endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city
by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia had
brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily falls to the lot of
mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering,
I purchased and put in some repair an abbey which I shall not name in
one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England. The
gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of
the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with
both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which
had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet,
although the external abbey with its verdant decay hanging about it
suffered but little alteration, I gave way with a child-like perversity,
and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a display
of more than regal magnificence within. For such follies, even in
childhood, I had imbibed a taste, and now they came back to me as if in
the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness
might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in
the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the
Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold! I had become a bounden
slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a
coloring from my dreams. But these absurdities I must not pause to
detail. Let me speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed, whither in
a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar as my bride--as the
successor of the unforgotten Ligeia--the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady
Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine.
There is no individual portion of the architecture and decoration of
that bridal chamber which is not now visibly before me. Where were the
souls of the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of gold,
they permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment _so_ bedecked, a
maiden and a daughter so beloved? I have said that I minutely remember
the details of the chamber, yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep
moment; and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic
display, to take hold upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret of
the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size.
Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon was the sole
window--an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice--a single pane,
and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon
passing through it fell with a ghastly luster on the objects within.
Over the upper portion of this huge window extended the trellis-work of
an aged vine which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The
ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and
elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a
semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of
this melancholy vaulting depended, by a single chain of gold with long
links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with
many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as
if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of
parti-colored fires.
Some few ottomans and golden candelabra of Eastern figure were in
various stations about; and there was the couch, too--the bridal
couch--of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony, with
a pall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber stood on
end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings
over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture.
But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief fantasy of all.
The lofty walls, gigantic in height--even unproportionably so--were hung
from summit to foot in vast folds with a heavy and massive-looking
tapestry--tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on
the floor, as a covering for the ottomans and the ebony bed, as a canopy
for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially
shaded the window. The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was
spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about
a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most
jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character of the
arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view. By a
contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very remote period of
antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one entering the room
they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities, but upon a farther
advance this appearance gradually departed; and, step by step as the
visitor moved his station in the chamber he saw himself surrounded by an
endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition
of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The
phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial
introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the
draperies--giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.
In halls such as these--in a bridal chamber such as this--I passed, with
the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first month of our
marriage--passed them with but little disquietude. That my wife dreaded
the fierce moodiness of my temper, that she shunned me, and loved me but
little, I could not help perceiving; but it gave me rather pleasure than
otherwise. I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to
man. My memory flew back--oh, with what intensity of regret!--to Ligeia,
the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed. I revelled in
recollections of her purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty, her ethereal
nature, of her passionate, her idolatrous love. Now, then, did my
spirit fully and freely burn with more than all the fires of her own. In
the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the
shackles of the drug) I would call aloud upon her name, during the
silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by
day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the
consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her to
the pathway she had abandoned--ah, could it be for ever?--upon the
earth.
About the commencement of the second month of the marriage the Lady
Rowena was attacked with sudden illness, from which her recovery was
slow. The fever which consumed her rendered her nights uneasy; and in
her perturbed state of half-slumber she spoke of sounds and of motions
in and about the chamber of the turret which I concluded had no
origin save in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in the
phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself. She became at length
convalescent--finally, well. Yet but a brief period elapsed ere a second
more violent disorder again threw her upon a bed of suffering, and from
this attack her frame, at all times feeble, never altogether recovered.
Her illnesses were, after this epoch, of alarming character and of more
alarming recurrence, defying alike the knowledge and the great exertions
of her physicians. With the increase of the chronic disease, which had
thus, apparently, taken too sure hold upon her constitution to be
eradicated by human means, I could not fail to observe a similar
increase in the nervous irritation of her temperament, and in her
excitability by trivial causes of fear. She spoke again, and now more
frequently and pertinaciously, of the sounds--of the slight sounds--and
of the unusual motions among the tapestries, to which she had formerly
alluded.
