1836

                                TWICE-TOLD TALES

                               THE WEDDING KNELL

                             by Nathaniel Hawthorne

   THERE IS A CERTAIN CHURCH in the city of New York which I have
always regarded with peculiar interest, on account of a marriage there
solemnized, under very singular circumstances, in my grandmother's
girlhood. That venerable lady chanced to be a spectator of the
scene, and ever after made it her favorite narrative. Whether the
edifice now standing on the same site be the identical one to which
she referred, I am not antiquarian enough to know; nor would it be
worth while to correct myself, perhaps, of an agreeable error, by
reading the date of its erection on the tablet over the door. It is
a stately church, surrounded by an inclosure of the loveliest green,
within which appear urns, pillars, obelisks, and other forms of
monumental marble, the tributes of private affection, or more splendid
memorials of historic dust. With such a place, though the tumult of
the city rolls beneath its tower, one would be willing to connect some
legendary interest.

   The marriage might be considered as the result of an early
engagement, though there had been two intermediate weddings on the
lady's part, and forty years of celibacy on that of the gentleman.
At sixty-five, Mr. Ellenwood was a shy, but not quite a secluded
man; selfish, like all men who brood over their own hearts, yet
manifesting on rare occasions a vein of generous sentiment; a
scholar throughout life, though always an indolent one, because his
studies had no definite object, either of public advantage or personal
ambition; a gentleman, high bred and fastidiously delicate, yet
sometimes requiring a considerable relaxation, in his behalf, of the
common rules of society.

   In truth, there were so many anomalies in his character, and though
shrinking with diseased sensibility from public notice, it had been
his fatality so often to become the topic of the day, by some wild
eccentricity of conduct, that people searched his lineage for an
hereditary taint of insanity. But there was no need of this. His
caprices had their origin in a mind that lacked the support of an
engrossing purpose, and in feelings that preyed upon themselves for
want of other food. If he were mad, it was the consequence, and not
the cause, of an aimless and abortive life.

   The widow was as complete a contrast to her third bridegroom, in
everything but age, as can well be conceived. Compelled to
relinquish her first engagement, she had been united to a man of twice
her own years, to whom she became an exemplary wife, and by whose
death she was left in possession of a splendid fortune. A southern
gentleman, considerably younger than herself, succeeded to her hand,
and carried her to Charleston, where, after many uncomfortable
years, she found herself again a widow. It would have been singular,
if any uncommon delicacy of feeling had survived through such a life
as Mrs. Dabney's; it could not but be crushed and killed by her
early disappointment, the cold duty of her first marriage, the
dislocation of the heart's principles, consequent on a second union
and the unkindness of her southern husband, which had inevitably
driven her to connect the idea of his death with that of her
comfort. To be brief, she was that wisest, but unloveliest, variety of
woman, a philosopher, bearing troubles of the heart with equanimity,
dispensing with all that should have been her happiness, and making
the best of what remained. Sage in most matters, the widow was perhaps
the more amiable for the one frailty that made her ridiculous. Being
childless, she could not remain beautiful by proxy, in the person of a
daughter; she therefore refused to grow old and ugly, on any
consideration; she struggled with Time, and held fast her roses in
spite of him, till the venerable thief appeared to have relinquished
the spoil, as not worth the trouble of acquiring it.

   The approaching marriage of this woman of the world with such an
unworldly man as Mr. Ellenwood was announced soon after Mrs.
Dabney's return to her native city. Superficial observers, and
deeper ones, seemed to concur in supposing that the lady must have
borne no inactive part in arranging the affair; there were
considerations of expediency which she would be far more likely to
appreciate than Mr. Ellenwood; and there was just the specious phantom
of sentiment and romance in this late union of two early lovers
which sometimes makes a fool of a woman who has lost her true feelings
among the accidents of life. All the wonder was, how the gentleman,
with his lack of worldly wisdom and agonizing consciousness of
ridicule, could have been induced to take a measure at once so prudent
and so laughable. But while people talked the wedding-day arrived. The
ceremony was to be solemnized according to the Episcopalian forms, and
in open church, with a degree of publicity that attracted many
spectators, who occupied the front seats of the galleries, and the
pews near the altar and along the broad aisle. It had been arranged,
or possibly it was the custom of the day, that the parties should
proceed separately to church. By some accident the bridegroom was a
little less punctual than the widow and her bridal attendants; with
whose arrival, after this tedious, but necessary preface, the action
of our tale may be said to commence.

