Capítulo 21 de 23

BERENICE

Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas

aliquar tulum fore levatas.—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 fail 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 the 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 idées. _Des

idées!—ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! Des

idées!—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.