THE MONOMANIAC.
In some of my prior papers, I have had occasion to make some oblique references to that disease called pseudoblepsis imaginaria—in other words, a vision of objects not present. Cullen places it among local diseases, as one of a depraved action of the organs contributing to vision; "whereby, of course, he would disjoin it from those cases of madness where a depraved action of the brain itself produces the same effect. In this, Cullen displays his ordinary acuteness; for we see many instances where there is a fancied vision of objects not present, without insanity; and, indeed, the whole doctrine of spirits has latterly been founded on this distinction.[2] From the very intimate connection, however, which exists between the visual organs and the brain itself, it must always be a matter of great difficulty—if indeed, in many cases, it be not entirely impossible—to make the distinction available; for there are cases—such as that of the conscience-spectre, and those that generally depend upon thoughts and feelings of more than ordinary intensity—that seem to lie between the two extremes of merely diseased visual organs and diseased brains; and, in so far as my experience goes, I am free to say that I have seen more cases of imaginary visions of distant objects, resulting from some terrible excitement of the emotions, than from the better defined causes set forth by the medical writers. Among the passions and emotions, again, that in their undue influence over the sane condition of the mind,
are most likely to give rise to the diseased vision of phantasmata, I would be inclined to place that which usually exerts so much absorbing power over the young female heart. The cause lies on the surface. In the case of the passions—of anger, revenge, fear, and so forth—the feeling generally works itself out; and, in many cases, the object is so unpleasant that the mind seeks relief from it, and flies it; while, in the emotions of love, there is a morbid brooding over the cherished image that takes hold of the fancy; the object is called up by the spell of the passion placed before the mind's eye, and held there for hours, days, and years, till the image becomes almost a stationary impression, and is invested with all the attributes of a real presence. I do not feel that I would be justified in saying that I am able to substantiate the remark I have now made by many cases falling under my own observation; the examples of monomania in sane persons are not very often to be met with; and I have heard many of my professional brethren say, that they never experienced a single instance in all their practice.
The case I am now to detail, occurred within two miles of the town of ——. The patient was a lady, Mrs C——, an individual of a nervous, irritable temperament, and possessed of a glowing fancy, that, against her will, brought up by-past scenes with a distinctness that was painful to her. She had lately returned from India, whither she had accompanied her husband, whom she left buried in a deep, watery grave in the channel of the Mozambique. I had been attending her for a nervous ailment, which had shattered her frame terribly, while it increased the powers of her creative fancy, as well as the sensibility by which the mental images were invested with their chief powers over her. She suffered also from a tenderness in the retina, which forced her to shun the light. How this latter complaint was associated with the other, I cannot explain, unless upon the principle which regulates the connection between the sensibility of the eye and the heated brains of those who labour under inflammation of that organ. I was informed by her mother, Mrs L——, as well as her sister, that she had come from India a perfect wreck, both of mind and body; and, for a period of eighteen months afterwards, could scarcely be prevailed upon to see any of her friends—shutting herself up for whole days in her room, the windows of which were kept dark, to prevent the light, which operated like a sharp sting, from falling upon her irritable eyes. It was chiefly with a view to the removal of this opthalmic affection, that I was requested to visit her; and I could very soon perceive, that the visionary state of her mind was closely connected with the habit of dark seclusion to which she was necessitated to resort, for the purpose of avoiding the pain produced by the rays of the sun. On my first interview, I found her sitting alone in the darkened room, brooding over thoughts that seemed to exert a strong influence over her; but she soon joined me in a conversation which, diverging from the subject of her complaint, embraced topics that brought out the peculiarity of her mind—a strong enthusiastic power of portraying scenes of grief which she had witnessed, and which, as she proceeded, seemed to rise before her with almost the vividness of presence; yet, with her, judgment was as strong and healthy as that of any day-dreamer among the wide class of mute poets, of whom there are more in the world than of philosophers.
I could not detect properly her ailment, and resolved to question her mother alone.
"Did you not notice anything peculiar about my daughter?" she said.
"The love of a shaded room, resulting from an irritability in the organs of sight, is to me no great rarity," I replied.
"Though her fit has not been upon her," rejoined she, with an air of melancholy, "it is not an hour gone since her scream rung shrilly through this house, as if she had been in the hands of fiends; and, to be plain with you, I left you to discover yourself what may be too soon apparent. I fear for her mind, sir."
"I have seen no reason for the apprehension; but her scream, was it not bodily pain?"
"I could wish that it had been mere bodily pain; but it was not. You have not heard Isabella's history," she continued, in a low, whispering tone. "She has experienced what might have turned the brain of any one. I discovered something extraordinary in her about six months ago. One evening, when the candles were shaded for the relief of her eyes, and I and Maria were sitting by her, she stopped suddenly in the midst of our conversation, and sat gazing intensely at something between her and the wall; pointing out her finger, her mouth open, and scarcely drawing her breath. I was terror-struck; for the idea immediately rushed into my mind, that it was a symptom of insanity; but I had no time for thought—a scream burst from her, and she fell at my feet in a faint. When she recovered, she told us that she had seen, in the shaded light of the candle, which assumed the blue tinge of the moonlight, the figure of a dead body sitting upright in the waters, with the sailcloth in which he was committed to the deep wrapped around him, and his pale face directed towards her. At the recollection of the vision, she shuddered, would not recur to the subject again, but betrayed otherwise no wandering of the fancy. Several times since, the same object has presented itself to her; and, what is extraordinary, it is always when the candle is shaded; yet she exhibits the same judgment, and I could never detect the slightest indication of a defect in the workings of her mind. I sent for you to treat her eyes, and left it to you to see if you could discover any symptoms of a diseased mind."
"Was the object she thus supposes present to her, ever exposed in reality to the true waking sense?" said I, suspecting a case of monomania.
"Did she not tell you?" rejoined she. "Come."
And leading me again into her daughter's darkened apartment, she whispered something in her ear, retired, and left us together.
