Transcriber’s Notes:
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
possible, including inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation, and
punctuation. Some corrections of spelling and punctuation have been
made. They are listed at the end of the text.
Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
MELMOTH
THE
WANDERER:
A
TALE.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “BERTRAM,” &c.
IN FOUR VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
EDINBURGH:
PRINTED FOR ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY,
AND HURST, ROBINSON, AND CO. CHEAPSIDE,
LONDON.
1820.
TO THE
MOST NOBLE
THE
MARCHIONESS OF ABERCORN,
This Romance
Is, by her Ladyship’s permission,
Respectfully inscribed by
THE AUTHOR.
PREFACE.
The hint of this Romance (or Tale) was taken from a passage in one of my
Sermons, which (as it is to be presumed very few have read) I shall here
take the liberty to quote. The passage is this.
“At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have
departed from the Lord, disobeyed his will, and disregarded his
word--is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that
man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his
salvation?--No, there is not one--not such a fool on earth, were the
enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!”
This passage suggested the idea of “Melmoth the Wanderer.” The Reader
will find that idea developed in the following pages, with what power or
success _he_ is to decide.
The “Spaniard’s Tale” has been censured by a friend to whom I read it,
as containing too much attempt at the revivification of the horrors of
Radcliffe-Romance, of the persecutions of convents, and the terrors of
the Inquisition.
I defended myself, by trying to point out to my friend, that I had made
the misery of conventual life depend less on the startling adventures
one meets with in romances, than on that irritating series of petty
torments which constitutes the misery of life in general, and which,
amid the tideless stagnation of monastic existence, solitude gives its
inmates leisure to invent, and power combined with malignity, the full
disposition to practise. I trust this defence will operate more on the
conviction of the Reader, than it did on that of my friend.
For the rest of the Romance, there are some parts of it which I have
borrowed from real life.
The story of John Sandal and Elinor Mortimer is founded in fact.
The original from which the Wife of Walberg is imperfectly sketched is a
living woman, and _long may she live_.
I cannot again appear before the public in so unseemly a character as
that of a writer of romances, without regretting the necessity that
compels me to it. Did my profession furnish me with the means of
subsistence, I should hold myself culpable indeed in having recourse to
any other, but--am I allowed the choice?
Dublin, }
31st August 1820. }
MELMOTH.
CHAPTER I.
Alive again? Then show me where he is;
I’ll give a thousand pounds to look upon him.
SHAKESPEARE.
In the autumn of 1816, John Melmoth, a student in Trinity College,
Dublin, quitted it to attend a dying uncle on whom his hopes for
independence chiefly rested. John was the orphan son of a younger
brother, whose small property scarce could pay John’s college expences;
but the uncle was rich, unmarried, and old; and John, from his infancy,
had been brought up to look on him with that mingled sensation of awe,
and of the wish, without the means to conciliate, (that sensation at
once attractive and repulsive), with which we regard a being who (as
nurse, domestic, and parent have tutored us to believe) holds the very
threads of our existence in his hands, and may prolong or snap them when
he pleases.
On receiving this summons, John set immediately out to attend his uncle.
The beauty of the country through which he travelled (it was the county
Wicklow) could not prevent his mind from dwelling on many painful
thoughts, some borrowed from the past, and more from the future. His
uncle’s caprice and moroseness,--the strange reports concerning the
cause of the secluded life he had led for many years,--his own dependent
state,--fell like blows fast and heavy on his mind. He roused himself to
repel them,--sat up in the mail, in which he was a solitary
passenger,--looked out on the prospect,--consulted his watch;--then he
thought they receded for a moment,--but there was nothing to fill their
place, and he was forced to invite them back for company. When the mind
is thus active in calling over invaders, no wonder the conquest is soon
completed. As the carriage drew near the Lodge, (the name of old
Melmoth’s seat), John’s heart grew heavier every moment.
