temperament, and aided by natural means within the reach of science, may
produce effects like those ascribed of old to evil magic. It might thus
haunt the walls of a human habitation with spectral revivals of all
guilty thoughts and guilty deeds once conceived and done within those
walls; all, in short, with which the evil will claims _rapport_ and
affinity,--imperfect, incoherent, fragmentary snatches at the old dramas
acted therein years ago. Thoughts thus crossing each other haphazard, as
in the nightmare of a vision, growing up into phantom sights and sounds,
and all serving to create horror; not because those sights and sounds
are really visitations from a world without, but that they are ghastly,
monstrous renewals of what have been in this world itself, set into
malignant play by a malignant mortal. And it is through the material
agency of that human brain that these things would acquire even a human
power; would strike as with the shock of electricity, and might kill, if
the thought of the person assailed did not rise superior to the dignity
of the original assailer; might kill the most powerful animal, if
unnerved by fear, but not injure the feeblest man, if, while his flesh
crept, his mind stood out fearless. Thus when in old stories we read of
a magician rent to pieces by the fiends he had invoked, or still more,
in Eastern legends, that one magician succeeds by arts in destroying
another, there may be so far truth, that a material being has clothed,
from his own evil propensities, certain elements and fluids, usually
quiescent or harmless, with awful shapes and terrific force; just as the
lightning, that had lain hidden and innocent in the cloud, becomes by
natural law suddenly risible, takes a distinct shape to the eye, and can
strike destruction on the object to which it is attracted.”
“You are not without glimpses of a mighty secret,” said Mr. Richards,
composedly. “According to your view, could a mortal obtain the power you
speak of, he would necessarily be a malignant and evil being.”
“If the power were exercised, as I have said, most malignant and most
evil; though I believe in the ancient traditions, that he could not
injure the good. His will could only injure those with whom it has
established an affinity, or over whom it forces unresisted sway. I will
now imagine an example that may be within the laws of nature, yet seem
wild as the fables of a bewildered monk.
“You will remember that Albertus Magnus, after describing minutely the
process by which spirits may be invoked and commanded, adds
emphatically, that the process will instruct and avail only to the few;
that _a man must be born a magician!_ that is, born with a peculiar
physical temperament, as a man is born a poet. Rarely are men in whose
constitution lurks this occult power of the highest order of intellect;
usually in the intellect there is some twist, perversity, or disease.
But, on the other hand, they must possess, to an astonishing degree, the
faculty to concentrate thought on a single object,--the energic faculty
that we call WILL. Therefore, though their intellect be not sound, it is
exceedingly forcible for the attainment of what it desires. I will
imagine such a person, pre-eminently gifted with this constitution and
its concomitant forces. I will place him in the loftier grades of
society. I will suppose his desires emphatically those of the
sensualist; he has, therefore, a strong love of life. He is an absolute
egotist; his will is concentred in himself; he has fierce passions; he
knows no enduring, no holy affections, but he can covet eagerly what for
the moment he desires; he can hate implacably what opposes itself to his
objects; he can commit fearful crimes, yet feel small remorse; he
resorts rather to curses upon others, than to penitence for his
misdeeds. Circumstances, to which his constitution guides him, lead him
to a rare knowledge of the natural secrets which may serve his egotism.
He is a close observer where his passions encourage observation; he is a
minute calculator, not from love of truth, but where love of self
sharpens his faculties; therefore he can be a man of science. I suppose
such a being, having by experience learned the power of his arts over
others, trying what may be the power of will over his own frame, and
studying all that in natural philosophy may increase that power. He
loves life, he dreads death; _he wills to live on_. He cannot restore
himself to youth, he cannot entirely stay the progress of death, he
cannot make himself immortal in the flesh and blood; but he may arrest,
for a time so long as to appear incredible if I said it, that hardening
of the parts which constitutes old age. A year may age him no more than
an hour ages another. His intense will, scientifically trained into
system, operates, in short, over the wear and tear of his own frame. He
lives on. That he may not seem a portent and a miracle, he _dies_, from
time to time, seemingly, to certain persons. Having schemed the
transfer of a wealth that suffices to his wants, he disappears from one
corner of the world, and contrives that his obsequies shall be
celebrated. He reappears at another corner of the world, where he
resides undetected, and does not visit the scenes of his former career
till all who could remember his features are no more. He would be
profoundly miserable if he had affections; he has none but for himself.
