Fallen man

“ From such ravings as these, he would suddenly become collected, and with unexaggerated but terrific words, paint the horrors of the time; describe with minute detail, the effects of the plague on the human frame, and tell heart-breaking tales of the snapping of dear affinities—the gasping horror of despair over the death-bed of the last beloved—so that groans and even shrieks burst from the crowd. One man in particular stood in front, his eyes fixt on the prophet, his mouth open, his limbs rigid, while his face changed to various colours, yellow, blue, and green, through intense fear. ”

“ There had been some sort of bond between them till the vision of death rose before each shrinking soul. Shoulder to shoulder in crime, they fell apart as their doom approached; and rushing, shrieking, each man for himself, they one and all sought to escape by doors, windows or any outlet which promised release from this fatal spot. One rushed by me—I do not know which one—and I felt as if a flame from hell had licked me, his breath was so hot and the moans he uttered so like the curses we imagine to blister the lips of the lost. ”

“ Gaunt, slinking dingoes snap and snarl,
Watching his slowly-ebbing breath;
⁠Crows are flying,
⁠Hoarsely crying
Burial service o’er the dying—
Foul harbingers of Death.
Full many a man has perished there,
Whose bones gleam white from the waste of sand—
⁠Who left no name
⁠On the scroll of Fame,
Yet died in his tracks, as well became
A son of that desert land. ”

“ Strong as dying men sometimes are in the last flickering up of life in the speedily dissolving frame, the lowering of this trap, and, above all, the drawing of it back into place, which I instinctively felt would be the hardest act of the two, would be beyond the utmost fire or force conceivable in a dying man. No, even if he, as a member of the family, knew of this subterranean retreat, he could not have made use of it. I did not even accept the possibility sufficiently to approach the place again with this new inquiry in mind. ”

“ Whenever it came, a heavy, numbing throb seemed to take hold of my heart, and say, 'Dead-dead-dead.' And I cried out, 'The living, the living shall praise Thee, O God; the dead cannot praise thee. There is no work in the grave; in the night no man can work. ”

“ Yet a few struggles, yet the throat-rattle, and the leaden hand of death choked the wounded man's last sigh, imprinted on his brow the seal of the last grief; gathering whole years of repentance into one rapid moment, in which the soul, tearing itself from the body, fears equally the tortures of life and of nothingness, feels at once all the gnawing of the past and all the agony of the future. ”

“ Wave rolling after wave was all that answered back again.
But night and morn and noon they prayed—oh blessed voice of prayer!
That God would bring their trembling souls out of this great despair.
Again the fatal die was cast; a man of powerful frame
Slowly and with reluctant step to the dread summons came.
Large drops of anguish on his brow—his lips were white with fear—
Oh 'tis a dreadful death to die! Is there no succor near? ”

“ As I mentally review that portentous hour it seems that it must have originated with my first glimpse of that funeral scene, silently strengthening its grip with a subtle insidiousness. A baleful malignant influence that seemed to emanate from the corpse itself held me with magnetic fascination. My whole being seemed charged with some ecstatic electrifying force, and I felt my form straighten without conscious volition. My eyes were trying to burn beneath the closed lids of the dead man's and read some secret message they concealed. ”

“ Into their grave, grew heavy, deep and still.
* * * * *
And so, ’tis said, if to that fairy thorn-tree
You dare to go, you see her ghost so lone,
She prays for love of her that you will aid her,
And give your soul to buy her back her own.
p. 95THE SUICIDE’S GRAVE This is the scene of a man’s despair, and a soul’s release
From the difficult traits of the flesh; so, it seeking peace,
A shot rang out in the night; death’s doors were wide;
And you stood alone, a stranger, and saw inside.
Coward flesh, brave soul, which was it? One feared the world,
The pity of men, or their scorn ”

