 | Mosses from an old manse |  |
EGOTISM;[1] OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT.
FROM THE UNPUBLISHED “ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART.”
“Here he comes!” shouted the boys along the street. “Here
comes the man with a snake in his bosom!”
This outcry, saluting Herkimer's ears, as he was about to enter
the iron gate of the Elliston mansion, made him pause. It was
not without a shudder that he found himself on the point of meeting
his former acquaintance, whom he had known in the glory
of youth, and whom now, after an interval of five years, he was
to find the victim either of a diseased fancy, or a horrible physical
misfortune.
“A snake in his bosom!” repeated the young sculptor to himself.
“It must be he. No second man on earth has such a
bosom-friend! And now, my poor Rosina, Heaven grant me
wisdom to discharge my errand aright! Woman's faith must be
strong indeed, since thine has not yet failed.”
Thus musing, he took his stand at the entrance of the gate, and
waited until the personage, so singularly announced, should make
his appearance. After an instant or two, he beheld the figure
of a lean man, of unwholesome look, with glittering eyes and
long black hair, who seemed to imitate the motion of a snake;
for, instead of walking straight forward with open front, he undulated
along the pavement in a curved line. It may be too fanciful
suggested the idea that a miracle had been wrought, by transforming
a serpent into a man; but so imperfectly, that the snaky
nature was yet hidden, and scarcely hidden, under the mere outward
guise of humanity. Herkimer remarked that his complexion
had a greenish tinge over its sickly white, reminding him of a
species of marble out of which he had once wrought a head of
Envy, with her snaky locks.
The wretched being approached the gate, but, instead of entering,
stopt short, and fixed the glitter of his eye full upon the compassionate,
yet steady countenance of the sculptor.
“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!” he exclaimed.
And then there was an audible hiss, but whether it came from
the apparent lunatic's own lips, or was the real hiss of a serpent,
might admit of discussion. At all events, it made Herkimer
shudder to his heart's core.
“Do you know me, George Herkimer?” asked the snake-possessed.
Herkimer did know him. But it demanded all the intimate
and practical acquaintance with the human face, acquired by
modelling actual likenesses in clay, to recognize the features of
Roderick Elliston in the visage that now met the sculptor's gaze.
Yet it was he. It added nothing to the wonder, to reflect that the
once brilliant young man had undergone this odious and fearful
change, during the no more than five brief years of Herkimer's
abode at Florence. The possibility of such a transformation
being granted, it was as easy to conceive it effected in a moment
as in an age. Inexpressibly shocked and startled, it was still the
keenest pang, when Herkimer remembered that the fate of his
cousin Rosina, the ideal of gentle womanhood, was indissolubly
interwoven with that of a being whom Providence seemed to have
unhumanized.
“Elliston! Roderick!” cried he, “I had heard of this; but
you? Why do I find you thus?”
“Oh, 'tis a mere nothing! A snake! A snake! The commonest
thing in the world. A snake in the bosom—that's all,”
answered Roderick Elliston. “But how is your own breast?”
continued he, looking the sculptor in the eye, with the most acute
and penetrating glance that it had ever been his fortune to encounter.
“All pure and wholesome? No reptile there? By
my faith and conscience, and by the devil within me, here is a
wonder! A man without a serpent in his bosom!”
“Be calm, Elliston,” whispered George Herkimer, laying his
hand upon the shoulder of the snake-possessed. “I have crossed
the ocean to meet you. Listen!—let us be private—I bring a
message from Rosina!—from your wife!”
“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!” muttered Roderick.
With this exclamation, the most frequent in his mouth, the
unfortunate man clutched both hands upon his breast, as if an
intolerable sting or torture impelled him to rend it open, and let
out the living mischief, even where it intertwined with his own
life. He then freed himself from Herkimer's grasp, by a subtle
motion, and gliding through the gate, took refuge in his antiquated
family residence. The sculptor did not pursue him. He saw
that no available intercourse could be expected at such a moment,
and was desirous, before another meeting, to inquire closely into
the nature of Roderick's disease, and the circumstances that had
reduced him to so lamentable a condition. He succeeded in obtaining
the necessary information from an eminent medical gentleman.
