of the choir, sublimed and dilated now, reaching him as though
from weird night gulfs of the upper air, and charged with an
overmastering pathos as of the lamentations of angels. In the dimness
and silence, in the aroused and exalted condition of his being, the
strains seemed unearthly in their immense and desolate grandeur
of sorrow, and their mournful and dark significance was now for
him. Working within him the impression of vast, innumerable fleeing
shadows, thick-crowding memories of all the ways and deeds of an
existence fallen from its early dreams and aims, poured across
the midnight of his soul, and under the streaming melancholy of
the dirge, his life showed like some monstrous treason. It did not
terrify or madden him; he listened to it rapt utterly as in some
deadening ether of dream; yet feeling to his inmost core all its
powerful grief and accusation, and quietly aghast at the sinister
consciousness it gave him. Still it swelled, gathering and sounding
on into yet mightier pathos, till all at once it darkened and spread
wide in wild despair, and aspiring again into a pealing agony of
supplication, quivered and died away in a low and funereal sigh.
The tears streamed suddenly upon his face; his soul lightened and
turned dark within him; and, as one faints away, so consciousness
swooned, and he fell suddenly down a precipice of sleep. The music
rose again, a pensive and holy chant, and sounded on to its close,
unaffected by the action of his brain, for he slept and heard it no
more. He lay tranquilly, hardly seeming to breathe, in motionless
repose. The room was dim and silent, and the furniture took uncouth
shapes around him. The red glow upon the ceiling, from the screened
fire, showed the misty figure of the phantom kneeling by his side.
All light had gone from the spectral form. It knelt beside him,
mutely, as in prayer. Once it gazed at his quiet face with a mournful
tenderness, and its shadowy hands caressed his forehead. Then it
resumed its former attitude, and the slow hours crept by.
At last it rose and glided to the table, on which lay the open
letter. It seemed to try to lift the sheets with its misty hands,
but vainly. Next it essayed the lifting of a pen which lay there,
but failed. It was a piteous sight, to see its idle efforts on
these shapes of grosser matter, which appeared now to have to it
but the existence of illusions. Wandering about the shadowy room,
it wrung its phantom hands as in despair.
Presently it grew still. Then it passed quickly to his side, and
stood before him. He slept calmly. It placed one ghostly hand above
his forehead, and with the other pointed to the open letter. In
this attitude its shape grew momentarily more distinct. It began
to kindle into brightness. The pale flame again flowed from its
hand, streaming downward to his brain. A look of trouble darkened
the sleeping face. Stronger,--stronger; brighter,--brighter; until,
at last, it stood before him, a glorious shape of light, with an
awful look of commanding love in its shining features: and the
sleeper sprang to his feet with a cry!
The phantom had vanished. He saw nothing. His first impression
was, not that he had dreamed, but that, awaking in the familiar
room, he had seen the spirit of his dead friend, bright and awful by
his side, and that it had gone! In the flash of that quick change,
from sleeping to waking, he had detected, he thought, the unearthly
being that, he now felt, watched him from behind the air, and it
had vanished! The library was the same as in the moment of that
supernatural revealing; the open letter lay upon the table still;
only _that_ was gone which had made these common aspects terrible.
Then all the hard, strong scepticism of his nature, which had been
driven backward by the shock of his first conviction, recoiled,
and rushed within him, violently struggling for its former
vantage-ground; till, at length, it achieved the foothold for a
doubt. Could he have dreamed? The ghost, invisible, still watched
him. Yes, a dream,--only a dream; but, how vivid, how strange!
With a slow thrill creeping through his veins, the blood curdling
at his heart, a cold sweat starting on his forehead, he stared
through the dimness of the room. All was vacancy.
With a strong shudder, he strode forward, and turned up the flames
of the chandelier. A flood of garish light filled the apartment.
In a moment, remembering the letter to which the phantom of his
dream had pointed, he turned and took it from the table. The last
page lay upward, and every word of the solemn counsel at the end
seemed to dilate on the paper, and all its mighty meaning rushed
upon his soul. Trembling in his own despite, he laid it down and
moved away. A physician, he remembered that he was in a state of
violent nervous excitement, and thought that when he grew calmer
its effects would pass from him. But the hand that had touched
him had gone down deeper than the physician, and reached what God
had made.
He strove in vain. The very room, in its light and silence, and the
lurking sentiment of something watching him, became terrible. He
could not endure it. The devils in his heart, grown pusillanimous,
cowered beneath the flashing strokes of his aroused and terrible
conscience. He could not endure it. He must go out. He will walk
the streets. It is not late,--it is but ten o'clock. He will go.