"Your mother informs, me, madam," said I, "that you have seen what exists not; and I am anxious, from professional reasons, to know from yourself whether I am to attribute it to the creative powers of an active fancy, or to an affection of the visual organs, that I have read more of than I have witnessed."
She started, and I saw I had touched a tender part—probably that connected with her own suspicions that her mother and sister deemed her insane.
"It was for this purpose, then, that you have been called to see me?" she replied, hastily. "It is well; I shall be tested by one who at least is not prejudiced. My mother and sister think that I am deranged. I need not tell you that I consider myself sane, although I confess that this illusion of the sense, to which I am subjected, makes me sometimes suspicious of myself. Will you listen to my story?"
I replied that I would; and thus she began:—
Experience, sir, is a world merely to those who live in it—it exists not—its laws cannot be communicated to the heart of youth; the transfusion of the blood of the aged into the veins of the young to produce wisdom, is not more vain than the displacing of the hopes of the young mind by the cold maxims of what man has felt, trembled to feel, and wished he could have anticipated, that he might have been prepared for it. Such has ever been, such is, such will ever be, the history of the sons and daughters of Adam. What but the changes into which I—still comparatively a young woman—have passed—not, it would almost seem, mutations of the same principle, but rather new states of existence—could have wrung from a heart, where hope should still have lighted her lamp, and illuminated my paths, these sentiments of a dearly purchased experience? When I and George Cunningham, my schoolfellow, my first and last lover, and subsequently my husband, passed those brilliant days of youth's sunshine among the green holms and shaggy dells of ——; following the same pursuits—conning the same lessons—indulging in the same dreams of future happiness, and training each other's hearts into a community of feeling and sentiment, till we seemed one being, actuated by the same living principle: in how happy a state of ignorance of those changes that awaited me in the world, did I exist? I would fall into the hackneyed strain of artificial fiction writing, were I to portray the pleasures of a companionship and love that had its beginning in the very first impulses of feeling; with a view to set off by contrast the subsequent events that awaited us, when our happiness should have been realized.
When a woman of sensibility says she loves a man, she has told, through a medium that works out the conditions of the responding powers of our common nature, the heart, more than all the eulogistic eloquence of the tongue could achieve, to show the estimate she forms of the qualities of the object of her affections; but when she adds that that love originated in the friendship of children, grew with the increase of the powers of mind and body, and entered as a part into every feeling that actuated the young hearts, she has expressed the terms of an endearment so pure, tender, exclusive, and lasting, that it transcends all the ordinary forms of the communion of spirits on earth. The attachment is different from all others—it stands by itself; and to endeavour to conceive its purity and force by any factitious mixture of friendship, and the ordinary endearments of limited time and favourable circumstances of meeting, would be as vain as all hypothetical investigation into the nature of feeling must ever be. I cannot tell when I first knew the young man whose name I have mentioned under an emotion that shakes my frame; the syllables were a part of my early lispings, and I cannot yet think that they are unconnected with a being that has now no local habitation upon earth. Our parents were intimate neighbours; and the woods and waters of ——, if their voices—sweeter than articulated intelligence—could imitate the accents of man, would tell best when they wooed us into that communion, which they cherished, and witnessed, with an apparent participation of our joy, to open into an early affection. The power of mutual objects of pleasure and interest, especially if they are a part of the lovely province of nature—the rural landscape, secluded and secreted from the eyes of all the world besides, with its dells and fountains, birds and flowers—in increasing the attachment of young hearts, has been often observed and described; but we felt it. These inanimate objects are generally, and were to us, not only a tie, but they shared a part of our love, as if in some mysterious way they had become connected with, and a part of us. The often imputed association of ideas is a poor and inadequate solution of this work of nature: it is the effect put for the cause; the common, boasted philosophy of man, who invents terms of familiar sound to explain secrets eternally hidden from him. If we who felt, as few have ever felt, the influence of these green, umbrageous shades—with their nut-trees, bushes, flowers, and gowany leas; their singing birds, and nests with speckled eggs; their half-concealed fountains of limpid water, and running streams, and beds of white pebbles—in nourishing and increasing our young loves, could not tell how or why they were invested with such power; the philosopher, I deem, may resign the task, and say, with a sigh, that it was nature, and nature alone, who did all this; and the secret will remain unexplained.
We enjoyed ten years of this intercourse—I calculate from the fifth to the fifteenth year of our youth—and every one of these years, as it evolved the ripening powers of our minds, so it strengthened the mingling affections of our hearts. We became lovers long before we knew the sanctions and rights, and duties of pledged faith; we were each other's by a troth, a thousand times spoken; exchanged and felt in the throbbing embrace, the burning sighs, and the eloquent looks, that were but the natural impulses of a feeling we rejoiced in, yet scarcely comprehended. My heart, recoiling from the thoughts of after years, luxuriates in the memory of these blissful hours; and, were not the theme exhausted a thousand times by the eloquence of rapt feeling, speaking with the tongue of inspiration, I could dwell on these early rejoicings of unsullied spirits for ever.
My dream was not scattered—it was only changed in its form and hues, when my youthful betrothed was removed from home, to go through a course of navigation to fit him for the service of the sea, to which the intentions of his father, and his own early wishes, led him. I could have doubted my existence sooner than the faith of his heart; and he was only gone to make those preparations for attaining a position in society that would enable him to realize those fond and bright prospects we had indulged in contemplating among the woods that resounded to pledges exchanged in the face of heaven. The first place of his destination was London, from whence, for a period of about three years, I heard from him regularly by letters, which breathed with an increased warmth the same sentiments we had repeated and interchanged so often during the long period of our prior intercourse. Some time after this, he sailed to India; then were my thoughts first tinged by the changing hues of solitude; and my hopes and fears bound to the wayward circumstances of a world which had as yet been to me a paradise.