The recollection of this awful uncle from infancy,--when he was never
permitted to approach him without innumerable lectures,--_not to be
troublesome_,--not to go too near his uncle,--not to ask him any
questions,--on no account to disturb the inviolable arrangement of his
snuff-box, hand-bell, and spectacles, nor to suffer the glittering of
the gold-headed cane to tempt him to the mortal sin of handling
it,--and, finally, to pilot himself aright through his perilous course
in and out of the apartment without striking against the piles of books,
globes, old newspapers, wig-blocks, tobacco-pipes, and snuff-cannisters,
not to mention certain hidden rocks of rat-traps and mouldy books
beneath the chairs,--together with the final reverential bow at the
door, which was to be closed with cautious gentleness, and the stairs to
be descended as if he were “shod with felt.”--This recollection was
carried on to his school-boy years, when at Christmas and Easter, the
ragged poney, the jest of the school, was dispatched to bring the
reluctant visitor to the Lodge,--where his pastime was to sit vis-a-vis
to his uncle, without speaking or moving, till the pair resembled Don
Raymond and the ghost of Beatrice in the Monk,--then watching him as he
picked the bones of lean mutton out of his mess of weak broth, the
latter of which he handed to his nephew with a needless caution not to
“take more than he liked,”--then hurried to bed by day-light, even in
winter, to save the expence of an inch of candle, where he lay awake and
restless from hunger, till his uncle’s retiring at eight o’clock gave
signal to the governante of the meagre household to steal up to him with
some fragments of her own scanty meal, administering between every
mouthful a whispered caution not to tell his uncle. Then his college
life, passed in an attic in the second square, uncheered by an
invitation to the country; the gloomy summer wasted in walking up and
down the deserted streets, as his uncle would not defray the expences of
his journey;--the only intimation of his existence, received in
quarterly epistles, containing, with the scanty but punctual remittance,
complaints of the expences of his education, cautions against
extravagance, and lamentations for the failure of tenants and the fall
of the value of lands. All these recollections came over him, and along
with them the remembrance of that last scene, where his dependence on
his uncle was impressed on him by the dying lips of his father.
“John, I must leave you, my poor boy; it has pleased God to take your
father from you before he could do for you what would have made this
hour less painful to him. You must look up, John, to your uncle for
every thing. He has oddities and infirmities, but you must learn to bear
with them, and with many other things too, as you will learn too soon.
And now, my poor boy, may He who is the father of the fatherless look on
your desolate state, and give you favour in the eyes of your uncle.” As
this scene rose to John’s memory, his eyes filled fast with tears, which
he hastened to wipe away as the carriage stopt to let him out at his
uncle’s gate.
He alighted, and with a change of linen in a handkerchief, (his only
travelling equipment), he approached his uncle’s gate. The lodge was in
ruins, and a barefooted boy from an adjacent cabin ran to lift on its
single hinge what had once been a gate, but was now a few planks so
villainously put together, that they clattered like a sign in a high
wind. The stubborn post of the gate, yielding at last to the united
strength of John and his barefooted assistant, grated heavily through
the mud and gravel stones, in which it left a deep and sloughy furrow,
and the entrance lay open. John, after searching his pocket in vain for
a trifle to reward his assistant, pursued his way, while the lad, on his
return, cleared the road at a hop step and jump, plunging through the
mud with all the dabbling and amphibious delight of a duck, and scarce
less proud of his agility than of his “sarving a gentleman.” As John
slowly trod the miry road which had once been the approach, he could
discover, by the dim light of an autumnal evening, signs of increasing
desolation since he had last visited the spot,--signs that penury had
been aggravated and sharpened into downright misery. There was not a
fence or a hedge round the domain: an uncemented wall of loose stones,
whose numerous gaps were filled with furze or thorns, supplied their
place. There was not a tree or shrub on the lawn; the lawn itself was
turned into pasture-ground, and a few sheep were picking their scanty
food amid the pebble-stones, thistles, and hard mould, through which a
few blades of grass made their rare and squalid appearance.
The house itself stood strongly defined even amid the darkness of the
evening sky; for there were neither wings, or offices, or shrubbery, or
tree, to shade or support it, and soften its strong harsh outline. John,
after a melancholy gaze at the grass-grown steps and boarded windows,
“addressed himself” to knock at the door; but knocker there was none:
loose stones, however, there were in plenty; and John was making
vigorous application to the door with one of them, till the furious
barking of a mastiff, who threatened at every bound to break his chain,
and whose yell and growl, accompanied by “eyes that glow and fangs that
grin,” savoured as much of hunger as of rage, made the assailant raise
the siege on the door, and betake himself to a well-known passage that
led to the kitchen. A light glimmered in the window as he approached: he
raised the latch with a doubtful hand; but, when he saw the party
within, he advanced with the step of a man no longer doubtful of his
welcome.
