passionate grasp--another threw his arm about her waist--the third
buried his hand among the curls that clustered beneath the widow's
cap. Blushing, panting, struggling, chiding, laughing, her warm breath
fanning each of their faces by turns, she strove to disengage herself,
yet still remained in their triple embrace. Never was there a livelier
picture of youthful rivalship, with bewitching beauty for the prize.
Yet, by a strange deception, owing to the duskiness of the chamber and
the antique dresses which they still wore, the tall mirror is said
to have reflected the figures of the three old, gray, withered
grand-sires, ridiculously contending for the skinny ugliness of a
shrivelled grandam.

But they were young: their burning passions proved them so. Inflamed
to madness by the coquetry of the girl-widow, who neither granted
nor quite withheld her favors, the three rivals began to interchange
threatening glances. Still keeping hold of the fair prize, they
grappled fiercely at one another's throats. As they struggled to and
fro, the table was overturned, and the vase dashed into a thousand
fragments. The precious Water of Youth flowed in a bright stream
across the floor, moistening the wings of a butterfly, which, grown
old in the decline of summer, had alighted there to die. The insect
fluttered lightly through the chamber, and settled on the snowy head
of Doctor Heidegger.

"Come, come, gentlemen!--come, Madame Wycherley!" exclaimed the
doctor, "I really must protest against this riot."

They stood still and shivered; for it seemed as if gray Time were
calling them back from their sunny youth, far down into the chill and
darksome vale of years. They looked at old Doctor Heidegger, who sat
in his carved arm-chair, holding the rose of half a century which he
had rescued from among the fragments of the shattered vase. At the
motion of his hand the rioters resumed their seats, the more readily
because their violent exertions had wearied them, youthful though they
were.

"My poor Sylvia's rose!" ejaculated Doctor Heidegger, holding it in
the light of the sunset clouds; "it appears to be fading again."

And so it was. Even while the party were looking at it the flower
continued to shrivel up, till it became as dry and fragile as when the
doctor had first thrown it into the vase. He shook off the few drops
of moisture which clung to its petals.

"I love it as well thus as in its dewy freshness," observed he,
pressing the withered rose to his withered lips. While he spoke, the
butterfly fluttered down from the doctor's snowy head, and fell upon
the floor.

His guests shivered again. A strange dullness, whether of the body or
spirit they could not tell, was creeping gradually over them all. They
gazed at one another, and fancied that each fleeting moment snatched
away a charm, and left a deepening furrow where none had been before.
Was it an illusion? Had the changes of a lifetime been crowded into so
brief a space, and were they now four aged people, sitting with their
old friend, Doctor Heidegger?

"Are we grown old again so soon?" cried they, dolefully.

In truth, they had. The Water of Youth possessed merely a virtue
more transient than that of wine. The delirium which it created had
effervesced away. Yes, they were old again! With a shuddering impulse,
that showed her a woman still, the widow clasped her skinny hands over
her face, and wished that the coffin lid were over it, since it could
be no longer beautiful.

"Yes, friends, ye are old again," said Doctor Heidegger; "and lo! the
Water of Youth is all lavished on the ground. Well, I bemoan it not;
for if the fountain gushed at my doorstep, I would not stoop to bathe
my lips in it--no, though its delirium were for years instead of
moments. Such is the lesson ye have taught me!"

But the doctor's four friends had taught no such lesson to themselves.
They resolved forthwith to make a pilgrimage to Florida, and quaff at
morning, noon, and night from the Fountain of Youth.




THE PURLOINED LETTER[1]

[Footnote 1: The pattern in method for all detective stories.]

_Edgar Allan Poe_ (1809-1849)


At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18--, I
was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in
company with my friend, C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library,
or book-closet, _au troisieme_, No. 33 Rue Dunot, Faubourg St.
Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence,
while each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and
exclusively occupied with the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed
the atmosphere of the chamber. For myself, however, I was mentally
discussing certain topics which had formed matter for conversation
between us at an earlier period of the evening; I mean the affair of
the Rue Morgue, and the mystery attending the murder of Marie Roget.
I looked upon it, therefore, as something of a coincidence, when
the door of our apartment was thrown open and admitted our old
acquaintance, Monsieur G----, the Prefect of the Parisian police.

We gave him a hearty welcome; for there was nearly half as much of the
entertaining as of the contemptible about the man, and we had not seen
him for several years. We had been sitting in the dark, and Dupin now
arose for the purpose of lighting a lamp, but sat down again, without
doing so, upon G----'s saying that he had called to consult us, or
rather to ask the opinion of my friend, about some official business
which had occasioned a great deal of trouble.

"If it is any point requiring reflection," observed Dupin, as he
forebore to enkindle the wick, "we shall examine it to better purpose
in the dark."

"That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had the
fashion of calling everything "odd" that was beyond his comprehension,
and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities."

"Very true," said Dupin, as he supplied his visitor with a pipe, and
rolled toward him a comfortable chair.

"And what is the difficulty now?" I asked. "Nothing more in the
assassination way, I hope?"

"Oh no, nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is _very_
simple indeed, and I make no doubt that we can manage it sufficiently
well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin would like to hear the
details of it, because it is so excessively _odd_."

"Simple and odd," said Dupin.

"Why, yes; and not exactly that, either. The fact is, we have all been
a good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles
us altogether."

"Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at
fault," said my friend.

"What nonsense you _do_ talk!" replied the Prefect, laughing heartily.

"Perhaps the mystery is a little _too_ plain," said Dupin.

"Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?"

"A little _too_ self-evident."

"Ha! ha! ha!--ha! ha! ha!--ho! ho! ho!" roared our visitor, profoundly
amused, "Oh, Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!"

"And what, after all, _is_ the matter on hand?" I asked.

"Why, I will tell you," replied the Prefect, as he gave a long,
steady, and contemplative puff, and settled himself in his chair. "I
will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin, let me caution you
that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I
should most probably lose the position I now hold were it known that I
confided it to any one."

"Proceed," said I.

"Or not," said Dupin.

"Well, then; I have received personal information, from a very high
quarter, that a certain document of the last importance has been
purloined from the royal apartments. The individual who purloined it
is known; this beyond a doubt; he was seen to take it. It is known,
also, that it still remains in his possession."

"How is this known?" asked Dupin.

"It is clearly inferred," replied the Prefect, "from the nature of the
document, and from the non-appearance of certain results which would
at once arise from its passing _out_ of the robber's possession--that
is to say, from his employing it as he must design in the end to
employ it."

"Be a little more explicit," I said.

"Well, I may venture so far as to say that the paper gives its holder
a certain power in a certain quarter where such power is immensely
valuable." The Prefect was fond of the cant of diplomacy.

"Still I do not quite understand," said Dupin.

"No? Well, the disclosure of the document to a third person, who shall
be nameless, would bring in question the honor of a personage of the
most exalted station, and this fact gives the holder of the document
an ascendancy over the illustrious personage whose honor and peace are
so jeopardized."

"But this ascendancy," I interposed, "would depend upon the robber's
knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber. Who would dare--"

"The thief," said G----, "is the Minister D----, who dares all things,
those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man. The method of the
theft was not less ingenious than bold. The document in question--a
letter, to be frank--had been received by the personage robbed while
alone in the royal _boudoir_. During its perusal she was suddenly
interrupted by the entrance of the other exalted personage from whom
especially it was her wish to conceal it. After a hurried and vain
endeavor to thrust it in a drawer, she was forced to place it, open as
it was, upon a table. The address, however, was uppermost, and, the
contents thus unexposed, the letter escaped notice. At this juncture
enters the Minister D----. His lynx eye immediately perceives the
paper, recognizes the handwriting of the address, observes the
confusion of the personage addressed, and fathoms her secret. After
some business transactions, hurried through in his ordinary manner, he
produces a letter somewhat similar to the one in question, opens it,
pretends to read it, and then places it in close juxtaposition to the
other. Again he converses, for some fifteen minutes, upon the public
affairs. At length, in taking leave, he takes also from the table
the letter to which he had no claim. Its rightful owner saw, but of
course, dared not call attention to the act, in the presence of the
third personage who stood at her elbow. The Minister decamped, leaving
his own letter--one of no importance--upon the table."

"Here, then," said Dupin to me, "you have precisely what you demand to
make the ascendancy complete--the robber's knowledge of the loser's
knowledge of the robber."

"Yes," replied the Prefect, "and the power thus attained has, for some
months past, been wielded, for political purposes, to a very dangerous
extent. The personage robbed is more thoroughly convinced, every day,
of the necessity of reclaiming her letter. But this, of course, cannot
be done openly. In fine, driven to despair, she has committed the
matter to me."

"Than whom," said Dupin, amid a perfect whirlwind of smoke, "no more
sagacious agent could, I suppose, be desired, or even imagined."

"You flatter me," replied the Prefect; "but it is possible that some
such opinion may have been entertained."

"It is clear," said I, "as you observe, that the letter is still in
the possession of the Minister; since it is this possession, and
not any employment of the letter, which bestows the power. With the
employment the power departs."

"True," said G----; "and upon this conviction I proceeded. My first
care was to make thorough search of the Minister's hotel; and here
my chief embarrassment lay in the necessity of searching without his
knowledge. Beyond all things, I have been warned of the danger which
would result from giving him reason to suspect our design."

"But," said I, "you are quite _au fait_ in these investigations. The
Parisian police have done this thing often before."

"Oh yes, and for this reason I did not despair. The habits of the
Minister gave me, too, a great advantage. He is frequently absent from
home all night. His servants are by no means numerous. They sleep at
a distance from their master's apartment, and, being chiefly
Neapolitans, are readily made drunk. I have keys, as you know, with
which I can open any chamber or cabinet in Paris. For three months a
night has not passed during the greater part of which I have not
been engaged, personally, in ransacking the D---- Hotel. My honor is
interested, and, to mention a great secret, the reward is enormous. So
I did not abandon the search until I had become fully satisfied that
the thief is a more astute man than myself. I fancy that I have
investigated every nook and corner of the premises in which it is
possible that the paper can be concealed."

"But is it not possible," I suggested, "that although the letter may
be in the possession of the Minister, as it unquestionably is, he may
have concealed it elsewhere than upon his own premises?"

"This is barely possible," said Dupin. "The present peculiar condition
of affairs at court, and especially of those intrigues in which D----
is known to be involved, would render the instant availability of the
document--its susceptibility of being produced at a moment's notice--a
point of nearly equal importance with its possession."

"Its susceptibility of being produced?" said I.

"That is to say, of being _destroyed_," said Dupin.

"True," I observed; "the paper is clearly, then, upon the premises. As
for its being upon the person of the Minister, we may consider that as
out of the question."

"Entirely," said the Prefect. "He has been twice waylaid, as if by
footpads, and his person rigidly searched under my own inspection."

"You might have spared yourself this trouble," said Dupin. "D----, I
presume, is not altogether a fool; and, if not, must have anticipated
these waylayings, as a matter of course."

"Not _altogether_ a fool," said G----; "but, then, he is a poet, which
I take to be only one remove from a fool."

"True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his
meerschaum, "although I have been guilty of certain doggrel myself."

"Suppose you detail," said I, "the particulars of your search."

"Why, the fact is, we took our time, and we searched _everywhere_. I
have had long experience in these affairs. I took the entire building,
room by room, devoting the nights of a whole week to each. We
examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We opened every
possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained
police-agent, such a thing as a '_secret_' drawer is impossible. Any
man is a dolt who permits a 'secret' drawer to escape him in a search
of this kind. The thing is so plain. There is a certain amount of
bulk--of space--to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have
accurate rules. The fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. After
the cabinets we took the chairs. The cushions we probed with the fine
long needles you have seen me employ. From the tables we removed the
tops."

"Why so?"

"Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged piece of
furniture, is removed by the person wishing to conceal an article;
then the leg is excavated, the article deposited within the cavity,
and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops of bedposts are employed in
the same way."

"But could not the cavity be detected by sounding?" I asked.

"By no means, if, when the article is deposited, a sufficient wadding
of cotton be placed around it. Besides, in our case, we were obliged
to proceed without noise."

"But you could not have removed--you could not have taken to pieces
_all_ articles of furniture in which it would have been possible to
make a deposit in the manner you mention. A letter may be compressed
into a thin spiral roll, not differing much in shape or bulk from a
large knitting-needle, and in this form it might be inserted into
the rung of a chair, for example. You did not take to pieces all the
chairs?"

"Certainly not; but we did better--we examined the rungs of every
chair in the hotel, and, indeed, the jointings of every description of
furniture, by the aid of a most powerful microscope. Had there been
any traces of recent disturbance we should not have failed to detect
it instantly. A single grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have
been as obvious as an apple. Any disorder in the gluing--any unusual
gaping in the joints--would have sufficed to insure detection."

"I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards and the
plates, and you probed the beds and the bedclothes, as well as the
curtains and carpets."

"That, of course; and when we had absolutely completed every particle
of the furniture in this way, then we examined the house itself. We
divided its entire surface into compartments, which we numbered, so
that none might be missed; then we scrutinized each individual square
inch throughout the premises, including the two houses immediately
adjoining, with the microscope, as before."

"The two houses adjoining!" I exclaimed. "You must have had a great
deal of trouble."

"We had; but the reward offered is prodigious."

"You include the _grounds_ about the houses?"

"All the grounds are paved with brick. They gave us comparatively
little trouble. We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it
undisturbed."

"You looked among D----'s papers, of course, and into the books of the
library?"

"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened
every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume, not
contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to the fashion of
some of our police officers. We also measured the thickness of every
book-_cover_, with the most accurate admeasurement, and applied to
each the most jealous scrutiny of the microscope. Had any of the
bindings been recently meddled with, it would have been utterly
impossible that the fact should have escaped observation. Some five or
six volumes, just from the hands of the binder, we carefully probed,
longitudinally, with the needles."

"You explored the floors beneath the carpets?"

"Beyond doubt. We removed every carpet, and examined the boards with
the microscope."

"And the paper on the walls?"

"Yes."

"You looked into the cellars?"

"We did."

"Then," I said, "you have been making a miscalculation, and the letter
is _not_ upon the premises, as you suppose."

"I fear you are right there," said the Prefect. "And now, Dupin, what
would you advise me to do?"

"To make a thorough research of the premises."

"That is absolutely needless," replied G----. "I am not more sure that
I breathe than I am that the letter is not at the hotel."

"I have no better advice to give you," said Dupin. "You have, of
course, an accurate description of the letter?"

"Oh yes!" And here the Prefect, producing a memorandum book, proceeded
to read aloud a minute account of the internal, and especially of the
external, appearance of the missing document. Soon after finishing
the perusal of this description, he took his departure, more entirely
depressed in spirits than I had ever known the good gentleman before.

In about a month afterward he paid us another visit, and found us
occupied very nearly as before. He took a pipe and a chair, and
entered into some ordinary conversation. At length I said:

"Well, but, G----, what of the purloined letter? I presume you have at
last made up your mind that there is no such thing as overreaching the
Minister?"

"Confound him, say I--yes; I made the re-examination, however, as
Dupin suggested--but it was all labor lost, as I knew it would be."

"How much was the reward offered, did you say?" asked Dupin.

"Why, a very great deal--a _very_ liberal reward--I don't like to say
how much, precisely; but one thing I _will_ say, that I wouldn't mind
giving my individual check for fifty thousand francs to any one who
could obtain me that letter. The fact is, it is becoming of more and
more importance every day; and the reward has been lately doubled. If
it were trebled, however, I could do no more than I have done."

"Why, yes," said Dupin, drawling, between the whiffs of his
meerschaum, "I really--think, G----, you have not exerted yourself--to
the utmost in this matter. You might--do a little more, I think; eh?"

"How?--in what way?"

"Why"--puff, puff--"you might"--puff, puff--"employ counsel in the
matter, eh"--puff, puff, puff. "Do you remember the story they tell of
Abernethy?"

"No; hang Abernethy!"

"To be sure! Hang him and welcome. But, once upon a time, a certain
miser conceived the design of spunging upon this Abernethy for
a medical opinion. Getting up, for this purpose, an ordinary
conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to the
physician as that of an imaginary individual."

"'We will suppose,' said the miser, 'that his symptoms are such and
such; now, doctor, what would _you_ have directed him to take?'

"'Take!' said Abernethy. 'Why, take _advice_, to be sure.'"

"But," said the Prefect, a little discomposed, "_I_ am _perfectly_
willing to take advice, and to pay for it. I would _really_ give fifty
thousand francs to any one who would aid me in the matter."

"In that case," replied Dupin, opening a drawer, and producing a
check-book, "you may as well fill me up a check for the amount
mentioned. When you have signed it, I will hand you the letter."

I was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunder-stricken.
For some minutes he remained speechless and motionless, looking
incredulously at my friend with open mouth, and eyes that seemed
starting from their sockets; then apparently recovering himself in
some measure, he seized a pen, and after several pauses and vacant
stares, finally filled up and signed a check for fifty thousand
francs, and handed it across the table to Dupin. The latter examined
it carefully and deposited it in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an
_escritoire_, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect. This
functionary grasped it in a perfect agony of joy, opened it with
a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents, and
then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length
unceremoniously from the room and from the house, without having
uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested him to fill up the check.

When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanation.

"The Parisian police," he said, "are exceedingly able in their way.
They are persevering, ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly versed in the
knowledge which their duties seem chiefly to demand. Thus, when G----
detailed to us his mode of searching the premises at the Hotel
D----, I felt entire confidence in his having made a satisfactory
investigation--so far as his labors extended."

"So far as his labors extended?" said I.

"Yes," said Dupin. "The measures adopted were not only the best of
their kind, but carried out to absolute perfection. Had the letter
been deposited within the range of their search, these fellows would,
beyond a question, have found it."

I merely laughed--but he seemed quite serious in all that he said.

"The measures, then," he continued, "were good in their kind, and well
executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case and
to the man. A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the
Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his
designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow for
the matter in hand, and many a school-boy is a better reasoner than
he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in
the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game
is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a
number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is
even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he
loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school.
Of course, he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere
observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For
example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his
closed hand, asks, 'Are they even or odd?' Our school-boy replies,
'Odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says
to himself: 'The simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his
amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon
the second; I will therefore guess odd'; he guesses odd, and wins.
Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned
thus;

'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in
the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a
simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton;
but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a
variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before.
I will therefore guess even'; he guesses even, and wins. Now this mode
of reasoning in the school-boy, whom his fellows termed 'Lucky,' what,
in its last analysis, is it?"

"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect
with that of his opponent."

"It is," said Dupin; "and, upon inquiring of the boy by what means he
effected the _thorough_ identification in which his success consisted,
I received answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or
how stupid, or how good, or how wicked, is any one, or what are his
thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as
accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his,
and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind
or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This
response of the school-boy lies at the bottom of all the spurious
profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucault, to La Bougive,
to Machiavelli, and to Campanella."

"And the identification," I said, "of the reasoner's intellect with
that of his opponent, depends, if I understand you aright, upon the
accuracy with which the opponent's intellect is admeasured."

"For its practical value it depends upon this," replied Dupin; "and
the Prefect and his cohort fail so frequently, first, by default of
this identification, and, secondly, by ill-admeasurement, or rather
through non-admeasurement, of the intellect with which they are
engaged. They consider only their _own_ ideas of ingenuity; and, in
searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which
_they_ would have hidden it. They are right in this much--that their
own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of _the mass_; but
when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from
their own, the felon foils them of course. This always happens when it
is above their own, and very usually when it is below. They have no
variation of principle in their investigations; at best, when urged by
some unusual emergency--by some extraordinary reward--they extend
or exaggerate their old modes of _practice_, without touching their
principles. What, for example, in this case of D----, has been done to
vary the principle of action? What is all this boring, and probing,
and sounding, and scrutinizing with the microscope, and dividing the
surface of the building into registered square inches--what is it all
but an exaggeration of the application of the one principle or set
of principles of search, which are based upon the one set of notions
retarding human ingenuity, to which the Prefect, in the long routine
of his duty, has been accustomed? Do you not see he had taken it for
granted that _all_ men proceed to conceal a letter, not exactly in
a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg, but, at least, in _some_
out-of-the-way hole or corner suggested by the same tenor of thought
which would urge a man to secrete a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a
chair-leg? And do you not see, also, that such _recherche_ nooks for
concealment are adapted only for ordinary occasions, and would be
adopted only by ordinary intellects; for, in all cases of concealment,
a disposal of the article concealed--a disposal of it in this
_recherche_ manner--is, in the very first instance, presumable and
presumed; and thus its discovery depends, not at all upon the acumen,
but altogether upon the mere care, patience, and determination of the
seekers; and where the case is of importance--or, when the reward is
of magnitude--the qualities in question have _never_ been known to
fail. You will now understand what I meant in suggesting that, had
the purloined letter been hidden anywhere within the limits of the
Prefect's examination--in other words, had the principle of
its concealment been comprehended within the principles of the
Prefect--its discovery would have been a matter altogether beyond
question. This functionary, however, has been thoroughly mystified;
and the remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the
Minister is a fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All
fools are poets; this the Prefect _feels_; and he is merely guilty
of a _non distributio medii_ in thence inferring that all poets are
fools. I mean to say, that if the Minister had been no more than a
mathematician, the Prefect would have been under no necessity of
giving me this check. I knew him, however, as both mathematician and
poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity, with reference
to the circumstances by which he was surrounded. I knew him as a
courtier, too, and as a bold _intriguant_. Such a man, I considered,
could not fail to be aware of the ordinary political modes of action.
He could not have failed to anticipate--and events have proved that he
did not fail to anticipate--the waylayings to which he was subjected.
He must have foreseen, I reflected, the secret investigations of his
premises. His frequent absences from home at night, which were hailed
by the Prefect as certain aids to his success, I regarded only as
_ruses_, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police, and
thus the sooner to impress them with the conviction to which G----, in
fact, did finally arrive--the conviction that the letter was not upon
the premises. I felt, also, that the whole train of thought, which
I was at some pains in detailing to you just now, concerning the
invariable principle of political action in searches for articles
concealed--I felt that this whole train of thought would necessarily
pass through the mind of the Minister. It would imperatively lead him
to despise all the ordinary _nooks_ of concealment. _He_ could not, I
reflected, be so weak as not to see that the most intricate and remote
recess of his hotel would be as open as his commonest closets to the
eyes, to the probes, to the gimlets, and to the microscopes of the
Prefect. I saw, in fine, that he would be driven, as a matter of
course, to _simplicity_, if not deliberately induced to it as a matter
of choice. You will remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect
laughed when I suggested, upon our first interview, that it was just
possible this mystery troubled him so much on account of its being so
_very_ self-evident."

"Yes," said I, "I remember his merriment well. I really thought he
would have fallen into convulsions."

"The material world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict
analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been
given to the rhetorical dogma that metaphor, or simile, may be made
to strengthen an argument as well as to embellish a description. The
principle of the _vis inertiae_, for example, seems to be identical in
physics and metaphysics. It is not more true, in the former, that a
large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller
one, and that its subsequent _momentum_ is commensurate with this
difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster
capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in
their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily
moved, and more embarrassed, and full of hesitation in the first few
steps of their progress. Again: have you ever noticed which of
the street signs, over the shop doors, are the most attractive of
attention?"

"I have never given the matter a thought," I said.

"There is a game of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon a map.
One party playing requires another to find a given word--the name of
town, river, state, or empire--any word, in short, upon the motley and
perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks
to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered
names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large
characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like
the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape
observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here
the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral
inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed
those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably
self-evident. But this is a point, it appears, somewhat above or
beneath the understanding of the Prefect. He never once thought it
probable, or possible, that the Minister had deposited the letter
immediately beneath the nose of the whole world, by way of best
preventing any portion of that world from perceiving it.

"But the more I reflected upon the daring, dashing, and discriminating
ingenuity of D----; upon the fact that the document must always have
been _at hand_, if he intended to use it to good purpose; and upon the
decisive evidence, obtained by the Prefect, that it was not hidden
within the limits of that dignitary's ordinary search, the more
satisfied I became that, to conceal this letter, the Minister
had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious expedient of not
attempting to conceal it.

"Full of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green
spectacles, and called one fine morning, quite by accident, at the
Ministerial hotel. I found D---- at home, yawning, lounging, and
dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of
_ennui_. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now
alive--but that is only when nobody sees him.

"To be even with him, I complained of my weak eyes, and lamented the
necessity of the spectacles, under cover of which I cautiously and
thoroughly surveyed the whole apartment, while seemingly intent only
upon the conversation of my host.

"I paid especial attention to a large writing-table near which he sat,
and upon which lay confusedly some miscellaneous letters and other
papers, with one or two musical instruments and a few books. Here,
however, after a long and very deliberate scrutiny, I saw nothing to
excite particular suspicion.

"At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a
trumpery filigree card-rack of pasteboard that hung dangling by a
dirty blue ribbon from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of
the mantelpiece. In this rack, which had three or four compartments,
were five or six soiled cards and a solitary letter. This last was
much soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the
middle--as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up
as worthless had been altered or stayed in the second. It had a large
black seal, bearing the D---- cipher _very_ conspicuously, and was
addressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D----, the Minister,
himself. It was thrust carelessly, and even, as it seemed,
contemptuously, into one of the uppermost divisions of the rack.

"No sooner had I glanced at this letter than I concluded it to be
that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance,
radically different from the one of which the Prefect had read us so
minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the
D---- cipher; there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the
S---- family. Here the address, to the Minister, was diminutive and
feminine; there the superscription, to a certain royal personage,
was markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of
correspondence. But, then, the _radicalness_ of these differences,
which was excessive; the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the
paper, so inconsistent with the _true_ methodical habits of D----, and
so consistent of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of
the worthlessness of the document--these things, together with the
hyperobtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every
visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to
which I had previously arrived--these things, I say, were strongly
corroborative of suspicion in one who came with the intention to
suspect.

"I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I maintained a
most animated discussion with the Minister upon a topic which I knew
well had never failed to interest and excite him, I kept my attention
riveted upon the letter. In this examination I committed to memory its
external appearance and arrangement in the rack, and also fell, at
length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I
might have entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper,
I observed them to be more _chafed_ than seemed necessary. They
presented the _broken_ appearance which is manifested when a stiff
paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded
in a reversed direction, in the same creases or edges which formed the
original fold. This discovery was sufficient. It was clear to me that
the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-directed and
re-sealed. I bade the Minister good-morning, and took my departure at
once, leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table.

"The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed, quite
eagerly, the conversation of the preceding day. While thus engaged,
however, a loud report, as if of a pistol, was heard immediately
beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a series of
fearful screams and the shoutings of a terrified mob. D---- rushed to
a casement, threw it open, and looked out. In the mean time I stepped
to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced
it by a _facsimile_ (so far as regards externals), which I had
carefully prepared at my lodgings--imitating the D---- cipher, very
readily, by means of a seal formed of bread.

"The disturbance in the street had been occasioned by the frantic
behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among a crowd of
women and children. It proved, however, to have been without ball, and
the fellow was suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard. When
he had gone, D---- came from the window, whither I had followed him
immediately upon securing the object in view. Soon afterward I bade
him farewell. The pretended lunatic was a man in my own pay."

"But what purpose had you," I asked, "in replacing the letter by a
_facsimile_? Would it not have been better, at the first visit, to
have seized it openly and departed?"

"D----," replied Dupin, "is a desperate man and a man of nerve. His
hotel, too, is not without attendants devoted to his interests. Had
I made the wild attempt you suggest, I might never have left the
Ministerial presence alive. The good people of Paris might have heard
of me no more. But I had an object apart from these considerations.
You know my political prepossessions. In this matter I act as a
partisan of the lady concerned. For eighteen months the Minister has
had her in his power. She has now him in hers--since, being unaware
that the letter is not in his possession, he will proceed with his
exactions as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at
once, to his political destruction. His downfall, too, will not be
more precipitate than awkward. It is all very well to talk about the
_facilis descensus Averni_; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani
said of singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In
the present instance I have no sympathy--at least no pity--for him
who descends. He is that _monstrum horrendum_, an unprincipled man of
genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the
precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the
Prefect terms 'a certain personage,' he is reduced to opening the
letter I left for him in the card-rack."

"How? Did you put anything particular in it?"

"Why--it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior
blank--that would have been insulting. D----, at Vienna once, did me
an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-humoredly, that I should
remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard to the
identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought it a pity not
to give him a clew. He is well acquainted with my MS., and I just
copied into the middle of the blank sheet the words:

  "'----
  ... Un dessein si funeste,
  S'il n'est digne d'Atree, este digne de Thyeste.'

They are to be found in Crebillon's _Atree_."




RAB AND HIS FRIENDS

_Dr. John Brown_ (1810-1882)


Four-and-thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary
Street from the High School, our heads together, and our arms
intertwisted as only lovers and boys know how or why.

When we got to the top of the street and turned north we espied a
crowd at the Tron Church. "A dog-fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and
so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before
we got up! And is not this boy-nature, and human nature, too? And
don't we all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it? Dogs
like fighting; old Isaac says they "delight" in it, and for the best
of all reasons; and boys are not cruel because they like to see
the fight. They see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or
man--courage, endurance, and skill--in intense action. This is very
different from a love of making dogs fight, and aggravating and making
gain by their pluck. A boy--be he ever so fond himself of fighting, if
he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have run
off with Bob and me fast enough; it is a natural, and a not wicked,
interest that all boys and men have in witnessing intense energy in
action.

Does any curious and finely ignorant woman wish to know how Bob's eye
at a glance announced a dog-fight to his brain? He did not--he could
not--see the dogs fighting; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid
induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting is a crowd
masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman
fluttering wildly round the outside and using her tongue and her hands
freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular,
compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its
heads all bent downward and inward to one common focus.

Well, Bob and I are up, and find it is not over; a small thoroughbred,
white bull-terrier is busy throttling a large shepherd's dog,
unaccustomed to war but not to be trifled with. They are hard at
it; the scientific little fellow doing his work in great style, his
pastoral enemy fighting wildly, but with the sharpest of teeth and a
great courage. Science and breeding, however, soon had their own; the
Game Chicken, as the premature Bob called him, working his way up,
took his final grip of poor Yarrow's throat--and he lay gasping and
done for. His master, a brown, handsome, big, young shepherd from
Tweedsmuir, would have liked to have knocked down any man, would
"drink up Esil, or eat a crocodile," for that part, if he had a
chance; it was no use kicking the little dog; that would only make him
hold the closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls of the
best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near, and
many cried for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriar's
Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged
man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of
Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth and bit it with all his might. This
was more than enough for the much-enduring, much-perspiring shepherd,
who, with a gleam of joy over his broad visage, delivered a terrific
facer upon our large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged friend, who went
down like a shot.

Still the Chicken holds; death not far off. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff!"
observed a calm, highly dressed young buck with an eye-glass in his
eye. "Snuff, indeed!" growled the angry crowd, affronted and glaring.
"Snuff! a pinch of snuff!" again observes the buck, but with more
urgency; whereon were produced several open boxes, and from a mull
which may have been at Culloden he took a pinch, knelt down, and
presented it to the nose of the Chicken, The laws of physiology and of
snuff take their course; the Chicken sneezes, and Yarrow is free!

The young pastoral giant stalks off with Yarrow in his
arms--comforting him.

But the bull-terrier's blood is up, and his soul unsatisfied; he grips
the first dog he meets, and, discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric
phrase, he makes a brief sort of _amende_ and is off. The boys, with
Bob and me at their head, are after him: down Niddry Street he goes,
bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow--Bob and I, and our
small men; panting behind.

There, under the single arch of the South Bridge, is a huge mastiff,
sauntering down the middle of the causeway, as if with his hands in
his pockets; he is old, brindled, as big as a little Highland bull,
and has the Shakespearean dewlaps shaking as he goes.

The Chicken makes straight at him, and fastens on his throat. To our
astonishment, the great creature does nothing but stand still, hold
himself up, and roar--yes, roar, a long, serious, remonstrative roar.
How is this? Bob and I are up to them. _He is muzzled_! The bailies
had proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength
and economy mainly, had encompassed his huge jaws in a home-made
apparatus constructed out of the leather of some ancient _breechin_.
His mouth was open as far as it could; his lips curled up in rage--a
sort of terrible grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the
darkness; the strap across his mouth tense as a bowstring; his whole
frame stiff with indignation and surprise; his roar asking us all
round, "Did you ever see the like of this?" He looked a statue of
anger and astonishment done in Aberdeen granite.

We soon had a crowd; the Chicken held on. "A knife!" cried Bob; and a
cobbler gave him his knife; you know the kind of knife, worn obliquely
to a point and always keen. I put its edge to the tense leather; it
ran before it; and then!--one sudden jerk of that enormous head, a
sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise, and the bright and
fierce little fellow is dropped, limp and dead. A solemn pause; this
was more than any of us had bargained for. I turned the little fellow
over, and saw he was quite dead: the mastiff had taken him by the
small of the back like a rat and broken it.

