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THE HAUNTERS & THE HAUNTED
GHOST STORIES AND TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY ERNEST RHYS
PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY
DANIEL O'CONNOR, 90 GREAT
RUSSELL STREET, W.C.1. 1921
For permission to use copyright stories in this volume, the
editor and publishers wish to make special acknowledgments to
Messrs Allen & Unwin, Mr Arnold Bennett, Mr E.H. Blakeney, Sir
George Douglas, Bart., Dr Greville MacDonald, Mr Arthur Machen,
and Mr Thomas Hardy.
CONTENTS
I. GHOST STORIES FROM LITERARY SOURCES
PAGE
1. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER 17
2. THE OLD NURSE'S STORY 40
3. THE SUPERSTITIOUS MAN'S STORY 54
4. A STORY OF RAVENNA 58
5. TEIG O'KANE AND THE CORPSE 67
6. THE HAUNTED AND THE HAUNTERS: OR THE HOUSE AND THE BRAIN 83
7. THE BOTATHEN GHOST 128
8. THE GHOST OF LORD CLARENCEUX 138
9. DR DUTHOIT'S VISION 143
10. THE SEVEN LIGHTS 147
11. THE SPECTRAL COACH OF BLACKADON 160
12. DRAKE'S DRUM 169
13. THE SPECTRE BRIDEGROOM 171
14. THE POOL IN THE GRAVEYARD 179
15. THE LIANHAN SHEE 181
16. THE HAUNTED COVE 216
17. WANDERING WILLIE'S TALE 225
II. GHOST STORIES FROM LOCAL RECORDS, FOLK LORE, AND LEGEND
PAGE
18. GLAMIS CASTLE 249
19. POWYS CASTLE 253
20. CROGLIN GRANGE 259
21. THE GHOST OF MAJOR SYDENHAM 264
22. THE MIRACULOUS CASE OF JESCH CLAES 268
23. THE RADIANT BOY OF CORBY CASTLE 270
24. CLERK SAUNDERS 274
25. DOROTHY DURANT 280
26. PEARLIN JEAN 284
27. THE DENTON HALL GHOST 287
28. THE GOODWOOD GHOST STORY 293
29. CAPTAIN WHEATCROFT 300
30. THE IRON CAGE 303
31. THE GHOST OF ROSEWARNE 310
32. THE IRON CHEST OF DURLEY 317
33. THE STRANGE CASE OF M. BEZUEL 320
34. THE MARQUIS DE RAMBOUILLET 326
35. THE ALTHEIM REVENANT 329
36. SERTORIUS AND HIS HIND 331
37. ERICHTHO 334
III. OMENS AND PHANTASMS
PAGE
38. PATROKLOS 343
39. VISION OF CROMWELL 345
40. LORD STRAFFORD'S WARNING 346
41. KOTTER'S RED CIRCLE 348
42. THE VISION OF CHARLES XI. OF SWEDEN 350
43. BEN JONSON'S PREVISION 359
44. QUEEN ULRICA 360
45. DENIS MISANGER 362
46. THE PIED PIPER 365
47. JEANNE D'ARC 367
48. ANNE WALKER 368
49. THE HAND OF GLORY 371
50. THE BLOODY FOOTSTEP 375
51. THE GHOSTLY WARRIORS OF WORMS 378
52. THE WANDERING JEW IN ENGLAND 379
53. BENDITH EU MAMMAU 382
54. THE RED BOOK OF APPIN 385
55. THE GOOD O'DONOGHUE 387
56. SARAH POLGRAIN 390
57. ELEANOR COBHAM, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER 393
INTRODUCTION
In this Ghost Book, M. Larigot, himself a writer of supernatural tales,
has collected a remarkable batch of documents, fictive or real,
describing the one human experience that is hardest to make good.
Perhaps the very difficulty of it has rendered it more tempting to the
writers who have dealt with the subject. His collection, notably varied
and artfully chosen as it is, yet by no means exhausts the literature,
which fills a place apart with its own recognised classics, magic
masters, and dealers in the occult. Their testimony serves to show that
the forms by which men and women are haunted are far more diverse and
subtle than we knew. So much so, that one begins to wonder at last if
every person is not liable to be "possessed." For, lurking under the
seeming identity of these visitations, the dramatic differences of their
entrances and appearances, night and day, are so marked as to suggest
that the experience is, given the fit temperament and occasion,
inevitable.
