Title: Stories of Tragedy
Author: Various
Language: English
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                             LITTLE CLASSICS

                                EDITED BY
                            ROSSITER JOHNSON

                               STORIES OF
                                 TRAGEDY

                             [Illustration]

                           BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                        HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                      The Riverside Press Cambridge
                                  1914

                COPYRIGHT, 1874, BY JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO.
                           ALL RIGHTS RESERVED



[Illustration]



CONTENTS.


                                                              PAGE

    THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE     _Edgar Allan Poe_          7

    THE LAUSON TRAGEDY                _J. W. DeForest_          56

    THE IRON SHROUD                   _William Mudford_        108

    THE BELL-TOWER                    _Herman Melville_        128

    THE KATHAYAN SLAVE                _Emily C. Judson_        149

    THE STORY OF LA ROCHE             _Henry Mackenzie_        165

    THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH        _Thomas De Quincey_      182

[Illustration]



[Illustration]



THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE.

BY EDGAR ALLAN POE.

    “What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when
    he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are
    not beyond all conjecture.”—SIR THOMAS BROWNE.


The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves,
but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their
effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to
their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest
enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting
in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst
in moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the
most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of
enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions
of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension
preternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of
method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical
study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly,
and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called,
as if _par excellence_, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to
analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one, without effort at
the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental
character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but
simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much
at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher
powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully
tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate
frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and
_bizarre_ motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex
is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The _attention_
is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an
oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves
being not only manifold, but involute, the chances of such oversights are
multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten, it is the more concentrative
rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the
contrary, where the moves are _unique_ and have but little variation,
the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention
being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by
either party are obtained by superior _acumen_. To be less abstract: Let
us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings,
and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that
here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only
by some _recherché_ movement, the result of some strong exertion of the
intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself
into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not
unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed
absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into
miscalculation.

Whist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the
calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have
been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while
eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is nothing of a
similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of analysis. The best
chess-player in Christendom _may_ be little more than the best player
of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all
these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. When
I say proficiency, I mean that perfection in the game which includes a
comprehension of _all_ the sources whence legitimate advantage may be
derived. These are not only manifold, but multiform, and lie frequently
among recesses of thought altogether inaccessible to the ordinary
understanding. To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and,
so far, the concentrative chess-player will do very well at whist;
while the rules of Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of
the game) are sufficiently and generally comprehensible. Thus to have
a retentive memory, and to proceed by “the book,” are points commonly
regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond
the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He
makes in silence a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps,
do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information
obtained lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the
quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of _what_ to
observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is
the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game.
He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it carefully with
that of each of his opponents. He considers the mode of assorting the
cards in each hand; often counting trump by trump, and honor by honor,
through the glances bestowed by their holders upon each. He notes every
variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fund of thought
from the differences in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of
triumph, or chagrin. From the manner of gathering up a trick he judges
whether the person taking it can make another in the suit. He recognizes
what is played through feint, by the air with which it is thrown upon the
table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping or turning
of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or carelessness in regard to
its concealment; the counting of the tricks, with the order of their
arrangement; embarrassment, hesitation, eagerness, or trepidation,—all
afford, to his apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true
state of affairs. The first two or three rounds having been played, he is
in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts
down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of
the party had turned outward the faces of their own.

The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for
while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often
remarkably incapable of analysis. The constructive or combining power,
by which ingenuity is usually manifested, and to which the phrenologists
(I believe erroneously) have assigned a separate organ, supposing it a
primitive faculty, has been so frequently seen in those whose intellect
bordered otherwise upon idiocy, as to have attracted general observation
among writers on morals. Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there
exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and
the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be
found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly
imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

The narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the
light of a commentary upon the propositions just advanced.

Residing in Paris during the spring and part of the summer of 18—, I
there became acquainted with a Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. This young
gentleman was of an excellent, indeed of an illustrious family, but, by
a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the
energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir
himself in the world, or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes. By
courtesy of his creditors, there still remained in his possession a small
remnant of his patrimony; and, upon the income arising from this, he
managed, by means of a rigorous economy, to procure the necessaries of
life, without troubling himself about its superfluities. Books, indeed,
were his sole luxuries, and in Paris these are easily obtained.

Our first meeting was at an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre,
where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare
and very remarkable volume brought us into closer communion. We saw
each other again and again. I was deeply interested in the little
family history which he detailed to me with all that candor a Frenchman
indulges whenever mere self is the theme. I was astonished, too, at the
vast extent of his reading; and, above all, I felt my soul enkindled
within me by the wild fervor and the vivid freshness of his imagination.
Seeking in Paris the objects I then sought, I felt that the society of
such a man would be to me a treasure beyond price; and this feeling I
frankly confided to him. It was at length arranged that we should live
together during my stay in the city; and as my worldly circumstances were
somewhat less embarrassed than his own, I was permitted to be at the
expense of renting, and furnishing in a style which suited the rather
fantastic gloom of our common temper, a time-eaten and grotesque mansion,
long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and
tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg
St. Germain.

Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we
should have been regarded as madmen,—although, perhaps, as madmen of a
harmless nature. Our seclusion was perfect. We admitted no visitors.
Indeed, the locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a secret
from my own former associates; and it had been many years since Dupin had
ceased to know or be known in Paris. We existed within ourselves alone.

It was a freak of fancy in my friend (for what else shall I call it?) to
be enamored of the night for her own sake; and into this _bizarrerie_, as
into all his others, I quietly fell; giving myself up to his wild whims
with a perfect _abandon_. The sable divinity would not herself dwell
with us always; but we could counterfeit her presence. At the first dawn
of the morning we closed all the massy shutters of our old building;
lighted a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the
ghastliest and feeblest of rays. By the aid of these we then busied our
souls in dreams,—reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the
clock of the advent of the true Darkness. Then we sallied forth into the
streets, arm and arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far
and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows
of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet
observation can afford.

At such times I could not help remarking and admiring (although from
his rich ideality I had been prepared to expect it) a peculiar analytic
ability in Dupin. He seemed, too, to take an eager delight in its
exercise,—if not exactly in its display,—and did not hesitate to confess
the pleasure thus derived. He boasted to me, with a low chuckling laugh,
that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms,
and was wont to follow up such assertions by direct and very startling
proofs of his intimate knowledge of my own. His manner at these moments
was frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression; while his
voice, usually a rich tenor, rose into a treble which would have sounded
petulantly but for the deliberateness and entire distinctness of the
enunciation. Observing him in these moods, I often dwelt meditatively
upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused myself with the
fancy of a double Dupin,—the creative and the resolvent.

Let it not be supposed, from what I have just said, that I am detailing
any mystery, or penning any romance. What I have described in the
Frenchman was merely the result of an excited, or perhaps of a diseased
intelligence. But of the character of his remarks at the periods in
question an example will best convey the idea.

We were strolling one night down a long dirty street, in the vicinity of
the Palais Royal. Being both, apparently, occupied with thought, neither
of us had spoken a syllable for fifteen minutes at least. All at once
Dupin broke forth with these words:—

“He is a very little fellow, that’s true, and would do better for the
_Théâtre des Variétés_.”

“There can be no doubt of that,” I replied unwittingly, and not at first
observing (so much had I been absorbed in reflection) the extraordinary
manner in which the speaker had chimed in with my meditations. In an
instant afterward I recollected myself, and my astonishment was profound.

“Dupin,” said I, gravely, “this is beyond my comprehension. I do not
hesitate to say that I am amazed, and can scarcely credit my senses. How
was it possible you should know I was thinking of—” Here I paused, to
ascertain beyond a doubt whether he really knew of whom I thought.

—“of Chantilly,” said he; “why do you pause? You were remarking to
yourself that his diminutive figure unfitted him for tragedy.”

This was precisely what had formed the subject of my reflections.
Chantilly was a _quondam_ cobbler of the Rue St. Denis, who, becoming
stage-mad, had attempted the _rôle_ of Xerxes, in Crébillon’s tragedy so
called, and been notoriously Pasquinaded for his pains.

“Tell me, for Heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed, “the method—if method there
is—by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter.” In
fact, I was even more startled than I would have been willing to express.

“It was the fruiterer,” replied my friend, “who brought you to the
conclusion that the mender of soles was not of sufficient height for
Xerxes _et id genus omne_.”

“The fruiterer!—you astonish me,—I know no fruiterer whomsoever.”

“The man who ran up against you as we entered the street: it may have
been fifteen minutes ago.”

I now remembered that, in fact, a fruiterer, carrying upon his head a
large basket of apples, had nearly thrown me down, by accident, as we
passed from the Rue C—— into the thoroughfare where we stood; but what
this had to do with Chantilly I could not possibly understand.

There was not a particle of _charlatânerie_ about Dupin. “I will
explain,” he said, “and that you may comprehend all clearly, we will
first retrace the course of your meditations, from the moment in which
I spoke to you until that of the _rencontre_ with the fruiterer in
question. The larger links of the chain run thus,—Chantilly, Orion, Dr.
Nichols, Epicurus, stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer.”

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives,
amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions
of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full
of interest; and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished
by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the
starting-point and the goal. What, then, must have been my amazement when
I heard the Frenchman speak what he had just spoken, and when I could not
help acknowledging that he had spoken the truth! He continued:—

“We had been talking of horses, if I remember aright, just before leaving
the Rue C——. This was the last subject we discussed. As we crossed into
this street, a fruiterer, with a large basket upon his head, brushing
quickly past us, thrust you upon a pile of paving-stones collected at a
spot where the causeway is undergoing repair. You stepped upon one of the
loose fragments, slipped, slightly strained your ankle, appeared vexed
or sulky, muttered a few words, turned to look at the pile, and then
proceeded in silence. I was not particularly attentive to what you did;
but observation has become with me, of late, a species of necessity.

“You kept your eyes upon the ground,—glancing, with a petulant
expression, at the holes and ruts in the pavement (so that I saw you
were still thinking of the stones), until we reached the little alley
called Lamartine, which has been paved, by way of experiment, with the
overlapping and riveted blocks. Here your countenance brightened up, and
perceiving your lips move, I could not doubt that you murmured the word
‘stereotomy,’ a term very affectedly applied to this species of pavement.
I knew that you could not say to yourself ‘stereotomy,’ without being
brought to think of atomies, and thus of the theories of Epicurus; and
since, when we discussed this subject not very long ago, I mentioned to
you how singularly, yet with how little notice, the vague guesses of that
noble Greek had met with confirmation in the late nebular cosmogony,
I felt that you could not avoid casting your eyes upward to the great
_nebula_ in Orion, and I certainly expected that you would do so. You did
look up; and I was now assured that I had correctly followed your steps.
But in that bitter _tirade_ upon Chantilly, which appeared in yesterday’s
_Musée_, the satirist, making some disgraceful allusions to the cobbler’s
change of name upon assuming the buskin, quoted a Latin line about which
we have often conversed. I mean the line,

    ‘Perdidit antiquum litera prima sonum.’

I had told you that this was in reference to Orion, formerly written
Urion; and, from certain pungencies connected with this explanation, I
was aware that you could not have forgotten it. It was clear, therefore,
that you would not fail to combine the two ideas of Orion and Chantilly.
That you did combine them I saw by the character of the smile which
passed over your lips. You thought of the poor cobbler’s immolation.
So far, you had been stooping in your gait; but now I saw you draw
yourself up to your full height. I was then sure that you reflected
upon the diminutive figure of Chantilly. At this point I interrupted
your meditations to remark that as, in fact, he _was_ a very little
fellow,—that Chantilly,—he would do better at the _Théâtre des Variétés_.”

Not long after this, we were looking over an evening edition of the
_Gazette des Tribunaux_, when the following paragraphs arrested our
attention:—

“EXTRAORDINARY MURDERS.—This morning, about three o’clock, the
inhabitants of the Quartier St. Roch were aroused from sleep by a
succession of terrific shrieks, issuing, apparently, from the fourth
story of a house in the Rue Morgue, known to be in the sole occupancy of
one Madame L’Espanaye, and her daughter, Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye.
After some delay, occasioned by a fruitless attempt to procure admission
in the usual manner, the gateway was broken in with a crow-bar, and
eight or ten of the neighbors entered, accompanied by two _gendarmes_.
By this time the cries had ceased; but, as the party rushed up the first
flight of stairs, two or more rough voices, in angry contention, were
distinguished, and seemed to proceed from the upper part of the house.
As the second landing was reached, these sounds, also, had ceased, and
everything remained perfectly quiet. The party spread themselves, and
hurried from room to room. Upon arriving at a large back chamber in the
fourth story (the door of which, being found locked, with the key inside,
was forced open), a spectacle presented itself which struck every one
present not less with horror than with astonishment.

“The apartment was in the wildest disorder,—the furniture broken and
thrown about in all directions. There was only one bedstead; and from
this the bed had been removed, and thrown into the middle of the floor.
On a chair lay a razor besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or
three long and thick tresses of gray human hair, also dabbled in blood,
and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots. Upon the floor were
found four Napoleons, an ear-ring of topaz, three large silver spoons,
three smaller of _métal d’Alger_, and two bags, containing nearly four
thousand francs in gold. The drawers of a bureau, which stood in one
corner, were open, and had been, apparently, rifled, although many
articles still remained in them. A small iron safe was discovered under
the bed (not under the bedstead). It was open, with the key still in the
door. It had no contents beyond a few old letters, and other papers of
little consequence.

“Of Madame L’Espanaye no traces were here seen; but an unusual quantity
of soot being observed in the fireplace, a search was made in the
chimney, and (horrible to relate!) the corpse of the daughter, head
downward, was dragged therefrom, it having been thus forced up the narrow
aperture for a considerable distance. The body was quite warm. Upon
examining it, many excoriations were perceived, no doubt occasioned by
the violence with which it had been thrust up and disengaged. Upon the
face were many severe scratches, and upon the throat dark bruises and
deep indentations of finger-nails, as if the deceased had been throttled
to death.

“After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house without
further discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the
rear of the building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her
throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell
off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated, the former
so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of humanity.

“To this horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest
clew.”

The next day’s paper had these additional particulars:—

“THE TRAGEDY IN THE RUE MORGUE.—Many individuals have been examined in
relation to this most extraordinary and frightful affair” [the word
_affaire_ has not yet, in France, that levity of import which it conveys
with us], “but nothing whatever has transpired to throw light upon it. We
give below all the material testimony elicited.

“_Pauline Dubourg_, laundress, deposes that she has known both the
deceased for three years, having washed for them during that period. The
old lady and her daughter seemed on good terms,—very affectionate towards
each other. They were excellent pay. Could not speak in regard to their
mode or means of living. Believed that Madame L. told fortunes for a
living. Was reputed to have money put by. Never met any persons in the
house when she called for the clothes or took them home. Was sure that
they had no servant in employ. There appeared to be no furniture in any
part of the building, except in the fourth story.

“_Pierre Moreau_, tobacconist, deposes that he has been in the habit of
selling small quantities of tobacco and snuff to Madame L’Espanaye for
nearly four years. Was born in the neighborhood, and has always resided
there. The deceased and her daughter had occupied the house in which the
corpses were found for more than six years. It was formerly occupied by
a jeweller, who under-let the upper rooms to various persons. The house
was the property of Madame L. She became dissatisfied with the abuse of
the premises by her tenant, and moved into them herself, refusing to let
any portion. The old lady was childish. Witness had seen the daughter
some five or six times during the six years. The two lived an exceedingly
retired life,—were reputed to have money. Had heard it said among the
neighbors that Madame L. told fortunes; did not believe it. Had never
seen any person enter the door except the old lady and her daughter, a
porter once or twice, and a physician some eight or ten times.

“Many other persons, neighbors, gave evidence to the same effect. No one
was spoken of as frequenting the house. It was not known whether there
were any living connections of Madame L. and her daughter. The shutters
of the front windows were seldom opened. Those in the rear were always
closed, with the exception of the large back room, fourth story. The
house was a good house, not very old.

“_Isidore Musèt_, _gendarme_, deposes that he was called to the house
about three o’clock in the morning, and found some twenty or thirty
persons at the gateway, endeavoring to gain admittance. Forced it
open, at length, with a bayonet,—not with a crow-bar. Had but little
difficulty in getting it open, on account of its being a double or
folding gate, and bolted neither at bottom nor top. The shrieks were
continued until the gate was forced, and then suddenly ceased. They
seemed to be screams of some person (or persons) in great agony; were
loud and drawn out, not short and quick. Witness led the way up stairs.
Upon reaching the first landing, heard two voices in loud and angry
contention; the one a gruff voice, the other much shriller,—a very
strange voice. Could distinguish some words of the former, which was
that of a Frenchman. Was positive that it was not a woman’s voice. Could
distinguish the words _sacré_ and _diable_. The shrill voice was that of
a foreigner. Could not be sure whether it was the voice of a man or of a
woman. Could not make out what was said, but believed the language to be
Spanish. The state of the room and of the bodies was described by this
witness as we described them yesterday.

“_Henri Duval_, a neighbor, and by trade a silversmith, deposes that
he was one of the party who first entered the house. Corroborates the
testimony of Musèt in general. As soon as they forced an entrance, they
reclosed the door to keep out the crowd, which collected very fast,
notwithstanding the lateness of the hour. The shrill voice, this witness
thinks, was that of an Italian. Was certain it was not French. Could not
be sure that it was a man’s voice. It might have been a woman’s. Was not
acquainted with the Italian language. Could not distinguish the words,
but was convinced by the intonation that the speaker was an Italian. Knew
Madame L. and her daughter. Had conversed with both frequently. Was sure
that the shrill voice was not that of either of the deceased.

“_—— Odenheimer_, _restaurateur_. This witness volunteered his testimony.
Not speaking French, was examined through an interpreter. Is a native of
Amsterdam. Was passing the house at the time of the shrieks. They lasted
for several minutes,—probably ten. They were long and loud, very awful
and distressing. Was one of those who entered the building. Corroborated
the previous evidence in every respect but one. Was sure that the shrill
voice was that of a man,—of a Frenchman. Could not distinguish the words
uttered. They were loud and quick, unequal, spoken apparently in fear as
well as in anger. The voice was harsh,—not so much shrill as harsh. Could
not call it a shrill voice. The gruff voice said repeatedly, _sacré_,
_diable_, and once _mon Dieu._

“_Jules Mignaud_, banker, of the firm of Mignaud et Fils, Rue Deloraine.
Is the elder Mignaud. Madame L’Espanaye had some property. Had opened
an account with his banking-house in the spring of the year —— (eight
years previously). Made frequent deposits in small sums. Had checked for
nothing until the third day before her death, when she took out in person
the sum of 4,000 francs. This sum was paid in gold, and a clerk sent home
with the money.

“_Adolphe Le Bon_, clerk to Mignaud et Fils, deposes that on the day in
question, about noon, he accompanied Madame L’Espanaye to her residence
with the 4,000 francs, put up in two bags. Upon the door being opened,
Mademoiselle L. appeared, and took from his hands one of the bags, while
the old lady relieved him of the other. He then bowed and departed. Did
not see any person in the street at the time. It is a by-street, very
lonely.

“_William Bird_, tailor, deposes that he was one of the party who entered
the house. Is an Englishman. Has lived in Paris two years. Was one of the
first to ascend the stairs. Heard the voices in contention. The gruff
voice was that of a Frenchman. Could make out several words, but cannot
now remember all. Heard distinctly _sacré_ and _mon Dieu_. There was a
sound at the moment as if of several persons struggling,—a scraping and
scuffling sound. The shrill voice was very loud,—louder than the gruff
one. Is sure that it was not the voice of an Englishman. Appeared to be
that of a German. Might have been a woman’s voice. Does not understand
German.

“Four of the above-named witnesses, being recalled, deposed that the
door of the chamber in which was found the body of Mademoiselle L. was
locked on the inside when the party reached it. Everything was perfectly
silent,—no groans or noises of any kind. Upon forcing the door no person
was seen. The windows, both of the back and front room, were down, and
firmly fastened from within. A door between the two rooms was closed,
but not locked. The door leading from the front room into the passage
was locked, with the key on the inside. A small room in the front of
the house, on the fourth story, at the head of the passage, was open,
the door being ajar. This room was crowded with old beds, boxes, and so
forth. These were carefully removed and searched. There was not an inch
of any portion of the house which was not carefully searched. Sweeps
were sent up and down the chimneys. The house was a four-story one, with
garrets (_mansardes_). A trap-door on the roof was nailed down very
securely,—did not appear to have been opened for years. The time elapsing
between the hearing of the voices in contention and the breaking open
of the room door was variously stated by the witnesses. Some made it as
short as three minutes, some as long as five. The door was opened with
difficulty.

“_Alfonzo Garcio_, undertaker, deposes that he resides in the Rue Morgue.
Is a native of Spain. Was one of the party who entered the house. Did not
proceed up stairs. Is nervous, and was apprehensive of the consequences
of agitation. Heard the voices in contention. The gruff voice was that of
a Frenchman. Could not distinguish what was said. The shrill voice was
that of an Englishman,—is sure of this. Does not understand the English
language, but judges by the intonation.

“_Alberto Montani_, confectioner, deposes that he was among the first to
ascend the stairs. Heard the voices in question. The gruff voice was that
of a Frenchman. Distinguished several words. The speaker appeared to be
expostulating. Could not make out the words of the shrill voice. Spoke
quick and unevenly. Thinks it the voice of a Russian. Corroborates the
general testimony. Is an Italian. Never conversed with a native of Russia.

“Several witnesses, recalled, here testified that the chimneys of all
the rooms on the fourth story were too narrow to admit the passage of a
human being. By ‘sweeps’ were meant cylindrical sweeping-brushes, such
as are employed by those who clean chimneys. These brushes were passed up
and down every flue in the house. There is no back passage by which any
one could have descended while the party proceeded up stairs. The body of
Mademoiselle L’Espanaye was so firmly wedged in the chimney that it could
not be got down until four or five of the party united their strength.

“_Paul Dumas_, physician, deposes that he was called to view the bodies
about daybreak. They were both then lying on the sacking of the bedstead
in the chamber where Mademoiselle L. was found. The corpse of the young
lady was much bruised and excoriated. The fact that it had been thrust
up the chimney would sufficiently account for these appearances. The
throat was greatly chafed. There were several deep scratches just below
the chin, together with a series of livid spots which were evidently
the impression of fingers. The face was fearfully discolored, and the
eyeballs protruded. The tongue had been partially bitten through. A
large bruise was discovered upon the pit of the stomach, produced,
apparently, by the pressure of a knee. In the opinion of M. Dumas,
Mademoiselle L’Espanaye had been throttled to death by some person or
persons unknown. The corpse of the mother was horribly mutilated. All
the bones of the right leg and arm were more or less shattered. The left
_tibia_ much splintered, as well as all the ribs of the left side. Whole
body dreadfully bruised and discolored. It was not possible to say how
the injuries had been inflicted. A heavy club of wood, or a broad bar of
iron, a chair, any large, heavy, and obtuse weapon, would have produced
such results, if wielded by the hands of a very powerful man. No woman
could have inflicted the blows with any weapon. The head of the deceased,
when seen by witness, was entirely separated from the body, and was also
greatly shattered. The throat had evidently been cut with some very sharp
instrument,—probably with a razor.

“_Alexandre Etienne_, surgeon, was called with M. Dumas to view the
bodies. Corroborated the testimony, and the opinions of M. Dumas.

“Nothing further of importance was elicited, although several other
persons were examined. A murder so mysterious, and so perplexing in all
its particulars, was never before committed in Paris,—if indeed a murder
has been committed at all. The police are entirely at fault,—an unusual
occurrence in affairs of this nature. There is not, however, the shadow
of a clew apparent.”

The evening edition of the paper stated that the greatest excitement
still continued in the Quartier St. Roch; that the premises in question
had been carefully researched, and fresh examinations of witnesses
instituted, but all to no purpose. A postscript, however, mentioned
that Adolphe Le Bon had been arrested and imprisoned, although nothing
appeared to criminate him, beyond the facts already detailed.

Dupin seemed singularly interested in the progress of this affair,—at
least so I judged from his manner, for he made no comments. It was only
after the announcement that Le Bon had been imprisoned, that he asked me
my opinion respecting the murders.

I could merely agree with all Paris in considering them an insoluble
mystery. I saw no means by which it would be possible to trace the
murderer.

“We must not judge of the means,” said Dupin, “by this shell of an
examination. The Parisian police, so much extolled for _acumen_, are
cunning, but no more. There is no method in their proceedings, beyond
the method of the moment. They make a vast parade of measures; but, not
unfrequently, these are so ill adapted to the objects proposed, as to put
us in mind of Monsieur Jourdain’s calling for his _robe-de-chambre—pour
mieux entendre la musique_. The results attained by them are not
unfrequently surprising, but, for the most part, are brought about by
simple diligence and activity. When these qualities are unavailing, their
schemes fail. Vidocq, for example, was a good guesser and a persevering
man. But, without educated thought, he erred continually by the very
intensity of his investigations. He impaired his vision by holding the
object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual
clearness, but in so doing he necessarily lost sight of the matter as a
whole. Thus there is such a thing as being too profound. Truth is not
always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I
do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the
valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is
found. The modes and sources of this kind of error are well typified in
the contemplation of the heavenly bodies. To look at a star by glances,
to view it in a sidelong way, by turning toward it the exterior portions
of the _retina_ (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than
the interior), is to behold the star distinctly, is to have the best
appreciation of its lustre,—a lustre which grows dim just in proportion
as we turn our vision _fully_ upon it. A greater number of rays actually
fall upon the eye in the latter case, but in the former there is the more
refined capacity for comprehension. By undue profundity we perplex and
enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish
from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too
direct.

“As for these murders, let us enter into some examinations for ourselves,
before we make up an opinion respecting them. An inquiry will afford us
amusement” [I thought this an odd term, so applied, but said nothing],
“and, besides, Le Bon once rendered me a service for which I am not
ungrateful. We will go and see the premises with our own eyes. I know
G——, the Prefect of Police, and shall have no difficulty in obtaining the
necessary permission.”

The permission was obtained, and we proceeded at once to the Rue Morgue.
This is one of those miserable thoroughfares which intervene between the
Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch. It was late in the afternoon when we
reached it, as this quarter is at a great distance from that in which we
resided. The house was readily found; for there were still many persons
gazing up at the closed shutters, with an objectless curiosity, from
the opposite side of the way. It was an ordinary Parisian house, with
a gateway, on one side of which was a glazed watch-box, with a sliding
panel in the window, indicating a _loge de concierge_. Before going in,
we walked up the street, turned down an alley, and then, again turning,
passed in the rear of the building,—Dupin, meanwhile, examining the
whole neighborhood, as well as the house, with a minuteness of attention
for which I could see no possible object.

Retracing our steps, we came again to the front of the dwelling, rang,
and, having shown our credentials, were admitted by the agents in charge.
We went up stairs,—into the chamber where the body of Mademoiselle
L’Espanaye had been found, and where both the deceased still lay. The
disorders of the room had, as usual, been suffered to exist. I saw
nothing beyond what had been stated in the _Gazette des Tribunaux_. Dupin
scrutinized everything,—not excepting the bodies of the victims. We then
went into the other rooms, and into the yard; a _gendarme_ accompanying
us throughout. The examination occupied us until dark, when we took our
departure. On our way home my companion stepped in for a moment at the
office of one of the daily papers.

I have said that the whims of my friend were manifold, and that _Je les
ménagais_,—for this phrase there is no English equivalent. It was his
humor, now, to decline all conversation on the subject of the murder,
until about noon the next day. He then asked me, suddenly, if I had
observed anything _peculiar_ at the scene of the atrocity.

There was something in his manner of emphasizing the word “peculiar”
which caused me to shudder, without knowing why.

“No, nothing _peculiar_,” I said; “nothing more, at least, than we both
saw stated in the paper.”

“The _Gazette_,” he replied, “has not entered, I fear, into the unusual
horror of the thing. But dismiss the idle opinions of this print. It
appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble, for the very
reason which should cause it to be regarded as easy of solution,—I mean
for the _outré_ character of its features. The police are confounded
by the seeming absence of motive,—not for the murder itself,—but for
the atrocity of the murder. They are puzzled, too, by the seeming
impossibility of reconciling the voices heard in contention, with
the facts that no one was discovered up stairs but the assassinated
Mademoiselle L’Espanaye, and that there were no means of egress without
the notice of the party ascending. The wild disorder of the room; the
corpse thrust, with the head downward, up the chimney; the frightful
mutilation of the body of the old lady,—these considerations, with those
just mentioned, and others which I need not mention, have sufficed to
paralyze the powers, by putting completely at fault the boasted acumen
of the government agents. They have fallen into the gross but common
error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse. But it is by these
deviations from the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels its way, if
at all, in its search for the true. In investigations such as we are now
pursuing, it should not be so much asked ‘what has occurred,’ as ‘what
has occurred that has never occurred before.’ In fact, the facility with
which I shall arrive, or have arrived, at the solution of this mystery,
is in the direct ratio of its apparent insolubility in the eyes of the
police.”

I stared at the speaker in mute astonishment.

“I am now awaiting,” continued he, looking toward the door of our
apartment,—“I am now awaiting a person who, although perhaps not
the perpetrator of these butcheries, must have been in some measure
implicated in their perpetration. Of the worst portion of the crimes
committed, it is probable that he is innocent. I hope that I am right
in this supposition; for upon it I build my expectation of reading the
entire riddle. I look for the man here—in this room—every moment. It is
true that he may not arrive; but the probability is that he will. Should
he come, it will be necessary to detain him. Here are pistols; and we
both know how to use them when occasion demands their use.”

I took the pistols, scarcely knowing what I did, or believing what I
heard, while Dupin went on, very much as if in a soliloquy. I have
already spoken of his abstract manner at such times. His discourse was
addressed to myself; but his voice, although by no means loud, had that
intonation which is commonly employed in speaking to some one at a great
distance. His eyes, vacant in expression, regarded only the wall.

“That the voices heard in contention,” he said, “by the party upon the
stairs, were not the voices of the women themselves, was fully proved by
the evidence. This relieves us of all doubt upon the question whether
the old lady could have first destroyed the daughter, and afterward
have committed suicide. I speak of this point chiefly for the sake of
method; for the strength of Madame L’Espanaye would have been utterly
unequal to the task of thrusting her daughter’s corpse up the chimney as
it was found; and the nature of the wounds upon her own person entirely
precludes the idea of self-destruction. Murder, then, has been committed
by some third party; and the voices of this third party were those heard
in contention. Let me now advert, not to the whole testimony respecting
these voices, but to what was _peculiar_ in that testimony. Did you
observe anything peculiar about it?”

I remarked that, while all the witnesses agreed in supposing the gruff
voice to be that of a Frenchman, there was much disagreement in regard to
the shrill, or, as one individual termed it, the harsh voice.

