** Edgar Allan Poe **
(1838)
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."