Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The Ambitious Guest by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Recording by Martin Reyto
One September night, a family had gathered round their hearth, and piled it high with
the drift-wood of mountain streams, the dry cones of the pine, and the splintered ruins
of great trees, that had come crashing down the precipice. Up the chimney roared the fire,
and brightened the room with its broad blaze. The faces of the father and mother had a sober
gladness; the children laughed; the eldest daughter was the image of Happiness at seventeen;
and the aged grandmother, who sat knitting in the warmest place, was the image of Happiness
grown old. They had found the "herb, heart's-ease," in the bleakest spot of all New England. This
family were situated in the Notch of the White Hills, where the wind was sharp throughout
the year, and pitilessly cold in the winter,—giving their cottage all its fresh inclemency, before
it descended on the valley of the Saco. They dwelt in a cold spot and a dangerous one;
for a mountain towered above their heads, so steep, that the stones would often rumble
down its sides, and startle them at midnight. The daughter had just uttered some simple
jest, that filled them all with mirth, when the wind came through the Notch and seemed
to pause before their cottage,—rattling the door, with a sound of wailing and lamentation,
before it passed into the valley. For a moment, it saddened them, though there was nothing
unusual in the tones. But the family were glad again, when they perceived that the latch
was lifted by some traveller, whose footsteps had been unheard amid the dreary blast, which
heralded his approach, and wailed as he was entering, and went moaning away from the door.
Though they dwelt in such a solitude, these people held daily converse with the world.
The romantic pass of the Notch is a great artery, through which the life-blood of internal
commerce is continually throbbing, between Maine on one side and the Green Mountains
and the shores of the St. Lawrence on the other. The stage-coach always drew up before
the door of the cottage. The wayfarer, with no companion but his staff, paused here to
exchange a word, that the sense of loneliness might not utterly overcome him, ere he could
pass through the cleft of the mountain, or reach the first house in the valley. And there
the teamster, on his way to Portland market, would put up for the night; and, if a bachelor,
might sit an hour beyond the usual bedtime, and steal a kiss from the mountain-maid, at
parting. It was one of those primitive taverns, where the traveller pays only for food and
lodging, but meets with a homely kindness, beyond all price. When the footsteps were
heard, therefore, between the outer door and the inner one, the whole family rose up, grandmother,
children, and all, as if about to welcome some one who belonged to them, and whose fate
was linked with theirs. The door was opened by a young man. His face
at first wore the melancholy expression, almost despondency, of one who travels a wild and
bleak road, at nightfall and alone, but soon brightened up, when he saw the kindly warmth
of his reception. He felt his heart spring forward to meet 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 smile placed the stranger on a footing of innocent familiarity with the eldest daughter.
"Ah, this fire is the right thing!" cried he; "especially when there is such a pleasant
circle round it. I am quite benumbed; for the Notch is just like the pipe of a great
pair of bellows; it has blown a terrible blast in my face, all the way from Bartlett."
"Then you are going towards Vermont?" said the master of the house, as he helped to take
a light knapsack off the young man's shoulders. "Yes; to Burlington, and far enough beyond,"
replied he. "I meant to have been at Ethan Crawford's to-night; but a pedestrian lingers
along such 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 purpose for me, and were waiting my
arrival. So I shall sit down among you, and make myself at home."
The frank-hearted stranger had just drawn his chair to the fire, when something like
a heavy footstep was heard without, rushing down the steep side of the mountain, as with
long and rapid strides, and taking such a leap, in passing the cottage, as to strike
the opposite precipice. The family held their breath, because they knew the sound, and their
guest held his, by instinct. "The old mountain has thrown a stone at us,
for fear we should forget him," said the landlord, recovering himself. "He sometimes nods his
head, and threatens to come down; but we are old neighbors, and agree together pretty well,
upon the whole. Besides, we have a sure place of refuge, hard by, if he should be coming
in good earnest." Let us now suppose the stranger to have finished
his supper of bear's meat; and, by his natural felicity of manner, to have placed himself
on a footing of kindness with the whole family, so that they talked as freely together, as
if he belonged to their mountain brood. He was of a proud, 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 like a brother or a son at the poor man's fireside. In the household
of the Notch, he found warmth and simplicity of feeling, the pervading intelligence of
New England, and a poetry of native growth, which they had gathered, when they little
thought of it, from the mountain peaks and chasms, and at the very threshold of their
romantic and dangerous abode. He had travelled far and alone; his whole life, indeed, had
been a solitary path; for, with the lofty caution of his nature, he had kept himself
apart from those who might otherwise have been his companions. The family, too, though
so kind and hospitable, had that consciousness of unity among themselves, and separation
from the world at large, which, in every domestic circle, should still keep a holy place, where
no stranger may intrude. But, this evening, a prophetic sympathy impelled the refined
and educated youth to pour out his heart before the simple mountaineers, and constrained them
to answer him with the same free confidence. And thus it should have been. Is not the kindred
of a common fate a closer tie than that of birth?