“That was the evidence itself,” said Dupin, “but it was not the
peculiarity of the evidence. You have observed nothing distinctive. Yet
there _was_ something to be observed. The witnesses, as you remark,
agreed about the gruff voice; they were here unanimous. But in regard to
the shrill voice, the peculiarity is, not that they disagreed, but that,
while an Italian, an Englishman, a Spaniard, a Hollander, and a Frenchman
attempted to describe it, each one spoke of it as that _of a foreigner_.
Each is sure that it was not the voice of one of his own countrymen.
Each likens it, not to the voice of an individual of any nation with
whose language he is conversant, but the converse. The Frenchman supposes
it the voice of a Spaniard, and ‘might have distinguished some words
_had he been acquainted with the Spanish_.’ The Dutchman maintains it
to have been that of a Frenchman; but we find it stated that, ‘_not
understanding French, this witness was examined through an interpreter_.’
The Englishman thinks it the voice of a German, and ‘_does not understand
German_.’ The Spaniard ‘is sure’ that it was that of an Englishman,
but ‘judges by the intonation’ altogether, ‘_as he has no knowledge
of the English_.’ The Italian believes it the voice of a Russian, but
‘_has never conversed with a native of Russia_.’ A second Frenchman
differs, moreover, with the first, and is positive that the voice was
that of an Italian; but, _not being cognizant of that tongue_, is, like
the Spaniard, ‘convinced by the intonation.’ Now, how strangely unusual
must that voice have really been, about which such testimony as this
_could_ have been elicited!—in whose _tones_, even, denizens of the five
great divisions of Europe could recognize nothing familiar! You will
say that it might have been the voice of an Asiatic, of an African.
Neither Asiatics nor Africans abound in Paris; but, without denying
the inference, I will now merely call your attention to three points.
The voice is termed by one witness ‘harsh rather than shrill.’ It is
represented by two others to have been ‘quick and _unequal_.’ No words—no
sounds resembling words—were by any witness mentioned as distinguishable.

“I know not,” continued Dupin, “what impression I may have made, so
far, upon your own understanding; but I do not hesitate to say that
legitimate deductions even from this portion of the testimony—the portion
respecting the gruff and shrill voices—are in themselves sufficient to
engender a suspicion which should give direction to all further progress
in the investigation of the mystery. I said ‘legitimate deductions’; but
my meaning is not thus fully expressed. I designed to imply that the
deductions are the _sole_ proper ones, and that the suspicion arises
_inevitably_ from them as the single result. What the suspicion is,
however, I will not say just yet. I merely wish you to bear in mind
that, with myself it was sufficiently forcible to give a definite form—a
certain tendency—to my inquiries in the chamber.

“Let us now transport ourselves, in fancy, to this chamber. What shall
we first seek here? The means of egress employed by the murderers. It
is not too much to say that neither of us believes in preternatural
events. Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye were not destroyed by spirits.
The doers of the deed were material, and escaped materially. Then how?
Fortunately, there is but one mode of reasoning upon the point, and that
mode _must_ lead us to a definite decision. Let us examine, each by each,
the possible means of egress. It is clear that the assassins were in the
room where Mademoiselle L’Espanaye was found, or at least in the room
adjoining, when the party ascended the stairs. It is then only from these
two apartments that we have to seek issues. The police have laid bare the
floors, the ceilings, and the masonry of the walls, in every direction.
No _secret_ issues could have escaped their vigilance. But, not trusting
to _their_ eyes, I examined with my own. There were, then, _no_ secret
issues. Both doors leading from the rooms into the passage were securely
locked, with the keys inside. Let us turn to the chimneys. These,
although of ordinary width for some eight or ten feet above the hearths,
will not admit, throughout their extent, the body of a large cat. The
impossibility of egress, by means already stated, being thus absolute, we
are reduced to the windows. Through those of the front room no one could
have escaped without notice from the crowd in the street. The murderers
_must_ have passed, then, through those of the back room. Now, brought
to this conclusion in so unequivocal a manner as we are, it is not our
part, as reasoners, to reject it on account of apparent impossibilities.
It is only left for us to prove that these apparent ‘impossibilities’
are, in reality, not such.

“There are two windows in the chamber. One of them is unobstructed by
furniture, and is wholly visible. The lower portion of the other is
hidden from view by the head of the unwieldy bedstead which is thrust
close up against it. The former was found securely fastened from within.
It resisted the utmost force of those who endeavored to raise it. A
large gimlet-hole had been pierced in its frame to the left, and a very
stout nail was found fitted therein, nearly to the head. Upon examining
the other window, a similar nail was seen similarly fitted in it; and
a vigorous attempt to raise this sash failed also. The police were now
entirely satisfied that egress had not been in these directions. And,
_therefore_, it was thought a matter of supererogation to withdraw the
nails and open the windows.

“My own examination was somewhat more particular, and was so for the
reason I have just given,—because here it was, I knew, that all apparent
impossibilities _must_ be proved to be not such in reality.

“I proceeded to think thus,—_à posteriori_. The murderers _did_
escape from one of these windows. This being so, they could not have
re-fastened the sashes from the inside, as they were found fastened,—the
consideration which put a stop, through its obviousness, to the scrutiny
of the police in this quarter. Yet the sashes were fastened. They _must_,
then, have the power of fastening themselves. There was no escape from
this conclusion. I stepped to the unobstructed casement, withdrew the
nail with some difficulty, and attempted to raise the sash. It resisted
all my efforts, as I had anticipated. A concealed spring must, I now
knew, exist; and this corroboration of my idea convinced me that my
premises, at least, were correct, however mysterious still appeared the
circumstances attending the nails. A careful search soon brought to light
the hidden spring. I pressed it, and, satisfied with the discovery,
forbore to upraise the sash.

“I now replaced the nail and regarded it attentively. A person passing
out through this window might have reclosed it, and the spring would
have caught,—but the nail could not have been replaced. The conclusion
was plain and again narrowed in the field of my investigations. The
assassins _must_ have escaped through the other window. Supposing, then,
the springs upon each sash to be the same, as was probable, there must be
found a difference between the nails, or at least between the modes of
their fixture. Getting upon the sacking of the bedstead, I looked over
the head-board minutely at the second casement. Passing my hand down
behind the board, I readily discovered and pressed the spring, which was,
as I had supposed, identical in character with its neighbor. I now looked
at the nail. It was as stout as the other, and apparently fitted in the
same manner,—driven in nearly up to the head.

“You will say that I was puzzled; but, if you think so, you must have
misunderstood the nature of the inductions. To use a sporting phrase, I
had not been once ‘at fault.’ The scent had never for an instant been
lost. There was no flaw in any link of the chain. I had traced the secret
to its ultimate result,—and that result was _the nail_. It had, I say,
in every respect, the appearance of its fellow in the other window; but
this fact was an absolute nullity (conclusive as it might seem to be)
when compared with the consideration that here, at this point, terminated
the clew. ‘There _must_ be something wrong,’ I said, ‘about the nail.’ I
touched it; and the head, with about a quarter of an inch of the shank,
came off in my fingers. The rest of the shank was in the gimlet-hole,
where it had been broken off. The fracture was an old one (for its edges
were incrusted with rust), and had apparently been accomplished by the
blow of a hammer, which had partially imbedded, in the top of the bottom
sash, the head portion of the nail. I now carefully replaced this head
portion in the indentation whence I had taken it, and the resemblance
to a perfect nail was complete,—the fissure was invisible. Pressing the
spring, I gently raised the sash for a few inches; the head went up with
it, remaining firm in its bed. I closed the window, and the semblance of
the whole nail was again perfect.

“The riddle, so far, was now unriddled. The assassin had escaped through
the window which looked upon the bed. Dropping of its own accord upon
his exit (or perhaps purposely closed), it had become fastened by the
spring; and it was the retention of this spring which had been mistaken
by the police for that of the nail,—further inquiry being thus considered
unnecessary.

“The next question is that of the mode of descent. Upon this point I
had been satisfied in my walk with you around the building. About five
feet and a half from the casement in question runs a lightning-rod. From
this rod it would have been impossible for any one to reach the window
itself, to say nothing of entering it. I observed, however, that the
shutters of the fourth story were of the peculiar kind called by Parisian
carpenters _ferrades_,—a kind rarely employed at the present day, but
frequently seen upon very old mansions at Lyons and Bordeaux. They are in
the form of an ordinary door (a single, not a folding door), except that
the lower half is latticed or worked in open trellis, thus affording an
excellent hold for the hands. In the present instance these shutters are
fully three feet and a half broad. When we saw them from the rear of the
house, they were both about half open; that is to say, they stood off
at right angles from the wall. It is probable that the police, as well
as myself, examined the back of the tenement; but, if so, in looking at
these _ferrades_ in the line of their breadth (as they must have done),
they did not perceive this great breadth itself, or, at all events,
failed to take it into due consideration. In fact, having once satisfied
themselves that no egress could have been made in this quarter, they
would naturally bestow here a very cursory examination. It was clear to
me, however, that the shutter belonging to the window at the head of the
bed would, if swung fully back to the wall, reach to within two feet
of the lightning-rod. It was also evident that, by exertion of a very
unusual degree of activity and courage, an entrance into the window, from
the rod, might have been thus effected. By reaching to the distance of
two feet and a half (we now suppose the shutter open to its whole extent)
a robber might have taken a firm grasp upon the trellis-work. Letting go,
then, his hold upon the rod, placing his feet securely against the wall,
and springing boldly from it, he might have swung the shutter so as to
close it, and, if we imagine the window open at the time, might even have
swung himself into the room.

“I wish you to bear especially in mind that I have spoken of a _very_
unusual degree of activity as requisite to success in so hazardous and
so difficult a feat. It is my design to show you, first, that the thing
might possibly have been accomplished; but, secondly and _chiefly_,
I wish to impress upon your understanding the _very extraordinary_,
the almost preternatural character of that agility which could have
accomplished it.

“You will say, no doubt, using the language of the law, that, ‘to
make out my case,’ I should rather undervalue than insist upon a full
estimation of the activity required in this matter. This may be the
practice in law, but it is not the usage of reason. My ultimate object
is only the truth. My immediate purpose is to lead you to place in
juxtaposition that _very unusual_ activity of which I have just spoken,
with that _very peculiar_ shrill (or harsh) and _unequal_ voice, about
whose nationality no two persons could be found to agree, and in whose
utterance no syllabification could be detected.”

At these words a vague and half-formed conception of the meaning of Dupin
flitted over my mind. I seemed to be upon the verge of comprehension,
without power to comprehend,—as men, at times, find themselves upon the
brink of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. My
friend went on with his discourse.

“You will see,” he said, “that I have shifted the question from the mode
of egress to that of ingress. It was my design to convey the idea that
both were effected in the same manner, at the same point. Let us now
revert to the interior of the room. Let us survey the appearances here.
The drawers of the bureau, it is said, had been rifled, although many
articles of apparel still remained within them. The conclusion here is
absurd. It is a mere guess,—a very silly one,—and no more. How are we to
know that the articles found in the drawers were not all these drawers
had originally contained? Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter lived an
exceedingly retired life,—saw no company,—seldom went out,—had little
use for numerous changes of habiliment. Those found were at least of as
good quality as any likely to be possessed by these ladies. If a thief
had taken any, why did he not take the best, why did he not take all?
In a word, why did he abandon four thousand francs in gold to encumber
himself with a bundle of linen? The gold _was_ abandoned. Nearly the
whole sum mentioned by Monsieur Mignaud, the banker, was discovered,
in bags, upon the floor. I wish you, therefore, to discard from your
thoughts the blundering idea of _motive_, engendered in the brains of the
police by that portion of the evidence which speaks of money delivered
at the door of the house. Coincidences ten times as remarkable as this
(the delivery of the money, and murder committed within three days upon
the party receiving it) happen to all of us every hour of our lives,
without attracting even momentary notice. Coincidences, in general, are
great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been
educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities,—that theory to
which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the
most glorious of illustrations. In the present instance, had the gold
been gone, the fact of its delivery three days before would have formed
something more than a coincidence. It would have been corroborative of
this idea of motive. But, under the real circumstances of the case, if we
are to suppose gold the motive of this outrage, we must also imagine the
perpetrator so vacillating an idiot as to have abandoned his gold and his
motive together.

“Keeping now steadily in mind the points to which I have drawn your
attention,—that peculiar voice, that unusual agility, and that startling
absence of motive in a murder so singularly atrocious as this,—let
us glance at the butchery itself. Here is a woman strangled to death
by manual strength, and thrust up a chimney, head downward. Ordinary
assassins employ no such modes of murder as this. Least of all do they
thus dispose of the murdered. In the manner of thrusting the corpse up
the chimney, you will admit that there was something _excessively outré_;
something altogether irreconcilable with our common notions of human
action, even when we suppose the actors the most depraved of men. Think,
too, how great must have been that strength which could have thrust the
body up such an aperture so forcibly that the united vigor of several
persons was found barely sufficient to drag it _down_!

“Turn now to other indications of the employment of a vigor most
marvellous. On the hearth were thick tresses—very thick tresses—of gray
human hair. These had been torn out by the roots. You are aware of the
great force necessary in tearing thus from the head even twenty or thirty
hairs together. You saw the locks in question as well as myself. Their
roots (a hideous sight!) were clotted with fragments of the flesh of
the scalp,—sure token of the prodigious power which had been exerted
in uprooting perhaps half a million of hairs at a time. The throat of
the old lady was not merely cut, but the head absolutely severed from
the body; the instrument was a mere razor. I wish you also to look at
the _brutal_ ferocity of these deeds. Of the bruises upon the body
of Madame L’Espanaye I do not speak. Monsieur Dumas, and his worthy
coadjutor Monsieur Etienne, have pronounced that they were inflicted by
some obtuse instrument, and so far these gentlemen are very correct.
The obtuse instrument was clearly the stone pavement in the yard, upon
which the victim had fallen from the window which looked in upon the bed.
This idea, however simple it may now seem, escaped the police, for the
same reason that the breadth of the shutters escaped them,—because, by
the affair of the nails, their perceptions had been hermetically sealed
against the possibility of the windows having ever been opened at all.

“If now, in addition to all these things, you have properly reflected
upon the odd disorder of the chamber, we have gone so far as to combine
the ideas of an agility astounding, a strength superhuman, a ferocity
brutal, a butchery without motive, a _grotesquerie_ in horror absolutely
alien from humanity, and a voice foreign in tone to the ears of men of
many nations, and devoid of all distinct or intelligible syllabification.
What result, then, has ensued? What impression have I made upon your
fancy?”

I felt a creeping of the flesh as Dupin asked me the question. “A
madman,” I said, “has done this deed; some raving maniac, escaped from a
neighboring _Maison de Santé_.”

“In some respects,” he replied, “your idea is not irrelevant. But the
voices of madmen, even in their wildest paroxysms, are never found to
tally with that peculiar voice heard upon the stairs. Madmen are of some
nation, and their language, however incoherent in its words, has always
the coherence of syllabification. Besides, the hair of a madman is not
such as I now hold in my hand. I disentangled this little tuft from the
rigidly clutched fingers of Madame L’Espanaye. Tell me what you can make
of it.”

“Dupin,” I said, completely unnerved, “this hair is most unusual; this is
no _human_ hair.”

“I have not asserted that it is,” said he; “but, before we decide this
point, I wish you to glance at the little sketch I have here traced upon
this paper. It is a fac-simile drawing of what has been described in
one portion of the testimony as ‘dark bruises, and deep indentations of
finger-nails,’ upon the throat of Mademoiselle L’Espanaye, and in another
(by Messrs. Dumas and Etienne) as a ‘series of livid spots, evidently the
impression of fingers.’

“You will perceive,” continued my friend, spreading out the paper upon
the table before us, “that this drawing gives the idea of a firm and
fixed hold. There is no _slipping_ apparent. Each finger has retained,
possibly until the death of the victim, the fearful grasp by which it
originally embedded itself. Attempt now to place all your fingers, at the
same time, in the respective impressions as you see them.”

I made the attempt in vain.

“We are possibly not giving this matter a fair trial,” he said. “The
paper is spread out upon a plane surface; but the human throat is
cylindrical. Here is a billet of wood, the circumference of which is
about that of the throat. Wrap the drawing around it, and try the
experiment again.”

I did so; but the difficulty was even more obvious than before. “This,” I
said, “is the mark of no human hand.”

“Read now,” replied Dupin, “this passage from Cuvier.”

It was a minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the
large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands. The gigantic
stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the
imitative propensities of these mammalia are sufficiently well known to
all. I understood the full horrors of the murder at once.

“The description of the digits,” said I, as I made an end of reading,
“is in exact accordance with this drawing. I see that no animal but
an Ourang-Outang of the species here mentioned could have impressed
the indentations as you have traced them. This tuft of tawny hair,
too, is identical in character with that of the beast of Cuvier. But I
cannot possibly comprehend the particulars of this frightful mystery.
Besides, there were _two_ voices heard in contention, and one of them was
unquestionably the voice of a Frenchman.”

“True; and you will remember an expression attributed almost unanimously,
by the evidence, to this voice,—the expression _mon Dieu_! This,
under the circumstances, has been justly characterized by one of the
witnesses (Montani, the confectioner) as an expression of remonstrance
or expostulation. Upon these two words, therefore, I have mainly built
my hopes of a full solution of the riddle. A Frenchman was cognizant of
the murder. It is possible, indeed it is far more than probable, that he
was innocent of all participation in the bloody transactions which took
place. The Ourang-Outang may have escaped from him. He may have traced it
to the chamber; but, under the agitating circumstances which ensued, he
could never have recaptured it. It is still at large. I will not pursue
these guesses,—for I have no right to call them more,—since the shades
of reflection upon which they are based are scarcely of sufficient depth
to be appreciable by my own intellect, and since I could not pretend to
make them intelligible to the understanding of another. We will call them
guesses, then, and speak of them as such. If the Frenchman in question
is indeed, as I suppose, innocent of this atrocity, this advertisement,
which I left last night, upon our return home, at the office of _Le
Monde_ (a paper devoted to the shipping interest, and much sought by
sailors), will bring him to our residence.”

He handed me a paper, and I read thus:—

    CAUGHT.—_In the Bois de Boulogne, early in the morning of
    the —— inst._ (the morning of the murder), _a very large,
    tawny Ourang-Outang of the Bornese species. The owner (who is
    ascertained to be a sailor belonging to a Maltese vessel) may
    have the animal again, upon identifying it satisfactorily, and
    paying a few charges arising from its capture and keeping. Call
    at No. ——, Rue ——, Faubourg St. Germain,—au troisième._

“How was it possible,” I asked, “that you should know the man to be a
sailor, and belonging to a Maltese vessel?”

“I do _not_ know it,” said Dupin. “I am not _sure_ of it. Here, however,
is a small piece of ribbon, which from its form, and from its greasy
appearance, has evidently been used in tying the hair in one of those
long _queues_ of which sailors are so fond. Moreover, this knot is one
which few besides sailors can tie, and is peculiar to the Maltese. I
picked the ribbon up at the foot of the lightning-rod. It could not have
belonged to either of the deceased. Now if, after all, I am wrong in my
induction from this ribbon, that the Frenchman was a sailor belonging
to a Maltese vessel, still I can have done no harm in saying what I did
in the advertisement. If I am in error, he will merely suppose that I
have been misled by some circumstance into which he will not take the
trouble to inquire. But if I am right, a great point is gained. Cognizant
although innocent of the murder, the Frenchman will naturally hesitate
about replying to the advertisement,—about demanding the Ourang-Outang.
He will reason thus: ‘I am innocent; I am poor; my Ourang-Outang is of
great value,—to one in my circumstances a fortune of itself,—why should
I lose it through idle apprehensions of danger? Here it is, within my
grasp. It was found in the Bois de Boulogne,—at a vast distance from the
scene of that butchery. How can it ever be suspected that a brute beast
should have done the deed? The police are at fault,—they have failed
to procure the slightest clew. Should they even trace the animal, it
would be impossible to prove me cognizant of the murder, or to implicate
me in guilt on account of that cognizance. Above all, _I am known_.
The advertiser designates me as the possessor of the beast. I am not
sure to what limit his knowledge may extend. Should I avoid claiming a
property of so great value, which it is known that I possess, it will
render the animal, at least, liable to suspicion. It is not my policy to
attract attention either to myself or to the beast. I will answer the
advertisement, get the Ourang-Outang, and keep it close until this matter
has blown over.’”

At this moment we heard a step upon the stairs.

“Be ready,” said Dupin, “with your pistols, but neither use them nor show
them until at a signal from myself.”

The front door of the house had been left open, and the visitor had
entered, without ringing, and advanced several steps upon the staircase.
Now, however, he seemed to hesitate. Presently we heard him descending.
Dupin was moving quickly to the door, when we again heard him coming up.
He did not turn back a second time, but stepped up with decision, and
rapped at the door of our chamber.

“Come in,” said Dupin, in a cheerful and hearty tone.

A man entered. He was a sailor, evidently,—a tall, stout, and
muscular-looking person, with a certain daredevil expression of
countenance, not altogether unprepossessing. His face, greatly sunburnt,
was more than half hidden by whisker and _mustachio_. He had with him
a huge oaken cudgel, but appeared to be otherwise unarmed. He bowed
awkwardly, and bade us “good evening,” in French accents, which, although
somewhat Neufchatelish, were still sufficiently indicative of a Parisian
origin.

“Sit down, my friend,” said Dupin. “I suppose you have called about the
Ourang-Outang. Upon my word, I almost envy you the possession of him,—a
remarkably fine, and no doubt a very valuable animal. How old do you
suppose him to be?”

The sailor drew a long breath, with the air of a man relieved of some
intolerable burden, and then replied, in an assured tone,—

“I have no way of telling, but he can’t be more than four or five years
old. Have you got him here?”

“O no; we had no conveniences for keeping him here. He is at a livery
stable in the Rue Dubourg, just by. You can get him in the morning. Of
course you are prepared to identify the property?”

“To be sure I am, sir.”

“I shall be sorry to part with him,” said Dupin.

“I don’t mean that you should be at all this trouble for nothing, sir,”
said the man. “Couldn’t expect it. Am very willing to pay a reward for
the finding of the animal,—that is to say, anything in reason.”

“Well,” replied my friend, “that is all very fair, to be sure. Let me
think!—what should I have? Oh! I will tell you. My reward shall be this.
You shall give me all the information in your power about these murders
in the Rue Morgue.”

Dupin said the last words in a very low tone, and very quietly. Just as
quietly, too, he walked toward the door, locked it, and put the key into
his pocket. He then drew a pistol from his bosom and placed it, without
the least flurry, upon the table.

The sailor’s face flushed up as if he were struggling with suffocation.
He started to his feet and grasped his cudgel; but the next moment he
fell back into his seat, trembling violently, and with the countenance
of death itself. He spoke not a word. I pitied him from the bottom of my
heart.

“My friend,” said Dupin, in a kind tone, “you are alarming yourself
unnecessarily,—you are indeed. We mean you no harm whatever. I pledge
you the honor of a gentleman, and of a Frenchman, that we intend you no
injury. I perfectly well know that you are innocent of the atrocities in
the Rue Morgue. It will not do, however, to deny that you are in some
measure implicated in them. From what I have already said, you must know
that I have had means of information about this matter,—means of which
you could never have dreamed. Now the thing stands thus. You have done
nothing which you could have avoided,—nothing, certainly, which renders
you culpable. You were not even guilty of robbery, when you might have
robbed with impunity. You have nothing to conceal. You have no reason for
concealment. On the other hand, you are bound by every principle of honor
to confess all you know. An innocent man is now imprisoned, charged with
that crime of which you can point out the perpetrator.”

The sailor had recovered his presence of mind, in a great measure, while
Dupin uttered these words; but his original boldness of bearing was all
gone.

“So help me God,” said he, after a brief pause, “I _will_ tell you all
I know about this affair; but I do not expect you to believe one half I
say,—I would be a fool indeed if I did. Still, I _am_ innocent, and I
will make a clean breast if I die for it.”

What he stated was, in substance, this. He had lately made a voyage
to the Indian Archipelago. A party, of which he formed one, landed at
Borneo, and passed into the interior on an excursion of pleasure. He
and a companion had captured the Ourang-Outang. This companion dying,
the animal fell into his own exclusive possession. After great trouble,
occasioned by the intractable ferocity of his captive during the home
voyage, he at length succeeded in lodging it safely at his own residence
in Paris, where, not to attract toward himself the unpleasant curiosity
of his neighbors, he kept it carefully secluded, until such time as it
should recover from a wound in the foot, received from a splinter on
board ship. His ultimate design was to sell it.

Returning home from some sailors’ frolic on the night, or rather in the
morning, of the murder, he found the beast occupying his own bedroom,
into which it had broken from a closet adjoining, where it had been, as
was thought, securely confined. Razor in hand and fully lathered, it was
sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in
which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the keyhole
of the closet. Terrified at the sight of so dangerous a weapon in the
possession of an animal so ferocious, and so well able to use it, the
man for some moments was at a loss what to do. He had been accustomed,
however, to quiet the creature, even in its fiercest moods, by the
use of the whip, and to this he now resorted. Upon sight of it, the
Ourang-Outang sprang at once through the door of the chamber, down the
stairs, and thence, through a window, unfortunately open, into the street.

The Frenchman followed in despair, the ape, razor still in hand,
occasionally stopping to look back and gesticulate at its pursuer, until
the latter had nearly come up with it. It then again made off. In this
manner the chase continued for a long time. The streets were profoundly
quiet, as it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. In passing down
an alley in the rear of the Rue Morgue, the fugitive’s attention was
arrested by a light gleaming from the open window of Madame L’Espanaye’s
chamber, in the fourth story of her house. Rushing to the building, it
perceived the lightning-rod, clambered up with inconceivable agility,
grasped the shutter, which was thrown fully back against the wall, and,
by its means, swung itself directly upon the head-board of the bed. The
whole feat did not occupy a minute. The shutter was kicked open again by
the Ourang-Outang as it entered the room.

The sailor, in the mean time, was both rejoiced and perplexed. He had
strong hopes of now recapturing the brute, as it could scarcely escape
from the trap into which it had ventured, except by the rod, where it
might be intercepted as it came down. On the other hand, there was much
cause for anxiety as to what it might do in the house. This latter
reflection urged the man still to follow the fugitive. A lightning-rod
is ascended without difficulty, especially by a sailor; but, when he had
arrived as high as the window, which lay far to his left, his career was
stopped; the most that he could accomplish was to reach over so as to
obtain a glimpse of the interior of the room. At this glimpse he nearly
fell from his hold through excess of horror. Now it was that those
hideous shrieks arose upon the night, which had startled from slumber the
inmates of the Rue Morgue. Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, habited
in their night-clothes, had apparently been occupied in arranging some
papers in the iron chest already mentioned, which had been wheeled into
the middle of the room. It was open, and its contents lay beside it on
the floor. The victims must have been sitting with their backs toward the
window; and, from the time elapsing between the ingress of the beast and
the screams, it seems probable that it was not immediately perceived. The
flapping-to of the shutter would naturally have been attributed to the
wind.

As the sailor looked in, the gigantic animal had seized Madame L’Espanaye
by the hair (which was loose, as she had been combing it) and was
flourishing the razor about her face, in imitation of the motions of a
barber. The daughter lay prostrate and motionless; she had swooned. The
screams and struggles of the old lady (during which the hair was torn
from her head) had the effect of changing the probably pacific purposes
of the Ourang-Outang into those of wrath. With one determined sweep of
its muscular arm it nearly severed her head from her body. The sight of
blood inflamed its anger into frenzy. Gnashing its teeth, and flashing
fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl, and embedded its
fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired.
Its wandering and wild glances fell at this moment upon the head of the
bed, over which the face of its master, rigid with horror, was just
discernible. The fury of the beast, which no doubt bore still in mind
the dreaded whip, was instantly converted into fear. Conscious of having
deserved punishment, it seemed desirous of concealing its bloody deeds,
and skipped about the chamber in an agony of nervous agitation, throwing
down and breaking the furniture as it moved, and dragging the bed from
the bedstead. In conclusion, it seized first the corpse of the daughter,
and thrust it up the chimney, as it was found; then that of the old lady,
which it immediately hurled through the window headlong.

As the ape approached the casement with its mutilated burden, the sailor
shrank aghast to the rod, and, rather gliding than clambering down it,
hurried at once home,—dreading the consequences of the butchery, and
gladly abandoning, in his terror, all solicitude about the fate of the
Ourang-Outang. The words heard by the party upon the staircase were the
Frenchman’s exclamations of horror and affright, commingled with the
fiendish jabberings of the brute.

I have scarcely anything to add. The Ourang-Outang must have escaped
from the chamber, by the rod, just before the breaking of the door. It
must have closed the window as it passed through it. It was subsequently
caught by the owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the
_Jardin des Plantes_. Le Bon was instantly released, upon our narration
of the circumstances (with some comments from Dupin) at the bureau of the
Prefect of Police. This functionary, however well disposed to my friend,
could not altogether conceal his chagrin at the turn which affairs had
taken, and was fain to indulge in a sarcasm or two, about the propriety
of every person’s minding his own business.

“Let him talk,” said Dupin, who had not thought it necessary to reply.
“Let him discourse; it will ease his conscience. I am satisfied with
having defeated him in his own castle. Nevertheless, that he failed in
the solution of this mystery is by no means that matter for wonder which
he supposes it; for, in truth, our friend the Prefect is somewhat too
cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no _stamen_. It is all head
and no body, like the pictures of the goddess Laverna; or, at best, all
head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all.
I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has
attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has _de nier ce
qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas_.”



[Illustration]



THE LAUSON TRAGEDY.

BY J. W. DEFOREST.


Cupid and Psyche! The young man and the young woman who are in love with
each other! The couple which is constantly vanishing and constantly
reappearing; which has filled millions of various situations, and yet
is always the same; symbolizing, and one might almost say embodying,
the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; acting a drama of endless
repetitions, with innumerable spectators!

What would the story-reading world—yes, and what would the great world
of humanity—do without these two figures? They are more lasting, they
are more important, and they are more fascinating than even the crowned
and laurelled images of heroes and sages. When men shall have forgotten
Alexander and Socrates, Napoleon and Humboldt, they will still gather
around this imperishable group, the youth and the girl who are in love.
Without them our kind would cease to be; at one time or another we are
all of us identified with them in spirit; thus both reason and sympathy
cause us to be interested in their million-fold repeated story.

We have the two before us. The girl, dark and dark-eyed, with Oriental
features, and an expression which one is tempted to describe by some
such epithet as imperial, is Bessie Barron, the orphan granddaughter
of Squire Thomas Lauson of Barham, in Massachusetts. The youth, pale,
chestnut-haired, and gray-eyed, with a tall and large and muscular build,
is Henry Foster, not more than twenty-seven years old, yet already a
professor in the scientific department of the university of Hampstead.
They are standing on the edge of a rocky precipice some seventy feet in
depth, from the foot of which a long series of grassy slopes descends
into a wide, irregular valley, surrounded by hills that almost deserve
the name of mountains. In the distance there are villages, the nearest
fully visible even to its most insignificant buildings, others showing
only a few white gleams through the openings of their elms, and others
still distinguishable by merely a spire.

There has been talk such as affianced couples indulge in; we must mention
this for the sake of truth, and we must omit it in mercy. “Lovers,”
declares a critic who has weight with us, “are habitually insipid, at
least to us married people.” It was a man who said that; no woman, it is
believed, could utter such a condemnation of her own heart: no woman ever
quite loses her interest in the drama of love-making. But out of regard
to such males as have drowned their sentimentality in marriage we will,
for the present, pass over the words of tenderness and devotion, and only
listen when Professor Foster becomes philosophical.

“What if I should throw myself down here?” said Bessie Barron, after a
long look over the precipice, meanwhile holding fast to a guardian arm.

“You would commit suicide,” was the reply of a man whom we must admit to
have been accurately informed concerning the nature of actions like the
one specified.

Slightly disappointed at not hearing the appeal, “O my darling, don’t
think of such a thing!” Bessie remained silent a moment, wondering if she
were silly or he cold-hearted. Did she catch a glimmering of the fact
that men do not crave small sensations as women do, and that the man
before her was a specially rational being because he had been trained
in the sublime logic of the laws of nature? Doubtful: the two sexes are
profoundly unlike in mental action; they must study each other long
before they can fully understand each other.

“I suppose I should be dreadfully punished for it,” she went on, her
thoughts turning to the world beyond death, that world which trembling
faith sees, and which is, therefore, visible to woman.

“I am not sure,” boldly admitted the Professor, who had been educated in
Germany.

In order to learn something of the character of this young man, we must
permit him to jabber his nondescript ideas for a little, even though we
are thereby stumbled and wearied.