Shortly after Elliston's separation from his wife—now nearly
four years ago—his associates had observed a singular gloom
spreading over his daily life, like those chill, grey mists that
sometimes steal away the sunshine from a summer's morning.
The symptoms caused them endless perplexity. They knew not
whether a canker of the mind was gradually eating, as such
cankers do, from his moral system into the physical frame, which
is but the shadow of the former. They looked for the root of
this trouble in his shattered schemes of domestic bliss—wilfully
shattered by himself—but could not be satisfied of its existence
there. Some thought that their once brilliant friend was in an
incipient stage of insanity, of which his passionate impulses had
perhaps been the forerunners; others prognosticated a general
blight and gradual decline. From Roderick's own lips, they
could learn nothing. More than once, it is true, he had been
heard to say, clutching his hands convulsively upon his breast—
“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”—but, by different auditors, a
great diversity of explanation was assigned to this ominous expression.
What could it be, that gnawed the breast of Roderick
Elliston? Was it sorrow? Was it merely the tooth of physical
disease? Or, in his reckless course, often verging upon profligacy,
if not plunging into its depths, had he been guilty of some
deed, which made his bosom a prey to the deadlier fangs of
remorse? There was plausible ground for each of these conjectures;
but it must not be concealed that more than one elderly
gentleman, the victim of good cheer and slothful habits, magisterially
pronounced the secret of the whole matter to be Dyspepsia!
Meanwhile, Roderick seemed aware how generally he had
become the subject of curiosity and conjecture, and, with a morbid
repugnance to such notice, or to any notice whatsoever,
estranged himself from all companionship. Not merely the eye
of man was a horror to him; not merely the light of a friend's
countenance; but even the blessed sunshine, likewise, which, in
its universal beneficence, typifies the radiance of the Creator's
face, expressing his love for all the creatures of his hand. The
dusky twilight was now too transparent for Roderick Elliston;
the blackest midnight was his chosen hour to steal abroad; and
gleamed upon his figure, gliding along the street, with his hands
clutched upon his bosom, still muttering:—“It gnaws me! It
gnaws me!” What could it be that gnawed him?
After a time, it became known that Elliston was in the habit
of resorting to all the noted quacks that infested the city, or whom
money would tempt to journey thither from a distance. By one
of these persons, in the exultation of a supposed cure, it was proclaimed
far and wide, by dint of hand-bills and little pamphlets
on dingy paper, that a distinguished gentleman, Roderick Elliston,
Esq., had been relieved of a Snake in his stomach! So
here was the monstrous secret, ejected from its lurking-place into
public view, in all its horrible deformity. The mystery was out;
but not so the bosom serpent. He, if it were anything but a
delusion, still lay coiled in his living den. The empiric's cure
had been a sham, the effect, it was supposed, of some stupefying
drug, which more nearly caused the death of the patient than of
the odious reptile that possessed him. When Roderick Elliston
regained entire sensibility, it was to find his misfortune the town
talk—the more than nine days' wonder and horror—while, at his
bosom, he felt the sickening motion of a thing alive, and the
gnawing of that restless fang, which seemed to gratify at once a
physical appetite and a fiendish spite.
He summoned the old black servant, who had been bred up in
his father's house, and was a middle-aged man while Roderick
lay in his cradle.
“Scipio!” he began; and then paused, with his arms folded
over his heart.—“What do people say of me, Scipio?”
“Sir! my poor master! that you had a serpent in your bosom,”
answered the servant, with hesitation.
“And what else?” asked Roderick, with a ghastly look at
the man.
“Nothing else, dear master,” replied Scipio;—“only that the
floor.”
