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The Works of Edgar Allan Poe Raven Edition Volume 2
BERENICE
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And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an afternoon in the winter of the year - one of those unseasonably warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon {*1}, - I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner apartment of the library. But, uplifting my eyes, I saw that Berenice stood before me.
Was it my own excited imagination - or the misty influence of the atmosphere - or the uncertain twilight of the chamber - or the gray draperies which fell around her figure - that caused in it so vacillating and indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She spoke no word; and I - not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my frame; a sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me; a consuming curiosity pervaded my soul; and sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some time breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her person. Alas! its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige of the former being lurked in any single line of the contour. My burning glances at length fell upon the face.
The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupilless, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to he contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of peculiar meaning, _the teeth_ of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!
* * * * * * *
The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found that my cousin had departed from the chamber. But from the disordered chamber of my brain, had not, alas! departed, and would not be driven away, the white and ghastly _spectrum_ of the teeth. Not a speck on their surface - not a shade on their enamel - not an indenture in their edges - but what that period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw them _now_ even more unequivocally than I beheld them _then_. The teeth! - the teeth! - they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full fury of my _monomania_, and I struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I longed with a phrenzied desire. All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in their single contemplation. They - they alone were present to the mental eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental life. I held them in every light. I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon the alteration in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression. Of Mademoiselle Salle it has been well said, "_Que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments_," and of Berenice I more seriously believed _que toutes ses dents etaient des idees_. _Des idees!_ - ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! _Des idees!_ - ah _therefore_ it was that I coveted them so madly! I felt that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.