The Atlantic Monthly/Volume 1/Number 7/Roger Pierce

The Man With Two Shadows.

"There is ever a black spot in our sunshine." Carlyle.

The sky is gray with unfallen sleet; the wind howls bitterly about the house; relentless in its desperate speed, it whirls by green crosses from the fir-boughs in the wood,--dry russet oak-leaves,--tiny cones from the larch, that were once rose-red with the blood of Spring, but now rattle on the leafless branches, black and bare as they. No leaf remains on any bough of the forest, no scarlet streamer of brier flaunts from the steadfast rocks that underlie all verdure, and now stand out, bleak and barren, the truths and foundations of life, when its ornate glories are fled away. The river flows past, a languid stream of lead; a single crow, screaming for its mate, flaps heavily against the north-east gale, that enters here also and lifts the carpet in long waves across the floor, whiffles light eddies of ashes in the chimney-corner, and vainly presses on door and window, like a houseless spirit shrieking and pining for a shelter from its bodiless and helpless unrest in the elements.

The whole air,--although, within, my fire crackles and leaps with steady cheer, and the red rose on my window is warm and sanguine with bloom,--yet this whole air is full of tiny sparks of chill to my sensitive and morbid nature; it is at once electric and cold, the very atmosphere of spirits.--What a shadow passed that pane! Roger, was it you?--The storm bursts, in one fierce rush of sleet and roaring wind; the little spaniel crouched at my feet whimpers and nestles closer; the house is silent,--silent as my thoughts,--silent as he is who walked these rooms once, with a face likest to the sky that darkens them now, and lonelier, lonelier than I, though at his side forever trod a companion.

This valley of the Moosic is narrow and thinly settled. Here and there the mad river, leaping from some wooded gorge to rest among the hemlock-covered islands that break its smoother path between the soft meadows, is crossed by a strong dam; and a white village, with its church and graveyard, clusters against the hill-side, sweeping upward from the huge mills that stand along the shore just below the bridge. Here and there, too, out of sight of mill or village, a quiet farmer's house, trimly painted, with barns and hay-stacks and wood-piles drawn up in goodly array, stands in its old orchard, and offers the front of a fortress against want and misery. Idle aspect! fortress of vain front! there are intangible foes that no man may conquer! In such a stronghold was born Roger Pierce, the Man with two Shadows.

He was the son of good and upright parents. Before he came into their arms, three tiny shapes had lain there, one after another, for a few brief weeks, smiled, moaned, and fallen asleep,--to sleep, forever children, under the daisies and golden-rods. For this reason they cling to little Roger with passionate apprehension; they fought with the Angel of Death, and overcame; and, as it ever is to the blind nature of man, the conquest was greater to them than any gift.

The boy grew up into childhood as other children grow, a daily miracle to see. Only for him incessant care watched and waited; unwearied as the angel that looked from him to the face of God, so to gather ever fresh strength and guidance for the wayward child, his mother's tender eyes overlooked him all day, followed his tottering steps from room to room, kept far away from him all fear and pain, shone upon him in the depths of night, woke and wept for him always. Never could he know the hardy self-reliance of those whom life casts upon their own strength and care; the wisdom and the love that lived for him lived in him, and he grew to be a boy as the tropic blossom of a hot-house grows, without thought or toil.

It was not until his age brought him in contact with others, that there seemed to be any difference between his nature and the common race of children. Always, however, some touch of sullenness lurked in his temperament; and whatever thwarted his will or fancy darkened the light of his clear eyes, and drew a dull pallor over his blooming cheek, till his mother used to tell him at such times that he stood between her and the sunshine.

But as he grew older, and shared in the sports of his companions, a strange thing came to pass. Beside the shadow that follows us all in the light, another, like that, but something deeper, began to go with Roger Pierce,--not falling with the other, a dial-mark to show the light that cast it, but capriciously to right or left; on whomever or whatever was nearest him at the moment, there that Shadow lay; and as time crept on, the Shadow pertinaciously crept with it, till it was forever hanging about him, ready to chill with vague terror, or harden as with a frost, either his fellows or himself.

