The Last Man
friend’s shape, altered by a thousand distortions, expanded into a
gigantic phantom, bearing on its brow the sign of pestilence. The
growing shadow rose and rose, filling, and then seeming to endeavour to
burst beyond, the adamantine vault that bent over, sustaining and
enclosing the world. The night-mare became torture; with a strong
effort I threw off sleep, and recalled reason to her wonted functions.
My first thought was Perdita; to her I must return; her I must support,
drawing such food from despair as might best sustain her wounded heart;
recalling her from the wild excesses of grief, by the austere laws of
duty, and the soft tenderness of regret.
The position of the stars was my only guide. I turned from the awful
ruin of the Golden City, and, after great exertion, succeeded in
extricating myself from its enclosure. I met a company of soldiers
outside the walls; I borrowed a horse from one of them, and hastened to
my sister. The appearance of the plain was changed during this short
interval; the encampment was broken up; the relics of the disbanded
army met in small companies here and there; each face was clouded;
every gesture spoke astonishment and dismay.
With an heavy heart I entered the palace, and stood fearful to advance,
to speak, to look. In the midst of the hall was Perdita; she sat on the
marble pavement, her head fallen on her bosom, her hair dishevelled,
her fingers twined busily one within the other; she was pale as marble,
and every feature was contracted by agony. She perceived me, and looked
up enquiringly; her half glance of hope was misery; the words died
before I could articulate them; I felt a ghastly smile wrinkle my lips.
She understood my gesture; again her head fell; again her fingers
worked restlessly. At last I recovered speech, but my voice terrified
her; the hapless girl had understood my look, and for worlds she would
not that the tale of her heavy misery should have been shaped out and
confirmed by hard, irrevocable words. Nay, she seemed to wish to
distract my thoughts from the subject: she rose from the floor: “Hush!”
she said, whisperingly; “after much weeping, Clara sleeps; we must not
disturb her.” She seated herself then on the same ottoman where I had
left her in the morning resting on the beating heart of her Raymond; I
dared not approach her, but sat at a distant corner, watching her
starting and nervous gestures. At length, in an abrupt manner she
asked, “Where is he?”
“O, fear not,” she continued, “fear not that I should entertain hope!
Yet tell me, have you found him? To have him once more in my arms, to
see him, however changed, is all I desire. Though Constantinople be
heaped above him as a tomb, yet I must find him—then cover us with the
city’s weight, with a mountain piled above—I care not, so that one
grave hold Raymond and his Perdita.” Then weeping, she clung to me:
“Take me to him,” she cried, “unkind Lionel, why do you keep me here?
Of myself I cannot find him —but you know where he lies—lead me
thither.”
At first these agonizing plaints filled me with intolerable compassion.
But soon I endeavoured to extract patience for her from the ideas she
suggested. I related my adventures of the night, my endeavours to find
our lost one, and my disappointment. Turning her thoughts this way, I
gave them an object which rescued them from insanity. With apparent
calmness she discussed with me the probable spot where he might be
found, and planned the means we should use for that purpose. Then
hearing of my fatigue and abstinence, she herself brought me food. I
seized the favourable moment, and endeavoured to awaken in her
something beyond the killing torpor of grief. As I spoke, my subject
carried me away; deep admiration; grief, the offspring of truest
affection, the overflowing of a heart bursting with sympathy for all
that had been great and sublime in the career of my friend, inspired me
as I poured forth the praises of Raymond.
“Alas, for us,” I cried, “who have lost this latest honour of the
world! Beloved Raymond! He is gone to the nations of the dead; he has
become one of those, who render the dark abode of the obscure grave
illustrious by dwelling there. He has journied on the road that leads
to it, and joined the mighty of soul who went before him. When the
world was in its infancy death must have been terrible, and man left
his friends and kindred to dwell, a solitary stranger, in an unknown
country. But now, he who dies finds many companions gone before to
prepare for his reception. The great of past ages people it, the
exalted hero of our own days is counted among its inhabitants, while
life becomes doubly ‘the desart and the solitude.’
“What a noble creature was Raymond, the first among the men of our
time. By the grandeur of his conceptions, the graceful daring of his
actions, by his wit and beauty, he won and ruled the minds of all. Of
one only fault he might have been accused; but his death has cancelled
that. I have heard him called inconstant of purpose—when he deserted,
for the sake of love, the hope of sovereignty, and when he abdicated
the protectorship of England, men blamed his infirmity of purpose. Now
his death has crowned his life, and to the end of time it will be
remembered, that he devoted himself, a willing victim, to the glory of
Greece. Such was his choice: he expected to die. He foresaw that he
should leave this cheerful earth, the lightsome sky, and thy love,
Perdita; yet he neither hesitated or turned back, going right onward to
his mark of fame. While the earth lasts, his actions will be recorded
with praise. Grecian maidens will in devotion strew flowers on his
tomb, and make the air around it resonant with patriotic hymns, in
which his name will find high record.”