He looked down at his victim appeased, ashamed, and amazed; sniffed
him all over, stared at him, and, taking a sudden thought, turned
round and trotted off. Bob took the dead dog up, and said, "John,
we'll bury him after tea." "Yes," said I, and was off after the
mastiff. He made up the Cowgate at a rapid swing; he had forgotten
some engagement. He turned up the Candlemaker Row, and stopped at the
Harrow Inn.

There was a carrier's cart ready to start, and a keen, thin,
impatient, black-a-vised little man, his hand at his gray horse's
head, looking about angrily for something. "Rab, ye thief!" said he,
aiming a kick at my great friend, who drew cringing up, and, avoiding
the heavy shoe with more agility than dignity and watching his
master's eye? slunk dismayed under the cart--his ears down, and as
much as he had of tail down, too.

What a man this must be--thought I--to whom my tremendous hero turns
tail! The carrier saw the muzzle hanging, cut and useless, from
his neck, and I eagerly told him the story, which Bob and I always
thought, and still think, Homer, or King David, or Sir Walter alone
were worthy to rehearse. The severe little man was mitigated, and
condescended to say, "Rab, ma man--puir Rabbie," whereupon the stump
of a tail rose up, the ears were cocked, the eyes filled and were
comforted; the two friends were reconciled. "Hupp!" and a stroke of
the whip were given to Jess, and off went the three.

Bob and I buried the Game Chicken that night (we had not much of a
tea) in the back-green of his house, in Melville Street, No. 17, with
considerable gravity and silence; and being at the time in the Iliad,
and, like all boys, Trojans, we of course called him Hector.

Six years have passed--a long time for a boy and a dog; Bob Ainslie
is off to the wars; I am a medical student, and clerk at Minto House
Hospital.

Rab I saw almost every week, on the Wednesday, and we had much
pleasant intimacy. I found the way to his heart by frequent scratching
of his huge head and an occasional bone. When I did not notice him he
would plant himself straight before me and stand wagging that bud of
a tail, and looking up, with his head a little to the one side. His
master I occasionally saw; he used to call me "Maister John," but was
laconic as any Spartan.

One fine October afternoon I was leaving the hospital, when I saw the
large gate open, and in walked Rab, with that great and easy saunter
of his. He looked as if taking possession of the place, like the Duke
of Wellington entering a subdued city, satiated with victory and
peace. After him came Jess, now white from age, with her cart; and
in it a woman carefully wrapped up--the carrier leading the horse
anxiously and looking back. When he saw me, James (for his name was
James Noble) made a curt and grotesque "boo," and said, "Maister John,
this is the mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest--some kind o'
an income, we're thinkin'."

By this time I saw the woman's face; she was sitting on a sack filled
with straw, with her husband's plaid round her, and his big-coat, with
its large, white metal buttons, over her feet.

I never saw a more unforgettable face--pale, serious, _lonely_,
delicate, sweet, without being at all what we call fine. She looked
sixty, and had on a mutch, white as snow, with its black ribbon; her
silvery, smooth hair setting off her dark-gray eyes--eyes such as one
sees only twice or thrice in a lifetime, full of suffering, full also
of the overcoming of it; her eyebrows black and delicate, and her
mouth firm, patient, and contented, which few mouths ever are.

As I have said, I never saw a more beautiful countenance, or one more
subdued to settled quiet. "Ailie," said James, "this is Maister John,
the young doctor; Rab's friend, ye ken. We often speak aboot you,
doctor." She smiled and made a movement, but said nothing, and
prepared to come down, putting her plaid aside and rising. Had
Solomon, in all his glory, been handing down the Queen of Sheba at his
palace gate, he could not have done it more daintily, more tenderly,
more like a gentleman than James, the Howland carrier, when he
lifted down Ailie, his wife. The contrast of his small, swarthy,
weather-beaten, keen, worldly face to hers--pale, subdued, and
beautiful--was something wonderful. Rab looked on concerned and
puzzled, but ready for anything that might turn up, were it to
strangle the nurse, the porter, or even me. Ailie and he seemed great
friends.

"As I was sayin', she's got a kind o' trouble in her breest, doctor;
wull ye tak' a look at it?" We walked into the consulting-room, all
four; Rab, grim and comic, willing to be happy and confidential if
cause should be shown, willing also to be the reverse on the same
terms. Ailie sat down, undid her open gown and her lawn handkerchief
round her neck, and, without a word, showed me her right breast. I
looked at it and examined it carefully, she and James watching me, and
Rab eying all three. What could I say? There it was, that had once
been so soft, so shapely, so white, so gracious and bountiful, so
"full of all blessed condition," hard as a stone, a centre of horrid
pain, making that pale face, with its gray, lucid, reasonable eyes,
and its sweet, resolved mouth, express the full measure of suffering
overcome. Why was that gentle, modest, sweet woman, clean and lovable,
condemned by God to bear such a burden?

I got her away to bed. "May Rab and me bide?" said James. "_You_ may;
and Rab, if he will behave himself." "I'se warrant he's do that,
doctor." And in slunk the faithful beast. There are no such dogs now.
He belonged to a lost tribe. As I have said, he was brindled, and gray
like Rubislaw granite; his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's;
his body thick-set, like a little bull--a sort of compressed Hercules
of a dog. He must have been ninety pounds' weight, at the least; he
had a large, blunt head; his muzzle black as night; his mouth blacker
than any night; a tooth or two--being all he had--gleaming out of his
jaws of darkness. His head was scarred with the records of old wounds,
a sort of series of fields of battles all over it; one eye out, one
ear cropped as close as was Archbishop Leighton's father's; the
remaining eye had the power of two; and above it, and in constant
communication with it, was a tattered rag of an ear, which was forever
unfurling itself, like an old flag; and then that bud of a tail, about
one inch long, if it could in any sense be said to be long, being as
broad as long--the mobility, the instantaneousness of that bud were
very funny and surprising, and its expressive twinklings and winkings,
the intercommunications between the eye, the ear, and it, were of the
oddest and swiftest.

Rab had the dignity and simplicity of great size; and, having fought
his way all along the road to absolute supremacy, he was as mighty in
his own line as Julius Caesar or the Duke of Wellington, and had the
gravity of all great fighters.

You must have often observed the likeness of certain men to certain
animals, and of certain dogs to men. Now, I never looked at Rab
without thinking of the great Baptist preacher, Andrew Fuller. The
same large, heavy, menacing, combative, sombre, honest countenance,
the same deep, inevitable eye; the same look, as of thunder asleep,
but ready--neither a dog nor a man to be trifled with.

Next day my master, the surgeon, examined Ailie. There could be no
doubt it must kill her, and soon. If it could be removed--it might
never return--it would give her speedy relief--she should have it
done. She curtsied, looked at James, and said, "When?" "To-morrow,"
said the kind surgeon--a man of few words. She and James and Rab and
I retired. I noticed that he and she spoke little, but seemed to
anticipate everything in each other. The following day, at noon,
the students came in, hurrying up the great stair. At the first
landing-place, on a small, well-known blackboard, was a bit of paper
fastened by wafers, and many remains of old wafers beside it. On the
paper were the words:

"An operation to-day.--J.B., _Clerk_."

Up ran the youths, eager to secure good places; in they crowded, full
of interest and talk. "What's the case?" "Which side is it?"

Don't think them heartless; they are neither better nor worse than you
or I; they get over their professional horrors, and into their proper
work; and in them pity, as an _emotion_, ending in itself or at best
in tears and a long-drawn breath, lessens, while pity, as a _motive_,
is quickened, and gains power and purpose. It is well for poor human
nature that it is so.

The operating-theatre is crowded; much talk and fun, and all the
cordiality and stir of youth. The surgeon with his staff of assistants
is there. In comes Ailie; one look at her quiets and abates the eager
students. That beautiful old woman is too much for them; they sit
down, and are dumb, and gaze at her. These rough boys feel the power
of her presence. She walks in quietly, but without haste; dressed in
her mutch, her neckerchief, her white dimity short-gown, her black
bombazeen petticoat, showing her white worsted stockings and her
carpet shoes. Behind her was James with Rab. James sat down in the
distance, and took that huge and noble head between his knees. Rab
looked perplexed and dangerous--forever cocking his ear and dropping
it as fast.

Ailie stepped up on a seat, and laid herself on the table, as her
friend the surgeon told her; arranged herself, gave a rapid look at
James, shut her eyes, rested herself on me, and took my hand.
The operation was at once begun; it was necessarily slow; and
chloroform--one of God's best gifts to his suffering children--was
then unknown. The surgeon did his work. The pale face showed its pain,
but was still and silent. Rab's soul was working within him; he saw
something strange was going on, blood flowing from his mistress, and
she suffering; his ragged ear was up and importunate; he growled and
gave now and then a sharp, impatient yelp; he would have liked to have
done something to that man. But James had him firm, and gave him a
_glower_ from time to time, and an intimation of a possible kick; all
the better for James--it kept his eye and his mind off Ailie.

It is over; she is dressed, steps gently and decently down from the
table, looks for James; then turning to the surgeon and the students,
she curtsies, and in a low, clear voice, begs their pardon if she has
behaved ill. The students--all of us--wept like children; the surgeon
wrapped her up carefully, and, resting on James and me, Ailie went
to her room, and Rab followed. We put her to bed. James took off his
heavy shoes, crammed with tackets, heel-capped and toe-capped, and put
them carefully under the table, saying: "Maister John, I'm for nane o'
yer strynge nurse bodies for Ailie. I'll be her nurse, and I'll gang
aboot on my stockin' soles as canny as pussy." And so he did;
and handy and clever, and swift and tender as any woman was that
horny-handed, snell, peremptory little man. Everything she got he gave
her; he seldom slept; and often I saw his small, shrewd eyes out of
the darkness, fixed on her. As before, they spoke little.

Rab behaved well, never moving, showing us how meek and gentle he
could be, and occasionally, in his sleep, letting us know that he
was demolishing some adversary. He took a walk with me every day,
generally to the Candlemaker Row; but he was sombre and mild; declined
doing battle, though some fit cases offered, and indeed submitted to
sundry indignities; and was always very ready to turn, and came faster
back, and trotted up the stair with much lightness, and went straight
to that door.

Jess, the mare, had been sent, with her weather-beaten cart, to
Howgate, and had doubtless her own dim and placid meditations and
confusions on the absence of her master and Rab and her unnatural
freedom from the road and her cart.

For some days Ailie did well. The wound healed "by the first
intention"; for as James said, "Oor Ailie's skin's ower clean to
beil." The students came in quiet and anxious, and surrounded her
bed. She said she liked to see their young, honest faces. The surgeon
dressed her, and spoke to her in his own short, kind way, pitying her
through his eyes, Rab and James outside the circle--Rab being now
reconciled, and even cordial, and having made up his mind that as yet
nobody required worrying, but, as you may suppose, _semper paratus_.

So far well; but, four days after the operation, my patient had a
sudden and long shivering, a "groosin," as she called it. I saw her
soon after; her eyes were too bright, her cheek ; she was
restless, and ashamed of being so; the balance was lost; mischief had
begun. On looking at the wound, a blush of red told the secret; her
pulse was rapid, her breathing anxious and quick; she wasn't herself,
as she said, and was vexed at her restlessness. We tried what we
could. James did everything, was everywhere, never in the way, never
out of it; Rab subsided under the table into a dark place, and was
motionless, all but his eye, which followed every one. Ailie got
worse; began to wander in her mind, gently; was more demonstrative in
her ways to James, rapid in her questions, and sharp at times. He was
vexed, and said, "She was never that way afore, no, never." For a time
she knew her head was wrong, and was always asking our pardon--the
dear, gentle old woman; then delirium set in strong, without pause.
Her brain gave way, and then came that terrible spectacle,

  "The intellectual power, through words and things,
  Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way";

she sang bits of old songs and Psalms, stopping suddenly, mingling the
Psalms of David and the diviner words of his Son and Lord with homely
odds and ends of ballads.

Nothing more touching, or in a sense more strangely beautiful, did
I ever witness. Her tremulous, rapid, affectionate, eager, Scotch
voice--the swift, aimless, bewildered mind, the baffled utterance,
the bright and perilous eye; some wild words, some household cares,
something for James, the names of the dead, Rab called rapidly and in
a "fremyt" voice, and he starting up, surprised, and slinking off as
if he were to blame somehow, or had been dreaming he heard. Many eager
questions and beseechings which James and I could make nothing of, and
on which she seemed to set her all, and then sink back ununderstood.
It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad.
James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as
ever; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms,
prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way,
showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and
doating over her as his "ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ain bonnie
wee dawtie!"

The end was drawing on; the golden bowl was breaking; the silver
cord was fast being loosed--that _animula, blandula, vagula, hospes,
comesque_, was about to flee. The body and the soul--companions for
sixty years--were being sundered and taking leave. She was walking,
alone, through the valley of that shadow into which one day we must
all enter--and yet she was not alone, for we know whose rod and staff
were comforting her.

One night she had fallen quiet, and, as we hoped, asleep; her eyes
were shut. We put down the gas, and sat watching her. Suddenly she sat
up in bed, and, taking a bedgown which was lying on it rolled up, she
held it eagerly to her breast--to the right side. We could see her
eyes bright with a surprising tenderness and joy, bending over this
bundle of clothes. She held it as a woman holds her sucking child;
opening out her night-gown impatiently, and holding it close and
brooding over it and murmuring foolish little words, as over one whom
his mother comforteth, and who sucks and is satisfied. It was pitiful
and strange to see her wasted, dying look, keen and yet vague--her
immense love.

"Preserve me!" groaned James, giving way. And then she rocked back and
forward, as if to make it sleep, hushing it, and wasting on it her
infinite fondness. "Wae's me, doctor; I declare she's thinkin' it's
that bairn." "What bairn?" "The only bairn we ever had; our wee Mysie,
and she's in the Kingdom forty years and mair." It was plainly true;
the pain in the breast, telling its urgent story to a bewildered,
ruined brain, was misread and mistaken; it suggested to her the
uneasiness of a breast full of milk, and then the child; and so again
once more they were together, and she had her ain wee Mysie on her
bosom.

This was the close. She sank rapidly; the delirium left her; but, as
she whispered, she was "clean silly"; it was the lightening before the
final darkness. After having for some time lain still, her eyes shut,
she said, "James!" He came close to her, and, lifting up her calm,
clear, beautiful eyes, she gave him a long look, turned to me kindly
but shortly, looked for Rab but could not see him, then turned to her
husband again, as if she would never leave off looking, shut her eyes,
and composed herself. She lay for some time breathing quick, and
passed away so gently that, when we thought she was gone, James, in
his old-fashioned way, held the mirror to her face. After a long
pause, one small spot of dimness was breathed out; it vanished away,
and never returned, leaving the blank, clear darkness without a stain.
"What is our life? It is even as a vapor, which appeareth for a little
time, and then vanisheth away."

Rab all this time had been full awake and motionless; he came forward
beside us; Ailie's hand, which James had held, was hanging down; it
was soaked with his tears; Rab licked it all over carefully, looked at
her, and returned to his place under the table.

James and I sat, I don't know how long, but for some time. Saying
nothing, he started up abruptly, and with some noise went to the
table, and, putting his right fore and middle fingers each into a
shoe, pulled them out and put them on, breaking one of the leather
latchets, and muttering in anger, "I never did the like o' that
afore!"

I believe he never did; nor after either. "Rab!" he said, roughly,
and, pointing with his thumb to the bottom of the bed. Rab leaped up
and settled himself, his head and eye to the dead face. "Maister John,
ye'll wait for me," said the carrier; and disappeared in the darkness,
thundering down-stairs in his heavy shoes. I ran to a front window;
there he was, already round the house and out at the gate, fleeing
like a shadow.

I was afraid about him, and yet not afraid; so I sat down beside Rab,
and, being wearied, fell asleep. I awoke from a sudden noise outside.
It was November, and there had been a heavy fall of snow. Rab was _in
statu quo_; he heard the noise, too, and plainly knew it, but never
moved. I looked out; and there, at the gate, in the dim morning--for
the sun was not up--was Jess and the cart, a cloud of steam rising
from the old mare. I did not see James; he was already at the door,
and came up the stairs and met me. It was less than three hours since
he left, and he must have posted out--who knows how?--to Howgate, full
nine miles off, yoked Jess, and driven her astonished into town. He
had an armful of blankets, and was streaming with perspiration. He
nodded to me, and spread out on the floor two pairs of clean old
blankets having at their corners, "A.G., 1794," in large letters in
red worsted. These were the initials of Alison Graeme, and James may
have looked in at her from without--himself unseen but not unthought
of--when he was "wat, wat, and weary," and, after having walked many
a mile over the hills, may have seen her sitting, while "a' the lave
were sleeping," and by the firelight working her name on the blankets
for her ain James's bed.

He motioned Rab down, and, taking his wife in his arms, laid her in
the blankets, and happed her carefully and firmly up, leaving the face
uncovered; and then, lifting her, he nodded again sharply to me, and
with a resolved but utterly miserable face strode along the passage
and down-stairs, followed by Rab. I followed with a light; but he
didn't need it. I went out, holding stupidly the candle in my hand in
the calm, frosty air; we were soon at the gate. I could have helped
him, but I saw he was not to be meddled with, and he was strong, and
did not need it. He laid her down as tenderly, as safely, as he had
lifted her out ten days before--as tenderly as when he had her first
in his arms when she was only "A.G."--sorted her, leaving that
beautiful sealed face open to the heavens; and then, taking Jess by
the head, he moved away. He did not notice me, neither did Rab, who
presided behind the cart.

I stood till they passed through the long shadow of the College and
turned up Nicolson Street. I heard the solitary cart sound through the
streets, and die away and come again; and I returned, thinking of that
company going up Libberton Brae, then along Roslin Muir, the morning
light touching the Pentlands, and making them like onlooking
ghosts; then down the hill through Auchindinny woods, past "haunted
Woodhouselee"; and as daybreak came sweeping up the bleak Lammermuirs,
and fell on his own door, the company would stop, and James would take
the key, and lift Ailie up again, laying her on her own bed, and,
having put Jess up, would return with Rab and shut the door.

James buried his wife, with his neighbors mourning, Rab watching the
proceedings from a distance. It was snow, and that black, ragged hole
would look strange in the midst of the swelling, spotless cushion of
white. James looked after everything; then rather suddenly fell ill,
and took to bed; was insensible when the doctor came, and soon died.
A sort of low fever was prevailing in the village, and his want of
sleep, his exhaustion, and his misery made him apt to take it. The
grave was not difficult to reopen. A fresh fall of snow had again made
all things white and smooth; Rab once more looked on, and slunk home
to the stable.

And what of Rab? I asked for him next week at the new carrier who got
the good-will of James's business and was now master of Jess and her
cart. "How's Rab?" He put me off, and said, rather rudely, "What's
_your_ business wi' the dowg?" I was not to be so put off. "Where's
Rab?" He, getting confused and red, and intermeddling with his hair,
said, "'Deed, sir, Rab's deid." "Dead! What did he die of?" "Weel,
sir," said he, getting redder, "he didna' exactly dee; he was killed.
I had to brain him wi' a rack-pin; there was nae doin' wi' him. He lay
in the treviss wi' the mear, and wadna come oot. I tempit him wi' kail
and meat, but he wad tak naething, and keepit me frae feeding the
beast, and he was aye gurrin', and grup, gruppin' me by the legs. I
was laith to mak' awa' wi' the auld dowg, his like wasna atween this
and Thornhill--but, 'deed, sir, I could do naething else." I believed
him. Fit end for Rab, quick and complete. His teeth and his friends
gone, why should he keep the peace and be civil?

He was buried in the braeface, near the burn, the children of the
village, his companions, who used to make very free with him and sit
on his ample stomach as he lay half asleep at the door in the sun,
watching the solemnity.




THE BOOTS AT THE HOLLY-TREE INN

_Charles Dickens_ (1812-1870)


Where had he been in his time? he repeated, when I asked him the
question, Lord, he had been everywhere! And what had he been? Bless
you, he had been everything you could mention, a'most!

Seen a good deal? Why, of course he had. I should say so, he could
assure me, if I only knew about a twentieth part of what had come in
_his_ way. Why, it would be easier for him, he expected, to tell what
he hadn't seen than what he had. Ah! a deal, it would.

What was the curiousest thing he had seen? Well! He didn't know.
He couldn't momently name what was the curiousest thing he had
seen--unless it was a Unicorn--and he see _him_ once at a fair. But
supposing a young gentleman not eight year old was to run away with
a fine young woman of seven, might I think _that_ a queer start?
Certainly. Then that was a start as he himself had had his blessed
eyes on, and he had cleaned the shoes they run away in--and they was
so little he couldn't get his hand into 'em.

Master Harry Walmers' father, you see, he lived at the Elmses, down
away by Shooter's Hill there, six or seven miles from Lunnon. He was
a gentleman of spirit, and good-looking, and held his head up when he
walked, and had what you call Fire about him. He wrote poetry, and he
rode, and he ran, and he cricketed, and he danced, and he acted, and
he done it all equally beautiful. He was uncommon proud of Master
Harry as was his only child; but he didn't spoil him neither. He was
a gentleman that had a will of his own and a eye of his own, and that
would be minded. Consequently, though he made quite a companion of the
fine bright boy, and was delighted to see him so fond of reading his
fairy-books, and was never tired of hearing him say my name is Norval,
or hearing him sing his songs about Young May Moons is beaming love,
and When he as adores thee has left but the name, and that; still he
kept the command over the child, and the child _was_ a child, and it's
to be wished more of 'em was.

How did Boots happen to know all this? Why, through being
under-gardener. Of course he couldn't be under-gardener, and he always
about, in the summer-time, near the windows on the lawn, a-mowing, and
sweeping, and weeding, and pruning, and this and that, without getting
acquainted with the ways of the family. Even supposing Master Harry
hadn't come to him one morning early, and said, "Cobbs, how should you
spell Norah, if you was asked?" and then began cutting it in print all
over the fence.

He couldn't say that he had taken particular notice of children before
that; but really it was pretty to see them two mites a-going about the
place together, deep in love. And the courage of the boy! Bless your
soul, he'd have throwed off his little hat, and tucked up his little
sleeves, and gone in at a lion, he would, if they had happened to meet
one, and she had been frightened of him. One day he stops, along with
her, where Boots was hoeing weeds in the gravel, and says, speaking
up, "Cobbs," he says, "I like _you." "Do_ you, sir? I'm proud to hear
it." "Yes, I do, Cobbs. Why do I like you, do you think, Cobbs?"
"Don't know, Master Harry, I am sure." "Because Norah likes you,
Cobbs." "Indeed, sir? That's very gratifying." "Gratifying, Cobbs?
It's better than millions of the brightest diamonds to be liked by
Norah." "Certainly, sir." "Would you like another situation, Cobbs?"
"Well, sir, I shouldn't object if it was a good 'un." "Then, Cobbs,"
says he, "you shall be our Head Gardener when we are married." And he
tucks her, in her little sky-blue mantle, under his arm, and walks
away.

Boots could assure me that it was better than a picter, and equal to a
play, to see them babies, with their long, bright, curling hair, their
sparkling eyes, and their beautiful light tread, a-rambling about the
garden, deep in love. Boots was of opinion that the birds believed
they was birds, and kept up with 'em, singing to please 'em. Sometimes
they would creep under the tulip-tree, and would sit there with their
arms round one another's necks, and their soft cheeks touching,
a-reading about the Prince and the Dragon, and the good and bad
enchanters, and the king's fair daughter. Sometimes he would hear them
planning about a house in a forest, keeping bees and a cow, and living
entirely on milk and honey. Once he came upon them by the pond, and
heard Master Harry say, "Adorable Norah, kiss me, and say you love
me to distraction, or I'll jump in head foremost." And Boots made no
question he would have done it if she hadn't complied. On the
whole, Boots said it had a tendency to make him feel he was in love
himself--only he didn't exactly know who with.

"Cobbs," said Master Harry, one evening, when Cobbs was watering
the flowers, "I am going on a visit, this present midsummer, to my
grandmamma's at York."

"Are you, indeed, sir? I hope you'll have a pleasant time. I am going
into Yorkshire, myself, when I leave here."

"Are you going to your grandmamma's, Cobbs?"

"No, sir. I haven't got such a thing."

"Not as a grandmamma, Cobbs?"

"No, sir."

The boy looked on at the watering of the flowers for a little while,
and then said, "I shall be very glad indeed to go, Cobbs--Norah's
going."

"You'll be all right, then, sir," says Cobbs, "with your beautiful
sweetheart by your side."

"Cobbs," returned the boy, flushing, "I never let anybody joke about
it when I can prevent them."

"It wasn't a joke, sir," says Cobbs, with humility--"wasn't so meant."

"I am glad of that, Cobbs, because I like you, you know, and you're
going to live with us. Cobbs!"

"Sir."

"What do you think my grandmamma gives me when I go down there?"

"I couldn't so much as make a guess, sir."

"A Bank-of-England five-pound note, Cobbs."

"Whew!" says Cobbs, "that's a spanking sum of money, Master Harry."

"A person could do a great deal with such a sum of money as
that--couldn't a person, Cobbs?"

"I believe you, sir!"

"Cobbs," said the boy, "I'll tell you a secret. At Norah's house they
have been joking her about me, and pretending to laugh at our being
engaged--pretending to make game of it, Cobbs!"

"Such, sir," says Cobbs, "is the depravity of human natur'."

The boy, looking exactly like his father, stood for a few minutes
with his glowing face toward the sunset, and then departed with,
"Good-night, Cobbs. I'm going in."

If I was to ask Boots how it happened that he was a-going to leave
that place just at that present time, well, he couldn't rightly answer
me. He did suppose he might have stayed there till now if he had been
anyways inclined. But you see, he was younger then, and he wanted
change. That's what he wanted--change. Mr. Walmers, he said to him
when he gave him notice of his intentions to leave, "Cobbs," he says,
"have you anythink to complain of? I make the inquiry, because if I
find that any of my people really has anythink to complain of, I wish
to make it right if I can." "No, sir," says Cobbs; "thanking you, sir,
I find myself as well sitiwated here as I could hope to be anywheres.
The truth is, sir, that I'm a-going to seek my fortun'." "Oh, indeed,
Cobbs!" he says; "I hope you may find it." And Boots could assure
me--which he did, touching his hair with his bootjack, as a salute in
the way of his present calling--that he hadn't found it yet.

Well, sir! Boots left the Elmses when his time was up, and Master
Harry, he went down to the old lady's at York, which old lady would
have given that child the teeth out of her head (if she had had any),
she was so wrapped up in him. What does that Infant do--for Infant
you may call him, and be within the mark--but cut away from that old
lady's with his Norah, on a expedition to go to Gretna Green and be
married!

Sir, Boots was at this identical Holly-Tree Inn (having left it
several times to better himself, but always come back through one
thing or another), when, one summer afternoon, the coach drives up,
and out of the coach gets them two children. The Guard says to our
Governor, "I don't quite make out these little passengers, but the
young gentleman's words was, that they was to be brought here."
The young gentleman gets out; hands his lady out; gives the Guard
something for himself; says to our Governor, "We're to stop here
to-night, please. Sitting-room and two bedrooms will be required.
Chops and cherry-pudding for two!" and tucks her in her little
sky-blue mantle, under his arm, and walks into the house much bolder
than Brass.

Boots leaves me to judge what the amazement of that establishment was,
when these two tiny creatures all alone by themselves was marched
into the Angel--much more so when he, who had seen them without their
seeing him, give the Governor his views upon the expedition they was
upon. "Cobbs," says the Governor, "if this is so, I must set off
myself to York, and quiet their friends' minds. In which case you must
keep your eye upon 'em, and humor 'em till I come back. But before I
take these measures, Cobbs, I should wish you to find from themselves
whether your opinions is correct." "Sir, to you," says Cobbs, "that
shall be done directly."

So Boots goes up-stairs to the Angel, and there he finds Master Harry,
on a e'normous sofa--immense at any time, but looking like the Great
Bed of Ware, compared with him--a-drying the eyes of Miss Norah with
his pocket-hankecher. Their little legs was entirely off the ground,
of course, and it really is not possible for Boots to express to me
how small them children looked.

"It's Cobbs! It's Cobbs!" cries Master Harry, and comes running to him
on t'other side, and catching hold of his t'other hand, and they both
jump for joy.

"I see you a-getting out, sir," says Cobbs. "I thought it was you. I
thought I couldn't be mistaken in your height and figure. What's the
object of your journey, sir? Matrimonial?"

"We're going to be married, Cobbs, at Gretna Green," returned the boy.
"We have run away on purpose. Norah has been in rather low spirits,
Cobbs; but she'll be happy, now we have found you to be our friend."

"Thank you, sir, and thank _you_, miss," says Cobbs, "for your good
opinion. _Did_ you bring any luggage with you, sir?"

If I will believe Boots when he gives me his word and honor upon
it, the lady had got a parasol, a smelling-bottle, a round and a
half of cold buttered toast, eight peppermint drops, and a
hair-brush--seemingly a doll's. The gentleman had got about half a
dozen yards of string, a knife, three or four sheets of writing-paper,
folded up surprising small, a orange, and a Chaney mug with his name
upon it.

"What may be the exact nature of your plans, sir?" says Cobbs.

"To go on," replied the boy--which the courage of that boy was
something wonderful!--"in the morning, and be married to-morrow."

"Just so, sir," says Cobbs. "Would it meet your views, sir, if I was
to accompany you?"

When Cobbs said this, they both jumped for joy again, and cried out,
"Oh yes, yes, Cobbs! Yes!"

"Well, sir!" says Cobbs. "If you will excuse me having the freedom
to give an opinion, what I should recommend would be this. I am
acquainted with a pony, sir, which, put in a pheayton that I could
borrow, would take you and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior (myself driving,
if you approved), to the end of your journey in a very short space of
time. I am not altogether sure, sir, that this pony will be at liberty
to-morrow, but even if you had to wait over to-morrow for him, it
might be worth your while. As to the small account here, sir, in case
you was to find yourself running at all short, that don't signify;
because I am a part proprietor of this inn, and it could stand over."

Boots assures me that when they clapped their hands, and jumped for
joy again, and called him "Good Cobbs!" and "Dear Cobbs!" and bent
across him to kiss one another in the delight of their confiding
hearts, he felt himself the meanest rascal for deceiving 'em that ever
was born.

"Is there anything you want just at present, sir?" says Cobbs,
mortally ashamed of himself.

"We should like some cakes after dinner," answered Master Harry,
folding his arms, putting out one leg, and looking straight at him,
"and two apples and jam. With dinner we should like to have toast and
water. But Norah has always been accustomed to half a glass of currant
wine at dessert. And so have I."

"It shall be ordered at the bar, sir," says Cobbs; and away he went.

Boots has the feeling as fresh upon him this moment of speaking as he
had then, that he would far rather have had it out in half a dozen
rounds with the Governor than have combined with him; and that he
wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where two
babies could make an impossible marriage, and live impossibly
happy ever afterward. However, as it couldn't be, he went into the
Governor's plans, and the Governor set off for York in half an hour.

The way in which the women of that house--without exception--every one
of 'em--married _and_ single--took to that boy when they heard the
story, Boots considers surprising. It was as much as he could do to
keep 'em from dashing into the room and kissing him. They climbed
up all sorts of places, at the risk of their lives, to look at him
through a pane of glass. They was seven deep at the keyhole. They was
out of their minds about him and his bold spirit.

In the evening, Boots went into the room to see how the runaway couple
was getting on. The gentleman was on the window-seat, supporting the
lady in his arms. She had tears upon her face, and was lying, very
tired and half asleep, with her head upon his shoulder.

"Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, fatigued, sir?" says Cobbs.

"Yes, she is tired, Cobbs; but she is not used to be away from home,
and she has been in low spirits again. Cobbs, do you think you could
bring a biffin, please?"

"I ask your pardon, sir," says Cobbs. "What was it you--"

"I think a Norfolk biffin would rouse her, Cobbs. She is very fond of
them."

Boots withdrew in search of the required restorative, and, when he
brought it in, the gentleman handed it to the lady, and fed her with a
spoon, and took a little himself; the lady being heavy with sleep, and
rather cross. "What should you think, sir," says Cobbs, "of a chamber
candlestick?" The gentleman approved; the chambermaid went first,
up the great staircase; the lady, in her sky-blue mantle, followed,
gallantly escorted by the gentleman; the gentleman embraced her at her
door, and retired to his own apartment, where Boots softly locked him
in.

Boots couldn't but feel with increased acuteness what a base deceiver
he was, when they consulted him at breakfast (they had ordered sweet
milk-and-water, and toast and currant jelly, over-night) about the
pony. It really was as much as he could do, he don't mind confessing
to me, to look them two young things in the face, and think what a
wicked old father of lies he had grown up to be. Howsomever, he went
on a-lying like a Trojan about the pony. He told 'em that it did so
unfortunately happen that the pony was half clipped, you see, and that
he couldn't be taken out in that state, for fear it should strike to
his inside. But that he'd be finished clipping in the course of the
day, and that to-morrow morning at eight o'clock the pheayton would be
ready. Boots' view of the whole case, looking back on it in my room,
is, that Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, was beginning to give in. She
hadn't had her hair curled when she went to bed, and she didn't seem
quite up to brushing it herself, and its getting in her eyes put
her out. But nothing put out Master Harry. He sat behind his
breakfast-cup, a-tearing away at the jelly, as if he had been his own
father.

