FALKNER'S NARRATIVE
"To palliate crime, and, by investigating motive, to render guilt less
odious--such is not the feeling that rules my pen; to confer honour upon
innocence, to vindicate virtue, and announce truth--though that offer my
own name as a mark for deserved infamy--such are my motives. And if I
reveal the secrets of my heart, and dwell on the circumstances that led
to the fatal catastrophe I record, so that, though a criminal, I do not
appear quite a monster, let the egotism be excused for her dear
sake--within whose young and gentle heart I would fain that my memory
should be enshrined without horror, though with blame.
"The truth, the pure and sacred truth, will alone find expression in
these pages. I write them in a land of beauty, but of desolation--in a
country whose inhabitants are purchasing by blood and misery the dearest
privileges of human nature--where I have come to die! It is night; the
cooing aziolo, the hooting owl, the flashing fire-fly, the murmur of
time-honoured streams, the moonlit foliage of the gray olive woods, dark
crags, and rugged mountains, throwing awful shadows, and the light of
the eternal stars--such are the objects around me. Can a man speak false
in the silence of night, when God and his own heart alone keep watch!
when conscience hears the moaning of the dead in the pauses of the
breeze, and sees one pale, lifeless figure float away on the current of
the stream! My heart whispers that before such witnesses the truth will
be truly recorded; and my blood curdles, and my nerves, so firm amid the
din of battle, shrink and shudder at the tale I am about to narrate.
"What is crime?
"A deed done injurious to others--forbidden by religion, condemned by
morality, and which human laws are enacted to punish.
"A criminal feels all mankind to be his foes, the whole frame of society
is erected for his especial ruin. Before he had a right to choose his
habitation in the land of his forefathers--and, placing the sacred name
of liberty between himself and power, none dared check his freeborn
steps--his will was his law; the limits of his physical strength were
the only barriers to his wildest wanderings--he could walk erect and
fear the eye of no man. He who commits a crime forfeits these
privileges. Men from out the lowest grade of society can say to him,
'You must come with us!'--they can drag him from those he loves, immure
him in a loathsome cell, dole out scant portions of the unchartered air,
make a show of him, lead him to death, and throw his body to the dogs;
and society, which for the innocent would have raised one cry of horror
against the perpetrators of such outrages, look on and clap their hands
with applause.
"This is a vulgar aspect of the misery of which I speak--a crime may
never be discovered. Mine lies buried in my own breast. Years have
passed, and none point at me and whisper, 'There goes the murderer!' But
do I not feel that God is my enemy, and my own heart whispers
condemnation? I know that I am an impostor--that any day may discover
the truth; but more heavy than any fear of detection is the secret
hidden in my own heart; the icy touch of the death I caused creeps over
me during the night. I am pursued by the knowledge that naught I do can
prosper, for the cry of innocence is raised against me, and the earth
groans with the secret burden I have committed to her bosom. That the
death-blow was not actually dealt by my hand in no manner mitigates the
stings of conscience. My act was the murderer, though my intention was
guiltless of death.
"Is there a man who at some time has not desired to possess, by illegal
means, a portion of another's property, or to obey the dictates of an
animal instinct, and plant his foot on the neck of his enemy? Few are so
cold of blood or temperate of mood as not, at some one time, to have
felt hurried beyond the demarcations set up by conscience and law; few
but have been tempted without the brink of the forbidden; but they
stopped, while I leaped beyond--there is the difference between us.
Falsely do they say who allege that there is no difference in guilt
between the thought and act; to be tempted is human; to resist
temptation--surely, if framed like me, such is to raise us from our
humanity into the sphere of angels.
"Many are the checks afforded us. Some are possessed by fear; others are
endowed by a sensibility so prophetic of the evil that must ensue, that
perforce they cannot act the thing they desire; they tremble at the idea
of being the cause of events over whose future course they can have no
control; they fear injuring others--and their own remorse.
"But I disdained all these considerations--they occurred but faintly and
ineffectually to my mind. Piety, conscience, and moral respect yielded
before a feeling which decked its desires in the garb of necessity. Oh,
how vain it is to analyze motive! Each man has the same motives; but it
is the materials of each mind--the plastic or rocky nature, the mild or
the burning temperament--that rejects the alien influence, or receives
it into its own essence and causes the act. Such an impulse is as a
summer healthy breeze just dimpling a still lake to one--while to
another it is the whirlwind that rouses him to spread ruin around.
