FUNERAL SHADOWS

A MYSTERY

by: Francis A. Durivage (1814-1881)

The following story is reprinted from The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales. Francis A. Durivage. Boston: Sanborn, 1856.

The wind was howling and moaning through the almost deserted streets of Boston, on a chilly evening of September, as a young man of medium height and slight figure drew a faded and threadbare black cloak around him, pulled his fur cap down on his forehead to shelter his eyes from the cutting wind, and strode down Washington Street in a northerly direction, with a rapid and impatient step. Arrived at the door of a house of moderate pretensions, he entered hastily. We shall follow him to the third story, enter with him a large and wholly dark apartment, and watch him while he kindles a fire on the ample hearth stone. A pale-blue flame flickers hesitatingly among the wood, and conjures up from the walls around strange shapes and countenances bathed in the indistinct and lurid light. And now the flame grows brighter, and the heavy furniture in the apartment flings strange shadows, horizontal, diagonal, and perpendicular; and the pictures on the wall (for we are in a painter's studio) looked quite as vague and vapory as the projected shadows. It is not difficult to imagine some of these faces endowed with vitality, and so wild and startling are many of them that the wavering shadows seem to belong to them, and to be their strangely-animated limbs.

The painter lit a lamp, and then a huge meerschaum filled with fragrant tobacco, his nightly solace and daily inspiration. While the smoke wreaths slowly ascended to the ceiling, he wove his Gothic fancies, and saw, in the blue clouds that hovered over him, embryo designs and groups that he afterwards transferred to canvas.

Malise Grey was an artist of great but peculiar talent—a fine draughtsman, an admirable colorist, but his imagination was of a Gothic cast, and he delighted in strange, fantastical, and supernatural subjects. He had travelled much in Germany, and his mind was imbued with the superstitions and legends of that storied land. These he loved to illustrate with his pencil, and his walls were covered with German scenes and subjects, from the "Witches' Sabbath" to the "Castled Crag of Drachenfels." Portraits he painted from necessity, not choice; but he was too true an artist for the million. The sleek hypocrite wore not on his canvas the deceptive look of holiness that bore him on through life to wealth and honor, but the crafty, sensual smile, the libertine eye, and lips that indicated the secret phases of his character. Imbecile beauty saw her index in the painted mirror. Folly stood convicted by the pencil. It was frequently remarked, that you might learn more of a man from a glance at his portrait than from months' companionship with the original. Malise Grey was not popular—but he lived for his art, and bread and water satisfied his earthly cravings.

The meerschaum fairly smoked out, the artist drew from a dusty pile of canvases one on which he had painted a family group. It was a fancy piece. An old man lay upon his death bed, over which bent a weeping wife and a sorrowing and lovely child. The face of the latter was one of unearthly beauty, and Raphael or Titian might not have disdained the painting of those glistening blue eyes, and the falling sunbeams of that golden hair. The painter had poured out his soul upon that angelic countenance and perfect figure.

"It is my ideal," said the artist, "and, by the mystic whisper of the heart, by the bright teaching of the star that rules my destiny, by the forbidden lore of which I have drank deeply, I know that the ideal of each mind is the reflex of the actual, and with the true artist fancy is existence!"

The meerschaum was again filled, and Malise Grey contemplated his picture. The smoke wreaths rolled around it, but it shone out luminous and starlike. Its harmony was like the silent melody of the spheres, and its musical radiance dispelled the remembrance of all his sufferings, and lulled him like the melody of falling waters. When, at length, he drew his poor couch from its recess, and threw himself upon it, he left the picture full in sight, and continued to watch it by the fading firelight till its last luminous point disappeared with the blaze, and slumber closed his lids to make its memory brighter.

The next morning was clear and sparkling; the first rays of the sun were like fiery rubies on the walls of the studio.

The painter sprang to his feet. "The dream!" he cried. "My heart did not deceive me. The spirits are at work for its accomplishment."