After breakfast Boots is inclined to consider they drawed soldiers--at
least he knows that many such was found in the fireplace, all on
horseback. In the course of the morning Master Harry rang the bell--it
was surprising how that there boy did carry on--and said, in a
sprightly way, "Cobbs, is there any good walks in this neighborhood?"

"Yes, sir," says Cobbs. "There's Love Lane."

"Get out with you, Cobbs!"--that was that there boy's
expression--"you're joking."

"Begging your pardon, sir," says Cobbs, "there _really is_ Love Lane.
And a pleasant walk it is, and proud shall I be to show it to yourself
and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior."

"Norah, dear," says Master Harry, "this is curious. We really ought to
see Love Lane. Put on your bonnet, my sweetest darling, and we will go
there with Cobbs."

Boots leaves me to judge what a Beast he felt himself to be, when that
young pair told him, as they all three jogged along together, that
they had made up their minds to give him two thousand guineas a year
as Head Gardener, on account of his being so true a friend to 'em.
Boots could have wished at the moment that the earth would have
opened and swallowed him up, he felt so mean, with their beaming
eyes a-looking at him, and believing him. Well, sir, he turned the
conversation as well as he could, and he took 'em down Love Lane to
the water-meadows, and there Master Harry would have drowned himself
in half a moment more, a-getting out a water-lily for her--but nothing
daunted that boy. Well, sir, they was tired out. All being so new and
strange to 'em, they was tired as tired could be. And they laid
down on a bank of daisies, like the children in the wood, leastways
meadows, and fell asleep.

Boots don't know--perhaps I do--but never mind, it don't signify
either way--why it made a man fit to make a fool of himself to see
them two pretty babies a-lying there in the clear, still day, not
dreaming half so hard when they was asleep as they done when they was
awake. But, Lord! when you come to think of yourself, you know, and
what a game you have been up to ever since you was in your own cradle,
and what a poor sort of chap you are, and how it's always either
Yesterday with you, or To-morrow, and never To-day, that's where it
is!

Well, sir, they woke up at last, and then one thing was getting pretty
clear to Boots--namely, that Mrs. Harry Walmerses, Junior's, temper
was on the move. When Master Harry took her round the waist, she said
he "teased her so"; and when he says, "Norah, my young May Moon, your
Harry tease you?" she tells him, "Yes; and I want to go home."

A biled fowl and baked bread-and-butter pudding brought Mrs. Walmers
up a little; but Boots could have wished, he must privately own to
me, to have seen her more sensible of the woice of love, and less
abandoning of herself to currants. However, Master Harry, he kept up,
and his noble heart was as fond as ever. Mrs. Walmers turned very
sleepy about dusk, and began to cry. Therefore, Mrs. Walmers went off
to bed as per yesterday; and Master Harry ditto repeated.

About eleven or twelve at night comes back the Governor in a chaise,
along with Mr. Walmers and a elderly lady. Mr. Walmers looks amused
and very serious, both at once, and says to our Missis: "We are much
indebted to you, ma'am; for your kind care of our little children,
which we can never sufficiently acknowledge. Pray, ma'am, where is
my boy?" Our Missis says: "Cobbs has the dear child in charge, sir.
Cobbs, show Forty!" Then he says to Cobbs: "Ah, Cobbs, I am glad to
see _you_! I understood you was here!" And Cobbs says: "Yes, sir. Your
most obedient, sir."

I may be surprised to hear Boots say it, perhaps; but Boots assures
me that his heart beat like a hammer, going up-stairs. "I beg your
pardon, sir," says he, while unlocking the door; "I do hope you are
not angry with Master Harry. For Master Harry is a fine boy, sir, and
will do you credit and honor." And Boots signifies to me that, if the
fine boy's father had contradicted him in the daring state of mind in
which he then was, he thinks he should have "fetched him a crack," and
taken the consequences.

But Mr. Walmers only says: "No, Cobbs. No, my good fellow. Thank you!"
And, the door being opened, goes in.

Boots goes in, too, holding the light, and he sees Mr. Walmers go up
to the bedside, bend gently down, and kiss the little sleeping face.
Then he stands looking at it for a minute, looking wonderfully like it
(they do say he ran away with Mrs. Walmers); and then he gently shakes
the little shoulder.

"Harry, my dear boy! Harry!"

Master Harry starts up and looks at him. Looks at Cobbs, too. Such is
the honor of that mite, that he looks at Cobbs, to see whether he has
brought him into trouble.

"I'm not angry, my child. I only want you to dress yourself and come
home."

"Yes, pa."

Master Harry dresses himself quickly. His breast begins to swell when
he has nearly finished, and it swells more and more as he stands, at
last, a-looking at his father; his father standing a-looking at him,
the quiet image of him.

"Please may I"--the spirit of that little creatur', and the way he
kept his rising tears down!--"please, dear pa--may I--kiss Norah
before I go?"

"You may, my child."

So he takes Master Harry in his hand, and Boots leads the way with the
candle, and they come to that other bedroom, where the elderly lady is
seated by the bed, and poor little Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, is fast
asleep. There the father lifts the child up to the pillow, and he lays
his little face down for an instant by the little warm face of poor
unconscious little Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, and gently draws it to
him--a sight so touching to the chambermaids, who are peeping through
the door, that one of them called out, "It's a shame to part 'em!" But
this chambermaid was always, as Boots informs us, a softhearted one.
Not that there was any harm in that girl. Far from it.

Finally, Boots says, that's all about it. Mr. Walmers drove away in
the chaise, having hold of Master Harry's hand. The elderly lady and
Mrs. Walmers, Junior, that was never to be (she married a Captain long
afterward, and died in India), went off next day. In conclusion, Boots
puts it to me whether I hold with him in two opinions: firstly, that
there are not many couples on their way to be married who are half as
innocent of guile as those two children; secondly, that it would be a
jolly good thing for a great many couples on their way to be married,
if they could only be stopped in time, and brought back separately.




A STORY OF SEVEN DEVILS[1]

[Footnote 1: From _Amos Kilbright and Other Stories_. 1888.]

_Frank R. Stockton_ (1834-1902)


The <DW64> church which stood in the pine woods near the little village
of Oxford Cross Roads, in one of the lower counties of Virginia, was
presided over by an elderly individual, known to the community in
general as Uncle Pete; but on Sundays the members of his congregation
addressed him as Brudder Pete. He was an earnest and energetic man,
and, although he could neither read nor write, he had for many years
expounded the Scriptures to the satisfaction of his hearers. His
memory was good, and those portions of the Bible, which from time to
time he had heard read, were used by him, and frequently with powerful
effect, in his sermons. His interpretations of the Scriptures were
generally entirely original, and were made to suit the needs, or what
he supposed to be the needs, of his congregation.

Whether as "Uncle Pete" in the garden and corn-field, or "Brudder
Pete" in the church, he enjoyed the good opinion of everybody
excepting one person, and that was his wife. She was a high-tempered
and somewhat dissatisfied person, who had conceived the idea that her
husband was in the habit of giving too much time to the church, and
too little to the acquisition of corn-bread and pork. On a certain
Saturday she gave him a most tremendous scolding, which so affected
the spirits of the good man that it influenced his decision in regard
to the selection of the subject for his sermon the next day.

His congregation was accustomed to being astonished, and rather liked
it, but never before had their minds received such a shock as when the
preacher announced the subject of his discourse. He did not take any
particular text, for this was not his custom, but he boldly stated
that the Bible declared that every woman in this world was possessed
by seven devils; and the evils which this state of things had brought
upon the world, he showed forth with much warmth and feeling.
Subject-matter, principally from his own experience, crowded in upon
his mind, and he served it out to his audience hot and strong. If
his deductions could have been proved to be correct, all women were
creatures who, by reason of their sevenfold diabolic possession, were
not capable of independent thought or action, and who should in tears
and humility place themselves absolutely under the direction and
authority of the other sex.

When he approached the conclusion of his sermon, Brother Peter closed
with a bang the Bible, which, although he could not read a word of
it, always lay open before him while he preached, and delivered the
concluding exhortation of his sermon.

"Now, my dear brev'ren ob dis congregation," he said, "I want you to
understan' dat dar's nuffin in dis yer sarmon wot you've jus' heerd
ter make you think yousefs angels. By no means, brev'ren; you was all
brung up by women, an' you've got ter lib wid' em, an ef anythin' in
dis yer worl' is ketchin', my dear brev'ren, it's habin debbils, an'
from wot I've seen ob some ob de men ob dis worl' I 'spect dey is
persest ob 'bout all de debbils dey got room fur. But de Bible don'
say nuffin p'intedly on de subjec' ob de number ob debbils in man, an'
I 'spec' dose dat's got 'em--an' we ought ter feel pow'ful thankful,
my dear brev'ren, dat de Bible don' say we all's got 'em--has 'em
'cordin to sarcumstances. But wid de women it's dif'rent; dey's got
jus' sebin, an' bless my soul, brev'ren, I think dat's 'nuff.

"While I was a-turnin' ober in my min' de subjec' ob dis sarmon, dere
come ter me a bit ob Scripter wot I heerd at a big preachin' an'
baptizin' at Kyarter's Mills, 'bout ten year' ago. One ob de preachers
was a-tellin' about ole mudder Ebe a-eatin' de apple, and says he: De
sarpint fus' come along wid a red apple, an' says he: 'You gib dis yer
to your husban', an' he think it so mighty good dat when he done eat
it he gib you anything you ax him fur, ef you tell him whar de tree
is.' Ebe, she took one bite, an' den she frew dat apple away. 'Wot you
mean, you triflin' sarpint,' says she, 'a fotchin' me dat apple wot
ain't good fur nuffin but ter make cider wid?' Den de sarpint he go
fotch her a yaller apple, an' she took one bite, an' den says she: 'Go
'long wid ye, you fool sarpint, wot you fotch me dat June apple wot
ain't got no taste to it?' Den de sarpint he think she like sumpin'
sharp, an' he fotch her a green apple. She takes one bite ob it, an'
den she frows it at his head, an' sings out: 'Is you 'spectin' me to
gib dat apple to yer Uncle Adam an' gib him de colic?' Den de debbil
he fotch her a lady-apple, but she say she won't take no sich triflin'
nubbins as dat to her husban', an' she took one bite ob it, an' frew
it away. Den he go fotch her two udder kin' ob apples, one yaller
wid red stripes, an' de udder one red on one side an' green on de
udder--mighty good-lookin' apples, too--de kin' you git two dollars a
bar'l fur at the store. But Ebe, she wouldn't hab neider ob 'em, an'
when she done took one bite out ob each one, she frew it away. Den de
ole debbil-sarpint, he scratch he head, an' he say to hese'f: 'Dis yer
Ebe, she pow'ful 'ticklar 'bout her apples. Reckin I'll have ter wait
till after fros', an' fotch her a real good one,' An' he done wait
till after fros', and then he fotch her a' Albemarle pippin, an' when
she took one bite ob dat, she jus' go 'long an' eat it all up, core,
seeds, an' all. 'Look h'yar, sarpint,' says she, 'hab you got anudder
ob dem apples in your pocket?' An' den he tuk one out, an' gib it to
her. ''Cuse me,' says she, 'I's gwine ter look up Adam, an' ef he don'
want ter know war de tree is wot dese apples grow on, you can hab him
fur a corn-field han'.'

"An' now, my dear brev'ren," said Brother Peter, "while I was
a-turnin' dis subjec' ober in my min', an' wonderin' how de women
come ter hab jus' seben debbils apiece, I done reckerleck dat bit ob
Scripter wot I heerd at Kyarter's Mills, an' I reckon dat 'splains how
de debbils got inter woman. De sarpint he done fotch mudder Ebe seben
apples, an' ebery one she take a bite out of gib her a debbil."

As might have been expected, this sermon produced a great sensation,
and made a deep impression on the congregation. As a rule, the men
were tolerably well satisfied with it; and when the services were over
many of them made it the occasion of shy but very plainly pointed
remarks to their female friends and relatives.

But the women did not like it at all. Some of them became angry, and
talked very forcibly, and feelings of indignation soon spread among
all the sisters of the church. If their minister had seen fit to stay
at home and preach a sermon like this to his own wife (who, it may be
remarked, was not present on this occasion), it would have been well
enough, provided he had made no allusions to outsiders; but to come
there and preach such things to them was entirely too much for their
endurance. Each one of the women knew she had not seven devils, and
only a few of them would admit of the possibility of any of the others
being possessed by quite so many.

Their preacher's explanation of the manner in which every woman came
to be possessed of just so many devils appeared to them of little
importance. What they objected to was the fundamental doctrine of his
sermon, which was based on his assertion that the Bible declared every
woman had seven devils. They were not willing to believe that the
Bible said any such thing. Some of them went so far as to state it was
their opinion that Uncle Pete had got this fool notion from some of
the lawyers at the court-house when he was on a jury a month or so
before. It was quite noticeable that, although Sunday afternoon had
scarcely begun, the majority of the women of the congregation called
their minister Uncle Pete. This was very strong evidence of a sudden
decline in his popularity.

Some of the more vigorous-minded women, not seeing their minister
among the other people in the clearing in front of the log church,
went to look for him, but he was not to be found. His wife had ordered
him to be home early, and soon after the congregation had been
dismissed he departed by a short cut through the woods. That afternoon
an irate committee, composed principally of women, but including also
a few men who had expressed disbelief in the new doctrine, arrived
at the cabin of their preacher, but found there only his wife,
cross-grained old Aunt Rebecca. She informed them that her husband was
not at home.

"He's done 'gaged hisse'f," she said, "ter cut an' haul wood fur
Kunnel Martin ober on Little Mount'n fur de whole ob nex' week. It's
fourteen or thirteen mile' from h'yar, an' ef he'd started ter-morrer
mawnm', he'd los' a'mos' a whole day. 'Sides dat, I done tole him dat
ef he git dar ter-night he'd have his supper frowed in. Wot you all
want wid him? Gwine to pay him fur preachin'?"

Any such intention as this was instantaneously denied, and Aunt
Rebecca was informed of the subject upon which her visitors had come
to have a very plain talk with her husband.

Strange to say, the announcement of the new and startling dogma had
apparently no disturbing effect upon Aunt Rebecca. On the contrary,
the old woman seemed rather to enjoy the news.

"Reckin he oughter know all 'bout dat," she said. "He's done had three
wives, an' he ain't got rid o' dis one yit."

Judging from her chuckles and waggings of the head when she made this
remark, it might be imagined that Aunt Rebecca was rather proud of the
fact that her husband thought her capable of exhibiting a different
kind of diabolism every day in the week.

The leader of the indignant church-members was Susan Henry; a mulatto
woman of a very independent turn of mind. She prided herself that she
never worked in anybody's house but her own, and this immunity from
outside service gave her a certain pre-eminence among her sisters. Not
only did Susan share the general resentment with which the startling
statement of old Peter had been received, but she felt that its
promulgation had affected her position in the community. If every
woman was possessed by seven devils, then, in this respect, she was no
better nor worse than any of the others; and at this her proud heart
rebelled. If the preacher had said some women had eight devils and
others six, it would have been better. She might then have made a
mental arrangement in regard to her relative position which would have
somewhat consoled her. But now there was no chance for that. The words
of the preacher had equally debased all women.

A meeting of the disaffected church-members was held the next night at
Susan Henry's cabin, or rather in the little yard about it, for the
house was not large enough to hold the people who attended it. The
meeting was not regularly organized, but everybody said what he or she
had to say, and the result was a great deal of clamor, and a general
increase of indignation against Uncle Pete.

"Look h'yar!" cried Susan, at the end of some energetic remarks, "is
dar enny pusson h'yar who kin count up figgers?"

Inquiries on the subject ran through the crowd, and in a few moments
a black boy, about fourteen, was pushed forward as an expert in
arithmetic.

"Now, you Jim," said Susan, "you's been, to school, an' you kin count
up figgers. 'Cordin' ter de chu'ch books dar's forty-seben women
b'longin' to our meetin', an' ef each one ob dem dar has got seben
debbils in her, I jus' wants you ter tell me how many debbils come to
chu'ch ebery clear Sunday ter hear dat ole Uncle Pete preach."

This view of the case created a sensation, and much interest was shown
in the result of Jim's calculations, which were made by the aid of a
back of an old letter and a piece of pencil furnished by Susan. The
result was at last announced as three hundred and nineteen, which,
although not precisely correct, was near enough to satisfy the
company.

"Now, you jus' turn dat ober in you all's minds," said Susan. "More'n
free hundred debbils in chu'ch ebery Sunday, an' we women fotchin 'em.
Does anybody s'pose I's gwine ter b'lieve dat fool talk?"

A middle-aged man now lifted up his voice and said: "I's been thinkin'
ober dis h'yar matter and I's 'cluded dat p'r'aps de words ob de
preacher was used in a figgeratous form o' sense. P'r'aps de seben
debbils meant chillun."

These remarks were received with no favor by the assemblage.

"Oh, you git out!" cried Susan. "Your ole woman's got seben chillun,
shore 'nuf, an' I s'pec' dey's all debbils. But dem sent'ments don't
apply ter all de udder women h'yar, 'tic'larly ter dem dar young uns
wot ain't married yit."

This was good logic, but the feeling on the subject proved to be even
stronger, for the mothers in the company became so angry at their
children being considered devils that for a time there seemed to be
danger of an Amazonian attack on the unfortunate speaker. This was
averted, but a great deal of uproar now ensued, and it was the general
feeling that something ought to be done to show the deep-seated
resentment with which the horrible charge against the mothers and
sisters of the congregation had been met. Many violent propositions
were made, some of the younger men going so far as to offer to burn
down the church. It was finally agreed, quite unanimously, that old
Peter should be unceremoniously ousted from his place in the pulpit
which he had filled so many years.

As the week passed on, some of the older men of the congregation who
had friendly feelings toward their old companion and preacher talked
the matter over among themselves, and afterward, with many of their
fellow-members, succeeded at last in gaining the general consent that
Uncle Pete should be allowed a chance to explain himself, and give
his grounds and reasons for his astounding statement in regard to
womankind. If he could show biblical authority for this, of course
nothing more could be said. But if he could not, then he must get down
from the pulpit, and sit for the rest of his life on a back seat of
the church. This proposition met with the more favor, because even
those who were most indignant had an earnest curiosity to know what
the old man would say for himself.

During all this time of angry discussion, good old Peter was quietly
and calmly cutting and hauling wood on the Little Mountain. His mind
was in a condition of great comfort and peace, for not only had he
been able to rid himself, in his last sermon, of many of the hard
thoughts concerning women that had been gathering themselves together
for years, but his absence from home had given him a holiday from
the harassments of Aunt Rebecca's tongue, so that no new notions of
woman's culpability had risen within him. He had dismissed the subject
altogether, and had been thinking over a sermon regarding baptism,
which he thought he could make convincing to certain of the younger
members of his congregation.

He arrived at home very late on Saturday night, and retired to his
simple couch without knowing anything of the terrible storm which had
been gathering through the week, and which was to burst upon him on
the morrow. But the next morning, long before church time, he
received warning enough of what was going to happen. Individuals and
deputations gathered in and about his cabin--some to tell him all that
had been said and done; some to inform him what was expected of him;
some to stand about and look at him; some to scold; some to denounce;
but, alas! not one to encourage; nor one to call him "Brudder Pete,"
that Sunday appellation dear to his ears. But the old man possessed a
stubborn soul, not easily to be frightened.

"Wot I says in de pulpit," he remarked, "I'll 'splain in de pulpit,
an' you all ud better git 'long to de chu'ch, an' when de time fur de
sarvice come, I'll be dar."

This advice was not promptly acted upon, but in the course of half an
hour nearly all the villagers and loungers had gone off to the church
in the woods; and when Uncle Peter had put on his high black hat,
somewhat battered, but still sufficiently clerical looking for that
congregation, and had given something of a polish to his cowhide
shoes, he betook himself by the accustomed path to the log building
where he had so often held forth to his people. As soon as he entered
the church he was formally instructed by a committee of the leading
members that before he began to open the services, he must make it
plain to the congregation that what he had said on the preceding
Sunday about every woman being possessed by seven devils was Scripture
truth, and not mere wicked nonsense out of his own brain. If he could
not do that, they wanted no more praying or preaching from him.

Uncle Peter made no answer, but, ascending the little pulpit, he put
his hat on the bench behind him where it was used to repose, took out
his red cotton handkerchief and blew his nose in his accustomed way,
and looked about him. The house was crowded. Even Aunt Rebecca was
there.

After a deliberate survey of his audience, the preacher spoke:
"Brev'eren an' sisters, I see afore me Brudder Bill Hines, who kin
read de Bible, an' has got one. Ain't dat so, Brudder?"

Bill Hines having nodded and modestly grunted assent, the preacher
continued. "An' dars' Ann' Priscilla's boy, Jake, who ain't a brudder
yit, though he's plenty old 'nuf, min', I tell ye; an' he kin read de
Bible, fus' rate, an' has read it ter me ober an' ober ag'in. Ain't
dat so, Jake?"

Jake grinned, nodded, and hung his head, very uncomfortable at being
thus publicly pointed out.

"An' dar's good ole Aun' Patty, who knows more Scripter dan ennybuddy
h'yar, havin' been teached by de little gals from Kunnel Jasper's an'
by dere mudders afore 'em. I reckin she know' de hull Bible straight
froo, from de Garden of Eden to de New Jerus'lum. An' dar are udders
h'yar who knows de Scripters, some one part an' some anudder. Now I
axes ebery one ob you all wot know de Scripters ef he don' 'member
how de Bible tells how our Lor' when he was on dis yearth cas' seben
debbils out o' Mary Magdalum?"

A murmur of assent came from the congregation, Most of them remembered
that.

"But did enny ob you ebber read, or hab read to you, dat he ebber cas'
'em out o' enny udder woman?"

Negative grunts and shakes of the head signified that nobody had ever
heard of this.

"Well, den," said the preacher, gazing blandly around, "all de udder
women got 'em yit."

A deep silence fell upon the assembly, and in a few moments an elderly
member arose. "Brudder Pete," he said, "I reckin you mought as well
gib out de hyme."




A DOG'S TALE[1]

[Footnote 1: 1903]

_Mark Twain_ (1835)


I

My father was a St. Bernard, my mother was a collie, but I am a
Presbyterian. This is what my mother told me; I do not know these nice
distinctions myself. To me they are only fine large words meaning
nothing. My mother had a fondness for such; she liked to say them, and
see other dogs look surprised and envious, as wondering how she got so
much education. But, indeed, it was not real education; it was
only show: she got the words by listening in the dining-room and
drawing-room when there was company, and by going with the children to
Sunday-school and listening there; and whenever she heard a large word
she said it over to herself many times, and so was able to keep it
until there was a dogmatic gathering in the neighborhood, then she
would get it off, and surprise and distress them all, from pocket-pup
to mastiff, which rewarded her for all her trouble. If there was a
stranger he was nearly sure to be suspicious, and when he got his
breath again he would ask her what it meant. And she always told him.
He was never expecting this, but thought he would catch her; so when
she told him, he was the one that looked ashamed, whereas he had
thought it was going to be she. The others were always waiting for
this, and glad of it and proud of her, for they knew what was going to
happen, because they had had experience. When she told the meaning of
a big word they were all so taken up with admiration that it never
occurred to any dog to doubt if it was the right one; and that was
natural, because, for one thing, she answered up so promptly that it
seemed like a dictionary speaking, and for another thing, where could
they find out whether it was right or not? for she was the only
cultivated dog there was. By-and-by, when I was older, she brought
home the word Unintellectual, one time, and worked it pretty hard
all the week at different gatherings, making much unhappiness and
despondency; and it was at this time that I noticed that during that
week she was asked for the meaning at eight different assemblages, and
flashed out a fresh definition every time, which showed me that she
had more presence of mind than culture, though I said nothing, of
course. She had one word which she always kept on hand, and ready,
like a life-preserver, a kind of emergency word to strap on when she
was likely to get washed overboard in a sudden way--that was the word
Synonymous. When she happened to fetch out a long word which had had
its day weeks before and its prepared meanings gone to her dump-pile,
if there was a stranger there of course it knocked him groggy for a
couple of minutes, then he would come to, and by that time she would
be away down the wind on another tack, and not expecting anything; so
when he'd hail and ask her to cash in, I (the only dog on the inside
of her game) could see her canvas flicker a moment,--but only just a
moment,--then it would belly out taut and full, and she would say, as
calm as a summer's day, "It's synonymous with supererogation," or some
godless long reptile of a word like that, and go placidly about and
skim away on the next tack, perfectly comfortable, you know, and leave
that stranger looking profane and embarrassed, and the initiated
slatting the floor with their tails in unison and their faces
transfigured with a holy joy.

And it was the same with phrases. She would drag home a whole phrase,
if it had a grand sound, and play it six nights and two matinees, and
explain it a new way every time,--which she had to, for all she cared
for was the phrase; she wasn't interested in what it meant, and knew
those dogs hadn't wit enough to catch her, anyway. Yes, she was
a daisy! She got so she wasn't afraid of anything, she had such
confidence in the ignorance of those creatures. She even brought
anecdotes that she had heard the family and the dinner guests laugh
and shout over; and as a rule she got the nub of one chestnut hitched
onto another chestnut, where, of course, it didn't fit and hadn't any
point; and when she delivered the nub she fell over and rolled on the
floor and laughed and barked in the most insane way, while I could see
that she was wondering to herself why it didn't seem as funny as it
did when she first heard it. But no harm was done; the others rolled
and barked too, privately ashamed of themselves for not seeing the
point, and never suspecting that the fault was not with them and there
wasn't any to see.

You can see by these things that she was of a rather vain and
frivolous character; still, she had virtues, and enough to make up,
I think. She had a kind heart and gentle ways, and never harbored
resentments for injuries done her, but put them easily out of her mind
and forgot them; and she taught her children her kindly way, and from
her we learned also to be brave and prompt in time of danger, and not
to run away, but face the peril that threatened friend or stranger,
and help him the best we could without stopping to think what the cost
might be to us. And she taught us, not by words only, but by example,
and that is the best way and the surest and the most lasting. Why, the
brave things she did, the splendid things! she was just a soldier;
and so modest about it--well, you couldn't help admiring her, and you
couldn't help imitating her; not even a King Charles spaniel could
remain entirely despicable in her society. So, as you see, there was
more to her than her education.


II

When I was well grown, at last, I was sold and taken away, and I never
saw her again. She was broken-hearted, and so was I, and we cried; but
she comforted me as well as she could, and said we were sent into this
world for a wise and good purpose, and must do our duties without
repining, take our life as we might find it, live it for the best good
of others, and never mind about the results; they were not our affair.
She said men who did like this would have a noble and beautiful reward
by-and-by in another world, and although we animals would not go
there, to do well and right without reward would give to our brief
lives a worthiness and dignity which in itself would be a reward. She
had gathered these things from time to time when she had gone to the
Sunday-school with the children, and had laid them up in her memory
more carefully than she had done with those other words and phrases;
and she had studied them deeply, for her good and ours. One may see
by this that she had a wise and thoughtful head, for all there was so
much lightness and vanity in it.

So we said our farewells, and looked our last upon each other through
our tears; and the last thing she said--keeping it for the last to
make me remember it the better, I think--was, "In memory of me, when
there is a time of danger to another do not think of yourself, think
of your mother, and do as she would do."

Do you think I could forget that? No.


III

It was such a charming home!--my new one; a fine great house, with
pictures, and delicate decorations, and rich furniture, and no gloom
anywhere, but all the wilderness of dainty colors lit up with
flooding sunshine; and the spacious grounds around it, and the great
garden--oh, greensward, and noble trees, and flowers, no end! And I
was the same as a member of the family; and they loved me, and petted
me, and did not give me a new name, but called me by my old one that
was dear to me because my mother had given it me--Aileen Mavourneen.
She got it out of a song; and the Grays knew that song, and said it
was a beautiful name.

Mrs. Gray was thirty, and so sweet and so lovely, you cannot imagine
it; and Sadie was ten, and just like her mother, just a darling
slender little copy of her, with auburn tails down her back, and short
frocks; and the baby was a year old, and plump and dimpled, and fond
of me, and never could get enough of hauling on my tail, and hugging
me, and laughing out its innocent happiness; and Mr. Gray was
thirty-eight, and tall and slender and handsome, a little bald in
front, alert, quick in his movements, businesslike, prompt, decided,
unsentimental, and with that kind of trim-chiselled face that just
seems to glint and sparkle with frosty intellectuality! He was a
renowned scientist. I do not know what the word means, but my mother
would know how to use it and get effects. She would know how to
depress a rat-terrier with it and make a lap-dog look sorry he came.
But that is not the best one; the best one was Laboratory. My mother
could organize a Trust on that one that would skin the tax-collars
off the whole herd. The laboratory was not a book, or a picture, or a
place to wash your hands in, as the college president's dog said--no,
that is the lavatory; the laboratory is quite different, and is
filled with jars, and bottles, and electrics, and wires, and strange
machines; and every week other scientists came there and sat in the
place, and used the machines, and discussed, and made what they called
experiments and discoveries; and often I came, too, and stood around
and listened, and tried to learn, for the sake of my mother, and in
loving memory of her, although it was a pain to me, as realizing what
she was losing out of her life and I gaining nothing at all; for try
as I might, I was never able to make anything out of it at all.

Other times I lay on the floor in the mistress's workroom and slept,
she gently using me for a footstool, knowing it pleased me, for it was
a caress; other times I spent an hour in the nursery, and got well
tousled and made happy; other times I watched by the crib there, when
the baby was asleep and the nurse out for a few minutes on the baby's
affairs; other times I romped and raced through the grounds and the
garden with Sadie till we were tired out, then slumbered on the grass
in the shade of a tree while she read her book; other times I went
visiting among the neighbor dogs,--for there were some most pleasant
ones not far away, and one very handsome and courteous and graceful
one, a curly haired Irish setter by the name of Robin Adair, who was a
Presbyterian like me, and belonged to the Scotch minister.

The servants in our house were all kind to me and were fond of me, and
so, as you see, mine was a pleasant life. There could not be a happier
dog than I was, nor a gratefuller one. I will say this for myself, for
it is only the truth: I tried in all ways to do well and right, and
honor my mother's memory and her teachings, and earn the happiness
that had come to me, as best I could.

By-and-by came my little puppy, and then my cup was full, my happiness
was perfect. It was the dearest little waddling thing, and so smooth
and soft and velvety, and had such cunning little awkward paws, and
such affectionate eyes, and such a sweet and innocent face; and it
made me so proud to see how the children and their mother adored it,
and fondled it, and exclaimed over every little wonderful thing it
did. It did seem to me that life was just too lovely to--

Then came the winter. One day I was standing a watch in the nursery.
That is to say, I was asleep on the bed. The baby was asleep in the
crib, which was alongside the bed, on the side next the fireplace. It
was the kind of crib that has a lofty tent over it made of a gauzy
stuff that you can see through. The nurse was out, and we two sleepers
were alone. A spark from the wood-fire was shot out, and it lit on the
<DW72> of the tent. I suppose a quiet interval followed, then a scream
from the baby woke me, and there was that tent flaming up toward the
ceiling! Before I could think, I sprang to the floor in my fright, and
in a second was half-way to the door; but in the next half-second my
mother's farewell was sounding in my ears, and I was back on the bed
again. I reached my head through the flames and dragged the baby
out by the waistband, and tugged it along, and we fell to the floor
together in a cloud of smoke; I snatched a new hold, and dragged the
screaming little creature along and out at the door and around the
bend of the hall, and was still tugging away, all excited and happy
and proud, when the master's voice shouted:

"Begone, you cursed beast!" and I jumped to save myself; but he was
wonderfully quick, and chased me up, striking furiously at me with his
cane, I dodging this way and that, in terror, and at last a strong
blow fell upon my left fore-leg, which made me shriek and fall, for
the moment, helpless; the cane went up for another blow, but never
descended, for the nurse's voice rang wildly out, "The nursery's on
fire!" and the master rushed away in that direction, and my other
bones were saved.

The pain was cruel, but, no matter, I must not lose any time; he might
come back at any moment; so I limped on three legs to the other end
of the hall, where there was a dark little stairway leading up into a
garret where old boxes and such things were kept, as I had heard say,
and where people seldom went. I managed to climb up there, then I
searched my way through the dark among the piles of things, and hid in
the secretest place I could find. It was foolish to be afraid there,
yet still I was; so afraid that I held in and hardly even whimpered,
though it would have been such a comfort to whimper, because that
eases the pain, you know. But I could lick my leg, and that did me
some good.

For half an hour there was a commotion down-stairs, and shoutings,
and rushing footsteps, and then there was quiet again. Quiet for some
minutes, and that was grateful to my spirit, for then my fears began
to go down; and fears are worse than pains,--oh, much worse. Then
came a sound that froze me! They were calling me--calling me by
name--hunting for me!

It was muffled by distance, but that could not take the terror out of
it, and it was the most dreadful sound to me that I had ever heard. It
went all about, everywhere, down there: along the halls, through all
the rooms, in both stories, and in the basement and the cellar; then
outside, and further and further away--then back, and all about the
house again, and I thought it would never, never stop. But at last it
did, hours and hours after the vague twilight of the garret had long
ago been blotted out by black darkness.

