The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 3 Read online

Page 27


  LIGEIA

  And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteriesof the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading allthings by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to theangels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of hisfeeble 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 sinceelapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, Icannot now bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the characterof my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast ofbeauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musicallanguage, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily andstealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown. YetI 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 herspeak. That it is of a remotely ancient date cannot be doubted. Ligeia!Ligeia! in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to deadenimpressions of the outward world, it is by that sweet word alone--byLigeia--that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who isno more. And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon me thatI have never known the paternal name of her who was my friend and mybetrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally thewife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia? orwas it a test of my strength of affection, that I should instituteno inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own--awildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion?I but indistinctly recall the fact itself--what wonder that I haveutterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or attended it?And, indeed, if ever she, the wan and the misty-winged Ashtophet ofidolatrous 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 fails me not. It isthe person of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and, inher latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portraythe majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanor, or the incomprehensiblelightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came and departed as ashadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study saveby the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble handupon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It wasthe radiance of an opium-dream--an airy and spirit-lifting visionmore wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered vision about theslumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not ofthat regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in theclassical labors of the heathen. “There is no exquisite beauty,” saysBacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera ofbeauty, “without some strangeness in the proportion.” Yet, although I sawthat the features of Ligeia were not of a classic regularity--althoughI perceived that her loveliness was indeed “exquisite,” and felt thatthere was much of “strangeness” pervading it, yet I have tried in vainto detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of “thestrange.” I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead--itwas faultless--how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty sodivine!--the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent andrepose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; andthen the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curlingtresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet,“hyacinthine!” I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose--andnowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld asimilar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface,the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the sameharmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free spirit. I regarded thesweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly--themagnificent turn of the short upper lip--the soft, voluptuous slumberof the under--the dimples which sported, and the color which spoke--theteeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray ofthe holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet mostexultingly radiant of all smiles. I scrutinized the formation of thechin--and here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softnessand the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality, of the Greek--thecontour which the god Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, theson of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large eyes of Ligeia.

  For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. It might have been,too, that in these eyes of my beloved lay the secret to which LordVerulam alludes. They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinaryeyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of thegazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was onlyat intervals--in moments of intense excitement--that this peculiaritybecame more than slightly noticeable in Ligeia. And at such moments washer beauty--in my heated fancy thus it appeared perhaps--the beauty ofbeings either above or apart from the earth--the beauty of the fabulousHouri 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 theformation, or the color, or the brilliancy of the features, and must,after all, be referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning! behindwhose vast latitude of mere sound we intrench our ignorance of so muchof the spiritual. The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for longhours have I pondered upon it! How have I, through the whole of amidsummer night, struggled to fathom it! What was it--that somethingmore profound than the well of Democritus--which lay far within thepupils of my beloved? What was it? I was possessed with a passion todiscover. Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs!they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest ofastrologers.

  There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of thescience of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact--never, Ibelieve, noticed in the schools--that, in our endeavors to recall tomemory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the veryverge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. Andthus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia’s eyes, haveI felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression--felt itapproaching--yet not quite be mine--and so at length entirely depart!And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found, in the commonestobjects of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expression. Imean to say that, subsequently to the period when Ligeia’s beauty passedinto my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine, I derived, from manyexistences in the material world, a sentiment such as I felt alwaysaroused within me by her large and luminous orbs. Yet not the morecould I define that sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it.I recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of arapidly-growing vine--in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, achrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean; inthe falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually agedpeople. And there are one or two stars in heaven--(one especially, astar of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near thelarge star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been madeaware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds fromstringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books. Amonginnumerable other instances, I well remember something in a volume ofJoseph Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its quaintness--who shallsay?) never failed to inspire me with the sentiment;--“And the willtherein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will,with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things bynature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor untodeath 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 Englishmoralist and a portion of the character of Ligeia. An intensity inthought, action, or speech, was possibly, in her, a result, or at leastan index, of that g
igantic 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, theever-placid Ligeia, was the most violently a prey to the tumultuousvultures of stern passion. And of such passion I could form no estimate,save by the miraculous expansion of those eyes which at once sodelighted and appalled me--by the almost magical melody, modulation,distinctness and placidity of her very low voice--and by the fierceenergy (rendered doubly effective by contrast with her manner ofutterance) of the wild words which she habitually uttered.

  I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense--such as Ihave never known in woman. In the classical tongues was she deeplyproficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to themodern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault. Indeed uponany theme of the most admired, because simply the most abstruse of theboasted erudition of the academy, have I ever found Ligeia at fault? Howsingularly--how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife hasforced itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! I said herknowledge was such as I have never known in woman--but where breathesthe man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas ofmoral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what I nowclearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, wereastounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy toresign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through thechaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busilyoccupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast atriumph--with how vivid a delight--with how much of all that isethereal in hope--did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but littlesought--but less known--that delicious vista by slow degrees expandingbefore me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might atlength pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not tobe forbidden!

