Dweller

“ The terror of his look is lost in love,
In fond, paternal love.
Enter Guildford.
Guild. Come to my arms,
And there conceal that penetrating eye,
Lest it should read what I would hide for ever,
Would hide from all, but most would hide from thee——
Thy father's grief, his shame, his rage, his tears.
Em. Tears! heaven and earth! see if he does not weep!
Guild. He who has drawn this sorrow from my eyes
Shall pay me back again in tears of blood.
'Tis for thy sake I weep.
Em. Ah, weep for me?
Hear, Heaven, and judge; hear, Heaven, and punish me!
If any crime of mine——
Guild. ”

“ I knew not what they said or did; but they broke out into lamentations on seeing my father's body, and taking me up in a blanket they carried me to the village, and set me down at the door of my father's house: alas! his no longer.
"My friends, all of you have seen the grief of women when death has come into the house and struck down a father, a brother, a son; all of you know how the shrieks and moans of women pierce into the heart, and turn men's livers into water. Till my father's body arrived there was no cry—no scream ”

“ The household spirit shares in the joy and sorrow of his home. If an inmate dies, he will show his grief by howling at night, while bitter sobbing and wailing forebode the death of the master of the house, and sorrowful moanings are heard if plague, war, conflagration, or some other calamity is threatening. ”

“ The large tears of mingled rage, grief, and pain might well spring from the poor boy’s eyes in his utter loneliness, as he clenched his hand with powerless wrath, and regained his feet, to retrace, as best he might, his way to where his widowed mother had found a temporary shelter in a small religious house. ”

“ Fool, what revenge is there? Death is the common heritage of all, And death comes best when it comes suddenly. [Goes up close to GUIDO.] Your father was betrayed, there is your cue; For you shall sell the seller in his turn. I will make you of his household, you shall sit At the same board with him, eat of his bread -
GUIDO. O bitter bread!
MORANZONE Thy palate is too nice, Revenge will make it sweet. Thou shalt o' nights Pledge him in wine, drink from his cup, and be His intimate, so he will fawn on thee, Love thee, and trust thee in all secret things. ”

“ I proclaim in your ears that the maiden who has this day escaped death, was guiltless of the crime for which she was condemned to die! Deceived by my own heart, mistaking the bitter passion of revenge for zeal in the service of my Maker, it was this hand that brought down the threatened ruin upon that child of innocence and love. The fetters that bound me in delusion and shame are broken for ever. But who shall wash our guilty hands from the blood we have shed? Who shall reanimate the cold forms that but yesterday lived and breathed in our midst? ”

“ The wretch not long after managed to approach me under another form, and one day, when I was in the garden, and asked for some refreshment, he brought me—in the disguise of a slave—a draught which changed me at once to this horrid shape. Whilst I was fainting with terror he transported me here, and cried to me with his awful voice: “There shall you remain, lonely and hideous, despised even by the brutes, till the end of your days, or till some one of his own free will asks you to be his wife. ”

“ Behold guilt with all that earth can give of power and exemption—the terrified maid on one side—the watchful doctor on the other—herself confessing, under a torture more awful than that of the rack, the bloody secret of her soul, and the physician taking notes of what falls from her lips! Behold guilt! in its castle—surrounded by its guards, with all the sources of earthly pleasure at its command. ”

“ Then well they knew that they would see no more their sons on earth, and great was their grief, and wroth were they with their husband, for well they knew now that he must have been the devil in the whirlwind, who had so punished the boys. ”

“ Slowly, at last, came the step of the dead, heavily ascending the stairs;—he entered—I rushed to meet him, and the long pent up agony of my soul burst forth in madness uncontrolled. ‘Monster!—murderer!—destroyer of thy father and thy brother! why comest thou thus to torture and not kill? why is thy bloody hand for ever raised, and yet forbearing to fall? If thine aim be vengeance, strike—strike—strike—thou blood-bespotted horror! ”

“ The curse of the widow and the orphan shall pursue—it shall cling to you and yours—it shall gnaw your heart in the midst of splendour—it shall cleave to the heritage of your son! There shall be a deathbed yet, beside which you shall see the spectre of her, now so calm, rising for retribution from the grave! ”

