The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Midnight Fantasy, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: A Midnight Fantasy Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich Release Date: November 6, 2007 [EBook #23363] Last Updated: March 3, 2018 Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MIDNIGHT FANTASY *** Produced by David Widger
“Take these again; for to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”
“These could never have waxed poor,” said Hamlet softly to himself, as he
leaned over the taffrail, the third day out, spreading the trinkets in his
palm, “being originally of but little worth. I fancy that that allusion to
'rich gifts' was a trifle malicious on the part of the fair Ophelia;” and
he quietly dropped them into the sea.
It was as a Danish gentleman voyaging for pleasure, and for mental profit
also, if that should happen, that Hamlet set forth on his travels. Settled
destination he had none, his sole plan being to get clear of Denmark as
speedily as possible, and then to drift whither his fancy took him. His
fancy naturally took him southward, as it would have taken him northward
if he had been a Southron. Many a time while climbing the bleak crags
around Elsinore he had thought of the land of the citron and the palm;
lying on his couch at night, and listening to the wind as it howled along
the machicolated battlements of the castle, his dreams had turned from the
cold, blonde ladies of his father's court to the warmer beauties that
ripen under sunny skies. He was free now to test the visions of his
boyhood.
So it chanced, after various wanderings, all tending imperceptibly in one
direction, that Hamlet bent his steps towards Italy.
In those rude days one did not accomplish a long journey without having
wonderful adventures befall, or encountering divers perils by the way. It
was a period when a stout blade on the thigh was a most excellent
travelling companion. Hamlet, though of a philosophical complexion, was
not slower than another man to scent an affront; he excelled at feats of
arms, and no doubt his skill, caught of the old fencing-master at
Elsinore, stood him in good stead more than once when his wit would not
have saved him. Certainly, he had hair-breadth escapes while toiling
through the wilds of Prussia and Bavaria and Switzerland. At all events,
he counted himself fortunate the night he arrived at Verona with nothing
more serious than a two-inch scratch on his sword arm.
There he lodged himself, as became a gentleman of fortune, in a suite of
chambers in a comfortable palace overlooking the swift-flowing Adige—a
riotous yellow stream that cut the town into two parts, and was spanned
here and there by rough-hewn stone bridges, which it sometimes sportively
washed away. It was a brave old town that had stood sieges and plagues,
and was full of mouldy, picturesque buildings and a gayety that has since
grown somewhat mouldy. A goodly place to rest in for the wayworn pilgrim!
He dimly recollected that he had letters to one or two illustrious
families; but he cared not to deliver them at once. It was pleasant to
stroll about the city, unknown. There were sights to see: the Roman
amphitheatre, and the churches with their sculptured sarcophagi and
saintly relics—interesting joints and saddles of martyrs, and enough
fragments of the true cross to build a ship. The life in the piazze
and on the streets, the crowds in the shops, the pageants, the lights, the
stir, the color, all mightily took the eye of the young Dane. He was in a
mood to be amused. Everything diverted him—the faint pulsing of a
guitar-string in an adjacent garden at midnight, or the sharp clash of
gleaming sword blades under his window, when the Montecchi and the
Cappelletti chanced to encounter each other in the narrow footway.
Meanwhile, Hamlet brushed up his Italian. He was well versed in the
literature of the language, particularly in its dramatic literature, and
had long meditated penning a gloss to “The Murther of Gonzago,” a play
which Hamlet held in deservedly high estimation.
He made acquaintances, too. In the same palace where he sojourned lived a
very valiant soldier and wit, a kinsman to Prince Escalus, one Mercutio by
name, with whom Hamlet exchanged civilities on the staircase at first, and
then fell into companionship.
A number of Verona's noble youths, poets and light-hearted men-about-town,
frequented Mercutio's chambers, and with these Hamlet soon became on
terms.
