搜档网
当前位置:搜档网 › Fall of the House of Usher(厄西亚房子的倒塌)

Fall of the House of Usher(厄西亚房子的倒塌)

----------------------- Page 1-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of
Usher

Edgar Allen Poe

1

----------------------- Page 2-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of
the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had
been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of
country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on,
within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--
but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom
pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by
any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the
mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or
terrible. I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house, and the
simple landscape features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the
vacant eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white
trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can
compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of
the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous
dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the
heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the
imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it--I paused
to think--what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the
House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with
the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to
fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt,
there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the
power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among
considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere
different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the
picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity
for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to
the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre
by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling
than before--upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge,
and the ghastly tree

-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a
sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of

2

----------------------- Page 3-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our
last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of
the country--a letter from him-- which, in its wildly importunate nature,
had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS gave evidence of
nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness--of a mental
disorder which oppressed him--and of an earnest desire to see me, as his
best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the
cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the
manner in which all this, and much more, was said--it was the apparent
heart that went with his request--which allowed me no room for hesitation;
and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular
summons.
Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really
knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and
habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been
noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament,
displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and
manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity,
as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more
than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties of musical science. I
had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race,
all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring
branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of
descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation,
so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought
the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited
character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence
which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon
the other--it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the
consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony
with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the
o

riginal title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the
"House of Usher"--an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds
of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.

3

----------------------- Page 4-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment--
that of looking down within the tarn--had been to deepen the first singular
impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid
increase of my supersition--for why should I not so term it?--served
mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the
paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might
have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the
house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange
fancy--a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid
force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my
imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain
there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate
vicinity-- an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but
which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the grey wall, and the
silent tarn--a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible,
and leaden-hued.
Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned
more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed
to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been
great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine
tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any
extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there
appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of
parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there
was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work
which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no
disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of
extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability.
Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely
perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front,
made its way down the wall in a zigzag dir

ection, until it became lost in
the sullen waters of the tarn.
Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A
servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the

4

----------------------- Page 5-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through
many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his
master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how,
to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While
the objects around me--while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre
tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the
phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but
matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my
infancy--while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this--I
still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary
images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician of
the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low
cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on.
The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his
master.
The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The
windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a dis- tance from
the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble
gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes,
and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects
around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of
the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark
draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse,
comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments
lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I
breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable
gloom hung over and pervaded all.
Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he had been lying
at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in
it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality--of the constrained effort of
the ennuye man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance,
convinced me of

his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some
moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity,
half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a

5

----------------------- Page 6-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring
myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the
companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at
all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid,
and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but
of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but
with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely-moulded
chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair
of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an
inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether
a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere
exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the
expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I
doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now
miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me.
The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its
wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not,
even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple
humanity.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence--
an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and
futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy--an excessive nervous
agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less
by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by
conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and
temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice
varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits
seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision--that
abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation--that leaden,
self- balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be
observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during
the periods of his most intense exc

itement.
It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire
to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at

6

----------------------- Page 7-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was,
he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired
to find a remedy--a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which
would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural
sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered
me; although, perhaps, the terms, and the general manner of the narration
had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses;
the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments
of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were
tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and
these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.
To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. "I
shall perish," said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus,
and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in
themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the
most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of
soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect-
-in terror. In this unnerved--in this pitiable condition--I feel that the period
will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in
some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR."
I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal
hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained
by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he
tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth--in
regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms
too shadowy here to be re-stated--an influence which some peculiarities in
the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long
sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit--an effect which the physique
of the grey walls and turrets, and of 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 of the
peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural
and far more palpable origin--to the severe and long-c

ontinued illness--
indeed to the evidently approaching dis- solution--of a tenderly beloved

7

----------------------- Page 8-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

sister--his sole companion for long years--his last and only relative on
earth. "Her decease," he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget,
"would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient
race of the Ushers." While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she
called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and,
without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an
utter astonishment not unmingled with dread--and yet I found it
impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed
me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length,
closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the
countenance of the brother--but he had buried his face in his hands, and I
could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread
the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears.
The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her
physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and
frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character,
were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the
pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on
the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as
her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating
power of the destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her
person would thus probably be the last I should obtain--that the lady, at
least while living, would be seen by me no more.
For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher
or myself: and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavours to
alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together; or I
listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar.
And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more
unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive
the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an
inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and
physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.
I shall ever bear about me a me

mory of the many solemn hours I thus
spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any

8

----------------------- Page 9-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the
occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and
highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long
improvised dirges will ring for ever in my ears. Among other things, I hold
painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the
wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his
elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness
at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing
not why;--from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I
would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion which should
lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by
the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever
mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least--in
the circumstances then surrounding me--there arose out of the pure
abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas,
an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the
contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.
One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so
rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly,
in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and
rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without
interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well
to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the
surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast
extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet
a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly
and inappropriate splendour.
I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve
which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of
certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to
which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great
measure, to the fantastic character of the performances. But the fervid
facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have
been, and were, in the notes, as well as i

n the words of his wild fantasias

9

----------------------- Page 10-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

(for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal
improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and
concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in
particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one
of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more
forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic
current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a
full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason
upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled "The Haunted Palace,"
ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:
I.
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace--
Radiant palace--reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion--
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
II.
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow;
(This--all this--was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odour went away.
III.
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well tuned law,
Round about a throne, where sitting

10

----------------------- Page 11-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
IV.
And all with pearl and r

uby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
V.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story,
Of the old time entombed.
VI.
And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh--but smile no more.
I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad, led us into
a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's
which I mention not so much on account of its novelty (for other men*
have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with which he

