A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE, by Nathaniel Parker Willis

(1843)

The death of a lady, in a foreign land, leaves me at liberty to narrate the circumstances which follow.

A few words of previous explanation, however.

I am inclined to believe, from conversations on the subject with many sensible persons, that there are few men who have not had, at different intervals in their lives, sudden emotions, currents of thought, affections of mind and body, which not only were wholly disconnected with the course of life thus interrupted, but seemed to belong to a wholly different being.

Perhaps I shall somewhere touch the reader’s experience by describing rather minutely, and in the first person, some sensations of this kind not unusual to myself.

Walking in a crowded street, for example, in perfect health, with every faculty gaily alive, I suddenly lose the sense of neighborhood. I see—I hear—but I feel as if I had become invisible where I stand, and was at the same time present and visible elsewhere. I know everything that passes around me, but I seem disconnected, and (magnetically speaking) unlinked from the human beings near. If spoken to at such a moment, I answer with difficulty. The person who speaks seems to be addressing me from a world to which I no longer belong. At the same time, I have an irresistible inner consciousness of being present in another scene of everyday life—where there are streets and houses and people—where I am looked on without surprise as a familiar object—where I have cares, fears, objects to attain—a different scene altogether, and a different life, from the scene and life of which I was a moment before conscious. I have a dull ache at the back of my eye for the minute or two that this trance lasts, and then, slowly and reluctantly, my absent soul seems creeping back, the magnetic links of conscious neighborhood, one by one, re-attach, and I resume my ordinary life, but with an irrepressible feeling of sadness.

It is in vain that I try to fix these shadows as they recede. I have struggled a thousand times in vain to particularize and note down what I saw in the strange city to which I was translated. The memory glides from my grasp with preternatural evasiveness.

In a book called “The Man of Two Lives,” similar sensations to these are made the basis of the story. Indeed, till I saw that book, the fear of having my sanity suspected, sealed my lips on the subject.

I have still a reserve in my confession. I have been conscious, since boyhood, of a mental peculiarity which I fear to name while I doubt that it is possessed by others than myself—which I should not allude to now, but that it forms a strange link of identity between me and another being to be mentioned in this story.

I may say, also, without attaching any importance to it, except as it bears upon this same identity, that, of those things which I had no occasion to be taught, or which I did, as the common phrase is, by intuition, drawing was the easiest and most passionately followed of my boyish pursuits.

With these preliminaries, and probably some similar experience of his own, the reader may haply form a woof on which to embroider the following circumstances.

Traveling through Styria, some years since, I chanced to have, for a fellow-occupant of the coupe of a diligence, a very courteous and well-bred person, a gentleman of Gratz. As we rolled slowly along the banks of the Muer, approaching his native town, he very kindly invited me to remain with him a day or two, offering me, as an inducement, a presentation at the soiree of a certain lady of consequence, who was to receive on the night of our arrival, and at whose house I should see, some fair specimens of the beauty of Styria.

Accepted.

It was a lovely summer’s night, when we strolled through the principal street, toward our gay destination, and as I draw upon my friend’s arm to stop him while the military band of the fortress finished a delicious waltz, (they were playing in the public square), he pointed out to me the spacious balconies of the Countess’s palace, whither we were going, crowded with the well-dressed company, listening silently to the same enchanting music. We entered, and after an interchange of compliments with the hostess, I availed myself of my friend’s second introduction to take a stand in one of the balconies beside the person I was presented to, and under cover of her favor, to hear out the unfinished music of the band.

As the evening darkened, the lights gleamed out from the illuminated rooms more brightly, and most of the guests deserted the balconies and joined the gayer circles within. My companion in the balcony was a very quiet lady, and, like myself, she seemed subdued by the sweet harmonies we had listened to, and willing to remain within the shadow of the curtain. We were not alone there, however. A tall lady, of very stately presence, and with the remains of remarkable beauty, stood on the opposite side of the balcony, and she too, seemed to shrink from the glare within, and cling to the dewy darkness of the summer night.

