The Great Stone Face, and Other Tales of the White Mountains Page 5

  THE AMBITIOUS GUEST

  One September night a family had gathered round their hearth, and piledit high with the driftwood of mountain streams, the dry cones of thepine, and the splintered ruins of great trees that had come crashingdown the precipice. Up the chimney roared the fire, and brightened theroom with its broad blaze. The faces of the father and mother had asober gladness; the children laughed; the eldest daughter was the imageof Happiness at seventeen; and the aged grandmother who sat knitting inthe warmest place, was the image of Happiness grown old. They had foundthe 'herb, heart's-ease,' in the bleakest spot of all New England. (Thisfamily were situated in the Notch of the White Hills, where the windwas sharp throughout the year, and pitilessly cold in the winter--givingtheir cottage all its fresh inclemency before it descended on thevalley of the Saco) They dwelt in a cold spot and a dangerous one; fora mountain towered above their heads, so steep, that the stones wouldoften rumble down its sides and startle them at midnight.

  The daughter had just uttered some simple jest that filled them all withmirth, when the wind came through the Notch and seemed to pausebefore their cottage--rattling the door, with a sound of wailing andlamentation, before it passed into the valley. For a moment it saddenedthem, though there was nothing unusual in the tones. But the familywere glad again when they perceived that the latch was lifted by sometraveller, whose footsteps had been unheard amid the dreary blast whichheralded his approach, and wailed as he was entering, and went moaningaway from the door.

  Though they dwelt in such a solitude, these people held daily conversewith the world. The romantic pass of the Notch is a great artery,through which the life-blood of internal commerce is continuallythrobbing between Maine, on one side, and the Green Mountains and theshores of the St. Lawrence, on the other. The stage-coach always drew upbefore the door of the cottage. The wayfarer, with no companion buthis staff, paused here to exchange a word, that the sense of lonelinessmight not utterly overcome him ere he could pass through the cleftof the mountain, or reach the first house in the valley. And here theteamster, on his way to Portland market, would put up for the night;and, if a bachelor, might sit an hour beyond the usual bedtime, andsteal a kiss from the mountain maid at parting. It was one of thoseprimitive taverns where the traveller pays only for food and lodging,but meets with a homely kindness beyond all price. When the footstepswere heard, therefore, between the outer door and the inner one, thewhole family rose up, grandmother, children, and all, as if about towelcome some one who belonged to them, and whose fate was linked withtheirs.

  The door was opened by a young man. His face at first wore themelancholy expression, almost despondency, of one who travels a wild andbleak road, at nightfall and alone, but soon brightened up when he sawthe kindly warmth of his reception. He felt his heart spring forward tomeet them all, from the old woman, who wiped a chair with her apron,to the little child that held out its arms to him. One glance and smileplaced the stranger on a footing of innocent familiarity with the eldestdaughter.

  'Ah, this fire is the right thing!' cried he; 'especially when there issuch a pleasant circle round it. I am quite benumbed; for the Notch isjust like the pipe of a great pair of bellows; it has blown a terribleblast in my face all the way from Bartlett.'

  'Then you are going towards Vermont?' said the master of the house, ashe helped to take a light knapsack off the young man's shoulders.

  'Yes; to Burlington, and far enough beyond,' replied he. 'I meant tohave been at Ethan Crawford's tonight; but a pedestrian lingers alongsuch a road as this. It is no matter; for, when I saw this good fire,and all your cheerful faces, I felt as if you had kindled it on purposefor me, and were waiting my arrival. So I shall sit down among you, andmake myself at home.'

  The frank-hearted stranger had just drawn his chair to the fire whensomething like a heavy footstep was heard without, rushing down thesteep side of the mountain, as with long and rapid strides, and takingsuch a leap in passing the cottage as to strike the opposite precipice.The family held their breath, because they knew the sound, and theirguest held his by instinct.

  'The old mountain has thrown a stone at us, for fear we should forgethim,' said the landlord, recovering himself. 'He sometimes nods his headand threatens to come down; but we are old neighbors, and agree togetherpretty well upon the whole. Besides we have a sure place of refuge hardby if he should be coming in good earnest.'

  Let us now suppose the stranger to have finished his supper of bear'smeat; and, by his natural felicity of manner, to have placed himselfon a footing of kindness with the whole family, so that they talked asfreely together as if he belonged to their mountain brood. He was of aproud, yet gentle spirit--haughty and reserved among the rich and great;but ever ready to stoop his head to the lowly cottage door, and be likea brother or a son at the poor man's fireside. In the household ofthe Notch he found warmth and simplicity of feeling, the pervadingintelligence of New England, and a poetry of native growth, which theyhad gathered when they little thought of it from the mountain peaks andchasms, and at the very threshold of their romantic and dangerous abode.He had travelled far and alone; his whole life, indeed, had been asolitary path; for, with the lofty caution of his nature, he had kepthimself apart from those who might otherwise have been his companions.The family, too, though so kind and hospitable, had that consciousnessof unity among themselves, and separation from the world at large,which, in every domestic circle, should still keep a holy place where nostranger may intrude. But this evening a prophetic sympathy impelledthe refined 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 a commonfate 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 hispathway--though not, perhaps, while he was treading it. But whenposterity should gaze back into the gloom of what was now the present,they would trace the brightness of his footsteps, brightening as meanerglories faded, and confess that a gifted one had passed from his cradleto his tomb with none to recognize him.

  'As yet,' cried the stranger--his cheek glowing and his eye flashingwith enthusiasm--'as yet, I have done nothing. Were I to vanish from theearth tomorrow, none would know so much of me as you: that a namelessyouth came up at nightfall from the valley of the Saco, and opened hisheart to you in the evening, and passed through the Notch by sunrise,and was seen no more. Not a soul would ask, 'Who was he? Whither did thewanderer go? But I cannot die till I have achieved my destiny. Then,let Death come! I shall have built my monument!'

  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 he hadbeen betrayed.

  'You laugh at me,' said he, taking the eldest daughter's hand, andlaughing himself. 'You think my ambition as nonsensical as if I were tofreeze myself to death on the top of Mount Washington, only that peoplemight spy at me from the country round about. And, truly, that would bea 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 thinks about us.'

  'I suppose,' Said her father, after a fit of musing, 'there issomething natural in what the young man says; and if my mind had beenturned that way, I might have felt just the same. It is strange, wife,how his talk has set my head running on things that are pretty certainnever to come to pass.'

  'Perhaps they may,' observed the wife. 'Is the man thinking what he willdo when he is a widower?'

  'No, no!' cried he, repelling the idea with reproachful kindness. 'WhenI think of your de
ath, Esther, I think of mine, too. But I was wishingwe had a good farm in Bartlett, or Bethlehem, or Littleton, or someother township round the White Mountains; but not where they couldtumble on our heads. I should want to stand well with my neighbors andbe called Squire, and sent to General Court for a term or two; for aplain, honest man may do as much good there as a lawyer. And when Ishould be grown quite an old man, and you an old woman, so as not to belong apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, and leave you allcrying around me. A slate gravestone would suit me as well as a marbleone--with just my name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and something tolet people know that I lived an honest man and died a Christian.'

  'There now!' exclaimed the stranger; 'it is our nature to desire amonument, be it slate or marble, or