Among the rest were an agreeable gentleman, with hazel eyes, named
Benvolio, and a gallant young fellow called Romeo, whom Mercutio bantered
pitilessly and loved heartily. This Romeo, who belonged to one of the
first families, was a very susceptible spark, which the slightest breath
of a pretty woman was sufficient to blow into flame. To change the
metaphor, he fell from one love affair into another as easily and
logically as a ripe pomegranate drops from a bough. He was generally
unlucky in these matters, curiously enough, for he was a handsome youth in
his saffron satin doublet slashed with black, and his jaunty velvet bonnet
with its trailing plume of ostrich feather.
At the time of Hamlet's coming to Verona, Romeo was in a great despair of
love in consequence of an unrequited passion for a certain lady of the
city, between whose family and his own a deadly feud had existed for
centuries. Somebody had stepped on somebody else's lap-dog in the far
ages, and the two families had been slashing and hacking at each other
ever since. It appeared that Romeo had scaled a garden wall, one night,
and broken upon the meditations of his inamorata, who, as chance would
have it, was sitting on her balcony enjoying the moonrise. No lady could
be insensible to such devotion, for it would have been death to Romeo if
any of her kinsmen had found him in that particular locality. Some tender
phrases passed between them, perhaps; but the lady was flurried, taken
unawares, and afterwards, it seemed, altered her mind, and would have no
further commerce with the Montague. This business furnished Mercutio's
quiver with innumerable sly shafts, which Romeo received for the most part
in good humor.
With these three gentlemen—Mercutio, Benvolio, and Romeo—Hamlet
saw life in Verona, as young men will see life wherever they happen to be.
Many a time the nightingale ceased singing and the lark began before they
were abed; but perhaps it is not wise to inquire too closely into this. A
month had slipped away since Hamlet's arrival; the hyacinths were opening
in the gardens, and it was spring.
One morning, as he and Mercutio were lounging arm in arm on a bridge near
their lodgings, they met a knave in livery puzzling over a parchment which
he was plainly unable to decipher.
“Read it aloud, friend!” cried Mercutio, who always had a word to throw
away.
“I would I could read it at all. I pray, sir, can you read?”
“With ease—if it is not my tailor's score;” and Mercutio took the
parchment, which ran as follows:—
“Signior Martino, and his wife and daughters; County Ansdmo, and his
beauteous sisters; the lady widow Vitrumo; Signior Placentio, and his
lovely nieces; Mercutio, and his brother Valentine; mine uncle Capulet,
his wife and daughters; my fair niece Rosaline; Livia; Signior Valentio,
and his cousin Tybalt; Lucio, and the lively Helena.”
“A very select company, with the exception of that rogue Mercutio,” said
the soldier, laughing. “What does it mean?”
“My master, the Signior Capulet, gives a ball and supper to-night; these
the guests; I am his man Peter, and if you be not one of the house of
Montague, I pray come and crush a cup of wine with us. Rest you merry;”
and the knave, having got his billet deciphered for him, made off.
“One must needs go, being asked by both man and master; but since I am
asked doubly, I 'll not go singly; I 'll bring you with me, Hamlet. It is
a masquerade; I have had wind of it. The flower of the city will be there—all
the high-bosomed roses and low-necked lilies.”
Hamlet had seen nothing of society in Verona, properly speaking, and did
not require much urging to assent to Mercutio's proposal, far from
foreseeing that so slight a freak would have a fateful sequence.
It was late in the night when they presented themselves, in mask and
domino, at the Capulet mansion. The music was at its sweetest and the
torches were at their brightest, as the pair entered the dancing-hall.
They had scarcely crossed the threshold when Hamlet's eyes rested upon a
lady clad in a white silk robe, who held to her features, as she moved
through the figure of the dance, a white satin mask, on each side of which
was disclosed so much of the rosy oval of her face as made one long to
look upon the rest. The ornaments this lady wore were pearls; her fan and
slippers, like the robe and mask, were white—nothing but white. Her
eyes shone almost black contrasted with the braids of warm gold hair that
glistened through a misty veil of Venetian stuff, which floated about her
from time to time and enveloped her, as the blossoms do a tree. Hamlet
could think of nothing but the almond-tree that stood in full bloom in the
little cortile near his lodging. She seemed to him the incarnation
of that exquisite spring-time which had touched and awakened all the
leaves and buds in the sleepy old gardens around Verona.
