“O that my lungs could bleat like buttered pease,” &c.
“O that my lungs could bleat like buttered pease,” &c.
“O that my lungs could bleat like buttered pease,” &c.
“O that my lungs could bleat like buttered pease,” &c.
There is no proof whatever that these miserable lines were really written by Lee, except that the measure is the fashionable quatrain of the period. It is singular that Stanton read on without suspicion of his own danger, quite absorbed inthe album of a mad-house, without ever reflecting on the place where he was, and which such compositions too manifestly designated.
It was after a long interval that he looked round, and perceived that his companion was gone. Bells were unusual then. He proceeded to the door,—it was fastened. He called aloud,—his voice was echoed in a moment by many others, but in tones so wild and discordant, that he desisted in involuntary terror. As the day advanced, and no one approached, he tried the window, and then perceived for the first time it was grated. It looked out on the narrow flagged yard, in which no human being was; and if there had, fromsuch a being no human feeling could have been extracted.
Sickening with unspeakable horror, he sunk rather than sat down beside the miserable window, and “wished for day.”
* * * *
At midnight he started from a doze, half a swoon, half a sleep, which probably the hardness of his seat, and of the deal table on which he leaned, had not contributed to prolong.
He was in complete darkness; the horror of his situation struck him at once, and for a moment he was indeed almost qualified for an inmate of that dreadful mansion. He felt his way to the door, shook it with desperate strength, and uttered the most frightful cries, mixed with expostulations and commands. His cries were in a moment echoed by a hundred voices. In maniacs there is a peculiar malignity, accompanied by an extraordinary acuteness of some of the senses, particularly in distinguishing the voice of astranger. The cries that he heard on every side seemed like a wild and infernal yell of joy, that their mansion of misery had obtained another tenant.
He paused, exhausted,—a quick and thundering step was heard in the passage. The door was opened, and a man of savage appearance stood at the entrance,—two more were seen indistinctly in the passage.—“Release me, villain!” “Stop, my fine fellow, what’s all this noise for?” “Where am I?” “Where you ought to be.” “Will you dare to detain me?” “Yes, and a little more than that,” answered the ruffian, applying a loaded horse-whip to his back and shoulders, till the patient soon fell to the ground convulsed with rage and pain. “Now you see you are where you ought to be,” repeated the ruffian, brandishing the horse-whip over him, “and now take the advice of a friend, and make no more noise. The lads are ready for you with the darbies, and they’ll clink them on in the crack of this whip,unless you prefer another touch of it first.” They then were advancing into the room as he spoke, with fetters in their hands, (strait waistcoats being then little known or used), and shewed, by their frightful countenances and gestures, no unwillingness to apply them. Their harsh rattle on the stone pavement made Stanton’s blood run cold; the effect, however, was useful. He had the presence of mind to acknowledge his (supposed) miserable condition, to supplicate the forbearance of the ruthless keeper, and promise complete submission to his orders. This pacified the ruffian, and he retired.
Stanton collected all his resolution to encounter the horrible night; he saw all that was before him, and summoned himself to meet it. After much agitated deliberation, he conceived it best to continue the same appearance of submission and tranquillity, hoping that thus he might in time either propitiate the wretches in whose hands he was, or, by his apparentinoffensiveness, procure such opportunities of indulgence, as might perhaps ultimately facilitate his escape. He therefore determined to conduct himself with the utmost tranquillity, and never to let his voice be heard in the house; and he laid down several other resolutions with a degree of prudence which he already shuddered to think might be the cunning of incipient madness, or the beginning result of the horrid habits of the place.