“Not sure?” queried Bessie. “How do you mean? Don’t you think suicide
sinful? Don’t you think sin will be punished?”

She spoke with eagerness, dreading to find her lover not orthodox,—a
woful stigma in Barham on lovers, and indeed on all men whatever.

“Admitting thus much, I don’t know how far you would be a free agent
in the act,” lectured the philosopher. “I don’t know where free agency
begins or ends. Indeed, I am so puzzled by this question as to doubt
whether there is such a condition as free agency.”

“No such thing as free agency?” wondered Bessie. “Then what?”

“See here. Out of thirty-eight millions of Frenchmen a fixed number
commit suicide every year. Every year just so many Frenchmen out of a
million kill themselves. Does that look like free agency, or does it
look like some unknown influence, some general rule of depression, some
law of nature, which affects Frenchmen, and which they cannot resist?
The individual seems to be free, at every moment of his life, to do as
he chooses. But what leads him to choose? Born instincts, conditions of
health, surroundings, circumstances. Do not the circumstances so govern
his choice that he cannot choose differently? Moreover, is he really an
individual? Or is he only a fraction of a great unity, the human race,
and directed by its current? We speak of a drop of water as if it were an
individuality; but it cannot swim against the stream to which it belongs;
it is not free. Is not the individual man in the same condition? There
are questions there which I cannot answer; and until I can answer them I
cannot answer your question.”

We have not repeated without cause these bold and crude speculations.
It is necessary to show that Foster was what was called in Barham a
free-thinker, in order to account for efforts which were made to thwart
his marriage with Bessie Barron, and for prejudices which aided to work a
stern drama into his life.

The girl listened and pondered. She tried to follow her lover over the
seas of thought upon which he walked; but the venture was beyond her
powers, and she returned to the pleasant firm land of a subject nearer
her heart.

“Are you thinking of me?” she asked in a low tone, and with an appealing
smile.

“No,” he smiled back. “I must own that I was not. But I ought to have
been. I do think of you a great deal.”

“More than I deserve?” she queried, still suspicious that she was not
sufficiently prized to satisfy her longings for affection.

He laughed outright. “No, not more than you deserve; not as much as you
deserve; you deserve a great deal. How many times are you going to ask me
these questions?”

“Every day. A hundred times a day. Shall you get tired of them?”

“Of course not. But what does it mean? Do you doubt me?”

“No. But I want to hear you say that you think of me, over and over
again. It gives me such pleasure to hear you say it! It is such a great
happiness that it seems as if it were my only happiness.”

Before Bessie had fallen in love with Foster, and especially before her
engagement to him, there had been a time when she had talked more to the
satisfaction of the male critic. But now her whole soul was absorbed
in the work of loving. She had no thought for any other subject; none,
at least, while with _him_. Her whole appearance and demeanor shows how
completely she is occupied by this master passion of woman. A smile seems
to exhale constantly from her face; if it is not visible on her lips,
nor, indeed, anywhere, still you perceive it; if it is no more to be seen
than the perfume of a flower, still you are conscious of it. It is no
figurative exaggeration to say that there is within her soul an incessant
music, like that of waltzes, and of all sweet, tender, joyous melodies.
If you will watch her carefully, and if you have the delicate senses of
sympathy, you also will hear it.

Are we wrong in declaring that the old, old story of clinging hearts
is more fascinating from age to age, as human thoughts become purer
and human feelings more delicate? We believe that love, like all other
things earthly, is subject to the progresses of the law of evolution,
and grows with the centuries to be a more various and exquisite source
of happiness. This girl is more in love than her grandmother, who made
butter and otherwise wrought laboriously with her own hands, had ever
found it possible to be. An organization refined by the manifold touch of
high civilization, an organization brought to the keenest sensitiveness
by poetry and fiction and the spiritualized social breath of our times,
an organization in which muscle is lacking and nerve overabundant, she
is capable of an affection which has the wings of imagination, which can
soar above the ordinary plane of belief, which is more than was once
human.

Consider for an instant what an elaboration of culture the passion of
love may have reached in this child. She can invest the man whom she has
accepted as monarch of her soul with the perfections of the heroes of
history and of fiction. She can prophesy for him a future which a hundred
years since was not realizable upon this continent. Out of her own mind
she can draw shining raiment of success for him which shall be visible
across oceans, and crowns of fame which shall not be dimmed by centuries.
She can love him for superhuman loveliness which she has power to impute
to him, and for victories which she is magician enough to strew in
anticipation beneath his feet. It is not extravagance, it is even nothing
but the simplest and most obvious truth, to say that there have been
periods in the world’s history, without going back to the cycles of the
troglodyte and the lake-dweller, when such love would have been beyond
the capabilities of humanity.

It must be understood, by the way, that Bessie was not bred amid the
sparse, hard-worked, and scantily cultured population of Barham, and
that, until the death of her parents, two years before the opening of
this story, she had been a plant of the stimulating, hot-bed life of a
city. Into this bucolic land she had brought susceptibilities which do
not often exist there, and a craving for excitements of sentiment which
does not often find gratification there. Consequently the first youth who
in any wise resembled the ideal of manhood which she had set up in her
soul found her ready to fall into his grasp, to believe in him as in a
deity, and to look to him for miracles of love and happiness.

Well, these two interesting idiots, as the unsympathizing observer might
call them, have turned their backs on the precipice and are walking
toward the girl’s home. They had not gone far before Bessie uttered a
speech which excited Harry’s profound amazement, and which will probably
astonish every young man who has not as yet made his conquests. After
looking at him long and steadfastly, she said: “How is it possible that
you can care for me? I don’t see what you find in me to make me worthy of
your admiration.”

How often such sentiments have been felt, and how often also they have
been spoken, by beings whose hearts have been bowed by the humility of
strong affection! Perhaps women are less likely to give them speech than
men; but it is only because they are more trammelled by an education of
reserve, and by inborn delicacy and timidity; it is not because they feel
them less. This girl, however, was so frank in nature, and so earnest and
eager in her feelings, that she could not but give forth the aroma of
loving meekness that was in her soul.

“What do you mean?” asked Foster, in his innocent surprise. “See nothing
to admire in _you_!”

“O, you are so much wiser than I, and so much nobler!” she replied. “It
is just because you are good, because you have the best heart that ever
was, that you care for me. You found me lonely and unhappy, and so you
pitied me and took charge of me.”

“O no!” he began; but we will not repeat his protestations; we will just
say that he, too, was properly humble.

“Have you really been lonely and sad?” he went on, curious to know every
item of her life, every beat of her heart.

“Does that old house look like a paradise to you?” she asked, pointing to
the dwelling of Squire Lauson.

“It isn’t very old, and it doesn’t look very horrible,” he replied, a
little anxious as he thought of his future housekeeping. “Perhaps ours
will not be so fine a one.”

“I was not thinking of that,” declared Bessie. “_Our_ house will be
charming, even if it has but one story, and that under ground. But _this_
one! You don’t see it with my eyes; you haven’t lived in it.”

“Is it haunted?” inquired Foster, of whom we must say that he did not
believe in ghosts, and, in fact, scorned them with all the scorn of a
philosopher.

“Yes, and by people who are not yet buried,—people who call themselves
alive.”

The subject was a delicate one probably, for Bessie said no more
concerning it, and Foster considerately refrained from further
questions. There was one thing on which this youth especially prided
himself, and that was on being a gentleman in every sense possible to
a republican. Because his father had been a judge, and his grandfather
and great-grandfather clergymen, he conceived that he belonged to a
patrician class, similar to that which Englishmen style “the untitled
nobility,” and that he was bound to exhibit as many chivalrous virtues
as if his veins throbbed with the blood of the Black Prince. Although
not combative, and not naturally reckless of pain and death, he would
have faced Heenan and Morrissey together in fight, if convinced that
his duty as a gentleman demanded it. Similarly he felt himself obliged
“to do the handsome thing” in money matters; to accept, for instance,
without haggling, such a salary as was usual in his profession; to be as
generous to waiters as if he were a millionaire. Furthermore, he must
be magnanimous to all that great multitude who were his inferiors, and
particularly must he be fastidiously decorous and tender in his treatment
of women. All these things he did or refrained from doing, not only out
of good instincts towards others, but out of respect for himself.

On the whole, he was a worthy and even admirable specimen of the genus
young man. No doubt he was conceited; he often offended people by his
bumptiousness of opinion and hauteur of manner; he rather depressed
the human race by the severity with which he classed this one and that
one as “no gentleman,” because of slight defects in etiquette; he
considerably amused older and wearier minds by the confidence with which
he settled vexed questions of several thousand years’ standing; but with
all these faults, he was a better and wiser and more agreeable fellow
than one often meets at his age; he was a youth whom man could respect
and woman adore. To noble souls it must be agreeable, I think, to see
him at the present moment, anxious to know precisely what sorrows had
clouded the life of his betrothed in the old house before him, and yet
refraining from questioning her on the alluring subject, “because he was
a gentleman.”

The house itself kept its secret admirably. It had not a signature of
character about it; it was as non-committal as an available candidate for
the Presidency; it exhibited the plain, unornamental, unpoetic reserve of
a Yankee Puritan. Whether it were a stage for comedy or tragedy, whether
it were a palace for happy souls or a prison for afflicted ones, it gave
not even a darkling hint.

A sufficiently spacious edifice, but low of stature and with a long
slope of back roof, it reminded one of a stocky and round-shouldered old
farmer, like those who daily trudged by it to and from the market of
Hampstead, hawing and geeing their fat cattle with lean, hard voices. A
front door, sheltered by a small portico, opened into a hall which led
straight through the building, with a parlor and bedroom on one side,
and a dining-room and kitchen on the other. In the rear was a low wing
serving as wash-house, lumber-room, and wood-shed. The white clapboards
and green blinds were neither freshly painted nor rusty, but just
sedately weather-worn. The grounds, the long woodpiles, the barn and its
adjuncts, were all in that state of decent slovenliness which prevails
amid the more rustic farming population of New England. On the whole,
the place looked like the abode of one who had made a fair fortune by
half a century or more of laborious and economical though not enlightened
agriculture.

“I must leave you now,” said Foster, when the two reached the gate of the
“front-yard”; “I must get back to my work in Hampstead.”

“And you won’t come in for a minute?” pleaded Bessie.

“You know that I would be glad to come in and stay in for ever and ever.
It seems now as if life were made for nothing but talking to you. But
my fellow-men no doubt think differently. There are such things as
lectures, and I must prepare a few of them. I really have pressing work
to do.”

What he furthermore had in his mind was, “I am bound as a gentleman to
do it”; but he refrained from saying that: he was conscious that he
sometimes said it too much; little by little he was learning that he was
bumptious, and that he ought not to be.

“And you will come to-morrow?” still urged Bessie, grasping at the next
best thing to to-day.

“Yes, I shall walk out. This driving every day won’t answer, on a
professor’s salary,” he added, swelling his chest over this grand
confession of poverty. “Besides, I need the exercise.”

“How good of you to walk so far merely to see me!” exclaimed the humble
little beauty.

Until he came again she brooded over the joys of being his betrothed, and
over the future, the far greater joy of being his wife. Was not this high
hope in love, this confidence in the promises of marriage, out of place
in Bessie? She has daily before her, in the mutual sayings and doings of
her grandfather and his spouse, a woful instance of the jarring way in
which the chariot-wheels of wedlock may run. Squire Tom Lauson does not
get on angelically with his second wife. It is reported that she finds
existence with him the greatest burden that she has ever yet borne,
and that she testifies to her disgust with it in a fashion which is at
times startlingly dramatic. If we arrive at the Lauson house on the day
following the dialogue which has been reported, we shall witness one of
her most effective exhibitions.

It is raining violently; an old-fashioned blue-light Puritan
thunder-storm is raging over the Barham hills; the blinding flashes
are instantaneously followed by the deafening peals; the air is full
of sublime terror and danger. But to Mrs. Squire Lauson the tempest is
so far from horrible that it is even welcome, friendly, and alluring,
compared with her daily showers of conjugal misery. She has just
finished one of those frequent contests with her husband, which her
sickly petulance perpetually forces her to seek, and which nevertheless
drive her frantic. In her wild, yet weak rage and misery, death seems a
desirable refuge. Out of the open front door she rushes, out into the
driving rain and blinding lightning, lifts her hands passionately toward
Heaven, and prays for a flash to strike her dead.

After twice shrieking this horrible supplication, she dropped her arms
with a gesture of sullen despair, and stalked slowly, reeking wet,
into the house. In the hall, looking out upon this scene of demoniacal
possession, sat Bessie Lauson and her maiden aunt, Miss Mercy Lauson,
while behind them, coming from an inner room, appeared the burly figure
of the old Squire. As Mrs. Lauson passed the two women, they drew a
little aside with a sort of shrinking which arose partly from a desire to
avoid her dripping garments, and partly from that awe with which most of
us regard ungovernable passion. The Squire, on the contrary, met his wife
with a sarcastic twinkle of his grim gray eyes, and a scoff which had the
humor discoverable in the contrast between total indifference and furious
emotion.

“Closed your camp-meeting early, Mrs. Lauson,” said the old man; “can’t
expect a streak of lightning for such a short service.”

A tormentor who wears a smile inflicts a double agony. Mrs. Lauson wrung
her hands, and broke out in a cry of rage and anguish: “O Lord, let it
strike me! O Lord, let it strike me!”

Squire Lauson took a chair, crossed his thick, muscular legs, glanced at
his wife, glanced at the levin-seamed sky, and remarked with a chuckle,
“I’m waiting to see this thing out.”

“Father, I say it’s perfectly awful,” remonstrated Miss Mercy Lauson.
“Mother, ain’t you ashamed of yourself?”

Miss Mercy was an old maid of the grave, sad, sickly New England type.
She pronounced her reproof in a high, thin, passionless monotone, without
a gesture or a flash of expression, without glancing at the persons whom
she addressed, looking straight before her at the wall. She seemed to
speak without emotion, and merely from a stony sense of duty. It was as
if a message had been delivered by the mouth of an automaton.

Both the Squire and his wife made some response, but a prolonged crash of
thunder drowned the feeble blasphemy of their voices, and the moving of
their lips was like a mockery of life, as if the lips of corpses had been
stirred by galvanism. Then, as if impatient of hearing both man and God,
Mrs. Lauson clasped her hands over her ears, and fled away to some inner
room of the shaking old house, seeking perhaps the little pity that there
is for the wretched in solitude. The Squire remained seated, his gray
and horny fingers drumming on the arms of the chair, and his faded lips
murmuring some inaudible conversation.

For the wretchedness of Mrs. Lauson there was partial cause in the
disposition and ways of her husband. Very odd was the old Squire;
violently combative could he be in case of provocation; and to those who
resisted what he called his rightful authority he was a tyrant.

Having lost the wife whom he had ruled for so many years, and having
enjoyed the serene but lonely empire of widowhood for eighteen months,
he felt the need of some one for some purpose,—perhaps to govern.
Once resolved on a fresh spouse, he set about searching for one in a
clear-headed and business-like manner, as if it had been a question of
getting a family horse.

The woman whom he finally received into his flinty bosom was a maiden
of forty-five, who had known in her youth the uneasy joys of many
flirtations, and who had marched through various successes (the
triumphs of a small university town) to sit down at last in a life-long
disappointment. Regretting her past, dissatisfied with every present,
demanding improbabilities of the future, eager still to be flattered
and worshipped and obeyed, she was wofully unfitted for marriage with
an old man of plain habits and retired life, who was quite as egoistic
as herself and far more combative and domineering. It was soon a
horrible thing to remember the young lovers who had gone long ago, but
who, it seemed to her, still adored her, and to compare them with this
unsympathizing master, who gave her no courtship nor tender reverence,
and who spoke but to demand submission.

“In a general way,” says a devout old lady of my acquaintance, “Divine
Providence blesses second marriages.”

With no experience of my own in this line, and with not a large
observation of the experience of others, I am nevertheless inclined to
admit that my friend has the right of it. Conceding the fact that second
marriages are usually happy, one naturally asks, Why is it? Is it because
a man knows better how to select a second wife? or because he knows
better how to treat her? Well disposed toward both these suppositions, I
attach the most importance to the latter.

No doubt Benedict chooses more thoughtfully when he chooses a second
time; no doubt he is governed more by judgment than in his first
courtship, and less by blind impulse; no doubt he has learned some
love-making wisdom from experience. A woman who will be patient with
him, a woman who will care well for his household affairs and for his
children, a woman who will run steadily rather than showily in the
domestic harness,—that is what he usually wants when he goes sparking at
forty or fifty.

But this is not all and not even the half of the explanation. He has
acquired a knowledge of what woman is, and a knowledge of what may fairly
be required of her. He has learned to put himself in her place; to
grant her the sympathy which her sensitive heart needs; to estimate the
sufferings which arise from her variable health; in short, he has learned
to be thoughtful and patient and merciful. Moreover, he is apt to select
some one who, like himself, has learned command of temper and moderation
of expectation from the lessons of life. As he knows that a glorified
wife is impossible here below, so she makes no strenuous demand for an
angel husband.

But Squire Thomas Lauson had married an old maid who had not yet given
up the struggle to be a girl, and who, in consequence of a long and
silly bellehood, could not put up with any form of existence which was
not a continual courtship. Furthermore, he himself was not a persimmon;
he had not gathered sweetness from the years which frosted his brow. An
interestingly obdurate block of the Puritan granite of New England, he
was almost as self-opinionated, domineering, pugnacious, and sarcastic as
he had been at fifteen. He still had overmuch of the unripe spirit which
plagues little boys, scoffs at girls, stones frogs, drowns kittens, and
mutters domestic defiances. If Mrs. Lauson was skittish and fractious, he
was her full match as a wife-breaker.

In short, the Squire had not chosen wisely; he was not fitted to win
a woman’s heart by sympathy and justice; and thus Providence had not
blessed his second marriage.

We must return now to Miss Mercy Lauson and her niece Bessie. They are
alone once more, for Squire Lauson has finished his sarcastic mutterings,
and has stumped away to some other dungeon of the unhappy old house.

“You _see_, Bessie!” said Miss Mercy, after a pinching of her thin lips
which was like the biting of forceps,—“you _see_ how married people can
live with each other. Bickerings an’ strife! bickerings an’ strife! But
for all that you mean to marry Henry Foster.”

We must warn the reader not to expect vastness of thought or eloquence of
speech from Miss Mercy. Her narrow-shouldered, hollow-chested soul could
not grasp ideas of much moment, nor handle such as she was able to grasp
with any vigor or grace.

“I should like to know,” returned Bessie with spirit, “if I am not likely
to have my share of bickerings and strife, if I stay here and don’t get
married.”

“That depends upon how far you control your temper, Elizabeth.”

“And so it does in marriage, I suppose.”

Miss Mercy found herself involved in an argument, when she had simply
intended to play the part of a preacher in his pulpit, warning and
reproving without being answered. She accepted the challenge in a tone
of iced pugnacity, which indicated in part a certain imperfect habit of
self-control, and in part the unrestrainable peevishness of a chronic
invalid.

“I don’t say folks will necessarily be unhappy in merridge,” she went
on. “Merridge is a Divine ord’nance, an’ I’m obleeged to respect it
as such. I do, I suppose, respect it more ’n some who’ve entered into
it. But merridge, to obtain the Divine blessing, must not be a yoking
with unbelievers. There’s the trouble with father’s wife; she ain’t a
professor. There, too, ’s the trouble with Henry Foster; he’s not one of
those who’ve chosen the better part. I want you to think it all over in
soberness of sperrit, Elizabeth.”

“It is the only thing you know against him,” replied the girl, flushing
with the anger of outraged affection.

“No, it ain’t. He’s brung home strange ways from abroad. He smokes an’
drinks beer an’ plays cards; an’ his form seldom darkens the threshold
of the sanctuary. Elizabeth, I must be plain with you on this vital
subject. I’m going to be as plain with you as your own conscience ought
to be. I see it’s no use talking to you ’bout duty an’ the life to come.
I must—there’s no sort of doubt about it—I _must_ bring the things of
this world to bear on you. You know I’ve made my will: I’ve left every
cent of my property to you,—twenty thousand dollars! Well, if you enter
into merridge with that young man, I shall alter it. I ain’t going to
have my money,—the money that my poor God-fearing aunt left me,—I ain’t
going to have it fooled away on card-players an’ scorners. Now there it
is, Elizabeth. There’s what my duty tells me to do, an’ what I shall do.
Ponder it well an’ take your choice.”

“I don’t care,” burst forth Bessie, springing to her feet. “I shall tell
_him_, and if it makes no difference to _him_, it will make none to _me_.”

Here a creak in the floor caught her ear, and turning quickly she
discovered Henry Foster. Entering the house by a side door, and coming
through a short lateral passage to the front hall, he had reached it in
time to hear the close of the conversation and catch its entire drift.
You could see in his face that he had heard thus much, for healthy,
generous, kindly, and cheerful as the face usually was, it wore now a
confused and pained expression.

“I beg pardon for disturbing you,” he said. “I was pelted into the house
to get out of the shower, and I took the shortest cut.”

Bessie’s Oriental visage flushed to a splendid crimson, and a whiter
ashiness stole into the sallow cheek of Aunt Mercy. The girl, quick and
adroit as most women are in leaping out of embarrassments, rushed into a
strain of light conversation. How wet Professor Foster was, and wouldn’t
he go and dry himself? What a storm it had been, and what wonderful,
dreadful thunder and lightning; and how glad she was that he had come,
for it seemed as if he were some protection.

“There’s only One who can protect us,” murmured Aunt Mercy, “either in
such seasons or any others.”

“His natural laws are our proper recourse,” respectfully replied Foster,
who was religious too, in his scientific fashion.

Bessie cringed with alarm; here was an insinuated attack on her aunt’s
favorite dogma of special providences; the subject must be pitched
overboard at once.

“What is the news in Hampstead?” she asked. “Has the town gone to sleep,
as Barham has? You ought to wake us up with something amusing.”

“Jennie Brown is engaged,” said Foster. “Isn’t that satisfactory?”

“O dear! how many times does that make?” laughed Bessie. “Is it a student
again?”

“Yes, it is a student.”

“You ought to make it a college offence for students to engage
themselves,” continued Bessie. “You know that they can hardly ever marry,
and generally break the girls’ hearts.”

“Have they broken Jennie Brown’s? She doesn’t believe it, nor her
present young man either. I’ve no doubt he thinks her as good as new.”

“I dare say. But such things hurt girls in general, and you professors
ought to see to it, and I want to know why you don’t. But is that all the
news? That’s such a small matter! such an old sort of thing! If I had
come from Hampstead, I would have brought more than that.”

So Bessie rattled on, partly because she loved to talk to this admirable
Professor, but mainly to put off the crisis which she saw was coming.

But it was vain to hope for clemency, or even for much delay, from Aunt
Mercy. Grim, unhappy, peevish as many invalids are, and impelled by a
remorseless conscience, she was not to be diverted from finishing with
Foster the horrid bone which she had commenced to pick with Bessie. You
could see in her face what kind of thoughts and purposes were in her
heart. She was used to quarrelling; or, to speak more strictly, she was
used to entertaining hard feelings towards others; but she had never
learned to express her bitter sentiments frankly. Unable to destroy
them, she had felt herself bound in general not to utter them, and
this non-utterance had grown to be one of her despotic and distressing
“duties.” Nothing could break through her shyness, her reserve, her habit
of silence, but an emotion which amounted to passion; and such an emotion
she was not only unable to conceal, but she was also unable to exhibit
it either nobly or gracefully: it shone all through her, and it made her
seem spiteful.

As she was about to speak, however, a glance at Bessie’s anxious face
checked her. After her painful, severe fashion, she really loved the
girl, and she did not want to load her with any more sorrow than was
strictly necessary. Moreover, the surely worthy thought occurred to her
that Heaven might favor one last effort to convert this wrong-minded
young man into one who could be safely intrusted with the welfare of
her niece and the management of her money. Hailing the suggestion, in
accordance with her usual exaltation of faith, as an indication from the
sublimest of all authority, she entered upon her task with such power as
nature had given her and such sweetness as a shattered nervous system had
left her.

“Mr. Foster, there’s one thing I greatly desire to see,” she began
in a hurried, tremulous tone. “I want you to come out from among the
indifferent, an’ join yourself to _us_. Why don’t you do it? Why don’t
you become a professor?”

Foster was even more surprised and dismayed than most men are when thus
addressed. Here was an appeal such as all of us must listen to with
respect, not only because it represents the opinions of a vast and justly
revered portion of civilized humanity, but because it concerns the
highest mysteries and possibilities of which humanity is cognizant. As
one who valued himself on being both a philosopher and a gentleman, he
would have felt bound to treat any one courteously who thus approached
him. But there was more; this appeal evidently alluded to his intentions
of marriage; it was connected with the threat of disinheritance which he
had overheard on entering the house. If he would promise to “join the
church,” if he would even only appear to take the step into favorable
consideration, he could remove the objections of this earnest woman to
his betrothal, and secure her property to his future wife. But Foster
could not do what policy demanded; he had his “honest doubts,” and he
could not remove them by an exercise of will; moreover, he was too
self-respectful and honorable to be a hypocrite. After pondering Aunt
Mercy’s question for a moment, he answered with a dignity of soul which
was not appreciated,—

“I should have no objection to what you propose, if it would not be
misunderstood. If it would only mean that I believe in God, and that
I worship his power and goodness, I would oblige you. But it would be
received as meaning more,—as meaning that I accept doctrines which I am
still examining,—as meaning that I take upon myself obligations which I
do not yet hold binding.”

“Don’t you believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?” demanded
Miss Mercy, striking home with telling directness.

“I believe in a Deity who views his whole universe with equal love. I
believe in a Deity greater than I always hear preached.”

Miss Mercy was puzzled; for while this confession of faith did not quite
tally with what she was accustomed to receive from pulpits, there was
about it a largeness of religious perception which slightly excited her
awe. Nevertheless, it showed a dangerous vagueness, and she decided to
demand something more explicit.

“What are your opinions on the inspiration of the Scriptures?” she asked.

He had been reading Colenso’s work on Genesis; and, so far as he could
judge the Bishop’s premises, he agreed with his conclusions. At the same
time he was aware that such an exegesis would seem simple heresy to Miss
Mercy, and that whoever held it would be condemned by her as a heathen
and an infidel. After a moment of hesitation, he responded bravely and
honestly, though with a placating smile.

“Miss Lauson, there are some subjects, indeed there are many subjects,
on which I have no fixed opinions. I used to have opinions on almost
everything; but I found them very troublesome, I had to change them so
often! I have decided not to declare any more positive opinions, but only
to entertain suppositions to the effect that this or that may be the
case; meantime holding myself ready to change my hypotheses on further
evidence.”

Although he seemed to her guilty of shuffling away from her question, yet
she, in the main, comprehended his reply distinctly enough. He did not
believe in plenary inspiration; that was clear, and so also was her duty
clear; she must not let him have her niece nor her money.

Now there was a something in her face like the forming of columns for
an assault, or rather like the irrational, ungovernable gathering of
clouds for a storm. Her staid, melancholy soul—a soul which usually lay
in chains and solitary—climbed writhing to her lips and eyes, and made
angry gestures before it spoke. Bessie stared at her in alarm; she tried,
in a spirit of youthful energy, to look her down; but the struggle of
prevention was useless; the hostile words came.

“Mr. Foster, I can’t willingly give my niece to such an one as you,” she
said in a tremulous but desperate monotone. “I s’pose, though, it’s no
use forbidding you to go with her. I s’pose you wouldn’t mind that. But I
expect you _will_ care for one thing,—for her good. My will is made now
in her favor. But if she marries you I shall change it. I sha’n’t leave
her a cent.”

Here her sickly strength broke down; such plain utterance of feeling and
purpose was too much for her nerves; she burst into honest, bitter tears,
and, rushing to her room, locked herself up; no doubt, too, she prayed
there long, and read solemnly in the Scriptures.

What was the result of this conscientious but no doubt unwise
remonstrance? After a shock of disagreeable surprise, the two lovers
did what all true lovers would have done; they entered into a solemn
engagement that no considerations of fortune should prevent their
marriage. They shut their eyes on the future, braved all the adverse
chances of life, and almost prayed for trials in order that each
might show the other greater devotion. The feeling was natural and
ungovernable, and I claim also that it was beautiful and noble.

“Do you know all?” asked Bessie. “Grandfather has never proposed to leave
me anything, he hated my father so! It was always understood that Aunt
Mercy was to take care of me.”

“I want nothing with you,” said Foster. “I will slave myself to death for
you. I will rejoice to do it.”

“O, I knew it would be so!” replied the girl, almost faint with joy and
love. “I knew you would be true to me. I knew how grand you were.”

When they looked out upon the earth, after this scene, during which they
had been conscious of nothing but each other, the storm had fled beyond
verdant hills, and a rainbow spanned all the visible landscape, seeming
to them indeed a bow of promise.

“O, we can surely be happy in such a world as this!” said Bessie, her
face colored and illuminated by youth, hope, and love.

“We will find a cloud castle somewhere,” responded the young man,
pointing to the western sky, piled with purple and crimson.

Bessie was about to accompany him to the gate on his departure, as was
her simple and affectionate custom, when a voice called her up stairs.

“O dear!” she exclaimed, pettishly. “It seems as if I couldn’t have a
moment’s peace. Good by, my darling.”

During the close of that day, at the hour which in Barham was known
as “early candle-lighting,” the Lauson tragedy began to take form.
The mysterious shadow which vaguely announced its on-coming was the
disappearance from the family ken of that lighthouse of regularity, that
fast-rooted monument of strict habit, Aunt Mercy. The kerosene lamp
which had so long beamed upon her darnings and mendings, or upon her
more æsthetic labors in behalf of the Barham sewing society, or upon the
open yellow pages of her Scott’s Commentary and Baxter’s Saints’ Rest,
now flared distractedly about the sitting-room, as if in amazement at
her absence. Nowhere was seen her tall, thin, hard form, the truthful
outward expression of her lean and sickly soul; nowhere was heard the
afflicted squeak of her broad calfskin shoes, symbolical of the worryings
of her fretful conscience. The doors which she habitually shut to keep
out the night-draughts remained free to swing, and, if they could find an
aiding hand or breeze, to bang, in celebration of their independence. The
dog might wag his tail in wonder through the parlor, and the cat might
profane the sofa with his stretchings and slumbers.

At first the absence of Aunt Mercy merely excited such pleasant
considerations as these. The fact was accepted as a relief from burdens;
it tended towards liberty and jocoseness of spirit. The honest and
well-meaning and devout woman had been the censor of the family, and,
next after the iron-headed Squire, its dictator. Bessie might dance
alone about the sober rooms, and play operatic airs and waltzes upon her
much-neglected piano, without being called upon to assume sackcloth and
ashes for her levity. The cheerful life which seemed to enter the house
because Aunt Mercy had left it was a severe commentary on the sombre and
unlovely character which her diseased sense of duty had driven her to
give to her unquestionably sincere religious sentiment. It hinted that
if she should be taken altogether away from the family, her loss would
awaken little mourning, and would soon be forgotten.

Presently, however, this persistent absence of one whose very nature
it was to be present excited surprise, and eventually a mysterious
uneasiness. Search was made about the house; no one was discovered up
stairs but Mrs. Lauson, brooding alone; then a neighbor or two was
visited by Bessie; still no Aunt Mercy. The solemn truth was, although
no sanguinary sign as yet revealed it, that the Lauson tragedy had an
hour since been consummated.

The search for the missing Aunt Mercy continued until it aroused the
interest and temper of Squire Lauson. Determined to find his daughter
once that he had set about it, and petulant at the failure of one line of
investigation after another, the hard old gentleman stumped noisily about
the house, his thick shoes squeaking down the passages like two bands
of music, and his peeled hickory cane punching open doors and upsetting
furniture. When he returned to the sitting-room from one of these
boisterous expeditions, he found his wife sitting in the light of the
kerosene lamp, and sewing with an impatient, an almost spiteful rapidity,
as was her custom when her nerves were unbearably irritated.