“Mercutio! who is that lady?”
“The daughter of old Capulet, by her stature.”
“And he that dances with her?”
“Paris, a kinsman to Can Grande della Scala.”
“Her lover?”
“One of them.”
“She has others?”
“Enough to make a squadron; only the blind and aged are exempt.”
Here the music ceased and the dancers dispersed. Hamlet followed the lady
with his eyes, and, seeing her left alone a moment, approached her. She
received him graciously, as a mask receives a mask, and the two fell to
talking, as people do who—have nothing to say to each other and
possess the art of saying it. Presently something in his voice struck on
her ear, a new note, an intonation sweet and strange, that made her
curious. Who was it? It could not be Valentine, nor Anselmo; he was too
tall for Signior Placentio, not stout enough for Lucio; it was not her
cousin Tybalt. Could it be that rash Montague who—Would he dare?
Here, on the very points of their swords? The stream of maskers ebbed and
flowed and surged around them, and the music began again, and Juliet
listened and listened.
“Who are you, sir,” she cried, at last, “that speak our tongue with
feigned accent?”
“A stranger; an idler in Verona, though not a gay one—a black
butterfly.”
“Our Italian sun will gild your wings for you. Black edged with gilt goes
gay.”
“I am already not so sad-colored as I was.”
“I would fain see your face, sir; if it match your voice, it needs must be
a kindly one.”
“I would we could change faces.”
“So we shall at supper!”
“And hearts, too?”
“Nay, I would not give a merry heart for a sorrowful one; but I will quit
my mask, and you yours; yet,” and she spoke under her breath, “if you are,
as I think, a gentleman of Verona—a Montague—do not unmask.”
“I am not of Verona, lady; no one knows me here;” and Hamlet threw back
the hood of his domino. Juliet held her mask aside for a moment, and the
two stood looking into each other's eyes.
“Lady, we have in faith changed faces, at least as I shall carry yours
forever in my memory.”
“And I yours, sir,” said Juliet, softly, “wishing it looked not so pale
and melancholy.”
“Hamlet,” whispered Mercutio, plucking at his friend's skirt, “the fellow
there, talking with old Capulet—his wife's nephew, Tybalt, a
quarrelsome dog—suspects we are Montagues. Let us get out of this
peaceably, like soldiers who are too much gentlemen to cause a brawl under
a host's roof.”
With this Mercutio pushed Hamlet to the door, where they were joined by
Benvolio.
Juliet, with her eyes fixed upon the retreating maskers, stretched out her
hand and grasped the arm of an ancient serving-woman who happened to be
passing.
“Quick, good Nurse! go ask his name of yonder gentleman. Nay, not the one
in green, dear! but he that hath the black domino and purple mask. What,
did I touch your poor rheumatic arm? Ah, go now, sweet Nurse!”
As the Nurse hobbled off querulously on her errand, Juliet murmured to
herself an old rhyme she knew:—
“If he be married,
My grave is like to be my wedding bed!”
When Hamlet got back to his own chambers he sat on the edge of his couch
in a brown study. The silvery moonlight, struggling through the swaying
branches of a tree outside the window, drifted doubtfully into the room,
and made a parody of that fleecy veil which erewhile had floated about the
lissome form of the lovely Capulet. That he loved her, and must tell her
that he loved her, was a foregone conclusion; but how should he contrive
to see Juliet again? No one knew him in Verona; he had carefully preserved
his incognito; even Mercutio regarded him as simply a young gentleman from
Denmark, taking his ease in a foreign city. Presented, by Mercutio, as a
rich Danish tourist, the Capulets would receive him courteously, of
course; as a visitor, but not as a suitor. It was in another character
that he must be presented—his own.
He was pondering what steps he could take to establish his identity, when
he remembered the two or three letters which he had stuffed into his
wallet on quitting Elsi-nore. He lighted a taper, and began examining the
papers. Among them were the half dozen billet-doux which Ophelia had
returned to him the night before his departure. They were, neatly tied
together by a length of black ribbon, to which was attached a sprig of
rosemary.
