Twice Told Tales

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

  IV.

  OLD ESTHER DUDLEY.

  Our host having resumed the chair, he as well as Mr. Tiffany andmyself expressed much eagerness to be made acquainted with the storyto which the loyalist had alluded. That venerable man first of all sawlit to moisten his throat with another glass of wine, and then,turning his face toward our coal-fire, looked steadfastly for a fewmoments into the depths of its cheerful glow. Finally he poured fortha great fluency of speech. The generous liquid that he had imbibed,while it warmed his age-chilled blood, likewise took off the chillfrom his heart and mind, and gave him an energy to think and feelwhich we could hardly have expected to find beneath the snows offourscore winters. His feelings, indeed, appeared to me more excitablethan those of a younger man--or, at least, the same degree of feelingmanifested itself by more visible effects than if his judgment andwill had possessed the potency of meridian life. At the patheticpassages of his narrative he readily melted into tears. When a breathof indignation swept across his spirit, the blood flushed his witheredvisage even to the roots of his white hair, and he shook his clinchedfist at the trio of peaceful auditors, seeming to fancy enemies inthose who felt very kindly toward the desolate old soul. But ever andanon, sometimes in the midst of his most earnest talk, this ancientperson's intellect would wander vaguely, losing its hold of the matterin hand and groping for it amid misty shadows. Then would he cackleforth a feeble laugh and express a doubt whether his wits--for by thatphrase it pleased our ancient friend to signify his mentalpowers--were not getting a little the worse for wear.

  Under these disadvantages, the old loyalist's story required morerevision to render it fit for the public eye than those of the serieswhich have preceded it; nor should it be concealed that the sentimentand tone of the affair may have undergone some slight--or perchancemore than slight--metamorphosis in its transmission to the readerthrough the medium of a thoroughgoing democrat. The tale itself is amere sketch with no involution of plot nor any great interest ofevents, yet possessing, if I have rehearsed it aright, that pensiveinfluence over the mind which the shadow of the old Province Houseflings upon the loiterer in its court-yard.

  * * * * *

  The hour had come--the hour of defeat and humiliation--when SirWilliam Howe was to pass over the threshold of the province-house andembark, with no such triumphal ceremonies as he once promised himself,on board the British fleet. He bade his servants and militaryattendants go before him, and lingered a moment in the loneliness ofthe mansion to quell the fierce emotions that struggled in his bosomas with a death-throb. Preferable then would he have deemed his fatehad a warrior's death left him a claim to the narrow territory of agrave within the soil which the king had given him to defend. With anominous perception that as his departing footsteps echoed adown thestaircase the sway of Britain was passing for ever from New England,he smote his clenched hand on his brow and cursed the destiny that hadflung the shame of a dismembered empire upon him.

  "Would to God," cried he, hardly repressing his tears of rage, "thatthe rebels were even now at the doorstep! A blood-stain upon the floorshould then bear testimony that the last British ruler was faithful tohis trust."

  The tremulous voice of a woman replied to his exclamation.

  "Heaven's cause and the king's are one," it said. "Go forth, SirWilliam Howe, and trust in Heaven to bring back a royal governor intriumph."

  Subduing at once the passion to which he had yielded only in the faiththat it was unwitnessed, Sir William Howe became conscious that anaged woman leaning on a gold-headed staff was standing betwixt him andthe door. It was old Esther Dudley, who had dwelt almost immemorialyears in this mansion, until her presence seemed as inseparable fromit as the recollections of its history. She was the daughter of anancient and once eminent family which had fallen into poverty anddecay and left its last descendant no resource save the bounty of theking, nor any shelter except within the walls of the province-house.An office in the household with merely nominal duties had beenassigned to her as a pretext for the payment of a small pension, thegreater part of which she expended in adorning herself with an antiquemagnificence of attire. The claims of Esther Dudley's gentle bloodwere acknowledged by all the successive governors, and they treatedher with the punctilious courtesy which it was her foible to demand,not always with success, from a neglectful world. The only actualshare which she assumed in the business of the mansion was to glidethrough its passages and public chambers late at night to see that theservants had dropped no fire from their flaring torches nor leftembers crackling and blazing on the hearths. Perhaps it was thisinvariable custom of walking her rounds in the hush of midnight thatcaused the superstition of the times to invest the old woman withattributes of awe and mystery, fabling that she had entered the portalof the province-house--none knew whence--in the train of the firstroyal governor, and that it was her fate to dwell there till the lastshould have departed.

  But Sir William Howe, if he ever heard this legend, had forgotten it.

  "Mistress Dudley, why are you loitering here?" asked he, with someseverity of tone. "It is my pleasure to be the last in this mansion ofthe king."

