Chapter III: Part 3

Even while he heard her singing, the sense of her remoteness gave Reymund a slight shudder. If she had been one shade more human; if he had ever seen her moved by any sparkle of wit, any drollery of humor, into a frolicking outburst of laughter, by any mischievous vexation into a flash of anger, a season of pettishness,--but no, such little incidents affected her no more than thistle-down affects the wind; and, recognizing it, Reymund knew that he loved her, yet felt somehow as he felt who had pledged a bridal ring upon the finger of a ghost; as that youth felt, perchance, whose beautiful mistress was after all a ghoul. He need not have concerned himself; Orient had no especial care for him; he passed before her, busy in her world of dreams, like a shadow; if she smiled upon him, it was as she smiled on everything else about her, as she smiled on the pink-wreathed peach-bough, on the urchin tumbling in grass, on the sunbeam overlaying both, on blue sky or on rainy weather; though, indeed, for the latter, Orient had superfluous smiles; she was always sunny herself upon a stormy day; she used to say that it seemed as if Nature had grown so familiar with her that she could afford to receive her and show herself to her in undress. Perhaps, had Reymund been more free himself from the soil and stain of earth, Orient would not have been so intangible.

They were going one day up the mountain, Orient, her mother, the guide, and Reymund, the first two riding, Reymund and the guide on foot. The air was so clear that it seemed like living in the inside of a crystal; everything stood with sharp outlines, as if drawn with a burin upon the deep substance of the blue: far away tender gauzes took up the distance, but that was merely on the outside edges of the world. After they had exhausted the view from the wide-reaching summit, where the eye seemed to wrest from the Creator more than had ever been given to it, they went below into the shelter of the great rocks and lunched. It was late in the afternoon ere they remounted and sought their way down the long descent. The path which had been slight with difficulties in climbing was now full of downward terrors. Orient bent far back in her seat, unable to see where her horse would plant his feet. It seemed to her that he was stepping over sheer abysses, and just as she herself went sliding and slipping forward over his head and down, a strong arm from an unseen form behind the cliff, round which she had just wound, would grasp her, and Reymund would hold her firm till the beast stood four-square again. It was to her a thing like the arm of Providence made visible to faith. Suddenly the girth broke, and but for that strong arm on the instant outstretched, Providence itself alone knows what would have become of her. Reymund caught her then as she reeled from the saddle, and placed her on the ground. The horse, startled by the unexpectedness of the affair, fled forward; the guide left the bridle he had held behind and pursued him. Catching the rein with a jerk and oath, he dealt such a blow with his boot that the animal lost his balance and fell, and would have rolled over the precipice but for a prostrate tree. In a moment what Reymund had wanted to see was granted him. Orient sprang forward, her face aflame, her eyes like balefires. The guide, amazed, as one might be at the sight of an avenger in his path, obeyed her single word, her vehement gesture, and plunged down the way and left them.

“Orient! what have you done?” cried her mother.

“Well, well, mamma,” answered the suddenly convicted and penitent one, “we can follow his red cap.”

But the guide, twice too cunning, hid himself in underhung paths that he knew, and they had not a sign or signal for aid.

Nevertheless, Reymund gladly accepted this fate because of the thing that brought it, and at which another man would have looked askance. This thing, this little temper, had proved to him that Orient was human,--and, therefore, to be won. He raised the pony, remounted Orient, and did his best in place of their faithless leader, trusting more to the instincts of the animals themselves than to any mountain-craft of his own.

The sharp outlines of distant peaks began to burn and blacken, those of the nearer rock and stunted shrub to grow diffuse; the air was keen and chill, a reddening sunset smouldered in clouds below them and shut out the world, a cold, wet mist below threatened to come creeping up around them. The horses neighed to each other, grew jaded and uncertain, stopped. Masses of impassable rock closed them in on every side, save the narrow defile through which they came and the precipice below; the atmosphere was purple with shade and clung to them in dew; already one star hung out its blue lamp.

“We can go no farther,” said Reymund. “This spot is more sheltered than any we are likely to find. Let us do what we can for comfort, and wait for the morning.”