I heard nothing from him for two long years after he left London. A portrayment of my thoughts during that period would be a thousand times more difficult than for the painter to seize and represent the changing hues of the gem that, thrown on a tropic strand, reflects the endless hues of the earth and sky. I trembled and hoped by turns but every idea and every feeling were so strongly mingled with reminiscences of former pleasures, the prospects of future happiness, the fears of a change in his affections, or of his death, that I could not pronounce my mind as being, at any given moment, aught but a medium of impressions that I could not seize or fix, so as to contemplate myself. All I can say is, that he was the presiding genius of every emotion with which my heart was influenced; and, to those who have loved, that may be sufficient to shew the utter devotion of every pulse of my being to the deified image enshrined within my bosom. Now came the period of the realizing of my dreams. George Cunninghame came back, and married me.
We had scarcely been two months married when my husband, whom I loved more and more every day, got, by the influence of powerful friends, the command of a large vessel—the Griffin—engaged in the trade to India. It was arranged that I should accompany him, that, as we had been associated from our earliest infancy, (our separation had been only that of the body, and interfered not with the union of the immaterial essence), we should still be together. In this resolution I rejoiced; and, though by nature a coward, my love overcame all my terrors of the great deep. The day was fixed for our departure. A lady passenger and two servants were to go with us to the Cape, from whose society I expected pleasure; and every preparation which love could suggest was made to render me happy. We left the Downs on a calm day of December, and went down the Channel with a rattling gale from the north. Life on board of an Indiaman has been a thousand times described; and, would to heaven I had nothing to detail but the ordinary conduct of civilized men! Our chief officer was one Crawley, and our second a person of the name of Buist—the only individual my husband had no confidence in being Hans Kreutz, the steward, a German, who was whispered to have been engaged as a maritime venatic, or pirate, in the West Indies: and, if any man's character might be detected in his countenance, this foreigner's disposition might have been read in lineaments marked by the graver of passion. Part of what I have now said may have been the result of after experience; yet I could perceive shadowings of evil at this time, which I had not the knowledge of human nature to enable me to turn to any account.
With a series of gentle breezes and fine weather, we came to the Cape, where Mrs Hardy and her two servants were put ashore. One of the servants had agreed to accompany me to Madras, and was to have come on board again, to join us, before we left Table Bay. Whether she had changed her mind, or been detained by some unforeseen cause, I know not, but the boat came off without her; and all the information that I could get was, that she was not to be found. I trembled to be left on board of a vessel without a female companion, and strongly insisted upon George to delay his departure until another effort should be made to endeavour to find a servant in Cape Town; but, a favourable wind having sprung up at that moment, Crawley remonstrated, in his peculiar mode of abject petitioning; and my husband, having himself seen the advantage of seizing the favourable opportunity for taking and accomplishing the passage of the Mozambique, we departed, under a stiff gale; and, in a short time, reached the middle of that famous Channel, where the fears of the seamen have been so often excited by the reputed cannibalism of the natives of Madagascar. At this time I was strangely beset by nightly visions of terror, which I could impute to no other cause than the stories that George had repeated to me of the wild character of these savages. During the day, but more especially during the blue, sulphurous, flame-coloured twilight of that region—I often fixed my eye on the long, dark, umbrageous coast—followed the ranges of receding heights—threaded the deep recesses of the valleys, that seemed to end in dark caves, and peopled every haunt with festive savages performing their unholy rites over a human victim, destined to form food for creatures bearing that external impress of God's finger which marks the lords of the creation. Those visions were always connected, in some way, with myself; and I could not banish the idea, which clung to me with a morbid power of adherence, that I might, alone and unprotected, be cast into some of these cimmerian recesses, and be subjected to the unutterable miseries of a fate a thousand times worse than death, and what might follow death, by the usages of of eaters of human beings. There was no cause for any such apprehensions; and I am now satisfied that these dark creations of my fancy were in some mysterious way connected with a disordered state of my physical economy; but I was not then aware of such predisposing causes of mental gloom, and still brooded over my imagined horrors, till I drove rest and sleep from my pillow, and disturbed my husband with my pictured images of a danger that he said was far removed from me. From him I got some support and relief; but the faces of the men I saw around me, and especially those of Crawley and Kreutz, seemed, to me, rather to reflect a corroboration of my fears, than to afford me encouragement and support. The grim visions retained their power over me; and, the wind having fallen off almost to a dead calm, I found myself fixed in the very midst of the scenes that thus nourished and perpetuated them. The depression of mind produced by these frightful day-dreams and nightmares, made me sickly and weak. I could scarcely take any food; every piece of flesh presented to me, reminded me of the feasts of the inhabitants of that dark, dismal island that lay stretching before me in the vapours of a tropical climate, like a land of enchantment called up by fiends from the great deep; the dyspeptic nausea of sickness was the very food of my gloomy thoughts; and the co-operative powers of mind and body tended to the increase of my misery, till I seemed a victim of confirmed hypochondria.
We were still fixed immovably in the same place: all motive powers seemed to have forsaken the elements—the sea was like a sheet of glass, the sails hung loose from the masts, and the men lay listless about, overcome with heat, and yawning in lethargy. It was impossible to keep me below. I required air to keep me breathing, and felt a strange melancholy relief from fixing my eyes on the very scene of my terrors. Every effort to occupy my mind was vain; and I lay, for hours at a time, with my eyes fixed on the shore, piercing the deep, wooded hollows, following the faint traces of the savages as they disappeared among the thick trees, and investing every naked demon with all the characteristics of the followers of the mysterious midnight rites in which I conceived they engaged when the hour of their orgies came. I often saw individuals—rendered gigantic by the magnifying medium of the thick vapour—come down to the beach, and fix their gaze on us for a time, and then pace back again to the wooded recesses. Sometimes, when unable to sleep, I crept up from the cabin, and sat and surveyed the silent scene around me—the hazy moon, throwing her thick beams over the calm sea—the dark shadows of unknown birds sailing slowly through the air, and uttering at intervals sounds I had never heard before—the fires of the inhabitants among the trees on the coast, that sent up a long column of red light through the atmosphere, and exhibited the flitting bodies of the naked beings as they danced round the objects of their rites. It is impossible for me, by any language of which I have the power, to convey an adequate conception of my feelings during these hours. They were realities to me; and, therefore, whatever may be said against fanciful creations, I have a right to claim attention to states of the mind and feelings that belong to our nature in certain positions. At a late hour one night, I was engaged in those gloomy watchings and reveries, when Kreutz came to me, and said the captain had been taken suddenly ill. I turned my eyes from the scene along the shore I was surveying, and fixed them for a moment on his face, where the light of the moon sat in deep contrast with the long bushy hair that flowed round his temples. A shudder—that might have been accounted for from the state of my mind and the nature of the communication he had made to me, but which I instinctively attributed, at the time, to the expression of his face—passed over me, and, starting up, I hurried into the cabin off the cuddy, where I found George under the grasp of relentless spasms of the chest and stomach. He was stretched along on the floor, grasping the carpet, which he had wound up into a coil, and vomiting violently into a bason which he had hurriedly seized before he fell.