One peculiar trait this Shadow had: the more the restless child thought of his visitant, the deeper it grew,--shrinking in size, but becoming more intensely dark, till it seemed like part of a heavy thunder-cloud, only that no lightning ever played across its blank gloom.

The first time that the Shadow ever stood before him as an actual presence was when, a mere child, he was busied one day in the warm May sunshine making a garden by the school-house, in a line with other little squares, tracked and moulded by childish fingers, and set with branches of sallow silvered with downy catkins, half-opened dandelions, twigs of red-flowered maple, mighty reservoirs of water in sunken clam-shells, and paths adorned with borders of broken china and glittering bits of glass. Next to Roger's garden-bed was one that belonged to two little boys who were sworn friends, and one of these was busy weaving a fence for his garden, of yellow willow-twigs, which the other cut and sharpened.

Roger looked on with longing eyes.

"Will you help me, Jimmy?" said he.

"I can't," answered the quiet, timid child.

"No!" shouted Jacob,--the frank, fearless voice bringing a tint of color into his comrade's cheek. "Jim shan't help you, Roger Pierce! Do you ever help anybody?"

Then the Shadow fell beside Roger, as he stood with anger and shame swelling in his throat; it fell across the blue violets he had taken from Jacob to dress his own garden, and they drooped and withered; it crossed the path of shining pebbles that he had forced the younger children to gather for him, and they grew dull as common stones; it reached over into Jacob's positive, honest face, and darkened it, and Jimmy, looking up, with fear in his mild eyes, whispered, softly,--"Come away! it's going to rain;--don't you see that dark cloud?"

Roger started, for the Shadow was darkening about himself; and as he moodily returned home, it seemed to grow deeper and deeper, till his mother drew his head upon her knee, and by the singing fire told him tales of her own childhood, and from the loving brightness of her tender eyes the Shadow slunk away and left the boy to sleep, unhaunted.

As day by day went by, in patient monotony, Roger became daily more aware of this ghostly attendant. He was not always alone, for he had friends who loved him in spite of the Shadow, and grew used to its appearing;--but he liked to be by himself; for, out of constant companionship and daily use, this Shadow made for itself a strange affinity with him, and following his daily rambles over the sharp hills, tracing to their source the noisy brooks, or setting snares for the wild creatures whose innocent timid eyes peered at their little enemy curiously from nook and crevice, he grew to have a moody pleasure in the knowledge that nothing else disturbed his path or shared his amusements.

But a time came when he must mix more with the outer world; for he was sent away from home to school, and there, amid a host of strange faces, he singled out the only one that had a thought of his past life and home in it, as his special companion,--the same quiet boy who had unconsciously feared the Shadow in their earlier school-days.

So good and gentle was he, that he did not feel the cloud of Roger's hateful Double as every one else did; and he even won the boy himself to except him only from a certain suspicion that had lately sprung from, his own consciousness of his burden,--a suspicion gradually growing into a belief that all the world had such a Shadow as his own.

Now this was not a strange result of so painful a reality. Seeing, as Roger Pierce did, in every action of others toward himself the dark atmosphere of the Shadow that was peculiarly his own, he watched also their mutual actions, and, throwing from his own obscurity a shade over all human deeds, he became possessed of the monomania, a practical belief that every mortal man, except it might be Jimmy Doane, was followed and overlooked by this terrible Second Shadow.

In proportion as the gloom of this black Presence seemed to be lightened over any one was his esteem for him; but by daily looking so steadily and with such a will to see only darkness in the hearts of men, he discovered traces of the Shadow even in Jimmy Doane,--and the darkness shut down, like night at sea, over all the world then.

