Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself. Vol. II (of 2)

"Farewell then," said he, "and good luck to you! It is a declaration of war, and now I'll keep no terms with you."

Then giving me a look that froze my blood, it was so furiously hostile and vindictive, he struck his hands together, rushed from the house, and I saw him no more for nearly a fortnight. I saw him no more, as I said; but coming home the following evening from the club, I found my strong-box broken open and rifled of the money that I left in it.

The sum was indeed but small, but the robbery had been perpetrated by my own son; and the reader, if he be a father, will judge what effect this discovery produced upon my mind. In good truth, I felt now that I was the most wretched of human beings, and was reduced nearly to distraction.

But this blow was but a buffet with the hand, compared with the thunder-bolt that fate was preparing to launch against my bosom. I cursed my miserable lot; yet it wanted one more stroke of misfortune to sever the chain with which avarice still bound me to my condition.

CHAPTER V.

THE FATE OF THE FIRSTBORN

On the eleventh day after the flight of Abbot, whom all my inquiries failed to discover, as I was walking towards the exchange, torn by my domestic woes, and by a threatened convulsion in stocks, which concerned me very nearly, I met one of my companions of the club, who, noting my disturbed countenance, drew me aside, and told me he was sorry I had got my foot into the fire; but the club had last night taken the matter into consideration, and agreed to stand by me, if it were possible.

All this was heathen Greek to me; and I told my friend I was in no trouble I knew of, and wanted no countenance from anybody.

"I am very glad to hear it," said he; "but what are you doing with so much paper in the market? That's no good sign, you'll allow!"

I started aghast, and he proceeded to inform me that he had himself seen two of my notes for considerable amounts, and had heard of others; and, finally, that he had just, parted with the president (an intimate friend of his) of a bank not a furlong off, who had asked divers questions as to the state of my affairs, and admitted there was paper of mine at that moment in the bank.

I was seized with consternation, assured him all such notes must be forgeries; and running with him to the bank, demanded to see any paper they had with my name to it. They produced two different notes for large amounts, which I instantly declared to be counterfeit; and then ran in search of others.

The hubbub created by this declaration was great, but the tumult in my mind was greater. A horrid suspicion as to the author of the forgeries entered my soul, and I became so deadly sick as to be unable to prosecute the inquisition further. My friend deposited me in a coach, and I was carried to my home, but in a condition more dead than alive. My suspicions were in a few hours dreadfully confirmed by my friend, who returned with the intelligence which he had acquired. The forger was discovered and arrested – it was the elder brother, Ralph Skinner.

Words cannot paint the agony with which I flew to the magistrate's office, and beheld the unfortunate youth in the hands of justice; but what was my horror to discover the extent and multiplicity of his frauds. The number of forgeries he had committed in his parent's name was indeed enormous; and it seems he had committed them with the intention of flying; for many of his guilty gains were found secreted on his person. But even after so much had been recovered, the residue to be refunded was appalling. The thought of making restitution drove me almost to a phrensy, while the idea of seeing him carried to jail, to meet the doom of a felon, was equally distracting. My misery was read on my face; and some one present, perhaps with a motive of humanity, cried out,

"Why persecute the young man? Here is his father, who acknowledges the notes to be genuine."

"Ah," said the magistrate, "does he so? Why, then we have had much foolish trouble for nothing."

I looked at the amount of the forgeries, a list of which some one put into my hands.

"It is false," I cried; "I will not pay a cent!"

I cast my eyes upon Ralph. He reached over a table behind which he stood, and waved his hand to and fro, as if, had he been nigh enough, he would have buffeted me on the face. His look was that of a demon, and he spat the foam from his lips, as if to testify the extremity of hatred.

"Let him go," I cried; "I will pay it all!"

"You can undoubtedly do so, if you will," said the magistrate, who had marked the malice that beamed from the visage of the young man; "but do not dream that that will discharge the prisoner from arrest, or from the necessity of answering the felony of which he now stands accused, before a court and jury. The extent of the forgeries, and the temper displayed by the accused, are such, that he must and shall abide the fruits of his delinquency. He stands committed – officer, remove him."

