Part 7 (1/2)
”Tell it to us, Aunt Nancy,” said Robert Dudley.
”It is too long to tell now,” said I, as the dinner-bell sounded.
”Then let us have it this evening,” urged Col. Donaldson--”for it is a subject in which I am much interested.”
Accordingly, in the evening, I gave them the ”o'er true tale” of
THE YOUNG MISANTHROPE.
”In the blue summer ocean, far off and alone,” lies a little island, known to mariners in the Pacific only for the fine water with which it supplies them, and for the bold sh.o.r.e which makes it possible for s.h.i.+ps of considerable tonnage to lie in quiet near the land. Discovered at first by accident, it has been long, for these reasons, visited both by English and American whalers. A few years since, and no trace of man's presence could be found there beyond the belt of rocks, amidst which arose the springs that were the chief, and indeed only attraction the island presented to the rough, hardy men by whom it had been visited.
But within that stony girdle lay a landscape soft and lovely as any that arose within the tropical seas. There the plantain waved its leafy crown, the orange shed its rich perfume, and bore its golden fruit aloft upon the desert air, and the light, feathery foliage of the tamarind moved gracefully to the touch of the dallying breeze. All was green, and soft, and fair, for there no winter chills the life of nature, but,
”The bee banquets on through a whole year of flowers.”
It was a scene which might have seemed created for the abode of some being too bright and good for the common earth of common men, or for some Hinda and Hafed, who, driven from a world all too harsh and evil for their n.o.bler natures, might have found in it a refuge,
”Where the bright eyes of angels only Should come around them to behold A paradise so pure and lonely.”
Alas for the dream of the poet! This beautiful island became the refuge, not of pure and loving hearts, but of one from whose nature cruel tyranny seemed to have blotted out every feeling and every faculty save hatred and fear; and he who first introduced into its yet untainted solitudes the bitter sorrows and dark pa.s.sions of humanity, was a child, who, but ten years before, had lain in all the loveliness of sinless infancy upon a mother's bosom. Of that mother's history he knew nothing--whether her sin or only her sorrows had thrown him fatherless upon the world, he was ignorant--he had only a dim memory of gentle eyes, which had looked on him as no others had ever looked, and of a low, sweet voice, speak to him such words as he had never heard from any other. He had been loved, and that love had made his life of penury in an humble hovel in England, bright and beautiful; but his mother had pa.s.sed away from earth, and with her all the light of his existence.
Child as he was, the succeeding darkness preserved long in brightness the memory of the last look from her fast glazing eyes, the last words from her dying lips, the last touch of her already death-cold hand. She died, and the same reluctant charity which consigned her to a pauper's grave, gave to her boy a dwelling in the parish poor-house. With the tender mercies of such inst.i.tutions the author of Oliver Twist has made the world acquainted. They were such in the present case, that the poor little Edward Hallett welcomed as the first glad words that had fallen on his ears for two long, weary years, the news that he was to be bound apprentice to a captain sailing from Portsmouth in a whaling s.h.i.+p. He learned rather from what was said _near_ him, than _to_ him, that this man wanted a cabin boy, but would not have one who was not bound to him, or to use the more expressive language in which it reached the ears of his destined victim, ”one with whom he could not do as he pleased.”
He who had come within the poor-house walls at six years old, a glad, rosy-cheeked, chubby child, went from them at eight, thin, and pale, and grave, with a frame broken by want and labor, a mind clouded, and a heart repressed by unkindness. But, sad as was the history of those years, the succeeding two taught the poor boy to regard them as the vanished brightness of a dream. The man--we should more justly say, the fiend--to whom the next fourteen years of his life were by bond devoted, was a savage by nature, and had been rendered yet more brutal by habits of intoxication. In his drunken orgies, his favorite pastime was to torture the unfortunate being whom the ”guardians of the poor” of an English parish had placed in his power. It would make the heart of the reader sick, were we to attempt a detail of the many horrible inventions by which this modern Caligula amused his leisure hours, and made life hideous to his victim. Nor was it only from this arch-fiend that the poor boy suffered. Mate, cook, and sailors, soon found in him a b.u.t.t for their jokes, an object on which they might safely vent their ill-humor, and a convenient cover for their own delinquencies.