Now Roger was miserable enough, knowing well that he could escape, if he would; for there had come with his increasing sense of his tyrant, a knowledge that every time he thought of the Shadow it darkened more deeply than ever, and that in forgetting it lay his only hope of escape from its power. But withal there was a morbid pleasure, the reflex influence of habit and indolence, that mingled curiously with his longing desire to forget his Double, but rendered it impossible to do so without a greater effort than he cared to make, or some help from another hand; and soon that help seemed to come.

When Roger left his home for school, he left in the quaint oak cradle a little baby-sister, too young to have a place in his thought as a definite existence; but after an absence of two years he came back to find in her a new phase of life, into which the Shadow could not yet enter.

The child's name her own childish tongue had softened into "Sunny," a name that was the natural expression of her sunshiny traits, the clear gay voice, the tranquil azure eyes, the golden curls, the loving looks, that made Sunny the darling of the house,--the stray sunbeam that glanced through the doors, flitted by the heavy wainscots, and danced up the dusky stairways of that old and solitary dwelling.

When Roger returned, fresh from the rough companionship of school, Sunny seemed to him a creature of some better race than his own. The Shadow vanished, for he forgot it in his new devotion to Sunny. Nothing did he leave undone to please her wayward fancies. In those hot summer-days, he carried her to a little brook that rippled across the meadow, and, sitting with her in his arms on the large smooth stones that divided those shallow waters, held her carefully while she splashed her tiny dimpled feet in the cool ripples, or grasped vainly at the blue-winged dragon-flies sailing past, on languid, airy pinions, just beyond her reach. Or he gathered heaps of daisies for the child to toss into the shining stream, and see the pale star-like blossoms float smoothly down till some eddy caught them in its sparkling whirl, and, drenching the frail, helpless leaves, cast them on the farther shore and went its careless way. Or he told her, in the afternoons, under some wide apple-tree, wonderful stories of giants and naughty boys, till she fell asleep on the sweet hay, where the curious grasshoppers peered at her with round horny eyes, and velvet-bodied spiders scurried across her fair curls with six-legged speed, and the robin eyed her from a bough above with wistful glances, till Roger must needs carry her tenderly out of their neighborhood to his mother's gentle care.

All this guard and guidance Sunny repaid with her only treasure, love. She left her pet kitten in its gayest antics to sit on Roger's knee; she went to sleep at night nestled against his arm; every little dainty that she gathered from garden or field was shared with him; and no pleasure that did not include Roger could tempt Sunny to be pleased.

For a while the unconscious charm endured; absorbed in his darling, Roger forgot the Shadow, or remembered it only at rare intervals; and in that brief time every one seemed to grow better and lovelier. He did not see in this the coloring of his own more kindly thoughts.

But when, at length, the novelty of Sunny's presence wore off, her claims grew tiresome. In the faith of her child's heart, she came as frankly to Roger for help or comfort as she had ever done; and he found his own plans for study or pleasure constantly interrupted by her requests or caresses, till the Shadow darkened again beside him, and, looking over his shoulder, fell so close to Sunny, that his old belief drew its veil across his eyes for a moment, and he started at the sight of what he dreaded,--a Shadow haunting Sunny.

Then,--though this first dread passed away,--slowly, but creeping on with unfailing certainty, the Shadow returned. It fell like a brooding storm over the fireside of home; he fancied a like shadow following his mother's steps, darkening his baby-sister's smile; and as if in revenge for so long an absence, the Shadow forced itself upon him more strenuously than ever, till poor Roger Pierce was like a bruised and beaten child,--too sore to have peace or rest, too sensitive to bear any remedy for his ailment, and too petulant to receive or expect sympathy from any other and more gentle nature than his own.

It was long before the Shadow made itself felt by Sunny. She never saw it as others did. If its chill passed over her warm rosy face, she stole up softly to her brother, and, with a look of pure childish love, put her hand in his, and said softly, "Poor Roger!" or, with a keener sense of the Presence, forbore to touch him, but played off her kitten's merriest tricks before him, or rolled her tiny hoop with shouts of laughter across the old house-dog as he slept on the grass, looking vainly for the smile Roger had always given to her baby plays before.

