I returned home comforted and happy, although I felt assured that some further and sadder trial was before me.
Still our household was overcast by the same insurmountable dread of our tenant. The same strange habits characterised him, and the same unaccountable sounds disquieted us — an atmosphere of death and malice hovered about his door, and we all hated and feared to pass it.
Let me now tell, as well and briefly as I may, the dreadful circumstances of my last great trial. One morning, my wife being about her household affairs, and I on the point of starting for town, I went into the parlour for some letters which I was to take with me. I cannot easily describe my consternation when, on entering the room, I saw our lodger seated near the window, with our darling little girl upon his knee.
His back was toward the door, but I could plainly perceive that the respirator had been removed from his mouth, and that the odious green goggles were raised. He was sitting, as it seemed, absolutely without motion, and his face was advanced close to that of the child.
I stood looking at this group in a state of stupor for some seconds. He was, I suppose, conscious of my presence, for although he did not turn his head, or otherwise take any note of my arrival, he readjusted the muffler which usually covered his mouth, and lowered the clumsy spectacles to their proper place.
The child was sitting upon his knee as motionless as he himself, with a countenance white and rigid as that of a corpse, and from which every trace of meaning, except some vague character of terror, had fled, and staring with a fixed and dilated gaze into his face.
As it seemed, she did not perceive my presence. Her eyes were transfixed and fascinated. She did not even seem to me to breathe. Horror and anguish at last overcame my stupefaction.
“What — what is it?” I cried; “what ails my child, my darling child?”
“I’d be glad to know, myself,” he replied, coolly; “it is certainly something very queer.”
“What is it, darling?” I repeated, frantically, addressing the child.
“What is it?” he reiterated. “Why it’s pretty plain, I should suppose, that the child is ill.”
“Oh merciful God!” I cried, half furious, half terrified— “You have injured her — you have terrified her. Give me my child — give her to me.”
These words I absolutely shouted, and stamped upon the floor in my horrid excitement.
“Pooh, pooh!” he said, with a sort of ugly sneer; “the child is nervous — you’ll make her more so — be quiet and she’ll probably find her tongue presently. I have had her on my knee some minutes, but the sweet bird could not tell what ails her.”
“Let the child go,” I shouted in a voice of thunder; “let her go, I say — let her go.”
He took the passive, deathlike child, and placed her standing by the window, and rising, he simply said —
“As soon as you grow cool, you are welcome to ask me what questions you like. The child is plainly ill. I should not wonder if she had seen something that frightened her.”
Having thus spoken, he passed from the room. I felt as if I spoke, saw, and walked in a horrid dream. I seized the darling child in my arms, and bore her away to her mother.
“What is it — for mercy’s sake what is the matter?” she cried, growing in an instant as pale as the poor child herself.
“I found that — that demon — in the parlour with the child on his lap, staring in her face. She is manifestly terrified.”
“Oh! gracious God! she is lost — she is killed,” cried the poor mother, frantically looking into the white, apathetic, meaningless face of the child.
“Fanny, darling Fanny, tell us if you are ill,” I cried, pressing the little girl in terror to my heart.
“Tell your own mother, my darling,” echoed my poor little wife. “Oh! darling, darling child, speak to your poor mother.”
It was all in vain. Still the same dilated, imploring gaze — the same pale face — wild and dumb. We brought her to the open window — we gave her cold water to drink — we sprinkled it in her face. We sent for the apothecary, who lived hard by, and he arrived in a few moments, with a parcel of tranquillising medicines. These, however, were equally unavailing.
Hour after hour passed away. The darling child looked upon us as if she would have given the world to speak to us, or to weep, but she uttered no sound. Now and then she drew a long breath as though preparing to say something, but still she was mute. She often put her hand to her throat, as if there was some pain or obstruction there.
I never can, while I live, lose one line of that mournful and terrible portrait — the face of my stricken child. As hour after hour passed away, without bringing the smallest change or amendment, we grew both alarmed, and at length absolutely terrified for her safety.
We called in a physician toward night, and told him that we had reason to suspect that the child had somehow been frightened, and that in no other way could we at all account for the extraordinary condition in which he found her.
This was a man, I may as well observe, though I do not name him, of the highest eminence in his profession, and one in whose skill, from past personal experience, I had the best possible reasons for implicitly confiding.
He asked a multiplicity of questions, the answers to which seemed to baffle his attempts to arrive at a satisfactory diagnosis. There was something undoubtedly anomalous in the case, and I saw plainly that there were features in it which puzzled and perplexed him not a little.
At length, however, he wrote his prescription, and promised to return at nine o’clock. I remember there was something to be rubbed along her spine, and some medicines beside.
But these remedies were as entirely unavailing as the others. In a state of dismay and distraction we watched by the bed in which, in accordance with the physician’s direction, we had placed her. The absolute changelessness of her condition filled us with despair. The day which had elapsed had not witnessed even a transitory variation in the dreadful character of her seizure. Any change, even a change for the worse, would have been better than this sluggish, hopeless monotony of suffering.
