to the Indian Archipelago. A party, of which he formed one, landed at
Borneo, and passed into the interior on an excursion of pleasure. He
and a companion had captured the Ourang-Outang. This companion dying,
the animal fell into his own exclusive possession. After great trouble,
occasioned by the intractable ferocity of his captive during the home
voyage, he at length succeeded in lodging it safely at his own residence
in Paris, where, not to attract toward himself the unpleasant curiosity
of his neighbors, he kept it carefully secluded, until such time as it
should recover from a wound in the foot, received from a splinter on
board ship. His ultimate design was to sell it.
Returning home from some sailors’ frolic on the night, or rather in the
morning, of the murder, he found the beast occupying his own bedroom,
into which it had broken from a closet adjoining, where it had been, as
was thought, securely confined. Razor in hand and fully lathered, it was
sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in
which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the keyhole
of the closet. Terrified at the sight of so dangerous a weapon in the
possession of an animal so ferocious, and so well able to use it, the
man for some moments was at a loss what to do. He had been accustomed,
however, to quiet the creature, even in its fiercest moods, by the
use of the whip, and to this he now resorted. Upon sight of it, the
Ourang-Outang sprang at once through the door of the chamber, down the
stairs, and thence, through a window, unfortunately open, into the street.
The Frenchman followed in despair, the ape, razor still in hand,
occasionally stopping to look back and gesticulate at its pursuer, until
the latter had nearly come up with it. It then again made off. In this
manner the chase continued for a long time. The streets were profoundly
quiet, as it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. In passing down
an alley in the rear of the Rue Morgue, the fugitive’s attention was
arrested by a light gleaming from the open window of Madame L’Espanaye’s
chamber, in the fourth story of her house. Rushing to the building, it
perceived the lightning-rod, clambered up with inconceivable agility,
grasped the shutter, which was thrown fully back against the wall, and,
by its means, swung itself directly upon the head-board of the bed. The
whole feat did not occupy a minute. The shutter was kicked open again by
the Ourang-Outang as it entered the room.
The sailor, in the mean time, was both rejoiced and perplexed. He had
strong hopes of now recapturing the brute, as it could scarcely escape
from the trap into which it had ventured, except by the rod, where it
might be intercepted as it came down. On the other hand, there was much
cause for anxiety as to what it might do in the house. This latter
reflection urged the man still to follow the fugitive. A lightning-rod
is ascended without difficulty, especially by a sailor; but, when he had
arrived as high as the window, which lay far to his left, his career was
stopped; the most that he could accomplish was to reach over so as to
obtain a glimpse of the interior of the room. At this glimpse he nearly
fell from his hold through excess of horror. Now it was that those
hideous shrieks arose upon the night, which had startled from slumber the
inmates of the Rue Morgue. Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, habited
in their night-clothes, had apparently been occupied in arranging some
papers in the iron chest already mentioned, which had been wheeled into
the middle of the room. It was open, and its contents lay beside it on
the floor. The victims must have been sitting with their backs toward the
window; and, from the time elapsing between the ingress of the beast and
the screams, it seems probable that it was not immediately perceived. The
flapping-to of the shutter would naturally have been attributed to the
wind.
As the sailor looked in, the gigantic animal had seized Madame L’Espanaye
by the hair (which was loose, as she had been combing it) and was
flourishing the razor about her face, in imitation of the motions of a
barber. The daughter lay prostrate and motionless; she had swooned. The
screams and struggles of the old lady (during which the hair was torn
from her head) had the effect of changing the probably pacific purposes
of the Ourang-Outang into those of wrath. With one determined sweep of
its muscular arm it nearly severed her head from her body. The sight of
blood inflamed its anger into frenzy. Gnashing its teeth, and flashing
fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl, and embedded its
fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired.
Its wandering and wild glances fell at this moment upon the head of the
bed, over which the face of its master, rigid with horror, was just
discernible. The fury of the beast, which no doubt bore still in mind
the dreaded whip, was instantly converted into fear. Conscious of having
deserved punishment, it seemed desirous of concealing its bloody deeds,
and skipped about the chamber in an agony of nervous agitation, throwing
down and breaking the furniture as it moved, and dragging the bed from
the bedstead. In conclusion, it seized first the corpse of the daughter,
and thrust it up the chimney, as it was found; then that of the old lady,
which it immediately hurled through the window headlong.
