 | Inklings of adventure |  |
SCENES OF FEAR.
1. No. I.
THE DISTURBED VIGIL.
Get me a conjurer, I say! Inquire me out a man that
lets out devils!”
Old Play.
Such a night! It was like a festival of Dian. A
burst of a summer shower at sunset, with a clap or
two of thunder, had purified the air to an intoxicating
rareness, and the free breathing of the flowers, and
the delicious perfume from the earth and grass, and
the fresh foliage of the new spring, showed the delight
and sympathy of inanimate Nature in the night's
beauty. There was no atmosphere—nothing between
the eye and the pearly moon,—and she rode
through the heavens without a veil, like a queen as
she is, giving a glimpse of her nearer beauty for a
festal favour to the worshipping stars.
I was a student at the famed university of Connecticut,
and the bewilderments of philosophy and
poetry were strong upon me, in a place where exquisite
natural beauty, and the absence of all other
temptation, secure to the classic neophite an almost
taste for the horrible in those days, which still clings
to me. I have travelled the world over, with no object
but general observation, and have dawdled my
hour at courts and operas with little interest, while the
sacking and drowning of a woman in the Bosphorus,
the impalement of a robber on the Nile, and the insane
hospitals from Liverpool to Cathay, are described in
my capricious journal with the vividness of the most
stirring adventure.
There is a kind of crystallization in the circumstances
of one's life. A peculiar turn of mind draws
to itself events fitted to its particular nucleus, and it is
frequently a subject of wonder why one man meets
with more remarkable things than another, when it is
owing merely to a difference of natural character.
It was, as I was saying, a night of wonderful beauty.
I was watching a corpse. In that part of the United
States the dead are never left alone till the earth is
thrown upon them, and, as a friend of the family, I
had been called upon for this melancholy service on
the night preceding the interment. It was a death
which had left a family of broken hearts; for, beneath
the sheet which sank so appallingly to the outline of
a human form, lay a wreck of beauty and sweetness
whose loss seemed to the survivors to have darkened
the face of the earth. The ethereal and touching
loveliness of that dying girl, whom I had known only
a hopeless victim of consumption, springs up in my
memory even yet, and mingles with every conception
of female beauty.
Two ladies, friends of the deceased, were to share
my vigils. I knew them but slightly, and, having
read them to sleep an hour after midnight, I performed
my half-hourly duty of entering the room where the
corpse lay, to look after the lights, and then strolled
night. The flowers were glittering in their pearl-drops,
and the air was breathless.
The sight of the long, sheeted corpse, the sudden
flare of lights as the long snuffs were removed from
the candles, the stillness of the close-shuttered room,
and my own predisposition to invest death with a supernatural
interest, had raised my heart to my throat.
I walked backwards and forwards in the garden-path;
and the black shadows beneath the lilacs, and even
the glittering of the glow-worms within them, seemed
weird and fearful.
The clock struck, and I re-entered. My companions
still slept, and I passed on to the inner chamber. I
trimmed the lights, and stood and looked at the white
heap lying so fearfully still within the shadow of the
curtains; and my blood seemed to freeze. At the moment
when I was turning away with a strong effort at
a more composed feeling, a noise like a flutter of wings,
followed by a rush and a sudden silence, struck on my
startled ear. The street was as quiet as death, and the
noise, which was far too audible to be a deception of
the fancy, had come from the side toward an uninhabited
wing of the house. My heart stood still. Another
instant, and the fire-screen was dashed down, and
a white cat rushed past me, and with the speed of light
sprang like a hyena upon the corpse. The flight of a
vampyre into the chamber would not have more
curdled my veins. A convulsive shudder ran cold
over me, but recovering my self-command, I rushed
to the animal, (of whose horrible appetite for the flesh
of the dead I had read incredulously,) and attempted
to tear her from the body. With her claws fixed in the
breast, and a yowl like the wail of an infernal spirit,
she crouched fearlessly upon it, and the stains already
upon the sheet convinced me that it would be impossible
corpse. I seized her by the throat, in the hope of
choking her, but with the first pressure of my fingers,
she flew into my face, and the infuriated animal seemed
persuaded that it was a contest for life. Half-blinded
by the fury of her attack, I loosed her for a moment,
and she immediately leaped again upon the corpse,
and had covered her feet and face with blood before I
could recover my hold upon her. The body was no
longer in a situation to be spared, and I seized her with
a desperate grasp to draw her off; but to my horror,
the half-covered and bloody corpse rose upright in her
fangs, and, while I paused in fear, sat with drooping
arms, and head fallen with ghastly helplessness over
the shoulder. Years have not removed that fearful
spectacle from my eyes.