   The clumsy wheels of several old-fashioned coaches were heard,
and the gentlemen and ladies composing the bridal party came through
the church door with the sudden and gladsome effect of a burst of
sunshine. The whole group, except the principal figure, was made up of
youth and gayety. As they streamed up the broad aisle, while the
pews and pillars seemed to brighten on either side, their steps were
as buoyant as if they mistook the church for a ball-room, and were
ready to dance hand in hand to the altar. So brilliant was the
spectacle that few took notice of a singular phenomenon that had
marked its entrance. At the moment when the bride's foot touched the
threshold the bell swung heavily in the tower above her, and sent
forth its deepest knell. The vibrations died away and returned with
prolonged solemnity, as she entered the body of the church.

   "Good heavens! what an omen," whispered a young lady to her lover.

   "On my honor," replied the gentleman, "I believe the bell has the
good taste to toll of its own accord. What has she to do with
weddings? If you, dearest Julia, were approaching the altar the bell
would ring out its merriest peal. It has only a funeral knell for
her."

   The bride and most of her company had been too much occupied with
the bustle of entrance to hear the first boding stroke of the bell, or
at least to reflect on the singularity of such a welcome to the altar.
They therefore continued to advance with undiminished gayety. The
gorgeous dresses of the time, the crimson velvet coats, the gold-laced
hats, the hoop petticoats, the silk, satin, brocade, and embroidery,
the buckles, canes, and swords, all displayed to the best advantage on
persons suited to such finery, made the group appear more like a
bright-colored picture than anything real. But by what perversity of
taste had the artist represented his principal figure as so wrinkled
and decayed, while yet he had decked her out in the brightest splendor
of attire, as if the loveliest maiden had suddenly withered into
age, and become a moral to the beautiful around her! On they went,
however, and had glittered along about a third of the aisle, when
another stroke of the bell seemed to fill the church with a visible
gloom, dimming and obscuring the bright pageant, till it shone forth
again as from a mist.

   This time the party wavered, stopped, and huddled closer
together, while a slight scream was heard from some of the ladies, and
a confused whispering among the gentlemen. Thus tossing to and fro,
they might have been fancifully compared to a splendid bunch of
flowers, suddenly shaken by a puff of wind, which threatened to
scatter the leaves of an old, brown, withered rose, on the same
stalk with two dewy buds- such being the emblem of the widow between
her fair young bridemaids. But her heroism was admirable. She had
started with an irrepressible shudder, as if the stroke of the bell
had fallen directly on her heart; then, recovering herself, while
her attendants were yet in dismay, she took the lead, and paced calmly
up the aisle. The bell continued to swing, strike, and vibrate, with
the same doleful regularity as when a corpse is on its way to the
tomb.

   "My young friends here have their nerves a little shaken," said the
widow, with a smile, to the clergyman at the altar. "But so many
weddings have been ushered in with the merriest peal of the bells, and
yet turned out unhappily, that I shall hope for better fortune under
such different auspices."

   "Madam," answered the rector, in great perplexity, "this strange
occurrence brings to my mind a marriage sermon of the famous Bishop
Taylor, wherein he mingles so many thoughts of mortality and future
wo, that, to speak somewhat after his own rich style, he seems to hang
the bridal chamber in black, and cut the wedding garment out of a
coffin pall. And it has been the custom of divers nations to infuse
something of sadness into their marriage ceremonies, so to keep
death in mind while contracting that engagement which is life's
chiefest business. Thus we may draw a sad but profitable moral from
this funeral knell."

