Ligeia
And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.Joseph Glanvill.
I CANNOT, for my soul, remember how, when, or
even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady
Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble
through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these
points to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved,
her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and
the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical
language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and
stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown.
Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some
large, old, decaying city near the Rhine. Of her family --I have
surely heard her speak. That it is of a remotely ancient date
cannot be doubted. Ligeia! Ligeia! in studies of a nature more
than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world,
it is by that sweet word alone --by Ligeia --that I bring before
mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more. And now,
while I write, a recollection flashes upon me that I have never
known the paternal name of her who was my friend and my
betrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally
the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my
Ligeia? or was it a test of my strength of affection, that I
should institute no inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a
caprice of my own --a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of
the most passionate devotion? I but indistinctly recall the fact
itself --what wonder that I have utterly forgotten the
circumstances which originated or attended it? And, indeed, if
ever she, the wan and the misty-winged Ashtophet of idolatrous
Egypt, presided, as they tell, over marriages ill-omened, then
most surely she presided over mine.
There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory
falls me not. It is the person of Ligeia. In stature she was
tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated.
I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease,
of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity
of her footfall. She came and departed as a shadow. I was never
made aware of her entrance into my closed study save by the dear
music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble hand upon
my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It
was the radiance of an opium-dream --an airy and spirit-lifting
vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered
vision about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet
her features were not of that regular mould which we have been
falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen.
"There is no exquisite beauty," says Bacon, Lord
Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty,
without some strangeness in the proportion." Yet, although I
saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classic regularity
--although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed
"exquisite," and felt that there was much of
"strangeness" pervading it, yet I have tried in vain to
detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of
"the strange." I examined the contour of the lofty and
pale forehead --it was faultless --how cold indeed that word when
applied to a majesty so divine! --the skin rivalling the purest
ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of
the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the
glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting
forth the full force of the Homeric epithet,
"hyacinthine!" I looked at the delicate outlines of the
nose --and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews
had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious
smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to
the aquiline, the same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the
free spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the
triumph of all things heavenly --the magnificent turn of the
short upper lip --the soft, voluptuous slumber of the under --the
dimples which sported, and the color which spoke --the teeth
glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of
the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet
most exultingly radiant of all smiles. I scrutinized the
formation of the chin --and here, too, I found the gentleness of
breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fullness and the
spirituality, of the Greek --the contour which the god Apollo
revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, the son of the Athenian.
And then I peered into the large eves of Ligeia.
For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique.
It might have been, too, that in these eves of my beloved lay the
secret to which Lord Verulam alludes. They were, I must believe,
far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even
fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the
valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was only at intervals --in moments of
intense excitement --that this peculiarity became more than
slightly noticeable in Ligeia. And at such moments was her beauty
--in my heated fancy thus it appeared perhaps --the beauty of
beings either above or apart from the earth --the beauty of the
fabulous Houri of the Turk. The hue of the orbs was the most
brilliant of black, and, far over them, hung jetty lashes of
great length. The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the
same tint. The "strangeness," however, which I found in
the eyes, was of a nature distinct from the formation, or the
color, or the brilliancy of the features, and must, after all, be
referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning! behind whose
vast latitude of mere sound we intrench our ignorance of so much
of the spiritual. The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for
long hours have I pondered upon it! How have I, through the whole
of a midsummer night, struggled to fathom it! What was it --that
something more profound than the well of Democritus --which lay
far within the pupils of my beloved? What was it? I was possessed
with a passion to discover. Those eyes! those large, those
shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda,
and I to them devoutest of astrologers.
There is no point, among the many incomprehensible
anomalies of the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than
the fact --never, I believe, noticed in the schools --that, in
our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we
often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without
being able, in the end, to remember. And thus how frequently, in
my intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes, have I felt approaching the
full knowledge of their expression --felt it approaching --yet
not quite be mine --and so at length entirely depart! And
(strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found, in the commonest
objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to theat
expression. I mean to say that, subsequently to the period when
Ligeia's beauty passed into my spirit, there dwelling as in a
shrine, I derived, from many existences in the material world, a
sentiment such as I felt always aroused within me by her large
and luminous orbs. Yet not the more could I define that
sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it. I recognized it,
let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine
--in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a
stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean; in the
falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually
aged people. And there are one or two stars in heaven --(one
especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable,
to be found near the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny
of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I have been
filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and
not unfrequently by passages from books. Among innumerable other
instances, I well remember something in a volume of Joseph
Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its quaintness --who shall
say?) never failed to inspire me with the sentiment; --"And
the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the
mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great
will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth
not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only
through the weakness of his feeble will."