Round a turf-fire, whose well-replenished fuel gave testimony to the
“master’s” indisposition, who would probably as soon have been placed on
the fire himself as seen the whole _kish_ emptied on it once, were
seated the old housekeeper, two or three _followers_, (_i. e._ people
who ate, drank, and lounged about in any kitchen that was open in the
neighbourhood, on an occasion of grief or joy, all for his honor’s sake,
and for the great rispict they bore the family), and an old woman, whom
John immediately recognized as the doctress of the neighbourhood,--a
withered Sybil, who prolonged her squalid existence by practising on the
fears, the ignorance, and the sufferings of beings as miserable as
herself. Among the better sort, to whom she sometimes had access by the
influence of servants, she tried the effects of some simples, her skill
in which was sometimes productive of success. Among the lower orders she
talked much of the effects of the “evil eye,” against which she boasted
a counter-spell, of unfailing efficacy; and while she spoke, she shook
her grizzled locks with such witch-like eagerness, that she never failed
to communicate to her half-terrified, half-believing audience, some
portion of that enthusiasm which, amid all her consciousness of
imposture, she herself probably felt a large share of; still, when the
case at last became desperate, when credulity itself lost all patience,
and hope and life were departing together, she urged the miserable
patient to confess “_there was something about his heart_;” and when
this confession was extorted from the weariness of pain and the
ignorance of poverty, she nodded and muttered so mysteriously, as to
convey to the bystanders, that she had had difficulties to contend with
which were invincible by human power. When there was no pretext, from
indisposition, for her visiting either “his honor’s” kitchen, or the
cottar’s hut,--when the stubborn and persevering convalescence of the
whole country threatened her with starvation,--she still had a
resource:--if there were no lives to be shortened, there were fortunes
to be told;--she worked “by spells, and by such daubry as is beyond our
element.” No one twined so well as she the mystic yarn to be dropt into
the lime-kiln pit, on the edge of which stood the shivering inquirer
into futurity, doubtful whether the answer to her question of “who
holds?” was to be uttered by the voice of demon or lover.
No one knew so well as she to find where the four streams met, in which,
on the same portentous season, the chemise was to be immersed, and then
displayed before the fire, (in the name of one whom we dare not mention
to “ears polite”), to be turned by the figure of the destined husband
before morning. No one but herself (she said) knew the hand in which the
comb was to be held, while the other was employed in conveying the apple
to the mouth,--while, during the joint operation, the shadow of the
phantom-spouse was to pass across the mirror before which it was
performed. No one was more skilful or active in removing every iron
implement from the kitchen where these ceremonies were usually performed
by the credulous and terrified dupes of her wizardry, lest, instead of
the form of a comely youth exhibiting a ring on his white finger, an
headless figure should stalk to the rack, (_Anglicè_, dresser), take
down a long spit, or, in default of that, snatch a poker from the
fire-side, and mercilessly take measure with its iron length of the
sleeper for a coffin. No one, in short, knew better how to torment or
terrify her victims into a belief of that power which may and has
reduced the strongest minds to the level of the weakest; and under the
influence of which the cultivated sceptic, Lord Lyttleton, yelled and
gnashed and writhed in his last hours, like the poor girl who, in the
belief of the horrible visitation of the vampire, shrieked aloud, that
her grandfather was sucking her vital blood while she slept, and expired
under the influence of imaginary horror. Such was the being to whom old
Melmoth had committed his life, half from credulity, and (_Hibernicè_
speaking) _more than half_ from avarice. Among this groupe John
advanced,--recognising some,--disliking more,--distrusting all. The old
housekeeper received him with cordiality;--he was always her
“whiteheaded boy,” she said,--(_imprimis_, his hair was as black as
jet), and she tried to lift her withered hand to his head with an action
between a benediction and a caress, till the difficulty of the attempt
forced on her the conviction that that head was fourteen inches higher
than her reach since she had last patted it. The men, with the national
deference of the Irish to a person of superior rank, all rose at his
approach, (their stools chattering on the broken flags) and wished his
honor “a thousand years and long life to the back of that; and would not
his honor take something to keep the grief out of his heart;” and so
saying, five or six red and bony hands tendered him glasses of whiskey
all at once. All this time the Sybil sat silent in the ample
chimney-corner, sending redoubled whiffs out of her pipe. John gently
declined the offer of spirits, received the attentions of the old
housekeeper cordially, looked askance at the withered crone who occupied
the chimney corner, and then glanced at the table, which displayed other
cheer than he had been accustomed to see in his “honor’s time.” There
was a wooden dish of potatoes, which old Melmoth would have considered
enough for a week’s subsistence. There was the salted salmon, (a luxury
unknown even in London. _Vide_ Miss Edgeworth’s Tales, “The Absentee”).
