BERENICE
Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas
meas aliquantulum forelevatas.
—Ebn Zaiat.
MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching
the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of
that arch—as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the
wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived
a type of unloveliness?—from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow?
But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of
joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of
to-day, or the agonies which
are, have their origin in the ecstasies
which
might have been.
My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet
there are no towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray,
hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race of visionaries; and
in many striking particulars—in the character of the family
mansion—in the frescos of the chief saloon—in the tapestries of the
dormitories—in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory—but
more especially in the gallery of antique paintings—in the fashion of
the library chamber—and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the
library's contents—there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant
the belief.
The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber,
and with its volumes—of which latter I will say no more. Here died my
mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not
lived before—that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it?—let
us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There
is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms—of spiritual and meaning
eyes—of sounds, musical yet sad—a remembrance which will not be
excluded; a memory like a shadow—vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady;
and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it
while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.
In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what
seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy
land—into a palace of imagination—into the wild dominions of monastic
thought and erudition—it is not singular that I gazed around me with a
startled and ardent eye—that I loitered away my boyhood in books,
and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it
is singular that as years
rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my
fathers—it
is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs
of my life—wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character
of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as
visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams
became, in turn, not the material of my every-day existence, but in very
deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.
Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal
halls. Yet differently we grew—I, ill of health, and buried in
gloom—she, agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers, the
ramble on the hill-side—mine the studies of the cloister; I, living
within my own heart, and addicted, body and soul, to the most intense
and painful meditation—she, roaming carelessly through life, with
no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the
raven-winged hours. Berenice!—I call upon her name—Berenice!—and
from the gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous recollections are
startled at the sound! Ah, vividly is her image before me now, as in the
early days of her light-heartedness and joy! Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic
beauty! Oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its
fountains! And then—then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which
should not be told. Disease—a fatal disease, fell like the simoon upon
her frame; and, even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept
over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a
manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of
her person! Alas! the destroyer came and went!—and the victim—where is
she? I knew her not—or knew her no longer as Berenice.
Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and
primary one which effected a revolution of so horrible a kind in the
moral and physical being of my cousin, may be mentioned as the most
distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of epilepsy not
unfrequently terminating in
trance itself—trance very nearly
resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery
was in most instances, startlingly abrupt. In the mean time my own
disease—for I have been told that I should call it by no other
appellation—my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon me, and assumed
finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form—hourly
and momently gaining vigor—and at length obtaining over me the most
incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it,
consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in
metaphysical science termed the
attentive. It is more than probable
that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner
possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate
idea of that nervous
intensity of interest with which, in my case,
the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried
themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of
the universe.
To muse for long unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to some
frivolous device on the margin, or in the typography of a book; to
become absorbed, for the better part of a summer's day, in a quaint
shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry or upon the floor; to lose
myself, for an entire night, in watching the steady flame of a lamp,
or the embers of a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a
flower; to repeat, monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by
dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the
mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical existence, by means of
absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in: such
were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a
condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled,
but certainly bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation.
Yet let me not be misapprehended. The undue, earnest, and morbid
attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must
not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common
to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by persons of ardent
imagination. It was not even, as might be at first supposed, an extreme
condition, or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and
essentially distinct and different. In the one instance, the dreamer,
or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually
not frivolous,
imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions
and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day
dream
often replete with luxury, he finds the
incitamentum, or first
cause of his musings, entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case, the
primary object was
invariably frivolous, although assuming, through
the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance.
Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few pertinaciously
returning in upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were
never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first
cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally
exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In
a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as
I have said before, the
attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the
speculative.
My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the
disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative
and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic qualities of the
disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise of the
noble Italian, Coelius Secundus Curio, "
De Amplitudine Beati Regni
Dei;" St. Austin's great work, the "City of God;" and Tertullian's "
De
Carne Christi," in which the paradoxical sentence "
Mortuus est Dei
filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum
est quia impossibile est," occupied my undivided time, for many weeks
of laborious and fruitless investigation.
Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial
things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by
Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily resisting the attacks of human
violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds, trembled
only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel. And although, to
a careless thinker, it might appear a matter beyond doubt, that the
alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the
moral condition of
Berenice, would afford me many objects for the exercise of that intense
and abnormal meditation whose nature I have been at some trouble in
explaining, yet such was not in any degree the case. In the lucid
intervals of my infirmity, her calamity, indeed, gave me pain, and,
taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle life, I
did not fall to ponder, frequently and bitterly, upon the wonder-working
means by which so strange a revolution had been so suddenly brought
to pass. But these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of
my disease, and were such as would have occurred, under similar
circumstances, to the ordinary mass of mankind. True to its own
character, my disorder revelled in the less important but more startling
changes wrought in the
physical frame of Berenice—in the singular and
most appalling distortion of her personal identity.