The mother bewailed herself; but Orient made cheer, and while Reymund corralled the horses, she was busy collecting twigs and splinters and bits of wood and dry moss in a pile. “Light them with your matches, Reymund,” she said. “A cigar will keep you warm, but we need a bit of blaze, perhaps.”

“When it is darker,” he replied; “you will need it more a little nearer to the witching time.”

“Do you imagine we shall see witches?”

“Take care, or you will see stars.”

“He rode alone through the silent night,
She swam like a star to his left and right,”

sang Orient. “After all, it is not the Walpurgis Night.”

“If we could only have a cup of tea!” sighed the mamma, at a loss for her luxuries in the wilderness.

“It will be so much more refreshing to-morrow,” said Orient. “And seasoned with romance,--a dash of danger,--your first adventure, little mother!”

But the little mother had no fancy for adventures; and while her daughter lost all her serenity and was crazy with delight at the wild beauty of the thing, she grew more and more lachrymose, and afforded at last a good background of shower for all Orient’s rainbows. Thereon Orient, sitting down, put her arms round her and comforted her, till the mother became herself somewhat alive to the circumstance that one seldom saw such a scene twice in a lifetime.

They had remained on the rocky platform where they paused, a shelf that after a few yards ended in an abrupt fall that led away by a course of stark precipices into the great valley beneath. This valley, filled with rolling vapor, whose volumes, smitten by sunset, were fused in splendid color, made a pavilion of cloud beneath them where billows of fleecy crimson and shining scarlet curdled together into creamy crests, here seeming to lash in feather-white foam against the base of some crag, and there letting a late sunbeam plough through spaces of a violet-dark drift till they were all inwrought with gold. Above them the cold and mighty heaven was already faintly but thickly strewn with stars.

“Into what awful and glorious region are we translated!” cried Orient. “We are above the world and the people of the world. Are we flesh and blood?”

“The free spirits of the air ‘have no such liberty’ as this of ours,” said Reymund.

“It is just as if we were dead!” shivered the mamma. “And I’m sure it’s cold enough for that!”

Orient wrapped the shawls about the doleful little woman, while Reymund opened his knapsack for any remnants of lunch that might afford them consolation. He kindled the fire, too, for the colors were fading away beneath, and the sky was getting gloomy overhead; and, warmed and enlivened in the genial light of the briefly crackling blaze, they forgot that they were lost upon the mountain, and all the possible horrors of their fate. But to Reymund there were few horrors in it, for if he died of exposure and starvation there on the bald, pitiless mountain, it would be with Orient in his arms at last.

While the fire crackled, Reymund found in his breast-pocket a tiny flask of cordial which he divided into three portions. “Drink it,” he said to them, “and make it take the place of the tea. It is Chartreuse--oily sunshine--distilled from the cones of some old fir-tree. First cousin to the cedars of Lebanon, for all I know. Mark how you taste hemlock in it. Socrates poisoned with hemlock? No, no; he drank himself to death on Chartreuse.”

Orient heard him indignantly. “I do not like it,” said she, when her turn came, and left hers in the horn. Reymund laughed; he hesitated a moment, then tossed it off himself.

The fire did not last them long, for all the twigs they could collect were scanty; the blaze had heated the rock a little; they drew closer to it, and the mother, curling up against it in her shawls, composed herself as she could for slumber; the voices of Orient and Reymund, from where they still sat and talked together, lulled her as the murmur of the waterfall lulled Sleep himself. Orient was repeating Jean Ingelow’s dream of her lover fallen and dead among the hills, with its vague and awesome imagery. “I do not understand,” she said, as she ceased, “this solicitude that my mother and so many others feel concerning their burial-place. I love life, delicious life; but if we die and lie unburied here forever among the lonely precipices, it will not matter any more to us than it did to the youth.” And she repeated again:--

“The first hath no advantage,--it shall not soothe his slumber
That a lock of his brown hair his father aye shall keep;
For the last, he nothing grudgeth, it shall naught his quiet cumber
That in a golden mesh of _his_, callow eaglets sleep.”

