Various - Stories of Mystery

V >> Various >> Stories of Mystery

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

The stern voice had grown softer than a child's. The same look of
unutterable tenderness brooded on the mournful face of the phantom by
his side; but its thin, shining hand was laid upon his head, and its
countenance had undergone a change. The form was still undefined; but
the features had become distinct. They were those of a young man,
beautiful and wan, and marked with great suffering.

A pause had fallen on the conversation, in which the father and daughter
heard the solemn sighing of the wintry wind around the dwelling. The
silence seemed scarcely broken by the voice of the young girl.

"Dear father, this was very sad. Did you say he died of want?"

"Of want, my child, of hunger and cold. I don't doubt it. He had wandered
about, as I gather, houseless for a couple of days and nights. It was
in December, too. Some one found him, on a rainy night, lying in the
street, drenched and burning with fever, and had him taken to the
hospital. It appears that he had always cherished a strange affection
for me, though I had grown away from him; and in his wild ravings he
constantly mentioned my name, and they sent for me. That was our first
meeting after two years. I found him in the hospital--dying. Heaven
can witness that I felt all my old love for him return then, but he
was delirious, and never recognized me. And, Nathalie, his hair,--it
had been coal-black, and he wore it very long,--he wouldn't let them
cut it either; and as they knew no skill could save him, they let him
have his way,--his hair was then as white as snow! God alone knows what
that brain must have suffered to blanch hair which had been as black
as the wing of a raven!"

He covered his eyes with his hand, and sat silently. The fingers of
the phantom still shone dimly on his head, and its white locks drooped
above him, like a weft of light.

"What was his name, father?" asked the pitying girl.

"George Feval. The very name sounds like fever. He died on Christmas
eve, fifteen years ago this night. It was on his death-bed, while his
mind was tossing on a sea of delirious fancies, that he wrote me this
long letter,--for to the last, I was uppermost in his thoughts. It is
a wild, incoherent thing, of course,--a strange mixture of sense and
madness. But I have kept it as a memorial of him. I have not looked
at it for years; but this morning I found it among my papers, and
somehow it has been in my mind all day."

He slowly unfolded the faded sheets, and sadly gazed at the writing.
His daughter had risen from her half-recumbent posture, and now bent
her graceful head over the leaves. The phantom covered its face with
its hands.

"What a beautiful manuscript it is, father!" she exclaimed. "The
writing is faultless."

"It is, indeed," he replied. "Would he had written his life as fairly!"

"Read it, father," said Nathalie.

"No, but I'll read you a detached passage here and there," he answered,
after a pause. "The rest you may read yourself some time, if you wish.
It is painful to me. Here's the beginning:--

"'_My Dear Charles Renton:--Adieu, and adieu. It is Christmas eve, and
I am going home. I am soon to exhale from my flesh, like the spirit
of a broken flower. Exultemus forever!_'

* * * * *

"It is very wild. His mind was in a fever-craze. Here is a passage that
seems to refer to his own experience of life:--

"'_Your friendship was dear to me. I give you true love. Stocks and
returns. You are rich, but I did not wish to be your bounty's pauper.
Could I beg? I had my work to do for the world, but oh! the world has
no place for souls that can only love and suffer. How many miles to
Babylon? Threescore and ten. Not so far--not near so far! Ask
starvelings--they know.

* * * * *

I wanted to do the world good, and the world has killed me, Charles._'"

* * * * *

"It frightens me," said Nathalie, as he paused.

"We will read no more," he replied sombrely. "It belongs to the
psychology of madness. To me, who knew him, there are gleams of sense
in it, and passages where the delirium of the language is only a
transparent veil on the meaning. All the remainder is devoted to what
he thought important advice to me. But it's all wild and vague.
Poor--poor George!"

The phantom still hid its face in its hands, as the doctor slowly turned
over the pages of the letter. Nathalie, bending over the leaves, laid
her finger on the last, and asked, "What are those closing sentences,
father? Read them."

"Oh! that is what he called his 'last counsel' to me. It's as wild as
the rest,--tinctured with the prevailing ideas of his career. First
he says, '_Farewell--farewell_'; then he bids me take his '_counsel
into memory on Christmas day_'; then after enumerating all the wretched
classes he can think of in the country, he says: '_These are your
sisters and your brothers,--love them all._' Here he says, '_O friend,
strong in wealth for so much good, take my last counsel. In the name
of the Saviour, I charge you be true and tender to mankind._' He goes
on to bid me '_live and labor for the fallen, the neglected, the
suffering, and the poor_'; and finally ends by advising me to help upset
any, or all, institutions, laws, and so forth, that bear hardly on the
fag-ends of society; and tells me that what he calls 'a service to
humanity' is worth more to the doer than a service to anything else,
or than anything we can gain from the world. Ah, well! poor George."

