III.

My mother had no companion. Even the servants lived apart, and performed their allotted offices at hours when she was not present; so that our table was laid and our wants supplied, for the most part by unseen hands. Such was my mother's way of life. Solitude and early griefs had fallen heavily upon her spirits, and fretted her temper. She rarely exchanged words with the servants, and never except upon unavoidable occasions. A spoken language was almost interdicted among us, and in its place the language of books was substituted. We dwelt in a world of our own, in which the unreal was invested with a living interest. Conversation wearied her; she had no sympathy with the actual life around her, and had long closed her heart against it. But the charm of books was ever fresh and inexhaustible. She possessed in a higher degree than any person I ever knew the power of realizing their contents. Portraits stepped out of them, and became as familiar to her as if they had moved about her bodily in the flesh. This daily intercourse with the creations of the brain fed her morbid desire for seclusion, and was cultivated with an earnestness that proved fatal at last.

Her taste lay entirely in one direction; the marvelous and extravagant alone interested her. She prohibited all works that treated of real life, and sought for the excitement she loved in the region of wonder and romance. Her library (a room of which I will speak more particularly presently) was filled with histories of sorcery and enchantment--of miraculous escapes and perils--providential interpositions--dreams, omens, and spectral appearances--astrology and witchcraft--church-yard legends, and the superstitions which ascribe a mysterious power to spells, charms, and incantations--traditions of giants and monsters--feats of the genii and evil spirits, and narratives that embraced the whole round of that curious lore which relates to the alchemists and diviners.

These books were the delight and occupation of her life; and when her eyes latterly began to grow dim with age, it was my task to read them aloud to her. At first, I revolted from this labor; it hung drearily upon me, and sickened me. Youth is naturally mutinous under confinement, and yearns for activity and freedom. But it was surprising how soon I fell into her tastes, and found myself kindling, as she used to do, over the horrors these terrible books unfolded. And now they took possession of me, I began to believe in them as she did; and with belief, or the awe which is so closely allied to it, my eagerness to penetrate further and further grew into an irresistible passion. Many a time in the bleak autumn nights, when the sharp winds snapped the leaves from the trees, and drifted their crisp spoils against the windows, have I sat gasping over some hideous tale, to which, by an involuntary association of ideas, the desolation of the season imparted additional terrors. I was wrought upon by that sort of fascination which resides in the eyes of the snake, when it fixes its gaze upon the face of a child.

Children who have been brought up in a healthy collision with the world know nothing of the state of fear and mental slavery I am describing. A little judicious counsel would have dispelled these delusions; a little timely explanation would have shown me their absurdity. But where was I to seek it? In my isolation I had not a single adviser. I took all I read for granted. The book could not dissipate the chaos of doubts and importunities of struggling reason it generated; it was dumb, and could not answer my questions. If I appealed to my mother, she was chafed at the interruption and the heresy, and commanded me to read on. At last I doubted no longer. Wonder after wonder swept away my feeble judgment. I believed in a spiritual kingdom--in the return of the dead to the earth--in the power of prophecy and the agency of demons--in second sight and the elixir vitæ--in amulets and miraculous invocations; the crystal mirror of Cornelius Agrippa, the witches of the Brocken, the Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew, were all realities to me. The ignorant alone believe in such things; but in this ignorance consisted all the knowledge that was thrown open to me.

The library was at some distance from the inhabited part of the house. It was an oblong room, with deep recesses, in which stood the old oak book-cases. If we had had the power of selecting a theatre for the performance of the legends which were read aloud here every night, we could not have found one better adapted to the purpose. The apartment was large and gloomy; and the tapestried walls, the ponderous draperies, the polished floor, the painted ceiling, the high-backed chairs, and the vast fire-place, with its carved mantle-shelf, supplied the very style of scene and furniture best adapted to give a striking effect to tales of crime and enchantment. Except close to the fire, and round the table on which we placed our lights, the library, from its height and extent, was buried in deep shadow; so that there was nothing wanted to help the imagination to a fitting locality for all kinds of mysteries.

I shall never forget my mother's sensations on one occasion when I read to her in this room an account of some man who kept watch through a whole night in a haunted chamber, and was never heard of afterward. She fancied that the tapestry moved, and called upon me to observe it. I did so, and fancied I saw it too. Twice she grasped my arm, and bade me cease; and looking shudderingly round, she twice desired me to listen, and tell her if I did not hear a foot-fall passing the extremity of the apartment in the dark with solemn regularity. I heard something--it was like the slow tread of a sentinel.

