 | Twice-told tales |  |
EDWARD FANE'S ROSEBUD.
There is hardly a more difficult exercise of fancy,
than, while gazing at a figure of melancholy age, to
re-create its youth, and, without entirely obliterating
the identity of form and features, to restore those
graces which time has snatched away. Some old
people, especially women, so age-worn and woful are
they, seem never to have been young and gay. It is
easier to conceive that such gloomy phantoms were
sent into the world as withered and decrepit as we
behold them now, with sympathies only for pain and
grief, to watch at death-beds, and weep at funerals.
Even the sable garments of their widowhood appear
essential to their existence; all their attributes combine
to render them darksome shadows, creeping
strangely amid the sunshine of human life. Yet it is
no unprofitable task, to take one of these doleful creatures,
and set fancy resolutely at work to brighten the
dim eye, and darken the silvery locks, and paint the
and crazy form, till a dewy maiden shall be seen in
the old matron's elbow-chair. The miracle being
wrought, then let the years roll back again, each sadder
than the last, and the whole weight of age and
sorrow settle down upon the youthful figure. Wrinkles
and furrows, the hand-writing of Time, may thus be
deciphered, and found to contain deep lessons of
thought and feeling. Such profit might be derived,
by a skilful observer, from my much-respected friend,
the Widow Toothaker, a nurse of great repute, who
has breathed the atmosphere of sick-chambers and
dying-breaths, these forty years.
See! she sits cowering over her lonesome hearth,
with her gown and upper petticoat drawn upward,
gathering thriftily into her person the whole warmth
of the fire, which, now at nightfall, begins to dissipate
the autumnal chill of her chamber. The blaze
quivers capriciously in front, alternately glimmering
into the deepest chasms of her wrinkled visage, and
then permitting a ghostly dimness to mar the outlines
of her venerable figure. And Nurse Toothaker holds
a tea-spoon in her right hand, with which to stir up
the contents of a tumbler in her left, whence steams
a vapory fragrance, abhorred of temperance societies.
Now she sips — now stirs — now sips again. Her sad
old heart has need to be revived by the rich infusion
of Geneva, which is mixed half-and-half with hot water,
in the tumbler. All day long she has been sitting
by a death-pillow, and quitted it for her home, only
when the spirit of her patient left the clay, and went
cheered, and her torpid blood warmed, and her
shoulders lightened of at least twenty ponderous years,
by a draught from the true Fountain of Youth, in a
case-bottle. It is strange that men should deem that
fount a fable, when its liquor fills more bottles than
the congress-water! Sip it again, good nurse, and see
whether a second draught will not take off another
score of years, and perhaps ten more, and show us,
in your high-backed chair, the blooming damsel who
plighted troths with Edward Fane. Get you gone,
Age and Widowhood! Come back, unwedded Youth!
But, alas! the charm will not work. In spite of fancy's
most potent spell, I can see only an old dame cowering
over the fire, a picture of decay and desolation,
while the November blast roars at her in the chimney,
and fitful showers rush suddenly against the window.
Yet there was a time when Rose Grafton — such
was the pretty maiden-name of Nurse Toothaker —
possessed beauty that would have gladdened this dim
and dismal chamber, as with sunshine. It won for her
the heart of Edward Fane, who has since made so
great a figure in the world, and is now a grand old
gentleman, with powdered hair, and as gouty as a lord.
These early lovers thought to have walked hand in
hand through life. They had wept together for Edward's
little sister Mary, whom Rose tended in her
sickness, partly because she was the sweetest child
that ever lived or died, but more for love of him. She
was but three years old. Being such an infant, Death
could not embody his terrors in her little corpse; nor
chill, as she curled the silken hair around it, nor to take
her tiny hand, and clasp a flower within its fingers.
Afterward, when she looked through the pane of glass
in the coffin-lid, and beheld Mary's face, it seemed not
so much like death, or life, as like a wax-work, wrought
into the perfect image of a child asleep, and dreaming
of its mother's smile. Rose thought her too fair a
thing to be hidden in the grave, and wondered that
an angel did not snatch up little Mary's coffin, and
bear the slumbering babe to heaven, and bid her wake
immortal. But when the sods were laid on little Mary,
the heart of Rose was troubled. She shuddered at
the fantasy, that, in grasping the child's cold fingers,
her virgin hand had exchanged a first greeting with
mortality, and could never lose the earthy taint. How
many a greeting since! But as yet, she was a fair
young girl, with the dew-drops of fresh feeling in
her bosom; and instead of Rose, which seemed too
mature a name for her half-opened beauty, her lover
called her Rosebud.
