(Translated for the Irish Penny Journal.)
No. VI.—THE REMORSE OF A NIGHT.
The last night of the year was about to expire; the winds, after a day of storminess, had subsided into slumber; the white earth lay outspread, like a shrouded map, under the moon; and innumerable stars arose out from the remotest abysses of heaven, twinkling as brightly as though they had but then begun their existence, and were never to suffer impairment. Eleven o’clock had tolled from the tower of an ancient Gothic church; and as the vibrations died away on the transparent air, an Old Man drew nigh to the window of a dark room in the desolate dwelling of which he had long been the solitary tenant, and cast his dull despairful eyes upwards towards the immoveable firmament, and from thence down on the blank waste of the earth, and then breathed a groaning prayer, that those eyes might never survey that firmament or that earth again. Wretched was he, in truth, that Old Man, beyond all parallel and beyond all consolation—for his grave lay open for him, as it seemed, by his side; it was thinly covered over, not by the flowers of Youth, but by the snows of Age; and when, heartsick of the sight, he looked away from it into himself, he saw that the sole fruits that he had gathered from a long and eventful life were sins, regrets, and maladies—a decayed body, a plague-smitten soul, a bosom full of bitterness, and an old age full of remorse. The beautiful days of his youth now came again before him like ghosts, and resummoned to his remembrance the cheerful morning upon which his venerable father had first placed him upon the great Cross-road of Life—a road which, trodden on the right hand, conducts the pilgrim along the noonday path of Virtue into a spacious, joyous land, abounding in sunbeams, harvests, and angelic spirits, but which, followed on the left, betrays him through lampless and miry ways, into the rueful wildernesses of Vice, where serpents for ever swarm, and pestilence chokes the atmosphere, and to quench his burning thirst the sluggish black rivers yield him but slime and poison.
Alas! the serpents were now coiled about him—the poison was rilling through his heart! Alas for him! he knew too well which road he had chosen—where he was—and what he must undergo—for eternity—for eternity!
With an anguish, with an agony, with a despair, that language cannot even faintly pourtray, he uplifted his withered arms towards heaven, clasped his hands, and cried aloud, O! give me back, give me back my youth! O! my father, lead me once more to the Cross-road, that I may once more choose, and this time choose with foreknowledge!
But his cries wasted themselves idly upon the frozen air, for his father was no more, and his youth was no more—both had alike long, long ago evanished, never to reappear. He knew this, and he wept—yes, that miserable old man wept; but his tears relieved him not; they were like drops of hot lava, for they trickled from a burning brain.
He looked forth, and he saw flitting lights—wills-o’-the-wisp—dancing over the morasses and becoming extinguished in the burial-grounds; and he said, Such were my riotous days of folly! He again looked forth, and he beheld a star fall from heaven to earth, and there melt away in blackness that left no trace behind, and he said, I am that star!—and with that woeful thought were torn open anew the leprous wounds in his bosom which the serpents that clung around him would never suffer to be healed.
His morbid imagination, wandering abroad till it touched on the confines of frenzy, showed him figures of sleep-walkers traversing like shadows the roofs of the houses:—the chimneys widened into furnaces vomiting forth flames and monsters—the windmills lifted up their giant arms, and threatened to crush him—and a forgotten spectre, left behind in a deserted charnel-house, glared on him with a horrible expression of malignity, and then mocked his terror by assuming his features.
On a sudden there flowed out upon the air a deep, rich, and solemn stream of music. It came from the steeple of the old Gothic church, as the bells announced the birth of the new year, for it was now the twelfth hour. Its cadences fell with a thrilling distinctness upon the ear and the heart of the Old Man; and every tone in the melody, through the agency of that mysterious power which sound possesses of re-assembling within the forsaken halls of the soul images long departed, brought before his mind some past scene of his life, vivid as a panoramic picture. Again he looked round upon the lucid horizon and over the frosted earth; and he thought on the opportunities he had forfeited—the warnings he had slighted—the examples he had scoffed at. He thought upon the friends of his youth, and how they, better and more fortunate than he, were now good men, at peace with themselves—teachers of wisdom to others, fathers of blessed families, torchlights for the world—and he exclaimed, Oh! and I also, had I but willed it, I also might, like them, have seen with tearless eyes, with tranquil heart, this night depart into eternity! Oh, my dear father—my dear, dear mother! I, even I, might have been now happy, had I but hearkened to your affectionate admonitions—had I but chosen to profit by the blessings which on every returning New Year’s Morn like this your tenderness led you to invoke on my head!
Amid these feverish reminiscences of his youth, it appeared to him as though the spectre which had assumed his features in the charnel-house gradually approached nearer and nearer to him—losing, however, as it advanced, one trait after another of its spectral character—till at length, as if under the dominion of that supernatural influence which on the last night of the old year is popularly said to compel even the Dead to undergo a change of form, it took the appearance of a living young man—the same young man that he had himself been fifty years before.