Bulwer Lytton / Quincey / Dickens Short Stories Collection

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-7519-0330-1
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 211 Seiten

A FRIEND of mine, who is a man of letters and a philosopher, said to me one day, as if between jest and earnest, "Fancy! since we last met I have discovered a haunted house in the midst of London." "Really haunted? and by what,-ghosts?" "Well, I can't answer these questions; all I know is this: six weeks ago I and my wife were in search of a furnished apartment. Passing a quiet street, we saw on the window of one of the houses a bill, 'Apartments Furnished.' The situation suited us; we entered the house, liked the rooms, engaged them by the week, and left them the third day. No power on earth could have reconciled my wife to stay longer; and I don't wonder at it."

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bulwer Lytton, Poe

Quincey, De

Dickens,

Lytton, Bulwer

Poe,

Leseproben

D’OUTRE MORT.

HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.

A MOUNTAIN intervale all velveted in green, and half the verdure overlaid with gold by broad rays of sunset falling level through the pass,—the hills, behind, a gray and gloomy encampment softened with wreaths of vapor and dim recesses of deepest purple, and here and there above the gaps a pale star trembling on the paler blue. In spite of the approaching night, there was a gay glad strength about the scene, so that all who saw it might have felt light at heart, as if the rocky rampart shut out the sorrows of the world and made the charmed valley an enchanted place.

They had been mowing in the intervale; half-formed haycocks, picturesquely piled along the meadows, loaded the air with heavy sweetness; in one, partly overthrown, a lounger lolled luxuriously, singing idly to himself that little Venetian song of Browning’s, to some tune delightful as the words:—

“ O, which were best, to roam or rest?
The land’s lap or the water’s breast?
To sleep on yellow millet-sheaves,
Or swim in lucid shallows, just

Eluding water-lily leaves,
An inch from Death’s black fingers thrust
To lock you, whom release he must;
Which life were best on summer eves?”

The perfumed wind blew softly over the singer, like a placid breath; the sense of gathering evening hung above him; he lay upon the billowy hay as if it were a cloud; he was a voluptuary in his pleasures; well for him if they were always as innocent.

A young girl approached the singer, swinging her hat as she came, and radiant in the low sunshine.

She was named Orient,—either because she seemed, with her golden locks, her fresh fair tints, like an impersonation of morning and the East, or because when she was born hope’s day-star rose again in her mother’s forlorn heart. Such a lovely yet half-fantastic creature was she, that you hardly believed in her existence when away from her.

“ What are you looking for, Orient?” said the lounger.

“ The fountain of youth,” answered her silvery tones. “It should be somewhere in this happy valley.”

“ You do not need it,” he replied after a lingering glance.

She stooped and extricated a long sweetbrier bough from the hay with which it had been bent but not cut down, and twisted it, still blossoming, round and round her head till it made a fragrant diadem of rosy stars.

“ Do not,” said Reymund. “Take it off; or I shall have to do as Voltaire did: erect my long, thin body and stand before you like a point of admiration!”

Orient did not reply; and, fulfilling his threat, he went on by her side to the old farm-house that had been turned into a summer hostelry for guests. More stars were beginning to steal forth in the tender firmament; the breeze blew down more freshly from the hills and brought the big dews and scattered starbeams with it; music was hushed, and all the world was still. It was summer evening, yet an unreal kind of summer, as summer might be in a distant dream, blown over by cool, awakening winds. Now and then Orient stopped to pick up a great butterfly that had fallen benumbed from its perch and lay it gently to rest among the leaves, without brushing a speck of dust from its freckled wings; after that her fingers worked in a vine by the way, and she pulled aside a tendril that kept a sleepy flower from shutting up its petals. As she did so, a little mother-bird upon her eggs stirred and briefly twittered out her secret to Orient’s ear. Reymund, who loitered in waiting for her, thought she seemed, as much as any of them, like a flower, a moth, a bird herself, a beautiful and almost dumb existence of nature.

