SCROLL
THE BOARDED WINDOW
In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of
Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region
was sparsely settled by people of the frontier—restless souls who no
sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and
attained to that degree of prosperity which to-day we should call
indigence than impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature they
abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and
privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had
voluntarily renounced. Many of them had already forsaken that region
for the remoter settlements, but among those remaining was one who had
been of those first arriving. He lived alone in a house of logs
surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence
he seemed a part, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a
needless word. His simple wants were supplied by the sale or barter of
skins of wild animals in the river town, for not a thing did he grow
upon the land which, if needful, he might have claimed by right of
undisturbed possession. There were evidences of "improvement"—a few
acres of ground immediately about the house had once been cleared of
its trees, the decayed stumps of which were half concealed by the new
growth that had been suffered to repair the ravage wrought by the ax.
Apparently the man's zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing
flame, expiring in penitential ashes.
The little log house, with its chimney of sticks, its roof of
warping clapboards weighted with traversing poles and its "chinking" of
clay, had a single door and, directly opposite, a window. The latter,
however, was boarded up—nobody could remember a time when it was not.
And none knew why it was so closed; certainly not because of the
occupant's dislike of light and air, for on those rare occasions when a
hunter had passed that lonely spot the recluse had commonly been seen
sunning himself on his doorstep if heaven had provided sunshine for his
need. I fancy there are few persons living to-day who ever knew the
secret of that window, but I am one, as you shall see.
The man's name was said to be Murlock. He was apparently seventy
years old, actually about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand
in his aging. His hair and long, full beard were white, his gray,
lustreless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which
appeared to belong to two intersecting systems. In figure he was tall
and spare, with a stoop of the shoulders—a burden bearer. I never saw
him; these particulars I learned from my grandfather, from whom also I
got the man's story when I was a lad. He had known him when living near
by in that early day.
One day Murlock was found in his cabin, dead. It was not a time
and place for coroners and newspapers, and I suppose it was agreed that
he had died from natural causes or I should have been told, and should
remember. I know only that with what was probably a sense of the
fitness of things the body was buried near the cabin, alongside the
grave of his wife, who had preceded him by so many years that local
tradition had retained hardly a hint of her existence. That closes the
final chapter of this true story—excepting, indeed, the circumstance
that many years afterward, in company with an equally intrepid spirit,
I penetrated to the place and ventured near enough to the ruined cabin
to throw a stone against it, and ran away to avoid the ghost which
every well-informed boy thereabout knew haunted the spot. But there is
an earlier chapter—that supplied by my grandfather.
When Murlock built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with
his ax to hew out a farm—the rifle, meanwhile, his means of support—he
was young, strong and full of hope. In that eastern country whence he
came he had married, as was the fashion, a young woman in all ways
worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of
his lot with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record
of her name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and
the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I
should share it! Of their affection and happiness there is abundant
assurance in every added day of the man's widowed life; for what but
the magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome
spirit to a lot like that?
One day Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the
forest to find his wife prostrate with fever, and delirious. There was
no physician within miles, no neighbor; nor was she in a condition to
be left, to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing her back
to health, but at the end of the third day she fell into
unconsciousness and so passed away, apparently, with never a gleam of
returning reason.
From what we know of a nature like his we may venture to sketch
in some of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather.
When convinced that she was dead, Murlock had sense enough to remember
that the dead must be prepared for burial. In performance of this
sacred duty he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly,
and others which he did correctly were done over and over. His
occasional failures to accomplish some simple and ordinary act filled
him with astonishment, like that of a drunken man who wonders at the
suspension of familiar natural laws. He was surprised, too, that he did
not weep—surprised and a little ashamed; surely it is unkind not to
weep for the dead. "To-morrow," he said aloud, "I shall have to make
the coffin and dig the grave; and then I shall miss her, when she is no
longer in sight; but now—she is dead, of course, but it is all
right—it
must be all right, somehow. Things cannot be
so bad as they seem."
He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair
and putting the finishing touches to the simple toilet, doing all
mechanically, with soulless care. And still through his consciousness
ran an undersense of conviction that all was right—that he should have
her again as before, and everything explained. He had had no experience
in grief; his capacity had not been enlarged by use. His heart could
not contain it all, nor his imagination rightly conceive it. He did not
know he was so hard struck;
that knowledge would come
later, and never go. Grief is an artist of powers as various as the
instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from
some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords
that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some
natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke
of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to
another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. We may
conceive Murlock to have been that way affected, for (and here we are
upon surer ground than that of conjecture) no sooner had he finished
his pious work than, sinking into a chair by the side of the table upon
which the body lay, and noting how white the profile showed in the
deepening gloom, he laid his arms upon the table's edge, and dropped
his face into them, tearless yet and unutterably weary. At that moment
came in through the open window a long, wailing sound like the cry of a
lost child in the far deeps of the darkening wood! But the man did not
move. Again, and nearer than before, sounded that unearthly cry upon
his failing sense. Perhaps it was a wild beast; perhaps it was a dream.
For Murlock was asleep.
Some hours later, as it afterward appeared, this unfaithful
watcher awoke and lifting his head from his arms intently listened—he
knew not why. There in the black darkness by the side of the dead,
recalling all without a shock, he strained his eyes to see—he knew not
what. His senses were all alert, his breath was suspended, his blood
had stilled its tides as if to assist the silence. Who—what had waked
him, and where was it?
Suddenly the table shook beneath his arms, and at the same moment
he heard, or fancied that he heard, a light, soft step—another—sounds
as of bare feet upon the floor!
He was terrified beyond the power to cry out or move. Perforce he
waited—waited there in the darkness through seeming centuries of such
dread as one may know, yet live to tell. He tried vainly to speak the
dead woman's name, vainly to stretch forth his hand across the table to
learn if she were there. His throat was powerless, his arms and hands
were like lead. Then occurred something most frightful. Some heavy body
seemed hurled against the table with an impetus that pushed it against
his breast so sharply as nearly to overthrow him, and at the same
instant he heard and felt the fall of something upon the floor with so
violent a thump that the whole house was shaken by the impact. A
scuffling ensued, and a confusion of sounds impossible to describe.
Murlock had risen to his feet. Fear had by excess forfeited control of
his faculties. He flung his hands upon the table. Nothing was there!
There is a point at which terror may turn to madness; and madness
incites to action. With no definite intent, from no motive but the
wayward impulse of a madman, Murlock sprang to the wall, with a little
groping seized his loaded rifle, and without aim discharged it. By the
flash which lit up the room with a vivid illumination, he saw an
enormous panther dragging the dead woman toward the window, its teeth
fixed in her throat! Then there were darkness blacker than before, and
silence; and when he returned to consciousness the sun was high and the
wood vocal with songs of birds.
The body lay near the window, where the beast had left
it when frightened away by the flash and report of the rifle. The
clothing was deranged, the long hair in disorder, the limbs lay anyhow.
From the throat, dreadfully lacerated, had issued a pool of blood not
yet entirely coagulated. The ribbon with which he had bound the wrists
was broken; the hands were tightly clenched. Between the teeth was a
fragment of the animal's ear.
Collected works
of Ambrose Bierce