The air of his dream still hung heavily about him. He was in the
street,--he hardly remembered how he had got there, or when; but
there he was, wrapped up from the searching cold, thinking, with a
quiet horror in his mind, of the darkened room he had left behind,
and haunted by the sense that something was groping about there
in the darkness, searching for him. The night was still and cold.
The full moon was in the zenith. Its icy splendor lay on the bare
streets, and on the walls of the dwellings. The lighted oblong
squares of curtained windows, here and there, seemed dim and waxen
in the frigid glory. The familiar aspect of the quarter had passed
away, leaving behind only a corpse-like neighborhood, whose huge,
dead features, staring rigidly through the thin, white shroud of
moonlight that covered all, left no breath upon the stainless skies.
Through the vast silence of the night he passed along; the very
sound of his footfalls was remote to his muffled sense.
Gradually, as he reached the first corner, he had an uneasy feeling
that a thing--a formless, unimaginable thing--was dogging him.
He had thought of going down to his club-room; but he now shrank
from entering, with this thing near him, the lighted rooms where
his set were busy with cards and billiards, over their liquors
and cigars, and where the heated air was full of their idle faces
and careless chatter, lest some one should bawl out that he was
pale, and ask him what was the matter, and he should answer,
tremblingly, that something was following him, and was near him
then! He must get rid of it first; he must walk quickly, and baffle
its pursuit by turning sharp corners, and plunging into devious
streets and crooked lanes, and so lose it!
It was difficult to reach through memory to the crazy chaos of
his mind on that night, and recall the route he took while haunted
by this feeling; but he afterward remembered that, without any
other purpose than to baffle his imaginary pursuer, he traversed
at a rapid pace a large portion of the moonlit city; always (he
knew not why) avoiding the more populous thoroughfares, and choosing
unfrequented and tortuous byways, but never ridding himself of
that horrible confusion of mind in which the faces of his dead
friend and the pale woman were strangely blended, nor of the fancy
that he was followed. Once, as he passed the hospital where Feval
died, a faint hint seemed to flash and vanish from the clouds of
his lunacy, and almost identify the dogging goblin with the figure
of his dream; but the conception instantly mixed with a disconnected
remembrance that this was Christmas eve, and then slipped from
him, and was lost. He did not pause there, but strode on. But just
there, what had been frightful became hideous. For at once he was
possessed with the conviction that the thing that lurked at a distance
behind him was quickening its movement, and coming up to seize
him. The dreadful fancy stung him like a goad, and, with a start,
he accelerated his flight, horribly conscious that what he feared
was slinking along in the shadow, close to the dark bulks of the
houses, resolutely pursuing, and bent on overtaking him. Faster!
His footfalls rang hollowly and loud on the moonlit pavement, and in
contrast with their rapid thuds he felt it as something peculiarly
terrible that the furtive thing behind slunk after him with soundless
feet. Faster, faster! Traversing only the most unfrequented streets,
and at that late hour of a cold winter night he met no one, and
with a terrifying consciousness that his pursuer was gaining on
him, he desperately strode on. He did not dare to look behind,
dreading less what he might see than the momentary loss of speed
the action might occasion. Faster, faster, faster! And all at once
he knew that the dogging thing had dropped its stealthy pace and
was racing up to him. With a bound he broke into a run, seeing,
hearing, heeding nothing, aware only that the other was silently
louping on his track two steps to his one; and with that frantic
apprehension upon him, he gained the next street, flung himself
around the corner with his back to the wall, and his arms convulsively
drawn up for a grapple; and felt something rush whirring past his
flank, striking him on the shoulder as it went by, with a buffet
that made a shock break through his frame. That shock restored
him to his senses. His delusion was suddenly shattered. The goblin
was gone. He was free.
