The fountain and the bottle comprising thrilling examples of the opposite effects of temperance and intemperance |
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CHARLEY RANDOLPH. |
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 | The fountain and the bottle |  |
CHARLEY RANDOLPH.
By Francis C. Woodworth.
I do not wonder that Fancy, when unchecked by
revelation, has so often represented this world as a
vast arena, on which two rival bands of genii, like
the gladiators of a former age, are constantly contending
for the mastery. I do not wonder that in the
mythic poetry of that age, every man is supposed to
have attached to him a good demon and an evil one—
the former prompting to noble, virtuous deeds, and the
latter leading the soul astray; for, after all, there never
was a scion of superstition engrafted on the dismembered
trunk of truth, that had not its origin in truth
—some truth or other. It must be so; else that scion
would not be homogeneous enough to grow there,
and ripen its fruit. Superstition is the poetry, the romance
of the invisible world. In it, if we will seek
for them there, we may always find indexes of known
or probable truths. In many instances, indeed, it is
scarcely necessary to do more than render this poetry,
this mythos, into prose, to discover the truth. No one
I am sure, accustomed to habits of thought, especially
if he sets himself to work to trace the relation between
he receives the sentiment of Milton as something
more than a poet's imagery, that
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep—”
that we are all surrounded by two opposite and conflicting
classes of influences and motives—the one
leading to virtue and holiness, the other to vice and
crime. One of the most fearful problems which the
lapse of years has eventually solved under my eye,
has been, whether, in the life of one whom I loved,
this class of influences and motives would prevail, or
that. And it is often not a problem, which, to the
human perception, is solved at once. Oh, what struggles
have I seen between reason, conscience, religion,
on the one hand,—and appetite, passion, and the syren
of vice, on the other!
Reader, will you listen to a little sketch from my
portfolio, of this character? It is a sad one—too sad,
perhaps you will say. But it carries a lesson along
with it which is worth learning, and if learned, is
worthy of being engraved with the point of a diamond
on the memory of every one, and especially of every
young man. It is a sketch of a tempted, struggling,
falling, fallen man.
It was in the spring of 184-, that I last visited the
graveyard of the little village of C—, some miles
inland from one of the most charming cities in Connecticut.
I love a country graveyard. I love to read
the inscriptions, rude and uncouth as many of them
the departed. But I love this inclosure more than
any other. It is the graveyard of my native village.
Here rest the ashes of a mother whom I almost worshipped;
and here too is the form of a cherished
sister, a flower cut down while yet fair and lovely,
and transferred to heaven. Side by side they rest—
all that is earthly of the mother and the sister; and
as I sit near the mounds above them, I seem to hold
a closer and sweeter communion with their spirits.
While I was wandering among the graves in this
inclosure, during the visit to which I have alluded,
my attention was directed to one evidently made but
a few months. The earth was fresh around it, and it
was plain that the chisel of the untutored sculptor
had just traced the words of a mourner's love upon
that humble headstone. I turned to read them:
“Charles Randolph, died Feb. 22d, 184-, aged 31
years.” It was the name of one whom I once loved
as a brother! Though somewhat my senior in years,
the closest intimacy and friendship existed between
us during the sunny period of boyhood. We shared
each other's little joys and sorrows. We sat side by
side in the village school. We gamboled in the woods
and meadows together. The sports of one were never
complete without the presence of the other. And
Charles was dead! His sun had gone down while it
was yet day. How did he fall? I must tell you.
I had not heard of my friend for several years
preceding the time when I first saw his tombstone.
I had not forgotten him. But amid the cares of my
him, and I at length lost the place of his residence.
The last time I saw him was at his wedding. Charles
married long after I left C— for a distant home;
but I was summoned to witness his happiness. The
object of his choice was one with whom we had both
been familiar from childhood. She was a charming
girl. Often, at school, have I looked slyly at her
over the top of my spelling-book, from my seat across
the room, and thought there was no face so beautiful,
no form so graceful and fairy-like, as Emma's. I am
but an indifferent philosopher. I never made any
pretensions in that way. But since a riper manhood
has overtaken me, I have often stopped a moment or
two, with perchance a slight fluttering of the heart,
as my memory daguerreotyped anew the scenes of
my childhood, to inquire what was the meaning of
some of those earlier emotions. I have analyzed them
not a little, and endeavoured, though never so as to
satisfy myself, to place them under their appropriate
caption in psychology. Verily, love has some curious
and unaccountable phases, or there were ingenious
and well-executed counterfeits of it in circulation
among some of us, long before we had reached the
first of those broad stairs in our progress towards maturity,
called the teens. But I am a poor philosopher,
as I said before.
Charles and Emma were young when they met at
the altar—young and happy. They were not rich.
Their parents did not entail on them the curse of a
fortune. They gave them a respectable “setting
neighbourhood—they gave them that, and their blessing—no
more. With that patrimony, Charles and
his bride, soon after their union, catching the enthusiasm
of the enterprising sons and daughters of
Connecticut, left their pleasant home and emigrated
westward, to seek their fortune in the wilderness of
northern Pennsylvania. At this point I lost sight of
them—with one of them for ever—with the other, till
I saw her a crushed and broken-hearted widow—a
Naomi, returned to bury her husband, and to die
among her kindred. The important incidents in their
history subsequent to the period of their emigration,
I learned from a reliable source in C—.