The rosebud was destined never to bloom for Edward
Fane. His mother was a rich and haughty dame,
with all the aristocratic prejudices of colonial times.
She scorned Rose Grafton's humble parentage, and
caused her son to break his faith, though, had she let
him choose, he would have prized his Rosebud above
the richest diamond. The lovers parted, and have
seldom met again. Both may have visited the same
mansions, but not at the same time; for one was bidden
to the festal hall, and the other to the sick-chamber;
she of Anguish. Rose, after their separation, was long
secluded within the dwelling of Mr. Toothaker, whom
she married with the revengeful hope of breaking her
false lover's heart. She went to her bridegroom's arms
with bitterer tears, they say, than young girls ought to
shed, at the threshold of the bridal chamber. Yet,
though her husband's head was getting gray, and his
heart had been chilled with an autumnal frost, Rose
soon began to love him, and wondered at her own conjugal
affection. He was all she had to love; there
were no children.
In a year or two, poor Mr. Toothaker was visited
with a wearisome infirmity, which settled in his joints,
and made him weaker than a child. He crept forth
about his business, and came home at dinner time and
eventide, not with the manly tread that gladdens a
wife's heart, but slowly — feebly — jotting down each
dull footstep with a melancholy dub of his staff. We
must pardon his pretty wife, if she sometimes blushed
to own him. Her visiters, when they heard him coming,
looked for the appearance of some old, old man;
but he dragged his nerveless limbs into the parlor —
and there was Mr. Toothaker! The disease increasing,
he never went into the sunshine, save with a staff
in his right hand, and his left on his wife's shoulder,
bearing heavily downward, like a dead man's hand.
Thus, a slender woman, still looking maiden-like, she
supported his tall, broad-chested frame along the pathway
of their little garden, and plucked the roses for
her gray-haired husband, and spoke soothingly, as to
utmost energy was peevishness. In a few months more,
she helped him up the staircase, with a pause at every
step, and a longer one upon the landing-place, and a
heavy glance behind, as he crossed the threshold of
his chamber. He knew, poor man, that the precincts
of those four walls would thenceforth be his world —
his world, his home, his tomb — at once a dwelling
and a burial-place, till he were borne to a darker and
a narrower one. But Rose was with him in the tomb.
He leaned upon her, in his daily passage from the bed
to the chair by the fireside, and back again from the
weary chair to the joyless bed — his bed and hers —
their marriage-bed; till even this short journey ceased,
and his head lay all day upon the pillow, and hers all
night beside it. How long poor Mr. Toothaker was
kept in misery! Death seemed to draw near the door,
and often to lift the latch, and sometimes to thrust his
ugly skull into the chamber, nodding to Rose, and
pointing at her husband, but still delayed to enter.
`This bed-ridden wretch cannot escape me!' quoth
Death. `I will go forth, and run a race with the swift,
and fight a battle with the strong, and come back for
Toothaker at my leisure!' Oh, when the deliverer
came so near, in the dull anguish of her worn-out
sympathies, did she never long to cry, `Death, come
in!'
But, no! We have no right to ascribe such a wish
to our friend Rose. She never failed in a wife's duty
to her poor sick husband. She murmured not, though
a glimpse of the sunny sky was as strange to her as
accents roused her from her sweetest dream, only to
share his wretchedness. He knew her faith, yet nourished
a cankered jealousy; and when the slow disease
had chilled all his heart, save one lukewarm spot,
which Death's frozen fingers were searching for, his
last words were: `What would my Rose have done
for her first love, if she has been so true and kind to
a sick old man like me!' And then his poor soul
crept away, and left the body lifeless, though hardly
more so than for years before, and Rose a widow,
though in truth it was the wedding night that widowed
her. She felt glad, it must be owned, when Mr. Toothaker
was buried, because his corpse had retained such
a likeness to the man half alive, that she hearkened
for the sad murmur of his voice, bidding her shift his
pillow. But all through the next winter, though the
grave had held him many a month, she fancied him
calling from that cold bed, `Rose! Rose! come put
a blanket on my feet!'
So now the Rosebud was the Widow Toothaker.
Her troubles had come early, and, tedious as they
seemed, had passed before all her bloom was fled.