He went forth to take his daily walk. There were times when an appalling dread of insanity smote his heart, and once the expression of a friend at the recital of one of his wildest fantasies led him into a train of reflection and self-examination which shook his very soul. For a time he forsook his studio, and went abroad into the gay world and formed fashionable acquaintances; but he went back to his lonely room and his hermit life at the expiration of a few weeks, convinced that the madness of art was preferable to the madness of society. And it was a painful thing for him to go abroad, for no one sympathized with him. His mind dwelt either on the shadowy past, or the yet more shadowy future. He held no communion with the present. So, on the occasion we have referred to, after a hurried walk, he returned to his room, the door of which he had left unlocked. A veiled lady sat before his easel. She rose upon his entrance. His heart beat high with anticipations. The lady thus addressed him:—

"Malise Grey, we have known each other in the land of dreams!" and removing her veil, she pointed with her left hand to the picture, while she extended her right to the painter. The ideal and the actual stood before him. A strange light gleamed upon the painter's mind, and he spoke as if prompted by some unseen power.

"Esther Vaughan, by this token do I know you." He took her hand, and added, "By the mystic spell that drew us to each other, I conjure you here to plight your troth to me for weal and woe."

"My father died shortly after that picture was painted," replied the maiden, "and my mother—my poor mother—soon followed him. The spirit summons commanded me to seek you out. I have obeyed."

* * * * *

A strange marriage was solemnized in the Old King's Chapel. The bride wore no rose or orange flower in her braided hair, and a long, black veil enveloped her from head to foot. In fact, her entire raiment, and that of the bridegroom, was of the same ghastly hue; and the ceremony was performed beneath the light of torches, which threw their funeral glare upon the mortuary tablets and reliefs that decorate the interior of the sacred edifice. As the newly-married pair were about to step into the carriage at the door, a thin figure in black approached the bride, and laid its hand upon her arm. The countenance was not visible. The bride uttered a sharp cry of pain and terror, and the figure instantly stepped back.

"Hold up your torch, there, sexton," cried the painter; "some one has insulted the bride."

A tall figure was seen stealing away through the tombstones in the churchyard, to which he had probably gained access through a breach in the wall, at that time wholly ruinous.

It is not our intention to describe the happiness of Malise Grey and his strangely-found and strangely-wedded bride. Enough to say, it was like all the circumstances that composed his existence—dream-like and strange. So vivid were his dreams and reveries, that he often wondered whether they were not the actual, and his marriage life the imaginary, part of his existence. He could not give himself up to enjoyment; and sometimes, when his young wife would have lavished on him the wealth of her innocent caresses, he turned from her moodily, and muttered, "What have I to do with a spirit bride? When the sun rises, these shadows will disperse."

Esther Grey had often solicited her husband to paint her portrait, since the likeness in the family picture showed her under the influence of grief. She wished a record of her happiness. Grey set about complying with her request. He assumed the task in a moment of inspired and fresh feeling, and went to work with heart and soul. His sketch was instantaneously executed, and then

"His touches they flew like leaves in a storm;

And the pure pearly white, and the carnation warm,

Contending in harmony, glowed."

Suddenly he threw down his pencil, and paced the apartment to and fro with rapid strides. "The doomed look!" he muttered, "the doomed look! Esther, I can paint no more to-day."

But the morrow found him early at his task. A few hours' work completed a portrait which, for fidelity of likeness, harmony of accessories, and felicity of coloring, was almost unsurpassable. Yet the painter refused to have it framed, and concealed it from view behind a curtain in his studio.

A day or two afterwards, a stranger called upon the artist. He was a tall, thin man, attired in a threadbare suit of black bombazine. He was frightfully pale. His jaws were prominent, and the sallow, shrunken skin clung close to every muscle of his countenance. His dark, sunken, and glossy eyes had an unearthly expression, and his air was melancholy in the extreme. A nameless chill came over the painter as he surveyed the aspect of his unknown visitor. The stranger coldly surveyed the productions of the artist, and honored them with a few brief comments. At length he paused before the veiled picture, and said, "This picture of your wife belongs to me."

The painter was so strong a believer in the supernatural, had been subject to so many inexplicable influences, that he felt no surprise at the stranger's naming the subject of the veiled picture without uncovering it. But he repeated, sternly, "Belongs to you? What mean you by that remark?"

"I mean it is, or will be mine, by purchase."

"Not so."

"Then you will not sell it?"

"I will not part with it at any price."

The stranger smiled, but not sneeringly or sarcastically The expression of his countenance was mournful in the extreme, and likewise unpleasant, because the parting of his shrivelled lips displayed his large, yellow teeth in unpleasant relief. He opened the door, but paused upon the threshold.

"You will not part with it?"

"Once more, no!" replied the painter.

"No matter; the original will soon be mine."

The door closed rapidly behind his noiseless steps. A vague terror shot through the soul of the artist.

