Читать книгу: «The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844», страница 3
Still Grosket stirred not, but with a curling lip and an eye as bright as his own, and voice so fearfully quiet and yet stern that at another time it might have quelled even the strong spirit of the robber, he said ‘Enoch Grosket never goes until his object is attained.’
‘Then you won’t go?’ demanded Jones.
‘No!’
Jones made a hasty step toward him, with his teeth set and his eyes burning like coals of fire; but whatever may have been his purpose, and from the expression of his face, there was little doubt but that it was a hostile one, he was diverted from it by hearing a hand on the latch of the door and a voice from without demanding admittance.
‘It is Rust,’ exclaimed Grosket, in a sharp whisper. He touched the burglar on the shoulder and said in the same tone, ‘I’m going in there.’ He pointed to a closet in a dark part of the room, nearly concealed by the wainscotting. Let him in, and betray me if you dare!’
‘You seem to know our holes well,’ muttered Jones. ‘You’ve been here afore.’ Grosket made no reply, but hurried across the room and secreted himself in the closet, which evidently had been constructed as a place of concealment, either for the tenants of the room themselves, or for whatever else it might not suit their fancy to have too closely examined.
Jones stared after him, apparently forgetting the applicant for admission, until a renewed and very violent knocking recalled his attention to it. He then went to the door, drew back the bolt, and walked to his seat, without even glancing to see who came in, or whom the person was who followed so closely at his heels. Nor did he look around until he felt his arm roughly grasped, and a sharp stern voice hissing in his ear:
‘So, so! a fine night’s work you’ve made of it. Tim Craig is dead and the whole city is already ringing with the news; and you, you’re a murderer!’
Jones started from his seat with the sudden spasmodic bound of one who has received a mortal thrust. He stared wildly at the sharp thin face which had almost touched his, and then sat down and said:
‘Don’t talk to me so, Mr. Rust; I can’t bear it.’
‘Ho, ho! your conscience is tender, is it? It has a raw spot that won’t bear handling, has it? We’ll see to that. But to business,’ said he, his face becoming white with rage; his black eyes blazing, and his voice losing its smoothness and quivering as he spoke.
‘I’ve come here to fulfil my agreement; you were to get that child for me to-day; I’ve come for her; where is she?’
Jones looked at him with an expression of impatience mingled with contempt, but made him no answer.
‘Tim Craig was to have gone to that house; he was to have carried her off; he was to have her here, here, HERE!’ said he, in the same fierce tone. ‘Why hasn’t he done it?’
‘Because he’s dead,’ said Jones savagely.
‘I’m glad of it! I’m glad of it!’ exclaimed Rust. ‘He deserved it. The coward! Let him die.’
‘Tim Craig was no coward,’ replied Jones, in a tone which, had Rust been less excited, would have warned him to desist.
‘Ha!’ exclaimed Rust, scanning him from head to foot, as if surprised at his daring to contradict him, ‘Would you gainsay me?’
Jones returned his look without flinching, his teeth firmly set and grating together. At last he said:
‘I do gainsay you; and I do say, whoever calls Tim Craig a coward lies!’
‘This, and from you!’ exclaimed Rust, shaking his thin finger in his very face; ‘this from you; you, a house-breaker, a thief, and last night the murderer of your comrade. Ho! ho! it makes me laugh! Fool! How many lives have you? One word of mine could hang you.’
‘You’ll never hang me,’ replied Jones, in the same low, savage tone. ‘I wish you had, before that cursed job of yours made me put a bullet in poor Tim. I wish you had; but it is too late. You wont now.’
Words cannot describe the fury of Michael Rust at seeing himself thus bearded by one whom he had been used to see truckle to him, whom he considered the mere tool of Craig, and whom he had never thought it worth while even to consult in their previous interviews.
‘Wont I? wont I? Look to yourself,’ muttered he, shaking his finger at him with a slow, cautioning gesture, ‘Look to yourself.’
‘You’re right, I will; I say I will,’ exclaimed Jones, leaping up and confronting him. ‘I say I will; and now I do!’ He grasped him by the throat and shook him as if he had been a child.
‘I might as well kill him at once,’ muttered he, without heeding the struggles of Rust. ‘It’s him or me; yes, yes, I’ll do it.’
Coming to this fatal conclusion, he flung Rust back on the floor and leaped upon him. At this moment, however, the door of the closet was thrown open, and Grosket, whom he had entirely forgotten, sprang suddenly out:
‘Come, come, this wont do!’ said he; ‘no murder!’