  "Not so, if it please Your Excellency," answered the time-strickenwoman. "This roof has sheltered me long; I will not pass from it untilthey bear me to the tomb of my forefathers. What other shelter isthere for old Esther Dudley save the province-house or the grave?"

  "Now, Heaven forgive me!" said Sir William Howe to himself. "I wasabout to leave this wretched old creature to starve or beg.--Takethis, good Mistress Dudley," he added, putting a purse into her hands."King George's head on these golden guineas is sterling yet, and willcontinue so, I warrant you, even should the rebels crown John Hancocktheir king. That purse will buy a better shelter than theprovince-house can now afford."

  "While the burden of life remains upon me I will have no other shelterthan this roof," persisted Esther Dudley, striking her stuff upon thefloor with a gesture that expressed immovable resolve; "and when YourExcellency returns in triumph, I will totter into the porch to welcomeyou."

  "My poor old friend!" answered the British general, and all his manlyand martial pride could no longer restrain a gush of bitter tears."This is an evil hour for you and me. The province which the kingentrusted to my charge is lost. I go hence in misfortune--perchance indisgrace--to return no more. And you, whose present being isincorporated with the past, who have seen governor after governor instately pageantry ascend these steps, whose whole life has been anobservance of majestic ceremonies and a worship of the king,--how willyou endure the change? Come with us; bid farewell to a land that hasshaken off its allegiance, and live still under a royal government atHalifax."

  "Never! never!" said the pertinacious old dame. "Here will I abide,and King George shall still have one true subject in his disloyalprovince."

  "Beshrew the old fool!" muttered Sir William Howe, growing impatientof her obstinacy and ashamed of the emotion into which he had beenbetrayed. "She is the very moral of old-fashioned prejudice, and couldexist nowhere but in this musty edifice.--Well, then, Mistress Dudley,since you will needs tarry, I give the province-house in charge toyou. Take this key, and keep it safe until myself or some other royalgovernor shall demand it of you." Smiling bitterly at himself and her,he took the heavy key of the province-house, and, delivering it intothe old lady's hands, drew his clonk around him for departure.

  As the general glanced back at Esther Dudley's antique figure hedeemed her well fitted for such a charge, as being so perfect arepresentative of the decayed past--of an age gone by, with itsmanners, opinions, faith and feelings all fallen into oblivion orscorn, of what had once been a reality, but was now merely a vision offaded magnificence. Then Sir William Howe strode forth, smiting hisclenched hands together in the fierce anguish of his spirit, and oldEsther Dudley was left to keep watch in the lonely province-house,dwelling there with Memory; and if Hope ever seemed to flit aroundher, still it was Memory in disguise.

  The total c
hange of affairs that ensued on the departure of theBritish troops did not drive the venerable lady from her stronghold.There was not for many years afterward a governor of Massachusetts,and the magistrates who had charge of such matters saw no objection toEsther Dudley's residence in the province-house, especially as theymust otherwise have paid a hireling for taking care of the premises,which with her was a labor of love; and so they left her theundisturbed mistress of the old historic edifice. Many and strangewere the fables which the gossips whispered about her in all thechimney-corners of the town.

  Among the time-worn articles of furniture that had been left in themansion, there was a tall antique mirror which was well worthy of atale by itself, and perhaps may hereafter be the theme of one. Thegold of its heavily-wrought frame was tarnished, and its surface soblurred that the old woman's figure, whenever she paused before it,looked indistinct and ghostlike. But it was the general belief thatEsther could cause the governors of the overthrown dynasty, with thebeautiful ladies who had once adorned their festivals, the Indianchiefs who had come up to the province-house to hold council or swearallegiance, the grim provincial warriors, the severe clergymen--inshort, all the pageantry of gone days, all the figures that ever sweptacross the broad-plate of glass in former times,--she could cause thewhole to reappear and people the inner world of the mirror withshadows of old life. Such legends as these, together with thesingularity of her isolated existence, her age and the infirmity thateach added winter flung upon her, made Mistress Dudley the object bothof fear and pity, and it was partly the result of either sentimentthat, amid all the angry license of the times, neither wrong norinsult ever fell upon her unprotected head. Indeed, there was so muchhaughtiness in her demeanor toward intruders--among whom she reckonedall persons acting under the new authorities--that it was really anaffair of no small nerve to look her in the face. And, to do thepeople justice, stern republicans as they had now become, they werewell content that the old gentlewoman, in her hoop-petticoat and fadedembroidery, should still haunt the palace of ruined pride andoverthrown power, the symbol of a departed system, embodying a historyin her person. So Esther Dudley dwelt year after year in theprovince-house, still reverencing all that others had flung aside,still faithful to her king, who, so long as the venerable dame yetheld her post, might be said to retain one true subject in New Englandand one spot of the empire that had been wrested from him.