  How poignant, then, must have been the grief with which, after someyears, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings to themselvesand fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted.Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the manymysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wantingthe radiant lustre of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew dullerthan Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequentlyupon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes blazedwith a too--too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became of thetransparent waxen hue of the grave, and the blue veins upon the loftyforehead swelled and sank impetuously with the tides of the gentleemotion. I saw that she must die--and I struggled desperately in spiritwith the grim Azrael. And the struggles of the passionate wife were, tomy astonishment, even more energetic than my own. There had been much inher stern nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death wouldhave come without its terrors;--but not so. Words are impotent to conveyany just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestledwith the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. I wouldhave soothed--I would have reasoned; but, in the intensity of her wilddesire for life,--for life--but for life--solace and reason werethe uttermost folly. Yet not until the last instance, amid the mostconvulsive writhings of her fierce spirit, was shaken the externalplacidity of her demeanor. Her voice grew more gentle--grew morelow--yet I would not wish to dwell upon the wild meaning of the quietlyuttered words. My brain reeled as I hearkened entranced, to a melodymore than mortal--to assumptions and aspirations which mortality hadnever before known.

  That she loved me I should not have doubted; and I might have beeneasily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have reignedno ordinary passion. But in death only, was I fully impressed with thestrength of her affection. For long hours, detaining my hand, would shepour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionatedevotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed bysuch confessions?--how had I deserved to be so cursed with the removalof my beloved in the hour of her making them? But upon this subjectI cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in Ligeia’s more thanwomanly abandonment to a love, alas! all unmerited, all unworthilybestowed, I at length recognized the principle of her longing with sowildly earnest a desire for the life which was now fleeing so rapidlyaway. It is this wild longing--it is this eager vehemence of desirefor life--but for life--that I have no power to portray--no utterancecapable 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 byherself 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 extendingher arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of theselines--“O God! O Divine Father!--shall these things be undeviatinglyso?--shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part andparcel in Thee? Who--who knoweth the mysteries of the will with itsvigor? 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 tofall, and returned solemnly to her bed of death. And as she breathed herlast sighs, there came mingled with them a low murmur from her lips. Ibent to them my ear and distinguished, again, the concluding words ofthe passage in Glanvill--“Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor untodeath utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”

  She died;--and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could nolonger endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim anddecaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world callswealth. Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinarilyfalls to the lot of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary andaimless wandering, I purchased, and put in some repair, an abbey, whichI shall not name, in one of the wildest and least frequented portions offair England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, thealmost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honoredmemories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings ofutter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocialregion of the country. Yet although the external abbey, with its verdantdecay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration, I gave way, witha child-like perversity, and perchance with a faint hope of alleviatingmy sorrows, to a display of more than regal magnificence within.--Forsuch follies, even in childhood, I had imbibed a taste and now they cameback to me as if in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much evenof incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous andfantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wildcornices
and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tuftedgold! I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and mylabors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams. But theseabsurdities I must not pause to detail. Let me speak only of that onechamber, ever accursed, whither in a moment of mental alienation, Iled from the altar as my bride--as the successor of the unforgottenLigeia--the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, ofTremaine.

  There is no individual portion of the architecture and decoration ofthat bridal chamber which is not now visibly before me. Where were thesouls of the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of gold,they permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment so bedecked, amaiden and a daughter so beloved? I have said that I minutely rememberthe details of the chamber--yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deepmoment--and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantasticdisplay, to take hold upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret ofthe castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacioussize. Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon was the solewindow--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-workof an aged vine, which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. Theceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, andelaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of asemi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess ofthis melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold with longlinks, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and withmany perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them,as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession ofparti-colored fires.

  Some few ottomans and golden candelabra, of Eastern figure, were invarious stations about--and there was the couch, too--bridal couch--ofan Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony, with apall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber stood onend a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kingsover against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture.But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy ofall. The lofty walls, gigantic in height--even unproportionablyso--were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy andmassive-looking tapestry--tapestry of a material which was found alikeas a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans and theebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of thecurtains which partially shaded the window. The material was the richestcloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, witharabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the clothin patterns of the most jetty black. But these figures partook of thetrue character of the arabesque only when regarded from a single pointof view. By a contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a veryremote period of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To oneentering the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; butupon a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step bystep, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himselfsurrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong tothe superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of themonk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificialintroduction of a strong continual current of wind behind thedraperies--giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.