Jones made no effort to resist the jerk at his arm with which Grosket accompanied his words, but quietly rose, and said:
‘Well, he drove me to it. He may thank you for his life, not me.’
Relieved from his antagonist, Rust recovered his feet, and turning to Grosket said, in a sneering tone:
‘Michael Rust thanks Enoch for having used his influence with his friend, to prevent the commission of a crime which might have made both Enoch and his crony familiar with a gallows. A select circle of acquaintance friend Enoch has.’
Grosket, quietly, pointed to the closet and said:
‘You forget that I have been there ever since you came in the room; and have overheard every thing that passed between you and my friend.’
Rust bit his lip.
‘Don’t let it annoy you,’ continued he, ‘for the most of what I heard I knew before. I have had my eye on you from the time we parted. With all your benevolent schemes respecting myself I am perfectly familiar. The debt which you bought up to arrest me on; your attempt to have me indicted on a false charge of felony; the quiet hint dropped in another quarter, that if I should be found with my throat cut, or a bullet in my head, you wouldn’t break your heart; I knew them all; but I did not avail myself of the law. Shall I tell you why, Michael Rust? Because I had a revenge sweeter than the law could give.’
‘Friend Enoch is welcome to it when he gets it,’ replied Rust, in a soft tone. ‘But the day when it will come is far off.’
‘The day is at hand,’ replied Grosket. ‘It is here: it is now. Not for a mine of gold would I forego what I now know; not for any thing that is dear in the world’s eyes, would I spare you one pang that I can now inflict.’
Rust smiled incredulously, but made no reply.
‘Your schemes are frustrated,’ continued Grosket. ‘The children are both found; their parentage known; your name blasted. The brother who fostered you, and loaded you with kindness will have his eyes opened to your true character; and you will be a felon, amenable to the penalty of the law, whenever any man shall think fit to call it down upon your head. But this is nothing to what is in store for you.’
‘Well,’ said Rust, with the same quiet smile; ‘please to enumerate what other little kindnesses you have in store for me.’
‘I will,’ replied Grosket. ‘I was once a happy man. I had a wife and daughter, whom I loved. My wife is dead; what became of my child? I say,’ exclaimed he bitterly, ‘what became of my child?’
‘Young women will forget themselves sometimes,’ said Rust, his thin lip curling. ‘She became a harlot—only a harlot.’
Grosket grew deadly pale, and his voice became less clear, as he answered:
‘You’re right—you’re right! why shrink from the word. It’s a harsh one; but it’s God’s truth; she did—and she died.’
‘That’s frank,’ said Rust, ‘quite frank. I am a straight-forward man, and always speak the truth. I’m glad to see that friend Enoch can bear it like a Christian.’
A loud, taunting laugh broke from Grosket; and then he said:
‘Thus much for me; now for yourself, Michael Rust. You once had a wife.’
Rust’s calm sneer disappeared in an instant, and he seemed absolutely to wither before the keen flashing eye which was fixed steadfastly on his.
‘She lived with you two years; and then she became—shall I tell you what?’
Rust’s lips moved, but no sound came from them. Grosket bent his lips to his ear, and whispered in it. Rust neither moved nor spoke. He seemed paralyzed.
‘But she died,’ continued Grosket, ‘and she left a child—a daughter; mine was a daughter too.’
Rust started from a state of actual torpor; every energy, every faculty, every feeling leaping into life.
‘That daughter is now alive,’ continued Grosket, speaking slowly, that every word might tell with tenfold force. ‘That daughter now is, what you drove my child to be, a harlot.’
‘It’s false as hell!’ shouted Rust, in a tone that made the room ring. ‘It’s false!’
‘It’s true. I can prove it; prove it, clear as the noon-day,’ returned Grosket, with a loud, exulting laugh.
‘Oh! Enoch! oh, Enoch!’ said Rust, in a broken, supplicating tone, ‘tell me that it’s false, and I’ll bless you! Crush me, blight me, do what you will, only tell me that my own loved child is pure from spot or stain! Tell me so, I beseech you; I, Michael Rust, who never begged a boon before—I beseech you.’
He fell on his knees in front of Grosket, and clasping his hands together, raised them toward him.
‘I cannot,’ replied Grosket, coldly, ‘for it’s as true as there is a heaven above us!’
