On entering, he found himself in a cottage of a more respectable interior than from its outward appearance he had been led to expect: but he had little leisure or inclination for the survey of its effects, for his senses and imagination were immediately and entirely occupied by the scene which presented itself on his entrance. In the center of the room into which he had been so readily admitted, stood, on its trestles, an open coffin; lights were at its head and foot, and on each side sat many persons of both sexes, who appeared to be engaged in the customary of watching the corpse previous to its internment in the morning. There were many who appeared to the stranger to be watchers, but there were two, who, in his eye, bore the appearance of mourners, and they had faces of grief which spoke too plainly of the anguish that was mining within: one, at the foot of the coffin, was a pale youth just blooming into manhood, who covered his dewy eyes with the trembling fingers that ill-concealed the tears which trickled down his wan cheeks beneath: the other—; but why should we again describe that still unbowed and lofty form? The awful marble brow upon which the stranger gazed, was that of Ruth Tudor.
There was much whispering and quiet talk amongst the people while refreshments were handed amongst them; and so little curiosity was excited by the appearance of the traveller, that he naturally concluded that it must be no common loss that could deaden a feeling so intense in the bosoms of Welsh peasants: he was even checked for an attempt to question; but one man,—he who had given him admittance, and seemed to possess authority in the circle—told him he would answer his question when the guests should depart, but till then he must keep silence. The traveller endeavored to obey, and sat down in quiet contemplation of the figure who most interested his attention, and who sat at the coffin’s head. Ruth Tudor spoke nothing, nor did she appear to heed aught of the business that was passing around her. Absorbed by reflection, her eyes were generally cast to the ground; but when they were raised, the traveller looked in vain for that expression of grief which had struck him so forcibly on his entrance; there was something wonderfully strange in the character of her perfect features: could he have found words for his thought, and might have been permitted the expression, he would have called it triumphant despair; so deeply agonized, so proudly stern, looked the mourner who sat by the dead.
The interest which the traveller took in the scene became more intense the longer he gazed upon its action; unable to resist the anxiety which had begun to prey upon his spirit, he arose and walked towards the coffin, with the purpose of contemplating its inhabitant: a sad explanation was given, by its appearance, of the grief and the anguish he had witnessed; a beautiful girl was reposing in the narrow house, with a face as calm and lovely as if she but slept a deep and refreshing sleep, and the morning sun would again smile upon her awakening: salt, the emblem of the immortal soul, was placed upon her breast; and, in her pale and perishing fingers, a branch of living flowers were struggling for life in the grasp of death, and diffusing their sweet odor of mortality. These images, so opposite, yet so alike, affected the spirit of the gazer, and he almost wept as he continued looking upon them, till he was aroused from his trance by the strange conduct of Ruth Tudor, who had caught a glimpse of his face as he bent in sorrow over the coffin. She sprung up from her seat, and darting at him a terrible glance of recognition, pointed down to the corpse, and then, with a hollow burst of frantic laughter, shouted—’Behold, thou liar!’
The startled stranger was relieved from the necessity of speaking by someone taking his arm and gently leading him to the farther end of the cottage: the eyes of Ruth followed him, and it was not until he had done violence to himself in turning from her to his conductor, that he could escape their singular fascination. When he did so, he beheld a venerable man, the pastor of a distant village, who had come that night to speak comfort to the mourners, and perform the last sad duty to the dead on the morrow. ‘Be not alarmed at what you have witnessed, my young friend,’ said he; ‘these ravings are not uncommon: this unhappy woman, at an early period of her life, gave ear to the miserable superstitions of her country, and wretched pretender to wisdom predicted that she should become a shedder of blood: madness has been the inevitable consequence in an ardent spirit, and in its ravings she dreams she has committed one sin, and is still tempted to add to it another.’
‘You may say what you please, parson,’ said the old man who had given admittance to the stranger, and who now, after dismissing all the guests save the youth, joined the talkers, and seated himself on the settle by their side; ‘you may say what you please about madness and superstition, but I know Ruth Tudor was a fated woman, and the deed that was to be I believe she has done: ay, ay, her madness is conscience; and if the deep sea and the jagged rocks could speak, they might tell us a tale of other things than that: but she is judged now; her only child is gone—her pretty Rachel. Poor Evan! he was her suitor: ah, he little thought two months ago, when he was preparing for a gay bridal, that her slight sickness would end thus: he does not deserve it; but for her—God forgive me if I do her wrong, but I think it is the hand of God, and it lies heavy, as it should.’ And the grey-haired old man hobbled away, satisfied that in thus thinking he was showing his zeal for virtue.