Length of years, and subsequent reflection, have
enabled me to trace, indeed, some remote connection between this
passage in the English moralist and a portion of the character of
Ligeia. An intensity in thought, action, or speech, was possibly,
in her, a result, or at least an index, of that gigantic volition
which, during our long intercourse, failed to give other and more
immediate evidence of its existence. Of all the women whom I have
ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the ever-placid Ligeia, was
the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern
passion. And of such passion I could form no estimate, save by
the miraculous expansion of those eyes which at once so delighted
and appalled me --by the almost magical melody, modulation,
distinctness and placidity of her very low voice --and by the
fierce energy (rendered doubly effective by contrast with her
manner of utterance) of the wild words which she habitually
uttered.
I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was
immense --such as I have never known in woman. In the classical
tongues was she deeply proficient, and as far as my own
acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe,
I have never known her at fault. Indeed upon any theme of the
most admired, because simply the most abstruse of the boasted
erudition of the academy, have I ever found Ligeia at fault? How
singularly --how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my
wife has forced itself, at this late period only, upon my
attention! I said her knowledge was such as I have never known in
woman --but where breathes the man who has traversed, and
successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and
mathematical science? I saw not then what I now clearly perceive,
that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding;
yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign
myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the
chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most
busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With
how vast a triumph --with how vivid a delight --with how much of
all that is ethereal in hope --did I feel, as she bent over me in
studies but little sought --but less known --that delicious vista
by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous,
and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to the goal
of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!
How poignant, then, must have been the grief with
which, after some years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations
take wings to themselves and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but
as a child groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone,
rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the
transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting the radiant
lustre of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller than
Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently
upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes
blazed with a too --too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers
became of the transparent waxen hue of the grave, and the blue
veins upon the lofty forehead swelled and sank impetuously with
the tides of the gentle emotion. I saw that she must die --and I
struggled desperately in spirit with the grim Azrael. And the
struggles of the passionate wife were, to my astonishment, even
more energetic than my own. There had been much in her stern
nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death would
have come without its terrors; --but not so. Words are impotent
to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with
which she wrestled with the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the
pitiable spectacle. would have soothed --I would have reasoned;
but, in the intensity of her wild desire for life, --for life
--but for life --solace and reason were the uttermost folly. Yet
not until the last instance, amid the most convulsive writhings
of her fierce spirit, was shaken the external placidity of her
demeanor. Her voice grew more gentle --grew more low --yet I
would not wish to dwell upon the wild meaning of the quietly
uttered words. My brain reeled as I hearkened entranced, to a
melody more than mortal --to assumptions and aspirations which
mortality had never before known.
That she loved me I should not have doubted; and I
might have been easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love
would have reigned no ordinary passion. But in death only, was I
fully impressed with the strength of her affection. For long
hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out before me the
overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion
amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by such
confessions? --how had I deserved to be so cursed with the
removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them, But upon
this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in
Ligeia's more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas! all
unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at length recognized the
principle of her longing with so wildly earnest a desire for the
life which was now fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild
longing --it is this eager vehemence of desire for life --but for
life --that I have no power to portray --no utterance capable of
expressing.
At high noon of the night in which she departed,
beckoning me, peremptorily, to her side, she bade me repeat
certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed
her. --They were these:
Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly --
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!That motley drama! --oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased forever more,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness and more of Sin
And Horror the soul of the plot.But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes! --it writhes! --with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.Out --out are the lights --out all!
And over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
"O God!" half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines --"O God! O Divine Father! --shall these things be undeviatingly so? --shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who --who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."
And now, as if exhausted with emotion, she
suffered her white arms to fall, and returned solemnly to her bed
of death. And as she breathed her last sighs, there came mingled
with them a low murmur from her lips. I bent to them my ear and
distinguished, again, the concluding words of the passage in
Glanvill --"Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto
death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble
will."
