The Fall of the House of Usher | Page 5

his master.
The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The
windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a dis- tance
from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within.
Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the
trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more
prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach
the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and
fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general
furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books
and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any
vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An
air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.
Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he had been lying
at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much
in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality--of the constrained
effort of the ennuye man of the world. A glance, however, at his
countenance, convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and
for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling
half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly
altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with
difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan
being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the
character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A
cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous
beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a
surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but
with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a
finely-moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of
moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these
features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple,

made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now
in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features,
and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change
that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and
the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even
awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded,
and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the
face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression
with any idea of simple humanity.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an
incoherence--an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a
series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual
trepidancy--an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this
nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by
reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced
from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action
was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a
tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in
abeyance) to that species of energetic concision--that abrupt, weighty,
unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation--that leaden, self-
balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be
observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium,
during the periods of his most intense excitement.
It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire
to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered,
at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady.
It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he
despaired to find a remedy--a mere nervous affection, he immediately
added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a
host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them,
interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms, and the
general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much
from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone
endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours
of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint

light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed
instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.
To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. "I shall
perish," said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and
not otherwise, shall I be