No good man would accept his longevity; and to no man, good or bad,
would he or could he communicate its true secret. Such a man might
exist; such a man as I have described I see now before me,--Duke of----,
in the court of----, dividing time between lust and brawl, alchemists
and wizards; again, in the last century, charlatan and criminal, with
name less noble, domiciled in the house at which you gazed to-day, and
flying from the law you had outraged, none knew whither; traveller once
more revisiting London, with the same earthly passions which filled your
heart when races now no more walked through yonder streets; outlaw from
the school of all the nobler and diviner mysteries. Execrable image of
life in death and death in life, I warn you back from the cities and
homes of healthful men! back to the ruins of departed empires! back to
the deserts of nature unredeemed!”
There answered me a whisper so musical, so potently musical, that it
seemed to enter into my whole being, and subdue me despite myself. Thus
it said:--
“I have sought one like you for the last hundred years. Now I have found
you, we part not till I know what I desire. The vision that sees through
the past and cleaves through the veil of the future is in you at this
hour,--never before, never to come again. The vision of no puling,
fantastic girl, of no sick-bed somnambule, but of a strong man with a
vigorous brain. Soar, and look forth!”
As he spoke, I felt as if I rose out of myself upon eagle wings. All the
weight seemed gone from air, roofless the room, roofless the dome of
space. I was not in the body,--where, I knew not; but aloft over time,
over earth.
Again I heard the melodious whisper: “You say right. I have mastered
great secrets by the power of will. True, by will and by science I can
retard the process of years; but death comes not by age alone. Can I
frustrate the accidents which bring death upon the young?”
“No; every accident is a providence. Before a providence, snaps every
human will.”
“Shall I die at last, ages and ages hence, by the slow, though
inevitable, growth of time, or by the cause that I call accident?”
“By a cause you call accident.”
“Is not the end still remote?” asked the whisper, with a slight tremor.
“Regarded as my life regards time, it is still remote.”
“And shall I, before then, mix with the world of men as I did ere I
learned these secrets; resume eager interest in their strife and their
trouble; battle with ambition, and use the power of the sage to win the
power that belongs to kings?”
“You will yet play a part on the earth that will fill earth with
commotion and amaze. For wondrous designs have you, a wonder yourself,
been permitted to live on through the centuries. All the secrets you
have stored will then have their uses; all that now makes you a stranger
amidst the generations will contribute then to make you their lord. As
the trees and the straws are drawn into a whirlpool, as they spin round,
are sucked to the deep, and again tossed aloft by the eddies, so shall
races and thrones be drawn into your vortex. Awful destroyer! but in
destroying, made, against your own will, a constructor.”
“And that date, too, is far off?”
“Far off; when it comes, think your end in this world is at hand!”
“How and what is the end? Look east, west, south, and north.”
“In the north, where you never yet trod, toward the point whence your
instincts have warned you, there a spectre will seize you. ’Tis Death! I
see a ship! it is haunted; ’tis chased! it sails on. Baffled navies sail
after that ship. It enters the region of ice. It passes a sky red with
meteors. Two moons stand on high, over ice-reefs. I see the ship locked
between white defiles; they are ice-rocks. I see the dead strew the
decks, stark and livid, green mould on their limbs. All are dead but one
man,--it is you! But years, though so slowly they come, have then
scathed you. There is the coming of age on your brow, and the will is
relaxed in the cells of the brain. Still that will, though enfeebled,
exceeds all that man knew before you; through the will you live on,
gnawed with famine. And nature no longer obeys you in that
death-spreading region; the sky is a sky of iron, and the air has iron
clamps, and the ice-rocks wedge in the ship. Hark how it cracks and
groans! Ice will imbed it as amber imbeds a straw. And a man has gone
forth, living yet, from the ship and its dead; and he has clambered up
the spikes of an iceberg, and the two moons gaze down on his form. That
man is yourself, and terror is on you,--terror; and terror has swallowed
up your will. And I see, swarming up the steep ice-rock, gray, grizzly
things. The bears of the North have scented their quarry; they come near
you and nearer, shambling, and rolling their bulk. And in that day every
moment shall seem to you longer than the centuries through which you
have passed. And heed this: after life, moments continued make the bliss
or the hell of eternity.”