Reymund quaked at the moment, as he thought of any lustrous lock of Orient’s curling out of the fierce beak that should tear it away from the white brow. Then he said: “Too philosophic by half. As for me, with the first peep of day in this high meridian, I shall be up and doing, and find a way to our level again or--perish in the attempt.”

“Resolved to perish, any way. Give you liberty or give you death. _I_ do not feel in such a hurry to be gone. How silent and solemn it is,--what a clear darkness,--listen a moment and catch the sough of that pine forest far beneath, like the wings of some great spirit sifting the air. I have never been so near heaven. I understand now why in the Bible they so often withdrew into a high mountain.”

Reymund did not answer her. “Say your prayers, innocent one,” was what he thought. “Wherever you are, there heaven is near.”

By and by Orient crept closer to her mother for mutual comfort, wound her own cloak round her like a chrysalis, and drowsed and dreamed.

Reymund sat beside her, his knees drawn up, his hands clasped round them. It was very cool; the air was so still that he wondered at the absence of a stinging frost, and he hugged himself thus for warmth. Orient stirred in her half-recumbent sleep, and her head fell on his shoulder. After that the solid mountain was less immovable than he. He let the beautiful head remain, watching it with downcast, sidelong gaze; if he had longed with all his heart to smooth one tress, to put his arm over her in a sheltering embrace, he dared not touch her. Something said to him that she was of a grade above, as the disembodied is beyond the clay; said, too, that whatever lovely or fine there might be in himself, the thickness of the outer wrapping rendered it invisible to her; that for Orient to read him right he must wait for another life. In spite of all that, he hoped,--hoped madly and wildly, there in the chill night, with the beautiful head fallen on his shoulder and the sweet, warm breath stealing gently across his bending brow. He had a strange fancy now and then that out of the encircling shadow a great face came and looked,--whether that of some uncreated thing, some phantasm of his brain, or that of some celestial being, some resident of vast spaces, or only a wild beast, a big, brown bear, roving on their tracks and coming to peer about their unprotected bivouac. Whatever it was, it retired as often as it came, awed in its turn, he thought, by the sweet innocence of that golden head. A late moon rose down over the low side of the earth as he still sat there; he knew it by the strange coppery light that began to glow through the vapors that yet filled the gulfs beneath, and boil them to a scum of dark, dun gold; then at last a broad beam parted the tumbling and sulphurous fogs, and the bright, thin crescent of the waning moon cut itself out on a clear air behind the horn of the hill, and, as if swinging from its sharp cusp, hung the watery diamond of the morning star. Still Reymund did not lift the head from his shoulder; he chose rather that the fair apparition of daybreak at this height above the earth might happen to him, as if through the imposition of that dear and tender touch. By and by she stirred restlessly,--the spell of her slumber was breaking; he moved away gently and left her the rock for a pillow. When the heavens were paling and retreating in a mist of star-breath, and when all the world was whitening about her and the great floor of cloud beneath was inwrought by dawn with sparks of fire, so that they seemed wrapped in an atmosphere of flame and snow, Orient awoke.

No hero in his self-restraint, in one wild, forgetful moment of that morning, Reymund told Orient that he loved her.

She repulsed him so gently that it gave him reason to hope, yet so firmly that he could do nothing but despair.

He urged that she was unconscious of herself, that she did not know her own heart, nor what it wanted; that he had approached her inner life more nearly than another might ever do; that, give him time and chance, he could not fail to win her.

She only answered that she was not won.

Before, in their windings and wanderings, they had reached the foot of the mountain that day, they met their recusant and repentant guide coming up with others in search of them, and all their toil and trouble were over.

Reymund’s holiday was over too. He was to return next day to his home, to engagements previously formed and not to be disregarded.

“At least,” he said to Orient, not sadly, but with a certain vigor of intention in his tone, “you will allow me to visit you at your mother’s house?”

“You could not do a kinder thing,” answered Orient, feeling now the gap that he would leave, and which nothing could quite fill, and willing to grant him anything but what he most desired.

“Then you will see me on Saturdays.”

