Part 4
“I shall be sorry to part with him,” said Dupin.
“I don’t mean that you should be at all this trouble for nothing, sir,” said the man. “Couldn’t expect it. Am very willing to pay a reward for the finding of the animal,—that is to say, anything in reason.”
“Well,” replied my friend, “that is all very fair, to be sure. Let me think!—what should I have? Oh! I will tell you. My reward shall be this. You shall give me all the information in your power about these murders in the Rue Morgue.”
Dupin said the last words in a very low tone, and very quietly. Just as quietly, too, he walked toward the door, locked it, and put the key into his pocket. He then drew a pistol from his bosom and placed it, without the least flurry, upon the table.
The sailor’s face flushed up as if he were struggling with suffocation. He started to his feet and grasped his cudgel; but the next moment he fell back into his seat, trembling violently, and with the countenance of death itself. He spoke not a word. I pitied him from the bottom of my heart.
“My friend,” said Dupin, in a kind tone, “you are alarming yourself unnecessarily,—you are indeed. We mean you no harm whatever. I pledge you the honor of a gentleman, and of a Frenchman, that we intend you no injury. I perfectly well know that you are innocent of the atrocities in the Rue Morgue. It will not do, however, to deny that you are in some measure implicated in them. From what I have already said, you must know that I have had means of information about this matter,—means of which you could never have dreamed. Now the thing stands thus. You have done nothing which you could have avoided,—nothing, certainly, which renders you culpable. You were not even guilty of robbery, when you might have robbed with impunity. You have nothing to conceal. You have no reason for concealment. On the other hand, you are bound by every principle of honor to confess all you know. An innocent man is now imprisoned, charged with that crime of which you can point out the perpetrator.”
The sailor had recovered his presence of mind, in a great measure, while Dupin uttered these words; but his original boldness of bearing was all gone.
“So help me God,” said he, after a brief pause, “I _will_ tell you all I know about this affair; but I do not expect you to believe one half I say,—I would be a fool indeed if I did. Still, I _am_ innocent, and I will make a clean breast if I die for it.”
What he stated was, in substance, this. He had lately made a voyage to the Indian Archipelago. A party, of which he formed one, landed at Borneo, and passed into the interior on an excursion of pleasure. He and a companion had captured the Ourang-Outang. This companion dying, the animal fell into his own exclusive possession. After great trouble, occasioned by the intractable ferocity of his captive during the home voyage, he at length succeeded in lodging it safely at his own residence in Paris, where, not to attract toward himself the unpleasant curiosity of his neighbors, he kept it carefully secluded, until such time as it should recover from a wound in the foot, received from a splinter on board ship. His ultimate design was to sell it.
Returning home from some sailors’ frolic on the night, or rather in the morning, of the murder, he found the beast occupying his own bedroom, into which it had broken from a closet adjoining, where it had been, as was thought, securely confined. Razor in hand and fully lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the keyhole of the closet. Terrified at the sight of so dangerous a weapon in the possession of an animal so ferocious, and so well able to use it, the man for some moments was at a loss what to do. He had been accustomed, however, to quiet the creature, even in its fiercest moods, by the use of the whip, and to this he now resorted. Upon sight of it, the Ourang-Outang sprang at once through the door of the chamber, down the stairs, and thence, through a window, unfortunately open, into the street.
The Frenchman followed in despair, the ape, razor still in hand, occasionally stopping to look back and gesticulate at its pursuer, until the latter had nearly come up with it. It then again made off. In this manner the chase continued for a long time. The streets were profoundly quiet, as it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. In passing down an alley in the rear of the Rue Morgue, the fugitive’s attention was arrested by a light gleaming from the open window of Madame L’Espanaye’s chamber, in the fourth story of her house. Rushing to the building, it perceived the lightning-rod, clambered up with inconceivable agility, grasped the shutter, which was thrown fully back against the wall, and, by its means, swung itself directly upon the head-board of the bed. The whole feat did not occupy a minute. The shutter was kicked open again by the Ourang-Outang as it entered the room.
The sailor, in the mean time, was both rejoiced and perplexed. He had strong hopes of now recapturing the brute, as it could scarcely escape from the trap into which it had ventured, except by the rod, where it might be intercepted as it came down. On the other hand, there was much cause for anxiety as to what it might do in the house. This latter reflection urged the man still to follow the fugitive. A lightning-rod is ascended without difficulty, especially by a sailor; but, when he had arrived as high as the window, which lay far to his left, his career was stopped; the most that he could accomplish was to reach over so as to obtain a glimpse of the interior of the room. At this glimpse he nearly fell from his hold through excess of horror. Now it was that those hideous shrieks arose upon the night, which had startled from slumber the inmates of the Rue Morgue. Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, habited in their night-clothes, had apparently been occupied in arranging some papers in the iron chest already mentioned, which had been wheeled into the middle of the room. It was open, and its contents lay beside it on the floor. The victims must have been sitting with their backs toward the window; and, from the time elapsing between the ingress of the beast and the screams, it seems probable that it was not immediately perceived. The flapping-to of the shutter would naturally have been attributed to the wind.
