Edward Fane's Rosebud (From "Twice Told Tales")
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864
English
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Below is a summary of Edward Fane's Rosebud (From "Twice Told Tales")
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TWICE TOLD TALES
EDWARD FANE'S ROSEBUD
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
There is hardly a more difficult exercise of fancy, than, while gazing
at a figure of melancholy age, to re-create its youth, and, without
entirely obliterating the identity of form and features, to restore
those graces which time has snatched away. Some old people,
especially women, so age-worn and woeful are they, seem never to have
been young and gay. It is easier to conceive that such gloomy
phantoms were sent into the world as withered and decrepit as we
behold them now, with sympathies only for pain and grief, to watch at
death-beds, and weep at funerals. Even the sable garments of their
widowhood appear essential to their existence; all their attributes
combine to render them darksome shadows, creeping strangely amid the
sunshine of human life. Yet it is no unprofitable task, to take one
of these doleful creatures, and set fancy resolutely at work to
brighten the dim eye, and darken the silvery locks, and paint the
ashen cheek with rose-color, and repair the shrunken and crazy form,
till a dewy maiden shall be seen in the old matron's elbow-chair. The
miracle being wrought, then let the years roll back again, each sadder
than the last, and the whole weight of age and sorrow settle down upon
the youthful figure.
Wrinkles and furrows, the handwriting of Time, may thus be deciphered,
and found to contain deep lessons of thought and feeling. Such profit
might be derived, by a skilful observer, from my much-respected
friend, the Widow Toothaker, a nurse of great repute, who has breathed
the atmosphere of sick-chambers and dying breaths these forty years.
See! she sits cowering over her lonesome hearth, with her gown and
upper petticoat drawn upward, gathering thriftily into her person the
whole warmth of the fire, which, now at nightfall, begins to dissipate
the autumnal chill of her chamber. The blaze quivers capriciously in
front, alternately glimmering into the deepest chasms of her wrinkled
visage, and then permitting a ghostly dimness to mar the outlines of
her venerable figure. And Nurse Toothaker holds a teaspoon in her
right hand, with which to stir up the contents of a tumbler in her
left, whence steams a vapory fragrance, abhorred of temperance
societies. Now she sips,--now stirs,--now sips again. Her sad old
heart has need to be revived by the rich infusion of Geneva, which is
mixed half and half with hot water, in the tumbler. All day long she
has been sitting by a death-pillow, and quitted it for her home, only
when the spirit of her patient left the clay and went homeward too.
But now are her melancholy meditations cheered, and her torpid blood
warmed, and her shoulders lightened of at least twenty ponderous
years, by a draught from the true Fountain of Youth, in a case-bottle.
It is strange that men should deem that fount a fable when its liquor
fills more bottles than the Congress-water! Sip it again, good nurse,
and see whether a second draught will not take off another score of
years, and perhaps ten more, and show us, in your high-backed chair,
the blooming damsel who plighted troths with Edward Fane. Get you
gone, Age and Widowhood! Come back, unwedded Youth! But, alas! the
charm will not work. In spite of fancy's most potent spell, I can see
only an old dame cowering over the fire, a picture of decay and
desolation, while the November blast roars at her in the chimney, and
fitful showers rush suddenly against the window.
Yet there was a time when Rose Grafton--such was the pretty maiden
name of Nurse Toothaker--possessed beauty that would have gladdened
this dim and dismal chamber as with sunshine. It won for her the
heart of Edward Fane, who has since made so great a figure in the
world, and is now a grand old gentleman, with powdered hair, and as
gouty as a lord. These early lovers thought to have walked hand in
hand through life. They had wept together for Edward's little sister
Mary, whom Rose tended in her sickness, partly because she was the
sweetest child that ever lived or died, but more for love of him. She
was but three years old. Being such an infant, Death could not embody
his terrors in her little corpse; nor did Rose fear to touch the dead
child's brow, though chill, as she curled the silken hair around it,
nor to take her tiny hand, and clasp a flower within its fingers.
Afterward, when she looked through the pane of glass in the coffin-
lid, and beheld Mary's face, it seemed not so much like death, or
life, as like a waxwork, wrought into the perfect image of a child
asleep, and dreaming of its mother's smile. Rose thought her too fair
a thing to be hidden in the grave, and wondered that an angel did not
snatch up little Mary's coffin, and bear the slumbering babe to
heaven, and bid her wake immortal. But when the sods were laid on
little Mary, the heart of Rose was troubled. She shuddered at the
fantasy, that, in grasping the child's cold fingers, her virgin hand
had exchanged a first greeting with mortality, and could never lose
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