“Every Saturday!” she exclaimed, with a bright face that made his heart bound. “That is too much to ask.”

“Of you, perhaps; not of me. Sunday is a spare day; if I use it for God’s worship, it shall be at what shrine I please,--St. Orient’s or another’s.”

“And it is such a long ride,” demurred she, remembering the miles on miles of low sea-coast country threaded with rivers and inlaid with marshes, that he must cross, all day flying along through their damp breath and salt winds. “Nine hours; I am afraid I ought not to allow it. And yet,--and yet, nine or nineteen, it shall make no difference.”

Orient had hesitated in her last sentence, wondering how she could deny herself the sympathy in her little pursuits that through this time she had received from Reymund. She had not encountered it before; it was delightful to her; perhaps it only had not taught her love because she did not know what love was. She had but little knowledge of human nature, almost none at all of her own nature: she preferred natural religion before theology, natural history, with its grandiose revolutions, before the petty struggles of warriors and diplomatists which her view was not broad enough to throw into epochs and revolutions more grandiose yet: it was Reymund who had taught her to look with kindly curiosity upon the lives of those about her, in hopes, it may be, of teaching her at last to look in upon her own. Of that she was unaware; but the interest in the flower never found before to-day, the discovery of the bird whose note had ravished the ear last sunset, the hunt up brookside and hill for a fragment of quartz that should have a mountain range and outlying spurs of amethyst crystals, or one full of imbedded beryls, the shining hexagons like drops of light filtered through seawater, or any heap of blooded garnets, a blaze of concrete color; the search into the age of the old pine-tree on the precipice; into the mountain strata, and the wonderment concerning that day of the earth’s date on which they were upheaved; the tracing out the path of some glacier with all its ancient and icy terrors overgrown by the verdant moss and turf of the moraine; the perpetual looking for the Maker’s fingers in his work,--all this, and such as this, she would miss and must resign if she forbade those recurring Saturdays. And then, on the other hand, a friend to meet with the results of work, the choice book, the week’s research, its thought, its fancy: she who had had no intimates, few friends--

Reymund did not wait for her to balance her ideas.

“The train arrives,” said he, “by five o’clock,--a little before. Every Saturday, therefore, at five o’clock, I shall be in your drawing-room.”

The thing was settled, then, without her. She began all at once to fear that, after all, it would not happen so; he would let other things creep between; when he was fairly at a distance from her he would be angry with her for having quite failed to feel that entire satisfaction in him, to give him that love which, in a high ideal, she believed to be due from every woman to her husband; a thousand things would hinder.

“I can hardly believe it,” she said.

“I am too happy when you doubt it,” he replied, half reading her thoughts. “It gives me hope; for we can easily believe that to which we are indifferent. How can I be hindered when I will it,--and when you wish it?” The blush that streamed up her temples doubly pleased him. “Do not doubt it!” he exclaimed, with more vivacity than so small a thing appeared to demand. “For, see, I swear it! I will be with you on each Saturday at five o’clock, with your permission, until the day I die!”

So, dropping her hand, he went down the lane to the coach. But, looking back, he saw her still standing in the doorway, hung with such drooping drapery of woodbine round her head, the sunlight lying in a glory on her golden hair, the downy bloom upon her cheek as though it were a peach, a smile upon her lip, and heaven’s own blue within her eye,--she seemed the incarnation of a summer sunrise. He saw the riotous wind lift one curl and twine it with the next, drop the petal of a rose upon her mouth, kiss and kiss again her ivory forehead, free and welcome where he dared not venture,--and the love in his heart made the blood boil hotly up his veins to cheek and brow,--and for all testimony to his thrilling passion, he only cried, “Every Saturday, at five o’clock!” and was away.