“Where’s Mercy?” he trumpeted. “Where _is_ the old gal? Has anybody
eloped with her? I saw Deacon Jones about this afternoon.”

This jest was meant to amuse and perhaps to conciliate Mrs. Lauson,
for whom he sometimes seemed to have a rough pity, as hard to bear as
downright hostility. He had now and then a way of joking with her and
forcing her to smile by looking her steadily in the eye. But this time
his moral despotism failed; she answered his gaze with a defiant glare,
and remained sullen; after another moment she rushed out of the room, as
if craving relief from his domineering presence.

Apparently the Squire would have called her back, had not his attention
been diverted by the entry of his granddaughter.

“I say, Bessie, have you looked in the garden?” he demanded. “Why the
Devil haven’t you? Don’t you know Mercy’s hole where she meditates? Go
there and hunt for her.”

As the girl disappeared he turned to the door through which his wife had
fled, as if he still had a savage mind to roar for her reappearance. But
after pondering a moment, and deciding that he was more comfortable in
solitude, he sat slowly down in his usual elbow-chair, and broke out in a
growling soliloquy:—

“There’s no comfort like making one’s self miserable. It’s a —— sight
better than making the best of it. We’re all having a devilish fine time.
We’re as happy as bugs in a rug. Hey diddle diddle, the cat’s in the
fiddle—”

The continuity of his rough-laid stone-wall sarcasm was interrupted by
Bessie, who rushed into the sitting-room with a low shriek and a pallid
face.

“What’s the matter now?” he demanded. “Has the cow jumped over the moon?”

“O grandfather!” she gasped, “I’ve found Aunt Mercy. I’m afraid she’s
dead.”

“Hey!” exclaimed the Squire, starting up eagerly as he remembered that
Aunt Mercy was his own child. “You don’t say so! Where is she?”

Bessie turned and reeled out of the house; the old man thumped after her
on his cane. At the bottom of the garden was a small, neglected arbor,
thickly overgrown with grape-vines in unpruned leaf, whither Aunt Mercy
was accustomed to repair in her seasons of unusual perplexity or gloom,
there to seek guidance or relief in meditation and prayer. In this arbor
they found her, seated crouchingly on a bench near the doorway, her
arms stretched over a little table in front of her, and her head lying
between them with the face turned from the gazers. The moon glared in
a ghastly way upon her ominously white hands, and disclosed a dark yet
gleaming stain, seemingly a drying pool, which spread out from beneath
her forehead.

“Good Lord!” groaned Squire Lauson. “Mercy! I say, Mercy!”

He seized her hand, but he had scarcely touched it ere he dropped it,
for it was the icy, repulsive, alarming hand of a corpse. We must
compress our description of this scene of horrible discovery. Miss Mercy
Lauson was dead, the victim of a brutal assassination, her right temple
opened by a gash two inches deep, her blood already clotted in pools or
dried upon her face and fingers. It must have been an hour, or perhaps
two hours, since the blow had been dealt. At her feet was the fatal
weapon,—an old hatchet which had long lain about the garden, and which
offered no suggestion as to who was the murderer.

When it first became clear to Squire Lauson that his daughter was dead,
and had been murdered, he uttered a sound between a gasp and a sob;
but almost immediately afterward he spoke in his habitually vigorous
and rasping voice, and his words showed that he had not lost his iron
self-possession.

“Bessie, run into the house,” he said. “Call the hired men, and bring a
lantern with you.”

When she returned he took the lantern, threw the gleam of it over his
dead daughter’s face, groaned, shook his head, and then, leaning on his
cane, commenced examining the earth, evidently in search of footmarks.

“There’s your print, Bessie,” he mumbled. “And there’s my print. But
whose print’s that? That’s the man. That’s a long slim foot, with nails
across the ball. That’s the man. Don’t disturb those tracks. I’ll set the
lantern down there. Don’t you disturb ’em.”

There were several of these strange tracks; the clayey soil of the walk,
slightly tempered with sand, had preserved them with fatal distinctness;
it showed them advancing to the arbor and halting close by the murdered
woman. As Bessie stared at them, it seemed to her that they were
fearfully familiar, though where she had seen them before she could not
say.

“Keep away from those tracks,” repeated Squire Lauson as the two laborers
who lived with him came down the garden. “Now, then, what are you staring
at? She’s dead. Take her up—O, for God’s sake, be gentle about it!—take
her up, I tell you. There! Now, carry her along.”

As the men moved on with the body he turned to Bessie and said: “Leave
the lantern just there. And don’t you touch those tracks. Go on into the
house.”

With his own hands he aided to lay out his daughter on a table, and
drew her cap from her temples so as to expose the bloody gash to view.
There was a little natural agony in the tremulousness of his stubbly and
grizzly chin; but in the glitter of his gray eyes there was an expression
which was not so much sorrow as revenge.

“That’s a pretty job,” he said at last, glaring at the mangled gray
head. “I should like to l’arn who did it.”

It was not known till the day following how he passed the next half-hour.
It seems that, some little time previous, this man of over ninety years
had conceived the idea of repairing with his own hands the cracked wall
of his parlor, and had for that purpose bought a quantity of plaster
of Paris and commenced a series of patient experiments in mixing and
applying it. Furnished with a basin of his prepared material, he stalked
out to the arbor and busied himself with taking a mould of the strange
footstep to which he had called Bessie’s attention, succeeding in his
labor so well as to be able to show next day an exact counterpart of the
sole which had made the track.

Shortly after he had left the house, and glancing cautiously about as
if to make sure that he had indeed left it, his wife entered the room
where lay the dead body. She came slowly up to the table, and looked at
the ghastly face for some moments in silence, with precisely that staid,
slightly shuddering air which one often sees at funerals, and without any
sign of the excitement which one naturally expects in the witnesses of
a mortal tragedy. In any ordinary person, in any one who was not, like
her, denaturalized by the egotism of shattered nerves, such mere wonder
and repugnance would have appeared incomprehensively brutal. But Mrs.
Lauson had a character of her own; she could be different from others
without exciting prolonged or specially severe comment; people said to
themselves, “Just like her,” and made no further criticism, and almost
certainly no remonstrance. Bessie herself, the moment she had exclaimed,
“O grandmother! what shall we do?” felt how absurd it was to address
such an appeal to such a person.

Mrs. Lauson replied by a glance which expressed weakness, alarm, and
aversion, and which demanded, as plainly as words could say it, “How can
you ask _me_?” Then without uttering a syllable, without attempting to
render any service or funereal courtesy, bearing herself like one who had
been mysteriously absolved from the duties of sympathy and decorum, she
turned her back on the body of her step-daughter with a start of disgust,
and walked hastily from the room.

Of course there was a gathering of the neighbors, a hasty and useless
search after the murderer, a medical examination of the victim, and a
legal inquest at the earliest practicable moment, the verdict being
“death by the hand of some person unknown.” Even the funeral passed, with
its mighty crowd and its solemn excitement; and still public suspicion
had not dared to single out any one as the criminal. It seemed for a day
or two as if the family life might shortly settle into its old tenor, the
same narrow routine of quiet discontent or irrational bickerings, with
no change but the loss of such inflammation as formerly arose from Aunt
Mercy’s well-meant, but irritating sense of duty. The Squire, however,
was permanently and greatly changed: not that he had lost the spirit of
petty dictation which led him to interfere in every household act, even
to the boiling of the pot, but he had acquired a new object in life,
and one which seemed to restore all his youthful energy; he was more
restlessly and distressingly vital than he had been for years. No Indian
was ever more intent on avenging a debt of blood than was he on hunting
down the murderer of his daughter. This terrible old man has a strong
attraction for us: we feel that we have not thus far done him justice: he
imperiously demands further description.

Squire Lauson was at this time ninety-three years of age. The fact
appeared incredible, because he had preserved, almost unimpaired, not
only his moral energy and intellectual faculties, but also his physical
senses, and even to an extraordinary degree his muscular strength. His
long and carelessly worn hair was not white, but merely gray; and his
only baldness was a shining hand’s-breadth, prolonging the height of
his forehead. His face was deeply wrinkled, but more apparently with
thought and passion than from decay, for the flesh was still well under
control of the muscles, and the expression was so vigorous that one was
tempted to call it robust. There was nothing of that insipid and almost
babyish tranquillity which is commonly observable in the countenances
of the extremely aged. The cheekbones were heavy, though the healthy
fulness of the cheeks prevented them from being pointed; the jaws, not
yet attenuated by the loss of many teeth, were unusually prominent and
muscular; the heavy Roman nose still stood high above the projecting
chin. In general, it was a long, large face, grimly and ruggedly massive,
of a uniform grayish color, and reminding you of a visage carved in
granite.

In figure the Squire was of medium height, with a deep chest and heavy
limbs. He did not stand quite upright, but the stoop was in his shoulders
and not in his loins, and arose from a slouching habit of carrying
himself much more than from weakness. He walked with a cane, but his
step, though rather short, was strong and rapid, and he could get over
the ground at the rate of three miles an hour. At times he seemed a
little deaf, but it was mainly from absorption of mind and inattention,
and he could hear perfectly when he was interested. The great gray eyes
under his bushy, pepper-and-salt eyebrows were still so sound that he
only used spectacles in reading. As for voice, there was hardly such
another in the neighborhood; it was a strong, rasping, dictatorial _caw_,
like the utterance of a gigantic crow; it might have served the needs of
a sea-captain in a tempest. A jocose neighbor related that he had in a
dream descended into hell, and that in trying to find his way out he had
lost his reckoning, until, hearing a tremendous volley of oaths on the
surface of the earth over his head, he knew that he was under the hills
of Barham, and that Squire Lauson was swearing at his oxen.

Squire Lauson was immense; you might travel over him for a week without
discovering half his wonders; he was a continent, and he must remain for
the most part an unknown continent. Bringing to a close our explorations
into his character and past life, we will follow him up simply as one of
the personages of this tragedy. He was at the present time very active,
but also to a certain extent inexplicable. It was known that he had
interviews with various officials of justice, that he furnished them
with his plaster cast of the strange footprint which had been found in
the garden, and that he earnestly impressed upon them the value of this
object for the purpose of tracking out the murderer. But he had other
lines of investigation in his steady old hands, as was discoverable later.

His manner towards his granddaughter and his wife changed noticeably.
Instead of treating the first with neglect, and the second with
persistent hostility or derision, he became assiduously attentive to
them, addressed them frequently in conversation, and sought to win their
confidence. With Bessie this task was easy, for she was one of those
natural, unspoiled women, who long for sympathy, and she inclined toward
her grandfather the moment she saw any kindness in his eyes. They had
long talks about the murdered relative, about every event or suspicion
which seemed to relate to her death, about the property which she had
left to Bessie, and about the girl’s prospects in life.

Not so with Mrs. Lauson. Even the horror which had entered the family
life could not open the hard crust which disease and disappointment had
formed over her nature, and she met the old man’s attempts to make her
communicative with her usual sulky or pettish reticence. There never
was such an unreasonable creature as this wretched wife, who, while she
remained unmarried, had striven so hard to be agreeable to the other
sex. It was not with her husband alone that she fought, but with every
one, whether man or woman, who came near her. Whoever entered the house,
whether it were some gossiping neighbor or the clergyman or the doctor,
she flew out of it on discovering their approach, and wandered alone
about the fields until they departed. This absence she would perhaps
employ in eating green fruit, hoping, as she said, to make herself
sick and die, or, at least, to make herself sick enough to plague her
husband. At meals she generally sat in glum silence, although once
or twice she burst out in violent tirades, scoffing at the Squire’s
management of the place, defying him to strike her, etc.

Her appearance at this time was miserable and little less than
disgusting. Her skin was thick and yellow; her eyes were bloodshot
and watery; her nose was reddened with frequent crying; her form was
of an almost skeleton thinness; her manner was full of strange starts
and gaspings. It was curious to note the contrast between her perfect
wretchedness of aspect and the unfeeling coolness with which the Squire
watched and studied her.

In this woful way was the Lauson family getting on when the country
around was electrified by an event which almost threw the murder itself
into the shade. Henry Foster, the accepted lover of Bessie Barron, a
professor in the Scientific College of Hampstead, was suddenly arrested
as the assassin of Miss Mercy Lauson.

“What does this mean!” was his perfectly natural exclamation, when seized
by the officers of justice; but it was uttered with a sudden pallor which
awakened in the bystanders a strong suspicion of his guilt. No definite
answer was made to his question until he was closeted with the lawyer
whom he immediately retained in his defence.

“I should like to get at the whole of your case, Mr. Foster,” said the
legal gentleman. “I must beg you, for your own sake, to be entirely frank
with me.”

“I assure you that I know nothing about the murder,” was the firm reply.
“I don’t so much as understand why I should be suspected of the horrible
business.”

The lawyer, Mr. Adams Patterson, after studying Foster in a furtive way,
as if doubtful whether there had been perfect honesty in his assertion
of innocence, went on to state what he supposed would be the case of the
prosecution.

“The evidence against you,” he said, “so far at least as I can now
discover, will all be circumstantial. They will endeavor to prove your
presence at the scene of the tragedy by your tracks. Footmarks, said to
correspond to yours, were found passing the door of the arbor, returning
to it and going away from it.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Foster. “I remember,—I did pass there. I will tell you
how. It was in the afternoon. I was in the house during a thunder-storm
which happened that day, and left it shortly after the shower ended.
I went out through the garden because that was the nearest way to the
rivulet at the bottom of the hill, and I wished to make some examinations
into the structure of the water-bed. A part of the garden walk is
gravelled, and on that I suppose my tracks did not show. But near the
arbor the gravel ceases, and there I remember stepping into the damp
mould. I did pass the arbor, and I did return to it. I returned to it
because it had been a heavenly place to me. It was there that I proposed
to Miss Barron, and that she accepted me. The moment that I had passed it
I reproached myself for doing so. I went back, looked at the little spot
for a moment, and left a kiss on the table. It was on that table that her
hand had rested when I first dared to take it in mine.”

His voice broke for an instant with an emotion which every one who has
ever loved can at least partially understand.

“Good Heavens! to think that such an impulse should entangle me in such a
charge!” he added, when he could speak again.

“Well,” he resumed, after a long sigh, “I left the arbor,—my heart as
innocent and happy as any heart in the world,—I climbed over the fence
and went down the hill. That is the last time that I was in those grounds
that day. That is the whole truth, so help me God!”

The lawyer seemed touched. Even then, however, he was saying to himself,
“They always keep back something, if not everything.” After meditating
for a few seconds, he resumed his interrogatory.

“Did any one see you? did Miss Barron see you, as you passed through the
garden?”

“I think not. Some one called her just as I left her, and she went, I
believe, up stairs.”

“Did you see the person who called? Did you see any one?”

“No one. But the voice was a woman’s voice. I took it to be that of a
servant.”

Mr. Patterson fell into a thoughtful silence, his arms resting on the
elbows of his chair, and his anxious eyes wandering over the floor.

“But what motive?” broke out Foster, addressing the lawyer as if he were
an accuser and an enemy,—“what sufficient motive had I for such a hideous
crime?”

“Ah! that is just it. The motive! They will make a great deal of that.
Why, you must be able to guess what is alleged. Miss Lauson had made a
will in her niece’s favor, but had threatened to disinherit her if she
married you. This fact,—as has been made known by an incautious admission
of Miss Bessie Barron,—this fact you were aware of. The death came just
in time to prevent a change in the will. Don’t you see the obvious
inference of the prosecution?”

“Good Heavens!” exclaimed Foster, springing up and pacing his cell. “I
murder a woman,—murder my wife’s aunt,—for money,—for twenty thousand
dollars! Am I held so low as that? Why, it is a sum that any clever man
can earn in this country in a few years. We could have done without it.
I would not have asked for it, much less murdered for it. Tell me, Mr.
Patterson, do you suppose me capable of such degrading as well as such
horrible guilt?”

“Mr. Foster,” replied the lawyer, with impressive deliberation, “I shall
go into this case with a confidence that you are absolutely innocent.”

“Thank you,” murmured the young man, grasping Patterson’s hand violently,
and then turning away to wipe a tear, which had been too quick for him.

“Excuse my weakness,” he said, presently. “But I don’t believe any worthy
man is strong enough to bear the insult that the world has put upon me,
without showing his suffering.”

Certainly, Foster’s bearing and the sentiments which he expressed had the
nobility and pathos of injured innocence. Were it not that innocence _can
be_ counterfeited, as also that a fine demeanor and touching utterance
are not points in law, no alarming doubt would seem to overshadow the
result of the trial. And yet, strange as it must seem to those whom my
narrative may have impressed in favor of Foster, the sedate, Puritanic
population of Barham and its vicinity inclined more and more toward the
presumption of his guilt.

For this there were two reasons. In the first place, who but he had any
cause of spite against Mercy Lauson, or could hope to draw any profit
from her death? There had been no robbery; there was not a sign that the
victim’s clothing had been searched; the murder had clearly not been the
work of a burglar or a thief. But Foster, if he indeed assassinated this
woman, had thereby removed an obstacle to his marriage, and had secured
to his future wife a considerable fortune.

In the second place, Foster was such a man as the narrowly scrupulous
and orthodox world of Barham would naturally regard with suspicion.
Graduate of a German university, he had brought back to America, not
only a superb scientific education, but also what passed, in the region
where he had settled, for a laxity of morals. Professor as he was in
the austere college of Hampstead, and expected, therefore, to set a
luminously correct example in both theoretical and practical ethics, he
held theological opinions which were too modern to be considered sound,
and he even neglected church to an extent which his position rendered
scandalous. In spite of the strict prohibitory law of Massachusetts, he
made use of lager-beer and other still stronger fluids; and, although he
was never known to drink to excess, the mere fact of breaking the statute
was a sufficient offence to rouse prejudice. It was also reported of him,
to the honest horror of many serious minds, that he had been detected in
geologizing on Sunday, and that he was fond of whist.

How apt we are to infer that a man who violates _our_ code of morals will
also violate his own code! Of course this Germanized American could not
believe that murder was right; but then he played cards and drank beer,
which we of Barham knew to be wrong; and if he would do one wrong thing,
why not another?

Meantime how was it with Bessie? How is it always with women when
those whom they love are charged with unworthiness? Do they exhibit
the “judicial mind”? Do they cautiously weigh the evidence and decide
according to it? The girl did not entertain the faintest supposition that
her lover could be guilty; she was no more capable of blackening his
character than she was capable of taking his life. She would not speak to
people who showed by word or look that they doubted his innocence. She
raged at a world which could be so stupid, so unjust, and so wicked as
to slander the good fame and threaten the life of one whom her heart had
crowned with more than human perfections.

But what availed all her confidence in his purity? There was the finger
of public suspicion pointed at him, and there was the hangman lying in
wait for his precious life. She was almost mad with shame, indignation,
grief, and terror. She rose as pale as a ghost from sleepless nights,
during which she had striven in vain to unravel this terrible mystery,
and prayed in vain that Heaven would revoke this unbearable calamity.
Day by day she visited her betrothed in his cell, and cheered him with
the sympathy of her trusting and loving soul. The conversations which
took place on these occasions were so naïve and childlike in their
honest utterance of emotion that I almost dread to record them, lest
the deliberate, unpalpitating sense of criticism should pronounce them
sickening, and mark them for ridicule.

“Darling,” she once said to him, “we must be married. Whether you are to
live or to die, I must be your wife.”

He knelt down and kissed the hem of her dress in adoration of such
self-sacrifice.

“Ah, my love, I never before knew what you were,” he whispered, as she
leaned forward, caught his head in her hands, dragged it into her lap,
and covered it with kisses and tears. “Ah, my love, you are too good.
I cannot accept such a sacrifice. When I am cleared publicly of this
horrible charge, then I will ask you once more if you dare be my wife.”

“Dare! O, how can you say such things!” she sobbed. “Don’t you know that
you are more to me than the whole universe? Don’t you know that I would
marry you, even if I knew you were guilty?”

There is no reasoning with this sublime passion of love, when it is truly
itself. There is no reasoning with it; and Heaven be thanked that it is
so! It is well to have one impulse in the world which has no egoism,
which rejoices in self-immolation for the sake of its object, which is
among emotions what a martyr is among men.

Foster’s response was worthy of the girl’s declaration. “My love,” he
whispered, “I have been bemoaning my ruined life, but I must bemoan it
no more. It is success enough for any man to be loved by you, and as you
love me.”

“No, no!” protested Bessie. “It is not success enough for you. No success
is enough for you. You deserve everything that ever man did deserve. And
here you are insulted, trampled upon, and threatened. O, it is shameful
and horrible!”

“My child, you must not help to break me down,” implored Foster, feeling
that he was turning weak under the thought of his calamity.

She started towards him in a spasm of remorse; it was as if she had
suddenly become aware that she had stabbed him; her face and her attitude
were full of self-reproach.

“O my darling, do I make you more wretched?” she asked, “when I would die
for you! when you are my all! O, there is not a minute when I am worthy
of you!”

These interviews left Foster possessed of a few minutes of consolation
and peace, which would soon change into an increased poverty of despair
and rage. For the first few days of his imprisonment his prevalent
feeling was anger. He could not in the least accept his position; he
would not look upon himself as one who was suspected with justice, or
even with the slightest show of probability; he would not admit that
society was pardonable for its doubts of him. He was not satisfied
with mere hope of escape; on the contrary, he considered his accusers
shamefully and wickedly blameworthy; he was angry at them, and wanted to
wreak upon them a stern vengeance.

As the imprisonment dragged on, however, and his mind lost its tension
under the pressure of trouble, there came moments when he did not
quite know himself. It seemed to him that this man, who was charged
with murder, was some one else, for whose character he could not stand
security, and who might be guilty. He almost looked upon him with
suspicion; he half joined the public in condemning him unheard. Perhaps
this mental confusion was the foreshadowing of that insane state of mind
in which prisoners have confessed themselves guilty of murders which they
had not committed, and which have been eventually brought home to others.
There are twilights between reason and unreason. The descent from the one
condition to the other is oftener a slope than a precipice.

Meanwhile Bessie had, as a matter of course, plans for saving her
lover; and these plans, almost as a matter of course too, were mainly
impracticable. As with all young people and almost all women, she
rebelled against the fixed procedures of society when they seemed likely
to trample on the dictates of her affections. Now that it was her lover
who was under suspicion of murder, it did not seem a necessity to her
that the law should take its course, and, on the contrary, it seemed to
her an atrocity. She knew that he was guiltless; she knew that he was
suffering; why should he be tried? When told that he must have every
legal advantage, she assented to it eagerly, and drove at once to see
Mr. Patterson, and overwhelmed him with tearful implorations “to do
everything,—to do everything that could be done,—yes, in short, to do
everything.” But still she could not feel that anything ought to be done,
except to release at once this beautiful and blameless victim, and to
make him every conceivable apology. As for bringing him before a court,
to answer with his life whether he were innocent or guilty, it was an
injustice and an outrage which she rebelled against with all the energy
of her ardent nature.

Who could prevent this infamy? In her ignorance of the machinery of
justice, it seemed to her that her grandfather might. Notwithstanding
the little sympathy that there had been between them, she went to the
grim old man with her sorrows and her plans, proposing to him to arrest
the trial. In her love and her simplicity she would have appealed to a
mountain or to a tiger.

“What!” roared the Squire. “Stop the trial? Can’t do it. I’m not the
prosecutor. The State’s attorney is the prosecutor.”

“But can’t you say that you think the proof against him is insufficient?”
urged Bessie. “Can’t you go to them and say that? Won’t that do it?”

“Lord bless you!” replied Squire Lauson, staring in wonder at such
ignorance, and dimly conscious of the love and sorrow which made it utter
its simplicities.

“O grandfather! do have pity on him and on me!” pleaded Bessie.

He gave her a kinder glance than she had ever received from him before
in her life. It occurred to him, as if it were for the first time, that
she was very sweet and helpless, and that she was his own grandchild. He
had hated her father. O, how he had hated the conceited city upstart,
with his pert, positive ways! how he had rejoiced over his bankruptcy,
if not over his death! The girl he had taken to his home, because, after
all, she was a Lauson by blood, and it would be a family shame to let
her go begging her bread of strangers. But she had not won upon him; she
looked too much like that “damn jackanapes,” her father; moreover, she
had contemptible city accomplishments, and she moped in the seclusion
of Barham. He had been glad when she became engaged to that other “damn
jackanapes,” Foster; and it had been agreeable to think that her marriage
would take her out of his sight. Mercy had made a will in her favor; he
had sniffed and hooted at Mercy for her folly; but, after all, he had in
his heart consented to the will; it saved him from leaving any of his
money to a Barron.

Of late, however, there had been a softening in the Squire; he could
himself hardly believe that it was in his heart; he half suspected at
times that it was in his brain. A man who lives to ninety-three is
exposed to this danger, that he may survive all his children. The Squire
had walked to one grave after another, until he had buried his last son
and his last daughter. After Mercy Lauson, there were no more children
for him to see under ground; and that fact, coupled with the shocking
nature of her death, had strangely shaken him; it had produced that
singular softening which we have mentioned, and which seemed to him like
a malady. Now, a little shattered, no longer the man that he so long had
been, he was face to face with his only living descendant.

He reached out his gray, hard hand, and laid it on her glossy, curly
hair. She started with surprise at the unaccustomed touch, and looked up
in his face with a tearful sparkle of hope.

“Be quiet, Bessie,” he said, in a voice which was less like a _caw_ than
usual.

“O grandfather! what do you mean?” she sobbed, guessing that deliverance
might be nigh, and yet fearing to fall back into despair.

“Don’t cry,” was the only response of this close-mouthed, imperturbable
old man.

“O, was it any one else?” she demanded. “Who do you think did it?”

“I have an idea,” he admitted, after staring at her steadily, as if to
impress caution. “But keep quiet. We’ll see.”

“You know it couldn’t be he that did it,” urged Bessie. “Don’t you know
it couldn’t? He’s too good.”

The Squire laughed. “Why, some folks laid it to you,” he said. “If he
should be cleared, they might lay it to you again. There’s no telling
who’ll do such things, and there’s no telling who’ll be suspected.”

“And you _will_ do something?” she resumed. “You _will_ follow it up? You
_will_ save him?”

“Keep quiet,” grimly answered the Squire. “I’m watching. But keep quiet.
Not a word to a living soul.”

Close on this scene came another, which proved to be the unravelling of
the drama. That evening Bessie went early, as usual, to her solitary
room, and prepared for one of those nights which are not a rest to the
weary. She had become very religious since her trouble had come upon her;
she read several chapters in the Bible, and then she prayed long and
fervently; and, after a sob or two over her own shortcomings, the prayer
was all for Foster. Such is human devotion: the voice of distress is far
more fervent than the voice of worship; the weak and sorrowful are the
true suppliants.

Her prayer ended, if ever it could be said to end while she waked, she
strove anew to disentangle the mystery which threatened her lover,
meanwhile hearing, half unawares, the noises of the night. Darkness has
its speech, its still small whisperings and mutterings, a language which
cannot be heard during the clamor of day, but which to those who must
listen to it is painfully audible, and which rarely has pleasant things
to say, but threatens rather, or warns. For a long time, disturbed by
fingers that tapped at her window, by hands that stole along her wall, by
feet that glided through the dark halls, Bessie could not sleep. She lost
herself; then she came back to consciousness with the start of a swimmer
struggling toward the surface; then she recommenced praying for Foster,
and once more lost herself.

At last, half dozing, and yet half aware that she was weeping, she was
suddenly and sharply roused by a distinct creak in the floor of her room.
Bessie had in one respect inherited somewhat of her grandfather’s iron
nature, being so far from habitually timorous that she was noted among
her girlish acquaintance for courage. But her nerves had been seriously
shaken by the late tragedy, by anxiety, and by sleeplessness; it seemed
to her that there was in the air a warning of great danger; she was half
paralyzed by fright.

Struggling against her terror, she sprang out of bed and made a rush
toward her door, meaning to close and lock it. Instantly there was a
collision; she had thrown herself against some advancing form; in the
next breath she was engaged in a struggle. Half out of her senses, she
did not scream, did not query whether her assailant were man or woman,
did not indeed use her intelligence in any distinct fashion, but only
pushed and pulled in blind instinct of escape.

Once she had a sensation of being cut with some sharp instrument. Then
she struck; the blow told, and her antagonist fell heavily; the fall was
succeeded by a short shriek in a woman’s voice. Bessie did not stop to
wonder that any one engaged in an attempt at assassination should utter
an outcry which would almost necessarily insure discovery and seizure.
The shock of the sound seemed to restore her own powers of speech, and
she burst into a succession of loud screams, calling on her grandfather
for help.

In the same moment the hope which abides in light fell under her hand.
Reeling against her dressing-table, her fingers touched a box of waxen
matches, and she quickly drew one of them against the wood, sending a
faint glimmer through the chamber. She was not horror-stricken, she did
not grasp a comprehension of the true nature of the scene; she simply
stared in trembling wonder when she recognized Mrs. Lauson.

“You there, grandmother!” gasped Bessie. “What has happened?”

Mrs. Lauson, attired in an old morning-gown, was sitting on the floor,
partially supported by one hand, while the other was moving about as if
in search of some object. The object was a carving-knife; she saw it,
clutched it, and rose to her feet; then for the first time she looked at
Bessie. “What do you lie awake and pray for?” she demanded, in a furious
mutter. “You lie awake and pray every night. I’ve listened in the hall
time and again, and heard you. I won’t have it. I’ll give you just three
minutes to get to sleep.”

Bessie did not think; it did not occur to her, at least not in any clear
manner, that this was lunacy; she instinctively sprang behind a large
chair and uttered another scream.

“I say, will you go to sleep?” insisted Mrs. Lauson, advancing and
raising her knife.

Just in the moment of need there were steps in the hall; the still
vigorous and courageous old Squire appeared upon the scene; after
a violent struggle the maniac was disarmed and bound. She lay upon
Bessie’s bed, staring at her husband with bloodshot, watery eyes, and
seemingly unconscious of anything but a sense of ill-treatment. The girl,
meanwhile, had discovered a slight gash on her left arm, and had shown it
to the Squire.

“Sallie,” demanded the cold-blooded old man, “what have you been trying
to knife Bessie for?”

“Because she lay awake and prayed,” was the ready and firm response of
downright mania.

“Look here, Sallie, what did you kill Mercy for?” continued the Squire,
without changing a muscle of his countenance.

“Because she sat up and prayed,” responded Mrs. Lauson. “She sat up in
the garden and prayed against me. Ever so many people sit up and lie
awake to pray against me. I won’t have it.”

“Ah!” said the old man. “Do you hear that, Bessie? Remember it, so as to
say it upon your oath.”

After a second or two he added, with something like a twinkle of his
characteristic humor in his hard gray eyes, “So I saved my life by not
praying!”

Thus ended the extraordinary scene which brought to light the murderer of
Miss Mercy Lauson. It is almost needless to add that on the day following
the maniac was conveyed to the State Lunatic Asylum, and that shortly
afterward Bessie opened the prison gates of Henry Foster, and told him of
his absolution from charge of crime.

“And now I want the whole world to get on its knees and ask your pardon,”
she said, after a long scene of tenderer words than must be reported.

“If the world should ask pardon for all its blunders,” he said, with
a smile, “it would pass its whole time in penance, and wouldn’t make
its living. Human life is like science, a sequence of mistakes, with
generally a true direction.”

One must stick to one’s character. A philosopher is nothing if not
philosophical.

[Illustration]



[Illustration]



THE IRON SHROUD.

BY WILLIAM MUDFORD.