One would even be disposed, accepting this idea, to bring into the
account, as valid, stories and pieces of literature not usually
accounted part of the ghostly canon. There are the novels and tales
whose argument is the tragedy of a haunted mind. Such are Dickens'
_Haunted Man_, in which the ghost is memory; Hawthorne's _Scarlet
Letter_, in which the ghost is cruel conscience; and Balzac's _Quest of
the Absolute_, in which the old Flemish house of Balthasar Claes, in the
Rue de Paris at Douai, is haunted by a dæmon more potent than that of
Canidia. One might add some of Balzac's shorter stories, among them
"The Elixir"; and some of Hawthorne's _Twice-Told Tales_, including
"Edward Randolph's Portrait." On the French side we might note too that
terrible graveyard tale of Guy de Maupassant, _La Morte_, in which the
lover who has lost his beloved keeps vigil at her grave by night in his
despair, and sees--dreadful resurrection--"que toutes les tombes étaient
ouvertes, et tous les cadavres en étaient sortis." And why? That they
might efface the lying legends inscribed on their tombs, and replace
them with the actual truth. Villiers de l'Isle Adam has in his _Contes
Cruels_ given us the strange story of Véra, which may be read as a
companion study to _La Morte_, with another recall from the dead to end
a lover's obsession. Nature and supernature cross in de l'Isle Adam's
mystical drama _Axël_ a play which will never hold the stage, masterly
attempt as it is to dramatise the inexplainable mystery.
Among later tales ought to be reckoned Edith Wharton's _Tales of Men and
Ghosts_, and Henry James's _The Two Magics_, whose "Turn of the Screw"
gives us new instances of the evil genii that haunt mortals, in this
case two innocent children. One remembers sundry folk-tales with the
same motive--of children bewitched or forespoken--inspiring them. And an
old charm in Orkney which used to run:
"Father, Son, Holy Ghost!
Bitten sall they be,
Bairn, wha have bitten thee!
Care to their black vein,
Till thou hast thy health again!
Mend thou in God's name!"
John Aubrey in his _Miscellanies_ has many naïve evidences of the
twilight region of consciousness, like that between wake and sleep,
which tends to fade when we are wideawake; so much so, that we call it
visionary. Yet it is very real to the haunted folk, to Aubrey's
correspondent, the Rector of Chedzoy, or to the false love of the Demon
Lover, or that Mr Bourne of whom Glanvil tells in _The Iron Chest of
Durley_, or the Bishop Evodius who was St Augustine's friend, or for
that matter the son of Monica himself. The reality of these visitations
may seem dim, but the most sceptical of us cannot doubt that, whether
from some quickened fear of death or impending disaster, from evil
conscience or swift intensification of vision; whether in the forms of
beloved sons lost at sea or of other revenants who were held
indispensably dear in life, the haunters have appeared, to the absolute
belief of those who saw them or their simulacra.
"It poseth me," said Richard Baxter, "to think of what kind these
visitants are. Do good spirits dwell then so near us, or are they sent
on such messages?" The question, indeed, poseth most of us, but we
cannot leave the inquiry alone. M. Larigot, realising this
preoccupation, has in the course of his investigations, during many
years, arrived at the conclusion that there is an Art of the
Supernatural, apart from the difficult science of psychical research,
worth cultivating for its own sake. So he has gone to Glanvil and Arise
Evans and the credulous old books--to Edgar Poe and Lord Lytton and the
modern writers who tell supernatural tales. He gives us their material
without positing its unquestionable effect as police-court evidence, and
if we recognise its artistic interest, he does not mind much if we say
at last with one great visionary, "Hoc est illusionum." But into those
realms of illusion we ought not, if he is right, to enter lightly. Those
who do enter there are warned that, having done so, they will not remain
the same; they become aware of what Eugenius meant, who said:
"I am unbody'd by thy Books, and Thee,
And in thy papers find my Extasie;
Or if I please but to descend a strain,
Thy Elements do screen my Soul again.
I can undress myself by thy bright Glass,
And then resume th' Inclosure, as I was.
Now I am Earth, and now a Star, and then
A Spirit: now a Star, and earth again ..."
We see that there is another aspect to the occultation of Orion, and a
very ominous one. Aurelius appeared to St. Augustine and made clear a
dark passage to him in his reading, and that great Divine and Father of
the Church knew it to be an enlightenment from above. But what of the
other visitants from regions that are unblessed? Paracelsus has taught
us to be careful in our dealings with the realities and the phantasies,
as he would conceive them, of the other world; for "under the Earth do
wander half-men." And there are other and worse manifestations due to
Black Magic or Nigromancy, and to the black witches and white and the
false sorcerers who have violently intruded into the true mystery--"like
swine broken into a delicate Garden." Against these subtle and powerful
magicians no weapons, coats of mail, or brigandines will help, no
shutting of doors or locks; for they penetrate through all things, and
all things are open to them.