'Good God, Isabella!' he exclaimed, 'what is this? I am dying. That villain Cr'——
And, whether from weakness or prudence, he stopped, with the guttural sound of these two letters, Cr, which applied equally to Crawley as to Kreutz, and left me in doubt which of them he meant. At this moment Buist the mate entered the cabin; and my agitation and the necessity of affording relief to the sufferer, took my mind off the fearful subject hinted at by the broken sentence I had heard. With the assistance of Buist, I got him placed on the bed. There was no doctor on board, and I was left to the suggestions of my own mind, for adopting means to save him. These were applied, but without imparting any relief. The painful symptoms continued, and he got every moment worse. Neither Crawley nor Kreutz appeared; and when Buist went out to bring what was deemed necessary for the patient, I hung over him, and asked him what he conceived to have been the cause of his illness; but my question startled him—he looked up wildly in my face; his mind was directed towards heaven; and the means of salvation through the redeeming influence of a believed divinity of Him who died on the cross, was the subject alone on which he would speak. The scene, at this moment, around me was extraordinary, and, though I cannot say I had any distinct perception of the individual circumstances that combined to make up the sum of my horrors, I can now see, as through a dark medium, the co-operating elements. There was no candle in the cabin; the light of the moon through the windows filling the apartment with a blue glare, and tinging his pallid face with its hues. My mind, wrought up by the dreamy visions I had indulged in previously, and labouring under a disease which imparted to every feeling its own eliminated gloom, saw even the darkest circumstances of my condition in a false and unnatural aspect. The scenes of our youth and early love; the impressions of the religious sentiments he was muttering in broken snatches; the view of his approaching death; the dark means by which it was accomplished; my condition after he should die, in the power of men I feared; the orgies of the natives I had been contemplating; the deep grave, so fearful in its dead calmness; and the monsters that revelled in it, to which he would be consigned—all flitted through my brain; but with such rapidity—driving out, by short energies, the more engrossing thoughts concerned in the manner of his recovery—that I could not particularize them, while I drew, by some synthetic process of the mind, their general attributes, and thus increased the terror of the scene.
Two hours passed, and every moment made it more apparent that my husband was posting to death. There was no sound heard throughout the ship except the dull tread of the watch; and, at intervals, the whispers of Crawley, as he communed stealthily with Buist, who went out of the cabin repeatedly, to carry intelligence of the state of the sufferer. For about three quarters of an hour he had been raving wildly. The detached words he uttered raised, by their electric power, the working of my fancy which filled up, by a train of thoughts scarcely more within the province of reason, the chain of his wandering ideas. No connected discourse on the subject of his illness, though mixed up with all the reminiscences of an affection that had lasted since the period of infancy, or the prospects that awaited me in the unprecedented position in which I was about to be thrown, could have distracted me in the manner effected by these insulated vocables, wrung by madness from expiring life and reason. They ring in my ears even yet, when the beams of the moon shine through the casements; and, even now, I think I see that dimly lighted cabin, and my husband lying before me in the agonies of death. I became, as if by some secret sympathy, as much deranged as himself. As I watched him, I cast rapid looks around me—out upon the still deep, in the direction of the fearful island—upon the articles of domestic use lying in confusion, and exhibiting dimly-illuminated sides and dark shades. It seemed to me some frightful dream; and, when I turned my eyes again on the pale face which had been the object of my excited fancy for so many years, saw the struggles of expiring nature, and heard the wild accents that still came from his parched lips, I screamed, and tore my hair in handfuls from my head. In that condition, I saw him die; and the increase of my frenzy, produced by that consummation of all evils, made me rush out, and forward to the side of the ship. I felt all the stinging madness of the resolution to die—to fly from the man who, I feared, had murdered him—to escape from that island of cannibals, where I thought I would be left by my relentless foes, by plunging into the deep, when Crawley, who had heard of his demise, seized me, and dragged me back.
This paroxysm was succeeded by a kind of stupor that seized my whole mind and body. I sat down on a cot in the side of the cabin, and saw Kreutz bring in a light. The glare of it startled me; but it was only as a vision that could not awake the sleeper. They proceeded to lay out my husband on a table. They undressed him—for his clothes were still on; and I saw them take a large sheet, wrap it round him, and pin it firmly at all the folds. When their labours were finished, they took each a large portion of brandy, and Crawley came forward and offered me a portion. I had no power to push it from me. He held it to my mouth; but my lips were motionless; and, tossing it off himself, he and the others went out of the cabin. No precaution was taken to keep me within; but the frenzy that had previously impelled me to self-destruction had subsided, and I shuddered at what a few moments before appeared to me to be a source of relief. I sat for hours in the position in which they left me, gazing upon the dead body before me, but without the energy to rise and look at the features of him who had formed the object of my earliest devotions, the subject of all my fondest dreams of early youth and matured womanhood, now lying there lifeless. I had scarcely, during that period, consciousness of any object, but of a long, white figure extended on the table, with the moonlight reflected from it. The stupor left me—I cannot tell at what hour; and the first movement of living energy in my brain was a stinging impulse to rush forward and seize the body. I obeyed it, without a power to resist; and, tearing off the folds, laid bare the face, which was as placid as I had ever seen it, when, watching over him, I used to steal a look of him, during the hours of night, as he slept by my side, in the moonlight that stole through the cabin-window. In my agony, I clung to him—kissed the cold lips—called out 'George! George!'—threw the folds of the sheet over the face—again looked round me for some one to comfort me—felt the consciousness of my perilous position—and, as a kind of refuge from the despair that met me on every hand, withdrew again the folds, and acted over again the frenzied parts of a madness that mocked the miseries of the inmates of an asylum.