Then in that blessed stillness my terror fell little by little away,
and I was at peace and slept. It was a good rest I had, but I woke
before the twilight had come again. I was feeling fairly comfortable,
and I could think out a plan now. I made a very good one; which was,
to creep down, all the way down the back stairs, and hide behind the
cellar door, and slip out and escape when the iceman came at dawn,
while he was inside filling the refrigerator; then I would hide all
day, and start on my journey when night came; my journey to--well,
anywhere where they would not know me and betray me to the master. I
was feeling almost cheerful now; then suddenly I thought, Why, what
would life be without my puppy!

That was despair. There was no plan for me; I saw that; I must stay
where I was; stay, and wait, and take what might come--it was not my
affair; that was what life is--my mother had said it. Then--well, then
the calling began again! All my sorrows came back. I said to myself,
the master will never forgive. I did not know what I had done to make
him so bitter and so unforgiving, yet I judged it was something a dog
could not understand, but which was clear to a man and dreadful.

They called and called--days and nights, it seemed to me. So long that
the hunger and thirst near drove me mad, and I recognized that I was
getting very weak. When you are this way you sleep a great deal, and I
did. Once I woke in an awful fright--it seemed to me that the calling
was right there in the garret! And so it was: it was Sadie's voice,
and she was crying; my name was falling from her lips all broken, poor
thing, and I could not believe my ears for the joy of it when I heard
her say,

"Come back to us--oh, come back to us, and forgive--it is all so sad
without our--"

I broke in with _such_ a grateful little yelp, and the next moment
Sadie was plunging and stumbling through the darkness and the lumber
and shouting for the family to hear, "She's found! she's found!"

The days that followed--well, they were wonderful. The mother and
Sadie and the servants--why, they just seemed to worship me. They
couldn't seem to make me a bed that was fine enough; and as for food,
they couldn't be satisfied with anything but game and delicacies that
were out of season; and every day the friends and neighbors flocked in
to hear about my heroism--that was the name they called it by, and it
means agriculture. I remember my mother pulling it on a kennel once,
and explaining it that way, but didn't say what agriculture was,
except that it was synonymous with intramural incandescence; and
a dozen times a day Mrs. Gray and Sadie would tell the tale to
new-comers, and say I risked my life to save the baby's, and both of
us had burns to prove it, and then the company would pass me around
and pet me and exclaim about me, and you could see the pride in the
eyes of Sadie and her mother; and when the people wanted to know
what made me limp, they looked ashamed and changed the subject, and
sometimes when people hunted them this way and that way with questions
about it, it looked to me as if they were going to cry.

And this was not all the glory; no, the master's friends came, a whole
twenty of the most distinguished people, and had me in the laboratory,
and discussed me as if I was a kind of discovery; and some of them
said it was wonderful in a dumb beast, the finest exhibition of
instinct they could call to mind; but the master said, with vehemence,
"It's far above instinct; it's _reason_, and many a man, privileged
to be saved and go with you and me to a better world by right of its
possession, has less of it than this poor silly quadruped that's
foreordained to perish"; and then he laughed, and said, "Why, look at
me--I'm a sarcasm! Bless you, with all my grand intelligence, the only
thing I inferred was that the dog had gone mad and was destroying the
child, whereas but for the beast's intelligence--it's _reason_, I tell
you!--the child would have perished!"

They disputed and disputed, and _I_ was the very centre and subject of
it all, and I wished my mother could know that this grand honor had
come to me; it would have made her proud.

Then they discussed optics, as they called it, and whether a certain
injury to the brain would produce blindness or not, but they could not
agree about it, and said they must test it by experiment by-and-by;
and next they discussed plants, and that interested me, because in the
summer Sadie and I had planted seeds--I helped her dig the holes, you
know,--and after days and days a little shrub or a flower came up
there, and it was a wonder how that could happen; but it did, and I
wished I could talk,--I would have told those people about it and
shown them how much I knew, and been all alive with the subject; but I
didn't care for the optics; it was dull, and when they came back to it
again it bored me, and I went to sleep.

Pretty soon it was spring, and sunny and pleasant and lovely, and the
sweet mother and the children patted me and the puppy good-bye, and
went away on a journey and a visit to their kin, and the master wasn't
any company for us, but we played together and had good times, and the
servants were kind and friendly, so we got along quite happily and
counted the days and waited for the family.

And one day those men came again, and said now for the test, and they
took the puppy to the laboratory, and I limped three-leggedly along,
too, feeling proud, for any attention shown the puppy was a pleasure
to me, of course. They discussed and experimented, and then suddenly
the puppy shrieked, and they set him on the floor, and he went
staggering around, with his head all bloody, and the master clapped
his hands, and shouted:

"There, I've won--confess it! He's as blind as a bat!"

And they all said,

"It's so--you've proved your theory, and suffering humanity owes you
a great debt from henceforth," and they crowded around him, and wrung
his hand cordially and thankfully, and praised him.

But I hardly saw or heard these things, for I ran at once to my little
darling, and snuggled close to it where it lay, and licked the blood,
and it put its head against mine, whimpering softly, and I knew in
my heart it was a comfort to it in its pain and trouble to feel its
mother's touch, though it could not see me. Then it drooped down,
presently, and its little velvet nose rested upon the floor, and it
was still, and did not move any more.

Soon the master stopped discussing a moment, and rang in the footman,
and said, "Bury it in the far corner of the garden," and then went on
with the discussion, and I trotted after the footman, very happy and
grateful, for I knew the puppy was out of its pain now, because it was
asleep. We went far down the garden to the furthest end, where the
children and the nurse and the puppy and I used to play in the summer
in the shade of a great elm, and there the footman dug a hole, and I
saw he was going to plant the puppy, and I was glad, because it would
grow and come up a fine handsome dog, like Robin Adair, and be a
beautiful surprise for the family when they came home; so I tried to
help him dig, but my lame leg was no good, being stiff, you know, and
you have to have two, or it is no use. When the footman had finished
and covered little Robin up, he patted my head, and there were tears
in his eyes, and he said, "Poor little doggie, you SAVED _his_ child."

I have watched two whole weeks, and he doesn't come up! This last
week a fright has been stealing upon me. I think there is something
terrible about this. I do not know what it is, but the fear makes me
sick, and I cannot eat, though the servants bring me the best of food;
and they pet me so, and even come in the night, and cry, and say,
"Poor doggie--do give it up and come home; _don't_ break our hearts!"
and all this terrifies me the more, and makes me sure something has
happened. And I am so weak; since yesterday I cannot stand on my feet
any more. And within this hour the servants, looking toward the sun
where it was sinking out of sight and the night chill coming on, said
things I could not understand, but they carried something cold to my
heart.

"Those poor creatures! They do not suspect. They will come home in
the morning, and eagerly ask for the little doggie that did the brave
deed, and who of us will be strong enough to say the truth to them:
'The humble little friend is gone where go the beasts that perish.'"




THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT[1]

[Footnote 1: From _The Luck of Roaring Camp_. 1871.]

_Bret Harte_ (1839-1902)


As Mr. John Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker
Flat on the morning of the 23d of November, 1850, he was conscious of
a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night. Two or
three men, conversing earnestly together, ceased as he approached, and
exchanged significant glances. There was a Sabbath lull in the air,
which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous.

Mr. Oakhurst's calm, handsome face betrayed small concern in these
indications. Whether he was conscious of any predisposing cause was
another question. "I reckon they're after somebody," he reflected;
"likely it's me." He returned to his pocket the handkerchief with
which he had been whipping away the red dust of Poker Flat from his
neat boots, and quietly discharged his mind of any further conjecture.

In point of fact, Poker Flat was "after somebody." It had lately
suffered the loss of several thousand dollars, two valuable horses,
and a prominent citizen. It was experiencing a spasm of virtuous
reaction, quite as lawless and ungovernable as any of the acts that
had provoked it. A secret committee had determined to rid the town of
all improper persons. This was done permanently in regard of two men
who were then hanging from the boughs of a sycamore in the gulch,
and temporarily in the banishment of certain other objectionable
characters. I regret to say that some of these were ladies. It is
but due to the sex, however, to state that their impropriety was
professional, and it was only in such easily established standards of
evil that Poker Flat ventured to sit in judgment.

Mr. Oakhurst was right in supposing that he was included in this
category. A few of the committee had urged hanging him as a possible
example, and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his pockets
of the sums he had won from them. "It's agin justice," said Jim
Wheeler, "to let this yer young man from Roaring Camp--an entire
stranger--carry away our money." But a crude sentiment of equity
residing in the breasts of those who had been fortunate enough to win
from Mr. Oakhurst overruled this narrower local prejudice.

Mr. Oakhurst received his sentence with philosophic calmness, none the
less coolly that he was aware of the hesitation of his judges. He was
too much of a gambler not to accept fate. With him life was at best an
uncertain game, and he recognized the usual percentage in favor of the
dealer.

A body of armed men accompanied the deported wickedness of Poker Flat
to the outskirts of the settlement. Besides Mr. Oakhurst, who was
known to be a coolly desperate man, and for whose intimidation the
armed escort was intended, the expatriated party consisted of a young
woman familiarly known as the "Duchess"; another who had won the title
of "Mother Shipton"; and "Uncle Billy," a suspected sluice-robber
and confirmed drunkard. The cavalcade provoked no comments from the
spectators, nor was any word uttered by the escort. Only when the
gulch which marked the uttermost limit of Poker Flat was reached, the
leader spoke briefly and to the point. The exiles were forbidden to
return at the peril of their lives.

As the escort disappeared, their pent-up feelings found vent in a
few hysterical tears from the Duchess, some bad language from Mother
Shipton, and a Parthian volley of expletives from Uncle Billy. The
philosophic Oakhurst alone remained silent. He listened calmly to
Mother Shipton's desire to cut somebody's heart out, to the repeated
statements of the Duchess that she would die in the road, and to the
alarming oaths that seemed to be bumped out of Uncle Billy as he rode
forward. With the easy good-humor characteristic of his class, he
insisted upon exchanging his own riding-horse, "Five Spot," for the
sorry mule which the Duchess rode. But even this act did not draw
the party into any closer sympathy. The young woman readjusted her
somewhat draggled plumes with a feeble, faded coquetry; Mother Shipton
eyed the possessor of "Five Spot" with malevolence, and Uncle Billy
included the whole party in one sweeping anathema.

The road to Sandy Bar--a camp that, not having as yet experienced the
regenerating influences of Poker Flat, consequently seemed to offer
some invitation to the emigrants--lay over a steep mountain range. It
was distant a day's severe travel. In that advanced season, the party
soon passed out of the moist, temperate regions of the foot-hills into
the dry, cold, bracing air of the Sierras. The trail was narrow and
difficult. At noon the Duchess, rolling out of her saddle upon the
ground, declared her intention of going no farther, and the party
halted.

The spot was singularly wild and impressive. A wooded amphitheatre,
surrounded on three sides by precipitous cliffs of naked granite,
sloped gently toward the crest of another precipice that overlooked
the valley. It was, undoubtedly, the most suitable spot for a camp,
had camping been advisable. But Mr. Oakhurst knew that scarcely half
the journey to Sandy Bar was accomplished; and the party were not
equipped or provisioned for delay. This fact he pointed out to his
companions curtly, with a philosophic commentary on the folly of
"throwing up their hand before the game was played out." But they were
furnished with liquor, which in this emergency stood them in place of
food, fuel, rest, and prescience. In spite of his remonstrances, it
was not long before they were more or less under its influence. Uncle
Billy passed rapidly from a bellicose state into one of stupor, the
Duchess became maudlin, and Mother Shipton snored. Mr. Oakhurst alone
remained erect, leaning against a rock, calmly surveying them.

Mr. Oakhurst did not drink. It interfered with a profession which
required coolness, impassiveness, and presence of mind, and, in his
own language, he "couldn't afford it." As he gazed at his recumbent
fellow-exiles, the loneliness begotten of his pariah-trade, his habits
of life, his very vices, for the first time seriously oppressed him.
He bestirred himself in dusting his black clothes, washing his hands
and face, and other acts characteristic of his studiously neat habits,
and for a moment forgot his annoyance. The thought of deserting his
weaker and more pitiable companions never perhaps occurred to him.
Yet he could not help feeling the want of that excitement which,
singularly enough, was most conducive to that calm equanimity for
which he was notorious. He looked at the gloomy walls that rose a
thousand feet sheer above the circling pines around him; at the sky,
ominously clouded; at the valley below, already deepening into shadow.
And, doing so, suddenly he heard his own name called.

A horseman slowly ascended the trail. In the fresh, open face of the
new-comer Mr. Oakhurst recognized Tom Simson, otherwise known as the
"Innocent," of Sandy Bar. He had met him some months before over
a "little game," and had, with perfect equanimity, won the entire
fortune--amounting to some forty dollars--of that guileless youth.
After the game was finished, Mr. Oakhurst drew the youthful speculator
behind the door and thus addressed him: "Tommy, you're a good little
man, but you can't gamble worth a cent. Don't try it over again." He
then handed him his money back, pushed him gently from the room, and
so made a devoted slave of Tom Simson.

There was a remembrance of this in his boyish and enthusiastic
greeting of Mr. Oakhurst. He had started, he said, to go to Poker
Flat to seek his fortune. "Alone?" No, not exactly alone; in fact
(a giggle), he had run away with Piney Woods. Didn't Mr. Oakhurst
remember Piney? She that used to wait on the table at the Temperance
House? They had been engaged a long time, but old Jake Woods had
objected, and so they had run away, and were going to Poker Flat to be
married, and here they were. And they were tired out, and how lucky it
was they had found a place to camp, and company. All this the Innocent
delivered rapidly, while Piney, a stout, comely damsel of fifteen,
emerged from behind the pine-tree where she had been blushing unseen,
and rode to the side of her lover.

Mr. Oakhurst seldom troubled himself with sentiment, still less
with propriety; but he had a vague idea that the situation was not
fortunate. He retained, however, his presence of mind sufficiently to
kick Uncle Billy, who was about to say something, and Uncle Billy was
sober enough to recognize in Mr. Oakhurst's kick a superior power that
would not bear trifling. He then endeavored to dissuade Tom Simson
from delaying further, but in vain. He even pointed out the fact that
there was no provision, nor means of making a camp. But, unluckily,
the Innocent met this objection by assuring the party that he was
provided with an extra mule loaded with provisions, and by the
discovery of a rude attempt at a log-house near the trail. "Piney can
stay with Mrs. Oakhurst," said the Innocent, pointing to the Duchess,
"and I can shift for myself."

Nothing but Mr. Oakhurst's admonishing foot saved Uncle Billy from
bursting into a roar of laughter. As it was, he felt compelled to
retire up the canon until he could recover his gravity. There he
confided the joke to the tall pine-trees, with many slaps of his leg,
contortions of his face, and the usual profanity. But when he returned
to the party, he found them seated by a fire--for the air had
grown strangely chill and the sky overcast--in apparently amicable
conversation. Piney was actually talking in an impulsive, girlish
fashion to the Duchess, who was listening with an interest and
animation she had not shown for many days. The Innocent was holding
forth, apparently with equal effect, to Mr. Oakhurst and Mother
Shipton, who was actually relaxing into amiability. "Is this yer a
d---d picnic?" said Uncle Billy, with inward scorn, as he surveyed the
sylvan group, the glancing firelight, and the tethered animals in the
foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that
disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular nature, for he
felt impelled to slap his leg again and cram his fist into his mouth.

As the shadows crept slowly up the mountain, a slight breeze rocked
the tops of the pine-trees, and moaned through their long and gloomy
aisles. The ruined cabin, patched and covered with pine-boughs, was
set apart for the ladies. As the lovers parted they unaffectedly
exchanged a kiss, so honest and sincere that it might have been heard
above the swaying pines. The frail Duchess and the malevolent Mother
Shipton were probably too stunned to remark upon this last evidence
of simplicity, and so turned without a word to the hut. The fire was
replenished, the men lay down before the door, and in a few minutes
were asleep.

Mr. Oakhurst was a light sleeper. Toward morning he awoke benumbed and
cold. As he stirred the dying fire, the wind, which was now blowing
strongly, brought to his cheek that which caused the blood to leave
it--snow!

He started to his feet with the intention of awakening the sleepers,
for there was no time to lose. But turning to where Uncle Billy had
been lying, he found him gone. A suspicion leaped to his brain and
a curse to his lips. He ran to the spot where the mules had been
tethered; they were no longer there. The tracks were already rapidly
disappearing in the snow.

The momentary excitement brought Mr. Oakhurst back to the fire with
his usual calm. He did not waken the sleepers. The Innocent slumbered
peacefully, with a smile on his good-humored, freckled face; the
virgin Piney slept beside her frailer sisters as sweetly as though
attended by celestial guardians, and Mr. Oakhurst, drawing his blanket
over his shoulders, stroked his mustaches and waited for the dawn.
It came slowly in a whirling mist of snowflakes, that dazzled and
confused the eye. What could be seen of the landscape appeared
magically changed. He looked over the valley, and summed up the
present and future in two words--"Snowed in!"

A careful inventory of the provisions, which, fortunately for the
party, had been stored within the hut, and so escaped the felonious
fingers of Uncle Billy, disclosed the fact that with care and prudence
they might last ten days longer. "That is," said Mr. Oakhurst,
_sotto voce_ to the Innocent, "if you're willing to board us. If you
ain't--and perhaps you'd better not--you can wait till Uncle Billy
gets back with provisions." For some occult reason, Mr. Oakhurst could
not bring himself to disclose Uncle Billy's rascality, and so offered
the hypothesis that he had wandered from the camp and had accidentally
stampeded the animals. He dropped a warning to the Duchess and Mother
Shipton, who of course knew the facts of their associate's defection.
"They'll find out the truth about us _all_ when they find out
anything," he added, significantly, "and there's no good frightening
them now."

Tom Simson not only put all his worldly store at the disposal of
Mr. Oakhurst, but seemed to enjoy the prospect of their enforced
seclusion. "We'll have a good camp for a week, and then the snow'll
melt, and we'll all go back together." The cheerful gayety of the
young man and Mr. Oakhurst's calm infected the others. The Innocent,
with the aid of pine-boughs, extemporized a thatch for the roofless
cabin, and the Duchess directed Piney in the rearrangement of the
interior with a taste and tact that opened the blue eyes of that
provincial maiden to their fullest extent. "I reckon now you're used
to fine things at Poker Flat," said Piney. The Duchess turned away
sharply to conceal something that reddened her cheeks through
their professional tint, and Mother Shipton requested Piney not to
"chatter." But when Mr. Oakhurst returned from a weary search for the
trail, he heard the sound of happy laughter echoed from the rocks. He
stopped in some alarm, and his thoughts first naturally reverted
to the whiskey, which he had prudently _cached_. "And yet it don't
somehow sound like whiskey," said the gambler. It was not until he
caught sight of the blazing fire through the still blinding storm and
the group around it that he settled to the conviction that it was
"square fun."

Whether Mr. Oakhurst had _cached_ his cards with the whiskey as
something debarred the free access of the community, I cannot say.
It was certain that, in Mother Shipton's words, he "didn't say
cards once," during that evening. Haply the time was beguiled by an
accordion, produced somewhat ostentatiously by Tom Simson from his
pack. Notwithstanding some difficulties attending the manipulation
of this instrument, Piney Woods managed to pluck several reluctant
melodies from its keys, to an accompaniment by the Innocent on a pair
of bone castanets. But the crowning festivity of the evening was
reached in a rude camp-meeting hymn, which the lovers, joining hands,
sang with great earnestness and vociferation. I fear that a certain
defiant tone and Covenanter's swing to its chorus, rather than any
devotional quality, caused it speedily to infect the others, who at
last joined in the refrain:

  "I'm proud to live in the service of the Lord,
  And I'm bound to die in His army."

The pines rocked, the storm eddied and whirled above the miserable
group, and the flames of their altar leaped heavenward, as if in token
of the vow.

At midnight the storm abated, the rolling clouds parted, and the
stars glittered keenly above the sleeping camp. Mr. Oakhurst, whose
professional habits had enabled him to live on the smallest possible
amount of sleep, in dividing the watch with Tom Simson, somehow
managed to take upon himself the greater part of that duty. He excused
himself to the Innocent by saying that he had "often been a week
without sleep." "Doing what?" asked Tom. "Poker!" replied Oakhurst,
sententiously; "when a man gets a streak of luck--<DW65>-luck--he
don't get tired. The luck gives in first. Luck," continued the
gambler, reflectively, "is a mighty queer thing. All you know about it
for certain is that it's bound to change. And it's finding out when
it's going to change that makes you. We've had a streak of bad luck
since we left Poker Flat--you come along, and slap you get into it,
too. If you can hold your cards right along, you're all right. For,"
added the gambler, with cheerful irrelevance--

  "'I'm proud to live in the service of the Lord,
  And I'm bound to die in His army,'"

The third day came, and the sun, looking through the white-curtained
valley, saw the outcasts divide their slowly decreasing store of
provisions for the morning meal. It was one of the peculiarities of
that mountain climate that its rays diffused a kindly warmth over the
wintry landscape, as if in regretful commiseration of the past. But it
revealed drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut--a hopeless,
uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to
which the castaways still clung. Through the marvellously clear air
the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away.
Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky
fastness hurled in that direction a final malediction. It was her last
vituperative attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a
certain degree of sublimity. It did her good, she privately informed
the Duchess. "Just you go out there and cuss, and see." She then set
herself to the task of amusing "the child," as she and the Duchess
were pleased to call Piney. Piney was no chicken, but it was a
soothing and original theory of the pair thus to account for the fact
that she didn't swear and wasn't improper.

When night crept up again through the gorges, the reedy notes of the
accordion rose and fell in fitful spasms and long-drawn gasps by the
flickering camp-fire. But music failed to fill entirely the aching
void left by insufficient food, and a new diversion was proposed by
Piney--story-telling. Neither Mr., Oakhurst nor his female companions
caring to relate their personal experiences, this plan would have
failed, too, but for the Innocent. Some months before he had chanced
upon a stray copy of Mr. Pope's ingenious translation of the
_Iliad_. He now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that
poem--having thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the
words--in the current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of
that night the Homeric demigods again walked the earth. Trojan bully
and wily Greek wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the canon
seemed to bow to the wrath of the son of Peleus. Mr. Oakhurst listened
with quiet satisfaction. Most especially was he interested in the
fate of "Ash-heels," as the Innocent persisted in denominating the
"swift-footed Achilles."

So with small food and much of Homer and the accordion, a week passed
over the heads of the outcasts. The sun again forsook them, and again
from leaden skies the snowflakes were sifted over the land. Day by day
closer around them drew the snowy circle, until at last they looked
from their prison over drifted walls of dazzling white, that towered
twenty feet above their heads. It became more and more difficult to
replenish their fires, even from the fallen trees beside them, now
half hidden in the drifts. And yet no one complained. The lovers
turned from the dreary prospect and looked into each other's eyes, and
were happy. Mr. Oakhurst settled himself coolly to the losing game
before him. The Duchess, more cheerful than she had been, assumed
the care of Piney. Only Mother Shipton--once the strongest of the
party--seemed to sicken and fade. At midnight on the tenth day she
called Oakhurst to her side. "I'm going," she said, in a voice of
querulous weakness, "but don't say anything about it. Don't waken the
kids. Take the bundle from under my head and open it." Mr. Oakhurst
did so. It contained Mother Shipton's rations for the last week,
untouched. "Give 'em to the child," she said, pointing to the sleeping
Piney. "You've starved yourself," said the gambler. "That's what they
call it," said the woman, querulously, as she lay down again, and,
turning her face to the wall, passed quietly away.

The accordion and the bones were put aside that day, and Homer was
forgotten. When the body of Mother Shipton had been committed to the
snow, Mr. Oakhurst took the Innocent aside and showed him a pair of
snow-shoes, which he had fashioned from the old pack-saddle. "There's
one chance in a hundred to save her yet," he said, pointing to Piney;
"but it's there," he added, pointing toward Poker Flat. "If you can
reach there in two days she's safe." "And you?" asked Tom Simson.
"I'll stay here," was the curt reply.

The lovers parted with a long embrace. "You are not going, too?" said
the Duchess, as she saw Mr. Oakhurst apparently waiting to accompany
him. "As far as the canon," he replied. He turned suddenly and kissed
the Duchess, leaving her pallid face aflame and her trembling limbs
rigid with amazement.

Night came, but not Mr. Oakhurst. It brought the storm again and the
whirling snow. Then the Duchess, feeding the fire, found that some
one had quietly piled beside the hut enough fuel to last a few days
longer. The tears rose to her eyes, but she hid them from Piney.

The women slept but little. In the morning, looking into each other's
faces, they read their fate. Neither spoke; but Piney, accepting the
position of the stronger, drew near and placed her arm around the
Duchess's waist. They kept this attitude for the rest of the day. That
night the storm reached its greatest fury, and, rending asunder the
protecting pines, invaded the very hut.

Toward morning they found themselves unable to feed the fire, which
gradually died away. As the embers slowly blackened, the Duchess crept
closer to Piney, and broke the silence of many hours: "Piney, can you
pray?" "No, dear," said Piney, simply. The Duchess, without knowing
exactly why, felt relieved, and, putting her head upon Piney's
shoulder, spoke no more. And so reclining, the younger and purer
pillowing the head of her soiled sister upon her virgin breast, they
fell asleep.

The wind lulled as if it feared to waken them. Feathery drifts of
snow, shaken from the long pine-boughs, flew like white-winged birds,
and settled about them as they slept. The moon through the rifted
clouds looked down upon what had been the camp. But all human stain,
all trace of earthly travail, was hidden beneath the spotless mantle
mercifully flung from above.

They slept all that day and the next, nor did they waken when voices
and footsteps broke the silence of the camp. And when pitying fingers
brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told,
from the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had
sinned. Even the law of Poker Flat recognized this, and turned away,
leaving them still locked in each other's arms.

But at the head of the gulch, on one of the largest pine-trees, they
found the deuce of clubs pinned to the bark with a bowie-knife. It
bore the following, written in pencil, in a firm hand:


           +

         BENEATH THIS TREE

          LIES THE BODY

               OF

         JOHN OAKHURST,

  WHO STRUCK A STREAK OF BAD LUCK

   ON THE 23D OF NOVEMBER, 1850,

              AND

      HANDED IN HIS CHECKS

    ON THE 7TH DECEMBER, 1850.

              +

And pulseless and cold, with a derringer by his side and a bullet in
his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who
was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker
Flat.




THE THREE STRANGERS[1]

[Footnote 1: From _Wessex Tales_.]

_Thomas Hardy_ (1840)


Among the few features of agricultural England which retain an
appearance but little modified by the lapse of centuries, may be
reckoned the high, grassy and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases,
as they are indifferently called, that fill a large area of certain
counties in the south and southwest. If any mark of human occupation
is met with hereon, it usually takes the form of the solitary cottage
of some shepherd.

Fifty years ago such a lonely cottage stood on such a down, and may
possibly be standing there now. In spite of its loneliness, however,
the spot, by actual measurement, was not more than five miles from
a county-town. Yet that affected it little. Five miles of irregular
upland, during the long inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows,
rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon
or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less
repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who
"conceive and meditate of pleasant things."

Some old earthen camp or barrow, some clump of trees, at least some
starved fragment of ancient hedge is usually taken advantage of in the
erection of these forlorn dwellings. But, in the present case, such a
kind of shelter had been disregarded. Higher Crowstairs, as the house
was called, stood quite detached and undefended. The only reason for
its precise situation seemed to be the crossing of two footpaths at
right angles hard by, which may have crossed there and thus for a good
five hundred years. Hence the house was exposed to the elements on
all sides. But, though the wind up here blew unmistakably when it did
blow, and the rain hit hard whenever it fell, the various weathers of
the winter season were not quite so formidable on the coomb as they
were imagined to be by dwellers on low ground. The raw rimes were
not so pernicious as in the hollows, and the frosts were scarcely so
severe. When the shepherd and his family who tenanted the house were
pitied for their sufferings from the exposure, they said that upon the
whole they were less inconvenienced by "wuzzes and flames" (hoarses
and phlegms) than when they had lived by the stream of a snug
neighboring valley.

The night of March 28, 182-, was precisely one of the nights that
were wont to call forth these expressions of commiseration. The level
rainstorm smote walls, <DW72>s, and hedges like the clothyard shafts
of Senlac and Crecy. Such sheep and outdoor animals as had no shelter
stood with their buttocks to the winds; while the tails of little
birds trying to roost on some scraggy thorn were blown inside-out like
umbrellas. The gable-end of the cottage was stained with wet, and the
eavesdroppings flapped against the wall. Yet never was commiseration
for the shepherd more misplaced. For that cheerful rustic was
entertaining a large party in glorification of the christening of his
second girl.

The guests had arrived before the rain began to fall, and they were
all now assembled in the chief or living room of the dwelling. A
glance into the apartment at eight o'clock on this eventful evening
would have resulted in the opinion that it was as cosy and comfortable
a nook as could be wished for in boisterous weather. The calling of
its inhabitant was proclaimed by a number of highly-polished sheep
crooks without stems that were hung ornamentally over the fireplace,
the curl of each shining crook varying from the antiquated type
engraved in the patriarchal pictures of old family Bibles to the most
approved fashion of the last local sheep-fair. The room was lighted
by half-a-dozen candles, having wicks only a trifle smaller than the
grease which enveloped them, in candlesticks that were never used but
at high-days, holy-days, and family feasts. The lights were scattered
about the room, two of them standing on the chimney-piece. This
position of candles was in itself significant. Candles on the
chimney-piece always meant a party.

On the hearth, in front of a back-brand to give substance, blazed a
fire of thorns, that crackled "like the laughter of the fool."

Nineteen persons were gathered here. Of these, five women, wearing
gowns of various bright hues, sat in chairs along the wall; girls shy
and not shy filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake
the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New the parish-clerk, and John Pitcher,
a neighboring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in
the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over
tentative _pourparlers_ on a life-companionship, sat beneath the
corner-cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved
restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot
where she was. Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more
prevailed in being unhampered by conventional restrictions. Absolute
confidence in each other's good opinion begat perfect ease, while the
finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity,
was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression or trait
denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds,
or do any eclipsing thing whatever--which nowadays so generally nips
the bloom and _bonhomie_ of all except the two extremes of the social
scale.

Shepherd Fennel had married well, his wife being a dairyman's
daughter from a vale at a distance, who brought fifty guineas in
her pocket--and kept them there, till they should be required for
ministering to the needs of a coming family. This frugal woman had
been somewhat exercised as to the character that should be given
to the gathering. A sit-still party had its advantages; but an
undisturbed position of ease in chairs and settles was apt to lead
on the men to such an unconscionable deal of toping that they would
sometimes fairly drink the house dry. A dancing-party was the
alternative; but this, while avoiding the foregoing objection on the
score of good drink, had a counterbalancing disadvantage in the matter
of good victuals, the ravenous appetites engendered by the exercise
causing immense havoc in the buttery. Shepherdess Fennel fell back
upon the intermediate plan of mingling short dances with short periods
of talk and singing, so as to hinder any ungovernable rage in either.
But this scheme was entirely confined to her own gentle mind: the
shepherd himself was in the mood to exhibit the most reckless phases
of hospitality.

The fiddler was a boy of those parts, about twelve years of age, who
had a wonderful dexterity in jigs and reels, though his fingers were
so small and short as to necessitate a constant shifting for the high
notes, from which he scrambled back to the first position with sounds
not of unmixed purity of tone. At seven the shrill tweedle-dee of this
youngster had begun, accompanied by a booming ground-bass from Elijah
New, the parish-clerk, who had thoughtfully brought with him his
favorite musical instrument, the serpent. Dancing was instantaneous,
Mrs. Fennel privately enjoining the players on no account to let the
dance exceed the length of a quarter of an hour.

But Elijah and the boy, in the excitement of their position, quite
forgot the injunction. Moreover, Oliver Giles, a man of seventeen,
one of the dancers, who was enamoured of his partner, a fair girl of
thirty-three rolling years, had recklessly handed a new crown-piece to
the musicians, as a bribe to keep going as long as they had muscle
and wind. Mrs. Fennel, seeing the steam begin to generate on the
countenances of her guests, crossed over and touched the fiddler's
elbow and put her hand on the serpent's mouth. But they took no
notice, and fearing she might lose her character of genial hostess if
she were to interfere too markedly, she retired and sat down helpless.
And so the dance whizzed on with cumulative fury, the performers
moving in their planet-like courses, direct and retrograde, from
apogee to perigee, till the hand of the well-kicked clock at the
bottom of the room had travelled over the circumference of an hour.

While these cheerful events were in course of enactment within
Fennel's pastoral dwelling, an incident having considerable bearing
on the party had occurred in the gloomy night without. Mrs. Fennel's
concern about the growing fierceness of the dance corresponded in
point of time with the ascent of a human figure to the solitary hill
of Higher Crowstairs from the direction of the distant town. This
personage strode on through the rain without a pause, following
the little-worn path which, further on in its course, skirted the
shepherd's cottage.