But before Reymund plunged afresh into the exterior world, which, for these weeks, had been shut from his sight, he turned aside for one last outlook upon pleasure. Thus it happened that he left the train at an earlier station than the one near Orient’s home, partly to avoid recognition in the future, partly for the sake of mounting and subduing a spirited horse which had been brought up to tear himself into a foam at sight of the engine. Reymund meant to gratify himself that day with a stroll through Orient’s garden and among the haunts of her bright youth. No one would have taken him for anything but an apparition, who saw him galloping down the long country roads in a cloud of dust. When he had conquered the angry temper of the beast he abated his gait and paced slowly along the margin of the twice-mown meadows, splendid in noon sunshine, over the shaven surfaces of rusty reds and browns, into which they shaded all their gilded verdure. Now and then a bittern cried from the bank of a tiny thread of the tide, other notes were hushed, there was only to be heard through the wide midday air the unbroken treble of the crickets, across which the rich horns of the locusts shrilled like the elfin trumpets of a summer’s state. Reymund hitched his horse, found a penetrable portion of the garden paling, and entered.

It was a large, old garden, laid out, fifty years ago, perhaps, in a kind of pleasance; for in one place a slight hill rose above the rest, while paths wandered round it into new and unsuspected regions; in another a brook meandered and sang silverly over shining pebbles, and among arrow-heads and lily-pods, and, dallying, went its way at last to empty into some tide-streak and find the sounding sea that called to it all night. Weeds, of course, had overgrown the beds, the untrained grapes hung heavily from wall and trellis, wasps and blackbirds made merry together with the nectar of ripening pears, plum and peach dropped ungathered from the bough; vine and tendril, leaf and spray, and branch and blossom, all wrought themselves to a delicious tangle of perfume and rustle and color. Here, through the beautiful and envious weeds, a gladiolus reared his flames, a larkspur absorbed the very blue, a carnation scattered spice; here honeysuckles still blew out a perfect fragrance, while mourning-brides and gillyflowers and spiked lavender and pansies sowed the air with their old-fashioned sweetness. The soft, lonely sky stretched away over the garden and the meadows to haze itself round low and distant woods, and all the empty air seemed sad and desolate between,--the fulness and richness of life at its high noon touching close upon the anti-climax of desert solitude. Through the place a light east-wind was blowing that had in it a tonic for the lungs like the sparkle of champagne. And, somehow, through all the spaces of the neglected garden the spell of Orient seemed complete. There Orient must have stood to twine that white rose upon the porch; there her fingers must have twinkled among the young vine-leaves; there, on that bank of turf, she must many an afternoon have sat at work; there, in the shallow crystal of the brook, she had waded with white feet to set the water-plants. These lichen-covered apple-trees had shed, how many a springtime, the rosy snow of their petals around her head; these gnarled old bergamots had dropped their pulpy globes into her hands; this nut-tree put out its leaves on the day when she was born; her little feet had worn these paths. The garden was the shadow of Orient herself, reduced to dumb and to material things. He wondered what it would be by the magic of moonlight,--the whole place silvered over with tranquil sheen, and raised from every day’s dull sight into the dreamy and ideal,--full of cool dew, and silence, and holy hush, as if it waited on her white sleep. Just under his feet, where the seed had been thrown in handfuls, he traced, written out with blue forget-me-nots, the name of Orient.

It would not do for him to stay much longer here; he should grow wild with hopes and fancies, for all he knew, tread out that lovely name with his heel. She must, she should be won! He clutched a cluster of the forget-me-nots, quickly escaped the labyrinth, galloped back to the station at a rate that streaked his chafing steed,--and so away from dreams to life and real work.

Thus Reymund returned to his routine; bills and lawsuits and politics, routes and rides; they were not calculated to lift him to any higher level than the old one.

And Orient and her mother came home; the mother having made quite as close acquaintance with the mountains as she cared to do.

Saturdays, now, surely as they came, brought Reymund under the same roof with Orient. Perhaps in their brief indulgence he found pardon for all the sins of the week,--for the week had its sins, its little trivial condoning of misdemeanors as unimportant, matters which lower one as steadily and certainly over the great pit, as block and tackle might do over another. On Sunday nights, when he glided away in the outward train, he felt as if it were an easy thing to maintain the height which, by Orient’s side, he gained; but after a Monday morning on the exchange, after a Tuesday night in the salon, after his evening gallop on the horse possessed with the spirit of Satan, he said to himself, “It is of no use. Nature is too crude in me, too gross a strain, too deep a dye. I should be like Shelley’s rock in the black abyss, that

‘Has from unimaginable years
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulf, and, with the agony
With which it clings, seems slowly coming down.’

