The Best Psychic Stories Part 6

I lean idly in the narrow slit, gazing at the softened landscape, the exquisite harmony of the greens, grays, and browns, the lazily turning arms of far-off mills, reminders of Cuyp, Van der Velde, Teniers, shadowy, mysterious recollections. I am conscious of uttering aloud some commonplaces of delight. A slight and sudden movement behind me, a smothered cough. A little old man in a black velvet coat stands looking up at me, twisting and untwisting his hands. There are ruffles at his throat and wrists, and an amused smile spreads over his face, which is cleanly shaven, of the color of wax, with a tiny network of red lines over the cheek-bones, as if the blood had been forced there by some excess of pa.s.sion and had remained. He has heard my sentimental e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n. I am conscious of the absurdity of the situation, and move aside for him to pa.s.s. He makes a courteous gesture with one ruffled hand.

There comes a prodigious rattling and grinding noise from above--then a jangle of bells, some half-dozen notes in all. At the first stroke the old man closes his eyes, throws back his head, and follows the rhythm with his long white hands, as though playing a piano. The sound dies away; the place becomes painfully silent; still the regular motion of the old man's hands continues. A creepy, shivery feeling runs up and down my spine; a fear of which I am ashamed seizes upon me.

"Fine pells, sare," says the little old man, suddenly dropping his hands, and fixing his eyes upon me. "You sall not hear such pells in your countree. But stay not here; come wis me, and I will show you the clavecin. You sall not see the clavecin yet? No?"

I had not, of course, and thanked him.

"You sall see Melchior, Melchior t'e Groote, t'e magnif'."

As he spoke we entered a room quite filled with curious machinery, a medley of levers, wires, and rope above; below, two large cylinders studded with shining bra.s.s points.

He sprang among the wires with a spidery sort of agility, caught one, pulled and hung upon it with, all his weight. There came a r-r-r-r-r-r of fans and wheels, followed by a shower of dust; slowly one great cylinder began to revolve; wires and ropes reaching into the gloom above began to twitch convulsively; faintly came the jangle of far-off bells.

Then came a pause, then a deafening _boom_, that well nigh stunned me.

As the waves of sound came and went, the little old man twisted and untwisted his hands in delight, and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "Melchior you haf heeard, Melchior t'e Groote--t'e bourdon."

I wanted to examine the machinery, but he impatiently seized my arm and almost dragged me away saying, "I will skow you--I will skow you. Come wis me."

From a pocket he produced a long bra.s.s key and unlocked a door covered with red leather, disclosing an up-leading flight of steps to which he pushed me. It gave upon an octagon-shaped room with a curious floor of sheet-lead. Around the wall ran a seat under the diamond-paned Gothic windows. From their shape I knew them to be the highest in the tower. I had seen them from the square below many times, with the framework above upon which hung row upon row of bells.

In the middle of the room was a rude sort of keyboard, with pedals below, like those of a large organ. Fronting this construction sat a long, high-backed bench. On the rack over the keyboard rested some sheets of music, which, upon examination, I found to be of parchment and written by hand. The notes were curious in shape, consisting of squares of black and diamonds of red upon the lines. Across the top of the page was written, in a straggling hand, "Van den Gheyn Nikolaas." I turned to the little old man with the ruffles. "Van den Gheyn!" I said in surprise, pointing to the parchment. "Why, that is the name of the most celebrated of _carillonneurs_, Van den Gheyn of Louvain." He untwisted his hands and bowed. "Eet ees ma name, mynheer--I am the _carillonneur_."

I fancied that my face showed all too plainly the incredulity I felt, for his darkened, and he muttered, "You not belief, Engelsch? Ah, I show you; then you belief, parehap," and with astounding agility seated himself upon the bench before the clavecin, turned up the ruffles at his wrists, and literally threw himself upon the keys. A sound of thunder accompanied by a vivid flash of lightning filled the air, even as the first notes of the bells reached my ears. Involuntarily I glanced out of the diamond-leaded window--dark clouds were all about us, the housetops and surrounding country were no longer to be seen. A blinding flash of lightning seemed to fill the room; the arms and legs of the little old man sought the keys and pedals with inconceivable rapidity; the music crashed about us with a deafening din, to the accompaniment of the thunder, which seemed to sound in unison with the boom of the bourdon.

It was grandly terrible. The face of the little old man was turned upon me, but his eyes were closed. He seemed to find the pedals intuitively, and at every peal of thunder, which shook the tower to its foundations, he would open his mouth, a toothless cavern, and shout aloud. I could not hear the sounds for the crashing of the bells. Finally, with a last deafening crash of iron rods and thunderbolts, the noise of the bells gradually died away. Instinctively I had glanced above when the crash came, half expecting to see the roof torn off.

