University of Virginia Library

26. CHAPTER XXVI.
HOBBLESHANK'S RETURN.

Upon the ground where he had fallen in the shock of
surprise and bewilderment, Hobbleshank sate, with the
trinket in his hand which seemed to hold him spell-bound
and motionless. As he recovered his powers, and was
aware of the gift in his charge, he would have shouted to
Leycraft and called him back—but when he looked in the
direction he had taken, Leycraft was out of sight.

The clasp was discolored as if often held in a damp
hand; but the tress, its other part, was fresh and bright,
in its auburn hues, as when first set in its place; and as
he turned it over and over again, his tears fell fast upon
it, for he knew well—who could mistake it?—the sweet
brow, now lying in the earth, from which it had been
shorn. Then he recalled what the strange man had said.
“It's the gift of a young friend, the dearest I ever had,
and I wish you'd make much of it!” He repeated them
over and over again. Yes, those were the words. And
then a hope came floating into his mind that was like a
new life and air to all his powers; a hope that filled his
heart with a genial noon, in which all old despondencies
and sorrows and sadnesses shrunk away, and left him
glad and happy, beyond measure. The boy—his child—
his young self—so the words gave him warrant—was not
dead. He had lived to be the companion of grown men;
to be with them, and with them share friendship and intimacies.
So he construed what Leycraft had said. He
bounded up, and choosing out the fairest of all the roads,
he took his way to the city. It was a green path; and the
trees, which had stepped to the road side from a neighboring
wood, for that very purpose, bent over the traveller,
and whispered peace and a pleasant journey to him.
Then he came to bare fences, along which the small-eyed
birds hopped and twittered, making merry with the old man
as he came galloping along. After this, there was an open
tract of sky and field about which the swallows flew
swiftly, writing their names in the air, and tying all sorts

of hard knots as they skimmed along backwards and forwards,
and up and down.

At the pace, with which he speeded on, he was soon in
the edge of the city. The bells, for some reason or other,
were ringing a quick peal; if they had been the voices
of angels hovering in the air, they could not have sounded
more sweetly to Hobbleshank.

He came to a park or square, in which children were
at play, and bursting through a gate, he borrowed from a
little blue-eyed lad—who yielded it partly in fear, partly
in love—the hoop on which he was resting—the old man
sprang away like the youngest of them all, and in the madness
of his new hope, drove it round and round the park,
humming to himself, “It's the gift of a young friend, the
dearest I ever had, and I wish you'd make much of it!”
Leaving the park, with thanks to his young friend, whom
he had caught in his arms and blessed with kisses that
exploded like so many squibs through the place, he
rambled breathless, but by no means wearied, into a great
thoroughfare. Here he found new objects to feed his rapture.
There were caps and canes and dainty little Wellington-boots
in the shops, in which the haughtiest parent,
the show-bill said, might be proud to see his son eating
ices and walking Broadway.

How often, ah, how often, during his twenty years of
sore trial and anguish, had the old man rambled from
window to window, from shop-door to shop-door, choosing
a little blue-tasseled cap at one, a pearl-tipped cane at
another, and the jauntiest pair of Wellingtons he could
pitch his eye upon at another—and, in his fancy, arraying
the boy who should have been so appareled, and at that
moment walking, with a little hand in his, at his side!
He had so taken the child, from the day he was lost, and
carried him forward, in imagination, through all the stages
of childhood and youth, up to the manhood, where if but
now living he would have arrived.

He well remembered the very day on which the child
had attained his quizzical, bird-like swallow-tail, which
the doating old man had picked out and even bargained
for months before. Pondering upon these old time pleasures,
his feet had brought him, almost without the guidance
of his will, to a door in a bye-street, the red and yellow

board over which denoted that a select school for children
was kept within.

He opened the gate—the trick of which he knew well—
walked through a paved alley, and turning in at a door
half way up, was in the very heart and bosom of the select
school at once. The select schoolmistress—his old
friend and who knew his humour well—was seated in a
well-worn rocker in the middle of her little room, arrayed
in her plain neat gown and cap, her book open on her lap,
her arms folded upon her breast, and watching, with a
kindly look, through her great glasses, the efforts of a
tiny, white-haired child, to master the twenty-sixth letter
of the alphabet. Hobbleshank laid off his hat, took his
seat at the side of the mistress, who had not even turned
when he came in; although the whole row of little scholars
stared in a line from the bench on which they were fixed
against the wall. They all knew the old man, but it was
so long now since he had been at the school, that they
could not avoid a welcome with their looks. What a
tuneful nest—embowered in its obscure corner—had that
little school been to him! How his eye had ranged—as
his finger would on a musical instrument—along the class,
beginning at the least and youngest, and sounding his
way up, fancying each in turn to be his child and son. They
had caught his look, and loved him for it. His joy was too
overflowing—too much in excess—to admit of his tarrying
long there or any where—and so leaving a tribute of
good will in the mistress' hand, to be distributed among
the scholars, and begging in her ear for a half-holiday for
the school, he broke away and was in the street again.

Even the three gilt balls which hung dangling over the
broker's door in the street through which he hurried, and
which used to look so hideous to him, now seemed to have
a gleam of sunshine and promise in them. There was
another street—the next to this—through which he could
not fail to pass. Here, years before, he had formed an
intimacy—a very close and friendly intimacy—with a
clothier's block which stood at the corner, (to be sure it
had no head, your finely-dressed gentlemen rarely have,)
swelling and expanding its breast in all the splendors of a
blue frock and pantaloons, with a handsome white vest
and ruffles to match. The intimacy lasted six months—

during which the old man had paid a daily visit to his
silent friend—when it was abruptly broken off, because
Hobbleshank was quite sure his son must by that time have
outgrown garments of that gentleman's cut and dimensions.