The thing is to abandon.” Yet Saturday’s sunset shone for him again always over Orient’s garden.

He had come one evening and found Orient among the grape-vines, playing with a parcel of little children, as pretty, bright, and fresh as a bunch of flowers. After the hubbub of business, the dust of travel, this garden, in a far outlying city suburb stretching towards the sea, seemed as pure and innocent as Eden. On Sunday morning, when the air soared illumined with a stiller lustre, when the azure deepened as if fresh-washed by sacred rains and dews, when the winds bore no murmur but that of ripening leaf and floating petal, when the birds themselves seemed to sing in the Sabbath, and all the wide world to be gladly and tranquilly conscious of the day,--they went to church together. If Orient was rapt in the worship, Reymund was at an exaltation as high for him,--rapt in his worship of her. By times this very thing lifted him into the upper region, his soul rose buoyant on the prayer and praise, and floated forward like a waif on the full tide of the organ’s music. When, afterward, he found himself and his sentience again, he said the thing was in him,--could he but keep the pitch,--were Orient forever by him to give him that key-note. But alone we come into this world, alone we go out of it. Neither Orient nor another could, for all eternity, give the tone to any soul; that discord or that harmony which one shall make must be the result of one’s own being.

He sat with Orient, in the afternoon, on the bank of turf that sloped down to the clear, brown brook, in whose bed many a diving and dipping sunbeam wrought mosaics of light and shade with the shining pebbles. The brook rustled and lilted on its way, a bird above it turned its burden into melody, now and then a waft of wind rippled all its course till the lily leaves shivered and turned up their crimson linings, soft clouds chased one another across the sky,--everything around wore the bloom of peace and pleasure.

“I often fear,” said Reymund, “that I must come here no more. The place grows too dear for one that must some day leave it.”

Orient turned and looked at him. He saw her tremble. “Not come here any more!” she said.

“Ah, Orient!” he cried, “once I declared to you the purpose of my life. Sometimes--now--sometimes--it seems to me as if you were almost won.”

He bent above her, glowing and passionate and daring. She trembled again, neither drew away, nor surrendered herself to the waiting grasp.

“I do not know,” she answered him, the globy tears suffusing her eyes till each one shone like the great star that hung its blue lamp in the zenith that night when they were lost upon the mountain. “Perhaps I cannot read my heart; but does a woman really love that which is less strong than herself? I must lean upon my husband, not he on me.”

“Am I so weak?” asked Reymund, with some bitterness, and a quiver on his lip. “Consider. If your own nature had been invested with a coarser flesh, left out thereby to coarser temptations,--since passions are things of the flesh,--what would have come of it? Then, if thrown in the midst of the revel, loving the flash of merriment, the excitement of chance, and wine and dice were going round--But, no! such speech is profanity. Yet, Orient, under all habit, under all action, I think there is that in my soul akin to yours, made to rule it and absorb it, hidden by the body; but there,--made to be loved by you, as you, all of you, flaws and beauties, are loved by me!”

“If I could only _see_ your soul,” said Orient, half yielding, contrite, yet uncertain.

“One day perhaps you will,” answered Reymund, his repeater giving the hour to his finger-pressure. “Now I must go.”

He rose, stooped again and touched her smooth, cold forehead with his mouth. The touch sent the blood back to his heart. “With time,” he murmured. “O, with time! she shall yet--she shall! Good by,--till Saturday again at five o’clock!” and then was gone.

All that week Reymund walked through his work with an absent mind, as if his spirit had half left his body, disengaging itself from the automaton of bone and muscle, as one might say; abstracted and lost in his thoughts, his wishes, his absolute resolutions. Old haunts had no attraction for him, old faces brought him no satisfaction, he sought no pleasure but such as was to be found on the back of that horse possessed by the spirit of Satan. And so he existed till the sunrise of Saturday, when, before it should be quite time for the train, he had the horse brought round for a gallop, as if he would ride the wind and tame the whirlwind.

