“Let us leave her,” said the good pastor, “to the care of her attendant; do not continue to meet her gaze your presence may increase, but cannot allay her malady: go up to your bed and rest.”
He retired as he spoke; and Owen, in compliance with his wish, ascended the ruinous stair which led to his chamber, after he had beheld Ruth Tudor quietly place herself in her seat at the open coffin’s head. The room to which he mounted was not of the most cheering aspect, yet he felt that he had often slept soundly in a worse. It was a gloomy unfinished chamber, and the wind was whistling coldly and drearily through the uncovered rafters above his head. Like many of the cottages in that part of the country, it appeared to have grown old and ruinous before it had been finished; for the flooring was so crazy as scarcely to support the huge wooden bedstead, and in many instances the boards were entirely separated from each other, and in the centre, time, or the rot, had so completely devoured the larger half of one, that through the gaping aperture Owen had an entire command of the room and the party below, looking down immediately above the coffin. Ruth was in the same attitude as when he left her, and the servant girl was dozing by her side. Every thing being perfectly tranquil, Owen threw himself upon his hard couch, and endeavoured to compose himself to rest for the night, but this had become a task, and one of no easy nature to surmount; his thoughts still wandered to the events of the day, and he felt there was some strange connexion between the scene he had just witnessed, and the darker one of the secret cave. He was an imaginative man, and of a quick and feverish temperament, and he thought of Ruth Tudor’s ravings, and the wretched skeleton of the rock, till he had worked out in his brain the chain of events that linked one consequence with the other: he grew restless and wretched, and amidst the tossings of impatient anxiety, fatigue overpowered him, and he sunk into a perturbed and heated sleep. His slumber was broken by dreams that might well be the shadows of his waking reveries. He was alone (as in reality) upon his humble bed, when imagination brought to his ear the sound of many voices again singing the slow and monotonous psalm; it was interrupted by the outcries of some unseen things who attempted to enter his chamber, and, amid yells of fear and execrations of anger, bade him “Arise, and come forth, and aid:” then the coffined form which slept so quietly below, stood by his side, and in beseeching accents, bade him “Arise and save her.” In his sleep he attempted to spring up, but a horrid fear restrained him, a fear that he should be too late; then he crouched like a coward beneath his coverings, to hide from the reproaches of the spectre, while shouts of laughter and shrieks of agony were poured like a tempest around him: he sprung from his bed and awoke.
It was some moments ere he could recover recollection, or shake off the horror which had seized upon his soul. He listened, and with infinite satisfaction observed an unbroken silence throughout the house. He smiled at his own terrors, attributed them to the events of the day, or the presence of a corse, and determined not to look down into the lower room till he should be summoned thither in the morning. He walked to the casement, and looked abroad to the night; the clouds were many, black, and lowering, and the face of the sky looked angrily at the wind, and glared portentously upon the earth; the sleet was still falling; distant thunder announced the approach or departure of a storm, and Owen marked the clouds coming from afar towards him, laden with the rapid and destructive lightning: he shut the casement and returned towards his bed; but the light from below attracted his eye, and he could not pass the aperture without taking one glance at the party.
They were in the same attitude in which he had left them; the servant was sleeping, but Ruth was earnestly gazing on the lower end of the room upon something, without the sight of Owen; his attention was next fixed upon the corpse, and he thought he had never seen any living thing so lovely; and so calm was the aspect of her last repose, that Meredith thought it more resembled a temporary suspension of the faculties, than the eternal stupor of death: her features were pale, but not distorted, and there was none of the livid hue of death in her beautiful mouth and lips; but the flowers in her hand gave stronger demonstration of the presence of the power, before whose potency their little strength was fading; drooping with a mortal sickness, they bowed down their heads in submission, as one by one they dropped from her pale and perishing fingers. Owen gazed, till he thought he saw the grasp of her hand relax, and a convulsive smile pass over her cold and rigid features; he looked again; the eye-lids shook and vibrated like the string of some fine-strung instrument; the hair rose, and the head cloth moved: he started up ashamed: “Does the madness of this woman affect all who would sleep beneath her roof?” said he; “what is this that disturbs me—or am I yet in a dream? Hark! what is that?” It was the voice of Ruth; she had risen from her seat, and was standing near the coffin, apparently addressing some one who stood at the lower end of the room: “To what purpose is thy coming now?” said she, in a low and melancholy voice, “and at what dost thou laugh and gibe? lo! you; she is here, and the sin you know of, cannot be; how can I take the life which another hath already withdrawn? Go, go, hence to thy cave of night, for this is no place of safety for thee.” Her thoughts now took another turn; she seemed to hide one from the pursuit of others; “Lie still! lie still!” she whispered; “put out thy light! so, so, they pass by and mark thee not; thou art safe; good night, good night! now will I home to sleep;” and she seated herself in her chair, as if composing her senses to rest.