I heard no more; my brain spun round and round, and I was again carried insensible to my miserable dwelling.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CATASTROPHE OF A TRAGEDY OFTEN PERFORMED ON THE GREAT STAGE OF LIFE

It may be supposed that the misery now weighing me to the earth was as much as could be imposed upon me; but I was destined to find, and that before the night was over, that misery is only comparative, and that there is no affliction so positively great that greater may not be experienced. In the dead of the night, when my woes had at last been drowned in slumber, I was roused by feeling a hand pressing upon my bosom; and, starting up, I saw, for there was a taper burning on a table hard by, a man standing over me, holding a pillow in his hand, which, the moment I caught sight of him, he thrust into my face, and there endeavoured to hold it, as if to suffocate me.

The horror of death endowed me with a strength not my own, and the ruffian held the pillow with a feeble and trembling arm. I dashed it aside, leaped up in the bed, and beheld in the countenance of the murderer the features of the long missing and abandoned son, Abbot Skinner.

His face was white and chalky, with livid stains around the eyes and mouth, the former of which were staring out of their orbits in a manner ghastly to behold, while his lips were drawn asunder and away from his teeth, as in the face of a mummy. He looked as if horror-struck at the act he was attempting; and yet there was something devilish and determined in his air, that increased my terror to ecstasy. I sprang from the bed, threw myself on the floor, and, grasping his knees, besought him to spare my life. There seemed indeed occasion for all my supplications: his bloated and altered visage, the neglected appearance of his garments and person, and a thousand other signs, showed that the whole period of his absence had been passed in excessive toping, and the murderous and unnatural act which he meditated manifested to what a pitch of phrensy he had brought himself by the indulgence. As I grasped his knees, he put his hand into his bosom, and drew out a poniard, a weapon I had never before known him to carry; at the sight of which I considered myself a dead man. But the love of life still prevailing, I leaped up, and ran to a corner of the room, where I mingled adjurations and entreaties with loud screams for assistance. He stood as if rooted to the spot for a moment; then dropping his horrid weapon, he advanced a few paces, clasped his hands together, fell upon his knees, and burst into tears, and all the while without having uttered a single word. But now, my cries still continuing, he exclaimed, but with a most wild and disturbed look – "Father, I won't hurt you, and pray don't hurt me!"

By this time the housekeeper Barbara, having been alarmed by my outcries, came into the chamber; and her presence relieving me of the immediate fear of death, I gave vent to the horror that his unnatural attempt on my life justly excited, and thus made the woman acquainted with his baseness.

The poor old creature, who had always loved him, was greatly affected, especially when, in reply to my reproaches, he began to talk incoherently, admitting the fact, one instant attempting to justify it by preferring some strange and incoherent complaint, and the next assuring me, in the most piteous manner, that he would do me no harm. To Barbara's upbraidings he replied with a like inconsistency; and when she reproached him for meditating violence at such a moment, while I was mourning the baseness of his brother, he paid little attention to what she said, seeming not only ignorant of Ralph's delinquency, but apparently indifferent to it.

For this reason I began to fear his brain was touched; of which, indeed, I had soon the most fatal proof; for Barbara, having led him to his chamber, came back, assuring me that he was going mad, that his mind was already in a ferment, and, in a word, that that horrible distraction which sooner or later overtakes the confirmed drinker, was lighting the torch in his brain that could only go out with life itself. A physician was sent for: our fears were but too just, and before dawn the miserable youth was raving distracted.

The day that followed was one of distraction, not only to the wretched Abbot, but to myself; and I remember it as a confused dream. The only thing that dwells on my recollection, apart from the outcries in Abbot's chamber and the tumult in my own heart, is, that some one who owed me a sum of money, due that day, came and paid it into my hands with great punctiliousness, and that I received and wrote the acquittance for it with as much accuracy as if nothing were the matter, though my thoughts were far from the subject before me.

At eleven o'clock at night a messenger came to me from the prison, and his news was indeed frightful. The wretched Ralph had just been discovered with his throat cut from ear to ear, having made way with himself in despair.

A few moments after I was summoned to the death-bed of his brother.