Charles was an industrious, ambitious man—a
daring fellow he was, too. If there were any dangers
to be encountered in our youthful exploits, Charley
Randolph was always summoned to lead the way.
He carried this spirit—so indispensable to a farmer
beginning his career in a forest where the axe of the
woodman had never been heard—to his new home, if
home that spot could be called which had to offer
him only the logs for his cottage. He set resolutely
to work; the tall oaks and pines fell fast around him:
soon he had a house—a log house, to be sure, but it
was comfortable enough, they thought—and Emma
said, laughingly, that they would at least have a practical
illustration of that very romantic scene, “love in
a cottage.” And so they did, without so much as
consulting a single fashionable French novel to learn
the art.
The detailed routine of an emigrant's life—his
struggles with the giants of the forest, amid the thousand
privations consequent upon a life so far removed
from the delights of refined society—would be tedious
enough. I shall be excused, if I pass hastily over
these matters. It will suffice to say that on the
banks of the Susquehanna, near one of those many
grand and glorious gorges between two contiguous
hills that mark that noble stream in its tortuous flow
towards the vale of Wyoming, there soon appeared a
farm, abundantly rewarding the labour of the husbandman,
and that farm was Charles Randolph's.
More than four years had passed. Other settlers had
arrived. It was not so lonely in that Pennsylvania
happy—so was Emma. Why should they not be
happy? Their hearts were intwined together as
closely as the tendrils of the ivy on the old oak which
they had left near their cottage door, to bless them
with its shade, and to be a home for the robin and
the bluebird. That was enough to make them happy.
But God gave them another blessing. Oh! what joy
there was in that cottage, as little Josephine passed
successively through the stages of frolicking, lisping,
creeping, walking, and, I scarcely know what besides.
Then heaven sent them another babe, and their cup
of joy was full. Did Charles forget God, then, as he
pressed his boy to his heart, and as he heard the idol
of his affections, his own Emma, call the little one
Charley? I know not.—
“Charles, my dear, you will not go out to night,
will you? It rains very fast, and I want you at
home. Did you know you had one of the most
selfish wives in the world, Charles?” So said Mrs.
Randolph, perhaps less than a year after the event
just related; and, as she said it, she looked more sad
than usual, for she had observed a change in her husband,
a slight change, but it alarmed her a little. He
did not love home less, perhaps—perhaps!—but he
had learned to find pleasure in the bar-room of a
neighbouring tavern, which some Yankee settler, with
an enthusiastic desire to promote the public good, had
recently erected. The loving, trusting wife knew
that her husband went there simply for society; but
that it might not always be thus.
In a moment, Randolph determined he would stay
at home that night. But then he thought of an engagement—might
not that engagement have been
innocently set aside?—and he said, tenderly, “I think
I must go, dear; but I will not stay long.”—Charles
Randolph! take care! Thou hast already placed thy
feet on one of the steps to ruin! Take care! Listen
to the voice of thy better genius. Hark! it whispers
to thee now. Nay, heed not that other voice. Let
not the tempter lure thee to thy ruin. Stop! thou
hast even now cause to tremble. Hast thou not already
entered the wicket-gate that leads from the path
of virtue and peace, to the path of vice and sorrow?
Take care! think of thy wife, Charles, and of thy
dear little babes. Alas! he has gone, and the partner
of his bosom is kneeling at the cradle of her boy,
and pouring out her heart to God for the tempted
man. Tears, bitter tears, roll down her cheeks. Can
it be?—but no, no—that were impossible! and she is
calm again. Thus it is with the sorrow-stricken woman,
the victim of a grief she cannot reveal, and of a
fear she cannot acknowledge, even to herself. Love,
pure as an angel's and stronger than the grave; hope,
lighting up the darkest night; trust, that spurns every
suspicion, as the voice of the tempter; constancy, like
the everlasting hills;—these nerve her arm, and impart
to her a heroism a thousand-fold more worthy of
the world's applause than that which is exhibited on
the battle-field.
Charles Randolph, the devoted husband and fond
father, loved more and more the excitement of the
bar-room. Many, many times, when his wife tearfully
remonstrated with him, he resolved to leave that
dangerous path. But his resolutions were broken. In
less than seven years from the day of his marriage,
he was a confirmed inebriate. Poverty stared that
family in the face. His grim visage entered the door
of their cottage, and became an inmate there.
Another year passed—two, perhaps. One night,
a bleak, cold, stormy night in February, that poor
victim of intemperance sought his accustomed haunt,
the tavern. Like an insect that plays around the
flame which is consuming him, fascinated by the
blaze, Randolph, though sensible that he was descending
the steps to ruin, was yet urged on by an appetite
which he had not now the power to control. That
was a bitter cold night: fiercely howled the winds
around the once happy home of Charles and Emma.
The snow fell profusely, and was hurled into drifts as
it reached the earth. Long and anxiously the wife and
mother looked for the absent one—but he came not.
He left the inn late, with the bottle in his hand. Poor
man! His tale is soon told:
Nor friends, nor sacred home.”
the road near his cottage, stiff and cold, with his dog
caressing him, and striving to rouse him from the
sleep of death!
| The fountain and the bottle | |