Rust made an effort to speak; his fingers worked convulsively, and he fell prostrate on the floor.
THE SACRIFICE
‘One day during the bloody executions which took place at Lyons, a young girl rushed into the hall where the revolutionary tribunal was held, and throwing herself at the feet of the judges, said: ‘There remain to me of all my family only my brothers! Mother, father, sister—you have butchered all; and now you are going to condemn my brothers. Oh! in mercy ordain that I may ascend the scaffold with them!’ Her prayer was refused, and she threw herself into the Rhone and perished.’
Du Broca
The judges have met in the council-hall,
A strange and a motley pageant, all:
What seek they? to win for their land a name
The brightest and best in the lists of fame?
The light of Mercy’s all-hallowed ray
To look with grief on the culprit’s way?
Nay! watch the smile and the flushing brow,
And in that crowd what read ye now?
The daring spirit and purpose high,
The fiery glance of the eagle eye
That marked the Roman’s haughty pride,
In the days of yore by the Tiber’s side?
The stern resolve of the patriot’s breast,
When the warrior’s zeal has sunk to rest?
No! Mercy has fled from the hardened heart,
And Justice and Truth in her steps depart,
And the fires of hell rage fierce and warm
Mid the fitful strife of the spirit’s storm.
But a wail is borne on the troubled air:
What victim comes those frowns to dare?
’Tis woman’s form and woman’s eye,
That Time hath passed full lightly by;
The limner’s art in vain might trace
The glorious beauty and winning grace
Of that fair girl; youth’s sunny day
Flings its radiance over life’s changing way:
Why has she left her princely home,
Why to that hall a suppliant come?
Her heart is sad with a deepening gloom,
For Hope has found in her heart a tomb.
With quiv’ring lip, and eye whose light
Is faint as the moon in a cloudy night,
And with cheek as pale as the crimson glow
That the sunset casts on the spotless snow;
Nerved with the strength of wild despair,
Low at their feet she pours her prayer:
‘My home! my home! is desolate,
For ye have slain them all,
And cast upon the light of Love
Death’s cold and fearful pall.
We knelt in agony to save
My father’s silver hair,
Ye would not mark the bitter tears,
Nor list the frantic prayer!
‘And then ye took my mother too:
Ye must remember now
The words that lingered on her lip,
The grief upon her brow;
My sister wept in bitter wo—
Her dark and earnest eyes
Asked for the mercy ye will seek
In vain in yonder skies!
‘But your hearts were like the flinty rock,
And cold as ocean’s foam;
You tore them from my clasping arms,
And bore them from our home:
And now my brothers ye will slay!
But they are proud and high,
And come with spirits brave and true,
Your tortures to defy.
‘I will not ask from you their lives,
I will not seek to roll
The clouds of midnight from your hearts;
Ye cannot touch the soul!
But grant my prayer, and I will pray
For you in yonder sky;
Oh, God! I ask a little thing—
I ask with them to die!’
But the burning words fell cold and lone,
As the sun’s warm rays on a marble stone;
Life was a curse too bitter and wild
For the broken heart of Earth’s weary child;
And the stricken one found a self-sought grave
’Neath the crystal light of the foaming wave.
Shelter-Island.Mary Gardiner.
THE DEATH BED
A STRAY LEAF FROM THE PORT-FOLIO OF A ‘COUNTRY DOCTOR.’
BY F. W. SHELTON
‘Bury me in the valley, beneath the willows where I have watched the rippling waves, among the scenes of beauty which I loved so well, oh! my friend!’ exclaimed the dying youth; and as he grasped my hand his lips moved tremblingly, tears gushed upon his wan cheeks, and an expression of very sadness stole upon him. His looks were lingering; such as one flings back upon some paradise of beauty which he leaves forever; some home which childhood has endeared to him, and affection has filled with the loves and graces. Pity touched my soul as I regarded silently that beaming countenance, alas! so shrunken from the swelling, undulating lines of his hilarious health; a pity such as one feels whose hopes are too inexplicably bound up with another’s, who shares his very being, and who knows by all the sympathies of a brother’s bosom that the other’s heart-strings are snapping. Animæ dimidium meæ!—beautiful expression of the poet, comprehended less while life unites, than when death severs. It is only when gazing on the seal which has been set, we inquire ‘Where is the spirit?’ and struggle in vain to understand that great difference; when the smiles which shed their sunshine have rapidly vanished, and the voice we loved has died away like the music of a harp; when that which was light, joy, wit, eloquence, has departed with the latest breath; when, in short, we are awakened from our revery by the clods falling on the coffin, and the mourners moving away; it is then that the soul, diminished of its essence, flits away with a strange sense to its unjoyous abode, as a bird would return to its lonely nest.