As the sailor looked in, the gigantic animal had seized Madame L’Espanaye by the hair (which was loose, as she had been combing it) and was flourishing the razor about her face, in imitation of the motions of a barber. The daughter lay prostrate and motionless; she had swooned. The screams and struggles of the old lady (during which the hair was torn from her head) had the effect of changing the probably pacific purposes of the Ourang-Outang into those of wrath. With one determined sweep of its muscular arm it nearly severed her head from her body. The sight of blood inflamed its anger into frenzy. Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl, and embedded its fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired. Its wandering and wild glances fell at this moment upon the head of the bed, over which the face of its master, rigid with horror, was just discernible. The fury of the beast, which no doubt bore still in mind the dreaded whip, was instantly converted into fear. Conscious of having deserved punishment, it seemed desirous of concealing its bloody deeds, and skipped about the chamber in an agony of nervous agitation, throwing down and breaking the furniture as it moved, and dragging the bed from the bedstead. In conclusion, it seized first the corpse of the daughter, and thrust it up the chimney, as it was found; then that of the old lady, which it immediately hurled through the window headlong.
As the ape approached the casement with its mutilated burden, the sailor shrank aghast to the rod, and, rather gliding than clambering down it, hurried at once home,—dreading the consequences of the butchery, and gladly abandoning, in his terror, all solicitude about the fate of the Ourang-Outang. The words heard by the party upon the staircase were the Frenchman’s exclamations of horror and affright, commingled with the fiendish jabberings of the brute.
I have scarcely anything to add. The Ourang-Outang must have escaped from the chamber, by the rod, just before the breaking of the door. It must have closed the window as it passed through it. It was subsequently caught by the owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the _Jardin des Plantes_. Le Bon was instantly released, upon our narration of the circumstances (with some comments from Dupin) at the bureau of the Prefect of Police. This functionary, however well disposed to my friend, could not altogether conceal his chagrin at the turn which affairs had taken, and was fain to indulge in a sarcasm or two, about the propriety of every person’s minding his own business.
“Let him talk,” said Dupin, who had not thought it necessary to reply. “Let him discourse; it will ease his conscience. I am satisfied with having defeated him in his own castle. Nevertheless, that he failed in the solution of this mystery is by no means that matter for wonder which he supposes it; for, in truth, our friend the Prefect is somewhat too cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no _stamen_. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the goddess Laverna; or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all. I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has _de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas_.”
THE LAUSON TRAGEDY.
BY J. W. DEFOREST.
Cupid and Psyche! The young man and the young woman who are in love with each other! The couple which is constantly vanishing and constantly reappearing; which has filled millions of various situations, and yet is always the same; symbolizing, and one might almost say embodying, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; acting a drama of endless repetitions, with innumerable spectators!
What would the story-reading world—yes, and what would the great world of humanity—do without these two figures? They are more lasting, they are more important, and they are more fascinating than even the crowned and laurelled images of heroes and sages. When men shall have forgotten Alexander and Socrates, Napoleon and Humboldt, they will still gather around this imperishable group, the youth and the girl who are in love. Without them our kind would cease to be; at one time or another we are all of us identified with them in spirit; thus both reason and sympathy cause us to be interested in their million-fold repeated story.
We have the two before us. The girl, dark and dark-eyed, with Oriental features, and an expression which one is tempted to describe by some such epithet as imperial, is Bessie Barron, the orphan granddaughter of Squire Thomas Lauson of Barham, in Massachusetts. The youth, pale, chestnut-haired, and gray-eyed, with a tall and large and muscular build, is Henry Foster, not more than twenty-seven years old, yet already a professor in the scientific department of the university of Hampstead. They are standing on the edge of a rocky precipice some seventy feet in depth, from the foot of which a long series of grassy slopes descends into a wide, irregular valley, surrounded by hills that almost deserve the name of mountains. In the distance there are villages, the nearest fully visible even to its most insignificant buildings, others showing only a few white gleams through the openings of their elms, and others still distinguishable by merely a spire.