"But isn't all that true, father?" said Netty; "it seems so."

"H'm," he murmured through his closed lips. Then with a vague smile,
folding up the letter, meanwhile, he said, "Wild words, Netty, wild
words. I've no objection to charity, judiciously given; but poor
George's notions are not mine. Every man for himself, is a good general
rule. Every man for humanity, as George has it, and in his acceptation
of the principle, would send us all to the almshouse pretty soon. The
greatest good of the greatest number,--that's my rule of action. There
are plenty of good institutions for the distressed, and I'm willing
to help support 'em, and do. But as for making a martyr of one's self,
or tilting against the necessary evils of society, or turning
philanthropist at large, or any quixotism of that sort, I don't believe
in it. We didn't make the world, and we can't mend it. Poor George.
Well--he's at rest. The world wasn't the place for him."

They grew silent. The spectre glided slowly to the wall, and stood as
if it were thinking what, with Dr. Renton's rule of action, was to
become of the greatest good of the smallest number. Nathalie sat on
her father's knee, thinking only of George Feval, and of his having
been starved and grieved to death.

"Father," said Nathalie, softly, "I felt, while you were reading the
letter, as if he were near us. Didn't you? The room was so light and
still, and the wind sighed so."

"Netty, dear, I've felt that all day, I believe," he replied. "Hark!
there is the door-bell. Off goes the spirit-world, and here comes the
actual. Confound it! Some one to see me, I'll warrant, and I'm not in
the mood."

He got into a fret at once. Netty was not the Netty of an hour ago,
or she would have coaxed him out of it. But she did not notice it now
in her abstraction. She had risen at the tinkle of the bell, and seated
herself in a chair. Presently a nose, with a great pimple on the end
of it, appeared at the edge of the door, and a weak, piping voice said,
reckless of the proper tense, "There was a woman wanted to see you,
sir."

"Who is it, James?--no matter, show her in."

He got up with the vexed scowl on his face, and walked the room. In
a minute the library door opened again, and a pale, thin, rigid,
frozen-looking little woman, scantily clad, the weather being
considered, entered, and dropped a curt, awkward bow to Dr. Renton.

"O, Mrs. Miller! Good evening, ma'am. Sit down," he said, with a cold,
constrained civility.

The little woman faintly said, "Good evening, Dr. Renton," and sat down
stiffly, with her hands crossed before her, in the chair nearest the
wall. This was the obdurate tenant, who had paid no rent for three
months, and had a notice to quit, expiring to-morrow.

"Cold evening, ma'am," remarked Dr. Renton, in his hard way.

"Yes, sir, it is," was the cowed, awkward answer.

"Won't you sit near the fire, ma'am?" said Netty, gently; "you look
cold."

"No, miss, thank you. I'm not cold," was the faint reply. She was cold,
though, as well she might be with her poor, thin shawl, and open bonnet,
in such a bitter night as it was outside. And there was a rigid, sharp,
suffering look in her pinched features that betokened she might have
been hungry, too. "Poor people don't mind the cold weather, miss," she
said, with a weak smile, her voice getting a little stronger. "They
have to bear it, and they get used to it."

She had not evidently borne it long enough to effect the point of
indifference. Netty looked at her with a tender pity. Dr. Renton
thought to himself, Hoh!--blazoning her poverty,--manufacturing
sympathy already,--the old trick; and steeled himself against any
attacks of that kind, looking jealously, meanwhile, at Netty.

"Well, Mrs. Miller," he said, "what is it this evening? I suppose you've
brought me my rent."

The little woman grew paler, and her voice seemed to fail on her
quivering lips. Netty cast a quick, beseeching look at her father.

"Nathalie, please to leave the room." We'll have no nonsense carried
on here, he thought, triumphantly, as Netty rose, and obeyed the stern,
decisive order, leaving the door ajar behind her.

He seated himself in his chair, and resolutely put his right leg up
to rest on his left knee. He did not look at his tenant's face,
determined that her piteous expressions (got up for the occasion, of
course) should be wasted on him.

"Well, Mrs. Miller," he said again.