The castle of the Prince of Tolfi was built on the summit of the towering
and precipitous rock of Scylla, and commanded a magnificent view of
Sicily in all its grandeur. Here, during the wars of the Middle Ages,
when the fertile plains of Italy were devastated by hostile factions,
those prisoners were confined, for whose ransom a costly price was
demanded. Here, too, in a dungeon excavated deep in the solid rock, the
miserable victim was immured, whom revenge pursued,—the dark, fierce, and
unpitying revenge of an Italian heart.

VIVENZIO,—the noble and the generous, the fearless in battle, and the
pride of Naples in her sunny hours of peace,—the young, the brave, the
proud Vivenzio,—fell beneath this subtle and remorseless spirit. He was
the prisoner of Tolfi; and he languished in that rock-encircled dungeon,
which stood alone, and whose portals never opened twice upon a living
captive.

It had the semblance of a vast cage; for the roof and floor and sides
were of iron, solidly wrought and spaciously constructed. High above
ran a range of seven grated windows, guarded with massy bars of the
same metal, which admitted light and air. Save these, and the tall
folding-doors beneath them, which occupied the centre, no chink or chasm
or projection broke the smooth, black surface of the walls. An iron
bedstead, littered with straw, stood in one corner, and, beside it, a
vessel of water, and a coarse dish filled with coarser food.

Even the intrepid soul of Vivenzio shrunk with dismay as he entered
this abode, and heard the ponderous doors triple-locked by the silent
ruffians who conducted him to it. Their silence seemed prophetic of his
fate, of the living grave that had been prepared for him. His menaces
and his entreaties, his indignant appeals for justice, and his impatient
questioning of their intentions, were alike vain. They listened but spoke
not. Fit ministers of a crime that should have no tongue!

How dismal was the sound of their retiring steps! And, as their faint
echoes died along the winding passages, a fearful presage grew within
him, that nevermore the face or voice or tread of man would greet his
senses. He had seen human beings for the last time! And he had looked
his last upon the bright sky and upon the smiling earth and upon a
beautiful world he loved, and whose minion he had been! Here he was to
end his life,—a life he had just begun to revel in! And by what means?
By secret poison? or by murderous assault? No; for then it had been
needless to bring him thither. Famine, perhaps,—a thousand deaths in one!
It was terrible to think of it; but it was yet more terrible to picture
long, long years of captivity in a solitude so appalling, a loneliness
so dreary, that thought, for want of fellowship, would lose itself in
madness, or stagnate into idiocy.

He could not hope to escape, unless he had the power, with his bare
hands, of rending asunder the solid iron walls of his prison. He could
not hope for liberty from the relenting mercies of his enemy. His
instant death, under any form of refined cruelty, was not the object
of Tolfi; for he might have inflicted it, and he had not. It was too
evident, therefore, he was reserved for some premeditated scheme of
subtle vengeance; and what vengeance could transcend in fiendish malice,
either the slow death of famine, or the still slower one of solitary
incarceration till the last lingering spark of life expired, or till
reason fled, and nothing should remain to perish but the brute functions
of the body?

It was evening when Vivenzio entered his dungeon; and the approaching
shades of night wrapped it in total darkness, as he paced up and down,
revolving in his mind these horrible forebodings. No tolling bell from
the castle, or from any neighboring church or convent, struck upon his
ears to tell how the hours passed. Frequently he would stop and listen
for some sound that might betoken the vicinity of man; but the solitude
of the desert, the silence of the tomb, are not so still and deep as the
oppressive desolation by which he was encompassed. His heart sunk within
him, and he threw himself dejectedly upon his couch of straw. Here sleep
gradually obliterated the consciousness of misery; and bland dreams
wafted his delighted spirit to scenes which were once glowing realities
for him, in whose ravishing illusions he soon lost the remembrance that
he was Tolfi’s prisoner.

When he awoke, it was daylight; but how long he had slept he knew not. It
might be early morning, or it might be sultry noon; for he could measure
time by no other note of its progress than light and darkness. He had
been so happy in his sleep, amid friends who loved him, and the sweeter
endearments of those who loved him as friends could not, that, in the
first moments of waking, his startled mind seemed to admit the knowledge
of his situation, as if it had burst upon it for the first time, fresh
in all its appalling horrors. He gazed round with an air of doubt and
amazement, and took up a handful of the straw upon which he lay, as
though he would ask himself what it meant. But memory, too faithful to
her office, soon unveiled the melancholy past, while reason, shuddering
at the task, flashed before his eyes the tremendous future. The contrast
overpowered him. He remained for some time lamenting, like a truth, the
bright visions that had vanished, and recoiling from the present, which
clung to him as a poisoned garment.

When he grew more calm, he surveyed his gloomy dungeon. Alas!
the stronger light of day only served to confirm what the gloomy
indistinctness of the preceding evening had partially disclosed,—the
utter impossibility of escape. As, however, his eyes wandered round
and round, and from place to place, he noticed two circumstances which
excited his surprise and curiosity. The one, he thought, might be fancy;
but the other was positive. His pitcher of water, and the dish which
contained his food, had been removed from his side while he slept,
and now stood near the door. Were he even inclined to doubt this, by
supposing he had mistaken the spot where he saw them over night, he could
not; for the pitcher now in his dungeon was neither of the same form nor
color as the other, while the food was changed for some other of better
quality. He had been visited therefore during the night. But how had
the person obtained entrance? Could he have slept so soundly that the
unlocking and opening of those ponderous portals were effected without
waking him? He would have said this was not possible, but that, in doing
so, he must admit a greater difficulty, an entrance by other means, of
which, he was convinced, none existed. It was not intended, then, that
he should be left to perish from hunger; but the secret and mysterious
mode of supplying him with food seemed to indicate he was to have no
opportunity of communicating with a human being.

The other circumstance which had attracted his notice was the
disappearance, as he believed, of one of the seven grated windows that
ran along the top of his prison. He felt confident that he had observed
and counted them; for he was rather surprised at their number, and there
was something peculiar in their form, as well as in the manner of their
arrangement, at unequal distances. It was so much easier, however, to
suppose he was mistaken, than that a portion of the solid iron, which
formed the walls, could have escaped from its position, that he soon
dismissed the thought from his mind.

Vivenzio partook of the food that was before him without apprehension. It
might be poisoned; but, if it were, he knew he could not escape death,
should such be the design of Tolfi; and the quickest death would be the
speediest relief.

The day passed wearily and gloomily, though not without a faint hope
that, by keeping watch at night, he might observe when the person came
again to bring him food, which he supposed he would do in the same way
as before. The mere thought of being approached by a living creature,
and the opportunity it might present of learning the doom prepared or
preparing for him, imparted some comfort. Besides, if he came alone,
might he not in a furious onset overpower him? Or he might be accessible
to pity, or the influence of such munificent rewards as he could bestow
if once more at liberty, and master of himself. Say he were armed. The
worst that could befall, if nor bribe nor prayers nor force prevailed,
was a faithful blow, which, though dealt in a damned cause, might work
a desired end. There was no chance so desperate but it looked lovely in
Vivenzio’s eyes, compared with the idea of being totally abandoned.

The night came, and Vivenzio watched. Morning came, and Vivenzio was
confounded! He must have slumbered without knowing it. Sleep must have
stolen over him when exhausted by fatigue; and, in that interval of
feverish repose, he had been baffled: for there stood his replenished
pitcher of water, and there his day’s meal! Nor was this all. Casting
his looks toward the windows of his dungeon, he counted but FIVE! _Here_
was no deception; and he was now convinced there had been none the day
before. But what did all this portend? Into what strange and mysterious
den had he been cast? He gazed till his eyes ached; he could discover
nothing to explain the mystery. That it was so, he knew. Why it was so,
he racked his imagination in vain to conjecture. He examined the doors. A
simple circumstance convinced him they had not been opened.

A wisp of straw, which he had carelessly thrown against them the
preceding day, as he paced to and fro, remained where he had cast it,
though it must have been displaced by the slightest motion of either of
the doors. This was evidence that could not be disputed; and it followed
there must be some secret machinery in the walls by which a person could
enter. He inspected them closely. They appeared to him one solid and
compact mass of iron; or joined, if joined they were, with such nice art
that no mark of division was perceptible. Again and again he surveyed
them, and the floor and the roof, and that range of visionary windows, as
he was now almost tempted to consider them: he could discover nothing,
absolutely nothing, to relieve his doubts or satisfy his curiosity.
Sometimes he fancied that altogether the dungeon had a more contracted
appearance,—that it looked smaller; but this he ascribed to fancy,
and the impression naturally produced upon his mind by the undeniable
disappearance of two of the windows.

With intense anxiety, Vivenzio looked forward to the return of night;
and, as it approached, he resolved that no treacherous sleep should
again betray him. Instead of seeking his bed of straw, he continued to
walk up and down his dungeon till daylight, straining his eyes in every
direction through the darkness, to watch for any appearances that might
explain these mysteries. While thus engaged, and, as nearly as he could
judge (by the time that afterward elapsed before the morning came in),
about two o’clock, there was a slight, tremulous motion of the floors.
He stooped. The motion lasted nearly a minute: but it was so extremely
gentle that he almost doubted whether it was real, or only imaginary.
He listened. Not a sound could be heard. Presently, however, he felt a
rush of cold air blow upon him; and, dashing toward the quarter whence
it seemed to proceed, he stumbled over something which he judged to be
the water ewer. The rush of cold air was no longer perceptible; and, as
Vivenzio stretched out his hands, he found himself close to the walls. He
remained motionless for a considerable time; but nothing occurred during
the remainder of the night to excite his attention, though he continued
to watch with unabated vigilance.

The first approaches of the morning were visible through the grated
windows, breaking, with faint divisions of light, the darkness that
still pervaded every other part, long before Vivenzio was enabled to
distinguish any object in his dungeon. Instinctively and fearfully he
turned his eyes, hot and inflamed with watching, toward them. There were
FOUR! He could _see_ only four: but it might be that some intervening
object prevented the fifth from becoming perceptible; and he waited
impatiently to ascertain if it were so. As the light strengthened,
however, and penetrated every corner of the cell, other objects of
amazement struck his sight. On the ground lay the broken fragments of
the pitcher he had used the day before, and, at a small distance from
them, nearer to the wall, stood the one he had noticed the first night.
It was filled with water, and beside it was his food. He was now certain,
that, by some mechanical contrivance, an opening was obtained through the
iron wall, and that through this opening the current of air had found
entrance. But how noiseless! for, had a feather even waved at the time,
he must have heard it. Again he examined that part of the wall; but both
to sight and touch it appeared one even and uniform surface, while, to
repeated and violent blows, there was no reverberating sound indicative
of hollowness.

This perplexing mystery had for a time withdrawn his thoughts from the
windows; but now, directing his eyes again toward them, he saw that
the fifth had disappeared in the same manner as the preceding two,
without the least distinguishable alteration of external appearances.
The remaining four looked as the seven had originally looked; that is,
occupying at irregular distances the top of the wall on that side of
the dungeon. The tall folding-door, too, still seemed to stand beneath,
in the centre of these four, as it had first stood in the centre of
the seven. But he could no longer doubt what, on the preceding day,
he fancied might be the effect of visual deception. The dungeon _was_
smaller. The roof had lowered; and the opposite ends had contracted the
intermediate distance by a space equal, he thought, to that over which
the three windows had extended. He was bewildered in vain imaginings to
account for these things. Some frightful purpose, some devilish torture
of mind or body, some unheard-of device for producing exquisite misery,
lurked, he was sure, in what had taken place.

Oppressed with this belief, and distracted more by the dreadful
uncertainty of whatever fate impended than he could be dismayed, he
thought, by the knowledge of the worst, he sat ruminating, hour after
hour, yielding his fears in succession to every haggard fancy. At last
a horrible suspicion flashed suddenly across his mind, and he started
up with a frantic air. “Yes!” he exclaimed, looking wildly round his
dungeon, and shuddering as he spoke,—“yes! it must be so! I see it! I
feel the maddening truth like scorching flames upon my brain! Eternal
God! support me! it must be so! Yes, yes, _that_ is to be my fate! Yon
roof will descend! these walls will hem me round, and slowly, slowly,
crush me in their iron arms! Lord God! look down upon me, and in mercy
strike me with instant death! O fiend! O devil!—is this your revenge?”

He dashed himself upon the ground in agony, tears burst from him, and the
sweat stood in large drops upon his face: he sobbed aloud, he tore his
hair, he rolled about like one suffering intolerable anguish of body,
and would have bitten the iron floor beneath him; he breathed fearful
curses upon Tolfi, and the next moment passionate prayers to Heaven for
immediate death. Then the violence of his grief became exhausted; and
he lay still, weeping as a child would weep. The twilight of departing
day shed its gloom around him ere he arose from that posture of utter
and hopeless sorrow. He had taken no food. Not one drop of water had
cooled the fever of his parched lips. Sleep had not visited his eyes for
six-and-thirty hours. He was faint with hunger; weary with watching, and
with the excess of his emotions. He tasted of his food; he drank with
avidity of the water, and reeling, like a drunken man, to his straw, cast
himself upon it to brood again over the appalling image that had fastened
itself upon his almost frenzied thoughts.

He slept; but his slumbers were not tranquil. He resisted, as long as he
could, their approach; and when, at last, enfeebled nature yielded to
their influence, he found no oblivion from his cares. Terrible dreams
haunted him; ghastly visions harrowed up his imagination; he shouted and
screamed, as if he already felt the dungeon’s ponderous roof descending
on him; he breathed hard and thick, as though writhing between its iron
walls. Then would he spring up, stare wildly about him, stretch forth
his hands to be sure he yet had space enough to live, and, muttering
some incoherent words, sink down again, to pass through the same fierce
vicissitudes of delirious sleep.

The morning of the fourth day dawned upon Vivenzio; but it was high noon
before his mind shook off its stupor, or he awoke to a full consciousness
of his situation. And what a fixed energy of despair sat upon his pale
features as he cast his eyes upwards, and gazed upon the THREE windows
that now alone remained! The three!—there were no more! and they seemed
to number his own allotted days. Slowly and calmly he next surveyed the
top and sides, and comprehended all the meaning of the diminished height
of the former, as well as of the gradual approximation of the latter. The
contracted dimensions of his mysterious prison were now too gross and
palpable to be the juggle of his heated imagination.

Still lost in wonder at the means, Vivenzio could put no cheat upon his
reason as to the end. By what horrible ingenuity it was contrived, that
walls and roofs and windows should thus silently and imperceptibly,
without noise and without motion, almost fold, as it were, within each
other, he knew not. He only knew they did so; and he vainly strove to
persuade himself it was the intention of the contriver to rack the
miserable wretch who might be immured there with anticipation merely of a
fate from which, in the very crisis of his agony, he was to be reprieved.

Gladly would he have clung even to this possibility, if his heart would
have let him; but he felt a dreadful assurance of its fallacy. And what
matchless inhumanity it was to doom the sufferer to such lingering
torments; to lead him day by day to so appalling a death, unsupported by
the consolations of religion, unvisited by any human being, abandoned to
himself, deserted of all, and denied even the sad privilege of knowing
that his cruel destiny would awaken pity! Alone he was to perish! Alone
he was to wait a slow-coming torture, whose most exquisite pangs would be
inflicted by that very solitude and that tardy coming.

“It is not death I fear,” he exclaimed, “but the death I must prepare
for! Methinks, too, I could meet even that, all horrible and revolting
as it is,—if it might overtake me now. But where shall I find fortitude
to tarry till it come? How can I outlive the three long days and nights
I have to live? There is no power within me to bid the hideous spectre
hence; none to make it familiar to my thoughts, or myself patient of
its errand. My thoughts rather will flee from me, and I grow mad in
looking at it. Oh! for a deep sleep to fall upon me! That so, in death’s
likeness, I might embrace death itself, and drink no more of the cup that
is presented to me than my fainting spirit has already tasted!”

In the midst of these lamentations, Vivenzio noticed that his accustomed
meal, with the pitcher of water, had been conveyed, as before, into his
dungeon. But this circumstance no longer excited his surprise. His mind
was overwhelmed with others of a far greater magnitude. It suggested,
however, a feeble hope of deliverance; and there is no hope so feeble as
not to yield some support to a heart bending under despair. He resolved
to watch, during the ensuing night, for the signs he had before observed,
and, should he again feel the gentle, tremulous motion of the floor, or
the current of air, to seize that moment for giving audible expression to
his misery. Some person must be near him, and within reach of his voice,
at the instant when his food was supplied; some one, perhaps, susceptible
of pity. Or, if not, to be told even that his apprehensions were just,
and that his fate _was_ to be what he foreboded, would be preferable
to a suspense which hung upon the possibility of his worst fears being
visionary.

The night came; and, as the hour approached when Vivenzio imagined he
might expect the signs, he stood fixed and silent as a statue. He feared
to breathe, almost, lest he might lose any sound which would warn him of
their coming. While thus listening, with every faculty of mind and body
strained to an agony of attention, it occurred to him he should be more
sensible of the motion, probably, if he stretched himself along the iron
floor. He accordingly laid himself softly down, and had not been long in
that position when—yes—he was certain of it—the floor moved under him! He
sprang up, and, in a voice suffocated nearly with emotion, called aloud.
He paused—the motion ceased—he felt no stream of air—all was hushed—no
voice answered to his—he burst into tears; and, as he sunk to the ground,
in renewed anguish, exclaimed, “O my God! my God! You alone have power to
save me now, or strengthen me for the trial you permit.”

Another morning dawned upon the wretched captive, and the fatal index of
his doom met his eyes. TWO windows!—and _two_ days—and all would be over!
Fresh food—fresh water! The mysterious visit had been paid, though he
had implored it in vain. But how awfully was his prayer answered in what
he now saw! The roof of the dungeon was within a foot of his head. The
two ends were so near that in six paces he trod the space between them.
Vivenzio shuddered as he gazed, and as his steps traversed the narrow
area; but his feelings no longer vented themselves in frantic wailings.
With folded arms, and clenched teeth; with eyes that were bloodshot from
much watching, and fixed with a vacant glare upon the ground; with a
hard, quick breathing, and a hurried walk,—he strode backward and forward
in silent musing for several hours. What mind shall conceive, what tongue
utter, or what pen describe, the dark and terrible character of his
thoughts? Like the fate that moulded them, they had no similitude in
the wide range of this world’s agony for man. Suddenly he stopped, and
his eyes were riveted upon that part of the wall which was over his bed
of straw. Words are inscribed there! A human language, traced by a human
hand! He rushes toward them; but his blood freezes as he reads,—

“I, Ludovico Sforza, tempted by the gold of the Prince of Tolfi, spent
three years in contriving and executing this accursed triumph of my
art. When it was completed, the perfidious Tolfi, more devil than man,
who conducted me hither one morning to be witness, as he said, of its
perfection, doomed _me_ to be the first victim of my own pernicious
skill; lest, as he declared, I should divulge the secret, or repeat the
effort of my ingenuity. May God pardon him, as I hope he will me, that
ministered to his unhallowed purpose. Miserable wretch, whoe’er thou art,
that readest these lines, fall on thy knees, and invoke, as I have done,
His sustaining mercy who alone can nerve thee to meet the vengeance of
Tolfi, armed with his tremendous engine which, in a few hours, must crush
_you_, as it will the needy wretch who made it.”

A deep groan burst from Vivenzio. He stood, like one transfixed, with
dilated eyes, expanded nostrils, and quivering lips, gazing at this fatal
inscription. It was as if a voice from the sepulchre had sounded in his
ears, “Prepare.” Hope forsook him. There was his sentence, recorded in
those dismal words. The future stood unveiled before him, ghastly and
appalling. His brain already feels the descending horror; his bones
seem to crack and crumble in the mighty grasp of the iron walls!
Unknowing what it is he does, he fumbles in his garment for some weapon
of self-destruction. He clenches his throat in his convulsive gripe,
as though he would strangle himself at once. He stares upon the walls;
and his warring spirit demands, “Will they not anticipate their office
if I dash my head against them?” An hysterical laugh chokes him as he
exclaims, “Why should I? He was but a man who died first in their fierce
embrace; and I should be less than man not to do as much!”

The evening sun was descending, and Vivenzio beheld its golden beams
streaming through one of the windows. What a thrill of joy shot through
his soul at the sight! It was a precious link that united him, for the
moment, with the world beyond. There was ecstasy in the thought.

As he gazed, long and earnestly, it seemed as if the windows had lowered
sufficiently for him to reach them. With one bound, he was beneath them;
with one wild spring, he clung to the bars. Whether it was so contrived,
purposely to madden with delight the wretch who looked, he knew not; but,
at the extremity of a long vista cut through the solid rocks, the ocean,
the sky, the setting sun, olive groves, shady walks, and, in the farthest
distance, delicious glimpses of magnificent Sicily, burst upon his sight.
How exquisite was the cool breeze as it swept across his cheek, loaded
with fragrance! He inhaled it as though it were the breath of continued
life. And there was a freshness in the landscape, and in the rippling of
the calm, green sea, that fell upon his withering heart like dew upon the
parched earth. How he gazed, and panted, and still clung to his hold!
sometimes hanging by one hand, sometimes by the other, and then grasping
the bars with both, as loath to quit the smiling paradise outstretched
before him; till, exhausted, and his hands swollen and benumbed, he
dropped helpless down, and lay stunned for a considerable time by the
fall.

When he recovered, the glorious vision had vanished. He was in darkness.
He doubted whether it was not a dream that had passed before his sleeping
fancy; but gradually his scattered thoughts returned, and with them came
remembrance. Yes! he had looked once again upon the gorgeous splendor
of nature! Once again his eyes had trembled beneath their veiled lids
at the sun’s radiance, and sought repose in the soft verdure of the
olive-tree or the gentle swell of undulating waves. O that he were a
mariner, exposed upon those waves to the worst fury of storm and tempest,
or a very wretch, loathsome with disease, plague-stricken, and his body
one leprous contagion from crown to sole, hunted forth to gasp out the
remnant of infectious life beneath those verdant trees, so he might shun
the destiny upon whose edge he tottered!

Vain thoughts like these would steal over his mind from time to time, in
spite of himself; but they scarcely moved it from that stupor into which
it had sunk, and which kept him, during the whole night, like one who
had been drugged with opium. He was equally insensible to the calls of
hunger and of thirst, though the third day was now commencing since even
a drop of water had passed his lips. He remained on the ground, sometimes
sitting, sometimes lying; at intervals sleeping heavily, and, when not
sleeping, silently brooding over what was to come, or talking aloud, in
disordered speech, of his wrongs, of his friends, of his home, and of
those he loved, with a confused mingling of all.

In this pitiable condition, the sixth and last morning dawned upon
Vivenzio, if dawn it might be called,—the dim, obscure light which
faintly struggled through the ONE SOLITARY window of his dungeon. He
could hardly be said to notice the melancholy token. And yet he did
notice it; for, as he raised his eyes and saw the portentous sign,
there was a slight convulsive distortion of his countenance. But what
did attract his notice, and at the sight of which his agitation was
excessive, was the change the iron bed had undergone. It was a bed no
longer. It stood before him, the visible semblance of a funeral couch or
bier! When he beheld this, he started from the ground; and, in raising
himself, suddenly struck his head against the roof, which was now so low
that he could no longer stand upright. “God’s will be done!” was all he
said, as he crouched his body, and placed his hand upon the bier; for
such it was. The iron bedstead had been so contrived, by the mechanical
art of Ludovico Sforza, that, as the advancing walls came in contact
with its head and feet, a pressure was produced upon concealed springs,
which, when made to play, set in motion a very simple though ingeniously
contrived machinery that effected the transformation. The object was, of
course, to heighten, in the closing scene of this horrible drama, all the
feelings of despair and anguish which the preceding one had aroused. For
the same reason, the last window was so made as to admit only a shadowy
kind of gloom rather than light, that the wretched captive might be
surrounded, as it were, with every seeming preparation for approaching
death.

Vivenzio seated himself on his bier. Then he knelt and prayed fervently;
and sometimes tears would gush from him. The air seemed thick, and he
breathed with difficulty; or it might be that he fancied it was so, from
the hot and narrow limits of his dungeon, which were now so diminished
that he could neither stand up nor lie down at his full length. But his
wasted spirits and oppressed mind no longer struggled with him. He was
past hope, and fear shook him no more. Happy if thus revenge had struck
its final blow; for he would have fallen beneath it almost unconscious of
a pang. But such a lethargy of the soul, after such an excitement of its
fiercest passions, had entered into the diabolical calculations of Tolfi;
and the fell artificer of his designs had imagined a counteracting device.

The tolling of an enormous bell struck upon the ears of Vivenzio! He
started. It beat but once. The sound was so close and stunning that it
seemed to shatter his very brain, while it echoed through the rocky
passages like reverberating peals of thunder. This was followed by a
sudden crash of the roof and walls, as if they were about to fall upon
and close around him at once. Vivenzio screamed, and instinctively spread
forth his arms, as though he had a giant’s strength to hold them back.
They had moved nearer to him, and were now motionless. Vivenzio looked
up, and saw the roof almost touching his head, even as he sat cowering
beneath it; and he felt that a further contraction of but a few inches
only must commence the frightful operation. Roused as he had been, he now
gasped for breath. His body shook violently; he was bent nearly double.
His hands rested upon either wall, and his feet were drawn under him to
avoid the pressure in front. Thus he remained for more than an hour,
when that deafening bell beat again, and again came the crash of horrid
death. But the concussion was now so great that it struck Vivenzio down.
As he lay gathered up in lessened bulk, the bell beat loud and frequent;
crash succeeded crash; and on and on and on came the mysterious engine
of death, till Vivenzio’s smothered groans were heard no more. He was
horribly crushed by the ponderous roof and collapsing sides; and the
flattened bier was his iron shroud.

[Illustration]



[Illustration]



THE BELL-TOWER.

BY HERMAN MELVILLE.


In the South of Europe, nigh a once frescoed capital, now with dank mould
cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at distance, seems
the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten
days, with Anak and the Titan.

As all along where the pine-tree falls its dissolution leaves a mossy
mound,—last-flung shadow of the perished trunk, never lengthening, never
lessening, unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun, shade immutable,
and true gauge which cometh by prostration,—so westward from what seems
the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ruin veins the plain.

From that tree-top, what birded chimes of silver throats had rung. A
stone pine; a metallic aviary in its crown: the Bell-Tower, built by the
great mechanician, the unblessed foundling, Bannadonna.

Like Babel’s, its base was laid in a high hour of renovated earth,
following the second deluge, when the waters of the Dark Ages had dried
up, and once more the green appeared. No wonder that, after so long and
deep submersion, the jubilant expectation of the race should, as with
Noah’s sons, soar into Shinar aspiration.

In firm resolve, no man in Europe at that period went beyond Bannadonna.
Enriched through commerce with the Levant, the state in which he lived
voted to have the noblest bell-tower in Italy. His repute assigned him to
be architect.

Stone by stone, month by month, the tower rose. Higher, higher;
snail-like in pace, but torch or rocket in its pride.

After the masons would depart, the builder, standing alone upon its
ever-ascending summit, at close of every day, saw that he overtopped
still higher walls and trees. He would tarry till a late hour there,
wrapped in schemes of other and still loftier piles. Those who of saints’
days thronged the spot,—hanging to the rude poles of scaffolding, like
sailors on yards or bees on boughs, unmindful of lime and dust and
falling chips of stone,—their homage not the less inspirited him to
self-esteem.

At length the holiday of the Tower came. To the sound of viols, the
climax-stone slowly rose in air, and, amid the firing of ordnance, was
laid by Bannadonna’s hands upon the final course. Then mounting it, he
stood erect, alone, with folded arms, gazing upon the white summits of
blue inland Alps, and whiter crests of bluer Alps off-shore,—sights
invisible from the plain. Invisible, too, from thence was that eye he
turned below, when, like the cannon-booms, came up to him the people’s
combustions of applause.

That which stirred them so was, seeing with what serenity the builder
stood three hundred feet in air, upon an unrailed perch. This none but he
durst do. But his periodic standing upon the pile, in each stage of its
growth,—such discipline had its last result.

Little remained now but the bells. These, in all respects, must
correspond with their receptacle.

The minor ones were prosperously cast. A highly enriched one followed,
of a singular make, intended for suspension in a manner before unknown.
The purpose of this bell, its rotary motion, and connection with the
clock-work, also executed at the time, will, in the sequel, receive
mention.

In the one erection, bell-tower and clock-tower were united, though
before that period such structures had commonly been built distinct; as
the Campanile and Torre dell’ Orologio of St. Mark to this day attest.

But it was upon the great state-bell that the founder lavished his
more daring skill. In vain did some of the less elated magistrates
here caution him, saying that, though truly the tower was Titanic, yet
limit should be set to the dependent weight of its swaying masses. But
undeterred he prepared his mammoth mould, dented with mythological
devices; kindled his fires of balsamic firs; melted his tin and copper,
and, throwing in much plate contributed by the public spirit of the
nobles, let loose the tide.

The unleashed metals bayed like hounds. The workmen shrunk. Through
their fright, fatal harm to the bell was dreaded. Fearless as Shadrach,
Bannadonna, rushing through the glow, smote the chief culprit with his
ponderous ladle. From the smitten part a splinter was dashed into the
seething mass, and at once was melted in.

Next day a portion of the work was heedfully uncovered. All seemed right.
Upon the third morning, with equal satisfaction, it was bared still
lower. At length, like some old Theban king, the whole cooled casting was
disinterred. All was fair except in one strange spot. But as he suffered
no one to attend him in these inspections, he concealed the blemish by
some preparation which none knew better to devise.

The casting of such a mass was deemed no small triumph for the caster;
one, too, in which the state might not scorn to share. The homicide
was overlooked. By the charitable that deed was but imputed to sudden
transports of æsthetic passion, not to any flagitious quality,—a kick
from an Arabian charger; not sign of vice, but blood. His felony remitted
by the judge, absolution given him by the priest, what more could even a
sickly conscience have desired?

Honoring the tower and its builder with another holiday, the republic
witnessed the hoisting of the bells and clock-work amid shows and pomps
superior to the former.

Some months of more than usual solitude on Bannadonna’s part ensued.
It was not unknown that he was engaged upon something for the belfry,
intended to complete it, and to surpass all that had gone before. Most
people imagined that the design would involve a casting like the bells.
But those who thought they had some further insight would shake their
heads, with hints that not for nothing did the mechanician keep so
secret. Meantime, his seclusion failed not to invest his work with more
or less of that sort of mystery pertaining to the forbidden.

Erelong he had a heavy object hoisted to the belfry, wrapped in a dark
sack or cloak,—a procedure sometimes had in the case of an elaborate
piece of sculpture or statue, which, being intended to grace the front of
a new edifice, the architect does not desire exposed to critical eyes,
till set up, finished, in its appointed place. Such was the impression
now. But, as the object rose, a statuary present observed, or thought he
did, that it was not entirely rigid, but was, in a manner, pliant. At
last, when the hidden thing had attained its final height, and, obscurely
seen from below, seemed almost of itself to step into the belfry as if
with little assistance from the crane, a shrewd old blacksmith present
ventured the suspicion that it was but a living man. This surmise was
thought a foolish one, while the general interest failed not to augment.

Not without demur from Bannadonna, the chief magistrate of the town, with
an associate,—both elderly men,—followed what seemed the image up the
tower. But, arrived at the belfry, they had little recompense. Plausibly
intrenching himself behind the conceded mysteries of his art, the
mechanician withheld present explanation. The magistrates glanced toward
the cloaked object, which, to their surprise, seemed now to have changed
its attitude, or else had before been more perplexingly concealed by the
violent muffling action of the wind without. It seemed now seated upon
some sort of frame or chair contained within the domino. They observed
that nigh the top, in a sort of square, the web of the cloth, either
from accident or from design, had its warp partly withdrawn, and the
cross-threads plucked out here and there, so as to form a sort of woven
grating. Whether it were the low wind or no, stealing through the stone
lattice-work, or only their own perturbed imaginations, is uncertain, but
they thought they discerned a slight sort of fitful, spring-like motion,
in the domino. Nothing, however incidental or insignificant, escaped
their uneasy eyes. Among other things, they pried out, in a corner, an
earthen cup, partly corroded and partly incrusted, and one whispered to
the other that this cup was just such a one as might, in mockery, be
offered to the lips of some brazen statue, or, perhaps, still worse.