  In halls such as these--in a bridal chamber such as this--I passed, withthe Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first month of ourmarriage--passed them with but little disquietude. That my wife dreadedthe fierce moodiness of my temper--that she shunned me and loved me butlittle--I could not help perceiving; but it gave me rather pleasure thanotherwise. I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon thanto man. My memory flew back, (oh, with what intensity of regret!) toLigeia, the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed. I revelledin recollections of her purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty, herethereal nature, of her passionate, her idolatrous love. Now, then, didmy 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 inthe shackles of the drug) I would call aloud upon her name, during thesilence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glensby day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, theconsuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her tothe pathway she had abandoned--ah, could it be forever?--upon the earth.

  About the commencement of the second month of the marriage, the LadyRowena was attacked with sudden illness, from which her recovery wasslow. The fever which consumed her rendered her nights uneasy; andin her perturbed state of half-slumber, she spoke of sounds, and ofmotions, in and about the chamber of the turret, which I concludedhad no origin save in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in thephantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself. She became at lengthconvalescent--finally well. Yet but a brief period elapsed, ere a secondmore violent disorder again threw her upon a bed of suffering; and fromthis attack her frame, at all times feeble, never altogether recovered.Her illnesses were, after this epoch, of alarming character, and of morealarming recurrence, defying alike the knowledge and the great exertionsof her physicians. With the increase of the chronic disease whichhad thus, apparently, taken too sure hold upon her constitution tobe eradicated by human means, I could not fail to observe a similarincrease in the nervous irritation of her temperament, and in herexcitability by trivial causes of fear. She spoke again, and now morefrequently and pertinaciously, of the sounds--of the slight sounds--andof the unusual motions among the tapestries, to which she had formerlyalluded.

  One night, near the closing in of September, she pressed thisdistressing subject with more than usual emphasis upon my attention. Shehad just awakened from an unquiet slumber, and I had been watching,with feelings half of anxiety, half of vague terror, the workings of heremaciated countenance. I sat by the side of her ebony bed, upon one ofthe ottomans of India. She partly arose, and spoke, in an earnest lowwhisper, of sounds which she then heard, but which I could not hear--ofmotions which she then saw, but which I could not perceive. The wind wasrushing hurriedly behind the tapestries, and I wished to show her(what, let me confess it, I could not all believe) that those almostinarticulate breathings, and those very gentle variations of the figuresupon the wall, were but the natural effects of that customary rushing ofthe wind. But a deadly pallor, overspreading her face, had proved to methat my exertions to reassure her would be fruitless. She appeared tobe fainting, and no attendants were within call. I remembered wherewas deposited a decanter of light wine which had been ordered by herphysicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure it. But, asI stepped beneath the light of the censer, two circumstances of astartling nature attracted my attention. I had felt that some palpablealthough invisible object had passed lightly by my person; and I sawthat there lay upon the golden carpet, in the very middle of the richlustre thrown from the censer, a shadow--a faint, indefinite shadow ofangelic 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, andheeded these things but little, nor spoke of them to Rowena. Havingfound the wine, I recrossed the chamber, and poured out a gobletful,which I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She had now partiallyrecovered, however, and took the vessel herself, while I sank upon anottoman near me, with my eyes fastened upon her person. It was then thatI became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the carpet, andnear the couch; and in a second thereafter, as Rowena was in the actof raising the wine to her lips, I saw, or may have dreamed that Isaw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in theatmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant andruby colored fluid. If this I saw--not so Rowena. She swallowed the wineunhesitatingly, and I forbore to speak to her of a circumstance whichmust, after all, I considered, have been but the suggestion of a vividimaginati
on, rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady, by theopium, and by the hour.

  Yet I cannot conceal it from my own perception that, immediatelysubsequent to the fall of the ruby-drops, a rapid change for the worsetook place in the disorder of my wife; so that, on the third subsequentnight, the hands of her menials prepared her for the tomb, and on thefourth, I sat alone, with her shrouded body, in that fantastic chamberwhich had received her as my bride.--Wild visions, opium-engendered,flitted, shadow-like, before me. I gazed with unquiet eye upon thesarcophagi in the angles of the room, upon the varying figures of thedrapery, and upon the writhing of the parti-colored fires in the censeroverhead. My eyes then fell, as I called to mind the circumstances ofa former night, to the spot beneath the glare of the censer where I hadseen the faint traces of the shadow. It was there, however, no longer;and breathing with greater freedom, I turned my glances to the pallidand rigid figure upon the bed. Then rushed upon me a thousand memoriesof Ligeia--and then came back upon my heart, with the turbulent violenceof a flood, the whole of that unutterable wo with which I had regardedher thus enshrouded. The night waned; and still, with a bosom full ofbitter thoughts of the one only and supremely beloved, I remained gazingupon the body of Rowena.