Farther on, and still nearer the heart of the city, Hobbleshank,
hurrying along in a joyous mood—he had directed
his feet that way—came upon a house in which, even
at broad day, there was a sound of music, a throng of
carriages at the door, and the very house itself palpitating
and quaking with the pulses of the gay dance that
was going on within. The old man had a good heart to
join in on the very flagging where he stood, for the house
and he were old and early friends. Far back in that past
time, whence dated, in two directions, all his joys and sorrows,
it had been Aunt Gatty's; there it was that Hobbleshank
had first met his young wife; there had been
wedded to her; and there had spent many a joyous night,
when the world was young with him, and when even
old Aunt Gatty had wealth and kind words more at command
than now. As he stood by the door gossiping with
the drivers and other loungers—gathering what he could
of the story of the wedding that was going forward, and
comparing it as he went along with the circumstances of
his own, his heart reproached him for tarrying there, and
withholding his good fortune from his two kind old friends
at home. Casting a bright half-dollar upon the ground—
where he left the coachmen, who had been for a long time
scant of calls, scrambling for it—he hurried away. At the
good speed with which he moved, and by dint of running
in and out—from street to pavement, from pavement to
street—not less than forty times—he was in no very long
time at his own door, which he confessed to himself had
something of an outlandish look, now that he had been
absent from it so long.

Bursting in to declare his news, he was arrested in the
very mid-career of his exultation, by a deep moan, proceeding
from the corner of the chamber. Looking thither he was
inexpressibly shocked, and stood rooted at the very threshold.
In the corner of the room, close in the remotest angle
of the hearth—bent nearly double, (ten years at least older
in her look than when he had left her,) and gazing into
vacancy, sate Aunt Gatty, clad in deep mourning—even

to her small crimped cap, which jet-black and fitted
closely to her head, gave to her features a pale and deathly
aspect. At her side stood Dorothy, tending on her in
some office suited to her condition, and striving to soothe
her with words of solace and comfort.

The aged woman refused to be comforted, and thrust
her companion away from her, constantly ejaculating,
“He is dead—dead, and I am the unlucky woman that
killed him. Is this the way that I fulfilled a death-bed
trust? God! oh, blessed God!” and here she moaned
and pined as in an agony that wrung her very soul.
“Deal gently with me for this—it was not my wish—he
would go forth; but then I should have held him back,
even by force. Oh! my dear kind play-fellow—now in
Heaven—is this the way I have kept my promise? Look
not in God's book of records and see what is against Gatty
—your Gatty, you loved to call me. Plague me no
more, Dorothy I have slain the poor old man: go away,
in Heaven's name, and let me die. Go away.”

Then, while Dorothy stood by, weeping and wringing
her hands over this mournful wreck, the aged woman fell
away into vacancy, awaking only every now and then to
utter a deep moan, and renew her complaint.

Hobbleshank, who had regarded all these goings-on with
a bewildered look, could restrain himself no longer, but,
hurrying forward, stood before them—his hat a little to
one side, where he had fixed it that his friends might know
at a glance what mood he was in, and the great, square
breast-pin, shining like an illumination in the front of his
bosom. He stood before them—his doubtful eye closed
hard, and the other opened in full blaze upon them, a
smile on his face, and a hand extended to each. In this
extraordinary costume and posture—it was some time before
even Dorothy was willing to acknowledge him; and
even after she had admitted it was Hobbleshank and no
counterfeit—there remained his right hand still extended,
waiting to be grasped by Aunt Gatty. It was a long time
before Aunt Gatty was willing to look at him; and when
she did, at length, turn her head slowly about and take
measure of his person, she regarded him with infinite
scorn and repulsion.

“It's a cheat,” she said after a long survey, and a

longer pondering, “you are practising upon me; this is
not my old friend that I am to account for; no, no. Don't
you think I know my good friend Hobbleshank? This is
some one that has stolen his garments and is trying to
play tricks with me.” She returned to her old posture
and could be brought by no persuasion or entreaty to a
further recognition.

“We must leave her to herself,” said Dorothy, drawing
Hobbleshank apart; “You will get back into her recollection
by degrees. It takes days with her now to fix
and unfix a notion. She will presently fall asleep.”

They watched her for a little while, when slumber,
coming in to befriend exhausted Nature, crept upon her,
and bearing her to her bed within, and laying her gently
to rest, they returned to the other chamber. Hobbleshank,
reviving rapidly from the gloom which Aunt Gatty had
cast upon his spirits, took a place by a small table that
Dorothy had drawn out, and launched forth in a glowing
description of the good luck on which he had so lately
stumbled. Dorothy—who could not share in all the good
hopes which he built on the disclosure of the stranger
and the possession of the half-bracelet—did nevertheless
strengthen and encourage Hobbleshank to go on in these
communications, by a cold ham, which she produced from
a closet, where it had stood untasted and inviting the
knife, for several days; and also by calling in—through
the ministry of a ragged-haired and bare-footed girl, who
was always on the prowl for small errands in the great
hall—a pot of Albany-brewed and two dozen oysters,
which, the last being well peppered and swallowed at a snap,
added not a little to the spirit of the old man's narration.