During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had
never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with
me,
had never been of the heart, and my passions
always were of the
mind. Through the gray of the early morning—among the trellised shadows
of the forest at noonday—and in the silence of my library at night—she
had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her—not as the living and
breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream; not as a being of
the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being; not as a
thing to admire, but to analyze; not as an object of love, but as
the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation. And
now—now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her approach;
yet, bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to
mind that she had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her
of marriage.
And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon
an afternoon in the winter of the year—one of those unseasonably
warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon
(*1),—I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner apartment of
the library. But, uplifting my eyes, I saw that Berenice stood before
me.
Was it my own excited imagination—or the misty influence of the
atmosphere—or the uncertain twilight of the chamber—or the gray
draperies which fell around her figure—that caused in it so vacillating
and indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She spoke no word; and
I—not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran
through my frame; a sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me; a
consuming curiosity pervaded my soul; and sinking back upon the chair,
I remained for some time breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted
upon her person. Alas! its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige
of the former being lurked in any single line of the contour. My burning
glances at length fell upon the face.
The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the
once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow
temples with innumerable ringlets, now of a vivid yellow, and jarring
discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy
of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and
seemingly pupilless, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare
to he contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a
smile of peculiar meaning,
the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed
themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them,
or that, having done so, I had died!
The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found that my
cousin had departed from the chamber. But from the disordered chamber
of my brain, had not, alas! departed, and would not be driven away,
the white and ghastly
spectrum of the teeth. Not a speck on their
surface—not a shade on their enamel—not an indenture in their
edges—but what that period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon
my memory. I saw them
now even more unequivocally than I beheld
them
then. The teeth!—the teeth!—they were here, and there, and
everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and
excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the
very moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full
fury of my
monomania, and I struggled in vain against its strange and
irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects of the external world
I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I longed with a phrenzied
desire. All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in
their single contemplation. They—they alone were present to the mental
eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of
my mental life. I held them in every light. I turned them in every
attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their
peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon the
alteration in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in
imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and even when unassisted by
the lips, a capability of moral expression. Of Mademoiselle Salle it
has been well said, "
Que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments," and
of Berenice I more seriously believed
que toutes ses dents etaient des
idees.
Des idees!—ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me!
Des idees!—ah
therefore it was that I coveted them so madly! I felt
that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me
back to reason.
And the evening closed in upon me thus—and then the darkness came, and
tarried, and went—and the day again dawned—and the mists of a second
night were now gathering around—and still I sat motionless in that
solitary room—and still I sat buried in meditation—and still the
phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy, as, with
the most vivid hideous distinctness, it floated about amid the changing
lights and shadows of the chamber. At length there broke in upon my
dreams a cry as of horror and dismay; and thereunto, after a pause,
succeeded the sound of troubled voices, intermingled with many low
moanings of sorrow or of pain. I arose from my seat, and throwing open
one of the doors of the library, saw standing out in the ante-chamber
a servant maiden, all in tears, who told me that Berenice was—no more!
She had been seized with epilepsy in the early morning, and now, at the
closing in of the night, the grave was ready for its tenant, and all the
preparations for the burial were completed.
I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It
seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream.
I knew that it was now midnight, and I was well aware, that since the
setting of the sun, Berenice had been interred. But of that dreary
period which intervened I had no positive, at least no definite
comprehension. Yet its memory was replete with horror—horror more
horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It
was a fearful page in the record my existence, written all over with
dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I strived to
decypher them, but in vain; while ever and anon, like the spirit of a
departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed
to be ringing in my ears. I had done a deed—what was it? I asked myself
the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber answered
me,—"
what was it?"
On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box. It
was of no remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, for
it was the property of the family physician; but how came it
there,
upon my table, and why did I shudder in regarding it? These things were
in no manner to be accounted for, and my eyes at length dropped to the
open pages of a book, and to a sentence underscored therein. The words
were the singular but simple ones of the poet Ebn Zaiat:—"
Dicebant
mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum
fore levatas." Why then, as I perused them, did the hairs of my head
erect themselves on end, and the blood of my body become congealed
within my veins?
There came a light tap at the library door—and, pale as the tenant of a
tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror,
and he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low. What said
he?—some broken sentences I heard. He told of a wild cry disturbing the
silence of the night—of the gathering together of the household—of
a search in the direction of the sound; and then his tones grew
thrillingly distinct as he whispered me of a violated grave—of
a disfigured body enshrouded, yet still breathing—still
palpitating—
still alive!
He pointed to garments;—they were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke
not, and he took me gently by the hand: it was indented with the impress
of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the
wall. I looked at it for some minutes: it was a spade. With a shriek I
bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could
not force it open; and in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell
heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound,
there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with
thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered
to and fro about the floor.
Notes—Berenice
(*1) For as Jove, during the winter season, gives twice seven days of
warmth, men have called this element and temperate time the nurse of the
beautiful Halcyon—
Simonides