One night near the closing in of September she pressed this distressing
subject with more than usual emphasis upon my attention. She had just
awakened from an unquiet slumber, and I had been watching, with feelings
half of anxiety, half of vague terror, the workings of her emaciated
countenance. I sat by the side of her ebony bed, upon one of the
ottomans of India. She partly arose, and spoke, in an earnest low
whisper, of sounds which she then heard, but which I could not hear, of
motions which she then saw, but which I could not perceive. The wind was
rushing hurriedly behind the tapestries, and I wished to show her (what,
let me confess it, I could not all believe) that those almost
inarticulate breathings, and those very gentle variations of the figures
upon the wall, were but the natural effects of that customary rushing of
the wind. But a deadly pallor overspreading her face had proved to me
that my exertions to reassure her would be fruitless. She appeared to be
fainting, and no attendants were within call. I remembered where was
deposited a decanter of light wine which had been ordered by her
physicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure it. But as I
stepped beneath the light of the censer, two circumstances of a
startling nature attracted my attention. I had felt that some palpable
although invisible object had passed lightly by my person; and I saw
that there lay upon the golden carpet, in the very middle of the rich
luster thrown from the censer, a shadow--a faint, indefinite shadow of
angelic aspect, such as might be fancied for the shadow of a shade. But
I was wild with the excitement of an immoderate dose of opium, and
heeded these things but little, nor spoke of them to Rowena. Having
found the wine, I recrossed the chamber and poured out a gobletful which
I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She had now partially
recovered, however, and took the vessel herself, while I sank upon an
ottoman near me, with my eyes fastened upon her person. It was then that
I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the carpet and near
the couch; and in a second after as Rowena was in the act of raising the
wine to her lips I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the
goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room,
three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby-colored fluid. If this
I saw--not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine unhesitatingly, and I
forbore to speak to her of a circumstance which must, after all, I
considered, have been but the suggestion of a vivid imagination,
rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady, by the opium, and by
the hour.
Yet I cannot conceal it from my own perception that, immediately
subsequent to the fall of the ruby-drops, a rapid change for the worse
took place in the disorder of my wife, so that, on the third subsequent
night the hands of her menials prepared her for the tomb, and on the
fourth I sat alone with her shrouded body in that fantastic chamber
which had received her as my bride. Wild visions, opium-engendered,
fluttered, shadow-like, before me. I gazed with unquiet eye upon the
sarcophagi in the angles of the room, upon the varying figures of the
drapery, and upon the writhing of the parti-colored fires in the censer
overhead. My eyes then fell, as I called to mind the circumstances of a
former night, to the spot beneath the glare of the censer where I had
seen the faint traces of the shadow. It was there, however, no longer;
and breathing with greater freedom, I turned my glances to the pallid
and rigid figure upon the bed. Then rushed upon me a thousand memories
of Ligeia--and then came back upon my heart with the turbulent violence
of a flood the whole of that unutterable woe with which I had regarded
_her_ thus enshrouded. The night waned; and still, with a bosom full of
bitter thoughts of the one only and supremely beloved, I remained gazing
upon the body of Rowena.
It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later--for I had
taken no note of time--when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct,
startled me from my revery. I _felt_ that it came from the bed of
ebony--the bed of death. I listened in an agony of superstitious
terror--but there was no repetition of the sound. I strained my vision
to detect any motion in the corpse--but there was not the slightest
perceptible. Yet I could not have been deceived. I _had_ heard the
noise, however faint, and my soul was awakened within me. I resolutely
and perseveringly kept my attention riveted upon the body. Many minutes
elapsed before any circumstance occurred tending to throw light upon the
mystery. At length it became evident that a slight, a very feeble and
barely noticeable tinge of color had flushed up within the cheeks, and
along the sunken small veins of the eyelids. Through a species of
unutterable horror and awe, for which the language of mortality has no
sufficiently energetic expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, my
limbs grow rigid where I sat. Yet a sense of duty finally operated to
restore my self-possession. I could no longer doubt that we had been
precipitate in our preparations--that Rowena still lived. It was
necessary that some immediate exertion be made, yet the turret was
altogether apart from the portion of the abbey tenanted by the
servants--there were none within call, and I had no means of summoning
them to my aid without leaving the room for many minutes--and this I
could not venture to do. I therefore struggled alone in my endeavors to
call back the spirit still hovering. In a short period it was certain,
however, that a relapse had taken place, the color disappeared from both
eyelid and cheek, leaving a wanness even more than that of marble; the
lips became doubly shrivelled and pinched up in the ghastly expression
of death; a repulsive clamminess and coldness overspread rapidly the
surface of the body; and all the usual rigorous stiffness immediately
supervened. I fell back with a shudder upon the couch from which I had
been so startlingly aroused, and again gave myself up to passionate
waking visions of Ligeia.
