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The Ambitious Guest
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 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
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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.
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"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?
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