He was not a man easily intimidated, or of unvaried experience; but the thin atmosphere of awe about this girl was something he had never penetrated; the ease with which he met another, toward her became impertinence; gay and careless with many, he felt that she was something apart, sacred as a passion-flower; he scarcely dared approach her lightly; when he spoke to her he crossed himself in his heart.

They had never met until a month ago, yet their address had been familiar almost from the first; on her side, through a large-eyed, childlike fearlessness; on his—he could not have answered why. He watched her as one watches a clear planet glow steadily from the soft, golden sky, but he seemed nevertheless to know all her characteristics without studying them,—he imagined that to one weary of trifle and artifice and the hollow way of the world, here was the rest divine. Yet beyond a point, he found this cool, remote being inaccessible,—as though there had been a gulf between them. He knew not how to call the blush to her cheek, the sparkle to her eye; if she had been some alien creature she might have been nearer,—to enrich her with human love was as fruitless an effort as scattering the pollen of a rose into the heart of a cold white lily. And yet, Reymund knew—as if through the same natural operations as those by which his pulse was made to beat, his breath to draw—that Orient’s soul needed his for its entireness; that his soul required hers, all as much as a star needed its atmosphere, a flower its fragrance, the earth itself its spheral roundness. It was not so much that he already loved her passionately, as that he felt himself lost without her; he had been in Orient’s presence, it seemed, all the time that he had ever lived; how could he then depart from it? If that which was a clod suddenly found itself a bed of blossom, how could it ever return again to dreary earthiness?

He watched her now approaching. Had any one said that she trailed lustre behind her as she walked, he would have answered that he had seen it. But to speak to her of any grace or charm or perfection that she possessed,—why, these things were herself, her identity, sacred and secret; as easily to some skyey messenger of solemn heaven commend his airy flight!

“ In what wonderful ways these mountains change their expression!” said Reymund, as she joined him again at last.

“ Yes,” she replied, “they are different beings every hour.”

“ A little while ago,” he continued, “they seemed like an army of giants sitting down to besiege the valley; now they are a wall between us and mankind; death cannot break through it, sickness cannot cross it.”

“ They are more alive than that,” said Orient. “This old sombre one moved aside just now to make room for the little alp laughing over his shoulder, with the rosy vapor streaming high on her face.”

“ Perhaps you hear what they are saying to one another, then?” he asked, half jestingly.

“ I often do.”

“ And you will translate?”

“ No. In the first place you would laugh; in the last place disbelieve.”

“ On my soul—no!”

“ I am not certain that you have a soul.”

“ Indeed? Is it so?” half sadly.

“ They say what the torrents rushing down by Chamouni say!”

“ Ah! And at other times?”

“ They talk of the beginning of the earth, and conjecture concerning the end of things.”

“ And do they take any notice of you? Nature always seems to me careless and indifferent.”

“ They invite me to come up and lie down on their great sides where the sun has lain all day before me. Yes, they always smile upon me.”

“ Do not go,—at least until the mamma and I go with you.”

“ I should not be afraid alone.”

No,—fear had never found the depths of those liquid, lucent eyes, he thought. “The mountains might be civil enough,” he rejoined, “and give you their purple berries to eat, their wild white brooks to drink; but I could not answer for the black bears and snakes.”

“ I think I could.”

“ And this, of course, is only what you interpret the hills to mean, sitting there in their grim conclave and affording us such a narrow coronal of sky?” asked Reymund, smiling.

“ I do not know,” she answered doubtfully. “I said things were real to me.”

“ There must have been those like you, who first saw and believed in fairies and all the goblin people,” he said, still smiling.

“ My father died before I was born,” said Orient. “Perhaps that gave me some lien upon the spiritual world.”

“ Then you see bogles as well as other things,—as well as the personalities of bud and bird and granite pile? Uncanny creature! What pleasure shall I take in meeting your glance when it rests also on a dead man behind me, and on the fetch of one about to join the innumerable caravan beside me? I must take my revenge normally and in kind,—if I die before you, you shall surely have a visitation from me. How should you like that?”

“ You would be just as welcome then as now,” she answered gravely.

“ An equivocal compliment. Nevertheless, I accept it as a challenge. Will you promise its counterpart?”

“ When I die,” said Orient,...