I must have exhausted myself by the excitement into which I was thrown; for, some time afterwards, I found myself lying upon the cot, and wakening again to a consciousness of all the ills that surrounded me. The light of the moon had given place to the dull beams of earliest dawn, which were only sufficient to shew me the extended figure on the table, and the confusion into which the furniture of the cabin was thrown. I heard the sounds of several footsteps in the cuddy. Sounds of voices struck my ear; and, rising up, I crawled forward to a situation where I could hear the communings from which my fate might be known.
'When the wind starts,' said Crawley—'it will be from the north—we should turn and make all speed for Rio, where we may dispose of the cargo, and then run the vessel to the West Indies. How do the men feel disposed, Kreutz—all braced and steady?'
'All but Wingate and Ryder, who are watched by the others,' replied the German. 'These dogs would mutiny, ha! ha!—mein gut friend Buist is against their valking the plank; but they must either come in or go out. Teufel! no mutineers aboard the Griffin.'
'Right, Hans,' said Crawley. 'Get Murdoch to knock together the boards—we will bury him to-morrow; but the wife, man, what is to be done with her?'
'Put her ashore, to be sure,' responded Kreutz. 'There is not von difficulty there. The natives will be glad of her, and we want her not. If this calm were gone, all would be gut and recht. That is the von thing only that troubles me.'
'If there is no wind,' said Crawley, 'to carry us out of the channel, there is none to bring any one to us.'
At this moment, I thought they heard some movements, produced by a nervous trembling that came over me, and forced me to hold by a chair. Some whisperings followed. Kreutz went away, and Crawley entered. I had just time to retreat to the other side of the body of my husband. His manner was now that which was natural to him—harsh and repulsive. He ordered me peremptorily to the lower cabin. I had no power to resist, or even to speak; but I saw, in the order, the eternal separation of me and George; and, rushing forward, I withdrew the covering from his face, to take the last look—to imprint the last kiss on his cold lips. The act operated like the stirrings of conscience on the cowardly man of blood. His averted eye glanced for an instant on the body, and, seizing the coverlet, he wrapped up the countenance, and, taking me by the arm, hurried me down to the apartment set apart for passengers. This cabin was darker than the captain's, from some of the windows having been changed into dead lights; and I considered myself pent up in a dungeon. Hitherto my feelings had been, in a great measure, the result of existing moving circumstances; but now I was left to reflection, in so far as that act of the mind could be concerned in the attempt to picture the extremities of a fate that seemed as unavoidable as unparalleled. The diseased visions that had distracted me before any real evil occurred, were changed, from their dreamy, shadowy character, to realities. The lengthened trains of images that were required to satisfy the cravings of hypochondria, fled; and, in their place, there was one general, overwhelming fear, that seemed to engross all my thinking energies, and left no power to particularize the visions of danger that awaited me among the savages. There was only one presiding, prevailing idea that served as the rallying point of my terrors; and that was the dead body of George, with the white sheet in which he was swathed, and the peculiarly-formed oaken table on which he was placed, and at which we used to dine upon all the dainties to be found on board an Indiaman. It was the steadfastness of this idea that excluded the images of the fearful deep recesses—the Bacchanalian orgies of the savages—their anthropophagous rites, their midnight revels; but retained, as it were, hanging round it, the fear they had engendered, as a more complex feeling. After Crawley had left me, I had thrown myself down on a couch—an act of which I retained no consciousness; for afterwards, when daylight began to break in through the only window that was not closed up, I started to my feet, and did not know, for some time, that I was separated from the corpse; the vision of which had, during the interval, been so vivid, that it combined the conditions of figure and locality as perfectly as if the object had been before me.
On the deck I now heard the sound of several loud voices, and afterwards a scuffle, accompanied with the tramping of feet. There was then silence for a time; but my ears were stung, on a sudden, by a scream, succeeded by a plash, as if some one had been precipitated into the sea. A gurgling noise, as if the individual were drowning, followed; and the suspicion rushed into my mind, that they had made an example (to terrify the others) of one of the men who had rebelled against the authority of the mutineers. A silence, as deep as that of death, succeeded, which lasted about an hour, at the end of which period the sound of the saw and hammer were distinctly heard. I recollected the orders of Crawley, for Murdoch, the carpenter, to prepare George's coffin. The knocking continued for a considerable time, and produced such an effect upon me that the ideas, which had been, as it were, chained up by the freezing influence of the prevailing vision of the extended and rolled-up body, broke away and careered through my mind with the velocity, unconnectedness, and intensity, that belong to certain states of excited mania. Images of the past and the future were mixed up in confusion; and every succeeding thought stung me with increased pain, till the idea of suicide again suggested itself, bringing in its train that which destroyed it—the terror of an avenging God, who will pass judgment on the takers of their own lives. I started, and sought forgiveness; and, for the first time under this agony, felt the soft action of the balm of a confided trust in Him who has mercy in endless stores for the good, but who poured his fury even upon the house of Israel, for the blood they shed upon the land. But, must I confess it, the relief I felt from this high source was immediately again lost in the cold shiverings of instinctive fear, as I heard the knocking cease, knew the coffin was finished, and perceived, from the sounds in the cabin off the cuddy, that they were putting the body into the rudely constructed box, with a view of burying him in the deep sea.
