THE BLACK CAT.
FOR the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, Ineither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it,in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am Inot--and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-dayI would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place beforethe world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series ofmere household events. In their consequences, these events haveterrified--have tortured--have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt toexpound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror--to manythey will seem less terrible than _barroques_. Hereafter, perhaps,some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to thecommon-place--some intellect more calm, more logical, and far lessexcitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances Idetail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of verynatural causes and effects.
From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of mydisposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to makeme the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and wasindulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spentmost of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressingthem. This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and in mymanhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure. Tothose who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagaciousdog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or theintensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in theunselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directlyto the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltryfriendship and gossamer fidelity of mere _Man_.
I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition notuncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, shelost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind. Wehad birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and _a cat_.
This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black,and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence,my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition,made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded allblack cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever _serious_ uponthis point--and I mention the matter at all for no better reason thanthat it happens, just now, to be remembered.
Pluto--this was the cat's name--was my favorite pet and playmate. Ialone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. Itwas even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following methrough the streets.
Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during whichmy general temperament and character--through the instrumentality of theFiend Intemperance--had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radicalalteration for the worse. I grew, day by day, more moody, moreirritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myselfto use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered herpersonal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the changein my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them. ForPluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me frommaltreating him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, themonkey, or even the dog, when by accident, or through affection, theycame in my way. But my disease grew upon me--for what disease is likeAlcohol!--and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old, andconsequently somewhat peevish--even Pluto began to experience theeffects of my ill temper.
One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts abouttown, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, inhis fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand withhis teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myselfno longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from mybody and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled everyfibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, openedit, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one ofits eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen thedamnable atrocity.
When reason returned with the morning--when I had slept off the fumes ofthe night's debauch--I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half ofremorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best,a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I againplunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.
In the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of the lost eyepresented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no longer appearedto suffer any pain. He went about the house as usual, but, as might beexpected, fled in extreme terror at my approach. I had so much of myold heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike onthe part of a creature which had once so loved me. But this feelingsoon gave place to irritation. And then came, as if to my final andirrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spiritphilosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives,than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of thehuman heart--one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments,which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundredtimes, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no otherreason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetualinclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that whichis _Law_, merely because we understand it to be such? This spiritof perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was thisunfathomable longing of the soul _to vex itself_--to offer violence toits own nature--to do wrong for the wrong's sake only--that urged me tocontinue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon theunoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose aboutits neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;--hung it with thetears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at myheart;--hung it _because_ I knew that it had loved me, and _because_I felt it had given me no reason of offence;--hung it _because_ I knewthat in so doing I was committing a sin--a deadly sin that wouldso jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it--if such a thing worepossible--even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the MostMerciful and Most Terrible God.
On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was arousedfrom sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames.The whole house was blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife,a servant, and myself, made our escape from the conflagration. Thedestruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, andI resigned myself thenceforward to despair.
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of causeand effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing achain of facts--and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect.On the day succeeding the fire, I visited the ruins. The walls, withone exception, had fallen in. This exception was found in a compartmentwall, not very thick, which stood about the middle of the house, andagainst which had rested the head of my bed. The plastering had here,in great measure, resisted the action of the fire--a fact which Iattributed to its having been recently spread. About this wall adense crowd were collected, and many persons seemed to be examining aparticular portion of it with very minute and eager attention. Thewords ”strange!” ”singular!” and other similar expressions, excited mycuriosity. I approached and saw, as if graven in _bas relief_ upon thewhite surface, the figure of a gigantic _cat_. The impression was givenwith an accuracy truly marvellous. There was a rope about the animal'sneck.
When I first beheld this apparition--for I could scarcely regard it asless--my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length reflectioncame to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a gardenadjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had beenimmediately filled by the crowd--by some one of whom the animal musthave been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into mychamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing mefrom sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of mycruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime ofwhich, with the flames, and the _ammonia_ from the carcass, had thenaccomplished the portraiture as I saw it.
Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to myconscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the lessfail to make a deep impression upon my fancy. For months I could not ridmyself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this period, there cameback into my spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse.I went so far as to regret the loss of the animal, and to look about me,among the vile haunts which I now habitually frequented, for another petof the same species, and of somewhat similar appearance, with which tosupply its place.
One night as I sat, half stupified, in a den of more than infamy, myattention was suddenly drawn to some black object, reposing uponthe head of one of the immense hogsheads of Gin, or of Rum, whichconstituted the chief furniture of the apartment. I had been lookingsteadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes, and what nowcaused me surprise was the fact that I had not sooner perceived theobject thereupon. I approached it, and touched it with my hand. It wasa black cat--a very large one--fully as large as Pluto, and closelyresembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair uponany portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinitesplotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast. Uponmy touching him, he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against myhand, and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then, was the verycreature of which I was in search. I at once offered to purchase itof the landlord; but this person made no claim to it--knew nothing ofit--had never seen it before.
I continued my caresses, and, when I prepared to go home, the animalevinced a disposition to accompany me. I permitted it to do so;occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded. When it reachedthe house it domesticated itself at once, and became immediately a greatfavorite with my wife.
For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. Thiswas just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but--I know not howor why it was--its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted andannoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance roseinto the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain senseof shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventingme from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, orotherwise violently ill use it; but gradually--very gradually--I cameto look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from itsodious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence.
What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, onthe morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had beendeprived of one of its eyes. This circumstance, however, only endearedit to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a high degree,that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait,and the source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures.
