6. CHAPTER VI.
The catastrophe of a tragedy often performed on the great stage of
life.
It may be supposed that the misery now weighing
me to the earth was as much as could be imposed
upon me; but I was destined to find, and
that before the night was over, that misery is only
comparative, and that there is no affliction so positively
great that greater may not be experienced.
In the dead of the night, when my woes had at
last been drowned in slumber, I was roused by
feeling a hand pressing upon my bosom; and,
starting up, I saw, for there was a taper burning
on a table hard by, a man standing over me, holding
a pillow in his hand, which, the moment I
caught sight of him, he thrust into my face, and
there endeavoured to hold it, as if to suffocate me.
The horror of death endowed me with a strength
not my own, and the ruffian held the pillow with
a feeble and trembling arm. I dashed it aside,
leaped up in the bed, and beheld in the countenance
of the murderer the features of the long missing
and abandoned son, Abbot Skinner.
His face was white and chalky, with livid
stains around the eyes and mouth, the former of
which were staring out of their orbits in a manner
ghastly to behold, while his lips were drawn asunder
and away from his teeth, as in the face of a
mummy. He looked as if horror-struck at the
act he was attempting; and yet there was something
devilish and determined in his air, that increased
my terror to ecstasy. I sprang from the
bed, threw myself on the floor, and, grasping his
knees, besought him to spare my life. There
seemed indeed occasion for all my supplications:
his bloated and altered visage, the neglected appearance
of his garments and person, and a thousand
other signs, showed that the whole period of
his absence had been passed in excessive toping,
and the murderous and unnatural act which he
meditated manifested to what a pitch of phrensy
he had brought himself by the indulgence.
As I grasped his knees, he put his hand into his
bosom, and drew out a poniard, a weapon I had
never before known him to carry; at the sight of
which I considered myself a dead man. But the
love of life still prevailing, I leaped up, and ran to
a corner of the room, where I mingled adjurations
and entreaties with loud screams for assistance.
He stood as if rooted to the spot for a moment;
then dropping his horrid weapon, he advanced a
few paces, clasped his hands together, fell upon
his knees, and burst into tears, and all the while
without having uttered a single word. But now,
my cries still continuing, he exclaimed, but with a
most wild and disturbed look—“Father, I won't
hurt you, and pray don't hurt me!”
By this time the housekeeper Barbara, having
been alarmed by my outcries, came into the chamber;
and her presence relieving me of the immediate
fear of death, I gave vent to the horror that
his unnatural attempt on my life justly excited, and
thus made the woman acquainted with his baseness.
The poor old creature, who had always loved
him, was greatly affected, especially when, in reply
to my reproaches, he began to talk incoherently,
admitting the fact, one instant attempting to justify
it by preferring some strange and incoherent complaint,
and the next assuring me, in the most piteous
manner, that he would do me no harm. To
Barbara's upbraidings he replied with a like inconsistency;
and when she reproached him for meditating
violence at such a moment, while I was
mourning the baseness of his brother, he paid little
attention to what she said, seeming not only ignorant
of Ralph's delinquency, but apparently indifferent
to it.
For this reason I began to fear his brain was
touched; of which, indeed, I had soon the most
fatal proof; for Barbara, having led him to his
chamber, came back, assuring me that he was
going mad, that his mind was already in a ferment,
and, in a word, that that horrible distraction which
sooner or later overtakes the confirmed drinker, was
lighting the torch in his brain that could only go
out with life itself. A physician was sent for: our
fears were but too just, and before dawn the miserable
youth was raving distracted.
The day that followed was one of distraction,
not only to the wretched Abbot, but to myself;
and I remember it as a confused dream. The
only thing that dwells on my recollection, apart
from the outcries in Abbot's chamber and the
tumult in my own heart, is, that some one who
owed me a sum of money, due that day, came and
paid it into my hands with great punctiliousness,
and that I received and wrote the acquittance for it
with as much accuracy as if nothing were the matter,
though my thoughts were far from the subject
before me.
At eleven o'clock at night a messenger came
to me from the prison, and his news was indeed
frightful. The wretched Ralph had just been discovered
with his throat cut from ear to ear, having
made way with himself in despair.
A few moments after I was summoned to the
death-bed of his brother.
I shall never forget the horror of that young
man's dissolution. He lay, at times, the picture
of terror, gazing upon the walls, along which, in
his imagination, crept myriads of loathsome reptiles,
with now some frightful monster, and now a
fire-lipped demon, stealing out of the shadows and
preparing to dart upon him as their prey. Now he
would whine and weep, as if asking forgiveness
for some act of wrong done to the being man is
most constant to wrong—the loving, the feeble, the
confiding; and anon, seized by a tempest of passion,
the cause of which could only be imagined,
he would start up, fight, foam at the mouth, and fall
back in convulsions. Once he sat up in bed, and,
looking like a corpse, began to sing a bacchanalian
song; on another occasion, after lying for many
minutes in apparent stupefaction, he leaped out of
bed before he could be prevented, and, uttering a
yell that was heard in the street, endeavoured to
throw himself from the window.
But the last raving act of all was the most horrid.
He rose upon his knees with a strength that could
not be resisted, caught up his pillow, thrust it down
upon the bed with both hands, and there held it,
with a grim countenance and a chuckling laugh.
None understood the act but myself: no other
could read the devilish thoughts then at work in
his bosom. It was the scene enacted in the chamber
of his parent—he was repeating the deed of
murder—he was exulting, in imagination, over a
successful parricide.
In this thought he expired; for while still pressing
upon the pillow with a giant's strength, he
suddenly fell on his face, and when turned over
was a corpse. He gave but a single gasp, and was
no more.
The horror of the spectacle drove me from the
chamber, and I ran to my own to fall down and
die; when the blessed thought entered my mind,
that the wo on my spirit, the anguish, the distraction,
were but a dream—that my very existence,
as the miser and broken-hearted father, was a phantasm
rather than a reality, since it was a borrowed
existence—and that it was in my power to exchange
it, as I had done other modes of being, for a better.
I was Sheppard Lee, not Abram Skinner; and this
was but a voluntary episode in my existence, which
I was at liberty to terminate.
The thought was rapture. I resolved to sally
out and fasten upon the first body I could find,
being certain I could be in none so miserable as I
had been in that I now inhabited. Nay, the idea
was so agreeable, the execution of it seemed to
promise such certain release from a load of wretchedness,
that I resolved to attempt it without even
waiting for morning.
I seized upon my hat and cloak, and, for fear I
might stumble into some poor man's body, as I had
done in the case of Dawkins's, I opened my strong-box,
and clapped into my pockets all the money it
contained, designing to take precautionary measures
to transfer it along with my spirit to the new
tenement. I seized upon the loaned money that
had been repaid that day, together with a small sum
that had been in the box before; and, had there been
a million in the coffer, I should have nabbed it all,
without much question of the right I actually possessed
in it. The whole sum was small, not exceeding
four hundred dollars, all being in bank-bills.
I should have been glad of more, but was too eager
to exchange my vile casing, with its miseries,
for a better, to think of waiting till bank-hours next
day.
Taking possession, therefore, of this sum, and
a dozen silver spoons that had been left in pledge
a few days before, I hastened to put my plan into
execution. I slipped down stairs, let myself out of
the door as softly as if I had been an intruder, and
set out, in a night of February, to search for a new
body.
