Vassall Morton Part 31

And canting fools would console them with saying that 'all is for the best.' I will sooner believe that the world is governed by devils, and that the prince of them all is bodied in Metternich. Why is there not in crushed hope, and stifled wrath, and swelling anguish, and frenzy, and despair, a force to burst these h.e.l.lish sepulchres, and blow them to the moon!

"It is but a weak punishment to which Milton dooms his ruined angel.

Action,--enterprise,--achievement,--a h.e.l.l like that is heaven to the cells of Ehrenberg. He should have chained him to a rock, and left him alone to the torture of his own thoughts; the unutterable agonies of a mind preying on itself for want of other sustenance. Action!--mured in this dungeon, the starved soul gasps for it as the lungs for air.

'Action, action, action!--all in all! What is life without it? A marsh, a quagmire, a rotten, stagnant pool. It is its own reward. The chase is all; the prize nothing. The huntsmen chase the fox all day, and, when they have caught her, fling her to their hounds for a worthless vermin. Alexander wept that he had no more worlds to conquer. What did it profit him that a conquered world lay already at his feet? The errant knights who roamed the world with their mistress's glove on their helmet, achieving impossibilities in her name,--which of them could have endured to live in peace with her for a six-month? The crusader master of Jerusalem, Cortes with Mexico subdued, any hero when his work is done, falls back to the ranks of common men. His lamp is out, his fire quenched; and what avails the stale, lack-l.u.s.tre remnant of his days?

"Action! the panacea of human ills; the sure resource of misery; the refuge of bad consciences; a maelstroom, in whose giddy vortex saints and villains may whirl alike. How like a madman some great criminal, some Macbeth, will plunge on through his slough of blood and treachery, frantic to dam out justice at every c.h.i.n.k, and bulwark himself against fate; clinching crime with crime; giving conscience no time to stab; finding no rest; but still plunging on, desperate and blind! How like a madman some pious anchorite, fervent to win heaven, will pile torture on torture, fast, and vigil, and scourge, made wretched daily with some fresh scruple, delving to find some new depth of self-abas.e.m.e.nt, and still struggling on unsatisfied, insatiable of penance, till the grave devours him! Human activity!--to pursue a security which is never reached, a contentment which eludes the grasp, some golden consummation which proves but hollow mockery; to seize the prize, to taste it, to fling it away, and reach after another! This cell, where I thought myself buried and sealed up from knowledge, is, after all, a school of philosophy. It teaches a dreary wisdom of its own. Through these stone walls I can see the follies of the world more clearly than when I was in the midst of them. A dreary wisdom; and yet not wholly dreary. There is a power and a consolation in it. Misery is the mind-maker; the revealer of truth; the spring of n.o.bleness; the test, the purger, the strengthener of the spirit. Our natures are like grapes in the wine press: they must be pressed to the uttermost before they will give forth all their virtue.

"Why do I delude myself? What good can be wrung out of a misery like mine? It is folly to cheat myself with hope. This h.e.l.l-begotten Austria has me fast, and will not loosen her gripe. Abroad in the free world, fort.i.tude will count for much. There, one can hold firm the clefts and cracks of his tottering fortunes with the cement of an unyielding mind; but here, it is but bare and blank endurance. Yet it is something that I can still find heart to face my doom; that there are still moments when I dare to meet this death-in-life, this slow-consuming horror, face to face, and look into all its hideousness without shrinking. To creep on to my end through years of slow decay, mind and soul famishing in solitude, sapped and worn, eaten and fretted away, by the droppings of lonely thought, till I find my rest at last under these cursed stones! G.o.d! could I but die the death of a man! De Foix,--Dundee,--Wolfe. I grudge them their b.l.o.o.d.y end. When the fierce blood boiled highest, when the keen life was tingling through their veins, and the shout of victory ringing in their ears, then to be launched at a breath forth into the wilderness of s.p.a.ce, to sail through eternity, to explore the seas and continents of the vast unknown! But I,--I must lie here and rot. You fool! you are tied to the stake, and must bide the baiting as you can. Will you play the coward? What can you gain by that? You cannot run away. What wretch, when misery falls upon him, will not cry out, 'Take any shape but that?' In the familiar crowd, in the daily resort, how many an unregarded face masks a wretchedness worse than this! some shrunken, cankered soul, palsied and world-weary, more hopelessly dungeoned than you. Crush down your anguish, choke down your groan, and say, 'Heaven's will be done.'

