第4章

The moon was bright on high; the blue firmament appeared to glowwith an inherent brightness; the greater stars were burning in theirspheres; the northern lights threw their mysterious glare far over thehorizon; the few small clouds aloft were burdened with radiance; butthe sky, with all its variety of light, was scarcely so brilliant asthe earth. The rain of the preceding night had frozen as it fell, and,by that simple magic, had wrought wonders. The trees were hung withdiamonds and many-colored gems; the houses were overlaid withsilver, and the streets paved with slippery brightness; a frigid glorywas flung over all familiar things, from the cottage chimney to thesteeple of the meetinghouse, that gleamed upward to the sky. Thisliving world, where we sit by our firesides, or go forth to meetbeings like ourselves, seemed rather the creation of wizard power,with so much of the resemblance to known objects that a man mightshudder at the ghostly shape of his old beloved dwelling, and theshadow of a ghostly tree before his door. One looked to beholdinhabitants suited to such a town, glittering in icy garments, withthe motionless features, cold, sparkling eyes, and just sensationenough in their frozen hearts to shiver at each other's presence.

By this fantastic piece of description, and more in the same style,I intended to throw a ghostly glimmer round the reader, so that hisimagination might view the town through a medium that should takeoff its every-day aspect, and make it a proper theatre for so wild ascene as the final one. Amid this unearthly show, the wretched brotherand sister were represented as setting forth, at midnight, through thegleaming streets, and directing their steps to a graveyard, whereall the dead had been laid, from the first corpse in that ancienttown, to the murdered man who was buried three days before. As theywent, they seemed to see the wizard gliding by their sides, or walkingdimly on the path before them. But here I paused, and gazed into thefaces of my two fair auditors, to judge whether, even on the hillwhere so many had been brought to death by wilder tales than this, Imight venture to proceed. Their bright eyes were fixed on me; theirlips apart. I took courage, and led the fated pair to a new-madegrave, where for a few moments, in the bright and silent midnight,they stood alone. But suddenly there was a multitude of people amongthe graves.

Each family tomb had given up its inhabitants, who, one by one,through distant years, had been borne to its dark chamber, but nowcame forth and stood in a pale group together. There was the grayancestor, the aged mother, and all their descendants, some witheredand full of years, like themselves, and others in their prime;there, too, were the children who went prattling to the tomb, andthere the maiden who yielded her early beauty to death's embrace,before passion had polluted it. Husbands and wives arose, who had lainmany years side by side, and young mothers who had forgotten to kisstheir first babes, though pillowed so long on their bosoms. Many hadbeen buried in the habiliments of life, and still wore their ancientgarb; some were old defenders of the infant colony, and gleamedforth in their steel-caps and bright breast-plates, as if startingup at an Indian war-cry; other venerable shapes had been pastors ofthe church, famous among the New England clergy, and now leaned withhands clasped over their gravestones, ready to call the congregationto prayer. There stood the early settlers, those old illustrious ones,the heroes of tradition and fireside legends, the men of history whosefeatures had been so long beneath the sod that few alive could haveremembered them. There, too, were faces of former townspeople, dimlyrecollected from childhood, and others, whom Leonard and Alice hadwept in later years, but who now were most terrible of all, by theirghastly smile of recognition. All, in short, were there; the dead ofother generations, whose moss-grown names could scarce be read upontheir tombstones, and their successors, whose graves were not yetgreen; all whom black funerals had followed slowly thither nowreappeared where the mourners left them. Yet none but souls accursedwere there, and fiends counterfeiting the likeness of departed saints.

The countenances of those venerable men, whose very features hadbeen hallowed by lives of piety, were contorted now by intolerablepain or hellish passion, and now by an unearthly and derisivemerriment. Had the pastors prayed, all saintlike as they seemed, ithad been blasphemy. The chaste matrons, too, and the maidens withuntasted lips, who had slept in their virgin graves apart from allother dust, now wore a look from which the two trembling mortalsshrank, as if the unimaginable sin of twenty worlds were collectedthere. The faces of fond lovers, even of such as had pined into thetomb, because there their treasure was, were bent on one anotherwith glances of hatred and smiles of bitter scorn, passions that areto devils what love is to the blest. At times, the features of thosewho had passed from a holy life to heaven would vary to and fro,between their assumed aspect and the fiendish lineaments whence theyhad been transformed. The whole miserable multitude, both sinfulsouls and false spectres of good men, groaned horribly and gnashedtheir teeth, as they looked upward to the calm loveliness of themidnight sky, and beheld those homes of bliss where they must neverdwell. Such was the apparition, though too shadowy for language toportray; for here would be the moonbeams on the ice, glitteringthrough a warrior's breast-plate, and there the letters of atombstone, on the form that stood before it; and whenever a breezewent by, it swept the old men's hoary heads, the women's fearfulbeauty, and all the unreal throng, into one indistinguishable cloudtogether.