“That was just like Ophelia!” muttered the young man, tossing the package
into the wallet again; “she was always having cheerful ideas like that.”
How long ago seemed the night she had handed him these love-letters, in
her demure little way! How misty and remote seemed everything connected
with the old life at Elsinore! His father's death, his mother's marriage,
his anguish and isolation—they were like things that had befallen
somebody else. There was something incredible, too, in his present
situation. Was he dreaming? Was he really in Italy, and in love?
He hastily bent forward and picked up a square folded paper lying half
concealed under the others.
“How could I have forgotten it!” he exclaimed.
It was a missive addressed, in Horatio's angular hand, to the Signior
Capulet of Verona, containing a few lines of introduction from Horatio,
whose father had dealings with some of the rich Lombardy merchants and
knew many of the leading families in the city. With this and several
epistles, preserved by chance, written to him by Queen Gertrude while he
was at the university, Hamlet saw that he would have no difficulty in
proving to the Capulets that he was the Prince of Denmark.
At an unseemly hour the next morning Mercutio was roused from his slumbers
by Hamlet, who counted every minute a hundred years until he saw Juliet.
Mercutio did not take this interruption too patiently, for the honest
humorist was very serious as a sleeper; but his equilibrium was quickly
restored by Hamlet's revelation.
The friends were long closeted together, and at the proper, ceremonious
hour for visitors they repaired to the house of Capulet, who did not hide
his sense of the honor done him by the prince. With scarcely any prelude
Hamlet unfolded the motive of his visit, and was listened to with rapt
attention by old Capulet, who inwardly blessed his stars that he had not
given his daughter's hand to the County Paris, as he was on the point of
doing. The ladies were not visible on this occasion; the fatigues of the
ball overnight, etc.; but that same evening Hamlet was accorded an
interview with Juliet and Lady Capulet, and a few days subsequently all
Verona was talking of nothing but the new engagement.
The destructive Tybalt scowled at first, and twirled his fierce mustache,
and young Paris took to writing dejected poetry; but they both soon
recovered their serenity, seeing that nobody minded them, and went
together arm in arm to pay their respects to Hamlet.
A new life began now for Hamlet—-he shed his inky cloak, and came
out in a doublet of insolent splendor, looking like a dagger-handle newly
gilt. With his funereal gear he appeared to have thrown off something of
his sepulchral gloom. It was impossible to be gloomy with Juliet, in whom
each day developed some sunny charm un-guessed before. Her freshness and
coquettish candor were constant surprises. She had had many lovers, and
she confessed them to Hamlet in the prettiest way. “Perhaps, my dear,” she
said to him one evening, with an ineffable smile, “I might have liked
young Romeo very well, but the family were so opposed to it from the very
first. And then he was so—so demonstrative, don't you know?”
Hamlet had known of Romeo's futile passion, but he had not been aware
until then that his betrothed was the heroine of the balcony adventure. On
leaving Juliet he-went to look up the Montague; not for the purpose of
crossing rapiers with him, as another man might have done, but to
compliment him on his unexceptionable taste in admiring so rare a lady.
But Romeo had disappeared in a most unaccountable manner, and his family
were in great tribulation concerning him. It was thought that perhaps the
unrelenting Rosaline (who had been Juliet's frigid predecessor) had
relented, and Montague's man Abram was dispatched to seek Romeo at her
residence; but the Lady Rosaline, who was embroidering on her piazza,
placidly denied all knowledge of him. It was then feared that he had
fallen in one of the customary encounters; but there had been no fight,
and nobody had been killed on either side for nearly twelve hours.
Nevertheless, his exit had the appearance of being final. When Hamlet
questioned Mercutio, the honest soldier laughed and stroked his blonde
mustache.
“The boy has gone off in a heat, I don't know where—to the icy ends
of the earth, I believe, to cool himself.”