It was nearly the time of full moon, and on this account, though the
sky was lined with a uniform sheet of dripping cloud, ordinary objects
out of doors were readily visible. The sad wan light revealed the
lonely pedestrian to be a man of supple frame; his gait suggested that
he had somewhat passed the period of perfect and instinctive agility,
though not so far as to be otherwise than rapid of motion when
occasion required. At a rough guess, he might have been about forty
years of age. He appeared tall, but a recruiting sergeant, or other
person accustomed to the judging of men's heights by the eye, would
have discerned that this was chiefly owing to his gauntness, and that
he was not more than five-feet-eight or nine.

Notwithstanding the regularity of his tread, there was caution in it,
as in that of one who mentally feels his way; and despite the fact
that it was not a black coat nor a dark garment of any sort that he
wore, there was something about him which suggested that he naturally
belonged to the black-coated tribes of men. His clothes were of
fustian, and his boots hobnailed, yet in his progress he showed not
the mud-accustomed bearing of hobnailed and fustianed peasantry.

By the time that he had arrived abreast of the shepherd's premises
the rain came down, or rather came along, with yet more determined
violence. The outskirts of the little settlement partially broke the
force of wind and rain, and this induced him to stand still. The most
salient of the shepherd's domestic erections was an empty sty at the
forward corner of his hedgeless garden, for in these latitudes the
principle of masking the homelier features of your establishment by a
conventional frontage was unknown. The traveller's eye was attracted
to this small building by the pallid shine of the wet slates that
covered it. He turned aside, and, finding it empty, stood under the
pent-roof for shelter.

While he stood, the boom of the serpent within the adjacent house,
and the lesser strains of the fiddler, reached the spot as an
accompaniment to the surging hiss of the flying rain on the sod, its
louder beating on the cabbage-leaves of the garden, on the eight or
ten beehives just discernible by the path, and its dripping from the
eaves into a row of buckets and pans that had been placed under
the walls of the cottage. For at Higher Crowstairs, as at all such
elevated domiciles, the grand difficulty of housekeeping was an
insufficiency of water; and a casual rainfall was utilized by turning
out, as catchers, every utensil that the house contained. Some queer
stories might be told of the contrivances for economy in suds and
dishwaters that are absolutely necessitated in upland habitations
during the droughts of summer. But at this season there were no
such exigencies; a mere acceptance of what the skies bestowed was
sufficient for an abundant store.

At last the notes of the serpent ceased and the house was silent. This
cessation of activity aroused the solitary pedestrian from the reverie
into which he had elapsed, and, emerging from the shed, with an
apparently new intention, he walked up the path to the house-door.
Arrived here, his first act was to kneel down on a large stone beside
the row of vessels, and to drink a copious draught from one of them.
Having quenched his thirst, he rose and lifted his hand to knock, but
paused with his eye upon the panel. Since the dark surface of the wood
revealed absolutely nothing, it was evident that he must be mentally
looking through the door, as if he wished to measure thereby all the
possibilities that a house of this sort might include, and how they
might bear upon the question of his entry.

In his indecision he turned and surveyed the scene around. Not a soul
was anywhere visible. The garden-path stretched downward from his
feet, gleaming like the track of a snail; the roof of the little well
(mostly dry), the well-cover, the top rail of the garden-gate, were
varnished with the same dull liquid glaze; while, far away in the
vale, a faint whiteness of more than usual extent showed that the
rivers were high in the meads. Beyond all this winked a few bleared
lamplights through the beating drops--lights that denoted the
situation of the county-town from which he had appeared to come. The
absence of all notes of life in that direction seemed to clinch his
intentions, and he knocked at the door.

Within, a desultory chat had taken the place of movement and musical
sound. The hedge-carpenter was suggesting a song to the company, which
nobody just then was inclined to undertake, so that the knock afforded
a not unwelcome diversion.

"Walk in!" said the shepherd, promptly.

The latch clicked upward, and out of the night our pedestrian appeared
upon the door-mat. The shepherd arose, snuffed two of the nearest
candles, and turned to look at him.

Their light disclosed that the stranger was dark in complexion and not
unprepossessing as to feature. His hat, which for a moment he did not
remove, hung low over his eyes, without concealing that they were
large, open, and determined, moving with a flash rather than a glance
round the room. He seemed pleased with his survey, and, baring his
shaggy head, said, in a rich, deep voice: "The rain is so heavy,
friends, that I ask leave to come in and rest awhile."

"To be sure, stranger," said the shepherd. "And faith, you've been
lucky in choosing your time, for we are having a bit of a fling for
a glad cause--though, to be sure, a man could hardly wish that glad
cause to happen more than once a year."

"Nor less," spoke up a woman. "For 'tis best to get your family over
and done with, as soon as you can, so as to be all the earlier out of
the fag o't."

"And what may be this glad cause?" asked the stranger.

"A birth and christening," said the shepherd.

The stranger hoped his host might not be made unhappy either by too
many or two few of such episodes, and being invited by a gesture to
a pull at the mug, he readily acquiesced. His manner, which, before
entering, had been so dubious, was now altogether that of a careless
and candid man.

"Late to be traipsing athwart this coomb--hey?" said the engaged man
of fifty.

"Late it is, master, as you say.--I'll take a seat in the
chimney-corner, if you have nothing to urge against it, ma'am; for I
am a little moist on the side that was next the rain."

Mrs. Shepherd Fennel assented, and made room for the self-invited
comer, who, having got completely inside the chimney-corner, stretched
out his legs and arms with the expansiveness of a person quite at
home.

"Yes, I am rather cracked in the vamp," he said freely, seeing that
the eyes of the shepherd's wife fell upon his boots, "and I am not
well fitted either. I have had some rough times lately, and have been
forced to pick up what I can get in the way of wearing, but I must
find a suit better fit for working-days when I reach home."

"One of hereabouts?" she inquired.

"Not quite that--further up the country."

"I thought so. And so be I; and by your tongue you come from my
neighborhood."

"But you would hardly have heard of me," he said quickly. "My time
would be long before yours, ma'am, you see."

This testimony to the youthfulness of his hostess had the effect of
stopping her cross-examination.

"There is only one thing more wanted to make me happy," continued the
new-comer, "and that is a little baccy, which I am sorry to say I am
out of."

"I'll fill your pipe," said the shepherd.

"I must ask you to lend me a pipe likewise."

"A smoker, and no pipe about 'ee?"

"I have dropped it somewhere on the road."

The shepherd filled and handed him a new clay pipe, saying, as he did
so, "Hand me your baccy-box--I'll fill that too, now I am about it."

The man went through the movement of searching his pockets.

"Lost that too?" said his entertainer, with some surprise.

"I am afraid so," said the man with some confusion. "Give it to me in
a screw of paper." Lighting his pipe at the candle with a suction that
drew the whole flame into the bowl, he resettled himself in the corner
and bent his looks upon the faint steam from his damp legs, as if he
wished to say no more.

Meanwhile the general body of guests had been taking little notice of
this visitor by reason of an absorbing discussion in which they were
engaged with the band about a tune for the next dance. The matter
being settled, they were about to stand up when an interruption came
in the shape of another knock at the door.

At sound of the same the man in the chimney-corner took up the poker
and began stirring the brands as if doing it thoroughly were the one
aim of his existence; and a second time the shepherd said, "Walk in!"
In a moment another man stood upon the straw-woven door-mat. He too
was a stranger.

This individual was one of a type radically different from the first.
There was more of the commonplace in his manner, and a certain jovial
cosmopolitanism sat upon his features. He was several years older
than the first arrival, his hair being slightly frosted, his eyebrows
bristly, and his whiskers cut back from his cheeks. His face was
rather full and flabby, and yet it was not altogether a face without
power. A few grog-blossoms marked the neighborhood of his nose. He
flung back his long drab greatcoat, revealing that beneath it he wore
a suit of cinder-gray shade throughout, large heavy seals, of some
metal or other that would take a polish, dangling from his fob as his
only personal ornament. Shaking the water-drops from his low-crowned
glazed hat, he said, "I must ask for a few minutes' shelter, comrades,
or I shall be wetted to my skin before I get to Casterbridge."

"Make yourself at home, master," said the shepherd, perhaps a trifle
less heartily than on the first occasion. Not that Fennel had the
least tinge of niggardliness in his composition; but the room was far
from large, spare chairs were not numerous, and damp companions were
not altogether desirable at close quarters for the women and girls in
their bright- gowns.

However, the second comer, after taking off his greatcoat, and hanging
his hat on a nail in one of the ceiling-beams as if he had been
specially invited to put it there, advanced and sat down at the table.
This had been pushed so closely into the chimney-corner, to give all
available room to the dancers, that its inner edge grazed the elbow
of the man who had ensconced himself by the fire; and thus the two
strangers were brought into close companionship. They nodded to each
other by way of breaking the ice of unacquaintance, and the first
stranger handed his neighbor the family mug--a huge vessel of brown
ware, having its upper edge worn away like a threshold by the rub of
whole generations of thirsty lips that had gone the way of all flesh,
and bearing the following inscription burnt upon its rotund side in
yellow letters:

  THERE IS NO FUN
  UNTILL I CUM.

The other man, nothing loth, raised the mug to his lips, and drank on,
and on, and on--till a curious blueness overspread the countenance
of the shepherd's wife, who had regarded with no little surprise the
first stranger's free offer to the second of what did not belong to
him to dispense.

"I knew it!" said the toper to the shepherd with much satisfaction.
"When I walked up your garden before coming in, and saw the hives all
of a row, I said to myself, 'Where there's bees there's honey,
and where there's honey there's mead,' But mead of such a truly
comfortable sort as this I really didn't expect to meet in my older
days." He took yet another pull at the mug, till it assumed an ominous
elevation.

"Glad you enjoy it!" said the shepherd warmly.

"It is goodish mead," assented Mrs. Fennel, with an absence of
enthusiasm which seemed to say that it was possible to buy praise for
one's cellar at too heavy a price. "It is trouble enough to make--and
really I hardly think we shall make any more. For honey sells well,
and we ourselves can make shift with a drop o' small mead and
metheglin for common use from the comb-washings."

"O, but you'll never have the heart!" reproachfully cried the stranger
in cinder-gray, after taking up the mug a third time and setting it
down empty. "I love mead, when 'tis old like this, as I love to go to
church o' Sundays, or to relieve the needy any day of the week."

"Ha, ha, ha!" said the man in the chimney-corner, who, in spite of the
taciturnity induced by the pipe of tobacco, could not or would not
refrain from this slight testimony to his comrade's humor.

Now the old mead of those days, brewed of the purest first-year or
maiden honey, four pounds to the gallon--with its due complement of
white of eggs, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mace, rosemary, yeast, and
processes of working, bottling, and cellaring--tasted remarkably
strong; but it did not taste so strong as it actually was. Hence,
presently, the stranger in cinder-gray at the table, moved by its
creeping influence, unbuttoned his waistcoat, threw himself back in
his chair, spread his legs, and made his presence felt in various
ways.

"Well, well, as I say," he resumed, "I am going to Casterbridge, and
to Casterbridge I must go. I should have been almost there by this
time; but the rain drove me into your dwelling, and I'm not sorry for
it."

"You don't live in Casterbridge?" said the shepherd.

"Not as yet; though I shortly mean to move there."

"Going to set up in trade, perhaps?"

"No, no," said the shepherd's wife. "It is easy to see that the
gentleman is rich, and don't want to work at anything."

The cinder-gray stranger paused, as if to consider whether he would
accept that definition of himself. He presently rejected it by
answering, "Rich is not quite the word for me, dame. I do work, and I
must work. And even if I only get to Casterbridge by midnight I must
begin work there at eight to-morrow morning. Yes, het or wet, blow or
snow, famine or sword, my day's work to-morrow must be done."

"Poor man! Then, in spite o' seeming, you be off than we." replied the
shepherd's wife.

"'Tis the nature of my trade, men and maidens. Tis the nature of my
trade more than my poverty.... But really and truly I must up and off,
or I shan't get a lodging in the town." However, the speaker did
not move, and directly added, "There's time for one more draught of
friendship before I go; and I'd perform it at once if the mug were not
dry."

"Here's a mug o' small," said Mrs. Fennel. "Small, we call it, though
to be sure 'tis only the first wash o' the combs."

"No," said the stranger, disdainfully. "I won't spoil your first
kindness by partaking o' your second."

"Certainly not," broke in Fennel. "We don't increase and multiply
every day, and I'll fill the mug again." He went away to the dark
place under the stairs where the barrel stood. The shepherdess
followed him.

"Why should you do this?" she said, reproachfully, as soon as they
were alone. "He's emptied it once, though it held enough for ten
people; and now he's not contented wi' the small, but must needs call
for more o' the strong! And a stranger unbeknown to any of us. For my
part, I don't like the look o' the man at all."

"But he's in the house, my honey; and 'tis a wet night, and a
christening. Daze it, what's a cup of mead more or less? There'll be
plenty more next bee-burning."

"Very well--this time, then," she answered, looking wistfully at the
barrel. "But what is the man's calling, and where is he one of, that
he should come in and join us like this?"

"I don't know. I'll ask him again."

The catastrophe of having the mug drained dry at one pull by the
stranger in cinder-gray was effectually guarded against this time by
Mrs. Fennel. She poured out his allowance in a small cup, keeping the
large one at a discreet distance from him. When he had tossed off
his portion the shepherd renewed his inquiry about the stranger's
occupation.

The latter did not immediately reply, and the man in the
chimney-corner, with sudden demonstrativeness, said, "Anybody may know
my trade--I'm a wheelwright."

"A very good trade for these parts," said the shepherd.

"And anybody may know mine--if they've the sense to find it out," said
the stranger in cinder-gray.

"You may generally tell what a man is by his claws," observed the
hedge-carpenter, looking at his own hands. "My fingers be as full of
thorns as an old pin-cushion is of pins."

The hands of the man in the chimney-corner instinctively sought the
shade, and he gazed into the fire as he resumed his pipe. The man at
the table took up the hedge-carpenter's remark, and added smartly,
"True; but the oddity of my trade is that, instead of setting a mark
upon me, it sets a mark upon my customers."

No observation being offered by anybody in elucidation of this enigma,
the shepherd's wife once more called for a song. The same obstacles
presented themselves as at the former time--one had no voice, another
had forgotten the first verse. The stranger at the table, whose soul
had now risen to a good working temperature, relieved the difficulty
by exclaiming that, to start the company, he would sing himself.
Thrusting one thumb into the arm-hole of his waistcoat, he waved the
other hand in the air, and, with an extemporizing gaze at the shining
sheep-crooks above the mantelpiece, began:

  "O my trade it is the rarest one,
    Simple shepherds all--
    My trade is a sight to see;
  For my customers I tie, and take them up on high,
    And waft 'em to a far countree!"

The room was silent when he had finished the verse--with one
exception, that of the man in the chimney-corner, who, at the singer's
word, "Chorus!" joined him in a deep bass voice of musical relish:

  "And waft 'em to a far countree!"

Oliver Giles, John Pitcher the dairyman, the parish-clerk, the engaged
man of fifty, the row of young women against the wall, seemed lost in
thought not of the gayest kind. The shepherd looked meditatively on
the ground, the shepherdess gazed keenly at the singer, and with some
suspicion; she was doubting whether this stranger were merely singing
an old song from recollection, or was composing one there and then for
the occasion. All were as perplexed at the obscure revelation as the
guests at Belshazzar's Feast, except the man in the chimney-corner,
who quietly said, "Second verse, stranger," and smoked on.

The singer thoroughly moistened himself from his lips inward, and went
on with the next stanza as requested:

    "My tools are but common ones,
         Simple shepherds all--
    My tools are no sight to see:
  A little hempen string, and a post whereon to swing,
    Are implements enough for me!"

Shepherd Fennel glanced round. There was no longer any doubt that the
stranger was answering his question rhythmically. The guests one and
all started back with suppressed exclamations. The young woman engaged
to the man of fifty fainted half-way, and would have proceeded,
but finding him wanting in alacrity for catching her she sat down
trembling.

"O, he's the--!" whispered the people in the background, mentioning
the name of an ominous public officer. "He's come to do it! 'Tis to be
at Casterbridge jail to-morrow--the man for sheep-stealing--the poor
clock-maker we heard of, who used to live away at Shottsford and had
no work to do--Timothy Summers, whose family were a-starving, and so
he went out of Shottsford by the high-road, and took a sheep in open
daylight, defying the farmer and the farmer's wife and the farmer's
lad, and every man jack among 'em. He" (and they nodded toward the
stranger of the deadly trade) "is come from up the country to do it
because there's not enough to do in his own county-town, and he's got
the place here now our own county man's dead; he's going to live in
the same cottage under the prison wall."

The stranger in cinder-gray took no notice of this whispered string of
observations, but again wetted his lips. Seeing that his friend in the
chimney-corner was the only one who reciprocated his joviality in any
way, he held out his cup toward that appreciative comrade, who also
held out his own. They clinked together, the eyes of the rest of the
room hanging upon the singer's actions. He parted his lips for the
third verse; but at that moment another knock was audible upon the
door. This time the knock was faint and hesitating.

The company seemed scared; the shepherd looked with consternation
toward the entrance, and it was with some effort that he resisted his
alarmed wife's deprecatory glance, and uttered for the third time the
welcoming words, "Walk in!"

The door was gently opened, and another man stood upon the mat. He,
like those who had preceded him, was a stranger. This time it was a
short, small personage, of fair complexion, and dressed in a decent
suit of dark clothes.

"Can you tell me the way to--?" he began: when, gazing round the room
to observe the nature of the company among whom he had fallen, his
eyes lighted on the stranger in cinder-gray. It was just at the
instant when the latter, who had thrown his mind into his song with
such a will that he scarcely heeded the interruption, silenced all
whispers and inquiries by bursting into his third verse:

  "To-morrow is my working day,
  Simple shepherds all--
  To-morrow is a working day for me:
  For the farmer's sheep is slain, and the lad who did it ta'en,
  And on his soul may God ha' merc-y!"

The stranger in the chimney-corner, waving cups with the singer so
heartily that his mead splashed over on the hearth, repeated in his
bass voice as before:

  "And on his soul may God ha' merc-y!"

All this time the third stranger had been standing in the doorway.
Finding now that he did not come forward or go on speaking, the guests
particularly regarded him. They noticed to their surprise that he
stood before them the picture of abject terror--his knees trembling,
his hand shaking so violently that the door-latch by which he
supported himself rattled audibly: his white lips were parted, and his
eyes fixed on the merry officer of justice in the middle of the room.
A moment more and he had turned, closed the door, and fled.

"What a man can it be?" said the shepherd.

The rest, between the awfulness of their late discovery and the odd
conduct of this third visitor, looked as if they knew not what to
think, and said nothing. Instinctively they withdrew further and
further from the grim gentleman in their midst, whom some of them
seemed to take for the Prince of Darkness himself, till they formed
a remote circle, an empty space of floor being left between them and
him--

"... circulus, cujus centrum diabolus."

The room was so silent--though there were more than twenty people in
it--that nothing could be heard but the patter of the rain against the
window-shutters, accompanied by the occasional hiss of a stray drop
that fell down the chimney into the fire, and the steady puffing of
the man in the corner, who had now resumed his pipe of long clay.

The stillness was unexpectedly broken. The distant sound of a gun
reverberated through the air--apparently from the direction of the
county-town.

"Be jiggered!" cried the stranger who had sung the song, jumping up.

"What does that mean?" asked several.

"A prisoner escaped from the jail--that's what it means."

All listened. The sound was repeated, and none of them spoke but the
man in the chimney-corner, who said quietly, "I've often been told
that in this county they fire a gun at such times; but I never heard
it till now."

"I wonder if it is _my_ man?" murmured the personage in cinder-gray.

"Surely it is!" said the shepherd involuntarily. "And surely we've
zeed him! That little man who looked in at the door by now, and
quivered like a leaf when he zeed ye and heard your song!"

"His teeth chattered, and the breath went out of his body," said the
dairyman.

"And his heart seemed to sink within him like a stone," said Oliver
Giles.

"And he bolted as if he'd been shot at," said the hedge-carpenter.

"True--his teeth chattered, and his heart seemed to sink; and he
bolted as if he'd been shot at," slowly summed up the man in the
chimney-corner.

"I didn't notice it," remarked the hangman.

"We were all a-wondering what made him run off in such a fright,"
faltered one of the women against the wall, "and now 'tis explained!"

The firing of the alarm-gun went on at intervals, low and sullenly,
and their suspicions became a certainty. The sinister gentleman in
cinder-gray roused himself. "Is there a constable here?" he asked, in
thick tones. "If so, let him step forward."

The engaged man of fifty stepped quavering out from the wall, his
betrothed beginning to sob on the back of the chair.

"You are a sworn constable?"

"I be, sir."

"Then pursue the criminal at once, with assistance, and bring him back
here. He can't have gone far."

"I will, sir, I will--when I've got my staff. I'll go home and get it,
and come sharp here, and start in a body."

"Staff!--never mind your staff; the man'll be gone!"

"But I can't do nothing without my staff--can I, William, and John,
and Charles Jake? No; for there's the king's royal crown a-painted
on en in yaller and gold, and the lion and the unicorn, so as when I
raise en up and hit my prisoner, 'tis made a lawful blow thereby. I
wouldn't 'tempt to take up a man without my staff--no, not I. If I
hadn't the law to gie me courage, why, instead o' my taking up him he
might take up me!"

"Now, I'm a king's man myself, and can give you authority enough for
this," said the formidable officer in gray. "Now then, all of ye, be
ready. Have ye any lanterns?"

"Yes--have ye any lanterns?--I demand it!" said the constable.

"And the rest of you able-bodied--"

"Able-bodied men--yes--the rest of ye!" said the constable.

"Have you some good stout staves and pitchforks--"

"Staves and pitchforks--in the name o' the law! And take 'em in yer
hands and go in quest, and do as we in authority tell ye!"

Thus aroused, the men prepared to give chase. The evidence was,
indeed, though circumstantial, so convincing, that but little argument
was needed to show the shepherd's guests that after what they had seen
it would look very much like connivance if they did not instantly
pursue the unhappy third stranger, who could not as yet have gone more
than a few hundred yards over such uneven country.

A shepherd is always well provided with lanterns; and, lighting these
hastily, and with hurdle-staves in their hands, they poured out of the
door, taking a direction along the crest of the hill, away from the
town, the rain having fortunately a little abated.

Disturbed by the noise, or possibly by unpleasant dreams of her
baptism, the child who had been christened began to cry heart-brokenly
in the room overhead. These notes of grief came down through the
chinks of the floor to the ears of the women below, who jumped up one
by one, and seemed glad of the excuse to ascend and comfort the baby,
for the incidents of the last half-hour greatly oppressed them. Thus
in the space of two or three minutes the room on the ground-floor was
deserted quite.

But it was not for long. Hardly had the sound of footsteps died away
when a man returned round the corner of the house from the direction
the pursuers had taken. Peeping in at the door, and seeing
nobody there, he entered leisurely. It was the stranger of the
chimney-corner, who had gone out with the rest. The motive of his
return was shown by his helping himself to a cut piece of skimmer-cake
that lay on a ledge beside where he had sat, and which he had
apparently forgotten to take with him. He also poured out half a cup
more mead from the quantity that remained, ravenously eating and
drinking these as he stood. He had not finished when another figure
came in just as quietly--his friend in cinder-gray.

"O--you here?" said the latter, smiling. "I thought you had gone to
help in the capture." And this speaker also revealed the object of his
return by looking solicitously round for the fascinating mug of old
mead.

"And I thought you had gone," said the other, continuing his
skimmer-cake with some effort.

"Well, on second thoughts, I felt there were enough without me," said
the first confidentially, "and such a night as it is, too. Besides,
'tis the business o' the Government to take care of its criminals--not
mine."

"True; so it is. And I felt as you did, that there were enough without
me."

"I don't want to break my limbs running over the humps and hollows of
this wild country."

"Nor I neither, between you and me."

"These shepherd-people are used to it--simple-minded souls, you know,
stirred up to anything in a moment. They'll have him ready for me
before the morning, and no trouble to me at all."

"They'll have him, and we shall have saved ourselves all labor in the
matter."

"True, true. Well, my way is to Casterbridge; and 'tis as much as my
legs will do to take me that far. Going the same way?"

"No, I am sorry to say! I have to get home over there" (he nodded
indefinitely to the right), "and I feel as you do, that it is quite
enough for my legs to do before bedtime."

The other had by this time finished the mead in the mug, after which,
shaking hands heartily at the door, and wishing each other well, they
went their several ways.

In the meantime the company of pursuers had reached the end of the
hog's-back elevation which dominated this part of the down. They had
decided on no particular plan of action; and, finding that the man of
the baleful trade was no longer in their company, they seemed quite
unable to form any such plan now. They descended in all directions
down the hill, and straightway several of the party fell into the
snare set by Nature for all misguided midnight ramblers over this part
of the cretaceous formation. The "lanchets," or flint <DW72>s, which
belted the escarpment at intervals of a dozen yards, took the less
cautious ones unawares, and losing their footing on the rubbly steep
they slid sharply downward, the lanterns rolling from their hands to
the bottom, and there lying on their sides till the horn was scorched
through.

When they had again gathered themselves together, the shepherd, as the
man who knew the country best, took the lead, and guided them round
these treacherous inclines. The lanterns, which seemed rather to
dazzle their eyes and warn the fugitive than to assist them in the
exploration, were extinguished, due silence was observed; and in this
more rational order they plunged into the vale. It was a grassy,
briery, moist defile, affording some shelter to any person who had
sought it; but the party perambulated it in vain, and ascended on the
other side. Here they wandered apart, and after an interval closed
together again to report progress. At the second time of closing in
they found themselves near a lonely ash, the single tree on this part
of the coomb, probably sown there by a passing bird some fifty years
before. And here, standing a little to one side of the trunk, as
motionless as the trunk itself, appeared the man they were in quest
of, his outline being well defined against the sky beyond. The band
noiselessly drew up and faced him.

"Your money or your life!" said the constable sternly to the still
figure.

"No, no," whispered John Pitcher. "'Tisn't our side ought to say that.
That's the doctrine of vagabonds like him, and we be on the side of
the law."

"Well, well," replied the constable, impatiently; "I must say
something, mustn't I? and if you had all the weight o' this
undertaking upon your mind, perhaps you'd say the wrong thing,
too!--Prisoner at the bar, surrender, in the name of the Father--the
Crown, I mane!"

The man under the tree seemed now to notice them for the first time,
and, giving them no opportunity whatever for exhibiting their courage,
he strolled slowly toward them. He was, indeed, the little man, the
third stranger; but his trepidation had in a great measure gone.

"Well, travellers," he said, "did I hear you speak to me?"

"You did; you've got to come and be our prisoner at once!" said the
constable. "We arrest 'ee on the charge of not biding in Casterbridge
jail in a decent proper manner to be hung to-morrow morning.
Neighbors, do your duty, and seize the culpet!"

On hearing the charge, the man seemed enlightened, and, saying not
another word, resigned himself with preternatural civility to the
search-party, who, with their staves in their hands, surrounded him on
all sides, and marched him back toward the shepherd's cottage.

It was eleven o'clock by the time they arrived. The light shining from
the open door, a sound of men's voices within, proclaimed to them as
they approached the house that some new events had arisen in their
absence. On entering they discovered the shepherd's living-room to
be invaded by two officers from Casterbridge jail, and a well-known
magistrate who lived at the nearest country-seat, intelligence of the
escape having become generally circulated.

"Gentlemen," said the constable, "I have brought back your man--not
without risk and danger; but every one must do his duty! He is inside
this circle of able-bodied persons, who have lent me useful aid,
considering their ignorance of Crown work. Men, bring forward your
prisoner!" And the third stranger was led to the light.

"Who is this?" said one of the officials.

"The man," said the constable.

"Certainly not," said the turnkey; and the first corroborated his
statement.

"But how can it be otherwise?" asked the constable. "Or why was he
so terrified at sight o' the singing instrument of the law who sat
there?" Here he related the strange behavior of the third stranger on
entering the house during the hangman's song.

"Can't understand it," said the officer coolly. "All I know is that it
is not the condemned man. He's quite a different character from this
one; a gauntish fellow, with dark hair and eyes, rather good-looking,
and with a musical bass voice that if you heard it once you'd never
mistake as long as you lived."

"Why, souls--'twas the man in the chimney-corner!"

"Hey--what?" said the magistrate, coming forward after inquiring
particulars from the shepherd in the background. "Haven't you got the
man after all?"

"Well, sir," said the constable, "he's the man we were in search of,
that's true; and yet he's not the man we were in search of. For the
man we were in search of was not the man we wanted, sir, if you
understand my every-day way; for 'twas the man in the chimney-corner!"

"A pretty kettle of fish altogether!" said the magistrate. "You had
better start for the other man at once."

The prisoner now spoke for the first time. The mention of the man in
the chimney-corner seemed to have moved him as nothing else could do.
"Sir," he said, stepping forward to the magistrate, "take no more
trouble about me. The time is come when I may as well speak. I have
done nothing; my crime is that the condemned man is my brother. Early
this afternoon I left home at Shottsford to tramp it all the way to
Casterbridge jail to bid him farewell. I was benighted, and called
here to rest and ask the way. When I opened the door I saw before me
the very man, my brother, that I thought to see in the condemned cell
at Casterbridge. He was in this chimney-corner; and jammed close
to him, so that he could not have got out if he had tried, was the
executioner who'd come to take his life, singing a song about it and
not knowing that it was his victim who was close by, joining in to
save appearances. My brother looked a glance of agony at me, and I
know he meant, 'Don't reveal what you see; my life depends on it.' I
was so terror-struck that I could hardly stand, and, not knowing what
I did, I turned and hurried away."

The narrator's manner and tone had the stamp of truth, and his story
made a great impression on all around.

"And do you know where your brother is at the present time?" asked the
magistrate.

"I do not. I have never seen him since I closed this door."

"I can testify to that, for we've been between ye ever since." said
the constable.

"Where does he think to fly to?--what is his occupation?"

"He's a watch-and-clock-maker, sir."

"'A said 'a was a wheelwright--a wicked rogue," said the constable.

"The wheels of clocks and watches he meant, no doubt," said Shepherd
Fennel. "I thought his hands were palish for's trade."

"Well, it appears to me that nothing can be gained by retaining this
poor man in custody," said the magistrate; "your business lies with
the other, unquestionably."

And so the little man was released off-hand; but he looked nothing the
less sad on that account, it being beyond the power of magistrate or
constable to raze out the written troubles in his brain, for they
concerned another whom he regarded with more solicitude than himself.
When this was done, and the man had gone his way, the night was found
to be so far advanced that it was deemed useless to renew the search
before the next morning.

Next day, accordingly, the quest for the clever sheep-stealer became
general and keen, to all appearance at least. But the intended
punishment was cruelly disproportioned to the transgression, and the
sympathy of a great many country-folk in that district was strongly on
the side of the fugitive. Moreover, his marvellous coolness and
daring in hob-and-nobbing with the hangman, under the unprecedented
circumstances of the shepherd's party, won their admiration. So that
it may be questioned if all those who ostensibly made themselves so
busy in exploring woods and fields and lanes were quite so thorough
when it came to the private examination of their own lofts and
outhouses. Stories were afloat of a mysterious figure being
occasionally seen in some old overgrown trackway or other, remote
from turnpike roads; but when a search was instituted in any of these
suspected quarters nobody was found. Thus the days and weeks passed
without tidings.

In brief, the bass-voiced man of the chimney-corner was never
recaptured. Some said that he went across the sea, others that he did
not, but buried himself in the depths of a populous city. At any
rate, the gentleman in cinder-gray never did his morning's work at
Casterbridge, nor met anywhere at all, for business purposes, the
genial comrade with whom he had passed an hour of relaxation in the
lonely house on the coomb.

The grass has long been green on the graves of Shepherd Fennel and his
frugal wife; the guests who made up the christening party have mainly
followed their entertainers to the tomb; the baby in whose honor they
all had met is a matron in the sere and yellow leaf. But the arrival
of the three strangers at the shepherd's that night, and the details
connected therewith, is a story as well-known as ever in the country
about Higher Crowstairs.

_March_, 1883.




JULIA BRIDE[1]

[Footnote 1: 1909.]


_Henry James_ (1843)


I

She had walked with her friend to the top of the wide steps of the
Museum, those that descended from the galleries of painting, and then,
after the young man had left her, smiling, looking back, waving all
gayly and expressively his hat and stick, had watched him, smiling
too, but with a different intensity--had kept him in sight till he
passed out of the great door. She might have been waiting to see if he
would turn there for a last demonstration; which was exactly what he
did, renewing his cordial gesture and with his look of glad devotion,
the radiance of his young face, reaching her across the great space,
as she felt, in undiminished truth. Yes, so she could feel, and she
remained a minute even after he was gone; she gazed at the empty air
as if he had filled it still, asking herself what more she wanted and
what, if it didn't signify glad devotion, his whole air could have
represented.