“Hush,” said the whisper. “But the day, you assure me, is far off, very
far! I go back to the almond and rose of Damascus! Sleep!”
The room swam before my eyes. I became insensible. When I recovered, I
found G---- holding my hand and smiling. He said, “You, who have always
declared yourself proof against mesmerism, have succumbed at last to my
friend Richards.”
“Where is Mr. Richards?”
“Gone, when you passed into a trance, saying quietly to me, ‘Your friend
will not wake for an hour.’”
I asked, as collectedly as I could, where Mr. Richards lodged.
“At the Trafalgar Hotel.”
“Give me your arm,” said I to G----. “Let us call on him; I have
something to say.”
When we arrived at the hotel, we were told that Mr. Richards had
returned twenty minutes before, paid his bill, left directions with his
servant (a Greek) to pack his effects, and proceed to Malta by the
steamer that should leave Southampton the next day. Mr. Richards had
merely said of his own movements, that he had visits to pay in the
neighborhood of London, and it was uncertain whether he should be able
to reach Southampton in time for that steamer; if not, he should follow
in the next one.
The waiter asked me my name. On my informing him, he gave me a note that
Mr. Richards had left for me, in case I called.
The note was as follows:--
“I wished you to utter what was in your mind. You obeyed. I have
therefore established power over you. For three months from this day you
can communicate to no living man what has passed between us. You cannot
even show this note to the friend by your side. During three months,
silence complete as to me and mine. Do you doubt my power to lay on you
this command? try to disobey me. At the end of the third month the spell
is raised. For the rest, I spare you. I shall visit your grave a year
and a day after it has received you.”
So ends this strange story, which I ask no one to believe. I write it
down exactly three months after I received the above note. I could not
write it before, nor could I show to G----, in spite of his urgent
request, the note which I read under the gas-lamp by his side.
[Illustration: text decoration]
D’OUTRE MORT.
BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.
A mountain intervale all velveted in green, and half the verdure
overlaid with gold by broad rays of sunset falling level through the
pass,--the hills, behind, a gray and gloomy encampment softened with
wreaths of vapor and dim recesses of deepest purple, and here and there
above the gaps a pale star trembling on the paler blue. In spite of the
approaching night, there was a gay glad strength about the scene, so
that all who saw it might have felt light at heart, as if the rocky
rampart shut out the sorrows of the world and made the charmed valley an
enchanted place.
They had been mowing in the intervale; half-formed haycocks,
picturesquely piled along the meadows, loaded the air with heavy
sweetness; in one, partly overthrown, a lounger lolled luxuriously,
singing idly to himself that little Venetian song of Browning’s, to some
tune delightful as the words:--
“O, which were best, to roam or rest?
The land’s lap or the water’s breast?
To sleep on yellow millet-sheaves,
Or swim in lucid shallows, just
Eluding water-lily leaves,
An inch from Death’s black fingers thrust
To lock you, whom release he must;
Which life were best on summer eves?”
The perfumed wind blew softly over the singer, like a placid breath; the
sense of gathering evening hung above him; he lay upon the billowy hay
as if it were a cloud; he was a voluptuary in his pleasures; well for
him if they were always as innocent.
A young girl approached the singer, swinging her hat as she came, and
radiant in the low sunshine.
She was named Orient,--either because she seemed, with her golden locks,
her fresh fair tints, like an impersonation of morning and the East, or
because when she was born hope’s day-star rose again in her mother’s
forlorn heart. Such a lovely yet half-fantastic creature was she, that
you hardly believed in her existence when away from her.
