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Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest
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Saint Francis and Saint Benedight Blesse this house from wicked wight
We now entered the Notch, and felt awestruck as we
passed
between the bare and rifted mountains....The site of the
Willie House standing with a little patch of green in the midst
of the dread wilderness of desolation called to mind the horrors
of that night....when these mountains were deluged and rocks
and trees were hurled from their high places down the steep
channelled sides of the mountains...
THOMAS COLE
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O ne 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 Happine ss 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 in 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 to-night; 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
to-morrow, 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, to-night," 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 graveclothes 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?

Old Willey House, Crawford Notch, N.H.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's inspiration for the Ambitious Guest.
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