There was the _slink-veal_, flanked with tripe; and, finally, there were
lobsters and _fried_ turbot enough to justify what the author of the
tale asserts, “suo periculo,” that when his great grandfather, the Dean
of Killala, hired servants at the deanery, they stipulated that they
should not be required to eat turbot or lobster more than twice a-week.
There were also bottles of Wicklow ale, long and surreptitiously
borrowed from his “honor’s” cellar, and which now made their first
appearance on the kitchen hearth, and manifested their impatience of
further constraint, by hissing, spitting, and bouncing in the face of
the fire that provoked its animosity. But the whiskey (genuine
illegitimate potsheen, smelling strongly of weed and smoke, and
breathing defiance to excisemen) appeared, the “veritable Amphitryon” of
the feast; every one praised, and drank as deeply as he praised.
John, as he looked round the circle, and thought of his dying uncle, was
forcibly reminded of the scene at Don Quixote’s departure, where, in
spite of the grief caused by the dissolution of the worthy knight, we
are informed that “nevertheless the niece eat her victuals, the
housekeeper drank to the repose of his soul, and even Sancho cherished
his little carcase.” After returning, “as he might,” the courtesies of
the party, John asked how his uncle was. “As bad as he can be;”--“Much
better, and many thanks to your honor,” was uttered in such rapid and
discordant unison by the party, that John turned from one to the other,
not knowing which or what to believe. “They say his honor has had a
fright,” said a fellow, upwards of six feet high, approaching by way of
whispering, and then bellowing the sound six inches above John’s head.
“But then his honor has had _a cool_ since,” said a man who was quietly
swallowing the spirits that John had refused. At these words the Sybil
who sat in the chimney corner slowly drew her pipe from her mouth, and
turned towards the party: The oracular movements of a Pythoness on her
tripod never excited more awe, or impressed for the moment a deeper
silence. “It’s not _here_,” said she, pressing her withered finger on
her wrinkled forehead, “nor _here_,--nor _here_;” and she extended her
hand to the foreheads of those who were near her, who all bowed as if
they were receiving a benediction, but had immediate recourse to the
spirits afterwards, as if to ensure its effects.--“It’s all _here_--it’s
all _about the heart_;” and as she spoke she spread and pressed her
fingers on her hollow bosom with a force of action that thrilled her
hearers.--“It’s all _here_,” she added, repeating the action, (probably
excited by the effect she had produced), and then sunk on her seat,
resumed her pipe, and spoke no more. At this moment of involuntary awe
on the part of John, and of terrified silence on that of the rest, an
unusual sound was heard in the house, and the whole company started as
if a musket had been discharged among them:--it was the unwonted sound
of old Melmoth’s bell. His domestics were so few, and so constantly near
him, that the sound of his bell startled them as much as if he had been
ringing the knell for his own interment. “He used always to _rap down_
for me,” said the old housekeeper, hurrying out of the kitchen; “he said
pulling the bells wore out the ropes.”