Hamlet regretted that Romeo should have had any feeling in the matter; but
regret was a bitter weed that did not thrive well in the atmosphere in
which the fortunate lover was moving. He saw Juliet every day, and there
was not a fleck upon his happiness, unless it was the garrulous Nurse,
against whom Hamlet had taken a singular prejudice. He considered her a
tiresome old person, not too decent in her discourse at times, and advised
Juliet to get rid of her; but the ancient serving-woman had been in the
family for years, and it was not quite expedient to discharge her at that
late day.
With the subtile penetration of old age the Nurse instantly detected
Hamlet's dislike, and returned it heartily.
“Ah, ladybird,” she cried one night, “ah, well-a-day! you know not how to
choose a man. An I could choose for you, Jule! By God's lady, there's
Signior Mercutio, a brave gentleman, a merry gentleman, and a virtuous, I
warrant ye, whose little finger-joint is worth all the body of this
blackbird prince, dropping down from Lord knows where to fly off with the
sweetest bit of flesh in Verona. Marry, come up!”
But this was only a ripple on the stream that flowed so smoothly. Now and
then, indeed, Hamlet felt called upon playfully to chide Juliet for her
extravagance of language, as when, for instance, she prayed that when he
died he might be cut out in little stars to deck the face of night. Hamlet
objected, under any circumstances, to being cut out in little stars for
any illuminating purposes whatsoever. Once she suggested to her lover that
he should come to the garden after the family retired, and she would speak
with him a moment from the balcony. Now, as there was no obstacle to their
seeing each other whenever they pleased, and as Hamlet was of a nice sense
of honor, and since his engagement a most exquisite practicer of
propriety, he did not encourage Juliet in her thoughtlessness.
“What!” he cried, lifting his finger at her reprovingly, “romantic again!”
This was their nearest approach to a lovers' quarrel. The next day Hamlet
brought her, as peace-offering, a slender gold flask curiously wrought in
niello, which he had had filled with a costly odor at an apothecary's as
he came along.
“I never saw so lean a thing as that same culler of simples,” said Hamlet,
laughing; “a matter of ribs and shanks, a mere skeleton painted black. It
is a rare essence, though. He told me its barbaric botanical name, but it
escapes me.”
“That which we call a rose,” said Juliet, holding the perfumery to her
nostrils and inclining herself prettily towards him, “would smell as sweet
by any other name.”
O Youth and Love! O fortunate Time!
There was a banquet almost every night at the Capulets', and the
Montagues, up the street, kept their blinds drawn down, and Lady Montague,
who had four marriageable, tawny daughters on her hands, was livid with
envy at her neighbor's success. She would rather have had two or three
Montagues prodded through the body than that the prince should have gone
to the rival house.
Happy Prince!
If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Laertes, and the rest of the dismal
people at Elsinore, could have seen him now, they would not have known
him. Where were his wan looks and biting speeches? His eyes were no longer
filled with mournful speculation. He went in glad apparel, and took the
sunshine as his natural inheritance. If he ever fell into moodiness—it
was partly constitutional with him—the shadow fled away at the first
approach of that “loveliest weight on lightest foot.” The sweet Veronese
had nestled in his empty heart, and filled it with music. The ghosts and
visions that used to haunt him were laid forever by Juliet's magic.
Happy Juliet!
Her beauty had taken a new gloss. The bud bad grown into a flower,
redeeming the promises of the bud. If her heart beat less wildly, it
throbbed more strongly. If she had given Hamlet of her superabundance of
spirits, he had given her of his wisdom and discretion. She had always
been a great favorite in society; but Verona thought her ravishing now.
The mantua-makers cut their dresses by her patterns, and when she wore
turquoise, garnets went ont of style. Instead of the groans and tears, and
all those distressing events which might possibly have happened if Juliet
had persisted in loving Romeo—listen to her laugh and behold her
merry eyes!
Every morning either Peter or Gregory might have been seen going up
Hamlet's staircase with a note from Juliet—she had ceased to send
the Nurse on discovering her lover's antipathy to that person—and
some minutes later either Gregory or Peter might have been observed coming
down the staircase with a missive from Hamlet. Juliet had detected his
gift for verse, and insisted, rather capriciously, on having all his
replies in that shape. Hamlet humored her, though he was often hard put to
it; for the Muse is a coy immortal, and will not always come when she is
wanted. Sometimes he was forced to fall back upon previous efforts, as
when he translated these lines into very choice Italian:—
“Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt Truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.”