It was in that room, which cast its gloom over every page, blotting out its lines of sunshine wherever any happened to fall, that I read the _Decameron_. The groups in the garden--radiant, joyous, and in rapt attitudes of expectation and attention--were distinctly present to me, but darkened by immediate associations. Sorrow and anguish seemed to sit in their faces; there was no flush of emotion, no lightening in the eyes, no intensity in the cleft lips, no streaming hair, or burning cheeks, or startled gestures. All was cold, as if it were cut in marble. That pallid circle of listeners, disposed in such picturesque forms, seemed to me to be lying in a trance, so completely did the miserable influence of that room kill the gayety of all objects, and leave nothing but the skeleton behind.

We were never at a loss for excitement of this kind, which appeared, indeed, the only thing for which we lived. Our pursuits were interrupted for a time by the serious illness of my mother; but her irritable temperament rendered her impatient of sickness, and before the signs of the malady had passed out from her stricken frame she insisted upon returning to her nightly vigils.

Night after night she continued at her dangerous indulgence, while her eyes were visibly contracting a dull film, her cheeks wasting and falling in, and her pulse growing fainter and fainter. It was not a sight for a son to look upon, and tend with idle fancies and the levities of fable. I felt this and remonstrated, and the agonizing reality before me awakened me for a moment to the vanities of books. But she persisted in her demand and still preserved her listening posture, although the sense of hearing and the faculty of attention were sinking rapidly.

Some weeks had been consumed in this way, when one winter night she desired me to read a certain history from a favorite volume of old legends. The history she selected was that of a supernatural appearance that was alleged to have followed a gentleman of Verona with the fidelity of a shadow. The history set forth the arts and devices by which he endeavored to perplex and evade it--how he went into dark and lonely places, and how still his spectral companion stood at his side--how he rushed into crowded scenes, forcing his way violently through the mass, in the hope that he would thus escape; but no matter how dense the multitude, or by what stratagems and confederacy the gentleman sought to bury himself out of sight, the apparition in its human shape was ever standing or moving close beside him. The strangest thing was that it bore an unnatural likeness to him, not only in its face and form, but in its actions, which were always so faithfully and so instantaneously copied after him, that they resembled a reflection in a mirror. He tried the most painful and unexpected contortions, only to see them reproduced with a rapidity that mocked his despair.

The history went on to say how he invented various schemes, and underwent many fearful trials of sorcery, in the hope of banishing or subduing his horrid familiar, but all in vain, for the fiend baffled all his efforts, and was still found at his side, day and night, whether he rode or walked, or threw himself on his couch for repose--how he summoned courage to speak to it at last, and was answered by the echoes of his own voice--how he swam floods with the ghastly thing floating along with him on the surge--how he climbed the highest hills and fled into savage caverns, the familiar still toiling or groveling beside him--how, in a fit of madness, he tried to grapple it on the edge of a precipice with the desperate intent of dragging it down with him into the abyss below, and how the shape wrought in the struggle, impalpable to the touch, but visible to the sight, like painted air--how, after enduring horrible tortures, the man wasted away, and became a mere shadow, the spirit waning and fading in like manner--and how the priests of a holy order, in the solitudes of the Apennines, hearing of these strange events, bethought them of shriving the man, and expelling the incarnate devil that had worked such inexplicable misery upon him.

The history next went on to relate how the monks found the man so weak and emaciated that he could scarcely take food or answer their questions--and how they had him conveyed to their chapel at midnight, amid the glare of torches and the chants of the holy brotherhood, the imperishable fiend lying stretched by his side in the litter, in open spite of the holy water with which they had sprinkled it, and of the care with which they had caused it to be made so small that it was thought impossible for him to find room upon it--and how, when the wretched man was brought to the altar, they placed him upright before it, and began to pray, the fiend all the while being in his usual place next to his mortal fellow--and how, as the prayers proceeded and the voices of the assembled priests, of whom numbers had collected from distant places to witness the scene, ascended to the roof, filling the sanctuary with solemn and blessed music, the man turned a look of deathly fear, and gazed into the eyes of the spirit, the spirit giving back the look with the same thrilling and awful expression--and how the sufferer, when the venerable abbot came to the benediction, and offered to place his hands upon his head, sank gradually down, the fiend sinking with him--and how, as the last word was uttered, they vanished together into the earth, and on the instant the torches were extinguished, as by a sudden gust of wind.

When I came to this point of the story, I lifted my eyes to look upon my mother. She sat upon her great chair opposite to me, looking straight at me with a glassy and vacant stare. Her limbs were rigid, and a spasm sat upon her features.

"Mother!" I exclaimed; "mother!" I could not speak more. I was choking for utterance, my hair coiled out like living fibres, the room seemed to swim round and round. I stretched out my arms and seized her hands--they were cold, cold and clammy. Let me not dwell on it--in that spectral chamber I was alone with the dead!