“No, no!” muttered Roderick to himself, as he shook his head,
and pressed his hands with a more convulsive force upon his
breast,—“I feel him still. It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”
From this time, the miserable sufferer ceased to shun the world,
but rather solicited and forced himself upon the notice of acquaintances
and strangers. It was partly the result of desperation,
on finding that the cavern of his own bosom had not proved deep
and dark enough to hide the secret, even while it was so secure
a fortress for the loathsome fiend that had crept into it. But still
more, this craving for notoriety was a symptom of the intense
morbidness which now pervaded his nature. All persons, chronically
diseased, are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind
or body; whether sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity
of some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of
mortal life. Such individuals are made acutely conscious of a
self, by the torture in which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to
be so prominent an object with them, that they cannot but present
it to the face of every casual passer-by. There is a pleasure—
perhaps the greatest of which the sufferer is susceptible—in displaying
the wasted or ulcerated limb, or the cancer in the breast;
and the fouler the crime, with so much the more difficulty does
the perpetrator prevent it from thrusting up its snake-like head to
frighten the world; for it is that cancer, or that crime, which
constitutes their respective individuality. Roderick Elliston, who,
a little while before, had held himself so scornfully above the
common lot of men, now paid full allegiance to this humiliating
law. The snake in his bosom seemed the symbol of a monstrous
egotism, to which everything was referred, and which he pampered,
night and day, with a continual and exclusive sacrifice
of devil-worship.
He soon exhibited what most people considered indubitable
prided and gloried himself on being marked out from the ordinary
experience of mankind, by the possession of a double nature, and
a life within a life. He appeared to imagine that the snake was
a divinity—not celestial, it is true, but darkly infernal—and that
he thence derived an eminence and a sanctity, horrid, indeed, yet
more desirable than whatever ambition aims at. Thus he drew
his misery around him like a regal mantle, and looked down triumphantly
upon those whose vitals nourished no deadly monster.
Oftener, however, his human nature asserted its empire over him,
in the shape of a yearning for fellowship. It grew to be his custom
to spend the whole day in wandering about the streets, aimlessly,
unless it might be called an aim to establish a species of brotherhood
between himself and the world. With cankered ingenuity,
he sought out his own disease in every breast. Whether insane
or not, he showed so keen a perception of frailty, error, and vice,
that many persons gave him credit for being possessed not merely
with a serpent, but with an actual fiend, who imparted this evil
faculty of recognizing whatever was ugliest in man's heart.
For instance, he met an individual, who, for thirty years, had
cherished a hatred against his own brother. Roderick, amidst the
throng of the street, laid his hand on this man's chest, and looking
full into his forbidding face,
“How is the snake to-day?”—he inquired, with a mock expression
of sympathy.
“The snake!” exclaimed the brother-hater—“What do you
mean?”
“The snake! The snake! Does he gnaw you?” persisted
Roderick. “Did you take counsel with him this morning, when
you should have been saying your prayers? Did he sting, when
you thought of your brother's health, wealth, and good repute?
Did he caper for joy, when you remembered the profligacy of his
only son? And whether he stung, or whether he frolicked, did
everything to sourness and bitterness? That is the way of such
serpents. I have learned the whole nature of them from my
own!”
“Where is the police?” roared the object of Roderick's persecution,
at the same time giving an instinctive clutch to his
breast. “Why is this lunatic allowed to go at large?”
“Ha, ha!” chuckled Roderick, releasing his grasp of the man.
—“His bosom serpent has stung him then!”
Often, it pleased the unfortunate young man to vex people with
a lighter satire, yet still characterized by somewhat of snake-like
virulence. One day he encountered an ambitious statesman, and
gravely inquired after the welfare of his boa-constrictor; for of
that species, Roderick affirmed, this gentleman's serpent must
needs be, since its appetite was enormous enough to devour the
whole country and constitution. At another time, he stopped a
close-fisted old fellow, of great wealth, but who skulked about the
city in the guise of a scare-crow, with a patched blue surtout,
brown hat, and mouldy boots, scraping pence together, and picking
up rusty nails. Pretending to look earnestly at this respectable
person's stomach, Roderick assured him that his snake was a
copper-head, and had been generated by the immense quantities
of that base metal, with which he daily defiled his fingers. Again,
he assaulted a man of rubicund visage, and told him that few
bosom serpents had more of the devil in them, than those that
breed in the vats of a distillery. The next whom Roderick
honored with his attention was a distinguished clergymen, who
happened just then to be engaged in a theological controversy,
where human wrath was more perceptible than divine inspiration.
“You have swallowed a snake, in a cup of sacramental wine,”
quoth he.
“Profane wretch!” exclaimed the divine; but, nevertheless, his
hand stole to his breast.