After the cessation of the music, there was no longer an excuse for the intermittent conversation, and, starting a subject which afforded rather freer scope, I did my best to credit my friend’s flattering introduction. I had discoursed away for half an hour very unreservedly before I discovered that, with her hand upon her side, in an attitude of repressed emotion, the tall lady was earnestly listening to me. A third person embarrasses even the most indifferent dialogue. The conversation languished, and my companion rose and took my arm for a promenade through the rooms.

Later in the evening, my friend came in search for me in the supper-room.

“Mon ami!” he said, “a great honor has fallen out of the sky for you. I am sent to bring you to the beau reste of the handsomest woman of Styria—Margaret, Baroness R—, whose chateau I pointed out to you in the gold of yesterday’s sunset. She wishes to know you—why I cannot wholly divine—for it the first sign of ordinary feeling that she has given in twenty years. But she seems agitated, and sits alone in the Countess’s boudoir. Allons-y!”

As we made our way through the crowd, he hastily sketched me an outline of the lady’s history: “At seventeen taken from a convent for a forced marriage with the baron whose name she bears; at eighteen a widow, and, for the first time, in love—the subject of her passion a young artist of Vienna on his way to Italy. The artist died at her chateau—they were to have been married—she has ever since worn weeds for him. And the remainder you must imagine—for here we are!”

The baroness leaned with her elbow upon a small table of ormolu, and her position was so taken that I seated myself necessarily in a strong light, while her features were in shadow. Still, the light was sufficient to show me the expression of her countenance. She was a woman apparently about forty-five, of noble physiognomy, and a peculiar fullness of the eyelid—something like to which I thought I remembered to have seen in a portrait of a young girl, many years before. The resemblance troubled me somewhat.

“You will pardon me this freedom,” said the Baroness with forced composure, “when I tell you, that—a friend—whom I have mourned for twenty-five years—seems present when you speak.”

I was silent, for I knew not what to say. The Baroness shaded her eyes with her hand, and sat silent for a few moments, gazing at me.

“You are not like him in a single feature,” she resumed, ‘yet the expression of your face, strangely, very strangely, is the same. He was darker—slighter”—

“Of my age?” I inquired, to break my own silence. For there was something in her voice which gave me the sensation of a voice heard in a dream.

“Oh God! that voice! that voice!” she exclaimed wildly, burying her face in her hands, and giving way to a passionate burst of tears.

“Rudolph,” she resumed, recovering herself with a strong effort, “Rudolph died with the promise on his lips that death should not divide us. And I have seen him! Not in dreams—not in reverie—not at times when my fancy could delude me. I have seen him suddenly before me in the street—in Vienna—here—at home at noonday—for minutes together, gazing on me. It is more in latter years that I have been visited by him; and a hope has latterly sprung into being in my heart—I know not how—that in person, palpable and breathing, I should again hold converse with him—fold him living to my bosom. Pardon me! You will think me mad!”

I might well pardon her; for, as she talked, a vague sense of familiarity with her voice, a memory, powerful, though indistinct, of having dwelt before on those majestic features, an impulse of tearful passion to rush to her embrace, well nigh overpowered me. She turned to me again.

“You are an artist?” she said, inquiringly.

“No, although intended for one, I believe, by nature.”

“And you were born in the year —.”

“I was!”

With a scream she added the day of my birth, and waiting an instant for my assent, dropped to the floor and clung convulsively and weeping to my knees.

“Rudolph! Rudolph!” she murmured faintly, as her long gray tresses fell over her shoulders, and her head dropped insensibly upon her breast.

Her cry had been heard, and several persons entered the room. I rushed out of doors. I had need to be in darkness and alone.

It was an hour after midnight when I re-entered my hotel. A chasseur stood sentry at the door of my apartment with a letter in his hand. He called me by name, gave me his missive, and disappeared. It was from the Baroness, and ran thus:

“You did not retire from me to sleep. This letter will find you waking. And I must write, for my heart and brain are overflowing.