He was beaten for and by them. The evil qualities which man had himself elicited from his nature, if not implanted there--the sullenness, and hardiness, and cunning he evinced, were made an excuse for further injury. During his first voyage of eighteen months, spite of all this, hope was not entirely dead in his heart. The s.h.i.+p was to return to England, and he determined to run away from her, and find his way back to the poor-house. It was a miserable refuge, but it was his only one.
He escaped--he found his way thither through many dangers--he told his story. It was heard with incredulity, and he was returned to his tormentors, to learn that there is even in h.e.l.l ”a deeper h.e.l.l.”
Again he went on a whaling voyage. Day after day the fathomless, the seemingly illimitable sea, the image of the Infinite was around him--but his darkened mind saw in it only a prison, which shut him in with his persecutors. Night after night the stars beamed peacefully above him, luring his thoughts upward, but he saw in them only the signals of drunken revelry to others, and of deeper woe to himself. There was but one wish in his heart--it had almost ceased to be a hope--to escape from man; to live and die where he should never see his form, never hear his voice. The s.h.i.+p encountered a severe storm. She was driven from her course, her voyage lengthened, and some of her water-casks were stove in. They made for an island, not far distant, by the chart, to take in a fresh supply of water. Edward Hallett heard the sailors say to each other that this island was uninhabited, and his wish grew into a pa.s.sionate desire--a hope. For the completion of this hope, he had but one resource--the sword and the s.h.i.+eld of the feeble--cunning; and well he exercised his weapon.
The s.h.i.+p lay within a quarter of a mile of the sh.o.r.e, and a boat was sent to procure water--one man remaining always to fill the empty vessels while the others returned to the s.h.i.+p with those already filled.
The best means of accomplis.h.i.+ng his purpose that occurred to the poor boy was to feign the utmost degree of terror at the lonely and unprotected situation of this man during the absence of his comrades. He spoke his terrors where he knew they would be heard by the prime author of his miseries. The result was what he had antic.i.p.ated.
”Ye're afraid, are ye, of being left there by yerself! Ye'd rather be whipped, or tied up by the thumbs, or be kept at the mast-head all night, would ye? Then, dam'me, that's just what I'll do to you. Here, hold on with that boat--take this youngster with you, and you can bring back Tom, and leave him to fill the casks for you.”
Well did the object of his tyranny act his part. He entreated, he adjured all around him to save him from so dreaded a fate--in vain, of course--for his affected agonies only riveted the determination of his tyrant. It was a new delight to see him writhe in agony, and strive to draw back from those who were urging him to the boat. He was forced in, borne to the island, and left to his task. But this was not enough. He could not escape in the broad light of day, from a spot directly under the eyes of his tormentors, while between him and the s.h.i.+p a boat was ever coming and going. Through the day he must persist in the part he had a.s.sumed. He did not fail to continue it, and when the day approached its close, he sent to the s.h.i.+p the most urgent entreaties that he might be allowed to return there before it was night. The sailors, rough and hard as they generally were to him, sympathized with his agony of fear, and asked that he might return; but his demon was now inflamed by drink, and every word in favor of his pet.i.tion insured its rejection. He even made the unusual exertion of going up himself in the last boat, that he might see the victim of his malice, and feast his ears with the cries and objurgations which terror would wring from him.
”If we should forget you in the morning, you can take the next homeward bound s.h.i.+p that stops here, but don't tell your friends at the poor-house too bad a tale of us,” were the parting words of this wretch.
