Twice Told Tales

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

  FANCY'S SHOW-BOX.

  A MORALITY.

  What is guilt? A stain upon the soul. And it is a point of vastinterest whether the soul may contract such stains in all their depthand flagrancy from deeds which may have been plotted and resolvedupon, but which physically have never had existence. Must the fleshlyhand and visible frame of man set its seal to the evil designs of thesoul, in order to give them their entire validity against the sinner?Or, while none but crimes perpetrated are cognizable before an earthlytribunal, will guilty thoughts--of which guilty deeds are no more thanshadows,--will these draw down the full weight of a condemningsentence in the supreme court of eternity? In the solitude of amidnight chamber or in a desert afar from men or in a church while thebody is kneeling the soul may pollute itself even with those crimeswhich we are accustomed to deem altogether carnal. If this be true, itis a fearful truth.

  Let us illustrate the subject by an imaginary example. A venerablegentleman--one Mr. Smith--who had long been regarded as a pattern ofmoral excellence was warming his aged blood with a glass or two ofgenerous wine. His children being gone forth about their worldlybusiness and his grandchildren at school, he sat alone in a deepluxurious arm-chair with his feet beneath a richly-carved mahoganytable. Some old people have a dread of solitude, and when bettercompany may not be had rejoice even to hear the quiet breathing of ababe asleep upon the carpet. But Mr. Smith, whose silver hair was thebright symbol of a life unstained except by such spots as areinseparable from human nature--he had no need of a babe to protect himby its purity, nor of a grown person to stand between him and his ownsoul. Nevertheless, either manhood must converse with age, orwomanhood must soothe him with gentle cares, or infancy must sportaround his chair, or his thoughts will stray into the misty region ofthe past and the old man be chill and sad. Wine will not always cheerhim.

  Such might have been the case with Mr. Smith, when, through thebrilliant medium of his glass of old Madeira, he beheld three figuresentering the room. These were Fancy, who had assumed the garb andaspect of an itinerant showman, with a box of pictures on her back;and Memory, in the likeness of a clerk, with a pen behind her ear, aninkhorn at her buttonhole and a huge manuscript volume beneath herarm; and lastly, behind the other two, a person shrouded in a duskymantle which concealed both face and form. But Mr. Smith had a shrewdidea that it was Conscience. How kind of Fancy, Memory and Conscienceto visit the old gentleman just as he was beginning to imagine thatthe wine had neither so bright a sparkle nor so excellent a flavor aswhen himself and the liquor were less aged! Through the dim length ofthe apartment, where crimson curtains muffled the glare of sunshineand created a rich obscurity, the three guests drew near thesilver-haired old man. Memory, with a finger between the leaves of herhuge volume, placed herself at his right hand; Conscience, with herface still hidden in the dusky mantle, took her station on the left,so as to be next his heart; while Fancy set down her picture-box uponthe table with the magnifying-glass convenient to his eye.

  We can sketch merely the outlines of two or three out of the manypictures which at the pulling of a string successively peopled the boxwith the semblances of living scenes. One was a moonlight picture, inthe background a lowly dwelling, and in front, partly shadowed by atree, yet besprinkled with flakes of radiance, two youthful figures,male and female. The young man stood with folded arms, a haughty smileupon his lip and a gleam of triumph in his eye as he glanced downwardat the kneeling girl. She was almost prostrate at his feet, evidentlysinking under a weight of shame and anguish which hardly allowed herto lift her clasped hands in supplication. Her eyes she could notlift. But neither her agony, nor the lovely features on which it wasdepicted, nor the slender grace of the form which it convulsed,appeared to soften the obduracy of the young man. He was thepersonification of triumphant scorn.

  Now, strange to say, as old Mr. Smith peeped through themagnifying-glass, which made the objects start out from the canvaswith magical deception, he began to recognize the farmhouse, the treeand both the figures of the picture. The young man in times long pasthad often met his gaze within the looking-glass; the girl was the veryimage of his first love--his cottage-love, his Martha Burroughs. Mr.Smith was scandalized. "Oh, vile and slanderous picture!" he exclaims."When have I triumphed over ruined innocence? Was not Martha wedded inher teens to David Tomkins, who won her girlish love and long enjoyedher affection as a wife? And ever since his death she has lived areputable widow!"

  Meantime, Memory was turning over the leaves of her volume, rustlingthem to and fro with uncertain fingers, until among the earlier pagesshe found one which had reference to this picture. She reads it closeto the old gentleman's ear: it is a record merely of sinful thoughtwhich never was embodied in an act, but, while Memory is reading,Conscience unveils her face and strikes a dagger to the heart of Mr.Smith. Though not a death-blow, the torture was extreme.

  The exhibition proceeded. One after another Fancy displayed herpictures, all of which appeared to have been painted by some maliciousartist on purpose to vex Mr. Smith. Not a shadow of proof could havebeen adduced in any earthly court that he was guilty of the slightestof those sins which were thus made to stare him in the face. In onescene there was a table set out, with several bottles and glasses halffilled with wine, which threw back the dull ray of an expiring lamp.There had been mirth and revelry until the hand of the clock stoodjust at midnight, when Murder stepped between the boon-companions. Ayoung man had fallen on the floor, and lay stone dead with a ghastlywound crushed into his temple, while over him, with a delirium ofmingled rage and horror in his countenance, stood the youthfullikeness of Mr. Smith. The murdered youth wore the features of EdwardSpencer. "What does this rascal of a painter mean?" cries Mr. Smith,provoked beyond all patience. "Edward Spencer was my earliest anddearest friend, true to me as I to him through more than half acentury. Neither I nor any other ever murdered him. Was he not alivewithin five years, and did he not, in token of our long friendship,bequeath me his gold-headed cane and a mourning-ring?"