The corpse sank back, and I succeded in throttling
the monster, and threw her at last lifeless from the
window. I then composed the disturbed limbs, laid
the hair away once more smoothly on the forehead,
and, crossing the hands over the bosom, covered the
violated remains, and left them again to their repose.
My companions, strangely enough, slept on, and I
paced the garden-walk alone, till the day, to my inexpressible
relief, dawned over the mountains.
2. No. II.
THE MAD SENIOR.
I was called upon in my senior year to watch with
an insane student. He was a man who had attracted
a great deal of attention in college. He appeared in
an extraordinary costume at the beginning of our
Freshman Term, and wrote himself down as Washington
Greyling, of —, an unheard-of settlement
somewhere beyond the Mississippi. His coat and
other gear might have been the work of a Chickasaw
tailor, aided by the superintending taste of some white
huntsman, who remembered faintly the outline of habiliments
he had not seen for half a century; it was
a body of green cloth, eked out with wampum and
otter-skin, and would have been ridiculous if it had
not encased one of the finest models of a manly frame
that ever trod the earth. With close-curling black
hair, a fine weather-browned complexion, Spanish features,
(from his mother—a frequent physiognomy in the
countries bordering on Spanish America,) and the port
and lithe motion of a lion, he was a figure to look upon
in any disguise with warm admiration. He was soon
put into the hands of a tailor-proper, and, with the
facility which belongs to his countrymen, became in a
month the best-dressed man in college. His manners
were of a gentleman-like mildness, energetic, but courteous
and chivalresque, and, unlike most savages and
all coins, he polished without “losing his mark.” At
the end of his first term, he would have been called a
high-bred gentleman at any court in Europe.
The opening of his mind was almost as rapid and
extraordinary. He seized every thing with an ardor
and freshness that habit and difficulty never deadened.
star, and was collecting knowledge for a world to
which he was to return. The first in all games, the
wildest in all adventure, the most distinguished even
in the elegant society for which the town is remarkable,
and unfailingly brilliant in his recitations and college
performances, he was looked upon as a sort of
admirable phenomenon, and neither envied nor opposed
in any thing. I have often thought, in looking on
him, that his sensations at coming fresh from a wild
western prairie, and, at the first measure of his capacities
with men of better advantages, finding himself
so uniformly superior, must have been stirringly delightful.
It is a wonder he never became arrogant;
but it was the last foible of which he could have been
accused.
We were reading hard for the honors in the senior
year, when Greyling suddenly lost his reason. He
had not been otherwise ill, and had, apparently in the
midst of high health, gone mad at a moment's warning.
The physicians scarce knew how to treat him.
The confinement to which he was at first subjected,
however, was thought inexpedient, and he seemed to
justify their lenity by the gentlest behavior when at
liberty. He seemed oppressed by a heart-breaking
melancholy. We took our turns in guarding and
watching with him, and it was upon my first night
of duty that the incident happened which I have thus
endeavored to introduce.
It was scarce like a vigil with a sick man, for our
patient went regularly to bed, and usually slept well.
I took my “Lucretius” and the “Book of the Martyrs,”
which was just then my favorite reading, and with hot
punch, a cold chicken, books and a fire, I looked forward
to it as merely a studious night; and, as the
wintry wind of January rattled in at the old college
about me, and congratulated myself on the
excessive comfortableness of my position. The Sybarite's
bed of roses would have been no temptation.
It had snowed all day, but the sun had set with a
red rift in the clouds, and the face of the sky was
swept in an hour to the clearness of—I want a comparison—your
own blue eye, dear Mary! The all-glorious
arch of heaven was a mass of sparkling stars.
Greyling slept, and I, wearied of the cold philosophy
of the Latin poet, took to my “Book of Martyrs.”
I read on, and read on. The college clock struck, it
seemed to me, the quarters rather than the hours.
Time flew: it was three.
“Horrible! most horrible!” I started from my chair
with the exclamation, and felt as if my scalp were self-lifted
from my head. It was a description in the harrowing
faithfulness of the language of olden time,
painting almost the articulate groans of an impaled
Christian. I clasped the old iron bound book, and
rushed to the window as if my heart was stifling for
fresh air.