"I think we had better go down," I said. "This tower has been struck by lightning several times, and I imagine that discretion--"

I don't know what more I said, for my eyes rested upon the empty bench, and the bare rack where the music had been. The clavecin was one ma.s.s of twisted iron rods, tangled wires, and decayed, worm-eaten woodwork; the little old man had disappeared. I rushed to the red leather-covered door; it was fast. I shook it in a veritable terror; it would not yield.

With a bound I reached the ruined clavecin, seized one of the pedals, and tore it away from the machine. The end was armed with an iron point.

This I inserted between the lock and the door. I twisted the lock from the worm-eaten wood with one turn of the wrist, the door opened, and I almost fell down the steep steps. The second door at the bottom was also closed. I threw my weight against it once, twice; it gave, and I half slipped, half ran down the winding steps in the darkness.

Out at last into the fresh air of the lower pa.s.sage! At the noise I made in closing the ponderous door came forth the old _custode_.

In my excitement I seized her by the arm, saying, "Who was the little old man in the black velvet coat with the ruffles? Where is he?"

She looked at me in a stupid manner. "Who is he," I repeated--"the little old man who played the clavecin?"

"Little old man, sir? I don't know," said the crone. "There has been no one in the tower to-day but yourself."

LIGEIA

BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

"And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For G.o.d is but a great will prevading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."--JOSEPH GLANVILL.

I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I cannot _now_ bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid caste of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive, that they have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine. Of her family I have surely heard her speak. That it is of a remotely ancient date cannot be doubted. Ligeia!

Ligeia! Buried in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world, it is by that sweet word alone--by Ligeia--that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more. And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon me that I have _never known_ the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia?

Or was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should inst.i.tute no inquiries upon this point? Or was it rather a caprice of my own--a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most pa.s.sionate devotion?

I but indistinctly recall the fact itself--what wonder that I have utterly forgotten the circ.u.mstances which originated or attended it?

And, indeed, if ever that spirit which is ent.i.tled Romance--if ever she, the wan and the misty-winged Ashtophet of idolatrous Egypt--presided, as they tell, over marriages ill-omened, then most surely she presided over mine.

There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory fails me not. It is the _person_ of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study, save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream--an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the cla.s.sical labors of the heathen. "There is no exquisite beauty," says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and _genera_ of beauty, "without some strangeness in the proportion." Yet, although I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a cla.s.sic regularity--although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed exquisite and felt that there was much of strangeness pervading it--yet I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of "the strange." I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead; it was faultless--how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine--the skin rivalling the purest ivory; the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, "hyacinthine"! I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose, and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly--the magnificent turn of the short upper lip, the soft, voluptuous slumber of the under, the dimples which sported, and the color which spoke, the teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of all smiles. I scrutinized the formation of the chin, and here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fulness and the spirituality of the Greek--the contour which the G.o.d Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, the son of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large eyes of Ligeia.

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. It might have been, too, that in these eyes of my beloved lay the secret to which Lord Verulam alludes. They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was only at intervals--in moments of intense excitement--that this peculiarity became more than slightly noticeable in Ligeia. And at such moments was her beauty--in my heated fancy thus it appeared perhaps--the beauty of beings either above or apart from the earth--the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk. The hue of the orbs was the most brilliant of black, and far over them hung jetty lashes of great length. The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the same tint. The "strangeness," however, which I found in the eyes, was of a nature distinct from the formation, or the color, or the brilliancy of the features, and must, after all, be referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning, behind whose vast lat.i.tude of mere sound we intrench our ignorance of so much of the spiritual! The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for long hours have I pondered upon it! How have I, through the whole of a midsummer night, struggled to fathom it! What was it--that something more profound than the well of Democritus--which lay far within the pupils of my beloved?

What _was_ it? I was possessed with a pa.s.sion to discover. Those eyes, those large, those shining, those divine orbs--they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.

There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact--never, I believe, noticed in the schools--that in our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. And thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes, have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression--felt it approaching, yet not quite be mine--and so at length entirely depart!

And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of a.n.a.logies to that expression. I mean to say that, subsequently to the period when Ligeia's beauty pa.s.sed into my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine, I derived from many existences in the material world a sentiment such as I felt always around, within me, by her large and luminous...o...b... Yet not the more could I define that sentiment, or a.n.a.lyze, or even steadily view it. I recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine, in the contemplation of a moth, a b.u.t.terfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean, in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are one or two stars in heaven, (one especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by pa.s.sages from books. Among innumerable other instances, I well remember something in a volume of Joseph Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its quaintness--who shall say?) never failed to inspire me with the sentiment: "And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For G.o.d is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."