“Alas, that so white a head should acknowledge so hard a heart!’ said the pastor; ‘Ruth is condemned, according to his system, for committing that which a mightier hand compelled her to do; how harsh and misjudging is age! But we must not speak so loud,’ continued he; ‘for see, the youth Evan is retiring for the night, and the miserable mother has thrown herself on the floor to sleep; the sole domestic is rocking on her stool, and therefore I will do the honors of this poor cottage to you. There is a chamber above this, containing the only bed in the hut; thither you may go and rest, for otherwise it will certainly be vacant tonight. I shall find a bed in the village; and even Evan sleeps near you with some of the guests in the barn. But, before I go, if my question is not unwelcome and intrusive, tell me who you are, and wither you are bound.’
‘I was ever a subscriber to the old man’s creed of fatalism,’ said the stranger, smiling, ‘and I believe I am more confirmed in it by the singular events of this day. My father was a man of a certain rank in society, but of selfish and disorderly habits. A course of extravagance and idleness was succeeded by difficulties and distress. Harassed by creditors, he was pained by their demands, and his selfishness was unable to endure the sufferings of his wife and children. Instead of exertion, he had recourse to flight, and left us to face the difficulties from which he shrunk. He was absent for years, while his family toiled and struggled with success. Suddenly we heard that he was concealed on this part of the coast; the cause which made that concealment necessary I forbear to mention; but he as suddenly disappeared from the eyes of men, though we never could trace him beyond this part of the country. I have always believed that I should one day find my father, and have lately, though with difficulty, prevailed upon my mother to allow me to make my inquiries in this neighborhood; but my search is at an end today,—I believe that I have found my father. Roaming along the beach, I penetrated into several of those dark caverns of the rocks, which might well, by their rugged aspects, deter the idle and timid from entering. Through the fissures of one I discovered, in the interior, a light. Surprised, I penetrated to its concealment, and discovered a man sleeping on the ground. I advanced to wake him, and found but a fleshless skeleton, cased in tattered and decaying garments. He had probably met his death by accident, for exactly over the corpse I observed, at a terrific distance, the daylight, as if streaming down from an aperture above. Thus the wretched man must have fallen, but how long since, or who had discovered his body and left the light which I beheld, I knew not, although I cannot help cherishing a strong conviction that it was the body of Rhys Meredith that I saw.’
‘Who talks of Rhys Meredith,’ said a stern voice near the coffin, ‘and the cave where the outcast rots?’ They turned quickly at the sound, and beheld Ruth Tudor standing up as if she had bee
n intently listening to the story. ‘It was I who spoke, dame,’ said the stranger gently, ‘and my speech was of my father, of Rhys Meredith; I am Owen his son.’
‘Son! Owen Rhys!’ said the bewildered Ruth, passing her hand over her forehead, as if to enable her to recover the combination of these names: ‘and who art thou, that thus givest human ties to him who is no more of humanity? why speakest thou of living things as pertaining to the dead? Father! he is father to naught save sin, and murder is his only begotten!’
She advanced to the traveller as she spoke, and again caught a view of his face; again he saw the wild look of recognition, and an unearthly shriek followed the convulsive horror of her face. ‘There! there!’ she said, ‘I knew it must be thyself; once before tonight have I beheld thee, yet what can thy coming bode? Back with thee, ruffian! for is not thy dark work done?’
‘Let us leave her,’ said the good pastor, ‘to the care of her attendant; do not continue to meet her gaze; your presence may increase, but cannot allay her malady: go up to your bed and rest.’