There has been talk such as affianced couples indulge in; we must mention this for the sake of truth, and we must omit it in mercy. “Lovers,” declares a critic who has weight with us, “are habitually insipid, at least to us married people.” It was a man who said that; no woman, it is believed, could utter such a condemnation of her own heart: no woman ever quite loses her interest in the drama of love-making. But out of regard to such males as have drowned their sentimentality in marriage we will, for the present, pass over the words of tenderness and devotion, and only listen when Professor Foster becomes philosophical.
“What if I should throw myself down here?” said Bessie Barron, after a long look over the precipice, meanwhile holding fast to a guardian arm.
“You would commit suicide,” was the reply of a man whom we must admit to have been accurately informed concerning the nature of actions like the one specified.
Slightly disappointed at not hearing the appeal, “O my darling, don’t think of such a thing!” Bessie remained silent a moment, wondering if she were silly or he cold-hearted. Did she catch a glimmering of the fact that men do not crave small sensations as women do, and that the man before her was a specially rational being because he had been trained in the sublime logic of the laws of nature? Doubtful: the two sexes are profoundly unlike in mental action; they must study each other long before they can fully understand each other.
“I suppose I should be dreadfully punished for it,” she went on, her thoughts turning to the world beyond death, that world which trembling faith sees, and which is, therefore, visible to woman.
“I am not sure,” boldly admitted the Professor, who had been educated in Germany.
In order to learn something of the character of this young man, we must permit him to jabber his nondescript ideas for a little, even though we are thereby stumbled and wearied.
“Not sure?” queried Bessie. “How do you mean? Don’t you think suicide sinful? Don’t you think sin will be punished?”
She spoke with eagerness, dreading to find her lover not orthodox,—a woful stigma in Barham on lovers, and indeed on all men whatever.
“Admitting thus much, I don’t know how far you would be a free agent in the act,” lectured the philosopher. “I don’t know where free agency begins or ends. Indeed, I am so puzzled by this question as to doubt whether there is such a condition as free agency.”
“No such thing as free agency?” wondered Bessie. “Then what?”
“See here. Out of thirty-eight millions of Frenchmen a fixed number commit suicide every year. Every year just so many Frenchmen out of a million kill themselves. Does that look like free agency, or does it look like some unknown influence, some general rule of depression, some law of nature, which affects Frenchmen, and which they cannot resist? The individual seems to be free, at every moment of his life, to do as he chooses. But what leads him to choose? Born instincts, conditions of health, surroundings, circumstances. Do not the circumstances so govern his choice that he cannot choose differently? Moreover, is he really an individual? Or is he only a fraction of a great unity, the human race, and directed by its current? We speak of a drop of water as if it were an individuality; but it cannot swim against the stream to which it belongs; it is not free. Is not the individual man in the same condition? There are questions there which I cannot answer; and until I can answer them I cannot answer your question.”
We have not repeated without cause these bold and crude speculations. It is necessary to show that Foster was what was called in Barham a free-thinker, in order to account for efforts which were made to thwart his marriage with Bessie Barron, and for prejudices which aided to work a stern drama into his life.
The girl listened and pondered. She tried to follow her lover over the seas of thought upon which he walked; but the venture was beyond her powers, and she returned to the pleasant firm land of a subject nearer her heart.
“Are you thinking of me?” she asked in a low tone, and with an appealing smile.
“No,” he smiled back. “I must own that I was not. But I ought to have been. I do think of you a great deal.”
“More than I deserve?” she queried, still suspicious that she was not sufficiently prized to satisfy her longings for affection.
He laughed outright. “No, not more than you deserve; not as much as you deserve; you deserve a great deal. How many times are you going to ask me these questions?”
“Every day. A hundred times a day. Shall you get tired of them?”
“Of course not. But what does it mean? Do you doubt me?”
“No. But I want to hear you say that you think of me, over and over again. It gives me such pleasure to hear you say it! It is such a great happiness that it seems as if it were my only happiness.”
Before Bessie had fallen in love with Foster, and especially before her engagement to him, there had been a time when she had talked more to the satisfaction of the male critic. But now her whole soul was absorbed in the work of loving. She had no thought for any other subject; none, at least, while with _him_. Her whole appearance and demeanor shows how completely she is occupied by this master passion of woman. A smile seems to exhale constantly from her face; if it is not visible on her lips, nor, indeed, anywhere, still you perceive it; if it is no more to be seen than the perfume of a flower, still you are conscious of it. It is no figurative exaggeration to say that there is within her soul an incessant music, like that of waltzes, and of all sweet, tender, joyous melodies. If you will watch her carefully, and if you have the delicate senses of sympathy, you also will hear it.