“ Within this mortal mansion are adulterers, fornicators, idolaters; drunkenness, witchcraft, variance, envy, emulation, hatred, wrath, murder. Appetites and passions have so dimmed their sight that he alone who looks from that dwelling, through the clearer pane of his own heart tired of sin, can see the Stranger. ”

“ Fleeing through the open window, undressed, see the murderer and adulterer vanish into the outer darkness of night, anywhere, rather than remain; and that guilty, beautiful, utterly miserable creature on her knee, her whole soul, her whole life, in her eyes, fixed on her dying husband, dying for and by her! ”

“ He sees his children become corrupt and his friends fall away. Some, perhaps, for the sake of bygone times, may stroke the coffin and let fall a tear, departing quickly with a cold smile. Worse than that, the wife sees her husband tortured in the yamên; the husband sees his wife victim to some horrible disease, lands gone, houses destroyed by flood or fire, and everything in unutterable confusion—the reward of former sins. ”

“ The man he sacrificed to his ambition, that innocent victim immolated on the altar of his father's faults, appeared to him pale and threatening, leading his affianced bride by the hand, and bringing with him remorse, not such as the ancients figured, furious and terrible, but that slow and consuming agony whose pangs are intensified from hour to hour up to the very moment of death. ”

“ She lives again through dead days—the convent, the marriage—a lamb led to slaughter—one more maiden sacrificed to the elderly debauchee. Then, love—white in its bud, red passion in its growth. Temptation. Crime. She secretly kills the loathed husband. And now there is no barrier between her and the man of her heart—the man who, honouring her, will not gain her through dishonour ... ”

“ Only a few weeks after I had followed my father to his resting-place in the silent grave, my brother was brought home with delirium tremens again, and, after suffering for a short time the most terrible agony, the poor boy died, and was laid in a drunkard's grave. O my God! why was I ever born? Why cannot I die, too? But what will my eternity be for having thus ruined my own brother, the bright and beautiful boy? ”

“ The new-born, the aged, the dying, the strong in life, and the recent dead are in the chambers of these many mansions. The full of hope, the happy, the miserable, and the desperate dwell together within the circle of my glance. In some of the houses over which my eyes roam so coldly, guilt is entering into hearts that are still tenanted by a debased and trodden virtue,—guilt is on the very edge of commission, and the impending deed might be averted; guilt is done, and the criminal wonders if it be irrevocable. ”

“ If you should wed, may a father's curse
⁠Be your swift and sure undoing.
“My curse shall feed on your fields of corn,
⁠On your roof-tree make its nesting,
Your wife shall wish your child unborn
⁠As he pines on her sore heart resting.”
Now when this cruel oath he said
⁠The youth did chide him, crying,
“Since I have neither field nor bed
⁠Your curse shall fall to dying. ”

“ Come home, whatever you are doing. Leave all business, and all prospects, and come and save them. That much you can do. Come, if it is only to take them back with you to that new land where you live, where they may forget their anguish.
“Come home, my son, and take vengeance. This, perhaps, you can not do, but you at least can try. By the time that you read these words they will be my voice from the grave; and thus I invoke you, and call you to take vengeance.
“But at least come and save your mother, your brother, and your sister. The danger is imminent. Not a friend is left. ”

“ Before a hand could be raised to deal vengeance, death struck down the father, and but few days and nights of anguish and solicitude had passed before his heir lay dead beside him, and the life of the boy who alone of all survived, lay trembling in the balance. ”

“ Nor writ her name, whose tomb should pierce the skies.
Presumptuous fear! How durst I dread her foes, 180
While nature’s loudest dictates I obey’d?
Pardon necessity, bless’d shade! of grief
And indignation rival bursts I pour’d;
Half execration mingled with my prayer;
Kindled at man, while I his God adored; 185
Sore grudged the savage land her sacred dust;
Stamp’d the cursed soil; and with humanity
(Denied Narcissa) wish’d them all a grave.
Glows my resentment into guilt? What guilt
Can equal violations of the dead?
The dead how sacred! ”