She died; --and I, crushed into the very dust with
sorrow, could no longer endure the lonely desolation of my
dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack
of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more,
very far more than ordinarily falls to the lot of mortals. After
a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering, I
purchased, and put in some repair, an abbey, which I shall not
name, in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair
England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the
almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and
time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison
with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into
that remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet although the
external abbey, with its verdant decay hanging about it, suffered
but little alteration, I gave way, with a child-like perversity,
and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a
display of more than regal magnificence within. --For such
follies, even in childhood, I had imbibed a taste and now they
came back to me as if in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how
much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the
gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of
Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns
of the carpets of tufted gold! I had become a bounden slave in
the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a
coloring from my dreams. But these absurdities must not pause to
detail. Let me speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed,
whither in a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar as
my bride --as the successor of the unforgotten Ligeia --the
fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine.
There is no individual portion of the architecture
and decoration of that bridal chamber which is not now visibly
before me. Where were the souls of the haughty family of the
bride, when, through thirst of gold, they permitted to pass the
threshold of an apartment so bedecked, a maiden and a daughter so
beloved? I have said that I minutely remember the details of the
chamber --yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment --and
here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display,
to take hold upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret of
the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious
size. Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon was the
sole window --an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice --a
single pane, and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of
either the sun or moon, passing through it, fell with a ghastly
lustre on the objects within. Over the upper portion of this huge
window, extended the trellice-work of an aged vine, which
clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The ceiling, of
gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and
elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens
of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most
central recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single
chain of gold with long links, a huge censer of the same metal,
Saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived
that there writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a
serpent vitality, a continual succession of parti-colored fires.
Some few ottomans and golden candelabra, of Eastern
figure, were in various stations about --and there was the couch,
too --bridal couch --of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured
of solid ebony, with a pall-like canopy above. In each of the
angles of the chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of
black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor,
with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture. But in the
draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of all.
The lofty walls, gigantic in height --even unproportionably so
--were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy and
massive-looking tapestry --tapestry of a material which was found
alike as a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans
and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous
volutes of the curtains which partially shaded the window. The
material was the richest cloth of gold. It was spotted all over,
at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in
diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most
jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character of
the arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view. By
a contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very remote
period of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one
entering the room, they bore the appearance of simple
monstrosities; but upon a farther advance, this appearance
gradually departed; and step by step, as the visitor moved his
station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless
succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition
of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The
phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial
introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the
draperies --giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.
In halls such as these --in a bridal chamber such as
this --I passed, with the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours
of the first month of our marriage --passed them with but little
disquietude. That my wife dreaded the fierce moodiness of my
temper --that she shunned me and loved me but little --I could
not help perceiving; but it gave me rather pleasure than
otherwise. I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon
than to man. My memory flew back, (oh, with what intensity of
regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the
entombed. I revelled in recollections of her purity, of her
wisdom, of her lofty, her ethereal nature, of her passionate, her
idolatrous love. Now, then, did my spirit fully and freely burn
with more than all the fires of her own. In the excitement of my
opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the shackles of
the drug) I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of
the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day,
as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the
consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore
her to the pathway she had abandoned --ah, could it be forever?
--upon the earth.
About the commencement of the second month of the
marriage, the Lady Rowena was attacked with sudden illness, from
which her recovery was slow. The fever which consumed her
rendered her nights uneasy; and in her perturbed state of
half-slumber, she spoke of sounds, and of motions, in and about
the chamber of the turret, which I concluded had no origin save
in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in the phantasmagoric
influences of the chamber itself. She became at length
convalescent --finally well. Yet but a brief period elapsed, ere
a second more violent disorder again threw her upon a bed of
suffering; and from this attack her frame, at all times feeble,
never altogether recovered. Her illnesses were, after this epoch,
of alarming character, and of more alarming recurrence, defying
alike the knowledge and the great exertions of her physicians.
With the increase of the chronic disease which had thus,
apparently, taken too sure hold upon her constitution to be
eradicated by human means, I could not fall to observe a similar
increase in the nervous irritation of her temperament, and in her
excitability by trivial causes of fear. She spoke again, and now
more frequently and pertinaciously, of the sounds --of the slight
sounds --and of the unusual motions among the tapestries, to
which she had formerly alluded.
