The $30,000 Bequest by Mark Twain (top 5 ebook reader TXT) đ
- Author: Mark Twain
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The mother mourned, saying:
âPoor child, how will she bear it when she knows? I shall never see
her again in life. It is hard, so hard. She does not suspect?
You guard her from that?â
âShe thinks you will soon be well.â
âHow good you are, and careful, dear Aunt Hester! None goes near
herr who could carry the infection?â
âIt would be a crime.â
âBut you SEE her?â
âWith a distance betweenâyes.â
âThat is so good. Others one could not trust; but you two guardian
angelsâsteel is not so true as you. Others would be unfaithful;
and many would deceive, and lie.â
Hesterâs eyes fell, and her poor old lips trembled.
âLet me kiss you for her, Aunt Hester; and when I am gone,
and the danger is past, place the kiss upon her dear lips some day,
and say her mother sent it, and all her motherâs broken heart is
in it.â
Within the hour, Hester, raining tears upon the dead face,
performed her pathetic mission.
Another day dawned, and grew, and spread its sunshine in the earth.
Aunt Hannah brought comforting news to the failing mother, and a
happy note, which said again, âWe have but a little time to wait,
darling mother, then we shall be together.â
The deep note of a bell came moaning down the wind.
âAunt Hannah, it is tolling. Some poor soul is at rest.
As I shall be soon. You will not let her forget me?â
âOh, God knows she never will!â
âDo not you hear strange noises, Aunt Hannah? It sounds like
the shuffling of many feet.â
âWe hoped you would not hear it, dear. It is a little company
gathering, forâfor Helenâs sake, poor little prisoner. There will
be musicâand she loves it so. We thought you would not mind.â
âMind? Oh no, noâoh, give her everything her dear heart can desire.
How good you two are to her, and how good to me! God bless you
both always!â
After a listening pause:
âHow lovely! It is her organ. Is she playing it herself, do you think?â
Faint and rich and inspiring the chords floating to her ears on
the still air. âYes, it is her touch, dear heart, I recognize it.
They are singing. Whyâit is a hymn! and the sacredest of all,
the most touching, the most consoling⊠. It seems to open
the gates of paradise to me⊠. If I could die now⊠.â
Faint and far the words rose out of the stillness:
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee,
Eâen though it be a cross
That raiseth me.
With the closing of the hymn another soul passed to its rest,
and they that had been one in life were not sundered in death.
The sisters, mourning and rejoicing, said:
âHow blessed it was that she never knew!â
At midnight they sat together, grieving, and the angel of the Lord
appeared in the midst transfigured with a radiance not of earth;
and speaking, said:
âFor liars a place is appointed. There they burn in the fires
of hell from everlasting unto everlasting. Repent!â
The bereaved fell upon their knees before him and clasped their
hands and bowed their gray heads, adoring. But their tongues
clove to the roof of their mouths, and they were dumb.
âSpeak! that I may bear the message to the chancery of heaven
and bring again the decree from which there is no appeal.â
Then they bowed their heads yet lower, and one said:
âOur sin is great, and we suffer shame; but only perfect and final
repentance can make us whole; and we are poor creatures who have learned
our human weakness, and we know that if we were in those hard straits
again our hearts would fail again, and we should sin as before.
The strong could prevail, and so be saved, but we are lost.â
They lifted their heads in supplication. The angel was gone.
While they marveled and wept he came again; and bending low,
he whispered the decree.
Was it Heaven? Or Hell?
***
A CURE FOR THE BLUES
By courtesy of Mr. Cable I came into possession of a singular book
eight or ten years ago. It is likely that mine is now the only copy
in existence. Its title-page, unabbreviated, reads as follows:
âThe Enemy Conquered; or, Love Triumphant. By G. Ragsdale McClintock,
[1] author of âAn Address,â etc., delivered at Sunflower Hill,
South Carolina, and member of the Yale Law School. New Haven:
published by T. H. Pease, 83 Chapel Street, 1845.â
No one can take up this book and lay it down again unread.
Whoever reads one line of it is caught, is chained; he has become
the contented slave of its fascinations; and he will read and read,
devour and devour, and will not let it go out of his hand till it
is finished to the last line, though the house be on fire over
his head. And after a first reading he will not throw it aside,
but will keep it by him, with his Shakespeare and his Homer,
and will take it up many and many a time, when the world is dark
and his spirits are low, and be straightway cheered and refreshed.
Yet this work has been allowed to lie wholly neglected, unmentioned,
and apparently unregretted, for nearly half a century.