Length of years and subsequent reflection have enabled me to trace, indeed, some remote connection between this pa.s.sage in the English moralist and a portion of the character of Ligeia. An intensity in thought, action, or speech was possibly, in her, a result or at least an index of that gigantic volition which, during our long intercourse, failed to give other and more immediate evidence of its existence. Of all the women whom I have ever known, she--the outwardly calm, the ever-placid Ligeia--was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern pa.s.sion. And of such pa.s.sion I could form no estimate, save by the miraculous expansion of those eyes which at once so delighted and appalled me, by the almost magical melody, modulation, distinctness, and placidity of her very low voice, and by the fierce energy (rendered doubly effective by contrast with her manner of utterance) of the wild words which she habitually uttered.

I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia; it was immense, such as I have never known in woman. In the cla.s.sical tongues was she deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault. Indeed upon any theme of the most admired, because simply the most abstruse of the boasted erudition of the academy, have I ever found Ligeia at fault? How singularly, how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife has forced itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! I said her knowledge was such as I have never known in woman--but where breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph, with how vivid a delight, with how much of all that is ethereal in hope, did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little sought--but less known--that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path I might at length pa.s.s onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!

How poignant, then, must have been the grief with which, after some years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings to themselves and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting the radiant l.u.s.ter of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes blazed with a too, too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became of the transparent waxen hue of the grave; and the blue veins upon the lofty forehead swelled and sank impetuously with the tides of the most gentle emotion. I saw that she must die--and I struggled desperately in spirit with the grim Azrael. And the struggles of the pa.s.sionate wife were, to my astonishment, even more energetic than my own. There had been much in her stern nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death would have come without its terrors; but not so. Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. I would have soothed, I would have reasoned, but, in the intensity of her wild desire for life--for life--_but_ for life--solace and reason were alike the uttermost of folly. Yet not until the last instance, amid the most convulsive writhings of her fierce spirit, was shaken the external placidity of her demeanor. Her voice grew more gentle--grew more low--yet I would not wish to dwell upon the wild meaning of the quietly uttered words. My brain reeled as I hearkened, entranced, to a melody more than mortal, to a.s.sumptions and aspirations which mortality had never before known.

That she loved me I should not have doubted, and I might have been easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have reigned no ordinary pa.s.sion. But in death only was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection. For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than pa.s.sionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions? How had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them? But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in Ligeia's more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas! all unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at length recognized the principle of her longing, with so wildly earnest a desire, for the life which was now fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild longing--it is this eager vehemence of desire for life--but for life--that I have no power to portray, no utterance capable of expressing.

At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me peremptorily to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed her. They were these:

Lo! 'tis a gala night Within the lonesome latter years!

An angel throng, bewinged, bedight In veils, and drowned in tears, Sit in a theater, to see A play of hopes and fears, While the orchestra breathes fitfully The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of G.o.d on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly; Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their condor wings Invisible Woe!

That motley drama!--oh, be sure It shall not be forgot!

With its Phantom chased for evermore, By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot; And much of Madness, and more of Sin And Horror, the soul of the plot!

But see, amid the mimic rout A crawling shape intrude!

A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude!

It writhes!--it writhes!--with mortal The mimes become its food, And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued.

Out--out are the lights--out all!

And over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm-- And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"

And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

"O G.o.d!" half-shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines, "O G.o.d! O Divine Father! Shall these things be undeviatingly so? Shall this conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who--who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, _nor unto death utterly_, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."

And now, as if exhausted with emotion, she suffered her white arms to fall, and returned solemnly to her bed of death. And as she breathed her last sighs, there came mingled with them a low murmur from her lips. I bent to them my ear, and distinguished again, the concluding words of the pa.s.sage in Glanvill: "_Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will._"

She died, and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily falls to the lot of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering, I purchased and put in some repair an abbey which I shall not name in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet, although the external abbey with its verdant decay hanging about it suffered but little alteration, I gave way with a child-like perversity, and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a display of more than regal magnificence within. For such follies, even in childhood, I had imbibed a taste, and now they came back to me as if in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold! I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams. But these absurdities I must not pause to detail. Let me speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed, whither in a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar as my bride--as the successor of the unforgotten Ligeia--the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine.

There is no individual portion of the architecture and decoration of that bridal chamber which is not now visibly before me. Where were the souls of the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of gold, they permitted to pa.s.s the threshold of an apartment _so_ bedecked, a maiden and a daughter so beloved? I have said that I minutely remember the details of the chamber, yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment; and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display, to take hold upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size.

Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon was the sole window--an immense sheet of unbroken gla.s.s from Venice--a single pane, and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon pa.s.sing through it fell with a ghastly l.u.s.ter on the objects within.

Over the upper portion of this huge window extended the trellis-work of an aged vine which clambered up the ma.s.sy walls of the turret. The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting depended, by a single chain of gold with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of parti-colored fires.