As the ape approached the casement with its mutilated burden, the sailor
shrank aghast to the rod, and, rather gliding than clambering down it,
hurried at once home,—dreading the consequences of the butchery, and
gladly abandoning, in his terror, all solicitude about the fate of the
Ourang-Outang. The words heard by the party upon the staircase were the
Frenchman’s exclamations of horror and affright, commingled with the
fiendish jabberings of the brute.
I have scarcely anything to add. The Ourang-Outang must have escaped
from the chamber, by the rod, just before the breaking of the door. It
must have closed the window as it passed through it. It was subsequently
caught by the owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the
_Jardin des Plantes_. Le Bon was instantly released, upon our narration
of the circumstances (with some comments from Dupin) at the bureau of the
Prefect of Police. This functionary, however well disposed to my friend,
could not altogether conceal his chagrin at the turn which affairs had
taken, and was fain to indulge in a sarcasm or two, about the propriety
of every person’s minding his own business.
“Let him talk,” said Dupin, who had not thought it necessary to reply.
“Let him discourse; it will ease his conscience. I am satisfied with
having defeated him in his own castle. Nevertheless, that he failed in
the solution of this mystery is by no means that matter for wonder which
he supposes it; for, in truth, our friend the Prefect is somewhat too
cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no _stamen_. It is all head
and no body, like the pictures of the goddess Laverna; or, at best, all
head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all.
I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has
attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has _de nier ce
qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas_.”
[Illustration]
THE LAUSON TRAGEDY.
BY J. W. DEFOREST.
Cupid and Psyche! The young man and the young woman who are in love with
each other! The couple which is constantly vanishing and constantly
reappearing; which has filled millions of various situations, and yet
is always the same; symbolizing, and one might almost say embodying,
the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; acting a drama of endless
repetitions, with innumerable spectators!
What would the story-reading world—yes, and what would the great world
of humanity—do without these two figures? They are more lasting, they
are more important, and they are more fascinating than even the crowned
and laurelled images of heroes and sages. When men shall have forgotten
Alexander and Socrates, Napoleon and Humboldt, they will still gather
around this imperishable group, the youth and the girl who are in love.
Without them our kind would cease to be; at one time or another we are
all of us identified with them in spirit; thus both reason and sympathy
cause us to be interested in their million-fold repeated story.
We have the two before us. The girl, dark and dark-eyed, with Oriental
features, and an expression which one is tempted to describe by some
such epithet as imperial, is Bessie Barron, the orphan granddaughter
of Squire Thomas Lauson of Barham, in Massachusetts. The youth, pale,
chestnut-haired, and gray-eyed, with a tall and large and muscular build,
is Henry Foster, not more than twenty-seven years old, yet already a
professor in the scientific department of the university of Hampstead.
They are standing on the edge of a rocky precipice some seventy feet in
depth, from the foot of which a long series of grassy slopes descends
into a wide, irregular valley, surrounded by hills that almost deserve
the name of mountains. In the distance there are villages, the nearest
fully visible even to its most insignificant buildings, others showing
only a few white gleams through the openings of their elms, and others
still distinguishable by merely a spire.
There has been talk such as affianced couples indulge in; we must mention
this for the sake of truth, and we must omit it in mercy. “Lovers,”
declares a critic who has weight with us, “are habitually insipid, at
least to us married people.” It was a man who said that; no woman, it is
believed, could utter such a condemnation of her own heart: no woman ever
quite loses her interest in the drama of love-making. But out of regard
to such males as have drowned their sentimentality in marriage we will,
for the present, pass over the words of tenderness and devotion, and only
listen when Professor Foster becomes philosophical.
“What if I should throw myself down here?” said Bessie Barron, after a
long look over the precipice, meanwhile holding fast to a guardian arm.