The sound of the bell produced its full effect. The housekeeper rushed
into the room, followed by a number of women, (the Irish præficæ), all
ready to prescribe for the dying or weep for the dead,--all clapping
their hard hands, or wiping their dry eyes. These hags all surrounded
the bed; and to witness their loud, wild, and desperate grief, their
cries of “Oh! he’s going, his honor’s going, his honor’s going,” one
would have imagined their lives were bound up in his, like those of the
wives in the story of Sinbad the Sailor, who were to be interred alive
with their deceased husbands.
Four of them wrung their hands and howled round the bed, while one, with
all the adroitness of a Mrs Quickly, felt his honor’s feet, and “upward
and upward,” and “all was cold as any stone.”
Old Melmoth withdrew his feet from the grasp of the hag,--counted with
his keen eye (keen amid the approaching dimness of death) the number
assembled round his bed,--raised himself on his sharp elbow, and
pushing away the housekeeper, (who attempted to settle his nightcap,
that had been shoved on one side in the struggle, and gave his haggard,
dying face, a kind of grotesque fierceness), bellowed out in tones
that made the company start,--“What the devil brought ye all here?”
The question scattered the whole party for a moment; but rallying
instantly, they communed among themselves in whispers, and frequently
using the sign of the cross, muttered “The devil,--Christ save us, the
devil in his mouth the first word he spoke.” “Aye,” roared the invalid,
“and the devil in my eye the first sight I see.” “Where,--where?”
cried the terrified housekeeper, clinging close to the invalid in her
terror, and half-hiding herself in the blanket, which she snatched
without mercy from his struggling and exposed limbs. “There, there,” he
repeated, (during the battle of the blanket), pointing to the huddled
and terrified women, who stood aghast at hearing themselves arointed
as the very demons they came to banish. “Oh! Lord keep your honor’s
head,” said the housekeeper in a more soothing tone, when her fright
was over; “and sure your honor knows them all, is’n’t _her_ name,--and
_her_ name,--and _her_ name,”--and she pointed respectively to each
of them, adding their names, which we shall spare the English reader
the torture of reciting, (as a proof of our lenity, adding the last
only, Cotchleen O’Mulligan), “Ye lie, ye b----h,” growled old Melmoth;
“their name is Legion, for they are many,--turn them all out of the
room,--turn them all out of doors,--if they howl at my death, they
shall howl in earnest,--not for my death, for they would see me dead
and damned too with dry eyes, but for want of the whiskey that they
would have stolen if they could have got at it,” (and here old Melmoth
grasped a key which lay under his pillow, and shook it in vain triumph
at the old housekeeper, who had long possessed the means of getting
at the spirits unknown to his “honor”), “and for want of the victuals
you have pampered them with.” “_Pampered_, oh Ch--st!” ejaculated the
housekeeper. “Aye, and what are there so many candles for, all _fours_,
and the same below I warrant. Ah! you--you--worthless, wasteful old
devil.” “Indeed, your honor, they are all _sixes_.” “Sixes,--and
what the devil are you burning sixes for, d’ye think it’s _the wake_
already? Ha?” “Oh! not yet, your honor, not yet,” chorussed the
beldams; “but in God’s good time, your honor knows,” in a tone that
spoke ill suppressed impatience for the event. “Oh! that your honor
would think of making your soul.” “That’s the first sensible word you
have said,” said the dying man, “fetch me the prayer-book,--you’ll
find it there under that old boot-jack,--blow off the cobwebs;--it has
not been opened this many a year.” It was handed to him by the old
governante, on whom he turned a reproaching eye. “What made you burn
sixes in the kitchen, you extravagant jade? How many years have you
lived in this house?” “I don’t know, your honor.” “Did you ever see
any extravagance or waste in it?” “Oh never, never, your honor.” “Was
any thing but a farthing candle ever burned in the kitchen?” “Never,
never, your honor.” “Were not you kept as tight as hand and head and
heart could keep you, were you not? answer me that.” “Oh yes, sure,
your honor; every _sowl_ about us knows that,--every one does your
honor justice, that you kept the closest house and closest hand in
the country,--your honor was always a good warrant for it.” “And how
dare you unlock my hold before death has unlocked it,” said the dying
miser, shaking his meagre hand at her. “I smelt meat in the house,--I
heard voices in the house,--I heard the key turn in the door over and
over. Oh that I was up,” he added, rolling in impatient agony in his
bed, “Oh that I was up, to see the waste and ruin that is going on. But
it would kill me,” he continued, sinking back on the bolster, for he
never allowed himself a pillow; “it would kill me,--the very thought
of it is killing me now.” The women, discomfited and defeated, after
sundry winks and whispers, were huddling out of the room, till recalled
by the sharp eager tones of old Melmoth.--“Where are ye trooping to
now? back to the kitchen to gormandize and guzzle? Won’t one of ye
stay and listen while there’s a prayer read for me? Ye may want it one
day for yourselves, ye hags.” Awed by this expostulation and menace,
the train silently returned, and placed themselves round the bed,
while the housekeeper, though a Catholic, asked if his honor would not
have a clergyman to give him _the rights_, (rites) of his church. The
eyes of the dying man sparkled with vexation at the proposal. “What
for,--just to have him expect a scarf and hat-band at the funeral.
