Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

by Ambrose Bierce

  From “The Iron Duchess.”

  As Wellington rode moodily away from the fatal field of Blenheim, meditating upon the wreck of his ambition, he encountered the seer whom he had met the day before.

  “Wretch!” he exclaimed, drawing his scimitar, “it is you that have done this! But for your accursed predictions I should have won the battle and the Swiss king would now be flying before my victorious legends. Die, therefore!”

  So saying, he raised his armed hand to smite, but the blow did not fall. Even while the blade was suspended in the air the seer’s long black cloak fell away, the white hair and concealing beard were flung aside, and the Iron Duke found himself gazing into the laughing eyes of Madame de Maintenon!

  Speechless with astonishment, he thundered: “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Ah, monsieur,” she replied, with that enchanting smile which had lured Louis XIV to the guillotine, “it means that I amuse myself.”

  From “The Noddle of Navarre.”

  When Henry of Navarre saw the ruin he had wrought he elevated his helmet from his marble brow and stepped three paces to the rear. The priest advanced with flashing eyes and, lifting both hands to the zenith, explained that vengeance was the Lord’s — He would repay I “It is better so,” assented the king—” I prefer it thus.”

  But even as he spake a shot from the moat pierced his brain and he fell, to reign no morel.

  From “Louis the Luckless.”

  Observing that his presence was not suspected, Richelieu remained with his eye glued to the keyhole. It was well that he did so, for the conspirators now laid off their masks, and among them he recognized the king himself! Here was a situation that he believed unique; in all his experience in court and camp there was no precedent. A sovereign conspiring for his own overthrow, his assassination! Richelieu was deeply affected by so striking an instance of unselfishness. He reeled and fell to the floor in an agony of admiration.

  From “The Road to Tusculum.”

  No sooner did Cicero perceive his legions retreating than he spurred impetuously from the field, thundering that all was lost. Passing swiftly across the Tiber by a secret bridge, he proceeded to the Forum, and entering the senate unannounced, communicated the news of the disaster. This was Pompey’s opportunity; he rose in his place and extending his index finger in the direction of the defeated warrior exclaimed in sarcastic accents: “Romans, behold your liberator from the chains of the Volscians! Behold the orator-general to whom you owe so much! Let him hereafter (if we have a hereafter) oppose to his country’s armed invaders the power of his matchless tongue. The sword is too heavy for a hand trained in the light calisthenics of gesticulation!” Maddened by this artful arraignment, the senators rose as one Roman and, headed by Marcus Aurelius, fell upon the unfortunate commander, tearing him limb from limb!

  From in “The Loves of Cromwell.”

  Night fell darkly over the city of Worcester.

  Cromwell had marched all day to reach it by seven roads, and at nine in the evening besieged it with a hundred thousand men.

  A desperate struggle ensued, at the close of which Cromwell rose from his knees victorious over the forces of his king!

  “Bring that son of Belial before me!” he roared, “that I may deal with him according to his sins.”

  Charles, pale and trembling, with manacled hands and bowed head, was led in.

  The lord protector eyed him haughtily, then addressing a brief prayer to Heaven sprang forward and with one stroke of his blade severed the royal head from the royal shoulders.

  Thus ended the War of the Roses, and England was again a republic.

  OUR TALES OF SENTIMENT

  From “One Woman.”

  GLADYS climbed to the balustrade of the bridge and, adjusting her skirts, plunged into the gloomiest forebodings.

  “Why,” she said, “should the future look so dark to one possessing all that fortune can donate?”

  She added a number of profound reflections on the vanity of life, ending with a brilliant epigram. It had scarcely died upon her lips when Armitage arrived upon the tapis and took in the situation at a glance. Striding hastily forward, he bowed gracefully and signified a desire to know the cause of her abstraction. She burst into tears and complied with his wish. Then she flung herself about his neck and accorded full expression to her grief, which he delicately professed not to observe; for this noble figure had been educated in the best schools of European gentility.