"The Almighty who framed my miserable being made me a man of passion.
They say that of such are formed the great and good. I know not that--I
am neither; but I will not arraign the Creator. I will hope that in
feeling my guilt--in acknowledging the superexcellence of virtue, I
fulfil, in part, his design. After me, let no man doubt but that to do
what is right is to ensure his own happiness; or that self-restraint,
and submission to the voice of conscience implanted in our souls, impart
more dignity of feeling, more true majesty of being, than a puerile
assertion of will and a senseless disregard of immutable principles.
"Is passion known in these days? Such as I felt, has any other
experienced it? The expression has fled from our lips; but it is as
deep-seated as ever in our hearts. Who, of created beings, has not
loved? Who, of my sex, has not felt the struggle, and the yielding in
the struggle, of the better to the worse parts of our nature? Who so
dead to nature's influence as not, at least for some brief moments, to
have felt that body and soul were a slight sacrifice to obtain
possession of the affections of her he loved? Who, for some moments in
his life, would not have seen his mistress dead at his feet rather than
wedded to another? To feel this tyranny of passion is to be human; to
conquer it is to be virtuous. He who conquers himself is, in my eyes,
the only true hero. Alas, I am not such! I am among the vanquished, and
view the wretch I am, and learn that there is nothing so contemptible,
so pitiable, so eternally miserable, as he who is defeated in his
conflict with passion.
"That I am such, this very scene--this very occupation testifies. Once
the slave of headlong impulse, I am now the victim of remorse. I am come
to seek death, because I cannot retrieve the past; I long for the moment
when the bullet shall pierce my flesh, and the pains of dissolution
gather round me. Then I may hope to be, that for which I thirst, free!
There is one who loves me. She is pure and kind as a guardian angel--she
is as my own child--she implores me to live. With her my days might pass
in a peace and innocence that saints might envy; but so heavy are the
fetters of memory, so bitter the slavery of my soul, that even she
cannot take away the sting from life.
"Death is all I covet. When these pages are read, the hand that traces
them will be powerless--the brain that dictates will have lost its
functions. This is my last labour--my legacy to my fellow-beings. Do not
let them disdain the outpourings of a heart which for years has buried
its recollections and remorse in silence. The waters were pent up by a
dam--now they rush impetuously forth--they roar as if pursued by a
thousand torrents--their turmoil deafens heaven; and what though their
sound be only conveyed by the little implement that traces these
lines--not less headlong than the swelling waves is the spirit that
pours itself out in these words.
"I am calmer now--I have been wandering beside the stream--and, despite
the lurking foe and deceptive moonbeams, I have ascended the steep
mountain's side--and looked out on the misty sea, and sought to gain
from reposing nature some relief to my sense of pain. The hour of
midnight is at hand--all is still--I am calm, and with deliberation
begin to narrate that train of circumstances, or rather of feelings,
that hurried me first to error, then to crime, and, lastly, brought me
here to die.
"I lost my mother before I can well remember. I have a confused
recollection of her crying--and of her caressing me--and I can call to
mind seeing her ill in bed, and her blessing me; but these ideas are
rather like revelations of an ante-natal life, than belonging to
reality. She died when I was four years old. My childhood's years were
stormy and drear. My father, a social, and, I believe, even a polite man
in society, was rough and ill-tempered at home. He had gambled away his
own slender younger brother's fortune and his wife's portion, and was
too idle to attend to a profession, and yet not indolent enough for a
life devoid of purpose and pursuit. Our family was a good one; it
consisted of two brothers, my father, and my uncle. This latter,
favoured of birth and fortune, remained long unmarried; and was in weak
health. My father expected him to die. His death, and his own consequent
inheritance of the family estate, was his constant theme; but the
delayed hope irritated him to madness. I knew his humour even as a
child, and escaped it as I could. His voice, calling my name, made my
blood run cold; his epithets of abuse, so frequently applied, filled me
with boiling but ineffectual rage.
"I am not going to dwell on those painful days when, a weak, tiny boy, I
felt as if I could contend with the paternal giant; and did contend,
till his hand felled me to the ground, or cast me from his threshold
with scorn and seeming hate. I dare say he did not hate me; but
certainly no touch of natural love warmed his heart.
