The Last Man
the stage, and, poor fellow, his dying sense eagerly accepted the last
human applause that could ever be bestowed on his grace and agility.
At another time we were haunted for several days by an apparition, to
which our people gave the appellation of the Black Spectre. We never
saw it except at evening, when his coal black steed, his mourning
dress, and plume of black feathers, had a majestic and awe-striking
appearance; his face, one said, who had seen it for a moment, was ashy
pale; he had lingered far behind the rest of his troop, and suddenly at
a turn in the road, saw the Black Spectre coming towards him; he hid
himself in fear, and the horse and his rider slowly past, while the
moonbeams fell on the face of the latter, displaying its unearthly hue.
Sometimes at dead of night, as we watched the sick, we heard one
galloping through the town; it was the Black Spectre come in token of
inevitable death. He grew giant tall to vulgar eyes; an icy atmosphere,
they said, surrounded him; when he was heard, all animals shuddered,
and the dying knew that their last hour was come. It was Death himself,
they declared, come visibly to seize on subject earth, and quell at
once our decreasing numbers, sole rebels to his law. One day at noon,
we saw a dark mass on the road before us, and, coming up, beheld the
Black Spectre fallen from his horse, lying in the agonies of disease
upon the ground. He did not survive many hours; and his last words
disclosed the secret of his mysterious conduct. He was a French noble
of distinction, who, from the effects of plague, had been left alone in
his district; during many months, he had wandered from town to town,
from province to province, seeking some survivor for a companion, and
abhorring the loneliness to which he was condemned. When he discovered
our troop, fear of contagion conquered his love of society. He dared
not join us, yet he could not resolve to lose sight of us, sole human
beings who besides himself existed in wide and fertile France; so he
accompanied us in the spectral guise I have described, till pestilence
gathered him to a larger congregation, even that of Dead Mankind.
It had been well, if such vain terrors could have distracted our
thoughts from more tangible evils. But these were too dreadful and too
many not to force themselves into every thought, every moment, of our
lives. We were obliged to halt at different periods for days together,
till another and yet another was consigned as a clod to the vast clod
which had been once our living mother. Thus we continued travelling
during the hottest season; and it was not till the first of August,
that we, the emigrants,—reader, there were just eighty of us in
number,—entered the gates of Dijon.
We had expected this moment with eagerness, for now we had accomplished
the worst part of our drear journey, and Switzerland was near at hand.
Yet how could we congratulate ourselves on any event thus imperfectly
fulfilled? Were these miserable beings, who, worn and wretched, passed
in sorrowful procession, the sole remnants of the race of man, which,
like a flood, had once spread over and possessed the whole earth? It
had come down clear and unimpeded from its primal mountain source in
Ararat, and grew from a puny streamlet to a vast perennial river,
generation after generation flowing on ceaselessly. The same, but
diversified, it grew, and swept onwards towards the absorbing ocean,
whose dim shores we now reached. It had been the mere plaything of
nature, when first it crept out of uncreative void into light; but
thought brought forth power and knowledge; and, clad with these, the
race of man assumed dignity and authority. It was then no longer the
mere gardener of earth, or the shepherd of her flocks; “it carried with
it an imposing and majestic aspect; it had a pedigree and illustrious
ancestors; it had its gallery of portraits, its monumental
inscriptions, its records and titles.”[24]
This was all over, now that the ocean of death had sucked in the
slackening tide, and its source was dried up. We first had bidden adieu
to the state of things which having existed many thousand years, seemed
eternal; such a state of government, obedience, traffic, and domestic
intercourse, as had moulded our hearts and capacities, as far back as
memory could reach. Then to patriotic zeal, to the arts, to reputation,
to enduring fame, to the name of country, we had bidden farewell. We
saw depart all hope of retrieving our ancient state—all expectation,
except the feeble one of saving our individual lives from the wreck of
the past. To preserve these we had quitted England—England, no more;
for without her children, what name could that barren island claim?
With tenacious grasp we clung to such rule and order as could best save
us; trusting that, if a little colony could be preserved, that would
suffice at some remoter period to restore the lost community of
mankind.
But the game is up! We must all die; nor leave survivor nor heir to the
wide inheritance of earth. We must all die! The species of man must
perish; his frame of exquisite workmanship; the wondrous mechanism of
his senses; the noble proportion of his godlike limbs; his mind, the
throned king of these; must perish. Will the earth still keep her place
among the planets; will she still journey with unmarked regularity
round the sun; will the seasons change, the trees adorn themselves with
leaves, and flowers shed their fragrance, in solitude? Will the
mountains remain unmoved, and streams still keep a downward course
towards the vast abyss; will the tides rise and fall, and the winds fan
universal nature; will beasts pasture, birds fly, and fishes swim, when
man, the lord, possessor, perceiver, and recorder of all these things,
has passed away, as though he had never been? O, what mockery is this!
