Berenice - Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone

MISERY is manifold.

The wretchedness of earth is multiform.

Overreaching the

wide

horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch,

—as distinct too,

yet as intimately blended.

Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow!

How is it

that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?

—from the covenant of

peace a

simile of sorrow?

But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact,

out of joy is

sorrow born.

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day,

or the agonies

which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

My baptismal name is Egaeus;

that of my family I will not mention.

Yet there are no

towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray, hereditary halls.

Our line

has been called a race of visionaries;

and in many striking particulars —in the

character

of the family mansion —in the frescos of the chief saloon —in the tapestries of

the

dormitories —in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory —but more

especially

in the gallery of antique paintings —in the fashion of the library chamber —and,

lastly,

in the very peculiar nature of the library’s contents, there is more than

sufficient

evidence to warrant the belief.

The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber,

and with its

volumes —of which latter I will say no more.

Here died my mother.

Herein was I born.

But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before

—that the

soul has no previous existence.

You deny it?

—let us not argue the matter.

Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.

There is, however, a remembrance of

aerial

forms —of spiritual and meaning eyes —of sounds, musical yet sad —a remembrance

which will not be excluded;

a memory like a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite,

unsteady;

and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it

while the

sunlight of my reason shall exist.

In that chamber was I born.

Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed,

but was

not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy-land —into a palace of

imagination

—into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition —it is not singular

that I

gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye —that I loitered away my boyhood

in

books, and dissipated my youth in reverie;

but it is singular that as years

rolled away,

and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers —it is

wonderful

what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life —wonderful how total an

inversion took place in the character of my commonest thought.

The realities of

the

world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the

land of

dreams became, in turn, —not the material of my every-day existence-but in very

deed

that existence utterly and solely in itself.

-

Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal halls.

Yet differently we grew —I ill of health, and buried in gloom —she agile,

graceful, and

overflowing with energy;

hers the ramble on the hill-side —mine the studies of

the

cloister —I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most

intense

and painful meditation —she roaming carelessly through life with no thought of

the

shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the ravenwinged hours.

Berenice!

—I call

upon her name —Berenice!

—and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand

tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound!

Ah!

vividly is her image

before me

now, as in the early days of her lightheartedness and joy!

Oh!

gorgeous yet

fantastic

beauty!

Oh!

sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim!

—Oh!

Naiad among its

fountains!

—and then —then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told.

Disease —a fatal disease —fell like the simoom upon her frame, and, even while I

gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept, over her, pervading her mind,

her habits,

and her character, and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible,

disturbing even the

identity of her person!

Alas!

the destroyer came and went, and the victim

—where was

she, I knew her not —or knew her no longer as Berenice.

Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and primary one

which effected a revolution of so horrible a kind in the moral and physical

being of my

cousin, may be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in its nature,

a species

of epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in trance itself —trance very nearly

resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was in

most

instances, startlingly abrupt.

In the mean time my own disease —for I have been

told

that I should call it by no other appelation —my own disease, then,

grew rapidly upon

me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary

form —

hourly and momently gaining vigor —and at length obtaining over me the most

incomprehensible ascendancy.

This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of

those

properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive.

It is more than

probable that I am not understood;

but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner

possible to

convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that

nervous

intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to

speak

technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most

ordinary objects of the universe.

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous

device

on the margin, or in the topography of a book;

to become absorbed for the

better part of

a summer’s day, in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry,

or upon the door;

to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp,

or the embers

of a fire;

to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower;

to repeat

monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition,

ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind;

to lose all sense of motion or

physical

existence, by means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately

persevered in;

—such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a

condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled,

but certainly

bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation.

Yet let me not be misapprehended.

—The undue, earnest, and morbid attention thus

excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded in

character

with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially

indulged

in by persons of ardent imagination.

It was not even, as might be at first

supposed, an

extreme condition or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and

essentially

distinct and different.

In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast,

being interested

by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in

wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until,

at the conclusion of

a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum or first cause

of his

musings entirely vanished and forgotten.

In my case the primary object was

invariably

frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a

refracted and unreal importance.

Few deductions, if any, were made;

and those few

pertinaciously returning in upon the original object as a centre.

The meditations were

never pleasurable;

and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause,

so far from

being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which

was the

prevailing feature of the disease.

In a word, the powers of mind more

particularly

exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are,

with the daydreamer,

the speculative.

My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the

disorder, partook, it

will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative and inconsequential nature,

of the

characteristic qualities of the disorder itself.

I well remember, among others,

the treatise

of the noble Italian Coelius Secundus Curio «de Amplitudine Beati Regni dei»;

St.

Austin’s great work, the «City of God»;

and Tertullian «de Carne Christi,»

in which the

paradoxical sentence «Mortuus est Dei filius;

credible est quia ineptum est:

et sepultus

resurrexit;

certum est quia impossibile est» occupied my undivided time,

for many

weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.

Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things,

my reason bore

resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily

resisting the attacks of human violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and

the

winds, trembled only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel.

And although, to a careless thinker, it might appear a matter beyond doubt,

that the

alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the moral condition of Berenice,

would

afford me many objects for the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation

whose

nature I have been at some trouble in explaining, yet such was not in any

degree the

case.

In the lucid intervals of my infirmity, her calamity, indeed,

gave me pain, and,

taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle life,

I did not fall to ponder

frequently and bitterly upon the wonderworking means by which so strange a

revolution had been so suddenly brought to pass.