She was at present so anxious that she could wonder if he stepped and
smiled like that for mere relief at separation; yet if he desired in
that degree to break the spell and escape the danger why did he keep
coming back to her, and why, for that matter, had she felt safe
a moment before in letting him go? She felt safe, felt almost
reckless--that was the proof--so long as he was with her; but the
chill came as soon as he had gone, when she took the measure,
instantly, of all she yet missed. She might now have been taking it
afresh, by the testimony of her charming clouded eyes and of the
rigor that had already replaced her beautiful play of expression. Her
radiance, for the minute, had "carried" as far as his, travelling on
the light wings of her brilliant prettiness--he, on his side, not
being facially handsome, but only sensitive, clean and eager. Then,
with its extinction, the sustaining wings dropped and hung.

She wheeled about, however, full of a purpose; she passed back through
the pictured rooms, for it pleased her, this idea of a talk with Mr.
Pitman--as much, that is, as anything could please a young person so
troubled. It happened indeed that when she saw him rise at sight of
her from the settee where he had told her five minutes before that she
would find him, it was just with her nervousness that his presence
seemed, as through an odd suggestion of help, to connect itself.
Nothing truly would be quite so odd for her case as aid proceeding
from Mr. Pitman; unless perhaps the oddity would be even greater for
himself--the oddity of her having taken into her head an appeal to
him.

She had had to feel alone with a vengeance--inwardly alone and
miserably alarmed--to be ready to "meet," that way, at the first
sign from him, the successor to her dim father in her dim father's
lifetime, the second of her mother's two divorced husbands. It made a
queer relation for her; a relation that struck her at this moment as
less edifying, less natural and graceful than it would have been even
for her remarkable mother--and still in spite of this parent's third
marriage, her union with Mr. Connery, from whom she was informally
separated. It was at the back of Julia's head as she approached Mr.
Pitman, or it was at least somewhere deep within her soul, that if
this last of Mrs. Connery's withdrawals from the matrimonial yoke had
received the sanction of the court (Julia had always heard, from far
back, so much about the "Court") she herself, as after a fashion,
in that event, a party to it, would not have had the cheek to make
up--which was how she inwardly phrased what she was doing--to the
long, lean, loose, slightly cadaverous gentleman who was a memory, for
her, of the period from her twelfth to her seventeenth year. She had
got on with him, perversely, much better than her mother had, and the
bulging misfit of his duck waistcoat, with his trick of swinging his
eye-glass, at the end of an extraordinarily long string, far over
the scene, came back to her as positive features of the image of her
remoter youth. Her present age--for her later time had seen so many
things happen--gave her a perspective.

Fifty things came up as she stood there before him, some of them
floating in from the past, others hovering with freshness: how she
used to dodge the rotary movement made by his pince-nez while he
always awkwardly, and kindly, and often funnily, talked--it had
once hit her rather badly in the eye; how she used to pull down and
straighten his waistcoat, making it set a little better, a thing of
a sort her mother never did; how friendly and familiar she must have
been with him for that, or else a forward little minx; how she felt
almost capable of doing it again now, just to sound the right note,
and how sure she was of the way he would take it if she did; how much
nicer he had clearly been, all the while, poor dear man, than his wife
and the court had made it possible for him publicly to appear; how
much younger, too, he now looked, in spite of his rather melancholy,
his mildly jaundiced, humorously determined sallowness and his
careless assumption, everywhere, from his forehead to his exposed and
relaxed blue socks, almost sky-blue, as in past days, of creases and
folds and furrows that would have been perhaps tragic if they hadn't
seemed rather to show, like his whimsical black eyebrows, the vague,
interrogative arch.

Of course he wasn't wretched if he wasn't more sure of his
wretchedness than that! Julia Bride would have been sure--had she been
through what she supposed _he_ had! With his thick, loose black hair,
in any case, untouched by a thread of gray, and his kept gift of a
certain big-boyish awkwardness--that of his taking their encounter,
for instance, so amusedly, so crudely, though, as she was not unaware,
so eagerly too--he could by no means have been so little his wife's
junior as it had been that lady's habit, after the divorce, to
represent him. Julia had remembered him as old, since she had so
constantly thought of her mother as old; which Mrs. Connery was indeed
now--for her daughter--with her dozen years of actual seniority to
Mr. Pitman and her exquisite hair, the densest, the finest tangle
of arranged silver tendrils that had ever enhanced the effect of a
preserved complexion.

Something in the girl's vision of her quondam stepfather as still
comparatively young--with the confusion, the immense element of
rectification, not to say of rank disproof, that it introduced into
Mrs. Connery's favorite picture of her own injured past--all this
worked, even at the moment, to quicken once more the clearness and
harshness of judgment, the retrospective disgust, as she might have
called it, that had of late grown up in her, the sense of all the
folly and vanity and vulgarity, the lies, the perversities, the
falsification of all life in the interest of who could say what
wretched frivolity, what preposterous policy; amid which she had been
condemned so ignorantly, so pitifully to sit, to walk, to grope, to
flounder, from the very dawn of her consciousness. Didn't poor Mr.
Pitman just touch the sensitive nerve of it when, taking her in with
his facetious, cautious eyes, he spoke to her, right out, of the old,
old story, the everlasting little wonder of her beauty?

"Why, you know, you've grown up so lovely--you're the prettiest girl
I've ever seen!" Of course she was the prettiest girl he had ever
seen; she was the prettiest girl people much more privileged than he
had ever seen; since when hadn't she been passing for the prettiest
girl any one had ever seen? She had lived in that, from far back, from
year to year, from day to day and from hour to hour--she had lived
for it and literally _by_ it, as who should say; but Mr. Pitman was
somehow more illuminating than he knew, with the present lurid light
that he cast upon old dates, old pleas, old values, and old mysteries,
not to call them old abysses: it had rolled over her in a swift wave,
with the very sight of him, that her mother couldn't possibly have
been right about him--as about what in the world had she ever been
right?--so that in fact he was simply offered her there as one more of
Mrs. Connery's lies. She might have thought she knew them all by this
time; but he represented for her, coming in just as he did, a fresh
discovery, and it was this contribution of freshness that made her
somehow feel she liked him. It was she herself who, for so long,
with her retained impression, had been right about him; and the
rectification he represented had _all_ shone out of him, ten minutes
before, on his catching her eye while she moved through the room with
Mr. French. She had never doubted of his probable faults--which her
mother had vividly depicted as the basest of vices; since some of
them, and the most obvious (not the vices, but the faults) were
written on him as he stood there: notably, for instance, the
exasperating "business slackness" of which Mrs. Connery had, before
the tribunal, made so pathetically much. It might have been, for that
matter, the very business slackness that affected Julia as presenting
its friendly breast, in the form of a cool loose sociability, to her
own actual tension; though it was also true for her, after they had
exchanged fifty words, that he had as well his inward fever and that,
if he was perhaps wondering what was so particularly the matter with
her, she could make out not less that something was the matter
with _him_. It had been vague, yet it had been intense, the mute
reflection, "Yes, I'm going to like him, and he's going somehow to
help me!" that had directed her steps so straight to him. She was
sure even then of this, that he wouldn't put to her a query about his
former wife, that he took to-day no grain of interest in Mrs. Connery;
that his interest, such as it was--and he couldn't look _quite_ like
that, to Julia Bride's expert perception, without something in the
nature of a new one--would be a thousand times different.

It was as a value of _disproof_ that his worth meanwhile so rapidly
grew: the good sight of him, the good sound and sense of him, such
as they were, demolished at a stroke so blessedly much of the horrid
inconvenience of the past that she thought of him; she clutched at
him, for a _general_ saving use, an application as sanative, as
redemptive as some universal healing wash, precious even to the point
of perjury if perjury should be required. That was the terrible thing,
that had been the inward pang with which she watched Basil French
recede: perjury would have to come in somehow and somewhere--oh so
quite certainly!--before the so strange, so rare young man, truly
smitten though she believed him, could be made to rise to the
occasion, before her measureless prize could be assured. It was
present to her, it had been present a hundred times, that if there had
only been some one to (as it were) "deny everything" the situation
might yet be saved. She so needed some one to lie for her--ah, she so
need some one to lie! Her mother's version of everything, her mother's
version of anything, had been at the best, as they said, discounted;
and she herself could but show, of course, for an interested party,
however much she might claim to be none the less a decent girl--to
whatever point, that is, after all that had both remotely and recently
happened, presumptions of anything to be called decency could come in.

After what had recently happened--the two or three indirect but so
worrying questions Mr. French had put to her--it would only be some
thoroughly detached friend or witness who might effectively testify.
An odd form of detachment certainly would reside, for Mr. Pitman's
evidential character, in her mother's having so publicly and
so brilliantly--though, thank the powers, all off in North
Dakota!--severed their connection with him; and yet mightn't it do
_her_ some good, even if the harm it might do her mother were so
little ambiguous? The more her mother had got divorced--with her
dreadful cheap-and-easy second performance in that line and her
present extremity of alienation from Mr. Connery, which enfolded
beyond doubt the germ of a third petition on one side or the
other--the more her mother had distinguished herself in the field of
folly the worse for her own prospect with the Frenches, whose
minds she had guessed to be accessible, and with such an effect of
dissimulated suddenness, to some insidious poison.

It was very unmistakable, in other words, that the more dismissed and
detached Mr. Pitman should have come to appear, the more as divorced,
or at least as divorcing, his before-time wife would by the same
stroke figure--so that it was here poor Julia could but lose herself.
The crazy divorces only, or the half-dozen successive and still
crazier engagements only--gathered fruit, bitter fruit, of her own
incredibly allowed, her own insanely fostered frivolity--either of
these two groups of skeletons at the banquet might singly be dealt
with; but the combination, the fact of each party's having been so
mixed-up with whatever was least presentable for the other, the fact
of their having so shockingly amused themselves together, made all
present steering resemble the classic middle course between Scylla and
Charybdis.

It was not, however, that she felt wholly a fool in having obeyed this
impulse to pick up again her kind old friend. _She_ at least had never
divorced him, and her horrid little filial evidence in court had been
but the chatter of a parrakeet, of precocious plumage and croak,
repeating words earnestly taught her, and that she could scarce even
pronounce. Therefore, as far as steering went, he _must_ for the hour
take a hand. She might actually have wished in fact that he shouldn't
now have seemed so tremendously struck with her; since it was an
extraordinary situation for a girl, this crisis of her fortune, this
positive wrong that the flagrancy, what she would have been ready to
call the very vulgarity, of her good looks might do her at a moment
when it was vital she should hang as straight as a picture on the
wall. Had it ever yet befallen any young woman in the world to wish
with secret intensity that she might have been, for her convenience, a
shade less inordinately pretty? She had come to that, to this view of
the bane, the primal curse, of their lavish physical outfit, which had
included everything and as to which she lumped herself resentfully
with her mother. The only thing was that her mother was, thank
goodness, still so much prettier, still so assertively, so publicly,
so trashily, so ruinously pretty. Wonderful the small grimness with
which Julia Bride put off on this parent the middle-aged maximum of
their case and the responsibility of their defect. It cost her so
little to recognize in Mrs. Connery at forty-seven, and in spite, or
perhaps indeed just by reason, of the arranged silver tendrils which
were so like some rare bird's-nest in a morning frost, a facile
supremacy for the dazzling effect--it cost her so little that her view
even rather exaggerated the lustre of the different maternal items.
She would have put it _all_ off if possible, all off on other
shoulders and on other graces and other morals than her own, the
burden of physical charm that had made so easy a ground, such a native
favoring air, for the aberrations which, apparently inevitable and
without far consequences at the time, had yet at this juncture so much
better not have been.

She could have worked it out at her leisure, to the last link of the
chain, the way their prettiness had set them trap after trap, all
along--had foredoomed them to awful ineptitude. When you were as
pretty as that you could, by the whole idiotic consensus, be nothing
_but_ pretty; and when you were nothing "but" pretty you could get
into nothing but tight places, out of which you could then scramble by
nothing but masses of fibs. And there was no one, all the while, who
wasn't eager to egg you on, eager to make you pay to the last cent the
price of your beauty. What creature would ever for a moment help you
to behave as if something that dragged in its wake a bit less of a
lumbering train would, on the whole, have been better for you? The
consequences of being plain were only negative--you failed of this and
that; but the consequences of being as _they_ were, what were these
but endless? though indeed, as far as failing went, your beauty too
could let you in for enough of it. Who, at all events, would ever for
a moment credit you, in the luxuriance of that beauty, with the study,
on your own side, of such truths as these? Julia Bride could, at the
point she had reached, positively ask herself this even while lucidly
conscious of the inimitable, the triumphant and attested projection,
all round her, of her exquisite image. It was only Basil French who
had at last, in his doubtless dry, but all distinguished way--the
way surely, as it was borne in upon her, of all the blood of all the
Frenches--stepped out of the vulgar rank. It was only he who, by the
trouble she discerned in him, had made her see certain things. It was
only for him--and not a bit ridiculously, but just beautifully, almost
sublimely--that their being "nice," her mother and she between them,
had _not_ seemed to profit by their being so furiously handsome.

This had, ever so grossly and ever so tiresomely, satisfied every one
else; since every one had thrust upon them, had imposed upon them, as
by a great cruel conspiracy, their silliest possibilities; fencing
them in to these, and so not only shutting them out from others, but
mounting guard at the fence, walking round and round outside it, to
see they didn't escape, and admiring them, talking to them, through
the rails, in mere terms of chaff, terms of chucked cakes and
apples--as if they had been antelopes or zebras, or even some superior
sort of performing, of dancing, bear. It had been reserved for Basil
French to strike her as willing to let go, so to speak, a pound or two
of this fatal treasure if he might only have got in exchange for it
an ounce or so more of their so much less obvious and Jess published
personal history. Yes, it described him to say that, in addition to
all the rest of him, and of _his_ personal history, and of his family,
and of theirs, in addition to their social posture, as that of a
serried phalanx, and to their notoriously enormous wealth and crushing
respectability, she might have been ever so much less lovely for him
if she had been only--well, a little prepared to answer questions. And
it wasn't as if quiet, cultivated, earnest, public-spirited, brought
up in Germany, infinitely travelled, awfully like a high-caste
Englishman, and all the other pleasant things, it wasn't as if he
didn't love to be with her, to look at her, just as she was; for he
loved it exactly as much, so far as that footing simply went, as any
free and foolish youth who had ever made the last demonstration of
it. It was that marriage was, for him--and for them all, the serried
Frenches--a great matter, a goal to which a man of intelligence, a
real shy, beautiful man of the world, didn't hop on one foot, didn't
skip and jump, as if he were playing an urchins' game, but toward
which he proceeded with a deep and anxious, a noble and highly just
deliberation.

For it was one thing to stare at a girl till she was bored with it, it
was one thing to take her to the Horse Show and the Opera, and to
send her flowers by the stack, and chocolates by the ton, and "great"
novels, the very latest and greatest, by the dozen; but something
quite other to hold open for her, with eyes attached to eyes, the
gate, moving on such stiff silver hinges, of the grand square
forecourt of the palace of wedlock. The state of being "engaged"
represented to him the introduction to this precinct of some young
woman with whom his outside parley would have had the duration,
distinctly, of his own convenience. That might be cold-blooded if one
chose to think so; but nothing of another sort would equal the high
ceremony and dignity and decency, above all the grand gallantry and
finality, of their then passing in. Poor Julia could have blushed red,
before that view, with the memory of the way the forecourt, as she now
imagined it, had been dishonored by her younger romps. She had tumbled
over the wall with this, that, and the other raw playmate, and had
played "tag" and leap-frog, as she might say, from corner to corner.
That would be the "history" with which, in case of definite demand,
she should be able to supply Mr. French: that she had already, again
and again, any occasion offering, chattered and scuffled over ground
provided, according to his idea, for walking the gravest of minuets.
If that then had been all their _kind_ of history, hers and her
mother's, at least there was plenty of it: it was the superstructure
raised on the other group of facts, those of the order of their having
been always so perfectly pink and white, so perfectly possessed of
clothes, so perfectly splendid, so perfectly idiotic. These things had
been the "points" of antelope and zebra; putting Mrs. Connery for the
zebra, as the more remarkably striped or spotted. Such were the _data_
Basil French's inquiry would elicit: her own six engagements and her
mother's three nullified marriages--nine nice distinct little horrors
in all. What on earth was to be done about them?

It was notable, she was afterward to recognize, that there had been
nothing of the famous business slackness in the positive pounce with
which Mr. Pitman put it to her that, as soon as he had made her
out "for sure," identified her there as old Julia grown-up and
gallivanting with a new admirer, a smarter young fellow than ever yet,
he had had the inspiration of her being exactly the good girl to
help him. She certainly found him strike the hour again, with these
vulgarities of tone--forms of speech that her mother had anciently
described as by themselves, once he had opened the whole battery,
sufficient ground for putting him away. Full, however, of the use she
should have for him, she wasn't going to mind trifles. What she really
gasped at was that, so oddly, he was ahead of her at the start. "Yes,
I want something of you, Julia, and I want it right now: you can do me
a turn, and I'm blest if my luck--which has once or twice been
pretty good, you know--hasn't sent you to me." She knew the luck he
meant--that of her mother's having so enabled him to get rid of her;
but it was the nearest allusion of the merely invidious kind that he
would make. It had thus come to our young woman on the spot and by
divination: the service he desired of her matched with remarkable
closeness what she had so promptly taken into her head to name to
himself--to name in her own interest, though deterred as yet from
having brought it right out. She had been prevented by his speaking,
the first thing, in that way, as if he had known Mr. French--which
surprised her till he explained that every one in New York knew by
appearance a young man of his so-quoted wealth ("What did she take
them all in New York then _for_?") and of whose marked attention to
her he had moreover, for himself, round at clubs and places, lately
heard. This had accompanied the inevitable free question "Was she
engaged to _him_ now?"--which she had in fact almost welcomed as
holding out to her the perch of opportunity. She was waiting to deal
with it properly, but meanwhile he had gone on, and to such effect
that it took them but three minutes to turn out, on either side, like
a pair of pickpockets comparing, under shelter, their day's booty, the
treasures of design concealed about their persons.

"I want you to tell the truth for me--as you only can. I want you to
say that I was really all right--as right as you know; and that I
simply acted like an angel in a story-book, gave myself away to have
it over."

"Why, my dear man," Julia cried, "you take the wind straight out of my
sails! What I'm here to ask of _you_ is that you'll confess to having
been even a worse fiend than you were shown up for; to having made
it impossible mother should _not_ take proceedings." There!--she had
brought it out, and with the sense of their situation turning to high
excitement for her in the teeth of his droll stare, his strange grin,
his characteristic "Lordy, lordy! What good will that do you?" She
was prepared with her clear statement of reasons for her appeal, and
feared so he might have better ones for his own that all her story
came in a flash. "Well, Mr. Pitman, I want to get married this time,
by way of a change; but you see we've been such fools that, when
something really good at last comes up, it's too dreadfully awkward.
The fools we were capable of being--well, you know better than any
one: unless perhaps not quite so well as Mr. Connery. It has got to
be denied," said Julia ardently--"it has got to be denied flat. But I
can't get hold of Mr. Connery--Mr. Connery has gone to China. Besides,
if he were here," she had ruefully to confess, "he'd be no good--on
the contrary. He wouldn't deny anything--he'd only tell more. So thank
heaven he's away--there's _that_ amount of good! I'm not engaged yet,"
she went on--but he had already taken her up.

"You're not engaged to Mr. French?" It was all, clearly, a wondrous
show for him, but his immediate surprise, oddly, might have been
greatest for that.

"No, not to any one--for the seventh time!" She spoke as with her head
held well up both over the shame and the pride. "Yes, the next time
I'm engaged I want something to happen. But he's afraid; he's afraid
of what may be told him. He's dying to find out, and yet he'd die
if he did! He wants to be talked to, but he has got to be talked to
right. You could talk to him right, Mr. Pitman--if you only _would_!
He can't get over mother--that I feel: he loathes and scorns divorces,
and we've had first and last too many. So if he could hear from you
that you just made her life a hell--why," Julia concluded, "it would
be too lovely. If she _had_ to go in for another--after having
already, when I was little, divorced father--it would 'sort of' make,
don't you see? one less. You'd do the high-toned thing by her: you'd
say what a wretch you then were, and that she had had to save her
life. In that way he mayn't mind it. Don't you see, you sweet man?"
poor Julia pleaded. "Oh," she wound up as if his fancy lagged or his
scruple looked out, "of course I want you to _lie_ for me!"

It did indeed sufficiently stagger him. "It's a lovely idea for the
moment when I was just saying to myself--as soon as I saw you--that
you'd speak the truth for _me_!"

"Ah, what's the matter with 'you'?" Julia sighed with an impatience
not sensibly less sharp for her having so quickly scented some lion in
her path.

"Why, do you think there's no one in the world but you who has seen
the cup of promised affection, of something really to be depended on,
only, at the last moment, by the horrid jostle of your elbow, spilled
all over you? I want to provide for my future too as it happens; and
my good friend who's to help me to that--the most charming of women
this time--disapproves of divorce quite as much as Mr. French. Don't
you see," Mr. Pitman candidly asked, "what that by itself must have
done toward attaching me to her? _She_ has got to be talked to--to be
told how little I could help it."

"Oh, lordy, lordy!" the girl emulously groaned. It was such a
relieving cry. "Well, _I_ won't talk to her!" she declared.

"You _won't_, Julia?" he pitifully echoed. "And yet you ask of
_me_--!"

His pang, she felt, was sincere; and even more than she had guessed,
for the previous quarter of an hour he had been building up his hope,
building it with her aid for a foundation. Yet was he going to see how
their testimony, on each side, would, if offered, _have_ to conflict?
If he was to prove himself for her sake--or, more queerly still, for
that of Basil French's high conservatism--a person whom there had been
no other way of dealing with, how could she prove him, in this other
and so different interest, a mere gentle sacrifice to his wife's
perversity? She had, before him there, on the instant, all acutely, a
sense of rising sickness--a wan glimmer of foresight as to the end of
the fond dream. Everything else was against her, everything in her
dreadful past--just as if she had been a person represented by some
"emotional actress," some desperate erring lady "hunted down" in a
play; but was that going to be the case too with her own very decency,
the fierce little residuum deep within her, for which she was
counting, when she came to think, on so little glory or even credit?
Was this also going to turn against her and trip her up--just to show
she was really, under the touch and the test, as decent as any one;
and with no one but herself the wiser for it meanwhile, and no proof
to show but that, as a consequence, she should be unmarried to the
end? She put it to Mr. Pitman quite with resentment: "Do you mean to
say you're going to be married--?"

"Oh, my dear, I too must get engaged first!"--he spoke with his
inimitable grin. "But that, you see, is where you come in. I've told
her about you. She wants awfully to meet you. The way it happens is
too lovely--that I find you just in this place. She's coming," said
Mr. Pitman--and as in all the good faith of his eagerness now; "she's
coming in about three minutes."

"Coming here?"

"Yes, Julia--right here. It's where we usually meet"; and he was
wreathed again, this time as if for life, in his large slow smile.
"She loves this place--she's awfully keen on art. Like _you_, Julia,
if you haven't changed--I remember how you did love art." He looked
at her quite tenderly, as to keep her up to it. "You must still of
course--from the way you're here. Just let her _feel_ that," the poor
man fantastically urged. And then with his kind eyes on her and his
good ugly mouth stretched as for delicate emphasis from ear to ear:
"Every little helps!"

He made her wonder for him, ask herself, and with a certain intensity,
questions she yet hated the trouble of; as whether he were still as
moneyless as in the other time--which was certain indeed, for any
fortune he ever would have made. His slackness, on that ground, stuck
out of him almost as much as if he had been of rusty or "seedy"
aspect--which, luckily for him, he wasn't at all: he looked, in his
way, like some pleasant eccentric, ridiculous, but real gentleman,
whose taste might be of the queerest, but his credit with his tailor
none the less of the best. She wouldn't have been the least ashamed,
had their connection lasted, of going about with him: so that what
a fool, again, her mother had been--since Mr. Connery, sorry as one
might be for him, was irrepressibly vulgar. Julia's quickness was,
for the minute, charged with all this; but she had none the less her
feeling of the right thing to say and the right way to say it. If
he was after a future financially assured, even as she herself so
frantically was, she wouldn't cast the stone. But if he had talked
about her to strange women she couldn't be less than a little
majestic. "Who then is the person in question for you--?"

"Why, such a dear thing, Julia--Mrs. David E. Drack. Have you heard of
her?" he almost fluted.

New York was vast, and she had not had that advantage. "She's a
widow--?"

"Oh yes: she's not--" He caught himself up in time. "She's a real
one." It was as near as he came. But it was as if he had been looking
at her now so pathetically hard. "Julia, she has millions."

Hard, at any rate--whether pathetic or not--was the look she gave him
back. "Well, so has--or so _will_ have--Basil French. And more of them
than Mrs. Drack, I guess," Julia quavered.

"Oh, I know what _they've_ got!" He took it from her--with the effect
of a vague stir, in his long person, of unwelcome embarrassment. But
was she going to give up because he was embarrassed? He should know
at least what he was costing her. It came home to her own spirit more
than ever, but meanwhile he had found his footing. "I don't see how
your mother matters. It isn't a question of his marrying _her_."

"No; but, constantly together as we've always been, it's a question of
there being so disgustingly much to get over. If we had, for people
like them, but the one ugly spot and the one weak side; if we had
made, between us, but the one vulgar _kind_ of mistake: well, I don't
say!" She reflected with a wistfulness of note that was in itself a
touching eloquence. "To have our reward in this world we've had too
sweet a time. We've had it all right down here!" said Julia Bride. "I
should have taken the precaution to have about a dozen fewer lovers."

"Ah, my dear, 'lovers'--!" He ever so comically attenuated.

"Well they _were_!" She quite flared up. "When you've had a ring from
each (three diamonds, two pearls, and a rather bad sapphire: I've kept
them all, and they tell my story!) what are you to call them?"

"Oh, rings--!" Mr. Pitman didn't call rings anything. "I've given Mrs.
Drack a ring."

Julia stared. "Then aren't you her lover?"

"That, dear child," he humorously wailed, "is what I want you to find
out! But I'll handle your rings all right," he more lucidly added.

"You'll 'handle' them?"

"I'll fix your lovers. I'll lie about _them_, if that's all you want."

"Oh, about 'them'--!" She turned away with a sombre drop, seeing so
little in it. "That wouldn't count--from _you_!" She saw the great
shining room, with its mockery of art and "style" and security, all
the things she was vainly after, and its few scattered visitors who
had left them, Mr. Pitman and herself, in their ample corner, so
conveniently at ease. There was only a lady in one of the far
doorways, of whom she took vague note and who seemed to be looking at
them. "They'd have to lie for themselves!"

"Do you mean he's capable of putting it to them?"

Mr. Pitman's tone threw discredit on that possibility, but she knew
perfectly well what she meant. "Not of getting at them directly, not,
as mother says, of nosing round himself; but of listening--and small
blame to him!--to the horrible things other people say of me."

"But what other people?"

"Why, Mrs. George Maule, to begin with--who intensely loathes us, and
who talks to his sisters, so that they may talk to _him_: which they
do, all the while, I'm morally sure (hating me as they also must). But
it's she who's the real reason--I mean of his holding off. She poisons
the air he breathes."

"Oh well," said Mr. Pitman, with easy optimism, "if Mrs. George
Maule's a cat--!"

"If she's a cat she has kittens--four little spotlessly white ones,
among whom she'd give her head that Mr. French should make his pick.
He could do it with his eyes shut--you can't tell them apart. But she
has every name, every date, as you may say, for my dark 'record'--as
of course they all call it: she'll be able to give him, if he brings
himself to ask her, every fact in its order. And all the while, don't
you see? there's no one to speak _for_ me."

It would have touched a harder heart than her loose friend's to note
the final flush of clairvoyance witnessing this assertion and under
which her eyes shone as with the rush of quick tears. He stared at
her, and at what this did for the deep charm of her prettiness, as
in almost witless admiration. "But can't you--lovely as you are, you
beautiful thing!--speak for yourself?"

"Do you mean can't I tell the lies? No, then, I can't--and I wouldn't
if I could. I don't lie myself, you know--as it happens; and it could
represent to him then about the only thing, the only bad one, I don't
do. I _did_--'lovely as I am'!--have my regular time; I wasn't so
hideous that I couldn't! Besides, do you imagine he'd come and ask
me?"

"Gad, I wish he would, Julia!" said Mr. Pitman, with his kind eyes on
her.

"Well then, I'd tell him!" And she held her head again high. "But he
won't."

It fairly distressed her companion. "Doesn't he want, then, to
know--?"

"He wants _not_ to know. He wants to be told without asking--told,
I mean, that each of the stories, those that have come to him, is a
fraud and a libel. _Qui s'excuse s'accuse_, don't they say?--so that
do you see me breaking out to him, unprovoked, with four or five
what-do-you-call-'ems, the things mother used to have to prove in
court, a set of neat little 'alibis' in a row? How can I get hold of
so _many_ precious gentlemen, to turn them on? How can _they_ want
everything fished up?"

She paused for her climax, in the intensity of these considerations;
which gave Mr. Pitman a chance to express his honest faith. "Why, my
sweet child, they'd be just glad--!"

It determined in her loveliness almost a sudden glare. "Glad to swear
they never had anything to do with such a creature? Then _I'd_ be glad
to swear they had lots!"

His persuasive smile, though confessing to bewilderment, insisted.
"Why, my love, they've got to swear either one thing or the other."

"They've got to keep out of the way--that's _their_ view of it, I
guess," said Julia. "Where _are_ they, please--now that they _may_ be
wanted? If you'd like to hunt them up for me you're very welcome."
With which, for the moment, over the difficult case, they faced each
other helplessly enough. And she added to it now the sharpest ache of
her despair. "He knows about Murray Brush. The others"--and her pretty
white-gloved hands and charming pink shoulders gave them up--"may go
hang!"

"Murray Brush--?" It had opened Mr. Pitman's eyes.

"Yes--yes; I do mind _him_."

"Then what's the matter with his at least rallying--?"

"The matter is that, being ashamed of himself, as he well might, he
left the country as soon as he could and has stayed away. The matter
is that he's in Paris or somewhere, and that if you expect him to come
home for me--!" She had already dropped, however, as at Mr. Pitman's
look.

"Why, you foolish thing, Murray Brush is in New York!" It had quite
brightened him up.

"He has come back--?"

"Why, sure! I saw him--when was it? Tuesday!--on the Jersey boat." Mr.
Pitman rejoiced in his news. "_He's_ your man!"

Julia too had been affected by it; it had brought, in a rich wave, her
hot color back. But she gave the strangest dim smile. "He _was_!"

"Then get hold of him, and--if he's a gentleman--he'll prove for you,
to the hilt, that he wasn't."

It lighted in her face, the kindled train of this particular sudden
suggestion, a glow, a sharpness of interest, that had deepened the
next moment, while she gave a slow and sad head-shake, to a greater
strangeness yet. "He isn't a gentleman."

"Ah, lordy, lordy!" Mr. Pitman again sighed. He struggled out of it
but only into the vague. "Oh, then, if he's a pig--!"

"You see there are only a few gentlemen--not enough to go round--and
that makes them count so!" It had thrust the girl herself, for that
matter, into depths; but whether most of memory or of roused purpose
he had no time to judge--aware as he suddenly was of a shadow (since
he mightn't perhaps too quickly call it a light) across the heaving
surface of their question. It fell upon Julia's face, fell with the
sound of the voice he so well knew, but which could only be odd to her
for all it immediately assumed.

"There are indeed very few--and one mustn't try _them_ too much!"
Mrs. Drack, who had supervened while they talked, stood, in monstrous
magnitude--at least to Julia's reimpressed eyes--between them: she was
the lady our young woman had descried across the room, and she had
drawn near while the interest of their issue so held them. We have
seen the act of observation and that of reflection alike swift in
Julia--once her subject was within range--and she had now, with all
her perceptions at the acutest, taken in, by a single stare, the
strange presence to a happy connection with which Mr. Pitman aspired
and which had thus sailed, with placid majesty, into their troubled
waters. She was clearly not shy, Mrs. David E. Drack, yet neither was
she ominously bold; she was bland and "good," Julia made sure at a
glance, and of a large complacency, as the good and the bland are apt
to be--a large complacency, a large sentimentality, a large innocent,
elephantine archness: she fairly rioted in that dimension of size.
Habited in an extraordinary quantity of stiff and lustrous black
brocade, with enhancements, of every description, that twinkled
and tinkled, that rustled and rumbled with her least movement, she
presented a huge, hideous, pleasant face, a featureless desert in a
remote quarter of which the disproportionately small eyes might have
figured a pair of rash adventurers all but buried in the sand. They
reduced themselves when she smiled to barely discernible points--a
couple of mere tiny emergent heads--though the foreground of the
scene, as if to make up for it, gaped with a vast benevolence. In
a word Julia saw--and as if she had needed nothing more; saw Mr.
Pitman's opportunity, saw her own, saw the exact nature both of Mrs.
Drack's circumspection and of Mrs. Drack's sensibility, saw even,
glittering there in letters of gold and as a part of the whole
metallic coruscation, the large figure of her income, largest of all
her attributes, and (though perhaps a little more as a luminous blur
beside all this) the mingled ecstasy and agony of Mr. Pitman's hope
and Mr. Pitman's fear.