With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemedto increase. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it wouldbe difficult to make the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it wouldcrouch beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with itsloathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet andthus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in mydress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast. At such times, althoughI longed to destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing,partly by a memory of my former crime, but chiefly--let me confess it atonce--by absolute dread of the beast.
This dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil--and yet I should beat a loss how otherwise to define it. I am almost ashamed to own--yes,even in this felon's cell, I am almost ashamed to own--that the terrorand horror with which the animal inspired me, had been heightened by oneof the merest chimaeras it would be possible to conceive. My wife hadcalled my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark ofwhite hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the solevisible difference between the strange beast and the one I haddestroyed. The reader will remember that this mark, although large, hadbeen originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees--degrees nearlyimperceptible, and which for a long time my Reason struggled to rejectas fanciful--it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness ofoutline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder toname--and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would haverid myself of the monster _had I dared_--it was now, I say, the imageof a hideous--of a ghastly thing--of the GALLOWS!--oh, mournful andterrible engine of Horror and of Crime--of Agony and of Death!
And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity.And _a brute beast _--whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed--_abrute beast_ to work out for _me_--for me a man, fashioned in the imageof the High God--so much of insufferable wo! Alas! neither by day norby night knew I the blessing of Rest any more! During the former thecreature left me no moment alone; and, in the latter, I started, hourly,from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of _the thing_upon my face, and its vast weight--an incarnate Night-Mare that I had nopower to shake off--incumbent eternally upon my _heart!_
Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnantof the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my soleintimates--the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness ofmy usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind;while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a furyto which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas!was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.
One day she accompanied me, upon some household errand, into the cellarof the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit. The catfollowed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong,exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in mywrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed ablow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatalhad it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand ofmy wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal,I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. Shefell dead upon the spot, without a groan.
This hideous murder accomplished, I set myself forthwith, and withentire deliberation, to the task of concealing the body. I knew that Icould not remove it from the house, either by day or by night, withoutthe risk of being observed by the neighbors. Many projects enteredmy mind. At one period I thought of cutting the corpse into minutefragments, and destroying them by fire. At another, I resolved to diga grave for it in the floor of the cellar. Again, I deliberated aboutcasting it in the well in the yard--about packing it in a box, as ifmerchandize, with the usual arrangements, and so getting a porter totake it from the house. Finally I hit upon what I considered a farbetter expedient than either of these. I determined to wall it up in thecellar--as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled uptheir victims.
For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted. Its walls wereloosely constructed, and had lately been plastered throughout with arough plaster, which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented fromhardening. Moreover, in one of the walls was a projection, caused bya false chimney, or fireplace, that had been filled up, and made toresemble the red of the cellar. I made no doubt that I could readilydisplace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the wholeup as before, so that no eye could detect any thing suspicious. And inthis calculation I was not deceived. By means of a crow-bar I easilydislodged the bricks, and, having carefully deposited the body againstthe inner wall, I propped it in that position, while, with littletrouble, I re-laid the whole structure as it originally stood. Havingprocured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution, Iprepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, andwith this I very carefully went over the new brickwork. When I hadfinished, I felt satisfied that all was right. The wall did not presentthe slightest appearance of having been disturbed. The rubbish onthe floor was picked up with the minutest care. I looked aroundtriumphantly, and said to myself--”Here at least, then, my labor has notbeen in vain.”
My next step was to look for the beast which had been the cause of somuch wretchedness; for I had, at length, firmly resolved to put it todeath. Had I been able to meet with it, at the moment, there could havebeen no doubt of its fate; but it appeared that the crafty animal hadbeen alarmed at the violence of my previous anger, and forebore topresent itself in my present mood. It is impossible to describe, or toimagine, the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the absence of thedetested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make itsappearance during the night--and thus for one night at least, since itsintroduction into the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slepteven with the burden of murder upon my soul!
The second and the third day passed, and still my tormentor came not.Once again I breathed as a freeman. The monster, in terror, had fled thepremises forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme!The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little. Some few inquirieshad been made, but these had been readily answered. Even a search hadbeen instituted--but of course nothing was to be discovered. I lookedupon my future felicity as secured.
Upon the fourth day of the assassination, a party of the police came,very unexpectedly, into the house, and proceeded again to make rigorousinvestigation of the premises. Secure, however, in the inscrutability ofmy place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatever. The officersbade me accompany them in their search. They left no nook or cornerunexplored. At length, for the third or fourth time, they descended intothe cellar. I quivered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as that ofone who slumbers in innocence. I walked the cellar from end to end. Ifolded my arms upon my bosom, and roamed easily to and fro. The policewere thoroughly satisfied and prepared to depart. The glee at my heartwas too strong to be restrained. I burned to say if but one word, byway of triumph, and to render doubly sure their assurance of myguiltlessness.
”Gentlemen,” I said at last, as the party ascended the steps, ”I delightto have allayed your suspicions. I wish you all health, and a littlemore courtesy. By the bye, gentlemen, this--this is a very wellconstructed house.” [In the rabid desire to say something easily, Iscarcely knew what I uttered at all.]--”I may say an _excellently_ wellconstructed house. These walls--are you going, gentlemen?--these wallsare solidly put together;” and here, through the mere phrenzy ofbravado, I rapped heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand, uponthat very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of thewife of my bosom.
But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the Arch-Fiend! Nosooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I wasanswered by a voice from within the tomb!--by a cry, at first muffledand broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling intoone long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman--ahowl--a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such asmight have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of thedammed in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.
Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered tothe opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remainedmotionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozenstout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, alreadygreatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes ofthe spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eyeof fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder,and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walledthe monster up within the tomb!