"Dr. Renton," she began, faintly gathering her voice as she proceeded,
"I have come to see you about the rent. I am very sorry, sir, to have
made you wait, but we have been unfortunate."

"Sorry, ma'am," he replied, knowing what was coming; "but your
misfortunes are not my affair. We all have misfortunes, ma'am. But we
must pay our debts, you know."

"I expected to have got money from my husband before this, sir," she
resumed, "and I wrote to him. I got a letter from him to-day, sir, and
it said that he sent me fifty dollars a month ago, in a letter; and
it appears that the post-office is to blame, or somebody, for I never
got it. It was nearly three months' wages, sir, and it is very hard
to lose it. If it hadn't been for that your rent would have been paid
long ago, sir."

"Don't believe a word of _that_ story," thought Dr. Renton,
sententiously.

"I thought, sir," she continued, emboldened by his silence, "that if
you would be willing to wait a little longer, we would manage to pay
you soon, and not let it occur again. It has been a hard winter with
us, sir; firing is high, and provisions, and everything; and we're only
poor people, you know, and it's difficult to get along."

The doctor made no reply.

"My husband was unfortunate, sir, in not being able to get employment
here," she resumed; "his being out of work in the autumn, threw us all
back, and we've got nothing to depend on but his earnings. The family
that he's in now, sir, don't give him very good pay,--only twenty
dollars a month, and his board,--but it was the best chance he could
get, and it was either go to Baltimore with them, or stay at home and
starve, and so he went, sir. It's been a hard time with us, and one
of the children is sick, now, with a fever, and we don't hardly know
how to make out a living. And so, sir, I have come here this evening,
leaving the children alone, to ask you if you wouldn't be kind enough
to wait a little longer, and we'll hope to make it right with you in
the end."

"Mrs. Miller," said Dr. Renton, with stern composure, "I have no wish
to question the truth of any statement you may make; but I must tell
you plainly, that I can't afford to let my houses for nothing. I told
you a month ago, that if you couldn't pay me my rent, you must vacate
the premises. You know very well that there are plenty of tenants who
are able and willing to pay when the money comes due. You _know_ that."

He paused as he said this, and, glancing at her, saw her pale lips falter.
It shook the cruelty of his purpose a little, and he had a vague feeling
that he was doing wrong. Not without a proud struggle, during which
no word was spoken, could he beat it down. Meanwhile, the phantom had
advanced a pace toward the centre of the room.

"That is the state of the matter, ma'am," he resumed, coldly. "People
who will not pay me my rent must not live in my tenements. You must
move out. I have no more to say."

"Dr. Renton," she said, faintly, "I have a sick child,--how can I move
now? O, sir, it's Christmas eve,--don't be hard with us!"

Instead of touching him, this speech irritated him beyond measure.
Passing all considerations of her difficult position involved in her
piteous statement, his anger flashed at once on her implication that
he was unjust and unkind. So violent was his excitement that it whirled
away the words that rushed to his lips, and only fanned the fury that
sparkled from the whiteness of his face in his eyes.

"Be patient with us, sir," she continued; "we are poor, but we mean
to pay you; and we can't move now in this cold weather; please, don't
be hard with us, sir."

The fury now burst out on his face in a red and angry glow, and the
words came.

"Now, attend to me!" He rose to his feet. "I will not hear any more
from you. I know nothing of your poverty, nor of the condition of your
family. All I know is that you owe me three months' rent, and that you
can't or won't pay me. I say, therefore, leave the premises to people
who can and will. You have had your legal notice; quit my house
to-morrow; if you don't, your furniture shall be put in the street.
Mark me,--to-morrow!"

The phantom had rushed into the centre of the room. Standing face to
face with him,--dilating,--blackening,--its whole form shuddering
with a fury to which his own was tame,--the semblance of a shriek upon
its flashing lips, and on its writhing features, and an unearthly anger
streaming from its bright and terrible eyes,--it seemed to throw down,
with its tossing arms, mountains of hate and malediction on the head
of him whose words had smitten poverty and suffering, and whose heavy
hand was breaking up the barriers of a home.

Dr. Renton sank again into his chair. His tenant,--not a woman!--not
a sister in humanity!--but only his tenant; she sat crushed and
frightened by the wall. He knew it vaguely. Conscience was battling
in his heart with the stubborn devils that had entered there. The
phantom stood before him, like a dark cloud in the image of a man. But
its darkness was lightening slowly, and its ghostly anger had passed
away.