“You would commit suicide,” was the reply of a man whom we must admit to
have been accurately informed concerning the nature of actions like the
one specified.
Slightly disappointed at not hearing the appeal, “O my darling, don’t
think of such a thing!” Bessie remained silent a moment, wondering if she
were silly or he cold-hearted. Did she catch a glimmering of the fact
that men do not crave small sensations as women do, and that the man
before her was a specially rational being because he had been trained
in the sublime logic of the laws of nature? Doubtful: the two sexes are
profoundly unlike in mental action; they must study each other long
before they can fully understand each other.
“I suppose I should be dreadfully punished for it,” she went on, her
thoughts turning to the world beyond death, that world which trembling
faith sees, and which is, therefore, visible to woman.
“I am not sure,” boldly admitted the Professor, who had been educated in
Germany.
In order to learn something of the character of this young man, we must
permit him to jabber his nondescript ideas for a little, even though we
are thereby stumbled and wearied.
“Not sure?” queried Bessie. “How do you mean? Don’t you think suicide
sinful? Don’t you think sin will be punished?”
She spoke with eagerness, dreading to find her lover not orthodox,—a
woful stigma in Barham on lovers, and indeed on all men whatever.
“Admitting thus much, I don’t know how far you would be a free agent
in the act,” lectured the philosopher. “I don’t know where free agency
begins or ends. Indeed, I am so puzzled by this question as to doubt
whether there is such a condition as free agency.”
“No such thing as free agency?” wondered Bessie. “Then what?”
“See here. Out of thirty-eight millions of Frenchmen a fixed number
commit suicide every year. Every year just so many Frenchmen out of a
million kill themselves. Does that look like free agency, or does it
look like some unknown influence, some general rule of depression, some
law of nature, which affects Frenchmen, and which they cannot resist?
The individual seems to be free, at every moment of his life, to do as
he chooses. But what leads him to choose? Born instincts, conditions of
health, surroundings, circumstances. Do not the circumstances so govern
his choice that he cannot choose differently? Moreover, is he really an
individual? Or is he only a fraction of a great unity, the human race,
and directed by its current? We speak of a drop of water as if it were an
individuality; but it cannot swim against the stream to which it belongs;
it is not free. Is not the individual man in the same condition? There
are questions there which I cannot answer; and until I can answer them I
cannot answer your question.”
We have not repeated without cause these bold and crude speculations.
It is necessary to show that Foster was what was called in Barham a
free-thinker, in order to account for efforts which were made to thwart
his marriage with Bessie Barron, and for prejudices which aided to work a
stern drama into his life.
The girl listened and pondered. She tried to follow her lover over the
seas of thought upon which he walked; but the venture was beyond her
powers, and she returned to the pleasant firm land of a subject nearer
her heart.
“Are you thinking of me?” she asked in a low tone, and with an appealing
smile.
“No,” he smiled back. “I must own that I was not. But I ought to have
been. I do think of you a great deal.”
“More than I deserve?” she queried, still suspicious that she was not
sufficiently prized to satisfy her longings for affection.
He laughed outright. “No, not more than you deserve; not as much as you
deserve; you deserve a great deal. How many times are you going to ask me
these questions?”
“Every day. A hundred times a day. Shall you get tired of them?”
“Of course not. But what does it mean? Do you doubt me?”
“No. But I want to hear you say that you think of me, over and over
again. It gives me such pleasure to hear you say it! It is such a great
happiness that it seems as if it were my only happiness.”
Before Bessie had fallen in love with Foster, and especially before her
engagement to him, there had been a time when she had talked more to the
satisfaction of the male critic. But now her whole soul was absorbed
in the work of loving. She had no thought for any other subject; none,
at least, while with _him_. Her whole appearance and demeanor shows how
completely she is occupied by this master passion of woman. A smile seems
to exhale constantly from her face; if it is not visible on her lips,
nor, indeed, anywhere, still you perceive it; if it is no more to be seen
than the perfume of a flower, still you are conscious of it. It is no
figurative exaggeration to say that there is within her soul an incessant
music, like that of waltzes, and of all sweet, tender, joyous melodies.