The reader must not imagine that he is to find in it wisdom,
brilliancy, fertility of invention, ingenuity of construction,
excellence of form, purity of style, perfection of imagery,
truth to nature, clearness of statement, humanly possible situations,
humanly possible people, fluent narrative, connected sequence of eventsâ
or philosophy, or logic, or sense. No; the rich, deep, beguiling charm
of the book lies in the total and miraculous ABSENCE from it of all
these qualitiesâa charm which is completed and perfected by the
evident fact that the author, whose naive innocence easily and surely
wins our regard, and almost our worship, does not know that they
are absent, does not even suspect that they are absent. When read
by the light of these helps to an understanding of the situation,
the book is deliciousâprofoundly and satisfyingly delicious.
I call it a book because the author calls it a book, I call it a work
because he calls it a work; but, in truth, it is merely a duodecimo
pamphlet of thirty-one pages. It was written for fame and money,
as the author very franklyâyes, and very hopefully, too, poor fellowâ
says in his preface. The money never cameâno penny of it ever came;
and how long, how pathetically long, the fame has been deferredâ
forty-seven years! He was young then, it would have been so much to
him then; but will he care for it now?
As time is measured in America, McClintockâs epoch is antiquity.
In his long-vanished day the Southern author had a passion for
âeloquenceâ; it was his pet, his darling. He would be eloquent,
or perish. And he recognized only one kind of eloquenceâthe lurid,
the tempestuous, the volcanic. He liked wordsâbig words,
fine words, grand words, rumbling, thundering, reverberating words;
with sense attaching if it could be got in without marring the sound,
but not otherwise. He loved to stand up before a dazed world,
and pour forth flame and smoke and lava and pumice-stone into
the skies, and work his subterranean thunders, and shake himself
with earthquakes, and stench himself with sulphur fumes. If he
consumed his own fields and vineyards, that was a pity, yes; but he
would have his eruption at any cost. Mr. McClintockâs eloquenceâ
and he is always eloquent, his crater is always spoutingâis of the
pattern common to his day, but he departs from the custom of the time
in one respect: his brethren allowed sense to intrude when it did
not mar the sound, but he does not allow it to intrude at all.
For example, consider this figure, which he used in the village
âAddressâ referred to with such candid complacency in the title-page
above quotedââlike the topmost topaz of an ancient tower.â
Please read it again; contemplate it; measure it; walk around it;
climb up it; try to get at an approximate realization of the size of it.
Is the fellow to that to be found in literature, ancient or modern,
foreign or domestic, living or dead, drunk or sober? One notices
how fine and grand it sounds. We know that if it was loftily uttered,
it got a noble burst of applause from the villagers; yet there isnât
a ray of sense in it, or meaning to it.
McClintock finished his education at Yale in 1843, and came to
Hartford on a visit that same year. I have talked with men who at
that time talked with him, and felt of him, and knew he was real.
One needs to remember that fact and to keep fast hold of it;
it is the only way to keep McClintockâs book from undermining oneâs
faith in McClintockâs actuality.
As to the book. The first four pages are devoted to an inflamed eulogy
of Womanâsimply woman in general, or perhaps as an institutionâ
wherein, among other compliments to her details, he pays a unique
one to her voice. He says it âfills the breast with fond alarms,
echoed by every rill.â It sounds well enough, but it is not true.
After the eulogy he takes up his real work and the novel begins.
It begins in the woods, near the village of Sunflower Hill.
Brightening clouds seemed to rise from the mist of the fair Chattahoochee,
to spread their beauty over the thick forest, to guide the hero whose
bosom beats with aspirations to conquer the enemy that would tarnish
his name, and to win back the admiration of his long-tried friend.
It seems a general remark, but it is not general; the hero mentioned
is the to-be hero of the book; and in this abrupt fashion,
and without name or description, he is shoveled into the tale.
âWith aspirations to conquer the enemy that would tarnish his nameâ
is merely a phrase flung in for the sake of the soundâlet it
not mislead the reader. No one is trying to tarnish this person;
no one has thought of it. The rest of the sentence is also merely
a phrase; the man has no friend as yet, and of course has had no
chance to try him, or win back his admiration, or disturb him in any
other way.
The hero climbs up over âSawneyâs Mountain,â and down the other side,
making for an old Indian âcastleââwhich becomes âthe red manâs hutâ
in the next sentence; and when he gets there at last, he âsurveys
with wonder and astonishmentâ the invisible structure, âwhich time
has buried in the dust, and thought to himself his happiness was
not yet complete.â One doesnât know why it wasnât, nor how near it
came to being complete, nor what was still wanting to round it up
and make it so. Maybe it was the Indian; but the book does not say.
At this point we have an episode:
Beside the shore of the brook sat a young man, about eighteen or twenty,
who seemed to be reading some favorite book, and who had a remarkably
noble countenanceâeyes which betrayed more than a common mind.
This of course made the youth a welcome guest, and gained him
friends in whatever condition of his life he might be placed.
The traveler observed that he was a well-built figure which showed
strength and
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