Darkness and silence were around the desolate boy, but they brought no fear with them. Man, his enemy, was not there. He saw not the beauty of the heavens, from which the stars looked down on him in their unchanged serenity, or of the earth, where flowers were springing at his feet, and graceful shrubs were waving over him. He heard not the deep-toned sea uttering its solemn music, or the breeze whispering its softer notes in his ear. He only saw the s.h.i.+p, the abode of men, fading into indistinctness, as the darkness threw its veil over it; he only heard the voice in his heart, proclaiming ever and again, ”I am free.” Before the morrow dawned, he had surmounted the rocks at the landing place, and wandered on with no aim, but to put as great a distance as possible between him and the s.h.i.+p. Two hours' walking brought him again to the sea, in an opposite direction to that by which he had approached the island. Here he crawled into a hiding-place among the rocks, and lay down to rest. The day was again declining before he ventured forth from his covert, and cautiously approached the distant sh.o.r.e, whence he might see the s.h.i.+p. He reached the spring by which he had stood yester eve, when his companions parted from him, with something like pity stirring in the hearts of all but one among them. Fearfully he looked around--before him--but no shadow on the earth, no sail upon the pathless sea, told of man's presence. He was alone--alone indeed, for the beauty of Nature aroused no emotion in his withered heart, and he held no communion with Nature's G.o.d. He was indeed an orphaned soul.
Could he have loved, had it been but a simple flower, he would have felt something of the joy of life; but the very power of love seemed to have been crushed from his heart, by years of cold neglect and harsh unkindness.
Weeks, months pa.s.sed, without any event that might awaken the young solitary from his torpor. By day, he roved through the island, or lay listlessly under the shadow of a tree; by night, he slept beneath the rocks which had first sheltered him; while the fruits, that grew and ripened without his care, gave him food. Thus he lived a merely animal life, his strongest sensation one of satisfaction for his relief from positive suffering, but with nothing that could be called joy in the present, and with no hope for the future; one to whom G.o.d had given an immortal spirit, capable of infinite elevation in the scale of intelligence and happiness, and whom man had pressed down to--ay, below--the level of the brutes, which sported away their brief existence at his side. Such tyranny as he had experienced, is rare; but its results may well give an impressive, a fearful lesson, to those to whom are committed the destinies of a being unconnected with them by any of those ties which awaken tenderness, and call forth indulgence in the sternest minds. Let them beware, lest the ”iron rule” crush out the life of the young heart, and darken the intellect by extinguis.h.i.+ng the light of hope.
Terrible was the retribution which his crimes wrought out for the author of our young hero's miseries. When he received the intelligence from the men whom he had sent in the morning to bring him from the island, that he was nowhere to be found, he read in their countenance what his own heart was ready to repeat to him, that he was his murderer; for neither they nor he doubted that the terrified boy had rushed into the sea, and been drowned in the effort to escape the horrors raised by his wild and superst.i.tious fancy. From that hour his persecutor suffered tortures as great as his bitterest enemies could have desired to inflict on him. The images which drove him with increased eagerness to the bottle, became more vivid and terrific under the influence of intoxication. He drank deeper and deeper, in the vain hope to banish them, and died ere many months had pa.s.sed, shouting, in his last moments, alternate prayers and curses to the imagined form of him whom he supposed the hope of revenge had conjured from the ocean grave to which his cruelties had consigned him.
Five months pa.s.sed over Edward Hallett, in the dead calm of an existence agitated by neither hope nor fear. The calm was broken one evening by the sight of a seaman, drawing water from the spring which had brought his former companions to the island. As he came in sight, the man turned his head, and stood for an instant spell-bound by the unexpected vision of a human being on that island, whose matted locks and tattered garments spoke the extreme of misery. There was only one hope for the sad wild boy--it was in flight--and turning, he ran swiftly back; but the path was strewn with rocks, and, in his haste, he stumbled and fell.
In a moment his pursuer stood beside him, acclaiming in a coa.r.s.e, but kindly meant language:--
”What the devil are you runnin' away from me for, youngster?--I'm sure I wouldn't hurt ye--but get up, and tell us what you're doing here, and where ye've come from.”