University of Virginia Library

THE LAST INTERVIEW.

By D. Strock, Jr.

One afternoon, early in the autumn of 1845, a little
boy knocked at the door of an humble dwelling, in
one of the districts of Philadelphia. “Is Mrs. Arnold
in?” he inquired of the individual who answered his
summons.

“She is in her room,” was the reply; and the boy
was shown into it. A tall, sickly-looking woman

arose to meet him. He presented her with a piece of
paper, awkwardly folded, and soiled with finger-marks
and oil. She ran her eye hastily over it, and then,
pausing for a moment, told the boy that she could not
come. As he retired, she sat down by a table, and,
resting her head on her hand, appeared to relapse
into a train of sad thoughts which the boy's entrance
had interrupted.

Ten minutes had scarcely elapsed, before another
and heavier rap announced a second messenger. A
man entered, and inquired for Mrs. Arnold.

“I am Mrs. Arnold,” answered the woman.

“Madam,” said the man, “let me entreat you, for
God's sake, to visit the individual who is called your
husband. He has not two hours to live, and during
his sane moments, he calls loudly on your name, and
inquires when you will come. I fear his death will
be an awful one if he does not see you.”

“I cannot come,” the woman replied in a husky
voice.

“Let me entreat you,” the stranger persisted. “I
know not what may be between your husband and
yourself, but do not refuse this request which I am
convinced will be his last. When the fit is on him,
he talks only of you, and of the hours of happiness
you once passed together. Do not refuse him this
small comfort in death's agonies.”

Mrs. Arnold paused. There was, in her features,
the hardened expression which years of grief sometimes
imparts even to the countenance of woman.
Yet beneath this might be seen an occasional gleam

of finer feeling, telling that the soul had not lost all
its sensitiveness for the woes of others. The stranger
noticed the mental conflict, and renewed his exhortation.

“Did he call me by name?” asked Mrs. Arnold.

“He did,” replied the man. “He denounced his
former life as the cause of all your misery, and spoke
of former times spent with you, in a manner that drew
a sigh from every heart. Shall I tell him you are
coming?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Arnold. “I had thought never
again to see him; but I will go this once.”

The man bowed, and departed; and, as the door
was heard closing upon him, a feeling, to which the
banished wife had long been a stranger, came upon
her. A chord strung in other days, but long since
neglected, had suddenly awoke to its former melody.
She seemed to move in the past—to hear the tones
of love, and see the smiles which were around her
when her children first learned to lisp her name, and
her husband was not a drunkard. Now she was
hastening to the last interview with the only one of
her kindred that still remained to her. The feeling
of estrangement, which, as she once supposed, had
stifled every other feeling, gave way in a moment
to an intense desire to see her husband.

Seizing the note, she hastily glanced at the direction,
and hurried into the street. After winding
her way along several narrow streets, the abodes of
wretchedness and crime, she stopped before a small
house, and, descending three steps, opened a door

which led into a gloomy and naked basement room.
It was destitute of furniture, unless we dignify by
that name a three legged stool, with the back broken
off, a rickety table, and some straw beds. Three or
four persons were moving about the room; and,
although the sun had not set, a candle was burning
on the window-ledge.

Death was busy in this dreary abode. Upon some
mattrasses in a corner, lay the once gay Albert
Arnold, writhing in the horrors of delirium tremens.

The first sounds heard by the wife on entering,
were the moans of her husband. During three years
she had lived estranged from him, neither hearing nor
seeing him. There was something fearful in the
accents with which the reconciliation had begun.
Pale with anxiety and terror, she paused at the door,
holding the latch in her hand. A man approached.

“Are you Mrs. Arnold?”

She replied in the affirmative.

“You have come to speak with your husband?”

She nodded assent.

“It is too late. Look at him.”

The woman turned in the direction indicated. A
poor maniac, tossing his hands, rolling from side to
side, and raving in a voice already rendered hoarse by
the touch of death. The candle shed sufficient light
upon his face, to render visible the eyes, bloodshot,
wide open, and staring; the muscles hardened to the
rigidity of iron, the distorted features, the teeth,
shining madman-like from between the severed lips.
Approaching, she kneeled beside him, but had no

words suited to the intensity of feeling which such a
scene inspires.

“Mr. Arnold,” said the nurse, kneeling beside the
wife. He ceased raving, and turned his head with a
cold simple stare, in the direction of the sound. “Your
wife is here,” continued the woman, hoping that some
word connected with her name, might illumine his
mind with a ray of reason. But in his countenance
remained the same cold expression; while his hand
moved rapidly and ceaselessly, over his wretched bed.

“Speak to him yourself,” said the nurse.

“Albert,” whispered the wife, bending her head towards
his, “Have you forgotten your own Annie—
Annie Campbell?”

Suddenly he turned his head towards her, and
pressed together his parched lips, hard and rapidly.
Reason seemed struggling to regain her seat. But
the transient emotion departed, the eye and the lips
resumed their fixedness, and he stared again, the terrible
stare of the maniac, more fearful from its silence
than his former ravings.

“He cannot hear you,” said the nurse.