An hour thus elapsed, when--could it be possible?--I was a second time
aware of some vague sound issuing from the region of the bed. I
listened--in extremity of horror. The sound came again--it was a sigh.
Rushing to the corpse, I saw--distinctly saw--a tremor upon the lips. In
a minute afterward they relaxed, disclosing a bright line of the pearly
teeth. Amazement now struggled in my bosom with the profound awe which
had hitherto reigned there alone. I felt that my vision grew dim, that
my reason wandered, and it was only by a violent effort that I at length
succeeded in nerving myself to the task which duty thus once more had
pointed out. There was now a partial glow upon the forehead and upon
the cheek and throat, a perceptible warmth pervaded the whole frame,
there was even a slight pulsation at the heart. The lady _lived_; and
with redoubled ardor I betook myself to the task of restoration. I
chafed and bathed the temples and the hands and used every exertion
which experience and no little medical reading could suggest. But in
vain. Suddenly, the color fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed
the expression of the dead, and, in an instant afterward, the whole body
took upon itself the icy chilliness, the livid hue, the intense
rigidity, the sunken outline, and all the loathsome peculiarities of
that which has been, for many days, a tenant of the tomb.
And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia--and again, (what marvel that I
shudder while I write?) _again_ there reached my ears a low sob from the
region of the ebony bed. But why should I minutely detail the
unspeakable horrors of that night? Why should I pause to relate how,
time after time, until near the period of the gray dawn, this hideous
drama of revivification was repeated; how each terrific relapse was only
into a sterner and apparently more irredeemable death; how each agony
wore the aspect of a struggle with some invisible foe; and how each
struggle was succeeded by I know not what of wild change in the personal
appearance of the corpse? Let me hurry to a conclusion.
The greater part of the fearful night had worn away, and she who had
been dead, once again stirred--and now more vigorously than hitherto,
although arousing from a dissolution more appalling in its utter
hopelessness than any. I had long ceased to struggle or to move, and
remained sitting rigidly upon the ottoman, a helpless prey to a whirl of
violent emotions, of which extreme awe was perhaps the least terrible,
the least consuming. The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more
vigorously than before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy
into the countenance, the limbs relaxed, and, save that the eyelids were
yet pressed heavily together and that the bandages and draperies of the
grave still imparted their charnel character to the figure, I might have
dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off utterly the fetters of Death.
But if this idea was not even then altogether adopted, I could at least
doubt no longer, when arising from the bed, tottering, with feeble
steps, with closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a
dream, the thing that was enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably into
the middle of the apartment.
I trembled not--I stirred not--for a crowd of unutterable fancies
connected with the air, the stature, the demeanor of the figure, rushing
hurriedly through my brain, had paralyzed--had chilled me into stone. I
stirred not--but gazed upon the apparition. There was a mad disorder in
my thoughts--a tumult unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be the living
Rowena who confronted me? Could it indeed be Rowena at all--the
fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine? Why, _why_
should I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth--but then
might it not be the mouth of the breathing Lady of Tremaine? And the
cheeks--there were the roses as in her noon of life--yes, these might
indeed be the fair cheeks of the living Lady of Tremaine. And the chin,
with its dimples, as in health, might it not be hers?--but _had she
then grown taller since her malady_? What inexpressible madness seized
me with that thought! One bound, and I had reached her feet. Shrinking
from my touch she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly
cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth into the
rushing atmosphere of the chamber huge masses of long and dishevelled
hair; _it was blacker than the raven wings of midnight_! And now slowly
opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. "Here then, at
least," I shrieked aloud, "can I never--can I never be mistaken--these
are the full and the black, and the wild eyes of my lost love--of the
Lady--of the LADY LIGEIA."
THE SYLPH AND THE FATHER[5]
By ELSA BARKER
[Footnote 5: By permission of the author of _War Letters of the Living
Dead Man_ and Mitchell Kennerley.]
Passing yesterday along the line where the great French army stands
before its powerful opponent, and marking the spirit of courage and
aspiration which makes it seem like a long line of living light, I saw a
familiar face in the regions outside the physical.
I paused, highly pleased at the encounter, and the sylph--for it was a
sylph whom I met--paused also with a little smile of recognition.
Do you recall in my former book the story of a sylph, Meriline, who was
the companion and familiar of a student of magic who lived in the rue de
Vaugirard in Paris?
It was Meriline that I met above the line of light which shows to
wanderers in the astral regions where the soldiers of _la belle France_
fight and die for the same ideal which inspired Jeanne d'Arc--to drive
the foreigner out of France.