These resolutions were put to desperate trial that very night. Just next to Stanton’s apartment were lodged two most uncongenial neighbours. One of them was a puritanical weaver, who had been driven mad by a single sermon from the celebrated Hugh Peters, and was sent to the mad-house as full of election and reprobation as he could hold,—and fuller. He regularly repeated over thefive pointswhile day-light lasted, and imagined himself preaching in a conventicle with distinguished success; towards twilight hisvisions were more gloomy, and at midnight his blasphemies became horrible. In the opposite cell was lodged a loyalist tailor, who had been ruined by giving credit to the cavaliers and their ladies,—(for at this time, and much later, down to the reign of Anne, tailors were employed by females evento makeandfit on their stays),—who had run mad with drink and loyalty on the burning of the Rump, and ever since had made the cells of the mad-house echo with fragments of the ill-fated Colonel Lovelace’s songs, scraps from Cowley’s “Cutter of Coleman street,” and some curious specimens from Mrs AphraBehn’splays, where the cavaliers are denominated theheroicks, and Lady Lambert and Lady Desborough represented as going to meeting, their large Bibles carried before them by their pages, and falling in love with two banished cavaliers by the way.—“Tabitha, Tabitha,” cried a voice half in exultation and half in derision; “thou shalt go with thy hair curled, andthy breasts naked;”—and then added in an affected voice,—“I could dance the Canaries once, spouse.” This never failed to rouse the feelings, or rather operate on the instincts of the puritanic weaver, who immediately answered, “Colonel Harrison shall come out of the west, riding on a sky-coloured mule, which signifies instruction(10).” “Ye lie, ye round-head son of a b——h,” roared the cavalier tailor, “Colonel Harrison will be damned before he ever mounts a sky-coloured mule;” and he concluded this pithy sentence with fragments of anti-Oliverian songs.
“And may I live to seeOld Noll upon a tree,And many such as he;Confound him, confound him,Diseases all around him.”
“And may I live to seeOld Noll upon a tree,And many such as he;Confound him, confound him,Diseases all around him.”
“And may I live to seeOld Noll upon a tree,And many such as he;Confound him, confound him,Diseases all around him.”
“And may I live to see
Old Noll upon a tree,
And many such as he;
Confound him, confound him,
Diseases all around him.”
“Ye are honest gentlemen, I can play many tunes,” squeaked a poor mad loyalistfiddler, who had been accustomed to play in the taverns to the cavalier party, and just remembered the words of a similar minstrel playing for Colonel Blunt in the committee. “Then play me the air to “Rebellion is breaking up house,” exclaimed the tailor, dancing wildly about his cell (as far as his chains allowed him) to an imaginary measure. The weaver could contain no longer. “How long, Lord, how long,” he exclaimed, “shall thine enemies insult thy sanctuary, in which I have been placed an anointed teacher? even here, where I am placed to preach to the souls in prison?—Open the flood-gates of thy power, and though thy waves and storms go over me, let me testify in the midst of them, even as he who spreadeth forth his hands to swim may raise one of them to warn his companion that he is about to sink.—Sister Ruth, why dost thou uncover thy bosom to discover my frailty?—Lord, let thine arm of power be with us as it was when thoubrakest the shield, the sword, and the battle,—when thy foot was dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs was red through the same.—Dip all thy garments in blood, and let me weave thee fresh when thou art stained.—When shall thy saints tread the wine-press of thy wrath? Blood! blood! the saints call for it, earth gapes to swallow it, hell thirsts for it!—Sister Ruth, I pray thee, conceal thy bosom, and be not as the vain women of this generation.—Oh for a day like that, a day of the Lord of hosts, when the towers fell!—Spare me in the battle, for I am not a mighty man of war; leave me in the rear of the host, to curse, with the curse of Meroz, those who come not to the help of the Lord against the mighty,—even to curse this malignant tailor,—yea, curse him bitterly.—Lord, I am in the tents of Kedar, my feet stumble on the dark mountains,—I fall,—I fall!”—And the poor wretch, exhausted by his delirious agonies, fell, and grovelled forsome time in his straw. “Oh! I have had a grievous fall,—Sister Ruth,—Oh Sister Ruth!—Rejoice not against me, Oh mine enemy! though I fall, I shall rise again.” Whatever satisfaction Sister Ruth might have derived from this assurance, if she could have heard it, was enjoyed tenfold by the weaver, whose amorous reminiscences were in a moment exchanged for war-like ones, borrowed from a wretched and disarranged mass of intellectual rubbish. “The Lord is a man of war,” he shouted.—“Look to Marston Moor!—Look to the city, the proud city, full of pride and sin!—Look to the waves of the Severn, as red with blood as the waves of the Red Sea!