I saw the features of Perdita soften; the sternness of grief yielded to
tenderness—I continued:—“Thus to honour him, is the sacred duty of his
survivors. To make his name even as an holy spot of ground, enclosing
it from all hostile attacks by our praise, shedding on it the blossoms
of love and regret, guarding it from decay, and bequeathing it
untainted to posterity. Such is the duty of his friends. A dearer one
belongs to you, Perdita, mother of his child. Do you remember in her
infancy, with what transport you beheld Clara, recognizing in her the
united being of yourself and Raymond; joying to view in this living
temple a manifestation of your eternal loves. Even such is she still.
You say that you have lost Raymond. O, no!—yet he lives with you and in
you there. From him she sprung, flesh of his flesh, bone of his
bone—and not, as heretofore, are you content to trace in her downy
cheek and delicate limbs, an affinity to Raymond, but in her
enthusiastic affections, in the sweet qualities of her mind, you may
still find him living, the good, the great, the beloved. Be it your
care to foster this similarity—be it your care to render her worthy of
him, so that, when she glory in her origin, she take not shame for what
she is.”
I could perceive that, when I recalled my sister’s thoughts to her
duties in life, she did not listen with the same patience as before.
She appeared to suspect a plan of consolation on my part, from which
she, cherishing her new-born grief, revolted. “You talk of the future,”
she said, “while the present is all to me. Let me find the earthly
dwelling of my beloved; let us rescue that from common dust, so that in
times to come men may point to the sacred tomb, and name it his—then to
other thoughts, and a new course of life, or what else fate, in her
cruel tyranny, may have marked out for me.”
After a short repose I prepared to leave her, that I might endeavour to
accomplish her wish. In the mean time we were joined by Clara, whose
pallid cheek and scared look shewed the deep impression grief had made
on her young mind. She seemed to be full of something to which she
could not give words; but, seizing an opportunity afforded by Perdita’s
absence, she preferred to me an earnest prayer, that I would take her
within view of the gate at which her father had entered Constantinople.
She promised to commit no extravagance, to be docile, and immediately
to return. I could not refuse; for Clara was not an ordinary child; her
sensibility and intelligence seemed already to have endowed her with
the rights of womanhood. With her therefore, before me on my horse,
attended only by the servant who was to re-conduct her, we rode to the
Top Kapou. We found a party of soldiers gathered round it. They were
listening. “They are human cries,” said one: “More like the howling of
a dog,” replied another; and again they bent to catch the sound of
regular distant moans, which issued from the precincts of the ruined
city. “That, Clara,” I said, “is the gate, that the street which
yestermorn your father rode up.” Whatever Clara’s intention had been in
asking to be brought hither, it was balked by the presence of the
soldiers. With earnest gaze she looked on the labyrinth of smoking
piles which had been a city, and then expressed her readiness to return
home. At this moment a melancholy howl struck on our ears; it was
repeated; “Hark!” cried Clara, “he is there; that is Florio, my
father’s dog.” It seemed to me impossible that she could recognise the
sound, but she persisted in her assertion till she gained credit with
the crowd about. At least it would be a benevolent action to rescue the
sufferer, whether human or brute, from the desolation of the town; so,
sending Clara back to her home, I again entered Constantinople.
Encouraged by the impunity attendant on my former visit, several
soldiers who had made a part of Raymond’s body guard, who had loved
him, and sincerely mourned his loss, accompanied me.
It is impossible to conjecture the strange enchainment of events which
restored the lifeless form of my friend to our hands. In that part of
the town where the fire had most raged the night before, and which now
lay quenched, black and cold, the dying dog of Raymond crouched beside
the mutilated form of its lord. At such a time sorrow has no voice;
affliction, tamed by its very vehemence, is mute. The poor animal
recognised me, licked my hand, crept close to its lord, and died. He
had been evidently thrown from his horse by some falling ruin, which
had crushed his head, and defaced his whole person. I bent over the
body, and took in my hand the edge of his cloak, less altered in
appearance than the human frame it clothed. I pressed it to my lips,
while the rough soldiers gathered around, mourning over this worthiest
prey of death, as if regret and endless lamentation could re-illumine
the extinguished spark, or call to its shattered prison-house of flesh
the liberated spirit. Yesterday those limbs were worth an universe;
they then enshrined a transcendant power, whose intents, words, and
actions were worthy to be recorded in letters of gold; now the
superstition of affection alone could give value to the shattered
mechanism, which, incapable and clod-like, no more resembled Raymond,
than the fallen rain is like the former mansion of cloud in which it
climbed the highest skies, and gilded by the sun, attracted all eyes,
and satiated the sense by its excess of beauty.
Such as he had now become, such as was his terrene vesture, defaced and
spoiled, we wrapt it in our cloaks, and lifting the burthen in our
arms, bore it from this city of the dead. The question arose as to
where we should deposit him. In our road to the palace, we passed
through the Greek cemetery; here on a tablet of black marble I caused
him to be laid; the cypresses waved high above, their death-like gloom
accorded with his state of nothingness. We cut branches of the funereal
trees and placed them over him, and on these again his sword. I left a