But, being questioned, the mechanician said that the cup was simply used
in his founder’s business, and described the purpose; in short, a cup to
test the condition of metals in fusion. He added that it had got into the
belfry by the merest chance.

Again and again they gazed at the domino, as at some suspicious incognito
at a Venetian mask. All sorts of vague apprehensions stirred them. They
even dreaded lest, when they should descend, the mechanician, though
without a flesh-and-blood companion, for all that, would not be left
alone.

Affecting some merriment at their disquietude, he begged to relieve them,
by extending a coarse sheet of workman’s canvas between them and the
object.

Meantime he sought to interest them in his other work; nor, now that the
domino was out of sight, did they long remain insensible to the artistic
wonders lying round them; wonders hitherto beheld but in their unfinished
state; because, since hoisting the bells, none but the caster had entered
within the belfry. It was one trait of his that, even in details, he
would not let another do what he could, without too great loss of time,
accomplish for himself. So, for several preceding weeks, whatever hours
were unemployed in his secret design, had been devoted to elaborating the
figures on the bells.

The clock-bell, in particular, now drew attention. Under a patient
chisel, the latent beauty of its enrichments, before obscured by the
cloudings incident to casting, that beauty in its shiest grace, was
now revealed. Round and round the bell, twelve figures of gay girls,
garlanded, hand-in-hand, danced in a choral ring,—the embodied hours.

“Bannadonna,” said the chief, “this bell excels all else. No added touch
could here improve. Hark!” hearing a sound, “was that the wind?”

“The wind, Eccellenza,” was the light response. “But the figures, they
are not yet without their faults. They need some touches yet. When those
are given, and the—block yonder,” pointing toward the canvas screen,
“when Haman there, as I merrily call him,—him? _it_, I mean,—when Haman
is fixed on this, his lofty tree, then, gentlemen, shall I be most happy
to receive you here again.”

The equivocal reference to the object caused some return of restlessness.
However, on their part, the visitors forbore further allusion to it,
unwilling, perhaps, to let the foundling see how easily it lay within
his plebeian art to stir the placid dignity of nobles.

“Well, Bannadonna,” said the chief, “how long ere you are ready to set
the clock going, so that the hour shall be sounded? Our interest in you,
not less than in the work itself, makes us anxious to be assured of your
success. The people, too,—why, they are shouting now. Say the exact hour
when you will be ready.”

“To-morrow, Eccellenza, if you listen for it,—or should you not, all the
same,—strange music will be heard. The stroke of one shall be the first
from yonder bell,” pointing to the bell adorned with girls and garlands;
“that stroke shall fall there, where the hand of Una clasps Dua’s. The
stroke of one shall sever that loved clasp. To-morrow, then, at one
o’clock, as struck here, precisely here,” advancing and placing his
finger upon the clasp, “the poor mechanic will be most happy once more to
give you liege audience, in this his littered shop. Farewell till then,
illustrious magnificoes, and hark ye for your vassal’s stroke.”

His still, Vulcanic face hiding its burning brightness like a forge,
he moved with ostentatious deference toward the scuttle, as if so far
to escort their exit. But the junior magistrate, a kind-hearted man,
troubled at what seemed to him a certain sardonical disdain, lurking
beneath the foundling’s humble mien, and in Christian sympathy more
distressed at it on his account than on his own, dimly surmising
what might be the final fate of such a cynic solitaire, nor perhaps
uninfluenced by the general strangeness of surrounding things,—this good
magistrate had glanced sadly, sidewise from the speaker, and thereupon
his foreboding eye had started at the expression of the unchanging face
of the hour Una.

“How is this, Bannadonna?” he lowly asked, “Una looks unlike her sisters.”

“In Christ’s name, Bannadonna,” impulsively broke in the chief, his
attention for the first time attracted to the figure by his associate’s
remark, “Una’s face looks just like that of Deborah, the prophetess, as
painted by the Florentine, Del Fonca.”

“Surely, Bannadonna,” lowly resumed the milder magistrate, “you meant the
twelve should wear the same jocundly abandoned air. But see, the smile of
Una seems but a fatal one. ’Tis different.”

While his mild associate was speaking, the chief glanced, inquiringly,
from him to the caster, as if anxious to mark how the discrepancy would
be accounted for. As the chief stood, his advanced foot was on the
scuttle’s curb. Bannadonna spoke:—

“Eccellenza, now that, following your keener eye, I glance upon the face
of Una, I do, indeed, perceive some little variance. But look all round
the bell, and you will find no two faces entirely correspond. Because
there is a law in art—But the cold wind is rising more; these lattices
are but a poor defence. Suffer me, magnificoes, to conduct you at least
partly on your way. Those in whose well-being there is a public stake
should be heedfully attended.”

“Touching the look of Una, you were saying, Bannadonna, that there was a
certain law in art,” observed the chief, as the three now descended the
stone shaft, “pray, tell me, then—”

“Pardon—another time, Eccellenza; the tower is damp.”

“Nay, I must rest, and hear it now. Here,—here is a wide landing, and
through this leeward slit no wind, but ample light. Tell us of your law,
and at large.”

“Since, Eccellenza, you insist, know that there is a law in art, which
bars the possibility of duplicates. Some years ago, you may remember, I
graved a small seal for your republic, bearing, for its chief device,
the head of your own ancestor, its illustrious founder. It becoming
necessary, for the customs’ use, to have innumerable impressions for
bales and boxes, I graved an entire plate, containing one hundred of
the seals. Now, though, indeed, my object was to have those hundred
heads identical, and though, I dare say, people think them so, yet, upon
closely scanning an uncut impression from the plate, no two of those
five-score faces, side by side, will be found alike. Gravity is the air
of all; but diversified in all. In some, benevolent; in some, ambiguous;
in two or three, to a close scrutiny, all but incipiently malign, the
variation of less than a hair’s breadth in the linear shadings round the
mouth sufficing to all this. Now, Eccellenza, transmute that general
gravity into joyousness, and subject it to twelve of those variations I
have described, and tell me, will you not have my hours here, and Una one
of them? But I like—”

“Hark! is that—a footfall above?”

“Mortar, Eccellenza; sometimes it drops to the belfry-floor from the arch
where the stonework was left undressed. I must have it seen to. As I was
about to say: for one, I like this law forbidding duplicates. It evokes
fine personalities. Yes, Eccellenza, that strange and—to you—uncertain
smile, and those fore-looking eyes of Una, suit Bannadonna very well.”

“Hark!—sure, we left no soul above?”

“No soul, Eccellenza; rest assured, no _soul_. Again the mortar.”

“It fell not while we were there.”

“Ah, in your presence, it better knew its place, Eccellenza,” blandly
bowed Bannadonna.

“But Una,” said the milder magistrate, “she seemed intently gazing on
you; one would have almost sworn that she picked you out from among us
three.”

“If she did, possibly it might have been her finer apprehension,
Eccellenza.”

“How, Bannadonna? I do not understand you.”

“No consequence, no consequence, Eccellenza: but the shifted wind is
blowing through the slit. Suffer me to escort you on; and then, pardon,
but the toiler must to his tools.”

“It may be foolish, Signor,” said the milder magistrate, as, from the
third landing, the two now went down unescorted, “but, somehow, our great
mechanician moves me strangely. Why, just now, when he so superciliously
replied, his walk seemed Sisera’s, God’s vain foe, in Del Fonca’s
painting. And that young, sculptured Deborah, too. Ay, and that—”

“Tush, tush, Signor!” returned the chief. “A passing whim.
Deborah?—Where’s Jael, pray?”

“Ah,” said the other, as they now stepped upon the sod,—“ah, Signor, I
see you leave your fears behind you with the chill and gloom; but mine,
even in this sunny air, remain. Hark!”

It was a sound from just within the tower door, whence they had emerged.
Turning, they saw it closed.

“He has slipped down and barred us out,” smiled the chief; “but it is his
custom.”

Proclamation was now made that the next day, at one hour after meridian,
the clock would strike, and—thanks to the mechanician’s powerful art—with
unusual accompaniments. But what those should be, none as yet could say.
The announcement was received with cheers.

By the looser sort, who encamped about the tower all night, lights
were seen gleaming through the topmost blind-work, only disappearing
with the morning sun. Strange sounds, too, were heard, or were thought
to be, by those whom anxious watching might not have left mentally
undisturbed,—sounds, not only of some ringing implement, but also—so they
said—half-suppressed screams and plainings, such as might have issued
from some ghostly engine overplied.

Slowly the day drew on; part of the concourse chasing the weary time with
songs and games, till, at last, the great blurred sun rolled, like a
football, against the plain.

At noon, the nobility and principal citizens came from the town in
cavalcade, a guard of soldiers, also, with music, the more to honor the
occasion.

Only one hour more. Impatience grew. Watches were held in hands of
feverish men, who stood, now scrutinizing their small dial-plates, and
then, with neck thrown back, gazing toward the belfry, as if the eye
might foretell that which could only be made sensible to the ear; for,
as yet, there was no dial to the tower-clock.

The hour-hands of a thousand watches now verged within a hair’s breadth
of the figure 1. A silence, as of the expectation of some Shiloh,
pervaded the swarming plain. Suddenly a dull, mangled sound,—naught
ringing in it; scarcely audible, indeed, to the outer circles of the
people,—that dull sound dropped heavily from the belfry. At the same
moment, each man stared at his neighbor blankly. All watches were upheld.
All hour-hands were at—had passed—the figure 1. No bell-stroke from the
tower. The multitude became tumultuous.

Waiting a few moments, the chief magistrate, commanding silence, hailed
the belfry, to know what thing unforeseen had happened there.

No response.

He hailed again and yet again.

All continued hushed.

By his order, the soldiers burst in the tower-door, when, stationing
guards to defend it from the now surging mob, the chief, accompanied
by his former associate, climbed the winding stairs. Half-way up, they
stopped to listen. No sound. Mounting faster, they reached the belfry,
but, at the threshold, started at the spectacle disclosed. A spaniel,
which, unbeknown to them, had followed them thus far, stood shivering
as before some unknown monster in a brake; or, rather, as if it snuffed
footsteps leading to some other world.

Bannadonna lay, prostrate and bleeding, at the base of the bell which was
adorned with girls and garlands. He lay at the feet of the hour Una; his
head coinciding, in a vertical line, with her left hand, clasped by the
hour Dua. With downcast face impending over him, like Jael over nailed
Sisera in the tent, was the domino; now no more becloaked.

It had limbs, and seemed clad in a scaly mail, lustrous as a
dragon-beetle’s. It was manacled, and its clubbed arms were uplifted, as
if, with its manacles, once more to smite its already smitten victim. One
advanced foot of it was inserted beneath the dead body, as if in the act
of spurning it.

Uncertainty falls on what now followed.

It were but natural to suppose that the magistrates would, at first,
shrink from immediate personal contact with what they saw. At the least,
for a time, they would stand in involuntary doubt; it may be, in more or
less of horrified alarm. Certain it is, that an arquebuse was called for
from below. And some add that its report, followed by a fierce whiz, as
of the sudden snapping of a main-spring, with a steely din, as if a stack
of sword-blades should be dashed upon a pavement,—these blended sounds
came ringing to the plain, attracting every eye far upward to the belfry,
whence, through the lattice-work, thin wreaths of smoke were curling.

Some averred that it was the spaniel, gone mad by fear, which was shot.
This, others denied. True, it was, the spaniel never more was seen; and,
probably, for some unknown reason, it shared the burial now to be related
of the domino. For, whatever the preceding circumstances may have been,
the first instinctive panic over, or else all ground of reasonable fear
removed, the two magistrates, by themselves, quickly re-hooded the
figure in the dropped cloak wherein it had been hoisted. The same night,
it was secretly lowered to the ground, smuggled to the beach, pulled far
out to sea, and sunk. Nor to any after urgency, even in free convivial
hours, would the twain ever disclose the full secrets of the belfry.

From the mystery unavoidably investing it, the popular solution of the
foundling’s fate involved more or less of supernatural agency. But some
few less unscientific minds pretended to find little difficulty in
otherwise accounting for it. In the chain of circumstantial inferences
drawn, there may or may not have been some absent or defective links.
But, as the explanation in question is the only one which tradition has
explicitly preserved, in dearth of better, it will here be given. But, in
the first place, it is requisite to present the supposition entertained
as to the entire motive and mode, with their origin, of the secret design
of Bannadonna; the minds above mentioned assuming to penetrate as well
into his soul as into the event. The disclosure will indirectly involve
reference to peculiar matters, none of the clearest, beyond the immediate
subject.

At that period, no large bell was made to sound otherwise than as
at present,—by agitation of a tongue within, by means of ropes, or
percussion from without, either from cumbrous machinery, or stalwart
watchmen, armed with heavy hammers, stationed in the belfry, or in
sentry-boxes on the open roof, according as the bell was sheltered or
exposed.

It was from observing these exposed bells, with their watchmen, that the
foundling, as was opined, derived the first suggestion of his scheme.
Perched on a great mast or spire, the human figure viewed from below
undergoes such a reduction in its apparent size as to obliterate its
intelligent features. It evinces no personality. Instead of bespeaking
volition, its gestures rather resemble the automatic ones of the arms of
a telegraph.

Musing, therefore, upon the purely Punchinello aspect of the human
figure thus beheld, it had indirectly occurred to Bannadonna to devise
some metallic agent, which should strike the hour with its mechanic
hand, with even greater precision than the vital one. And, moreover,
as the vital watchman on the roof, sallying from his retreat at the
given periods, walked to the bell with uplifted mace to smite it,
Bannadonna had resolved that his invention should likewise possess the
power of locomotion, and, along with that, the appearance, at least, of
intelligence and will.

If the conjectures of those who claimed acquaintance with the intent
of Bannadonna be thus far correct, no unenterprising spirit could have
been his. But they stopped not here; intimating that though, indeed,
his design had, in the first place, been prompted by the sight of the
watchman, and confined to the devising of a subtle substitute for
him, yet, as is not seldom the case with projectors, by insensible
gradations, proceeding from comparatively pygmy aims to Titanic ones,
the original scheme had, in its anticipated eventualities, at last
attained to an unheard-of degree of daring. He still bent his efforts
upon the locomotive figure for the belfry, but only as a partial type of
an ulterior creature, a sort of elephantine Helot, adapted to further,
in a degree scarcely to be imagined, the universal conveniences and
glories of humanity; supplying nothing less than a supplement to the Six
Days’ Work; stocking the earth with a new serf, more useful than the ox,
swifter than the dolphin, stronger than the lion, more cunning than the
ape, for industry an ant, more fiery than serpents, and yet, in patience,
another ass. All excellences of all God-made creatures, which served man,
were here to receive advancement, and then to be combined in one. Talus
was to have been the all-accomplished Helot’s name. Talus, iron slave to
Bannadonna, and, through him, to man.

Here it might well be thought that, were these last conjectures as to
the foundling’s secrets not erroneous, then must he have been hopelessly
infected with the craziest chimeras of his age, far outgoing Albert Magus
and Cornelius Agrippa. But the contrary was averred. However marvellous
his design, however apparently transcending not alone the bounds of human
invention, but those of divine creation, yet the proposed means to be
employed were alleged to have been confined within the sober forms of
sober reason. It was affirmed that, to a degree of more than sceptic
scorn, Bannadonna had been without sympathy for any of the vainglorious
irrationalities of his time. For example, he had not concluded, with the
visionaries among the metaphysicians, that between the finer mechanic
forces and the ruder animal vitality some germ of correspondence might
prove discoverable. As little did his scheme partake of the enthusiasm
of some natural philosophers, who hoped, by physiological and chemical
inductions, to arrive at a knowledge of the source of life, and so
qualify themselves to manufacture and improve upon it. Much less had he
aught in common with the tribe of alchemists, who sought, by a species
of incantations, to evoke some surprising vitality from the laboratory.
Neither had he imagined, with certain sanguine theosophists, that, by
faithful adoration of the Highest, unheard-of powers would be vouchsafed
to man. A practical materialist, what Bannadonna had aimed at was to have
been reached, not by logic, not by crucible, not by conjuration, not by
altars; but by plain vice-bench and hammer. In short, to solve Nature,
to steal into her, to intrigue beyond her, to procure some one else to
bind her to his hand,—these, one and all, had not been his objects; but,
asking no favors from any element or any being, of himself to rival her,
outstrip her, and rule her. He stooped to conquer. With him, common-sense
was theurgy; machinery, miracle; Prometheus, the heroic name for
machinist; man, the true God.

Nevertheless, in his initial step, so far as the experimental automaton
for the belfry was concerned, he allowed fancy some little play; or,
perhaps, what seemed his fancifulness was but his utilitarian ambition
collaterally extended. In figure, the creature for the belfry should
not be likened after the human pattern, nor any animal one, nor after
the ideals, however wild, of ancient fable, but equally in aspect as in
organism be an original production; the more terrible to behold, the
better.

Such, then, were the suppositions as to the present scheme, and
the reserved intent. How, at the very threshold, so unlooked-for a
catastrophe overturned all, or rather, what was the conjecture here, is
now to be set forth.

It was thought that on the day preceding the fatality, his visitors
having left him, Bannadonna had unpacked the belfry image, adjusted it,
and placed it in the retreat provided,—a sort of sentry-box in one corner
of the belfry; in short, throughout the night, and for some part of the
ensuing morning, he had been engaged in arranging everything connected
with the domino: the issuing from the sentry-box each sixty minutes;
sliding along a grooved way, like a railway; advancing to the clock-bell,
with uplifted manacles; striking it at one of the twelve junctions of the
four-and-twenty hands; then wheeling, circling the bell, and retiring to
its post, there to bide for another sixty minutes, when the same process
was to be repeated; the bell, by a cunning mechanism, meantime turning on
its vertical axis, so as to present, to the descending mace, the clasped
hands of the next two figures, when it would strike two, three, and so
on, to the end. The musical metal in this time-bell was so managed in
the fusion, by some art, perishing with its originator, that each of the
clasps of the four-and-twenty hands should give forth its own peculiar
resonance when parted.

But on the magic metal, the magic and metallic stranger never struck but
that one stroke, drove but that one nail, severed but that one clasp,
by which Bannadonna clung to his ambitious life. For, after winding up
the creature in the sentry-box, so that, for the present, skipping the
intervening hours, it should not emerge till the hour of one, but should
then infallibly emerge, and, after deftly oiling the grooves whereon it
was to slide, it was surmised that the mechanician must then have hurried
to the bell, to give his final touches to its sculpture. True artist, he
here became absorbed,—an absorption still further intensified, it may be,
by his striving to abate that strange look of Una; which, though before
others he had treated it with such unconcern, might not, in secret, have
been without its thorn.

And so, for the interval, he was oblivious of his creature; which, not
oblivious of him, and true to its creation, and true to its heedful
winding up, left its post precisely at the given moment; along its
well-oiled route, slid noiselessly toward its mark; and, aiming at the
hand of Una, to ring one clangorous note, dully smote the intervening
brain of Bannadonna, turned backward to it; the manacled arms then
instantly upspringing to their hovering poise. The falling body clogged
the thing’s return; so there it stood, still impending over Bannadonna,
as if whispering some post-mortem terror. The chisel lay dropped from the
hand, but beside the hand; the oil-flask spilled across the iron track.

In his unhappy end, not unmindful of the rare genius of the mechanician,
the republic decreed him a stately funeral. It was resolved that the
great bell—the one whose casting had been jeopardized through the
timidity of the ill-starred workman—should be rung upon the entrance of
the bier into the cathedral. The most robust man of the country round was
assigned the office of bell-ringer.

But as the pall-bearers entered the cathedral porch, naught but a broken
and disastrous sound, like that of some lone Alpine land-slide, fell
from the tower upon their ears. And then, all was hushed.

Glancing backward, they saw the groined belfry crushed sidewise in. It
afterward appeared that the powerful peasant who had the bell-rope in
charge, wishing to test at once the full glory of the bell, had swayed
down upon the rope with one concentrate jerk. The mass of quaking metal,
too ponderous for its frame, and strangely feeble somewhere at its top,
loosed from its fastening, tore sidewise down, and tumbling in one sheer
fall, three hundred feet to the soft sward below, buried itself inverted
and half out of sight.

Upon its disinterment, the main fracture was found to have started
from a small spot in the ear; which, being scraped, revealed a defect,
deceptively minute, in the casting; which defect must subsequently have
been pasted over with some unknown compound.

The re-molten metal soon reassumed its place in the tower’s repaired
superstructure. For one year the metallic choir of birds sang musically
in its belfry-boughwork of sculptured blinds and traceries. But on the
first anniversary of the tower’s completion,—at early dawn, before the
concourse had surrounded it,—an earthquake came; one loud crash was
heard. The stone-pine, with all its bower of songsters, lay overthrown
upon the plain.

So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord; but, in obedience, slew him.
So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too heavy for
the tower. So the bell’s main weakness was where man’s blood had flawed
it. And so pride went before the fall.



[Illustration]



THE KATHAYAN SLAVE.

BY EMILY C. JUDSON.


At the commencement of the English and Burmese war of 1824, all the
Christians (called “hat-wearers,” in contradistinction from the turbaned
heads of the Orientals) residing at Ava were thrown unceremoniously into
the death-prison. Among them were both Protestant and Roman Catholic
missionaries; some few reputable European traders; and criminals shadowed
from the laws of Christendom “under the sole of the golden foot.” These,
Americans, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, and Armenian, were
all huddled together in one prison, with villains of every grade,—the
thief, the assassin, the bandit, or all three in one; constituting, in
connection with countless other crimes, a blacker character than the
inhabitant of a civilized land can picture. Sometimes stript of their
clothing, sometimes nearly starved, loaded with heavy irons, thrust
into a hot, filthy, noisome apartment, with criminals for companions
and criminals for guards, compelled to see the daily torture, to hear
the shriek of anguish from writhing victims, with death, death in some
terribly detestable form, always before them, a severer state of
suffering can scarcely be imagined.

The Burmese had never been known to spare the lives of their
war-captives; and though the little band of foreigners could scarcely be
called prisoners of war, yet this well-known custom, together with their
having been thrust into the death-prison, from which there was no escape,
except by a pardon from the king, cut off nearly every reasonable hope
of rescue. But (quite a new thing in the annals of Burmese history),
although some died from the intensity of their sufferings, no foreigner
was wantonly put to death. Of those who were claimed by the English at
the close of the war, some one or two are yet living, with anklets and
bracelets which they will carry to the grave with them, wrought in their
flesh by the heavy iron. It may well be imagined that these men might
unfold to us scenes of horror, incidents daily occurring under their own
shuddering gaze, in comparison with which the hair-elevating legends of
Ann Radcliff would become simple fairy tales.

The death-prison at Ava was at that time a single large room, built
of rough boards, without either window or door, and with but a thinly
thatched roof to protect the wretched inmates from the blaze of a
tropical sun. It was entered by slipping aside a single board, which
constituted a sort of sliding-door. Around the prison, inside the yard,
were ranged the huts of the under-jailers, or Children of the Prison,
and outside of the yard, close at hand, that of the head-jailer. These
jailers must necessarily be condemned criminals, with a ring, the sign of
outlawry, traced in the skin of the cheek, and the name of their crime
engraved in the same manner upon the breast. The head-jailer was a tall,
bony man, with sinews of iron; wearing, when speaking, a malicious smirk,
and given at times to a most revolting kind of jocoseness. When silent
and quiet, he had a jaded, careworn look; but it was at the torture
that he was in his proper element. Then his face lighted up,—became
glad, furious, demoniac. His small black eyes glittered like those of
a serpent; his thin lips rolled back, displaying his toothless gums
in front, with a long, protruding tusk on either side, stained black
as ebony; his hollow, ringed cheeks seemed to contract more and more,
and his breast heaved with convulsive delight beneath the fearful word
MAN-KILLER. The prisoners called him _father_, when he was present to
enforce this expression of affectionate familiarity; but among themselves
he was irreverently christened the Tiger-cat.

One of the most active of the Children of the Prison was a short,
broad-faced man, labelled THIEF, who, as well as the Tiger, had a
peculiar talent in the way of torturing; and so fond was he of the use
of the whip, that he often missed his count, and zealously exceeded the
number of lashes ordered by the city governor. The wife of this man was
a most odious creature, filthy, bold, impudent, cruel, and, like her
husband, delighting in torture. Her face was not only deeply pitted with
smallpox, but so deformed with leprosy, that the white cartilage of the
nose was laid entirely bare; from her large mouth shone rows of irregular
teeth, black as ink; her hair, which was left entirely to the care of
nature, was matted in large black masses about her head; and her manner,
under all this hideous ugliness, was insolent and vicious. They had two
children,—little vipers, well loaded with venom; and by their vexatious
mode of annoyance, trying the tempers of the prisoners more than was in
the power of the mature torturers.

As will readily be perceived, the security of this prison was not in the
strength of the structure, but in the heavy manacles, and the living
wall. The lives of the jailers depended entirely on their fidelity;
and fidelity involved strict obedience to orders, however ferocious.
As for themselves, they could not escape; they had nowhere to go;
certain death awaited them everywhere, for they bore on cheek and
breast the ineffaceable proof of their outlawry. Their only safety was
at their post; and there was no safety there in humanity, even if it
were possible for such degraded creatures to have a spark of humanity
left. So inclination united with interest to make them what they really
were,—demons.

The arrival of a new prisoner was an incident calculated to excite but
little interest in the hat-wearers, provided he came in turban and
waistcloth. But one morning there was brought in a young man, speaking
the Burmese brokenly, and with the soft accent of the North, who at
once attracted universal attention. He was tall and erect, with a
mild, handsome face, bearing the impress of inexpressible suffering; a
complexion slightly tinted with the rich brown of the East; a fine, manly
carriage, and a manner which, even there, was both graceful and dignified.

“Who is he?” was the interpretation of the inquiring glances exchanged
among those who had no liberty to speak; and then eye asked of eye,
“What can he have done?—he, so gentle, so mild, so manly, that even these
wretches, who scarcely know the name of pity and respect, seem to feel
both for him?” There was, in truth, something in the countenance of the
new prisoner which, without asking for sympathy, involuntarily enforced
it. It was not amiability, though his dark, soft, beautiful eye was
full of a noble sweetness; it was not resignation; it was not apathy;
it was hopelessness, deep, utter, immovable, suffering hopelessness.
Very young, and apparently not ambitious or revengeful, what crime could
this interesting stranger have committed to draw down “the golden foot”
with such crushing weight upon his devoted head? He seemed utterly
friendless, and without even the means of obtaining food; for, as the day
advanced, no one came to see him; and the officer who brought him had
left no directions. He did not, however, suffer from this neglect, for
Madam Thief (most wonderful to relate!) actually shared so deeply in the
universal sympathy, as to bring him a small quantity of boiled rice and
water.

Toward evening, the Woon-bai, a governor, or rather Mayor of the city,
entered the prison, his bold, lion-like face as open and unconcerned as
ever, but with something of unusual bustling in his manner.

“Where is he?” he cried sternly,—“where is he? this son of Kathay? this
dog, villain, traitor! where is he? Aha! only one pair of irons? Put on
five! do you hear? five!”

The Woon-bai remained till his orders were executed, and the poor
Kathayan was loaded with five pairs of fetters; and then he went out,
frowning on one and smiling on another; while the Children of the Prison
watched his countenance and manner, as significant of what was expected
of them. The prisoners looked at each other, and shook their heads in
commiseration.

The next day the feet of the young Kathayan, in obedience to some new
order, were placed in the stocks, which raised them about eighteen inches
from the ground; and the five pairs of fetters were all disposed on
the outer side of the plank, so that their entire weight fell upon the
ankles. The position was so painful that each prisoner, some from memory,
some from sympathetic apprehension, shared in the pain when he looked at
the sufferer.

During this day, one of the missionaries, who had been honored with an
invitation, which it was never prudent to refuse, to the hut of the
Thief, learned something of the history of the young man, and his crime.
His home, it was told him, was among the rich hills of Kathay, as they
range far northward, where the tropic sun loses the intense fierceness of
his blaze, and makes the atmosphere soft and luxurious, as though it were
mellowing beneath the same amber sky which ripens the fruits, and gives
their glow to the flowers. What had been his rank in his own land, the
jailer’s wife did not know. Perhaps he had been a prince, chief of the
brave band conquered by the superior force of the Burmans; or a hunter
among the spicy groves and deep-wooded jungles, lithe as the tiger which
he pursued from lair to lair, and free as the flame-winged bird of the
sun that circled above him; or perhaps his destiny had been a humbler
one, and he had but followed his goats as they bounded fearlessly from
ledge to ledge, and plucked for food the herbs upon his native hills.
He had been brought away by a marauding party, and presented as a slave
to the brother of the queen. This Men-thah-gyee, the Great Prince, as
he was called, by way of pre-eminence, had risen, through the influence
of his sister, from the humble condition of a fishmonger, to be the
Richelieu of the nation. Unpopular from his mean origin, and still more
unpopular from the acts of brutality to which the intoxication of power
had given rise, the sympathy excited by the poor Kathayan in the breasts
of these wretches may easily be accounted for. It was not pity or mercy,
but hatred. Anywhere else, the sufferer’s sad, handsome face, and mild,
uncomplaining manner, would have enlisted sympathy; but here, they would
scarcely have seen the sadness, or beauty, or mildness, except through
the medium of a passion congenial to their own natures.

Among the other slaves of Men-thah-gyee was a young Kathay girl of
singular beauty. She was, so said Madam the Thief, a bundle of roses,
set round with the fragrant blossoms of the champac-tree; her breath was
like that of the breezes when they come up from their dalliance with
the spicy daughters of the islands of the south; her voice had caught
its rich cadence from the musical gush of the silver fountain, which
wakes among the green of her native hills; her hair had been braided
from the glossy raven plumage of the royal edolius; her eyes were twin
stars looking out from cool springs, all fringed with the long, tremulous
reeds of the jungle; and her step was as the free, graceful bound of
the wild antelope. On the subject of her grace, her beauty, and her
wondrous daring, the jailer’s wife could not be sufficiently eloquent.
And so this poor, proud, simple-souled maiden, this diamond from the
rich hills of Kathay, destined to glitter for an hour or two on a
prince’s bosom, unsubdued even in her desolation, had dared to bestow her
affections with the uncalculating lavishness of conscious heart-freedom.
And the poor wretch, lying upon his back in the death-prison, his feet
fast in the stocks and swelling and purpling beneath the heavy irons,
had participated in her crime; had lured her on, by tender glances
and by loving words, inexpressibly sweet in their mutual bondage, to
irretrievable destruction. What fears, what hopes winged by fears,
what tremulous joys, still hedged in by that same crowd of fears, what
despondency, what revulsions of impotent anger and daring, what weeping,
what despair, must have been theirs! Their tremblings and rejoicings,
their mad projects, growing each day wilder and more dangerous,—since
madness alone could have given rise to anything like hope,—are things
left to imagination; for there was none to relate the heart-history of
the two slaves of Men-thah-gyee. Yet there were some hints of a first
accidental meeting under the shadow of the mango and tamarind trees,
where the sun lighted up, by irregular gushes, the waters of the little
lake in the centre of the garden, and the rustle of leaves seemed
sufficient to drown the accents of their native tongues. So they looked,
spoke, their hearts bounded, paused, trembled with soft home-memories:
they whispered on, and they were lost. Poor slaves!

