Part 11

The Professor is an old man now, and the fame of his learning has become great in the land. And all the people tell about his funeral; and how, every Christmas since, in his scarlet clothes and furs, laden with “pretty things,” he leads the children in their play, and scatters on them a thousand toys, while they, in gleeful groups, join their hands and dance.

THE FEVERFEW.

During my youth I suffered from a naturally delicate constitution. I was pale, feeble and sickly, but from no decided disease. A dreamy, quiet cast of temperament caused me to shrink from the rough sports of my brothers; the contact of strangers was equally disagreeable, and I seldom strayed from home. Indeed, I lived almost entirely within myself, although by no means devoid of natural affection; on the contrary, my emotions were strong, and my sympathy easily aroused.

How it happened that I acquired a love of learning I do not know, all the outward circumstances by which I was surrounded tending to foster any thing rather than intellectual habits, for our family, although each member possessed a common education, were strictly practical; but this difference in my disposition cut me off from their pursuits, and I found my chief enjoyment in the volumes of a library to which I obtained access.

Perhaps it was the sedentary life I led, the close confinement, and lack of exercise, that brought on a violent attack of sickness when I was in my nineteenth year, so that I lay for several weeks completely prostrated. During two or three days my life hung as in a balance, which a breath might have turned and launched me beyond the confines of time. However, the disease succumbed to the persevering attention of experienced nurses. I arose from my weary bed and found my physical health slowly improving, but from that period I was subject at irregular intervals to what the physician pronounced temporary delirium, which I knew he used as a milder term for insanity.

But it was not insanity. I never lost control of my mind, but I lost control of my body. It obeyed a will that was not my own. A mighty antagonistic power seemed to creep over my brain, which impelled my movements and held my struggling soul in subjection. I presented the singular phenomenon of one person governed by two separate and distinct wills, for my mind was not disordered, but only mastered by superior strength. In this strange condition I would see familiar objects magnified, exaggerated, and contorted, in an atmosphere varying with all colors, at the same time being perfectly conscious of their real appearance. I would hear sounds sweet and musical grow into wails of heart-rending despair. I could recognize my friends when they were present, but was forced to regard them with the cold eye of a stranger. I would commit acts that no human agency could have compelled me to do when my faculties were untrammelled. I never submitted without a struggle, and always felt conscious that, if I could but once resist this seemingly invincible power, if I could but once disregard its promptings, I should be free.

The attacks were never of long duration. They always left me utterly exhausted, and it would sometimes require a week to recruit my expended strength. I could afterward recall every incident with the most distinct minuteness, for they were branded in characters of fire on my memory. Vainly I asserted again and again that it was not delirium, that I was forced into subjection to some mysterious power I could not withstand; my statements made no impression upon the physician, who evidently considered mine but a common case of one suffering from attacks of temporary insanity, and, when I persisted in my statement, he forbade any further reference to the subject.

However, I could not prevent my mind from continually dwelling upon it in secret. What was this so foreign, so antagonistic to myself that mastered my will, that controlled my actions, that made me literally another being? Why did I not shake off this evil influence and be free? I felt perfectly conscious of possessing the power, but was not able to arouse it from a latent condition.

As I have said before, I was naturally of a studious disposition, and I now turned my attention to metaphysics. I read works, ancient and modern, on its different branches; I studied medical treatises on insanity, and, the more I learned, the more thoroughly convinced I became that I was not suffering from mental aberration. Constant brooding over my disease greatly wore upon my physical strength; traveling was recommended, in hopes that change of climate and scene might benefit my health. My old aversion to strangers clung to me, and, although possessed by a restlessness to which I was wholly unaccustomed, I persistently refused to leave home; no arguments could gain my consent, so that my friends were forced to give up the project in despair.

One morning, when more than the usual gloom oppressed my spirits, I made an effort to arouse myself and throw off the melancholy that was settling upon me, which each day I felt to be growing more confirmed. I was sitting by a window, which stood wide open, and, just outside, a caged canary was singing and fluttering its feathers in the warm spring sunshine. The little bird was my particular property, and I regarded it with an affection which is rarely bestowed upon pets. With the exception of my young sister, a child about four years of age, this was the only living thing that I had taken any interest in since my sickness. I had trained the canary from the shell, and the little creature seemed to repay all my care, for from no other member of the family would it receive caresses. I was so much afraid of its being accidentally injured that I never allowed it to be freed from the cage, except in my presence. At my call it would fly about me, resting on my head, shoulders, or hands, and chirping in a perfect ecstasy of enjoyment.