"Muster what courage you may. Not those spasms of valor that make the hero of an emergency, and when the heart is on fire and the soul in arms, bear him on to great achievement. Mine must be an inward flame, that warms though it cannot shine; a fire, like the sacred Chaldean fire, that must never go out; a perpetual spring, flowing up without ceasing, to meet the unceasing need.

"And you, source of my deepest joy and my deepest sorrow,--do not fail me now. Come to me in this darkness; let your spirit haunt this tomb where I lie buried. In your presence, the evil of my heart shrank back, rebuked; its good sprang up and grew in life and freshness. You rose upon me like the sun, warming every n.o.ble germ into leaf and flower. You streamed into my soul, banishing its mists, and gladdening it to its depths with summer light. These are no girl's tears. Towards myself and my own woes, I have hardened my heart like the barren flint. I should be less than man if I did not weep when I think of you. You must pa.s.s the appointed lot; you must fade with time and sorrow; but to me you will be radiant still with youth and beauty. So will I bide my hour, anch.o.r.ed on that pure and lofty memory, waiting that last release when the winged spirit shall laugh at bolts and dungeon bars."

CHAPTER XL.

Lost liberty and love at once he bore; His prison pained him much, his pa.s.sion more.--_Palemon and Arcite_.

Since his illness, Morton had had some of an invalid's privilege. He had been allowed to walk on the rampart for half an hour daily. In the distance, a great mountain range bounded the view, and, nearer, the Croatian forest stretched its dark and wild frontier. The scene recalled kindred scenes at home; and when he was led back to his cell, when the heavy door clashed and the bolts grated upon him, he leaned his forehead on his hand, and stood in fancy again among the mountains of New England, with all their a.s.sociations of health, freedom, and golden hopes. The White Mountains seemed to rise around him like a living presence, rugged with their rocks and pines, scarred with avalanches, cinctured with morning mists; and, standing again on the bank of the Saco, he seemed to feel their breezes and hear the brawling of their waters. Then his roused fancy took a wider range; carried him across the Alleghanies and along the Ohio, up the Mississippi to its source, and downward to the sea, picturing the whole like the shifting scene of a panorama.

"Ah," he thought, "if my story could be blown abroad over those western waters! How long then should I lie here dying by inches? The farmers of Ohio, the planters of Tennessee, the backwoodsmen of Missouri, how would they endure such outrage to the meanest member of their haughty sovereignty! A hopeless dream! I have looked my last on America. My wrongs will find no voice. They and I are smothering together, safely walled up in sound and solid mason-work. Strange, the power of fancy! Heaven knows how or why, but at this moment I could believe myself seated on the edge of the lake at Matherton, under the beech trees, on a hot July noon. The leaves will not rustle; the birds will not sing; nothing seems awake but the small yellow b.u.t.terflies, flickering over the clover tops, and the heat-loving cicala, raising his shrill voice from the dead pear tree. The breathless pines on the farther bank grow downward in the gla.s.sy mirror. The water lies at my feet, pellucid as the air; the dace, the bream, and the perch glide through it like spirits, their shadows following them over the quartz pebbles; and, in the cove hard by, the pirate pickerel lies asleep under the water lilies.

"On such a day, I came down the garden walk, and found Edith reading under the shade of the maple grove. On the evening of such a day, I heard from her lips the words which seemed to launch me upon a life of more than human happiness. Could I have looked into the future! Could I have lifted the glowing curtain which my fancy drew before it, the gay and gilded illusion which covered the hideous truth! Where is she now? Does she still walk in the garden, and read under the grove of maples? She thinks me dead: almost four years! She has good cause to think so; and perhaps at this moment some glib-tongued suitor, as earnest and eager as I was, is whispering persuasion into her ear, winning her to his hearth stone and his arms. Powers of h.e.l.l, if you would rack man's soul with torments like your own, show him first a gleam of heaven; bathe him in celestial light; then thrust him down to a d.a.m.nation like this."

And he groaned between his set teeth, in the extremity of mental torture.

CHAPTER XLI.

The manly heart must sometimes cease to languish, Ruled by the manly brain.--_Bayard Taylor_.

One day the jailer came in at his stated hour. He was, by birth, a German peasant, stupid and brutish enough; but, his calling considered, he might have been worse, and, in the lack of better company, Morton had diligently cultivated his acquaintance. On this occasion he was more than commonly dogged and impenetrable; and, on being taken to task for some neglect or malperformance of his functions, he made no manner of reply, by word, look, or gesture.

Being again upbraided, he turned for a moment towards the prisoner a face as expressive as a block of pudding stone, and then sullenly continued his work as before. Morton laughed, partly in vexation, and resumed his walk, of just three paces, to and fro, the length of his cell. He followed the jailer with his eye, as the latter closed the door.