Then at evening, when the dark-browed maidens of the golden city
gathered, with their earthen vessels, about the well,—there, shaded by
the thick clumps of bamboo, with the free sky overhead, the green earth
beneath, and the songs and laughter of the merry girls ringing in their
ears, so like their own home, the home which they had lost forever,—O,
what a rare, sweet, dangerous meeting-place for those who should not, and
yet must be lovers!

Finally came a day fraught with illimitable consequences,—the day when
the young slave, not yet admitted to the royal harem, should become more
than ever the property of her master. And now deeper grew their agony,
more uncontrollable their madness, wilder and more daring their hopes,
with every passing moment. Not a man in Ava, but would have told them
that escape was impossible; and yet, goaded on by love and despair, they
attempted the impossibility. They had countrymen in the city, and, under
cover of night, they fled to them. Immediately the minister sent out his
myrmidons; they were tracked, captured, and brought back to the palace.

“And what became of the poor girl?” inquired the missionary with much
interest.

The woman shuddered, and beneath her scars and the swarthiness of her
skin she became deadly pale.

“There is a cellar, Tsayah,” at last she whispered, still shuddering,
“a deep cellar, that no one has seen, but horrible cries come from it
sometimes, and two nights ago, for three hours, three long hours—such
shrieks! Amai-ai! what shrieks! And they say that he was there, Tsayah,
and saw and heard it all. That is the reason that his eyes are blinded
and his ears benumbed. A great many go into that cellar, but none ever
come out again,—none but the doomed like him. It is—_it is like the
West Prison_,” she added, sinking her voice still lower, and casting an
eager, alarmed look about her. The missionary too shuddered, as much at
the mention of this prison, as at the recital of the woman; for it shut
within its walls deep mysteries, which even his jailers, accustomed as
they were to torture and death, shrank from babbling of.

The next day a cord was passed around the wrists of the young Kathayan,
his arms jerked up into a position perpendicular with his prostrate body,
and the end of the cord fastened to a beam overhead. Still, though faint
from the lack of food, parched with thirst, and racked with pain, for his
feet were swollen and livid, not a murmur of complaint escaped his lips.
And yet this patient endurance seemed scarcely the result of fortitude
or heroism; an observer would have said that the inner suffering was so
great as to render that of the mere physical frame unheeded. There was
the same expression of hopelessness, the same unvarying wretchedness, too
deep, too real, to think of giving itself utterance on the face as at his
first entrance into the prison; and except that he now and then fixed on
one of the hopeless beings who regarded him in silent pity a mournful,
half-beseeching, half-vacant stare, this was all.

That day passed away as others had passed; then came another night of
dreams, in which loved ones gathered around the hearth-stone of a dear,
distant home; dreams broken by the clanking of chains and the groans
of the suffering; and then morning broke. There still hung the poor
Kathayan; his face slightly distorted with the agony he was suffering,
his lips dry and parched, his cheek pallid and sunken, and his eyes wild
and glaring. His breast swelled and heaved, and now and then a sob-like
sigh burst forth involuntarily. When the Tiger entered, the eye of the
young man immediately fastened on him, and a shiver passed through his
frame. The old murderer went his usual rounds with great nonchalance;
gave an order here, a blow there, and cracked a malicious joke with a
third; smiling all the time that dark, sinister smile, which made him so
much more hideous in the midst of his wickedness. At last he approached
the Kathayan, who, with a convulsive movement, half raised himself from
the ground at his touch, and seemed to contract like a shrivelled leaf.

“Right! right, my son!” said the old man, chuckling. “You are expert at
helping yourself, to be sure; but then you need assistance. So,—so,—so!”
and giving the cord three successive jerks, he succeeded, by means of
his immense strength, in raising the Kathayan so that but the back of
his head, as it fell downward, could touch the floor. There was a quick,
short crackling of joints, and a groan escaped the prisoner. Another
groan followed, and then another,—and another,—a heaving of the chest, a
convulsive shiver, and for a moment he seemed lost. Human hearts glanced
heavenward. “God grant it! Father of mercies, spare him further agony!”
It could not be. Gaspingly came the lost breath back again, quiveringly
the soft eyes unclosed; and the young Kathayan captive was fully awake to
his misery.

“I cannot die so,—I cannot,—so slow,—so slow,—so slow!” Hunger gnawed,
thirst burned, fever revelled in his veins; the cord upon his wrists cut
to the bone; corruption had already commenced upon his swollen, livid
feet; the most frightful, torturing pains distorted his body, and wrung
from him groans and murmurings so pitiful, so harrowing, so full of
anguish, that the unwilling listeners could only turn away their heads,
or lift their eyes to each other’s faces in mute horror. Not a word was
exchanged among them,—not a lip had power to give it utterance.

“I cannot die so! I cannot die so! I cannot die so!” came the words, at
first moaningly, and then prolonged to a terrible howl. And so passed
another day, and another night, and still the wretch lived on.

In the midst of their filth and smothering heat, the prisoners awoke from
such troubled sleep as they could gain amid these horrors; and those who
could, pressed their feverish lips and foreheads to the crevices between
the boards, to court the morning breezes. A lady, with a white brow,
and a lip whose delicate vermilion had not ripened beneath the skies of
India, came with food to her husband. By constant importunity had the
beautiful ministering angel gained this holy privilege. Her coming was
like a gleam of sunlight,—a sudden unfolding of the beauties of this
bright earth to one born blind. She performed her usual tender ministry
and departed.

Day advanced to its meridian; and once more, but now hesitatingly, and as
though he dreaded his task, the Tiger drew near the young Kathayan. But
the sufferer did not shrink from him as before.

“Quick!” he exclaimed greedily,—“quick! give me one hand and the
cord,—just a moment, a single moment,—this hand with the cord in it,—and
you shall be rid of me forever!”

The Tiger burst into a hideous laugh, his habitual cruelty returning at
the sound of his victim’s voice.

“Rid of you! not so fast, my son; not so fast! You will hold out a day
or two yet. Let me see!” passing his hand along the emaciated, feverish
body of the sufferer. “O, yes; two days at least, perhaps three, and
it may be longer. Patience, my son; you are frightfully strong! Now
these joints,—why any other man’s would have separated long ago; but
here they stay just as firmly—” As he spoke with a calculating sort of
deliberation, the monster gave the cord a sudden jerk, then another,
and a third, raising his victim still farther from the floor, and then
adjusting it about the beam, walked unconcernedly away. For several
minutes the prison rung with the most fearful cries. Shriek followed
shriek, agonized, furious, with scarcely a breath between; bellowings,
howlings, gnashings of the teeth, sharp, piercing screams, yells of
savage defiance; cry upon cry, cry upon cry, with wild superhuman
strength, they came; while the prisoners shrank in awe and terror,
trembling in their chains. But this violence soon exhausted itself,
and the paroxysm passed, giving place to low, sad moans, irresistibly
pitiful. This was a day never to be forgotten by the hundred wretched
creatures congregated in the gloomy death-prison. The sun had never
seemed to move so slowly before. Its setting was gladly welcomed, but
yet the night brought no change. Those piteous moans, those agonized
groanings, seemed no nearer an end than ever.

Another day passed,—another night,—again day dawned and drew near its
close; and yet the poor Kathayan clung to life with frightful tenacity.
One of the missionaries, as a peculiar favor, had been allowed to creep
into an old shed, opposite the door of the prison; and here he was joined
by a companion, just as the day was declining towards evening.

“O, will it ever end?” whispered one.

The other only bowed his head between his hands,—“Terrible! terrible!”

“There surely can be nothing worse in the West Prison.”

“Can there be anything worse,—can there be more finished demons in the
pit?”

Suddenly, while this broken conversation was conducted in a low tone,
so as not to draw upon the speakers the indignation of their jailers,
they were struck by the singular stillness of the prison. The clanking
of chains, the murmur and the groan, the heavy breathing of congregated
living beings, the bustle occasioned by the continuous uneasy movement
of the restless sufferers, the ceaseless tread of the Children of the
Prison, and their bullying voices, all were hushed.

“What is it?” in a lower whisper than ever; and a shaking of the head,
and holding their own chains to prevent their rattle, and looks full of
wonder, was all that passed between the two listeners. Their amazement
was interrupted by a dull, heavy sound, as though a bag of dried bones
had been suddenly crushed down by the weight of some powerful foot.
Silently they stole to a crevice in the boards, opposite the open door.
Not a jailer was to be seen; and the prisoners were motionless and
apparently breathless, with the exception of one powerful man, who was
just drawing the wooden mallet in his hand for another blow on the temple
of the suspended Kathayan. It came down with the same dull, hollow,
crushing sound; the body swayed from the point where it was suspended by
wrist and ankle, till it seemed that every joint must be dislocated; but
the flesh scarcely quivered. The blow was repeated, and then another, and
another; but they were not needed. The poor captive Kathayan was dead.

The mallet was placed away from sight, and the daring man hobbled back to
his corner, dangling his heavy chain as though it had been a plaything,
and striving with all his might to look unconscious and unconcerned. An
evident feeling of relief stole over the prisoners; the Children of the
Prison came back to their places, one by one, and all went on as before.
It was some time before any one appeared to discover the death of the
Kathayan. The old Tiger declared it was what he had been expecting, that
his living on in this manner was quite out of rule; but that those hardy
fellows from the hills never would give in, while there was a possibility
of drawing another breath. Then the poor skeleton was unchained, dragged
by the heels into the prison-yard, and thrown into a gutter. It did not
apparently fall properly, for one of the jailers altered the position of
the shoulders by means of his foot; then clutching the long black hair,
jerked the head a little farther on the side. Thus the discolored temple
was hidden; and surely that emaciated form gave sufficient evidence of a
lingering death. Soon after, a party of government officers visited the
prison-yard, touched the corpse with their feet, without raising it, and,
apparently satisfied, turned away, as though it had been a dead dog, that
they cared not to give further attention.

Is it strange that, if one were there, with a human heart within him, not
brutalized by crime or steeled by passive familiarity with suffering, he
should have dragged his heavy chain to the side of the dead, and dropped
upon his sharpened, distorted features the tear, which there was none
who had loved him to shed? Is it strange that tender fingers should
have closed the staring eyes, and touched gently the cold brow, which
throbbed no longer with pain, and smoothed the frayed hair, and composed
the passive limbs decently, though he knew that the next moment rude
hands would destroy the result of his pious labor? And is it strange that
when all which remained of the poor sufferer had been jostled into its
sackcloth shroud, and crammed down into the dark hole dug for it in the
earth, a prayer should have ascended, even from that terrible prison?
Not a prayer for the dead; he had received his doom. But an earnest,
beseeching upheaving of the heart, for those wretched beings that, in the
face of the pure heavens and the smiling earth, confound, by the inherent
blackness of their natures, philosopher, priest, or philanthropist, who
dares to tickle the ears of the multitude with fair theories of “Natural
religion,” and “The dignity of human nature.”



[Illustration]



THE STORY OF LA ROCHE.

BY HENRY MACKENZIE.


More than forty years ago an English philosopher, whose works have since
been read and admired by all Europe, resided at a little town in France.
Some disappointments in his native country had first driven him abroad,
and he was afterward induced to remain there from having found, in this
retreat, where the connections even of nation and language were avoided,
a perfect seclusion and retirement highly favorable to the development of
abstract subjects, in which he excelled all the writers of his time.

Perhaps, in the structure of such a mind as Mr. ——’s, the finer and
more delicate sensibilities are seldom known to have place, or, if
originally implanted there, are in a great measure extinguished by the
exertions of intense study and profound investigation. Hence the idea of
philosophy and unfeelingness being united has become proverbial, and, in
common language, the former word is often used to express the latter.
Our philosopher had been censured by some as deficient in warmth and
feeling; but the mildness of his manners has been allowed by all, and it
is certain that, if he was not easily melted into compassion, it was at
least not difficult to awaken his benevolence.

One morning, while he sat busied in those speculations which afterward
astonished the world, an old female domestic, who served him for a
housekeeper, brought him word that an elderly gentleman and his daughter
had arrived in the village the preceding evening, on their way to some
distant country, and that the father had been suddenly seized in the
night with a dangerous disorder, which the people of the inn where they
lodged feared would prove mortal; that she had been sent for, as having
some knowledge of medicine, the village surgeon being then absent; and
that it was truly piteous to see the good old man, who seemed not so much
afflicted by his own distress as by that which it caused to his daughter.
Her master laid aside the volume in his hand, and broke off the chain of
ideas it had inspired. His nightgown was exchanged for a coat, and he
followed his _gouvernante_ to the sick man’s apartment.

It was the best in the inn where they lay, but a paltry one
notwithstanding. Mr. —— was obliged to stoop as he entered it. It was
floored with earth, and above were the joists not plastered, and hung
with cobwebs. On a flock-bed, at one end, lay the old man he came to
visit; at the foot of it sat his daughter. She was dressed in a clean
white bedgown; her dark locks hung loosely over it as she bent forward,
watching the languid looks of her father. Mr. —— and his housekeeper had
stood some moments in the room without the young lady’s being sensible of
their entering it.

“Mademoiselle!” said the old woman at last, in a soft tone.

She turned and showed one of the finest faces in the world. It was
touched, not spoiled, with sorrow; and when she perceived a stranger,
whom the old woman now introduced to her, a blush at first, and then the
gentle ceremonial of native politeness, which the affliction of the time
tempered but did not extinguish, crossed it for a moment and changed its
expression. It was sweetness all, however, and our philosopher felt it
strongly. It was not a time for words; he offered his services in a few
sincere ones.

“Monsieur lies miserably ill here,” said the _gouvernante_; “if he could
possibly be moved anywhere.”

“If he could be moved to our house,” said her master. He had a spare
bed for a friend, and there was a garret room unoccupied, next to the
_gouvernante’s_.

It was contrived accordingly. The scruples of the stranger, who could
look scruples though he could not speak them, were overcome, and the
bashful reluctance of his daughter gave way to her belief of its use to
her father. The sick man was wrapped in blankets, and carried across the
street to the English gentleman’s. The old woman helped his daughter
to nurse him there. The surgeon, who arrived soon after, prescribed a
little, and nature did much for him; in a week he was able to thank his
benefactor.

By that time his host had learned the name and character of his guest. He
was a Protestant clergyman of Switzerland, called La Roche, a widower,
who had lately buried his wife, after a long and lingering illness, for
which travelling had been prescribed, and was now returning home, after
an ineffectual and melancholy journey, with his only child, the daughter
we have mentioned.

He was a devout man, as became his profession. He possessed devotion in
all its warmth, but with none of its asperity,—I mean that asperity which
men, called devout, sometimes indulge in.

Mr. ——, though he felt no devotion, never quarrelled with it in others.
His _gouvernante_ joined the old man and his daughter in the prayers
and thanksgivings which they put up on his recovery; for she too was
a heretic, in the phrase of the village. The philosopher walked out,
with his long staff and his dog, and left them to their prayers and
thanksgivings.

“My master,” said the old woman, “alas! he is not a Christian; but he is
the best of unbelievers.”

“Not a Christian!” exclaimed Mademoiselle La Roche, “yet he saved my
father! Heaven bless him for it! I would he were a Christian.”

“There is a pride in human knowledge, my child,” said her father, “which
often blinds men to the sublime truths of revelation; hence opposers of
Christianity are found among men of virtuous lives, as well as among
those of dissipated and licentious characters. Nay, sometimes I have
known the latter more easily converted to the true faith than the former,
because the fume of passion is more easily dissipated than the mist of
false theory and delusive speculation.”

“But Mr. ——,” said his daughter, “alas! my father, he shall be a
Christian before he dies.” She was interrupted by the arrival of their
landlord. He took her hand with an air of kindness. She drew it away from
him in silence, threw down her eyes to the ground, and left the room.

“I have been thanking God,” said the good La Roche, “for my recovery.”

“That is right,” replied his landlord.

“I would not wish,” continued the old man hesitatingly, “to think
otherwise. Did I not look up with gratitude to that Being, I should
barely be satisfied with my recovery as a continuation of life, which,
it may be, is not a real good. Alas! I may live to wish I had died,
that you had left me to die, sir, instead of kindly relieving me,”—he
clasped Mr ——’s hand,—“but, when I look on this renovated being as the
gift of the Almighty, I feel a far different sentiment; my heart dilates
with gratitude and love to him; it is prepared for doing his will, not
as a duty, but as a pleasure, and regards every breach of it, not with
disapprobation, but with horror.”

“You say right, my dear sir,” replied the philosopher, “but you are
not yet re-established enough to talk much; you must take care of your
health, and neither study nor preach for some time. I have been thinking
over a scheme that struck me to-day when you mentioned your intended
departure. I never was in Switzerland. I have a great mind to accompany
your daughter and you into that country. I will help to take care of you
by the road; for as I was your first physician, I hold myself responsible
for your cure.”

La Roche’s eyes glistened at the proposal. His daughter was called in and
told of it. She was equally pleased with her father, for they really
loved their landlord,—not perhaps the less for his infidelity; at least,
that circumstance mixed a sort of pity with their regard for him,—their
souls were not of a mould for harsher feelings; hatred never dwelt in
them.

They travelled by short stages; for the philosopher was as good as his
word in taking care that the old man should not be fatigued. The party
had time to be well acquainted with each other, and their friendship
was increased by acquaintance. La Roche found a degree of simplicity
and gentleness in his companion which is not always annexed to the
character of a learned or a wise man. His daughter, who was prepared to
be afraid of him, was equally undeceived. She found in him nothing of
that self-importance which superior parts, or great cultivation of them,
is apt to confer. He talked of everything but philosophy and religion; he
seemed to enjoy every pleasure and amusement of ordinary life, and to be
interested in the most common topics of discourse; when his knowledge of
learning at any time appeared, it was delivered with the utmost plainness
and without the least shadow of dogmatism.

On his part, he was charmed with the society of the good clergyman
and his lovely daughter. He found in them the guileless manner of the
earliest times, with the culture and accomplishment of the most refined
ones; every better feeling warm and vivid, every ungentle one repressed
or overcome. He was not addicted to love; but he felt himself happy in
being the friend of Mademoiselle La Roche, and sometimes envied her
father the possession of such a child.

After a journey of eleven days, they arrived at the dwelling of La
Roche. It was situated in one of those valleys of the canton of Berne,
where Nature seems to repose, as it were, in quiet, and has enclosed her
retreat with mountains inaccessible. A stream, that spent its fury in
the hills above, ran in front of the house, and a broken waterfall was
seen through the wood that covered its sides; below it circled round a
tufted plain, and formed a little lake in front of a village, at the end
of which appeared the spire of La Roche’s church, rising above a clump of
beeches.

Mr. —— enjoyed the beauty of the scene; but to his companions it recalled
the memory of a wife and parent they had lost. The old man’s sorrow was
silent; his daughter sobbed and wept. Her father took her hand, kissed it
twice, pressed it to his bosom, threw up his eyes to heaven, and, having
wiped off a tear that was just about to drop from each, began to point
out to his guest some of the most striking objects which the prospect
afforded. The philosopher interpreted all this, and he could but slightly
censure the creed from which it arose.

They had not been long arrived when a number of La Roche’s parishioners,
who had heard of his return, came to the house to see and welcome him.
The honest folks were awkward, but sincere, in their professions of
regard. They made some attempts at condolence; it was too delicate for
their handling, but La Roche took it in good part. “It has pleased God,”
said he; and they saw he had settled the matter with himself. Philosophy
could not have done so much with a thousand words.

It was now evening, and the good peasants were about to depart, when
a clock was heard to strike seven, and the hour was followed by a
particular chime. The country folks, who had come to welcome their
pastor, turned their looks toward him at the sound. He explained their
meaning to his guest.

“That is the signal,” said he, “for our evening exercise. This is one of
the nights of the week in which some of my parishioners are wont to join
in it; a little rustic saloon serves for the chapel of our family and
such of the good people as are with us. If you choose rather to walk out,
I will furnish you with an attendant; or here are a few old books that
may afford you some entertainment within.”

“By no means,” answered the philosopher; “I will attend Mademoiselle at
her devotions.”

“She is our organist,” said La Roche. “Our neighborhood is the country of
musical mechanism, and I have a small organ fitted up for the purpose of
assisting our singing.”

“’Tis an additional inducement,” replied the other; and they walked into
the room together.

At the end stood the organ mentioned by La Roche; before it was a
curtain, which his daughter drew aside, and, placing herself on a seat
within and drawing the curtain close so as to save her the awkwardness
of an exhibition, began a voluntary, solemn and beautiful in the highest
degree. Mr. —— was no musician, but he was not altogether insensible
to music; and this fastened on his mind more strongly from its beauty
being unexpected. The solemn prelude introduced a hymn, in which such of
the audience as could sing immediately joined. The words were mostly
taken from holy writ; it spoke the praises of God, and his care of good
men. Something was said of the death of the just, of such as die in the
Lord. The organ was touched with a hand less firm; it paused; it ceased;
and the sobbing of Mademoiselle La Roche was heard in its stead. Her
father gave a sign for stopping the psalmody, and rose to pray. He was
discomposed at first, and his voice faltered as he spoke; but his heart
was in his words, and its warmth overcame his embarrassment. He addressed
a Being whom he loved, and he spoke for those he loved. His parishioners
caught the ardor of the good old man; even the philosopher felt himself
moved, and forgot, for a moment, to think why he should not.

La Roche’s religion was that of sentiment, not theory, and his guest
was averse from disputation; their discourse, therefore, did not lead
to questions concerning the belief of either; yet would the old man
sometimes speak of his, from the fulness of a heart impressed with its
force and wishing to spread the pleasure he enjoyed in it. The ideas of
a God and a Saviour were so congenial to his mind, that every emotion
of it naturally awakened them. A philosopher might have called him an
enthusiast; but, if he possessed the fervor of enthusiasts, he was
guiltless of their bigotry. “Our Father, which art in heaven!” might the
good man say, for he felt it, and all mankind were his brethren.

“You regret, my friend,” said he to Mr. ——, “when my daughter and I
talk of the exquisite pleasure derived from music,—you regret your want
of musical powers and musical feelings; it is a department of soul,
you say, which nature has almost denied you, which, from the effects
you see it have on others, you are sure must be highly delightful. Why
should not the same thing be said of religion? Trust me, I feel it in
the same way,—an energy, an inspiration, which I would not lose for all
the blessings of sense, or enjoyments of the world; yet, so far from
lessening my relish of the pleasures of life, methinks I feel it heighten
them all. The thought of receiving it from God adds the blessing of
sentiment to that of sensation in every good thing I possess; and when
calamities overtake me,—and I have had my share,—it confers a dignity on
my affliction, so lifts me above the world. Man, I know, is but a worm;
yet, methinks, I am then allied to God!”

It would have been inhuman in our philosopher to have clouded, even with
a doubt, the sunshine of this belief. His discourse, indeed, was very
remote from metaphysical disquisition or religious controversy. Of all
men I ever knew, his ordinary conversation was the least tinctured with
pedantry, or liable to dissertation. With La Roche and his daughter,
it was perfectly familiar. The country round them, the manners of the
villagers, the comparison of both with those of England, remarks on
the works of favorite authors, on the sentiments they conveyed and the
passions they excited, with many other topics in which there was an
equality or alternate advantage among the speakers, were the subjects
they talked on. Their hours, too, of riding and walking were many,
in which Mr. ——, as a stranger, was shown the remarkable scenes and
curiosities of the country. They would sometimes make little expeditions
to contemplate, in different attitudes, those astonishing mountains, the
cliffs of which, covered with eternal snows, and sometimes shooting into
fantastic shapes, form the termination of most of the Swiss prospects.
Our philosopher asked many questions as to their natural history and
productions. La Roche observed the sublimity of the ideas which the view
of their stupendous summits, inaccessible to mortal foot, was calculated
to inspire, which naturally, said he, leads the mind to that Being by
whom their foundations were laid.

“They are not seen in Flanders,” said Mademoiselle with a sigh.

“That’s an odd remark,” said Mr. ——, smiling.

She blushed, and he inquired no further.

It was with regret he left a society in which he found himself so happy;
but he settled with La Roche and his daughter a plan of correspondence,
and they took his promise that, if ever he came within fifty leagues of
their dwelling, he should travel those fifty leagues to visit them.

About three years after, our philosopher was on a visit at Geneva; the
promise he made to La Roche and his daughter, on his former visit, was
recalled to his mind by the view of that range of mountains on a part of
which they had often looked together. There was a reproach, too, conveyed
along with the recollection, for his having failed to write to either for
several months past. The truth was, that indolence was the habit most
natural to him, from which he was not easily roused by the claims of
correspondence, either of his friends or of his enemies; when the latter
drew their pens in controversy, they were often unanswered as well as
the former. While he was hesitating about a visit to La Roche, which he
wished to make, but found the effort rather too much for him, he received
a letter from the old man, which had been forwarded to him from Paris,
where he had then fixed his residence. It contained a gentle complaint
of Mr. ——’s want of punctuality, but an assurance of continued gratitude
for his former good offices; and, as a friend whom the writer considered
interested in his family, it informed him of the approaching nuptials
of Mademoiselle La Roche with a young man, a relation of her own, and
formerly a pupil of her father’s, of the most amiable dispositions and
respectable character. Attached from their earliest years, they had
been separated by his joining one of the subsidiary regiments of the
canton, then in the service of a foreign power. In this situation he had
distinguished himself as much for courage and military skill as for the
other endowments which he had cultivated at home. The time of his service
was now expired, and they expected him to return in a few weeks, when the
old man hoped, as he expressed it in his letter, to join their hands and
see them happy before he died.

Our philosopher felt himself interested in this event; but he was not,
perhaps, altogether so happy in the tidings of Mademoiselle La Roche’s
marriage as her father supposed him. Not that he was ever a lover of the
lady’s; but he thought her one of the most amiable women he had seen,
and there was something in the idea of her being another’s forever that
struck him, he knew not why, like a disappointment. After some little
speculation on the matter, however, he could look on it as a thing
fitting if not quite agreeable, and determined on this visit to see his
old friend and his daughter happy.

On the last day of his journey, different accidents had retarded his
progress: he was benighted before he reached the quarter in which La
Roche resided. His guide, however, was well acquainted with the road,
and he found himself at last in view of the lake, which I have before
described, in the neighborhood of La Roche’s dwelling. A light gleamed on
the water, that seemed to proceed from the house; it moved slowly along
as he proceeded up the side of the lake, and at last he saw it glimmer
through the trees, and stop at some distance from the place where he then
was. He supposed it some piece of bridal merriment, and pushed on his
horse that he might be a spectator of the scene; but he was a good deal
shocked, on approaching the spot, to find it proceed from the torch of a
person clothed in the dress of an attendant on a funeral, and accompanied
by several others who, like him, seemed to have been employed in the
rites of sepulture.

On Mr. ——’s making inquiry who was the person they had been burying, one
of them, with an accent more mournful than is common to their profession,
answered,—

“Then you knew not Mademoiselle, sir? You never beheld a lovelier—”

“La Roche!” exclaimed he in reply.

“Alas! it was she indeed.”

The appearance of surprise and grief which his countenance assumed
attracted the notice of the peasant with whom he talked. He came
up closer to Mr. ——. “I perceive, sir, you were acquainted with
Mademoiselle La Roche.”

“Acquainted with her!—Good God!—when—how—where did she die? Where is her
father?”

“She died, sir, of heart-break, I believe. The young gentleman to whom
she was soon to have been married was killed in a duel by a French
officer, his intimate companion, to whom, before their quarrel, he had
often done the greatest favors. Her worthy father bears her death as he
has often told us a Christian should; he is even so composed as to be now
in his pulpit, ready to deliver a few exhortations to his parishioners,
as is the custom with us on such occasions. Follow me, sir, and you shall
hear him.”

He followed the man without answering.

The church was dimly lighted, except near the pulpit, where the venerable
La Roche was seated. His people were now lifting up their voices in a
psalm to that Being whom their pastor had taught them ever to bless and
to revere. La Roche sat, his figure bending gently forward, his eyes half
closed, lifted up in silent devotion. A lamp placed near him threw its
light strong on his head, and marked the shadowy lines of age across the
paleness of his brow, thinly covered with gray hairs.

The music ceased. La Roche sat for a moment, and nature wrung a few
tears from him. His people were loud in their grief: Mr. —— was not less
affected than they. La Roche arose.

“Father of mercies!” said he, “forgive these tears; assist thy servant
to lift up his soul to thee, to lift to thee the souls of thy people.
My friends, it is good so to do; at all seasons it is good; but in the
days of our distress, what a privilege it is! Well saith the sacred book,
‘Trust in the Lord; at all times trust in the Lord!’ When every other
support fails us, when the fountains of worldly comfort are dried up,
let us then seek those living waters which flow from the throne of God.
’Tis only from the belief of the goodness and wisdom of a Supreme Being
that our calamities can be borne in that manner which becomes a man.
Human wisdom is here of little use; for, in proportion as it bestows
comfort, it represses feeling, without which we may cease to be hurt by
calamity, but we shall also cease to enjoy happiness. I will not bid
you be insensible, my friends. I cannot, if I would.” His tears flowed
afresh. “I feel too much myself, and I am not ashamed of my feelings; but
therefore may I the more willingly be heard; therefore have I prayed God
to give me strength to speak to you, to direct you to him, not with empty
words, but with these tears, not from speculation, but from experience,
that while you see me suffer you may know also my consolation. You behold
the mourner of his only child, the last earthly stay and blessing of
his declining years. Such a child too! It becomes not me to speak of
her virtues; yet it is but gratitude to mention them, because they were
exerted toward myself. Not many days ago you saw her young, beautiful,
virtuous, and happy. Ye who are parents will judge of my felicity then;
ye will judge of my affliction now. But I look toward him who struck me;
I see the hand of a father amidst the chastenings of my God. Oh! could I
make you feel what it is to pour out the heart, when it is pressed down
with many sorrows, to pour it out with confidence to him in whose hands
are life and death, on whose power awaits all that the first enjoys,
and in contemplation of whom disappears all that the last can inflict.
For we are not as those who die without hope; we know that our Redeemer
liveth,—that we shall live with him, with our friends, his servants, in
that blessed land where sorrow is unknown, and happiness is endless as it
is perfect. Go, then, mourn not for me; I have not lost my child; but a
little while, and we shall meet again, never to be separated. But ye are
also my children: would ye that I should not grieve without comfort? So
live as she lived, that, when your death cometh, it may be the death of
the righteous, and your latter end like his.”

Such was the exhortation of La Roche: his audience answered it with
their tears. The good old man had dried up his at the altar of the Lord:
his countenance had lost its sadness and assumed the glow of faith and
hope. Mr. —— followed him into his house. The inspiration of the pulpit
was past; at sight of him, the scenes they had last met in rushed again
on his mind; La Roche threw his arms around his neck, and watered it
with his tears. The other was equally affected. They went together,
in silence, into the parlor, where the evening service was wont to be
performed. The curtains of the organ were open; La Roche started back at
the sight.

“Oh! my friend!” said he, and his tears burst forth again.

Mr. —— had now recollected himself; he stepped forward, and drew the
curtains close. The old man wiped off his tears, and taking his friend’s
hand, “You see my weakness,” said he, “’tis the weakness of humanity; but
my comfort is not therefore lost.”

“I heard you,” said the other, “in the pulpit; I rejoice that such
consolation is yours.”

“It is, my friend,” said he; “and I trust I shall ever hold it fast. If
there are any who doubt our faith, let them think of what importance
religion is to calamity, and forbear to weaken its force. If they
cannot restore our happiness, let them not take away the solace of our
affliction.”

Mr. ——’s heart was smitten, and I have heard him, long after, confess
that there were moments when the remembrance overcame him even to
weakness; when, amidst all the pleasures of philosophical discovery and
the pride of literary fame, he recalled to his mind the venerable figure
of the good La Roche, and wished that he had never doubted.