  It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later, for I hadtaken 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 ofebony--the bed of death. I listened in an agony of superstitiousterror--but there was no repetition of the sound. I strained my visionto detect any motion in the corpse--but there was not the slightestperceptible. Yet I could not have been deceived. I had heard the noise,however faint, and my soul was awakened within me. I resolutely andperseveringly kept my attention riveted upon the body. Many minuteselapsed before any circumstance occurred tending to throw light upon themystery. At length it became evident that a slight, a very feeble, andbarely noticeable tinge of color had flushed up within the cheeks,and along the sunken small veins of the eyelids. Through a species ofunutterable horror and awe, for which the language of mortality has nosufficiently energetic expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, mylimbs grow rigid where I sat. Yet a sense of duty finally operated torestore my self-possession. I could no longer doubt that we had beenprecipitate in our preparations--that Rowena still lived. It wasnecessary that some immediate exertion be made; yet the turret wasaltogether apart from the portion of the abbey tenanted by theservants--there were none within call--I had no means of summoning themto my aid without leaving the room for many minutes--and this I couldnot venture to do. I therefore struggled alone in my endeavors to callback the spirit ill hovering. In a short period it was certain, however,that a relapse had taken place; the color disappeared from both eyelidand cheek, leaving a wanness even more than that of marble; the lipsbecame doubly shrivelled and pinched up in the ghastly expressionof death; a repulsive clamminess and coldness overspread rapidly thesurface of the body; and all the usual rigorous illness immediatelysupervened. I fell back with a shudder upon the couch from which I hadbeen so startlingly aroused, and again gave myself up to passionatewaking visions of Ligeia.

  An hour thus elapsed when (could it be possible?) I was a secondtime aware of some vague sound issuing from the region of the bed. Ilistened--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. Ina minute afterward they relaxed, disclosing a bright line of the pearlyteeth. Amazement now struggled in my bosom with the profound awe whichhad hitherto reigned there alone. I felt that my vision grew dim, thatmy reason wandered; and it was only by a violent effort that I at lengthsucceeded in nerving myself to the task which duty thus once more hadpointed out. There was now a partial glow upon the forehead and upon thecheek and throat; a perceptible warmth pervaded the whole frame; therewas even a slight pulsation at the heart. The lady lived; and withredoubled ardor I betook myself to the task of restoration. I chafedand bathed the temples and the hands, and used every exertion whichexperience, and no little medical reading, could suggest. But in vain.Suddenly, the color fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed theexpression of the dead, and, in an instant afterward, the wholebody took upon itself the icy chilliness, the livid hue, the intenserigidity, the sunken outline, and all the loathsome peculiarities ofthat which has been, for many days, a tenant of the tomb.

  And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia--and again, (what marvel that Ishudder while I write,) again there reached my ears a low sob from theregion of the ebony bed. But why shall I minutely detail the unspeakablehorrors of that night? Why shall I pause to relate how, time aftertime, until near the period of the gray dawn, this hideous drama ofrevivification was repeated; how each terrific relapse was only into asterner and apparently more irredeemable death; how each agony wore theaspect of a struggle with some invisible foe; and how each struggle wassucceeded by I know not what of wild change in the personal appearanceof the corpse? Let me hurry to a conclusion.

  The greater part of the fearful night had worn away, and she who hadbeen dead, once again stirred--and now more vigorously than hitherto,although arousing from a dissolution more appalling in its utterhopelessness than any. I had long ceased to struggle or to move, andremained sitting rigidly upon the ottoman, a helpless prey to a whirl ofviolent emotions, of which extreme awe was perhaps the least terrible,the least consuming. The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now morevigorously than before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energyinto the countenance--the limbs relaxed--and, save that the eyelids wereyet pressed heavily together, and that the bandages and draperies of thegrave still imparted their charnel character to the figure, I mighthave dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off, utterly, the fetters ofDeath. But if this idea was not, even then, altogether adopted, I couldat least doubt no longer, when, arising from the bed, tottering, withfeeble steps, with closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered ina dream, the thing that was enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably intothe middle of the apartment.

  I trembled not--I stirred not--for a crowd of unutterable fanciesconnected with the air, the stature, the demeanor of the figure, rushinghurriedly through my brain, had paralyzed--had chilled me into stone. Istirred not--but gazed upon the apparition. There was a mad disorderin my thoughts--a tumult unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be theliving Rowena who confronted me? Could it indeed be Rowena at all--thefair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine? Why, whyshould I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth--but thenmight it not be the mouth of the breathing Lady of Tremaine? And thecheeks--there were the roses as in her noon of life--yes, these mightindeed 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 thengrown taller since her malady? What inexpressible madness seized me withthat thought? One bound, and I had reached her feet! Shrinking from mytouch, she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly cerementswhich had confined it, and there streamed forth, into the rushingatmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of long and dishevelled hair; itwas blacker than the raven wings of the midnight! And now slowly openedthe 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 thefull, and the black, and the wild eyes--of my lost love--of the lady--ofthe LADY LIGEIA.”

 

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