"'G.o.d made him, and therefore let him pa.s.s for a man.' Measure the distance from Shakspeare down to that fellow, and then from him again down to a baboon, and which measurement would be the longer? It would be a knotty problem to settle the question of kindred; and yet, after all, a soul to be saved, such as it is, and an indefinite power of expansion and refining, give Jacob strong odds against the baboon. He has human possibilities, like the rest of us; his unit goes to make up the sum of man; man, the riddle and marvel of the universe, the centre of interest, the centre of wonder. When I was a boy, I pleased myself with planning that I would study out the springs of human action, and trace human emotion up to its sources. It was a boy's idea,--to fathom the unfathomable, to line and map out the shifting clouds and the ever-moving winds. De Stael speaks the truth--'Man may learn to rule man, but only G.o.d can comprehend him.' View him under one aspect only.

Seek to a.n.a.lyze that pervading pa.s.sion, that mighty mystic influence which, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, prevails in human action, and holds the sovereignty of the world. It is a vain attempt; the reason loses and confounds itself. What human faculty can follow the workings of a principle which at once exalts man to the stars, and fetters him to the earth; which can fire him with triumphant energies, or lull him into effeminate repose; kindle strange aspirations and eager longings after knowledge; spur the intellect to range time and s.p.a.ce, or cramp it within narrow confines, among mean fancies and base a.s.sociations? In its mysterious contradictions, its boundless possibilities of good and ill, it is a type of human nature itself. The soldier saint, Loyola, was right when he figured the conflicts of man's spirit by the collision of two armies, ranked under adverse banners; for what is the spirit of man but a field of war, with its marches and retreats, its ambuscades, stratagems, surprises, skirmishings, and weary life-long sieges; its shock of onset, and death-grapple, throat to throat? And whoever would be wise, or safe, must sentinel his thoughts, and rule his mind by martial law, like a city beleaguered.

"How to escape such strife! There is no escape. It has followed hermits to their deserts; and it follows me to my prison. It will find no end but in that decay and torpor, that callousness of faculty, which long imprisonment is said to bring, but which, as yet, I do not feel. Perhaps I may never feel it; for strive as I will to prepare for the worst, by inuring my mind to contemplate it, that spark of hope which never, it is said, dies wholly in a human heart, is still alive in mine. And sometimes, of late, it has kindled and glowed, as now, with a strange brightness. Is it a delusion, or the presage of some succor not far distant? Let that be as it may, I will still cling to the possibility of a better time. Whatever new disaster meets me, I will confront it with some new audacity of hope. I will nail my flag to the mast, and there it shall fly till all go down, or till flag, mast, and hulk rot together."

CHAPTER XLII.

But droop not; fortune at your time of life, Although a female moderately fickle, Will hardly leave you, as she's not your wife, For any length of days in such a pickle.--_Don Juan_.

Here his reflections were interrupted by the opening of the outer door of his cell, and a voice somewhat sternly p.r.o.nouncing his name.

It was a regulation of the prison, that twice a day an official should visit each cell, to prevent the possibility of the tenant's attempting to escape, or hold communication with neighboring prisoners. This duty was commonly discharged by non-commissioned officers of certain corps in the garrison. Each cell had two doors. The outer one was of ma.s.sive wood, guarded by iron plates and rivets. The inner door, though much less ponderous, was secured with equal care; but in the middle of it was an oblong aperture, much like that of a post office letter box, though shorter and wider. The visiting official opened the outer door, and without opening the inner, could see the prisoner by applying his eye to this aperture.

"What are you doing there?" demanded the voice, in the usual form of the visitor's challenge.

The voice was different from that to which Morton had been accustomed; and, as he gave the usual answer, he looked towards the opening. Here he saw a full, clear, blue eye, with a brown eyebrow, very well formed; altogether a different eye from that which had formerly presented itself,--a contracted, blackish, or mud-colored organ, furrowed round about with the wrinkles called "crow's feet;"--altogether a mean and vulgar-looking eye, belonging, indeed, to a rugged old soldier, whose skull might safely have been warranted sabre-proof.

Morton looked at the eye, and the eye looked at him, with great intentness, seemingly, for some twenty seconds. Then it disappeared, but returned, and resumed its scrutiny for some moments longer.

"A new broom sweeps clean," thought Morton; "that fellow means to do his duty."

The eye vanished at length, the door closed, and the step of the retiring visitor sounded along the flag-stones.