One night, near the closing in of September, she
pressed this distressing subject with more than usual emphasis
upon my attention. She had just awakened from an unquiet slumber,
and I had been watching, with feelings half of anxiety, half of
vague terror, the workings of her emaciated countenance. I sat by
the side of her ebony bed, upon one of the ottomans of India. She
partly arose, and spoke, in an earnest low whisper, of sounds
which she then heard, but which I could not hear --of motions
which she then saw, but which I could not perceive. The wind was
rushing hurriedly behind the tapestries, and I wished to show her
(what, let me confess it, I could not all believe) that those
almost inarticulate breathings, and those very gentle variations
of the figures upon the wall, were but the natural effects of
that customary rushing of the wind. But a deadly pallor,
overspreading her face, had proved to me that my exertions to
reassure her would be fruitless. She appeared to be fainting, and
no attendants were within call. I remembered where was deposited
a decanter of light wine which had been ordered by her
physicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure it. But,
as I stepped beneath the light of the censer, two circumstances
of a startling nature attracted my attention. I had felt that
some palpable although invisible object had passed lightly by my
person; and I saw that there lay upon the golden carpet, in the
very middle of the rich lustre thrown from the censer, a shadow
--a faint, indefinite shadow of angelic aspect --such as might be
fancied for the shadow of a shade. But I was wild with the
excitement of an immoderate dose of opium, and heeded these
things but little, nor spoke of them to Rowena. Having found the
wine, I recrossed the chamber, and poured out a gobletful, which
I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She had now partially
recovered, however, and took the vessel herself, while I sank
upon an ottoman near me, with my eyes fastened upon her person.
It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall
upon the carpet, and near the couch; and in a second thereafter,
as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips, I saw,
or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if
from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three
or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid. If
this I saw --not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine
unhesitatingly, and I forbore to speak to her of a circumstance
which must, after all, I considered, have been but the suggestion
of a vivid imagination, rendered morbidly active by the terror of
the lady, by the opium, and by the hour.
Yet I cannot conceal it from my own perception that,
immediately subsequent to the fall of the ruby-drops, a rapid
change for the worse took place in the disorder of my wife; so
that, on the third subsequent night, the hands of her menials
prepared her for the tomb, and on the fourth, I sat alone, with
her shrouded body, in that fantastic chamber which had received
her as my bride. --Wild visions, opium-engendered, flitted,
shadow-like, before me. I gazed with unquiet eye upon the
sarcophagi in the angles of the room, upon the varying figures of
the drapery, and upon the writhing of the parti-colored fires in
the censer overhead. My eyes then fell, as I called to mind the
circumstances of a former night, to the spot beneath the glare of
the censer where I had seen the faint traces of the shadow. It
was there, however, no longer; and breathing with greater
freedom, I turned my glances to the pallid and rigid figure upon
the bed. Then rushed upon me a thousand memories of Ligeia --and
then came back upon my heart, with the turbulent violence of a
flood, the whole of that unutterable wo with which I had regarded
her thus enshrouded. The night waned; and still, with a bosom
full of bitter thoughts of the one only and supremely beloved, I
remained gazing upon the body of Rowena.
It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or
later, for I had taken no note of time, when a sob, low, gentle,
but very distinct, startled me from my revery. --I felt that it
came from the bed of ebony --the bed of death. I listened in an
agony of superstitious terror --but there was no repetition of
the sound. I strained my vision to detect any motion in the
corpse --but there was not the slightest perceptible. Yet I could
not have been deceived. I had heard the noise, however faint, and
my soul was awakened within me. I resolutely and perseveringly
kept my attention riveted upon the body. Many minutes elapsed
before any circumstance occurred tending to throw light upon the
mystery. At length it became evident that a slight, a very
feeble, and barely noticeable tinge of color had flushed up
within the cheeks, and along the sunken small veins of the
eyelids. Through a species of unutterable horror and awe, for
which the language of mortality has no sufficiently energetic
expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, my limbs grow rigid
where I sat. Yet a sense of duty finally operated to restore my
self-possession. I could no longer doubt that we had been
precipitate in our preparations --that Rowena still lived. It was
necessary that some immediate exertion be made; yet turret was
altogether apart from the portion of the abbey tenanted by the
servants --there were none within call --I had no means of
summoning them to my aid without leaving the room for many
minutes --and this I could not venture to do. I therefore
struggled alone in my endeavors to call back the spirit ill
hovering. In a short period it was certain, however, that a
relapse had taken place; the color disappeared from both eyelid
and cheek, leaving a wanness even more than that of marble; the
lips became doubly shrivelled and pinched up in the ghastly
expression of death; a repulsive clamminess and coldness
overspread rapidly the surface of the body; and all the usual
rigorous illness immediately supervened. I fell back with a
shudder upon the couch from which I had been so startlingly
aroused, and again gave myself up to passionate waking visions of
Ligeia.