  From “But a Single Thought.”

  Seeing her proceeding away from him, perhaps forever, Auvergne intercepted her with an expression of regret for his rudeness, coupled with a plea for pardon. For a breathless instant she stayed her progress as if uncertain as to the degree of his offense, then resumed her pace till she reached the river’s brim. With an unconscious prayer she sprang swooning into the breakers and was with difficulty prevented from meeting a watery grave.

  From “A Belle of Castile.”

  Josephina had progressed but a brief distance into the garden when some inner sense proclaimed that she was followed: the crunching of a gentleman’s heel upon the gravel was indisputable. Partially terrified, she sought concealment in the shrubbery that bordered the path on the one side and the other. It passed by her there in the moonlight, that dreadful sound, yet no one visible! It went on and on, growing fainter and fainter, like herself, and was lost to hearing. Then she remembered the tradition of the Invisible Knight and her heart smote her for the absence of faith with which she had so often greeted it.

  “I am fitly punished,” she conceded, “for my sceptical attitude. Henceforth, so far as the constitution of my mind will permit, I will be more hospitable to the convictions of the simple.”

  How she adhered to this expiational resolution we shall behold.

  From “The Queen’s Chaperon.”

  The duke stepped from his carriage to a neighboring hill and cast his eye athwart his ancestral domain. “All this,” he mused, “I must renounce if I comply with the queen’s royal suggestion to fly with her to Rome. Is she worth the privation? I must have time to consider a transaction of such great importance.”

  Hastily entering his carriage, he haughtily bade the coachman drive him to some expensive hotel, whence he dispatched a delicately perfumed note to her Majesty, saying that he should be detained a few days by affairs of state, but assuring her of his uncommon fidelity. Then he retired to his couch and thought it all over in Italian. The next day he arose and fled rapidly.

  From “The Uplifting of Lennox.”

  On hearing the terrible news Myra fell supine to earth without delay!

  “Is it nothing?” inquired Lennox. “Is it only a temporary indisposition? — will it soon pass?”

  But Myra replied only with a significant pallor which told all too plainly what the most accomplished linguist would vainly have striven to express.

  How long she lay unconscious we know not, but promptly on becoming her previous self she let fall a multitude of tears.

  Lennox yielded to the requirements of etiquette and stole away. — .

  From “Bertha of Bootha.”

  As they strolled along the Riviera the setting sun was just touching the summit of the Alps and firing them with an electrical glow. Turning to her, he looked into her beautiful eyes and thus expressed himself:

  “Dearest, I am about to make an important statement.”

  She almost instantly divined the character of the communication that he referred to, and it affected her with perturbation. It was so sudden. “If,” she remarked, “you could postpone the statement above mentioned until a more suitable occasion I should regard your forbearance with satisfaction.”

  “Very well,” he replied, with coldness, “I will wait until we are not alone.”

  “Thank you, ever so much,” she blushed, and all was silence. Later in the season he explained to her the trend of his affections, and she signified the pleasure/ that she derived from his preference.
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  From “Hertha of Hootha.”

  The moon rose in the east without a sound and the ripples on the bosom of the main ran silently to the beach. Hertha and Henri, having similar sensibilities, were equally overcome by the solemnity of the scene, and neither inaugurated a conversation. Their love was too true for utterance by human tongue. Thus they paced for a considerable period, when suddenly the silence was cut asunder by a woman’s scream!

  “I know that voice,” cried Henri, hastily divesting himself of as many of his upper garments as, under the circumstances, he deemed it proper to do; “it is Minetta committing suicide!”

  He immediately plunged into the Atlantic, while Hertha stood rooted to the sand, endeavoring to regulate her emotions. In a few moments, which seemed an age, he emerged from the deep, bearing the deceased, whom he tenderly flung at her rival’s feet.

  Then the survivors knelt and prayed in both English and French.

  From “Ethel Shanks.”