Again at the fire. The large walnut faggots had
burnt to a bed of bright coals, and I sat gazing into
it, totally unable to shake off the fearful incubus from
my breast. The martyr was there,—on the very hearth,
—with the stakes scornfully crossed in his body; and
as the large coals cracked asunder and revealed the
brightness within, I seemed to follow the nerve rending
instrument from hip to shoulder, and suffer with
him pang for pang, as if the burning redness were the
pools of his fevered blood.
“Aha!”
It struck on my ear like the cry of an exulting fiend.
“Aha!”
I shrunk into the chair as the awful cry was repeated,
my shoulder. A single fierce eye was fixed upon me
from the mass of bed-clothes, and, for a moment, the
relief from the fear of some supernatural presence was
like water to a parched tongue. I sank back relieved
into the chair.
There was a rustling immediately in the bed, and,
starting again, I found the wild eyes of my patient
fixed still steadfastly upon me. He was creeping
stealthily out of bed. His bare foot touched the floor,
and his toes worked upon it as if he was feeling its
strength, and in a moment he stood upright on his
feet, and, with his head forward and his pale face livid
with rage, stepped towards me. I looked to the door.
He observed the glance, and in the next instant he
sprang clear over the bed, turned the key, and dashed
it furiously through the window.
“Now!” said he.
“Greyling!” I said. I had heard that a calm and
fixed gaze would control a madman, and with the
most difficult exertion of nerve, I met his lowering
eye, and we stood looking at each other for a full minute,
like men of marble.
“Why have you left your bed?” I mildly asked.
“To kill you!” was the appalling answer; and in
another moment the light-stand was swept from between
us, and he struck me down with a blow that
would have felled a giant. Naked as he was, I had
no hold upon him, even if in muscular strength I had
been his match; and with a minute's struggle I yielded,
for resistance was vain. His knee was now upon my
breast and his left hand in my hair, and he seemed
by the tremulousness of his clutch to be hesitating
whether he should dash my brains out on the hearth.
I could scarce breathe with his weight upon my chest,
but I tried, with the broken words I could command,
to move his pity. He laughed, as only maniacs can,
ever forget the fiendish deliberation with which he
closed those feverish fingers?
“Greyling! for God's sake! Greyling!”
“Die! curse you!”
In the agonies of suffocation I struck out my arm,
and almost buried it in the fire upon the hearth.
With an expiring thought, I grasped a handful of the
red-hot coals, and had just strength sufficient to press
them hard against his side.
“Thank God!” I exclaimed with my first breath,
as my eyes recovered from their sickness, and I looked
upon the familiar objects of my chamber once more.
The madman sat crouched like a whipped dog in
the farthest corner of the room, gibbering and moaning,
with his hands upon his burnt side. I felt that I
had escaped death by a miracle.
The door was locked, and, in dread of another attack,
I threw up the broken window, and to my
unutterable joy the figure of a man was visible upon
the snow near the out-buildings of the college. It
was a charity-student, risen before day to labour in
the wood-yard. I shouted to him, and Greyling leapt
to his feet.
“There is time yet!” said the madman; but as he
came towards me again, with the same panther-like
caution as before, I seized a heavy stone pitcher
standing in the window-seat, and hurling it at him
with a fortunate force and aim, he fell stunned and
bleeding on the floor. The door was burst open at
the next moment, and, calling for assistance, we tied
the wild Missourian into his bed, bound up his head
and side, and committed him to fresh watchers....
We have killed bears together at a Missouri Salt
Lick since then; but I never see Wash. Greyling
with the smile off his face, without a disposition to
look around for the door.
3. No. III.
THE LUNATIC'S SKATE.
I have only, in my life, known one lunatic—properly
so called. In the days when I carried a satchel
on the banks of the Shawsheen, (a river whose half-lovely,
half-wild scenery is tied like a silver thread
about my heart,) Larry Wynn and myself were the
farthest boarders from school, in a solitary farm-house
on the edge of a lake of some miles square, called by
the undignified title of Pomp's Pond. An old negro,
who was believed by the boys to have come over with
Christopher Columbus, was the only other human
being within any thing like a neighbourhood of the
lake, (it took its name from him,) and the only approaches
to its waters, girded in as it was by an
almost impenetrable forest, were the path through old
Pomp's clearing, and that by our own door. Out of
school, Larry and I were inseparable. He was a pale,
sad-faced boy, and, in the first days of our intimacy,
he had confided a secret to me which, from its uncommon
nature, and the excessive caution with
which he kept it from every one else, bound me to
him with more than the common ties of schoolfellow
attachment. We built wigwams together in the
woods, had our tomahawks made of the same fashion,
united our property in fox-traps, and played Indians
with perfect contentment in each other's approbation.