He retired as he spoke; and Owen, in compliance with his wish, ascended the ruinous stair which led to his chamber, after he beheld Ruth Tudor quietly place herself in her seat at the open coffin’s head. The room to which he mounted was not of the most cheering aspect, yet he felt that he had often slept soundly in a worse. It was a gloomy unfinished chamber, and the wind was whistling coldly and drearily through the uncovered rafters above his head. Like many of the cottages in that part of the country, it appeared to have grown old and ruinous before it had been finished; for the flooring was so crazy as scarcely to support the huge wooden bedstead, and in many instances the boards were entirely separated from each other, and the center, time, or the rot, had so completely devoured the larger half of one, that through the gaping aperture Owen had an entire command of the room and the party below, looking down immediately upon the coffin. Ruth was in the same attitude as when he had left her, and the servant girl was dozing by her side. Everything being perfectly tranquil, Owen threw himself upon his hard couch and endeavored to compose himself to rest for the night, but this had become a task, and one of no easy nature to surmount; his thoughts still wandered to the events of the day, and he felt there was some strange connection between the scene he had just witnessed, and the darker one of the secret cave. He was an imaginative man, and of a quick and feverish temperament, and he thought of Ruth Tudor’s ravings, and the wretched skeleton of the rock, till he had worked out in his brain the chain of events that linked one consequence with the other: he grew restless and wretched, and amidst the tossings of impatient anxiety, fatigue overpowered him, and he sunk into a perturbed and heated sleep. His slumber was broken by dreams that might well be the shadows of his waking reveries. He was alone (as in reality) upon his humble bed, when imagination brought to his ear the sound of many voices again singing the slow and monotonous psalm; it was interrupted by the outcries of some unseen things who had attempted to enter his chamber, and amid yells of fear and execrations of anger, bade him ‘Arise and save her.’ In his sleep he attempted to spring up, but a horrid fear restrained him, a fear that he should be too late; then he crouched like a coward beneath his coverings, to hide from the reproaches of the spectre, while shouts of laughter and shrieks of agony were poured like a tempest around him: he sprung from his bed and awoke.
It was some moments ere he could recover recollection, or shake off the horror which had seized upon his soul. He listened, and with infinite satisfaction observed an unbroken silence throughout the house. He smiled at his own terrors, attributed them to the events of the day, or the presence of a corpse, and determined not to look down into the lower room till he should be summoned thither in the morning. He walked to the casement and looked abroad to the night; the clouds were many, black, and lowering, and the face of the sky looked angrily at the wind, and glared portentously upon the earth; the sleet was still falling; distant thunder announced the approach or departure of a storm, and Owen marked the clouds coming in afar towards him, laden with the rapid and destructive lightning: he shut the casement and returned towards his bed; but the light from below attracted his eye, and he could not pass the aperture without taking one glance at the party.
They were in the same attitude in which he had left them; the servant was sleeping, but Ruth was earnestly gazing on the lower end of the room upon something, without the sight of Owen; his attention was next fixed upon the corpse, and he thought he had never seen any living thing so lovely; and so calm was the aspect of her last repose, that Meredith thought it more resembled a temporary suspension of the faculties than the eternal stupor of death: her features were pale, but not distorted, and there was none of the livid hue of death in her beautiful mouth and lips; but the flowers in her hand gave stronger demonstration of the presence of the power before whose potency their little strength was fading; drooping with a mortal sickness, they bowed down their heads in submission, as one by one they dropped from her pale and perishing fingers. Owen gazed till he thought he saw the grasp of her hand relax, and a convulsive smile pass over her cold and rigid features; he looked again; the eyelids shook and vibrated like the string of some fine-strung instrument; the hair rose, and the head-cloth moved: he started up ashamed: ‘Does the madness of this woman affect all who would sleep beneath her roof?’ said he; ‘what is this that disturbs me—or am I yet in a dream? Hark! what is that?’ It was the voice of Ruth; she had risen from her seat, and was standing near the coffin, apparently addressing someone who stood at the lower end of the room: ‘To what purpose is thy coming now?’ said she, in a low and melancholy voice, ‘and at what dost thou laugh and gibe? lo! you; she is here, and the sin you know of, cannot be; how can I take the life which another hath already withdrawn? Go, go, hence to thy cave of night, for this is no place of safety for thee.’ Her thoughts now took another turn; she seemed to hide one from the pursuit of others: ‘Lie still! Lie still!’ she whispered; ‘put out thy light! so, so, they pass by and mark thee not; thou art safe; good-night, good-night! now will I home to sleep’; and she seated herself in her chair, as if composing her senses to rest.
Owen was again bewildered in the chaos of thought, but for this time he determined to subdue his imagination, and throwing himself upon his bed, again gave himself up to sleep; but the images of his former dreams still haunted him, and their hideous phantasms were more powerfully renewed; again he heard the solemn psalm of death, but unsung by mortals—it was pealed through earth up to high heaven, by myriads of the viewless and the mighty; again he heard the execrations of millions for some unremembered sin, and the wrath and the hatred of a world was rushing upon him: ‘Come forth! come forth!’ was the cry; and amid yells and howls they were darting upon him, when the pale form of the beautiful dead arose between them, and shielded him from their malice; but he heard her say aloud, ‘It is time for this, that thou wilt not save me; arise, arise, and help!’