Writing as a physician, Paracelsus sought to anticipate by his
_Celestial Medicine_ and his _Twelve Signs_ the whole mystery of
healing, and the cure of the troubled souls and bodies of men and women,
which are not accorded but at odds with nature and supernature. The
spirits of discord are indeed always with us; and whether you see them
as witches, disguised in the living human form, or as monstrous and
terrifying dream-figures, or as floating impalpable atmospheres, they
are vigilantly to be guarded against. We know
"Vervain and dill
Hinders witches from their will!"
in the old herbals; but we need new drugs. As for that witch which hath
haunted all of us, "Maladicta," Lilly in his _Astrology_ has a remedy.
"Take unguentum populeum, and Vervain and Hypericon, and put a red-hot
iron into it: You must anoint the back-bone, or wear it in your breast."
The haunting apparitions are not all of earth. Cornelius Agrippa, in his
book of the Secret Doctrine, shows that they are astral too. The
familiar spirits of Mars, in his account, are no lovelier than Macbeth's
witches:--"They appear in a tall body, cholerick, a filthy countenance,
of colour brown, swarthy or red, having horns, like Harts' Horns, and
gryphon's claws, and bellowing like wild Bulls."
But the spirits of Mercury are delightful. They indeed are "of colour
clear and bright, like unto a knight armed,--and the motion of them is
as it were silver-coloured clouds." So, if Mars has troubled the world,
as in the unhappy history of our own time, we must hope for the brighter
forms, and the remedial and aerial messengers of Mercury.
We may seem to have strayed from the proper boundaries in going so far.
But it is one of the offices of this book to widen the area of research,
and relate the ghost-story anew to the whole literature of wonder and
imagination. Such sagas as that which Dr Douglas Hyde has translated
with consummate art from the Irish, "Teig O'Kane and the Corpse," which
Mr W.B. Yeats called a little masterpiece; or Boccaccio's story of the
spectre-hounds that pulled down the daughter of Anastasio, or Scott's
"Wandering Willie's Tale," or Hawker's "Cruel Coppinger," or Edgar Poe's
"Fall of the House of Usher," are of their kind not to be beaten. And in
their own way some of the later records are as telling. One can take the
book as a text-book of the supernatural, or as a story-book of that
middle world which has given us the ghosts that Homer and Shakespeare
conjured up.
ERNEST RHYS.
I
GHOST STORIES FROM LITERARY SOURCES
I
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
By EDGAR ALLAN POE
Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne.
DE BERANGER.
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the
year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been
passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of
country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew
on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it
was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of
insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the
feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic,
sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural
images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before
me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the
domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like windows--upon a
few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an
utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation
more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the
bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous dropping off of the veil.
There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed
dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture
into aught of the sublime. What was it--I paused to think--what was it
that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was
a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies
that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the
unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there _are_
combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus
affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations
beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different
arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the
picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its
capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined
my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in
unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder
even more thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and inverted images
of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and
eye-like windows.
Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a
sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of
my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last
meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of
the country--a letter from him--which, in its wildly importunate nature,
had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of
nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness--of a mental
disorder which oppressed him--and of an earnest desire to see me, as his
best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by
the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was
the manner in which all this, and much more, was said--it was the
apparent _heart_ that went with his request--which allowed me no room
for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still
considered a very singular summons.
Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really
knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and
habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been
noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament,
displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and
manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive
charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps
even more than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties, of
musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the
stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at
no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family
lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling
and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I
considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the
character of the premises with the accredited character of the people,
and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the
long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other--it was
this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent
undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the
name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the
original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of
the "House of Usher"--an appellation which seemed to include, in the
minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family
mansion.
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish
experiment--that of looking down within the tarn--had been to deepen the
first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness
of the rapid increase of my superstition--for why should I not so term
it?--served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long
known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a
basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again
uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there
grew in my mind a strange fancy--a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I
but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed
me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about
the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to
themselves and their immediate vicinity--an atmosphere which had no
affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the
decayed trees, and the grey wall, and the silent tarn--a pestilent and
mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
Shaking off from my spirit what _must_ have been a dream, I scanned more
narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed
to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been
great. Minute _fungi_ overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine
tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any
extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and
there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect
adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual
stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality
of old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault,
with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this
indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of
instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinising observer might have
discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof
of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag
direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.
Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A
servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of
the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence,
through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the _studio_
of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know
not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already
spoken. While the objects around me--while the carvings of the ceilings,
the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors,
and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were
but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my
infancy--while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all
this--I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which
ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the
physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled
expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with
trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered
me into the presence of his master.
The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows
were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black
oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams
of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and
served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects
around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles
of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark
draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse,
comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments
lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I
felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and
irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.
Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at
full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in
it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality--of the constrained
effort of the _ennuyé_ man of the world. A glance, however, at his
countenance, convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for
some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half
of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered,
in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that
I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me
with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face
had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye
large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and
very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate
Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril, unusual in similar
formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence,
of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and
tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions
of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be
forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character
of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay
so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor
of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things
startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to
grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated
rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect
its arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence--an
inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble
and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy--an excessive
nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been
prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish
traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical
conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and
sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the
animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic
concision--that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding
enunciation--that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural
utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the
irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense
excitement.
It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest
desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He
entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his
malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for
which he despaired to find a remedy--a mere nervous affection, he
immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass on. It displayed
itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed
them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms, and
the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much
from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone
endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of
all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint
light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed
instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.
To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. "I shall
perish," said he, "I _must_ perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus,
and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future,
not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of
any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this
intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger,
except in its absolute effect--in terror. In this unnerved--in this
pitiable condition--I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive
when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the
grim phantasm, FEAR."
I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal
hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was
enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling
which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured
forth--in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed
in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated--an influence which some
peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had,
by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit--an effect
which the _physique_ of the grey walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn
into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the
_morale_ of his existence.
He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the
peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more
natural and far more palpable origin--to the severe and long-continued
illness--indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution--of a tenderly
beloved sister--his sole companion for long years--his last and only
relative on earth. "Her decease," he said, with a bitterness which I can
never forget, "would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last
of the ancient race of the Ushers." While he spoke, the Lady Madeline
(for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the
apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I
regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread--and
yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of
stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a
door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and
eagerly the countenance of the brother--but he had buried his face in
his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary
wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many
passionate tears.
The disease of the Lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her
physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and
frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical
character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne
up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself
finally to bed; but, on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at
the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with
inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer; and
I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus
probably be the last I should obtain--that the lady, at least while
living, would be seen by me no more.
For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or
myself: and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavours to
alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together; or
I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking
guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more
unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I
perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which
darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all
objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation
of gloom.
I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus
spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in
any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or
of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An
excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over
all. His long improvised dirges will ring for ever in my ears. Among
other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and
amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the
paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded and which grew, touch
by touch, into vagueness at which I shuddered the more thrillingly,
because I shuddered knowing not why;--from these paintings (vivid as
their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more
than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely
written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs,
he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that
mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least--in the circumstances then
surrounding me--there arose out of the pure abstractions which the
hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of
intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation
of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.
One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so
rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although
feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely
long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and
without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design
served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding
depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any
portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of
light, was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout,
and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour.
I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which
rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of
certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow
limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave
birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances.
But the fervid _facility_ of his _impromptus_ could not be so accounted
for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the
words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself
with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental
collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as
observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial
excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily
remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he
gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I
fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness
on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her
throne. The verses, which were entitled "The Haunted Palace," ran very
nearly, if not accurately, thus:
I
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted
Once a fair and stately palace--
Radiant palace--reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion--
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
II
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow;
(This--all this--was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odour went away.
III
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well tunèd law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
IV
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
V
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
VI
And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh--but smile no more.
I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad, led us into a
train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's
which I mention not so much on account of its novelty (for other men[1]
have thought thus), as on account of the pertinacity with which he
maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the
sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the
idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain
conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganisation. I lack words to express
the full extent, or the earnest _abandon_ of his persuasion. The belief,
however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the grey
stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience
had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of
these stones--in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of
the many _fungi_ which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which
stood around--above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this
arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn.