—There were the hoofs broken by means of the prancings, the prancings of the mighty ones.—Then, Lord, was thy triumph, and the triumph of thy saints, to bind their kings in chains, and their nobles in links of iron.” The malignant tailor burst out in his turn: “Thank thefalse Scots, and their solemn league and covenant, and Carisbrook Castle, for that, ye crop-eared Puritan,” he yelled. “If it had not been for them, I would have taken measure of the king for a velvet cloak as high as the Tower of London, and one flirt of its folds would have knocked the “copper nose” into the Thames, and sent it a-drift to Hell.” “Ye lie, in your teeth,” echoed the weaver; “and I will prove it unarmed, with my shuttle against your needle, and smite you to the earth thereafter, as David smoteGoliath. It wasthe man’s(such was the indecent language in which Charles the First was spoken of by the Puritans)—it was the man’s carnal, self-seeking, world-loving, prelatical hierarchy, that drove the godly to seek the sweet word in season from their own pastors, who righteously abominated the Popish garniture of lawn-sleeves, lewd organs, and steeple houses. Sister Ruth, tempt me not with that calf’s head, it isall streaming with blood;—drop it, I beseech thee, sister, it is unmeet in a woman’s hand, though the brethren drink of it.—Woe be unto thee, gainsayer, dost thou not see how flames envelope the accursed city under his Arminian and Popish son?—London is on fire!—on fire!” he yelled; “and the brands are lit by the half-papist, whole-arminian, all-damned people thereof.—Fire!—fire!” The voice in which he shrieked out the last words was powerfully horrible, but it was like the moan of an infant, compared to the voice which took up and re-echoed the cry, in a tone that made the building shake. It was the voice of a maniac, who had lost her husband, children, subsistence, and finally her reason, in the dreadful fire of London. The cry of fire never failed to operate with terrible punctuality on her associations. She had been in a disturbed sleep, and now started from it as suddenly as on that dreadful night. It was Saturdaynight, too, and she was always observed to be particularly violent on that night,—it was the terrible weekly festival of insanity with her. She was awake, and busy in a moment escaping from the flames; and she dramatized the whole scene with such hideous fidelity, that Stanton’s resolution was far more in danger from her than from the battle between his neighboursTestimonyandHothead. She began exclaiming she was suffocated by the smoke; then she sprung from her bed, calling for a light, and appeared to be struck by the sudden glare that burst through her casement.—“The last day,” she shrieked, “The last day! The very heavens are on fire!”—“That will not come till the Man of Sin be first destroyed,” cried the weaver; “thou ravest of light and fire, and yet thou art in utter darkness.—I pity thee, poor mad soul, I pity thee!” The maniac never heeded him; she appeared to be scrambling up a stair-case toher children’s room. She exclaimed she was scorched, singed, suffocated; her courage appeared to fail, and she retreated. “But my children are there!” she cried in a voice of unspeakable agony, as she seemed to make another effort; “here I am—here I am come to save you.—Oh God! They are all blazing!—Take this arm—no, not that, it is scorched and disabled—well, any arm—take hold of my clothes—no, they are blazing too!—Well, take me all on fire as I am!—And their hair, how it hisses!—Water, one drop of water for my youngest—he is but an infant—for my youngest, and let me burn!” She paused in horrid silence, to watch the fall of a blazing rafter that was about to shatter the stair-case on which she stood.—“The roof has fallen on my head!” she exclaimed. “The earth is weak, and all the inhabitants thereof,” chaunted the weaver; “I bear up the pillars of it.”
The maniac marked the destruction ofthe spot where she thought she stood by one desperate bound, accompanied by a wild shriek, and then calmly gazed on her infants as they rolled over the scorching fragments, and sunk into the abyss of fire below. “There they go,—one—two—three—all!” and her voice sunk into low mutterings, and her convulsions into faint, cold shudderings, like the sobbings of a spent storm, as she imagined herself to “stand in safety and despair,” amid the thousand houseless wretches assembled in the suburbs of London on the dreadful nights after the fire, without food, roof, or raiment, all gazing on the burning ruins of their dwellings and their property. She seemed to listen to their complaints, and even repeated some of them very affectingly, but invariably answered them with the same words, “But I have lost all my children—all!” It was remarkable, that when this sufferer began to rave, all the others became silent. Thecry of nature hushed every other cry,—she was the only patient in the house who was not mad from politics, religion, ebriety, or some perverted passion; and terrifying as the out-break of her frenzy always was, Stanton used to await it as a kind of relief from the dissonant, melancholy, and ludicrous ravings of the others.