The poor woman, paler than before, had sat mute and trembling, with
all her hopes ruined. Yet her desperation forbade her to abandon the
chances of his mercy, and she now said,--

"Dr. Renton, you surely don't mean what you have told me. Won't you
bear with me a little longer, and we will yet make it all right with
you?"

"I have given you my answer," he returned, coldly; "I have no more to
add. I never take back anything I say--never!"

It was true. He never did--never! She half rose from her seat as if
to go; but weak and sickened with the bitter result of her visit, she
sunk down again with her head bowed. There was a pause. Then, solemnly
gliding across the lighted room, the phantom stole to her side with
a glory of compassion on its wasted features. Tenderly, as a son to
a mother, it bent over her; its spectral hands of light rested upon
her in caressing and benediction; its shadowy fall of hair, once
blanched by the anguish of living and loving, floated on her throbbing
brow; and resignation and comfort not of this world sank upon her spirit,
and consciousness grew dim within her, and care and sorrow seemed to
die.

He who had been so cruel and so hard, sat silent in black gloom. The
stern and sullen mood, from which had dropped but one fierce flash of
anger, still hung above the heat of his mind, like a dark rack of
thundercloud. It would have burst anew into a fury of rebuke, had he
but known his daughter was listening at the door, while the colloquy
went on. It might have flamed violently, had his tenant made any further
attempt to change his purpose. She had not. She had left the room meekly,
with the same curt, awkward bow that marked her entrance. He recalled
her manner very indistinctly; for a feeling like a mist began to gather
in his mind, and make the occurrences of moments before uncertain.

Alone, now, he was yet oppressed with a sensation that something was
near him. Was it a spiritual instinct? for the phantom stood by his
side. It stood silent, with one hand raised above his head, from which
a pale flame seemed to flow downward to his brain; its other hand
pointed movelessly to the open letter on the table beside him.

He took the sheets from the table, thinking, at the moment, only of
George Feval; but the first line on which his eye rested was, "In the
name of the Saviour, I charge you, be true and tender to mankind!" And
the words touched him like a low voice from the grave. Their penetrant
reproach pierced the hardness of his heart. He tossed the letter back
on the table. The very manner of the act accused him of an insult to
the dead. In a moment he took up the faded sheets more reverently, but
only to lay them down again.

He had not been well that day, and he now felt worse than before. The
pain in his head had given place to a strange sense of dilation, and
there was a silent, confused riot in his fevered brain, which seemed
to him like the incipience of insanity. Striving to divert his mind
from what had passed, by reflection on other themes, he could not hold
his thoughts; they came teeming but dim, and slipped and fell away;
and only the one circumstance of his recent cruelty, mixed with
remembrance of George Feval, recurred and clung with vivid persistence.
This tortured him. Sitting there, with arms tightly interlocked, he
resolved to wrench his mind down by sheer will upon other things; and
a savage pleasure at what at once seemed success, took possession of
him. In this mood, he heard soft footsteps and the rustle of festal
garments on the stairs, and had a fierce complacency in being able to
apprehend clearly that it was his wife and daughter going out to the
party. In a moment he heard the controlled and even voice of Mrs.
Renton,--a serene and polished lady with whom he had lived for years
in cold and civil alienation, both seeing as little of each other as
possible. With a scowl of will upon his brow, he received her image
distinctly into his mind, even to the minutia of the dress and ornaments
he knew she wore, and felt an absolutely savage exultation in his
ability to retain it. Then came the sound of the closing of the hall
door and the rattle of receding wheels, and somehow it was Nathalie
and not his wife that he was holding so grimly in his thought, and with
her, salient and vivid as before, the tormenting remembrance of his
tenant, connected with the memory of George Feval. Springing to his
feet, he walked the room.

He had thrown himself on a sofa, still striving to be rid of his
remorseful visitations, when the library door opened, and the inside
man appeared, with his hand held bashfully over his nose. It flashed
on him at once that his tenant's husband was the servant of a family
like this fellow; and, irritated that the whole matter should be thus
broadly forced upon him in another way, he harshly asked him what he
wanted. The man only came in to say that Mrs. Renton and the young lady
had gone out for the evening, but that tea was laid for him in the
dining-room. He did not want any tea, and if anybody called, he was
not at home. With this charge, the man left the room, closing the door
behind him.