[Illustration]



[Illustration]



THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH.

BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY.


What is to be thought of sudden death? It is remarkable that, in
different conditions of society, it has been variously regarded as the
consummation of an earthly career most fervently to be desired, and
on the other hand, as that consummation which is most of all to be
deprecated. Cæsar the Dictator, at his last dinner-party (_cæna_), and
the very evening before his assassination, being questioned as to the
mode of death which, in _his_ opinion, might seem the most eligible,
replied, “That which should be most sudden.” On the other hand, the
divine Litany of our English Church, when breathing forth supplications,
as if in some representative character for the whole human race prostrate
before God, places such a death in the very van of horrors. “From
lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle
and murder, and from sudden death,—_Good Lord, deliver us_.” Sudden death
is here made to crown the climax in a grand ascent of calamities; it is
the last of curses; and yet, by the noblest of Romans, it was treated
as the first of blessings. In that difference, most readers will see
little more than the difference between Christianity and Paganism. But
there I hesitate. The Christian Church may be right in its estimate of
sudden death; and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may also
be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from life,—as that which
_seems_ most reconcilable with meditation, with penitential retrospects,
and with the humilities of farewell prayer. There does not, however,
occur to me any direct Scriptural warrant for this earnest petition
of the English Litany. It seems rather a petition indulged to human
infirmity, than exacted from human piety. And, however _that_ may be, two
remarks suggest themselves as prudent restraints upon a doctrine, which
else _may_ wander, and _has_ wandered, into an uncharitable superstition.
The first is this: that many people are likely to exaggerate the horror
of a sudden death (I mean the objective horror to him who contemplates
such a death, not the subjective horror to him who suffers it), from the
false disposition to lay a stress upon words or acts, simply because by
an accident they have become words or acts. If a man dies, for instance,
by some sudden death when he happens to be intoxicated, such a death is
falsely regarded with peculiar horror; as though the intoxication were
suddenly exalted into a blasphemy. But _that_ is unphilosophic. The man
was, or he was not, _habitually_ a drunkard. If not, if his intoxication
were a solitary accident, there can be no reason at all for allowing
special emphasis to this act, simply because through misfortune it became
his final act. Nor, on the other hand, if it were no accident, but one
of his _habitual_ transgressions, will it be the more habitual or the
more a transgression, because some sudden calamity, surprising him, has
caused this habitual transgression to be also a final one? Could the man
have had any reason even dimly to foresee his own sudden death, there
would have been a new feature in his act of intemperance,—a feature of
presumption and irreverence, as in one that by possibility felt himself
drawing near to the presence of God. But this is no part of the case
supposed. And the only new element in the man’s act is not any element of
extra immorality, but simply of extra misfortune.

The other remark has reference to the meaning of the word _sudden_. And
it is a strong illustration of the duty which forever calls us to the
stern valuation of words, that very possibly Cæsar and the Christian
Church do not differ in the way supposed; that is, do not differ by any
difference of doctrine as between Pagan and Christian views of the moral
temper appropriate to death, but that they are contemplating different
cases. Both contemplate a violent death, a Βιαθανατος—death that is
Βιαιος: but the difference is that the Roman by the word “sudden” means
an _unlingering_ death: whereas the Christian Litany by “sudden” means
a death _without warning_, consequently without any available summons
to religious preparation. The poor mutineer, who kneels down to gather
into his heart the bullets from twelve firelocks of his pitying comrades,
dies by a most sudden death in Cæsar’s sense: one shock, one mighty
spasm, one (possibly _not_ one) groan, and all is over. But, in the sense
of the Litany, his death is far from sudden; his offence, originally,
his imprisonment, his trial, the interval between his sentence and
its execution, having all furnished him with separate warnings of his
fate,—having all summoned him to meet it with solemn preparation.

Meantime, whatever may be thought of a sudden death as a mere variety in
the modes of dying, where death in some shape is inevitable,—a question
which, equally in the Roman and the Christian sense, will be variously
answered according to each man’s variety of temperament,—certainly, upon
one aspect of sudden death there can be no opening for doubt, that of all
agonies incident to man it is the most frightful, that of all martyrdoms
it is the most freezing to human sensibilities,—namely, where it
surprises a man under circumstances which offer (or which seem to offer)
some hurried and inappreciable chance of evading it. Any effort, by which
such an evasion can be accomplished, must be as sudden as the danger
which it affronts. Even _that_, even the sickening necessity for hurrying
in extremity where all hurry seems destined to be vain, self-baffled, and
where the dreadful knell of _too_ late is already sounding in the ears
by anticipation,—even that anguish is liable to a hideous exasperation
in one particular case, namely, where the agonizing appeal is made not
exclusively to the instinct of self-preservation, but to the conscience
on behalf of another life besides your own, accidentally cast upon _your_
protection. To fail, to collapse in a service merely your own, might seem
comparatively venial; though, in fact, it is far from venial. But to
fail in a case where Providence has suddenly thrown into your hands the
final interests of another,—of a fellow-creature shuddering between the
gates of life and death; this, to a man of apprehensive conscience, would
mingle the misery of an atrocious criminality with the misery of a bloody
calamity. The man is called upon, too probably, to die; but to die at
the very moment when, by any momentary collapse, he is self-denounced as
a murderer. He had but the twinkling of an eye for his effort, and that
effort might, at the best, have been unavailing; but from this shadow
of a chance, small or great, how if he has recoiled by a treasonable
_lâcheté_? The effort _might_ have been without hope; but to have risen
to the level of that effort would have rescued him, though not from
dying, yet from dying as a traitor to his duties.

The situation here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer lurking far down
in the depths of human nature. It is not that men generally are summoned
to face such awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy outline, such
a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men’s natures,—muttering
under ground in one world, to be realized perhaps in some other. Upon
the secret mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly projected at
intervals, perhaps, to every one of us. That dream, so familiar to
childhood, of meeting a lion, and, from languishing prostration in
hope and vital energy, that constant sequel of lying down before him,
publishes the secret frailty of human nature,—reveals its deep-seated
Pariah falsehood to itself,—records its abysmal treachery. Perhaps not
one of us escapes that dream; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man,
that dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation, the
original temptation in Eden. Every one of us, in this dream, has a bait
offered to the infirm places of his own individual will; once again a
snare is made ready for leading him into captivity to a luxury of ruin;
again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man falls from innocence; once
again, by infinite iteration, the ancient Earth groans to God, through
her secret caves, over the weakness of her child; “Nature, from her seat,
sighing through all her works,” again “gives signs of woe that all is
lost”; and again the countersign is repeated to the sorrowing heavens
of the endless rebellion against God. Many people think that one man,
the patriarch of our race, could not in his single person execute this
rebellion for all his race. Perhaps they are wrong. But, even if not,
perhaps in the world of dreams every one of us ratifies for himself the
original act. Our English rite of Confirmation, by which, in years of
awakened reason, we take upon us the engagements contracted for us in
our slumbering infancy,—how sublime a rite is that! The little postern
gate, through which the baby in its cradle had been silently placed for a
time within the glory of God’s countenance, suddenly rises to the clouds
as a triumphal arch, through which, with banners displayed and martial
pomps, we make our second entry as crusading soldiers militant for God,
by personal choice and by sacramental oath. Each man says in effect, “Lo!
I rebaptize myself; and that which once was sworn on my behalf, now I
swear for myself.” Even so in dreams, perhaps, under some secret conflict
of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness at the time, but
darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each several child of
our mysterious race completes for himself the aboriginal fall.

As I drew near to the Manchester post-office, I found that it was
considerably past midnight; but to my great relief, as it was important
for me to be in Westmoreland by the morning, I saw by the huge saucer
eyes of the mail, blazing through the gloom of overhanging houses,
that my chance was not yet lost. Past the time it was; but by some
luck, very unusual in my experience, the mail was not even yet ready
to start. I ascended to my seat on the box, where my cloak was still
lying as it had lain at the Bridgewater Arms. I had left it there in
imitation of a nautical discoverer, who leaves a bit of bunting on the
shore of his discovery, by way of warning off the ground the whole human
race, and signalizing to the Christian and the heathen worlds, with
his best compliments, that he has planted his throne forever upon that
virgin soil: henceforward claiming the _jus dominii_ to the top of the
atmosphere above it, and also the right of driving shafts to the centre
of the earth below it; so that all people found after this warning,
either aloft in the atmosphere, or in the shafts, or squatting on the
soil, will be treated as trespassers,—that is, decapitated by their very
faithful and obedient servant, the owner of the said bunting. Possibly
my cloak might not have been respected, and the _jus gentium_ might have
been cruelly violated in my person,—for in the dark, people commit deeds
of darkness, gas being a great ally of morality,—but it so happened that,
on this night, there was no other outside passenger; and the crime,
which else was but too probable, missed fire for want of a criminal. By
the way, I may as well mention at this point, since a circumstantial
accuracy is essential to the effect of my narrative, that there was no
other person of any description whatever about the mail—the guard, the
coachman, and myself being allowed for—except only one,—a horrid creature
of the class known to the world as insiders, but whom young Oxford called
sometimes “Trojans,” in opposition to our Grecian selves, and sometimes
“vermin.” A Turkish Effendi, who piques himself on good-breeding, will
never mention by name a pig. Yet it is but too often that he has reason
to mention this animal; since constantly, in the streets of Stamboul,
he has his trousers deranged or polluted by this vile creature running
between his legs. But under any excess of hurry he is always careful,
out of respect to the company he is dining with, to suppress the odious
name, and to call the wretch “that other creature,” as though all
animal life beside formed one group, and this odious beast (to whom, as
Chrysippus observed, salt serves as an apology for a soul) formed another
and alien group on the outside of creation. Now I, who am an English
Effendi, that think myself to understand good-breeding as well as any
son of Othman, beg my reader’s pardon for having mentioned an insider
by his gross natural name. I shall do so no more; and, if I should have
occasion to glance at so painful a subject, I shall always call him “that
other creature.” Let us hope, however, that no such distressing occasion
will arise. But, by the way, an occasion arises at this moment; for the
Reader will be sure to ask, when we come to the story, “Was this other
creature present?” He was _not_; or more correctly, perhaps, _it_ was
not. We dropped the creature—or the creature, by natural imbecility,
dropped itself—within the first ten miles from Manchester. In the latter
case, I wish to make a philosophic remark of a moral tendency. When I
die, or when the reader dies, and by repute suppose of fever, it will
never be known whether we died in reality of the fever or of the doctor.
But this other creature, in the case of dropping out of the coach, will
enjoy a coroner’s inquest; consequently he will enjoy an epitaph. For
I insist upon it, that the verdict of a coroner’s jury makes the best
of epitaphs. It is brief, so that the public all find time to read; it
is pithy, so that the surviving friends (if any _can_ survive such a
loss) remember it without fatigue; it is upon oath, so that rascals and
Dr. Johnsons cannot pick holes in it. “Died through the visitation of
intense stupidity, by impinging on a moonlight night against the off-hind
wheel of the Glasgow mail! Deodand upon the said wheel—twopence.” What a
simple lapidary inscription! Nobody much in the wrong but an off-wheel;
and with few acquaintances; and if it were but rendered into choice
Latin, though there would be a little bother in finding a Ciceronian
word for “off-wheel,” Marcellus himself, that great master of sepulchral
eloquence, could not show a better. Why I call this little remark _moral_
is, from the compensation it points out. Here, by the supposition, is
that other creature on the one side, the beast of the world; and he
(or it) gets an epitaph. You and I, on the contrary, the pride of our
friends, get none.

But why linger on the subject of vermin? Having mounted the box, I took
a small quantity of laudanum, having already travelled two hundred
and fifty miles,—namely, from a point seventy miles beyond London,
upon a simple breakfast. In the taking of laudanum there was nothing
extraordinary. But by accident it drew upon me the special attention of
my assessor on the box, the coachman. And in _that_ there was nothing
extraordinary. But by accident, and with great delight, it drew my
attention to the fact that this coachman was a monster in point of size,
and that he had but one eye. In fact, he had been foretold by Virgil as—

    “Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens cui lumen ademptum.”

He answered in every point,—a monster he was,—dreadful, shapeless, huge,
who had lost an eye. But why should _that_ delight me? Had he been one
of the Calendars in the Arabian Nights, and had paid down his eye as
the price of his criminal curiosity, what right had _I_ to exult in
his misfortune? I did _not_ exult; I delighted in no man’s punishment,
though it were even merited. But these personal distinctions identified
in an instant an old friend of mine, whom I had known in the South for
some years as the most masterly of mail-coachmen. He was the man in all
Europe that could best have undertaken to drive six-in-hand full gallop
over _Al Sirat_,—that famous bridge of Mahomet across the bottomless
gulf,—backing himself against the Prophet and twenty such fellows. I
used to call him _Cyclops mastigophorus_, Cyclops the whip-bearer, until
I observed that his skill made whips useless, except to fetch off an
impertinent fly from a leader’s head; upon which I changed his Grecian
name to Cyclops _diphrélates_ (Cyclops the charioteer). I, and others
known to me, studied under him the diphrelatic art. Excuse, reader, a
word too elegant to be pedantic. And also take this remark from me, as
a _gage d’amitié_, that no word ever was or _can_ be pedantic which,
by supporting a distinction, supports the accuracy of logic; or which
fills up a chasm for the understanding. As a pupil, though I paid extra
fees, I cannot say that I stood high in his esteem. It showed his dogged
honesty (though, observe, not his discernment), that he could not see
my merits. Perhaps we ought to excuse his absurdity in this particular
by remembering his want of an eye. _That_ made him blind to my merits.
Irritating as this blindness was (surely it could not be envy!) he always
courted my conversation, in which art I certainly had the whip-hand
of him. On this occasion, great joy was at our meeting. But what was
Cyclops doing here? Had the medical men recommended northern air, or
how? I collected, from such explanations as he volunteered, that he had
an interest at stake in a suit-at-law pending at Lancaster; so that
probably he had got himself transferred to this station, for the purpose
of connecting with his professional pursuits an instant readiness for the
calls of his lawsuit.

Meantime, what are we stopping for? Surely, we’ve been waiting long
enough. O, this procrastinating mail, and O, this procrastinating
post-office! Can’t they take a lesson upon that subject from _me_? Some
people have called _me_ procrastinating. Now you are witness, reader,
that I was in time for _them_. But can _they_ lay their hands on their
hearts, and say that they were in time for me? I, during my life, have
often had to wait for the post-office; the post-office never waited
a minute for me. What are they about? The guard tells me that there
is a large extra accumulation of foreign mails this night, owing to
irregularities caused by war and by the packet service, when as yet
nothing is done by steam. For an _extra_ hour, it seems, the post-office
has been engaged in threshing out the pure wheaten correspondence of
Glasgow, and winnowing it from the chaff of all baser intermediate towns.
We can hear the flails going at this moment. But at last all is finished.
Sound your horn, guard. Manchester, good by; we’ve lost an hour by your
criminal conduct at the post-office; which, however, though I do not mean
to part with a serviceable ground of complaint, and one which really _is_
such for the horses, to me secretly is an advantage, since it compels us
to recover this last hour amongst the next eight or nine. Off we are at
last, and at eleven miles an hour; and at first I detect no changes in
the energy or in the skill of Cyclops.

From Manchester to Kendal, which virtually (though not in law) is the
capital of Westmoreland, were at this time seven stages of eleven miles
each. The first five of these, dated from Manchester, terminated in
Lancaster, which was therefore fifty-five miles north of Manchester, and
the same distance exactly from Liverpool. The first three terminated in
Preston (called, by way of distinction from other towns of that name,
_proud_ Preston), at which place it was that the separate roads from
Liverpool and from Manchester to the north became confluent. Within these
first three stages lay the foundation, the progress, and termination of
our night’s adventure. During the first stage, I found out that Cyclops
was mortal: he was liable to the shocking affection of sleep,—a thing
which I had never previously suspected. If a man is addicted to the
vicious habit of sleeping, all the skill in aurigation of Apollo himself,
with the horses of Aurora to execute the motions of his will, avail him
nothing. “O Cyclops!” I exclaimed more than once, “Cyclops, my friend;
thou art mortal. Thou snorest.” Through this first eleven miles, however,
he betrayed his infirmity—which I grieve to say he shared with the whole
Pagan Pantheon—only by short stretches. On waking up, he made an apology
for himself, which, instead of mending the matter, laid an ominous
foundation for coming disasters. The summer assizes were now proceeding
at Lancaster: in consequence of which, for three nights and three days,
he had not lain down in a bed. During the day, he was waiting for his
uncertain summons as a witness on the trial in which he was interested;
or he was drinking with the other witnesses, under the vigilant
surveillance of the attorneys. During the night, or that part of it when
the least temptations existed to conviviality, he was driving. Throughout
the second stage he grew more and more drowsy. In the second mile of the
third stage, he surrendered himself finally and without a struggle to his
perilous temptation. All his past resistance had but deepened the weight
of this final oppression. Seven atmospheres of sleep seemed resting
upon him; and to consummate the case, our worthy guard, after singing
“Love amongst the Roses” for the fiftieth or sixtieth time, without any
invitation from Cyclops or me, and without applause for his poor labors,
had moodily resigned himself to slumber,—not so deep doubtless as the
coachman’s, but deep enough for mischief, and having, probably, no
similar excuse. And thus at last, about ten miles from Preston, I found
myself left in charge of his Majesty’s London and Glasgow mail, then
running about eleven miles an hour.

What made this negligence less criminal than else it must have been
thought, was the condition of the roads at night during the assizes. At
that time all the law business of populous Liverpool, and of populous
Manchester, with its vast cincture of populous rural districts, was
called up by ancient usage to the tribunal of Lilliputian Lancaster. To
break up this old traditional usage required a conflict with powerful
established interests, a large system of new arrangements, and a new
parliamentary statute. As things were at present, twice in the year so
vast a body of business rolled northwards, from the southern quarter of
the county, that a fortnight at least occupied the severe exertions of
two judges for its despatch. The consequence of this was, that every
horse available for such a service, along the whole line of road, was
exhausted in carrying down the multitudes of people who were parties to
the different suits. By sunset, therefore, it usually happened that,
through utter exhaustion amongst men and horses, the roads were all
silent. Except exhaustion in the vast adjacent county of York from a
contested election, nothing like it was ordinarily witnessed in England.

On this occasion, the usual silence and solitude prevailed along the
road. Not a hoof nor a wheel was to be heard. And to strengthen this
false luxurious confidence in the noiseless roads, it happened also that
the night was one of peculiar solemnity and peace. I myself, though
slightly alive to the possibilities of peril, had so far yielded to the
influence of the mighty calm as to sink into a profound revery. The month
was August, in which lay my own birthday; a festival, to every thoughtful
man, suggesting solemn and often sigh-born thoughts. The county was my
own native county,—upon which, in its southern section, more than upon
any equal area known to man past or present, had descended the original
curse of labor in its heaviest form, not mastering the bodies of men
only as slaves, or criminals in mines, but working through the fiery
will. Upon no equal space of earth was, or ever had been, the same
energy of human power put forth daily. At this particular season also
of the assizes, that dreadful hurricane of flight and pursuit, as it
might have seemed to a stranger, that swept to and from Lancaster all
day long, hunting the county up and down, and regularly subsiding about
sunset, united with the permanent distinction of Lancashire as the very
metropolis and citadel of labor, to point the thoughts pathetically upon
that counter-vision of rest, of saintly repose from strife and sorrow,
towards which, as to their secret haven, the profounder aspirations of
man’s heart are continually travelling. Obliquely we were nearing the
sea upon our left, which also must, under the present circumstances, be
repeating the general state of halcyon repose. The sea, the atmosphere,
the light, bore an orchestral part in this universal lull. Moonlight
and the first timid tremblings of the dawn were now blending; and the
blendings were brought into a still more exquisite state of unity by a
slight silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered the woods and
fields, but with a veil of equable transparency. Except the feet of our
own horses, which, running on a sandy margin of the road, made little
disturbance, there was no sound abroad. In the clouds and on the earth
prevailed the same majestic peace; and in spite of all that the villain
of a schoolmaster has done for the ruin of our sublimer thoughts, which
are the thoughts of our infancy, we still believe in no such nonsense
as a limited atmosphere. Whatever we may swear with our false feigning
lips, in our faithful hearts we still believe, and must forever believe,
in fields of air traversing the total gulf between earth and the central
heavens. Still, in the confidence of children that tread without fear
_every_ chamber in their father’s house, and to whom no door is closed,
we, in that Sabbatic vision which sometimes is revealed for an hour upon
nights like this, ascend with easy steps from the sorrow-stricken fields
of earth upwards to the sandals of God.

Suddenly from thoughts like these I was awakened to a sullen sound, as
of some motion on the distant road. It stole upon the air for a moment;
I listened in awe; but then it died away. Once roused, however, I could
not but observe with alarm the quickened motion of our horses. Ten years’
experience had made my eye learned in the valuing of motion; and I saw
that we were now running thirteen miles an hour. I pretend to no presence
of mind. On the contrary, my fear is, that I am miserably and shamefully
deficient in that quality as regards action. The palsy of doubt and
distraction hangs like some guilty weight of dark unfathomed remembrances
upon my energies, when the signal is flying for _action_. But, on the
other hand, this accursed gift I have, as regards _thought_, that in
the first step towards the possibility of a misfortune, I see its total
evolution; in the radix I see too certainly and too instantly its entire
expansion; in the first syllable of the dreadful sentence, I read already
the last. It was not that I feared for ourselves. What could injure _us_?
Our bulk and impetus charmed us against peril in any collision. And I had
rode through too many hundreds of perils that were frightful to approach,
that were matter of laughter as we looked back upon them, for any anxiety
to rest upon _our_ interests. The mail was not built, I felt assured,
nor bespoke, that could betray _me_ who trusted to its protection. But
any carriage that we could meet would be frail and light in comparison
of ourselves. And I remarked this ominous accident of our situation. We
were on the wrong side of the road. But then the other party, if other
there was, might also be on the wrong side; and two wrongs might make a
right. _That_ was not likely. The same motive which had drawn _us_ to the
right-hand side of the road, namely, the soft beaten sand, as contrasted
with the paved centre, would prove attractive to others. Our lamps, still
lighted, would give the impression of vigilance on our part. And every
creature that met us would rely upon _us_ for quartering. All this, and
if the separate links of the anticipation had been a thousand times more,
I saw, not discursively or by effort, but as by one flash of horrid
intuition.

Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the evil which _might_ be
gathering ahead, ah, reader! what a sullen mystery of fear, what a sigh
of woe, seemed to steal upon the air, as again the far-off sound of a
wheel was heard! A whisper it was,—a whisper from, perhaps, four miles
off,—secretly announcing a ruin that, being foreseen, was not the less
inevitable. What could be done—who was it that could do it—to check the
storm-flight of these maniacal horses? What! could I not seize the reins
from the grasp of the slumbering coachman? You, reader, think that it
would have been in _your_ power to do so. And I quarrel not with your
estimate of yourself. But, from the way in which the coachman’s hand was
viced between his upper and lower thigh, this was impossible. The guard
subsequently found it impossible, after this danger had passed. Not the
grasp only, but also the position of this Polyphemus, made the attempt
impossible. You still think otherwise. See, then, that bronze equestrian
statue. The cruel rider has kept the bit in his horse’s mouth for two
centuries. Unbridle him, for a minute, if you please, and wash his mouth
with water. Or stay, reader, unhorse me that marble emperor: knock me
those marble feet from those marble stirrups of Charlemagne.

The sounds ahead strengthened, and were now too clearly the sounds of
wheels. Who and what could it be? Was it industry in a taxed cart? Was
it youthful gayety in a gig? Whoever it was, something must be attempted
to warn them. Upon the other party rests the active responsibility,
but upon _us_—and, woe is me! that _us_ was my single self—rests the
responsibility of warning. Yet, how should this be accomplished? Might I
not seize the guard’s horn? Already, on the first thought, I was making
my way over the roof to the guard’s seat. But this, from the foreign
mail’s being piled upon the roof, was a difficult and even dangerous
attempt, to one cramped by nearly three hundred miles of outside
travelling. And, fortunately, before I had lost much time in the attempt,
our frantic horses swept round an angle of the road, which opened upon
us the stage where the collision must be accomplished, the parties that
seemed summoned to the trial, and the impossibility of saving them by any
communication with the guard.

Before us lay an avenue, straight as an arrow, six hundred yards,
perhaps, in length; and the umbrageous trees, which rose in a regular
line from either side, meeting high overhead, gave to it the character
of a cathedral aisle. These trees lent a deeper solemnity to the early
light; but there was still light enough to perceive, at the farther end
of this Gothic aisle, a light, reedy gig, in which were seated a young
man, and, by his side, a young lady. Ah, young sir! what are you about?
If it is necessary that you should whisper your communications to this
young lady,—though really I see nobody at this hour, and on this solitary
road, likely to overhear your conversation,—is it, therefore, necessary
that you should carry your lips forward to hers? The little carriage is
creeping on at one mile an hour; and the parties within it, being thus
tenderly engaged, are naturally bending down their heads. Between them
and eternity, to all human calculation, there is but a minute and a
half. What is it that I shall do? Strange it is, and, to a mere auditor
of the tale, might seem laughable, that I should need a suggestion from
the _Iliad_ to prompt the sole recourse that remained. But so it was.
Suddenly I remembered the shout of Achilles, and its effect. But could I
pretend to shout like the son of Peleus, aided by Pallas? No, certainly:
but then I needed not the shout that should alarm all Asia militant; a
shout would suffice, such as should carry terror into the hearts of two
thoughtless young people, and one gig horse. I shouted,—and the young man
heard me not. A second time I shouted,—and now he heard me, for now he
raised his head.

Here, then, all had been done that, by me, _could_ be done: more on _my_
part was not possible. Mine had been the first step: the second was
for the young man: the third was for God. If, said I, the stranger is
a brave man, and if, indeed, he loves the young girl at his side,—or,
loving her not, if he feels the obligation pressing upon every man
worthy to be called a man, of doing his utmost for a woman confided
to his protection,—he will at least make some effort to save her. If
_that_ fails, he will not perish the more, or by a death more cruel, for
having made it; and he will die as a brave man should, with his face to
the danger, and with his arm about the woman that he sought in vain to
save. But if he makes no effort, shrinking, without a struggle, from his
duty, he himself will not the less certainly perish for this baseness
of poltroonery. He will die no less: and why not? Wherefore should we
grieve that there is one craven less in the world? No; _let_ him perish,
without a pitying thought of ours wasted upon him; and, in that case,
all our grief will be reserved for the fate of the helpless girl, who
now, upon the least shadow of failure in _him_, must, by the fiercest
of translations,—must, without time for a prayer,—must, within seventy
seconds, stand before the judgment-seat of God.

But craven he was not: sudden had been the call upon him, and sudden
was his answer to the call. He saw, he heard, he comprehended, the ruin
that was coming down: already its gloomy shadow darkened above him; and
already he was measuring his strength to deal with it. Ah! what a vulgar
thing does courage seem, when we see nations buying it and selling it
for a shilling a day: ah! what a sublime thing does courage seem, when
some fearful crisis on the great deeps of life carries a man, as if
running before a hurricane, up to the giddy crest of some mountainous
wave, from which, accordingly as he chooses his course, he describes
two courses, and a voice says to him audibly, “This way lies hope; take
the other way and mourn forever!” Yet, even then, amidst the raving of
the seas and the frenzy of the danger, the man is able to confront his
situation,—is able to retire for a moment into solitude with God, and
to seek all his counsel from _him_! For seven seconds, it might be, of
his seventy, the stranger settled his countenance steadfastly upon us,
as if to search and value every element in the conflict before him. For
five seconds more he sat immovably, like one that mused on some great
purpose. For five he sat with eyes upraised, like one that prayed in
sorrow, under some extremity of doubt, for wisdom to guide him towards
the better choice. Then suddenly he rose; stood upright; and, by a sudden
strain upon the reins, raising his horse’s forefeet from the ground,
he slewed him round on the pivot of his hind legs, so as to plant the
little equipage in a position nearly at right angles to ours. Thus far
his condition was not improved; except as a first step had been taken
towards the possibility of a second. If no more were done, nothing was
done; for the little carriage still occupied the very centre of our path,
though in an altered direction. Yet even now it may not be too late:
fifteen of the twenty seconds may still be unexhausted; and one almighty
bound forward may avail to clear the ground. Hurry then, hurry! for the
flying moments—_they_ hurry! O, hurry, hurry, my brave young man! for
the cruel hoofs of our horses—_they_ also hurry! Fast are the flying
moments, faster are the hoofs of our horses. Fear not for _him_, if human
energy can suffice: faithful was he that drove, to his terrific duty;
faithful was the horse to _his_ command. One blow, one impulse given with
voice and hand by the stranger, one rush from the horse, one bound as if
in the act of rising to a fence, landed the docile creature’s forefeet
upon the crown or arching centre of the road. The larger half of the
little equipage had then cleared our over-towering shadow: _that_ was
evident even to my own agitated sight. But it mattered little that one
wreck should float off in safety, if upon the wreck that perished were
embarked the human freightage. The rear part of the carriage—was _that_
certainly beyond the line of absolute ruin? What power could answer the
question? Glance of eye, thought of man, wing of angel, which of these
had speed enough to sweep between the question and the answer, and divide
the one from the other? Light does not tread upon the steps of light
more indivisibly, than did our all-conquering arrival upon the escaping
efforts of the gig. _That_ must the young man have felt too plainly. His
back was now turned to us; not by sight could he any longer communicate
with the peril; but by the dreadful rattle of our harness, too truly had
his ear been instructed,—that all was finished as regarded any further
effort of _his_. Already in resignation he had rested from his struggle;
and perhaps in his heart he was whispering, “Father, which art above,
do thou finish in heaven what I on earth have attempted.” We ran past
them faster than ever mill-race in our inexorable flight. O, raving of
hurricanes that must have sounded in their young ears at the moment of
our transit! Either with the swingle-bar, or with the haunch of our near
leader, we had struck the off-wheel of the little gig, which stood rather
obliquely and not quite so far advanced as to be accurately parallel
with the near wheel. The blow, from the fury of our passage, resounded
terrifically. I rose in horror, to look upon the ruins we might have
caused. From my elevated station I looked down, and looked back upon the
scene, which in a moment told its tale, and wrote all its records on my
heart forever.

The horse was planted immovably, with his forefeet upon the paved crest
of the central road. He of the whole party was alone untouched by the
passion of death. The little cany carriage,—partly perhaps from the
dreadful torsion of the wheels in its recent movement, partly from the
thundering blow we had given to it,—as if it sympathized with human
horror, was all alive with tremblings and shiverings. The young man
sat like a rock. He stirred not at all. But _his_ was the steadiness
of agitation frozen into rest by horror. As yet he dared not to look
round; for he knew that if anything remained to do, by him it could no
longer be done. And as yet he knew not for certain if their safety were
accomplished. But the lady—

But the lady,—O heavens! will that spectacle ever depart from my
dreams, as she rose and sank upon her seat, sank and rose, threw up
her arms wildly to heaven, clutched at some visionary object in the
air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing! Figure to yourself, reader,
the elements of the case; suffer me to recall before your mind the
circumstances of the unparalleled situation. From the silence and deep
peace of this saintly summer night,—from the pathetic blending of this
sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight,—from the manly tenderness of
this flattering, whispering, murmuring love,—suddenly as from the
woods and fields,—suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in
revelation,—suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon
her, with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crownéd phantom, with all
the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice.

The moments were numbered. In the twinkling of an eye our flying horses
had carried us to the termination of the umbrageous aisle; at right
angles we wheeled into our former direction; the turn of the road carried
the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams
forever.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Stories of Tragedy" ***

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