The secret of the young man's character was, a high and abstracted ambition. He could have
borne to live an undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning
desire had been transformed to hope; and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty,
that, obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway,—though not,
perhaps, while he was treading it. But, when posterity should gaze back into the gloom
of what was now the present, they would trace the brightness of his footsteps, brightening
as meaner glories faded, and confess, that a gifted one had passed from his cradle to
his tomb, with none to recognize him. "As yet," cried the stranger, his cheek glowing
and his eye flashing with enthusiasm,—"as yet, I have done nothing. Were I to vanish
from the earth to-morrow, none would know so much of me as you; that a nameless youth
came up, at nightfall, from the valley of the Saco, and opened his heart 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 the wanderer 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 amid abstracted revery, which
enabled the family to understand this young man's sentiments, though so foreign from their
own. With quick sensibility of the ludicrous, he blushed at the ardor into which he had
been betrayed. "You laugh at me," said he, taking the eldest
daughter's hand, and laughing himself. "You think my ambition as nonsensical as if I were
to freeze myself to death on the top of Mount Washington, only that people might spy at
me from the country round about. And truly, that would be a 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 is something natural in
what the young man says; and if my mind had been turned 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 certain never to come to pass." "Perhaps they may," observed the wife. "Is
the man thinking what he will do when he is a widower?"
"No, no!" cried he, repelling the idea with reproachful kindness. "When I think of your
death, Esther, I think of mine, too. But I was wishing we had a good farm, in Bartlett,
or Bethlehem, or Littleton, or some other township round the White Mountains; but not
where they could tumble on our heads. I should want to stand well with my neighbors, and
be called Squire, and sent to General Court for a term or two; for a plain, honest man
may do as much good there as a lawyer. And when I should be grown quite an old man, and
you an old woman, so as not to be long apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, and leave
you all crying around me. A slate gravestone would suit me as well as a marble one,—with
just my name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and something to let people know that I lived
an honest man and died a Christian." "There now!" exclaimed the stranger; "it is
our nature to desire a monument, be it slate, or marble, or a pillar of granite, or a glorious
memory in the universal heart of man." "We're in a strange way, to-night," said the
wife, with tears in her eyes. "They say it's a sign of something, when folks' minds go
a wandering so. Hark to the children!" They listened accordingly. The younger children
had been put to bed in another room, but with an open door between, so that they could be
heard talking busily among themselves. One and all seemed to have caught the infection
from the fireside circle, and were outvying each other in wild wishes and childish projects
of what they would do when they came to be men and women. At length, a little boy, instead
of addressing his brothers and sisters, called out to his mother.
"I'll tell you what I wish, mother," cried he. "I want you and father and grandma'm,
and all of us, and the stranger too, to start right away, and go and take a drink out of
the basin of the Flume!" Nobody could help laughing at the child's
notion of leaving a warm bed, and dragging them from a cheerful fire, to visit the basin
of the Flume,—a brook which tumbles over the precipice, deep within the Notch. The
boy had hardly spoken, when a wagon rattled along the road, and stopped a moment before
the door. It appeared to contain two or three men, who were cheering their hearts with the
rough chorus of a song, which resounded, in broken notes, between the cliffs, while the
singers hesitated whether to continue their journey, or put up here for the night.
"Father," said the girl, "they are calling you by name."
But the good man doubted whether they had really called him, and was unwilling to show
himself too solicitous of gain, by inviting people to patronize his house. He therefore
did not hurry to the door; and the lash being soon applied, the travellers plunged into
the Notch, still singing and laughing, though their music and mirth came back drearily from
the heart of the mountain. "There, mother!" cried the boy, again. "They'd
have given us a ride to the Flume." Again they laughed at the child's pertinacious
fancy for a night ramble. But it happened, that a light cloud passed over the daughter's
spirit; she looked gravely into the fire, and drew a breath that was almost a sigh.
It forced its way, in spite of a little struggle to repress it. Then starting and blushing,
she looked quickly round the circle, as if they had caught a glimpse into her ***.
The stranger asked what she had been thinking of.
"Nothing," answered she, with a downcast smile. "Only I felt lonesome just then."
