 | Tales of the grotesque and arabesque |  |
BERENICE.
Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is
multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon like the
rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that
arch, as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching
the wide horizon like the rainbow! How
is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?—from
the covenant of peace a simile of
sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of
good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the
memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the
agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies
which might have been. I have a tale to tell in
its own essence rife with horror—I would suppress
it were it not a record more of feelings than of
facts.
My baptismal name is Egæus—that of my family
I will not mention. Yet there are no towers in the
land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray hereditary
halls. Our line has been called a race of
visionaries: and in many striking particulars—in
the character of the family mansion—in the frescos
the chiseling of some buttresses in the
armory—but more especially in the gallery of antique
paintings—in the fashion of the library chamber
—and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the
library's contents, there is more than sufficient evidence
to warrant the belief.
The recollections of my earliest years are connected
with that chamber, and with its volumes—of which
latter I will say no more. Here died my mother.
Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say
that I had not lived before—that the soul has no
previous existence. You deny it—let us not argue
the matter. Convinced myself I seek not to convince.
There is, however, a remembrance of aërial forms—
of spiritual and meaning eyes—of sounds, musical
yet sad—a remembrance which will not be excluded:
a memory like a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite,
unsteady—and like a shadow too in the impossibility
of my getting rid of it, while the sunlight of my
reason shall exist.
In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from
the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity,
at once into the very regions of fairy land—into a
palace of imagination—into the wild dominions of
monastic thought and erudition—it is not singular
that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent
eye—that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and
dissipated my youth in reverie—but it is singular
that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood
found me still in the mansion of my fathers—it is
of my life—wonderful how total an inversion took
place in the character of my common thoughts. The
realities of the world affected me as visions, and as
visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of
dreams became, in turn,—not the material of my
every-day existence—but in very deed that existence
utterly and solely in itself.
* * * * * * * *
Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up
together in my paternal halls—yet differently we
grew. I ill of health and buried in gloom—she
agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy. Hers
the ramble on the hill-side—mine the studies of the
cloister. I living within my own heart, and addicted
body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation—she
roaming carelessly through life with no
thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight
of the raven-winged hours. Berenice!—I call upon
her name—Berenice!—and from the gray ruins of
memory a thousand tumultuous recollections are
startled at the sound! Ah! vividly is her image before
me now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness
and joy! Oh! gorgeous yet fantastic beauty!
Oh! sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim!—Oh!
Naiad among her fountains!—and then—then all
is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be
told. Disease—a fatal disease—fell like the simoon
upon her frame, and, even while I gazed upon her,
mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a manner
the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the
identity of her person! Alas! the destroyer came
and went, and the victim—where was she? I knew
her not—or knew her no longer as Berenice.
Among the numerous train of maladies, superinduced
by that fatal and primary one which effected a
revolution of so horrible a kind in the moral and physical
being of my cousin, may be mentioned as the
most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species
of epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in trance
itself—trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution,
and from which her manner of recovery was,
in most instances, startlingly abrupt. In the meantime
my own disease—for I have been told that I
should call it by no other appellation—my own disease,
then, grew rapidly upon me, and, aggravated
in its symptoms by the immoderate use of opium, assumed
finally a monomaniac character of a novel and
extraordinary form—hourly and momently gaining
vigor—and at length obtaining over me the most
singular and incomprehensible ascendency. This
monomania—if I must so term it—consisted in a
morbid irritability of the nerves immediately affecting
those properties of the mind in metaphysical science
termed the attentive. It is more than probable that I
am not understood—but I fear that it is indeed in no
manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely
general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity
of interest with which, in my case, the
and, as it were, buried themselves, in the contemplation
of even the most common objects of the universe.
To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention
rivetted to some frivolous device upon the margin,
or in the typography of a book—to become absorbed
for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint
shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the
floor—to lose myself for an entire night in watching
the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire
—to dream away whole days over the perfume of a
flower—to repeat monotonously some common word,
until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased
to convey any idea whatever to the mind—to lose
all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of
absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered
in—such were a few of the most common
and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition
of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled,
but certainly bidding defiance to anything
like analysis or explanation.
Yet let me not be misapprehended. The undue,
earnest, and morbid attention thus excited by objects
in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded
in character with that ruminating propensity common
to all mankind, and more especially indulged in
by persons of ardent imagination. It was not even,
as might be at first supposed, an extreme condition,
or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and
essentially distinct and different. In the one instance
usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of
this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions
issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of
a day-dream often replete with luxury, he finds the
incitamentum or first cause of his musings entirely
vanished and forgotten. In my case the primary object
was invariably frivolous, although assuming,
through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted
and unreal importance. Few deductions—
if any—were made; and those few pertinaciously
returning in, so to speak, upon the original object as
a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable;
and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause,
so far from being out of sight, had attained that
supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the
prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the
powers of mind more particularly exercised were,
with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are,
with the day-dreamer, the speculative.