But the utmost efforts of his resolution began to sink under the continued horrors of the place. The impression on his senses began to defy the power of reason to resist them. He could not shut out these frightful cries nightly repeated, nor the frightful sound of the whip employed to still them. Hope began to fail him, as he observed, that the submissive tranquillity (which he had imagined, by obtaining increased indulgence, might contribute to his escape, or perhaps convince the keeper of his sanity) was interpreted by the callous ruffian, who was acquainted only with the varieties ofmadness, as a more refinedspecies of that cunning which he was well accustomed to watch and baffle.
On his first discovery of his situation, he had determined to take the utmost care of his health and intellect that the place allowed, as the sole basis of his hope of deliverance. But as that hope declined, he neglected the means of realizing it. He had at first risen early, walked incessantly about his cell, and availed himself of every opportunity of being in the open air. He took the strictest care of his person in point of cleanliness, and with or without appetite, regularly forced down his miserable meals; and all these efforts were even pleasant, as long as hope prompted them. But now he began to relax them all. He passed half the day in his wretched bed, in which he frequently took his meals, declined shaving or changing his linen, and, when the sun shone into his cell, turned from it on his straw with a sigh of heart-broken despondency.Formerly, when the air breathed through his grating, he used to say, “Blessed air of heaven, I shall breathe you once more in freedom!—Reserve all your freshness for that delicious evening when I shall inhale you, and be as free as you myself.” Now when he felt it, he sighed and said nothing. The twitter of the sparrows, the pattering of rain, or the moan of the wind, sounds that he used to sit up in his bed to catch with delight, as reminding him of nature, were now unheeded.
He began at times to listen with sullen and horrible pleasure to the cries of his miserable companions. He became squalid, listless, torpid, and disgusting in his appearance. * * * * * * *
It was one of those dismal nights, that, as he tossed on his loathsome bed,—more loathsome from the impossibility to quit it without feeling more “unrest,”—he perceived the miserable light that burned inthe hearth was obscured by the intervention of some dark object. He turned feebly towards the light, without curiosity, without excitement, but with a wish to diversify the monotony of his misery, by observing the slightest change made even accidentally in the dusky atmosphere of his cell. Between him and the light stood the figure of Melmoth, just as he had seen him from the first; the figure was the same; the expression of the face was the same,—cold, stony, and rigid; the eyes, with their infernal and dazzling lustre, were still the same.
Stanton’s ruling passion rushed on his soul; he felt this apparition like a summons to a high and fearful encounter. He heard his heart beat audibly, and could have exclaimed with Lee’s unfortunate heroine,—“It pants as cowards do before a battle; Oh the great march has sounded!”
Melmoth approached him with that frightful calmness that mocks the terrorit excites. “My prophecy has been fulfilled;—you rise to meet me rattling from your chains, and rustling from your straw—am I not a true prophet?” Stanton was silent. “Is not your situation very miserable?”—Still Stanton was silent; for he was beginning to believe this an illusion of madness. He thought to himself, “How could he have gained entrance here?”—“Would you not wish to be delivered from it?” Stanton tossed on his straw, and its rustling seemed to answer the question. “I have the power to deliver you from it.” Melmoth spoke very slowly and very softly, and the melodious smoothness of his voice made a frightful contrast to the stony rigour of his features, and the fiend-like brilliancy of his eyes. “Who are you, and whence come you?” said Stanton, in a tone that was meant to be interrogatory and imperative, but which, from his habits of squalid debility, was at once feeble and querulous. His intellects had become affected by the gloom of his miserable habitation, as thewretched inmate of a similar mansion, when produced before a medical examiner, was reported to be a complete Albinos.—“His skin was bleached, his eyes turned white; he could not bear the light; and, when exposed to it, he turned away with a mixture of weakness and restlessness, more like the writhings of a sick infant than the struggles of a man.”
