第77章
He was of a proud, yet gentle spirit- haughty and reserved among therich and great; but ever ready to stoop his head to the lowlycottage door, and be like a brother or a son at the poor man'sfireside. In the household of the Notch he found warmth and simplicityof feeling, the pervading intelligence of New England, and a poetry ofnative growth, which they had gathered when they little thought ofit from the mountain peaks and chasms, and at the very threshold oftheir romantic and dangerous abode. He had travelled far and alone;his whole life, indeed, had been a solitary path; for, with thelofty caution of his nature, he had kept himself apart from thosewho might otherwise have been his companions. The family, too,though so kind and hospitable, had that consciousness of unity amongthemselves, and separation from the world at large, which, in everydomestic circle, should still keep a holy place where no strangermay intrude. But this evening a prophetic sympathy impelled therefined and educated youth to pour out his heart before the simplemountaineers, and constrained them to answer him with the same freeconfidence. And thus it should have been. Is not the kindred of acommon fate a closer tie than that of birth?
The secret of the young man's character was a high and abstractedambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but notto be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had been transformedto hope; and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty, that,obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway-though not, perhaps, while he was treading it. But when posterityshould gaze back into the gloom of what was now the present, theywould trace the brightness of his footsteps, brightening as meanerglories faded, and confess that a gifted one had passed from hiscradle to his tomb with none to recognize him.
"As yet," cried the stranger- his cheek glowing and his eyeflashing with enthusiasm- "as yet, I have done nothing. Were I tovanish from the earth tomorrow, none would know so much of me asyou: that a nameless youth came up at nightfall from the valley of theSaco, and opened his heart to you in the evening, and passed throughthe Notch by sunrise, and was seen no more. Not a soul would ask, 'Whowas he? Whither did the wanderer go?' But I cannot die till I haveachieved my destiny. Then, let Death come! I shall have built mymonument!"There was a continual flow of natural emotion, gushing forth amidabstracted reverie, which enabled the family to understand thisyoung man's sentiments, though so foreign from their own. With quicksensibility of the ludicrous, he blushed at the ardor into which hehad been betrayed.
"You laugh at me," said he, taking the eldest daughter's hand,and laughing himself. "You think my ambition as nonsensical as if Iwere to freeze myself to death on the top of Mount Washington, onlythat people might spy at me from the country round about. And,truly, that would be a noble pedestal for a man's statue!""It is better to sit here by this fire," answered the girl,blushing, "and be comfortable and contented, though nobody thinksabout us.""I suppose," said her father, after a fit of musing, "there issomething natural in what the young man says; and if my mind hadbeen turned that way, I might have felt just the same. It isstrange, wife, how his talk has set my head running on things that arepretty certain never to come to pass.""Perhaps they may," observed the wife. "Is the man thinking what hewill do when he is a widower?""No, no!" cried he, repelling the idea with reproachful kindness.
"When I think of your death, Esther, I think of mine, too. But I waswishing we had a good farm in Bartlett, or Bethlehem, or Littleton, orsome other township round the White Mountains; but not where theycould tumble on our heads. I should want to stand well with myneighbors and be called Squire, and sent to General Court for a termor two; for a plain, honest man may do as much good there as a lawyer.
And when I should be grown quite an old man, and you an old woman,so as not to be long apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, andleave you all crying around me. A slate gravestone would suit me aswell as a marble one- with just my name and age, and a verse of ahymn, and something to let people know that I lived an honest manand died a Christian.""There now!" exclaimed the stranger; "it is our nature to desirea monument, be it slate or marble, or a pillar of granite, or aglorious memory in the universal heart of man.""We're in a strange way, tonight," said the wife, with tears in hereyes. "They say it's a sign of something, when folks' minds goa-wandering so. Hark to the children!"They listened accordingly. The younger children had been put to bedin another room, but with an open door between, so that they couldbe heard talking busily among themselves. One and all seemed to havecaught the infection from the fireside circle, and were outvyingeach other in wild wishes, and childish projects, of what they woulddo when they came to be men and women. At length a little boy, insteadof addressing his brothers and sisters, called out to his mother.
"I'll tell you what I wish, mother," cried he. "I want you andfather and grandma'm, and all of us, and the stranger too, to startright away, and go and take a drink out of the basin of the Flume!"Nobody could help laughing at the child's notion of leaving awarm bed, and dragging them from a cheerful fire, to visit the basinof the Flume- a brook, which tumbles over the precipice, deep withinthe Notch. The boy had hardly spoken when a wagon rattled along theroad, and stopped a moment before the door. It appeared to contain twoor three men, who were cheering their hearts with the rough chorusof a song, which resounded, in broken notes, between the cliffs, whilethe singers hesitated whether to continue their journey or put up herefor the night.