CHAPTER XVII.
NOCTURNAL.
Gradually a desire to be out in the spiritual solitude of the night came upon him. He rose from his seat, closed the window, took his hat from the wall, and setting the night-lamp in the open chimney, turned it down to a faint glimmer, and left the room, locking the door behind him.
A feeble growl reminded him of the dog, and he delayed a moment to go to the kennel of the animal. The creature knew him, and lazily yawning as he approached, pawed feebly in its nest in the packing case, and wagged its tail. Patting it on the head, and murmuring a kind word or two, he turned from it, and abstractedly wandered out at the gate, and away from the house, with his head bent upon his breast, and his arms behind him.
It was the dead of night, and the shadowy streets, wanly lighted by the setting moon, were intensely still. The air was bleak and cold, but the wind, which had been stirring before midnight, had gone down. On that memorable night, as he afterward remembered, he was in such a condition of mental abstraction, that he took no note of the course his steps pursued, nor did he once lift his head to look around him. The strangeness of the moon as he crossed the streets where it was visible, would have roused him to observation, had he chanced to look at it. But he did not, and meeting no person, not even a watchman, and unmindful of the route he took, he wandered mechanically on.
What thoughts engaged him, if any, he never could recall. It seemed to him, however, that his mind must have been in blank vacancy, uncrossed by any shadow of mentality. Yet he was remotely sensible of the echoes of his footfalls in the solitary streets and of his passage under the overshadowing bulks of the dark houses. Remotely sensible, too, that there was moonlight, that the air was ghast and cold, and that he was loitering on, alone, with his head sunk upon his breast, and his hands clasped behind him.
He knew, too, when he had reached Washington street, though he did not look up, but he felt, as it were, the character of the street, and was dimly aware of the great multitude of signs that covered the buildings. He was conscious of wandering up the deserted thoroughfare for some distance, then of returning, still in the same absent mood, of crossing several moonlit spaces formed by the intersecting streets, of passing the grey, towering spire of the Old South Church, and of turning up School street. In all this route, he did not meet a single person, or once arouse even for a moment from his intense abstraction.
But as he turned up School street on the left hand side, the solemn and funereal clang from the Old South steeple startled him from his lethargy, striking with gloomy clangor the hour of two. He stopped, listening to the sombre and heavy blare of the great bell as it tolled the hour, and then died away in ghostly and aërial reverberations. Hearkening till the last faint dinning of the swarming tones seemed to fail into soundless vibratory waves, he waited till these too failed, and the awful silence of the night again descended brooding on the air. Two. The hour when spirits, as some wild seer avers, have power to enter from without, and walk the earth till dawn. Looking up, as the fancy crossed his mind, he saw the street, a lonely vista darkling in blue and melancholy gloom, so strangely litten, so unearthly in its whole appearance, that a sudden and silent diffusion of awe spread softly through his being, and held him still.
Had he been brought there blindfolded, and the bandage removed, he would scarcely have known where he was, so changed was the street from its familiar aspect. The gibbous moon, a huge, misshapen mass of watery light hanging low in the dead, dark blue, poured a flood of wan, metallic brilliance down one side of the vista, bringing out its architectural features in vivid lustre and ebon blackness, while the structures on the side on which he stood, loomed dark and sharp in deep shadow. So lone, so ghast, so supernaturally still, so changed in the weird and frigid glitter, so desolate and splendid in the melancholy light, the haggard darkness, the mournful and marble silence, that the gazer might have dreamed he stood in the demon-city of the Hebrew story, where foot of man hath seldom trod, and the evil night broods eternal.
Tranced with wondering awe, he moved slowly up the pavement, gazing upon the solemn palaces of ebony and silver, with his imagination darkly stirred. Beyond him lay a garden space, breaking the line of the vista, with two chestnut-trees in front on the pavement, whose thick cones of foliage seemed sculptured in metal, and were dimly silvered by the moon. Further on rose the square belfry and high-windowed wall of the Stone Chapel, with its flank gleaming, and its panes glittering in the wan lustre. As his glance rested on this, he saw a gaunt and spectral figure emerge from a shadowed angle, and move slowly, with a strange, uncertain motion, along the base of the chapel wall, with the unearthly light upon its shapeless outlines, and its long, black shadow distinct upon the gleaming pavement. Now creeping on, now halting and appearing to waver, strange in movement, strange and alien in form, it intensified the ghastly and desolate solitude with its presence, and seemed like some lone vagrant fiend slinking abroad from his lair, in the pallor of the waning moon.
Vaguely attracted by the strangeness of its shape and movements, which had something unusual about them he could not define, Harrington kept his eyes fixed upon it, as he moved on. The figure halted and wavered in its shambling walk as he drew nigh, and finally stood still, looking toward him. A secret tremor stirred his blood, for the nearer he approached the figure, the more inexplicable was the gauntness and shapelessness of its outlines. He was still some twenty or thirty yards distant from it, and without well knowing why he did so, for he had no intention of accosting it, he slowly crossed the street, and walked as slowly forward. As he drew nearer, a vague disgust mingled with the faint tremor of his veins, for a horrible and poisonous smell, which grew stronger as he approached, burdened the cold air. What dreadful outcast is this? he thought. Suddenly he stood still, aghast, petrified, filled with an icy affright mixed with unutterable loathing, and his eyes riveted to the awful shape before him. He was within a couple of yards of it, and as it stood trembling in the weird brilliance of the moon, it seemed some terrific scare-crow risen from Hell.