“ The dead bodies even of the fairest and strongest, when they have lain awhile, become dung, such vile bodies have we. And here such multitudes shall fall that their bodies shall lie as thick as heaps of dung in the furrows of the field, and no more notice shall be taken of them than of the handfuls which the harvestman drops for the gleaners, for none shall gather them, but they shall remain in sight, monuments of divine vengeance, that the eye of the impenitent survivors may affect their heart. ”

“ The other day the church bell was tolling. It was for this ne'er-do-weel. He had returned [289] home to die. The sole wish in the heart of the man with a wasted life was to lie, to cast down the wreck of his body, in the earth of the native parish which had bred him, and to have no headstone to mark the mound under which lay naught but the ashes of a ne'er-do-weel. ”

“ The fell and thrilling crimes that stalk abroad when the world sleeps,—the parricide with his stealthy step and horrent brow and lifted knife; the unwifed mother that glides out and looks behind, and behind, and shudders, and casts her babe upon the river, and hears the wail, and pities not—the splash, and does not tremble,—these the starred kings behold, to these they lead the unconscious step; but the guilt blanches not their lustre, neither doth remorse wither their unwrinkled youth. Each star wore a kingly diadem; round the loins of each was a graven belt, graven with many and mighty signs ”

“ Did ever man ask lodgment in like circumstances? It was the burial mound of an old Druid headman, and I laughed a little again to think how well I had known him—grim old Ufner of the Reeking Altars. Hoth! what a cruel, bloody old priest he was!—never did a man before, I chuckled, combine such piety and savagery together. How that old fellow’s cruel small eyes did sparkle with native pleasure as the thick, pungent smoke of the sacrificial fire went roaring up, and the hiss and splutter half drowned the screaming of men and women pent in their wicker cages amid that blaze! ”

“ The frail, brittle creature lying there, a victim of hysterics, fit only to be cherished and guarded by a doting mother—placed in a large, empty, gousty mansion—doomed to guard alone a suicide and a father, and, perhaps, to wrestle with him through blood—her parent's blood!—for the preservation of a remaining spark of a self-taken life! ”

“ With moans and sobs he then raised the poor body, silent to his remorse as to his hate, and, passionately kissing the lips, grown desirable to him only in death, with his own hands laid it in the coffin he had ready prepared for it in the very chamber to which the living soul had fled, in thought, for refuge. ”

“ If the robber were to be strangled in a corner of his dungeon; if the general were to be put to death privately in his own apartment; if the widow were to be burnt quietly on her own hearth; if the nun were to be secretly smuggled in at the convent gate like a bale of contraband goods,—we might hear another tale. ”

“ And we cling to each other!—O Grave, he is thine! The eye tells the woe that is mute to the ears— And we dare to resent what we grudge to resign, Till the heart's sinful murmur is choked in its tears. ”

“ When a pretty young creature in cheap mourning appeared at the Grange as governess to the younger children, you might predict a proud, harsh mistress, troublesome and insulting pupils, and a broken heart by reason of the squire’s son, almost to a certainty. ”

“ Your brother's widow and her orphan child spurn the shelter of your roof, and shun you with disgust and loathing. Your kindred renounce you, for they know no shame but the ties of blood which bind them in name with you. ”

“ The youth, who seem'd to watch a time for sin,
Approach'd the careless guide, and thrust him in;
Plunging he falls, and rising lifts his head,
Then flashing turns, and sinks amongst the dead.
⁠Wild, sparkling rage inflames the father's eyes,
He bursts the bands of fear, and madly cries,
Detested wretch—but scarce his speech began,
When the strange partner seem'd no longer man. ”

“ Am I more loathsome to thee, than the Grave,
That thou dost seek to shield thee there, and shun
My Love? But to the Grave I'll follow thee-
He looks not, minds not, hears not; barbarous Man,
Am I neglected thus? Am I despis'd? ”

“ Instance after instance did the youth hear of men who had sacrificed brother and sister, wife and concubine,—nay, sometimes even father and mother,—to carry out some just vengeance, and who had died happy because they survived the satisfactory end of their vendetta long enough to cast one glance of exulting victory upon the dead or dying body of their victim. ”