He stood panting, like one just roused from some terrible dream,
wiping the reeking perspiration from his forehead, and thinking
confusedly and wearily what a fool he had been. He felt he had
wandered a long distance from his house, but had no distinct perception
of his whereabouts. He only knew he was in some thinly peopled
street, whose familiar aspect seemed lost to him in the magical
disguise the superb moonlight had thrown over all. Suddenly a film
seemed to drop from his eyes, as they became riveted on a lighted
window, on the opposite side of the way. He started, and a secret
terror crept over him, vaguely mixed with the memory of the shock
he had felt as he turned the last corner, and his distinct, awful
feeling that something invisible had passed him. At the same instant
he felt, and thrilled to feel, a touch, as of a light finger, on
his cheek. He was in Hanover Street. Before him was the house,--the
oyster-room staring at him through the lighted transparencies of
its two windows, like two square eyes, below; and his tenant's
light in a chamber above! The added shock which this discovery
gave to the heaving of his heart made him gasp for breath. Could
it be? Did he still dream? While he stood panting and staring at
the building the city clocks began to strike. Eleven o'clock; it
was ten when he came away; how he must have driven! His thoughts
caught up the word. Driven,--by what? Driven from his house in
horror, through street and lane, over half the city,--driven,--hunted
in terror, and smitten by a shock here! Driven,--driven! He could
not rid his mind of the word, nor of the meaning it suggested.
The pavements about him began to ring and echo with the tramp of
many feet, and the cold, brittle air was shivered with the noisy
voices that had roared and bawled applause and laughter at the
National Theatre all the evening, and were now singing and howling
homeward. Groups of rude men, and ruder boys, their breaths steaming
in the icy air, began to tramp by, jostling him as they passed,
till he was forced to draw back to the wall, and give them the
sidewalk. Dazed and giddy, in cold fear, and with the returning
sense of something near him, he stood and watched the groups that
pushed and tumbled in through the entrance of the oyster-room,
whistling and chattering as they went, and banging the door behind
them. He noticed that some came out presently, banging the door
harder, and went, smoking and shouting, down the street. Still
they poured in and out, while the street was startled with their
stimulated riot, and the bar-room within echoed their trampling
feet and hoarse voices. Then, as his glance wandered upward to
his tenant's window, he thought of the sick child, mixing this
hideous discord in the dreams of fever. The word brought up the name
and the thought of his dead friend. "In the name of the Saviour,
I charge you be true and tender to mankind!" The memory of these
words seemed to ring clearly, as if a voice had spoken them, above
the roar that suddenly rose in his mind. In that moment he felt
himself a wretched and most guilty man. He felt that his cruel
words had entered that humble home, to make desperate poverty more
desperate, to sicken sickness, and to sadden sorrow. Before him
was the dram-shop, let and licensed to nourish the worst and most
brutal appetites and instincts of human natures, at the sacrifice
of all their highest and holiest tendencies. The throng of tipplers
and drunkards was swarming through its hopeless door, to gulp the
fiery liquor whose fumes give all shames, vices, miseries, and
crimes a lawless strength and life, and change the man into the
pig or tiger. Murder was done, or nearly done, within those walls
last night. Within those walls no good was ever done; but daily,
unmitigated evil, whose results were reaching on to torture unborn
generations. He had consented to it all! He could not falter, or
equivocate, or evade, or excuse. His dead friend's words rang in his
conscience like the trump of the judgment angel. He was conquered.
Slowly, the resolve instantly to go in uprose within him, and with
it a change came upon his spirit, and the natural world, sadder than
before, but sweeter, seemed to come back to him. A great feeling
of relief flowed upon his mind. Pale and trembling still, he crossed
the street with a quick, unsteady step, entered a yard at the side
of the house, and, brushing by a host of white, rattling spectres of
frozen clothes, which dangled from lines in the enclosure, mounted
some wooden steps, and rang the bell. In a minute he heard footsteps
within, and saw the gleam of a lamp. His heart palpitated violently
as he heard the lock turning, lest the answerer of his summons
might be his tenant. The door opened, and, to his relief, he stood
before a rather decent-looking Irishman, bending forward in his
stocking-feet, with one boot and a lamp in his hand. The man stared
at him from a wild head of tumbled red hair, with a half-smile round
his loose open mouth, and said, "Begorra!" This was a second-floor
tenant.
Dr. Renton was relieved at the sight of him; but he rather failed
in an attempt at his rent-day suavity of manner, when he said,--
"Good evening, Mr. Flanagan. Do you think I can see Mrs. Miller
to-night?"
"She's up _there_, docther, anyway." Mr. Flanagan made a sudden
start for the stairs, with the boot and lamp at arm's length before
him, and stopped as suddenly. "Yull go up? or wud she come down to
ye?" There was as much anxious indecision in Mr. Flanagan's general
aspect, pending the reply, as if he had to answer the question
himself.
"I'll go up, Mr. Flanagan," returned Dr. Renton, stepping in, after
a pause, and shutting the door. "But I'm afraid she's in bed."