So by degrees she went back to her own pleasures, full of tender thought for every living thing, and a loving consciousness of their wants and ways. Her lisping voice chattered brook-like to birds and bees; her lip curled grievously over the broken wing of a painted moth, or the struggles of a drowning fly; in Nature's company she played as with an infant ever divine; and no darkness assailed the never-weary child.

But Roger grew daily closer to his Shadow, and gave himself up to its dominion, till his mother saw the bondage, and tried, mourning, every art and device to win him away from the evil spirit, but tried in vain. So they lived till Sunny was four years old, when suddenly, one bright day in June, she left the roses in her garden with broken stems, but ungathered, and, tottering into the house, fell across the threshold, flushed and sleepy,--as they who lifted her saw at once, in the first stage of a fever.

This unexpected blow once more severed Roger from his Shadow. He watched his little sister with a heart full of anxious regret, yet so fully wrapt in her wants and danger, that the gloomy Shadow, which looked afar off at his self-accusations, dared not once intrude.

At length that day of crisis came, the pause of fever and delirium, desired, yet dreaded, by every trembling, fearful heart that hung over the child's pillow. If she slept, the physician said, her fate hung on the waking; life or death would seal her when sleep resigned its claim. It was early morning when this sentence was given; in an hour's time the fever had subsided, the flush passed from Sunny's cheek, and she slept, watched breathlessly by Roger and his mother. The curtains of the room were half drawn to give the little creature air, and there rustled lightly through them a low south wind, bearing the delicate perfume of blossoms, and the lulling murmur of bees singing at their sweet toil.

Roger was weary with watching; the chiming sounds of Summer, the low ticking of the old clock on the stairs, and the utter quiet within, soothed him to slumber; his head bent forward and rested on the bedside; he fell asleep, and in his sleep he dreamed.

Over Sunny's pillow (for in this dream he seemed to himself waking and watching) he saw a hovering spirit, the incarnate shape of Light, gazing at the sleeping child with ineffable tenderness; but its keen eyes caught the aspect of Roger's Shadow; the pure lineaments glowed with something more divinely awful than anger, and with levelled lance it assailed that evil Presence and bore it to the ground; but the Shadow slipped aside from the spear, and cowered into distance; the angelic face saddened, and, stooping downward, folded Sunny in its arms as if to bear her away.

Roger woke with his own vain attempt to grasp and detain the child. The setting sun streamed in at the window, and his mother stood at his side, brought by some inarticulate sound from Sunny's lips.

She sent the boy to call his father, and when they came in together, the child's wide blue eyes were open, full of supernatural calm; her parched lips parted with a faint smile; and the loose golden curls pushed off her forehead, where the blue veins crept, like vivid stains of violet, under the clear skin.

"Dear mother!" she said, raising her arms slowly, to be lifted on the pillow; but the low, hoarse voice had lost its music.

Then she turned to her father with that strange bright smile, and again to Roger, uttering faintly,--

"Stand away, Roger; Sunny wants the light."

They drew all the curtain opposite her bed away, and, as she stretched her hands eagerly toward the window, the last rays of sunshine glowed on her pale illuminated face, till it was even as an angel's, and Roger caught a sudden gleam of wings across the air; but a cold pain struck him as he gazed, for Sunny fell backward on her pillow. She had gone with the sunshine.

It seemed now for a time as if the phantasm that haunted Roger Pierce were banished at last. His moody reserve disappeared; he addressed himself with quiet, constant effort to console his mother,--to aid his father,--to fill, so far as he could, the vacant place; and his heart longed with an incessant thirst for the bright Spirit that hovered in his dream over Sunny;--he seemed almost to have begun a natural and healthy life.

But year after year passed away, and the light of Sunny's influence faded with her fading memory. Green turf grew over her short grave, and the long slant shadow of its headstone no longer lay on a foot-worn track. Roger's pilgrimages to that spot were over; his heart had ceased to remember. The Shadow had reassumed its power, and reigned.