Read the prayers yourself, you old ------; that will save something.”
The housekeeper made the attempt, but soon declined it, alleging, as
her reason, that her eyes had been watery ever since his honor took
ill. “That’s because you had always a drop in them,” said the invalid,
with a spiteful sneer, which the contraction of approaching death
stiffened into a hideous grin.--“Here,--is not there one of you that’s
gnashing and howling there, that can get up a prayer to keep me from
it?” So adjured, one of the women offered her services; and of her it
might truly be said, as of the “most desartless man of the watch” in
Dogberry’s time, that “her reading and writing came by nature;” for
she never had been at school, and had never before seen or opened a
Protestant prayer book in her life; nevertheless, on she went, and with
more emphasis than good discretion, read nearly through the service for
the “churching of women;” which in our prayer-books following that of
the burial of the dead, she perhaps imagined was someway connected with
the state of the invalid.
She read with great solemnity,--it was a pity that two interruptions
occurred during the performance, one from old Melmoth, who, shortly
after the commencement of the prayers, turned towards the old
housekeeper, and said, in a tone scandalously audible, “Go down and draw
the niggers of the kitchen fire closer, and lock the door, and let me
_hear it locked_. I can’t mind any thing till that’s done.” The other
was from John Melmoth gliding into the room, hearing the inappropriate
words uttered by the ignorant woman, taking quietly as he knelt beside
her the prayer-book from her hands, and reading in a suppressed voice
part of that solemn service which, by the forms of the Church of
England, is intended for the consolation of the departing.
“That is John’s voice,” said the dying man; and the little kindness he
had ever shewed this unfortunate lad rushed on his hard heart at this
moment, and touched it. He saw himself, too, surrounded by heartless and
rapacious menials; and slight as must have been his dependence on a
relative whom he had always treated as a stranger, he felt at this hour
he was no stranger, and grasped at his support like a straw amid his
wreck. “John, my good boy, you are there.--I kept you far from me when
living, and now you are nearest me when dying.--John, _read on_.” John,
affected deeply by the situation in which he beheld this _poor man_,
amid all his wealth, as well as by the solemn request to impart
consolation to his dying moments, read on;--but in a short time his
voice became indistinct, from the horror with which he listened to the
increasing hiccup of the patient, which, however, he struggled with from
time to time, to ask the housekeeper if _the niggers were closed_. John,
who was a lad of feeling, rose from his knees in some degree of
agitation. “What, are you leaving me like the rest?” said old Melmoth,
trying to raise himself in the bed. “No, Sir,” said John; “but,”
observing the altered looks of the dying man, “I think you want some
refreshment, some support, Sir.” “Aye, I do, I do, but whom can I trust
to get it for me. _They_, (and his haggard eye wandered round the
groupe), _they_ would poison me.” “Trust me, Sir,” said John; “I will go
to the apothecary’s, or whoever you may employ.” The old man grasped his
hand, drew him close to his bed, cast a threatening yet fearful eye
round the party, and then whispered in a voice of agonized constraint,
“I want a glass of wine, it would keep me alive for some hours, but
there is not one I can trust to get it for me,--_they’d steal a bottle,
and ruin me_.” John was greatly shocked. “Sir, for God’s sake, let _me_
get a glass of wine for you.” “Do you know where?” said the old man,
with an expression in his face John could not understand. “No, Sir; you
know I have been rather a stranger here, Sir.” “Take this key,” said old
Melmoth, after a violent spasm; “take this key, there is wine in that
closet,--_Madeira_. I always told them there was nothing there, but they
did not believe me, or I should not have been robbed as I have been. At
one time I said it was whiskey, and then I fared worse than ever, for
they drank twice as much of it.”