She was still fair enough to captivate a bachelor, or,
with a widow's cheerful gravity, she might have won
a widower, stealing into his heart in the very guise of
his dead wife. But the Widow Toothaker had no such
projects. By her watchings and continual cares, her
heart had become knit to her first husband with a constancy
which changed its very nature, and made her
love him for his infirmities, and infirmity for his sake.
lover could not have supplied his place. She had
dwelt in a sick-chamber, and been the companion of
a half-dead wretch, till she should scarcely breathe in
a free air, and felt ill at ease with the healthy and the
happy. She missed the fragrance of the doctor's stuff.
She walked the chamber with a noiseless foot-fall. If
visiters came in, she spoke in soft and soothing accents,
and was startled and shocked by their loud
voices. Often, in the lonesome evening, she looked
timorously from the fireside to the bed, with almost a
hope of recognising a ghastly face upon the pillow.
Then went her thoughts sadly to her husband's grave.
If one impatient throb had wronged him in his lifetime
— if she had secretly repined, because her buoyant
youth was imprisoned with his torpid age — if ever,
while slumbering beside him, a treacherous dream had
admitted another into her heart — yet the sick man
had been preparing a revenge, which the dead now
claimed. On his painful pillow, he had cast a spell
around her; his groans and misery had proved more
captivating charms than gayety and youthful grace;
in his semblance, Disease itself had won the Rosebud
for a bride; nor could his death dissolve the nuptials.
By that indissoluble bond she had gained a home in
every sick-chamber, and nowhere else; there were
her brethren and sisters; thither her husband summoned
her, with that voice which had seemed to issue
from the grave of Toothaker. At length she recognised
her destiny.
We have beheld her as the maid, the wife, the
character: she was, in all her attributes, Nurse Toothaker.
And Nurse Toothaker alone, with her own shriveled
lips, could make known her experience in that
capacity. What a history might she record of the
great sicknesses, in which she has gone hand in hand
with the exterminating angel! She remembers when
the small-pox hoisted a red-banner on almost every
house along the street. She has witnessed when the
typhus fever swept off a whole household, young and
old, all but a lonely mother, who vainly shrieked to
follow her last loved one. Where would be Death's
triumph, if none lived to weep! She can speak of
strange maladies that have broken out, as if spontaneously,
but were found to have been imported from
foreign lands, with rich silks and other merchandise,
the costliest portion of the cargo. And once, she recollects,
the people died of what was considered a new
pestilence, till the doctors traced it to the ancient grave
of a young girl, who thus caused many deaths a hundred
years after her own burial. Strange that such
black mischief should lurk in a maiden's grave! She
loves to tell how strong men fight with fiery fevers,
utterly refusing to give up their breath; and how consumptive
virgins fade out of the world, scarcely reluctant,
as if their lovers were wooing them to a far
country. Tell us, thou fearful woman! tell us the
death-secrets! Fain would I search out the meaning
of words, faintly gasped with intermingled sobs, and
broken sentences, half audibly spoken between earth
and the judgment-seat!
An awful woman! She is the patron-saint of young
physicians, and the bosom friend of old ones. In the
mansions where she enters, the inmates provide themselves
black garments; the coffin-maker follows her;
and the bell tolls as she comes away from the threshold.
Death himself has met her at so many a bedside,
that he puts forth his bony hand to greet Nurse
Toothaker. She is an awful woman! And, oh! is
it conceivable, that this handmaid of human infirmity
and affliction — so darkly stained, so thoroughly imbued
with all that is saddest in the doom of mortals —
can ever again be bright and gladsome, even though
bathed in the sunshine of eternity? By her long communion
with woe, has she not forfeited her inheritance
of immortal joy? Does any germ of bliss survive
within her?
Hark! an eager knocking at Nurse Toothaker's
door. She starts from her drowsy reverie, sets aside
the empty tumbler and tea-spoon, and lights a lamp
at the dim embers of the fire. Rap, rap, rap! again;
and she burries adown the staircase, wondering which
of her friends can be at death's door now, since there
is such an earnest messenger at Nurse Toothaker's.
Again the peal resounds, just as her hand is on the
lock. `Be quick, Nurse Toothaker!' cries a man on
the door-step; `old General Fane is taken with the
gout in his stomach, and has sent for you to watch by
his death-bed. Make haste, for there is no time to
lose!' `Fane! Edward Fane! And has he sent
for me at last? I am ready! I will get on my cloak
and begone. So,' adds the sable-gowned, ashen-visaged,
his Rosebud!'
Our question is answered. There is a germ of bliss
within her. Her long-hoarded constancy — her memory
of the bliss that was — remaining amid the gloom
of her after life, like a sweet-smelling flower in
a coffin, is a symbol that all may be renewed. In
some happier clime, the Rosebud may revive again
with all the dew-drops in its bosom.
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