Orient threw off her hat and shawl and stole into the apartment where Reymund had been placed. The white face that fastened her eye was still as a mask of clay, and there was stamped upon it that look of unutterable melancholy into which she had seen the smile fade yesterday,--the linen where it lay was less white, a marble image had been less still. As Orient bent there her breath stirred the dark lock of hair on the brow, and the slight and airy motion of itself brought into forceful being all the awful immobility and silence of death.
“He does not breathe! His heart does not beat! Will he never open his eyes again?” she said. “O Reymund, Reymund, I love you!”
She bent nearer as she sighed the words, and her lips were sealed to his.
A quiver ran through all the frozen frame reposing there beside her, a pulse of warmth, perhaps, played in the hand hers clasped; the eyelids shook and lifted and unveiled the dark and woful eyes.
“You have seen my soul, Orient,” said Reymund. “Good by.”
The dark and woful eyes were veiled again. And this time Reymund’s soul was gone beyond recall.
Son cœur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il rèsonne. DE BERANGER.
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-pleasurable, 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 every-day 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 gray sedge and the ghastly tree-stems and the vacant and eye-like windows.