“Not hear it?  Yes, I hear it, and have heard it.  Long—­long—­long—­many minutes, many hours, many days have I heard it—­yet I dared not—­O, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—­I dared not—­I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb!  Said I not that my senses were acute?  I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin.  I heard them many, many days ago—­yet I dared not—­I dared not speak!  And now—­to-night—­Ethelred—­ha! ha!—­the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!—­say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault!  O, whither shall I fly?  Will she not be here anon?  Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste?  Have I not heard her footstep on the stair?  Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?  Madman!”—­here he sprang furiously to his feet and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—­“Madman!  I tell you that she now stands without the door!”

As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws.  It was the work of the rushing gust; but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher.  There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.  For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—­then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and, in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.

From that chamber and from that mansion I fled aghast.  The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway.  Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued, for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me.  The radiance was that; of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base.  While I gazed this fissure rapidly widened; there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—­the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—­my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—­there was a long, tumultuous, shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—­and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher.

  NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.