Some indescribable emotion, at this time, forced me towards the cabin window, although the sight of the water was frightful to me. It was still and calm as ever, and the light was already sufficient to enable me to see far down in its green recesses. I could not take my eye from it. There were numerous creatures swimming about in it, some of which I had got described to me, but many of them I had never seen before. They seemed more hideous to me now than they had ever appeared when, on former occasions, I sat and watched their motions. The large bull-mouthed shark was there, rolling his huge body in apparent lethargy, and turning up his white belly in grim playfulness, as if in mockery of my misery. It had a charm about its truculent savageness that riveted my attention, while it shook my frame. It was connected in my mind with the fate of George's body, which, every moment, I expected to hear plash in the sea, in the midst of that shoal of creatures with strange forms and ravenous maws. An exacerbation of these sickly feelings made me lift my eyes; but it was only to fix them on the not less fearful island that lay before in the far distance, and now, in the fogs of the morning, through which the red sun struggled to send his beams, appeared a huge mass of inspissated vapour lying motionless on the surface of the sea. The very indistinctness of this hazy vision stimulated my fancy to its former morbid activity, and I saw again the mystic wooded ravines, sacred to the rights of cannibalism, of which I myself was doomed to be the object.
From this dream I was roused by the loud tread of men's feet over my head, as if the individuals were bearing a load that increased the heaviness of their steps. I was at no loss for the cause—they were carrying the coffin with the body in it to midship, where it was to be let down into its watery grave. In a short time afterwards, a gurgling of the waters met my ear, and, struggling to the foot of the companion ladder, I would have rushed upon deck if my strength would have permitted; but I fell upon the steps, and, lying there, heard a cry from some of them. I gathered, from the detached words I heard, that the bottom of the coffin had given way, from its insufficiency and the weight that had been put in it to make it sink; and that the body had gone down, while the chest swam on the surface. Several feet were now heard rapidly in motion, and the voice of Kreutz, who was running aft, fell on my ear.
'Teufel!' I heard him say, 'we shall have that grim corpse when the gallenblase—ha!—ha!—the gall bladder has burst, rising like von geist from the bottom of the deep sea, and staring at us. Hell take the stumper, Murdoch!'
These words, uttered by the German, were followed by some expression from Crawley, no part of which I could make out, except the oaths directed against the carpenter. The sounds died away; but I heard enough to satisfy me of the fact that George's body had been consigned to the deep with only the shroud to defend it against the attacks of the ravenous creatures I had been contemplating. My mind was again forced, and with increased energy, into the train of gloomy meditations suggested by what I had heard; and so vivid were the visions that obeyed the excited powers of my imagination, that I forgot, as I lay brooding over them on the sofa to which I had staggered, the danger that next awaited myself. I could not now look at the sea, for I feared to meet the fact which would add probation to my imaginations—that the animals I had seen there had disappeared to crowd round the prey that had been given to them. Yet the actual vision of that dear form, mutilated, torn, and devoured, could not, I am satisfied, have produced more insufferable agony, than accompanied and resulted from the diseased imaginings in which my fancy was engaged. The process that I pictured going on in the bottom of the sea, was coloured by hues so sickly, and attended by circumstances so distorted and grim, that all natural appearances, however harrowing, must have fallen short of the power they exercised over me. The positions in which I imagined him to be placed, were varied in a greater degree than ever I had seen the human body; the expressions of the countenance, though fixed by death, and not likely to be changed, became as Protean as the changing postures of the limbs; and the marine monsters that gambolled or fought around him for the prize, were invested with forms, colours, and attributes, of a kind not limited to what I had ever seen in the deep. The only idea that seemed to remain stationary, and not liable to the mutations into which all the others were every moment gliding, was the colour of the body, which was that of the green medium in which he lay. That sickly hue pervaded all parts; and even the dark or light colours of the inhabitants of the deep, partook, more or less, of the prevailing tint. It seemed to be the universal of all particulars, as time or space is the medium or condition of existence of all thought and matter; I felt the impossibility of any idea being true that did not partake of it; and, so strongly was the feeling of the ex-natural that accompanied it, that even now I cannot look at anything green without shuddering.
I cannot tell how long I was under the dominion of this train of thought. I was, in a manner, torn from it by the entrance of Kreutz with some food for me. He growled out a few words of mixed German and English, and left it on the table. It is needless to say that I could eat nothing. Even before these misfortunes overtook me, my appetite had left me; but now I loathed all edibles. After having been roused from the train of morbid imaginings in which I had been engaged, and which I clung to as if they imparted to me some unnatural satisfaction, I felt (and it is a curious fact) a recoiling disinclination to resume the grim subject, and even resorted to some imbecile and despairing efforts to avoid it. It was not that I expected any relief from forbearing: every other subject that could be suggested by my position was equally fraught with tears and pains; but that having, as I now suppose, exhausted, for the time, the diseased workings, the view of an effort to call up again the thoughts that had been as it were supplied by disease, penetrated me with a sensation beyond the powers of endurance. For two or three hours afterwards, my attention was directed to the proceedings upon deck; but I could hear little beyond indistinct mutterings, and occasional sounds of the treading of feet over me. The calm, which had lasted for many days, still continued; and, until a wind sprung up, no effort could be made by the mutineers to retrace their progress through the channel, and proceed to their projected destination. At last the shades of night began to fall; exhausted nature claimed some relief from her sufferings; but the drowsiness that overcame me, was only a medium of a new series of imaginings still more grotesque and unnatural than those that had haunted me during the day.