Such was Stanton’s situation; he was enfeebled now, and the power of the enemy seemed without a possibility of opposition from either his intellectual or corporeal powers. * * * * * * * *
Of all their horrible dialogue, only these words were legible in the manuscript, “You know me now.”—“I always knew you.”—“That is false; you imagined you did, and that has been the cause of all the wild * * * * * * * * * of the * * * * * of your finally being lodged in this mansion of misery, where only Iwould seek, where only I can succour you.” “You, demon!”—“Demon!—Harsh words!—Was it a demon or a human being placed you here?—Listen to me, Stanton; nay, wrap not yourself in that miserable blanket,—that cannot shut out my words. Believe me, were you folded in thunder-clouds, you must hearme! Stanton, think of your misery. These bare walls—what do they present to the intellect or to the senses?—White-wash, diversified with the scrawls of charcoal or red chalk, that your happy predecessors have left for you to trace over. You have a taste for drawing,—I trust it will improve. And here’s a grating, through which the sun squints on you like a step-dame, and the breeze blows, as if it meant to tantalizeyouwith a sigh from that sweet mouth, whose kiss you must never enjoy. And where’s your library,—intellectual man,—travelled man?” he repeated in a tone of bitter derision; “where be your companions, your peaked men ofcountries, as your favourite Shakespeare has it? You must be content with the spider and the rat, to crawl and scratch round your flock-bed! I have known prisoners in the Bastile to feed them for companions,—why don’t you begin your task? I have known a spider to descend at the tap of a finger, and a rat to come forth when the daily meal was brought, to share it with his fellow-prisoner!—How delightful to have vermin for your guests! Aye, and when the feast fails them, they make a meal of their entertainer!—You shudder—Are you, then, the first prisoner who has been devoured alive by the vermin that infested his cell?—Delightful banquet, not “where you eat, but where you are eaten!” Your guests, however, will give you one token of repentance while they feed; there will begnashing of teeth, and you shall hear it, and feel it too perchance!—And then for meals—Oh you are daintily off!—The soup that the cat has lapped; and (as herprogeny has probably contributed to the hell-broth) why not?——Then your hours of solitude, deliciously diversified by the yell of famine, the howl of madness, the crash of whips, and the broken-hearted sob of those who, like you, are supposed, ordrivenmad by the crimes of others!—Stanton, do you imagine your reason can possibly hold out amid such scenes?—Supposing your reason was unimpaired, your health not destroyed,—suppose all this, which is, after all, more than fair supposition can grant, guess the effect of the continuance of these scenes on your senses alone. A time will come, and soon, when, from mere habit, you will echo the scream of every delirious wretch that harbours near you; then you will pause, clasp your hands on your throbbing head, and listen with horrible anxiety whether the scream proceeded fromyouorthem. The time will come, when, from the want of occupation, the listless and horrible vacancy of your hours, you willfeel as anxious to hear those shrieks, as you were at first terrified to hear them,—when you will watch for the ravings of your next neighbour, as you would for a scene on the stage. All humanity will be extinguished in you. The ravings of these wretches will become at once your sport and your torture. You will watch for the sounds, to mock them with the grimaces and bellowings of a fiend. The mind has a power of accommodating itself to its situation, that you will experience in its most frightful and deplorable efficacy. Then comes the dreadful doubt of one’s own sanity, the terrible announcer thatthatdoubt will soon become fear, andthatfear certainty. Perhaps (still more dreadful) thefearwill at last become ahope,—shut out from society, watched by a brutal keeper, writhing with all the impotent agony of an incarcerated mind, without communication and without sympathy, unable to exchange ideas but with those whose ideas are only the hideous spectresof departed intellect, or even to hear the welcome sound of the human voice, except to mistake it for the howl of a fiend, and stop the ear desecrated by its intrusion,—then at last your fear will become a more fearful hope; you will wish to become one of them, to escape the agony of consciousness. As those who have long leaned over a precipice, have at last felt a desire to plunge below, to relieve the intolerable temptation of their giddiness(11), you will hear them laugh amid their wildest paroxysms; you will say, ‘Doubtless those wretches have some consolation, but I have none; my sanity is my greatest curse in this abode of horrors. They greedily devour their miserable meals, while I loathe mine. They sleep sometimes soundly, while my sleep is—worse than their waking.They are revived every morning by some delicious illusion of cunning madness, soothing them with the hope of escaping, baffling or tormenting their keeper; my sanity precludes all such hope.I know I never can escape, and the preservation of my faculties is only an aggravation of my sufferings. I have all their miseries,—I have none of their consolations. They laugh,—I hear them; would I could laugh like them.’ You will try, and the very effort will be an invocation to the demon of insanity to come and take full possession of you from that moment for ever.