There never existed one who more lived and moved, and had his spiritual being in the affections; a sensitive nature wooed into life by the kindness of the faintest breath, but killingly crushed by the footsteps of the thoughtless or the cruel. For such a one, life is well deserving of the epithet applied to it by the poet Virgil: dulcis vita, sweet life. It is not a vulgar sensuality, a Lethean torpor; the triumph of the grosser nature over the eternal principle within. It is already a separation of the carnal from the spiritual; a refinement of fierce passions; a present divorce from a close and clinging alliance; a foretaste of the waters of life; in short, the very essence and devotion of a pure religion. Would it seem strangely inconsistent that a being of so sweet a character as I shall describe him, my poor young friend declared, with a gush of the bitterest tears, that he could not go into the dark valley, for he loved life with an inconceivable, passionate love? His was the very agony and pathos of the dying Hoffman, when almost with his latest breath, he alluded to ‘the sweet habitude of being.’ But it was only, thanks be to God! a short defection, a momentary clouding of that bright faith which was destined soon to see beyond the vale. His tears ceased to flow, glistened a moment, and then passed away as if they had been wiped by some gentle hand.
He leaned upon a soft couch, so very pale and haggard that his hour seemed very near. Costly books strewed his table; pictures and many exquisite things were scattered about with lavish hand; for wealth administered to refined luxury, and affection crowned him with blessings which gold can never buy. A mother hid from him her bitter tears, and spoke the words of cheerfulness; sisters pressed around him with the poignant grief an only brother can inspire; a beautiful betrothed betokened to him in irrepressible tears her depth and purity of love. Letters came to him hurried on the wings of friendship, and impressed on all their seals with sentiments which awakened hope. Youth and beauty hovered around him with their unintermitted care, and Age sent up its fervent prayers to heaven. Oh! who but the ungrateful would not love a life so filled with blandishments and crowned with blessings? Who could see all these receding without a sigh, or feel the pressure of that kiss of love as pure as if it had its origin in Heaven? But with the finest organization of intellectual mind, he had been accustomed to look at all things in the light of poetry. For one so constituted the pleasures which are in store are as inexhaustible as the works or mercies of his God. Not an hour which did not present some new phase of undiscovered beauty. He revelled in the beams of the morning; the rising sun was never a common object, nor its grandeur ever lost upon a soul so conscious of the sublime. For all beauty in nature he found a correspondent passion in the soul; and intoxicated alike with the music of birds or the perfume of flowers, found no weariness in a life whose current was like the living spring, pure, perennial and delightful.
To be so susceptible of pleasure, I would be willing to encounter all the keenness of pangs suffered by such natures. For such, the rational delights of a year are crowded into a day, an hour; and the ignorant reader of their obituary sighs mournfully, computing their lives by a false reckoning. Yet after all, we have been disposed to regard the death of the young as something unnatural; the violent rending asunder of soul and body; the penalty enacted of a life artificial in its modes and repugnant to nature. As Cicero has beautifully expressed it, it is like the sudden quenching of a bright flame; but the death of the virtuous Old is as expected, as free from terror as the sunset; it is the coming of a gentle sleep after a long and weary day.
Travers was in the very gush and spring-tide of his youth; yet crowned as he was with blessings, and every attribute for their most perfect enjoyment, the true secret of his too fond desire to live, was that he loved:
‘He loved but one,
And that loved one, alas! could ne’er be his.’
In her the poetry of his life centred; and as a river is swollen by divers rills, and tributary streams, so all the thoughts and passions of his soul hurried with a pure and rapid tide to mingle and be lost in one. But illness, and the long looking at death, and above all, the Christian’s hope, enable us one by one to break off the dearest ties, and to renounce whatever we most love on earth. And so my young friend in good time emerged from the cloud which obscured his prospects, and saw clearly beyond the vale. It is not long since, being well assured that his fate was inevitable, he expressed a desire, which he carried into execution, to visit once more his well-loved haunts, and take a solemn farewell of them all. As one grasps the hand of a friend at parting, he looked his last at things which were inanimate. He rambled in the deep, dark groves whither he had so often gone in health, to enjoy their Gothic grandeur, to breathe the spirit of the religion they inspire, or to murmur in their deepest shades the accents of his pure and passionate love. He inscribed his name for the last time upon the smooth bark of a tree; then leaving them forever, as he emerged into the gay meadows, he turned to me with tears and said:
‘Ye woods, and wilds, whose melancholy gloom
Accords with my soul’s sadness, and draws forth
The voice of sorrow from my bursting heart!’