When the morning dawned, I expected every moment the execution of the purpose I had heard declared by Crawley, to put me ashore on the island; and, during moments of more rational reflection, I could not account for my not having been disposed of in this way on the previous day. The terrors of that destiny were as strong upon me as ever; but, I must confess, that the view of real evil, almost unprecedented, as it seemed, in its extent and peculiarity, produced feelings entirely different from what resulted from the prior musings of my hypochondriac fancy: I would not be believed were I to say that the expected reality was not much more painful than the sickly vision. The miseries were of different kinds, proceeding from different causes, operating upon a mind in two different states. There was something in my own power. I was not justified in committing suicide as a mode of escape from an affliction that God might have seen meet to put upon me; but all my reasonings on this subject fled before the view of this next calamity that awaited me. An extraordinary thought seized me, that I was not bound to hold life, when, through my own body and sensibilities, God's laws were to be overturned, and my sufferings were to be made a shame in the face of heaven. I secreted a knife in my bosom, and sat in silent expectation of the issue. I was again supplied with meat; but, on this occasion, Crawley brought it to me—and here began a new evil. He resumed, partially, his former dastardly sneaking manner; made love to me; offered me the honour of being still a captain's wife, and accompanied the offer with, obliquely-hinted threats of a due consequence of my rejection of his suit. I spurned him; but I cannot dwell on the details of this proceeding. His suit was persisted in for two or three days, when, roused to madness, he told me, that next day, if I consented not, I would be wedded to the natives of Madagascar. I traced the outline of the knife through the covering of my bosom, and defied him.
The next night was clear, and somewhat chill—indications of a cessation of the calm. The rudeness of Crawley had had the effect of keeping my mind from falling into the grasp of the demon of diseased fantasy; but, now my fate was fixed, I had no more to fear from him; and towards midnight, I fell again into the train of imaginings that had formerly haunted me. I had opened the cabin window for air—having felt a suffocating oppression of the chest during the day, proceeding from the extreme heat and the confined apartment. My eyes were again fixed in the direction of the island. I could see the dark shade of the land lying upon the gilded waters. All was still; my thoughts sought again the deep—the grave of George, the fancied condition of his body; and, as my ideas diverged to the calm scene around, it appeared to me as if all nature were dead, and that my own pulsations were the only living movements on earth. Lights now began to move along the shore, and then a fire blazed up into the firmament. The bodies of the savages flitted before it; I had seen the same appearances before; but I was now connected with these orgies in a more real manner than formerly. They ceased, and my mind again sought the recesses of the green deep, where all I loved on earth lay engulfed. My eye at times wandered over the surface of the waters; but I feared to look downwards into their bosom. My attention was suddenly fixed by an object in the sea. I put up my hands and rubbed my eyes. Was I deceived by a fancy? No! a dead body was there, not four yards distant from where I sat. It was that of my husband, rolled up in the same white sheet in which I had seen him extended on the oak table, and with his head raised somewhat above the surface, by the weights placed in the shroud having, as I afterwards thought, descended to the feet. A part of the sewing had been torn off the head, which was bare—the face was openly exposed to me, the moon shone upon it; I could perceive the very features, and even the lustreless eyes, that seemed fixed on the ship. There was not a breath of wind to ruffle the surface of the sea, which shone with a blue lustre in the light of the moon; and the body was as motionless as if it had been fixed on the earth. I have described, hitherto, what actually befell me, with the various states of my mind under extraordinary circumstances of pain and depression. My fancies belonged as much to nature as the facts which excited and nourished them, and must be believed by those who have studied the workings of the mind, even unconnected with the principles and facts of pathology. This was, however, no vision of the fancy, but a reality resulting from well-known physical laws. I sat, fixed immovably, at the window, and felt no more power of receding from it, than I formerly had of resigning my musings. My eyes were fixed upon that countenance which had been the beau ideal of love's idolatry—the fairest thing on earth, and the archetype of my dreams of heaven. I could not fly from it, horrible as it seemed in its blue glare and ghastly expression. I loved it while it shocked me; and all my powers of thinking were bound up in freezing terror. I felt the hair on my head move as the shrivelling skin became corrugated over my temples. That, and the occasional throbbings of my heart, were the only motions of any part of my being; but the body I gazed at seemed to be as immovable, and its eyes seemed not less steadfastly fixed on me than mine were on it.
How long I sat in this position I know not. There was no internal impulse that moved me to desist. I could, I thought, have looked for ever. Certain fearful objects possess a charm over the mind—and this was one of them; but I have sometimes thought that the power lay in producing the negative state of mental paralysis; for the instant my attention was called to a strange noise upon the deck, I was suddenly recalled to a natural sense of the fear it inspired. The sounds I heard were a mixture of exclamations and objections, pronounced in tones of fear and anger. I turned away my face from the dead body, with a strong feeling of repugnance to contemplate it again; and, groping my way to the companion-ladder, listened to what was going on above. Kreutz and Crawley were in communication.
'There is more than chance in that frightful appearance,' I heard Crawley say. 'And this calm too—it will never end. God have mercy on us! Is there no man that will undertake to sink the body? I cannot stand the gaze of these white balls. See! the face is directed towards me; and yet I did not do the deed, though I authorized it. Will no one save me from the glare of the grim avenger? I will give twenty gold pieces to the man who will remove it to the deep. Go forward, Kreutz, and try if you can prevail upon a bold heart to undertake the task!'
'Pho, man!' responded the German—'all von phantasy—anybody would have risen in the same way—Teufel! I heed it not von peterpfenning. But the men are alarmed, and begin to say that the captain has not got fair play. Hush! seize your degen. There is von commotion before the mast.'
I now heard a tumult in the fore part of the vessel and began to suspect that the crew had been led to believe that George had died a natural death, and had been by some means prevailed upon to work the vessel, when the wind rose in another direction, under the command of Crawley. The noise increased, and with it the fears of the cowardly villain whose conscience had been awakened by such strange means. Kreutz had left him to try to pacify the men; and the tones of his terror-struck voice continued to murmur around.