(There were other details, both of the menaces and temptations employed by Melmoth, which are too horrible for insertion. One of them may serve for an instance).
“You think that the intellectual power is something distinct from the vitality of the soul, or, in other words, that if even your reason should be destroyed, (which itnearly is), your soul might yet enjoy beatitude in the full exercise of its enlarged and exalted faculties, and all the clouds which obscured them be dispelled by the Sun of Righteousness, in whose beams you hope to bask for ever and ever. Now, without going into any metaphysical subtleties about the distinction between mind and soul, experience must teach you, that there can be no crime into which madmen would not, and do not precipitate themselves; mischief is their occupation, malice their habit, murder their sport, and blasphemy their delight. Whether a soul in this state can be in a hopeful one, it is for you to judge; but it seems to me, that with the loss of reason, (and reason cannot long be retained in this place), you lose also the hope of immortality.—Listen,” said the tempter, pausing, “listen to the wretch who is raving near you, and whose blasphemies might make a demon start.—He was once an eminent puritanical preacher. Half the day he imagines himselfin a pulpit, denouncing damnation against Papists, Arminians, and even Sub-lapsarians, (he being a Supra-lapsarian himself). He foams, he writhes, he gnashes his teeth; you would imagine him in the hell he was painting, and that the fire and brimstone he is so lavish of, were actually exhaling from his jaws. At night hiscreed retaliates on him; he believes himself one of the reprobates he has been all day denouncing, and curses God for the very decree he has all day been glorifying Him for.
“He, whom he has for twelve hours been vociferating “is the loveliest among ten thousand,” becomes the object of demoniac hostility and execration. He grapples with the iron posts of his bed, and says he is rooting out the cross from the very foundations of Calvary; and it is remarkable, that in proportion as his morning exercises are intense, vivid, and eloquent, his nightly blasphemies are outrageous and horrible.—Hark! Now he believes himselfa demon; listen to his diabolical eloquence of horror!”
Stanton listened, and shuddered * * * * * * “Escape—escape for your life,” cried the tempter; “break forth into life, liberty, and sanity. Your social happiness, your intellectual powers, your immortal interests, perhaps, depend on the choice of this moment.—There is the door, and the key is my hand. Choose—choose!”—“And how comes the key in your hand? and what is the condition of my liberation?” said Stanton. * * * * * * *
The explanation occupied several pages, which, to the torture of young Melmoth, were wholly illegible. It seemed, however, to have been rejected by Stanton with the utmost rage and horror, for Melmoth at last made out,—“Begone, monster, demon!—begone to your native place. Even this mansion of horror trembles to contain you; its walls sweat,and its floors quiver, while you tread them.” * * * * * * * *
The conclusion of this extraordinary manuscript was in such a state, that, in fifteen mouldy and crumbling pages, Melmoth could hardly make out that number of lines. No antiquarian, unfolding with trembling hand the calcined leaves of an Herculaneum manuscript, and hoping to discover some lost lines of the Æneis in Virgil’s own autograph, or at least some unutterable abomination of Petronius or Martial, happily elucidatory of the mysteries of the Spintriæ, or the orgies of the Phallic worshippers, ever pored with more luckless diligence, or shook a head of more hopeless despondency over his task. He could but just make out what tended rather to excite than assuage that feverish thirst of curiosity which was consuming his inmost soul. The manuscript told no more of Melmoth, but mentioned that Stanton was finally liberated from hisconfinement,—that his pursuit of Melmoth was incessant and indefatigable,—that he himself allowed it to be a species of insanity,—that while he acknowledged it to be the master-passion, he also felt it the master-torment of his life. He again visited the Continent, returned to England,—pursued, inquired, traced, bribed, but in vain. The being whom he had met thrice, under circumstances so extraordinary, he was fated never to encounter againin his life-time. At