If you will watch her carefully, and if you have the delicate senses of
sympathy, you also will hear it.
Are we wrong in declaring that the old, old story of clinging hearts
is more fascinating from age to age, as human thoughts become purer
and human feelings more delicate? We believe that love, like all other
things earthly, is subject to the progresses of the law of evolution,
and grows with the centuries to be a more various and exquisite source
of happiness. This girl is more in love than her grandmother, who made
butter and otherwise wrought laboriously with her own hands, had ever
found it possible to be. An organization refined by the manifold touch of
high civilization, an organization brought to the keenest sensitiveness
by poetry and fiction and the spiritualized social breath of our times,
an organization in which muscle is lacking and nerve overabundant, she
is capable of an affection which has the wings of imagination, which can
soar above the ordinary plane of belief, which is more than was once
human.
Consider for an instant what an elaboration of culture the passion of
love may have reached in this child. She can invest the man whom she has
accepted as monarch of her soul with the perfections of the heroes of
history and of fiction. She can prophesy for him a future which a hundred
years since was not realizable upon this continent. Out of her own mind
she can draw shining raiment of success for him which shall be visible
across oceans, and crowns of fame which shall not be dimmed by centuries.
She can love him for superhuman loveliness which she has power to impute
to him, and for victories which she is magician enough to strew in
anticipation beneath his feet. It is not extravagance, it is even nothing
but the simplest and most obvious truth, to say that there have been
periods in the world’s history, without going back to the cycles of the
troglodyte and the lake-dweller, when such love would have been beyond
the capabilities of humanity.
It must be understood, by the way, that Bessie was not bred amid the
sparse, hard-worked, and scantily cultured population of Barham, and
that, until the death of her parents, two years before the opening of
this story, she had been a plant of the stimulating, hot-bed life of a
city. Into this bucolic land she had brought susceptibilities which do
not often exist there, and a craving for excitements of sentiment which
does not often find gratification there. Consequently the first youth who
in any wise resembled the ideal of manhood which she had set up in her
soul found her ready to fall into his grasp, to believe in him as in a
deity, and to look to him for miracles of love and happiness.
Well, these two interesting idiots, as the unsympathizing observer might
call them, have turned their backs on the precipice and are walking
toward the girl’s home. They had not gone far before Bessie uttered a
speech which excited Harry’s profound amazement, and which will probably
astonish every young man who has not as yet made his conquests. After
looking at him long and steadfastly, she said: “How is it possible that
you can care for me? I don’t see what you find in me to make me worthy of
your admiration.”
How often such sentiments have been felt, and how often also they have
been spoken, by beings whose hearts have been bowed by the humility of
strong affection! Perhaps women are less likely to give them speech than
men; but it is only because they are more trammelled by an education of
reserve, and by inborn delicacy and timidity; it is not because they feel
them less. This girl, however, was so frank in nature, and so earnest and
eager in her feelings, that she could not but give forth the aroma of
loving meekness that was in her soul.
“What do you mean?” asked Foster, in his innocent surprise. “See nothing
to admire in _you_!”
“O, you are so much wiser than I, and so much nobler!” she replied. “It
is just because you are good, because you have the best heart that ever
was, that you care for me. You found me lonely and unhappy, and so you
pitied me and took charge of me.”
“O no!” he began; but we will not repeat his protestations; we will just
say that he, too, was properly humble.
“Have you really been lonely and sad?” he went on, curious to know every
item of her life, every beat of her heart.
“Does that old house look like a paradise to you?” she asked, pointing to
the dwelling of Squire Lauson.
“It isn’t very old, and it doesn’t look very horrible,” he replied, a
little anxious as he thought of his future housekeeping. “Perhaps ours
will not be so fine a one.”
“I was not thinking of that,” declared Bessie. “_Our_ house will be
charming, even if it has but one story, and that under ground. But _this_
one! You don’t see it with my eyes; you haven’t lived in it.”
“Is it haunted?” inquired Foster, of whom we must say that he did not
believe in ghosts, and, in fact, scorned them with all the scorn of a
philosopher.