"Naw--she's not, sur." Mr. Flanagan made another feint with the boot
and lamp at the stairs, but stopped again in curious bewilderment,
and rubbed his head. Then, with another inspiration, and speaking
with such velocity that his words ran into each other, pell-mell,
he continued: "Th' small girl's sick, sur. Begorra, I wor just
pullin' on th' boots tuh gaw for the docther, in th' nixt streth,
an' summons him to her relehf, fur it's bad she is. A'id betther be
goan." Another start, and a movement to put on the boot instantly,
baffled by his getting the lamp into the leg of it, and involving
himself in difficulties in trying to get it out again without dropping
either, and stopped finally by Dr. Renton.
"You needn't go, Mr. Flanagan. I'll see to the child. Don't go."
He stepped slowly up the stairs, followed by the bewildered Flanagan.
All this time Dr. Renton was listening to the racket from the bar-room.
Clinking of glasses, rattling of dishes, trampling of feet, oaths
and laughter, and a confused din of coarse voices, mingling with
boisterous calls for oysters and drink, came, hardly deadened by
the partition walls, from the haunt below, and echoed through the
corridors. Loud enough within,--louder in the street without, where
the oysters and drink were reeling and roaring off to brutal dreams.
People trying to sleep here; a sick child up stairs. Listen! "_Two_
stew! _One_ roast! _Four_ ale! Hurry 'em up! _Three_ stew! _In_ number
six! _One_ fancy--_two_ roast! _One_ sling! Three brandy--_hot!
Two_ stew! _One_ whisk' _skin!_ Hurry 'em up! _What_ yeh _'bout!_
_Three_ brand' punch--_hot! Four_ stew! _What_-ye-e-h 'BOUT! _Two_
gin-cock-t'il! _One_ stew! Hu-r-r-y 'em up!" Clashing, rattling,
cursing, swearing, laughing, shouting, trampling, stumbling, driving,
slamming of doors. "Hu-r-ry 'em UP."
"Flanagan," said Dr. Renton, stopping at the first landing, "do
you have this noise every night?"
"Naise? Hoo! Divil a night, docther, but I'm wehked out ov me bed
wid 'em, Sundays an' all. Sure didn't they murdher wan of 'em,
out an' out, last night!"
"Is the man dead?"
"Dead? Troth he is. An' cowld."
"H'm"--through his compressed lips. "Flanagan, you needn't come
up. I know the door. Just hold the light for me here. There, that'll
do. Thank you." He whispered the last words from the top of the
second flight.
"Are ye there, docther?" Flanagan anxious to the last, and trying
to peer up at him with the lamplight in his eyes.
"Yes. That'll do. Thank you!" in the same whisper. Before he could
tap at the door, then darkening in the receding light, it opened
suddenly, and a big Irishwoman bounced out, and then whisked in
again, calling to some one in an inner room, "Here he is, Mrs.
Mill'r"; and then bounced out again, with a, "Walk royt in, if _you_
plaze; here's the choild"; and whisked in again, with a "Sure an'
Jehms was quick"; never once looking at him, and utterly unconscious
of the presence of her landlord. He had hardly stepped into the
room and taken off his hat, when Mrs. Miller came from the inner
chamber with a lamp in her hand. How she started! With her pale
face grown suddenly paler, and her hand on her bosom, she could
only exclaim, "Why, it's Dr. Renton!" and stand, still and dumb,
gazing with a frightened look at his face, whiter than her own.
Whereupon Mrs. Flanagan came bolting out again, with wild eyes and
a sort of stupefied horror in her good, coarse, Irish features;
and then, with some uncouth ejaculation, ran back, and was heard
to tumble over something within, and tumble something else over in
her fall, and gather herself up with a subdued howl, and subside.
"Mrs. Miller," began Dr. Renton, in a low, husky voice, glancing
at her frightened face, "I hope you'll be composed. I spoke to you
very harshly and rudely to-night; but I really was not myself--I
was in anger--and I ask your pardon. Please to overlook it all,
and--but I will speak of this presently; now--I am a physician;
will you let me look now at your sick child?"
He spoke hurriedly, but with evident sincerity. For a moment her
lips faltered; then a slow flush came up, with a quick change of
expression on her thin, worn face, and, reddening to painful scarlet,
died away in a deeper pallor.
"Dr. Renton," she said, hastily, "I have no ill-feeling for you,
sir, and I know you were hurt and vexed; and I know you have tried
to make it up to me again, sir, secretly. I know who it was, now;
but I can't take it, sir. You must take it back. You know it was
you sent it, sir?"