"One day he received a letter from his brother--I was but ten years old,
but rendered old and careworn by suffering; I remember that I looked on
him as he took it and exclaimed, 'From Uncle John! What have we here?'
with a nervous tremour as to the passions the perusal of it might
excite. He chuckled as he broke the seal--he fancied that he called him
to his dying bed--'And that well over, you shall go to school, my fine
fellow,' he cried; 'we shall have no more of your tricks at home.' He
broke the seal, he read the letter. It announced his brother's marriage,
and asked him to the wedding. I let fall the curtain over the scene that
ensued: you would have thought that a villanous fraud had been
committed, in which I was implicated. He drove me with blows from his
door; I foamed with rage, and then I sat down and wept, and crept away
to the fields, and wondered why I was born, and longed to kill my uncle,
who was the cause to me of so much misery.
"Everything changed for the worse now. Hitherto my father had lived on
hope--now he despaired. He took to drinking, which exalted his passions
and debased his reason. This at times gave me a superiority over
him--when tipsy, I could escape his blows--which yet, when sober, fell
on me with double severity. But even the respite I gained through his
inebriety afforded me no consolation--I felt at once humbled and
indignant at the shame so brought on us. I, child as I was, expostulated
with him--I was knocked down, and kicked from the room. Oh, what a world
this appeared to me! a war of the weak with the strong--and how I
despised everything except victory.
"Time wore on. My uncle's wife bore him in succession two girls. This
was a respite. My father's spirits rose--but, fallen as he was, he could
only celebrate his reawakened hopes by deeper potations and coarse
jokes. The next offspring was a boy--he cost my father his life. Habits
of drink had inflamed his blood--and his violence of temper made him
nearly a maniac. On hearing of the birth of the heir, he drank to drown
thought; wine was too slow a medicine; he quaffed deeply of brandy, and
fell into a sleep, or rather torpor, from which he never after awoke. It
was better so--he had spent everything--he was deeply in debt--he had
lost all power of raising himself from the state of debasement into
which he had fallen--the next day would have seen him in prison.
"I was taken in by my uncle. At first the peace and order of the
household seemed to me paradise--the comfort and regularity of the meals
was a sort of happy and perpetual miracle. My eye was no longer blasted
by the sight of frightful excesses, nor my ear wounded by obstreperous
shouts. I was no longer reviled--I no longer feared being felled to the
ground--I was not any more obliged to obtain food by stratagem or by
expostulations, which always ended by my being the victim of personal
violence. The mere calm was balmy, and I fancied myself free, because I
was no longer in a state of perpetual terror.
"But soon I felt the cold--and rigid atmosphere that, as far as regarded
me, ruled this calm. No eye of love ever turned on me, no voice ever
spoke a cheering word. I was there on sufferance, and was quickly deemed
a troublesome inmate; while the order and regularity required of me, and
the law passed that I was never to quit the house alone, became at last
more tormenting than the precarious, but wild and precious liberty of my
former life. My habits were bad enough; my father's vices had fostered
my evil qualities--I had never learned to lie or cheat, for such was
foreign to my nature; but I was rough, self-willed, lazy, and insolent.
I have a feeling, such was my sense of bliss on first entering the
circle of order and peace, that a very little kindness would have
subdued my temper and awakened a desire to please. It was not tried.
From the very first I was treated with a coldness to which a child is
peculiarly sensitive; the servants, by enforcing the rules of the house,
became first my tormentors, and then my enemies. I grew imperious and
violent--complaint, reprehension, and punishment despoiled my paradise
of its matin glow--and then I returned at once to my own bad self; I was
disobedient and reckless; soon it was decreed that I was utterly
intolerable, and I was sent to school.
"This, a boy's common fate, I had endured without a murmur, had it not
been inflicted as a punishment, and I made over to my new tyrants, even
in my own hearing, as a little blackguard, quite irreclaimable, and only
to be kept in order by brute force. It is impossible to describe the
effect of this declaration of my uncle--followed up by the master's
recommendation to the usher to break my spirit if he could not bend
it--had on my heart, which was bursting with a sense of injury, panting
for freedom, and resolved not to be daunted by the menaces of the
tyrants before me. I declared war with my whole soul against the world;
I became all I had been painted; I was sullen, vindictive, desperate. I
resolved to run away; I cared not what would befall me; I was nearly
fourteen--I was strong, and could work--I could join a gang of gipsies,
I could act their life singly, and, subsisting by nightly depredation,
spend my days in liberty.