At the appointed hour the physician returned. He appeared disappointed, almost shocked, at the failure of his prescriptions. On feeling her pulse he declared that she must have a little wine. There had been a wonderful prostration of all the vital powers since he had seen her before. He evidently thought the case a strange and precarious one.
She was made to swallow the wine, and her pulse rallied for a time, but soon subsided again. I and the physician were standing by the fire, talking in whispers of the darling child’s symptoms, and likelihood of recovery, when we were arrested in our conversation by a cry of anguish from the poor mother, who had never left the bedside of her little child, and this cry broke into bitter and convulsive weeping.
The poor little child had, on a sudden, stretched down her little hands and feet, and died. There is no mistaking the features of death: the filmy eye and dropt jaw once seen, are recognised whenever we meet them again. Yet, spite of our belief, we cling to hope; and the distracted mother called on the physician, in accents which might have moved a statue, to say that her darling was not dead, not quite dead — that something might still be done — that it could not be all over. Silently he satisfied himself that no throb of life still fluttered in that little frame.
“It is, indeed, all over,” he said, in tones scarce above a whisper; and pressing my hand kindly, he said, “comfort your poor wife”; and so, after a momentary pause, he left the room.
This blow had smitten me with stunning suddenness. I looked at the dead child, and from her to her poor mother. Grief and pity were both swallowed up in transports of fury and detestation with which the presence in my house of the wretch who had wrought all this destruction and misery filled my soul. My heart swelled with ungovernable rage; for a moment my habitual fear of him was neutralised by the vehemence of these passions. I seized a candle in silence, and mounted the stairs. The sight of the a
ccursed cat, flitting across the lobby, and the loneliness of the hour, made me hesitate for an instant. I had, however, gone so far, that shame sustained me. Overcoming a momentary thrill of dismay, and determined to repel and defy the influence that had so long awed me, I knocked sharply at the door, and, almost at the same instant, pushed it open, and entered our lodger’s chamber.
He had had no candle in the room, and it was lighted only by the “darkness visible” that entered through the window. The candle which I held very imperfectly illuminated the large apartment; but I saw his spectral form floating, rather than walking, back and forward in front of the windows.
At sight of him, though I hated him more than ever, my instinctive fear returned. He confronted me, and drew nearer and nearer, without speaking. There was something indefinably fearful in the silent attraction which seemed to be drawing him to me. I could not help recoiling, little by little, as he came toward me, and with an effort I said —
“You know why I have come: the child — she’s dead!”
“Dead — ha! — dead — is she?” he said, in his odious, mocking tone.
“Yes — dead!” I cried, with an excitement which chilled my very marrow with horror; “and you have killed her, as you killed my other.”
“How? — I killed her! — eh? — ha, ha!” he said, still edging nearer and nearer.
“Yes; I say you!” I shouted, trembling in every joint, but possessed by that unaccountable infatuation which has made men invoke, spite of themselves, their own destruction, and which I was powerless to resist— “deny it as you may, it is you who killed her — wretch! — FIEND! — no wonder she could not stand the breath and glare of HELL!”
“And you are one of those who believe that not a sparrow falls to the ground without your Creator’s consent,” he said, with icy sarcasm; “and this is a specimen of Christian resignation — hey? You charge his act upon a poor fellow like me, simply that you may cheat the devil, and rave and rebel against the decrees of heaven, under pretence of abusing me. The breath and flare of hell! — eh? You mean that I removed this and these (touching the covering of his mouth and eyes successively) as I shall do now again, and show you there’s no great harm in that.”
There was a tone of menace in his concluding words not to be mistaken.
“Murderer and liar from the beginning, as you are, I defy you!” I shouted, in a frenzy of hate and horror, stamping furiously on the floor.
As I said this, it seemed to me that he darkened and dilated before my eyes. My senses, thoughts, consciousness, grew horribly confused, as if some powerful, extraneous will, were seizing upon the functions of my brain. Whether I were to be mastered by death, or madness, or possession, I knew not; but hideous destruction of some sort was impending: all hung upon the moment, and I cried aloud, in my agony, an adjuration in the name of the three persons of the Trinity, that he should not torment me.
Stunned, bewildered, like a man recovered from a drunken fall, I stood, freezing and breathless, in the same spot, looking into the room, which wore, in my eyes, a strange, unearthly character. Mr. Smith was cowering darkly in the window, and, after a silence, spoke to me in a croaking, sulky tone, which was, however, unusually submissive.
“Don’t it strike you as an odd procedure to break into a gentleman’s apartment at such an hour, for the purpose of railing at him in the coarsest language? If you have any charge to make against me, do so; I invite inquiry and defy your worst. If you think you can bring home to me the smallest share of blame in this unlucky matter, call the coroner, and let his inquest examine and cross-examine me, and sift the matter — if, indeed, there is anything to be sifted — to the bottom. Meanwhile, go you about your business, and leave me to mine. But I see how the wind sits; you want to get rid of me, and so you make the place odious to me. But it won’t do; and if you take to making criminal charges against me, you had better look to yourself; for two can play at that game.”