I arose and opened the door of its prison, then, reseating myself, softly whistled while it darted into the air, wheeled once or twice, and descended upon my hand. Stroking its spotless yellow plumage, I regarded the little thing with a degree of pleasure I had not experienced for several weeks. But sudden horror almost caused my heart to cease its beatings, and the perspiration started from my forehead in great drops, for I felt my fingers slowly closing over the delicate bird. Although I made an attempt greater than the racking effort we sometimes exert in the nightmare, I had no power to restrain them. The canary fluttered in my clasp. I would have dropped it, I would have shrieked for help, but my muscles, my voice, my _body_, obeyed me not, and my fingers, like the steady working of machinery, gradually tightened their relentless grasp. In my agony the veins of my face protruded like lines of cordage. I heard the frail bones breaking beneath the crushing pressure, then my involuntary grip suddenly relaxed, and the bird fell upon my knee, dead and mangled!

At the same moment, I saw, through the open door, my little sister playing upon the grass-plat; and, almost before I was aware of moving, or of any volition, I found myself walking rapidly toward her, while my fingers twitched with a convulsive, clutching movement. Good Heavens! I already saw her face turn purple, and heard her gasping breath smothered by gurgling blood. With this terrible picture before my mental vision, my brain felt as if it would burst its bounds in the desperate, but unavailing effort I made to turn back, to fly from the spot. But I could not command myself. In that moment I endured suffering more intense than language can describe. Perhaps my strange and wild appearance frightened the child; for, in place of holding out her arms to me, her favorite brother, she fled crying to the nurse, who did not observe my approach, and carried her into the house. Saved! unconsciously saved—saved from a fate too terrible to contemplate.

I sank insensible upon the ground, and, when I recovered, found myself surrounded by the family, each one applying some restorative, for I had been in a long and death-like swoon. Slowly, but distinctly, the recollections of the events which had reduced me to this condition presented themselves to my memory with all their appalling horror, nearly depriving me again of consciousness.

I did not refer in any manner to the subject, which was also carefully avoided by all others in my presence, for fear that it might produce renewed excitement, and my friends had no suspicion of the circumstances which brought it about. The bird was found dead upon the floor, and the family imagined that it had met with some accident. They were evidently surprised, when the fact was communicated to me, that I made no remarks, for they had anticipated an outburst of grief.

Grief! I did not suffer from grief; grief was overpowered by the horror that racked my brain—horror for the act I had committed, and the more fearful one which had been so mercifully prevented. I had committed? No, it was not _my_ mind or will which had prompted my hand to do the deed. I was innocent, even though my fingers had dripped with the blood of a sister; but the frightful thought filled me with a terror that wrung my soul. I pondered continually upon it. When might not this mysterious demon again assert its evil control over me? Strange as it may seem, I felt certain that it was some foreign agency—I knew not what—that mastered my will, and not the result of my own intellect, in a disordered condition.

This overpowering dread of the future, of what might happen, which took possession of me, drove me to the decision of leaving home, as the best way of avoiding danger to my friends. Perhaps, too, if my physical health became better, I might gain strength enough to defy this infernal power; for, as I have said before, I possessed a singular consciousness that, if I could once successfully resist its promptings, my soul would be liberated from thraldom. I announced my determination of making a journey, without any explanation of my sudden change, and it was greeted with delight by my friends and relatives, who were anxious to hasten my departure while the humor was upon me; but they need not have feared any change of purpose on my part, for I was haunted by this terrible dread of the future, and I gladly said farewell for a time to my home and birthplace.

The incidents of travel and of new scenes broke the monotony, and dispelled to some degree the gloom that had taken fast hold upon me. In a short period I found myself rapidly improving. Every week brought me an increase of strength, and I suffered less frequently from these frightful attacks. Although they occurred at longer intervals than formerly, they seemed to grow more severe in character; the conflict was fiercer, and my mind made a more desperate effort to gain the supremacy. My whole frame would be racked by the intense struggle which I constantly maintained, though I was constantly vanquished.

The increasing delight I took in the scenery, the continued exercise and excitement, almost drove despair from me, and hope once more brightened my countenance. I began to look forward to the time when my health would be entirely restored, and my body and mind be in unison. I did not hope vainly, for the final conflict came, and with it a strange termination of my long sufferings.

I stood upon the side of an Eastern mountain. Above my head vast rocks arose in solemn grandeur, their summits lost in canopied mists which, gray and clinging, wrapped them in obscurity. Below, a great chasm rent the mountain; a yawning, bottomless gulf. While I gazed, awed by the thought of its mysterious depths, where no human eye had seen, where no human foot had trod, a ray of light struggled in and rested on gaunt trees, on snake-like ferns, damp and cold, that clung to its slimy sides, and on one pale flower which nodded in the chill draught that came up, a palpable horror, from the blackness of darkness. I turned away. Near the western horizon dead clouds were piled one above another, and their heavy shadow lay brown and dark upon the sullen earth. No wind stirred the forests, or rustled their motionless leaves, and the awe of the unbroken silence fell, with a dread oppression, upon my heart.