In the mean time Orient pursued her way in what, for her, was perturbation. There seemed to be a riddle in these days beyond her reading. Penitent over her pride in presuming herself to be stronger than her lover, conscious that she could not dispense with him, yet full as sure that she felt no perfect passion for him, there was nothing to do but marvel what it meant. “I am drawn to him,” she said to herself. “Ah, I know that well enough! But have I any right to be? If there were something to confirm me! If I thought the good and beautiful part were any abiding principle, were anything but love of me! If I could only see his soul!”

She was walking that Saturday afternoon in the woods that could be seen from her garden across the meadows. It was a clear October afternoon, the red leaves were dropping round her and leaving the bright blue sky more bare with every gentle gust that brought them to her feet; a bracing day of early autumn, when the wind fainted with the sweet freight of balsam from the pines, and all things only prophesied hope and lightsomeness. In spite of this, Orient could not tell why she had a constant sensation of gray and misty horizons, of marshy air and cold sea-wind all day; as she walked now, the fitful breeze in the tree-tops seemed the muffled murmur of waves on the distant beach, and once in a while she shivered as if a cold foam-wreath were flying by her face. She thought at first that all this damp and drear sensation was some sympathy with Reymund, now travelling along the sea-coast on his way to her. “But what absurdity!” she said. “Where the track lies, the sky is as blue as this one; the wind is scarcely more chilly there than here. Reymund is rolling along, comfortable among his cushions and books; and not a naked spirit all abroad in the sea-scented air!”

She went home on the causeway that was laid along the meadows,--hurrying a little, for she judged by the sinking sun that it must be nearly time for the arrival of the train. As she went, she heard her name called.

She turned, for the voice seemed to come from the woods. But seeing no one, she fancied the note of some bird had followed her.

Again the sound. Her name; and Reymund’s voice. “He has come,” thought Orient, with a thrill of unsuspected pleasure, “and he is calling me from the garden.” And she made all haste to answer the summons in person. Going along, then, with her boughs of bright leaves, she wished she had not delayed so long in the woods,--her dress so soiled, and her hands, her hair so disordered; she resolved to steal in at the side door and freshen her toilet before greeting him. As the door was opened to her, “Mr. Reymund has come,” said the maid, gleefully. “I have just let him in. He is waiting in the drawing-room.”

“Very well,” answered Orient. “Tell him I will be there directly.”

She hastened towards the staircase, boughs in hand.

“You haven’t seen your friend?” asked her aunt, passing her on the landing as she sped up.

“No,” replied Orient again; “have you?”

“I just met him in the hall as he was entering the drawing-room,” said the good woman, calling over the balusters and going her way.

Orient hurried at her bath, clad herself with all despatch, and put on a garment whose airy frills and ruffles made her look like a white rose. As she went by her mother’s room, the mother looked out and said, lightly, “Reymund has come. Did you know it?”

“Yes, mamma,” she answered. “Why didn’t you go and make him welcome?”

“O, my hair was all down!” said the other. “I just caught a glimpse of him, passing the foot of the stairs as he went into the drawing-room.”

So Orient stepped slowly down, adjusting her bracelets as she went. She saw Reymund a second, as the winding way of the stairs for that space allowed her, standing in the bay-window and looking out. She did not know what made her so hesitate to enter. She paused a moment longer in the doorway, gazing in.

The room was very gay with bunches of deep-blue and scarlet salvia, and drooping clusters of barberry boughs stringing their splendid pendants all along most graceful curves; but there was another brightness than that in the room. It was where Reymund stood in the embrasure of the window, with the late sunlight falling all over him. She wondered that he did not advance to meet her; but, as she wondered, went up the room toward him.

“Something must have happened to make him very happy,” thought Orient. “I never saw such a smile!”