“What are you looking for, Orient?” said the lounger.
“The fountain of youth,” answered her silvery tones. “It should be
somewhere in this happy valley.”
“You do not need it,” he replied after a lingering glance.
She stooped and extricated a long sweetbrier bough from the hay with
which it had been bent but not cut down, and twisted it, still
blossoming, round and round her head till it made a fragrant diadem of
rosy stars.
“Do not,” said Reymund. “Take it off; or I shall have to do as Voltaire
did: erect my long, thin body and stand before you like a point of
admiration!”
Orient did not reply; and, fulfilling his threat, he went on by her side
to the old farm-house that had been turned into a summer hostelry for
guests. More stars were beginning to steal forth in the tender
firmament; the breeze blew down more freshly from the hills and brought
the big dews and scattered starbeams with it; music was hushed, and all
the world was still. It was summer evening, yet an unreal kind of
summer, as summer might be in a distant dream, blown over by cool,
awakening winds. Now and then Orient stopped to pick up a great
butterfly that had fallen benumbed from its perch and lay it gently to
rest among the leaves, without brushing a speck of dust from its
freckled wings; after that her fingers worked in a vine by the way, and
she pulled aside a tendril that kept a sleepy flower from shutting up
its petals. As she did so, a little mother-bird upon her eggs stirred
and briefly twittered out her secret to Orient’s ear. Reymund, who
loitered in waiting for her, thought she seemed, as much as any of them,
like a flower, a moth, a bird herself, a beautiful and almost dumb
existence of nature.
He was not a man easily intimidated, or of unvaried experience; but the
thin atmosphere of awe about this girl was something he had never
penetrated; the ease with which he met another, toward her became
impertinence; gay and careless with many, he felt that she was something
apart, sacred as a passion-flower; he scarcely dared approach her
lightly; when he spoke to her he crossed himself in his heart.
They had never met until a month ago, yet their address had been
familiar almost from the first; on her side, through a large-eyed,
childlike fearlessness; on his--he could not have answered why. He
watched her as one watches a clear planet glow steadily from the soft,
golden sky, but he seemed nevertheless to know all her characteristics
without studying them,--he imagined that to one weary of trifle and
artifice and the hollow way of the world, here was the rest divine. Yet
beyond a point, he found this cool, remote being inaccessible,--as
though there had been a gulf between them. He knew not how to call the
blush to her cheek, the sparkle to her eye; if she had been some alien
creature she might have been nearer,--to enrich her with human love was
as fruitless an effort as scattering the pollen of a rose into the heart
of a cold white lily. And yet, Reymund knew--as if through the same
natural operations as those by which his pulse was made to beat, his
breath to draw--that Orient’s soul needed his for its entireness; that
his soul required hers, all as much as a star needed its atmosphere, a
flower its fragrance, the earth itself its spheral roundness. It was not
so much that he already loved her passionately, as that he felt himself
lost without her; he had been in Orient’s presence, it seemed, all the
time that he had ever lived; how could he then depart from it? If that
which was a clod suddenly found itself a bed of blossom, how could it
ever return again to dreary earthiness?
He watched her now approaching. Had any one said that she trailed lustre
behind her as she walked, he would have answered that he had seen it.
But to speak to her of any grace or charm or perfection that she
possessed,--why, these things were herself, her identity, sacred and
secret; as easily to some skyey messenger of solemn heaven commend his
airy flight!
“In what wonderful ways these mountains change their expression!” said
Reymund, as she joined him again at last.
“Yes,” she replied, “they are different beings every hour.”
“A little while ago,” he continued, “they seemed like an army of giants
sitting down to besiege the valley; now they are a wall between us and
mankind; death cannot break through it, sickness cannot cross it.”
“They are more alive than that,” said Orient. “This old sombre one moved
aside just now to make room for the little alp laughing over his
shoulder, with the rosy vapor streaming high on her face.”
“Perhaps you hear what they are saying to one another, then?” he asked,
half jestingly.
“I often do.”
“And you will translate?”