  And did she dwell there in utter loneliness? Rumor said, "Not so."Whenever her chill and withered heart desired warmth, she was wont tosummon a black slave of Governor Shirley's from the blurred mirror andsend him in search of guests who had long ago been familiar in thosedeserted chambers. Forth went the sable messenger, with the starlightor the moonshine gleaming through him, and did his errand in theburial-grounds, knocking at the iron doors of tombs or upon the marbleslabs that covered them, and whispering to those within, "My mistress,old Esther Dudley, bids you to the province-house at midnight;" andpunctually as the clock of the Old South told twelve came the shadowsof the Olivers, the Hutchinsons, the Dudleys--all the grandees of abygone generation--gliding beneath the portal into the well-knownmansion, where Esther mingled with them as if she likewise were ashade. Without vouching for the truth of such traditions, it iscertain that Mistress Dudley sometimes assembled a few of the stanchthough crestfallen old Tories who had lingered in the rebel townduring those days of wrath and tribulation. Out of a cobwebbed bottlecontaining liquor that a royal governor might have smacked his lipsover they quaffed healths to the king and babbled treason to therepublic, feeling as if the protecting shadow of the throne were stillflung around them. But, draining the last drops of their liquor, theystole timorously homeward, and answered not again if the rude mobreviled them in the street.

  Yet Esther Dudley's most frequent and favored guests were the childrenof the town. Toward them she was never stern. A kindly and lovingnature hindered elsewhere from its free course by a thousand rockyprejudices lavished itself upon these little ones. By bribes ofgingerbread of her own making, stamped with a royal crown, she temptedtheir sunny sportiveness beneath the gloomy portal of theprovince-house, and would often beguile them to spend a whole play-daythere, sitting in a circle round the verge of her hoop-petticoat,greedily attentive to her stories of a dead world. And when theselittle boys and girls stole forth again from the dark, mysteriousmansion, they went bewildered, full of old feelings that graver peoplehad long ago forgotten, rubbing their eyes at the world around them asif they had gone astray into ancient times and become children of thepast. At home, when their parents asked where they had loitered such aweary while and with whom they had been at play, the children wouldtalk of all the departed worthies of the province as far back asGovernor Belcher and the haughty dame of Sir William Phipps. It wouldseem as though they had been sitting on the knees of these famouspersonages, whom the grave had hidden for half a century, and hadtoyed with the embroidery of their rich waistcoats or roguishly pulledthe long curls of their flowing wigs. "But Governor Belcher has beendead this many a year," would the mother say to her little boy. "Anddid you really see him at the province-house?"--"Oh yes, dearmother--yes!" the half-dreaming child would answer. "But when oldEsther had done speaking about him, he faded away out of his chair."Thus, without affrighting her little guests, she led them by the handinto the chambers of her own desolate heart and made childhood's fancydiscern the ghosts that haunted there.

  Living so continually in her own circle of ideas, and never regulatingher mind by a proper reference to present things, Esther Dudleyappears to have grown partially crazed. It was found that she had noright sense of the progress and true state of the Revolutionary war,but held a constant faith that the armies of Britain were victoriouson every field and destined to be ultimately triumphant. Whenever thetown rejoiced for a battle won by Washington or Gates or Morgan orGreene, the news, in passing through the door of the province-house asthrough the ivory gate of dreams, became metamorphosed into a strangetale of the prowess of Howe, Clinton or Cornwallis. Sooner or later,it was her invincible belief, the colonies would be prostrate at thefootstool of the king. Sometimes she seemed to take for granted thatsuch was already the case. On one occasion she startled thetownspeople by a brilliant illumination of the province-house withcandles at every pane of glass and a transparency of the king'sinitials and a crown of light in the great balcony-window. The figureof the aged woman in the most gorgeous of her mildewed velvets andbrocades was seen passing from casement to casement, until she pausedbefore the balcony and flourished a huge key above her head. Herwrinkled visage actually gleamed with triumph, as if the soul withinher were a festal lamp.

  "What means this blaze of light? What does old Esther's joy portend?"whispered a spectator. "It is frightful to, see her gliding about thechambers and rejoicing there without a soul to bear her company."

  "It is as if she were making merry in a tomb," said another.

  "Pshaw! It is no such mystery," observed an old man, after some briefexercise of memory. "Mistress Dudley is keeping jubilee for the kingof England's birthday."

  Then the people laughed aloud, and would have thrown mud against theblazing transparency of the king's crown and initials, only that theypitied the poor old dame who was so dismally triumphant amid the wreckand ruin of the system to which she appertained.