If he could but sleep a little! Rising from the sofa he turned the lights
of the chandelier low, and screened the fire. The room was still. The
ghost stood, faintly radiant, in a remote corner. Dr. Renton lay down
again, but not to repose. Things he had forgotten of his dead friend,
now started up again in remembrance, fresh from the grave of many years;
and not one of them but linked itself by some mysterious bond to
something connected with his tenant, and became an accusation.

He had lain thus for more than an hour, feeling more and more unmanned
by illness, and his mental excitement fast becoming intolerable, when
he heard a low strain of music, from the Swedenborgian chapel, hard
by. Its first impression was one of solemnity and rest, and its first
sense, in his mind, was of relief. Perhaps it was the music of an evening
meeting; or it might be that the organist and choir had met for practice.
Whatever its purpose, it breathed through his heated fancy like a cool
and fragrant wind. It was vague and sweet and wandering at first,
straying on into a strain more mysterious and melancholy, but very
shadowy and subdued, and evoking the innocent and tender moods of early
youth before worldliness had hardened around his heart. Gradually, as he
listened to it, the fires in his brain were allayed, and all yielded to a
sense of coolness and repose. He seemed to sink from trance to trance of
utter rest, and yet was dimly aware that either something in his own
condition, or some supernatural accession of tone, was changing the music
from its proper quality to a harmony more infinite and awful. It was
still low and indeterminate and sweet, but had unaccountably and
strangely swelled into a gentle and sombre dirge, incommunicably
mournful, and filled with a dark significance that touched him in his
depth of rest with a secret tremor and awe. As he listened, rapt and
vaguely wondering, the sense of his tranced sinking seemed to come to an
end, and with the feeling of one who had been descending for many hours,
and at length lay motionless at the bottom of a deep, dark chasm, he
heard the music fail and cease.

A pause, and then it rose again, blended with the solemn voices of the
choir, sublimed and dilated now, reaching him as though from weird
night gulfs of the upper air, and charged with an overmastering pathos
as of the lamentations of angels. In the dimness and silence, in the
aroused and exalted condition of his being, the strains seemed
unearthly in their immense and desolate grandeur of sorrow, and their
mournful and dark significance was now for him. Working within him the
impression of vast, innumerable fleeing shadows, thick-crowding
memories of all the ways and deeds of an existence fallen from its early
dreams and aims, poured across the midnight of his soul, and under the
streaming melancholy of the dirge, his life showed like some monstrous
treason. It did not terrify or madden him; he listened to it rapt
utterly as in some deadening ether of dream; yet feeling to his inmost
core all its powerful grief and accusation, and quietly aghast at the
sinister consciousness it gave him. Still it swelled, gathering and
sounding on into yet mightier pathos, till all at once it darkened and
spread wide in wild despair, and aspiring again into a pealing agony
of supplication, quivered and died away in a low and funereal sigh.

The tears streamed suddenly upon his face; his soul lightened and
turned dark within him; and, as one faints away, so consciousness
swooned, and he fell suddenly down a precipice of sleep. The music rose
again, a pensive and holy chant, and sounded on to its close, unaffected
by the action of his brain, for he slept and heard it no more. He lay
tranquilly, hardly seeming to breathe, in motionless repose. The room
was dim and silent, and the furniture took uncouth shapes around him.
The red glow upon the ceiling, from the screened fire, showed the misty
figure of the phantom kneeling by his side. All light had gone from
the spectral form. It knelt beside him, mutely, as in prayer. Once it
gazed at his quiet face with a mournful tenderness, and its shadowy
hands caressed his forehead. Then it resumed its former attitude, and
the slow hours crept by.

At last it rose and glided to the table, on which lay the open letter.
It seemed to try to lift the sheets with its misty hands, but vainly.
Next it essayed the lifting of a pen which lay there, but failed. It
was a piteous sight, to see its idle efforts on these shapes of grosser
matter, which appeared now to have to it but the existence of illusions.
Wandering about the shadowy room, it wrung its phantom hands as in
despair.

Presently it grew still. Then it passed quickly to his side, and stood
before him. He slept calmly. It placed one ghostly hand above his
forehead, and with the other pointed to the open letter. In this
attitude its shape grew momentarily more distinct. It began to kindle
into brightness. The pale flame again flowed from its hand, streaming
downward to his brain. A look of trouble darkened the sleeping face.
Stronger,--stronger; brighter,--brighter; until, at last, it stood
before him, a glorious shape of light, with, an awful look of commanding
love in its shining features: and the sleeper sprang to his feet with
a cry!

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14