Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 07, May, 1858

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.