To be sure, he had originally composed this quatrain for Ophelia; but what
would you have? He had scarcely meant it then; he meant it now; besides, a
felicitous rhyme never goes out of fashion. It always fits.
While transcribing the verse his thoughts naturally reverted to Ophelia,
for the little poesy was full of a faint scent of the past, like a pressed
flower. His conscience did not prick him at all. How fortunate for him and
for her that matters had gone no further between them? Predisposed to
melancholy, and inheriting a not very strong mind from her father, Ophelia
was a lady who needed cheering up, if ever poor lady did. He, Hamlet, was
the last man on the globe with whom she should have had any tender
affiliation. If they had wed, they would have caught each other's
despondency, and died, like a pair of sick ravens, within a fortnight.
What had become of her? Had she gone into a nunnery? He would make her
abbess, if he ever returned to Elsinore.
After a month or two of courtship, there being no earthly reason to
prolong it, Hamlet and Juliet were privately married in the Franciscan
Chapel, Friar Laurence officiating; but there was a grand banquet that
night at the Capulets', to which all Verona went. At Hamlet's
intercession, the Montagues were courteously asked to this festival. To
the amazement of every one the Montagues accepted the invitation and came,
and were treated royally, and the long, lamentable feud—it would
have sorely puzzled either house to explain what it was all about—was
at an end. The adherents of the Capulets and the Montagues were forbidden
on the spot to bite any more thumbs at each other.
“It will detract from the general gayety of the town,” Mercutio remarked.
“Signior Tybalt, my friend, I shall never have the pleasure of running you
through the diaphragm; a cup of wine with you!”
The guests were still at supper in the great pavilion erected in the
garden, which was as light as day with the glare of innumerable flambeaux
set among the shrubbery. Hamlet and Juliet, with several others, had
withdrawn from the tables, and were standing in the doorway of the
pavilion, when Hamlet's glance fell upon the familiar form of a young man
who stood with one foot on the lower step, holding his plumed bonnet in
his hand. His hose and doublet were travel-worn, but his honest face was
as fresh as daybreak.
“What! Horatio?”
“The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever.”
“Sir, my good friend: I 'll change that name with you. What brings you to
Verona?”
“I fetch you news, my lord.”
“Good news? Then the king is dead.”
“The king lives, but Ophelia is no more.”
“Ophelia dead!”
“Not so, my lord; she 's married.”
“I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student.”
“As I do live, my honored lord, 't is true.”
“Married, say you?”
“Married to him that sent me hither—a gentleman of winning ways and
a most choice conceit, the scion of a noble house here in Verona—one
Romeo.”
The oddest little expression flitted over Juliet's face. There was never
woman yet, even on her bridal day, could forgive a jilted lover marrying.
“Ophelia wed!” murmured the bridegroom.
“Do you know the lady, dear?”
“Excellent well,” replied Hamlet, turning to Juliet; “a most estimable
young person, the daughter of my father's chamberlain. She is rather given
to singing ballads of an elegiac nature,” added the prince, reflectingly,
“but our madcap Romeo will cure her of that. Methinks I see them now”—
“Oh, where, my lord?”
“In my mind's eye, Horatio, surrounded by their little ones—noble
youths and graceful maidens, in whom the impetuosity of the fiery Romeo is
tempered by the pensiveness of the fair Ophelia. I shall take it most
unkindly of them, love,” toying with Juliet's fingers, “if they do not
name their first boy Hamlet.”
It was just as my lord Hamlet finished speaking that the last horse-car
for Boston—providentially belated between Water-town and Mount
Auburn—swept round the curve of the track on which I was walking.
The amber glow of the car-lantern lighted up my figure in the gloom, the
driver gave a quick turn on the brake, and the conductor, making a sudden
dexterous clutch at the strap over his head, sounded the death-knell of my
fantasy as I stepped upon the rear platform.
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