There was a suppressed whine in all this, which strangely contrasted with the cool and threatening tone of his previous conversation.
Without answering a word I hurried from the room, and scarcely felt secure, even when once more in the melancholy chamber, where my poor wife was weeping.
Miserable, horrible was the night that followed. The loss of our child was a calamity which we had not dared to think of. It had come, and with a suddenness enough to bereave me of reason. It seemed all unreal, all fantastic. It needed an effort to convince me, minute after minute, that the dreadful truth was so; and the old accustomed feeling that she was still alive, still running from room to room, and the expectation that I should hear her step and her voice, and see her entering at the door, would return. But still the sense of dismay, of having received some stunning, irreparable blow, remained behind; and then came the horrible effort, like that with which one rouses himself from a haunted sleep, the question, “What disaster is this that has befallen?” — answered, alas! but too easily, too terribly! Amidst all this was perpetually rising before my fancy the obscure, dilated figure of our lodger, as he had confronted me in his malign power that night. I dismissed the image with a shudder as often as it recurred; and even now, at this distance of time, I have felt more than I could well describe in the mere effort to fix my recollection upon its hated traits, while writing the passages I have just concluded.
This hateful scene I did not recount to my poor wife. Its horrors were too fresh upon me. I had not courage to trust myself with the agitating narrative; and so I sate beside her, with her hand locked in mine: I had no comfort to offer but the dear love I bore her.
At last, like a child, she cried herself to sleep — the dull, heavy slumber of worn-out grief. As for me, the agitation of my soul was too fearful and profound for repose. My eye accidentally rested on the holy volume, which lay upon the table open, as I had left it in the morning; and the first words which met my eye were these— “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” This blessed sentence riveted my attention, and shed a stream of solemn joy upon my heart; and so the greater part of that mournful night, I continued to draw comfort and heavenly wisdom from the same inspired source.
Next day brought the odious incident, the visit of the undertaker — the carpentery, upholstery, and millinery of death. Why has not civilisation abolished these repulsive and shocking formalities? What has the poor corpse to do with frills, and pillows, and napkins, and all the equipage in which it rides on its last journey? There is no intrusion so jarring to the decent grief of surviving affection, no conceivable mummery more derisive of mortality.
In the room which we had been so long used to call “the nursery,” now desolate and mute, the unclosed coffin lay, with our darling shrouded in it. Before we went to our rest at night we visited it. In the morning the lid was to close over that sweet face, and I was to see the child laid by her little brother. We looked upon the well-known and loved features, purified in the sublime serenity of death, for a long time, whispering to one another, among our sobs, how sweet and beautiful we thought she looked; and at length, weeping bitterly, we tore ourselves away.
We talked and wept for many hours, and at last, in sheer exhaustion, dropt asleep. My little wife awaked me, and said —
“I think they have come — the — the undertakers.”
It was still dark, so I could not consult my watch; but they were to have arrived early, and as it was winter, and the nights long, the hour of their visit might well have arrived.
“What, darling, is your reason for thinking so?” I asked.
“I am sure I have heard them for some time in the nursery,” she answered.
“Oh! dear, dear little Fanny! Don’t allow them to close the coffin until
I have seen my darling once more.”
I got up, and threw some clothes hastily about me. I opened the door and listened. A sound like a muffled knocking reached me from the nursery.
“Yes, my darling!” I said, “I think they have come. I will go and desire them to wait until you have seen her again.”
And, so saying, I hastened from the room.
Our bedchamber lay at the end of a short corridor, opening from the lobby, at the head of the stairs, and the nursery was situated nearly at the end of a corresponding passage, which opened from the same lobby at the opposite side As I hurried along I distinctly heard the same sounds. The light of dawn had not yet appeared, but there was a strong moonlight shining through the windows. I thought the morning could hardly be so far advanced as we had at first supposed; but still, strangely as it now seems to me, suspecting nothing amiss, I walked on in noiseless, slippered feet, to the nursery-door. It stood half open; some one had unquestionably visited it since we had been there. I stepped forward, and entered. At the threshold horror arrested my advance.
The coffin was placed upon tressles at the further extremity of the chamber, with the foot of it nearly towards the door, and a large window at the side of it admitted the cold lustre of the moon full upon the apparatus of mortality, and the objects immediately about it.
At the foot of the coffin stood the ungainly form of our lodger. He seemed to be intently watching the face of the corpse, and was stooped a little, while with his hands he tapped sharply, from time to time at the sides of the coffin, like one who designs to awaken a slumberer. Perched upon the body of the child, and nuzzling among the grave-clothes, with a strange kind of ecstasy, was the detested brute, the cat I have so often mentioned.
The group thus revealed, I looked upon but for one instant; in the next I shouted, in absolute terror —
“In God’s name! what are you doing?”
Our lodger shuffled away abruptly, as if disconcerted; but the ill-favoured cat, whisking round, stood like a demon sentinel upon the corpse, growling and hissing, with arched back and glaring eyes.
Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu Page 729