I had found out, soon after my arrival at school,
that Larry never slept on a moonlight night. With
the first slender horn that dropped its silver and graceful
shape behind the hills, his uneasiness commenced,
and by the time its full and perfect orb poured a flood
of radiance over vale and mountain, he was like one
closed the shutters, stuffing every crevice that could
admit a ray; and then, lighting as many candles as
he could beg or steal from our thrifty landlord, he sat
down with his book, in moody silence, or paced the
room with an uneven step, and a solemn melancholy
in his fine countenance, of which, with all my familiarity
with him, I was almost afraid. Violent exercise
seemed the only relief, and when the candles
burnt low after midnight, and the stillness around the
lone farm-house became too absolute to endure, he
would throw up the window, and, leaping desperately
out into the moonlight, rush up the hill into the depths
of the wild forest, and walk on with supernatural excitement
till the day dawned. Faint and pale he
would then creep into his bed, and, begging me to
make his very common and always credited excuse of
illness, sleep soundly till I returned from school. I
soon became used to his way, ceased to follow him,
as I had once or twice endeavoured to do, into the
forest, and never attempted to break in on the fixed
and rapt silence which seemed to transform his lips
to marble. And for all this Larry loved me.
Our preparatory studies were completed, and, to
our mutual despair, we were destined to different
universities. Larry's father was a disciple of the great
Channing, and mine a Trinitarian of uncommon
zeal; and the two institutions of Yale and Harvard
were in the hands of most eminent men of either
persuasion, and few are the minds that could resist a
four years' ordeal in either. A student was as certain
to come forth a Unitarian from one as a Calvinist
from the other; and in the New-England States these
two sects are bitterly hostile. So, to the glittering
atmosphere of Channing and Everett went poor Larry,
lonely and dispirited; and I was committed to the
miles off, to learn Latin and Greek, if it pleased
Heaven, but the mysteries of “election and free grace,”
whether or no.
Time crept, ambled, and galloped by turns, as we
were in love or out, moping in term-time, or revelling
in vacation, and gradually, I know not why, our correspondence
had dropped, and the four years had
come to their successive deaths, and we had never
met. I grieved over it; for in those days I believed
with a school-boy's fatuity,
“That two, or one, are almost what they seem;”
man or woman again—with a pain at my heart. I
wrote one or two reproachful letters in my senior
years, but his answers were overstrained, and too full
of protestations by half; and seeing that absence had
done its usual work on him, I gave it up, and wrote
an epitaph on a departed friendship. I do not know,
by the way, why I am detaining you with all this, for
it has nothing to do with my story; but let it pass as
an evidence that it is a true one. The climax of
things in real life has not the regular procession of
incidents in a tragedy.
Some two or three years after we had taken “the
irrevocable yoke” of life upon us, (not matrimony,
but money-making,) a winter occurred of uncommonly
fine sleighing—sledging, you call it in England.
At such times the American world is all
abroad, either for business or pleasure. The roads
are passable at any rate of velocity of which a horse
is capable; smooth as montagnes Russes, and hard
as is good for hoofs; and a hundred miles is diminished
to ten in facility of locomotion. The hunter
brings down his venison to the cities, the western
and tracts, and parties of all kinds scour the
country, drinking mulled wine and “flip,” and shaking
the very nests out of the fir-trees with the ringing of
their horses' bells. You would think death and sorrow
were buried in the snow with the leaves of the
last autumn.
I do not know why I undertook, at this time, a
journey to the west; certainly not for scenery, for it
was a world of waste, desolate, and dazzling whiteness,
for a thousand unbroken miles. The trees were
weighed down with snow, and the houses were
thatched and half-buried in it, and the mountains and
valleys were like the vast waves of an illimitable sea,
congealed with its yesty foam in the wildest hour of a
tempest. The eye lost its powers in gazing on it.