“No. In the first place you would laugh; in the last place disbelieve.”
“On my soul--no!”
“I am not certain that you have a soul.”
“Indeed? Is it so?” half sadly.
“They say what the torrents rushing down by Chamouni say!”
“Ah! And at other times?”
“They talk of the beginning of the earth, and conjecture concerning the
end of things.”
“And do they take any notice of you? Nature always seems to me careless
and indifferent.”
“They invite me to come up and lie down on their great sides where the
sun has lain all day before me. Yes, they always smile upon me.”
“Do not go,--at least until the mamma and I go with you.”
“I should not be afraid alone.”
No,--fear had never found the depths of those liquid, lucent eyes, he
thought. “The mountains might be civil enough,” he rejoined, “and give
you their purple berries to eat, their wild white brooks to drink; but I
could not answer for the black bears and snakes.”
“I think I could.”
“And this, of course, is only what you interpret the hills to mean,
sitting there in their grim conclave and affording us such a narrow
coronal of sky?” asked Reymund, smiling.
“I do not know,” she answered doubtfully. “I said things were real to
me.”
“There must have been those like you, who first saw and believed in
fairies and all the goblin people,” he said, still smiling.
“My father died before I was born,” said Orient. “Perhaps that gave me
some lien upon the spiritual world.”
“Then you see bogles as well as other things,--as well as the
personalities of bud and bird and granite pile? Uncanny creature! What
pleasure shall I take in meeting your glance when it rests also on a
dead man behind me, and on the fetch of one about to join the
innumerable caravan beside me? I must take my revenge normally and in
kind,--if I die before you, you shall surely have a visitation from me.
How should you like that?”
“You would be just as welcome then as now,” she answered gravely.
“An equivocal compliment. Nevertheless, I accept it as a challenge. Will
you promise its counterpart?”
“When I die,” said Orient, “I shall have other things to do.”
“But I would like to see a ghost, just to be assured that there are such
things.”
“As if there could be any doubt!”
“You understand, then,” he said, as she went in under the low
woodbine-curtained door, “that at some time--when time shall be no
more--I will cast my shadow at your feet!”
It was an hour later that, while he still strolled in the short, wet
grass and enjoyed the rich, half-dusky atmosphere, he heard Orient
singing gently from her window, as she leaned out upon the cool,
star-sown air, and the song seemed to belong to her, like a natural
expression, as to the night the night-wind, or to the dark the dew:--
“In the evening over me leaning,
Often I fancy a waving wing,
And with the warning of blushing morning
Softly glimmers the same fair thing.
“O bright being, beyond the seeing
Of aught but the spirit that feels you near,
Your white star leaving, and earthward cleaving,
You break the murk of this mortal sphere.
“Still, sweet stranger, in peace or danger,
Out of the air above me bloom,
And heaven’s own sweetness in such completeness
Drop on my head from your shining plume!”
Even while he heard her singing, the sense of her remoteness gave
Reymund a slight shudder. If she had been one shade more human; if he
had ever seen her moved by any sparkle of wit, any drollery of humor,
into a frolicking outburst of laughter, by any mischievous vexation into
a flash of anger, a season of pettishness,--but no, such little
incidents affected her no more than thistle-down affects the wind; and,
recognizing it, Reymund knew that he loved her, yet felt somehow as he
felt who had pledged a bridal ring upon the finger of a ghost; as that
youth felt, perchance, whose beautiful mistress was after all a ghoul.
He need not have concerned himself; Orient had no especial care for him;
he passed before her, busy in her world of dreams, like a shadow; if she
smiled upon him, it was as she smiled on everything else about her, as
she smiled on the pink-wreathed peach-bough, on the urchin tumbling in
grass, on the sunbeam overlaying both, on blue sky or on rainy weather;
though, indeed, for the latter, Orient had superfluous smiles; she was
always sunny herself upon a stormy day; she used to say that it seemed
as if Nature had grown so familiar with her that she could afford to
receive her and show herself to her in undress. Perhaps, had Reymund
been more free himself from the soil and stain of earth, Orient would
not have been so intangible.