Are we wrong in declaring that the old, old story of clinging hearts is more fascinating from age to age, as human thoughts become purer and human feelings more delicate? We believe that love, like all other things earthly, is subject to the progresses of the law of evolution, and grows with the centuries to be a more various and exquisite source of happiness. This girl is more in love than her grandmother, who made butter and otherwise wrought laboriously with her own hands, had ever found it possible to be. An organization refined by the manifold touch of high civilization, an organization brought to the keenest sensitiveness by poetry and fiction and the spiritualized social breath of our times, an organization in which muscle is lacking and nerve overabundant, she is capable of an affection which has the wings of imagination, which can soar above the ordinary plane of belief, which is more than was once human.
Consider for an instant what an elaboration of culture the passion of love may have reached in this child. She can invest the man whom she has accepted as monarch of her soul with the perfections of the heroes of history and of fiction. She can prophesy for him a future which a hundred years since was not realizable upon this continent. Out of her own mind she can draw shining raiment of success for him which shall be visible across oceans, and crowns of fame which shall not be dimmed by centuries. She can love him for superhuman loveliness which she has power to impute to him, and for victories which she is magician enough to strew in anticipation beneath his feet. It is not extravagance, it is even nothing but the simplest and most obvious truth, to say that there have been periods in the world’s history, without going back to the cycles of the troglodyte and the lake-dweller, when such love would have been beyond the capabilities of humanity.
It must be understood, by the way, that Bessie was not bred amid the sparse, hard-worked, and scantily cultured population of Barham, and that, until the death of her parents, two years before the opening of this story, she had been a plant of the stimulating, hot-bed life of a city. Into this bucolic land she had brought susceptibilities which do not often exist there, and a craving for excitements of sentiment which does not often find gratification there. Consequently the first youth who in any wise resembled the ideal of manhood which she had set up in her soul found her ready to fall into his grasp, to believe in him as in a deity, and to look to him for miracles of love and happiness.
Well, these two interesting idiots, as the unsympathizing observer might call them, have turned their backs on the precipice and are walking toward the girl’s home. They had not gone far before Bessie uttered a speech which excited Harry’s profound amazement, and which will probably astonish every young man who has not as yet made his conquests. After looking at him long and steadfastly, she said: “How is it possible that you can care for me? I don’t see what you find in me to make me worthy of your admiration.”
How often such sentiments have been felt, and how often also they have been spoken, by beings whose hearts have been bowed by the humility of strong affection! Perhaps women are less likely to give them speech than men; but it is only because they are more trammelled by an education of reserve, and by inborn delicacy and timidity; it is not because they feel them less. This girl, however, was so frank in nature, and so earnest and eager in her feelings, that she could not but give forth the aroma of loving meekness that was in her soul.
“What do you mean?” asked Foster, in his innocent surprise. “See nothing to admire in _you_!”
“O, you are so much wiser than I, and so much nobler!” she replied. “It is just because you are good, because you have the best heart that ever was, that you care for me. You found me lonely and unhappy, and so you pitied me and took charge of me.”
“O no!” he began; but we will not repeat his protestations; we will just say that he, too, was properly humble.
“Have you really been lonely and sad?” he went on, curious to know every item of her life, every beat of her heart.
“Does that old house look like a paradise to you?” she asked, pointing to the dwelling of Squire Lauson.
“It isn’t very old, and it doesn’t look very horrible,” he replied, a little anxious as he thought of his future housekeeping. “Perhaps ours will not be so fine a one.”
“I was not thinking of that,” declared Bessie. “_Our_ house will be charming, even if it has but one story, and that under ground. But _this_ one! You don’t see it with my eyes; you haven’t lived in it.”
“Is it haunted?” inquired Foster, of whom we must say that he did not believe in ghosts, and, in fact, scorned them with all the scorn of a philosopher.
“Yes, and by people who are not yet buried,—people who call themselves alive.”
The subject was a delicate one probably, for Bessie said no more concerning it, and Foster considerately refrained from further questions. There was one thing on which this youth especially prided himself, and that was on being a gentleman in every sense possible to a republican. Because his father had been a judge, and his grandfather and great-grandfather clergymen, he conceived that he belonged to a patrician class, similar to that which Englishmen style “the untitled nobility,” and that he was bound to exhibit as many chivalrous virtues as if his veins throbbed with the blood of the Black Prince. Although not combative, and not naturally reckless of pain and death, he would have faced Heenan and Morrissey together in fight, if convinced that his duty as a gentleman demanded it. Similarly he felt himself obliged “to do the handsome thing” in money matters; to accept, for instance, without haggling, such a salary as was usual in his profession; to be as generous to waiters as if he were a millionaire. Furthermore, he must be magnanimous to all that great multitude who were his inferiors, and particularly must he be fastidiously decorous and tender in his treatment of women. All these things he did or refrained from doing, not only out of good instincts towards others, but out of respect for himself.