Perhaps it was this smile that so transfigured him; a plain man commonly, the sunshine now seemed to bring out rich, dark tints on the countenance, the eyes overflowed with light, and whether it were grace of posture, overlying sunshine, or beaming smile, features and face and figure expressed a subtle harmony, and the man was beautiful,--beautiful as a strong angel pictured in some instant of stooping flight.

“He does not mean to speak till I do,” thought Orient again.

But as she drew near, the smile changed to a look of utter melancholy, as a shining cloud melts into rain,--a melancholy gaze that pierced her through and through. She put out her hand, nevertheless, to take his extended grasp.

And there was nothing there!

In the same instant, with a loud and terrible voice, crying, “Orient!”--a voice as if it were the voice of death, the tomb, and all corruption,--the thing had vanished; the place was empty!

That cry rang through the house, that loud and terrible voice. Maid and mother rushed into the room; and they found no one there but Orient, fallen unconscious to the floor.

It did not take long to revive the child. “Something has happened to Reymund,” she said, upon lifting her head. “We must go to him at once!”

“My love!” cried her mother. “The idea of the thing. The--”

But expostulations were wasted breath; while they were being made, Orient was calmly getting on her travelling-gown, and, seeing herself powerless, the mother--with her heart palpitating in the ends of her fingers through awe and through alarm, and interweaving with the ejaculations that escaped her chattering teeth a thousand instructions to her quaking maid and sister--hastened to do likewise and be off with her.

Thus it happened that the telegram from Reymund’s brother crossed the travellers on their way; and they reached his brother’s house in the gray of the shivering morning.

It was just as Orient’s heart had told her. Reymund had been thrown from his horse on the previous morning, striking his head on a curbstone’s edge; he had been taken up senseless, and had lain since then in a stupor only broken by his twice calling her name in the afternoon. At a little after five o’clock he had risen on the pillow, and in a loud and terrible voice had called Orient again, and then had fallen back; and whether he were dead or alive there was no one able to say.

Orient threw off her hat and shawl and stole into the apartment where Reymund had been placed. The white face that fastened her eye was still as a mask of clay, and there was stamped upon it that look of unutterable melancholy into which she had seen the smile fade yesterday,--the linen where it lay was less white, a marble image had been less still. As Orient bent there her breath stirred the dark lock of hair on the brow, and the slight and airy motion of itself brought into forceful being all the awful immobility and silence of death.

“He does not breathe! His heart does not beat! Will he never open his eyes again?” she said. “O Reymund, Reymund, I love you!”

She bent nearer as she sighed the words, and her lips were sealed to his.

A quiver ran through all the frozen frame reposing there beside her, a pulse of warmth, perhaps, played in the hand hers clasped; the eyelids shook and lifted and unveiled the dark and woful eyes.

“You have seen my soul, Orient,” said Reymund. “Good by.”

The dark and woful eyes were veiled again. And this time Reymund’s soul was gone beyond recall.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

BY EDGAR ALLAN POE.

Son cœur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu’on le touche il rèsonne.
DE BERANGER.

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was, but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me,--upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain,--upon the bleak walls,--upon the vacant, eye-like windows,--upon a few rank sedges,--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees,--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium,--the bitter lapse into every-day life,--the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart,--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it,--I paused to think,--what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion that, while, beyond doubt, there _are_ combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate, its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge and the ghastly tree-stems and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country,--a letter from him,--which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The manuscript gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness,--of a mental disorder which oppressed him,--and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said,--it was the apparent _heart_ that went with his request,--which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons.

Although as boys we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other,--it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher,”--an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.

I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment--that of looking down within the tarn--had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition--for why should I not so term it?--served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy,--a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity,--an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees and the gray wall and the silent tarn,--a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

Shaking off from my spirit what _must_ have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine, tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me,--while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy,--while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this, I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation, and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.

Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality,--of the constrained effort of the _ennuyé_ man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance, convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity;--these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.

In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence,--an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy,--an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision,--that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation,--that leaden, self-balanced, and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.

It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy,--a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms, and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. “I shall perish,” said he, “I _must_ perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect,--in terror. In this unnerved, in this pitiable condition, I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.”