"Mrs. Miller," he replied, puzzled beyond measure, "I don't understand
you. What do you mean?"
"Don't deny it, sir. Please not to," she said imploringly, the
tears starting to her eyes. "I am very grateful,--indeed I am. But
I can't accept it. Do take it again."
"Mrs. Miller," he replied, in a hasty voice, "what do you mean? I
have sent you nothing,--nothing at all. I have, therefore, nothing
to receive again."
She looked at him fixedly, evidently impressed by the fervor of
his denial.
"You sent me nothing to-night, sir?" she asked, doubtfully.
"Nothing at any time, nothing," he answered, firmly.
It would have been folly to have disbelieved the truthful look of
his wondering face, and she turned away in amazement and confusion.
There was a long pause.
"I hope, Mrs. Miller, you will not refuse any assistance I can render
to your child," he said, at length.
She started, and replied, tremblingly and confusedly, "No, sir; we
shall be grateful to you, if you can save her"; and went quickly,
with a strange abstraction on her white face, into the inner room.
He followed her at once, and, hardly glancing at Mrs. Flanagan,
who sat there in stupefaction, with her apron over her head and
face, he laid his hat on a table, went to the bedside of the little
girl, and felt her head and pulse. He soon satisfied himself that
the little sufferer was in no danger, under proper remedies, and
now dashed down a prescription on a leaf from his pocket-book.
Mrs. Flanagan, who had come out from the retirement of her apron,
to stare stupidly at him during the examination, suddenly bobbed
up on her legs, with enlightened alacrity, when he asked if there
was any one that could go out to the apothecary's, and said, "Sure
I wull!" He had a little trouble to make her understand that the
prescription, which she took by the corner, holding it away from
her, as if it were going to explode presently, and staring at it
upside down, was to be left--"_left_, mind you, Mrs. Flanagan--with
the apothecary--Mr. Flint--at the nearest corner--and he will give
you some things, which you are to bring here." But she had shuffled
off at last with a confident, "Yis, sur--aw, I knoo," her head
nodding satisfied assent, and her big thumb covering the note on
the margin, "Charge to Dr. C. Renton, Bowdoin Street," (which,
_I_ know, could not keep it from the eyes of the angels!) and he
sat down to await her return.
"Mrs. Miller," he said, kindly, "don't be alarmed about your child.
She is doing well; and, after you have given her the medicine Mrs.
Flanagan will bring, you'll find her much better, to-morrow. She
must be kept cool and quiet, you know, and she'll be all right
soon."
"O Dr. Renton, I am very grateful," was the tremulous reply; "and
we will follow all directions, sir. It is hard to keep her quiet,
sir; we keep as still as we can, and the other children are very
still; but the street is very noisy all the daytime and evening,
sir, and--"
"I know it, Mrs. Miller. And I'm afraid those people down stairs
disturb you somewhat."
"They make some stir in the evening, sir; and it's rather loud
in the street sometimes, at night. The folks on the lower floors
are troubled a good deal, they say."
Well they may be. Listen to the bawling outside, now, cold as it
is. Hark! A hoarse group on the opposite sidewalk beginning a
song,--"Ro-o-l on, sil-ver mo-o-n--" The silver moon ceases to
roll in a sudden explosion of yells and laughter, sending up broken
fragments of curses, ribald jeers, whoopings, and cat-calls, high
into the night air. "Ga-l-a-ng! Hi-hi! What ye-e-h _'bout!_"
"This is outrageous, Mrs. Miller. Where's the watchman?"
She smiled faintly. "He takes one of them off occasionally, sir;
but he's afraid; they beat him sometimes." A long pause.
"Isn't your room rather cold, Mrs. Miller?" He glanced at the black
stove, dimly seen in the outer room. "It is necessary to keep the
rooms cool just now, but this air seems to me cold."
Receiving no answer, he looked at her, and saw the sad truth in
her averted face.
"I beg your pardon," he said quickly, flushing to the roots of his
hair. "I might have known, after what you said to me this evening."
"We had a little fire here to-day, sir," she said, struggling with
the pride and shame of poverty; "but we have been out of firing
for two or three days, and we owe the wharfman something now. The
two boys picked up a few chips; but the poor children find it hard
to get them, sir. Times are very hard with us, sir; indeed they
are. We'd have got along better, if my husband's money had come,
and your rent would have been paid--"