  Ethel hastened slowly along the path leading to the cliff above the lake. The full moon was rising in the east, for the hour was midnight, and her warm radiance bathed the landscape in a blue languor.

  To Ethel the sky had never seemed so blue, nor the Polyanthes tuberosa in her corsage so white. She drank joy with her every breath, and she breathed quickly from her exertion in climbing the eminence on which she stood. Hearing footprints approaching, she turned, and the baron stood before her! “I was hasty,” he explained. “I should not have disclosed my love with such abruption. Permit me to withdraw my inconsiderate declaration.”

  Ethel’s heart sank within her! She could not refuse him the desired permission; that would not have been genteel: and Ethel was under all circumstances the lady. So she beat back the tears and said:

  “Please, sir, dismiss it from attention.”

  The cry of her broken heart was unheard by that callous ear, unaccustomed to the sad, sweet chords evoked from the harp of a dead hope. The nobleman lit his pipe and, his cruel errand performed, returned to his ancestral mansion. For one or two moments Ethel stood on the brink of eternity. Precipitating herself from the extreme edge, she awaited death with composure; she had done her full duty and had no fear of the Hereafter.... At the base of the precipice she came into violent contact with a large granite boulder and was no more.

  They found her body at the feet of the cliff, and the baron was torn by conflicting emotions, for the head lay at some distance from the trunk, a truly melancholy spectacle.

  “Can it be possible,” he remarked, “that she is no more?”

  Assured by the physician that such was the fact, he signified a high degree of regret and strode from the spot unattended; and to this day his fate is cloaked in the impenetrable waters of oblivion.

  From “A Demising Love.”

  James endeavored ineffectually to ascertain the trend of her affections: her expression remained a blank. He erroneously attributed his failure to poor skill in physiognomy and inwardly bewailed his youthful neglect of the advantages of education. While so engaged he fancied he detected in her look something significant of an interest in his personality. Could he be mistaken? No, there it was again!

  Arising from his sedentary attitude to the full stature of his young manhood, he crossed the intervening Persian rug and possessed himself of her hand.

  “Mabel,” he inquired, “do you not experience the promptings of a dawning tenderness for one to whom you are much?”

  Receiving no negative answer he kissed her simultaneously on both cheeks, and, falling rapidly upon one knee, poured out his soul in beautiful language, mostly devoted to commendation of her fine character and disposition.

  Mabel did not at once respond. She was deceased.

  From “March Hares.”

  Mrs. Rorqual deposited her embroidery on the sofa by her side and, slightly changing color, said, “No, my ideals are not unchangeable; they have undergone memorable alteration within the last hour.”

  “Let us hope,” said DAnchovi, uncrossing his hands, and putting one forefinger into a buttonhole of his coat, “that they are still high.”

  She resumed her embroidery and, looking at a painting of the martyrdom of St. Denis over the mantel, replied, “Would it matter?”

  “Surely,” said he, lightly beating the carpet with the heel of his well-fitting shoe; “for ideals are more than thoughts. I sometimes think they are things — that we are their thoughts.”

  She did not immediately reply. A curtain at an open window moved audibly. A sunbeam crept through the lattice of the piazza outside and fell upon the window-ledge. The fly previously mentioned now walked indolently along the top of the Japanese screen, then fearlessly descended the face of it to within an inch of the mouth of a painted frog. Danchovi, with a lifting of his eyebrows, maintained a determined silence.

  “I should think that an uncomfortable creed,” Mrs. Rorqual said at last, withdrawing the tip of her shoe, which had been visible beneath the edge of her gown, and shifting her gaze from St. Denis to one of the crystal ornaments of the candelabrum pendent from the ceiling.

  He passed the fingers of his right hand through his hair, slightly shifted his position on his chair and said: “Mrs. Rorqual, I have to thank you for a most agreeable hour. Shall I see you on the golf-links to-morrow?”