11

----------------------- Page 12-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience
of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed
a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the
kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent, or the
earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as
I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his
forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined,
fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones--in the order of their
arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them,
and of the decayed trees which stood around-- above all, in the long
undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in th

e
still waters of the tarn. Its evidence--the evidence of the sentience--was to
be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain
condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls.
The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and
terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his
family, and which made him what I now saw him--what he was. Such
opinions need no comment, and I will make none.
Our books--the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of
the mental existence of the invalid--were, as might be supposed, in strict
keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over such
works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of
Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean
Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud,
of Jean D'Indagine, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue
Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun by Campanella. One favourite
volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum, by the
Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius
Mela, about the old African Satyrs and OEgipans, over which Usher
would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the
perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic--the
manual of a forgotten church--the Vigiliae Mortuorum Secundum Chorum
Ecclesiae Maguntinae.
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its

12

----------------------- Page 13-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having
informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his
intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight, (previously to its final
interment), in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the
building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular
proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother
had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the
unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and
eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and
exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that
when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom

I met
upon the staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to
oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an
unnatural, precaution.
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for
the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two
alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had
been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive
atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp,
and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth,
immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own
sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times,
for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of
deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a
portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through
which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of
massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight
caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges.
Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region
of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and
looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the
brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining,
perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I
learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies

13

----------------------- Page 14-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our
glances, however, rested not long upon the dead--for we could not regard
her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity
of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical
character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and
that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death.
We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of
iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of
the upper portion of the house.
And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable
change came over the features of the mental disorder of my frien

d. His
ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected
or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal,
and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible,
a more ghastly hue--but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out.
The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a
tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his
utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly
agitated mind was labouring with some oppressive secret, to divulge
which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was
obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I
beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the
profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no
wonder that his condition terrified--that it infected me. I felt creeping upon
me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic
yet impressive superstitions.
It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh
or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that
I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my
couch--while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off
the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavoured to believe
that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of
the gloomy furniture of the room--of the dark and tattered draperies, which,
tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to

14

----------------------- Page 15-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the
bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually
pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an
incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a
struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within
the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened-- I know not why, except
that an instinctive spirit prompted me--to certain low and indefinite sounds
which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not
whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable
yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should
sleep no more during the night,) and endeavou

red to arouse myself from
the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro
through the apartment.
I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an
adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognized it as that
of Usher. In an instant afterwards he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my
door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual,
cadaverously wan--but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in
his eyes--an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour. His air
appalled me--but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so
long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief.
"And you have not seen it?" he said abruptly, after having stared about
him for some moments in silence--"you have not then seen it?--but, stay!
you shall." Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he
hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm.
The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet.
It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly
singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected
its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in
the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which
hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our
perceiving the lifelike velocity with which they flew careering from all
points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say
that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this--yet

15

----------------------- Page 16-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

we had no glimpse of the moon or stars--nor was there any flashing forth
of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated
vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were
glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible
gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.
"You must not--you shall not behold this!" said I, shudderingly, to
Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat.
"These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena
not uncommon--or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank
miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement;--the air is chilling and
dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favourite romances. I will
r

ead, and you shall listen;--and so we will pass away this terrible night
together."
The antique volume which I had taken up was the "Mad Trist" of Sir
Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favourite of Usher's more in sad
jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and
unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and
spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately
at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now
agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental
disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly
which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild overstrained
air of vivacity with which he hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the
words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success
of my design.
I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred,
the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into
the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force.
Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus:
"And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was
now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he
had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in
sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his
shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright,

16

----------------------- Page 17-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his
gauntleted hand; and now pulling therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and
ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding
wood alarmed and reverberated throughout the forest."
At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment, paused;
for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy
had deceived me)--it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion
of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been,
in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one
certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had
so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone
which had arrested my attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the
casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still in

creasing
storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have
interested or disturbed me. I continued the story:
"But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was
sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but,
in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanour, and of
a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of
silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this
legend enwritten--
Who entereth herein, a conquerer hath bin;
Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win;
and Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon,
which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid
and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears
with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never
before heard."
Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild
amazement--for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I
did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it
impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and
most unusual screaming or grating sound--the exact counterpart of what
my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek as

17

----------------------- Page 18-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

described by the romancer.
Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of the second and
most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in
which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained
sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the
sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he
had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange
alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanour.
From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his
chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could
but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as
if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast--
yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the
eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at
variance with this idea--for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet
constant and uniform

sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I
resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus proceeded:
"And now, the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the
dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of
the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the
way before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of
the castle to where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried not
for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a
mighty great and terrible ringing sound."
No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than--as if a shield of
brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver--I
became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet
apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my
feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I
rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him,
and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But,
as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over
his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he
spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my

18

----------------------- Page 19-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous
import of his words.
"Not hear it?--yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long- -long--long--
many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it--yet I dared not--
oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!--I dared not--I dared not speak!
We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute?
I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin.
I heard them--many, many days ago--yet I dared not--I dared not speak!
And now--to-night--Ethelred--ha! ha!--the breaking of the hermit's door,
and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangour of the shield!--say, rather,
the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison,
and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither
shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me
for my haste? Have I not heard her footsteps on the stair? Do I not
distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!" here
he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the
effort he were giving up his soul--"Madman! I tell you that she no

w stands
without the door!"
As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found
the potency of a spell--the huge antique panels to which the speaker
pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony
jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust--but then without those doors
there DID stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of
Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some
bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment
she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold,-- then,
with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother,
and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a
corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm
was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old
causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to
see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and
its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full,

19

----------------------- Page 20-----------------------

The Fall of the House of Usher

setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through that once
barely-discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from
the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed,
this fissure rapidly widened--there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind--
the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight--my brain reeled
as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder--there was a long tumultuous
shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters--and the deep and dank
tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the
"House of Usher".
* Watson, Dr Percival, Spallanzani, and especially the Bishop of
Landaff.

20

相关主题