He was introducing them, with his pathetic belief in the virtue for
every occasion, in the solvent for every trouble, of an extravagant,
genial, professional humor; he was naming her to Mrs. Drack as the
charming young friend he had told her so much about and who had been
as an angel to him in a weary time; he was saying that the loveliest
chance in the world, this accident of a meeting in those promiscuous
halls, had placed within his reach the pleasure of bringing them
together. It didn't indeed matter, Julia felt, what he was saying: he
conveyed everything, as far as she was concerned, by a moral pressure
as unmistakable as if, for a symbol of it, he had thrown himself
on her neck. Above all, meanwhile, this high consciousness
prevailed--that the good lady herself, however huge she loomed, had
entered, by the end of a minute, into a condition as of suspended
weight and arrested mass, stilled to artless awe by the fact of her
vision. Julia had practised almost to lassitude the art of tracing in
the people who looked at her the impression promptly sequent; but it
was a striking point that if, in irritation, in depression, she felt
that the lightest eyes of men, stupid at their clearest, had given her
pretty well all she should ever care for, she could still gather a
freshness from the tribute of her own sex, still care to see her
reflection in the faces of women. Never, probably, never would that
sweet be tasteless--with such a straight grim spoon was it mostly
administered, and so flavored and strengthened by the competence of
their eyes. Women knew so much best _how_ a woman surpassed--how and
where and why, with no touch or torment of it lost on them; so that as
it produced mainly and primarily the instinct of aversion, the sense
of extracting the recognition, of gouging out the homage, was on the
whole the highest crown one's felicity could wear. Once in a way,
however, the grimness beautifully dropped, the jealousy failed: the
admiration was all there and the poor plain sister handsomely paid it.
It had never been so paid, she was presently certain, as by this great
generous object of Mr., Pitman's flame, who without optical aid, it
well might have seemed, nevertheless entirely grasped her--might in
fact, all benevolently, have been groping her over as by some huge
mild proboscis. She gave Mrs. Brack pleasure in short; and who could
say of what other pleasures the poor lady hadn't been cheated?

It was somehow a muddled world in which one of her conceivable joys,
at this time of day, would be to marry Mr. Pitman--to say nothing of a
state of things in which this gentleman's own fancy could invest such
a union with rapture. That, however, was their own mystery, and Julia,
with each instant, was more and more clear about hers: so remarkably
primed in fact, at the end of three minutes, that though her friend,
and though _his_ friend, were both saying things, many things and
perhaps quite wonderful things, she had no free attention for them
and was only rising and soaring. She was rising to her value, she was
soaring _with_ it--the value Mr. Pitman almost convulsively imputed
to her, the value that consisted for her of being so unmistakably the
most dazzling image Mrs. Brack had ever beheld. These were the uses,
for Julia, in fine, of adversity; the range of Mrs. Brack's experience
might have been as small as the measure of her presence was large:
Julia was at any rate herself in face of the occasion of her life,
and, after all her late repudiations and reactions, had perhaps never
yet known the quality of this moment's success. She hadn't an idea of
what, on either side, had been uttered--beyond Mr. Pitman's allusion
to her having befriended him of old: she simply held his companion
with her radiance and knew she might be, for her effect, as irrelevant
as she chose. It was relevant to do what he wanted--it was relevant to
dish herself. She did it now with a kind of passion, to say nothing of
her knowing, with it, that every word of it added to her beauty. She
gave him away in short, up to the hilt, for any use of her own, and
should have nothing to clutch at now but the possibility of Murray
Brush.

"He says I was good to him, Mrs. Drack; and I'm sure I hope I was,
since I should be ashamed to be anything else. If I could be good to
him now I should be glad--that's just what, a while ago, I rushed up
to him here, after so long, to give myself the pleasure of saying. I
saw him years ago very particularly, very miserably tried--and I saw
the way he took it. I did see it, you dear man," she sublimely went
on--"I saw it for all you may protest, for all you may hate me to talk
about you! I saw you behave like a gentleman--since Mrs. Drack agrees
with me, so charmingly, that there are not many to be met. I don't
know whether you care, Mrs. Drack"--she abounded, she revelled in
the name--"but I've always remembered it of him: that under the most
extraordinary provocation he was decent and patient and brave. No
appearance of anything different matters, for I speak of what I
_know_. Of course I'm nothing and nobody; I'm only a poor frivolous
girl, but I was very close to him at the time. That's all my little
story--if it _should_ interest you at all." She measured every beat of
her wing, she knew how high she was going and paused only when it was
quite vertiginous. Here she hung a moment as in the glare of the upper
blue; which was but the glare--what else could it be?--of the vast and
magnificent attention of both her auditors, hushed, on their side, in
the splendor she emitted. She had at last to steady herself, and
she scarce knew afterward at what rate or in what way she had still
inimitably come down--her own eyes fixed all the while on the very
figure of her achievement. She had sacrificed her mother on the
altar--proclaimed her as false and cruel: and if that didn't "fix" Mr.
Pitman, as he would have said--well, it was all she could do. But the
cost of her action already somehow came back to her with increase; the
dear gaunt man fairly wavered, to her sight, in the glory of it, as if
signalling at her, with wild gleeful arms, from some mount of safety,
while the massive lady just spread and spread like a rich fluid a bit
helplessly spilt. It was really the outflow of the poor woman's
honest response, into which she seemed to melt, and Julia scarce
distinguished the two apart even for her taking gracious leave of
each. "Good-bye, Mrs. Drack; I'm awfully happy to have met you"--like
as not it was for this she had grasped Mr. Pitman's hand. And then
to him or to her, it didn't matter which, "Good-bye, dear good Mr.
Pitman--hasn't it been nice after so long?"


II

Julia floated even to her own sense swan-like away--she left in her
wake their fairly stupefied submission: it was as if she had, by an
exquisite authority, now _placed_ them, each for each, and they would
have nothing to do but be happy together. Never had she so exulted
as on this ridiculous occasion in the noted items of her beauty. _Le
compte y etait_, as they used to say in Paris--every one of them, for
her immediate employment, was there; and there was something in it
after all. It didn't necessarily, this sum of thumping little figures,
imply charm--especially for "refined" people: nobody knew better than
Julia that inexpressible charm and quotable "charms" (quotable
like prices, rates, shares, or whatever, the things they dealt in
down-town) are two distinct categories; the safest thing for the
latter being, on the whole, that it might include the former, and the
great strength of the former being that it might perfectly dispense
with the latter. Mrs. Drack was not refined, not the least little bit;
but what would be the case with Murray Brush now--after his three
years of Europe? He had done so what he liked with her--which
had seemed so then just the meaning, hadn't it? of their being
"engaged"--that he had made her not see, while the absurdity lasted
(the absurdity of their pretending to believe they could marry without
a cent), how little he was of metal without alloy: this had come up
for her, remarkably, but afterward--come up for her as she looked
back. Then she had drawn her conclusion, which was one of the many
that Basil French had made her draw. It was a queer service Basil was
going to have rendered her, this having made everything she had ever
done impossible, if he wasn't going to give her a new chance. If he
was it was doubtless right enough. On the other hand, Murray might
have improved, if such a quantity of alloy, as she called it, _were_,
in any man, reducible, and if Paris were the place all happily to
reduce it. She had her doubts--anxious and aching on the spot, and had
expressed them to Mr. Pitman: certainly, of old, he had been more open
to the quotable than to the inexpressible, to charms than to charm. If
she could try the quotable, however, and with such a grand result, on
Mrs. Drack, she couldn't now on Murray--in respect to whom everything
had changed. So that if he hadn't a sense for the subtler appeal, the
appeal appreciable by people _not_ vulgar, on which alone she could
depend, what on earth would become of her? She could but yearningly
hope, at any rate, as she made up her mind to write to him immediately
at his club. It was a question of the right sensibility in him.
Perhaps he would have acquired it in Europe.

Two days later indeed--for he had promptly and charmingly replied,
keeping with alacrity the appointment she had judged best to propose
for a morning hour in a sequestered alley of the Park--two days later
she was to be struck well-nigh to alarm by everything he had acquired:
so much it seemed to make that it threatened somehow a complication,
and her plan, so far as she had arrived at one, dwelt in the desire
above all to simplify. She wanted no grain more of extravagance or
excess of anything--risking as she had done, none the less, a recall
of ancient license in proposing to Murray such a place of meeting. She
had her reasons--she wished intensely to discriminate: Basil French
had several times waited on her at her mother's habitation, their
horrible flat which was so much too far up and too near the East Side;
he had dined there and lunched there and gone with her thence to other
places, notably to see pictures, and had in particular adjourned
with her twice to the Metropolitan Museum, in which he took a great
interest, in which she professed a delight, and their second visit
to which had wound up in her encounter with Mr. Pitman, after her
companion had yielded, at her urgent instance, to an exceptional
need of keeping a business engagement. She mightn't, in delicacy,
in decency, entertain Murray Brush where she had entertained Mr.
French--she was given over now to these exquisite perceptions and
proprieties and bent on devoutly observing them; and Mr. French, by
good-luck, had never been with her in the Park: partly because he had
never pressed it, and partly because she would have held off if he
had, so haunted were those devious paths and favoring shades by the
general echo of her untrammelled past. If he had never suggested their
taking a turn there this was because, quite divinably, he held it
would commit him further than he had yet gone; and if she on her side
had practised a like reserve it was because the place reeked for her,
as she inwardly said, with old associations. It reeked with nothing
so much perhaps as with the memories evoked by the young man who now
awaited her in the nook she had been so competent to indicate; but
in what corner of the town, should she look for them, wouldn't those
footsteps creak back into muffled life, and to what expedient would
she be reduced should she attempt to avoid all such tracks? The Museum
was full of tracks, tracks by the hundred--the way really she had
knocked about!--but she had to see people somewhere, and she couldn't
pretend to dodge every ghost.

All she could do was not to make confusion, make mixtures, of the
living; though she asked herself enough what mixture she mightn't find
herself to have prepared if Mr. French should, not so very impossibly,
for a restless, roaming man--_her_ effect on him!--happen to pass
while she sat there with the mustachioed personage round whose name
Mrs. Maule would probably have caused detrimental anecdote most
thickly to cluster. There existed, she was sure, a mass of luxuriant
legend about the "lengths" her engagement with Murray Brush had gone;
she could herself fairly feel them in the air, these streamers of
evil, black flags flown as in warning, the vast redundancy of so cheap
and so dingy social bunting, in fine, that flapped over the stations
she had successively moved away from and which were empty now, for
such an ado, even to grotesqueness. The vivacity of that conviction
was what had at present determined her, while it was the way he
listened after she had quickly broken ground, while it was the special
character of the interested look in his handsome face, handsomer than
ever yet, that represented for her the civilization he had somehow
taken on. Just so it was the quantity of that gain, in its turn, that
had at the end of ten minutes begun to affect her as holding up a
light to the wide reach of her step. "There was never anything the
least serious between us, not a sign or a scrap, do you mind? of
anything beyond the merest pleasant friendly acquaintance; and if
you're not ready to go to the stake on it for me you may as well know
in time what it is you'll probably cost me."

She had immediately plunged, measuring her effect and having thought
it well over; and what corresponded to her question of his having
become a better person to appeal to was the appearance of interest she
had so easily created in him. She felt on the spot the difference that
made--it was indeed his form of being more civilized: it was the
sense in which Europe in general and Paris in particular had made him
develop. By every calculation--and her calculations, based on the
intimacy of her knowledge, had been many and deep--he would help her
the better the more intelligent he should have become; yet she was to
recognize later on that the first chill of foreseen disaster had been
caught by her as, at a given moment, this greater refinement of his
attention seemed to exhale it. It was just what she had wanted--"if
I can only get him interested--!" so that, this proving quite vividly
possible, why did the light it lifted strike her as lurid? Was it
partly by reason of his inordinate romantic good looks, those of a
gallant, genial conqueror, but which, involving so glossy a brownness
of eye, so manly a crispness of curl, so red-lipped a radiance of
smile, so natural a bravery of port, prescribed to any response
he might facially, might expressively, make a sort of florid,
disproportionate amplitude? The explanation, in any case, didn't
matter; he was going to mean well--that she could feel, and also that
he had meant better in the past, presumably, than he had managed to
convince her of his doing at the time: the oddity she hadn't now
reckoned with was this fact that from the moment he did advertise an
interest it should show almost as what she would have called weird. It
made a change in him that didn't go with the rest--as if he had broken
his nose or put on spectacles, lost his handsome hair or sacrificed
his splendid mustache: her conception, her necessity, as she saw, had
been that something should be added to him for her use, but nothing
for his own alteration.

He had affirmed himself, and his character, and his temper, and his
health, and his appetite, and his ignorance, and his obstinacy, and
his whole charming, coarse, heartless personality, during their
engagement, by twenty forms of natural emphasis, but never by emphasis
of interest. How in fact could you feel interest unless you should
know, within you, some dim stir of imagination? There was nothing in
the world of which Murray Brush was less capable than of such a dim
stir, because you only began to imagine when you felt some approach to
a need to understand. _He_ had never felt it; for hadn't he been born,
to his personal vision, with that perfect intuition of everything
which reduces all the suggested preliminaries of judgment to the
impertinence--when it's a question of your entering your house--of
a dumpage of bricks at your door? He had had, in short, neither to
imagine nor to perceive, because he had, from the first pulse of his
intelligence, simply and supremely known: so that, at this hour,
face to face with him, it came over her that she had, in their old
relation, dispensed with any such convenience of comprehension on his
part even to a degree she had not measured at the time. What therefore
must he not have seemed to her as a form of life, a form of avidity
and activity, blatantly successful in its own conceit, that he could
have dazzled her so against the interest of her very faculties and
functions? Strangely and richly historic all that backward mystery,
and only leaving for her mind the wonder of such a mixture of
possession and detachment as they would clearly to-day both know.
For each to be so little at last to the other when, during months
together, the idea of all abundance, all quantity, had been, for
each, drawn from the other and addressed to the other--what was it
monstrously like but some fantastic act of getting rid of a person by
going to lock yourself up in the _sanctum sanctorum_ of that person's
house, amid every evidence of that person's habits and nature? What
was going to happen, at any rate, was that Murray would show himself
as beautifully and consciously understanding--and it would be
prodigious that Europe should have inoculated him with that delicacy.
Yes, he wouldn't claim to know now till she had told him--an aid to
performance he had surely never before waited for, or been indebted
to, from any one; and then, so knowing, he would charmingly endeavor
to "meet," to oblige and to gratify. He would find it, her case, ever
so worthy of his benevolence, and would be literally inspired to
reflect that he must hear about it first.

She let him hear then everything, in spite of feeling herself slip,
while she did so, to some doom as yet incalculable; she went on very
much as she had done for Mr. Pitman and Mrs. Drack, with the rage
of desperation and, as she was afterward to call it to herself, the
fascination of the abyss. She didn't know, couldn't have said at the
time, _why_ his projected benevolence should have had most so the
virtue to scare her: he would patronize her, as an effect of her
vividness, if not of her charm, and would do this with all high
intention, finding her case, or rather _their_ case, their funny old
case, taking on of a sudden such refreshing and edifying life, to
the last degree curious and even important; but there were gaps of
connection between this and the intensity of the perception here
overtaking her that she shouldn't be able to move in _any_ direction
without dishing herself. That she couldn't afford it where she had got
to--couldn't afford the deplorable vulgarity of having been so many
times informally affianced and contracted (putting it only at that, at
its being by the new lights and fashions so unpardonably vulgar): he
took this from her without turning, as she might have said, a hair;
except just to indicate, with his new superiority, that he felt the
distinguished appeal and notably the pathos of it. He still took
it from her that she hoped nothing, as it were, from any other
_alibi_--the people to drag into court being too many and too
scattered; but that, as it was with him, Murray Brush, she had been
_most_ vulgar, most everything she had better not have been, so she
depended on him for the innocence it was actually vital she should
establish. He flushed or frowned or winced no more at that than he did
when she once more fairly emptied her satchel and, quite as if they
had been Nancy and the Artful Dodger, or some nefarious pair of that
sort, talking things over in the manner of _Oliver Twist_, revealed
to him the fondness of her view that, could she but have produced a
cleaner slate, she might by this time have pulled it off with Mr.
French. Yes, he let her in that way sacrifice her honorable connection
with him--all the more honorable for being so completely at an end--to
the crudity of her plan for not missing another connection, so much
more brilliant than what he offered, and for bringing another man,
with whom she so invidiously and unflatteringly compared him, into her
greedy life.

There was only a moment during which, by a particular lustrous look
she had never had from him before, he just made her wonder which turn
he was going to take; she felt, however, as safe as was consistent
with her sense of having probably but added to her danger, when he
brought out, the next instant: "Don't you seem to take the ground that
we were guilty--that _you_ were ever guilty--of something we shouldn't
have been? What did we ever do that was secret, or underhand, or any
way not to be acknowledged? What did we do but exchange our young vows
with the best faith in the world--publicly, rejoicingly, with the full
assent of every one connected with us? I mean of course," he said with
his grave kind smile, "till we broke off so completely because we
found that--practically, financially, on the hard worldly basis--we
couldn't work it. What harm, in the sight of God or man, Julia," he
asked in his fine rich way, "did we ever do?"

She gave him back his look, turning pale. "Am I talking of _that_? Am
I talking of what _we_ know? I'm talking of what others feel--of what
they _have_ to feel; of what it's just enough for them to know not to
be able to get over it, once they do really know it. How do they know
what _didn't_ pass between us, with all the opportunities we had?
That's none of their business--if we were idiots enough, on the top of
everything! What you may or mayn't have done doesn't count, for _you_;
but there are people for whom it's loathsome that a girl should have
gone on like that from one person to another and still pretend to
be--well, all that a nice girl is supposed to be. It's as if we had
but just waked up, mother and I, to such a remarkable prejudice; and
now we have it--when we could do so well without it!--staring us
in the face. That mother should have insanely _let_ me, should so
vulgarly have taken it for my natural, my social career--_that's_ the
disgusting, humiliating thing: with the lovely account it gives of
both of us! But mother's view of a delicacy in things!" she went on
with scathing grimness; "mother's measure of anything, with her grand
'gained cases' (there'll be another yet, she finds them so easy!) of
which she's so publicly proud! You see I've no margin," said Julia;
letting him take it from her flushed face as much as he would that her
mother hadn't left her an inch. It was that he should make use of the
spade with her for the restoration of a bit of a margin just wide
enough to perch on till the tide of peril should have ebbed a little,
it was that he should give her _that_ lift--!

Well, it was all there from him after these last words; it was before
her that he really took hold. "Oh, my dear child, I can see! Of course
there are people--ideas change in our society so fast!--who are not in
sympathy with the old American freedom and who read, I dare say, all
sorts of uncanny things into it. Naturally you must take them as they
are--from the moment," said Murray Brush, who had lighted, by her
leave, a cigarette, "your life-path does, for weal or for woe, cross
with theirs." He had every now and then such an elegant phrase.
"Awfully interesting, certainly, your case. It's enough for me that it
_is_ yours--I make it my own. I put myself absolutely in your place;
you'll understand from me, without professions, won't you? that I do.
Command me in every way! What I do like is the sympathy with which
you've inspired _him_. I don't, I'm sorry to say, happen to know him
personally,"--he smoked away, looking off; "but of course one knows
all about him generally, and I'm sure he's right for you, I'm sure it
would be charming, if you yourself think so. Therefore trust me and
even--what shall I say?--leave it to me a little, won't you?" He had
been watching, as in his fumes, the fine growth of his possibilities;
and with this he turned on her the large warmth of his charity. It was
like a subscription of a half-a-million. "I'll take care of you."

She found herself for a moment looking up at him from as far below as
the point from which the school-child, with round eyes raised to the
wall, gazes at the parti- map of the world. Yes, it was a
warmth, it was a special benignity, that had never yet dropped on her
from any one; and she wouldn't for the first few moments have known
how to describe it or even quite what to do with it. Then, as it still
rested, his fine improved expression aiding, the sense of what had
happened came over her with a rush. She was being, yes, patronized;
and that was really as new to her--the freeborn American girl who
might, if she had wished, have got engaged and disengaged not six
times but sixty--as it would have been to be crowned or crucified. The
Frenches themselves didn't do it--the Frenches themselves didn't dare
it. It was as strange as one would: she recognized it when it came,
but anything might have come rather--and it was coming by (of all
people in the world) Murray Brush! It overwhelmed her; still she could
speak, with however faint a quaver and however sick a smile. "You'll
lie for me like a gentleman?"

"As far as that goes till I'm black in the face!" And then while he
glowed at her and she wondered if he would pointedly look his lies
that way, and if, in fine, his florid, gallant, knowing, almost
winking intelligence, _common_ as she had never seen the common
vivified, would represent his notion of "blackness": "See here, Julia;
I'll do more."

"'More'--?"

"Everything. I'll take it right in hand. I'll fling over you--"

"Fling over me--?" she continued to echo as he fascinatingly fixed
her.

"Well, the biggest _kind_ of rose- mantle!" And this time, oh,
he did wink: it _would_ be the way he was going to wink (and in the
grandest good faith in the world) when indignantly denying, under
inquisition, that there had been "a sign or a scrap" between them. But
there was more to come; he decided she should have it all. "Julia,
you've got to know now." He hung fire but an instant more. "Julia,
I'm going to be married." His "Julias" were somehow death to her; she
could feel that even _through_ all the rest. "Julia, I announce my
engagement."

"Oh, lordy, lordy!" she wailed: it might have been addressed to Mr.
Pitman.

The force of it had brought her to her feet, but he sat there smiling
up as at the natural tribute of her interest. "I tell you before any
one else; it's not to be 'out' for a day or two yet. But we want you
to know; _she_ said that as soon as I mentioned to her that I had
heard from you. I mention to her everything, you see!"--and he almost
simpered while, still in his seat, he held the end of his cigarette,
all delicately and as for a form of gentle emphasis, with the tips
of his fine fingers. "You've not met her, Mary Lindeck, I think: she
tells me she hasn't the pleasure of knowing you, but she desires it so
much--particularly longs for it. She'll take an interest too," he went
on; "you must let me immediately bring her to you. She has heard so
much about you and she really wants to see you."

"Oh mercy _me_!" poor Julia gasped again--so strangely did history
repeat itself and so did this appear the echo, on Murray Brush's lips,
and quite to drollery, of that sympathetic curiosity of Mrs. Drack's
which Mr. Pitman had, as they said, voiced. Well, there had played
before her the vision of a ledge of safety in face of a rising tide;
but this deepened quickly to a sense more forlorn, the cold swish of
waters already up to her waist and that would soon be up to her chin.
It came really but from the air of her friend, from the perfect
benevolence and high unconsciousness with which he kept his
posture--as if to show he could patronize her from below upward quite
as well as from above down. And as she took it all in, as it spread to
a flood, with the great lumps and masses of truth it was floating, she
knew inevitable submission, not to say submersion, as she had never
known it in her life; going down and down before it, not even putting
out her hands to resist or cling by the way, only reading into the
young man's very face an immense fatality and, for all his bright
nobleness his absence of rancor or of protesting pride, the great gray
blankness of her doom. It was as if the earnest Miss Lindeck, tall and
mild, high and lean, with eye-glasses and a big nose, but "marked" in
a noticeable way, elegant and distinguished and refined, as you could
see from a mile off, and as graceful, for common despair of imitation,
as the curves of the "copy" set of old by one's writing-master--it was
as if this stately well-wisher, whom indeed she had never exchanged
a word with, but whom she had recognized and placed and winced at
as soon as he spoke of her, figured there beside him now as also in
portentous charge of her case.

He had ushered her into it in that way as if his mere right word
sufficed; and Julia could see them throne together, beautifully at one
in all the interests they now shared, and regard her as an object of
almost tender solicitude. It was positively as if they had become
engaged for her good--in such a happy light as it shed. That was the
way people you had known, known a bit intimately, looked at you as
soon as they took on the high matrimonial propriety that sponged over
the more or less wild past to which you belonged, and of which, all of
a sudden, they were aware only through some suggestion it made them
for reminding you definitely that you still had a place. On her
having had a day or two before to meet Mrs. Drack and to rise to her
expectation she had seen and felt herself act, had above all admired
herself, and had at any rate known what she said, even though losing,
at her altitude, any distinctness in the others. She could have
repeated later on the detail of her performance--if she hadn't
preferred to keep it with her as a mere locked-up, a mere unhandled
treasure. At present, however, as everything was for her at first
deadened and vague, true to the general effect of sounds and motions
in water, she couldn't have said afterward what words she spoke, what
face she showed, what impression she made--at least till she had
pulled herself round to precautions. She only knew she had turned
away, and that this movement must have sooner or later determined
his rising to join her, his deciding to accept it, gracefully and
condoningly--condoningly in respect to her natural emotion, her
inevitable little pang--for an intimation that they would be better on
their feet.

They trod then afresh their ancient paths; and though it pressed upon
her hatefully that he must have taken her abruptness for a smothered
shock, the flare-up of her old feeling at the breath of his news, she
had still to see herself condemned to allow him this, condemned
really to encourage him in the mistake of believing her suspicious of
feminine spite and doubtful of Miss Lindeck's zeal. She was so far
from doubtful that she was but too appalled at it and at the officious
mass in which it loomed, and this instinct of dread, before their walk
was over, before she had guided him round to one of the smaller gates,
there to slip off again by herself, was positively to find on the
bosom of her flood a plank by the aid of which she kept in a manner
and for the time afloat. She took ten minutes to pant, to blow gently,
to paddle disguisedly, to accommodate herself, in a word, to the
elements she had let loose; but as a reward of her effort at least she
then saw how her determined vision accounted for everything. Beside
her friend on the bench she had truly felt all his cables cut, truly
swallowed down the fact that if he still perceived she was pretty--and
_how_ pretty!--it had ceased appreciably to matter to him. It had
lighted the folly of her preliminary fear, the fear of his even yet to
some effect of confusion or other inconvenience for her, proving
more alive to the quotable in her, as she had called it, than to the
inexpressible. She had reckoned with the awkwardness of that possible
failure of his measure of her charm, by which his renewed apprehension
of her grosser ornaments, those with which he had most affinity, might
too much profit; but she need have concerned herself as little for his
sensibility on one head as on the other. She had ceased personally,
ceased materially--in respect, as who should say, to any optical or
tactile advantage--to exist for him, and the whole office of his
manner had been the more piously and gallantly to dress the dead
presence with flowers. This was all to his credit and his honor, but
what it clearly certified was that their case was at last not even one
of spirit reaching out to spirit. _He_ had plenty of spirit--had all
the spirit required for his having engaged himself to Miss Lindeck,
into which result, once she had got her head well up again, she read,
as they proceeded, one sharp meaning after another. It was therefore
toward the subtler essence of that mature young woman alone that he
was occupied in stretching; what was definite to him about Julia
Bride being merely, being entirely--which was indeed thereby quite
enough--that she _might_ end by scaling her worldly height. They would
push, they would shove, they would "boost," they would arch both their
straight backs as pedestals for her tiptoe; and at the same time, by
some sweet prodigy of mechanics, she would pull them up and up with
her.

Wondrous things hovered before her in the course of this walk; her
consciousness had become, by an extraordinary turn, a music-box in
which, its lid well down, the most remarkable tunes were sounding. It
played for her ear alone, and the lid, as she might have figured, was
her firm plan of holding out till she got home, of not betraying--to
her companion at least--the extent to which she was demoralized. To
see him think her demoralized by mistrust of the sincerity of the
service to be meddlesomely rendered her by his future wife--she would
have hurled herself publicly into the lake there at their side, would
have splashed, in her beautiful clothes, among the frightened swans,
rather than invite him to that ineptitude. Oh, her sincerity, Mary
Lindeck's--she would be drenched with her sincerity, and she would
be drenched, yes, with _his_; so that, from inward convulsion to
convulsion, she had, before they reached their gate, pulled up in the
path. There was something her head had been full of these three or
four minutes, the intensest little tune of the music-box, and it made
its way to her lips now; belonging--for all the good it could do
her!--to the two or three sorts of solicitude she might properly
express.

"I hope _she_ has a fortune, if you don't mind my speaking of it:
I mean some of the money we didn't in _our_ time have--and that we
missed, after all, in our poor way and for what we then wanted of it,
so quite dreadfully."

She had been able to wreathe it in a grace quite equal to any he
himself had employed; and it was to be said for him also that he kept
up, on this, the standard. "Oh, she's not, thank goodness, at all
badly off, poor dear. We shall do very well. How sweet of you to have
thought of it! May I tell her that too?" he splendidly glared. Yes, he
glared--how couldn't he, with what his mind was really full of? But,
all the same, he came just here, by her vision, nearer than at any
other point to being a gentleman. He came quite within an ace of
it--with his taking from her thus the prescription of humility of
service, his consenting to act in the interest of her avidity, his
letting her mount that way, on his bowed shoulders, to the success in
which he could suppose she still believed. He couldn't know, he would
never know, that she had then and there ceased to believe in it--that
she saw as clear as the sun in the sky the exact manner in which,
between them, before they had done, the Murray Brushes, all zeal and
sincerity, all interest in her interesting case, would dish, would
ruin, would utterly destroy her. He wouldn't have needed to go on, for
the force and truth of this; but he did go on--he was as crashingly
consistent as a motorcar without a brake. He was visibly in love
with the idea of what they might do for her and of the rare "social"
opportunity that they would, by the same stroke, embrace. How he had
been offhand with it, how he had made it parenthetic, that he didn't
happen "personally" to know Basil French--as if it would have been at
all likely he _should_ know him, even _im_ personally, and as if he
could conceal from her the fact that, since she had made him her
overture, this gentleman's name supremely baited her hook! Oh, they
would help Julia Bride if they could--they would do their remarkable
best; but they would at any rate have made his acquaintance over it,
and she might indeed leave the rest to their thoroughness. He would
already have known, he would already have heard; her appeal, she was
more and more sure, wouldn't have come to him as a revelation. He had
already talked it over with _her_, with Miss Lindeck, to whom the
Frenches, in their fortress, had never been accessible, and his whole
attitude bristled, to Julia's eyes, with the betrayal of her hand, her
voice, her pressure, her calculation. His tone, in fact, as he talked,
fairly thrust these things into her face. "But you must see her for
yourself. You'll judge her. You'll love her. My dear child"--he
brought it all out, and if he spoke of children he might, in his
candor, have been himself infantine--"my dear child, she's the person
to do it for you. Make it over to her; but," he laughed, "of course
see her first! Couldn't you," he wound up--for they were now near
their gate, where she was to leave him--"couldn't you just simply make
us meet him, at tea say, informally; just _us_ alone, as pleasant old
friends of whom you'd have so naturally and frankly spoken to him: and
then see what we'd _make_ of that?"

It was all in his expression; he couldn't keep it out of that, and his
shining good looks couldn't: ah, he was so fatally much too handsome
for her! So the gap showed just there, in his admirable mask and
his admirable eagerness; the yawning little chasm showed where the
gentleman fell short. But she took this in, she took everything in,
she felt herself do it, she heard herself say, while they paused
before separation, that she quite saw the point of the meeting, as he
suggested, at her tea. She would propose it to Mr. French and would
let them know; and he must assuredly bring Miss Lindeck, bring her
"right away," bring her soon, bring _them_, his fiancee and her,
together somehow, and as quickly as possible--so that they _should_
be old friends before the tea. She would propose it to Mr. French,
propose it to Mr. French: that hummed in her ears as she went--after
she had really got away; hummed as if she were repeating it over,
giving it out to the passers, to the pavement, to the sky, and all as
in wild discord with the intense little concert of her music-box. The
extraordinary thing too was that she quite believed she should do it,
and fully meant to; desperately, fantastically passive--since she
almost reeled with it as she proceeded--she was capable of proposing
anything to any one: capable too of thinking it likely Mr. French
would come, for he had never on her previous proposals declined
anything. Yes, she would keep it up to the end, this pretence of owing
them salvation, and might even live to take comfort in having done for
them what they wanted. What they wanted _couldn't_ but be to get at
the Frenches, and what Miss Lindeck above all wanted, baffled of it
otherwise, with so many others of the baffled, was to get at Mr.
French--for all Mr. French would want of either of them!--still more
than Murray did. It was not till after she had got home, got straight
into her own room and flung herself on her face, that she yielded to
the full taste of the bitterness of missing a connection, missing the
man himself, with power to create such a social appetite, such a grab
at what might be gained by them. He could make people, even people
like these two and whom there were still other people to envy, he
could make them push and snatch and scramble like that--and then
remain as incapable of taking her from the hands of such patrons as of
receiving her straight, say, from those of Mrs. Drack. It was a high
note, too, of Julia's wonderful composition that, even in the long,
lonely moan of her conviction of her now certain ruin, all this grim
lucidity, the perfect clearance of passion, but made her supremely
proud of him.




A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT

_Robert Louis Stevenson_ (1850-1894)


It was late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous,
relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered
it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after
flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous,
interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it
seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had
propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window: was
it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus, or were the holy
angels moulting? He was only a poor Master of Arts, he went on; and as
the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture
to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the
company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honor of the
jest and the grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his
own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when
he was Villon's age.

