THE AMBITIOUS GUEST

Sketches from Memory

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

THE AMBITIOUS GUEST, SKETCHES FROM MEMORY by Nathaniel Hawthorne

One September night a family had gathered round their hearth, and
piled it high with the driftwood 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 {n 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 here 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 tonight; 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 tomorrow, 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 reverie, 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, tonight,' 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 bosom. The stranger asked what
she had been thinking of.

'Nothing,' answered she, with a downcast smile. 'Only I felt lonesome
just then.'

'Oh, 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 grave-
clothes 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 the 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?