The sound of the bell produced its full effect. The housekeeper rushed into the room, followed by a number of women, (the Irish præficae),25 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.26
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 arointed27 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,28 – 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 sowl29 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 hatband 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;’30 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-books31 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 niggers32 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 i
n 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.33 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,34 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. – THALABA35
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 towards 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 habit 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,’36 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 Hippocratica37 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.38 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 starving 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,39 – I have not enough left t
o bury me. I always told every one I was poor, but the more I told them so, the less they believed me.’
Melmoth the Wanderer Page 5
