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Horror Fantasy Season#1

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Pearl #2

I had been about a year settled at my pleasant homestead in Maine, when the

great misfortune of my life fell upon me.

My existence was almost exceptional in its happiness. Independent in

circumstances; master of a beautiful place, the natural charms of which were

carefully seconded by art; married to a

woman whose refined and cultivated mind seemed to be in perfect accord with

my own; and the father of the loveliest little maiden that ever tottered upon tiny

feet—what more could I wish for? In the summer-time we varied the pleasant

monotony of our rustic life by flying visits to Newport and Nahant. In the winter,

a month or six weeks spent in New York, party-going and theatre-going,

surfeited us with the rapid life of a metropolis, but gave us food for conversation

for months to come. The intervals were well filled up with farming, reading, and

the social intercourse into which we naturally fell with the old residents around

us.

I said a moment ago that I was perfectly happy at this time. I was wrong. I was

happy, but not perfectly happy. A vague grief overshadowed me. My wife’s

health gave me at times great concern. Charming and spirituelle as she was on

most occasions, there were times when she seemed a prey to a brooding

melancholy. She would sit for hours in the twilight, in what appeared to be a

state of mental apathy, and at such times it was almost impossible to rouse her

into even a moderate state of conversational activity. When I addressed her, she

would languidly turn her eyes on me, droop the eyelids over the eyeballs, and

gaze at me with a strange expression that, I knew not why, sent a shudder

through my limbs. It was in vain that I questioned her to ascertain if she

suffered. She was perfectly well, she said, but weary. I consulted my old friend

and neighbor, Doctor Melony, but, after a careful study of her constitution, he

proclaimed her, after his own fashion, to be “Sound as a bell, sir! sound as a

bell!”

To me, however, there was a funereal tone in this bell. If it did not toll of

death, it at least proclaimed disaster. I cannot say why those dismal forebodings should have possessed me. Let who will explain the many presentinients of good

and bad fortune which waylay men in the road of life, as the witches used to

waylay the traveller of old, and rises up in his path prognosticating or cursing.

At times, though, Minnie, as if to cheat speculation, displayed a gayety and

cheerfulness beyond all expectations. She would propose little excursions to

noted places in our neighborhood, and no eyes in the party would be brighter, no

laugh more ringing than hers. Yet these bright spots were but checkers on a life

of gloom;—days passed in moodiness and silence; nights of restless tossing on

the coach; and ever and anon that strange, furtive look following me as I went to

and fro!

As the year slowly sailed through the green banks of summer into the flaming

scenery of the fall, I resolved to make some attempt to dissipate this melancholy

under which my wife so obviously labored.

“Minnie,” I said to her, one day, “I feel rather dull. Let us go to New York for

a few weeks.”

“What for!” she answered, turning her face around slowly until her eyes rested

on mine—eyes still filled with that inexplicable expression “What for? To amuse

ourselves? My dear Gerald, how can New York amuse you? We live in a hotel,

each room of which is a stereotyped copy of the other. We get the same bill of

fare—with a fresh date—every day for dinner. We go to parties that are a

repetition of the parties we went to last year. The same thin-legged young man

leads ‘the German,’ and one could almost imagine that the stewed terrapin which

you got supper had been kept over since the previous winter. There is no

novelty—no nothing.”

“There is a novelty, my dear,” I said, although I could not help smiling at her

languid dissection of the New York season. “You love the stage, and a new, and,

as I am told, a great actress, has appeared there. I, for my part, want to see her

“Who is she? But, before you answer, I know perfectly well what a great

American dramatic novelty is. She has been gifted by nature with fine eyes, a

good figure, and a voice which has a

tolerable scale of notes. Some one, or something, puts it into her head that she

was born into this world for the special purpose of interpreting Shakespeare. She

begins by reciting to her friends in a little village, and, owing to their

encouragement, determined to take lessons from some broken-down actor, who

ekes omit an insufficient salary by giving lessons in elocution. Under his tuition

—as she would under the instruction of any professor of that abominable art

known as ‘elocution’—she learns how to display her voice at the expense of the sense of the author. She thinks of nothing but rising and falling inflections,

swimming entrances and graceful exits. Her idea of great emotion is hysterics,

and her acme of by-play is to roll her eyes at the audience. You listen in vain for

a natural intonation of the voice. You look in vain on the painted—over-painted

—face for a single reflex of the emotions depicted by the dramatist;—emotions

that, I am sure, when he was registering them on paper, flitted over his

countenance, and thrilled his whole being as the auroral lights shimmer over the

heavens, and scud a vibration through all nature! My dear husband, I am tired of your great American actress. Please go and buy me half a dozen dolls

I laughed. She was in her cynical mood, and none could be more sarcastic than

she. But I was determined to gain my point.

“But,” I resumed, “the actress I am anxious to see is the very reverse of the too

truthful picture you have painted. I want to see Matilda Heron

“And who is Matilda Heron