Owen was again bewildered in the chaos of thought, but for this time he determined to subdue his imagination, and, throwing himself upon his bed, again gave himself up to sleep; but the images of his former dreams still haunted him, and their hideous phantasms were more powerfully renewed; again he heard the solemn psalm of death, but unsung by mortals—it was pealed through earth up to the high heaven, by myriads of the viewless and the mighty: again he heard the execrations of millions for some unremembered sin, and the wrath and the hatred of a world was rushing upon him: “Come forth! come forth!” was the cry; and amid yells and howls they were darting upon him, when the pale form of the beautiful dead arose between them, and shielded him from their malice; but he heard her say aloud, “It is for this, that thou wilt not save me; arise, arise, and help!”
He sprung up as he was commanded; sleeping or waking he never knew; but he started from his bed to look down into the chamber, as he heard the voice of Ruth loud in terrific denunciation: he looked; she was standing, uttering yells of madness and rage, and close to her was a well-known form of appalling recollection—his father, as he had seen him last; he arose and darted to the door: “I am mad,” said he; “I am surely mad, or this is still a continuation of my dream:” he looked again; Ruth was still there, but alone.
But, though no visible form stood by the maniac, some fiend had entered her soul, and mastered her mighty spirit; she had armed herself with an axe, and shouting, “Liar, liar, hence!” was pursuing some imaginary foe to the darker side of the cottage: Owen strove hard to trace her motions, but as she had retreated under the space occupied by his bed, he could no longer see her, and his eyes involuntarily fastened themselves upon the coffin; there a new horror met them; the dead corpse had risen, and with wild and glaring eyes was watching the scene before her. Owen distrusted his senses till he heard the terrific voice of Ruth, as she marked the miracle he had witnessed; “The fiend, the robber!” she yelled, “it is he who hath entered the pure body of my child. Back to thy cave of blood, thou lost one! back to thine own dark hell!” Owen flew to the door; it was too late; he heard the shriek—the blow: he fell into the room, but only in time to hear the second blow, and see the cleft hand of the hapless Rachel fall back upon its bloody pillow; his terrible cries brought in the sleepers from the barn, headed by the wretched Evan, and, for a time, the thunders of heaven were drowned in the clamorous grief of man. No one dared to approach the miserable Ruth, who now, in utter frenzy, strode around the room, brandishing, with diabolical grandeur, the bloody axe, and singing a wild song of triumph and joy. All fell back as she approached, and shrunk from the infernal majesty of her terrific form; and the thunders of heaven rolling above their heads, and the flashings of the fires of eternity in their eyes, were less terrible than the savage glare and desperate wrath of the maniac:—suddenly, the house rocked to its foundation; its inmates were blinded for a moment, and sunk, felled by a stunning blow, to the earth;—slowly each man recovered and arose, wondering he was yet alive;—all were unhurt, save one. Ruth Tudor was on the earth, her blackened limbs prostrate beneath the coffin of her child, and her dead cheek resting on the rent and bloody axe;—it had been the destroyer of both.
THE YELLOW DWARF.
A TALE OF THE ORANGE TREE.
Oranges and Lemons.
Every body knows, or at least ought to know, with what an uproar of delight the birth of an heir to any noble family was celebrated in the old baronial times of fisty-cuff memory; exactly such a festival would we, the humble historian of the illustrious house of Tecklenburgh, describe, if we knew how to render justice to the outrageous mirth which shook the old castle to its very foundation, on the day of the eventful morn on which the lady of the eldest son of the family had presented her lord, and his no less expecting father the count, with a new prop to the seat of their ancient dignities. It was amid the mingled uproar of trumpets, bells, soldiers, women, horses, and dogs, that the respectable purple-nosed dominican, who was confessor to the family, gave a blessing and a name to its future representative; and immediately after the ceremony, the knights and nobles, wearied by the blows given and received in the jousts, retired to the dining hall with the threefold intention of filling their empty stomachs with something better than the east wind, solacing their spirits with the biting jests of the count’s fool, and curing their wounds and bruises of the morning by bathing them in flagons of rhenish, till the moon should look down upon the evening.