Morton thought little more of the matter, but busied himself with his usual masculine employment of stocking knitting, till seven in the evening, when the visitor came on his second round, and the same voice challenged him through the opening. He looked up, and saw the eye again; when to his astonishment, the low, hissing sound--"s--s--t"--used by Italians and some other Europeans when they wish to attract attention, sounded from the soldier's lips. At the next instant, however, something seemed to have alarmed him; for the eye disappeared, and the door closed abruptly.

Morton perplexed himself greatly with conjectures about this incident, and had half persuaded himself that the whole was a cheat of the fancy; when, on the next morning, as he was led back, under a guard, from his walk on the rampart, he saw, on entering a long gallery of the prison, a tall man approaching from the farther end. He recognized him at once. It was Max Kubitski, the corporal, who long before had guarded him to his sham execution, and whose friendly whisper in his cell had wakened in him a short gleam of hope. As the corporal pa.s.sed, his eye met Morton's for an instant, with, as the latter thought, a glance of recognition.

In vain he tried to reason down the new hope that, in spite of himself, this meeting kindled. Of one thing he was sure; the corporal's eye was the eye that looked in upon him through the hole in the door; and he felt a.s.sured, moreover, that, from whatever cause, the corporal inclined to befriend him.

He waited, in great expectancy and some agitation, for the next visit; and at the stated hour, the outer door was opened, and the eye appeared.

Morton, as he replied to the challenge, made a gesture of friendly recognition.

"You remember me, eh?" whispered a voice, in broken French; "be always close to the door when I come. I shall have something to tell you."

The moustached lips whence the whisper issued were withdrawn from the opening, and Morton was left to his reflections.

To have a friend near him, however humble, was much, and the hope, slender as it seemed, that this friend might aid him, filled him with a feverish excitement. Why the corporal should interest himself in his behalf, he could not imagine; and he waited restlessly for his next coming.

In due time, the eye appeared.

"Look here," whispered Max, and thrust a paper through the opening, waiting only long enough to see Morton pick it up.

The chirography was worse, if possible, than the spelling; but Morton at last deciphered words to the following purport.

"You are brave. Don't despair. I shall help you, if I can. Long live America! Down with the emperor! Only be patient. Be sure to chew this paper, and swallow it."

The last injunction had its objections, and the prisoner compromised the matter by tearing the paper into small pieces, and stuffing them into the crevices of the floor.

At the next appearance of the eye, Morton, in a few rapid words, expressed his grat.i.tude; adding that if the corporal would help him to escape, and go with him to America, he would make him rich for life.

The intimation probably had its effect; and yet in the case of Max it was not needed. Though his tastes and habits savored of the barrack, the corporal was one of the most simple-hearted and generous of men, with, besides, much of that kind of enthusiasm of character which is apt to be rather ornamental than useful to its owner. His birth and connections were not quite so low as might have been argued from his mean station in the service, in which his life had been spent from boyhood. He was a native of Gallicia. Several of his brothers, and others of his relatives, had been deeply compromised in the Polish rising of 1831, and had suffered heavy and humiliating penalties in consequence. His eldest brother, however, had escaped in time, and gone to America, where, being very different in character from Max, he had thriven wonderfully. After a long absence, he had reappeared, travelling with a United States pa.s.sport, as an American, inveighing against European despotisms, and dilating on the glories of his adopted country. Max, the only auditor of these declamations, was greatly excited by them. He had long been tired of his thankless position in the Austrian service; and listening to his brother's persuasions, he agreed to desert, and go with him to America, the seat, as he began to imagine, of more than earthly beat.i.tude. But before he could find opportunity, his cautious brother took alarm; and seeing some indications that his ident.i.ty was suspected by the police, decamped with the promptness and alacrity which had always distinguished him in times of danger. Max, therefore, was left alone; his adviser, for fear of compromising him, not daring to attempt any communication.

It was soon after this, that, being on guard in the commissioner's inquest room at Ehrenberg, Max first saw Morton, brought in for examination, and learned from the questions and replies, that the prisoner was an American. His interest was greatly stirred; for he had never seen one of the favored race before; and, like the commissioner, he had no doubt that Morton had come on a revolutionary mission. His interest was inflamed to enthusiasm, when, being ordered to guard Morton to his execution, he saw the calmness with which the latter faced his expected fate. Indeed, his soldier heart was moved so deeply, that in the flush of the moment he conceived the idea of helping Morton to escape, and going with him to the land of promise.

It was an idea more easily conceived than executed; and before he could find an opportunity, his corps was removed from the castle, and sent on duty elsewhere.