The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the
flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up.
An army might have marched from end to end and not a footfall given
the alarm. If there were any belated birds in heaven, they saw the
island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white
spars, on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the snow
settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was
drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque
or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into great false
noses, drooping toward the point. The crockets were like upright
pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind there was a
dull sound of dripping about the precincts of the church.

The cemetery of St. John had taken its own share of the snow. All the
graves were decently covered; tall, white housetops stood around in
grave array; worthy burghers were long ago in bed, benightcapped like
their domiciles; there was no light in all the neighborhood but a
little peep from a lamp that hung swinging in the church choir, and
tossed the shadows to and fro in time to its oscillations. The clock
was hard on ten when the patrol went by with halberds and a lantern,
beating their hands; and they saw nothing suspicious about the
cemetery of St. John.

Yet there was a small house, backed up against the cemetery wall,
which was still awake, and awake to evil purpose, in that snoring
district. There was not much to betray it from without; only a stream
of warm vapor from the chimney-top, a patch where the snow melted
on the roof, and a few half-obliterated footprints at the door. But
within, behind the shuttered windows, Master Francis Villon, the poet,
and some of the thievish crew with whom he consorted, were keeping the
night alive and passing round the bottle.

A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from
the arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy
monk, with his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared to the
comfortable warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the
firelight only escaped on either side of his broad person, and in
a little pool between his outspread feet. His face had the beery,
bruised appearance of the continual drinker's; it was covered with a
network of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now
pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him
on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange
excrescence on either side of his bull neck. So he straddled,
grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of his portly
frame.

On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a
scrap of parchment; Villon making a ballade which he was to call the
_Ballade of Roast Fish_, and Tabary spluttering admiration at his
shoulder. The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with
hollow cheeks and thin black locks. He carried his four-and-twenty
years with feverish animation. Greed had made folds about his eyes,
evil smiles had puckered his mouth. The wolf and pig struggled
together in his face. It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly
countenance. His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knotted
like a cord; and they were continually flickering in front of him in
violent and expressive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent,
admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips:
he had become a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of
burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese
and human donkeys.

At the monk's other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game
of chance. About the first there clung some flavor of good birth and
training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly
in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin,
poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery
that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been
gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald
head shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant
stomach shook with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains.

"Doubles or quits?" said Thevenin.

Montigny nodded grimly.

"_Some may prefer to dine in state_" wrote Villon, "_On bread and
cheese on silver plate_. Or--or--help me out, Guido!"

Tabary giggled.

"_Or parsley on a silver dish_" scribbled the poet.

The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and
sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made sepulchral
grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper as the night
went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with something
between a whistle and a groan. It was an eerie, uncomfortable talent
of the poet's, much detested by the Picardy monk.

"Can't you hear it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are
all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my
gallants, you'll be none the warmer! Whew, what a gust! Down
went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged
medlar-tree!--I say, Dom Nicolas, it'll be cold to-night on the St.
Denis Road?" he asked.

Dom Nicolas winked both his big eyes, and seemed to choke upon his
Adam's apple. Montfaucon, the great grisly Paris gibbet, stood hard by
the St. Denis Road, and the pleasantry touched him on the raw. As for
Tabary, he laughed immoderately over the medlars; he had never heard
anything more light-hearted; and he held his sides and crowed. Villon
fetched him a fillip on the nose, which turned his mirth into an
attack of coughing.

"Oh, stop that row," said Villon, "and think of rhymes to 'fish.'"

"Doubles or quits," said Montigny doggedly.

"With all my heart," quoth Thevenin.

"Is there any more in that bottle?" asked the monk.

"Open another," said Villon. "How do you ever hope to fill that big
hogshead, your body, with little things like bottles? And how do you
expect to get to heaven? How many angels, do you fancy, can be spared
to carry up a single monk from Picardy? Or do you think yourself
another Elias--and they'll send the coach for you?"

"_Hominibus impossibile_" replied the monk, as he filled his glass.

Tabary was in ecstasies.

Villon filliped his nose again.

"Laugh at my jokes, if you like," he said.

"It was very good," objected Tabary.

Villon made a face at him. "Think of rhymes to 'fish,'" he said. "What
have you to do with Latin? You'll wish you knew none of it at the
great assizes, when the devil calls for Guido Tabary, clericus--the
devil with the humpback and red-hot finger-nails. Talking of the
devil," he added, in a whisper, "look at Montigny!"

All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not seem to be
enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril
nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his
back, as people say, in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed
hard under the gruesome burden.

"He looks as if he could knife him," whispered Tabary, with round
eyes.

The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread his open hands to
the red embers. It was the cold that thus affected Dom Nicolas, and
not any excess of moral sensibility.

"Come now," said Villon--"about this ballade. How does it run so far?"
And beating time with his hand, he read it aloud to Tabary.

They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal
movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and Thevenin
was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny
leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. The blow
took effect before he had time to utter a cry, before he had time to
move. A tremor or two convulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut,
his heels rattled on the floor; then his head rolled backward over
one shoulder with the eyes open, and Thevenin Pensete's spirit had
returned to Him who made it.

Everyone sprang to his feet; but the business was over in two twos.
The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly
fashion; the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a
singular and ugly leer.

"My God!" said Tabary, and he began to pray in Latin.

Villon broke out into hysterical laughter. He came a step forward and
clucked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin, and laughed still louder. Then
he sat down suddenly, all of a heap, upon a stool, and continued
laughing bitterly as though he would shake himself to pieces.

Montigny recovered his composure first.

"Let's see what he has about him," he remarked; and he picked the dead
man's pockets with a practised hand, and divided the money into four
equal portions on the table. "There's for you," he said.

The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a single stealthy
glance at the dead Thevenin, who was beginning to sink into himself
and topple sideways off the chair.

"We're all in for it," cried Villon, swallowing his mirth. "It's a
hanging job for every man jack of us that's here--not to speak of
those who aren't." He made a shocking gesture in the air with his
raised right hand, and put out his tongue and threw his head on one
side, so as to counterfeit the appearance of one who has been hanged.
Then he pocketed his share of the spoil, and executed a shuffle with
his feet as if to restore the circulation.

Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the money, and
retired to the other end of the apartment.

Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew out the dagger,
which was followed by a jet of blood.

"You fellows had better be moving," he said, as he wiped the blade on
his victim's doublet.

"I think we had," returned Villon with a gulp. "Damn his fat head!" he
broke out. "It sticks in my throat like phlegm. What right has a man
to have red hair when he is dead?" And he fell all of a heap again
upon the stool, and fairly covered his face with his hands.

Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Tabary feebly chiming in.

"Cry baby," said the monk.

"I always said he was a woman," added Montigny with a sneer. "Sit up,
can't you?" he went on, giving another shake to the murdered body.
"Tread out that fire, Nick." But Nick was better employed; he was
quietly taking Villon's purse, as the poet sat, limp and trembling, on
the stool where he had been making a ballade not three minutes before.
Montigny and Tabary dumbly demanded a share of the booty, which the
monk silently promised as he passed the little bag into the bosom of
his gown. In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical
existence.

No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon shook himself,
jumped to his feet, and began helping to scatter and extinguish the
embers. Meanwhile Montigny opened the door and cautiously peered into
the street. The coast was clear; there was no meddlesome patrol in
sight. Still it was judged wiser to slip out severally; and as Villon
was himself in a hurry to escape from the neighborhood of the dead
Thevenin, and the rest were in a still greater hurry to get rid of him
before he should discover the loss of his money, he was the first by
general consent to issue forth into the street.

The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only a
few vapors, as thin as moonlight, fleeted rapidly across the stars. It
was bitter cold; and by a common optical effect, things seemed almost
more definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was
absolutely still: a company of white hoods, a field full of little
Alps, below the twinkling stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would it
were still snowing! Now, wherever he went he left an indelible trail
behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was still
tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he
must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the
crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came
back to him with a new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to
pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a street at random, stepped
boldly forward in the snow.

Two things preoccupied him as he went: the aspect of the gallows at
Montfaucon in this bright windy phase of the night's existence, for
one; and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald head and
garland of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept
quickening his pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by
mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes he looked back over his shoulder
with a sudden nervous jerk; but he was the only moving thing in the
white streets, except when the wind swooped round a corner and threw
up the snow, which was beginning to freeze, in spouts of glittering
dust.

Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a couple of
lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as though
carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And though it was merely
crossing his line of march, he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot
as speedily as he could. He was not in the humor to be challenged, and
he was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow. Just
on his left hand there stood a great hotel, with some turrets and a
large porch before the door; it was half-ruinous, he remembered, and
had long stood empty; and so he made three steps of it and jumped
inside the shelter of the porch. It was pretty dark inside, after
the glimmer of the snowy streets, and he was groping forward with
outspread hands, when he stumbled over some substance which offered an
indescribable mixture of resistances, hard and soft, firm and loose.
His heart gave a leap, and he sprang two steps back and stared
dreadfully at the obstacle. Then he gave a little laugh of relief. It
was only a woman, and she dead. He knelt beside her to make sure upon
this latter point. She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A
little ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and her
cheeks had been heavily rouged that same afternoon. Her pockets were
quite empty; but in her stocking, underneath the garter, Villon found
two of the small coins that went by the name of whites. It was little
enough; but it was always something; and the poet was moved with a
deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent
her money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he
looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to
the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man's life. Henry V. of
England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered France, and
this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great man's doorway,
before she had time to spend her couple of whites--it seemed a cruel
way to carry on the world. Two whites would have taken such a little
while to squander; and yet it would have been one more good taste in
the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul,
and the body was left to birds and vermin. He would like to use all
his tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern broken.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling,
half-mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped beating;
a feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs, and a cold
blow seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment;
then he felt again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst
upon him, and he was covered with perspiration. To spendthrifts money
is so living and actual--it is such a thin veil between them and their
pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune--that of time; and
a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they
are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most
shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing,
in a breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the halter
for it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so dearly
earned, so foolishly departed. Villon stood and cursed; he threw the
two whites into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he stamped,
and was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor corpse. Then
he began rapidly to retrace his steps toward the house beside the
cemetery. He had forgotten all fear of the patrol, which was long gone
by at any rate, and had no idea but that of his lost purse. It was in
vain that he looked right and left upon the snow; nothing was to be
seen. He had not dropped it in the streets. Had it fallen in the
house? He would have liked dearly to go in and see; but the idea of
the grisly occupant unmanned him. And he saw besides, as he drew near,
that their efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the
contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played
in the chinks of the door and window, and revived his terror for the
authorities and Paris gibbet.

He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the
snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion. But he
could only find one white; the other had probably struck sideways and
sunk deeply in. With a single white in his pocket, all his projects
for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away. And
it was not only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp; positive
discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before
the porch. His perspiration had dried upon him; and though the wind
had now fallen, a binding frost was setting in stronger with every
hour, and he felt benumbed and sick at heart. What was to be done?
Late as was the hour, improbable as was success, he would try the
house of his adopted father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.

He ran there all the way, and knocked timidly. There was no answer. He
knocked again and again, taking heart with every stroke; and at last
steps were heard approaching from within. A barred wicket fell open in
the iron-studded door, and emitted a gush of yellow light.

"Hold up your face to the wicket," said the chaplain from within.

"It's only me," whimpered Villon.

"Oh, it's only you, is it?" returned the chaplain; and he cursed him
with foul unpriestly oaths for disturbing him at such an hour, and
bade him be off to hell, where he came from.

"My hands are blue to the wrists," pleaded Villon; "my feet are dead
and full of twinges; my nose aches with the sharp air; the cold lies
at my heart. I may be dead before morning. Only this once, father, and
before God I will never ask again."

"You should have come earlier," said the ecclesiastic, coolly. "Young
men require a lesson now and then." He shut the wicket and retired
deliberately into the interior of the house.

Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and
feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.

"Wormy old fox," he cried. "If I had my hand under your twist, I would
send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit."

A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet down long
passages. He passed his hand over his mouth with an oath. And then the
humor of the situation struck him, and he laughed and looked
lightly up to heaven, where the stars seemed to be winking over his
discomfiture.

What was to be done? It looked very like a night in the frosty
streets. The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination, and
gave him a hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early night
might very well happen to him before morning. And he so young! and
with such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement before him! He
felt quite pathetic over the notion of his own fate, as if it had been
some one else's, and made a little imaginative vignette of the scene
in the morning when they should find his body.

He passed all his chances under review, turning the white between his
thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately he was on bad terms with some old
friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a plight. He had
lampooned them in verses, he had beaten and cheated them; and yet now,
when he was in so close a pinch, he thought there was at least one who
might perhaps relent. It was a chance. It was worth trying at least,
and he would go and see.

On the way, two little accidents happened to him which  his
musings in a very different manner. For, first, he fell in with the
track of a patrol, and walked in it for some yards, although it lay
out of his direction. And this spirited him up; at least he had
confused his trail; for he was still possessed with the idea of people
tracking him all about Paris over the snow, and collaring him next
morning before he was awake. The other matter affected him very
differently. He passed a street corner, where, not so long before, a
woman and her child had been devoured by wolves. This was just the
kind of weather, he reflected, when wolves might take it into their
heads to enter Paris again; and a lone man in these deserted streets
would run the chance of something worse than a mere scare. He stopped
and looked upon the place with unpleasant interest--it was a centre
where several lanes intersected each other; and he looked down them
all one after another, and held his breath to listen, lest he should
detect some galloping black things on the snow or hear the sound of
howling between him and the river. He remembered his mother telling
him the story and pointing out the spot, while he was yet a child. His
mother! If he only knew where she lived, he might make sure at least
of shelter. He determined he would inquire upon the morrow: nay, he
would go and see her, too, poor old girl! So thinking, he arrived at
his destination--his last hope for the night.

The house was quite dark, like its neighbors, and yet after a few
taps, he heard a movement overhead, a door opening, and a cautious
voice asking who was there. The poet named himself in a loud whisper,
and waited, not without some trepidation, the result. Nor had he
to wait long. A window was suddenly opened, and a pailful of slops
splashed down upon the doorstep. Villon had not been unprepared for
something of the sort, and had put himself as much in shelter as the
nature of the porch admitted; but for all that, he was deplorably
drenched below the waist. His hose began to freeze almost at once.
Death from cold and exposure stared him in the face; he remembered he
was of phthisical tendency, and began coughing tentatively. But the
gravity of the danger steadied his nerves. He stopped a few hundred
yards from the door where he had been so rudely used, and reflected
with his finger to his nose. He could only see one way of getting a
lodging, and that was to take it. He had noticed a house not far away
which looked as if it might be easily broken into, and thither he
betook himself promptly, entertaining himself on the way with the idea
of a room still hot, with a table still loaded with the remains of
supper, where he might pass the rest of the black hours, and whence he
should issue, on the morrow, with an armful of valuable plate. He even
considered on what viands and what wines he should prefer; and as he
was calling the roll of his favorite dainties, roast fish presented
itself to his mind with an odd mixture of amusement and horror.

"I shall never finish that ballade," he thought to himself; and then,
with another shudder at the recollection, "Oh, damn his fat head!" he
repeated fervently, and spat upon the snow.

The house in question looked dark at first sight; but as Villon made
a preliminary inspection in search of the handiest point of attack, a
little twinkle of light caught his eye from behind a curtained window.

"The devil!" he thought. "People awake! Some student or some saint,
confound the crew! Can't they get drunk and lie in bed snoring like
their neighbors! What's the good of curfew, and poor devils of
bell-ringers jumping at a rope's-end in bell-towers? What's the use of
day, if people sit up all night? The gripes to them!" He grinned as he
saw where his logic was leading him. "Every man to his business, after
all," added he, "and if they're awake, by the Lord, I may come by a
supper honestly for this once, and cheat the devil."

He went boldly to the door, and knocked with an assured hand. On both
previous occasions he had knocked timidly and with some dread of
attracting notice; but now, when he had just discarded the thought of
a burglarious entry, knocking at a door seemed a mighty simple and
innocent proceeding. The sound of his blows echoed through the house
with thin, phantasmal reverberations, as though it were quite empty;
but these had scarcely died away before a measured tread drew near, a
couple of bolts were withdrawn, and one wing was opened broadly, as
though no guile or fear of guile were known to those within. A tall
figure of a man, muscular and spare, but a little bent, confronted
Villon. The head was massive in bulk, but finely sculptured; the nose
blunt at the bottom but refining upward to where it joined a pair
of strong and honest eyebrows; the mouth and eyes surrounded with
delicate markings, and the whole face based upon a thick white
beard, boldly and squarely trimmed. Seen as it was by the light of a
flickering hand-lamp, it looked perhaps nobler than it had a right to
do; but it was a fine face, honorable rather than intelligent, strong,
simple, and righteous.

"You knock late, sir," said the old man in resonant, courteous tones.

Villon cringed, and brought up many servile words of apology; at a
crisis of this sort, the beggar was uppermost in him, and the man of
genius hid his head with confusion.

"You are cold," repeated the old man, "and hungry? Well, step in." And
he ordered him into the house with a noble enough gesture.

"Some great seigneur," thought Villon, as his host, setting down the
lamp on the flagged pavement of the entry, shot the bolts once more
into their places.

"You will pardon me if I go in front," he said, when this was done;
and he preceded the poet up-stairs into a large apartment, warmed with
a pan of charcoal and lit by a great lamp hanging from the roof. It
was very bare of furniture; only some gold plate on a sideboard; some
folios; and a stand of armor between the windows. Some smart tapestry
hung upon the walls, representing the crucifixion of our Lord in one
piece, and in another a scene of shepherds and shepherdesses by a
running stream. Over the chimney was a shield of arms.

"Will you seat yourself," said the old man, "and forgive me if I leave
you? I am alone in my house to-night, and if you are to eat I must
forage for you myself."

No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from the chair on which
he just seated himself, and began examining the room, with the stealth
and passion of a cat. He weighed the gold flagons in his hand, opened
all the folios, and investigated the arms upon the shield, and the
stuff with which the seats were lined. He raised the window-curtains,
and saw that the windows were set with rich stained glass in figures,
so far as he could see, of martial import. Then he stood in the middle
of the room, drew a long breath, and retaining it with puffed cheeks,
looked round and round him, turning on his heels, as if to impress
every feature of the apartment on his memory.

"Seven pieces of plate," he said. "If there had been ten I would have
risked it. A fine house, and a fine old master, so help me all the
saints."

And just then, hearing the old man's tread returning along the
corridor, he stole back to his chair, and began toasting his wet legs
before the charcoal pan.

His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a jug of wine in
the other. He set down the plate upon the table, motioning Villon
to draw in his chair, and going to the sideboard, brought back two
goblets, which he filled.

"I drink to your better fortune," he said, gravely touching Villon's
cup with his own.

"To our better acquaintance," said the poet, growing bold. A mere
man of the people would have been awed by the courtesy of the old
seigneur, but Villon was hardened in that matter; he had made mirth
for great lords before now, and found them as black rascals as
himself. And so he devoted himself to the viands with a ravenous
gusto, while the old man, leaning backward, watched him with steady,
curious eyes.

"You have blood on your shoulder, my man," he said.

Montigny must have laid his wet right hand upon him as he left the
house. He cursed Montigny in his heart.

"It was none of my shedding," he stammered.

"I had not supposed so," returned his host quietly. "A brawl?"

"Well, something of that sort," Villon admitted with a quaver.

"Perhaps a fellow murdered?"

"Oh, no, not murdered," said the poet, more and more confused. "It was
all fair play--murdered by accident. I had no hand in it, God strike
me dead!" he added fervently.

"One rogue the fewer, I dare say," observed the master of the house.

"You may dare to say that," agreed Villon, infinitely relieved. "As
big a rogue as there is between here and Jerusalem. He turned up his
toes like a lamb. But it was a nasty thing to look at. I dare say
you've seen dead men in your time, my lord?" he added, glancing at the
armor.

"Many," said the old man. "I have followed the wars, as you imagine."

Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just taken up again.

"Were any of them bald?" he asked.

"Oh, yes, and with hair as white as mine."

"I don't think I would mind the white so much," said Villon. "His was
red." And he had a return of his shuddering and tendency to laughter,
which he drowned with a great draught of wine. "I'm a little put out
when I think of it," he went on. "I knew him--damn him! And the cold
gives a man fancies--or the fancies give a man cold, I don't know
which."

"Have you any money?" asked the old man.

"I have one white," returned the poet, laughing. "I got it out of
a dead jade's stocking in a porch. She was as dead as Caesar, poor
wench, and as cold as a church, with bits of ribbon sticking in her
hair. This is a hard world in winter for wolves and wenches and poor
rogues like me."

"I," said the old man, "am Enguerrand de la Feuillee, seigneur
de Brisetout, bailly du Patatrac. Who and what may you be?"

Villon rose and made a suitable reverence. "I am called Francis
Villon," he said, "a poor Master of Arts of this university. I know
some Latin, and a deal of vice. I can make chansons, ballades, lais,
virelais, and roundels, and I am very fond of wine. I was born in a
garret, and I shall not improbably die upon the gallows. I may add,
my lord, that from this night forward I am your lordship's very
obsequious servant to command."

"No servant of mine," said the knight; "my guest for this evening, and
no more."

"A very grateful guest," said Villon, politely; and he drank in dumb
show to his entertainer.

"You are shrewd," began the old man, tapping his forehead, "very
shrewd; you have learning; you are a clerk; and yet you take a small
piece of money off a dead woman in the street. Is it not a kind of
theft?"

"It is a kind of theft much practised in the wars, my lord."

"The wars are the field of honor," returned the old man proudly.
"There a man plays his life upon the cast; he fights in the name of
his lord the king, his Lord God, and all their lordships the holy
saints and angels."

"Put it," said Villon, "that I were really a thief, should I not play
my life also, and against heavier odds?"

"For gain, and not for honor."

"Gain?" repeated Villon with a shrug. "Gain! The poor fellow wants
supper, and takes it. So does the soldier in a campaign. Why, what are
all these requisitions we hear so much about? If they are not gain
to those who take them, they are loss enough to the others. The
men-at-arms drink by a good fire, while the burgher bites his nails to
buy them wine and wood. I have seen a good many ploughmen swinging on
trees about the country; ay, I have seen thirty on one elm, and a very
poor figure they made; and when I asked some one how all these came to
be hanged, I was told it was because they could not scrape together
enough crowns to satisfy the men-at-arms."

"These things are a necessity of war, which the low-born must endure
with constancy. It is true that some captains drive overhard; there
are spirits in every rank not easily moved by pity; and, indeed, many
follow arms who are no better than brigands."

"You see," said the poet, "you cannot separate the soldier from the
brigand; and what is a thief but an isolated brigand with circumspect
manners? I steal a couple of mutton chops, without so much as
disturbing the farmer's sheep; the farmer grumbles a bit, but sups
none the less wholesomely on what remains. You come up blowing
gloriously on a trumpet, take away the whole sheep, and beat the
farmer pitifully into the bargain. I have no trumpet; I am only Tom,
Dick, or Harry; I am a rogue and a dog, and hanging's too good for
me--with all my heart--but just you ask the farmer which of us he
prefers, just find out which of us he lies awake to curse on cold
nights."

"Look at us two," said his lordship. "I am old, strong, and honored.
If I were turned from my house to-morrow, hundreds would be proud to
shelter me. Poor people would go out and pass the night in the streets
with their children, if I merely hinted that I wished to be alone.
And I find you up, wandering homeless, and picking farthings off dead
women by the wayside! I fear no man and nothing; I have seen you
tremble and lose countenance at a word. I wait God's summons
contentedly in my own house, or, if it please the king to call me out
again, upon the field of battle. You look for the gallows; a rough,
swift death, without hope or honor. Is there no difference between
these two?"

"As far as to the moon," Villon acquiesced. "But if I had been born
lord of Brisetout, and you had been the poor scholar Francis, would
the difference have been any the less? Should not I have been warming
my knees at this charcoal pan, and would not you have been groping for
farthings in the snow? Should not I have been the soldier, and you the
thief?"

"A thief!" cried the old man. "I a thief! If you understood your
words, you would repent them."

Villon turned out his hands with a gesture of inimitable impudence.
"If your lordship had done me the honor to follow my argument!" he
said.

"I do you too much honor in submitting to your presence," said the
knight. "Learn to curb your tongue when you speak with old and
honorable men, or some one hastier than I may reprove you in a sharper
fashion." And he rose and paced the lower end of the apartment,
struggling with anger and antipathy. Villon surreptitiously refilled
his cup, and settled himself more comfortably in the chair, crossing
his knees and leaning his head upon one hand and the elbow against the
back of the chair. He was now replete and warm; and he was in nowise
frightened for his host, having gauged him as justly as was possible
between two such different characters. The night was far spent, and in
a very comfortable fashion after all; and he felt morally certain of a
safe departure on the morrow.

"Tell me one thing," said the old man, pausing in his walk. "Are you
really a thief?"

"I claim the sacred rights of hospitality," returned the poet. "My
lord, I am."

"You are very young," the knight continued.

"I should never have been so old," replied Villon; showing his
fingers, "if I had not helped myself with these ten talents. They have
been my nursing mothers and my nursing fathers."

"You may still repent and change."

"I repent daily," said the poet. "There are few people more given to
repentance than poor Francis. As for change, let somebody change my
circumstances. A man must continue to eat, if it were only that he may
continue to repent."

"The change must begin in the heart," returned the old man solemnly.

"My dear lord," answered Villon, "do you really fancy that I steal for
pleasure? I hate stealing, like any other piece of work or danger. My
teeth chatter when I see a gallows. But I must eat, I must drink,
I must mix in society of some sort. What the devil! Man is not
a solitary animal--_Cui Deus foeminam tradit_. Make me king's
pantler--make me abbot of St. Denis; make me bailly of the Patatrac;
and then I shall be changed indeed. But as long as you leave me the
poor scholar Francis Villon, without a farthing, why, of course, I
remain the same."

"The grace of God is all-powerful."

"I should be a heretic to question it," said Francis. "It has made you
lord of Brisetout, and bailly of the Patatrac; it has given me nothing
but the quick wits under my hat and these ten toes upon my hands. May
I help myself to wine? I thank you respectfully. By God's grace, you
have a very superior vintage."

The lord of Brisetout walked to and fro with his hands behind his
back. Perhaps he was not yet quite settled in his mind about the
parallel between thieves and soldiers; perhaps Villon had interested
him by some cross-thread of sympathy; perhaps his wits were simply
muddled by so much unfamiliar reasoning; but whatever the cause, he
somehow yearned to convert the young man to a better way of thinking,
and could not make up his mind to drive him forth again into the
street.

"There is something more than I can understand in this," he said, at
length. "Your mouth is full of subtleties, and the devil has led you
very far astray; but the devil is only a very weak spirit before God's
truth, and all his subtleties vanish at a word of true honor, like
darkness at morning. Listen to me once more. I learned long ago that a
gentleman should live chivalrously and lovingly to God, and the king,
and his lady; and though I have seen many strange things done, I
have still striven to command my ways upon that rule. It is not only
written in all noble histories, but in every man's heart, if he will
take care to read. You speak of food and wine, and I know very well
that hunger is a difficult trial to endure; but you do not speak of
other wants; you say nothing of honor, of faith to God and other men,
of courtesy, of love without reproach. It may be that I am not very
wise--and yet I think I am--but you seem to me like one who has lost
his way and made a great error in life. You are attending to the
little wants, and you have totally forgotten the great and only real
ones, like a man who should be doctoring a toothache on the Judgment
Day. For such things as honor and love and faith are not only nobler
than food and drink, but, indeed, I think that we desire them more,
and suffer more sharply for their absence. I speak to you as I think
you will most easily understand me. Are you not, while careful to fill
your belly, disregarding another appetite in your heart, which spoils
the pleasure of your life and keeps you continually wretched?"

Villon was sensibly nettled under all this sermonizing. "You think I
have no sense of honor!" he cried. "I'm poor enough, God knows! It's
hard to see rich people with their gloves, and you blowing your hands.
An empty belly is a bitter thing, although you speak so lightly of
it. If you had had as many as I, perhaps you would change your tune.
Anyway, I'm a thief--make the most of that--but I'm not a devil from
hell, God strike me dead. I would have you to know I've an honor of my
own, as good as yours, though I don't prate about it all day long, as
if it were a God's miracle to have any. It seems quite natural to me;
I keep it in its box till it's wanted. Why now, look you here, how
long have I been in this room with you? Did you not tell me you were
alone in the house? Look at your gold plate! You're strong, if you
like, but you're old and unarmed, and I have my knife. What did I want
but a jerk of the elbow, and here would have been you with the cold
steel in your bowels, and there would have been me, linking in the
streets, with an armful of gold cups! Did you suppose I hadn't wit
enough to see that? And I scorned the action. There are your damned
goblets, as safe as in a church; there are you, with your heart
ticking as good as new; and here am I, ready to go out again as poor
as I came in, with my one white that you threw in my teeth! And you
think I have no sense of honor--God strike me dead!"

The old man stretched out his right arm. "I will tell you what
you are," he said. "You are a rogue, my man, an impudent and a
black-hearted rogue and vagabond. I have passed an hour with you. Oh!
believe me, I feel myself disgraced! And you have eaten and drank at
my table. But now I am sick at your presence; the day has come, and
the night-bird should be off to his roost. Will you go before, or
after?"

"Which you please," returned the poet, rising. "I believe you to be
strictly honorable." He thoughtfully emptied his cup. "I wish I could
add you were intelligent," he went on, knocking on his head with his
knuckles. "Age, age! the brains stiff and rheumatic."

The old man preceded him from a point of self-respect; Villon
followed, whistling, with his thumbs in his girdle.

"God pity you," said the lord of Brisetout at the door.

"Good-bye, papa," returned Villon, with a yawn. "Many thanks for the
cold mutton."

The door closed behind him. The dawn was breaking over the white
roofs. A chill, uncomfortable morning ushered in the day. Villon stood
and heartily stretched himself in the middle of the road.

"A very dull old gentleman," he thought. "I wonder what his goblets
may be worth."




INDEX

  Aesop
    beast-fables
  Apuleius
    _The Golden Ass_
    likeness to Kipling
  Aristotle
    _Secretum Secretorum_

  Barrett, Charles Raymond
    _Short-Story Writings_
  Beast-fables
  Boccaccio
    _Teseide_
    _Decameron_
  Brown, Dr. John (1810-1882)
    _Rab and His Friends_
  Bunyan, John

  Cable
    _Strange True Stories of Louisiana_
  Cervantes
    _Don Quixote_
  Chaucer
  Coleridge
    _Ancient Mariner_

  _Deeds of the Romans, The_
  Defoe, Daniel (1661-1731)
    _Short-Story Essay_
    _The Apparition of Mrs. Veal_
  Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
    _The Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn_
  Drelincourt
    _Book on Death_

  Fenton, Geoffrey
    _Tragical Discourses_
  Fuller, Thomas

  Garnett, Richard
    _The Poison Maid_
    _Gesta Romanorum, The_

  Hardy, Thomas (1840)
    _The Three Strangers_
  Harris, Chandler
    _Uncle Remus_
  Harte, Bret (1839-1902)
    _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_
  Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1807-1864)
    _Dr. Heidegger's Experiment_
  Hogg, James (1770-1835)
    the Ettrick Shepherd
    early life
    _Shepherd's Calendar_
    _The Brownie of Bodsbeck_
    Professor Wilson on
    _The Mysterious Bride_
  Holmes, Oliver Wendell
    _Elsie Venner_
  Hood, Thomas
    _The Dream of Eugene Aram_

  _Ingoldsby Legends, The_
  Irving, Washington (1783-1859)
    _The Devil and Tom Walker_

  James, Henry (1843)
    _Julia Bride_

  Kipling, Rudyard
    _Just-so Stories_
    _Jungle-Book_
    _Finest Story in the World_
    _The Man Who Would be King_

  Laws of the short-story
  _Leech of Folkstone, The_

  Malory, _Morte D'Arthur_
  Matthews, Professor Brander
  Morris, William, _Defence of Guinevere_

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, _Rappaccini's Daughter_
  North, Sir Thomas, _Plutarch's Lives_

  _Of Temporal Tribulation_
  _Of the Transgressions and Wounds of the Soul_

  Paynter, William, _The Palace of Pleasure_
  _Peregrine Pickle_
  Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849),
    laws of short-story;
    essay on Hawthorne;
    _Tale of the Ragged Mountains_;
    _The Purloined Letter_.
  Powell, Prof. J.W.
  _Practical Treatise on the Art of the Short-Story_

  _Redgauntlet_
  _Roderick Random_
  Rossetti, _White Ship_

  Shakespeare, _Pericles, Prince of Tyre_;
    borrower.
  Shelton, Thomas, _Don Quixote_
  Short-Story, Evolution of the
  Smith, Herbert H.
  Sterne, Laurence
  Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894),
    _A Lodging for the Night_
  Stockton, Frank R. (1834-1902),
    _A Story of Seven Devils_

  Tennyson,
    _The Idylls of the King_;
    _The Lady of Shalott_.
  _Tom Jones_
  Trollope, Anthony
  Twain, Mark (1835),
    _A Dog's Tale_

  Underdown, Thomas, _Heliodorus_

  _Vicar of Wakefield_

  Walton, Isaak
  Wilson, Professor, on James Hogg


END OF VOL. I



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