My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually
serve to irritate the disorder, partook, it will be perceived,
largely, in their imaginative, and inconsequential
nature, of the characteristic qualities of the
disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the
treatise of the noble Italian Cœlius Secundus Curio
“de amplitudine beati regni Dei”—St. Austin's great
work, the “City of God”—and Tertullian “de Carne
Christi,” in which the unintelligible sentence “Mortuus
est Dei filius; credibile est quia ineptum est:
et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile
est” occupied my undivided time, for many weeks of
laborious and fruitless investigation.
Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance
only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance
to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion,
which, steadily resisting the attacks of human violence,
and the fiercer fury of the waters and the
winds, trembled only to the touch of the flower called
Asphodel. And although, to a careless thinker, it
might appear a matter beyond doubt, that the fearful
alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the
moral condition of Berenice, would afford me many
objects for the exercise of that intense and morbid
meditation whose nature I have been at some trouble
in explaining, yet such was not by any means the
case. In the lucid intervals of my infirmity, her
calamity indeed gave me pain, and, taking deeply to
heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle life, I
did not fail to ponder frequently and bitterly upon the
wonder-working means by which so strange a revolution
had been so suddenly brought to pass. But
these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of
my disease, and were such as would have occurred,
under similar circumstances, to the ordinary mass of
mankind. True to its own character, my disorder
revelled in the less important but more startling
changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice,
and in the singular and most appalling distortion of
her personal identity.
During the brightest days of her unparalleled
strange anomaly of my existence, feelings, with me,
had never been of the heart, and my passions always
were of the mind. Through the gray of the early
morning—among the trellissed shadows of the forest
at noon-day—and in the silence of my library at
night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen
her—not as the living and breathing Berenice, but
as the Berenice of a dream—not as a being of the
earth—earthly—but as the abstraction of such a
being—not as a thing to admire, but to analyze—
not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most
abstruse although desultory speculation. And now
—now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale
at her approach; yet, bitterly lamenting her fallen
and desolate condition, I knew that she had loved
me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her of
marriage.
And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching,
when, upon an afternoon in the winter of
the year, one of those unseasonably warm, calm, and
misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon,[1]
I sat, and sat, as I thought, alone, in the inner
apartment of the library. But uplifting my eyes Berenice
stood before me.
Was it my own excited imagination—or the
misty influence of the atmosphere—or the uncertain
which fell around her figure—that caused it to loom
up in so unnatural a degree? I could not tell. She
spoke no word, and I—not for worlds could I have
uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my
frame; a sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me;
a consuming curiosity pervaded my soul; and, sinking
back upon the chair, I remained for some time
breathless, and motionless, and with my eyes rivetted
upon her person. Alas! its emaciation was excessive,
and not one vestige of the former being lurked
in any single line of the contour. My burning glances
at length fell upon the face.
The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly
placid; and the once golden hair fell partially
over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with
ringlets now black as the raven's wing, and jarring
discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the
reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes
were lifeless, and lustreless, and I shrunk involuntarily
from their glassy stare to the contemplation of
the thin and shrunken lips. They parted: and in a
smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed
Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view.
Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that,
having done so, I had died!
* * * * * * * *
The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking
chamber. But from the disordered chamber of my
brain, had not, alas! departed, and would not be
driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of the
teeth. Not a speck upon their surface—not a shade
on their enamel—not a line in their configuration
—not an indenture in their edges—but what that
brief period of her smile had sufficed to brand in
upon my memory. I saw them now even more unequivocally
than I beheld them then. The teeth!—
the teeth!—they were here, and there, and every
where, and visibly, and palpably before me, long,
narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips
writhing about them, as in the very moment of their
first terrible development. Then came the full fury
of my monomania, and I struggled in vain against
its strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied
objects of the external world I had no thoughts
but for the teeth. All other matters and all different
interests became absorbed in their single contemplation.
They—they alone were present to the mental
eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the
essence of my mental life. I held them in every
light—I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed
their characteristics—I dwelt upon their peculiarities
—I pondered upon their conformation—I mused
upon the alteration in their nature—and shuddered
as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and
sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips,
a capability of moral expression. Of Mad'selle
sentiments,” and of Berenice I more seriously believed
que tous ses dents etaient des idées.