I shall never forget the horror of that young man's dissolution. He lay, at times, the picture of terror, gazing upon the walls, along which, in his imagination, crept myriads of loathsome reptiles, with now some frightful monster, and now a fire-lipped demon, stealing out of the shadows and preparing to dart upon him as their prey. Now he would whine and weep, as if asking forgiveness for some act of wrong done to the being man is most constant to wrong – the loving, the feeble, the confiding; and anon, seized by a tempest of passion, the cause of which could only be imagined, he would start up, fight, foam at the mouth, and fall back in convulsions. Once he sat up in bed, and, looking like a corpse, began to sing a bacchanalian song; on another occasion, after lying for many minutes in apparent stupefaction, he leaped out of bed before he could be prevented, and, uttering a yell that was heard in the street, endeavoured to throw himself from the window.

But the last raving act of all was the most horrid. He rose upon his knees with a strength that could not be resisted, caught up his pillow, thrust it down upon the bed with both hands, and there held it, with a grim countenance and a chuckling laugh. None understood the act but myself: no other could read the devilish thoughts then at work in his bosom. It was the scene enacted in the chamber of his parent – he was repeating the deed of murder – he was exulting, in imagination, over a successful parricide.

In this thought he expired; for while still pressing upon the pillow with a giant's strength, he suddenly fell on his face, and when turned over was a corpse. He gave but a single gasp, and was no more.

The horror of the spectacle drove me from the chamber, and I ran to my own to fall down and die; when the blessed thought entered my mind, that the wo on my spirit, the anguish, the distraction, were but a dream – that my very existence, as the miser and broken-hearted father, was a phantasm rather than a reality, since it was a borrowed existence – and that it was in my power to exchange it, as I had done other modes of being, for a better. I was Sheppard Lee, not Abram Skinner; and this was but a voluntary episode in my existence, which I was at liberty to terminate.

The thought was rapture. I resolved to sally out and fasten upon the first body I could find, being certain I could be in none so miserable as I had been in that I now inhabited. Nay, the idea was so agreeable, the execution of it seemed to promise such certain release from a load of wretchedness, that I resolved to attempt it without even waiting for morning.

I seized upon my hat and cloak, and, for fear I might stumble into some poor man's body, as I had done in the case of Dawkins's, I opened my strong-box, and clapped into my pockets all the money it contained, designing to take precautionary measures to transfer it along with my spirit to the new tenement. I seized upon the loaned money that had been repaid that day, together with a small sum that had been in the box before; and, had there been a million in the coffer, I should have nabbed it all, without much question of the right I actually possessed in it. The whole sum was small, not exceeding four hundred dollars, all being in bank-bills. I should have been glad of more, but was too eager to exchange my vile casing, with its miseries, for a better, to think of waiting till bank-hours next day.

Taking possession, therefore, of this sum, and a dozen silver spoons that had been left in pledge a few days before, I hastened to put my plan into execution. I slipped down stairs, let myself out of the door as softly as if I had been an intruder, and set out, in a night of February, to search for a new body.

CHAPTER VII.

IN WHICH IT IS SHOWN THAT A MAN MAY BE MORE USEFUL AFTER DEATH THAN WHILE LIVING

The reflection that I possessed the power (already thrice successfully exercised) to transfer my spirit, whenever I willed it, from one man's body to another, and so get rid of any afflictions that might beset me, was highly agreeable, and, under the present circumstances, consolatory. But there was one drawback to my satisfaction; and that was a discovery which I now made, that men's bodies were not to be had every day, at a moment's warning. This was the more provoking, as I knew there was no lack of them in the world, between eighty and ninety thousand men, women, and children having given up the ghost in the natural way that very day, whose corses would be on the morrow consigned to miserable holes in the earth, where they could and would be of no service to any person or persons whatever, the young doctors only excepted.

And here I cannot help observing, that it is an extremely absurd practice thus to dispose of – to squander and throw away, as I may call it – the hosts of human bodies that are annually falling dead upon our hands; whereas, with the least management in the world, they might be converted into objects of great usefulness and value.