John took the key from his uncle’s hand; the dying man pressed it as he
did so, and John, interpreting this as a mark of kindness, returned the
pressure. He was undeceived by the whisper that followed,--“John, my
lad, don’t drink any of that wine while you are there.” “Good God!” said
John, indignantly throwing the key on the bed; then, recollecting that
the miserable being before him was no object of resentment, he gave the
promise required, and entered the closet, which no foot but that of old
Melmoth had entered for nearly sixty years. He had some difficulty in
finding out the wine, and indeed staid long enough to justify his
uncle’s suspicions,--but his mind was agitated, and his hand unsteady.
He could not but remark his uncle’s extraordinary look, that had the
ghastliness of fear superadded to that of death, as he gave him
permission to enter his closet. He could not but see the looks of horror
which the women exchanged as he approached it. And, finally, when he was
in it, his memory was malicious enough to suggest some faint traces of a
story, too horrible for imagination, connected with it. He remembered in
one moment most distinctly, that no one but his uncle had ever been
known to enter it for many years.
Before he quitted it, he held up the dim light, and looked around him
with a mixture of terror and curiosity. There was a great deal of
decayed and useless lumber, such as might be supposed to be heaped up to
rot in a miser’s closet; but John’s eyes were in a moment, and as if by
magic, rivetted on a portrait that hung on the wall, and appeared, even
to his untaught eye, far superior to the tribe of family pictures that
are left to moulder on the walls of a family mansion. It represented a
man of middle age. There was nothing remarkable in the costume, or in
the countenance, but _the eyes_, John felt, were such as one feels they
wish they had never seen, and feels they can never forget. Had he been
acquainted with the poetry of Southey, he might have often exclaimed in
his after-life,
“Only the eyes had life,
They gleamed with demon light.”--THALABA.
From an impulse equally resistless and painful, he approached the
portrait, held the candle towards it, and could distinguish the words on
the border of the painting,--Jno. Melmoth, anno 1646. John was neither
timid by nature, or nervous by constitution, or superstitious from
habit, yet he continued to gaze in stupid horror on this singular
picture, till, aroused by his uncle’s cough, he hurried into his room.
The old man swallowed the wine. He appeared a little revived; it was
long since he had tasted such a cordial,--his heart appeared to expand
to a momentary confidence. “John, what did you see in that room?”
“Nothing, Sir.” “That’s a lie; every one wants to cheat or to rob me.”
“Sir, I don’t want to do either.” “Well, what did you see that you--you
took notice of?” “Only a picture, Sir.” “A picture, Sir!--the original
is still alive.” John, though under the impression of his recent
feelings, could not but look incredulous. “John,” whispered his
uncle;--“John, they say I am dying of this and that; and one says it is
for want of nourishment, and one says it is for want of medicine,--but,
John,” and his face looked hideously ghastly, “I am dying of a fright.
That man,” and he extended his meagre arm toward the closet, as if he
was pointing to a living being; “that man, I have good reason to know,
is alive still.” “How is that possible, Sir?” said John involuntarily,
“the date on the picture is 1646.” “You have seen it,--you have noticed
it,” said his uncle. “Well,”--he rocked and nodded on his bolster for a
moment, then, grasping John’s hand with an unutterable look, he
exclaimed, “You will see him again, he is alive.” Then, sinking back on
his bolster, he fell into a kind of sleep or stupor, his eyes still
open, and fixed on John.