He met a person of sickly sensibility, who, on some early disappointment,
had retired from the world, and thereafter held no
intercourse with his fellow-men, but brooded sullenly or passionately
over the irrevocable past. This man's very heart, if Roderick
might be believed, had been changed into a serpent, which
would finally torment both him and itself to death. Observing a
married couple, whose domestic troubles were matter of notoriety,
he condoled with both on having mutually taken a house-adder to
their bosoms. To an envious author, who deprecated works
which he could never equal, he said that his snake was the slimiest
and filthiest of all the reptile tribe, but was fortunately without a
sting. A man of impure life, and a brazen face, asking Roderick
if there were any serpent in his breast, he told him that there
was, and of the same species that once tortured Don Rodrigo, the
Goth. He took a fair young girl by the hand, and gazing sadly
into her eyes, warned her that she cherished a serpent of the
deadliest kind within her gentle breast; and the world found the
truth of those ominous words, when, a few months afterwards,
the poor girl died of love and shame. Two ladies, rivals in
fashionable life, who tormented one another with a thousand little
stings of womanish spite, were given to understand, that each of
their hearts was a nest of diminutive snakes, which did quite as
much mischief as one great one.
But nothing seemed to please Roderick better than to lay hold
of a person infected with jealousy, which he represented as an
enormous green reptile, with an ice-cold length of body, and the
sharpest sting of any snake save one.
“And what one is that?” asked a bystander, overhearing him.
It was a dark-browed man, who put the question; he had an
evasive eye, which, in the course of a dozen years, had looked
no mortal directly in the face. There was an ambiguity about
this person's character—a stain upon his reputation—yet none
could tell precisely of what nature; although the city gossips,
recent period he had followed the sea, and was, in fact, the very
ship-master whom George Herkimer had encountered, under such
singular circumstances, in the Grecian Archipelago.
“What bosom-serpent has the sharpest sting?” repeated this
man: but he put the question as if by a reluctant necessity, and
grew pale while he was uttering it.
“Why need you ask?” replied Roderick, with a look of dark
intelligence. “Look into your own breast! Hark, my serpent
bestirs himself! He acknowledges the presence of a master-fiend!”
And then, as the bystanders afterwards affirmed, a hissing
sound was heard, apparently in Roderick Elliston's breast. It
was said, too, that an answering hiss came from the vitals of the
shipmaster, as if a snake were actually lurking there, and had
been aroused by the call of its brother-reptile. If there were in
fact any such sound, it might have been caused by a malicious
exercise of ventriloquism, on the part of Roderick.
Thus, making his own actual serpent—if a serpent there actually
was in his bosom—the type of each man's fatal error, or
hoarded sin, or unquiet conscience, and striking his sting so unremorsefully
into the sorest spot, we may well imagine that
Roderick became the pest of the city. Nobody could elude him;
none could withstand him. He grappled with the ugliest truth
that he could lay his hand on, and compelled his adversary to do
the same. Strange spectacle in human life, where it is the instinctive
effort of one and all to hide those sad realities, and leave
them undisturbed beneath a heap of superficial topics, which constitute
the materials of intercourse between man and man! It
was not to be tolerated that Roderick Elliston should break through
the tacit compact, by which the world has done its best to secure
repose, without relinquishing evil. The victims of his malicious
remarks, it is true, had brothers enough to keep them in countenance;
either a brood of small serpents, or one overgrown monster, that
had devoured all the rest. Still, the city could not bear this new
apostle. It was demanded by nearly all, and particularly by the
most respectable inhabitants, that Roderick should no longer be
permitted to violate the received rules of decorum, by obtruding
his own bosom-serpent to the public gaze, and dragging those of
decent people from their lurking-places.
Accordingly, his relatives interfered, and placed him in a private
asylum for the insane. When the news was noised abroad,
it was observed that many persons walked the streets with freer
countenances, and covered their breasts less carefully with their
hands.
His confinement, however, although it contributed not a little
to the peace of the town, operated unfavorably upon Roderick
himself. In solitude, his melancholy grew more black and sullen.