“Shall I write to you as a stranger?—you whom I have strained so often to my bosom—you whom I have loved and still love with the utmost idolatry of mortal passion—you who have once given me the soul that, like a gem long lost, is found again, but in a newer casket! Mine still—for did we not swear to love forever!

“But I am taking counsel of my heart only. You may still be unconvinced. You may think that a few singular coincidences have driven me mad. You may think that, though born in the same hour that my Rudolph died, possessing the same voice, the same countenance, the same gifts—though by irresistible consciousness I know you to be him—my lost lover returned in another body to life—you may think the evidence incomplete—you may, perhaps, even now, be smiling in pity at my delusion. Indulge me one moment.

“The Rudolph Isenberg whom I lost, possessed a faculty of mind, which, if you are he, answers with the voice of an angel to my appeal. In that soul resided, and, wherever it be, must now reside, the singular power.

* * * *

(The reader must be content with my omission of this fragment of the letter. It contained a secret never before clothed in language—a secret that will die with me, unless betrayed by what indeed it may lead to—madness! As I saw it in writing—defined accurately and inevitably in the words of another—I felt as if the innermost chamber of my soul was suddenly laid open to the day—I abandoned doubt—I answered to the name by which she called me—I believed in the previous existence of my whole life, no less than these extraordinary circumstances, had furnished me with repeated evidence. But, to resume the letter.)

“And now that we know each other again—now that I can tell you by name, as in the past, and be sure that your innermost consciousness must reply—a new terror seizes me! Your soul comes back, youthfully and newly clad, while mine, though of unfading freshness and youthfulness within, shows to your eye the same outer garment grown dull with mourning and faded with the wear of time. Am I grown distasteful? Is it with the sight only of this new body that you look upon me? Rudolph!—spirit that was my devoted and passionate admirer! soul that was sworn to me forever!—am I—the same Margaret, re-found and recognized, grown repulsive? Oh God! What a bitter answer would this be to my prayers for your return to me!

“I will trust in Him to whose benign goodness smiles upon fidelity of love. I will prepare a fitter meeting for two who parted as lovers. You shall not see me again in the house of a stranger and in mourning attire. When this letter is written, I will depart at once for the scene of our love. I hear my horses already in the courtyard, and while you read this I am speeding swiftly home. The bridal dress you were secretly shown the day before death came between us, is still freshly kept. The room where we sat—the bowers of the stream—the walks where we projected our sweet promise of a future—they shall all be made ready. They shall be as they were! And I—oh, Rudolph, I shall be the same! My heart is not grown old, Rudolph! Believe me, I am unchanged in soul! And I will strive to be—I will strive to look—God help me to look and be as of yore!

“Farewell now! I leave horses and servants to wait on you til I send to bring you to me. Alas, for my delay! but we will pass this life and all other time together. We have seen that a vow of eternal union may be kept—that death cannot divide those who will to love forever! Farewell now!

Margaret.”

Circumstances compelled me to read this letter with but one feeling, exquisite pain! Love lasts till death, but it is mortal! The affections, however intense and faithful, (I now knew,) are part of the perishable coil, forgotten in the grave. With the memory of this love of another life, haunting me through my youth, and keeping its vow of visitation, I had given the whole heart of my second youth to another. Affianced to her, waited for by her, bound to her by vows which death had not divided, I had but one course to pursue. I left Gratz in an hour, never to return.

* * * *

A few days since, I was walking alone in the crowded thoroughfare of the city where I live. Suddenly my sense of presence there fell off me. I walked on, but my inward sight absorbed all my consciousness. A room which was familiar to me shut me in, and a bed hung in mourning became apparent. In another instant a figure laid out in a winding sheet, and partially covered with a velvet pall, grew distinct through the dimness, and in the low laid head I recognized, what a presentiment had already betrayed to me, the features of Margaret, Baroness R—. It will be moths before I can see the announcement of her death. But she is dead.