The house was now perfectly silent, and John had time and space for
reflection. More thoughts came crowding on him than he wished to
welcome, but they would not be repulsed. He thought of his uncle’s
habits and character, turned the matter over and over again in his mind,
and he said to himself, “The last man on earth to be superstitious. He
never thought of any thing but the price of stocks, and the rate of
exchange, and my college expences, that hung heavier at his heart than
all; and such a man to die of a fright,--a ridiculous fright, that a man
living 150 years ago is alive still, and yet--he is dying.” John paused,
for facts will confute the most stubborn logician. “With all his
hardness of mind, and of heart, he is dying of a fright. I heard it in
the kitchen, I have heard it from himself,--he could not be deceived. If
I had ever heard he was nervous, or fanciful, or superstitious, but a
character so contrary to all these impressions;--a man that, as poor
Butler says, in his Remains of the Antiquarian, would have ”sold Christ
over again for the numerical piece of silver which Judas got for
him,“--such a man to die of fear! Yet he _is_ dying,” said John,
glancing his fearful eye on the contracted nostril, the glazed eye, the
dropping jaw, the whole horrible apparatus of the _facies Hippocratica_
displayed, and soon to cease its display.
Old Melmoth at this moment seemed to be in a deep stupor; his eyes lost
that little expression they had before, and his hands, that had
convulsively been catching at the blankets, let go their short and
quivering grasp, and lay extended on the bed like the claws of some bird
that had died of hunger,--so meagre, so yellow, so spread. John,
unaccustomed to the sight of death, believed this to be only a sign that
he was going to sleep; and, urged by an impulse for which he did not
attempt to account to himself, caught up the miserable light, and once
more ventured into the forbidden room,--the _blue chamber_ of the
dwelling. The motion roused the dying man;--he sat bolt upright in his
bed. This John could not see, for he was now in the closet; but he heard
the groan, or rather the choaked and guggling rattle of the throat, that
announces the horrible conflict between muscular and mental convulsion.
He started, turned away; but, as he turned away, he thought he saw the
eyes of the portrait, on which his own was fixed, _move_, and hurried
back to his uncle’s bedside.
Old Melmoth died in the course of that night, and died as he had lived,
in a kind of avaricious delirium. John could not have imagined a scene
so horrible as his last hours presented. He cursed and blasphemed about
three half-pence, missing, as he said, some weeks before, in an account
of change with his groom, about hay to a starved horse that he kept.
Then he grasped John’s hand, and asked him to give him the sacrament.
“If I send to the clergyman, he will charge me something for it, which I
cannot pay,--I cannot. They say I am rich,--look at this blanket;--but I
would not mind that, if I could save my soul.” And, raving, he added,
“Indeed, Doctor, I am a very poor man. I never troubled a clergyman
before, and all I want is, that you will grant me two trifling requests,
very little matters in your way,--save my soul, and (whispering) make
interest to get me a parish coffin,--I have not enough left to bury me.
I always told every one I was poor, but the more I told them so, the
less they believed me.”
John, greatly shocked, retired from the bed-side, and sat down in a
distant corner of the room. The women were again in the room, which was
very dark. Melmoth was silent from exhaustion, and there was a
death-like pause for some time. At this moment John saw the door open,
and a figure appear at it, who looked round the room, and then quietly
and deliberately retired, but not before John had discovered in his face
the living original of the portrait. His first impulse was to utter an
exclamation of terror, but his breath felt stopped. He was then rising
to pursue the figure, but a moment’s reflection checked him. What could
be more absurd, than to be alarmed or amazed at a resemblance between a
living man and the portrait of a dead one! The likeness was doubtless
strong enough to strike him even in that darkened room, but it was
doubtless only a likeness; and though it might be imposing enough to
terrify an old man of gloomy and retired habits, and with a broken
constitution, John resolved it should not produce the same effect on
him.
But while he was applauding himself for this resolution, the door
opened, and the figure appeared at it, beckoning and nodding to him,
with a familiarity somewhat terrifying. John now started up, determined
to pursue it; but the pursuit was stopped by the weak but shrill cries
of his uncle, who was struggling at once with the agonies of death and
his housekeeper. The poor woman, anxious for her master’s reputation and
her own, was trying to put on him a clean shirt and nightcap, and
Melmoth, who had just sensation enough to perceive they were taking
something from him, continued exclaiming feebly, “They are robbing
me,--robbing me in my last moments,--robbing a dying man. John, won’t
you assist me,--I shall die a beggar; they are taking my last shirt,--I
shall die a beggar.”--And the miser died.