The “spirit-bird” that spread his refreshing green
wings before the pained eyes of Thalaba would have
been an inestimable fellow-traveller. The worth of
the eyesight lay in the purchase of a pair of green
goggles.
In the course of a week or two, after skimming over
the buried scenery of half a dozen states, each as
large as Great Britain, (more or less,) I found myself
in a small town on the border of one of our western
lakes. It was some twenty years since the bears had
found it thinly settled enough for their purposes, and
now it contained perhaps twenty thousand souls.
The oldest inhabitant, born in the town, was a youth
in his minority. With the usual precocity of new
settlements, it had already most of the peculiarities of
an old metropolis. The burnt stumps still stood about
among the houses, but there was a fashionable circle,
at the head of which were the lawyer's wife and the
member of Congress's daughter; and people ate their
peas with silver forks, and drank their tea with scandal,
woman's one, very much as in towns whose history
is written in black letter. I dare say there were
not more than one or two offences against the moral
and Levitical law, fashionable on this side the water,
which had not been committed, with the authentic
aggravations, in the town of —; I would mention
the name if this were not a true story.
Larry Wynn (now Lawrence Wynn, Esq.) lived
here. He had, as they say in the United States, “hung
out a shingle” (Londonicé, put up a sign) as attorney
at law, and to all the twenty thousand innocent inhabitants
of the place, he was the oracle and the squire.
He was besides colonel of militia, churchwarden, and
canal commissioner; appointments which speak volumes
for the prospects of “rising young men” in our
flourishing republic.
Larry was glad to see me—very. I was more glad
to see him. I have a soft heart, and forgive a wrong
generally, if it touches neither my vanity nor my
purse. I forgot his neglect, and called him “Larry.”
By the same token he did not call me “Phil.” (There
are very few that love me, patient reader; but those
who do, thus abbreviate my pleasant name of Philip.
I was called after the Indian Sachem of that name,
whose blood runs in this tawny hand.) Larry looked
upon me as a man. I looked on him, with all his
dignities and changes, through the sweet vista of
memory—as a boy. His mouth had acquired the
pinched corners of caution and mistrust common to
those who know their fellow men; but I never saw it
unless when speculating as I am now. He was to me
the pale-faced and melancholy friend of my boyhood;
and I could have slept, as I used to do, with my arm
around his neck, and feared to stir lest I should wake
him. Had my last earthly hope lain in the palm of
it, but to make him sleep; and yet he thought of me
but as a stranger under his roof, and added, in his
warmest moments, a “Mr.” to my name! There is
but one circumstance in my life that has wounded
me more. Memory, avaunt!
Why should there be no unchangeableness in the
world? why no friendship? or why am I, and you,
gentle reader, (for by your continuing to pore over
these idle musings, you have a heart too,) gifted with
this useless and restless organ beating in our bosoms,
if its thirst for love is never to be slaked, and its aching
self-fulness never to find flow or utterance? I
would positively sell my whole stock of affections for
three farthings. Will you say “two?”
“You are come in good time,” said Larry one morning,
with a half-smile, “and shall be groomsman to
me. I am going to be married.”
“Married?”
“Married.”
I repeated the word after him, for I was surprised.
He had never opened his lips about his unhappy lunacy
since my arrival, and I had felt hurt at this apparent
unwillingness to renew our ancient confidence,
but had felt a repugnance to any forcing of the topic
upon him, and could only hope that he had outgrown
or overcome it. I argued, immediately on this information
of his intended marriage, that it must be so.
No man in his senses, I thought, would link an impending
madness to the fate of a confiding and lovely
woman.
He took me into his sleigh, and we drove to her
father's house. She was a flower in the wilderness.
Of a delicate form, as all my countrywomen are, and
lovely, as quite all certainly are not, large-eyed, soft
in her manners, and yet less timid than confiding and
caught, perhaps, with the “trick of sadness” from himself,
and a patrician slightness of reserve, or pride,
which Nature sometimes, in very mockery of high
birth, teaches her most secluded child,—the bride elect
was, as I said before, a flower in the wilderness. She
was one of those women we sigh to look upon as they
pass by, as if there went a fragment of the wreck of
some blessed dream.
The day arrived for the wedding, and the sleigh-bells
jingled merrily into the village. The morning
was as soft and genial as June, and the light snow on
the surface of the lake melted, and lay on the breast
of the solid ice beneath, giving it the effect of one white
silver mirror, stretching to the edge of the horizon.