Its evidence--the evidence of the sentience--was to be seen, he said
(and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain
condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the
walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet
importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the
destinies of his family, and which made _him_ what I now saw him--what
he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none.
Our books--the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of
the mental existence of the invalid--were, as might be supposed, in
strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over
such works as the _Ververt et Chartreuse_ of Gresset; the _Belphegor_
of Machiavelli; the _Heaven and Hell_ of Swedenborg; the _Subterranean
Voyage of Nicholas Klimm_ by Holberg; the _Chiromancy_ of Robert Flud,
of Jean D'Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the _Journey into the Blue
Distance_ of Tieck; and the _City of the Sun_ of Campanella. One
favourite volume was a small octavo edition of the _Directorium
Inquisitorum_, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were
passages in _Pomponius Mela_, about the old African Satyrs and Ægipans,
over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight,
however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious
book in quarto Gothic--the manual of a forgotten church--the _Vigiliæ
Mortuorum Chorum Ecclesiæ Maguntinæ_.
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its
probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having
informed me abruptly that the Lady Madeline was no more, he stated his
intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight (previously to its
final interment), in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of
the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular
proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The
brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration
of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain
obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the
remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will
not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the
person whom I met upon the staircase, on the day of my arrival at the
house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a
harmless, and by no means an unnatural, precaution.
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for
the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone
bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had
been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive
atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small,
damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great
depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my
own sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal
times, for the worst purpose of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a
place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance,
as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway
through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The
door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense
weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound as it moved upon its
hinges.
Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of
horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin,
and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between
the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher,
divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I
learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that
sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between
them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead--for we could
not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in
the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly
cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and
the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so
terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having
secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely
less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house.
And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change
came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His
ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or
forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and
objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible,
a more ghastly hue--but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone
out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a
tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterised his
utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly
agitated mind was labouring with some oppressive secret, to divulge
which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was
obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness,
for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of
the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It
was no wonder that his condition terrified--that it infected me. I felt
creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of
his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.
It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the
seventh or eighth day after the placing of the Lady Madeline within the
donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came
not near my couch--while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to
reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavoured to
believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering
influence of the gloomy furniture of the room--of the dark and tattered
draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising
tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily
about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An
irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there
sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking
this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows,
and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber,
hearkened--I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted
me--to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses
of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an
intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on
my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the
night), and endeavoured to arouse myself from the pitiable condition
into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the
apartment.
I had taken but a few turns in this manner, when a light step on an
adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognised it as
that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch,
at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual,
cadaverously wan--but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in
his eyes--an evidently restrained _hysteria_ in his whole demeanour. His
air appalled me--but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had
so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief.
"And you have not seen it?" he said abruptly, after having stared about
him for some moments in silence--"you have not then seen it?--but, stay!
you shall." Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he
hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm.
The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet.
It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one
wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently
collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent
alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of
the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house)
did not prevent our perceiving the lifelike velocity with which they
flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away
into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not
prevent our perceiving this--yet we had no glimpse of the moon or
stars--nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under
surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapour, as well as all
terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural
light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation
which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.
"You must not--you shall not behold this!" said I, shudderingly, to
Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat.
"These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena
not uncommon--or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the
rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement;--the air is
chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favourite
romances. I will read, and you shall listen;--and so we will pass away
this terrible night together."
The antique volume which I had taken up was the _Mad Trist_ of Sir
Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favourite of Usher's more in
sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth
and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty
and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book
immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement
which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history
of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness
of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the
wild overstrained air of vivacity with which he hearkened, or apparently
hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated
myself upon the success of my design.
I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred,
the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission
into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by
force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus:
"And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now
mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had
drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth,
was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his
shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace
outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the
door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling therewith sturdily, he so
cracked and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and
hollow-sounding wood alarmed and reverberated throughout the forest."
At the termination of this sentence I started, and, for a moment,
paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my
excited fancy had deceived me)--it appeared to me that, from some very
remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears,
what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo
(but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping
sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond
doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid
the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled
noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing,
surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the
story:
"But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore
enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but,
in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanour, and
of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a
floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass
with this legend enwritten--
Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin;
Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win;
and Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon,
which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so
horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to
close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like
whereof was never before heard."
Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild
amazement--for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance,
I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found
it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh,
protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound--the exact
counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's
unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.