Suddenly I was seized by an ungovernable desire to possess the flower—the colorless flower that hung far down in the death-damp of the chasm. A freezing terror crept through my blood as I recognized this decree of a will I had never been able to disobey. I felt myself crawling closer to the verge of the precipice; nearer, yet nearer, until I sat within the very jaw of the savage gulf. The dead clouds heaved their shroud-like forms and wavered overhead. I heard the rush of subterranean waters sounding a muffled requiem. The sickly flower with its long stem writhed and twisted, as a serpent stretches his folds into the air. Slowly back and forth it swayed, glaring at me like a lustreless eye.

My brain reeled, and all the forces of my nature gathered up their increased strength for one fierce and final conflict. I felt the blood rage through my veins with the headlong fury of cataracts. The very spring of life within me was stirred and troubled, when, with one mighty strain, I drew myself up and fell backward on the grass.

The whole world went out in utter darkness. Before my eyes stretched a vast, illimitable gloom, when suddenly out of its impenetrable depths above my head there grew and glimmered faintly a thin and wavering mist. Folding upon itself, it hung down, white and luminous, a cloud of palpitating nebulæ. Pricked with a thousand points of fire it gathered slowly to a nucleus in the center—a flickering speck, a disc, it flamed, blazed into a star, and lo! poised midway in the air, an aureole of light, it rested upon the brow of a female figure.

Her scornful eyes looked down upon me with a lurid gleam that seemed to burn my soul. A smile of derision sat upon her lips that were more vivid in hue than the vermilion dye. Her locks were yellow as the sun at noontide; her skin was white as the leper’s; her breath hot as the desert air, and the light of the star upon her forehead burned red with the frightful redness of fresh blood. Suddenly I saw that the murky clouds on either side her form swarmed with a thousand dwarfed and warted shapes. Black and hideous, they knotted, flitted to and fro, in and out, with their formless claws and tumultuous motion. She spread her wings. Immediately there gathered all the dusky shapes—the legion demons of delirium with their needle eyes—and settled down upon her sable plumes. A shrill phantom laugh rang out, mocked itself by echoes that ran up in thin shafts of sound to the skies, and the SPIRIT OF FEVER had fled from me forever!

The rays of the sun as it sank to rest, slanting through rose-colored avenues, fell upon the gray mists, and crowned the mountain’s summit in a rainbow of glory. The rising breeze swept through the forests with a soothing sound, and, eastward, the eye was lost in mellow lines of golden haze, which to my soul freed from captivity, seemed cathedral aisles of peace.

OLD SIMLIN, THE MOULDER.

“You’re right! I ain’t got no relatives an’ nobody to look after, so thar isn’t any sense in workin’ too much. That’s just what I say.”

And that is just what he always did say, poor Simlin, but he never ceased, notwithstanding. Nearly every body that knew him and spoke to him about it always found him quick to acquiesce: “Thar was nothin’ plainer than what they said, and it was just what he said, too.” But it did not make the slightest difference, for he continued to work away all the same; so what else could be done but merely to give up the question?

Now, if he had only expressed himself in decided opposition, there might have been something to hope for in the matter—at least, it would have opened the way for an argument upon the subject; and, then, there was always the possibility that he might be induced to change his mind. However, his provoking approval put the case wholly beyond reach. And so old Simlin, toiling early and late, quietly followed his vocation.

There was not a better moulder in the whole foundry, or one that drew much higher wages. But, then, he was getting old. To be sure, he never had been young, so far as they knew any thing about him, even ten years ago, when, altogether unknown and friendless, he had first made his appearance in the village. But these ten years combined had not worn upon him like the last one. His head now, if once the soot had been removed, would not have shown a single black hair; and his voice was weak and cracked, and there was a visible trembling about the old man’s legs. Perhaps he did imbibe liquor; but nobody had any right to say so, for nobody could prove that it was true. Only of late he had a strangely confused manner when anyone addressed him, and, raising his unsteady hand nervously to his head, would repeat the sentence that had been on his lips a hundred, yes, a thousand times, until it had long ago grown into a stereotyped form—“I ain’t got no relatives an’ nobody to look after, so thar isn’t any sense in workin’ too much.”

Perhaps he really thought that the people would never see that he was straining every effort, using every moment of his time, though, before the sun was up, and often after it was gone, the old man was at his place. And Simlin was always the first on hand if there was an extra job that would bring an extra cent.