It was exquisitely beautiful, and I was standing at the
window in the afternoon, looking off upon the shining
expanse, when Larry approached, and laid his hand
familiarly on my shoulder.
“What glorious skating we shall have,” said I, “if
this smooth water freezes to-night!”
I turned the next moment to look at him; for we
had not skated together since I went out, at his earnest
entreaty, at midnight, to skim the little lake where we
had passed our boyhood, and drive away the fever
from his brain, under the light of a full moon.
He remembered it, and so did I; and I put my arm
behind him, for the colour fled from his face, and I
thought he would have sunk to the floor.
“The moon is full to-night,” said he, recovering instantly
to a cold self-possession.
I took hold of his hand firmly, and, in as kind a
tone as I could summon, spoke of our early friendship,
and apologizing thus for the freedom, asked if he
had quite overcome his melancholy disease. His face
worked with emotion, and he tried to withdraw his
an answer.
“Tell me, dear Larry,” said I.
“Oh God! No!” said he, breaking violently from
me, and throwing himself with his face downwards
upon the sofa. The tears streamed through his fingers
upon the silken cushion.
“Not cured? And does she know it?”
“No! no! thank God! not yet!”
I remained silent a few minutes, listening to his
suppressed moans, (for he seemed heart-broken with
the confession,) and pitying while I inwardly condemned
him. And then the picture of that lovely and
fond woman rose up before me, and the impossibility
of concealing his fearful malady from his wife, and
the fixed insanity in which it must end, and the whole
wreck of her hopes and his own prospects and happiness,—and
my heart grew sick.
I sat down by him, and, as it was too late to remonstrate
on the injustice he was committing toward her,
I asked how he came to appoint the night of a full
moon for his wedding. He gave up his reserve, calmed
himself, and talked of it at last as if he were relieved
by the communication. Never shall I forget the
doomed pallor, the straining eye, and feverish hand
of my poor friend during that half hour.
Since he had left college he had striven with the
whole energy of his soul against it. He had plunged
into business,—he had kept his bed resolutely night
after night, till his brain seemed on the verge of frenzy
with the effort,—he had taken opium to secure to himself
an artificial sleep;—but he had never dared to confide
it to any one, and he had no friend to sustain him
in his fearful and lonely hours; and it grew upon him
rather than diminished. He described to me with the
most touching pathos how he had concealed it for
to his insane restlessness in the silent streets of the city
at midnight, and in the more silent solitudes of the
forest,—how he had prayed, and wrestled, and wept
over it,—and finally, how he had come to believe that
there was no hope for him except in the assistance and
constant presence of some one who would devote life
to him in love and pity. Poor Larry! I put up a silent
prayer in my heart that the desperate experiment might
not end in agony and death.
The sun set, and, according to my prediction, the
wind changed suddenly to the north, and the whole
surface of the lake in a couple of hours became of the
lustre of polished steel. It was intensely cold.
The fires blazed in every room of the bride's paternal
mansion, and I was there early to fulfil my office
of master of ceremonies at the bridal. My heart was
weighed down with a sad boding, but I shook off at
least the appearance of it, and superintended the concoction
of a huge bowl of punch with a merriment
which communicated itself in the shape of most joyous
hilarity to a troop of juvenile relations. The house
resounded with their shouts of laughter.
In the midst of our noise in the small inner room
entered Larry. I started back, for he looked more like
a demon possessed than a Christian man. He had walked
to the house alone in the moonlight, not daring to trust
himself in company. I turned out the turbulent troop
about me, and tried to dispel his gloom, for a face like
his at that moment would have put to flight the rudest
bridal party ever assembled on holy ground. He
seized on the bowl of strong spirits which I had mixed
for a set of hardy farmers, and before I could tear it
from his lips had drunk a quantity which, in an ordinary
mood, would have intoxicated him helplessly in
an hour. He then sat down with his face buried in
his hands, and in a few minutes rose, his eyes sparkling
face utterly changed. I thought he had gone wild.
“Now, Phil,” said he; “now for my bride!” And
with an unbecoming levity he threw open the door,
and went half dancing into the room where the friends
were already assembled to witness the ceremony.
I followed with fear and anxiety. He took his place
by the side of the fair creature on whom he had placed
his hopes of life, and, though sobered somewhat by
the impressiveness of the scene, the wild sparkle still
danced in his eyes, and I could see that every nerve
in his frame was excited to the last pitch of tension.