Still through its obscurity he kept one gleam of light,--an admiration undiminished for those who seemed to have no such attendance; but daily the number of these grew less.

At length, after the studies of his youth were over, and he had returned to his old home for life, there came over the settled and brooding darkness of his soul a warm ray of dawn. In some way, as naturally as one meets a fresh wind full of vernal odor and life, yet never marks the moment of its first caress, so naturally, so unmarkedly, he renewed a childish acquaintance with Violet Channing, a dweller in the same quiet valley with himself, though for long years the fine threads of circumstance had parted them.

Not a stone, and the frail green moss that clings to it, are more essentially different than were Roger Pierce and Violet Channing. Without a trace of the Shadow in herself, Violet disbelieved its existence in others. She had heard a rumor of Roger's phantom, but thought it some strange delusion, or want of perception, in those who told her,--being rather softened toward him with pity that he should be so little understood.

In the first days of their acquaintance, it seemed as if the light of the girl's face would have dispelled forever the darkness of her companion's Shadow, it was so mild and quiet a shining,--not the mere outer lustre of beauty, but the deep informing expression of that Spirit which had companioned Sunny heavenward.

With Violet, soothed by the timid sweetness of her manner, aroused by her sudden flashes of mirth and vivid enthusiasm, Roger seemed to forget his hateful companion, or remembered it only to be consoled by her tender eyes that beamed with pity and affection.

Month after month this intimacy went on, brightening daily in Roger's mind the ideal picture of his new friend, but creating in her only a deeper sympathy and a more devout compassion for his wretched and oppressed life. But as years instead of months went by, the sole influence no longer rested with the girl, drawing Roger Pierce upward, as she longed and strove to do, into her own sunshine. Their mutual relation had only lightened his darkness in part, while it had drawn over her the faint twilight of a Shadow like his own. But as the chief characteristic of this unearthly Thing was that it grew by notice, as some strange Eastern plants live on air, it throve but slowly near to Violet Channing, whose thoughts were bent on curing the heart-evil of Roger Pierce, and were so absorbed in that patient care that they had little chance to turn upon herself; though, when patience almost failed, and, weary with fruitless labor and unanswered yearning, her heart sunk, she was conscious of a vague influence that made the sunbeams fall coldly, and the songs of Summer mournful.

Hour after hour she lavished all the treasure she knew, and much that she knew not consciously, to beguile the darkness from Roger's brow; or recalled again and again her own deeds and words, to review them with strict judgment, lest they might have set provocation in his path; till at length her loving thoughts grew restless and painful, her face paled, her frame wasted away, and over her deep melancholy eyes the Shadow hung like a black tempest reflected in some clear lake.

Roger was not blind to this change; he did not see who had cast the first veil of darkness over the pure light that had shone so freely for him; and while he silently regretted what he deemed the desecration of the spotless image he had loved, nothing whispered that it was his own Shadow brooding above the true heart that had toiled so faithfully and long for his enlightening.

The most painful result of all to Violet was the new coldness of Roger's manner to her. Shadowed as he was, he did not perceive this change in himself; but Violet, in the silence of night, or in the solitary hours she spent in wood and field beside her growing Shadow, felt it with unmingled pain. Vainly did the Spirit of Light within her counsel her to persevere, looking only at the end she would achieve; subtler and more penetrative to her untuned ear were the words of the fiend at her side.

One day she had brooded long and drearily on the carelessness and coldness of her dear, her disregardful friend, and in her worn and weary soul revolved whatever sweetness of the past had now fled, and what pangs of love repulsed and devotion scorned lay before her in the miserable future; and as she held her throbbing head upon her hands, wasted with fiery pulses, it seemed to her as if the Shadow, inclining to her ear, whispered, almost audibly,--

"Think what you have given this man!--your hope and peace; the breath of your life and the beatings of your heart. All your soul is lavished on him, and see how he repays you!"

