'I am dying--yet shall I live. Therefore for me, Morella, thy wife,
hath the charnel house no terrors--mark me!--not even the terrors of
the _worm_. The days have never been when thou couldst love me; but
her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.'
'Morella!'
'I repeat that I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that
affection--ah, how little! which you felt for me, Morella. And when my
spirit departs shall the child live--thy child and mine, Morella's.
But thy days shall be days of sorrow--that sorrow which is the most
lasting of impressions, as the cypress is the most enduring of trees.
For the hours of thy happiness are over, and Joy is not gathered twice
in a life, as the roses of Pæstum twice in a year. Thou shalt not,
then, play the Teian with Time, but, being ignorant of the myrtle and
the vine, thou shalt bear about with thee thy shroud on earth, like
the Moslemin at Mecca.'
'Morella!'--I cried--'Morella! how knowest thou this?'----but she
turned away her face upon the pillow, and, a slight tremor coming over
her limbs, she thus died, and I heard her voice no more.
Yet, as she had foreseen, her child--to which in dying she had given
birth, and which breathed not till the mother breathed no more--her
child, a daughter, lived. And she grew strangely in size and
intellect, and was the perfect resemblance of her who had departed,
and I loved her with a love more fervent and more intense than I
believed it possible to feel on earth.
But ere long the Heaven of this pure affection became overcast; and
Gloom, and Horror, and Grief came over it in clouds. I said the child
grew strangely in stature and intelligence. Strange indeed was her
rapid increase in bodily size--but terrible, oh! terrible were the
tumultuous thoughts which crowded upon me while watching the
development of her mental being. Could it be otherwise, when I daily
discovered in the conceptions of the child the adult powers and
faculties of the woman?--when the lessons of experience fell from the
lips of infancy? and when the wisdom or the passions of maturity I
found hourly gleaming from its full and speculative eye? When, I say,
all this became evident to my appalled senses--when I could no longer
hide it from my soul, nor throw it off from those perceptions which
trembled to receive it, is it to be wondered at that suspicions of a
nature fearful, and exciting, crept in upon my spirit, or that my
thoughts fell back aghast upon the wild tales and thrilling theories
of the entombed Morella? I snatched from the scrutiny of the world a
being whom Destiny compelled me to adore, and in the rigid seclusion
of my ancestral home, I watched with an agonizing anxiety over all
which concerned my daughter.
And as years rolled away, and daily I gazed upon her eloquent and mild
and holy face, and pored over her maturing form, did I discover new
points of resemblance in the child to her mother--the melancholy, and
the dead. And hourly grew darker these shadows, as it were, of
similitude, and became more full, and more definite, and more
perplexing, and to me more terrible in their aspect. For that her
smile was like her mother's I could bear--but then I shuddered at its
too perfect _identity_: that her eyes were Morella's own I could
endure--but then they looked down too often into the depths of my soul
with Morella's intense and bewildering meaning. And in the contour of
the high forehead, and in the ringlets of the silken hair, and in the
wan fingers which buried themselves therein, and in the musical tones
of her speech, and above all--oh! above all, in the phrases and
expressions of the dead on the lips of the loved and the living, I
found food for consuming thought and horror--for a worm that would not
die.
Thus passed away two lustrums of her life, yet my daughter remained
nameless upon the earth. 'My child' and 'my love' were the
designations usually prompted by a father's affection, and the rigid
seclusion of her days precluded all other intercourse. Morella's name
died with her at her death. Of the mother I had never spoken to the
daughter--it was impossible to speak. Indeed during the brief period
of her existence the latter had received no impressions from the
outward world but such as might have been afforded by the narrow
limits of her privacy. But at length the ceremony of baptism presented
to my mind in its unnerved and agitated condition, a present
deliverance from the horrors of my destiny. And at the baptismal font
I hesitated for a name. And many titles of the wise and beautiful, of
antique and modern times, of my own and foreign lands, came thronging
to my lips--and many, many fair titles of the gentle, and the happy
and the good. What prompted me then to disturb the memory of the
buried dead? What demon urged me to breathe that sound, which, in its
very recollection, was wont to make ebb and flow the purple blood in
tides from the temples to the heart? What fiend spoke from the
recesses of my soul, when amid those dim aisles, and in the silence of
the night, I shrieked within the ears of the holy man the syllables,
Morella? What more than fiend convulsed the features of my child and
overspread them with the hues of death, as, starting at that sound,
she turned her glassy eyes from the Earth to Heaven, and falling
prostrate upon the black slabs of her ancestral vault, responded 'I am
here!'
Distinct, coldly, calmly distinct--like a knell of death--horrible,
horrible death, sank the eternal sounds within my soul. Years--years
may roll away, but the memory of that epoch--never! Now was I indeed
ignorant of the flowers and the vine--but the hemlock and the cypress
overshadowed me night and day. And I kept no reckoning of time or
place, and the stars of my Fate faded from Heaven, and, therefore, my
spirit grew dark, and the figures of the earth passed by me like
flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only--Morella. The winds
of the firmament breathed but one sound within my ears, and the
ripples upon the sea murmured evermore--Morella. But she died, and
with my own hands I bore her to the tomb, and I laughed, with a long
and bitter laugh as I found no traces of the first in the charnel
where I laid the second--Morella.
For the Southern Literary Messenger.