  Again had Memory been turning over her volume, and fixed at lengthupon so confused a page that she surely must have scribbled it whenshe was tipsy. The purport was, however, that while Mr. Smith andEdward Spencer were heating their young blood with wine a quarrel hadflashed up between them, and Mr. Smith, in deadly wrath, had flung abottle at Spencer's head. True, it missed its aim and merely smashed alooking-glass; and the next morning, when the incident was imperfectlyremembered, they had shaken hands with a hearty laugh. Yet, again,while Memory was reading, Conscience unveiled her face, struck adagger to the heart of Mr. Smith and quelled his remonstrance with heriron frown. The pain was quite excruciating.

  Some of the pictures had been painted with so doubtful a touch, andin colors so faint and pale, that the subjects could barely beconjectured. A dull, semi-transparent mist had been thrown over thesurface of the canvas, into which the figures seemed to vanish whilethe eye sought most earnestly to fix them. But in every scene, howeverdubiously portrayed, Mr. Smith was invariably haunted by his ownlineaments at various ages as in a dusty mirror. After poring severalminutes over one of these blurred and almost indistinguishablepictures, he began to see that the painter had intended to representhim, now in the decline of life, as stripping the clothes from thebacks of three half-starved children. "Really, this puzzles me!" quothMr. Smith, with the irony of conscious rectitude. "Asking pardon ofthe painter, I pronounce him a fool as well as a scandalous knave. Aman of my standing in the world to be robbing little children of theirclothes! Ridiculous!"

  But while he spoke Memory had searched her fatal volume and found apage which with her sad calm voice she poured into his ear. It was notaltogether inapplicable to the misty scene. It told how Mr. Smith hadbeen grievously tempted by many devilish sophistries, on the ground ofa legal quibble, to commence a lawsuit against three orphan-children,joint-heirs to a considerable estate. Fortunately, before he was quitedecided, his claims had turned out nearly as devoid of law as justice.As Memory ceased to read C
onscience again thrust aside her mantle, andwould have struck her victim with the envenomed dagger only that hestruggled and clasped his hands before his heart. Even then, however,he sustained an ugly gash.

  Why should we follow Fancy through the whole series of those awfulpictures? Painted by an artist of wondrous power and terribleacquaintance with the secret soul, they embodied the ghosts of all thenever-perpetrated sins that had glided through the lifetime of Mr.Smith. And could such beings of cloudy fantasy, so near akin tonothingness, give valid evidence against him at the day of judgment?Be that the case or not, there is reason to believe that one trulypenitential tear would have washed away each hateful picture and leftthe canvas white as snow. But Mr. Smith, at a prick of Conscience tookeen to be endured, bellowed aloud with impatient agony, and suddenlydiscovered that his three guests were gone. There he sat alone, asilver-haired and highly-venerated old man, in the rich gloom of thecrimsoned-curtained room, with no box of pictures on the table, butonly a decanter of most excellent Madeira. Yet his heart still seemedto fester with the venom of the dagger.

  Nevertheless, the unfortunate old gentleman might have argued thematter with Conscience and alleged many reasons wherefore she shouldnot smite him so pitilessly. Were we to take up his cause, it shouldbe somewhat in the following fashion. A scheme of guilt, till it beput in execution, greatly resembles a train of incidents in aprojected tale. The latter, in order to produce a sense of reality inthe reader's mind, must be conceived with such proportionate strengthby the author as to seem in the glow of fancy more like truth, past,present or to come, than purely fiction. The prospective sinner, onthe other hand, weaves his plot of crime, but seldom or never feels aperfect certainty that it will be executed. There is a dreaminessdiffused about his thoughts; in a dream, as it were, he strikes thedeath-blow into his victim's heart and starts to find an indelibleblood-stain on his hand. Thus a novel-writer or a dramatist, increating a villain of romance and fitting him with evil deeds, and thevillain of actual life in projecting crimes that will be perpetrated,may almost meet each other halfway between reality and fancy. It isnot until the crime is accomplished that Guilt clenches its gripe uponthe guilty heart and claims it for his own. Then, and not before, sinis actually felt and acknowledged, and, if unaccompanied by repentance,grows a thousandfold more virulent by its self-consciousness. Be itconsidered, also, that men often overestimate their capacity for evil.At a distance, while its attendant circumstances do not press upontheir notice and its results are dimly seen, they can bear tocontemplate it. They may take the steps which lead to crime, impelledby the same sort of mental action as in working out a mathematicalproblem, yet be powerless with compunction at the final moment. Theyknew not what deed it was that they deemed themselves resolved to do.In truth, there is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and fullresolve, either for good or evil, except at the very moment ofexecution. Let us hope, therefore, that all the dreadful consequencesof sin will not be incurred unless the act have set its seal upon thethought.

  Yet, with the slight fancy-work which we have framed, some sad andawful truths are interwoven. Man must not disclaim his brotherhoodeven with the guiltiest, since, though his hand be clean, his hearthas surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity. He mustfeel that when he shall knock at the gate of heaven no semblance of anunspotted life can entitle him to entrance there. Penitence must kneeland Mercy come from the footstool of the throne, or that golden gatewill never open.