Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the moment of Morellas decease? I did. But the fragile spirit clung to its tenement of clay for many days for many weeks and irksome months until my tortured nerves obtained the mastery over my mind, and I grew furious with delay, and with the heart of a fiend I cursed the days, and the hours, and the bitter moments which seemed to lengthen, and lengthen as her gentle life declined like shadows in the dying of the day.
But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in Heaven, Morella called me to her side. There was a dim mist over all the earth, and a warm glow upon the waters, and amid the rich October leaves of the forest a rainbow from the firmament had surely fallen. As I came, she was murmuring in a low undertone, which trembled with fervor, the words of a Catholic hymn:
Sancta Maria! turn thine eyes
Upon the sinners sacrifice
Of fervent prayer, and humble love,
From thy holy throne above.
At morn, at noon, at twilight dim,
Maria! thou hast heard my hymn.
In joy and wo, in good and ill,
Mother of God! be with me still.
When my hours flew gently by.
And no storms were in the sky,
My soul, lest it should truant be,
Thy love did guide to thine and thee.
Now, when clouds of Fate oercast
All my Present, and my Past,
Let my Future radiant shine
With sweet hopes of thee and thine.
It is a day of days said Morella a day of all days either to live or die. It is a fair day for the sons of Earth and Life ah! more fair for the daughters of Heaven and Death.
I turned towards her, and she continued.
I am dying yet shall I live. Therefore for me, Morella, thy wife, hath the charnel house no terrors mark me! not even the terrors of the worm. The days have never been when thou couldst love me; but her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.
Morella!
I repeat that I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that affection ah, how little! which you felt for me, Morella. And when my spirit departs shall the child live thy child and mine, Morellas. But thy days shall be days of sorrow that sorrow which is the most lasting of impressions, as the cypress is the most enduring of trees. For the hours of thy happiness are over, and Joy is not gathered twice in a life, as the roses of Paestum twice in a year. Thou shall not, then, play the Teian with Time, but, being ignorant of the myrtle and the vine, thou shalt bear about with thee thy shroud on earth, like the Moslemin at Mecca.
Morella! I cried Morella! how knowest thou this? but she turned away her face upon the pillow, and, a slight tremor coming over her limbs, she thus died, and I heard her voice no more.
Yet, as she had foreseen, her child to which in dying she had given birth, and which breathed not till the mother breathed no more her child, a daughter, lived. And she grew strangely in size and intellect, and was the perfect resemblance of her who had departed, and I loved her with a love more fervent and more intense than I believed it possible to feel on earth.
But ere long the Heaven of this pure affection became overcast; and Gloom, and Horror, and Grief came over it in clouds. I said the child grew strangely in stature and intelligence. Strange indeed was her rapid increase in bodily size but terrible, oh! terrible were the tumultuous thoughts which crowded upon me while watching the development of her mental being. Could it be otherwise[45], when I daily discovered in the conceptions of the child the adult powers and faculties of the woman? when the lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy? and when the wisdom or the passions of maturity I found hourly gleaming from its full and speculative eye? When, I say, all this became evident to my appalled senses when I could no longer hide it from my soul, nor throw it off from those perceptions which trembled to receive it, is it to be wondered at that suspicions of a nature fearful, and exciting, crept in upon my spirit, or that my thoughts fell back aghast upon the wild tales and thrilling theories of the entombed Morella? I snatched from the scrutiny of the world a being whom Destiny compelled me to adore, and in the rigid seclusion of my ancestral home, I watched with an agonizing anxiety over all which concerned my daughter.
And as years rolled away and daily I gazed upon her eloquent and mild and holy face, and pored orer her maturing form, did I discover new points of resemblance in the child to her mother the melancholy, and the dead. And hourly grew darker these shadows, as it were, of similitude, and became more full, and more definite, and more perplexing, and to me more terrible in their aspect. For that her smile was like her mothers I could bear but then I shuddered at its too perfect identity: that her eyes were Morellas own I could endure but then they looked down too often into the depths of my soul with Morellas intense and bewildering meaning. And in the contour of the high forehead, and in the ringlets of the silken hair, and in the wan fingers which buried themselves therein, and in the musical tones of her speech, and above all oh! above all, in the phrases and expressions of the dead on the lips of the loved and the living, I found food for consuming thought and horror for a worm that would not die.