  Oftentimes it was her custom to climb the weary staircase that woundupward to the cupola, and thence strain her dimmed eyesight seawardand countryward, watching for a British fleet or for the march of agrand procession with the king's banner floating over it. Thepassengers in the street below would discern her anxious visage andsend up a shout: "When the golden Indian on the province-house shallshoot his arrow, and when the cock on the Old South spire shall crow,then look for a royal governor again!" for this had grown a by-wordthrough the town. And at last, after long, long years, old EstherDudley knew--or perchance she only dreamed--that a royal governor wason the eve of returning to the province-house to receive the heavy keywhich Sir William Howe had
committed to her charge. Now, it was thefact that intelligence bearing some faint analogy to Esther's versionof it was current among the townspeople. She set the mansion in thebest order that her means allowed, and, arraying herself in silks andtarnished gold, stood long before the blurred mirror to admire her ownmagnificence. As she gazed the gray and withered lady moved her ashenlips, murmuring half aloud, talking to shapes that she saw within themirror, to shadows of her own fantasies, to the household friends ofmemory, and bidding them rejoice with her and come forth to meet thegovernor. And while absorbed in this communion Mistress Dudley heardthe tramp of many footsteps in the street, and, looking out at thewindow, beheld what she construed as the royal governor's arrival.

  "Oh, happy day! Oh, blessed, blessed hour!" she exclaimed. "Let me butbid him welcome within the portal, and my task in the province-houseand on earth is done." Then, with tottering feet which age andtremulous joy caused to tread amiss, she hurried down the grandstaircase, her silks sweeping and rustling as she went; so that thesound was as if a train of special courtiers were thronging from thedim mirror.

  And Esther Dudley fancied that as soon as the wide door should beflung open all the pomp and splendor of bygone times would pacemajestically into the province-house and the gilded tapestry of thepast would be brightened by the sunshine of the present. She turnedthe key, withdrew it from the lock, unclosed the door and steppedacross the threshold. Advancing up the court-yard appeared a person ofmost dignified mien, with tokens, as Esther interpreted them, ofgentle blood, high rank and long-accustomed authority even in his walkand every gesture. He was richly dressed, but wore a gouty shoe,which, however, did not lessen the stateliness of his gait. Around andbehind him were people in plain civic dresses and two or threewar-worn veterans--evidently officers of rank--arrayed in a uniform ofblue and buff. But Esther Dudley, firm in the belief that had fastenedits roots about her heart, beheld only the principal personage, andnever doubted that this was the long-looked-for governor to whom shewas to surrender up her charge. As he approached she involuntarilysank down on her knees and tremblingly held forth the heavy key.

  "Receive my trust! Take it quickly," cried she, "for methinks Death isstriving to snatch away my triumph. But he conies too late. ThankHeaven for this blessed hour! God save King George!"

  "That, madam, is a strange prayer to be offered up at such a moment,"replied the unknown guest of the province-house, and, courteouslyremoving his hat, he offered his arm to raise the aged woman. "Yet, inreverence for your gray hairs and long-kept faith, Heaven forbid thatany here should say you nay. Over the realms which still acknowledgehis sceptre, God save King George!"

  Esther Dudley started to her feet, and, hastily clutching back thekey, gazed with fearful earnestness at the stranger, and dimly anddoubtfully, as if suddenly awakened from a dream, her bewildered eyeshalf recognized his face. Years ago she had known him among the gentryof the province, but the ban of the king had fallen upon him. How,then, came the doomed victim here? Proscribed, excluded from mercy,the monarch's most dreaded and hated foe, this New England merchanthad stood triumphantly against a kingdom's strength, and his foot nowtrod upon humbled royalty as he ascended the steps of theprovince-house, the people's chosen governor of Massachusetts.

  "Wretch, wretch that I am!" muttered the old woman, with such aheartbroken expression that the tears gushed from the stranger's eyes."Have I bidden a traitor welcome?--Come, Death! come quickly!"

  "Alas, venerable lady!" said Governor Hancock, lending her his supportwith all the reverence that a courtier would have shown to a queen,"your life has been prolonged until the world has changed around you.You have treasured up all that time has rendered worthless--theprinciples, feelings, manners, modes of being and acting which anothergeneration has flung aside--and you are a symbol of the past. And Iand these around me--we represent a new race of men, living no longerin the past, scarcely in the present, but projecting our lives forwardinto the future. Ceasing to model ourselves on ancestral superstitions,it is our faith and principle to press onward--onward.--Yet," continuedhe, turning to his attendants, "let us reverence for the last time thestately and gorgeous prejudices of the tottering past."

  While the republican governor spoke he had continued to support thehelpless form of Esther Dudley; her weight grew heavier against hisarm, but at last, with a sudden effort to free herself, the ancientwoman sank down beside one of the pillars of the portal. The key ofthe province-house fell from her grasp and clanked against the stone.

  "I have been faithful unto death," murmured she. "God save the king!"

  "She hath done her office," said Hancock, solemnly. "We will follow herreverently to the tomb of her ancestors, and then, my fellow-citizens,onward--onward. We are no longer children of the past."