The Fall of the House of Usher Read online

half of pity,half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered,in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was withdifficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of thewan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yetthe character of his face had been at all times remarkable. Acadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminousbeyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of asurpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model,but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; afinely-moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of awant of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness andtenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above theregions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance noteasily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of theprevailing character of these features, and of the expressionthey were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted towhom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the nowmiraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and evenawed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow allunheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated ratherthan fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connectits Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.

  In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with anincoherence--an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arisefrom a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome anhabitual trepidancy--an excessive nervous agitation. Forsomething of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less byhis letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, andby conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformationand temperament. His action was alternately vivacious andsullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision(when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) tothat species of energetic concision--that abrupt, weighty,unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation--that leaden,self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which maybe observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater ofopium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.

  It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of hisearnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me toafford him. He entered, at some length, into what he conceivedto be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, aconstitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despairedto find a remedy--a mere nervous affection, he immediately added,which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in ahost of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailedthem, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms,and the general manner of the narration had their weight. Hesuffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the mostinsipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments ofcertain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; hiseyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were butpeculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which didnot inspire him with horror.

  To an anomalous species of terror I found him a boundenslave. "I shall perish," said he, "I must perish in thisdeplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I belost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, butin their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the mosttrivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerableagitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger,except in its absolute effect--in terror. In this unnerved--inthis pitiable condition--I feel that the period will sooner orlater arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, insome struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR."

  I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken andequivocal hints, another singular feature of his mentalcondition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressionsin regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for manyyears, he had never ventured forth--in regard to an influencewhose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy hereto be re-stated--an influence which some peculiarities in themere form and substance of his family mansion, had, bydint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit--aneffect which the physique of the grey walls and turrets, andof the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length,brought about upon the morale of his existence.

  He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much ofthe peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to amore natural and far more palpable origin--to the severe andlong-continued illness--indeed to the evidently approachingdissolution--of a tenderly beloved sister--his sole companion forlong years--his last and only relative on earth. "Her decease,"he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, "would leavehim (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient raceof the Ushers." While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so wasshe called) passed slowly through a remote portion of theapartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared.I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled withdread--and yet I found it impossible to account for suchfeelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyesfollowed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closedupon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly thecountenance of the brother--but he had buried his face in hishands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinarywanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through whichtrickled many passionate tears.

  The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skillof her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away ofthe person, and frequent although transient affections of apartially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis.Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of hermalady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on theclosing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, shesuccumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressibleagitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer; and Ilearned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thusprobably be the last I should obtain--that the lady, at leastwhile living, would be seen by me no more.

  For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by eitherUsher or myself: and during this period I was busied in earnestendeavours to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. Wepainted and read together; or I listened, as if in a dream, tothe wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as acloser and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedlyinto the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceivethe futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from whichdarkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth uponall objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasingradiation of gloom.

  I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hoursI thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet Ishould fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exactcharacter of the studies, or of the occupations, in which heinvolved me, or led me the way. An excited and highlydistempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. Hislong improvised dirges will ring for ever in my ears. Amongother things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singularperversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz ofVon Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancybrooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at whichI shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing notwhy;--from these paintings (vivid as their images now are beforeme) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portionwhich should lie within the compass of merely written words. Bythe utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, hearrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea,that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least--in thecircumstances then surrounding me--there arose out of the pureabstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon hiscanvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which feltI ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet tooconcrete reveries of Fuseli.

  One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend,partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may beshadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picturepresented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vaultor tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and withoutinterruption or de
vice. Certain accessory points of the designserved well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at anexceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet wasobserved in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch,or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a floodof intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in aghastly and inappropriate splendour.

  I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditorynerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, withthe exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. Itwas, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himselfupon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to thefantastic character of the performances. But the fervidfacility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for.They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in thewords of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompaniedhimself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of