He clambered the steep hill-side, and sinking exhausted beneath a smitten tree, enjoyed the picturesqueness of the scene; the meadows, the streams, the pasture-grounds, the dappled herds, the sereneness of the summer skies, cleft by the wing of the musical lark, in all their purity of blue. He sat beside the sea-shore, and watched the big billows breaking and bursting at his feet; and as he looked where the waters and the sky met together in the far horizon, he exclaimed, ‘Now indeed do I long to fly away!’ Then he returned to his pillow, never to go forth again. ‘I shall die,’ he said, ‘when the season is in its prime and glory; when the fields are green and the trees leafy; and the sunlight shall shimmer down through the branches where the birds sing over my grave.’ Then casting a look at his books, where they stood neatly arranged on the well-filled shelves, he lamented that he had not time to garner half the stores of a beautiful literature; to satisfy his perpetual thirst; to drink to the full at the ‘pure wells of English undefiled.’ There were the Greek poets, whom he would have more intimately cherished, (he had been lately absorbed in the sublimity of the ‘Prometheus Vinctus;’) there was the great master and anatomizer of the human heart, who knew how to detail the springs of action common to all ages, the paragon of that deep learning which is not derived from books, but gleaned by his genius from all nature with a rare intuition, and with an incomprehensible power of research. In him what mines of instruction, what sources of undiscovered delight, what philosophy yet to be grappled with, to be laid to the heart! Charles Lamb has with a quaint melancholy depicted the pain of parting from his books, and from the indefinable delights laid up in each dear folio. Yet after all, what is the literature of one age but the reproduction, the remoulding, the condensation of the literature of another; the loss and destruction of its waste ore, but the re-setting of its gems, and the renewed investiture of all its beauties. There is no glowing thought, no exquisite conception, no sublime and beautiful idea, which is not imperishable as the mind itself, and which shall not be carried on from age to age, or if destroyed or lost upon the written page, revived by some happy coincidence of intellectual being, and perpetuated and enjoyed, here or hereafter, wherever mind exists. A communion like this will be a communion of spirits. A finer organization, expanded faculties shall rapidly consume the past; but oh, the future! what glories are to be crowded into its immensity? How shall knowledge be commensurate with the stars, or wander over the universe? Now bring me the written Revelation, the written word. It clasps within its volume all excellencies, all sublimities of speech; secrets which could not be developed by reason, nor found in the arcana of human wisdom. Henceforth this shall be my only companion, and its promises shall light my passage over the grave.’
I marked the lustrous beaming of his eye, and from that time he looked at all things on the ‘bright side.’ His very love could think upon its object without a tear, and look forward to a pure and eternal re-union. At last the hour of dissolution came. I knew it by its unerring symptoms; yet still I listened to his passionate, poetic converse. It was for the last time; I was in the chamber of death. What observer can mistake it; the darkened windows, the stillness, the grouping, the subdued sobs, the awful watchfulness for the identical moment when a lovely and intellectual spirit breaks its bonds, as if the strained vision could detect the spiritual essence. What a heart-sickness comes over those who love! What a change in the appearance of all things! The very sun-light is disagreeable, the very skies a mockery; the very roses unlovely. We look out of the casement, and see the external face of nature still the same; how heartless, how destitute of sympathy, now appears the whole world without, with the home, that inner world! How can those birds sing so sweetly on the branches; how can the flowers bloom as brightly as ever; how can those children play so gleefully; how can yon group laugh with such unconcern! He is an only son. Though wan, and wasted in all his lineaments, his pure brow, his gentle expression, tell that he was worthy to be loved. Can no human power restore him to the arms of a fond mother? It is in vain! The spirit flutters upon his lips; it has departed. But it has left behind it a token; a clear, bright impress; a smile of undissembled love and purity; an expression beaming with the last unutterable peace; the graces which were so winning upon earth, but which shall attain their perfection in heaven.