An hour thus elapsed when (could it be possible?) I
was a second time aware of some vague sound issuing from the
region of the bed. I listened --in extremity of horror. The sound
came again --it was a sigh. Rushing to the corpse, I saw
--distinctly saw --a tremor upon the lips. In a minute afterward
they relaxed, disclosing a bright line of the pearly teeth.
Amazement now struggled in my bosom with the profound awe which
had hitherto reigned there alone. I felt that my vision grew dim,
that my reason wandered; and it was only by a violent effort that
I at length succeeded in nerving myself to the task which duty
thus once more had pointed out. There was now a partial glow upon
the forehead and upon the cheek and throat; a perceptible warmth
pervaded the whole frame; there was even a slight pulsation at
the heart. The lady lived; and with redoubled ardor I betook
myself to the task of restoration. I chafed and bathed the
temples and the hands, and used every exertion which experience,
and no little. medical reading, could suggest. But in vain.
Suddenly, the color fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed
the expression of the dead, and, in an instant afterward, the
whole body took upon itself the icy chilliness, the livid hue,
the intense rigidity, the sunken outline, and all the loathsome
peculiarities of that which has been, for many days, a tenant of
the tomb.
And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia --and again,
(what marvel that I shudder while I write,) again there reached
my ears a low sob from the region of the ebony bed. But why shall
I minutely detail the unspeakable horrors of that night? Why
shall I pause to relate how, time after time, until near the
period of the gray dawn, this hideous drama of revivification was
repeated; how each terrific relapse was only into a sterner and
apparently more irredeemable death; how each agony wore the
aspect of a struggle with some invisible foe; and how each
struggle was succeeded by I know not what of wild change in the
personal appearance of the corpse? Let me hurry to a conclusion.
The greater part of the fearful night had worn away,
and she who had been dead, once again stirred --and now more
vigorously than hitherto, although arousing from a dissolution
more appalling in its utter hopelessness than any. I had long
ceased to struggle or to move, and remained sitting rigidly upon
the ottoman, a helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions, of
which extreme awe was perhaps the least terrible, the least
consuming. The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more vigorously
than before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy
into the countenance --the limbs relaxed --and, save that the
eyelids were yet pressed heavily together, and that the bandages
and draperies of the grave still imparted their charnel character
to the figure, I might have dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken
off, utterly, the fetters of Death. But if this idea was not,
even then, altogether adopted, I could at least doubt no longer,
when, arising from the bed, tottering, with feeble steps, with
closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a dream,
the thing that was enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably into
the middle of the apartment.
I trembled not --I stirred not --for a crowd of
unutterable fancies connected with the air, the stature, the
demeanor of the figure, rushing hurriedly through my brain, had
paralyzed --had chilled me into stone. I stirred not --but gazed
upon the apparition. There was a mad disorder in my thoughts --a
tumult unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be the living Rowena who
confronted me? Could it indeed be Rowena at all --the
fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine?
Why, why should I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the
mouth --but then might it not be the mouth of the breathing Lady
of Tremaine? And the cheeks-there were the roses as in her noon
of life --yes, these might indeed be the fair cheeks of the
living Lady of Tremaine. And the chin, with its dimples, as in
health, might it not be hers? --but had she then grown taller
since her malady? What inexpressible madness seized me with that
thought? One bound, and I had reached her feet! Shrinking from my
touch, she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly
cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth, into
the rushing atmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of long and
dishevelled hair; it was blacker than the raven wings of the
midnight! And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which
stood before me. "Here then, at least," I shrieked
aloud, "can I never --can I never be mistaken --these are
the full, and the black, and the wild eyes --of my lost love --of
the lady --of the LADY LIGEIA."