Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas
meas aliquantulum forelevatas.
Ebn Zaiat.
Misery
is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the
wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that
arch as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide
horizon as 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
today, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies
which might have been.
My baptismal name is Egaeus; 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 of the chief saloon in
the tapestries of the dormitories, in the chiselling 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 aerial 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 wonderful what stagnation there
fell upon the springs of my life, wonderful how total an inversion took
place in the character of my commonest thought. 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 its 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, the spirit of change swept over her,
pervading 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 is 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 mean time 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 assumed finally a monomaniac
character of a novel and extraordinary form, hourly and momently gaining
vigor, and at length obtaining over me the most incomprehensible
ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid
irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science
termed the attentive. It is more than probable that I am not understood;
but I fear, indeed, that it is 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 powers of meditation
(not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the
contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.
To
muse for long unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to some
frivolous device on 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, by means 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, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object
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 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, Coelius Secundus Curio, “De Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei;”
St. Austin’s great work, the “City of God;” and Tertullian’s “De Carne
Christi,” in which the paradoxical sentence “Mortuus est Dei filius;
credible 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 alteration produced by her unhappy malady,
in the moral condition of Berenice, would afford me many objects for
the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature I have
been at some trouble in explaining, yet such was not in any degree 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 in the singular and
most appalling distortion of her personal identity.
During the
brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved
her. In the 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 trellised shadows of
the forest at noonday 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,
earthy, 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 called to mind 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, I
sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner apartment of the
library. But, uplifting my eyes, I saw that Berenice stood before me.
Was
it my own excited imagination, or the misty influence of the
atmosphere, or the uncertain twilight of the chamber, or the gray
draperies which fell around her figure that caused in it so vacillating
and indistinct an outline ? 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, with my eyes riveted 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 jetty hair fell partially
over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets,
now of a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic
character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes
were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupilless, and I shrank
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 up, I found that my cousin had
departed from the 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 on their surface, not a shade
on their enamel, not an indenture in their edges but what that 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 everywhere, 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. For
these I longed with a phrenzied desire. 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. I 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
Mademoiselle Salle it has been well said, “Que tous ses pas etaient des
sentiments,” and of Berenice I more seriously believed que toutes ses
dents etaient des idees. Des idees! - ah here was the idiotic thought
that destroyed me ! Des idees ! - ah therefore it was that I coveted
them so madly! I felt that their possession could alone ever restore me
to peace, in giving me back to reason.
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 ascendancy, as, with the most vivid hideous
distinctness, it floated about amid the changing lights and shadows of
the chamber. At length there broke in upon my dreams a 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 from my seat, and throwing open one of the doors of the
library, saw standing out in the ante-chamber a servant maiden, all in
tears, who told me that Berenice was...no more ! She had been seized
with epilepsy 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.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I
found myself 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 intervened I had no positive, at least no definite
comprehension. Yet its memory was replete with horror - horror more
horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It
was a fearful page in the record 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 ? I asked
myself the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber
answered me, - “what was it ?”
On the table beside me burned a
lamp, and near it lay a little box. It was of no remarkable character,
and I had seen it frequently before, for it was the property of the
family physician; but how came it there, upon my table, and why did I
shudder in regarding it ? These things were in no 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
ones 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 become congealed 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 enshrouded, yet still breathing still palpitating, still
alive !
He pointed to garments; they were muddy and clotted with
gore. I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand: 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 box that lay upon it.
But I could not force it open; and in my tremor, it slipped from my
hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a
rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery,
intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances
that were scattered to and fro about the floor.
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