When Esther Vaughan came to the dwelling of the painter, she was radiant with a health which had triumphed over sorrow and long watching, but the seeds of disease now fastened upon her frame, and she sunk under its influence, growing daily feebler. The almost distracted husband employed the best physicians in the city, and under their efforts Esther, for a while, seemed to revive. One day, in solemn conclave, they decided that the patient would live, and announced the intelligence to the poor painter, as he sat in his lonely studio, with much pomposity and emphasis. At the time of this announcement, the painter was standing opposite the open door through which the physicians had just entered. At the moment when a smile of gratified love was lighting up his intelligent countenance, his eyes, looking beyond the group of visitors, caught in the corridor those of the strange bidder for the veiled picture. The unknown shook his head slowly and mournfully, then turned and retired.

"Stop him, gentlemen," cried the painter, bursting through the group of leeches; "he is a deadly enemy!"

The physicians looked at each other, smiled darkly, and shook their heads.

"Poor Grey!" said an old doctor.

"Mad?" asked the youngest of the group.

"The cell, the chain, and scourge would be a wholesome prescription," said the first speaker.

Such were the tender mercies of science to madness in the eighteenth century.

* * * * *

It was a hushed midsummer night. The hum of busy footsteps had long since died away, and the twinkling lights had faded, one by one, from the huge bulk of the metropolis. To the lonely night watcher, there was enough of light in the mild effulgence of the moon to distinguish whether the pale invalid woke or slumbered; whether the repose of the dead was inviolate, or invaded by noisome things that move abroad only in darkness. And midway between life and death, so motionless that you would say she belonged to the dark realm of the latter, so lovely that the former still seemed to claim her own, lay the earth-born love of the painter, with her ethereal essence yet hovering near the beloved of her soul. The painter sat by the bedside, with her thin, pale hand clasped in his. He had listened to her last accents; he had heard her call him, in the fervor of her affection, "her beautiful, her own;" and he knew that, ere the unseen clock had recorded the death of another hour, the feeble pulse that fluttered beneath his fingers would have ceased to beat. Yet, with all this, his eyes were tearless, and his heart less heavy than in those dark dreams which had foreshadowed this event. In weal or woe, his prophetic dreams seemed even more impressive than the realities which followed them.

It appeared as if there were a magnetic influence in the touch of the dying hand; that the soul of Esther, bathed in the dawning light of the better world, had communicated a portion of its brightness to his own. So the hours wore on; the feeble pulse yet beat, but fainter and fainter. At last, through the open window which commanded a view of the east, the brightening streaks of dawn appeared; in the leaves of a solitary tree, that stood amid a wilderness of brick hard by, was heard the faint, tremulous twitter of a bird waiting but a ruddier ray to launch forth upon his dewy pinions. A smile, like a ray of light, dawned upon the countenance of Esther. She pointed to a shadowy alcove in the chamber, and the painter's eye, following the indication, detected the figure of his mysterious and prophetic visitor. But the countenance of the unknown was milder, softer; a veil of brightness had fallen upon the more repulsive lineaments, and when the broad daylight beamed into the apartment, his image melted into the ray, like a rain-drop into a sunny sea. A thrill ran through the painter's frame; he gazed upon the face of Esther; it was that of death.

* * * * *

An unfinished painting rests upon an easel; it is a glimpse of paradise. In the centre is a focus of almost intolerable splendor, the luminous veil of the Inconceivable and Infinite; while towards it, as if drawn by a vortex of glory, yet held in suspense when too near, hovers a cloud of radiant forms and faces, their souls, pure and beatified, beaming from their countenances, all full of adoration, intelligence, and bliss. The painter sat before it, giving the last touches with a feeble yet graceful hand. A light seemed to stream upon him from the picture, and lit up his pale, inspired countenance.

The door opened, yet the painter turned not from his task; he heard no footstep, yet he knew that the messenger—no longer feared, but hoped for—was standing at his side.

"One touch more," he said, softly. "Thus 'tis done, and bravely done!"

He turned—the mysterious messenger was truly there. But as the painter gazed, the herald's form was transfigured; his poor garments had given place to shining raiments; his countenance beamed glory and goodness; effulgent wings expanded their snowy plumage from his glorious shoulders, and on his forehead shone a star like that of morning. He touched the mortal hand that throbbed to meet his clasp; the last film fell from the painter's eye, and he saw, with ecstasy, no horrid phantom, but Azrael, the Angel of Death, great, beautiful, and good.