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 today 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
meager 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 today 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, lusterless 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 arid 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. "Tomorrow,"
he said aloud, "I shall have to make the coffin arid 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 woods! 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.