“ We talk about the dead by our fire-sides.
And then for our immortal part, we want
No symbols, Sir, to tell us that plain tale:
The thought of death sits easy on the man
Who has been born and dies among the mountains:
LEONARD. Your dalesmen, then, do in each other's thoughts
Possess a kind of second life: no doubt
You, Sir, could help me to the history
Of half these Graves? ”

“ So I found it amid this scene of horror and anguish, with everything to excite that can operate upon the mind—the woman stricken motionless and senseless by grief; the dead man, as it were, recalled to life by the words that were to herald him into life everlasting; the old man, whom I had known but as a gay companion, displayed now before my eyes in all the workings of his feeling heart, called up by the afflictions of one world and the terrors of another—and this in a wild and dreary valley, far from man's dwelling. ”

“ And a man with death's dews on his forehead, and blood on his coat and his cheek;
"I am dying — I feel death upon me — but yet, even yet, if God wills
I may crawl on my knees to the doctor's — yes, this is the last of the hills! ”

“ Do you want to become another Courtlandt Allerton and go rocking down the avenue—a grimacing, tailor-made sepulcher?—the pompous obsequies of a dead intellect?—a funeral on two wavering legs, carrying the corpse of all that should be deathless in a man? ”

“ Guy put back the curls, and gazed long and wistfully into the childish face, where the inherited beauty was repeated line for line. But softened, spiritualised, as, years after its burial, some ghost of a man's old sorrows may rise up and meet him, the very spirit of peace shining out of its celestial eyes. ”

“ I felt assured on the instant that I had found the dead man—the old prophecy recurred to my memory—a strange yearning sorrow, a vague foreboding of ill, an inexplicable terror, as I thought of the poor lad who was awaiting my return in the distant town, struck through me with a chill of superstitious dread, robbed me of my judgment and resolution, and left me when I had at last recovered myself, weak and dizzy, as if I had just suffered under some pang of overpowering physical pain. ”

“ As for the dead whose countless prone bodies strewn upon the beach with curious pitiful inertness so different from that of sleep, that you know instinctively means death—there was no use then risking live men to give the dead the attention, to award them such decencies of care and burial as were their due. This also would be the work of the night. Yes, and with many a man as he worked over the graves of his fallen comrades pitching into that grave, himself become a dead man—betrayed to a sniper by the moonlight’s gleam. ”

“ He had seen men drowned, men who had frozen to death, men accidentally shot to death, and men who had died naturally and comfortably in their beds. It was, therefore, not the sight of death that startled him, but the horror and tragic appeal in the dead man's staring eyes. ”

“ Looking down upon the dead face, touching the cold hand, lifting up the leaden arm, one cannot help feeling how utterly dead a dead man looks, an impression enormously deepened, as a rule, by the circumstances of the last days. ”

“ A shot, a cry, a struggle, and a fainting woman's kiss;
Life's blood let 'mid the grasses—and all a world was lost,
And no one may ever know how he paid the cost.
He is lost in the crowd of the dead, in the night-time of death,
A name on a stone left to tell that he ever drew breath.
So desperate body die there, with your soul's long release,
And, unhappy spirit, God grant you Eternity's peace! ”

“ Some fling themselves prostrate beside the corpse and sob as if their very hearts would break. They take the dead man by the hand, they stroke him, they straighten out the poor feet which are already growing cold. ”

“ And he appeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the centre of his forehead among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.
As always, the image of the dead man solaced him immediately and banished from his mind the things which had just preoccupied him. His uneasiness became composed, his bitterness disappeared, and his repugnance gave place to a new sensation of tranquil security. What had he to fear? Why did his imagination exaggerate so childishly the suffering which awaited him and which henceforth was inevitable? ”

“ But, generally speaking, I have observed in such scenes something to mitigate, if not the sorrows, at least the terrors, of death; the dying man seldom seems to feel the reality of his situation; a dull consciousness of approaching dissolution, a dim anticipation of unconsciousness and insensibility, are the feelings which most nearly border upon an appreciation of his state ”

