Part 5 (1/2)
When the boy was sixteen, Captain Allen took him to sea. From that period for many years, both of them were absent for at least two-thirds of the time. At twenty-five, John took command of a large merchant-man, trading to the South American coast, and his father, now worn down by hard service, as well as by years, retired to his home in S----, to close up there, in such repose of mind as he could gain, the last days of his eventful life. He died soon after by apoplexy.
Prior to this event, his son, the younger Captain Allen, had brought home from Cuba a Spanish woman, who took the name of his wife. Of her family, or antecedents, no one in our town knew anything; and it was questioned by many whether any rite of marriage had ever been celebrated between them. Of this, however, nothing certain was known. None of the best people, so called, in S----paid her the hospitable compliment of a visit; and she showed no disposition to intrude herself upon them.
And so they stood towards each other as strangers; and the Allen house remained, as from the beginning, to most people a terra incognita.
Neither Captain Allen nor his Spanish consort, to whom no children were born, as they advanced in years, ”grew old gracefully.” Both had repulsive features, which were strongly marked by pa.s.sion and sensuality. During the last two years of his life I was frequently called to see him, and prescribe for his enemy, the gout, by which he was sorely afflicted. Mrs. Allen also required treatment. Her nervous system was disordered; and, on closer observation, I detected signs of a vagrant imagination, leading her away into states verging upon insanity.
She was fretful and ill-tempered; and rarely spoke to the Captain except complainingly, or in anger. The visits I made to the Allen house, during the lifetime of Captain Allen, were among the most unsatisfactory of all my professional calls. I think, from signs which met my eyes, that something more than bitter words pa.s.sed occasionally between the ill-matched couple.
Late in the day, nearly five years anterior to the time of which I am now writing, I was summoned in haste to visit Captain Allen. I found him lying on a bed in the north-west chamber, where he usually slept, in a state of insensibility. Mrs. Allen received me at the door of the chamber with a frightened countenance. On inquiry as to the cause of his condition, she informed me that he had gone to his own room about an hour before, a little the worse for a bottle of wine; and that she had heard nothing more from him, until she was startled by a loud, jarring noise in his chamber. On running up stairs, she found him lying upon the floor, insensible.
I looked at her steadily, as she gave me this relation, but could not hold her eyes in mine. She seemed more uneasy than troubled. There was a contused wound just below the right temple, which covered, with its livid stain, a portion of the cheek. A cursory examination satisfied me that, whatever might be the cause of his fall, congestion of the brain had occurred, and that but few chances for life remained. So I informed Mrs. Allen. At the words, I could see a shudder run through her frame, and an expression of something like terror sweep over her face.
”His father died of apoplexy,” said she in a hoa.r.s.e whisper, looking at me with a side-long, almost stealthy glance, not full and open-eyed.
”This is something more than apoplexy,” I remarked; still observing her closely.
”The fall may have injured him,” she suggested.
”The blow on his temple has done the fearful work,” said I.
There was a perceptible start, and another look of fear-almost terror.
”For heaven's sake, doctor,” she said, rousing herself, and speaking half imperatively, ”do something! Don't stand speculating about the cause; but do something if you have any skill.”
Thus prompted, I set myself to work, in good earnest, with my patient.
The result was in no way flattering to my skill, for he pa.s.sed to his account in less than an hour, dying without a sign.
I shall never forget the wild screams which rang awfully through the old mansion, when it was announced to Mrs. Allen that the Captain was dead.
She flung herself upon his body, tore her hair, and committed other extravagances. All the slumbering pa.s.sions of her undisciplined nature seemed quickened into sudden life, overmastering her in their strong excitement. So it would have seemed to a less suspicious observer; but I thought that I could detect the overacting of pretence. I may have done her wrong; but the impression still remains. At the funeral, this extravagant role of grief was re-enacted, and the impression was left on many minds that she was half mad with grief.
Occasionally, after this event, I was summoned to the Allen House to see its unhappy mistress. I say unhappy, for no human being ever had a face written all over with the characters you might read in hers, that was not miserable. I used to study it, sometimes, to see if I could get anything like a true revelation of her inner life. The sudden lighting up of her countenance at times, as you observed its rapidly varying expression, made you almost shudder, for the gleam which shot across it looked like a reflection from h.e.l.l. I know no other word to express what I mean. Remorse, at times, I could plainly read.
One thing I soon noticed; the room in which Captain Allen died--the north-west chamber before mentioned--remained shut up; and an old servant told me, years afterwards, that Mrs. Allen had never been inside of it since the fatal day on which I attended him in his last moments.
At the time when this story opens the old lady was verging on to sixty.
The five years which had pa.s.sed since she was left alone had bent her form considerably, and the diseased state of mind which I noticed when first called in to visit the family as a physician, was now but a little way removed from insanity. She was haunted by many strange hallucinations; and the old servant above alluded to, informed me, that she was required to sleep in the room with her mistress, as she never would be alone after dark. Often, through the night, she would start up in terror, her diseased imagination building up terrible phantoms in the land of dreams, alarming the house with her cries.
I rarely visited her that I did not see new evidences of waning reason.
In the beginning I was fearful that she might do some violence to herself or her servants, but her insanity began to a.s.sume a less excitable form; and at last she sank into a condition of torpor, both of mind and body, from which I saw little prospect of her ever rising.
”It is well,” I said to myself. ”Life had better wane slowly away than to go out in lurid gleams like the flashes of a dying volcano.”
CHAPTER V.
And now, reader, after this long digression, you can understand my surprise at seeing broad gleams of light reaching out into the darkness from the windows of that north-west chamber, as I breasted the storm on my way to visit the sick child of Mary Jones. No wonder that I stood still and looked up at those windows, though the rain beat into my face, half blinding me. The shutters were thrown open, and the curtains drawn partly aside. I plainly saw shadows on the ceiling and walls as of persons moving about the room. Did my eyes deceive me? Was not that the figure of a young girl that stood for a moment at the window trying to pierce with her eyes the thick veil of night? I was still in doubt when the figure turned away, and only gave me a shadow on the wall.
I lingered in front of the old house for some minutes, but gaining no intelligence of what was pa.s.sing within, I kept on my way to the humbler dwelling of Mary Jones. I found her child quite ill, and needing attention. After doing what, in my judgment, the case required, I turned my steps towards the house of Mrs. Wallingford to look into the case of her son Henry, who, according to her account, was in a very unhappy condition.