The weak and disheartened girl shivered; the time was past when she could have despised the voice of this dread companion, when the Shadow dared not have spoken thus; and with bitter tears swelling into her eyes she and the Shadow walked forth together to a haunt on the mountain-side where she had been used to meet Roger.

It was a bare rock, just below the summit of a peak crowned with a few old cedars, from whose laborious growth of dull, dark foliage long streamers of gray moss waved in the wind. There were scattered crags about their roots, against whose lichen-covered sides the autumn sun shone fruitlessly; and from the leafless forests in the deep valley beneath rose a whispering sound, as if they shuddered, and were stirred by some foreboding horror.

Violet made her way to this height as eagerly as her lessened strength and panting heart allowed; but as she lifted her eyes from the narrow path she had tracked upward, they rested on the last face she wished to meet, the gloomy visage of Roger Pierce. The girl hesitated, and would have drawn back, but Roger bade her come near.

"There is no need of your going, Violet," said he; and she crouched quietly on the rock at his feet, silently, but with fixed eyes, regarding the double nature before her, the Man and his Shadow.

Still upward from the valley crept that low shiver of dread; the pale sun shed its listless light on the gray rocks and dusky cedars; the silent unexpectant earth seemed to have paused; all things were wrapt in vague awe and dim apprehension; some inexpressible fatality seemed to oppress life and breath.

A sudden impulse of escape, desperate in its strength, possessed Violet; perhaps to name that Thing that clung so closely to Roger might shake its power,--and with a trembling, vibrating voice she spoke:--

"Roger,--you are thinking of the Shadow?"

He did not move, nor at once speak; no new expression stirred his dark face; at length he answered, in a voice that seemed to come from some lips far away, in an unechoing distance:--

"The Shadow?--Yes. I see it in all faces. It lies on the valley yonder; in the air; on every mortal brow and lip it gathers deeper yet. Violet, you, too, share the Shadow!"

Slowly, as if his words froze her, Violet rose and turned toward him; a light shone from her eyes that melted their dark depths into the radiance of high noon; and she spoke with a thrilled, yet unfaltering tone:--

"Yes, I share it, it is true. I feel and see the gloom; but if the Shadow haunts me, Roger Pierce, ask your own heart who cast it there! When we were first friends, I knew nothing of that darkness. I tried with all purity and compassion to draw you upward into light; and for reward, you have wrapped your own blackness round me, and hate your own doing. My work is over,--is in vain! It remains only that I free myself from this Shadow, and leave you to the mercy of a Power with whom no such Presence can cope,--in whom no darkness nor shadow may abide."

She turned to leave him with these words, but cast back a look of such love and tender pity, that she seemed to Roger the very Spirit that had borne Sunny away.

Bewildered and pained to the heart, he groped his way homeward, and night lapsed into morning, and returned and went again more than once, ere sleep returned to his eyes.

Violet kept no vigils; she wept herself asleep as a child against its mother's bosom, and loving eyes guarded that childlike rest. But Roger's waking was haunted with remorse and fearful expectation; and as days crept by, and Memory, like one who fastens the galley-slave to his oar, still pressed on his thoughts the constant patience, toil, and affection of Violet Channing, he felt how truly she had spoken of him, and from his soul abhorred the Shadow of his life.

Here he vanishes. Whether with successful conflict he fought with the evil and prevailed, and showed himself a man,--or whether the Thing renewed its dominion, and he drew to himself another nature, not for the good power of its pure contact, but for the further increase of that darkness, and the blinding of another soul, is never yet to be known.

Of Violet Channing he saw no more; with her his sole earthly redemption had fled; she went her way, free henceforward from the Shadow, and guarded in the arms of the shining Spirit.

The wind yet howls and dashes without; the rain, rushing in gusts on roof and casement, keeps no time nor tune; the fire is dead in the ashes; the red rose, in the lessening light, turns gray;--but far away to the south the cloud begins to scatter; faint amber steals along the crest of the distant hills; after all evils, hope remains,--even for a Man with two Shadows. Let us, perhaps his kindred after the spirit, not despair.