He spent whole days—indeed, it was his sole occupation—in
communing with the serpent. A conversation was sustained, in
which, as it seemed, the hidden monster bore a part, though unintelligibly
to the listeners, and inaudible, except in a hiss. Singular
as it may appear, the sufferer had now contracted a sort
of affection for his tormentor; mingled, however, with the intensest
loathing and horror. Nor were such discordant emotions
incompatible; each, on the contrary, imparted strength and
poignancy to its opposite. Horrible love—horrible antipathy—
embracing one another in his bosom, and both concentrating
themselves upon a being that had crept into his vitals, or been
engendered there, and which was nourished with his food, and
lived upon his life, and was as intimate with him as his own
heart, and yet was the foulest of all created things! But not
the less was it the true type of a morbid nature.
Sometimes, in his moments of rage and bitter hatred against
the snake and himself, Roderick determined to be the death of
by starvation. But, while the wretched man was on the point
of famishing, the monster seemed to feed upon his heart, and to
thrive and wax gamesome, as if it were his sweetest and most
congenial diet. Then he privily took a dose of active poison,
imagining that it would not fail to kill either himself, or the devil
that possessed him, or both together. Another mistake; for if
Roderick had not yet been destroyed by his own poisoned heart,
nor the snake by gnawing it, they had little to fear from arsenic
or corrosive sublimate. Indeed, the venomous pest appeared to
operate as an antidote against all other poisons. The physicians
tried to suffocate the fiend with tobacco-smoke. He breathed it
as freely as if it were his native atmosphere. Again, they drugged
their patient with opium, and drenched him with intoxicating
liquors, hoping that the snake might thus be reduced to stupor,
and perhaps be ejected from the stomach. They succeeded in
rendering Roderick insensible; but, placing their hands upon his
breast, they were inexpressibly horror-stricken to feel the monster
wriggling, twining, and darting to and fro, within his narrow
limits, evidently enlivened by the opium or alcohol, and incited to
unusual feats of activity. Thenceforth, they gave up all attempts
at cure or palliation. The doomed sufferer submitted to his fate,
resumed his former loathsome affection for the bosom-fined, and
spent whole miserable days before a looking-glass, with his mouth
wide open, watching, in hope and horror, to catch a glimpse of
the snake's head, far down within his throat. It is supposed that
he succeeded; for the attendants once heard a frenzied shout,
and rushing into the room, found Roderick lifeless upon the floor.
He was kept but little longer under restraint. After minute
investigation, the medical directors of the asylum decided that his
mental disease did not amount to insanity, nor would warrant
his confinement; especially as its influence upon his spirits was
unfavorable, and might produce the evil which it was meant to
violated many of the customs and prejudices of society;
but the world was not, without surer ground, entitled to treat him
as a madman. On this decision of such competent authority,
Roderick was released, and had returned to his native city, the
very day before his encounter with George Herkimer.
As soon as possible after learning these particulars, the sculptor,
together with a sad and tremulous companion, sought Elliston
at his own house. It was a large, sombre edifice of wood, with
pilasters and a balcony, and was divided from one of the principal
streets by a terrace of three elevations, which was ascended by
successive flights of stone steps. Some immense old elms almost
concealed the front of the mansion. This spacious and once
magnificent family-residence was built by a grandee of the race,
early in the past century; at which epoch, land being of small
comparative value, the garden and other grounds had formed
quite an extensive domain. Although a portion of the ancestral
heritage had been alienated, there was still a shadowy enclosure
in the rear of the mansion, where a student, or a dreamer, or a
man of stricken heart, might lie all day upon the grass, amid the
solitude of murmuring boughs, and forget that a city had grown
up around him.
Into this retirement, the sculptor and his companion were
ushered by Scipio, the old black servant, whose wrinkled visage
grew almost sunny with intelligence and joy, as he paid his humble
greetings to one of the two visitors.
“Remain in the arbor,” whispered the sculptor to the figure
that leaned upon his arm, “you will know whether, and when, to
make your appearance.”
“God will teach me,” was the reply. “May he support me
too!”
Roderick was reclining on the margin of a fountain, which
gushed into the fleckered sunshine with the same clear sparkle,
growth flung their shadows across its bosom. How strange is the
life of a fountain, born at every moment, yet of an age coeval
with the rocks, and far surpassing the venerable antiquity of a
forest!
