Part 8
It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch,--while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavored to believe that much, if not all, of what I felt was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room,--of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, upon my very heart sat an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself on the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened--I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me--to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavored to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment.
I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognized it as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan; but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes,--an evidently restrained _hysteria_ in his whole demeanor. His air appalled me; but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief.
“And you have not seen it?” he said abruptly, after having stared about him for some moments in silence,--“you have not then seen it?--but, stay! you shall.” Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm.
The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this; yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars, nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.
“You must not, you shall not behold this!” said I, shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat. “These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon; or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement; the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favorite romances. I will read, and you shall listen; and so we will pass away this terrible night together.”
The antique volume which I had taken up was the Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favorite of Usher’s more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild, overstrained air of vivacity with which he hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.
I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus:--
“And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarumed and reverberated throughout the forest.”
At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me),--it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, came indistinctly to my ears what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the story.
“But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten:--
‘Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin; Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win.’
And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard.”
Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement; for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound,--the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon’s unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.
Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanor. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast; yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea; for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus proceeded:--
“And now the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound.”
No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than--as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver--I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.
“Not hear it?--yes, I hear it, and _have_ heard it. Long--long--long--many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it--yet I dared not--O, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!--I dared not--I _dared_ not speak! _We have put her living in the tomb!_ Said I not that my senses were acute? I _now_ tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them--many, many days ago--yet I dared not--_I dared not speak!_ And now--to-night--Ethelred--ha! ha!--the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!--say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! O, whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!”--here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul,--“_Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!_”
As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance had been found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust; but then without those doors _did_ stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened,--there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind,--the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight,--my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder,--there was a long, tumultuous, shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters,--and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher.
CHOPS THE DWARF.
BY CHARLES DICKENS.
At one period of its reverses, the House to Let fell into the hands of a showman. He was found registered as its occupier, on the parish books of the time when he rented the House, and there was therefore no need of any clew to his name. But he himself was less easy to be found; for he had led a wandering life, and settled people had lost sight of him, and people who plumed themselves on being respectable were shy of admitting that they had ever known anything of him. At last among the marsh lands near the river’s level, that lie about Deptford and the neighboring market-gardens, a grizzled personage in velveteen, with a face so cut up by varieties of weather that he looked as if he had been tattooed, was found smoking a pipe at the door of a wooden house on wheels. The wooden house was laid up in ordinary for the winter near the mouth of a muddy creek; and everything near it--the foggy river, the misty marshes, and the steaming market-gardens--smoked in company with the grizzled man. In the midst of the smoking party, the funnel-chimney of the wooden house on wheels was not remiss, but took its pipe with the rest in a companionable manner.
On being asked if it were he who had once rented the House to Let, Grizzled Velveteen looked surprised, and said yes. Then his name was Magsman. That was it, Toby Magsman,--which was lawfully christened Robert; but called in the line, from an infant, Toby. There was nothing agin Toby Magsman, he believed? If there was suspicion of such, mention it!
There was no suspicion of such, he might rest assured. But some inquiries were making about that house, and would he object to say why he left it?
Not at all; why should he? He left it along of a dwarf.
Along of a dwarf?
Mr. Magsman repeated, deliberately and emphatically, “Along of a dwarf.”
Might it be compatible with Mr. Magsman’s inclination and convenience to enter, as a favor, into a few particulars?
Mr. Magsman entered into the following particulars:--
It was a long time ago to begin with,--afore lotteries and a deal more was done away with. Mr. Magsman was looking around for a good pitch, and he see that house, and he says to himself, “I’ll have you if you are to be had. If money’ll get you, I’ll have you.”
The neighbors cut up rough, and made complaints; but Mr. Magsman don’t know what they all would have had. It was a lovely thing. First of all, there was the canvas representin the pictur of the Giant in Spanish trunks and a ruff, who was half the height of the house, and was run up with a line and pulley to a pole of the roof, so that his Ed was coeval with the parapet. Then there was the canvas representin the pictur of the Albina lady, showin her white ’air to the Army and Navy in correct uniform. Then there was the canvas representin the pictur of the Wild Indian scalpin a member of some foreign nation. Then there was the canvas representin the pictur of a child of a British planter seized by two Boa-Constrictors,--not that we never had no child, nor no Constrictors neither. Similarly, there was the canvas representin the pictur of the Wild Ass of the Prairies,--not that we never had no wild asses, nor wouldn’t have had ’em as a gift. Last there was the canvas representin the pictur of the Dwarf, and like him too (considerin), with George the Fourth in such a state of astonishment at him as his Majesty couldn’t with his utmost politeness and stoutness express. The front of the House was so covered with canvases that there wasn’t a spark of daylight ever visible on that side. “MAGSMAN’S AMUSEMENTS,” fifteen foot long by two foot high, ran over the front door and parlor winders. The passage was a arbor of green baize and garden stuff. A barrel-organ performed there unceasing. And as to respectability,--if threepence ain’t respectable, what is?
But the Dwarf is the principal article at present, and he was worth money. He was wrote up as “Major Tpschoffki, of the Imperial Bulgraderian Brigade.” Nobody couldn’t pronounce the name, and it never was intended anybody should. The public always turned it, as a regular rule, into Chopski. In the line he was called Chops; partly on that account, and partly because his real name, if he ever had any real name (which was very dubious), was Stakes.