“ In old woodcuts, the souls of the dying are represented as issuing from the mouth in the form of small human figures; and the Tyrolese peasants still fancy the soul is seen coming out of the mouth of a dying man like a little white cloud. [110] From the mouth of a patient in a London hospital some time since the nurses observed issuing a pale bluish flame, and soon after the man died. The frightened nurses—not being acquainted with the corpse-candle theory of such things—imagined the torments of hell had already begun in the still living body. ”

“ One seemed then on the borderland of life where things moved that did not venture out into the sun, or in the sun became invisible. And, under the cover of this darkness, the dead man might somehow be able to carry out his threat. ”

“ But beware when any one you love is seated in that corner of the settle where the cushion invites rest, lest it be your fate to mourn and wail as it is mine to curse the hour when I sought to clear my way by murder. For the doom of the man of blood is upon me. The hindrance is gone from my life, but a horror has entered it beyond the conception of any soul that has not yielded itself to the unimaginable influences emanating from an accomplished crime. ”

“ But when they make up their minds to die, when they deliberately set themselves to give up the ghost,—I knew one old man who passed in ten days from sound health to the coffin,—when they do that, they are past praying for. ”

“ When we have watched through a long vigil with a great and agonizing sorrow, when we have rebelled against it, and battled and fought with the air, in our vain outcry against its injustice, when we have longed and wept and prayed for release in vain, and then, at last, have laid it in its ashes and stood beside that open grave, which yawns sooner or later in every past, then—the coming of its ghost is bitter with the bitterness of death. ”

“ I should have swelled the crowd of nameless unfortunates, I should not have let myself be followed by the traces of my sorrows as a wounded man is followed by the traces of his blood.
Those who might be troubled by these descriptions and tempted to imitate these follies, those who might attach themselves to my memory through my illusions, must remember that they are listening only to a dead man's voice. Reader, whom [Pg 92] I shall never know, nothing remains: nought is left of me save that I am in the hands of the living God who has judged me. ”

“ As one might feel who had buried himself yet living—who had pulled the coffin-lid down on his own head, and heard the devils eagerly filling the grave up and laughing at their work—and at each new shovelful of heavy clay had felt the distance between him and life grow shorter, and felt the weight press heavier and heavier, and the horror and the darkness grow tighter and tighter around him, and the remorse, and the helplessness, and the terror—so I felt that hideous night, and so I feel whenever I remember it. ”

“ But, as no one connected by blood with any of the living had fallen, and it is not the disposition of men to mourn always, this feeling gradually subsided, and at the end of three weeks the deaths had lost most of their influence, or were recalled only at moments by those who thought it wise to dwell on such solemn subjects. ”

“ Breathed a low wail of fear, and, quivering, closed;
Then the corpse sank back motionless again.
Enough for him. Even the haggard face,
And hair more white than silver, could not make
His heart deceive him. 'Twas her altered form.
The crowd turned to him when that bony hand
Pointed him out, and when surprise was past,
Rushed with a yell upon him. Thus he woke.
The morning drum proclaimed the time was near
When deadly contest between foe and foe
Required his soldier's spirit, and he shook
The influence from him of that dreadful dream,
And went forth to the struggle. ”

“ Does a dead Man talk and walk? I wish I may never meet with more frightful Ghosts than you are. Pa.Ay, indeed, you make a Jest of it; but for all that, you kill poor me, and more cruelly too, than if you stuck a Dagger in my Breast. For now I, poor Wretch as I am, die a lingering Death. Ma.Prithee tell me, how many Women with Child have miscarried at the Sight of thee? Pa.My Paleness shews I have no more Blood in my Body than a Ghost. ”

“ When wearied and wounded to death he sinks down there; once more is heard completed, as if 'twere ghostly tones from the far off unapproachable distance, that dream-like melody for the first time ringing out full and perfect in death, and the notes fade and die softly, as the life-blood ebbs away. ”