Surely death is not death, and humanity is not extinct; but merely
passed into other shapes, unsubjected to our perceptions. Death is a
vast portal, an high road to life: let us hasten to pass; let us exist
no more in this living death, but die that we may live!
We had longed with inexpressible earnestness to reach Dijon, since we
had fixed on it, as a kind of station in our progress. But now we
entered it with a torpor more painful than acute suffering. We had come
slowly but irrevocably to the opinion, that our utmost efforts would
not preserve one human being alive. We took our hands therefore away
from the long grasped rudder; and the frail vessel on which we floated,
seemed, the government over her suspended, to rush, prow foremost, into
the dark abyss of the billows. A gush of grief, a wanton profusion of
tears, and vain laments, and overflowing tenderness, and passionate but
fruitless clinging to the priceless few that remained, was followed by
languor and recklessness.
During this disastrous journey we lost all those, not of our own
family, to whom we had particularly attached ourselves among the
survivors. It were not well to fill these pages with a mere catalogue
of losses; yet I cannot refrain from this last mention of those
principally dear to us. The little girl whom Adrian had rescued from
utter desertion, during our ride through London on the twentieth of
November, died at Auxerre. The poor child had attached herself greatly
to us; and the suddenness of her death added to our sorrow. In the
morning we had seen her apparently in health—in the evening, Lucy,
before we retired to rest, visited our quarters to say that she was
dead. Poor Lucy herself only survived, till we arrived at Dijon. She
had devoted herself throughout to the nursing the sick, and attending
the friendless. Her excessive exertions brought on a slow fever, which
ended in the dread disease whose approach soon released her from her
sufferings. She had throughout been endeared to us by her good
qualities, by her ready and cheerful execution of every duty, and mild
acquiescence in every turn of adversity. When we consigned her to the
tomb, we seemed at the same time to bid a final adieu to those
peculiarly feminine virtues conspicuous in her; uneducated and
unpretending as she was, she was distinguished for patience,
forbearance, and sweetness. These, with all their train of qualities
peculiarly English, would never again be revived for us. This type of
all that was most worthy of admiration in her class among my
countrywomen, was placed under the sod of desert France; and it was as
a second separation from our country to have lost sight of her for
ever.
The Countess of Windsor died during our abode at Dijon. One morning I
was informed that she wished to see me. Her message made me remember,
that several days had elapsed since I had last seen her. Such a
circumstance had often occurred during our journey, when I remained
behind to watch to their close the last moments of some one of our
hapless comrades, and the rest of the troop past on before me. But
there was something in the manner of her messenger, that made me
suspect that all was not right. A caprice of the imagination caused me
to conjecture that some ill had occurred to Clara or Evelyn, rather
than to this aged lady. Our fears, for ever on the stretch, demanded a
nourishment of horror; and it seemed too natural an occurrence, too
like past times, for the old to die before the young. I found the
venerable mother of my Idris lying on a couch, her tall emaciated
figure stretched out; her face fallen away, from which the nose stood
out in sharp profile, and her large dark eyes, hollow and deep, gleamed
with such light as may edge a thunder cloud at sun-set. All was
shrivelled and dried up, except these lights; her voice too was
fearfully changed, as she spoke to me at intervals. “I am afraid,” said
she, “that it is selfish in me to have asked you to visit the old woman
again, before she dies: yet perhaps it would have been a greater shock
to hear suddenly that I was dead, than to see me first thus.”
I clasped her shrivelled hand: “Are you indeed so ill?” I asked.
“Do you not perceive death in my face,” replied she, “it is strange; I
ought to have expected this, and yet I confess it has taken me unaware.
I never clung to life, or enjoyed it, till these last months, while
among those I senselessly deserted: and it is hard to be snatched
immediately away. I am glad, however, that I am not a victim of the
plague; probably I should have died at this hour, though the world had
continued as it was in my youth.”
She spoke with difficulty, and I perceived that she regretted the
necessity of death, even more than she cared to confess. Yet she had
not to complain of an undue shortening of existence; her faded person
shewed that life had naturally spent itself. We had been alone at
first; now Clara entered; the Countess turned to her with a smile, and
took the hand of this lovely child; her roseate palm and snowy fingers,
contrasted with relaxed fibres and yellow hue of those of her aged
friend; she bent to kiss her, touching her withered mouth with the
warm, full lips of youth. “Verney,” said the Countess, “I need not
recommend this dear girl to you, for your own sake you will preserve
her. Were the world as it was, I should have a thousand sage
precautions to impress, that one so sensitive, good, and beauteous,
might escape the dangers that used to lurk for the destruction of the
fair and excellent. This is all nothing now.
“I commit you, my kind nurse, to your uncle’s care; to yours I entrust
the dearest relic of my better self. Be to Adrian, sweet one, what you
have been to me—enliven his sadness with your sprightly sallies; sooth
his anguish by your sober and inspired converse, when he is dying;
nurse him as you have done me.”
Clara burst into tears; “Kind girl,” said the Countess, “do not weep