  So they parted, but when he was gone she toyed thoughtfully with a spray of heliotrope growing in a jardiniere and then ran her forefinger along a part of the pattern of the wallpaper.

  From “ A Study in Dissection.”

  Captain Gerard introspected. He spread his heart, as it were, upon the dissecting-table of conscience and examined it from several points of view. It is a familiar act — we call it analysis of motive. When he had concluded he knew why he had accepted the invitation of the countess to dinner. He knew why he had insulted the count. Equally obvious were his reasons for mentioning to Iphigeneia the holy bonds of matrimony. In all his conduct since his last introspection but one act baffled him: why, alas, had he spoken to Iphigeneia of the bar-semester in his crest?

  As he pondered this inexplicable problem a footfall fell upon his ear and he shuddered as if the hand of death; had stepped in.

  It was the countess!

  From “Her Diplodocus.”

  “Sir!” Miss Athylton drew herself up to her full height and looked her interlocutor squarely in the visage. For an instant he returned her scrutiny; then his eyes fell to the earth, stammering apologies. With a sweeping curtsey she passed out of the room, hand over hand.

  From “L’Affaire Smith.”

  As they sat there wrapping their arms about each other, she advanced the belief that they had loved in a former state of existence.

  “But not as now, Irene, surely not as now.” She was well content to let him feel so about it, and did not seek to alter the character of his emotion. To have done so would have cut her to the heart. On the contrary, a little bird perched in the passion-vine above them and sang several thrilling passages.

  From “Clarisse.”

  He gazed into her beautiful eyes for a considerable period, during which he did not converse; then he said, with an effort to be sociable: “It has been represented to me that you are a lady of great wealth. May I inquire if I have been rightly informed?”

  Blushing energetically at the compliment, she replied in silence, and for a few minutes there was an embarrassing hiatus in the exchange of thought and feeling.

  Fearing that he had offended her, the duke arose, and striding to the grand piano began to improvise diligently. At that moment there came in through the open window a sound of wheels on the gravel outside.

  He ceased in the middle of a nocturne and would have left the room, but she restrained him:

  “It is only my father returning from India,” smiled she; “I shall be so glad to introduce you.”

  The full horror of the situation burst upon him like a thunderbolt out of a clean sky.

  “Madam,” he thundered, “your f
ather is dead! He died of the plague in Bombay, and I — attended the funeral, although he had cursed me with his last breath. I cannot — cannot meet him!”

  With those words falling from his white lips he flung himself out of the room. A servant entered and handed Clarisse the visiting card of Mrs. Delahanty.

  From “Mary Ann & Co.”

  As they neared each other on the narrow bridge Paul observed that she was profoundly agitated.

  “Darling,” he said, “please to signify the cause of your perturbation. It is not impossible that I may be able to remove it. You know,” he added, “that I have studied medicine.”

  She blushed deeply, then turned pale and continued to tremble. He seized her hand and laid two fingers upon her wrist.

  “The pulse,” he said, “is abnormally frequent and irregular.”

  With a barely audible expression of disapproval, she withdrew her hand and endeavored to pass him on the narrow footway of the bridge. A misstep precipitated her into the stream, from which with no small difficulty she was taken in a dying condition, a halfmile below. The person that drew her forth from the waters was Paul’s aged uncle. “Tell Paul Dessard,” she said with her last breath, “that I love him, die for him!

  Tell him how I strove successfully to hide my love from him lest he think me unmaidenly; but it cannot matter now if he know it. Tell him all, I pray you tell him all, and add that in that Better Land whither I go my spirit will await him with impatience, prepared to explain all.”

  The good old man bent over her, placed his open hand behind his ear and ejaculated:

  “Hay?”

  She shook her head with an infinite pathos and suspired.

  From” Ideals”

  Where the grand old Hudson river rolls its floods seaward between the rugged Palisades and the agricultural country of its eastern bank Janey Sewell dwelt in a little vine-covered cottage in one of the most picturesque spots of the latter.