“Yes, and by people who are not yet buried,—people who call themselves
alive.”
The subject was a delicate one probably, for Bessie said no more
concerning it, and Foster considerately refrained from further
questions. There was one thing on which this youth especially prided
himself, and that was on being a gentleman in every sense possible to
a republican. Because his father had been a judge, and his grandfather
and great-grandfather clergymen, he conceived that he belonged to a
patrician class, similar to that which Englishmen style “the untitled
nobility,” and that he was bound to exhibit as many chivalrous virtues
as if his veins throbbed with the blood of the Black Prince. Although
not combative, and not naturally reckless of pain and death, he would
have faced Heenan and Morrissey together in fight, if convinced that
his duty as a gentleman demanded it. Similarly he felt himself obliged
“to do the handsome thing” in money matters; to accept, for instance,
without haggling, such a salary as was usual in his profession; to be as
generous to waiters as if he were a millionaire. Furthermore, he must
be magnanimous to all that great multitude who were his inferiors, and
particularly must he be fastidiously decorous and tender in his treatment
of women. All these things he did or refrained from doing, not only out
of good instincts towards others, but out of respect for himself.
On the whole, he was a worthy and even admirable specimen of the genus
young man. No doubt he was conceited; he often offended people by his
bumptiousness of opinion and hauteur of manner; he rather depressed
the human race by the severity with which he classed this one and that
one as “no gentleman,” because of slight defects in etiquette; he
considerably amused older and wearier minds by the confidence with which
he settled vexed questions of several thousand years’ standing; but with
all these faults, he was a better and wiser and more agreeable fellow
than one often meets at his age; he was a youth whom man could respect
and woman adore. To noble souls it must be agreeable, I think, to see
him at the present moment, anxious to know precisely what sorrows had
clouded the life of his betrothed in the old house before him, and yet
refraining from questioning her on the alluring subject, “because he was
a gentleman.”
The house itself kept its secret admirably. It had not a signature of
character about it; it was as non-committal as an available candidate for
the Presidency; it exhibited the plain, unornamental, unpoetic reserve of
a Yankee Puritan. Whether it were a stage for comedy or tragedy, whether
it were a palace for happy souls or a prison for afflicted ones, it gave
not even a darkling hint.
A sufficiently spacious edifice, but low of stature and with a long
slope of back roof, it reminded one of a stocky and round-shouldered old
farmer, like those who daily trudged by it to and from the market of
Hampstead, hawing and geeing their fat cattle with lean, hard voices. A
front door, sheltered by a small portico, opened into a hall which led
straight through the building, with a parlor and bedroom on one side,
and a dining-room and kitchen on the other. In the rear was a low wing
serving as wash-house, lumber-room, and wood-shed. The white clapboards
and green blinds were neither freshly painted nor rusty, but just
sedately weather-worn. The grounds, the long woodpiles, the barn and its
adjuncts, were all in that state of decent slovenliness which prevails
amid the more rustic farming population of New England. On the whole,
the place looked like the abode of one who had made a fair fortune by
half a century or more of laborious and economical though not enlightened
agriculture.
“I must leave you now,” said Foster, when the two reached the gate of the
“front-yard”; “I must get back to my work in Hampstead.”
“And you won’t come in for a minute?” pleaded Bessie.
“You know that I would be glad to come in and stay in for ever and ever.
It seems now as if life were made for nothing but talking to you. But
my fellow-men no doubt think differently. There are such things as
lectures, and I must prepare a few of them. I really have pressing work
to do.”
What he furthermore had in his mind was, “I am bound as a gentleman to
do it”; but he refrained from saying that: he was conscious that he
sometimes said it too much; little by little he was learning that he was
bumptious, and that he ought not to be.
“And you will come to-morrow?” still urged Bessie, grasping at the next
best thing to to-day.
“Yes, I shall walk out. This driving every day won’t answer, on a
professor’s salary,” he added, swelling his chest over this grand
confession of poverty. “Besides, I need the exercise.”
“How good of you to walk so far merely to see me!” exclaimed the humble
little beauty.