'There it still is,' he groaned, as his attention seemed to be divided between the sight he contemplated and the tumult, 'gazing steadfastly with these lack-lustre eyes for revenge. It is on me they are fixed—immovably fixed—as a victim which the spirit that floats over the body in that dead light of the moon demands, and will get. There is a God above in that blue firmament, who sees all things. I am lost. These men obey the call of a power that chooses that grim apparition as its instrument to call down destruction on my head. Ha! Kreutz has no influence here; the avengers are prepared.'
A step now came rapidly forward, and Kreutz's voice was again heard.
'If you will not try to quell them,' said he, 'all is lost. They swear the captain has been murdered, and that verdamt traitor Buist heads them on. Donner! shall Hans Kreutz die like one muzzled dog? On with degen in hand, and it may not be too late! We have friends among the caitiffs; strike down the first man; his blut will terrify them more than that staring geist, which is, after all, only von natural body, with no more spirit in it than the bones of my grandmutter. Frisch! frisch! auf, man! come, come, dash in and strike the first mutineer!'
The cowardly spirit of Crawley was acted upon by the stern German; for I heard him cry out—
'Hold there, men! what means this tumult—'sdeath?'
The rest of his words were drowned by the noise; but I heard the sounds of his and Kreutz's feet as they rushed forward. In an instant, the sound like that of a man falling prostrate on the deck, met my ear; and then there rose a yell that rung through every cranny of the ship. All seemed engaged in a desperate struggle. The words 'Revenge for our captain!' often rose high above all the other sounds. The clanging of many daggers followed; several bodies fell with a crash upon the deck, and loud groans, as if from persons in the agonies of death, were mixed with the cries of those who were struggling for victory. The tramping and confusion increased, till all distinct sound seemed lost in a general uproar. I got alarmed, and left my station at the foot of the companion-ladder; but I knew not whither to fly. I took again my seat at the window, as if I felt that there was an opening for me from which I might fly from the fearful scene. My agitation had banished from my mind for an instant the vision of the body; and I started again with increased fear as my eyes fell upon the corpse that had apparently been the cause of the uproar. It was still there, as motionless as before; yet, I thought, still nearer to me. I saw the features still more distinctly than ever, and found my mind again chained down by the charm it threw over me. The sounds for a time seemed to come upon my ear from a far, far distance, or like those heard in a dream; and like a dreamer, too, I struggled to get away from a vision that I at once loved and trembled at. The noises on deck seemed as those of the world, and the object before me the creation of the fancy that bound my soul, but left the sense of hearing open to living sounds. While in this state, I was suddenly roused by a rush of several men into the cabin; they held daggers in their hands and their countenances were besmeared with blood. I looked at them, under the impression that they were my enemies, and that the cause of Crawley had triumphed; but I was soon undeceived—they told me that both he and Kreutz lay dead upon the deck, and that the victorious party were determined to complete the voyage and take the ship to Madras. The removal of one evil from a mind borne down by the weight of many, only leaves a greater power of susceptibility of the pain of what remains. The moment I heard of my own personal safety, I recurred again to the subject that affected me more deeply than even the fears of being consigned to the natives of the island—the dead body of George was still in the waters. The men understood and appreciated my sufferings. I again went to the cabin window, and, pointing to the corpse, implored Buist, who was present, to get it taken up and buried. He replied, that that had already been agreed upon, and orders were given to that effect. Several of the men volunteered of themselves to assist. A boat was put out, and I watched the solemn process. I saw them drag up the body from the sea, and would have flown to the deck to embrace once more the dearest object of my earthly affections; but I was restrained from motives of humanity. I had reason to suppose that it had been dreadfully mutilated, and that was the reason why I was saved the pain of the sad sight. That same evening it was consigned again to the deep; and with it sunk the bodies of his murderers, Crawley and Kreutz.
Next day, a breeze sprang up, and bore us away from that fatal place. My eyes were fixed on it till I could see no longer any traces of that island which had caused me so many fears. In a short time, we arrived in India, where I remained about two months, and returned again with the Griffin to Britain.
"Now, sir," she continued, "all these things are in the course of man's doings in this strange world. It is also very natural that I should think of him. But a more dreadful effect has followed. I shudder when I think of it."
She stopped and looked at me, as if she were afraid to touch upon the subject of the visual illusion. I told her that I understood the cause of her fears; and having questioned her, I satisfied myself from her answers that I had at last discovered a case of true monomania, in which the patient conceived that she saw, with the same distinctness as when she looked from the cabin window of the Griffin the corpse of her husband swimming in the sea, with the head and chest above the waters, surrounded with the same blue moonlight, and every minute circumstance attending the real presence.
I meditated a cure; but I frankly confess that it was my anxious wish to witness her under the influence of the fit; and, with that view, I purposed waiting upon her repeatedly in the evenings, when, under the shaded light of the candle, it generally came over her. I was baffled in this for several weeks, chiefly, I presume, from the circumstance of my presence operating as an engagement of her mind; but one evening when I was sitting with her mother in another room, the sister came suddenly, and beckoned me into that occupied by my patient. The door was opened quietly and, on looking in, I saw, for the first time, a vision-struck victim of this extraordinary disease. She sat as if under a spell, her arms extended, her eyes fixed on the imaginary object, and every sense bound up in that which contemplated the spectre vision. The fit ended with a loud scream; she fell back in her chair, crying wildly—"George!—George!" and lay, for a minute or two, apparently insensible.
I continued my study of this extraordinary case for a considerable period; and, while I administered to her relief, I got her to explain to me some things which may be of use to our profession. I need not say that I was able to penetrate the dark secret of the seat of either the pathology or the metaphysique of the disease. That it was connected with the irritability of her nerves, and the affection of the eyes, there can be little doubt; because, as she mended in health, the fits diminished in number, and latterly went off. I may, however, state that, from all I could learn from her, the fit was something of the nature of a dream—all the objects around her, at the time, being as much unnoticed as if they existed not; and although she was possessed with an absolute conviction that the body of her husband was actually at the time present, it was precisely that kind of conviction that we feel in a vivid dream.