According to the computation of philosophers, the population of the world may be reckoned in round numbers at just one thousand millions; of which number the annual mortality, at the low rate of three in a hundred, is thirty millions – and that without counting the extra million or two knocked on the head in the wars. Let us see what benefit might be derived from a judicious disposition of this mountain of mortality – I say mountain, for it is plain such a number of bodies heaped together would make a Chimborazo. The great mass of mankind might be made to subserve the purpose for which nature designed them, namely – to enrich the soil from which they draw their sustenance. According to the economical Chinese method, each of these bodies could be converted into five tons of excellent manure; and the whole number would therefore produce just one hundred and fifty millions of tons; of which one hundred and fifty thousand, being their due proportion, would fall to the share of the United States of America, enabling our farmers, in the course of ten or twelve years, to double the value of their lands. This, therefore, would be a highly profitable way of disposing of the mass of mankind. Such a disposition of their bodies would prove especially advantageous among American cultivators in divers districts, as a remedy against bad agriculture, and as the only means of handing down their fields in good order to their descendants. Such a disposition of bodies should be made upon every field of victory, so that dead heroes might be made to repair some of the mischiefs inflicted by live ones. The English farmers, it is well known, made good use of the bones left on the field of Waterloo; and though they would have done much better had they carried off the flesh with them, they did enough to show that war may be reckoned a good as well as an evil, and a great battle looked upon as a public blessing. A similar disposition (to continue the subject) of their mortal flesh might be, with great propriety, required, in this land, of all politicians and office-holders, from the vice-president down to the county collector; who, being all patriots, would doubtless consent to a measure that would make them of some use to their country. As for the president, we would have him reserved for a nobler purpose; we would have him boiled down to soap, according to the plan recommended by the French chymists, to be used by his successor in scouring the constitution and the minds of the people.

In this manner, I repeat, the great bulk of human bodies could be profitably appropriated; but other methods should be taken with particular classes of men, who might claim a more distinguished and canonical disposition of their bodies. The rich and tender would esteem it a cruelty to be disposed of in the same way with the multitude. I would advise, therefore, that their bodies should be converted into adipocire, or spermaceti, to be made into candles, to be burnt at the tops of the lamp-posts; whereby those who never shone in life might scintillate as the lights of the public for a week or two after. Their bones might be made into rings and whistles, for infant democrats to cut their teeth on.

The French and Italian philosophers, as I have learned from the newspapers, have made sundry strange, and, as I think, useful discoveries, in relation to the practicability of converting the human body into different mineral substances. One man changes his neighbour's bones into fine glass; a second turns the blood into iron; while a third, more successful still, transforms the whole body into stone. If these things be true, and I have no reason to doubt them, seeing that I found them, as I said before, in the newspapers, they offer us new modes of appropriation, applicable to the bodies of other interesting classes. Lovers might thus be converted into jewels, which, although false, could be worn with less fear of losing them than happens with living inamoratos; or, in case of extreme grief on the part of the survivers, into looking-glasses, where the mourners would find a solace in the contemplation of their own features. The second process, namely, the conversion of blood into iron, would be peculiarly applicable in the case of soldiers too distinguished to be cast into corn-fields; and, indeed, nothing could be more natural than that those whose blood we buy with gold, should pay us back our change in iron. The last discovery could be turned to equal profit, and would do away with the necessity of employing statuaries in all cases where their services are now required. But I would confine the process of petrifaction to those in whom Nature had indicated its propriety by beginning the process herself. None could with greater justice claim to have their bodies turned into stone, than those whose hearts were of the same material; and I should propose, accordingly, that such a transformation of bodies should be made only in the case of tyrants, heroes, duns, and critics.

But this subject, though often reflected on, I have had no leisure to digest properly. For which reason, begging the reader's pardon for the digression, I shall now leave it, and resume my story.

CHAPTER VIII.

SHEPPARD LEE'S SEARCH FOR A BODY. – AN UNCOMMON INCIDENT

I was provoked, I say, to think there were so many millions of dead bodies thrown away every year, for which I, in the greatest of my difficulties, should be none the better. Such was the extremity to which I was reduced, that I should have been content to change conditions with a beggar.