   But, though the clergyman might have given his moral even a
keener point, he did not fail to dispatch an attendant to inquire into
the mystery, and stop those sounds, so dismally appropriate to such
a marriage. A brief space elapsed, during which the silence was broken
only by whispers, and a few suppressed titterings, among the wedding
party and the spectators, who, after the first shock, were disposed to
draw an ill-natured merriment from the affair. The young have less
charity for aged follies than the old for those of youth. The
widow's glance was observed to wander, for an instant, towards a
window of the church, as if searching for the time-worn marble that
she had dedicated to her first husband; then her eyelids dropped
over their faded orbs, and her thoughts were drawn irresistibly to
another grave. Two buried men, with a voice at her ear, and a cry afar
off, were calling her to lie down beside them. Perhaps, with momentary
truth of feeling, she thought how much happier had been her fate,
if, after years of bliss, the bell were now tolling for her funeral,
and she were followed to the grave by the old affection of her
earliest lover, long her husband. But why had she returned to him,
when their cold hearts shrank from each other's embrace?

   Still the death-bell tolled so mournfully, that the sunshine seemed
to fade in the air. A whisper, communicated from those who stood
nearest the windows, now spread through the church; a hearse, with a
train of several coaches, was creeping along the street, conveying
some dead man to the churchyard, while the bride awaited a living
one at the altar. Immediately after, the footsteps of the bridegroom
and his friends were heard at the door. The widow looked down the
aisle, and clinched the arm of one of her bridemaids in her bony
hand with such unconscious violence, that the fair girl trembled.

   "You frighten me, my dear madam!" cried she. "For Heaven's sake,
what is the matter?"

   "Nothing, my dear, nothing," said the widow; then, whispering close
to her ear, "There is a foolish fancy that I cannot get rid of. I am
expecting my bridegroom to come into the church, with my first two
husbands for groomsmen!"

   "Look, look!" screamed the bridemaid. "What is here? The funeral!"

   As she spoke, a dark procession paced into the church. First came
an old man and woman, like chief mourners at a funeral, attired from
head to foot in the deepest black, all but their pale features and
hoary hair; he leaning on a staff, and supporting her decrepit form
with his nerveless arm. Behind appeared another, and another pair,
as aged, as black, and mournful as the first. As they drew near, the
widow recognized in every face some trait of former friends, long
forgotten, but now returning, as if from their old graves, to warn her
to prepare a shroud; or, with purpose almost as unwelcome, to
exhibit their wrinkles and infirmity, and claim her as their companion
by the tokens of her own decay. Many a merry night had she danced with
them, in youth. And now, in joyless age, she felt that some withered
partner should request her hand, and all unite, in a dance of death,
to the music of the funeral bell.

   While these aged mourners were passing up the aisle, it was
observed that, from pew to pew, the spectators shuddered with
irrepressible awe, as some object, hitherto concealed by the
intervening figures, came full in sight. Many turned away their faces;
others kept a fixed and rigid stare; and a young girl giggled
hysterically, and fainted with the laughter on her lips. When the
spectral procession approached the altar, each couple separated, and
slowly diverged, till, in the centre, appeared a form, that had been
worthily ushered in with all this gloomy pomp, the death knell, and
the funeral. It was the bridegroom in his shroud!

   No garb but that of the grave could have befitted such a
deathlike aspect; the eyes, indeed, had the wild gleam of a sepulchral
lamp; all else was fixed in the stern calmness which old men wear in
the coffin. The corpse stood motionless, but addressed the widow in
accents that seemed to melt into the clang of the bell, which fell
heavily on the air while he spoke.

   "Come, my bride!" said those pale lips, "the hearse is ready. The
sexton stands waiting for us at the door of the tomb. Let us be
married; and then to our coffins!"