But these reflections partook

not of

the idiosyncrasy of my disease, and were such as would have occurred,

under similar

circumstances, to the ordinary mass of mankind.

True to its own character,

my disorder

revelled in the less important but more startling changes wrought in the

physical frame

of Berenice —in the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal

identity.

During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never

loved

her.

In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been

of the

heart, and my passions always were of the mind.

Through the gray of the early

morning —among the trellissed shadows of the forest at noonday —and in the

silence

of my library at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her —not as

the living

and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream —not as a being of the

earth,

earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being-not as a thing to admire,

but to analyze —

not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although

desultory

speculation.

And now —now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her

approach;

yet bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition,

I called to mind that

she had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage.

And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an

afternoon in

the winter of the year, —one of those unseasonably warm, calm, and misty days

which

are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon1, —I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,

) in the

inner apartment of the library.

But uplifting my eyes I saw that Berenice stood

before

me.

-

Was it my own excited imagination —or the misty influence of the atmosphere —or

the

uncertain twilight of the chamber —or the gray draperies which fell around her

figure

—that caused in it so vacillating and indistinct an outline?

I could not tell.

She spoke no

word, I —not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable.

An icy chill ran

through my

frame;

a sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me;

a consuming curiosity

pervaded

my soul;

and sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some time breathless

and

motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her person.

Alas!

its emaciation was

excessive,

and not one vestige of the former being, lurked in any single line of the

contour.

My

burning glances at length fell upon the face.

The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid;

and the once jetty

hair fell

partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable

ringlets now

of a vivid yellow, and Jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character,

with the

reigning melancholy of the countenance.

The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless,

and

seemingly pupil-less, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to the

contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips.

They parted;

and in a smile of

peculiar

meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my

view.

Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!

1 For as Jove, during the winter season, gives twice seven days of warmth,

men have

called this clement and temperate time the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon

—Simonides.

The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found that my cousin had

departed from the chamber.

But from the disordered chamber of my brain, had not,

alas!

departed, and would not be driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of

the

teeth.

Not a speck on their surface —not a shade on their enamel —not an

indenture in

their edges —but what that period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my

memory.

I saw them now even more unequivocally than I beheld them then.

The teeth!

—the teeth!

—they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably

before me;

long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing

about them,

as in the very moment of their first terrible development.

Then came the full

fury of my

monomania, and I struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible

influence.

In the

multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth.

For these I

longed with a phrenzied desire.

All other matters and all different interests

became

absorbed in their single contemplation.

They —they alone were present to the

mental

eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental

life.

I held

them in every light.

I turned them in every attitude.

I surveyed their

characteristics.

I

dwelt upon their peculiarities.

I pondered upon their conformation.

I mused upon the

alteration in their nature.

I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a

sensitive

and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral

expression.

Of Mad’selle Salle it has been well said, «que tous ses pas etaient

des

sentiments,» and of Berenice I more seriously believed que toutes ses dents

etaient des

idees.

Des idees!

—ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me!

Des idees!

—ah

therefore it was that I coveted them so madly!

I felt that their possession

could alone

ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.

And the evening closed in upon me thus-and then the darkness came, and tarried,

and

went —and the day again dawned —and the mists of a second night were now

gathering around —and still I sat motionless in that solitary room;

and still I sat buried

in meditation, and still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible

ascendancy

as, with the most vivid hideous distinctness, it floated about amid the

changing lights

and shadows of the chamber.

At length there broke in upon my dreams a cry as of

horror and dismay;

and thereunto, after a pause, succeeded the sound of troubled

voices, intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow, or of pain.

I arose from my

seat and, throwing open one of the doors of the library, saw standing out in the

antechamber a servant maiden, all in tears, who told me that Berenice was —no

more.

She had been seized with epilepsy in the early morning, and now,

at the closing in of

the night, the grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the

burial

were completed.

I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there

alone.

It

seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream.

I knew that it

was now midnight, and I was well aware that since the setting of the sun

Berenice had

been interred.

But of that dreary period which intervened I had no positive —at

least

no definite comprehension.

Yet its memory was replete with horror —horror more

horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity.

It was a fearful

page in the record my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and

unintelligible recollections.

I strived to decypher them, but in vain;

while ever and

anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a

female voice

seemed to be ringing in my ears.

I had done a deed —what was it?

I asked myself the

question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber answered me, «what was

it?»

On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box.

It was of no

remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, for it was the

property of the

family physician;

but how came it there, upon my table, and why did I shudder in

regarding it?

These things were in no manner to be accounted for, and my eyes at

length dropped to the open pages of a book, and to a sentence underscored

therein.

The

words were the singular but simple ones of the poet Ebn Zaiat, «Dicebant mihi sodales

si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.

«Why then, as I

perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and the blood

of my

body become congealed within my veins?

There came a light tap at the library

door,

and pale as the tenant of a tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe.

His looks were

wild

with terror, and he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low.

What said

he?

—some broken sentences I heard.

He told of a wild cry disturbing the

silence of the

night —of the gathering together of the household-of a search in the direction

of the

sound;

—and then his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he whispered me of a

violated

grave —of a disfigured body enshrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating,

still alive!

He pointed to garments;-they were muddy and clotted with gore.

I spoke not,

and he

took me gently by the hand;

—it was indented with the impress of human nails.

He

directed my attention to some object against the wall;

—I looked at it for some

minutes;

—it was a spade.

With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that

lay

upon it.

But I could not force it open;

and in my tremor it slipped from my

hands, and

fell heavily, and burst into pieces;

and from it, with a rattling sound,

there rolled out

some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small,

white and

ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.