If he had fallen a gibbering maniac on the floor, I
should not have been astonished.
The ceremony proceeded, and the first tone of his
voice in the response startled even the bride. If it
had rung from the depths of a cavern, it could not have
been more sepulchral. I looked at him with a shudder.
His lips were curled with an exulting expression,
mixed with an indefinable fear; and all the blood
in his face seemed settled about his eyes, which were
so bloodshot and fiery, that I have ever since wondered
he was not, at the first glance, suspected of insanity.
But oh! the heavenly sweetness with which
that loveliest of creatures promised to love and cherish
him, in sickness and in health! I never go to a bridal
but it half breaks my heart; and as the soft voice
of that beautiful girl fell with its eloquent meaning on
my ear, and I looked at her, with lips calm and eyes
moistened, vowing a love which I knew to be stronger
than death, to one who, I feared, was to bring only
pain and sorrow into her bosom, my eyes warmed
with irrepressible tears, and I wept.
The stir in the room as the clergyman closed his
prayer seemed to awake him from a trance. He looked
around with a troubled face for a moment; and
his arms about her, and straining her violently to
his bosom, broke into an hysterical passion of tears
and laughter. Then suddenly resuming his self-command,
he apologized for the over-excitement of his
feelings, and behaved with forced and gentle propriety
till the guests departed.
There was an apprehensive gloom over the spirits
of the small bridal party left in the lighted rooms;
and, as they gathered round the fire, I approached,
and endeavoured to take a gay farewell. Larry was
sitting with his arm about his wife, and he wrung
my hand in silence as I said, “Good night,” and
dropped his head upon her shoulder. I made some
futile attempt to rally him, but it jarred on the general
feeling, and I left the house.
It was a glorious night. The clear piercing air had
a vitreous brilliancy, which I have never seen in any
other climate, the rays of the moonlight almost visibly
splintering with the keenness of the frost. The
moon herself was in the zenith, and there seemed
nothing between her and the earth but palpable and
glittering cold.
I hurried home: it was but eleven o'clock; and,
heaping up the wood in the large fire-place, I took a
volume of “Ivanhoe,” which had just then appeared,
and endeavoured to rid myself of my unpleasant
thoughts. I read on till midnight; and then, in a
pause of the story, I rose to look out upon the night,
hoping, for poor Larry's sake, that the moon was
buried in clouds. The house was near the edge of
the lake: and as I looked down upon the glassy waste,
spreading away from the land, I saw the dark figure
of a man kneeling directly in the path of the moon's
rays. In another moment he rose to his feet, and
the tall, slight form of my poor friend was distinctly
away upon his skates along the shore.
To take my own Hollanders, put a collar of fur
around my mouth, and hurry after him, was the
work of but a minute. My straps were soon fastened;
and, following in the marks of the sharp irons at the
top of my speed, I gained sight of him in about half
an hour, and with great effort neared him sufficiently
to shout his name with a hope of being heard.
“Larry! Larry!”
The lofty mountain-shore gave back the cry in repeated
echoes; but he redoubled his strokes, and
sped on faster than before. At my utmost speed I followed
on; and when, at last, I could almost lay my
hand on his shoulder, I summoned my strength to
my breathless lungs, and shouted again—“Larry!
Larry!”
He half looked back, and the full moon at that instant
streamed full into his eyes. I have thought
since that he could not have seen me for its dazzling
brightness; but I saw every line of his features with
the distinctness of daylight, and I shall never forget
them. A line of white foam ran through his half-parted
lips; his hair streamed wildly over his forehead,
on which the perspiration glittered in large drops;
and every lineament of his expressive face was stamped
with unutterable and awful horror. He looked
back no more; but, increasing his speed with an
energy of which I did not think his slender frame capable,
he began gradually to outstrip me. Trees,
rocks, and hills fled back like magic. My limbs began
to grow numb; my fingers had lost all feeling, but a
strong north-east wind was behind us, and the ice
smoother than a mirror; and I struck out my feet
mechanically, and still sped on.