And the evening closed in upon me thus—and
then the darkness came, and tarried, and went—
and the day again dawned—and the mists of a
second night were now gathering around—and still
I sat motionless in that solitary room, and still I sat
buried in meditation, and still the phantasma of the
teeth maintained its terrible ascendency as, with the
most vivid and hideous distinctness, it floated about
amid the changing lights and shadows of the chamber.
At length there broke forcibly in upon my dreams a
wild cry as of horror and dismay; and thereunto,
after a pause, succeeded the sound of troubled voices,
intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow, or
of pain. I arose hurriedly from my seat, and, throwing
open one of the doors of the library, saw standing
out in the antechamber a servant maiden, all in tears;
and she told me that Berenice was—no more. Seized
with an epileptic fit she had fallen dead in the early
morning, and now, at the closing in of the night, the
grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations
for the burial were completed.
With a heart full of grief, yet reluctantly, and oppressed
with awe, I made my way to the bed-chamber
of the departed. The room was large, and very
dark, and at every step within its gloomy precincts
I encountered the paraphernalia of the grave. The
coffin, so a menial told me, lay surrounded by the
curtains of yonder bed, and in that coffin, he whisperingly
Who was it asked me would I not look upon the
corpse? I had seen the lips of no one move, yet the
question had been demanded, and the echo of the
syllables still lingered in the room. It was impossible
to refuse; and with a sense of suffocation I dragged
myself to the side of the bed. Gently I uplifted the
sable draperies of the curtains. As I let them fall
they descended upon my shoulders, and shutting me
thus out from the living, enclosed me in the strictest
communion with the deceased. The very atmosphere
was redolent of death. The peculiar smell of the
coffin sickened me! and I fancied a deleterious odor
was already exhaling from the body. I would have
given worlds to escape—to fly from the pernicious
influence of mortality—to breathe once again the pure
air of the eternal heavens. But I had no longer the
power to move—my knees tottered beneath me—
and I remained rooted to the spot, and gazing upon
the frightful length of the rigid body as it lay outstretched
in the dark coffin without a lid.
God of heaven!—was it possible? Was it my
brain that reeled—or was it indeed the finger of the
enshrouded dead that stirred in the white cerement
that bound it? Frozen with unutterable awe I slowly
raised my eyes to the countenance of the corpse.
There had been a band around the jaws, but, I know
not how, it was broken asunder. The livid lips
were wreathed into a species of smile, and, through
the enveloping gloom, once again there glared upon
me in too palpable reality, the white and glistening,
from the bed, and, uttering no word, rushed forth a
maniac from that apartment of triple horror, and
mystery, and death.
* * * * * * * *
I found myself again sitting in the library, and
again sitting there alone. It seemed that I had newly
awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I
knew that it was now midnight, and I was well
aware that since the setting of the sun Berenice had
been interred. But of that dreary period which had
intervened I had no positive, at least no definite comprehension.
But its memory was rife with horror—
horror more horrible from being vague, and terror
more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page
in the record of my existence, written all over with
dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I
strived to decypher them, but in vain—while ever
and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the
shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed
to be ringing in my ears. I had done a deed—
what was it? And the echoes of the chamber
answered me “what was it?”
On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it
lay a little box of ebony. It was a box of no remarkable
character, and I had seen it frequently before,
it being the property of the family physician;
but how came it there upon my table, and why did I
manner to be accounted for, and my eyes at length
dropped to the open pages of a book, and to a
sentence underscored therein. The words were the
singular but simple words of the poet Ebn Zaiat.
“Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem
curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.” Why
then, as I perused them, did the hairs of my head
erect themselves on end, and the blood of my body
congeal within my veins?
There came a light tap at the library door, and,
pale as the tenant of a tomb, a menial entered upon
tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and he
spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very
low. What said he?—some broken sentences I
heard. He told of a wild cry disturbing the silence of
the night—of the gathering together of the household—of
a search in the direction of the sound—
and then his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he
whispered me of a violated grave—of a disfigured
body discovered upon its margin—a body enshrouded,
yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive!
He pointed to my garments—they were muddy
and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me
gently by the hand—but it was indented with the
impress of human nails. He directed my attention to
some object against the wall—I looked at it for some
minutes—it was a spade. With a shriek I bounded
to the table, and grasped the ebony box that lay upon
it. But I could not force it open, and in my tremor
burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound,
there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery,
intermingled with many white and glistening substances
that were scattered to and fro about the
floor.
| Tales of the grotesque and arabesque | |