"It was at an hour when I was meditating flight that the master sent for
me. I believed that some punishment was in preparation. I hesitated
whether I should not instantly fly--a moment's thought told me that was
impossible, and that I must obey. I went with a dogged air, and a
determination to resist. I found my tyrant with a letter in his hand. 'I
do not know what to do with you,' he said; 'I have a letter here from a
relation, asking you to spend the day. You deserve no indulgence, but
for this once you may go. Remember, any future permission depends upon
your turning over an entirely new leaf. Go, sir; and be grateful to my
lenity, if you can. Remember, you are to be home at nine.' I asked no
questions--I did not know where I was to go; yet I left him without a
word. I was sauntering back to the prison-yard which they called a
playground, when I was told that there was a pony-chaise at the door
ready to take me. My heart leaped at the word; I fancied that, by means
of this conveyance, I could proceed on the first stage of my flight. The
pony-carriage was of the humblest description; an old man drove. I got
in, and away we trotted, the little cob that drew it going much faster
than his looks gave warrant. The driver was deaf--I was sullen--not a
word did we exchange. My plan was, that he should take me to the
farthest point he intended, and then that I should leap out and take to
my heels. As we proceeded, however, my rebel fit somewhat subsided. We
left the town in which the school was situated, and the dreary, dusty
roads I was accustomed to perambulate under the superintendence of the
ushers. We entered shady lanes and umbrageous groves; we perceived
extensive prospects, and saw the winding of romantic streams; a curtain
seemed drawn from before the scenes of nature; and my spirits rose as I
gazed on new objects, and saw earth spread wide and free around. At
first this only animated me to a keener resolve to fly; but, as we went
on, a vague sentiment possessed my soul. The skylarks winged up to
heaven, and the swallows skimmed the green earth; I felt happy because
nature was gay, and all things free and at peace. We turned from a lane
redolent with honeysuckle into a little wood, whose short thick turf was
interspersed with moss and starred with flowers. Just as we emerged I
saw a little railing, a rustic green gate, and a cottage clustered over
with woodbine and jessamine, standing secluded among, yet peeping out
from the overshadowing trees. A little peasant boy threw open the gate,
and we drove up to the cottage door.
"At a low window which opened on the lawn, in a large arm-chair, sat a
lady, evidently marked by ill health, yet with something so gentle and
unearthly in her appearance as at once to attract and please. Her
complexion had faded into whiteness--her hair was nearly silver, yet not
a grizzly grayish white, but silken still in its change; her dress was
also white--and there was something of a withered look about
her--redeemed by a soft, but bright gray eye, and more by the sweetest
smile in the world, which she wore, as, rising from her chair, she
embraced me, exclaiming, 'I know you from your likeness to your
mother--dear, dear Rupert.'
"That name of itself touched a chord which for many years had been mine.
My mother had called me by that name; so indeed had my father, when any
momentary softness of feeling allowed him to give me any other
appellation except 'You sir!' 'You dog, you!' My uncle, after whom I was
also called John, chose to drop what he called a silly, romantic name;
and in his house, and in his letters, I was always John. Rupert breathed
of a dear home and my mother's kiss; and I looked inquiringly on her who
gave it me, when my attention was attracted, riveted by the vision of a
lovely girl, who had glided in from another room, and stood near us,
radiant in youth and beauty. She was, indeed, supremely
lovely--exuberant in all the charms of girlhood--and her beauty was
enhanced by the very contrast to the pale lady by whom she stood--an
houri she seemed, standing by a disimbodied spirit--black, soft, large
eyes, overpowering in their lustre, and yet more so from the soul that
dwelt within--a cherub look--a fairy form; with a complexion and shape
that spoke of health and joy. What could it mean? Who could she be? And
who was she who knew my name? It was an enigma, but one full of promise
to me, who had so long been exiled from the charities of life; and who,
'as the hart panteth for the water brooks,' panted for love."