For two hours we had kept along the shore. The
ice, and the hills seemed hanging in the air, and floating
past us with the velocity of storm-clouds. Far
down the lake, however, there glimmered the just
visible light of a fire, and I was thanking God that we
were probably approaching some human succour,
when, to my horror, the retreating figure before me
suddenly darted off to the left, and made swifter than
before toward the centre of the icy waste. Oh, God!
what feelings were mine at that moment. Follow him
far I dared not; for, the sight of land once lost, as it
would be almost instantly with our tremendous speed,
we perished, without a possibility of relief.
He was far beyond my voice, and to overtake him
was the only hope. I summoned my last nerve for
the effort, and, keeping him in my eye, struck across
at a sharper angle, with the advantage of the wind
full in my back. I had taken note of the mountains,
and knew that we were already forty miles from
home, a distance it would be impossible to retrace
against the wind; and the thought of freezing to
death, even if I could overtake him, forced itself appallingly
upon me.
Away I flew, despair giving new force to my limbs,
and soon gained on the poor lunatic, whose efforts
seemed flagging and faint. I neared him. Another
struggle! I could have dropped down where I was,
and slept, if there were death in the first minute, so
stiff and drowsy was every muscle in my frame.
“Larry!” I shouted. “Larry!”
He started at the sound, and I could hear a smothered
and breathless shriek, as, with supernatural
strength, he straightened up his bending figure, and,
leaning forward again, sped away from me like a
phantom on the blast.
I could follow no longer. I stood stiff on my skates,
look after him, but the frost had stiffened my eyes,
and there was a mist before them, and they felt like
glass. Nothing was visible around me but moonlight
and ice, and dimly and slowly I began to retrace the
slight path of semicircles toward the shore. It was
painful work. The wind seemed to divide the very
fibres of the skin upon my face. Violent exercise no
longer warmed my body, and I felt the cold shoot
sharply into my loins, and bind across my breast like
a chain of ice; and, with the utmost strength of
mind at my command, I could just resist the terrible
inclination to lie down and sleep. I forgot poor
Larry. Life—dear life!—was now my only thought!
So selfish are we in our extremity!
With difficulty I at last reached the shore, and then,
unbuttoning my coat, and spreading it wide for a sail,
I set my feet together, and went slowly down before
the wind, till the fire which I had before noticed began
to blaze cheerily in the distance. It seemed an
eternity in my slow progress. Tree after tree threw
the shadow of its naked branches across the way; hill
after hill glided slowly backward; but my knees
seemed frozen together, and my joints fixed in ice;
and if my life had depended on striking out my feet,
I should have died powerless. My jaws were locked,
my shoulders drawn half down to my knees, and in a
few minutes more, I am well convinced, the blood
would have thickened in my veins, and stood still, for
ever.
I could see the tongues of the flames—I counted
the burning faggots—a form passed between me and
the fire—I struck, and fell prostrate on the snow; and
I remember no more.
The sun was darting a slant beam through the trees
when I awoke. The genial warmth of a large bed of
me, and beneath my head was a soft cushion of withered
leaves. On the opposite side of the fire lay four Indians
wrapped in their blankets, and, with her head on
her knees, and her hands clasped over her ankles, sat an
Indian woman, who had apparently fallen asleep upon
her watch. The stir I made aroused her, and, as she
piled on fresh faggots, and kindled them to a bright
blaze with a handful of leaves, drowsiness came over
me again, and I wrapped the blanket about me more
closely, and shut my eyes to sleep.
I awoke refreshed. It must have been ten o'clock
by the sun. The Indians were about, occupied in vavarious
avocations, and the woman was broiling a slice
of deer's flesh on the coals. She offered it to me as I
rose; and having eaten part of it with a piece of a
cake made of meal, I requested her to call in the men,
and with offers of reward, easily induced them to go
with me in search of my lost friend.
We found him, as I had anticipated, frozen to death,
far out on the lake. The Indians tracked him by the
marks of his skate-irons, and from their appearance he
had sunk quietly down, probably drowsy and exhausted,
and had died of course without pain. His
last act seemed to have been under the influence of
his strange madness, for he lay on his face, turned
from the quarter of the setting moon.
We carried him home to his bride. Even the Indians
were affected by her uncontrollable agony. I
cannot describe that scene, familiar as I am with pictures
of horror.
I made inquiries with respect to the position of his
bridal chamber. There were no shutters, and the
moon streamed broadly into it, and after kissing his
shrinking bride with the violence of a madman, he
sprang out of the room with a terrific scream, and she
saw him no more till he lay dead on his bridal bed.
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