He sprung up as he was commanded; sleeping or waking he never knew; but he started from his bed to look down into the chamber, as he heard the voice of Ruth in terrific denunciation: he looked; she was standing, uttering yells of madness and rage, and close to her was a well-known form of appalling recollection—his father, as he had seen him last; he arose and darted to the door: ‘I am mad,’ said he; ‘I am surely mad, or this is still a continuation of my dream.’: he looked again; Ruth was still there, but alone.
But, though no visible form stood by the maniac, some fiend had entered her soul and mastered her mighty spirit; she had armed herself with an axe, and shouting, ‘Liar, liar, hence!’ was pursuing some imaginary foe to the darker side of the cottage. Owen strove hard to trace her motions, but as she had retreated under the space occupied by his bed, he could no longer see her, and his eyes involuntarily fastened themselves upon the coffin; there a new horror met them; the dead corpse had risen, and with wild and glaring eyes was watching the scene before her. Owen distrusted his senses till he heard the terrif
ic voice of Ruth, as she marked the miracle he had witnessed: ‘The fiend, the robber!’ she yelled, ‘it is he who hath entered the pure body of my child. Back to thy cave of blood, thou lost one! back to thine own dark hell!’ Owen flew to the door; it was too late; he heard the shriek—the blow: he fell into the room, but only in time to hear the second blow, and see the cleft head of the hapless Rachel fall back upon its bloody pillow; his terrible cries brought in the sleepers from the barn, headed by the wretched Evan, and, for a time, the thunders of heaven were drowned in the clamorous grief of man. No one dared to approach the miserable Ruth, who now, in utter frenzy, strode around the room, brandishing, with diabolical grandeur, the bloody axe, and singing a wild song of triumph and joy. All fell back as she approached, and shrunk from the infernal majesty of her terrific form; and the thunders of heaven rolling above their heads, and the flashing of the fires of eternity in their eyes, were less terrible than the savage glare and desperate wrath of the maniac:—suddenly, the house rocked to its foundations; its inmates were blinded for a moment, and sunk, felled by a stunning blow, to the earth;—slowly each man recovered and arose, wondering he was yet alive;—all were unhurt save one. Ruth Tudor was on the earth, her blackened limbs prostrate beneath the coffin of her child, and her dead cheek resting on the rent and bloody axe;—it had been the destroyer of both.
THE STORY OF THE UNFINISHED PICTURE, by Charles Hooten
(1847)
“Weigel was an intimate acquaintance of mine,—a good painter, and had commenced his career promisingly. Calculating on a fortune not yet made, and a reputation that still had to take root, although it put forth strongly, he married a handsome girl of poor and obscure parentage, and found himself involved in all the cares of a young family before he was three-and-twenty. Fortune almost seemed to abandon him from the very day of his wedding, and from hard experience he soon found that he had begun the world too soon. But he was ambitious to an excess, and frequently used to say to his acquaintances that he would willingly lay down his life, only to become an artist that the world would never forget. Nay, I have often heard him say he was in the nightly habit of invoking the aid, in prayers, of either good spirits or bad (he cared not which), whichever, if such existed, would come first to assist him in the attainment of a painter’s success and immortality. ‘What matters,’ says he, ‘even if a man could give away his immortality in the uncertain hereafter, for a certain immortality here, though he should go so far as to do it? ’Twould be but as exchange of equivalents; or perhaps a gain on the side of earth which is real, positive, known; rather than on the chance of the future beyond death, which to our philosophy is unreal, not positive, and unknown. It may be darkness and nothingness,—I do not say it is, but it may be: and to barter away our title to it may be nothing more than parting with the shadow of a shadow—even the shade—for such this future may be, and nothing more,—cast forwards by the light of real life, and called in our ignorance another world. For my part,’ he said, ‘if there were good spirits, they would assist me; if bad they would accept my offers. Now I have often tempted both, but never seen either, and hence conclude them to be only the idle work of idle imaginations,—the future to be a blank, the present only a reality, in which the power to create an immortality is given us and which, if not exercised, we return to a state after life and being, as perfect in its nonentity to us, as is that in which we were, if we really were at all, before life and being commenced. Talk as you will, we really know no more of the life after, than of the life prior to, this. Of the latter nobody professes either dogmas or doctrine; for men never saw profit or advantage to be derived from the establishment of a spiritual world anterior to earth-life; while of the former, the religious of the world give us but assertion and opinion, not knowledge; for I hold nothing to be knowledge which is beyond the definition of philosophy. Probability it may be, but it is not knowledge.’
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