He was an uncommon small man, he really was. Certainly not so small as he was made out to be, but where’s your dwarf as is? He was a most uncommon small man, with a most uncommon large Ed; and what he had inside that Ed nobody never knowed but himself; even supposin himself to have ever took stock of it, which it would have been a stiff job for him to do. The kindest little man as never growed!--spirited, but not proud. When he travelled with the Spotted Baby, though he knowed himself to be a nat’ral Dwarf, and knowed the Baby’s spots to be put onto him artificial, he nursed that Baby like a mother. You never heard him give a ill name to a giant. He did allow himself to break out into strong language respectin the Fat Lady from Norfolk; but that was an affair of the ’art; and when a man’s ’art has been trifled with by a lady, and the preference giv to a Indian, he ain’t master of his actions.
He was always in love, of course; every human nat’ral phenomenon is. And he was always in love with a large woman; I never knowed the dwarf as could be got to love a small one. Which helps to keep ’em the curiosities they are.
One sing’lar idea he had in that Ed of his, which must have meant something, or it wouldn’t have been there. It was always his opinion that he was entitled to property. He never put his name to anything. He had been taught to write by a young man without any arms, who got his living with his toes (quite a writing-master _he_ was, and taught scores in the line), but Chops would have starved to death afore he’d gained a bit of bread by putting his hand to a paper. This is the more curious to bear in mind, because HE had no property, except his house and a sarser. When I say his house, I mean the box, painted and got up outside like a reg’ler six-roomer, that he used to creep into, with a diamond ring (or quite as good to look at) on his forefinger, and ring a little bell out of what the public believed to be the drawing-room winder. And when I say a sarser, I mean a Cheney sarser in which he made a collection for himself at the end of every entertainment. His cue for that he took from me: “Ladies and gentlemen, the little man will now walk three times round the Cairawan, and retire behind the curtain.” When he said anything important, in private life, he mostly wound it up with this form of words, and they was generally the last thing he said to me afore he went to bed.
He had what I consider a fine mind,--a poetic mind. His ideas respectin his property never come upon him so strong as when he sat upon a barrel-organ and had the handle turned. Arter the wibration had run through him a little time, he would screech out: “Toby, I feel my property coming,--grind away! I’m counting my guineas by thousands, Toby,--grind away! Toby, I shall be a man of fortun! I feel the mint a jingling in me, Toby, and I’m swelling out into the Bank of England!” Such is the influence of music on the poetic mind. Not that he was partial to any other music but a barrel-organ; on the contrairy, he hated it.
He had a kind of everlasting grudge agin the public; which is a thing you may notice in many phenomenons that get their living out of it. What riled him most in the nater of his occupation was that it kep him out of society. He was continiwally sayin: “Toby, my ambition is to go into society. The curse of my position towards the public is that it keeps me hout of society. This don’t signify to a low beast of a Indian; he ain’t formed for society. This don’t signify to a Spotted Baby; _he_ ain’t formed for society,--I am.”
Nobody never could make out what Chops done with his money. He had a good salary, down on the drum every Saturday as the day came round, besides having the run of his teeth,--and he was a woodpecker to eat,--but all dwarfs are. The sarser was a little income, bringing him in so many half-pence that he’d carry ’em, for a week together, tied up in a pocket-handkercher. And yet he never had money. And it couldn’t be the Fat Lady from Norfolk, as was once supposed; because it stands to reason that when you have a animosity towards a Indian which makes you grind your teeth at him to his face, and which can hardly hold you from goosing him audible when he’s going through his war-dance,--it stands to reason you wouldn’t under them circumstances deprive yourself to support that Indian in the lap of luxury.
Most unexpected, the mystery came out one day at Egham races. The public was shy of bein pulled in, and Chops was ringin his little bell out of his drawin-room winder, and was snarlin to me over his shoulder as he kneeled down with his legs out at the back door,--for he couldn’t be shoved into his house without kneeling down, and the premises wouldn’t accommodate his legs,--was snarlin: “Here’s a precious public for you; why the devil don’t they tumble up?” when a man in the crowd holds up a carrier-pigeon and cries out: “If there’s any person here as has got a ticket, the Lottery’s just drawd, and the number as has come up for the great prize is three, seven, forty-two! Three, seven, forty-two!” I was givin the man to the furies myself, for calling of the public’s attention,--for the public will turn away, at any time, to look at anything in preference to the thing showed ’em; and if you doubt it, get ’em together for any individual purpose on the face of the earth, and send only two people in late and see if the whole company ain’t far more interested in taking particular notice of them two than you,--I say I wasn’t best pleased with the man for callin out, wasn’t blessin him in my own mind, when I see Chops’s little bell fly out of the winder at a old lady, and he gets up and kicks his box over, exposin the whole secret, and he catches hold of the calves of my legs and he says to me: “Carry me into the wan, Toby, and throw a pail of water over me, or I’m a dead man, for I’m come into my property!”
Twelve thousand odd hundred pounds was Chops’s winnins. He had bought a half-ticket for the twenty-five thousand prize, and it had come up. The first use he made of his property was to offer to fight the Wild Indian for five hundred pound a side, him with a poisoned darnin-needle and the Indian with a club; but the Indian being in want of backers to that amount, it went no further.