"Where is your friend and master?" I asked the sylph, and she pointed
below to a trench which spoke loud its determination to conquer.
"I am here, to be still with him," she said.
"And can you speak to him here?" I asked.
"I can always speak with him," she answered. "I have been very useful to
him--and to France."
"To France?" I enquired, with growing interest.
"Oh, yes! When his commanding officer wants to know what is being
plotted over there, he often asks my friend, and my friend asks me."
"Truly," I thought, "the French are an inspired people, when the
officers of armies ask guidance from the realm of the invisible! But had
not Jeanne her visions?"
"And how do you gain the information desired?" I asked, drawing nearer
to Meriline, who seemed more serious than when we met some years before
in Paris.
"Why," she answered, "I go over there and look around me. I have learned
what to look for, he has taught me, and when I bring him news he rewards
me with more love."
"And do you love him still, as of old?"
"As of old?"
"Yes, as you did back there in Paris."
"Time must have passed slowly with you," said the sylph, "if you call a
few years ago 'as of old'."
"Are a few years, then, as nothing?"
"A few years are as nothing to me," she replied. "I have lived a long
time."
"And do you know the future of your friend?" I asked.
A puzzled look came over the face of Meriline, and she said, slowly:
"I used to know everything that would happen to him, because I could
read his will, and whatever he willed came to pass; but since we have
been out here he seems to have lost his will."
"Lost his will!" I exclaimed, in surprise.
"Yes, lost his will; for he prays continually to a great Being whom he
loves far more than me, and he always prays one prayer, 'Thy will be
done!' It used to be his will which was always done; but now, as I say,
he seems to have lost his will."
"Perhaps," I said, "it is true of the will as was once said of the life,
and he that loses his will shall find it."
"I hope he will find it soon," she answered, "for in the old days he was
always giving me interesting things to do, to help him achieve the
purposes of his will, and now he only sends me over there. I don't like
_over there_!"
"Why not?"
"Because my friend is menaced by something over there."
"And what has his will to do with that?"
"Why, even about that, he says all day to the great Being that he loves
so much more than me, 'Thy will be done.'"
"Do you think you could learn to say it, too?" I asked.
"I say it after him sometimes; but I don't know what it means."
"Have you never heard of God?"
"I have heard of many gods, of Isis and Osiris and Set, and of Horus,
the son of Osiris."
"And is it to one of these that he says, 'Thy will be done'?"
"Oh, no! It is not to any of the gods that he used to call upon in his
magical working. This is some new god that he has found."
"Or the oldest of all gods that he has returned to," I suggested. "What
does he call Him?"
"Our Father who art in heaven."
"If you also should learn to say 'Thy will be done' to our Father who is
in heaven," I said, "it might help you toward the attainment of that
soul you were wanting and waiting for, when last we met in Paris."
"How could our Father help me?"
"It was He who gave souls to men," I said.
The eyes of the sylph were brilliant with something almost human.
"And could He give a soul to me?"
"It is said that He _can_ do anything."
"Then I will ask Him for a soul."
"But to ask Him for a soul," I said, "is not to pray the prayer your
friend prays."
"He only says----"
"Yes, I know. Suppose you say it after him."
"I will, if you will tell me what it means. I like to do what my friend
does."
"'Thy will be done,'" I said, "when addressed to the Father in heaven,
means that we give up all our desires, whether for pleasure or love or
happiness, or anything else, and lay all those desires at His feet,
sacrificing all we have or hope for to Him, because we love Him more
than ourselves."
"That is a strange way to get what one desires," she said.
"It is not done to get what one desires," I answered.
"But what is it done for?"
"For love of the Father in heaven."
"But I do not know the Father in heaven. What is He?"
"He is the Source and the Goal of the being of your friend. He is the
One that your friend will re-become some day, if he can forever say to
Him, Thy will be done."
"The One he will re-become?"
"Yes, for when he blends his will with that of the Father in heaven, the
Father in heaven dwells in his heart and the two become one."
"Then is the Father in heaven really the Self of my friend?"
"The greatest philosopher could not have expressed it more truly," I
said.
"Then indeed do I love the Father in heaven," breathed the sylph, "and I
will say now every day and all day, 'Thy will be done' to Him."
"Even if it separates you from your friend?"
"How can it separate me from my friend, if the Father is the Self of
him?"