Twice Told Tales

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

  THE HAUNTED MIND.

  What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun torecollect yourself, after starting from midnight slumber! By unclosingyour eyes so suddenly you seem to have surprised the personages ofyour dream in full convocation round your bed, and catch one broadglance at them before they can flit into obscurity. Or, to vary themetaphor, you find yourself for a single instant wide awake in thatrealm of illusions whither sleep has been the passport, and behold itsghostly inhabitants and wondrous scenery with a perception of theirstrangeness such as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed.The distant sound of a church-clock is borne faintly on the wind. Youquestion with yourself, half seriously, whether it has stolen to yourwaking ear from some gray tower that stood within the precincts ofyour dream. While yet in suspense another clock flings its heavy clangover the slumbering town with so full and distinct a sound, and such along murmur in the neighboring air, that you are certain it mustproceed from the steeple at the nearest corner; You count thestrokes--one, two; and there they cease with a booming sound like thegathering of a third stroke within the bell.

  If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night, itwould be this. Since your sober bedtime, at eleven, you have had restenough to take off the pressure of yesterday's fatigue, while beforeyou, till the sun comes from "Far Cathay" to brighten your window,there is almost the space of a summer night--one hour to be spent inthought with the mind's eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams, andtwo in that strangest of enjoyments the forgetfulness alike of joy andwoe. The moment of rising belongs to another period of time, andappears so distant that the plunge out of a warm bed into the frostyair cannot yet be anticipated with dismay. Yesterday has alreadyvanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emergedfrom the future. You have found an intermediate space where thebusiness of life does not intrude, where the passing moment lingersand becomes truly the present; a spot where Father Time, when hethinks nobody is watching him, sits down by the wayside to takebreath. Oh that he would fall asleep and let mortals live on withoutgrowing older!

  Hitherto you have lain perfectly still, because the slightest motionwould dissipate the fragments of your slumber. Now, being irrevocablyawake, you peep through the half-drawn window-curtain, and observethat the glass is ornamented with fanciful devices in frost-work, andthat each pane presents something like a frozen dream. There will betime enough to trace out the analogy while waiting the summons tobreakfast. Seen through the clear portion of the glass where thesilvery mountain-peaks of the frost-scenery do not ascend, the mostconspicuous object is the steeple, the white spire of which directsyou to the wintry lustre of the firmament. You may almost distinguishthe figures on the clock that has just told the hour. Such a frostysky and the snow-covered roofs and the long vista of the frozenstreet, all white, and the distant water hardened into rock, mightmake you shiver even under four blankets and a woollen comforter. Yetlook at that one glorious star! Its beams are distinguishable from allthe rest, and actually cast the shadow of the casement on the bed witha radiance of deeper hue than moonlight, though not so accurate anoutline.

  You sink down and muffle your head in the clothes, shivering all thewhile, but less from bodily chill than the bare idea of a polaratmosphere. It is too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad.You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bedlike an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy ofinaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth suchas you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in itstrain. You think how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds andnarrow coffins through the drear winter of the grave, and cannotpersuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor shiver when the snowis drifting over their little hillocks and the bitter blast howlsagainst the door of the tomb. That gloomy thought will collect agloomy multitude and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour.

  In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though thelights, the music and revelry, above may cause us to forget theirexistence and the buried ones or prisoners whom they hide. Butsometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flungwide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passivesensibility, but no active strength--when the imagination is a mirrorimparting vividness to all ideas without the power of selecting orcontrolling them--then pray that your griefs may slumber and thebrotherhood of remorse not break their chain. It is too late. Afuneral train comes gliding by your bed in which passion and feelingassume bodily shape and things of the mind become dim spectres to theeye. There is your earliest sorrow, a pale young mourner wearing asister's likeness to first love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowedsweetness in her melancholy features and grace in the flow of hersable robe. Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness with dust amongher golden hair and her bright garments all faded and defaced,stealing from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach:she was your fondest hope, but a delusive one; so call herDisappointment now. A sterner form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles,a look and gesture of iron authority; there is no name for him unlessit be Fatality--an emblem of the evil influence that rules yourfortunes, a demon to whom you subjected yourself by some error at theoutset of life, and were bound his slave for ever by once obeying him.See those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lipof scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger touchingthe sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormousfolly at which you would blush even in the remotest cavern of theearth? Then recognize your shame.

  Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one if, riotously miserable,a fiercer tribe do not surround him--the devils of a guilty heart thatholds its hell within itself. What if Remorse should assume thefeatures of an injured friend? What if the fiend should come inwoman's garments with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and liedown by your side? What if he should stand at your bed's foot in thelikeness of a corpse with a bloody stain upon the shroud? Sufficientwithout such guilt is this nightmare of the soul, this heavy, heavysinking of the spirits, this wintry gloom about the heart, thisindistinct horror of the mind blending itself with the darkness of thechamber.

  By a desperate effort you start upright, breaking from a sort ofconscious sleep and gazing wildly round the bed, as if the fiends wereanywhere but in your haunted mind. At the same moment the slumberingembers on the hearth send forth a gleam which palely illuminates thewhole outer room and flickers through the door of the bedchamber, butcannot quite dispel its obscurity. Your eye searches for whatever mayremind you of the living world. With eager minuteness you take note ofthe table near the fireplace, the book with an ivory knife between itsleaves, the unfolded letter, the hat and the fallen glove. Soon theflame vanishes, and with it the whole scene is gone, though its imageremains an instant in your mind's eye when darkness has swallowed thereality. Throughout the chamber there is the same obscurity as before,but not the same gloom within your breast.

  As your head falls back upon the pillow you think--in a whisper be itspoken--how pleasant in these night solitudes would be the rise andfall of a softer breathing than your own, the slight pressure of atenderer bosom, the quiet throb of a purer heart, imparting itspeacefulness to your troubled one, as if the fond sleeper wereinvolving you in her dream. Her influence is over you, though she haveno existence but in that momentary image. You sink down in a floweryspot on the borders of sleep and wakefulness, while your thoughts risebefore you in pictures, all disconnected, yet all assimilated by apervading gladsomeness and beauty. The wheeling of gorgeous squadronsthat glitter in the sun is succeeded by the merriment of childrenround the door of a schoolhouse beneath the glimmering shadow of oldtrees at the corner of a rustic lane. You stand in the sunny rain of asummer shower, and wander among the sunny trees of an autumnal wood,and look upward at the brightest of all rainbows overarching theunbroken sheet of snow on the American side of Niagara. Your mindstruggles pleasantly between the dancing radiance round the hearth ofa young man a
nd his recent bride and the twittering flight of birds inspring about their new-made nest. You feel the merry bounding of aship before the breeze, and watch the tuneful feet of rosy girls asthey twine their last and merriest dance in a splendid ball-room, andfind yourself in the brilliant circle of a crowded theatre as thecurtain falls over a light and airy scene.

  With an involuntary start you seize hold on consciousness, and proveyourself but half awake by running a doubtful parallel between humanlife and the hour which has now elapsed. In both you emerge frommystery, pass through a vicissitude that you can but imperfectlycontrol, and are borne onward to another mystery. Now comes the pealof the distant clock with fainter and fainter strokes as you plungefarther into the wilderness of sleep. It is the knell of a temporarydeath. Your spirit has departed, and strays like a free citizen amongthe people of a shadowy world, beholding strange sights, yet withoutwonder or dismay. So calm, perhaps, will be the final change--soundisturbed, as if among familiar things, the entrance of the soul toits eternal home.