"My child," and "my love," were
the designations usually prompted by a father's affection, and the
rigid seclusion of her days precluded all other intercourse. Morella's
name died with her at her death. Of the mother I had never spoken to
the daughter, it was impossible to speak. Indeed, during the brief
period of her existence, the latter had received no impressions from
the outward world, save such as might have been afforded by the narrow
limits of her privacy. But at length the ceremony of baptism presented
to my mind, in its unnerved and agitated condition, a present
deliverance from the terrors of my destiny. And at the baptismal
font I hesitated for a name. And many titles of the wise and
beautiful, of old and modern times, of my own and foreign lands,
came thronging to my lips, with many, many fair titles of the
gentle, and the happy, and the good. What prompted me then to
disturb the memory of the buried dead? What demon urged me to
breathe that sound, which in its very recollection was wont to make
ebb the purple blood in torrents from the temples to the heart? What
fiend spoke from the recesses of my soul, when amid those dim
aisles, and in the silence of the night, I whispered within the ears
of the holy man the syllables- Morella? What more than fiend
convulsed the features of my child, and overspread them with hues of
death, as starting at that scarcely audible sound, she turned her
glassy eyes from the earth to heaven, and falling prostrate on the
black slabs of our ancestral vault, responded- "I am here!"
Distinct, coldly, calmly distinct, fell those few simple sounds
within my ear, and thence like molten lead rolled hissingly into my
brain.
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