"O, I have always had a gift of feeling what is in other people's hearts!" said he, half
seriously. "Shall I tell the secrets of yours? For I know what to think, when a young girl
shivers by a warm hearth, and complains of lonesomeness at her mother's side. Shall I
put these feelings into words?" "They would not be a girl's feelings any longer,
if they could be put into words," replied the mountain nymph, laughing, but avoiding
his eye. All this was said apart. Perhaps a germ of
love was springing in their hearts, so pure that it might blossom in Paradise, since it
could not be matured on earth; for women worship such gentle dignity as his; and the proud,
contemplative, yet kindly soul is oftenest captivated by simplicity like hers. But, while
they spoke softly, and he was watching the happy sadness, the lightsome shadows, the
shy yearnings of a maiden's nature, the wind, through the Notch, took a deeper and drearier
sound. It seemed, as the fanciful stranger said, like the choral strain of the spirits
of the blast, who, in old Indian times, had their dwelling among these mountains, and
made their heights and recesses a sacred region. There was a wail, along the road, as if a
funeral were passing. To chase away the gloom, the family threw pine branches on their fire,
till the dry leaves crackled and the flame arose, discovering once again a scene of peace
and humble happiness. The light hovered about them fondly, and caressed them all. There
were the little faces of the children, peeping from their bed apart, and here the father's
frame of strength, the mother's subdued and careful mien, the high-browed youth, the budding
girl, and the good old grandam, still knitting in the warmest place. The aged woman looked
up from her task, and, with fingers ever busy, was the next to speak.
"Old folks have their notions," said she, "as well as young ones. You've been wishing
and planning; and letting your heads run on one thing and another, till you've set my
mind a-wandering too. Now what should an old woman wish for, when she can go but a step
or two before she comes to her grave? Children, it will haunt me night and day, till I tell
you." "What is it, mother?" cried the husband and
wife, at once. Then the old woman, with an air of mystery,
which drew the circle closer round the fire, informed them that she had provided her graveclothes
some years before,—a nice linen shroud, a cap with a muslin ruff, and everything of
a finer sort than she had worn since her wedding-day. But, this evening, an old superstition had
strangely recurred to her. It used to be said, in her younger days, that, if anything were
amiss with a corpse, if only the ruff were not smooth, or the cap did not set right,
the corpse, in the coffin and beneath the clods, would strive to put up its cold hands
and arrange it. The bare thought made her nervous.
"Don't talk so, grandmother!" said the girl, shuddering.
"Now," continued the old woman, with singular earnestness, yet smiling strangely at her
own folly, "I want one of you, my children,—when your mother is dressed, and in the coffin,—I
want one of you to hold a looking-glass over my face. Who knows but I may take a glimpse
at myself, and see whether all's right?" "Old and young, we dream of graves and monuments,"
murmured the stranger youth. "I wonder how mariners feel, when the ship is sinking, and
they, unknown and undistinguished, are to be buried together in the ocean,—that wide
and nameless sepulchre?" For a moment, the old woman's ghastly conception
so engrossed the minds of her hearers, that a sound, abroad in the night, rising like
the roar of a blast, had grown broad, deep, and terrible, before the fated group were
conscious of it. The house, and all within it, trembled; the foundations of the earth
seemed to be shaken, as if this awful sound were the peal of the last trump. Young and
old exchanged one wild glance, and remained an instant, pale, affrighted, without utterance,
or power to move. Then the same shriek burst simultaneously from all their lips.
"The Slide! The Slide!" The simplest words must intimate, but not
portray, the unutterable horror of the catastrophe. The victims rushed from their cottage, and
sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot,—where, in contemplation of such an
emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared. Alas! they had quitted their security, and
fled right into the pathway of destruction. Down came the whole side of the mountain,
in a cataract of ruin. Just before it reached the house, the stream broke into two branches,—shivered
not a window there, but overwhelmed the whole vicinity, blocked up the road, and annihilated
everything in its dreadful course. Long ere the thunder of that great Slide had ceased
to roar among the mountains, the mortal agony had been endured, and the victims were at
peace. Their bodies were never found. The next morning, the light smoke was seen
stealing from the cottage chimney, up the mountain-side. Within, the fire was yet smouldering
on the hearth, and the chairs in a circle round it, as if the inhabitants had but gone
forth to view the devastation of the Slide, and would shortly return, to thank Heaven
for their miraculous escape. All had left separate tokens, by which those who had known
the family were made to shed a tear for each. Who has not heard their name? The story has
been told far and wide, and will forever be a legend of these mountains. Poets have sung
their fate. There were circumstances which led some to
suppose that a stranger had been received into the cottage on this awful night, and
had shared the catastrophe of all its inmates. Others denied that there were sufficient grounds
for such a conjecture. Woe, for the high-souled youth, with his dream of earthly immortality!
His name and person utterly unknown; his history, his way of life, his plans, a mystery never
to be solved; his death and his existence equally a doubt! Whose was the agony of that
death moment? End of The Ambitious Guest
by Nathaniel Hawthorne