“You are come! I have expected you,” said Elliston, when
he became aware of the sculptor's presence.
His manner was very different from that of the preceding day
—quiet, courteous, and, as Herkimer thought, watchful both over
his guest and himself. This unnatural restraint was almost the
only trait that betokened anything amiss. He had just thrown a
book upon the grass, where it lay half-opened, thus disclosing
itself to be a natural history of the serpent-tribe, illustrated by
life-like plates. Near it lay that bulky volume, the Ductor Dubitantium
of Jeremy Taylor, full of cases of conscience, and in
which most men, possessed of a conscience, may find something
applicable to their purpose.
“You see,” observed Elliston, pointing to the book of serpents,
while a smile gleamed upon his lips, “I am making an effort to
become better acquainted with my bosom-friend. But I find
nothing satisfactory in this volume. If I mistake not, he will
prove to be sui generis, and akin to no other reptile in creation.”
“Whence came this strange calamity?” inquired the sculptor.
“My sable friend, Scipio, has a story,” replied Roderick, “of a
snake that had lurked in this fountain—pure and innocent as it
looks—ever since it was known to the first settlers. This insinuating
personage once crept into the vitals of my great-grandfather,
and dwelt there many years, tormenting the old gentleman
beyond mortal endurance. In short, it is a family peculiarity.
But, to tell you the truth, I have no faith in this idea of the snake's
being an heir-loom. He is my own snake, and no man's else.”
“But what was his origin?” demanded Herkimer.
“Oh! there is poisonous stuff in any man's heart, sufficient to
“You should have heard my homilies to the good townspeople.
Positively, I deem myself fortunate in having bred but a single
serpent. You, however, have none in your bosom, and therefore
cannot sympathize with the rest of the world. It gnaws me! It
gnaws me!”
With this exclamation, Roderick lost his self-control and threw
himself upon the grass, testifying his agony by intricate writhings,
in which Herkimer could not but fancy a resemblance to the
motions of a snake. Then, likewise, was heard that frightful hiss,
which often ran through the sufferer's speech, and crept between
the words and syllables, without interrupting their succession.
“This is awful indeed!” exclaimed the sculptor—“an awful
infliction, whether it be actual or imaginary! Tell me, Roderick
Elliston, is there any remedy for this loathsome evil?”
“Yes, but an impossible one,” muttered Roderick, as he lay
wallowing with his face in the grass. “Could I, for one instant,
forget myself, the serpent might not abide within me. It is my
diseased self-contemplation that has engendered and nourished
him!”
“Then forget yourself, my husband,” said a gentle voice
above him—“forget yourself in the idea of another!”
Rosina had emerged from the arbor, and was bending over him,
with the shadow of his anguish reflected in her countenance, yet
so mingled with hope and unselfish love, that all anguish seemed
but an earthly shadow and a dream. She touched Roderick with
her hand. A tremor shivered through his frame. At that moment,
if report be trustworthy, the sculptor beheld a waving
motion through the grass, and heard a tinkling sound, as if something
had plunged into the fountain. Be the truth as it might, it
is certain that Roderick Elliston sat up, like a man renewed, restored
to his right mind, and rescued from the fiend, which had
so miserably overcome him in the battle-field of his own breast.
“Rosina!” cried he, in broken and passionate tones, but with
nothing of the wild wail that had haunted his voice so long.
“Forgive! Forgive!”
Her happy tears bedewed his face.
“The punishment has been severe,” observed the sculptor.
“Even Justice might now forgive—how much more a woman's
tenderness! Roderick Elliston, whether the serpent was a physical
reptile, or whether the morbidness of your nature suggested
that symbol to your fancy, the moral of the story is not the less
true and strong. A tremendous Egotism—manifesting itself, in
your case, in the form of jealousy—is as fearful a fiend as ever
stole into the human heart. Can a breast, where it has dwelt so
long, be purified?”
“Oh, yes!” said Rosina, with a heavenly smile. “The serpent
was but a dark fantasy, and what it typified was as shadowy
as itself. The past, dismal as it seems, shall fling no gloom upon
the future. To give it its due importance, we must think of it
but as an anecdote in our Eternity!”
| Mosses from an old manse | |