THE BOARDED WINDOW
by Ambrose Bierce
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.
~~~~~~~ THE END ~~~~~~~
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