But, other than making the assertion that he had no relatives, and nobody depending upon him, and that he did not think it worth while to work over-much, he never carried on a conversation. That there was no one to look after _him_ was a self-evident fact. He lived utterly alone, in a small cabin on the brow of the hill. Rarely a soul but himself ever crossed its threshold. Under the step the gray gophers made their burrow, and, beneath the tall beech trees, that threw down their prickly nuts, the brown weasels played in peaceful groups. The shy quail, sounding their whistle, fled among the ferns; and above, from the myriad branches, the beautiful wild doves mourned out their perpetual sadness. At evening, when the sun went down, and the long line of the Scioto Hills flushed crimson with serene glory; when, by slow degrees, the pageant of departing day withdrew its gorgeous colors; even when the valley below was black with the gloom of night, the western radiance lingered, like the transforming light of some other land, upon the rude cabin, standing on its high and solitary perch.

Empty and bare, it afforded but little protection from the weather, for through it the winds blew in Winter, and the rains dripped in Summer. Simlin’s wants, however, appeared to be few and simple. He seldom had a fire, even at the coldest season. What he subsisted upon, nobody knew. Once, perhaps, in two or three days, he would buy a loaf of coarse bread from the baker in the village, and his table evidently was supplied in the most frugal manner.

The people put down his besetting sin to be avarice; and the hut, if it contained no furniture, was reported to contain wealth enough, hidden away in its obscure cracks and corners, to have draped its dreary boards in the most costly velvet and lace, and encased its walls with marble. Of course, he was a miser. More than ten years now he had been at the foundry, and not a cent of the wages which he drew regularly had he spent, or put so much as a farthing into the savings bank, where many of the hands had laid up quite a pile. But, unlike the majority of misers, the old man never complained of being poor; indeed, he never complained at all, or spoke of money in any way. If the subject was brought up in his presence, he either preserved utter silence or quietly got up and left; and, if driven to the last extremity, and made to say something, he would remark, running into the same old channel, that “It didn’t much matter—he hadn’t any relatives nor any body dependin’ upon him.”

So lonely and forlorn did he seem, and so harmless withal—for the old man never was known to do a mean action, or resent an angry word—that many uncouth kindnesses had been shown him on the part of the hands, with whom he was by no means unpopular. Especially had this been the case latterly; for, though he himself was apparently unconscious of it, so terribly broken had he become that the change was sorrowful to behold; and, rude as were the foundry-workmen, what there was pathetic in the patient manner in which the feeble old man silently worked on told upon them by instinct.

There had even been an interest taken in him up at the great house. Every season, “the colonel,” as the owner and sole proprietor of the Rocky Ford Foundry was called by all the employes, brought his family down from the city to spend a few months rusticating in the beautiful Scioto Valley, where he had built a summer residence for that purpose, and that he might be near his great iron-works at the same time. There was always gay company up at the house—visitors from town, who needed no second invitation to entice them from the dust of the city to this peaceful retreat among the lovely hills of Ohio. Besides, the colonel had a beautiful daughter, and every body liked the “young misses.” Seldom, though, did she ever go down to the foundry; never, indeed unless some special object took her there.

Coming from her home a mile distant—this home for her embowered in perpetual Summer and wrapped in the peace that broods upon the everlasting hills, where she could see, far off, the golden meadow-lands and the more distant Paint Ridge, with its transparent veil of mist; this home from which she had often looked out and listened to the blue Scioto, unflecked with sail or skiff, struggling by day and night to tell its mysterious story, as it flowed forever on its lonely course—coming from this home, over the narrow path that led down the slope to the river’s edge, where the green rushes grew and the wild columbine hung its bells above the water—coming on, past the great rocks, where the scarlet lichens flamed in the sun and the blossoming alder displayed its drifted clusters; coming still with active feet over the velvet moss—coming from the lovely valley, coming from the tranquil hills, when she entered the foundry it seemed like stepping suddenly from the beautiful world into some haunt of evil spirits.

Within the great dingy walls no shining sunlight brightened the air. Dim and cheerless, it hung laden with smoke and vapor, that floated in clouds to the rafters. The harsh clang of heavy machinery, together with the roar of the furnaces, seemed to shake the very building. Among the enormous wheels that whirled with frightful velocity, and the immense belts that whizzed above their heads, the workmen, black and begrimed, looked small, weird and unearthly, moving about upon the damp ground, with its jet-like covering of charred cinders. The place seemed an apparition of demons, performing in some cavern of the lower regions their evil incantations. No wonder the young lady seldom went there. Its gloom fell upon her with a heavy oppression, and her breath only came freely when once more she found herself out in the clear and open sunlight.

It happened in this manner that she first came to take any notice of old Simlin: There were gathered quite a party of young folks; and the colonel, who had been in Cincinnati upon business, had returned the previous evening, bringing with him another gentleman, apparently a stranger to the family.