“Oh, it is dreadful,” sobbed the poor wife as she
buried her face in her hands.

“Albert, Albert, speak to me,” she continued leaning
over him. “Do not die in this horrible manner.”

“He will never speak with you again,” said the
nurse.

“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted the dying man, with a voice,
that made every one shudder. “Ha! ha! ha! ha! I
remember her well, Annie Campbell, Annie Campbell,

my own dear Annie. Oh yes, oh yes—I will sing
the song she used to sing to me—listen, she is singing
now. Oh enchanting,” he continued clasping
his hands, with convulsive energy. “But she is dead,
gone—she died a raving maniac—I called her, and
she would not come to see me—cruel Annie—she
died alone. All flesh is as grass. She died alone.”

“Speak to him again,” said the nurse. The wife
whispered her name in his ear.

“She died alone,—alone!” and his voice hung on
the word, as the departing soul to life. “We sailed on
the river at night—so still and beautiful—her song,
her song. There were bright eyes beaming on me
but I saw only Annie's. The moon too and the stars,
they were beaming. I see them, shining far down,
in the deep water. It is too much—too lovely. See
the green trees by the river's bank, and the glassy
waves, sparkling—the moonlight is chasing them
along. The sun is not there. He went down long
ago, among the dead people. Annie is gone too. She
would not come to me when I sent for her. I hear
her singing, but I'll never see her again. She died
alone.”

The maniac rolled on his side, and clenching his
hands tightly, became again silent. One of the men
came near, and bathed his head with cold water.
There was a long pause, interrupted only by the
whispers of the attendants, the moans of the dying
man, or the sobs of his wife. A student of medicine,
who was in the room, stooped down and felt his pulse.
To Mrs. Arnold's eager inquiry he shook his head;

and when further pressed, he replied that he was
failing fast.

“And must he die thus?” said the wife.

“The main disease has been broken,” the student
replied, “his case is now one of ordinary insanity.
Death is approaching; but a gleam of reason may
still illume his last moments.”

Scarcely was this sentence uttered, when the maniac
sprung suddenly to a sitting posture. His eyes
glared as though starting from their sockets.

“I have been there,” he said, in a tone whose calmness
was terrible. “It was horrible, horrible.”

“Where have you been?” asked the student, humouring
his madness.

“To the regions of woe,” continued the maniac,
while his frame shuddered with the remembrance of
the recent vision; and then, he poured forth words
wild and blasphemous, as if they had actually been
learned in the abodes of despair. Gradually, however,
he grew calmer, and at length sunk upon his bed
exhausted.

This painful scene was drawing to a close. For
more than an hour the wife had endured it; and now
some straggling rays of the setting sun, gleaming
through the window, fell upon her husband's face,
and showed the change which had been wrought
there, even in that short time. Amid all the inexplicable
phases of that mysterious, mental wandering
which we call insanity, nothing is more wonderful
than the apparently trivial manner, in which its spell
is frequently broken, and reason restored. A word

—a look—the ticking of a clock, or the chirp of a
cricket, has restored those, over whom doctors knit
their brows and looked wise in vain. Was there that,
in the solitary sunbeam, which could harmonize the
deranged faculties of this poor maniac? It seemed
so; for as it played warmly on his cheek, he raised
his eyes suddenly towards it, and appeared to regain
some recollection, bright as itself. His fixed eyelids
relaxed and partially closed, his lips lost their contraction,
and his face its rigidity. Reason was restored.

“He is sensible,” said the student. Every one
started. The miserable wife once more gazed upon
her husband; and, for the first time, since many a
weary month had elapsed, their glances met. A longing
gaze, and the quivering of his lip, told that she
was recognized, but there was no welcome of the
voice. Silence, which may not be broken this side
the grave, had sealed his lips. Bending over him,
she exclaimed, in a voice deepened by the solemnity
of the scene around—

“Albert! do you know me?”

A faint smile illumined his countenance, and his
voice struggled for utterance. Even these poor marks
of recognition were precious in a last interview.

“Will you speak to me?” she continued, her
anxiety increasing as death came nearer. There was
no answer—only the smile hovering around the lips.
That, too, ceased at last, and even the tones of the
wife, begging her husband's farewell, were hushed.
The long pause that succeeded was broken by a deep

groan from the dying man. Stretching himself to his
full length, he rolled his eyes upward, and remained
motionless.

The student spoke first. “He is dead,” said he.

The nurse reached the candle from the window-sill.
Its light, falling upon his features, showed too
truly that death had indeed laid his hand there. She
touched his breast, but the fluttering of the heart had
ceased.

“Poor man!” said the nurse to Mrs. Arnold. “He
had still some tender feelings left. He talked night
and day of you, whom he called his murdered Annie.
I wish the rumseller had but witnessed his death.”

The wife, still kneeling beside him, held one of her
hands over his brow, while with the other she covered
her own. “Oh!” she exclaimed at intervals, while
tears came to her eyes, “did I think, when we first
met, that our last interview would be like this!”

The student stood talking with the other men
“See,” he said to one of them, “the doings of Rum!”