   How shall the widow's horror be represented? It gave her the
ghastliness of a dead man's bride. Her youthful friends stood apart,
shuddering at the mourners, the shrouded bridegroom, and herself;
the whole scene expressed, by the strongest imagery, the vain struggle
of the gilded vanities of this world, when opposed to age,
infirmity, sorrow, and death. The awestruck silence was first broken
by the clergyman.

   "Mr. Ellenwood," said he, soothingly, yet with somewhat of
authority, "you are not well. Your mind has been agitated by the
unusual circumstances in which you are placed. The ceremony must be
deferred. As an old friend, let me entreat you to return home."

   "Home! yes, but not without my bride," answered he, in the same
hollow accents. "You deem this mockery; perhaps madness. Had I
bedizened my aged and broken frame with scarlet and embroidery- had
I forced my withered lips to smile at my dead heart- that might have
been mockery, or madness. But now, let young and old declare, which of
us has come hither without a wedding garment, the bridegroom or the
bride!"

   He stepped forward at a ghostly pace, and stood beside the widow,
contrasting the awful simplicity of his shroud with the glare and
glitter in which she had arrayed herself for this unhappy scene. None,
that beheld them, could deny the terrible strength of the moral
which his disordered intellect had contrived to draw.

   "Cruel! cruel!" groaned the heart-stricken bride.

   "Cruel!" repeated he; then, losing his deathlike composure in a
wild bitterness: "Heaven judge which of us has been cruel to the
other! In youth you deprived me of my happiness, my hopes, my aims;
you took away all the substance of my life, and made it a dream
without reality enough even to grieve at- with only a pervading gloom,
through which I walked wearily, and cared not whither. But after forty
years, when I have built my tomb, and would not give up the thought of
resting there- no, not for such a life as we once pictured- you call
me to the altar. At your summons I am here. But other husbands have
enjoyed your youth, your beauty, your warmth of heart, and all that
could be termed your life. What is there for me but your decay and
death? And therefore I have bidden these funeral friends, and bespoken
the sexton's deepest knell, and am come, in my shroud, to wed you,
as with a burial service, that we may join our hands at the door of
the sepulchre, and enter it together."

   It was not frenzy; it was not merely the drunkenness of strong
emotion, in a heart unused to it, that now wrought upon the bride. The
stern lesson of the day had done its work; her worldliness was gone.
She seized the bridegroom's hand.

   "Yes!" cried she. "Let us wed, even at the door of the sepulchre!
My life is gone in vanity and emptiness. But at its close there is one
true feeling. It has made me what I was in youth; it makes me worthy
of you. Time is no more for both of us. Let us wed for Eternity!"

   With a long and deep regard, the bridegroom looked into her eyes,
while a tear was gathering in his own. How strange that gush of
human feeling from the frozen bosom of a corpse! He wiped away the
tears even with his shroud.

   "Beloved of my youth," said he, "I have been wild. The despair of
my whole lifetime had returned at once, and maddened me. Forgive;
and be forgiven. Yes; it is evening with us now; and we have
realized none of our morning dreams of happiness. But let us join
our hands before the altar, as lovers whom adverse circumstances
have separated through life, yet who meet again as they are leaving
it, and find their earthly affection changed into something holy as
religion. And what is Time, to the married of Eternity?"

   Amid the tears of many, and a swell of exalted sentiment, in
those who felt aright, was solemnized the union of two immortal souls.
The train of withered mourners, the hoary bridegroom in his shroud,
the pale features of the aged bride, and the death-bell tolling
through the whole, till its deep voice overpowered the marriage words,
all marked the funeral of earthly hopes. But as the ceremony
proceeded, the organ, as if stirred by the sympathies of this
impressive scene, poured forth an anthem, first mingling with the
dismal knell, then rising to a loftier strain, till the soul looked
down upon its wo. And when the awful rite was finished, and with
cold hand in cold hand, the Married of Eternity withdrew, the
organ's peal of solemn triumph drowned the Wedding Knell.

                        THE END
..
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