length, discovering that he had been born in Ireland, he resolved to go there,—went, and found his pursuit again fruitless, and his inquiries unanswered. The family knew nothing of him, or at least what they knew or imagined, they prudently refused to disclose to a stranger, and Stanton departed unsatisfied. It is remarkable, that he too, as appeared from many half-obliterated pages of the manuscript, never disclosed to mortal the particulars of their conversation in the mad-house; and the slightest allusionto it threw him into fits of rage and gloom equally singular and alarming. He left the manuscript, however, in the hands of the family, possibly deeming, from their incuriosity, their apparent indifference to their relative, or their obvious inacquaintance with reading of any kind, manuscript or books, his deposit would be safe. He seems, in fact, to have acted like men, who, in distress at sea, intrust their letters and dispatches to a bottle sealed, and commit it to the waves. The last lines of the manuscript that were legible, were sufficiently extraordinary. * * * * * *
“I have sought him every where.—The desire of meeting him once more, is become as a burning fire within me,—it is the necessary condition of my existence. I have vainly sought him at last in Ireland, of which I find he is a native.—Perhaps our final meeting will be in * * * * * *
Such was the conclusion of the manuscriptwhich Melmoth found in his uncle’s closet. When he had finished it, he sunk down on the table near which he had been reading it, his face hid in his folded arms, his senses reeling, his mind in a mingled state of stupor and excitement. After a few moments, he raised himself with an involuntary start, and saw the picture gazing at him from its canvas. He was within ten inches of it as he sat, and the proximity appeared increased by the strong light that was accidentally thrown on it, and its being the only representation of a human figure in the room. Melmoth felt for a moment as if he were about to receive an explanation from its lips.
He gazed on it in return,—all was silent in the house,—they were alone together. The illusion subsided at length; and as the mind rapidly passes to opposite extremes, he remembered the injunction of his uncle to destroy the portrait. He seized it;—his hand shook at first, but the mouldering canvas appeared to assisthim in the effort. He tore it from the frame with a cry half terrific, half triumphant;—it fell at his feet, and he shuddered as it fell. He expected to hear some fearful sounds, some unimaginable breathings of prophetic horror, follow this act of sacrilege, for such he felt it, to tear the portrait of his ancestor from his native walls. He paused and listened:—“There was no voice, nor any that answered;”—but as the wrinkled and torn canvas fell to the floor, its undulations gave the portrait the appearance of smiling. Melmoth felt horror indescribable at this transient and imaginary resuscitation of the figure. He caught it up, rushed into the next room, tore, cut, and hacked it in every direction, and eagerly watched the fragments that burned like tinder in the turf-fire which had been lit in his room. As Melmoth saw the last blaze, he threw himself into bed, in hope of a deep and intense sleep. He had done what was required of him, and felt exhausted both in mind and body;but his slumber was not so sound as he had hoped for. The sullen light of the turf-fire, burning but never blazing, disturbed him every moment. He turned and turned, but still there was the same red light glaring on, but not illuminating, the dusky furniture of the apartment. The wind was high that night, and as the creaking door swung on its hinges, every noise seemed like the sound of a hand struggling with the lock, or of a foot pausing on the threshold. But (for Melmoth never could decide) was it in a dream or not, that he saw the figure of his ancestor appear at the door?—hesitatingly as he saw him at first on the night of his uncle’s death,—saw him enter the room, approach his bed, and heard him whisper, “You have burned me, then; but those are flames I can survive.—I am alive,—I am beside you.” Melmoth started, sprung from his bed,—it was broad day-light. He looked round,—there was no human being in the room but himself.He felt a slight pain in the wrist of his right arm. He looked at it, it was black and blue, as from the recent gripe of a strong hand.